Chelsea / Lower East Side galleries

Galleries' walks around NYC make me think of past lives in neighborhoods, of gentrification in the making, of new lives and new fortunes, of style and architecture and changing tastes, of fashion, of course, of the “cool” and the “hip” being dead and being re-invented to die again in the cycle of the making of “the contemporary”. And of the crazy velocity of these processes in NYC. Chelsea's galleries story begins in the 90's; a result of an over priced Soho art scene. Chelsea had to offer cheap rent for huge spaces; warehouses, abandoned factories, inheritance of early 20 century industrialization, in a relatively residentially abandoned urban space (particularly between 10 ave. and the river). Galleries in Chelsea excel in size, depth and heights. A Richard Serra sculpture (roughly 60 by 25 feet!) fits comfortably in the Gagosian generous space. 

 They offer a convincing set for well established artists or emerging stars; beautiful wooden ceilings (converted inheritance of old warehouses), cleverly designed open skylights and almost total erasure of normal street life. Residential/architectural activity is new and clearly builds upon the booming art scene; High Line district; Frank Gehry IAC building, Jean Nouvel etc., all manifest reverence of artistic hype and accompanied real estate climbing values . Walking in Chelsea feels like stepping into the contemporary art hall of fame. 

 It is powerful, intimidating, and somehow alienating.

Lower east side art scene is still in the making, a scene that is on the verge of success. There is still room here for emerging artists relatively new to the scene. It is friendlier, definitely smaller and more approachable. Even if the art-fashion pairing may be already too cute and too expensive,

 it hasn't reached yet Chelsea's arty heights of Commes de garcons and Balenciaga. 

 

and you can still find a shade of past sweat shops if you look hard

The street still has its presence here, invading galleries' space and vice versa. The noise of a near-by construction site (they are really everywhere you look ) makes it hard not to think of Henry Roth's “Call it Sleep”, of past immigrant life here in another century and another world that is being transformed.

LES v. Chelsea

Chelsea feels old and stodgy. I think it's the architecture, big sans-serif fonts on the doors, which are tall and heavy and made of steel and glass, and the huge names. And even if I don't know the names of artists who are exhibiting, I feel like I should. I don't go to Chelsea that often, even though it's easily accessibly by the train. In my mind, and I know that this is a bad thing to have done, I've divided Chelsea vs. the Lower East Side into "irrelevant old stuff" vs. "what's interesting." Chelsea feels really inaccessible and institutional in comparison with the Lower East Side-- I can't imagine a show with a little fake tree on the top and a whole pet shop in a lower floor happening in Chelsea. I really think it's the architecture. And it's really clean and I feel out of place. I like the Lower East Side because of the architecture-- so many galleries are in tiny old storefronts and old apartments. But that's also what troubles me about the Lower East Side-- gentrification through arts. Part of the charm of the LES is its seediness, dirtyness. It seems "realer" than Chelsea. There are old Chinese people everywhere and also there are drug addicts. That is edgy. Edginess makes cool, cool plus art makes money and money makes no more edginess (edginess can no longer afford to be cool). I like the Lower East Side galleries because everyone seems to know each other and everyone is quite young-- everyone is young-gossipy, young-collaborative, and young-attitude-friendly/awkward. I don't know how Chelsea gallery dynamics work that much, really, and I probably am making overarching statements about LES that aren't true. 

this video has a title that has to do with the Lower East Side, and that's about it, unless you want to do some deep thinking I think (It can be fun). I like this song. 

Santigold - LES Artistes

Stage and non-stage

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages." William Shakespeare

Yet, life was happening outside the windows in Lower East Side galleries. People were populating the space not for the sake of art and its stage but for their own existence. Chelsea on the other hand is but a stage. A pretty nice stage, not gonna lie, but a stage.

Chelsea Galleries versus LEGalleries

 I noticed how much larger the space was in the Chelsea galleries than the Lower East-side galleries. The artists were also more well-known and higher priced.

However, the Lower East-side galleries were more intimate and not so commercial. 

The art seemed more intuitive, not so contemporary cliche as in Chelsea. Also, there was a feeling of discovering something new and at the same time something repeated from past art. Contemporaries is like always eating new food from new recipes, and never be allowed to repeat old favorite dishes. I like to be able to have both.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Let there be light

 “In the beginning there was nothing. God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better. ”

― Ellen DeGeneres 

When Collier Schorr takes picture, the flash light actually  makes the subject hard to see, at least for other people.

Maybe there really wasn't that much to see.

seeing things in things

There is nothing to see, so we look. We make a lot of stuff up.

the systematized classification and categorization of things and people

eye-tricks

extrapolation and metaphor -- they are just another part of a plant

???? 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2186984/Stories-Treblinka-Last-living-survivors-speak-horrors-haunting-memories-Nazi-death-camp.html

There is nothing to see, so you look. 

Holocaust memorial day in Israel. Israeli tv is on and I watch the recent documentary about Samuel and Kalman, the last two living survivors from Treblinka, the death factory camp, where a million Jews were exterminated in the efficiently-designed gas chambers. The article above tells their story of horror and survival. It contains some images taken on site. Grey on grey, black on black, shadings of shades composing a photographic documentation; a documentation of what the Nazis had attempted to obliterate from an unimmaginably horrific past so no-one could ever see. My generation of Israelis grew up with these shadows; from private homes to schools, television documentaries and cultural testimonials. We were taught not to forget the hard way: we were taught to look at the unseen.

Beautiful trees grow along side the hidden train tracks that led staright to Treblink's gas chambers. The road looks like a pastoral Korot painting; peaceful, perfect in its everydayness. The two men, now in their late 80's, take this road again. I think it is Kalman or was it Samuel, who both, like Lot's wife are, and had, and have been looking back straight into the bottomless black hole of horror, eye to eye, who comments “one can imagine even touching the green leaves while taking the ride”. Indeed, Anselm Kiefer's painting “Lot's Wife” features muddy, earthy train tracks, (a leitmotif in his works).

You might see the road, the trees that cover the now empty tracks, you might note the resemblane to a pastoral Korot painting, stretched like a thick, blunt facade to be lifted so you could look.

Random thoughts on Elizabeth Neel

From Interview Magazine

NEEL: My parents were supportive, essentially believing my decision came from some rational,
meaningful place. So I went back and started painting at about 23. I started right from the beginning, going to figure class where they set up a model. I was really familiar with representational figurative painting because I’ve been around it all my life.

Neel earned a degree in History from Brown and was seriously considering going to law school before making a big life-shift and delving into painting. This means a lot to me as someone who started painting at 22. An absolute beginner, bored with the analytical, I what-the-hell registered for Beginning Drawing... and never looked back at nursing, or mathematics, or psychology...

From the same interview:

NEEL: I used to be jealous of Andrew because he could go back to the file that was untouched, before all of the things in it got screwed up. But then I realized that’s part of what painting does. I’m the kind of person who likes to keep all of my options open all the time. It forces me to take risks, make choices, bite the bullet. That’s when the best things happen.

I think this boldness permeates all of Elizabeth Neel's work. Every mark, every gesture, is confident. I don't personally see her work as "violent" (although she loosely admits to it being so), but I think these risks/choices/biting-the-bullet is so prominent that it makes the viewer kind of uncomfortable, like violence. Definitely a quality that separates the art student from the artist and, thus, something I want to keep in mind in those moments of hesitation when I work.


I really like how these works, both featuring dogs but in almost polar situations (sex and fight, respectively), are so stylistically connected, creating a continuous narrative:


The Humpndump (2008; Oil on canvas)


Good vs Evil (2009; Oil on canvas)


Elizabeth Neel's sculptural/installation work is also really intriguing. Images from her 2011 solo show at the Pilar Corrias Gallery in London create an interesting juxtaposition (and compliment) to the above dog works:










What are your thoughts on Elizabeth Neel?

See and Look, Look and See

Roman Sarcophagus

Detail

Here is yet another Roman sarcophagus with a mythological relief. Look and see if you can figure out the story being portrayed.

Shakespeare, really? (yes, really)

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed, 
The dear repose for limbs with travel tir'd;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body's work's expir'd:
For then my thoughts (from far where I abide)
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see:
Save that my soul's imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.
Lo, thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind
For thee, and for myself, no quiet find. 
                                    --Shakespeare, Sonnet XXVII

I'm not a huge fan of Shakespeare (I'm usually the one in a circle of writers getting dirty looks for suggesting that his work might be a tad overrated), but this sonnet--the sentiment more than the exact words--comes to me often. It narrows in on a process that I believe to be fundamental to art making,  which is that in order to create, one must look beyond the world as it is presented to where there is nothing, and there find possibilities.

Circus of Life

The Circus of Life:

'There's nothing to see, so you look'

I often feel this way nowadays.. There's nothing to see. The show had no script, the applause will not arrive. I used to try to rationalize every step. My goal in life, was to understand the meaning of life. Now I do. It's found in satisfaction. Daringness and courage.. Chances and survival. But where am I in the meaning? For, once I know, I then still seek to know what to do with it. The question is always how to live. Some people ask it, and engage in an intellectual exercise of life.. only to return to disregard it as before. Some never ask, and simply move forward in life. No choice is wrong, and it's the choice I've come to understand is the obstacle. We should not choose what to do, for our nature has already chosen. Deep inside our soul is a voice, whispering to us, all we need to do is listen. The voice knows the reason for every next step, the voice knows who you love, and why you love. The voice knows when to smile, and why to cry. If we listen to ourselves, we need not ask questions, only act, and live..

It's our folly that we try to write over ourselves, look to someone else and try to quicken our steps to theirs, to learn by copying, and to unlearn our own beauty.. We ignore feelings, we deny truth, we cope in silence, and we turn our heads to our own desire.. yet the voice is always there, calling, calling to you. It never stops asking, the door is always open, the voice is there waiting for you. And if you seek it, you will find it waiting. The voice knows love, the voices knows life. Call it spirit, call it soul, or simply calm your voice, and let yourself listen. What does the voice want, what does it seek and yearn? If you find out, there will be no more need for other answers.

Looking is desire

There is nothing to see:

 I didn’t know the phone was taking pictures, but when I went back to the camera roll, there were all these random shots. I looked at them. And then I decided to collage them into a slide. There is nothing to see—they make no particular sense. But in looking at these random fragments that bear no intentions of being anything in particular, my interest began to linger with the lines and textures and colors. I began to see something(s). 

Seeing is the state of apprehension of meaning. Looking is the process of generating meaning. We ourselves are separate from the object of our vision when we look (“for”, “at”, “in”, “around”, “beside”, “to”, “between”, “on” or even “upon”). But when we see, visual input unites with the associations formed from looking to imbue our vision with meaning. In this way, looking is a journey and seeing is an arrival. There is nothing to see, so you look. And after you have looked, you may in fact see “nothing,” but that would then be a meaning and not a statement about the visual field. Looking is a desire for meaning. Seeing is meaning made.

Looking is desire.

There is nothing to see, so you look.

When considering this week's prompt, the first thing that came to my mind was Robert Ryman's Versions IV painting (1991-92; oil and graphite on Lumasite with wax paper) at the Met Museum.



Ryman's work got me thinking about Andy Warhol's Rorschach painting (1984; synthetic polymer paint on canvas) at the MoMA.



"Rorschach" directly references the Rorschach Test, or inkblot test, created by Swiss psychiatrist/psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach, circa 1927. Here are the original 10 cards:



The most interesting thing to me is not that we look when there is nothing to see, but that we often conjure up the same images from our individual subconscious (for example, popularly, a bat in the 5th card), and that we are frightened when other individuals don't imagine the same thing we project onto the nothingness; we are frightened by the anomalous, as if there could be an objective status quo for the what one looks for in the nothingness.

Every time we look to make sure there is nothing to see.

Every time we look to make sure there is nothing to see.

When we are done, we close the lid and flush to make sure there is nothing for the next person to see.

group show/ community projet I'm in ~opening this friday~

Hi all,

I have two paintings in a community project space/group show in East New York in Brooklyn and wanted to invite yall to its opening this Friday from 6-9. Arts East New York, the center where the works will be shown, is focused around three components: community beautification, arts education, and special events (basically social justice through art, I think). Here's its mission statement: http://artseastny.org/?page_id=91

From what I've heard there'll be pastries and wine and cute things like that at the opening. 

Aaand here's the flyer/description for the show which I'll be in, Off the Street, which asks what happens to street art when taken out of its original context. http://artseastny.org/?page_id=134

I'm planning on leaving campus at around 5:30 on Friday and would super love for people to come with!

my number: 510 418 0925

(my thing on the front of this!!)

There is nothing to see, so I look elsewhere

Nothing to see

Elsewhere

"Representational Shit" Critique

Hello, fellow artists! I have come (again) in search of critique! :)

This is my second sculpture project, "Representational Shit." Although my sculpture crit this week was cut short and not very detailed, I did come away with a few good suggestions: 1) I plan on omitting the angora rabbit from the installation; the litter box is strong as an independent object (agree/disagree?) and 2) The photographs do not capture the hostile reaction my rabbit had towards the box, so I need to get more angry photos, or omit them entirely (?). I would like to exhibit this piece in the upcoming undergrad show, so I am really looking for feedback about whether photos (provided I better document the hostile reaction) strengthen or weaken the piece? (I was conducting an experiment of sorts to see if my rabbit would use the replica litter box. He ignored it until he needed to use the bathroom, then attacked the replica, and tried to eat it.)

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Genevieve

Ghost of the deer

The PixCell-Deer#24 by Kohei Nawa is a taxidermied deer sculpted with glass PixCell beads...
http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/60051566?img=1

The deer is said to resemble a religious painting known as Kasuga Deer Mandala, 'which features a deer - the messenger animal of Shinto deities - posed similarly with its head turned to its side, and with a round sacred mirror on its back.

Perhaps this is the sacred mirror..

Lawlziwallz goofybootz

Outside Orna's Room of Renaissance Requirement: Little grumpy troll dude guarding the secret of perspective and making sure you don't steal nothing with that backpack of yours

In Mary's other Room of Requirement of American things: an angry bust of a guy who is angry because he's stuck in a dusty shelf full of calm people who can't hear him/don't care:

another in Mary's collection: this woman is stuck staring at someone's shoulder/the corner of a wall until the next intern decides what she'll look at next

Justin's sarcophagus love story: whachu doin down there??!?!

 Back to Mary's crazy room: a creepy old man in a satin baby bonnet and shiny bodice

and outside in the Upper East Side:

you can even buy shade to throw here if you can't produce it naturally haha

(shade)

Cupid, pay attention? It's your sculpture

Is this the face of love? Cupid looks like he is in absolute pain or just completely zoning out.
I feel like there is some story that I don't know behind Cupid and Psyche...

Civitali's Gabriel lost his wings.  It makes him closer to us (if not for the unusual slanted/suspended posture and unfortunate

gravitational forces). Empty wings' slots in his back, yet, not a fallen angel.

I'm sticking to Renaissance Firenze and find (sorry, but again)Bennozzo Gozzoli's work from 1460 "Saint Zenobius Resuscitating a Dead child, saint Peter and Simon Magus; the conversion of Saint Paul; Totila before saint Benedict" tempera on wood.  This four panel piece (on top) was commissioned by the florentine patrician and powerful Alessandri family to update an altarpiece made 150 years before.

I

I particularly like the second from right: Saint Paul is falling from his horse at the apparition of Christ.  The "apparition" itself is particularly interesting.  A golden "blob"hanging at the top while most of its circular shape is out of frame.  A golden transparent ray is hitting the fallen saint's left eye.  Zooming in I detect a carefully depicted celestial scene with christ and cherubs surrounding the throne.

Just one more. Fra Filippo Lippi (1406-1469)"saint Lawrence Enthroned with saints and Donors" tempera on wood, gold ground.  The painting was commissioned by the same Florentine patrician, Alessandri, in the 1440s.

  

What is particularly interesting to me here are is the damaged surfaces, the attempts to restore the piece throughout the ages.  The saint is depicted enthroned.  His feet are resting on the grill on which he was martyred. Just under his feet as part of the floor, there is a damaged area that might be still unrestored.  An original "rug" perhaps. It is a painting within a painting. (and I'm wildly associating a Klee painting)

On the left side, with a red background, (a hint of the "real" red robe of a saint or a donor) I could swear, there's a figure standing (torso), leaning, looking outward at us.