On the north-west corner of Trafalger Square in London lies a structure simply coined the Fourth Plinth. Originally designed in 1841 by Sir Charles Barry, the massive pedestal was intended to display an equestrian statue, but the sculpture was never finished due to a lack of funds. Since the late nineties, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts has commissioned several sculptural works for the Fourth Plinth including works from Marc Quinn to Rachel Whiteread.

Last summer, British artist Antony Gormley was also invited to complete a project utilizing the Fourth Plinth. Instead of creating a static sculptural form to sit elevated on a pedestal before the city, the artist took a risky move to randomly invite 2,400 people to occupy the structure for a period of one hour, twenty four hours a day for a total of 100 days. Titled One & Other, the pieced allowed each person that inhabited the plinth to become the work of art,  leveling any hierarchy that defines who should be represented in a work of art. Each attendee occupied the structure alone, but was allowed to do anything they like for the hour, providing that it is legal in the UK.

For a brief period, participants could address the world at large and speak to any issue that is of concern to them.  Certainly a momentary equality of voice doesn’t exactly elicit the illusions of grandeur that are usually associated with political or societal utopias, but the ability to speak openly to an audience about an idea or issue that you are invested in without consequence is certainly the first step to identifying a common ideal. To further extend the impact and reach of each participants voice, every minute of the 100 day project was streamed live over the internet and then archived for indefinite public access.

However, Gormley’s work isn’t just interested in the idea of or struggle for utopia in relation to society, politics or even a specific place. Most often the work quietly references the notion of balance and harmony as a state of being. Gormley’s training in archaeology, anthropology and art history at Cambridge University, mixed with years of practice with Buddhist meditation in India and Sri Lanka has positioned him in a unique place to express the experience of inner balance to a greater audience though the language of visual art. When describing the material usage for the majority of his figurative sculptures, the artist will state air as a fundamental material. This is because Gormley is as interested in the inner ’space’ of his forms as he is the ‘outer space’ that the form itself occupies.

For his first US public art project, the artist is presenting Event Horizon, a current project that includes 31 life-sized figures cast in iron and bronze modeled form the artist’s own body and now populate Madison Square Park and rooftops throughout New York’s Flatiron District. In an area that is vibrant, hectic and anything but still and quiet, these forms serve as a reminder of the balance and utopia that can be obtained inwardly even in the most chaotic of locations. However, this reminder often happens in an abrupt and oddly irritating way. In a recent interview with the New York Times, the artist addressed this notion stating, “You could almost say the insertion of the sculpture is like the insertion of acupuncture needles within a collective body. And seeing how the body as a whole reacts to the presence of this irritation is very much the point.”

If the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh keeps putting on shows like Twisted Pair: Marcel Duchamp/Andy Warhol then maybe the ol’ Burgh deserves a place on the official Dia art pilgrimage map, along with James Turrell’s Roden Crater in Arizona and Walter De Maria’s New Mexican Lightning Field.  Curated by longtime Warhol archivist Matt Wrbican, Twisted Pair is smart, funny and long overdue. Where many curators employ obscure art theory in attempts to somehow prove that what they are doing is true, Wrbican actually uses the archive. This makes for a much more grounded take on these artists, which is exactly what they need after decades of art world deification.

This show reminds us that before all of the flashbulbs, fame and auction numbers, Andy Warhol was just another young New York artist, albeit a very promising one. It also accurately depicts Duchamp as being fairly aware of what young artists were up to, despite his status as art world legend. He was more accessible as a chess playing jokester than a solitary genius.

Andy Warhol, Oxidation, 1978. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917/1964.

There are some terrific pairings in this show, like Warhol’s Oxidation paintings next to Duchamp’s Urinal. There are also a few rare finds like Warhol’s The Lord Gave Me My Face But I Can Pick My Own Nose, 1948 and Duchamp’s Door at 11 Rue Larrey Photographic Enlargement, 1964. But some of the best stuff on view are the letters and archival material that might truly feel sacred to fans of either artist. Usually ephemera bores me to tears but here I was fascinated to see a butcher-paper test print for one of Warhol’s Shadows hanging above a case full of Duchamp’s optical illusion machines.

Among the qualities that Warhol and Duchamp share are a desire to shock, a taste for celebrity, a belief in the everyday object, a penchant for drag, and a strong voyeuristic impulse.  Duchamp’s groundbreaking idea of the readymade looms larger than any other in the 20^th century and no one did more with it than Warhol.  Warhol understood that advertisements, consumer objects, newspaper photos, the Empire State Building, and people themselves were all up for grabs as objects d’art. If Duchamp’s Bottle Rack looks rather pedestrian next to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, it’s because Warhol never fully committed to the anti-retinal to the same degree that Duchamp did.

Andy Warhol, The Lord Gave Me My Face But I Can Pick My Own Nose, 1948, Collection Paul Warhola Family.

This show is so effective in pointing out connections between these two artists that it is tempting to see them as the same creative force formed by two separate eras. However, their differences are just as striking as their similarities. Duchamp embodied an authentic lackadaisical attitude that Warhol could only feign. With a work ethic that would make his Pittsburghian forebears proud, Warhol called his studio the Factory and constantly cranked out product.  Duchamp let large amounts of time, not to mention dust, seep into his works before finishing them. Warhol was a worldwide sensation while Duchamp only appealed to art-nerds. These days it is impossible to imagine any appropriation art, assemblage, or hip art collective like the Paris-based Claire Fontaine without these two artists – they are so influential that we are almost tired of them.

My friends in Pittsburgh roll their eyes when I over-praise their city’s magnificent bridges, or go on about how the PPG Building is like the best Banks Violette sculpture ever. And yes, I’ve been caught on Greenpoint Avenue in Brooklyn wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball hat.  But hometown bias aside, this show is worth traveling for.

On the other hand, Twisted Pair is so essentially New York that its next destination really should be the Whitney, but I doubt this will happen.  If a real sense of what these artists were like intrigues you, and the thought of seeing relics pertaining to their lives and work gets you all fluttery, then a trip to Pittsburgh is a must. After the show, indulge yourself with a little urban exploration. Vacant, post-industrial downtown Pittsburgh might be the closest thing to 60s SoHo to be found.

Andreas Templin’s multi-dimensional body of work includes sculpture, video, installation, photography, and urban interventions. His diverse practice is guided by a critical approach to the making of art; each work is the outcome of an insightful process that examines culture from a philosophical point of view. As the artist states, “The adult individual consumer is faced with the creative possibility of reinventing his identity each day, with the wide variety of enhancement products now available for use. The artist, too, must move with the times, and avoid being a fixed label, but use everything available to him.”

Templin’s technically simplistic, and somewhat disconcerting, video work, As if to nothing (9:54), consists of the constant display of earth’s qualitative statistical data, culled from governmental sources, accompanied by a recording of Anton Bruckner’s 7th Symphony. The emotional depth of the audio heightens the impact and immediacy of the dreary data display. Selected statistics include a tally of the world’s population, military expenditures, infectious diseases, and species extinct. The environmental data set “Ocean Oil Spills (tons)” holds particular poignancy in our current cultural moment.

This type of cultural insight, and perhaps critique, appears in Templin’s vinyl record album, Andreas Templin plays Bach, a recording of the artist whistling Bach throughout the city streets. This more playful form of artistic commentary was born out of the artist’s distaste with the “clean and highly competitive virtuoso-recordings” that exist of the German composer, and was recorded in the red light district of Amsterdam. The album cover was created by classical music photographer Felix Broede.

Templin, who lives and works in Berlin, is currently participating in the group show Consume at Exit Art in New York. The exhibition, which is a project of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics), investigates world food production, consummation, distribution, and waste. Consume will remain on view until August 28th.

At six o’clock on Saturday evening in SoHo, Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman made public their intent to fill the hole that Jeffrey Deitch’s trans-continental career move created in the world of New York art, which is no small undertaking. The two former directors of Deitch Projects opened a much anticipated new space at 104 Greene Street, aptly titled The Hole. The inaugural exhibition, Not Quite Open for Business, was directed by Taylor McKimens and showcases unfinished works by over twenty artists, including Nate Lowman and Rosson Crow.

When their originally planned exhibition fell through mere weeks before the scheduled opening, Grayson and Coleman decided to make the best of what others might deem an impossible situation. They solicited their artists to “Give us an incomplete piece…Give us a drawing that you just cant bring yourself to finish from your flat files. Put half your makeup on and give us most of a performance!” In a press release littered with intentional “typoos,” Grayson and Coleman clarify that this is not about the process of the artist, or the deliberate incompletion of work, but about “being caught with your pants down and your lipstick smudged and your armpits sweaty because you didn’t have time to take a shower before YOUR FIRST GALLERY SHOW.” A personal and self-deprecating tone replaced the more traditional formality of this document. The opening was a straightforward and unpretentious debut for Grayson and Coleman, making up in energy what it lacked in polish.

The unfinished theme pervades, and the space resembles a construction site overtaken by creatives. Painted scrap lumber, an industrial ladder, bare studs and unfinished sheetrock share the space with art. Works on paper are mounted with thumbtacks. A half painted logo contributes to the the display’s impromptu, work-in-progress quality, disarming the viewer and generating unlimited interest in future progress.

Not Quite Open for Business will remain on view until August 14th. As mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article written by Erica Orden, upcoming exhibitions include a solo show by Mat Brinkman and an installation by Kenny Scharf and the collective Dearraindrop. Other projects in the plans for The Hole include a book store in the back room of the gallery, Holey Books, and a dating service for artists, purportedly titled Hole Lotta Love. We’ll keep you posted.

This week, the Christian Marclay: Festival will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The exhibition celebrates many of the artist’s graphic scores for performance and will take the form of multiple daily performances by individual musicians and vocalists. The Whitney has pulled together some of country’s finest Avant-garde musicians to play more than a dozen of Marclay’s scores dated from 1985 to 2010. Some of the works to be performed include, ChalkBoard (2010), Covers (2007-10) and Screen Play (2005). Many of the pieces take the form of a physical art object produced from videos, photographs, found images, and readymade objects which are intended to elicit a musical response from the performers.

Christian Marclay, Screen Play, 2005. Courtesy the artist. © Christian Marclay

Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay is internationally known for his innovative artworks that explore the intersection of image and sound. Over the past several decades, the artist has combined performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video to create unique work that provides commentary on many aspects of contemporary culture, while continuing to push the boundaries of visual art and music. Marclay is often recognized as an early pioneer of turntablism, as he first began to use turntables and physically altered records as instruments for performances in the late 1970’s.

Festival begins this Thursday, July 1st with two pieces performed by Min Xiao-Fen and Elliot Sharp at 1pm and Ulrich Kieger at 2:30pm. The exhibition will continue through September 26, 2010.

If the come hither of May’s New York Gallery Week annoyed the crap out of you, then maybe KRATOS — ABOUT (IL)LEGITIMATE(D) POWER at Team Gallery has just the gravitas you’ve been seeking. Monochrome in execution and serious in tone, this Debbie Downer of a show stands in stark contrast to the group hugs that typically fill galleries’ summer schedules.

The show is dominated by the stultifying audio in Maja Bajević’s video which repeats the phrase, “How do you want to be governed” in deadpan monotone while a woman is mildly accosted by an unseen interrogator. The audio drove me crazy, but this show is about power and control so I suppose at some level annoyance is the point.  That being said, the works in KRATOS treat this subject matter rather flatly. For instance, I’d be much more interested in an extrapolation of what it is to identify with one’s captor rather than the less complex ideas of resistance and endurance that are on display in Bajević’s piece. Likewise, Gianni Motti’s I’m not on Facebook would be more interesting if perhaps he were. He might in fact want to socialize a bit.

Artur Żmijewski, Patricia, Yolanda, 2006 single channel video 16:50 color sound

Artur Żmijewski’s companion videos, Yolanda and Patricia, attempt to break down class structures by presenting the lives of two women on opposite ends of the social scale in a pared-down documentary style — a.k.a. it’s a snoozefest. Teresa Margolles’ work takes an even more blunt look at the intersection of class and fate. While working at a Mexico City morgue, she pulled shards of glass from the bodies of anonymous murder victims and inlayed them into pseudo-fancy jewelry. Her CSI approach to art making extended to last year’s Venice Biennale, where she hung blood stained tarps on the facade of the U.S Pavilion.  There, it might have been a poignant statement on the effect of U.S imperialist policies on developing nations, but here at Team, represented merely in photograph, the work lacks resonance. Furthermore, it hangs for sale in the same capitalist system it portends to critique.

Maria Eichhorn, Prohibited Imports, 2003/2008, black and white photography, 14 parts, 20 x 27.5 inches

A more effective conceptual hook is employed in Maria Eichhorn’s Prohibited Imports, in which she re-photographed pages from a Robert Mapplethorpe catalogue seized from her luggage by Japanese customs officials. Rather than confiscating the entire book, the officials inexplicably scratched out all the depictions of male genitalia, of which there were many. They were careful to stay within the outlines of the form and the effect is bewilderingly perverse. Maybe they should have just used fig leaves, because the ghost dicks they created are just as penile, if not more so, than the original images. The visual experience of Eichhorn’s work is at least as engaging as the idea behind it, which can’t be said for the rest of the work in this show. No matter how shocking or subversive an artist’s idea may be, it’s tough to move beyond a boring video or annoying sound byte.

If summer fun is what you’re looking for, stay away from KRATOS. But, If you’ve spent the past month bitching online about the superficiality of Bravo’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist”, this show might be your soul mate.

"Spell List (Resist Planar Alignment)," 2009. Marker, spray paint, and house paint on paper. 30 x 22"

Michael Tomeo: I’ve read that you use Dungeons & Dragons dice rolls to inform your compositions…how does this work?

Kadar Brock: It isn’t so much about the composition per se; it’s about determining an amount of marks. Each piece adopts a rule set from a D&D spell. These rules involve rolling a certain type of die a certain number of times, and the resultants determine how many of those zigzag marks the piece will get. That then determines the composition. But really the use of D&D is just a system or a set up. It takes away certain decisions from me and forces more onus on the mark making and paint handling to communicate things. It also sets up an analogy with abstraction – both essentially being belief systems and participatory experiences.

MT: This reminds me of how 60s artists like John Cage or Robert Rauchenberg would use the I Ching to create music or dance. I feel like the spiritual and Zen-influenced side of their work kind of got trampled by the onward march of minimalist sculpture. At the risk of sounding corny, does any spirituality from the spells influence your work? Are you into any thing like Jospeh Campell or the idea of the monomyth?

KB: Not corny at all – in fact incredibly spot on…this is what I’m getting at, while trying to co-opt/include self-criticism. It’s post-cynical romantic, i.e. incorporating and coming out on the other side of my doubts, while still maintaining and believing in this stuff I choose to call “other content” like the sublime, spiritual, romantic (essentially the lineage I find myself to be a part of). It’s about finding meaning and creating meaning. The I Ching is a set of rules too, and something that is given belief, given meaning, by the person playing by those rules or using those rules. That participation is a creative act. For me I’ve always felt that, and this really ties into Campbell, it’s my job/endeavor/whatever as an artist and human being to come up with my own sense of meaning for this life, to come up with what would be my own mode of myth. It’s the only way not to succumb to some other person’s story and the power that exerts over you, it’s also, at least for me, the only way to be sure that life is “fresh” or new to me.

I’m also very much into the spiritual connotations of spells and magic. My parents were hippies, I was raised all new age, and the reason I got into abstraction was because of its spiritual, metaphysical, and Gnostic underpinnings, and the relationship between that and my upbringing. I like the idea of abstract paintings being spells and being magical. I think using this set up, calling them spells etc. co-opts any cynicism I have about it and incorporates it, takes in my doubts and beliefs. It comes out on the other side with something.

"Combust," 2010. Marker, spray paint, and house paint on canvas (diptych). 72 x 96"

MT: About being a post cynical romantic, correct me if I’m wrong but it seems like you are taking up where Gen X left off or maybe it’s that you don’t have to follow their well-worn paths. To generalize, Gen X seemed to know more what it didn’t want to do rather than what it did. I’m thinking of John Cusak’s famous “I don’t want to buy anything, etc…” rant from Say Anything. You don’t have Gen X’s weighty sense of nostalgia/regret and you seem to combine some ideas from the literary sense of romance, like a belief in the supernatural, but your work is also firmly placed in the unsentimental present.  In other words, your work has feeling and you believe in things but you’re not like Lloyd Dobler standing with a boom box over his head in the rain, right?

KB: Yeah, I think I do believe in things. And that pretty much sums it up, I think I do… or better yet, I think about what I do believe in and challenge that, but as a means of clarifying all of it, not trying to get that nihilistic “I don’t want to do anything.” I have these moments of intensity. I have these things I relate to and feel moved by. And I see people in the past that talk about these same things, these same moments. So maybe it’s something other people relate to also. That said, maybe not everybody does, maybe some paintings ain’t gonna do shit for someone and they’ll be meaningless to them.

I think abstract painting really exists on a precipice of being meaningful and meaningless, and I really embrace that. For me the paintings are meaningful, but for someone else – nothing. Same like D&D – for someone invested in that system, someone putting into it and participating – wow! I read a study about how role-playing was able to cure someone’s social anxiety, and another one about how it cured someone’s depression. I also watched a documentary about a live action role playing community outside of Baltimore, and man, that game, that world, the characters these people played, gave their life a more pointed sense of purpose and meaning and worth. I mean, couldn’t you say by being this art maker I’m doing the same thing? I get to think and feel all these things that are incredibly important and crucial, and make all this stuff.

But yeah, for me, I am concerned with this romantic stuff. I had been taught to be cynical about it in school, to make fun of it, or use it winkingly. I’m over that though, but I also feel a responsibility to not just weep and bleed out a painting (in fact I think that’d be boring). It’s like how do I experience that moment of intensity, how do I talk about that moment with some self-awareness, that precipice of believing and feeling, while still giving into the feeling and the belief. And that in itself is another precipice between letting go (which I do in the act/action of painting), and staying self-conscious.

But to get back to your analogy, I think if I were going to be Cusak in the rain though, I’d be him in High Fidelity, figuring out relationships and feeling some shit.

"Disintegrate," 2009-10. Spray paint, house paint, and pigment dispersion on canvas (diptych). 96 x 144" (courtesy private collection)

MT: What I like is that even though you’ve poured a lot of energy into a painting, you acknowledge that someone looking at it just might not get it, and that’s ok. I don’t think you’d ever be offended by a reading of your work that might not match your intentions…

KB: Not exactly, but I’m definitely not offended if people don’t respond to it. Everyone is different, and that’s ok. Some people will get into it and others won’t and that’s fine. I do want the people into it though to get into what I’m into, and to experience that in someway. And if their interpretation is a little different, all the better, because then they’re participating more and making it more their own, which in the end, I think is more meaningful and will be more significant to them.

MT: When did you start to fully engage with myth? Did that have anything to do with a tendency toward reduction and the monochrome I’ve noticed in recent works?

KB: You know, I’m not totally sure when it started. I’ve really always been interested in that mode of thinking and relating. I mean, I’ve always thought, since like high school, that it was my job to come up with my own belief system or synthesis of belief systems in order to relate to the world in a more direct and meaningful way. I mean if you want to look at it one way, I would always draw comic book characters and fantasy characters when I was a kid – those subjects are rife with mythological content.  I was reading myths in college too and making some drawings related to them – the subjects ranged from Siegfried in the Nieblungenlied to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And I’ve always been fascinated by the myths I related to about being an artist – ideas of heroes and shamans, the magic of the painting practice and inherent communication that happens in the act of painting. The possibility to talk about things words can’t really touch on. The ability to get all this complexity of thought and feeling into on object/moment, that then can unfold and change before someone.

The shift towards monochromatic work came from wanting to challenge my belief in the myth of painting’s inherent communicative qualities and wanting to put as much pressure on my gesture/mark making as the touchstone of communicating subjective content. So yeah, it definitely relates to a myth I believe in and want to investigate, challenge, and potentially validate.

MT: Although my experience is limited, what I always liked about D&D is that despite its endless volumes of rules, the nuance of the game lies in the dungeon master’s discretionary or even improvisational application of them. Does improvisation play a role in your current work?

KB: It’s really funny, Michael, I’ve actually never played either! I wish I had, and actually would still like to now (if there’s anyone out there who’d be into it, email me). But yeah, there’s a lot of freedom in the framework – and again, it really comes down to a belief system and participating, and internalizing and making it one’s own.

In regards to the painting though, I think improvisation is everything in the work. I mean that’s where all the feeling is going to come from, all the wet “other” content. How a piece gets folded, what sort of spray/marker/house paint/other paint combination is used, how many drips, footprints, scratches, whatever, are all in the moment.  The whole system thing is just that, a system, a box, a set up, so I can have as much freedom in the act of painting as possible. If I know what I’m painting, have all these limitations, the only place for the stuff I want to come through is in improvisation in the action of making it.

- Kadar Brock’s work can currently be seen in Substance Abuse, curated by Colin Heurter, at Leo Koenig Projekte, up through July 3rd, and in In.flec.tion at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art through July 26th. Conjuring and Dispelling, a solo show at Motus Fort, Tokyo, Japan, opens on June 18th.

Arena #10 (Dogs) (1990) Stuffed animals on afghan, 11.5 x 123 x 32 inches.

These seven works, all created in 1990, puncture the mythic preciousness for which stuffed animals and handmade baby blankets are renown.  Generally, cloth is used by artists for its connection to the body and domesticity, and Kelley manages to bring these associations along while still creating a colder, more antagonistic ambiance.  In addition, Kelley also manages, despite the suave white cube setting, to deflate the illusion that art need be urbane or polished.

Arena #10 (Dogs) is one of the most playful and visually-pleasing compositions in the show.  On a bright red, orange, and brown striped afghan sit eight stuffed animals that seem to be engaged in a tug of war to divide the centermost animal, a two-headed dog.  Most of the other animals are also dogs, but some are silly, ambiguous hybrids like the snake/dachshund/duck concoction or the cheerfully anthropomorphic tomato.  Arena #10 is just fun-n-games; yet look at the display for perhaps too long, and you’ll see that some of the dogs’ expressions are not quite right.

Arena #7 (Bears) (1990) Stuffed animals on blanket, 11.5 x 53 x 49 inches.

In Arena #7 (Bears) five stuffed animals are poised at the perimeter of a satin-edged receiving blanket on the floor: two monkeys, one taupe bear, and twinned golden bears that could be the uglier younger brothers of Pooh. The colors of the animals harmonize with the cream-colored blanket.  The animals sit at the edge of the square as though playing Monopoly, or waiting for a referee’s whistle to blow and a game to begin.  It is one of the sweeter, more innocuous pieces in the show, but even so, the second-hand blanket is on the floor and the bears and monkeys are bedraggled, adulterating the potential innocence of the scene.

Arena #9 (Blue Bunny) (1990) Stuffed animal on blanket, 7 x 60 x 74 inches.

In contrast to #10 and #7, Arena #9 (Blue Bunny) feels stark.  A lone light-blue knitted rabbit sits in the center of a grubby light-blue blanket, smiling somewhat sheepishly with arms raised.  The ambiguity of the gesture—is this an expression of the victor alone at last on the playing field, or a sign of mommy-pick-me-up dependence?—gives the piece a heightened emotional force.

Arena #5 (E.T's) (1990) Stuffed animals on blanket, 7 x 97 x 87 inches.

Arena 5 (E.T’s) is, no pun intended, the most alien.  Here, the field is a large goldenrod-colored blanket.  At one corner sits a lone alien, facing toward the other actors but solemnly looking down.  In the diagonally opposite corner, two cloth E.T. dolls inspect a prone pink humanoid dispassionately.  The attitude and position of the dolls and the emptiness of the territory turns a pilled old throw and some fabric toys into a diorama with all the warmth of an operating theater.

It’s a mild case of what anthropologist Mary Douglas called “pollution behavior”: activities likely to cross closely-held boundaries or repudiate cherished designations, like putting boots on the kitchen table or eating spaghetti in bed.  In this case, and especially in the context of an urbane Upper East Side gallery, it’s the contact with the floor that evokes pollution.  Not just by using obviously worn and recycled objects, but by literally reducing art objects to the level of the floor, Kelley manages to interrogate assumptions about art and also the viewer’s feeling for handmade and beloved objects.  Kelley melds the personal, cherished nature of stuffed animals and security blankets and the costly, refined nature of blue-chip art to show us how flimsy the narrative of sacred objects can be.

Wires Ripped (2009-10) Wood veneer, shellac. 61" x 29"

The unusual medium draws you in. A first glance might suggest that Taylor’s work is painted, but a closer look reveals that the compositions are actually blade-thin fragments of wood inlaid in panels. The pieces in the show are all crafted with pleasurable attention to detail: up-close viewing shows the joins to fit together perfectly without gaps, lumps, or smudges of glue. Taylor is self-taught, so her obvious facility with the fragile veneer is particularly impressive.

In Foreclosed, Taylor’s overarching concept was to respond to “the human impact of the short-sighted policies and greed that triggered millions of foreclosures.” The works in the exhibition can be divided into two categories: portraits of people, and portraits of destruction. Somewhat perversely, the work shines when it reveals the kicked walls, torn out electricals, or water-damaged ceilings of the vacant houses. These, such as the photorealistic Wires Ripped (2009-10), marry the materials and vision—wood veneer creating an image of ravaged drywall and wood studs—that moves the work beyond skill and into the realm of distinction. Taylor’s adept use of the medium is a reversal of the careless damage, creating a tense, almost anxious connection between the image and its flawless ground. Rendered in sumptuous detail, the ravaged drywall and cracked wood studs are a perfect stand-in for the economic and emotional destruction of domestic bliss laid to waste.

Squatter Doorway (2009) Wood veneer, shellac. 53" x 46 1/2"

Another example, the large Squatter Doorway (2009) is an interior view of a ragged hole in the exterior wall of a house, where wooden slats and scraps of decorative molding are nailed to make a sloppy latticework barricade against intruders. Beyond the slats are glimpses of the normally-invisible framing of the wall, and still further beyond, a peek into the yard and wooden siding of the house. What fascinates here, aside from the beauty and precision of the execution, is the conceptual dimensionality: wood is the structural material used to depict the material structure. There is a lucid circularity to it, a completeness that holds the subject matter to the physicality of the work. Another large piece, the installation Tap Left On (2009-10), portrays a water-damaged ceiling to the same brilliant effect.

Tap Left On (2009-10) Wood veneer, shellac. 71" x 75" x 48"

The portraits, unfortunately, don’t have the same conceptual texture. The Pyrographist (2009) is obviously executed with equal skill. A smiling bespectacled woman stands proudly in front of her creations, a series of wood-burned nature scenes on the paneled wall behind her. But without the ideological marriage of the subject to the medium, it falls flat.

The Pyrographist (2009) Wood veneer, pyrography, shellac. 46" x 40"

Interestingly, reviews of her work to date have not raised the issue of craft qua craft. Marquetry is a practice typically limited to popular subjects or patterning on functional objects like tables. Taylor’s work displays an unmistakable mastery of woodworking, unusual in the contemporary arts but vital to traditional craft. Instead of being a detractor, this association with folksiness seems to bolster the overall theme of the exhibition. By using an atypical yet unthreatening medium, Taylor reveals an accessible but still intriguing vision of loss and anger.

Brent Green, Leonard's House From Front, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Mixed media, 2010.

Is it true belief’s unyielding determination that redeems and protects? This question lies at the heart of Brent Green’s solo exhibition Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then at Andrew Edlin Gallery. The issue of belief occupies both Green and the man whose work provided the inspiration for the project.

The story goes like this: a man named Leonard Wood once built a house entirely by hand in Kentucky—a chaotic house of multiple rooms with strange dimensions—believing it would save his wife Mary from dying of cancer. Green visited the house before it was torn down and acquired the hand-drawn plans. In examining the house and its meaning, Green was inspired to rebuild it on his own property in Pennsylvania, resurrecting a lost monument to love, devotion, hope, and delusion.

Brent Green, House Opened Up, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Mixed media, 2009.

But Gravity is more than just a house. It is a multilayered project that is comprised of the house, its contents, sculptures, projections, and a feature-length stop-motion film. And the project is more than the story of a crazy man who thought he could heal his wife’s cancer with planks and nails: beyond the biography of Wood, it’s also the story of Green himself, as he explores his conviction and responsibility as an artist.

In the back room of the gallery, Green has installed the house in situ: bedroom, bathroom, sitting room with piano, kitchen; each element recreated with a palpable zeal. Avoiding the common pitfalls of outsider art created by an insider, there is nothing ironic, or cynical, or tongue-in-cheek here. The components are charming without being cloying or twee. Instead, one comes away with the feeling that Green is as much a true believer as Wood, though each in his own way. In the first iteration, the work of building the house was a testament to faith; in the second, it is a guileless exploration of belief itself, a willful belief in belief. The result reads as an authentic ode to desperate hope and an all-in commitment to hopeless causes.

Brent Green, Mary's First Memory, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Video still, 2010.

A looped projection plays in the front of the gallery, showing Gravity Preview, the trailer for the film. Dark and dreamily restless in the way of all stop-motion, the fitful shots show Leonard and Mary in various scenes as Green’s voiceover narrates. The main characters build, plant flowers, and sleep in scenes of magical reality, stuttering and jerking in the frame while metal flowers grow and bloom, and galvanized nails roll into the gutters.

Toward the end of Gravity Preview, Green’s voiceover explains “…and so I decided to make this film about Leonard, and I rebuilt his house behind my barn in Pennsylvania, full-scale. And, you know, I’m making this film about him and just running everything down to zero to leave something wonderful behind, which is exactly what Leonard did.” In retracing Wood’s steps, Green presents a full-scale documentation of Wood’s doomed project, but what we also see is Green’s struggle to overcome his own skepticism and faithlessness.

In an attempt to reconcile sources of daily anxiety while simultaneously recording seemingly mundane facets of life, artist Joan Linder painstakingly illustrates the objects that fill her days. Objects such as junk mail, weeds, resumes, and domestic items are all rendered with the greatest of detail through the most economic of means, paper and pen.

Cost of Living is the title of the artist’s most recent exhibition, on view now at Mixed Greens in New York City. The exhibition contains several new drawings from multiple series including Documents, a series of to scale drawings of the artist’s bills, advertisements, schedules, coupons, instructions and directions. The ink and watercolor drawings, which are all strewn across a glass table top in the gallery, are a near exact replica of their source material and offer an intimate look into the artists personal life.

Other works included in Cost of Living are from the artist’s resume series. These works, which are hand drawn reproductions of artist resumes, include an out dated copy of artist Louise Bourgeois’ resume. The famed artist’s resume outlines just what it means to have a successful and enduring career as an artist.

Cost of Living marks the fourth solo exhibition for the artist at Mixed Greens.  Other recent exhibitions include, More Fun in the New World at Judi Rotenberg Gallery in Boston and the pink at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo. The artist currently lives and works in Buffalo, New York and received her MFA from Columbia University (1996).

Anthony Discenza, Teaser #1 (2009)

Opening Thursday, May 13th and running through Saturday the 15th is a flash project at Catherine Clark Gallery’s New York space, the 14th Street Studio. The show, entitled Everything Will Probably Work Out OK, will feature recent work by Oakland, CA-based Anthony Discenza. Discenza’s text-based work is both literary-minded and low-brow laugh-inducing, and references the artist’s interest in what he calls an “internal viewing experience,” which is born of the freedom offered when one steps back from the constant heckling of image-based culture. His aluminum “street signs” offer the sort of one-liners that the Age of Twitter has become known for, though their enigmatic sentiments require a deeper dive into the murky waters of the wasted adult imagination than most 140 character witticisms.

When I spoke recently with gallery Owner/Director, Catherine Clark, she responded to Discenza’s new work—his so-called “non-visual source material”—by noting that “the new body of text-based projects, while in some ways a media or stylistic departure from his videos, remains consistent with his interests in appropriation and re-contextualizing cultural information.”

Everything Will Probably Work Out OK is the second pop-up exhibition being held at the 14th Street Studio—which is not so much a gallery in the classic sense (there is no “Catherine Clark Gallery, New York”), as an experiment into the way collectors and the public commingle with work. The first show at the space opened in March of this year—during the swarming of Manhattan that is New York art fair week—inspired by the idea that this season the gallery would like to present work in a more personalized setting in lieu of doing a fair.

The Discenza exhibition is a similar, though slightly altered, East Coast incarnation of an eponymously titled show at the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco in January/February 2010. According to Clark, while many of the pieces from the original exhibit will be re-presented in the new space, “there are some significant additions and changes,” including the addition of a large digital photo-based work featuring the Olsen Twins. Additionally, she notes that “some of the text-based signs and works on paper are either newer pieces or feel more appropriate in relationship to the space and the other works selected for the exhibition.” While Everything Will Probably Work Out OK is only on view for three days this weekend, including during several cocktail receptions, the body of work will be up through the beginning of September and can be arranged for viewing by appointment.

Anthony Discenza, ELECTIVE PROCEDURE (2009) and LOW-KEY BASICS (2009)

Anthony Discenza earned his BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT and his MFA in Film and Video from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. His work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the Getty Center, the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive and at the 2000 Whitney Biennial at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Cory Arcangel, The Sharper Image, installation view. Image by Steven Brooke.

On view through May 9th at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami is a retrospective of  work made by Brooklyn-based artist, Cory Arcangel, from 2002 to present. The solo exhibition, entitled The Sharper Image, examines the prolific artist’s diverse practice, featuring a virtual grab bag of media—video, print, sound, performance, sculpture, drawing and web-based work. An artist, computer programmer and web designer, Arcangel was first featured on DailyServing in 2007. He is best known for his explorations of consumer technology and digital culture, including cheeky modifications to old-school Nintendo games, such as in the 2002 piece I Shot Andy Warhol—an interpretation of the 1980s NES game Hogan’s Alley. Other works on view in The Sharper Image include: several prints of Photoshop Product Demonstration Gradients; Space Invader (2004), the modification of the old Atari Game Space Invaders; and a temporary re-design of the MOCANOMI website by changing the font to Comic Sans, which is live throughout the tenure of the exhibition.

Cory Arcangel, The Sharper Image, installation view. Image by Steven Brooke.

Cory Arcangel lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been included in numerous international group exhibitions such as Younger than Jesus at the New Museum, New York (2009), The Possibility of an Island at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2008); Color Chart at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Speed 3 at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia, Spain (2007); Time Frame at P.S. 1, New York (2006); Database Imaginary at The Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada (2004); and the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004). A solo show of his work just closed at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. He is represented by Team Gallery in New York.

Grayson is a graduate of Dartmouth College and currently lives and works in New York City. The artist serves as the director of Deitch Projects in NYC and works as an independent curator, essayist and book editor. Recent exhibitions include works at Park Life in San Francisco and D’Amelio Terras in NYC.