"Brooklyn Dispatches: Groundhog Day All Over Again: Lowbrow, No-Brow, Pop Surrealism," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

“You know, I’m completely ignorant of that artist’s work.  I try not to pay any attention to art history”.  I heard these words from a slight, young European artist, a lock of hair strategically hanging across his left eye, just frazzled enough to be chic.  I wanted to smack him upside the head; thought better, maybe just a headlock and some nuggies.  It wasn’t like I was talking to him about some cult figure from Albania or Bushwick. I was referring to Robert Rauschenberg, the Robert Rauschenberg

I’d bumped into this kid after closing time on a Sunday afternoon in the “killing Room” at a Williamsburg Gallery.  I’m usually running around looking at shows in the off-hours, trying to get an unobstructed view of the work.  Seems young artists on the make have picked up on the idea, since it’s a great time to talk to exhausted galleriests wrapping up the weekend, their defenses down.

Hans (not his real name) is proposing an installation piece for the gallery, a large kiddy clubhouse of corrugated cardboard boxes on flimsy wooden supports.  From the jpegs on his ultra-sleek notebook computer, I couldn’t help but recall Rauschenberg’s Card Bird series from the early seventies (probably several years before he was born).  Some of these pieces were dead ringers. 

I was still incredulous, wondering if Hans was pulling my leg, playing naïve to deflect any questions of derivation.  Thinking back, I once loved to tweak geezers just to get a rise out of them, but in this case I had my doubts.  As fashion and the market have become the sole forces shaping current art production, the concept of historical legacy, or its relevance to today, seems to have been relegated to some far-off garret of academia having nothing to do with studio or post-studio practice.  After an excruciating ten-minute animated Flash presentation with alternative-punk musical accompaniment, a far cry from the manila envelope, slide sheets, and black tie portfolios I’d hauled around, I made a diplomatic dash for the door.  Weaving my way down Driggs Avenue I tried to console myself with the thought that perhaps my concern about art history was a personal hang-up, a real buzz-killer if you want to mingle with Williamsburg’s youngsters.  Maybe it’s more important to just do art.  A big enjoyable part of being young is being dumb.  Unfortunately, the fearlessness of youth seems to have been replaced with a reluctance to venture out of the nursery. The trend towards infantile scribblings, childlike narratives, and exhibitions that could pass for kindergarten projects has gotten stale.  I imagine dozens of recent art school grads, curled in fetal positions, wrapped in cuddly skuzzy blankets sucking their thumbs and afraid to leave babydom, endlessly rehashing images from afternoon cartoon shows but refusing to risk the uncomfortable realization that childhood wasn’t meant to last a lifetime.           
    
“Those who do not learn from history are domed to repeat it.”  Yeah, it’s a well-worn cliché, but reliving history is preferable to being stuck in a one-note prehistory, and Santayana’s sentiments seem to be playing out in our amnesiac art world in evermore swiftly repeating cycles.  The original movement/manifesto of the morning is supplanted by its post/neo version in the afternoon only to be pasted over with a cynical post-post kitsched-up neo-nuevo edition by dinnertime.  Then it’s all repeated with minor variations the next day.  Maybe Hans was right, forget the timeline, just make the work, even if it looks just like stuff done fifteen, thirty or fifty years ago.  History is for “highbrows”.

Pop Subversion, an exhibition provocatively curated by Andrew Ford at Ad Hoc Art, presents a broad group of works that raises a range of questions about the current state of New Figuration, Street Art, Low Brow and Graffiti.  Presiding over this diverse group is an engagingly bizarre little canvas “In the pavilion of the Red Clown,” (2001) by the Californian cult favorite Robert Williams.  Williams started out as an art director for Ed (Big Daddy) Roth, which are all the credentials I need.  “Red Clown” is a masterfully illustrated set piece—a blitzed-out, one-legged clown holds up a bird cage with a white viper inside, the bulge of an undigested birdie preventing the serpent from slipping through the narrow bars, while a showgirl in a star-studded costume recoils in shock against a backdrop of circus props, a prosthetic leg, and half a dozen empty vodka bottles.  I called this an illustration, and William’s style and technique borrows a lot from magazines and comic books of the fifties and sixties, yet it begs the question: do we still need the divide between high and commercial art or has all art become commercial, with “high” referring only to the price tag?  Perhaps critical rhetoric has evolved into an artifactual wardrobe, a reversible one-size-fits-all casual/formal cloak, draping the object in whatever conceptual garment fits the occasion?

Pop Subversion lies on this cusp, and subverts not just from the bottom up but from the top down.  Since its New York flowering in the early seventies, Graffiti has morphed from underground bad-boy turf marking to chic gallery darling to corporate logos and back.  Local “Old School” Graf, with its broad arm swings, twisted interlacings and rugged spontaneity, has a more than a passing relation to New York School Action Painting, and as with the waning of the “Tenth Street Touch” when pressed on whether we’ve now entered a state of Post-Graffiti Mr. Ford demurred, stating he couldn’t answer that question.  However, works on display like “Power Girl Black” and “Power Girl Green” by AICO, which maintain a scruffy aerosol facture while melding erotic cartoon images of a bounding buxom super-babe with the stencil technique now popular in contemporary street art, seem to imply we have. 

“Landscape” is a nightmarishly comical scene by Joe Vaux that intermingles a hallucinatory cast of goofy mini-monsters, anthropomorphized trees and mutant birds.  Its gestalt—Hieronymus Bosch meets Joan Miro on Nickelodeon’s Martian channel—and its slick surface and peachy color scheme wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a children’s fantasy sci-fi book.

Although not hung entirely salon style, mostly the works are packed in without much breathing room.  The claustrophobic feeling lends a streetwise sincerity to the installation—akin to standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a packed L train—but it suits most of the medium to small-sized works well.  Strolling around the gallery just when I thought I’d gotten a fix on some commonality, a piece like “See No Evil” by Robert Steel would pop up.  This black-and-white drawing of a girl and boy in a tenement back lot next to a graveyard in Washington DC Is an engaging character study, and though realistically detailed with a nice rendering of textures and skin tone, it doesn’t quite fall into the hyper-realist category.  The use of deep raking shadows and subtle gradations seem to radiate heat from a glaring grisaille sun.

The eyes have it, and there were certainly a sizable contingent of the “Big Eye” school of painting.  I heard comments a couple of years ago during the Armory Show Art Fair about the glut of figurative pieces with big eyes.  At the time, it seemed to reflect the influence of Japanese anime on “Chick Art.”  In this show, the works of Gil, Camilla d’Errico, Fawn Fruits, Sandra Chi and Benjamin Lacombe, the glistening iris-and-deep-pupils trend has continued in an apparent homage to that still-active avatar of twentieth century kitsch, Margaret Keane.  Even so, the “Big Eye” girls in Camilla d’Errico’s paintings get an edgy twist, wearing hats swarming with white mice and centipedes or receiving licentious kisses with mouths full of honeycombs.

Brendan Danielsson contributes sharp-focus portrait drawings depicting unsettling, sexually ambiguous grotesques.  The man/woman in “Texas Tea” could be from a long-faded photo of a pioneer couple who have somehow melded together.  On the right side, a grizzly, weather-beaten settler in a stiff suit and collar, black beard and curling mustache, grimaces while he/she transitions to an equally tough female left side with flowing black hair and an exposed breast squirting milk over the prairies. 

Perhaps an aspect of Post-Modernist thought is the attempt to transcend our obsession with novelty and the post-neo-newest, to jump the timeline and see history as a ball rather than a strip, an ocean rather than a river.  After all, the Gothic style was vibrant for three hundred years.  Surrealism, though perhaps not quite so durable, keeps coming back like a persistent skin rash.  And rather that asking ourselves if it’s a failure of artistic originality that an image might echo something done decades ago, we might rather ponder what kinds of shared impulses an artist in Paris in the 1930s, San Francisco in 1969, or Brooklyn in 2008 would lead to such similar results?

A video tour of “Pop Subversion” with an Andrew Ford interview is available at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r9yxjRZo4U

"Brooklyn Dispatches: The Ethics of Aesthetics," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Little did I realize when I wrote “The Gangs of New York” (Brooklyn Rail July/August 2007), on the new phenomenon of the art blogosphere, that shortly we’d be witnessing a major power shift as some of these bloggers flex their newfound muscle.  Until recently, their torrent of opinions, reviews, and excruciatingly clever snarking about artists, critics, curators and other bloggers has been ignored by the mainstream press and art establishment.  Because, in the “democracy” that is the Internet, where anyone can start a blog, those who succeeded in building a readership did so through the uniqueness of their voices, the consistency of their entries and the thoroughness of their cross-linking. With time the cream has risen to the surface, creating an online network despite the near-impossibility of generating income from a site and the amount of time and effort it takes to maintain a blog, while the desire to take part in the larger conversation keeps lesser talents bent over keyboards clicking away in the pursuit of relevance.

It wasn’t till last fall that a valid possibility for the blogosphere evolved: that of moralistic watchdog, in essence, an art world “Bullshit Detector”.  In his October 9th posting on ANABA (http://anaba.blogspot.com) titled “Jerry Saltz is an UNDEAD ZOMBIE,” the untiring Martin Bromirski took New York’s favorite (and one of its most influential) art critics to task.   Bromirski, an ardent fan, complained about Saltz recycling several phrases verbatim in his October 15, 2007 New York Magazine essay “Has Money Ruined Art?” from an earlier essay “Seeing Dollar Signs” published in the Village Voice January 18, 2007.  Bitching and moaning are the bread and butter of blogging and for an influential critic, like Mr. Saltz, this kind of carping comes with the territory.  (Indeed, Teresa Duncan, one half of last summer’s bizarre double suicide had railed relentlessly against Saltz and his wife Roberta Smith on her popular blog The Wit of Stair Case (http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/art/index.html) in the weeks just prior to her OD.)  But the nose of the camel got into the tent when Saltz immediately published a mea culpa and admitted in part that “I was guilty of using many of the same ideas, lines, and quotes that I have used in previous articles. The blogger called this ‘very lazy’; actually, he/she also called me ‘an undead zombie.’ I’m afraid I agree; it was lazy. It’s also unfair to the reader and undermines my credibility”.  Though the response was appropriate—the reference to Mr. Bromirski as he/she not withstanding (maybe a holdover from the gazillion Shemale adds in the Voice)—many times in the past these types of screeds would simply be ignored.   This tidbit and its aftermath must have induced a wave of nausea rippling through the upper levels of the critical “Good Old Boys and Girls Club” as they realized an uncomfortable precedent had been set.  Chalk one up for the bloggers.  

Charlie Finch, our favorite grump, in what may have been a preemptive blitz to discredit the entire blogging enterprise, and no doubt trying to cover Saltz’s back, staged a counterattack from his artnet.com column titled “The Not-So-Vast-Right-Wing Conspiracy” from October 26, 2007.  If equating bloggers with the Right Wing wasn’t heinous enough, he goes on to say “Unfortunately, the proliferation of art blogs has taken all the day-tripper fun out of criticism by circle-jerking, recycling and regurgitating the effluvia of critique beyond the wildest fantasies of Rosalind Krauss.” And further that “They all refer and link to each other, since their primary audience is themselves.”  Finch goes after Tyler Green with special gusto, saying he ”… sucks up to every curator on the planet, and I wish him well on his world tour of speaking engagements at obscure museums, cashing his money orders at the bus station.”

On the heels of Finch’s trash talk, Peter Plagens gathered together five leading art bloggers from diverse cities across the country for a roundtable discussion in the November 2007 Art in America titled “The New Grass Roots.”Included are Regina Hackett who writes for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/art/), Jeff Jahn, based in Portland Oregon,  (http://www.portlandart.net/), the above-mentioned Washington, D.C., writer, Tyler Green, (http://www.artsjournal.com/man/), the Philadelphia team of Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof (http://fallonandrosof.blogspot.com/), and our own former-Williamsburg-now-Chelsea-hotshot-galleriest, Edward Winkleman (http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com/). This very informative dialogue covers basic question about motivation, number of page views, financial arrangements, and the editorial responsibilities of online art critics. 

At this point, the blogosphere is garnering more positive attention than at any time in its still nascent history.  But for art world insiders, good word of mouth and media buzz, especially on the Internet, are short-lived.  What really gets their attention is money or the exercise of raw power, and that’s the crux of this brief recap.

When Christian Veveros-Faune, the recently installed replacement for Jerry Saltz at the Village Voice, sat for a three-part interview with Tyler Green, he probably wasn’t expecting to do more than kibitz and wow an out-of-towner art writer with his hip insights. (Full Discloser: I’ve known Christian for years, reviewed shows at Reobling Hall while he was a partner there in Williamsburg, and interviewed him in his capacity as a critic at the Village Voice.)  In the ensuing chat, Green went after Ververos-Faune’s apparent conflict of interest, asking how a critic can also function as a curator for two commercial art fairs (the Volta fair which runs concurrently with the Armory Show locally, and the Next Fair in Chicago).  In an editorial epilog Green calls on Ververos-Faune to either separate himself from the commercial fairs or for Voice editor Tony Ortega to “stop publishing him.”  When the dust settled, Ververos-Faune was out of his job at the Voice (leaving us with one less reason to pick up the paper) and drawing undesired attention to his two other positions as art fair organizer.  Beyond that, Green’s questions and implied standards have art world operators looking at their tally sheets and dance cards and questioning whether they were in compliance with this new blogger-enforced code of ethics.

Response was instantaneous (a tactical advantage of online media) and expected.  Most bloggers cheered, hailing Green for nailing an influential critic, and dealing Ververos-Faune his comeuppance.  Many members of the New York critical community just grumbled and circled the wagons.  Some blamed the new pusillanimous management at the Voice for folding so fast.  The final results, other than driving thousands of eyeballs to Modern Art Notes (Green’s site), and giving the fingers of countless bloggers a thorough workout, is yet to be seen.  For anyone with local experience, the art world is and always has been nothing other than one giant knot of conflicting interests, whether political, financial, institutional, professional, sexual, or pharmaceutical.  As a fan and champion of both the art blogosphere and the New York scene, I’m conflicted.  Yes, it’s great to see the real world take action when prodded by the virtual but, call me a chauvinist, I don’t think out-of-towners possess a realistically sensitive view of the subtle relationships that make up this particular milieu.  Are art critics, as Green asserts, mere journalists, that report only the facts of who, what, where, and when?  If, as Camus implies, the making of art is an act of rebellion, then shouldn’t its most impassioned commentators likewise be rebels?  What of pathos and poetry?   Is it time for an art critical code of ethics, complete with signed affidavits and oaths?  Geez, I hope not.  Good critics, first of all, have to love art, and that is in itself a conflict; second; they have to voice strong opinions which, in this all too politically correct era, keep many mum for fear of alienating possible allies; third we want them to be entertaining, make art viewing fun, challenging, risky, and spare us the market analysis (this is art, not financial instruments we’re talking about).  If we extend this to “purge trials,” then let’s start at the top with the museum boards, their directors and curators.   How do their personal, political and financial interests impose boundaries on what and who gets shown? Then let’s go after the big time commercial art publications, their editors, advertisers and critics, then on to government and private foundations and their grant selection process.  Let’s not forget academia and the vagaries of tenure and funding and on and on and on. If this is a harbinger of a reformation, a cyberspace nailing-of-theses-to-the-door moment, then there’ll be plenty to keep bloggers typing for an eternity.  But after they’ve all worn their fingers bloody, and all our eyes are bleached by cathode rays, will any of this make for better art or art criticism?  As Granny said, don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.

"Memories of Future Amnesia “Willliamsburg Without the Fluff” ," Saatchi Online Magazine

By James Kalm

Opinions vary; ether it’s over, done, dead, soooo last millennium, or it’s vibrant, challenging, a great place to experiment, push the envelope, take your shot at the “big leagues”.  In many cases declarations like the former, are delivered with rolled eyes, smug sneers or raised brows, made by blabbermouths who, though not openly admitting it, got their ignominious beginnings within the Williamsburg community. 

When I was approached to write yet another Williamsburg over-view essay (seems I’ve written this at least five times since 1997) I decided to cut the crap scrap off the fluff and tell it like it is.  Williamsburg is Williamsburg, a neighborhood in transition, a real estate developer’s dream, a place under incredible pressure brought on by its own success, a boom town with oblivious crowds mining for that last nugget, a place where “fucked up shit happens”, where careerist goals and opportunist ambitions twist relationships like pretzels and still, occasionally, magic. 

Welcome to Williamsburg 2.0.  So what’s new?

Like the terrible mixed metaphors of the proverbial blind man and elephant (if you can’t see the big picture it’s a totally different critter depending on whether you’re touching the trunk, the leg or the tail), and “you don’t want to see how sausage is really made”, Williamsburg fills a messy and complex yet profound place in New York’s cultural heritage.

Let’s Remember

As part of a research project involved with my exhibition “Greater Williamsburg: We Are Our Own Art History” I was able to document during the years between 1985 and 2006, the existence of over 140 galleries/art-spaces in the neighborhood, a number nearly twice as large as the East Village in its heyday.  Remarkably, nearly all these spaces were founded by artists who felt shut out of the EV, Soho, 57th Street and Chelsea systems.  To remedy this, these intrepid pioneers developed a DIY (Do It Yourself) attitude that is still a hallmark of local endeavors.  Collaborative happenings like “All Fools Show”, (1982) “The Mustard Factory” (1993), “Cats Head” and bunches of other transitory cultural potlatches influenced groups and individuals and resonated far beyond the Bedford/Metropolitan Avenue nexus.  By using a highly developed informational grape vine, organizers, on short notice, could summon swarms of energetic artists to clean up, prop up, and show up for art raves/exhibitions/concerts.  In the late eighties, as the East Village scene foundered, a few brave souls sans business plan or marketing strategies came over the bridge and started impromptu galleries.  Ward Shelley’s famous “Williamsburg Timeline Drawing” designates this period as the “Golden Age” and for some, in their own prime, it was. 

I began to establish my own art critical beat here in 1997 when you could walk between the half-dozen or so galleries in twenty minutes, but without the now numerous coffee boutiques and juice bars to refresh ambulating explores.  Then, as now, most galleries schedules were weekend affairs squeezed in after grueling day jobs.  As central Williamsburg became more pricy the adventurous began to pitch camp ever farther north, south and east.  Enclaves in Greenpoint, east of the BQE and south to Flushing Avenue have come and in some cases gone.  With pangs of nostalgia I picked up a crappy mimeographed listings (perhaps computer simulated mimeography) published by something called Godsofmars informing us about a cluster of risky galleries at the burg’s eastern boarder with Bushwick, once again raising hopes for a new destination to cruse.  Unfortunately, no sooner than reports of the establishment of spaces like NUTUREart, 3rd Ward, Ad Hoc Art, Pocket Utopia and English Kills come, than we’re informed Taste Like Chicken, the ground breaking neighborhood venue, has been forced into paralysis by an anxious landlord.

At the risk of seeming insensitive and stirring up hurt feelings I’d like to mention some of those who have passed through the nab and gone on.  Though they might play it down or deprecate their associations, several of Chelsea’s hottest young galleriests are Williamsburg veterans.  Leo Koenig, golden boy dealer and scion to one of Europe’s most influential art families, recipient of a New Yorker Magazine profile, weathered his apprenticeship with his first gallery attempt at Four Walls, the same location now occupied by VertexList.  Becky Smith together with three friends maxed out their credit cards on their way to founding Bellwether in the upstart Greenpoint district.  She then went solo, relocated to Grand Street, and left mobs of grumbling locals still pissed off at her meteoric rise and eventual departure to raise havoc in Chelsea.  Joel Beck of Roebling Hall and his former partner Christian Viveros-Faune (who has forsaken art dealer-hood to peruse criticism for the prestigious Village Voce) were community stalwarts and opened first a satellite gallery in Soho, eventually relocating the whole shebang, like many former burgsters, to West Chelsea, beyond 11th Avenue.  The above are just a few of the many who come to mind, and though some Brooklyn hold-outs bare grudges both personally and professionally, we all recognize that Williamsburg is still the place where ambitious kids come for on the job training in creating their own art world.

Beyond the petty beefs that fill our gossip quotas we’ve also had a roster of real tragedies:  we lost Annie Herron, credited by many as having opened the first “commercial” gallery Test Site in the early 90s, to a rare form of cancer.  When Sophia Loren (or as rumor has it, a Sophia look-a-like) visited his show at Pierogi, it was too late for Mark Lombardi who’d committed suicide in 2000 just as he was beginning to taste the fruits and receive serious recognition for his maniacal mapping of international political networks.  Steve Parrino was killed coming home on his motorcycle from a holiday party in the wee hours of the new year 2005 and won’t see his draped and “misshaped” canvases gracing the walls at Gagosian on Madison Avenue this October.

Despite all the buzz killers, Williamsburg is still the territory of unique events and venues that could happen no place else.  The now legendary Christmas exhibition that’s morphed into “The War Is Over” show at Side Show is one of New York’s largest independently currated affairs.  The 2007 edition featured the works of nearly 300 artists from three generations and lends credence to the notion that the burg is not just a place where the young come to break into the scene, but where mature practitioners (some with impeccable credentials) who’ve fallen from grace, can be rediscovered.  It may be counterintuitive considered the ever expanding square footage of Manhattan galleries, but here, thinking small may be a good thing and Holland Tunnel is ahead of the curve.  This garden-shed cum gallery has hosted national and internationally known artists’ work in a space about the size of the average urban bathroom.  And speaking of small, David Gibson, the hardest working curator in the neighborhood, has been organizing shows for the past four years at Real Form Project Space in the very heart of the scene at Bedford and North 5th Street. Gibson took over this 6 x 3 x 7 foot store window from Larry Walczak, whose eyewash productions now exists as a “migratory gallery”.

Clement Greenberg said that art on the edge might initially “look ugly”, weird, or strange, not in a good way.  Some venues here have pronounced agendas supporting “new media”, “techno art” or gadgets and installations that challenge our norms of aesthetics.  A cluster of galleries on the Williamsburg/Greenpoint boarder have displayed an allegiance, at least in part, to questioning the connections of technology and art.  Vertexlist specializes in work that crosses the line between high-tech gizmos and sculpture.  Artmovingprojects also delves into the techno as well as video and on-line new media.  On the South-East side Dam & Stuhltrager consistently presents installations and sculpture that might be as dangerous to the viewer’s life and limb as they are to their excepted ideas of beauty.

Every aficionado seeking a forum that reports and critiques on all things cultural from a Brooklyn perspective owes a debt to the Brooklyn Rail, its publisher Phong Bui, and the art scene staff headed by John Yau.  In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve been a writer for the Rail for nearly eight years now, and I’m proud and amazed at the dedication of its reporters and the determination that has taken what was an armature journalistic project and developed it into one of New York’s most influential arts publications.  Much of the critical attention and examination of local endeavors has come from the Rail.   Beyond the hard copy, the Rail has organized discussions and symposiums, giving natives a connection with the grand flow of New York art history.  An intriguing panel, held at Pierogi concurrently with the Philip Guston retrospective at the Met, was attended by Irving Sandler, Wolf Kahn and Nicholas Carone, all three members of the famed “Artists Club”, the ad hoc organization responsible for the establishment of the “New York School”.

The WAGA (Williamsburg Art Gallery Association) has been tirelessly organizing district wide events with galleries and art venues, a feat akin to herding cats.  Williamsburg Every Second is a second Friday of every month shindig featuring openings, late gallery hours, special performances and rollicking gallery crawls.

A brief story by way of comparison: While visiting some galleriest friends (former Brooklynites) at their new digs in one of those massive, airless, windowless Chelsea gallery buildings, the clock struck 6:00.  Our conversation stopped.  Designer jackets were slipped on, elegantly spare briefcases toted.  On cue, my friends and the six neighboring dealers walked out, locked their shop doors, waved to each other and headed to 10th Avenue to flag cabs for home.  I jumped on my bike, peddled across town and over the bridge.  By the time I hit Grand Street it was way past closing time, but lights were still on in many of the galleries.  Folks in grungy paint-stained camo shorts were yakking in the front doorways, people watched the pigeons wheeling overhead.  Antsy women with facial piercing and breaded strands of torques and magenta hair debated reviews in the Rail.  Everyone was engaged, and mostly the subject was art, real, genuine, messy, stinking art.  They were living it, they were talking it, and they were making it, not just trying to sell it.  Sure you can stroll the hundreds of look alike white box galleries in Chelsea (I still do) leaving a trail of bread crumbs so as not to get lost in the endless maze of simulacrum. But lest we forget, for over twenty years now Williamsburg, despite all the confrontations, is still the place to go for an authentic, unfiltered, free range art experience.

"Brooklyn Dispatches: Authentic Beauty, or The Real Phony," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Sometimes as I peddle to endless art openings, studio visits, multi-million dollar museum extravaganzas and the ever-expanding galaxy of art fairs, I’m occasionally struck by parallel sensibilities or common developments.  As a spate of recent shows here in Brooklyn seem to indicate, a subtle shift seems to be taking place with regard to culture’s perception of beauty.  Whether or not the exhibits of a few disparate artists constitute a movement or trend, they do serve as a gauge for the very contentious subject of “authenticity” and its apparent ascension over beauty in the hierarchy of aesthetic experience.

Previously the designation of the authentic was reserved for the “Outsider” or the exotic “other”, usually defined by ethnicity, class, psychological state or sub-cultural enclave.  With the assimilation of Art Brut and a broadening awareness of global culture, these areas have become just other fields within the greater art market, aped by professionals and routinely taught in art departments everywhere (just check out the number of wannabe Dargers and Wölflis at the next grad student show).   Ironically, the new outside is actually inside, a place so bizarre and uncharted that the thought of actually going there scares the shit out of East Coast artsy types and their international cronies as well. That place is back-road, red state America.

This isn’t your father’s Americana of folksy flags, eagles and baseball, but a dark mirror image of Norman Rockwell’s America as depicted in movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Sling Blade, a low-rent world of dinged-up trailer parks and skuzzy truck-stops inhabited by toothless mouth-breathers and failed nut-case eccentrics, the incestuous progeny of crank fueled unions in Monkey Wards parking lots.  These bozos actually worship God, not the New York Times.

“Knucklehead Blues” a double solo show by Jason Eisner and Brent Owens, at English Kills, is a humorous yet disturbing demonstration of “back-roads” style.  Of the two, Jason Eisner seems more concerned with the iconic roads part.  His constructions, fashioned from knotty-pine (a prime signifier of hick-stick) and plywood, are set on low rolling “trailers” with crude, hand-cut wooden wheels highlighted in toxic pink, matching sheets of Styrofoam insulation (another pathetic material) decorating the sculptures’ surfaces.  They’d look right at home hooked to tow bars behind rusting Nissan pickup trucks in a Jefferson Davis Day parade. Eisner’s other offerings include a portable mock-billboard painted in simulated wood grain, tree stumps, high-voltage towers, and a small mixed-media drawing of three olive green figures in baseball caps chopping down, and dismembering trees—an image that pays homage to that most knuckleheaded of art tools, the chainsaw.  Loud as hell, dangerous and belching oily, stinking exhaust, the chainsaw is the epitome of the Dada-lumberjack mentality as well as a symbol of an environment under assault.

 “‘ONCE YOU PASS THE MODE RATIONAL MARK YOU’VE PASSED IT, AND THE GYRATION YOU FEEL WORKING DOWN FROM THE TOP OF YOUR BRAIN’ HE SAID ‘THAT’S THE HAND OF GOD LAYING A BLESSING ON YOU.  HE HAS GIVEN YOU YOUR RELEASE.’”  This barely comprehensible “poem” is routered into a largish panel of thick planks by Brent Owens in a ham-fisted backwoods style recalling the signage of national parks or rustic souvenir shops.  It sets the tone for a series of hayseed “inspirational plaques” with sentiments like “Lord let me die with a hammer in my hand” or “If I could fuck a mountain, Lord I would fuck a mountain”.  A grouping of saws with hand-carved handles and painted blades share space with a medieval mace and chain carved from a single log, another manifestation of the woodworkers’ aesthetic running through both Eisner’s and Owens’s output.  The pièce de résistance of “Knucklehead” was the fully operational still titled “The Taxpayer” (2007) dripping moonshine whiskey over the run of the show.  Cobbled together from a secondhand propane grill, a large pressure cooker, various tanks and copper coils, the still is an updated version of a design that Owens inherited from his grandparents.  Visiting the show the day after the opening, I spoke with the bleary-eyed Mr. Owens, who was recovering from the previous night’s “white lightning” binge, and sampled a glass of fresh booze.

These artists are presenting a view of an alternative America, not an alien “other” but the “other” within us, an authentic, visceral vision uncontaminated by Northeastern liberal guilt and the chaffing shackles of political correctness.  With its hot-rod hood sculptures and biker chick photos, Richard Prince’s massive Spiritual America retrospective at the Guggenheim mines a similar vein, and it set off howls from New York’s critical establishment.  Jason Rhodes’ bombastic “Black Pussy” installation at Zwirner, likewise, seeks a Post-Duchampian buzz from a gallery-filling accumulation of trading post tchachkas and cowboy druggy paraphernalia all interspersed with 180 neon “pussy words.” Though the “Knuckleheads” don’t enjoy similar budgets or institutional support, they are clearly junior members of this anti-aesthetic “take this art and shove it” good old boys network. 

Another iconic American “other” is the lone tinkerer, the eccentric over-the-top hobbyist laboring away in the family garage, another variation of the American Dream gone slightly awry.

With “BPL”, the “Brower Propulsion Laboratory,” Steve Brower brings together the remnants, models and memorabilia of several projects under one roof.  According to “recently declassified documents,” BPL was the bastard stepbrother of NASA.  Like a collection bucket under an overflow release valve, it became the final repository for ideas deemed too outlandish or nutty for NASA, as well as for personnel who didn’t make the final cut.

A series of drawings with text record the comically pathetic story of one Conrad Carpenter, an astronaut washout.  Never able to live up to expectations, this poor schnook spent a lifetime regretting the fact he’d missed his chance to make it into orbit.  Even after his premature death the attempt to rocket his ashes into space is flubbed.  A case of space launch funerary apparatus is displayed in front of the drawings.   

The well-crafted “LIMPER” (Limited Intelligence Marginally Produced Exploration Rover) (2007) is a beautifully tooled simulation of a slacker Mars Rover, filling an official-looking Plexiglas case with its aluminum wheels, stainless steel axel-struts and gold tinted foil cowling.  On closer inspection it’s obvious that this contraption couldn’t make it to the gallery door, but its phony scientific assertiveness will power it for light-years in the minds of viewers. 

Brower’s intense efforts to simulate “authenticity” are on warp-drive in the fabrication of “Child Astronaut Test Suit” designed for ether “a chimp or an orphan.”  The scale is right, hose ducts and snaps are expertly installed, identification patches and seams are flawless.  There’s even a patina of “space dirt” for that grimy touch of real-life wear and tear. 

As with the above-mentioned shows, Brower has eschewed the quest for formal beauty in favor of an off-balance ecstasy by combining an almost-credible narrative with expert craftsmanship. Devices (such as glass display cases and photo documentation) add another layer of faux authority, persuading the view of the work’s “authenticity” while simultaneously subverting it.  
Is the demotion of beauty just another fashion generated by the popularity of “Outsider Art” and the increasing appreciation of artifacts by the eccentric and insane? Or is it the last gasp by a bunch of “angry white guys” sticking it to the art world man, the last of a waning breed of aesthetic “bad boys”?  Have the perfect simulations of the computer-generated world made the “ugly real” more desirable than the “synthetically beautiful?” Perhaps a more provocative question would be: if authenticity can be faked, at what point does the sincerity of its simulation raise it to the level of the authentically authentic? The jury’s still out, but in the meantime, I’ll be in the garage pondering this dilemma as I sip moonshine out of a tin cup and sharpen my chainsaw.

A video tour of the exhibition “Knucklehead Blues” with a Brent Owens interview is available at:  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkNFeuIFtoU

A video tour of Steve Brower’s “BPL” is available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9knaptvrwqI

"Brooklyn Dispatches: An Unobstructed View," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

As a twenty-five year local resident I can unashamedly admit it: I love the Brooklyn Museum of Art.  Like the borough itself it’s big, quirky, and, for the uninitiated, a bit odd.  Try as I might, in the three years since the reinstallation of its prized American painting collection (unique in scope within the greater Metropolitan area), I can no longer remain silent. It’s now obvious that BMA’s decision to hang its masterpieces of the Hudson River School, the Ashcan School, and the Early Modernists, including the likes of O’Keeffe, Dove and an unparalleled selection of Hartleys, in interior “environments,” many behind period furniture like so many decorative chatchkas, is not a temporary, admirable mistake by “well intentioned” curators, experimenting with “new ideas.”  It’s a disaster, a wooly-headed scheme that, either through good intentions or paternalistic condescension, toward the “educational” interest of is constituents, could have been spawned only from an anti-painting agenda. (Exhibit A might be an interview with Robyn Perry that appeared in the September issue of Artillery, in which the museum’s director, Arnold Lehman, states, “I admit that I was also a painter. A failed, badly failed painter … it was clear to me that I was untalented,” adding that “…for a very long time, you would be hard-pressed to find a painting in our house.”) 

This antithetical arrangement is particularly galling with respect to one of the Museum’s choicest possession, Stuart Davis’ “The Mellow Pad” (1945-51).  Unquestionably one of his greatest paintings, and an icon of American Modernism, it occupied Davis for the six years following WWII, a period of fundamental reevaluation during which the young lions of Abstract Expressionism took center stage, and usurped whatever meager attention Davis and his fellow avant-gardists had earned over long and demanding careers.  Despite its small size (a mere 26 x 42 inches), its dense composition harbingers ideas and techniques that will flower in his grand late style, foreshadowing Pop Art, Color Field Abstraction, the Abstract Imagists and Text Painting.  So important is “The Mellow Pad” that when the BMA presented its groundbreaking “Stuart Davis: Art and Art Theory” exhibition in 1978, a full-color illustration of “The Mellow Pad” wrapped around the catalog’s cover.

Now, not only “The Mellow Pad,” but “Pad No. 4” (1947) a stunning study for “Pad,”  are sequestered behind a roped-off platform the size of a small room, with chairs and a vanity table designed by Louis Dierra and KEM Weber, inaccessible for intimate viewing. At this point, short of demanding a total reinstallation of the collection, I’ll just fall to my knees and beg, PLEASE MR. LEHMAN, free these Davis paintings, grant the viewing public a more immediate experience, allow us an unobstructed view.

Back on the streets, unobstructed views are less problematic.  Cruise east on Flushing Avenue, through the Hasidic neighborhood near the BQE, past signs that read, sequentially, Old Reliable Hardware, Mexican Refrigerated Foods and CuchaFrieto Café until you come to the Bogart Street intersection.  Two blocks north is Ad Hoc Art Gallery.  This venue has been in operation for two years yet seems like a vestige of Williamsburg circa 1992.  It shares space with Peripheral Media Projects, a silkscreen jobber that produces tee shirt and poster designs, which may account for the street-hip and punchy graphic attitude of much of the art shown.  If Warhol and Rauschenberg used silkscreen as a means of negating the “handmade paintings” fetishized by the New York School, then Buy:Product (Three Years of PMP Silkscreen), Ad Hoc’s current show, brings the technique full circle.  Works by Ray Cross and Garrison Buxton employ found objects like sheets of plywood and cardboard or anything else they could scrounge as grounds for a mix of paint, collage and screen-print images.  In most cases the photo-screens were produced for other projects, and their images range from eighteenth-century illustrations of exotic machines to directional diagrams for folding origami.  These unrelated depictions become readymade elements for the pictures.  A grouping of small works titled “Bleed Prints” are panel-mounted paper towels that were used to clear a screen after use.  The accumulation of haphazard images and ink stains are cropped then enhanced, creating high-keyed paintings that read like optical static from a world oversaturated with visual media.

Heading off at an oblique angle, a block west on Flushing and not even rating an official street sign (it’s relegated to a black-on-orange wood strip wired to a telephone pole) is Forrest Street.  Half a block south brings you to English Kills.  Directed by Chris Harding, English Kills hosts the highly recommended installation Blind Spot, an extensive architectural project by artist team Andrew Ohanesian and Tescia Seufferlein.  The initial unexpectedness of Blind Spot is a jolting revelation.  Hrag Vartanian’s review in the October 2007 Rail provides an insightful reading.

Pocket Utopia is nestled next to a Chinese take-out joint two blocks east at 1037 Flushing.  Founded by artist/director Austin Thomas, Pocket Utopia is appropriately named, and beyond exhibiting art, it has as its mission an engagement with the community to encourage an interchange between the newly arrived artsy crowd and its longtime multi-cultural neighbors.  As homage to the Williamsburg community, Utopia’s first exhibition was a selection of works from the renowned Pierogi flat files.  Currently on view are the paintings, photos and films of Lucas Reiner depicting the lives of urban trees in Los Angeles

Call it love, or call it naïveté, but at the core of what makes the Williamsburg community unique are the people who sacrifice their time, space and cash to pursue their particular vision, usually with no thought of remuneration.  The ‘temporary Museum of Painting, housed in the landmark Hecla Iron Works Building, is a prime example. Cathy Nan Quinlan has created not only a beautiful exhibition space, but a latter-day salon.  Besides the timely exhibitions, mostly focused on contemporary painting issues, visitors will find a floating discussion group welcoming them to have a cup’o’tea and chat, rap and yak about art and all its ancillary challenges, an activity that has become an unfortunate casualty of our evermore reticent society.  

As a study in inclusion, the current show, The Impermanent Collection V, unites divergent directions whose only commonality is the medium of paint.  A wall-filling Naples yellow triptych, “Tuff Strut” (2006) by Larry Webb, bulges with an abundance of small and medium-sized forms.  These simple shapes, in warm browns, grays, blues and reds, recall a microscopic panorama of zipping amoebas and fluttering protozoa.  Julia Jacquette contributes a pair of hyper-realistic scenes of extravagant consumption.  In “My Houses (View with Yacht)” (2006), we look past a gaudy chandelier and through a satin-draped window overlooking a limpid, sun-drenched pool and a yacht floating in a bay.  Ironically, Jacquette’s glassy surfaces themselves embody a highly polished signifier of an equally luxurious commodity.  The still lifes of Rachel Youens are composed of the stuff of daily sustenance; loaves of bread, wedges of fruit and slices of cheese.  The arrangements imply various narratives, with their casually discarded rinds and architecturally stacked and balanced elements that threaten to topple at the slightest adjustment.  With a tip of the hat to the Metaphysical still lifes of Morandi, Youens incorporates a nubby surface and tonal approach into her depiction of form, but her expanded range of hues and intensities deliver a very contemporary punch to the pictures.  Also included in “The Impermanent Collection V” are Michele Araujo, Suzanne Chamlin, Greg Kwiatek, Susan Mayr and Hilda Shen. If you’re in the neighborhood and you want to talk painting, stop by any weekend.  

"Brooklyn Dispatches: Call it Merde (and They Will Eat It): Ruminations on Crap," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Be forewarned: those of you with delicate sensibilities please forego this essay; those choosing to read on, please step lightly and roll up your pant cuffs.
As the new art season opens, led by the charge of the market bulls, we’re confronted once again with the latest, the hottest, the chicest.  For this somewhat jaded spectator, who’s experienced our culture's willing desensitization via a plethora of evermore “shocking” gestures, I find myself wondering about its relationship to that most base of all materials: shit, crap, doodoo, poop.  “Inter faeces et urinam nascimur”—“Between shit and piss we are born” to quote St. Augustine: one could say quite literally that for the New York avant-garde (if that designation has any relevance these days) this proctological association of art with excrement is in fact profound. 

A Brief History of Crap

There’s a rich history of scatological imagery reaching back across the millennia.  But for a brief glance at its relationship to Modernism, Post-Modernism, and the avant-garde, we can start with James Ensor, a seminal artist who extended the grand Northern European tradition of feces and urine as elements of satire by not merely depicting them in his paintings, but by also cultivating a palette and texture that has been long compared to dung. Other radical Expressionists followed, but, ironically, it is the cerebral Marcel Duchamp and his “Fountain” to which much of the “Crap Art” of the Twentieth Century owes a debt.  Whether it’s Jackson Pollock (who was quoted as saying that his dribble style evolved from observations of piss holes in the snow) urinating in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace, or canned feces cleverly marketed as “Artist’s Shit” (1961) by Piero Manzoni for the price of its weight in gold, we can’t seem to get enough.  To list contemporary examples of piss, poop, bodily fluids and/or functions would take the rest of this essay, but here are a few notables: Wim Delvoy’s “Cloaca” (2000), a contraption exhibited at the New Museum in 2002 that processes gourmet food over a period of days and converts it into synthetic shit, which, like Manzoni’s canned crap, is then packaged and sold to expectant collectors; Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ” (1987), a photo of a crucifix submerged in what is billed as urine (would it have attained the same notoriety if it were beer, apple juice or water with amber food-coloring?);  Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” (1996), a depiction of the Holy Mother festooned with porn clippings of female genitalia and standing on lumps of varnished elephant dung, which created a succès de scandale at the Saatchi-sponsored Sensations exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 and hyped Rudy Giuliani’s reputation among the Christian Right; and Andy Warhol’s “Oxidation Paintings”, in which Andy and an assistant, Victor Hugo, pissed on canvases covered in metallic pigment, then marveled at the coloristic incidents generated by the subsequent chemical reactions.  In one of the more odiferous projects of recent years, artists Jan Northoff and Benne Ender spent time running around Kassel during Documenta XI in 2002, collecting fecal matter from public toilets and restrooms.   They delivered their pungent harvest to Paul McCarthy and Jason Rhoades, who incorporated the poop into “Shit Plug,” a self-descriptive sculptural form that McCarthy recycled into a twenty-foot-tall commission from the city of Amsterdam titled “Santa with Butt Plug” (2002), which the artist presented at this year’s Basel Art Fair. Kim Jones, in an in-depth interview with Stephen Maine that appeared in the November 2006 edition of The Brooklyn Rail, rhapsodizes about his breakthrough performances as the “Mudman,” in which he smeared his body with mud and his own shit and asked stunned audience members for a hug.  And let’s not forget Dash Snow, who “excreted” last season’s very popular cum-stained newspapers to critical acclaim.

The Avant-Garde Crap-Shoot

In an essay titled “The Trouble With Youth” that appeared August 20th on artnet, Donald Kuspit lays out a thesis that in part draws a correlation between the mentality of the avant-garde and society’s obsession with youth-culture and the desire to remain forever young, hot and audacious.  This overriding desire for innovation and novelty, rather than hard-won mastery, which has dominated the art market for much of the last century, is one of the most blatant symptoms of the syndrome.  Predictably, this Peter Pan impulse has devolved to a ridiculous degree, so that we’ve now gone from mere youthfulness to a state of infancy.  “Progressive” art has prized untainted childlike perception for decades, and for babies, little Duchamps in diapers, feces is the first readymade medium. It’s warm and friendly, smelly and tactile, and admittedly there’s nothing like the straight-ahead unselfconscious urgency of slapping shit on a wall.  With today’s trend toward narcissistic self-documentation, what could be a more personal material for expression than a medium that’s produced by our own bodies? Another hallmark of the avant-garde—subversion and transgression—is facilitated by using crap, the all too obvious highpoint of low matter. Advanced artists employ it not only to undermine our notions of aesthetic beauty, but also to seize the opportunity to grab society by the ears and rub its nose in it, to shatter the viewers’ sensibilities and maybe shock them into a rethinking of standards and conventions. 

The Marketing of Merde

Beyond the physical nature of caca there’s the symbolic condition of its very commonness, its abject worthlessness, which, when tied to economics, raises a more troubling set of questions.  The market is controlled not by piss and shit, but by fear and greed. For cultural mavens, it’s fear of being out of step with the dictates of avant-tastemakers, and a practical desire to possess critically touted baubles that will reap a financial bonanza as well as a social one.  But can über-hipsters actually sell irrational ideas to their devotees as au courant, goading them into behaviors that strain common sense?  Consider the urine-drinking craze noted by Simon Doonan a few years ago, a health-and-beauty campaign complete with celebrity endorsements.  Is this a wickedly cynical joke on trend-followers or a disturbing example of bandwagon jumping that strains notions not only of basic hygiene but “good taste”?  

When modern architects began designing mass-produced housing for their utopian cities of the future, their modular designs (whose standardized proportions are still in use today) and elimination of decoration were based on prisons and workers’ housing.  We all admire efficiency and functionality, and from a production standpoint, reducing construction costs may override aesthetics when it comes to the bottom line.  But how to convince the upwardly mobile middle-class of the glamour of living in a prison cubicle? Easy.  The critics and tastemakers of the day simply told a malleable public that living in a cell is fantastic and modern.  Who needs a ceiling higher than seven feet nine inches or a door wider than seventy-five centimeters?     

In several recent articles and lectures Jerry Saltz has lamented the fact that “we have no economic theory for the art market”.  Not to pick on poor Andy, but despite his relative merits as an artist, he’s Exhibit A of the “Bizarro World” nature of monetary value in the art world.  In early May this year, Warhol’s “Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I)” (1963) achieved a new auction record for the artist: 71.7 million bucks (what about versions II-XXXV?). There’s a clear disconnect between Warhol’s claim that he “wanted to be a machine”—his use of commercial art technology (silkscreen) and assistants to maximize production while removing virtually any trace of the artist’s hand—and the basic economic principle that rarity and scarceness increase a product’s value. The mind-boggling amounts of product cranked out at the “Factory” (which continues to cause endless authentication problems for the Warhol Foundation) seem to dehumanize it. This reduces the collector from risky cultural connoisseur to mass-market consumer, or worse yet, hedge-fund commodity speculator, hoping to peddle hyped goods at grossly inflated prices to the next unsuspecting rube before the ceiling falls in.  To the unconvinced, this looks an awful lot like a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scam built from turds. 

The Measure of Merde

Once we’ve accepted the nature of crap, its ubiquity and banality, we then have the tricky assignment of deciding on its relative merits.  Shit is shit.  That’s a wonderfully egalitarian statement, but how and why is some crap beloved—praised by critics, purchased for outrageous sums, and ultimately winding up in museums—while other shit is just shit?  Like every other extreme or experimental concern, whether pornography, kitsch or the grotesque, it’s only a brief matter of time before crap is assimilated by the academy, deodorized, homogenized and glamorized, becoming unrecognizable—alas a pathetic end for anything.  Middle-class society as a whole may still be shocked by poop, but for highfalutin art world mucky-mucks, its historical credentials and cynical connotations make it just another option to consider. Perhaps it’s less about the poop and more about the asshole.  Keep all this in mind the next time someone tries to sell you a diamond-studded $100-million load of it.   Now if you’ve had enough scat, wipe that grin off your face and get back to work.

"Brooklyn Dispatches: Still Crazy: Unveiled Previews Unprecedented Collection at the Denver Art Museum," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

ONE BILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF ART, yeah, that caught your attention, probably more than “great paintings,” “masterworks of Abstract Expressionism,” or “a unique opportunity for in-depth study of one artist’s oeuvre.” But that figure is not hyperbole; it’s an accurate estimate of the value of the Clyfford Still Estate, which will be housed in the Brad Cloepfil-designed Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. We have seen a Pollock go for $140 million, a de Kooning for $63.5 million, a Rothko at $73 million and a Johns for $80 Million. Last year witnessed a new auction record—$21,296,000—for Still’s own “1947-R #7.”  So you could say that this group of more than 2,400 works by one of the founders of Ab-Ex is a “Diamond as Big as the Ritz.”

I’ll admit I’m a sucker for the mythology of the Abstract Expressionists and the New York School but, as a fellow Westerner, I feel a sympathetic nudge toward Pollock and Still.  Clyfford Still (1904-1980), though less known than Pollock to the general public, chose a strategy for dealing with market forces that was as prickly and uncompromising as his paintings.  In “An Open Letter to an Art Critic,” published in the December 1963 Artforum, Still writes “…I had made it clear that a single stroke of paint, backed by work and a mind that understood its potency and implications, could restore to man the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology and devices for subjugation.  It was instantly hailed, and recognized by two or three men that it threatened the power ethic of this culture, and challenged its validity.”  Whether idealistic or delusional, this level of Old Testament prophet-like conviction emboldened Still to reject the corruptions of the New York art world.  Ironically, he had enough market savvy to show up looking sharp, in a crisply pressed suit, for Nina Leen’s famous 1950 photo, “The Irascibles,” and lateragreed to be “exploited” by Dorothy Miller’s “15 Americans” exhibition at MoMA in 1952. However, just as critical and market interests were taking notice of what would become the first internationally accepted American art movement, Still wrote a scathing series of screeds denouncing many of his old confidants and supporters, including Rothko, who had introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, paving the way for his groundbreaking New York show in February 1946 at her Art of This Century Gallery.  Simultaneously, Still flipped off the dealers, critics and curators who were packaging him and his peers for worldwide consumption. 

Having seen firsthand the negative impact of commercial manipulation on an artist’s work (most memorably, Pollock’s bad end), in the early sixties he hunkered down in a country house in Maryland and came to believe that the only way to maintain the significance of his work was to control every aspect of its presentation. In the last twenty-five years of his practice he consented to only two museum exhibitions, one at the Albert-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, in 1966, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art just months before his death in 1980.  Since then, as stipulated in his will, the work in the estate, the roughly 950 oil paintings and 1,600 works on paper—an estimated 94% his total output—has been stashed away in storage, awaiting an offer from a city willing to build a museum to showit. As you might expect, even from the grave Still controls virtually every condition under which his work can be seen, including caveats like: no other artist’s work shall be shown in the museum unless it is in context with Still’s work; no sales or loans from the estate; no auditorium or restaurants on the premises.  Even the heights of the ceilings in the viewing areas are specified.

The deal brokered in 2004 between the artist’s widow, Patricia Still, and Denver’s mayor, John Hickenlooper, facilitated by the Stills’ nephew, Denver resident Curt Freed, calls for an outlay of $12 million to $20 million dollars, raised from private sources, for construction of the museum, which is to be located directly behind the Denver Art Museum (DAM). It’s expected to open in 2010.  All this comes right on the heels of the DAM’s recently completed 30,000-square-foot, $75 million Daniel Libeskind-designed Hamilton Building, which required Denver voters to approve a $62.5 million bond initiative. While I’m heartened by this kind of community support, I’ve got to think that the city fathers and mothers were casting a longing eye on sites like Don Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, or James Turrell’s Roden Crater project, and betting on Still’s draw to raise Denver’s standing as a cultural tourism destination.

Clifford Still Unveiled: Selections from the Estate, is a mouthwatering hors d’œuvre of what will, no doubt, be a full course meal when the CSM opens in 2010.  Though limited to only thirteen works, it displays a chronological view of Still’s stylistic trajectory, with revealing examples of his “American Scene” figurative paintings, strange transitional Surrealist works, and various phases of his mature, earthy-hued, jagged abstractions.  A self-portrait, “Untitled (PH-382)” (1940), is a surprisingly competent rendering of Still’s stern, tightlipped face atop a three-quarter-turned torso caped in a long black smock.  The glowing flesh of a half-closed hand at his side foreshadows the light-on-dark flickering forms of the later pictures.  Already predominant are the rusty reds, blacks and putty grays.  And his full-bodied impasto is evident in the boilerplate, Benton-like “Wheat Shockers (PH – 77)” from 1936.

Still’s reputation as a seminal Abstract Expressionist in its most American sense was based to a certain extent on his uncontaminated native approach—at least that was the image he sought to present by destroying much of his early work.  A couple of surviving transitional pieces from the late thirties display a befuddling amalgam of Social Realism and Surrealism tracking Still’s aesthetically complex leap from figuration to abstraction, which he navigated without passing through Modernist abstraction’s gateway, Cubism.  A pastel and charcoal drawing from 1935 shows a long, mask-like face alongside an equally long hand hanging off a pitchfork.  The black outlines, elongated and indistinct features, and brown tonalities render this composition as repugnant and unsettling as some of Guston’s late “Dung Beetle” images but without Guston’s pleasant pinks.  Another stunner, “(PH–343)” from 1937, is a vertically bifurcated composition in which an odd, disquieting figure on dark brown is paired with stark, attenuated black shapes on a white ground that hint at the gothic value contrasts of the breakthrough abstractions.

Arguably one of Still’s first “Abstract Expressionist” paintings is 1944’s “# 4,” a work he completed after moving to Virginia to teach at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University).  This large canvas (105 x 92.5 inches) is a monochrome field of heavily knifed black.  A crimson line twisting like a stream on a topographical map meanders up the left side and down the right while a white wisp and a pale yellow streak hang from the top edge like Spanish moss.  A thick emerald green “flame” near the lower right corner snaps the composition into coloristic tension.  The simplicity and elegance of “# 4” is astounding, and its reductive composition, grand scale and attention to the physical qualities of oil paint represent a breakthrough that resonated with other Ab-Exers such as Newman, Rothko, and the Proto-Minimalist Reinhardt, and sent out ripples of influence through Stella, Ryman and Marden, all the way down to Schnabel. 

By the late forties, Still had hit his groove. The paintings are less heavily worked, and his employment of raw canvas as both a textural and coloristic element brought a graphic sense akin to drawing on off-white paper, adding lightness and space while contrasting the fat, layered slabs and delicate veins of oil paint. By the time we get to “#2” (1957), the artist is working at full throttle.  The flurry of jagged forms across this mural-sized painting seems to flutter and mesh at the same time.  With its massive scale and brutal fracture of blacks and reds and tiny flames of yellow and magenta at the periphery, the canvas appears formed more by the forces of nature than by pictorial logic.

Although I’d like to see the Clyfford Still Museum open next door, or at least within biking distance, it couldn’t be more appropriate, given Still’s antipathy toward the New York art world, that Denver should win this prize.  Sitting on the western edge of the Great Plains at the foot of the Eastern slopes of the Rockies, Denver embodies the grand contrasts of landscape that inspired Still’s monumental outpourings.  I guess I’ll have to settle for visits to his room at the Met while coming up with semi-believable rationalizations for occasional trips to Denver to get my Still fix.

"Brooklyn Dispatches: Gangs of New York," Brooklyn Rail

“Don’t talk, paint.  If you can express what you want in words you should be a writer or poet, not an artist”.  This was one of the slogans frequently repeated by faculty members in the art department where I studied during the late seventies.  Somehow this vestigial wisdom spread from the kingdom of macho existentialism on East 10th Street, to generations of academic artists whose only contact with the “real art world” was a monthly dose of high-brow “critical theory” indoctrination and gossip from East Coast publications like ARTFORUM, Art in America, and Art News.  With exhibition opportunities limited to faculty shows every other year, and the chance of making a sale slim to nil, life in the American hinterlands during this period wasn’t easy for artist wannabes toiling in the vineyards of higher education.  This situation created conflicted state, on the one hand, these academic artists relied on writers to tell them what was happening in places like New York and Los Angeles while, on the other, they were dismissive of writers for not being practicing artists.   Still, I’m inclined to think that their pedantics were a self-serving device designed to keep students in a repressed state, as idiot-savants in a goof-ball utopia unable to communicate in writing, and biased against anyone who did.  Critics were seen as energy vampires, sucking their sustenance from the creative juices imbedded within authentic art objects and spewing out a perverted literary facsimile that diminished the actual viewing experience.  In short, when I landed in New York and began to establish my own artistic practice, I was lugging a Buick-sized chip on my shoulder

At a well attended panel discussion about Clement Greenberg organized by David Cohen a few years ago at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery, Geoffrey Dorfman recounted the tale of Arshile Gorky’s confrontation with Greenberg.  It seems Greenberg had recently reviewed Gorky’s 1945 show at the Julien Levy Gallery and the review implied a suspicion that, because of his stylistic loyalty to Picasso and Miro, Gorky “…lacked independence and masculinity of character.”  When they met in the street after a group discussion Gorky challenged Greenberg to draw a simple portrait, reasoning that before a critic could be taken seriously they should at least have a minimal level of expertise.  Of course Greenberg copped out knowing he couldn’t hold a candle to Gorky’s legendary facility as a draftsman, and though known as a brawler himself, perhaps he was a bit intimidated by Gorky’s strapping physique.  Eventually Greenberg changed his opinion and admitted Gorky to his pantheon of art stars.  By that time the accolades were delivered posthumously.  Though this account may be apocryphal, it illustrates the energy that made for such scintillating criticism in the forties, fifties, and sixties.  The art world was divided into two camps and critical diatribes were delivered like pot shots over trench berms.  The “Jets” were headed up by Harold Rosenberg and Thomas B. Hess and the “New York School” while the “Sharks” were made up of the “Greenbergian formalists”.  Young conscripts were enlisted on sides, girlfriends, boyfriends, acolytes, and favorites of either team were fair game for attack.  Somewhere the fun went out of the game.  Nowadays we’re way too “civilized” to indulge in anything that might rock the art market boat or rattle the windows of the bureaucracy.  Perhaps things are just too pluralistic for any kind of “critical mass”.  Despite Sandler’s complaint about the diminished prestige of today’s art critics, I’ve personally seen the directorial staffs of New York’s finest galleries snap to obsequious attention when an influential critic drops in for an opening (certainly not me).  Current valuations for a gushing review from one of New York’s top five critics are rumored to be worth in the neighborhood of $50,000 in sales and a life long boost that will be recycled on résumés even after the cold fingers of death try to snatch it away.  The prestige of said critic is usually measured by circulation numbers, targeted audience (up scale trumps hip), and ad revenues generated by their publications. All too often I hear art world types mouthing rehashed views of the two or three hot-shot critics they read. Even though they haven’t bothered visiting the shows, they seem to think talking about the critics views important to dinner-party conversation and God forbid you should confront one of the big three or four critics with an opinion in variance with the current thinking.

Maybe it’s time to stop being afraid, to start challenging the status quo, to ask the critics if they could draw a portrait, paint a hand, make a video or do a performance.  Heck, it’s even been suggested that we turn over art critics, many of whom have been pontificating for over thirty years, as regularly as they turn over artists.  Maybe we should have a critical petting zoo and allow young artists to get up close and personal with the big-time critics. Of course they’d have to be hobbled and muzzled so the newbies realize they have nothing to be afraid of. 

Today, instead of a cultural crisis, we’re facing a paradigm shift.  Thanks to the internet, the monopoly of the elites and the publishing empires they represent are crumbling and if the blinders imposed by the powers that be haven’t yet been pried off, they have at least, for the moment, been bent back.  If you don’t believe in democracy this is a problem.  If you do, then this is could be the dawning of a new golden age.  Anyone who visits websites like artnet.com, artforum.com, or our own brooklynrail.org, is aware of the vast amount of valuable content on the net.  Within the past few years individual art blogger have appeared.  As a confirmed contrarian, committed to opposing what ever power structure that pops up, the idea of a venue where the only limitations are an individual’s intellect, energy, and time is very appealing.  Though the list of people writing and creating forums for discussions in cyberspace, is long, indeed very long, for the purposes of this article I interviewed three who have made unique innovations.

As you might assume from the name, “Paintersnyc” is a blog which concentrates on painting. That’s what brought it to my attention about a year ago after reading about it at artnet.com. Log-ins can leave comments on the posted paintings de jur, in short a free-form critique not unlike what might have occurred at the local artists bar a decade or two ago.  Thus far paintersnyc has posted 391 works with some artists repeated.  It’s run by a young Greenpoint based artist who’s racked up a track record that includes several group shows and a solo exhibition with a hot young gallery that has recently pulled up stakes in Williamsburg for the big time in Manhattan.   Painterpaparazzi (to maintain her anonymity here, she’s chosen to use her blog moniker) joined the blogosphere almost by accident in November 2005.  “I didn’t get the idea originally.  I didn’t even know what a blog was until someone told me to look at Nicole Eisenman’s “A Blog Called Nowhere”.   Then I signed up to get a blog.  I had a group of photos of friend’s works that I started up-loading just to see how they would look together.  I didn’t think there would be much of an audience but people started showing up.  No one commented at first.  Someone might ask a question like ‘where can I see this painting?’  Then a couple of people with blogs came and started posting comments and connecting it with other blogs and then everybody started showing up and leaving comments.”  With that, paintersnyc took off.  Now, with an average of 1,500 views a day and about 40 comments, painterpaparazzi has seen the blog take on an independent character at odds with some of her original intents.  “Things have changed considerably.  For the first two months I participated a lot, posting comments and trying to lead the conversation.  There are no personal comments allowed, if they show up they’re deleted.  At first I wanted to show the paintings of people who were working in New York, then it was people who showed in New York.  Now I just pick what I think is best and most interesting.  There are so many comments posted these days that I can’t even read everything, I just scan it.”

With a project like paintersnyc there’s always a danger that it might take over your life and detract from studio time.   Painterpaparazzi has had some doubts, “I feel like I’ve learned a lot about other painters, but sometimes I don’t want to look anymore.  It’s hard to look at and search out paintings all the time when you’re a painter yourself.”  It was the critical aspect of painternyc that intrigued me.  Here was a blog where anyone could be a critic, and your value was based on the merit of your argument and its relevance to the work.  “I don’t think of the posters as critics”, said painterpaparazzi, “It’s good that people correspond but they don’t have to be professionals.  You have to realize that you’re looking at a blog, not an art publication.  Some of the contributors are just as smart or insightful as the critics, but mixed in you might have someone writing about last night’s dinner.”  When asked about the future of art blogs, painterpaparazzi was less sanguine.  “I’ve created a forum, and I hope it’s a positive service.  I don’t have an agenda, it’s not about me, but sometimes I worry.  The blog format is flawed, and the anonymous nature of posts a problem.  I think it might evolve into something like TMZ.com, a celebrity stocking site, or perezhilton.com, where they just deal with celebrities”.  Perhaps art world blogging will morph into just another version of B grade Hollywood celeb watching.

As honorees at the recent Nurture Art benefit at Chelsea’s CUE Art Foundation, James Wagner and Barry Hoggard have become legendary with young and under-recognized artists and their upstart galleries in both Chelsea and Williamsburg.  With a pair of the longest lived art blogs in the New York community, jameswagner.com, and bloggy.com, as well as the listings site, artcal.net, James and Barry have trekked to and reported on darn near every new and emerging space in town.  As true enthusiasts with extraordinary eyes for quality, and daring confidence as collectors, they are pioneers in the arts blogospohere.  James explained the beginnings of jameswagner.com, “It started after 9/11.  We were feeling overwhelmed by what was happening and I began to send out e-mails to friends trying to express our distress.  Barry set up a blog site for me without images.  A lot of it was political, but we were also interested in emerging art, performance, and music.  As it progressed we became more discouraged with the ineffectual nature of our political activism and so we began to concentrate more on the arts, though we still comment on politics.  Since we both had digital cameras it was natural for us to begin to add photos which has become very important”

Because they’ve come to their appreciation of art without benefit of formal art educations, both Barry and James feel that their critical stance is more akin to fandom, so there’s an aspect of friendly documentation that informs their blogging.  “I think what we do is important for small galleries.  Sometimes we’re the only people who write about these unseen artists.  Occasionally we’ll go into galleries and see copies of entries from our blogs on the reception desks.  We’ve had artists tell us that they were noticed and invited into other shows because of our little blogs.  It’s exciting to be able to help those artists,” mused Barry.  James added “I write these entries out of a sense of intimacy.  Technically we’re not critics, we don’t criticize anything, but we only write about the things we like.  We live in Chelsea so I can visit a gallery even on the last day of a show, and sometimes almost accidentally l can document the artist’s work and get immediate response, and once you put something on the web it’s there forever. The magazines can take six months, sometimes longer.”  To this point, between them, James and Barry have written about over a thousand artists.

Because of Barry’s computer expertise I was able to delve into some of the demographics of the sites.  “Well artcal.net gets between 1,500 and 2,500 page views per day.  As of April 1st, jameswagner.com had 5,000 views and bloggy.com had 1,500 per day.  Generally the distribution for artcal.net is 85% in the US followed by Canada, the UK, Germany, Japan and France.  Last week jameswagner.com had six views from the Sudan!”

The potential for art blogs seems more positive to James and Barry:  “Everyone is so independent that I don’t see the bloggers joining an association, but I’d like to see museums and some galleries relax their policies concerning photographing the work.  This is a chance to get a wider availability of images out there, to introduce the public to more artists and their work.  What could be wrong with that?”, questions James.  Barry would like to see the blogs “become more interactive, perhaps with guest editors or even containing mini-blogs.”  He’s even considering on-line surveys that would allow frequent users to vote on exhibitions or artists they would like to see covered. 

It’s a glorious new world.  Now not only can everybody be an artist with the potential of a world wide audience but a critic as well, and it’s all just a click away.  Take that Dinosaur Art Media.

"Brooklyn Dispatches: Family Matters," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

At a jam-packed lecture delivered at the New School in 2000, Dave Hickey, the bad boy of contemporary criticism, presented an idea, profound in its breadth, that it’s memory—not taste, not fashion, not even aesthetics—that determines the “staying power” of a work of art.  Moreover, it is the work’s ability to remain vivid and to morph in memory that shows its strength.  Heady stuff, especially in an age when we’re surrounded by theorists and pundits who encourage short memories, even a state of art-world amnesia.  They believe that one should “deconstruct” history and approach a work of art with a mind uncluttered by the sordid residue of the past (and thus assuring an unchallenged sales pitch).  All art comes from art; its history is its DNA.  Every artist and art viewer carries within him/herself a mini-version of art history.

Søren Kierkegaard is quoted as saying “Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.” Therefore, if we’re interested in understanding art, we must also have an understanding of memory and its role in solving the mystery of art.  And if we seek more than just a coexistence with art, we must know the history of art.

If you were to ask me whose artistic vision I would trust for an accurate, or at least honest, reflection of the past, I would unhesitatingly have to answer Jonas Mekas.  With a flurry of recent exhibitions, including an expansive overview at Maya Stendhal Gallery and a mini-retrospective at PS1, Mekas—a longtime denizen and chronicler of Williamsburg—has become something of an unexpected poster boy for artistic perseverance.  Like a hyper-hip, underground Zelig, Mekas has popped up next to, and has trained his camera on, some of the most electrifying people of the past sixty years.  A stroll through the exhibit at PS1 was akin to hanging out at the most perfect Sunday afternoon party imaginable, with a guest list that included John Lennon and Yoko Ono frolicking on stage, Alan Ginsberg, the bard of the East Village, chanting antiwar verse and rhythmically drumming the table with his fist, Salvador Dali squirting shaving cream on a nude woman in a vacant Manhattan lot, his bravado with a spray can foreshadowing the antics of graffiti writers thirty year later, and a young Andy Warhol in black-and-white, still content to be a member of the cast.  The list goes on and on, but Mekas also casts his eye on ordinary people, rendering the pathos of their lives into cinematic gold.  With his films, videos and still photos, Mekas has unselfconsciously blazed a path toward the future with flickering remnants preserved from the past.  He has validated the premise that the observer does affect the outcome, that there is a power in SEEING.  It’s at moments like these that I thank providence for the happenstance that led the lighthearted and whimsical hand of Jonas Mekas to pick up that first movie camera and start the shadow play that is still fascinating us fifty years later.  Oh yes I remember it well.

Within our far-flung and dysfunctional creative tribe, family is another structure that facilitates and preserves memory.  The artist Ward Jackson must surely be smiling as he looks down from what ever rung of the heavenly realm artists are allowed to enter.  “Ward Jackson: A Life In Painting 1928-2004” at Metaphor Contemporary Art is a show that focuses on the seminal work of a painter who was in the thick of the action in New York’s art scene for half a century.  This gem of a show was lovingly curated by the artist’s nephew, Julian Jackson, and charts the stylistic arc of a career that began as a precocious teenager in Virginia.  After reading an article in a national magazine about Hilla Rebay and her activities at what was soon to become the Guggenheim Museum, Jackson took the audacious step of sending Rebay a letter of introduction, followed by examples of his workfor the “Baroness” to critique.  After a period of correspondence and a summer spent studying with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Jackson moved to New York and continued his relationship with Rebay and the museum, becoming its archivist and the head of its viewing program, positions he would continue to hold for forty years.

Beginning with a youthful self-portrait, in which the artist is seen holding a flower or paint brush beside his easel, hints of his interest in overlapping planes are already evident in the rendering of the back of the canvas and its stretcher bars.  “Rite of Spring” (1951) is a jazzy little vertical picture, its jagged black and white forms floating over a thicket of hot reds and pinks, demonstrating a dramatic “push and pull” that he no doubt picked up from Hofmann.  From the mid-50s a series of painterly abstractions upped the scale and introduced the freewheeling brushwork that displays a solidarity with the 10th Street School and a pared-down, post-Cubist faceting of space that will become the main subject of the breakthrough paintings he would produce in a few short years.  The decade of the sixties, with its ambition and confidence, also brought artists to a junction of intent between the more emotional and “expressive” content, as exemplified by Kandinsky and much of the New York School, and the austere intellectual geometries of Mondrian.  Jackson chose the latter. His adoption of the diamond format (a square tilted at 45 degrees) was an homage to Mondrian, and he would, with his unique vision, explore it extensively for the remainder of his painting career.  Across the rear wall of the gallery, we are presented with a stunning example of his lozenge-shaped paintings; a group of six precisely calculated compositions, hanging in two horizontal rows with tips nearly touching, evinces a hard study of Neo-Plasticism.  The black-and-white palette and strict symmetry of several of the works are prime examples of artistic gambits that would result in the ascendancy of Minimalist and Post-Painterly painting by mid-decade

With the seventies, a sunny “Pop” optimism appears.  Brilliant, highly keyed color becomes a major component in his compositional design.  Returning to a square format with the Virginia River Series, Jackson, in pictures like “Chillihowie” (1971), arranges wedges of hot red and kelly green to create zigzag divisions of the canvas that read as luminist landscapes reduced to their essence.  Returning to the diamond, the late paintings are a handsome merger of elegant form and luscious color.  In “Chords” (1990) the white ground is bracketed by broad color bands that extend to the 45º edge on one end and terminate at a lesser angle within the framing edge on the other.  This visual discordance delivers a whimsical yet sophisticated riff on the strict horizontal and vertical doctrine of Neo-Plasticism, and with its colors of light green, purple, navy blue, and deep yellow, reveals a sensuality that does not distract from its formalism.

Besides his work as a painter, and his long-term involvement with the Guggenheim Museum, Jackson was a past president and archivist of the American Abstract Artists group, and a vocal champion of emerging and established artists through his publication of the original ART NOW New York,a portfolio of reproductions and artists’ statements that has become the art lovers’ pocket guide to the New York scene.  Yet, even with his total immersion in artistic and community activities, it is the painting that one senses at the core of Jackson’s attention, an example worth heralding.

"William Powhida “This is a Work of Fiction” At Schroeder Romero May 11- June 9," Brooklyn Rail

By James Kalm

Not only does the emperor have no clothes, he’s bloated, vulgar, ignorant, complacent, drooling bile colored spittle at the corners of his mouth and wallowing in historically unprecedented mountains of cash.  This being New York, we’re talking about the art world, and those mountains of cash intimidate and /or seduce most observers into biting their tongues and staying close enough to scoop up a few handfuls of green while the grabbing is stillgood.  A few bitchy diatribes from “old school” critics are expected, even self congratulatory in a soul-searching “success is so painful” kind of way.  But only an innocent or a fool would be so self-destructive or naïve as to rip off his or her own clothes and prance, mince and mimic the “emperor” in a loudmouthed, over-the-top, piercing parody that comes just a little too close to being true. 

Enter William Powhida.  I first stumbled across his work a couple of years ago, noticing a set of drawings as funny as they were disturbing.  Reminiscent ofa graphic novel, the storyline followed a night of hard drinking, bar fights, hanging off the side of a moving car and eventually falling into a stupor and passing out.  I took it seriously, having known guys who started down similar paths and came to bad ends (they’re all dead now) and decided to offer Powhida some big brotherly advice on sobriety.   The story was a ruse.

Then I saw his video, “Persona,” a medley of twitchy alter-egos spliced together with jump cuts of all his various Williams, Bills and Wills whining about their jobs, their fears, and the shenanigans of the art world.  That upped the ante. 

Before his one-man show at Williamburg’s Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery in 2005, I stopped by for a studio visit and saw a work that in its ambition and commitment, elevated it into a realm I’ll call “meta-drawing”.  Called something like “Everyone I’ve Ever Known,” it comprises a chronological diagramming of over three hundred small head studies of everybody but everybodyPowhida could remember having known in his under-thirty years, a feat of memory that was not only artistic but psychological as well.  It stretches out over eight feet and includes brief poetic texts paired with most of the heads, things like, “He was the first kid I knew who died.  Cancer’s a bitch.”   A project like this is the kind of stoner idea that lots of folks might have in the flush of a fresh buzz or after waking up on a particularly good morning, but most wouldn’t do more than just note it in their sketch books; who’d actually be dumb enough or have enough time to try it?  See your bet and raise you.

Now with This Is A Work Of Fiction, we see the latest Powhida “persona,” a megalomaniacal “successful” artist, someone who has gorged himself on the media buffet of glamour and debauchery with all its titillating bombast, trendiness and extravagant vacantness and pukes a double dose of it back in our faces.  This character, like a social transistor, is so attuned to the latest bullshit hype job, that he amplifies its impulses, and transmits its latest batch of absurdities like a dysfunctional rescue beacon.

There is no sparing of targets. In “The New York Enemies List” (2007), we’re served the usual “real world” suspects, including Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, along with a healthy dose of art world denizens like Zach Feuer, Bellwether’s Becky Smith, Dana Schutz and of course Dash Snow.  Rumors have it that some subjects have taken umbrage at their inclusion and have gone out of their way to make Powhida’s life and career difficult. 

In “The Bastard” (2007), Powhida creates his own version of the gushing hipster human interest story, the kind that was recently delivered about Dash Snow, a current lampooning favorite.  Simulating a New York Magazine spread, the “artist” places himself on the cover between two naked models under the headline “Genius.” A hand-lettered facsimile of a celeb profile follows, running several pages and a couple thousand words with pull-quotes like “I want to destroy the art market,” and “I don’t have a circle. There’s not enough room. I AM THE CIRCLE.”.  To those who consume the daily art world media mix, the references and insider jokes are obvious.  To those who actually have lives to lead, this level of self-absorption would seem comically absurd... but.  For all of Powhida’s haranguing and clichéd “Rich people suck” outrage, there is floating, just off stage, a creepy but all-too-human obsession of desperately wanting to join the “beautiful people,” to have the army of assistants, to have the Gagosians and Boones of the world fighting for his attention, in short, to transform himself from an actor into a player.  Mixed into the Hogarthian satire, fitting of a twenty-first century “Rake’s Progress,” Powhida seems to be walking a razor’s edge, deriding the “avant-garde elite” to maintain his underground/outsider credibility while stroking the fragile egos ofthese very same people.

The “Notes,” a series of small drawings that depict pages of lists and ideas are typical. Rendered in an illustrative trompe l’oeil, the pictures show dog-eared blue-ruled sheets with yellowing tape and smudgy shadows, as if they were hanging on the studio wall.  These notes, with their faux intimacy, are an abbreviated device that allows Powhida to delve directly into the wacky ego-driven self-consciousness behind so much of our celebrity art culture.  “Things to Do,”  “Proposals,” “Reasons” all seem normal until you read them and get smacked by a comically distorted worldview that is only partially a joke: “If you don’t BUY IT the person BEHIND you or the person looking at a JPEG will!”  Though most of the punch of the smaller works comes from their textual rather than visual content, there is an effective melding of the two, though a more challenging painterly approach evidenced in the large colored panels wouldn’t hurt.

It’s been said that being an artist is like playing chicken with the speeding hundred-ton locomotive of obscurity.  In the case of Powhida, we’re riveted by the spectacle of a guy with the pedal to the metal, and if things don’t break right, there’s going to be one hell of a crack-up, and a nasty stinking mess for some one to clean up.