Ride On Time- A meditation on the nature of time and history at Grand Central Station

Posted on April 29, 2013 by melissa

published in CityArts/The New York Press April 29, 2013

What do you think passes through someone’s mind as they dash though Grand Central Station? I would wager that the most common thought is something along the lines of  “What time does my train leave?” or “Will I be on time?” Time is the driving force behind any working train station. And “time” is a precious commodity in New York City, where we move fast and the past is quickly overtaken by the present. How apt it is that curator Amy Hausman has titled her lyrical and compelling exhibition “On Time /Grand Central at 100,” tying the underlying constructs of speed and travel with the centennial celebration of Grand Central Station. This group exhibition is organized by the group  MTA Arts For Transit, in conjunction with the New York Transit Museum at the New York Transit Museum branch in the station.

Showing mixed-media work of 17 artists and one poet, this is an exquisitely curated show. Approximately half of the pieces were commissioned for the exhibition, including a poem by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Time is not a new concept for artists to explore, but in this show time is related to the great building that has both withstood the wrecking ball of NYC “progress” and every day serves as a conduit for living. Grand Central Station has become an iconic and romantic symbol of the past, an architectural ode to New York as it once was. It is also a very busy and entirely contemporary train station. This elegant and emotional exhibition captures the complexities and beauty of these two facts.

GrandCentral_Sophie-Blackall-Missed-Connections
It is fitting that video plays a large role in this show. Improv Everywhere has two videos on view. One documents their infamous performance piece where 200 people “froze” motionless in the Grand Hall of the station for five minutes, and captures the reactions of commuters and tourists. The second documents a commissioned “prank” staged on Feb 1, 2013 to commemorate the anniversary of the station. It involves blinking lights, camera flashes and the delighted responses of hundreds of people who just happened to be passing though the station at that magic moment. The unfettered joy of being in the right place at the right time. Both pieces portray GCS as a giant and benevolent performance space.

Jim Campbell and Ian Dicke use the tools available in digital filming to capture and play with the image of masses of people who pass through the station each day, slowing and quickening their movements to create visual poetry.

Mid-century photographer Paul Himmel contributes what are to me the most poetic and thoughtful comments in the show with two vintage black and white photos that capture a moment of stillness amidst the mad dash of humanity.

Illustrators Sophie Blackall and Peter Sis’s work will be instantly recognizable to any subway rider. They focus their gentle view of the world on the architecture of the station itself. Sis portrays Jacqueline Onassis as literally the guardian angel of Grand Central Station, and Blackall shows our ongoing fascination with the mythological world portrayed on the station ceiling.

The punch line is that this is an exhibition that asks us to stop and look around as we run frantically through Grand Central Station. Maybe even take a later train.

“OnTime/Grand Central at 100” runs through July 7, 2013. New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex in Grand Central Terminal. www.mta.info/art

Tags: Amy Hausman, Ian Dicke, Jim Campbell, Melissa Stern, Paul Himmel, Peter Sis, Sophie Blackall

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Further Thoughts on the Art of Melissa Stern

Posted on January 23, 2013 by melissa

Paul J. Karlstrom                               19 January 2013

 

 

 

 

On a recent trip to New York my wife and I managed to see several exhibitions during what was primarily a family Christmas week in Brooklyn. Although we were staying in Chelsea, we saw none of the numerous gallery exhibitions in that trendy neighborhood. Matisse at the Met and Inventing Abstraction at MOMA were by themselves worth the trip from our home in San Francisco. We agreed that they were among the best modern art shows we have seen in a long time.

A third exhibition we visited, the only one in a gallery, in its more modest way was equally compelling and thought-provoking. That wonderful, highly original show was Melissa Stern’s The Talking Cure at Smart Clothes Gallery. On view on the Lower East Side (November 8-December 20), this most engaging multi-media presentation was for us a revelation. The title, of course, invokes Freud’s famous method. Consisting of twelve sculptures and the same number of drawings, writers, and actors, the show was as much a conceptual art piece as a display of objects. Stern had outdone herself in the sophisticated deployment of text, sound, object, and image in what was a visual and aural performance. Each part played its role, further illuminating—or rather suggesting—an artistic vision that is uniquely Stern’s, as those familiar with her productive career will attest.

Ann and I,  joined by our daughter, Clea, are no newcomers to Melissa’s ceramic art, having lived with examples for years (full disclosure: we were staying in Melissa’s loft in Chelsea and had the pleasure of seeing the show with the artist). What struck us, or certainly struck me, was the consistency of Melissa’s focused artistic goals along with the sophistication and intellectual rigor she brings to what for many viewers is playful (although frequently ominous) and childlike. Or perhaps like Outsider art, examples of which she has in her quite revealing collection. That is an artful deception, a means to coax viewers to look internally and through individual memory confront a past that deeply informs the present. The “issues” brought out in imagined narrative responses to the sculptures and drawings, and recorded by actors as a kind of Acoustiguide (invoking museum experience), in this case via up-to-date QR code, are both shared and very personal. This is no kiddie art.

Upon returning home I took a look at the small catalogue for Melissa Stern: Back to School, a 2003 exhibition of drawings at the Children’s Museum of the Arts for which I wrote the essay. I was both amazed and quite pleased that what I had to say about Melissa’s work then seemed entirely applicable to the recent exhibition:

“Stern is careful to create images strictly from her own personal experiences and concerns, past and present, and the imaginative equivalents [emphasis new] they suggest to her. The narrative, if there is one, is the secret world of Melissa Stern. What elevates these images to the status of compelling works of art is her willingness [maybe even compulsion] to share her world [to invite us in through her art]. She does so in a calculated and strategic way, through fantastic images intended to create for the viewer the mental and sensory aids that become bridges to the past. Although Stern is loathe to speak directly to [specific] meaning and artistic intention in her work, preferring to allow it to work its magic without interference, it is clear that she is using memory and the past to provide the keys to self-discovery in the present.”

So I look at both exhibitions and my understanding of Melissa and her art, and I see a child’s discovery of her world through images, words, reading, and looking. The same basic qualities and individuality that distinguish the earlier show are present in The Talking Cure, just more so. Above all, Melissa brings a sly sense of humor and amusement to what is a very adult project: the ongoing effort to understand ourselves. I think Stern’s chosen means to achieve her very grownup and ambitious goals are not just unique but brilliant. I wish The Talking Cure would travel to discover how many others would agree with that statement.

PJK © 1-19-13

Paul Karlstrom is former west coast regional director (1973-2003) of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. He is well-known for his oral histories. His latest book is a biography of art historian Peter Selz, a major player in the story of modern art in New York and California. Peter Selz: Sketches of a Life in Art (California, 2012).

 

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Lost In Her Cosmos

Posted on December 15, 2012 by melissa

The New York Press- Dec 5, 2012 •
Rosemarie Trockel’s World on View

Torckel’s World

The much-anticipated exhibition Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos now at the New Museum, is a complicated show to get one’s arms around and a hard one to love. The show spans three floors, each with a different curatorial intent and style, and each containing very different bodies of work. One floor is devoted to objects and artworks by other artists who have inspired Trockel’s own vision. The intent is to showcase and connect the various source materials that have inspired Trockel’s work over the past 30 years. The result is a show that feels oddly disjointed. Rosemarie Trockel and Lynne Cooke jointly curate, and while I can understand their desire to break the mold of a traditional retrospective, this show does not do Trockel’s long and interesting career the justice that it might have.

The first of the three floors is the most intriguing. I love to look at the art and objects that inspire artists; it often provides insight into what makes their work tick. Some of the pieces mounted here as examples of inspiration are in themselves so striking and spirited that it would be hard for anyone’s work to hold up in comparison.

The omission of much of Trockel’s best-known works—machine knitted, politically oriented and delightfully subversive—leaves, to me, be a huge hole in this show. Instead, there is an entire floor of wool wall pieces—big wooden stretchers wrapped with wool, a twist on color-field painting. They are surprisingly tame—think Barnet Newman in cloth. These works are paired with Joyce Scott’s exuberant, obsessive and nutty wool-wrapped objects. The vibrant energy that this work throws off does no favors to Trockel’s rather stiff use of the same material.

The third floor of the exhibition is divided into two parts. One long vitrine holds a large collection of pamphlets, zines and drawings, what we use to call artist ephemera. The addition of some contextual information would have been helpful to understand how and where all of this printed material fits into the larger picture of the artist’s life. The second half of this floor, devoted to the artist’s work in clay, is for me, the most problematic. Clay is a medium that’s very easy to fall for and very hard to use well. To get past the material’s obvious charms and break new ground is the tricky part. Trockel’s pieces show a love for the material but don’t make that transcendental leap.

This is an admirably ambitious exhibition. Trockel and Cooke took on the huge task of showing the full “cosmos” in which an artist lives. That the show is not entirely successful is no surprise, given the enormity of the undertaking. A longtime fan of Trockel’s work, I left feeling unfulfilled by an exhibit that makes one work too hard to understand the artist’s cosmos at the expense of enjoying her most worthy art.

Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos, through Jan 20. New Museum, 235 Bowery. www.newmuseum.org

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Wagging the Dog

Posted on October 5, 2012 by melissa

The New York Press- Oct 3, 2012 •


WEGMAN THROWS SINCERITY A BONE
Irony is one the most overused conceits in contemporary art. So much so that the term “ironic hipster” has become part of our current lexicon. I’m tired of ironic hipster art, minimal drawings coupled with what are meant to be pearls of wisdom encapsulated in a tagline. The current show of vintage William Wegman drawings and videos at Salon 94 Freemans, Drawings for a Better Tomorrow and a Worse Yesterday, reminds us that there was a time when irony in visual art was a fresh and delightful concept. Wegman’s quirky view of the world holds up to the test of time and shows just how meaningful a few well-drawn lines and well-chosen words can be when crafted by the right hands.

Most of these drawings and videos are from the 1970s, when William Wegman was a shaggy-haired guy who always schlepped a dog around with him. I met him when I was a freshman in college. He showed up to my class (dog in tow) and spoke on a relatively new art form for the time: video. He was lovely, self-deprecating and, above all, generous to students. That spirit of generosity has always come through in Wegman’s art. An attitude of inclusiveness is ever-present throughout his body of work. Wegman respects and invites the viewer, rather than carrying on with a sense that “there’s a joke here, and you’re not cool enough to get it,” an attitude that is pervasive among some of his hipster successors.

Several of the standout drawings in the show are so slight that it takes a good second look to see how deceptively complicated they really are. To describe them and give away the punchline would be to do the work a  disservice. It’s that momentary collaboration with the viewer by which a simple drawing and a few words combine in a flash of delight and recognition. A smattering of drawings from the 1980s are included, and it is evident that Wegman continues to view the world with a bemused intelligence that shows no sign of wearing thin.

In the videos we get to re-meet the soulful Weimaraner Man Ray, a dog with a face so expressive he could have been a silent movie star. Wegman sets up the most absurd situations: The artist chiding Man Ray about the dog’s spelling errors, Man Ray in bed with an alarm clock. Somehow, through the gentle art of irony, he makes those encounters both hilarious and poignant.

This exhibition is a refuge from the jaded contemporary art scene. See it and remember another era in the art world, one that could genuinely make you smile.

William Wegman, Drawings for a Better Tomorrow and a Worse Yesterday
Through Oct. 20 at Salon 94 Freemans, 1 Freeman Alley. Call 212.529.7400 or visit
www.salon94.com for more information.

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Trade Routes

Posted on June 19, 2012 by melissa

Mapping globalization at Aicon

CityArts June 11, 2012

The current exhibition at Aicon Gallery, Mapmakers: The Evolution of Indian Art, got me thinking about globalization. I will freely admit to a certain amount of cultural bias when looking at art. I suppose we all have it; some of us are just more willing to pony up and admit it. When I go to look at a show of contemporary Italian art (for example), I don’t expect to see art that is particularly “Italian” in nature. I expect work that is about contemporary issues, materials and/ or politics, but that is in many ways similar to what I might see in from American artists in New York City.

Right or wrong, I go to a show of non- Western art with the full expectation that I’m going to see artwork that is somehow intrinsically tied to that culture. One hopes the work has a unique and contemporary tweak to it, but I look forward to seeing artwork that has some overt relation to the culture from which it has evolved.

Perhaps because modernism came later to non-Western countries, I expect to be surprised and delighted by the integration of traditional and contemporary vocabularies. And while I don’t believe I am alone in this perspective, my viewpoint—indeed this review—reveals as much about my bias as it do about the art I am reviewing.

Having enjoyed and admired Parts One and Two of The Rubin Museum’s groundbreaking exploration of the development of modernist and contemporary art in India, I was eager to experience the Aicon Gallery’s view of the contemporary Indian art scene. What I saw was a mixed bag of art trends from the past decade, some interesting, but largely populated with the same tired ideas with which American art schools have been filling U.S. galleries. Globalization has made all art look the same.

The painting by Baiju Parthan, “Progression (Last Supper—After Da Vinci)” is painted as if it were an altered film strip, washed out and blurry. It is about eight feet long, with inexplicable architectural red lines thrusting into the frame in the vicinity of Christ’s head. Cool and passionless, its colors are reduced to icy blues, black and white. A bland and formulaic response to the great passion contained in the original.

Baiju Parthan, “Progression (Last Supper—After da Vinci),” oil and acrylic on canvas. 2008,

Perhaps I’m being a wee bit tough. There are some standout pieces that have the feel of authenticity to them. Nitin Mukul’s painting “Fountain” (2008) is a vigorous and engaging abstracted vision of water. The painting is beautiful. Shapes of water droplets swirl in an almost psychedelic mass of color and pattern. It not only transcends the subject of water, but, more significantly, transcends cliché.

But in the main, the contemporary Indian artists on display are turning out much the same work as anywhere else in the world. I miss the sense of place that is so prevalent in all art forms that come from India. It is part of what draws me to the culture. Perhaps as the place itself becomes more global, its most contemporary and worldly artists cannot help but reflect the trend. If so, then some of the works on display at Aicon succeed most admirably. But in its attempt to show how global contemporary Indian art has become, the show’s curators have lost the pulse of what makes Indian art so very unique and moving in the first place.

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I’m a Weekling !

Posted on June 11, 2012 by melissa

My heroic friends at The Weeklings have graciously invited me to help curate the visual art part of their  superpowered blog. I will be posting about visual art on Sundays. I don’t have a secret identity yet, but I do have superpowers………. Stay tuned for more fun in the sun!!!

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It All Adds Up…..

Posted on May 25, 2012 by melissa

This group of drawings, called NEW MATH, is visual therapy for my angst-ridden relationship with numbers. Remember how bewildering it was when they introduced “New Math” in school? I never got over wondering what happened to “Old Math.” Was it in an assisted living facility? Was it put to ‘sleep’ like an unwanted puppy at the pound or buried in  a city landfill? And what the hell was wrong with “Old Math”?  Why did I have to play with little colored “cusinare rods,” and how did they possibly relate to real numbers? Why would anyone  be emptying a tank at the same time as they were filling it? This last “word problem” is what stopped me dead in math class…FOREVER. I  could never get past the philosophical issue of what a waste it was to be emptying and filling a tank at the same time.

While taking the math SAT,  I filled in the little circles in neato patterns. My score was so low that I think I got into college as a freak of nature, a curiosity, if you will, a sideshow example of a living girl with no relationship to numbers. Step right up, folks.  But I digress…

Absent any real understanding of what they mean, I find the visual tangle of hundreds of numbers quite beautiful . The shapes of numbers, bouncing off of each other in a cheerful jumble, their values no more or less meaningful than those of other marks. Every now and then one jumps out at you and may trigger a thought. “A giant 8, what grade was I in when I was 8?” “5? Best birthday party, ever!” But the constant jostling for dominance- why after all is a seven bigger than a three- is gone. They are shapes  and patterns and simply beautiful marks on a page.

 

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Man of Steel

Posted on May 21, 2012 by melissa

My friend Arthur is a brilliant artist, he’s also a man of many words…. check this out-

I Hear Voices

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M at MOMA

Posted on May 16, 2012 by melissa

A recent visit to The Museum of Modern Art.

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Keep On Truckin’

Posted on May 5, 2012 by melissa

May 4, 2012

published in CityArts
Jade Townsend’s “Beastly” Installation

Jade Townsend’s new body of work, entitled “Leviathan,” is a challenging show to get one’s arms around.  Upon entering the Lesley Heller Workspace on lower Orchard Street, the viewer is faced with two choices: Option one, to the right is the lower half of a human mannequin with a giant red painting propped upon it. To see the stunning drawing on the wall behind it you must gingerly make your way around the obstacle. Option two is to walk through an open-ended wooden box constructed in the gallery that spits you out into the belly of the exhibition. Neither is a particularly welcoming entrance to what is an interesting, if not a wee bit overreaching show of drawings and sculpture.

The exhibit consists of a series of drop-dead gorgeous drawings. Richly executed and darkly funny, they depict a perverted circus world full of ambivalence and peril. The drawings are full of truck imagery, in itself a wonderful tweak on the circus theme. The work is hung on walls loosely striped with red paint, to simulate a circus tent. OK, this kind of works; it relates to the drawings, and I dig an off-beat installation. But then there are also the three big sculptural elements: The aforementioned mannequin, the box, which is said to represent the back of a “box” truck used for delivering art, and a giant wooden construction of the cab of a truck upended, as if the front had crashed propelling the seats high in the air. A video loop plays on what would be the windshield with a soundtrack of African pop music. The back of the “truck” has an old medical textbook on the heart wedged into it with plastic tubes streaming out of the sides. Entitled “Beast.”

Art in the belly of the beast–I get it. It’s a big concept. But you know, the drawings are so damn interesting on their own, delicate narratives meticulously worked with colored pencil, graphite and pastel. They could live perfectly well solo. One wishes the artist had kept it simple, in favor of the beauty and complexity of the drawings, and resisted forcing them into an “installation.”   “Leviathan” remains an interesting and worthy show, an exhibit worth seeing.

Jade Townsend’s “Leviathian” through May 25. Lesley Heller Workspace
54 Orchard St. http://lesleyheller.com/ (212) 410-6120

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