The exhibition is primarily comprised of portraits or documentary-style snapshots of Seelie’s friends and colleagues, as well as community members and concert attendees. As an example of the ambiguous relationship the show has with whimsy, one might consider the fact that a Bugs Bunny costume makes two appearances: once as an innocuous, nostalgic figure and then again as a quasi-violent prankster getting his due from two vicious dogs. One of his most successful articulations of sobriety can be found in the insightful portrait entitled Porch Ridin’ (2007). It is a tightly composed depiction of two contemplative male figures on the dilapidated porch of a freight car. Seelie successfully communicates an undeniable sense of restlessness and tension, as one imagines the car progressing with screeches and lurches for miles of endless track.

However, it may be argued that any credibility the photographer established with his ability to capture the frenetic tone of nomadic, creative, youthful existence is called into question with his ridiculously staged zombie portraits. Specifically in Lucy Blood (2006) the subject’s face has been made up to look pale, beaten, and bloody. She stares at the camera with an expression that verges on confrontation, but is ultimately resigned to just barely threatening to suck your brains out. It is unclear what Seelie is attempting to say about his personal experiences or about being a member of the current creative class. Perhaps this is exactly the point. It could be that a cohesive theme and a sense of soullessness is intentional in “Slowdancing to Slayer”, unless one is to stretch her imagination for an explanation based on the vacuous obsession with remaining young (or young at heart) forever.

The landscapes are strangely the least raucous, most compelling images included in the show. Bike Tide (2004) is a truly stunning image of a bicycle half-floating, half-sunken into a pallid lake set against a looming, mountainous backdrop. There is a melancholic, thoughtful, restrained quality in the slightly diagonal composition, and the muted tones temper any underlying suggestions of violence. Seelie is well known for his commitment to bike culture, with his involvement in Critical Mass, and his professed love for his Williamsburg bike shop, personal aspects that clearly influenced the photographer’s decision to treat this subject with such reverent tenderness. Mattress Field (2006) is successful in a similar way. One gets the sense that life on the road, although exhilarating at times, is truly exhausting. The filthy abandoned mattress amidst a grove of trees exudes a lonesome homesickness, and one might extend the metaphor if Seelie is indeed making a statement about the experience of existing as a member of an unstable, independent creative class, searching for his artistic voice as he roams infinitely from place to place.

It seems fitting to consider Seelie’s practice as akin to Ryan McGinley’s, and derivative of Larry Clark. All three photographers are undeniably committed to the project of giving voice to a conflicted, marginalized and youthful existence. However, McGinley’s successful communication of exuberance and unabashed conventional defiance can be seen as an alternative to Clark’s excellence in his dark representations of marginalized, abuse-laden cultures. The relationship between McGinley and Clark is clear, whereas Seelie’s position in this triangulation is a bit more obscure. He seems to want to articulate the best of both his peer and his predecessor, but that aim becomes muddled by his divided focus. It could be that in several years, Seelie will feel more comfortable with the direction he and his photography will take. It may also be that his point is not knowing what to say about contemporary culture, or which way it is headed.

If you are lucky, you will enter the gallery space at least a few minutes before the timer goes off on Mad House (2008) and Bang Bang Room (1992), two large installations that operate at roughly 20-minute intervals for about 10 minutes apiece.



Bang Bang Room, a deconstructed living space made out of wood and steel and ornamented only with wallpaper, resembles a house with the walls blown open and the doors left ajar. Viewers are invited to walk within the structure, to stand on the platform “floor” and gaze confusedly at each other through the open space. When the timer goes off, the effect is that of an inanimate object come alive: doors open and shut violently and loudly; the walls move back and fourth rapidly. To be caught unawares near Bang Bang Room as it starts thumping is anxiety-inducing but captivating nonetheless. It is nearly impossible to look away from the spectacle, let alone carry on a conversation.

The only thing that may steal your attention away from the vibrating room is the spinning cube of Mad House, which moves in conjunction with Bang Bang Room. Elevated off the floor and surrounded on all sides by an industrial gate, the large, plywood box spins at an incredible speed. Inside the cube is a chair, which also spins, but at a slower rate. You will inevitably begin to imagine yourself seated in that chair, as though the piece were a twisted Coney Island amusement park ride.



As this movement comes to a halt and the noise dies down, you may focus your attention on Spinning Room (2008), a cube of double-sided projection screens which display pre-taped videos, interrupted by live feed images of museum visitors standing within the structure. Fully enclosed, your image rotates around you. As you step outside the space, your image is projected against the floor-to-ceiling mirrors at the back of the gallery. This is disconcerting to say the least. Again, there is an amusement park fun-house element of participation here, as your figure is shown and distorted despite vanity’s disapproval. McCarthy forces us to take part in his work, to see and be seen, to fully embody the space we (temporarily) inhabit. We interact with the art, but also with our fellow viewers—it is a slippery sort of performance art. McCarthy has tricked us into joining him on stage.



This show is all about interaction between architecture, performance, viewer, art, and space. Transfixed, we are hyper-aware of ourselves, our bodies, of our relationship to the maze of structures around us. The viewer is nervous but exhilarated (or at least that was the general consensus), eager to participate in the neurotic movement and clamoring noise of this highly conceptual exhibition.

ALSO OF INTEREST
PAUL McCARTHY: Film List, July 11 - September 28, 2008
Film has been an important inspiration for Paul McCarthy since the beginning of his career. McCarthy began making films as a student in the 1960s, and his current exhibition on the Whitney’s third floor includes two rare 16mm films screening for the first time in decades. In conjunction with his exhibition, McCarthy has curated a film program that brings together works by, among others, Stan VanDerBeek, Francis Picabia, Walt Disney, Kurt Kren, Yves Klein, and Bruce Conner. McCarthy’s selections provide an intriguing insight into the impact of cinema on his thinking as an artist.

When the canvas itself becomes an image of a human body, tattooing becomes art: Tattoo artists brought together by New York Adorned’s Lori Leven paired with street photographer Patrick O’Dell Thursday, July 24, 2008 for “Uncharted Waters,” part of the White Box’s Six Feet Under Summer Festival. Twelve artists each drew one-of-a-kind images during the gallery’s opening on identical O’Dell prints of a standing nude woman. As the artists covered the image with tattoo-inspired art, the crowd, sipping beer or medicine-sized cups of wine, watched over the artists’ shoulders.

The resulting portraits made the attendees feel like they were watching a living woman having her own skin engraved. The artists drew before a capacity crowd in the White Box, with more onlookers waiting outside and peering down through a glass window to get a peek at the event. The live art event was billed as a metaphor for change in the world; the transformation from nude to covered illustrating the power someone has over his or her own destiny. But the show was much just as effective at changing the popular perception of tattoo culture. The drawings become the focal point of the art, as the woman’s image faded into the background. The tattoo art extended outside of the borders of the human body onto the blue background, allowing canvas and human to blend into one collaborative piece of art.

Artists on view include:
Bryan Randolph, Daniel Santoro, Virginia Elwood, Katja Ramirez, Dana Helmuth, Chris O’Donnell, Horizakura, Stephanie Tamez, Thomas Hooper, and photography by Patrick O’Dell.

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White Box
New York Adorned

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Artist’s site: Dave Tree
Artist’s site: Jasper Patch
McCaig Welles and Rosenthal

The atmosphere on the first evening was, no surprise, relaxed, at the swanky summer resort for some New Yorkers. The selection of art works appeared straightforward, a bit classical and “good looking.”

Let me tell you a story. Somewhere along a lonely street in Long Island City, nestled between warehouses and the edge of the East River, lies an explosive tribute installation akin to a fantastical phoenix reborn, ready to party, and covered in stardust and rubble.

The energetic artist collective, assume vivid astro focus (avaf), has taken over Deitch Studios, LIC with a sprawling universe of deconstructive collage. As a commentary on urban renewal, avaf collected demolition materials from Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Long Island City’s condo construction sites over a two-month period. Amassing more wood than you can shake a stick at, avaf populates “Absolutely Venomous Accurately Fallacious (Naturally Delicious)” with remnants of old buildings in wood, color, and chaos in ultra-bright colors, pattern, symbols, and haphazard structures.

An unassuming, small entrance of wooden shards welcomes its visitors into avaf’s re-envisioned world for humanity, where art, technology, contortionism, pop culture, sex, dance and music all play as one. Planted here and there, are friendly neon signs twisted into symmetrical knots that undeniably resemble vaginas. Swirling digital imagery is foil to paint-dripped artwork. The over-stimulation settles into a rhythmic pattern that coddles its visitors into a state of effervescent information overload.

Imagine the scene in Alice in Wonderland, where a growing Alice unexpectedly bursts through the White Rabbit’s house. Avaf filters that bursting into one moment. At the center of the installation, anchoring the chaos lays a colossal transvestite doll flinging itself full force into a Brooklyn house façade. This duo-gendered entity is a symbol for transition—genders change, communities change, relationships change, skylines change, ideas change. With change comes infinite information, and it is okay to interpret it as your own.

Along the far wall a neon sign of a stylized atomic cloud frames a view of the Manhattan skyline. The angry and adorable cumulus seems to entertain the idea of re-imagining our lovely city. Avaf speaks to its visitors in street tongues with its myriad of visual languages and asks the viewer to find pattern and reason in all the static. Glitter and drama find home amongst dilapidated demolition. Fabric, patterned with fierce acrylic finger nails, drapes itself over a rotting wooden frame. Unfinished lumber is meticulously cut and shaped into a diffracted architectural porch. A neon vagina gently illuminates the painting of a girl in solace. Reconstituted faces glamorize walls of plywood. Masked figures stand tall among phosphorous clouds. Faces are plastered with overly made-up lips, eyelashes, and eyebrows. In addition, collections of wigs and hair clump together to form odd growths in the over-stylized environment. These lyrical explosions address multiple themes including falsities, independence, equality, sexuality and rebirth.

Think, a Popsicle melting, a balloon popping, a lighting bolt striking, an idea being born. It’s okay to dream in the face of destruction, to feel alive through demolition, creating, digesting information, reconfiguring and finding commonality with others. avaf is warm, honest, and eager. With so many places to explore, you can find solace in thoughtful corners of rough sketches and raw wood or get amplified through colorful neon installations, and avaf’s virulently spreading freedom. I highly suggest checking out this exhibition when it comes to life during one of its weekend parties.

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Artists’ site
Deitch Projects

Just south of Washington Square Park, the organically alien-looking 24-foot Fly’s Eye Dome (1976) is on display outside at LaGuardia Place. There until mid-August, the dome looks like the outer half of a hollowed out space rock smashed into the Manhattan sidewalk—until you realize how perfectly symmetrical it is. Geodesic domes are examples of Fuller’s design imperative: Be simple and unobtrusive to the surrounding environment in a way that can provide housing at minimal cost and effort. Though not meant for shelter, Fly’s Eye is oddly welcoming, attracting children to hang from its circular openings despite a sign forbidding just that. The public location serves it well, demonstrating the unassuming power and presence of Fuller’s domes. As the city flows past, the thin circular skeleton holds firmly to the concrete.

The dome is being displayed in conjunction with two Fuller exhibitions at Max Protetch and Sebastian + Barquet. The galleries contain mostly medium-sized photographs as well as pencil drawings that accompany an assortment of odd objects. Large models like Close Packing of Spheres (1980), a polyhedron formed by transparent thermoplastic balls kept in place by steel rods, demonstrate the theories on shape that Fuller used in architecture and invention. Such theories produced off-beat contraptions like Rowing Needle (1968), a large one-man water-transport composed of a single seat, two massive floating needles and a hinged rowing apparatus. The boat hangs from the ceiling of Sebastian + Barquet, dominating its tiny showroom. It is one part of a larger creative process, which includes intimate notes and sketches that brought his inventions to life. What ends up on display quite appropriately blurs the line between science and art in a way that Fuller seemed to invite. This theme is explored further in a larger setting at the Whitney Museum.

“Starting with the Universe” at the Whitney feels like a playground extracted from some deep recess of Buckminster Fuller’s brain. It is brought to life with scaled models and concept drawings of the future, polygonal shapes and frenzied pen-scribbled sketches surrounded by scientific equations and symbols. There are tetrahedrons, octet trusses, geodesic domes, and objects labeled “Dymaxion” and “4D.” Terms like “transegrity” and “synergetics,” manifestations of Fuller’s philosophy and Unitarian world-view, are introduced.

Alongside the collection of Fuller’s works are pieces by artists like Isamu Noguchi and Shoji Sadao, friends and colleagues of Mr. Fuller. Resulting collaborations with Sadao produced Dome Over Manhattan (1960) and Floating Cloud Structures (Cloud Nine) (1960), marvelous representations of a Buckminster-dreamed future. These are startling because the things he envisions, such as floating sphere-enclosed cities, are given technical explanations that would seem to make them immediately possible. The awesome scale of his work still affects us. Fuller’s passion for ideas and his determined optimism for the future of humankind are sentiments that seem to be lost and perhaps in need of finding again.

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Whitney Museum of American Art
Max Protetch
Sebastian + Barquet

ALSO OF INTEREST
The Buckminster Fuller Institute

Born in 1935, Kudo was deeply affected as a child by WWII and the U.S. atomic attacks on Japan. He first surfaced as an active figure in Han-Geijutsu, the Japanese anti-art movement of the ’60s, but his emigration to Paris in 1962 marked the arrival of new influences for the artist, ranging from French Nouveau Réalisme to the European Fluxus movement. Throughout his career Kudo incorporated elements of Neo-Dadaism, Pop Art, and Japanese Postmodernism, but remained outside of any artistic or political movements. His body of work is akin to the self-made worlds of artists like Yayoi Kusama or Joseph Beuys, with their own symbolic languages and social commentaries. The pieces exhibited at Andrea Rosen, like his three-decade career, resist easy categorization—perhaps one of the reasons this late artist’s work remains relatively unknown in the U.S.

Kudo addresses themes of commodification, impotency, illness and despair brought on by the increasingly technological and commercialized world of the ’60s and ’70s in a series of birdcage works including: Your Portrait (1972-73), where songbirds reveal themselves to be amputated phalluses, bereft of strength, caged and on display; Portrait of an Artist in Crisis (1976), in which a deflated cartoon of a mask attempts to paint a pile of excrement while being encircled by captive creatures, heart and phallus; and Meditation in the Endlesstape of the Future<-->Past (1979), where two spools of magnetic tape and a sea of colorful “thought” string seems to swirl endlessly around a caged head.

On the loose elsewhere in the gallery are more parts and pieces. Phalluses sprout from soil in buckets and terrariums in Cultivation in Nature - People Who are Looking at It (1970), and inch up the stems of wilting flowers in Pollution-Cultivation-Nouvelle Écologie (1971). Arms and legs sprout from young trees in a macabre “Grafted Garden,” and eyeballs stare up at viewers from the bottom of a mirrored bucket in Cultivation of Nature and People Who are Looking at It” (1971). These pieces are at once remnants of something dead or destroyed while already fodder for something new, growing, and perhaps alien and unknown. Kudo’s references to the self and to his viewers ask us to consider where we fit into this “new ecology” of a transforming world.

Before his passing in 1990, Kudo’s work became increasingly concerned with Eastern philosophies of contemplation, spirituality and interconnectedness. The Zen-like theme of the life-death continuum apparent throughout his career began to manifest itself in more abstract shapes and an increased use of colored strings and analog tape as symbols for connections, thoughts and energies. The Survival of the Avant-garde (1985) is one of those latter pieces present at Andrea Rosen. A human skull rests on the floor in the middle of an almost insect-shaped body of tangled string (The Metamorphosis is another of Kudo’s favorite themes). Some viewers liken the corpse to a melted atomic bomb victim, a psychic ghost of Kudo’s past. Others, with an ironic nod towards its title, see it as a clever commentary on the end of an era. Still some can’t help but think of Kudo’s own lifelong endeavor to forge a unique humanistic language throughout the course of his life. In true Kudo style, we’re not quite sure if what is before us is survival, or death, or a transformation into something else entirely. The essence at the center of this piece seems as if has been destroyed, but perhaps it has just been set free.

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Andrea Rosen Gallery

ALSO OF INTEREST
Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) presents “Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis”
The late Japanese artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, premieres at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, October 18, 2008–January 11, 2009.

Featured architects include:
KieranTimberlake Associates, Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier, Horden Cherry Lee Architechts/Haack + Höpfner Architects. MIT School of Architecture and Planning/Associate Professor Lawrence Sass, and Kaufmann | Rüf Architects.

The landscape here is pretty bleak. As Gioni deadpans, “It is not joyful.” In Tinho Sehgal’s arresting live sculpture, a woman writhes on the floor in a tortured knot. Roger Ballen’s selenium-toned gelatin silver prints depict similarly affected scenes. Reminiscent of the images from Abu Ghraib, Untitled (1069) shows a gaunt man clad only in sweatpants. His head hangs down, toes curled and fingers scraping the wall. Fibrous material resembling hair drops in tendrils around him and a rather large pair of blades lie in the corner. The visual information is ambiguous, and hard to look away from.

This mix of violence and prophecy comes together in the revelations of Reverend Howard Finster. From his Untitled (Sermon Cards), ND: “The honest man and Christians have been cheated and robbed and killed until they are depressed and feel unwelcome on earths planet and when most of them or all of them are gone the earth will pass away with a great noise….” Finster gained notoriety as a folk artist in the 1980s when he collaborated on album covers for R.E.M. and Talking Heads. His own improbable career as a prolific painter and ecstatic preacher suggests a desire to fill the world with as many stories as possible. Included in the exhibition, these narratives neatly fold into a larger one.

Up on the 4th floor, Maurizio Cattelan’s taxidermied horse would be the ultimate “Have I got a story for you….” Stuck head-first into the gallery wall, its neck, body and legs are suspended in motion 15 feet off the ground, perhaps caught in mid-escape. Leaving one reality to enter another. Zoe Leonard’s Tree also depicts the natural world as frail, bound by steel cables and broken.

In the work of other artists, however, the natural world seems to be thriving. In August Strindberg’s Celestographs, photographic paper left overnight captures light from the stars (or at least cosmic detritus), eliminating the need for human artistic intervention. William Christenberry’s photographs, with titles like Kudzu Devouring Building, near Greensboro, Alabama, are inspired by a slight shudder at the efficiency of the creeping plant. Human-made structures become hybrid. I was reminded of a quote from another of Werner Herzog’s films, Grizzly Man: “And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.”