If you need a reminder why you moved to New York, Club Rhubarb promises the affirmation you seek. The nomadic art project from artist-turned-curator Tony Cox echoes the transgressive and make-do attitude of a downtown before soaring rents and invasive chain stores.
After two prior locations – Cox’s own Chinatown walk-up and a Dimes Square townhouse – Club Rhubarb now calls an assuming two-floor house right across from the New Museum home. The blink-and-you-miss it entrance on the edge of Prince Street opens up to a wonderland that is currently inside the gnarly imagination of artist Brock Enright who has been quietly producing genre-pushing and materially driven mixed-media artworks for 30 years. The 50-year-old’s attention-demanding and unapologetically diaristic artworks in the exhibition ‘I am so pretty’ possess memory-laden found objects and punchy short video work – and they do justice to Cox’s experimental vision.
The takeover starts immediately at the house’s mudroom, up a staircase and into the living room, with splashy-coloured paintings built with wood, acrylic and foam as well as an array of found objects, often with hints at an early MTV-era childhood in American suburbs. Bits of toys, Salvation Army pins, Polaroids and hoses punctured with tiny pins contain a neat obsessiveness, with a precision in their abruptness. Recalling German Conceptualist Rosemarie Trockel in their balancing of an internalised geometry and textured abstraction, the paintings expand from the moodily lit staircase into the bright and spacious living room, which overlooks the New Museum’s own soaring staircase.
Cox, who met Enright around three decades ago, equates his friend’s art to weather. He tells Wallpaper* that ‘there have been so many weather conditions and changes that there is enough work to put in different spaces’. And the curator, who started out as a skater in the 1990s before transitioning to an art practice, fills the space to the brim with Enright’s generous output, mainly created between 2009 and the present. Cox even sees a parallel between his own art practice and Enright’s, which perhaps is most evident on the second floor’s showstopper installation of electronic guitars. In the darkened room, meant to evoke the artist’s own basement in his upstate New York home, a red light plays across the silhouettes of guitars and a shrine with a witch’s hat. A booming audio loop of Enright’s own tunes emanates from the guitars that he physically altered to transmit the unexpected sounds.
One of the inviting doors at the ensuing narrow hallway opens up to the show’s most intimate and grotesque offering: a darkened bathroom where visitors, perched on a bench in the shower, can watch videos streaming on a flat screen mounted above the bathtub. Light Drawing You (2014-25) – an intensely scratched mirror painting lit to a dramatic effect with LED lights – stands above the sink where the cabinet for toiletries would otherwise be hung. Cox says it was Enright’s idea to exhibit his short films from the 2000s inside the bathroom, which has led to this capsule installation that the curator has called BBC Brocks Bijou Cinema in an homage to the eponymous now bygone East Village movie theatre and cruising spot.
The darkened bathroom’s midnight soirée aura suits the videos’ gore content, which chronicles Enright’s defunct business of abducting volunteering clients to experience the thrill of being kidnapped. The venture, which had the artist appear in Rolling Stone and TV shows such as The View and Good Morning America, today feels like an odd alchemy of Saw movie franchise and reality shows in which the extreme is tested with monetary gain as well as loss of self-awareness.
The show’s finale brings back the daylight at the top floor’s main room above the hectic foot traffic of the Bowery which saw countless downtown fixtures stomp its sidewalks before the new Millenium brought waves of change. Here, a generous layout of intricately composed sculptures, which Cox overall calls the Wailing Witches Receiver Arena, evokes the feeling of walking into a secret ritual. Mostly suspended from the ceiling, these gentle sculptures beg for close inspection to reveal the obsessive core of Enright’s drive for embodying any feeling, even when this means an awkwardly fleeting sense of nostalgia. Both alien and disarmingly familiar, the compositions of finds – used scrunchies, bottle corks, straws, umbrellas and toys – resemble magic wands and dreamcatchers. They both animate humour and sternness. As witnesses to the artist’s last three decades of practice, they encapsulate a material force to remember, but they also release a generosity to belong to anybody with a suggestion of possibility and refusal of reason.
Expect a true downtown full circle moment when visiting Club Rhubarb, especially after a visit to the New Museum, which started out 50 years ago displaying similarly experimental work. Cox admits the thrill he finds in organising shows in lived spaces, especially with artworks that hold alluring oddities like Enright’s. ‘I spend so much time in these spaces before I install the shows,’ Cox says and adds, ‘It all started with understanding the uniqueness of seeing art with real things around them.’
‘I Am So Pretty’ is available to visit through an online booking.
