Frieze Week: Let's Fucking Gooooooooooo?
Barney, Donnelly, Paglen, Weeks, and more--plus the cheapest white wine at Bacaro
Feeling a little quid pro quo this week? Perfect timing: Frieze is coming to New York. Spigot is here to help you plan your days and nights.
EXHIBITIONS
Matthew Barney’s Secondary
Matthew Barney has been due for a comeback for a while now. His influence (or prescience) vis-à-vis the biomorphic, quasi-theistic, and eccentrically symbolic is subtly everywhere; to pick just two divergent examples currently on view in New York, look to Josh Kline’s cycles of video and sculpture packing them in at the Whitney and the Paul Thek-ier excursions of Kelly Akashi at Tanya Bonadkar, where the LA-based artist connects esoterica, torqued and fluid body-forms, and the literal cosmos.
Barney’s worked in a massive warehouse on a pier in Long Island City for something like two decades. He’s finally leaving it (even a blue-chip artist can only afford waterfront real-estate in New York for so long, I suppose), but before then he’s turning it into an exhibition space. Using a familiar expressive vocabulary that’s sure to prime the pump of his reappreciation, the new work, titled Secondary, plays the hits: American football, violence and masculinity, and, as Barney pithily puts it, “materials-based choreography.” Inside the building, there’s an hour-long five-channel movie, the colorful astroturf on which the film was shot, and a six-foot-trench that floods and drains with the tides, a jewel-box Earthwork cum Gordon Matta-Clark.
Secondary opened Thursday night in the flickering glow of the huge digital timepiece mounted on the warehouse’s East River facade. (Used as a game clock in the film, it was in fact built as a Trump-term countdown clock.) Inside, the film screened on four giant monitors and a Jumbotron. At the risk of overstatement, I think it might just be great. Secondary is an operatic apotheosis of a famously terrible incident when a player was paralyzed on an NFL field in 1978. In returning to familiar themes and motifs after setting them aside, Barney has rendered them with a new specificity. As events progress, they remain mapped to their template, which results in a helpful but hardly diluting degree of clarity: in a context of vocalizing referees who conjure Macbeth’s witches and footballs of translucent goo, linearity is still fairly outré.
There’s a lot to say about the piece and little room here. But the most striking of Secondary’s myriad remarkable elements (which include a gleeful choral deployment of the death-metal stylings of Oakland/LA Raiders fans) is the captivating exactitude of its choreography. The cast, which includes the artist, spotlights a number of well-known dancers, including the piece’s movement director, David Thomson, and Wally Cardona. Has Barney actually been dance all along?
Trevor Paglen at Pace
The original Do-Your-Own-Research artist has always been a curious fit in the gallery system, toying with the dynamic between what power hides and what it makes visible and importing it into his modes of presentation in ways that can be a little frustrating. I keep getting sucked in nevertheless. Paglen’s always got something substantive to say, unlike so many artists, and he does it in detail. Take AI, for example, which he creepily featured in his last Metro Pictures show well before people started blowing their minds by with DALL-E in-the-style-ofs.
Like Barney, Paglen seems to be revisiting familiar territory. In this, his first show at Pace, he’s back to black ops with a study of militarism’s gangrening effects on American culture. The flyer image is undeniably sick; I hope he’s putting it on T-shirts. And then I hope Eliza Douglas buys one so she can finally make a good painting.
Trisha Donnelly at Matthew Marks
A riddle inside an enigma shrouded in the gesyeric mists of geological time and riding a white horse. One of the best. Per usual, there’s nothing on the Marks site except an ambiguous black-and-white degraded photograph that appears to be landscape of trees, rock, and sky through a car window, or on an old TV, or torqued on a photocopy machine. I haven’t gone yet, so no spoilers, please.
The Last Show at Housing
The subject line of the most recent Housing email I received—"HOUSING’s Last Exhibition Before KJ Freeman Sells Out”—is some kind of sardonic, I’m just not sure what kind. In fact Housing is in fact going on a hiatus and shifting to a roving/online model, according to the gallery’s Instagram. If you’re selling out, KJ, god bless; I’ve dug the shows at your space. You, dear reader, have until May 21 to check out the current group exhibition, Pedagogy as Self, which riffs on the legacy of Black Mountain College and features artists including Faith Icecold and Antwan Duncan.
POLL
GENITALIA
Spigot’s #1 fan and local heartthrob Paige K. B.—who happens to have a wild, riddling installation of her own currently on view at Blade Study, featuring ashes and 2x4s, dark jokes and balloons—turned me on to this 21-second chrome-boner masterpiece. More accessible than Alex da Corte, more sex-positive than Marilyn Minter’s golden-shower water fountain, Isamaya Ffrench [sic] is coming to a kunsthalle near you! I realize that it undermines my credibility to plug into this nonsense’s irony jack. But if Uri Aran can mount a show about dog testicles at Andrew Kreps and people can write seriously about Beau Is Afraid, I can gush all over Lips.
POETRY
Laurie Weeks reading at Hauser & Wirth
Laurie Weeks is the author of a brilliant hilarious underappreciated junkie lesbian futility-of-desire New York City novel called Zippermouth from 2011. She doesn’t publish much, so you shouldn’t miss her appearance as part of a Nicole Eisenmann–curated poetry event for the Hauser house magazine. Though in fact it’s better for me if you don’t go—I don’t want it to be crowded.
WINE
The cheapest white wine at Bacaro. Frieze Week means awkward dining. There are the people you used to be friends with when they lived in New York, people you worked with once or twice remotely, and total strangers you find yourself embroiled with for some fiscal reason. Why not convene your discomfort at the Lower East Side’s most reliable site for a tête-a-tête, Bacaro? Pros: the vaguely illicit ambiance of a setting that’s literally underground; the Northern Italian cuisine is familiar enough to go down easy without being dull; the prices are unusually fair. Cons? You won’t get that perfect bathroom-mirror fit pic.
Between the balmy weather and the throat-rawing yakity yak, might I suggest white wine with your vongole? Bacaro’s $50 Gavi is one of those crisp, quenching mountain wines that’s atypical for Italy, neither too fruity nor oily in texture. The marque Bacaro is pouring, Il Forte, is an especially good version, like pretty much all the wines I’ve tried at the place. In fact I liked it so much that I gave it the ultimate tribute: at the end of a long and rowdy dinner for the Eunnam Hong show at Lubov, I tenderly tucked an entire open bottle of it into my trench coat and spilled nary a drop on the long ride home.
MUSIC
As is well observed, the nostalgia cycle is tightening faster than ever. Somehow we’re back to Bladee, and that was only a year ago! Let Spigot be the first to cinch the belt of cultural implosion one notch further. Remember . . . October 2022? The fellas were all sweating in their Banshees of Inishirin cable-knits; the girls were all toasting Annie Ernaux’s Nobel. And none of us enbees on TikTok could stop listening to this stem over and over. When you head to Frieze this week, take the Wock.
Terada Honke's "Musubi Chiba" is a pretty psycho little bottle of sake if ur looking for review material
“And then I hope Eliza Douglas buys one so she can finally make a good painting.” Lmaoo