Hint's resident arty animal hits the galleries and cheap chardonnay
March '04
By Aric Chen
The Whitney Biennial is that survey of contemporary American art, mounted every other year, that everyone loves to hate. But this year the consensus is that 2004 is a winner. Topped by a giant blow-up doll by Paul McCarthy that turns its Marcel Breuer building into a giant granite-clad pedestal, the museum has brought together works by 108 new and established artists that hit on some of the more prevalent trends of the moment. There's the ongoing resurgence of drawing and painting, for example (David Hockney is installed across from Elizabeth Peyton, with other noteworthy pieces by Zak Smith, Julie Mehretu and Barnaby Furnas), and politically-charged works (drawings by Raymond Pettibon and Sam Durant, objects by Olav Westphalen and the photos of a documentary project by Emily Jacir) that are—thankfully—more poignant and witty than didactic. Meanwhile, the Sixties and Seventies reverberate in hallucinogenic installations like Yayoi Kusama's mirrored chamber of colored lights and the psychedelic party room (pictured here) created by Assume Vivid Astro Focus, a.k.a. Eli Sudbrack. While the focus is on rising artists, as always, the inclusion of the more seasoned likes of Hockney, Pettibon and Kusama provides a contextualizing background—new art isn't produced in a vacuum—that does away with the eye-rolling pretense of cutting-edginess while adding depth to the younger artists they've influenced.
Galleries from Berlin to Beijing set up shop at Piers 90 and 92 for the sixth annual Armory Show (March 12-15). With 189 dealers of contemporary art, over a third from New York, the fair showcased photography, drawings, paintings, sculptures and a smattering of video and installations—as well as a performance piece by the Japanese art collaborative Kathy that featured wigged mannequins and performers with nylon-covered faces—to become a (market-driven) art survey of its own. At night, the packed crowds of art world regulars and baby-strolling weekenders gave way to gatherings at Crobar and a soiree for Vanessa Beecroft at Marquee, while Scope—the alternative fair for less established galleries, with editions also in Miami, Los Angeles and, soon, London—took over four floors of the almost-finished Hotel Gansevoort.
Polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra is having an identity crisis in Non So Piu Cosa Son, Cosa Faccio… (the first line from a Figaro aria that translates "I no longer know who I am or what I do"), currently at Postmasters gallery. Here she chronicles her immersion into both opera and the Berlin drag queen scene in a multi-channel video installation set within a labyrinthe of red curtains that could come as easily from a peep show as the stage. Thrust by her diva mentor, Gloria Viagra, into the realm of live sex shows and department store make-up lessons, she also studies Maria Callas and undergoes hilariously tortuous voice training. They're efforts that diametrically draw her toward the demimonde and the cultivated to overcome her own plainness in that common search for transformation and self-circumvention that so often, and so theatrically, produces culture in the broadest sense.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
A giant bug zapper, costume masks and a mock nail salon table made with a riot police shield help make up the seemingly random assortment of items in Moving Towards the Light, an installation by the closely-watched artist Christian Holstad at Daniel Reich Gallery. Holstad, who is also included in the Whitney Biennial, is known for his complex poetic assemblages, and this especially difficult one brings together disparate objects to portray renewal and transfiguration at the same time as predation and unwitting self-destruction. The former manifests in elaborate cut-outs of insects, drag elements and a video of Lou Ferrigno losing his Incredible Hulk make-up to represent a changing of skin, while the zapper, a purple hyena gripping a dead flamingo and a jukebox playing both party and hunting soundtracks cast an ambivalently darker specter. In the back gallery, he's posted print-outs of eBay auctions for used men's underwear that just barely skirt the site's decency standards, and which highlight the artist's penchant for subversive narratives.
Photographer Catherine Opie, best known for her portraits dealing with gender and sexual identity, has turned her gaze to urban and natural landscapes in recent years. In her Surfers series, currently on view at Gorney Bravin + Lee—and also, in part, at the Whitney Biennial—she brings the two together in intimate images of Malibu wave-worshippers opposite largescale panoramas of her subjects, now distant flecks, in action. By counterpoising the two-series-in-one, she applies a microscopic and macroscopic lens to subliminally capture the situations and other cues—both applied and self-imposed—that bind groups of people together.

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