Art 12/1/07

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES
December 1, 2007–March 23, 2008
the New Museum

Well know for their online projects using rich rhythms and pulsating texts Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries has created a seven screen installation as part of the new New Museum's inaugural exhibition. The screens alternate between the vertical and horizontal formats as they span the wall. The work presents a disjointed narrative that can be read within each screen or across the seven. Using just black type on a white ground the words and letters fill the spaces as they flash on and off in time to the syncopated rhythm of the music. The carefully choreographed stories intersect one another. They begin and end in unison. These rich works are inspired by literary and cultural works as well as by film noir yet are reduced to their essentials. Using only the Monaco font the works have no images or color. Yet Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries creates an engagingly visual work through their deliberate animation of text.

Peter Paul Chocolates
Maccarone
630 Greenwich Street
November 15 - Dec 24

The Los Angeles based multi media bad-boy has done it again. This time he has created an innocent and delicious product -- a chocolate santa-- that is not quite as innocent as it seems. Paul McCarthy has transformed the Maccarone Gallery into a functioning chocolate factory that produced just one product-- a 10 inch high dark chocolate santa who holds a butt plug in his hand. Each day 1000 santas are produced and packaged ready for consumption. The exhibition is open daily to visitors who can watch the chocolateers creating the figures, mixing the syrup and pouring it into the molds. The relationship between art and commerce is evident here. The artist has transformed a large scale sculpture he created into an accessible commodity that is available to all for $100. Adults and children alike can sample the chocolate and buy the sculpture. Yet the santa is holding a butt plug. How does one explain that to children? Perhaps that is not the point. Mass production, and the creation of excess as will the 30,000 santas produced during the show's duration find a home? What happens to them later? Will the product last forever? Once the 'wow" wears off one is left with many questions about McCarthy's endeavor, yet the endearing santa begs to be enjoyed, as food and as art.

Robert Beck
How am I to Sign Myself
CRG Gallery
November 10 - Dec 22

How am I to Sign Myself is an excerpt from a letter written to James Joyce in 1904. Using that as well as a variety of psychological tests used to understand the functioning of a subject's personality Robert beck presents the culmination of 10 years of drawings a suite of works that can be referred to as "Diagnostic Drawings."

Robert Barry
Art and War
Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert
148 9th Street

In the multi-roomed space that is the Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Gallery, Robert Barry adheres a single word created in mirrored vinyl to each wall. The words dissect the space, and are oriented in all directions. The words resonate in numerous ways. How are they seen in relation to each other? What do they signify alone. How does the title "Art and War" direct our reading of them?

Yasumasa Morimura
Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th
November 24 - December 23

Using himself as subject, Yasumasa Morimura recreates iconic photographs that illustrate historical figures and political events from the 20th century. Che as well as Hitler are presented as is Lenin and Mao and Einstein. Using well know photographic images as his source Morimura carefully recreates the scene making himself up to look like the subject. His transformation is uncanny and his ability not only to be come another but who he chooses to picture creates an interesting portrait. In a three channel video entitled "A Requiem" Mishima, 2007" Morimura reenacts Yukio Mishima's speech from 1970 that was deliver to inspire a coup d'etat. Morimura 's speech was deliver to a group of young artists rather than soldiers where he encourages them to rise up and fight the so as to not become slaves of foreign culture.


Antony Gormley
Blind Light
Sean Kelly Gallery
Gormley brings aspects of his exhibition that was presented at the Hayward Gallery in London to Sean Kelly. While the Hayward show was inclusive, this exhibition features three sculptures and the evocative Blind Light, a smoke filled room in which one looses all sense of where they are.

Charles Ray
Matthew Marks Gallery
Charles Ray presents three sculptures. A toy plow with a driver painted green, a white sculpture depicting a naked boy who sits on the floor playing with a toy car and a life size egg cracked open to show the baby bird inside.

Jim Shaw
Metro Pictures
November 20 - December 22
Dismembered human forms are the common theme in Jim Shaw’s exhibition. Shaw also shows a group of sculptures that take the form of body parts as home décor. The hybrids include an ear couch covered in blue velvet, nose wall sconces, butt-head stools and a digestive-tract wall sculpture.

Eric Wesley
Bortolami
510 West 25th Street,
November 30, 2007 - January 5, 2008
For the exhibition, Wesley has created the Spa-ference Room, the latest installment of an ongoing project called Spa-fice. Half spa, half office this environment creates a mood of simultaneous relaxation and productivity. Originally designed as a functioning apparatus for a relationship between work and rest, otium and negotium, this social machine exists only at the aesthetic crossroads of sculpture and invention. Spa-ference Room takes a celestial form as one encounters an absurdly gigantic bathrobe suspended in the atmosphere of the gallery

Golan Levin
Bitforms
Golan Levin is well known for his work in audiovisual performance and interactive software art

Urs Fischer
Gavin Brown Enterprise
October 25 - Dec 22
A huge hole in the gallery's floor

Lisa Sigal, Tent Paintings
Frederieke Taylor Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
November 29, 2007 - January 12, 2008
Lisa Sigal has been conflating building with the act of making art. Architecture becomes surface and painting can become shelter. Questioning the way in which space is measured and mediums are defined, Sigal plays with the differences between color, line, signage and wall until all things are seemingly equal.