Big Five Oh, part 4: Pulse

Robert Boyd

After Ford, LM, DC and I left JHB Gallery, Ford decided he was ready to check out some non-visual art aspects of New York. He wanted to hit the big comic stores and record stores and musical instrument stores and cool bars in Brooklyn and so forth. He had a list which DC, who has lived in NYC for decades, was able to add to and annotate for him.  Ford went off on his own adventure while LM, DC and I went to Pulse.

Last year, Pulse struck me as the cheesiest, most pandering of the three art fairs I went to New York. It retains its position this year, but the thing about art fairs is that the content can vary so much from gallery to gallery and even within a single gallery. There is an economic imperative that pushes work in a certain direction.

1. Galleries pay a lot of money to be at Pulse
2. Therefore, they necessarily must bring their work that is most likely to sell
3. Which may include work with a high T 'n' A quotient
4. Or work that makes viewers say things like "Boy, that's clever!" or "That's look great in the living room!"

Jordan Doner, Auto Dali II, 2006, C-Print, printed 2013 at Steven Kasher Gallery

Steven Kasher Gallery was a somewhat schizo gallery in that regard. You had high pander-rate photos like Auto Dali II (which recreates the famous 1951 Dali photo In Voluptas Mors but with modern sleek skinny models). But then you had super-charming photos like Untitled (Boy with Pipe at Shoreline) by Vivian Maier.


Vivian Maier, Untitled (Boy with Pipe at Shoreline), ca. 1960s, gelatin silver, printed 2012, 20 x 16 inches

You had this split-beaver collage by Ashkan Honarvar.


Ashkan Honarvar, Creed, The Apple 1, 2013, collage, 10.6 x 26.8 inches

But you also had these classic subway graffiti photos by Henry Chalfant. (I had and treasured copies of his books Subway Art and Spraycan Art in the 80s, which encouraged me to do my own large scale graffiti pieces in 1988.)


Henry Chalfant, top to bottom: Untitled (Soup Cans), ca. 1980; Crash Dealt, 1980; Revolt Min, 1979; Blades, 1979, printed 2011, Kodak Professional Endura metallic paper, 11 x 42 inches each

And some naked Kate Moss courtesy of Chuck Close is an easy 65 grand for Adamson Gallery. (Actually, I have no idea if this is true. Even for Kate, that's a lot of money.)


Chuck Close, Untitled (Kate), 2008, archival pigment print on Innova-F gloss paper, Chine-colléd to Fabriano watercolor paper, 60 x 40 inches

Then there was art that was cutesy and "clever", like the pieces by Jorge Perianes at PanAmerican Art Projects.


Jorge Perianes, Untitled, 2008, mixed media, 36 x 40 inches

But the work I hated most of all can at least say it wasn't trying to pander to anyone's baser tastes.


Kim Rugg, Are You Sitting Comfortably, 2012, hand-woven needlepoint on found object and carved wood chair, 32 x 23 x 21 inches at Davidson Contemporary

Kim Rugg's Are You Sitting Comfortably was so smug and self-righteous that I really did want to sit comfortably on it and maybe even take a nap.

But all in all, this year's Pulse didn't seem quite as crass as last year's Pulse. I saw plenty of art I liked such as this beautiful abstract photo by Amanda Means.


Amanda Means, Grid Abstraction #39, 2005, developer on Ilford matte gelatin silver fiber paper, 24 x 20 inches at Von Lintel Gallery


Aylin Langreuter at Galerie Wittenbrink

Aylin Langreuter had several "cars in the jungle" pieces, of which this was the best one.


Dawn Black, Conceal Project (24 Panels), 2013, Watercolor and gouache on paper, 5 1/2 x 7 1/2 each

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Dawn Black, one of the panels in Conceal Project (24 Panels), 2013, Watercolor and gouache on paper, 5 1/2 x 7 1/2 each

I loved these weird little portraits by Dawn Black at Cynthia Reeves.


Jeffrey Gibson, Dances Hard for Who We Were, 2013 Wool US Army blankets, artist's own repurposed painting, glass beads, steel, artificial sinew, acrylic paint 60 x 16 x 16 inches

 Dances Hard for Who We Were by Jeffrey Gibson is a piece I'd be proud to hang in my gym.


Liset Castillo, Shopping Bag, 2011, Sand, cable, fabric, resin water, Matte Super Heavy Gel Medium and Plexiglass Box at Habana

Shopping Bag by Liset Castillo belongs in that category of art I noticed at Frieze: sculptures of modest containers.

And then there were pieces that made me laugh, and I value that highly.


Yoan Capote, Juntos, 2006, metal, wood, fabric at Habana

Juntos by Yoan Capote prompted DC, LM and I to speculate on the practical design of an umbrella for couples.


Michael Scoggins, Conan the Barbarian, 2008, marker,prismacolor on paper, 67 x 51 inches at Freight + Volume

Michael Scoggins' tribute to junior high notebook art is even funnier in person given that it is over five feet tall.


Adam Parker Smith, Untitled (Poster), 2013, acrylic on paper, 30 x 20 inches at Davidson Contemporary

It's hilarious that Davidson Contemporary felt it necessary to include a hand-written note reading "PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH!!!" on the wall label for Adam Parker Smith's piece. I guess people tried to rip the phone numbers off.

Book Art

If there was a trend at Pulse, it was art made our of books.


LongBin Chen, Bach, from Composer Series, 2013 at the West Collection


LongBin Chen, Bach, from Composer Series, 2013 at the West Collection


Jessica Drenk, Bibliophylum, books, wax, pins at Adeh Rose

Jessica Drenk somehow took books and carved them into these little feather-like objects.


Rune Guneriussen, Discipline Comsidered an Option, C-Print, 45 x 69 inches at Galerie Olivier Waltman

Pulse Projects

Every art fair brings in sculptures and performances as part of the experience. Pulse describes Pulse Projects as "the presentation and promotion of audience- engaging large-scale sculptures, installations and performances." I commend Pulse for this because I generally prefer this kind of work to audience-repelling sculptures, installations and performances.


Russell Maltz, Painted/Stacked, ongoing, Day-Glo enamel on concrete block with wood palette and banding iron; dimensions variable


Tristin Lowe, Comet: Nature, 2011, neon, glass, transformers, aluminum, steel; 101 x 29 inches

Duck!

Coagula

One of the inspirations for The Great God Pan Is Dead was Coagula. Coagula played with being a gossip tabloid in format, but what appealed to me is that in doing so, it went below the surface of the art world to display the machinations and personalities that animated it. It assumed that art could not be somehow isolated from the world in which it exists. After a few naive years of pollyanna idealism, this has become my belief, too. That's why this blog is so interested in such things as the mechanics of art fairs, for example.

Anyway, Coagula now puts its money where its mouth is with its own gallery space, Coagula Curatorial. They had one of the most interesting booths at Pulse. As for the magazine, it still exists on-line and you can read editor/publisher Mat Gleason's pieces regularly on HuffPost.



Mat Gleason (with the shocking red hair) at the Coagula booth


David Horii, Boys' Life (Henry), 2011, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 18 inches at Coagula


panties by Leigh Salgado at Coagula


Tim Youd, Typing Tropic, 2013, ongoing performance

Coagula had a performance in their booth, which set them apart from every other exhibitor as far as I could tell. Tim Youd was typing a copy of Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller on two pieces of paper run through the typewriter over and over again. The top piece gets the ink (as you can see in the photo below), some of which eventually leaks through to the bottom piece, I assume. The typewriter itself was the exact model that Henry Miller used to compose this novel.

This is the kind of pointless, absurd act that I associate with a certain strain of performance. The Art Guys' best performances are along these lines. It's the kind of performance that no one sees the entirety of. It's not theatrical or about entertainment. It's barely even about expression. It's about taking a banal act (like typing) and pushing it so far that it forces you to think about it in a different way. In engaging in this performance, Tim Youd is acquiring a new awareness of the act of typing and of Henry Miller and Tropic of Capricorn. And we get to watch.


Tim Youd, Typing Tropic, 2013, ongoing performance

Gleason printed up a newspaper give-away issue of Coagula for the show featuring interviews with the artists he showed. But true to Coagula's spirit, the cover article was about a Facebook flame war with David Rimanelli.

We Think Hard About Buying Some Art

Over at Adah Rose Gallery, DC noticed these paintings on metal tubes and square conduits by Brian Dupont. He was quite taken with them, and as it turned out, I knew Dupont. He had been in a two man show with Chris Rusak at Skydive in 2012. I even owned a postcard-sized piece by Dupont--my premium for supporting the Kickstarter that he and Rusak had to finance their travel and shipping. But my glancing familiarity with the artist wasn't what got DC interested--he saw the pieces before I even noticed them. But he was eager to get my opinion. We talked about them for a bit and then I moved on.


Brian Dupont, Pipe Piece III, oil on aluminum

A little while later, I returned to the Adah Rose booth, and DC was still there! He was chatting with the gallerist who had pulled out several more Brian Duponts from the back to show him. He was really weighing them carefully, examining each one. Many of them have fragments of text painted on them, and he wanted to know the source for each text piece. In the end, he didn't buy one there because if he liked the source of the text on a piece, he didn't like the painting, and when he liked the painting, he didn't like the text. In other words, he wanted the perfect combination of text and painting. But I also think he wasn't into the three-dimensionality of the pieces. That demands a lot of the viewer (there is a reason why paintings on tubes is not really a thing).

But a few weeks later, he asked me to look at some Dupont drawings online and give him my opinion. This is how DC buys art. He takes his time. He is the opposite of impulsive. In a sense, that makes him not the ideal art fair collector, but for DC, the benefit of an art fair is that you get introduced to a lot of artists' work. It's like speed-dating. And if after the introduction, you want to take that relationship deeper, you can.


Miki Taira, A Tale of Two Brother: the Long-armed Brother and His Long-Legged Sibling, 2013, linen, sumi ink, hanging scroll, acrylic mirror, 245 x 200 x 100 cm at Tokyo Gallery/Beijing Tokyo Art Projects

Miki Taira is a Japanese artist who studied calligraphy and now employs it in a way that deftly combines the contemporary with the folkloric. She writes out folktales onto linen and then makes objects (usually strange doll-like figures, but not always) with the linen.


Miki Taira, Charcoal-roasting Millionaire, 2012, linen, sumi ink,vinyl sheet, silk, acrylic case, 40.8 x 15.5 x 15.5 cm at Tokyo Gallery/Beijing Tokyo Art Projects

LM had first seen her work at an art fair in Hong Kong (And I think he said he bought one there). He had come to Pulse earlier in the week and bought another one. For an artist, this has to be one of the advantages of having your work shown at an art fair. It becomes possible for you to develop international collectors. 
 


There was an elaborate (and beautiful) process for packing up Miki Taira's piece. This level of attention to wrapping it up seems stereotypically Japanese. But I'm sure it is also highly practical when it comes to shipping the work.



LM had become acquainted with Galería Nieves Fernández in Spain at ARCO (LM is something of an art fair road warrior).  So gallerist Nerea Fernández took us on a guided tour of the work in her booth, including this suite of works by Danica Phelps. What Phelps does is to draw a picture of something she bought. The drawings are beautiful pencil contour drawings with no chiaroscuro for the most part. Then she indicates how much she paid for the thing with red hashmarks painted below the drawing. If she sells the drawing, she makes a copy of it (by hand), with the same red hashmarks, but adds green hashmarks to indicate how much she was paid for the drawing. She also includes on the new drawing the name of the person who bought the previous drawing and where it was bought. So she could conceivably sell drawings of the same subject many time, with the green painted hashmark area getting bigger in each iteration. And perhaps most eccentric of all, she puts a price on each piece.


Danica Phelps, McDonald's Coffee and Cookies, March 16, 2013, 2013, pencil on vellum, mounted onto paper which is in turn mounted onto wood

So I was looking at each of these drawings when I noticed that McDonald's Coffee and Cookies, March 16, 2013 had a price of $200 on it. That couldn't be right. I asked Fernández about it, and she confirmed with a sigh that this drawing was indeed selling for $200. (I later wrote to Phelps and asked about it--she said "It is an important part of my work that it be accessible to all kinds of different people." Including people like me!) I impulsively decided to buy it. I only had $180 in cash on me, so LM kicked in an additional $20.

Even though the first generation had been made less than two months earlier, it had already sold once to a guy named Knut Marten at the Cologne Art Fair. Phelps got $100 after the gallery's cut, which is indicated by the 100 green hashmarks. If she does another version of McDonald's Coffee and Cookies, March 16, 2013, it will have 200 green hasmarks on it and my name as the second buyer.

That was our Pulse experience. DC had to leave us at this point--he had a wife and children at home who wanted their daddy back. But LM, like me, was maximizing his art experience and had one more stop to make. He invited me along, and that's the subject of part 5.

Creature Comforts at Anya Tish

Robert Boyd

The current show at Anya Tish almost makes sense. You get kitschy irony with Wesley Harvey's ceramics, mixed with the sugar overload of Ann Wood's assemblages, the poster-colored cuteness of Mindy Kober's gouaches and the cartoony figures in Jennifer Nuttall's pieces. Dawn Black seems to  be the odd artist out, to my eye. What really links these artists is that they all have achieved a certain level of local prominence in the world of non-profit artspaces like Lawndale and Box 13. The show was curated by Nuttall, but if one thinks of it from Tish's perspective, for her, as for any gallerist, taking on a new artist is a risk. A group show hedges but does not eliminate that risk. So achievement in other arenas may help a gallerist decide which risk to take. Of course, this has nothing to do with the quality of the exhibit. But as regular readers know, I like to think about the economics and sociology of visual art.

In fact, the show is pretty good. I first saw Mindy Kober's work at The Big Show last year. In that show, she had a witty piece showing a group of school children observing (being menaced?) by large floating Russian Supremacist abstract shapes. Her drawing style, outlines with flat colors and minimal details recalls old children's books, and because of that likewise recalls the absurdist cartoons of the great Glen Baxter. That approach is carried over into this show.


Mindy Kober, Not Another Kitty Painting, gouache on paper, 17 x 24", 2010

A group of Civil War-era soldiers are fighting around two gigantic kittens, one collared and immobile, the other nosing around with curiosity. The soldiers don't appear to be Union vs. Confederacy--their uniforms are all mixed up. And the "landscape" they occupy is a flat mustard-colored field. The lilliputian men, the kittens, the flat colors all scream "aw cute," a feeling only slightly mitigated by the four dead or wounded soldiers in the picture.

But her strongest drawing is Undertow, for which I don't have a reproduction. It's another gouache, but much larger--60 x 90". It's an ocean scene with the horizon at about the middle of the page. But don't let the fact that there is a horizon fool you into thinking there is a comprehensible space here. Scale is less important that fitting all the elements in--elements that relate to the ocean. So you have modern swimmers and beach-goers mixed in with Poseidon and Triton, as well as a couple of battling Patrick-O'Brian-style wooden ships. All done in Kober's simplified, story-book outline style.It's my favorite piece from this show.

Ann Wood's pieces are sculptural assemblages made with hunting decoys. (Elaine Bradford has been using decoys in her art recently as well--does that mean it's a trend?) In both her pieces, Scream and Bitter Sweet, the decoys are covered with gooey, almost edible-looking foam.



Ann Wood, Scream, decoy, polyurethane foam, flowers, plastic fruit, 2010



Ann Wood, Scream, decoy, polyurethane foam, flowers, plastic fruit, 2010

 It looks as if the pieces were actually assembled there in the gallery, with the foam poured onto the floor. The bright pink foam in Scream--well, it screams at you. It's the first thing you notice in the room. It feels so artificial, so plastic and fake. It's both amusing and disturbing that a deer is coated with it. One could read this as a conflict between a more natural state of things and a highly artificial state. It could have an environmental interpretation. But I think it's key that the pink is really appealing. It might be a crime against nature to cover a deer in pink chemical foam, but it looks really cool.



Ann Wood, Bittersweet, decoy, foam, rubber, pushpins

I think the theme is a little more obvious in this one--bird coated with a nasty dark substance. Seems as if that has been in the news a bit lately. But that is undermined a bit by the fact that the duck is also covered with little colored dots--it looks like it has been dipped in chocolate and covered with sprinkles. Rather than being a victim of BP, it looks like a creation of Krispy Kreme. We have nature under assault, but looking sugar-sweet.

Wesley Harvey also employs cuteness in his work. Harvey teaches art in San Antonio. Like many adjunct professors, he works for multiple schools, including the Southwest School of Art and Craft (Gary Schott also teaches there). His work in this show is ironic and kitschy.



Wesley Harvey, And all the yellow bunnies..., porcelain, glaze, gold leaf, velvet, 2009

But the irony is not subversive. I don't think that's his goal. Far from undermining the saccharine nature of his subjects, Harvey seems to be ramping that aspect up. Looking at And all the yellow bunnies is like eating a pound of chocolate Easter eggs.


Jennifer Nuttall also plays with irony, but hers seems the least interesting. Smiley cartoon figures trapped in bureaucratic political nightmares. Her figures have faces that look like those of 80s punk cartoonist Krystine Kryttre.



Jennifer Nuttall, Detention & Removal, illustration board, duct and brown masking tape, oil, 2010

My problem with these pieces is that the approach Nuttall takes doesn't particularly serve her political message very well. In particular, she undercuts it with the cuteness of the characters. It's unfair of me, but I want to political art to have the power of Jacques-Louis David and the moral clarity and inclusion of the viewer of Hans Haacke.



Dawn Black, The Snake and the Rising of the Stag, goauche, ink, watercolor on paper, 2010

Dawn Black doesn't trade in irony like the rest. Her mysterious, haunting figures in their indistinct, empty spaces are both specific and dreamlike at the same time. Pictures contain hints of rituals, bizarre performances, illicit activities, etc., without being specific about what these activities might signify. Especially interesting and intriguing is the "Conceal Series," small color drawings of masked people--a huge variety of people wearing a huge variety of masks.



Dawn Black, Conceal Project #116, goauche, ink, watercolor on paper, 2010

The outfits of these figures may conceal, but they also reveal quite a bit about the character (and possibly the obsessions) of the subjects. Black's skilled drawing of clothed figures, along with a flair for the mysterious, is what makes all this work.