Hotel Art

By Charles Kessler

Will Brand (Art Fag City) and Jerry Saltz have good posts (i.e., I agree with them) on the Dependent art fair which took place in a cheap Comfort Inn on the Lower East Side March 10th — in the same week as the mammoth Armory Show. The tiny rooms were used as galleries and the art was installed everywhere: bathrooms, beds, dresser drawers. It was crowded, and people were amiable and playful.

It reminded me of how the Armory Show has changed — and not for the better. The first Armory Show — not the very first 1913 one, the first art fair one — took place in a funky old hotel in Gramercy Park in 1994. There had never been an art fair in a hotel before, at least to my knowledge, and this was a blast. The rooms, hallways and stairways were packed with a lighthearted crowd. It was all very strange but all the more festive because of it. There was a sense that the art dealers were doing their creative best to promote their artists on a shoestring. Sure they wanted to sell art, but selling art didn’t seem like the ONLY thing. Now there isn’t even the pretense of anything else.

On a related manner, there's been a lot written about Damien Hirst manipulating the art market — one of the better posts is here. But one thing I haven't seen discussed as a contributing factor to the astronomical prices artists like Hirst, Richter and Koons have been getting is that there are more extremely wealthy people today then there have been since the age of the Robber Barons (many of whom were also art collectors). And the wealth of this group has gone up so much that the relative prices (of what they think is a scarce resource) have not increased all that much. To this growing number of billionaires, spending $3 million on a painting is like an ordinary person spending $300. This is what is driving the prices up, or at least is partly responsible for it. With a relative pittance, they can buy respect, power, prestige, whatever (or believe they can). It's a bargain!

An Ode to 29th Street

By Charles Kessler

One of the things I love most about New York and other great cities is the mind-boggling variety of visually interesting things you can see by just walking down a street: people, of course, mostly wearing black clothing, but enormous variety within that, Korean markets with their flowers displayed in front, ornate old churches, Art Deco bistros and thousands of businesses, every one different (unless it's a chain, and there are relatively few of those in great cities). (See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities for the importance of diversity in big cities.) In addition, over time older cities naturally accumulate a great number of buildings with different architectural styles; and sometimes these styles are even mixed together in the same building; and sometimes they have decorated tops that can’t even be seen from the street.

To celebrate the abundance of this architectural diversity, I took photographs of several buildings along one of the many streets in Manhattan that yield unexpected delights — the eastern end of 29th (the western end of 29th Street is unfortunately pretty bleak). This isn’t a grand area like the Financial District, nor is it festive like Times Square or Fifth Avenue, and it isn’t quaintly beautiful like the West Village; in fact the street as a whole isn’t at all charming or even particularly different — but that’s what makes coming across these buildings such a joy.

Starting from the farthest west is this brick carriage house and next to it one of the rare wood clapboard buildings left in Manhattan — both on the National Register of Historic Places.

201 E. 29th Street

Here is a typical late 19th-century brick tenement you find all over the city, but this one has a silly, adorable addition in the front:

143 E. 29th Street

Next is the Belgian restaurant Resto. The facade is different stylistically from the rest of the architecture on the street, but it's all the more interesting because of it. I couldn't get a good picture so I'm using a photo from this food blog.

Resto - 111 E. 29th Street (Between Park and Lexington)

I'm cheating a little here since the entrance to this luxurious hotel is on Madison, but the entrance to the hotel's restaurant is on 29th, and you can best see the building from 29th Street.

The Carlton Hotel, Madison Avenue at 29th Street.

Lobby, Carlton Hotel

About a year ago I was thrilled to come upon this quaint church and garden (below) in the midst of a busy high-rise district, and the joy I felt at the time is the impetus for this post. 

The Church of the Transfiguration surrounded by high-rise buildings, 1 E. 29th Street.

The Church of the Transfiguration, also known as "The Little Church Around the Corner," is one of the most famous Episcopal churches in the United States. Established in 1848, its congregation has taken pride over the years in being welcoming and inclusive. The church has also been involved with theater for a long time -- it has been the the national headquarters of the Episcopal Actors' Guild since its founding in 1923. The interior of the church is dark and cozy and contains beautifully carved wood and some of the oldest stained glass in the country.

Marble Collegiate Church is another active and welcoming church on the street. Although its Sanctuary is currently undergoing renovations, people are encouraged to visit their 29th Street lobby. The colorful banners hanging from the fence represent prayers for the thousands of soldiers and civilians killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Marble Collegiate Church, 5th Ave. at 29th Street.

Next is the very hip Ace Hotel, and in it the John Dory Oyster Bar, The Breslin Bar and Dining Room, and the excellent Stumptown Coffee. Their lobby is open to the public and, despite being full of more people using MacBook Airs than you'll find at any Apple store, it's a pleasant place to drink your Stumptown coffee.

Stumptown Coffee at the Ace Hotel, 20 W. 29th Street.

And last, the grand finale, the bustling blocks around 29th Street between Fifth and Sixth with hundreds of small, some tiny, stores that sell ribbons, buttons, costume jewelry and notions of all kinds. This is the New York capitalism of legend, the capitalism of the old Lower East Side, where new immigrants open up small shops, hire family or other immigrants, work incredibly hard and (sometimes) make a better life for their children. I'm not talented enough to capture this scene in a photograph; you need to experience it in person. I find the area very moving.

29th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenues.

Art News

By Charles Kessler

First the good news:
Despite some doubts about the attribution, the J. Paul Getty Museum acquired what is almost certainly a major work by the 18th-century French painter Antoine Watteau.

Antoine Watteau, The Italian Comedians, c. 1720, oil on canvas, 50 ¾ x 36 ¾ inches (J. Paul Getty Museum, #2012.5)

The other good news is that the trend to put art resources online is continuing:

• Thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation, Bomb Magazine has placed online more than 1000 interviews from the last 30 years including interviews with Laurie Anderson, Eric Fischl, Sol Lewitt, Christian Marclay, Dan Graham, Richard Serra and Sonia Delauney.
• The Ghent Altarpiece can be seen in super high definition at a new website: Closer to Van Eyck. 

Van Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece, 1432 - Detail of Eve.

• If you missed this year's Moving Image Art Fair or didn't want to spend the time standing up to watch all those videos, at Art Fag City you can see some of them online in the comfort of your home.
• The Getty Research Institute has made access to its collection of two million photographs a lot easier.
• Art in America is supposed to have its archive online, but as of now I only find an occasional article and photos of the covers of issues from the 1980's onward. Watch for more.

Now for the bad news:

As a reminder: The original Pennsylvania Station, NYC, razed in 1963.

The Barnes Foundation had the gall to move the seminal Henri Matisse mural, The Dance, 1932-33, from its site in Dr. Albert Barnes's home in Merion Pennsylvania to the Barnes Foundation's new site in downtown Philadelphia. As Tyler Green convincingly demonstrates, Matisse made the mural specifically for that setting and was particularly interested in how it interacted with the green landscape outside as well as how it gave support to the easel paintings inside (“[My] decoration should not oppress the room, but rather should give more air and space to the pictures to be seen there."). In a 1934 letter to Alexander Fromm, Matisse wrote of the mural: "Architectural painting depends absolutely on the place that has to receive it, and which it animates with a new life. Once it is placed there, it cannot be separated."

Matisse's The Dance in it's original site:

An undated photo shows the Barnes Foundation and its world-renowned art collection in Lower Merion, Pa."The Dance," a mural by Henri Matisse is at left.  (AP Photo/Barnes Foundation).

Matisse's The Dance in its new site:

Finally, there are two noteworthy articles about the East Village in the eighties:
a Village Voice interview with Philip Glass, and a scorching and fun article by former Village Voice art critic Gary Indiana, One Brief, Scuzzy Moment.

In and Around Monochrome

By Carl Belz

(Note: Living in rural northern New Hampshire, I can’t jump into my car and do studio visits as I did while living near Boston. Nonetheless, I’ve become newly aware during the past couple of years of artists among my Facebook friends whose work looks good to me on my computer, like work I'd like somehow to engage, so I’m here beginning a series of “virtual exhibitions,” group shows based on themes and subjects and such that reflect what I’ve been seeing and thinking about. I hope you’ll enjoy them. –CB)  

We got a taste of monochrome painting in the 1960s with the early work of Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, and Frank Stella. None among them was a monochrome hard liner, none out to declare the end of painting or the dawn of a new age utopia—none the direct offspring of either Rodchenko or Malevich—and none operated from a theoretical platform of any kind. All of them, however, having been born in the 1930s, had come of age in a post-World War II culture where abstract art was not only widespread, it was just as widely celebrated for its expressionist freedom. It needed no defending, as it had needed defending in its beginnings, but it did need reining in—at least, that was the assessment of it by an emerging generation of artists who felt the urge to simplify and distill and systematically shape and set limits upon it in order to clarify what they wanted to say with it. Thus the appeal of monochrome painting in the 60s. Except it wasn’t called monochrome painting, it was called minimal art.   

Monochrome spawned no school or movement following its appearance in the early 1960s, but it has nonetheless remained a presence in the art of our time, its directness and simplicity periodically offering respite within a culture drenched increasingly by spectacle, while at the same time demonstrating anew abstraction’s capacity to secure meaning, even when self-imposed limits seemingly reduce its options to degree zero. In varying measures, its appeal has all along been visual and conceptual, a matter of body and mind together accounting for its integrity as art. And so it is—or so it looks to me anyway—with the artists whose work I’ve come to know individually via the internet and have brought together in this virtual exhibition: John Zinsser, Daniel Levine, Karen Baumeister, Jeffrey Collins, and Matt McClune. In mining a radical vein of modernist abstraction, they extend a century-old tradition; with their individual voices, they demonstrate its continuing vitality.   

   

John Zinsser’s paintings are self-reflective, they have a lot to do with the challenges that go into making paintings, with the process of getting paint the way you want it from the can onto the canvas, with the kinds of marks you mean to make with it once you get it there. The process is physical, the paint has substance, you can see how it’s moved around by brush or squeegee or trowel, you can see that it’s sometimes obdurate, sometimes yielding. The process is also deliberate, you’re aware that different kinds of marks connote different kinds of meanings and construct different kinds of pictures, sturdy and assertive pictures, for instance, along with pictures that are welcoming and serene, pictures that are fast, pictures that are slow. Thus does the process signal the pictures’ internal awareness, determine their character, and shape their meaning. Through all the process, however, there’s also pleasure, pleasure evident in the paint’s lubricious tactility, in the mark’s decisive sweep, in the choice of a picture’s identifying color. Which is where monochrome comes in: It’s not so much Zinsser’s subject as it is the framework for his enterprise, it’s an anchor, it functions as a constant against which we register and measure his art-making reflections and experience the wide-ranging and abundant pleasures they engender—for the artist, and for us as well.

John Zinsser, Quantity and Method, 2011, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches.

John Zinsser, Manner of Illusion, 2010, Oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches.
(Click to enlarge)

John Zinsser, Primary Nature, 2010, oil on canvas, 19 x 24 inches.
(Click to enlarge)

John Zinsser, The Waking Sky, 2011, Oil and enamel on canvas, 40 x 36 inches.

The pleasures that accrue to Daniel Levine’s paintings are of a different order, they’re delicate, ethereal. Their rarefied atmosphere is circumscribed by rigorously defined and scrupulously observed parameters: Levine paints only with primary colors and white, each monochrome is contained by a razor-sharp border of raw canvas, all of the pictures are minimally off-square. In a 2004 statement, he wrote, “I’m not motivated by objects, but by the idea of them.” In conversation with John Zinsser earlier this year, Levine referred to his own paintings as being “inherently internalized”, and he further acknowledged, “…my paintings aren’t ‘outwardly friendly’…” Asked about his influences, he referenced Philip Guston, John McLaughlin and Myron Stout as “…the ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” Asked why he titled his pictures, he commented, “…people have names for God.” Yet, both his statement and his conversation are sprinkled with references to punk and popular culture, notable among them, Iggy and the Stooges and Tuesday Weld. In response to this devil-or-angel conundrum, I’d say the pictures’ significance is pretty clear. If I imagine being with one of them, in my home, say, I see myself in a private space, a space for meditation beatified by the painting’s austere and otherworldly presence, a space outside of which beckoning demons may hover, but they’re kept at bay by the radiant, life-giving light of the picture’s surface, leaving me at peace—with myself, with the world.  

Daniel Levine, O. M., 2007 - 2010, oil on cotton, 8 x 7 ⅞ inches (Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson).
(Click to enlarge)

Daniel Levine, Untitled #2, 2001, oil on cotton, 16" x 15 3/4".
(Click to enlarge)

Daniel Levine, Untitled #3, 2009-2010, oil on cotton, 9 x 8 11/16 inches (private collection).
(Click to enlarge)

Daniel Levine, Untitled #5, 2010, oil on cotton, 16 7/8 x 16 13/16 inches.
(Click to enlarge)

Karen Baumeister’s dignified monochromes return us to the world of everyday experience. She paints them in everyday light, which is also how she prefers having them seen, because she conceives of them as being lived with, in harmony with their everyday environment, responding to it as naturally as plants respond to sunlight. Her preferred format is square or close to square, suggesting still life paintings, images of everyday objects instead of human figures, which would be clearly vertical, or landscapes, which would be clearly horizontal. Her paint, generously and sensuously layered across canvas supports, accumulates visibly at the pictures’ edges and further underscores their physicality, their tactility, their referencing of objects we routinely handle. And her color, whether gray or green, red or white, is consistently muted and restful, neither thrusting at us nor tugging us in. Its unassuming tone reflects the pictures’ comfort about being in the world, content in allowing the monochromes to integrate and signal their individual identities. Thus do the paintings become, for us, objects of contemplation, hushed invitations to become absorbed in them and partake of their pleasuring content. But what kinds of everyday things do these monochrome still lifes comprise, what are we likely to find within them? Secrets, perhaps. Or maybe dreams. Or desires. Or memories. All of which are within and around us all of the time—common things right before our eyes in these uncommonly meaningful and satisfying paintings. 

Karen Baumeister, Grays Over Blackened Blue, 2011, 64 x 64 inches.

Detail: Karen Baumeister, Grays Over Blackened Blue, 2011, 64 x 64 inches

Karen Baumeister, Everchanging, 2010, 8 x 9 inches.
(Click to enlarge)

Karen Baumeister, Red, 2010, 64 x 64 inches.

I have an artist friend who periodically reminds me that art doesn’t have to be ugly to be sincere. I can’t remember what got him started saying it. It could have been when punk was the rage or when grunge came along, or it could have been in reference to the anti-aesthetic of California Funk or Neo-Expressionism or the YBAs. Whenever and whatever, it had to have been one of those characteristically modern moments when beauty gets questioned as being merely beauty, meaning merely decorative, out of touch with lived experience, inauthentic as art. But, behold, beauty has made a serious comeback since the start of the millennium, in painting and elsewhere—in my estimation, because a new generation of artists is emerging that’s often been deeply inspired by modernist abstraction and is fully informed of its achievement, but by dint of time and space, a lengthy span of postmodern irony, and an increasingly global perspective, is coming to maturity feeling unburdened by the baggage of what that abstraction may earlier have meant, and correspondingly free to make their own reading of it . In the context of monochrome, for instance, Jeffrey Collins bonds gestural abstraction with minimalist reserve, an unlikely pairing, to attain a delectable expressionism that is unique within the genre. 

Jeffrey Collins,  07-01-2011, 2011, acrylic and wood filler on canvas, 36 x 30 inches. 

Jeffrey Collins, 07-22-2011, 2011, acrylic and wood filler on canvas, 39 x 36 inches. 

Jeffrey Collins, 11-18-2011, 2011, acrylic and wood filler on canvas, 30 x 24 inches.

Jeffrey Collins, 02-17-2011, 2011, acrylic and wood filler on canvas, 25 ½ x 16 inches.

Matt McClune, by comparison, presents us with layered veils of color, fragile, alluring, astonishingly and irresistibly beautiful, which appear to have come into being on their own, without agency, as if they were forces of nature—monochrome highlighting not so much the process of their becoming as the autonomous state of their being. 

Matt McClune, Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 53 x 39 inches. 

Matt McClune, Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 35 ½ x 29 ½ inches

Matt McClune, Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 35 ½ x 24 ½ inches.

Matt McClune, Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 25 ½ x 22 ½ inches.

In greater and lesser degrees, these monochrome paintings, simplified and distilled and systematically shaped as they are, sometimes make painting look easy, as if the way it is is the only way it could ever have been, as if inspiration and its expression—regardless of the facts of their gestation—were born as one, effortlessly and simultaneously, in an instant. Really good art of any kind has a way of doing that, and the effect can be exhilarating—still, risk attends the urge to go for it. This Yeats knew:

A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.            

Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. 

Chelsea Roundup

Installation view, Happenings: New York, 1958-1963, PACE gallery

By Charles Kessler

Happenings: New York, 1958-1963, PACE gallery (Through March 17)

For the most part this show is made up of historical documentation — there’s very little art — as a result it's pretty dry going even if the subject is pretty wild stuff. More important, this show is not about “Happenings,” but rather it’s about a type of avant-garde theater that many New York artists (among them Jim Dine, Simone Forti, Red Grooms, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Whitman) were involved with then — theater that the Dadaist, Surrealists, Picasso and many others had already been doing forty to fifty years before.

True "Happenings," on the other hand, were invented in the late '50's, probably by Allan Kaprow, and it was a more original art form. The difference is, as I understand it, that theater is acted (rehearsed and repeated) whereas Happenings are real, here-and-now events in which audience participation is a defining feature.

Performance art derived from Happenings, not from theater (however far-out the theater was), although lately performance art seems to be merging with theater in that it’s acted but also allows for some audience participation.

With that off my chest, this is an important show, one that should have been done by a museum and in greater depth. While the theater these artists did wasn't original (or all that good for that matter), it is historically important because it kept viable for them, and others, the option of narrative and representation in vanguard art.

***

Charles Garabedian, The Wine Dark Sea, 2011, acrylic on paper, approx. 30 x 185 inches

Charles Garabedian at Betty Cuningham (through March 24)
 

I’ve written a lot about Charles Garabedian’s art, most recently here and here. So now I'd like to take the opportunity of comparing his art to the art of a friend and colleague of Garabedian's who happens to be showing across the street at the Prince Street Gallery: Arthur Levine.

Arthur Levine, English Church, 2011, acrylic on birch panel, 22x29. CLICK TO ENLARGE.

Both taught art at UCLA and I knew them when I was a student there although, studying Art History at the time, I never had a class with either of them. Both are about the same age (Garabedian is older but Levine has painted for longer), both work in a manner that manages to bring rather inert acrylic paint to life, and both are semi-representational painters.

But Garabedian, even though he's not getting all the recognition I think he deserves (except from other artists and Christopher Knight) is relatively well-known and shows in great galleries in New York and Los Angeles; whereas Levine is hardly known at all and shows at a co-op gallery, one of the better ones, but still....

Levine's work suffers from reproductions more than most, so clicking on the image to enlarge it might help. You can't really experience the light and space evoked from color interactions in reproduction. You can't see the choppy, rhythmic brushwork and the patterns they form — as good as any you'll find in a Milton Resnick. And you can't see the texture and thickness of the paint that sometimes plays against spatial illusions. Levine's paintings provide more pure visual pleasure than 99% of the art in Chelsea today. Visual pleasure may not be what art is about — but it isn't what it's NOT about either.

So what separates the two artists? Size is certainly one possibility; easel painting isn't fashionable, although Tom Nozkowski, Bill Jensen (until recently), John Lees and many other artists work small and are pretty well known. Also, unlike Garabedian's raw, pugnacious approach to art-making, Levine paints in a traditional manner — but that doesn't bother Eric Fischl or any number of other representational artists. I think the main difference is subject matter. Levine's paintings don't have the provocative subject matter of a Garabedian, nor do they have a conceptual schpeel like postmodern art. On the contrary, landscapes have become a hackneyed subject. We can't help thinking of all that kitschy art in tourist towns when looking at landscape painting today. Well get over it! This work may not be great art, there's very little of that EVER, but it evokes a haunting, pastoral mood that's profoundly deep, which is more than I can say for most art in Chelsea today. Go see for yourself. Just be open-minded.

***

Installation view, Klaus Weber at Andrew Kreps Gallery.

Klaus Weber, If you leave me I’m not following, Andrew Kreps (through March 24).

Weber's work is in the pseudo-scientific spirit of the art of Marcel Duchamp, Tim Hawkinson, Shane Hope and others. Weber, for example, invented a quirky way to print by rigging up an apparatus to keep sunlight shining on words (the complete text by JK Huysmans: A Rebours) that are printed on sheets of glass. The sun shines through to paper that it bleaches, leaving the text dark. There a strange droll ritualism to this type of work that transforms it from clever invention into meaningful art.

***

Doug Wheeler, A MI 75 DZ NY 12, David Zwirner (ended February 25).

I said a lot of nasty things about Doug Wheeler’s installation; now you have an opportunity to judge for yourselves. Which is better: before or after?

Installation view, Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012).

De-installation view, Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012)

***

Ryan McNamara, The Haunting, 2012, at Elizabeth Dee

Ryan McNamara, Still at Elizabeth Dee (through April 7).

This is a form of performance art/photography. Whoever comes in the door is dressed, given props and asked to pose.  The results are exhibited on the gallery website — most of the photos are better than this.

Bushwick Art Seen

By Charles Kessler

This is the last in a three-part series on the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The relaxed intimacy and DIY ethic of the Bushwick art scene extend to the art made and exhibited here. Of course with thirty galleries and thousands of artists, every conceivable kind of art is made and shown here. But you're not going to find much super-sophisticated, flashy postmodernist work. Sincerity predominates, and what irony exists is good-natured and playful.

Matt Freedman's exhibition The Golem of Ridgewood at the Valentine Gallery (through March 11) is a prime example. The show revolves around a film we are suppose to believe is seventy years old and was discovered in an old synagogue near the gallery.  The film purportedly documents the creation of a Golem (a destructive and uncontrollable monster) that was employed by the synagogue' s congregation as protection from its anti-Semitic neighbors.

But the show's a lot more than a zany spoof. The Golem is a deep-rooted archetype (think the atomic bomb), and there are moments when I got caught up by the imagery and thought how desperate a people must have been to resort to such a dangerous (and cockamamie) weapon. Perhaps the reason I could be so moved is I never felt Freedman was being unkind or ridiculing people, or even just being insensitive. There's fun here, but there's true sympathy too.

Especially effective in this regard is a life-sized carnival-type backdrop depicting a strong-man strangling cartoony caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini, one in each hand. The face of the strong-man is cut out to allow people to stick their own face in and have their picture taken. Of course I know that Matt Freedman really made this thing, but I'm still moved by the idea of a powerless people doing whatever they could, however lame and pathetic, to boost their morale.

In addition to the film, the exhibition includes "recovered props and artifacts related to it" (very much hand-made ones) as well as a "timeline" (compiled with "consulting art-historian" Frances Rabinovitch) to "contextualize these fascinating relics." Most of the time the connection between the film and the "contextualized relics" is pretty far-fetched, a creepy knight's gauntlet sticking straight out of the wall, for example, but that adds to the whacky fun.

***

Film-Makers’ Co-op Press Conference, 1964, L to R - Gregory Markopoulos, P. Adams Sitney, Andy Warhol, Ron Rice (Jonas Mekas © 1964).

We are Cinema — 50 Years of the Film-Makers’ Co-op (through March 5th) at MICROSCOPE gallery is a serious, historical exhibition, a show PS 1 or the New Museum should be doing. It's another commemoration, but a real one: the 50th anniversary of the Film-Makers' Co-op, now the largest repository of avant-garde and experimental films. It was initiated by Jonas Mekas who gathered about 20 other avant-garde filmmakers in order to find ways to independently archive, exhibit and distribute their films.

In addition to early archival materials, the exhibition has photographs, collages, drawings and other art made by former and current members including Jonas Mekas, Rudy Burckhardt, Carolee Schneemann and Jack Smith.

The gallery will be screening films all month; see their website for the schedule.

***

Agape Enterprise, SAPC Bushwick , Shinsuke Aso's three-day performance (February 17 - 19) celebrated the opening of Shinsuke Aso’s postcard shop SAPC (Shinsuke Aso Post Card). Shinsuke cut up cereal boxes, soap boxes, and other found materials to make hundreds of postcards which he taped to the gallery walls salon style or stacked in piles and sold for 25 cents each. People took the ones they liked right off the wall (to be replaced by others) and deposited the change through a slot in a can hanging from a string in the center of the room.

This is art for the other 99% of us. It reminded me of the C.A.S.H./Newhouse gallery in the East Village in the early eighties. They had a shoe box on their front desk full of small works that you could buy for ten or twenty dollars, or some small amount. This show is in the same democratic and generous spirit.

The exhibition is also about recycling, of course, but in addition it says something interesting about graphics. As Pop Art showed, the graphics on the packaging of consumer products is usually pretty good. Strategically cropping the cardboard packages at unusual angles abstracts the graphics, allowing you to appreciate the beauty as pure design. Some are better than others, of course, but that's part of the fun -- you get to choose your favorites.

Full disclosure: I'm one of Shinsuke Aso’s biggest collectors. Two dollars means nothing to me!

***

Installation view of Paul D’Agostino's exhibition, Appearance Adrift in the Garden, at Norte Maar.

Paul D’Agostino's exhibition at Norte Maar, Appearance Adrift in the Garden, is getting some deserved attention. D'Agostino is one of those scary smart people. He's a translator and poet in at least four (update: it's five!) languages. His reading of his poetry last week at Norte Maar was as good as anything I've heard at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House -- and that includes Mark Strand. In addition, he's the owner of the well-respected Centotto gallery, and, if this show is any indication, he's a first-rate artist.

Most of the work is unframed prints and mono-prints on rough paper surfaces, and there’s an occasional collaged painting on paper. Like a lot of the work I’ve been seeing in Bushwick, these paper pieces have a very tactile and hand-made quality. They’re small, intimate, heavily-worked and dense. They need to be looked at carefully and savored.

D’Agostino's newly-published limited-edition chapbook, Bodies, Voids and a Tale of Seas, accompanies the exhibition.

***

Elizabeth Riley, Tabletop Cityscape, 2010,  42 x 48 x 84 inches, inkjet prints of video stills, found wood, mixed media, live videomini projector and embedded video monitor.

Martin Bromirski, Rachel LaBine, and Elizabeth Riley, StorefrontBushwick (until March 11).
This is a three-person exhibition of semi-abstract art. I particularly liked the Riley’s “Tabletop Landscape” which she said was inspired by walking around Manhattan in the west 30’s and 40’s where she used to live. There’s certainly plenty going on, and she captures it using mini-video projections, small sculptures, prints, found wood and mixed other media -- all set on a 4 x 8 foot table. This is a small, active, exuberant, self-contained world.

***

Charles Atlas, The Illusion of Democracy, installation view (Luhring Augustine Bushwick, 2012)

Charles Atlas, The Illusion of Democracy (until May 20) includes three video installations, Painting by Numbers, 2008, and Plato’s Alley, 2009, and a new one made specifically for the opening of the Bushwick branch of this blue-chip Chelsea gallery. This is large, polished and theatrical work — a grand spectacle (some reviews related it to the movie Matrix) — not at all the Bushwick aesthetic I've been describing, but I must admit it was pretty impressive, even exciting sometimes, as when the numbers were projected on the audience.

Updated Map and Guide of Bushwick Galleries

A downloadable PDF of this map and guide can be found on the right sidebar under 

"Gallery and Museum Guides."

By Charles Kessler

The only gallery that closed since my last update is Famous Accountants, and that is a big loss. At least nine new galleries opened, however, and I discovered many others -- thirty all together!  The galleries are listed in an order that I suggest would make an efficient route for a gallery tour. They are spread out over a large area; what is being called “Bushwick” actually includes parts of eastern Williamsburg and Ridgewood, Queens. If you have the energy, it’s possible to do it all in one afternoon (it's about 4 1/2 miles), but you can easily split the tour into eastern and western sections if you prefer. For the eastern section, you can end with Factory Fresh and walk back to the Morgan Avenue L stop. For the western section, you can start from the Dekalb Avenue L subway station and tour in reverse order. You can return via the Jefferson Street L (at Wyckoff and Troutman).

Some galleries are open Friday - Monday, 1 - 6 pm, and most are open at least Sundays. Some galleries, however, are only open by appointment, and I noted those in the listings. It's a good idea to check gallery websites (their names below are linked to their websites), email them, or call the galleries in advance to confirm. It’s also a good idea to take the gallery phone numbers with you because in some cases you may need be let in.

I took the opportunity to list some bars and a variety of restaurants along the route. These are not on the map but are placed in the listings under the galleries they are closest to.

To start the tour, take the L train to Morgan Avenue and go out the Bogart Street exit (toward the back of the train if you’re coming from the west). 56 Bogart is across the street from where you exit.

56 Bogart Street galleries:
Agape Enterprise - (718) 417-0037  info@agapeenterprise.com
Bogart Salon - (203) 249-8843  bogartsalon@gmail.com
C.C.C.P. - (917) 974-9664  cccp@mindspring.com
Interstate Projects  - no phone listed  tom@interstateprojects.com
Momenta Art - (718) 218-8058   email via their website
NURTUREart - (718) 782-7755   gallery@nurtureart.org
Slag Contemporary - (917) 977-1848   info@SlagGallery.com
Studio 10 - (718) 852-4396   studio10bogart@gmail.com
THEODORE:Art - (212) 966-4324  theodoreart@gmail.com

Nearby:
Roberta's Restaurant,  261 Moore Street (near Bogart Street), (718) 417-1118
MoMo Sushi Shack, 43 Bogart Street (near Moore Street), (718) 418-6666

Luhring Augustine - 25 Knickerbocker Avenue (at Ingraham),  (212) 206-9100   info@luhringaugustine.com

Kesting/Ray - 257 Boerum Street (east of Bushwick Avenue), (212) 334-0204   email via their website     The gallery will probably open in mid-March.

Centotto - 250 Moore Street  #108 (west of Bogart), 908-338-3590   postuccio@gmail.com
Open by appointment. Call to be let in.

English Kills - 114 Forrest Street -- use door to the garden on the right, (917) 375-6266    info@englishkillsartgallery.com

Grace Exhibition Space  (Performance art) - 840 Broadway, 2nd Floor, (646) 578-3402
Open by appointment and when they have performances.

Airplane - 70 Jefferson Street - basement, (646) 345-9394    airplanegallery@gmail.com
Central Avenue is a more pleasant street to take to this gallery than the safe but bleak Evergreen Avenue.

Microscope  - 4 Charles Place (and Myrtle Avenue), (347) 925-1433    info@microscopegallery.com

The Parlour - 791 Bushwick Avenue (at Dekalb Avenue), (718) 360-3218    info@theparlourbushwick.com

Nearby:
Tandem, 236 Troutman Street (between Wilson and Knickerbocker),  (718) 386-2369

StorefrontBushwick - 16 Wilson Avenue (south of Flushing Avenue)
    (917) 714-3813    StorefrontBushwick@gmail.com

Nearby:
Narrows Bar, 1037 Flushing Avenue (near Morgan), (281) 827-1800

Factory Fresh - 1053 Flushing Avenue, (917) 682-6753     ali@factoryfresh.net

Secret Project Robot - 389 Melrose Street (between Knickerbocker and Irving), no phone listed. 
secrets@secretprojectrobot.org

Nearby:
Cafe Ghia Restaurant, 24 Irving Avenue (at Jefferson Street), (718) 821-8806.
Arepera Guacuco (Venezuelan restaurant), 44 Irving Avenue (at Troutman Street)
(347) 305-3300 - no website
The Bodega (Bar/Restaurant), 24 Saint Nicholas Avenue (corner of Troutman Street)

CLEARING - 505 Johnson Avenue # 10,  (347) 383-2256    desk@c-l-e-a-r-i-n-g.com

The Active  space - 566 Johnson Ave (three short blocks north of Flushing Avenue -- buzz #5 to be let in), no phone listed.   ashley**at**566johnsonave.com

SUGAR - 449 Troutman Street (between Street Nicholas and Cypress Avenues),  (718) 417-1180
email via their website   Open by appointment.

Regina Rex  - 1717 Troutman Street — ring bell #329, (646) 467-2232
(The numbers change when you cross the Queens border -- it's not as far as the address would imply.)
 info[at]reginarex.org

Nearby:
Northeast Kingdom (Restaurant/Bar), 18 Wyckoff Avenue (at Troutman), (718) 386-3864

Norte Maar - 83 Wyckoff Avenue, (646) 361-8512    email via their website   Open by appointment.

Valentine -  464 Seneca Avenue, (718) 381-2962    valentineridgewood@gmail.com

Botanic - 150 Wyckoff Avenue, no phone listed.   PaulMNicholson@gmail.com

Sardine  - 286 Stanhope Street (between Irving and Wyckoff), no phone or email listed. A small gallery/boutique.

950 Hart - 950 Hart Street (and Wyckoff), (347) 693-6231   950hartgallery@gmail.com

Small Black Door - 19-20 Palmetto Street (off of Fairview Avenue), no phone listed    email via their website.   Open by Appointment. They are a few blocks beyond the eastern boundary of the map.

I Love Bushwick

By Charles Kessler

Opening of the Charles Atlas Exhibition at the new Bushwick branch of the Luhring Augustine Gallery

People in Bushwick are worried the blue-chip Chelsea gallery, Luhring Augustine, which inaugurated a new 10,000-square-foot building in Bushwick Friday night (see photo above), is the harbinger of a bigger and less congenial art scene. This may be so, but I think it will take more than Luhring Augustine and even a few other big galleries moving in to change things. Big galleries can even help small DIY ones by attracting collectors to the area who might otherwise be reluctant to come, and that in turn helps artists too. The problem will come, of course, if too many big galleries move in and make the area too popular. I hope it never comes to that.

I love Bushwick the way it is now. People are friendly, as you’d expect in a real neighborhood. At a typical opening of a small Bushwick gallery, people mingle in a relaxed manner and actually talk about the art and other shows they’ve seen. Of course it’s networking, but it’s comfortable and sincere.

At Matt Freedman's opening at the Valentine gallery, also Friday night, Fred Valentine welcomed people as they came in, introduced himself and introduced them to Matt Freedman, who in turn introduced them to other people. Contrast that with Luring Augustine's opening. Roland Augustine also greeted people at the door, and that was a nice gesture to the community, but it’s one thing to welcome hundreds of people into an anonymous space, and quite another to welcome a few dozen people into an intimate space and engage them in conversation.

The mood at Bushwick's other openings was so infectious Friday evening that Jerry Saltz went around introducing himself and Roberta Smith to a few people hanging out at the new Theodore:Art gallery; and as outgoing as Saltz is, I somehow can’t imagine that happening in a big crowded Chelsea opening, or Luhring Augustine’s new Bushwick space for that matter. In any case it wouldn’t be as amiable.

I really, really hope Bushwick doesn't change much for many years. I intend to cherish it while it lasts.

Next post: Bushwick gallery map and guide.