Andy Colquitt and Frank Haines at Lisa Cooley.  Installation Shot

This week at ArtReview.com I speak about a couple of the smaller galleries outside Chelsea, and why you might want to check them out. A teaser below.

The reasons innovative galleries often begin in obscure locations are many, but it has less to do with the romantic idea of escaping the system than with the economic practicalities of running a business without a financial backer. Rent is cheaper outside of Chelsea, and successful galleries like Canada and Jen Bekman (both on the Lower East Side), can afford the drop-off in foot traffic in their out-the-way locations in part because they can rely on meeting collectors either at art fairs or online instead. This may offer some explanation to the seemingly endless proliferation of galleries in New York. ArtCal, an exhibition listing service for New York City, reports over 835 galleries in their database, a huge number even when you consider the fact that some of them are no longer in business. There must also be many more new galleries and provisional spaces not yet accounted for. The true number of galleries in New York might be an unknowable Borgesian riddle.

The appeal of these smaller outfits however has remained much the same over the years. A little like discovering Hospital Productions, a music store deep in the East Village requiring patrons to squeeze through a trap door in the floor to view its inventory, finding an unknown gallery outside Chelsea can make you feel as if you’re in on something special. While an exhibition that requires a GPS system to find it might not be that great, the bittersweet allure of these out-of-the-way galleries lies in the fact that for all the crap you’ll see, there are usually one or two galleries doing something you’d never see elsewhere.

To read the full piece click here.

Jeff koons with Katy Siegel. Photo: Elise Gardella

This week at ArtReview.com I discuss Jeff Koon’s latest talk with Katy Siegel at The 92nd Street Y. The event was presented cooperation with the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

By the looks of the audience at New York’s 92nd Street Y, young artists don’t have much interest in establishment figures such as Jeff Koons. I only recognized maybe three or four Chelsea personalities at the artist’s talk with Artforum critic Katy Siegel last week. This came of something of a surprise given the market’s continued investment in his work, and I left thinking that contemporary professionals had missed out on one of Koons’s more revealing talks. He certainly faired considerably better than he did earlier this month with New York Times reporter Carol Vogel. He demonstrated his deep investment in the process of art making, and what appeared to be a genuine disinterest in his market value. Siegel’s amicable demeanor and insight made Koons’s familiar slick facade and penchant for clichéd aphorisms a bit more palatable.

Koons started out discussing his investment in art as a child and a student. This helped dispel the myth that the artist began as a stockbroker (he went into it after art school) and the assumptions that frequently follow – that he had no artistic background or training. It also prompted one of the more illuminating observations of the evening, where Siegel responded to Koons’s reflections about his father’s occupation as an interior designer, and his experiences in the family’s showroom.

“I think there’s an important tension in your work between the temporary – the idea that things change – and the idea of the more permanent,” Siegel said. “And so I wonder if that comes from the experience of seeing something that looked like a house when you were young, but that was always changing in a way that our houses don’t.” Siegel clicked to a slide of plexiglass vitrine Koons made in the early 1980s featuring his male and female-like “breathing machines” (vacuum cleaners). The slide not only showed the appliance to be very specific to his interest in an object’s relationship to change and permanence – and sexuality – but drew a very clear connection to his father’s showroom and his own use of display.

Such observations helped substantiate Koons’s familiar and often plain weird shtick about how methods of display reveal our “sense of self” and how his choice of subject matter is often an attempt to assist us with “self acceptance”. This a process that apparently begins when a child takes a bath and “investigate[s] their bod[y] for the first time”. Koons dwelled on childhood, especially his own, as though every anecdote were of interest or merit. “At around five years old I stuck our vacuum cleaner in the toilet, and I got in a little bit of trouble.” Shortly thereafter, he speculated about the origin of his interest in vacuum cleaners, which he displayed in fluorescently-lit vitirines in his early-1980s series The New. “I would imagine [my interest in the vacuum cleaner] also comes from being a child, being confronted by a machine that’s kind of strong…” While many of these childhood experiences clearly influenced his work, such references lack currency among most professionals, presumably because most of us understand as a given that our early environment shapes our perception, but expect greater complexity in the ideas the work attempts to address.

To read the full piece click here.

Photo by: David Willems, Image courtesy The Armory Show

Now at ArtReview.com, my interview with Armory Show director Katelijne De Backer. As always, the teaser below.

Armory Show organizers sure are busy this time of year. The largest of nine winter New York fairs, the event saw $82 million in sales last year, boasts 160 exhibitors this year, and expects to see more than 52,000 visitors. In anticipation of the upcoming edition, running 27-30 March, I spoke to executive director Katelijne De Backer over email about the downturn in the economy, Merchandise Mart’s takeover of the fair, and some of this year’s special projects.

Paddy Johnson: With the European stock market crash, and fears of a US recession, what are your expectations for the Armory’s economic performance this year?

Katelijne De Backer: There’s been a lot of speculation about the health of the art market every year since the beginning of The Armory Show in 1999, yet all signs show that it remains healthy - sales have been steady and galleries are confident. We have no evidence that this will change this year.

PJ: Perhaps, but in 2006 galleries were reporting almost frantic buying at Art Basel while in 2007 Miami, not all galleries reported astounding sales. Doesn’t indicate at least a more cautious collector than last years?

KDB: Possibly, but we spoke to many galleries when we were in Miami, and though they said there wasn’t the frenzy that they’d seen in the past couple of years they were satisfied with sales. It might just be that new collectors have been learning to make more considered acquisitions.

PJ: Do you expect the economy to affect fair attendance?

KDB: Whatever the state of the economy, New Yorkers are interested in art… And this year our fair coincides with the Whitney Biennial, which is sure to spike attendance rates, as it did in 2004 and 2006.

To continue reading click here.

Photo AFC 

My latest piece on ArtReview.com.  A teaser below:

Letting down the power point connoisseurs of the art world, Czeck-born artist Harun Farocki’s array of statistical sports casting technologies at Greene Naftali has everything but a pie chart. Not that I think anybody actually misses the graph in this intriguing exhibition; I point out its absence mostly in response to the overwhelming amount of data Farocki somehow retrieved from the back-end of one network’s coverage of the 2006 World Cup final between France and Italy: bar charts mysteriously rising and falling, Second Life-like avatar of all the players going about their business, squiggly lines tracing the movement of each player and calculating their distance travelled, the trajectory of the ball, an individual camera seemingly on every player, a digital chalkboard diagram of the pitch with blue and white blobs floating around, scenes of calm and quiet from the tunnels beneath the stands, a live transcript of all the activity in the game, the coaches shouting at their players, on and on…

Full review here.

Bart Michiels, Thermopylae 480BC, Kolonnos Hill.  Image via Foley Gallery

ArtReview.com has asked us to blog for them every Monday for the next month, a responsibility we’ve gladly accepted.  Unfortunately, as per usual, I managed to take a large number of photographs at the Thursday night Chelsea openings, almost all of them being unusable for one reason or another, so sorry for that.  We do however have a small discussion on a few of the shows we saw that evening on artreview.com’s new site.  A teaser below.

Will there ever be a time when Chelsea elevators become usable during opening night receptions? This question came to mind at around 6 pm last Thursday as I entered the 547 West 27th street building and found myself in the unusual position of being able to get on the lift. A fluke to be sure – the lines forming behind me even as I entered: a crowd of 20 people just as uncool myself, nerdily showing up at the precise opening reception time.

While arriving early has the distinct advantage of elevator availability, fully stoked wine supplies and coat rack space, none of this numbs the senses to the array of bad art populating the fifth floor galleries. Foley Gallery probably had the best selection of work I saw in the building that night, featuring Tiffany Dow’s decorative biomorphic drawings and Bart Michiels’ banal photographic landscapes of old Mediterranean battlefields. Michiels’ shots of the now beautiful terrain boasted good printing quality, but suffer from a rather remedial intellectual investigation. After all, the idea that we view images differently knowing their historical background was popularized 36 years ago in John Berger’s 1972 famous television series and book Ways of Seeing. Michiels doesn’t bring anything new or even that interesting to the table with this series.

To read the full text click here.