Fragonard's 'Girl Playing With a Dog and a Cat,' ca. 1775–90.

It's shaping up to be a very fine summer here in New York.

The Mayor's Office just reported that all eight of the city's free public beaches will open tomorrow, Sandy be damned, and Zach Feuer and Untitled are showing a  bounty of Jewish artists. 

Now White Columns comes bearing good news: writer and artist Rhonda Lieberman is organizing its summer show, and it is called "The Cat Show." It has work by more than 50 artists, and will offer the opportunity to adopt cats from the East Village's Social Tees Animal Rescue as part of a Cats-in-Residence program. (Which is great since I still feel stupid about not adopting one of Darren Bader's cat sculptures in his MoMA PS1 show.)

The show runs June 14–July 27, with the Cats-in-Residence program on June 14–15 and July 19–20. On those days 10 cats will "lounge around and run amok in a pussy playground designed by architects Gia Wolff and Freecell."

There are lots of great artists in this one, and lots of great puns in the press release, which follows below. A relevant Cory Arcangel cat piece concludes this post.

The Cat Show

Curated by Rhonda Lieberman

(Organized in partnership with the Social Tees Animal Rescue.)

June 14 – July 27, 2013

(Opening reception June 13, 6 – 8pm.)

Featuring 'The Cats-in-Residence Program' June 14/15 and July 19/20.

Participating artists/contributors include:

Michele Abeles, Rita Ackermann, Antonio Adams, Bill Adams, Laura Aldridge, Graham Anderson, Araki, Cory Arcangel, Michel Auder, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Matthew Barney, Will Benedict, Janet Burchill, Kathe Burkhart, Carter, Antoine Catala, Cole, David Colman, Lucky DeBellevue, Jake Ewert, Bella Foster, Magdalena Frimkess, Jeff Funnell, Rainer Ganahl, Paul Georges, Eric Ginsburg, Karin Gulbran, Tamar Halpern, June Hamper, Daniel Heidkamp, Robert Heinecken, John Hiltunen, Ann Cathrin November Hoibo, Jonathan Horowitz, Marc Hundley, Gary Indiana, Matt Keegan, Mike Kelley, Wayne Koestenbaum, Barbara Kruger, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Sadie Laska, Elad Lassry, Mark Leckey, Cary Leibowitz, Rhonda Lieberman, Cassandra MacLeod, Alissa McKendrick, Lucy McKenzie, Ryan McNamara, Siobhan Meow, Marilyn Minter, Dave Muller, Takeshi Murata, Eileen Neff, Laura Owens, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Prince, Rob Pruitt, Eileen Quinlan, Jennifer Rochlin, Sam Roeck, Ruth Root, Kay Rosen, Jason Rosenberg, Theo Rosenblum and Chelsea Seltzer, Gus Van Sant, Joe Scanlon, Steven Shearer, David Shrigley, Patti Smith, Frances Stark, Amy Taubin, Nicola Tyson, Andy Warhol, Jordan Wolfson, B. Wurtz, Rob Wynne, and architects Gia Wolff and Freecell (John Hartman and Lauren Crahan). (List in formation.)

............................................................................................

White Columns is proud to present ‘The Cat Show’ curated by writer and artist Rhonda Lieberman, and developed in partnership with the Social Tees Animal Rescue, who will offer cats for adoption during ‘The Cats-in-Residence Program' to be held in the gallery on June 14/15 and July 19/20.

CATS AND ART TOGETHER AT LAST

The Cat Show features adoptable purr-formers (a.k.a. cats).

“I Can Haz Art Show?”

Cats and their cartoonish antics rule today’s Internet. But in the real world, many are very unlucky, especially those that land in the city pound, which destroys a shocking number of healthy, frisky and ultra-adoptable cats simply because they have no more room. Rescue groups can only save a fraction of them. Better adoption outlets are needed - but they are a low priority for over-extended rescuers.

Art can help!

'The Cat Show' will celebrate cats of all shapes, sizes and subjectivities. The conceptual brainchild of writer, artist and curator Rhonda Lieberman, herself the custodian of (only!) two cats, this large, eclectic group show will include cat-alytic work by over 50 artists.

The centerpiece, 'The Cats-in-Residence Program,' will allow 10 cats from the Social Tees Animal Rescue in the East Village to lounge around and run amok in a pussy playground designed by architects Gia Wolff and Freecell (John Hartman and Lauren Crahan), and hopefully even find purr-manent homes at the two adoption events that open and close the show. Every rescue cat adopted allows another one to be pulled from the city’s Department of Animal Control.

Recast as art objects/subjects as well as purr-formance artists, the rescue cats in the show have been all been anointed with art purr-sonas. “Meowrina Abramovic will be present,” says Lieberman. “as well as Bruce Meowman, Jeff Maine Coons, Claws Oldenburg, Alex Katz, Frida Kahlico and many others. ”

Lieberman’s felis-itous approach is meant to foster an unorthodox spirit of art-making and art-looking. “Art isn’t only for a meditative, aesthetic experience,” says Lieberman. “It can also be a conduit for the redemption of pussycats and people.” “The Cat Show” is not just about rescuing cats, it’s about re-skewing the notion of rescue with levity and gravity alike.

............................................................................................

For more information about this project contact: info@whitecolumns.org or visithttp://whitecolumns.org and http://twitter.com/catsinresidence

*Social Tees Animal Rescue is a 501c3 non-profit that, every year, takes over 3000 atrisk animals from kill shelters, gives them veterinary care and finds them loving homes. Founded in 1991. Social Tees rescues, rehabilitates, and places over 3,000 dogs, cats, birds, and exotics per year. http://animalrescuenyc.org

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF6IBWTDgnI

For his curation, or “project identification,” of his younger studio-mate’s show, Mr. Melgaard has painted the walls in bright pop geometries and installed a flea market’s worth of chairs, barbecue grills, pants, mounted elephant tusks, methuselahs of champagne, and other objects on which the late Robert Loughlin, a well-known New York furniture scout and late-blooming artist, painted a cigarette-dangling male profile borrowed from Tom of Finland, as well as a curtain of bottlecaps, a curtain of corks and ceramic ware made by Mr. Bjertnes’s mother, Randi Koren Bjertnes, and painted with Hanna Maria’s face. This visual excess expeditiously drowns out the edge of exploitative objectification in Mr. Bjertnes’s obsessively repetitive series of paintings of Hanna Maria taking a bath. The performance is not only an obstacle to intimacy: it’s also its vehicle. Squinting through the noise, you can see instead, in one purplish-sepia close-up with a tricolor smear across the sternum (all the paintings of her are titled Hanna Maria), the painter’s genuine love for his subject. The model’s love, meanwhile, you can see everywhere, but especially in one painting with a green sweater hanging from a corner of its frame. (Through April 20)

“Looking Back” opens with portraits of artists by artists: Alice Neel’s magisterial 1964 painting of the actor and civil rights leader Hugh Hurd commands the room. (The painting was included in David Zwirner’s excellent Neel retrospective.) Next to it is Alex Israel’s As It Lays (2012) the video series in which the young L.A.-based artist, speaking in a deadpan monotone, interviews D-list celebrities. The pairing emphasizes a formal rhyme between the subjects’ poses. Jason Simon’s collection of films, books and ephemera by the French filmmaker Chris Marker, on display in a vitrine, presents a more abstract form of portraiture, as does Kaucyila Brooke’s starkly lit photographs of the deceased author and punk feminist icon Kathy Acker’s worn clothing (lots of Vivienne Westwood).

But “Looking Back” also looks forward—the best works here were made for the exhibition space. Sam Pulitzer and Bill Hayden’s Korean tattoo-parlor dragon, an adhesive vinyl cut-out wrapping around White Columns’ storefront glass, greets visitors to the show; at night, its eyes are illuminated by tactical laser sights. Yuji Agematsu has created a sizable installation in one room, Not Yet Titled (2011). On one wall, painted a murky gold evoking both Japanese screen painting backgrounds and Warhol’s silver factory walls, are pinned hundreds of sad, pretty, bedraggled bits of trash and detritus the artist has collected from New York’s streets since the 1980s: little nests of matted hair, bits of glittering unidentifiable material, melted plastic and asphalt, lint felted by the street. The stuff is organized according to formal as well as more historical qualities (time of day, season and place found were suggested to me as systematizing principles), but a dominant archival strategy is not apparent: instead, the loose taxonomy of flotsam and jetsam, pinned to the wall like so many urban waste butterflies, is hung in a way that evokes the process of discovery that resulted in the pieces being preserved in the first place.

Much of the work in the show has been similarly repurposed from the major contemporary exhibitions of the last year. Sites include Gareth James’s “Human Metal,” his Vertigo-like meditation on a spiraling scribble found in a photograph of French philosopher Louis Althusser (from Miguel Abreu), Sam Lewitt’s terrific installation from the Whitney Biennial, Martin Beck’s monochromes pieced together from polygons of white fabric from his solo show at 47 Canal, and Liam Gillick and Henry Bond photographs from Mr. Gillick’s collaboratively oriented retrospective at CCS Bard. It wouldn’t be a summary of 2012 without a piece by Bjarne Melgaard, the year’s most omnipresent figure, represented here by his interview of venerable queer theorist Leo Bersani (first screened at The Kitchen in April). Because the works at White Columns are fragments of their original installations, their insertion sometimes feels homeopathic, a repurposed fragment pointing toward a larger whole.

If there is a fault to Mr. Birkett’s curation, it is that there’s something low-stakes about a show stacked with material pre-vetted by so many of-the-moment galleries like Bortolami, Alex Zachary, Real Fine Arts, Reena Spaulings and Essex Street. The display exemplifies an extreme tastefulness that borders on being too correct, as if the curator were gunning for an “A” from some imagined audience. Mr. Birkett, here, seems less concerned with discovering underrepresented work or presenting new ideas than with lending his ear to just the right people. On the other hand, if you were out of town for much of 2012, or just don’t get out much, Mr. Birkett has done a commendable job of assembling work from the shows you probably should have seen (or pretended that you did).

And there is plenty of pleasure to be had in this exhibition. Three of essayist and art critic Tan Lin’s colorful books are nailed to the wall in one of the funnier text/art moments in recent memory; Moyra Davey’s hourlong video Les Goddesses (2011), a sustained meditation on the relationship between literary and personal history that I missed at both Murray Guy gallery and its screening at the Whitney Biennial, gets its own room here. A sole example from Harry Smith’s historical knot collection is a mystically oriented take on geometric abstraction in the form of a complex cat’s cradle.

The show’s ratio of déjà vu to discovery will depend on what you saw this past year. The ideal viewer of this exhibition might well be someone who missed all these works the first time around, spent 2012 deep in the studio or abroad, and is discovering them here. But these artworks are also absorbing if you’re looking back. (Through Feb. 23, 2013)

Mr. Higgs first saw Mr. Koestenbaum’s paintings in early 2011 at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, where they shared space with works by Leigh Ledare, Tracey Emin and Laurel Nakadate, and immediately had the idea for a show.

Mr. Koestenbaum came to painting by way of writing. “I’ve always looked at painting and written about it and cared about it,” he told Gallerist. “I think when I wrote my biography of Andy Warhol, that was a real chance to apprentice myself to the way a painter proceeded.”

He said that he paints in “the mood of Joe Brainard or John Wesley, but with the procedure and crazy intensity of obsessive repeaters like Yayoi Kusama.”

He doesn’t have any plans to stop writing. He’s actually written two books since he started painting, and one of them, Humiliation—for which he wrote about things like the joys of amputee pornography and masturbating to the image of one of his 20-something students—earned him an art comparison. Literary critic Dwight Garner described the book in The New York Times as “The literary equivalent of Vito Acconci’s Seedbed”(1972), in which Mr. Acconci hid himself under a ramp at the Sonnabend Gallery and masturbated audibly.

“It’s quite risky.” said Mr. Higgs of Mr. Koestenbaum’s decision to show his paintings. “I think most people will come to the work with some pre-existing Wayne Koestenbaum baggage, and then they’ll have to work out what that means in relation to visual art by Wayne.”

“I am nervous about showing the work publicly,” Mr. Koestenbaum admitted. “I’m also entirely ecstatic. It seems like a fantasy of some wild Cinderella kind coming true.”

—Rozalia Jovanovic

Darren Bader's bulletin board. (Courtesy the artist and Venus Over Manhattan)

The second show at the new Upper East Side gallery Venus Over Manhattan is filled with bulletin boards. (Disclosure: Venus Over Manhattan is owned by Observer contributor Adam Lindemann.) The West Village alternative space White Columns, which has been home to a bulletin-board exhibition space for a number of years, gave bulletin boards to more than 20 artists and art types and asked them to present something with it.

The conceit could have produced one-liners, but there are quite a few strong pieces. Daniel Turner scrapped down and disfigured his cork board, leaving it empty except for some deep scars. B. Wurtz elegantly hung four socks on a stretch of canvas painted with the words "know thyself." Gavin Brown took photographs of the inside of a refrigerator and presented them inside one board's windows. And Bjarne Melgaard stuffed his with crumpled drawings, mail and at least one hypodermic needle—a bulletin board overflowing with information and harkening back to the creepy murderer-obsessed installation he staged in the bathroom of Luxembourg & Dayan a few months ago.

But our favorite board belongs to Darren Bader, who took perhaps the most resolutely minimal approach, offering a bulletin board in its most pure form. He hung just a single item with a pin, an odd little painting of something not quite safe for work happening in a bedroom. There's a caption in Spanish underneath it. Click the image to see it a bit closer and head to the show before Aug. 24 to see it.

Every Friday, Don’t Miss It! looks at a single artwork on view in New York.

(Courtesy Venus Over Manhattan)

After its dark, moody debut exhibition "À Rebours," which channeled the feel of a late-19th-century aristocrat's private chambers, the Venus Over Manhattan gallery is going in a comparatively contemporary and light-hearted direction for its sophomore effort. This outing is titled "Bulletin Boards," and it's being organized by West Village alternative space White Columns. (Full disclosure: VoM is owned by Observer contributor Adam Lindemann.)

For the show, Matthew Higgs, the director and chief curator of White Columns, has asked more than 20 artists and art types, including Rita Ackermann, Darren Bader, Gavin Brown, Margaret Lee and Michele Abeles, Bjarne Melgaard, Virginia Overton, Daniel Turner and B. Wurtz, to present work using a bulletin board. The show opens July 19.

"They range between a very literal take on the bulletin board to somebody who, as of right now, is going to turn one into a fish tank," a gallery representative told us by phone, adding, "It's nice to be bringing White Columns uptown." Proceeds from sales will benefit White Columns.

Since 2004, Mr. Higgs himself has operated a bulletin board as an exhibition space in the lobby of White Columns, and prior to arriving at the institution used one as a project space at the California College of the Arts, according to the gallery's release. For this affair, 20 participants will have 4-foot-by-3-foot boards and four people will have 6-foot-by-4-foot boards.

This announcement underscores what has been a strong season for bulletin board-related art. The very pleasurable Liam Gillick retrospective at CCS Bard's Hessel Museum of Art, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., is filled with bulletin boards, whose contents have been selected by a variety of students and luminaries (one whole gallery is lined with them and bears a Boetti map), and Pati Hertling has been hosting occasional events under the name Bulletin Board.

Installation view of "Looking Back/The 6th White Columns Annual."

It may not be quick, but it’s certain: sometime after the Deluge, fish will learn to walk. At the entrance to the downtown alternative space White Columns, above a glass-covered bulletin board containing a Mary Cassatt reproduction, a handout about Fernand Léger, and Chloe Dzubilo’s 2007 marker-on-canvas announcement There Is a Transolution, hangs Maria Lassnig’s six-and-a-half-foot-tall 2009 painting Die Optimisten.

With the large, brash strokes of a magazine illustration, Ms. Lassnig shows a topless man and woman in a formless void, ankle deep in translucent green water, standing back to back but turned slightly toward the viewer. He has a big nose, an orange tone and a wobbly smirk; she has striking cheekbones and pink skin. Her eyes are on him, but he’s looking up, as if trying to remember something—or maybe forget it—as they both extend a thumbs-up toward the viewer.

Or rather, while it’s certainly formless, it could be that the background only feels like a void. At the tail end of the Modernist teleology—after iconoclasm; the erection of new idols of abstraction; the elaboration of theologies for those idols; the cataloging and ritualizing of the theologies into empty spectacle at the top and endless opacity at the bottom—the world is full of water. It’s not possible to point in any direction without pointing at something someone’s already done, and there’s nothing to breathe. But there are also, at this year’s White Columns Annual, an exhibition curated by Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss, flickers of light-hearted optimism, because what’s full and fully decadent is ready to burst into something new.

In the gallery’s central room, two paintings—Alex Kwartler’s Wheel and Thomas Eggerer’s Downward (Dark Triangle)—hold back the void to make space for Michaela Eichwald’s 37-foot-long postindustrial cave painting Pofalla (willst Du mir jetzt komplett den Garaus machen?). Wheel is a large piece of plywood painted with a rough triskelion (think Back to the Future’s flux capacitor meets Martín Ramirez) in a thin, disconcertingly glossy layer of blue-, gray- and purple-tinted plaster. We can’t picture the void, but in trying, we pull it closer: as the plaster dried, it warped the board into concavity. Or, if we can’t picture the void, we can picture the way the void pictures us: Downward shows two male figures in bathing suits descending a perfect gray slope under a sky the color of greenscreen.

Knit together from multiple, fold-creased sheets of paper, decorated with letters, wallpaper swatches and show announcements marked out with teal X’s, rolling and roiling through stormy colors from nativity crimson and cheery aquamarine to fully rotten black, and ending in an uncomfortably dated photo of seven naked African men cutting up a baby elephant and an advertisement for a gelateria on the Isle of Elba, Ms. Eichwald’s Pofalla is not just more but distinctly other than the sum of its parts: it’s the jolting moment when decay becomes rebirth.

In another gallery, Adrian Piper’s I Am Somebody, The Body of My Friends #1-18, a suite of 15 color and three black-and-white photographs showing the artist posing with 14 men, 11 women and one girl in various permutations, constitutes a typology of social moments and contexts; in yet another gallery, a slide show of 35mm images by Alvin Baltrop, from 1974 to 1991, collects doorways, tar roofs, liquor stores, wet streets at night, sunsets, fire escapes, a man hunched over on the subway and a woman with an umbrella walking into a windy rain.

In a third space, Antoine Catala’s HDDH joins two HD televisions with a mirrored cylinder so that the facing images melt into each other; you may wonder when you walk in if it isn’t your eyes that are melting. When The Observer visited, the screens happened to be showing TV foodie Adam Richman as he described having once seen “a film Salvador Dalí made of his father and his father’s second wife eating sea urchins straight from the shell.”

The pendulum swings from art to image and, we hope, back again; but it also swings from crowds and wholesale food in 1930s Washington Market, down through the empty, garbage-strewn no-man’s-land where James Nares shot his 1976 video Pendulum—currently on view, along with an assortment of related films, photos, drawings, notes, and lead and concrete spheres at Paul Kasmin Gallery—and up again to the hedge-fund paradise that is Tribeca in 2012.

In the video, we’re looking down Jay Street toward Independence Plaza when a gray sphere—the size of a wrecking ball, but clearly different in kind—floats gently around the corner. As we turn to get a better look, we see that the very substance of reality, the abstracted stand-in for the nature of physical being, or a meaningless round placeholder for the study of time and motion, is swinging from a foot bridge that crosses over Staple Street from roof to roof. In 17 short minutes, accompanied by a rumbling sound, the artist attempts every possible approach. He shows us the fullness of the pendulum’s range of motion from the side, loops it around like a yo-yo, and eases it in and out of the frame like the tides. He switches from observation to meta-observation, filming down through the grating of the foot bridge, catching the toes of his boot; from direct observation to inference, focusing on the ball’s shadow as it waxes and wanes; and to study by direct experience, filming from the weight as it swings, moving without affect through shots handsome, ugly and indifferent, meaningful and meaningless, until the process becomes the thing. But it’s inexhaustible: it can still go on and on.

editorial@observer.com

Billy Childish, "Toni Kurz Descending (Study 1)," 2011, oil and charcoal on linen, 59.8 x 36 inches. (Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery)

“There are people who have said to me, ‘They’re not going to swallow you in the art world until you’re dead,’” the musician, poet, novelist and artist Billy Childish said. “The chance that it has been moved forward 20—or 30 years, hopefully—is something that I never expected.”

Mr. Childish, 51, was speaking on the phone from Chatham, England, where he was born and still lives, and he was discussing his upcoming painting show at the Lower East Side branch of the Lehmann Maupin gallery, which opens Nov. 4. He has had a handful of shows in Europe, but this exhibition will be his first at a commercial gallery in New York.

These days, many visual artists are multitaskers. They write, they make clothing, they work in multiple mediums; art’s expanded field has made experimentation and cross-disciplinary practice not just an attractive option, but de rigueur. Which makes Mr. Childish inadvertently prescient: he has been at it for years. Not that it’s been easy.

“Really creative people are not liked in literature, in art or in music,” he said. “They tend to be excluded, and the reason being that they’re not containable and they’re pains in the ass. I’m one of those people—uncontainable and a pain in the ass.”

What from all appearances has certainly been uncontainable is Mr. Childish’s output. Since the late 1970s, he has completed more than 2,000 paintings, published more than 50 books of poetry and written five novels. He has run a printing press and a record label, and he has played a supporting role in many of British contemporary art’s major events.

But he is best known as a musician. He has released more than 110 records with a variety of post-punk, blues-inflected bands since the late 1970s with monikers like the Pop Rivets, Thee Milkshakes, Thee Mighty Caesars, Thee Headcoats, the Musicians of the British Empire and the Buff Medways.

“In the 1990s, I think I must have seen Billy’s bands play more than 100 times,” British-born curator Matthew Higgs told The Observer, “and I will say without hesitation he was the best front man I have ever seen.” Mr. Higgs, 47, presented the artist’s work at the White Columns alternative space in the West Village, where he is director, and is curating the Lehmann Maupin exhibition.

“They wanted someone who has some history with me to try to tell this very big story without confusing people,” Mr. Childish said. He and Mr. Higgs have been friends since the early 1990s, when the painter Peter Doig introduced them. Messrs. Doig and Higgs co-curated a show of Mr. Childish’s work at London’s nonprofit Cubitt gallery in 1993, the very first show that Mr. Higgs ever produced.

“It was the first stirrings of the YBAs,” Mr. Higgs said, referring to the group known as the Young British Artists, who were gaining fame at the time. “The work Billy was making was very different.” As YBA Damien Hirst began making his first sculptures with live animals and carcasses—a 1990 work consisted of a white box in which maggots fed on a rotting cow head, eventually growing into flies—Mr. Childish was looking to painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

That work, Mr. Higgs said, “was very influenced by German Expressionism. There was a very strong line; it was almost a painted version of woodcuts.” He painted pastoral scenes in long strokes and bright colors, recalling the work of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch. Sometimes a silent solitary figure appears in these landscapes, wandering through them.

“Both Peter and I knew Billy’s music, art and writing,” Mr. Higgs told us, “but his painting simply wasn’t as well known.” And yet that had been the artist’s first passion. In his youth, he painted at home and often took trips to the museums in London, where he developed unfashionable tastes, leaning away from conceptual and abstract work. “I would look at the Rothkos, and I found them completely depressing and uninteresting,” he said.

After dropping out of school at 16 to work at a dockyard as a stonemason, Mr. Childish continued to draw, but, having no credentials, he had to fight his way into art school, first at a local college. “I was very unimpressed by art schools and art teachers telling me what to do,” he said. “I came from an educational background where we didn’t listen to teachers at all. We were just dockyard fodder.”

Even when he did manage to enroll at Saint Martins College, he remained an iconoclast. “I refused to paint inside the college,” he said. “I painted at home, and told them I did not want to be contaminated by painting in their building.” Not unpredictably, he was expelled. On the plus side, he met Mr. Doig. “We were into the same type of music, and he gave me—I’m looking at it right now on the shelf—it’s Bukowski’s Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. Pete said, ‘Oh you’ll like this.’”

At the time, Mr. Childish was already churning out material—drawing, printing, painting, writing and cutting records at a rapid pace—not unlike Bukowksi. “He’s not my favorite writer by a long shot,” he told us. “There’s a huge amount of work, and there’s a lot of it that isn’t that good, when he’s acting like a macho idiot, but there is a hell of a lot of it that is, and that bit is still more than a lot of people do in a couple of lifetimes. I realized in retrospect that I was doing the right thing.”

In the 1980s, Mr. Childish became involved with the artist Tracey Emin, who went on to become one of the progenitors of the YBA aesthetic, becoming best known for confessional work, like a camping tent in which she sewed the names of every person she’d ever slept with. (Mr. Childish was included.) She had been studying fashion at the time and worked with him on his printing press. After they split, they remained friends. “Tracey and I did not see eye to eye on Britart,” Mr. Childish said with good humor, using another name for the YBA's art. “I called it bankers’ Dada.”

On the phone, Mr. Childish is soft spoken and gracious, every bit the English gentleman. But he can be biting. He has a “primal, aggressive, antagonistic aesthetic,” Mr. Higgs said. He sings songs with titles like “I’ve Been Fucking Your Daughters and Pissing on Your Lawn” and “Get Out of Here Pretty Girl.” The lyrics of the latter announce, “I’m gonna put a sock in your mouth / and throw you out that door.” He often performs these songs dressed in a tweed blazer and bow tie, sometimes wearing a newsboy hat or a fedora.

He has also written acerbic diatribes about the state of contemporary art. In the mid-1990s, he wrote what he calls “very strong anti-art manifestos. They were very volatile, very contradictory, very sarcastic.” One manifesto, published in 1997, which railed against conceptual art, includes the dictums “Good taste is fascism” and “We must embrace the unacceptable in all spheres.”

Mr. Childish’s candidness, and his prolific output, which dealers frown on, did not help his art career; nor did joining with an old literary rival, Charles Thompson—“He used to try to have me banned from readings for being so outspoken and condescending about his work,” he explained—in the late 1990s to form a group called Stuckism, which devoted itself to painting and figuration, and aligned itself in opposition to the YBAs.

The name for the movement came from a poem by Mr. Childish in which he recounted Ms. Emin telling him, “Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck!”

“Charles Thompson had a big problem with Tracey at the time, because I think that she hadn’t made him a cup of tea when she went to go visit,” Mr. Childish told us. “She hadn’t been as welcoming as he thought she should have been.”

These days, the Stuckists tend to surface for half-baked protests surrounding festivities related to the Turner Prize, the annual art award that Tate bestows on one artist under 50, and which has often favored conceptual or abstract work. “I never attended any of the demonstrations, or condoned it,” Mr. Childish said. “I thought that they were overly concerned about what Britart represented, and I did not want to get into a reactionary situation of validating bankers’ Dada.”

He now says that he wanted to leave the group after its first exhibition in 1999, but stuck around for about a year and a half, formally resigning in 2001. Nevertheless, that short involvement, as well as his music background, has given him a reputation of an outsider.

“He is constantly being anachronistic,” Mr. Higgs told us. “Whatever he is doing, it seems to be wrong, and you have to have an extraordinary amount of self-confidence to believe in that.” Indeed, as cultural tastes have changed, Mr. Childish has kept working as he always has, churning out records, honing his painting and writing prodigiously.

“He comes in and out of focus in the culture,” Mr. Higgs said. As interests shift, people discover him and he becomes a star; other times he is forgotten. He added, “Now, more than 30 years after he started, we can see what a remarkable thing he set in motion as an 18 or 19 year old. His idea was fully formed at the beginning, and his life has really been fleshing out this idea.”

Mr. Childish’s painting has gradually evolved, and he has been working on a larger scale. “I paint a little less than I used to,” he said, “and I make a little less music, which is still too much. I’m trying to moderate myself.” His new works at Lehmann Maupin (which, by coincidence, also represents Ms. Emin) will include paintings of figures like the Finnish composer Sibelius and the German mountain climber Toni Kurz, who died tragically at the age of 23.

“I like this existential loneliness of people who go out into the void and do something,” Mr. Childish said. “The heroism of it; pitting yourself against yourself.”

Does he see himself in that role? “It’s not something that I want,” he replied. “I’m interested in it, but I don’t think that it’s the truth—I think it’s a very easily believed lie.”

But, Mr. Childish allowed, “Sibelius is a bit of a kindred spirit in the sense that he was a completely messed up, melancholic young man. He wrote his last symphony and decided it would never be quite good enough at age 60 and so he burned it and never wrote another thing and lived into his 90s.”

He thought for a moment.

“That’s almost the opposite of what I’m like,” he said. “But I don’t know. I’m not 60.”

arusseth@observer.com