New York art is spinning off in different directions. Small drawings in Williamsburg and upscale oil in the Meatpacking District. Politics and teen angst. Radical or accessible. So what's up with the art scene? Hynek Pallas hung around studios, sipped white wine at Chelsea openings and met the new artists. A month later we had the answer.
While making the rounds of the gallery openings in Chelsea, I stop to sum up my impressions of a month in the New York art world. The evening offers up more of what I've already seen during my stay in the city: a young art scene that is oddly homogeneous and still dominated by the naïve naturalist trend of recent years. It's filled with birds and reindeer, drawn or in collages, and the more escapist elements of surrealism. With psycheldia and fantasy, it feels like a whole generation is longing for the sixties of its parents, but they are taking a detour through the eighties wallpaper of their childhood rooms, their storybooks and the role-playing games of their teen years. I see one of the clearest examples at the Oliver Kamm Gallery in Chelsea: an oil painting by Van Hanos that's looks like the graffiti artist Futura 2000 got stuck in a bad acid trip during a game of Dungeons and Dragons.
This collective, apparently apolitical escapism is what the discussion keeps coming back to as I make the rounds, talking to New York's gallerists, artists, & curators. That and the fact that artists barely out of school have to sell their work on market terms with no incubation period at all. It should be easy to carry, easy to sell-these are the key words. Van's painting, over a meter square, is the exception. Much of the art in the galleries today consists of small drawings, especially in Williamsburg.
Here at the Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery (the last name “Meaningless” spoofs the “heavy” names of Chelsea), Matthew Chase says that such art has created a new group of buyers outside traditional art-buying circles.
--Smaller, more accessible, relatively cheap work is more common today because many current buyers, especially in Brooklyn, are young people interested in art they can understand. And a lot of them want to support young Brooklyn artists.
Kelie Bowman of Cinders Gallery on Havemeyer Street thinks the trend is partly the result of a shaky economy:
--The recent wave of video art has begun to ebb out for the same reason. Drawing is cheaper, especially for young artists who don't have big workspaces.
Cinders' stated goal is to make art more accessible to people outside the institutionalized art world of Chelsea:
--A lot of people who wouldn't go to galleries otherwise come here because we have a shop in the gallery where we sell books, tee-shirts and postcards by the artists, says Kelie, who operates the gallery along with some artist friends.
What's interesting, though, is that Cinders is essentially showing the same easily accessible, narrative drawings that many established Chelsea galleries show. Kelie's explanation is that the established art world, just like mainstream culture, had opened its arms to outsider folk art.
--But that's not just a bad thing, she says. Even if some of the magic disappears, it enables more artists to live on what they create.
Not everyone is quite so positive towards the accessible illustrative art trend, though. Ingrid Ditner at the Chelsea gallery Ditner Fine Arts is plain irritated by it. She thinks the artists aren't taking any risks, “and by risks I don't mean showing naked bodies.”
--Young artists need to start investing in their own ideas, not just looking at what sells, she says. Many Chelsea collectors have started hunting down young artists before they even get out of Columbia or Yale. Of course, we have to nurture talents, but it can be dangerous to buy work from artists when they are too young.
Many influential voices chime in on her side in a New York Times article about how Chelsea gallerists are buying work from art students at UCLA. The Los Angeles based collector Dean Valentine notes in the article that artists “need time to find their voice, painters especially need time to develop their hands.” Gallerist Randy Sommer adds that the risk involved in an art market that flirts aggressively with young artists is that the artists may simply stop taking creative risks when they see what sells.
One New York artist who has gone his own way is Joshua Abelow, whose abstract paintings of geometric figures have gradually been gaining hype.
Why aren't you doing drawings like everybody else?
--Both as a person and as an artist, it's to my advantage to put my paintings and my own vision at the forefront, says Joshua. It may be a while before I have my first one-man show in New York, but I just can't think that way. I can't bring money into the process of artistic creation. Being creative has nothing to do with money.
Twenty seven year old artist and curator Kamrooz Aram is currently taking part in the Greater New York show at PS1. He agrees:
--There's too much style and too little content right now. And it's the market that's driving the trend. When style and market meet like this, it takes a toll on content.
--Artists around 25 are focusing on sixties retro, hippies and psychedelia, the same things you see on tee-shirts at Urban Outfitters, Kamrooz adds. It doesn't feel good.
Artist Pali Kashi agrees that there's a certain sameness of approach among young New York artists. She thinks politics is part of the reason:
--A lot of people are doing art as a career. They know what sells, so a lot of work looks the same. I think it's because of the political climate. For one thing, people are apathetic because it doesn't seem like it's possible to change anything - I mean, we really wanted Kerry to win. For another, today's culture is very PC and conservative, which means artists don't dare step out of line with what everybody else is doing.
Monya Rowe, owner of the Chelsea gallery of the same name, disagrees:
--No, that's not correct. Of course artists think about sales sometimes, but not when they are painting the individual paintings. That's the gallerist's job. I don't think it makes any difference where they went to school, either.
However, Rowe agrees that today's young artists seem to be stuck in a teen angst phase, and that the naivist, youthful DIY paintings and drawings have overstayed their welcome. “Too last year,” she says.
But with more and more young artists focusing on style, and more and more going through long training programs, shouldn't craft be coming to the fore in contemporary art?
Yes, says Kelie at Cinders, but she's not sure that it's the result of more artists going to school:
--There are so many artists today that you have to stand out and have skills, she says. She shows me a collection of beehive-shaped houses David McQueen made.
--He even built his own little saw to do this.
Another example of technical virtuosity is the artist Glen Baldridge, who combines renaissance technique with airbrushing and silkscreen painting to create a unique style.
Unique, yes - and superb. But where are the artists on the barricades, the truly politically engaged? In a city so firmly polarized against the rest of America, one expects to find artists out on the front lines. Especially since this feeling suffuses every aspect of American alternative culture.
--Today's young artists are not political because they are isolated, cut off, says Ingrid Ditner.
Ingrid grew up in the sixties and thinks - not unusually for her generation - that today's young people are far too uninterested in what's going on in the world.
--But bring back the draft and then you'll see things start happening, she says.
Not even that would make a difference according to artist and curator Kamrooz:
--People assume that artists would have something to say about the society around them if they weren't escaping into pictures of cuddly animals. But most American artists are as isolated as Americans are generally. They wouldn't necessarily have anything to say even if they tried.
Yet perhaps this naivism and escapism are essentially a political reaction. Suzanne Butler at the rough Lower East Side gallery CANADA thinks the naïve bird images and naturalist romanticism can actually be interpreted politically:
--It came after 9/11, she says. At first people made directly political art, but now artists are showing us what they want: calm idylls. I also see it as a rejection of the hard, cynical punk revival wave that washed over us for a couple of years.
Joshua Abelow agrees:
--The psychedlia and folktronica in today's art and music are direct consequences of 9/11. People escape into it. They want the world to be a kinder, gentler place. And art is much more interesting today than it was five years ago. People are trying to say something. Joshua mentions Jules de Balincourt's witty paintings as an example of good political art.
Kamrooz, who also teaches 20-something art students, thinks he sees a generation gap in attitudes to political art:
You know how everybody wondered what would happen to art after September 11th? The answer is, nothing. Not if you look at the long-term effects on people who had already schooled themselves as artists. But now I see that the people who were teenagers and had just started painting then are much more politically committed today. And it's not just trendy Bush-bashing. They are as likely to comment on the housing shortage in Baltimore as on foreign affairs.
Kamrooz points at one of his own paintings and laughs self-consciously:
--This has gone on a bit too long. I hope that content and meaning will be the next big trend.
JOSHUA ABELOW
--I consider myself a scientist, says Joshua Abelow. When I paint, I ask myself what I can discover. If the results don't surprise me, it ends up in the trash.
In his Lower East Side studio, Joshua Abelow takes a break from working on his third painting of the day - like the earlier ones, an abstract variation on triangles and circles in brown and red - to explain his working philosophy. Of all the paintings I see during my stay in New York, his are unquestionably the most striking. Their strict lines are far from the wild surrealism of Joshua's contemporary Kamrooz Aram, and they have nothing in common with the trend towards narrative illustration. Joshua has no difficulty summing up his attitude to current trends:
--If, as an artist, you worry too much about what other people think. . .then you have big problems.
In school, Joshua was into neo-expressionism, especially Julian Schnabel, and his work eventually led him to Ross Bleckner. By chance, a classmate happened to meet Bleckner and got his address. Joshua wrote him a letter and asked whether he needed an assistant. A few months later, he moved into Bleckner's loft at 77 White Street, better known as the Mudd Club - the artistic home of the Talking Heads, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring (who left behind an original chalk drawing on the wall of Joshua's bedroom studio).
In the fall of 2001, Joshua was living just a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center.
--After 9/11, I started asking myself why, ultimately, I paint, he says. I wanted to do something that was a direct response, and ended up doing symbolic paintings that included towers. After a while I'd had enough, so recently I've started working with more abstract images.
Joshua's career received a shot in the arm from an unconventional corner. When editor Claudia Wu founded Me magazine, she happened to think of the talented boy in another class at her school whom she had never dared talk to. She e-mailed him and suddenly Joshua found himself a cover boy.
--It was a bit of a shock to go into Universal News on Broadway and see myself, he says. I spun on my heel and ran out of there.