May/June Picks
Christopher Chambers
Inspired by Carlo McCormick’s curatorial effort at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, "The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene 1974 — 1984," or "Downtown is Over" (my words), what follows is an oblique commentary on the subject:
A friend dying from AIDS in the late 80s said to me, "We were part of something special, don’t you think?"
Developers have finally succeeded in getting legendary art critic Edit Deak out of her loft on Wooster Street. Friends are advising her to buy in Jersey City. For you kids too young to know, Edit was one of the masterminds behind the late 70s/early 80s art scene in NYC. Jeffrey Deitch used to call her his guru. Queen art bitch Rene Ricard paraphrased her in print constantly. Several millionaire artists owe(d) their careers to her, and her loft was the site of many, shall we say, interesting evenings. But don’t get me wrong, although Ms. Deak is being forcibly evicted, she is not destitute by a long shot–but that’s not my point: It’s the irony of what is happening to New York amid the current wildcat real estate boom, the likes of which have not been seen since the days of the W.P.A. The very thing that attracts developers and all their money here is the same thing that gets stamped out by their presence. "THE WHOLE BOWERY ROW LIKE THIS AND ALL THE BIG MONEY TRAMPLED UNDER THESE FEET —SAMO."
The character of a neighborhood, or the characters in a neighborhood; case in point: Edit Deak. It was the efforts and sincerity and inspiration of her generation that created bohemian SoHo, but it’s too expensive to be bohemian, and there are plenty of others who will pay top dollar for what people like her created to their own eventual detriment. In his successful second mayoral campaign billionaire Michael Bloomberg went on about how expensive New York was when he first came here forty years ago. I guess he didn’t live downtown. Personally, I miss urban blight. What my rent was back then is lunch money nowadays. So, in this light, are artists still expected to starve and work for free? Any rock and roll band gets paid at least carfare to show up. An artist can have a thousand people attend his opening reception, but if not enough buy it’s a bust. However, the landlord still has to be paid somehow. A friend of mine chaperoned half a dozen tours of collectors around Brooklyn galleries recently for free as a favor to a private dealer we know. I yelled at him, "She would have to pay a guy two hundred bucks to show up in a Yogi Bear suit for an hour, yet you spend all day showing her and her clients all over Brooklyn and she doesn’t even offer you lunch." She mailed him a Hermes scarf a few weeks later. "Thanks." Well, things have got to progress, too bad about the collateral cultural damage. The art and financial worlds may be strange bedfellows, but it’s historically a necessary symbiosis. If all the artists in New York moved en mass to Ohio, creating a Las Vegas of art in the cornfields, do you think the big money would follow? Forget Beacon, it’s already too expensive. Real estate affects the visual arts more than the other arts because of the physical requirements involved in making the stuff and bringing it to market.
And now a few words about the Pick of the month: American painter Ed Evans’ exhibition at China Gallery this winter on 57th Street was unique and remarkable for several reasons: Visually, the work is stunning. The degree of illusion he achieves through his mastery of airbrush techniques is unlike anything I have seen. Airbrush has always been sneered at by fine artists as being a tool for lowly illustration. Score one for Evans for using it anyway to invent a style both lush and stark. Nowadays, with digital manipulations rampant, there are no tricks disallowed anyway, but he has been painting with airbrush for 25, maybe 30 years. His subject is Chinese text. He writes about his mental processes involved in the artmaking; uses a computer to translate from English into Chinese; and creates optically baffling renderings of the texts seemingly inscribed into (rather than onto) fluttering or crumpled tablets, papers, or cloth. He invents the imagery purely from his imagination. And conceptually, it is most intriguing that he is not at all interested in calligraphy. The characters are copied from the rigid mechanical fonts of his translation program. These ironies create layers of contradicting ingenuity that adds up to more than meets the eye. The work was exhibited alongside ancient Asian ceramic sculptures. This extreme juxtaposition highlights the meticulous craftsmanship involved in creating these historical treasures as well as the care Edward Evans takes in patiently following his own singular path through art history.
