July 27, 2006
Summer Hot Chelsea
MP3
Rob and I took a very hot walk to some Chelsea galleries who are open and have terrific art. Richard Serra at Gagosian, Ashley Bickerton at Sonnabend and group shows at Elizabeth Dee, Sikkema Jenkins & co., Sara Tecchia and Sandra Ghering.
The Serra show is masterful. I think of him as the Michaelangelo of America. I feel privileged to know him. If anything can be said about what we saw its' a critical bracket between The Serra show on the one hand and a (if you can believe it!) faux punk art show at Elizabeth Dee gallery. Everything else falls in between these two markers. The Sikkema show is a lot of installation style painting directly on the wall, dialog with architecture or maybe we should call it neo-muralist. OK it was fun to feel the large scale but I ask why is the art there? Does it advance art history or the discourse of art? Is there any critical meaning? I have to say no. If you're looking for a direct painting on the wall go to Sara Tecchia's gallery. Duston Spear does a direct painting on the wall. But there's a reason for it. She works with graffiti and text. The piece in the group show is terrific. It is actually better than her paintings on canvas because it's true to form.
The Elizabeth Dee show is titled, Bring the War Home. It's a fake show with fake angst. It looks like a late seventies early eighties COLAB Punk and East Village show. Baudrillard would be besides himself, simulated angst, unbeleiveable.
I was one of those Punk artists that didn't have enough money to do anything other than cheap xerox art and performance work. The only surviving ephemera from that period is a rant piece called Rich Sucker Rap. see my article on the thing for a better idea of what I'm talking about. http://post.thing.net/node/719
Ashley Bickerton at Sonnabend is another gem of a show, it's all about the South Seas Islands where he lives and Gaugin and sexual tourism and WW2 and object making and cargo culture and.. I wanted to dislike the show but it was so eccentric in an art world that fakes eccentricity at every turn that I ended up loving the show. Finally Sandra Gering has a group show of light fixture art that is vaguely neo-geo using simple construction materials. Villareal's flourescent wall piece is very subtle but the show is another sort of question mark of why is this here?