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Gallery Chronicle (March)


Locks Gallery, Philadelphia. All images by James Panero

THE NEW CRITERION
March 2013

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

A survey of the Philadelphia art scene: On “Sarah Sze” at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, “In Daylight: Small Paintings” at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, “Mia Rosenthal: A Little Bit Every Day” at Gallery Joe, Philadelphia, and “Yeesookyung: The Meaning of Time” at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

 Artists are a swarming species. There’s a reason why, a century ago in Montparnasse, the main studio building was called La Ruche, or “The Beehive.” While great art can, of course, emerge in isolation, more often it comes out of hives of activity—dense, furious places, usually frightening to outsiders, that must be surrounded by just the right kind of environment. And for several generations, it is safe to say, the largest swarm has settled in New York. Certainly, from time to time, the actual location of its hive has moved—from Tenth Street, to Spring Street, to the East Village, to Williamsburg and Bushwick. But since the 1950s, the living arts have fed off the same citywide ecosystem.

Which goes to show you how unpredictable artistic swarms can be. New York has always been a city of both nectar and insecticide. No other place may be so sweet to artists while at the same time striving to kill them off—its environment rich in resources but unsentimental towards artists’ habits and needs. Of course, particularly harsh circumstances may account for the tenacity of art in New York. The arts have thrived despite, not because of, what New York offers.

This is not to suggest the swarm is ever stable; great art is a fragile product. The buzz on the ground only tells us so much about the health of the hive, and swarms move in unpredictable ways. A few distant bees may just be out for a long day, or they may end up relocating the whole hive—La Ruche, au revoir.

In New York, the talk has always been, Where to? How much longer? What’s next? The city’s imminent artistic collapse is a perennial topic of conversation. So far, the artists have largely stayed within city lines, even as they have moved to its outer limits. But a handful of busy bees have been going even farther afield—up to the country where they nest in the eaves of barn studios, or off to municipalities with exotic names like Hoboken.

To put the city of Philadelphia in this final category may be as New York–centric as it comes. Philly was an art town before New York had a canvas to paint on. Founded in 1805, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts remains America’s oldest art academy and museum. Its singular headquarters, designed by Frank Furness in the 1870s, continues to be a hive of activity. Its best-known student and teacher, Thomas Eakins, may be the single greatest painter in American history.

With grand boulevards cutting broad sightlines through tight city streets, Philly has had the cultural ambitions of imperial France. Philadelphia’s City Hall is a cacophony of Second Empire striving and is said to be the tallest masonry building in the world—a reason that, through gross tonnage, it has escaped the wrecking ball. The city has also long placed the arts and sciences, for better or worse, at the heart of its civic identity (and municipal meddling). The Philadelphia Museum of Art, one of the greatest encyclopedic museums to come out of the nineteenth century, now looks down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at the city’s latest (and, to some, most infamous) artistic acquisition: the relocated Barnes Foundation.

Philadelphia’s centralized cultural outreach, now called Visit Philadelphia, is today the envy of all museum towns—and a convincing one at that. So this past month, I took this column to Philadelphia (meaning I must pass over the latest New York appearances by Loren Munk at Freight + Volume, Austin Thomas at Hansel & Gretel, and Deborah Brown at Lesley Heller—not that you should.)

I never intended the “Gallery Chronicle” to be soley about New York, after all, but it goes where I go, and most months I travel no farther than a New York City subway ride. As the vibrancy of art in New York has been pushed to the margins, with an alternative scene now flourishing in the outer boroughs, Philly is sometimes talked about as the “sixth borough” for its ability to offer artist-friendly space, at artist-friendly prices, in a city that trumpets its artistic infrastructure. I’m sure Philadelphians don’t think of themselves that way, but it helps us New Yorkers to see the world as an extension of our streets rather than as unique places. There’s even a website, called extendny.com, that will lay the Manhattan grid over the entire globe and calculate every avenue and cross-street.

I should say here that my weekend survey of Philadelphia’s gallery scene was anything but scientific. With only a general sense of where to go, I found myself sounding the social-media siren the morning of my arrival. Fortunately, in what I gather is called “crowdsourcing,” the recommendations came pouring back in. The Brooklyn-based painter and curator Paul Behnke, who lived for several years in Philadelphia, was particularly insightful. I also found online resources such as theartblog.org to offer an excellent guide to the city’s contemporary highlights. Unfortunately, from the moment of my arrival, which was the first weekend in February, I came to understand that I had come at somewhat the wrong time. Philly’s gallery scene is coordinated to such an extent that almost all its shows open on the same “first Friday” of the month—and I was there on the last Saturday.


Sarah Sze at Fabric Workshop

That means I never made it to some highly touted spots, such as The Icebox Project Space in the Crane Arts building. My regrets also go out to Fjord, another space in Fishtown. I did see the Fabric Workshop, thanks to a suggestion by the fabric artist Brece Honeycutt, and I’m glad I did. The current installation by Sarah Sze, who was an artist in residence, might have little to do with fabric but seemed to employ just about every other material—newspapers, stones, ceramic particles—to build up and break off systems of significance.1

Here an entire floor is filled with boulders that are really (for the most part) hollow sculptures covered in digital mylar printouts of rocky moss-covered textures. What did it mean? I didn’t really care, because the technique alone was so intriguing and the sense of it so unnerving, with massive forms that weighed almost nothing.


Grizzly Grizzly

Another curious space I passed through was a grimy gallery building at 319A North 11th Street, which I dub “Little Bushwick,” home to such artfully named startups and cooperative spaces as Vox Populi, Marginal Utility, Grizzly Grizzly, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid. I’m sorry TSA wasn’t open, since its exhibition of molded sculptures by Benjamin White looked promising. What I saw at Vox Populi left me underwhelmed, while Grizzly Grizzly’s white cave of oddities by Trevor Amery, sculptural work of mirrors and plaster (I think) “that questions our relationship to discreet art objects and challenges our role as passive art viewers,” as a press release said, left me scratching my thick bear head. I did respect the fact that the gallerist in attendance had no chair and had to sit with a laptop on the floor.


Installation view at Larry Becker

My visit to Larry Becker Contemporary Art in Philadelphia’s Old City was a knockout—in the sense that once I walked in, and got wrapped in conversation with its co-founders Larry Becker and Heidi Nivling, it was several hours before I regained my senses to move on. The gallery, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in February, reflects the city’s do-it-yourself art scene at its best. Becker and Nivling met as students at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art and decided to return after graduate studies, buying a small factory building with a ground-floor exhibition space. Here their program has focused on serious, reductive painting, the kind of labor-intensive studio practice that seems right at home in the painted, scraped back, and painted-over environment of Old City.


Detail of Steve Baris work at Pentimenti

On view through March 15, Becker has brought together nine such painters for an exhibition called “In Daylight.”2 With work by Eve Aschheim, Karen Baumeister, Anna Bogatin, Dove Bradshaw, Max Cole, Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Martha Groome, Kazimira Rachfal, Merrill Wagner—some new, many returning—the exhibition offers an excellent overview of what this gallery is about. With mostly small, meditative work, the exhibition draws extra attention to the subtleties of light on paint, showing at least one work by each artist in the front window. (Behind the desk at the nearby Pentimenti gallery, I stumbled upon an interesting painting by Steve Baris—accompanied by the artist himself—that worked with many of these same ideas.)


Portrait of Eadweard Muybridge at Gallery Joe

I found something similar at Gallery Joe, another Old City space that came recommended and which opened the doors of its current exhibition early for me. Gallery Joe’s focus is works on paper, and Mia Rosenthal, now on view, offers the kind of paper-working I find extra enjoyable.3

Part draftsmanship, part note-taking, in “A Little Bit Every Day” Rosenthal reprocesses the furtive images of online landscapes back into items of craft. She draws “portraits” of people’s laptops and smart-phone screens. She layers pictogram over pictogram of the world’s evolving, spiraling species, including tiny handwritten labels, in extremely dense drawings such as Life on Earth (2013). She also makes composite sketches of online image searches. Her Google Portrait of Eadweard Muybridge (2013) here works best, as Muybridge’s famous stop-frame photography gets repeated over and over in search results, which Rosenthal freezes in pencil and ink.


Detail of Yeesookyung sculpture at Locks

No tour of Philadelphia’s gallery scene would be complete without a visit to Locks, founded in 1968, and by far the city’s largest (only?) blue-chip international gallery. The building itself is stunning—a historic, neoclassical facade overlooking Philly’s Washington Square Park, leading onto multiple floors of spare, loft-like space. Again, my timing here could have been better. An exhibition of paintings by Nancy Graves was just coming down, while all that was left of an installation by Rob Wynne were hundreds of nails in the wall. At the same time, the current Robert Rauschenberg exhibition, focusing on a worldwide tour he made in the 1980s called the “Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange,” was still in the shipping containers.

I did, however, get a glimpse of its other current show, by the Korean artist Yeesookyung.4 There’s undoubtedly a style of international art that takes some local craft, often an expensive one, and recasts it through a contemporary pop aesthetic. Yeesookyung’s sculptures made from shards of oriental pottery, held together with gold, would seem to fit in this category. But Yee’s sculptures, crafted from imperfect, cast-off fragments of contemporary Joseon Dynasty–style porcelain and Goryeo Dynasty–style celadon, transcend this obvious framework with hauntingly ephemeral, dynamic, bubbling forms. To borrow a phrase once reserved for Duchamp’sNude Descending a Staircase (now another Philly resident), Yee’s sculptures resemble an explosion in a teacup factory.

If I were to single out one factor that seemed to be missing from most of these Philadelphia exhibitions, it would be the pressure of the market that one feels in New York. Larry Becker and Heidi Nivling, after all, call themselves gallerists, not dealers: Their focus is on showing art, not selling from a back room. The dominant style of art in Philadelphia, Nivling says, is no style. With less of an imperative to follow the trends, Philadelphia’s artists and dealers have a greater freedom to show what they like. Taken together with its great museums and peerless orchestra, the arts of Philadelphia certainly reverse those old W. C. Fields jokes that have been made at the city’s expense. From here on out, second prize is a week in Philadelphia, and first prize is two.

1 “Sarah Sze” opened at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, on December 13, 2013, and remains on view through April 6, 2014.

2 “In Daylight: Small Paintings” opened at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, on December 28, 2013 and remains on view through March 15, 2014.

3 “Mia Rosenthal: A Little Bit Every Day” opened at Gallery Joe, Philadelphia, on February 7 and remains on view through March 22, 2014.

4 “Yeesookyung: The Meaning of Time” opened at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, on February 7 and remains on view through March 15, 2014. 

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The Miami Fairs

THE NEW CRITERION
January 2014

The Miami Fairs
by James Panero

When Art Basel brought its art-fair franchise to Miami Beach in 2002, the worlds of sand, spectacle, and real-estate speculation turned out for a new pagan rite celebrating contemporary art’s tumescent wrongs. Art Basel’s orgy of art in the first week of December each year quickly came to embody the excesses of the contemporary market. It also attracted a hedonistic class of fractional-jet-owning migrants to feed off the fury. “They were a wriggling, slithering, writhing, squiggling, raveling, wrestling swarm of maggots rooting over and under one another in a heedless, literally headless, frenzy to get at the dead meat,” writes Tom Wolfe, inBack to Blood, of the billionaires queuing up outside Entrance Hall D of the Miami Beach Convention Center. Elevated in this “riot of cocktail receptions, dinner parties, after-parties, covert cocaine huddles,” and “inflamed catting,” as Wolfe calls it, the valueless became the vaunted under the December Miami sun. Through the toxic shock of the new, the revelers of Art Basel danced over the past, including Miami’s own regional culture, in pursuit of some freshly body-waxed avant-garde.

After years of avoiding it, this past month I packed up the Ray-Bans and went to see it for myself. What I discovered is that Art Basel has a flipside—a seemly underside, even, to the vapid sheen. Granted, I arrived once the doors had already opened. This meant Miami was already over as far as the A-listers were concerned, and Larry Gagosian had already been quoted calling the whole affair a “social rat fuck.” After two days of touring every square inch of Convention Center floor, a half-dozen satellite fairs, a handful of private collections, and the new Pérez Art Museum Miami, peeking out beneath the decadence, I must report, were glimmers of decorum. That’s right: behind the veil of immodesty that is Art Basel Miami Beach there existed a thin thread of respectability, high-mindedness, and serious art.


Jack Pierson’s MOTHERFUCKER at Richard Gray Gallery at Art Basel (all photos by James Panero)

Even the chthonic maw of the Art Basel fair itself had not been so thoroughly scrubbed of sobriety. In that golden grid that turns Miami’s aging Convention Center floor into the Taj Mahal of art viewing, where billions of dollars of work are divided among the cubbies of some 250 international galleries, one could find art’s best and worst battling it out in a Manichean struggle over what piece made for the best selfie. (This year’s winner was Jeff Koons’s elephant ornament and tinfoil Easter egg at Gagosian; honorable mention went to Jack Pierson’s MOTHERFUCKER sign at Richard Gray Gallery.)


Helly Nahmad Gallery at Art Basel

To be sure, Art Basel wasted little time turning up the sleaze by positioning the Helly Nahmad Gallery by the front door. Last November, after an extensive investigation by the Manhattan U.S. attorney, the gallery’s playboy owner pleaded guilty to running a high stakes gambling ring with ties to Hollywood celebrities and the Russian mob. By selecting him for the prime spot, Art Basel asked, “Will that be cash, credit, or poker chips for your Miró?”


Walter Pach, The Wall of the City (1912) and Sunday Night (1916) at Francis M. Naumann at Art Basel

Yet there just down the first aisle to the right was Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, with a booth that told a concise history of modern art through a handful of brilliant pairings. On one side was a landscape by Walter Pach,The Wall of the City (1912), that had appeared in the 1913 Armory Show. Naumann unearthed it from a collection in Greece, and the painting made a reappearance in “The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show” at the Montclair Art Museum last year. Next to it was Pach’s abstract compositionSunday Night of 1916—a work that spoke to the jump many American artists made in the face of the Armory’s Europeans, and not always successfully. Following up on the theme, Naumann was offering his reprint of a charming 1913 illustrated book called The Cubies’ ABC that attempted to explain The Armory Show in nursery rhyme. (For $35, I bought one; perhaps the least expensive purchase ever made at Art Basel.) Rounding out the booth, Naumann also offered a focused show of Man Ray as printmaker.

Across the aisle, David Nolan Gallery paired a series of Mel Kendrick maquettes with the artist’s recent extra-large works on paper. For years Kendrick has brought a remarkable internal logic to his sculptures, carving a constructivist nugget out of a cube base and placing one on top of the other, with the positive and negative volumes equally reflected in the final work. When Kendrick scaled these up in striped cement for Madison Square Park in 2009, the success of the approach was a shot in the arm for rigorous sculpture. What can get lost in the volumetric shapes, however, are the abstracted forms Kendrick draws into them. At Nolan, through the rich textures of his works on paper, created by pressing forms into spongy pulp at high pressure, Kendrick brought his abstractions back to the surface with a kind of sculpture in relief.

Other smart presentations at Art Basel included Mary Boone, with the mosaic paintings of Joe Zucker next to the diagrams of Peter Halley and theColored Vases of Ai Weiwei; Landau Fine Art, which converted its booth into an intimate salon of modern masters; Acquavella, with the latest from Wayne Thiebaud; Michael Rosenfeld, with the unsung painters Charmion von Wiegand and Alma Thomas; and Hirschl & Adler, with the outsider artist James Edward Deeds and the transcendental painter Emil Bisttram. The visual strength of each of these presentations demonstrated how the organizers behind Art Basel wanted more than spectacle out of their exhibitors. Art Basel’s twenty-five shows within shows, called “Kabinetts,” even highlighted galleries that brought an extra level of curatorial intelligence to the floor. Deeds, Kendrick, and Man Ray were each part of this program that helped to turn the fair into more than a three-billion-dollar tag sale.


A piece of wall from Red Hook with Banksy's heart-balloon painting at Art Miami

The same cannot be said for Art Miami, the largest of Art Basel’s independent “satellite fairs,” which put down its catering tent back across Biscayne Bay in Midtown. Art Miami predates Art Basel’s arrival by over a decade but felt thoroughly B-side, even if it seemed more packed than the Convention Center. While Art Basel could make bad art look good, Art Miami made good art look bad, with tight, noisy aisles that were like a carnival midway. In the middle of one of them was the heart-balloon painting by the graffiti artist Banksy. Cut from its original location, it can now be yours along with a large chunk of Red Hook wall. Nevertheless, past the Maserati VIP lounge (where VIP status earned you a free can of Perrier), there was a beautiful Helen Frankenthaler (Red Shift from 1990) at James Barron Art and other interesting work at Context, the fair’s recent addition for mid-career artists, including abstractions by Bushwick-based Paul Behnke at Markel Fine Arts.


Color studies updated by Richard Garrison at Robert Henry Contemporary at Aqua

With a fair on every corner, much of the conversation in Miami revolves around what to see, what you’ve seen, and what you missed. I had to forego the Scope, Pulse, and Nada fairs, and only popped my head into something called Red Dot, which resembled a foreclosed Grand Union. I did spend some time at a fair called Aqua, in a (former?) fleabag hotel on Collins Avenue. Save for the excellent Robert Henry Contemporary, with its superb color studies by Richard Garrison, the less said about this, the better.


Dustin Yellin at Richard Heller at Miami Project

Miami Project, a fair out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn enjoying its second year in Miami and located in an undistinguished tent down the block from Art Miami, showed some of the best work anywhere. Dedicated to U.S. galleries with a “serious commitment to important living artists” or “extensive involvement with remarkable estates,” Miami Project lived up to its claims. After seeing Dustin Yellin’s apocalyptic vision, which was like John Martin’s The Deluge encased in glass, at Phong Bui’s magisterial exhibition “Surviving Sandy,” I was excited for Yellin’s smaller works at Richard Heller Gallery. A large Chuck Webster from his recent show at Betty Cuningham made an appearance at Steven Zevitas. The geometric abstractions of Devin Powers—an artist to watch—looked great at Lesley Heller. Margaret Thatcher Projects had exquisite colored sculptures by Heidi Spector. And Tibor de Nagy, new to Miami, brought must-have paintings by Shirley Jaffe and Nell Blaine. The one sour note emanated from the Joshua Liner Gallery. Here the artist David Ellis had rigged up a typewriter and a box of bottles to play the tune from Grandmaster Flash’s rap classic “The Message,” which could be heard throughout the fair tent. The programming that went into this work was undoubtedly ingenious, and several exhibitors told me they wanted to buy it so they could smash it to bits.


Rachel Beach at Blackston at Untitled

Another recent arrival, certainly the most brilliantly rethought fair in Miami, is called Untitled. Here’s an idea: Since Miami Beach has, you know, a beach, why not create a fair that looks out on more than a parking lot? So last year Untitled designed a tent that could go right on the beach, with translucent panels (such as we’ve seen at Frieze New York) that wash the exhibitors in just the right amount of natural light. Unlike the rat races at other fairs, Untitled had a blissed-out vibe, with a patio overlooking the sea. Maybe that’s a bad thing when it comes to art sales, in the way that casinos don’t like windows. Still, the change was refreshing, and the art on display reflected a younger, alternative spirit. Bushwick’s Microscope Gallery had “Time Capsules” by Amos Poe—newspapers covered in colored duct tape from 2006 and 2007—which turned the news cycle into haunting geometric collages. Auxiliary Projects, another Bushwick venue, featured a flat file full of casual drawings of the mundane by Adam Thompson. Todd Kelly’s plaid abstractions at Asya Geisberg had a similarly relaxed feel, even as they were composed of obsessive mark-making. The bloggers at Art F City were turned fair exhibitors with Tumblr-inspired work. And (much like Frieze) sculpture looked especially good in Untitled’s ambient light. Alois Kronschlaeger had an eye-poking metal grid at Site:Lab punching through the floor to the white sand beneath. Blackston also featured the wonderful work of Rachael Beach—part painted sculptures, part sculptural paintings—that plays with our sense of surface and volume.


Clemente Padin from the Sackner Archive & Hibiscus (1943) by Cuban modernist Amelia Pelaez at PAMM

Art fairs weren’t the only game in town. Miami uses Art Basel to show off its museums and private collections. This past December, the formerly Young British Artist Tracey Emin—who is like a U.K. boy band that can never quite cross over to the U.S. market—was making a go at her first American museum exhibition at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art. I also found the private Margulies, Rubell, and Pérez collections intriguing. Sorry . . . I misspoke there. Pérez is now a public obligation, after Jorge M. Pérez, the “Donald Trump of the tropics” (according toTime), bought off the public Miami Art Museum for $40 million in “cash and art,” even as Miami-Dade taxpayers floated a bond of $100 million for the project. For less than it should cost to get the naming rights on a bathroom, Pérez got the whole Pérez Art Museum Miami, which opened over Basel week in a new Renzo-Piano-on-steroids facility designed by Herzog & de Meuron. More than the name, the PAMM must now act as custodians for Perez’s dreary personal collection, which casts the entire museum in the pall of identity politics. (What is it with these capitalist dogs and the art of the oppressed?) It should be said that a few (non-Pérez) side exhibitions here were excellent: “Amelia Peláez: The Craft of Modernity” brought a splendid Cuban painter to light, and a room of printed work from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry was remarkable. It was also good to see Ai Weiwei’s touring retrospective brought down from the Hirschhorn. Yet until taxpayers float another bond to buy back their museum, the scandal of the Perez assures us that even if Miami at times seems serious about culture, an orgy of consumption is never far from view.

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Miami in 140 words or less

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Last week I visited Art Basel Miami Beach, its surrounding satellite fairs, and some of Miami's public and private collections. My tour included Art Basel at the Miami Convention Center, the satellite fairs Untitled, Art Miami, Context, Miami Project, Red Dot, and Aqua, the Rubell and Margulies collections, and the Perez Art Museum Miami. My full report will appear in the upcoming January issue of The New Criterion. In the meantime, here is an informal 140-character glimpse of what I saw.

For this last link, the artist persona known as Grossmalerman, playing party photographer, called me "an inexplicably intriguing subject." Something for the blurb file! Full report here.

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