and now for a little artist on artist action

best tribute to east end culture: 

The Parrish and

 Artists Choose Artists

new works by Perry Burns in background...revelers in foreground

scenes from an opera...Mary Ellen Bartley and Ross Bleckner

Alice Aycock

among the crowds...Susan Lazarus-Reiman, Alice Aycock, Dan Rizzie

Alice Hope, bbs and magnets

Liliya Lifanova, another kind of engagement

bravo to all.
 

New York...just like I pictured it:

nothing says summer like art in public places. here's a sampler of a few offerings around town.

the highline: 

Robert Adams at The Highline, Nebraska, circa 1978; billboard selections made by Joel Sternfeld

Sarah Sze's birdhouses -- perfection for the urban bird

Spencer Finch, River That Flows Both Ways -- every color at nearly every time of day -- the Hudson River, photo by David B. Smith

madison park:

Juame Plensa, Echo...such tranquility...there's something truly mystical about this work.

city hall park:

Sol Lewitt, Splotch 15, one of 15 sculptures on view at City Hall Park

i love new york.

Architecture of a Bomb at Silas Marder

A little mayhem is good for the soul, particularly if you're the one creating it. Witness the upper bunk at Silas Marder Gallery where sculptors Michael Rosch and Ben Butler have assembled/disassembled miles of tubes, fencing, right angles, signage and bits of detritus into a heaving Tower of Babel in a collaborative work titled, Architecture of a Bomb.

The artists were invited to participate in a thematic exhibition based on architecture. The perimeters: they could use whatever they could carry from the back lot of Marder's -- perhaps the East End's most majestic garden center -- undoubtedly a feast of earth-moving, landscaping and tree-hugging paraphernalia. The only rule: no nails in the floors or walls. Oh, and did I mention...they had 3 days from conception to opening night.

Within this architectural rubric, Rosch felt the Tower of Babel would provide a useful metaphor. Since they couldn't use nails he commenced to wedging and weaving found elements into one another until they started to form a tangled citadel. The results: a vision of total bedlam -- harnessed -- like a tornado in a glass jar. It feels (and it is so physical that it absolutely provokes particular "feelings") as if any second it could let loose an apocalyptic belch of the highest order. The interior of Marder's barn is like a gigantic beehive, lending another layer of order vs. cacophony to the site.

I like my chaos with a side of sublime, and here Rosch deftly slips in a little Zen with a straight back chair hovering in the corner where it stands like a Buddha balanced on the head of a pin. It is an effective point/counterpoint to the tower -- a sort of intellectual martial arts move that perfectly torques this environment. Not an antidote for chaos, but perhaps its inverse or a sibling from another branch of the same family.

Butler's zig-zagging ramp, made from leftover pallets, is one part Temple Grandin and one part dazzle camouflage -- a dizzying linear abstraction that acts as a nave or the beginning of a corn maze.

Above it all, a model fighter jet seems to soar too close to the sun. The installation, it turned out, was completed at the exact moment (Japan time) of the 66th Anniversary of Hiroshima. An apt and exhilarating metaphor for destruction and resurrection, Architecture of a Bomb is on view through October.  


JMG

Love letter found in back room

 inspired by

Ted Gahl, Last Love  

Halsey McKay Gallery August 5-30

The Idea of the Thing That Isn't,  

curated by Rachel Uffner 

v. cool show in the front room 

now through September 4  

Ted Gahl, Last Love

broken surface

Sonia Delaunay, L Prose du Transsiberien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, 1913

broken glass jello, courtesy the food librarian

Gee's Bend Quilts, Mary L. Bennett, Housetop, 1965

Valeska Soares, courtesy Eleven Rivington

Mike Kelley, Test Room, 2001, courtesy Gagosian Gallery

best use of plastic bags

Josh Blackwell rethinks painting, plastic and debris at the Riverside Art Museum, California courtesy of designboom:

'blue stripe plastic basket' by josh blackwell images courtesy of josh blackwell the riverside art museum in california presents work by new york based artist josh blackwell, in an exhibition shared with roger white and curated by james bae. exploring the imaginative possibilities of detritus, this installation features the artist's 'plastic baskets' series, in which plastic bags are salvaged, embroidered with yarn, and thus repurposed into artworks. a topic which blackwell has investigated since the mid-2000s, the conversion of these disposable items into art objects questions the nature of waste and necessity, as well as what differentiates low from high culture. blackwell explains: 'ostensibly useless, plastic bags are the second most common form of litter in the world after cigarette butts. I began collecting semi-degraded plastic bags from kitchen cupboards and city streets about six years ago. the bags are sewn shut with yarn, deliberately thwarting their function. the protean shapes suggest faces, animals, or clothing. their textured, worn, or melted surfaces wear the remains of physical activity like dirty laundry left on the floor. the bags attempt to redress their impoverished status with the addition of colorful embroidery in geometric patterns.' this presentation of blackwell's work is particularly timely, given that on july 1, 2011, supervisors of los angeles banned plastic bags in unincorporated areas of the county due to their detrimental effects on the environment. thank you designboom! Love this work.

Was ist los?

Helmut Lang -- yes that Helmut Lang -- at  

The Fireplace Project

Make it Hard - organized by Neville Wakefield

Helmut Lang walked away from the fashion empire that still bears his name in 2005. He moved to East Hampton, regrouped and has now emerged in his latest iteration: visual artist. Showing now at The Fireplace Project in Springs, Austrian-born Lang has eviscerated some 6000 of his own iconic fashion statements and repurposed the shreds into totemic sculptures, 16 of which are on view here.

The columns stand like sentinels throughout the two main galleries while video documentation grinds away on a flat screen television in the front room. In it, garment after garment is sucked into the teeth of a bulk-load shredder and pulverized into the raw material that will eventually become these columnar forms. The scraps -- bits of fur, fiber, plastic and hair --  are mixed with a binder and extruded through pipes to emerge as something that looks pretty much like gigantic standing bratwursts. They are Nietzschean, visceral and not so vaguely intestinal. The belly of the fashion beast?

But standing in front of these floor to ceiling extrusions, they have a hypnotic presence; one that is beautiful in the way decay is beautiful. Ambiguous, hermetic and in some strange way -- regenerative -- the totems read like a testament of sorts. An ashes to ashes manifesto. The ways in which art is restorative are pretty endless. Definitely worth a trip uptown.

String Theory

Chris Duncan: Patterns & Light at Halsey McKay

Last chance to see the shimmering reflections, endless prisms and luscious, radiant color of Oakland based artist Chris Duncan. His work is smart and seductive in the way it draws you inside -- it is meditative without being ecclesiastical, deductive but not analytical. 

Duncan's installation is dazzling and refreshing. It possesses an elusiveness that keeps viewers guessing all the way through. It's especially smart in the way it borrows from Robert Smithson and Pink Floyd at the same time; contemplates Buckminster Fuller, Brancusi and Fred Sandback all at once but somehow manages to retain its own playfulness and wide-eyed curiosity. 

I like this work. Last weekend to check it out -- and try to see it at night, too. It's completely magical.

Prism Schism, 2011

a little cosmic dust....

 

window treatment...

mystical packing tape -- how cool is that?

mirrors are fascinating

Lucian Freud dies at 88

Lucian Freud, British painter of the human form

By Matt Schudel, Thursday, July 21, 8:52 PM

Few painters of modern times have received the honors and riches that came to Lucian Freud, the deeply talented and mysterious grandson of Sigmund Freud.Often considered the greatest living master of the human form, Mr. Freud painted many hundreds of portraits that were seldom flattering but that revealed their subjects in searing, sometimes brutal honesty that might have made his grandfather proud. 

But he wasn’t just the heir of the father of psychoanalysis. He managed to re-create and expand the tradition of classical portraiture in his paintings, which penetrated masks of pretense and seemed to pierce to the soul.
Mr. Freud, who died in London on Wednesday at 88, had found moderate success in Britain early in his career. He was a leading figure, along with Francis Bacon, in the London School of painters of the 1960s who concentrated on the human form. 

It wasn’t until a 1987 retrospective at Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum that Americans began to notice the depth and power of Mr. Freud’s work. A new continent of art lovers was astonished by paintings that seemed to defy prevailing conventions, as well as time itself. 

“They stop you where you stand,” Washington Post critic Paul Richard wrote at the time. “It is as if gravity itself had somehow been increased. . . . Freud’s pictures have a sense of time expanded, not easily explained. Anchored to the present, they seem to preexist the photograph.”

Time magazine critic Robert Hughes called Mr. Freud “the greatest living realist painter.” From then on, despite frequent feuds with galleries and his reluctance to be interviewed, Mr. Freud became an art-world sensation.

He slathered paint onto canvases in thick layers of impasto, creating a brushwork style that seemed to echo the heaviness of the figures he represented. Girth deepened into gravity in a Freud portrait, and the disturbing grays, greens and purples blending with pinks and other flesh tones only added psychological depth to his figures.
Mr. Freud’s paintings have a rough incandescence, an oxymoronic ugly beauty from which people cannot avert their eyes — or close their wallets. In 2008, his portrait “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” was sold by the New York branch of Christie’s auction house for $33.6 million — the most ever paid for a painting by a living artist.
Many of his works, including self-portraits, showed his figures in the nude — or “naked,” the term he preferred. He sometimes asked his subjects back for as many 80 sittings, coaxing them out of their clothes under a harsh light during intimate, all-night sessions.

Often irascible with the press, Mr. Freud could be charming and solicitous — almost therapeutic — to his portrait subjects. Posing for him, one model told Britain’s Express newspaper in 2008, it “felt like being an apple in the Garden of Eden. When it was over, I felt as if I had been cast out of Paradise.”

He often painted people with their pets, with the animals usually looking more dignified than their owners. His works were frequently very small — a 1998 portrait of a pregnant Jerry Hall, then the girlfriend of Mick Jagger, was four by six inches — but other portraits measured several feet across. Some of his famous subjects, such as Hall and model Kate Moss, were well known, but Mr. Freud more often portrayed his otherwise little-known friends, relatives and lovers, of whom there were many. He turned down requests from Princess Diana and Pope John Paul II, but he completed a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in 2001.

“At one point I remember saying to [the queen], ‘You probably think I’m going in­cred­ibly slowly,” Mr. Freud told the London Times in 2006, “ ‘but in fact I’m going at 90 miles an hour and if I go any faster the car might overturn!’ ”
Lucian Michael Freud was born Dec. 8, 1922, in Berlin and went to England with his family in 1932. His father was an architect. Young Lucian saw a good deal of his celebrated grandfather while growing up and gave him some of his paintings. “I liked his company very much,” Mr. Freud recalled of his grandfather, who died in 1939. “He was never boring. He told me jokes.”

Mr. Freud served as a seaman in the British merchant navy during World War II and studied at several art schools. Although he sometimes pretended not to know their work, he was influenced by the between-wars tradition of such German painters as Otto Dix and George Grosz. 

After his first gallery shows in the 1940s, Mr. Freud developed his signature style of thickly applied paint, coupled with an unsparing, straightforward gaze that exposed deep psychological currents.
In 1948, he married Kathleen Garman Epstein, daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein. They had two daughters before their divorce in 1952. A year later, Mr. Freud married writer Caroline Blackwood, from whom he was divorced in 1958.

In recent years, it was revealed that Mr. Freud was a rake of epic proportions. He had at least 12 illegitimate children and, if the British press is to be believed, as many as 40. In his 80s, he was seen in the company of women who were young enough to be his granddaughters.

He often returned to museums to view the painters he considered his inspiration and, perhaps, his equals: Titian, Rembrandt, Ingres and Degas. Almost to the end, Mr. Freud remained a feverishly busy artist.

“I like it,” he said in 2006, “if people say very contradictory things about my work: ‘It’s very ugly.’ ‘It’s very beautiful.’ ‘Do you get your models from an asylum?’ ”

Renowned portraitist and grandson of Sigmund Freud, Lucian Freud died yesterday. His paintings of Leigh Bowery are some of the most brilliant from the late 20th C. but this tidbit from his Wikipedia profile is pretty delicious:

Freud is rumored to have up to 40 illegitimate children, although this number is generally accepted as an exaggeration.

does it get any better than this:

Longhouse Reserve

20th Anniversary Gala

really -- is there any place more seductive than Longhouse on a balmy summer eve? congratulations to Jack Lenor Larsen and everyone involved for 20 years of celebrating the natural world.

 

greeted by adorable young men in blue ties...

nature providing a type of glamour all its own...

sea of blue books

Taking breath away -- this other worldly ship by sculptor Dale Chihuly, honored this year alongside Barbara Slifka

...lonesome dove

legendary New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham and New York Ballet principals

Hope Sandrow, awardee, Best in Show, Planters: ON&OFF the Ground IV; Bravo Hope!

la

good night world...