Art Review; Cinema à la Warhol, With Cowboys, Stillness and Glamour

Art Review; Cinema à la Warhol, With Cowboys, Stillness and Glamour

Holland Cotter publishes a critic of movies in the New York Times, April 5, 2002 about Shadow Box at Paula Cooper Gallery during NAP Video Festival

2002-04-05

Text

New York City

ART REVIEW; Cinema à la Warhol, With Cowboys, Stillness and Glamour By HOLLAND COTTER Published: April 5, 2002 Mr. Calm shoots many of his images -- of buildings, playgrounds, people on the street -- from his apartment window, and sometimes he hires neighbors to pose for him. He digitally manipulates the results, adding animation and a sampled sound track. His work is, in fact, a form of visual sampling, with images blending into one another. A basketball net grows into a web that engulfs a child; a bulldozer shovels debris from a demolition as a computer-drawn house begins to erect itself on the site. The show finds Mr. Calm still in the process of sorting out ideas. But he is an ambitious artist doing imaginative things with still-experimental digital media, and this is a promising debut. New Arts Program For a sense of what film and video artists outside New York are up to, drop by the Fourth New Arts Program Biennial Video Festival 2001, a traveling juried show at Paula Cooper making its second last stop. It's a mixed bag, but the two top-prize pieces are beauties: ''Procession'' by Van McElwee, an artist from St. Louis, is a slice of dust-to-dust Americana, as small-town parade bands drift across the screen and dissolve into air; ''Trans(e) Bleu,'' by the Montreal team of Emmanuel Avenel and Marie-France Giraudon, is stream-of-consciousness meditation on the idea of ''far north.'' Pierre Yves Clouin's jolting little ''Shadow Box'' is also worth sticking around for. You might want to wrap up a Chelsea visit with two further film stops: one short, ''The Paradise Institute'' by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller at Luhring Augustine, and one long, Bruce Nauman's ''Mapping My Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage)'' at Dia, a Warholian five hours. Or maybe move on to attractions elsewhere. At Other Galleries One is uptown at Suite 106, a smart new gallery run by Irena Popiashvili and Marisa Newman in the Milburn Hotel on the Upper West Side. On view is a video titled ''We Are Waiting'' by Chris Sollars and Mads Lynnerup, a sort of ''Screen Tests'' in reverse. In Mr. Hobart's film, gay men tease a macho ideal; in ''We Are Waiting,'' two straight men, played by the San Francisco-based artists, gamely and, on the whole, convincingly try on the role of dial-up gay call-guys. Finally, there are two film-and-video group shows in the waterfront district near Brooklyn Heights known as Dumbo (for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). ''Eyestalk'' at Smack Mellon Studios has installation-size pieces by Chris Doyle, Shannon Kennedy, Eric Saks and Eve Sussman, all scaled to the colossal space. Down the block at GAle GAtes is ''Superlounge,'' put together by Andréa Salerno and Mari Spirito, with Christoph Draeger's vivid restagings of cinematic blood baths, Candice Breitz's hypnotically prolonged European train trip, and one of Patty Chang's endurance-test mini-dramas. In this one, she tries to navigate a patch of open field that bucks and pitches like a rough sea. It's as though Andrew Wyeth's Christina suddenly felt the earth move under her feet, though no painting could match the zany dynamic -- of an iconic image taking a new twist in real time -- that Ms. Chang creates through video here. All Around Town The artists and New York City galleries in the review of video art. T. J. WILCOX, Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 206-7100. Through April 13. DANNY HOBART, Gorney Bravin and Lee, 534 West 26th Street, Chelsea, (212) 352-8372. Through April 13. ''VAPOR,'' Marianne Boesky Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 680-9889. Through April 20. KEMBRA PFAHLER, American Fine Arts Company at P.H.A.G., 530 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 941-0401. Through tomorrow. JONATHAN CALM, Caren Golden Fine Art, 526 West 26th Street, Suite 215, Chelsea, (212) 727-8304. Through April 27. FOURTH NEW ARTS PROGRAM BIENNIAL VIDEO FESTIVAL 2001, Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 West 21st Street, Chelsea, (212) 255-1105. Through April 20. CHRIS SOLLARS AND MADS LYNNERUP, Suite 106, Milburn Hotel 242 West 76th Street, Manhattan, (212) 362-1006. Through May 25. ''EYESTALK,'' Smack Mellon Studios, 56 Water Street, Brooklyn, (718) 834-8761. Through April 14. ''SUPERLOUNGE,'' GAle GAtes et al., 37 Main Street, Brooklyn, (718) 522-4596. Through May 4.

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