THAW

estudiotres is opening Friday January 18th with the group show--Thaw: Winter won't last forever.

Samia Mirza presents her work Conjoined Snowmen (We all Fall Down) which is a beautiful and sad sculpture. I have variously interpreted this sculpture through many different readings. Mirza's work is an inspiration for me and has helpped me understand how "art in the present-tense" must be experienced in the moment. Standing before the sculpture we are transported to the moment of pre-reflective wonderment, where a child creates his very first sculpture before he even understands words. This pre-reflective moment of joy, intuition, gut feeling and wonder comes from birth. Imagine the shock of being born, of coming out of the whom and seeing the world for the first time.

Mirza's work brings us back to ourselves. Importantly, her work brings her back to herself, telling us stories of who she is.

Alternatively, I have seen this work through pre-modern, modern, fruedian, post-modern, feminist, semiotic and even queer lens. Conjoined Snowman reminds me that much great art is open ended, free to be interpreted and reinterpreted through different views and new sets of eyes.

Through a certain lens I see the two snowman as a sad impossible homoerotic love, two of the same kind, lovers who can't make love work-- collapsed on the floor. Or maybe forbidden desire, larger than any of us.

New Season of Art Openings

A new art season kicks off this week with a thick list of openings last Friday.

*Russell Bowman Gallery in River North opened the year with a Kiki Smith exhibition that is solid offering of recent work. Collaborating with Pace gallery Russell Bowman transported a recent larger than life bronze sculpture that is the center-piece of the exhibition. This exhibition like so many others at Bowman gallery is carefully installed and beautifully lit.

*Carl Hammer opened with a provocative exhibition Black Gravity, works from the recent School of the Art Institute graduate SEUNG WOOK SIM. There is something magnetic about these works that really draws you in-- they are dark, sexy, mystical and fantastic.

Advice from a Caterpillar

In one of the most exciting and memorable passage of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she encounters a sleepy hookah-smoking caterpillar. He asks her the all-important question, a question essential to all of us-- "Who are YOU?"

The hookah-smoking caterpillar is more direct than most of us. But one question I get asked at parties or bars is: "Where are you from?" This is a tricky question to answer, because at its core it is about geography relates to identity. Where I am from relates to who I am-- a gay Jewish east-coaster. But actually I was born in Chicago, yet I don't feel like a midwesterner.

Like Alice, I am constantly changing and "my self" is radically fractured. I agree with Alice that `all I know is, it would feel very queer to ME.'

Alice feels very queer and indeed she is. But the caterpillar, older, wiser and more centered gives her some solid advice.

The old caterpillars who will soon undergo the most incredible change, the transformation into a butterfly. Says that change is hard but must be embraced. The spectacular metamorphsis happens through the comming together of 'imaginal cells', which the caterpillar immune system resists and fights against, but eventualy the imaginal cells take over the caterpillar cells and give birth to a butterfly.

I am not just a gay New York Jew, I am also, a global citizen, post-gay, post-New York, post-Jew. We live in a post-ethnic world were we can choose what part of our identity we want to express, what part of Jewish or what part of gay. The Spertus musuem has an incredible exhibition, “The New Authentics.” The gay Canadian/American artist David Altmejd is the star of the show and is deffinately post-jew. "Free to choose their affiliations, they are Jewish culturally, religiously, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, partially, biologically, or invisibly."

Samia Mirza is a young up-and-coming artist here in Chicago who is a mixed race women with incredible sculptures, with perverted childhood wonderment. Her don't miss exhibition is opening this Friday at the estudiotres gallery in Andersonville.


One last bit of advice from Alice's Adventures :

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

And so we are all a little mad.

Unmonumental reflection of life

The New Museum is one of the most interesting institutions in the New York arts world. The founder and first curator, Marcia Tucker the legendary and passionate pioneer trail blazer who kicked opened the doors for daring and innovative arts. The New Museum is a staple in thriving lower Manhattan arts scene, founded in 1977 it is the only museum in New York City devoted to global contemporary art. A new permanent home for the museum opened on December 1 to much acclaim and celebration. I visited the New Museum to see the amazing building and current exhibition. One museum-wide show took up all three exhibition floors- Unmonumental.The show points to an important shift in the way art is being made and the way we are all participating in the arts. Most of the artist in the exhibition creat work from assamblage-- that is putting together and arranging found objects with enormous care and precision.At the heart of assembalage is taking care to bring disperate small things into an arrangement full of meaning. This is the point of Unmonumental to point to things that help us reflect of the world. Across New York city at the Whitney is an retrospective of Lawrence Wiener-- who also asks us to reflect on the world and the important relationships between things.Unmonumental is an exhibition of young international artists who grew up in a globalized and digital world with an entirely new set of problems to face. Although the important issues in their work: spirituality, love, forgiveness and death are timeless, they ask us to reflect upon the most pressing issues of the present. Iza Genzken, the oldest and hippest artist in the show creates a huge Elephant out of trash she found in and around Berlin. This is the largest single work in the show and full of surprises, moments of profound transformation. Many of the younger artist have room to grow-- but Ms. Genzken's mature works reveal an artist in her prime. Elephant asks us to reflect on important issues of fractured identity, or loss of faith or loss of icons. What can we make of radically decentered world and of the rapid progress of globalization and international trade? One thing is to make small gestures with profound transformational power. My boyfriend who prefers more traditional art but really likes elephants, appreciated this sculpture for the surprising way the artist creates a recognizable likeness out of disgarded dolls, fake flowers, blankets,pipes, plastic scraps, tubing, using simple geometric shapes. There is also a sense of the spiritual in her composition, a way of understanding god through simple everyday materials. And although elephant is a large sculpture, the scale is still human and approachable.Ms. Genzken shows us the value of the undervalued-- she elevates the most mundane to the most transcendent.In the end her work is just a perfectly balanced sculpture of junk, but its temporal nature and impermanent materials suggest new possibilities in a new world.

Art and Design

I spent the last half of 2007 thinking about the important relationship between art and design. When I press the issue and try to dig into the ways design relates and fine art and vice versa, I find the line between them is often an illusion. Some of the most interesting things happening in both art and design seem to blur the line and even walk the line.

Erik Wenzel posted about figurines that The National Gallery produced from some notable paintings, taking the two dimensional work as a starting point and creating three dimensional objects. The most interesting thing is that three-dimensional objects can now be printed and not necessarily molded and cast.

Three-dimensional rapid prototyping is now coming of age and cheap 3D printers and being mass produced. Just last year 3D printing was limited to very few uses, costly and complicated. In the coming year 3D prints will become more common place and useful in more sectors.

Unfortunately, the figures from the National Gallery were not 3D printed and were also not actually made by artists. I am very interested in artist produced and created multiples.

Cereal Art is currently one of the best company around for producing artist multiples and they have worked with some incredible contemporary artists.

New York City Update

I took the past few days to see three important exhibitions in New York. All centered around black artists. This is a rare once in a lifetime moment where three major museums are exhibiting the art work of Africa at the same time.

My first stop was the MOMA to see the Martin Puryear. The exhibitions is one of the best in city-- because Puryear is possibly one of the all time great sculptors. He is so careful and reserved that seeing his works together in one place gives you a better sense of his aims as an artist. On the main mezzanine of the museum is a perfect grouping of three free standing sculptures that enhance, compliment and dance off each other in perfect balance. This is culmination of the entire exhibition.

The best sculpture in the show, and one of the best in the museum is the piece "Ladder for Booker T." Technically this is not a free standing sculpture because it is suspended from the ceiling with thin cables which are easily ignored for the illusion of a floating ladder. This is one of Puryear's few daring works and after seeing the entire exhibition one can sense he took a chance on this piece and it was well worth the risk. One other risky work is right next to the ladder and is giant animal machine with huge wheels and a stick reaching to the sky. Actually, Puryear brings life to many essential forms taken from rural life which are also African hunting symbols. From Africa he also takes his most lasting image. The abstracted face that come from a gibon mask, with only enough markings to recognize features-- he exaggerates the essential and adds his own voice by making the huge mask into an explosion on a wheelbarrow.

DREAMER + REALIST = ENGAGED CITIZEN

Happy New Year.

A big idea came to me this year.

I am dreamer.

Curiosity, creativity and imagination are not a laundry list but are all part of the same circle--each connected action is connected to each other. But the circle also includes realism, stoicism and pragmatism.

How is that?

We often think of dreaming in opposition to realism-- but it is not.


This blog is named after the Biennale Art 52nd International Art Exhibition , curated by the great Robert Storr.

The full title of the 52nd Venice Biennale is "THINK with the SENSES, FEEL with the MIND: Art in the present tense."


What I believe Storr means by this is that art is EXPERIENCED. What we need now is art that helps us become more engaged citizens of the world.

On his curatorial message Storr said:

I am not trying to say a single thing. I am trying to present a certain approach to art, an attitude towards how to think about it. Essentially, I am trying to say that certain divisions that are common in art criticism, in particular those found among academic writers, are an impediment to understanding and experiencing art. Mainly, that prevalent notions of a division between the conceptual and the perceptual, an idea that had its origin in Marcel Duchamp and was then reinforced by certain avant-garde practices in the ‘70s, and then reinforced further in the ‘80s by the reaction against painting, is a misunderstanding. Because there is no such thing as a good painting without an idea, and there is no such thing as a good idea without a form


Here is a story to end 2007 and bring us into 2008.

The first time I walked into Andrea Rosen's gallery in New York city was during the summer before I would leave pre-medical studies to go study art in Chicago. Because it was summer the gallery have an unimpressive exhibition of inventory from the artists they represented. Most of the work was OK, nothing to exciting.

There was two stacks of paper in the middle of the room-- side by side.

They where stacked about knee high, white paper bigger than poster size. One stack of paper had the sentence "Somewhere better than this place." The other stack read "Nowhere better than this place." The work was by the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The artist left instructions to take a sheet of paper, but only one.

So I look and carefully choose "Somewhere better than this place." it seem the obvious choice. This is positive thinking and wishing and dreaming. The other piece of paper seemed so negative.

I picked up the poster and to my surprise... it was a double sided poster the other side read "Nowhere better than this place."


Mr. Gonzalez-Torres piece was all of the life, the whole circle, two-sides of the same coin. An epiphany: to be a complete person, we must be both a dreamer and a realist.