Interview

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The dinner for Oscar de la Renta, chairman of Spanish chain Mango's El Botón-Mango Fashion Awards in Barcelona, kicked off the Awards in a pastel Venetian-style government building. Derek Blasberg described the setting best when turned to me and whispered, "I feel like we're inside a wedding cake." Last year Valentino headed up the awards—and if neither he nor de la Renta are so Gaudi (gaudy?) in their classic tastes on modernism, both capture Barcelona's Old World familial intimacy, while lending the awards a global platform. Fledgling designer Moises de la Renta dined with his father's friends, no doubt promoting his new collection MDLR (for which New York-based DJ Lissy Trullie plays muse). Trullie couldn't make it—neither could the rumored guest, tennis star Rafael Nadal—although we learned later that we'd missed a different Nadal.

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Billboards are cluttered with wheatpaste ads for TopShop or Terry Richardson's campaign for Belvedere, indie album releases or forthcoming horror films. Occasionally a witty advert will cause us to think, like about what to buy or where we should eat next. But generally, we pass the plywood facades that go up to Bandaid a construction site or dilapidated building on legally-owned property, and without even thinking about it, we buy something or eat something!

When Jordan Seiler found out that many of the billboards operated by monopolistic (and very profitable) advertising company NPA Outdoor were in fact illegal, and for the most part ignored by the city, he took action. Last week, Seiler and his arts group PublicAdCampaign took back walls for artists and the public at large, an act of détournement intended to shed light on the illegal nature of these advertising structures and propose alternative visions of public communication. Their aim was to generate discussion about who the public serves by organizing an ad space take over. 26 whitewashers in orange worker vests painted over 120 sites in Manhattan and Brooklyn with cans of white paint. A team of 50 artists revisited the site the same day to fill the space with their work, however each saw fit. Painters like Lauren Doe turned her delicate drawings into wheatpaste posters that danced down the billboard outside of the Bowery Bar & Grill, and recession-inspired street campaign Enjoy Banking (an anonymous group reputedly related to the former Canal Chapter and Stanton Chapter) warped their collective tags into colorful imagery at sites like Houston and Mulberry and Kenmare and Bowery. The billboards were in effect turned into street canvases, art living outside white boxes and in the public arena. Although one assault team was arrested, New Yorkers appeared to mostly ignore the law-breakers. The NPA Outdoor, however, retaliated by having their teams put their illegal advertising back up early Sunday morning. Will this wildposter war continue? Keep your eyes open.

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Since it started six years ago, Pecha Kucha Night has established itself as Tokyo's premiere creative gathering, and while the straightforward formula has become a powerful vehicle for artistic expression, it has also stretched over to academia and the business world. What, you ask, is Pecha Kucha? (LEFT: THE NEW MUSEUM'S BENJAMIN GODSILL LEARNS WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT)

"Pecha kucha" literally means "chit-chat" in Japanese, and the patented (it's literally patented) form of a Power Point presentation was developed by Tokyo-based architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein of Tokyo's Klein-Dytham Architecture (KDa) to break up the stereotypical banality of the presentations; to ultimately avoid "death by Powerpoint." Klein and Dytham created the technique to give young designers a venue to meet, network, and show their work; and to attract people to SuperDeluxe, the multi-media experimental event space they had set up in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. Simply by word of mouth, the Pecha Kucha phenomenon disseminated, first in Tokyo and then through the creative community, like a virus, it spread to over 110 cities globally. The platform is simple but the end product—nothing more than knowledge and awareness of the individual presenters—is ever-changing, inspiring, fun and/or all of the above. It's a presentation meets poetry slam, "a platform for creative people to talk about creative things" (Pecha Kucha Boston's motto), where each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each, so he or she has to say what he needs to say in 6 min and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words with images. Presenters (and much of the audience) are usually from the design, architecture, photography, art and creative fields, but the academia and business communities have also caught on. For the creative community, the goal is nothing more than self-promotion and/or inspiration. There is no winner and, most of the time, no underlying theme; there are simply ideas and images in the same room with creative minds; new forms of Pecha Kucha have musical interludes (i.e. live bands) or an immediate critique of the presentation.

For over a hundred years Berlin and Tokyo have been linked by historical and art historical connections, so it was no surprise that the forward-thinking city caught on to Pecha Kucha early on. It was at the ‘20 Years of Change—Berlin Days' event at the New Museum earlier this month where I first experienced Pecha Kucha. New Museum curatorial associate Benjamin Godsill took the stage for his first Pecha Kucha experience and did exceptionally well, using various images and anecdotes to explain the undeniably controversial and often criticized (mostly by newer New Yorkers who never experienced the shifty past of the Bowery) evolution of the Bowery and construction of the glass edifice that is now the New Museum, along with the New Museum's own colorful past (i.e. running out of a dilapidated office in Soho for its first decade of existence). Artist Jacob Dyrenforth told the story of ex-marine Jim Baker, who founded natural food restaurant The Source on the Sunset Strip in L.A. in the 1960s, changed his name to Father Yod, opened a commune, and took more than a dozen wives with names like Isis and Electricity. The last presenter marked the end and we all left with maybe a few designers to look up, artists to keep on eye on or simply a few new tales. This marks the death of "death by Powerpoint," or a double negative forming a positive: the re-birth of Powerpoint. Hallelujah.

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The art world was supposed to be a place where men could grow old, a place where Picasso could re-visit the old master for decades, and be photographed, virile and shirtless, well into his fifties—if not to the same critical success, then to continuously accruing popular appeal. But the art world can also be a cruel place, for artists who aren't Richard Prince and don't make the museum circuit, especially in a New York that for the last decade or more indulged in the flowers of youth. One wonders if economic downturn means sobriety and maturity, or that artists born in the 1990s might not know an alternative to mid-career at 30. In due spirit we highlight artists Peter Saul and Barry Le Va, with shows on exhibition at David Nolan Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery, respectively.

At 75, painter Peter Saul is respected by his peers (Chuck Close, Steve DiBenedetto, and KAWS came out for the opening), but under-appreciated (or avoided) by major institutions, due at least in part to the polite white-box notion that Saul's bright and busy large-scale paintings intentionally violate good taste. The colorful scenes in this exhibition string together cartoonish depictions of large-breasted women and celebrities partaking in scenes alternatingly obscene and banal with Nazis or real-life villains like Hitler, Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Bernie Madoff. The works make prickly references to capitalism, Communism, homophobia, feminism, racism, pedophilia, and art-world politics. Saul says in the exhibition catalogue that he doesn't have "some political opinion behind it; I just hope it will be interesting" although that's for the viewer to decide. Nonetheless, this exhibition of colorful works clearly looks at the fringes and formalities of Pop, and informs the aesthetic of painters like Carroll Dunham, Elizabeth Murray and Peter Doig.

Uptown is always a safer bet for in-depth surveys and historical value, and collectors with the past at heart. At Mary Boone's Fifth Avenue location, 68-year-old artist Barry Le Va, a pioneer of both minimal and conceptual art, has a retrospective of "Cleaver Configurations," a so-called "Process" work started in 1969 up to the present, works comprised of meat cleavers embedded in the wall or the floor. Le Va's art possesses a quality rare in such reductive art: a visual representation and understanding of the process. The three wall pieces in the exhibition were each made by thrusting a cleaver into the wall at intervals equivalent to a large side step. The works are clear, direct, unadorned manifestations of a simple physical process, created without self-conscious aesthetic intention. Le Va's work is determined by the space it occupies; as one of the first Process artists, Le Va has informed generations of artists with work that was the virtuality before "virtual" was even part of the daily lexicon.


Works by Peter Saul are on view at David Nolan Gallery through May 23. The gallery is located at 527 West 29 St., New York. Barry Le Va's "Cleaver Configurations" is on view at Mary Boone Gallery through May 16. The gallery is at 745 Fifth Avenue, New York.

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