Category: art

After seeing it posted here and there, I finally got around to reading the Times article on Rachel Barrett’s photo series of NYC newsstands.
The documentation & typology field has been well plowed, photography-wise, but I guess Barrett doesn’t have to necessarily break new ground to make good art.
Still, for my money–and I wish I’d been able to spend it, but I was literally like the fifth or sixth hold on it when it took over Andrew Kreps’ booth at the 2003 Armory Show, so I never had a chance–no newsstand-related art beats Cheyney Thompson’s spectacular, life-size painting of a newsstand on East 86th St, An Event Commencing in the Spring of 1997 (part 2).
Even back then, in 2003, when there were still newsstands aplenty, Cheyney’s work was already marking lost time; he’d painted the same newsstand three years before. Never mind that every detail–magazine covers, candies, drinks–were completely different, and yet somehow the same. And never mind the inherent futility of using an excruciatingly slow and laborious medium to capture a single instantiation of an everchanging media landscape. Or actually, mind all these things, which are embodied in the meticulously non-photorealistic brushwork.
According to the Times, Barrett’s photos have been overtaken by nostalgia for a disappearing streetscape. Fine with me; the only things I buy at newsstands are Dots and the occasional Sunday Times anyway. But Cheyney’s painting has me reminiscing about the good old days, too: the days when an art fair was a major event of discovery, where an energetic young painter would declare his presence with a work three or six years in the making, not three months. Ahh, 2003. Those were the days.
Yesterday’s News [nyt]
An Event Commencing in the Spring of 1997 (part 2), Cheyney Thompson, via Andrew Kreps Gallery [andrewkreps.com]
Michael Wilson wrote about Cheyney’s work in 2003 for Frieze [frieze.com]

In 1982, the Public Art Fund commissioned Agnes Denes to create Wheatfield – A Confrontation. She planted, cultivated, and harvested two acres of wheat on the vacant landfill that is now Battery Park City.
The image above is one of several at the Chelsea Art Museum site, relating to a 2004 retrospective of Denes’s work. She is also included in a great-looking show at the Sculpture Center right now, “Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s.” Even though, as I mentioned, Wheatfield was done in 1982. [That’s sculpture-dash-center, btw.]
Interestingly enough, this year’s incarnation of PS1’s Young Architects program is called PF1, Public Farm 1 by WORK Architecture Company. It’s a giant herb, flower, and vegetable garden suspended in a structure of giant cardboard tubes.
Also, in the From Sea To Shining Sea Department, artist Lauren Bon created Not A Cornfield a 2006 public art project which tranformed a 32-acre brownfield site adjacent to downtown Los Angeles into a, well, a cornfield for an agricultural cycle.

Brian Eno and Kevin Kelly traded outrageous predictions for the future back in 1993. Here’s one of Eno’s I will definitely be looking forward to:

* 2025 AD: A social archaeologist discovers a cowshed built from nineteen old Julian Schnabel paintings.

Of course, it kind of reminds me that in 1993, I glued all the pages of my extra copy of Madonna’s Sex book, then jigsawed the center out of it to make a box. So the future’s mocking me to the tune of about $800 right now.
Unthinkable Futures [kk via jk]

A guard at the Carnegie International defaced a Vija Celmins painting, Night Sky #2, making a “long vertical gouge” with a key. The conservator calls it a “total loss,” though the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns the 1991 painting, said they would look at the possibility of repairing it.
Though the story only surfaced on Friday in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the incident occurred on May 16th [a Friday]. The guard, an Azerbaijani immigrant named Timur Serebrykov, was confronted about the action and arrested on May 20th [a Tuesday]. He initially denied any wrongdoing, but then he confessed, adding, “I didn’t like the painting.” There were eight Celmins paintings of night skies in the gallery at the time.
Guard charged with ruining museum piece [post-gazette.com via artforum]
Night Sky #2, 1991, Vija Celmins [artic.edu]

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up Basel:

Ferreira finally teased the name out of the Englishman, who turned out to be Nicholas Logsdail, founder of Lisson Gallery, at which everyone around me seemed to tense up a bit.
After a brief chat with him, he motioned to step away. Shaking my hand he said, “Pleasure to have met you. I suppose if you’re successful, I’ll see you everywhere, and if you’re not, you’ll disappear.”
— Andrew Berardini

[artforum]

Maybe I shouldn’t post about this until I win the auction, but Peter Young’s Folded Mandala paintings are spectacular, an entrancing mix of hippie, psychedelic beauty and rigorously visible process.
Young left the New York art world behind literally while his show was up at Leo Castelli. The Folded Mandala paintings developed after the schism, so on a purely artistic basis, it was the right thing to do.
Career-wise, however, not so much, but then, that was his point. Young’s paintings from the 1960’s-1980’s were the subject of two tantalizing shows last year, at PS1 and at Mitchell Algus. [Algus had the mandalas].
The shows’ favorable reviews apparently tipped off a sharp-eyed estate sale watcher, who picked up this mandala, #27, just a few weeks ago, and is now flipping it at Christie’s. Rather random estimate: $7-9,000.
Update: seriously, what are the odds? I’d read that Young stopped painting grids after visiting Agnes Martin’s studio in the 1960’s, but check out how Young explained the 1966 encounter to the Brooklyn Rail:

Working at Pace as a preparator, Young had the occasion to visit Agnes Martin’s studio. By this point, he had begun making his own grid paintings, a practice he abandoned shortly after his visit. Martin would twice play a pivotal role in his development. On this occasion Martin herself was not present but her paintings were enough to convince him that he had better reconsider his subject. He turned to images of the night sky and the dotting technique that would shortly bring him notoriety.

I notice that Young’s site has many dot works that pre-date his discovery of Martin’s paintings, but this 1967 dot painting, #8, is wonderful, at once abstract and yet evocative. As if it were a photonegative of a sky survey, perhaps.

Weird title for a great review: Kandy-Colored Dot-Flake Streamline Maverick [nyt]
also a nice slideshow [nyt]