Armory Deluxe
What got left out of my season-opening observations in Artforum. Plus Austin Martin White.
Just out: my chronicle of the first week of September in New York for Artforum. The season’s opening was even more manic than usual. My reportage includes Yoshitaka Amano and Miriam Cahn, burlesque and astrology, basements and glass palaces, terrible sculpture and great painting, and heat indexes between 95 and 100 degrees, with cameos by figures as diverse as Bradley Eros and the Dare. The writing is more atmospheric than art critical and, if possible, even more barbed than what readers might expect.
This weekend I’ll be attending Drunk vs Stoned 3, an exhibition at the Ranch in Montauk that takes up a trope dating back to Gavin Brown’s Passerby era. If I am not traumatically shoved, a Spigot on the subject will be forthcoming next week.
To tide you over until then, I offer you a companion to my Artforum piece, a para-column: Spigot qua liner notes. To explain:
I have been dismayed to hear of at least two separate occasions where a reader recommended Spigot to someone who swiftly concluded that I was an asshole. In fact I am full of love.
It is true, however, that I’ve sometimes wanted to clarify things after I publish a piece of writing. Also, as a pragmatist, I hate to waste the stuff that gets cut. Finally, I’ve wondered how a column composed of many short discrete items would play, rather than the more writerly usual format.
Thus the following collection of fragments and augmentations. I don’t expect you, dear reader, to read the AF piece (though I would be thrilled if you did), so hopefully the below stands on its own as well.
Notes on “Occupational Hazards”
Lest you be concerned, I am not turning neocon despite my recent scholarship of Leo Strauss. Know Your Enemy, as the podcast title goes.
Barthes’s “The World of Wrestling” (1954) will be familiar to readers of Mythologies, which collects some of his columns from the French literary review Les lettres nouvelles where the dreamiest of semioticians invents cultural criticism as we know it.
One artist I got intrigued by in the Focus section of the Armory was the underappreciated Brazilian-Spanish conceptualist Vera Chaves Barcellos at Zielensky gallery from Barcelona and São Paulo.
Some NYC street ambiance from the recycling bin: “The heat added a strange valence to the proceedings; the buzz of early autumn that rattles through the entire city mixed with the first heat of summer which, as one friend noted, was making everyone horny.” Accurate but a little flat.
Pro tip when you go to a Theta opening in balmy weather: there’s an AC unit all the way in the back.
I didn’t actually hate the Dare EP: a 2 Live Crew reference is always complimentary in my book.
Your number one location for a mid jazz trio on a Friday night is the bar hidden in the Walker Hotel’s basement. They close promptly at 2.
Austin Martin White, The Winds of Four (book cover), 2023 See the Austin Martin White shows at Derek Eller (which I stop by in the Artforum piece) and Petzel uptown. They’re exceptional. White’s canvases are dense and gymnastic, with the paint appearing as if extruded via a screening process. The result is a patterning of fine built-up lines with glotty, rippling textures—thick, intricate surfaces that at times resemble woodcuts, at times embroidery. Within a canvas, White multiplies images, catching figures in different stages of motion or depicting multiple scenes within a single frame. The subject matter at the heart of these frantic, vibratory works is colonialism, via White’s scrutiny of casta painting (detailed in a very fine press release), which addressed hierarchies of race and class in colonial-era Mexico. Figures appear in appropriated postures of power relations, supplicant/servant and so on, but White also throws in discordant elements: in one painting at Eller, I spotted I’m-Just-a-Bill sad-scroll guy of ’70s Schoolhouse Rock fame. It’s a bold comparison, but White is a bit like a psychedelic Kara Walker. The paintings form a dizzying analogy of contemporary image reception, where neither your mind nor your eye can sit still.
While it does capture an annoying phenomenon, I cut this sentence for seeming a little too whiny: “The week was also plagued by interminable moments of dithering between events, the killing of spare half hours, the torturous indecision of large groups trying to determine how to get ten blocks from a gallery to a restaurant, from a restaurant to a bar.”
I have no benzodiazepine addiction at this time.
James Bidgood as “Terry Howe” mixing with the crowd at Club 82, 1950s. Source: Metal Magazine, https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/article/james-bidgood-the-legend-of-gay-glam I didn’t think the wall of paintings in the Ella Funt dining room was offensive; I just thought it was lame. The people working there were very nice, and the food was good. The history of the 82 Club is fascinating and complex.
Because I’m constantly thinking about what I’m not doing, I made a long list of the many exhibitions that opened last week that I was curious about but failed to visit. Perhaps it’ll prove useful for readers looking for shows to see in New York in the next few weeks. In no particular order:
Ashley Bickerton at Gagosian, Charline von Heyl at Petzel, Math Bass at Bonakdar, Kaari Upson at Sprüth Magers, Dewey Crumpler at Andrew Kreps, Larissa Lockshin at Europa, Covey Gong at Derosia, Sondra Perry at Bridget Donohue, Michael Rakowitz at Jane Lombard, Barbara Kasten at Bortolami, Kate Mosher Hall at Miguel Abreu, Elle Pérez at 47 Canal, Caroline Monnet at Arsenal, Carlos Motta and Mosie Romney at PPOW, Kerry Schuss at Gordon Robichaux
Last but not least, I’m really looking forward to the Liz Magic Laser’s “Convulsive States,” now open at Pioneer Works in Red Hook.
Music
No, it’s not the Dare. It’s Taylor Swift, naturally—“Mirrorball,” in honor of the Ella Funt basement’s disco accessorizing. It’s one of her tersest and prettiest songs, completely self-centered of course, but also relatable for anyone who’s ever yearned for attention, be it from a gawping crowd or the object of one’s affection. The lyrics are right there; go ahead and sing along.