Saturday, October 31, 2009

PAZ ON DADD


"...Richard Dadd,spending nine years, from 1855 to 1864,painting the FAIRY-FELLER'S MASTERSTROKE in the madhouse at Broadmoor, England. A fairly small painting that is a minute study of just a few square inches of ground--grasses, daisies, berries, tendrils of vines, hazelnuts,leaves, seeds--in which the depths of which there appears an entire population of minuscule creatures, some of them characters from fairy tales and others who are probably portraits of Dadd's fellow inmates and of his jailersand keepers. The painting is a spectacle:the staging ofthe drama of the supernatural world in the theaterof the natural world. A spectacle that contains another,a paralyzing and anxiety filled one, the theme of whichis expectation:the figures that people the paintingare awaiting an event that is about to take place at any moment now. The center of the composition is an empty space, the point of intersection of all sorts of powers and the focal point on which all eyes are trained, a clearing in the forest of allusionsand enigmas; at the center of this there is a hazelnut on which the stone axe is about to fall. Althoughwe do not know what is hidden inside the hazelnut, we know that if the axe splits it in two,everything will change:life will commence to flow once more and the curse that has turned the figures in the painting to stone will be broken...(from THE MONKEY GRAMMARIAN by Octavio Paz 1981;trans. Helen Lane)

Friday, October 30, 2009

THOREAU'S CHIMAERAL HORIZON

"I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail.
Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks,
and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound,
and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud,
and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves."

Thursday, October 29, 2009

ON MERCE CUNNINGHAM

Merce Cunningham, who died on July 27th at the age of ninety, has been aptly described as the Einstein of dance. Much as Einstein questioned the interstices smoothed over by Newtonian mechanics, so Cunningham questioned the precepts of choreography. He released dance from its traditional dependence on music, and plot. There are no stories in his dances -- or rather, we are on that dream-like border where stories flicker in and out, like reading the embers or clouds. Stage space, too, which in ballet tends to a Palladian regularity and in expressionist choreography to writhing mounds, seemed in his work to be limning an invisible architecture which--if the dancers were writing instruments—might resemble the floor plan of the Sydney Opera house or the buildings of Frank Gehry well before his day. The frontality of traditional stage space was thoroughly upended. Watching his dances, I frequently had the sense of looking into an aquarium whose fishes have no sense of audience as they move.

His movement, more deeply classical than is commonly acknowledged, took Balanchine's segmentation of the body into new levels of complexity. If it seemed as if a dancer were going in several different directions at once, it was because they probably were. His ability to conjure living sculptures from two or more bodies was as compelling. And he treated his works, at least until this last decade, as recombinant, as if to be mixed like a salad with whatever ingredients were next at hand, including the sound. His dancers, consequently, were sometimes as surprised by the music as the audience.

The music was an additional source of controversy, being "musique concrete" or based on chance operations devised by his partner, the composer John Cage , and others in his sphere. Retrospectively, these have proven to be a very distinguished roster, Earle Browne, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma to name a few. Cage and Mumma, in particular, were blithely able to create the auditory equivalent of a katzenjammer or even a train wreck, and a few of Cunningham's strongest critical partisans never-the-less objected to the decibel levels that chance apparently decreed, preferring the mysterious silences punctuated with web-washes of sound that characterized Browne or Wolff. The point, however, was to violate the sense of inevitability to which music in the west has aspired, and open perception to the random.

It always puzzled me that Cunningham and Cage could break so many rules and reveal so much beauty. Perhaps this was because it was purposeful, not merely nihilistic, and if shocking not merely meant to shock. Cage's noise-music had the happy effect of making me hear my surroundings anew-the overtones of the dish drain! the Webern-like properties of the dripping faucet! And often after viewing Cunningham's dances, it would seem to me that the pedestrian traffic of a Manhattan intersection would be mysteriously elevated into a dance. Thus did the random come to make the random seem deliberate. The real underpinning of Cage's and Cunningham's work was not anarchy, but a Buddhist mindfulness transposed to the conditions of New York. This present-mindedness shook the pedestal of preconception and unobtrusively re-sacralized daily life.

Before Merce was hobbled by arthritis, he was also one of the most arresting stage presences I have seen, always as alert as an exclamation point. In the early days, he was frequently compared to a faun strayed from a satyr-play, which can be seen in his incredibly goofy wrestling bout with a five or six sleeved sweater documented in Antic Meet. This was a parody, it is said, of Martha Graham's self-regarding psychological strip-tease way of shedding clothes onstage. Others compared him to the Winnebago Trickster figure who at one point in the myth-cycle removes his penis, which grows a propeller, and chases him around a lake. Things like this seemed to happen to Merce, more or less. Later still, he became a bemused deity moving among his dancers haplessly making adjustments (making anarchy) in the midst of, say, an exquisite and intricate quintet. He was not like Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, but something in his demeanor recalled the greats of silent comedy.

Many years ago, the choreographer Elizabeth Streb invited me to see an "event" at Cunningham's Westbeth studio. It was a sultry July evening, and soon a lightning storm blew across the Hudson; its progress could be seen through the great studio windows as a backdrop to the dancers. When it came upon the building the electricity went out, but the concentration of the dancers did not, and we watched them silhouetted in the dark or illumined by a sudden flash of lightning. They did not waver an iota, I recall, but somehow seemed monumental, imperturbable, as if we were permitted to spy upon the hidden workings of an angelic crew. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever pried my eyes to see. Then the lights came back on, and Merce did a cryptic, calligraphic solo. It didn't seem much at the time, but several hours after, back at my loft, I found myself impulsively standing up and repeating what I remembered of it. It was as if his little solo had gotten under the radar, and registered its impact without my knowing it. His work was like that.

IMAGES OF RUINS




Ruins, of course, have been a leitmotif in western art since Claude Lorrain and Poussin. What is different now,perhaps, from the period of the baroque with its nostalgia for the pastoral, or the Enlightment with its grand seigneural overview of civilization's rise and fall in the form of a folly, is vertigo. This begins--it is a commonplace to say so--with Piranesi, both the recorder of the vestiges of imperial Rome, and the fabricator of the Carcerari, the Prisons, those dark interiors replete with huge intruments of torture and tiny humans,whose spatial ambiguities are said to presage cubism. They come with a distinguished literary geneology, moreover, ranging from Choleridge and de Quincy to Marguerite Yourcenar.



De Quincy, who devotes pages of Confessions of an English Opium Eater to the Prisons, projects a curious error on Piranesi's etchings. He finds in one the figure of Piranesi himself (how he is so identified is unknown) who is seen not only on the ground floor of one such prison,but at intervals on the stairs. He finds in Piranesi, in short, the same effect which in heraldry is called mis en abyme, in which the image contains an image of itself and that in turn an image an image of itself ad infinitum.But couldn't these receding figures on the stairs be Piranesi's descendants rather than Piranesi himself? There would be not only Kafka, then, but Borges, and Dino Buzzati, and the Cavafy of The City, and M.C. Escher and George Tooker among visual artists. Several artists of our time might find themselves on Piranesi's stairway, among them Anne and Patrick Poirier, Cheryl Goldsleger, Jean-Michel Fauquet, and most recently,the photographer Lorie Nix.



I am trying to remember where I first saw the Poirier's early work--Sonnabend? The De YoungMuseum? They had constructed a vast ruined neo-classical city out of charcoal in a dim room .It had stadiums, temples, monuments, a fallen colossus, racetracks, and thoroughfares.We viewers loomed above these like titans in mourning. I found the work unsettling then--charcoal was once wood and the wood a tree:now it is burnt; an altogether more symbolically freighted material for models than cork.There was also the sense of clumsiness that being a giant in the near dark provoked, a sensation almost of guilt at the ruin of such a vast-if even-so miniature civilization, as if we off-stage were somehow at fault.Finally, there was what we might call the Ozymandias effect, a mixture of regret with relief at the passing of civilizations,for so many monuments have been made under the whip, and not only during antiquity.



Charles Simonds, at about the same time, was covertly placing his tiny and artfully constructed models on fugitive sites through the Lower East Side.If the imagery of thePoiriers might be described as Graeco-Roman with a dollop from Roland Topor's cartoon epic,the Fantastic Planet added, Simonds' seemed to derive from the abandoned cliff dwellings in New Mexico or the bee-hive shaped brick structures--prototypes of the dome--originating in Cappodochia. He invented an anthropology of the little people who had dwelled there--it was an age of anthropology, with the semi-Utopian counter-cultural aspiration to posing alternative social structures--and his placement of these beautifully constructed buildings was done with the co-operation of the neighborhoods,which were then mostly poor. His work is now in museums, and the neighborhoods are high-rent.

A salient feature of the Carcerari is the wedding of the constructive with the destructive , a quality especially noticeable when the earlier versions are compared to the much revised later plates, which sacrifice coherency for depth. The earlier Prisons are buildings; the later Prisons are buildings and the destruction of buildings and the reconstruction of buildings over the relics of their destruction.It is this quality of multiple perspectives which causes them to be cited as proto-cubist.



Something of this multiple-perspectivedness is to be found in the paintings of Cheryl Goldsleger, whose work, on first glimpse,seems to be a skillful depiction of early Renaissance or late nineteenth century Beaux Arts architecture, but proves on inspection to be many layers of depictions of such buildings skillfully --I am tempted to say almost harmonically--sequenced to co-exist, as if we are viewing their construction through layers of time. Her colors are mostly amber, honey,and black, remindful of architectural drawings of Bramante or the Sangallo clan, done in sepia or bistre. Now and then she will overlay what might be called a "memory scaffolding" over the other layers in white. She glazes a sedimentary metaphor for time on the flat surface of canvas.


















Two others I admire who also use architecture to metaphorize the workings of time are Jean Michel Fauquet, who does sequences of dark stairways descending (they don't appear to ascend)into oubliettes, and Lori Nix, whose recent photographic sequence, The City, is a surveyof the imagery of disaster.Nix has had to take pains to clarify the point that these works were conceived before the destruction of the Twin Towers. This says more about our historical attention-span than her art.Nor would post 9/11 imagery account for a vein of humor in the dread--there is an archaeopteryx or pterodactyl or something with leathern wings not to be found in an aviary flying above the ruins of" The Library". The aquarium has pools of recent fishes on the floor.The museum of natural history is in ruins but its dioramas are intact.Here is an interior of a clocktower, obviously defunct.It looks exactly like where I would liked to have lived as a boy.There is a vacuum cleaner show-room, the view outside its window overgrown with bramble.These are painterly photographs of exquisitely fabricated images of destruction. Their colors are saturated, autumnal,sunset, with the streaked skies of storms only recently receding, of broken columns--a repertoire of romantic cliches revived by a hint of parody:they are toy tableaux after all,which evoke concrete disaster.

Anne and Patrick Poirier show at Sonnabend
Cheryl Goldsleger at Kidder Smith in Boston(but I saw her work at Hodges and Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, N.C.)
Jean Michel Fauquet at Chaim Hanin
Lori Nix at Clampart in New York and MillerBloc in Boston

ZEITQUEST:HILARY BRACE AND ROLAND FLEXNER



Among the lesser known works of Poe is The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, a saga of a stowaway aboard a vessel undergoing mutiny, of cannibalism and of lots being drawn to see who would be eaten, and finally of an expedition into the hollows of the earth where an in-world exists which may be entered via antarctica. It was sold and published as a factual account, Jules Verne wrote a sequel, and hollow-earthers still cite it with fixed conviction . It is one of the great landscapes of a peculiar time and climate, at the end of the age of a world map with tracts marked terra incognito and the industrial revolution.It is strange that two very different painters, working on a modest scale, should evoke its tonality a century and a half later, the tonality of nascent science fiction and the romantic sublime.




Hilary Brace is one of several artists of whom I am aware who works with charcoal on mylar. Her draftsmanship seems nearly photographic but her content-- of spaces which could be macrocosmic, like the Magellanic clouds, or microscopic, like an xray of the aveole--conveys neither locale or scale despite its graphic clarity. Looking at them over intervals, I find some principle of compression, of shrinking a big vision into a narrow compass, keeps them from being facile; they cross a territory of an ominous brightness,dawning in a place which is vast and very cold.Something not quite remembered at the tip promontory of collective memory.




Roland Flexner's sumi ink and soap bubble drawings have a similiar effect. His work is as dark as Brace's is luminous, but a similiar skill, the skill of sheering off into metaphor- thwarting ,is one he shares with her. I thought when first viewing them that these are landscapes, of course--but the "of course" is due to the desire to interpret a bisecting line as a horizon, a swirl as a vortex. Actually it is heuristic device by someone expert at brinksmanship. The blackness of the ink instantly brought to mind Milton(I'd been rereading Paradise Lost):

"a dungeon horrible on all sides round as one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames no light; but rather darkness visible.'




but what is being depicted might also be as unapocalyptic as a forest at night viewed through a rain-streaked windshield.Not every abstract work has this image-permutability, or this memorability.Flexner has the ability to convey grandeur in a the span of few inches -like Blake, or Samuel Palmer.
According to the press release, Flexner's last show at D'Amelio Terras was shown with Japanese "looking stones", which I have not seen but which I suspect I own something like. One of these is a chrysaloccoca given me by the late Bill Martin as we viewed a butte between Santa Fe and Taos New Mexico. The stone I held in my hand resembled in extreme reduction the monument before us. These painters evoke similiar sensations of the reversal and re-reversal of scale.
Brace is represented by Edward Thorp. Flexner is shown at D'Amelio/Terras in New York and Hosfelt in San Francisco.

PETAH COYNE


"...the black fugatos are strumming the black of the black...Thick strings stutter the finial gutturals.He does not lie there remembering the blue jay, say the jay.His grief is that he mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw,In that distant chamber, a bearded queen..."(Wallace Stevens:Madame La Fleurie)


Space in our time has grown steadily more eccentric, more nest-like than building-like. It is as irrational as Mies or Mondrian was rational. Architecture seems to be attempting its own dis-embodiment, and sculpture a space which makes earlier installation artseem almost classical.If there is some familial resemblance to Conceptual Altar Space or Immersive Assemblage Space, it is a Gothick decade later, with its mutant concerns.


A sculpture of braided horse-hair ensnaring a tide of silk roses punctuated with hyper-alert taxidermied pheasants and plovers, as do the sculptures of Petah Coyne, turns the whitest cubicle into...what? The names which one comes up for it---gesticulative spatial expressionism or Carnival of Souls Rococco--are absurd, but the work is a marvel.


Coyne's work first reminded me (A)of a Victorian relict seen in a great home, a floral arrangement made of the rosettes of braided hair of the female family members and kept under a bell-jar (B) the women's-training- hospital ghost in Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, which abided by day in a pencil eraser but which by night rolled around on tenacled eye-balls to crush the breath from the sleeping(C) Poe's mystical yearning for Annabel Lee and/or Ligeia(D) Hearses from a horse-drawn time (E) Bernini. It is the sense that the sculpture turns the room on a centrifugal force of its--the sculpture's-- making which brings up Bernini. Coyne's work seems to tilt the room off its armature.



In a Bomb interview with Lynn Tillmann, Coyne spoke admiringly of Miss Havisham in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, the Miss Havisham of the sealed off wedding-banquet chamber,whose wedding cake was colonized with rats and festooned by spiders, who had not changed from her wedding gown in thirty years after being jilted at the altar. This accounts, indirectly, for the sense of her earlier pieces being like brides and their own cast-off bouquets, a synthesis of the wedding and the funeral. Miss Havisham alarms us because in some sense she is buried alive,like Madeline Usher or Persephone. She becomes the death-bride ; the Russian surrealist Tchelitchev referred to her as the White Lady.



The myth of the rape of the bride by the underworld is more central to modernism than is commonly observed. It appears not only in Poe, among the pre-Raphaelites, in poets as different as William Carlos Williams and Rilke, but was critical to the early days of feminism, which attempted many revisions of the myth of Persephone. Obviously, it marked the strong sense among women that they had been seized, captured, and confined--entombed-- in unwanted identities.This is a political truth with an historical dimension, as events in the world testify. It is also a metaphor for the imaginative faculties of the human Psyche under warrant, hence its appearance in Dickens and Poe. This is the Self kidnapped from Ceres, or Mother Nature,by Pluto ("RICHES"), into the airless and artificial mirror realm of cunningly be-jeweled counterfeits. According to Guy Davenport, it is the diagnostic myth of the mental illness of western culture from the nineteenth century on.



This is the vein that Coyne taps. The artists she cites as influences--Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Anne Hamilton--don't form a school or even resemble each other much, but they do outline a geneology.The keen awareness of the abjection of the flesh, the tumnescent neediness and the decay of the body, are Bourgeois' contribution; the de-regulation of minimalism in favor of a willed awkwardness,lopsided eccentricity,is Hesse'--along with her tangled skeins. Ann Hamilton provided both hair-as-metaphor and hair quite literally, as she gave Coyne the horsehair used for her 1993 DIA installation-- those famous stairways covered with hair. What these artists have in common is the will to revise further and further into the intuitional unknown. There is nothing neatly rounded off or pat about any of them.



This is why I don't think Coyne's work is kitsch, as it has been accused of being.Those undulating beds of roses, each with their own separate sigh, animating each otherby implication, over which some fatal candle has dripped, and which are interwoven withthose aforementioned birds and leaping taxidermied squirrels, remind me of a constellation of things without being quite like anything else I've seen. That's a complex response. And formally what keeps it far from cliche is Coyne's feeling for orphaned forms, for fungal shapes and weed shapes,the way twigs are plaited together by the flood which casts them ashore as detritus, by algae, and stumps, and curly willow, by the revival and transmutation of life through the process of decay.Those upsidedown bouquets which are also chandeliers or those biers which appear to rustle are also nests in which souls seem to gather. She calls them her "girls".

Sunday, October 25, 2009

LEITMOTIFS

Things I noticed as I viewed the holdings of gallery after gallery:
there are big pieces with small ideas and vice versa
there are schools but not trends
what was once a trend is now a historical option
an historical option is not perceived as in being any chronological order but as an item on a menu equidistant to all others
there were virtuoso scissorers who I thought of, absurdly, as string players and artists who were literally string players
black on black which always has a matte vs shiny mystique was undergoing a revival
there were any number of permutations on the theme of the scary clown or the innocently- but- fatally- demon born
that our Gothick is more Teutonic than the Gothicizing modes of previous decades; it has a Hoffmannesque quality to it. One of his heroines turned into a carrot.And if a certain morbidezza is the mood it is the mood of more than a moment.
ALSO
Graphite artists of utmost nuancedness, photographers of urban prairies of desuetude or other alienation effects--always alienation effects--under enlargement.the morganatic marriage of art to costume legitimized ,the triumph of the C print.the happy sense that an artisanal technique did not,after all, require the aegis of irony to assist in its revival.
AND
in every major american city a major painter of celestial blues, blues out of medieval books of hours transposed to the twenty-first century;why now?

ON LISTENING TO WHAT YOUR EARS TELL YOU

I am falling down the corridors of cyber-information with delight. Several months ago I "discovered" the number of classical performances on You-tube, last night all sorts of sources for music ranging from Fado to Sean-nos. This almost makes up for a huge record collection jettisoned during a divorce. The You-tube phenomena is interesting for the great music available, as well as the sometimes imbecilic commentary which accompanies it. Thanks to a site called Tru-crypt I have been able to acquaint myself with Soviet-period pianists of the Russian school about whom I had only heard before. Pianists have their geneology--what Lincoln Kirstein used to call in ballet the "apostolic succession". Some of these studied with Tchaikovsky's friend, the great Anton Rubinstein. And one, Vladimir Sofrinitsky, was the son in law of Scriabin. Scriabin wanted his later works to be accompanied by light shows and the burning of incense-- psychedelia avant la lettre--and hoped that he could hang bells from the sky. Such were the aspirations of the pre-Bolshevic theosophists. His perverse, beautiful sonatas, with their air of opium-smoking in the orchid pavilion, have had many distinguished advocates, including Horowitz, Richter, John Ogdon, Askenazi, but the Scriabinisti accord
special status to Sofrinitsky, and in hearing them, I can hear why. He manages to give a human amplitude to what can sometimes seem pathological, special case, like a madhouse made of venetian glass. But it was Sofrinitsky's recording of a very great piece of music, the Chopin op. 60 Barcarolle, which really floored me. This is a work to which Friedrich Nietzchte ascribed transcendent powers. Sofrinitsky's is among the best I have heard. Here,however, is where the fly is found in the ointment, in the comments made. Someone says that the Sofrinitsky blows away Dinu Lipatti's classic account , and someone else says that of the performance of Alfred
Cortot. I listened to both again, and to a performance of Artur Rubinstein's from 1958, and each seemed definitive as I listened, as did an admirable account by Krystian Zimmerman. And each, of course, was subtly different, the Sofrinitsky performance being almost two minutes longer than Dinu Lipatti's account, a minute longer than Rubinsteins, and three quarters of a minute longer than Cortot, as I dazzedly recall. The sound world of each pianist was also quite different--for tonal beauty it would be difficult to match Cortot, the earliest recording, but this impression soon evaporated at different times which each of the others. Completely unnecessary and ungenerous to demote any of these superb performances at the expense of the others, as the Chopin Barcarolle itself is the raison d'etre. In heaven there are many mansions. Which brings me to the imbecilic aspect of comparison here: if a great work has been played for over a century and a half by an array of pianists of the first rank there is room. Time has made room and we can choose different interpretations in different seasons. There is no need to beat excellence down. I have given up on "definitive" performances myself, though like anyone else I have my druthers. Strange but enlightening to hear a Beethoven sonata on a forte-piano. Years ago I would only listen to Bach or Handel if played on a harpsichord. To continue with this dogma, useful in its way, would have deprived me of the Bach and Handel of Andras Schiff, Richter, and Glenn Gould. Each has given me joy, and joy is always in short quantity. Apropos which, one You-tuber said of Gould's Bach that it exploded Sviatslav Richter's. By wicked coincidence, I had just listened to an interview with Glenn Gould in which he described Richter as the greatest musical communicator he had ever heard.

Friday, October 23, 2009

ZEITQUEST INDEX


During the months of July and August last year, I viewed the web-sites and
the entire rosters of 700 art dealers nationwide, 250 in Chelsea alone.
I suspect that the approximate figure of 14,000 artists whose work I viewed is too little.
It certainly was a quasi-mystical experience. I tried, without success,
to come up with some grand-scale oracular pronunciamento until I realized that I,too, was
succumbing to an afflatus of the election year. Thank Heaven, I was spared and so were you.
Also : I have always wondered what eyrie the large-scale surveyors of history--it could be Spengler,it could be Foucault--perch on.
While a general thesis eluded me, I did have the pleasure of discovering for myself
a number of artists of whom I had been unaware; some have influenced
my thinking, and I will write about them eventually.But for a time, here is the list of those I found compelling, starting in Chelsea, but proceeding to Brooklyn,Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Austen, Los Angeles, Scottsdale, San Francisco, Seattle,
Portland, Montreal, and Toronto.
(footnote: as this list was put together before the economic crisis,it inevitably
mentions dealers no longer in existence; it is important to remember that their artists
still are.To those dealers who remain: permissions to reproduce work will speed
any comment I might make, and the prompt response to correspondence
will provoke astonishment as well as gratitude. The asterisk means: I adore you from afar; the + means seriously elegant work;the marginilia preserves my notes, but inclusion is proof of my admiration.)































































































































































CHELSEA
DL. AlvarezDerek Eller
roger andersonSarah Meltzer
esao AndrewsJ Le Vine
paolo AraoJeff Bailey Gallery
assume vivid astral focus*
John Connolly Presents after the wake, an orgy
ali BanisadrLeslie Tonkonow
gary BasemanThe big stories are all fairytales
gary BattyFeature
james Barsness*George AdamsHe draws like Rackham; he thinks like Tex Avery
tony BechakaAndre Zarre
Berkowitz and BruaDerek Ellertables climb walls decked with the soul's laundry
Tim BishopJ Le Vine
suzzane BocenagraLucas Schoormans
Hilary Brace*Edward ThorpeApparitional Whiteness from the Hollow Earth
alex BrownFeature
jason BrownRare
jeff BurtonCasey Kaplan
dean Byington*Leslie Tonkonowan Heir of Richard Dadd
olaf BreuningMetro Pictures
ingrid calameJames Cohan
james casabere +Paul Kasmin the de Chirico sublet
jonathan CallanNicole Klagsburn
Beth CampbellNicole Klagsburn
martines CanasJulie Saul
gillian CarnegieAndrea Rosen
nathan carterCasey Kaplan
St Clair Cemin*Sikkemma Jenkins
peter Coffin*Andrew Krepsthe wreck of the Hegel in the form of crunched stairs
matthew Collishaw Bonakdar
lia Cook Nancy Margolis
george condo Luhring AugustineDe Kooning and Saul Steinberg fight over a broad
petah coyne* Gallerie LelongMiss Havisham and Madeleine Usher discuss Nerval
andy cvijanovic Bellwether
Inka Essenhigh 303
tim dalyDFN
james DavisRare
edith derdyuk+Haim Chanin String theory meets Atropos
leonardo Drew*Sikkemma Jenkins
jeff Elrod+Fredericks Freiser
jean-michel fauquetHaim ChaninPhysical stairways to metaphysical oubliettes
angelo filomeno*Galerie LeLongas true (and as artificial) as Chopin or Baudelaire
roland fisherVon Lintel
roland Flexner*D'Amelio Terras Taoist of the profound soap bubble
Mark Fox*Larisa GoldstonThe Paganini of Scissors shapes a Tornado
adam FowlerMargaret Thatcher Projects
yuichi higashionaBoesky
Francesca GabrianiSarah Meltzer
stan GregorySunduram Tagore
orly GengerLarisa Goldston
sam GibbonsClaire Oliver
Tomoo GokitaATM
Anthony Gormley
richard Greaves*Andrew Edlin The bigfoot of the Canadian Rockies
jonah GreensbergerBellwether
stan GregorySunduram Tagore
Andreas GurskyMatthew Marks
diana al hadiPerry Rubinstein
Liz HalloranDCKTstreaks of speed in progress
trenton doyle Hancock James Cohan
Jutta HaeckelHosfelt
Jacob el HananiHosfelt
Ann HardyBellwether
lyle ashton harrisCRG Gallery
jeppe Hein303
julie heffernanPPOW
kent hendricksenJohn ConnallyPresents Part of the problem is that my boyfriend dabbles in dark arts
oliver Herring*Max Protech Victor Frankenstein's career in high fashion
eva HildNancy Margolis
julie HirstPavel Zoubok
Karsten HollierCasey Kaplan
timothy Horn*Hosfelt the debate of the baroque with the rococo conducted in spun sugar
jacqueline humphries Greene Naftali
aaron johnsonStux
butt johnsonCRG GalleryI was in the outhouse when Daddy got raptured
cassandra c jonesVanina Holasek Gallery
brian JungenCasey Kaplan
jen kimSteinberg
Ron KleinHoward Scott
jolyn kystosekLucas Schoormans
Jeff LadouceurZieher Smith
rezi van lankveldPetzel
sarah LeahyKim Foster
Catherine LeeGalleries Lelongthe disaffection of the great horizon
wonju lim Boesky
graham little CRG Gallery
donald lipski*Gallerie Lelongthe charioteer of found objects
nicola lopez Caren Golden
john maeda+Christenrose So slick it becomes another substance
Marco Maggi* Hosfeltdepict the cryptogram and decrypt the pictogram
frank magnottaCohan + Leslie
didier MassardJulie Saul
tatsuya MatsushitaMehr Gallery
josiah mc elhenyAndrea Rosen
maureen mc quillanMc Kenzie
jason meadowsBonakdar
sarah MorrisPetzel
ron mueck()
james nakesPaul Kasmin
ernesto neto*Bonakdarangelic snot sacks
aaron NoblePavel Zoubok
ludwika orgozelecNancy Margolis Gallery
jean michel Othoniel+Sikkemma Jenkins
gary panterClementina
james patersonBitforms
jorge Pardo*Petzel
roxy payneJames Cohan
emilio perezGalerie Lelong
diego peroneCasey Kaplan
ara Peterson*James Connally presents
jack Pierson+Danziger
jaume Plensa*Galerie Lelong Alphabody Fountainface
ken priceMatthew Marks
matthew ritchieAndrea Rosen
john rappeleyejeff baileySnakes writhe through skulls in desert blanched colors
mary reillyDFN Gallery
anil reuriSundurum tagore
matthew ritchieAndrea Rosen
michel angelo rocaATM
jimmy joe rocheRare
betsabee romeroGalerie Ramis Barquet
alexander Ross Boesky
victoria RyanJohn Stevenson
ursula von rydinguardGalerie LelongTreetrunk Tankards for Fafner and Fasolt
dennis rudolphPerry Rubinstein
alain saret+James Cohan
tojkijito SatoLeslie Tonkonow
robert SagarmanMarguerite Thatcher Projects
peter sarkissian
aaron spanglerRare
peter schuyffNicole Klagsbrun
michelle segreDerek Ellerthe cracquelature of the biomorphic forms found near Oz
hiroshi senjoSunduram Tagore
gary simmonsMetro Pictures
john stashkevitchVon Lintel
james everett stanleyFreight+Volume
simon starlingCasey Kaplan
max streicherRicco Maresca
mark Swanson+Bellwether
francesca sundstenJenkins Johnson Gallery
james SurlsCharles CowlesOld Wild Cowboy Ropes Trickster Tree
barbara takenagaMc Kenzie
maki TamuraLucas Schoormans
whiting tennisDerek Eller
gordon TerryJeff Bailey
fred tomaselli*James Cohan vast worlds from small aspirins
tam van tranCohan + Leslie
scott trealeaven+James Connally presents The Commedia del Arte meets the Neopolitan Inquisition on toile
james Valerio +George Adams
mark dean vecaJ le Vine
michael velliquetteDCKT Gallery
mark wagnerPavel Zoubok
hugh waltonClementina
wayne whiteClementina
adam wallacavage
kit whiteAndre Zarre
wayne whiteClementina
terry wintersMatthew Marks
mike womackZieher Smith
c yassGallerie Lelong
amy yoesSteinberg
jason youngChristenrose
Michelle ZaponyEssoSpook girl sends large postcards
Rhonda Zwillinger Pavel Zoubok

(no James Turrell or Christian Boltanski or Mona Hatoum or Olafur Eliasson or Yayoi Kusama?
no one from certain galleries I greatly respect? No, merely a certain mental footweariness
and the understanding that a jeux d'esprit does not have to be ecumenical-- so many a blue chip's
been left out, not that I'd mind owning one) Oct.9th, 2009