Good art commands attention — it forces an opinion and is often an acquired taste. The sheer economic pressure of an art fair seems to discourage this kind of display. While this year’s Armory Show provided the expected dose of the boring, the polite, and the decorative, it also reminded me that it can, and has often, served as the perfect stage for challenging art. James Capper’s solo exhibition Power Tools, presented by Hannah Barry Gallery of London, seems to revel in the politeness of many of its neighbors at the fair. After all, the more china in the shop, the more there is for the bull to trample.
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Those who do make physical objects today are sometimes in danger of retreating so far into their own medium as to remove themselves from the conversation. I recently went to objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, an exhibition of six contemporary painters and sculptors at Chelsea’s Kravets/Webhy Gallery, and I was reminded of the tricky balance that painters today must maintain.
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I have to be honest: as a child, I wasn’t a big fan of recess. All is well and good when you’re running around the dodge ball court — until someone gets pegged in the face. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been a big fan of capture the flag, and who doesn’t love a little fresh air, but that shit can be brutal. That’s what the word conjures for me, at least: 100 wild young children running around, consumed by the wild thrill of unmonitored free time. It just always seemed so stressful.
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New York is a city awash in information. If your body was a receiver can you imagine how overwhelmed by senseless Facebook updates and spam mail it would be? It goes without saying that the more connected we are the more unavoidable digital reality becomes. This does not exclude the white walls of the art gallery. Artie Vierkant’s first solo exhibition Image Object at Higher Pictures on the Upper East Side is proof of this.
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I think it’s funny that Patricia Albers’s recent and authoritative biography on Joan Mitchell was given the subtitle “Lady Painter.” It’s my only guess that Mitchell’s lifestyle and her painting were so out of character for the time that the term becomes ironic. The artist was known for her camaraderie with Cedar Tavern macho dudes like de Kooning and Pollock, her hangout sessions with beatnik poets, her ability to party, and her tendency to drink and sleep around with bravado. At the time these activities and attitudes were thought to be reserved for men. Mitchell gradually carved out a space for her paintings to be given the same treatment.
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How many hours do you spend a day looking at cat picture on the internet? The fact is our already media saturated lives are constantly becoming more image dependent. We shape much of our lives based upon the associations and decisions we make on the internet. Whether we are seeking information or shopping on eBay it is no secret that we rely more and more on stock images. It is this reality that informs artist Kate Steciw. Her current exhibition Boundless Hyper is on view at Toomer Labzda Gallery in the Lower East Side.
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There are many an artist who dedicate themselves to subverting the commodification of their own work and the current exhibition at Nurture Art, Is This Free?, addresses the topic with a three-part summer exhibition.
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Curated by Scott Hug, B-Out at Andrew Edlin Gallery, weaves together over 100 artists into an imaginative installation that illustrates a partial and subjective history of what it means to create outside the norm.
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One of the founding members of the often praised Ridgewood/Bushwick space, Regina, Rex, has gone Manhattan with a new gallery on the Lower East Side, Eli Ping.
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Last weekend, while rummaging through the Lower East Side what I needed was a life boat, something to transport my mind away from the sticky, forsaken confines of my sweat drenched body. What I got was Someone Has Stolen Our Tent at Simon Preston Gallery.
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