Alice Gregory

Ambling on the central machine, Sina Najafi, Cabinet’s Editor-in-Chief, flanked on either side by matching treadmills, played the MC, or, as he preferred “Speed Demon,” summoning each reader from the audience by blowing a whistle. Hands in trouser pockets, strolling leisurely – indoors on a forever-repeating non-course – Najafi was a walking – ha! – parody of the flâneur. The gym, perhaps the paragon of a certain sort of urban renewal, and this one located only blocks from Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs’s most frequently cited neighborhood, was a particularly loaded setting.

The most immediate works were the space/time-specific inter-activities, but the walls of each storefront were by no means bare. A Kenny Scharf neon graffiti piece took up most of one wall and an intimidating quantity of painting and drawing hung in each room. Offset had full-reign on a closet-sized room. The door advertised “ten contemporary artists who make posters,” and sure enough, the space was plastered like an adolescent bedroom.

The little boys swarmed like flies to Kon Trubkovich’s Freefall is Free For All, a crushed car of American make and 1970s scale, that is enclosed by a chainlink fence. It would seem that the old cultural industry stalwarts of colossal destruction and megawatt violence have not stopped seducing young boys. The kids, entranced by the automotive corpse and annoyed by the fence that separated them from the car, likely missed the barrier’s symbolism, which offered a paradoxical mutual protection to both the viewer and the car itself, a well-timed display just three months after GM filed for bankruptcy.