Interview

RAQIB SHAW, THE DOVE OF PEACE THAT JUST WENT UNNOTICED

Friday night's opening of "A Nightmare Full of Things Unspeakable" was not an event to miss by sleeping. Curated by Nicola Vassell, who works down the street as a director of Deitch Projects, and curator/dealer Karline Moeller, the 13(!)-artist show doubled as a salon for friends in Nicola's five-floor walk-up apartment, which they call concept v.

Inspired by Vassell's and Moeller's evidently eventful summer travels, the show's theme was hysteria. "In daily life you see this hysteria; not only in politics but in sex, fear, religion, everything. The idea here was to embody this hysteria, whether it's by the artist's process or the final outcome," explained Moeller. Vassell added, "The show is based on our personal relationships with artists we love and believe in." Sounds like a behind-the-scenes in the making.

Upon entering the space, the first work is Gelitin's colorful, childish and odd collage of plastilline and wood characters. Across the hall, Katharina Sieverding's fractured, psychedelic photographic self-portrait offers a type of madness more self-reflexive but similarly extroverted. This is the first
time Sieverding's work is exhibited with that of her daughter, Pola. Sieverding, Jr., shows a lush still-life photograph of a wrist saddlebagged with designer watches and jewelry. London-based Raqib Shaw makes a similar connection of luxury to madness. His bedazzled watercolor, The Dove of Peace that Just Went Unnoticed, witnesses exotic birds pulling out the eyes and entrails of warriors. Meanwhile, Rachel Kneebone's madness is one of bodily deliquescence, mixed with a near-psychotic verve for delicacy. Kneebone's elegant porcelain tendrils sit atop a pyramid like some shrine to extra-terrestrial life-in-formation. In a home like this, what's to be precious about?



"A Nightmare Full of Things Unspeakable" is on view through January 30, Tues–Sat, 12–7 PM. concept V is located at 96 Greene Street, 5th fl.

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Artist Christopher Makos has a highly developed sense of intuition. He is, after all the man who introduced Warhol to the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring—and we know how that worked out. Makos began by apprenticing with photographer Man Ray, and according to legend showed Andy Warhol showed how to operate his first camera. On the eve of his show of Polaroids in Milan, we asked the artist to explain his five favorite instant-pictures. In another clear sign of otherworldly prescience, we get not just beautiful, crisp images that attest to the permanence of a throwaway format—but also an eerie look at OJ Simpson.


Christopher Makos, "Polaroids," is on view November 17–January 15. Photology is located at Via Moscova 25, Milan.

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Lisa Rovner and Alice Heart's project, "Message is the Medium," is composed of beautifully blended fragments from Godard films, Guy Bordin film clips, or elegant vintage footage with brands such as Agnes B., the New York Times' Style Magazine, Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle Perfume, and other high-end labels. The results represent the associations between the disparate images and the timeless essences of the labels better than many of their own contemporary ad campaigns. But is that art, or artistic advertising? Rovner and Heart were not commissioned to create the videos. So are they really just well-crafted valentines to the labels that they love?

Here I discuss their joint video project, "Message is the Medium," which named as a reference to cultural critic Marshall McLuhan's 1967 study "The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects" with Rovner and Heart, who answer as a duo.


ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: How do you distinguish between selling art and using art to sell?

LISA ROVNER AND ALICE HEART: I'm not sure we've thought about that question enough. We'd like to live in a world where one wouldn't have to... Like William Burroughs: images, millions of images, that's what we eat.  We are interested in using the space of advertising to convey messages. We see mass media as an art material, and a curatorial space.

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For the next two Sundays this month (Nov. 14 and 21), Will Cotton will turn New York's Partners & Spade Gallery into a wonderland of cakes, macaroons, pies, tarts, gorgeous girls, and the other delights that typically appear in his paintings. Cotton is living a fantasy of his own–by acting as a premier pastry chef and selling his goodies at bakery prices.

Cotton is exposing his fans to the sensual warmth and smells of his own studio, where he often personally cooks his own props on site. Cotton's pastry shop connects the visual fantasies his paintings illustrate to all of his viewers' senses that they stimulate. Here, Cotton discusses baking for gallery goers and offers tastes of the deeper socio-political, psychological and culture specific meanings that permeate our most indulgent treats.


ANA FINEL HONIGMAN:  Did you read that article in the New York Times about the man who only eats candy? You don't think he's cool, do you?

WILL COTTON: I read that. Seems like he's missing out on an awful lot of culinary pleasure. At the same time, I respect his decision to not follow conventional eating habits.

HONIGMAN: It seems that he does though. Most people out there seem to eat primarily for pleasure and immediate energy. Are you very aware of your paintings being perceived differently in different parts of the US or abroad?

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