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The
Art Set
Charlie Scheips
Hot and Cold
If the crowds seem a little sparse in Chelsea’s
galleries this weekend it is because a huge chunk
of the Art Set has jumped over to London for the
second annual Frieze Art Fair at Regent’s
Park.
Founded by the Amanda Sharp and Matthew
Slotover,
publishers of the British contemporary art magazine
frieze, the fair, which opened last night
and continues through Monday, has about 150 of the
world’s
top galleries — with more than 30 from New
York this year.
While the fair attracted more or less cutting edge
galleries last year, major blue-chip galleries from
New York and other major art capitals have joined
the momentum including Marian Goodman, Barbara
Gladstone, Sperone Westwater and Matthew
Marks. Additionally,
two other art fairs have sprung up this time — the Zoo Art Fair also
at Regents’ Park and scope in the
Meliá White House hotel nearby on Albany
Street.
I couldn’t make it over this year but my spies
tell me that London is just teeming with art types — especially
at Claridge’s, the art hotel of
choice. That is, as long as you are feeling flush.
London is an expensive place to hang no matter
where you’re staying but why not save more than a
few pounds on taxi fares and have all your friends
meet you at Claridge’s cozy bar or for a
quick bite at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant. At least
that is the art world’s version of logic.
Another
big draw in London is Bruce Nauman’s
installation that just opened at the Tate Modern’s
Turbine Hall. Entitled Raw Materials, this influential
American artist has chosen 22 texts sampled from
various works of his to create an aural collage that
fades in and out of earshot as visitors travel through
the Museum’s cavernous entry. The museum’s
website features an interactive version of the piece.
If you’d like to see and hear it for yourself click here.
Nauman is the latest in a series of prominent artists
including Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor,
and Olafur Eliasson who
have created memorable installations at the museum
which is housed in the former Bankside
Powerstation and now the Tate’s center for
art after 1900. The last time I was there I took
the Museum’s Damian Hirst-designed Tate
Boat that shuttles between the Museum’s
two buildings on the Thames. It takes about 40
minutes and also
makes a stop right in front of the Saatchi Gallery
at County Hall.
The advertising magnate Charles Saatchi’s
collection is most well known as the preeminent collection of
contemporary British art. You may remember the to-do
over the Brooklyn Museum’s
presentation of the traveling Sensation exhibition
of Saatchi’s
collection in 1998 that got our then Mayor
Giuliani in a dither over Chris
Ofili’s dung-crusted Madonna. Saatchi was in the headlines last spring
when the Momart art warehouse caught fire destroying
dozens of works from the collection including Jake
and Dinos Chapman’s Hell.
The gallery, which moved to bigger quarters a couple
years ago in the former London County Hall building,
is celebrating its 20th anniversary next year. To
honor the occasion Saatchi is moving out his fellow
country men and women artists for a show entitled
The Triumph of Painting. It will focus
on five of today’s hottest painters from continental
Europe — Belgian Luc Tuymans, the South African-born Dutch artist
Marlene Dumas, Scotsman Peter
Doig, the late German
born Austrian artist and cult figure Martin
Kippenberger,
and German Jörg Immendorf. The show opens in
January 2005.
Back to Damian Hirst, the bad boy British
artist is again in the news this week
as the entire contents of his celebrated, but short-lived
(1998-2003), Notting
Hill restaurant Pharmacy is up for sale
at Sotheby’s
London auction room on Monday. Comprising over 140
lots, you can buy everything from Hirst–designed
or inspired ashtrays and chandeliers, aspirin-shaped
bar stools to actual Hirst artwork in a sale that
is expected to bring in over 5 million dollars. The
sale includes 10 of the artist’s signature
butterfly paintings. It will be a real temperature
test for the contemporary art market with so many
of an individual artist’s work being
auctioned at one time.
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Damian
Hirst's Notting Hill restaurant, Pharmacy
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Last
Wednesday night, I went over to the architect Rafael
Vinõly’s huge studio on Van Damm Street
for The Design Trust for Public Space’s benefit
auction and party. Decorator Kitty Hawks,
along with Susie Slesin, art dealer Michael
Steinberg, and the Design Trust’s executive
director Deborah Marton, hosted the event
that featured artworks and design objects donated by artists
and designers. Several dozen lanterns designed by everyone
from Isaac Mizrahi and Antony Todd to Isar
Patkin and Ali Tayar/Natalia Echeverri were
sold as well as artwork in various media by artists including Ross
Bleckner, Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close, Joel Meyerowitz, William
Wegman, Robert Therrien, Alexander Vethers. C & M
Art’s Jennifer Vorbach auctioned
off eight of the lots with her natural aplomb despite the
cacophony of the very talkative crowd. Despite the
din, the party managed to raise over $100,000.
Founded by Andrea Woodner in 1995, the Design Trust is a support
and advocacy group that seeks to enhance and promote innovation in our public
spaces throughout the City’s five boroughs. A feasibility study they produced
was instrumental in convincing the Bloomberg administration
to preserve the High Line elevated train structure in Manhattan’s
lower West Side from destruction.
The High Line is now the centerpiece for the City’s plan for Hudson
Yards. If you don’t know, there is a great plan to transform a 1.5 mile
stretch of the elevated train tracks stretching between the Meatpacking district
and the Javits Center on Manhattan’s lower West Side into a public park. |
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Clockwise
from top left: The Design Trust's silent auction
at Raphael Vinõly's studio; Ali
Tayar and Natalia Echeverri's Lantern; Andrea
Woodner, Kitty Hawks,
and Deborah Marton.
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It’s
a fantastic project and needs everyone’s
support — go
to http://www.thehighline.org to find
out more. You can find out more about what’s going on in the city’s
public spaces at: http://www.designtrust.org.
I saw House & Garden’s Maer Roshan, New York Time Magazine’s Pilar
Viladas, the New Yorker’s Elisabeth Biondi, ArtNews’ Robin
Cembalest patrons Eric and Fiona Rudin, private dealer Julian
Weismann, the Municipal Art Society’s Frank
Sanchis, MoMA curators Terry
Riley and Paola Antonelli, New York City Council’s Amanda
Burden, Target Margin Theater artistic director David
Herskovits, photographer Roxanne Lowit and novelist Jennifer
Eagan among the packed throng.
I also ran into Skip Mooney and Kevin
Guyer as they were placing bids on several lots. Kevin mixed the music
for the evening, and told me of the success he’s had with the costumes
he designed for the sold-out New York Theater Workshop production of Henrik
Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. I also caught up with Whitney Museum
curator Chrissie Isles who is currently working on the first
major museum exhibition of James Lee Byers since 1970. Chrissie
was a co-curator on the last Whitney Biennial. She did a fantastic show
a couple years ago entitled Into the Light: The Projected Image in American
Art 1964-1977.
Art party wizard Melissa Feldman’s MF Productions made
the whole thing happen. She also has the upcoming benefit celebrations for DIA and
the Studio Museum on her plate this season.
Afterwards,
I jumped into a cab with Jennifer Vorbach and banker Thong
Nguyen and headed uptown to art collector George
Robertson’s party celebrating Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline
Tarry’s first solo show in New York at the Marvelli
Gallery which opens today in Chelsea. Robertson’s art-filled
loft in the middle of the Chelsea’s flower district was re-fitted
for the occasion with a huge buffet on his long kitchen counter
with chef Sami Rodriguez and his staff continuously
providing new delicacies to the hungry group. International Center
for Photography director Buzz Hartshorn and collectors Susan
and Michael Hort were some of the luminaries present including
gallery owner Marcello Marvelli. |
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Marcello
Marvelli and Timothy Rhodes looking
at pictures from the McCallum & Tarry exhibition
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The
spread
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Artists
Jackie Tarry, Bradley McCallum with
son Otis,
Marcello Marvelli, and Buzz
Hartshorn
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Michael
Hort, George Robertson, and Susan Hort
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Photographs
by Chiu-Ti Jensen
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McCallum
and Tarry are a husband and wife team. Their show, entitled Endurance,
presents a series of life size color photographs and a video that together document
a 25-hour endurance performance by 26 homeless Seattle teenagers.
The
youths stood still on a Seattle public sidewalk, while looking
directly into the camera for an hour. The video presents the time-lapsed
performance to compress
26 hours into a two-hour recording, during which we see a full cycle of night
following day, with pedestrians and cars passing at breakneck speed as the kids
maintain stillness. The video effectively pairs swirling chaos with motionlessness.
In the DVD soundtrack, the pictured youth explain – eloquently and often
heartbreakingly - their experiences with drug dependency, their wretched childhoods
and the street crimes they have endured.
I ran into art and charity impresario Simon Watson sitting with
the New Museum curator Dan Cameron. Simon's company Scenic is
producing two big events in the next month — a Collage Party at Bergdorf
Goodman and the next ARTWALK NY, to benefit Coalition for the Homeless (in its
10th year) that takes place here November 20th. That day, leading curators will
take groups through artists’ studios throughout Manhattan. ABC Newsman Peter
Jennings is once again the event chair which this year will honor artist Ed
Ruscha and collector and patron Donald B. Marron.
Sotheby’s is hosting both the party and silent auction on November 20 and
the gala dinner on the 22nd that features a live auction with Sotheby’s Jamie
Niven as auctioneer. One of the prize lots of the live auction is a
brand new Ed Ruscha painting entitled Hot and Cold that is estimated
to sell for over $70,000. For more information call Scenic at: 212 608 5999. |
The
art of collage, which Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented
a century ago, is having a renaissance of sorts among some of today’s
emerging
artists including Scott Hug, Dearraindrop, Paul Butler and Adam
Pendleton. For the last few years, the Collage Party conceived
by artist Paul Butler and othergallery taken place throughout Canada, with artists
making collages in a live setting and for sale.
The first US Collage Party will take place at Bergdorf Goodman, sponsored
by Etro, on October 25th from 10 am to 6 pm in the Men’s Department and
in the windows of the store at 58th Street and Fifth Avenue. They will be on
view and for sale at Bergdorf’s through November 8 — 50% of all sales
will benefit the New Museum here and the Power Plant in Toronto. Another party
will take place in LA three weeks later linked to an exhibition at the Museum
of Contemporary Art (MoCA). |
Long
before papier collé re-entered the landscape of contemporary
art, Pavel Zoubok has been a champion of it
both in its current incarnations and historically.
His show
last month of Dodie Wexler’s collages
was sublime. Pavel opened a new gallery this summer on 23rd
in Chelsea and neighborhood
is all the better
for it. You have to check out John Evans’ As Days
Go By at Zoubok (pictured right) which opened
last night.
From 1964, Evans made collages every day until the year 2000. It’s
a fabulous show that is dream for lovers of the process — meaning me. There
is even a major new book to document the occasion. |
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The
Art Set, ©Charlie Scheips, 2004 |
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