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Day 3: The Museum of Contemporary Art ¶Oh Karen Kilimnik, how many ways can I sing your praises.  The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago is currently hosting a large and well represented exhibition of the Philadelphia painter’s career that sums up the sentiments of this site’s previous review of her work.  Kilimnik represents an artist who makes solid decisions; conceptually and aesthetically.  Her work routinely plays with the simplicity of ideas and cluttering of forms.  She also manages to make grand statements about the historical position in which we find ourselves today.  Between referencing art history, femininity, youth culture and glamour, Kilimnik seems to be making lemonade out of a whole mess of lemons.  ¶Noone is really impressed with our American culture these days, for good reason.  We have developed celebrity into a new animal, fostered a culture aflood with prescriptions, and managed to piss off the rest of the world.  Artistically speaking, the most troubling of all of these might well be our creation of an uninspired popular culture.  It is less about being outright ‘bad’ or ‘good.’  We have become closer to just being, generally speaking, boring.  ¶Kilimnik, like many other cultural producers, has acknowledged this broken wing of ours.  Also like many others, she is not aiming to repair, but rather benignly comment.   One must first understand that there are few simple things left in our modern lives.  Each subject comes with footnotes, insider information and countless perspectives.  As such, it an inundating task to stay abreast of things.  Perhaps the most important realization on the artist’s behalf is that the best thing to do, and the most entertaining, is to take things lightly and enjoy the times.  Not necessarily avoid the severity of situations or their ramifications.  Rather, absorb as much as possible while continuing to move ahead.  ¶This wisdom is expounded by the oeuvre of Kilimnik.  As a successful artist, she has known biennials, solo exhibition and the feeling of having been the subject of multiple books and articles.  She has also addressed many issues and operated in a variety of media.  Throughout all of these changes her work remains focused on the benefits of being loosely focused.  This boundless perspective affords the ability to freely change and alter trajectory.  If anything, it allows for continual surprises.  Kilimnik knows that once her audience guesses what’s next, it is time to changes.  In such an oversaturated market this is proving to be a successful method of staying on top of the curve.  ¶Chicago: the summation and the Cultural Center¶While enjoying some delicious coffee in the Loop, I was privy to a discussion on New York’s dominance, culturally speaking, over Chicago.  Like many American cities, the mid-Western capitol it posits itself against the eastern giant, often walking away let-down.  What Chicago has, unlike New York, is a lot of incongruous things to do.  The two people I was listening to seemed to share my opinion, if only out of spite for the Big Apple.  Where New York offers codified ’scenes’ to immerse oneself in, Chicago offers only tastes and samples.  With a smaller population, it should be no surprise that a few people tend to support any given event or exhibition.  There are rarely droves or crowds of the New York sort and almost never a line.  Instead, Chicago affords the ability to calmly collect oneself in front of a work of folk art in Pilsen or high art downtown.  It’s wealth of niche museums, only a few of which were discussed here, present just one means of rationalizing the Chicago’s sprawl.  ¶One institution not previously mentioned was the Chicago Cultural Center.  Like the city itself, this bastion of artistic endeavors is one of constant discovery, revelry and entertainment.  Thankfully, for this New Yorker, it is also a place where one can escape a crowd, enjoy some culture and be relatively alone for a time.  Located right on Michigan Avenue in the heart of the city’s tourist district, the museum presents a variety of media, concepts, and artforms - performative and otherwise.  This is why I chose to end here, and also why I chose not to mention the things I encountered there.  Rather, as with the city itself, I will merely recommend a stop next time anyone is in the area.  Like its namesake city, the Cultural center offers a lot, but they won’t tell you that.  You’ll have to figure it out on your own.   

 This year’s Whitney Biennial has been dwelling.  For whatever reason, the works and their relationships to each other have stunned my critical thought.  It was not until a recent conversation with a friend and art viewer that it became clear just exactly why this was the case.  I felt that the show was one of the best in recent history.  I felt that the collection of artists was appropriate and well chosen for the time.  I even felt that the exhibition was, for the first time in my memory, relatively vacant, allowing for a more labored consideration of the works.  There was still something, however, that irked me.  ¶Much of the art work in the exhibition, and the art world in general, has become dizzyingly introspective and wrapped up in its own game of appropriation.  Many artists today are taking imagery and ideas from those who came before.  However, this is something that they were taught to do.  ¶During the final years of the Modern era, a cache of artists developed the ‘trick’ of reclaiming past ideas, images, concepts and methods as a means of developing new art.  This new impulse was in the lineage of Marcel Duchamp who routinely reorganized the world around him to make art - employing objects such as urinals and bottle racks to the like.  It also came out of the era of Pop Art, which allowed artists to freely assume both the authorial language and the aesthetics of popular, consumerist culture.  So in these conjoined paths came artists like Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Robert Longo, to name a few well known characters known for re-presenting and reflecting our world and our art back onto our culture.  ¶In the wake of this development, a great many artists came to the understanding that every idea had been thought before and the only option for young artists was clever reproduction, re-conceptualization leaving, ultimately, to savvy rehashing.  As these ideas become dogma, the art world understandably drew its influences from inside.  Like a hermetic bubble of production, the art and the art-schooling were preoccupied with the language and activities therein.  The artists of that time, the 1980s, have since become teachers and professors, in addition to scholars and famous names.  And these artists are among the many who taught the young painters, sculptors and printers whose works are on view at the Whitney.  ¶With this in mind, it is pleasant to view the art there because appropriation is not the focus, even though it may be frequent.  Instead of intellectually gleaning from art theory, these works draw on history in a cut and paste manor, almost without thought.  Many of them are still keeping their references within an art-world bubble.  There are art works about the relationships of seeing and touching, a heady concept but almost culturally moot.  There were works about art display and fetish, another art-world-reference.  Also, there were works that broke down the consumerist ideas of art, the production of art within a consumer society, art about the shallowness of painting in a post-Modern mindscape and a few Modernist sculptures about the artness and materiality of things.  The intention, with developing this discussion, is less about making individual judgments on artists -  as the previous Biennial review notes, I enjoyed the show.  The goal, however, is to call attention to the possible end of this era.  ¶Many critics, myself included, noted a recognizable sobriety to the works on view.  Unlike previous exhibitions, where the works utilized the same appropriation methods with an air of self-creation and pseudo-responsibility, these works display an awareness of their own historical moment.  Basically, the young artists of two, or even six years ago, displayed such a sense of pride in their citations which amounts to historical dominance.   Their works showed a certain cockiness, as if they had won all of the mechanisms that they used in the hard and fast battle of artistic whit.  What we have at the Whitney right now is markedly different.  These artists are acknowledging their lineage and their seemingly minute stature against history.  That same history is pronounced in almost every work of art.  As if awakening to the turbid nature of the post-9/11 American culture, these people are making the first steps toward moving forward; to recognizing one’s present.  ¶Future histories of our passing decade will be voluminous.  It has seen an empire quake and battle.  Culturally, is has witnessed celebrity take hold in new and troubling ways, and discussions of money and belongings develop simultaneously.   Artistically, it has been wild.  From mainstream exhibitions of American colored-pencil artists depicting two-headed dinosaurs, to the ‘opening’ of the Asian marketplace, this first decade of a millennium many of us feared, has been something.  This is what the Whitney exhibition realizes, and what occurred to me while discussing the show with my aforementioned friend.  With the loudness, speed and anger of our contemporary lives, artists have begun to search, instead, for order.  Like many French artists at the close of the Second World War - Picasso and Matisse leading the pack - young Americans are seeking to return order.  They are collectively examining the recent past quietly, soberly and sadly as a means of effecting change.  Our world has quickly become something of a morose backdrop to art-making and as such, the works should themselves be melancholic but ultimately alert.  

Skarstedt Gallery is currently displaying some mighty paintings by New York lifer, Carroll Dunham.  These works from the mid-1980s capture a period in the artist’s development where he is most actively working through a variety of painterly dilemmas and influences.  Each of these paintings is large and abstractly colorful.  As each operates autonomously from the rest, the exhibition is a more similar to an anthology than an exploration of series.  Although many of the panels make use of similar stylistic elements, such as color, line quality, dimensionality and imagery, they are all constructed to different ends.  Where one may be about the shifting tonalities of woodgrain as explored through nuanced brown hues, others display twists and turns in a search of perfect voluptuous balance.  ¶As with any ‘good’ paintings, these offer up a smorgasbord of possible readings.   The most striking to me was each works’ strong preoccupation with space.  Dunham’s use of 3-dimensionality is perhaps some of the most entrancing from the era.  Schooled by Mel Bochner and Dorthea Rockburne, pillars of Post-Minimal painting, Dunham was certainly privy to discussions of painting’s place within the more sculpturally attuned art world of the late 1970s.  His response, the paintings in discussion here, was a variety of explorations into the limits of painting and what they can afford.  ¶Big Pine (1982-3) is perhaps the most vivacious of all the works on view.  Dominating one of the gallery’s larger upstairs walls, the work showcases a wealth of Dunham’s preoccupation.  Heavy with pink and red hues, the panel reads more as collage than high painting.  Here Dunham appears to be toying with the recessional capabilities of 2-dimensional art.  Collage offers this by mixes vantage points and blending perspectives.  It is rare that two photographs will exhibit the same authorial angle, forcing any collager to meld the two in the best possible way.  What is left for the viewer, then, is a combination of perspectives mashed together to create some loosely cohesive idea.  Big Pine represents this mode of thinking for Dunham.  The work overlaps and intertwines drawn forms in such a way as to suggests collaboration. However, it is solely Dunham’s mind that put this variety of tubular and undulating forms to work together. ¶Three years late, Migration (1985-6) was completed with only traces of Big Pine’s legacy.  Rather than limit the recession to joining 2-dimensional forms, here Dunham employs painterly tactics to push the space back.  By adding stronger orthogonal lines amidst an array of brownish backdrops, Dunham increases the representation of space tremendously.  Overlapping flat objects such as dots or expressionistic brush-strokes, he reinforces not only the flatness of the object, but also the depth of field.  We, as viewers, are acutely aware of our relationship to this piece of board, but are given another world to visually inhabit. ¶During this time, Dunham began to entrench himself more in the newly revived discussion of painting.  By the middle 1980s there was a veritable resurgence of contemporary painting, of which he was an active part.  This led him to develop more a personal style - with pronounced blocks of solid color and a slowly encroaching figurative mode - but also to respond to the forefathers of American painting - namely the Abstract Expressionists and their their prodigy.  With Brain Secretes Thought (1985-6) Dunham takes on the male-dominated model of art making as well as its obsession with genius.  The initial catch of the work is its indebtedness to Mark Rothko, because of its bands of color running horizontally across the panel.  These stripes are laid atop seemingly countless pictures that Dunham was overpainting.  The end result is a sense of a young artist bearing the burden of painting’s history.  As a young painter trying to pronounce himself during a ‘revival’ of painting, it is hard for viewers not to acknowledge the legacy into which you are rooted.  Rather then wait for the public to make this claim, Dunham acts.  He references his subjugated place amongst these painters.  In reference to the cult of the artistic genius, Dunham places the most male of icons in the top-right of the panel. A large purple phallus, unmistakable, looks over the work, as if passing judgement.  It seems humorous at first, but sinister upon thought.  Streaks of messy white paint conjure up adolescent joking but also a kind of disturbing prowess.  As if acknowledging his own humility, Dunham pays respect in jest.  Offering one of his paintings up for sacrifice to the male-artist hegemony in order to allow the other to speak volumes for themselves.  ¶These paintings offer such insight into the world of young artists awakening to a point in history that needs them.  Dunham, like his contemporaries, continued the lineage of American painting at a time when it was only lightly endorsed by the market.  They capture a great deal of art history, much more than is outlined here.  So before April 19th, go and see for yourself, some of the strongest paintings of the last 30 years.  

In 2004 I moved to Chicago, Illinois.  At that point a few galleries were promoting independent artists while even fewer participated in the mainstream international art scene.  Before then, however, Chicago had been a semi-hub with the like of Art Chicago, an annual art fair, that helped boost its market.  However, for two years, 2004 & 2005, the fair was cancelled and, in a lot of ways, so was the Chicago art scene.  ¶Something has changed for the better.  On a recent vacation to my old stomping grounds I was pleased to find that those who had been producing art for the two-year hiatus had come out.  The Chicago press more actively sought out new talent.  Small galleries seemed better supported.  All tolled, Chicago seemed to have woken itself up.  And it is doing marvelously.  From the north and south sides alike, artworks by renowned or unknown artists are on display.  The following is a short collection of reviews that best capture my four days downtown.  ¶ The First Day: My friend and I wandered into Chicago’s bustling barrio, Pilsen.  The small Mexican enclave has grown to dominate local politics and as such has become less a clandestine neighborhood and more a certified congregation.  Planted in the neighborhood’s Harrison Park is the National Museum of Mexican Art.  Like most niche museums, the expectation was for an expensive entrance fee with little to look at.  In reality, the free museum offered a variety of art objects that displayed a plethora of styles, concepts and media.  Particularly enthralling was the exhibition “Horns, Hooves, Wings, Fins and Tails: Animal Imagery in the Permanent Collection.”  The shows title seemingly removes any element of surprise.  The works were, as is suggested, based around common animal-like creatures, whether mythological or natural.  Most fascinated for myself was the wide variety of ‘cartoneria,’ or festival creatures.  These creations, often hybrids of real animals, are fashioned into small, highly decorative figurines.  My personal favorite was an untitled figurine by Inocencio Vasquez.  It was shaped like a horse, painted like a giraffe with the face of a woman laid on top of the animal’s skull.  With four long ponytails radiating off the creature’s face, the whole object was absurd and playful.  Also on show were several examples by the Lineras Family, perhaps the most recognizable artisans of such objects.  The most ferocious of their brood was entitled ‘The Encounter of Two Worlds (Eagle Knight, Equestrian Spaniard and Horse Companion).” These three skeletal figurines, two anthropomorphic and one equine, are paused in battle.  Seemingly an allegory of the Spanish conquest of tribal Mexico, the scene is reduced to a playful aesthetic.  These toy-like figures are roughly 12 -16 inches high with the posture of marionettes.  Together they dance in an eternal struggle, seeking balance, perhaps, between Mexican culture’s native roots and Spanish influence.  Ultimately, these totemic figurines illustrate the lighter tone of Mexican folklore.  Unlike the more Euro-centric weight attached to religious ceremony and festivals, these brightly colored, often patterned objects are celebratory in almost every way, for any occasion.  Although they capture demons and other such creatures, there is little remorse or penance attached to them.  Collectively, these small fantasy creations correspond to the nature of the museum which presents a not only different aesthetic, but a wholly different mode of art making.  ¶The Second Day: Henry Darger, now a hero within the discussion of outsider art, lived in a small apartment in Chicago for his entire adult life.  He worked as a janitor by day and created the most concrete fantasy-reality outside of mainstream science fiction in his room at night.  His tome, some 10,000 pages long, entitled In The Realms of the Unreal, chronicals a war of almost unimaginable proportions.  Seven little girls, known collectively as the daughters of Robert Vivian, or the Vivian Sisters, represent the Good army of child soldiers, while the evil Glandilinians represent the opposing side.  Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, has become the repository for this reclusive creator.  His apartment was relocated, plank by plank, into the gallery’s back room.  A library of outsider art is adjacent.  On display are a variety of signature Darger works; all large, colored pencil drawings with imagery based on carbon-copies of advertising materials.   It was not my first encounter with the works themselves, as Darger is somewhat of a posthumous art star.   Individually, these pictures show an acute sense of artistic direction.  Darger understood precisely what he wanted and executed it.  However, en mass his clear vision is only reinforced.  Although little of the lengthy narrative can be deciphered by looking at this pictures, it is remarkable to see such a thorough conceptualization from any artist, whether inside or outside the traditional model.  Darger represents a pinnacle of craftsmanship and drive.  He began work on the novel in response to the 1911 murder of five-year-old Elise Paroubek and was not finished until the middle 1930s.  Throughout, however, his concept and style rarely altered.  Some might saw that he had a limited skill-set which hindered artistic development.  But I will argue the contrary.  Darger, although he had almost no artistic training, was not seeking to develop a style.  He found a means of storytelling and held true, without changing course.  His works are both sophisticated and playful; a balance many young artists seek to establish.  If anything his works demand the kind of study that places like Intuit and New York’s American Folk Art Museum can access.  Intuit should be a stop for anyone in the Chicago area.  Not only do they offer an exhibition hall for other shows, but they retain a home for an idiosyncratic genius and many of his creations.  

In the recent weeks I have tried to grapple with my opinions of the Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition on view at the New York’s Guggenheim Museum that has garnered a great amount of press and conversation.  I couldn’t do it.  The show was just unmemorable and distracted.  An exhibition of an artist so rooted in performance work should highlight it.  But they didn’t.  Instead we saw a lot of preparatory works and a few pedantic sculptures with videos of the performances wedged in where the projectors would fit.  An hour after I left, I had forgotten I had even gone.  So instead, I will say quickly, go to the Metropolitan Museum and see their exhibitions of Jasper Johns and, the newly opened, Gustave Courbet.  In tandem these shows illustrate the trajectory of modernism; from its birth in confident paintings and even cockier attitudes up to anti-emotional, detached encaustic wall-hangings.  Apart, these exhibitions display the consistency and refrain of each artist.  However, together they parlay a disjointed history which is the basis for much of our current art-historical moment.  Make a day of it.  After the shows wander though the halls of our collective culture and reap the benefits. It will be more fulfilling.   

Dan Cameron has announced the star-studded roster for the inaugural run of his ‘Prospect.1 New Orleans.”  This biennial is supposedly aimed at rejuvenating the city which is still reeling from the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina some years ago.  By bringing such names as Cai Guo-Qiang and Fred Tomaselli into the Louisiana bayou, the idea is that something lost in the storm will be reclaimed, that the lives of residents will get better and that the city will actually heal in some capacity.  I am still unsure over the original conception of this event, because all of it sounds like complete make-believe.   Like many others, I do believe in the communicative powers of art.  I also hold that successful works can also parlay some amount of spirituality or emotion or the like.  But I have little faith in contemporary arts ability to bring any level of stability back to a place like New Orleans.  Not only is city still lacking a stable infrastructure, but it is also missing residents and strong political leaders.  That Cameron, a veteran curator and long-time New Orleans fan, thinks a biennial can fix any of those things is myopic at best. I do not believe that this fair is destined for failure, or that it will not bring about some sort of short-term change in the scarred city.  The risk here is more long-term.  On a volunteer trip to the city a year after the storm, it was apparent to me that certain parts, particularly those that catered to privilege, had been rebuilt.  They had running water, police patrols and pedestrian traffic.  Within walking distance from these places, however, some down-trodden neighborhoods were boasting the highest crime rate in the continental United States.  Homes that had been ravaged by the storm were still untouched and the residents were incapable of returning.  Even now, years later, stories of lives interrupted still come out and thousands of New Orleans’s old residents are still dispersed around the country.  In this chapter of New Orleans history, it confuses me what exactly Cameron imagines will be the aftermath of attracting a wealthy art-public to the city.  It may cause some hotels to be built, but with companies drawing contracts with Latin American countries for workers, it will not stimulate the local job market, or bring the old residents back.  It may bring money into the French Quarter and Garden District, but neither were truly incapacitated by the storm.  It may also bring a renewed interest to the city, but without those thousands of residents who are still forced to stay away, NOLA will be only a reminiscent shadow of its former self.  Unfortunately there is little to do but wait and watch as the show goes on view at the end of this year.  One can hope that Cameron will be right and NOLA will be flooded with artsy upstarts aimed at making the city better.  Now it is just a matter of who is defining better.  Sadly, I think those who saw NOLA as a rich center for Jazz and Black American history may not like what develops.  As someone who wants to see the city stabilize itself, I hope that I will be surprised by the outcome of Prospect.1 New Orleans.   

When I eagerly arrived at the Whitney Museum of American Art I would have never thought that I had forgotten a pen.  Oh well, the first is always a cursory look anyway.  So I continued onward.   As more of a review will follow, I being without any true/hard facts about the exhibition, and will reflect only briefly.  ¶Collectively, it was a more cohesive exhibition than the previous two.  With less silly stylistic nuances, the works presented a sobering view of the contemporary art scene.   It seemed to be about life much more than art.  Specificially, it was Javier Téllez’s ‘Letter On The Blind For The Use Of Those Who See’ (2007) that stood out.  The work was simply refreshing.  A marker of sensory perception.  The video showcases six blind people who take turns feeling an elephant in the middle of a drained swimming pool.  It seems surreal, and it is.  However, in concept and execution, the work demands the viewer both appreciate their reality as seeing people while acknowledging something entirely different.   This idea may not be particularly innovative, but Téllez’s photography and mise-en-scéne add human depth.  So whenever you wander through, take a few minutes to watch this one.  You’ll be better for it.  

A few simple facts pervade the contemporary art scene: there is far too much art to process fully, much of it is poorly thought out or aesthetically clumsy and everyone wants to mention the price of an artwork first.  ¶There is an overwhelming amount of art works to see.  There is too much art for any one person to see, let alone process.  Like any aspect of our contemporary culture whether music or film, the playing field is so vast that one can only hope to keep up with the pace of change and not the lose themselves in the details.  Its less about seeing every object - although you must attempt to see as many as you can.  But more, what art should be asking people to do, is contemplate what they are actually seeing and not wonder what they might be missing.  ¶Cynicism can take hold when someone looks at too much art.  Much of what is created under that banner of art is bad.  Some critics prefer to stop the conversation there; only to continue in the face of a ‘masterpiece.’  The problem with that is missing out on the underlying nuance of cultural change.  Just because a work of art may be visually or conceptually sub-par, does not make it an illegitimate creation of our time.   In turn, even a poorly executed artwork can offer insights into the collective understanding of our historic situation.  My intent is not to be broadly accepting of all artworks in an inclusive way.  There does exist such things as ‘good art,’ although this judgement has more to do with historical perspective than inherent qualities.  Simply, consider it all without being simplistically dismissive.  ¶Money is quantitative and as such is something that is easy for people to discuss.   Some art critics as well as a lot of the viewing public are seemingly preoccupied with the weight of gold above anything else.  Innumerable articles ‘examine’ the present art market and offer ‘insider’s advice.’  As one who was educated at an auction house, let me offer this: the works themselves should never be solely discussed as objects of monetary equivalence.  Not only can this debase the nature of the works, but it undermines any aspect of honest criticism.  It matters not what something is worth in gold if it only seen as an abstraction of the stuff.  Paintings, sculpture and all the rest of it are much more valuable, although the return can be worse.  But if your interest in art is reliant on a currency symbol, take the safer bet and trade futures.  ¶In many ways this is my circuitous effort to define ‘art.’ But more simply, take the art world with a grain of salt.  Its less austere than it can make you believe.

¶Dutch artist Michel Francois is preoccupied with the way that we precieve the things of our lives.  His current show is up at Bortolami Gallery on 25th street in Chelsea.  Its good.  He has filled a room with a variety of industrial byproducts, most useless, that have been dipped repeatedly in plaster or encased in minute styrofoam balls.  They play with weight and space and perspective like sculpture is supposed to.  But what makes these things so noteworthy is that they make you think about how we have come to constantly manipulate the artifacts of current history.   ¶Without being didactic or authoritative, Francois’s work looks at how we have collectively altered the products of our industry.  These things are quiet and offer little patronizing instruction. They are not meant to make us reconsider our habit of making such alterations.  Francois merely wants us to be aware of such manipulations.  Like sterilized museum objects, they reflect what our society has put into them.  To further soften this lesson-plan, the artist has garnished them with elements of beauty.  Some have glitter and shimmer under the gallery lighting.  Others demand close inspection of the affected surfaces.  Either way they are entrancing, captivating, fetish-like objects.  ¶These objects alone can only offer a precursor to the true thesis of the show.  A small video piece explains further.  Like the objects, it is simple and austere.  In it wine glasses are juggled by figures disguised in black costumes.   The lighting is minimal which leaves almost nothing to the reel.  But what exists are slight reflections, only momentary.  This fluttering imagery is overlaid with the sound of shattering glasses.  It is apparent that something is going wrong, but the repetition operates as a sedative.  There is no need to panic, things break and we recreate them.  There is an endless supply of glasses to juggle, break and repeat.  Like the fetish ornaments in the other rooms, this video is about our ephemeral appreciation for our own artifacts.  Francois is intent on investigating our relationship with these now mundane things.  Gone are the days of widespread industrial anxiety or novelty.  Where before artists examined the austere beauty in a perfectly created steel box or plastic form, now its about how we are embellishing them with traces of our existence.  These objects are not about how our bodies relate, but how we as a collective of people have broken them down and transformed them into precisely what we want.  They are as  much as an exercise in making beautified objects as they are about reasserting human dominance on the artifacts of our history.   

¶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.