Yesterday was a big day of openings. Despite the heat and humidity, people were enthusiastic about seeing art, cooling off inside galleries, while smoozing over wine. My favorites were Jack Pierson’s gorgeous photographs (nailed into the walls) at Bartolami and The Tell-Tale Heart (Part 2) at James Cohan curated by Elyse Goldberg. I just had to check out Andy Warhol’s Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall) at Nicholas Robinson, which was surprisingly empty but offered a moment of comtemplation. Ended the warm evening to see friends’ works at Leo Kesting in a group show featuring street art called Dead Letter Playground. It was like a mini art fair happening in Chelsea, and so good bumping into you all! (more photos after the jump…)
By now, you’ve probably seen or heard about the super-hyped new reality series Work of Art put out by Bravo TV. I don’t watch TV or follow much on mainstream media, but this got me buzzing with curiosity. And recently on WNYC (yes, the radio) I heard an interesting and unexpected interview with Sarah Jessica Parker showing this other side of her being an art enthusiast. So that partly explains why she co-produced Work of Art and also why (other than it being a reality show) it has that Sex and the City flavor. When I got the news that they combined reality TV and art together, I was both shocked but excited. How “real” is it? The pitch is nothing new: competition-driven, opportunity-of-a-lifetime, artists becoming contestants playing this game, and one winner gets to have it all. Sounds a bit silly, but it must take a lot of guts to push yourself out in front of those cameras many hours a day, especially strange if you’re an artist used to working in solitude. Ultimately it is rewarding since the winner gets a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum and cash. After all, the show is made for public broadcast entertainment but how much reality is it really? I guess it’s also up to the individual artists as well. As Jerry Saltz puts it “maybe being sick to one’s stomach comes from whatever it is that drives someone like me to even appear on a reality-TV show at all.” This crazy New York art world is a whole reality in itself and that’s what drives us to be thrilled by it.
If you haven’t already noticed the MTA has just put out the new subway map to replace the previous one, which has constantly been updated for the past 10 years. This new map shows more defined routes compared to the previous map, which had a lot of unfinished business. The new map that launched this month is graphically cleaner with finer attention paid to the color scheme, although I think the bright blue is a tad loud. The New York Subway system must be the oldest in the world, you can witness this history at the Chambers Street station, where you can still feel the grit of New York’s past times. Updating the map is a sign that the city is putting an effort for these improvements, and evidently they are enhancing some of the stations, albeit at a slow rate. I think there are still lots of technological advancement that we can learn from other cities such as the London Undergound, which has a superior information design navigational system (online and onsite), and Berlin with its time table that is precise to the second, and other cities in Asia such as Tokyo and Hong Kong that are admirable for their service to riders. And perhaps even Barcelona, that gives riders an ad-free commute.
The NYTimes did a great article comparing the map of MTA’s present and past here.
Summer vacation seems to have started a bit earlier in the Chelsea gallery world than the rest of us. This past Thursday, it was nearly empty in Chelsea. The weather was perfect for gallery hopping, but I suppose that the beach is more exciting than looking at art. I randomly walked into ATM gallery to be caught by surprisingly fresh work. The group exhibition appropriately titled Summer Survey are works by Anne Eastman, Virginia Martinsen, Noam Rappaport, Miguel Angelo Rocha, Eric Sall, Peter Sutherland, and Vince Rourke. You may already be familiar with some of the names, such as Peter Sutherland who is renowned for his photographs. Here he shows his recent video Ice Cream and Tacos (2010). The works are a dry yet interesting showing of urban minimalist grit and raw that is usually more of an LA thing than in Chelsea, NY. I really enjoyed this off-the-beaten-path of a Summer Survey.
Flyfire Team: Carlo Ratti, Assaf Biderman, Carnaven Chiu, E Roon Kang,
Caitlin Zacharias, Shaocong Zhou
An idea based gallery show with no tangible objects, everything in the exhibition SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures can be found online. The group show which is on now at GAFFTA Gallery consists of fifteen awesome and innovative projects chosen from MIT’s SENSEable Cities Laboratory that aim at posing questions and creating sustainable solutions to our rapidly evolving cities. The Copenhagen Wheel is just one solution that encourages sustainability and mobility by being a bicycle wheel that can turn your pushbike into an electric bike and communicate with your smart phone about traffic patterns and pollution levels along your route. However, the wheel was not at the gallery, in fact none of the projects had a tangible component, they were represented by wall texts, photos and a looping video. Everyone should be familiarized with MIT’s SENSEable Cities Laboratory, however, trekking all the way to GAFFTA Gallery to do so seems rather unnecessary when you can just flip your laptop open to http://senseable.mit.edu and see the whole show and much more.
Double Rainbow as Lazy Tongs: Poem on the Occasion of the 15th Annual Poetry Walk Across For Poets House
I walked across a bridge tonight,
a poet among poets, in line and abreast
east bound toward Brooklyn
with mighty bridge as pathway
Say poet, are you lonely, are you hungry
Pray poet, are you frightened, are you sorry
Play poet, dance at mid-bridge and kiss her
Stay poet, calm this gathering, this gay poetry crowd
Clasp the hand of humanity for poetry
aboard these lazy tongs
reaching with anchored heart
before the collage called city
Tell the story of elders, culture and space
tell it true without restraint
Speak of personal or general
river beneath you
loosening or guiding
This is a call to all poets… or follower of poets
to walk the bridge of poetry
then turn
and start again.
June 2010/Gabriella Radujko
Related article here Read more on Marianne Moore’s description of the Brooklyn Bridge.
David Kramer is a dreamer. He is also a storyteller through his paintings, poetry, performances, sculptures, videos and set designs. He is definitely very process oriented and extremely productive. I had the opportunity to meet David at the press preview for his solo exhibition “Seems Like We’ve Been Down This Road Before” curated by Sarah Murkett at Armand Bartos Fine Art. The exhibition spans a 20-year period of Kramer’s career, and are full of symbolic and nostalgic Americana images that are reminiscent of 70s advertisements (e.g. cowboys, Whiskey bottles, a motel sign, and baseball players). A bygone American dream replaced by present day hyper-consumerism, where one rarely gets to reflect idly on life.
Frank Webster (artist)
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