A Blog Called Nowhere

Here are some art reviews. Images are posted below. I had a wonder filled art crawl through Chelsea with Medrie MacPhee today. We saw the good bad and ugly. Hilariously ugly was the painting of a skunk with a hard-on (See Ill.1) painted by a Bard student of Medries. Bravo. We picked up on a bird theme today first with Jason Middlebrooks irritating show at Sara Melzer Gallery. The press release says the pictures of North American birds imply mans destruction of the forest and his subsequent use of its materials to cover up nature. Does that include the paper Jason draws on? What a snooze. Sandra Scolniks bizzaro paintings at CRG use birds to great affect. Namely biting the nipples of women and kooky stuff like that. (Ill.2 3 4) Sandra is completely off her trolly. Her paintings are beautiful and keep getting stranger and stranger. Next we saw Damian Hurst. I liked the painting of the guy whith the bloody face, it reminded me of this great album cover of Andrew WK (Ill. 5). I couldnt really care less about the paintings. I dont think he brings anything new to the table conceptually and the subject matter is morbid and dull. His paintings remind me of Jeff Koons. Jeff is Sex and Money Damian is Death but its all the same shit really. Next we met Jules de Ballincourt at LFL and admired his show. He told us he made all the works in 3 months. Bloody hell thats a lot of amphetamines or sompthing! Next we ambled over to Luhring Augustine where we spent a lot of time bathing in the warm glow of Martin Kippenburgers genius. I was moved to tears looking at his work -no its not rag week- we were both moved by the show. He was a brilliant symbolist and visual poet. The struggle he had with alcohol is described in a lot of the work (Ill 6) In this painting he holds up a life preserver in one hand and a noose in the other. Life and death is a balancing act by a drunken frog on a crucifix with an egg in one hand and a stein of beer in the other. I really mourn the loss of this great artist. He was loose and associative in his thinking confident with oil paint and self deprecating in a hilarious and tragic way. Also the portraits of him wearing the giant Picasso underwear reminded us of another favorite artist Mike Smith. We ran into Leo Koenig on our lunch break (Ill.7) He invited us to see the new space hes fixing up on 23rd st. It looks like its going be great. Last we saw David Shrigley and Ellen Birkenblit at Anton Kern. David is too funny and we were laughing all the way through his show. Also digging Ellens cheerful and strong paintings but could do without the installation aspect which diffuses the impact of the works on canvas. Phew. I got to go get in front of the Tee Vee for a while.