Featherweight Champions
Operation Pillowfight toys with issues of exploitation and sexuality, but discovers that downtown glamour and high-cleavage horseplay are much less of a downer.


What: Operation Pillowfight
Location: Greene Street Gallery, New York
Date: October 14, 2006
Cost: Free
Bohemian Factor: Some high-salaried hipsters
Geek Factor: Absolutely zero, sadly

*******

Ah, what is the threshold at which art becomes commerce?

An Andy-Warhol-ish question with a very practical answer. (That's right, Dave Hickey -the highly esoteric art-and-pop culture historian -won't be staying up all night pondering the answer to this one) I think one possible answer may be when the posse of popular snark site gawker shows up.

Upon hearing that a staged pillow fight would be taking place in conjunction with an art gallery opening event at the Greene Street Gallery, I knew I had to be there. Envisioning the kind of scrappy whimsical populism that NewMindSpace traffics in, I headed to SoHo...I found myself surrounded by an exhibit featuring adolescent girls with preternaturally large breasts fighting and/or fondling one another with pillows.

Inspired by online pornography, the exhibit– like so many ventures-promises to demonstrate the commodification of sexuality. Hmm, if he's that concerned for the image of women in society, I'm not sure that he wouldn't be better off volunteering for NOW? Or an organization like this one? There seemed to be a fairly literal but vague obsession with menstrual blood, and a rather unapologetic reinforcement of the "Scantily clad chicks duking it out is HOT" motif. Given the violent allusions in some of the art on display, the relatively benign and goofy sight of art models, strategically garbed in loose pajamas meant to slip off for some serious boobage – which took place instantaneously – whapping one another all the while giggling, only brought attention to what was missing from the crowd's curious expectations: malice, either feigned or authentic. There was neither blood nor feathers drawn, and several individuals in the crowd- friends of the artist, I now suspect- willingly dove into the fray. I could just feel one of the many well-groomed post-collegiate guys bemoaning the opportunity to growl, "Rrrrarrrrr!!" they way they do when excitedly expecting a catfight for their viewing pleasure.

"It would be cooler if they were like jello-wrestling or something," opined a youngish guy behind me. Cooler, indeed, and more to the point: female on female violence is sadly perceived as erotic in this society, so why disguise where this was all heading with cuddly cushions and silk pajamas? A rather unfair judgment, perhaps, and I do suspect this pillow fight idea attracted a lot of very beautiful, very trendy looking people who wouldn't have shown up at a dive for your standard brawl in Berry Blue; and, in a City where buzz is more valuable than Google stock – I suspect that the artist might be asked to do more of this sort of thing.

Objects in Space
Excursion to Dia Beacon offers life-size cubes, boxes, spheres, strings, and occasionally clunky verbiage.


Serra's Torqued Ellipses, as captured on the Dia's web site

What: Dia Beacon
Location: Beacon, New York
Date: Year round
Cost: $27 with MTA's "One Day Getaway" fare (includes transportation and museum admission) Yes, it’s over $20, BUT hey..it’s a day trip!
Bohemian Factor: Mostly concentrated near the Warhol room.
Geek Factor: Quite low.

*******

Make friends with engineers.

This seems to be the take home lesson of my excursion to Dia Beacon, the gargantuan center for contemporary sculpture in upstate New York. For those occasionally baffled by the industrial aesthetic, imposing scale and seemingly impersonal nature of contemporary art, it helps to drag along someone who traffics in the business of structure, geometry, Newton’s laws, and most importantly, embraces the tactile when surrounded by high-fallutin’ discourse.

“I want to run my finger around the rim!” announced C as we both stared up at the curving structures.

"What do you think would happen?" I asked.

She thought a moment. “It would be dusty.”

Led into spiral-like trajectories by the “torqued ellipses” of Richard Serra, I checked in with C to share thoughts about what kind of cosmic profundity resided in the design of the structures, sprawling in magisterial loopiness. The pathway in front of us suddenly became freakishly narrow, and then opened outwards into a funky angular crevice. I expected, at the very least, some dark and brooding statement on the limits of perception.

Fortunately, C was thinking about other, less esoteric things.

“This is a great echo! What do you think would happen if we sing inside one of these?”

At least I’d found an outlet for the Sondheim song stuck inside my head all morning; C was right – the echo was fantastic, although we attracted some curious looks from other visitors.

So C and I conducted a few possibly ill-informed, harmlessly silly accoustical experiments to find the locations where the soundwaves might resonate the most. The psychological impact of the structures continued to awe us, but became something felt rather than something we needed to talk about. This turns out to be a good approach to Dia.

For some New Yorkers, the end of summer signals last opportunities to head North and West; to Long Island; to the Hamptons; to their upstate cabins and enjoy the last opportunities afforded to us for pastoral escape while the green remains. For shoestring budgets, day trips are the answer, particularly when Metro North offers a package deal. The train ride up to Dia offers some pretty views of the Hudson and a chance to explore offer a quaint Main Street with boutiques and coffee shops. But who has time for antiquing when the largest works of the 20th Century avant garde visual arts world are around the corner? C and I made a bee line for the museum; given its 240,000 square feet of space (it used to be a box-factory built in the 1920’s) we correctly assumed it would take all day to explore.



The view of the Hudson from Dia, New York
We had other favorites beside the ellipses, including Serra's Union of the Torus and the Sphere, which is simply fun to walk around, regardless of one’s feelings toward geometry.

There is no need to walk around Fred Sandback’s installations of colored strings laid out into outlines of planar surfaces; you can walk right through them. “These look like the first phase of the design process.” C noted after we both stared at several of the shapes. The text accompanying Sandback’s work instructed us that his work contains both “fact and illusion. Trying to weed out one in favor of the other is dealing with an incomplete situation.” Well, perhaps more dangerous than incomplete: Running from side of the museum to the other in a hurry later on, I managed to run – literally- right into the string itself – prompting some worried gasps from onlookers and security guards.

Thankfully, museum officials, perhaps anticipating the less-than-perfect coordination of some visitors, have made close-up viewings of Michael Heizer’s “North East South West” available via appointment only, preventing, say, visitors from falling from a rather unpleasant precipice. Otherwise, they can only be observed behind barricades. Holzer's “negative sculptures,” are huge steel, subterranean structures with shapes – cubes, cones – subtracted from their interiors. While I was beginning to get lost staring down into what struck me as melancholy depths – C wrestled with the question of how they were brought in from the California desert.

Those who like a puzzle can easily get lost in comparing Donald Judd’s similar-but-not-quite plywood boxes, each one a slightly different variation on an almost absurdly simple box shape. Just when you think you’ve found two that are alike, you go back and see, no, not quite; this one is cantilevered; this one has a funky little inclined surface, and so forth.

C’s perspective was a particularly refreshing antidote to the pompous explanatory texts that accompanied each work. For fairness sake, there is more of a burden, I think, on exhibits like those at Dia. Our experience of, say, Dan Flavin’s light fixtures, diverges so much from, say, looking at one of Monet’s haystacks. That said, the descriptions often end up sounding like an angry PhD student about to retake the GRE’s.

An example:

The weightiness of this quintessentially sculptural work is embodied in an interplay between optical quiddity and physical proximity… the visual and textural figures are cadences to mine the conditions they embody in an almost tautological imbrication of text context and site.

I don’t think the literary agents are going to come a’calling. All this quiddity, imbriation, aegis and other vocabulary words are flung, in this case, at images of stacked rectangles, with black print text on the wall that matter of factly states “One slab put top to butt on another slab.”

Perhaps a refute to all this verbiage can be found in a quote from a drawing by Joseph Beuys at the gallery, acknowledging that the intellectual and the visceral experience of art do not always have to march in lockstep. The painting asks, to no one in particular “Where would I have got if I had been intelligent?”