Basquiat & Constellation
Are you missing Old New York? If so, drop down to Deitch Projects for the latest exhibition on Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist who enjoys seasonal revivals since his death in August 1988.
After the grand retrospective at The Brooklyn Museum last spring, and Cheim & Read's semiotic survey of Basquiat's painted patois, this show focuses exclusively on works from 1981, the year he moved from the street to the studio. The resulting selection is mostly works on paper (any paper: sketch sheets, yellow pads, index cards, a shopping bag), with occasional canvas and found-object surfaces thrown in for context and street-cred. This work, while well framed and elegantly installed, doesn't lose the spiky freshness and crackling cartoon quality that initially grabbed us. The jaunty stick figures, stuttering nonsense writing, car wrecks and music scene references are engaging and offer a "now" urgency that makes you forget that was "then."
Why then, with so many new galleries, international art fairs and new, out-of-school artists, do we still bother with Basquiat? Perhaps because he represents the last flourishing of unselfconscious scribbling before luxury developments became the only game in town.
In 1970s Soho, you couldn't buy a pair of shoes to save your life, and handbags were out of the question. It was a dark and scary time, but Soho soon became the new Art Mecca if only for a few decades. "Constellation," at Pavel Zoubok Gallery, is an exhibit celebrating five insider/outsider artists of this first wave: Buster Cleveland, John Evans, Al Hanson, Ray Johnson and May Wilson. Their canny collages, assemblages, Dada, Surrealist and Pop reflexes, subterfuge guerilla art and the occasional stilt walk brought new life to the tired Soho streets.
Long before Fred Thomaselli, Cleveland was mummifying ephemera in layers of poured plastic. There are 10 glittering Clevelands mocking the art world (already!) alongside Wilson's subversive stuffed animals, icons of mother-care made suddenly morbid. Hansen plays with matches, cigarettes butts, mahjong tiles and Hershey wrappers creating sexy Venus figures, while Johnson and Evans cut, paste, post and play pranks with "mail-art." This is the Cast Iron District before irony-raw, wild and immediate. Go see this show for a boost.
"Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1981 The Studio of the Street." Through May 27. Deitch Projects, 76 Grand St. (betw. Greene & Wooster Sts.), 212-343-7300.