Support our Kickstarter

Wall of Color

Wall Sketchlp.jpg

Pocket Utopia is a collaborative art space, for which Fred Gutzeit has installed, a 58-foot installation that belongs to a series of works inspired bythe painter Lee Lozano (1930-1999).  Fred and Lee were friends during the 1960s peace and love era. Before Lozano famously made her exit from the art world, she left Gutzeit a notebook with the inscription "Love to Fred from Lee Lozano." Fast forward thirty years, Gutzeit picks up where the latter's Wave series left off. Given that Lozano prized the intertwining of Art and Self, "living her art" at all costs, the gifted notebook must be a momentous passing of a baton.

I was there to see Lee Lozano's posthumous 2003 PS1 show of disconcerting oversized drawings of hammers and other tools, as well as an intimate notebook of drawings with enigmatic phrases such as "I WILL MAKE MYSELF EMPTY TO RECEIVE COSMIC INFO." Lozano was on the edge, and Gutzeit is reverently hounding these margins by referencing Lozano's scientific renderings of progressive light waves. Lee Wall is an exciting installation, with its cascading Art Nouveau forms, rhythmic circular waves rendered in multitudes of color that are drawn, digitally manipulated and redrawn.

Key to Pocket Utopia's founder Austin Thomas's vision, the narrow nook of the gallery multi-tasks as a salon for the co-mingling of ideas. Gutzeit has chosen to display Lozano's notebook and related works by other artists. Audra Wolowiec has created Intimate Apparel (for Fred Gutzeit & Lee Lozano),  two hip shirts with holes cut out on the sides for "comrades" to slip their hands around each other's backs. Not related but worthy of mention is artist-in-resident Amy Lincoln, whose paintings of her office co-workers depict the painfully normal. With all of this, Pocket Utopia succeeds in creating the spontaneity of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork.


This article originally appeared in ArtSlant.
Images: Wall Sketch for Billboard Installation (2008); Lee Wall(2008). Courtesy Pocket Utopia.

Comments

no no no no no ! I'm sorry, but absolutely not! no!

errr I just erased 5 min of this I will not give up on my comment. Ok...one recent day ago I got lost on the subway system got off walked and happend upon P.S.1's bleak perimeter (cement wall's no color) & I saw that this giant building before me as an art institue I thought lucky dog & I merely walked in, affter I had finally passed the long walk though the prison exterior with cameras pointing in every wich direction, I got inside feeling a bit cold inside, as if I needed another reminder of what many of our unfourtunate bother's & sister's are going and have gone through. So I paid $2 & no I'm not a student & I'm very happy that I didn't wast or contribute another cent to this "art" building. The first place I discovered was the bookstore full of book's I though oh joy, however after spending maby 40min and checking out a couple of dozen book's I left confused & angry at the gross bleak pathetic hope dashing misrepresentation of out world wid culutrual art and art history, my favorit was this cool looking book describing on it's cover a rich history of our counter culutre's phycadelic art work & upon opening ??!??!!! huh it was litterally crayon drawing's of people & thing's less creative than a preschoolers drawing's. I walked out & went to the cafe to get some tap water...I don't think I've seen a worse cafe even in the midwest.... As I traveled though the various room's and floors of the art exhibits I was greated in each room & floor by more security guard's than their were people to see the art, what's more they consistantly harrased & hounded me thoughout the whole building (you're to closse to that art to sir step back! No picture's! Hey Don't Touch That!) constantly sticking their head's around corner's checking to see what you're doing it was plain odd & it wasn't just me either...Each room I walked into I was presented with but a few or a couple pieces of art in a vast very large open space for the building and room's were huge, I don't think I've seen such a wast of space the art work was so uncreative and unthoughtful I wondered howcome they simply didn't fill the room's with their modern art? instead a triangle on the floor one tiny picture with a few line's in it..yes I could have done a much better job than those few line's (I kind of like to juge art by the context of can I do a better job than that) and a half inflated ballon partialy adheased tot he floor. Every room was like this. I couldnt belive it I kept thinking how the hell do they come up with the funding to pay for this gigantic building & who come's to see it. I briskly walked though the whole building all 3 floor's and the basement. I couldnt really take to much time to think about the art simply because it didn't require hardly a moment's thought to completly grok. Atlast I calapsed in a room with two projection screen's and techno music blastin to a video stream about government created aid's, ufo's, and lizard people. I was acctually sorry to say that this was the most creative "art" exhibit in the whole of the building. So I sat contemplating this place the people and the building and I was left with the following impretion wich I wrote down in my notebook: P.S.1 the lion's den of death culture art. Humans who believe in this desperatly cling to what is called art, a gross misrepresentation of our rich art history consistantly dashing the hopes of those that so desperatly cling to what they wish, hope, belive to be a wealth of human art. Effectively brain washing those whom enter it's helish prision like gate's a litteral fortress of the helish human mindscape. I left hoping someone will soon tag all over it's large bleak cement wall surounding it's perimeter. The most beutiful art I had seen that day was all over the building ajacent the P.S.1 completly covered in a clash of graffitee style's all the way to the top of the 5 to 7 storie building wraped all the way around it and even on the ground. The best art is free & color's our everyday life.

I sure am

glad you decided not to abandon your comment, entheogen.  Sounds like a good juxtaposition of dreck featured within and actual expression outside.  Now, the art of this post on the other hand... trying to lose me in higher dimensions?  Dig it