Still, abstract thinking hasn’t completely given way to polished concrete. Michele Maccarone decamped to the West Village, and Mirabelle Marden’s pioneering Rivington Arms (and its star artist, Dash Snow) is no more; but the four artist-partners behind Canada are still showing sui generis work, like the obsessively geometric paintings of Xylor Jane (a beekeeping recluse in western Massachusetts), or the large West African idol made of wood, clay, and plaster designed by Polish artist Joanna Malinowska with the intention of making the world implode. (“It didn’t work,” Suzanne Butler, one of Canada’s partners, notes drily.) And plenty of gallerists—an impressive number of them women, including Lisa Cooley, Laurel Gitlen, Rachel Uffner, Participant Inc’s Lia Gangitano, and On Stellar Rays’ Candice Madey—are cultivating a colorful DIY aesthetic that permeates everything from performance to painting. The hilarious videos shown last year at Participant by the Los Angeles performance collective My Barbarian put a comic spin on the banalities of modern life: In one episode a woman tries to marry her extraterrestrial lover to get a better insurance plan, but is turned down because the alien is the same sex as she.
“It’s more improvised here, and that’s what I like,” says Biesenbach, who moved to the nearby Seward Park co-op complex four years ago. When it came to selecting works for “Greater New York,” he notes that it was no accident that so many of the show’s artists came from L.E.S. galleries. “A little over a year ago, I was walking up Orchard Street, and I noticed a pirate standing on the street. He said ‘Come downstairs!’ I saw it was On Stellar Rays, and there was a crazy performance by Debo Eilers; then I went upstairs, and there was a fantastic show by Tommy Hartung. Both of them ended up in ‘Greater New York.’”
Hartung’s was fairly minimal: a glowing fish tank inhabited by two live koi and a video re-creating a 1973 BBC documentary about evolution. Meanwhile, the Eilers piece, Four-Hour Fundamental, was a spoof of art school that included a smoke machine, seedy green lights, and pheromones, as well as a cast of young artists selling things like T-shirts, pills, and one-night stands. Eilers stood by in what Madey describes as a “hoodie G-string.”
But a big component of the scene’s anarchic oomph is not in the art but in the framework around it. “Part of it is just the small physical size of the galleries,” explains Cooley. “When you come in here, you talk to me. It’s like those eight-seat restaurants where the chef brings you your food, or how the Swiss Institute and Margaret Lee had a crazy dance party at this space on Canal, and Lee thought, Hey, this could be a space for me; and now that’s her gallery, 179 Canal. So it’s really a social connectivity that leads to inventiveness—you know, Hey, wouldn’t this be a great idea?”
