Contemporary Art + Gossip + Music Recs
The gossip is the carrot.
Disclaimer: There’s always typos because I’m always typing these newsletters quickly.
I love reading Lil Picard’s essays for the East Village Other in the 1960s and 1970s because it gives me the feeling that I’m on the phone, gabbing about art with my friend Lil. Here’s a snippet before I turn to telling you about some of the art I’ve seen lately. It’s short because today’s newsletter is a procrastination tactic for my “real” job.
Good
PPOW has been running a coat drive the last two weekends. I brought two coats, both unnecessary gifts from the parents. Mom, I don’t need a heated jacket with a built-in battery that you orded off of Amazon—I’m used to the cold by now! There were a handful of other people who brought a lot more than me in the half an hour or so I was there to check out the Gerald Lovell show. Good for y’all—or, as my bad conscience says, bad on you all for having too much stuff in the first place.
Cauleen Smith’s Wanda Coleman lovefest at 52 Walker is the best thing I’ve seen this month. I will be returning, and I want to write about it more in-depth.
I also feel that “wanting to write more formally about a show” feeling about The Ceremony Must Be Found at EFA Project Space. It’s about ritual, but that’s a topic that really needs to be expanded upon in the current consciousness given how it’s also been adapted to self-help vocabulary, tech culture, etc.
Dunkunsthalle has been killing it as a (mostly) one-screen-only space. Nancy Holt’s Perspectives from last fall paired the long, sublime silences of Sun Tunnels (1973-1976) with the hippy-dippy chit-chat of East Coast/ West Coast (1969). In late January, I attended a one-day-only screening of Everything But The World (2022) by DIS. I didn’t know I was going to see Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin—I haven’t seen any new work by them in years—and I didn’t know I needed them to show me “your wake repurposed as a how-to channel.” Dunky Honey, you make me want to be part of an experimental curatorial space again.
Good & Okay
Gerald Lovell, verde, PPOW (390 Broadway, 2nd Floor): When I walked in, I started choking on the smell of just-finished paintings in the gallery. I’m not the only person who’s sensitive to smells: please, let’s stop the practice of showing new paintings that will make people queasy. Once I got over wanting to throw up, I did have a nice time with the work. There’s some unsettling narrative juxtapositions going on in the back room, with a painting of a Telfar bag (bourgeois Black excellence) staring down a twisty bit of Alpine mountain scenery (travel excellence), a young couple who aren’t ready to face the camera just yet (travel excellence meets friendship/romance awkwardness?), and the excellence of just being—or being high. The paintings are vibrant, airy, and seem to present such care for their subjects à la Alice Neel. I just wish I were a bigger fan of impasto. Runs through March 9, 2024.
Excuse Me?
In 2022, I wrote about 1969 Gallery’s Pure Joy, an exhibition about the varieties of disabled experience. Since returning to the gallery, the ramp that had been installed at the entrance to make the exhibition space accessible has since…disappeared. Was this a one-off attempt at ADA accessibility? What’s the excuse?
Links to Read, Listen, and Watch
Orit Gat reviews a vitrine-feminism show in London. You can’t put baby in the corner, but you can put her in a vitrine!
David Raskin writes about the complexity of art, Judaism, and sine waves at the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s a short op-ed and it doesn’t offer any easy answers. The essay is behind a paywall, but I uploaded a PDF to my Google Drive.
That polyamory piece for New York Mag was a great hate read because it was utterly selective to choose to write about young, HOT people with a ton of friends who prefer spending their free time dating people rather than reading books! Not linking to it because it’s already had too much screen time in this part of Brooklyn.
Who am I kidding? I don’t read that much new stuff. Here’s a nice summary of ecocriticism from 2011.
If you know me, you know that I like old, analog video art. I’m drawn to the concept of infinity that artists and technicians working with feedback and generative synthesizers searched for in the 1970s. That desire for infinite variation contiues, but without recursion, with signal-minded artists today. At least, that’s the expression I got when reading about LoVid’s heartsleeves work, in which a “live generator will play forever without looping, suggesting an infinite abstract plane.” Forever!
Current bandcamp recs: bergsonist, Reverend Kristen Michael Hayter, PROCESSOR PLUS, and The Threat.