Art galleries

[chanaleh]

So this past Saturday, hahathor was going to be in town, and proposed a get-together to go gallery-hopping in Chelsea. I have not really done this before (last winter, I went once to one gallery in Chelsea for the Demaines' origami exhibition, and as a follow-up, the sweet Jewish guy who picked me up there (!) took me out on a date to the Front Street Galleries on the First Thursday gallery walk in DUMBO... but that's it).

We fortified ourselves with brunch first at Rafaella's (quite charming, and the $14.95 prix fixe includes one brunch cocktail!), then made basically one circuit of 21st-to-22nd St. in the next 2 hours.

Highlights:

• At the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery: Olafur Eliasson's Volcanoes and shelters, of which I thought the most striking parts were not the downstairs photographs but the more tactile upstairs installations: Your disappearing garden and the darkened room containing three strobe-lighted fountains, Doc Edgerton style, entitled Soon, Now, and Then.
  
  
• At the Paula Cooper Gallery, Walid Raad's Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World, which included a set of text-based panels that made me go "MUST TOTALLY DO THIS!", and so I came home with a brilliant idea for a top-secret new art project which I already started working on Sunday morning, so there.
  
  
• At Center548... well. We walked in the open doors, and there was no real foyer, just an all-white stairwell and an elevator, and a small formal-looking art sign on the wall saying "Untitled" with the artist's name... which we couldn't figure out what it could possibly be referring to, but decided it meant the installation of colored fluorescent lightbulb tubes (lit) extending all the way up the corner of the 5-floor stairwell. "Well, let's take the elevator to the top and then work our way down through the art," says hahathor, so we did, and emerged... on the roof. A lovely roof deck with some sandbagged-down teak benches and amazing views of the Chelsea Piers and so on. So we hung out and chatted there a while and then took the stairs down... through what turned out to be a completely empty gallery. EMPTY. The fourth floor had an office (deserted) and some shockingly well-appointed restrooms (piped-in ocean wave sounds??), and miles of empty white-painted space, with incredible acoustics (ask us how we know!). The third floor was more of the same, but with a few dozen empty round banquet tables, folding chairs, and bagged stacks of tablecloths: "Aha," I said, "they're setting up for SOME kind of event." The second floor was more of the same, but we could hear workmen around on the other side of the freight elevator. "RUN!" we said, and scooted down to the front entrance... where there was now suddenly a posted sign saying "SORRY, CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC". "That wasn't there when we got here!! We would have noticed... right??" Still, the truth is, it was incredibly cool and I'm not sorry a bit.
  
  
• At the CRG Gallery: Brian Tolle's Commander In Chief, which was far and away the highlight of the afternoon. You guys -- especially you, smacaski, I hear -- you must all go read the article and look at all the pictures, it was that cool. It was all Presidential iconography, but carried out in a really smart and interesting and multilayered way. Abraham Lincoln shooting Lasers of Democracy from his eyes! (We came away saying "That was even better than the empty gallery!")
  
  
• At Carolina Nitsch: some self-portraits by Ai Weiwei, which if nothing else is fun to say.
  
  
• At the Matthew Marks Gallery: Tony Smith's Source, which made both of us want to install it in a public square with a fountain so we could sunbathe on it.
  
  
• At the Sonnabend Gallery: besides a photography series of German industrial buildings, there was Robert Morris's Labyrinth, which was a chain-link structure out in the center courtyard that we took turns walking. It was at once strangely claustrophobic and strangely open (I've never had occasion to look through four layers of chain-link before; an interesting exercise in depth of field).
  
  
• At the Newman Popiashvili Gallery: Jaye Moon's Breaking The Code, which made hahathor go "MUST TOTALLY USE THIS!" (Is that a spoiler?)

Which we declared a good stopping point and went off to lunch at Patsy's for good measure.

I really, REALLY need to do this again.

Comments

[tober]

Is it safe to assume (as you apparently just posted this entry) that you have weathered the storm relatively unscathed and that your electricity is on and dwelling is habitable and all that good stuff?

[chanaleh]

Oh yeah, I should have added. :-) Yes, there's been a blackout below 14th St., but so far we're all good up here. NYC public schools are closed again for tomorrow (Tuesday), which means my work is staying closed too, which means another day at home, where I sincerely hope the internet holds out. :-D