Antony Gormley and Urs Fischer

My bags are packed for Miami, where in the coming days I will no doubt be crushed into place at several simultaneous art fairs, a few private museums, the beach concert by Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and a late night party or two. If critic Jerry Saltz is right, and "taste is a blood sport," then this is the grand gathering of vampires--seasoned veterans with the sharpest teeth and sexiest coffins, a growing second tier of intelligent neck chewers, and a ravenous mob of makers, curators, buyers, bloggers, and additional lithe bodies. Objects and opportunities, desire and deals, millions of em.

I have to admit, even as I look for my sunglasses, that I much prefer quieter and slower spatial relations with art, and with space itself for that matter. The kind of experience you can have on a rainy Wednesday in a gallery or alternative space somewhere. With this in mind (and body) I fondly recall two recent New York gallery visits.

The photo above shows the entrance to Antony Gormley's Blind Light, a glass room-within-a-room at the Sean Kelly Gallery. As I walked into the dense and luminous mist behind my friend, I immediately lost her. Visibility was less than a foot, and as I negotiated the the disorienting and exhilarating territory, I was reminded of driving through an East Coast blizzard in my old Dodge Charger, focused and hopeful that everything would work out alright.
When my friend and I reconnected, we felt for the walls to make our way out, close to each other but still invisible and alone.

At Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Urs Fischer presented You, a bold excavation of the gallery space which yielded a 38 x 30 foot crater. Crisp white walls surround the earthy brown of the site, and a modest concrete ledge allows one to survey the pit and intrepid climbers. Every bit of the architecture is activated--from above and below, from the edge and the center. What is there and what is gone presses on you the joys of risk and remembrance.



Gormley and Fischer, with water and dirt, have made my month.

posted by the Contemporary