RYOJI IKEDA the transfinite

Had three minutes to stop by the opening of Ryoji Ikeda's new installation at the Park Avenue Armory, which was probably best because the place was packed! I am looking forward to heading back on an off day and having the place to myself - I imagine it will be somewhat formidable in that big drill hall, in the dark, with alien-like music coupled with the mad-scientists like movement of the numbers and lines, but I am totally up for the experience. Enjoy some videos below, sorry I am not a better videographer.   www.armoryonpark.org 

Performa 2011

Elmgreen & Dragset AND Ragnar Kjartansson both signed-up for Performa 2011 - this is going to be one god damn amazing fall! 


See the Press Release HERE 

Performa 09 in Times Square 

Link to Performa's website 

Gallery Line Up

This Saturday we're hitting West Chelsea - below is our top 22 of the weekend - hoping to make it to all, aggressive, but doable (need to keep the drinking at a minimum at brunch). 


Donald Judd at David Zwirner
525 W 19
http://www.davidzwirner.com/ 

Foreclosed at The Kitchen
512 W 19
http://www.thekitchen.org/

Cao Fei at Lombard-Freid
518 W 19
http://www.lombard-freid.com/

Donald Lokuta at Hpgrp
529 W 20 2W
http://www.hpgrpgallery.com/

Tim Knowles at Bitforms
529 W 20 2nd Flr
http://www.bitforms.com/index.php

Square Dancing at Nyehaus
358 W 20
http://www.nyehaus.com/

Aaron Young at Bortolami
520 W 20
http://www.bortolamigallery.com/

Keith Haring at Gladstone
530 W 21
http://www.gladstonegallery.com/

Sol LeWitt at Paula Cooper
534 W 21
http://www.paulacoopergallery.com/

Locations at Paula Cooper
521 W 21
http://www.paulacoopergallery.com/

Kara Walker at Sikkema
530 W 22
http://www.sikkemajenkinsco.com/

Philippon and Lecoq at Demisch
542 W 22
http://www.demischdanant.com/

Chamberlain at Pace
545 W 22
http://thepacegallery.com/

John Chamberlain at Gagosian
555 W 24
http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2011-05-05_john-chamberlain/

Martin Kipperberger at Luhring
531 W 24
http://www.luhringaugustine.com/

Mary Henderson at Lyons Wier
542 W 24
http://www.lyonswiergallery.com/

Gunderson at ClampArt
521 W 25
http://clampart.com/

EV Day at Salomon
526 W 26 #519
http://www.salomoncontemporary.com/

Harma Heikens at Witzenhausen
547 W 27 #530
http://www.witzenhausengallery.nl/exhibition_detail.php?idxEvent=299

Chris Marker at Peter Blum
526 W 29
http://peterblumgallery.com/exhibitions/2011/passengers

Cleon Peterson at Joshua Liner
548 W 28 3rd Flr
http://joshualinergallery.com/exhibitions/peterson_white_flag_may_17_2011/

Live from Detroit at Fred Torres
527 W 29
http://www.fredtorres.com/exhibition-space/2011-04-14_live-from-detroit/

Los Angeles Spring 11

Los  Angles Recap

It wasn’t a weekend defined by art (that will come in October for http://pacificstandardtime.org/), but we covered a lot of ground in three days. The weekend started out with MOCA PDC to see the Rodarte: States of Matter exhibit. The PDC branch of MOCA is great as it’s in the middle of West Hollywood and a small space – perfect for a pop-in, which we did after breakfast at Urth and on our way to Santa Monica.  The exhibit was haunting with almost death-like black dresses and costumes from Black Swan suspended from the ceiling with very minimal, eerie lighting. This was the highlight of the exhibit as it was a true transition from the blazing Southern California sun into this dark world. Your eyes hurt from the drastic shift in perception. When I was in LA last fall, I felt the same way about this ground floor space with Ryan Trecartin’s exhibition, the upstairs just doesn’t cut it for some reason. This time the lighting, which was at least a few dozen two-foot long halogen boxes on the floor was not working. I imagine the space feels completely different with the lighting and therefore we glanced at the three vignettes of white and red dress – a clear separation between ethereal, virgin-like frocks and blood-red devilish ensembles. We rolled out in 15 minutes flat – which I knew we would.

Later that day we hit LACMA for the Human Nature exhibition, a David Smith retrospective and Firooz Zahedi’s photos of Liz Taylor in Iran. I was excited to see the pavilions again (the new Renzo Piano “Resnick Pavilion” just opened in the fall) and to see the new pieces at the Broad. Human Nature obviously featured some great Bruce Nauman works (as he has used that phrase in a lot of his themes and works). In addition, there were considerable pieces from new artists I had not heard of again. Besides the quintessential Nauman’s, there was a great Muslim prayer mat made out of small needles with a compass in the middle – a great, tactile piece that really spoke to current cultural issues. The show started off really strong with the heavy hitters but got continually flatter the more we moved through it. The show ended with an oversized kitty litter box that was bigger than a king bed – reminded me of Charles Ray but it wasn’t.

The David Smith exhibition was the highlight of LACMA. He is an artist I am familiar with but have never seen a collection of his work to this extent. It was great to see all the varied pieces, the geometry of the works and his inspiration. Also, the Piano-designed galleries were amazing – the way the light was diffused and the scale of the spaces really were the perfect backdrops to see such influential works.

Finally, we went to the Ahmanson building to see the Liz Taylor photographs. I was surprised to see how outdated the building was – it felt like I was back in an old college library with wood-paneled walls and dropped ceilings. It was weird and somewhat alarming as the Renzo Piano buildings obviously cost tens of millions of dollars, yet the existing buildings need a serious makeover. It’s unclear to me why they’d spend so much on new buildings but leave the existing ones in 1970s conditions. The Liz Taylor photos were great and worth the pop-in, but nothing amazing.

Later that night, we ran over to Regen Projects for the opening of Walead Beshty. Since the bf and I are considering an eventual move west, to follow all the art luminaries who have already started the Western migration, we were excited to see the crowd and the set-up of an LA gallery reception. The crowd was a good mix of real people, LA hippies, hipsters and art lunatics with a surprisingly small percentage of homos. When we entered the exhibit I was surprised to realize I had already seen his work at MoMA in the New Photography series last fall (another reminder I am entering full-on artfag status). The art was very interesting – striped down works. Per the press release:

Beshty's large-scale "Black Curl" photograms are seductive and elusive works that refer to both the analog beginnings of photography and mine the gaps in the medium's historical narrative. 

They look like color spectrum, beautiful large sheets of paper – the size of a single mattress (not sure why all the bed references) with the edges of the paper still slightly curled – a great effect I really embraced. He also had a series he called The Copper Surrogates, which were in a way photographic molds of the spaces in his gallery – but made out of copper. The pieces were very tactile yet smooth and rough at the same time, very simple works with a lot to say. My favorite, however was the “Make-Ready” series made from discarded paper used for the catalog compressed together they made landscaped works that were simple, elegant and somewhat earthy in their color and texture, like a desert landscape on the wall. I don’t know if I’d want any of these pieces in my home, but found them interesting and refreshing.

The same night of the Regen opening, MOCA was opening the Art in the Streets exhibit at the Geffen – still one of my favorite spaces in LA  (I can still remember the impact seeing Altered States there in 2005). We couldn’t make it downtown as we had dinner reservations on the Westside, but on Monday, we found time to shoot downtown and see the exhibit. The show was impressive and it was pulling in a crowd that probably wouldn’t be at Walead Beshty but I found the whole thing to be very noisy and chaotic and not focused or sophisticated. Now this is graffiti art, so what should I expect, right? In hindsight, I think that’s the best part about the Geffen, its rambling space and towering ceilings provide a lot of flexibility for curating. In full disclosure, by the time we got there, I’d been on three restless nights and so I wasn’t as focused as I should have been and more of a sourpuss than I normally am – which is not cute. I think I would have learned more had I been more focused, but due to a restless haze, I became increasing annoyed at the amateur feeling to the show. But honestly, there were some beautiful works – intricate, colorful, mind-blowing works that really did wake me up. As is the theme in my life, I wish I would have had more time to linger, but we had to run to a dinner back on the Westside.

That was it for our LA art adventures. I still didn’t hit L&M (http://www.lmgallery.com/exhibitions/?view=losangeles) or Bergamot Station in Santa Monica (http://bergamotstation.com/) but if the financial gods align, I will make our fall trip for Pacific Standard Time an all-out art expedition followed by some downtime in SF and Napa.

Armory Show 2011

We started the Armory Show at Vernissage on Wednesday night with all the “glamorous” masses. Vernissage is a bourgeois art fair term for the VIP opening night, for which you either need to be invited or pay $100. The word references varnish in French, apparently in the “old days” artists would have parties when they were finished with a work and friends would come over for the varnishing of the piece. Today in the art world circle, it’s a complete shitshow where everyone goes to see and be seen, which is all it’s really good for because it’s so crowded you can barely see any art. I got there relatively early, hoping to beat the late-night crowds, which worked for about 20 minutes before the place was billowing with men with angular haircuts and Euro-trashy girls in very, very high heels. There wasn’t that much the grabbed my attention or seemed new or revolutionary, nor where there some greats – Nauman, Flavin or any of the others I saw at Basel Miami in December.

The only great highlight was a booth completely void of walls and completely enclosed by an illuminated fence. It was created by Ivan Navarro at Paul Kasmin Gallery. Other highlights included Jacob Hashimoto's "Positive and Negative n. 1" 2003 at Studio Lacitta, a beautiful resin piece in black and white with smooth and crystal clear crater-like landscapes.  I would say Phoebe Washburn's "Pickle Project" at Zach Feuer was interesting, but looking back at it a month later, I don’t think so. I was starving for something beautiful, and this was the best of it, not to say it wasn’t interesting, it just didn’t stop me in my tracks. However, "Untitled (Nothing is wholly obvious...)", 2011 by Muntean/Rosenblum did grab my attention. There were several paintings of this style together in the gallery and there combination of a somewhat eerie scene mixed with brilliantly captured light were haunting and beautiful. I also loved the oversized painting by Norbert Bisky at Galerie Daniel Templon.  The more you looked at it, the more you saw – it was gay erotic homicide – very interesting combo. Almost felt like a window (albeit a very, very large window) into the mind of a madman – a gay madman.

We tried to bust out of there as quickly as possible, but I was convinced we needed to get a towncar to take us from the Armory Show to Scope. Both are on the West Side Highway and trying to get cabs was a nightmare – so was waiting for our db (deadbeat) towncar. So we waited in the freezing cold for 30 minutes. Somehow my boyfriend did not kill me – thank god one of us is patient.  However, once we got to Scope – everything was immediately better!

Almost every gallery in the show had something interesting or different and some were real mind-fucks, which I always love. Hamburg Kennedy had one great photograph after another. Artists Wanted had taken up residence in a corner and staged a miraculous royal thrown of sorts. The hipster king and queen were at the top of a big red box – him eating raw meat from the bone and her creating juice from crushing grapes in her mouth and spitting the juice into a gold bowl. With them were performers either lounging, posing or handing out this freshly squeezed juice. It was hot-mess amazingness – a welcome reprieve from the uptown snobbery. The show continued to be very interesting. Hector de Gregorio at Opus Art had beautiful punk period paintings that were hard and beautiful at the same time. Wayne Coe's "Art Basel Boys/Bijou" was a hysterical reinterpretation of the 1970s baths and old school gay porn updated with the heavy hitters of the current art world.  The night ended with an amazing dinner at ‘eno in the west village.

The next two days I tried to sneak out of work to see the other fairs, but that didn’t happen. Thursday night I made in down to Chelsea for Pulse and then Soho for Red Dot. Pulse was very simple, noting really amazing. Stephen Abbleby-Barr was there with a few new pieces – should have totally bought a piece last year. His work is so amazing and a great combination of historical, period styling with an all-male cast that has a somewhat mischievous undertone. Andres Basurto at Lyons Wier was the only other notable work, a collection of beautiful broken glass skulls. The light made each of these pop even though there was a creepy, almost religious tone to them. Otherwise, the show was a lot of misses – nothing really new or anything that stood out. From there I ran down to Soho for Red Dot – which was so amateur and seemed like a regional art fair not worthy of a global city. There were some small regional galleries that had bad pieces you’d see in a resort town – a lot of snoresville woodwork sculptures and landscapes. The only great works were a corner full of beautiful paintings by Nicholas Evans-Cato – they were of unique and rare shots of the New York waterfront. Simple but still interesting.

I ended up going to Volta twice – once by myself on Friday and it was so good the bf and I went back Saturday. It was so good – I don’t even know where to start. Natasha Kissell’s paintings placed art museums and major institutions in fairytale settings – beautiful over-stylized landscapes with the New Museum just popped in the center. Jill Sylvia at Magrorocca took mathematical graph paper and sliced each box out perfectly to create amazing clean and geometric works that were simple in their design but perplexing in their creation. Christian Schoeler at Schuebbe painting dream-like paintings with young, naked boys in landscapes. They were not sexual at all – more ethereal and harkening back to a simple time when nakedness did not equal sexuality (if ever such a time existed).  

Michael Decker in the Lobby of the Volta show created a sculpture out of a collection of old ironing boards. The piece was not anything monumental or significant – just fun and entertaining. Finally, Bertram Hasenauer at Fruehsorge created beautiful works. My favorite, which totally reminded of Salsitano, was a simple, elegant drawing of the side of a man’s head. This work was the only one that really stopped me in my tracks and really pulled me in. it was way out of my price range – which was basically $10 – but the work gave me inspiration and reminded me why I love going to the fairs. Volta’s diversity and quality made up for some of the misses this week.

After Volta, the bf and I ran over the West Chelsea to hit Moving Image and Independent. Moving Image was a collection of video works, mostly historically, set on suspended flat screens throughout the main space of the Tunnel building. Some I had seen before, but my favorite was a new work and not on a flat screen. It was a rectangular box created with light bulbs that were slightly larger than Christmas lights. The lights were timed to show animated people walking by – it was such a visually beautiful piece – again, really simple but still stunning. From there we rushed over to the Frying Pan for Independent. This was the one show we had to pay for as it was their opening night and my fancy-pants MoMA membership didn’t get me in. The bf hated it – it was too cheap, grassroots, and hokey for him. I loved it. It was very start-up, interesting, thought provoking and a total mind-fuck. We only had 15 minutes – which totally sucked! I wish we had at least an hour – we would have had a drink and taken in:

1980’s cartoon characters all with oversized penises wallpaper

real life naked Jesus in front of a light box cross

a sketchy, smelly lower level with tons of small works

the Golden Girls made with spray paint

It was total visual overload- everywhere you looked was something new, provocative and interesting. Even if it wasn’t the most detailed work or expensively built sculpture – its more art that is feeding your mind, imagination and consciousness. We had to run to a dinner – bad planning on my part.

What I would have done was blow off the Bushwick Arts collective as it was a shitshow of a different caliber. We thought we schlepped out to the Morgan stop on the L train to see some performance art. Instead we got videos of performance art. Luckily, we had a fabulous brunch and a few drinks instead – thank god it was a nice day and we could walk to amazing restaurants and bars. It ended up being one of those great days where we started with art, rolled into brunch, then drinks, then dinner, then a party and ended up dancing our faces off till 4am. It was a crazy day – one that should not be forgotten.

And that was my Armory week. I guess in hindsight, it was a good week. Next year, assuming I am still in New York, I might have to take a day off for it. But it’s no Miami Basel – where you need at least three days. There were a few highlights, but overall I learned I never plan enough time. Need more of a buffer for great shows and outs for bad ones.

Saturday gallery tours (God willing)

11 galleries in West Chelsea with family in tow? Let's hope so.... 

Terrace Koh at Mary Boone via the NY Times

Ellsworth Kelly at http://www.matthewmarks.com/
Tara Donovan at http://thepacegallery.com/
Terrace Koh at http://www.maryboonegallery.com/index.html
Donald Judd at  http://thepacegallery.com/
Marcel Dzama at http://www.davidzwirner.com/
Josh Smith http://www.luhringaugustine.com/
Hiraki Sawa at http://www.jamescohan.com/
Sue de Beer at http://www.marianneboeskygallery.com/current/
Richard butler at http://www.freightandvolume.com/
Duke Riley at http://www.magnanmetz.com/
Hope gangloff at http://www.inglettgallery.com/

Armory Show Pics

Armory Week 2011

Armory Show 

Jacob Hashimoto's "Positive and Negative n. 1" 2003

at Studio Lacitta 

Phoebe Washburn's "Pickle Project" at Zach Feuer

"Untitled (Nothing is wholly obvious...)", 2011 by Muntean/Rosenblum

Artist Unknown at Evergreen out of Geneva 

Scope Opening 

Selections from Hamburg Kennedy

Selections from Hamburg Kennedy

Selections from Hamburg Kennedy

Hector de Gregorio at Opus Art 

Wayne Coe's "Art Basel Boys/Bijou"

Pictures from Pulse

Hello? Stephen Abbleby-Barr a 2010 find we are still dying for! 

Another Stephen 

Andres Basurto at Lyons Wier 

Few good pieces at Red Dot

Nicholas Evans-Cato 

Nicholas Evans-Cato 

Volta - the best of the week 

Natasha Kissell

Natasha Kissell

Jill Sylvia at Magrorocca

Jill Sylvia at Magrorocca

Christian Schoeler at Schuebbe

Christian Schoeler at Schuebbe

Michael Decker in the Lobby 

Bertram Hasenauer at Fruehsorge