FREEwilliamsburg: Williamsburg Gallery Crawl

Keane's Blog-Friday Night in Williamsburg
Highest Score: 5 Greenbergs

The neighborhood isn't dead. It's just a little smaller this year. There certainly was a lot of energy Friday night in Williamsburg with a slew of openings from tiny Plus Ultra all the way down to Roebling Hall, who haven't totally abandoned us for their Chelsea space. Anyway, I'll dig some of the dirt off the coffin with two reviews of what I saw through a bourbon glaze. Those evil men at Plus Ultra were offering shots of Jack Daniels and a beer for 3 dollars. Well, they aren't evil but I definitely left the gallery with a bit of vertigo, and it wasn't caused by Thomas Lendvai's space altering installation A Series of 'nows'.

Lendvai's brilliant installation looked like some kind of boring minimalist photography on the invite, but it's anything but that. Part engineering marvel and part embrace the series of wooden beams transform the gallery into an adult playground. At the opening, depending on your position, you might see a floating head here, or a pair of legs there as Lendvai progressively lowers the beams towards the floor. By the middle of the gallery, you have to either hunch down or slip up into the gaps. There was a wonderful sense of closeness between the beams creating an oddly comforting environment to socialize. It wasn't for everyone though, some claustrophobic types wouldn't step into the structure, but it looked striking from the street anyway. While I'm not usually so enthralled with installation art, this worked better as a weird social device than a thing to be looked at anyway. If you're going to see this, bring some friends and hang out for a while. It invites play.
. A Series of 'nows' is what's up until February 7th.

After getting fairly drunk at Plus Ultra, we marched over to Schroeder Romero to see Michael Waugh's drawings in the Project Space. When we got there, it was all short hair and nose rings. Evan Schwartz's series of photographs documenting his change from girl to boy brought out the art kids in force. Schwartz is still a student at Pratt, and his life has become his art. (I'd love to sit on the class critiques). Anyway, the gender-switch narrative is poignant and Schwartz isolates moments of longing and whimsy without sentimentality. My personal favorite is of the artist playing in a bubble bath, blithely acting or re-enacting like a little boy flying an imaginary plane. My buddies did their best to look sympathetic, though I could tell they trying to figure out if they could hit on anyone. It's hard for S to feel so average.

In the project room Michael Waugh's controlled drawings meditated on homosexual desire in an increasingly conservative moment. Waugh's depictions of men in historic, military, and political scenes are surrounded or composed of text from inaugural presidential speeches. The watercolor of two interwoven men is the strangest work in the room and reveals something of the hypocrisy of the politicians who create artificial divisions between their public and private lives. Had Jim McGreevy given a presidential inaugural address before being outed this would be perfectly clear to middle America. That language, specifically that of marriage, has become the battle ground for control over homosexual identity makes Waugh's appropriation utterly relevant. The conservative political effort to control the definition of marriage and introduce civil unions is another way of saying separate but equal. A socially conscious friend of mine is getting 'committed' to his woman, because they object to the institution. I dig his stance, given the current administrations efforts, but it's a right to refuse, not one denied. Waugh's seductive drawings make the feeling of difference as palpable as Schwartz's photographs on the subject.
. Reclaiming Puberty Series and Inaugural-2005 are complicating the right through February 14th

After the gender-bending bonanza, J felt a bit confused so we headed down to Roebling Hall for some straightforward painting. I can safely say I saw the work, but that doesn't mean I looked at it. In fact, we left the big canvasses behind for the warm confines of the ratty Subway bar to hang out with our gay friend R, who didn't seem to mind us as company, even when I mentioned there was a pizza after-party at Metropolitan for Michael Waugh's show, he was all like "the gay bar I've never been to?" Nothing is ever stereotypical, really. I'll be weighing in on some other shows later this week. I'm fluid now.

Send me mail:

keanepepper@hotmail.com

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