No Fair
Lee Klein
This season I was
less excited to attend the art fairs than ever (knowing full well in advance
that the atmosphere would be cool). I burst into the giant downstairs room at
the Dylan hotel for the scope art fair opening party (where I was actually helping
out inside at an exhibition space/hotel room for a little while). Upon walking
in I was almost consumed by the partying mass in the club formerly associated
with former teen pop sensation Brittany Spears (of this space whereabouts tourists
on the double Decker buses have in summers past asked tour guides by saying where
is Brittany Spears’ restaurant? She is no longer involved…..)
At the scope art
fair the most interesting artist I discovered was Christopher Johnson at Plus
Ultra. Johnson’s paints removed scenes or scenes removed of strip bars and
or adult entertainment facilities posted out on roadside America. He also exhibited
some out of context painting and shots of Hugh Hefner within a posse of gals
(I spotted the Playboy mogul with the bus one time noticing him from above with
his pipe in his hands behind him thinking at first that he was former New York
and current Los Angeles police commissioner William Bratton… pointing Hef
out to the tourists I was than criticized by them for being “so fame driven”)
The fetish photos
at rare extra were interesting in that they read like photos from an Internet
sex interests room.
There was a single artist theme (though, some galleries broke the rule like Stevenson
fine art with Peggy Bates; Roy Lerner, and Irene Neal). Therein hypertexture
and heightened texture took a fracturing bolt between the doors. Thus it was
that Bates’ syrupy heightened texture went right over the bed. Meanwhile,
Lerner’s works were placed in the middle of the room and Neal’s half
arcs of colored swirl in the marble-showered bathroom.
Ross Bleckner and Calvin Klein came by (before the most manifestation of my namesake
was off to rehab after talking to Latrell Sprewell during a Knicks game and being
escorted back to his seat by security). As well fair executive director Irene
Nikolai came in and curtsied to Irene Neal and Gary Shapiro cohort Laurie Heifitz.
Soon after she as also off to rehab too (as well since I am a tour guide and
pass Bellevue I can mention now mention Irene with other former famous arrivals
like Delmore Schwartz; Norman Mailer, and William S. Burroughs). I made these
observations to the esteemed Mr. Stevenson and he furthered that I had gone to
rehab as well. My rehab was only consultation with the tour guide Yehuda Evan-Zohar
(who by the way is a relative of Roy Liechtenstein).
Roy Lerner in the
meantime is one of the most important unrecognized artists of our time. However
his behavior at times is as bad as his worst merchandise. His work like no one
else’s in the decade previous captured the optical landscape and after-glow
of our virtual industrial geological landscape. His contribution maybe monumental.
The problem however for this writer as for any writer dealing with any artist
is the mercantile mind numbing mantras of the marketplace. These demands or lustful
callings drive artists like satanic drones to do anything and everything. I love
art and its’ place in the world but have finally decided not to be a human
sacrifice.
Meanwhile at the
Armory fair Kehinde Wiley (freshly famous from the lauded especially by the Hilton
Kramer crowd “Black Romantic” exhibition at the studio museum in Harlem
and 125th street mural) saw his
work presented by several galleries at the piers. The works this writer observed
were interesting single male portraits with sort of a gratified like calligraphic
overlay (reminding me later in spring of Brian Gormley’s bright fresh burst
informed silk screens). It seemed with his multiple representations that the
marketplace was in agreement as to Wiley’s place in the new realist cannon
Fabian Marcaccio’s one work at the Gorney, Bravin, and Lee booth gave me
a chance to play further catch-up (after missing his most recent exhibition at
GBL).
Therein due to
oversight and the inability to predict that his work there would be so more exciting
than his work at the Hagia Irene at the Istanbul Bienal. So I lapsed as per my
duties as an informed dutiful scribe in a lackluster repeatathon of artworld
top forty. But now I m ready to return as the super -human penman of hypetexture
pronto.
At Cheim and Read
there were a couple of Linda Benglis’s on the floor whose most prominent
colors were green and orange. These were works that seriously reminded me of
a peter Bradley canvas; “Broughtonia Sanguinea” (2002). The aforementioned
work about which I had just written about for the Portlock black cultural center
art Easton, Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College is a canvas where green and
orange flies in upon a Claude Monet like lily pond field as if so much fire breathed
into it (first seeing it on the floor in his Greene street studio then the thick
combination of paint and molding paste read heavy but after it was expertly mounted
upon canvass by Rick Hildebrandt in Pennsylvania it read stately its texture
making it sculptural a tension existing between the ephemeral tone of the canvas
and the weight of the material as staggering combination made more profound by
the black incorporated as if a concerto of sorts was being written green orange
red black). No such strong reading seems to come into play in the Benglis put
on the floor (as I guess it was supposed to be) at the armory art fair at the
cruise ship piers.
Meanwhile Andrew
Moore’s “Target 2002” at Yancy Richardson was right on target
for this writer (who again as a tour guide has navigated that corner of 42nd
and eighth countless times). Here a bright sun illuminates a large-scale cibachrome
capturing the signs amassed on the street-sides of the 42nd street Ewalk entertainment
complex at the bottom of the Arquitecitonica Westin hotel. This assemblage of
mixed media and billboards was originally designed by Yale architecture dean
and post-modern stalwart Robert Stern. Then here in the confines of Dewitt Clinton’s
become Piet Mondrian’s grid’s the primary colors are pop symphonic-when
captured agreeably. Portrayed are the Mexican restaurants’ (CHEVYS) citrus
come apart xylophone shadows signs punctuated by neon script as the negative
space cast by the sun projecting the building’s lower attached architecture’s
alter ego of monochromatic reflection. Further then with the ketchup and mustard
colored cacophony of grid mobility engineered by a red double Decker tour bus
and yellow taxi cab combo’s dissonance is briefly interrupted by a an off-red
passenger sedan the work becomes a contained orgy of color octave containment
moving gradually forth like a chromatic chess game in sidewinding four square
block commotion.
Than it was off
to the less celebrity packed then ever Damian Loeb opening where removed became
vacant and the paintings of horror sci-fi left everyone including me wondering.
The works were isolated moments film stills and had none of the impact even subtlety
of the previous suites of work. Oh well next time he’ll probably hit a home
run again. But (as I was discussing with Shalom Neuman the transfusionist made
so by my reappropriation) a Richter piece may not make sense alone but does in
full well occupied retrospect. Maybe one day the same will be said of these works.
Here I liked the one taken from “2001 a Space Odyssey” …. For
its full use of space,
