Out Cold: New York's Midwinter Shows

"My mind, though enfeebled by New Year's celebrations, was fine; I'd traveled to Queens to see Jeffrey Joyal's "my Life Underground" at Gandt. For this exhibition, the gallery left its longtime home in a basement for a column-laden miniature ballroom in a clinic up the block, complete with a wrought-iron chandelier and ghostly portrait hanging above the crown molding. Walking through the lobby to the exhibition room, I passed by an empty suggestion box entreating patients to "rate their therapist.""

"While the exhibition's text contextualized Joyal's sculptures as a celebration of New York's downtrodden straphangers, the show succeeded better in its meditation on privatization and theft. Unlike the cast bronze appropriations of Marcel Duchamp's 1917 Fountain that Sherrie Levine made in the 1990s, Joyal's copies isolate their source material from their specific physical context. At Fourteenth Street, the statues line the benches and ground and look upward; walking over them, you catch their eyes as you would another commuter's, sharing a mutual recognition"

"The exhibition featured eleven reproductions of Tom Otterness's public art series "Life Underground," 1998-2001, little bronze sculptures of twentieth-century immigrants, commuters, and tycoons installed on the floor of the subway station at Fourteenth Street and Eighth Avenue. To make the copies, Joyal completed illegal gonzo casts or scans of the original works in situ, rendering them in plaster, rubber, and clay."

An exhibition presented eleven reproductions of Tom Otterness's public art series "Life Underground" (1998–2001), small bronze figures originally installed on a subway station floor. The reproductions resulted from illegal gonzo casts or scans made in situ and were realized in plaster, rubber, and clay. The works in the clinic-gallery occupy a hip-height table and face away from one another, producing isolation rather than recreating the original public context. In their original subway placement the statues line benches and engage commuters with mutual recognition; removed and rearranged, the figures appear individual, aloof, and denied narrative interaction. The show emphasizes privatization, theft, and the consequences of decontextualization, echoing debates about appropriation.

Read at Artforum