Issue Number 96
March 8, 2003
Copyright © 2003, Charles Giuliano

Charles Giuliano is a Boston based artist, curator and critic. He is an editor of Art New England, contributor to Nyartsmagazine, and the director of exhibitions for The New England School of Art & Design at Suffolk University. He is represented by FLATFILESphotography GALLERY in Chicago.

Streetwalking
Marching Along Boston’s Gallery Row

Dah wedah has been moidah, as they would say in the Bronx. In my neighborhood, East Boston, or Eastie, there are cones, barrels and chairs marking out parking spaces. The much coveted and fiercely defended turf between immense piles of snow. A record 27.5 inches in a blizzard. Never mind that the event occurred some three weeks ago. The barrels remain. The trick is to stay put and wait for the thaw that never comes.

Add to that what they call in Chicago, the Hawk. That icy blast off the lake. Here they just say, wicked cold, wicked, wicked cold. Blasting through layers of garments and icing up the frontal lobes. It gets to you. And we all are a little edgy and snappy as the gloom just settles into your bones.

So I was hardly in the best of spirits on a recent March afternoon as I made my way, dutifully, down Newbury Street, Boston’s official and upscale gallery row. It is where to find the saleable art. The more adventurous work will be encountered elsewhere in the city in a rich cornucopia of contemporary museums, university programs and alternative spaces. By comparison, the official art of Newbury Street makes me depressed. It gets harder to differentiate between galleries and art shops. The best indicator is the frames. The worse the art the more elaborate the setting. That tends to be a giveaway.

Many galleries I outright shun. Never pass the threshold but glimpse through the storefront windows. The more marginal ones I dart in and out of. There is always the possibility that even bad galleries may occasionally show interesting work. Trouble is that I am too readily spotted. I prefer to be anonymous but I long ago blew my cover. This may result in a furtive exchange of greetings.
The trick is to keep it short and cute. Get it down to a oneliner. And keep it brief. It doesn’t take long to absorb bad art. Unless, of course, you attend the opening. In which case you endure the art
for the social benefits and a couple of glasses of headache wine. Or the occasional peanut.

So strolling along the critic may indeed become conflated with the persona of the streetwalker. Some of my more notable colleagues have developed this tricking to a far greater degree than I have. One dealer, a good friend actually, has accused me of hating art that sells. Another confided to me, the other day, that the worst thing about showing art you don’t believe in is when it doesn’t sell. He said it with a wonderful conspiratorial laugh and a twist on his mustache.

The positive aspect of making the rounds of galleries is the possibility of seeing some really outstanding work. But, on high rent Newbury Street, one is always required to deconstruct just what is meant by work of high quality and interest. Gallerists, as they often take the trouble to remind me, have to survive. In that regard one has to respect the challenges involved. The rules are simple: The strong endure and the weak perish.

Then there is that quality thing. Everything that is shown on Newbury Street from the most serious and ambitious galleries, of which there are many, to the most craven and strumpy art shops, have, within their own definitions, a notion of what constitutes quality. Simply put the work must in some sense be well made. Even the worst bourgeois over the sofa crap is in some viewer’s eye, hopefully
the buyer, well made.

Then there is the matter of taste. Galleries that I view as little more than bordellos get tons of ink from my peers. It is, for example, always worth a good laugh to see what makes the annual year’s
best list of the Boston Phoenix, the city’s, get this, "alternative," we used to say, "underground," paper.

Having whet your appetite let us now comment on some of the highlights of the current March Madness along Newbury Street.

David Moore: Vibe
Gallery Naga
March 7-29

Bostonians have a fascination, no fetish, about all aspects of painting. One of the very best of these painters is the mid career artist, David Moore. In a series of shows at Naga he has produced series of exquisite abstract works. The surfaces are rich and subtle.

Some time ago he produced seemingly monochromes with barely discernible plaids in thin complementary lines and colors. Compared to that subtlety and elegance these new works are
jumpy and vibrating.

Although Moore is using vertical stripes, and a broad range of colors and gyrations, he seems to have evolved into an equivalent of the late Mondrian in Manhattan of the Broadway Boogie
Woogie phase. The analogy to music is apt in the case of Moore as he has another identity as a musician. His instrument of choice is unorthodox. When properly coaxed and enticed he plays the
bent saw with a bow. It is an eerily beautiful and spooky bit of magic.

There is always a sense of order and discipline in the paintings. He imposes a set of constraints and rules. But this time he both sets up and seeming violates his agenda. There are sweeping arcing curves finding their way through the vertical lines. They have a kind of a hey, look at me, over here, attention getting demeanor. As if the artist were intending to break out of his imposed order and discipline. There is also an element of the loose and painterly about the stripes. This sets them off from the hard edge, taped tradition of the ‘60s recalled in the works of Larry Zox, Frank Stella, Gene Davis and Guido Molinari to mention just a few of the generation of hard edge painters. Here Moore is more edgy than edge. Also more is Moore.

For a more learned overview of the work be sure to pick up or request a copy of the handout essay that accompanies the show by Rose Art Museum Director, Joseph D. Ketner. It, among other
things, discusses Moore’s traffic accident some time back and the impact on the work. It is a good read.

Denise Marika: Bisected: Body Projections
Howard Yezerski Gallery
14 Newbury Street
Through March 18

This work is tough to take and painful to watch. The artist who always uses her nude body as the subject for performative video projections put herself through obsessive, ritual exercises. She seems to grit and strain.

These are not exercises in the sense of body building and molding but rituals and exorcisms. She seems to be punishing herself or driving out demons. There is also the element of repetition. We are
induced or seduced into her bodily mantras.

This devolves us into a troubled participant, part voyeur, and part transformative shamanistic cultist. One part of me notices and even intrudes on glimpses of the female body, and another wiser
instinct induces self flagellation for succumbing to the verboten male gaze. When will I ever learn or get over it. Looking at art should be independent of hormones. And certainly Marika, although
nude, is evoking anything other than sexuality. Unless, and here it gets problematic, you get off on viewing someone else’s pain.

There are three projections that display the body head on in an extreme foreshortening. It is the other end view of the Mantegna, Dead Christ. Seen from the head not the feet but with the same
dramatic perspective impact. In one of the videos the artist lifts her head only to drop it with a thud on the surface below. It has to be painful and dangerous. Why is she doing this?

Clearly this is important and risky work. The artist has been featuresd at MoMA and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum among other important venues. It has earned her a national reputation and one of the works in this show has been acquired by Panoma College in California. Bravo for Marika. I feel her pain. And for Yezerski for sticking by her for a number of years.

New Media Artists: Installations by Erik Freeman, Devrim Kadirbeyoglu and Douglas Weathersby
Guest Curated by Denise Marika and Megan Goltermann
Videospace of the Judi Rotenberg Gallery
Closing March 9

Abigail Ross, the director of Judi Rotenberg Gallery, and daughter of its founder, has created an interesting project room in the apartment above the main gallery. In the past year she has used his
annex to present emerging artists in a lively and diverse program. She has also sought collaborations with such notable curators as George Fifield who works with video and, in this latest example, with Denise Marika and Megan Goltermann.

The work is fun and refreshing. One piece involves aspects of shaped dust and a shadow cast by a wire chair, a projection into a fireplace, another slanting along the corner walls and a third piece, a monitor mounted on a stand.

Unfortunately the space and program generate little traffic. You have to know that it is there and ask for a viewing. But, apparently, a number of visitors make it upstairs during the main gallery’s
crowded openings. Check it out.

Cynthia Packard
Chase Gallery
Anne Packard
Arden Gallery
Both March

Two galleries, both of which feature representational painting, Arden and Chase, who are just across and adjoining entrance hall, have combined forces to present a mother, Anne Packard, and
her daughter, Cynthia Packard, in a tandem of shows.

Although a generation separates them, they both evolve from the same conservative figurative traditions of their native Provincetown, Mass., where they maintain a very successful, summer
gallery on Commercial Street that features their work.

In the mother, who favors seascapes and the landscape of the sublime with the occasional beached
dory, one senses the tradition of Charles Hawthorne who lived and taught in P’Town in the early years of the 20th century. At his best, Hawthorne was revered for his bravura brushstroke and lush
surfaces in the allaprima tradition of Hals. Packard gives just a glimpse of that. While daugher Cynthia seems to continue in another P’Town tradition related to Henry Hensche, a famed teacher, who was a distant reflection of the French Fauve tradition. But Hensche was a less than wild beast and Cynthia is an even more domesticated form of the animal. But she evokes the now century old manner of the loaded brush and blocky depiction of pre cubist planes defining the form of nudes.

The gallery is filled with female nudes, in this case, even less erotic than the naked Marika. When did I come to actually not enjoying images of naked women? Oh yes, and the Chase show also
includes a dog. Near the door. You catch it on the way out. Thank heavens for the dog.

Y’All Come Back