the following piece was contributed to the nonist by artist, filmmaker, and critic mathieu borysevicz*

So I finally managed to break out of my work around the clock habits and venture out into the cultural elitism of grand New York City. It was my first gallery going experience in the newly arrived era of political despondency and as might be expected the stakes and positions have been dramatically shifted. Art was no longer to be seen in the pre-election light of anticipated hope and cheap shot complacency. However most of the shows, hung in an altogether different atmosphere, did not benefit from the election results but instead were put in the same pathetic glare that most good Americans find themselves burning in right now. It has always been easy to critique but not so easy to create. yet in an age of desperation and destitution real alternatives must be sought whose ingenuity exists somewhere out of the box, because that’s where we’ve been all along, a citizenry boxed and warehoused in altogether incommunicable and different ideologies.

Following the general trend of political art for politically repressive times post-election Chelsea was spotted with various group shows that whined inarticulately to the choir. a choir which, of course, included me and my pinko leftist friends.

A pre-election opening titled, democracy is fun turned into the past-tense democracy

fun in the white box’s limp wrested attempt at political and / or institutional critique. Ironically the exhibition never was really that fun. The show contained a roster of up and coming and already arrived hipsters sporting that fuck-it-all aestheticism of yesteryear’s east village scene. Opening with a piece by “pursue the pulse” that poses as an interactive, vintage Betamax VCR, the codeck democratically invites you to bring your own video art, created in this defunct format, and play it for all to see. The show continues with an assume vivid astro focus piece, a testimony to why the group should stay working in a large scale installation format. There were soccer balls covered by Bush face-masks that would’ve be fun to kick around only if you were permitted to bust up the other scrappy Bush-bashing collages. there was an ATM machine, and man-on-the-street style video interviews strung together that reminded me of every conversation I’ve had for the last six months, there was a curious assemblage of patriotic pizza boxes and stacks of NY Post’s with Spiderman on the cover, and then there was, as always, the highlight that made coming worthwhile, namely the Sisley Xhafa video. it shows the artist himself passionately gesturing and shouting in a frenzy of stock trading, not on the market floor, but rather at a train station’s time-table. Here the abstract absurdity of international economic ebbs, flows, and sharp time crunches are reciprocally translated into international transport itself, psychotically blurring facets of the global condition.

across the street and up the stairs at 526W26 are a few worthwhile shows. Paul Chan’s show at Greene Naftali is dominated by an enormous double-sided panoramic flash animation installation that, in its high / low-falutin- out of fashion-ability, alludes to both biggie smalls and pier pasolini. you could read more on the show by a more seasoned and insightful critic in this week’s Village Voice.

next door (or was it up stairs at marvelli gallery?) is a compelling display of effective and affective socio / political art. Several near life-size photographs, along with a video of heroin ravaged, homeless, but not entirely hopeless seattle youth make up endurance. the video is a 26 hour timelapsed performance of 26 homeless Seattle teenagers standing on a street corner looking directly into the camera as time, and the general public, indifferently whizz by. In the voice over the subjects, eloquently and often heartbreakingly, tell of their experiences with drug dependency, wretched childhoods, and the street crimes they have endured. The project was made by the husband and wife team of mccallum & tarry in partnership with several non-profits in seattle.  In the gallery’s project room is a display of equally striking though more formalized portraits by photographer ingar krauss of juvenile russian prisoners. on a different, more humorous, though still judicious note, adam mcewen’s history is a perpetual virgin endlessly and repeatedly deflowered by successive generations of fucking liars is a show about itself inasmuch as it is about the cooky-ness of present day reality and its vestiges.

The paul pfeiffer show at gagosian was impressive. if by nothing else at least the merit of this dazzling artist’s upward mobility. geez, he must be 34 and already a serious blue chipper. either way, shows at Gagosian are usually impressive because the gallery is impressive… or is it just imposing?… like being in the privileged land of the lost, which brings me to my next thought- there are several new pfeiffer’s cordoned off in a labyrinth of separate rooms… some pieces better than others, most of them displaying his signature non-linear technical virtuosity. Y’know, “hmmm how did he do that?” kind of stuff. My favorite was the tiny portable DVD player piece that displays scenes from vintage and not so vintage TV game shows. Participants stand alone in an environment stripped bare of its monetary and textual signification dazzled by the chromatic remains of the consumer spectacle. The video is dream like, euphoric, with contestants adrift in a blinking candy colored paradise of the promised yet illusory jackpot.  The large basketball player prints and the paintings in the main gallery by mark tansey are also enigmatically worthy of view.

there is a show at american fine arts, titled election that seems strikingly similiar to the white box’s aforementioned democracy etc etc. the show is introduced by a self-aggrandizing, wall sized testimony to the gallerist own dedication to the “world of ideas” over the marketplace. right.  the stand out pieces for me (mind you I am skipping through the galleries as one does these days) is bush’s tour of the oval office- a found video download (now unavailable, but commented on here) from the white house website. very, very funny. Bush should just be a goddamn comedian, y’know have a late-night show where he talks to himself about the issues… anyway. there’s also this humongous button that says ”have sex in a voting booth” that’s probably John Waters’ piece since I couldn’t find anything else that might’ve belonged to him. Then there’s Paul Chan’s (again) very tried and true “Baghdad in no Particular Order” which is an ambient / documentary video depicting the normal, peaceful lives of Iraqis a month prior to the American invasion… heart breaking only because of historical outcome.

another worthwhile show was david altmejd at andrea rosen. This Whitney Biennial standout produced more psycho-symptomatic jewel case creepiness touching upon everything from Hollywood glam to Madison Ave. decadence to Armageddon to bankruptcy and back… but maybe I’m just looking too much into it.

and finally thomas erben on W21st Street had an eclectic mix of contemporary art from India including this crazy posterized video of a very plump woman improvising ballet and belly flopping around her bare studio in the buff. There are of course a zillion other things out in the Chelsea art maze worthwhile that I didn’t catch, i chose instead to see a lecture at the Cooper Union on the Abu Ghraib prison photos now on view at the international center of photography.

[update]

nyc cultura part2:  post election Abu Ghraib imagery and intellectual impotence

The lecture brought together such critical minds as Luc Sante, David Levi Strauss, and Seymour Hersh. The question was basically- what do these images, now post-election (for some godforsaken reason they were absent from any presidential debate) now museum-ified, and ironically largely forgotten by the public at-large, mean? Seymour Hersh with his first hand insight of the Middle East catastrophe dominated the discussion much to the dismay of the other participant’s flowery yet impotent intellectual meanderings. Mr. Hersh laid bare the facts of espionage, deceit and confoundedness endemic to the United States foreign policy. Hersh prophesized “Get your money out of the US because the economy’s going belly up… only until we hit bottom will the US be able to exorcise the demons of its errors.”  So it’s all about money.  After hours of art-going the discussion shed light on the fact that any fictional image production has even stricter limits on affect. If these horrific images, the ultimate Freudian slip of American imperialism, cannot affect change, can art? Certainly bringing these images into an art context only confounds the answer. Oddly enough the holocaust of WW2 is evoked largely through images, yet here in our time, only a mere few months ago, these digital images have become a lost chapter in the sick fiction of our times. Hopefully battering these images about in the bowels of Cooper Union, where, I might add, revolutions had begun in the past, will affect change for the future… or maybe we’ll all just turn our greenbacks into Euros.

*A Brooklyn based artist, filmmaker, and critic, Mathieu has worked in the production and post-production of films and television for such networks as ABC, CNN, BET, ZDF, Channel 4 UK, Arté, National Geographic TV as well as for various television stations throughout China. He has also made films for The UNHCR, The European Union, and The World Bank. He has edited films that have been shown on PBS’ Independent Lens and POV, Anthology Film Archives, and Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center. Mathieu has also exhibited his art at ICA London, the Bauhaus in Dessau, The Beijing Art Museum, White Box NY, and at Socrates Sculpture Park.