Creative Time's Nicholas Weist, photo by Steve Benisty
Since the crowds at this year’s New York fairs seemed to be doing more window shopping than actual purchasing, we asked a few of our favorite art personalities to send us a “wish list” – Whitewall’s version of a letter to Santa. Creative Time’s Nicholas Weist, a wearer of many hats (curator, writer and editor, Why + Wherefore’s director), gave us his picks from the Armory and Volta.
1. Carter, Constant, (James Franco as inanimate object as Robert Gober sculpture) #6, Yvon Lambert (The Armory Show, Pier 94): This work, replicating precisely the look of Robert Gober’s 1990 Untitled Leg reimagines Gober’s sculpture, made of beeswax and human hair, as facsimile copy of actor James Franco’s right leg in polyurethane elastomer. Franco, who recently played gay rights activist Harvey Milk’s boyfriend in Gus Van Sant’s film, is astutely cast (no pun intended) as the shiny, plastic, post-millennial version of Gober’s body-centric original in natural materials. Cold but heart-rending, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Maybe both at once would be best.
2. Bruce Conner, 5/19/1995, Susan Inglett (The Armory Show, Pier 94): The lesser-known works on paper of seminal filmmaker Bruce Conner borrow a patterning technique from Rorschach, with several vertical folds producing mirrored mandalas across the page. For all the brilliance of Conner’s assemblage and appropriation, when he actually put pen to paper, the results were as ethereal and transcendental as CROSSROADS and as reflective as A MOVIE.
3. Center for Tactical Magic, Wands, Voges + Partner (VOLTA): The Center for Tactical Magic’s collection of modern-day magic wands include a back massager, TV remote, and about 15 other long, skinny instruments that perform, each in their own fashion, wondrous feats. Encased in a large vitrine like an anthropological display, the hilarious and slightly grotesque accretion of post-industrialist tools of leisure subbing in for the producers of chimeras and miracles of times past recall the best of Koons and the worst of Hammacher Schlemmer.
4. Kim Gordon, Untitled, 2009, KS Art (The Armory Show, Pier 94): Erstwhile Sonic Youth member Kim Gordon’s suite of untitled watercolors, in the words of the artist, depict an audience from the point of view of being on stage. Abstracted and wash in metallic tones, the ghostly visages—which float on delicate rice paper—are haunting and glamorous in an anonymous, No Wave kind of way.
5. Charlie White, OMG BFF LOL, Loock Galerie (VOLTA): This collection of videos could be had for the recession-friendly price of fifteen dollars, appropriately enough. The cartoon miniseries follows two tweens: “Blakey: At the mall, there is all the stuff you want but, like, can’t have right? Tara: …all that wanting is, like, what I dream about all week long. I think it helps to want more than I can have, you know what I mean? ’Cause I love to want.” In our crumbling market, there was nothing more chilling than hearing some inverted Debord channeled through the glossed lips of a buxom mall rat. Tara even had some words for this humble wish list–writer, “Life is about wanting to have and then getting and then having and then, like, wanting more.”
