NYPOST E-News
IT GIVES ONE PAWS
By JAMES GARDNER

May 6, 2002 -- FAR be it from me to make the obvious and entirely gratuitous point that Tillie is not the first and surely will not be the last bitch to get ahead in the highly competitive world of contemporary art. With a résumé most of the art world would kill for - 11 solo exhibitions in two years -Tillie, a 3-year-old Jack Russell terrier whose name is short for Tillamook Cheddar (an Oregon cheese she seems to like), now arrives in the prestigious National Arts Home Club at Gramercy Park with attitude to spare. Apparently, Tillie is prepared to do just about anything for a slice of cheddar. Not only does she obey the most whimsical promptings of her master/dealer, Bowman Hastie, a Brooklyn writer who organized her show. She is even willing to team up with a dozen other artists as she scratches and paws at the work they have laid out for her. Among them is Tom Sachs, who recently received 15 nanoseconds of fame for his Prada Death Camp piece at the Jewish Museum. It's nice to see him moving up in the art world. Some of these works are almost entirely by Tillie, like those in which Ryan MaGinness places a color transfer over a suede board Horoscope and allows Tillie to have at it.The result, a frenzied maze of red, white and blue scribblings, betrays the influence of Cy Twombley in the '60s (his best Lifestyle period), and of four or five severely psychotic outsider artists. Other works reveal Tillie to be a cunning performance artist.NYC "I Love Tillie and Tillie Likes Me," in collaboration with Andrew Kromelow, is a slyly post-modern appropriation of a famous performance piece by Josef Beuys from the early '80s. In that earlier work, the artist was beset by an angry dog. Here, it is the artist herself, Tillie, who assails the human being. As a result of the National Arts Club's exhibition, I confess that I have had to rethink two of my most basic assumptions about art and life: first, the notion that animals cannot have an aesthetic sense; second, the core conviction that no sentient entity could possibly paint anything worse than what Julian Schnabel recently showed at Sports the Gagosian Gallery. On both accounts, I stand corrected.

COLLABORATIONS At the National Arts Club,
15 Grammercy Park, (212) 475-3424.