If you ever catch yourself pondering just how many sperm there are in an ejaculation, then we’ve got the show for you. Head down to Alphabet City gallery The Phatory, and check out Sperm Count, the latest installation by Swedish artist Lennart Grebelius. With sperm wallpaper, books, posters and a video, this place has got quite the sperm count. And for you budget jism-lovers, there are unsigned sperm posters for as little as $15! Pick up a sperm picture book, or if you’re really dedicated, a cool $10,000 will buy you the show’s central piece, “One Ejaculation,” which is basically three shelves’ worth of these books.

The gallery’s owner, artist Sally Lelong, tells me she’s tired of “art about art” and puts her efforts into exhibiting art that the viewer can really, um, relate to. Talk about a sense of humor: when I entered the gallery the second time with a friend, she howled, “I see you’ve come again!” In these tough times the world could use a few more dirty punsters. Keep ’em comin’, Sally!–David Levitz

The Phatory, 618 E 9th St between Aves B and C. Sperm Count is open through June 11. Image courtesy Lennart Grebelius and The Phatory, New York.

Photos courtesy Virginia Rollison

Earlier this month I sat down with London artist Joe Black and the artist-duo Miss Bugs to talk about their work. The artists flew in to prepare their show at Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Brooklynite Gallery and to add their touch to the neighborhood by means of a little street art. This show was the first at the gallery, and maybe anywhere, to have its opening broadcast online, and according to cofounder Rae McGrath, 45 viewers from 30 different countries tuned in to the gallery’s website for the live feed. Street artist Leon Reid IV interviewed guests, some local, some international, creating what McGrath calls a “red carpet” atmosphere.

Time Out New York: Miss Bugs, you’ve said that you don’t refer to yourselves as “artists,” rather as “image-makers.” Why is that?
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With a lead who sings like Björk, a penchant for the quirky and light overtones of Pina Bausch–inspired dance theater, Seattle’s Degenerate Art Ensemble could be grouped into a genre I call “whimsically disturbing performance art.” The group’s particular blend of media and performance modes, which integrates original instrumental and vocal music, video and percussion-dance à la Stomp, appeared unique in the preview they gave last week at the New Museum for “Sonic Tales,” a piece set to premiere this fall in their hometown. Whatever hints of clumsiness remain in this work-in-progress, the performers are so refined that they leave no doubts about the show’s future success.

The DAE successfully elicits audience participation in the show’s soundtrack in a nonthreatening manner, at different points getting audience members to make strange noises, which the performers direct like orchestra conductors. “Sonic Tales” begins with the band’s lead, Haruko Nishimura, dressed in a red gown one would expect to see on a manga Alice in Wonderland. Beginning with a narrative thread, the plot quickly dissolves into a pure celebration of rhythm as a bar hung with pots and pans drops from the ceiling and the musicians, dressed as ninjas, attack it with their drumsticks until they turn to their next victim: our protagonist, who percussively defends herself with a pan and spatula, while gyrating on the rim of a steel hoopskirt. Next, we see a film the group shot while in New York about the adventures of Bagel Boy, a bagel who must escape the threats of ingestion and menacing schoolyard bullies (the bagel is played by one of the group’s performers, a brown man who appears in whiteface, or arguably bagelface).

Silly and spirited, the common theme of the show is the power of things small against the universe’s larger forces. Case in point are the lyrics to the song “Appetite,” which address all sorts of hunger: “33 giants in one night, and even then I finish it of with a couple of dirty films.”—David Levitz
Photos courtesy Virginia Rollison

The DAE is back in Seattle now, but check out the New Museum’s other upcoming events.

“The Swan Prince,” courtesy Rubell Family Collection, Miami

Hernan Bas’s new show, “The Dance of the Machine Gun & other forms of unpopular expression,” opens tonight at Lehmann Maupin (201 Chrystie St between Rivington and Stanton Sts), 6–8pm.

Last month the Brooklyn Museum, where the artist’s traveling retrospective is currently on display, debuted miamiHeights: Hernan Bas, a documentary about the painter. One highlight of the film is a montage which splices grandiose, imposing shots of the museum with clips of the artist sucking back a Bud Light in his Miami studio. And that doesn’t seem to be an atypical moment, either.

Another of the movie’s funnier scenes features the artist staring at his brush and then speaking to it, as if to question its motives. After the screening, Bas explained to the audience that he has become a painter’s painter almost in spite of himself and his intention to create in other media. “If that’s all you do, that’s what you’ve got to be called,” said the painter. “Kind of like, if you only sleep with men, you’re probably gay.” Bas’s tempers this kind of carefree humor with a much darker side, of which we only get fleeting glimpses; at one point in the film he mentions that, for many years, he was convinced he would die young.

Though the artist once took a semester at Cooper Union before he stopped going to class and has been to New York a great deal recently, he revealed to me that he is looking forward to his upcoming opening at Lehmann Maupin, when he hopes to spend more time here and make it to the Met for a day. I asked him what keeps him in Miami, and if he would ever consider moving back to New York. Bas told me, “You would cry if I told you how much I pay for my studio in Miami.” And then he did tell me. And you probably would.—David Levitz

“Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection” is currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum through May 12. Bas’s show at Lehmann Maupin will be up through July 10.

Best known as John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono has long been an influential artist, musician and activist in her own right. Beginning in the early 1960s, works like Cut Piece, in which she invited people to snip away at her clothes with scissors, helped define Conceptual, performance and feminist art. Wearing her trademark floppy hat and sunglasses, Ono appeared recently at the Guggenheim for what was billed as a lecture and performance to coincide with the museum’s “Third Mind” show on crosscurrents between East and West.

Those looking for Ono to provide lucid insights into her artistic development were sorely disappointed. In a painfully extended attempt at conversation with curator Alexandra Munroe, the 76-year-old proved unable to put a coherent sentence together, veering wildly off topic at every opportunity. Did the interview make her acutely uncomfortable, had she lost her marbles or was this some kind of Dadaist put-on? In support of the latter theory, the nonchat was at various points interrupted by performers re-creating pieces from the Ono oeuvre: In one, they wore black bags and wriggled across the stage; in another, they “measured” audience questions using lengths of yarn. Ono herself got into the act, dancing with a chair, then peering through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. For a finale, she had audience members take shards of a shattered ceramic, coyly inviting us to reconvene in ten years and put it back together. Thanks, but I think I’ll keep mine.—Tim Paul

“The Third Mind” continues through Apr 19 at the Guggenheim.
Photos courtesy Enid Alvarez and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

No plans for this weekend? Or next?

This Saturday at the New Museum, the Seattle art-performance band Degenerate Art Ensemble is leading a free audiovisual workshop for all ages at 3pm. Finally, here’s your chance to become a real AV geek and perform in a music video!

Recordings from this Saturday will be used in the band’s concerts at the museum on April 16 and 17.—David Levitz

Here’s a teaser from a show the group did in its hometown:

Sarah Small, like TONY, has tapped into the ancient wisdom that nudity turns heads. Last Saturday, in a Greenpoint studio, the photographer, who snaps group studio shots of visually diverse figures, assembled a bunch of her models and enlisted the sponsorship of a vodka company, throwing a tableau vivant mixer replete with cocktails. This marked the first time I witness performance art tipsy.

After everyone had their drinks, the models strutted out in a line to chanting music and took their poses on stage with resident taxidermies. Most were naked, a few not; bodybuilder Michelle from Connecticut wore her bikini, and another chick sported nothing but heels, topless lingerie and a giant, blond Afro wig.

While the naked folks did really kept my attention going—especially when Small occasionally directed them to make out or shake their fists in anger—what was most interesting about the performance, artistically speaking, was not necessarily the models, but rather the audience. They were going nuts, taking pictures with their iPhones and whispering to each other, “You think they’re gonna fuck?” I happily passed on the tidbit I’d heard from one of Small’s Bulgarian folk-singing buddies that she had given them permission to do just that. Whatever one’s feelings about the project in general, that certainly would have been art.–David Levitz

Photos courtesy David Rosenzweig

Two weeks ago I was lucky enough to get a behind-the-scenes preview of the Brooklynite Gallery’s current show, “It Hurts,” and to chat with cofounder Rae McGrath and street-cum-studio artist Remed while the show was being installed. While both Remed and his Polish counterpart Zbiok—who couldn’t get the necessary visa to come for the two-person exhibition—show influences of Keith Haring, Remed’s stuff also has strong touches of major 20th-century painters like Léger and, he claims, Modigliani. One painting of his that I find particularly striking—a labyrinth of amorous, twisted figures—pairs the color and lively spirit of Matisse’s dancers with Haring’s overt phallocentrism.

Remed originally hails from Lille in the north of France, but prefers Madrid for its sunny weather and vibrant street life. About starting off painting in the streets, he says, “I wanted to show my work, and I knew no gallery would take my work” (clearly no longer the case). When I told Remed that many people would find it strange for a European artist to spend nearly the entirety of his first trip to New York in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he nodded thoughtfully and responded that street art for him is partially about reclaiming the street and overcoming the fear and paranoia we are taught. It’s also as much about the act as the art; the artist lit up telling me about the energy of the streets in Bed-Stuy,  how he saw kids dancing and making music, and how he even befriended a 50-year-old tagger whose spray signature he showed me beside his own mural on Malcolm X Boulevard. (Remed believes that any unique act of self-expression can be street art, except for the “street marketing” that has become big in Europe, with major clothing brands paying artists as much as 800 euros to graffiti their logos.)

I was curious what Rae had to say about this show coinciding with the city’s major art fairs. On the business end of things, he explained to me that, while a gallery in Bed-Stuy is much cheaper to maintain than a space in Chelsea or even Williamsburg,  it also seems to lend an air of authenticity—a reverse cachet, if you will—to the sorts of shows they do, attracting a neighborhood audience as well as visitors from as far away as Japan.

-David Levitz

Photos courtesy Virginia Rollison
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Floater-airplanes by Jenna Lucente

When Adam Simon realized in 2005 that there was a surplus of good art and a shortage of good homes for it, he decided to take action. In 2006, with the help of Art in General, Simon launched the Fine Art Adoption Network, an organization that allows artists to give, and ordinary people to adopt, works of art. Yes, these are real artists; most have had solo gallery shows, and one has even been on the cover of Art Forum. And yes, it’s really free. But if you see something you like, you may be competing with other potential adoptive parents, so you should at least ask nicely.

Simon, himself a working artist, took a little time off from the installation of his new show at Pocket Utopia, which opened this past Saturday, to talk to me about the FAAF, which has now had adopters—most of them first-time art owners—from all over the country and all walks of life, including a 12-year-old Bostonian, a policeman from D.C., a judge in Florida, and a small farming town in upstate New York. Watch for an upcoming book on the FAAN published by Art in General.

With the advent of the post-Bush economy, we’ve started to see some changes in the landscape of the art world, both in terms of structural change—like galleries closing—and in terms of a shift in focus. The Swiss Institute, for example, has a show on right now (“Regift”), which focuses on the theme of the gift. Have you received increased interest in the Fine Arts Adoption Network in the past few months?

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