www.chrisstiegler.com

¶A friend once told me that when the Nordic people found the byproduct of bee pollination they gave it a name of highest affection.  ’Honey’ was, for them, a word associated with the best thing, the sweetest thing.  Since then the oozing, sugar-like concentration has been referred to by this moniker.   Likewise, a connotation has bore euphemisms of the dearest sort.  ’Honey’ has become a word steeped in the finest and sweetest pleasures. ¶Perhaps the folks behind the newest Chelsea gallery - Honey Space - knew this etymological lineage, though  I’m almost sure they didn’t.  Artist Thomas Beale, the gallery’s founder, envisioned an exhibition room in the ‘unused’ space on 11th Avenue between 21st and 22nd streets.  And so he made improvements, albeit few, and this gallery was born. Since its inaugural opening on Feb 14th, Honey Space has received attention from the New York Times, mainly for its rough aesthetic and survivalist mentality.  ¶It’s a space without heat, windows or rent.  That there is not a toilet or phone line shouldn’t surprise you either.  The space does, however, have a history, and not just as a gay bar.  Many who frequent Chelsea openings might remember the location as housing a variety of art events.  My personal favorite was last spring when the New Orleans based band Why Are We Building Such A Big Ship played an invigorating set amongst Beale’s found-wood sculptures, absinthe and beer.  What the space contains now is a wood structure in the center of the room adorned with small masonite paintings by Adam Stanforth.  I say this plainly because it is my gripe against the space.  There are an abundance of rooms in the district to show art.  Many have quirky attributes; like Cueto Projects’ pool space and the tiny street-level spaces of Matthew Marks and Paula Cooper. ¶So why disrupt a history of  hosting more subversive and vivacious events, to transform into another gallery?  Let me be clear, I do not necessarily have a problem with the space changing .  It is what it has become that worries me.  Before Honey Space, this address was a sort of refuge from the unforgiving Chelsea marketplace.  The environment, aesthetic and all were wrapped up in youthful glory.  And now, it seems slightly more homogenized and thus sterilized.  It is quirky, but boringly so.  Without a white reception desk or vaulted ceilings, this gallery is still another gallery.  If anything is different about this and the mega-art halls of the other streets, it is that this space is more experiential than visual and thus distracting.  Conceptually, the whole project appears more as an installation than a one-man exhibition.  The monolithic wooden structure that sits in the center of the gallery, adorned with Stanforth’s canvases, seems more a byproducts of the entire situation.  Its difficult to take the art without the gallery’s nuance skewing your view.  A testament to this is the Times article.  Although accompanied by photographs of the paintings, and even the painter himself, they rarely speak of the art.  It is not necessarily a matter of taste or quality, just that the pictures were riding second tier, almost an afterthought of the gallery’s conception.   ¶Unfortunately this seems like it may become a plaguing issue.  Although the gallery does not intend to survive much beyond a year or two, it runs the risk of being ‘that gallery without heat, windows or employees.’ Personally, I would have preferred it remain a venue for one-off events fueled by the frustration of wandering the Chelsea circuit.  Instead it is printing press kits and fliers as a means to compete.

Dates, titles and history are things that painter Karen Kilimnik has continually made use of.  At her most recent exhibition with 303 Gallery she conflates these concepts to comment on the history of painting and our current move into a Rococo mindset.  By layering decadence on top of labored painting technique, Kilimnik fabricates a world in which history has little grounding making our moment in time paramount.  The works are all small.  They are paintings, oil on canvas, accompanied by some small photographs.  Their titles are coy; “A Summer Day, 1763″ or “The Sea.” Many of them explore the tonal variations of blues and greens.  Sometimes violets shades or mountaintop imagery make their way in, but only so often.  All of them are lit by crystal chandeliers and hang on diamond dusted walls.  However, the canvases themselves are simple contemplations on paint application.   The variations are not referencing the champions of High Modernism with gruff and patchy passage, but rather something more distant and historical.  Kilimnik has a thorough understanding of the history of painting and references it regularly.  She paints the sky like gentle color swatches in the manner of Corot and distant, triumphant mountaintops like Church.  The paint is not thick, but even and tempered.  These are luscious pictures.     Fracture is also an important element of these canvases.  Each one offers only a glimpse into the world Kilimnik is working out of.  Because of this detached sense of continuity, these works control our gaze.  The painter is not allowing us the full picture, but rather only a meditation on certain elements.  These are only bits of a world that appear is such quick and seemingly random succession.  They thereby transform the gallery into a collage of sort.  We are given several parts  at once and left to decipher what we can.  The end result of such a combination is a concession to our modern love affair for everything.  As viewers, listeners, readers we are offered as many stimuli as we can focus on at that given moment.   And so Kilimnik gives it to us.  Not only are we afforded a glimpse at her painting technique, but we also see her thoughts on art history, global climate change (or so says the press release) and her photographic prowess.  This does not, however, read as some youthful artist trying to play every part of the artistic field.  It truly points to Kilimnik’s preoccupation with indulgence.  Why can’t we have a sky from 1763 or a view from a mermaid’s perspective?  The point is that we can.  If our culture can imagine it, we have it.  And in this case we can have decadent paintings on diamond dusted walls lit by crystal chandeliers.  Oddly, it was exactly what I wanted.  

Out of industry, came a great many things.  The last of which was an expressionistic form of art.  Within recent years artists have begun creating works that balance the cool and detached aesthetic of the machine with the thoughtfulness of human existence.  Thanks to the fashioning of Tara Donovan these contemplations are on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.The work, a single-room installation housed in the Modern and Contemporary galleries, has a simple aesthetic.  Donovan shaped strips of thinly cut metal into circles about two inches in diameter.  From there, the artist designed an entrancing multi-wall image that employs these little circles to meander about the gallery space. Resting circle upon circle and building along the walls of the gallery, Donovan has created more of an image than a sculptural work or installation.  Although shadow and depth force the matter of three-dimensionality, the design of the work recalls a more two-dimensional mode.  Donovan, an artist with a history of custom using industrial materials, has built landscapes out of plastic cups and honey-comb like walls out of drinking straws.  Here, her thinking is similar. Like the cups and straws before, these circles seem to reference the human condition.  However, the illusions here are less artifactual, and more aesthetic.  Plastic cups and drinking straws are usable items, made for and discarded by people.  There symbolism is therefore more direct.  Strips of metal are groundless: either potential useful or sheer waste.  By distancing her work from usable human culture, Donovan has made something that is alternately poetic by creating some needed distant.  In that way, these circles can be read as distant relatives of Judd’s cubes or Andre’s floor pieces.  This work, like the Minimalist forefathers that it references, translates the human situation into a mechanical language.  Unlike those works, Donovan alludes to human interaction, rather than end the discussion on the mechanized form.  Where Judd and Andre were speaking primarily on the capabilities afforded by the machine, Donovan is hinting at its symbolic lacking.  Her circles, resting and relying on each other, offer an alternate view of industry.  Donovan’s is a history where machines have made us interdependent and reliant on each other as well as the machines of our lives.   These circles are about our relationships to each other, the things we live around and how, at this point in our interaction with machines, we have become vastly connected.  

As the initial entry on any website, I feel as though this should be introductory.  My name, as the title suggests, is Chris Stiegler.  I’m an writer who lives and works in New York City.  Recently, I graduated from Christie’s Education with a Master’s in Modern Art, Connoisseurship and the History of the Market.  The degree gave me an even overview of the various aspects present in the contemporary art world.  It is with this positioning that I intend to offer my thoughts and ideas on the state of art of today. I do not intend to start any discourse on the market itself, for there are far too many words spilt on the matter.  Rather I  will try to steer the conversation away, to newer topics.  It has always been my understanding and belief that art is a vessel made by and aimed at the world in which it is created.  Whether finely painted clay jars, pastoral landscapes or collage, artworks are as much about the world at large as they are manifestations of creative thought.  As such, the objects of contemporary are the direct byproduct of our world and demand to be discussed as such.  I have no interest in the monetary value of these things.  I am, instead, looking to understand their cultural meaning.  There will, therefore,  be an underlying theme of social art history.  It is simply that I’m trying to define the alchemy of our current situation.