No visit to SoHo is complete without a stop at Art in General. Its new commissions program offers fresh work by emerging artists who are normally off the beaten track, and hand-picked for their visions. This time they’ve lined up three ambitious projects. Collectively titled “Erratic Anthropologies,” they are “performance installations …that mine the visual culture of flawed but influential community structures.” In essence, the three projects are each ironic, comical looks at the dystopia of our consumer-based society. Revolving around the detritus we create for ourselves as we search for whatever it is we try to find when we buy things, these installations actually take the dialogue of consumer culture deeper by looking at what happens when we try to sell things – things people don’t want, or no longer want.

In Justin Rancourt and Chuck Yatsuk’s Phase IV the large gallery is transformed into a what looks like the set of a bad movie about a short-sighted realty developer. His name is Don Donavucci and you can pick up his business card if you’d like to give him a call. He seems to be responsible for the half-built home you can walk into, just a few steps from the dark, eerie swamp covered with plastic greenery. It’s the kind of cookie-cutter home in every American suburb radiating out of our big cities like beige halos. They are the thin membrane between us and the wild, dark, weird outdoors. Rancourt/Yatsuk’s version of the leering swamp is complete with a sunken streetlight hovering just above the swampy lake, glowing in pace with a strange grumbling to be heard all around.

Rancourt and Yatsuk hail from sunny Florida, where real-estate speculation has made the state one of the worst casualties of the economic crisis. Homes were built cheap and are now sitting abandoned in tacky neighborhoods, made of material not too dissimilar to the Astroturf lining this gallery’s floor. The house is actually intended as a model home that Don Donavucci hopes will inspire buyers and precipitate an urban sprawl. The crocodile swamps here serve as a double metaphor: the predatory lending that has made fools of the likes of Don Donavucci and the dilapidation of our natural resources to make way for  homes like the one in mid-construction on view.

Shana Moulton’s The Undiscovered Antique is an installation of three videos and a few sculptures related to the artist’s alter-ego, Cynthia, who is depicted in the main video as a legless, though otherwise run-of-the-mill American. Inspired by the television show, “The Antiques Roadshow,” she seeks out to sell what she hopes is an old Native American pot, but it turns out to be an Avon footbath inspired by their ancient designs. The piece is a witty and aesthetically charming exploration of consumer culture’s ability to pry on our insecurities and raise our hopes in vain. It also plays on the self-help industry with a happy ending in which Cynthia grows legs by using the supposedly worthless footbath. Moulton cleverly weaves together complex issues of exoticization and commercialization with subcultures of self-help, low-brow spiritualism, and popular culture.

Beautifully connecting Moulton’s work to the downstairs installation by Guy Benfield is the motif of pottery. The room has been transformed into a gesamtkunstwerk of sensory overload centered around a white sculpture in the shape of an oven meant to represent a kiln. Colored lights and strobes flicker in the disco oven, echoed by the rest of the shiny room of mirrored wall panels and black vinyl floor. Two flatscreen monitors are included in the installation, one showing a procession of seemingly disconnected photographs, and the other footage of the artist crawling the floor of his studio edited between shots of African masks and other imagery. A strong smoky odor of frankincense fills the room as does extremely loud drone electorock. The combination of smell, noise, and flashing lights makes it hard to pick up on the clay pots and interesting shards laying about the place as haphazardly as everything else.  There are strong references to Abstract Expressionism and the Modernist legacy as a whole as well as older performance art pieces. We are told that the installation is meant to represent a series of spaces such as pottery showroom, studio, and storage area, but with the complete assault on the senses, we are left with few incentives to delve in and investigate the work in full.

In the elevator is ArtSlant’s very own Hong-An Truong’s Adaptation Fever.  Mounted on a flatscreen monitor, Adaptation Fever consists of three black and white videos. Most of the videos consist of a split screen showing mirror imagery of archival footage filmed in French-occupied Viet Nam. The historic footage is carefully edited, some set to Vietnamese versions of classic American pop songs. The most interesting aspect of the works is their subtitles, which are sometimes missing completely or seem too concise to truly translate to English the Vietnamese or French lyrics. This gives the viewer a sense of displacement and inaccessibility common to all immigrants. Like the others in Erratic Anthropologies, Truong is mining the modern world and the new-colonial cultural order that it has created.

Images: Shana Moulton, The Undiscovered Antique (2009), mixed medium installation. Courtesy of Art in General; Guy Benfield, Night Store (2009), mixed medium installation. Courtesy of Art in General; Rancourt/Yatsuk, Phase IV (2009), mixed medium site-specific installation. Photo by Blaine Davis, courtesy of the artists and Kate Werble Gallery, New York

Avant-Guide to NYC is a wonderful and thoughtfully curated exhibitions that is also quite hard to place. Not an historic survey, not a thematic group show per se, and not a typical geographically defined show, although it centers around New York City. It brings together work by mostly rising and mid-career (by loose standards) internationally active artists working in this city, grappling with the legacy of previous generations and the cultural milieu which they shaped and by which they were shaped in turn. All of the artists are heady, conceptual types who rely heavily not simply on text, but on actual data. Their point of depature is the legacy of particular artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark and John Cage and how such work has influenced the worldviews of this new generation. They mine New York City and its intertwined cultural history, and the resulting works reveal this city as a palimpsest of bohemian life and cultural acts.

What makes this show layered and complex is that it goes for detail, not broad movements. Many of the pieces weave in specific works by historic artists as way of “digesting” or processing their cultural inheritance.

There are two works that serve as points of entry to the show, both broad maps laying down the history of New York’s cultural movements and their passage over its urban landscape. Ward Shelley’s Specific Sites is a beautiful flow diagram superimposed over a map of the city. The inclusion of the map is a new development in his oeuvre. He is known for paintings reminiscent of Mark Lombardi’s work, text-heavy diagrams of politics and history, and sometimes “portraits” of individuals. Complimenting this is Dexter-Sinister’s brochure to the show, with curator Sandra Skurvida’s amazing text. It melds seemingly unrelated historic points on the city map to tie in the works in the show, reading like a Rube Goldberg chain reaction.

The show is densely hung and some gems particularly stand out. Alex Villar’s Broken Window takes Gordon Matta-Clark’s Food and Window Blow-Out and conflates them with recent scenes of urban life to create a storyboard for a film in progress. Villar’s work resonates beautifully with Nina Katchadourian’s Two Leaps that parallels two suicides that took place in SoHo about three decades apart. The first is of Gordon Matta-Clark’s brother’s, Sebastian, and the second of Katchadourian’s neighbor. Katchadourian frames notes and diaries, creating panels that trace out a mirrored story board of its own. Similarly structured in panels, Xaviera Simmons’ work centers around Vito Acconci’s early performance pieces, photographing the sites they had taken place in and her hand-drawn lists of them.

The memory of place figures strongly in all of the works. It seems to be a manifestation of our collective and individual reverie of the watershed of post-modern artists and the rich scene they created in the 1970s. The ones gathered here are not lacking in the same engagement and thoughtfulness of their predecessors. This is a rich, museum-quality exhibition that is a must-see for any cultural consumer in New York.

Images: Ward Shelley, Specific Sites (2009), DETAIL. Courtesy of the Artist; Dexter Sinister, Timebend (2009). Courtesy of the artist & Apexart; Ward Shelley, Specific Sites (2009). Courtesy of the Artist.

Sau Voi Corp.
Southeast corner of Walker and Lafayette
New York, NY 10013

If you’re at all like me (my sympathies), art makes you hungry. And an empty belly makes me hate everything I see. And if you’re like most New Yorkers, time and money are both scarce. The solution: Sau Voi. This quick corner shop, disguised as a Vietnamese video shop/lottery center, has a food counter and prepared bundles at Chinatown prices. The vegan options are slim, but you can get a veggie sandwich for $2.35 (and fake ham for $4.00). Most of their small prepared foods run between $2.75 to $3.75 and the most deluxe sandwichs reach a whopping $4.20. Their drink selection is quite something too (they serve Ovaltine!).