Cerealart’s stylish new all-white digs on Third Street
Cerealart, the little business that makes product from art, may enlarge its scope to include art exhibits curated with some international flair, now that the business has moved its digs to North Third Street between Cafe Ole and Indigo. For a start, proprietor Larry Mangel said he was asking curators like Anna-Catharina Gebbers, from Germany, and Sylvia Chivaratanond, whose curatorial background includes the 2003 Venice Biennale and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
The exhibit space would be the back room of the new location. Mangel, who has made a business of manufacturing relatively affordable multiples for art-world biggies like Nara, Maurizio Cattelan and Allan McCollum, is a genial guy who often uses local talent to help create the products.
Parking Lotus, by Yoshua Okun, 6 inches high, sculpted for Cerealart by Chris Smith
When I stopped in, I saw a piece I’d never seen before, Parking Lotus, a magnetic figure based on a parking attendant in a Yoshua Okun installation that had been in Cattelan’s The Wrong Gallery. (See post here for a mini-review on Okun at the New Museum–oy, I misspelled his name there). The Cerealart multiple, which is 6 inches high, was sculpted by local artist Chris Smith. The little magnet embedded in the back allows the figure to float behind the door of the Wrong Gallery multiple, another Cereal Arts product (are you still with me here? …I’m losing it myself; the layers of reality and tongue-in-cheekness are starting to overwhelm).
Mangel said he was taken aback when Cattelan assumed Cerealart would make a full line of objects to install in the Cerealart version of the Wrong Gallery, based on all the installations that had shown in the real-world Wrong Gallery. The Full Monty would cost big bucks, however, and Mangel said he couldn’t do it, at least for now.
Personally, I’d love Parking Lotus for my refrigerator, so now that I’m too compromised to review art dispassionately (see post and comments), if any of you want to buy this for me, go right ahead. I’ll give you a great review. Just kidding (about the review, that is).
