Gallery Hop: Guitarist Nick Zinner's Photos at Fuse

It’s the dog days of summer. This is when most of the galleries close up and prepare for the fall’s splash of shows. Even finding exhibits that last through September is harder than normal. This dilemma led me to explore other neighborhoods.

There is nothing like the East Village to get me going. Sometimes, it’s such a cliché, that it’s beyond cliché. For example: Rock Star Art. A while back when I wrote about David Byrne’s “Playing the Building” installation, I found a quote where Byrne said how he avoided linking his musical career in any way to his art for years. Even though Byrne has been a visual artist since the ’70s, for the first twentysome years of his art career, he deliberately kept the two separate. He said that he wanted to avoid the “Rock Star Artist” tag; where a Rock Star dabbles in the art world and garners attention solely because of his/her popularity.

It’s hard to be fair to genuine Rock Star Art, but I’ll try to be fair to Nick Zinner and his current exhibit, [It's OK, Don't Look at the Road], at Fuse Gallery since, beneath all of these snapshots, I do believe there is sincerity. Nick Zinner is, of course, the [guitar player for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs](http://nypress.com/21/35/news&columns/feature.cfm). Nick does have a background in photography. He studied it at Bard College and has done national and international exhibitions and has also published three books of photos.

Nonetheless, the somewhat self congratulatory nature of his press release was a little bit of a contradiction to what was being shown. It states: “Documenting his experience as a musician in a successful band, Nick Zinner is able to reveal moments detached from context and free of rock ’n’ rolllcliché. His images reflect modest and sincere vignettes of life on and off the road. In his work, stark realism unfolds into a contemplative snapshot.” This kind of verbiage didn’t exactly enhance my experience.

This exhibition could have been great for CD artwork, but by raising the bar so high with his press release, one wonders why so many crowd shots of adoring fans were included. Unlike the stated premise, most of these images make it impossible to forget that you are watching a guitar player taking pictures on the road. These are not images that are “detached from context and free of rock ’n’ role cliché”. For example “Pill”, which is a shot of a young woman who is looking pretty ‘rock and roll’ with her wide open mouth (in which sits a big pill). It’s not that it’s poor quality, but there is no sense of transcendence or contemplation.

There is one exception: “Paper” is an artful exposition of confetti that takes on an element of abstract expressionism. The way that the picture gradually and logically makes the transition into darkness shows that there is real talent at work here. More shots like this, where it did live up to the hype, would have been welcomed. Maybe it’s a hint at a developing direction. Rock on, Nick Zinner.