January Picks – by Christopher Chambers

Spike Gallery closed out ‘02 with a cosmic-cool, tandem exhibition by husband and wife team Eric Goulder and Dana Volkert.

January Picks

by Christopher Chambers

Spike Gallery closed out ‘02 with a cosmic-cool, tandem exhibition by husband and wife team Eric Goulder and Dana Volkert. They matched up otherworldly, albeit humanoid heads cast in glass, bronze, or silver, and one carved in marble by Goulder, with strange biological organisms painted in silvery tones on round canvases on one wall and rectangular ones on another by Volkert. In back was a suite of small paintings of bugs. The combined imagery makes a kind of spooky intergalactic statement alluding to a universal life force; a sort of quasi-scientific spirituality. ~~ Robert Morgan curated the inaugural exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum, Home of the Miotte Foundation. His show, titled "Samadhi: The Contemplation of Space," delved into an abstract understanding of pictorial space featuring various large works by eleven artists ~~ Tom Sachs built an entire model car racetrack at Sperone Westwater. It was fun to look at, but what do you have to do to get to play with the cars? The installation cleverly remarked on a dysfunctional America, but I’d rather go to a slot car set up that works.

My maxim for the New Year is, "The problem with subtlety is that it’s, well, subtle." As we all know, the artworld is a very competitive place. It seems that if an artist wishes to be heard (or seen, as it were) he/she must employ all the powers of amplification at his/her disposal. Hard edges, clashing colors; sexual, ethnic, and violent subject matter all help. I visited–next painter in line to make a million bucks–John Newsom in his studio last year. His method of working at the time was to paint the foreground first and then fill in the background later. We faced a large canvas with a freshly rendered foreground on blank white. He described his intended background imagery and asked me if I thought he should use a subtle color scheme or go real pop and bright. Well, I refused to comment, but while I thought, "subtle," to myself, we both knew he was going to make it as sharp a burn your eyes out set of tonalities as he could muster. Newsom is a smart guy. This does appear to be what’s required to get attention. Whispering in a crowd may be romantic, but it plain doesn’t work. For these reasons we should also applaud George Condo for his recent exhibition at Luhring Augustine of unframed, reasonably scaled, painterly paintings on canvas with no further embellishments. His wry and quirky humor could just be made out over the din of screaming art exhibitions all over Chelsea: from Anselm Kiefer’s enormous, valorous, monumentally ponderous behemoths at Gagosian, to Mathew Ritchie’s paint all over the place installation at Andrea Rosen, and even our pal John Newsom’s louder than thou canvases at Stux.