According to my own little world, most contemporary art can be dropped into one of three buckets:
- Stuff anyone (even I) could do, but not as art.
- Stuff anyone (even I) could do, but which is ingenious regardless.
- And stuff that is true craft.
The PS1 exhibit
Lesser New York or something has got a mix of these buckets. In my own little world, this mix makes the best exhibit I have ever experienced. It is funny, irreverant, cute and unexpected.
Art in America says the cloud of nine-eleven obviously still hangs over the artists in the show, but
Art in America must be published in Cleveland or something, because the only clouds I saw in the show were of the usual
if-i-act-melancholy-then-i-must-be-deep variety artists emulate when they can't think of anything original.
Charred wood. Ooh. How spook-y.
The point is, the exhibit was so good I left after an hour so that I could come back again this summer to see the rest. So this is incomplete.
Ryan Johnson’s
Ramblin Man was like iterative photoshop motion blurs with an increasingly geometric persuasion, executed as a three-dimensional paper sculpture. Craft.
Kirsten Hassenfeld’s intricately snipped and illuminated cake is more amazing from a craft perspective, though not from the conceptual angle.
Sean Bluechel came from the other spectrum, with crudely drawn cactus-cum-cute-clansmen in socks and turkey in hand, glorious in their own right (I am a sucker for eigth-grade-style ballpoint pen or pencil sketches in galleries), and lifted into the stratosphere as self-effacing industry-nose-thumbing snark with the title
The Titles Are With Joseph Campbell (individual titles available upon request. Of course, my mother felt this was merely poncy, so maybe I am the only one who finds it adorable.
Also in the
my-kid-could-do-that-but-hasn’t-and-won’t-so-shut-up-and-let-me-enjoy-this-you-bush-voter camp is
Benjamin Degen’s pencil drawn Barn,
Nina Lola Bachhuber’s graphite orifices of all sorts, and Mika Rottenberg’s
B10,
B13, and
B12.
Back in the Craft department, we have
David Opdyke’s USS Mall. Funny how anti-war truths bite no deeper than the amount needed to make one knowingly and cynically chuckle. The award for simplest, cutest and most endearing goes to Guy Ben-ner’s family video
Moby Dick. Should I say something deep here? Made me want to make children.
Perhaps Yuken Teruya’
Notice Forest is meant to make us remember the source of our rubbish, but for a rare moment in contemporary art any semblance of concept is irrelevant, because these carefully cut out trees from paper bags are pure, skillful craft --
nothing else is needed.
In Kent Henricksen’s work at the show, concept is not only irrelevant, but downright detrimental; he can be forgiven for
his bullshit about "cross-referencing" because his stuff makes me so damn happy. Not sure if they are clansmen or gimps, but his
embroidery over delftish scenes makes me feel illicit, provoked, and inspired.
Memorable installations include Will Ryan’s sneaker-clad creatures scowling for escape from
The Pit, Marc Swanson’s Self portrait as Yeti, and
Derrick Adam’s Look What You Made Me Do (a human-size teddy bear who has fallen face-down to his knees onto a mirror, only to find that his head has become a sailboat and floated away.
For video, we’ve got Oliver Michael’s toy train running from room to room through little bitty tunnels, and Nicholas Sanchez Gold showing us who he would sleep with on the New York Subway, as Music Video.
In summary, is it just me, or does
Art in America crib all its articles from
Flash Art International, and then say obvious and incorrect things? You show me nine-eleven in the PS1 exhibit, and I’ll show you a bunch of
New York Artists who aren’t New Yorkers.
Did I mention this was the best exhibit I have ever been to? It was like all the best bits of Chelsea Galleries stuck in one building. Wait. All the best bits of Chelsea Galleries are stuck in one building. Hmm.
Anyway, LIC kicks Penn Station’s ass any day. Here’s to the yuppies taking over Queens. Suckers.
