Sunday marked the closing of another successful Armory Week in New York. Following the trend of Art Basel in Miami, the aisles were teeming with enthusiasts, artists, collectors, and dealers who seemed not to be aware in the least about our turbulent economic climate. Damien Hirst prints had five and six stickers next to them, denoting sales. It truly was a collector’s fair.

Photo by Stacy Kimball

Made up of the Park Avenue Armory show, Scope, Fountain, and Piers 92 and 94, this was the most important week in New York for collectors and gallery-owners alike.

Mike Bevilacqua

James Casebere

James Nares

It seems to be a good rule of thumb to not expect to meet any artists when making your way around art fairs. As one fantastic art—who will remain nameless—told me: “Why do I want to walk around an art show? I’m just going to get frustrated looking at all the crap that’s selling and wonder why mine isn’t up there. It’s very hard to get inspired that way.” As I’ve come to understand it, art fairs are another way for big-budget galleries to boast to one another about who has the most fabulous pieces in their collections and who has the biggest artists in their respective stables. Deitch is always certain to have at least a few Warhols, Basquaits, Harings, Barry McGee installations, ad infinitum. Tony Shafrazi usually counters back with a fantastic collection of David LaChapelle, Dennis Hopper, and Jasper Johns. Expect to see Richard Prince, Picasso, Ed Ruscha, and a handful of other A-listers at Larry Gagosian’s monolithic booth.

Regardless of what you think about the fanfare behind the art fairs, they’re enjoyable to peruse. Until December’s Basel in Miami, stay tuned for more about these cultural instigators.

Photo by Stacy Kimball

Photo by Stacy Kimball

Photo by Stacy Kimball

Sven'tgolle Sven'tolle. Photo by Stacy Kimball.

Photo by Stacy Kimball

Mel Bochner. Photo by Stacy Kimball

Jacob Hashimoto. Photo by Stacy Kimball

]]> http://www.spreadartculture.com/2010/03/10/new-york-armory-week-2010/feed/ 0 http://www.spreadartculture.com/2010/03/08/skin-fruit-jeff-koons-curatorial-debut-at-the-new-museum/ http://www.spreadartculture.com/2010/03/08/skin-fruit-jeff-koons-curatorial-debut-at-the-new-museum/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:42:27 +0000 Jonathan http://www.spreadartculture.com/?p=1300 By JRS

In 1985, when billionaire Greek industrialist Dakis Joannou bought the first piece of his now world-renowned contemporary art collection—a basketball signed by Dr. Jay submerged in a tank of water and simply titled “Equilibrium”—it started two chain reactions. One, Mr. Koons would never have to worry about people buying his work again, as Jonnau has been very successful in buying up most of it for his monolithic museum in Athens. Secondly, Joannou would be very adept in helping to solidify emerging artists and future greats (Terrence Koh, Cindy Sherman, Takashi Murakami), as well as helping to shape the very nature of collecting.

And thus, in the middle of last week, the world got the first look at Jeff Koons’ curatorial debut: “Skin Fruit: Selections for the Dakis Joannou Collection.” On how he chose the pieces for the exhibition, Koons told SPREAD ArtCulture: “I did everything very intuitively. I’ve known Dakis since 1985, and from meeting with him and following the collection from that time, I just wanted to try and capture what I felt represented his interests and his ambition and broadness in collecting contemporary art…but very intuitively.”

SPREAD ArtCulture: Is this your first of many curating efforts?

Jeff Koons: I think artists always curate their own work, but I have an Ed Paschke show that will open in about two weeks that I will curate that I brought together. But it’s like anything: When you’re creating an artwork, you’re just following your interests, and in curating, it’s the same thing. But it’s intuitive, there’s a lot of great work. Some of the best art pieces, some of the best works in the collection, aren’t here. Maybe they’re on loan or it’s an artist’s work that didn’t it within this context of looking at the body.

SAC: How did you choose the pieces in this show and under what context?

JK: It’s just my intuition. I would go through the collection and choose works that I felt represented Dakis’s desire with the collection, and I would go back through and go over them again, and I would find that I was always coming up with the same things. And I made models of the museum; I would lay things out and they developed their own relationships, and it’s just the same when you’re following your own ideas and creating your own works that this happens. It got to a point where if I would try and move something on one of the floors, and take it from one location to another, for me, it just wouldn’t work.

Some of the artists we were able to speak to at the opening, such as Terence Koh, were far less articulate about their involvement in the show:

A sculpture by Terence Koh

SPREAD ArtCulture: Tell me about your involvement in Skin Fruit.

Terence Koh: I was just chosen.

SAC: What are you working on now?

TK: Drinking water.

Koh was the only artist to have sculptures, as well as paintings, in the show.

Some patrons, such as the Chelsea behemoth Tony Shafrazi, were able to weigh in with the learned authority of and award-winning curator (Shafrazi was the recipient of Rob Pruitt’s “Best Group Show” in 2009 at the first ever Art Awards):

"Noodles" by Urs Fischer

SPREAD ArtCulture: What do you think of the show?

Tony Shafrazi: I love the show! I think it’s an eclectic wonderful representation of what’s going on. Dakis is a great collector, and has been for many years, and you see such a great mixture of young, new work, such as been selected from a great many things. I love this Fischer piece right here (Urs Fischer’s “Noodles”), don’t you just love it? It’s one of my favorite pieces in the place. Every piece in here is interesting.

Charles Ray's "Aluminum Girl"

"Fall '91" by Charles Ray (foreground); Terence Koh's "Chocolate Mountains" (background)

Charles Ray's "Revolution Counter-Revolution"

A piece by Downtown favorite and partner of the late Dash Snow, Dan Colen

Dan Altmejd's calamitous "Giant"

Maurizio Cattelan's very bland and largely pedantic "All," an eight-piece installation featuring life-size body bags carved from Carrara marble

"Untitled (Jack)" by Paul McCarthy, which could be a prop straight out of Kubrick

A wonderfully whimsical and weird colloboration by the team of Paul McCarthy and Paula Jones

A wonderfully whimsical and weird colloboration by the team of Paul McCarthy and Paula Jones

There seemed to be a very even split among opening-night patrons as to whether or not the show was a success. Check it out for yourself until June 6th and let us know what you think.

Williams airbrushing "A Diamond in a Goat's Ass (A Lyrically Poetic Euphemism for Pretension)"

Often know by the name “pop surrealism,” lowbrow art leapt onto the art community’s radar in the 1970s in Los Angeles. A tormented stepchild of punk rock, underground comix, and America’s obsession with hot rods, this movement was delineated by a sense of humor, sharp wit, and, above all else, a grandiloquent denouement with chaos ruling the canvas, the likes of which had not been accepted in a gallery setting before.

Barret S. Bingham tells us, “This alternative art movement found its most congealing participant in one of America’s most opprobrious and maligned underground artists, painter Robert Williams. It was this artist to brought the term “lowbrow” into the fine arts lexicon, with his ground breaking 1979 book, The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams. It was from this point that the seminal elements of West Coast Outlaw culture slowly started to aggregate.”

The wonderfully garrulous David Dalton says of Williams, “Who the hell gets to call it reality, anyway? Robert Williams, the kinky king of West Coast outlaw culture, that’s who. Why? Because this is his show, a rabid art dog’s x-ray of angsty, eye-popping hyperreality. Putrid, crusading, loutish, leering, and profound, Williams is a generator of pure cerebral monsters summoned out of drooling lust, apocalyptic kitsch, alien hatchlings, and gross gonzo tableaux.

A master draftsman, inventor, and depictor of the seething teen brain, Robert Williams’ art is an uncanny graphic analogy for heavy metal’s raunch and grind—nasty, perverse, loud, lewd, and out of control—which is why Guns N’ Roses used his title and painting “Appetite For Destruction,” on the cover of their album of the same name eight years later,where a hideous chrome-toothed orange space monster zaps a robot into a skeleton as he is about to rape a blonde female street peddler…. Wait a minute, I can’t describe this! You just gotta see it. Not surprisingly, art academia was aghast at this aesthetic whiplash. It was as if the Hells Angels had vroomed into the hallowed white space of the gallery on their Harleys threatening to gang-bang the Mona Lisa.”

"Wrangling the Firmament"

Joining Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in the mid-1960s, Williams had previously tried to forge a fine-arts path, finding more solace in the underground world of comix. Embracing the same trinity that helped spawn the movement from its inception, Williams soon joined forces with the likes of R. Crumb and other pioneers of the lowbrow to form the now-ubiquitous Zap Comix.

"Mythical Benevolence Via Ice Cream"

Bingham continues: “Robert Williams’ influence on alternative art is immeasurable. From his endeavors to broaden the possibilities for young artists to gain exposure, sprang the well known art chronicle, JUXTAPOZ magazine. Even with this popular manifesto and landmark publication, Williams’ well-meaning machinations still places his work in a lost league of unvindicated ghosts—he’s now an outsider among outsiders.

Williams’ paintings now take us into the world of subjective theory-a mock realm of violated graphic physics. This is his theoretical search to pinpoint the exact location where the sky meets the ground, with the golden socket wrench used only by quantum mechanics. His art is the first step on that hypothetical ourney, but it is now a hapless sojourn through metaphysical superstition or false mystery. It is simply the next logical step into abstract thought.”

"Tortured Libido"

Robert Williams’ “In the Service of the Hypothetical” is showing through January 23rd at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York.

SPREAD ArtCulture caught up with George Horner, an administrator at New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery, at Art Basel and talked about David LaChapelle and Dennis Hopper’s new exhibitions.

SPREAD ArtCulture: When did these new LaChapelle images come about?

George Horner: These images were shot in Hawaii recently because David has a lot of land there. It was actually once a nudist colony that he bought years ago. He flew in Michael Jackson impersonators and look-a-likes for this shoot. He was a huge Michael fan and was really affected by his death. The look-a-likes go through real pains in this series, in order to be as genuine as possible.

He’s certainly not poking fun at Michael; he has complete reverence for him, almost to the point of absurdity. Mr. LaChapelle, who never photographed Mr. Jackson, said he wanted to depict the singer as a “martyr crucified by the media.” These photographs are kind of like the three different stages of Michael: Michael in the eighties with the curly hair, then Michael of about two thousand or so, with the light skin, straight hair, and the extreme nose job and chin implants that he claimed he never got. At the end, where he’s actually dead, the glove has fallen off. We’re selling it as a triptych because it’s almost like an altarpiece. Mr. Shafrazi has an incredible eye for installation.

SAC: What of this new Dennis Hopper work?

GH: The photographs are photographs that Dennis took from about 1960 to 1967. Taschen just put out a new book all about the photographs. It was incredible the circles Dennis was privy to, he was a really privileged character, being a movie star. He was an artist then and he’s an artist now. It’s not like this is new work, like he’s decided to take some photographs now. These photographs are forty-five years old. And, you know, he’s a collector. He’s been a collector his whole life and he’s been an artist his whole life. He was one of the first people to buy Warhol, and Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns, and Rauschenberg. He was a real champion of pop art. It spoke to him somehow.

SAC: Why billboards?

GH: So, an early inspiration of the pop artist were billboards. Rosenquist was a billboard artist. A lot of the photographs are of billboards. A number of years ago, Dennis had this idea that he wanted to go full-circle: he had the billboards and he took photos of the billboards and the billboards become photographs and then you take those photographs and you turn them into billboards again. It’s like the full journey. He employs billboard painters to paint them. It’s not that he couldn’t or I don’t know if he has that in him—that’s not the point. It’s really more like paying homage to the old school and to the original inspiration to a lot of these pop people and kind of paying homage to a dying art. There’s fewer and fewer companies that still hand-paint. Everything’s digital now. These particular ones were done by a company we found in Brooklyn called Colossal and they did a fantastic job. Of course Dennis was there every step of the way, it’s not like “Do this, I’m going to walk away.” It wasn’t like that at all. He was really there and worked with them and Mr. Shafrazi did, too. They’re really beautiful.