By 8:30 p.m. last Thursday, just half an hour after opening, line to join “The Patriot,” an unclassifiable and frankly deranged group exhibition at the gallery O’Flaherty’s at 55 C Avenue had stretched around the corner down East 4th Street and was flirting with B Avenue. By the time the New York Police Department arrived, with at least a dozen officers and several patrol cars, it was estimated. Preliminary put the crowd somewhere close to 1,000 people. , and it is entirely conceivable that many of them are waiting to see their own work.
About four weeks ago, the gallery issued a call for democratic openness: no work under three square meters was removed. It was answered excellently. At last count, the exhibition features 820 works of art crammed into the gallery’s modest storefront space, most of which are hung salon-style with impressively small breathing rooms, but also climb to the ceiling. , scattered across the floor and covered the entire bathroom.
In the New York art world, the summer group show has traditionally been a polite, low-impact operation of loosely related affairs with a minimal taxing presumption. It was a placeholder, really, until the collector class returned from Amagansett — “the most disappointing performance for a participating artist,” as the show’s printed statement pinpointed it. corpse.
“The Patriot” is not polite. Beyond its madness, it pushes the summer team’s program to its absurd breaking point. It is hysterical, obscene, unhygienic, obnoxious, and vaguely obnoxious, respectively. It’s also a lot of fun. Given the volume, it’s predictable that not all is good, and some are positively negative (“I mean, what’s like this?” asked the artist. Jamian Juliano-Villani, who runs? exhibition room with artist Billy Grant and musician Ruby Zarsky, pointing to what appears to be a rotting herring in a plastic sandwich bag taped to a door).
It seems that every conceivable and unthinkable medium is represented: paints, of course, but also synthetic wigs, bust hockey sticks, insulating foam, needlepoints, hubcaps, pub menu. A precisely scaled sheep is shaped from tin foil and left on a small dog – a good gag – to roam around the main floor. Any kind of collective curation principle is out of the question, which is trying to do something interesting, rather than simply moving the product.
No context does not mean no premise. “The Patriot” became its own kind of concept art. “Everybody thinks they have an original idea, but there are 10,000 of the same pictures,” says Juliano-Villani. Rightly so, themes emerged: overworked muddy oil paintings; ready-made sex toys; post-ironic obsession with celebrities (drawing of famous paparazzi images by Jake Gyllenhaal eats clumsy Kirsten Dunst soup protrudes).
If the overall effect is that of a Cooper Union thesis program on psilocybin, it is perhaps unintentionally revealing the deep and implicit desire of the city’s artists for exposure and publicity. acceptance, as well as the difficulty of securing commissions and representation. The show is a microcosm of the art scene in all its dismal manifestations: art school dropouts, first-timers, long-suffering artists. obscurity, wild celebrities. It showcases an alternative kind of Whitney Biennial (most of the work is submitted by local artists, but some are from Virginia and Vermont). In terms of unearthing the depraved heart of American art production, it’s more effective in many ways.
While the thrill of an artist struggling to secure their first group show must certainly be real – and alongside established artists like Josh Smithno less, the person who previously filled the commission for Louis Vuitton, and who here contributed a box of Rauschenbergian cigars with razor blades glued with gum – it wouldn’t be considered anyone’s big break or burned CV If the show used them as plagiarism old man, none of them seemed to mind.
When I returned the day after opening, the scene was much more civilized. A handful of people wander around, sharing what looks like a dizzying expression of sensory overload. An artist works on a kinetic sculpture set on the floor, an intricate network of pumping and recycling silicone skin that looks like blood from two gallon-sized jars. A gallery assistant asked about the possibility of it exploding. It’s not out of the question.
It is impossible to determine if a plastic shopping bag left behind in the middle of the main floor is a real work of art, but it could well be (it was later retrieved by a visitor, but a similar one can be found in the office, where a series of flashing videos operate on a small screen that flashes like a miniature Shinjuku district). Sometimes the entire gallery groans, signaling a visitor has tripped on a vibrating floorboard in an adjoining room containing a lens filled with what is said to be Abraham Lincoln’s death pillow on loan from the Museum. Museum and the Morgan Library. (Juliano-Villani: “Billy once dated someone there who owed him a favor”; of course, a Morgan spokesman said the object was never in the collection. and the museum has not lent any objects for exhibition.)
In fact, the number of established artists elected to participate can be surprising. For example, you might try to locate Jonas Wood, Terence Koh, Jordan Wolfson, Rob Pruitt, and Sarah Morris. Cecily Brown shows a half-shaped canvas (attached near a jar of Eurocrem, Serbia’s answer to Nutella). The lipstick stain on the underside of the toilet lid in the bathroom was attributed to Dan Colen. A sculpture in the dark by the British duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster sits on a stand and probably looks better during the opening, when the gallery lights go out and visitors are given flashlights to polish in the dark. For better or worse, there’s no aesthetic judgment, says Juliano-Villani, which is “the perfect way to destroy any art form.”
There was a period of turbulence used to define the downtown scene but have been largely absent lately, drawn by conscious judgments of taste and tempered by the uniformity of tradition. socialism and expansionism. In all its dripping humanity, “The Patriot” is the complete opposite of a sterile semi-concrete floor. However, like everything that works or doesn’t work in New York City, “The Patriot” has a real estate component. From August 10, this is the gallery’s last show in this space. Exhibitors say their hosts, less enamored with their anarchist spirit, are pushing them out, and that the exhibit is an assortment of artifacts that disappear in the form of nearly 1,000 holes in the wall, a voter only punk ultimately fit their surroundings.
Avenue C has remained largely untouched by the gloss that has overtaken other parts of the city. It only takes a few minutes in either direction to reach the art processing grounds west of Chelsea or TriBeCa, but spiritually it could also be on the moon. When O’Flaherty’s opened last year, Juliano-Villani, who is feeling stymied by market demand, described her desire to “show the art of not being afraid of yourself.” In the window, a dull green neon sign asks “What’s wrong?” — a question that teases the inner workings, but can also be reasonably posed for the rest of the art world at large, and perhaps should be.
Patriots
Through August 10, O’Flaherty’s, 55 Avenue C, Manhattan, oflahertysnyc.com.
