WHITNEY BIENNIAL 5/23/14

WHITNEY BIENNIAL – 2014

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2014Biennial/

Whitney Biennials - no matter how mediocre always intrigue me. This is not one of the great Biennials by far, but the three floors that I saw were as varied as the interests of the curators: installations were diverse as were the conceptual underpinnings. The three Curators were Stuart Comer (Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MOMA ), Anthony Elms (Associate Curator ICA Philadelphia) and Michelle Grabner (Artist and Professor at School of the Art Institute in Chicago.)

Surprisingly I ended up responding to the sculptural works over everything else. My favorites include Sterling Ruby's ceramics which had such a bulky presence that they stood out for their ugly aggressiveness. I could not take my eyes off of them. Carol Jackson - an artist whose work I did not know - had wall pieces that were gentler than Ruby's, made of wood, acrylic, paper mache and inkjet prints, but their strength lay in an eccentricity of  form and  surface which drew me to them from across a crowded room. Ricky Swallow displayed small elegantly abstract shapes cast in bronze from cardboard. They were ethereal as were Shio Kusaka’s noble installation of ceramic bowls and jars. Terry Adkins, who tragically died a few months ago – at the height of his career - exhibited “Aviarium” – sound based artworks that were silent. He used wave vectors of bird songs and translated them into 3-D, hanging high from the ceiling visually shooting out of the walls - trumpeting the vigor and robustness of nature’s music. Sheila Hicks’ monumental cascading colored ropes dominated the room she was in, as did her exquisite small paper and silk thread “drawings” on paper. Ken Lum’s fictitious Vietnam-owned shop displays, based on suburban shopping plaza signs, invokes the splendor and irony of Capitalism’s marketing of desire.

Paintings took second fiddle to other work.  Dona Nelson’s two sided paintings were pugnacious and intrusive – Karl Haendel’s graphite drawings felt familiar though beautifully rendered with some formal quirks thrown in. Keith Mayerson’s salon-style room consisted of over 20 years of work – the range of resolution varied and that gave the paintings a directness and honesty, which felt personal and  refreshing in an age of over produced and mechanical art. Mayerson’s skills and observations were out there for us to scrutinize and we felt their authenticity. The series was entitled My American Dream and included portraits of Annie Oakley, Abraham Lincoln, James Dean, Louise Bourgeois and Keith’s husband and family.

Writers, critics, archivists, and philosophers took their place in the sun. Included were former Village Voice columnist Gary Indiana who showed us that he too is an artist; Triple Canopy, a magazine “…that encompasses digital works of art and literature, public conversations, exhibitions, and books…”; Joseph Grigley’s collection of Gregory Battock’s writings and ephemeral;  Semiotext(e) founded in 1974 produced 28 pamphlets introducing French Poststructuralist theory to the U.S. and the notebooks that  David Foster Wallace used to “compose early drafts of The Pale King (2011) the novel he was working on when he took his life in 2008.”

Julie Ault’s room included interviews with and paintings by Martin Wong, David Wojnarowicz’s “magic box” and Danh Vos’ clipping of the marriage announcement of Barbara Pierce to then Lt. George Walker Bush. “…A range of voices, energies, artworks, artifacts, and texts, all displayed as equal participants, invoke themes of disappearance and regeneration and the notion that subjectivity is an integral dimension of archiving and historical representation…” Lots of reading, if you want to take the time, revisiting recent art history through the intellectual journals of the time.

Photographs and videos involved experimentation, collage and animation.The exception was Dawoud Bey whose clear, moving inkjet diptychs “…pairing portraits of African Americans the same ages as the victims of the 1963 [Birmingham Alabama] killings with pictures of adults at the ages that the victims would have been in 2012…” were rich in tonal and emotional range. I also loved Stephen Berens’ multiple photos printed on top of one another sequentially - entitled 40 Views of Rome resulting in deeply resonant images. David Robbin’s videos screening commercials advertising contemporary art, which Robbins produces and buys time for broadcast are both hilarious and poignant. Zoe Leonard's camera obscura piece was magical but on a bright sunny day would have been even more so; today's cloudiness made the darkened (almost black room) hazy with the mysteries of the outside world turned upside down in the space.

Scatter school strewn installations are to be avoided and yes they are present, and now they have the most recent technology thrown into the mix – but in 2014 felt very déjà vu. The paintings of Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, Suzanne McClelland and Rebecca Morris were uninspiring,  but I thought that was due to weak curatorial decisions as they are all strong artists. In contrast, Louise Fishman held her own ground, and seems to have separated herself from the 25^th generation Abstract Expressionists that continue to spring up all around, finding her own voice. Jacqueline Humphries also shone with two luminous glittering works.

The 2014 Whitney Biennial is a mixed medley but one worth visiting.  I always have fun, but this time nothing made me want to rush home and paint.

RICHARD HAAS 4/18/14

Richard Haas is first and foremost an artist, muralist and printmaker, but has been called a magician, an illusionist and a seer; words that make perfect sense when you see his recent exhibition titled: PROJECTS & PROPOSALS-HYPOTHETICAL, UNREALIZED, DESTROYED 1975-2013. I am a native New Yorker, daughter of an architect involved in building Middle Income-Cooperative Housing (Penn Station South, Coop City, Seward Park, The Amalgamated, etc.) whose spirit was frequently deflated by the architectural transformations in the city. Often careless, downright ugly, indifferent to historical tradition and the relationship to the community, au-courant structures spring up driven by the financiers and real estate power brokers having access to politicians who then make crucial decisions as to a building’s life breath and eventual demise, paving the way for “new growth” on the streets where we live.

In a microcosm we see one man’s personal struggle with many of these issues. Paul Goldberger the eminent Architectural critic wrote, as early as 1978 that:

“The art of Richard Haas is at once entirely realistic and quite fantastic…. He imagines architectural elements and then paints them in situations where they achieve a reality, almost a life of their own… When in his large outdoor and indoor works Haas chose to ignore the existing structural style, an entire world of imaginary and fantastic architectural space was made possible. The mural on the Boston Architecture Center, painted on the back of a “brutal style” building became a cross section cutaway of an 18th Century pantheon. A small cubical lobby interior in Chicago became an interior similar to San Miniato in Florence…”

And in 2013 in an interview with Richard Haas on CBS Sunday Morning, we get some background on his one-man “urban renewal” struggles and dreams. At the end of the interview, in answer to the question - what do you want your legacy to be?  Haas responds that he “likes the idea of making enough work… so that “some of it, only some of it will stick around.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AYRImFtTvc

Photographs in the show are overlaid with graphite, pencil, gouache, including several aquatints and etchings of BEFORE and AFTER PROPOSALS, HYPOTHETICAL PROPOSALS, and REALIZED AND UNREALIZED plans which are mesmerizing to see, and at the same time have a gripping poignancy as we look at the accompanying text and see the word DESTROYED crying out at us, the building having been either torn down, along with Richard’s mural or painted over - after being part of the cultural landscape for many years. There are 28 pieces in the show – all rich in humor and pathos. Some examples: HYPOTHETICAL PROPOSAL: Tomb from Petra on building Façade near 9^th Ave. and 33^rd Street; BEFORE AND AFTER SHADOW SERIES: To paint the shadow of the Old Madison Square Garden on a wall on 23^rd Street; HYPOTHETICAL PROPOSAL: A portion of the Wailing Wall on the side of a church near the corner of 33^rd and 9^th Avenue.
Images: http://tinyurl.com/krwmoqb

 From the first moment I saw the BEFORE and AFTER SHADOW SERIES, I was an enthusiast. Seduced by the beauty of his design, the quirky humor conflated with a trenchant political outlook, addressing contemporary issues or evoking memories of buildings that once were rooted on those grounds, dignified and secure in their construction and connection with the earth, and now forgotten/wiped out – a reminder of our own fleeting life cycle.

FXFOWLE

FX FOWLE ARCHITECTS

22 West 19^th Street, NYC11^th fl. 

April 17-June 13, 2014

Gallery Hours: M-F 9am-5pm.

BONNIE LUCAS RETROSPECTIVE 3/18/14-4/26/14

Bonnie Lucas’ retrospective at the Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery, 417 Lafayette St. 4^th floor, NYC is an exhibition that is fiercely personal, bitterly moving, and joyfully idiosyncratic dealing with seduction, defiance and rejection. A comprehensive show comprised of mixed media pieces, watercolors and paintings – all dealing with Lucas’ psyche, but one that cracks through and enters into every female’s core being.

The color pink often dominates along with ribbons, satin fabrics, notions, toys, and dolls - illuminating childhood dreams which often become adult nightmares. As young girls we are wrapped in sunny halos of future illusions  - wedding gowns, happily-married-after scenarios, efficient and joyful housewifely duties, loving caregiver and caretaker – floating bubbles in a rainbow atmosphere of fairyland hope and desire.

Bonnie Lucas is able to convey that vision but also the perverse, impure and heinous reality which is imperceptibly swimming in these assemblages –camouflaged inside this universe of white gloves, hankies, and satin. High heels that are both destructive and coquettish lures;  handcuffs painted a seductive bluish-purple; knitting needles and coat hangers all disguised under the mantle of pastel colors - sharp pointy objects that look like vaginal speculums referencing abortion and punctured longings.

The artist skillfully incorporates a myriad of iconography – oh so easy to look at – but like Cassandra an impending cautionary warning.  Diaphragm-like coils, broken heads, baby blankets – are woven into the soft, luxurious mix – one can weep from the depth of grief that awaits growing up into the unknowable future, but that is the journey that unfolds with time.

Over the years there has been a real consistency to Bonnie Lucas' work. I first remember her shows in the East Village and those “classic works” such as LUCKY LADY (1985), PRINCESS OF POWER ( 1988), PINK DRESS  (1981) are in the show, along with wonderfully delicate watercolors that contain images that are often an ironic view of childhood incorporating children’s drawings, crayons and collage - feminist surrealism joined with anger and foreboding. Yet there is delight in the beauty of the rendering – sensitive to the exquisitely fragile nature of innocence.
http://www.waldkimgallery.blogspot.com/

SANDY GELLIS - CONTEMPORARY SORCERESS 4/3/14

A version of this article first appeared in Women's Voices for Change

 http://womensvoicesforchange.org/women-in-art-sandy-gellis-the-contemporary-sorceress.htm

“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable. . . ”

—T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets

The artist Sandy Gellis is one of the pioneer women artists to utilize water, earth, air and light as her palette, investigating the indispensable primary elements of life by transforming the mysterious “unseen” to the germinating “seen.” This poetic process often involves collaborating with people from all over the world who contribute specimens and life stories to her projects adding the human element to the metallurgic mix. Chemistry between people and the chemistry among basic mineral elements become a level of scrutiny and experimental research that harvest the shock of the wondrous.

The lack of final control can be liberating. How can we capture time in a timeless universe? How can we monitor the minutiae of burgeoning growth where the artist becomes nature’s architect – raining water on collected soil at her discretion; gathering hair from friends for HAIR PORTRAITS placing the tufts /thatches of locks into individualized hand-blown glass bowls filled with water, bubbles adhering to the floating strands as we observe fusion and adulteration beginning. Decay and ripening are often conjoined. The ever-moving clock will astonish us with what might occur - that is the awe-inspiring mystery the apprehensive dread of “art” constructed out of the capriciousness of earth’s materials. Like life itself we cannot corral change.

Sandy Gellis was born in New York City in the 1940s, and like many other children growing up in the1950s, she spent hours exploring and traipsing the streets of this magical city, playing gritty urban sports on the concrete sidewalks of the Bronx—a mainstay for most kids raised during that period. Her apartment rooftop was her observatory where the seeds for examining rainfall, clouds and rivers were sowed. A determinedly independent woman, Gellis began to pursue an interest in art, starting at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and continuing at the School of Visual Arts. She eventually connected with Jack Sonenberg, an inspiring and encouraging teacher, who she affectionately calls her “art daddy.” She credits Sonenberg as the person who gave her the courage to step out into the world and call herself an artist.

Living in a concrete jungle surrounded by cement did not preclude a curiosity about water that goes back to her childhood in the Bronx when she would have nightmarish dreams of tidal waves engulfing her being, both terrifying and seductive. Ironically she never learned to swim – she can float – she says laughingly. Her very first outdoor public art installation sited at ON THE BEACH – BATTERY PARK, 1978 sponsored by Creative Time was titled OXIDIZING HOLES – SITE I. Holes were dug deep into the sand at the landfill and were coated with iron oxide powder. Clear plexiglass sheets sat atop welded iron frames covering the voids allowing for the cycle of condensation and evaporation to occur and function as markers defining the space. Fortunately her well-thought out plans went askew, as often happens when dealing with “Mother Nature,” and the power of the tides caused the holes to fill up and disappear (like her ever-recurring dream) causing Sandy to physically have to cope with the changing structures, frequently moving the markers and digging new holes making the project visually and psychologically more eloquent and expressive. Wrestling with this task forged a powerful epiphany strengthening her view of the water to the point that she often makes pilgrimages to rivers and oceans - like a wave washing over her – to feel at peace.   

A trip to Nepal, while standing on a bridge overlooking a fairly dry river basin containing a trickle of water from the Himalayas, which in the Spring becomes a racing torrent of water, was “life changing” in its revelation of a microcosm of life’s commonplace and deeply significant social observances.

 “While traveling in Nepal in the 1980’s my awareness of rivers as a source of all life came into my consciousness. The river is a place where things happen: birth, death and cremation, sending ashes on in ritual, washing, bathing, feeding animals, digging up sand as mortar in building houses, a place to play and a place to wander...I was horrified and stimulated, sowing the seeds of a lifelong study…”

Despite being a distance from her studio Sandy Gellis has a unique aesthetic relationship with the Hudson River.  It is a place where she often walks, carrying a bucket on a rope, which she imbeds into the water, and returns home to use in her artwork, mixing the river water (and whatever sludge remains,) with basic metals such as copper, bronze, cadmiums and iron powder, etc. The microscopic elements that we cannot see – the abundant evanescent organisms that swarm and multiply and are constantly flitting around us – are exposed over time, so we too can partake in the secret journey of living.

HUDSON RIVER INCUBATION – a gallery installation involving gestation and ripening, came out of her insatiable curiosity about what was pullulating in the river, and hoping that the resulting formations could be made visible. Sandy found a private dock along Lower Manhattan’s Hudson River, and got permission from the proprietor to drop into the river several clear snakelike tubes stuffed with cotton (acting like a petri dish)- one end nailed to the dock and the other end placed under the water for a period of two months. Once she removed the tubes from the water, they were sealed with wax and placed on the floor of the gallery. The artist placed lights slightly above the winding, circular tubes creating a constant source of heat so things nourished and propagated. But the work had a life of its own – growing very quickly and seemingly out-or-control, and Sandy had a visceral insight into both the beauty and chaos of natural phenomena.

In the spring of 1987, Gellis in her desire to perceptibly capture atmospheric occurrences mailed twelve brass plates coated with water soluble ground to twelve individuals living at various locations above the equator with instructions that the plates be altered by the seasonal precipitation, and returned by early summer. The results became SPRING IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE, an etching project. She then collaborated with Master Printers, who executed her wild and chimerical visions creating prints that are exquisitely elegant and subtly washed with color. 

It is not only the rivers that Sandy explores but she also looks up to the skies. I asked about photographs of soaring turkey vultures, and am told that these birds depend on the rising pockets of sun-heated air (thermals) to effortlessly drift in flight, as they do not flap their wings. Sandy has spent many hypnotic hours regarding them with awe and admiration, tracing their patterns in the sky on etching plates - like automatic drawing – not looking down - her hand never leaves the plates, resulting in abstract diagrams of their gliding movements, which became the MAPPING THERMALS series made up of 12 intaglio, digital images with the actual plates adhered to the work.

Visiting the loft I am stunned by the “cabinet of curiosities” I see on the walls, tables and floor. Glass cylinders of all sizes, fossil fragments, feathers, bowls of hair, pine needles, jars of collected rainfall, wires, colored pigments, and other materials that are a mystery to the uninitiated, but to Sandy Gellis they are the alchemy with which she conjures her art.   One might mistake some of the images we see in her photographs, prints, and books for the cosmos, but I realized that everything was interconnected. Our interior and exterior perspectives are aligned - time and space in Sandy's art range from the deepest oceans to the stars.

GALLERY HOPPING 3/27/14

Saw some good shows today in Chelsea. Just made it under the wire on some of them.
1. Cheim & Read is showing Pat Steir's beautifully modulated, tonal, poured and dripped paintings consisting of paint layers merging with the canvas, weaving into one another, generating light and texture effortlessly. The "thereness" that thrilled me years ago when I first saw Helen Frankenthaler, are present in these poetic, expansive works.
http://www.cheimread.com/exhibitions/2014-02-20_pat-steir/

2. Kiki Smith's exhibition at Pace Gallery contain Jacquard Tapestries which are so finely textured and woven that i was knocked out. Smith's work is enriched by the textural quality of the fabric - the fit was perfect. The fairy-tale mythic nature of her imagery conveys the innocence of childhood - an innocence that all good artists never lose or abandon to self-conscious repetitiveness.
https://www.pacegallery.com/newyork/exhibitions/12650/kiki-smith

3. Chuck Close Nudes 1967-2014 - primarily made up of large polaroids with a mysterious group of daguerrotypes installed on a shelf. I was most fascinated by the evolution of pubic hair - shaved, waxed, grown out, etc. over the years. Various testicle and nipple sizes, shapes, were also something my friend and I were fascinated by. The latest works which were also large polaroids reminded me of Mapplethorpe wrought large.
https://www.pacegallery.com/newyork/exhibitions/12653/nudes-1967-2014

4. Sarah Lucas in her first solo show in 10 years at Barbara Gladstone Gallery exhibits gigantic cast concrete phalluses- what can you say? I wondered who the model was? But I discovered a new word NOB - a british slang term for a penis - the title of the show is Nud Nob. One learns something important everyday! This exhibition was amusing and very very out there and according to the press release: "... Language and its potential for both poetic alliteration and sly allusion is central to Lucas's works, and her titles often draw on slang, puns, and historical references to invoke allusions that are variously erotic, romantic, and funny..."
http://www.gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/8487#&panel1-1

ARC MAGAZINE article: roycrosse - The River Exhibition at Coppin State University, Baltimore Md. 2012 6/15/12

"The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth."

-       Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness,

roycrosse’s exhibition titled The River consists of black and white drawings, a video and a sculptural installation – all of which describe the collective mortal journey and the circuitous paths we travel over time. There is a “river” that snakes around the center of the gallery floor – comprised of various sized rocks, pebbles, and plastic sheathing giving off a shimmering light moving us along at various speeds through memory and life’s vicissitudes, always bathing us with its beauty and unpredictable undulations.  Bridges and barriers are set up so that we need to literally “cross” the river to reach the other side - to experience the black and white drawings that hang on the wall.

“I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy

bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

— Langston Hughes

Roy too has known rivers since he was a young boy in Trinidad.

“As a boy I lived just outside the city limits, and within walking distance from our two bedroom concrete bungalow was the "Never Dirty River", a place I would visit with friends and sometimes alone where I caught guppies for my homemade aquarium. The River was a source of joy, a retreat, a place of adventure and play.

“Oddly enough, when we move to the city several years later I lived one block from a River, this one man-made. It was called the Dry River, except in the rainy season when it would flood its banks, a rather scary proposition. So you see I have been around rivers for most of my childhood.”

Once we have crossed The River we encounter the rich black and white graphite drawings of varying dimensions depicting buildings with cathedral windows and vaulted arches, but here we are not submerged in the luxurious color of stained glass, but rather we are overwhelmed with a blinding white light in contrast to the enigmatic architectural skin of a dark edifice which might be a sanctuary. The space of these drawings is ambiguous – A moon hovers in the interval between inside and outside. Windows become transparent ghosts floating above bridges and upward reaching structures that are no longer earth-bound but transformed into wraith-like dreams.

 Can man wrestle nature into submission? That is the question I asked myself when I was confronted by the signature piece of the show entitled appropriately The River, a large @9 foot drawing on canvas consisting of roycrosse’s panoply of wedge-like interventional shapes/man-made “designs” superimposed upon the river’s natural flow of time and movement. Another large drawing has trees lined up along the edge of a barren world – nurtured by the river but devoid of vegetation - bleak and haunted a symbol of sublime despair.

Upon leaving the exhibition I was galvanized by a video that roycrosse shot while traveling in New Orleans camera in hand directed at the Mississippi River. Here we get the essence of the complexity, momentum, and core power of a river to elevate and to destroy; to give and to take, to stagger with its aesthetic grandeur and to vitiate with its omnipotence.

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

-Toni Morrison

Catalogue Essay for roycrosse' WAR & PEACE 1/29/11

roycrosse
View From Cyberspace.

About nine years ago my good friend and confidant, the artist roycrosse, left Newark, NJ to move to Baltimore, Md. Usually when such a shift occurs, bonds – no matter how robust – weaken.  Friendships evolve into an occasional holiday greeting card arriving by snail or email, but not so with my New Jersey confidant.  Unexpectedly, the opposite occurred and our computer correspondence blossomed into a spirited discourse and a deeper awareness of each other’s make-up, mettle and artistic idiosyncrasies. I actually have a roycrosse folder on my computer filled with his writings.  I have been enriched by the opportunity to partake of poems, photos of artworks-in-progress as well as completed pieces and what Roy calls his “missives.” I respect and delight in Roy’s working process, whether it be painting, drawing, making videos, constructing an installation or listening to the sweet, musical sounds of his compositions on the Steel Pans.

THE MIGRATION EXPERIENCE – excerpt from notes and conversations: “Although I had exercised my creative spirit growing up in Port of Spain, Trinidad by making marks on every conceivable surface I could find, it was not until I immigrated to Canada in 1962 that I found support and realized that my drawings and artifacts might have a place in the world. Formally trained (Toronto – I would eventually relocate to the USA,) in painting and sculpture centered on a Euro-Colonial aesthetic, my challenge…was to find a voice that would embrace my formative development in the Caribbean with my new discoveries in America and a growing curiosity about the use of art in the lives of African peoples…”


 The “Migration Experience” became critical to Roy’s approach to materials experimenting with collage and assemblage. “…  The fact that I was now living and working in a society that was rich enough to support life on its rubbish meant there was lots of material available for… reintroduction into my world of art making… The impact of migration on my work may be seen through layers of time, geography, and social context…The use of abandoned materials (not to be confused with found objects)…is a direct result of my introduction to an abundant ‘throw away culture.”

At the time the Civil Rights movement was “gaining steam” in America  similar upheavals were occurring in Port–of-Spain Trinidad & Tobago.  Roy returned to Trinidad. His sense of injustice was honed by what he saw and was experiencing on his homeland’s streets. Since most businesses were colonially administered, roycrosse and several friends began to organize cottage industries involving local youths (selling sno-cones and food during Carnival season, designing tee-shirts etc.) out of kiosks in Port-of-Spain. While these activities caused them to become targets of the police, it created a sense of dignity among the participants that acknowledged the value of vernacular ownership despite its danger.

Continued political concerns are ever present and evident in the five large installations in roycrosse’s War & Peace exhibition:

SPIRIT TEMPLE - A beautiful hand-stitched white gossamer material enveloping the viewer inhabits a meditative space. The spectator can walk through this fragile, yet sensual environment and experience an aesthetic and visual peace. The delicacy of the work breathes life into the labyrinth that we are forced to circumnavigate as we glide our way through the artwork brushing against the gentle fabric of light.

THE PATRIOTS – A “living” room has been constructed complete with the comforts of home, including chairs, a radio, lamps, TV, computer, sconces and photographs neatly hung on the walls depicting images of what some would and others would not consider “patriots.”  Words of hate and vitriol – WE DON’T WANT ANY JAPS BACK HERE EVER are juxtaposed alongside photographs of Native Americans, African American slaves and soldiers, Condoleezza Rice and General George Patton – the totality of which forces us to ask ourselves WHO is the true patriot here? The perversion and irony of the concept and language of patriotism are subdued to the confines of the four walls of our mind.

GARDEN OF PEACE - Vividly colored fabrics wrapped tightly evolve into flowers outlining a walkway leading up to an altar of cloth - wrapped guns with a lit candle precariously placed on top of the tightly woven bandaged instruments of death – reminiscent of the flower placed into the muzzle of guns during the 1960s demonstrations against the Vietnam War. The instruments of war – guns - are wrapped and camouflaged rising out of a bubbling fountain of water like the ashes of Phoenix reborn as a cry for peace.

THE WAILING WALL - Referencing historical African and West Indian crafts, roycrosse has twisted and braided material to create a cascading "The Wailing Wall,” a site where one grieves for the dead. The names of "fallen soldiers" are written and placed at the feet of the interlaced wall – a wall that is penetrable suggesting that anguish and mourning flows continuously through the twisted plaits liberating our pain.

HOMAGE TO THE VETERANS – Shrouded and swaddled crutches stand erect like soldiers lined up at attention creating a stunning installation marking the tragic injury and loss in combat. War statistics are placed on the ground screaming for us to be mindful. The collateral damage of war are the very Veterans who return and are ignored  (often homeless) - cast off by the very society that enlisted them to fight their battles.

Relating to the four graphite drawings that complement the mixed media installations roycrosse says,  "Fragmented Interior II, Raid, After the Raid I and After the Raid II remind the viewer of what’s left after the conflict: fragmented neighborhoods, broken cities and shadows of the former landscape become a new reality."


roycrosse grew up in a particular situation with very lean resources. Because of his own curiosity, need and self-motivation, he taught himself to do everything, an attitude he brings to his art.  He is a motorcycling-riding writer/musician/composer/cook and carpenter. Anyplace he lives and works, you feel his presence both individually and in the community. He has established artist groups and Alternative Art spaces dating back to his early days in Toronto with Sapodilla Gallery and continues today with varied and penetrating exhibitions that he curates at WESTNORTH Studio in Baltimore, Md. where he and his wife Anelda reside.


Link to images
http://tinyurl.com/3msqpj6

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PAUL MCCARTHY, WS 8/1/13 - AT PARK AVENUE ARMORY, NYC

Paid my money and went into the Park Avenue Armory on 67^th St., an elegant historic brick exterior filling an entire block to see Paul McCarthy’s exhibition WS (White Snow); the reverse initials for Disney’s classic film Snow White based on the original fairy tale written by The Brothers Grimm. The atmosphere of this vast space includes trees and a “magic” forest exuding a deceptive charm giving us an early clue to the upside down, insane/crazy, chaotic nature of this vast installation which comments and revels in the underbelly of the human psyche with the “id” totally unleashed; Dionysian orgies of yore gone mad without restraint. White Snow is innocence willingly corrupted, delightedly carousing in the  debauchery.

As if to emphasize the need to control man’s hidden scabrous temperament, there were more guards - about 20 of them – than actual onlookers (when I was there) overseeing the various “stage sets” - rooms/ tableaus depicting 3-D scenes from the 4 channel 7 hour video which is projected at both ends of the huge space.  I sat through about 2 hours of the video and actually would have stayed longer, but my friend and I had to finally leave to go back home.  I was alternately intrigued, bored, excited, humored, and surprisingly fascinated by McCarthy’s seemingly adolescent wallowing in scatology and pornography, but kept feeling that there was  “something else” going on here. I found myself intellectually aroused by the roots of this sometimes disgusting, sometimes tedious, and sometimes brilliant satirical work with roots going back to Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, as well as the cinematic work of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. Holland Cotter in his NY Times review compared the “Yahoos” from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to the dwarfs in this presentation.

There is a personal element to this video with the psychological merging of Walt Disney and Paul McCarthy who acts the part of Walt, a boorish, fleshy participant and director of the wildly provocative proceedings, complete with mustache and toupee, and is called Walt/Paul. The production stage designs of the house and rooms are based on McCarthy’s own Mormon childhood home in Utah – that fact alone would keep psychiatrists busy for years.

 Yes I do recommend this ambitious exhibition that I anticipated really disliking. It ends August 4^th, but it is not for the faint of heart and those who are disgusted by wads of blood, excrement, and lots of humping and dumping, all played out against the innocence of a much beloved childhood tale.

ISA GENZKEN AT MOMA 1/17/14

Isa Genzken - reflections on her MOMA exhibition.

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1345

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2008/may/isa-genzkens-proposals-for-ground-zero

The Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts. Founded by Walter Gropius with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together, it operated from 1919 to 1933 when the Nazis shut it down.

Isa Genzken’s stunningly moving retrospective both utilizes and repudiates Bauhaus legacy, brashly demonstrated by a seminal work entitled "Fuck The Bauhaus". Her retrospective surprised me with its range of experimental approaches, giving voice to a unique personal view of life – from the frottage oil paintings that looked like aerial views of bombed out/flattened terrains to the glitzy pedestal sculptures.

When I entered the Isa Genzken show at MOMA I was floored by the beauty of an installation depicting large formally pristine kayak-like shapes lying on the ground (“ellipsoids” and “hyperbolos”) – having no contact with one another, but hovering alongside each other with a do-not-touch-beauty that is rarified. Then I turn around and the aesthetic has shifted. I chuckle to see cement blocks anthropomorphized with T.V. antenna’s shooting out of their heads – inanimate becoming animate, making a point about materials – industrial materials in particular which often seem remote and inaccessible – but now like a magnet I approach what was once unapproachable.

The whole show is one of contradictions in the service of Isa Genzken’s singular humanity. She tosses off previous restraints, and I imagine her saying “fuck it – I NEED to do this!” And she does. Experimenting with materials – all kinds of detritus from the mechanical/manufactured culture to the throwaways of the consumer-merchandising sphere.

Scale dominates the show not only the physical but the psychological reaches of hierarchy and structure, often woven together - most evident in a group of building columns transmuting into intimate portraits of good friends – each subtly individualized. We are tossed around by architectural scale reduced to accessible mortal proportions.

American capitalistic scope and power is explored; the underbelly of shame and greed, the global reach of violence and mayhem are presented in assemblages utilizing whatever objects (toy cars, dolls, fast-food wrappers, etc.) and materials that are necessary to vent her anger at man’s inhumanity to man. These assemblages employ scale to great emotional effect ie: a building structure becomes larger because a small plastic tree is placed in the tableaux, delicate and fragile; a dreamlike ornament floats next to blood and terror. Installations are ripped from the headlines - the assault on a young schoolgirl being witnessed by her classmates’ cell phone pictures – a room reeking of horror and voyeurism.

Isa Genzken was in Manhattan on September 11, 2001 and there is a room devoted to her apocalyptic architectural proposals for Ground Zero that includes a Church, Disco, Hospital and Memorial Tower. Monuments that do not memorialize but instead bear witness to the act of destruction itself. In Car Park miniature cars are upended in a cage-like structure that is devoid of any possible movement or passage. The journey has ended.

Isa Genzken’s exhibition can be unabashedly gaudy wrapping the fragility and vulnerability of the human condition with the rubble and sediment of everyday objects. The result is painful and piercingly tender. The sadness enraptures.