WEDNESDAY
* William Kentridge "Five Themes" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave). A three-decade survey of the S. African artist, encompassing his charcoal-drawing animations (which is how I know him best), prints, works on paper, sculpture etc, in his continuing dialogue w/ apartheid, colonialism and cultural events both unique to S. Africa but applicable to contemporary society. Plus he's been working on a stage adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's satire "The Nose", led by Dmitri Shostakovich and debuting @ the Met Opera next month.
+ Yin Xiuzhen. Large site-specific installation by the Chinese artist, adapting a minibus into a corridor-like chamber for chitchat.
THURSDAY
* 2010 Whitney Biennial @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St). The mighty Whitney has the distinction of leading off the ecstatic wave of impending art events (the Armory Show + VOLTA and its satellites and the Dakis Joannou show @ New Museum, happening next week). So it's to the museum's benefit that this smaller, focused gathering (55 international artists, based in the museum itself instead of bleeding out into the city) has the potential to be something very good. I mean, two years is a LONG time. Much has happened since the last sprawling Biennial. Let's see what they've done to better it.
* Tala Madani "Pictograms" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. Madani is running a strong cool-wave now, w/ her strong solo show at the gallery in '08, her powerful output @ the New Museum's "Younger Than Jesus" inaugural Triennial, and an assortment of group shows. Her new exhibition, augmented by spraypaint on canvas, utilizes her characteristic all-male cast, only this time they resemble letters, to dual representational effect.
* "Animate Matter" Group Show @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. Four gallery artists 'activate' their mediums in various methods, incl. VOLTA showcase artist Dona Nelson (whose cloth-covered abstract paintings hang freeform), Pia Maria Martin's animations, Richard Staub's signature stylized junk-assemblage and works on paper by Rose Wylie.
* Pieter Hugo "Nollywood" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. He riveted us a few years back w/ the unparalleled 'The Hyena and Other Men', and the S. African photographer returns w/ his lens focused on the Nigerian film industry and its special self-representation.
* Chris Martin + Joe Bradley @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 528 W 26th St. I would have been satisfied w/ just a Martin show, he of the colorful mixed media abstract paintings, but this show was conceived as a dialogue b/w the two NY-based artists, and Bradley's streamlined work should pair well against Martin's maximalist canvases.
* Nari Ward "LIVESupport" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Ward's 1st solo show in the gallery should cut to the quick in two ways: his junk-assemblage installations recalling violence and disarray and his reedited vintage photography. Ward's work will also be part of the gallery's booth at this year's Armory Show.
* Debra Hampton "Twenty Paces" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Wildly realized warrior-heroines of some near-future apocalyptic world, composed of very NOW materials (like fashion mag collages) — think sort of a cross b/w Wangechi Mutu and early 'Heavy Metal'.
* Anya Kielar "Face" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. This looks cool: Kielar assembles these pigmented-sand-covered relief sculptures of various materials on masonite board in such a way that, abstractly, they resemble part of a human face.
* Toro y Moi + Twin Sister @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5. Two very different, very trippy takes on dream-pop. I am completely enraptured by Twin Sister's trip-hop-ish live set, and Toro (aka SC's Chaz Bundick) croons over sun-drenched electronics.
* "Monsters & Murderers: The Films of Bong Joon-ho" @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (D/M/NR to Pacific, 23/45/B/Q to Atlantic). The mini-festival title is a bit silly if you think of monsters in the conventional beastly sense — of which, Bong's "The Host" is nonpareil in its mastery of that genre — but if you add to it the monstrous human element, that WE can take this horrid form, then the meaning becomes way more clear. SO, in celebration of the full-on debut of Bong's latest film "Mother" (premiered here @ the NY Film Festival), a look back at his other three films, plus a selection of shorts.
* "Memories of Murder" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2003) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 7:30p. Bong made it big w/ this one, based on S. Korea's 1st serial killer. And it's ace seeing the incredibly versatile Song Kang-ho as an earnest detective in this grueling feature.
FRIDAY
* Robert Morris @ Leo Castelli / 18 E 77th St. I always dug Morris' scatter pieces more than his felt (though, admittedly, no one can do felt quite like Morris). This seminal piece, recreated from his original 1969 solo show at the gallery, contains that signature felt, plus metal and is augmented by nine original work drawings related to the piece.
* Alexander Calder @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. W Chelsea just got inundated w/ a lot of fine sculpture. What w/ the fab small-scale stuff of Beverly Pepper (Marlborough) and Ken Price (Matthew Marks), now we've large-scale sculptures by Calder from 1957-64 (and classics by David Smith, a few blocks away). And though there are no mobiles here, I somehow expect these works to carry that deceivingly light, kinetic mannerism of his smaller works.
* David Smith @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Five of Smith's final major large-scale cubular sculpture before his premature death. Pair w/ the Calder show a few blocks away.
* Eemyun Kang "Dozing River" @ Tina Kim Gallery / 545 W 25th St 3rd Fl. Large-scale sleepy abstract landscape paintings, tending toward one large central floral element against a hazy colored background.
* Lucas Ajemian + Julien Bismuth "Les Tristes" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. The duo is making a film, which will be staged in and around the gallery, and a publication of sorts. The 2nd part of that reminded me a bit of Alexandra Mir's 'newsroom' installation at Mary Boone back in 2007, crossed w/ the live readings of On Kawara's 'One Million Years' at David Zwirner in early 2009, only...you can actually BE in Ajemian and Bismuth's film.
* Noveller + Sisters + Knight School @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5. Bruar is going to be crowded tonight! An investigation into noise, segueing from the clean pop of Knight School to the garage-thump duo Sisters to Noveller's wailing, multi-textured solo drone guitar.
* "Persecution" (dir. Patrice Chéreau, France, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 8:40p (part of Film Comment Selects). AKA Romain Duris + Charlotte Gainsbourg's new film, a destructive path of romantic distress and torment, which Chéreau knows VERY well how to depict (anybody see "Gabrielle"?). ALSO SAT 6p
* "Mother" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2009) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 7p + Q&A w/ Bong. Dude hard-up on his luck possibly framed for murder, and his tough-as-nails mom goes to bat for him on an inexhaustible quest to prove his innocence.
SATURDAY
* Five Year Anniversary @ Jonathan Levine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. Excellent primer for those new to 'Pop Surrealism' (or Street Art, if you've actually never heard of that before, and obvs you're not from NY) or those who want to catch up w/ the gallery's fine roster of artists. Expect poetically beautiful representational works, wildly colored abstracts, and viscerally disturbing paintings.
* Joan Jonas "Reading Dante III" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Jonas furthers her investigation into Dante's "Divine Comedy", which you may have seen at Performa 09, by a reinterpreted multimedia installation, melding the characters w/ her own personal journeys.
+ Stefan Bruggemann "Headlines & Last Line in the Movies". I know Bruggemann's site-specific installations best for their heavy textual context — he's VERY good at creating lively character-based works. Though at a group show last year @ the gallery, he flipped a mirror and called that his piece. This time, he spraypaints mirrors w/ final dialogue from films, which just sounds dope.
* Mike Nelson @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Nelson's disquietingly familiar installations remind me a bit like Ed Kienholz's works but absent of people, which is perhaps creepier.
* Thomas Nozkowski "Works on Paper 1991-2008" @ Senior & Shopmaker Gallery / 210 11th Ave. The gallery inaugurates its new space in a big way, w/ a survey of the dots+bars artist's printmaking techniques and varied output.
* Esko Männikkö "Harmony Sisters" @ Yancey Richardson Gallery / 535 W 22nd St 3rd Fl. I am digging this influx of Finnish art, both here and at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery a few blocks north (and at the upcoming Armory Show, via Galerie Forsblom + Galerie Anhava). This exhibit features Mannikkö's super-sharp portraits of wild and domesticated animals.
* "The Helsinki School: Seven Approaches" @ Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery / 505 W 24th St. Seven artists who use photography as a conceptual device. Members of the School include Joonas Ahlava, Ola Kolehmainen and Niko Luoma.
* "Celebration: The Birthday in Chinese Art" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). w/ the lovely Cinnabar (the Chinese art of carved lacquer) recently closed, I felt this gaping loss in Chinese decorative arts that I did not even realize I HAD. Luckily, this exhibition of auspicious occasions, feat. embroidered hanging scrolls, lacquered screens and loads else from the Ming and Qing dynasties, should satisfy this new-found crazy craving.
* "The Host" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2006) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 6:30/9:30p. Outrageously good, breathtakingly thrilling. Bong takes the worn-out CGI'ed notion of the blockbuster monster movie and turned it on its ear. Not only are the effects and the beasty absolutely ACE, but just beneath the surface is Bong's main point: a bittersweet, fractured family drama, w/ Song Kang-ho as the bumbling young dad and Bae Doona as the emotionally distant athletic sister. Gets my LIST's seal of approval.
* Surfer Blood + Beach Fossils @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle/Broadway), 8p/$10. Those Florida boys Surfer Blood rock really hard, and though their show tomorrow night @ Mercury Lounge sold out, THIS one should be wayyy better. Though both share biilling w/ Nashville's Turbo Fruits (think The Guess Who), Market Hotel also hosts Greenpoint's Beach Fossils, whose surf-inflected live show is (somehow) more energetic than ever, riling the crowd into a happy frenzy, and the sludgy Grooms. NICE.
* pow wow! @ Fort Useless / 36 Ditmars St, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle/Broadway), 8p/. I missed the Nazareno Bros & crew during CMJ and only now realize they've augmented their good-vibey retro-pop w/ a lead guitarist/singer named Amanda. I dig it! w/ Mama Bear. (and, incidentally, this venue is located like a block from Market Hotel)
SUNDAY
* "A Brighter Summer Day" (dir. Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1991) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 1:30p (part of Film Comment Selects). Yang's four-hour coming-of-age opus, set in early '60s Taiwan and feat. a cast of extras numbering in the thousands, I think. I'm like many Westerners, unfortunately, who know Yang only for his masterpiece "Yi Yi", completed before his premature death, but as a member of Taiwanese New Wave he had many films before, only they never had proper billing stateside. This is one of them.
* "Barking Dogs Never Bite" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2000) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 6:50/9:15p. Bong's debut, which never got proper billing stateside, about a socially-challenged young college professor who begins kidnapping dogs around his apartment complex and an equally young dreamer (Bae Doona) who investigates the disappearances.
* Pterodactyl + Shooting Spires @ Union Pool / 484 Union Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p/$7. Dig: the messily melodic punks Pterodactyl v. Parts & Labor's BJ Warshaw, AKA Shooting Spires, his amped-up solo project.
MONDAY
* Bong Joon-ho Shorts (dir. Bong Joon-ho, various) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 7p. Including his contribution to "Tokyo!", Bong's afflicting portrait of Teruyuki Kagawa as a hikkikomori in 'Shaking Tokyo', plus 'Sink and Rise' and 'Influenza' (both from 2004, who each contain ingredients that reappear in 'The Host'). Essential!
* "Morphia" (dir. Alexei Balabanov, Russia, 2008) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6p (part of Film Comment Selects). AKA 'Morphine', the good young doctor in a rural hospital during the Revolution, who becomes addicted to said drug and entangled w/ the nurse.
* Purim Party @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Jewish Halloween? PopJew hosts a fab lineup, feat. Beachniks, Sundelles, Tough Knuckles and headliners So So Glows, urging us all to 'get down'.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Robert Ryman "Large/Small, Thick/Thin, Light Reflecting, Light Absorbing" @ Pacewildenstein / 32 E 57th St. An exhibition rich in Ryman's particular aesthetic vocabulary, both in media (varnish, enamel, epoxy, graphite) and surface (wood, MDF, Tyvek, cotton). In my opinion one of THE MOST important shows on right now, and an excellent primer for anyone who 1) wants to 'get' this painter's message and 2) might think just because he uses only white paint his stuff all looks the same and boring. Guess again!
* Ross Bleckner @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Bleckner gives us huge square-ish abstracts of submerged flowers in two flavours: shiny phantomic arrays on shiny photographic paper (not my favorite) and fuzzy soft-focus renderings on linen incorporating digital numbers. These work especially well, and I'd love to see a bench or two installed in the gallery's main room, so we can contemplate these a bit more thoroughly, like a good Monet, allowing the petals and numbers to emerge and subsume one another over their dark backings.
* Keith Haring @ Tony Shafrazi Gallery / 544 W 26th St. The 20th Anniv. of the downtown NY icon. You can't hate on Haring unless you're an absolute Philistine, but if you are you're probably not reading this LIST. Shafrazi created a career-spanning exhibition of Haring's oeuvre, the Day-Glo paintings, the silkscreens and works on paper, the graffiti, Haring's bent-metal sculpture — and despite the fact I've seen a lot of this stuff (and probably you have too, if you followed Haring), there are some nice additions. One: the totemic carved-wood monoliths, painted in searing Day-Glo orange or yellow, and two: the black-light room. Oh yes, a black-light room, way out on the north gallery, outfitted w/ several of Haring's particularly psychedelic works and an '80s techno soundtrack, interspersed w/ Haring's commentary. But beware: you enter the black-light room, you might spend 15+ minutes in there like me b/c, even though I was born in the 80s and missed much of this stuff, it still acted as a sudden flashback.
* George Segal @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. It is a treat to see Segal's plaster-cast figures in situ, in their 'natural urban habitats'. The gallery was transformed into their playground, NYC-ish park benches, a truncated subway car and the like. While Segal isn't nearly as unsettling as Ed Kienholz's installations, there is a strong sense of quiet, sad nostalgia in some of the characters: a seated woman in profile a la James McNeill Whistler, and a nude woman, cleaved just above the knees, contemplating her reflection in a stained bathroom mirror.
* Baron Adolph de Meyer @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. A lavish, discernibly chic survey of the preeminent fashion photographer's body of work, from early portraits of his wife and muse to his later projects with Conde Nast and screen/stage actresses. There is a LOT to see here, so a few highlights: the unmissable reddish pigment print of Baroness Olga de Meyer (1897), Natica Nast, replete w/ beaded necklaces, against this glowingly ethereal stand (1920), a debonair self-portrait w/ a cigarette and a wall of screen beauties, each one in a fiercer feathered hat than the last. Repeat visits are necessary.
* Bill Jensen @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Gorgeous not-large abstract paintings and works on paper. You get Jensen's Taoist background more readily from the b&w works, perhaps, w/ their snaking brushstrokes, but the saturated-color lot really come alive, all resonating red-oranges and other 'hot' colors. In fact, the textural nature of these, the sort of static-y, roughly applied color intermixed w/ solid drips and pours, reminds me a bit of Gerhard Richter's signature (de)application style. But what keeps it firmly Jensen's own are the color bands, tributaries for the eyes.
* Beverly Pepper "Metamorphoses" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Ahhhh this is dope!! I MUCH prefer Pepper's smaller works, like this blocky selection rendered in delicious media like onyx, Zimbabwe granite and marble. The variations on angles, crypto-portals and bent triangles lends itself to like this slightly sci-fi futuristic vibe, like said objet were ephemeral forms discovered on Mars or whatnot, so they embody a prescience that requires further contemplation. I could stare at them for hours.
+ George Rickey. Classic works from Rickey's estate, lighter-than-air steel cubes and rods (and in the case of the 'Nebula' sculptures, schools of fish) that wave or undulate via fans and ambient airflow. A mesmerizing accompaniment to Pepper's weightier offering and a very satisfying dual-sculpture exhibition.
* Gary Simmons "Midnight Matinee" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Simmons makes vintage cinema signage ghostly and frightening by hazing it out like cold flames on spare, black backgrounds. This works most effectively on the massive wall painting, effectively matte-ing the black and permitting the divided image to be sucked up the top and bottom edges.
* Jaehyo Lee @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 535 W 24th St 2nd Fl. I was absolutely riveted by Lee's first environmental-intervention sculpture show in 2008, from the leaves-curtain onward. This one is a bit 'fancier', like the designer furniture fashioned smoothly from logs or the obelisk of nail-formed letters (looking something like Jasper Johns' stamped encaustics, only in heavy metal). But mate that w/ this dorsal column of logs, like a massive sea-beast rising from the gallery floor, and an array of twig curtains, and it's impossible to ignore Lee's unique artistic prowess.
* James Rosenquist "The Hole in the Middle of Time" @ Acquavella / 18 E 79th St. The American Pop legend, and a personal hero of yours truly, has a history of adding 'movement' to his epic paintings — which goes beyond the obvious dynamism of his increasingly abstract works, I mean like physical moving parts like laser clocks and conveyor belts. But Rosenquist takes it a step further w/ the installation 'The Hole in the Wallpaper', 14 spinning laser-print reproductions of his classic works, each inscribed w/ a static mirror reflecting us and the greater room. This piece accompanies the titular exhibition, large works of melting cosmic clocks and silly string fireworks explosions, augmented by either spinning painted clock-face mirrors or outsized colored pencils.
* William Bailey @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. I am VERY impressed w/ Bailey's exhibition. Though I'm familiar w/ his from-memory still-lifes (meaning he has a collection of objects he uses, but he pairs them in his head, adjusting the lighting and so on and then paints the image), I've never seen his portraiture before. And these, a mix of oil paintings and works on paper, are somehow both dreamlike and physically immediate — thanks especially to the models' intense gazes.
* Theresa Chong @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. Chong's new series of pencil and gouaches on paper (either a midnight blue backdrop or a whitish rice paper) are named for snowy Arctic Circle scenes, which makes sense as her constellations of lines and tiny blocks sort of resemble ice crystals.
* Park Jihyun "Incense Series: Weightlessness" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Park composes — 'paints' or 'erases' if that helps — his works on paper w/ fire, marking them w/ burning incense to create cloudy subtracted forms. The show opens w/ a very effective installation of 'trees', nighttime on one side and daytime on the other. There are also several that look like breaks in a forest canopy, looking up into a night sky aswirl w/ stars. Another daytime work is a cloudbank framed by a window. Another thing: all these are impossibly abstract up close, which adds to the laboriousness of Park's process, effectively burning in just the right spots so, when viewed from a dozen feet back, the image becomes crystal sharp.
* Jill Moser @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. The majority of Moser's new abstracts feature a sunnier palette (think the goldenrods, yellows and pinks of Joan Mitchell) instead of her blue-green algaeish earlier works. They're still sparsely colorful, but they're loads warmer now.
LAST CHANCE
* "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.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Action Minimalism
Though I've done my share of frequenting (and hyping) the so-called 'bad boy artist' exhibits currently on 'round the city, I balance that w/ proper Minimalism. Like pork belly + beet salad. Now there are some misnomers when it comes to Minimalism and minimalist artists, that they're all stoic, static, oppressively unmoving. You might think of Kazimir Malevich's painted 'Black Square's (Suprematism) or Mark Rothko's late-work plums and purplish-blacks (like those on view at the Rothko Chapel in Houston TX) which are technically color-field, or the fluorescent light works by Dan Flavin. OK so far, I guess. So let's throw in one of the obvious modern masters who's still doing it, and doing it brilliantly: Robert Ryman, he of the so-called 'white paintings', five decades of 'em. Ryman has a brilliant exhibition of new works, spanning his creative vocabulary, at Pacewildenstein uptown and it is anything BUT stoic/static. And despite the fact that the 30 works are mostly the same squarish size (usually 10" to 30" around), they're anything BUT boring. Same deal w/ Scotland's Callum Innes, who in a few words could be called an 'unpainter' — as his stuff may begin as a monochrome (even hardedge or color-field), until he vigorously 'un-paints' part of it, via turpentine, creating a very different, very active minimalist monochromatic new piece. His new show at Sean Kelly Gallery, coupled w/ Ryman's, is a fantastic instance of what I'm calling 'action minimalism'. Dig it? Read on.
Ryman's oeuvre sounds deceptively simple, varieties of white paint on varieties of backings (cloth, wood, metal etc), but the end results are practically endlessly varied. Ryman tweaks bits of each work, adds something new here, changes the size of the painted field, leaves part of the penciled-in grid, reworks the support mechanisms etc, to create loads of new results. But he furthers this experimentation, to the delightful benefit of us, the viewers, by meticulously working w/ the gallery lighting. THIS is where Ryman's paintings come alive, far beyond anything that could be captured in a catalogue. This is why when you walk into the room you'll note the gallery has added partitions and soft incandescents to 'activate' the paintings, drawing out the nuances that makes each work unique. An easy example straight away is how shiny and textured the paintings on wood are, how the grain of the wood bleeds through the paint (except in a few instances where he added additional cloudy grayish-white shapes, quite nearly like color-field, that obliterate all beneath it). Contrast w/ the paintings on MDF, shimmering like Eagle-Brand condensed milk, reflecting the room w/in it, but w/ no trace of the board's surface. Especially note the difference w/ the one stretched-cotton work, mounted on wood, and how 'flat' the white is, compared to the wood/MDF surfaces. Ryman's usage of Tyvek is also intriguing, as the solid-white bleeds into the gallery walls, permitting anything on it (an eggshell coloring, or gray-white) to literally bounce off the surface. Never have I been more aware of the gallery walls than at a Ryman show. You catch yourself comparing 'true white'. Ryman says "it is not just the intensity of the light, but the direction of the source that is important, and in each light situation the paintings [look] different". This exhibition is a brilliant chance to take advantage of looking for these differences — and differences in experience — and realizing the complexity of Ryman's work.
On paper, Innes' new series look like divided monochromes, one half white, the other half some color (and a few appear totally white, divided down the middle by a line a la Barnett Newman). Guess what: there is a LOT going on here, but you need to see them in person. Gallery lighting is a benefit, but another is just being in the presence of these paintings to immediately pick up on what's at play here. I detailed the path of least resistance in a previous LIST, but your best bet is to head straight in towards this glowing lemony yellow canvas and note its matte whitish half. I'm talking about the original gesso layer, what once was also lemony yellow until Innes took his turpentine-soaked brush and painstakingly obliterated the color. EXCEPT check the side of the canvas: you'll note spare traces of dry paint, which tend towards a whole rainbow of hues, not just the apparent yellow — which makes one wonder if there are other colors tucked beneath the apparent outer layer). The interplay b/w paint and gesso is especially clear in the white/white pairing on the inner wall. The half w/ paint shimmers like an expanse of White-Out while the gesso'd half is flat like a pencil eraser took a go at it. But again, the sides belie the energy Innes had to enact to rid it of color, even if that color should be white. Same deal w/ the gesso/black paintings: one has a reddish undertone, the other a greenish, but you'd only know that by seeing the leftovers on the gesso'd side. So besides the reverberating, shining color (whatever color that may be), there is a lot of spent energy on the other half of all these paintings. A lot of action happened to make these, and action is required of us to investigate just what is going on with them. It is to our betterment that we can check these out from multiple POVs, just like seeing the Ryman paintings from different angles and distances.
So my point is: Minimalism as a term and a theory can be VERY deceptive. It's not 'easy' nor a 'cop-out' for one's attention span. You have to pay attention to these, you have to be willing to take a role in checking them out. Only then does the action of these on-the-surface minimalist works come out, kinetic-like, interacting w/ the viewer.
Ryman's oeuvre sounds deceptively simple, varieties of white paint on varieties of backings (cloth, wood, metal etc), but the end results are practically endlessly varied. Ryman tweaks bits of each work, adds something new here, changes the size of the painted field, leaves part of the penciled-in grid, reworks the support mechanisms etc, to create loads of new results. But he furthers this experimentation, to the delightful benefit of us, the viewers, by meticulously working w/ the gallery lighting. THIS is where Ryman's paintings come alive, far beyond anything that could be captured in a catalogue. This is why when you walk into the room you'll note the gallery has added partitions and soft incandescents to 'activate' the paintings, drawing out the nuances that makes each work unique. An easy example straight away is how shiny and textured the paintings on wood are, how the grain of the wood bleeds through the paint (except in a few instances where he added additional cloudy grayish-white shapes, quite nearly like color-field, that obliterate all beneath it). Contrast w/ the paintings on MDF, shimmering like Eagle-Brand condensed milk, reflecting the room w/in it, but w/ no trace of the board's surface. Especially note the difference w/ the one stretched-cotton work, mounted on wood, and how 'flat' the white is, compared to the wood/MDF surfaces. Ryman's usage of Tyvek is also intriguing, as the solid-white bleeds into the gallery walls, permitting anything on it (an eggshell coloring, or gray-white) to literally bounce off the surface. Never have I been more aware of the gallery walls than at a Ryman show. You catch yourself comparing 'true white'. Ryman says "it is not just the intensity of the light, but the direction of the source that is important, and in each light situation the paintings [look] different". This exhibition is a brilliant chance to take advantage of looking for these differences — and differences in experience — and realizing the complexity of Ryman's work.
On paper, Innes' new series look like divided monochromes, one half white, the other half some color (and a few appear totally white, divided down the middle by a line a la Barnett Newman). Guess what: there is a LOT going on here, but you need to see them in person. Gallery lighting is a benefit, but another is just being in the presence of these paintings to immediately pick up on what's at play here. I detailed the path of least resistance in a previous LIST, but your best bet is to head straight in towards this glowing lemony yellow canvas and note its matte whitish half. I'm talking about the original gesso layer, what once was also lemony yellow until Innes took his turpentine-soaked brush and painstakingly obliterated the color. EXCEPT check the side of the canvas: you'll note spare traces of dry paint, which tend towards a whole rainbow of hues, not just the apparent yellow — which makes one wonder if there are other colors tucked beneath the apparent outer layer). The interplay b/w paint and gesso is especially clear in the white/white pairing on the inner wall. The half w/ paint shimmers like an expanse of White-Out while the gesso'd half is flat like a pencil eraser took a go at it. But again, the sides belie the energy Innes had to enact to rid it of color, even if that color should be white. Same deal w/ the gesso/black paintings: one has a reddish undertone, the other a greenish, but you'd only know that by seeing the leftovers on the gesso'd side. So besides the reverberating, shining color (whatever color that may be), there is a lot of spent energy on the other half of all these paintings. A lot of action happened to make these, and action is required of us to investigate just what is going on with them. It is to our betterment that we can check these out from multiple POVs, just like seeing the Ryman paintings from different angles and distances.
So my point is: Minimalism as a term and a theory can be VERY deceptive. It's not 'easy' nor a 'cop-out' for one's attention span. You have to pay attention to these, you have to be willing to take a role in checking them out. Only then does the action of these on-the-surface minimalist works come out, kinetic-like, interacting w/ the viewer.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
fee's LIST (through 2/23)
WEDNESDAY
* George Segal @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. So cool: classic 20th C. figurative sculptural tableaux. You know the man: those sort of creepy plaster-cast figures assembled into urban 'environments' (park bench, street sign, phone booth); less 'real' than Duane Hanson, less 'freaky' than Ed Kienholz, yet alluring, atmospherically, all the same. This exhibition spans his career.
* Baron Adolph de Meyer @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. A discerningly chic exhibition of the preeminent fashion photographer's oeuvre, feat. portraits of his wife and muse, plus works from his years at Conde Nast and portraits of stage and screen actresses.
* Nonhorse + Blissed Out @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$6. Ever seen Woods perform live? Ever seen that guy kneeling on the floor, mic-headphones tethered to his face while he rocks out to what looks like cassette-tape mixers? That's G. Lucas Crane aka Nonhorse, and his noisy sound-sculpting is serious next-level.
THURSDAY
* Bill Jensen @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Jensen is one of my favorite not-large-scale abstract painters, alongside Josh Smith (though his is more mixed media) and the untouchable Gerhard Richter. Jensen's compositions, underwater explosions of saturated color or sweeping b&w, are imbued w/ his Taoist background.
* Beverly Pepper "Metamorphoses" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. I'll admit I didn't love Pepper's soaring twist-sculptures from '08, but this new exhibition, blocky crypto-portals and angles (in delicious onyx and granite) looks really satisfying.
+ George Rickey. Marlborough balances Pepper's heavy arsenal w/ lighter-than-air steel sculpture from Rickey's estate, soaring blocks and bars (and a few 'Nebula's that are like schools of fish) that interact w/ the air.
* Gary Simmons "Midnight Matinee" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Creepy renderings, in oils, wax and pigment, of nostalgic cinema and drive-in signage.
* Jaehyo Lee @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 535 W 24th St 2nd Fl. I was absolutely riveted by Lee's first solo show at the gallery back in 2008, and this one, lined w/ his current sculptures in burnt wood and steel, should be charming. His sculptures tend to smell really nice, heady, like the curtain of leaves he installed last time, so I'm hoping for some of that too.
* James Rosenquist "The Hole in the Middle of Time" @ Acquavella / 18 E 79th St. Take Rosenquist's trippiest cosmic washing-machine paintings, combine 'em with mirrors, and then motorize the paintings so they spin. Offset w/ massive paintings that incorporate spinning mirrors. Success.
* William Bailey @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. An excellent pairing of Bailey's from-memory still-life paintings and his dreamlike figure portraits, on canvas and paper.
* Park Jihyun "Incense Series: Weightlessness" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Park composes — 'paints' or 'erases' if you need to conceptualize it that way — his works on paper w/ fire, marking them w/ burning incense to create cloudy subtracted images like textural rubbings.
* Hannah Whitaker "Victory over the Sun!" @ Kumukumu Gallery / 42 Rivington St. My likes and dislikes for art photography dwell more on a gut-reaction sensibility. And it's telling me that Whitaker is dope. Her shots are not exactly representational nor abstract, they offer up their subject (an excavated tree, a bunny, a 'constellation' of lights) for us to judge, and they tend to look pretty cool.
* Jill Moser @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. I'm excited to see Moser's new abstract paintings and prints, rendered deftly in drypoint, aquatint and acrylic, as she seems to be eschewing her moodier constant palette for sunny hues a la Joan Mitchell.
* Liam Gillick @ Casey Kaplan / 525 W 21st St. Powder-coated aluminum and plexiglass frames and constructs, in delicious jeweltone colors. Mate's also got an installation in Wright, the new dining room of the Gugg, an added bonus.
* Aa + Dan Friel @ Don Pedro / 90 Manhattan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Montrose, JM to Lorimer, G to Broadway), 10p. Let Dan Friel, the composer/vocalist of math-rock trio Parts & Labor, warm you up w/ his wheezy electronics before the Aa percussion contingent like totally obliterate the place in ecstasy-inducing drumming.
FRIDAY
* Robert Ryman "Large/Small, Thick/Thin, Light Reflecting, Light Absorbing" @ Pacewildenstein / 32 E 57th St. Look again, is all I have to say for those hesitant to explore Ryman's ostensibly 'white' paintings further than a passing glance — in this case a glance across 30 square works. He draws from his wide historical vocabulary, so each and every element (from the paint media to the the wall hangings) differs, but the coolest aspect, what you must experience in person to really 'get', is the interplay b/w the paintings and the light. Trust me on this. Check it out. See for yourself.
* Dan Walsh "Days and Nights" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The artist injects some looseness into his large hypnotically-patterned canvases, which have a tendency to pulse before your eyes, the rate of which depends on his chosen color palette.
*Céleste Boursier-Mougenot "harmonichaos" @ Paula Cooper 'Boutique' / 465 W 23rd St. From what I can tell, this is a smaller, though no less cool, version of Boursier-Mougenot's awe-inspiring sound installation, which I saw at the 21st St gallery back in '06, involving old-school vacuum cleaners outfitted w/ harmonicas, motion sensors and lights.
* Yun-Fei Ji "Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Huge, gorgeous narrative watercolors and ink works on paper, combining traditional ghost stories and folklore with the Three Gorges Dam.
* Kim Fisher @ John Connelly Presents / 625 W 27th St. One of the more interesting contemporary abstract artists, Fisher paints fractured/fragmented blocks of color onto linen, but keeps some of the surface untouched – so we're left with a really interesting combination of textures and interplay b/w the hard-edged color and the raw linen. This series is Fisher's take on exotic shells from the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.
* Jacco Olivier @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. A looser direction for the Dutch artist, whose painted narrative films are even further into the 'painting' direction, probably to excellent effect. The centerpiece is 'Revolution', a galaxy's cycle in 24 minutes, accompanied by 'Bath' (recalling proper post-Impressionists) and 'Landscape' and 'Transition' (w/ their ever-changing scenery).
* Josh Azzarella @ DCKT / 195 Bowery. Azzarella manipulates film stills and amateur photography, creating anonymous, relatable scenarios. This show won't be nearly as grueling as his 2008 exhibition (which feat. manipulated press images from Abu Ghraib prison) but its unsettling enough to accompany a good ghost story.
* Film Comment Selects @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St) THRU MAR 4. The tagline for this dope festival of new international and domestic (+ a few reissues) is "Edgy. Extreme. Out there. Don't say we didn't warn you" — which nearly reads like something I would write, and it totally sums up the two-dozen films. Never been to a film festival before? This one is an excellent primer (and w/ Rendez-Vous w/ French Cinema coming up in a few weeks, you'll need the ocular exercise). Check this for full festival details and showtimes. I've included some of my selections below.
* Fucked Up w/ Frankie & the Outs @ Europa / 98 Meserole Ave, Greenpoint (G to Nassau), 7p/$13. Well yes, you might not pin me for a hardcore fan, but I've always wanted to see Fucked Up. And the deal is sweetened further w/ the addicting harmonies and fuzzy guitars of Frankie & the Outs, two nights before their show in Manhattan.
* Noveller + Secret Machines + Bear in Heaven @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/$15. The draw for me, beyond the spacey pop of Brooklyn's Bear in Heaven and NY/Chicago's Secret Machines, is the beautiful noise conjured by Sarah Lipstate (aka Noveller) via her pedal-looped guitars.
SATURDAY
* "Accident" (dir. Soi Cheang, Hong Kong, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre, 1:30p (part of Film Comment Selects). This is a gritty, in-your-face director (I mean seriously in your face. His crime-dramas "Dog Bite Dog" (2006) and "Shamo" (2007) were all hooked elbows, flickering sweat and blood, and ultra close-in fighting), and his new film — an 'accident choreographer' hitman caught in a choreographed accident — sounds particularly deliciously claustrophobic.
* "Godard Rarities" (dir. JLG, France) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre, 3:30p (part of Film Comment Selects). This just SOUNDS dope: odds and ends from the master of Nouvelle Vague, which I believe will include some American stuff too but it's JLG and he can do no wrong in my eyes.
* Crystal Stilts + The Beets + Beach Fossils @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$15. If you've never once stepped foot into an 'indie' NY venue, if you've never heeded my advice and checked out a local band, if you've been yearning to catch up on the Brooklyn (and Jackson Heights!!) scene: well aren't you in luck?? This lineup is a fab primer: the surf-friendly Beach Fossils and the sing-along punks The Beets w/ mix-matched German Measles and pop cuties Christmas Island for added flava. Oh, and headlined by Crystal Stilts, who are a bit Velvet Underground but so much more than that.
* The Golden Filter + DJ Nancy Whang @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 11p/$5. Ever danced in a bowling alley? I don't mean like what you did in junior high; I mean REALLY danced, like to really good music. Like duo The Golden Filter, so hot right now, and Nancy Whang (of The Juan MacLean), who pulls off a jumpsuit w/ an effortless chic that should not be taken for granted.
SUNDAY
* "The Revenge: A Visit from Fate" + "The Revenge: A Scar That Never Fades" (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan 1997) double screening @ Walter Reade Theatre, 3p/4:45p (part of Film Comment Selects). Double-header! I'm wild about Kiyoshi Kurosawa. And while I won't quite say 'before there was Koji Yakusho there was Sho Aikawa', you've got to give it to Kurosawa for knowing how to select some true hard-boiled, no-nonsense roughhousers. Aikawa looks like he could chew nails. Which is a good thing, as "The Revenge" double-feature, filmed just before Kurosawa's J-Horror psych-out game changer "Cure" (starring Yakusho), is Aikawa up against the baddest-ass yakuza thugs. Like Toshiro Mifune in Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo"/"Sanjuro", only set in the mid-90s.
* Dum Dum Girls + Frankie & The Outs @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p/$10. Major double-header of proper '60ish girl-indie-rock. Frankie Rose pulls overtime, first leading her band in ethereal three-part harmonies (tempered by buzzsaw guitars), then taking the drums for psychedelic Dum Dum Girls, who are just as cool. w/ Coasting.
TUESDAY
* "Air Doll" (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre, 6:15p (part of Film Comment Selects). I was so bummed when Koreeda's new film wasn't included in 2009's New York Asian Film Festival, and now I've got my chance to see it! Now, this director is not one to shy away from controversial subjects, oh say like Bae Doona playing a live-action inflatable sex doll to a sarariman? You know it's more than that.
* JEFF the Brotherhood + Screaming Females + Stupid Party @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. This will be a hard-rockin' night, beginning w/ the authentically mid-90s sludge of Stupid Party (who pair that w/ an intriguing bit of spaghetti western instrumentals), then the boom-bop of Marissa and Screaming Females, finished by the deceivingly minimalist setup of the Orrall bros — trust me they rock full-out.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Olafur Eliasson "multiple shadow house" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Eliasson never ceases to disappoint. His simplistic-on-paper installations (here focusing on light, shadow, and color — nothing new to the artist) should thrill even the most jaded art-goer. Unless you're a total killjoy. The titular piece, a wooden framework w/ projection-screen walls and varying colored spotlights, is a dormant creature until you and your friends begin traversing it, then it comes alive like a really fantastic avant-garde carnival attraction. Upstairs, amid Eliasson's spectrum watercolors, is 'abstract afterimage star', a flotilla of light projectors that switch on seemingly randomly — or is it really? — throwing up abstract tangram shapes on the wall that overlap into gorgeous color combinations.
* El Anatsui @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. The Ghanian sculpture had a major installation at last year's Armory Show, nearly stealing the attention from, well, practically all else there, it was that dope. So I've been yearning for an Anatsui fix, and he delivers. His shimmery, curtainlike woven sculptures, if they can be called 'sculptures' as they seem so fluid, resemble flags, animal pelts, and zoomed-out topography, variously — yet look close their painstaking composition (liquor labels, bottle caps). They're so big, you've got to step back from various angles to take 'em all in, like you're contemplating a sleeping lion from the distance.
* Thomas Ruff @ David Zwirner Gallery / 533 W 19th St. Works from two new series by the conceptual photographer — 'zycles' (I dug it, large-scale prints or canvas-printed renderings of wire-frame curves) and 'cassini', spacey captures of Saturn from the Cassini-Huygens Spacecraft, which are beautiful but foggy, a combo of the original film grain and Ruff's color saturation.
* Diana Thater "Between Science and Magic" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 W 19th St. Appearances are deceiving, so I suggest you stay longer than a minute when viewing Thater's dual-projection video installation. It subject, a rabbit-in-the-hat magic show, lasts but a blip in time, but she films it from multiple perspectives, and as the cameras travel 'round our magician, we begin to wonder: 'which is the 'actual' film and which is the 'film of the filming'?'
* Daido Moriyama @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Double props here for the brilliant installation, specifically the hanging of Moriyama's newish 'Hawaii' series in the main gallery. Largish b&w prints, 40x60" verticals or horizontals, framed in white pine, line the walls at comfortable eye level, like Josh Smith's show last year, creating an immersive environment for the photographer's lovely, contrasty works. And as with his classic Japanese prints in the back gallery, Moriyama captures various local subjects w/ effortless chic — whether it's a flower-draped mannequin, the Hawaiian skyline at night, an old automobile, or a rocky seashore, everything looks gorgeous. The most usual and banal ARE gorgeous under Moriyama's lens. Highly recommended, esp. w/ the adjacent Wolfgang Tillmans photo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.
* Banks Violette @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. No proper sound installation to complete Violette's 'dark triangle' (meaning messy wires + lots of shiny black), but the low buzz off the fluorescent bar 'chandelier' takes its place. This plus the massive billboard-like pieces are tongue-in-cheek Minimalism, the former an obvious Dan Flavin, the latter Ad Reinhardt (or anti-Robert Ryman) crossed w/ Steven Parrino's tortured canvases.
LAST CHANCE
* Inka Essenhigh @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. "The Old New Age". Really fine psychedelia here, in Essenhigh's largish oil paintings of surface-level landscapes that somehow come off w/ this dreamy submerged vibe. Like the action — a stately Clydesdale in a flowing golden field, a squadron of spooky shapes in an antiquarian forest, and the green goddess herself encircled by pink blossoms — is trapped in a liquid-filled globe, slowing everything down, lending grace and continuous movement. And the one piece, 'Lower East Side', well besides the bass guitar, it's a mix of that magical street from 'Harry Potter' (stay with me here) w/ something out of Vermeer's time, and it's absolutely gorgeous.
* 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).
* 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.
* 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.
* Markus Schinwald + Koo Jeong-A "A-Z" @ 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).
* 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.
* 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'.
* 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.
* 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.
* "Cinnabar: The Chinese Art of Carved Lacquer" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). If you came to the Met to check out Xie Zhiliu's modern yet faithfully traditional paintings and calligraphic works, I advise you to check out this stunning historic collection as well. Part of the fun is locating it, which means you take this private lift tucked in a corner of the Chinese art galleries, to the Chinese Decorative Art Galleries on the 3rd Fl. There lies a miraculous assortment of carved lacquer, from bowls and small containers to an eight-panel screen from the 16th century, depicting a pretty excellent bash. The craftsmanship in these carvings is unparalleled. Seeing it is like falling into a secret, extra-special domain of works of art in the truest sense.
* George Segal @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. So cool: classic 20th C. figurative sculptural tableaux. You know the man: those sort of creepy plaster-cast figures assembled into urban 'environments' (park bench, street sign, phone booth); less 'real' than Duane Hanson, less 'freaky' than Ed Kienholz, yet alluring, atmospherically, all the same. This exhibition spans his career.
* Baron Adolph de Meyer @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. A discerningly chic exhibition of the preeminent fashion photographer's oeuvre, feat. portraits of his wife and muse, plus works from his years at Conde Nast and portraits of stage and screen actresses.
* Nonhorse + Blissed Out @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$6. Ever seen Woods perform live? Ever seen that guy kneeling on the floor, mic-headphones tethered to his face while he rocks out to what looks like cassette-tape mixers? That's G. Lucas Crane aka Nonhorse, and his noisy sound-sculpting is serious next-level.
THURSDAY
* Bill Jensen @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Jensen is one of my favorite not-large-scale abstract painters, alongside Josh Smith (though his is more mixed media) and the untouchable Gerhard Richter. Jensen's compositions, underwater explosions of saturated color or sweeping b&w, are imbued w/ his Taoist background.
* Beverly Pepper "Metamorphoses" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. I'll admit I didn't love Pepper's soaring twist-sculptures from '08, but this new exhibition, blocky crypto-portals and angles (in delicious onyx and granite) looks really satisfying.
+ George Rickey. Marlborough balances Pepper's heavy arsenal w/ lighter-than-air steel sculpture from Rickey's estate, soaring blocks and bars (and a few 'Nebula's that are like schools of fish) that interact w/ the air.
* Gary Simmons "Midnight Matinee" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Creepy renderings, in oils, wax and pigment, of nostalgic cinema and drive-in signage.
* Jaehyo Lee @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 535 W 24th St 2nd Fl. I was absolutely riveted by Lee's first solo show at the gallery back in 2008, and this one, lined w/ his current sculptures in burnt wood and steel, should be charming. His sculptures tend to smell really nice, heady, like the curtain of leaves he installed last time, so I'm hoping for some of that too.
* James Rosenquist "The Hole in the Middle of Time" @ Acquavella / 18 E 79th St. Take Rosenquist's trippiest cosmic washing-machine paintings, combine 'em with mirrors, and then motorize the paintings so they spin. Offset w/ massive paintings that incorporate spinning mirrors. Success.
* William Bailey @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. An excellent pairing of Bailey's from-memory still-life paintings and his dreamlike figure portraits, on canvas and paper.
* Park Jihyun "Incense Series: Weightlessness" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Park composes — 'paints' or 'erases' if you need to conceptualize it that way — his works on paper w/ fire, marking them w/ burning incense to create cloudy subtracted images like textural rubbings.
* Hannah Whitaker "Victory over the Sun!" @ Kumukumu Gallery / 42 Rivington St. My likes and dislikes for art photography dwell more on a gut-reaction sensibility. And it's telling me that Whitaker is dope. Her shots are not exactly representational nor abstract, they offer up their subject (an excavated tree, a bunny, a 'constellation' of lights) for us to judge, and they tend to look pretty cool.
* Jill Moser @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. I'm excited to see Moser's new abstract paintings and prints, rendered deftly in drypoint, aquatint and acrylic, as she seems to be eschewing her moodier constant palette for sunny hues a la Joan Mitchell.
* Liam Gillick @ Casey Kaplan / 525 W 21st St. Powder-coated aluminum and plexiglass frames and constructs, in delicious jeweltone colors. Mate's also got an installation in Wright, the new dining room of the Gugg, an added bonus.
* Aa + Dan Friel @ Don Pedro / 90 Manhattan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Montrose, JM to Lorimer, G to Broadway), 10p. Let Dan Friel, the composer/vocalist of math-rock trio Parts & Labor, warm you up w/ his wheezy electronics before the Aa percussion contingent like totally obliterate the place in ecstasy-inducing drumming.
FRIDAY
* Robert Ryman "Large/Small, Thick/Thin, Light Reflecting, Light Absorbing" @ Pacewildenstein / 32 E 57th St. Look again, is all I have to say for those hesitant to explore Ryman's ostensibly 'white' paintings further than a passing glance — in this case a glance across 30 square works. He draws from his wide historical vocabulary, so each and every element (from the paint media to the the wall hangings) differs, but the coolest aspect, what you must experience in person to really 'get', is the interplay b/w the paintings and the light. Trust me on this. Check it out. See for yourself.
* Dan Walsh "Days and Nights" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The artist injects some looseness into his large hypnotically-patterned canvases, which have a tendency to pulse before your eyes, the rate of which depends on his chosen color palette.
*Céleste Boursier-Mougenot "harmonichaos" @ Paula Cooper 'Boutique' / 465 W 23rd St. From what I can tell, this is a smaller, though no less cool, version of Boursier-Mougenot's awe-inspiring sound installation, which I saw at the 21st St gallery back in '06, involving old-school vacuum cleaners outfitted w/ harmonicas, motion sensors and lights.
* Yun-Fei Ji "Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Huge, gorgeous narrative watercolors and ink works on paper, combining traditional ghost stories and folklore with the Three Gorges Dam.
* Kim Fisher @ John Connelly Presents / 625 W 27th St. One of the more interesting contemporary abstract artists, Fisher paints fractured/fragmented blocks of color onto linen, but keeps some of the surface untouched – so we're left with a really interesting combination of textures and interplay b/w the hard-edged color and the raw linen. This series is Fisher's take on exotic shells from the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.
* Jacco Olivier @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. A looser direction for the Dutch artist, whose painted narrative films are even further into the 'painting' direction, probably to excellent effect. The centerpiece is 'Revolution', a galaxy's cycle in 24 minutes, accompanied by 'Bath' (recalling proper post-Impressionists) and 'Landscape' and 'Transition' (w/ their ever-changing scenery).
* Josh Azzarella @ DCKT / 195 Bowery. Azzarella manipulates film stills and amateur photography, creating anonymous, relatable scenarios. This show won't be nearly as grueling as his 2008 exhibition (which feat. manipulated press images from Abu Ghraib prison) but its unsettling enough to accompany a good ghost story.
* Film Comment Selects @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St) THRU MAR 4. The tagline for this dope festival of new international and domestic (+ a few reissues) is "Edgy. Extreme. Out there. Don't say we didn't warn you" — which nearly reads like something I would write, and it totally sums up the two-dozen films. Never been to a film festival before? This one is an excellent primer (and w/ Rendez-Vous w/ French Cinema coming up in a few weeks, you'll need the ocular exercise). Check this for full festival details and showtimes. I've included some of my selections below.
* Fucked Up w/ Frankie & the Outs @ Europa / 98 Meserole Ave, Greenpoint (G to Nassau), 7p/$13. Well yes, you might not pin me for a hardcore fan, but I've always wanted to see Fucked Up. And the deal is sweetened further w/ the addicting harmonies and fuzzy guitars of Frankie & the Outs, two nights before their show in Manhattan.
* Noveller + Secret Machines + Bear in Heaven @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/$15. The draw for me, beyond the spacey pop of Brooklyn's Bear in Heaven and NY/Chicago's Secret Machines, is the beautiful noise conjured by Sarah Lipstate (aka Noveller) via her pedal-looped guitars.
SATURDAY
* "Accident" (dir. Soi Cheang, Hong Kong, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre, 1:30p (part of Film Comment Selects). This is a gritty, in-your-face director (I mean seriously in your face. His crime-dramas "Dog Bite Dog" (2006) and "Shamo" (2007) were all hooked elbows, flickering sweat and blood, and ultra close-in fighting), and his new film — an 'accident choreographer' hitman caught in a choreographed accident — sounds particularly deliciously claustrophobic.
* "Godard Rarities" (dir. JLG, France) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre, 3:30p (part of Film Comment Selects). This just SOUNDS dope: odds and ends from the master of Nouvelle Vague, which I believe will include some American stuff too but it's JLG and he can do no wrong in my eyes.
* Crystal Stilts + The Beets + Beach Fossils @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$15. If you've never once stepped foot into an 'indie' NY venue, if you've never heeded my advice and checked out a local band, if you've been yearning to catch up on the Brooklyn (and Jackson Heights!!) scene: well aren't you in luck?? This lineup is a fab primer: the surf-friendly Beach Fossils and the sing-along punks The Beets w/ mix-matched German Measles and pop cuties Christmas Island for added flava. Oh, and headlined by Crystal Stilts, who are a bit Velvet Underground but so much more than that.
* The Golden Filter + DJ Nancy Whang @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 11p/$5. Ever danced in a bowling alley? I don't mean like what you did in junior high; I mean REALLY danced, like to really good music. Like duo The Golden Filter, so hot right now, and Nancy Whang (of The Juan MacLean), who pulls off a jumpsuit w/ an effortless chic that should not be taken for granted.
SUNDAY
* "The Revenge: A Visit from Fate" + "The Revenge: A Scar That Never Fades" (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan 1997) double screening @ Walter Reade Theatre, 3p/4:45p (part of Film Comment Selects). Double-header! I'm wild about Kiyoshi Kurosawa. And while I won't quite say 'before there was Koji Yakusho there was Sho Aikawa', you've got to give it to Kurosawa for knowing how to select some true hard-boiled, no-nonsense roughhousers. Aikawa looks like he could chew nails. Which is a good thing, as "The Revenge" double-feature, filmed just before Kurosawa's J-Horror psych-out game changer "Cure" (starring Yakusho), is Aikawa up against the baddest-ass yakuza thugs. Like Toshiro Mifune in Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo"/"Sanjuro", only set in the mid-90s.
* Dum Dum Girls + Frankie & The Outs @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p/$10. Major double-header of proper '60ish girl-indie-rock. Frankie Rose pulls overtime, first leading her band in ethereal three-part harmonies (tempered by buzzsaw guitars), then taking the drums for psychedelic Dum Dum Girls, who are just as cool. w/ Coasting.
TUESDAY
* "Air Doll" (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre, 6:15p (part of Film Comment Selects). I was so bummed when Koreeda's new film wasn't included in 2009's New York Asian Film Festival, and now I've got my chance to see it! Now, this director is not one to shy away from controversial subjects, oh say like Bae Doona playing a live-action inflatable sex doll to a sarariman? You know it's more than that.
* JEFF the Brotherhood + Screaming Females + Stupid Party @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. This will be a hard-rockin' night, beginning w/ the authentically mid-90s sludge of Stupid Party (who pair that w/ an intriguing bit of spaghetti western instrumentals), then the boom-bop of Marissa and Screaming Females, finished by the deceivingly minimalist setup of the Orrall bros — trust me they rock full-out.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Olafur Eliasson "multiple shadow house" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Eliasson never ceases to disappoint. His simplistic-on-paper installations (here focusing on light, shadow, and color — nothing new to the artist) should thrill even the most jaded art-goer. Unless you're a total killjoy. The titular piece, a wooden framework w/ projection-screen walls and varying colored spotlights, is a dormant creature until you and your friends begin traversing it, then it comes alive like a really fantastic avant-garde carnival attraction. Upstairs, amid Eliasson's spectrum watercolors, is 'abstract afterimage star', a flotilla of light projectors that switch on seemingly randomly — or is it really? — throwing up abstract tangram shapes on the wall that overlap into gorgeous color combinations.
* El Anatsui @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. The Ghanian sculpture had a major installation at last year's Armory Show, nearly stealing the attention from, well, practically all else there, it was that dope. So I've been yearning for an Anatsui fix, and he delivers. His shimmery, curtainlike woven sculptures, if they can be called 'sculptures' as they seem so fluid, resemble flags, animal pelts, and zoomed-out topography, variously — yet look close their painstaking composition (liquor labels, bottle caps). They're so big, you've got to step back from various angles to take 'em all in, like you're contemplating a sleeping lion from the distance.
* Thomas Ruff @ David Zwirner Gallery / 533 W 19th St. Works from two new series by the conceptual photographer — 'zycles' (I dug it, large-scale prints or canvas-printed renderings of wire-frame curves) and 'cassini', spacey captures of Saturn from the Cassini-Huygens Spacecraft, which are beautiful but foggy, a combo of the original film grain and Ruff's color saturation.
* Diana Thater "Between Science and Magic" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 W 19th St. Appearances are deceiving, so I suggest you stay longer than a minute when viewing Thater's dual-projection video installation. It subject, a rabbit-in-the-hat magic show, lasts but a blip in time, but she films it from multiple perspectives, and as the cameras travel 'round our magician, we begin to wonder: 'which is the 'actual' film and which is the 'film of the filming'?'
* Daido Moriyama @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Double props here for the brilliant installation, specifically the hanging of Moriyama's newish 'Hawaii' series in the main gallery. Largish b&w prints, 40x60" verticals or horizontals, framed in white pine, line the walls at comfortable eye level, like Josh Smith's show last year, creating an immersive environment for the photographer's lovely, contrasty works. And as with his classic Japanese prints in the back gallery, Moriyama captures various local subjects w/ effortless chic — whether it's a flower-draped mannequin, the Hawaiian skyline at night, an old automobile, or a rocky seashore, everything looks gorgeous. The most usual and banal ARE gorgeous under Moriyama's lens. Highly recommended, esp. w/ the adjacent Wolfgang Tillmans photo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.
* Banks Violette @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. No proper sound installation to complete Violette's 'dark triangle' (meaning messy wires + lots of shiny black), but the low buzz off the fluorescent bar 'chandelier' takes its place. This plus the massive billboard-like pieces are tongue-in-cheek Minimalism, the former an obvious Dan Flavin, the latter Ad Reinhardt (or anti-Robert Ryman) crossed w/ Steven Parrino's tortured canvases.
LAST CHANCE
* Inka Essenhigh @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. "The Old New Age". Really fine psychedelia here, in Essenhigh's largish oil paintings of surface-level landscapes that somehow come off w/ this dreamy submerged vibe. Like the action — a stately Clydesdale in a flowing golden field, a squadron of spooky shapes in an antiquarian forest, and the green goddess herself encircled by pink blossoms — is trapped in a liquid-filled globe, slowing everything down, lending grace and continuous movement. And the one piece, 'Lower East Side', well besides the bass guitar, it's a mix of that magical street from 'Harry Potter' (stay with me here) w/ something out of Vermeer's time, and it's absolutely gorgeous.
* 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).
* 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.
* 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.
* Markus Schinwald + Koo Jeong-A "A-Z" @ 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).
* 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.
* 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'.
* 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.
* 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.
* "Cinnabar: The Chinese Art of Carved Lacquer" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). If you came to the Met to check out Xie Zhiliu's modern yet faithfully traditional paintings and calligraphic works, I advise you to check out this stunning historic collection as well. Part of the fun is locating it, which means you take this private lift tucked in a corner of the Chinese art galleries, to the Chinese Decorative Art Galleries on the 3rd Fl. There lies a miraculous assortment of carved lacquer, from bowls and small containers to an eight-panel screen from the 16th century, depicting a pretty excellent bash. The craftsmanship in these carvings is unparalleled. Seeing it is like falling into a secret, extra-special domain of works of art in the truest sense.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Dope Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is another dope director, who for better or worse has been dumped into the far-reaching (and by now mostly diluted and exhausted J-Horror genre). I write this w/ particular disdain b/c Kurosawa, for the longest time, for me anyway, kept a grip on the psychological aspect of horror w/out resorting to extreme violence and perversion that can weigh down proper J-Horror films — esp. those catering to Western audiences (and this means ANY J-Horror film remade into an American horror film). Kurosawa's best films inject you with a deep, gnawing feeling of dread that never lets up until long after the credits have rolled. And in advance of his double-header "Revenge" films (despite their obscure status stateside, they predate the first part of Park Chan-wook's famous 'Revenge Trilogy' by five years and, while also predating Kurosawa's J-Horror films, bear many elements found in his future works, like the hardboiled loner crimefighter) — I'm speaking of "The Revenge: A Visit from Fate" and "The Revenge: A Scar That Never Fades" — at the Lincoln Center, part of the Film Comment Selects series, I present my updated discourse on Kurosawa.
I've been a fan since randomly encountering "回路/Kairo" (2001, billed as "Pulse" in the States, and this was before that wack American-director remake from 2006), @ IFC Center, this extra-spooky ghost-in-the-Internet thriller with lots of cute girl actors (led by Kumiko Asō). This one probably epitomizes the traditional J-horror ideal (and by that I mean way back to '幽霊', like Japanese ghost stories, long black hair and floating spectres etc), w/ its slow-moving ghosts and glowing red eyes, but its focus on suicide and loneliness in the afterlife is signature psychological Kurosawa.
Which brings me to the loose quartet of Kōji Yakusho (non-Japanese viewers will probably sooner remember Yakusho from "Babel" — he was the dad to Rinko Kikuchi — or "Memoirs of a Geisha", as the disfigured Nobu) films, starting w/ the classic "キュア/Cure" (1997), which begins relatively light and then, after a jarring scene of violence, pitches down a rabbit-hole of psychosomatic trauma. You'll never look at a lighter's flame quite the same way, after viewing "Cure". And while Yakusho the detective is tracking, accosting, and attempting to psychoanalyze the murder, he's got his own problems at home via his mentally disturbed wife. This is one of Kurosawa's strengths: he gets at the hero from all sides, not only from the dangers of the outside world but by shattering the comforts of their personal life. "降霊/Seance" (2001) freaked me out with its harbingers of future Kurosawa films. The plot centers around Yakusho and his psychic wife Junko and a kidnapped little girl, but seemingly random bits thrown in strike sharply to what's in store for later. Like Junko seeing a ghostly woman in red trailing after a salaryman (see "叫/Retribution"), or Yakusho's brief, odd encounter with his doppelganger (that would be "ポッペルゲンガー/Doppelganger" obvs). Which brings me to "Doppelganger" (2003), which I thought was brilliant and shows Yakusho's incredible range as an actor b/c he has to play two guys: the uptight yet brilliant inventor and his sarcastic, superegoist double (it helps if you understand Japanese to catch all the wry slang thrown out by 2nd Yakusho, but even if you don't you'll probably catch it due to Yakusho's hangdog expressions). And what's esp. wild about Kurosawa's direction is that "Dpppelganger" begins as a typically spooky J-Horror-esque film, from the start to where Yakusho discovers his double leering at him. But then...subtly but surely, the film digresses into this strange and eventually rather lighthearted road movie, with Yakusho and costar Hiromi Nagasaku practically high-fiving and breaking into song-and-dance @ the end. Then we have "Retribution" (2006, whose proper title means "Scream" in Japanese and no way can you bill another film by that title after the spooky mask, sequel-inducing garbage produced by that series), which opened 2007's NY Asian Film Festival. Kurosawa returns to his extra-creepy, psychologically-driven horror roots, and Yakusho plays the grizzled, disturbed detective once again. His home life seems oddly calm via an eternally understanding girlfriend (no spoilers here), but something is up with the bizarre drownings in an unrecognizable, industrial neighborhood of Tokyo. And the ghostly woman in red?? She's the main antagonist, with a shriek like a car alarm. And the ending?? Classic Kurosawa. You thought "Cure" was obscure, where you had to watch it a few times to see what exactly Yakusho is up to? And "Doppelganger" a bit too fun? Wait til you reach the end of "Retribution" (hint: bring Kleenex).
I believe Kurosawa's latest film "Tokyo Sonata" (2008) which hit the IFC last March for a proper two-week-ish screening, not part of a festival or anything, introduced the director to a wider, Western audience. This is a realist psychological family drama (which he alluded to in "Seance"), bit more commercial-friendly but playing to all his strengths of this directorial style. And it came highly lauded from the international festival circuit and has been picking up awards (Cannes etc). But word of advice, if you want to do it right before "Revenge", if you've any inkling of interest in this director, begin with "Cure" (or for a big name experience outside Kōji Yakusho's films, try "明るい未来/Bright Future" from 2003, starring the dreamy duo of Tadanobu Asano and Jō Odagiri — sorta like if Johnny Depp and James Franco teamed up in a film) and see what Kurosawa's all about.
I've been a fan since randomly encountering "回路/Kairo" (2001, billed as "Pulse" in the States, and this was before that wack American-director remake from 2006), @ IFC Center, this extra-spooky ghost-in-the-Internet thriller with lots of cute girl actors (led by Kumiko Asō). This one probably epitomizes the traditional J-horror ideal (and by that I mean way back to '幽霊', like Japanese ghost stories, long black hair and floating spectres etc), w/ its slow-moving ghosts and glowing red eyes, but its focus on suicide and loneliness in the afterlife is signature psychological Kurosawa.
Which brings me to the loose quartet of Kōji Yakusho (non-Japanese viewers will probably sooner remember Yakusho from "Babel" — he was the dad to Rinko Kikuchi — or "Memoirs of a Geisha", as the disfigured Nobu) films, starting w/ the classic "キュア/Cure" (1997), which begins relatively light and then, after a jarring scene of violence, pitches down a rabbit-hole of psychosomatic trauma. You'll never look at a lighter's flame quite the same way, after viewing "Cure". And while Yakusho the detective is tracking, accosting, and attempting to psychoanalyze the murder, he's got his own problems at home via his mentally disturbed wife. This is one of Kurosawa's strengths: he gets at the hero from all sides, not only from the dangers of the outside world but by shattering the comforts of their personal life. "降霊/Seance" (2001) freaked me out with its harbingers of future Kurosawa films. The plot centers around Yakusho and his psychic wife Junko and a kidnapped little girl, but seemingly random bits thrown in strike sharply to what's in store for later. Like Junko seeing a ghostly woman in red trailing after a salaryman (see "叫/Retribution"), or Yakusho's brief, odd encounter with his doppelganger (that would be "ポッペルゲンガー/Doppelganger" obvs). Which brings me to "Doppelganger" (2003), which I thought was brilliant and shows Yakusho's incredible range as an actor b/c he has to play two guys: the uptight yet brilliant inventor and his sarcastic, superegoist double (it helps if you understand Japanese to catch all the wry slang thrown out by 2nd Yakusho, but even if you don't you'll probably catch it due to Yakusho's hangdog expressions). And what's esp. wild about Kurosawa's direction is that "Dpppelganger" begins as a typically spooky J-Horror-esque film, from the start to where Yakusho discovers his double leering at him. But then...subtly but surely, the film digresses into this strange and eventually rather lighthearted road movie, with Yakusho and costar Hiromi Nagasaku practically high-fiving and breaking into song-and-dance @ the end. Then we have "Retribution" (2006, whose proper title means "Scream" in Japanese and no way can you bill another film by that title after the spooky mask, sequel-inducing garbage produced by that series), which opened 2007's NY Asian Film Festival. Kurosawa returns to his extra-creepy, psychologically-driven horror roots, and Yakusho plays the grizzled, disturbed detective once again. His home life seems oddly calm via an eternally understanding girlfriend (no spoilers here), but something is up with the bizarre drownings in an unrecognizable, industrial neighborhood of Tokyo. And the ghostly woman in red?? She's the main antagonist, with a shriek like a car alarm. And the ending?? Classic Kurosawa. You thought "Cure" was obscure, where you had to watch it a few times to see what exactly Yakusho is up to? And "Doppelganger" a bit too fun? Wait til you reach the end of "Retribution" (hint: bring Kleenex).
I believe Kurosawa's latest film "Tokyo Sonata" (2008) which hit the IFC last March for a proper two-week-ish screening, not part of a festival or anything, introduced the director to a wider, Western audience. This is a realist psychological family drama (which he alluded to in "Seance"), bit more commercial-friendly but playing to all his strengths of this directorial style. And it came highly lauded from the international festival circuit and has been picking up awards (Cannes etc). But word of advice, if you want to do it right before "Revenge", if you've any inkling of interest in this director, begin with "Cure" (or for a big name experience outside Kōji Yakusho's films, try "明るい未来/Bright Future" from 2003, starring the dreamy duo of Tadanobu Asano and Jō Odagiri — sorta like if Johnny Depp and James Franco teamed up in a film) and see what Kurosawa's all about.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
fee's LIST (through 2/16)
THURSDAY
* Olafur Eliasson 'multiple shadow house' @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The ecstasy-inducing Danish-Icelandic artist returns w/ a two-floor exhibition destined to warm our snowed-in hearts in this NY winter. I literally just composed that preceding poetic sentence in less than a minute. The ground floor installation: think of the framework for a house, whose multiple colored light projections interact w/ the movement of visitors. Upstairs: 'full-spectrum' watercolors and a Constructivist projection abstraction.
* El Anatsui @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Anatsui's massive, rippling, shimmering structures — they defy convention, exceeding terminology like 'assemblage' or 'sculpture' or 'relief' — stole the Armory Show spotlight last year (sorry Kenny Scharf!). He's back w/ what should be an epic, though elegant, presentation of new works.
* Emilio Perez "Breakfast by the Light of the Moon" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. Think of the movement in Van Gogh's brush, brilliantly displayed in his nighttime skies and fields of crops. Perez conjures a similar, albeit moody, vibe, via many many many layers of latex and acrylic, carefully carved away in varying degrees.
* Sangbin Im "Confluence" @ Mary Ryan Gallery / 527 W 26th St. Im's utopian compositions match the passage of time in a single landmark (like Central Park) w/ seamless atmospheric elements (water, sky etc).
* Ross Bleckner @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Big abstract paintings of what looks like crushed flowers, blurred, redone, removed, on linen and photographic paper.
* Takming Chuang "Resolution" @ CHC Gallery / 511W 20th St. Super-saturated acrylic abstracts, think of your favorite color-field painter on mescaline, crossed w/ Brice Marden's whiplike 'Cold Mountain' shapes.
* Thomas Ruff @ David Zwirner Gallery / 533 W 19th St. Two new series from the label-defying conceptual photographer: zycles and cassini, the former incorporating physics and mathematics, and the latter astronomy — and, for both, loads of creative thinking.
* Diana Thater "Between Science and Magic" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 W 19th St. Challenge your perceptions in Thater's two looped film projections of the signature rabbit-in-a-hat trick.
* Theresa Chong @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. New Wave pointillist? The artist's delicate charcoal and gouache drawings, on either rice paper or hand-dyed Japanese paper, can be both surges of deep-sea bubbles, a cloud of noseeums, a backlit tree. Use your imagination.
* Courtney Johnson "Glass Cities" @ Jenkins Johnson Gallery / 521 W 26th St 5th Fl. Double meaning in the show title. Johnson creates luminous photography of big cities, but she uses cliché-verre (glass negative) technique to paint, enlarge, and combine — to stunning results.
* Gert & Uwe Tobias "Come and See Before the Tourists WIll Do — The Mystery of Transylvania" @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. The catchy exhibition title stems from a series of lovely, graphic wood-block prints from the brothers, incorporating European horror into the works. I am crossing my fingers they did at least one giallo-inspired print.
* Mattia Bonetti @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. A blurring of contemporary art and design or an exhibition that should instead be at MOSS gallery? Highlight: 'commode' composed of stainless steel plates stacked like playing cards. I leave this one to you.
* Tseng Kwong Chi @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 511 W 27th St. A series of prints from '83, a collaboration b/w the photographer, Keith Haring, and choreographer Bill T. Jones. This is especially relevant as 1) it's the 20th anniv. of Tseng and Haring's passings, and 2) it should pair nicely w/ Tony Shafrazi's Haring show.
* Inbai Kim "Turbulent O'Clock" @ Doosan Gallery / 531 W 25th St. Fluid sculptural forms, composed of aluminum rods, signaling the movement of a busy populace.
FRIDAY
* Daido Moriyama @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Japan's preeminent postwar photographer (or OTHER etc etc, if you were thinking either Araki or Hiroshi Sugimoto), Moriyama produces the most gorgeous inky/contrasy b&w prints (of his wanderings and crude modern urban society) that you've ever seen. This exhibit features one of his newest series, 'Hawaii'.
* Banks Violette @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. ANYTHING could happen here, when the lovely gloom rocker-artist has control. Picture sound installation, cascading fluorescent tubes and wires, and lots of gorgeous black.
* Elena Pankova & Anke Weyer "Mother the Cake is Burning" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. They're not quite 'anti-painters' b/c they paint very well, but their techniques (Weyer's in constant reduction, subtraction, manipulation; Pankova's in modifying store-bought canvases) may challenge traditional notions of the medium, as in you go from point a) (blank canvas) to point b) completed work w/o a lot of the messy go-between seen here.
* 'New Films from Hungary' @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), thru FEB 18. OK my background on contemporary Hungarian cinema is a bit...lacking, but I love Béla Tarr, and one of his films — "The Man from London" (2007) — is included in this 13-film festival. Check the site for film schedule and ticket info.
* "1" (dir. Pater, Sparrow, 2009) @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of 'New Films from Hungary' Festival), 9:10p. A discovered magical text that tells the fate of the entire world in a minute, based on an essay by Stanisław Lern (who wrote 'Solaris').
* "Inglourious Basterds" (dir. Quentin Tarentino, 2009) screenings @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston (FV to 2nd Ave). Why is this film playing again, when you could see it in NY theatres last year? I don't know!! But it stars a be-moustached, Tennessee-accented Brad Pitt, a smokin' hot Mélanie Laurent, and a disturbingly charming, multilingual Christoph Waltz (amid many many others), and hey it's about killin' Nazis! So see it again.
* Frankie & the Outs w/ Harlem @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Hot stuff. Miss Frankie Rose and crew play a tight set of fuzzed out noise-pop w/ gorgeous harmonies.
* SUSU + Antimagic @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$6. Before SUSU's heavy garage-rock decimates the stage, we get the fractured synth pop duo Antimatic (whose instrumentalist wiz is Ted from These Are Powers).
* Total Slacker + X-Ray Eyeballs @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/FREE. Total Slacker have totally grown on me: they're young and brash, but their earnest sets are loose and loads of fun. They share the bill w/ gloomy Joy Division-ish X-Ray Eyeballs.
SATURDAY
* Peter Halley @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Tasty geometric abstracts, mostly in Day-glo colors, that, in the artist's own lingo, are comprised of 'prisons' (horizontal bars, in a box, not entirely unlike Dan Walsh but way more hardedge here) and 'conduits' (Mario Bros pipes, only again hardedge). Chiptune bands would have a field-day here.
* Keith Haring "20th Anniversary" @ Tony Shafrazi Gallery / 544 W 26th St. It's all good. Even when it isn't all good, sometimes you need that somebody to show you — or in Haring's way, depict to you — how it can be all good. This is the 20th anniv of his passing. I don't need to explain any further. Catch this show + the Tseng Kwong Chi photo exhibit at Paul Kasmin's 27th St space.
* Blank Dogs + Frankie & the Outs w/ So Cow @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. What's better than seeing Miss Frankie Rose and her girls (The Outs) perform live? Answer: seeing them perform live TWICE, in the same venue, over a weekend. I can barely stand it! You won't want to miss this night, b/c it includes those Irish boys So Cow (scraggly, therapeutic pop) and Mike Sniper's Blank Dogs (glam-drenched indie-rock).
* Beach Fossils + The Beets @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$7. But they're not going to make it easy for me! Two fab shows w/in walking distance of one another, the Monster Island Basement show + this one: either way you can't go wrong.
SUNDAY
* "The Man from London" (dir. Béla Tarr, 2007) @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of 'New Films from Hungary' Festival), 1:30p. The classic humble laborer tale, witness to a murder, discoverer of lots of $, then... only drenched in Tarr's signature long-takes and powerful shadowy contrasts. ALSO TUES 8:30p.
* So Cow @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. Now THIS is a cool way to spend V-Day: in a crowded basement listening to dope bands (Brooklyn's doo-wop big band White Blue Yellow and Clouds and noisy garage-rock super-group Babies), capped off by So Cow, those Irish lads led by Brian Kelly, who do a fine catchy bit of jangly indie rock in English AND Korean.
MONDAY
* '"F" Valentine's Day' party @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5. feat. Fluffy Lumbers, North Highlands, Dream Diary. PopJew aka the superlative Rachel) curates this most excellent post-V-day show. OD'ed on chocolates? Didn't hook up like you wanted to? Having issues w/ your sweetie? Check the proper poppy indie rock, from start to finish.
* Double Leopards @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle), 8p/. Ohhh, you read it correctly: Mike + Maya (from Religious Knives) w/ Chris + Marcia = Double Leopards, perhaps NY's finest drone/noise combo, they of the brooding, somnambulant sort, reunite TONIGHT!
CURRENT SHOWS
* Damien Hirst "End of an Era" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Hirst's last solo show at the gallery was nearly five years ago and didn't include any formaldehyde tanks. Don't worry: they're back. Actually, he's provided several flavours of viewing-experience, so if you're more into the luxe, aesthetic Hirst, check the 4th fl. Beyond his dot paintings (the grayscale immemorially titled "Acetaldehye" is especially off-putting) and medicine cabinets are a series of wildly colored, wildly effective butterfly paintings. Indeed, Hirst combines household gloss and actual butterflies (either just the wings or the entire insect) into brilliant, super-trippy mosaics. Check them from different POVs to get the iridescent effect. It's like Philip Taaffe's mandala drawings only way more intense, like comparing shroom tea to a double-hit of acid. Fancy the de-luxe Hirst? Hit the 6th fl, ideally up the spiraling staircase instead of the lifts, and blind yourself w/ "Forgotten Promises" (he always names his art well), a room-filling gold-plated mirrored vitrine, its shelves lined w/ like a thousand cubic zirconia. The next-door gallery contains the aforementioned show-stopper: surrounded by photorealistic renderings of precious gemstones, and an even bigger wall-lining gold-plated mirrored vitrine ("Judgement Day", housing like a million manufactured diamonds) is "End of an Era", a gold-horned bull's head, in formaldehyde, on a marble plinth. If you fear being even remotely offended by said installation, I advise you to give wide berth to the neck-end of the vitrine (the bull is, after all, decapitated). But seen from a front or side view (and more effectively from a short distance, w/ the glittering wall of diamonds in the background, it's a stirring piece. And a highly recommended, very dope exhibition.
* Ida Applebroog "MONALISA" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. The hook to this vibrant new installation from Applebroog lies in an extensive series of self-portrait vagina drawings from '69. This project was rediscovered only last year, and the artist scanned and digitally augmented the drawings (sometimes w/ the addition of light color washes) and hung the updated vellum prints to nearly totally cover a wood-scaffolding structure, the show's titular piece. The chamber itself is blocked by a ladder (adorned with an ambiguously gendered visage who I am honored to write shares my surname), and beyond that is the massive doll-like portrait 'Monalisa', swimming in a field of red. It's a bracingly energetic experience.
* Sterling Ruby "2TRAPS" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. Ruby's debut show at PW is a heavy metal gut-punch: two same-scale installations, the self-describing BUS (covered inside and out w/ metal security gates and outfitted w/ subwoofers) and the chilling PIG PEN, a bus-shaped rectangular prism of interlocking rusty security gates, a dialogue on both human containment and an apocalyptic near-future.
* Callun Innes "At One Remove" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. Follow my prescribed route to get the most enjoyable experience from Innes' intense 'monochromes': head straight toward the practically glowing lemony yellow canvas and note its matte whitish half. Innes painstakingly stripped it of its color, retaining only the original gesso layer. Check the edges of the gesso half and catch dry slashes and spurts of erased color. A lot of elbow-grease (a violence, almost) went into this effort. Do a clockwise track of the gallery, past the white/gesso canvases — the shine of the paint v. the matte of the gesso is totally evident w/ these — and the half-blacks, noting the greenish/reddish under-layerings. Then hit the entryway gallery last, and the wetly blood-red canvas will feel even more intense.
* Robert Grosvenor @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. Three fantastic vintage works from the industrial 'assemblage' artist, composed of his heavy signature materials (sheet metal, cinderblocks, concrete slabs). The earliest piece on display, from '86, is like an archaeological site, only the fossil is a concrete wall and the canopy a bunch of crudely-cut, welded steel. The latest, from '94,includes a welded surfboard/UFO object resting atop a row of lashed-together poles.
* Jan Dibbets "New Horizons" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. The Dutch photographer plays w/ two horizon photos, crashing waves and a field, adjoining them to various interesting, geometric effects. There's quite a bit of repetition here (it's only two photos, in various crops), but the gallery to the left of the entryway contain Dibbets' most playful combos.
* Robert Adams "Summer Nights, Walking" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. The gallery writes that Adams' nocturnal landscape photography (this series is from '76-'82) 'vacillates between quiet foreboding and tranquil domesticity', but I'd take that one step further and call some of it tipping toward voyeurism. But don't mistake me: they're gorgeous, this lot, including the slightly creepy ones: a barely lit porch, a rather striking garage door, covered by the massive shadow of an unseen tree (trees in particular and foliage in general figure into most of Adams' works). Another fab instance: shrubbery in the foreground backlit by the flooding glare of headlights, as if someone enacted their revenge on his sneaking lens. A few others show a faraway cityscape caught b/w the shadowy trees and the multitudinously gray night sky, which is the closest to me to a warm summer's night.
* Ken Price @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. A dozen new soft-form sculptures by Price, incl three epic-scale ones, one of which, somehow, reminds me of Snoopy. The patina of these things is incredible, an oilslick of multiple colors (thanks to the many, many layers of paint used in their construction). The twisty question-mark sculptures are bit too cute, but they are few and far between (despite one hot-orange sculpture, a must-see) around his usual slumped and sagging variety. A small goldish one looks remarkably like vintage Louise Bourgeois, only coated in Lynda Benglis' media. Another, an outsized gold at the entryway, has the pebbly dermis of magnified human skin and the figuration of a reclining nude, an interesting foray for Price.
LAST CHANCE
* 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.
* "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).
* Pearlstein/Held "Five Decades" @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. Allow me to walk you through this incredible, if tantalizingly brief, duet b/w long-career American artists Al Held (he of the super abstract school) and Philip Pearlstein (he of the entirely figurative school). The 1st thing you'll probably see, out of your left peripherals, is Held's ultra-yellow targetish "Echo" from 1966, which pairs across the way w/ Pearlstein's "Female Nude on Yellow Drape" from the same decade. In the alcove w/ "Echo" is an early, wetly composed Pearlstein (which up close resembles mudwrestling) and an early Held, all impasto and thick swaths of paint. Get it? The interrelatedness of the two painters, albeit via on-the-surface different paths? You need this structure going into the spacious main room, where Pearlstein's newer works dominate, at least at first blush. Note the differences b/w a '76 piece and an '08 or '09, the increasing complexity of reflection, color palette and general franticness of composition. And note too how Held's works, while definitely not shirking on the color side (after a foray into sharp b&w in the '70s), calms his geometric compositions as their horizons stretch to eternity. And Roberta Smith of the NY Times likes it! I liked it over two months ago!
* 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.
* 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.
* "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.
* 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.
* "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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Olafur Eliasson 'multiple shadow house' @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The ecstasy-inducing Danish-Icelandic artist returns w/ a two-floor exhibition destined to warm our snowed-in hearts in this NY winter. I literally just composed that preceding poetic sentence in less than a minute. The ground floor installation: think of the framework for a house, whose multiple colored light projections interact w/ the movement of visitors. Upstairs: 'full-spectrum' watercolors and a Constructivist projection abstraction.
* El Anatsui @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Anatsui's massive, rippling, shimmering structures — they defy convention, exceeding terminology like 'assemblage' or 'sculpture' or 'relief' — stole the Armory Show spotlight last year (sorry Kenny Scharf!). He's back w/ what should be an epic, though elegant, presentation of new works.
* Emilio Perez "Breakfast by the Light of the Moon" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. Think of the movement in Van Gogh's brush, brilliantly displayed in his nighttime skies and fields of crops. Perez conjures a similar, albeit moody, vibe, via many many many layers of latex and acrylic, carefully carved away in varying degrees.
* Sangbin Im "Confluence" @ Mary Ryan Gallery / 527 W 26th St. Im's utopian compositions match the passage of time in a single landmark (like Central Park) w/ seamless atmospheric elements (water, sky etc).
* Ross Bleckner @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Big abstract paintings of what looks like crushed flowers, blurred, redone, removed, on linen and photographic paper.
* Takming Chuang "Resolution" @ CHC Gallery / 511W 20th St. Super-saturated acrylic abstracts, think of your favorite color-field painter on mescaline, crossed w/ Brice Marden's whiplike 'Cold Mountain' shapes.
* Thomas Ruff @ David Zwirner Gallery / 533 W 19th St. Two new series from the label-defying conceptual photographer: zycles and cassini, the former incorporating physics and mathematics, and the latter astronomy — and, for both, loads of creative thinking.
* Diana Thater "Between Science and Magic" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 W 19th St. Challenge your perceptions in Thater's two looped film projections of the signature rabbit-in-a-hat trick.
* Theresa Chong @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. New Wave pointillist? The artist's delicate charcoal and gouache drawings, on either rice paper or hand-dyed Japanese paper, can be both surges of deep-sea bubbles, a cloud of noseeums, a backlit tree. Use your imagination.
* Courtney Johnson "Glass Cities" @ Jenkins Johnson Gallery / 521 W 26th St 5th Fl. Double meaning in the show title. Johnson creates luminous photography of big cities, but she uses cliché-verre (glass negative) technique to paint, enlarge, and combine — to stunning results.
* Gert & Uwe Tobias "Come and See Before the Tourists WIll Do — The Mystery of Transylvania" @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. The catchy exhibition title stems from a series of lovely, graphic wood-block prints from the brothers, incorporating European horror into the works. I am crossing my fingers they did at least one giallo-inspired print.
* Mattia Bonetti @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. A blurring of contemporary art and design or an exhibition that should instead be at MOSS gallery? Highlight: 'commode' composed of stainless steel plates stacked like playing cards. I leave this one to you.
* Tseng Kwong Chi @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 511 W 27th St. A series of prints from '83, a collaboration b/w the photographer, Keith Haring, and choreographer Bill T. Jones. This is especially relevant as 1) it's the 20th anniv. of Tseng and Haring's passings, and 2) it should pair nicely w/ Tony Shafrazi's Haring show.
* Inbai Kim "Turbulent O'Clock" @ Doosan Gallery / 531 W 25th St. Fluid sculptural forms, composed of aluminum rods, signaling the movement of a busy populace.
FRIDAY
* Daido Moriyama @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Japan's preeminent postwar photographer (or OTHER etc etc, if you were thinking either Araki or Hiroshi Sugimoto), Moriyama produces the most gorgeous inky/contrasy b&w prints (of his wanderings and crude modern urban society) that you've ever seen. This exhibit features one of his newest series, 'Hawaii'.
* Banks Violette @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. ANYTHING could happen here, when the lovely gloom rocker-artist has control. Picture sound installation, cascading fluorescent tubes and wires, and lots of gorgeous black.
* Elena Pankova & Anke Weyer "Mother the Cake is Burning" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. They're not quite 'anti-painters' b/c they paint very well, but their techniques (Weyer's in constant reduction, subtraction, manipulation; Pankova's in modifying store-bought canvases) may challenge traditional notions of the medium, as in you go from point a) (blank canvas) to point b) completed work w/o a lot of the messy go-between seen here.
* 'New Films from Hungary' @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), thru FEB 18. OK my background on contemporary Hungarian cinema is a bit...lacking, but I love Béla Tarr, and one of his films — "The Man from London" (2007) — is included in this 13-film festival. Check the site for film schedule and ticket info.
* "1" (dir. Pater, Sparrow, 2009) @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of 'New Films from Hungary' Festival), 9:10p. A discovered magical text that tells the fate of the entire world in a minute, based on an essay by Stanisław Lern (who wrote 'Solaris').
* "Inglourious Basterds" (dir. Quentin Tarentino, 2009) screenings @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston (FV to 2nd Ave). Why is this film playing again, when you could see it in NY theatres last year? I don't know!! But it stars a be-moustached, Tennessee-accented Brad Pitt, a smokin' hot Mélanie Laurent, and a disturbingly charming, multilingual Christoph Waltz (amid many many others), and hey it's about killin' Nazis! So see it again.
* Frankie & the Outs w/ Harlem @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Hot stuff. Miss Frankie Rose and crew play a tight set of fuzzed out noise-pop w/ gorgeous harmonies.
* SUSU + Antimagic @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$6. Before SUSU's heavy garage-rock decimates the stage, we get the fractured synth pop duo Antimatic (whose instrumentalist wiz is Ted from These Are Powers).
* Total Slacker + X-Ray Eyeballs @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/FREE. Total Slacker have totally grown on me: they're young and brash, but their earnest sets are loose and loads of fun. They share the bill w/ gloomy Joy Division-ish X-Ray Eyeballs.
SATURDAY
* Peter Halley @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Tasty geometric abstracts, mostly in Day-glo colors, that, in the artist's own lingo, are comprised of 'prisons' (horizontal bars, in a box, not entirely unlike Dan Walsh but way more hardedge here) and 'conduits' (Mario Bros pipes, only again hardedge). Chiptune bands would have a field-day here.
* Keith Haring "20th Anniversary" @ Tony Shafrazi Gallery / 544 W 26th St. It's all good. Even when it isn't all good, sometimes you need that somebody to show you — or in Haring's way, depict to you — how it can be all good. This is the 20th anniv of his passing. I don't need to explain any further. Catch this show + the Tseng Kwong Chi photo exhibit at Paul Kasmin's 27th St space.
* Blank Dogs + Frankie & the Outs w/ So Cow @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. What's better than seeing Miss Frankie Rose and her girls (The Outs) perform live? Answer: seeing them perform live TWICE, in the same venue, over a weekend. I can barely stand it! You won't want to miss this night, b/c it includes those Irish boys So Cow (scraggly, therapeutic pop) and Mike Sniper's Blank Dogs (glam-drenched indie-rock).
* Beach Fossils + The Beets @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$7. But they're not going to make it easy for me! Two fab shows w/in walking distance of one another, the Monster Island Basement show + this one: either way you can't go wrong.
SUNDAY
* "The Man from London" (dir. Béla Tarr, 2007) @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of 'New Films from Hungary' Festival), 1:30p. The classic humble laborer tale, witness to a murder, discoverer of lots of $, then... only drenched in Tarr's signature long-takes and powerful shadowy contrasts. ALSO TUES 8:30p.
* So Cow @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. Now THIS is a cool way to spend V-Day: in a crowded basement listening to dope bands (Brooklyn's doo-wop big band White Blue Yellow and Clouds and noisy garage-rock super-group Babies), capped off by So Cow, those Irish lads led by Brian Kelly, who do a fine catchy bit of jangly indie rock in English AND Korean.
MONDAY
* '"F" Valentine's Day' party @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5. feat. Fluffy Lumbers, North Highlands, Dream Diary. PopJew aka the superlative Rachel) curates this most excellent post-V-day show. OD'ed on chocolates? Didn't hook up like you wanted to? Having issues w/ your sweetie? Check the proper poppy indie rock, from start to finish.
* Double Leopards @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle), 8p/. Ohhh, you read it correctly: Mike + Maya (from Religious Knives) w/ Chris + Marcia = Double Leopards, perhaps NY's finest drone/noise combo, they of the brooding, somnambulant sort, reunite TONIGHT!
CURRENT SHOWS
* Damien Hirst "End of an Era" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Hirst's last solo show at the gallery was nearly five years ago and didn't include any formaldehyde tanks. Don't worry: they're back. Actually, he's provided several flavours of viewing-experience, so if you're more into the luxe, aesthetic Hirst, check the 4th fl. Beyond his dot paintings (the grayscale immemorially titled "Acetaldehye" is especially off-putting) and medicine cabinets are a series of wildly colored, wildly effective butterfly paintings. Indeed, Hirst combines household gloss and actual butterflies (either just the wings or the entire insect) into brilliant, super-trippy mosaics. Check them from different POVs to get the iridescent effect. It's like Philip Taaffe's mandala drawings only way more intense, like comparing shroom tea to a double-hit of acid. Fancy the de-luxe Hirst? Hit the 6th fl, ideally up the spiraling staircase instead of the lifts, and blind yourself w/ "Forgotten Promises" (he always names his art well), a room-filling gold-plated mirrored vitrine, its shelves lined w/ like a thousand cubic zirconia. The next-door gallery contains the aforementioned show-stopper: surrounded by photorealistic renderings of precious gemstones, and an even bigger wall-lining gold-plated mirrored vitrine ("Judgement Day", housing like a million manufactured diamonds) is "End of an Era", a gold-horned bull's head, in formaldehyde, on a marble plinth. If you fear being even remotely offended by said installation, I advise you to give wide berth to the neck-end of the vitrine (the bull is, after all, decapitated). But seen from a front or side view (and more effectively from a short distance, w/ the glittering wall of diamonds in the background, it's a stirring piece. And a highly recommended, very dope exhibition.
* Ida Applebroog "MONALISA" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. The hook to this vibrant new installation from Applebroog lies in an extensive series of self-portrait vagina drawings from '69. This project was rediscovered only last year, and the artist scanned and digitally augmented the drawings (sometimes w/ the addition of light color washes) and hung the updated vellum prints to nearly totally cover a wood-scaffolding structure, the show's titular piece. The chamber itself is blocked by a ladder (adorned with an ambiguously gendered visage who I am honored to write shares my surname), and beyond that is the massive doll-like portrait 'Monalisa', swimming in a field of red. It's a bracingly energetic experience.
* Sterling Ruby "2TRAPS" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. Ruby's debut show at PW is a heavy metal gut-punch: two same-scale installations, the self-describing BUS (covered inside and out w/ metal security gates and outfitted w/ subwoofers) and the chilling PIG PEN, a bus-shaped rectangular prism of interlocking rusty security gates, a dialogue on both human containment and an apocalyptic near-future.
* Callun Innes "At One Remove" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. Follow my prescribed route to get the most enjoyable experience from Innes' intense 'monochromes': head straight toward the practically glowing lemony yellow canvas and note its matte whitish half. Innes painstakingly stripped it of its color, retaining only the original gesso layer. Check the edges of the gesso half and catch dry slashes and spurts of erased color. A lot of elbow-grease (a violence, almost) went into this effort. Do a clockwise track of the gallery, past the white/gesso canvases — the shine of the paint v. the matte of the gesso is totally evident w/ these — and the half-blacks, noting the greenish/reddish under-layerings. Then hit the entryway gallery last, and the wetly blood-red canvas will feel even more intense.
* Robert Grosvenor @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. Three fantastic vintage works from the industrial 'assemblage' artist, composed of his heavy signature materials (sheet metal, cinderblocks, concrete slabs). The earliest piece on display, from '86, is like an archaeological site, only the fossil is a concrete wall and the canopy a bunch of crudely-cut, welded steel. The latest, from '94,includes a welded surfboard/UFO object resting atop a row of lashed-together poles.
* Jan Dibbets "New Horizons" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. The Dutch photographer plays w/ two horizon photos, crashing waves and a field, adjoining them to various interesting, geometric effects. There's quite a bit of repetition here (it's only two photos, in various crops), but the gallery to the left of the entryway contain Dibbets' most playful combos.
* Robert Adams "Summer Nights, Walking" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. The gallery writes that Adams' nocturnal landscape photography (this series is from '76-'82) 'vacillates between quiet foreboding and tranquil domesticity', but I'd take that one step further and call some of it tipping toward voyeurism. But don't mistake me: they're gorgeous, this lot, including the slightly creepy ones: a barely lit porch, a rather striking garage door, covered by the massive shadow of an unseen tree (trees in particular and foliage in general figure into most of Adams' works). Another fab instance: shrubbery in the foreground backlit by the flooding glare of headlights, as if someone enacted their revenge on his sneaking lens. A few others show a faraway cityscape caught b/w the shadowy trees and the multitudinously gray night sky, which is the closest to me to a warm summer's night.
* Ken Price @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. A dozen new soft-form sculptures by Price, incl three epic-scale ones, one of which, somehow, reminds me of Snoopy. The patina of these things is incredible, an oilslick of multiple colors (thanks to the many, many layers of paint used in their construction). The twisty question-mark sculptures are bit too cute, but they are few and far between (despite one hot-orange sculpture, a must-see) around his usual slumped and sagging variety. A small goldish one looks remarkably like vintage Louise Bourgeois, only coated in Lynda Benglis' media. Another, an outsized gold at the entryway, has the pebbly dermis of magnified human skin and the figuration of a reclining nude, an interesting foray for Price.
LAST CHANCE
* 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.
* "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).
* Pearlstein/Held "Five Decades" @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. Allow me to walk you through this incredible, if tantalizingly brief, duet b/w long-career American artists Al Held (he of the super abstract school) and Philip Pearlstein (he of the entirely figurative school). The 1st thing you'll probably see, out of your left peripherals, is Held's ultra-yellow targetish "Echo" from 1966, which pairs across the way w/ Pearlstein's "Female Nude on Yellow Drape" from the same decade. In the alcove w/ "Echo" is an early, wetly composed Pearlstein (which up close resembles mudwrestling) and an early Held, all impasto and thick swaths of paint. Get it? The interrelatedness of the two painters, albeit via on-the-surface different paths? You need this structure going into the spacious main room, where Pearlstein's newer works dominate, at least at first blush. Note the differences b/w a '76 piece and an '08 or '09, the increasing complexity of reflection, color palette and general franticness of composition. And note too how Held's works, while definitely not shirking on the color side (after a foray into sharp b&w in the '70s), calms his geometric compositions as their horizons stretch to eternity. And Roberta Smith of the NY Times likes it! I liked it over two months ago!
* 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.
* 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.
* "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.
* 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.
* "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.
* 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.
* 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.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Heavy Metal
The January highlights of the W.Chelsea gallery scene — Anthony McCall's 'sculpted light' projections at Sean Kelly and the California Minimalists group show at David Zwirner, whose acrylic lozenges, fiberglass wedges, and projected-light prisms belied their weighty emotive tendencies — are supplemented by heavy vibes of a more readily perceivable sort. As in: heavy metal. I mean the one-two shot of Robert Grosvenor at Paula Cooper and Sterling Ruby at Pacewildenstein. Both artists, the younger Cali-based Ruby and the stalwart NYer Grosvenor, contribute unmistakably affective works in two unmissable exhibitions.
Ruby's first installation at Pacewildenstein is a lovely gut-punch: two new roughly same-scale works frankly titled BUS and PIG PEN. The former, newer piece is just that: a reconfigured bus (if the corroded outside advert is any clue, it used to be a Monster Energy Drink vehicle) screened w/ a latticework of metal security doors on the outside and inside. Ruby kept the driver's seat, mirrors, and various bus-related detritus here and there, but otherwise the narrow interior was gutted in favor of the cages, which one might imagine could house either detainees or refrigerated lockers for the illicit body-part trade. The back quarter of the bus — what I am calling the 'VIP Area' — has leather seats but also a ridiculous array of subwoofers and chrome hemispheres. It's like that flatbed truck in Luis Gispert's short film 'Smother' (which premiered at Mary Boone Gallery two years ago), when the kid is like biking alongside it and the flatbed is lined w/ massive speakers blasting quintessential Miami booty bass and one big dude, cross-armed, staring the kid over. PIG PEN is basically a bus-sized gridlock of rusty metal security gates, welded into rectangular blocks and stood either end-to-end or on their sides. One vertical block is doorless, and should you choose to stand inside it note I am about 5'8" tall and could just stand vertically inside it. Now transpose this menacing grid into contemporary society and solitary confinement cages, and let that simmer for a bit in your subconscious.
Anyone who told you assemblage is just inconsequential agglomerations of mix-matched detritus, prone to tipping over and certainly not worthy of producing a deep impact obviously isn't familiar w/ Grosvenor. And while I feel his more recent works are a bit too clean and balanced, his vintage sculpture — three of which are on display at Paula Cooper — are where it's at: industrial, raw, and somehow just treading the border between elegant and violent. His piece from '89 at last year's group show stole my attention away, practically insinuating itself and its tank-like cinderblock slab in the room, sucking the life out of the other pieces. Grosvenor is a tricky addition to group exhibitions: his style dominates; unlike, say, a twisted-steel John Chamberlain or a steel and neon assemblage from Keith Sonnier, where you can observe then turn away, Grosvenor's hinder this flighty discernment. As in: when a Grosvenor assemblage is in the room there's NOTHING ELSE in the room, unless that happens to be another Grosvenor. In this show, the '86 assemblage takes the rough-hewn painted steel curtain (a recurring Grosvenor element), and creates a canopy supported on four sides by rusty steel disks, like badass saw-bladed enlarged 500x. This shelter houses a portion of a concrete wall, displayed on a blue work-tarp like some gigantic dinosaur fossil. It manages to recall both archaeology and transit while appearing as nothing you've ever seen before. The '91 piece also has a canopy, a translucent fiberglass form staked above what appears to be a rusted off-green-colored car hood. Richard Prince's readymade skewered by a metal pole. '94 maintains this brutal hand in what appears to be a surfboard-shaped welded steel conglomerate, resting on a plank of affixed industrial tubes that hover above a silvery low hemisphere like a torn-off piece of a circa-'50s UFO. It's the most ostentatious of the three, and not just due to the silver. For me, this piece in particular is the demarcation b/w Grosvenor's solid early works and his more fully-formed, more studied, more, ah, perfect later assemblages. That said, '94 is a nicely unpolished one.
So get in there, immerse yourself w/ the heavy metal.
Ruby's first installation at Pacewildenstein is a lovely gut-punch: two new roughly same-scale works frankly titled BUS and PIG PEN. The former, newer piece is just that: a reconfigured bus (if the corroded outside advert is any clue, it used to be a Monster Energy Drink vehicle) screened w/ a latticework of metal security doors on the outside and inside. Ruby kept the driver's seat, mirrors, and various bus-related detritus here and there, but otherwise the narrow interior was gutted in favor of the cages, which one might imagine could house either detainees or refrigerated lockers for the illicit body-part trade. The back quarter of the bus — what I am calling the 'VIP Area' — has leather seats but also a ridiculous array of subwoofers and chrome hemispheres. It's like that flatbed truck in Luis Gispert's short film 'Smother' (which premiered at Mary Boone Gallery two years ago), when the kid is like biking alongside it and the flatbed is lined w/ massive speakers blasting quintessential Miami booty bass and one big dude, cross-armed, staring the kid over. PIG PEN is basically a bus-sized gridlock of rusty metal security gates, welded into rectangular blocks and stood either end-to-end or on their sides. One vertical block is doorless, and should you choose to stand inside it note I am about 5'8" tall and could just stand vertically inside it. Now transpose this menacing grid into contemporary society and solitary confinement cages, and let that simmer for a bit in your subconscious.
Anyone who told you assemblage is just inconsequential agglomerations of mix-matched detritus, prone to tipping over and certainly not worthy of producing a deep impact obviously isn't familiar w/ Grosvenor. And while I feel his more recent works are a bit too clean and balanced, his vintage sculpture — three of which are on display at Paula Cooper — are where it's at: industrial, raw, and somehow just treading the border between elegant and violent. His piece from '89 at last year's group show stole my attention away, practically insinuating itself and its tank-like cinderblock slab in the room, sucking the life out of the other pieces. Grosvenor is a tricky addition to group exhibitions: his style dominates; unlike, say, a twisted-steel John Chamberlain or a steel and neon assemblage from Keith Sonnier, where you can observe then turn away, Grosvenor's hinder this flighty discernment. As in: when a Grosvenor assemblage is in the room there's NOTHING ELSE in the room, unless that happens to be another Grosvenor. In this show, the '86 assemblage takes the rough-hewn painted steel curtain (a recurring Grosvenor element), and creates a canopy supported on four sides by rusty steel disks, like badass saw-bladed enlarged 500x. This shelter houses a portion of a concrete wall, displayed on a blue work-tarp like some gigantic dinosaur fossil. It manages to recall both archaeology and transit while appearing as nothing you've ever seen before. The '91 piece also has a canopy, a translucent fiberglass form staked above what appears to be a rusted off-green-colored car hood. Richard Prince's readymade skewered by a metal pole. '94 maintains this brutal hand in what appears to be a surfboard-shaped welded steel conglomerate, resting on a plank of affixed industrial tubes that hover above a silvery low hemisphere like a torn-off piece of a circa-'50s UFO. It's the most ostentatious of the three, and not just due to the silver. For me, this piece in particular is the demarcation b/w Grosvenor's solid early works and his more fully-formed, more studied, more, ah, perfect later assemblages. That said, '94 is a nicely unpolished one.
So get in there, immerse yourself w/ the heavy metal.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
fee's LIST (through 2/9)
WEDNESDAY
* "Yojimbo" + "Sanjuro" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1961/1962) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 5:25/7:30p. As we come to the end of a month-long Kurosawa retrospective, I cannot think of a better way of going out than this two-fer: the saga of ballsy ronin Toshiro Mifune (as titular Yojimbo) v. a bunch of thugs and a pistol-wielding Tatsuya Nakadai.
* "Examined Life" (dri. Astra Taylor, 2009) screening @ DCTV / 87 Lafayette St (6/JMZ to Canal St), 7:30p/RSVP: rsvp@dctvny.org. Today's 'rockstar' philosophers (sorry, 'contemporary thinkers') walk the streets, row boats — and incidentally Slavoj Zizek rummages a London garbage dump — and have off-the-cuff chats w/ the camera. Talking eggheads, you say? I think it sounds perfect. w/ director Taylor in attendance.
THURSDAY
* Sterling Ruby "2TRAPS" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. The LA-based artist's gallery debut sounds like a jackknife into still waters: two large-scale sculptures entitled BUS and PIG PEN, composed of security doors, confinement cages, sub-woofers, and other modes of disorientation and imprisonment.
* Callum Innes "At One Remove" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. Ooh, I'm a big Innes fan. His style is 'making/unmaking' abstract paintings, but the new works, while tactically complex and lovingly abraded, are divided vertically, w/ 1/2 the painting awash in shimmering color and the other side stripped back (nearly) its original underlying gesso layer. Hot stuff.
* Dinh Q. Lê "Elegies" @ PPOW / 511 W 25th St #301. Lê's photography and video animation centers on the South China Sea Pishkun of 1975, plus footage from 'Platoon' and 'Apocalypse Now' reedited together as 'From Father to Son: A Right of Passage'.
* Gabriel J. Shuldiner "Black Mash" @ Jodi Arnold / 56 University Place. Tasty black- and blackened mixed media composites, post-everything.
* Unsound Festival NY 2010: Opening Event = Vladislav Delay + Lillevan @ Lincoln Center (David Rubenstein Atrium) / 1881 Broadway (1 to 66th St), 8p/FREE. This 10-day multi-venue showcase of experimental Eastern European music starts off w/ an echoey bang, thanks to Finland's warm electronics improv genius Sasu Ripatti (playing for the 1st time here as Vladislav Delay) and Berlin's video manipulator Lillevan. Expect a very intimate show that bends both time signatures and reality.
* Big Troubles + Twin Sister @ Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NRW/456/L to Union Square), 8p/$7. Chocolate Bobka curated this who's who of hot local talent, specifically those unafraid of dreamy reverb. We've got Big Troubles (whose noisy garage rock shimmers) and Twin Sister (currently my band of choice, they are so dope live), plus soundscapers Run DMT and more.
* Naked Hearts + The Vandelles @ Littlefield / 622 Degraw St, Gowanus (M/R to Union, D/M/NR to Pacific), 8p/$12. Nice combo here, the guitar/drums duo Naked Hearts (replete w/ Amy's gorgeous vocals) and the whispery anthems of The Vandelles, hidden amidst dissonant guitars and a pounding rhythm section.
* Maria Chavez w/ Shelley Burgon + Mike Wexler + Corridors @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (M/R/F to 9th St/4th Ave), 8p/$15. Another well-curated duet night at ISSUE. Chavez is an avant-turntablist and Burgon improvs on the harp and laptop. Wexler is an intricate, inventive guitarist and Corridors (Byron Westbrook) conjures discreet, multi-channel audio pieces. Not sure either have played together before but there is so much talent here tonight that it should be quite a show.
FRIDAY
* Robert Grosvenor @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. I'll admit I prefer Grosvenor's earlier works (freakishly spare agglomerations of industrial materials incl. but not limited to: concrete blocks and steel) to his neat and sort-of beautiful recent sculptures. Like his haunting turret of cinderblocks and metal, recalling a maximum security cell, from last year's gallery group show. This exhibition, luckily, includes these not-new pieces, three heavy presences spanning 1986 to 1994, whose happenstance materials weigh heavily on the viewer's subconscious.
* "A Celebration of Spring" @ Ippodo Gallery / 521 W 26th St. A group show around the theme of flowers (Shinya Yamamura's eye-popping lacquers, paintings by Yoko Semoto and Tetsushi Kokin, ceramics by Kohei Nakamura and loads else), which is appropriate for many reasons as this is the calendar block before cherry-blossom season and Feb 4 is 'risshun', the first day of spring, which is still bloody cold but initiates a promise of warmer climes ahead.
* Jan Dibbets "New Horizons" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Like the show title goes, the Dutch photographer begins w/ the natural horizon in conjoining seascapes and natural scenes into new compositions.
* Inigo Manglano-Ovalle "Happiness is a state of inertia" @ Max Protetch / 511 W 22nd St. I dig the artist's sensory-disrupting installations. He begins this time w/ a take on Mies van der Rohe's 'House with Four Columns', adding glass and steel and a rather interesting fish tank.
* Unsound Festival NY 2010 = "Kiss" + "Blow Job" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1963) w/ live Carl Craig + nsi. soundtrack @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 7:30p/9:30p, $25. I cannot make this stuff up. Furthering the inroads to experimental music, we have substitutes for these simply titled films' soundtracks, substituting the sounds one might expect to hear from, say 55 minutes of kissing or a half-hour blowjob, w/ live improv from German duo nsi. ('Kiss') and Detroit's Craig ('Blow Job').
* "Ran" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1985) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), for TWO WEEKS. The Kurosawa festival officially ends w/ this two-week run of his famous adaptation of Shakespeare's 'King Lear'...annnd I've never seen it. This is the director going out w/ a bang, big-time, tour-de-force style, huge color-coded armies, femme fatales, wigged out Tatsuya Nakadai as the old king... what are we waiting for??
* "Eyes Wide Open" (dir. Haim Tabakman, 2009) screenings @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (NRW/456/L to Union Square). I totally dig this recent graduate from the 2010 NY Jewish Film Festival and am pleased it's got proper billing in NYC. The premise, an intriguing romance set in an ultra-orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood, is riveting.
* "Reservoir Dogs" (dir. Quentin Tarentino, 1992) midnight screening @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (FV to 2nd Ave). Way before Tarentino's sarariman-suited Crazy 88's, his motley color-pseudonymed Dogs ruled the screen. I can't even begin to list all the cool scenes, though the notorious Stealers Wheel bit ("Stuck in the Middle With You", complete w/ a blood-lusting, straight-razor wielding Michael Madsen, perhaps at his pinnacle) definitely does it for me every time.
* Adventure w/ Teengirl Fantasy @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle), 10p. If you need a primer on alt-dance music, this might be the show for you. Benny Boeldt's soulful NES tunes as Adventure + the fractured house beats of duo Teengirl Fantasy (who, name aside, are incredibly dope). Late edition: surf-boy(s) Beach Fossils annnnnd NEON INDIAN.
SATURDAY
* "Mastering the Art of Chinese Painting: Xie Zhiliu (1910-1997)" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). The museum has an absolute trove of this modern artist's works, a leading figure in Chinese traditional style, and they have crafted a 100-odd selection of his paintings, calligraphy, and sketches.
* Robert Adams "Summer Nights, Walking" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. Totally gorge vintage nocturnal landscape photography from a guy who knows how to capture tranquil foliage (see his last MM show, 'Questions for an Overcast Day').
* Ken Price @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. Sixteen spanking new softly shaped, sensual/suggestive sculptures in shimmering spectrums from the stalwart sculptor.
* Twin Sister @ The Tank / 345 W 45th St (ACE/123/NRW to 42nd St), 7:30p/$5. The dreamy psychedelic rock outfit Twin Sister (bit like Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions, bit like Portishead) lead this night of 'young pop groups in NYC'. w/ Ava Luna and Data Dog.
* Anamanaguchi @ Shea Stadium / 20 Meadow St, Bushwick (L to Grand St), 9p/$8. Brooklyn's hacked-NES punks Anamanaguchi are embarking on the 8Bit Alliance Tour in March, so catch 'em now alongside some of their chiptune brethren. w/ D/A/D.
MONDAY
* Knight School + Family Portrait @ Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NRW/456/L to Union Square), 8p/FREE. I'd usually be hard-pressed to send you out to Webster Hall, but when it's a free concert of dope local-ish bands (psych-folk DC guys Family Portrait and Brooklyn smart-indie-pop Knight School) then it's fair game.
* Unsound Festival NY2010 = Sawako + Ezekiel Honig @ Littlefield / 622 Degraw St, Gowanus (M/R to Union, D/M/NR to Pacific), 8p/$10. The NY-based Anticipate label showcase, w/ all-star sound-sculptor Sawako and fuzzy electro-acoustic impresario (and label founder) Ezekiel Honig. w/ live visuals from superDraw.
TUESDAY
* Beach Fossils + The Beets @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. Oh man, Cake Shop is going to be crowded tonight! From the get-go (fun-loving Total Slackers), through the carefree groove of Beach Fossils (dare you to remain still during their set), up until The Beets (the originals, Jackson Heights' only garage-rock trio) carry the basement venue into a thumping, caterwauling singalong. Oh, epiphanies will be had!
* Unsound Festival NY 2010 = Zavoloka + Bora Yoon + Zenial @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (M/R/F to 9th St/4th Ave), 8:30p/$15. Two Eastern European experimental musicians, Poland's Zenial (aka Lukasz Szalankiewicz, co-curator of Unsound) and Ukraine's Zavoloka, play shimmering discreet-sound sets w/ Brooklyn's Bora Yoon (who makes some yummy glitch tunes herself).
CURRENT SHOWS
* "The Drawings of Bronzino" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). It is my duty, as curator of my LIST, to inform you of current dope cultural events, no matter the degree to which I can conceivably explain them. Hence is the case w/ this brilliant exhibition of Agnolo Bronzino at the Met, nearly all the lush, sensual drawings attributed to him (60 here), the leading Italian Mannerist. The Times' Holland Cotter and The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl, amid others surely, have already done a far more eloquent job than I'll ever muster. SO, I will do my very best of being Bronzino's hype-man and encourage you, nay, entreat you to this very essential, very beautiful show. The vast majority of these drawings were made in black or red chalk on paper (sometimes prepared w/ a color wash), though Bronzino took what sounds to me like a cumbersome medium and totally elevated it. His lines are masterful, confident, tracing out figures then shading in their supple musculature. Richard Hawkins, for one, would have a field day deconstructing the fleshy amorousness in the posing nude youths (and speaking of sheer detailing, only Peter Peri immediately springs to mind for a contemporary counterpart — his show at Bortolami is pretty impressive — but it's nothing like Bronzino's). Bronzino depicts women, too, incl. personal fave 'Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View', whose exacting title belies the riveting rendering, her downward-cast eyes, the highlight on her cheekbone. He also does draping, which by that I mean like folded cloth, and if that sounds simplistic you need to take a look at his drawings, the incredible capture of shadows. A few 'modellos' are included in the show, drawings augmented by 16th C. ink and washes that are jarringly intense when seen alongside his singular, concentrated figure studies. And while I've just skimmed the surface her, trust me when I say Bronzino is where it's at. The show continues until mid-April so I've got loads of time to improve the above summary.
+ Richard Hamilton. You only THINK you know Hamilton, meaning you equate the British artist w/ his famous 'Just What is it that makes Today's Homes so Different, So Appealing?' collage from '56. A redo of that one (a super-quality print from a few years ago) is included in this 35-year survey, but the other two dozen works really illuminate Hamilton's forays into print media, via intaglio and rather complex digital techniques. This includes the trippy 'Palindrome' lenticular acrylic collotype from '74 that seems like 20 years ahead of its time (it's a bit like a hologram, bit like a mirror) and the cheekily titled 'A dedicated follower of fashion' photogravure from '80.
* Wolfgang Tillmans @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Lots of fine moments — emotive, aha, and inspired — in Tillman's 'constellation of photography' show. Nothing is framed sans his 'Ostgut/December Edit' from 2002, the earliest piece in the show, and it's like 50 Kodak print-center-sized C-prints, a primer for what's ahead. And what's ahead is the main gallery covered, but not consumed, by Tillman's bright C-prints and inkjet prints, in varying sizes, shot from all over the world. We have recognizable Thailand here (an open-airs Bangkok market) and India there (four continuous vignettes shot from a bus in Varanasi). The cheeky moments (Tillmans titles a slew of trashy gossip/entertainment mags 'magazine rack UK', and you don't need to know German to discern the title 'Scheisse im Gras') are continuously balanced by the beautiful ones, the Bauhaus-like 'bus seat', the 'Tarsier' peering from a cropped-in rain forest, the embracing 'fans at concert'. Even a row of depleted toner cartridges ('waste ink') looks lovely. That's the thing about these prints: they're not ultra-composed, nor are they forced upon you w/ airs of reverence or seriousness. It's this precise looseness that makes them so accessible, so engaging and endearing.
* Leonardo Drew @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Attend Drew's wood-relief sculpture show and you'll see how my mind works when crafting these LISTs. Here's what I was thinking: the blackened wood pieces (incl. the MASSIVE one at the entryway) echo Louise Nevelson, and the inclusion of cubbyhole dividers practically scream her name; the spinier structures look sort of like Ursula von Rydingsvard's rough-hewn wood sculpture, only they're cut against the grain and suspended from the wall; the large cartography pieces (one spans an entire wall) resemble Mark Bradford's scorched urban mapmaking; and the behind-glass organic shapes are a bit like Anselm Reyle but w/o the new-car paint job. See, it's fun!
+ Vik Muniz, in the project room. Three more of his junk sculpture C-prints and one dirt-drawn C-print, everything has to do w/ skulls or skeletons and they look like woodcuts from a great distance but up close, when you decipher the scale Muniz used (a shoe here, a petrol can there) you realize these things are pretty fantastically big (except for the dirt-drawn skull, that's true to scale but no less impressive).
* Erwin Olaf "Hotel & Dawn/Dusk" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. Olaf's 'Dawn/Dusk' series mirrors each other, large C-prints of ornately outfitted pale rooms inhabited by a light-skinned family or ornately outfitted twilit rooms inhabited by a dark-skinned family. The white boy is done up in a jockey's outfit, the black boy in a sailor suit. The carved marble in one is replaced by carved chestnut in the other. 'Hotel' is seminude models (all women sans one) in hotel rooms. Orange juice somehow figures into several of these...
* Inka Essenhigh "The Old New Age" @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Really fine psychedelia here, in Essenhigh's largish oil paintings of surface-level landscapes that somehow come off w/ this dreamy submerged vibe. Like the action — a stately Clydesdale in a flowing golden field, a squadron of spooky shapes in an antiquarian forest, and the green goddess herself encircled by pink blossoms — is trapped in a liquid-filled globe, slowing everything down, lending grace and continuous movement. And the one piece, 'Lower East Side', well besides the bass guitar, it's a mix of that magical street from 'Harry Potter' (stay with me here) w/ something out of Vermeer's time, and it's absolutely gorgeous.
LAST CHANCE
* 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.
* 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.
* "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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Urs Fischer "Marguerite de Ponty" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave). Fischer made my 'Top Ten LIST-worthy Cultural Events of 2009' posting. It's a safe bet many of us art-lovers (and sometimes-enthusiasts) were anticipating Fischer's gallery-filling solo show. Maybe for his gleeful irreverence to standing architecture (aka 'investigation of space', as in the floor-razing "You" at Gavin Brown's Enterprise a few years back), maybe for his multitalented mixed medium works (melting candle figures, cast-aluminum 'soft' sculpture, anti-Dada 'readymades'). Lots of scare-quotes here, sorry, but it's necessary. And Fischer's exhibition, of works from the past few years, exceeds in expectation whilst simultaneously lifting his cred as a serious artist. The sole hole here, the advert-spoiler "Noisette", is a motion-sensitive tongue that thrusts itself out a tennis ball-sized wall gash: it's a bit of a raspberry to his naysayers, maybe, but it's playful, innocent, innocuous, and by far the best thing. Start from the 4th fl, amid the towering cast-aluminum abstract forms, and decide for yourself what they mean. Maybe "Ix" is a horse-head (the missing head from Mauricio Cattelan's famous "Untitled"? Or Berlinde de Bruyckere's unsettling taxidermy?), or the stunning "David, the Proprietor" a primeval sea beast lashing up from the ocean's depths, or the eponymous "Marguerite de Ponty" a stately, voluptuous lifeform? The other bits in this room, the Robert Gober-esque (in a terribly surreal way) "The Lock", w/ its truncated subway bench and hovering cake, and the bizarrely-titled "Violent Cappuccino" (more aluminum and paint, in the guise of a skeleton fighting off 'cardboard boxes'), are cool to look at but are recurring characters in Fischer's past works. The 3rd fl is trippy, nearly empty save for the aforementioned "Noisette" and a melting (cast-aluminum again) piano. But the great surprise here is the site-specific environment, the collaborative effort w/ graphic designer Scipio Schneider, an installation where the empty gallery was exhaustively photographed and then reprinted as wall- and ceiling-paper. The result: soft pinks, purples and greens w/ trompe l'oeil shadows, sky-light, and public-safety signs. You need several minutes to really take in the unsettling effect — leave the floor if necessary but come back to see it again. He's done this before (the doubled "Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns" environment in Tony Shafrazi Gallery last year, replete w/ Shafrazi 'guards', was a trip), but the sneak-up quality here exceeds the earlier works. The 2nd fl, beginning or preferably the end, is Fischer's new multipart work "Service à la Française", but what this means is dozens of mirrored chrome boxes, silkscreened on all surfaces w/ a single object each: a sofa-sized tennis shoe, a milk-crate-sized Balenciaga strappy heel, a canoe-sized sausage. This piece works so well: it's Fischer having fun again but it's a joy to explore. Check the repetitions: halved red Bartlett pear here, rotting red Bartlett pear there; wax-candle cupcake here, deliciously-rendered chocolate-frosted cupcake (replete w/ sprinkles, naturally) there. The effect of it all, and seeing glimpses of yourself in the mirrors as you dash from one objet d'art to the next, is stimulus-overload, exhilarating, thoroughly recommended. I'm sad to see it go.
* "Yojimbo" + "Sanjuro" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1961/1962) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 5:25/7:30p. As we come to the end of a month-long Kurosawa retrospective, I cannot think of a better way of going out than this two-fer: the saga of ballsy ronin Toshiro Mifune (as titular Yojimbo) v. a bunch of thugs and a pistol-wielding Tatsuya Nakadai.
* "Examined Life" (dri. Astra Taylor, 2009) screening @ DCTV / 87 Lafayette St (6/JMZ to Canal St), 7:30p/RSVP: rsvp@dctvny.org. Today's 'rockstar' philosophers (sorry, 'contemporary thinkers') walk the streets, row boats — and incidentally Slavoj Zizek rummages a London garbage dump — and have off-the-cuff chats w/ the camera. Talking eggheads, you say? I think it sounds perfect. w/ director Taylor in attendance.
THURSDAY
* Sterling Ruby "2TRAPS" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. The LA-based artist's gallery debut sounds like a jackknife into still waters: two large-scale sculptures entitled BUS and PIG PEN, composed of security doors, confinement cages, sub-woofers, and other modes of disorientation and imprisonment.
* Callum Innes "At One Remove" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. Ooh, I'm a big Innes fan. His style is 'making/unmaking' abstract paintings, but the new works, while tactically complex and lovingly abraded, are divided vertically, w/ 1/2 the painting awash in shimmering color and the other side stripped back (nearly) its original underlying gesso layer. Hot stuff.
* Dinh Q. Lê "Elegies" @ PPOW / 511 W 25th St #301. Lê's photography and video animation centers on the South China Sea Pishkun of 1975, plus footage from 'Platoon' and 'Apocalypse Now' reedited together as 'From Father to Son: A Right of Passage'.
* Gabriel J. Shuldiner "Black Mash" @ Jodi Arnold / 56 University Place. Tasty black- and blackened mixed media composites, post-everything.
* Unsound Festival NY 2010: Opening Event = Vladislav Delay + Lillevan @ Lincoln Center (David Rubenstein Atrium) / 1881 Broadway (1 to 66th St), 8p/FREE. This 10-day multi-venue showcase of experimental Eastern European music starts off w/ an echoey bang, thanks to Finland's warm electronics improv genius Sasu Ripatti (playing for the 1st time here as Vladislav Delay) and Berlin's video manipulator Lillevan. Expect a very intimate show that bends both time signatures and reality.
* Big Troubles + Twin Sister @ Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NRW/456/L to Union Square), 8p/$7. Chocolate Bobka curated this who's who of hot local talent, specifically those unafraid of dreamy reverb. We've got Big Troubles (whose noisy garage rock shimmers) and Twin Sister (currently my band of choice, they are so dope live), plus soundscapers Run DMT and more.
* Naked Hearts + The Vandelles @ Littlefield / 622 Degraw St, Gowanus (M/R to Union, D/M/NR to Pacific), 8p/$12. Nice combo here, the guitar/drums duo Naked Hearts (replete w/ Amy's gorgeous vocals) and the whispery anthems of The Vandelles, hidden amidst dissonant guitars and a pounding rhythm section.
* Maria Chavez w/ Shelley Burgon + Mike Wexler + Corridors @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (M/R/F to 9th St/4th Ave), 8p/$15. Another well-curated duet night at ISSUE. Chavez is an avant-turntablist and Burgon improvs on the harp and laptop. Wexler is an intricate, inventive guitarist and Corridors (Byron Westbrook) conjures discreet, multi-channel audio pieces. Not sure either have played together before but there is so much talent here tonight that it should be quite a show.
FRIDAY
* Robert Grosvenor @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. I'll admit I prefer Grosvenor's earlier works (freakishly spare agglomerations of industrial materials incl. but not limited to: concrete blocks and steel) to his neat and sort-of beautiful recent sculptures. Like his haunting turret of cinderblocks and metal, recalling a maximum security cell, from last year's gallery group show. This exhibition, luckily, includes these not-new pieces, three heavy presences spanning 1986 to 1994, whose happenstance materials weigh heavily on the viewer's subconscious.
* "A Celebration of Spring" @ Ippodo Gallery / 521 W 26th St. A group show around the theme of flowers (Shinya Yamamura's eye-popping lacquers, paintings by Yoko Semoto and Tetsushi Kokin, ceramics by Kohei Nakamura and loads else), which is appropriate for many reasons as this is the calendar block before cherry-blossom season and Feb 4 is 'risshun', the first day of spring, which is still bloody cold but initiates a promise of warmer climes ahead.
* Jan Dibbets "New Horizons" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Like the show title goes, the Dutch photographer begins w/ the natural horizon in conjoining seascapes and natural scenes into new compositions.
* Inigo Manglano-Ovalle "Happiness is a state of inertia" @ Max Protetch / 511 W 22nd St. I dig the artist's sensory-disrupting installations. He begins this time w/ a take on Mies van der Rohe's 'House with Four Columns', adding glass and steel and a rather interesting fish tank.
* Unsound Festival NY 2010 = "Kiss" + "Blow Job" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1963) w/ live Carl Craig + nsi. soundtrack @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 7:30p/9:30p, $25. I cannot make this stuff up. Furthering the inroads to experimental music, we have substitutes for these simply titled films' soundtracks, substituting the sounds one might expect to hear from, say 55 minutes of kissing or a half-hour blowjob, w/ live improv from German duo nsi. ('Kiss') and Detroit's Craig ('Blow Job').
* "Ran" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1985) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), for TWO WEEKS. The Kurosawa festival officially ends w/ this two-week run of his famous adaptation of Shakespeare's 'King Lear'...annnd I've never seen it. This is the director going out w/ a bang, big-time, tour-de-force style, huge color-coded armies, femme fatales, wigged out Tatsuya Nakadai as the old king... what are we waiting for??
* "Eyes Wide Open" (dir. Haim Tabakman, 2009) screenings @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (NRW/456/L to Union Square). I totally dig this recent graduate from the 2010 NY Jewish Film Festival and am pleased it's got proper billing in NYC. The premise, an intriguing romance set in an ultra-orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood, is riveting.
* "Reservoir Dogs" (dir. Quentin Tarentino, 1992) midnight screening @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (FV to 2nd Ave). Way before Tarentino's sarariman-suited Crazy 88's, his motley color-pseudonymed Dogs ruled the screen. I can't even begin to list all the cool scenes, though the notorious Stealers Wheel bit ("Stuck in the Middle With You", complete w/ a blood-lusting, straight-razor wielding Michael Madsen, perhaps at his pinnacle) definitely does it for me every time.
* Adventure w/ Teengirl Fantasy @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle), 10p. If you need a primer on alt-dance music, this might be the show for you. Benny Boeldt's soulful NES tunes as Adventure + the fractured house beats of duo Teengirl Fantasy (who, name aside, are incredibly dope). Late edition: surf-boy(s) Beach Fossils annnnnd NEON INDIAN.
SATURDAY
* "Mastering the Art of Chinese Painting: Xie Zhiliu (1910-1997)" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). The museum has an absolute trove of this modern artist's works, a leading figure in Chinese traditional style, and they have crafted a 100-odd selection of his paintings, calligraphy, and sketches.
* Robert Adams "Summer Nights, Walking" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. Totally gorge vintage nocturnal landscape photography from a guy who knows how to capture tranquil foliage (see his last MM show, 'Questions for an Overcast Day').
* Ken Price @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. Sixteen spanking new softly shaped, sensual/suggestive sculptures in shimmering spectrums from the stalwart sculptor.
* Twin Sister @ The Tank / 345 W 45th St (ACE/123/NRW to 42nd St), 7:30p/$5. The dreamy psychedelic rock outfit Twin Sister (bit like Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions, bit like Portishead) lead this night of 'young pop groups in NYC'. w/ Ava Luna and Data Dog.
* Anamanaguchi @ Shea Stadium / 20 Meadow St, Bushwick (L to Grand St), 9p/$8. Brooklyn's hacked-NES punks Anamanaguchi are embarking on the 8Bit Alliance Tour in March, so catch 'em now alongside some of their chiptune brethren. w/ D/A/D.
MONDAY
* Knight School + Family Portrait @ Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NRW/456/L to Union Square), 8p/FREE. I'd usually be hard-pressed to send you out to Webster Hall, but when it's a free concert of dope local-ish bands (psych-folk DC guys Family Portrait and Brooklyn smart-indie-pop Knight School) then it's fair game.
* Unsound Festival NY2010 = Sawako + Ezekiel Honig @ Littlefield / 622 Degraw St, Gowanus (M/R to Union, D/M/NR to Pacific), 8p/$10. The NY-based Anticipate label showcase, w/ all-star sound-sculptor Sawako and fuzzy electro-acoustic impresario (and label founder) Ezekiel Honig. w/ live visuals from superDraw.
TUESDAY
* Beach Fossils + The Beets @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. Oh man, Cake Shop is going to be crowded tonight! From the get-go (fun-loving Total Slackers), through the carefree groove of Beach Fossils (dare you to remain still during their set), up until The Beets (the originals, Jackson Heights' only garage-rock trio) carry the basement venue into a thumping, caterwauling singalong. Oh, epiphanies will be had!
* Unsound Festival NY 2010 = Zavoloka + Bora Yoon + Zenial @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (M/R/F to 9th St/4th Ave), 8:30p/$15. Two Eastern European experimental musicians, Poland's Zenial (aka Lukasz Szalankiewicz, co-curator of Unsound) and Ukraine's Zavoloka, play shimmering discreet-sound sets w/ Brooklyn's Bora Yoon (who makes some yummy glitch tunes herself).
CURRENT SHOWS
* "The Drawings of Bronzino" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). It is my duty, as curator of my LIST, to inform you of current dope cultural events, no matter the degree to which I can conceivably explain them. Hence is the case w/ this brilliant exhibition of Agnolo Bronzino at the Met, nearly all the lush, sensual drawings attributed to him (60 here), the leading Italian Mannerist. The Times' Holland Cotter and The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl, amid others surely, have already done a far more eloquent job than I'll ever muster. SO, I will do my very best of being Bronzino's hype-man and encourage you, nay, entreat you to this very essential, very beautiful show. The vast majority of these drawings were made in black or red chalk on paper (sometimes prepared w/ a color wash), though Bronzino took what sounds to me like a cumbersome medium and totally elevated it. His lines are masterful, confident, tracing out figures then shading in their supple musculature. Richard Hawkins, for one, would have a field day deconstructing the fleshy amorousness in the posing nude youths (and speaking of sheer detailing, only Peter Peri immediately springs to mind for a contemporary counterpart — his show at Bortolami is pretty impressive — but it's nothing like Bronzino's). Bronzino depicts women, too, incl. personal fave 'Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View', whose exacting title belies the riveting rendering, her downward-cast eyes, the highlight on her cheekbone. He also does draping, which by that I mean like folded cloth, and if that sounds simplistic you need to take a look at his drawings, the incredible capture of shadows. A few 'modellos' are included in the show, drawings augmented by 16th C. ink and washes that are jarringly intense when seen alongside his singular, concentrated figure studies. And while I've just skimmed the surface her, trust me when I say Bronzino is where it's at. The show continues until mid-April so I've got loads of time to improve the above summary.
+ Richard Hamilton. You only THINK you know Hamilton, meaning you equate the British artist w/ his famous 'Just What is it that makes Today's Homes so Different, So Appealing?' collage from '56. A redo of that one (a super-quality print from a few years ago) is included in this 35-year survey, but the other two dozen works really illuminate Hamilton's forays into print media, via intaglio and rather complex digital techniques. This includes the trippy 'Palindrome' lenticular acrylic collotype from '74 that seems like 20 years ahead of its time (it's a bit like a hologram, bit like a mirror) and the cheekily titled 'A dedicated follower of fashion' photogravure from '80.
* Wolfgang Tillmans @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Lots of fine moments — emotive, aha, and inspired — in Tillman's 'constellation of photography' show. Nothing is framed sans his 'Ostgut/December Edit' from 2002, the earliest piece in the show, and it's like 50 Kodak print-center-sized C-prints, a primer for what's ahead. And what's ahead is the main gallery covered, but not consumed, by Tillman's bright C-prints and inkjet prints, in varying sizes, shot from all over the world. We have recognizable Thailand here (an open-airs Bangkok market) and India there (four continuous vignettes shot from a bus in Varanasi). The cheeky moments (Tillmans titles a slew of trashy gossip/entertainment mags 'magazine rack UK', and you don't need to know German to discern the title 'Scheisse im Gras') are continuously balanced by the beautiful ones, the Bauhaus-like 'bus seat', the 'Tarsier' peering from a cropped-in rain forest, the embracing 'fans at concert'. Even a row of depleted toner cartridges ('waste ink') looks lovely. That's the thing about these prints: they're not ultra-composed, nor are they forced upon you w/ airs of reverence or seriousness. It's this precise looseness that makes them so accessible, so engaging and endearing.
* Leonardo Drew @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Attend Drew's wood-relief sculpture show and you'll see how my mind works when crafting these LISTs. Here's what I was thinking: the blackened wood pieces (incl. the MASSIVE one at the entryway) echo Louise Nevelson, and the inclusion of cubbyhole dividers practically scream her name; the spinier structures look sort of like Ursula von Rydingsvard's rough-hewn wood sculpture, only they're cut against the grain and suspended from the wall; the large cartography pieces (one spans an entire wall) resemble Mark Bradford's scorched urban mapmaking; and the behind-glass organic shapes are a bit like Anselm Reyle but w/o the new-car paint job. See, it's fun!
+ Vik Muniz, in the project room. Three more of his junk sculpture C-prints and one dirt-drawn C-print, everything has to do w/ skulls or skeletons and they look like woodcuts from a great distance but up close, when you decipher the scale Muniz used (a shoe here, a petrol can there) you realize these things are pretty fantastically big (except for the dirt-drawn skull, that's true to scale but no less impressive).
* Erwin Olaf "Hotel & Dawn/Dusk" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. Olaf's 'Dawn/Dusk' series mirrors each other, large C-prints of ornately outfitted pale rooms inhabited by a light-skinned family or ornately outfitted twilit rooms inhabited by a dark-skinned family. The white boy is done up in a jockey's outfit, the black boy in a sailor suit. The carved marble in one is replaced by carved chestnut in the other. 'Hotel' is seminude models (all women sans one) in hotel rooms. Orange juice somehow figures into several of these...
* Inka Essenhigh "The Old New Age" @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Really fine psychedelia here, in Essenhigh's largish oil paintings of surface-level landscapes that somehow come off w/ this dreamy submerged vibe. Like the action — a stately Clydesdale in a flowing golden field, a squadron of spooky shapes in an antiquarian forest, and the green goddess herself encircled by pink blossoms — is trapped in a liquid-filled globe, slowing everything down, lending grace and continuous movement. And the one piece, 'Lower East Side', well besides the bass guitar, it's a mix of that magical street from 'Harry Potter' (stay with me here) w/ something out of Vermeer's time, and it's absolutely gorgeous.
LAST CHANCE
* 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.
* 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.
* "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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Urs Fischer "Marguerite de Ponty" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave). Fischer made my 'Top Ten LIST-worthy Cultural Events of 2009' posting. It's a safe bet many of us art-lovers (and sometimes-enthusiasts) were anticipating Fischer's gallery-filling solo show. Maybe for his gleeful irreverence to standing architecture (aka 'investigation of space', as in the floor-razing "You" at Gavin Brown's Enterprise a few years back), maybe for his multitalented mixed medium works (melting candle figures, cast-aluminum 'soft' sculpture, anti-Dada 'readymades'). Lots of scare-quotes here, sorry, but it's necessary. And Fischer's exhibition, of works from the past few years, exceeds in expectation whilst simultaneously lifting his cred as a serious artist. The sole hole here, the advert-spoiler "Noisette", is a motion-sensitive tongue that thrusts itself out a tennis ball-sized wall gash: it's a bit of a raspberry to his naysayers, maybe, but it's playful, innocent, innocuous, and by far the best thing. Start from the 4th fl, amid the towering cast-aluminum abstract forms, and decide for yourself what they mean. Maybe "Ix" is a horse-head (the missing head from Mauricio Cattelan's famous "Untitled"? Or Berlinde de Bruyckere's unsettling taxidermy?), or the stunning "David, the Proprietor" a primeval sea beast lashing up from the ocean's depths, or the eponymous "Marguerite de Ponty" a stately, voluptuous lifeform? The other bits in this room, the Robert Gober-esque (in a terribly surreal way) "The Lock", w/ its truncated subway bench and hovering cake, and the bizarrely-titled "Violent Cappuccino" (more aluminum and paint, in the guise of a skeleton fighting off 'cardboard boxes'), are cool to look at but are recurring characters in Fischer's past works. The 3rd fl is trippy, nearly empty save for the aforementioned "Noisette" and a melting (cast-aluminum again) piano. But the great surprise here is the site-specific environment, the collaborative effort w/ graphic designer Scipio Schneider, an installation where the empty gallery was exhaustively photographed and then reprinted as wall- and ceiling-paper. The result: soft pinks, purples and greens w/ trompe l'oeil shadows, sky-light, and public-safety signs. You need several minutes to really take in the unsettling effect — leave the floor if necessary but come back to see it again. He's done this before (the doubled "Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns" environment in Tony Shafrazi Gallery last year, replete w/ Shafrazi 'guards', was a trip), but the sneak-up quality here exceeds the earlier works. The 2nd fl, beginning or preferably the end, is Fischer's new multipart work "Service à la Française", but what this means is dozens of mirrored chrome boxes, silkscreened on all surfaces w/ a single object each: a sofa-sized tennis shoe, a milk-crate-sized Balenciaga strappy heel, a canoe-sized sausage. This piece works so well: it's Fischer having fun again but it's a joy to explore. Check the repetitions: halved red Bartlett pear here, rotting red Bartlett pear there; wax-candle cupcake here, deliciously-rendered chocolate-frosted cupcake (replete w/ sprinkles, naturally) there. The effect of it all, and seeing glimpses of yourself in the mirrors as you dash from one objet d'art to the next, is stimulus-overload, exhilarating, thoroughly recommended. I'm sad to see it go.
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