Brooklyn Art Blog

Christina has up some paintings, made up, apparently, of her old paintings, which have been shredded and reconstrued. The work is related to the Wall Street financial crisis metaphorically and physically. I’m not aware of any artists who have taken such direct action with regard to the crisis. Or actually, anybody who has done much of anything about it anywhere.

The works also have scraps of clothing in them, which remind me of the race to the bottom drive to produce cheap goods and IT infrastructure, and of the race to the top of the financial / consumerist housing bubble which precipitated the financial crisis.

This got me thinking that there is no financial system per se, but a crazy quilt based on the markets from, oh, about 800 years ago. Why not build a good one? Maybe that’s my day job talking.

Better to trash everything and start fresh.

http://www.corridorgallerybrooklyn.org/

I’ve never been a good audience for modern dance because the human condition tends so easily toward absurdity as it veers from dignity. That critical dialectic has always seemed absent. I may be biased though, as my own ballet career was marked by equal parts dignity and [unwitting] absurdity.

I had the good fortune to attend a preview of what Gallim Dance has in store for its run at the Joyce, and finally felt someone had accomplished the main hack. The lines, theatrical modes, and staging reach deep into the human condition, in ways that other art forms exactly cannot. It was like everyone in the audience, and everything they brought in with them off of the street, all of it was somehow being worked out.

Much better than The Avengers.

http://www.gallimdance.com/

Distorting (a messiah project, 13C) is a hanging installation of  linked pods that map out the relationships between views of the Jewish messiah. Each pod has a QC code which can be scanned using a mobile device to get a text snippet describing that pod’s messianic reference. R. Justin Stewart happens to be an agnostic.

When people think of books or art genres they likely do so using their own signature shorthand, as opposed to the official linear version.  I saw this dialectic as art vs. the endgame: you see the point, even though it is not there.

There is something neat about scanning the code and getting the link to pop up on the mobile device. There is just that existential split second, which we encounter hundreds of times a day, and then the jolt of a recognition that forces our humanity upon us.

Is it the messiah?

http://www.theinvisibledog.org

Kelsey has up some interesting photos in Van Dyke Brown technique. They are stitched together and reference government FSA programs. Seems like a deconstructive approach that leads to – something, for a change. They are like negatives that develop in front of your eyes, as you adjust / confirm your own assumptions. Check them out to get new insight into some of our American myths.

www.fountainartfair.com

One of the major innovations in gallery structure. It is an online gallery with a focus on Bushwick artists, but the physical exhibition space is at a different popup location each month.  This setup has great integrity for the artistic community. It really seems like the way to do it. Plus it’s cool that they are combining their niche with a very strong international interest.

http://www.bushwickgallery.com

Performance made for video has a subtle syntax. I look at Glenn Gould’s piano music to check it out in a different setting. These videos by Atlas are played out over a big dark room so the audience can’t help but be implicated, as they see their shadows thrown into the work, and the projection literally into their faces. I bet you could digitally analyze the grouping of people across art openings and come up with predictive patterns, the way they do on Wall Street.

This is the first show of a big gallery in Bushwick.  Luhring Augustine is making a concerted effort to show work at this location that is different from the Chelsea stuff. That’s great, since a new space won’t make a new scene unless there’s something there there.

I guess if something’s going to happen you have to bring it, and this show is a good start.

http://www.luhringaugustine.com

When I saw these paintings I was reminded of something essential in art, which is that it’s more than the sum of its parts. Still if you just do any old thing it will be bad art. There has to be some way to make the case. And in this making some mesh of structure emerges.

The closest thing I can think of is the notion in poetry of poetic diction. Language is a core aspect of people, and vice versa. But which came first?

These paintings are bigger than James’ previous works and were worked on from a distance.  The closer you get the more they pull you in. A really neat dialogue ensues.

http://www.stuxgallery.com

There’s a lot of stuff in galleries and museums, and technology usually just adds to the confusion. Art world dogma seems expertly crafted to gloss over the mess. I’ve been thinking how somebody’s got to address this whole issue of art techno-glut head-on.

Shalom Neuman’s incisive mashups and Terrenceo’s genre-busters go a long way toward dispelling a lot of derelict ideas related to art, political correctness, technology, and society.  Karim Marquez also puts up some work that exemplifies this new approach to integrity.

Looking at the show, I got a sense for the first time that there is in fact a king of art historical sweep passing through the present day, one that’s inclusive, literate, inspiring, and technologically astute.

And without much downside.

http://www.lambertfinearts.com

One of my pet peeves is where the little guy is supposed to defer to the big shot. Do we have to love a show of old stuff done by someone who’s already famous? All I know is, if I ever find myself at a track meet among a field of pros, I’m going to go all out rather than stop and genuflect along the way.

Trudy Benson’s paintings combine actual and virtual abstraction in a way that isolates whatever it is about art that can’t be represented digitally. You have to see it in person.  Very cool from existential, realist, modern, and postmodern points of view.

It’s great to see someone go from art school to a major show based on the quality of the work and nothing else. This is what New York gallery experiences are supposed to be about.

Mike Weiss Gallery

I went to Berlin because it had a vibe I couldn’t get elsewhere. One of my friends had an underground club – literally underground, in the water and sewer system, so that you had to dodge traffic then dive down a manhole to get in – called Club Sexyland. At that time, there were subterranean art shows at various popup locations throughout the city.

It was hard to sort out what was chaos and what order and which came first. The art scene was chaotic, but had some kind of logic related to The Wall coming down. The Internet was emerging as a logical system, belying the chaos of the Twitter revolutions to come.

When I saw the work by Stefanie Gutheil, it struck me that the infinite loop of German Expressionism offers more to reality than I had realized. You can take something with you when you leave the show. That’s the way it should be – a show inspires you to do things that you otherwise would not have done.

Mike Weiss Gallery