Catalog Essay

The Art World According to Kenny Schachter

`LONDON ARTFORMS GALLERY
"Sex & Drugs & Explosives"
Curated by K. Schachter
March 28 - May 23, 1996
7-15 Rosebery Avenue
London, England

Since about sometime around 1990 Kenny Schachter has taken on the challengeof showing the New York art world just how much it doesn't know about artbeing created in New York City. He's the anti-curator, an in-your-face combinationof talent scout, aesthetician, dealer, impresario, artist and seat-of-the-pantstheoretician.

His group shows migrate from one vacant and inexpensively rented space toanother; always in the general vicinity of Soho, always with an eye outfor new artists. But Schachter's shows cheerfully project an enlightened,manic amateurism; a disregard for the niceties and conceits of the Sohomanner. He's managed to organize a kind of repertory company of young, unrepresentedartists; to provide a platform for the viewing and discussion of their workand to--and why not?--make a few bucks. And when these artists move on,he seems to find a new batch to showcase in his decidedly idiosyncraticgroup exhibitions. Artists like Janine Antoni, Andrea Zittel, Willie Cole,Beth Haggart and Christian Schumann were in Schachter exhibitions beforegoing on to the austere limelight of the Soho commercial gallery scene andartists like Ricci Albenda and RachelHarrison represent a more recent wave of Schachter exhibitions and artworld percipience.

He reluctantly admits to being trained as a lawyer and is self-trained asboth an artist and a curator, using the frenetic go-go 1980's art worldas on-the-job-training. Initially setting up as a more conventional dealerhe received his diploma in curating-without-a-net after the art market collapseof 1991 wiped out the market value of his artists in one fell swoop. Butit also transformed him into the nomadic curator-with-a-mission that hehas since become. Operating without a fixed gallery, he moves from one spaceto another for his periodic exhibitions. In the post-collapse art marketmalaise that continues to hang over New York, he's built a record of presentinga grungy but sophisticated stable of messy, idiosyncratic painterly abstractionand pop-oriented neo-Fluxus (or perhaps arte povera) derived works at atime when its harder than ever for young artists to show in a depressed
commercial gallery market.

"A stifling, backstabbing, offensive place"

Schachter's unlikely background provides at least some partially reliableinsights into his drive to beat the Soho art world at its own game--butwith his rules. He declares that he's an aesthete without an aesthetic,"there's no systematic way to choose artists. " But in the endthere's clearly some kind of sensibility, some kind of mental divining rodfor art at work. Naturally he breaks usual curator's rules: he puts hisown work in his shows ("I don't hog the space but people think itsdisgusting. Whenever you blur the lines people get upset"). His exhibitionshave defined a broad esthetic of conceptually manipulated industrial/massmarket debris with a healthy dose of works that range freely between a distinctmedia savvy (and media despair), psychological play and weird science. Thesetraits suggest a self-appointed avant-garde showman who, while still operatinggenerally within the confines of the contemporary art world and its hermeticconundrums, has managed to create a style for the presentation of new artthat is unpretentious and unpredictable--that reaches new artists and quiteoften new audiences. He has different notions about art and about its presentationin the New York art world. To be sure, there are a few contradictions. He'sa populist rabble rouser trying to capture a broad audience for work which,despite a good natured grasp at egalitarianism, is typified by rarefiedtaste and high-minded obscurantism. In Soho, where it's not unusual to heara dealer proclaim that they are after "50 of the right people, "Schachter responds that he's after "5000 of the wrong people."He keeps his spaces open 7 days a week with prices from $100 on up, "I'ma like a Korean Grocer," he says, "the days of the snotty, obnoxiousSoho gallery selling to the same collector over and over are gone.

The Schachter method of presenting art has its advantages and it's as experimentalas the work of the artists he shows. But just as importantly he's also shownthe ability to tap into a measure of what is most characteristic, most aggressivelyinteresting about art being made in New York today. Over the years his exhibitionshave been characterized by an aggressively contemporaneous sense of Americanmass culture, a shrewd low taste, an overall sense of ongoing cultural andtechnological decay and--not surprisingly--imminent social catastrophe.These traits are supplemented by an off the wall humor, a self-consciousambiguity and an inventively pop-oriented relationship to 20th century arthistory that has produced a series of exhibitions both chaotic and cogent.

"People say my shows are chaotic, of course they're chaotic, that'sthe point."

Call it chaos, cultural turbulence or the zeitgeist, but a Schachter showbrings together artists that seem to tap into various sub-arterial veinsof the American cultural stream of consciousness. Rachel Harrison's installationscombine a workmanlike, idiosyncratic handcraft with a restlessly unpredictablevariety of materials, gadgets, household goods, discards and mass consumerflotsam. Call them say, awkwardly formal, thoughtfully odd--descriptionsthat are meant to capture the inventiveness of her constructions and theirsingular combination of the compulsive honesty of folk/naive art with thesemiotic overtones of jaded, history laden, tactical New York art. Theseconstructions clasp together a wide range of social patterns (linked byassociation to the bric-a-brac she selects), bringing together both thejoy of imagination and its unforced intellectual underpinnings.

Robert Chambers also has an aura of deliberatelyshrewd naiveté in works that often turn science, gadgetry and chemicalprocesses on their head. His work suggests the intersection between scienceand standup comedy, distilling useful aspects of both. In his work the comedian'sdeadpan response, in the face of apparent absurdity, coexists quite happilywith an utterly weird scientific method--arcane engineering, fantastic gadgetryand a delightfully pointless manipulation of the chemistry of householdpotions.

John Lekay's works survey related issues of banalityand enormity. His demonic heads, shaped from Paradichlorobenzene or thestuff they use to make air fresheners, crystallize into a mythologicallysuggestive symbolic power, one foot in the cosmos the other in the housewaressection of the supermarket.

Ricci Albenda's elegant typographic paintingsembrace minimalism's historic distillation of painting's formal particularswhile adding a sense of content; a sense of meaning and interpretation tothe work's refined retinal simplicity. His crisp and exactingly executedword compositions capture painting's historical legacy of representationalprecision. Centered around immaculately rendered words and phrases, thepaintings present a stripped down but conceptually rich mode of visual/linguisticrepresentation open as well, to a wide cultural and social reading.

Graham Gillmore's paintings troll similar areasof representation crowding the canvas with words and phrases, building visualframeworks suggestive of genetic structures or chemical compositions, inworks as elusive as they are rich in allusions. Brendan Cass's idiomaticpaintings combine broad painterly gestures in works that emphasize surface,stroke and a unifying iconic central form or icon.

Lawrence Seward's odd and simple drawings seemto lace ordinary people in ambiguous but potentially degrading dispositions.Delineated in the spare linear manner of a comic strip, the works exudea discomfiting combination of social banality and sexual desire.

Jonathan Horowitz's video's catalog an endlesssub cerebral stream of media symbolism and prosaic imagery that form a kindof video mirror in which to examine the world beyond the screen. His isolatedvideo images provide an opportunity (or an addictive need) to verify humanperception through the video reality check. To examine and reexamine (rewindtake another look) what we thought we saw and whatever it might mean.

Schachter's own works often manipulate video events, either cataloging hisown introspective self-documentation or transforming mediated fragmentsfrom TV into vaguely traditional but digitized print forms. His individualworks seem to convey the same sense of cultural and social survey suggestedby his exhibitions. Ranging over a media-transformed landscape of digitized,retransmitted emotions, Schachter's works project a sense of calamity andcomedy and manage to distill a moment or two of visual poignancy.

Calvin Reid
New York City 1996