The new Parrish Art Museum under construction

Earlier this month, the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton raised $675,000 at its glitzy annual fund-raising gala—the last to take place in its present building. Meanwhile, a few miles away, in Water Mill, the skeleton of the Parrish’s new home, an elegant, barnlike building designed by Swiss starchitects Herzog & de Meuron that’s as long as a city block, has begun to rise by the side of Montauk Highway, next to Duck Walk Vineyards. Days before the Parrish’s gala, the village of Southampton presented to the public for the first time its future plans for an arts center in the Parrish’s present, soon to be former, building on Jobs Lane.

On the afternoon of the gala, Parrish director Terrie Sultan took The Observer on a tour of the museum’s vault, where its collection of over 2,600 artworks is housed. She rolled back floor-to-ceiling racks to reveal paintings by William Merritt Chase, Willem de Kooning and realist Fairfield Porter, of whom she says the museum has the largest collection in the country. (When Porter died in 1975, his widow donated the contents of his studio to the Parrish.) In the new building, set to open next summer, 7,500 of the 12,300 square feet of exhibition space will be dedicated to shows from this permanent collection.

While it’s been scaled back from the Parrish’s original ambitions—an $80 million project by Herzog & de Meuron that would have mimicked the look of artist residences—the new building, a financially more manageable project that was conceived during the recession in 2009, is widely admired. (It’s still nearly double the size of the current building, and its $26.2 million price is 80 percent paid for, with construction proceeding on schedule.) With its capacity for showcasing the permanent collection, it is also meant to inspire growth in the collection: “It’s very hard to solicit works from collectors if you can’t demonstrate that they will be on view,” Ms. Sultan said, adding that “there’s a wish list.” And so far, it seems to be working. In the vault, Ms. Sultan pointed to a recent acquisition—one of Ross Bleckner’s “Architecture of the Sky” paintings still in the bubble wrap in which it was shipped. It’s the first of that series to enter a public institution (Mr. Bleckner had been saving the piece for himself, but changed his mind). Nearby were some Porter paintings that came as gifts. Ms. Sultan also mentioned a recent gift of a Keith Sonnier sculpture.

Museum supporters are eager to see that permanent collection go on regular view. A recent addition to the board of trustees—he joined in December 2009—Manhattan-based lawyer Peter Haveles characterizes himself as “a modest collector”; his children benefited from summer art-education programs at the Parrish. He said he’s excited to see the museum “operate on all of its cylinders” by doing temporary exhibitions and permanent collection shows at the same time; up to now, it’s been either/or. He described his recent visit to the vault with Ms. Sultan as being “like a 6-year-old in a candy store,” and says the typical patron of the Parrish will be excited about seeing the rotating exhibition of Fairfield Porters.

But it’s not just the permanent collection that will be on view once the new building is completed.

“If you’re asking, are we going to be organizing and presenting world-class exhibitions that people will come from all over the world to see, the answer is yes,” Ms. Sultan told The Observer, standing in the museum’s current exhibition of work by Dorothea Rockburne. She added that the museum will be “engaging in an international dialogue on all levels.” She said it’s too early to release information about the opening exhibition, but hinted that it will be of a contemporary artist who has a connection to the East End, and that it will be “the kind of thing where people say, ‘Of course! And why didn’t we think of that?’”

Last September, the museum added a trustee—one of six new board members to join since December 2009—who seemed particularly interested in world-class exhibitions and international dialogue. Adam Sender, who runs the hedge fund Exis Capital Management, has been summering in Sag Harbor, with his family, for the past 15 years. Two weeks before the Parrish gala, he hosted a cocktail party for the museum at his home. Ms. Sultan and Art in America magazine editor Lindsay Pollock, as well as local artists like Michael Halsband and Matthew Satz, toured the spacious house and landscaped grounds, gazing at works by international avant-garde stars, the kinds of pieces you are likely to come across at Art Basel or the Venice Biennale. Mr. Sender is anything but a modest collector. A large white abstract Sol Lewitt sculpture sat on the manicured lawn; a huge Urs Fischer sculpture of a cigarette lighter dominated the living room; across from it hung a giant Damien Hirst butterfly painting; an entire gallery space devoted to pieces made from panty hose and cigarettes by Sarah Lucas was next to the stairwell; light-box photographs by Jeff Wall lit up the dining room; a bright yellow Bruce Nauman neon light tube piece that spells out “Run from fear fun from rear” illuminated an upstairs hallway; there were works by up-and-coming talents like Brendan Fowler, Elad Lassry and Matt Chambers. Mr. Sender employs a personal curator and regularly loans his artworks for exhibitions around the world.

In other words: Fairfield Porter this was not. Alice Aycock, an artist who is known for her earthwork-style sculptures, and who will have a major exhibition of her drawings at the Parrish in 2013, was among the guests at Mr. Sender’s party. “My jaw dropped,” Ms. Aycock told The Observer a week later, describing her reaction to the house, grounds and collection. “I live within walking distance and I had no idea this was there.”

She added, “If people like Adam Sender will get behind the Parrish, then the museum will be cooking with gas.”

“With a building like that, they have the opportunity to do some exciting shows,” said Mr. Sender, referring to the new Herzog & de Meuron structure. He put aside plans to open a private exhibition space for his collection in a disused church in Sag Harbor, joining the Parrish board instead. “Exciting to me means contemporary.”

Mr. Haveles characterized the Parrish’s board, a mixture of full- and part-time residents, as diverse and engaged, but not meddlesome. On the board level, he said, the museum is discussed not as one with aspirations to be a global or national institution, but rather as an important regional one, one that reflects the art of the region and serves the region’s needs, and that will be attractive to people visiting from other parts of the East End, and also to visitors from Manhattan.

Ms. Sultan put the emphasis on the artistic legacy of the East End—ranging from Childe Hassam to Jackson Pollock to Roy Lichtenstein to Chuck Close.  “We are very proud to be a museum in this region,” she said. “It’s one of the only regions like this in the country where the level of contribution from the artists who have an association with this area is as high as it is.”

If the word “regional” comes up often in discussions of the new Parrish, “local” and “pedestrian-oriented” are more likely to be used in descriptions of the village’s plans for its own $20 million project: a hybrid arts complex at the site the Parrish is leaving.

On July 7, the village of Southampton held the first public presentation of plans—four different ones were presented—for the Southampton Center for the Arts. Siamak Samii, chair of the village’s planning commission, told The Observer that part of a master plan for the center of the village is the creation of an arts district, of which the old Parrish site will serve as anchor. It will incorporate visual and performing arts as well as education, and parts of it will be accessible around the clock; the center will be aimed at both summer and year-round residents. (The village’s full time population is 3,000-4,000; in summer it spikes to around 12,000.)

One object of the project, Mr. Samii said, is to “bring residential living into the heart of the village.” In neighboring villages like East Hampton, he said, “commerce and retail” have been the engines of growth. “We want culture to be the engine of growth.”

The arts complex will be fueled by partnerships with cultural institutions, such as museums and theater groups, and educational institutions outside the village that will use the facility as an extension. He said the village has so far reached out to 15 institutions, including the Lincoln Center Film Festival, and responses have been positive.

The Parrish’s lease is up in summer 2012; it plans to have next summer’s gala in its completed building, in Water Mill. Between now and that time, Mr. Samii said, the village will set up boards, bring in a director and fund-raise, with the aim of breaking ground in the next two to three years. Manhattan-based arts consultancy Webb Management Services has put the three-year project, which will create 40,000 square feet of facilities at around $20 million, once the operational costs are factored in.

The village does not see its arts complex competing with the Parrish, but rather complementing it—an “amicable relationship” that, as Mr. Samii described it, could even include the Parrish’s doing loan shows there.

“One of the main elements is to engage some of the local artists even more,” said Mr. Samii. “Local artists who don’t feel they are on the radar of the Parrish. And there are a lot of them.” He added that the facility would ideally be a place “where there would be more interaction between the community and its artists.” It is envisioned as “a place of gathering, a piazza for the center of the village.”

The Parrish, as he put it, “is extending itself to a more international high-profile, high-energy art scene. But we think that should not be at the expense of ignoring the local community.”

sdouglas@observer.com

Ask Salvatore Scarpitta to make a single wooden ski and paint it red. Lean it carefully by the door, pointing up, toward the top floor, where the furniture has been turned to sculpture. There's Sarah Lucas' Cigarette Tits [Idealized Smoker's Chest III], a schoolroom chair of plywood and steel wearing a bra filled with globular breasts made of cigarettes, and a naked mattress, by Pier Paolo Calzolari, from which grows a single rose. There's also sculpture made in the appearance of furniture: David Baskin's Figure 74 (chair), a dusty white armchair made of gypsum polymer, and Rachel Whiteread's IN OUT-II, an equally white door leaning against a wall. Robert Gober's Untitled, which looks like the squashed, empty box for a little drugstore apple pie, is actually made of painted copper; Maurizio Cattelan's Cheap to Feed, apparently a little white terrier curled up asleep on another armchair, really is a dog--just not one that will ever wake up.

But a multipaneled mirror made by Claudia Wieser is harder to place--it could almost be used as a mirror. (Ms. Wieser also covered one corner with almost-wallpaper made from a beautiful series of patterns xeroxed in black and white onto brown paper.) Friedrich Kunath's 54 framed photos of the backs of people's heads arranged on a black lacquered table shaped like a piano probably should have used a real piano, whether in this context or not. But is Donald Moffett's framed floral silverprint about the practice of hanging art on the wall, or is it just art that's been hung on the wall?

This last unsettled categorical flirtation--art being used to represent art--continues with Shio Kusaka's elegant ceramics, white with blue dots, lining a mantelpiece, with Martin Honert's photo lightbox Schneeman (Snowman), and especially in the ground-floor study, with Jessica Jackson Hutchins' Self-titled #2, a sparse collage on a found framed mirror. It's displayed here leaning against a larger framed mirror built into the wall, so that the comment, whatever it is, is more about the piece than in it.

This study is, nevertheless, where art and architecture make their peace, in theater. A scaly gray desk by Jay Heikes, with a frightening wrought-iron throne and a working desk clock that flips through out-of-sequence roman numerals, sits with its back to the window. A black rubber candle by Fischli & Weiss, Lucy Skaer's long, black, heavily simple monoprint Mahogany Cinema, and Urs Fischer's nightmarish, imperfectly separated Siamese chairs (Stühle) complete the sense that you've walked into a set. Down the hall is a black mouse made of polyester resin by Katharina Fritsch. Jonas Wood's colorful painting of a potted plant and Ms. Hutchins' mirror add depth without dispersing the fog. Is this the very heart of the art world? A petrified desk in a beautiful townhouse on East 64th Street? Mr. Heikes' piece is called Private Hell.

Once someone began making high-end, ultra-realistic latex sex dolls, it was inevitable that someone else would start taking art photos of them. (Philip Dick probably predicted it.) And Laurie Simmons, already well known for shooting dolls and dummies and other frozen, not quite human figures, is the woman for the job. So she ordered herself a pretty, plastic, life-size, 60-pound, fully bendable, fully functional--and easily cleaned--new model direct from Japan, and some of the resulting pictures, numbered according to the day of the doll's tenure as Ms. Simmons' model, are on display at Salon 94.

They're large, deft, in color, pretty and conventional, alluring without being explicitly sexual. (The doll is naked in one photo, but also playing with a puppy. Mostly she jumps over walls and stares at jewelry and into mirrors.) In other words, the photographs could almost have been shot for a catalog, and so what you make of the project must depend heavily on how you feel about the dolls themselves. Concerned at how much energy we spend trying to simulate humanity? Undecided about whether photographs of dolls get at the central falsity of art, or illuminate, by contrast, the ineffability of real life? Lonely? Sad? Amused? The fact is that these very expensive dolls exist only because people buy them--and not for art's sake--and it would be hard for any photograph to be quite as strange as that.

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Fertig's paintings you can't pass without a second glance. His pictures of battleships with their flags unfurled, soldiers on horseback, men in rowboats heading ashore and Captain Marbot, an officer in Napoleon's army, are odd and alluring, just short of inexplicable. Mr. Fertig's investment in his subject is never in doubt-the paintings don't lack for a pictorial rationale-yet its import remains elusive all the same.

Were he any more compulsive, Mr. Fertig would be easier to peg as an out-and-out nut, someone we can all get a handle on. As it is, he stands at a sober remove from the tumult of history. During the course of over 60 small panels, Mr. Fertig transforms the Napoleonic Wars in to a stylishly deadpan comedy of manners. There's something caustic about Mr. Fertig's enterprise, though what that causticity portends I wouldn't hazard to guess.

Mr. Fertig frustrates ready comprehension-not an endearing trait, to be sure, yet it can make for compelling art. So, too, can a paint-handler of extraordinary, if somewhat conflicted, gifts. A strange mix of intuition and affectation, of unrelenting rigor and impatient caprice, Mr. Fertig can do anything with oils. Whether smearing, splotching or finger-painting, he creates seductive, abrupt and, at times, harsh passagesofatmosphere,lightand space. Imagine an information-age Edouard Vuillard or a Gerhard Richter withheartand you'll have some idea of the puzzling figure cut by Mr. Fertig. Would that he were capable of ingraining a single image with the authority brought to bear on an entire run of pictures. Once that happens, watch out. In the meantime, watch Mr. Fertig go and marvel at the peculiarities of one man's vision.

David Fertig: Paintings is at JG/Contemporary, 1014 Madison Avenue, until March 5.

Fleeting Fashion

Consider these titles: Man Versus Human Nature, Time to Plant Fears, God Is Dad, Jesus Was Married. Note how each phrase expresses contempt for the big idea it poaches upon. Take a look at the sculptures the titles belong to: Ramshackle assemblages cobbled together from wire hangers, concrete blocks, light bulbs and (just so you know sex is in the mix) panty hose, often tautly stretched.

Read the press release and learn that the work explores "rickety concepts of domesticity and religion" and "assumed linguistic and gender codes." Ponder how inflated jargon is deployed as cover for a paucity of artistic invention. Realize that the artist, Sarah Lucas, gained notoriety during the 1990's as a Y.B.A. (Young British Artist), one of several savvy careerists responsible for turning Dadaism into the defining style of our corporate age. Wonder what happens when a Y.B.A. is no longer Y or, rather, H (hot). Conclude, finally, that the Barbara Gladstone Gallery will come full circle when it dumps Ms. Lucas for the next big and fleeting thing.

Sarah Lucas: God Is Dad is at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, until March 14.

Small Charms

If it's ambition-free art you crave, the paintings of Sue Chenoweth, the subject of an exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation, will float your boat. That's not an entirely qualitative distinction: There's something to be said for an art of small moments. Ms. Chenoweth's layered compendiums of rude doodles, collaged cutouts and arrant splatters of acrylic give body to private, all but inarticulate reveries. The images-that is, when they haven't been obscured by Ms. Chenoweth's sanded and scuffed surfaces-can be childlike (women sticking out their tongues), schematic (shambling, fantastic architecture), decorative (geometric cutouts) or weirdly reverent (cartoonish scenes of material and sexual excess hinting at a Bible-thumping righteousness).

None of it adds up to much, which may be the point. Trading in half-rememberedsensations,Ms. Chenoweth errs on the side of the nebulous. The three best pieces, seen on the east wall of the gallery, bring some measure of clarity and structure to an overabundance of imagery, ambiguity and pictorial incident. Unfortunately, they hang adjacent to The Rich Man (2005), a lumpish wall painting crafted from Wikki Stix, a waxy, thread-like and altogether unappealing substance. Painters who capitulate to the installation aesthetic only underscore the belief that painting, somehow, isn't enough. I don't think that was Ms. Chenoweth's intention, yet it's enough to prompt qualms about the work's unkempt charms.

Sue Chenoweth is at the CUE Art Foundation, 511 West 25th Street, until March 12.