Cover of
"Shopping" catalogue,
by Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft,
turned off, at Prada
Mona Hatoum,
Deep Throat
In the window of
the SoHo Guggenheim,
a photo of
Stefano Basilico
by Miltos Manetas
Anne Marie Jugnet
I you he she
it we you they
detail
Claude Leveque's
Photo at Agnes
B Homme
Ken Lum's video
at John Dellaria
Tailor Mastro Giuseppe
with Joseph Havel's
label, just sewed in
Polly Apfelbaum's
installation at
Boesky + Callery
A Warning
to the visitor
Back cover of
catalogue, showing
the Deitch Projects
logo and storefront
Cover of the
SoHo Arts Festival
1996 brochure
Centerfold of the
brochure; as if
artists have cellulite
Tessa Hughes Freeland
and Ela Troyano,
Playboy Voodo,1991
Steven Carter's
chair at Artists
Space's "A Strategy
Hinted Act",
curated by
Anastasia Aukeman
Benita Immanuel
Grosser Yoga class
Angie Eng
video installation
at Artists Space
Brigitte Engler
Pine, 1992
Paul D.Miller
Vector Analysis, 1996
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artist's diary
by Robert Goldman
Sept. 5, 1996--First day of the Soho Arts
Festival. It's interesting that for all the
complaints about the SoHo fashion scene's
commercial hegemony, others have been able
to coopt it. Most of the galleries open
Sept. 7, but "Shopping," 26 installations
at shops and restaurants throughout Soho, a
"project" produced by Jeffery Deitch and
curated by Jerome Sans, opened today. The
first I visited was Miu Miu Prada where
Vanessa Beecroft's piece was still being
installed. Miu Miu is an eerie space,
changed very little from when it was the
home of the Annina Nosei Gallery, a dealer
who gave the likes of David Salle and Jean-
Michel Basquiat their first gallery shows.
Across the street at Jerry's, one of Soho's
trendy yet comfortable and informal
restaurants, Mona Hatoum's work took a
while to find because it blended so easily
into the environment. My skepticism about
the crass commercialism of "Shopping" was
immediately dispelled because Hatoum has
made a truly important work. Called Deep
Throat, a normal Jerry's table has been
set with a plate whose bottom is cut out to
expose a video screen playing a medical
video in which the miniature camera lens
travels down an actual digestive system.
Yuk! Have a seat at the table and watch it.
Its references range all the way from
Magritte to, using Anastasia Aukeman's
phrase, "the current done-to-death subject
of the body."
Again across the street at the new and very
chic make-up store Face Stockholm, Sam
Samore has this breezy poem on the window
glass:
spinning the
wheel
floodgates of
wonder
swallowed by
the whirlpool
Other installations ranged from the banal
to an attempt to shock. At Liquid Sky, the
ultra-youth boutique, a young salesgirl
called the bound-and-hung effigies by the
Dutch artists Jes Brinch and Henrik Plenge
Jakobsen "a little bit less than stupid."
In the window of the Guggenheim Soho
bookstore, Miltos Manetas presented digital
portraits of art world denizens, many of
them European. In the morning with the sun
shining in the window you couldn't make out
a thing. In the window of Agnes B, Anne
Marie Jugnet displayed T shirts with
pronouns (I, we, they, etc.) screened on
them. Next to that Claude Leveque showed a
large photo of a hairless man with
strawberry jam smeared on his head and
body. This stuff seemed pretty useless to
me. Vanessa Beecroft's video in the window
of Miu Miu finally came on. She's primping
and posing. Ken Lum had the most
purposefully banal video of all in the
window on John Dellaria's hair salon on
West Broadway--a women washing her hair.
Now that 303 Gallery has left Soho for
Chelsea, the only one left at 89 Greene
Street showing art is Mastro Guissepe
Tailor. For two dollars he will sew the
artist Joseph Havel's label onto anything
you like.
On my way over to the opening at Jeffery
Deitch's I peeked into Boesky (daughter of
Ivan) & Callery where Polly Apfelbaum is
showing her trademark stained crushed
velvet paintings. In this show the stains
are cut out and grouped on the floor. They
shimmer, but after a few seasons of this is
it too late for her to try something new?
At Deitch's John Weber told me that after
25 years in Soho he is moving his gallery
to 22nd Street, but agrees that Soho is
still vibrant. Weber is an adventurous guy.
A few years ago he bought me an absinthe at
Chicote on the Gran Via in Madrid. It
turned out to be a memorable night,
particularly for him.
There was a commotion on the street when a
gaggle of fashion models appeared wearing
some odd clothes and posing for the
photographer Mr. Means. This turned out to
be a production of artist Lucy Orta. The
clothes had been sewed by people living at
the Salvation Army in Paris. A miniskirt
was made of various belts sewn together
horizontally, a corset or bustier was put
together out of only zippers and a long
coat was made of ties sewn together. All of
this was very odd indeed.
In Deitch's back room, the artist and
filmmaker Guillermo Paneque pointed out to
me a series of four black-and-white
photographs, very understated, of a hand
sliding up a women's skirt. It was erotic
in how little it exposed. This work was by
Noritoshi Hirakawa, who has been living in
New York for the last three years. His
installation for "Shopping" is at Yohji
Yamamoto. A barefoot actor, elegantly
dressed in black Yamamoto clothes, walks
around the shop talking to himself about
misadventures in Manhattan like a deranged,
brain-dead homeless person. The ambiance it
creates is quite strange. In the back of
the shop the texts are projected on a wall.
My final gallery show for the day was
CRG's "La Toilette de Venus--Women and
Mirrors," a title that pretty much tells
what this show is about. Mona Hatoum
invokes a sense of mortality through the
simplest of means. Kiki Smith, Yoko Ono,
Cathleen Lewis and many other participants
made this an intriguing event. At the
opening, Massimo Audiello asked the
question, "Why do women look into mirrors
more than men?"
The opening party for the Soho Arts
Festival took place at the Puck building
with the Rock Steady Crew and X-Men
performing. After Simon Watson, who is the
one responsible for creating this event,
thanked all of his sponsors, Leon Golub,
honorary co-chair, gave a short talk where
he made the curious remark: "Retain your
cynicism."
Caroline Nathusius, publisher of Penguin
Editions, informed me of the very sad news
that Pat Hearn's Chihuahua, Chi Chi,
unfortunately passed away this July. This
beautiful little dog had been celebrated in
Massimo Audiello's mid-'80s "Chi Chi Show"
with works by Phillip Taaffe, Donald
Baechler, George Condo and others. Chi Chi
also appears in the recent book Dogs of
Soho by Anastasia Croy.
I also heard at this party that Gerard
Basquiat, Jean-Michel's father, had pulled
the estate out of the Robert Miller Gallery
some months ago. This development, along
with Howard Reed and others leaving to open
a gallery, and the aforementioned
Audiello taking over at Miller,
spells change for the still
powerful Robert Miller Gallery.
Sept. 6, 1996--Went over to Robin Winters'
loft on Broadway where he came up with this
gem, "Julian Schnabel's movie Basquiat is
like Hitler making the Anne Frank Story."
Robin is doing a large-scale ceramic
project in Holland later this month.
Lucy Orta's installation in the front of
the Salvation Army (69 Spring St.) gave me
a chance to look at her creations more
closely. The coat was made of 27 tweed ties
lined with 27 silk ties beautifully sewn
together. A pair of pants called "hipsters"
are made out of 35 pairs of leather gloves.
Emily Harvey Gallery (537 Broadway) in
collaboration with Lance Harvey had works
by Nicolas Africano, Emmett Williams, Ben
and others. The Identical Lunch by Allison
Knowles used photos of her lunch guests and
details such as the brand of tuna she used
to make sandwiches for a serial photo work.
The big energetic mob scene in SoHo this
evening was on Greene St. where Casey
Kaplan and Lauren Wittels opened their new
galleries. Kaplan's "projects space" has
Michael Jenkins' wry kindergarten-scale
electric chairs mounted on the wall with a
cute cut-out of an electro devil-man
cartoon figure. Michael Cohen, curator of
the group show at Wittels ("Mutate/Loving
the New Flesh"), showed small loose
paintings, one of which was a pair of
testicles with two penises. Janine Antoni
recommended Chen Zhen's installation at the
Chinese auto repair on Mercer St.
Down to the Franklin Furnace for "Voyeur's
Delight" curated by Barbara Rusin and Grace
Roselli. High on the wall is one of Jane
Dickson's classic paintings: at a window
someone is pulling back the blinds peering
out. To depict the voyeur, the painter
becomes voyeur, and by doing so the viewer
is implicated through his/her gaze. Michel
Auder is the true voyeur/spy. His video
Rooftop and Other Scenes purloins people's
private moments. It's so banal and slow. Is
anything going to happen? The first thing
the voyeur learns is "you always gotta
wait." Watching and waiting itself, the
"Voyeur's Delight."
Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Ela Troyano are
showing their 16mm film Playboy Voodoo
transfered to video and played in one of
the booths made for this show. The booths
are a curious curatorial device that
effects and encloses the experience of
watching. Playboy Voodoo is dense, multi-
layered, sensory, erotic. The image of a
masturbating woman is obscured by flashing
superimpositions, the whole thing fading in
and out of view like a dream.
Dike Blair presents a version of his
project Gray Goo Lounge. The "gray goo"
problem is illustrated by "virus-sized,
computer-controlled, man-made robots (with
the ability) to reproduce themselves
endlessly." Dike continues, "there had
better be a way of programing them to stop
or, like the mops and pails in Disney's The
Sorcerer's Apprentice, they could convert
all matter in the world into copies of
themselves." Dike's version of this is an
erotic female pose digitally composed of
small images of the pose itself.
Sept. 7, 1996--Chen Zhen's installation (at
Mercer Auto Repair, 41 Mercer St.) is based
on this horrifing statistic: China plans to
have one billion cars by the year 2010. A
mass of inflated bicycle inner tubes
hanging from the ceiling has tiny black toy
cars glued to it.
Artists Space and Basilico Fine Arts had
openings this evening. At Basilico is
"Joint Ventures," of which curator Nicolas
Bourriaud said that the Ben Kinmonts' work
is the emblematic. Kinmont had stopped
people on the street and gave them a
statement asking for a loan of some dishes
to be exhibited in the show. "If the dishes
are sold, then the money will be split
equally between myself [Kinmont], the
participant, and the gallery dealer."
Kinmont's installation consisted of two
dishes he had obtained plus written notes
and documention as well as the statement he
handed out on the street, with the press
release for the show printed on the
reverse.
Artists Space's "A Strategy Hinted At,"
curated by Anastasia Aukeman, had eight
young neo-conceptual artists as well as a
project space installation by Angie Eng. At
the opening David Hershkovitz, publisher of
Paper magazine, was lounging the whole time
on a chair made of square pieces of
carpeting stacked up by artist Steven
Carter. Benita-Immanuel Grosser, which is
the name used by a pair of artists based in
Berlin, offer yoga classes at the gallery
as part of the show: beginners every
Tuesday 6:30 to 8:30 pm, Sept. 10-Oct.
15, and beginners/intermediate every
Saturday 4:00 to 5:30 pm Sept. 14-Oct. 12.
Brigitte Engler showed beautiful, luminous
needlepoint works based on woodgrain
patterns. Angie Eng's dark, creepy room had
stained paper towels strewn all over the
floor with a dispenser showing a small
video of a red-gloved hand with a pistol.
Sept. 18, 1996--Chelsea. Ellen Cantor:
After missing the show last season at
Thomas Nordstadt today I saw two pieces at
Xavier LaBoulbenne. One is a projection on
the wall of a love scene from the Louis
Malle film The Lovers and the other is a
large frame in the shape of a cross,
containing snap-shot-sized black-and-white
photos of close-up s-and-m sex shots
interspersed with stills from Madonna's
Truth or Dare. Appropriate Madonna and
show the imagined parts that she didn't. At
the same time Cantor is including Madonna
as an unwitting participant to affirm her
sex photos. She's in it and the viewer's
gaze completes the intellectual menage a'
trois.
At Annina Nosei (upstairs at 530 W. 22nd
St.) was DJ Spooky (aka Paul D. Miller).
Did you like that? Silver calligraphy on
unfolded cardboard boxes, like Brian Gysin,
with elaborate framing. Large cross-shaped
window grates hanging in the middle of the
gallery. A Brian Eno-like soundtrack.
Comfortable bean bag chairs. In this show
you could pull up a couple of bean bags and
make-out. In the large gallery I imagined
that the big hanging steel window grates
would bounce the sound waves of Spooky's
track back and forth around the room. I
like that.
At Pat Hearn Steven Parrino, for me, is the
more interesting of three painters.
Am I wrong or is the new astronaut on the
Mir Space Station named Blaha?
The Dia Center showed Gordon Matta-Clark
films from the 1970s on its roof. It takes
a lot of work to drop a heavy beam from a
pier into the water below. In
Clockshower, Matta-Clark climbs to the
Clocktower's clock, where he has rigged a
shower, and drenches himself in cleansing,
redeeming water spouting from an image of
shattered time. Gordon died many years ago
of cancer but his work lives on.
On Dia's third floor Hanne Darboven's
installation includes odd objects that now
inhabit her insular world.
Fred Sandback is one of the artists the Dia
Art Foundation has extensively collected.
His installation of lines of colored
acrylic yarn stretched through space and
along walls, ceiling and floor is flawless
in the clarity of its simplicity. The
sculpture, through the most Minimal of
means, is boundry-less. Lynne Cooke quotes
Sandback in the brochure: "Fact and
illusion are equivalents." This was like
the old Dia of the `70s, a moment of a
classic commitment of patronage.
I had the pleasure of being introduced to
Robert Ryman who mentioned that what he is
making at the moment is not yet worked out
to his satisfaction. Fred Sandback I had
met once before at a dinner at Rudolf
Zwirner's in Cologne where Phillip
Pearlstein told me the tale of his guarding
Masaccio's and Masolino's Brancacchi Chapel
in Florence as a soldier in WWII.
Sept. 20, 1996--Quote from Roberta Smith's
review of Paul McCarthy's show at Luhring
Augustine: "Sex is so overdone in art these
days that it is becoming ho-hum."
Robert Goldman is a New York artist.
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