The Obsessions Collective show at the Cavin-Morris Gallery closed the 21st of last month with a brief performance by John Zorn on sax and Shanir Blumenkranz on upright bass. The Collection was founded in 2010 by the downtown avant-garde mogul largely of artists affiliated with his Tzadik record label and other projects, and was inspired by a show curated by Mr. Zorn at the MEM Gallery in 2009. The artists themselves come from a broad range of styles, methods, and media, and included:
Heung-Heung Chin, whose phantasmagoric prints resembled Takashi Murakami, minus the terrifying cuteness, but not necessarily minus the terrifying.
Madeline von Foerster created some fascinatingly textured pieces in oil and tempera, treating late-Gothic and early Renaissance motifs with a coyly surreal air.
Scott Irvine, a photographer using silver gelatin stock to capture breathtaking, darkly brooding, sometimes intentionally distorted, images.
Patrick Jacobs’ hole-in-the-wall dioramas were either masterpieces of perspective or of miniaturism.
Bea Kwan Lim, whose half-abstract, half-representative drawings activate both worlds in conflict and often-erotic communion.
Michael Macioce, photographer with a special eye; like Mr. Irvine he uses traditional silver gelatin techniques, yet expanded with layered and overlapped information through ingenious double exposure and other techniques of manipulation.
Kate Manheim, who operated in a variety of aesthetics, from deconstructing classic themes and works of Western art through collage, to layered patterns referencing a range of historical and non-Western forms, to obsessively busy abstract pattern works reminiscent of Adolf Wölfli or Marsden Hartley.
John McVicker, who displayed a fine sense of spatial composition in his surreal paintings of baubles and tubes.
Zena Pesta’s “I Found This in Liberace's closet!” was an ingenious bit to Duchamp-like wit, transforming a chintzy 1970’s seafood serving set into an act of blasphemy against taste and Neptune simply by calling it, “art.”
David Chaim Smith’s extraordinarily and carefully detailed pencil-on-paper drawings recalled Kabbalistic diagrams or grimoire frontispieces.
In the brief set performed by Mssrs. Zorn and Blumenkranz, the former was definitely the guest of honor, but was in many ways outshined from the background by the latter. Zorn supplied his usual virtuosic shtick, beginning with a melodic improvisation replete with the regular augmented 2nds of his Judaica proclivities before breaking into abstract riffs and finally wailing on his instrument, using his whole vocabulary of extended techniques and multiphonics, finally closing the circle some minutes later with a return to melodious modality. Mr. Blumenkranz accompanied Mr. Zorn with a simple, but endlessly malleable, pizzicato lick, to which he repeatedly returned for reference in the most subtle and inventive ways, as he journeyed himself to bowed and plucked abstract improvisation and extended techniques. Displaying incredible sensitivity, intelligence, and responsiveness in his playing, not only supported his more assertive and audacious partner, but provided the commentary and dialogue that gave the duet its emotional and intellectual meaning and resonance.
[Disclosure: this article has been corrected to more properly take into account the artists' self-descriptions]
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