My first intro­duc­tion to the art of Michael Alan was through the Liv­ing Instal­la­tion events he’s hosted in New York for the past few years. Per­for­mance art sub­sumes real life at these explo­sive events, where actors are clothed only in the scraps, props and paint Alan fash­ions for their costumes.

At the open­ing of Col­lapsi­ble Anatomy, his sec­ond exhi­bi­tion at Chelsea’s Gasser/​Grunert, I rec­og­nized many of Alan’s beau­ti­ful bohemian per­form­ers as they admired new works along­side young graf­fiti punks and Chelsea pow­er­houses in slick suits. The envi­ron­ment Alan inhab­its is one of his own cre­ation and reflects an appre­ci­a­tion of infi­nite ges­ture and aes­thetic dis­tor­tion.

Within each piece of Col­lapsi­ble Anatomy, Alan com­mu­ni­cates and elab­o­rates a uni­ver­sal under­stand­ing: forms which seem famil­iar become abstracted, with a viewer’s eye flow­ing seam­lessly from pen to spray-​paint to mono­print, while the com­po­si­tions never feel unnec­es­sar­ily busy. Alan’s visual lan­guage earns the intended vis­ceral response through many lay­ers of move­ment and media. The artist wields volatile tools with restraint in ren­der­ing his most del­i­cate ideas. This is appar­ent in his piece “Black and Blue,” which for me evokes the artis­tic con­fi­dence of Basquiat’s “Rid­ing With Death,” and sim­i­larly cap­tures the para­dox of sus­pended melan­choly that accom­pa­nies our con­scious human existence.

Alan skill­fully expresses his themes in a way that makes his art as acces­si­ble as it is fun to look at. On open­ing night, atten­dees were not just view­ing art, they were pop­u­lat­ing Alan’s world. The eclec­tic crowd drifted between two floors of the open space, dwarfed by the gallery’s high con­crete walls. (The gallery says it’s under­go­ing ren­o­va­tions, yet the unfin­ished aes­thetic fits well.) A woman dressed for a goth rave appre­ci­ates Alan’s work as a guy in expen­sive dress shoes fishes a beer out of a garbage bin of ice water. High­brow is hum­bled at Col­lapsi­ble Anatomy, which, like Alan’s Liv­ing Instal­la­tion events, is best expe­ri­enced first­hand.–Co-​written by E. Sar­gent and Robin Grearson.

Gasser/​Grunert
524 West 19^th Street
New York, NY
through June 18, 2011

Tags: Alan inhabits, bohemian, Collapsible Anatomy, Gasser Grunert, Michael Alan, subsumes

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 6th, 2011 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Art.
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