Thursday, leaving Arlene endlessly puzzling over train schedules to the Newark Airport, we walked the Village…

then mistakenly went all the way to Canal underground so walked even more; up to and up the Bowery…

…to the New Museum where “The End is Here”, Jim Shaw’s immense retrospective, proved infinitely distracting and as perversely fascinating as someone else’s extremely bad acid trip [not shown, though the video was particularly mesmerizing and endlessly disturbing].

…and more!  Much more. Salon style hangings of Shaw’s vast collections of thrift store paintings and crackpot religious propaganda in all their myriad densities culminating with a room-filling cartooned diorama kept us there unto near starvation until, feeling banal, unambitious and extremely lazy [art’ll do that to ya, particularly three whole floors of one guy’s stuff], we exited*.

*[We resolved to get the catalog and, once home, did; like much New Museum stuff it was kinda unsatisfying though their Shaw and Ofili shows have been anything but.]

Eschewing the rip-off “bistro” next door we wandered down Prince to find Brazilian fish tacos [not shown] served outside in crazily mild end-of-October weather; perfect!

Pressed for time and uninformed, further minor infiltrations of the Lower East Side didn’t net us much…

…someday, we promise ourselves, we’ll do better [last year, in freezing rain, we ranged further, though without noticeably better results].

Thursday evening dined early in the neighborhood [Snack Taverna] with old friends, an all-too-brief-event celebrated annually which we annually vow to make more time for one of these trips…

As Ron only had to work the five o’clock show Friday we motored together that morning to the somewhat upper reaches of Chelsea for a last artcrawl;

We started with some fancy French stuff. Simon Hantai, Hungarian really, worked his entire life there; famous in the seventies, and for me, having only seen magazine reproductions, better than anticipated.

Then around the corner sculptures by Max Ernst, Alsatian and international, but pretty much Franco-associated throughout his long life; spendy, not very exciting and the street more intriguing, sculpturally…all these being at or around Paul Kasmin’s various venues.

We continued on, rejecting much until Beatriz Milhazes at James Cohan catches us. Brazilian must be a theme; first those tacos, now these paintings…wild thangs!

Big ‘n’ bland Rauschenbergs were extremely disappointing…sad, I suppose, but not really, and not shown; street views shown.

An Andy Goldsworthy retrospective at LeLong was momentarily diverting;

…but absolutely most cool were Robert Miller’s Cubans, in a big survey called “Nuevos Colores”;

Notwithstanding that chainlink fence at Miller my fave of the day was a spectacular little show at Lennon Weinberg called “A Few Days” consisting of a single work from every painter they’d represented in their 27 year history – endless variations of modest excellence.  Here are just two of the twenty involved [Carl Palazzolo; Robin Lowe] to give an idea of the range…

Also notable, for sheer mania if nothing else, was Zhang Huan’s massive painting of Mao and 1000 of his closest friends, executed nearly life-size in ash from Buddhist offerings at Pace;

We rounded another corner to see what all Peter Scheldahl’s fuss was about over Maureen Gallace’s little landscapes [they looked much like what I was trying to do back when I used to go to Cape Breton with Dave]; plain old plein aire…sweet enough…

…and then, final surprise, Svenja Deninger’s very solid, satisfying and vaguely constructivist abstractions at Boesky.

Various people weary in various ways, also hungry, we adjourned to Pepegiallo’s back garden for a lunch of pasta and for me an uncharacteristic [well I similarly indulged at Spring Street Tuesday] glass of daytime wine, discovering ourselves pretty much in agreement about the works witnessed and happy to have seen them.

On our own L. and I might have made a few more stops, but no matter; we abandoned the quest and returned to the West Village to collect provisions for the night ahead…

Final days…next.

 

M