Streetwise, on canvas

Okay, let's start with a delectable image of Michelangelo's David holding a Kalishnikov. At 86" x 56" you can't miss it. At $13,000 it's sold. As spraypaint on canvas, there are a few more in the edition. Indubitably, it's the work of the originator (and maestro) of the stencil brigade ("Every time I think I've painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek Le Rat has done it as well. Only twenty years earlier." Banksy, 2005). Well-hung between two other full-lengths, it grabs, and retains, the eye. Insightful and inciting.
Also arresting is the work of D*Face. Provocateur ("Talk minus action equals zero"), Brit, and master skewerer, he modifies/improves upon a dollar bill: "Washed Up" instead of the name of the familiar founding father, a skull substituted for the portrait's face, said face festooned with taloned antlers. Warhol's Marilyn also get the treatment. True to his moniker, the lady has one eye gouged out and sports winged horns growing out of her temples. This image is available (sorry, sold) in four color combinations. My fave transubstantiation was "Cli Che". No explanation necessary.
Strange is what comes up for Blu. This Bolognese usually paints entire walls -- exterior walls. Here he's represented by small drawings, cartoonish pen and inks meticulously drawn and fully realized. Oh, and scary as hell. They're shown in their own room, and if you've ever been hospitalized due to mental instability, bring a friend. "Page 2" (no formal titles) depicts a man at his toilette, his reflected face is comprised of entwined tentacles. Another shows a guy's head neatly sliced open, other heads emerge and emerge, like mutant Russian dolls. Ow. And so it goes, quietly and disturbedly.
Space Invader uses tiles, not paint. A double portrait of Sid Vicious is made up of 588 Rubik's Cubes. For real. The pixilation is incredible. This artist usually installs his "invader" mosaics in the cityscape, hidden in plain sight (psst: there's one just to the right of the Andrea Rosen Gallery, look down).

It's always odd to see street art in a white wall gallery. In a way, the work feels denuded. So it's refreshing to glimpse Blek's signature rodent scampering close to the floor (one's to the left of the David canvas), Microbo's patterned stencils on the wall, and Blu's wash of grayish brushstrokes covering his space. Call it contextual.

Graffiti has come a long way since Lascaux.


"The Streets of Europe" at Jonathan LeVine
529 W. 20 st.
212-243-3822
through Dec. 29
www.jonathanlevinegallery.com

A tree grows in...

...Williamsburg! Alexandra Newmark shows a forest of twisted felt trees, stuffed forms head-high in white or red. Aah, punctuation. Gnarled branches with oval holes, channelling Izamu Noguchi (or Dr. Suess?) in spacial complexity if not in material. Mutant creatures hover among the "trunks": a cyan ostrich-like thing, pompoms at the end of its pipe-cleaner tail; a yellow oversize beret parked upside-down; a multi-teated quadriped with spiraled antlers. Uh, make that fallopian tubes.
One wants to hug these mohair beasts. My visitor of choice was a black critter, sporting three horns and four legs and a saucer-shaped body, squatting about 6" off the ground. Oddly, the press release states that the forms "can be frightening and alien." Well, yeah, if the wine is sour. (I guess the operative word is can. At least Newmark embraces the panopoly of interpretation, thereby allowing the work to exhibit a rich, interior life and avoiding shaggy, shedding dogma.) I found them comic, charming, fantastical. I was happy here.


Alexandra Newmark, "In the Forest" at Front Room Gallery
147 Roebling St.
718-782-2556
Fri-Sun 1-6 & by appt.
through Dec. 16
www.frontroom.org

On the wall

One comes upon it as one comes upon many a Donavan work: all at once. Silver Mylar tape formed into various sized loops, stuck together like a million cells at a party, or a rave. They gather, they hang off each other, and as is indicative for Donovan, resemble nothing you've ever seen before. The prosaic made profound.
This piece could be a map. The loops scale the walls and archipelegos form; isthmuses, lakes, peninsulas, all tenuously attached. The shredded coastline of Greece.
But it's not just these crazy loops. It's the light reflected into their minute interiors: the most delicate of wisps, each tracery unique.
This fragile sculpture is exquisite--but never precious--and compelling. Okay, unalloyed joy.

Fom the artist: "In a sense, I develop a dialogue with each material that dictates the forms that develop. With every new material comes a specific repetitive action that builds the work...
"I think the new fertile territory encompasses a range of practices that capitalize on the iconic identities of commercial and industrial materials by pressing them further into the realm of seduction."


Tara Donovan, "Untitled (Mylar)" at the Met
212-535-7710
through April 28, 2008
www.metmuseum.org

Tara Donovan (American, born 1969)
Detail, Untitled (Mylar), 2007
Mylar and glue
© Tara Donovan, courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York.
Photo: Ellen Labenski

Meaty, beefy, big and bouncy

Also big, burly, fleshy and butch.

From one wall piece to another, across a couple of centuries and seas. I spent the rest of the afternoon ogling the Baroque tapestries. Things get incendiary when Peter Paul Rubens enters the weave: the hangings come to life and the medium is altered. "The Battle of Veseris and the Death of Decius Mus" hits you like a whallop, all muscle and drama. Action in war, over-the-top musculature (17th century Chelsea boys, yeah!) flying manes, a perfect, dappled (equine, sorry) rump fore and center. Caught in mid-tumble, a horseman looks away; his steed rears among the carnage. Horrifying and thrilling and thrusting. Prior to this, the medium had been busy but somewhat stately (exception: Rafael for the Vatican). Rubens brought the full force of painting to tapestry and, in this exhibit, it howls.
The English were not to be left out. Charles I had a fine eye: "Perseus on Pegasus" evinces power and strength. Highlights are accented to the point of solarization. Then there's the Italians: the Medici favored a more naturalistic approach, augmented with a Cecil B. de Mille sensibility. Don't miss the cape of gluttonous splendor worn by Pope Clement VIII. Glittering with gold thread, it out-does Cher. (Room for altar boys, too.)
And then there is Gobelins. Louis XIV would not be denied, and this manufactury became synonymous with the apotheosis of the weavers' art. Stupendous works, allegorical and historical, astonishing even (especially?) to the modern eye. The colors are vibrant, the detail astounding; even the crustaceans in "Water" look extra-ugly. All is heightened (check out the seaweed-draped coral in that tapestry's border).
This room is overwhelming, and you will find yourself shuttling between it and the previous one (the Italians), wondering at the difference. This is glorious, unabashed excess, the epitome of the Baroque, and you will never see its like again.

"Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor," at the Met
through Jan. 6, 2008
www.metmuseum.org/home.asp

photos courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Top: "The Battle of Veseris and the Death of Decius Mus", bottom "The Battle of the Granicus"

Banksy of England

All the money that's fit to print...not too shabby if you do it yourself. Banksy, that prankster deluxe, shows iconic images, tweaked. A sheet of uncut, adulterated banknotes, a sly Di replacing the Queen. Why stop there? "Banksy of England" looks good on paper. Stuffed into three minute rooms of a townhouse gallery (and hung crookedly, with prices scrawled in pencil directly on the wall), this show brims with pithy, subversive and ribald work. This street artist has been hitting the paper and canvas for several years; this is not his first show in New York, and the images aren't new. So what! They're so immediate: a girl hugs a nuclear bomb; death with a smiley face, perched on a clockface ("Grin Reaper"); a Warhol Marilyn that looks more like Kate Moss--the T shirt comes in a variety of color combos. A military helicopter with a huge pink bow ("Happy Choppers"). His substitution of bananas for guns (think Tarantino) still has me shaking with laughter. What he's not taking the piss out of he's pissing on. Sometimes both, simultaneously. Even though alot of the work is familiar, it doesn't lessen the impact. Banksy of England, we are thine.

Verdict: scathing social commentary veined with insouciance. No leg but lots of cheek.
Goes with: a fat wallet. But there's a catalogue...
This is an unauthorized show.


Banksy, at Vanina Holasek Gallery
502 W. 27 st.
212-367-9093
through Dec. 29
vaninaholasekgallery.com/upcoming.html
www.banksy.co.uk/

p.s.--Can't afford the real thing? Pull a Richard Prince...

School of art school

The New Museum opened today with a burp. You've seen the building--a stack of off-kilter boxes, like in a child's room, wedged between solid, old brick structures. Besides being incongruous (but it's new!) the facade has all the appeal of a prison, its industrial aluminum mesh encasing, and ultimately strangling, the structure. Windows? A bank of them adorn the fifth floor, but you're still behind that brutal grille: purdah. The double-height galleries -- devoid of interior walls -- dwarf the art. A waste of space except where it's really needed--the one sculpture on the second floor that towered above the rest appeared cramped. The lights are bare fluorescents, symmetrically arranged in overhead tracks. Wal-Mart lighting in a warehouse. Concrete floors complete the effect.

The seventh floor terrace makes the building. Unemcumbered by that grating, one has the sky above and the stunning view ahead. A glass fence, high enough to deter the impromptu jump, girdles the walk. Inside, the glass-walled bare space (used as a dance floor on opening day) is comparably intimate. It's begging for an installation that expands on this, but tellingly, is "primarily" for rent.

And the art? See the title of this post. The exhibit is called "Unmonumental." "Non-Olympic," quipped art critic Julia Morton.
There's a photo of the museum all lit up at dusk. It appears eerily, but not redeemingly, beautiful.

Goes with: Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?"


"Unmonumental" at the New Museum
235 Bowery, at Prince
through March 23, 2008
www.newmuseum.org/about/

p.s.--for the unexpurgated/blasphemous/vituperative version, contact me.