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800 Words With Alexandre Singh
I first met Alexandre Singh while working as The Unreliable Tour Guide at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Friends suggested I stay in the converted factory in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he lives and works. A vast single-story unit on an industrial estate, the place was full of Italian artists, gutted ice cream vans, and autonomous half-timbered living spaces—like an Elizabethan village rebuilt inside Cinecittà. At its calm centre, in front of a crackling log fire, sat Alex himself, a quiet, self-possessed young Englishman of Indian extraction. His art, I later discovered, involved slideshows, lectures, and talks, all delivered in a quiet, aristocratic burr. The mixture of restraint, precision, exuberance and playfulness reminded me of Peter Greenaway's Drowning by Numbers, or the quietly delirious filmed tours of Patrick Keiller, in which curious historical details are read over images of traffic systems and warehouses.Read More
600 Words With Michael Portnoy
In 2000 I was in a Chelsea gallery recording people singing, when an otherwise rather quiet man opened his throat and gave a gorgeous impression of Klaus Nomi doing madrigal. Michael Portnoy was then a trained dancer curating his first art show at White Box. That same quiet man had in 1998 jumped onstage to flail shirtless alongside Bob Dylan, the words "SOY BOMB" mysteriously scrawled on his chest. Appearing more recently as a tassel-fringed croupier or a "director of behavior" who addresses his audience with conversational instructions, Portnoy has become one of the most interesting performance artists anywhere. I met him in Berlin, where he's been holidaying and developing ideas for "temporary fascist nightclubs."Read More
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Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, a city with one museum and one major gallery, Nick Van Woert's mixed-media practice evolved from doodles, dra
