In an art world championed by monumental sculptures and large-format prints, Elizabeth Peyton, painter of small oil portraits and aquatint street scenes, would seem an unlikely success. But such is the mystery and romanticism that shrouds the elusive artists’ career; one that begun in a Chelsea hotel room and continues now in the monumental white box of The New Museum’s main gallery. Almost fifteen years and over a hundred paintings later, there’s still much to be resolved.

In looking for answers within Peyton’s work, we’re forced to contemplate her subject matter which ranges from historical figures (Napoleon, Ludwig II of Bavaria) to more recent celebrities (Kurt Cobain, Jarvis Cocker) to friends and family, many of who are famous in their own right, including the artists Matthew Barney and Piotr Uklański and the designer Marc Jacobs. The later are the most interesting, for what at first appears as systematic star fucking on closer inspection becomes a meditation on the temporality of life.

A portrait of the rapper Eminem, casually titled Em, finds the celebrity in a contemplative, vulnerable state, uneasily positioned against a monotonous grey backdrop while a portrait of the Oasis front man Liam Gallagher and Pulp rocker Jarvis Cocker captures a private moment between two very public figures. The people that populate Peyton’s paintings are not always famous, as in Spencer Walking, in which a friend walks into a bustling city landscape, but even as so they are cast in an iconic light surrounded by figures like Walt Whitman and Keith Richards.

Such romantic a notion could only be fostered by a gallerist like Gavin Brown, Peyton’s long time collaborator who has been known to allow his artists free range within his Chelsea space (even letting the artist Urs Fischer dig a crater into the marble of his gallery’s floor.) Peyton met Brown in 1995 while living in New York, a recent SVA graduate and Brown an aspiring gallerist on the brink of buying his first space. Peyton’s first show was mounted in a small room in The Chelsea Hotel, which Brown had rented allowing visitors to request a key at the front desk. The iconic locale, where Bob Dylan wrote Highway 66 and Dylan Thomas died of alcohol poisoning, is a monument of artistic death and rebirth, which provided the perfect setting for Peyton’s faded icons.

But here, finally on display in a museum, they seem out of place; naked without setting and bare without context. Against white walls, Peyton’s work looses its figurative duality but engages in an irony that so very fitting for her work. Spaced against the walls, lit from overhead, every piece, every fleeting moment seems to live forever.

When Kevin Kallaugher was middle school, he thought it might be funny to draw a cartoon of his teacher. After he drew it, it soon started getting passed under desks and collecting giggles from every corner of the room. He was feeling proud and confident of himself, until, by some terrible stroke of bad luck, his teacher got hold of it. She was appalled by the image, which stressed her most prominent feature: a loud talking mouth. She made Kallaugher come up to the front of the class where she shamed him, making him promise that he would never do it again.

Kallaugher did not keep his promise; in fact he did the direct opposite. Today, Kevin ‘Kal’ Kallaugher is the chief cartoonist for The Economist Magazine, where every week, his distinct ink cartoons shed some light and humor on the generally dour state of affairs in the world-at-large.

He spoke last Saturday to a full house at the Edison Theatre, in the second of a series of programs hosted by The Economist Magazine. Audiences were made privy to the ins and outs of a professional cartoonist’s life; a highly specific line of work that he says, “maybe only roughly 80 people in this country actually make a living from.”

“The pen is powerful,” Kallaugher warned, as he spoke of the Muhammad cartoon controversy in 05’, in which a Danish newspaper printed cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, “People got angry, people were killed. There were riots,” he said, “That was because of a cartoon.”

Kallaugher explained that the “trick” to political cartooning, is to identify the signature features of your subjects, and accentuate on them. “Sarah Palin is a hard one to draw,” he said, as he started giving us an actual demonstration on a big white paper board, “because she has this one eye that keeps on blinking.”

McCain, he explained, “is Piranha-like” as he drew the candidate with a chuffed angry face, and John Kerry has a “massive chin,” for which he taped another sheet to the base of the first one to draw fully.

Kallaugher stressed the importance of political cartoons, and why we love them, “Cartoons are empowering to those under authority,” he said; they can poke and chide. “Our job is not to make you laugh,” he said, “its to make you think.”

Labels: Cartoons, Economist Magazine, Festival, Kal, Kallaugher, Kevin, Off the Page, Political, Satire

Rhinestone encrusted trophy-heads, laminated t-shirt panels; taxideremied peacocks and woolen yetis are all reoccurring themes throughout the work of Marc Swanson. The New York based sculptor and installation artist has garnered a reputation for his deeply personal and highly aesthetic works which deal with issues of identity, masculinity, mysticism and death. His latest pair of shows at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum in Ithaca and the Bellwether Gallery in New York, further his investigation into the divisive nature of man and the cruel irony of nature with an ensemble of new works and a well-picked selection of old ones.

Despite Swanson’s startling resolve and methodical approach to art making, his road to becoming an artist has not been a typical one. An art school dropout turned commercial sculptor, Swanson made a living designing trade-show displays and commercial plaster in San Francisco. As his skills developed and his confidence increased, he began to experiment with works of his own; consisting largely of small dioramas and installations, which challenged models of masculinity in the age of indentity politics.

With virtually no formal training, Swanson began showing in San Francisco and soon in New York before earning a residency in Switzerland. It wasn’t until 2000 that he enrolled in the prestigious nine-week residency offered by the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and subsequently Bard College for his MFA.

As his work has progressed, it has become increasingly personal and much of the works in the Johnson Museum and the Bellwether Gallery shows make reference to his childhood; growing up the gay son of a devoted trophy hunter in rural New Hampshire and moving to San Francisco to pursue art. Embellished deer recall hunting with his father, while mystic symbols made of the artists t-shirts and underwear ask grander questions about the state of man, all the while a peacock perched above appears as both a phoenix and a vulture, a constant reminder of death and reinvention.
The majesty of Marc Swanson’s work exists in his ability to capture a dual narrative. At once highly personal and self-referential, Swanson’s work illuminates greater truths about life in the modern era.

The Saint at Large, Bellwether Gallery, New York, NY
Hurry on Sundown, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

The Seagull is not an easy play. It’s about a group of artists who meet for a weekend retreat, and intense egotistical warfare ensues. It’s about a young writer trying to confirm himself, and the strange relationship he has with his mother. It’s about art and how it’s sometimes more a luxury and a necessity. At times, it’s a parody of art; it’s triviality. The difficult themes of Checkov's masterpiece are readdressed in a new, excellent, production at the Walter Kerr Theatre.

Christen Scott Thomas, though not the main character is the main attraction. She plays the role of, Arkadina, Konstantin’s beautiful, proud and arrogant mother. Arkadina is a character is so complex and intricate, and Thomas plays her with such ease, that it’s a wonder Thomas hasn’t gone mad doing so. Or who knows, maybe already she has? There’s still ten weeks left.

Mackenzie Crook, the gauntly cubicle worker from the British version of the Office, is gloriously redefined in the lead role of, Konstantin, the tortured young writer. And Peter Sarsgaard, though the weakest link because of his phasing American accent, plays the role of, Trigorin, the jaded writer genius nicely, with his deadpan butter face.

People say that you can judge the quality of a Seagull production, among other things, by its ending; if it gets your jaw to drop. Well these guys must have done it in spades.

For more information: http://www.seagulltheplay.com/

Labels: play, review, scott thomas, the seagull, theatre, walter kerr

It was a mash up. A triple bill of some of the most important indie bands of the 90’s: The Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr., and the headliner, Built To Spill, performing the entirety of their album, Perfect From Now On.

The Meat Puppets hadn’t aged well. Their legendary drug use had taken its toll, both the Kirkwood brothers looked haggard, especially Chris, the bassist, who looked like an old tree log. But they still managed to rock through their foot tapping country-tinged grunge with grace. They ended with an impressive jam that left behind a quiet audience in its quake.

The Meat Puppets were loud, but Dinosaur Jr. was a war machine. J. Mascis, their long white haired guitarist and front man, was like a towering Nordic God as he thrashed out angry riffs from within the confines of a Marshal Stack fortress.

Built To Spill played to a packed theatre. Part of front man Doug Marstch’s charm is that his face has a calm to it when it’s not whining melodies, but tonight it seemed that in many ways, he was genuinely tired. After performing the same album day after day for months on end, Marstch seemed weary.

When the band was finished, they were treated to a roaring applause. Amid the shouting and clapping Marstch’s strumming arm could be heard playing the introduction to “The Plan,” a song not on the album. Then they played “Center of the Universe.” And then in what seemed too good to be true, they jumped into their indie rock masterpiece, “Carry the Zero.” For the first time in the show Marstch seemed truly passionate. His face turned a violet red as his convulsing body banged on the strings of his guitar, and he sang with pure cold-blooded conviction about love as a failed math equation.

Labels: built to spill, concert, review, terminal five

Go to The Market Hotel for a gallery of pictures of when The Americans & The So So Glos performed. selfportrait.net/greeley

Normally, I only write about the galleries in the Paris, but on a recent trip to NYC I stopped by the Melville Gallery down at the South Street Seaport. It is a small gallery run by the South Street Seaport Museum. The show, Plastic Topography, curated by Carl Eckhoff, runs through the end of September. The artist roster includes: Steven Baines, Kim Baranowski, J.J. Garfinkel, Adam Henry and Duke Riley.

Labels: seaport nyc

With a far more sophisticated and dynamic touch than that of author Louis XXX or similar illustrators, Japanese artist Tam Ochiai has taken to delicately mimicking the honest and romantic style of an untrained child sketching with colored pencils—thinly veiling, of course, the formal talent he possesses as an established artist whose current show has been written up in artscape and Tokyo Art Beat.
The opening of Ochiai’s fifth solo show at team (gallery inc.) last Tuesday included seventy 11 x 8.5 colored pencil drawings framed and hung in a neat row which ran all the way around the white walls of the Grant Street space. Some of the forms are wispy gestures on shallow backgrounds, manifesting the crème of Western cultured life’s treasured indulgences—french fries, tennis, classical music; others are layered, waxy color fields in which hover what appear to be moons, but are titled far more ominously (“Benign Tumor”).

The stated source of the unpolished style is the show’s protagonist, real life 19th Century prize-winning show cat Tiam O’shian IV, through whose mind Tam Ochiai approaches his subjects, not unlike an experiment in, say, being John Malkovich. The thin, uneven pencil scratches do indeed suggest a feline presence, but I would argue that it is hard not to associate the drawings more with a gesture towards childhood and memory. One looks upon one of the pieces in the show as one looks upon a Tin Tin story—sweetly optimistic, bright and simple, but unerringly true and somehow aesthetically and emotionally profound. The moments he has sketched out are deeply personal in their rawness: the minimal strokes allow the viewer to fill in the face of their own long-distance romancier or favorite tennis partner, we identify which of the listed French breakfast treats hold special places in our hearts, etc. The more frenzied scribbles seem to reference the way in which emotions, in memory, fall apart, and their strands float freely through our remembered past, as we attach them where we will in its recalling. Tam’s drawings become somehow our own intimate pictorial memories, only more elegant and more exotic—the way we would like to remember them.

It was beautiful to see a slightly older Japanese artist look backwards in time this way, especially because he does it while distancing himself from the now-mainstream techniques of Nara or Murakami: channeling a daunting youth through the whimsical plasticity and consumerism of Japanese anime culture.

Best of all, the gallery was subtly but completely interrupted by two large installations: a giant tube in the main room and a white cube in the back room which creates a sort of square hallway path for viewing the series. You could walk through the show without noticing much of the sculptures except the inconvenience they cause…that’s the point. According to the press release, the objects “can’t help but alter the movement of a viewer attempting to move simply from drawing to drawing. The sculptures serve to foreground the role of the human body and of architecture in the “reading” of drawings.” They succeed—may I say that they explore the ways in which we construct and obstruct our own memories?
The party, too, was fun—photographer Ryan McGinley pranced past team gallery Associate Director Alex Logsdail and social fixture Drew Caldwell to browse the works. If you can’t make it to team for Tam, definitely pencil in time to see the Cory Archangel show which will take its place later in the year. Check out teamgal.com for details.

We've all returned to school or whatever and I don't know about you, but I am savagely clawing to hang on to the last remnants of summer. Anyway, for those of you who are like me or for those of you who missed it, summer in New York City saw the production of some great music. Here is a small podcast of the best of it from up and coming recording artists living in the City. Listen to it in January when it's freezing and remember that June is only six short months away.

1. Self-Taught Learner -- Lissy Trullie
2. 123 Stop -- The Postelles
3. One Night Stand -- The Americans
4. We Got the Days -- The So So Glos
5. Start It Out -- Frankpollis
6. Anomalous Phenomena -- Earth Eater
7. Feed -- Julia Tepper
8. I Heart New York -- Samuel

Click here to listen.

Isaac Brest is an exciting prospect to come across. He is a talented photographer though he never considered himself a photographer at all until a few months ago. Even so, he’s been taking pictures for years. Great pictures. And, as someone for whom photography does not normally speak to as a medium (the rash of lastnightsparty.com scene shots and contrived black and white digital works of New York City lamp posts make me really nauseous), Isaac Brest has absolutely renewed my interest.

Sitting in a small coffee shop around the corner from 7Eleven Gallery, the space that he and the artist collective he co-runs with longtime friend Alex Perweiler are transforming into a cohesive exhibition space (but more on that later...), Isaac enlightened me as to the importance of a good eye, film over digital, exposure length, types of cameras, and the general catharsis of the development process.


His most impressive work is a succinct series of photographs taken during time spent abroad in Cuba. Walking through the streets, Isaac captured a world that is rarely seen as a traveler. He exposes something through his pictures that displays a comfort--a familiarity, actually--with these scenes that is very hard to show as an outsider. It is noteworthy that Isaac values his film. He is not of the habit of taking pictures superfluously and then relying on probability to produce a handful of quality shots. No picture is taken without forethought and Isaac will not even focus his lens unless he is positive the photograph will come out well. Hence, these are not the photos of some turista snapping away at a countryside or ecclesiastical monument, they are the products of immersion and research.



As the photos are almost journalistic in their representation, they are artistically resonant. The importance of having a good eye and a handle on craft and technique are present as Isaac’s deft studies of light and shadow create dramatic Brassai-esque atmospheres for his photographs. Most definitely check out Isaac's work at his website.


Isaac is also doing something very exciting in the form of the artist’s collective Still House which he cofounded with his longtime friend Alex Perweiler. It is terrific to see peers and artists coming together with the sheer intention of exposing what they find exciting to the world.

The collective, which consists of Isaac and Alex, Lucien Smith, Jack Greer, Louis Eisner, Zach Susskind, Brendan Lynch, Nick Darmstaedter, Jack Siegel, and John Roman, is something that has been absent for a long time. The mission, according to Isaac, is to create a sort of "one stop shop" for the emerging artists that are working in New York City. Currently, the residents all exist within the same scene, but eventually Isaac aims for the group to be a more open forum based exploration of the youth-based art of high quality in New York. It is an assembly of peers that are very excited about eachother's work. To me, that is the purest form of artist representation. The group is inspiring. Anything that can bring artists together to engage in dialogue and promote the creation of work and generate exposure is always beneficial.

Go see their opening of photography, mixed media, and installation work on Friday, September 5th, from 6pm to 9pm and the 7Eleven Gallery located at 711 Washington Street in Manhattan.