Imagine my surprise when reading the Arts section of the NY Times and seeing this article on the Unsound Festival — and realizing the opening act at the Lincoln Center is none other than Finland's Sasu Ripatti, perhaps best known as Vladislav Delay. This is MAYJAH in the very essence of the word. Ripatti has never played in the States under his Vladislav Delay moniker — I believe he's played in NY before as Luomo but not otherwise. AND his style of abstract electronic music is quite possibly the warmest you will ever come across. I am completely serious with this statement. Throw out your notions of bumping 4x4 house and garbage-y trance, of shattered drum'n'bass and soothing, but heavily processed, ambient. Turn toward abstract and you get Autechre, whose music is so tantalizingly layered and alien that it comes off organic, breathing, but the 'warm' moments are few and far between. No, with Ripatti, in both his Vladislav Delay and Luomo forms, produces a very warm, albeit abstract, form of electronic music. His tracks, especially the ones that have the duration to move around and grow, really feel alive. It's funny that the other electronic act that draws such a strong reaction from me is another Finnish duo, Pan Sonic, though their style couldn't sound more different. At least you can't call them 'warm': their spectrum veers swiftly from ferocious, white-hot beats to ice-bloody-cold stretches of buzzing ambience, like icebergs moving a nearly frozen sea. But whoever told you Pan Sonic sounds like refrigerators humming, they're lying: if fridges sounded even remotely this interesting, we'd all be paying more attention. But I digress.
There seem to be two major schools of thought w/ Ripatti fans: those who came in digging him as Vladislav Delay (and/or Uusitalo, whose debut 'live album' Vapaa Muurari is very Vladislav-ian) or as Luomo, and as he began releasing albums under both names around the same time I can kind of see why the diverging interest. Plus, Luomo, on surface level, is WAY more accessible, even w/ his first album 'Vocalcity', which defined the subgenre microhouse. Ripatti takes your basic house concepts — 4x4 beat, bassline, female (mostly) vocal, hi-hat, synth — and cuts 'em down to size, repeats 'em, revises here and there and then may add a dash of this or that ingredient, but w/ restraint. The opening track on 'Vocalcity', "Market", HAS vocals, but they don't begin until like 3+ minutes into the 12-min track, though when you hear the woman's croon you'll probably find it damn catchy, even after the wait. "The Right Wing", also on 'Vocalcity', is 16 minutes long. Remember, this is accessible Ripatti. Despite the repetition and lengthy tracks, all the elements are readily IDable and, courtesy of the driving 4x4 house beats on each track, varied though they may be, you can bob along to it, dance even. Luomo's second release, 'The Present Lover', while still abstract as far as run-of-the-mill dance music is concerned, is totally made for the clubs, w/ a heavier degree of soulful singing (the 1-2 punch of "Shelter" and "What Good" does it everytime). By the time 'Paper Tigers' came out (let alone '08's 'Convivial') I began to lose the script. Dope tunes, but a bit too macro for my tastes. Still hotter than most other danceable electronic music, but not my cup of tea (though no one can touch old-school Luomo, in pure microhouse-ness).
Which brings me to Vladislav Delay, and the other school of thought. Some Luomo adherents consider Delay albums to be beatless Luomo albums, which is absolutely stupid. You must understand these are two hemispheres of one man, Ripatti, it's not like he's removing one thing (the 4x4 beat, say) to create one persona, or vice versa. His Delay tunes stand on their own as explorations into the sonic atmosphere, like aural spelunking, which makes a bunch of sense if you've heard his tracks, the ever-present delay. His stuff (bass, reverb, hiss) is DEEP. Spacious. This is where the life-form thing comes in. Delay tracks vary in length, more-so than Luomo's usual 6- to 12-min runtime. Early Delay, like the 'Ele' album, has 15- to 30- min beasts, undulating exercises in abstract electronic. And their not totally beatless, either, just fractured beats. His 'Anima' album from 2001, which many people seem to speak of either reverently or w/ disdain, is an eponymously titled hour-long improv fest, where Ripatti took a theme and built on it, deconstructed it, repeated it, echoed it, added more. It's a beguiling experience, and perhaps due to the awesome length I feel as though I hear new things every time I listen to it. Which I grant you is impossible, the track is on album, it's not like Ripatti is there conjuring new routines, but it feels that way sometimes. His 'Demo(n) Tracks' album features both short and longer tracks (some only 3 min in length), and while they're built to bleed into one another, they neatly fit a concept/melody/rhythm into each and can then stand autonomously. I sense this even better w/ his 2004 EP release 'Demo(n) Cuts', five untitled tracks of groovy, skeptical beats created after several big Luomo albums. This neat little project is a brilliant all-in primer for the Delay newbie and a personal favorite. Listen to this and the following long-player 'Demo(n) Tracks' and you'll catch remix-like similarities, but the EP is a fully-realized standalone. Plus its 5th track, not featured on 'Demo(n) Tracks', is a wicked, emotive closer — with beats AND a discernible synth line! The latest Delay release, 'Tummaa', is heavy on Ripatti's jazz roots, and features contributions from long-time collaborator Craig Armstrong and Lucio Capece. It is a cool meditative (and at times unnerving) experience, like hearing Murcof's pairing of chilly programmed beats w/ live strings, only drenched in Ripatti's breathy reverb.
Ripatti's performance this Thursday, as Delay, is alongside Lillevan, the Berlin-based video artist. His KinoVida duet w/ Ripatti debuted at Skanu Mezc Festival in Riga, Latvia in May 2009 and if it is anything like Thursday's performance (which, granted, should be extremely free-form and improvy, as is the nature of both Ripatti and Lillevan), NYC is in for something totally special.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
fee's LIST (through 2/2)
WEDNESDAY
* Naked Hearts + The Nasties @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p. I really dig Naked Hearts: Amy + Noah pack a lot of punch in their stripped-down guitar-drums duo (and she can sing really well).
* "Hausu" (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). I am so glad IFC Center installed two additional screens, so they can provide such luxe silver screen gems as this heady, Technicolor-fueled, schoolgirl-cast psychedelic freakout. Like Dario Argento through the mind of a preteen girl, super-cute yet incredibly disturbing.
THURSDAY
* Erwin Olaf "Hotel & Dawn/Dusk" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. Two new photo series' from the Dutch artist: 'Dawn/Dusk' maintains beautifully ornate rooms but w/ a cast either very pale ('Dawn') or dark ('Dusk'). 'Hotel' seems to be seminude models in hotel rooms.
* Geujin Han @ Gallery Satori / 164 Stanton St @ Clinton. Han manages to work w/ hard-edged geometric shapes AND thickly poured paint, to a interestingly organic abstract result.
* Oh No Ono + The Depreciation Guild @ Union Hall / 702 Union St, Park Slope (R to Union St, 23/45 to Atlantic Ave), 7:30p/$10. Brooklyn's Depreciation Guild (Kurt and Christoph of ultra-cuties The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) pair shoegaze w/ NES beats extremely effectively, but sometimes that makes them an odd addition to a bill. Not so w/ Denmark's electro-dreamy Oh No Ono, in their U.S. debut.
* "Rashomon" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1950) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 8:20/10:10p. Yes, it comes down to this, sadly, the final week of a giant 100th Anniv. Akira Kurosawa festival. But what a bangin' week it is! "Rashomon" is one of his most famous, a multiple-POV detective story set in 12th-C Kyoto, and feat. Machiko Kyo (the conflicted noblewoman) and Toshiro Mifune (the wildin' thug) at perhaps their most iconic roles.
* "Dreams" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1990) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 6p. Annnnnd we get Kurosawa at perhaps his most bizarre, a two-hour hallucination in a Van Gogh painting (courtesy of Martin Scorsese, srsly, as the artist) and other 'folk dreams'.
FRIDAY
* Tino Sehgal @ Guggenheim / 1071 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th S). I've got a very very strong feeling you'll need to catch Sehgal's solo exhibition more than once... or more than a dozen times, and yet you'll probably leave w/ a totally different feeling each visit. That's b/c Sehgal constructs 'situations', 'performances', 'gestures' — he instructs attendants to then execute these over the course of the show, w/ much opportunity for chance and improvisation. It's going to be fun trying to report on this...
* Family Portrait + Twin Sister @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. Absolutely incredible lineup, the magic-makers behind DC's Underwater Peoples label, Family Portrait, come together, right now, w/ the dreamy torch-song nuances of NY's Twin Sister (who, dare I say it, sound a slight bit like Portishead??), for free. w/ Austin's Pure Ecstasy.
* Oneida + Noveller @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle), 8p/$10. Let's call it 'progressive improv' night, the Kraut-rockish Brooklyn legends Oneida and Sarah Lipstate's (Noveller) mesmerizing guitar-drone set. w/ live video from Mighty Robot Visuals.
* Asobi Seksu @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (6 to Bleecker, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 7p/$15. The lovely Asobi Seksu may be working their dream-pop roots overtime (they always had it in 'em), but they keep the volume high and the feedback roiling on their live shows, don't you forget it.
* "Seven Samurai" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1954) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 8:20p (ALSO SAT 4:40/8:20p). You cannot top Kurosawa-san in epic fight-scenes. Hence astute leader Takashi Shimura and his odd band of rebels, incl. the always-lovable Toshiro Mifune, who can do no wrong w/ a nodachi.
SATURDAY
* Damien Hirst "End of An Era" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. A sea change for the subversive artist? Beyond his glittery photorealist paintings, Hirst includes two stunning installations, the titular taxidermy piece (a coda to "The Golden Calf"?) and a wall of 30,000 manufactured diamonds. I'm serious.
* Wolfgang Tillmans @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. The press release does well in dubbing this a 'constellation' of the artist's new photography: everything's unframed, and shot all over the world, so when taken as a whole perhaps we may sense its mirroring our own collective experience of contemporary society.
* Leonardo Drew @ Sikkema Jenkins @ Co / 530 W 22nd St. Large-scale 'excavation-style' installations (think mud, tree roots branches) plus works on paper and smaller freestanding sculpture. Trickster Vik Muniz furthers his 'Pictures of Junk' series — which if you've not seen, are wildly impressive massive outlined figures made in a junkyard — in the project space.
* Knyfe Hyts + Noveller + MNDR @ DCTV / 87 Lafayette St (6/JMZ to Canal St), 7p. Like a bolt out of the blue, DIY collective Less Artists more Condos drop a fantastic roster for Saturday night. The entire show sounds dope, so show up early for Noveller's (Sarah Lipstate) guitar-drone atmospherics and Grooms' progressive sludge-rock, and stay for no-wavers Knyfe Hyts (81?), one-woman groove act MNDR and Julianna Barwick's chordal ambience, bringing the whole night full circle. Note: unless info changes, the show will be here and NOT St James Church (also in Chinatown), as earlier advertised.
* Damon & Naomi w/ Michio Kurihara @ 92Y Tribeca / 200 Hudson St (1 to Hudson), 9:30p/$12. I've never totally fallen in love w/ Damon & Naomi's dreamy/woozy rock — maybe it's Damon's big ol' acoustic guitar high in the mix, overshadowing the rest — but I don't debate their relevance. Their experimentation has my interest, like their longtime collaboration w/ Ghost guitar maestro Kurihara (who sometimes plays alongside Japanese stoner-rock trio Boris). I pray they let him really WAIL on his six-string, b/c brother he really can.
* Rain Machine + Anti-Pop Consortium @ BAM Howard Gilman Opera House / 30 Lafayette St, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins, M/R to Dekalb Ave), 8p/$20. Rain Machine is the solo moniker for Kyp Malone (aka guitarist/co-vocalist of TV on the Radio), whose personal project is more bluegrassy, more jazzy, than TV's own eclectic stylistic stew. And NY's own Anti-Pop Consortium are w/o a doubt the most cerebrally electrifying abstract hip-hop group in existance. Part of the 'Sounds Like Brooklyn' series.
* Total Slacker + Fluffy Lumbers + Sisters @ Shea Stadium / 20 Meadow St, Willliamsburg (L to Grand), 9p/$7. One jam-packed fun-filled night of young Brooklyn indie. Inclusion of Fluffy Lumbers is enuff to get me out there, but I'm digging Total Slacker's loose sing-along sets more and more.
* Twin Sister @ Lofts above Richie's Gym / intersection of Jefferson St & Stanwix, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle, it's like a block from Market Hotel), 9p/$5. Chocolate Bobka is sponsoring a jammy loft party w/ Twin Sister and Pure Ecstasy — think of it as a super-indie next-night afterparty from the Bruar Falls show.
SUNDAY
* Darlings @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. All is right in the world. January is over and Darlings play a big-hearted, boy-girl-harmonizing, feedback-y indie rock set at a free show in Wsburg. w/ Rifle Recoil.
TUESDAY
*"Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). Photocollage and watercolors by aristocratic women in the mid 19th C. I cannot make this stuff up.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Josh Keyes "Fragment" + Saelee Oh "Infinite Roots" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. VERY good dual show, props to the gallery for finding two artists who balance quite well. Keyes' exquisitely rendered acrylic paintings take up much of the space, and they're a trip. Each is like a 3/4 square of either earth, pavement or water, involving some sort of fauna (elk, bears and sharks are recurring characters) interacting w/ or morphing into the space. Think Shintaro Kago's dreamlike manga (specifically "Abstraction"), only less frightening. Oh's contribution, a combo of wildly realized hand-cut paper mock-ups of detailed human-root structures and wispy mixed media works on paper, similar subject matter to the cut-outs but quite colorful, is a softer counterpart to Keyes' amorphous edges.
* Superflex "Flooded McDonald's" @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. The 21-minute allure of this Danish collective's titular video rivals many of the long-players in theatres right now. Picture this: they mocked up a true-to-life McDonalds (that iconic fast-food institution that has metastasized globally) then inundated it w/ water. Said deluge first appears to come from the loo (hilarious), but then its everywhere, rising w/in minutes. One of the 1st casualties, funnily enough, is the life-size Ronald McDonald statue (made of plastic, I'm guessing, as it floats buoyantly amidst the waves). Then you have the trays of uneaten food sweeping off the tables (the lead-up is palpable, you're like 'oh I canNOT wait to see what happens'). Finally, the electric signage (golden arches et al) fizzle out, and we're left w/ a few minutes of creepy submerged darkness, the odd fry or soda can floating by... Superflex's other two videos don't hold the same power, though their cinematic 'Burning Car' will satiate action-movie freaks.
* David Reed "Works on Paper" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St. Absolutely essential viewing for Reed buffs (self included) or anyone remotely interested in the workings of one of contemporary art's more intriguing abstract painters. I am totally serious here. Check it: Reed paints these ribbon-y, otherworldly, color-saturated abstracts in either skinny verticals or subway-graf style horizontals. I have no idea how he does it, but his mastery and control of the paint is top-notch. This expansive show features his work-sheets (enlarged diary entries, almost, sketches, paint swatches and his draftsman's lettering covering graph paper) and color studies. Read through a suitably detailed work-sheet (they all are, just pick one), get the gist of 'layering', 'transparency', 'removal' etc, then check one of the rough color studies and you will still have NO idea how point A goes to point B — but you'll have some insight into the artist's workings. The suite of color studies in the front gallery, which I strongly suggest you check LAST, are an eye-popping green and dayglo orange mix from this year, progress towards some dope paintings, no doubt.
* Hannes Bend "endlich" @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. The Berlin-based artist's unique candy-cast sculpture (typical downtown-chic Christian religious imagery, plus an elk head) are really sweet. But seriously, they're pretty damn cool — they look like resin but aren't (like if Mike Kelley and Terence Koh collaborated). His geometric explosions on black ground are masterful, in that there's no bleedthough from the endlessly superimposed circles, and somehow the really glittery colors resemble candy wrappers.
* Anne Collier @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Collier's super-sharp C-prints w/ their eye-trickery subject matter (check the Rene Magritte-ish 'Open Book' series, plus the crisp 'Cut') totally reminded me of Christopher Williams, the conceptual photographer I most ID w/ when viewing these sort of representational prints.
* Stanley Whitney @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. I like Whitney's mostly big blocky oil on linen abstracts, and the cool thing is the 1st 1/2 of them (in the front gallery, check the coolly named 'Bob's (Rauschenberg) Smile') bear the artist's streaky brushstrokes, sometimes as color building over other color. This contrasts the larger paintings in the back gallery, which figure in more hard-edge swaths that abut, just so, to one another.
LAST CHANCE
* Zhang Huan "Neither Coming Nor Going" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. Zhang's second solo show w/ the gallery is an overall calmer affair than last year's, though it maintains two of his signature recurring elements: monumental scale and ash. This time both figure into one piece, the 18'-tall "Rulai", an ash Buddha imbued w/ relics, copper dishes and unburned joss sticks. It's actually a few feet taller than his cowhide-composed "Giant No. 3", the woman-and-child sculpture from last year's show, but — and maybe this is b/c the subject matter is a Buddha — this compact-ash sculpture just seems more serene, blending in w/ the architecture and beams of the gallery instead of competing w/ it as a huge installation. Framing "Rulai" are Zhang's new large-scale ink and feather paintings on handmade mulberry paper, depictions of deer and landscapes in the manner of 17th c. calligrapher Bada Shanren and 7th c. Tang Dynasty tome "Tui Bei Tu". My final assessment: last year's debut grabbed our attention. This year's solidifies Zhang's oeuvre in our conscious.
* 'Repetition' Group Show @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. I am unofficially titling this five-artist exhibition a 'repetition' show, though one artist, Joel Shapiro, contributes a single plaster-cast cone instead of multiples. Think of it like a trumpet for the others, the earthy creosote-wood slabs from Carl Andre, the architecturally-exacting clean wood Krate Tables from Sherrie Levine (a rotation of same-size planks, to wondrous effect), Jennifer Bartlett's bracing enamel wall installation (a meditation on evolving forms?) and a wildly gridlike wood piece from Sol LeWitt.
* Jon Pylypchuk "The War" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. OK picture the puppet-characters from a classic dark-hearted Jim Henson film, or perhaps better yet anything by Tim Burton. Now cross those w/ the tribal masks from the Met's Oceanic Arts dept, only cobble 'em together out of hardware store materials. Illuminate 'em all how you see fit, either incandescent or flickery fire bulbs. Actually, Pylypchuk's show is sort of like that Amex "don't take chances, take charge" commercial, where it's like a series of sad faces and happy faces. I am slightly embarrassed to even know this.
* Sharon Lockhart "Lunch Break" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Really nice exhibition. Lockhart frames an ironworkers' union via indirect means: C-prints focused on their lunchboxes (check the woven-basket one), snack-food commons areas, and this super slo-mo tracking shot of the men at rest. This is executed quite well: we watch the camera slowly, slowwwwly move up this corridor to the din of heavy machinery, passing the workers' lockers and the odd boxy machine, and you probably can't help but gaze at this flanneled dude standing in the middle of the corridor, staring up at something. The guys around him move in and out of frame (albeit very slowly), rustling newspapers or drinking coffee, but this guy stands transfixed, captivated. Finally, once the camera nearly overtakes him, he reaches up, his hands going towards an unseen object, then we realize he was watching the microwave, and out comes a bag of popped corn, and off he goes, away from the camera's eye.
* Naked Hearts + The Nasties @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p. I really dig Naked Hearts: Amy + Noah pack a lot of punch in their stripped-down guitar-drums duo (and she can sing really well).
* "Hausu" (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). I am so glad IFC Center installed two additional screens, so they can provide such luxe silver screen gems as this heady, Technicolor-fueled, schoolgirl-cast psychedelic freakout. Like Dario Argento through the mind of a preteen girl, super-cute yet incredibly disturbing.
THURSDAY
* Erwin Olaf "Hotel & Dawn/Dusk" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. Two new photo series' from the Dutch artist: 'Dawn/Dusk' maintains beautifully ornate rooms but w/ a cast either very pale ('Dawn') or dark ('Dusk'). 'Hotel' seems to be seminude models in hotel rooms.
* Geujin Han @ Gallery Satori / 164 Stanton St @ Clinton. Han manages to work w/ hard-edged geometric shapes AND thickly poured paint, to a interestingly organic abstract result.
* Oh No Ono + The Depreciation Guild @ Union Hall / 702 Union St, Park Slope (R to Union St, 23/45 to Atlantic Ave), 7:30p/$10. Brooklyn's Depreciation Guild (Kurt and Christoph of ultra-cuties The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) pair shoegaze w/ NES beats extremely effectively, but sometimes that makes them an odd addition to a bill. Not so w/ Denmark's electro-dreamy Oh No Ono, in their U.S. debut.
* "Rashomon" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1950) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 8:20/10:10p. Yes, it comes down to this, sadly, the final week of a giant 100th Anniv. Akira Kurosawa festival. But what a bangin' week it is! "Rashomon" is one of his most famous, a multiple-POV detective story set in 12th-C Kyoto, and feat. Machiko Kyo (the conflicted noblewoman) and Toshiro Mifune (the wildin' thug) at perhaps their most iconic roles.
* "Dreams" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1990) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 6p. Annnnnd we get Kurosawa at perhaps his most bizarre, a two-hour hallucination in a Van Gogh painting (courtesy of Martin Scorsese, srsly, as the artist) and other 'folk dreams'.
FRIDAY
* Tino Sehgal @ Guggenheim / 1071 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th S). I've got a very very strong feeling you'll need to catch Sehgal's solo exhibition more than once... or more than a dozen times, and yet you'll probably leave w/ a totally different feeling each visit. That's b/c Sehgal constructs 'situations', 'performances', 'gestures' — he instructs attendants to then execute these over the course of the show, w/ much opportunity for chance and improvisation. It's going to be fun trying to report on this...
* Family Portrait + Twin Sister @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. Absolutely incredible lineup, the magic-makers behind DC's Underwater Peoples label, Family Portrait, come together, right now, w/ the dreamy torch-song nuances of NY's Twin Sister (who, dare I say it, sound a slight bit like Portishead??), for free. w/ Austin's Pure Ecstasy.
* Oneida + Noveller @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle), 8p/$10. Let's call it 'progressive improv' night, the Kraut-rockish Brooklyn legends Oneida and Sarah Lipstate's (Noveller) mesmerizing guitar-drone set. w/ live video from Mighty Robot Visuals.
* Asobi Seksu @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (6 to Bleecker, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 7p/$15. The lovely Asobi Seksu may be working their dream-pop roots overtime (they always had it in 'em), but they keep the volume high and the feedback roiling on their live shows, don't you forget it.
* "Seven Samurai" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1954) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 8:20p (ALSO SAT 4:40/8:20p). You cannot top Kurosawa-san in epic fight-scenes. Hence astute leader Takashi Shimura and his odd band of rebels, incl. the always-lovable Toshiro Mifune, who can do no wrong w/ a nodachi.
SATURDAY
* Damien Hirst "End of An Era" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. A sea change for the subversive artist? Beyond his glittery photorealist paintings, Hirst includes two stunning installations, the titular taxidermy piece (a coda to "The Golden Calf"?) and a wall of 30,000 manufactured diamonds. I'm serious.
* Wolfgang Tillmans @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. The press release does well in dubbing this a 'constellation' of the artist's new photography: everything's unframed, and shot all over the world, so when taken as a whole perhaps we may sense its mirroring our own collective experience of contemporary society.
* Leonardo Drew @ Sikkema Jenkins @ Co / 530 W 22nd St. Large-scale 'excavation-style' installations (think mud, tree roots branches) plus works on paper and smaller freestanding sculpture. Trickster Vik Muniz furthers his 'Pictures of Junk' series — which if you've not seen, are wildly impressive massive outlined figures made in a junkyard — in the project space.
* Knyfe Hyts + Noveller + MNDR @ DCTV / 87 Lafayette St (6/JMZ to Canal St), 7p. Like a bolt out of the blue, DIY collective Less Artists more Condos drop a fantastic roster for Saturday night. The entire show sounds dope, so show up early for Noveller's (Sarah Lipstate) guitar-drone atmospherics and Grooms' progressive sludge-rock, and stay for no-wavers Knyfe Hyts (81?), one-woman groove act MNDR and Julianna Barwick's chordal ambience, bringing the whole night full circle. Note: unless info changes, the show will be here and NOT St James Church (also in Chinatown), as earlier advertised.
* Damon & Naomi w/ Michio Kurihara @ 92Y Tribeca / 200 Hudson St (1 to Hudson), 9:30p/$12. I've never totally fallen in love w/ Damon & Naomi's dreamy/woozy rock — maybe it's Damon's big ol' acoustic guitar high in the mix, overshadowing the rest — but I don't debate their relevance. Their experimentation has my interest, like their longtime collaboration w/ Ghost guitar maestro Kurihara (who sometimes plays alongside Japanese stoner-rock trio Boris). I pray they let him really WAIL on his six-string, b/c brother he really can.
* Rain Machine + Anti-Pop Consortium @ BAM Howard Gilman Opera House / 30 Lafayette St, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins, M/R to Dekalb Ave), 8p/$20. Rain Machine is the solo moniker for Kyp Malone (aka guitarist/co-vocalist of TV on the Radio), whose personal project is more bluegrassy, more jazzy, than TV's own eclectic stylistic stew. And NY's own Anti-Pop Consortium are w/o a doubt the most cerebrally electrifying abstract hip-hop group in existance. Part of the 'Sounds Like Brooklyn' series.
* Total Slacker + Fluffy Lumbers + Sisters @ Shea Stadium / 20 Meadow St, Willliamsburg (L to Grand), 9p/$7. One jam-packed fun-filled night of young Brooklyn indie. Inclusion of Fluffy Lumbers is enuff to get me out there, but I'm digging Total Slacker's loose sing-along sets more and more.
* Twin Sister @ Lofts above Richie's Gym / intersection of Jefferson St & Stanwix, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle, it's like a block from Market Hotel), 9p/$5. Chocolate Bobka is sponsoring a jammy loft party w/ Twin Sister and Pure Ecstasy — think of it as a super-indie next-night afterparty from the Bruar Falls show.
SUNDAY
* Darlings @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. All is right in the world. January is over and Darlings play a big-hearted, boy-girl-harmonizing, feedback-y indie rock set at a free show in Wsburg. w/ Rifle Recoil.
TUESDAY
*"Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). Photocollage and watercolors by aristocratic women in the mid 19th C. I cannot make this stuff up.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Josh Keyes "Fragment" + Saelee Oh "Infinite Roots" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. VERY good dual show, props to the gallery for finding two artists who balance quite well. Keyes' exquisitely rendered acrylic paintings take up much of the space, and they're a trip. Each is like a 3/4 square of either earth, pavement or water, involving some sort of fauna (elk, bears and sharks are recurring characters) interacting w/ or morphing into the space. Think Shintaro Kago's dreamlike manga (specifically "Abstraction"), only less frightening. Oh's contribution, a combo of wildly realized hand-cut paper mock-ups of detailed human-root structures and wispy mixed media works on paper, similar subject matter to the cut-outs but quite colorful, is a softer counterpart to Keyes' amorphous edges.
* Superflex "Flooded McDonald's" @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. The 21-minute allure of this Danish collective's titular video rivals many of the long-players in theatres right now. Picture this: they mocked up a true-to-life McDonalds (that iconic fast-food institution that has metastasized globally) then inundated it w/ water. Said deluge first appears to come from the loo (hilarious), but then its everywhere, rising w/in minutes. One of the 1st casualties, funnily enough, is the life-size Ronald McDonald statue (made of plastic, I'm guessing, as it floats buoyantly amidst the waves). Then you have the trays of uneaten food sweeping off the tables (the lead-up is palpable, you're like 'oh I canNOT wait to see what happens'). Finally, the electric signage (golden arches et al) fizzle out, and we're left w/ a few minutes of creepy submerged darkness, the odd fry or soda can floating by... Superflex's other two videos don't hold the same power, though their cinematic 'Burning Car' will satiate action-movie freaks.
* David Reed "Works on Paper" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St. Absolutely essential viewing for Reed buffs (self included) or anyone remotely interested in the workings of one of contemporary art's more intriguing abstract painters. I am totally serious here. Check it: Reed paints these ribbon-y, otherworldly, color-saturated abstracts in either skinny verticals or subway-graf style horizontals. I have no idea how he does it, but his mastery and control of the paint is top-notch. This expansive show features his work-sheets (enlarged diary entries, almost, sketches, paint swatches and his draftsman's lettering covering graph paper) and color studies. Read through a suitably detailed work-sheet (they all are, just pick one), get the gist of 'layering', 'transparency', 'removal' etc, then check one of the rough color studies and you will still have NO idea how point A goes to point B — but you'll have some insight into the artist's workings. The suite of color studies in the front gallery, which I strongly suggest you check LAST, are an eye-popping green and dayglo orange mix from this year, progress towards some dope paintings, no doubt.
* Hannes Bend "endlich" @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. The Berlin-based artist's unique candy-cast sculpture (typical downtown-chic Christian religious imagery, plus an elk head) are really sweet. But seriously, they're pretty damn cool — they look like resin but aren't (like if Mike Kelley and Terence Koh collaborated). His geometric explosions on black ground are masterful, in that there's no bleedthough from the endlessly superimposed circles, and somehow the really glittery colors resemble candy wrappers.
* Anne Collier @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Collier's super-sharp C-prints w/ their eye-trickery subject matter (check the Rene Magritte-ish 'Open Book' series, plus the crisp 'Cut') totally reminded me of Christopher Williams, the conceptual photographer I most ID w/ when viewing these sort of representational prints.
* Stanley Whitney @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. I like Whitney's mostly big blocky oil on linen abstracts, and the cool thing is the 1st 1/2 of them (in the front gallery, check the coolly named 'Bob's (Rauschenberg) Smile') bear the artist's streaky brushstrokes, sometimes as color building over other color. This contrasts the larger paintings in the back gallery, which figure in more hard-edge swaths that abut, just so, to one another.
LAST CHANCE
* Zhang Huan "Neither Coming Nor Going" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. Zhang's second solo show w/ the gallery is an overall calmer affair than last year's, though it maintains two of his signature recurring elements: monumental scale and ash. This time both figure into one piece, the 18'-tall "Rulai", an ash Buddha imbued w/ relics, copper dishes and unburned joss sticks. It's actually a few feet taller than his cowhide-composed "Giant No. 3", the woman-and-child sculpture from last year's show, but — and maybe this is b/c the subject matter is a Buddha — this compact-ash sculpture just seems more serene, blending in w/ the architecture and beams of the gallery instead of competing w/ it as a huge installation. Framing "Rulai" are Zhang's new large-scale ink and feather paintings on handmade mulberry paper, depictions of deer and landscapes in the manner of 17th c. calligrapher Bada Shanren and 7th c. Tang Dynasty tome "Tui Bei Tu". My final assessment: last year's debut grabbed our attention. This year's solidifies Zhang's oeuvre in our conscious.
* 'Repetition' Group Show @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. I am unofficially titling this five-artist exhibition a 'repetition' show, though one artist, Joel Shapiro, contributes a single plaster-cast cone instead of multiples. Think of it like a trumpet for the others, the earthy creosote-wood slabs from Carl Andre, the architecturally-exacting clean wood Krate Tables from Sherrie Levine (a rotation of same-size planks, to wondrous effect), Jennifer Bartlett's bracing enamel wall installation (a meditation on evolving forms?) and a wildly gridlike wood piece from Sol LeWitt.
* Jon Pylypchuk "The War" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. OK picture the puppet-characters from a classic dark-hearted Jim Henson film, or perhaps better yet anything by Tim Burton. Now cross those w/ the tribal masks from the Met's Oceanic Arts dept, only cobble 'em together out of hardware store materials. Illuminate 'em all how you see fit, either incandescent or flickery fire bulbs. Actually, Pylypchuk's show is sort of like that Amex "don't take chances, take charge" commercial, where it's like a series of sad faces and happy faces. I am slightly embarrassed to even know this.
* Sharon Lockhart "Lunch Break" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Really nice exhibition. Lockhart frames an ironworkers' union via indirect means: C-prints focused on their lunchboxes (check the woven-basket one), snack-food commons areas, and this super slo-mo tracking shot of the men at rest. This is executed quite well: we watch the camera slowly, slowwwwly move up this corridor to the din of heavy machinery, passing the workers' lockers and the odd boxy machine, and you probably can't help but gaze at this flanneled dude standing in the middle of the corridor, staring up at something. The guys around him move in and out of frame (albeit very slowly), rustling newspapers or drinking coffee, but this guy stands transfixed, captivated. Finally, once the camera nearly overtakes him, he reaches up, his hands going towards an unseen object, then we realize he was watching the microwave, and out comes a bag of popped corn, and off he goes, away from the camera's eye.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
fee's LIST (through 1/26)
WEDNESDAY
* Total Slacker + Reading Rainbow @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$7. This should be a good 'n messy show, the feedback-drenched Reading Rainbow and particularly Total Slacker, whose Warholish frontman buries the lyrics under a trundling bassline. Added bonus is the charmingly titled Easter Vomit, who has something to do w/ Queens all-stars The Beets.
* Big Troubles + My Teenage Stride @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St, 6 to Bleecker), 10p/$8. I honestly don't understand how this is billed as a 'fully seated' event. Oh, I bet there are chairs, but how can you sit to Jedediah Smith and crew's wonderfully popish My Teenage Stride, let alone the searing feedback jamming of Big Troubles??
THURSDAY
* Anne Collier @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Collier's first solo show at the gallery, an exhibition of her crisply subversive C-print photography.
* Darlings @ Union Pool / 484 Union Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 9p/$7. Brooklyn's Darlings (and they truly are) craft the freshest boy-girl '90s indie-rock around, bar none. Raleigh's Lonnie Walker joins the party for some campfire tunes of his own.
* Open Ocean w/ Bull Thieves @ Monkeytown / 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 10:30p/$5 (reservations recommended!). A/V artist Shadrach Lindo creates live manipulated video projections to accompany these two dreamy bands. But the real coup for me is Open Ocean: this fashion-y foursome play some wicked, emotive pop music (I'd almost take it to mid-90s, Bristol-based trip-hop, if that sweetens the deal).
* "The Shaft" (dir. Zhang Chi, 2008) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 7p (ALSO SUN 5p). Family drama centered around western China's mining industry, where the three main characters (aged father, attractive daughter, singer-inspired son) make a living.
* "Pripyat" (dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 1999) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 Second Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7:15p. A doc on the people who still live and work 'in the zone', i.e. the restricted area around Chernobyl. For real.
FRIDAY
* Superflex "Flooded McDonald's" @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. The Danish collective shows three short films, including their first, "Burning Car" (2007), a deadpan 'cinematic' take on a potent symbol of disorder (and sensationalism), and the titular film, a slowly submerging reconstruction of the omnipresent fast-food joint.
* "The Good The Bad The Weird" (dir. Kim Ji-woon, 2008) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 7p. Kim's madcap take on the spaghetti western, set in 1930's Manchuria, where the theme 'showdown' is ever-present and ever-inventive.
* "The Girl on the Train" (dir. André Téchine´, 2010) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). The focus: white girl from the banlieue is the victim of an anti-Semetic bias attack by a group of Arab youths on the train. Only...she made it all up. Lives spiral out of control. Based on true events.
* "The Face of Another" (dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966) screening @ Rubin Museum / 150 W 17th St (1 to 18th St), 9:30p. The most existential director of Japan's New Wave collective instills an acute sense of disquietude w/ the concept of social anonymity (and its abuse of power).
SATURDAY
* "Paris and the Avant-Garde" @ Guggenheim Museum / 1071 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). A delicious 30-piece collection of early 20th c. Paris-based art, from such lovelies as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, Georges Braque — you can learn all about these guys in an art history class but wouldn't it be doper to just see 'em in real life?
* Inka Essenhigh @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Landscape is apparently a hot topic in the gallery scene; it's like everyone's reimagining it. Essenhigh's style, though, I dig. Her technique and palette are gauzy pastels a la Lisa Yuskavage, but her subject matter of crashing waves and fantastical forest nymphs is somehow surreal, Daliesque (perhaps w/ a bit of John Currin thrown in the mix).
* "Drunken Angel" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1948) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 7:50/9:50p. The titular 'angel' is Takashi Shimura, the hard-drinkin' doc, but Toshiro Mifune in swaggering gangster mode is the perfect foil, except he's infected w/ TB!!!
* "Double Dirty Dancing 2010" @ Monkeytown / 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/FREE (reservations recommended). The Monkeytown classic dual screening installation (the Swayze/Grey original and the ultra-dope "Holiday", Pooja Bhatt's 2006 shot-for-shot don't-call-it-a-remake) one last time, on the eve of the venue's closing. I'm telling you, you've NEVER experienced anything like this (it ranks higher than that bonkers four-screen Bowie film installation Monkeytown hosted a few years back, which incidentally eschewed video sound for an unrelated gamelan soundtrack). Epic in every sense of the word.
* (the) Tony Castles @ Union Pool / 484 Union Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 9p/$8. I'm a believer in Tony Castles' New Wave-ish energy, which for me is just a tad bit like Phil Collins (and that's a good thing!), and if you need further convincing check out their new track 'Adequate Sheen'. Game over.
SUNDAY
* "The Quiet Duel" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1949) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 1p. Did you catch "Drunken Angel"? OK so this time Toshiro Mifune plays a doctor (Takashi Shimura plays his MD dad), and this time he catches syphilis!
* Closing Party @ Monkeytown / 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10 (reservations recommended!!!). The Williamsburg venue ends it w/ a bash, sort of a blow-by-blow of the eclectic curating that made the place so special. This means audio improv from the Almovacy trio, wicked raga-chamber-jazz from Neel Murgai Ensemble, an electroacoustic set from Shelley Burgon (of Stars Like Fleas), and Maria Chavez's fractured turntablist soundscapes. Will this culminate in one mega jam session?
MONDAY
* "No Regrets For Our Youth" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1946) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 6:25/10:10p. This brilliant early romance from Kurosawa stars Setsuko Hara in a powerful lovesick role, predating Nouvelle Vague by like 15 years.
TUESDAY
* DJ Krush @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), $17. I owe a lot of my chillness to this seminal Japanese DJ, whose deft combo of (mostly) instrumental hip-hop and acid jazz exemplifies the "smoked out" persona. Heaaavvvy.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Joel Shapiro @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Early small-scale bronze and cast-iron sculpture from the NY artist you probably equate w/ ginormous stacked-box figurative sculpture. These discreet, simplified forms (chair, house, tree-root), and their positioning in the space itself, demand your undivided attention. Closer inspection reveals a few creepy idiosyncrasies too, like the windowless chamber or the covered shaft plunging from a wall panel.
* 'Repetition' Group Show @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. I am unofficially titling this five-artist exhibition a 'repetition' show, though one artist, Joel Shapiro, contributes a single plaster-cast cone instead of multiples. Think of it like a trumpet for the others, the earthy creosote-wood slabs from Carl Andre, the architecturally-exacting clean wood Krate Tables from Sherrie Levine (a rotation of same-size planks, to wondrous effect), Jennifer Bartlett's bracing enamel wall installation (a meditation on evolving forms?) and a wildly gridlike wood piece from Sol LeWitt.
* Markus Schinwald + Koo Jeong-A @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Despite their asymmetric practices, these two artists pair well together. Schinwald's antique-y oil portraits are creeped out by these weird little medical additions, like braces and prostheses and the like, coming out the subject's nostrils or covering their mouth — you get the idea, very unsettling. Sort of like those mashup pieces from Quirk Books (like Seth Grahame-Smith's "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"). He furthers the unease w/ an installation, white pillars jutting out from the gallery walls and ceiling, interrupting traversing the space, and these odd chair-leg constructs that come off oddly hooflike, in a Satanic sort of way. Koo's inclusion is her typical (though w/ her there's nothing really 'typical') series of watercolors, placed sporadically across three walls, feat. elements both banal (a soccer team?) and startlingly deep (lone figures falling through a royal blue sky).
* "The Promise of Loss: A Contemporary Index of Iran" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St, 2nd Fl. Shahenn Merali has curated one of the most important group exhibitions that I've experienced in a good long while. First try to name even two contemporary Iranian artists, then throw all your didacticism out and catch this show, feat. more than a dozen artists based in Iran and abroad, from people 20 years my senior to several years younger than I, working in a broad variety of media. The lavish painting by Vienna-based duo Asgar/Gabriel echoes the 'Twitter Generation' protests following the June 2009 elections in Iran — a piece specially created for this show, as the duo claim to rarely be so overtly political. This particular painting sets the tone, created by a Tehran-born man and an Austrian woman, for the ideas coming from the multiple participants in the exhibition. Vancouver-based Babak Golkar pairs traditional nomad carpet w/ futuristic high-rise architecture, whose extruded shape mimics the patterns in the weave. Samira Abbassy takes elements of formal miniaturist painting in her multi-panel treatises on war and gender. Mandana Moghaddam's scene-stealing installation of a concrete trough (full of bubbling fluid), surrounded by empty gasoline containers and blinking green fluorescent bars, recalls the largest cemetery in Tehran. And that's just a bit of the art for viewing.
* Philip Taaffe "Works on Paper" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. A whole slew of concert poster-sized (most of 'em are about 21x30") 'mixed media' works on paper from the mandalic — is that a real word? Mandala-derived? — NY-based artist, heavy on the décalcomanie technique. Hmm, by 'mixed media' does he mean lots of proper entheogens? The show is beautiful, don't get me wrong, but by the time you pass the school of fish- and coral reef-works (many of these have an aquatic vibe), and the beautiful dragonflies, and get into the fuzzy skulls, the aliens, the, uh, grasping hands... you'll feel like whatever you're buzzing on — secondhand, bien sur — just morphed from psilocybin to ayahuasca (or salvinorin, hell might as well take it all the way there, and if you get the references I'm not sure I should be pleased w/ that) .
* Elisa Sighicelli "The Party is Over" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Sighicelli's forte is light. Her array of backlit lightbox C-prints of spare urban spaces (empty billboards, construction sites) glow with this energy, but there wasn't a lot of variety to hold my attention. Luckily she included two video works, the titular piece (this 7.5 hour beast, which obviously you don't have to stay the whole while to get it, a silent number w/ reverse fireworks against a night sky, quite mesmerizing) and the standout, called 'Phil Building', a very Electric Company-ish light show against an office tower, accompanied Paolo Campana's spacey soundtrack, veering from theremin-laden mood-scapes to light bossa-nova like from a YHC Heavy Industries piece. It's dope.
+ 'Solid and Fractured' Group Show. I came up with the title for this four-artist amuse bouche in the project gallery. But it's a nice one. Dan Flavin and Walter de Maria contribute the 'solid' pieces, w/ the latter totally outdoing the former w/ his mirror-polished hendecagonal rods. For 'fractured' we get a brilliant black-striped twisted canvas from Steven Parrino (wittily titled 'Skeletal Implosion #2') and a shattered and epoxied basketball backboard from Dan Colen.
* Emi Fukuzawa "Landscape Transcended" @ Castelli Gallery / 18 E 77th St. These new small- and medium-sized mixed media works on several varieties of Japanese paper echo the artist's travels in rainforests. Maybe that's why I got this 'Avatar' vibe from some of them. The basic makeup of most of these is a cascade of diagonal greenish lines and swoops, like dense foliage — most of her works have a green palette as the basis — but then there are these flitting yellow, red and blue blurs, just so often, like some brilliant canopy-dwelling bird swooping down.
* "Look Again" group show @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. The gallery focuses on good ol' re-appropriation via its international roster of artists (plus some guest stars), to mostly cool effect. Arman's posthumous work steals the show (you can't really mess with a massive multipanel painting in homage to Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" that includes trails of paintbrushes tracing the curves of the star-paths), but Yasumasa Morimura's staged photography (mimicking the Old Masters) comes a close second. I was genuinely surprised by the overall freshness of the included works. Richard Pettibone's tiny take on Frank Stella's classic "River of Ponds" and Peter Coffin's 'stamped' transfers of iconic modern art were both pretty dope too.
* "Stripped, Tied and Raw" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. OK Boesky gets the Winter 2010 award for 'Most Creative Title'. But seriously, any show that involves Steven Parrino and his classic, tortured canvases, is sheer golden to me. His presence is creatively accompanied by gallery fixture Donald Moffett, whose zippered and hole-spliced raw canvases take it one step further w/ "Lot 103007X", the lime-green center of which is pulled open like a vivisection; plus the tied cloth-amalgams of Jorge Eielson and Salvatore Scarpitta's mixed media oddities.
* Jacob Aue Sobol "Sabine" and "I, Tokyo" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. You could get away w/ dubbing Sobol's photographic technique 'harsh', as his contrast-y b&w prints, w/ the looming shadows and blazing flash (let alone the subject matter) practically reverberate w/ grit. But it works in these two photo series, the earlier "Sabine" (shot in Greenland) and the more recent, lovely "I, Tokyo", a slew of hormonal closeups of naked skin and drenched architecture.
* Richard Misrach @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St. Misrach's latest series of jumbo 'positive capture' pigment prints fairly well encapsulates the trippy vibe going down in the W.Chelsea scene right now. As in reverse-color landscapes, ultra-sharp reflections of water and sky, glowing rocky shores in Oregon and shimmering dunes in Nevada. It's funny, too, b/c David Hockney just had a show here of trippily-colored landscapes, though he painted 'em.
* Roy Dowell @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. I like this exhibition of new small-scale acrylic and collage works from Dowell, as he's included more hand-drawn 'collage-y' bits in addition to his generally vibrant use of color.
* "The Rise and Fall of Excess Culture" Group Show @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. Jelena Tomasevic threatens to usurp attention from the other six gallery artists and related from this New Economy-driven show, curated by Jovana Stokic. Why do I write this? Tomasevic's new piece, "Thought", a mini swim pool outfitted w/ a hair-dryer (picture rippling water), installed at the exhibition entrance, is so entrancing, literally, that you might not want to proceed further. But you should: Patricia Iglesias's modified floor plans are cool, Shimon Okshteyn's installation isn't terribly offensive, and Zhou Tao's three-channel video, following linked energy power on a corner, is fairly mesmerizing.
* Christian Hellmich "The Array/Transfer-Domino" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. The German painter continues his foray into architectural renderings, but they've become so abstract now, like explosions of lines and geometry, that I get this serious inescapable Thomas Scheibitz vibe off them, the other German. And I love Scheibitz, but Hellmich is no Scheibitz, if you get my drift.
LAST CHANCE
* Matt Connors, Arturo Herrera, Merlin James "Building on a Cliff" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. A benefit of writing this LIST is my totally subjective approach to the art I cover. And though this is billed as a group show, I suggest you take it as James' highly experimental investigation and variation on landscape painting — leave it as that, a solo show, James', w/ Herrera's and Connors' respective works on the side for amusement. Hell, there's a great short film from Singapore video artist Sherman Ong in the back gallery, just to REALLY mix things up. But if you focus on this 'group show' as James' solo show, and take the layout in a clockwise fashion by heading straight back into the big main gallery space and then follow the wall (and smaller galleries) towards the entrance, tracing James' canvases of innocuous country vistas that suddenly transform into acrylic on translucent screens or jute fabric (like the show's titular work, recalling Joan Miro), literally throwing the traditional medium oil-on-canvas out the window, then returning to it @ the end — only by this point you'll second guess yourself and think the canvas is actually stretched vinyl, like some of his other pieces — and you've just experienced QUITE a show.
* Paolo Ventura "Winter Stories" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. The only way I sorted out the scale of these meticulously created carnivalesque C-prints is the one vitrined diorama that accompanies the lot. In fact, you see these prints in a magazine, you might think they're real, and not Ventura's painstakingly rendered, nostalgic world. The study drawings in the side gallery are a nice accompaniment.
* 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.
* 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.
* Kazuo Shiraga "Six Decades" @ McCaffrey Fine Arts / 23 E 67th St. Lots of 1sts in this brief but intensely compelling show: 1st US solo show for the Zero-kai founder and Gutai member (think sort of like Japanese Fluxus, for absolute shorthand purposes); 1st in-depth catalogue in English; and I'll go ahead + posit that much of the works here (besides Shiraga's singular "Challenging Mud" from the mid-50s) have NEVER shown in the US. Much as contemporaries Jackson Pollock and Yves Klein approached the canvas w/ wildly new forms of abstraction, so did Shiraga, substituting his feet for brushes, to confidently energetic results. In fact, the range here is incredible, from the explosive reddish energy of "Chizensei Kirenji (Demon Face incarnated from Earthly Whole Star)" (Shiraga's titles are amazing, and remind me of Keiji Haino's lengthy, descriptive song titles) from '61 to the heavily impasto'd "Kanyou" from '80 and "Souryuu no Mai (Dance of the Two-Headed Dragon)" from '94 — both of whose densely textured surfaces are lightened by diaphanous strains of green and white, respectively —, to the fluid "Funryuu (Jetstream)" from '73, a dance of b&w alkyd paint that half resembles the melted deliciousness remaining at the end of a chocolate-syrup-inundated sundae.
* "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (EV to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). This is a great show. And unless you're a Bauhaus-fanatic, you will learn something, or a lot of something, just by casually perusing the works. Proceed through the early Johannes Itten and Paul Klee color studies (plus Klee's brilliant mechanicalesque drawings), the painted glass from Josef Albers (if you only know his 'Homage to a Square', brace yourself), and of course the furniture, the lamps, the tea-sets, the architecture. Intellectual shows that are as effective as this are rare, so don't miss out.
* Total Slacker + Reading Rainbow @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$7. This should be a good 'n messy show, the feedback-drenched Reading Rainbow and particularly Total Slacker, whose Warholish frontman buries the lyrics under a trundling bassline. Added bonus is the charmingly titled Easter Vomit, who has something to do w/ Queens all-stars The Beets.
* Big Troubles + My Teenage Stride @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St, 6 to Bleecker), 10p/$8. I honestly don't understand how this is billed as a 'fully seated' event. Oh, I bet there are chairs, but how can you sit to Jedediah Smith and crew's wonderfully popish My Teenage Stride, let alone the searing feedback jamming of Big Troubles??
THURSDAY
* Anne Collier @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Collier's first solo show at the gallery, an exhibition of her crisply subversive C-print photography.
* Darlings @ Union Pool / 484 Union Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 9p/$7. Brooklyn's Darlings (and they truly are) craft the freshest boy-girl '90s indie-rock around, bar none. Raleigh's Lonnie Walker joins the party for some campfire tunes of his own.
* Open Ocean w/ Bull Thieves @ Monkeytown / 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 10:30p/$5 (reservations recommended!). A/V artist Shadrach Lindo creates live manipulated video projections to accompany these two dreamy bands. But the real coup for me is Open Ocean: this fashion-y foursome play some wicked, emotive pop music (I'd almost take it to mid-90s, Bristol-based trip-hop, if that sweetens the deal).
* "The Shaft" (dir. Zhang Chi, 2008) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 7p (ALSO SUN 5p). Family drama centered around western China's mining industry, where the three main characters (aged father, attractive daughter, singer-inspired son) make a living.
* "Pripyat" (dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 1999) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 Second Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7:15p. A doc on the people who still live and work 'in the zone', i.e. the restricted area around Chernobyl. For real.
FRIDAY
* Superflex "Flooded McDonald's" @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. The Danish collective shows three short films, including their first, "Burning Car" (2007), a deadpan 'cinematic' take on a potent symbol of disorder (and sensationalism), and the titular film, a slowly submerging reconstruction of the omnipresent fast-food joint.
* "The Good The Bad The Weird" (dir. Kim Ji-woon, 2008) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 7p. Kim's madcap take on the spaghetti western, set in 1930's Manchuria, where the theme 'showdown' is ever-present and ever-inventive.
* "The Girl on the Train" (dir. André Téchine´, 2010) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). The focus: white girl from the banlieue is the victim of an anti-Semetic bias attack by a group of Arab youths on the train. Only...she made it all up. Lives spiral out of control. Based on true events.
* "The Face of Another" (dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966) screening @ Rubin Museum / 150 W 17th St (1 to 18th St), 9:30p. The most existential director of Japan's New Wave collective instills an acute sense of disquietude w/ the concept of social anonymity (and its abuse of power).
SATURDAY
* "Paris and the Avant-Garde" @ Guggenheim Museum / 1071 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). A delicious 30-piece collection of early 20th c. Paris-based art, from such lovelies as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, Georges Braque — you can learn all about these guys in an art history class but wouldn't it be doper to just see 'em in real life?
* Inka Essenhigh @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Landscape is apparently a hot topic in the gallery scene; it's like everyone's reimagining it. Essenhigh's style, though, I dig. Her technique and palette are gauzy pastels a la Lisa Yuskavage, but her subject matter of crashing waves and fantastical forest nymphs is somehow surreal, Daliesque (perhaps w/ a bit of John Currin thrown in the mix).
* "Drunken Angel" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1948) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 7:50/9:50p. The titular 'angel' is Takashi Shimura, the hard-drinkin' doc, but Toshiro Mifune in swaggering gangster mode is the perfect foil, except he's infected w/ TB!!!
* "Double Dirty Dancing 2010" @ Monkeytown / 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/FREE (reservations recommended). The Monkeytown classic dual screening installation (the Swayze/Grey original and the ultra-dope "Holiday", Pooja Bhatt's 2006 shot-for-shot don't-call-it-a-remake) one last time, on the eve of the venue's closing. I'm telling you, you've NEVER experienced anything like this (it ranks higher than that bonkers four-screen Bowie film installation Monkeytown hosted a few years back, which incidentally eschewed video sound for an unrelated gamelan soundtrack). Epic in every sense of the word.
* (the) Tony Castles @ Union Pool / 484 Union Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 9p/$8. I'm a believer in Tony Castles' New Wave-ish energy, which for me is just a tad bit like Phil Collins (and that's a good thing!), and if you need further convincing check out their new track 'Adequate Sheen'. Game over.
SUNDAY
* "The Quiet Duel" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1949) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 1p. Did you catch "Drunken Angel"? OK so this time Toshiro Mifune plays a doctor (Takashi Shimura plays his MD dad), and this time he catches syphilis!
* Closing Party @ Monkeytown / 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10 (reservations recommended!!!). The Williamsburg venue ends it w/ a bash, sort of a blow-by-blow of the eclectic curating that made the place so special. This means audio improv from the Almovacy trio, wicked raga-chamber-jazz from Neel Murgai Ensemble, an electroacoustic set from Shelley Burgon (of Stars Like Fleas), and Maria Chavez's fractured turntablist soundscapes. Will this culminate in one mega jam session?
MONDAY
* "No Regrets For Our Youth" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1946) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 6:25/10:10p. This brilliant early romance from Kurosawa stars Setsuko Hara in a powerful lovesick role, predating Nouvelle Vague by like 15 years.
TUESDAY
* DJ Krush @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), $17. I owe a lot of my chillness to this seminal Japanese DJ, whose deft combo of (mostly) instrumental hip-hop and acid jazz exemplifies the "smoked out" persona. Heaaavvvy.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Joel Shapiro @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Early small-scale bronze and cast-iron sculpture from the NY artist you probably equate w/ ginormous stacked-box figurative sculpture. These discreet, simplified forms (chair, house, tree-root), and their positioning in the space itself, demand your undivided attention. Closer inspection reveals a few creepy idiosyncrasies too, like the windowless chamber or the covered shaft plunging from a wall panel.
* 'Repetition' Group Show @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. I am unofficially titling this five-artist exhibition a 'repetition' show, though one artist, Joel Shapiro, contributes a single plaster-cast cone instead of multiples. Think of it like a trumpet for the others, the earthy creosote-wood slabs from Carl Andre, the architecturally-exacting clean wood Krate Tables from Sherrie Levine (a rotation of same-size planks, to wondrous effect), Jennifer Bartlett's bracing enamel wall installation (a meditation on evolving forms?) and a wildly gridlike wood piece from Sol LeWitt.
* Markus Schinwald + Koo Jeong-A @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Despite their asymmetric practices, these two artists pair well together. Schinwald's antique-y oil portraits are creeped out by these weird little medical additions, like braces and prostheses and the like, coming out the subject's nostrils or covering their mouth — you get the idea, very unsettling. Sort of like those mashup pieces from Quirk Books (like Seth Grahame-Smith's "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"). He furthers the unease w/ an installation, white pillars jutting out from the gallery walls and ceiling, interrupting traversing the space, and these odd chair-leg constructs that come off oddly hooflike, in a Satanic sort of way. Koo's inclusion is her typical (though w/ her there's nothing really 'typical') series of watercolors, placed sporadically across three walls, feat. elements both banal (a soccer team?) and startlingly deep (lone figures falling through a royal blue sky).
* "The Promise of Loss: A Contemporary Index of Iran" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St, 2nd Fl. Shahenn Merali has curated one of the most important group exhibitions that I've experienced in a good long while. First try to name even two contemporary Iranian artists, then throw all your didacticism out and catch this show, feat. more than a dozen artists based in Iran and abroad, from people 20 years my senior to several years younger than I, working in a broad variety of media. The lavish painting by Vienna-based duo Asgar/Gabriel echoes the 'Twitter Generation' protests following the June 2009 elections in Iran — a piece specially created for this show, as the duo claim to rarely be so overtly political. This particular painting sets the tone, created by a Tehran-born man and an Austrian woman, for the ideas coming from the multiple participants in the exhibition. Vancouver-based Babak Golkar pairs traditional nomad carpet w/ futuristic high-rise architecture, whose extruded shape mimics the patterns in the weave. Samira Abbassy takes elements of formal miniaturist painting in her multi-panel treatises on war and gender. Mandana Moghaddam's scene-stealing installation of a concrete trough (full of bubbling fluid), surrounded by empty gasoline containers and blinking green fluorescent bars, recalls the largest cemetery in Tehran. And that's just a bit of the art for viewing.
* Philip Taaffe "Works on Paper" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. A whole slew of concert poster-sized (most of 'em are about 21x30") 'mixed media' works on paper from the mandalic — is that a real word? Mandala-derived? — NY-based artist, heavy on the décalcomanie technique. Hmm, by 'mixed media' does he mean lots of proper entheogens? The show is beautiful, don't get me wrong, but by the time you pass the school of fish- and coral reef-works (many of these have an aquatic vibe), and the beautiful dragonflies, and get into the fuzzy skulls, the aliens, the, uh, grasping hands... you'll feel like whatever you're buzzing on — secondhand, bien sur — just morphed from psilocybin to ayahuasca (or salvinorin, hell might as well take it all the way there, and if you get the references I'm not sure I should be pleased w/ that) .
* Elisa Sighicelli "The Party is Over" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Sighicelli's forte is light. Her array of backlit lightbox C-prints of spare urban spaces (empty billboards, construction sites) glow with this energy, but there wasn't a lot of variety to hold my attention. Luckily she included two video works, the titular piece (this 7.5 hour beast, which obviously you don't have to stay the whole while to get it, a silent number w/ reverse fireworks against a night sky, quite mesmerizing) and the standout, called 'Phil Building', a very Electric Company-ish light show against an office tower, accompanied Paolo Campana's spacey soundtrack, veering from theremin-laden mood-scapes to light bossa-nova like from a YHC Heavy Industries piece. It's dope.
+ 'Solid and Fractured' Group Show. I came up with the title for this four-artist amuse bouche in the project gallery. But it's a nice one. Dan Flavin and Walter de Maria contribute the 'solid' pieces, w/ the latter totally outdoing the former w/ his mirror-polished hendecagonal rods. For 'fractured' we get a brilliant black-striped twisted canvas from Steven Parrino (wittily titled 'Skeletal Implosion #2') and a shattered and epoxied basketball backboard from Dan Colen.
* Emi Fukuzawa "Landscape Transcended" @ Castelli Gallery / 18 E 77th St. These new small- and medium-sized mixed media works on several varieties of Japanese paper echo the artist's travels in rainforests. Maybe that's why I got this 'Avatar' vibe from some of them. The basic makeup of most of these is a cascade of diagonal greenish lines and swoops, like dense foliage — most of her works have a green palette as the basis — but then there are these flitting yellow, red and blue blurs, just so often, like some brilliant canopy-dwelling bird swooping down.
* "Look Again" group show @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. The gallery focuses on good ol' re-appropriation via its international roster of artists (plus some guest stars), to mostly cool effect. Arman's posthumous work steals the show (you can't really mess with a massive multipanel painting in homage to Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" that includes trails of paintbrushes tracing the curves of the star-paths), but Yasumasa Morimura's staged photography (mimicking the Old Masters) comes a close second. I was genuinely surprised by the overall freshness of the included works. Richard Pettibone's tiny take on Frank Stella's classic "River of Ponds" and Peter Coffin's 'stamped' transfers of iconic modern art were both pretty dope too.
* "Stripped, Tied and Raw" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. OK Boesky gets the Winter 2010 award for 'Most Creative Title'. But seriously, any show that involves Steven Parrino and his classic, tortured canvases, is sheer golden to me. His presence is creatively accompanied by gallery fixture Donald Moffett, whose zippered and hole-spliced raw canvases take it one step further w/ "Lot 103007X", the lime-green center of which is pulled open like a vivisection; plus the tied cloth-amalgams of Jorge Eielson and Salvatore Scarpitta's mixed media oddities.
* Jacob Aue Sobol "Sabine" and "I, Tokyo" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. You could get away w/ dubbing Sobol's photographic technique 'harsh', as his contrast-y b&w prints, w/ the looming shadows and blazing flash (let alone the subject matter) practically reverberate w/ grit. But it works in these two photo series, the earlier "Sabine" (shot in Greenland) and the more recent, lovely "I, Tokyo", a slew of hormonal closeups of naked skin and drenched architecture.
* Richard Misrach @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St. Misrach's latest series of jumbo 'positive capture' pigment prints fairly well encapsulates the trippy vibe going down in the W.Chelsea scene right now. As in reverse-color landscapes, ultra-sharp reflections of water and sky, glowing rocky shores in Oregon and shimmering dunes in Nevada. It's funny, too, b/c David Hockney just had a show here of trippily-colored landscapes, though he painted 'em.
* Roy Dowell @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. I like this exhibition of new small-scale acrylic and collage works from Dowell, as he's included more hand-drawn 'collage-y' bits in addition to his generally vibrant use of color.
* "The Rise and Fall of Excess Culture" Group Show @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. Jelena Tomasevic threatens to usurp attention from the other six gallery artists and related from this New Economy-driven show, curated by Jovana Stokic. Why do I write this? Tomasevic's new piece, "Thought", a mini swim pool outfitted w/ a hair-dryer (picture rippling water), installed at the exhibition entrance, is so entrancing, literally, that you might not want to proceed further. But you should: Patricia Iglesias's modified floor plans are cool, Shimon Okshteyn's installation isn't terribly offensive, and Zhou Tao's three-channel video, following linked energy power on a corner, is fairly mesmerizing.
* Christian Hellmich "The Array/Transfer-Domino" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. The German painter continues his foray into architectural renderings, but they've become so abstract now, like explosions of lines and geometry, that I get this serious inescapable Thomas Scheibitz vibe off them, the other German. And I love Scheibitz, but Hellmich is no Scheibitz, if you get my drift.
LAST CHANCE
* Matt Connors, Arturo Herrera, Merlin James "Building on a Cliff" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. A benefit of writing this LIST is my totally subjective approach to the art I cover. And though this is billed as a group show, I suggest you take it as James' highly experimental investigation and variation on landscape painting — leave it as that, a solo show, James', w/ Herrera's and Connors' respective works on the side for amusement. Hell, there's a great short film from Singapore video artist Sherman Ong in the back gallery, just to REALLY mix things up. But if you focus on this 'group show' as James' solo show, and take the layout in a clockwise fashion by heading straight back into the big main gallery space and then follow the wall (and smaller galleries) towards the entrance, tracing James' canvases of innocuous country vistas that suddenly transform into acrylic on translucent screens or jute fabric (like the show's titular work, recalling Joan Miro), literally throwing the traditional medium oil-on-canvas out the window, then returning to it @ the end — only by this point you'll second guess yourself and think the canvas is actually stretched vinyl, like some of his other pieces — and you've just experienced QUITE a show.
* Paolo Ventura "Winter Stories" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. The only way I sorted out the scale of these meticulously created carnivalesque C-prints is the one vitrined diorama that accompanies the lot. In fact, you see these prints in a magazine, you might think they're real, and not Ventura's painstakingly rendered, nostalgic world. The study drawings in the side gallery are a nice accompaniment.
* 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.
* 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.
* Kazuo Shiraga "Six Decades" @ McCaffrey Fine Arts / 23 E 67th St. Lots of 1sts in this brief but intensely compelling show: 1st US solo show for the Zero-kai founder and Gutai member (think sort of like Japanese Fluxus, for absolute shorthand purposes); 1st in-depth catalogue in English; and I'll go ahead + posit that much of the works here (besides Shiraga's singular "Challenging Mud" from the mid-50s) have NEVER shown in the US. Much as contemporaries Jackson Pollock and Yves Klein approached the canvas w/ wildly new forms of abstraction, so did Shiraga, substituting his feet for brushes, to confidently energetic results. In fact, the range here is incredible, from the explosive reddish energy of "Chizensei Kirenji (Demon Face incarnated from Earthly Whole Star)" (Shiraga's titles are amazing, and remind me of Keiji Haino's lengthy, descriptive song titles) from '61 to the heavily impasto'd "Kanyou" from '80 and "Souryuu no Mai (Dance of the Two-Headed Dragon)" from '94 — both of whose densely textured surfaces are lightened by diaphanous strains of green and white, respectively —, to the fluid "Funryuu (Jetstream)" from '73, a dance of b&w alkyd paint that half resembles the melted deliciousness remaining at the end of a chocolate-syrup-inundated sundae.
* "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (EV to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). This is a great show. And unless you're a Bauhaus-fanatic, you will learn something, or a lot of something, just by casually perusing the works. Proceed through the early Johannes Itten and Paul Klee color studies (plus Klee's brilliant mechanicalesque drawings), the painted glass from Josef Albers (if you only know his 'Homage to a Square', brace yourself), and of course the furniture, the lamps, the tea-sets, the architecture. Intellectual shows that are as effective as this are rare, so don't miss out.
Friday, January 15, 2010
J-Horror References at Paula Cooper Gallery
I wondered why the two recent exhibitions at Paula Cooper Gallery's two 21st St locations — a show of Joel Shapiro's small bronze and iron sculpture and a typically subtle group show based on repetition — produced such a visceral emotional impact in me. I shouldn't have been surprised as this is the sort of art I REALLY get into: clean, minimal, cerebral, stuff that you can lock your gaze in and trail off somewhere else, art that is both somehow mechanical and entirely organic. But yet there I was, still feeling it after spending a good long while in each gallery. And it hit me: I was picking up trace remnants of some of my favorite Japanese horror films in the artwork. For real.
Allow me to explain: the Joel Shapiro show, composed of works from 1969-1979, is enough to throw you off-balance if you are fairly versed in the NY artist's oeuvre. His stacked block figurative sculpture tends to hit massive proportions, like his show of new works from autumn 2007 at Pacewildenstein. But this one recalls his first one-person exhibitions at Paula Cooper, when he displayed stark, bronze sculpture of familiar objects (houses, chairs, ladders) in extremely intimate scale. As in unsettlingly tiny. This spare installation of about a dozen pieces works off that. Yet each piece is twisted in such a way to creep you out: a barn-shaped house with wee doorways so you can peer inside to the enveloping darkness; a tree-root shaped like a beckoning claw; another house affixed to a slab of bronze, like a landscape coated in dingy metal; a shaft plunging off a shelf but w/o an opening. I knew what I was feeling: Hideo Nakata's 1998 shocker "Ringu", which sparked American interest in J-Horror and pale, long-haired girl demons. If you're scratching your head, recall the American remake the "The Ring" (dir. Gore Verbinski, 2002), which while freaky wasn't nearly as frightening as Nakata's original. Scenes of young Sadako crawling from the well, and the crude videotape of mom Shizuko in a barren landscape touched a chord with me, that Shapiro's minimalist figurative sculptures carried some sort of tormented spirits. Which is silly, but take a closer look at the figures, and don't miss the few tucked away in the project room: the house with one path extending out into space, this catacomb-like bookend... in the press materials he called these "a physical manifestation of thought in material and form", and their presence is certainly evident. I wonder if Nakata is familiar with Shapiro's works?
I had a more electrified experience across the street, at five-artist group show that is generally based around the gallery-tried-and-true notion of repetition. Beyond the earthy offerings from Carl Andre (coruscated wood slabs) and Sherrie Levine (six exacting unfinished ash Krate Tables) lies a stunner from Jennifer Bartlett, simply titled "Drawing and Painting" (1974). While the other pieces on display are made of wood (the aforementioned and Sol LeWitt's wild, painted-wood grid; Joel Shapiro's is a very wooden-appearing plaster), Bartlett's stands out both b/c it's a wall-piece, it's relatively colorful (blue and red, in addition to b&w), and it's her signature enamel and steel media. This 78-unit triangular composition calls to mind two pivotal J-Horror scenes: the 'lifeforms' computer program in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Kairo/Pulse" (2001) and a video surveillance scene in Takashi Shimizu's "Marebito" (2004). Bartlett's piece, read top to bottom, left to right, begins fairly clearly with a blank grid, then a slowly morphing polygonal shape, growing a fishlike tail (or birdlike wings) as it progresses left to right, and changing color from white outline to gray to black, then blue outline to blue, as you move downward. However, by the time the vibrant bluebird (or bluefish) interacts in its five-panel space, everything changes. The four-panel block beneath is a field of blue-red-black dots, signature Bartlett, like television static. What just happened? And the following three-panel block is jet-black, beyond a red circle here and there, then a bluish grid of two and a single fully blue square to finish. In "Marebito", the protagonist (wonderfully, idiosyncratically played by director/actor Shinya Tsukamoto) has installed a bunch of surveillance cameras in his flat. He's a cameraman anyway, but this seems a bit weird. He's been using them to monitor this nude animal-like girl (brilliantly played by young actress Tomomi Miyashita), who he rescued from the catacombs of Tokyo — like literally inside the hollow earth (choice reading here and here) — so she doesn't harm herself while alone in his flat. There is a scene like 2/3 the way through, where Tsukamoto's out and about and checks in on Miyashita, she's crawling about the room, moves towards the window, seems to be conversing w/ something/one outside then — the video screen goes blank for like 10 seconds, and when it regains power, she's sprawled on the carpet, convulsing. What the hell just happened? thinks Tsukamoto, and of course we the viewer. That's the rift in Bartlett's piece, this sort of regeneration and evolution that abruptly cuts off 3/4 of the way down, and what proceeds from there on is something very different. In the case of Kurosawa's "Kairo/Pulse", I'm reminded of this 'lifeform' computer program that mimics birth, death, regeneration and evolution via these flying pixels on a black screen. Characters Ryosuke and Harue observe it captivatingly, and all goes as formula intended until this fuzzy-edged spectre appears on the screen, devouring up the other pixels like an invulnerable Pac-Man, only scarier. What's left, eventually, is a black screen, empty save for the one odd, unwanted element.
At first blush, if you're not used to this style of minimalist art, you might think it can't hold your attention, that your eyes bounce straight off Andre's burnt-wood slab configurations, Levine's 'simplistic' wooden multiples, and Shapiro's discreetly tiny bronze figures. I dare you to linger and look a bit closer, and you just might be irretrievably tugged in, encouraging your mind to conjure up all sorts of memories and references to marry w/ what you're seeing. Which could just be proper J-Horror films.
Allow me to explain: the Joel Shapiro show, composed of works from 1969-1979, is enough to throw you off-balance if you are fairly versed in the NY artist's oeuvre. His stacked block figurative sculpture tends to hit massive proportions, like his show of new works from autumn 2007 at Pacewildenstein. But this one recalls his first one-person exhibitions at Paula Cooper, when he displayed stark, bronze sculpture of familiar objects (houses, chairs, ladders) in extremely intimate scale. As in unsettlingly tiny. This spare installation of about a dozen pieces works off that. Yet each piece is twisted in such a way to creep you out: a barn-shaped house with wee doorways so you can peer inside to the enveloping darkness; a tree-root shaped like a beckoning claw; another house affixed to a slab of bronze, like a landscape coated in dingy metal; a shaft plunging off a shelf but w/o an opening. I knew what I was feeling: Hideo Nakata's 1998 shocker "Ringu", which sparked American interest in J-Horror and pale, long-haired girl demons. If you're scratching your head, recall the American remake the "The Ring" (dir. Gore Verbinski, 2002), which while freaky wasn't nearly as frightening as Nakata's original. Scenes of young Sadako crawling from the well, and the crude videotape of mom Shizuko in a barren landscape touched a chord with me, that Shapiro's minimalist figurative sculptures carried some sort of tormented spirits. Which is silly, but take a closer look at the figures, and don't miss the few tucked away in the project room: the house with one path extending out into space, this catacomb-like bookend... in the press materials he called these "a physical manifestation of thought in material and form", and their presence is certainly evident. I wonder if Nakata is familiar with Shapiro's works?
I had a more electrified experience across the street, at five-artist group show that is generally based around the gallery-tried-and-true notion of repetition. Beyond the earthy offerings from Carl Andre (coruscated wood slabs) and Sherrie Levine (six exacting unfinished ash Krate Tables) lies a stunner from Jennifer Bartlett, simply titled "Drawing and Painting" (1974). While the other pieces on display are made of wood (the aforementioned and Sol LeWitt's wild, painted-wood grid; Joel Shapiro's is a very wooden-appearing plaster), Bartlett's stands out both b/c it's a wall-piece, it's relatively colorful (blue and red, in addition to b&w), and it's her signature enamel and steel media. This 78-unit triangular composition calls to mind two pivotal J-Horror scenes: the 'lifeforms' computer program in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Kairo/Pulse" (2001) and a video surveillance scene in Takashi Shimizu's "Marebito" (2004). Bartlett's piece, read top to bottom, left to right, begins fairly clearly with a blank grid, then a slowly morphing polygonal shape, growing a fishlike tail (or birdlike wings) as it progresses left to right, and changing color from white outline to gray to black, then blue outline to blue, as you move downward. However, by the time the vibrant bluebird (or bluefish) interacts in its five-panel space, everything changes. The four-panel block beneath is a field of blue-red-black dots, signature Bartlett, like television static. What just happened? And the following three-panel block is jet-black, beyond a red circle here and there, then a bluish grid of two and a single fully blue square to finish. In "Marebito", the protagonist (wonderfully, idiosyncratically played by director/actor Shinya Tsukamoto) has installed a bunch of surveillance cameras in his flat. He's a cameraman anyway, but this seems a bit weird. He's been using them to monitor this nude animal-like girl (brilliantly played by young actress Tomomi Miyashita), who he rescued from the catacombs of Tokyo — like literally inside the hollow earth (choice reading here and here) — so she doesn't harm herself while alone in his flat. There is a scene like 2/3 the way through, where Tsukamoto's out and about and checks in on Miyashita, she's crawling about the room, moves towards the window, seems to be conversing w/ something/one outside then — the video screen goes blank for like 10 seconds, and when it regains power, she's sprawled on the carpet, convulsing. What the hell just happened? thinks Tsukamoto, and of course we the viewer. That's the rift in Bartlett's piece, this sort of regeneration and evolution that abruptly cuts off 3/4 of the way down, and what proceeds from there on is something very different. In the case of Kurosawa's "Kairo/Pulse", I'm reminded of this 'lifeform' computer program that mimics birth, death, regeneration and evolution via these flying pixels on a black screen. Characters Ryosuke and Harue observe it captivatingly, and all goes as formula intended until this fuzzy-edged spectre appears on the screen, devouring up the other pixels like an invulnerable Pac-Man, only scarier. What's left, eventually, is a black screen, empty save for the one odd, unwanted element.
At first blush, if you're not used to this style of minimalist art, you might think it can't hold your attention, that your eyes bounce straight off Andre's burnt-wood slab configurations, Levine's 'simplistic' wooden multiples, and Shapiro's discreetly tiny bronze figures. I dare you to linger and look a bit closer, and you just might be irretrievably tugged in, encouraging your mind to conjure up all sorts of memories and references to marry w/ what you're seeing. Which could just be proper J-Horror films.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
fee's LIST (through 1/19)
WEDNESDAY
* Akira Kurosawa centennial festival @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St) - THRU FEB 4. OK film freaks, this is what you need to know about this absolutely dope Kurosawa full-career retrospective: each film (be it classics "Rashomon" or "The Seven Samurai" or kookies like "Kagemusha" or "Dreams") plays for one day only but w/ multiple screenings that day. So if you're like 'oh I can't make "Drunken Angel" tonight, I'll try for tomorrow', well, you're out of luck, partner. Visit the festival site for the full festival and showtimes, and I'll do my best to keep you apprised on Kurosawa's doper films (granted, there are many).
* "Stray Dog" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1949) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 7/9:30p, through JAN 14. Kurosawa does the neo-noir hardboiled detective drama and he does it WELL. This is the exception to the festival rule, as "Stray Dog" has its own screen for over a week at Film Forum, and you'd be doing yourself a great favor in checking this out. Feat. Kurosawa stalwarts Toshiro Mifune (clean-cut and hangdog-ish) as the young detective and Takashi Shimura as the grizzled vet. Oh, and the femme fatales! My goodness.
* New York Jewish Film Festival @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St) -THRU JAN 28. Co-sponsored by the Jewish Museum, these two dozen films feat. an international landscape and directorship, and nearly all these are stateside premieres. Check the festival site for the full lineup and ticket info (you know these Lincoln Center films tend to sell out quickly), plus a few I've got my eye on:
- "Eyes Wide Open/Eynayim Pekuhot" (dir. Haim Tabakman, Israel, 2009), an intriguing romance set in an ultra-orthodox neighborhood
- "Ajami" (dir. Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani, Israel/Germany, 2008), a tightly wound drama told from Israeli & Palestinian POVs
- "Within the Whirlwind" (dir. Marleen Gorris, Germany/Poland/Belgium, 2009), based on Jewish poet/professor Evgenia Ginzburg's memoirs in Stalinist Russia
* David Reed "Works on Paper" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St. I was enamored by Reed's softly futuristic vertical and subway-bomber-style horizontal abstract paintings at Max Protetch Gallery in '07. This time, Peter Blum investigates Reed's work process via color studies and works on paper, a rewarding look at this unique abstract artist.
* "Look Again" Group show @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. The angle here is this nearly 2 doz. strong show (feat. gallery artists + special, subversive guests like Vik Muniz and Arman) is 'trompe l'oeil', but like any group show worth its weight, this one should have us second-guessing ourselves, both to the nature of representation and when unlikely subjects 'become' art.
THURSDAY
* Roy Dowell @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. New small scale collages, which Dowell pairs w/ acrylic paint to colorful, almost Dadaist, effect.
* Christian Hellmich "The Array/Transfer-Domino" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Hellmich's big mechanical paintings still have both feet planted firmly in architecture, but you won't find recognizable escalators or foyers this time. He's turned the lot inside out (and sometimes inward again, twisted up like falling down the rabbit hole), creating an abstract hybrid that falls somewhere between the Futurists and Thomas Scheibitz. He's got my attention!
* Elisa Sighicelli "The Party is Over" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Sighicelli's mastery of light, in her large C-prints (here, imageless billboards and scaffoldings mostly), which are all taken at night, if that wasn't clear, is hypnotic and otherworldly. One video work, same name as the exhibition, accompanies and features nighttime fireworks in reverse. Bring your drug of choice!
* Koo Jeong-A "A-Z" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Best way I can describe this Korean-born, Paris-based artist's mixed media installations, which include her watercolors and loads of found objects (and sometimes video) are 'interventions'. She hasn't shown much at the NY Yvon Lambert Gallery, so this solo show should be a mind-widening treat.
* Richard Misrach @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St. Huge pigment prints from the pioneering photographer's recent 'Untitled' series, all created using 'positive capture', which is like a negative but from a powerful digital camera...I think. The source material is landscapes, but think more like David Hockney's fun-with-colors scheme than anything remotely of this world.
* Dan Perjovschi "Postcards from the World" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. Last time, the Bucharest-based artist whose cartoony style packs a wallop, converted the gallery into a huge chalkboard. This exhibition, he inundates the space w/ 500+ postcard-sized drawings of his international travels and observations.
* "The Rise and Fall of Excess Culture" Group Show @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. Lots of group shows this season! Hmm, sounds like a blog topic in the works... this one, curated by Jovana Stokic, focuses on the current economic climate and capitalism and feat. some of the gallery's more 'challenging' artists (Shimon Okshteyn, Aaron Johnson, Patricia Iglesias) + video artist Zhou Tao and the incredibly surreal figurative painter Hillary Harkness.
* Sarah Lipstate (Noveller) + Kyle Bobby Dunn & Richard Lainhart @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (F/M/R to 9th St/4th Ave), 8:30p/$15. An eclectic evening of soundscapes and creative video work, courtesy of ISSUE's typically stellar programming. The draw for me is Lipstate's guitar-drone work, which I hope (as the venue bills this under her full name) accompanies one of her experimental short films.
* Grant Hart @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$10. I still cannot fathom this. Hart, legendary drummer/vocalist/songwriter of legendary '80s punk band Husker Du playing Cake Shop, where you could like stand stage-side and touch him, nearly, if you wanted to. Game plan, if you're in the area: attend this show (catch Brooklyn's Sisters 1st), stay for Hart, then head north to Pianos just in time for Teengirl Fantasy's deviant-house set.
* Teengirl Fantasy @ Pianos / 158 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. Brooklyn's fractured-house duo Teengirl Fantasy are back in town — did you catch them in Williamsburg last week, like I recommended? You've another chance tonight, but they go on late so keep that in mind.
FRIDAY
* "Speed & Chaos" Group Show @ Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery / 505 W 24th St. Into the future of Asian art, so the press release reads. Seven internationally based contemporary artists from China, Taiwan and Korea take on the subject of representation and the global Asian experience in the 21st century. This theme may sound familiar (see Gana NY's Korean-driven show), but featured heavyweights Wang Qinsong and Noh Sang-Kyoon should anchor this show.
* Jack Tworkov "True and False" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 528 W 26th St. A tasting of paintings from the influential Abstract Expressionist's career, incl. works from the 'Variables' (multiple compositions on one huge canvas) and his near-monochromes.
* Hannes Bend "endlich" @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. The 1st US solo exhibition from the color-hungry Berlin-based artist, including his iconic sculptural reproductions, cast out of, uh, candy...and Bauhaus-ready color studies.
* Carl Johan de Geer "Long Live the Large Family" signing @ Dashwood Books / 33 Bond St (6 to Bleecker, BDFV to Broadway/Lafayette), 6-8p. Meet the Swedish Underground Leica-wielder in the flesh, in support of his new compendium of grid-composed, lush b&w photography.
* Cinema Fury/Big Art Group @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p/$12. Nick Hallett organized this wildly immersive 60-min action-media performance by Caden Manson's Big Art Group that explores information corruption and digital transmission, contains a fair bit of transmogrification (of the digital and folkloric hue), a hybridization of theatre and film, and culls audience interaction.
* "Hausu" (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). I am so glad IFC Center installed two additional screens, so they can provide such luxe silver screen gems as this heady, Technicolor-fueled, schoolgirl-cast psychedelic freakout. Like Dario Argento through the mind of a preteen girl, super-cute yet incredibly disturbing.
* "Pripyat" (dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 1999) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 Second Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p. A doc on the people who still live and work 'in the zone', i.e. the restricted area around Chernobyl. For real. (ALSO MON 9p)
* "7915 km" (dir. NIkolaus Geyrhalter, 2008) screening @ Anthology Film Archives, 9:15p. Dig it: the Austrian director's new film follows the Dakar Rally 2007 and the multitudinous cultural landscape of NW and W Africa. Familiar w/ Dave Eggers' "You Shall Know Our Velocity!"? (ALSO SUN 3:45p)
* The Yummy Fur + Bishop Allen + German Measles + McDonalds w/ DJs Peggy Wang/Shirley Braha @ Market Hotel, 1142 Myrtle @ Broadway, Bushwick (JM to Myrtle), 8:30p/$12. A very special night way out in furthest Greenpoint. Allow me to break it down for you: legendary Scots The Yummy Fur (aka John McKeown and crew) last played their indie rock chords 10 years ago. And they've never played stateside. That changes tonight, as they reunite for a very brief, inaugural US tour. They are supported by Brooklyn stalwart smart-indies Bishop Allen and party rockers German Measles and McDonalds...oh and if saw my lengthy explanation above, Peggy from the Pains of Being Pure at Heart is on deck. Magical.
* Led Er Est + Noveller @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Ahhh this is going to be good! Led Er Est do a sort of Joy Division meets Cure thing, which is dope, but you'll have to wait on that when Sarah Lipstate (aka Noveller) brings the heat via her double-necked guitar — all ethereal drones and furious noise permitted.
* Real Estate + The Beets + Beach Fossils + Total Slacker @ St James Church / 64 James St (JM to Chambers St, F to East Broadway), 8p/$10. Less Artists More Condos, those fab DIY promoters, host a who's-who of NY-area indie rock inside a Roman Catholic Church. Did you catch all that?
SATURDAY
* Philip Taaffe "Works on Paper" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Seems Gagosian is out to mess w/ our heads, like psychedelically, what w/ Elisa Sighicelli's glowing show uptown and now Taafe's large Mandala-based works. What, you say they look like a bit like massively enlarged LSD blotter paper? Why, whatever do you mean?
* Aa w/ Dinowalrus (record release party) + Graffiti Monsters @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$7. Way too much fun tonight. If Graffiti Monsters (who rock a Gameboy much as one can rock one of those things) and psych-rockers Dinowalrus (record release party) weren't enough, the trundling percussive army Aa will LEVEL Cake Shop's basement, I promise you. Heavy stuff.
* Beach Fossils + Alex Bleeker and the Freaks @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. So when I write 'way too much fun tonight' (above), this is what I mean. Chocolate Bobka hosts an incredible lineup of surf/folk-friendly Underwater Peoples artists, incl. Alex Bleeker and his freaks and the always charming Beach Fossils. I cannot wait!
* "The Hidden Fortress" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1958) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 6:20/9p. All "Star Wars" buffs should know the plot already: countrywide clan wars (evil empire v. the Jedi), a swashbuckling Toshiro Mifune (I guess Han Solo?) and tough-as-nails Misa Uehara (Princess Leia), w/ constant comedic effect from the two bickering farmers (uh, the droids) lassoed into Mifune's servitude. One of my favorite Kurosawa classics.
* "Chateau du Chic" @ Monkeytown / 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5 (reservations recommended!). Legendary Wiilliamsburg multimedia rec-room Monkeytown is closing on JAN 24. This is one of the hardest things I have ever wrote. It is very sad, but the programming up until that fateful night is spot-on ace. This night in particular, a multimedia cabaret MCed by faux Britpop personality Nicklcat (aka performer de résistance Nick Hallett) and feat. Katie Eastburn (chanteuse), Shana Moulton (A/V) and some warm surprises.
MONDAY
* Woods (playing "Woods Family Creeps" improv) @ Monkeytown / 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/10:30p/$10 (reservations recommended!). See my rant above regarding Monkeytown's imminent closing. Woods are perhaps Brooklyn's finest psych-folk-rockers — or at least the weirdest yet most immediately huggable — and they return to their trippy, improv roots on this freeform, two-show jam session.
* Ecstatic Sunshine + McDonalds @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$7. I can get into Baltimore's ambient psych-rockers Ecstatic Sunshine, but the real draw tonight is McDonalds aka the entire caUSE co-MOTION!
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Primary Atmospheres" California Minimalism 1960-1970 @ David Zwirner / 525-533 W 19th St. An essential addition to the W.Chelsea scene, this warm-vibes group may make you forget how cold it actually is outside. We get two flavors, the seductively emotive light-installations from James Turrell and spare visually trickery from Robert Irwin in the 525 space, and a solid two-room offering of gorgeous clear-based (acrylic, resin, glass) sculptural wedges and cubes at 533. If beautiful subtlety is your thing, this is your candy store.
* Joseph Beuys "We are the Revolution" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Independent curator and art historian Dr. Pamela Kort culled together this fascinating, museum-quality showcase of Beuys' multiples (famous pieces 'Sled', 'Capri Battery', 'Telephone', 'Felt Suit', plus loads others) and media and literary materials in a flotilla of vitrine cases, plus a few chalkboards from 'Action Third Way' for good measure. A brilliant, intellectually-packed exhibition, highly recommended.
* Jeffrey Vallance "Relics & Reliquaries" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Trace a path through Vallance's precious tabernacles (feat. objet from his time in the Tonga islands to detritus from his impressionable teen years), reading each supplied text (they're good, trust me), and you'll feel like you really know the artist. Religious imagery infused w/ familiar suburban banality; if you grew up stateside, chances are you either 1) know a Vallance or 2) share some of these experiences.
+ "Strange Travelers" Group Show, curated by Mark Dion, plus Dion's "Travels of William Bartram – Reconsidered". This cheeky travelogue to the 18th C. American naturalist is Dion at his methodical finest, and he pulls it off very well (from a case of Dion's hand-drawn and painted flora/fauna postcards from Bartram's garden to a ridiculously extensive glass cabinet of all kinds of tchotchke alligators, incl. the naturalist's own reptilian reproduction). His curated show of international travel-minded artists is interesting. James Prosek's Audobon-style paintings of birds are more straightforward than Walton Ford's (the only other contemporary artist I can think of who does this, besides Dion maybe), but he takes it a step further w/ hybrid 'tool birds', both taxidermy and brush. Sanna Kannisto contributes lush C-prints from her work in S. American rainforests, and David Brook styles a belt-lashed collection of hewn telephone poles that carries a disarming echo of felled forest trees.
* Patti Smith w/ Steven Sebring "Objects of Life" @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. This crowded exhibition follows the creative process b/w musician/artist Smith (who can do no wrong, IMO) and photographer/filmmaker Sebring, and it often blurs the line b/w which work is accredited to Smith or Sebring (or both, at times). The distinction is obvious in the weaker moments, like Sebring's light-box blowups of Smith's source materials (boots, camera, scarf etc), which strike a vividly atonal tone w/ the rest of the gloomily seductive offering. Better are Smith's b&w photography and her collaboration w/ Sebring, a small series of albumen prints that somehow resemble both darkroom manipulation and graffiti.
* Diane Arbus "In the Absence of Others" + Williams Eggleston "21st Century" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. When you pair another photographer w/ Arbus, you've got to bring the heat. And Eggleston's new, textural prints, don't exactly bring it, but they've got their moments. A car wash windshield could be both an undersea view or a color-manipulated deep-space nebula, another spare car window includes a stick-on Santa Claus in an otherwise spare view, and a gorgeous nighttime view in New Jersey is masterful. However, Eggleston's portion of the show could use an edit, as it doesn't carry the concentrated energy of Arbus' dozen-plus b&w prints of NYC's empty hotel lobbies, cinemas and landscapes. There is a palpable closeness to each of these, as if the presence of people just off the frame's edge.
* Keith Sonnier "Oldowan Series" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. The source inspiration for Sonnier's new collection of bent neon tubing sculpture are Paleolithic tools! But these pieces bear a graceful, balletic lightness belying the weight and relative crudeness of their particular inspiration. In fact, these pleasing tangles of colorful O's and curves look a bit like figurative sketches of the human form, but done Sonnier's way.
* "On the Square" @ Pacewildenstein / 32 E 57th St. The gallery pulls from its roster of minimalists and geometric heavyweights for a group show based around that deceptively simple four-cornered shape. Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin provide the sturdy, scholarly framework for exploration and invention, whether the spare (Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold), the playful (Keith Tyson, Joel Shapiro), or the wildly dangerous (Tara Donovan's contribution is a just-held-together cube of pins, some of which have already sought more interesting territories by scattering about the nearby perimeter).
* Pascal Grandmaison "The Inverted Ghost" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. The show's namesake comes from a series of large color inkjet diptychs of oily smears, like scarred featureless masks. The Canadian artist accompanies these with two films, incl. the recent "Light My Fiction", which marries decrepit Coney Island amusement parks w/ decades-old video game consoles.
* Andy Warhol "Still Lifes and Feet" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. It's nice this show of Warhol's very early pen drawings (1956-1961) debuted w/ Louis Menard's article in last week's New Yorker. It's not got the immediacy of his hypercolor silkscreened portraits, but these intimate drawings of the titular namesake, (mostly male) human feet and a texture or adornment, showcase Warhol's simple, confident pen-lines. And if you've got even the remotest fetish for this kind of thing: beware; one in particular, he masterfully captures the turned-up sole of a bare foot against a huge whelk-like seashell.
* Marlo Pascual @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Pascual's first solo show at the gallery feat. her masterful pairing of disparate objects: vaguely familiar silver screen starlets (via b&w prints, greatly enlarged and usually theatrically cropped) and heavy physical objects (rocks, potted plants), her 'props'. She takes this concept even further by staging vignette-like installations in the main gallery, including planks, lighting and chairs to complement her manipulated vintage prints.
* Anne Lindberg + Johnny Swing @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 535 W 24th St 2nd Fl. Swing's massive rusty steel twists act as an earthy anchor for the real showcase here, which are Lindberg's fascinatingly laborious graphite-on-cotton works. Her control of the pencil lines cause 3D shadows to float and flutter from the surface, like you could breathe on the canvas to produce the same effect.
* Works on Paper group show @ Danese / 535 W 24th St. MoMA's long-running "Compass in Hand" contemporary drawings show just closed, and if you are just aching for more of that, but w/ a bunch of artists who weren't included in that show (Su-en Wong, Bill Jensen, John Chamberlain, Valerie Giles, Richard Serra) + those who were (Warren Isensee, Barry Le Va), take a moment to peruse this very extensive show of mostly new works.
* Kirsten Nelson "Assembly Required" @ Frederieke Taylor Gallery / 535 W 22nd St 6th Fl. I dig Nelson's stark sculptural installation, composed of materials you could quite easily find @ Home Depot (sheetrock, plywood, drywall etc)...though the effect is way less than perusing a hardware store than it is noticing the details of the compositions, wallpaper-like patterns tucked just beyond the apparent field of vision.
+ dNASAb "dataclysmic", in the project room. The title and concept, wild video sculptures utilizing phosphorescent silicone and consumer electronics, might sound a little too easy, eye-candy-ish, but they are mad gorgeous up close.
* Peter Peri @ Bortolami / 510 W 25th St. This London artist's reductive mixed media paintings, gloomy canvases marred by either razor-sharp linework or the occasional tonal explosion, creep me out in a really good way. It's sort of like taking Tomma Abts style, enlarging it, then painting over it. He mates these w/ some absurdly deft linework on simple geometric shapes and a mirror image of Jean Auguste Dominique's famous 'Odalisque'.
* William Daniels @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Perhaps the contemporary master of the niche-like small scale renderings of Old Masters via found-objet, Daniels turns to abstract foil surfaces for his source material whilst keeping the lushly painted canvases tiny. There are only ten pieces here, so take your time discerning each, the color choice (the Orange Crush-flavored one in the back is a favorite) and the diffusion of light. Delicious.
* Hélio Oiticica "Drawings, 1954-58" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. Rare works from the Brazilian artist and member of Grupo Frente, the mid-'50s avant-garde collective. Do the math: Oiticica produced nearly all these either geometrically-sparse or discreetly colored gouaches when he was a teenager. Like Aphex Twin doing Jean (Hans) Arp.
LAST CHANCE (closing this weekend)
* 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.
* 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.
* 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 "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.
* Akira Kurosawa centennial festival @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St) - THRU FEB 4. OK film freaks, this is what you need to know about this absolutely dope Kurosawa full-career retrospective: each film (be it classics "Rashomon" or "The Seven Samurai" or kookies like "Kagemusha" or "Dreams") plays for one day only but w/ multiple screenings that day. So if you're like 'oh I can't make "Drunken Angel" tonight, I'll try for tomorrow', well, you're out of luck, partner. Visit the festival site for the full festival and showtimes, and I'll do my best to keep you apprised on Kurosawa's doper films (granted, there are many).
* "Stray Dog" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1949) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 7/9:30p, through JAN 14. Kurosawa does the neo-noir hardboiled detective drama and he does it WELL. This is the exception to the festival rule, as "Stray Dog" has its own screen for over a week at Film Forum, and you'd be doing yourself a great favor in checking this out. Feat. Kurosawa stalwarts Toshiro Mifune (clean-cut and hangdog-ish) as the young detective and Takashi Shimura as the grizzled vet. Oh, and the femme fatales! My goodness.
* New York Jewish Film Festival @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St) -THRU JAN 28. Co-sponsored by the Jewish Museum, these two dozen films feat. an international landscape and directorship, and nearly all these are stateside premieres. Check the festival site for the full lineup and ticket info (you know these Lincoln Center films tend to sell out quickly), plus a few I've got my eye on:
- "Eyes Wide Open/Eynayim Pekuhot" (dir. Haim Tabakman, Israel, 2009), an intriguing romance set in an ultra-orthodox neighborhood
- "Ajami" (dir. Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani, Israel/Germany, 2008), a tightly wound drama told from Israeli & Palestinian POVs
- "Within the Whirlwind" (dir. Marleen Gorris, Germany/Poland/Belgium, 2009), based on Jewish poet/professor Evgenia Ginzburg's memoirs in Stalinist Russia
* David Reed "Works on Paper" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St. I was enamored by Reed's softly futuristic vertical and subway-bomber-style horizontal abstract paintings at Max Protetch Gallery in '07. This time, Peter Blum investigates Reed's work process via color studies and works on paper, a rewarding look at this unique abstract artist.
* "Look Again" Group show @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. The angle here is this nearly 2 doz. strong show (feat. gallery artists + special, subversive guests like Vik Muniz and Arman) is 'trompe l'oeil', but like any group show worth its weight, this one should have us second-guessing ourselves, both to the nature of representation and when unlikely subjects 'become' art.
THURSDAY
* Roy Dowell @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. New small scale collages, which Dowell pairs w/ acrylic paint to colorful, almost Dadaist, effect.
* Christian Hellmich "The Array/Transfer-Domino" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Hellmich's big mechanical paintings still have both feet planted firmly in architecture, but you won't find recognizable escalators or foyers this time. He's turned the lot inside out (and sometimes inward again, twisted up like falling down the rabbit hole), creating an abstract hybrid that falls somewhere between the Futurists and Thomas Scheibitz. He's got my attention!
* Elisa Sighicelli "The Party is Over" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Sighicelli's mastery of light, in her large C-prints (here, imageless billboards and scaffoldings mostly), which are all taken at night, if that wasn't clear, is hypnotic and otherworldly. One video work, same name as the exhibition, accompanies and features nighttime fireworks in reverse. Bring your drug of choice!
* Koo Jeong-A "A-Z" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Best way I can describe this Korean-born, Paris-based artist's mixed media installations, which include her watercolors and loads of found objects (and sometimes video) are 'interventions'. She hasn't shown much at the NY Yvon Lambert Gallery, so this solo show should be a mind-widening treat.
* Richard Misrach @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St. Huge pigment prints from the pioneering photographer's recent 'Untitled' series, all created using 'positive capture', which is like a negative but from a powerful digital camera...I think. The source material is landscapes, but think more like David Hockney's fun-with-colors scheme than anything remotely of this world.
* Dan Perjovschi "Postcards from the World" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. Last time, the Bucharest-based artist whose cartoony style packs a wallop, converted the gallery into a huge chalkboard. This exhibition, he inundates the space w/ 500+ postcard-sized drawings of his international travels and observations.
* "The Rise and Fall of Excess Culture" Group Show @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. Lots of group shows this season! Hmm, sounds like a blog topic in the works... this one, curated by Jovana Stokic, focuses on the current economic climate and capitalism and feat. some of the gallery's more 'challenging' artists (Shimon Okshteyn, Aaron Johnson, Patricia Iglesias) + video artist Zhou Tao and the incredibly surreal figurative painter Hillary Harkness.
* Sarah Lipstate (Noveller) + Kyle Bobby Dunn & Richard Lainhart @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (F/M/R to 9th St/4th Ave), 8:30p/$15. An eclectic evening of soundscapes and creative video work, courtesy of ISSUE's typically stellar programming. The draw for me is Lipstate's guitar-drone work, which I hope (as the venue bills this under her full name) accompanies one of her experimental short films.
* Grant Hart @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$10. I still cannot fathom this. Hart, legendary drummer/vocalist/songwriter of legendary '80s punk band Husker Du playing Cake Shop, where you could like stand stage-side and touch him, nearly, if you wanted to. Game plan, if you're in the area: attend this show (catch Brooklyn's Sisters 1st), stay for Hart, then head north to Pianos just in time for Teengirl Fantasy's deviant-house set.
* Teengirl Fantasy @ Pianos / 158 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. Brooklyn's fractured-house duo Teengirl Fantasy are back in town — did you catch them in Williamsburg last week, like I recommended? You've another chance tonight, but they go on late so keep that in mind.
FRIDAY
* "Speed & Chaos" Group Show @ Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery / 505 W 24th St. Into the future of Asian art, so the press release reads. Seven internationally based contemporary artists from China, Taiwan and Korea take on the subject of representation and the global Asian experience in the 21st century. This theme may sound familiar (see Gana NY's Korean-driven show), but featured heavyweights Wang Qinsong and Noh Sang-Kyoon should anchor this show.
* Jack Tworkov "True and False" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 528 W 26th St. A tasting of paintings from the influential Abstract Expressionist's career, incl. works from the 'Variables' (multiple compositions on one huge canvas) and his near-monochromes.
* Hannes Bend "endlich" @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. The 1st US solo exhibition from the color-hungry Berlin-based artist, including his iconic sculptural reproductions, cast out of, uh, candy...and Bauhaus-ready color studies.
* Carl Johan de Geer "Long Live the Large Family" signing @ Dashwood Books / 33 Bond St (6 to Bleecker, BDFV to Broadway/Lafayette), 6-8p. Meet the Swedish Underground Leica-wielder in the flesh, in support of his new compendium of grid-composed, lush b&w photography.
* Cinema Fury/Big Art Group @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p/$12. Nick Hallett organized this wildly immersive 60-min action-media performance by Caden Manson's Big Art Group that explores information corruption and digital transmission, contains a fair bit of transmogrification (of the digital and folkloric hue), a hybridization of theatre and film, and culls audience interaction.
* "Hausu" (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). I am so glad IFC Center installed two additional screens, so they can provide such luxe silver screen gems as this heady, Technicolor-fueled, schoolgirl-cast psychedelic freakout. Like Dario Argento through the mind of a preteen girl, super-cute yet incredibly disturbing.
* "Pripyat" (dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 1999) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 Second Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p. A doc on the people who still live and work 'in the zone', i.e. the restricted area around Chernobyl. For real. (ALSO MON 9p)
* "7915 km" (dir. NIkolaus Geyrhalter, 2008) screening @ Anthology Film Archives, 9:15p. Dig it: the Austrian director's new film follows the Dakar Rally 2007 and the multitudinous cultural landscape of NW and W Africa. Familiar w/ Dave Eggers' "You Shall Know Our Velocity!"? (ALSO SUN 3:45p)
* The Yummy Fur + Bishop Allen + German Measles + McDonalds w/ DJs Peggy Wang/Shirley Braha @ Market Hotel, 1142 Myrtle @ Broadway, Bushwick (JM to Myrtle), 8:30p/$12. A very special night way out in furthest Greenpoint. Allow me to break it down for you: legendary Scots The Yummy Fur (aka John McKeown and crew) last played their indie rock chords 10 years ago. And they've never played stateside. That changes tonight, as they reunite for a very brief, inaugural US tour. They are supported by Brooklyn stalwart smart-indies Bishop Allen and party rockers German Measles and McDonalds...oh and if saw my lengthy explanation above, Peggy from the Pains of Being Pure at Heart is on deck. Magical.
* Led Er Est + Noveller @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Ahhh this is going to be good! Led Er Est do a sort of Joy Division meets Cure thing, which is dope, but you'll have to wait on that when Sarah Lipstate (aka Noveller) brings the heat via her double-necked guitar — all ethereal drones and furious noise permitted.
* Real Estate + The Beets + Beach Fossils + Total Slacker @ St James Church / 64 James St (JM to Chambers St, F to East Broadway), 8p/$10. Less Artists More Condos, those fab DIY promoters, host a who's-who of NY-area indie rock inside a Roman Catholic Church. Did you catch all that?
SATURDAY
* Philip Taaffe "Works on Paper" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Seems Gagosian is out to mess w/ our heads, like psychedelically, what w/ Elisa Sighicelli's glowing show uptown and now Taafe's large Mandala-based works. What, you say they look like a bit like massively enlarged LSD blotter paper? Why, whatever do you mean?
* Aa w/ Dinowalrus (record release party) + Graffiti Monsters @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$7. Way too much fun tonight. If Graffiti Monsters (who rock a Gameboy much as one can rock one of those things) and psych-rockers Dinowalrus (record release party) weren't enough, the trundling percussive army Aa will LEVEL Cake Shop's basement, I promise you. Heavy stuff.
* Beach Fossils + Alex Bleeker and the Freaks @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. So when I write 'way too much fun tonight' (above), this is what I mean. Chocolate Bobka hosts an incredible lineup of surf/folk-friendly Underwater Peoples artists, incl. Alex Bleeker and his freaks and the always charming Beach Fossils. I cannot wait!
* "The Hidden Fortress" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1958) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 6:20/9p. All "Star Wars" buffs should know the plot already: countrywide clan wars (evil empire v. the Jedi), a swashbuckling Toshiro Mifune (I guess Han Solo?) and tough-as-nails Misa Uehara (Princess Leia), w/ constant comedic effect from the two bickering farmers (uh, the droids) lassoed into Mifune's servitude. One of my favorite Kurosawa classics.
* "Chateau du Chic" @ Monkeytown / 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5 (reservations recommended!). Legendary Wiilliamsburg multimedia rec-room Monkeytown is closing on JAN 24. This is one of the hardest things I have ever wrote. It is very sad, but the programming up until that fateful night is spot-on ace. This night in particular, a multimedia cabaret MCed by faux Britpop personality Nicklcat (aka performer de résistance Nick Hallett) and feat. Katie Eastburn (chanteuse), Shana Moulton (A/V) and some warm surprises.
MONDAY
* Woods (playing "Woods Family Creeps" improv) @ Monkeytown / 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/10:30p/$10 (reservations recommended!). See my rant above regarding Monkeytown's imminent closing. Woods are perhaps Brooklyn's finest psych-folk-rockers — or at least the weirdest yet most immediately huggable — and they return to their trippy, improv roots on this freeform, two-show jam session.
* Ecstatic Sunshine + McDonalds @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$7. I can get into Baltimore's ambient psych-rockers Ecstatic Sunshine, but the real draw tonight is McDonalds aka the entire caUSE co-MOTION!
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Primary Atmospheres" California Minimalism 1960-1970 @ David Zwirner / 525-533 W 19th St. An essential addition to the W.Chelsea scene, this warm-vibes group may make you forget how cold it actually is outside. We get two flavors, the seductively emotive light-installations from James Turrell and spare visually trickery from Robert Irwin in the 525 space, and a solid two-room offering of gorgeous clear-based (acrylic, resin, glass) sculptural wedges and cubes at 533. If beautiful subtlety is your thing, this is your candy store.
* Joseph Beuys "We are the Revolution" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Independent curator and art historian Dr. Pamela Kort culled together this fascinating, museum-quality showcase of Beuys' multiples (famous pieces 'Sled', 'Capri Battery', 'Telephone', 'Felt Suit', plus loads others) and media and literary materials in a flotilla of vitrine cases, plus a few chalkboards from 'Action Third Way' for good measure. A brilliant, intellectually-packed exhibition, highly recommended.
* Jeffrey Vallance "Relics & Reliquaries" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Trace a path through Vallance's precious tabernacles (feat. objet from his time in the Tonga islands to detritus from his impressionable teen years), reading each supplied text (they're good, trust me), and you'll feel like you really know the artist. Religious imagery infused w/ familiar suburban banality; if you grew up stateside, chances are you either 1) know a Vallance or 2) share some of these experiences.
+ "Strange Travelers" Group Show, curated by Mark Dion, plus Dion's "Travels of William Bartram – Reconsidered". This cheeky travelogue to the 18th C. American naturalist is Dion at his methodical finest, and he pulls it off very well (from a case of Dion's hand-drawn and painted flora/fauna postcards from Bartram's garden to a ridiculously extensive glass cabinet of all kinds of tchotchke alligators, incl. the naturalist's own reptilian reproduction). His curated show of international travel-minded artists is interesting. James Prosek's Audobon-style paintings of birds are more straightforward than Walton Ford's (the only other contemporary artist I can think of who does this, besides Dion maybe), but he takes it a step further w/ hybrid 'tool birds', both taxidermy and brush. Sanna Kannisto contributes lush C-prints from her work in S. American rainforests, and David Brook styles a belt-lashed collection of hewn telephone poles that carries a disarming echo of felled forest trees.
* Patti Smith w/ Steven Sebring "Objects of Life" @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. This crowded exhibition follows the creative process b/w musician/artist Smith (who can do no wrong, IMO) and photographer/filmmaker Sebring, and it often blurs the line b/w which work is accredited to Smith or Sebring (or both, at times). The distinction is obvious in the weaker moments, like Sebring's light-box blowups of Smith's source materials (boots, camera, scarf etc), which strike a vividly atonal tone w/ the rest of the gloomily seductive offering. Better are Smith's b&w photography and her collaboration w/ Sebring, a small series of albumen prints that somehow resemble both darkroom manipulation and graffiti.
* Diane Arbus "In the Absence of Others" + Williams Eggleston "21st Century" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. When you pair another photographer w/ Arbus, you've got to bring the heat. And Eggleston's new, textural prints, don't exactly bring it, but they've got their moments. A car wash windshield could be both an undersea view or a color-manipulated deep-space nebula, another spare car window includes a stick-on Santa Claus in an otherwise spare view, and a gorgeous nighttime view in New Jersey is masterful. However, Eggleston's portion of the show could use an edit, as it doesn't carry the concentrated energy of Arbus' dozen-plus b&w prints of NYC's empty hotel lobbies, cinemas and landscapes. There is a palpable closeness to each of these, as if the presence of people just off the frame's edge.
* Keith Sonnier "Oldowan Series" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. The source inspiration for Sonnier's new collection of bent neon tubing sculpture are Paleolithic tools! But these pieces bear a graceful, balletic lightness belying the weight and relative crudeness of their particular inspiration. In fact, these pleasing tangles of colorful O's and curves look a bit like figurative sketches of the human form, but done Sonnier's way.
* "On the Square" @ Pacewildenstein / 32 E 57th St. The gallery pulls from its roster of minimalists and geometric heavyweights for a group show based around that deceptively simple four-cornered shape. Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin provide the sturdy, scholarly framework for exploration and invention, whether the spare (Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold), the playful (Keith Tyson, Joel Shapiro), or the wildly dangerous (Tara Donovan's contribution is a just-held-together cube of pins, some of which have already sought more interesting territories by scattering about the nearby perimeter).
* Pascal Grandmaison "The Inverted Ghost" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. The show's namesake comes from a series of large color inkjet diptychs of oily smears, like scarred featureless masks. The Canadian artist accompanies these with two films, incl. the recent "Light My Fiction", which marries decrepit Coney Island amusement parks w/ decades-old video game consoles.
* Andy Warhol "Still Lifes and Feet" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. It's nice this show of Warhol's very early pen drawings (1956-1961) debuted w/ Louis Menard's article in last week's New Yorker. It's not got the immediacy of his hypercolor silkscreened portraits, but these intimate drawings of the titular namesake, (mostly male) human feet and a texture or adornment, showcase Warhol's simple, confident pen-lines. And if you've got even the remotest fetish for this kind of thing: beware; one in particular, he masterfully captures the turned-up sole of a bare foot against a huge whelk-like seashell.
* Marlo Pascual @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Pascual's first solo show at the gallery feat. her masterful pairing of disparate objects: vaguely familiar silver screen starlets (via b&w prints, greatly enlarged and usually theatrically cropped) and heavy physical objects (rocks, potted plants), her 'props'. She takes this concept even further by staging vignette-like installations in the main gallery, including planks, lighting and chairs to complement her manipulated vintage prints.
* Anne Lindberg + Johnny Swing @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 535 W 24th St 2nd Fl. Swing's massive rusty steel twists act as an earthy anchor for the real showcase here, which are Lindberg's fascinatingly laborious graphite-on-cotton works. Her control of the pencil lines cause 3D shadows to float and flutter from the surface, like you could breathe on the canvas to produce the same effect.
* Works on Paper group show @ Danese / 535 W 24th St. MoMA's long-running "Compass in Hand" contemporary drawings show just closed, and if you are just aching for more of that, but w/ a bunch of artists who weren't included in that show (Su-en Wong, Bill Jensen, John Chamberlain, Valerie Giles, Richard Serra) + those who were (Warren Isensee, Barry Le Va), take a moment to peruse this very extensive show of mostly new works.
* Kirsten Nelson "Assembly Required" @ Frederieke Taylor Gallery / 535 W 22nd St 6th Fl. I dig Nelson's stark sculptural installation, composed of materials you could quite easily find @ Home Depot (sheetrock, plywood, drywall etc)...though the effect is way less than perusing a hardware store than it is noticing the details of the compositions, wallpaper-like patterns tucked just beyond the apparent field of vision.
+ dNASAb "dataclysmic", in the project room. The title and concept, wild video sculptures utilizing phosphorescent silicone and consumer electronics, might sound a little too easy, eye-candy-ish, but they are mad gorgeous up close.
* Peter Peri @ Bortolami / 510 W 25th St. This London artist's reductive mixed media paintings, gloomy canvases marred by either razor-sharp linework or the occasional tonal explosion, creep me out in a really good way. It's sort of like taking Tomma Abts style, enlarging it, then painting over it. He mates these w/ some absurdly deft linework on simple geometric shapes and a mirror image of Jean Auguste Dominique's famous 'Odalisque'.
* William Daniels @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Perhaps the contemporary master of the niche-like small scale renderings of Old Masters via found-objet, Daniels turns to abstract foil surfaces for his source material whilst keeping the lushly painted canvases tiny. There are only ten pieces here, so take your time discerning each, the color choice (the Orange Crush-flavored one in the back is a favorite) and the diffusion of light. Delicious.
* Hélio Oiticica "Drawings, 1954-58" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. Rare works from the Brazilian artist and member of Grupo Frente, the mid-'50s avant-garde collective. Do the math: Oiticica produced nearly all these either geometrically-sparse or discreetly colored gouaches when he was a teenager. Like Aphex Twin doing Jean (Hans) Arp.
LAST CHANCE (closing this weekend)
* 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.
* 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.
* 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 "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.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Minimalist Bookends + Museum-worthy
Two wonderfully, sublimely minimal shows currently bookend the W.Chelsea gallery scene. First mark the extreme southern border of W.Chelsea at 19th St and the extreme northern border 29th St. The shows I am referring to are the 'Primary Atmospheres' group show, a collection of California Minimalists from 1960-1970 at David Zwirner Gallery on 19th St (which just opened), and the brilliant installation of Anthony McCall's new works at Sean Kelly Gallery on 29th St (which opened before the winter holiday and runs through the end of this month). Though this is a considerable haul, all of ten blocks in the blustery Hudson River chill of January, I urge you to embark on it and cover both shows in one day's worth of gallery-going, ideally beginning on one and ending on the other (the order I leave up to you).
I began at the southern end, at Zwirner's and the one holdover from the stunning Dan Flavin show from late autumn. This would be "alternating pink and 'gold'", the three-wall installation of sugary pink and goldenrod fluorescent rods at the 519 space. Though he operated from the other coast, this work falls w/in the adjacent show's timeline (here '67), and it's dope to look at. The Cali minimalist show proper, next door, starts off w/ a velvet-coated bang in the form of three Robert Irwin pieces, each superseding the next. In fact, the powder-white and clear works recede into and swell from the gallery walls, tricking us into thinking the room devoid of art. The two acrylic pieces in particular, a columnar glasslike obelisk and a reverberating UFO-like orb, seem to occupy additional dimensions in the way they play off the stark space. The calming, soft-edged Doug Wheeler neon and acrylic square in the next room prepares the eye for two brilliant colored-light projections from James Turrell, a master of 'emotive light'. For those of you not sold on his holograms exhibition @ Pacewildenstein this past autumn, I dare you not to be moved by the Jolly Rancher green lozenge and red triangle, in their respective rooms.
In the corridor connection 525 w/ 533, Laddie John Dill does this Robert Smithson thing w/ sand, glass and argon, creating Mesozoic-like land striations from these deceptively simple ingredients. And it's here that the exhibition opens up into a bunch of relatively smaller, though no less awe-inspiring, pieces. In fact, there are so many of them in the two exhibition spaces of 533 that you have to stop to catch your breath, visually speaking. Whether it's Peter Alexander's rainwater-colored polyester resin 'wedges', Larry Bell's vacuum-coated glass cubes (check esp. the brilliant etched ellipses box), or the polyester resin and acrylic orbs by Helen Pashgian (think of the mutant acrylic speakers from Apple, then rewind like 30+ years to possible source material) — there is a LOT of wicked stuff involving clear industrial materials going on here. The next room is overall more colorful and practically pushes the show over the visual threshold w/ De Wain Valentine's supersized holiday ornament (made of shimmery red fiberglass-reinforced polyester) and Craig Kauffman's pink-and-green gradiented plastic panel, flopped over a steel chain like soft-sculpture color-field crossed w/ Listerine PocketPacks.
Up ten blocks at Sean Kelly, Anthony McCall's new installation is comparatively simpler, as it 'only' involves two light projection pieces and those pieces are composed of light projectors and audio tracks. I write 'only' w/ some trepidation, as this show, like all of McCall's, is way more stirring in person than it will ever be in print. McCall is a light-sculptor, much as Turrell emotes light in his own works. But as McCall's involve moving light works, via projection, the effects can be all the more incredible, and interaction is strongly encouraged. His "Leaving (with Two-Minute Silence)", the double-projection installation in the main gallery room, is such a piece. The two light-beams 'draw' these undulating solid-line shapes on the wall, and should you walk in front of one of the beams, you would find yourself 'inside' the light-sculpture. Try to picture this: you're inside a cone of hazy light; it's not blinding you b/c the central beam is somewhere else, only its broadened dimensions have caught you. There are lines w/in this cone, some of them more solid and smokier than others. They appear solid but if you run your hand over one it lights up b/c, obvs, it's just light. 'Just light'. Check the smoke too when it billows up all around you lagoon-like. You may never want to leave. The other projection "Meeting You Halfway II", is interesting as the light-projection includes gaps of dead space, forming like bifurcated beams of smoky light that you can navigate around.
And this brings me to my 2nd topic, museum-worthiness. There's been a lot of news in this new economy about how museums will tackle exhibitions on a more mindful budget. This could mean less blue-chip knockouts (I'm looking at Cai Guo-Qiang's retrospective at the Guggenheim, a gorgeous affair but probably incredibly expensive), or more narrowly-targeted, rewarding mini-shows (Johannes Vermeer's "The Milkmaid" at the Met this past autumn is a wonderful example). So that's so, but then we have museum-quaility exhibitions in the galleries, too. And my way of thinking is: these belong in a museum. Or rather, why aren't they in a museum; I'm happy they're in W.Chelsea (or wherever), where I can access them whenever I want, but why didn't a museum think of this? I am referring to the Zwirner show, above, on California Minimalists, and on the new exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in W.Chelsea, called Joseph Beuys 'We Are the Revolution', curated by Pamela Kort. Of course there was a superb Minimalist show at the Guggenheim back in 2004 (my first show at the Gugg!), but I haven't seen anything so deftly concentrated on this particular vibe as the Zwirner show. Anyone who knows my art-going tendencies knows I love Minimalism (check my time spent up at Dia Beacon); but again, this is Minimalism w/ all the sunny good-vibes feelings imbuing it. Perhaps it's the Cali angle? Regarding the Beuys show, Mary Boone enlisted Dr. Kort, independent curator and art historian, specializing in German art from Europe. She did a fine job in this intellectually-packed show, a suite of vitrines showcasing Beuys' multiples (the classics 'Sled', 'Telephone', 'Capri Battery' and loads else) and literary materials, plus pen drawings, drypoint and etchings, 'Action Third Way' blackboards, and felt literally everywhere (from the iconic 'Felt Suit' to a rather cool felt-lined tape deck, feat. this extremely Dada recording of Beuys' voice heard when you first enter the gallery). And trust me, much as I dig the Beuys wing of the MoMA, organized by Ann Tempkin (which incl. his seminal video "I Like America and America Likes Me" from '74), I'd seen a lot of those works before, or I felt as though I had...perhaps from my time spent amid the Beuys up at Dia. Kort's curated exhibition at Mary Boone felt entirely new — slightly, comfortingly familiar in the the way of 'Sled' and a few other multiples, of course.
And then I wonder: are these not BETTER than museum shows? Are they not MORE than museum-worthy? We don't have crowds of slow-moving tourists, holding those telephone-receiver ear-pieces, gawking at poetic signage instead of the art itself. Oh I'm going there. We don't have coffee-bars or museum cafés, either, nor queues to check our coats or have our bags searched. We enter the space, we take in the art, we read the literature at the front desk if we feel like it, and we leave. Perhaps these galleries have the right idea after all.
I began at the southern end, at Zwirner's and the one holdover from the stunning Dan Flavin show from late autumn. This would be "alternating pink and 'gold'", the three-wall installation of sugary pink and goldenrod fluorescent rods at the 519 space. Though he operated from the other coast, this work falls w/in the adjacent show's timeline (here '67), and it's dope to look at. The Cali minimalist show proper, next door, starts off w/ a velvet-coated bang in the form of three Robert Irwin pieces, each superseding the next. In fact, the powder-white and clear works recede into and swell from the gallery walls, tricking us into thinking the room devoid of art. The two acrylic pieces in particular, a columnar glasslike obelisk and a reverberating UFO-like orb, seem to occupy additional dimensions in the way they play off the stark space. The calming, soft-edged Doug Wheeler neon and acrylic square in the next room prepares the eye for two brilliant colored-light projections from James Turrell, a master of 'emotive light'. For those of you not sold on his holograms exhibition @ Pacewildenstein this past autumn, I dare you not to be moved by the Jolly Rancher green lozenge and red triangle, in their respective rooms.
In the corridor connection 525 w/ 533, Laddie John Dill does this Robert Smithson thing w/ sand, glass and argon, creating Mesozoic-like land striations from these deceptively simple ingredients. And it's here that the exhibition opens up into a bunch of relatively smaller, though no less awe-inspiring, pieces. In fact, there are so many of them in the two exhibition spaces of 533 that you have to stop to catch your breath, visually speaking. Whether it's Peter Alexander's rainwater-colored polyester resin 'wedges', Larry Bell's vacuum-coated glass cubes (check esp. the brilliant etched ellipses box), or the polyester resin and acrylic orbs by Helen Pashgian (think of the mutant acrylic speakers from Apple, then rewind like 30+ years to possible source material) — there is a LOT of wicked stuff involving clear industrial materials going on here. The next room is overall more colorful and practically pushes the show over the visual threshold w/ De Wain Valentine's supersized holiday ornament (made of shimmery red fiberglass-reinforced polyester) and Craig Kauffman's pink-and-green gradiented plastic panel, flopped over a steel chain like soft-sculpture color-field crossed w/ Listerine PocketPacks.
Up ten blocks at Sean Kelly, Anthony McCall's new installation is comparatively simpler, as it 'only' involves two light projection pieces and those pieces are composed of light projectors and audio tracks. I write 'only' w/ some trepidation, as this show, like all of McCall's, is way more stirring in person than it will ever be in print. McCall is a light-sculptor, much as Turrell emotes light in his own works. But as McCall's involve moving light works, via projection, the effects can be all the more incredible, and interaction is strongly encouraged. His "Leaving (with Two-Minute Silence)", the double-projection installation in the main gallery room, is such a piece. The two light-beams 'draw' these undulating solid-line shapes on the wall, and should you walk in front of one of the beams, you would find yourself 'inside' the light-sculpture. Try to picture this: you're inside a cone of hazy light; it's not blinding you b/c the central beam is somewhere else, only its broadened dimensions have caught you. There are lines w/in this cone, some of them more solid and smokier than others. They appear solid but if you run your hand over one it lights up b/c, obvs, it's just light. 'Just light'. Check the smoke too when it billows up all around you lagoon-like. You may never want to leave. The other projection "Meeting You Halfway II", is interesting as the light-projection includes gaps of dead space, forming like bifurcated beams of smoky light that you can navigate around.
And this brings me to my 2nd topic, museum-worthiness. There's been a lot of news in this new economy about how museums will tackle exhibitions on a more mindful budget. This could mean less blue-chip knockouts (I'm looking at Cai Guo-Qiang's retrospective at the Guggenheim, a gorgeous affair but probably incredibly expensive), or more narrowly-targeted, rewarding mini-shows (Johannes Vermeer's "The Milkmaid" at the Met this past autumn is a wonderful example). So that's so, but then we have museum-quaility exhibitions in the galleries, too. And my way of thinking is: these belong in a museum. Or rather, why aren't they in a museum; I'm happy they're in W.Chelsea (or wherever), where I can access them whenever I want, but why didn't a museum think of this? I am referring to the Zwirner show, above, on California Minimalists, and on the new exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in W.Chelsea, called Joseph Beuys 'We Are the Revolution', curated by Pamela Kort. Of course there was a superb Minimalist show at the Guggenheim back in 2004 (my first show at the Gugg!), but I haven't seen anything so deftly concentrated on this particular vibe as the Zwirner show. Anyone who knows my art-going tendencies knows I love Minimalism (check my time spent up at Dia Beacon); but again, this is Minimalism w/ all the sunny good-vibes feelings imbuing it. Perhaps it's the Cali angle? Regarding the Beuys show, Mary Boone enlisted Dr. Kort, independent curator and art historian, specializing in German art from Europe. She did a fine job in this intellectually-packed show, a suite of vitrines showcasing Beuys' multiples (the classics 'Sled', 'Telephone', 'Capri Battery' and loads else) and literary materials, plus pen drawings, drypoint and etchings, 'Action Third Way' blackboards, and felt literally everywhere (from the iconic 'Felt Suit' to a rather cool felt-lined tape deck, feat. this extremely Dada recording of Beuys' voice heard when you first enter the gallery). And trust me, much as I dig the Beuys wing of the MoMA, organized by Ann Tempkin (which incl. his seminal video "I Like America and America Likes Me" from '74), I'd seen a lot of those works before, or I felt as though I had...perhaps from my time spent amid the Beuys up at Dia. Kort's curated exhibition at Mary Boone felt entirely new — slightly, comfortingly familiar in the the way of 'Sled' and a few other multiples, of course.
And then I wonder: are these not BETTER than museum shows? Are they not MORE than museum-worthy? We don't have crowds of slow-moving tourists, holding those telephone-receiver ear-pieces, gawking at poetic signage instead of the art itself. Oh I'm going there. We don't have coffee-bars or museum cafés, either, nor queues to check our coats or have our bags searched. We enter the space, we take in the art, we read the literature at the front desk if we feel like it, and we leave. Perhaps these galleries have the right idea after all.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
fee's LIST (through 1/12)
WEDNESDAY
* Akira Kurosawa centennial festival @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St) - THRU FEB 4. OK film freaks, this is what you need to know about this absolutely dope Kurosawa full-career retrospective: each film (be it classics "Rashomon" or "The Seven Samurai" or kookies like "Kagemusha" or "Dreams") plays for one day only but w/ multiple screenings that day. So if you're like 'oh I can't make "Drunken Angel" tonight, I'll try for tomorrow', well, you're out of luck, partner. Visit this page for the full festival and showtimes, and I'll do my best to keep you apprised on Kurosawa's doper films (granted, there are many).
* "Stray Dog" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1949) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 7/9:30p, through JAN 14. Kurosawa does the neo-noir hardboiled detective drama and he does it WELL. This is the exception to the festival rule, as "Stray Dog" has its own screen for over a week at Film Forum, and you'd be doing yourself a great favor in checking this out. Feat. Kurosawa stalwarts Toshiro Mifune (clean-cut and hangdog-ish) as the young detective and Takashi Shimura as the grizzled vet. Oh, and the femme fatales! My goodness.
* Patti Smith w/ Steven Sebring "Objects of Life" @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. 2010 in W Chelsea kicks off in a big way, w/ a collaborative multimedia effort from musician/artist Smith and photographer/filmmaker Sebring. w/ 'Objects of Life', source materials for Smith's own photography and collaborative photo-collages b/w Smith and Sebring, and more highlighting the creative process.
* Babies + Beach Fossils @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7:30p/$7. Glasslands is famous for its extra-packed music rosters, and this one, feat. the beachy suntoned pop of Beach Fossils and headlined by motley Babies (w/ Cassie Ramone of Vivian Girls and some of the Woods guys, among others), who used to rarely play but now have been reappearing more and more — this should be a long, very fun night.
THURSDAY
* Diane Arbus "In the Absence of Others" + Williams Eggleston "21st Century" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. A dual photography show, feat. Eggleston's new highly-textural works (concurrent w/ a show at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London) and Arbus' emotive, spare photography from the '60s.
* Keith Sonnier "Oldowan Series" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. The source inspiration for Sonnier's new collection of bent neon tubing sculpture are Paleolithic tools!
* Pascal Grandmaison "The Inverted Ghost" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. The show's namesake comes from a series of large color inkjet diptychs of oily smears, like scarred featureless masks. The Canadian artist accompanies these with two films, incl. the recent "Light My Fiction", which marries decrepit Coney Island amusement parks w/ decades-old video game consoles.
* "Urbanization and Globalization" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Contemporary Korean artists, based in the country and abroad, balance traditional approaches w/ genre-bending variety in their respective takes on modern Korean society.
* Andy Warhol "Still Lifes and Feet" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. This concisely (though perhaps slightly off-putting) titled show is really like one big sketchbook, Warhol's prolific early ballpoint pen figure studies of, you guessed it, human feet and simply rendered objet and patterns.
* Annette Lemieux "The Last Suppa" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 511 27th St. Livestock, milkmaids, religious imagery — continuing Lemieux's investigation into the manner of the cow and country fair.
* Alessio Delfino "Metamorphoseis" @ Kips Gallery / 511 W 25th St. Photography and static video work based around gold-painted nude models.
* Marlo Pascual @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Pascual's marriage of silver screen starlets (via C-prints) and heavy physical objects (rocks, shells, bricks etc) reminds me of a cross between John Baldessari (or Rene Magritte) and Lee Ufan, meaning the semi-obscuration of a famous subject and the pairing of unlikely objects.
* Anne Lindberg + Johnny Swing @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 535 W 24th St 2nd Fl. Another fine meeting of opposites at this gallery, as Lindberg's soft graphite on cotton abstracts act as the white-noise backdrop to Swing's massive steel twists and steel-and-light installation.
* Works on Paper group show @ Danese / 535 W 24th St. Some two dozen artists, gallery roster and otherwise, contribute to this no-doubt solid group show. The fact we've got such a range of talent, from Su-en Wong's (self-) figurative works to the geometric abstracts from Barry Le Va and Joel Shapiro, I think this could be pretty great.
* Kirsten Nelson "Assembly Required" @ Frederieke Taylor Gallery / 535 W 22nd St 6th Fl. I dig Nelson's stark sculptures, composed of materials you could quite easily find @ Home Depot (sheetrock, plywood, drywall etc)...though the effect is way less than perusing a hardware store than it is noticing the details of the compositions.
+ dNASAb "dataclysmic", in the project room. The title and concept, wild video sculptures utilizing phosphorescent silicone and consumer electronics, might sound a little too easy, eye-candy-ish, but the press materials, at least, look mind-blowingly gorgeous.
* Fluffy Lumbers w/ Bonus Eventus @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey), 8p/$5. Slammin' surf-rock from Fluffy and hook-driven party rock from those young Massapequa boys Bonus Eventus = a fun night of indie. w/ Shark?.
* Alex Bleeker & The Freaks + Drink Up Buttercup @ Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NRW/456/L to Union Square), 7p/$10. It's nice when big ol' Webster Hall shows some local love, and what's even cooler that good-vibey Drink Up Buttercup is the smooth folksy tones of Real Estate's Alex Bleeker and friends.
FRIDAY
* "Banners of Persuasion" Group Show @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Also known as: 'Demons, Yarns & Tales', it's a show of hand-woven tapestries from 13 international artists, who ostensibly do not use tapestry as their primary medium. Like: Paul Noble, Kara Walker, Shahzia Sikander and Gary Hume. Dope, non?
* "On the Square" @ Pacewildenstein / 32 E 57th St. The gallery pulls from its roster of minimalists and geometric heavyweights for a group show based around that deceptively simple four-cornered shape.
* Peter Peri @ Bortolami / 510 W 25th St. This London artist's reductive mixed media paintings, gloomy canvases marred by either razor-sharp linework or the occasional tonal explosion, creep me out in a really good way. It's sort of like taking Tomma Abts style, enlarging it, then painting over it.
* "Primary Atmospheres" California Minimalism 1960-1970 @ David Zwirner / 519-533 W 19th St. These dozen artists share an acuity for utilizing light and space in their works, adding a layer of sunny SoCal emotion to otherwise minimalist works. Think Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Mary Corse and more, in this special exhibition of seldom-seen works.
* Martin Wilner "A Life in Days" @ Sperone Westwater / 415 W 13th St. Highly detailed graphic drawings in two series, 'Making History' and 'Journal of Evidence Weekly', utilizing equal measures cartoon and cartography, displayed alongside text-heavy pieces.
* "Blood of a Poet" Group Show @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Named after Jean Cocteau's 1930 film, this seven-artist show approaches nouveau minimalism and conceptualism.
* "In Search of Memory" (dir. Petra Seeger, 2008) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). Much as I loved Astra Taylor's thoughtful take on 'rock-star' philosopher Slavoj Žižek, you can bet I'm into Seeger's look at Eric Kandel, professor of biochemistry and biophysics @ Columbia Uni and perhaps the world's 1st 'rock-star' neuroscientist.
* "L'eclisse" (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) screening @ Rubin Museum of Art / 150 W 17th St (1 to 18th St, ACE/123 to 14th St), 9:30p/$7. Quite possibly my favorite Antonioni film, and certainly his most riveting, w/ the howling silence b/w muse Monica Vitti and her ex-lover juxtaposed w/ overwhelmingly raucous stock-exchange scenes, and everything a gorgeous, luxurious b&w.
* Open Ocean @ ArtJail / 50 Eldridge St, 6th Fl (BD to Grand, F to Canal), 9p. This sounds super duper fun. NYC's most fashionable female four-piece, led by Jill Bradshaw's honeyed vocals and solid bassline, w/ the jammy Brooklyn dudes from Big Game.
* Teengirl Fantasy @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. The cringe-worthy name aside, Brooklyn's Teengirl Fantasy are back in town, finally, and their fractured, woozy, held-together-w/-scotch-tape-style house beats are so dope you owe it to yourself to pay 'em a welcome back. w/ Blondes and Light Asylum.
* SUSU + The Sour Notes (Austin) + Rowzero (Houston) @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$7. Brooklyn's dissonant masters SUSU round out this Texas-heavy lineup.
* Anamanaguchi @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. Ever heard Gameboy-punk? This is Starscream's album release party, but I've got my $ on Anamanaguchi, who have successfully married guitar noise to NES beats and yet make the whole mix totally danceable.
SATURDAY
* Jeffrey Vallance "Relics & Reliquaries" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Super-precious altarpiece-style installations containing absolutely mundane objects, a deft combo of religious imagery and suburban banality.
+ "Strange Travelers" Group Show, curated by Mark Dion, plus Dion's "Travels of William Bartram – Reconsidered". The latter sounds right up Dion's alley: a travelogue based on 18th C. American naturalist Bartram. He also oversees a show of six artists unique to the gallery, but who share his delight in travel as discovery and adventure.
* Joseph Beuys "We are the Revolution" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Mary Boone is certainly starting strong this season, w/ a new exhibition of Keith Sonnier's fuzzy-edged neon works uptown and this solid, extensive collection from Beuys' long, influential career. Feat. his famous multiples (like 'Sled', 'Felt Suit'), blackboards, loads more.
* William Daniels @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Perhaps the contemporary master of the niche-like small scale renderings of Old Masters via found-objet, Daniels turns to abstract foil surfaces for his source material whilst keeping the lushly painted canvases tiny. Delicious.
SUNDAY
* "Antichrist" (dir. Lars von Trier, 2009) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 2p. Midafternoon is probably the ideal time to see this terribly unnerving, sparse film from a director notorious for his sparseness (and unnerving-ness). Unless you've been on the moon, you've probably heard a bit about the disturbing goings-on b/w Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe in the forest, but I won't give anything away except I kept closing my eyes during certain scenes.
MONDAY
* Beachniks @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. Beachniks had a wild record release party last week. This amalgam who's who, feat. members of German Measles, Crystal Stilts etc, proves that party indie rock is really really dope.
TUESDAY
* Audrey Chen, Nate Wooley, Gil Arno Trio @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (F/M/R to 9th St/4th Ave), 8:30p, $10. Beyond their propensity for delivering awesome solo talent, ISSUE's programming is notable for crafting intriguing multidisciplinary jam sessions. As in cellist/lyricist Chen, free-improv trumpeter Wooley and sound collagist Arno. w/ solo guitar sets from Kenta Nagai (who also plays the samisen) and Bram Stadhouders.
* Led Er Est + Light Asylum @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/$7. Don't be embarrassed by attending a synthpop dance party! Hey, if they spin The Cure or VNV Nation, it's all good (you heard it here first), and Led Er Est, who've played alongside the crackling-dark Blank Dogs, just may surprise you in how dope they are.
LAST CHANCE (closing this weekend)
* Audrey Kawasaki "Hajimari – a prelude" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. The gorg solo debut from the young NYC-based artist, feat. works on paper and sumptuous oils and graphite on wood panels. This is Kawasaki's strongest suit: she exercises a fair level of restraint w/ the paint, allowing the grain and natural scars and imperfections of the wood shine through her fantastical, fairytale-like, and Japanese-inspired renderings of young women. She incorporates backgrounds into her portraits, too, ranging from subtle color gradations that seem to follow the wood's natural pigments to lush rooms and natural environments.
+ James Marshall (Dalek) "And There Was War in Heaven". A hard-edged slew of geometric bijoux to accompany Kawasaki's lovingly organic exhibition. Dalek's works are sort of like late-period Al Held (in palette and technique, but only straight lines) crossed w/ Imagination Station.
* Norbert Schwontkowski @ 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.
* Su-Mei Tse "Words and Memories" @ Peter Blum Gallery / 526 W 29th St. A delight for the eyes and ears; Tse's latest really transcends easy description, but it's a joy to experience. Her tubular fluorescent sculpture, here a swing, there a birdcage, are fun but are diminished by several audio-rich installations, augmented by her partner Jean-Lou Majerus. These include "Many Spoken Words", a bubbling cast-iron ink fountain, think the reverence of Charles Ray w/ the opportunity for a huge mess (a la Paul McCarthy or Andres Serrano, maybe); the hypnotic "Floating Memories" (whose shimmering walnut veneer and resin platform plays off the skipping LP); and deceptively simple "Sound for Insomniacs", five large C-prints of cats w/ related MP3 players — listen in and hear the saturated, satisfied purrs, and challenge yourself not to be lulled to sleep.
* 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.
* Akira Kurosawa centennial festival @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St) - THRU FEB 4. OK film freaks, this is what you need to know about this absolutely dope Kurosawa full-career retrospective: each film (be it classics "Rashomon" or "The Seven Samurai" or kookies like "Kagemusha" or "Dreams") plays for one day only but w/ multiple screenings that day. So if you're like 'oh I can't make "Drunken Angel" tonight, I'll try for tomorrow', well, you're out of luck, partner. Visit this page for the full festival and showtimes, and I'll do my best to keep you apprised on Kurosawa's doper films (granted, there are many).
* "Stray Dog" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1949) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 7/9:30p, through JAN 14. Kurosawa does the neo-noir hardboiled detective drama and he does it WELL. This is the exception to the festival rule, as "Stray Dog" has its own screen for over a week at Film Forum, and you'd be doing yourself a great favor in checking this out. Feat. Kurosawa stalwarts Toshiro Mifune (clean-cut and hangdog-ish) as the young detective and Takashi Shimura as the grizzled vet. Oh, and the femme fatales! My goodness.
* Patti Smith w/ Steven Sebring "Objects of Life" @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. 2010 in W Chelsea kicks off in a big way, w/ a collaborative multimedia effort from musician/artist Smith and photographer/filmmaker Sebring. w/ 'Objects of Life', source materials for Smith's own photography and collaborative photo-collages b/w Smith and Sebring, and more highlighting the creative process.
* Babies + Beach Fossils @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7:30p/$7. Glasslands is famous for its extra-packed music rosters, and this one, feat. the beachy suntoned pop of Beach Fossils and headlined by motley Babies (w/ Cassie Ramone of Vivian Girls and some of the Woods guys, among others), who used to rarely play but now have been reappearing more and more — this should be a long, very fun night.
THURSDAY
* Diane Arbus "In the Absence of Others" + Williams Eggleston "21st Century" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. A dual photography show, feat. Eggleston's new highly-textural works (concurrent w/ a show at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London) and Arbus' emotive, spare photography from the '60s.
* Keith Sonnier "Oldowan Series" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. The source inspiration for Sonnier's new collection of bent neon tubing sculpture are Paleolithic tools!
* Pascal Grandmaison "The Inverted Ghost" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. The show's namesake comes from a series of large color inkjet diptychs of oily smears, like scarred featureless masks. The Canadian artist accompanies these with two films, incl. the recent "Light My Fiction", which marries decrepit Coney Island amusement parks w/ decades-old video game consoles.
* "Urbanization and Globalization" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Contemporary Korean artists, based in the country and abroad, balance traditional approaches w/ genre-bending variety in their respective takes on modern Korean society.
* Andy Warhol "Still Lifes and Feet" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. This concisely (though perhaps slightly off-putting) titled show is really like one big sketchbook, Warhol's prolific early ballpoint pen figure studies of, you guessed it, human feet and simply rendered objet and patterns.
* Annette Lemieux "The Last Suppa" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 511 27th St. Livestock, milkmaids, religious imagery — continuing Lemieux's investigation into the manner of the cow and country fair.
* Alessio Delfino "Metamorphoseis" @ Kips Gallery / 511 W 25th St. Photography and static video work based around gold-painted nude models.
* Marlo Pascual @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Pascual's marriage of silver screen starlets (via C-prints) and heavy physical objects (rocks, shells, bricks etc) reminds me of a cross between John Baldessari (or Rene Magritte) and Lee Ufan, meaning the semi-obscuration of a famous subject and the pairing of unlikely objects.
* Anne Lindberg + Johnny Swing @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 535 W 24th St 2nd Fl. Another fine meeting of opposites at this gallery, as Lindberg's soft graphite on cotton abstracts act as the white-noise backdrop to Swing's massive steel twists and steel-and-light installation.
* Works on Paper group show @ Danese / 535 W 24th St. Some two dozen artists, gallery roster and otherwise, contribute to this no-doubt solid group show. The fact we've got such a range of talent, from Su-en Wong's (self-) figurative works to the geometric abstracts from Barry Le Va and Joel Shapiro, I think this could be pretty great.
* Kirsten Nelson "Assembly Required" @ Frederieke Taylor Gallery / 535 W 22nd St 6th Fl. I dig Nelson's stark sculptures, composed of materials you could quite easily find @ Home Depot (sheetrock, plywood, drywall etc)...though the effect is way less than perusing a hardware store than it is noticing the details of the compositions.
+ dNASAb "dataclysmic", in the project room. The title and concept, wild video sculptures utilizing phosphorescent silicone and consumer electronics, might sound a little too easy, eye-candy-ish, but the press materials, at least, look mind-blowingly gorgeous.
* Fluffy Lumbers w/ Bonus Eventus @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey), 8p/$5. Slammin' surf-rock from Fluffy and hook-driven party rock from those young Massapequa boys Bonus Eventus = a fun night of indie. w/ Shark?.
* Alex Bleeker & The Freaks + Drink Up Buttercup @ Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NRW/456/L to Union Square), 7p/$10. It's nice when big ol' Webster Hall shows some local love, and what's even cooler that good-vibey Drink Up Buttercup is the smooth folksy tones of Real Estate's Alex Bleeker and friends.
FRIDAY
* "Banners of Persuasion" Group Show @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Also known as: 'Demons, Yarns & Tales', it's a show of hand-woven tapestries from 13 international artists, who ostensibly do not use tapestry as their primary medium. Like: Paul Noble, Kara Walker, Shahzia Sikander and Gary Hume. Dope, non?
* "On the Square" @ Pacewildenstein / 32 E 57th St. The gallery pulls from its roster of minimalists and geometric heavyweights for a group show based around that deceptively simple four-cornered shape.
* Peter Peri @ Bortolami / 510 W 25th St. This London artist's reductive mixed media paintings, gloomy canvases marred by either razor-sharp linework or the occasional tonal explosion, creep me out in a really good way. It's sort of like taking Tomma Abts style, enlarging it, then painting over it.
* "Primary Atmospheres" California Minimalism 1960-1970 @ David Zwirner / 519-533 W 19th St. These dozen artists share an acuity for utilizing light and space in their works, adding a layer of sunny SoCal emotion to otherwise minimalist works. Think Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Mary Corse and more, in this special exhibition of seldom-seen works.
* Martin Wilner "A Life in Days" @ Sperone Westwater / 415 W 13th St. Highly detailed graphic drawings in two series, 'Making History' and 'Journal of Evidence Weekly', utilizing equal measures cartoon and cartography, displayed alongside text-heavy pieces.
* "Blood of a Poet" Group Show @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Named after Jean Cocteau's 1930 film, this seven-artist show approaches nouveau minimalism and conceptualism.
* "In Search of Memory" (dir. Petra Seeger, 2008) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). Much as I loved Astra Taylor's thoughtful take on 'rock-star' philosopher Slavoj Žižek, you can bet I'm into Seeger's look at Eric Kandel, professor of biochemistry and biophysics @ Columbia Uni and perhaps the world's 1st 'rock-star' neuroscientist.
* "L'eclisse" (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) screening @ Rubin Museum of Art / 150 W 17th St (1 to 18th St, ACE/123 to 14th St), 9:30p/$7. Quite possibly my favorite Antonioni film, and certainly his most riveting, w/ the howling silence b/w muse Monica Vitti and her ex-lover juxtaposed w/ overwhelmingly raucous stock-exchange scenes, and everything a gorgeous, luxurious b&w.
* Open Ocean @ ArtJail / 50 Eldridge St, 6th Fl (BD to Grand, F to Canal), 9p. This sounds super duper fun. NYC's most fashionable female four-piece, led by Jill Bradshaw's honeyed vocals and solid bassline, w/ the jammy Brooklyn dudes from Big Game.
* Teengirl Fantasy @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. The cringe-worthy name aside, Brooklyn's Teengirl Fantasy are back in town, finally, and their fractured, woozy, held-together-w/-scotch-tape-style house beats are so dope you owe it to yourself to pay 'em a welcome back. w/ Blondes and Light Asylum.
* SUSU + The Sour Notes (Austin) + Rowzero (Houston) @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$7. Brooklyn's dissonant masters SUSU round out this Texas-heavy lineup.
* Anamanaguchi @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. Ever heard Gameboy-punk? This is Starscream's album release party, but I've got my $ on Anamanaguchi, who have successfully married guitar noise to NES beats and yet make the whole mix totally danceable.
SATURDAY
* Jeffrey Vallance "Relics & Reliquaries" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Super-precious altarpiece-style installations containing absolutely mundane objects, a deft combo of religious imagery and suburban banality.
+ "Strange Travelers" Group Show, curated by Mark Dion, plus Dion's "Travels of William Bartram – Reconsidered". The latter sounds right up Dion's alley: a travelogue based on 18th C. American naturalist Bartram. He also oversees a show of six artists unique to the gallery, but who share his delight in travel as discovery and adventure.
* Joseph Beuys "We are the Revolution" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Mary Boone is certainly starting strong this season, w/ a new exhibition of Keith Sonnier's fuzzy-edged neon works uptown and this solid, extensive collection from Beuys' long, influential career. Feat. his famous multiples (like 'Sled', 'Felt Suit'), blackboards, loads more.
* William Daniels @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Perhaps the contemporary master of the niche-like small scale renderings of Old Masters via found-objet, Daniels turns to abstract foil surfaces for his source material whilst keeping the lushly painted canvases tiny. Delicious.
SUNDAY
* "Antichrist" (dir. Lars von Trier, 2009) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 2p. Midafternoon is probably the ideal time to see this terribly unnerving, sparse film from a director notorious for his sparseness (and unnerving-ness). Unless you've been on the moon, you've probably heard a bit about the disturbing goings-on b/w Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe in the forest, but I won't give anything away except I kept closing my eyes during certain scenes.
MONDAY
* Beachniks @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. Beachniks had a wild record release party last week. This amalgam who's who, feat. members of German Measles, Crystal Stilts etc, proves that party indie rock is really really dope.
TUESDAY
* Audrey Chen, Nate Wooley, Gil Arno Trio @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (F/M/R to 9th St/4th Ave), 8:30p, $10. Beyond their propensity for delivering awesome solo talent, ISSUE's programming is notable for crafting intriguing multidisciplinary jam sessions. As in cellist/lyricist Chen, free-improv trumpeter Wooley and sound collagist Arno. w/ solo guitar sets from Kenta Nagai (who also plays the samisen) and Bram Stadhouders.
* Led Er Est + Light Asylum @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/$7. Don't be embarrassed by attending a synthpop dance party! Hey, if they spin The Cure or VNV Nation, it's all good (you heard it here first), and Led Er Est, who've played alongside the crackling-dark Blank Dogs, just may surprise you in how dope they are.
LAST CHANCE (closing this weekend)
* Audrey Kawasaki "Hajimari – a prelude" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. The gorg solo debut from the young NYC-based artist, feat. works on paper and sumptuous oils and graphite on wood panels. This is Kawasaki's strongest suit: she exercises a fair level of restraint w/ the paint, allowing the grain and natural scars and imperfections of the wood shine through her fantastical, fairytale-like, and Japanese-inspired renderings of young women. She incorporates backgrounds into her portraits, too, ranging from subtle color gradations that seem to follow the wood's natural pigments to lush rooms and natural environments.
+ James Marshall (Dalek) "And There Was War in Heaven". A hard-edged slew of geometric bijoux to accompany Kawasaki's lovingly organic exhibition. Dalek's works are sort of like late-period Al Held (in palette and technique, but only straight lines) crossed w/ Imagination Station.
* Norbert Schwontkowski @ 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.
* Su-Mei Tse "Words and Memories" @ Peter Blum Gallery / 526 W 29th St. A delight for the eyes and ears; Tse's latest really transcends easy description, but it's a joy to experience. Her tubular fluorescent sculpture, here a swing, there a birdcage, are fun but are diminished by several audio-rich installations, augmented by her partner Jean-Lou Majerus. These include "Many Spoken Words", a bubbling cast-iron ink fountain, think the reverence of Charles Ray w/ the opportunity for a huge mess (a la Paul McCarthy or Andres Serrano, maybe); the hypnotic "Floating Memories" (whose shimmering walnut veneer and resin platform plays off the skipping LP); and deceptively simple "Sound for Insomniacs", five large C-prints of cats w/ related MP3 players — listen in and hear the saturated, satisfied purrs, and challenge yourself not to be lulled to sleep.
* 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.
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