A multitude of well-known artists offer “Multiple Pleasures” at Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
FUNCTIONAL OBJECTS IN CONTEMPORARY ART
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Monday – Friday through July 30
Admission: free
212-414-4144
www.tanyabonakdargallery.com
A few months back, Sabrina Blaichman, Caroline Copley, and Genevieve Hudson-Price, of 7Eleven Gallery, put together “Make Yourself at Home,” in which they turned a Chelsea garage into a sort of home showcase, featuring works by a multitude of artists arranged in different “rooms,” with nearly every chair, table, lamp, tire swing, and fake shower available for sale, sitting, and touching. Curator Nathalie Karg, the founder of Cumulus Studios, has now organized “Multiple Pleasures: Functional Objects in Contemporary Art,” a two-floor exhibit of reimagined useful household items by such artists as Doug Aitken, Ross Bleckner, Olaf Breuning, Peter Doig, Sarah Sze, William Kentridge, Douglas Gordon, Barbara Kruger, Yoshitomo Nara, Andrea Zittel, Ernesto Nara, and Richard Prince, among more than eighty others, one big name after another. As opposed to the 7Eleven show, you can’t touch most of the pieces here, which tend to be somewhat more expensive on the whole. But at the front counter, Tanya Bonakdar is selling a number of far more affordable items, including magnets, T-shirts, salt-and-pepper shakers, and towels by the likes of Kenny Scharf, Ed Ruscha, and Damien Hirst. In addition, you can obtain a unique digital screensaver by Olafur Eliasson by making a small donation to Maternity Worldwide, a nonprofit organization seeking to reduce the maternal mortality rate in Ethiopia and around the world.
Director Tamra Davis (GUNCRAZY) transports viewers back to the 1980s New York art scene in the intimate documentary JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD. In 1986, just as the career of street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was exploding, Davis filmed him being interviewed by designer Becky Johnson, a revealing portrait that she put away in a drawer for more than twenty years. Davis finally brings out that footage, making it the centerpiece of this new examination of the ambitious, influential artist and musician who experienced massive success before falling hard and fast and dying of a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven in 1988. Davis, a friend of Basquiat’s, conducts new interviews with many of the people from his inner circle, including art dealers Jeffrey Deitch, Larry Gagosian, Annina Nosei, Tony Shafrazi, and Bruno Bischofberger; Basquiat’s girlfriends Suzanne Mallouk and Kelle Inman; close Basquiat friends Diego Cortez and Fab 5 Freddy; NEW YORK BEAT cable TV host Glenn O’Brien; and fellow artist Julian Schnabel, who directed Basquiat in DOWNTOWN 81. Davis has also dug up amazing footage from the 1980s of Basquiat that shows him to be a unique, driven figure who used whatever he could — from broken windowframes and doors he’d find on the street to immense canvases — to spread his art and world view, which began with drawings in which he identified himself as Samo, criticizing contemporary art as “the same old shit.” Ultimately, though, it was his relationship with Andy Warhol that was the beginning of the end. JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD is a dazzling document of a fascinating time and a cautionary tale of success that comes too fast, too soon. Davis will be at Film Forum for the 8:00 shows on July 21-22, with Fab 5 Freddy appearing at the 8:00 screening on July 23.
