Lil Picard and Counterculture New York
Grey Art Gallery, NYU
April 20 - July 10, 2010

Like gaseous bubbles through the stagnant green waters over tar pits, forgotten artists from the past occasionally exhibit in New York. These exhibitions can often burst with noxious fumes of archival decomposition. Of course the art works of the dead are mangled and mishandled. Their messages – or for those you don't like that phrase, the living force of their life's work – is always and already misconstrued.

This was the powerful sense I had upon visiting the exhibition “Lil Picard and Counterculture New York” at the NYU Grey Gallery. I knew Lil Picard (1900-1994) first as a curious European antique – one of the grande dames of the Fluxus circle when I was a babe in the woods of NYC. Much later, I read her writing for the East Village Other, where she was an impassioned partisan of the anti-war avant garde of the 1960s. This show filled that picture in some by showing that Lil Picard also was part of this group. She wrote as a critic, for money (in German) and for love (in the EVO), but she was also an artist. That “also” got her slapped as a Sunday painter by the professionalized U.S. avant-garde.

James Kalm is cruising around the nabes and captures a couple of interesting local happenings, most notably the de-installation of the controversial New Museum exhibition "Skin Fruit". Rolling north-west from the Bowery, we visit the gem like mini-retrospective "Trim" and Other Works 1967-2010 by a personal favorite, Jim Nutt. This show features three recent "portrait" paintings and a group of related drawings. But the real treat is a small but choice selection of amazing work from the past forty years. As one of the leading members of the Chicago group "Hairy Who" Nutt has sustained one of the most consistent and provocative careers within the eccentric figurative mode.

James Kalm makes a early summer trek to West Chelsea to imbibe in the latest selection of works by Kelli Williams. If the Marquee De Sade was living in New York, surfing the internet, indulging in high colonics and hanging out with Brooklyn hipsters while writing "The 120 days of Sodom" Williams would be a shoe-in for creating the illustrations. Her obsessively detailed and patterned works challenge nearly every hierarchical notion of propriety and decorum, while simultaneously extending a formerly unfashionable legacy of fantastical Feminist Surrealist painting.

James Kalm pedals up to the opening of Inka Essenhigh’s most recent selection of paintings, “The Old New Age”. In these works the artist has concentrated on developing a sharp focus depiction of the natural landscape that surrounds her summer studio in Maine. Mingling a fantastic Surrealism with the romantic sublime, forest maddens and spirits in the mist appear to observant viewers. Includes an interview with Inka Essenhigh.

James Kalm slides through this exhibition just before closing time to bring viewers a glance at works by one of today’s most influential “bad” painters. Robert Williams has been a presence on the West Coast art scene for decades. He came to my attention while I was still in high school as the artistic director of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s studio. There after, he teamed up with the likes of Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson as a contributor to the iconic Zap Comix. In 1979 he birthed and became the Godfather of “lowbrow” and, in 1994 founded JUXTAPOZ Magazine. His aesthetic encompasses Hotrod and surf culture the seamy side of Hollywood grudge, punk, hipster, slacker, and scuzz, the epitome of current “bad taste".

This is the best thing on American politics I have read in a very long time.

The Surreal Politics of Premeditated War
by R.W. Behan

Published on Sunday, December 3, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
blogged here with the permission of the author R.W. Behan

George W. Bush, who proudly claimed the mantle of “war president,” was keenly rebuked in the recent mid-term election. The event was notable, but it merely continued the surreal politics of premeditated war—a politics that has dominated the last six bizarre, hideous years of our nation’s history.