Manhattan Cathedral, ITIN ’05
Ben and I spent Sunday at diva fair down town. It was odd to be at ground zero again. I haven’t visited in a while… Still a big tourist draw, but it looks awful clean now.
There was some interesting work at the fair, but most of the interest was in going room to room in a hotel…it had a strange brothel-like quality… a hint of sex in the air.
Should be a few ideas I can steal for omEGG. I particularly liked the way a French/Canadian guy, Alexandre Castonguay was playing with image and interface.
Dadi Wirz at IT IN space 2003
On monday I had to return down town to give the LMCC grant to the attractive woman in the lobby of 120 Broadway. It was a very funny site: Office people in suits going about their daily downtown-financial lives and then a few random bohemian types wandering the lobby lost looking for a place to drop their slides. I got directions from a lobby guard and shouted to anyone who looked scruffy: “You’re with me!” and soon we were a parade marching through the catacombs of the lower mezzanine. We kept gathering new lost artists along the way. Deadalous would have been proud.
With that done, I visited my old lower east side studio on Stanton. It’s a basement of an old tenement and used to be a German workers beer hall, or keller (like in Basel). There is a bar down their and a water garden with fish and a lot of cool stone work and welding. Jack and Daniel have turned it into a gallery now and it is worth a visit. 178 Stanton Street: Basement Aire Gallery. There’s an opening on friday. Check it out Sid (a quote from Swimming to Cambodia).
Jack and Danial are old members of the Rivington School of welders and have been down there since the early eighties at least. The place looks so nice (compared to when I was slinging paint there …I was just back from Paris, working at Pearl, and about to be haunted by J.M.B.) In general the lower east side is a mind fuck. It’s just so different now. I never thought I’d miss the junkies on the corner, but I sort of do.
Jack is dealing with the aftermath of working at Groundzero. He spent months there and lost like 150 pounds doing it, but I think he breathed some shit that’s messing with him (I know I did in Brooklyn…so…) Unsung Heroes while we focus all our money on the Villains.
It reminded me of when my dad’s old friend from the Kunstgeweber school, Dadi Wirz visited me in the basement. We drank Ballentine beer and I showed him all these pages of drawings I was doing. To his credit, he was about the only person who got what I was trying to do at that point (of couse he’s a great teacher and taught at RISD for years). Everyone else just saw scribbles (even Allan Stone, who usually gets stuff, was mystified… of course in a contrarian mode I probably showed Allan the absolute worst drawings… to be fair to myself, I only liked the bad ones).
It was a real treat a couple of years later to show Dadi and his close friends Crista Grauer and Beryl Sokoloff at IT In space on Mercer Street. Dadi was back in N.Y.C. talking about his father Paul Wirz and showing his photos of Papua New Guniea at the Met. A Swiss film crew just brought Dadi back to New Gunea and….Well I guess Dadi is a daddy. He met a son he never Knew. A living memory of his youthful adventures with his father. The documentary should be interesting.
4 Now and then invite, Crista Grauer ’02