One of these bottles in Christian Jankowski exhibit at Friedrich Petzel Gallery could have been ours (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Friedrich Petzel Gallery
537 West 22nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through July 27, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-680-9467
www.petzel.com

Back in April, we received several e-mails about Christian Jankowski’s upcoming exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in Chelsea. Thinking it was just the usual series of press releases, we filed them away, to be revisited once the show began and we checked it out. We really wish we had paid more attention back then, because they turned out to be invitations to actually be part of the multimedia show. The Berlin-based Jankowski specializes in work that explores the meta surrounding the art world, resulting in multidimensional installations that are as much about the work itself as they are works of art on their own. The show at Friedrich Petzel contains four distinct elements that combine to give viewers a fascinating look into Jankowski’s unique creative process. As you enter the gallery, you are met by a flatscreen monitor hanging from the ceiling, depicting NY1 Senior Business Anchor Annika Pergament giving a fake report about Jankowski’s latest installation, the very “Discourse News” that you are watching. Pergament talks with so-called experts about Jankowski and his oeuvre while highlighting such questions as “Why is the artist so obsessed with the discourse?” It’s so professionally done that it’s difficult to determine what’s real and what’s staged, but what really makes it so riveting — and so entertaining — is that it lets visitors in on the inside joke from the very start. Meanwhile, to the left behind the reception desk, the words “Please Stop You’re Boring Me to Death” are written out in white neon along with a drawing of two people, taken from something a visitor wrote in a gallery sign-in book, as Jankowski once again creates a work of art about something someone else said about a work of art. “Review,” the piece we were invited to be part of, consists of dozens of handwritten advance reviews that “renowned art critics” rolled up and placed in sealed glass and plastic bottles, then sent to Jankowski, who has scattered them across the gallery’s main space, where the pre-reviews tantalize visitors since the writings will never be read, as opposed to our review that you’re reading now and cannot be rolled up and stored away forever, sight unseen, within a sealed bottle. The show concludes with the forty-seven-minute black-and-white video The Eye of Dubai, in which a blindfolded Jankowski — and his blindfolded crew — make their way through Dubai led by local artist Rami Farook and followed by BBC World News, which is preparing a Collaboration Culture documentary about the project, the meta becoming an integral part of the discourse. Just the idea of an artist walking around blind in the massively growing international city that now hosts a highly touted art fair invites plenty of discourse on its own, but including the BBC doing a story on it takes it to the next level. Jankowski, whose ”Living Sculptures: Caesar, Dali Woman, El Che” was installed in the Doris C. Freedman Plaza entrance to Central Park in 2008-2009, also currently has a piece in the Public Art Fund’s “Common Ground” group show in City Hall Park, a granite grave stone that says, “Christian Jankowski 1968- Buried Somewhere on Common Ground in City Hall Park,” because in Jankowski’s world, even the eventual death of the artist can be a work of art worthy of further commentary.