From the misty Accabonac Harbor, Terence Koh arrived by kayak. His magnificent wedding gown enveloped him like a cloud of cornstarch.* The wedding attendees whispered and chuckled in awe and mirth, respectively, as the art star bride touched upon the shore and disembarked from his vessel. He tip-toed through the rain-soaked grass to his groom, Garrick Gott, who sat perched in a tree like the charming lovebird he is.

Böcklin, Isle of the Dead, 1880

Twenty (or so) lovers of love responded to the last-minute request of the pleasure of their company at the marriage of longtime lovers and former Canadians, Terence Koh and Garrick Gott. The private garden ceremony was New York-minute brief, yet epic; beach casual, yet precious. And despite the overwhelming fabulosity, the palpable romance fostered wholesome tenderness.

Alight Up My Life

Koh patron and host Philip Aarons presided, offering an eloquent, anecdotal canticle on the young couple. Terence and Garrick beamed as they smooched under the Koh-crafted tulle veil (KOHTURE, he calls it), thanked everyone for coming, then tossed the bouquet. Nobody caught it the first time, so they tossed it again.

Curator Shamim M. Momin

After cutting the cake, Terence led a toast, pausing to honor his late friend, Dash Snow.

...in a tree; K-I-S-S-I-N-G..

Attendees included art world luminaries Kathy Grayson, Lisa Anastos, Shamim Momin, Edsel Williams, Klaus Biesenbach, the Schnabel scions, and many more. Some compared notes on the annual Watermill party from the night previous. Others commented on the tenebrous skies, appropriate for an otherwise gleeful celebration of this master of effete art. Muslin veils are signature Koh material; would this wedding make it into his future catalogue raisonn-gay? Will it be recreated for a museum show on wedding gowns? You could include Robert Gober here and here.

Ride that Train

Embracing atop a Ned Smyth kinetic sculpture, the newlyweds danced to Joy Division. Courtesy of Shamim’s upper body strength, they turned, beaming with each revolution. “Let’s stop now,” Terence chirped. “This is getting too gay.”

The small congregation began to thin and the Just-Married cooed and nuzzled, careful not to spill their Veuve Clicquot. I had joked that Terence was the only virgin bride I had met; but that gown looked capacious enough for two. Was the honeymoon about to begin?

*Or other white powder.

Fleur Du Mal

IMAGES: Michael Bilsborough

How did you celebrate National Art Hate Week? Spraypaint a Picasso? Slash a Newman? Steal a Munch? Audition for a Bravo reality show about artists? But non-violent protest would have been valid. Silent contempt would suffice. Never underestimate the potency of a cold shoulder.

Tracey Emin, Everyone I have Ever Slept With (1963–95) (1995)

I celebrated by visiting a few summer group shows. Summer group shows are terrific. They are like a sampler platter at a seafood restaurant, which might determine the entrée you order next time. You can share with friends, then each will vote his or her favorite. “I liked the mozzarella sticks.” At D’Amelio Terras, my artgoing comrades in hate each selected a different work. I actively hated Permanent Occupant, by Aiko Hachisuka. That work is included in Tables and Chairs, curated by Jedediah Caesar and Shana Lutker.

Permanent Occupant, 2007 by Aiko Hachisuka

I actively, or maybe passive-aggressively hated it, because it’s so enchanting. Wish I’d thought of it.

With a couch as its support/catalyst, Permanent Occupant is an assemblage amalgamation of bedding and clothing stitched, buttoned, and bound together. Dozens of phantom children are wrestling or snuggling, then building pillow effigies/frankensteins/voltrons under the sheets while they sneak out at night. Mirror Stage sleepover?

Closer

Generations of childhood imagery jumble together: Star Wars mingles with Mickey and Minnie, nestled next to Shrek, bunched up against Winnie the Pooh. Disney holds hands with Hanna Barbera.

Cozy Couch

Yet the generation gaps don’t impose expiration dates. Through apparent timelessness, every figure resists obsolescence, and rather than being replaced by its successors, all of the characters merge in an ever-widening parade of glee, enlivening Collective Memory Boulevard with balloons and cotton candy.

Despite the cotton candy and balloons in its genes, Permanent Occupant has the stuffed, severed, and segmented limbs of a re-inanimated Scarecrow, and seems to host sibling rivalry, growing pains, and filial emancipation. There’s the Mike Kelley thing. It also reminds me of Derrick Adams’ work at Greater New York 2005, Look What You Made Me Do, and sometimes I just don’t feel like myself at Momenta Art.

And while the characters are ageless, they are also genderless. Star Wars might have found more favor with boys, its phosphorescent light sabers leaving boys – and some men – glistening with phallocentric drool, but then couldn’t girls identify with Princess Leia? Most of the Permanent Occupant co-ed cast share a unisex, universal appeal that boys and girls can enjoy together. Everyone liked Snoopy. Everyone liked Scooby-Doo (and Scrappy, too!). Is that why they are timeless?

Yes, we can!

This is your brain. This is your brain on Ikea. (Or as Ikea.)

Or “The World as Will and Ikea.”

Peicasso

Alexandre Singh completely blew my mind with the latest in his ongoing Assembly Instructions series, a sweeping survey regarding memory, logic, history, knowledge, and showroom architecture. This lecture, (Manzoni, Klein, et al.)was the second in a series of events and performances comprising the invited (cordially uninvited), curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen for the Artists Space exhibition The columns held us up. Lucky attendees filled the faculty apartment of Alex Nagel in one of NYU’s silver towers, a Pei/Picasso landmark.

Alexandre coolly paced before two overhead projectors, relics of last century’s classrooms, precariously perched atop stacks of art history hardcovers. His audience included art fixtures Fia Backstrom, Sam Gordon, Michael Portnoy, Lisa Oppenheim, Benjamin Tischer, and Bob Nickas; and about 30 other people I didn’t recognize; and at one point, an obese, fluffy cat. Alexandre, alum of SVA Fine Arts ’05, is one of the most successful artists from SVA’s recent graduating classes, already embarking on international shows and a White Room exhibition at the impenetrable White Columns, and of course, he was on the three stripes creating Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, later regenerated at Art Basel Miami and now compounded at Deitch Projects, both without his involvement.

Alexandre dressed in his signature black suit/black tie, a neutral and uninflected mantle, and – in a rare happy marriage between art and fashion – Adidas trainers, reminding us of his book/video/research exegesis, The Marque of the Third Stripe. His mic was a thin wire connected to his ear, very cool.

Yipes, Stripes

And then he began a feature-length soliloquy, identifying the determined IKEA design with the mysterious architecture of our brains, how departments of the store could model the regions of our brains, inventory our concepts. In fact, his PAX storage systems, a faceless multiscreen of closets and shelves, and its contents could stand in as a structure of earth and its kingdoms and phyla.

Renaissance Art scholar and event host, Alexander Nagel (l) with friend

Via dreams, dreams of dreams, and dreams of other people’s dreams – no electric sheep – Alexandre strung together Piero Manzoni, his Base of the World (1961); the pecking order of marine life; Sculpture éponge bleue sans titre (1959), and its auteur, Yves Klein; the Campidoglio and its Marcus Aurelius equestrian bronze, long misinterpreted as depicting Emperor Constantine; a camera that could record everything in the universe; a projector that could convey it back; a machine that created anything starting with the letter “N,” including “nothing;” the last dying breath of Julius Caesar; the color brown in light, in paint, in shit, in theory, and color theory; Baruch Spinoza; Barack Obama; monads; and more, though not in this order. The apex was the dazzling segment claiming that, “Inevitable mutations bring about uncertainties about old knowledge and the continuous incarnation of lies,” with those words ping-ponged from projector to projector.

Didja get all that?

Did you get all that? Neither did anyone else. Alexandre was purposefully hyperlinking through strata of ideas. It was a free association of images, yet guided by logical connections. It reminded me of Lars Laumann’s brilliant Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana (2006), whereby a stream of concepts, with shifting criteria and lacking formulas, is enabled to drum up syntax and patterns. It’s like Alice in Wonderland playing croquet with the Queen: the rules keep changing. And Alexandre’s barrage of names, titles, terms, and leaps between languages seem meant to overwhelm any listener. It’s information maximalism. Alexandre wields ideas the way Jason Rhodes uses materials: countless, dense, and surrounding. However, recreating a Jason Rhoades would likely require a diagram, numeric coding, and documentation. Recreating (Manzoni, Klein, et al.) could theoretically happen by retracing the logical steps and connections. It’s knowledge you already know; it’s talk between Plato and Meno.

GPS: Good Pointing Skills

To illustrate his material (immaterial?), Alexandre sifted through a sequence of transparencies to simultaneously cast their images from the twin towers of overhead projectors. Each image was a photocopied from Alexandre’s witty and marvelous collages, layering art historical images, hijacked book pages, witty diagrams, repatriated photos. The hundreds of images themselves would be a sufficient exhibition; so we get a show in a lecture and a lecture in a show. Pick a department, dynamic metaphysicians: photocopies = photography? Collage = mixed media? Acetate/sequence = film? Presence = performance? Stacked materials = sculpture?

Codex/Index

It could be that Alexandre sounds brilliant because he has an English accent. Or it could be that his brain is a boundless MegaIKEAPlex filled to the brim with goods that could make this lecture series a lifelong undertaking.

IMAGE: Tom Fletcher; all others Michael Bilsborough

All things considered, it is heartbreaking when any little girl must grow up without a father. Do you blame the father for choosing against his family? Or the compulsion that lured him away? Gauguin chose painting over his wife and five children, ditching them to follow his bliss in Paris. Dash Snow seems to have followed drugs over his daughter, Secret; but we will never know his intentions. But the cause of death seems to be a gradual suicide stretched over the years, made increasingly legendary each time we mention it.

Comments at the NY Times and Gawker range from jaded told-you-so’s to streetz-styled shout-outs. Many attack Dash for selfishly belaboring his high-risk drug consumption, which jeopardized his paternal obligations. But where is the blame in addiction? I’ve never been hooked on anything except coffee and phonics, so I’m keeping mute.

Though we were in a casual group show together, I knew Dash Snow only through what he revealed/boasted in his Polaroids. And my last post was all RIP Michael Jackson. ::Two good reasons to avoid writing a requiem. (The best photo tribute is at Tiny Vices.)

Besides that, Dash Snow’s art didn’t really do it for me. On sex, drugs, counterculture, dystopian glamour, cocks, blood, outlaws, cum, and psychotic violence, who could really top the Sex Pistols, Richard Hell, Bret Easton Ellis, Cady Noland, Tommy Lee, Suicide Girls, Marilyn Manson, Andres Serrano, Larry Clark? And how seriously could you take it after This is Spinal Tap?

RIP Sid&Nancy; Rob Pruitt, iPhotos insltn at Gavin Brown

That doesn’t mean Dash’s work was DOA. For Holland Cotter, Dash was a bellwether:

“…Work that visually goes few places that Dada hasn’t already been. That’s O.K. If a young artist is searching for models, extreme Dada is an excellent choice. What’s encouraging is how far Mr. Snow, who is in his 20′s, has moved in such a short time, focusing and shaping a chafed, loose-cannon energy without reducing it.”

But isn’t extreme usually so mainstream, commercial-friendly, and producty that the nearby Marketing Exec has it tattooed on his shoulder in Chinese?

For Jerry Saltz, Dash was “a drug-addled scion of an American fortune,” and warned that if “Snow’s work doesn’t get more original, all that will one day be said about it will be that we had the luxury to say a lot about it.”

Drugs can be a potent catalyst for art. Hector Berlioz’ “Symphonie Fantastique” is notorious for having been fueled by opium. Jimi Hendrix supposedly nestled a tab of acid under his sweaty headband. Jack Kerouac popped Benzedrine while writing about pot.

Berlioz and his Montmarte real estate

Paul Schimmel curated Ecstasy: In and About Altered States at the L.A. MOCA. Gavin Brown hosted Drunk vs. Stoned, followed by a sequel. Responding to the GBE shows, Jerry Saltz (yes, again), observes that “stoned art” is introspective, hypersensitive, detail-oriented, and prone to surprise, spirals, and repetition, while drunk art is outward-looking, impulsive, romantic, and unafraid of messiness and sloppy emotions.”

What is the draw about heroin? Lou Reed, now 67, canonized it 30 years ago, yet it ambushes us every few years: Jim Morrison, Basquiat, Kurt Cobain, Trainspotting, Pulp Fiction, Pete Doherty, Amy Winehouse. Predictably, every time, the seductive neighbor becomes a rapist warden. Yet, we can’t discredit its generative potency in making art.

But let’s go back a few lines, no pun intended. If drugs can unleash creative potential, then why choose a drug that starts digging your grave? Wouldn’t it make more sense to apply a high that takes a lesser toll? A more “sustainable” drug? -Whoever died of a pot overdose? -Wouldn’t it be more revelatory, fun, and addiction-free to ride acid or mushrooms behind the scenes of reality? –What would mescaline do to a still life painting? Ask Picasso and Braque.

Is heroin just more glamorous, knighted as the hedonist ultimate? Is it more coded, branded as the aesthete’s elixir? Is heroin just more “extreme?” I know lots of people who have tried everything available, except heroin. Heroin is going too far, they think. But in Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries, “H” seems as ubiquitous as its “gateway” sibling. So maybe “extreme” is relative.

And to relatives, friends, and loved ones of Dash Snow: I am genuinely sorry that you lost someone in your life.