008. Hot Pursuit
Enjoying the never-ending-ness of art to see.
I never feel like there is no good art to see. I typically feel like there is too much!
I know the hot take du jour is that contemporary art (as a whole, as if you can even lump together ALL the art currently being made under one umbrella) is failing us. It is “too woke,” uninventive, derivative, overworked and yet lazy at the same time. I personally think the people who feel this way should go see more art. Just keep searching. Maybe skip the big museum biennials and mega gallery shows that irk you so. Go somewhere else. Resist the urge to be so cynical.
Recently, I watched Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001) for the first time. The plot is a wild goose chase that occurs across timelines and realities—an older actress searching for a rogue dissident she rescued as a girl. She spends her whole life looking for him. At the end of the film, she learns his fate and realizes that she was more interested in the process of looking for him than what would happen if she found him. The final line is especially poignant; the actress says “After all, what I really love is the pursuit of him.”
Sometimes I slow down and think, what am I really looking for? Why all of the running around, the endless churn of seeing art in galleries and museums? Am I just constantly chasing this high of connecting with a piece of art, with other artists? That doesn’t always happen. Is it still worth it? But it’s not only that—I love the pursuit. I love walking around, I love sharpening my vision, talking to people about art. It’s social, it’s physical, it’s exciting. The goal is not to only see amazing art, but to participate in something truly interesting and strange and complicated.
Art is endless. You can find that exhausting or you can find that exhilarating. You don’t have to love a product to love its pursuit.
Keeping it short and sweet this week with some additional Tribeca recs (I had every intention of bopping around Chelsea but was rerouted!) and some required reading for all aesthetes and Deep Thinkers.
Ian Miyamura at Bureau (112 Duane Street) - New-to-me painter with a few different styles of paintings that are alike mainly in their considered perfection and presentation. Miyamura presents colorblocked, geometric panels, chess-inspired still lifes, and a few nature paintings. Eclectic but not discordant. I saw echoes of Ruscha, Seurat, and Mondrian here!
Go downstairs to check out the group show in the basement. I particularly liked the two Em Rooney sculptures in the middle of the room.
Gwen O’Neil at Almine Rech (361 Broadway) - I used to have a lot of ideas about genres of art I “like” and “do not like.” Anything abstract was OUT for a long time. Artists like Richard Tinkler and Gwen O’Neil and many others have forced my hand on this. How lovely to sit or stand and get lost in something non-figurative. It’s like listening to instrumental music rather than lyrical music. Sometimes you need to ingest something mysterious.
Downstairs there is a hodgepodge of what I presume are available works? There’s a fun Genevieve Figgis, who I love and rarely get to see IRL.
Roe Ethridge at Andrew Kreps (22 Cortland Alley) - Is there anything sexier than a large expensive photograph in a minimal frame? I really like them in general and these ones specifically. Ethridge is one of the great photographers who manages to straddle commercial, editorial, and fine art photography. Or maybe he eludes categorization altogether, where any of these things could be all of these things, where usually they are siloed by purpose and then ranked in purity by sanctimonious art people. {oops no photos of this, just go}
“Behind the Bedroom Door” at James Cohan (48 Walker Street) - A sprawling group exhibition that “explores the private realms where intimacy and solitude share space with the inner life of dreams and fantasies.” There are some heavy hitters in this bunch and it’s certainly a ripe theme around which to organize a show. There’s a small Lisa Yuskavage painting (always a fan), and I briefly mistook this Elizabeth Glaessner painting for a Cathleen Clarke, which is a compliment as I love Clarke’s work.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Jilaine Jones at 15orient (72 Walker, 3rd Floor - enter in Cortland Alley, look up for the sign on the corner, it’s confusing) - Even if rusty looking metal sculpture is not your thing (it’s not really mine), go to enjoy the beautiful, airy space that is really special and smells like sawdust and cigs.
Have you heard of The Book of Tea before? It’s a short book that was written in 1906 by Okakura Kakuzō. Okakura wanted to help Westerners understand the culture of Japan and some of the unifying beliefs of Asia, more broadly speaking. The book is about tea customs in Japan but, because of tea’s lofty place in Japanese culture, it’s really about society, how to live, and everything that’s wrong with people (our base human nature has not changed, apparently, since 1906).
There is a whole chapter called “ART APPRECIATION” (there is also a whole chapter called “FLOWERS”). I like what Okakura has to say about being a spectator of art. He writes:
“The sympathetic communion of minds necessary for art appreciation must be based on mutual concession. The spectator must cultivate the proper attitude for receiving the message, as the artist must know how to impart it.”
Okakura also notes in this chapter that “we classify too much and enjoy too little” when it comes to art. I think we all have a lot to learn from this century-old, pocket-sized book.
As always, enjoy the pursuit of something beautiful this week :) xx