Review: Armory Show

Had a great time at the Armory Show; highly recommended for those on or near NYC before it closes Monday evening. People consider it an overwhelming amount of art to see but for me (who once did 18 museums on the 5-day Paris pass) it is just almost enough, acting overwhelmed is just silly; next year I want to get an earlier jump on things and see one of the other fairs the same day. After the first 100 galleries a brief visual fatigue sets in followed by a state of hypnosis which I find conducive to optimal reception. Plus the international fashion show of it all.. here what crowds there are, which seem to disperse somewhat during the dinner hour, are not such a detriment, and some of the cell conversations are downright hilarious in an unintentional way.

Perhaps the most powerful canvas was Daniel Richter’s The Owner’s Historic Lesson (Zwirner), which shows the back of a diabolical-seeming figure in shadow with a gallery of hooded death masks in the audience, bringing to mind works by Ensor, Picabia, and others. The coloration and composition pulls off this concept, the red and white background features the black figure in the center, as the viewer sees the scene from the perspective of the black figure.

Sean Kelly had wonderful new paintings by Ilya Kabakov – villages on mountaintops with upside-down villages meeting them from the top of the canvases - what seemed a Utopian Magritte vision. Another highlight from an old favorite was Marcel Broodthaers’ 1960s canvas replicating the page layout of Mallarmé’s Un coup de Dés (the first edition of which can be seen at the Rutgers New Brunswick, NJ’s Zimmerli) with straight lines (Crousel, Paris).

Audi was one of the corporate sponsors, and several jokes (cries) were made at the expense of Mercedes: Dongwook Lee’s new sculptures that portrayed the medallion with a plastic female nude as the interior three-pointed star, and elsewhere a 1974 Piero Golia that linked the medallions together to make a ritualistic necklace. Along with Dongwook Lee in Arario’s (Beijing) impressive lineup was Wang Guangyi’s ‘Great Criticism - Art Museum No’ which utilizes socialist realism for the broad strokes of a manifesto.

It’s not an Armory Show unless viewers are shocked, and though many tried, including a bloody, sensual Paul McCarthy photographic sequence, or a neon ‘Shit’ that greeted visitors through the turnstiles, I did see shocked people regarding Tracey Emin’s neon construction consisting solely of an oval containing the words ‘People like you need to fuck people like me.’ What I liked about it is its relation to the commercial tradition of neon - if you are not being shameless, why use neon? Another propagandist work I was sold on was Erwin Worm’s canvas (Krinzinger, Vienna) ‘Support Hegel,’ with minimal figurative illustration.

Also utilizing the commercial tradition was Ulrich Strothjohann’s lit signs that rearranged wordings from their retail beginnings. The Aachen gallery showing him also had wonderful Mexican photos chronicling archeology ancient and modern; doesn’t everyone grow up there wanting to be in the Anthropology Museum, the big show?

The progeny theme continued with Diego Fernandez’s ‘Vulgi Fabulae (Rise of the Giant Witch Craze)’ which stuck Marilyn Monroe’s partially obscured head with what looked like a piece of prefab insulation on top of it, above a vintage volume of ‘Catholic Viewpoint on Overpopulation’ by Anthony Zimmerman SOD with a base of cutouts of various Hollywood stars among which only Salma Hayek was recognizable to me.

I give the folks at Enrique Guerrero, Mexico DF credit for downing robust amounts of tequila during the proceedings, bringing back fond memories from my thirsty days down there when produce merchants would ply me with free shots while I was sorting through corn and avocados. Their offerings did not disappoint; Enrique Jozin’s ‘Practica (Fifty 12-oz. cartridges)' was wooden figurative constructions with bullet holes, and Pablo Helguera chipped in with thought-provoking photo diaries and collages that sorted out globalization.

Politics was present but tended to not focus itself directly on current goings on: one worthy attention-getter was Thomas Hirshhorn’s large, grotesque installation ‘Outgrowth - Family,’ which represented without subtlety the word out there. Martha Rosler’s mid-80s multimedia ‘If it's too bad to be true, it could be DISINFORMATION’ (pictured) focused on media distortions in reportage of the Contra War. Lara Almarcegui (Pepe Cobo, Madrid) centers her compositions amid the overdevelopment of São Paolo, in on canvas cataloging the building materials used, in photographs showing the vain battle of flora to remain glorious. Another vision of an urban future is the cartoon-like canvas Rickshawpolis from a gallery in India.

Comic Strip, 1968

Unreal city, scooters hydroplaning on ant clusters, the undead razing their unworld. Objects in Id’s mirror may be closer to Le Pen than they appear. The master trades classical distance for caricature, only those parts of the third dimension capable of freedom. Pop goes Greenberg’s resistance to kitsch, giant green jolly goes Pop. I, Tiresias, old man in an Isis costume, saw the first six episodes of Captain Pugwash, gathered the rest. Who’s laughing now, a part united of press syndicate, all the way to the comic bank. It’s love flies like a bird, it’s death flies like a plane.

Flamenco, 1995

We don’t line up for Il Confomista for the soft colors of Paris but for the hard lines of EUR, the state’s shilling also building Storaro’s Forbidden City. Architecture feeding on alienation as its sponsors tend to do. Here everyone passes through longing for a village but finds a Malevich. But it’s self the light favors, the essence that remains, becoming what we know when blinded by beacons.

Stroszek, 1977

The pathos here is cheap, the pathos is for the people. Loplop stuffed inside an Allegory of Music, nothing declared at customs. The rabbit as king of the fire that is never consumed. Follow the sunset West and it never leaves you, your proverbial kicks means the proverb never has to end. The social contract has won, the camera won’t smoke it out of its cave. I know why they hawk omniscience. Ski lifts are cyclical, time is home.

Band of Outsiders, 1964

I’d like to see a basketball game in a room of ancient sculptures, with an audience of prisoners. Replicas will do for starters, perhaps thereafter: the real ones would sound an apocalyptic note, a ritual of expenditure, Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus. I saw a kid prancing through a museum somewhat recently, with the requisite reproach from Mom: here the Band storms the palace, taking their own sarcophagus by force while the Horatii look on helplessly, a tomb where they’ll never belong.

Pierrot Lunaire, 'Mondestrunken'

Dance: Rudolph Nureyev; Choreography: Glen Tetley; Music: Arnold Schoenberg; Translation of Giraud Into German: Otto Erich Hertleben

‘...into the waves flows a flood of Spring, the silent horizon. The eye tastes countless desires as they swim against the flood. The wine which with the eyes we drink, spilling night into the waves. The poet, devoted, fills with potion, mind of sky...’ - Albert Giraud, 1884

Sunlight, carne vale

Melting snow makes separate offerings to different senses, ‘la boue est faite de nos pleurs.’ The birds have returned. I have no previous memory of being healthy in the cold weather: last year it was a minor but persistent fever, the year before a hernia I mistook for something more threatening, the year before I crossed into Presidio, TX just in time to see the pretty girls in the supermarkets with ashes on their foreheads. My emotions are free from memory, inventions!

Off the ballot

Dream last night: I had to write a press release that an actress/model that was constantly gone on hard drugs was going to forgo a run for the school board. I think she was not running, though it’s possible that she was entering the race; it’s a good thing I don’t have to actually write the press release.

Anna Nicole-related: probably, though I don’t turn on the tube someone related the hullabaloo to me last week and I descended into a dozen or more news stories. You can invent scenarios that are more descriptive of these United States, even less extreme, more revelatory ones, it’s just hard, as it’s supposed to be.