Hint Fashion Magazine -- Art Crawl

On the back of a T-shirt in an Abercrombie & Fitch ad that he tore out and framed, artist Tony Matelli has scribbled "I Don't Make Any Stupid Fucking T-Shirts." He might not, but it seems everyone else does. Call it punk nostalgia or the rise of skaterism. Or chalk it up to a technology-enabled do-it-yourself mentality, or the return of drawing and illustration, or a bad economy, or the merging of fashion and art, art and commodity, and commodity and individuality. But everyone is making T-shirts and 150 of them—some for sale, some not, some not even really T-shirts, like Matelli's—are at New York's Daniel Silverstein gallery. They're designed by artists and art-types (from Matelli, Laurel Nakadate, and Spencer Sweeney to Kiki Smith), fashion designers (Indigo People, United Bamboo, Nun, Susan Cianciolo), and various others (Anthony Haden-Guest). Look for widespread use of the word Fuck, in all its derivations, and more gothic lettering than a Guttenberg Bible.

Don't look now, but there's another Times Square distraction to slow down the tourists and the irritable locals trying to walk past them. Cowboy Waltz, a new work by media/art darling du jour Jeremy Blake, is the latest in Creative Time's The 59th Minute program, which regularly lights up the million and a half LEDs of Times Square's Astrovision with work by artists. Played the last minute of most hours of the day, Blake's light show at Broadway and 43rd St.—which coincides with a series of his screenings at The American Museum of the Moving Image—is an abstracted narrative of photos and digital animations that pay homage to the prolonged freak-out of Sarah Winchester. She was the paranoid San Jose firearms heiress who, from 1884, built a mansion designed to confuse the vengeful ghosts of Winchester gun victims, whom—she was convinced—knew their way to San Jose.

The group show of group shows in Chelsea right now is Now Playing: Daniel Reich Gallery, K48, John Connelly Presents at D'Amelio Terras gallery. The three-in-one package brings together Scott Hug's K48—best known for its eponymous underground magazine—and gallerists-to-watch Daniel Reich and John Connelly, who each have their own space in this subculturalpalooza of emerging artists and other mulleted talents.

K48's altar-like corner displays over 75 limited edition CDs (and their cover art) by as many music-and-art scenesters. Reich, who was gallerist Pat Hearn's right-hand man, has brought together works like a kinetic sculpture by Bjorn Copeland, in which a plastic garden gnome is slowly ground down on sandpaper, and Christian Holstad's When the Color Runs Out, a poetic installation of ceramic birdcages assembled as a fallen man lying in a bed of moss below hanging casts of bird decoys.

Nudie photos by Bruce La Bruce and Slava Mogutin (see Art Crawl, April 2003), along with other work by Chelsea regulars like Karen Heagle, Sissel Kardel and Wade Guyton make up Connelly's up-to-the-minute section. A former gallery director for Andrea Rosen, Connelly has also included P is for Poodle, a 1983 self-portrait of the three members of '70s and '80s Canadian art collective General Idea. By including them in the show—in itself a collective project—Connelly indirectly points out that the creative collaborative, that much-hyped arrangement in current art, design, and fashion, has been around for a while. But, largely rooted in artists' efforts, beginning in the 60s, to undermine notions of authorship and the myth of the artist-hero, the collaborative today is more like a see-what-happens party of creative convergence, and D'Amelio Terras has acted as host.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

Revelers at Warm Up—the annual DJ series that PS1 hosts in its courtyard every summer Saturday (love the idea, hate the name)—will be dancing the late afternoon and early evening away in an installation by Tom Wiscombe, the most recent winner of the closely-watched competition to transform the space each year. (Prior winners have included rising architects like SHoP and Lindy Roy). This time, the LA designer is taunting New Yorkers with his "urban beach" design, which features an aluminum mesh-covered metal canopy and two long wading pools.

Skaters might show off their kickturns and fakies on the ramps, but at LA's New Image Art gallery, they're comparing pencil drawings. Organized by skate art-pioneering gallery owner Marsea Goldberg and artist Rich Jacobs-also co-curators of a skater art show now at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia-Lead Poisoning includes over sixty doodles by artists Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton (left), Ryan McGinness, Barry McGee and Geoff McFetridge, among others.

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