If I weren't posessed of the native ability to see directly through the chiffon matrix of New York's culture and glamour to the wind-blown, garbage-strewn, sooty, selfish, close-minded and mildly yet unnervingly insane place it really is, I could be tricked from time to time into thinking I liked New York.
Take this afternoon, for instance, when I find myself with 40 minutes to kill before an Outrigger Canoe paddle in Chelsea. If you know me at
all, you know that "time to kill" and "Chelsea" are serendipitous confluences in my mind, and that an afternoon in the 25th street galleries is the one worthwhile pursuit New York has to offer.
Okay, one of three:
- Chelsea Galleries
- Bouldering in Central Park
- and the latest addition, Outrigger Canoeing
So, picture this, one moment I am in a cement-floored white-walled gallery unsure which is more sublime: the painting or the striking geometric tableaux of afternoon sunshine through a chelsea gallery window directly next to it. The next moment, I am squinting directly into that afternoon sunshine, trying to keep my pace consistent in the front of a six man Outrigger Canoe as we stroke down the Hudson towards the statue of Liberty!
I'll forgive these people for thinking the sport comes from Hawaii, for the fact that I can actually get my ass in a canoe this side of the Pacific. The
Atlantic, for that matter.
Back to the art, we have the most accomplished use of pallette knife since
Bacon* in
Daniel Phill’s Botanicals. I’m not in theory a fan of flower paintings. In fact, of late I prefer mateurishly affixed cardboard cut-offs to anything in oil or acrylic. But these sloping, dripping, shaven flowers are the first time I have seen such essential and non-gratuitous drip and scrape.
Over at the
Jeff Bailey Gallery, I had to wonder was twisted part of my mind somehow made $2,000 seem so affordable to my formerly Fiji dollar-earning and currently zero-dollar earning Art Loving Ass, as I gawked and winced and sighed and loved Sue Havens’s
Cemetery, in which a hairy "bulbous silhouetted shape" slips out from between the broad stripes of a flat, faded flag.
Sue, installment plan for a great but recently poor fan?
While Sue’s
muted-in-a-trendy old-t-shirt not a banana-republic way colors fit her neatly into the niche of Stuff I Currently Like to Ogle, over at
thatcher (honey needs a new web-site
*) Frank Badur’s
grid drawings were so obviously
Mine that I had to think for a second why I fall so hard for penciled graph paper... I came up with this: the delicate, hand-rendered
Povera brings nostalgia to a repetitive, computer-like exercise. And exercise books they do resemble. So is this earning for P.S. 94, or just a little humanity in those goddamn Operating Systems that seem to follow me wherever I move? Also the fact that it looks like something I could do myself.
Plus I found an uncreased
Modern Painters on the
top of the gallery’s rubbish bin, a ten dollar value enhanced by the fact that it contained
Guy Ben-Ner and
Tracy Emin, and introduced me to the fantastic yet clearly exposed which makes him slightly worse off because that means
I didn’t discover him
Matthew Collings. I think he is channeling me, sucessfully.
Is that why I suck so much?
What’s strange is that at this moment I have the most money I have ever had in my life, yet because of my decision of what I am about to do with it, I consider myself and need to live my life as though I am at the poorest moment of my life.
Oh yes, and I am glad someone spent over $10,000 on
Louise Belcourt’s
I-macs on a See-saw, because that way us poor Art Lovers can feel superior.
* Er,
Bacon (though that’s not the one I was thinking of)
* Two words: shape tween.
and for old time sakes,
a link to something web.
