Hello, I am back! If anyone might have missed me the past couple weeks in ARTPOST, all was painfully due to my computer crashing. Many arty things to report, but lets do the 'time machine', not all at once...
My lovely Swiss friend Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky is like my artist doppelganger in situ (she was also in NYC for 3 months to check out the city), and like a cat, came back 10 days later 'hungry for art', in her words. Last Thursday evening, after visiting Eva's group exhibition in DUMBO, we decided to walk the Manhattan bridge for dumplings and to Jeff Koons curated show of the Greek collector Dakis Joannou's art at the New Museum. We both thought it was time, seeing as Thursday nights are free, and it was a sign that I saw old Jeff make an adorable cameo as a politician in 'MILK' the evening before. He's a real good talker all right!
Starting on the top floor to work our way down the 'SKIN FRUIT' (yawn, that's actually the title of the show), it wasn't that all the work was necessarily bad, but we already expected it to be a bad show. What we didn't expect was this - an insane, amazing situation that was completely sublime and would have made Tino Sehgal really happy (he has a work in the show as we find out later). Here is Eva's description:
“Today in the New Museum we saw the most beautiful art piece, only realizing after that what we were witness of was not a work of art but a moment in time which seemed so absurd and bewitched from our viewpoint that we could only explain it by calling it a work of art. There is this little "balcony" like view down on the narrow stairs that lead from the 4th to the 3th floor. When looking down on the stairs we saw 5 people. Amy was already looking down when I joined here. Something was odd. All the people seemed frozen, and without movement for many minutes. One of two women standing together was moving very slightly, a third was standing in a way that she was blocking the stairs. I was sure that she was a sculpture, as I could not explain it to myself in any other way. Facing this woman and with his back to us was a man leaning on the wall with a white plastic shopping bag. Also he seemed to be out of movement, frozen. It was a uncanny situation and at the same time so perfect, natural and logical that you cant help but doubt if what you are seeing is something that is staged and made up. As longer we observed the more convinced we got that what we where seeing were sculptures not real people, but we couldn't be sure. It all was just too perfect, how they where standing, the everyday poses but also ordinary clothes and things they where carrying with them (white plastic bag). The woman in front who was not interacting with the two others after a time slowly looked up at us, then just walked down the stairs and out of the scene. Just like that. Ok, I thought, so it's not sculpture, it's performance that seems to get to a ending. But although I understood her now as a character in a performance I was somehow still convinced that what we where seeing were puppets, until the young man moved his leg. It was so weird, and how I explained to myself was that this puppet has a little motor in his leg, that makes him able to do this movement. Because how else could he have moved? But then, with any pre-warning the two last persons on our imaginary stage walked down the stairs and away.
So what happened? What where we witness of? Was it the white cube walls we were surrounded by that made us experience this tiny bit of reality as a wonderful and special art piece? Or was it a frozen, transcendental moment in time?? Is this what art is supposed to be like? And what are we going to make of it?”
To me, the situation was totally baroque in its composition because the woman on the stairs had one foot forward, with her finger pointing on the banister, head tilted at ¾ profile, actually each person was looking in a different direction in perfect tableaux which echoed the Kiki Smith sculpture above on the wall, in relation to the other figures standing in their suggestive stillness... that slight quivering of the man's leg became completely horrifying. What an amazing ART! We thought. And so we proceeded down the next floor because we wanted to look at the 'piece' from a closer perspective, only to realize all the figures had all disappeared. Omg, FREAKY! We thought. We even had to ask a guard to verify whether there was a performance that happened, of which there wasn't. What art nerds we are, and as Eva says, 'so losers'.
But I later realized how the rest of the exhibition was filled with all assortment of distorted, badass figurative sculpture (the curating!) from Liza Lou, Maurizio Cattelan to Paul Mccarthy, David Altmejd, Urs Fischer etc etc. This made our situation all the more appropriate, unsettling and shocking than any actual work in the show. Which made all the more apparent the strained, affected intention of the whole exhibition. Or it could be that the show was so effective that we were vibed out by it unconsciously, I'm hovering on that notion!
Photo: Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky
