Sometimes a dumb joke is a smart move. Last Saturday, as the city’s art
scene was bogged down by eight art fairs, “All About Frank,” a weeklong
exhibition, popped up on the second floor of a town house in Little
Italy. As its title suggests, the exhibit—a rangy group show, including works by
forty-one artists—is a free-associative riff on the syllable “frank,”
from Walter Robinson’s breezy paintings of mustard-frilled frankfurters
and Andrea Bergart’s teen-dream abstractions of Lisa Frank Trapper
Keepers to Larry Rivers’s misty-eyed portrait of the poet Frank O’Hara
and a Lilliputian sculptural marvel by Curtis Talwst Santiago: a tableau
nestled inside a ring box, in which the artist’s father, Frank, is seen
feeding baby Curtis a bottle. There is no Helen Frankenthaler, but there
is a 1973 Academy Award-winning short, “Frank Film,” by Frank and
Caroline Mouris, the Busby Berkeleys of cut-out collage.
The show was organized by Arielle de Saint Phalle, who is twenty-eight,
and Taylor Roy, who is twenty-seven, two young women with careers in
film production who curate on the side, for the fun of it—which may help
explain why “All About Frank” and its silly premise struck me as so
refreshing. Art can start to feel like a professionalized racket during
Armory Week (so called after the biggest of the market-driven affairs);
de Saint Phalle and Roy’s idiosyncratic selection is winningly
catch-as-catch-can. The show opens on the staircase leading to the
second floor, with selections from the collection of Frank Andrews, who has been a
psychic on Mulberry Street since the nineteen-sixties. A small whimsy by
Chrysanne Stathacos, picturing Andrews with the Great Pyramid, alludes
to his calling; a Yoko Ono album with a personalized inscription nods to
his star-studded clientele list.
The week-long pop-up installation “All About Frank,” at a Prince Street town house in Little Italy.
Photograph by Samuel Morgan / SPRING/BREAK Art Show
The show congregates an unpredictable mix of the established and the
unknown. Rivers is a downtown legend (as much for his persona as for his
paintings) who died in 2002; Robinson is a veteran of the
nineteen-eighties Pictures Generation, who is enjoying a recent uptick
in popularity; Santiago is an up-and-comer, who has shown at the New
Museum and with the sharp-eyed gallerist Rachel Uffner; Bergart, who
contributes a cyanotype photogram as well as paintings, may be best
known for her murals on cement
trucks. The show’s most
famous participant isn’t a visual artist at all: it’s Iggy Pop, represented by
a rambling audio recording and a nearly life-size puppet (made by Jonny
Sabbagh and Nick Ball), last seen cavorting in a
video by Fatboy Slim,
in a song titled “He’s Frank.” One of several artists making their
débuts in the show is Dave Cutrone (showing pencil sketches of Frank
Sinatra, Frankie Valli, and Aretha Franklin); he may be best known to
art-world veterans for working at Max’s Kansas City back in the day.
“Frank O’Hara: Poet and Poem,” from 1995, by Larry Rivers.
Photograph Courtesy SPRING/BREAK Art Show
Truth be told, “All About Frank” is a sort of extended-play art fair
itself, billed as a “secret show” counterpart to “Spring
Break,” the youthquakiest of last
week’s eight fairs. Still, while looking at the eclectic works gathered
together for this lark of an exhibition, from a film, by Tessa
Hughes-Freeland, of burning frankincense to a painting, by KT Hickman, of
the Coca-Cola logo (designed by Frank Mason Robinson), I felt, as Frank
O’Hara once wrote, “moved to believe once more, freshly, in the divine
trap.”
“All About Frank” is on view through Friday, March 16th, at 32 Prince
Street.
Sourse: newyorker.com
