Art Hag

PS 1 presents its third installment of Greater New York, a comprehensive survey of emerging artists based in New York that takes place every five years. Taking over the whole building and focusing on the "creative process" as well as "the final artistic product," selected artists have been invited to "use spaces as studios to shoot photographs and video, create books and catalogues, rehearse performances, and experiment in various media to test the boundaries of art and its making" (from show's notes).

It was nice to see works by a few familiar names like Tauba Auerbach, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Tamar Halpern, Rashaad Newsome, and Zak Prekop and learn a bunch of new ones too. Of the 68 participating artists, ones that stood out include: David Adamo, David Brooks, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zipora Fried, Tala Madani, Hank Willis Thomas, Naama Tsabar, and Conrad Ventur.

Adamo's Untitled (the rite of spring), 2008 is a carefully and meticulously laid out installation of hundreds of wooden baseball bats covering a small gallery's entire floor, mimicking a tatami-like floor that visitors can gingerly tread across. Brooks created a two-story, decaying Preserved Forest, 2010 using nursery grown trees, earth and concrete to protest deforestation. Frazier presents a series of haunting, oddly retro-looking documentary photographs. Fried stabbed Armoire, 2008 in the back with hundreds of assorted knives and attached hundreds of glass bottles to the underside of a table creating the "udderly" Chere Maman, 2008. Madani screens her Accident Series, three darkly humored and mesmerizing painted animations. Thomas' Unbranded Reflections in Black Corporate America, 2005-2008, a series of actual adverts targeting African-Americans from 1968-2008 with their original text and logos digitally removed is a clever and fascinating examination of how the advertising industry "reinforces generalizations surrounding race, gender, and cultural identity" (from show's notes). For Untitled (speaker-wall) Tsabar used rows and rows of bookshelf speakers to create two massive, playable bass guitars that produce deep sounds and core-rattling vibrations. And Ventur's This Is My Life (Shirley Bassey), 2009 is a hypnotic 3 channel video piece using rotating crystal pendants dangling in front of the video projectors' lenses creating multiple, ghostly, spinning images of Bassey as she emotionally belts out the tune This Is My Life. Greater New York is a great introduction to a number of up-and-comers whom we'll surely be seeing a lot more from in the future. Learn more at ps1.org. Read Roberta Smith's review and see pics at nytimes.com. Through October 18th.

Architecture firm Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu is the winner of MoMA and PS1's eleventh annual Young Architects Program. Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu's urban landscape titled Pole Dance was installed in PS1's spacious courtyard June 25th, just in time for the kickoff to PS1's 2010 Warm Up outdoor concert/party series on July 3rd. The interactive environment is composed of an "interconnected system" of "25-foot-tall [fiberglass] poles on 12 x 12-foot grids connected by bungee cords whose elasticity cause the poles to gently sway..." (from ps1.org). "Each grid contains a number of playful activators, such as hammocks, pulls, misters, and rain collecting plants." Eight of the poles hold an audio device "that measures the motion" of its poles and "converts it [the motion] to sound." A net is draped over the entire structure to stabilize the poles' movement and hold giant colorful balls. A small wading pool and a sandpit complete the environment. Learn more about Pole Dance, the Young Architects Program and Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu at ps1.org and see my pics below. Through September 6th. Check out the full Warm Up schedule here.

David Brooks, Preserved Forest, 2010