Moments from A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality on Saturday, Nov. 21 @ Blender Theater.  Curated by Mike Kelley and Mark Beasley!

The legendary Destroy All Monsters

Vito Acconci is in the House

Christian Marclay and Shelley Hirsch:

A little more, if you can handle it; don’t sweat the [Marclay] technique:

John Duncan’s performance scared the bejeezus out of everyone!  In the pitch black dark theater…

Evacuate?

…a chorus of people suddenly began screaming like maniacs.  Terror!  Nobody would attack an avant-garde crowd, right?

(l) Standing Nude, (r) Sitting Dust

-Right?  To my relief, the Xenon flash identified the screamers as merry pranksters, not bloody murderers.

More merry than hairy

Take a bow?

Artsy Fartsy? (No thanks!)

On with the show~

IMAGES: Michael Bilsborough

PETE DOHERTY!  OMG!

Self Portrait, 2007

Pete Doherty‘s self-portrait doodle in Brit-blood sold at auction last weekend at Phillips De Pury, London!  Trousers.

One lucky bidder scored the work for £3750.  That’s like $6,226.99 in American pounds.

I highly recommend this article for scan!da!lous! background info and MMA (mixed media art) of Kate Moss, his ex-gf.  And here it is contextualized among other British male gazes:

(l-r) Lucien Freud, Marc Quinn, Pete Doherty

JOIN US ON FACEBOOK!

Koh intern and vamp, Val

“If I were a member, I’d be livid,” whispered one super fierce publishing figure last night at the National Arts Club, referring to the dinner jacket-clad grown-ups who weren’t there for the Terence Koh lecture, who might have felt uncomfortably bumrushed by the scores of the artist’s ab fab fans, friends, a-KOH-lytes, and KOH-konspirators.

Garrick Gott and event organizer Stacy Engman, NAC Chair of Contemporary Art

To appease the outnumbered, but patient and actually very welcoming real NAC members, and to satiate the hungry, anxious club visitors, refreshments were abundant, including exotic absinthe spritzers, chocolate covered ants, port wine cheese spread, and Campbell’s soup with straws.

Who was there? Who wasn’t?

NAC President Arlene S. Hamsun introduces Terence Koh

Marina Abramovic, Klaus Biesenbach, Phil and Shelley Aarons, Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith, Cecilia Dean, Adam McEwen, Jeffrey Deitch, Mary Boone (happy belated birthday, still sexy at 58), RoseLee Goldberg, Kathy Grayson, Sophia Lamar…

…and lots of fashion people I can identify only by their looks.

W.W.W.D.?

The patrician, oil-on-canvas dinner jacket set would have been pleased.

Armchair historians

At 45 minutes, with nearly 400 images handpicked from local libraries and the artist’s bookshelves, individually scanned to ensure the highest quality, Terence Koh’s Art History 1642-2009 was a whirlwind tour of Western and Eastern Art, mostly chronological from 1642 to the present, and admitting into the Koh canon a few book covers, party photos, vintage porn, and even some line graph charts to diagram art market confidence.

Autumnal Degas moment at the NAC

Who was in it?  Who made the Terence Koh Canon?

KOHlympia

Marcel Duchamp, Vermeer, Velasquez, Warhol, Koons, Aurel Schmidt, Adam McEwen, Marina Abramovic, David Shrigley, Goya, Rembrandt, Judd, Bourgeois, Wojnarowicz, William Blake, Hockney, Rob Pruitt, Kelley Walker, Dash Snow, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Karen Black/Kembra Pfahler, Christian Holstad;

Maurizio Cattelan, Aaron Bondaroff, Muntean/Rosenblum, Yoko Ono, Bianca Jagger, Nauman, Robert Smithson, Yayoi Kusama, James Lee Byars, Girodet, Chardin, Flavin, Jenny Saville, Damien Hirst, Julian Schnabel, Murakami, Zhang Huan, General Idea, Dan Colen – not in that order (no McGinley? no AVAF?) – and that’s just a fraction of art history according to Terence Koh – which is more expansive than the Eurocentric humanities courses I took in college.

RIP Jeanne-Claude, Long live Bruce High Quality

Koh spoke his own private ida-Koh language, which sounds something like Proto-Indo-Cabbie, though I heard someone ask Terence if it was Swedish.

Tonight at NAC

He barely stopped to breathe, only taking breaks to sip from his glass of vodka.  He frequently strided away from his lectern to gesticulate and indicate details of the projected images.

A few times, he ranted at a rapid-fire clip, sounded like a Sotheby’s auctioneer, notably while discussing the Jeff Koons chrome bunny, which at the scale of the projection, looked like a anthropomorphic Sputnik.

RIP Dash Snow

Terence shouted and waved his arms indignantly while covering pictures of Hitler looking at artwork, and in the more emotive moments, slowed and spoke solemnly, especially when Dash Snow appeared, and when he displayed AA Bronson’s heartbreaking AIDS revelation, Felix, which is, for me, one of the most moving images of contemporary art since I first saw it in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Long live AA Bronson

In these heavyhearted moments, Terence sounded plantive and morose, though somehow resisted tears.  His lecture was politically charged, addressing, for example, 20th Century China and the Reagan administration’s delusional failure to intervene during the incipient AIDS epidemic.

Ups and Downs

And although nobody but Terence understood his words, he still said a lot, contextualizing himself and refreshingly reminding us that ultimately, art is remembered for being seen, and all that matters is how it looks!

Shrigley vs. Seymour (vs. Brant)

Is this the new Terence Koh, post market crash, post Snow?  Still cheeky, but more substantial, orchestrated, polychrome, narrative, and profound?  Let’s find out at his “secret” performance tomorrow evening at Tompkins Square Park.

Ike-Koh (gesundheit!)

Oh, and rumor reveals a potential Terence Koh/Lady Gaga collaboration! DisKOH Stick!

Hansonians

I stood behind Erik Hanson to hear what he was saying at the opening of his solo show, From the Morning, at Horton Gallery:

(The title comes from a Nick Drake song, but I’m too busy listening to Nirvana’s Bleach re-issue to know anything about melancholic Songwriters who tragically gave up on life before 30.)

No, you crackers just don't have the Ass for it

He said, “I was a punk rock DJ, but there were a few disco songs that I liked.  It wasn’t cool to listen to disco, but I did – just a few songs – so this was my ‘coming-out’ piece,” he said, pointing at a dreamy drawing tattooed with handwritten titles of disco hits.

Macho, macho man

In his show last year at Eleven Rivington, only a few blocks away, Erik did a salon-style show of disheveled, coded, stripe paintings bearing lyrics of the song played while he painted.  Each painting done in one sitting, which is sort of, supposedly how Luc Tuymans works, too.

Ethan Shoshan (l) and Erik Hanson (r)

The new show still gets filed under Pop/Rock music, but also reaches back ten years and branches out to include two clever sculptures, one in the clouds and one from the earth; a batch of whirly paintings like eccentric vinyl, twee thumbprints magnified, or folk galaxies; a grid of tiny photos; and a towering wall of monoprints that made the iPhone camera go spastic when trying to focus on Erik and friend Ethan Shoshan, who told me about the T-shirts he produced for the MIX festival.  My favorite is My Shameful Taste, described as “a grouping of realistically-sculpted birch logs topped with graphite drawings of the LP labels of the artist’s ‘guilty pleasures,’ which were hidden from peers as a Boy Scout but ultimately became emblematic in the formation of his sexual identity.”

At the opening, Erik presided over a crowd of followers and described the Monday-night show at Santos Party House of living, loving legend Vaginal P. Davis and morbid, spiteful Tony Clifton:

“Most of the crowd left after two or three minutes of his singing,” Erik says of the Andy Kaufman-crafted persona whose “career” outlived its creator.

But for Erik, most of the crowd remained for much longer than a few minutes, happily absorbing his Selections.  Congratulations, Erik!

That reminds me that I forgot to post photos of Vaginal P. Davis at the Participant, Inc opening a week or two ago, just days after Frank Liu unplugged the tragically short-lived Horton/Liu co-writing credit!  My insider tells me that Frank Liu swiped some artwork as he stormed out of the gallery.  That all seems incomprehensible, because who could fight with Sean Horton?  Since working at Volume Gallery (now Freight + Volume), then helping to pioneer the LES gallery scene, Sean has always seemed to me  a warm and hard-working artist-turned-dealer with innovative taste in outsider-ish queer art.  But then what do I know?

(l-r) Vaginal P. Davis, Billy Miller, pretty brunette

Anyway, back to Vag: I was gonna save these photos for the next Stuart Sherman post, but they aren’t getting any younger!

VPD is tall, dark, and handsome; and also famous, prolific, and hilarious!  A complete package.

Even dogs can’t keep their eyes off of Vaginal P. Davis, and she works blondes into a frenzy!

Doug & Dog McClemont, with St. Theresa ecstatic in background