" Drunk " featured in an NYC Art Exhibit
Posted: Sat 27 Aug 2005, 2:58 am
I ran across this article & thought I'd share part of it. It was in the New York Times. I've snipped off the last 1/2 of the article. Read down almost to the end :
Art Review | 'Drunk vs. Stoned 2'
Along the Blurry Line Between Blotto and Buzzed
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: August 26, 2005
"Drunk vs. Stoned 2," an ambitious if understandably discombobulated group show at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, cuts to the chase in terms of artistic dualities. Expressionist versus realist? Neo-figurative versus abstract? They're so 20th century.
Gavin Brown's Enterprise
An installation view of "Drunk vs. Stoned 2," the sequel to a spring show.
Forum: Artists and Exhibitions
Fittingly perhaps, the opposition that counts here is less about style than about lifestyle, based on an artist's preferred shortcut to artistic transcendence. And what could be handier? Drunk versus stoned is a distinction familiar to many people, often from direct experience.
Perhaps most important, the appearances and visual effects of artworks themselves can be loosely categorized as either drunk (delirious, openly emotional, robustly physical) or stoned (mesmerizing, becalmed, obsessively repetitious). Abstract Expressionism is drunk art; Pop Art and Minimalism are stoned.
Like the original "Drunk vs. Stoned," staged by this gallery last spring, the sequel has been instigated by the founders of General Store, a freewheeling art gallery in Milwaukee: the artist-brothers Scott Reeder and Tyson Reeder, and Elysia Borowy-Reeder, Scott Reeder's wife, who is now a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. They collaborated with Gavin Brown and his gallery director, Corinna Durland. As before, there is an intermittently operative bar, this one ensconced in a marvelous replica of a rustic Western saloon, courtesy of the Reeder brothers.
The show's 39 works, which include film and video, interact in different ways with the framing duality. Some conform neatly to one side or the other, often by concentrating on the different physical effects of indulgence. "Stoned Robot" and "Drunk Robot," light-blue, nearly life-size sculptures by Scott Reeder and Donald Morgan, capture the body language of zoned out and falling-down drunk with boxy accuracy.
The noted drinker Martin Kippenberger, no longer with us, is represented by photographs of himself seemingly under the influence. Rebecca Warren's ceramic sculpture suggests a large, wobbly martini glass and even has a red nose; a photograph by Sarah Lucas shows an empty wine bottle sprouting the letters of her name like a bouquet.
Edgar Bryan's "Touched" depicts a pale Chaplinesque young man staring fixedly at some flowers. "Bong Island Butterfly Lamp," by Abel McHone, incorporates, in miniature, the ideal apparatus and locale for getting stoned and even a suitable object of the ultra-focused (stoned) gaze: a spiraling flock of fake butterflies. The personal wear and tear of alcohol is alluded to in Anne Collier's "Spill," a photograph of a neat row of LP's, the first one titled the Pet Shop Boys' "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk." Next to it, Robert Crumb counters with a drawing of a belligerent woman titled "I Suppose You Think I've Had Too Much to Drink."
Art Review | 'Drunk vs. Stoned 2'
Along the Blurry Line Between Blotto and Buzzed
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: August 26, 2005
"Drunk vs. Stoned 2," an ambitious if understandably discombobulated group show at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, cuts to the chase in terms of artistic dualities. Expressionist versus realist? Neo-figurative versus abstract? They're so 20th century.
Gavin Brown's Enterprise
An installation view of "Drunk vs. Stoned 2," the sequel to a spring show.
Forum: Artists and Exhibitions
Fittingly perhaps, the opposition that counts here is less about style than about lifestyle, based on an artist's preferred shortcut to artistic transcendence. And what could be handier? Drunk versus stoned is a distinction familiar to many people, often from direct experience.
Perhaps most important, the appearances and visual effects of artworks themselves can be loosely categorized as either drunk (delirious, openly emotional, robustly physical) or stoned (mesmerizing, becalmed, obsessively repetitious). Abstract Expressionism is drunk art; Pop Art and Minimalism are stoned.
Like the original "Drunk vs. Stoned," staged by this gallery last spring, the sequel has been instigated by the founders of General Store, a freewheeling art gallery in Milwaukee: the artist-brothers Scott Reeder and Tyson Reeder, and Elysia Borowy-Reeder, Scott Reeder's wife, who is now a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. They collaborated with Gavin Brown and his gallery director, Corinna Durland. As before, there is an intermittently operative bar, this one ensconced in a marvelous replica of a rustic Western saloon, courtesy of the Reeder brothers.
The show's 39 works, which include film and video, interact in different ways with the framing duality. Some conform neatly to one side or the other, often by concentrating on the different physical effects of indulgence. "Stoned Robot" and "Drunk Robot," light-blue, nearly life-size sculptures by Scott Reeder and Donald Morgan, capture the body language of zoned out and falling-down drunk with boxy accuracy.
The noted drinker Martin Kippenberger, no longer with us, is represented by photographs of himself seemingly under the influence. Rebecca Warren's ceramic sculpture suggests a large, wobbly martini glass and even has a red nose; a photograph by Sarah Lucas shows an empty wine bottle sprouting the letters of her name like a bouquet.
Edgar Bryan's "Touched" depicts a pale Chaplinesque young man staring fixedly at some flowers. "Bong Island Butterfly Lamp," by Abel McHone, incorporates, in miniature, the ideal apparatus and locale for getting stoned and even a suitable object of the ultra-focused (stoned) gaze: a spiraling flock of fake butterflies. The personal wear and tear of alcohol is alluded to in Anne Collier's "Spill," a photograph of a neat row of LP's, the first one titled the Pet Shop Boys' "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk." Next to it, Robert Crumb counters with a drawing of a belligerent woman titled "I Suppose You Think I've Had Too Much to Drink."
