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On the coldest night of the year, a large, convivial crowd turned out for Brian Degraw’s New York debut at James Fuentes Gallery’s inaugural. A veritable youth quake—jostled cheek to jowl—squeezed together into the small, Chinatown storefront. A call to arms for youth to man the barricades, or at least so the press release pronounced in its mini manifesto. The artist, a DJ, composer and member of New York’s Gang Gang Dance, was flexing his aesthetic muscles, ready to “break down the barriers that define tribalism and bend genre,” in order to define what making art means to him. And so he did.
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Brian Degraw: Behead The Genre – E.K. Clark
On the coldest night of the year, a large, convivial crowd turned out for Brian Degraw’s New York debut at James Fuentes Gallery’s inaugural. A veritable youth quake—jostled cheek to jowl—squeezed together into the small, Chinatown storefront. A call to arms for youth to man the barricades, or at least so the press release pronounced in its mini manifesto. The artist, a DJ, composer and member of New York’s Gang Gang Dance, was flexing his aesthetic muscles, ready to “break down the barriers that define tribalism and bend genre,” in order to define what making art means to him. And so he did.
Brian Degraw’s exhibition consists of three pieces: two drawings and an installation. One drawing, if you can call it that, titled Untitled (Youth of Today), consists of a collection of DJ requests from adoring fans scribbled on torn pieces of whatever was at hand; paper napkins, old lottery tickets, laundry bills and so forth, all pinned to a mat, under glass and framed. The act of framing and packaging the DJ requests undermines the free spirit and spontaneity of the original concept. A casual presentation would have been more convincing.
The second drawing, Untitled (Youth as a Stage of Life), is a philosophical dialogue presented as an outline, in formal script. The Roots of Dissent, the Decline of Utopia and Faces of Dissent are some of the topics. A large drawing of a nun imbricates the script. The earnest and religious overtones underline the faux gravitas of the project. The material is probably appropriated from an unidentified, arcane school text. The artist seems to be both deconstructing academic methodology, and, at the same time, presenting a slice of life.
The artifice of real life, or rather, lived experience, is explored further in the installation located at the center of the room. On a low podium, arrayed in a free wheeling style—think student dorm—are a number of possessions/objects: four silk-screened record covers, a palette and a colorful pyramidal structure patterned on a house of cards. The objects reveal a narrative mirroring of the artist as a young man—his musical passions, his beliefs and his artistic aspirations. The confessional mode is irresistible. One record cover, titled Youth Of Today, refers to a precocious 80s suburban teenage band; the other, Musical Youth, alludes to an 80s Jamaican group. On the other side of the stand, the record covers mirror the originals. In the center, the minimal, pyramidal structure, festooned with colorful flags, represents all of the nations of the world as well as Degraw’s utopian desire to erase tribal boundaries.
Finally, the palette on the edge of the stand is the most ambiguous object, a clichéd reference to the artist in the act of creation. It doubles as a Ouija board. And it is covered with references: numbers; the words “WITCHBOARD,” “YES,” “NO”; a pentacle used in Wiccan rituals; an alphabet—an allusion to Jasper Johns and to our fundamental systems of knowledge. Dabs of paint run off the palette—a signifier for the Western tradition of painting.
