Creepier than Krusty the Clown @ Alexander and Bonin

I love this gallery. I pop in several times a week when I'm in the neighborhood, and loiter longer than is decent before works that enthrall, intrigue, transfix.

Like this creepy clown, by LA artist Alison Schulnik. The eyes are like two tragic abysses, hollowed out from the thick, thick paint, perhaps with a finger. The strokes look like a supersize tube of each color - mainly black - was the actual brush. She must have gone through a truckload of tubes.

Creepy the Clown's brethren come alive in a super trippy, melancholy claymation clip called Hobo the Clown on Alison's website. Those eyes spin and merge and spread and splatter as only claymation can.

With the classic circus clown, the sad mouth is always over-exaggerated, the eyes reduced to "+" signs receding into a backdrop of pancake white. Yet here, it's like Alison is bringing those tiny eyes out of their sockets into the limelight, like dark, disturbed windows into the clown's sad, psychotic soul. Spooky wooky!



The other paintings I liked were these two, by an artist I can't for the life of me remember. Someone help me out. They're naive, almost child-like, yet have a painterly, impressionistic quality. I like the abstract "natural" light, an oxymoron if you even saw one. Monet unplugged. Plus the colors go really well together. I even like the shadow the bottom of the painting casts on the wall.





This exhibition was called "Whaddya wanna be, a flower?". Flowers are the main theme, where they were seen wilting in a kitsch (what else?) white Jeff Koons puppy planter ($3000 a piece); there was a pot plant being serenaded by a megaphone uttering names of colors. It clearly didn't work, because the plant was wilting. Or maybe that was the point. A complementary video of a plant being read the alphabet didn't seem to fare any better. Fertilizer isn't going out of style any time soon!



There was also an opportunity to create my own artwork in the gallery while the maintenance folks came in to freshen up the flowers in the Koons planters. I call this one, "Sweeping with the enemy."



Alexander and Bonin Gallery

A stroll along the Highline, Day 0 (Movie + Photo Gallery)

My Photos | My movie (5 min)
I've been a bit remiss in posting to this blog, but this gave me a reason to kick start it. The Highline is a repurposed, elevated railway trestle running from around 17th St to 30th St near Manhattan's western shore. It was slated for the scrap metal yard but an avid supporter group, Friends of the Highline, managed to convince people with deep pockets that it was worth developing into an elevated park.

New York Times posted a nice overview, as did New York Post, so I won't re-swoon the swoonable. Suffice to say it's an intriguing execution merging public landscaping with art. Some of the choo-choo-inspired detailing seems a little cloying on first toe stub - like the raised bits suggesting uneven ground? - but when the plants - or rather, intentional weeds grow through the stylized railway runners, subtlety will prevail. It's a terrific place to watch the sun sink over Jersey.

Some random personal observations:

* It's trippy looking down into the window of the yoga class I once attended at the Equinox Chelsea Gym (when I could afford an "execquinox trial month"); you could downdog in time with men in hard hats hitting things outside the window. The gym should post a sign in the window that says "Put the donut DOWN and get your ass in HERE. NOW." I can just see ad copywriters going beserk with locale-specific one liners...

* There's a spot where you turn a bend and get a giant faceful of a near-fornicating Armani Exchange couple, jolting you out of your communing with weeds - and making you very self conscious of your untoned tum and scowl lines. The sign should say, "We've given this place a facelift. Now how about you? 1-800-BOTOX" It would be MUCH nicer if that ad space was donated to an eco-centric organization or even Amtrak/MTA to encourage use of mass transit, and discourage contributing to the cacophonous maelstrom below ...

* The 'sun lounges' - some on train carriage-like casters that move a little, really are a relaxing way to sit back and gaze across the Hudson to Jersey. I could barely drag myself to my feet once I sat down. I'm glad they restrained themselves from having a plaque attached to each one naming a sponsor. In fact there is a refreshing lack of back-patting in evidence - perhaps because it was largely funded by taxpayer money. Let's hope it stays that way.

* Being Chelsea, it also is suggestive of a fashion show runway, especially with that intrusive Armani Exchange supermodel thrusting her breasts over the chicken wire. Flagship stores of Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen, Comme de Garcon and all the brands you can't buy until they end up at Century 21 are right around the corner. Maybe we'll see the NY Fashion show move from plastic marquees at Bryant Park to here - with rows of chairs on the street below all pointing Miu Miu-ward.

* Brrr I'd hate to be up there in winter. It got damn chilly last night. As the sun sinks, the railway-platform-inspired lighting takes over. Light is all LED and indirect, there's not a bulb in sight, except for some vertical rows of LED's that might suggest railway signals. I like the way some sections are brightly lit as if by sodium lamps in windswept, forlorn, cross-country railstops, with the opposite side plunged into darkness. Who hasn't pressed their nose against the window in a train rushing on into the night?

* Light, vision, sound ... I wondered if they'd go so far as to have an aural element in the landscaping - the clackety clacking of railways as you pass by certain spots. There's already so much traffic noise I guess that idea, if it ever was one, got weeded out early in the piece.

* As someone who isn't a fan of manicured gardens, I'm eager to see if this structure will elevate the common weed to high art, much like Jackson Pollock did with flinging paint around on a canvas. Someone once said, "A weed is just a plant in the wrong place." Here, on the Highline, the weed has found a place of acceptance and respect.

* As I commented on the NYT site (along with hundreds of others): I'm a cyclist, and I too am glad no bikes or dogs (or skateboards?) are allowed. This city is cacophonous and jostling enough - now there's a place to retreat to in addition to the defunct hospital end of Roosevelt Island, the muʻumuʻu section at the Bay Ridge Century 21 and, of course, your broom closet. Besides, we cyclists need cross training - here's my proof.


More New York Minutes

David Diao: "I lived there until I was 6 ..."

AFTER enthusiastically kicking off this blog, I'll admit the Manhattan winter bailed me up just outside the front door. Fortunately, the artsy mayhem begins as soon as I make it past the pooping chichuahuas and preening Sharpeis ...

The first of these galleries is Postmasters which featured a very personal show by David Diao. The site features a concise roundup of his show entitled "I lived there until I was 6".

From the Postmasters press release:

David Diao left his home in China under extreme circumstances 59 years ago at the moment of the Communist takeover. The property was confiscated and made into the offices of the "Sichuan Daily." By the time of his first visit back 30 years later, the house had been demolished. For years Diao has sought to render his charged feelings about this loss into a group of paintings ...

Essayist Philip Tinari writes: Using his memory and those of his assorted aunts and uncles, and calibrated by the fixed dimensions of the tennis court that was the house's special feature, he conjectured his former reality back into existence ...

I found this show both entrancing and disquieting. Staring from the opening canvas near the front door, the story unfolds by gradually 'zooming in' on the coordinates of his former home, starting from this stylized map of China with a single red dot marking his hometown in Chengdau.



Different houseplans, scribbled as if on a napkin over a bowl of fish ball soup, plus vignettes of tennis balls, a leaf that might have wafted onto the tennis court, and the court itself, gives the sense you are journeying with him as he searches his memory banks and imagination to re-construct his childhood abode.






The tennis court is particularly tantalizing. It suggests a sense of relaxation and play in an otherwise subdued, almost somber upbringing. Yet its linearity and restraint stops the memoir from being too playful, joyous, too ... un-Chinese (it takes one to know one).




Although I have never been to China, I felt strangely related to the work on display. It's the same feeling I get when I wander into Chinatown - a comforting anonymity, and sense of belonging, regardless of whether you read Chinese or not. Perhaps Diao, despite being a fully-vested transplant like me, is seeking to fill that void that almost all ethnic minorities experience, no matter how long they've been going through the motions in their adopted country. And beckoning from across the oceans, promising that connection, are these few straws of his ancestral home.