Jenny Walty

I've had enough free time to visit Chelsea twice in the last month due to the fact that I'm waiting to begin a new job. This is part one, describing my first visit to Chelsea, on which I didn't have time to make an itinerary before setting out with a friend so hit the blue-chips and personal faves before pooping out for turkey burgers at a diner.

We started with Hans Haacke's effortless "State of the Union" at Paula Cooper (open until Dec. 23). I read some negative things about this show but the materiality he employs is so precise. As someone with similarly metaphorical goals I can tell you it is not as easy as it looks to create meaning out of disparate objects, or tableaus that evoke our current national crisis as this exhibition does.

Haacke is no windbag either, these works come out of a true engagement with politics and as an artist he has suffered the consequences. His solo show at the Guggenheim was cancelled in 1971 because he took on the NY Real Estate power brokers, obviously powerful supporters of the museum. I admire the reach and depth of his work, the work in the Reichstag struck me as a imminently successful public art work. There's a wonderful Haacke quote in the press release,

"Experience tells us we should never leave politics to the politicians. Aside from the trouble this can get us into, such abdication would also be in conflict with generally held notions of democracy. But it would also be dangerous for art. Shutting out the social world would reduce it to a self-consuming 'art for art's sake.'"

My friend Jay was at the gallery desk when we stopped by and recommended the Mike Kelley show as not to be missed so we trundled over to Gagosian. He was right, it's a wild show that is worth seeing. The scale evokes a museum show, completely filling the space with macabre and puzzling installations and photographs, detailing where the gothic love affair begins and the documentary ends. Kelley has a dark sense of humor as he recreates "(oc)cult" 70's scenes and documents the recreation with photographs that mimic the source and sometimes videos in some cases which abstract or supply narrative to the installations. As Jay said, Kelley has created a fun-house or house of horrors but held onto a sense of mystery that holds our schizophrenic attention. It's open until Dec. 17 and is worth catching; it's almost date-worthy!

Byron Kim's show at Max Protetch (until Dec. 23) was a quiet counterpoint. While this is not a sculpture show, I am mentioning it because of installational goals and two sculptural works that the artist includes. I don't know, but the desire to represent the entire world seems sculptural to me, thinking about the space around the body seems sculptural to me, and working with other people to realize form and create experience seems sculptural to me.

"The Art of Chess" at Luhring Augustine was a fun way for sculptors like Paul McCarthy, Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Yayoi Kusama, Maurizio Cattelan, Rachel Whiteread, Barbara Kruger and Tom Friedman to take on a functional form. Of course it's a totally commercial endeavor (editions of 7, exhibition right before the holidays) but I always enjoy seeing artists respond to specific parameters, solving the same problem in very different ways.

I glimpsed "mobile" by Xavier Veilhan through the window at Sandra Gehring, the clean abstract aesthetic leaves me cold. Mona Hatoum's, "Mobile Home" was not as striking as her previous works, it felt unfocused.

I love Bill Viola and his exhibition at James Cohan is up until Dec 22. Go see it. Spend an hour, become quiet and focused, let your eyes go and your mind wander through these temporal video images. There's a lot of work but it's worth taking the time to experience each one fully; consider it psychic balm for the holidays.

We finished up at Bellwether with Marc Swanson's installation of trees, with nests, feathers, lights, and other things. I've been noticing that trees are a time honored sculptural subject as well as an active contemporary sculptural discourse. From the peacock clock in the hermitage to Mark Dions earlier work, trees are used to literally support the concept of nature, but Dion takes it a step further to make a more complicated and resounding argument bringing the concept of nature back to the feet of culture through the human idea of categorization. Swanson has moved on from mirrored deer heads to hanging all kinds of crap from trees. While in some ways it's sweet and lovely, it is not specific. Swanson may wish to reference some of the above-mentioned work, but it is not clear to what end.

Luckily we have Mark Dion himself at Tanya Bonakar to be clear and purposeful with piles of crap.