Live the Art by Rizzoli International Publications

DEITCH PROJECTS WAS NOT MEANT TO BE AN ART GALLERY / JEFFREY DEITCH

DEITCH PROJECTS / LIVE THE ART

Contents Jeffrey Deitch Live the Art

1998

Exhibitions and performances

Y. Z. Kami

1996 Vanessa Beecroft VB16 Piano Americano-Beige

Jocelyn Taylor Alien at Rest

Nari Ward Happy Smilers

Mariko Mori Made in Japan

Chen Zhen Daily Incantations

Shopping

Jessica Diamond Tributes to Kusama

Teresita Fernández

1997

Cornelia Parker Mass (Colder Darker Matter) Yoko Ono Ex It

Cecily Brown High Society

LOT/EK Architecture TV-TANK

1999

Nicola Constantino Human Furrier

100

Barry McGee, Todd James, and Steve Powers Street Market

102

Johan Grimonprez INFLIGHT

106

Keith Haring Paradise Garage: Keith Haring and Music

108

2001 Yehudit Sasportas The Carpenter & the Seamstress

110

Martin Kersels Tumble Room

112

Paul McCarthy The Garden

114

Inka Essenhigh New Paintings

Malick Sidibé The Clubs of Bamako

Haluk Akakçe Blood Pressure

116

Barry McGee The Buddy System

Philippe Bradshaw Disco Damage

118

Margaret Kilgallen To Friend and Foe

Ravinder Reddy Sculpture

120

Widely Unknown

122

Beth B Portraits & Playthings

Cecily Rose Brown Spectacle

Brad Kahlhamer Friendly Frontier

Cerith Wyn Evans

George Condo Portraits Lost in Space

2000

2002 Alan Suicide Collision Drive

126

Chris Verene & Christian Holstad The Self-Esteem Salon—The Baptism Series

128 130

Oleg Kulik I Bite America and America Bites Me

VALIE EXPORT Images of Contact

Nedko Solakov Somewhere (Under the Tree)

Tim Noble & Sue Webster I You

Fischerspooner Sweetness

Noritoshi Hirakawa Garden of Nirvana

Michal Rovner Overhang

Santiago Sierra Nine Forms of 100 x 100 x 600 cm

Johan Grimonprez Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y

Ghada Amer Intimate Confessions

Montien Boonma House of Hope

Zhang Huan My America

Shahzia Sikander Murals and Miniatures

Vanessa Beecroft VB42 Intrepid/ The Silent Service

Barbara Kruger Power Pleasure Desire Disgust

Kurt Kauper Diva Fictions

Harper’s Bazaar Deitch Projects portrait

Each, Constructed to be Supported Perpendicular to a Wall

134

ASFOUR

136

Richard Woods Super Tudor

138

Liza Lou Testimony

140

Yes Yes Y’all—The Birth of Hip Hop

142

Deitch Projects was not meant to be an art gallery. Deitch Projects was not meant to be an art gallery. It on my circular route through SoHo, I remember thinkbegan with the invitation to take over the lease of a ing that this little building on Grand Street would make Street in SoHo. I had long been intrigued by this eccen-

galleries were located on the ground floors or upper

tric structure, which had captured my attention dur- floors of loft buildings, and the concept of a gallery in ing my nightly walks through SoHo in the mid-1970s. A a garage building with concrete floors and skylights tiny lunch counter [1] serving the local warehouse and

did not yet exist in New York. The building at 76 Grand Street eventually did be-

[1] 76 Grand Street, circa 1975.

come an art gallery. Joe Fawbush and Tom Jones opened Fawbush Gallery in the space, putting the address on the art-world map with their extraordinary Kiki Smith exhibition in 1988. After Joe’s premature death in 1995, Tom offered me the opportunity to take over the lease, remembering how much I admired the gallery’s program and the rough “found architecture”

factory workers had been wedged into an improvised of the space. At the time, I was operating an art advistorefront on the right-hand side. On the left there

sory firm and was helping Jeff Koons to produce his

was a mysteriously impractical garage door, too nar- “Celebration” series. I was collecting the work of row to permit the passage of a truck. The building was emerging artists but was not thinking about opening a one of a small number of one-story garages in SoHo, gallery specializing in new work. The contemporarycheaply erected on the sites of burned-down or col- art market had still not recovered from the crash in lapsed loft buildings. The depressed economy of the 1990, and it was hard to imagine building a profitable area had not warranted the construction of anything business dealing in emerging art. The offer to take over more elaborate for decades. Walking by the building the space that I had fantasized about for twenty years 13 © 2014 Rizzoli International Publications. All Rights Reserved

DEITCH PROJECTS / LIVE THE ART

modest garage-type building located at 76 Grand a perfect art gallery. At the time, all the downtown

DEITCH PROJECTS WAS NOT MEANT TO BE AN ART GALLERY / JEFFREY DEITCH

expanding the boundaries of artistic expression and our embrace of original and unconventional creative talent. Our cumulative support of uncommercial but innovative work served to build our reputation and create an inviting context for artists we hoped would work with us.

Yoko Ono

It is interesting for me to look back at the gallery program and see how much of the work that we presented, including painting and sculpture, had performance and social interaction at its foundation. My entire involvement in the art world, in fact, has performance and social sculpture at its foundation. I still vividly remember casually picking up an issue of Avalanche on the magazine rack at the Wesleyan University Art

(The gates of Hell are only a play

Library in the fall of 1972. It happened to be the [12] Front cover of Lives (1975).

100 coffins male - larger female - medium infants - small

now legendary volume featuring the work of Vito Acconci. I was stunned to see the images of Trappings, Seedbed, and other examples of Vito’s “Ex It” was a remarkable installation of one hundred simple wooden coffins with fruit trees growing out of the opening where one normally sees the face of the dead. The haunted atmosphere dramatically combined a vision of death and rebirth, which was further confused by the sound of birds and human voices. The work served as both a memorial to victims of war and natural catastrophes, and a celebration of nature’s ability to renew itself. One left with a sense of hope that life can bloom again from a landscape of death.

Opposite: Yoko Ono, Ex It, 1997, 100 wooden coffins with a variety of fruit saplings. Installation view, 76 Grand Street.

body art performances. At that moment, I knew —Yoko Ono, notes from installation drawing, 1997

that if that was where art was going, that’s where I wanted to be. When I moved to New York two years later, Minimalism and Conceptualism were at the height of their influence, but for the more ambitious artists of the younger generation, the Minimalists seemed to have painted themselves into a corner. My group of friends was more stimulated by the new performance art and by the new bands like Suicide that were emerging out of the

DEITCH PROJECTS / LIVE THE ART

Citrus trees growing from the coffins through the opening where the face of the dead is usually seen.

art community. The first exhibition I curated, “Lives,” which opened in December 1975 in the then-abandoned building on the corner of Hudson and Franklin Streets that now houses the restaurant Nobu, featured forty artists who used their daily lives as part of the structure of their work. [12] I even created some works of social sculpture myself, including a performance in which I started arguments on a busy New York street corner and then withdrew to photograph

the

vortex

agitated

people.

[13]

Beginning with Vanessa Beecroft’s project in January 1996, the majority of our projects have inDEITCH PROJECTS WAS NOT MEANT TO BE AN ART GALLERY / JEFFREY DEITCH

volved performance in their conception, development, execution, or in the way the audience participated in the work. Our second project, in February

Cecily Brown HIGH SOCIETY

1996, was Jocelyn Taylor’s Alien at Rest, an astonishing video of the artist walking naked down Canal Street: The artist walks casually as if everything is perfectly normal, with trucks and taxis driving by and pedestrians visible in the background. In the tradition of radical art, Taylor’s piece created her own model of the world, sharpening and questioning our perception of our own sense of reality. Our third project, in March 1996, Nari Ward’s Happy Smilers, could be described as a performance sculpture. Performance sculpture reveals the process of the work’s conception and construction in the viewer’s experience of the work. It requires the viewer not just to look at but to experience the space, the sound, and the texture of the installation. The visitor’s participation completes the structure of the work. Nari’s project was inspired by the Happy Smilers, a band led by his uncle that played for tourists in Jamaica. A passageway painted in tropical yellow and draped in colorful plastic bottles led into a solemn churchlike space with a floor of sand and walls made of hundreds of discarded appliances and household items wrapped in old fire hose. [14] The sound of rainwater falling on a tin Jamaican roof filled the 64

Cecily Brown’s high-energy canvases are, in the words of the artist, “lush frenetic orgies of potent color, at once vulgar and subtle.” Her work sweeps through the history of painting, layering references as diverse as the flesh of Rubens and the abstract baroque space of recent Stella. Brown pits abstraction against figuration to create a “hallucinatory limbo” where process, form, and content are inseparable. The application of paint embodies what is depicted—alternately caressing, thrusting, penetrating; a kiss and a slap at once. It is sometimes hard and fast, sometimes sensual and languorous. The changes in tempo are echoed by changes in space and scale. The space loops, swerves, twists, and is pulled taut, sweeping the viewer into an expansive extravaganza. The titles of Brown’s works and of the exhibition were inspired by the highly artificial Technicolor fantasies of movie musicals. The artist embraces and celebrates the fiction and artifice of painting. The imagination fills in what is implicit, fueled by what is explicit.

Opposite: Cecily Brown, High Society, 1998, oil on linen, 76 x 98 inches.

1998

DEITCH PROJECTS / LIVE THE ART

1998

ultimate example of performance sculpture, one of the rare works that truly contributed to a change in the direction of contemporary art. One of our best projects to follow Paul McCarthy’s approach to all-encompassing sculptural installation was “Street Market,” in the fall of 2000. I had traveled to Philadelphia to see “Indelible Market,” an amazing collaborative show with by Barry McGee (Twist), Todd James (REAS), and Stephen Powers (ESPO), curated by Alex Baker. It was a great concept: the construction of a mock bodega with bogus products and off-kilter signs creDEITCH PROJECTS WAS NOT MEANT TO BE AN ART GALLERY / JEFFREY DEITCH

ated by ESPO and exterior and interior painting and installations by Barry and REAS. I had the idea of expanding the show into the creation of an entire urban street inside our large Wooster Street gallery.

Paul McCarthy THE GARDEN

[20] Jeffrey Deitch, Dash Snow, and Barry McGee install “Street Market,” 2000, 18 Wooster Street.

The artists were enthusiastic about the idea, and they created the most ambitious and extraordinary exhibition that we had presented up to that time. A complete block front, including a working bodega, a check cashing store, a stall selling cheap jewelry, and a car service, was constructed on the old lumber platform. On the concrete floor below was a chaotic scene of overturned trucks bombed with tags. The walls were covered with disconcerting half-real versions of commercial signs hung on top of painted scenes of Pop apocalypse. For the opening, ESPO invited a group of street tough rappers, including Thirstin Howl III, to perform on top of one of the overturned trucks. The overflow crowd pushed the situation to the brink of chaos, but it was the most

Paul McCarthy’s most famous work, The Garden[i], 1991–92, was installed in the Wooster Street gallery as part of his New Museum retrospective. The artist and his son, Damon, and their crew spent two weeks creating the definitive version of The Garden[i]. The installation also included a full set of McCarthy’s preparatory drawings. Above and opposite: Paul McCarthy, The Garden (details), 1991–92, plants and motorized figures in artificial garden, 335 7/8 x 359 7/8 x 240 1/8 inches (853 x 914 x 610 cm).

DEITCH PROJECTS / LIVE THE ART

DEITCH PROJECTS WAS NOT MEANT TO BE AN ART GALLERY / JEFFREY DEITCH

A.V.A.F. ASSUME VIVID ASTRO FOCUS VII

“Assume Vivid Astro Focus VII” was a multimedia installation that covered not only the interior walls of Deitch Projects’ 76 Grand Street space but the floors, windows, and exterior facade as well. The large gallery space featured a projection of AVAF and honeygunlab’s collaborative video project Walking on Thin Ice[i], based on a 1981 song of the same name by Yoko Ono. AVAF also created new wall drawings and wallpaper for the space. Sampling tapestry design and softcore porn, coloring books and Tibetan thangka paintings, Pink Floyd and Picabia, AVAF spins vibrant and outrageous patterns from their personal simulacra of images. Part Brazilian Carnival, part Aubrey Beardsley, AVAF’s own brand of psychedelia washes over the senses, feeling both familiar and daringly new. The storefront gallery was turned into a tattoo parlor where gallery visitors could receive both AVAF tattoos and the tattoo artist’s own designs amid an AVAF jungle of drawings and

a video of a previous nest in Miami to give insight into this contemporary answer to a “happening.” Dan Colen is a painter and sculptor known for his conceptually charged, realistic executions in paint of various objects in ruin. His bird-shit paintings bear an interesting resemblance to the spitball-stuccoed back wall of the gallery and the shredded debris below. Dash Snow’s photography, sculpture, and collage captured his life as a radical dissenter living in dangerous times. Although the artists’ individual projects are different, the sensibility and rebellious exuberance that runs through their work is exactly the spirit of this collaborative performance. The artists themselves were not interested in the destruction that lies in their wake per se, but rather sought a total freedom of expression, and an expression of their relationship with each other and members of their community. This exhibition was truly “activated” during a performance on July 24, when the bands Gang Gang Dance and Prurient had fifty of the artists’ friends ecstatically throwing paper and freaking out in the nest. The show was dedicated to Secret, Dash and Jade’s daughter, who was born the morning of July 23.

DEITCH PROJECTS / LIVE THE ART

Previous pages: Views of Dash Snow and Dan Colen, Nest, 2007, 76 Grand Street. Left: Dash Snow and Dan Colen at the Gang Gang Dance concert celebrating the opening of “Nest,” July 24, 2007, 76 Grand Street.