Barbara Friedman at Storefront Ten Eyck

Barbara Friedman

Têtes: Portraits by Contemporary Artists

Now at Storefront Ten Eyck

Through January 19th, 2014

Barbara Friedman is represented at ethan pettit gallery

Panel Discussion on Bushwick Galleries this Saturday. Don't Miss It!

After three months in business as an art dealer, I have built up a bit of a steam of things to say about this business. About new models that need to be explored, and old assumptions that need to be relegated to the dustbin of art history.

This Saturday at 5:30 (Sept. 8) I will be participating in a panel discussion at the Bogart Salon in Bushwick, as part of Citydrift. 56 Bogart Street, Morgan L Stop.

The business and role of galleries in Brooklyn today is most definitely a compelling topic, and we have Peter Hopkins and Meenakshi Thirukode to thank for pushing this to the discussion it needs!

The weekend will be full of other panel discussions as well. For example, I will definitely be interested in what my landlord Thomas Burr Dodd of Brooklyn Fire Proof has to say about the new business environment in Bushwick.

Download the entire Citydrift/Bushwick schedule of panel discussions.

AND DON'T FORGET TO COME TO OUR OPENING ON FRIDAY NIGHT — WACKADOODLE. 7PM - 11PM. 119 Ingraham Street, Suite 312. Morgan L Stop.

See the time and location details for WACKADOODLE on our website

Thank you for your time. And I hope to see you on Friday night.

— Ethan Pettit

New Galleries Open in Bushwick

About six weeks into business as a gallery, with back to back stories in the Bushwick Daily about galleries closing and opening, and after a little poking around, it seems "displacement" is not the primary factor in galleries closing. Just running the place seems to be the sticking point. Many galleries in Bushwick are run by artists, and they are primarily about pulling new groups of artists together and having a place to show for as long as need be. And then eventually the founders move on to other creative projects, or return to making art full time. These kinds of galleries are the lifeblood of the art world, I think. And we always want them to last forever. And maybe some of them will! Bushwick Daily announces some new galleries. Check out Weldon Arts.

3 Galleries Close in Bushwick

Bushwick Daily announces the closure of Famous Accountants, 950 Hart, and Botanic. I may have been early to Williamsburg, but I was late to Bushwick. Our gallery is one month old today. So my hat goes off to those who started the gallery scene in Bushwick and made my job just a little bit easier. We wish these curators massive success and fulfillment in their next endeavors.

Yay! We Have a Doorbell !

Dial "312" and you will reach the gallery by intercom. My apologies to anyone who may have tried to visit us and couldn't get in. Up until now it has been necessary to call me on my cellphone in order to get into the gallery, even during opening hours. We put the cart a little bit before the horse on certain logistical matters in our rush to open during Bushwick Open Studios. In fact, we have yet to paint the walls. But we're getting there fast.

Humann Moves to "Affiliated" After Talks with his Gallery

We are not surprised. It was a known possibility. And we are overjoyed to be affiliated with Richard Humann. He is now "affiliated" not "represented." It initiates as well for us a new and needed category at the gallery. We are now officially in a "creative collaboration" with Richard, but not under any contract with him.

As an aside, I only have one signed contract with an artist at the moment. I established at the outset that we have until September to talk business. And so far it's been all thumbs up.

Inaugural Show

The inaugural show of our new gallery was a resounding success. We had good support early on from the community, good buzz, and great attendance. It took place over the weekend of Bushwick Open Studios, and we were listed in Bushwickdaily.com among the "top 15" galleries and studios to visit during the open studio weekend. Really a very thrilling weekend overall. THANK YOU to all of you who came out to support us and see the art. Visit us for more pics and info at the gallery and on Facebook.

One of our artists, Rafael Fuchs (aka "Fuchs of Bushwick") performs a night action while all of Germany looks on via the ZDF TV station. Friday night, June 1, 2012

thirty9 – the work of Richard Humann

Salt of the Earth Richard Humann
won by the author at the wagmag Benefit Raffle
on May 8, 2012. Photo by Paul Behnke

Humann's Lightbox is an assemblage of the portfolio slides of Brooklyn artists in the late 90s, just as archiving was going digital. Eighteen display boxes for more than 300 individual slides, it is a trenchant work of social art, deployed in Humann's signature furniture-grade birch plywood. “I chose slides because they are the currency of artists, and I wanted the currency as the art itself.”


A funny thing happened to me at the Wagmag Benefit Art Raffle at the Boiler in Greenpoint last night. The way the raffle works is, you buy a ticket for $200. For that you are guaranteed one of the works hanging in the cavernous space, of which there were more than a hundred. The sooner your ticket is drawn from the bin, the larger the selection of art you have to choose from.

It is a bracing event, a benefit to support Wagmag, the must-have guide to art galleries across Brooklyn. The raffle has been going annually for a number of years, and has become a key social event in the Brooklyn art world; a kind of barometer of the scene and of the overall quality of work being made. There appear to have been considerably more works contributed by artists than there were tickets sold, so there is an element of competition to be sure. Presumably, at the end of the evening you’d just as soon not see your work still hanging on the wall. And if you are a well-known artist, you probably won't.

Daniel Aycock of Front Room draws a ticket at the raffle

I am starting a gallery of my own in "Bushwick" and a few of the artists I’m representing had contributed work to the raffle, as did some artists who are just friends. So I had a few people in mind as I entered the massive Boiler space on a shabby-chic street on the Greenpoint waterfront. As it happens, coming up right behind me at the entrance was the artist Richard Humann. “Richard” I said. “How auspicious. I had you in mind when I bought my raffle ticket.”

In the lost decade between Gowanus in the early 80s and the warehouse movement of early 90s Williamsburg, Richard Humann occupies an interesting place. He is probably the first conceptual artist in Williamsburg. Granted, his work was cooler and cleaner, more "classical" than the baroque science fiction of the environments who engulfed the neighborhood in the 90s. There is more 70s minimalism in Humann's early Brooklyn work, whereas we find more of a "bladerunner" aesthetic in the warehouse movement. Appreciable stylistic differences. And yet art in this neighborhood that has been provocative about space seems to begin with Richard Humann.

My raffle ticket and the list of artists with work in the raffle.
A total coincidence.

Anyway. The funny thing that happened is this. I discovered that my raffle number happened to be the same as the number indicating Humann's place on the list of participating artists. Unless I am missing something about how this raffle works, this could only have been pure chance. The list of artists is arbitrary, it does not correspond to the raffle number you happen to get — as this picture might suggest. And in any case, when your number is drawn, you get whatever you want that's still hanging on the walls. In this case, my number was 39, and the work I wanted was by Richard Humann, who happened to be number 39 on the list.

The sculpture I won, Salt of the Earth, even resembles a raffle bin. It is a standard saltshaker filled with tiny letters that seem to have been snipped out of a book or text of some kind. It alludes to randomness, chance, and the “aleatoric” in art as I think John Cage put it. I am really quite pleased with my take. Humann is no slouch, the piece clicks.

six33 a five-foot square, 9-inch deep panel of Baltic birch wood,
painted with flat black and gloss white enamel,
with flexographic ink transfer type burnished to the surface.
Art in the Urban Matrix, FFA Gallery, 1989

In 1989 I was in a show in Greenpoint with Humann called Art in the Urban Matrix. Part of his work for that show involved numbers. Numbers encompass the entire idea. In square panels, a number appears, partly as a word and partly in numerals, to acknowledge the spoken sound as well as the digit. "Numbers were chosen," says Humann, "because they allow, much more than words, the viewer the opportunity to make a decision based on his or her own experiences. I originally listed pages of words and phrases, but they were too powerful."

Art in the Urban Matrix, 1989, PDF Download

In the early days, Richard was absorbed with language and signs, his work was astringent, precise, he had an architect’s eye for every detail of the material and conditions of the work. It was very straight-edged for Williamsburg in those days. The “Humann factor” was always an enigma in the local art scene. Why was he so influenced by minimalism and language art, when the news on the street was that we had all been “liberated” from that reductive theology? Hadn’t he heard that “one-liners” were over, and now we needed to immerse ourselves in painting and environmental art?

But Humann stuck with his shorthand and honed it, and the result is a body of work that is limpid, poetic, and of great range in form and subject matter. He was not typical of Williamsburg artists 20 years ago, minimalism was not fashionable, but he took a gamble on his overarching and suspended style of presentation, and it has got him a big space in the field. Richard Humann is the artist who saved conceptual art from postmodernism, the one who has given a second life to "Idea Art" and American conceptualism.

Shelter late 1980s

This was the first time I’d ever been to this raffle, so I was aimless, and basically just making for the absinth-spiked punch bowl manned by the sizzling hipstress in the racy outfit. The place was packed and I quickly became absorbed in socializing, so I managed only a cursory glance at the art on the walls. When my ticket was called, I had no idea what was still available. “Richard Humann!” I yelled out on impulse. And I received a sculpture by an artist who is not only a friend but also a well known artist.

Humann is a dark horse with pedigree. It is because he has been in the Brooklyn scene longer than most, and because he has such a distinctive style, that he stands aloof from much that comes after him. And yet his work resonates in many places in Williamsburg over the course of 30 years. He is a gallery heavy, a veteran of the Venice Biennial, and a contemporary of the foundational Greenpoint school of painters like Chris Martin and Peter Acheson. But his work also anticipates by about half a decade the forceful engagement with space and installation that would engulf the neighborhood from 1989 onward in the work of artists like Lauren Szold, Dennis Del Zotto, and the Immersionists. He tracks two major currents in the formation of Williamsburg art, that of the studios and of the warehouses, and for that I think there's no question that Brooklyn owes Richard Humann a winning ticket.

Wave Swinger bass wood, 22.5" x 36" x 43". 2008

Silently For Me Kaohsiung International Container Arts Festival, Taiwan, December 2011

Will the Real Golem Please Step Forward

Matt Freedman's Golem at Valentine

The Golem of Ridgewood:
Matt Freedman at Valentine

The Illusion of Democracy:
Charles Atlas at Luhring-Augustine

Two shows that opened last Friday night in Brooklyn could not have been more different in style and temperament. The premier opening of Luhring-Augustine in Bushwick was a packed affair that featured a dazzling light show on the cutting edge of conceptual art.

The low-key affair at Valentine a bit farther out on the Brooklyn art belt, was an eccentric exhibition of thickly modeled sculpture and curious "artifacts" concerning thousands of years of occult history.

And yet there is a common theme in each of these shows: real estate.

Charles Atlas, The Illusion of Democracy, Luhring-Augustine

In 2002 the artist Matt Freedman bought an old synagogue in Ridgewood and converted it into a living and working space. From this event flows his show at Valentine, in which Freedman exhibits a “half-degraded film” said to be from the early 1940s, along with other “props and artifacts” allegedly discovered in the building. These objects are said to document the efforts of a local rabbi to “build a golem” to defend his congregation against the local German-American Nazi bund.

Hence The Golem of Ridgewood, a work of historical imagination, augmented with sculptures by Freedman that embody all the weirdness and wonder you’d expect from the innards of any old church or temple in Brooklyn or Queens. Among the objects on view is a rather mottled scale model of the synagogue itself.

Matt Freedman, The Golem of Ridgewood
8mm film segment, Valentine

Matt Freedman, sculpture at Valentine

Another interesting transaction in the neighborhood, has been that of a fine old factory in Bushwick by the Chelsea gallery Luhring-Augustine. For several million dollars about a year ago. This has been no news to the local art scene, and the curators have obliged everyone’s curiosity by launching their new space with a show that does the most to highlight what everyone is really interested in — the space itself. That is, there are no objects in the room, only light projections by the artist Charles Atlas. The projections are of numbers, numerals, in various states of animation. See James Kalm's video of the show.

Charles Atlas, The Illusion of Democracy
courtesy of Luhring-Augustine

 

Luhring-Augustine at the corner of Ingraham Street and
Knickerbocker Avenue, East Williamsburg aka "Bushwick"

The inside of the building has been sweepingly renovated, the outside is left basically as it is. And since the show consists only of projected light, the cumulative effect is of the building itself as the featured work, framed, so to speak, between a skim of light and the fact of its renovation. The artist, Charles Atlas, comes from that generation of conceptual artists for whom anything could be art “if I say so.” Whether it is or is not “art” is a matter of judgment, but it is definitely no longer a balloon factory or a chicken farm or whatever the place used to be.

Congregation Agudas Israel on Cornelia Street Ridgewood, Queens.
presently owned by artist Matt Freedman.

Had Fred Valentine of Valentine in Ridgewood curated this show at Luhring-Augustine in Bushwick, the building would probably still be a chicken farm, albeit some weirdly excavated iteration thereof. The difference between excavation and renovation underscores the difference between these two shows, each of which involves a different response to real estate. At Valentine, the acquisition of a synagogue a few blocks away from the gallery is cause for an immersion into occult reverie. At Luhring-Augustine, at least for the moment, it seems to be all about the numbers.

Charles Atlas, The Illusion of Democracy
Feb. 18 - May 20, 2012
Luhring-Augustine Bushwick
Video of the show by James Kalm

Matt Freedman, The Golem of Ridgewood
Open Saturdays and Sundays 1-6 PM and by appointment on Fridays
Valentine

The Bisected Moon – Takahiko iimmura at Microscope

Takahiko iimura: Between the Frames
Microscope, March 19-April 11, 2011

It was a supermoon over the Township of Bushwick. When the moon is full the penumbra of the City of Williamsburg draws inwards like a contracting tide, and the great heath of northern Brooklyn reclaims its Bushwickness for a night. And in the round ass of that very Bushwick lies the confluence of Evergreen and Myrtle, where in a pocket of that neighborhood is the gallery called microscope.

The more industrial the region, the more rarefied the event. The door to the place actually opens. And though the place is dark and silent, thirty people stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the room. On the wall the moon flickers, cast upon the wall by so many holes punched into a 60-foot loop of 16-mm film. Only the sputter of a projector sounds in the room. The loop of film careens like a cable along the length of the ceiling, and then drops in a corkscrew wiggle down in front of the jiggling moon, bisecting it.

Heads are transfixed, silhouettes are still, cellphone cameras raised all around. All the rest is space | space split open. Space bisected by the string of celluloid that also casts the dancing strobe. When the film finally jams up in a hot red toenail of light and the projector coughs and chokes and sputters out, the room erupts in applause, the house lights go up, and Takahiko iimura waves a springy bush of film triumphantly aloft.

iimura has been working in experimental film since the 1960s. On the press release Jonas Mekas writes, “He has explored this direction of cinema in greater depth than anyone else.” This is as basic, as classical a work of “conceptual” or “structural film” as you'll find, the work of a master axeman of minimalism. A piece of cinema, sculpture, and performance art, since iimura punches the holes into the film as it is rolling, until the film becomes too weak and jams up.

From an old school conceptualist, this is a poignant remark on Bushwick today. It was not only a clever film sculpture, but iimura deftly illuminated a neighborhood that has in fact made a transformation from manufacturing to a so-called "creative economy" that includes film production.