PISS about town 001: Downtown Art Schlep
Before we piss off to London for a bit, the NYC art shows that got our juices flowing the most. PART 1
Hey wicked pisser,
How are we doing?! Seen anything worth pissing on? Well, we have! And we are going to tell you about it here, in PISSING about town.
To save you the trouble of running from Henry Street to Canal and back going to a bunch of art shows that you might not even like (since the time we all have to piss about is precious and should not be wasted) we did it for you—you’re welcome.
But before we proceed, it’s time to introduce you to something very important, the fun and ingenious way we rate the things we come across pissing about town: the PISSOMETER!
The more wicked pissers that you see, the more we loved it. If it’s worth pissing on, expect at least 3 pissers, but don’t expect to see many 5 pisser reviews just yet. We all see things we really love, but let’s not get carried away. We will be sure to send pissive updates if need be, if that 4 pisser rating can become a five in the canon of markable territories. A caveat: if there is a usable bathroom, we may be swayed to up the rating because there is nothing worse than having to piss while pissing about.
It’s important where we mark our territory. Quality matters and the only way to keep the people in charge of the wonderful single room galleries on their toes is NOT to fling your praises in their direction willy-nilly!
Ok, context over! Let’s get into it, our first one is a long one.
“Subsequent Icons,” Karlheinz Weinberger @Situations until FEB 25, 2024
In an intimate Henry Street space, the nude portraits taken by Karlheinz Weinberger manage to exist in a space in between works of pornographic sexuality and pictorial portraiture produced of young men a generation previous, like that of F. Holland Day.
I remember buying a book of his work published by Situations in London over the summer, with a brilliant introduction by Collier Schorr. In person, the work is moving.
The dicks do not stare you down, though the men pictured hold gazes which draw you closer as you scan their bodies, not allowing the viewer to become voyeur, instead becoming something like a scene partner. They look at you with the eyes they set on Karlheinz himself in the makeshift studio he used from the late 1950s to the 1970s in his mother’s house.
This work doesn’t feel like the secret porn-stash of a closeted man designed to be masturbated to. It has an artistry which, as I was told at the gallery by a wonderful person working whose name I did not get, was discovered by the artist’s family towards the end of his life in 2006. Before that, the work had not been exhibited much in the spirit of a Vivian Maier type. “When he died, his family found all of these portraits, these prints of nude men. And when they were looking at them they recognized these weren’t just causal photographs of lovers. They said to themselves, ‘We think he was really an artist.’”
The careful lighting and staging of the photographs shows this and more, the way the work is in dialogue with the likes of Tom of Finland, with graphic tan lines and shadows around the edges of the bodies. She said, “Karlheinz was making this work anonymously, not exhibiting it often if at all,” and that’s what makes it so resonant today. To think of the care of privacy bestowed upon the subjects, an anonymity that allows the photographs to exist beyond sexuality.
Each piece was hand-printed by the photographer who worked in the Zurich Siemens factory for many years. Each print is a one-off. I wish I had a spare $1,000 to buy one. Alas, until February 25th I can commune with these men on Henry St. Go, and let them look at you.
“Nine Oils,” Anna-Sophie Berger, Sanya Kantarovsky, Oliver Osborne, Minh-lan Tran, Banks Violette @Francis Irv until MAR 9, 2024
Artforum (BOO!) says this is one of the shows to see right now in NYC. And there were some real winners for me. But I don’t know if it’s a solo mission if you aren’t already out and don’t need to pee at 106 Walker, the best bathroom below Canal. The crazy part? They weren’t all oils, but I have no idea why because there was no statement and I didn’t wanna ask the bros in change since they were enjoying a beer. I mean, I went at 5:30pm so I hope you’ll give me a break for this one. Let’s imagine:
I think part of the reason I won’t be rating this higher is that the space created a lack of synergy amongst the works, divided by pipes and a desk. I went for the Kantarovsky, a large oil on linen of a greyhound tending to a man with wounds and a button-like penis. It was a real treat to look at, the pastels of the dreamlike background swirled amongst flora which contrasted the work’s pictorial fauna well. A sense of dread was baked into the eyes. The dog’s silly round nose remarked on a contrast between heightened emotion and the absurd reality of life stripped down.
There also, a scene of two horses by Violette in graphite rendered in a tonal inversion, which I liked because it reminded me of the brush paintings my grandmother made.
Francis Irv was a cool space, and we hope to PISS there again soon!
"Eight Paintings Proving Angels are Really Watching Over Us,” Robert Roest @Europa until FEB 25, 2024
In 8 paintings, Robert Roest tries to find the divine in the sky and paints the same rusty nail in the bottom right corner of each work. The title of the show is extremely explicit about what you are supposed to get from the work, which at times can be a helpful way to allow wicked pissers like us to understand what the hell we are looking at on the floor of a basement galley space. Here, a little mystery would’ve been nice. Though the Lord of the Rings-esque names were a nice touch.
The painting’s large scale helps to evoke a sense of grandeur and the sublime, a moment in which the child in all of us looks back up at a sky we now know brings rain, thunder and sweltering heat, and sees a figure beyond worldly boundaries. Yet, how can this unknowable sense of awe be rendered “crisply” as the gallery suggests? Do we need to state that the work exists both in and out of religiosity in meaning and form and use words like “meta-conscious” to understand work that acts most interesting in the subconscious, drawing on a collective Western familiarity with Christian iconography? I think what the show lacked intellectually was a sense of self-awareness, a placement of the work in the material given by the gallery outside of metaphors and references most people understand. There is a violet Jesus reaching out to us! More on that please.
Maybe a text linking the work to Dutch masters and the famous Microsoft desktop wasn’t required at all for a generation of viewers whose nascent memories of the online and the natural would’ve been provoked either way if the work was successful.
In some ways, something like Charles O’Rear’s “Bliss,” 1996, is more resonant because of its context within the online, becoming a place of unity for millions of people amongst a digital community of users everyday since 2001. It straddles ideas presented in Roest’s work, like the pastoral, but its computer framing allows this vision of natural heaven to be individually felt. When I look at it, I see that “Bliss” is a moment immortalized in time, now of course an agricultural plot, brown and used. The most impactful of the works features a looming spectre whose bright eyes gaze down upon a city and looks ready to punish the inhabitants for not looking up to it more often; If the work was more like this then perhaps Roest would be giving us a window into what we’re missing.
All that being said, my opinion on this show changed when I read the text I referenced above: something about being told how to view the divine irritated me since I thought the paintings were interesting.
I’m just not sure if Roest is looking for angels in the right place and seeing them with the hopeful eyes of America’s pastoral soul. The work was gorgeous, and worth looking at for its aesthetic value, but the places the artist pictures the divine render a message as wispy and hard to grapple with at the angels made of mist in his country skies.
This concludes PART 1 of PISS about town 001. Part 2 coming Tuesday, 30 Jan!
P.S.
Let’s take a moment to congratulate the two intrepid chickens we saw in Brooklyn today who had somehow escaped from a local slaughterhouse. These divas were brave, fight the power! If you see them, say hi!
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