Cindy Sherman untitled # 175 / Kenny scharf (?)

Urs Fischer and Gavin Brown, together with the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, present Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns?

The title of the exhibition refers to Barnett Newman's famous painting Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? Having just completed the painting Mr. Newman wanted to name it Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns? 

Keith Haring ,Cady Noland ,Kenny Scharf

Rikrit Tiravanija 

 Malcolm Morley / Keith Haring

Donald Baechler 

Gilbert and George / Basqieat/Scharf/ Sherman 

Richard Prince/ Jean-Michel Basquieat/Richard Prince 

voor meer afbeeldingen (oa Francis Bacon !) CHECK:

http://www.tonyshafrazigallery.com/index.php?mode=current&object_id=39 

Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” is an early contender for Gallery Group Show of the Year. It has 22 artists—or 25, if you count those on view in reproduction. But really it has no artists at all. The show centers on a collaboration by the two impresario-organizers, gallerist Gavin Brown and artist Urs Fischer. It is all about memory, morals, redemption, tribal loyalty, and railing against cozy cliché. One of its causes can be traced to February 28, 1974, the infamous day when Tony Shafrazi, a 30-year-old Iranian-born artist, entered the Museum of Modern Art, yelled, “Call the curator. I am an artist,” and spray-painted KILL LIES ALL in red letters across Picasso’s Guernica. I’d always assumed Shafrazi meant to paint “All Lies Kill.” However, he recently told me he wrote exactly what he wanted to write, and that it was meant to be read in “a Finnegans Wake way” so that it said something whichever way you read it. (It’s still gibberish to me. Whatever.) Asked about it later, Shafrazi stated he wanted to bring Guernica “absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from art history and give it life.” Regardless, the painting had a protective coating, was cleaned soon after, and now hangs at the Reina Sofía in Madrid. Shafrazi was arrested, charged with “criminal mischief,” and released on $1,000 bail.

SEE ALSO:
Tony Shafrazi Defaces ‘Guernica’ Again
The story gets weirder from there. Around 1980, Shafrazi opened a Soho gallery and began exhibiting artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat—who also graffitied over things. Shafrazi’s gallery became a hot spot. Or so I heard: My inner Church Lady got the best of me, and, except for occasional shows, I smugly boycotted Shafrazi’s gallery for the next two decades.

By the time my moralism calmed down and I started going again, the gallery was only a shadow if its former self. These days, Shafrazi isn’t in the limelight so much. No one would have expected to see this new show in this gallery. He’s known mainly as a dealer of secondary art and blue-chip artists, but “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” changes that, at least temporarily. Shafrazi claims, “I put my life in their hands.” Gavin Brown puts it this way: Shafrazi’s previous show had been up for months, and “there needed to be an intervention.”

The intervention they came up with produces a discombobulating retinal wallop. Fischer, the living master of visual disorientation, had the previous four-person exhibition photographed, including the ceiling and the guards. These images were reproduced in perfect one-to-one scale and wallpapered into the gallery, even on the ceiling, in an exact replica of itself. Then a new show was hung atop the old. Initially, you don’t know what you’re seeing. Everything looks as if it’s on top of everything else, an optical overload.

It’s uncanny. There’s a Picabia on top of a Donald Baechler, Francis Bacon atop Kenny Scharf, a Lawrence Weiner overlapping a Jean-Michel Basquiat. Lily van der Stokker has painted over graffiti painters, a Cady Noland leans on a Haring, a real Haring hangs on top of a photographed one. Some juxtapositions are nasty. Sue Williams’s man slapping a woman while calling her “stupid cunt” is next to Richard Prince’s rephotographing of the naked preteen Brooke Shields; Cindy Sherman’s picture of vomit is placed in the mouth of a Scharf. Other juxtapositions read like homage: Rob Pruitt’s eternally burning lighter in front of a John Chamberlain sculpture. Knitting this whole phantasmagoria together is a fantastic smudged white carpet by Rudolf Stingel.

“Who’s Afraid” is like some mad replicating vision machine, or a walk-in Louise Lawler. The ghosts of shows past have their way with the present; the art of now elbows aside the art of “then.” “Who’s Afraid” allows you to optically experience how every work of art is in dialogue with, building on, reacting to, or fighting against every other work of art ever made. The gallery says that the show “demonstrates how each work of art has many selves hidden within, and how forces outside the frame constantly … limit a work’s interpretation.” Brown and Fischer suggest that the purposeful white cube of the modern art gallery is also a curse, that it neutralizes art and our thinking about it.

Some visitors have called this show adolescent and self-serving. Time Out’s Howard Halle called it “deeply cynical.” But cynicism can also be a creative force. “Who’s Afraid” isn’t insincere and misanthropic. True, the organizers are criticizing the insider art world from as deep inside the belly of the beast as possible. Everything here is A-list. Yet “Who’s Afraid” is a labor of love and a rebel yell. It communes with artistic ancestors and resurrects art no longer in fashion. Insularity notwithstanding, Brown and Fischer want to set art free from the context of the white box.

Successful or not, something freeing did happen the night of the opening. It was Shafrazi’s birthday. At the large after-party, Brown and Fischer presented him with a five-foot-long cake decorated with a perfect rendition of Guernica. Brown climbed atop a table and, amid much yelling, toasted Shafrazi. He then thrust a cake decorator filled with red icing into Shafrazi’s hands. As the crowd screamed, Brown implored, “Write, Tony! Write!” Shafrazi started moving the device over the cake. Slowly he wrote the words I AM SORRY. Time stood still. It was like an angel of redemption had entered the room to take away Shafrazi’s guilt. The room went silent. I was shocked. Then, Shafrazi began writing again. He wrote one more word: not! It was like the Sopranos finale. Just as you thought everything was going to change, everything only became more of what it already was.

At the after-party for the opening of "Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns," an exhibit at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery curated by Swiss artist Urs Fischer and gallerist Gavin Brown, two strippers dressed as cops wheeled out an enormous Guernica-decorated cake to laughter and applause. The puckish subtext of the exhibit, after all, was the notorious 1974 incident in which Shafrazi, then a 30-year-old artist, spray-painted the words "Kill Lies All" onto Picasso's Guernica. Photos of Shafrazi being led out of MoMA in handcuffs graced a table near the front door of the head-spinning exhibition, which features pieces by Keith Haring, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and others displayed against a backdrop of life-size photographs Fischer took of a previous show at the gallery, creating a trompe l'oeil effect of one show superimposed on another.
"The whole show was more or less related to that, basically," Shafrazi said later in the evening of his shocking act of youthful indiscretion, which he described at the time as an attempt to update the masterpiece (and which earned him only five years of probation after MoMA conservators were able to immediately clean the painting). "Many elements in the show are related to my history or something or another, but not directly. The whole idea of juxtaposing things one on top of the other, one thing relating to something else, both things talking together … It doesn't have to seem to be destructive or aggressive, but on the other hand, the way it's done is very thoughtful and celebratory." Not a few people in the art world have been unable to forgive Shafrazi for what he did. If given the chance, would he do it again? "Oh, it was a different time, you can't talk about it that way," he said. "It was a miserable time, and there was a need to be addressed. I was 30 years old. Many, many elements make that particular moment unique. I wouldn't be that person now, of course not."

But does he regret the incident? At the after-party, faced with the Guernica cake, Shafrazi was momentarily taken aback, but quickly plunged in. "I'M SORRY," he told us he scrawled on the cake with red icing. "NOT!" —Andrew Goldstein

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http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/whos_afraid_of_jasper_johns 

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On February 28, 1974, a 30-year-old man walked into the third-floor galleries of the Museum of Modern Art and proceeded to deface Pablo Picasso’s Guernica by spray-painting KILL ALL LIES across it in red, foot-high letters. The New York Times account of the incident is illuminating, describing the man as “enraged,” and adding that he’d been living in “a $15-a-week room at the George Washington Hotel at Lexington Avenue and 23rd Street”—details usually associated with the aloof neighbor who becomes a presidential assassin. But the perpetrator wasn’t some lone gunman; although MoMA’s policy was (and still is) to never report acts of vandalism, lest they invite copycats, he’d arranged to have a friend alert the Associated Press of his undertaking. “Call the curator,” he reportedly shouted as guards grabbed him. “I am an artist.”

His name was Tony Shafrazi, and rather than being confined to a mental hospital for the rest of his days (the fate of many despoilers of masterpieces), he became a hugely successful art dealer, profiting from the careers of Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf. This ironic turn of events is the inspiration for the current show at Shafrazi’s capacious Chelsea gallery, even though it’s titled “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” Indeed, the arrest photo of the young Tony—worthy of Weegee, with its contrast of the former’s blank, baby-smooth countenance alongside the expressions of the police—graces the exhibition poster. But the show isn’t directly about Shafrazi, or Johns for that matter: It is a deeply cynical meditation on the deeply cynical nature of the contemporary art market.

Although nominally a group exhibit of works by artists oldish (Francis Bacon, Francis Picabia) and newish (Lily Van Der Stokker, Rirkrit Tiravanija), “Who’s Afraid?” is really a self-reflexive installation “conceived” by artist Urs Fischer and dealer Gavin Brown. It’s certainly in keeping with Fischer’s efforts to date, which have involved committing structural travesties to gallery spaces—blowing holes through walls or craters into floors—at no small expense. Here, the approach is far more decorous. The gallery has been sheathed in a trompe l’oeil replica of itself. The organizers had photos taken of the previous show—a gathering of gallery staples Haring, Basquiat, Scharf and Donald Baechler—including images of the space itself. Nothing, it seems, went undocumented: the ceiling, the doorjambs, the windows, even Shafrazi’s security guards. All were recorded and transformed into life-size photomurals standing in for “real life.”

The effect is uncanny: Entering the space, you’re absolutely convinced at first that the exhibit indulges in the curatorial heresy of hanging one work on top of another. Thus, a real Picabia graces the center of a fake Baechler, while works by Richard Prince and Sue Williams create an artful sandwich out of a faux Basquiat. An otherwise conventional survey is thus transformed into a sort of reenactment of Shafrazi’s jejune assault on Guernica. And much as Shafrazi sometimes spoke of “collaborating” with Picasso, Fischer, with Brown’s help, communes with art history to offer an homage from one bad-boy artist to another.

So, how does Johns fit in? In Three Flags (1958), he stacked successive canvases on top of each other. But more to the point, Johns based his entire practice on the trompe l’oeil style of late-19th-century American painters like William Harnett and John F. Peto. Embracing their ambiguity, if not their illusionism, Johns created a pictorial space with which he could smother the certainties of Abstract Expressionism like a thick wool blanket. With its sealed windows, harsh fluorescent lighting and plush showroom carpeting (courtesy of artist Rudolph Stingle), “Who’s Afraid” seems similarly airless, a corporate void for marketing trangressive acts and their attendant associations with youth. Visitors, in fact, are greeted by Rob Pruitt’s fountain cascading down Shafrazi’s long, cardiac-arresting front stairs, its waters spiked with 2,000 milligrams of Viagra. Like the show as a whole, Pruitt’s falls are a joke, albeit a bitter one with no resolution.

Shafrazi’s own motivations for his youthful indiscretion remain hazy. He called it a political protest, but by 1974, the expiration date for such activities had long past. His friends described him as having been temporarily deranged, yet he had the presence of mind, or calculation, to use spray paint that could be easily removed. His target was quickly restored, and eventually repatriated to Spain, where it’s on view at the Prado amidst stringent security. Shafrazi’s fate since then, and maybe even the art world’s, is a lot like Guernica’s: cleaned up and placed under bulletproof glass.