art - others

Seen In Chelsea While Everyone Was in Miami

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gallery

carl ostendarp

Top: Unnamed hippie gallery that doesn't allow photos (or so they told me after this was taken)--presumably so you will not take your fuzzy 45 degree angle snapshots and correct them in a computer and sell the resulting imperfect images as prints on a blanket out on the street. Or because soul-capturing photos destroy the gallery's contemplative pan-cultural vibe (if you can ignore the half-drunk cocktails and cigarette butts on the stairs outside). These people have been sending me press releases for their shows so I take that as an implied waiver of any "no publicity" rule.

Bottom: Image in the back room of the Carl Ostendarp retrospective at Elizabeth Dee. Linguists might call this painting a nugatory declarative illocutionary speech act, in that it answers the question "who is this painting by?" without giving any actual information.

Tourist Cabins on Park Avenue

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Donna Dennis

Donna Dennis, Tourist Cabins on Park Avenue, 2007. This is not as cool as the kids who lived in a furnished squat inside the Providence Mall, or the J. G. Ballard story about the man who eked out a Robinson Crusoe-like existence in a gap between freeways, but it does qualify as an example of interstitial architecture. When I was a kid I used to drive by a real estate office in a vacant lot that looked like this cabin. I always used to imagine living in it. As an adult I've spent some time in oversized closets--but not on traffic medians. (Photo-Peter Mauss/ESTO)

Update: Ha, guess I should have clarified that the cabins are artworks. Simon Sellars at Ballardian has more thoughts on them in the context of urban slippage zones: "In an over-commodified, all-seeing, all devouring age in which every point on the map seems to have been articulated, colonised and claimed, the inarticulate nature of these ‘blurred zones’ generates a readymade, real-world wormhole, one foot within reality, the other foot without."

Carl D'Alvia

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Carl D

An editioned resin sculpture. Look closely and you see two monkeys embracing; fur covers their bodies and joins them together and merges with the base, like some horrible Telepod accident from The Fly. But sensuous too--D'Alvia's careful carving of the strands of fur in the original wax (or clay?) model makes the work ecstatic rather than merely grotesque.