The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
FEB 2006
Art
The Splendor of the Word: Lucy Freeman Sandler with Jim Long
by Lucy Freeman SandlerArt
Performa 05, the first Biennial ever of “new visual art performance,” that ambiguous yet agreed-upon term encompassing spoken word, theater, film, video, computer art, photography, music, sound, travel, and lectures, stormed across the alleyways, byways, hallways and city streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Governor's Island, revitalizing the tattered memories and hearts of that even more ambiguous thing referred to as “downtown.”
Jake Berthot with Ron Janowich
by Ron JanowichArt
In the midst of his preparations for a new exhibit at Betty Cuningham Gallery, Jake Berthot takes time to welcome painter Ron Janowich to his Accord studio in upstate New York to talk about his life and work.
Jon Kessler with Katie Stone Sonnenborn
by Katie Stone SonnenbornArt
Jon Kessler’s exhibition at P.S. 1, The Palace at 4 A.M. is anathema in the current state of art. Raging and fierce, his elaborate kinetic sculptures directly address the current socio-political state of the world through the eyes of an American. Incorporating images from Iraq, Afghanistan, reality TV, luxury cars, fashion magazines, airplanes, and the White House, as well as museum visitors who are caught in the cross-fire of his closed-circuit security cameras, Kessler provides an incisive critique of twenty-first century systems of representation and communication. On a rainy evening in early 2006, Katie Stone Sonnenborn visited Jon Kessler at his Williamsburg studio to talk about art, politics, and what lay behind their union in his powerful new work.
Frequency: Studio Museum in Harlem
by Nick StillmanArt
In all of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Frequency-related printed matter the exhibition’s wall text, press release, and brochure curators Thelma Golden and Christine Kim distance the museum’s second supershow of emerging American black artists from its first, the whoppingly successful 2001 exhibition Freestyle. Per the curators, Frequency “is commonly misconstrued as Freestyle II,” it isn’t “a reprise, nor is it a continuation” of its themes, and “it differs in several fundamental ways” (none of which are explained in Frequency’s press release; perhaps they will in its catalogue, still unavailable three weeks after the show’s opening)1. Freestyle grouped 28 young black artists and what later emerged as a categorizing principle was “post-black,” which Frequency’s wall text cites as a term that, “Identified a generation of black artists who felt free to abandon or confront the label of ‘black artist,’ preferring to be understood as individuals with complex investigations of blackness in their work.” So why this resistance to position Frequency as Freestyle’s follow-up?
The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984
by Thomas MicchelliArt
First, let’s get the nostalgia out of the way. Sure, the bands were great, and if you were lucky enough to play in one, the clothes were great too. But if the young, wild, and barely employed could afford to live, make art, and party hard between Canal and 14th Streets in the mid- to late-seventies, it was for the same socio-economic reasons that govern affordability, or the lack of it, anywhere. Except for a few oases like the Ukrainian enclave around East 6th Street, the area that spawned the Downtown scene was blighted by poverty, unemployment, drugs, prostitution, homelessness, arson, and street crime; or it was simply bleak.
Work & Play
by Mira SchorArt
"For the inaugural exhibition of its satellite location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the artist Emily Katrenik is eating the wall that separates the gallery's exhibition space from the bedroom of its director [...] Video of her ingestion is included in the exhibition; she also removes some of the plaster and bakes it into loaves of bread, which are available for gallery visitors to sample."
—Mia Fineman.
Keily Jenkins
by James KalmArt
It was a thrilling time. Riffs of Run DMC or Grandmaster Flash & Mele Mel’s “White Lines” rumbled out of boom boxes and over-amped car radios as they slinked through Loisaida streets. Soho was suffocating in its own moribund kabuki dance with late formalism, and the East Village was eating their lunch.
