A boring blasphemy

Anty-Christ: Just in time for Christmas, the Brooklyn Museum features a tiresome work that has insects crawling over a Jesus figurine.

NEW YORK POST
November 18, 2011

A boring blasphemy
B’klyn Museum’s shock schlock
by James Panero

Why wait for Black Friday to begin the tedious “War on Christmas”? The Brooklyn Museum has already begun the annual attack on Christian sensibilities in the name of free speech with its “controversial” exhibition, “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.”

The show features a video called “Fire in my Belly,” in which ants crawl over a bloody crucifix. The Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn has already asked that the video be removed from view.

The museum has fallen back on good old “shock art” in a bid to boost something almost as shopworn: its own moral superiority.

It doesn’t have much else to offer. It lost 35 percent of its endowment — $35 million — by gambling on the stock market in 2008; the museum’s director, Arnold Lehman, even went running to the city for a handout.

Even the critics have been panning the museum for years. There’s the garish and expensive new glass entry hall protruding onto Eastern Parkway. There’s the downmarket exhibition program — the art of “Star Wars” — which has done nothing to boost attendance. There’s its disconnection from the burgeoning contemporary art scene in the borough — a fact the museum has only begun to address.

But rather than put in the hard work to make the institution truly responsive to the people of Brooklyn, the museum has decided to party like it’s 1999 — when it made international headlines and earned the accolades of its peers by going toe to toe with Mayor Rudy Giuliani over its “Sensation” show, which featured a painting of the Virgin Mary made of elephant dung and pornographic photos.

After a similar controversy erupted late last year in Washington, DC, when Hide/Seek” premiered at the National Portrait Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum pounced.

Cynical? Sure. Hardly anyone took notice of the show or its video by the AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz until the Smithsonian (a government-funded institution like the Brooklyn Museum) removed it from view after complaints from Christian groups.

“It was entirely predictable that the right would try to bash the show for their own agenda,” Jonathan Katz, one of the show’s curators, later proclaimed. (He’s now a big ticket on the lecture circuit.) “The Catholic League and other radical conservative groups — they’re parasites that feed off controversy. That’s how they make money. I knew that and so did the Smithsonian.”

Parasites that feed off controversy? Liberal tastemakers are the ones who have taken this controversy to the bank. As the cry of censorship went up between Washington and New York, only then did “Fire in my Belly,” an artistically insignificant work, became a hot item. The Museum of Modern Art bought it for its permanent collection, the New Museum put it on display in its lobby and the artist’s New York gallery started promoting the work like crazy.

Now Arnold Lehman has snagged the entire exhibition for an outerborough run. Of course, he hopes the controversy will come to town, too: Nothing sells liberal superiority better than the free publicity of a Christian backlash.

That’s true even if you are a public institution trying to enrage part of your constituency to sell yourself to another.

Readers responses here.

Hi Charlie.

Storefront Gallery in the News

Storefront, the essential Bushwick gallery that featured "The Joe Bonham Project: An Exhibition curated by James Panero," will stay in Bushwick after a change in ownership. From The New York Observer:

After a two-year run, the Storefront gallery, on 16 Wilson Avenue, will close its doors on Dec. 18, Benjamin Sutton reports in L Magazine.

Partners Jason Andrew and Deborah Brown are parting ways. Ms. Brown has signed a new two-year lease for the space, and will operate it under the name Storefront Bushwick, while Mr. Andrew will continue to operate his Norte Maar nonprofit, which organizes interdisciplinary art projects.

Storefront hosted an impressive, varied range of exhibitions, including groups shows curated by artists Jules de Balincourt and William Powhida and writers James Panero and Hrag Vartanian, as well as a memorable one-person show by Greg Kwiatek.

Read the entire news story here.

Tom Evans at Sideshow Gallery

James writes:

I am delighted that the painter Tom Evans asked me to write the catalogue essay for his upcoming exhibition at Sideshow. A show of Tom's new work is a rare, must-see event in New York's alternative art circles. See you at the opening on November 19!

CATALOGUE ESSAY

TOM EVANS: New Paintings
by James Panero

Exhibition on view at Sideshow Gallery, Williamsburg, from November 19 through December 18, 2011.

Opening Saturday, November 19, 6-9pm.

“Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretenses to foretell events”
--Jonathan Swift

Somewhere out in deep space is Tom Evans. This master of abstraction circulates through the art world in a long twelve-to-fifteen year orbit. That’s more than enough time for everyone to forget who he was and what he can do. I rather admire this quality in him.

Of course, Tom never really disappears, but he seems particularly skilled at receding from public view. He still attends the gallery openings of his many friends in the New York art community. In particular he stays close to the abstract painters who came of age with him downtown in the 1970s. But he never reveals all that much when you run into him. A few portentous remarks, which don’t really register at the time, might emanate from behind his beard.

Online, he is no different. Tom has no Internet presence. A Google search for “Tom Evans artist” will pull up a different Tom Evans who also happens to be from Minnesota. In an age when most artists have become their own pitchmen and social-media gadflies, Tom has only recently upgraded to a hand-cut business card. Wherever he is, he appears blissfully detached from the hustle of a career.

Instead Tom lets the studio determine his progress. He never got the memo that painting is dead, or that art should be theoretical, or that you need to sound good to sell work. I doubt he realizes art is supposed to be a joke. Instead what you get with Tom is an artist who never stopped processing the ways to make a painting. He works diligently in the same live-work studio in Tribeca he has occupied with his family since the 1970s.

Tom’s drawn-out absences give his periodic reappearances their excitement. He stays away so that we will be all the more dazzled by the emergence of his latest work, perfected through years in the studio. Tom has operated this way since he burst onto the scene forty years ago with shimmering, frightening metallic scrims created through a self-invented process of pleating canvas on the studio floor. “The effect is both lustrous and dour, a slightly toxic variation on the modernist monochrome” wrote Roberta Smith in the The New York Times, when these works made a critically praised reappearance a few years back.

After departing from this truly toxic medium, Tom reappeared with abstractions of dense, packed gestures in which fugitive images float in and out of view. Some time later, out came an entirely different mode: paintings of outlandish carnival figures with desultory dental hygiene. That work promptly ended up in the New Museum.

Whenever Tom comes back around with new work, his paintings crack open the sky with the brilliance of a comet. His latest abstractions may be the boldest work to date. “I really have to make paintings that will punch people in the face,” he confides in me as we review his new work in the studio.

These latest creations are the products of a lifetime of pushing and pulling and punching with paint. They appear elemental: an alchemy of fire and ice and volatile chemicals. They present for our interpretation embryonic images of faces, animals, and volcanic islands. “They need to be loose, vibrant, in a state of flux,” Tom explains. “They need to look like something in perpetual movement.” These painterly dynamics do not come by chance. “There’s no irony in the paintings I’ve done,” Tom concludes. After seeing his work radiate like flaming bolts from heaven, I have no doubt he’s serious.