One thing I sometimes do when I visit New York is to visit the galleries just to see who is doing what in the visual arts space. I’ve only managed it three or four times since SOHO finally surrendered & turned into a district of infinitely overpriced shoe shops, the gallery scene drifting up to the eastern end of Chelsea. So I felt I was overdue & made that Thursday’s game plan.

 

I didn’t have that much time, either, wanting to get out of town before the afternoon rush hit & having gotten off to a late start that morning in part due to the clutter in the Gramercy Park Hotel lobby & in the immediate streets outside resulting from a shoot for the TV series Third Watch. Henry Winkler is the guest star in this episode & is going to be confronted by regulars Molly Price & Jason Wiles as he comes out the front door of the hotel. Like most film & TV shoots, this one seems to involve large numbers of people mostly milling around, with industrial strength power cords everywhere. I’ve never actually watched an entire episode of Third Watch, tho I could say that for most television, and I can’t say that this episode looks at all scintillating. One thing I did note, tho, was that Winkler was very careful never to make eye contact with anyone between shots, unlike Price & Wiles who stood around chatting with the techies & seemed far more relaxed. But, hey, it’s their show.

 

My timing for this trip wasn’t great in terms of seeing great art – the new Whitney Biennale doesn’t open for another week and several galleries (Mary Boone, Matthew Marks, Gagosian) were closed, preparing for shows due to open the next day. Mostly I hit 25^th & 24^th streets, exhausting myself in the process without ever really running into anything extraordinary.

 

Well, there were three significant exceptions to that statement – work that has had me thinking about it for the past several days now. 

 

The first was Hong Hao’s show at Chambers Fine Arts on the role of reading in China – it consists of mocked up books, giant scanned collages of books – for example Mao’s Red Book in literally dozens of editions – plus every other bit of reading matter that one might imagine – i.d. cards, food containers, whatever. There are tromp l’oeil two-sided works that appear to be an open three-dimensional book (one of these is blank), so that you have to approach closely to realize that it’s really two-dimensional. The room overwhelms you in the way that Marcel Duchamp’s gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art overwhelms you, maybe even more so. Unfortunately, of all the shows I saw, this one has the least competent or effective web site.

 

The second show was William T. Wiley, a longtime Northern California artist who had a show that has now closed at the Charles Cowles Gallery called “More than Meats, the I.” Wiley is one of those Northern California souls – Robert Hudson & Robert Arneson are two others – who has always struck me as the perfect visual arts analogy for other San Francisco-Marin-Sonoma cultural trends, such as the San Francisco Sound of the 1960s. Mellow, witty, formally intelligent without being formalist, full of color. So I was surprised to see the rather sharp political turn from his recent work. One diptych in particular struck me as moving almost to the sort of postmodern space I associate with David Salle, but a Salle with brooding politics. Mellow is not one of the terms one would employ to characterize the show at Cowles. Despair might be far closer to the target, especially with a piece in which a young George W is being scolded by a teacher for drawing a giant cock on the classroom blackboard. 

 

The third show is a collection of recent paintings by Hermann Nitsch at Mike Weiss Gallery, mostly what he calls splatter paintings, giant drip productions that would scream nostalgia for Jackson Pollock save for one notable distinction – they’re monochromatic, impossibly deep yellow or an equally impossibly rich red. One gallery in each color. Some paintings have a crossbar attached to the front of the canvas from which hangs a plain t-shirt that has become fused to the rest of the work through this process of spilled paint. And some have saw horses in front of them on which are laid old priests’ vestments.

 

My sense of Nitsch is as a conceptual artist, part of Viennese actionism – and his productions have a fixation with the crucifixion that Mel Gibson might understand. But like so many artists whose primary work is more cognitive than material – think of Christo – Nitsch has figured out that what a conceptual artist can sell is documentation. So it is important that these pieces fit into the (literal) iconography of his major obsessions, just as it is important that they look good as art. Unlike Pollock, tho, there is no interest here in documenting the sanctified moment of creation – no equivalent to that spilled line that is essential to Pollock’s weave. But it made me wonder just how much the larger projects of these conceptual pieces he does are predicated on the need to spin off enough snazzy documenta for the collectors.

 

From these two shows – both of which moved, puzzled & to some degree troubled me – the drop-off struck me as pretty steep, down to shows which were technically excellent, but whose intellectual premises irritated me. A good example of this was Robert Longo’s loving & heroic – both in presentation & size – charcoal renditions of the atomic era. What makes this work so cynical – in all the wrong senses – is its knowing aspect of retro beauty: mushroom cloud as designer object. In a similar vein, Bettina Von Zwehl’s photographs of women, always dressed in black, standing under what appears to be an off-camera hose – the show is titled Rain – presents a show so knowing in what works, what is good formally & yet just hip enough culturally, that one feels thoroughly manipulated by the sum of these pieces, even as – or possibly even because – they are so well executed. More interesting, because it’s less well executed – you can see her thinking in the interstices between works, not simply presenting Terrific Output – is Joy Episalla’s exploration of birds & lawn chairs at Debs & Co. But the project is overwhelmed by its need to present itself in all its projectness.

 

Another level down, there was work that exceptionally well produced, but which felt cognitively empty to me. The first of these was Jem Southam’s show of British nature photography at the Robert Mann Gallery at 210 11^th Avenue. Southam uses color in the most painterly fashion imaginable and any of these works would look great on a bank wall – that’s also their limitation. In a very similar fashion, Michael Abrams’ show of oil landscapes at the Sears Peyton Gallery presents the most fawning nostalgia for American impressionism I’ve seen in ages. These too will look fabulous on the walls of a major financial institution.

 

Then, of course, there were all the works that wouldn’t look good even on a bank wall, which were conceptually muddled, derivative without any attitude and/or hopeless muddled. There’s a lot of that out there these days. I’m not sure that this hasn’t always been the case. But if I go into another small dark room to watch a bad video only to notice that there is sand on the floor, I’m going to spew. Or abstractions that scream out that the last person to have a good idea about abstract art was Hoffman or Pollock or DeKooning.

 

Of all of these shows, only Hao’s felt at all new to me, doing what I take to be a primary task of art – cognitively pushing into the real world in such a way as to add definition. And in the process expanding the definition of art itself. Hao was born & raised & lives in Beijing, not where you’d expect someone active in the contemporary art scene to live. He’s also under 40. Chambers Fine Arts is at 210 11^th Street and the show will be up until March 20.