With Flowers and Open Wings III, 2007

Over the ages, people have looked to visual art to do many things. Whether the images they made, studied, and revered represented their cosmological beliefs, recorded the ins and outs of their survival systems, delivered them from banality to a place of fantasy, or simply sniffed out hidden beauty in the world around them, these classic aspirations have preceded and outlived the trappings of so-called postmodern art, and have more recently infused it with new tenor. Ernesto Caivano’s work reaches each of these art historical golden rings.
     In the summer of 2001, after a long trip to Europe, the artist began After the Woods, a series of drawings made with ink gouache, watercolor, and graphite on paper that can only be described as epic. At the time the contemporary art world was busy decrying the end of irony (an ironically befuddling death sentence) and dismissing classically beautiful work as “low brow”. Caivano had the fortitude to work against the grain and the foresight to launch a series that still keeps him engaged so many years later. Nonetheless, it’s a surprisingly complex project to define. “I’ve been trying to come up with a one-liner for eight years now,” says the artist. His work revolves around a master narrative he wrote at the beginning of the project.

Photography by Derek Peck

Coke. Semen. Viscera. Shit. These are the greatest hits of subject matter (and materials) among New York’s so-called “downtown” scene of artists. Like a diamond-dusted bauble, Terence Koh has floated to the top of this sea of curious creatures. The artist has literally sold gold-plated nuggets of his own poop for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And this was in the early days of his young career, with collectors at Art Basel fighting like agro moms over
     Cabbage Patch Dolls, circa 1984, to wrap their fingers around his scat. Now they’ll pay upwards of half a million for anything the artist has dipped in chocolate.
     Among the downtown kids, the radius of Koh’s circle is a bit wider than most. It includes child stars, art stars, their financiers, and those who write about them, and on given occasions in this milieu, the whole machine turns into a giant ferris wheel, where everyone’s on top eventually and there’s no more slowing down than there is speeding up, just a state of being akin to floating, a vantage best characterized as “high”.

Photography by Noel Spirandelli

New York-based experimental band Gang Gang Dance are often described as “neo-primitive” or “neo-tribal”, but then again, so was starkly edged modern art. These descriptors apply only insofar as the band’s music can be trance-inducing. Indeed, despite the fact that members Lizzi Bougatsos, Brian DeGraw, Tim Dewitt, Josh Diamond, and Nathan Maddox have all the loud beats of a rock and roll band and all the good looks expected of rock stars, there’s something about watching them that makes the eyes roll back and the mind glaze over.
     Though make no mistake, they are not the live equivalent of your high school rave mix. Theirs is a trance for the robot set: for people on the go in a high-tech society, to whom the electronic drone that envelops lead singer Lizzi Bougatsos’ voice is a natural language. These are people who can’t help but connect to and be lulled by the band’s aggressive mixing and their stroboscopic waxing and waning of reverb that works like the blades of a fan spinning so fast as to give the illusion of stasis. Each of the group’s more highly orchestrated song elements tends to be punctuated by these cascading jam breaks.

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Photo by Paul Pedersen, Beauty, 1993

In recent years, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has become a prime exemplar of the international art star. He’s received no shortage of praise for his installations, which frequently incorporate light, water, and various natural or unnatural representations of the earth’s elements, to become the fine-tuned infrastructure for an experience of the perception of beauty as it manifests in the world. His work often inspires the kind of gee-whiz wonderment that youngsters first experience in learning about the physical sciences, but they rest clearly in the domain of fine art, drawing on crafts as much conceptual as technical.
     Four years ago, at the age of 36, the artist experienced a major career breakthrough when the Tate Modern commissioned him to fill their massive Turbine Hall, with a site-specific installation. Eliasson’s Weather Project tapped into a global phenomenon — the weather — in a way that particularly resonated with UV-deprived Londoners. The large former power plant became a literal and metaphorical mirror of the local landscape, with a giant “sun” regulating the accumulation and dissipation of mist beneath a mirrored “sky”. Visitors came repeatedly to bask, frolic, and picnic. They also came to meditate. By taking the weather’s core elements out of circulation and re-creating them within the museum, the artist offered witnesses the space and time to reconsider their relationship to reality. This is his oft-stated agenda, which tends to be met in very visceral, participatory ways.