Armory Arts Week NYC: Independent Art Fair

Adriano Costa

For this year's Armory Arts Week in NYC I decided not to pay the $30 to see the jam packed 2013 Centennial Armory Show for favor of visiting two for free.  The second Art Fair I visited was Independent in Chelsea for its fourth edition.

Three words: DIVERSE, CLEAN, CURRENT.  I have to admit that I only made it to the third floor, but I really enjoyed the show.  The layout was dynamic, the space was beautiful, and the fair was cohesive.

According to the Independent website... www.independentnewyork.com

This year’s edition will feature over 40 international galleries and non-profit institutions representing fourteen countries. Independent will also highlight the presentation of international publications Mousse, Bidoun, and DAP housed within the commissioned rooftop, designed by architect Christian Wassmann. Wassmann will also collaborate withIndependent on the architectural design of the exhibition space, which will reflect the spatial and curatorial concerns of the galleries and institutions.

This year’s edition will be dedicated to the non-profit institutions in New York that were hit hardest by Hurricane Sandy. Chelsea-based organizations The Kitchen and Printed Matter will participate for the first time at Independent presenting their programs.

Independent is also pleased to announce the Privatus Prize for the 2013 edition. This $10,000 prize will be awarded by a curatorial jury to a gallery or institution in support of outstanding curatorial work at Independent.

In collaboration with media partner Mousse (Milan), a limited-edition publication that reflects the ever-evolving spirit of Independent will debut at the fourth edition of the exhibition.

Independent was conceived by Elizabeth Dee and Darren Flook and developed in conjunction with creative advisor Matthew Higgs and Co-Directors Jayne Drost Johnson and Laura Mitterrand.

Here are selections of fair that would like to share with all of you... enjoy

Verena Dengler

Waldemar Zimbelmann

 Ulrike Heise

Billy Childish

 Anna-Bella Papp

Andrew Masullo

Nancy Shaver

Margarethe Held

Richard Aldrich

9/11 Memorial: The North and South Pools

The South Pool

Yesterday I visited the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan... it's breathtaking.  The recessed pools, in particular, are profoundly moving.  There are two of these, each at the foundation of the original towers.  At the center is a second drop into a seemingly bottomless pit.  While I stood in contemplation of one and then the other, I felt as though each droplet of water cascading into the "black hole" were the lives affected by the tragedy of 9/11... falling together and rising together only to plunge again... forever.  Peter Walker (landscape architect) and Michael Arad (architect) were the two that designed this minimal masterpiece.  According to their winning design statement... 

Computer generated graphic of the Memorial's design

This memorial proposes a space that resonates with the feelings of loss and absence that were generated by the destruction of the World Trade Center and the taking of thousands of lives on September 11, 2001 and February 26, 1993. It is located in a field of trees that is interrupted by two large voids containing recessed pools. The pools are set within the footprints of the Twin Towers. A cascade of water that describes the perimeter of each square feeds the pools with a continuous stream. They are large voids, open and visible reminders of the absence.

The surface of the memorial plaza is punctuated by the linear rhythms of rows of deciduous trees, forming informal clusters, clearings and groves. This surface consists of a composition of stone pavers, plantings and low ground cover. Through its annual cycle of rebirth, the living park extends and deepens the experience of the memorial.

Surrounding the pools on bronze parapets are the names. The enormity of this space and the multitude of names underscore the vast scope of the destruction. Standing there at the water's edge, looking at a pool of water that is flowing away into an abyss, a visitor to the site can sense that what is beyond this parapet edge is inaccessible.

The memorial plaza is designed to be a mediating space; it belongs both to the city and to the memorial. Located at street level to allow for its integration into the fabric of the city, the plaza encourages the use of this space by New Yorkers on a daily basis. The memorial grounds will not be isolated from the rest of the city; they will be a living part of it.

Below are photographs and a few videos I took with my phone.  I hope they give you an idea of the kind of experience you'll have at the Memorial.

The North Pool

Thirty-foot waterfall cascading into The North Pool

The "Survivor Tree" secured to the ground... I suppose
so that no storm can uproot it like it did in 2010?

Onlookers

A witness to the tragedy

Construction continues...

Just a reminder that you're being watched!

John Allen: Little Known Minimalist Along the Hudson

I came across the above sculpture at The Marina Gallery in Cold Spring, NY... I immediately fell in love with it.  I have a thing for minimal sculpture, especially the kind made with found objects or natural elements.  The little brad nails outlining the contour of the reddish brown ovals staggered up and down this white washed serpentine stick stirred me and put my mind into a quiet contemplative state.  Work with this degree of abstraction, simplicity, texture, and intimacy of size awakens my senses.  When I lived in Berkeley, CA on top of the hills I would take midnight strolls in the moonlight through patches of fog along the ridge trail overlooking Wildcat Canyon.  The smell of the eucalyptus and knob cone pines; the sounds of an orgy of frogs from the valley below and occasional screech of a bird from one of the scores of massive rolling hills trailing off into the darkness; the texture of dirt, rock, pine needles, and dry grasses crunching under my every step... moments like that I will never forget.  I felt a sense of ecstasy, of being alive on those quiet, slow, strolls on the outskirts of Tilden Regional Park.  Sculpture like this, give me a piece of that deep feeling of calm and connectedness I sometimes experience in times of solitude and meditation.

The maker of this lovely work of art is John Allen of Garrison, NY (I believe) and member artist of The Marina Gallery.  I was unfamiliar with his art so I did some research on-line and found a few more images of his sculptures.  In his own words... "John Allen is a little known, essentially not-for-profit artist who lives nearby and makes a living doing something else"

Below is what John had to say regarding the moving sculpture in this video as published in the New York Times...

The sculpture “pending” originated in my desire to make a piece that has the sense of how I feel about the environmental destruction that we humans have so blithely initiated. (I was drawn to call it tocsin, for a couple of reasons, but it is unsuitable, for a couple of reasons, not least because tocsin has an imperative ring to it.)

My secret hope was somehow to transcend the obvious ominous and find another way to emotionally process the information. As it turns out, that has not happened. I sat in the gallery yesterday afternoon and found that the intermittent mild hammer tap was easy to ignore, I think in the same way that we ignore repeated upsetting new information documenting climate change. It gets absorbed into and becomes part of the shifting dark background status quo (which we can bear), rather than transformed into action.

Regarding changing people’s minds there is a book “Moral Ground,” that considers this problem. I think it is like other matters that do not yield to simply intellectual processes, i.e., “How do you encourage compassion, teach gratitude, embrace self acceptance, etc.?”

The answer being you keep working at it, tap, tap, tap, while keeping your heart open….

The timing of the hammer drop is adjustable, from a virtually silent 1 – 2 minutes to a noisy 5 seconds. The geared speed-reduction component rules this, plus the longer interval keeps the surprise annoyance factor fresh, rather than a constant unseemly grinding sound.

Christopher Knowles: Autistic and Awesome

Christopher Knowles is a poet and visual artist from New York City who was diagnosed with autism as a child.  He has had a long and successful career since he was fourteen years old... he is now in his fifties.  Christopher is exhibiting new oil marker drawings on canvas at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in Manhattan.  The show will be up for one more week... go see it.  http://www.gavinbrown.biz/home/exhibitions.html

I was not familiar with his work before I saw this show and so I didn't experience the exhibition from the perspective of his previous body of work.  What I see in these drawings of his is a tremendously bold and original visual language at play.  His drawings are fun, absent of a sense of effort or forcefulness, and fresh.  His compositions of football players are a dazzling display of flattened 3D forms transformed into abstract puzzle pieces.  His fruit drawings on the other hand, are boiled down, bare bone compositions that magnify the simple repetition and subtle differences shape to shape.

Let us examine the subject matter these works.  Football players, the Twin Towers, fruit, beer advertisement, rustic village cafe scenes, a traffic light, word play, an abstract geometric shape, fictional (maybe "made-up") characters... all of these things are of the ordinary, things you might see on TV, or things of the imagination of a child.  Interestingly enough there is only one emotionally charged subject: the Twin Towers.  But here Christopher doesn't portray them from a  melancholic or tragic angle... instead he accentuated their abstract character and flattened the Brooklyn Bridge, in the foreground, to create a visually interesting composition of contrasting simple and complex shapes that seem to make the image oddly 2D and 3D.

I appreciate the drawing of modest, non-political, and emotionally indifferent subject matter.  I think Christopher is just drawing the things that he has a visual interest in... and I think that this kind of motivation behind the creation of his art is in some cases more sincere or "real"  than artists that have supposed "good reasons" for making art... whether it be work that is political or cultural in nature, or is art for art's sake.  

My Wife and Newborn Sons: Drawings and Paintings

At 2:30am on Friday my wife gave birth to our twin sons Jackson and Dayton!  The coming Sunday (today) we had scheduled doing a charcoal drawing to accurately render Jacque's massive growing belly.  Its purpose was to serve as a kind of relic to remind ourselves of this special time in our lives forever.  Instead, we missed our opportunity, but in exchange I was given the chance to paint my two wonderful little boys and Jacque with a shrinking belly.

Needless to say, I have a lot I'd like to express about this event... but instead of painstakingly putting it all into words, I'll let my art do the talking and share with all of you this extraordinary moment.

Jackson James Galas;
Watercolor

Dayton Thomas Galas;
Watercolor

Gerhard Richter: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

All these years I was under the impression that Gerhard Richter's art was overly conceptual and cerebral... Even his abstract paintings, I remember being told that they were planned out ahead of time so that he had a very good idea of what the outcome would be.  Evidently you can't believe everything you hear as a college student, especially if it's from another college student.  Both the person Gerhard Richter and his art are completely different from how I imagined them to be.

Here are two thoughts of mine about Gerhard after watching this film, which is a movie that primarily focuses on his process of painting abstract pieces.…

-He is a champion of painting… painting is an act of discovery and an improvisational dance with each individual piece; all assumptions of where the painting was supposed to go are thrown out the window and the painting is allowed to go where it wants to go.

-Gerhard is a modest, charismatic, and wise man.  The instance in the movie when he was not feeling connected to the paintings he was working on, he expressed great sorrow and explained that as an artist there is no worse feeling than the sensation of being disconnected from and unhappy with your work.  I thought that was very honest of him and he must have felt quite vulnerable to express those feelings on camera.  Also, he bravely admitted to the interviewer that he seldom knows what to do next when painting abstract pieces... we might have expected that such a great artist as Gerhard would never arrive at a moment while painting when he does not know what to do.  But I think that this indicates his greatness because in reality, us artists are always trying to figure out how to resolve the piece that we are working on, and we sometimes stubble through its creation ungracefully.  It reminds me of the book titled "Zen Mind, Beginners Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki, which implies that the master's and the beginner's frame of mind is in essence no different from one another because of their adherence to the continuous process of becoming.  Gerhard understands the full value of insecurity when it comes to art... to be insecure is to be open, and to be open is risky business.  But when no risk is taken, there is no opportunity for freedom... and it's that ability for the artist to transcend their medium and create an intangible aura or presence from material that when experienced by an audience jolts us into that necessary deep connection with our true innermost self... it brings us home to our roots and fills us with catharsis, or compassion, or pathos, or love.

See the documentary for yourself and let me know your reactions.