WEDNESDAY
* "The Road" (dir. John Hillcoat, 2009) opens @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (FV to 2nd Ave). Consummate outdoorsman Viggo Mortensen stars in this grim post-apocalyptic road story. It's not quite Michael Haneke's "Time of the Wolf", but then again nothing could ever be that.
* "Small Change" (dir. François Truffaut, 1976) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). This family comedy of children in Thiers, France, classic late-period Truffaut, is rare-ish for American audiences and, in its innocence and highly improved script, should be a treat to see (think the antithesis of "The Road").
FRIDAY
* "Celebrating Chekhov" @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St). A selection of Soviet and Russian film adaptations of one of my favorite writer's short stories and plays? Everything about this appeals to me, and if you're familiar w/ Anton Chekhov's breathless, tidy writings (or have heard about them ad nauseam from me) then you should be as well. Visit the festival site for the schedule and ticket info (THRU DEC 3) and note my favorites below:
* "Ward No. 6/Palata No. 6" (dirs. Karen Shakhnazraov & Alexandr Gornovsky, Russia, 2009) US premiere. Dir. Shakhnazarov attends the 7:30p screening, adapted from one of Chekhov's bleakest tales, influenced by his background in medical science. In a decrepit mental facility, a doctor is drawn to one of his most complex patients and begins to question his place in the world. Essential.
* Liam the Younger @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p/FREE. I'm excited to see Jersey's Liam in concert again, though I DID just catch him like a week ago and can attest his acoustic vignettes add a refreshing dose of fragility and maturity from the youngster. w/ Shark?
* Hank and Cupcakes @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 10p/$7. They're adorable, this Brooklyn duo. She drums and sings, he attacks the bass. Now, these "&" couples are not exactly a novelty — two contemporary examples jump immediately to mind: Mommy & Daddy (electro-thrash, via bass and electronics) and Matt & Kim (sloppy party singalongs, via drums and electronics). A third, Experimental Dental School (drums v. guitars) doesn't have the "&" element but they're smartly experimental in like a Deerhoof vein. In this case, though Cupcakes can sing REALLY well and keep a beat, while Hank's basslines are colorful and encouraging, w/o overshadowing the vocals a la Tom Jenkinson (or Flea, if you will). Oh, and they do a dope cover of Joy Division's "She's Lost Control".
SATURDAY
* "L'Age d'Or" (dirs. Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dali, 1930) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p. They just want to make love, our leading couple, and are denied at every instance by Catholicism and bourgeois society, in this classic surrealist 'romance'.
* "The Lady with the Dog/Dama s sobachkoy" (dir. Iosif Kheifits, USSR, 1960) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (see above). One of my favorite Chekhov short stories, involving an adulterous affair b/w a Moscow banker and a young woman. Kheifits' adaptation won a Special Prize @ the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.
* "Ward No. 6/Palata No. 6" (dirs. Karen Shakhnazraov & Alexandr Gornovsky, Russia, 2009) US premiere @ Walter Reade Theatre (see above). Dir. Shakhnazarov attends the 3:20p and 7:20p screenings, adapted from one of Chekhov's bleakest, medical science-influenced tales.
SUNDAY
* "Ward No. 6/Palata No. 6" (dirs. Karen Shakhnazraov & Alexandr Gornovsky, Russia, 2009) US premiere @ Walter Reade Theatre (see above). Dir. Shakhnazarov attends the 2:40p and 7:10p screenings, adapted from one of Chekhov's bleakest, medical science-influenced tales.
* "Uncle Vanya/Dyadya Vanya" (dir. Andrei Konchalovsky, USSR, 1970) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (see above), 5:15p. This April, the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg, under direction by Lev Dodin, perform Chekhov's quintessential tragicomedy @ BAM. See the film first!
MONDAY
* Darmstadt "Terry Riley's In C" @ Galapagos ArtSpace / 16 Main St, DUMBO (F to York, AC to High St), 8p/$10. The NY Times' Allan Kozinn http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/arts/music/10grand.html gave a shout-out to 2007's "In C", the performance I attended back when Galapagos was in Williamsburg. This one, Darmstadt's 5th Anniv reading, should be at least as dope, if not better. The premise: a roughly hour-long improvisation on permutations of the C chord, which relies entirely on the talents and variables of its ensemble, the person keeping the pulse (whether that's piano, bells etc) and the many, many voices and instruments sliding over it. This year's lineup includes a fierce guitar section (led by drone-god Zach Layton, who co-curatesTK the show w/ voice-guru Nick Hallett), plus Sawako and Luke DuBois (electronics), MV Carbon and Ha Yang Kim (cellos), Ryan Sawyer (drums), Jon Gibson (saxophone and multi-instrumentalist) and live cinema from Joshua Light Show.
* "An Evening with n+1: The Unfinished Work of Feminism is Love" @ The Kitchen / 512 W 19th St, 7p/FREE. n+1 editor-at-large Allison Lorentzen moderates a discussion around "Why can't feminists agree on love?", feat. Meghan O'Rourke (Slate culture critic), Meghan Falvey (author of "Women, the New Social Problem"), Carlene Bauer (author of "Not That Kind of Girl"), and Astra Taylor (one of my favorite contemporary documentarians, she directed philosophic journeys "Žižek!" and "Examined Life").
TUESDAY
* "Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art" @ Guggenheim Museum / 1071 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St), 6:30p/SOLD OUT (but standby tix are apparently available). Are you like me, ticketless but yearning to hear the conversation b/w Richard Armstrong (the Gugg's museum director), Judith Goldman (writer/scholar) and THE MAN himself, anti-Pop icon James Rosenquist? The discussion title culls from Rosenquist's properly colorful memoir, out now (which I've read, hence my choice in labeling him 'anti-Pop'), and hell, he's a hero of mine, Rosenquist — standby ticketing begins at 6p, people.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Gerhard Richter "Abstract Paintings, 2009" @ Marian Goodman Gallery / 24 W 57th St. This is a massive, museum-quality exhibition of Richter's newest signaturely abstract paintings, composed on canvas, wood, and metal (and that's not counting the flotilla "Sindbad", a 'diptych-esque' suite of gooey lacquer between glass panels). You should choose to either begin or end w/ Richter's monolithic monochromish works, hung together in the opening gallery, whose glistening whitish surfaces conceal the wild chromatic abstraction beneath. In a few instances, slices through the translucent layering here and a general dilution of the white paint there, the colors (green, red, blue mostly, but in one vertical example a long smear reminiscent of a rainbow rocket popsicle) gleam through. Elsewhere, note how Richter's varying choice of surface interacts w/ the lesions and acid-stripped baths of paint. How the metal provides a smoothly blurred vibe, the wood either soaks up the color (a brilliant several lava-reds) or is macerated by it, and of course "Sindbad". Each notebook-sized panel is a delicious standalone work on its own, but taken as a whole, the two-wall installation is saturation mastery at its finest.
* Egon Schiele "As Printmaker" @ Galerie St. Etienne / 24 W 57th St. A gorgeous selection of the rakish young artist's varied media, etchings, drypoints, pencil and gouache drawings — all of it portraiture and all of it really echoing once again Schiele's omnipotent linework. I found this most evident in his charcoal and 'black crayon' drawings of nudes, full of movement and tense musculature but w/o any stray or unnecessary lines.
* Cy Twombly "Eight Sculptures" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. These stately bronzes, each bearing a plywood plinth save one totemic piece, residing on its own 'petrified' trunk, embody a resonating calm and maturity needed in the always-crowded gallery scene. Even in the labyrinthine uptown Gagosian, where such disparate couplings as Jeff Koons and Pablo Picasso are known to collide, you need a show like Twombly's to cut through the mania. That said, my favorite pieces, if pressed, are the two wedding cake-like structures, one neatly dwarfed by its base and the other enlarged to match it. But the entire lot is good and, in the stark gallery space, it feels as though you've stumbled upon something very special (hint: you have).
+ Roger Ballen "Boarding House". A massive exhibition of the photographer's latest b&w series, taken in a three-story occupied warehouse in Johannesburg. His generally idiosyncratic and unsettling portraiture is reduced to seemingly stage-set vignettes: limbs, mouths and the occasional cat moving about blanketed walls. Thing is, though, the 'actors' are all real, meaning they're the impoverished inhabitants of the Boarding House, posing for and interacting w/ Ballen's lens. And there's a strong proper Surrealism in his compositions, too, the stained sculptural busts and figure framing (concealed faces), plus the odd rose or apple, made me think he did his Rene Magritte homework.
+ Richard Prince "1, 2, 3, 4". What a nice juicy surprise! I'm not even sure if this tiny show of new collage works from the trickster even has a title, but the theme is the traditional rock-song count-off, from The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" onward. Each canvas bears four numbered images, related as far as your mind will tie them together — punk imagery and sex scenes dominate. Much like Prince's "Bettie Kline" book (tying together essential Franz Kline abstract paintings w/ Bettie Page imagery), his knack for unearthing intriguing similarities continues to surprise.
* Paul McCarthy "White Snow" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. A deliciously dirty show of new works from the relentlessly deviant (yet always grandfatherly) artist — really it's two shows, the fairly quiet suite of Snow White-derived drawings and character studies (the titular exhibition), which is totally graphic, don't mistake me, and a series of massive, McCarthy-scale collages on 7x10' paper, which are vividly graphic and continue the Snow White theme, albeit in messier, warped means. "White Snow" is good and weird; if you're keen to experience it w/ a clear head I suggest taking to the 2nd fl tout de suite, ignoring the colorful larger works until later. Expect series of Snow White and the Prince in various positions, of phallic-nosed Dopey, of lewd-minded dwarves and forest creatures milling about ol' Snow in her dreamy reveries. Downstairs, the increasingly psychedelic large collage works rule the day and kept my interest far better. Beyond McCarthy's usual charcoal drawings and scribbly oil-stick, these works incl. tears from exhibition catalogues (Christie's bears sharp notice, esp. extended views of Jeff Koons' shows) and porn mags. Good old Paul! The bizarre titles ("GAP", "Michael Jackson", "100") generally come from some magazine element on the massive works and obscurely reference the on-page action. Though by the time we get to "Inside Her Ordeal", a personal fave, the aforementioned dense maelstroms wash away into a rather spare piece, w/ a glassy eyed Snow grinning out into oblivion.
* Liu Ye "Leave Me in the Dark" @ Sperone Westwater / 415 W 13th St. I love Ye's haunting, spare acrylics, which mostly capture a solitary doll-like girl in scenarios worth of Rene Magritte. She might be reading a book or standing, raincoated and w/ luggage but w/ her back turned to the viewer — and suddenly everything is just a bit less familiar. Ye's 'compositions', of bamboo, blocks and drugs, are rendered w/ a scalpel's clarity, but lack the gauzy beauty of his portraiture.
* David Hockney "New Paintings" @ Pacewildenstein / 32 E 57th St. If I were forced to decide which Hockney show I preferred, the downtown one or the midtown one, I honestly could not choose. 25th St's gorgeous super-large-scale glades (echoed in autumnal reds and springlike greens) command your attention, while 57th St's multiple totemic renderings require a bit more intense contemplation. I've decided you need to see both shows to fully 'get' Hockney's new en plein air paintings of his native Yorkshire. And the range at 57th St (it's not just hawthorne), like the acid-green saturation workout of "Stray" and the calming emptiness of a rainwater-colored lolling hill, do not reproduce fully in the catalogue and must be seen in person.
* Marc Quinn "Iris" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. Quinn's massive circular canvases of the namesake eye-related body part harbor the potential of New Age-y-ness, meaning those strange crackling-lightning and bubbling spheres and pseudo-3D computer wallpaper shit circa '02 (you know, 640x480-pixel-sized). But they're nothing like that. In person, and specifically up close, Quinn's deftly rendered irises are incredibly unslick and painterly, which detracts exactly 0% from the work.
* Sol LeWitt, Keith Sonnier, Lawrence Weiner @ Leo Castelli / 18 E 77th St #3. A deceptively simple show, ostensibly three artists comfortable w/ wall art. But that's such a cop-out! Weiner's hot-pink "LAID OUT FLAT BENT [NOW] THIS WAY TURNED [NOW] THAT WAY (i.e. LOOPED OVER)" grounds the other two, the sunny yellow ruled and wobbly lines from LeWitt's circa-1971 wall piece (in contemporary terms, it looks a bit like Wolfgang Laib's hand-sifted pollen installations) and two very intriguing takes from Sonnier. The noisy one, feat. flickering lights, latex and a motor, feels more typical but the other, a wall-mounted trapezoid of flock w/ string, intrigues in its rawness.
* Lynda Benglis @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Frozen bubblebath, my first thought upon viewing Benglis' tinted polyurethane sculpture "Swinburne Figure I", part of her exhibition of new relief works at the gallery. Everything crawls along the wall here, from other globular polyurethane objet (check the esp. effective orange-sun "D'Arrest") to the black patina'd bronzes (mimicking either coral reefs or coagulated chocolatey breakfast cereal), like the hand-like "Figure 3" and animale "Figure 5".
* Richard Mosse "The Fall" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Mosse's photojournalist record of his remotest travels, here a series of large C-prints, interrupt the respective snowy, deserted or otherwise forest-laden landscape w/ the carcass of a once-great metal beast. As in, the burned out, bullet-riddled frame of an automobile; the wingless body and nose of a jet, throwing forth its shadow like the maw of a prehistoric predator; the basically decayed wing of an airliner, tattooed w/ several decades' worth of graffiti.
* Norbert Schwontkowski "Ångstrœm" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 528 W 26th St. Schwontkowski's muted color palette, in a slew of mostly smallish oils on canvas, is due to his cache of hand-ground pigments. These lend a murky, De Chiricoesque air to his spare compositions, which do indeed channel the metaphysical Surrealist in certain measures, plus Dali and early Magritte.
* Blanca Muñoz "The Blue Dance" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Muñoz's lyrical perforated stainless steel sculpture (kissed here and there by mirrored cobalt blue steel) resemble plantlike alien lifeforms. Think visually weightless lilypads or some tropics-dwelling frond basking in the sunlight or wafting gently in a sea current. Even the massive pieces (Muñoz breaks up her sculpture by either small table-top or relief works — which execute especially well — or auto-sized beasts) retain a lightness belying their obviously heavy components, the perforations and screws magnified to extra-large dimensions.
+ Alejandro Corujeira "The Accessible, Dressed in Salts". I detect traces of fairly contemporary Brice Marden in some of Corujeira's wavy line acrylics, though I'm not sure the artist enacts the same sort of fierce attention and loving care that Marden does to his whiplike shapes.
* Pearlstein/Held "Five Decades" @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. Allow me to walk you through this incredible, if tantalizingly brief, duet b/w long-career American artists Al Held (he of the super abstract school) and Philip Pearlstein (he of the entirely figurative school). The 1st thing you'll probably see, out of your left peripherals, is Held's ultra-yellow targetish "Echo" from 1966, which pairs across the way w/ Pearlstein's "Female Nude on Yellow Drape" from the same decade. In the alcove w/ "Echo" is an early, wetly composed Pearlstein (which up close resembles mudwrestling) and an early Held, all impasto and thick swaths of paint. Get it? The interrelatedness of the two painters, albeit via on-the-surface different paths? You need this structure going into the spacious main room, where Pearlstein's newer works dominate, at least at first blush. Note the differences b/w a '76 piece and an '08 or '09, the increasing complexity of reflection, color palette and general franticness of composition. And note too how Held's works, while definitely not shirking on the color side (after a foray into sharp b&w in the '70s), calms his geometric compositions as their horizons stretch to eternity.
* Aya Takano "Reintegrating Worlds" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. The 1st solo show from the young Kaikai Kiki artist is a beaut, all pastel-toned acrylics of girls and animals interacting in a sort of stoned contemporary take on Amami Oshima Islands culture. Beyond what appears to be a flooded subway, most of the action occurs outdoors, in a landscape occupied by deer and cats.
* Jean Dubuffet @ Helly Nahmad Gallery / 975 Madison Ave. A lovely range of the artist's later-period works, beginning w/ his famous sculptures and coded red-blue-white-black paintings (like cuneiform, or some ancient lost language before graffiti became cool) and punctuated here and there w/ bright bursts of color, like the superior late-work "Mire G 33 (Kowloon)", a network of red and blue loops against vibrant yellow, and this blackboard-sized and -rendered canvas filled w/ colored-chalk figures and a Citroen.
* William J. O'Brien @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. The first evidence of O'Brien's craft, in the opening gallery, may turn you off. A berserkly scribbled drawing and malformed clay sculpture admittedly gave me pause. But continue onward to the larger back gallery and your fears will disappear. Amid O'Brien's signature, cleanly and lovingly rendered colored pencil and ink drawings are a series of related small-scale steel and ceramic works, a motley assortment not unlike Louise Bourgeois' crowded worktable upstate in Dia:Beacon.
* Shinya Yamamura "Urushi Decorations" @ Ippodo Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Splendid, singular lacquer works, little cups, bowls and tchotchkes (I think the logical Japanese term here is 'okimono'), most twinkling with an uncommon brilliance culled from the natural world by this modern master.
* Kim Nam Pyo "Instant Landscapes" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. You read the gallery checklist just to confirm that Kim's large-scale works are 'just' charcoal drawings and not collages or like horsehair-brushed oils (Daliesque) — as they are so exactingly rendered, every bent tree-branch or bizarro zebra head or Barneys-quality accessory (the light sources on the croc bags and high heels are exquisite). Sure Kim adds faux fur to the lot, usually in the manner of equine tails or crests, but that blends in amid the extremely surreal, beautifully detailed landscapes.
* Emi Uchida "Lines" @ Onishi Gallery / 521 W 26th St. The artist's influences are clearer than ever in this series of obscured works on paper. Uchida's shunga-inspired drawings (Edo-era erotic woodcut works) are veiled by her signature wavy charcoal lines.
* Luke Smalley "Sunday Drive" @ ClampArt / 521 W 25th St. Mostly vaguely homoerotic C-prints of male models in jail, tattooing one another and pining after their partners, who I take it are meant to be the three young women in the automobile. Would not be out of place in Dazed & Confused, which Smalley incidentally shoots for.
+ Jill Greenberg 'New Bears". You cannot help but like Greenberg's animal 'portraits', esp. this new suite of brightly-lit mostly brown bears. One of them is winking at the camera! You must be made of stone if you don't like that.
CLOSING WEDNESDAY
* Bill Viola "Bodies of Light" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Love or loathe Viola, his exhibitions, which tend around watery slo-mo video, draw insane crowds. Like this one, which is total eye-candy (try to NOT be visually arrested by "Incarnation" and "Acceptance", even though they're sort of like being filmed in the shower) but by no means insubstantial. In fact, the "Pneuma" installation (this grainy video on three of four gallery walls) is a super palate cleanser from the fussier shows on the block.
* "Before Again" Group Show @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. This it totally my personal taste, but I prefer the roughly-applied abstract style of Abstract Expressionist legend Joan Mitchell and contemporary Louise Fishman (whose oily swaths are particularly invigorating) over the cleaner, technical renderings by Jill Moser and Melissa Meyer.
* Rashaad Newsome "Standards" @ Ramis Barquet / 532 W 24th St. This is dope. Newsome created meticulous collages, which from a distance appear to be regal crests and coats of arms, but are actually composite bling, babes, grillz and Italian fashion house labels (Gucci chains figure heavily here). These bijoux are carried further by a life-size steel gate, adorned w/ more Gucci and several real chrome rims, spinners and all, plus a video that mixes the intro to Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" w/ hip-hop claps and 808 beats.
* Hope Gangloff @ Susan Inglett Gallery / 522 W 24th St. Huge Gangloff fan here, and maybe it's b/c her lush compositions of friends and Brooklyn-esque scenery that act as a mirror to my own experiences. The picnic-ready 'still-life', for instance, includes various beers, heels and beach umbrellas (plus what I take to be the MoMA Design Store ceramic 'paper cup', which I own).
CLOSING SUNDAY
* Johannes Vermeer "The Milkmaid" + related paintings @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). This extraordinary, brief mini exhibition focused on the on-loan masterpiece (which hasn't visited the States since 1939), alongside all the Met's Vermeer paintings and related works by Pieter de Hooch, Nicolaes Maes, Gabriel Metsu, Gerard ter Borch and (perhaps marginally) Emanuel de Witte, may well signify the Met's style of recession-era exhibitions. And if that's the case, eschewing mammoth blowouts for one singular piece and related beauties, nothing is lost. I'd argue, in fact, just "The Milkmaid" (a smallish painting with a shimmering surface) in a small, dim room, illuminated from overhead, would be enough. It is thematic to speak of Vermeer's deft, inventive (and expensive) use of color, and it's been done in far more eloquent ways than you'll read here so I'll skip that + just say it's beautiful. The brilliant azure blue in the milkmaid's apron and a cloth flung over the table, jump off the canvas. The realistic stream of milk from the upturned jug twinkles. The rays of daylight on the table's accouterments and the milkmaid's shirt add warmth. Of the Met's other Vermeer works (they have five, out of I think three dozen attributed to the artist), I liked "A Maid Asleep" the best, which both dwarves the others and lends an incredible notion of depth, from the foregrounded chair and fruit bowl to the table and framed painting in the next room, far in the background. His others are "Woman with a Lute" (dreamlike, sun-dappled), "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher" (gorgeous blues and detail), "Study of a Young Woman" (this one always slightly freaks me out) and "Allegory of the Catholic Faith" (which I don't think I've ever seen up close, it's a big canvas too and very strange, with the azure details here and there incl. this knifelike cloth suspending a glass orb, descending from the rafters). Of the related works, Nicolaes Maes' "Young Woman Peeling Apples" had me transfixed: the soft light and moving shadows lend intimacy, the girl's expression peace and contentment, and Maes' palette of orange, brown and red is superb. I want to see loads more from him. And you may not know it by my writings and general attitude toward art but I really dig Pieter de Hooch. His "The Visit", w/ the upturned hat in the foreground, is fantastic, and the framing of the people against static space is intriguing. I can't believe it's closing already; though it had a nearly three-month run it still feels too soon. And, if weather permits, dash up to the roof for your last chance @ Roxy Paine's phenomenal "Maelstrom" creature. Catch both tout de suite, you'll thank me later.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
Tsai Ming-Liang
Considering the Tsai Ming-Liang mini-retrospective @ the Asia Society, ending this weekend w/ a screening of his superior "What Time Is It There?" (2001) at 5p, I felt it appropriate to post my thoughts on essential contemporary director (who, along w/ Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang, founded the Taiwanese New Wave). It's a drag the Asia Society didn't include Tsai's riveting "The Wayward Cloud" (2005) and "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" (2006), which are both crucial for total appreciation of the director's oeuvre — esp. for the devoted viewer, who has traced lead actor Lee Kang-Sheng's maturation from the early days of punk wannabe ("Rebels of the Neon God", 1992) and emotionally fragile columbarium salesman ("Vive L'Amour", 1994). But hey, if you read my below text and dig it and attempt to track down Tsai's later (and regrettably rarer) works, then my work is done. So:
Tsai Ming-Liang — this guy is dope. you think of classic auteur directors who had their iconic recurring muses (Antonioni and Monica Vitti, Godard and Anna Karina, Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Leaud); now we have Tsai and his dynamic duo, Lee Kang-Sheng (Tsai's everyman who, depending on who you hear it from, may just be a bit like Tsai himself, onscreen) and Chen Shiang-Chyi (her incredible range from Lee's nameless fling in early film "The River" (1997) through her life-giving angelic power in recent film "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" cannot be denied). Tsai is part of the 'Second New Wave' of Taiwanese film, which incl. Hou Hsiao-Hsien (whose oeuvre I love, more on that another time) and Edward Yang ("Yi Yi" is pretty close to essential viewing for any film buff), though Tsai was born in Malaysia. This is interesting as most of his films are set in big-city, highly industrialized Taipei expect for his latest "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" (2006), which is set in similarly highly industrialized Kuala Lumpur — and most of the cast is Malaysian or Bangladeshi. This director is a proponent of long shots and static, atmospheric sound. The lengthy takes and pans are polarizing. Tsai newbies and fans of the MTV generation will undoubtedly be bored stiff, but if you take a moment and LOOK at what he's focusing on, you'll get it. Like the multi-minute-long tracking shot at the conclusion of "Vive L'Amour" (1994), following real estate agent Yang Kuei-Mei (she also stars as an unnamed songstress in "The Wayward Cloud") across a construction-razed park, up to an outdoor stadium, where she bursts into tears and the camera holds there patiently. Or like the fish-eye distorted static shot of the corridors in "The Wayward Cloud", as Chen first carts an enormous watermelon from one length of the frame to the other, then later drags a young comatose porn starlet from the lift to Chen's flat. Or the scene in "...Sleep Alone" where Lee (as migrant worker) sits in a dilapidated parking garage (centered around an enormous pond-like body of water), wearing a sarong, as a butterfly slowly moves into frame and alights on his shoulder. The sound bit is another, funny thing if you've seen his films from the earliest, "Rebels of the Neon God" (1992, with its dated-yet-cool pulsing Detroit techno soundtrack), through the present, you'll note the expansion of atmospheric sound over, say, soundtrack and even proper scripted dialogue! Oh there is a lot of 'speaking' in the loose trilogy of "What Time Is It There?" (2001, which is set partially in Paris and has a cameo by Jean-Pierre Leaud, perfect!!), "The Wayward Cloud" (2005, despite all its musical singalongs) and "...Sleep Alone", but much of this 'speaking' is either from the television, the radio, or overheard dialogue in crowded lunch halls and busy night streets. Lee and Chen are the leads in all three of these films but their scripted dialogue decreases dramatically in each. In fact, Lee says not a word in "...Sleep Alone" despite the fact he plays two people!! — a migrant worker and a comatose young man. And though this sort of makes sense as he's Taiwanese in Kuala Lumpur and doesn't speak the local tongue (and his other role is obviously nonspeaking, he's comatose), it is still of note. Chen doesn't say anything in "...Sleep Alone" either, but she cries once when her mother backhands her. Like 1/2 of "What Time..." is set in Paris, where Chen is visiting (for fun? for business? we never learn but she goes alone), and it's practically wordy by comparison. Chen meets up with a slightly older woman from Hong Kong, senses her kindred spirit, and tries making out with her (big mistake, Chen quickly learns). Meanwhile Lee is stuck in Taipei pining away for her. When "The Wayward Cloud" picks up, Chen is back in Taipei and Lee has become a porn star. Now SHE is desperately seeking him, and he plays it cool, to the point of standoffishness. It's tough to watch — you know she's really into him and he's not into her, but she doesn't get it and he's acting like a bastard. And then there's "...Sleep Alone", and Chen's dual role as caregiver to her comatose brother (Lee) and her blossoming relationship with grungy migrant worker (also Lee), who trails after her like a dog. They consummate, bringing full circle something that started nine years ago in "The River" (and jarred to consciousness violently at the conclusion of "The Wayward Cloud", and I'll write no more on that). And then we wonder, what's next for Tsai, Chen and Lee?
Tsai Ming-Liang — this guy is dope. you think of classic auteur directors who had their iconic recurring muses (Antonioni and Monica Vitti, Godard and Anna Karina, Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Leaud); now we have Tsai and his dynamic duo, Lee Kang-Sheng (Tsai's everyman who, depending on who you hear it from, may just be a bit like Tsai himself, onscreen) and Chen Shiang-Chyi (her incredible range from Lee's nameless fling in early film "The River" (1997) through her life-giving angelic power in recent film "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" cannot be denied). Tsai is part of the 'Second New Wave' of Taiwanese film, which incl. Hou Hsiao-Hsien (whose oeuvre I love, more on that another time) and Edward Yang ("Yi Yi" is pretty close to essential viewing for any film buff), though Tsai was born in Malaysia. This is interesting as most of his films are set in big-city, highly industrialized Taipei expect for his latest "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" (2006), which is set in similarly highly industrialized Kuala Lumpur — and most of the cast is Malaysian or Bangladeshi. This director is a proponent of long shots and static, atmospheric sound. The lengthy takes and pans are polarizing. Tsai newbies and fans of the MTV generation will undoubtedly be bored stiff, but if you take a moment and LOOK at what he's focusing on, you'll get it. Like the multi-minute-long tracking shot at the conclusion of "Vive L'Amour" (1994), following real estate agent Yang Kuei-Mei (she also stars as an unnamed songstress in "The Wayward Cloud") across a construction-razed park, up to an outdoor stadium, where she bursts into tears and the camera holds there patiently. Or like the fish-eye distorted static shot of the corridors in "The Wayward Cloud", as Chen first carts an enormous watermelon from one length of the frame to the other, then later drags a young comatose porn starlet from the lift to Chen's flat. Or the scene in "...Sleep Alone" where Lee (as migrant worker) sits in a dilapidated parking garage (centered around an enormous pond-like body of water), wearing a sarong, as a butterfly slowly moves into frame and alights on his shoulder. The sound bit is another, funny thing if you've seen his films from the earliest, "Rebels of the Neon God" (1992, with its dated-yet-cool pulsing Detroit techno soundtrack), through the present, you'll note the expansion of atmospheric sound over, say, soundtrack and even proper scripted dialogue! Oh there is a lot of 'speaking' in the loose trilogy of "What Time Is It There?" (2001, which is set partially in Paris and has a cameo by Jean-Pierre Leaud, perfect!!), "The Wayward Cloud" (2005, despite all its musical singalongs) and "...Sleep Alone", but much of this 'speaking' is either from the television, the radio, or overheard dialogue in crowded lunch halls and busy night streets. Lee and Chen are the leads in all three of these films but their scripted dialogue decreases dramatically in each. In fact, Lee says not a word in "...Sleep Alone" despite the fact he plays two people!! — a migrant worker and a comatose young man. And though this sort of makes sense as he's Taiwanese in Kuala Lumpur and doesn't speak the local tongue (and his other role is obviously nonspeaking, he's comatose), it is still of note. Chen doesn't say anything in "...Sleep Alone" either, but she cries once when her mother backhands her. Like 1/2 of "What Time..." is set in Paris, where Chen is visiting (for fun? for business? we never learn but she goes alone), and it's practically wordy by comparison. Chen meets up with a slightly older woman from Hong Kong, senses her kindred spirit, and tries making out with her (big mistake, Chen quickly learns). Meanwhile Lee is stuck in Taipei pining away for her. When "The Wayward Cloud" picks up, Chen is back in Taipei and Lee has become a porn star. Now SHE is desperately seeking him, and he plays it cool, to the point of standoffishness. It's tough to watch — you know she's really into him and he's not into her, but she doesn't get it and he's acting like a bastard. And then there's "...Sleep Alone", and Chen's dual role as caregiver to her comatose brother (Lee) and her blossoming relationship with grungy migrant worker (also Lee), who trails after her like a dog. They consummate, bringing full circle something that started nine years ago in "The River" (and jarred to consciousness violently at the conclusion of "The Wayward Cloud", and I'll write no more on that). And then we wonder, what's next for Tsai, Chen and Lee?
Monday, November 16, 2009
fee's LIST (through 11/24)
WEDNESDAY
* Air Waves + Beach Fossils @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/FREE. Well I know what I'm doing tonight! Free concert w/ the lovable surf-rocker(s) Beach Fossils and equally summery Air Waves, in a bowling alley in Wsburg. Very much yes.
* Gutai: A "Concrete" Discussion of Transnationalism @ Guggenheim Museum / 1071 5th Ave (456 to 86th St), 6:30p/$10. Alexandra Munroe, the Gugg's senior curator of Asian art, moderates a panel discussion on the Conceptualist Gutai Art Association, which preempted many art tendencies in the 1960s. Discussion topic: the message of Gutai in an increasingly transnational world.
THURSDAY
* Blanca Munoz "The Blue Dance" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Munoz's exciting wavelike stainless steel sculpture, inlaid w/ shots of cobalt blue perforated steel, affect a lightness belying their obvious weight. And apparently her works play off the natural light in the room, adding a second layer to the experience. This is the Madrid-based artist's NY debut.
+ Alejandro Corujeira "The Accessible, Dressed in Salts". The debut NY show from the Spanish artist (also based in Madrid), feat. his meandering linework and pleasant, pale color palette in a suite of acrylic paintings and works on paper.
* Lynda Benglis @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. New oozy, gravity-defying and -threatening sculptural works from the master of urethane and slippery cast aluminum.
* Richard Mosse "The Fall" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. A photographic survey of intense, remote locations (from the tip of Patagonia to far-north Canada) plus Mosse's works as an embed w/ the US military.
* Norbert Schwontkowski "Ångstrœm" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 528 W 26th St. The artist's surreally cartoonish oil paintings feat. hand-ground pigments, which should add to the intrigue of viewing these things in person.
* Pearlstein/Held "Five Decades" @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. I'm digging this parallel comparison on two divergent American artists, the figurative realist Philip Pearlstein (whose name befits his pearly capture of bare skin) and the uber-abstract artist Al Held. Both entered the art world around the same time and (though Held recently passed) they're nearly the same age, but their styles seem so totally different — right? Why not have a closer look?
* William J. O'Brien @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. The youngish artist pairs his cheery, trippy colored pencil works w/ glazed ceramic abstract sculpture, so it's kind of like looking at two different artists at once.
* Jerry Hirshberg @ Danese Gallery / 535 W 24th St. Hirshberg will teach you that photorealistic acrylic closeups of bamboo forests are really really cool to look at and contemplate.7
* Shinya Yamamura "Urushi Decorations" @ Ippodo Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Splendid, deftly prepared and finely colored traditional lacquer works, culled from the resiny urushi tree (same genus as poison ivy, I looked it up!).
* Kim Nam Pyo "Instant Landscapes" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. I've seen Kim's collage-y mixed media works before (his use of faux fur and diluted black paint to mimic traditional Korean ink painting is interesting), and this solo show should offer a broader view of his oeuvre — heavy, it seems, on equine imagery.
+ Andy Warhol "Small Paintings". Whenever the gallery hosts a non-Korean exhibit, it tends to be something thoughtful and quietly iconic. As in, Warhol's small-scale Maos, Flowers and Robots.
* Tom Hall + Sawako @ Monkeytown / 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7:30p/$7. A truly multisensory, space-exploring paring w/ discreet sound artist Sawako and mixed media performer Tom Hall.
FRIDAY
* "Mammoth" (dir. Lukas Moodysson, 2009) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). Emphasis here is less the solid cast (Michelle Williams and Gael Garcia Bernal, as the poor rich kids) than that this is the Swedish director's 1st NY-based film. His oeuvre incl. the charmingly gritty-sweet "Show Me Love" (1998), the visceral experiment "A Hole in My Heart" (2004) and standout "Lilya 4-Ever" (2002), whose ex-Soviet human-trafficking story is like a pickaxe to your heart.
* Ulrich Lamsfuss "Birdie" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 521 W 26th St. The Berlin-based artist reinterprets advert imagery in a series of oil paintings, watercolors, and pencil on paper portraits.
* "Broken Embraces" (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) screenings @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (FV to 2nd Ave). The beauty of self-referential cinema, as properly executed by Almodóvar w/ a strong noirish hand. And good as Quentin Tarentino is, placing the history of film w/in his films, the signature powerful women leads (Penélope Cruz, Angela Molina and Lola Dueñas, for three) and the gorgeous camerawork put Almodóvar on top. It's no surprise this was a big inclusion at this year's NYFF.
* ZAZA @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p. Brooklyn's dreamy, druggy ZAZA lead a nice lineup of positive-vibe indie-pop, which also feat. My Other Friend and Heliotropes.
* "Frontier of Dawn/La Frontiere de L'Aube" (dir. Philippe Garrel, 2008) screenings @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p+9:15p. Garrel's exquisite camerawork (I adored "Regular Lovers") continues in this story of l'amour fou, feat. his son Louis as a photographer and Laura Smet as his subject and object of desire. ALSO SAT/SUN 4:45, 7, 9:15p
* Crystal Fighters + Lemonade @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford) 9p/$8. Pepped up electro outfit Crystal Fighters hail from Spain, + their new single "Xtatic Truth" is refreshingly anthemic, but w/o the trashy saccharine undertones of trance music. And Lemonade's slinky grooves should pair nicely.
SATURDAY
* Fluffy Lumbers + Family Portrait @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$7. YES, this is a stellar lineup, courtesy of sunny, surfy Underwater Peoples. Begin w/ the folky, slightly beneath-the-waves "Mega Secrets" (Family Portrait), conclude w/ the bright sounds of "Cruisers" (Fluffy Lumbers).
* The Beets + Beachniks @ Death by Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Bit upset they're pitting my favs The Beets against Fluffy Lumbers (et al, @ Cake Shop, same time, different borough). Well, I do love the boys' stirred-up sing-along barbershop punk, so we'll see...
* "What Time is it There?" (dir. Tsai Ming-Liang, 2001) screening @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (), 5p. The finale of a mini sort-of retrospective of my favorite Taiwanese New Wave director is perhaps my favorite film from his enrapturing output. This Taipei- and Paris-set Nouvelle Vague journey begins a loose trilogy of unrequited love b/w recurring leads Lee Kang-Sheng and Chen Shiang-Chyi (followed by the polarizing soft-core musical "The Wayward Cloud" and the Kuala Lumpur-set, nearly dialogue-free "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone", both sadly absent from this festival). Enigmatic and heart-rending, and totally recommended.
SUNDAY
* Noveller @ Death by Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Sarah Lipstate brings the destruction via her bow, loop pedals and FX and a wicked double-necked guitar. One minute you're blanketed w/ Sigur Ros-like reverb, the next a maelstrom of gorgeous, hot noise. Recommended!
* Talib Kweli @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. I hear this often: what's the matter w/ indie hip-hop in NY? We've got Jay-Z commanding the radio and the Wu Tang basically scattered about (though R&Bish Ghostface is still dope), but what about that non-mainstream voice? Tell me you know Brooklyn's Kweli, of Black Star (w/ Mos Def) and Reflection Eternal (w/ DJ Hi-Tek) amid others. You're welcome.
* Clair/Picabia/Bunuel @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 5:30p. Feat. "Un Chien Andalou" (Bunuel w/ Dali, 1928), "Entr'acte" (Clair w/ Picabia, 1924), and Bunuel's solo project "Land Without Bread" (1932) — if you missed the brilliant Dada show @ the MoMA a few years back, consider this your golden primer on maddeningly essential Surrealist cinema.
MONDAY
* Melt-Banana @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Delancey), 8p/$15. Oh man, I've such memories of getting nasty sweaty to Japanese noise-rock outfit Melt-Banana back in uni. Maybe they've added increasing melody to their later works (which extend past the two-minute-mark, believe it or not), but if their earlier Knitting Factory show was any warning they're still intense as hell.
TUESDAY
* The Specific Heats w/ Family Portrait @ Bruar Falls / 295 Grand St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p/FREE. This will be dope, from beginning to end. Come early for undeniably good-vibey Family Portrait (see my SAT listing), stay late for Boston's high-fiving guy-girl-harmonizing The Specific Heats.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Urs Fischer "Marguerite de Ponty" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave, 6 to Spring St). It's a safe bet many of us art-lovers (and sometimes-enthusiasts) have been anticipating Fischer's gallery-filling solo show. Maybe for his gleeful irreverence to standing architecture (aka 'investigation of space', as in the floor-razing "You" at Gavin Brown's Enterprise a few years back), maybe for his multitalented mixed medium works (melting candle figures, cast-aluminum 'soft' sculpture, anti-Dada 'readymades'). Lots of scare-quotes here, sorry, but it's necessary. And Fischer's exhibition, of works from the past few years, exceeds in expectation whilst simultaneously lifting his cred as a serious artist. The sole hole here, the advert-spoiler "Noisette", is a motion-sensitive tongue that thrusts itself out a tennis ball-sized wall gash: it's a bit of a raspberry to his naysayers, maybe, but it's playful, innocent, innocuous, and by far the best thing. Start from the 4th fl, amid the towering cast-aluminum abstract forms, and decide for yourself what they mean. Maybe "Ix" is a horse-head (the missing head from Mauricio Cattelan's famous "Untitled"? Or Berlinde de Bruyckere's unsettling taxidermy?), or the stunning "David, the Proprietor" a primeval sea beast lashing up from the ocean's depths, or the eponymous "Marguerite de Ponty" a stately, voluptuous lifeform? The other bits in this room, the Robert Gober-esque (in a terribly surreal way) "The Lock", w/ its truncated subway bench and hovering cake, and the bizarrely-titled "Violent Cappuccino" (more aluminum and paint, in the guise of a skeleton fighting off 'cardboard boxes'), are cool to look at but are recurring characters in Fischer's past works. The 3rd fl is trippy, nearly empty save for the aforementioned "Noisette" and a melting (cast-aluminum again) piano. But the great surprise here is the site-specific environment, the collaborative effort w/ graphic designer Scipio Schneider, an installation where the empty gallery was exhaustively photographed and then reprinted as wall- and ceiling-paper. The result: soft pinks, purples and greens w/ trompe l'oeil shadows, sky-light, and public-safety signs. You need several minutes to really take in the unsettling effect — leave the floor if necessary but come back to see it again. He's done this before (the doubled "Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns" environment in Tony Shafrazi Gallery last year, replete w/ Shafrazi 'guards', was a trip), but the sneak-up quality here exceeds the earlier works. The 2nd fl, beginning or preferably the end, is Fischer's new multipart work "Service à la Française", but what this means is dozens of mirrored chrome boxes, silkscreened on all surfaces w/ a single object each: a sofa-sized tennis shoe, a milk-crate-sized Balenciaga strappy heel, a canoe-sized sausage. This piece works so well: it's Fischer having fun again but it's a joy to explore. Check the repetitions: halved red Bartlett pear here, rotting red Bartlett pear there; wax-candle cupcake here, deliciously-rendered chocolate-frosted cupcake (replete w/ sprinkles, naturally) there. The effect of it all, and seeing glimpses of yourself in the mirrors as you dash from one objet d'art to the next, is stimulus-overload, exhilarating, thoroughly recommended.
* Richard Serra "Blind Spot/Open Ended" @ Gagosian Gallery / 522 W 21st St. A thrilling pas de deux of Cor-Ten giants for W Chelsea. These related massive sculptures play off one another in form and function. "Blind Spot" is the scarier one, for me anyway, as it features odd little sharp right angles as you navigate the shell-like spiral, passing similar structures and you feel like you're walking in circles until suddenly the path truncates in this tight V deep w/in the sculpture. "Open Ended" has two entrance/exits (thankfully), but feels more dynamic in a way, as the sides rush up at you like waves of several-tonne steel as you loop up and cross back.
* Wayne Gonzales @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. This suite of hypnotic paintings, hung singly and in pairs and trios, function sort of like alienesque test patterns, as if Gonzales blew up his trademark dot-patterns to exceptional scale.
* Mark Manders @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The Dutch artist's last solo show (his first @ the gallery) was a thorough exercise in dread: windows papered over w/ freaky gibberish 'news', crumbling office-like installations, stolid clay-fired figures. This exhibition continues Manders' telltale unease but w/ a far sparer setup. The monumental set-pieces (w/ wild names like "Livingroom Scene with Enlarged Chairs" and "Large Figure with Book and Fake Dictionaries") often have an entire room to themselves, affording uninterrupted contemplation on such good-vibey stuff like bifurcated epoxy heads, threadbare clay-infused chairs, and iron towers. Proceed w/ caution!
* Kaz Oshiro "Setting Sun" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Oshiro takes his trompe l'oeil shaped and painted canvases to glorious heights, mainly in this wicked installation of 'Orange speaker cabinets'. If only Wata (and all of Boris, my fav Japanese stoner-rock trio) were present too! Plus slightly bent abstract canvases and 'rubbish bins'.
+ Robert Ryman. Lots going on w/ these three ostensibly Minimalist white paintings, from the late '60s and early '70s. The two larger canvases feat. a subtle banding and a yellowish tint (one seems to have heavier coats of paint near the bottom), and the smaller canvas has a waxy white chevron pattern, like Ryman taped the thing off to create the effect.
* Peter Fischli + David Weiss "Sleeping Puppets" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 526 W 22nd St. Fischli and Weiss have the run of Marks' three W Chelsea galleries, and I love this one the best. In the spare boutique-y space, they've installed a like 1/3 scale version of their avatars Rat and Bear, fast asleep on a pile of blankets. Observe closely their addicting repose: a hidden air apparatus subtly inflates each puppet's chest to echo their 'breathing'. Delightful.
* Peter Fischli + David Weiss "Sun, Moon and Stars" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. This symphony of advertisements under glass looks incredibly annoying and asinine from the doorway, but I strongly encourage you to venture in and walk the array, skimming over the chromatic and thematic groupings. By like halfway in I began to find the transitions (and even the subject of these ads) terribly hilarious.
* Dan Flavin "Series and Progressions" @ David Zwirner / 519-533 W 19th St. A gorgeous, sobering investigation into the Minimalist's core practice of repetition and color. Begin w/ the jewel-box "alternating pink and 'gold'" at 519, a three-wall installation of sugary pink and goldenrod fluorescent rods. Note the fuzzy-edged vibrations, how pairing the two colors turn the pinks whitish and the yellows lemony. In 525 you pass through a series of rooms, from the warm yellow and cherry-red pairings through the shock-saturated blue/reds and shimmering greens, ending on almost a sunrise-like blast of brightness. The seminal all-white "the nominal three (to William of Ockham)" acts as a palate-cleanser before the brilliant cage-like "untitled (to Helga and Carlo, with love and affection"), a white-hot bluish latticework extending across the breadth of 533's space.
* Peter Fischli + David Weiss "Clay and Rubber" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. A delicious assortment of the artists' bare clay or cast-rubber sculpture, mostly of banal objects (a cup, a pipe, a tree-root), from the past two decades. I especially dug the rubber stuff, incl. this incredible life-size 'leather' ottoman, w/ every stitch and dimple in place.
* Mike Kelley "Horizontal Tracking Lines" @ Gagosian Gallery / 555 W 24th St. Goodness, Kelley is a weirdo. His latest show is one heady trip, but it builds on his earlier accomplishments (coital rag-dolls, modified Abstract Expressionism, quirky video) so if you're familiar w/ his trickery, use his reputation to your advantage here. Expect: misshapen canvases bearing crudely rendered cartoonish or pornish figures amid smeared paint — and each of these is mounted on flat-color polychrome panels like massive pixels. Even better: the eponymous installation "Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms", which feat. more polychrome bars and three test-patterened video screens that project, once the click-track ends, random, split-second (and generally hilarious) Youtube clips. Think less his narrative-driven "Day is Done" and more like Luis Gispert's "Pony Show".
* "The Irreverent Object: European Sculpture from the '60s, '70s and '80s" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. A solid collection of disquietingly beautiful (and sometimes just undeniably disquieting) works from a range of talent. We get the banal ingredients (a lovely look-twice Dieter Roth and several approachable Martin Kippenbergers), the brain-trust (blood-red Lucio Fontana, intriguing Joseph Beuys, epic Louise Bourgeois) and several stunning glassed display boxes from Arman — and I dare you to pick the more disturbing, the assortment of gas masks or the boozy detritus credited to Robert Rauschenberg.
* Eric Fischl "Corrida in Ronda" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Confession: bullfighting is like the furthest from my cup of tea, but I still find Fischl's typically large, center-lit canvases dazzling. Though I did sort of avert my eyes from the more violent lot (there's one solo canvas, at the entryway, feat. just the bull, no toreros, that is quite lovely).
* Yue Minjun "Smile-isms" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St. Yue's guffawing, grimacing 'self'-portraits are a bunch of active men, throwing baseballs, climbing trees, sitting crosslegged on a diving board like a bunch of demure bathing beauties... What's the dialogue? Well, in these gorgeous color lithographs, maybe Yue means, in order to do these activities properly, the State wants you to enjoy the hell out of them. Be happy all the time! Check the gigantic Yue, yawning mouth stretching over a field of cattle, for a more literal impact.
* David Hockney "Paintings 2006-2009" @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St. I never thought I'd enjoy a straightforward landscape painting show as much as I enjoyed Hockney's. His renderings of Yorkshire, which mostly involves glades, felled trees and bunches of hawthorne, through various seasons, are magnetizing. The colors are fanciful (purplish roads, orange grass) yet visceral in his capture of the specific lighting. And the depth of these, esp. the woods, stretch for miles away. You know those scenes in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up", when David Hemmings is in the park and all you hear is the sound of the wind through the trees? That's what this exhibition feels like.
* Tim Eitel "New Paintings" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. Eitel's stark humanist renderings are moodily humorous as ever — figures in uncomfortable repose, homeless tents, misshapen piles of clothes, ruffled birds — but he's shrunk his canvases down now to book-sized, permitting nothing but the intensity of what's on paint to engulf your vision.
* Kristin Baker "Splitting Twilight" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. The energy in Baker's troweled acrylic on PVC panels is palpable as usual, but the subject matter — her 'remixes' of landscape style — is way more my thing. Her signature collage-y, mixed textural technique is in high effect, and she operates across the entire color spectrum like James Rosenquist, but there's a serious depth to these ostensibly 'flat' works that draws you in. One resembles a mashup of Nouveau Soho (cascading prisms of grayscale glass) w/ meteoric blobs of yellow and violet (like the graffiti-covered building across the street from the gallery). Another drifts woozily in a red-tinted tropical landscape amid fat 'palm tree' columns. A third, the dealmaker, is a three-panel study of restless blue waves under a multitonal sunset.
* Paul Chan "Sade for Sade's sake" @ Greene Naftali / 508 W 26th St 8th Fl. Word of advice before entering this brilliant narrative projection, arguably the standout work when it premiered at the 53rd Venice Biennale: you won't see the whole thing. Chan's centerpiece is nearly six hours long and there are no benches. But linger over the stark shadowy figures in various states of coitus and violence, covered now and then by abstract floating geometric shapes. If you're lucky, you'll see multicolored blocks, like translucent tinted tiles, sweeping across a landscape of de Sade's making. But if you hang around even for 10 minutes you'll experience the unnerving, graceful ballet of orgy, whippings, beatings, masturbation (with figures now and then speaking to one another), amid shapes that either obscure the action or flood past like the great shadows of trees and landscapes from the window of a train. Chan's loose ink drawings in the side galleries augment the action on the wall.
* Sean Scully @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. The neatest part of Scully's show is sorting out which canvases are linen and which are aluminum, as the fuzzy-edged blocks of paint take rather well to each. Though, like the press release, I dig "LANDBAR" quite a bit, as he exposes one panel of aluminum amid the painted surfaces.
* Bill Viola "Bodies of Light" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Love or loathe Viola, his exhibitions, which tend around watery slo-mo video, draw insane crowds. Like this one, which is total eye-candy (try to NOT be visually arrested by "Incarnation" and "Acceptance", even though they're sort of like being filmed in the shower) but by no means insubstantial. In fact, the "Pneuma" installation (this grainy video on three of four gallery walls) is a super palate cleanser from the fussier shows on the block.
* Teresita Fernandez @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. I really do dig Fernandez's graphite-only show, as the shimmery v. matte 'landscape' reliefs and soft v. rocky wall installation bear a meatier, dirtier aesthetic than her previous slick glass forays.
* Wolfgang Laib "Frieze of Life" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. The standout piece here, in Laib's typically spare show, is his rather literally titled "Pollen from Hazelnut". This belies the impact of the enormous fuzzy-edged yellow rectangle on the gallery floor, the result of several jars of hand-sifted pollen. It's like Rothko on the floor, sort of.
* Walton Ford @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. This has got to be the most violent Ford show I've seen, and the Audubonesque artist's masterfully watercolored and gouached large-scale works typically feature some sort of unrest or distress amid the regally rendered beasts of the earth. But these new works are another story: several are suicidal (incl. a dignified gorilla, twisting a rifle's barrel into its mouth), others bloodthirsty (a chilling caged deathmatch b/w two tigers and a lion and the infamous "The Island", a globe of wolflike thylacines gnawing at lambs and one another).
* Alighiero e Boetti "Mappa" @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. The first retrospective of the Arte Povera artist's 'Mappa' series: hand-embroidered world maps composed of respective country's flags. That is a simplistic summary, though, as these geopolitical works, working off Boetti's global consciousness, are both graphically and mindfully relevant.
* Tony Feher "Blossom" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. The show title draws from Feher's latest venture: super-duper big yet ominously feather-light extruded-polystyrene 'fans'.
+ Yoshihiro Suda. Fun thing about Suda's discreet trompe l'oeil wood-carved, hand-painted plants is how, on a rainy day like this past weekend, when people would track like the odd leaf or whatever into the gallery space, you can't quite tell whether that leaf is from outdoors or is intentionally placed there by the artist — his sculpture is THAT realistic.
* Air Waves + Beach Fossils @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/FREE. Well I know what I'm doing tonight! Free concert w/ the lovable surf-rocker(s) Beach Fossils and equally summery Air Waves, in a bowling alley in Wsburg. Very much yes.
* Gutai: A "Concrete" Discussion of Transnationalism @ Guggenheim Museum / 1071 5th Ave (456 to 86th St), 6:30p/$10. Alexandra Munroe, the Gugg's senior curator of Asian art, moderates a panel discussion on the Conceptualist Gutai Art Association, which preempted many art tendencies in the 1960s. Discussion topic: the message of Gutai in an increasingly transnational world.
THURSDAY
* Blanca Munoz "The Blue Dance" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Munoz's exciting wavelike stainless steel sculpture, inlaid w/ shots of cobalt blue perforated steel, affect a lightness belying their obvious weight. And apparently her works play off the natural light in the room, adding a second layer to the experience. This is the Madrid-based artist's NY debut.
+ Alejandro Corujeira "The Accessible, Dressed in Salts". The debut NY show from the Spanish artist (also based in Madrid), feat. his meandering linework and pleasant, pale color palette in a suite of acrylic paintings and works on paper.
* Lynda Benglis @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. New oozy, gravity-defying and -threatening sculptural works from the master of urethane and slippery cast aluminum.
* Richard Mosse "The Fall" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. A photographic survey of intense, remote locations (from the tip of Patagonia to far-north Canada) plus Mosse's works as an embed w/ the US military.
* Norbert Schwontkowski "Ångstrœm" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 528 W 26th St. The artist's surreally cartoonish oil paintings feat. hand-ground pigments, which should add to the intrigue of viewing these things in person.
* Pearlstein/Held "Five Decades" @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. I'm digging this parallel comparison on two divergent American artists, the figurative realist Philip Pearlstein (whose name befits his pearly capture of bare skin) and the uber-abstract artist Al Held. Both entered the art world around the same time and (though Held recently passed) they're nearly the same age, but their styles seem so totally different — right? Why not have a closer look?
* William J. O'Brien @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. The youngish artist pairs his cheery, trippy colored pencil works w/ glazed ceramic abstract sculpture, so it's kind of like looking at two different artists at once.
* Jerry Hirshberg @ Danese Gallery / 535 W 24th St. Hirshberg will teach you that photorealistic acrylic closeups of bamboo forests are really really cool to look at and contemplate.7
* Shinya Yamamura "Urushi Decorations" @ Ippodo Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Splendid, deftly prepared and finely colored traditional lacquer works, culled from the resiny urushi tree (same genus as poison ivy, I looked it up!).
* Kim Nam Pyo "Instant Landscapes" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. I've seen Kim's collage-y mixed media works before (his use of faux fur and diluted black paint to mimic traditional Korean ink painting is interesting), and this solo show should offer a broader view of his oeuvre — heavy, it seems, on equine imagery.
+ Andy Warhol "Small Paintings". Whenever the gallery hosts a non-Korean exhibit, it tends to be something thoughtful and quietly iconic. As in, Warhol's small-scale Maos, Flowers and Robots.
* Tom Hall + Sawako @ Monkeytown / 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7:30p/$7. A truly multisensory, space-exploring paring w/ discreet sound artist Sawako and mixed media performer Tom Hall.
FRIDAY
* "Mammoth" (dir. Lukas Moodysson, 2009) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). Emphasis here is less the solid cast (Michelle Williams and Gael Garcia Bernal, as the poor rich kids) than that this is the Swedish director's 1st NY-based film. His oeuvre incl. the charmingly gritty-sweet "Show Me Love" (1998), the visceral experiment "A Hole in My Heart" (2004) and standout "Lilya 4-Ever" (2002), whose ex-Soviet human-trafficking story is like a pickaxe to your heart.
* Ulrich Lamsfuss "Birdie" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 521 W 26th St. The Berlin-based artist reinterprets advert imagery in a series of oil paintings, watercolors, and pencil on paper portraits.
* "Broken Embraces" (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) screenings @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (FV to 2nd Ave). The beauty of self-referential cinema, as properly executed by Almodóvar w/ a strong noirish hand. And good as Quentin Tarentino is, placing the history of film w/in his films, the signature powerful women leads (Penélope Cruz, Angela Molina and Lola Dueñas, for three) and the gorgeous camerawork put Almodóvar on top. It's no surprise this was a big inclusion at this year's NYFF.
* ZAZA @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p. Brooklyn's dreamy, druggy ZAZA lead a nice lineup of positive-vibe indie-pop, which also feat. My Other Friend and Heliotropes.
* "Frontier of Dawn/La Frontiere de L'Aube" (dir. Philippe Garrel, 2008) screenings @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p+9:15p. Garrel's exquisite camerawork (I adored "Regular Lovers") continues in this story of l'amour fou, feat. his son Louis as a photographer and Laura Smet as his subject and object of desire. ALSO SAT/SUN 4:45, 7, 9:15p
* Crystal Fighters + Lemonade @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford) 9p/$8. Pepped up electro outfit Crystal Fighters hail from Spain, + their new single "Xtatic Truth" is refreshingly anthemic, but w/o the trashy saccharine undertones of trance music. And Lemonade's slinky grooves should pair nicely.
SATURDAY
* Fluffy Lumbers + Family Portrait @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$7. YES, this is a stellar lineup, courtesy of sunny, surfy Underwater Peoples. Begin w/ the folky, slightly beneath-the-waves "Mega Secrets" (Family Portrait), conclude w/ the bright sounds of "Cruisers" (Fluffy Lumbers).
* The Beets + Beachniks @ Death by Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Bit upset they're pitting my favs The Beets against Fluffy Lumbers (et al, @ Cake Shop, same time, different borough). Well, I do love the boys' stirred-up sing-along barbershop punk, so we'll see...
* "What Time is it There?" (dir. Tsai Ming-Liang, 2001) screening @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (), 5p. The finale of a mini sort-of retrospective of my favorite Taiwanese New Wave director is perhaps my favorite film from his enrapturing output. This Taipei- and Paris-set Nouvelle Vague journey begins a loose trilogy of unrequited love b/w recurring leads Lee Kang-Sheng and Chen Shiang-Chyi (followed by the polarizing soft-core musical "The Wayward Cloud" and the Kuala Lumpur-set, nearly dialogue-free "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone", both sadly absent from this festival). Enigmatic and heart-rending, and totally recommended.
SUNDAY
* Noveller @ Death by Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Sarah Lipstate brings the destruction via her bow, loop pedals and FX and a wicked double-necked guitar. One minute you're blanketed w/ Sigur Ros-like reverb, the next a maelstrom of gorgeous, hot noise. Recommended!
* Talib Kweli @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. I hear this often: what's the matter w/ indie hip-hop in NY? We've got Jay-Z commanding the radio and the Wu Tang basically scattered about (though R&Bish Ghostface is still dope), but what about that non-mainstream voice? Tell me you know Brooklyn's Kweli, of Black Star (w/ Mos Def) and Reflection Eternal (w/ DJ Hi-Tek) amid others. You're welcome.
* Clair/Picabia/Bunuel @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 5:30p. Feat. "Un Chien Andalou" (Bunuel w/ Dali, 1928), "Entr'acte" (Clair w/ Picabia, 1924), and Bunuel's solo project "Land Without Bread" (1932) — if you missed the brilliant Dada show @ the MoMA a few years back, consider this your golden primer on maddeningly essential Surrealist cinema.
MONDAY
* Melt-Banana @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Delancey), 8p/$15. Oh man, I've such memories of getting nasty sweaty to Japanese noise-rock outfit Melt-Banana back in uni. Maybe they've added increasing melody to their later works (which extend past the two-minute-mark, believe it or not), but if their earlier Knitting Factory show was any warning they're still intense as hell.
TUESDAY
* The Specific Heats w/ Family Portrait @ Bruar Falls / 295 Grand St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p/FREE. This will be dope, from beginning to end. Come early for undeniably good-vibey Family Portrait (see my SAT listing), stay late for Boston's high-fiving guy-girl-harmonizing The Specific Heats.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Urs Fischer "Marguerite de Ponty" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave, 6 to Spring St). It's a safe bet many of us art-lovers (and sometimes-enthusiasts) have been anticipating Fischer's gallery-filling solo show. Maybe for his gleeful irreverence to standing architecture (aka 'investigation of space', as in the floor-razing "You" at Gavin Brown's Enterprise a few years back), maybe for his multitalented mixed medium works (melting candle figures, cast-aluminum 'soft' sculpture, anti-Dada 'readymades'). Lots of scare-quotes here, sorry, but it's necessary. And Fischer's exhibition, of works from the past few years, exceeds in expectation whilst simultaneously lifting his cred as a serious artist. The sole hole here, the advert-spoiler "Noisette", is a motion-sensitive tongue that thrusts itself out a tennis ball-sized wall gash: it's a bit of a raspberry to his naysayers, maybe, but it's playful, innocent, innocuous, and by far the best thing. Start from the 4th fl, amid the towering cast-aluminum abstract forms, and decide for yourself what they mean. Maybe "Ix" is a horse-head (the missing head from Mauricio Cattelan's famous "Untitled"? Or Berlinde de Bruyckere's unsettling taxidermy?), or the stunning "David, the Proprietor" a primeval sea beast lashing up from the ocean's depths, or the eponymous "Marguerite de Ponty" a stately, voluptuous lifeform? The other bits in this room, the Robert Gober-esque (in a terribly surreal way) "The Lock", w/ its truncated subway bench and hovering cake, and the bizarrely-titled "Violent Cappuccino" (more aluminum and paint, in the guise of a skeleton fighting off 'cardboard boxes'), are cool to look at but are recurring characters in Fischer's past works. The 3rd fl is trippy, nearly empty save for the aforementioned "Noisette" and a melting (cast-aluminum again) piano. But the great surprise here is the site-specific environment, the collaborative effort w/ graphic designer Scipio Schneider, an installation where the empty gallery was exhaustively photographed and then reprinted as wall- and ceiling-paper. The result: soft pinks, purples and greens w/ trompe l'oeil shadows, sky-light, and public-safety signs. You need several minutes to really take in the unsettling effect — leave the floor if necessary but come back to see it again. He's done this before (the doubled "Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns" environment in Tony Shafrazi Gallery last year, replete w/ Shafrazi 'guards', was a trip), but the sneak-up quality here exceeds the earlier works. The 2nd fl, beginning or preferably the end, is Fischer's new multipart work "Service à la Française", but what this means is dozens of mirrored chrome boxes, silkscreened on all surfaces w/ a single object each: a sofa-sized tennis shoe, a milk-crate-sized Balenciaga strappy heel, a canoe-sized sausage. This piece works so well: it's Fischer having fun again but it's a joy to explore. Check the repetitions: halved red Bartlett pear here, rotting red Bartlett pear there; wax-candle cupcake here, deliciously-rendered chocolate-frosted cupcake (replete w/ sprinkles, naturally) there. The effect of it all, and seeing glimpses of yourself in the mirrors as you dash from one objet d'art to the next, is stimulus-overload, exhilarating, thoroughly recommended.
* Richard Serra "Blind Spot/Open Ended" @ Gagosian Gallery / 522 W 21st St. A thrilling pas de deux of Cor-Ten giants for W Chelsea. These related massive sculptures play off one another in form and function. "Blind Spot" is the scarier one, for me anyway, as it features odd little sharp right angles as you navigate the shell-like spiral, passing similar structures and you feel like you're walking in circles until suddenly the path truncates in this tight V deep w/in the sculpture. "Open Ended" has two entrance/exits (thankfully), but feels more dynamic in a way, as the sides rush up at you like waves of several-tonne steel as you loop up and cross back.
* Wayne Gonzales @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. This suite of hypnotic paintings, hung singly and in pairs and trios, function sort of like alienesque test patterns, as if Gonzales blew up his trademark dot-patterns to exceptional scale.
* Mark Manders @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The Dutch artist's last solo show (his first @ the gallery) was a thorough exercise in dread: windows papered over w/ freaky gibberish 'news', crumbling office-like installations, stolid clay-fired figures. This exhibition continues Manders' telltale unease but w/ a far sparer setup. The monumental set-pieces (w/ wild names like "Livingroom Scene with Enlarged Chairs" and "Large Figure with Book and Fake Dictionaries") often have an entire room to themselves, affording uninterrupted contemplation on such good-vibey stuff like bifurcated epoxy heads, threadbare clay-infused chairs, and iron towers. Proceed w/ caution!
* Kaz Oshiro "Setting Sun" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Oshiro takes his trompe l'oeil shaped and painted canvases to glorious heights, mainly in this wicked installation of 'Orange speaker cabinets'. If only Wata (and all of Boris, my fav Japanese stoner-rock trio) were present too! Plus slightly bent abstract canvases and 'rubbish bins'.
+ Robert Ryman. Lots going on w/ these three ostensibly Minimalist white paintings, from the late '60s and early '70s. The two larger canvases feat. a subtle banding and a yellowish tint (one seems to have heavier coats of paint near the bottom), and the smaller canvas has a waxy white chevron pattern, like Ryman taped the thing off to create the effect.
* Peter Fischli + David Weiss "Sleeping Puppets" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 526 W 22nd St. Fischli and Weiss have the run of Marks' three W Chelsea galleries, and I love this one the best. In the spare boutique-y space, they've installed a like 1/3 scale version of their avatars Rat and Bear, fast asleep on a pile of blankets. Observe closely their addicting repose: a hidden air apparatus subtly inflates each puppet's chest to echo their 'breathing'. Delightful.
* Peter Fischli + David Weiss "Sun, Moon and Stars" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. This symphony of advertisements under glass looks incredibly annoying and asinine from the doorway, but I strongly encourage you to venture in and walk the array, skimming over the chromatic and thematic groupings. By like halfway in I began to find the transitions (and even the subject of these ads) terribly hilarious.
* Dan Flavin "Series and Progressions" @ David Zwirner / 519-533 W 19th St. A gorgeous, sobering investigation into the Minimalist's core practice of repetition and color. Begin w/ the jewel-box "alternating pink and 'gold'" at 519, a three-wall installation of sugary pink and goldenrod fluorescent rods. Note the fuzzy-edged vibrations, how pairing the two colors turn the pinks whitish and the yellows lemony. In 525 you pass through a series of rooms, from the warm yellow and cherry-red pairings through the shock-saturated blue/reds and shimmering greens, ending on almost a sunrise-like blast of brightness. The seminal all-white "the nominal three (to William of Ockham)" acts as a palate-cleanser before the brilliant cage-like "untitled (to Helga and Carlo, with love and affection"), a white-hot bluish latticework extending across the breadth of 533's space.
* Peter Fischli + David Weiss "Clay and Rubber" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. A delicious assortment of the artists' bare clay or cast-rubber sculpture, mostly of banal objects (a cup, a pipe, a tree-root), from the past two decades. I especially dug the rubber stuff, incl. this incredible life-size 'leather' ottoman, w/ every stitch and dimple in place.
* Mike Kelley "Horizontal Tracking Lines" @ Gagosian Gallery / 555 W 24th St. Goodness, Kelley is a weirdo. His latest show is one heady trip, but it builds on his earlier accomplishments (coital rag-dolls, modified Abstract Expressionism, quirky video) so if you're familiar w/ his trickery, use his reputation to your advantage here. Expect: misshapen canvases bearing crudely rendered cartoonish or pornish figures amid smeared paint — and each of these is mounted on flat-color polychrome panels like massive pixels. Even better: the eponymous installation "Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms", which feat. more polychrome bars and three test-patterened video screens that project, once the click-track ends, random, split-second (and generally hilarious) Youtube clips. Think less his narrative-driven "Day is Done" and more like Luis Gispert's "Pony Show".
* "The Irreverent Object: European Sculpture from the '60s, '70s and '80s" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. A solid collection of disquietingly beautiful (and sometimes just undeniably disquieting) works from a range of talent. We get the banal ingredients (a lovely look-twice Dieter Roth and several approachable Martin Kippenbergers), the brain-trust (blood-red Lucio Fontana, intriguing Joseph Beuys, epic Louise Bourgeois) and several stunning glassed display boxes from Arman — and I dare you to pick the more disturbing, the assortment of gas masks or the boozy detritus credited to Robert Rauschenberg.
* Eric Fischl "Corrida in Ronda" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Confession: bullfighting is like the furthest from my cup of tea, but I still find Fischl's typically large, center-lit canvases dazzling. Though I did sort of avert my eyes from the more violent lot (there's one solo canvas, at the entryway, feat. just the bull, no toreros, that is quite lovely).
* Yue Minjun "Smile-isms" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St. Yue's guffawing, grimacing 'self'-portraits are a bunch of active men, throwing baseballs, climbing trees, sitting crosslegged on a diving board like a bunch of demure bathing beauties... What's the dialogue? Well, in these gorgeous color lithographs, maybe Yue means, in order to do these activities properly, the State wants you to enjoy the hell out of them. Be happy all the time! Check the gigantic Yue, yawning mouth stretching over a field of cattle, for a more literal impact.
* David Hockney "Paintings 2006-2009" @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St. I never thought I'd enjoy a straightforward landscape painting show as much as I enjoyed Hockney's. His renderings of Yorkshire, which mostly involves glades, felled trees and bunches of hawthorne, through various seasons, are magnetizing. The colors are fanciful (purplish roads, orange grass) yet visceral in his capture of the specific lighting. And the depth of these, esp. the woods, stretch for miles away. You know those scenes in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up", when David Hemmings is in the park and all you hear is the sound of the wind through the trees? That's what this exhibition feels like.
* Tim Eitel "New Paintings" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. Eitel's stark humanist renderings are moodily humorous as ever — figures in uncomfortable repose, homeless tents, misshapen piles of clothes, ruffled birds — but he's shrunk his canvases down now to book-sized, permitting nothing but the intensity of what's on paint to engulf your vision.
* Kristin Baker "Splitting Twilight" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. The energy in Baker's troweled acrylic on PVC panels is palpable as usual, but the subject matter — her 'remixes' of landscape style — is way more my thing. Her signature collage-y, mixed textural technique is in high effect, and she operates across the entire color spectrum like James Rosenquist, but there's a serious depth to these ostensibly 'flat' works that draws you in. One resembles a mashup of Nouveau Soho (cascading prisms of grayscale glass) w/ meteoric blobs of yellow and violet (like the graffiti-covered building across the street from the gallery). Another drifts woozily in a red-tinted tropical landscape amid fat 'palm tree' columns. A third, the dealmaker, is a three-panel study of restless blue waves under a multitonal sunset.
* Paul Chan "Sade for Sade's sake" @ Greene Naftali / 508 W 26th St 8th Fl. Word of advice before entering this brilliant narrative projection, arguably the standout work when it premiered at the 53rd Venice Biennale: you won't see the whole thing. Chan's centerpiece is nearly six hours long and there are no benches. But linger over the stark shadowy figures in various states of coitus and violence, covered now and then by abstract floating geometric shapes. If you're lucky, you'll see multicolored blocks, like translucent tinted tiles, sweeping across a landscape of de Sade's making. But if you hang around even for 10 minutes you'll experience the unnerving, graceful ballet of orgy, whippings, beatings, masturbation (with figures now and then speaking to one another), amid shapes that either obscure the action or flood past like the great shadows of trees and landscapes from the window of a train. Chan's loose ink drawings in the side galleries augment the action on the wall.
* Sean Scully @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. The neatest part of Scully's show is sorting out which canvases are linen and which are aluminum, as the fuzzy-edged blocks of paint take rather well to each. Though, like the press release, I dig "LANDBAR" quite a bit, as he exposes one panel of aluminum amid the painted surfaces.
* Bill Viola "Bodies of Light" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Love or loathe Viola, his exhibitions, which tend around watery slo-mo video, draw insane crowds. Like this one, which is total eye-candy (try to NOT be visually arrested by "Incarnation" and "Acceptance", even though they're sort of like being filmed in the shower) but by no means insubstantial. In fact, the "Pneuma" installation (this grainy video on three of four gallery walls) is a super palate cleanser from the fussier shows on the block.
* Teresita Fernandez @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. I really do dig Fernandez's graphite-only show, as the shimmery v. matte 'landscape' reliefs and soft v. rocky wall installation bear a meatier, dirtier aesthetic than her previous slick glass forays.
* Wolfgang Laib "Frieze of Life" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. The standout piece here, in Laib's typically spare show, is his rather literally titled "Pollen from Hazelnut". This belies the impact of the enormous fuzzy-edged yellow rectangle on the gallery floor, the result of several jars of hand-sifted pollen. It's like Rothko on the floor, sort of.
* Walton Ford @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. This has got to be the most violent Ford show I've seen, and the Audubonesque artist's masterfully watercolored and gouached large-scale works typically feature some sort of unrest or distress amid the regally rendered beasts of the earth. But these new works are another story: several are suicidal (incl. a dignified gorilla, twisting a rifle's barrel into its mouth), others bloodthirsty (a chilling caged deathmatch b/w two tigers and a lion and the infamous "The Island", a globe of wolflike thylacines gnawing at lambs and one another).
* Alighiero e Boetti "Mappa" @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. The first retrospective of the Arte Povera artist's 'Mappa' series: hand-embroidered world maps composed of respective country's flags. That is a simplistic summary, though, as these geopolitical works, working off Boetti's global consciousness, are both graphically and mindfully relevant.
* Tony Feher "Blossom" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. The show title draws from Feher's latest venture: super-duper big yet ominously feather-light extruded-polystyrene 'fans'.
+ Yoshihiro Suda. Fun thing about Suda's discreet trompe l'oeil wood-carved, hand-painted plants is how, on a rainy day like this past weekend, when people would track like the odd leaf or whatever into the gallery space, you can't quite tell whether that leaf is from outdoors or is intentionally placed there by the artist — his sculpture is THAT realistic.
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