What happens to graffiti when it’s hung inside a gallery and sold, besides losing a great deal of its cool? Is it fine art, and is it good art? An exhibit at one elegant Lower East Side Gallery gathers saleable pieces from several prominent street artists. Most of the pieces look like they’re samples – smaller segments cut out from works the artist might have completed on the side of a building somewhere. They feel unnaturally reigned in, like zoo animals, drained of their natural elan.

Only the pieces by Ben Eine sit comfortably within the gallery. This English artist stencils letters across buildings, and is best-known for painting the entire alphabet on storefronts along Middlesex Street in London. Like Shepard Fairey, his work is linked to Barack Obama: Prime Minister David Cameron presented Obama with an Eine canvas on a state visit. And, like Shepard Fairey, Eine is a skillful graphic designer. His work relies less on scale, site and bravado for its power – as so much street art does – than on composition and color. There’s a strong tension between figure an field in his paintings; he doesn’t like empty space, and inflates letters to fill the void. The lettering styles he uses resemble nineteenth-century type faces, so that, both in process and feeling, his stencils feel more mechanical than free-form. And his texts are becoming increasingly complicated, especially when he stencils streams of letters. He’s not writing poetry, not yet, but his format slows the act of reading, so that one stops and thinks rather than taking in the words all at once, seamlessly and mindlessly, as happens with so much advertising, signage and media. Eine's letters have a bracing physicality that alerts us to how powerful and subversive text can be. Sentences are always written for us with a reason.

I know…, 2012. Ben Eine. Couretesy of Charles Bank Gallery.

January 24, 2013 by Nalina Moses

How do we represent something too horrible to represent? When 27 people, 20 of them young children, were shot and killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connectictut last month, many news outlets showed a photo of a police officer and a teacher leading a line of children to safety. Each child held her arms out around the shoulders of the child in front of her, as if it were some kind of playground game. There is fear on the children’s faces and one girl is shrieking. Yet the image doesn’t convey the extraordinary facts of the tragedy: that people are shooting at small children, and that twenty of them are dead. Except for a photo of the bloodshed, what could have conveyed that?

Six days later, after the victims' bodies had been identified and their families notified, The New York Times listed their names on the front page, in white letters, across a black field three-columns-wide and half-a-page high. Since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC was unveiled in 1982, the act of listing victims’ names in memorial architecture has become standard practice, almost a design cliche. But the listing in the newspaper is especially powerful. It exploits the traditional broadsheet format: words on paper, black and white graphics, and the authoritative Times type face. The big black box, uncomfortably off-center, is severe. The italicized letters are stately, like those on a formal invitation, or a gravestone. Reading the list is wrenching. These children have the kind of enchanted first names (Chase, Grace, Aviella) we give children now, and last names (Irish, Italian, Chinese, hyphenated) that conjure something of their family life. Beside each victim's name the Times lists her age. All of the children were 6 or 7, and reading these numbers again and again is staggering. Even the ages of the adult victims, from 25 to 52, are irrationally young. The list capures a gravity and complexity that most photographs of the event just don’t.

January 23, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Time, and life, stream by, without a moment for contemplation. It’s hard to recall what happened yesterday, or in this morning’s dreams. It’s as if we're lost within our own stories or, sometimes, as if there is no story at all. I’ve tried in various ways to capture the relentless assault of experience, including photo-taking, memento-collecting, and journal-writing. But even when carried out diligently these methods are inadequate. They can’t always capture the shocking, disruptive impact of small moments, and the deeper shifts in mood that underline the weeks. They don’t get it.

Riitta Ikonen’s warm and rigorous conceptual art project Mail Art, gets a great deal of it. Over the past several years, once every week, she has mailed an A5 format “postcard” to a professor at an art school she attended in Brighton, England. They’re dispatched from wherever she happens to be that week, and crafted from whatever materials she has on hand. She’s sent over two hundred of them so far, all of which her professor has saved and returned to her. Ikonen has a liberated graphic sensibility: she has mailed, among other things: a stone, the sole of a boot, a stack of MetroCards, and a chunk of little fish sealed in glue. Each missive is packaged, titled, addressed and stamped distinctively yet unfussily. When taken together, as they were at an exhibit last year, the postcards make up a vibrant personal, physical and psychic history. They’re alive with the tactility and pungency of everyday experience.

“Found paper clips” from Mail Art, by Riita Ikonen.

January 21, 2013 by Nalina Moses

The play Ganesh and the Third Reich is sort of like the Wizard of Oz, with Ganesh (instead of Dorothy) seeking an audience with Hitler (instead of the Wizard) to reclaim the swastika (instead of trying to get back home). It’s a lot of things: a play within a play, a tonal essay, and an exploration of cultural iconography. The Public Theater, where the Back to Back Theatre company is performing it, issued a warning to ticket-buyers that the production "contains coarse language, adult themes and a portrayal of Lord Ganesh which some may find troubling.“ What was far more troubling to me than seeing the Hindu god portrayed by a dour, overweight Australian actor, as well as all the swastikas, was something else. Three of the five actors in the ensemble are mentally disabled, which shocked me.

Why was it shocking? These three actors are, simply, playing characters who are mentally disabled. Mental disability isn’t one of the play’s themes; it’s not explored structurally or poetically here, to discover how a differently-minded individual uses language and imagines the world, as it has been in some of Robert Wilson’s collaborations with autistic poet Christopher Knowles. The play contains dramatic tonal shifts, with lyrical scenes (there’s a train travel sequence that might be the most captivating thing I’ve ever seen on a stage) undercut by brutally naturalistic ones (like a a scrum of the five actors rolling around the bare stage). In one memorable passage, a displaced, mentally disabled, German Jew running from the Nazis remembers that he had been different since he was a child, saying "I heard stories differently." What unsettled me about watching the mentally disabled actors was the fear that they were, somehow, making themselves especially vulnerable to the audience without entirely understanding these vulnerabilities. Yet they performed with such clarity and alacrity that this might not be true.

January 18, 2013 by Nalina Moses