Art on Paper, January-February, 2003
"Gallery Walk: New York" by Sarah Schmerler

Fashion magazines are always touting ridiculously simple truisms like "Red is the new black." Upon reading them, I wonder: Are hordes of women really running out to buy crimson cocktail dresses, all the better to leave me behind the curve? New trends are announced with such an absurd tone of authority that I must pronounce my own here: Sunday is the new Saturday when it comes to seeing art.

But first, let me retrace my steps. On a recent foray into Chelsea, most every show I saw by a big-name artist feld mannered and overblown. Only one, Michael Hurson's at Paula Cooper, truly delighted. Forming its centerpiece was a suite of muscular yet whimsical studies in gouache, ink, and pastel (and most anything else you could imagine) of Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Hurson took lots of expressionistic liberties with Seurat's image of almost classical repose, rendering the foliage in scribbled whorls of pencil, or undercutting the shadows wittth daubs of correction fluid. Yet everything was there: the tiny rowers on the Seine, the woman fishing by the water's edge, and, most incredibly, as though they were notes transposed into another octave, the deep tone of that long, cool shadow that fills most of the foreground, and the brightness of the sky beyond.

Inspired by Hurson (and all those leisurely pursuits depicted), I decided to leave Chelsea behind and vowed to see as much art as I could on the following Sunday (when all of Chelsea is closed). I'd take the family, the fishing rod, the monkey (well, OK, I don't have a monkey), and I'd keep an eye out for artists who, like Hurson, are keen on making art inspired by art.

There are, by a very modest count, about sixy bona-fide, for-profit gallery spaces open on Sundays in the city, from Harlem in the north to Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the south. Some, like those in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, are bordered by streets clogged with expensive boho boutiques, coffee bars, and scads of other Sunday gallery hounds who have arrived on the scene before you. Others, like Maccarone, Inc., on the Lower East Side, are one-stop destinations, bordered only by places where you can cop a cheap lunch.

The show at Maccarone, Inc., was definitely worth the stop. It marked the first solo New York foray by sisters Claudia and Julia Müller of Switzerland, and was heavy with some rather abstruse poster-sized drawings in sepia-colored acrylic on paper: menus from restaurants in Basel, faithfully copied, for instance. Clearer was the aptly titled installation upstairs, Idylls. Its centerpiece consisted of drawings in pencil on paper that had been scanned and reproduced by the Müllers in slow animatin video. in them we see a happy family, as if captured in a holiday snapshot. There is a mommy, a daddy, a baby. But as each new drawing replaces the next, the scene gently changes. The daddy turns from a white man to a black man. The baby in their arms transforms from white to Asian. A dog replaces the baby. In a deft use of mixed media, the Müllers sited these projections within a larger wall painting of green foliage, with which the drawings merged seamlessly. Yet this Idyll was no sweet picnic.

The element of surprise and a certain wry cynicism about the art market fueled Helsinki-based artist Jani Leinonen's show at Plus Ultra gallery in Williamsburg. Leinonen invited six artists to participate, and their works were displayed in specially built frames covered with opaque glass. The hitch: Viewers could only observe the work by placing a coin in it's frame, allowing the opaque glass to go clear for fifteen seconds. What's more, prices for said viewing changed daily, based on viewer demand. David Humphrey's piece (a childlike image of bunnies eating sandwiches), one dollar the Saturday before, was twenty-five cents the Sunday I went. the show's real surprise was a Louise Lawler photo (actually depicting a collector's fairly non-descript living room interior), billed as by "Anonymous." Keeping her name out of it threw a little wrench in Leinonen's experiment in reputation-determining value. Lawler was by far the most famous artist in the show. Still, perhaps because visitors didn't know the work was by her, her photo hadn't gotten so many hits yet that Sunday that I couldn't see it for a quarter.

Nearby at Pierogi, Bob and Roberta Smith (that's a pseudonym for a single British artist, by the way) presented a viewer-participatory send-up of the art world entitled The Art Amnesty that, alas, didn't live up to the hype. In short, visitors to the gallery were encouraged to sign a card that read "I promise never to make art again"; to use paper and markers provided to make a "last drawing"; and, if they brought their previous "bad" art with them, to deposit it in a huge dumpster parked outside the gallery - thereby freeing them from the shackles of low-quality art. Colorful banner-like phrases papered the walls. "Artists Ruin It for Everyone," read one. "Henry Moore Never Had an Original Idea," read another. For my money, the show was two parts stunt, one part art. As if to underscore my feelings, a TV crew happened to be there making a documentary the day I visited. Suddenly they focused on my one-year-old, who had gotten ahold of a magic marker and was scribbling away. "Is he doing his last drawing?" asked a woman from the TV crew. "No, actually, he's doing his first drawing," I replied, and quickly got junior out of camera range.

David Kramer (at Eyewash Gallery@OPEN GROUND) also traffics in a certain art world insider baseball, but his humor I can handle. A long-time local Williamsburger, he's seen it all, and although his self-deprecating text-based works and performances are often about "making it" in the greater market, he has no illusions about what a hollow goal that can be. One of the better drawings here included his fantasies of being a high-school football hero. Its facts were so improbable, yet its tone of self-deception so real, that it's hard to know truth from fiction.

Poking fun at either self or art was shaping up to be something of a Sunday theme, and not exactly what I expected. With that said, it was Brooklyn-based artist Daniel Davidson who deserved the award for best draftsman of the self-deprecatory - weighing in with a suite of works in acrylic and collage on paper at Jessica Murray Projects in Williamsburg that provided as much sensuous viewing pleasure as punch. Davidson portrays himself as a series of shiftless characters - sporting a bright Hawaiian shirt in one colorful image; an overweight, unshaven joe trying to shove a hot dog in his maw in another. The beautiful part is, Davidson clearly enjoys handling pen and brush. Hence, we might say that he comes more out of the Hurson tradition than that of Smiths. His painting chops speak up for his qualities, even if his autographic characters don't.

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