Michael Wang

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  diary September 22, 2006

  Project Runway

  Montello, NV

  Wearing a modish flight-attendant uniform, Art in General programs manager Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy distributed packaged toiletries, an “airport map,” and vouchers for food, coffee, and shuttle rides to a group of seven arts patrons, curators, and writers packed inside the chartered plane headed for Las Vegas—by way of Montello, a small town in northeast Nevada. “This is a travel kit, compliments of AIG airlines, because the layover might be rather extended,” Hernández warned. Once on the ground last weekend at the closest working airfield, Wendover Air Force Base, participants in AIG’s

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  diary August 10, 2006

  Pitching Tents

  New York

  A happy hunting ground of sorts for ex-electroclashers, reformed notebook doodlers, and other lost boys (and a few girls), K48’s latest incarnation, “Kamp K48,” lured the last of the season’s gallerygoers to John Connelly Presents’ far-west-Chelsea foothold last Friday evening. Taking viewers on “an artistic hike through the breathtaking scenery and boundless beauty of the natural world,” show curator, artist, and “Kubmaster” Scott Hug (of “Boy Skouts of Amerika Troop K48”) conjured a scene somewhere between jamboree and NAMBLA meeting. (The press release hints at “troop leaders gone wild,”

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  diary July 27, 2006

  Black Market

  New York

  “Time Out said there’s a black actor performing about race. And I guess that’s you, but where’s the performance?” demanded one particularly aggressive member of the viewing public at William Pope.L’s performance/installation on wheels, “The Black Factory,” which took up temporary residence on a stretch of Fourteenth Street at Union Square last Saturday. Part bazaar, part museum, part potlatch, the Factory “performed” blackness as commodity fetish. Participants in yellow T-shirts and kilts served visitors with “twice-sold” canned goods and tar-dipped stuffed animals, with the reminder that art

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  diary June 03, 2006

  Parents Day

  New York

  I caught the early end of Stephen Shore’s Wednesday-night opening at 303 Gallery as lots of late-afternoon sun filtered down Twenty-second Street. For most of Chelsea’s gallery hoppers, there was still time for a late-afternoon promenade; just in front of the gallery steps, Bob Nickas strolled by, presumably enjoying the last rays before making a more appropriately timed arrival, and designer John Bartlett slipped past, headed in the other direction. Stepping in alongside International Center of Photography curator Carol Squiers and collector Neil Frankel (dog in tow), I found Shore leisurely

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  diary May 17, 2006

  Reality Bites

  New York

  “When I first started out in the art world in the ’70s, the whole idea of a self-respecting artist waiting in line to be in a TV show would have been ridiculous,” asserts Jeffrey Deitch in the opening minutes of the first episode of Artstar, Deitch Projects and VOOM HD Networks’ reality television series set in the New York art world. Previewing at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, the hour-long episode follows the selection of eight would-be luminaries from a motley crew of over 400 hopefuls who showed up at Deitch’s Wooster Street Gallery last winter for an open call. The

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  diary March 15, 2006

  Fair Game

  New York

  David Rimanelli set an 11 AM wake-up call with the opening for “Survivor,” his show of mostly New York artists (and, mostly, friends) staged under the for-now-disused High Line adjacent to Stefania Bortolami and Amalia Dayan’s Chelsea gallery. Nabbing a free coffee and doughnut from the pushcart vendor stationed outside (“our VIP brunch,” Rimanelli quipped) and still feeling a little groggy from having attended artist Li Ping’s “future” Cock (said nightspot resurrected the previous evening at Terence Koh and Javier Peres’s new Chinatown gallery, A.S.S.), I joined the ranks of artists, collectors,

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  diary March 04, 2006

  Wagon Covered

  New York

  “Have you been around yet? Find me later. I need to dish,” urged artist Mathew Cerletty at the opening of “Day for Night,” the 2006 Whitney Biennial exhibition. I popped out of the elevator at the foot of Matthew Day Jackson’s looming Conestoga wagon and found myself on the show’s “downtown” floor. Predictably, it was impossible to get a real sense of the art, not because of the overwhelming crowds or the scope of the exhibition but rather the zigzagging circulation of the opening promenade is more about scoping fellow visitors than whatever was on display behind them. (One errant cruiser had

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  diary February 16, 2006

  Box Set

  New York

  “It smells like dirty knickers!” exclaimed project organizer Katie Holten while sampling one of artist Lisa Kirk's three “revolutionary” scents at the opening of Holten's “Cluster” last Friday at Lower East Side nonprofit Participant Inc. The patchouli-and-body-odor perfume (“like gas and soot and shit” according to one of the ski-masked “insurgents” offering up testers) overwhelmed the lower level office space, the site of Holten's informal two-day show, and effectively suffused an already cramped opening with the stink of that much more humanity.

  The sporadic, loosely curated venture brought

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  diary January 19, 2006

  Tunnel Vision

  New York

  Crowds poured in and out of a new strip of galleries lining Twenty-seventh Street last Thursday on the site of downtown impresario Peter Gatien’s late Tunnel nightclub. Gone are the days of Michael Alig’s lunch box–toting club kids and events like Kurfew’s gay chickenfest Saturdays or Funkmaster Flex’s Sunday hip-hop nights, where the likes of the Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, and DMX partied with the plebs back before rap’s royals cloistered themselves in VIP rooms. These days it’s fresh art going down at John Connelly Presents, Clementine Gallery, Foxy Production, Wallspace, Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery,

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  diary December 19, 2005

  Miss Mosh

  New York

  Clad in jean jacket and leather boots, Jack Pierson matched the press-release descriptions of an antihero “guy” circa films like Midnight Cowboy or Scorpio Rising. Almost to prove the point, he didn’t even lose his cool when a puffy-jacketed woman stumbled over Psycho Killer, his floor piece of piled electric signage. My first stop out during a hectic schedule of Thursday-night openings, Pierson's “Early Works and Beyond,” an exhibition at Daniel Reich Gallery arranged with the cooperation of Cheim and Read, offered an idiosyncratic look at the Boston School bad boy’s oeuvre. Behind a plywood

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  diary December 02, 2005

  Crowd City

  Miami

  Wednesday evening on Miami Beach kicked off with the revived New York Dolls playing their unmistakable brand of proto-punk on the beach behind twenty shipping containers that had been converted into exhibition spaces by galleries showing young artists. The veteran band still looked the part: David Johansen in a studded kilt, his belly bared; Sylvain Sylvain in red jeans and cap; and newbie Steve Conte in an outsized pirate hat. Finishing up their tidy set with the crowd-pleasing “Personality Crisis,” Johansen struck a few classic poses, skinny arms in the air, and shouted, “If you don’t know

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  diary November 22, 2005

  Pardner My French

  New York

  “Man, that Whitney museum sounds good!” actor/poet Jim Fletcher drawled into the microphone between sets at an evening of Cajun country music hosted by Richard Maxwell and the Reena Spaulings Fine Art posse. This installment in the institution's series of Friday night gigs was also affiliated with the French Embassy and Association Française d'Action Artistique's “Act French,” a citywide series of performances celebrating Franco-American cultural exchange. Performed by a revolving quintet of vocalists, including Fletcher, Maxwell, and Reena Spaulings's spritelike founder Emily Sundblad, the