#oh and also its such a surprise i draw whitney so much because if i met whitney irl

[hakusins]

cw // tattoos, piercings

why are they so loud about liking blondes .... i haven't slept in months pLEASE (<- not a blonde enjoyer)

even the version thats not in DOL universe likes blondes too 😭😭😭

slight cameo of whitney the faithful that belongs to moosen/jdolh !! (no tag cause its just smol cameo 😭)

[caveartfair]

Inside the Magical and Relentlessly Creative World of Beloved Artist Kiki Smith

Over her four-decade-long career, artist Kiki Smith has made sculptures of body parts, tapestries depicting animals and the cosmos, and drawings of wolves and women—a strange confluence of the corporeal and the fantastic, with distinct feminist undertones. Smith is known as a leader of the downtown art scene that emerged in Manhattan throughout the 1980s, and many of her pieces have a dark fairy-tale quality—as if they could illustrate pages from the Brothers Grimm. I expected for the artist herself to have a bit of magic about her.

So I was surprised, on a recent visit to Smith’s East Village apartment, to watch her scratch at a piece of plexiglass for over an hour with hands tattooed with little turquoise dots. It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon, and Smith was working on a print for an upcoming exhibition at the Deste Foundation in Greece. Each dutiful scratch emphasized just how banal and unmagical the process of artmaking can truly be.

Kiki Smith works on a tapestry in the studio in her East Village home. Photo by Daniel Dorsa for Artsy.

Smith said that the scratch marks would ultimately result in multiple prints and sculptures of a capricorn—the mythical figure with a goat’s body and fish’s tail that is also the artist’s astrological sign. Indeed, she’s known for her seriality, spinning concepts and images into one work after another, until something new piques her interest. Her sources of inspiration remain in flux, but Smith’s work itself tends to revolve around the body, death, mythology, and nature. Rumpelstiltskin may have been able to weave hay into gold, but there’s no alchemy to Smith’s practice: just hours of making, year after year.

When I visit Smith, she’s in the midst of multiple projects in addition to the Deste show, among them an exhibition entitled “Murmur” at Pace Gallery (through March 30th). She’s still finalizing the details.

“Sometimes I have things that I want to do,” she says breezily. “But in general, I just go through the space, and then that tells you what to do.” She sounds laissez-faire, and there is a level of unpredictability to her planning: One venue might inspire a full body of work, while another might require a grouping of previous series into a new conceptual whole.

Plans for Kiki Smith’s solo exhibition “Murmur” at Pace Gallery. Photo by Daniel Dorsa for Artsy.

There’s little art in Smith’s studio, so she shows me an image of a sculpture, bound for the Pace show, on her phone. It’s a jagged, triangular black form with multipoint stars emerging from the surface. It looks like a fallen-over Christmas tree: simultaneously stark, rough, and hopeful.

“That’s a wave,” Smith says. It doesn’t resemble any wave I’ve ever seen. Yugoslavian World War II monuments, called spomenik, inspired the shape, she says, showing me a picture of one of these, too, on her phone: two craggy stone hunks that emerge from the earth parallel to each other, then fan outward.

“I just think those sculptures are very beautiful,” she says. “They’re culturally very different from how we make memorials.” The water was a particular draw for Smith.

“Water holds memories,” she says. Her explanations, like her work, are often simultaneously lyrical and opaque.

Kiki Smith, Wave, 2016. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Smith was born into an artistic family. She was born in Germany, where her mother, Jane Lawrence, was working as an opera singer. In 1955, when the artist was one year old, her family moved to New Jersey, where she spent the remainder of her childhood. Her father, Tony Smith, was an artist, known for his own monumental black sculptures. He rose to prominence in the mid-1960s, and curator Kynaston McShine included him in “Primary Structures,” the Jewish Museum’s iconic 1966 show on American and British Minimalism. He also showed at the Venice Biennale and multiple Whitney Annuals (the predecessor to the Whitney Biennial) during his lifetime.

Smith began her artistic apprenticeship earlier than most of her peers: Along with her sisters Seton and Beatrice, she helped her father in his studio from a young age. In 1974, she enrolled in Connecticut’s Hartford Art School, yet she dropped out after just three semesters and settled back into Manhattan. Smith says she was around age 24 when she decided to become a professional artist.

“I didn’t know what else to do particularly. I liked making things,” she says.

Portrait of Kiki Smith in her New York home and studio. Below the couch, archival boxes store rubbing and templates from past work. Portrait by Daniel Dorsa for Artsy.

She joined an artist collaborative called Colab (short for Collaborative Projects Inc.)—Tom Otterness and Jenny Holzer were also members—and she worked odd jobs. Still scratching at the plexiglass between moments of eye contact, Smith says that one of these jobs, working as an electrician’s assistant, led her to consider life, art, and the body anew.

“Electricity is like a pulse,” she says. “Our bodies are electrical systems. Everything is going positive, negative, positive, negative. That gives you the chance to change your life. It’s not a continuum.”

The delicate work required a meticulousness that remains evident in her practice, and the insights it offered into power and the body worked their way into Smith’s first solo presentation, “Life Wants to Live,” at the alternative performance space The Kitchen in 1982. It honored women who’d fought back against male assailants—and killed them.

“If you made one thing and could really be satisfied, then you could stop and do something more interesting than sitting in your house scratching things.”

Smith sourced headlines about such incidents from the New York Post, then painted them on gauze. The feminist movement was still wrangling with how to deal with violent men and pornography, and fracturing as they disagreed about both issues; Smith’s work tapped into the zeitgeist. She recalls Andrea Dworkin speaking out against pornography—a topic that can still polarize the feminist community. Smith herself once handed out Valerie Solanas’s 1968 publication “The SCUM Manifesto,” which called for men’s destruction, at a former Lower East Side community center called Charas.

“They kicked me out because they said that it’s reactionary,” Smith recalls. In general, she now advocates for a gentler approach to life. “If you can avoid extreme anything, it’s probably better,” she says. “But not everyone is afforded that.”

Smith included her own body in the show via a series of X-rays she made with her friend, David Wojnarowicz—another major downtown figure, who received a posthumous Whitney retrospective last year. The pair visited a medical testing lab in Brooklyn (run by Marvin Numeroff, who was also a gallerist), turned on the machine, and captured themselves beating each other up. She remembers Numeroff telling her afterwards: “You should have been wearing shields for your genitals in case you want to reproduce.” “It was like, ‘Oh, thanks for telling us now,’” she says.

Kiki Smith, Untitled, 1989–90. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Reproduction itself was very much on Smith’s mind: She first visited Numeroff’s lab to look at sperm. “You’d look at them under the microscope,” she says, “and it’s so extraordinary because it’s just like life, teeming, moving.” Later, she made hundreds of lead-crystal sculptures of sperm (Untitled, 1989–90).

Years of body-part art followed: terracotta ribs, an iron digestive system, a glass stomach, a plaster pregnant belly. In 1988, Smith’s sister Beatrice died of AIDS; Wojnarowicz succumbed to the illness in 1992. Many have drawn connections between these profound losses and the work and exhibitions that Smith put out in the years that followed. But Smith downplays the deaths’ influence.

“You experience it privately, the loss of a person,” she says.

Smith says that she does think about presence and absence in her work. She also made panels for the AIDS Memorial Quilt (a massive public project, initiated in 1985, that commemorates those affected by the disease) for both her sister and Wojnarowicz.

Portrait of Kiki Smith by Daniel Dorsa for Artsy.

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Smith examined the body not just as a site of external violence, but as a vessel that could betray its owner. An untitled, red-ink-on-paper work from 1988 resembles a dismembered, bloody corpse hanging from the wall in pieces: torso, legs, and arms all dangle separately. Another horror film–worthy piece, Blood Pool (1992), is a wax, gauze, and pigment sculpture of a nude woman curled up on the floor. The glossy, uneven, red-and-yellow surface gives the appearance of a figure stripped of its skin. Its arms, sans hands, fold into its legs. The sculpture’s rawness and vulnerability make for a cringe-inducing viewing experience.

Kiki Smith, Blood Pool, 1992. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Installation view of Kiki Smith, Untitled (Red Man), 1991, from “Creature,” at The Broad, 1991. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation.

Kiki Smith, Glass Stomach, 1985. © Kiki Smith. Photo by Ellen Labenski. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Smith looked beyond humans to animal bodies, as well. In her 1990 work Dowry Cloth, she stitched together patches of sheep wool and human hair. Hanging on the wall in a loose rectangular shape, the highly textured, unevenly hued piece resembles a dirty tapestry. In 1994, she met a scientist who told her “how many mammals were projected to be extinct in the next 40 years. I thought I should rather pay attention to that,” she recalls. Smith visited Harvard and began making drawings at the university’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. Over the next few years, she sculpted blackbirds and wolves, incorporating them into prints and drawings, as well.

Kiki Smith, Woman with Wolf, 2003. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Kiki Smith, Head with Bird I (Side), 1994. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Academics interpreting Smith’s work have alternately viewed the animals as symbols or allegorical figures, as attempts to unite the human and non-human natural world, or as invocations of savagery. Yet Julia Bryan-Wilson, who wrote about Smith on the occasion of her 2018 exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich, opts for a different reading.

“Much of Smith’s art with animals introduces a queer uncertainty around sex difference,” Bryan-Wilson writes. After fixating for so long on gender and sexuality, she suggests, Smith opted to represent life in a way that transcended the binary.

Smith herself is more expansive and less prescriptive about her approach. “I think about animals in a much more abstract way than they might experience themselves,” Smith says. “I don’t think about their gender very often.” Yet she tells me that she did, recently, make a sculpture of mating deer—her old interest in reproduction and new life seeping into her contemporary practice.

Kiki Smith, Rapture, 2001. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Kiki Smith, Born, 2002. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Kiki Smith, Geneviéve and the May Wolf, 2000. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Installation view of Kiki Smith, “Kiki Smith: New Work,” at 142 Greene Street, New York, 1995. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Kiki Smith, Crows, 1995. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Kiki Smith, Deer Mating, 2018. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Lilith, 1994. Kiki Smith San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Kiki Smith, Untitled, 1992. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Meanwhile, Smith was also creating small sculptures and drawings of women. They faint, entangle themselves in stars, and sit with their arms wide open in offering. Altogether, they create a kind of benevolent coven. If Smith separated organs from bodies in her earlier work, now, she was creating not just whole bodies, but entire feminine communities. In two bronzes, Born (2002) and Rapture (2001), Smith sculpted nude women conjoined with animals—a deer and a wolf, respectively. Sans clothing or intricate detailing, the figures look less contemporary than archetypal: part of a mythological brood of feminine spirits that includes characters both biblical (her 1994 sculpture Lilith resembles a nude woman mounted on the wall) and earthbound (an untitled work from 1992 resembles a crouching woman with outstretched hands).

Portrait of Kiki Smith by Daniel Dorsa for Artsy.

Spinners, 2014. Kiki Smith Pace Gallery

The way Smith discusses her practice is more happenstance than strategic. She tells me, for example, that it was “opportunity” that led her to begin making tapestries in the 2010s. Artist Don Farnsworth, a director of the Oakland-based studio Magnolia Editions, visited Smith and asked her if she’d be interested in working in the medium. Smith took on the challenge and ultimately created 12 vibrant tapestries, filled with blue skies and oceans, yellow grounds, and pink birds. She says that it offered her an opportunity to stretch outside of her typical size and aesthetic.

“I never thought I could make a picture so big,” Smith says. She adds that it was also an opportunity to make works with color, something she doesn’t frequently do.

A selection of the tapestries is on view at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery through June 2nd. Congregation (2014) merges many of Smith’s most significant interests in thread. The composition features a nude woman sitting atop a tree trunk, a web of branches emerging from her eyes. The spindly network also connects to a deer, squirrel, owl, and bat in the background. On the ground beneath lies a banner sprinkled with starry shapes. Here, Smith depicts a very literal interconnection between the female body and nature. Sky (2012) positions a nude female body curving into the star-filled night sky.

Congregation, 2014. Kiki Smith Peters Projects

Sky, 2011. Kiki Smith Peters Projects

During my visit to Smith’s studio, another of the tapestries, Spinners (Moths & spider webs) (2014), lies on a table. It features a murky black-and-blue strip on the bottom, from which thin pussy willows emerge. Higher up, spiderwebs spin across the stalks in light, radiant, outward-reaching threads. Moths flurry in and out of the brush, creating a sense of motion and energy. Smith says the idea for the work began when she started taking care of silkworms for her artist friend Valerie Hammond. She had to feed them mulberry leaves everyday. When the creatures bloomed into moths, Smith took photographs and painted watercolors of them. She merged these images digitally with those of other wildlife, creating a life-sized drawing, which was then replicated in thread.

Smith explains that the scene could never actually occur in nature: Moths and pussy willows develop at different times of year. “They don’t make any sense,” she says of the works.

Detail of Kiki Smith’s home and studio. Photos by Daniel Dorsa.

Detail of Kiki Smith’s home and studio, featuring a print by Hilma af Klint (center). Photo by Daniel Dorsa for Artsy.

Smith isn’t generally interested in naturalistic representations, or a logical progression of her own practice. Instead, she infuses everything she makes with the feeling of the day, allowing interactions, news items, and photographs to provide her with temporary inspiration.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Pace show seems to obliquely address the #MeToo era. Picking up her phone again, Smith shows me a picture of a light blue–tinged, crosshatch-textured sculpture bound for the show. It resembles a three-dimensional drawing of a woman’s face (thin instead of spherical, more scratched into than sculpted), with wave shapes emerging from her eyes, mouth, and hair—rays that suggest embodied sight and speech. It seems like a metaphor for the torrent of speech and thought that women have offered in the past year, as their voices grow louder in both the press and in the U.S. government.

Installation view of Kiki Smith, “Kiki Smith: Murmur,” at Pace Gallery, New York, 2019. Photo by Kyle Knodell. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Smith has continued scratching at the plexiglass of the piece bound for Deste in between brief interludes to show images of other work. Eventually, she stops that work and begins whittling away at a small frog. “It’s not a very complicated frog. But I still sit for hours, taking off a little bit of wax,” she says. She’s making some rings for her husband, a beekeeper who lives upstate and wants one for each finger. She’ll place the frog atop one band; another gold band will receive a tourmaline stone. She places a ring in my hand and tells me to feel its heft.

Portrait of Kiki Smith by Daniel Dorsa for Artsy.

Smith says that sometimes she’s not sure what drives this relentless, slow, and measured making. “I think, ‘Oh, you’re just making sure nothing else can happen in the entire day except your attention to the frog,’” she says. Artmaking becomes a kind of time-hurrying spell.

Other times, she’s driven by the fact that each new piece falls short of satisfying her aims. “If you made one thing and could really be satisfied, then you could stop and do something more interesting than sitting in your house scratching things,” she says.

With this, I leave her house, walking downstairs along celestially patterned wallpaper. Passing through her bright-red front door into the rain, Smith’s mystique is still intact.

from Artsy News

[sshbpodcast]

The Best Yeoman in the Fleet

By Ames

Phaser up a cup of coffee, we're toasting our hero Yeoman Rand today.  I'm not usually a non-fiction reader (let me wave my English degree at you), but Grace Lee Whitney's autobiography The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy is one of those stories that deserves to be heard.  In a few episodes of A Star to Steer Her By, we touched upon Whitney's rough experiences and ultimate removal from Star Trek, so I was curious what her side was.  While generally agreed to often be repetitive and written maybe a grade better than the Horta writes, her story is a complex and difficult one that warrants a moment of people's time.  Fun.  Let's dig in.

[images © Paramount/CBS]

Whitney launches right into the book with the account of her sexual assault during an afterparty for the episode “Miri” (is there anything that episode didn't ruin?) before going back and telling the rest of her life story relatively chronologically.  The incident with The Executive and her subsequent firing from the series literally days later made such a huge impact on her life that all other anecdotes in the book draw from this context.  I give Whitney a lot of credit not only for coming forward with this story, but also for framing it the way she does.  She has never publicly identified her assailant, and presumably took this detail to her grave.  This is not HIS story, and Whitney very consciously tries not to tell other people's stories because she didn't live them.  I applaud this mode of storytelling, though its success in the rest of the biography sort of varies, but I'll get to that in a minute.

The character Janice Rand deserved much better from the show, but she just wasn't utilized in the best way.  Instead she became a glorified office temp with fairly little agency (we've all been there) when she was meant to be Kirk's confidante, his tether when the job was getting him down, the one person on the ship who really understands him in a McCoy-Spock type of love-that-will-never-be-because-professionalism.  Dammit, Star Trek.  The producers stated that they wrote her out because Kirk couldn't be tied to one woman – especially if he was destined to plow his way through the galaxy, dick first.  I call bullshit.  There are ways to make that work in an episodic television series that seems to forget every single battle, meeting with an alien species, or silver contact lens–inducing incident that happened previously.  Other sources say she was axed due to budget concerns, but she made like $750 per episode; I'm sure each black cat was paid more.  It's entirely possible that The Executive who assaulted her had a hand in her erasure to avoid future confrontations; I wouldn't be at all surprised.  Frustrated, but not surprised.

The ordeal drove Whitney deeper into the bottle than Scotty trying to outwit an alien, Cyrano Jones at last call, and Bones on a fairly middling day, combined.  After sinking to Requiem for a Dream–level depravity, she sobered up and strove to spread the word of twelve-step programs, to tell her story of fighting the disease of alcoholism, and to help people overcome their addictions (sadly, it turns out she was too late to help a severely afflicted Roger Carmel).  So the narration throughout this section feels like it incessantly parrots Alcoholics Anonymous idioms out the gorn-hole, which gets tiresome, but Whitney lived it and really owns her experiences, so let's move on.

The jesus stuff, oh boy.  What gets a little weird and preachy is the end of the book when Whitney refound religion, to which I say whatever floats your boat as long as you're not imposing your beliefs on other people, but whoops, that didn't happen.  She spends a whole chapter spouting religious fundamentals against Gene Roddenberry's well-known atheist views, which left a sour taste in my mouth considering she'd made such a point to clarify she wasn't going to tell anyone else's stories.  He had already died by the time she was writing this, stop trying to convert him, lady!

I'll say this: if you or anyone you know struggles with addiction, read this book (and probably seek help too, but this book is a start).  Star Trek nearly destroyed Grace Lee Whitney, and Star Trek also saved her life.  She was harshly honest, saucily funny, and as willful as they come; I still believe she was written out of TOS way too early.  That's show biz for ya.

I’d love to get my hands on more autobiographies to put through the wringer, so be sure to keep listening, follow “A Star to Steer Her By” on Facebook and Twitter, and please (please) be sure to tip your yeoman.

[nofomoartworld]

Art F City: We Went to Frieze, Part One: Seagull Poop, People Poop, and Demon Poop

The Frieze entrance. Photo: Paddy Johnson

Every year Frieze installs a massive tent on Randall’s Island and lures jetsetters from across the globe to its contemporary art fair. This year, the fair expanded its usual roster of contemporary art galleries to include a few secondary market stalwarts as well. Newcomers to the fair included Bernard Jacobson Gallery, Castelli Gallery, and Axel Vervoordt and Eykyn Maclean.

That’s not a huge change in the landscape of the fair, but notably the fair’s director, Victoria Siddall, told the Art Newspaper recently that there was a significant uptick in applications from galleries in this market. Is Frieze grooming the New York market for an edition of their London-based Frieze Masters (a fair focused on secondary market art works)? Only time will tell.  

Meanwhile, Frieze New York is much better than usual. Art fair standards that drag these events down—geometric abstraction, process based abstraction, and assembly line art works by A-list artists—were few and far between. Overall, the work on view seemed unusually fresh and thoughtful. Neither are words we normally use to describe art fair art, let alone that at Frieze.

Jon Rafman, Dream Journal, 2017, single-channel video

Michael: The first artwork we saw entering Frieze this year was a painting by Tala Madani of a man crawling away from the viewer, scrotum in tow. The last piece we saw was a Jon Rafman animation that involved voluptuous young women wearing a xanax cap, popping demons’ pimples, navigating holes in space time, and pooping balls of demon blood.

Paddy: Well, technically speaking the first work we saw was an Elmgreen & Dragset piece at Massimo De Carlo that placed a plaster vulture on top of a wire fence and gate with a sign that read “Miracle”. It seemed like an appropriate way to start the fair. I interpreted this message to mean that as fair visitors, we’re all scavengers seeking the false hope that art provides.  

Michael: Ha! I literally had to convince myself it wasn’t a reference to the gated-off holy town (with meta-promotion) in HBO’s The Leftovers. But I’m pleasantly surprised by how much we enjoyed Frieze this year. In a strange way, some of the booths reminded me of NADA a few years ago, back when we actually liked NADA. By that I mean the boring, fussy, predictable stuff we expect from “mature” fairs seems to have retreated significantly at Frieze. So many booths this year felt fun, for lack of a better word.

A few quickly-identifiable trends:

Political work that didn’t take itself too seriously (and some that did).

Less video and installation.

Artists referencing classical architecture in new ways (works that wouldn’t look out of place in an old townhouse with a very modern renovation, perhaps?)

Afro-centric photography

Playful paintings (Plenty of figuration including strange nudes or more-fun-looking abstraction).

More people wearing Comme des Garçons than I had ever seen in one room in real life. (Thanks Met Gala).

Text based neon

Mirrors on furniture

Seagull paintings with poop

Here are some of the highlights (and a few lowlights) from Frieze, with more to come tomorrow:

Elmgreen & Dragset at Massimo De Carlo

Tala Madani at David Kordansky Gallery

R.H. Quaytman, “D. Kasper”, 2017, Silkscreen ink, diamond dust, gesso on two wood panels with self. Miguel Abreu Gallery.

Paddy: Miguel Abreu Gallery’s stock and trade might best be described as careful formalism paired with academic intelligence, and the booth showcased some of the best versions of this ranging from a Liz Deschenes striped chromogenic print to a Hans Bellmer photograph of a doll dismembered and bound. None of these works photograph well, including the R.H. Quaytman above made with diamond dust. I’m assuming the work above refers to artist Dawn Kasper, who perhaps most famously transplanted her studio to the Whitney Biennial in 2015. Normally, Quaytman has a tome of background that goes into her paintings. None of that is visible here, though. It’s just a foot ornamented with lines diamond dust—a rather pristine representation of a performance artist whose studio looks like a hoarders depot.

Michael: That’s funny: this is the kind of work I was excited to see less of this year. I was bored almost immediately upon walking into the booth.

Paddy: Why?

Michael: I suppose it all felt familiar? I think I was in a headspace of wanting to be surprised all day and this just looked like such an art fair booth. Even when I found kinda average works from artists I really love (Marilyn Minter at Salon 94, for example) I just wanted to move on to something new.

Paddy: I’d agree that the Bellmer’s were lesser works from his overall oeuvre, but the quality of the Liz Deschenes wowed and surprised me. (It is made up of white glossy stripes and impossible to photograph, so sorry—no reproduction here.) It’s exactly the kind of work I’d dismiss as easy minimalist abstraction, except that in the same way that a Daniel Buren stripe painting can kind of vibrate from the wall, so too did the subtle undulations of the fading black and white stripes in her print. If there was any way to photograph it I would have made it a highlight.

Adriano Costa at Mendes Wood DM

Michael: I can’t tell if Adriano Costa’s work is terrible or brilliant… and for that I have a total art crush. We first spotted a painting comprising spray paint on ugly HGTV-makeover-show-looking tiling, which read “My Boyfriend is Vegan”. I literally LOLed. Another piece features real tools sewn to the canvas and another is covered in knee-length socks the artist has ironed-on phrases to. The majority of these socks just ask “FANCY A FUCK?”

Paddy: I suppose if you’re going to put text on socks affixed to a painting that’s a reasonable message?

John Currin at Gagosian, Installation view

I’m not sure I can forgive John Currin for being a Republican, but I have to acknowledge the skill of these drawings. The left half of the booth is weaker than the right, which tends to have a few more fully rendered images that have been more thought out. As per usual with Currin, the weirder, the better.

John Currin at Gagosian

Andres Serrano, “America” at Galerie Nathalie Obadia

Michael: Boy, French/Belgian Galerie Nathalie Obadia probably thought they had hit the mother-of-all-timely/conceptual-bombs when someone remembered “Oh yeah, didn’t Andres Serrano do a photo series after 9/11 where he took pictures of Muslim girls and Mexican workers and Donald Trump for some reason and American flags with blood on them and called it ‘America’? Like back when Donald Trump was just a weird C-List celebrity? So deep and prescient!”

The problem with this improbably hot-button-relevant series from over a dozen years ago is that the work is just terrible. The fact that Serrano’s response to 9/11 was to photograph “BLACK PEOPLE! WHITE PEOPLE! INDIAN PEOPLE! FAMOUS PEOPLE!” like a buy-the-world-a-coke commercial (that’s selling me what, exactly?) is so cheesy. That this series now looks important because it features Donald Trump as a sitter and he’s an asshole to the demographics of the other sitters just makes this more cringe-worthy.

Paddy: These aren’t even good commercial portraits. The backgrounds looks like they’re made from cheap colored gels and the only visual trick to the work is that he’s managed to infuse the skin tones with some of the same lighting tones. Someone needs to show his bunny rabbit series. There’s no intellectual heft to them either, but there, the cheeseball backgrounds seem funny—like intentional faux-preciousness for an already ridiculous concept—rabbit portraits. 

Roman Ondak, “Swap”, 2011, Performance, edition 3 of 5 at Esther Schipper.

Paddy: Okay, I know this looks like a terrible photo of this poor lad, but it’s actually incredibly illustrative of the annoying qualities in this performance, which is why we’re using it. (Also, it’s the only photo we have.) The performance title, “Swap”, tells a viewer everything they need to know—the guy pictured above sits at a table for four days, swapping one item for another, in the hopes of swapping upwards. It’s an art fair, though, so when we saw him all he’d been able to do was swap business cards.

Michael, you refused his business card swap offer when you were approached, explaining that that’s the last thing you want more of at a fair. When he tried to tell you this card would be art, I lost my manners. “OoooOOOOooooh, Art!” I told him, laughing hysterically. After that he refused to talk to me.

Anyway, apologies to the man in the chair, but this Roman Ondak performance deserves a special place in hell. What in God’s name is the purpose of this piece? To unpack and aggrandize the concept of swapping? Sell someone else.  

Michael: I kept thinking this performance was never meant for an art fair. At a gallery in a warehouse district in Berlin (the gallery’s hometown) I am sure the exchanges would be much more interesting. Here, of course the only thing people would have with them are business cards or maybe an overpriced bottle of juice. Don’t they make you check all your personal effects at the door of the tent?

Paddy: I still think he should have took the elastic a nearby photographer offered him. He could have done better with that.

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