Went to Chelsea to see art a couple of days ago.

Man, is it taxing walking around looking at artwork.

The Nathalie Djurberg show at Zack Feuer (LFL), a series of creepy, sexually-charged claymation shorts shown on separate monitors, was fun but I didn’t have the patience to sit through all of them. For me, it’s weird standing around a gallery for an hour looking at TV monitors. “Send me the DVD!” I want to say. Why do video artists even want to show their work in a gallery context? Isn’t it strange that gallerists are always trying to hawk a bunch of CDs, something so easily replicated, for thousands of dollars? Artists in the 60s and 70s worked so hard to make art that was not commodifiable and now that we have it with cheap CDs, video artists want to run right back into the gallery with all the paintings and sculptures. Then again, people still pay good money for instructions on how to make a Sol Lewitt, even though I could easily make one on my livingroom wall right now and it would look great.

What else?—the Dirk Skreber show, “Crystal Mess,” at Friedrich Petzel looks good. Landscapes of strangeness and destruction worked up with fat layers of paint.

I liked the Stephen Mueller paintings at Baumgartner. I liked them because the small ones reminded me of my own stuff. The big ones I didn’t care for.

Here’s what the small paintings looked like—a shield-shape with a flat-footed pattern on top of a washy ground:

This one sort of looks like a Ukrainian egg hovering over a winter landscape:

Good paintings, right? I’m not so sure about that shield shape, though—it seems like there was once a vogue for taking the heraldic shapes you find in the sticker-books at stationary shops and putting them in your paintings, but that time has passed, Stephen. It’s probably better just to make up a shape. The symmetry is nice. I’m a big fan of symmetry—it’s a pretty dumb solution (in a good way) for organizing a canvas and it calls attention to the literal shape of the supports, pushing the painting ever closer toward “objecthood,” although maybe that too is old hat.

In the 60s, abstract painting was in its last gasp and it had a lot of symmetry. Artists wanted to make paintings as deadpan and direct as possible without all that faggy fussing around with composition. They also thought that compositions that were all about how the individual parts related to each other—as apposed to having the painting be just one big “thing” without parts—were lame.

So they made big symmetrical paintings like this:

And this:

These look better up close.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 26th, 2006 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, art.