(View mobile version of Joel Shapiro video here.)

I had the pleasure of documenting an interview with Joel Shapiro at the Paula Cooper Gallery this past winter. The gallery had a retrospective of his work on display and artist Jenny Snider organized a question and answer meeting with her fellow artists-in-residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation.

Massimiliano Fuksas is the name of the architect who designed the grand staircase in the newly renovated Giorgio Armani Store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. It is the centerpiece of the store, overshadowing even the clothing designer himself. The design can be considered representative of what has become a movement in architecture. Pushing the limits of construction, this work is singular in retail design, one which cannot be easily made appropriate by most venues. It exists along side the designs of the other starchitects—Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Santiago Calatrava, Rem Koolhaas.

Apparently every stair was fabricated in Italy, and shipped to Manhattan to be installed on site. The execution of the treads are immaculate.  The rest of the staircase, I’m not so sure. When you look closely, it seems as if they may have cut some corners, and hired unskilled day-laborers to do the plaster/drywall work. It is a bit rough, and not executed in the pristine manner one would expect.

Also, if you peer up, to the underside of the treads and risers, you’ll see another area not completely resolved.  Did they forget that people would be looking at the underside of the staircase when they walk down.  Not really sure.  What you do see are all the little imperfections in execution.

The stairs wind, turn, weave, and slide the shopper from one floor to another. Perhaps a precursor to a more organic escalator design? Men’s clothes, women’s clothes, casual, formal, a restaurant, and even a chocolatier exist in this futuristic market. The shops are dark, not just a little, but dark like the back room of an East Village bar, where you have to feel around for the merchandise.

Speirs and Major were hired to do the lighting for not just the stairs but also the buildings exterior lighting. Very subtle, true designers, they allow their work to take a back seat to the whole creation. The lights of the stairs are hidden underneath the rail, which gives a beautiful glow from below for the actors who dramatically ascend and descend the establishment.

I’m very excited to see where architecture will take us in the next decade. We are building stronger, lighter, organic, complex structures that historically have never been conceived, much less executed in reality. There must be some references to nature going on in these unique spaces. I cannot place it yet. Also for the first time, you see the glass box being combined with curvilinear forms, which are other-worldly. It’s difficult to imagine that even this too will become dated.  I’m not sure that it will ever become commonplace, however.

I finally get it. It’s amazing when something becomes so clear after I had thought that I had it all figured out.  I have never been a fan of Dan Flavin’s work. Despise would have been an accurate description of my feeling towards the work.  At least until this show.  To me it was always fluorescent light art. Who cares about fluorescent lights propped up in a corner, or colored lights hanging on the wall. He used commercially-available fluorescent lamps, which to me had little artistic merit. You see those lights everywhere, and growing up, the quality of light they gave was a poor attempt at lighting, given the terrible hue they emitted in libraries, office buildings, and shopping malls. They always made one look deathly ill. It has never been flattering.

But the recent show at David Zwirner Gallery opened my eyes to a whole new Flavin. The Flavin I see now, is not a sculptor but an installation artist.  His work is not about the object, it’s about the environment.  It isn’t about the lighting fixture, or the bulb. It’s about the light. How it bounces off the wall, or what happens when two colors comingle and combine into another, brighter light.

To those who haven’t studied color the way we do as artists and designers, here’s a crash course. When combining colors in pigment (i.e., paint), the colors change in ways that we expect. Red and blue turn purple, yellow and blue turn green.  The more colors you add, the darker, and muddier the colors become. Eventually, if you add enough pigments, you end up with black. But things work very differently with light. It works almost in the opposite way. As more colored light is added, they combine to make white.

This is especially apparent if you are a print designer. For a little more than 2 decades, designers have been doing their work on computer screens. Because the final output is print, the colors you see on screen are almost never the colors that end up in print. Print designers have had to rely on colored paper swatches to ensure they get the colors they are expecting.  It’s worse than designing in the dark, because in the dark you only have your imagination. Instead, your ideas are competing with what you see on screen. You have to learn that what you see is not what you get.

Technically the color gamuts of light vs pigment are not the same. They are like a Venn diagram—two overlapping shapes where there are areas which do not intersect. You can get much richer, more nuanced hues in light. It’s a wider color gamut. In print, especially 4-color CMYK process, the color gamut is small, and not very nuanced. The mixed pigments get muddy very quickly. It’s almost impossible to get a rich, bright orange in print, for instance, by combining inks.

To some, probably to many, who have seen Dan Flavin’s work have thought of it in the way that I used to see it. Ugly fixtures that have bad associations. But the art isn’t about the fixture, it’s about the space. The way the show was installed—very large rooms, empty except for the light—made the difference. The fixtures shrank, and sometimes almost dropped away. The glow of the rooms from the street, or the glow peering around the corner from one room, while experiencing the glow from another, made the experience poetic.

The contrast between the uncolored light installation and those that were multicolored, forced one to think about the information that the eye is receiving. One of the reasons why my impression of Dan Flavin’s work changed is due to how much technology has changed in the past few decades. Fluorescent lights come in so many different shades now. There is daylight fluorescent, bright white, cool white. The unpleasant associations that once existed—studying for hours with your head buzzing from the flicker, or trying to shop for clothing, but looking in the mirror and seeing a jaundiced figure staring back—they could not be easily dismissed. Today’s lights are so accurately developed, the colors so nuanced, and the fixtures in the public arena has been replaced with more appropriate daylight bulbs, so I can finally see past the functional use of fluorescents, and I think of the medium as emotionally neutral. Minimal.

So I woke up this morning thinking about this venue of artblogging, and I came upon the article in the NY Times about Shepard Fairey confessing to a copyright violation for using an AP image in his famous “Obama Hope” poster. Of course I, like everyone else in America is familiar with the poster and image. But the artist, I wasn’t so familiar with, at least I thought.

But then I recalled taking a photo of an interesting installation in a window in Chelsea a few weeks back. The image (seen above) was of boy-band looking thugs in a graphic, silk screened, monochromatic etching style. These otters were striking a pose holding weapons against a floral patterned designed wallpaper. The image was very sexy, so I thought that it may be interesting to keep track of the artist.

In the bottom right corner, was that familiar stencil, the one plastered and spray painted all over the country. I’ve since learned that the image is of Andre the Giant. When I first moved to NY a number of years back, I would see it everywhere. And I really hated it. It was not particularly attractive, and it was so over-exposed, it seemed to me that some no-talent hack was doing his very best to try and gain some notoriety.

New York is plastered with graffiti. It’s one of the things New York is known for. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Rudolph Giuliani had almost all of New York stripped of it, and there is a law in place now that puts the responsibility of cleaning it up on the owners of the establishment who get tagged. I’m certain that there is a loop hole somewhere in the law that allows for some of the quality graffiti (probably a permit and payment to the city.) But for the most part, the city has been stripped clean.

So when I would see these Andre The Giant stencils all over the city, I thought, who is this hack who has stenciled this crappy image all over the place? I certainly didn’t recognize Andre the Giant in the image, and even if I did, who cares (no offense to Andre’s loved ones, but seriously.) I’ve seen some amazing graffiti around the city. These days, the most impressive celebration of graffiti can be seen on the 7 train, as you head toward PS1 from Manhattan.

Graffiti artists, taggers, are true artists. The do their work under the cover of night. They work with the laws against them.  In New York, spray paint is locked up behind the counter. Taggers do their work over days, weeks, and months, adding a little bit more to their illegal public murals. And in many cases, the work is spectacular. Some are art school grads, but for the most part they are self taught. The each have their own pseudonyms, and special signature icon, and generally a signature style.

By comparison to real graffiti art, Andre the Giant’s image was crap.

So when the Obama Hope poster first came out, I thought that it was appropriately generic and perfect for the audience.  It was immediately accessible and the image was obviously appropriated. Perhaps I had seen it before because I’m an NY Times online junkie, but I could have seen that image anywhere before the poster came out. It even crossed my mind when I first saw it that there must have been some association with it to the original image, because it was clearly using an image that was out in the public sphere.

When I heard that the poster was winning accolades, again, I thought that it seems like a misguided attempt to raise some unknown self-made artist-next-door onto the wave of Obama’s populist movement. The most original aspect to it is the word “hope” which, while appropriate for the cause, didn’t seem so incredibly profound. Bush was gone, regardless of whomever won.

In analyzing the poster, obviously the Obama campaign had already been branded, as seen in the button Obama is wearing in the poster. The colors chosen were orange-red, white, and cyan, which I guess is in interesting twist on the classic red-white-and-blue. So “hope” was the most ingenious aspect of this poster? I think that the logo design is genius. But the poster seemed very bland.

So in reading the article, apparently Shepard Fairey claimed to have used a completely different image, and counter-sued the AP, who had sued him for copyright violation. He went as far as referencing a different image, and creating development sketches, after the fact, to bolster the claim.

Dude, are you serious? Do you really take us all for idiots?

For graphic designers, (as he is, and I am) copyright is an issue from the start. The whole existence of graphic designers is based on the work of other peoples words. We are hired to take those words, and display them in a fashion most easy for viewers to read, comprehend, and absorb.  Surprisingly, it is quite a lot of work. And the better the graphic designer, the less work it appears the designer has done.  Because it is our job to make the words and ideas pop. So Shepard Fairey definitely has great graphic design skills.

But as graphic designers we are constantly challenged by the decision, especially in today’s world of easy access to images, to either purchase stock imagery or create it ourselves. Custom photography or illustration can takes weeks to perfect. Selecting a group of stock images, manipulating them in Photoshop, and having the client choose one, cuts out an incredible amount of work. The cost of stock imagery is so much cheaper than the process of presenting concept sketches and completing the rendering. In other words, copyright is always a the forefront of any designers consciousness. So who did he think that he was kidding?

There were options that Fairey could have chosen to argue his use of the image.

The first would be oversight.  Oops, I meant to pay for the images, but in my business, I forgot. What do I owe you? Please sir, don’t gouge me, I’m a starving artist. I’m not sure of the order of events, but if he already was getting recognition, it would have been easy, and possibly gone under the radar.

Or he could have argued that it was a form of Appropriation art, a movement widely recognized in the art world as conceptual art.

Most of my conceptual artworks reveal themselves only after I have made the work. I’ll think of an idea, begin production, work on it forever, complete it, hate it, and in hindsight realize, hey, this is what I was thinking about when I was doing this piece. So when people ask about its meaning later, It sounds like the concept was thought through before the work was executed. He may not have won the court case by arguing that it was a form of appropriation art, but it would have been a respectable argument.

Or perhaps he could have argued that the actual image he appropriated didn’t matter because the poster combined enough new content that it was a wholly new work. Again, not sure that it would have won the case, but an understandable crossing of a fine line where you didn’t think that you crossed.

No, instead, he went down the path of morons. The path that promised the greatest humiliation, and at the greatest cost to his reputation. I’m sure there is a parable about this. If there isn’t there should be.

Perhaps it’s not all bad. I’m writing about it. And now I know who he is. I think that he’s an idiot. You know what they say, the worst press is no press. I’m not sure that is true in the case where you look like a total loser.  But I do love his images of boy-band otters pretending to be bad boys.

So I realize that this post is quite a bit late, given that it is now October, and John Currin Works on Paper, A Fifteen Year Survey of Women was up at the Andrea Rosen Gallery over the summer.  But I thought that it would be good to write about it anyway.

So again, I must admit that I am a fan of the work. It reminds me of the strange doe-eyed characters in the paintings on the wall of my pediatrician growing up in the 70s. The colors, the style, the deformation of anatomy—big head, big eyes, big boobs.

And here is my six degrees of separation: my cousin’s son plays with John Currin’s son. So there you have it. I await my invitation to Thanksgiving dinner, with a goody bag of pencil drawn caricatures of all the guests.

What was particularly terrible, and similarly wonderful about this show, is to see the master at work, with art that was, at times, clearly not masterful. Unfortunately I chose not to photograph those pieces, and instead chose to shoot the best works in the show. All of the work that I’d seen to date, had been perfectly executed, down to the background details.

But the works in this show were quite varied, stylistically. Some were straight up pencil/charcoal on paper portraiture done in most aesthetically pleasing, idealistic realism. Others were small, gouache and watercolor on paper, quick studies, where you see John Currin exploring his technique and determining what exactly will become his signature style. And many appear to be works that are typical life drawing techniques we all learn in classic art school training: using white and black charcoal for highlights and shadow on a medium tint paper, or combining ink-and-pen with ink-and-brush washes.

The show brings insight to an artist that usually reveals only the most perfect works. His failures along with his successes make it fascinating.

I saw a picture of John Currin in a book once.  It was interesting how many of the characters he paints have faces that strangely resemble his own. A man who paints women with faces of a man. (Not to say that the women look manly.)  I don’t know if that is intentional.  My guess is that is probably is not. In my own experience, likeness is terribly difficult to attain, especially if you don’t know your subject well. So inevitably the artist falls back on his/her own image, because those features are most familiar, most studied, hence easiest to draw.

Monolithic. Topographic. Singular. The show is very impressive.

This is definitely a blue chip show, at a blue chip gallery, from a blue chip artist.

The reason that I bring this up is because, initially this show immediately overwhelms the senses, in its scale, and its poetry. It is representative of what Maya Lin is known for best. Landscape architecture.

But the difficulty that I have with the work, is that it lacks depth and layer of concept.

For those of us who went to school to challenge ourselves on an intellectual and creative level, the works reminds us of that first assignment in architecture school. “Take a single object and create a larger, conceptual work”. So this references topographical maps. The earth, created by a larger force.

Architects and builders have been doing that for ages. Just look around Manhattan, and see monolithic edifices of glass, or brick, or steel clad. They don’t seem to reference anything natural. But then if you look at Manhattan from the sky, or sea, you see that topography again. Awe inspiring.

So, I think that the work is poetic, and is clearly appropriate given the artists earlier works. But I don’t see much development. (And the 3rd work, done with wire could use some more wires. It seems like an effort incomplete in its execution by comparison.)

I definitely can be categorized as a fan of Kara Walker’s work.  Okay, we know it’s derivative, that is, it’s been done.  When I first saw the work years back, I knew it seemed familiar.  I didn’t know where it was that I may have seen the graphic silhouettes before, depicting the struggles of African Americans.  But I knew they referenced an established style. So I finally saw the style in real life, on teacups. I believe that it was in the collection at the Museum of the City of New York (it was a while back, so I’ll have to verify which museum it was). Nonetheless, I do enjoy the work every time I see it.

Kara Walker at times ventures outside the boundaries of her recognized schtick. And I would have to say, I’ve never been very impressed with those experiments. I think that it is because the silhouette is so strong in its graphical nature that using anything other that the simple presentation, and the jarring narrative associated with it ends up competing with what is expected.

So the 3 dimensional cut paper dioramas are a comfortable extension of her work. At the NY Art Book Fair last week, I saw a piece by her, created as an edition for the Norton Family Holiday card. It was a pop-up book of delicately cut images. I believe that it was an edition of 4000. I would expect that they were laser cut, rather than hand cut, but again the imagery was riveting, and wonderful eye candy.

On my rounds a few weeks back of the galleries, I stopped into Printed Matter to check out if there was anything titillating for me to browse through. One of my favorite things to do, especially when I was a student, is to spend hours thumbing through books at the bookstore.

I haven’t been doing that so much lately, partly due to the fact that there really aren’t many bookstores left. Barnes & Noble and Borders Books put all the mom-and-pop shops out of business, and now Amazon has been doing the same to B&H and Borders. It’s amazing to watch evolution at work before our very eyes.

So I got there early on Saturday moring, to try and beat the crowds. In general I love crowds, but when you’re trying to get something accomplished, the crowds in NYC can be debilitating. The first encounter I had was with Leandro Erlich’s “Swimming Pool” installation, which was really quite fun, and initially jarring. You approach the piece from above. It is designed to look like a swimming pool and accompanying deck.  You peer into the crystal blue water, and there’s someone standing at the bottom of the pool!  Do they have weights on thier ankles? How do they hold their breathe for so long?  Then you realize that the person on the bottom is just another art viewer, who has entered the pool from a room below. The water is only a few inches deep, on the top of a sheet of plexiglass, with fans blowing to create waves.  It’s very funny.

So typical for events at PS1, the crowd consisted greatly of those 20-somethings from Brooklyn, with their trailer-park chic, and their porcelain white skin. Coming from Washington Heights, I forget how pleasantly idyllic the lives of the pseudo-unwashed can be. I long to be there again.

So one of the great disappointments of the NY Art Book Fair 2009, is that I missed many of the things of interest. Apparently there were many conferences, book signings, performances, etc. going on for the 3 days plus that the fair was held.  The only indication of them was a chalkboard at the entrance cryptically listing all of the event names and times. I had briefly glanced at the website before heading over, and knew there was stuff going on, but I couldn’t find it. I looked for a flyer with the description of the events (it is a print fair after all) one didn’t exist. I went up to the floor where the conferences were held, and tried asking around. There were plenty of security staff, and maybe one NY Art Book Fair staff, who answered one person’s question, and quickly walked in another direction. I stuck my head in one classroom, where I got a glimpse of AA Bronson, the surviving member of General Idea, a group of 3 artists from Canada who did artistic commentary on the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s.  The door was quickly shut as they were setting up an exhibit of some sort.

So I just found the schedule of events in the back of the book which listed all the contributors in attendance. My bad.  I guess I should have investigated a little deeper. Or maybe they could have posted the schedule in key places around the event.

An ongoing dialog that I have been having with my colleagues, is whether print is dead. As a graphic designer who started in print design in the late 1990s, I was pulled, kicking and screaming into the web. Yes, there is the daunting task of learning about programming, and the technical aspects of how the Internet works, plus the great work involved in making communication design secondary to the information being conveyed. It requires both creative skill and mathematical abilities to do web design effectively. Print is much more immediate, and discrete in its work.

The works presented were varied in the scope and purpose. There were many artist catalogs for sale by the artists themselves, the galleries that represent them, the publishers that produce them, and even the booksellers who promote them.  The experience was very multicultural, which languages of all sorts being spoken. There was representation from Canada, Mexico, and California (yes, to me, CA is a totally separate nation.)

My favorite were the hand made books created by the artists themselves. There were a couple that I picked up, that didn’t necessary stand out from the rest for anyone other than me.

The first was a small book created by a recent graduate of OCAD, the oldest art and design school in Canada. Ryan Dodgson drew simple line drawings of his friends, and in place of their heads, he had buildings from around the Toronto area. A very sweet, simple idea.

The drawings were photocopied and saddle stitched by hand, printed on what I hope is acid free paper.

The second piece that I got was a truly wonderful book by Mel Kadel.  It is an edition of 100, titled Spring Lounge. The drawings are exquisitely rendered, and printed on hand stained paper, and printed using an inkjet printer. The images make reference to the psychedelic 60s, wall paper, graphic novels, illustrated maps, and Chinese landscape painting. I really love it.

The variety of works in the fair was inspiring. Magazines that cross the lines of architecture, design, and style sharing a table with a magazine specializing in those whose sexual focus it “the behind”. That zine was aptly named Butt. Elsewhere, I picked up a couple of newsprint images, offered for free, depicting a straight couple enjoying themselves on a roof top.

Then there was The Thing. The Thing is a quarterly periodical which, instead of print, the subscriber receives an object. The artists range from visual artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers. The concept is brilliant.  The objects were interesting.

In all, it was a very enjoyable experience. I look forward to next year’s fair.  This time, I’ll try and be a little better prepared.

There are a number of aspects to this piece that makes the work so successful. Firstly, it is light, literally. Intensive spotlights are pointed at a square piece of cardboard mounted with found objects: a gun, Bambi, the Statue of Liberty, Barbie, a palm tree, a sailboat, a helicopter, a Tyrannosaurus rex, a Mexican rooster, and other familiar chachkas. The cardboard rotates on a turntable. The light acts like a lens, and the intensity of the light, and the small distance between the objects creates an interesting depth-of-field effect in shadows on the scrim covered wall.

Secondly, the cheapness, and sense of spontaneity given the choice of construction materials. Found objects, slapped-together tables and lighting fixures gives the impression that the work was built with little thought, an artist savant.

And finally the tension between the light, the rotating objects, and the shadows that makes one wonder what exactly makes the work complete? The sign warning “Hot Lampshades Don’t Touch”. Is it really finished or a work in progress? Junk left on the table unnecessarily: empty glasses, rubber band, discarded backing for double sided tape, work gloves, wood, foam. Yet there is formality, proportion of the room, the length of the table, the no-man’s land between the table and the scrim.

Here’s a show that clearly deserves one of the first reviews on my new blog. I have no idea who the curator is, so I’m going to tell it how it is. The gallery should have considered closing at the end of July instead of leaving this rubbish heap open for all to see. Your Gold Teeth II curated by Todd Levin at Marianne Boesky Gallery is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the art scene in New York.

Upon entering the gallery, it feels like perhaps you have arrived pre or post show, and things are being moved in or out with little concern for placement. The images here give you an example of how poorly installed this show is. What is the theme of this group show?

Is this really the work of an experienced curator of a quarter century?  As professed, I know little of the who’s who in the New York art scene, but I know a load of crap when I smell it. This curator must be very well connected to be able to pass off this uninspired show as one worthy of Marianne Boesky Gallery. And to be reviewed in the New York Times. Very well positioned, indeed.

What is even more amazing, is that there are some big names in this show: Basquiat, Boetti, Castle, Cornell, Fischli and Weiss, Nauman, Noland, Ono, Trockel, West. Artists who have amazing careers, creating art whose placement ought to be considered carefully. Your Gold Teeth II had the grace and style of a midterm student show in some small backwoods state school whose funding was cut, and suffered a drop in enrollment. The use of white painted pedestals for the sculptures made me cringe. It was like he was thinking, okay eye level… hmm, what’s in the back room? Oh, painted white pedestals, and guess what, they’re the perfect size!  Or maybe the show started with “what kind of show can we put on using these painted white pedestals?”

So I had to delve a little further.  It was the second visit to the show, and instead of just walking in and out, like I normally would, I decided to stay a while and think about why it was so bad. It felt like a flea market that you arrived at too late.  Everything
picked over, nothing left but the junk no one wants…

So I grabbed the press release. It reads like the bullshit they try to get you to read in graduate school. Convoluted, condescending nonsense that actually may have a point, but so vague, and obtuse, that my brain glazes over before I can decipher any of it.

Whilst relistening to, and reflecting upon these radio programs recently, it became sadly apparent that facile irony had become one of the dominant philosophical stances of the art world, and that perhaps the artists and artwork I chose for inclusion in Your Gold Teeth II simply had to lay in wait until the Oligarch decade was over.

Dear curator, What the fuck are you talking about? And why does my brain hurt when I try to make sense of your writing? And why does this art look like a load of crap in this space? Does all of your curating look this bad? Cuz if it does, I hope that your clients hire a separate interior designer to make sense of the work you help them buy. This show looks like shit! I don’t even care which artists are included in this show because my first and second impressions make me think there is nothing here worth considering. No story, no attention to detail, no jarring juxtaposition, rhythm, repetition, nuance.  Just a room full of unrelated junk.

I think you’ve got the idea.  The pix say it all.