Alice Gregory

In the January 1971 issue of ArtNews, Linda Nochlin published her now-canonical essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? She must not have been talking about photography.

The show’s title, ‘Basin,’ comes from the name of one of many dumpster companies that service municipal New York. Dumpsters – ubiquitous but unseen – are, for whatever reason, marked by enigmatic inscriptions: “Liberty Ashes,” “Avid,” “Stallion,” “Viking,” “Imperial,” “Tiffany,” “King’s,” “Royal,” “Crown,” “Castle,” “Amanda,” “Rose,” “Atlas,” “Hercules.” The romance and heraldry of these brand names is of the sort of irony best left to Joan Didion. To read these alien messages – tragic, and oh-so American – is to be confronted by signals both familiar and foreign.

Kimmerich’s ambiance, redolent of a long-gone and much-mythologized SoHo, seems an appropriate setting for the paintings of Ivan Morley, an artist, who, in the past, has likened his work to “souvenirs of a fictional as well as an actual place.” His charged, symbolic images, often layered atop each other, evoke embellished memories and edited nightmares. Of the eight, multimedia paintings – hair, thread and leather sneak their way in – two are on fragmented, asymmetrical canvases, a chaotic, formal alteration to match the content.

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.