sachs craft

Tom Sachs' show of recent work (May 8 - June 21) at Sperone Westwater (http://www.speronewestwater.com) in the meatpacking district of Manhattan reveals the 41 year old New Yorker DIY re-appropriator with still a lot to say.  Sachs is probably best known for his (infamous) concentration camp fabricated from a Prada hatbox, his candy jar of 9-mm bullets (which led to his [then] gallery owner Mary Boone being arrested for a night), and his various misuses of Hello Kitty.  And while shock value still has its place in his work today, the strongest pieces go way beyond catty conversations among culturati in martini bars.

The best pieces in the show are "handmade" (more on this in a second) constructions -- boxes, cabinets, odd lamps, Duchampian ready-made-aided works -- which show both an eye to artisanal detail (like inset slots and toggles for keys and hooks) and awkward do-it-yourself bricolage (e.g. hand-burnt letters, exposed wiring).

Particularly stunning is Sachs' "Negro Music": a ghetto blaster and tons of tapes (and a bottle of Jack) safely locked away in a laboratory glove box (through rubber gloves you can switch tapes, hit play, rewind... the Jack Daniels however remains unassailable).  The strange protection offered is of course an illusion, for the sound comes through... as too the disturbing image of white culture testing, genetically modifying, appropriating and taming black cultural production.

The political reappears in other whimsical ways.  Sachs' "Waffle Bike" -- a tricked out bike (riffing off Puerto Rican bikes in New York) with attached refrigerator, waffle maker, a cage for chickens, a flag pole (Norway) and loud speakers (broadcasting Arabic) proclaims a untenable melding of northern European cuisine and Southern itinerant street sellers.  The only thing lacking is seeing it in action.  And syrup.  

In the same way, the kooky "LaGuardia", a observation tower for cats (built on several levels with stairs: liter box, goldfish pond, observation deck...) is both whimsical and disturbingly prison like (what are these cats surveilling?!).

I loved the mandela meets Renaissance dueling cabinet gun chest "Hardcore" in which handmade guns and the tools that were used to make them (pliers, hammers, etc.) -- all lovingly inscribed or etched with punk band names and the track listings from their albums -- are elegantly ensconced and sealed in a beautiful mirrored plywood case.  Once again, a "dangerous" cultural production (hardcore punk, a Brechtian hammer) has been aestheticized and sealed off, but the keys are close to hand and the case can travel.  (I would gladly have opened up the case and started to play... but the gallery do-not-touch-ethos is hard to fight).

I am not enraptured by everything that Sachs puts out.  His foamcore whales, Hello Kittys, pyrographic reproductions of animal fable engravings (do grandparents still give wood burning kits to their grand kids? do you remember the smell of the wood burning under the smoldering stylus?) leave me cold.  

Even more so, I do not know what to make of artistic productions that involve -- Renaissance atelier style -- the mobilization of a crew of (14) assistants (like Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Sol Lewitt...).  It seems to me that "DIY" has a hard time surviving a capitalist production method no matter how artisan-based its ethics.  It would be more honest if each and every one of the assistants added their name to the masthead... but that dilemma is also a part of Sachs' attack.

[addendum 6/27:  Sachs "handmade" boxes have  brought me back (by antithesis) to thinking about Toland Grinnell (a Brooklyner, born in 1969) whose work has prominently featured creepy sets of elaborate and luxurious traveling cases and collapsable furniture in Vuitton-style precision.  The design-centered detail of Grinnell's work has always been a stumbling block for me. 

(Here's an interesting interview with Grinnell from 2003: http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag03/nov03/grinnell/grinnell.shtml.

Grinnell's "Pied-à-Terre" was on longterm display at the Brooklyn Museum through last May: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/toland_grinnell/ )]

touching me touching you

Everyone remembers the great joy (although maybe it's more a boy thing?) of going to a science museum (or even better: more recent museological funrides like the Exploratorium in San Francisco) and being able to hit buttons, making sparks fly, setting whirring planetary models into motion, proving... oh but what were those presentations demonstrating in fact?

Carl André's invitation to walk on his floor pieces of aluminum or wood squares notwithstanding (ha, a pun! - and sadly, the last time I was in MOMA, they seemed to be discouraging touching or walking on the André piece), contemporary art remains generally disdainful of the public's touch.

Not so, two gallery shows currently on view in New York.

* Yoko Ono at Galerie LeLong (http://www.galerie-lelong.com/newyork/fr_newyork.htm).  Love her, hate her, it doesn't matter.  The LeLong show (April 18 - May 31) invites the public to "Touch Me" via molded soft rubber parts of the artist's body (lips, knees, breasts, belly, feet).  The effect is a little creepy: I could swear that someone had got her nipples wet, and her foot was already missing a toe (the panel next to the feet referenced the loss as typical of the violence that a woman's body is always subject to).

Touching Yoko's knee.

I am a little confused about the work's ideology, however, for Ono asks the public to cut themselves up and objectify their own bodies by shoving their limbs or faces out through holes cut in a large canvas and having the gallery assistant take Polaroids which are then pinned to a wall (with the pictured people's comments written on them).  I wish this part of the show had more force, but everyone seemed so excited about having their stocking-covered leg or well-posed hand mounted on the wall, that it was just goofy.

(I think this was why I so loved Kate Gilmore's video piece Star Bight, Star Might (2007) from the 2007 Arsenal Show - pushing her head through that plywood is a painful and laborious act.  Splinters and scratches remain on her face when she finally manages to break through.)

Kate Gilmore, Star Bright, Star Might

I guess Yoko could have forced her public to endure something more humiliating or honest than Polaroids.  Although I saw a couple of nipples on the wall, I didn't see much that dared.  How 'bout us being forced to endure groping and touching?  Would the public oblige?  Would the public touch?  (Even sex clubs keep the lights down in their back rooms).

(Ancillary thought: Michel Leiris talks a lot about the essential element of the kind of art he is engaged in (confessional, intimate) being "risk", exposure to the horns of the minotaur... It's a good mantra.)

* Upstairs at Tanya Bonakdar (http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com), and in concert with a major show of his works at MOMA and PS1, there is a nice participatory sound piece by Olafur Eliasson called Spatial Vibration: String-Based Instrument, Study II (see http://spatialvibration.blogspot.com).  Using something resembling (tonically) a traditional asian instrument attached to a turntable-like drawing machine, the public can create a large round paper image of the vibrations they play.  SPROINGGGG!  CHHHHRRRRING!

Eliasson's Spatial Vibration (the assistant is changing the ink pen)

Groovier still, you can take the huge round sheet of paper home, Felix Gonzales-Torres like.  Stamped with the artist and the piece's name no less.  It's got noise.  It's got free.  It's got participatory.  It's got take-home.  What more could you want?  From a gallery, at least.

strike the tall grass

I am obsessed with people tangled in and lost among trees, bamboo and tall grass.  

So, when I saw pictures of Fang-Yi Sheu clinging to and tangled upside-down in a field of plastic blue reeds  -- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style -- in TimeOutNY (go to these sites for pix; dance theaters are very strict with trying to take pictures during a show), I knew I had to see the Ballet Tech / ManDanceProject (www.ballettech.org/mandance.html) performance of Eliot Feld's works at the Joyce Theater (www.joyce.org).

Along with the reed sequence mentioned above (an Isis story with a curious set of stations (of which the reeds were one): part descent into the Labyrinth, part exercise machines in a gym from Space-1999), several other images throughout the evening were stunning:

* the condensation of breath and body heat on the inside of a clinging transparent plastic sheet womb wrapped around a body struggling to push through.

* a long roll (50+ feet by 6 feet) of butcher-colored paper/plastic, crumpled and spilling forth, enveloping and obliterating the contours of a body-become-shambling heap.

* the glinting strobe effect of light bouncing off a large (5' diameter?) shallow silvery bowl and onto Fang-Yi's body as she tipped and rocked the bowl while dancing in it.

In the seat in front of me during the show, a person I took later to be the choreographer himself (? - people congratulated him afterwards) chatted up his guest during the show and, once, let out a obscenely loud "damn it! that's their cue to get off the stage!".  Harrumph.

One more thing: the set change from the first to the second piece was done with the curtain up.  The purposeful and disciplined striking of a set is a mesmerizing bit of choreography.  I would love to make a piece consisting only of sets, flats, curious arbitrary ramps and objects being placed, raised and struck again and again, silently.

air bear

I love Joshua Allen Harris' New York subway grate ephemeral inflatable bear, although it looks a lot more like a dog to me (thanks to YouTube's Rocketboom for featuring the piece in their broadcast today).  It makes me so freaking happy to see that apparent trash slowly rise up and take form as the subway air comes rushing from the grate, and then wag, shake its head (the mouth half-open in anticipation), shiver with excitement...

... then sink down to the grate -- commuters on their way -- and disappear once again as a heap of discarded plastic on the city street.

(New York's fifth season, as everyone knows, is when the plastic bags bud in all the trees, thrust there by winter/spring winds rushing through the steel and glass canyons... Ian Frazier has a nice piece about his own personal obsessive attempt to tackle the problem one tree at a time -- (see http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2001/01/treebags.html) : "Bag snagging was our exercise, our companionship, our hobby, our impromptu community action program")

Harris' second inflatable piece is more kooky, a kind of alien sideshow assemblage of critters waving arms, but it reminds me a bit of those inflatables outside of car dealerships and it doesn't have the fragile -- and ultimately lonely -- impact of the lost dog... er, bear.

You can find out a little more on Harris' work at the Wooster Collective ("dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world"): http://www.woostercollective.com/

biennial 2008

Complaining about the Whitney Biennial (http://whitney.org/biennial) is as New York as griping about how your neighborhood isn't what is used to be or about the proliferation of Duane Reade's, Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks on every block.  

Angry Dog Barking at Whitney-Goers 

(dog, electrical van, plastic cones, 3 hours - unplanned site-specific installation)

And true to form, while I haven't caught the Park Avenue Armory section (a new feature) of this year's show yet , I did find the work at the Whitney to be lackluster overall.  There are a lot of large pieces this year, but the number of artists represented is significantly smaller than in previous years (from over 100 in 2006 down to 81)and there is also almost no painting.

My ideal biennial is a rousing, overflowing, reckless affair, with art spilling out every old which way (like Chris Johanson's wooden streetscapes in the stairwells in 2002), including sound art and internet art, defying easy summaries of the state of contemporary art in America and surprising me at every step.  For this reason, 2002 was a great biennial (http://www.whitney.org/2002biennial/index.shtml), and I still have in my mind Roxy Paine's aluminum tree, Trenton Doyle Hancock's wall-size graphite tree, Karin Campbell's open/closed eyes, Stephen Dean's Holi festival video, Vija Celmins' spiderweb, Chris Ware's comic art, Robert Lazzarini's warped payphone, and Tim Hawkinson's self-portraits, to name a few.  

This being said, I find my memory of any specific biennial becomes rather blurry over time, and in my head they all meld into some kind of super-mega biennial composite of all the biennials I have seen, 2002's works placed beside Yayoi Kusama's firefly room and Eve Sussman's live action recreation of Velasquez's "Las Meninas" from 2004 and Paul Chan's haunting shadow show of floating bodies from 2006 (I could add dozens of other artists/works to this list).

Among the works that did work for me this year:  

* Lisa Sigal's strange little room "The Day Before Yesterday and the Day After Tomorrow" (http://whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/?section=artists&page=artist_sigal ) with its decaying wallpaper, peeling paint, cracked lathe and plaster, and slits in the back wall through which one can glimpse tiny alcoves.  There is a nostalgic feeling of an abandoned apartment (shades of Christian Boltanski) and of discovering lost secrets, and it reminds me of my time in a crumbling squat when we painted on the walls and were kept up at night by the scurrying of the mice.

(Like the Sigal piece, space/place and architecture seem to be preoccupations this year: William Cordova recreates the police informant floor plan of the Chicago house of two Black Panthers, infamously burned by the cops in the 1969; Adam Putnam creates an optical illusion of hallways and doors in a dark room; Mika Rottenberg constructs a goat cheese shanty tended by long-haired maids; Charles Long works through/with found items and shapes (bird droppings) from the L.A. river...)

* Jedediah Caesar's resin works (http://whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/?section=artists&page=artist_caesar ).  The  large block in the middle of the show has a beautiful drippiness with stalagmite-esque hollows and crevasses, while his wall-mounted polished resin squares show off cross-cut detritus and urban junk like millennia-old fossils.

*Ry Rocklen's box-springs spangled with carpenter nails (a bedtime version of Eva Hesse's Ascension).

* My friend L. loved Julia Meltzer and David Thorne's video "Still from not a matter of if but when: brief records of a time when expectations were repeatedly raised and lowered and people grew exhausted from never knowing if the moment was at hand or was still to come" (which is, you have to admit, a great title), a (on first blush) straightforward arab-language video-blog narration (with subtitles) of tragedy, frustration and life quandaries that engages you with its sense of seriousness, but remains utterly inscrutable, it being impossible to fully comprehend what the heck he's going on about.  Which, I guess, says (among other things) a hell of a lot about US-Arab relations today.

***

addendum - I think that Holland Cotter's review of the show in the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/arts/design/07bien.html ) captures the mood pretty well -- "uncharismatic surfaces, complicated backstories", "low-key", "questioning", collaborative -- and is correct about the prevalence of narrative (especially via film/video).  I also appreciated the observation that this biennial (unlike 2002, for example) is not a repeat of works from the year's galleries, but instead a place for newly commissioned works (although, is this entirely a good thing?).  I would hesitate however to extrapolate from this show to a description of contemporary art as "lowered expectations" or "recession-bound": just chalk it up to the biennial being a highly-selective idiosyncratic curatorial snapshot.