Several recommended exhibitions on view in Manhattan: "Superimposition" at Caren Golden (especially Matthew Bakkom's vase* made of what looks like miles of tightly-wound, 35mm motion-picture film), "Being There" at Derek Eller (check out Carl D'Alvia's cyborg monkeys!), "Perfunctory" at Team (Carol Bove's room of girl-drawings and bookshelves with '70s feminist texts is understated but superb), and Rebecca Quaytman's solo show at Spencer Brownstone (a tight array of abstractions and photo-paintings obliquely charting the death of an ancestor).
The "Superimposition" show is a grab bag of mostly young or "under-known" artists, assembled by hard-working curator David Hunt (pace yourself, man, you'll get an aneurysm!). Adobe Illustrator obsessive Marsha Cottrell has a couple of elaborate line drawings (Oce prints on Mylar) in the show; to see a detail of UNT, WT5.1, click here. *Addendum: I've just learned that, per Holland Cotter in the Times, Bakkom's vase is a "funeral urn made of the entire movie The Insider, in the form of tightly wound 35 mm film." That takes it down a couple of notches in my estimation. First of all, because The Insider is lousy. The movie features a hero we can't root for (a big media type) against a villain we already know is bad (big tobacco). The point of the movie? Big media is corrupt. Well, duh. But I also dislike art with obligatory, "deconstructive" back story. I would have enjoyed the piece just fine as a kind of sleek, Ripley's-Believe-It-or-Not craft project: winding and shaping film so it looks like something cut with a laser on a high-tech lathe. Obviously the pearlescent, gem-like surface is film, you can see what look like figures reflected in the emulsion. But do we really need to know exactly what film it is? All that does is provide a helpful soundbite for an overworked journalist, and a one-liner for grant panels. It's so grad-school!
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Several recommended exhibitions on view in Manhattan: "Superimposition" at Caren Golden (especially Matthew Bakkom's vase* made of what looks like miles of tightly-wound, 35mm motion-picture film), "Being There" at Derek Eller (check out Carl D'Alvia's cyborg monkeys!), "Perfunctory" at Team (Carol Bove's room of girl-drawings and bookshelves with '70s feminist texts is understated but superb), and Rebecca Quaytman's solo show at Spencer Brownstone (a tight array of abstractions and photo-paintings obliquely charting the death of an ancestor).
The "Superimposition" show is a grab bag of mostly young or "under-known" artists, assembled by hard-working curator David Hunt (pace yourself, man, you'll get an aneurysm!). Adobe Illustrator obsessive Marsha Cottrell has a couple of elaborate line drawings (Oce prints on Mylar) in the show; to see a detail of UNT, WT5.1, click here.
*Addendum: I've just learned that, per Holland Cotter in the Times, Bakkom's vase is a "funeral urn made of the entire movie The Insider, in the form of tightly wound 35 mm film." That takes it down a couple of notches in my estimation. First of all, because The Insider is lousy. The movie features a hero we can't root for (a big media type) against a villain we already know is bad (big tobacco). The point of the movie? Big media is corrupt. Well, duh.
But I also dislike art with obligatory, "deconstructive" back story. I would have enjoyed the piece just fine as a kind of sleek, Ripley's-Believe-It-or-Not craft project: winding and shaping film so it looks like something cut with a laser on a high-tech lathe. Obviously the pearlescent, gem-like surface is film, you can see what look like figures reflected in the emulsion. But do we really need to know exactly what film it is? All that does is provide a helpful soundbite for an overworked journalist, and a one-liner for grant panels. It's so grad-school!
- tom moody 7-12-2001 5:46 pm