"What is happening to the New York art scene?” The question is on the minds of local art aficionados, and theories abound about how the recession will affect the five-figure rents and multi-million-dollar price tags that galleries deal with. I’ll start by revealing my own bias, which is that I wouldn’t be devastated if the Murakami or Damien Hirst conglomerates lost a few market shares.
The current worldview calls for a kind of frugality, resourcefulness and outsider inventiveness that is the opposite of the Damien Hirst/Harry Winston school. Diamond-studded skulls, stuffed “unicorns” and formaldehyde aquariums with vivisected sea creatures weren’t High Art to begin with— these bestiaries and other excesses were more like taxidermy with a 1980s sensibility.
The days of the artist as glitterati-in-chief of an alienated production process, manipulating the market at will, are over. But elements of the NYC art scene are holding their own, and then some.The first big event to kick off the New Year, the Outsider Art Fair, was an ode to the naive and the baroque.The folk art extravaganza, which is reserved for self-taught artists (like Henry Darger, or the current bad boy of the outsider scene, Chris Hipkiss) was a success, surpassing expectations (unlike Art Basel Miami Beach, a magnet for jet-setters who like to party first and buy art as an afterthought, which saw sales plummet).
Outsider art tends to sell for much less than the work of establishment artists, and the movement really took off in the United States during the Great Depression—which is probably why we are witnessing a comeback (“Out is In,” was the title of the rundown on Artnet).
These days, though, the line between outsider art and the work of a posse of wunderkinds coming out of Brooklyn (and other urban locales), most of whom did attend art school, is infinitely malleable.
My name for this trend is “Supercraft,” and all it means is that the artwork has a crafty feel and makes use of traditional skills, like stitching, marquetry and woodcarving.
At the time, many collectors— such as Edith Gregor Halpert and Abby Rockefeller—were forced by the 1929 stock-market crash to shun the works of American masters and instead focused on outsider art, which they considered a branch of Modernism. Similarly, Supercraft could be the contemporary collector’s answer to Jeff Koons since it often makes use of cheap and recycled material and can sell for a few hundred dollars.
But what is rousing about Supercraft is that it has that same gutsy feel as the work of those early outsider artists like Grandma Moses, Horace Pippin and Henri Rousseau. In fact, Supercraft is more radical and more irreverent. For one, the naiveté associated with folk art is totally absent—it’s seditious, subverting the whole needlepoint aesthetic, à la Clare Rojas (her works have titles like “Penis Push-Up,” which should give you an idea what I’m talking about).
One of the local agitators of Supercraft is Amy Harrington. She’s got a show up now with her partner Militia Shimkovitz at
Capricious Space (103 Broadway at Berry St., Brooklyn).They are the
hardcore version of the reigning interdisciplinary duettists Gilbert
and George, who in 2007 had the largest retrospective in the history of
Tate Modern and were just featured at the Brooklyn Museum. Provocateurs
in sheep’s clothing, Harrington and Shimkovitz use slapstick in their
deviant Grand Guignol videos, which owe as much to The Marx Brothers as
to Carolee Schneemann. Harrington makes mixed-media portraits of
celebrities such as Condi Rice or Mel Gibson in paper, sand and string.
Sandpainting is a traditional Navajo technique, but these intricate,
hybrid tableaus lack that folkloric charm and respire with a kind of
gnawingly appropriate villainy. Best of all, you could get one for
under $500. Shimkovitz produces a new series of work every month in a
variety of materials like Wite-Out, rope, Kansas limestone and fleece, and she describes herself as “a folk artist who’s behind the times.”
She’s
to Folk Art what Marlene Dumas is to watercolor—a revolutionary force
reinventing herself. The erotically supercharged embroideries of Orly Cogan are
another example of this trend.They’re on display as part of a textile
show entitled “Narrative Thread,” visible through Feb. 9 at Lyons Wier
and Ortt (175 7th Ave. at W. 20th St.), which fled the prospect of a
crippling lease renewal in Chelsea two years ago and has been making a
name for itself on Seventh Avenue.
Cogan’s works are
Dionysian:They feature explicit orgies in a bucolic setting.The sexual
imagery is reminiscent of Rojas (who shows at Deitch Projects, and is
part of the globe-touring Beautiful Losers exhibition), whose
quilts and wall installations feature Native American and peasant
imagery—along with libidinous flashers’ spiky erections—and have a
graphic style that is often alienating. Cogan’s textile works flow,
however, like an unfurling stream, and her lines inhabit a continuum of
overlapping forms, engaging the viewer in her bacchanals.
Jim Dine’s “Pinocchio”
series of wood sculptures, which have been recycled for his latest
show—through Feb. 7 at Pace Wildenstein (534 W. 25th St. betw. 10th
& 11th Aves.)—come to mind, as do Tom Sachs’ Interstate batteries, which were constructed in bronze foundries (and are currently visible at Lever House in Midtown).
But
there is a critical difference between the grass-roots nature of
Supercraft and Sachs’ work. Outsourcing cannot be an essential
component of Supercraft, which, like crafting itself, suggests an
eminently personal investment in the production process. Providing
instructions, à la Donald Judd, and then letting someone else do the
actual labor, using robotics and computer-aided manufacturing
techniques, is not Supercraft: It’s industrial art. Supercraft does not
require a referential element lurking without, it’s not art commentary
posing as art. It is the interplay of mechanism and medium at its most
basic.
Showing in Chelsea right now is probably what will
endure as the most visually arresting show of 2009, the surrealistic
confections of Nick Cave at Jack Shainman Gallery (513 W. 20th
St. betw. 10th & 11th Aves.). Cave’s “soundsuits,” thus named
because they are made to be worn and generate sound, are adorned with
African beads, raffia, sequin, hand-painted porcelain birds on metal
armatures and a lot of crazy-quilt patchwork. His lush,
multi-dimensional work harkens back to American Maximalism, which is
also a growing force in contemporary painting. Cave’s sculptural works
are the very quintessence of Supercraft.
In all fairness,
Supercraft is everywhere you look these days. Practitioners like Misaki
Kawai, Richard Klein, Jim Drain, Don Porcella and LoVid (another
Brooklynbased interdisciplinary duo) all have work that is visible now,
or will soon be visible, in New York
(as do a plethora of others I don’t have the space to mention). And
when you think that the Impressionists were mostly a starving lot, we
can only hope the recession might spawn more than Supercraft—other
avant-garde, eruptive, self-propelling and deeply heartfelt movements
that will come to define our new era.
