A high view of Clopen Studio, a show by RISD alumni at 1100 Broadway. — Photo by Michael Assiff

Friday night’s Clopen Studio at 1100 Broadway ended up somewhere in between an opening on W. 27th Street and a Providence house party.  Everyone is aesthetically disheveled (think Jim Drain, formerly of Fort Thunder), chain-smoking, and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) or Brown in the last five years.  1100 Broadway, a communal studio space for artists and one design team, was cleaned up and hung with about the same care as a school studio critique.

In the white-walled space that was curiously reminiscent of the RISD painting studios, the floors were painted battleship gray, riddled with beer bottles and splattered paint.  Many in attendance were visiting from Providence.  Covered in sawdust, beards thick, pants rolled up to bicycle home, their presence transformed the space from your run-of-the-mill Bushwick scene into the DIY, “we do it just because we love it” feel that this writer has only ever experienced in Providence.

But 1100 Broadway has a New York history of its own, despite the recent Providence influx.  It was the home of the Bruce High Quality Foundation (BHQ), which is a relationship the young artists who work there take very seriously.  BHQ’s members had only graduated from Cooper Union in 2004 and were only featured prominently in the international art scene in the last two years, highlighted by their inclusion in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. This incestuous overlapping and referencing of (very) recent art history elevates and literally invents importance and relationships that may or may not exist.  But it is a generating culture.  All of the art at 1100 Broadway was exceptional, but two installations were particularly relevant in that space, at this particular moment.

The recent-graduate-collective model has come to importance of late, mostly in light of Bruce High Quality’s "major league" status after their collaboration with Creative Time to create the Bruce High Quality University (Bring Your Own University.)  Similarly, another collective, called Still House, a conglomeration of early 20-somethings recently emerged from NYU, Parsons, Pratt, Cooper, and SVA, was featured in the last issue of Modern Painters as a new style of making a career as an emerging artist "in this economy."  They too are billed to have a close relationship with BHQ’s structure (loose friendly relationships among artists with strong senses of humor), and to be a direct product of the recession.

Korakrit Arunanondchai’s gigantic work. Click to see more from Clopen Studio.

Korakrit Arunanondchai, currently on view at HPGRP Gallery in the Meatpacking District, installed two massive silk-screen-based paintings on panel, propped up on stilts painted the same color. The precarious fashion with which they are simply leaned against the wall, accompanied by their sheer size — particularly large for the neighborhood, on a scale much more common to Chelsea than Bushwick — made them formidable, but simultaneously self-aware and responsive to the current climate for painting.  The structure of the objects seem to be a much simpler and more effective gesture than Kristin Baker‘s architectural intrusions.  Furthermore, the exclusive exhibition of just two objects elevated the Clopen Studio to a feeling of a gallery opening.

A textless zine was printed and stapled for the show, and includes a blurry black-and-white Xerox image of a Hieronymus Bosch (another focus of Still House, to make work accessible and affordable to youth); the allusion is obvious: Arunanondchai is clearly referencing art history pre-1970.  The all-over composition of these Bosch-inspired billboard-sized images can’t help but reference Ross Bleckner at Mary Boone.  Raw ambition and energy by far outweigh Krit’s lack of finesse with the paint; the two works side by side were truly impressive.

Michael Assiff installed two series of paintings across two enormous walls somewhat casually, and piled the extras against the wall on the floor.  The two series represent two painting styles coming out of high Modernism in the 1950s; one, Frank Stella, and the other, Helen Frankenthaler.  The juxtaposition of these two styles highlight binaries between male/female, geometric/polymorphic, highly methodical and totally spontaneous methods of image development.  This binary immediately calls the viewer into question: Which aesthetic do you prefer, and why is that important?  The same artist made both series and is no more emotionally or philosophically tied to one style than the other.

Michael Assiff’s Olympic-reminiscent display. Click to see more from Clopen Studio.

Assiff cleverly requested our former professor and artist, Dike Blair, to come and pin up first, second, and third place ribbons next to the paintings he liked most.  The ribbons were playfully rearranged by various viewers.  Note, Blair didn’t choose any of the "Stellas." The effect was a questioning of studio critique, in both its effectiveness and its the social function.  The partially-painted black plywood podium Assiff installed with a bouquet of flowers in a glass vase further emphasized the structure of value judgment.  In light of the currently ongoing Winter Olympic Games, it is particularly significant, but made the installation somewhat didactic.  It was just a Clopen Studio after all, better to take the risk.

Most of the activity centered around RISD’s alumni goes largely unnoticed in the greater Bushwick arts community, in the neighborhood’s various festivals and local galleries. That at least two parallel networks of artists, studios, exhibitions, and critiques occur on top of one another, almost unaware of each other, is a huge credit to at least the scope of Bushwick.

Why and how did the RISD Painting Department select Bushwick?  We can isolate some variables: one is a function of economy (Bushwick is one of the most affordable neighborhoods) and two, geography (New York is the largest arts community closest to Providence); social pressures and stereotypes (artists only establish careers in New York) as well as peer influence also play a role.  Was it intentional on the part of the thirty or fifty artists that moved here after graduating RISD — or was it strictly coincidental, unintentional?

Might there be other parallel scenes of which we are not yet aware related to other art schools (Cooper, Pratt, Parsons, SVA, MICA, etc) that jettisoned all of their alumni into a single neighborhood and effectively generated a grassroots arts community?

Clopen Studio, Friday, February 19, 2010, 6-10 PM (one night only)
Featured Artists: Korakrit Arunanondchai, Michael Assiff, John Bianchi, Allie Pisarro-Grant, Clayton Schiff, Andrew Russell Thomas, Justin Warsh, and Daddy (Audrey Berman, Scott Goodman, Alli Miller, Taylor Shields, C. Ryan Spence)