After visiting The Armory Show, I had some time to kill until our dinner reservations and decided to head over to the Scope Art Fair in a tent at Damrosch Park by Lincoln Center. (My wife, who had her fill of art for the day, preferred to spend her time at the Time Warner Center.) For $15 you get an ice blue wrist band which gains you entry to the fair.

On a per-gallery basis, I think there was more quality work at Scope than there was at The Armory Show. At least, skill was more evident in more of the paintings. The crowd appeared to be much younger at Scope, as were most of the dealers. The Scope show is much smaller than The Armory Show, so that it was easy to cruise through the whole affair in less than 45 minutes and not feel like you’ve short changed anything.

I enjoyed some “manuscripted glass” pieces by an artist named Sidney Philocreon: guns drawn onto four layers of glass within a wooden frame, using inscrutable foreign language text rather than line for contours and texture, creating a simple 3d effect.

The best pieces at the show were by Yigal Ozeri at Mike Weiss, though these were works that I had already seen at the gallery on 24th Street a few months ago. They are gorgeous, beautifully executed portraits of a woman (”Priscilla”) with a Medusa-like hairstyle, tucked surrealistically into a forest landscape. Also included were some rather creepy but sort of beautiful paintings by Christian Vincent, such as “Capture“, showing multiple views of a woman in a pale yellow dress reaching up to pluck reddish butterflies out of the sky.

Another interesting piece was one that wasn’t for sale. At Galleri K, Steinar Jakobsen had several dozen oil on aluminum panels on display, part of a commissioned piece entitled “Look Back in Puzzlement II“. Each painting is a photo-realistic snapshot of an urban scene as if it were viewed through a “night shot” camera — green and black. The press release describing the piece, however, seemed to go a bit overboard about the meaning of the work and how one interprets the indeterminate city scenes that are depicted.

So this year I only made it to two art fairs in this massive weekend of art fairs in New York, and two was plenty. Last year I think I slogged my way through five or six fairs over two days, and was exhausted from the effort (and numbed by the overload). Two is much more manageable, although in the end I think that neither one was worth the price of admission since you can have a superior experience for free down in Chelsea.

(Side note: If you ever make it to Sapphire Indian Restaurant on 60th Street & Broadway, try the new chicken dish on their menu — Chicken Cafreal. One of the tastiest dishes I’ve had in a long time, it’s a Goan-style highly spiced chicken in a green sauce. Fantastic!)

Kudos to the folks running The Armory Show for attempting to manage the crush of people attending the annual art fair on the west side of Manhattan. (Last year was a total mess, with lines into the street, shuttle buses canceled, and taxis confused about where to go.) However, they only earn a “C” for execution. It seemed at first that the decision to purchase tickets online ahead of time was a smart one: my wife and I went straight to the E-ticket line and avoided about 200 feet of outside line-waiting. But, for some unfathomable reason, once inside the building we were shuffled from one queue to another, finally waiting about 10 minutes to move four spots on line to reach the single staffer who was equipped to scan our E-ticket.A maddening start to the show.

Unlike the Whitney Biennial, The Armory Show has lots of paint. I guess it’s easier to sell a painting than it is to sell an installation piece of golf balls, Gatorade, and flowers. Alas, though, there really wasn’t all that much to catch the eye. And yet, “The Art Newspaper” (handed out at the entrance) reported that sales were strong, much stronger than had been anticipated by dealers who worried about the economy’s meltdown.

There were at least a few delights throughout the show. A Swedish gallery (Brändström & Stene, I think) showed five paintings by Glen Rubsamen, similar to the ones exhibited at Robert Miller Gallery in December 2006: Landscapes with a brightly colored background and snippets of foreground at the bottom of the painting in silhouette. I don’t really know why I find these pieces interesting, except that they remind me of various photographs I’ve taken in the past.

Jon Kessler had an interesting sculpture entitled Hanging Swan. It was an assemblage of twisted, torqued metal that resembled a mask in a Picasso portrait. Hanging as part of the sculpture about a foot away from the “mask” was a mini camera, pointed right at the mask, with the video from the camera displayed on a monitor hanging on the wall. Viewers would raise their face into various configurations of the mask and watch as their visage appeared Picasso-esque on the monitor. (The “Swan” piece is a part of a series that is apparently a commentary on TV makeover shows.)

Perhaps the most interesting pieces in the fair were Zan Jbai’s untitled near-white portraits (see Jbai’s site for an example). These two oil on canvas works at first read as solid white, but upon further inspection you see that through a variety of brushstrokes, changes in the glossiness of the paint, and perhaps an underpainting that’s been painted over in white, you see that the works are actually very subtly toned, low contrast portraits.

Another near-monochrome piece, by Jason Martin, was also worthy of closer inspection: dark oil paint brushed with perhaps a 12” brush over a purple underpainting on a large aluminum panel read as wavy dark hair (you can see a similar piece here).

Galerie Gebr. Lehmann exhibited a nice Ellen Harvey piece, taken from her ongoing Museum of Failure series ($35,000), though it didn’t have the complexity of the piece on view at the Biennial.

A nice Sol LeWitt gouache on paper was already sold for $45,000 (for some reason, “red dots” to mark sold pieces seemed to be out of fashion at The Armory Show this year and almost none of the galleries had prices posted on the walls).

Pace Wildenstein had a “greatest hits” group show with lots of favorites: a great Bridget Riley stripe painting, a nice blue Robert Mangold column structure painting, some Michal Rovner animated-people-on-stone-tablets (I always get a kick out of these), and a quaint but delightful James Siena “powers of two” painting.

But for $30, I would have hoped to find more at the show to like. In the end, I’m left with the feeling that The Armory Show of 2008 was not worth the price of admission. Most of the work on display shows better in a traditional gallery space than it does in these makeshift “white boxes.” It costs nothing to walk around the galleries in Chelsea and it’s much less of a hassle.

I’ve just finished a new painting called Phenomenal Character (acrylic on panel, 30 x 30 in., 2008). The term is one sometimes used in the philosophy of mind or in cognitive science and refers to “what it is like” to have a perceptual experience. In a more ordinary sense, the phrase could imply a narrative or refer to one’s moral traits (or perhaps just describe a really great bit of typography).

It wasn’t the best day to walk around New York City, with gusty, cold winds belying the first day of spring. But I managed to see quite a few shows in Chelsea, several of which are worth mentioning.

First up, at a gallery I had never visited before – and one that’s technically not in Chelsea – was Anoka Faruqee at Hosfelt Gallery. (In Feb 2007, I visited Princeton University where the California-based Ms. Faruqee was scheduled to be a speaker; to my dismay I was the only one there as the talk had been cancelled due to a bad snowstorm!) I enjoyed seeing her work in person this time, in what is a very nice gallery space (though rather far out of the way, half a block from the Javits Center). This show is comprised of two kinds of paintings. In her “fade paintings”, thousands of repetitive marks, such as asterisks or swirls, fade into the foggy background colors of the canvas (or perhaps are in fact being obscured by a misty foreground). Although these works have some similar formal issues to my own paintings, I in fact found the second set of works in the show more interesting: each work consists of two paintings, one large piece full of stripes with various color interactions, the other a smaller “copy” of the larger, though the copies appear to be more intuitive replications rather than exact copies. I found these to be particularly interesting to look at in terms of color, surface quality, and paint handling.

In Chelsea proper, another California artist, Tom Leaver, has a show at McKenzie Fine Art that shares some formal characteristics with the Faruqee fade paintings. The Leaver pieces read as large, brushy, drippy landscapes whose foregrounds are prominent (though unidentifiable) but whose backgrounds fade out through a “turpentined” aerial perspective.

One of my new favorite gallery buildings is at 547 West 27^th Street. Not only does the building contain a diverse selection of quality galleries, but the people working in many of the galleries are very friendly and willing to talk with you about the works on display. On the first floor is Sundaram Tagore gallery, which always has high quality shows. Today, they have an excellent pan-Asian group show. My favorite painting was a piece by Hosook Kang, “Autumn”, full of orange and blue rippling waves of color. Also in the building were the Buddhist-inspired works of Tenzing Rigdol & Palden Weinreb (that’s a mouthful) at Dinter Fine Art and eyeball abstractions by Yuichiro Shibata at the funky Monkdogz Urban Art.

Robert Miller gallery has a gorgeous collection of large photographs by Dirk Braeckman. Although the imagery itself in the photographs isn’t particularly exciting – corners of a room, curtains, a figure – the silver gelatin prints themselves are worthy of contemplation. The matte finish and grainy texture make them look like charcoal renderings. The show also includes one huge inkjet triptych print that runs from floor to ceiling which details the light and texture on what looks like a fancy carpet runner.

Byron Kim, whose piece “Synecdoche” I noted from the MoMA Color Chart exhibition, also has a solo show up at Max Protetch. The first painting in the gallery immediately reminded me of the Robert Irwin sculptures I had seen in several Los Angeles museums a few weeks ago. Indeed, the gallery press release explains that this painting (and another similar one) is based on a photo reproduction of Irwin’s sculpture from Kirk Varnedoe’s book, Pictures of Nothing (an excellent book, I might add). Another interesting piece in the show was “Delacroix’s Shadow,” consisting of a painted yellow panel casting a shadow from carefully aligned lights onto a rectangle of gray paint (the title comes from a story about Delacroix noticing how yellows in Paris cast a violet shadow).

At the Valerie Jaudon show at Von Lintel, each painting is a tessellation of squares, with each square containing the same pattern either mirrored or rotated. The forms consist of strips of white paint, some straight, others curvy, thickly painted on raw linen with clear and distinguished brushstrokes. The only problem with the show is the similarity of all the works – although they each use different patterns that are evident upon patient examination, from a macro point of view the pieces tend to all look alike.

I should mention two representational shows worth seeing. First, at BravinLee Programs, Amparo Sard creates wonderful “pointillist” works on white paper using thousands of pinpricks as her mark. The pricks are used for both contours and also for texture and shading (the denser the pinholes, the darker it reads). Most of the works in the show are figures, often of a woman interacting with some sort of planar surface such as a mirror, rising waters, or abstract rectangular shapes.

Finally, I loved Kim Cogan’s brushy, atmospheric cityscapes at Gallery Henoch. The most stunning piece in the show was “Stairway,” which perfectly captures the lighting at night of a stairway between two buildings.

I’ve just launched a completely new design for AndrewWerth.com — whew! There are still a few kinks to work out (especially here on the blog page, which uses different software from the rest of the site), but I hope you’ll like the new look. It should be cleaner, better looking, and easier to maintain. Most importantly, I hope it will display the paintings more clearly and without the high-chroma distractions of the previous version of the web site.

At the opening reception of the Mercer County Artists show at The Gallery @ Mercer County Community College. (3/5/2008)

Photo courtesy Tom Maslowski.

I made it up to the Whitney on member-preview day shortly after the noon opening for the 2008 Whitney Biennial. The first impression that sticks with me was the show’s relative lack of paintings. Since I’m a painter and I like to look at paintings more than anything else, this focus on other media almost necessarily limited the amount of enjoyment and interest I would find in this Biennial. It seemed that the galleries had quite a bit of sculpture, assemblage, film, and other objects that weren’t paintings.

Another thing I noticed rather quickly was that almost the entire museum-going population was women, mostly over age fifty. (This was in stark contrast to the MoMA design show, where there was quite a diversity of viewers, many under age 13!) I’m guessing this was due to the fact that it was a mid-day, members-only preview, so there wouldn’t be many tourists or 9-to-5′ers.

Finally, although this Biennial had quite a few video installations, it was much quieter and more subdued than I remember from the last two Biennials. No fluorescent rooms with flashing strobe lights; no loud, repetitive, driving sounds.

(Put these last two points together and you get a chance to hear everyone’s opinion, especially those of people who make it a point to shout their opinions to their friends across the room…)

On to the artwork… By far the piece that I enjoyed the most was Ellen Harvey’s “Museum of Failure — Collection of Impossible Subjects & Invisible Self-Portrait in My Studio”. In a small gallery by itself, the viewer is first presented with a brushed shiny Plexiglas “mirror” that has been engraved with drawings of ornate picture frames. The wall is illuminated from the rear by fluorescent lights so that the engraved markings appear to light up. In place of one of the frames on this wall, though, is a space cut out so that you can see the wall behind. On that wall is a multi-panel painting that shows the same picture frames fully rendered in oil paint; filling those painted frames are paintings of mirrored reflections of components of the artist’s studio. I loved this piece because it gave you a lot to think about: figuring out what it was, how it worked, and how best to look at it. Also, the rear wall paintings are beautifully handled and would stand on their own aesthetically without the front mirror. Together, I found it conceptually interesting and exciting to look at.

The only other representational paintings that stick in my head are Robert Becthle’s near photo-realist California streetscapes whose sienna underpaintings glow through subsequent layers of paint and provide some texture to look at in otherwise smooth paintings.

Echoing the Color Chart show I saw earlier in the day at MoMA was Daniel Joseph Martinez’s “Divine Violence.” The gallery is full of rectangular panels painted with “automotive goldflake” paint, each labeled in the middle with the name of an “organization around the world attempting to affect politics through violent means.” Obvious choices like Hamas or Al Qaeda are present, but also included are “Central Intelligence Agency”, giving the piece a different kind of slant.

A few graphic works were of note: Matthew Brannon filled a small gallery with letterpress graphic images whose textual elements contain puzzling or pithy or poetic or humorous contrasts with the imagery. Seth Price had three well-composed graphic “Gold Key” panels (though his other piece, “Untitled”, which looks something like a disconnected map of the US with Texas dangling off, wasn’t as catchy).

Adam Putnam’s green hallway was beautiful and interestingly constructed. The viewer enters a small, darkened room. In the middle is a platform upon which a small glass & mirror sculpture rests. Dangling from the ceiling is a cord that holds a single light bulb right in the middle of the sculpture. The light is bounced around and cast against the dim gallery walls and the cast, colored shadows on the walls look like spooky three dimensional hallways.

Finally, the most puzzling work in the show was Phoebe Washburn’s “Birth of a Soda Shop”, a large assembly of wood, pipes, tanks, golfballs, Gatorade, and flowers. Yes, it’s a rather unconventional choice of materials. In the piece, flower bulbs are growing in tanks whose “soil” is either orange or yellow golf balls and whose water appears to be orange or lemon Gatorade. If you walk behind the piece, you can examine the pump system and witness a few more tanks of flower bulbs. I really don’t know what to make of it, other than it caused much head scratching, though it did at least hold my attention for several minutes as I tried to figure it all out.

Much of the work in this Biennial doesn’t quite stand on its own. That is, without some additional explanation about the artist’s intentions or background, it’s difficult to know how to interpret the work. Very little in the show catches the eye at a purely aesthetic level, and with only a few exceptions I don’t recall there being a lot of color anywhere. But being the Whitney Biennial, it’s still worth seeing, even if it doesn’t get your creative juices flowing like some of the past Biennials.

While the Color Chart show was practically empty during most of my visit, the other sixth floor exhibition space was completely packed, both with people and with things to look at. “Design and the Elastic Mind” is a fascinating, fun show that deserved more time than I had to give it yesterday. One problem was that because the show was so crowded, you feel rushed to read the display cards and move along quickly. Yet many of the objects on display require some contemplation and reading the placards is important to understand what you are seeing. (If only they could “design” a better way to put on a show like this…? I guess the online interactive interface is pretty nifty, though it’s very hard to read on my screen and a bit overwhelming.)

The exhibition is about innovation and how designers are trying to solve some of the problems the world faces in a time of rapid change and major dislocations. Mostly what I got out of it was a sense of how exciting it might be to be a researcher or product designer working on these problems. (Not quite exciting enough for me to think about reverting to my prior career, however.)

Of the dozens and dozens of items on display, there are a few that particularly stick in the mind. Philip Worthington’s Shadow Monster had people lining up to give it a try. You enter a room with a giant lightbox behind you and a large screen in front of you, ostensibly with your shadow being cast onto the screen. Yet something is not quite right: the shadow isn’t exactly you, but rather a monstrous (in a playful way) adaptation, with chirps, burps, and roars of audio as well as amazing cartoon-like shadow animation (e.g., flick your wrist and you can cause your shadow monster to flick off some flying birds, or open your hands like jaws and your shadow somehow has teeth!). This one had the kids giggling and the grownups laughing along as well. (I should note that, unlike the Color Chart show, Design and the Elastic Mind was full of kids.)

A number of information visualizations caught my eye. Aaron Koblin used North American flight data to create a dazzling, firework-like sparkler of flight paths. In a similar display, the “New York Telephone Exchange” animates the volume of phone calls between New York City and the rest of the world. Various parts of the globe grow and shrink over time as the volume of traffic ebbs and flows (though it seems we have a lot of traffic to and from India no matter the time of day).

Many products on display aim to help the world, from “solar-powered” water decontamination jugs to efficient space heaters. At a time when the world sometimes seems out of control without much cause for optimism, I found that, at least a little bit, it was a relief to be presented with some evidence that there are people out there coming up with very out-of-the-box, transformative solutions to some challenging problems. If you have any interest at all in technology, design, or what the future might look like, I’d highly recommend a visit to this show.

My first stop (after a mediocre breakfast at a cafe on 53rd @ 7th Ave) on a busy art day was a visit to the Museum of Modern Art. This was a day when museum memberships prove their worth as I was able to avoid the very long lines outside the museum and stroll right in at the 10:30am opening time. The nice thing about getting in at 10:30am at MoMA is that if you know where you’re going, you can beat most of the crowd to the exhibits and have a chance to look at things more closely before the throngs start clogging the galleries.

The Color Chart show focuses on the use of systems, chance, and ready-made colors in art since 1950. I found the show quite stimulating to look at, though it was perhaps not the kind of “inspired-to-go-home-and-paint-right-away” exhibition that I might have expected. Most of the work displayed little brushstroke or other articulation, with flat color application the norm. That said, there were a number of pieces worth noting.

Francois Morellet had a piece in the first room of the exhibition which filled a grid of something like 40,000 tiny squares with either red or blue paint, using numbers in the phone book to determine which color to apply. Even numbers yield one color, odd numbers the other. If I hadn’t read the wall label to learn that the numbers were thusly distributed, I would have stared at the painting longer to see if it “popped” like a 3d stereogram.

I’m not usually a big fan of John Chamberlain’s work (they’re fun, but if you’ve seen fifty…), but I enjoyed the enamel (car-paint?) coated panels on display here with names like “Elvis”. I think these are the first time I’ve seen Chamberlains that weren’t crushed cars.

I also don’t usually get excited by the light sculptures of Dan Flavin, but a particularly playful (and very bright) installation here at MoMA was worth the green afterimages it produced in my eyes. In the room following Flavin, Byron Kim’s “Synechdoche” seemed to glow green and purple in between the flesh-colored panels, either my eyes playing tricks on me or more likely the lingering effects and leaking light from the adjoining Flavin display. (In the aptly named piece — Synechdoche is a type of metaphor where a part is used to stand in for the whole — Kim paints each panel a different flesh tone based on a real person’s actual skin color.)

A Blinky Palermo piece made from dyed cotton stood out with its simple, Ellsworth Kelly-like composition of red & blue rectangles. (Kelly is also included in the show with his random grid of colored squares.)

I love Sol LeWitt’s work and Wall Drawing #91, a grid with each square marked by “non-straight” lines of three separate color pencils, didn’t disappoint (though it was not as exciting as a work I had seen at MoCA in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago).

Near the end of the exhibit in a side nook, a suite of Katharina Fritsch paintings practically glowed. Each piece consisted of a panel or canvas of smoothly applied color surrounded by a deep metallic frame that reflected color and light from the center of the piece as well as from other works in the room.

In the last gallery, I found a video by Cory Arcangel somewhat compelling. I can’t recall the exact algorithm described on the wall panel, but here’s the gist: Arcangel digitally reworked the movie “Colors” so that it consisted solely of vertical bands of color based on pixels in the original movie. It’s intriguing to watch the stripes dance on the screen in sync with the audio and to note how the color themes change depending upon the scene.

On a final note, the staff at MoMA wore Daniel Buren-designed vests of variously colored, presumably 8.7cm-wide stripes. I asked one of the guards if they get to keep the vests after the show. He looked at me, perplexed, and shook his head, “No.”

Yesterday was an art-filled day from start to finish. I took the train in to NYC where my first stop was MoMA to see the “Color Chart” and “Design and the Elastic Mind” shows. From there, I headed north to the Whitney Museum for the preview day of the Biennial. Pushing forward, I hoofed it up to the Met to check out the Jasper Johns “Gray” show. With a little bit of time left before needing to catch the train back home, I slogged through the Courbet and Poussin installations at the Met, probably not giving them enough time but without any interest in going back for more. Finally, after returning to Jersey, I attended the opening reception for the “Mercer County Artists” show at The Gallery @ Mercer County Community College. I’ll report further on these in separate posts.