Arrive Magazine - March/April, 2009

Julian Schnabel’s Red Painting was auctioned last year at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea.

cowboy looking at his own Wanted poster nailed to a tree. 303gallery.com

and their various orifices,” he says. Depending on the angle, the number of doughnuts in each picture and the jelly oozing out, you can make your own conjecture about which part of the female body is being depicted. danesegallery.com

Max Protetch

Ever wonder what truly cutting-edge art looks like? Sure, it’s easy to attach that label to almost anything that bucks convention, but at Max Protetch at 511 W. 22nd St., the phrase is genuine. Computer-generated pieces created by Siebren Versteeg randomly draw images from the Internet and create ever-changing digital collages on wall-mounted plasma screens. One installation, New

York Windows, took the concept a step further, incorporating touch screens that visitors ran their hands over, moving the Internet-generated amalgamations around at will as the screens continued to be populated with new images. Great for kids—not only for the tech connection but also for the “please touch” policy. maxprotetch.com

303 Gallery

Known mainly for its provocative video installations, this windowless gallery at 525 W. 22nd St. exudes a raw warehouse ambience with its concrete floors, making it the perfect venue for experimental film. Regularly showcased, Doug Aitken often uses multiple screens and closely focused shorts. In one exhibit, called Migration, Aitken filmed various animals, such as a horse and a raccoon, standing awkwardly in a motel room. The animals’ out-of-place presence and sense of being trapped while waiting to move on seemed to parallel humans’ feelings of alienation in our highly mobile society. You may also be able to catch some of Rodney Graham’s lightboxes overlaid with chromogenic or black-and-white transparencies and illustrating Western-inspired scenes, including a man sitting backward on a horse or a

Tony Shafrazi

You’ll definitely be rewarded for climbing the long set of steep, surrealistic white stairs into the spacious galleries of Iranian-born Tony Shafrazi at 544 W. 26th St. A kind of performance artist in his own right, in 1974 Shafrazi sprayed “Kill Lies All” onto Picasso’s Guernica while it hung in the MOMA. Perhaps in this case a little too much, too late, it was in protest against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Belying his rebellious roots, Shafrazi has amassed a huge collection of actor Dennis Hopper’s photography. Before starring in the classic 1969 movie Easy Rider, Hopper shot a series of photos depicting scenes from his life from 1960 to 1967. Look out in spring 2009 for a book compiling some 500 of these pictures. tonyshafrazigallery.com

JEffRE Y UfBERG/WIREIMAGE

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