Two New Chelsea Art Institutions

Most folks would say that there has been no worse time than the present to open a museum of art in New York. With tourism down, the economy on a bumpy ride to slumpland, a generalized climate of pessimism and growing talk of war, several of New York's major arts institutions have scaled back their operations dramatically. Some, like the Guggenheim Museum, have done so to stave off impending disaster. Others are busy slashing budgets and cutting costs in preparation for even worse times to come. Yet the sun never goes down on optimists, even in New York, a town as used to puncturing the illusions of wide-eyed newcomers as was Ebenezer Scrooge. Two weeks ago, for example, two new arts institutions opened their doors in Chelsea. The Bohen Foundation, known in art circles for its significant largesse, inaugurated its flashy new space on W. 13th St., smack in the middle of the once roughneck, now chichi meatpacking district. The second space, an institution somewhat deceptively called the Chelsea Art Museum, opened its doors to the public in slightly more central real estate: 22nd St. and 11th Ave., next door to the Dia Art Foundation?until recently the only art institution to leaven the neighborhood's preponderance of commercial galleries with some 40,000 square feet of arts philanthropy.

Though these two new arts institutions have been in existence in one form or another for years (the Bohen Foundation for nearly 18, and the Chelsea Art Museum in kernel form as the Miotte Foundation for three), mid-November 2002 was selected, despite a raft of unfavorable portents, as the launching date for their costly physical vessels. Seemingly untroubled by the storm clouds gathering on the horizon, they're now off on their inaugural voyages, each of them in search of a new world yet lugging enough anchor to force a break in the current sufficient to assert their own peculiar identities.

And this is where the similarities stop. There could hardly be two more different arts projects dreamed up for a single New York neighborhood in the same decade. The arts equivalent of opening a branch of Junior's next door to a Keith McNally restaurant, the Bohen and the Chelsea Art Museum meet at one of those blessed and underpraised intersections of New York culture where the up-to-the-minute and the anachronism greet, acknowledge each other and, let's hope, thrive.

The Bohen, a foundation that specializes in commissioning projects by young artists that it later donates to institutions like the Guggenheim (the museum received a gift of some 275 works last year), hired the recycling-artists-cum-architectural firm of LOT-EK to design a flexible exhibition environment for their 15,000 square feet of raw warehouse space. The Bohen then tapped Tom Sachs, the 90s bad-boy artist responsible for last year's "Prada Death Camp" at the Jewish Museum, for its curtain-raising exhibition. The space, which consists of eight movable shipping-container sections on rails and a large grated floor section that opens up into a double-height space, squares firmly with the Bohen's mission as a purveyor of contemporary installations, film, video and new media work. Sachs' sprawling installation, which he has titled "Nutsy's" (rhymes with Nazis) with typically cliquish enigma, is a jokey, anal-retentive jumble of miniatures that despite their inventiveness and wide-ranging topicality have trouble transcending their own punch line.

A self-styled Holden Caufield of the contemporary art scene (he even includes a copy of Catcher in the Rye in the installation), Sachs follows firmly in the tradition of studiedly underachieving artists like Jason Rhoades and Mike Kelley, except that Sachs' underachievement lies not in his hostility toward craft but in the realm of ideas. Like LOT-EK, a wonderful recycler of other people's materials and theories (the loaded French term "bricolage" is incantatorily used by both the artist and the architects to refer to the fairly standard practice of do-it-yourself construction), Sachs turns everyday materials like foamcore and scavenged lumber into Warholian lampoons of designer labels like Chanel and Hermes.

"Nutsy's" includes a homemade racetrack that snakes around giant foamcore models of the Unité d'Habitation, Le Corbusier's famous utopian housing block in Marseille, a Barcelona chair, a McDonald's food cart, a ghetto, a pissoir, a 10,000 watt boombox and something called "a bong-hit station." Complete with instructional videos that document the making of "Nutsy's," Sachs' kid-clever, rollicking installation coheres finally into the kind of sense that bright, compulsive children make when asked why they chose to sacrifice their father's neckties for a brace of handpuppets. "Why did you do it, Johnny?" Simple: "Because I could." Hardly a good reason for making art, though, is it?

If the Bohen Foundation has committed itself to presenting hip art projects by fashionable artists like Sachs, then the Chelsea Art Museum's efforts hearken back to a simpler time when homeyness and experimentalism went hand in hand. "Confident," as they put it, "that the heart of cutting-edge art is adequately represented in New York," the museum's founders, Dr. Dorothea Kesser and the French tachiste Jean Miotte, have turned their attention to "midcareer artists and young national and international artists to whom New York audiences have not been previously exposed." Translation: the museum aims in part to become a home to forgotten traditions, largely ignored movements and artists who have mostly been overlooked.

Merely on the strength of its collection of art informel, the French and Continental counterpart to American abstract expressionism, the institution proves itself to be as far from the Chelsea mainstream as is the Museum of American Folk Art. Built in a former factory for Christmas ornaments that once belonged to Clement Clarke Moore, the author of "The Night Before Christmas" (will the holiday references never stop!), the three-story museum has been elegantly designed to house modest temporary exhibitions from "European and smaller American museums" if not necessarily to withstand the ambivalence of the advanced art set.

On view currently are a stodgy exhibition titled "Samadhi: The Contemplation of Space," whose concerns place us somewhere at the academic end of 1960s minimalism; a small if lively exhibition of crime photography curated by Gail Buckland; and selections from the museum's own permanent collection (which includes a few gems, like several Mimmo Rotellas and a single lovely, blocky canvas by the painter Jean Paul Riopelle). None of this is likely to quiet folks who suspect the museum's mission to present outdated art will extend to future exhibitions. But whatever one makes of the new museum's inaugural displays, one does have to grant that the directors have a point.

"Cutting-edge art," however that is defined, is represented almost to a fault in New York. Far from the classic era of 1970s alternative arts institutions (Exit Art, Artists Space, etc.), today's not-for-profit spaces and commercial galleries trip over one another to get to the next younger generation of artists. What is lacking at present is precisely a space for artists who did not make it through New York's art-world thresher the first time around. That, and added room for idiosyncratic exhibitions that give the art world exactly the opposite of what it says it wants: namely, a salutary dose of the unexpected in an imaginative package, free from fashionable hype, speculativeness and assorted backroom deals. That is, after all, what museums are supposed be all about. Aren't they?