Art + The City

SUMMATION

Now that I’ve had some time to digest the experience, I’m going to work on adding more pictures and showing all the ones I took in an album. I should be getting those up on Flickr soon. Upon my return from NYC my laptop immediately died and I had to replace my hard drive. Thankfully my pictures were saved. I also plan on adding a long more links and hyperlinking some of the text portions of my blog so that you might use it as a virtual tour guide.

Thankfully, I’ll be returning to NYC in about two weeks for a trip with my advertising portfolio class and I’ll be spending my summer there on an internship. I hope to do some more exploring in the galleries and museums in the city.

Overall the trip was amazing. It was different from any of my other experiences (future included) because of the art-focus. I don’t think most people get to see the range of art I did in seven days. Also, the great part for me was getting to explore different parts of the city. I really loved Chelsea and Williamsburg and will definitely go back there this summer. While I’ve been to tons of large, famous museums, this experience was different because I saw a wider range of contemporary art that I’ve ever seen. I also got so see the work of today’s most famous current contemporary artists and started to get a sense of what the gallery scene is like. Getting to listen to David Kramer was a special treat. Another broad highlight for me was getting to see new media and new genres of art. I loved seeing the incorporation of comic, graphic and street forms. I had never gotten to see a lot of photography or large installation pieces either. It was a great trip.

RECAP : DAY 7 :: Thursday, March 29

Our final art-filled day in the city was a bit of a marathon. We headed to splurge on galleries in Chelsea. I absolutely fell in love with this part of the city.

There are hundred of galleries in this area, so with a guide in hand, we chose a semi-random sampling and took 24th street by storm visiting about fifteen in all.

The first I think was the Franz Gertsch Gallery. I love the large, bold photos and interesting images by Chuck Close. I feel like I saw some of his work somewhere else in the trip. Next we hit the Max Lang Galerie. Here there were some cool Andy Warhol (Dracula) and Keith Haring prints. There was some other pop-looking art from an artist named Tom Ken. There was some other cool works by a graffiti artist who goes by QUIK. Next door was the Gladstone Gallery with works by Anish Kapoor and Caroll Dunham. These were actually a little disappointing. I didn’t really like the abstract color works on paper of Kapoor’s. I thought Dunham was more interesting. Not to say I like looking at what I thought were some semi-abstract assholes (literal) and guns, but I did like the bright, bold geometric shaped and interesting uses of the frame (breaking the frame and combining frames).

At the Mike Weiss Gallery we saw “New Paintings” by Andrea Belag. Cool name, didn’t care at all for the paintings. There were works by lots of different artists at the Baumgartner. I particularly liked a piece of completely balanced stones called “Axial Stones” by an artist named Quasha and a bold piece by an artist named William Anastasi. I actually liked what I saw at the Stellan Holm Gallery. There was an exhibit by Dwayne Moser called “The Real Tinsel,” that featured kind of large-scale cool paintings of city scenes around Hollywood that were painting from photographs that were also there.

The Matthew Marks Gallery was my absolute favorite of the day. We spent a while in there viewing Nan Goldin’s “The Other Side.” The photographs show a spectrum of transsexuals and drag queens. I loved the different and emotions and tones of the images. Some conveyed struggle and isolation while others seemed to be liberating and glamorous. It was beautiful.

The other galleries worth mentioning was Vera Lutter’s huge pinhole-camera photographs at the Gagosian Gallery. I was also intrigued by Andy Hofer’s “Only Gods Could Survive” exhibit. It was a strange mix than seemed straight out of an offbeat kid’s animation onto a sketchbook. Some took the form of odd superhero sketchbook drawings, to a bat-shaped armour, to hanging picture installations. It might be best described in some recurring themes or images: dinosaurs, bats, blackletter, superheroes, medieval, armour, trees, skulls and mythology.

We wrapped up the evening with a lovely Italian dinner paid for by Kartz and nicely completely with some vino rosso.

RECAP: DAY 6 :: Wednesday, March 28

Today I think I reached the threshold of sane art consumption. After a wonderful trip to the MoMA I hit a wall and could barely digest the works at the Whitney (which I will thankfully return to this summer!)

Like the MET, I had visited the MoMA a year ago with my mom, so I didn’t feel pressured to rush through everything. That said, MoMA’s one of my all-time favorite museum. I love the space itself and it contains numerous works by some of my favorite artists including Andy Warhol, Van Gogh, Picasso, Mondrian, Jasper Johns, Rauchenberg, Duchamp, and El Lissitzky to name a few. I revisited some favorites, but saw some great new things on this particular visit.

 

I loved the incorporation of new media. There was even more this time than my previous visit. I watched many of the video pieces. I especially liked over hearing other peoples reactions, particularly those unfamiliar with contemporary art and new media. Some said, “Oh so this is art now.” I think overall people liked it because it’s different and somehow more entertaining and interactive. It’s in the medium that many people are digesting in everyday life.

Another treat was “Comic Abstraction” exhibit by a collection of artists that are incorporating comics somehow into their art. Right now I’ve been mesmerized by this art form. I’ve been reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud and reading graphic novels by Chris Ware. I was really interested in cartooning when I was younger, and it’s cool to see different forms reasserting themselves and changing in both the art and commercial art worlds. It seems like there’s also been a lot of interpretations linked to comics and also graphed and calculated visual representations of data and narratives that I’ve been exploring.

By the time we finally hit the Whitney, I was a stage five struggler. There was lots to see, and I definitely plan to return soon. I had really been looking forward to seeing Gordon Matta-Clark's "You Are the Measure" because I had a friend see his "Walls Paper" exhibit in Spain this summer. It was astounding. I also really liked the Lorna Simpson pieces. This trip was one of the first times I've seen contemporary photography in museums and galleries so it was great that I got to see the different styles, themes and conceptual executions from a variety of artists. I felt like  I was playing catch-up. I also really loved the Jeff Wall exhibit I had seen at the MoMA.

RECAP : DAY 5 :: Tuesday, March 27

Today was an extremely long, but wonderful day. We took on two art behemoths today: The MET and the Guggenheim. Like yesterday, this was also a favorite (yet much less relaxing) day.

I actually visited the MET about a year ago with my mom so this was a different experience. I got to be a little more selective with what I wanted to see, which was really nice. I skipped some of the heavier-traffic areas and headed right for the “Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudí to Dalí” exhibit. There were some amazing works in it, and I loved having the exhibit to connect to the area’s history. Picasso is one of my favorite artists so there was a lot to see. I also saw a lot of pieces by Miró and Dalí that I loved and hadn’t seen before.

After that I headed to the “Closed Circuit: Video and New Media at the Metropolitan.” It was cool that I get to see MET changing and part of that is including works in new media. I spent quite a bit of time watching the different pieces.

Next was the Guggenheim, which I haven’t seen before. I have to admit I was disappointed. The outside of Gehry’s work of architectural genius was covered in scaffolding for pending renovations so I was forced to look at a postcard in the gift shop and use my imagination. The inside, however, was breathtaking, and even though my body ached from a museum marathon, the treasures inside were a treat.

There were a few current exhibitions, the main one being “Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso.” If the day lacked something, it most definitely wasn’t Spaniards. What I like most about this exhibit was how it was organized. In the Guggenheim you get to travel around the spiral and view the pieces, avoiding the nightmare of missing something in the more common labyrinth-style. The exhibit was organized not, by date or artist, but by theme (15 in all) so you could compare how different artists handled subject in their style and time. It was awesome. I liked noticing how different executions showed cultural shifts and how even when life was more traditional, artists like Velázquez and Goya were still ahead of the times. It was interesting to compare that with the social commentary methods of Miró and Picasso.

An unexpected exhibit “Family Pictures” ended up being one of my favorite exhibits of the entire trip. It showed how families and children have been portrayed in contemporary photography and video. Loretta Lux had these offbeat, ethereal portraits of children. Sally Mann’s work was also remarkable. Another highlight for me was being able to see the work of controversial Robert Mapplethorpe. For one of my journalism requirements I wrote a 100-page research paper addressing art and censorship through the National Endowment for the Arts, and Mapplethorpe’s work was constantly decried by right-winged obscenity and decency representatives like Senator Jesse Helms. It was cool to be able to evaluate some of his work for myself.

RECAP : DAY 4 :: Monday, March 26

Today might have been my favorite day of the trip. We took the train upstate to the DIA: Beacon

First of all, it the building was amazing. It was architecturally pure with large spaces flooded in natural light. The 240,000 square feet of open wood-floored rooms with expansive white walls set the perfect atmosphere for the huge, contemporary installations. My favorite (although it was tough to choose ) was Sol LeWitt’s “Drawing Series.” There were about 14 wall sized-conceptual drawings. The was something poetic in the repetition and calculation. Somehow having these presets and rules made me want to grab a piece of paper and start drawing with obsessive compulsion. The drawings themselves are both hard and simple to explain. Simple by reading some of the titles, “Wall Drawing #46: Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly,” “Wall Drawing #97: Ten thousand straight and ten thousand not straight lines,” and “Wall Drawing #123: Copied lines.” They are hard to explain because of their beauty, simplicity, complexity, and impact they have.

Another memorable exhibit was the 4 pieces by Michael Heizer. They are enormous sculptures of different shapes and depths of (I think) 40 feet total. I believe the titles were “North,” “South,” “East,” and “West.” You have to have a guide take you into the exhibit and you can walk up to the edges of the sculptures and peer down into them. Some seemed to have no end. They were both beautiful and slightly terrifying.

The massive iron works by Richard Serra were similarly unsettling. You could walk in and around the huge torqued pieces that were fit (purposefully) into a too-small space so that you could feel them shift. There were other not-so-memorable pieces there, but maybe because there were a number of good ones. I loved seeing the Warhol exhibit (a favorite artist of mine) and I the simplicity of the florescent pieces of Dan Flavin are also worth mentioning. Overall, I loved this museum because it was unlike anything I’ve seen before. I’ve been to museums all over the U.S. (including previous NYC trips to MoMA and MET) and worldwide (Louvre, Musee d’Orsay, L’Ufficio, etc.), and this was totally refreshing. It’s one of the rare places where I’ve seen works in a large space, which was a nice break from the crowded and busy streets of NYC.

RECAP: DAY 3 :: Sunday, March 25

Today we went to Brooklyn to visit the studio of artist David Kramer and to see some of the galleries in Williamsburg.

First of all, I absolutely loved David Kramer. It was cook to get into the mind of “the starving artist.” Although I can understand that he’s a bit of a joker, it was interesting to hear his take on “the system” being the galleries, curators, artists, critics, etc. His video pieces were funny. I especially liked “It’s so hard to be an artist” and his confessional style. I definitely sympathized with his satirical plight of his art studio exploding in the wake of 9/11.

His drawings were cool. They were satirical and text-based pieces that showed his disillusionment with the notion of the American lifestyle he had formed from the media and culture during his childhood. There was something fun and refreshing about his style. I love text-based works most of the time, and a lot of his pieces worked for me. A lot of them reminded me of ads from and “American Ads of the 50s” I have. Maybe that’s why I liked them. They seemed to comment and borrow from advertising, which is my focus of study. I l also liked the way he explained his work and his process. It was cool to see how he works across mediums. His paintings were cool. What I found most interesting was how he revealed his thoughts about painting, and how he had some sort of reverence for painting with a capital “P”. Sitting and listening to his Woody Allen- like dialogue I agreed with his quote, “The job of an artist is to confuse yourself.” Very true.

After the stop at Kramer’s we looked at some galleries in Williamsburg. I thought the area itself was a neat enclave. Nothing really stuck out to me of the work we saw. Some stuff with yarn. A bird on a stack of broken glass. A light piece with two two-way mirrors was kind of neat. The only one I really remembered was "Fictional Neighbors" by Gerard Williams mostly because it was kind of offbeat.

We had the rest of the day to head to Brooklyn. I (um…needing time to process the day’s art) headed to a Irish pub (we were told the best in the area) to down a few beers and watch the Duck game. We failed to advance past Florida, but the it the beer was good.

RECAP: DAY 2 :: Saturday, March 24

Today we met at noon to head to the Sculpture Center and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (a MoMA affiliate) in Queens. It was a great way to kick off our NYC art binge.

It was nice to be able to focus on just a few pieces at the Sculpture Center. The most memorable was Monica Bonvicini’s shattered glass and light bulb sculpture “Built for Crime.” These words were constructed from the mentioned materials. What I like most about these sculptures was how they interacted with the space. The Sculpture Center is in a beautiful old warehouse. The object was suspended from the super high ceiling by fragile, almost transparent fixtures, and dangled to fill in the space. The letters were large, and we could walk around a view it from multiple sides. When you looked at it closer you could see cracks in the glass. The light also changed, blinked and flashed in the dark room. Although I have no idea what the artist was saying, there was still something cool and mysterious about it. Bonvicini had another mirrored text sculpture called “Desire” in the entrance, and it was cool because it reflected the scenery around it. It would mean something completely different in another location.

Downstairs in the Sculpture Center there were a few other pieces. One seemed to address mining, but honestly, it was kind of boring. There was an interesting video piece of a roller coaster in the winter with a creepy narrative.

After the Sculpture Center we broke for lunch and along came across a sanctioned graffiti spot. This was a highlight for me. It was cool to see that expression embraced. The graffiti covered about a block from all different taggers. All the surfaces of these huge high-story warehouses were covered, and you could even climb up the ladders to get a better look. I absolutely loved it.

The sketchy piece of pizza I ate was a cool complement to the variety of stuff I saw at P.S.1. This was one of my favorite places of the trip. In the basement there was a disturbing sound piece of an amplified cat purr. When you walked into the space different speakers surrounded you. The sound shot and ricocheted off the different surfaces in the room. Another highlight was the “Not For Sale” exhibition. It featured all sort of works by artists who for on reason or another refused to sell. Reasons ranged from sentimental to they thought the piece was unfinished or crap. It was a neat journey into the personalities and minds of an artist.

I also loved most of the works in Vik Muniz’s exhibit “Reflex.” He photographs these images (many of them portraits) constructed out of all sorts of things like chocolate syrup, diamonds, peanut butter and jelly, large objects, toys, string and wire. I liked that these pieces didn’t take art too seriously. There was a Warhol-esque peanut butter and jelly iteration of the Mona Lisa and a spaghetti representation of Medusa.

The other piece I really liked was an installation on the top floor called “High Plane V” by Katrin Sigurdardottir. It was like something in a dream. There was a room with two steep wooden ladders. You would climb one and then stick your head through a small hole. Inside you had a 360-degree view of this ethereal place. Everyone felt different sensations. For me it felt like I was looking at the Arctic with the feeling of being in a Styrofoam cup. There were little clouds and ice bergs. It was a unique experience and a nice way to end the day.

RECAP : DAY ONE :: Friday, March 23

I arrived in New York City Friday night with two friends joining me on the trip, Annie Schoenecker and Ashly Stewart. We finally arrived in our hostel after tracking down a stolen piece of luggage (simple case of mistaken identity) and grabbing a shuttle to push our way through Friday rush hour. Then we took off for the Time’s Square to watch the UO Duck game at ESPN Zone.

It’s been almost 7 years since I’ve seen Time’s Square at night, and I forgot how paralyzing the energy is. I say this after having gone to Las Vegas less than a month ago. There are so many lights, motion, ads, text, music, video, ticker tape, traffic and people it seems futuristic. It’s hard to distinguish where you are. The buildings disappear into one another and everything blends together while vibrating for your attention. It’s sensory overload but still somehow exhilarating (at least for a while). One Duck victory, a few beers and some subway navigation later, we were back at our hostel snuggling cozily (6/room) in our twin beds preparing ourselves for the coming art-filled day in New York City.

"IM IN N'NEW YORK SHYT"

Well it's day three in NYC, and the amount of time it took to round up this quick first post is directly proportional to the amount of activity here in NYC.

To help grasp this spin cycle of happenings, take a look at why I'm here: Art + The City. Once I'm able to sit down and digest both the volume of art and amount of dessert that I consumed at Serendipity this evening (3), I'll be providing some delightful recap and commentary of my thrilling NYC experiences. Meanwhile have a lookie at one of my favorite pictures I took of the graffiti out in Brooklyn.