DOWNTICK: 80'S PAINTING
What in heaven's earth is Jeff Koons thinking with regard to his new series of paintings aside from money? They are without doubt the most awful crop of crap to emerge from the studio of a leading light of contemporary art since...there is no comparison to be made, as this body of work stands unto itself in the annals of art. Not even dwelling on the reputed sweat shop studio filled with in excess of forty Soviet immigrants working on the paintings in shifts that stretch 24-7 (hours per day and days per week), they feel corrupt for other reasons. First and foremost, there is the James Rosenquist rip-off factor; despite the fact that Rosenquist is still alive and well and making more authentic and underrated versions of the real thing recently on view at Gagosian's Chelsea outpost, crafty Koons displayed his mercenary restatements at Gogo's Beverly Hills branch. Fitting that Koons' "paintings" debuted in Beverly Hills since they felt as fake as bad plastic surgery cases resplendent in the sunny streets of Los Angeles. The paintings are spliced and diced with shards and fragments of children's toys, desserts and body parts in the hyper realistic mode that has reared its ugly head in the equally off-putting works of Mary Boone's new batch of "talent" Damien Loeb and Will Cotton. Sure, there is nothing wrong with assistants fabricating work, and Koon's vacuum cleaner assisted readymades and statuettes are wonderful, but here they just come off as the shady output of a charlatan.
And, continuing the rampage is the recent hyperbolized 1980's painting show with the dim-witted title: Mythic Proportions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. The cracked crockery paintings of Julien Schnabel have not aged very well and seem the result of an out of control temper tantrum from the monstrously egotistical tyrant who thankfully has picked up steam in his directing career. Can we really afford to loose that much volume of space on the planet with more of his office building sized creations? Too bad David Salle's movie directing career has fizzled in direct proportion to Schnable's advancement because his paintings have the veneer of a hangover from a point in time that is better put behind us, and we are assured to get nothing but more of the same. Ross Bleckner looks here the same as he ever was: dull, repetitive and decorative; like wallpaper for the aesthetically challenged. Peter Halley, though interesting colorist as he is, remains the reigning king of the formulaic-how it must feel to be locked into an economic conundrum where one feels the need to make the same work over and over for in excess of twenty years. He paints prison bars and seems forever locked into one. Take your Cucchi, Clemente, and Chia thank you very much; we have entered a new millennium, so let us quickly get over this overrated, overvalued and overpriced period of art.
UPTICKS: HARLEM
Harlem is heating up hot in the real estate and art markets. Though the sale of townhouses has not breached the one million dollar mark, it is a threshold that is bound to be broken soon irregardless of the present economic slowdown that has seen some residential prices drop by 20% elsewhere in Manhattan. MVRDV, the Dutch architectural firm (an offshoot of Rem Koolhaas' office) much in demand after making a big splash at Expo 2000 in Hanover, are presently in discussions to build in the area for a young New York City collecting couple in the tech industry. Way up north on 149th Street, Sasha Newly, the British born society portrait painter and son of Joan Collins has set up a live/work space on a full floor of a refurbished brownstone. Many contemporary artists are presently migrating uptown to Harlem to set up studios and seeking living accommodations, since compared to artist-infested Brooklyn, the rents are competitive and the atmosphere much more sympathetic.
Art-wise, there is The Project, the progressive gallery run by Christian Hayes that in it's few short years in existence has become a must see for the hard core gallery going public. The gallery represents such luminaries as perennial Whitney Museum wonder-boy Paul Pfeiffer, winner of the first $100,000 Buxbaum Prize for video recently awarded by the museum and newcomer painter and installation artist Peter Rostovsky. After Thelma Golden was unceremoniously dumped by new Whitney chief Max Anderson, and after a short stint with the Peter and Eileen Norton Foundation, she has settled into to a position as Deputy Director of the Studio Museum of Harlem on West 125th Street. The Director of the museum, Lowery Stokes Sims was formerly the Curator of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum (that hotbed of contemporary art activity!) where she had been on staff since the early 1970's. The Studio Museum is presently undergoing a major expansion and renovation, to be completed by 2002, which includes a new glass facade; entry court; caf™; auditorium; and new 2,500 square foot permanent collection galleries. As commented upon by a gallery-goer after the opening of the latest offering, curated by Golden, entitled "Freestyle":
"They have this area perched in between two buildings (i.e. in an alley) which they turned into the little social area, brightly lit and shrouded in white linen, where the liquor was served and the elite meet and greet and congratulate. It was every other opening, but it was right there in Harlem. At the opening you even heard a yell or siren from the streets, alerting us all to the fact that this little pretentious bubble could pop. It was so not-Harlem. It was so 'fine-art'."
From glancing at the press release, though, one would think "Freestyle" and the Studio Museum in general represent less freethinking and more overt dependence on Philip Morris and their cultural cigarette smoke and mirrors.
PERSONAL PICKS: SANFORD BIGGERS AND SUSAN SMITH PINELO
Standouts from the Studio Museum of Harlem "Freestyle" exhibition were a video by Susan Smith-Pinelo, a recent graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University and sculptures by Sanford Biggers, recently graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago. Smith-Pinelo presented a work titled: "Sometimes" which depicted a closely cropped set of bodacious boobs swaying up and down, and right and left to the sound of Rhythm & Blues music. Filling the entire screen was the hypnotically pulsating crevice of her cleavage in a white tank top shirt sporting a jeweled necklace spelling out her name. Concise, to the point, and remarkably memorable and effective-a kind of site-specific work that dealt with the context of the show in its immediate surroundings in a more meaningful way than most other entrants in the exhibit.
Sanford Biggers was recently the recipient of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Grant which entitled him to a studio on the 92nd floor of one of the World Trade Center Towers. In the downtown venue (the more successful of the two for him) Biggers presented a large-scale sculptural installation and uptown a series of clear cast resin Buddahs filled with sundry detritus culled from local Harlem neighborhood life. The Trade Center sculpture was a headrest of a queen sized bed fitted in red satin sheets and faux black fur comforter, in the form of a giant afro hair pick shaped into a clenched fist and clad in black leather. The piece utilized the symbol of the Black Power movement, conceptually reduced to the kitsch of a hair comb, then enlarged to a bed ornament morphing into a comment on the clich™ of African American male prowess in the sack. All in all, a tough though humorous and seductive work of art.
