Some Art News

By Charles Kessler


A couple of new galleries opened on the Lower East Side.
The Hole
312 Bowery (just above Houston)
212-466-1100

July 21st, The Hole hosted “The History of American Graffiti” book-signing event featuring special guest TAKI 183. Photo from their blog, “Art From Behind."

The Hole Gallery moved from a hole of a space on Greene Street in Soho to a relatively large and airy space in the Lower East Side. The gallery is run by Kathy Grayson, a former director of Deitch Project, and the gallery employees are nice, young, ambitious and willing to try new things. For example, their last show, FriendsWithYou, the art of the Miami duo Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III, included a pop-up store that sold Native Shoes, a footwear company that makes some pretty wild shoes.

Mulherin + Pollard Gallery
212-967-0045
The gallery is at the end of Freeman Alley, across from Salon 94, off of Rivington between Bowery and Chrystie Streets. You can also enter at 187 Chrystie Street, but Freeman Alley is much more interesting. They have a group show there now entitled Mundus Incognita, but as yet there’s nothing on their website about it or future shows.


In other news:
Today Roberta Smith has an excellent review of the Met’s Frans Hals exhibition; this in contrast to the disappointing New Yorker review by Peter Schjeldahl (you can get only an excerpt online).  Unfortunately, Schjeldahl's reviews lately have been superficial, contradictory and, surprising for The New Yorker, sloppily written.

One of the many nice thing about the Hals exhibition is the comparison you can make between Hals's painting Malle Babbe and a student version of the same subject. It really gives you a sense of how good Hals is.

Detail, Frans Hals, Malle Babbe, 1633-35, Oil on canvas (Staatliche Museen, Berlin)

Detail, Style of Frans Hals, Malle Babbe, mid-17th century, Oil on canvas, (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Via the Los Angeles Times I found out about a FREE iPad app that has breathtaking photos, live-action video and interviews of a series of dances Merce Cunningham choreographed for the nonprofit visual and performing arts journal 2wice. And did I say it was FREE?

From 2wice's Merce Cunningham  iPad App

While I’m on apps, the National Gallery, London has two — a very good free one with a couple of hundred photographs of their collection that can be downloaded HD directly into your iPhone or iPad photo album; and a great $1.99 one with almost 2000 photos. Here’s a sample; click to enlarge:

Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, (The Burlington Cartoon),  c.1499-1500, charcoal, black and white chalk on tinted paper mounted on canvas, 55.7 × 41.2 inches, (National Gallery, London)

A report from the Brussels-based art dealers’ federation Cinoa is going around the blogosphere. They found that art fairs and on-line art sales are taking over as the main source of revenue, and it’s hurting traditional galleries. 

Another thing making the rounds is an article in The Art Newspaper about why art is getting bigger. They conclude: Commissioning and acquiring art has always been a way for the wealthy and powerful to affirm their position, taste, influence and money; and there is nothing new either about huge spaces to display it in.

Finally, this to lift your spirits: The New York Times went through their archives and came up with a series of photographs of kids playing in New York. It’s a joy to look at.

1977: In the mud at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Neal Boenzi/The New York Times.

EVERY THURSDAY: ¡Arriba! Music and Dance on the High Line

Last Night, 9pm

Check the High Line website for more events.

A Few of My Favorite Things - Small East Side Museums

By Charles Kessler


Transportation Note: For the East Side museums, the best thing to do is start at the Neue Galerie (Fifth Avenue and 86th Street) and take the Fifth Avenue bus downtown to the other museums. They are never more than a few blocks away from a bus stop. It would require a lot of endurance to do all the East Side museums in one day; it’s possible, but not desirable.

Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue (at 86th Street)
Warning: their website can be very slow sometimes.
Hours: Thursday - Monday, 11 am - 6 pm; (closed Tuesday and Wednesday)
Admission: $15 General; $10 Students and Seniors. The museum is free from 6 - 8 pm on the first Friday of every month.
Photography is only permitted on the ground floor and lower level of the building; you are not allowed to enter the museum with bottled water - they make you throw it away!

Installation view, Vienna 1900: Style and Identity, Neue Galerie

The Neue Galerie is devoted to early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design. It is relatively new -- they opened on November 16, 2001 in a converted Fifth Avenue mansion, the former William Starr Miller House, a Louis XIII/Beaux-Arts structure. Happily they kept many of the historic  details of the Miller House and added architectural and design elements from early twentieth-century Vienna.  In addition to the museum, they also have a bookstore, design shop, and two Viennese cafés: Café Sabarsky and Café Fledermaus.

Cafe Sabarsky, Neue Galerie.

The Neue Galerie cafés are an important part of the experience of this museum. They are modeled after the Viennese cafés that served as important centers of intellectual and artistic life at the turn of the century and are outfitted with period objects including lighting fixtures by Josef Hoffmann and furniture by Adolf Loos. Viennese food is their specialty, and it’s superb, especially their pastries such as strudel and Linzertorte. There are usually long waits to get in, but it’s well worth it, especially Café Sabarsky.

Currently on view (only until August 8th) is an ambitious exhibition, Vienna 1900: Style and Identity, 
that aims to: reveal a common thread running through the fine and decorative arts in turn-of-the-century Vienna: the redefinition of individual identity in the modern age. The show explores the newly-evolving attitudes about gender and sexuality, and it's especially interesting in that it includes clothing, accessories, and even a pornographic movie of the period.

Egon Schiele (1890-1918), Reclining Semi-Nude, 1911, Watercolor, gouache, and pencil (Private Collection)

This Schiele is actually one of the tamer drawings in the exhibition — after all, this is a family blog! Schiele, like many of his fellow artists, pushed the boundaries of what was permissible, and he was convicted for displaying indecent images where minors could have viewed them. This was a lesser crime than what he was originally accused of: kidnapping and sexually molesting a a fourteen-year-old girl who ran away from home and sought refuge with Schiele and his model Wally Neuzil.

One of my favorite works in the show, and it’s part of their permanent collection, is a self-portrait by the little-known Richard Gerstl. Little-known because Gerstl, at the age of 25, after a disastrous love affair with Schönberg’s wife, killed himself and destroyed most of his work. Fewer than 100 pieces survive.

Richard Gerstl, Self-Portrait in Front of a Stove, 1907, Oil on canvas on board, 27 x 21 ½ inches
(Neue Galerie, New York).

And for Gustav Klimt lovers, I counted 10 paintings in the exhibition, many major ones, and 12 drawings.


The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street (at Fifth Avenue)
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm; Sundays, 11:00 am - 5:00 pm.
Admission: $18 General; $15 Seniors; $10 Students. Pay what you wish Sundays 11:00 am - 1:00 pm.
Photography is not permitted.

The Frick is simply the BEST small museum in the country -- maybe the world! Visiting the Frick is  like walking through the pages of Janson’s History of Art (is this still used for Art History Survey classes?). They have some of the best art, by some of the best European artists, displayed under the best conditions — installed in the Henry Clay Frick mansion. The only problem is that people have found out about this treasure so it can get crowded. It's best to get there when it first opens.

Screen shot of the Living Hall from the Frick virtual tour.

Screen shot of the West Gallery from the Frick virtual tour.

They also have an excellent website with beautiful color, zoomable, photos of practically everything in their collection, and with detailed information about each work. They even provide an email address, info@frick.org, if you need additional information. If that’s not enough, Google Art Project has a virtual tour of the Frick and several high def photographs of the highlights of the collection. (The Frick also has a virtual tour on their own website.)

Here are some of my favorites:

Okay, these paintings are almost silly in their romanticism, and I think Rembrandt at least was having some fun with the idea, but they’re also two of the great painterly paintings in the country.

The Frick has three of the thirty-five paintings now accepted as being by Vermeer. (The Met has five, the showoffs, but the Frick’s are better.)

Johannes Vermeer, Officer and Laughing Girl, c. 1657, oil on canvas (lined), 19 7/8 x 18 1/8 in. (Henry Clay Frick Bequest, Accession number: 1911.1.127).

And then there’s this:

Piero della Francesca, St. John the Evangelist, c. 1454-1469, tempera on poplar panel, 52 3/4 x 24 1/2 inches (Purchased by The Frick Collection, 1936, Accession number: 1936.1.138).

Tip: Most of the time you’re allowed to sit on some of the plush chairs in the Living Hall, a peaceful and intimate room even when the museum is crowded. I love to doze off there because, for a few seconds after I wake up, I feel like I’m in paradise.


Asia Society Museum, 725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street)
Hours: Tuesday - Sunday, 11:00 am - 6:00 pm.
Admission: $10.00 General; $7.00 Seniors; $5 Students; free for persons under 16.
Admission is free on Fridays 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm.
Photography and electronic recording of any kind are not permitted anywhere in the building.

The museum is an uninteresting modern building, but at least it doesn’t intrude on the art.

Exterior, Asia Society Museum

Their claim to fame is the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Collection which is considered one of the great collections of Asian art in the United States even thought there are fewer than 300 pieces.

Bottle, North China; Northern Song period, 12th century, Stoneware with sgraffito design in slip under glaze, 12 1/2  x  8 1/2 inches  (Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection of Asian Art, number 1979.141).

Unfortunately, the Rockefeller Collection is on view only occasionally, and most of the time they have exhibitions of mildly interesting videos and new-media art by contemporary Asian and Asian-American artists. About half the total exhibition space is now taken up with an exhibition of photographs -- 227 relatively large ones, hung salon style, that the popular contemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei took from 1983 - 1993 when he was living in the East Village. The photographs are interesting for its documentation of that period, but they are little more than snapshots blown up, except maybe from 1990 onward where Ai Weiwei seemed to be exploring the medium a bit more.

The museum is in the process of installing a long-delayed exhibition of Buddhist art from Pakistan (opens August 9th).


The Morgan Library & Museum.  225 Madison Avenue (at 36th Street)
Hours: Tuesday - Thursday, 10:30 am - 5 pm; Friday, 10:30 am - 9 pm; Saturday, 10 am - 6 pm; Sunday, 11 am - 6 pm
Admission: $15 General; $10 Children, Seniors and Students. Free on Fridays, 7 pm - 9 pm.
Photography is not allowed except for the ground-floor public spaces.

The old Morgan Library and Museum, before the 2006 Renzo Piano expansion and renovation, was a Mecca for connoisseurs of drawing. Almost every time I went I would overhear educated and intelligent discussions about the drawings on view. Not anymore. What’s surprising is I don’t think attendance has increased since the renovation, at least not in my experience. I don’t know the numbers, but the place sure looks empty every time I’ve been there.

The Renzo Piano expansion and renovation added a lot: a nice welcoming entrance on Madison Avenue, two restaurants, greater handicapped accessibility, a beautiful new performance hall (see photo below), a better reading room, and better storage for the collections.

Gilder Lehrman Performance Hall, The Morgan Library & Museum.

They claim to have doubled the amount of exhibition space, but it really doesn’t seem like that. In any case, typical of museum expansions in the last few years, there’s a lot of what I think of as wasted space — space devoted to a soaring glass atrium, an expansive lobby, a large museum store and two (!) restaurants. MoMA is the prime example, but it’s also true of most other museum expansions.

The Morgan Library & Museum’s new lobby.

Do not not miss seeing the original Morgan Library. Even though it's connected to the modern addition, it’s a little hard to find. Ask one of the guards for directions. The Library is a palazzo-like structure built between 1902 and 1906. It was designed by Charles Follen McKim to serve as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan, and it's pretty spectacular.

Eastroom - Pierpont Morgan's library

Westroom - Pierpont Morgan's study

Here are some of my favorites works from the permanent collection that are currently on view in the old Morgan Library:

Etruscan Cista with cover, c.300 B.C., Palestrina, Bronze, Height (from foot to top of handle lid) 14 1/4 inches; diameter (at top of cylinder) 8 11/16 inches; (at base of cylinder) 8 1/8 inches (Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1907; AZ046a-b).

Hans Memling, Portrait of a Man with a Pink, ca. 1475, Tempera on panel, 10 3/4 x 15 inches (Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1907; AZ073).

Pietro Vannucci, called Perugino, Madonna and Saints Adoring the Christ Child, ca. 1500, Tempera on wood, 34 1/2 x 28 3/8 inches (Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1911; AZ066).

They also have a mind-boggling collection of original manuscripts including:
the sole surviving manuscript of John Milton's Paradise Lost, transcribed and corrected under the direction of the blind poet; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s "autograph manuscript" of the Haffner Symphony; Charles Dickens's manuscript of A Christmas Carol; Henry David Thoreau's journals; Thomas Jefferson's letters to his daughter Martha; and manuscripts and letters of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Lord Byron, Wilkie Collins, Albert Einstein, John Keats, Abraham Lincoln and John Steinbeck.

These Are A Few of My Favorite Things - Small West Side Museums

By Charles Kessler


I'm talkin' art here, not “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.” And, to narrow it down, my favorite art from some of the lesser-known, small art museums in Manhattan. (I’ll do the outer boroughs and New Jersey another time.) I also want to focus some attention on the lesser-known work in these museums.

You can easily do all the small museums on the West Side in one day; the East Side museums would require more endurance, but it’s also possible to do in a day. On the West Side, I began at the Hispanic Society and worked my way downtown via the Number 1 train which has a stop no more than a block away from all the West Side museums.

First, two general observations. Holland Cotter is without question correct when he wrote in the Times that contemporary art is pushing out traditional art from the non-Western museums. This disheartening trend is very much in play with many of these museums. The other thing I noticed is that all of the recent construction of expensive new buildings and additions hasn't added much exhibition space, but it has caused financial problems for the institutions — sometimes fatal ones. (The latest fatality is the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi that overspent on a Frank Gehry building.)

Hispanic Society
Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets. (Subway: Number 1 to Broadway and 157th Street.)
Admission is free.
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 4:30 pm
Photography without flash is permitted in the museum.

The museum is part of Audubon Terrace, an early 20th-century Beaux Arts complex of eight buildings that is worth the trip by itself. The site includes the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is the former home of The American Geographical Society, the American Numismatic Society and the Museum of the American Indian-Heye Foundation.

Exterior of the Hispanic Society showing some of the Audubon Terrace complex.

The Hispanic Society specializes in Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American art and artifacts, and they also have a rare book and manuscript research library. The guards are knowledgeable, helpful and friendly, if perhaps a little too attentive sometimes.  The interior of the Hispanic Society is a work of art in itself, but it’s a bit dark in places.

Interior, Hispanic Society.

Even the bathrooms are worth checking out.

Men's bathroom, Hispanic Society.

Most of the paintings are hung close together, and they're on a balcony which doesn't allow you to step back and view the work — but what great work it is! They have some of the best paintings by Velazquez and Goya in the country.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Pedro Mocarte, 1805, oil on canvas, 30 ½ x 22 ½ inches.

And they also have an extensive collection of ceramics and hardware like this fun 15th-century knocker hammer.

Knocker Hammer, 15th Century, iron (Hispanic Society).

Taking up about a quarter of the main floor is the Sorolla Room, a massive series of paintings by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida created from 1911 to 1919 that depict scenes from each of the provinces of Spain.

Finally, for a scholarly institution their website is surprisingly unhelpful. There are very few reproductions and little information about the work in their collection.


American Folk Art Museum
Columbus Avenue at 66th Street, across from Alice Tully Hall. (Subway: Number 1 to 66th Street.)
(Their building on West 53rd Street is closed.)
Admission is free.
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, noon -7:30 pm; Sunday, noon - 6:00 pm; Monday closed
Photography without flash is permitted in the museum.

This is a sad case study in museum over-extension. They built a new show-piece building near the Museum of Modern Art that they could not afford and recently ended up selling it to the Modern and moving to this very modest space. The museum store is in the front and takes up about a quarter of the space.

American Folk Art Museum store.

For the next year the only exhibitions they will be doing are three quilt shows gathered from their comprehensive collection. They don't have the money or space for anything else. They do have some great quilts though. Here are a couple of outstanding examples on display now:

Artist unidentified, United States, 1900-1940. Cotton with cotton and wool embroidery, 76 x 71 inches. Gift of Mary and Al Shands. (American Folk Art Museum #2008 8.1) Photo by Gavin Ashworth.

Artist unidentified, Starburst Crib Quilt, 1880-90, Maine, cotton (American Folk Art Museum).

The Rubin Museum of Art
17th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. (Subway: Number 1 to 18th Street.)
Hours: Monday and Thursday, 11 am - 10 pm; Tuesday, closed; Wednesday, 11 am - 7 pm;
Friday, 11 am - 10 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 11 am - 6 pm.
Admission: Adults - $10.00; Seniors (although I believe seniors are also adults) and students - $5.00.
No photography of the work is allowed.

The Rubin Museum of Art is dedicated to the art and culture of the Himalayas. It’s a fairly new museum -- it opened in October, 2004 --  and they did a beautiful renovation to what used to be Barney’s department store.  They have an active and creative educational program that includes music, film, lectures, meditation, and storytelling. Even their cafe features Himalayan-inspired food. Their website has slide shows, audio tours and podcasts, blogs, educational PDF’s and lots of information on related art and culture. They are a very hip organization.

On the second floor there's an exhibition of work from their permanent collection titled Masterworks: Jewels of the Collection — and they are masterworks indeed!

Installation view of Masterworks: Jewels of the Collection (Rubin Museum of Art).

The rest of the space has an extraordinary number of changing exhibitions: Human Currents: The World’s Largest Pilgrimage (until October 24, 2011); Patterns of Life: The Art of Tibetan Carpets (until August 22, 2011); and the newly opened Gateway to Himalayan Art (until January 1, 2012).

The exhibition that made the biggest impression on me was Quentin Roosevelt’s China: Ancestral Realms of the Naxi (until September 19, 2011). The Naxi, mostly unknown in the West, are one of China’s 55 minority nationalities. They live in a remote area of southwest China and have their own distinctive religious and artistic traditions (called Dongba) — including the world’s only living pictographic script (see photo below).

Dongba Pictographic Manuscript Pages, created some time between the 18th century and 1949, ink and paint on paper. From the Harvard-Yenching Library ID# B63 - 04 (The Rubin Museum of Art).
Click to enlarge.

Ritual slats (Kobiu) with animals and Naga dieties (The Rubin Museum of Art).
Click to enlarge.

Dongba priests insert these ritual slats into the ground to show their respect to the spirits and the gods of nature. The animals are chosen to represent the totality of the realm of nature.


National Museum of the American Indian
One Bowling Green.  (Subway: Number 1 to South Ferry.)
Hours: 10 am - 5 pm every day; Thursdays until 8 pm.
Admission is free.

The entrance to the National Museum of the American Indian. Security, like all the Smithsonian Museums, is very tight.

This museum is a big disappointment - it has become a cultural museum like its Washington counterpart, to the detriment of traditional art.  In addition, most of the space is taken up by large corridors and a huge empty rotunda. It’s a grand Beaux-Arts space designed by Cass Gilbert in 1907 and was the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, but it doesn’t serve this art well — at least not the way they’re currently using (or not using) the space.

Rotunda of the New York branch of the National Museum of the American Indian.

Half the remaining space is taken up with contemporary art and another quarter with a theater — mostly empty.

Theater at the National Museum of the American Indian - they are teaching children how to hula.

Very little of their enormous permanent collection is on view — it’s just like Holland Cotter observed — and what little they do display is behind glass cases and difficult to see.

Permanent collection, National Museum of the American Indian.

They have an excellent website, though, with photos of and information on everything in the collection.

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Next time: The small East Side museums

Alexander McQueen vs. Frans Hals at the Met

A small section of the 1 1/2 hour line to get into the Alexander McQueen show at the Met

Entrance to the Frans Hals show at the Met (through October 10th)

Larry Gagosian Has Come A Long Way

Gagosian store, 988 Madison Avenue

Larry Gagosian started in 1969 with a poster store in Westwood, and now he has a store on Madison Avenue. He's done a few other things too.

Gagosian Store interior

Art News

By Charles Kessler


There have been a couple of deaths in the art world: Cy Twombly and Lucian Freud. Roberta Smith has an insightful appraisal of Cy Twombly’s art.

  Cy Twombly at Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston in front of the gallery's largest painting, Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor.

And The Telegraph has an excellent obituary of Lucian Freud. 

Lucian Freud, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995, oil on canvas, 59 5/8 x 86¼ inches

I   must admit I never cared much for Freud’s art, and it always annoyed me that what I considered to be minor art got all this acclaim and astronomical amounts of money — $33 million for the painting above. On the other hand, at least the guy could really paint, unlike Elizabeth Payton, George Condo, etc.

Also, sadly, Amy Winehouse died at age 27 - a cursed age for rock musicians. The Telegraph once again has an excellent obituary.

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Peter Plagens reviews two new books about the history of Los Angeles art: Rebels in Paradise by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp and L.A. Rising by Lyn Kienholz.

Via the art blog Hyperallergic I found out about this video tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous house, Fallingwater. It’s very much an amateur video, but you get to see some beautiful details.

The always topical Brooklyn Rail has two in-depth interviews, one by Jarrett Earnest with Peter Selz,  and one by Phong Bui with Richard Serra.

And finally, Triggerpit.com, a website devoted to “photography and events that makes us go WOW,” has 37 photographs of extreme weather conditions by the storm chaser and photographer Mike Hollingshead. Here’s a sample:

Extreme Instability: Shelf cloud moves over a storm chaser producing what they term the “whales mouth” in southeast Nebraska August 9, 2009. All rights reserved by extremeinstability.com

Gallery Roundup

By Charles Kessler


Chelsea:
Richard Tuttle’s show at Pace Gallery is over, but it looks like his influence has now extended from the Lower East Side to Chelsea. I suspect it’s because Chelsea galleries usually have group shows of younger artists in the summer — but whatever. The best of the shows, my favorite anyway, is a semi-retrospective of B. Wurtz at Metro Pictures (Wurtz is represented by the gallery Feature, Inc.) through August 5th. I say semi-retrospective because Metro Pictures chose to show only one aspect of B. Wurtz’s art — maybe the Whitney will do a fuller exhibition some day. This work is influenced by Tuttle at his best: inventive, subtle and joyous.

Installation view, B. Wurtz: Works 1970–2011, Metro Pictures, New York.

Other examples of Tuttle’s influence: The Andrea Rosen Gallery has a sculpture in her back room that I actually thought may have been a Tuttle but turned out to be by Elliott Hundley; most of the work in D’Amelio Terras’s group show, Affinities: Painting in Abstraction; likewise, a fun show at Casey Kaplan called Everything Must Go; and CRG’s summer sculpture show (they moved to a new space at 548 W. 22nd).

Two other shows I liked are The Women in Our Life at Cheim & Read (until September 17th), an anniversary exhibition of women they have shown over the last fifteen years — and they’ve shown some of the greats; and Im Schatten der Made (In the Shadow of the Maggot), a zany exhibition of a John Bock video that looks like an old-time movie, and the props he used in the video. It’s at Anton Kern until August 12th.

Installation view, John Bock, 2011, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, NY

Lower East Side:
Like Chelsea, there are mainly group shows on the Lower East Side -- and it’s a chance to see some new faces. A wide-ranging show of ceramics titled Paul Clay (awful pun) at Salon 94 Bowery (until July 30th) was reviewed by Roberta Smith and has received a lot of attention. This is an excellent show, but I agree with Smith: why is it that ceramic shows are so crowded? It makes everything in this show, with the major exception of Jessica Jackson Hutchins's piece, look like chachkies.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Symposion, 2011, mixed media, 47 x 115 x 78 inches (Courtesy of Salon 94 Gallery)

Installation view, Paul Clay, Salon 94 Gallery

The New Museum just opened a God-awful show, Ostalgia, (until September 25th). Ostalgia is a term used to describe a sense of longing and nostalgia for the era before the collapse of the Communist Bloc. It’s an ambitious show, I’ll give it that. It includes more than fifty artists from twenty countries across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics. One work made the show worthwhile for me, however: Victor Alimpiev’s video of the faces of two opera singers, one singing corrections of breathing technique into the other’s ear. They are singing about singing and it’s tender, haunting, lyrical and beautiful.

Victor Alimpiev, My Breath, 2007. (Courtesy of the artist and Regina Moscow/London)

The Stephan Stoyanov Gallery presents another well-crafted video (things are getting better in that respect), this by Cliff Evans, and it's a unique one. Unfortunately the gallery’s site doesn’t provide any images, or even any information about the work, but you can see a typical example on Evans's website. The video is a composite of animations that flow together to create a complicated moving landscape. It's dense and complicated, but not hysterical in the way Ryan Trecartin’s work at PS1 is. I especially love the odd vertical shape (about 24” x 12”) of the video. It makes it more of a thing.

UPDATE: Cliff Evens sent me a photo (below) from the video, and it's a beaut. It's still important to go to his website to see how it works.

Finally, there are good group shows at Feature and Rachel Uffner Galleries; and Mulherin + Pollard Gallery opened a space at 187 Chrystie Street, at the end of Freeman Alley off of Rivington.

More Art News

By Charles Kessler

 

GIFs

There’s been a lot of discussion about GIFs (an image with a few details animated) in the art blogs, mainly in response to a post by Tom Moody. Now, via The Browser, I learned of a Washington Post article about a collaboration between photographer Jamie Beck and motion graphics artist Kevin Burg that produced much more sophisticated GIFs (which they call “cinemagraphs”). Here is their site; it has many more of their cinemagraphs. And here’s a good tutorial on how to create cinemagraphs.

GIFs UPDATE:
Anil Dash has a excellent article with many good links, as does Paddy Johnson. Four good sites to see what artists are doing with the GIF format are:
http://dump.fm/
http://computersclub.org/
http://www.tommoody.us/
and especially http://rhizome.org/ which is probably the most extensive site devoted to digital art.

Finally, there's 3Frames, a pretty good free iPhone app that makes it easy to make animated GIFs with your iPhone.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s Muse

Unknown photographer, Jane Avril at the Moulin Rouge, c.1892. Musée Montmartre, Paris

A Courtauld Gallery exhibition (until 18 September 2011) chronicles the relationship of the aristocratic artist Toulouse-Lautrec and the cancan-dancing daughter of a prostitute, Jane Avril. More about the exhibition can be found here, here and here.

Summer Art Event

Culturefix, a bar, gallery and event space on the Lower East Side (9 Clinton Street,  just below Houston), has undertaken an ambitious project called Telephone: a Game of Multi- Disciplinary Communication.

From their press release: culturefix chef and owner Ari Stern will create a dish based off of the wikipedia entry about the game telephone. From this dish, composer Michael Vincent Waller will write a piece of music which will be performed for 16 artists who in turn will create pieces of art to be displayed during the length of the exhibition. Based off of the 16 visual works of art, playwrights from the Overturn Theatre Ensemble will have one week to write plays that will then be directed and performed by professional actors under professional direction.

I have no idea how good this is, but it seems worth checking out. There will be play readings every night through July 24, from 6:30 -8pm. For more information and to buy tickets for the play readings, go to: http://culturefixny.com/events/telephone-exhibition/