Gallery Notes: Chelsea (November 24, 2009)

Last Tuesday, I spent a few hours wandering the galleries in the Chelsea district of New York. This article presents some brief reviews of what I found.

In truth, the highlight of the afternoon was not inside the galleries, but out on the street. I wandered around my favorite neighborhoods architecturally speaking, and visited the High Line for the first time since it opened. Both the refurbished elevated structures and the surrounding post-industrial landscape are quite photogenic. I presented a couple of my photos on a previous post.

After spending time outside taking in the neighborhood at both street and aerial level, I came indoors to a solo exhibition of works by Dan Flavin at David Zwirner. Flavin’s large-scale pieces were series of fluorescent lights in alternating colors. The simplicity of the lines and lights and spare nature of the large white concrete rooms of the gallery made of a stark contrast with the intensity and energy of the city just outside. The way to experience these works was to take in the expanse from the center, and then slowly walk along the perimeter with the lights, a sort of walking meditation.

Another exhibit that lent itself to a more slow, contemplative viewing was Spencer Finch’s The Brain — is wider than the Sky. This exhibition consisted of three works. The Shield of Achilles (Night Sky over Troy 1184 B.C.) featured a series of cans hanging from the ceiling, each containing a light bulb and a small hole in its base to let out a point of light. Viewers were invited to lie on a mat below and gaze upward, as if looking at the night sky. Although the cans are meticulously arranged to represent ancient Greek constellations, I found myself thinking of them simply as an abstract array of lights and cylinders. Nearby, 366 (Emily Dickinson’s Micalous year) interpreted the 366 poems Dickenson wrote in 1862 as a colorful spiral labyrinth composed of candles, each of which is colored according to the corresponding poem. The candles are lit in sequence, one a day, so that when I saw the piece several of the candles were already melted. The third piece Paper Moon (Studio All at Night) consisted of gray four-sided shapes as was described by the artist as “a very boring piece and clearly not for everyone.”

Matthew Ritchie’s solo exhibition Line Shot at Andrea Rosen Gallery stood out for me, with the abstract, mathematical quality of both the sculptural and two-dimensional pieces. The swirling, intricate forms with circles, curves, latticework and polyhedra suggest both a mechanical or computer-generated origin, and an organic living structure at the same time, perhaps a large city in space or a rather complex molecule. The two dimensional pieces seem to be projections of the sculptures onto a flat surface, with added layers of color. I was particularly drawn to the title work of the exhibition, Line Shot, an animated feature film with moving versions of his projected sculptural forms, with floating text and spoken word, and a sound track built from metallic resonances – and sound that is very rich but also familiar and inviting. I was impressed to read about Ritchie’s past and present collaborations with physicists, musicians, writers and a host of people from other disciplines; I wish I had been around to see The Long Count, a related performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music back in October.

At Greene Naftali I saw Paul Chan’s sexually charged show Sade for Sade’s sake. At first glance, the drawings in the first gallery were simply abstract nude figures drawn with curving black lines, and reminded me a bit of the charcoal drawings of Reiko Muranaga. The sexual dimension becomes more apparent in the accompanying video animations, which feature the similar abstract-figurative shapes moving and convulsing while geometric shapes float in the background. Chan also created a set of fonts (available for download) in which individual keys are mapped to sexual phrases that can be used for generating live poetry or performances. In the gallery, he presents several large-scale panels presenting the character set for each font. In the center of this room was a computer keyboard in which the keys had been replaced with modernist geometric tombstones.

At Stricoff, I once again saw Catherine Mackey’s Wharves and Warehouses (I had previously seen her and her work at Open Studios. It was interesting to see her work, which focuses on the modern urban landscape, paired with the work of other artists in the gallery, such as Zachary Thornton’s woman in a yellow dress set against a dark background.

When I saw the sign Edward Burtynsky’s photographic series Burtynsky: Oil at Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery, I was thinking, “oh, ok, another politically charged photo series…” and not expecting much. But the images were surprisingly beautiful. There were area views of open pit mines that had an abstract beauty with their curved contours and subtle shades, if one can dismiss the ugliness of the practice being shown. Other symbolic images included towers in oil fields, and a highway interchange from Los Angeles, a theme of which I am quite fond (and featured in an old Fun with Highways post).

Some other quick notes. I saw early drawings of Jean-Michel Basquiat at Stellan Holm Gallery, which displayed the frenetic combinations of text, figures and shapes that characterize his paintings. Yvonne Jacquette’s intricate and detailed wood carvings featured familiar scenes from around New York City, including buildings, bridges and the waterfront. Hope Gangloff’s large canvases at Susan Inglett Gallery included one nude figure with a cell phone and beer, and another with a writing bad surrounded by abstract shapes, as well as several figures with interesting clothing. Robert Motherwell’s Works on Paper at the architecturally interesting Jim Kempner Fine Art were simple and quite calming, with little bits of detail to discover like cut sections from musical scores.

Antibodies, Sk Orchestra, Do Make Say Think, The Happiness project

On Saturday, I went a couple of very different performances in various neighborhoods of Brooklyn, ranging from poetry reading and performance art to experimental jazz and pop. At Central Booking in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn, I saw a performance by the Sk Orchestra, which uses Casio SK-1 sampling keyboards as their main instrument. The SK-1 is a very playable instrument for low-fi real-time sampling and lends itself well to live performance. On this evening, the orchestra was more of “chamber ensemble”, with two SK-1 performers plus a third performer playing an old-style hand-cranked telephone. The SK-1s were used for live sampling in a “call-and-response” style, with one player sampling a phrase in his own voice, and the other providing a sampled response. The back-and-forth of samples at different rates of attack and pitches got increasingly confrontational as the performance went on, even approaching “fake violence” as the players hid behind a screen from which screaming sounds could be heard.

The performance was actually part of a release party for the book Antibodies, a collaboration of the interdisciplinary artist and musician Brandstifter and the word-and-sound artist Dirk huelsTrunk. The art book was based on found text and images from German medical textbooks. The authors performed a live reading from the book, reading lines once in German, once in English and the sung in both languages simultaneously. The performances featured a wide variety of musical and theatrical styles, from popular to more subdued to noisy/avant garde.


At the Music Hall of Williamsburg, I saw a show featuring the Toronto-based band Do Make Say Think. Their music combined rock and pop with jazz and experimental elements, moving seamlessly from a driving rock rhythm to a rhythmless section of extended delay lines and analog-synthesizer drones to an acoustic chorale of trumpets and saxophone. They were able to blend the timbres of the core instruments (guitar, bass, drums, keyboard) with the large horn section and their rather impressive array of electronics – each performer appeared to have a large collection of dedicated pedals. The overall show had a lot of energy and seemed to move forwarded from one song to another without stopping (hence the joke towards the end of the set that they were “now going to play their second song), and resonated with the full but not claustrophobic audience.

Beforehand, a subset of Do Make Say Think performed as Happiness Project, an intriguing set based on recordings made by bassist and lead Charles Spearin of his neighbors. He was intrigued by the prosody of the spoken words, with their wide variety of intonations, rhythms and phrases, and created several musical pieces that followed five of the neighbors’ recordings. We heard an old Jamaican woman’s voice followed by closely by saxophone’ Spearin’s daughter’s complaints interpreted by a violin against a minor-key jam; a very moving speech by a woman who was deaf until the age of 30, and her melodic description of what is was like to hear for the first time; a rather amusing repeated phrase from a six-year old girl as funky brass hits against a latin rhythm; and a duo of a bass and the words of a old Caribbean man. I have certainly seen musical performances before that attempt to capture the pitches and rhythms of speech closely, though this project worked quite well, and was certainly memorable. And it gives me something to think about for future pieces…

Lights on the 7 Subway Line

Some lines in the New York City subway system use diamonds and circles to differentiate between express and local, respectively. This is the case on the 7 (Flushing) line as well. However, I while most trains simply carry the appropriate sign, the trains on this line used lights instead, creating a unique effect:

As far as I know, this is only line which features these lights. The picture above illustrates the green circle representing the local train. Below is a red diamond representing the express:

I was not particularly happy with the second photo, but it does illustrate both the red light and an interesting side-effect that I observed: the reflection of these bright colored geometric lights on the windows both from other trains and within the car itself. I found myself watching the colored shapes dance, and contrast with a few of the passengers sitting in the car or rushing along the platform. Not mesmerized per se, the way a cat reacts to a light pointer, but still focused. I don’t know if anything will come of it besides this brief post.

Bleecker Street Station, New York City

Many of the stations on the New York subway system have been upgraded over the years, cleaned up and adorned with artwork and location-specific decor. The Bleecker Street Station on the Lexington Avenue line is not one of them. It’s still quite spare and run-down, the supporting columns a bit rusty. As I waited for an uptown #6 train, I took this photograph looking along the tracks and platform:

Just afterwards, I looked across to the opposite platform and saw a young woman making a similar photograph, also looking uptown. Almost as quickly, a downtown #6 pulled into the station, and as the train pulled away, she was of course gone. A typical movie cliche, but our main purpose in this little station was to catch our trains to wherever it was were going next.

ShanghaiPRIDE

This weekend is marks Pride 2009 here in San Francisco, and while the parade and other events here were huge (and occasionally over the top) as always, I found myself thinking of the much smaller, but nonetheless significant event I saw during Pride week in Shanghai on June 8.

I had the chance to attend the opening night event, which took place at a large bar in the French Concession district of Shanghai. There was a good mixture of both native Chinese and expats; of course, the attendance was a couple hundred rather than hundreds of thousands. But one must think about the significance of having an event like this in China, which is still a relatively conservative country and where gatherings of any sort can be complicated.

The open night featured screenings of two documentaries. The first was a film from Singapore entitled “Autopsy” which follows the filmmaker Loo Ziham’s dialogue with his mother about his sexuality. Following that was a documentary “Queer China”, a rather stylized look at the history of homosexuality and LGBT issues in China. The film interspersed images from traditional Chinese art and literature with historical footage from early years of the Peoples Republic, but focused primarily on relatively contemporary interviews. Those interviewed ranged from a young man who nearly committed suicide over his sexual orientation to an older man (I think he was in his 80s) discussing sexuality in rather open terms. Because of the way the room was set up, it was sometimes difficult to see the English subtitles, so I did miss some of what people were saying. One thing I was able to gather from the film was that much of the progress in terms of recognition and getting groups organized and sanctioned came under the heading of AIDS prevention – the one young woman interviewed noted the irony that AIDS was not a big issue for everyone.

In any case, it was quite interesting to see such an event in another country. And I leave wondering if Chinese can go out and take the cultural risk of participating in such an event, why does it have to remain “hidden” for people here in certain ethnic groups?

Cats of Tokyo

“He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. I wish I could convey to you the simplicity—the lack of affectation—of this couple who had come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery so their cat Tora would be protected. No she wasn’t dead, only run away. But on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name. So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.”

I remembered this scene from Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil of the temple in the suburbs of Tokyo that was dedicated to cats, and when I knew that I was in fact going to be in Tokyo for a couple of days, I decided I would find this temple. It is in fact the Gotoku-ji Temple in the Setagaya ward in the western suburbs of Tokyo.

It really was tucked away in a relatively quiet residential neighborhood, easily missed if one did not know where to find the gate. The temple grounds were very quiet, with very few visitors other than myself.


[click to enlarge]

There is a small building near the large tower in the photo above. I believe it is a side temple of sorts. Behind it is a set of shelves containing hundreds of maneki nekos, or beckoning cats, left as offerings. Indeed, Gotoku-ji claims to be the birthplace of the popular cat figurines.


[click to enlarge]

This was definitely the temple from Sans Soleil, I had succeeded in finding it. And having come this far, I spent a little time to linger in this small, quiet place.

Gotoku-ji is not the only site that claims to be the birthplace of the maneki neko. In Akasuka, not far from the famed Senso-ji temple, is the Imado Shrine.

Like Gotoku-ji, the shrine was tucked away in an alley in a quiet residential neighborhood. It was quite small, but had enough space for gardens, trees and statues leading up to the main building:


[click to enlarge]

Inside on the altar is a pair of large cats:

The one on the left has spots and is the male cat, while the one on the right is the female cat, and together the lucky cats of Imado are supposed bring good fortune to couples or those seeking love. Images of the pair of cats can be found throughout the shrine:


[click to enlarge]

The wooden plaques tied below the image of the cats contain wishes left by visitors. This is a common practice at temples and shrines, but it was specifically here that I chose to leave such a wish myself. Another common practice is selecting a fortune from a box near the shrine – at the Imado temple, each fortune comes with a tiny cat figure. I did get one of these, and of course a few ceramic cats from both Imado and Gotoku-ji.

One cannot help but think a little bit about spiritual things after visiting spiritual places, and a coincidence that occurred soon after leaving Imado contributed. Heading back south towards the Senso-ji temple, I saw a small narrow park, really a stone path lined with trees, and decided to walk in that direction. About halfway, a saw a woman with an open cat carrier, and inside was a black cat with green eyes!


[click to enlarge]
Although we had almost no words in common except basic greetings and “neko”, I was able to express my appreciation of her cat, and showed photos of Luna. “Lady?”, she asked in English. I nodded. She pointed to her own cat and smiled “Boy!”

The symbol of the cat is ubiquitous in Tokyo, spiritually as well as commercially:


[click to enlarge]

In the image above, we see a shop carrying not only an impressive array of maneki neko, but some examples of Japan’s other famous feline symbol, Hello Kitty. I have approximately zero interest in Hello Kitty, but during my trip I did build up a small collection of maneki neko, of which a subset are shown below:

Included are one of the simple ceramics from Gotoku-ji, the tiny cat that came with the fortune at Imado, and a couple of black cats that I found.

Beyond the black cat in the park, I did not see very many live cats during my short visit. Apparently, this is an issue from Japanese ailurophiles as well. There are now several cat cafes around Tokyo, where for a fee one can spend an hour or so interacting with the cafe’s very friendly (and very clean) cats. I did see a cat cafe in Akiabara (an area which will be the focus of one of our next articles), but I did not have time to check it out. However, Akiabara, the center of electronics and anime in Tokyo, will itself be the topic of an upcoming article here at CatSynth.