New Yorking
December 01, 2024
I had the good fortune to spend a few days in New York last month: looking at art, listening to music, catching up with old friends, walking and more walking. I try to go at least once a year, in the fall, when a lot of new shows go up, and I always see something that blows my mind and either changes the trajectory of my art, or unlocks a door that I have been knocking on for a while. The only downside to spending time in New York is that it makes me want to leave New York, to get back into the studio to start making work immediately.
I’m going to take a minute to catalog some of the highlights. Both as a way to give credit where credit is due, but also as a way to lay some breadcrumbs that I can revisit months or years from now. Sometimes, a single work of art can change everything, but we don’t realize the impact until much later.
Thomas Schutte at MoMA. In particular, one piece where he designed his own tombstone, essentially setting a timer that would give him fifteen years to succeed as an artist — I love this so much. I have always had a tricky relationship with sculpture, and I’m not sure why. But Schutte’s dimensional works really spoke to me — there is a rawness and realness that taps into something visceral, biological. I could feel his work in my heart, in my stomach:
The KAWS collection at The Drawing Center. Aside from being free to attend, I love seeing how artists are inspired. This selection of pieces, which are almost all illustration, are a window into the mind of one of the most commercially successful artists of all time. And it changed my perception of his work — there are slivers, slices and chunks of all of these other artists in all of his pieces. It’s like seeing the architectural blueprints for a seamless, modern building — a peek behind the curtain, going backstage:
I paid a visit to Devon Turnbull’s OJAS listening room, located in the back of the USM store on Greene St. It’s a room designed and built for deep listening — something in which I’m really interested. That day, they were playing a new soundtrack from Elori Saxl, a lush, ambient soundscape that seemed like it was made for this sound system, this room. An hour of deep, intentional listening takes focus and effort. But I loved it:
I wandered Chelsea for an afternoon, but I didn’t see much that spoke to me. Chelsea has gotten so fancy that I now have a hard time seeing past the polished, hushed, perfectly constructed spaces. It’s just so much weight for art to carry, and such a bright spotlight, that (for me) it sucks the life out of the works on those massive, million dollar walls. It feels disconnected from reality, which makes it hard for me to connect to the work. But the scale of Chelsea is certainly impressive!
Studiolo @ Adler Beatty, curated by Kathy Huang. This was a great show on the upper east side. A series of tiny, detailed paintings, presented casually in a beautiful top floor study — so many universes in such a small space. It was an endless, delicious tasting menu of tiny, widely varied bites, all within steps of each other. I didn’t want this meal to end. My favorites here were from Keita Morimoto, Michal Borremans, and OG Francisco Goya:
On the last day of my trip, I went to The Met, which I usually don’t visit. It’s too big, too old, too etc. But a few nights earlier I’d bumped into Geoff McFetridge who told me that The Met was his favorite. So I decided to go have another look. It was also pretty cool to bump into Geoff McFetridge, another plus to being in New York.
Modern art galleries and museums are great, and I love visiting them, but they are rooted in the present, focused on the here and now. The Met is about everything, for all time, like a shelf of old encyclopedias and history books you can walk through.
As I wandered its maze of spaces, enveloped in works that had over centuries, somehow all made it safely to this final resting place, I thought about all of the artists who have ever lived. The passionate souls who dedicated their lives to thinking, writing, creating, building, making, and ultimately inspiring the next generation of artists in order to carry that torch to the here and now.
Standing there in the American Wing, I was overwhelmed with love and gratitude for ALL of these artists, going back to the first cave painting over 40,000 years ago. It was an entirely new museum experience for me, and one that The Met delivers beautifully.
