Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

Pretentious vibe and managed by overly pleased with themselves hipsters. I think the horse event was the last hurrah? If not, I can’t say I’d be venturing back, no matter the buzz.

Animals are not objects, they are individuals who feel pain, exhaustion, fear, and any number of other emotions. This exhibit is abusing animals who are unable to sit down or move, and they did not consent to this torture. I hope this gallery goes away like horse carriages in NYC: to the shameful dustbin of history.

What a terrible place! Clearly need better judgement in choosing what constitutes arts and what to exhibit.

How about the owner and artist are chained up to the wall instead of the horses for hours on end? NOT ART, this is torture and animal abuse. I can not give a good review for any gallery that supports this kind of «installation.» Go outside of city limits if you want to look at horses, this is meaningless other than these poor animals must suffer.

I don’t get down here often enough but I really love this gallery. I think they show compelling work that is topical and relevant, but they don’t try and avoid beauty. I’ve seen a lot of gorgeous stuff here. Way out of my price range, but I consider most galleries in this area to basically be museums anyway.
The Elizabeth Peyton show there in March was stunning. I spent a lot of time enjoying the tiny little paintings she made. It was all glamour scaled down.
I haven’t been down to see the Bjarne Melgaard show yet, but he is not so much my taste.
It’s a trek but it’s almost always worth it to get down from the Chelsea art scene. And everytime I am intrigued by the picnic table where a lot of the staff works. It’s odd and cool!

Very cool gallery! There’s a great slogan painted on the façade: «the whole world + the work = the whole world.» I know this sounds corny, but every time I see it I feel inspired.
Last time I went the inside also had words on the walls – not painted on but put there by a projector for an installation by Frances Stark. The work was based on her internet chats with Italian men. As far as I could tell the text was a transcription of video chats where Italians were showing her their dicks and vice versa. But the words made it into the art, and I was glad that Gavin Brown’s Enterprise put big couches in the middle of the gallery so I could get cozy for 30+ minutes of reading.
Frances Stark made this work for an important exhibition in Venice last summer and the guys she chats with – as I mentioned before – are Italian, like the people in Venice. The projections are timed to the rhythm of music from a Mozart opera, which has lyrics in Italian, even though Mozart spoke German. But the lyrics are gone, just like the images of these Italian guys who were typing to Frances Stark in English. All these removals and reminders of geographical distance really made me think about the distance between an artist and her audience, because in most cases the artist «isn’t in the picture,» so to speak, when the audience encounters the work. But, at the same time, the audience wants the artist to expose a private side of herself so they can have a vicarious experience of the genuine emotional connection that’s missing from their everyday lives. That expectation for art is basically the same impulse that sends people to sites that promise spontaneous and exciting random encounters, like Chatroulette, even though (or maybe because?) all these sites have to offer is a bunch of dicks. There’s something like a «lost in translation» problem there when you can’t match your desires up with the desires of the guy who wants you to look at his dick. Same thing with the artist’s anxiety over whether what she wants to show is what people want to see. Or when you tell an Italian guy that stab is a verb and he thinks it’s a dick. I’m pretty sure that’s what Frances Stark was thinking about when she made this work, given the way she mixes together «I’m gonna chat with guys in Italy» with «I’m gonna show my art in Italy.»
I got a little carried away there but I thought this was super interesting and also somewhat relevant to my point, which is: Gavin Brown’s Enterprise is a good place to have an intimate experience with some good art.