Hint's resident arty animal hits the galleries and cheap chardonnay
May '03
By Aric Chen

Nothing stands in your way when you're a gay boy. The latest example of PoMo homo youth art kicks off this month at LA's new Peres Projects gallery, which opens on the city's too-cool Chung King Road. This time, the unpunctuated New York artist Asianpunkboy—best known for his "faggy filth" eponymous zine—presents sculptures, installations (including live birds), reappropriated images and other works derived from the underbelly of the urban dude-on-dude scene in a show called The Whole Family. Fresh from his own photography show at the Whitney, the beer-guzzling, boy-bonking street kid artist Ryan McGinley DJed at the opening party.
 
Those feeling a little moody in midtown Manhattan (which would be all of us) have a new, nonviolent way to express it. Mariko Mori—the New York-based, Japanese artist whose videos, performances and other works have transformed her into everything from a sci-fi Bodhisattva to a tea-serving alien—has brought her mind-reading Wave UFO installation to the lobby of 590 Madison Avenue.

Basically a giant tear-shaped capsule with a holographic shimmer, Wave UFO (which runs concurrently with a Mori show downtown at Deitch Projects) can accommodate up to three artgoers who snuggle into squishy Technogel cushions and put on headsets with electrodes that pick up their brainwaves. The waves are then translated by a computer and projected onto a screen in a mind orgy of abstract shapes that change color and movement depending on the wearers' psychological states.

"It's like giving the experience of being connected and also sharing a single life," Mori says, "so you’re going through a kind of inner world that becomes like a world of our collective consciousness."

Some of us are quite happy keeping our feelings to ourselves, but Mori's contraption isn't just about group sharing. Instead, it's a more interactive example of the artist's dreamlike mix of science fiction, social commentary, and pop culture that further closes the gap between technology, the body and awareness.


On May 18, the Dia Foundation—the Mecca for Minimalism, that Capital of Conceptual Art—opens Dia:Beacon, its much-anticipated outpost up the Hudson in Beacon, New York. In a giant former Nabisco box factory renovated by artists Robert Irwin and the architects at OpenOffice, visitors will go crackers over major installations by the pantheon of greats that includes Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Richard Serra.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
 


Designers from John Bartlett to Karl Lagerfeld have been inspired by the work of Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich. And now they can head to the Guggenheim (and, afterwards, Houston's Menil Collection) to bask in the glow of this early 20th century pioneer of abstract painting who, between 1915 and 1932, developed what came to be known as Suprematism. Fetishizing pure forms like circles and rectangles, Malevich sought to create a universal language free of cultural baggage, that artistically expressed the period's utopian faith in a more progressively enlightened world. Seventy years later, at least we can say it looks good on a dress.
Every once in a while, the art world declares painting dead, but then comes the likes of Luc Tuymans. The 45-year-old Belgian art star has fought to bring new life to the genre with sublime canvases that portray the darker side through a haze of luminously washed-out and neutral colors. For his current New York show at David Zwirner gallery, Tuymans applies his modern heart-of-darkness approach to the city, zooming in on some of its more unremarkable features to create nightmarish images populated by ghostly apparitions. Think Jocelyn Wildenstein in a steam room—the horror, the horror!



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