Tag Archives: Tony Matelli

TOM SACHS: TRAINING

Tom Sachs, “Training,” synthetic polymer paint on plywood, 2016 (image courtesy the artist)

The FLAG Art Foundation
545 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., ninth floor
Wednesday, July 6, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
212-206-0220
flagartfoundation.org
www.tomsachs.org

In his operation manual for his 2006 installation “The Island,” New York City native Tom Sachs quotes Yoda: “Do, or do not. There is no try.” Sachs does. And he has a lot of fun doing it. The Bennington College graduate takes a DIY approach to his art, displaying a wry sense of humor in such works as “Chanel Guillotine,” “Prada Toilet,” “Nutsy’s McDonald’s,” “Barbie Slave Ship,” and “Hello Kitty Nativity.” In 2008, he went up against the Neistat brothers in a hilarious power boat race. In 2012, he staged an intricately planned trip to the red planet in his massive interactive Park Avenue Armorny exhibition “Space Program: Mars,” which was later turned into a 2016 film. Currently, “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1996 – 2016” welcomes visitors to the Brooklyn Museum, while “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” offers an immersive experience at the Noguchi Museum. On July 6, Sachs will be at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea, activating “Training,” his contribution to the group show “Summer School,” which consists of playful works by such artists as John Baldessari, Dan Colen, Tara Donovan, Mark Grotjahn, Tony Matelli, Marilyn Minter, Vik Muniz, and Ugo Rondinone. “Training” is a helicopter rescue game / wall sculpture that involves riddles and such game pieces as a bag of McDonald’s fries and an Apollo command module. Sachs and his studio team will participate in a live tournament that will put the finishing touches on the work. Admission is free, but advance RSVP is recommended; as a bonus, whiskey and wine will be served. The tournament starts at 7:00, but be sure to get there at 6:30 to check out “Summer School” as well as the tenth-floor exhibit, Patricia Cronin’s “Shrine for Girls, New York.”

WANDERLUST: SLEEPWALKER BY TONY MATELLI

A group of women pose with Tony Matelli’s “Sleepwalker” on the High Line (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The High Line
Eleventh Ave. from 34th St. to Gansevoort St.
“Wanderlust” through March 17, 2017
Open daily, free, 7:00 am – 11:00 pm
www.thehighline.org
sleepwalker high line slide show

It’s all about context. In June 2014, there was a furor at Wellesley when students at the all-woman college protested against the installation of Tony Matelli’s “Sleepwalker” sculpture, a lifelike rendering of a bald white man in nothing but his tighty-whities, eyes closed and arms outstretched. While he is meant to be in the midst of harmless somnambulation, hundreds of women signed an online petition that claimed that the work “has become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for some members of our campus community”; others playfully mocked the work, creating virtual images of it dressed in school T-shirts and the like. Matelli responded by telling CBS Boston, “I think that these people are misconstruing this work. I think they’re seeing something in this work that isn’t there. But who am I to say how people should react to this?” Ultimately, the statue had to be removed after being spray-painted and subsequently broken in protest. A few months later, I encountered a different casting of “Sleepwalker” on the rooftop deck of the Marlborough Chelsea, where it was just him and me; at the time, I wrote that I found it to be “intriguing and humorous, not threatening at all, perhaps even symbolic of an America that often seems to be half asleep.” Of course, I’m not a college-age woman, and the sculpture is not by the side of the road in some woods.

Tony Matelli’s “Sleepwalker” gets a hug from a happy stranger on the High Line (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Sleepwalker” has now made its way to the High Line, where it awaits visitors by the Fourteenth St. entrance as part of the group show “Wanderlust.” On a recent Saturday afternoon, I watched as people huddled around it, many wondering if it were an actual real person, waiting for him to make a sudden movement. Kids reached out to touch a hand, a young man sniffed its head, and tourists posed in silly positions with the work. There were hugs, funny faces, selfies, and an abundance of smiles after initial hesitation. At Wellesley, “Sleepwalker” was steeped in controversy. At the Marlborough Chelsea, it was somewhat of a lonely, pathetic creature. And now, on the High Line, one of the city’s most attractive destinations, it has become a novelty; there was even an official photo contest on April 23 “inviting visitors to the park to post their most creative photo inspired by Tony Matelli’s sculpture ‘Sleepwalker.’” It’s a far cry from the spray-painted version surrounded by police tape on the Wellesley campus. Art affects people in different ways, and “Sleepwalker” is a stunning example of that. It also says a lot about where we are as a culture in the twenty-first century.

GREATER NEW YORK

Lionel Maunz’s “Fertilize My Mouth” emphasizes feeling of absence at “Greater New York ”show at MoMA PS1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Thursday – Monday through March 7, suggested donation $5-$10 (free with MoMA ticket within fourteen days of MoMA visit), 12 noon – 6:00 pm
718-784-2084
momaps1.org

The fourth iteration of MoMA PS1’s quinquennial exhibition, “Greater New York,” is very much about absence and presence, what is not there as well as what is. Instead of focusing primarily on up-and-coming artists, curators Peter Eleey, Douglas Crimp, Thomas J. Lax, Mia Locks, Mark Beasley, and Jenny Schlenzka have included works by nearly 150 artists, more than 60 of whom are over 50 (or would have been if they were still alive), resulting in a wide-ranging look at how New York City and the art market have changed over the last generations. James Nares’s 1976 Super 8 video “Pendulum” shows a wrecking ball ominously swinging in an empty Tribeca alley but not actually knocking anything down — yet. Amy Brener encases such found objects as watches, motherboards, and calculators into colorful resin, foam, glass, and plaster sculptures that harken back to a long-gone era. Alvin Baltrop’s silver gelatin prints remind us what the piers were like prior to renovation and gentrification and what gay life was like before AIDS. Liene Bosquê uses found souvenirs from around the world to construct imaginary cities in “Recollection.” Henry Flynt’s SAMO© Graffiti Portfolio photographs from 1979 reintroduce us to Jean-Michel Basquiat. A large gallery of lifelike sculptures by Tony Matelli, Elizabeth Jaeger, John Ahearn, Judith Shea, and others create a false sense of reality and investigate the human figure and physical relationships. Joy Episalla’s photos of motel bedrooms reflected in television sets fill viewers with personal memories. Fierce Pussy’s “For the Record” features backward text about the AIDS crisis, repeating such sentences as “he would be at this opening if she were alive today” (sic).

Amy Brener repurposes found items into memory sculptures at “Greater New York ”show at MoMA PS1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Glenn Ligon’s silkscreened “Housing in New York: A Brief History” details the various places he lived between 1960 and 2007 and reveal how the neighborhoods changed. In the boiler room, Lionel Maunz’s cast iron and concrete “Fertilize My Mouth” consists of a pair of disembodied legs standing in front of a tilted slab of concrete on which something bad appears to have happened. Louise Lawler’s “Not Yet Titled (adjusted to fit)” is a stretched photo of Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Bingo” sculpture of a derelict house. And photographs of Matta-Clark’s “Building Cuts” into the walls of PS1 back in 1976 bring the exhibition full circle. Among the other artists in the show are Chantal Akerman, Richard Artschwager, Dara Birnbaum, Mel Bochner, Rudy Burckhardt, John Giorno, William Greaves, Yvonne Rainer, Ugo Rondinone, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, and Sergei Tcherepnin. If you were around in the 1970s, you know that New York City was not exactly a paradise — and “Greater New York” takes us back there while also putting it all in a contemporary now you see it, now you don’t context.

Sound comes and goes in Christine Sun Kim’s visitor-operated “Game of Skill 2.0” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The exhibition will be on view through March 7, and there are still a handful of programs left on the schedule. On February 21 at 4:00, Hayley Aviva Silverman’s live-action “Twister” casts dogs as characters from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Jan de Bont’s 1996 disaster film, Twister; Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World is being shown February 21-27; on February 25 at 7:00, Fia Backström will perform “Aphasia as a visual shape of speaking – A-production and other language syndromes”; on February 28 at 1:00, Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts New York will host participatory activities; on February 28 at 4:00, Devin Kenny will deliver the performance essay “Love, the Sinner”; short films by Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, Ira Sachs, and others are screening February 28 through March 7; on March 3 & 4 at 7:00, Geo Wyeth will present “Storm Excellent Salad”; and on March 6, you can catch Stewart Uoo’s “It’s Get Better III” at 3:00 and Angie Keefer’s roundtable “What Is Authority?” at 4:00.

TONY MATELLI: SLEEPWALKER

Tony Matelli’s “Sleepwalker” sculpture at Wellesley became a crime scene when vandals struck

Marlborough Chelsea
545 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through August 8, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-463-8634
www.marlboroughchelsea.com
www.wellesley.edu/davismuseum

Several weekends ago, after coming home from a jaunt through Chelsea galleries, I showed my wife photos I’d taken of some of my favorite works. Upon seeing one of them, she immediately said, “I think that’s the same piece that caused such a furor at Wellesley.” Indeed, I had shown her a photo of Tony Matelli’s “Sleepwalker,” a life-size painted bronze sculpture of a zombielike middle-aged white man in his underwear, eyes closed, arms outstretched, standing on the outdoor deck of the Marlborough Gallery on West 21st St. Being a sucker for lifelike sculpture — I can spend hours checking out works by Ron Mueck, Paul McCarthy, Mark Jenkins, and others — I got a huge kick out of the piece, which I found intriguing and humorous, not threatening at all, perhaps even symbolic of an America that often seems to be half asleep. However, context is everything. My wife quickly pointed out that a significant number of Wellesley students were aghast when a fiberglass cast of “Sleepwalker” had been placed outside, on campus, in February as part of the “Tony Matelli: New Gravity” exhibition at the university’s outstanding Davis Museum, the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based sculptor’s first solo museum show. Coincidentally, we were going to Wellesley the following weekend, where we looked forward to seeing the sculpture for ourselves in an environment very different from the Chelsea deck, but sadly it had had to be removed in May, ahead of the July 20 conclusion of the exhibition, for a very surprising reason.

Shortly after the unveiling of “Sleepwalker,” which was placed outside in a wooded area near the Davis, where it could be seen from a window, hundreds of Wellesley students signed an online petition calling for the work to be moved inside the museum. The petition read in part, “Within just a few hours of its outdoor installation, the highly lifelike sculpture . . . has become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for some members of our campus community. While it may appear humorous, or thought provoking to some, the ‘Sleepwalker’ has already become a source of undue stress for a number of Wellesley College students, the majority of whom live, study, and work on campus.” Davis Museum director Lisa Fischman defended the installation, explaining, “Art has an extraordinary power to evoke personal response, and to elicit the unexpected. . . . Art provokes dialogue, and discourse is the core of education. In that spirit, I am enormously glad to have your response.”

“Sleepwalker” will stay up at the Marlborough Chelsea through August 8 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Matelli himself chimed in on the debate, telling CBS Boston, “I think that these people are misconstruing this work. I think they’re seeing something in this work that isn’t there. But who am I to say how people should react to this?” He added, “I don’t think they’ll take the statue down. But if they make that decision, that’s fine with me.” I’m not sure it’s fine with Matelli why it ultimately had to be taken down; first, a student (since suspended) spray-painted the statue yellow, her class color (she did the same to Matelli’s nearby small dog sculpture), then a still-unidentified perp broke the five-foot, nine-inch-high “Sleepwalker” at its ankles, apparently in an effort to kick it down. I was shocked when I saw photos of the damage, which totaled the work, leaving it irreparable; was this really possible at such a liberal, free-thinking college as Wellesley? Is this type of censorship any different from Attorney General John Ashcroft and deputy director of public affairs Monica Goodling using a blue curtain to cover up the partially nude “Spirit of Justice” Art Deco aluminum statue in the Great Hall of the Justice Department in 2002? Or when performance artist Alexander Brener spray-painted a green dollar sign over Kazimir Malevich’s “Suprematisme 1920-1927” in 1997 in protest of the commercialism of art? (“I view my act as a dialogue with Malevich,” Brener said in court.) During the Wellesley reunion weekend, I spoke with numerous current and former students of all ages, and each had an individual reaction to the installation of “Sleepwalker” itself and to the eventual damage. Some felt that art is art and people should “get a life” and not interpret everything so personally. Others believed it was a gross error on the part of the museum and the school to put a statue so suggestive to survivors or victims of sexual abuse outside, near a wooded area, at a woman’s college. Fortunately, no one was in favor of the vandalism. Yes, it’s encouraging that a work of art elicited such strong personal feelings on many fronts, but have we become a bunch of whimpering souls, not able to look the other way when it comes to an inanimate sculpture that means different things to different people? If something is displeasing to some but not to others, must it be wished away into the cornfield, hidden where no one will ever see it? Or is it further evidence that the gender divide is still much larger than we imagined, even at such an illustrious college as Wellesley? You can check out Matelli’s “Sleepwalker” at the Marlborough through August 8, but, of course, you’ll never be able to see the Wellesley version.

DARK CHRISTMAS

Georg Baselitz, “Die Kreuztragung (Christ Bearing the Cross),” oil on canvas, 1984

Leo Koenig Inc.
545 West 23rd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday through Saturday through January 14 (closed 12/31)
212-334-9255
www.leokoenig.com

The holiday season always includes screenings of such films as White Christmas, the musical with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, and Black Christmas, Bob Clark’s bloody slasherfest, as well as multiple versions of such favorite seasonal tunes as “Blue Christmas,” which has been sung by everyone from Elvis Presley and the Partridge Family to Céline Dion and She & Him. This year Chelsea’s Leo Koenig Inc. gallery is adding “Dark Christmas” to the mix, a wide-ranging collection of paintings, photographs, and sculptures that date from the 1930s to the present examining secular and religious iconography, with a particular focus on the human body. Curated by Stephanie Schumann and Leo Koenig, the exhibition features numerous works that have been deemed obscene and sacrilegious along with pieces that are more abstract and not as easy for naysayers to condemn. Among the more clear-cut examples are Tony Matelli’s “Jesus Lives,” Ana Mendieta’s “Untitled (Body Print),” Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” Georg Baselitz’s “Die Kreuztragung (Christ Bearing the Cross),” and Kiki Smith’s “Daisy Chain”; the show also includes works by Bruce Nauman, Sigmar Polke, Arnulf Rainer, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Nicola Tyson, Christopher Wool, Hans Bellmer, Paul McCarthy, and others. So if you’re looking for something a little different to do to conclude your holidays, you might want to head into Chelsea to check out this unique and, at times, very colorful look at Christmas.