Jennifer Dalton's show at the FLAG Art Foundation Reviewed in today's New York Times

Ken Johnson has reviewed Jennifer Dalton's exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation in today's New York Times. The exhibition runs through September 10th. Don't miss it!

Jennifer Dalton: Making Sense
By KEN JOHNSON
Published: August 13, 2010

FLAG Art Foundation
545 West 25th Street
Chelsea
Through Sept. 10

Jennifer Dalton mines data about various sorts of art-world behavior and presents her findings in low-tech, handmade forms. (See her Web site, jenniferdalton.com.) “What Does an Artist Look Like? (Every Photograph of an Artist to Appear in the New Yorker, 1999 & 2009)” presents a copy of just what its self-explanatory title says. The array of portraits includes not only visual artists like Damien Hirst and Cindy Sherman, but also actors, writers and other creative types. Each is ranked on a scale from genius to pinup.

Insiders will be particularly amused by “What Are We Not Shutting Up About?,” a 15-foot-wide chart that graphically represents statistical information gleaned from five months’ worth of Facebook conversations between the art critic Jerry Saltz and his online friends. The chart lists all of Mr. Saltz’s status updates, and colored bars of different heights show the number of responses to each. One notable result Ms. Dalton turns up — represented in pie-chart form — is that 18.5 percent of all responses were generated by just 5 people, with 930 people accounting for the rest.

Ms. Dalton’s investigations might seem inconsequential, a kind of gossip-mongering journalism; or she might be teasing the art world for its solipsism. Either way, she is serious about being systematically unserious. Her irreverence is infectious and thought-provoking.

Also on view at the FLAG Foundation are Robert Lazzarini’s magical-realist sculptures of handguns, knives and brass knuckles, distorted so they seem to exist in some sort of warped virtual space; and, by Noriko Ambe, art books that have been intricately cut into ingenious sculptural forms. KEN JOHNSON

Here are some other installation views of Jennifer's show:

Jennifer Dalton, "Making Sense," installation view.


Jennifer Dalton, What Does an Artist Look Like? (Every Photograph of an Artist to Appear in the New Yorker, 1999 & 2009), installation view.

Jennifer Dalton, What Does an Artist Look Like? (Every Photograph of an Artist to Appear in the New Yorker, 1999 & 2009), installation view (detail of 2009).

Image at top: Jennifer Dalton’s “What Are We Not Shutting Up About?” graphs discussions on the art critic Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page. Photograph by Genevieve Hanson.