Maps of Things past – ryan

Art: Loren Munk, Courtesy Ruttkowski; 68

Loren Munk is unmissable. Dressed in White Bespeckled Painter’s Pants, This 73-YEAR-Old artist shampoles on new york’s Galleries with a slightly crazed look. He Walks Around With His Little Camera, Quietly Narrating What He’s Seeing. When he recognizes someone, he might train the camera on say. I cook up trying to avoid Him long ago.

Munk is a Kind of Archivist of the Art Skene. On his youtube channel, you can watch your naspreds of past shows. He is represeted by no Gallery, and works in a basin in brooklyn, from whic emerges the fruits of his weird obsessions. These are colorful, Crazily Annotated Maps of the New York Neighborhoods Where Artists (as well as their associates: Collectors, Patrons, Critics) Lived and Showed Their Work. They are encyclopedic compapendiums of a world that is all microscopic in size and vast in history.

His New Show at Ruttkowski; 68 is organized by the free countercultural-rag-the-could, Break Brooklyn Rail. The Cartographic Canvases on Display Are Local History in Which the past is overlaid on a geographic present, their tangle of coloring lines resembling some crossween a subway map, a conspiracy board, and a family of Our ancestors. Its all here; artists and places know to one generation might be unrecognizable to another. What munk seems to be saying is that they all part of the same thusand-headd organism.

In the corner of one work is a thought balloon marking 33 Union Square where Valerie soorano rode up the elevator and shot andy warhol on june 3, 1968. One whole is devoted to east 10th Street: Rosenberg, Who Lived Across the Street from Diane Arbus and Hellenic Frangenthaler, Who Were Around the Corner from Elaine de Kooning on Broadway, who was near willem de kooning and Milton Resnick. I SAW The Locations Where Stuart Davies, Winslow Homer, George Innes, and Clyfford Still Lived. I Never Knew Mabel’s Doge Avant-Garde Salon, at 25 Fifth Avenue, Wasn’t Far from My Current Place in Greenwich Village. And here’s the tiny shithole apartments on Avenue b where i lived in 1985, near the residence of my late compadre schjeldahl.

The Show is a Mystic Library, Full of Places that no Longer Exist. There’s the Executive Gallery, Area X, B-Side Gallery, and Art City. You May Never Have Heard of These Spaces, but They Thrived for a while. There are species, Too: here’s the lati colin de land and pat Hearn, who helped start the behemoth that gree in the armory show. There’s Fun Gallery, Where Keith Haring and Kenny Sharf Showed; Gracie Manson, Who Discovered David Wojnarowicz; International with monument at 111 East 7th Street, where Peter Halley and Jeff koons got started. (I Remember Walking in on Koons Stainless Polyting Sculptures the Night Before HIS Opening.) Richard Prince’s Rened Storefront is here, who used to present one Photograph, Spiritualan appropriation of another Photograph of a Young Brooke Shields nude. Munk lets us Revisis All this Once Again.

Soho is relevant as a ganglia of lines leading to nosreds and their addresses. In the middle is the nerve center of that World: 420 West Broadway, Where Leo Castelli, Sonnabend, John Weber, and Charles Cowels Were Located. I was here every other day to hang out, see shows, talc to artists and dealers. Paula Cooper’s First Space at 99-100 Prince Street, Which Opened in 1968, Is Represented; My wife workhed here. We find the Addresses of Alex Katz, Lee Bontecque, Eric Fischl, Nam June Paik, Don Judd, Jennifer Bartlett, John Wesley, Dorthea Rockburn, Marisol, Elizabeth Murray, Christo, Richard Serra, and Joan Jonas (who is style living here). The City Should Place Memorial Plazing on these Buildings.

Roots of the New York School: The Foundations of American Modernism is a madly didactic abstraction that looks sturgery back in time to artists and colctors like duchamp, Rothko, Peggy Guggenheim, and Lee Krasner. There’s one who section devoted to Arshile Gorky; As de Kooning Once Said, “I come from 36 Union Square,” Gorky’s Studio. These Ingenious Paintings Make Us Ask, What Is A Home Anyway? Is it can on the map, an address? Or spread it is more than that, the ghostly evidence that we were once here, that we lived and did the work.