Barbaric, Classical, Solemn

Matt Hoyt and Tom Thayer, molto Mangiones, and compositions on Paul Klee. Plus Oyster Bay for the holidays!

Photo by Ryan Kitson, who makes a hell of a ceramic in case you’re doing some seasonal shopping

Contrary to any Ausländer raus der Kunst tales you might have heard lately, there are lots of good shows up in New York right now. Christine Kozlov at the American Academy of Fine Arts is a superb retro of an elliptical Conceptualist who was mostly left out of the movement’s history, with a spare exhibition design by artist Nora Schultz. The Matthew Barney/Alex Katz joint at O’Flaherty’s is haunting in multiple senses, with the gallery’s new, temporary creepshow interiors and a three-channel docufilm of Katz making a painting that’s given the Barney treatment. Denzil Forrester is having a two-gallery mini-retro (curated by Sheena Wagstaff) of his spatially strange canvases at Andrew Kreps and Stephen Friedman; you feel torqued in various directions while soaking in an unearthly palette that tends to the lavender and soaking up slashy figuration in recent works that, to my eye, have ’80s hooks and tinges of fashion illustration.

One show that I particularly love, which closes this weekend, is the two-person Matt Hoyt and Tom Thayer exhibition at Bureau. Both stray outside the usual schema of art making; for both, their work seems to emerge not from what one might call a practice but rather from its own less-than-consensus universe.

Tom Thayer, Rock Symphony, 2024. Stones, metal lid, bowls, wood, mixed media, and electronics, 36 × 36 × 5 ½ in.

The two artists, who are friends, each work in various mediums, particularly Thayer, who makes meditative animations (a fine example of which is on view downstairs), performances, works on paper, music, and sculptures. Here the latter ranks include a droll, multivalent piece involving three inept mechanized rocks performing a composition by striking (or missing) three metal bowls with tiny dowels. Thayer is also fond of puppets; the play between animate and inanimate permeates all his work.

Hoyt meanwhile is an extraordinary crafter of otherworldly objects. The work always makes me think of Lee Bontecou: his sculptures are always both recognizable and alien, natural and inorganic, accretive and eternal. They’re truly like nothing anyone else makes. For this Bureau exhibition, Hoyt shows some of his square radiant op paintings, which conjure apotropaic insignia daubed on a barn by a dosed Mennonite, alongside his characteristic small sculptures that here have a slight Giger-ish inflection. While horror is not his MO, Hoyt’s work always has an air of the fantastic—and, as with Thayer, there’s an uncertainty around what’s animate and what isn’t, what may have once been alive and what in some sense still might be.

Works by Matt Hoyt. Left: Untitled, 2022, Tempera on illustration board, acrylic on wood frame, 18 ¾ × 18 ¾ in. Right: Untitled, 2017–2024, Metal, epoxy putty, air-dry clay, water-based glue, tempera, acrylic, and oil paint, 5 ½ × 9 ½ × 1 ¾ in.

Interested parties take note: The show, titled I Want to Climb Through the Windows of My Eyes and Become Static Electricity, concludes with a performance by Hoyt and Thayer at 8 pm this Saturday, December 14.

Music

The trumpeter and flugelhornist Chuck Mangione is apparently no relation to that other Mangione capturing headlines these days; nor do we know if he shares Luigi’s appreciation of Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future, which the latter awarded 4 of 5 stars on Goodreads.

Chuck has his own bona fides, however. He performed with real heads like Art Blakey in the 1950s and ’60s, then in the 1970s perfected a smooth jazz sound that made his music popular, even ubiquitous. In 1980, he wrote the themes for both the Lake Placid Winter Olympics and the Burt Reynolds box-office hit The Cannonball Run. Later, Mangione had an unexpected second career as a voice artist on, of all things, King of the Hill, playing himself as a celeb pitchman in 10 episodes from 1997 to 2003.

While Chuck’s most familiar tune is “Feels So Good,” a quintessential bit of ’70s ephemera that reached #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978, I discovered an eccentricity of Mangione’s transitional period between jazz and pop: a late ’60s album called The National Gallery Performing Musical Interpretations of the Paintings of Paul Klee. Mangione co-wrote all but one of the tracks of (but did not perform on) this wacko hybrid of psych-folk, prog, and light jazz, which reminds me alternately of a brassier Robert Wyatt, Fairport Convention, and Irmin Schmidt/Can’s “I’m Hiding My Nightengale” (a song whose exceptional recording by White Magic in 2015 I can never fail to stan). The National Gallery’s implausible farrago presumably made a bit more sense at the time: some tracks, like “Fear Behind the Curtain,” sound like the Residents—who started out as Bay Area freaks alongside the folky Grateful Dead, after all.

Major props to the fan of Chuck who went to the trouble to track down all the Klee works that inspired the album, a task at which I was having no luck. I can vouch for neither the accuracy of the translations from the Deutsch, however, nor the images’ color correction; the first track’s namesake, Klee’s watercolor barbarisch-klassisch-festlich (1926), resides in the collection of the Museum Berggruen and on its website appears decidedly less cyan. The apophenic will be disappointed that there is no banger on Performing Paul Klee that reps everyone’s favorite angel being blown backwards, Angelus Novus (1920), though if The National Gallery had waited only a year to record, who knows? The first English translation of “On the Concept of History” appeared the same year the album was released, in 1968.

Wine

We all fuck with Oyster Bay. The sauvignon blanc is a party staple, cheap by the bottle and in bulk, no corkscrew required. You’ll quite possibly be swigging some over the next few weeks. But how often do you stop and give it a proper delectation?

Sauvignon can tend toward the smoky, but with Oyster Bay it becomes pronounced like with a Fumé, even tarry. There’s also an aroma of grass, giving the wine a weedy campfire appeal that seems a little Aotearoa somehow. It’s tart, lemony, spicy—savory, almost like organ meat. I often recommend Côtes de Gascogne to people as a cheap white, and Oyster Bay has a similar gaminess. The whole experience is bang-bang, the finish quick and cleansingly acidic. Don’t keep the bottle sitting around in the fridge for a week, but you won’t. And you’ll find it tastes a whole lot better out of a glass than a flimsy 4-oz. plastic cup.