The Met’s Art of the Arab Lands Exhibit – Reopened At Last!

When’s the last time you spent time in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Arab Lands collection? If you knew it existed at all, that would have been sometime in 2003 or before then, when the museum mothballed it and then spent the next eight years giving it some major renovations. It’s open again, and it’s the kind of exhibit that often gets overlooked: other than some Manhattan building-sized carpets, and the interior of a Damascus home originally built in 1119 AD, it isn’t full of the kind of colorful or breathtaking objects that crowds typically come here to see. And for that reason, it’s very much worth your while to spend some quality time here when you next visit the Met.

Because the original collectors of this kind of art wanted objects which reaffirmed their own class status, you won’t get a look at how ordinary people in Iraq, or Iran, or Egypt, or Bangladesh lived centuries or millennia ago. Most of the objects whose origin is known – the utensils, jewelry, weapons, manuscripts, sculptures and Turkish suits of armor – have some sort of royal lineage. But if you pay close attention, you’ll encounter some irresistible treasures. There’s an incense burner large enough to intimidate a medium-sized dog (this was from the days before Lysol); a depiction of a crazy machine that proves that Rube Goldberg contraptions predated Mr. Goldberg by several centuries; and a manuscript very vividly illustrating a Hafez poem which celebrates drunkenness as a way to connect with the divine, something you might not expect to see in a gallery dedicated to art made by Muslims. Serious art history fans can follow the collection on a chronological path out of Egypt as it makes its way to South Asia, illuminating how much cross-pollination was going on (just tracing how much medieval and dark-age European tapestries were influenced by the levantine world, and how the influence then came full circle, is fascinating to witness). There’s a recreation of a major archaeological dig outside Teheran, astrolabes, at least one harpy, and overwhelming evidence that the Baghdad spice traders of a thousand years ago were just as obsessed with size and status as the Darien hedge fund traders are today. And thanks to new techniques developed by the Met’s preservationists, there’s a rotating series of rare paper and fabric objects and fragments dating from as far back as the fourth century AD

Along with several tours by Met staff, there’s an informative audio tour available for $7 (museum members get a discount). Museum hours are Tuesday–Thursday; 9:30 AM-5:30 PM; Friday and Saturday: 9:30 AM -9 PM, and Sunday: 9:30 AM-5:30 PM, holidays excepted.

By the way, there are a couple of excellent concerts – free with museum admission – coming up on Nov 4 and 5 at 5 PM at the Balcony Bar featuring the Alwan Arab Music Ensemble, an all-star Middle Eastern group including  George Ziadeh – oud, vocals; Tareq Abboushi – buzuq, vocals; Sami Shumays – violin, vocals; Johnny Farraj – riqq, vocals; Zafer Tawil – qanun, violin, vocals; and Amir ElSaffar – santur, vocals.

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Quality Overcomes Schlock at This Year’s NYC Fountain Art Fair

The good stuff at this year’s Fountain Art Fair made the trip all the way over to the Chelsea Piers worthwhile many times over. Outdoors, the contrast between the captivating and the boring was much the same as it was inside. Past the gangway to the Frying Pan lightship, mimes stood motionless and a couple of women knitted a sinister seine while a masked trio writhed on the ground and banged on a toy piano. Beyond the performers, a raft to the fore of the ship carried a Pompeii-esque series of uncredited lifesize, silver-painted, featureless sculptures: quadrupeds – dogs? bears? – and a sad, defeated creature – an alien? knight in armor? mummy? – its head lowered dejectedly, half its helmet carved out and concave, leaving a black hole.

Inside, a straw poll of many of the artists on display delivered the unanimous verdict that Greg Haberny was the star of this one, hands down. He’s hilarious, fearlessly profane, insightful and historically aware. A trio of mixed-media pieces matched scrawled bathroom graffiti-style captions to iconic imagery. In Haberny’s eyes, via a twisted take on FBI most-wanted posters, Santa breaks into your house and leaves all kind of shit nobody wants; the Easter Bunny delivers pot; and Jesus turns water into Colt .45 malt liquor, among other feats. Jesus appears again in a can of Rust-Oleum and an Ex-Lax box. From a New Yorker’s perspective, the funniest of them all might have been a parody of the Warhol soup can that sits in a box on the wall of the Gershwin Hotel with a letter of authenticity: Haberny’s version was stolen from Christie’s and is available for a song. When he’s not mocking religious nuts or the cluelessness of the art world, Haberny’s paintings, billboards and mixed media raise a defiant middle finger to the fearmongering that the ruling classes have been dishing out via the corporate media since long before 9/11 (Vietnam references, for example, recur again and again). There was also a letter from a Cash4gold spokesman to Haberny, seemingly oblivious to the stunt factor in Haberny sending them a box of gold-painted rocks along with a request for the late Ed McMahon (their pitchman at the end of his life) to host his birthday party. Even the obvious stuff resonated: the BP logo with a sawed-off shotgun; the Supreme Court as the Seven Dwarves, and a 1968 prisoner of war depicted not as an American soldier, but a hippie wearing a gas mask. Haberny’s composition is meticulous. The heavily weathered “found look”of his larger works is actually achieved via an intricate process of layering, sanding and controlled damage. Haberny had a whole corner of the ship to himself and he deserved it: best to investigate this subversive guy yourself.

Downstairs the fun continued. Sergio Coyote is totally punk, just as fearless and funny. Some of his items on display included a trio of blurry, enlarged face shots of Elvis at his last-ever gig, puffy, wasted and sweating hard, along with an oil painting setting a little latin guy in silhouette, face to an enormous wave. Coyote also has fun with album covers: a series of bloodspattered Christian albums, a Kraftwerk record with Hitler moustaches and a concert album by Korean orphans in Austin, Texas that was so surreal that it really didn’t need alteration. And Rob Servo – a musician who also leads expansive, sprawling jam band Homespun Vector – brought along an irresistibly witty series of surrealist oils, including a brownstone building turned into a wobbly spider and a cleverly layered thought piece inspired by a trip to Pompeii.

Back upstairs, there was plenty of amateurish Bushwick garbage – pseudo-porn, day-glo and kitsch galore. But there was plenty of food for thought as well. Mark Demos (not to be confused with the New Jersey landscape watercolorist Mark DeMos) was represented by several meticulously layered tableaux a la early Arthur Robins, textured acrylic on glass creating a nocturnal volcanic effect, some of it extremely gripping. Jonathan Levitt’s color photo studies in decomposition – a dog carcass, a pig that might or might not have been dead, a freshly bloody deerskin – were stomach-turning but impossible to turn away from. There were a handful of Ray Sell antique-magazine collages playfully mocking kitschy retro iconography, the best of these a stuffed bear coming off the wall to swat at a group of oblivious hunters gathered around a country club table. Andrew Rigby had several playful yet wary studies in geometrics and olive drab; “pop surrealist” Mab Graves’ stylized Addams Family-meets-Emily the Strange style portraits stood out as well.

Someone who calls him/herself Radical! displayed a series of stylized 60s psychedelic illustrations: everything with a head that’s someone or something else’s; dogs armed with syringes chasing a cat, and chicken-headed girls in bikinis (yup – had to smile at that one). On the way out, a wall held a menagerie of Dickchicken cartoon characters with penises coming out of their heads, or where their noses should be. If you used to draw that kind of thing in middle school, be advised that there’s a market for it – or at least a desire to show it. And why not – in its own predictably twisted way, it fit in.

Art Review: The Spiritual and the Simian at the Jewish Museum

There are two strikingly different but captivating new exhibits up at the Jewish Museum (1109 5th Ave., enter on 92nd St.) for you to enjoy. The more serious one exhibits three iconic poststructuralists’ works rarely seen outside the space for which they were commissioned, the Congregation B’nai Israel Synagogue in Millburn, New Jersey. In 1951, Robert Motherwell, Herbert Ferber and Adolph Gottlieb were called on to deliver A) a rather striking, symbolically-charged wall-size painting, B) a vividly optimistic, ur-1950s lead-on-copper sculpture that foreshadows Frank Stella and C) a floor-to-ceiling quilt designed by Gottlieb, woven with respect to tradition by the women of the congregation. These were all cutting-edge then and it’s fascinating to see them here today, out of context.

Now for the fun, family-friendly part. For those of us who grew up with Curious George and retain happy memories of his misadventures, the exhibit on H.A. Rey and his wife Margaret is pure nirvana – and it’ll resonate with curious kids a little older than Curious George age who haven’t come to the point where they consider those books babyish. And it wasn’t Hector Aquiles Rey from Mexico or the Dominican who wrote them – it was the former Hans Augusto Reyersbach, a German Jewish emigrant who narrowly escaped the Nazi invasion of Paris with his wife, making the thousand-mile trek to Lisbon via bicycle before embarking for Brazil and then New York. As it turns out, he’s the model for the Man in the Yellow Hat (Reyersbach hispanicized his name while working in Brazil); Margaret was the inspiration for Fifi, later renamed Curious George by an American editor. Very interestingly, she was the mastermind behind the stories. There are sketches, original illustrations and rare photos by Margaret along with an especially poignant exchange of correspondence between H.A. Rey and his editor in London, carried on from stops along the way (the Reys never stopped writing and working on stories, and evidence of this actually saved them from suspicion by the authorities on several occasions).It’s truly an exhibit for the H.A. Rey completist – the museum has their passports, their visas, their address books, everything but their luggage (much of that, sadly, was lost somewhere between Paris and Lisbon). There’s also a cozy nook for little ones to play, with copies of the books in question. The whole thing adds an entirely new dimension to a Curious George style “narrow escape.”

The exhibits run concurrently through August 1. Museum hours are Saturday-Tuesday 11 AM-5:45 PM, Thursday 11 AM-8 PM and Friday 11 AM-4 PM. Free day is Saturday.

Art Review: An Excellent Short Summer Group Show at Black and White Gallery, NYC

Black and White Gallery’s current exhibit is characteristically relevant, cutting-edge and well worth a jaunt over to the western fringes of Chelsea. Michael Van den Besselaar provocatively addresses denial and in so doing takes a casual slap at pop art shallowness. Softly photorealistic portraits of vintage television sets from the 70s – two of Asian manufacture, one European – project images of terrorist activity (a hijacked airliner, a helicopter and a trio of Mercedes 240 series sedans) from their grainy black-and-white screens. Eerier still is a set of six Weegee-esque dead womens’ faces. Bonnie Parker, Marilyn Monroe, Mother Teresa, Evita Peron and Rosa Parks are smaller in death than life; the Anna Nicole Smith portrait pans down on her, puffy and lifeless in the purest sense of the word.

Most striking of all is Van den Besselaar’s Lethal Chamber Series. Whether or not these are actual depictions of the rooms where American executioners paralyze and then inject convicts with caustic de-icing chemicals, they’re impossible to turn away from, the curtained white rooms with their gurneys and straps radiating a brutally sarcastic soft-focus light.

Also on display: all-white, lifesize gas masks by Konstantinos Stamatiou; starkly strange cross-stitch-on-canvas figures by Alicia Ross; hip-hop inspired black-and-white collages by Elia Alba and a characteristically devious trio of pitch black “fur geese” sculptures by the irrepressible Jason Clay Lewis (the guy responsible for a recent series of sculptures made out of D-Con rat poison), which might be characterized as the most disturbing items in the entire exhibit

On opening night, the gallery also featured live black-and-white art. Pesu methodically painted a stylized Asian-tinged portrait of a dragon with what appeared to be smiley faces on its back. Those turned out to be scales. To his right, Fernando Mora created a raw, striking, possibly gunsight-view tableau that started out convex and then as he embellished it became just the opposite. Getting your perspective turned inside out after mass quantities of wine is great mind-melting fun – and serves as a vivid reminder of the arduous physical labor that is so often part and parcel of creating first-class art. More galleries should be doing things like this. The current exhibit runs through August 8. Black and White Gallery is at 636 W 28th St., ground floor, hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM and by appointment.

Art Review: The WAH Center Does It Again

Another pretty amazing group show up at the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center. This one features a “younger generation” of women born after 1950, up through the end of May. Many highlights, probably as many as last year’s vastly diverse exhibit.

 

Nivi Alroy contributes an intense collection of mixed media, notably a tall (seven-foot) sculpture of a bombed-out house sitting in an upturned dresser drawer, the scorched face of a stuffed rabbit fixing its stare from a second story window. There’s also a rustic woodcut of a collapsing industrial area juxtaposed with a reflection below, a daguerreotype-style view of workers staring at themselves in the water. Andrea Cukier has three green-tinted, stylized medieval Chinese-inflected pondscapes: as with so much of her work, she makes the heat and humidity visceral.

 

Shan Shan Sheng has a number of strikingly colorful, heavy glass sculptures here including an absolutely haunting, orange-tinted undersea scene and a couple of massive bells, one of them abruptly upturned. Bahar Behbahani has both a murky, out-of-focus wallsize umber-tinged portrait of a family staring out from their couch, Arabic calligraphy and musical notes floating overhead, as well as an unsettling 3-D piece, a dense mandala-like figure on a screen a couple of inches above a second, painted level, obscuring more calligraphy and a dead sheep on its back.

 

Even more provocative were a series of bombs (their noses, to be precise, seemingly fashioned from restaurant-sized carbon dioxide canisters) by Leonor Mendoza. Adorned with earrings, peace signs, an animal figurine, lockets, charms, and most ominously, melted green plastic peoploids, they’re poignant and as understated as bombs can be. 

 

Of the best-known artists on display here, Judy Chicago is represented by a trio of black-and-white woodcuts, the earth mother under siege, as well as a sculpture study from The Dinner Party, part of the plate eerily peeling back. There are also prints and a striking, colorful wallsize painted quilt depicting a jazz trio and its unperturbable frontwoman from Faith Ringgold.

 

But the most striking of all the images here was the live installation by Olek (Agata Oleksiak) and Naomi White. They’d positioned a group of people in colorful, full-body knitwear, their faces hidden, lazing around a living room, watching tv, the screen depicting the struggles of someone in an all-white bodysuit, seemingly in a lot of pain and trying to escape. Abu Graib, anybody? Talk about making an impact!

 

Over by the Nivi Alroy section, classical guitarist Margaret Slovak played warmly and virtuosically. You probably won’t get to hear her or be taken in by the Olek/Naomi White installation, but the show is a must-see if you’re in Williamsburg – it’s only a couple of minutes from the J/M stop at Marcy Ave., 135 Broadway on the south side of Williamsburg, about a block past Bedford as you walk toward the water. Hours are Saturday-Sunday noon-6 PM.

Art Review: Ellen Driscoll at the Frederieke Taylor Gallery, NYC

This was at the top of the page at artcal, and for good reason. Ellen Driscoll’s latest exhibit, titled FastForwardFossil is a must-see, as hauntingly intense as it is apropos to our time. The theme is environmental armageddon, its centerpiece a massive, floorsized sculpture constructed mainly from cut-up pieces of plastic spring water bottles. A conflation of three real-life oil drilling sites, it packs a wallop the size of an ice sheet, even if it’s melting (and part of it is: there’s a big hole in the upper tier with a half-frozen pool below it where the water has “landed.”) Every ominous portent of the aftereffects of two centuries’ of burning fossil fuels is here, whether overt (the big sinkhole into which somebody’s house has disappeared, the splintered, dead trees) or less obvious (the tiny gallows adjacent to the empty cages). This deserves to wind up in MoMA along with her other works on display there.

 

The watercolors are awash in richly evocative earthtones, sharing an eerie apocalypticism. An oil refinery sits silent and abandoned, victim of a new ice age. A tanker meets the same fate, as does a stadium. There are also a couple of marvelous multi-frame works, somewhat in the style of a Chinese scroll, the first depicting a pipeline rising from the ground, eventually turning into a highway for a caravan of armored assault vehicles, the second a coastline view from the wall encircling an amusement park, to the polluted beach, to the water as it gets deeper, almost submerging a tin-roof shed and an abandoned car. The exhibit runs through at the Frederieke Taylor Gallery, 535 W 22nd St., 6th Floor through May 16, Tuesday through Saturday, 11-6 PM.

 

While you’re in the neighborhood, don’t miss Shahzia Sikander’s equally apropos, antiwar-themed exhibit at Sikkema Jenkins across the street, up through May 3.

Art Review: Current Chelsea Exhibits

Amy Pleasant has an absolutely riveting show up at the Jeff Bailey Gallery. It seems unlikely that its theme is in any way 9/11-related, but anyone who lived through the attack and the days afterward will find special resonance in her paintings’  grey-toned, swirling clouds of smoke and silhouettes. Ironically, the show’s centerpiece – the wall-sized black silhouette of a woman sleeping, her back turned to the viewer – is the least compelling. But the guy falling through the clouds – only the outline of his ankles and shoes visible through the black smoke – and the fat man with the glasses tumbling out of the lower right corner are disconcerting, to say the least, and the mixed hues of the clouds are spot-on. There are also a couple of large works, each of whose centerpiece is a woman getting a consoling hug, one a city scene with doors and windows visible amidst the smoke, the other extremely evocative of the billowing sky after the Twin Towers were detonated and came down.

 

Photographer Walter Niedermayr has a collection of his signature multi-panel distant shots up at the Robert Millery Gallery through March 14. The most obvious one is also the most potent, a side view of New Museum on the Bowery, its practically hypnotic mesh exterior contrasting with the neighborhood visible in the distance in the lower lefthand corner, graffiti and all: wow, people actually live here! The most amusing of the photos is a bunch of tour boats circling amidst icebergs, an outboard-motor-propelled pontoon boat looking particularly jaunty and carefree. Yikes! There are also several panels of people climbing beach dunes, and a ski slope. Nature dwarfs everything here. Nobody’s fooling anyone.

 

Julie Allen has a typically playful, in fact absolutely delightful, Rube Goldberg-esque collection of sculpture up at McKenzie Fine Art, also through March 14. Many of her colorful plastic creations look like something you might expect to see after getting halfway through a plastic model kit for a car, or an aircraft: lots of axles and other mechanical parts. Dare you to get through this without cracking a smile – it’s impossible. On display: one of the arms from the Scrambler (you know, the carnival ride, the one with the arm that goes up and down as the inner axle spins)? A strangely connected lighthouse and millwheel? A bizarre caterpillar vehicle with what looks like the explorer arm from a space rover? A headless robot picking up something, and a baby’s arm holding an apple (just kidding about that last one).

 

And in lieu of a scathing dismissal of another current Chelsea show – trying hard to hold back the contempt here – renderings of drunken facebook photos of your spoiled, rich college pals are not, as one “artist” calls them, “scandalous.” Scandalous would be a spycam photo of Dick Cheney getting fucked up the ass by Jeff Gannon.

Art Review: Jason Clay Lewis at 31Grand Gallery, NYC

[Editor’s note – This is the most half-assed art review ever. The review, not the art, that is: it’s great, it’s just that the show is over. We happened on the closing party, drawn in off the street by what was in the gallery window. We just didn’t want to let the show pass by without spreading the word about the work that had been on display – it’s a lot of fun]

 

The D-Con owl drew us in off the street. A lifesize sculpture of an owl made completely from D-Con boxes. Too much fun. Jason Clay Lewis’ recently closed show at 31grand – NYC’s Edgy Art Cental – featured many more pieces in a similar vein. A series of stylized 70s headshop pinup posters each had a death’s head. There were also a box of candy and a fullsize madonna sculpture created completely from glazed D-Con (now it becomes obvious where the boxes came from. Another Madonna, looking a little downcast, also came to life in striking D-Con yellow and black. But not everything here was surreal gallows humor: a small potted tree took root in an upside-down skull, evidence that all is not completely bleak chez Lewis. What a fun discovery this guy’s work is: formerly personal assistant to Jasper Johns, the Oklahoma-born Cooper Union grad has some pieces coming up in group shows here and in Philadelphia. Watch this space for further info.

Tamara Kostianovsky – Actus Reus at the Black & White Gallery, NYC

The phrase “actus reus,” meaning the physical commission of a crime, in combination with “mens rea,” the mind to do it, equate to criminal liability in a court of law. For her New York solo debut, Israeli/Argentinian artist Tamara Kostianovsky has created a series of mostly lifesize sculptures of beef carcasses made from used clothing. The show has all the subtlety of a Mack truck hitting a brick wall at 100 MPH, but sometimes that’s what you need to do to prove a point: these works are impossible to turn away from. The colors are bloodless, the reds muted admidst the pink, beige and white of cowskin, fat and sinew, which makes them all the more powerful: the stuffed animal quality almost makes you want to cuddle these dead animals and reassure them that everything’s ok. Of course, it’s not.

The slaughterhouse includes a quartet of “beef” sides, each in plastic bags with their own individual tag (which looks suspiciously like a recycled airline baggage label); a sink full of “blood” (knitted or embroidered), “blood” seeping all around it; several carcasses, some on hooks, others not, shown from the the underside of the ribcage; and the most striking cow of all, who hangs from the ceiling by a single leg, the other limp, the skin of her belly peeled away to reveal an intricate network of veins. The realism is striking, as is Kostianovsky’s remarkable prowess as a seamstress. As agitprop goes, it doesn’t get much better than this (is Kostianovsky a vegetarian? One would think so). If all else fails, she can always become the house artist for PETA. But the equation isn’t that simple. Most of us eat meat. Only a tiny fraction of the carnivores of the Western world actually kill what they consume. In tackling this cognitive dissonance head-on, Kostianovsky takes on the difficult task of trying to give these animals some dignity in their ugliest possible state and succeeds brilliantly. Through May 24 at the Black & White Gallery, 636 West 28th St., west of 11th Ave., Tuesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM and by appointment.

Art Review: Leonardo Drew, A.D. Peters et al. at the Brenda Taylor Gallery, NYC

You have all of two short weeks – through February 16 – to rush over to Chelsea to the Brenda Taylor Gallery, 511 W 25th St. between 10th and 11th Sts., gallery #401 on the fourth floor, to catch some of the most astonishing art on display in New York right now. In the side room there are several boldly playful, colorful, somewhat tongue-in-cheek paintings by Kathleen Kucka, acrylic appliqué on acrylic. Although many of the accent colors here are pastels, Kucka’s clever cut-and-paste gives them an amusing, guilt-free edge.

But the stars of the show are in the main room where you’ll find A.D. Peters’ new work Iron Ridge: Sunsplash, which is oil and ferric oxide (translation: rust) on a sheet of iron. It’s absolutely brilliant, a reverse image of sorts, of light seen through a thicket of trees. Only the light is painted: the woods reside in the untouched iron. The painting’s focal point, where the light is greatest, is obscured by a tree trunk. It’s a stunningly imaginative, somewhat dark work and is surprisingly inexpensive for something of such imagination and quality. Kudos to the gallery for spotting it.

The piece de resistance here is Leonardo Drew’s Number 74, dating from 1999. Drew’s specialty is gargantuan, wall- and floorsize installations assembled from found objects, something akin to the toy town Bob Geldof constructed out of bits and pieces of sledgehammered appliances in the film The Wall, taken to its logical extreme. Drew’s work is deliberately unsettling, often grotesque. This piece is particularly visceral, practically nauseating: it packs a knockout punch. It is impossible to turn away from. Within its huge, approximately eight by ten foot frame, there are several hundred square wood boxes, each seemingly in various states of decay (Drew’s use of sawdust here, mixed with other debris, is spectacularly effective). Across the top are plastered what appear to be used mop heads (or something equally Blair Witch), along with a couple dozen stuffed toys in various states of decomposition. All of the toys’ faces are either turned away from the viewer, or have been deliberately effaced. Childhood has hardly ever been this brutally or dismissively portrayed: to call this piece iconoclastic is a gross understatement. A work this powerful is too important to reside in the hands of a private collector (although one has to wonder who would actually have the fortitude to come home at night and be greeted by this on the adjacent wall). Whatever price the gallery is charging is not too much for a world-class museum to afford. MOMA, are you listening?