Special Projects
Everything Terence does is a serious joke. Have you heard this one? He hosted a show at his gallery (called Asian Song Society so Terence could tell all his friends when he had an A.S.S. OPENING, ha ha) where the press release stated that North Korean artist Chang Chol is exhibiting packing peanuts shipped from the US to North Korea and back to represent “an ultimate refusal of the west”. Except Chang Chol is not a real person and Terence just wanted to fill his gallery with peanuts for people to swim around in. I could really go on forever. You’ve been a great audience: thank you and good night! Despite Terence’s flamboyant expenditure as art activity, many other artists on the scene exhibit themes of antiboom angst: for example, Nate’s whole oeuvre contains the anxiety of imminent collapse. Crazy whirlwind of an artist Agathe Snow recently threw a “recession beach party”, hilariously featured in ELLE Magazine, where she fed fifty people for under two-hundred bucks with shit from the back of a U-Haul filled with sand and a taped up beach photo. Kembra’s prevailing mandate of AVAILABISM states that you can only make things out of the materials available (and usually scavenged, donated, or free), and must do everything yourself. Closing Down Sale, we covered that already, right? What these artists are really fascinated with is the decadence and decay of (late) (post) capitalism. Nate tells Tokion his soul is “somewhere between retail and spiritual” and retail is about to take a dive. Whatever, all of us have eaten rice with barbeque sauce for a week, or are immanently about to. Artists are as notoriously durable as cockroaches. But the optimism comes from these artists’ dogged pursuit of turning shit into gold. Which Terence literally made once as an art piece. Laughing all the way to the bank or maybe just laughing through the tears. Why is New York repeatedly the epicenter for artists working in this post punk punning pop mode? Why doesn’t New York produce abstract, spiritual video artists or conceptual figuration sculptors? I think unless you are interested in and inspired by all the low down dirty shit that happens here in New York, you would have moved away long ago. And the art world and its surrounding party monster make us all crazy and self-conscious and the best of us respond in an interesting way. You couldn’t make these artworks somewhere else, they are as befouled and bemused as we all are here. All images courtesy of KATHY GRAYSON and DEITCH PROJECTS unless otherwise noted.