[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: October 5, 2009]
It's a long way from post-Abstract Expressionism to pre-punk neo-Actionism, or from Chelsea to the Chinatown rump of Orchard Street.
I have just visited two shows which indicate, if nothing else, that modern art is a broad church. I wasn't familiar with David Novros until a couple of interesting reviews sent me to the Paula Cooper gallery to see a few works painted in the late '60s (the show is now closed, I'm afraid). Novros, one of a group of artists associated with the Park Place Gallery in SoHo (which Paula Cooper once directed) would have been in his twenties when these paintings - or objects - were created.
The most obvious touchstone for the works in the larger room is, I suppose, color-field painting - except that Novros abolishes, or works around - perhaps even "deconstructs" - the field. These works are sets of L-shaped brackets, individually colored (fibreglass in one case, otherwise canvas) arranged on the gallery walls. You'd better take a look. It is as if Novros had taken some of the repeated bracketing devices used by artists such as Joan Mitchell and Richard Diebenkorn to organize what would otherwise be swathes of chaotic color, and made arrangements of those devices alone - larger in size and more formal in shape. What is noticeable is the harmony, and seeming inevitability, of the arrangements.
The understanding is assisted by consulting two smaller works in a different room. Here Novros introduces variously sized rectangles to the L's and shows how the now binary system can be resolved into a unitary field. Cool, visually based intellectualism - and pleasing.
Uproariously alternative, and smart in an entirely different way, are the collages by Genesis P. Orridge now showing at Invisible-Exports. The artist calls them "cut ups," doubtless in homage to Brion Gysin, with whom he has collaborated. But then Gen has collaborated with an awful lot of avant garde eminences. These cut-ups span a period of three decades during which he has tirelessly committed himself to performance art, installations, happenings, cultic ritual, industrial music, pop music, political activism, has spent a lot of time on the front page of tabloid newspapers, and even one period in exile after being falsely portrayed as some kind of black magician in a television documentary.
Ah, Genesis. Ah, humanity. These bits and pieces take you back to the days of COUM Transmissions, the art group which scandalized London by displaying Cosey Fanny Tutti's used tampons at the Insitute of Contemporary Art. There's a hilariously defaced welfare statement - a reminder that Neil Megley did indeed change his name legally to Genesis P. Orridge, and was addressed by the authorities as such. The royal family are a recurrent theme: there's a splendidly defiant work which juxtaposes Gen outside his front door with a portrait of a royal group - "Two Houses at War." This has a Gilbert & George feel to it. Some quieter works remind me of Blake, although Gen is cutting out his angels, not drawing them. Finally, there are works which some will find discomiting - "Two Into One We Go," for example - referring to Gen's extraordinary project of swapping physical identities with his (late) wife.
Beneath the wild silliness, the gamesplaying, the manufacturing of ideas, the disco CDs, the Crowley worship, one finds a truly courageous artist: one whose body has always been a site of action. I think a comparison with the high risk Austrian actionists Otto Mühl and Hermann Nitsch could reasonably be made - although Gen made records you can dance to. There are images here not for the squeamish. (Oh, this is adults only stuff for sure.)
Thirty Years of Being Cut Up is at Invisible-Exports through October 18.
