What a stunning exhibition from MoMA, an historical look at Pablo Picasso's printmaking throughout his career (from the early Blue Period stuff through the 1960s and onward). And this isn't even the entire MoMA trove from the Prints and Illustrated Books Dept, just the veritable cream off the top of the works by a superlatively influential modern artist. I will convey three clear points, that 1) nearly all Picasso's prints are beautiful, 2) you'll see his methodology in abstraction in ranges of lithographs and etchings as he works one highly representational image (like a bull) into something wildly abstract, and 3) he experimented a lot in his printmaking, which lends some rather wicked results.
The show is not explicitly chronological, though you'll find the earliest works — like the sparsely, though precisely, rendered "Head of a Woman" (1905) drypoint at the entrance. Another wild one on the adjacent wall is "The Frugal Repast" (1904), a very Blue Period etching of a farming-type couple at a table, his arm slung 'round her shoulder as she cradles her chin in her hand in trailing thought. According to the placard, which I have to believe, this precise piece was Picasso's first foray into printmaking, and it led his 'Saltimbanques' series. The harlequins are in greater, though terribly surreal, form in the nearby "Salomé" (1905), a loose, dreamy drypoint of a few seated characters (incl. one guy holding a severed head on a platter?) and a gymnast-type girl, her leg extended in either a warm-up stretch or a kick. The adjacent wall features some of Picasso's 'Minotaurs', explaining that the Minotaur was like a stand-in for him in the '30s (though considering the overall proliferation of bulls throughout it's not hard to see Picasso injecting himself into many of these works). And here we go with a side-by-side shocker: "Blind Minotaur" from 1934, shown here as a lovely etching and then a ridiculously cool combo aquatint/engraving/drypoint. The night sky comes alive on the latter, the paper seems to glow, practically, w/ an unearthly luminescence. And thanks to the shadows off the aquatint, the latter feels 3D, nearly like a relief carving. It's magical. Though it loses out to my personal favorite "Minotauromachy" (1935, an engraving and etching) next door. This largish work bears the fruit of the soon-to-arrive "Guernica", Picasso's renowned painting of the bombing of the town during the Spanish Civil War. Though "Minotauromachy" has a much more realist composition, the ingredients are obvious: the light-bearer, the cringing horse, the swooning maiden, the onlookers, and of course the brutish bull, here as a bare-chested Minotaur. It's a stunner, tamed perhaps by the inclusion of "Female Bullfighter" (1934, etching on vellum) and "Large Bullfight" (1934, etching). The latter is an incredible achievement, Picasso's usage of etching in automatic drawing (a Surrealist theme), and I don't know how one can 'automatically etch' but he did it, revealing this fractured angles, festival-like vibe that nearly obscures the violent action. The former is less cluttered but retains a Marc Chagall-like resonance, w/ the maiden and bull twisted back on one another, she bearing the sword and 'he' making like he's going to kiss her whilst feeling the steel simultaneously. And one more thing on bulls: the "Bull" lithographs fro 1945-6, shown here in five stages as, over a winter-time, Picasso took an almost Audobon-styled bull on the plain and, w/ reductive and increasingly draftsmanlike strokes, converted it into a polygonal figure — though still entirely bull-like. It's just no one else could do that like him.
Enough on bulls. Women figure into many of Picasso's prints, wives, lovers and others. The iconic Dora Maar is here as "Weeping Woman" (a combo etching/drypoint/aquatint from 1937) that you'll surely recognize from the famous painting. This is also in direct dialogue w/ "Guernica"; they were both completed around the same time. His "Two Nude Women" variations, a set of lithographs from 1946 set in a vitrine, are worth some lingering, as he pulled back the layers over several 'takes' to convert a seductive duo, one seated, the other in repose, totally could have come from his Rose Period, into those amorphic blobs and shapes that, somehow, still very much look like two gorgeous women. But it's not the same as taking some filter in Photoshop and abstracting the hell out of an image to attempt to achieve such results. Picasso was able to do this, like a mathematical formula in his head, to SEE these abstractions and work them out to still make sense to the viewer, while remaining something no one has ever seen before. I quite dug his Rene Matisse-like linework on "Françoise with a Bow in her Hair" (a 1946 lithograph), of Françoise Gilot, Picasso's lover and muse from the mid-40s to mid-50s (following Dora Maar). She is incredibly captivating w/o superfluous lines. The later set of Jacqueline Roque linocuts (Picasso's 2nd wife, following Gilot — so I guess there IS a chronology to all this!) range from ghostly to high-contrast (like Jean Dubuffet's more figurative stuff), all black on tan.
I don't know what linocut means, precisely, but Picasso added like 12 colors to the hallucinogenic "Luncheon on the Grass (After Manet)", from 1962, which is characteristically Picasso-trippy (balloon-like maidens on the lawn) in a Paul Gauguin Tahitian backdrop, done up in chartreuse, red-orange, violet and kelly green. The essence of Manet is there but Picasso's version looks like the gathering is having WAY more fun. Also: his three lithographs on "David and Bathsheba (After Lucas Cranach the Elder)" (1947) begins w/ a fairly close take to the original, though done in Picasso's heavier, constrasty way (like how R. Crumb illustrates the Book of Genesis, sort of ), but then he inverts everything so that the next version is all-black w/ incised white lines and white-shadowed figures (an overall magical sensation) and the third even further, white wire-frame figures on black, a polygonal world. The "Nocturnal Dance With Owl" linocuts from '59 on the adjacent wall have him playing with this printmaking technique, to ecstatic results. The subject matter is fairly to-the-point, a night-scape of people getting down at a party, dancing around and playing instruments. Even the goat is getting down. And there's the lone owl in the tree, looking stoic or bemused. Picasso began w/ a brown on black linocut and then took it elsewhere, revisiting the block and painting over the ink and rinsing the print in his shower (IN HIS SHOWER) to form this mottled, negative-space print on black, that lends incidental shadows to the figures. Then he went and added watercolor to another take, creating a pinkish tone to the entire thing.
I'm all about this exhibition. The endless array of experimentation and opportunities provided by printmaking techniques totally led to some of Picasso's most renowned paintings, and we get a great glimpse into his process. That said, he elevated printmaking as a whole, to where any of these works could stand confidently on their own and be called nothing but fine art.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
fee's LIST (through 3/30)
WEDNESDAY
* "New Directors/New Films 2010" @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St) + MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Just how it sounds: new works from emerging international filmmakers. Screenings occur at either theatre, and though some of 'em have hit the int'l film circuit, this is the first-time screening for most of 'em stateside, so read on below for some of my picks, or visit the site for the full list. THROUGH APR 4.
* James Welling "Glass House" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. A three-year survey of Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House in New Canaan, CT, luminously elevated by Welling's color filters and trichromatic effects.
* "Bill Cunningham New York" (dir. Richard Press, USA, 2010) screening @ MoMA (part of "New Directors/New Films 2010"), 7:30p/9:30p. You've seen this man, the older gentleman in the blue windbreaker, permasmiling on his Schwinn whilst photographing fashion trends for the NY Times. Hell, he'd been doing it for decades before all these trendy 'street-photographers' came around. So it's time we had a portrait of Cunningham. ALSO THURS, 9:15, at Walter Reade Theatre.
* deVries + North Highlands @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. OK, SXSW is OVER. Jam-packed indie shows for Austinites and non-locals are great, but Brooklyn knows how to do it. Like this half-psych/half-folky night, w/ locals deVries, North Highlands, Schocholautte and Small Mountain Path. Welcome back, all.
THURSDAY
* Tatiana Trouvé @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. The entire 5th Fl gallery space is Trouvé's playground, and she's turning it into a stark, dystopic landscape of scrap metal, graphite wall drawings, and fragmented domesticity. (read my Ed Paschke review below in CURRENT SHOWS; Trouvé's should be a strong counterpoint)
* Joe Zucker "Tales of Cotton" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Classic Zucker, taking Ben-Day-style Pop Art on its side (and w/ that the textural Process Art and gridded Minimalism) w/ his paint saturated fields of cotton balls, forming a disarming relationship w/ their charged Antebellum imagery.
* Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. New sculpture from the 'Anatomy' series of 'deconstructed humans' in burlap w/ steel and wood armatures, plus life-size and larger-than-life-size cast-aluminum figures.
+ Stephen Talasnik "Thought Pattern". Talasnik's mechanical drawings/collages and related fantastical sculpture is like an ongoing push-pull w/ the unbuildable, but what SHOULD be buildable.
* Miki Carmi + Tamy Ben-Tor "Disembodied Archetypes" @ Zach Feuer LFL / 530 W 24th St + STUX / 530 W 25th St. A really dope dual-gallery experience, feat. chameleonlike performance/video-art impresario Ben-Tor (of Zach Feuer) and painter/photographer Carmi (of STUX) in collaboration. How do Carmi's unsettling old-person 'death masks' fare w/ Ben-Tor's multi-persona farces on the Middle East? The notion of identity is an ongoing theme, and luckily Ben-Tor's live performances (like on Saturday, at Zach Feuer, read below) might help.
* Antony Gormley "Breathing Room II" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. Many NYers (and loads of tourists) are getting to know Gormley via his 'Event Horizon', those 2doz+ sculptures of himself on rooftops and sidewalks around Madison Square Park. But this show @ Sean Kelly, Gormley's light-sculpture, spatially-disrupting titular piece (plus freestanding sculptures based on orthogonal structures and absolute geometry), should be way doper.
* "Great Photographs of the 20th Century: Staged and Startled" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. We have an incredible range here in a century's-worth of brilliant photographers. The span is incredible and the names are the best (Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Lee Friedlander, Steven Klein, Robert Frank, Lisette Model and more).
* German Measles + The Nymphets @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$6. I think 1/2 German Measles' songs have 'wild' in the title, but seriously they're loads of fun, these Brooklyn boys. The Nymphets are not-too-serious punk, Montreal-style.
FRIDAY
* Susan Philipsz "I See a Darkness" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Philipsz continues her sculptural sound forays with a journey: converting the main gallery space into a darkened lair w/ precisely angled and sequenced speakers for an immersive experience.
+ Siobhan Hapaska "The Nose that Lost its Dog". New sculptural works from the artist, blurring the line b/w organic and machine, that come from her residency at Glasgow Sculpture Studios.
* Lia Halloran "The Only Way Out is Through" @ DCKT Contemporary / 195 Bowery. Fuzzified — and I hate to use this word but 'painterly', as in you can follow the brushstrokes — paintings of crystal caves in the Cueva de los Cristales in Naica, Mexico.
* Aki Sasamoto "Strange Attractors" @ Whitney Museum (part of 2010 Whitney Biennial), 4p. I caught Sasamoto last year at Zach Feuer and I was hooked. I have this vision in my head about Joseph Beuys' chalkboard 'teaching' performances, and to me Sasamoto's stream-of-consciousness forays into the sociopolitical, the mathematical and the mundane (somehow she balances all this, coherently) is, to me, like a Beuys. Her lair @ the Whitney, astrewn w/ video cameras and hanging net bags containing microphones and water glasses, is the site of her shows, performed at 4p on dates incl the numerals '6' and '9' (so if you can't make this one you've other chances).
* "My Turn: Ari Marcopoulos" @ Whitney Museum (part of 2010 Whitney Biennial), 7:30p. I REALLY dug Marcopoulos' deliciously noisy "Detroit" video from the Biennial, and his live performance should be even more ferosh, as 'electroacoustic improvisation' artists — read: NOISE — like Orphan and, ahem, Yellow Tears threaten to tear the roof off the Whitney. Thank you, Whitney, for daring to do it.
* Black Tambourine listening party @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/FREE. OK, not the same as Slumberland Records' Black Tambourine THE BAND, performing off their brand-new compilation LP, which if that were the case it'd be = MAYJAH, but this is a listening party for perhaps the rarest yet terribly influential early '90s, stateside fuzz-pop band (you know, back during grunge).
* "Bluebeard" (dir. Catherine Breillat, 2009) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). Breillat's adaptation of that classic psychosexual fairy tale, the brutish, otherworldly noblemen who murders his wives, and the young Marie-Catherine who confronts him.
SATURDAY
* Barbara Kruger @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Introducing Kruger's new multi-channel video installation "The Globe Shrinks", a cacophonous conversation on contemporary culture, and all that, but surely as piercingly to-the-point as her characteristically bold, textual silkscreens.
* Tamy Ben-Tor "Disembodied Archetypes" performance @ Zach Feuer LFL / 530 W 24th St (CE to 23rd St), 4p. See my above entry on Ben-Tor's collaboration w/ Miki Carmi in this two-gallery mixed media show.
* "Tehroun" (dir. Nader T. Homayoun, Iran/France, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "New Directors/New Films 2010"), 8p. Homayoun's feature-length debut is a moving portrait — beauty and violence, dreams and nightmares — of Iran's multifaceted capital city.
* "Mulholland Dr." (dir. David Lynch, 2001) screening @ 92Y Tribeca / 200 Hudson St (1/ACE to Canal St), 7:30p/$12. In my opinion, this is Lynch's modern masterpiece, not as jackknife-surrealist as the later "Inland Empire", nor as dread-imbued as earlier "Blue Velvet" or as sinister as the untouchable "Eraserhead" — it's Lynch's surgical takedown of the Hollywood façade.
* Love Is All + Crystal Stilts @ Maxwell's / 1039 Washington St, Hoboken (PATH to Hoboken), 10p/$12. The Stilts are working on a new album, and if it's anything like their increasingly psychedelic jam-session sets (complete w/ Brad rocking out on a harmonica), then this Velvet Underground-ish band hasn't lost its edge at ALL. w/ The Beachniks (added bonus).
* Beaches + Total Slacker @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$6. Melbourne's Beaches are in town a few days via SXSW, and this is probably the dopest night of them all. Think about it: five Aussie women playing psych-tinged, proggy guitar lines. DbA will be crawling the walls!
SUNDAY
* "Picasso: Themes and Variations" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Pablo Picasso at MoMA. Have I got your attention yet?? Remember "Mosqueteros", that wonderful Picasso portrait show @ Gagosian, around this time last year? The queues that stretched around the block? Think this one's going to be as popular, what w/ its 100+ print-related works related to the prolific artist's experimentation w/ lithography, etching and the like, from his early Blue Period through Cubism and his later works? Answer: OBVS. Luckily this is on the 2nd Fl and that exhaustively long-running Tim Burton show is on 3, so the inevitable clusterf**k won't be so major. (and just a head's up: there's a MAYJAH Picasso show coming to the Met next month; so consider the MoMA's a tasty primer)
* Vivian Girls + German Measles @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/FREE. Hmm, free show w/ adorable lo-fi party-rockin' boys (German Measles) and super-cute punkish girls (Vivian Girls) in a very beery bowling alley. How crowded do you think it'll be?
* Love is All + The Beets + Beach Fossils @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$14. If you didn't feel like hauling out on the PATH to check Swedish indie cuties Love Is All alongside Brooklyn's art-swaggerers Crystal Stilts, OK I get it. How about this: Love Is All but in Wsburg, w/ the singalong dancey one-two punch of Beach Fossils (surfy!) and The Beets (punky!). LOVE!
MONDAY
* A Sunny Day in Glasgow @ Bell House / 149 7th St, Gowanus (F/M/R to 9th St/4th Ave), 7:30p/$12. Sometimes you get that band w/ the PERFECT name, like A Sunny Day in Glasgow, that Philly six-piece led by songwriter Ben Daniels and feat. dual vocalists Jen Goma and Annie Fredrickson. They sometimes cover Fleetwood Mac! That's OK with me!
TUESDAY
* "Blame It on Voltaire/La Faute à Voltaire" (dir. Abdel Kechiche, 2000) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 3:15p. I LOVE Kechiche's films — "L'Esquive" and "La Graine et le Mulet" — and their beautiful casts of 'real' France: multicultural, multiethnic. This is his debut full-length, about a young Moroccan man facing shocking adversity and forging relationships in a very real Paris.
* "Evening Dress/La Robe du soir" (dir. Myriam Aziza, France, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "New Directors/New Films 2010"), 6:15p. A young girl's coming-of-age, and her intense physical attraction to Mme. Solenska, her effortlessly-chic French teacher. ALSO WED, 9:15p, @ MoMA.
* "Women Without Men" (dir. Shirin Neshat, Germany/Austria/France, 2009) screening @ MoMA (part of "New Directors/New Films 2010"), 6:15p. The interconnected lives of four women in 1950's Iran, amid the CIA-supported coup d'état that struck down Iran's democratically-elected government.
* Flying Lotus @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St, 6 to Bleecker), 10p/$20. Luckily the venue is removing the chairs/tables before Mr. Steven Ellison takes the decks, w/ his slammin', fractured beats and sampled bedroom moans. Eschew terms like IDM and just call his particular style of dance-floor 'fierce'. (I mean, check his newish song "Meeting the Prez" on his Myspace — it could be a 20min track, it's that dope)
CURRENT SHOWS
* Ursula von Rydingsvard "ERRĀTUS" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. There is a complex awe and elegance to von Rydingsvard's rough-hewn cedar sculpture — the sort that follows Louise Bourgeois' non-spider sculpture (like the Personages) rather than the steel/cubular/mobile stuff of other large-scale sculptors. Her works tower and crawl, ripple and bend. The wavelike "Droga", for instance...OK permit me to geek out a bit, but it TOTALLY reminded me of the massive 'land worm' beast from Final Fantasy VI (anyone get the ref?). The incredible "Blackened Word" is canyon-like, smoothly flowing on one side and replete w/ gullies and Paleolithic nooks on the other. I encourage you to peer into this one: besides the fact it smells good, the closeness to the wood mutes outside sounds.
* Janet Cardiff & George Burnes Miller @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. I drop terms like 'heady trip' a bit too often, but that is precisely what this show is, beginning w/ the sensorially-disturbing "Carnie" installation, a very disturbing, sonically treated carousel, which plays like cut-up, backwards merry-go-round tunes w/ sped-up kids' voices and a sporadic snare rush. Oh: and the carousel animals have speakers tethered to their faces like gimp masks. However...in the next gallery, "The Cabinet of Curiousness" is extremely cool, and lighter-hearted: a circuit-bent card catalog that plays various musical/operatic loops depending on which drawers are pulled out.
* Ross Rudel "Burgeon" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Rudel's flexible mastery of organic sculpture (sans the gorgeous bronzed 'Ouroboros 2', the 1st in that media for him, most of the works are various woods) is tempered by his thoughtful acrylic resin 'collages' on wood, which incorporate carrion blossoms into lush nighttime scenes. He handles abstraction well (the walnut-carved 'Ouroboros' and the disquietingly damp-looking 'Phantom', a knot of resin-slickened bed linen on wood) but I'll bet you've never seen Los Angeles river algae handled quite like his shamanic 'Green Man Resurrection'.
+ Todd Hebert. Paintings and works on paper in a hyperrealistic style that somehow, probably due to the lighting (cityscapes, christmas lights etc) and the use of blurring, become cleverly abstract, in a fogged-window, "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" sort of way.
* Catherine Opie "Girlfriends" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. I'm quite fond of this sweet, portraiture-driven exhibition. Opie's new body of work, portraits of friends and lovers of the 'butch-dyke' persona, is elevated by an array of square-format b&w prints from her archive, never before printed before now. The latter acts almost diary-like, recalling Opie's ties to the S&M community in LA and San Francisco from the early '90s, and some of its subjects (like the riveting Pig Pen) recur in the new series, nearly 15 years later. Among the portraits include a regal k.d. lang against a Canadian wilderness, Jenny Shimizu in leather on a pristine white-sheeted bed and Idexa, tattooed and barechested, crouching on a rock. But I kept going back to Pig Pen, from her almost waifish figure in '94, wearing a play-piercing 'crown of thorns' for a performance in Mexico City, to her tanned, mature figure in '09, a thorn-wrapped heart tattoo emblazoned on her chest.
* Ed Paschke @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Jeff Koons, Paschke's studio assistant in the '70s and curator of this career-spanner, notes the 'neurological effect' of Paschke's paintings. That's adept, as this array of druggy, acid-colored anti-Pop portraits, w/ their either collage-y or hallucinogenic (often both) effects, are a particularly fierce trip. His earlier works fuse celebrity w/ kitchy wrestlers and cartoons — like the Marilyn in "Pink Lady" (1970), the gender-bending "Ramrod" (1969). But then they get weirder, as Paschke nears and bypasses 1980, adding test-patterns and neon glows to this increasingly psychedelic bunch. "Gestapo" (1970) feels like a scene from David Lynch's "Inland Empire", and the terrific trio "Ambrosia" (1979), "Fumar" (1979) and stunner "Violencia" (1980), w/ its disembodied lips and saturated electrical singes, is like diving into your favorite '80's cyberpunk film — though the proliferation of blank-eyed, identical, vaguely sinister, suited dudes could be interpreted as a precursor to "The Matrix".
+ Alberto di Fabio. I recommend immersing yourself in Di Fabio's fractured abstract acrylic paintings (most of smallish to medium-sized scale) and works on paper, w/ their purplish and pinkish hues that mimic both ice crystals, frozen tree branches, and somehow neural synapses and aveoli, AFTER pulling yourself from Ed Paschke's intense, but rewarding, exhibition.
* Eva Hesse @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. A very special exhibition of Hesse's late-period postminimalist works, shortly before her premature passing at age 34. I stress the importance of this collection of mostly unseen pieces, as Hesse had achieved — and was furthering — a transcendent 'non-art' trade that was unlike anything else at the time. That said, however, the majority of this 14-piece offering is a collection of 'improvisational test pieces', wisps and husks of papier-caché (often combined w/ cheesecloth and sometimes a type of adhesive), displayed on a spotlighted work-table, throwing dynamic shadows and resting there simultaneously like archaeological artifacts (they are a boon for us to investigate Hesse's work process) and potentialities for her never-realized future sculpture.
* Marlene Dumas "Against the Wall" @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St. Dumas wields a sense of tension and foreboding in her typically ghostly/ambiguious suite of new paintings, set approximately from media imagery of Israel and Palestine. "The Wall", probably the 1st canvas you'll see upon entering the gallery, sets the tone: a group of Orthodox Jewish men in front of what appears to be the Western Wall in Jerusalem, though it's actually an Israeli security fence in Bethlehem. This stark reality recurs in the other wall works, women lined up against a wall not in prayer but to be searched by armed soldiers, and the unsettling, De Chirico-esque "Figure in a Landscape", where the constriction of the lone woman to the looming security wall 'landscape' is practically echoing. Dumas' close-ups manage to capture this feeling of permeating isolation and lack of human communication, whether the painful "Resurrection" or the mysterious "Olive Tree", whose foliage cannot totally blot out the barriers in the distance.
* Elliot Hundley "Agave of the Bacchae" @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. I got strong echoes of Dave McKean's "Sandman"-era cover work, specifically the 'Brief Lives' series, from Hundley's stunning large-scale collage works (paint swooshes, multiple photographs of the actors, and cut-out lettering amid forests of pins), which takes cues from Euripides.
+ Inez Van Lamsweerde + Vinoodh Matadin & Eugene Van Lamsweerde "Sculptographs". I thought back to the power photog couple's knockout show at Matthew Marks back in 2005, and recalled they collaborated w/ Inez's uncle Eugene in that one too, but this show, filled w/ the couple's discreet, lovely bodily works augmented by Eugene's metal and mixed media, is way more thorough and fine-figured. Nearly all these pieces are very small, locket-sized prints w/ dabs of enamel or wax and reedlike appendages of scrap metal, like mechanical fairies.
* Ryan McGinley "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. Much as I can get down w/ McGinley's ecstatically-tinged soft-focus C-prints of naked youth romping about in fields just after a spring rain (sounds great, right?), I really dig the starkness of this b&w portrait show, part of the 150 subjects the photographer chose and snapped from around the world over a two-year period. Perhaps strains of Robert Mapplethorpe run in these nude, generally androgynous youths (bare breasts and cocks aside), but Mapplethorpe was before my time; I am experiencing McGinley NOW and I find a freshness to it. Now, his subjects aren't entirely anonymous — I picked out Rila Fukushima straight off the bat, but then again how many other enamoring platinum blond, high-cheekboned Japanese women does one know? — but they're suitably 'clean-slate'. Roughly half have some piercing or tattoo, or several, and many are lean to the point of 'waifish' or 'gangly'. But there's a lot of beautiful moments here, like Rila's, like India's clasped hands, Chloe (who could be a young French starlet), Sal (whose sculptural contortion nearly hides his wrist-brace), Owl (either that's the girl's 'name' or the name of the wide-eyed bird on her ass), Janelle (another classic starlet's visage) and Christina's lithe physique and gentle Afro crown.
* Joseph Smolinski @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Smolinski continues his dialogue on American wildlife w/ infringing technologies w/ these creepy mobile phone towers, disguised in his detailed works on paper as trees. You'd better believe the bison, kodiaks, wolves, woodpeckers (and non-native beasts, like an elephant) know what the jig is and do everything in their power to dismantle said shady devices. I especially dug "Disconnected - Beaver Dam", where said animal grins toward the viewer liked 'don't worry about us, mate, we've got it under control'.
* Charline von Heyl @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Lots of great abstract shows in W Chelsea, and von Heyl's pairing linework w/ splashes of color and undulating shapes (to sometimes collage-y effect) is a winner. Check especially "Yellow Guitar", w/ vibes of Picasso/Braque Cubism and "Black Stripe Mojo", a chimeric figure laying over a precise jaillike b&w grid.
* Simon Hantai @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. An excellent mini-survey of the Hungarian-born/Paris-based Abstract Expressionist's unique oeuvre: 'folded canvases'. This includes his heyday works from the '60s, like the stained-glass-like "Peinture", through his reductive monochromes from the '80s that fuse a pattern b/w the paint and bare canvas.
* "Donald Judd and 101 Spring St" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. Judd's iconic downtown cast iron dwelling/studio is going under a three-year, major restoration beginning this summer. But first!! Robinson Gallery has a cache of Judd's personal collection — mostly Minimalist — and you bet it's a beauty. One of his lovely angled-plywood boxes is in effect, but the rest veer b/w clean lines (Carl Andre, Larry Bell, David Novros, Frank Stella) and some nice surprises (HC Westermann's mesmerizing "Lily Bolero", a painted wood prism w/ color streams suspended in one glass side; a tiny Kurt Schwitters charcoal figure). And don't miss the two Dan Flavin fluorescent pieces downstairs, esp. the soothingly chromatic "Untitled (In Honor of Harold Joachim)".
* "A Word Like Tomorrow Wears Things Out" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Photography doesn't have to be fussy (see Catherine Opie's "Girlriends" show @ Gladstone, above, or Robert Adams' night-scapes @ Matthew Marks) — but sometimes tricked-out prints is just what I need. My favorite from this four-artist show, far and beyond, is Mariah Robertson, whose misshapen C-prints looked like jagged buildings (all glass and prisms) over fields of color. Not exactly neo-Cubist but definitely fun, and a consequence of her darkroom experimentation. Kelly Barrie's photo luminescent pigments as 'drawings', tremendously collaged into their final print forms, are rather neat too, in an unearthly Tim Burton-esque sense.
LAST CHANCE
* Jessica Jackson Hutchins "Over Come Over" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) / 261 Broome St. Hutchins does a fine job of conveying the beguiling impression of human presence and absence via her trade glazed ceramic vessels and roughly composed plaster forms (and deftly chosen other media). Her Pres. Obama-newspapered sofa at this year's Whitney Biennial is one of the stronger pieces in an overall solid show, AND she had an echo-y presence at this year's Armory Show (repped by this gallery and Derek Eller's) — so 2010 has been a particularly good year to 'get to know' this Portland-based artist's dynamic mixed media works. This show works excellently as an installation, w/ pieces involving chairs (the striking "Sweater Arms", incl. a sweater pinned to a chair by a ceramic vase) or chair-like forms (the disarming "Leaning Figure") referenced in collage works on paper. Same deal in the side gallery, w/ a crouching ceramic blob, "Disgraced Skater", echoed w/ collaged newsprint works about the same subject.
* Jessica Jackson Hutchins "Kitchen Table Allegory" @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. An excellent counter-dialogue to Hutchins' show on the LES. Eller lends breathing room to Hutchins' larger pieces — the standout "Couple", a messily figurative couple from the torso up locked in amorous embrace on a sagging, discolored couch (think Brancusi crossed w/ Rene Magritte's "Personal Values"), and the titular piece, a lived-in-and-loved kitchen table from Hutchins' family home, bearing a large, open-ended vase (like a picked over hunk of crusty French bread) in place of a table-leaf. There's an overall feeling of happiness, of loved ones (lovers and familial relations) and connectivity, that balances the sombre vibe at Laurel Gitlen's gallery.
* 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.
* Rosson Crow "Bowery Boys" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. The third-to-final show at Deitch is a fierce summary of classic (and in blurred ways, contemporary) naughty downtown NYC culture, so infused in Deitch itself, wielded w/ hallucinogenic panache by Crow. Her works are huge and familiar by degrees (even if you've never been to The Cock, you'll no doubt recognize its facade, or white-neon titular animal, unless you've like never been on the Bowery before. In some works, she combines the 'old' bad boy-type w/ the new, like "The Bang Bang Room", overlaying Andre Balazs' Boom Boom Room w/ Bruce Nauman's neon copulating figures. Others have particular timing, like the riff on the Dakis show at the New Museum. Or there's "The Nest", named after the Dash Snow + Dan Colen famous installation at Deitch, perhaps the gallery's pivotal show and, considering Snow's premature passing, definitely the coda to an era.
* 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!
* 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.
* FIve Year Anniversary @ Jonathan Levine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. One immediate takeaway from this 3doz.-strong group show, nearly the entire gallery roster, + some special guests, is that figurative/realist painting is NOT dead. Many of these artists (Andy Kehoe, Jim Houser, Xiaoqing Ding, Tara McPherson) have excellent control of the brush. Add to it the cultural-mindedness of Doze Green, Jeff Soto and WK Interact (+ the requisite lovelies of Ray Caesar, Invader and Souther Salazar) and you'd better cast that term 'low art' wayyy off to the side. This is dope.
* Chris Martin + Joe Bradley @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. VERY successful pairing by these two painters. Bradley's stoically clean canvases (some w/ just painted frames) prepare the eyes b/w Martin's breathlessly maximalist mixed media paintings, like the massive 'Hemlock' (complete w/ fungi seed packets) and the self-referential 'Big Glitter Painting' (which, if you didn't get it, is both gigantic and glittery).
* Liam Gillick @ Casey Kaplan / 525 W 21st St. The immediately apparent 1/2 of Gillick's great two-tone show is the installation of his signature colored-plexiglass frames (like roofs, here) and painted aluminum benches. These act as open-airs contemplation booths ('Discussion Benches') for the 2nd 1/2 of the show, an amusing and intriguing array of text- and woodblock-derived prints. It begins rather funnily:
Alberto: "What can I get you?"
Frank: "What's on tap?"
Alberto: "Old beer."
Frank: "Old beer?"
Alberto: "I've also got Smirnoff Ice, Bacardi Breezers or Red Strip in bottles with a straw."
But then, in subsequent frames, becomes increasingly surreal. That + the juxtaposition w/ the woodblock prints reminded me of the double world in Haruki Murakami's "Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World".
* "New Directors/New Films 2010" @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St) + MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Just how it sounds: new works from emerging international filmmakers. Screenings occur at either theatre, and though some of 'em have hit the int'l film circuit, this is the first-time screening for most of 'em stateside, so read on below for some of my picks, or visit the site for the full list. THROUGH APR 4.
* James Welling "Glass House" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. A three-year survey of Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House in New Canaan, CT, luminously elevated by Welling's color filters and trichromatic effects.
* "Bill Cunningham New York" (dir. Richard Press, USA, 2010) screening @ MoMA (part of "New Directors/New Films 2010"), 7:30p/9:30p. You've seen this man, the older gentleman in the blue windbreaker, permasmiling on his Schwinn whilst photographing fashion trends for the NY Times. Hell, he'd been doing it for decades before all these trendy 'street-photographers' came around. So it's time we had a portrait of Cunningham. ALSO THURS, 9:15, at Walter Reade Theatre.
* deVries + North Highlands @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. OK, SXSW is OVER. Jam-packed indie shows for Austinites and non-locals are great, but Brooklyn knows how to do it. Like this half-psych/half-folky night, w/ locals deVries, North Highlands, Schocholautte and Small Mountain Path. Welcome back, all.
THURSDAY
* Tatiana Trouvé @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. The entire 5th Fl gallery space is Trouvé's playground, and she's turning it into a stark, dystopic landscape of scrap metal, graphite wall drawings, and fragmented domesticity. (read my Ed Paschke review below in CURRENT SHOWS; Trouvé's should be a strong counterpoint)
* Joe Zucker "Tales of Cotton" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Classic Zucker, taking Ben-Day-style Pop Art on its side (and w/ that the textural Process Art and gridded Minimalism) w/ his paint saturated fields of cotton balls, forming a disarming relationship w/ their charged Antebellum imagery.
* Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. New sculpture from the 'Anatomy' series of 'deconstructed humans' in burlap w/ steel and wood armatures, plus life-size and larger-than-life-size cast-aluminum figures.
+ Stephen Talasnik "Thought Pattern". Talasnik's mechanical drawings/collages and related fantastical sculpture is like an ongoing push-pull w/ the unbuildable, but what SHOULD be buildable.
* Miki Carmi + Tamy Ben-Tor "Disembodied Archetypes" @ Zach Feuer LFL / 530 W 24th St + STUX / 530 W 25th St. A really dope dual-gallery experience, feat. chameleonlike performance/video-art impresario Ben-Tor (of Zach Feuer) and painter/photographer Carmi (of STUX) in collaboration. How do Carmi's unsettling old-person 'death masks' fare w/ Ben-Tor's multi-persona farces on the Middle East? The notion of identity is an ongoing theme, and luckily Ben-Tor's live performances (like on Saturday, at Zach Feuer, read below) might help.
* Antony Gormley "Breathing Room II" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. Many NYers (and loads of tourists) are getting to know Gormley via his 'Event Horizon', those 2doz+ sculptures of himself on rooftops and sidewalks around Madison Square Park. But this show @ Sean Kelly, Gormley's light-sculpture, spatially-disrupting titular piece (plus freestanding sculptures based on orthogonal structures and absolute geometry), should be way doper.
* "Great Photographs of the 20th Century: Staged and Startled" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. We have an incredible range here in a century's-worth of brilliant photographers. The span is incredible and the names are the best (Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Lee Friedlander, Steven Klein, Robert Frank, Lisette Model and more).
* German Measles + The Nymphets @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$6. I think 1/2 German Measles' songs have 'wild' in the title, but seriously they're loads of fun, these Brooklyn boys. The Nymphets are not-too-serious punk, Montreal-style.
FRIDAY
* Susan Philipsz "I See a Darkness" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Philipsz continues her sculptural sound forays with a journey: converting the main gallery space into a darkened lair w/ precisely angled and sequenced speakers for an immersive experience.
+ Siobhan Hapaska "The Nose that Lost its Dog". New sculptural works from the artist, blurring the line b/w organic and machine, that come from her residency at Glasgow Sculpture Studios.
* Lia Halloran "The Only Way Out is Through" @ DCKT Contemporary / 195 Bowery. Fuzzified — and I hate to use this word but 'painterly', as in you can follow the brushstrokes — paintings of crystal caves in the Cueva de los Cristales in Naica, Mexico.
* Aki Sasamoto "Strange Attractors" @ Whitney Museum (part of 2010 Whitney Biennial), 4p. I caught Sasamoto last year at Zach Feuer and I was hooked. I have this vision in my head about Joseph Beuys' chalkboard 'teaching' performances, and to me Sasamoto's stream-of-consciousness forays into the sociopolitical, the mathematical and the mundane (somehow she balances all this, coherently) is, to me, like a Beuys. Her lair @ the Whitney, astrewn w/ video cameras and hanging net bags containing microphones and water glasses, is the site of her shows, performed at 4p on dates incl the numerals '6' and '9' (so if you can't make this one you've other chances).
* "My Turn: Ari Marcopoulos" @ Whitney Museum (part of 2010 Whitney Biennial), 7:30p. I REALLY dug Marcopoulos' deliciously noisy "Detroit" video from the Biennial, and his live performance should be even more ferosh, as 'electroacoustic improvisation' artists — read: NOISE — like Orphan and, ahem, Yellow Tears threaten to tear the roof off the Whitney. Thank you, Whitney, for daring to do it.
* Black Tambourine listening party @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/FREE. OK, not the same as Slumberland Records' Black Tambourine THE BAND, performing off their brand-new compilation LP, which if that were the case it'd be = MAYJAH, but this is a listening party for perhaps the rarest yet terribly influential early '90s, stateside fuzz-pop band (you know, back during grunge).
* "Bluebeard" (dir. Catherine Breillat, 2009) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). Breillat's adaptation of that classic psychosexual fairy tale, the brutish, otherworldly noblemen who murders his wives, and the young Marie-Catherine who confronts him.
SATURDAY
* Barbara Kruger @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Introducing Kruger's new multi-channel video installation "The Globe Shrinks", a cacophonous conversation on contemporary culture, and all that, but surely as piercingly to-the-point as her characteristically bold, textual silkscreens.
* Tamy Ben-Tor "Disembodied Archetypes" performance @ Zach Feuer LFL / 530 W 24th St (CE to 23rd St), 4p. See my above entry on Ben-Tor's collaboration w/ Miki Carmi in this two-gallery mixed media show.
* "Tehroun" (dir. Nader T. Homayoun, Iran/France, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "New Directors/New Films 2010"), 8p. Homayoun's feature-length debut is a moving portrait — beauty and violence, dreams and nightmares — of Iran's multifaceted capital city.
* "Mulholland Dr." (dir. David Lynch, 2001) screening @ 92Y Tribeca / 200 Hudson St (1/ACE to Canal St), 7:30p/$12. In my opinion, this is Lynch's modern masterpiece, not as jackknife-surrealist as the later "Inland Empire", nor as dread-imbued as earlier "Blue Velvet" or as sinister as the untouchable "Eraserhead" — it's Lynch's surgical takedown of the Hollywood façade.
* Love Is All + Crystal Stilts @ Maxwell's / 1039 Washington St, Hoboken (PATH to Hoboken), 10p/$12. The Stilts are working on a new album, and if it's anything like their increasingly psychedelic jam-session sets (complete w/ Brad rocking out on a harmonica), then this Velvet Underground-ish band hasn't lost its edge at ALL. w/ The Beachniks (added bonus).
* Beaches + Total Slacker @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$6. Melbourne's Beaches are in town a few days via SXSW, and this is probably the dopest night of them all. Think about it: five Aussie women playing psych-tinged, proggy guitar lines. DbA will be crawling the walls!
SUNDAY
* "Picasso: Themes and Variations" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Pablo Picasso at MoMA. Have I got your attention yet?? Remember "Mosqueteros", that wonderful Picasso portrait show @ Gagosian, around this time last year? The queues that stretched around the block? Think this one's going to be as popular, what w/ its 100+ print-related works related to the prolific artist's experimentation w/ lithography, etching and the like, from his early Blue Period through Cubism and his later works? Answer: OBVS. Luckily this is on the 2nd Fl and that exhaustively long-running Tim Burton show is on 3, so the inevitable clusterf**k won't be so major. (and just a head's up: there's a MAYJAH Picasso show coming to the Met next month; so consider the MoMA's a tasty primer)
* Vivian Girls + German Measles @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/FREE. Hmm, free show w/ adorable lo-fi party-rockin' boys (German Measles) and super-cute punkish girls (Vivian Girls) in a very beery bowling alley. How crowded do you think it'll be?
* Love is All + The Beets + Beach Fossils @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$14. If you didn't feel like hauling out on the PATH to check Swedish indie cuties Love Is All alongside Brooklyn's art-swaggerers Crystal Stilts, OK I get it. How about this: Love Is All but in Wsburg, w/ the singalong dancey one-two punch of Beach Fossils (surfy!) and The Beets (punky!). LOVE!
MONDAY
* A Sunny Day in Glasgow @ Bell House / 149 7th St, Gowanus (F/M/R to 9th St/4th Ave), 7:30p/$12. Sometimes you get that band w/ the PERFECT name, like A Sunny Day in Glasgow, that Philly six-piece led by songwriter Ben Daniels and feat. dual vocalists Jen Goma and Annie Fredrickson. They sometimes cover Fleetwood Mac! That's OK with me!
TUESDAY
* "Blame It on Voltaire/La Faute à Voltaire" (dir. Abdel Kechiche, 2000) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 3:15p. I LOVE Kechiche's films — "L'Esquive" and "La Graine et le Mulet" — and their beautiful casts of 'real' France: multicultural, multiethnic. This is his debut full-length, about a young Moroccan man facing shocking adversity and forging relationships in a very real Paris.
* "Evening Dress/La Robe du soir" (dir. Myriam Aziza, France, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "New Directors/New Films 2010"), 6:15p. A young girl's coming-of-age, and her intense physical attraction to Mme. Solenska, her effortlessly-chic French teacher. ALSO WED, 9:15p, @ MoMA.
* "Women Without Men" (dir. Shirin Neshat, Germany/Austria/France, 2009) screening @ MoMA (part of "New Directors/New Films 2010"), 6:15p. The interconnected lives of four women in 1950's Iran, amid the CIA-supported coup d'état that struck down Iran's democratically-elected government.
* Flying Lotus @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St, 6 to Bleecker), 10p/$20. Luckily the venue is removing the chairs/tables before Mr. Steven Ellison takes the decks, w/ his slammin', fractured beats and sampled bedroom moans. Eschew terms like IDM and just call his particular style of dance-floor 'fierce'. (I mean, check his newish song "Meeting the Prez" on his Myspace — it could be a 20min track, it's that dope)
CURRENT SHOWS
* Ursula von Rydingsvard "ERRĀTUS" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. There is a complex awe and elegance to von Rydingsvard's rough-hewn cedar sculpture — the sort that follows Louise Bourgeois' non-spider sculpture (like the Personages) rather than the steel/cubular/mobile stuff of other large-scale sculptors. Her works tower and crawl, ripple and bend. The wavelike "Droga", for instance...OK permit me to geek out a bit, but it TOTALLY reminded me of the massive 'land worm' beast from Final Fantasy VI (anyone get the ref?). The incredible "Blackened Word" is canyon-like, smoothly flowing on one side and replete w/ gullies and Paleolithic nooks on the other. I encourage you to peer into this one: besides the fact it smells good, the closeness to the wood mutes outside sounds.
* Janet Cardiff & George Burnes Miller @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. I drop terms like 'heady trip' a bit too often, but that is precisely what this show is, beginning w/ the sensorially-disturbing "Carnie" installation, a very disturbing, sonically treated carousel, which plays like cut-up, backwards merry-go-round tunes w/ sped-up kids' voices and a sporadic snare rush. Oh: and the carousel animals have speakers tethered to their faces like gimp masks. However...in the next gallery, "The Cabinet of Curiousness" is extremely cool, and lighter-hearted: a circuit-bent card catalog that plays various musical/operatic loops depending on which drawers are pulled out.
* Ross Rudel "Burgeon" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Rudel's flexible mastery of organic sculpture (sans the gorgeous bronzed 'Ouroboros 2', the 1st in that media for him, most of the works are various woods) is tempered by his thoughtful acrylic resin 'collages' on wood, which incorporate carrion blossoms into lush nighttime scenes. He handles abstraction well (the walnut-carved 'Ouroboros' and the disquietingly damp-looking 'Phantom', a knot of resin-slickened bed linen on wood) but I'll bet you've never seen Los Angeles river algae handled quite like his shamanic 'Green Man Resurrection'.
+ Todd Hebert. Paintings and works on paper in a hyperrealistic style that somehow, probably due to the lighting (cityscapes, christmas lights etc) and the use of blurring, become cleverly abstract, in a fogged-window, "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" sort of way.
* Catherine Opie "Girlfriends" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. I'm quite fond of this sweet, portraiture-driven exhibition. Opie's new body of work, portraits of friends and lovers of the 'butch-dyke' persona, is elevated by an array of square-format b&w prints from her archive, never before printed before now. The latter acts almost diary-like, recalling Opie's ties to the S&M community in LA and San Francisco from the early '90s, and some of its subjects (like the riveting Pig Pen) recur in the new series, nearly 15 years later. Among the portraits include a regal k.d. lang against a Canadian wilderness, Jenny Shimizu in leather on a pristine white-sheeted bed and Idexa, tattooed and barechested, crouching on a rock. But I kept going back to Pig Pen, from her almost waifish figure in '94, wearing a play-piercing 'crown of thorns' for a performance in Mexico City, to her tanned, mature figure in '09, a thorn-wrapped heart tattoo emblazoned on her chest.
* Ed Paschke @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Jeff Koons, Paschke's studio assistant in the '70s and curator of this career-spanner, notes the 'neurological effect' of Paschke's paintings. That's adept, as this array of druggy, acid-colored anti-Pop portraits, w/ their either collage-y or hallucinogenic (often both) effects, are a particularly fierce trip. His earlier works fuse celebrity w/ kitchy wrestlers and cartoons — like the Marilyn in "Pink Lady" (1970), the gender-bending "Ramrod" (1969). But then they get weirder, as Paschke nears and bypasses 1980, adding test-patterns and neon glows to this increasingly psychedelic bunch. "Gestapo" (1970) feels like a scene from David Lynch's "Inland Empire", and the terrific trio "Ambrosia" (1979), "Fumar" (1979) and stunner "Violencia" (1980), w/ its disembodied lips and saturated electrical singes, is like diving into your favorite '80's cyberpunk film — though the proliferation of blank-eyed, identical, vaguely sinister, suited dudes could be interpreted as a precursor to "The Matrix".
+ Alberto di Fabio. I recommend immersing yourself in Di Fabio's fractured abstract acrylic paintings (most of smallish to medium-sized scale) and works on paper, w/ their purplish and pinkish hues that mimic both ice crystals, frozen tree branches, and somehow neural synapses and aveoli, AFTER pulling yourself from Ed Paschke's intense, but rewarding, exhibition.
* Eva Hesse @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. A very special exhibition of Hesse's late-period postminimalist works, shortly before her premature passing at age 34. I stress the importance of this collection of mostly unseen pieces, as Hesse had achieved — and was furthering — a transcendent 'non-art' trade that was unlike anything else at the time. That said, however, the majority of this 14-piece offering is a collection of 'improvisational test pieces', wisps and husks of papier-caché (often combined w/ cheesecloth and sometimes a type of adhesive), displayed on a spotlighted work-table, throwing dynamic shadows and resting there simultaneously like archaeological artifacts (they are a boon for us to investigate Hesse's work process) and potentialities for her never-realized future sculpture.
* Marlene Dumas "Against the Wall" @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St. Dumas wields a sense of tension and foreboding in her typically ghostly/ambiguious suite of new paintings, set approximately from media imagery of Israel and Palestine. "The Wall", probably the 1st canvas you'll see upon entering the gallery, sets the tone: a group of Orthodox Jewish men in front of what appears to be the Western Wall in Jerusalem, though it's actually an Israeli security fence in Bethlehem. This stark reality recurs in the other wall works, women lined up against a wall not in prayer but to be searched by armed soldiers, and the unsettling, De Chirico-esque "Figure in a Landscape", where the constriction of the lone woman to the looming security wall 'landscape' is practically echoing. Dumas' close-ups manage to capture this feeling of permeating isolation and lack of human communication, whether the painful "Resurrection" or the mysterious "Olive Tree", whose foliage cannot totally blot out the barriers in the distance.
* Elliot Hundley "Agave of the Bacchae" @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. I got strong echoes of Dave McKean's "Sandman"-era cover work, specifically the 'Brief Lives' series, from Hundley's stunning large-scale collage works (paint swooshes, multiple photographs of the actors, and cut-out lettering amid forests of pins), which takes cues from Euripides.
+ Inez Van Lamsweerde + Vinoodh Matadin & Eugene Van Lamsweerde "Sculptographs". I thought back to the power photog couple's knockout show at Matthew Marks back in 2005, and recalled they collaborated w/ Inez's uncle Eugene in that one too, but this show, filled w/ the couple's discreet, lovely bodily works augmented by Eugene's metal and mixed media, is way more thorough and fine-figured. Nearly all these pieces are very small, locket-sized prints w/ dabs of enamel or wax and reedlike appendages of scrap metal, like mechanical fairies.
* Ryan McGinley "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. Much as I can get down w/ McGinley's ecstatically-tinged soft-focus C-prints of naked youth romping about in fields just after a spring rain (sounds great, right?), I really dig the starkness of this b&w portrait show, part of the 150 subjects the photographer chose and snapped from around the world over a two-year period. Perhaps strains of Robert Mapplethorpe run in these nude, generally androgynous youths (bare breasts and cocks aside), but Mapplethorpe was before my time; I am experiencing McGinley NOW and I find a freshness to it. Now, his subjects aren't entirely anonymous — I picked out Rila Fukushima straight off the bat, but then again how many other enamoring platinum blond, high-cheekboned Japanese women does one know? — but they're suitably 'clean-slate'. Roughly half have some piercing or tattoo, or several, and many are lean to the point of 'waifish' or 'gangly'. But there's a lot of beautiful moments here, like Rila's, like India's clasped hands, Chloe (who could be a young French starlet), Sal (whose sculptural contortion nearly hides his wrist-brace), Owl (either that's the girl's 'name' or the name of the wide-eyed bird on her ass), Janelle (another classic starlet's visage) and Christina's lithe physique and gentle Afro crown.
* Joseph Smolinski @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Smolinski continues his dialogue on American wildlife w/ infringing technologies w/ these creepy mobile phone towers, disguised in his detailed works on paper as trees. You'd better believe the bison, kodiaks, wolves, woodpeckers (and non-native beasts, like an elephant) know what the jig is and do everything in their power to dismantle said shady devices. I especially dug "Disconnected - Beaver Dam", where said animal grins toward the viewer liked 'don't worry about us, mate, we've got it under control'.
* Charline von Heyl @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Lots of great abstract shows in W Chelsea, and von Heyl's pairing linework w/ splashes of color and undulating shapes (to sometimes collage-y effect) is a winner. Check especially "Yellow Guitar", w/ vibes of Picasso/Braque Cubism and "Black Stripe Mojo", a chimeric figure laying over a precise jaillike b&w grid.
* Simon Hantai @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. An excellent mini-survey of the Hungarian-born/Paris-based Abstract Expressionist's unique oeuvre: 'folded canvases'. This includes his heyday works from the '60s, like the stained-glass-like "Peinture", through his reductive monochromes from the '80s that fuse a pattern b/w the paint and bare canvas.
* "Donald Judd and 101 Spring St" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. Judd's iconic downtown cast iron dwelling/studio is going under a three-year, major restoration beginning this summer. But first!! Robinson Gallery has a cache of Judd's personal collection — mostly Minimalist — and you bet it's a beauty. One of his lovely angled-plywood boxes is in effect, but the rest veer b/w clean lines (Carl Andre, Larry Bell, David Novros, Frank Stella) and some nice surprises (HC Westermann's mesmerizing "Lily Bolero", a painted wood prism w/ color streams suspended in one glass side; a tiny Kurt Schwitters charcoal figure). And don't miss the two Dan Flavin fluorescent pieces downstairs, esp. the soothingly chromatic "Untitled (In Honor of Harold Joachim)".
* "A Word Like Tomorrow Wears Things Out" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Photography doesn't have to be fussy (see Catherine Opie's "Girlriends" show @ Gladstone, above, or Robert Adams' night-scapes @ Matthew Marks) — but sometimes tricked-out prints is just what I need. My favorite from this four-artist show, far and beyond, is Mariah Robertson, whose misshapen C-prints looked like jagged buildings (all glass and prisms) over fields of color. Not exactly neo-Cubist but definitely fun, and a consequence of her darkroom experimentation. Kelly Barrie's photo luminescent pigments as 'drawings', tremendously collaged into their final print forms, are rather neat too, in an unearthly Tim Burton-esque sense.
LAST CHANCE
* Jessica Jackson Hutchins "Over Come Over" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) / 261 Broome St. Hutchins does a fine job of conveying the beguiling impression of human presence and absence via her trade glazed ceramic vessels and roughly composed plaster forms (and deftly chosen other media). Her Pres. Obama-newspapered sofa at this year's Whitney Biennial is one of the stronger pieces in an overall solid show, AND she had an echo-y presence at this year's Armory Show (repped by this gallery and Derek Eller's) — so 2010 has been a particularly good year to 'get to know' this Portland-based artist's dynamic mixed media works. This show works excellently as an installation, w/ pieces involving chairs (the striking "Sweater Arms", incl. a sweater pinned to a chair by a ceramic vase) or chair-like forms (the disarming "Leaning Figure") referenced in collage works on paper. Same deal in the side gallery, w/ a crouching ceramic blob, "Disgraced Skater", echoed w/ collaged newsprint works about the same subject.
* Jessica Jackson Hutchins "Kitchen Table Allegory" @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. An excellent counter-dialogue to Hutchins' show on the LES. Eller lends breathing room to Hutchins' larger pieces — the standout "Couple", a messily figurative couple from the torso up locked in amorous embrace on a sagging, discolored couch (think Brancusi crossed w/ Rene Magritte's "Personal Values"), and the titular piece, a lived-in-and-loved kitchen table from Hutchins' family home, bearing a large, open-ended vase (like a picked over hunk of crusty French bread) in place of a table-leaf. There's an overall feeling of happiness, of loved ones (lovers and familial relations) and connectivity, that balances the sombre vibe at Laurel Gitlen's gallery.
* 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.
* Rosson Crow "Bowery Boys" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. The third-to-final show at Deitch is a fierce summary of classic (and in blurred ways, contemporary) naughty downtown NYC culture, so infused in Deitch itself, wielded w/ hallucinogenic panache by Crow. Her works are huge and familiar by degrees (even if you've never been to The Cock, you'll no doubt recognize its facade, or white-neon titular animal, unless you've like never been on the Bowery before. In some works, she combines the 'old' bad boy-type w/ the new, like "The Bang Bang Room", overlaying Andre Balazs' Boom Boom Room w/ Bruce Nauman's neon copulating figures. Others have particular timing, like the riff on the Dakis show at the New Museum. Or there's "The Nest", named after the Dash Snow + Dan Colen famous installation at Deitch, perhaps the gallery's pivotal show and, considering Snow's premature passing, definitely the coda to an era.
* 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!
* 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.
* FIve Year Anniversary @ Jonathan Levine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. One immediate takeaway from this 3doz.-strong group show, nearly the entire gallery roster, + some special guests, is that figurative/realist painting is NOT dead. Many of these artists (Andy Kehoe, Jim Houser, Xiaoqing Ding, Tara McPherson) have excellent control of the brush. Add to it the cultural-mindedness of Doze Green, Jeff Soto and WK Interact (+ the requisite lovelies of Ray Caesar, Invader and Souther Salazar) and you'd better cast that term 'low art' wayyy off to the side. This is dope.
* Chris Martin + Joe Bradley @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. VERY successful pairing by these two painters. Bradley's stoically clean canvases (some w/ just painted frames) prepare the eyes b/w Martin's breathlessly maximalist mixed media paintings, like the massive 'Hemlock' (complete w/ fungi seed packets) and the self-referential 'Big Glitter Painting' (which, if you didn't get it, is both gigantic and glittery).
* Liam Gillick @ Casey Kaplan / 525 W 21st St. The immediately apparent 1/2 of Gillick's great two-tone show is the installation of his signature colored-plexiglass frames (like roofs, here) and painted aluminum benches. These act as open-airs contemplation booths ('Discussion Benches') for the 2nd 1/2 of the show, an amusing and intriguing array of text- and woodblock-derived prints. It begins rather funnily:
Alberto: "What can I get you?"
Frank: "What's on tap?"
Alberto: "Old beer."
Frank: "Old beer?"
Alberto: "I've also got Smirnoff Ice, Bacardi Breezers or Red Strip in bottles with a straw."
But then, in subsequent frames, becomes increasingly surreal. That + the juxtaposition w/ the woodblock prints reminded me of the double world in Haruki Murakami's "Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World".
Friday, March 19, 2010
I Dig: Jessica Jackson Hutchins
It's time you got to know Jessica Jackson Hutchins. The Portland OR-based mixed media artist (doubly cool as she is also the wife of Stephen Malkmus from Pavement) has TWO significant, complementary solo shows on in NYC galleries that, concurrent w/ her role in this year's Whitney Biennial, give a broader picture of where she is now and where she may be taking her art in the near future.
To see a singular Hutchins piece, esp. if the piece is one of her sculptural forms and not a wall-collage, is slightly akin to running into a thrift-store pileup inside a white-box gallery. Not terribly unfamiliar if you're into Mark Manders and his threadbare office furniture and rusted metal bits but nothing at all like, say Rachel Harrison's broadly ostentatious output, or Shinique Smith's somehow neatly composed, haphazard clothing monoliths. No, Hutchins' pairings of papier-mache or ceramic with furniture tend towards a discreet line, a quietly suffocating loneliness that engages the viewer far deeper in that, despite the generally abstract offerings, the fleeting sensation of a human presence is like totally THERE.
OK here we go: Hutchins uses careworn furniture from either her own home or found stuff, combining that somehow w/ roughly composed ceramic vessels (which occasionally go the abstract route a la early Lucio Fontana, but most of it is recognizably mugs, water pitchers, vases and the like) and/or papier-mache forms (which, in some instances, are cast in the SHAPE of the furniture, for an extra layered effect). She also works in collage that, when exhibited with a sculpture, tends to play off the other stuff in the room. And the deal w/ the ceramic vessels, even the more clearly vase-like forms, is additionally multilayered: you start guessing a high-neck vase to be like a human torso, then you see the ceramics plonked on the couch could be like stand-ins for a figure, or two figures. This human essence pervades her work.
I'd seen Hutchins' work in group shows before but I credit two recent occurrences to really getting her to click w/ me:
1. Hutchins' "Couch For a Long Time" at the Whitney Biennial, a stunning piece — newspaper articles of Pres. Obama glued to Hutchins' childhood sofa, w/ several glazed ceramic pieces (both vessels and, uh, limb-like) plonked on the cushions — that should serve as a great primer for her more challengingly nonfigurative works
2. the Montréal-based artist Valérie Blass, who showed at this year's VOLTA NY through the gallery Parisian Laundry. Blass' seemingly abstract sculptural works all reference the human form to varying degrees, from the simple verticality of one to this disarmingly 'real' slanted swagger of another. I think my time w/ her pieces allowed me to readjust my eyes to seeing deeper into Hutchins' works
So besides the Whitney, two galleries are hosting complementary solo shows: Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) on the LES and Derek Eller Gallery in W.Chelsea. Both galleries also featured Hutchins at the Armory Show (Gitlen's gallery had her with Will Rogan, but the space felt like a Hutchins solo show, w/ the derelict waiting-room chairs astrewn w/ ceramics and accompanying large collage). Gitlen's space on the LES is the smaller of the two galleries, a not-spacious room and a smaller back room, but the space works w/ contributing a particular atmosphere to the pieces, which in their loose references to fallen athletes seem to shrink away from you, either cringing towards the walls (the literal "Disgraced Skater", a raspberry-glazed lump not entirely unlike an early Ken Price) or slumped in situ, unattended to (the powerful "Sweater Arms", a like caved-in urn planted on a sweater, the lot resting on a wooden chair w/ its back like blasted out by some prior unseen violence force; and the equally stirring "Chairs", I think my favorite collage of Hutchins' and probably the most forlorn congregate of silkscreened easychairs over a mustard backdrop). Nothing is particularly large here in "Over Come Over", and most objects are placed lowish to the ground, inviting you to peer into the vessels, peruse the sculpture not unlike a voyeur. And you should pay careful attention to "Leaning Figure", an arresting mixed-media conglomerate shaped in roughly chairish form, propped against a bench and the wall, w/ a patch of blue-jean precisely wear a human knee would be located, if a human were in place of the papier-mache, the rest of it a map of newsprint and flesh-toned stains — and then the whole thing becomes way more disquieting, more visceral, like it's the limbless body of a burn victim, reminding that just b/c the essence of a figure may emerge, it doesn't necessarily make that a welcome thing.
Derek Eller's "Kitchen Table Allegory" (dope name!) is blessed w/ space, and Hutchins delivers w/ the standout "Couple", a messily figurative couple from the torso up locked in hopefully amorous (though it could run to violent) embrace on a sagging, discolored couch. Think of Brancusi crossed w/ Rene Magritte's "Personal Values" (ginormous comb, soap, shave brush etc in a sky-wallpapered chamber)...I was going to write 'also combine w/ George Segal's plaster-cast characters' but Hutchins has the edge on this sort of highly-abstract-yet-essence-capturing sculpture that I can't quite compare that to anyone else (Blass marginally). That is one thing so fresh, so invigorating about Hutchins' shows. This newness. The titular piece in the exhibition is a gouged out kitchen table, bequeathed from Hutchins' home and bearing a large, open-ended vase (think a massive, picked over hunk of crusty French bread) in the gaping middle, in place of a table-leaf. This piece has a pleasing lived-in vibe emanating from it. W/o too much imagination, you can infer the bread broken, the stories shared (and the collages/monoprints created!)... "Settee", near the entrance to the gallery, is a bit sexy. Trust me on this. Despite the typically 'well-loved' settee itself, which may not look too sexy to you, take the larger form, bisected in one part by ruffled fuchsia satin, and the smaller form, and pretend its two parents and their kid on the settee, and there's a bit of naughtiness here, but it's implied the kid doesn't realize it — or you could take it a step further, that the larger form is a couple embracing and the kid is zoning out off to the side... Take these and add "Frontal" (the overly descriptive title belies the so-considered simplicity of it: a lump of glaze on a chair-caning seat) and "Orange Bowl", which could be called "Frontal" as it looks quite a bit like a kneeling figure from the ass downward, though pair it w/ the seated shape in "Frontal" maybe... Get the picture? The overall vibe @ Derek Eller is a happier place, replete w/ love-making and togetherness (even the recliner-shaped plaster collage "Recliner" doesn't give off a desolate impression, as its blanketed w/ what looks to be vacation photos). This balances the sombre atmosphere of Hutchins' show on the LES, and they work so nicely together. We need to have both. A just-happy show would be fine but perhaps not as memorable w/o its lonely counterpart. And after taking in the emotion hanging in the pottery and under the layers of paper in Laurel Gitlen's gallery, this homey human presence is a comforting relief.
To see a singular Hutchins piece, esp. if the piece is one of her sculptural forms and not a wall-collage, is slightly akin to running into a thrift-store pileup inside a white-box gallery. Not terribly unfamiliar if you're into Mark Manders and his threadbare office furniture and rusted metal bits but nothing at all like, say Rachel Harrison's broadly ostentatious output, or Shinique Smith's somehow neatly composed, haphazard clothing monoliths. No, Hutchins' pairings of papier-mache or ceramic with furniture tend towards a discreet line, a quietly suffocating loneliness that engages the viewer far deeper in that, despite the generally abstract offerings, the fleeting sensation of a human presence is like totally THERE.
OK here we go: Hutchins uses careworn furniture from either her own home or found stuff, combining that somehow w/ roughly composed ceramic vessels (which occasionally go the abstract route a la early Lucio Fontana, but most of it is recognizably mugs, water pitchers, vases and the like) and/or papier-mache forms (which, in some instances, are cast in the SHAPE of the furniture, for an extra layered effect). She also works in collage that, when exhibited with a sculpture, tends to play off the other stuff in the room. And the deal w/ the ceramic vessels, even the more clearly vase-like forms, is additionally multilayered: you start guessing a high-neck vase to be like a human torso, then you see the ceramics plonked on the couch could be like stand-ins for a figure, or two figures. This human essence pervades her work.
I'd seen Hutchins' work in group shows before but I credit two recent occurrences to really getting her to click w/ me:
1. Hutchins' "Couch For a Long Time" at the Whitney Biennial, a stunning piece — newspaper articles of Pres. Obama glued to Hutchins' childhood sofa, w/ several glazed ceramic pieces (both vessels and, uh, limb-like) plonked on the cushions — that should serve as a great primer for her more challengingly nonfigurative works
2. the Montréal-based artist Valérie Blass, who showed at this year's VOLTA NY through the gallery Parisian Laundry. Blass' seemingly abstract sculptural works all reference the human form to varying degrees, from the simple verticality of one to this disarmingly 'real' slanted swagger of another. I think my time w/ her pieces allowed me to readjust my eyes to seeing deeper into Hutchins' works
So besides the Whitney, two galleries are hosting complementary solo shows: Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) on the LES and Derek Eller Gallery in W.Chelsea. Both galleries also featured Hutchins at the Armory Show (Gitlen's gallery had her with Will Rogan, but the space felt like a Hutchins solo show, w/ the derelict waiting-room chairs astrewn w/ ceramics and accompanying large collage). Gitlen's space on the LES is the smaller of the two galleries, a not-spacious room and a smaller back room, but the space works w/ contributing a particular atmosphere to the pieces, which in their loose references to fallen athletes seem to shrink away from you, either cringing towards the walls (the literal "Disgraced Skater", a raspberry-glazed lump not entirely unlike an early Ken Price) or slumped in situ, unattended to (the powerful "Sweater Arms", a like caved-in urn planted on a sweater, the lot resting on a wooden chair w/ its back like blasted out by some prior unseen violence force; and the equally stirring "Chairs", I think my favorite collage of Hutchins' and probably the most forlorn congregate of silkscreened easychairs over a mustard backdrop). Nothing is particularly large here in "Over Come Over", and most objects are placed lowish to the ground, inviting you to peer into the vessels, peruse the sculpture not unlike a voyeur. And you should pay careful attention to "Leaning Figure", an arresting mixed-media conglomerate shaped in roughly chairish form, propped against a bench and the wall, w/ a patch of blue-jean precisely wear a human knee would be located, if a human were in place of the papier-mache, the rest of it a map of newsprint and flesh-toned stains — and then the whole thing becomes way more disquieting, more visceral, like it's the limbless body of a burn victim, reminding that just b/c the essence of a figure may emerge, it doesn't necessarily make that a welcome thing.
Derek Eller's "Kitchen Table Allegory" (dope name!) is blessed w/ space, and Hutchins delivers w/ the standout "Couple", a messily figurative couple from the torso up locked in hopefully amorous (though it could run to violent) embrace on a sagging, discolored couch. Think of Brancusi crossed w/ Rene Magritte's "Personal Values" (ginormous comb, soap, shave brush etc in a sky-wallpapered chamber)...I was going to write 'also combine w/ George Segal's plaster-cast characters' but Hutchins has the edge on this sort of highly-abstract-yet-essence-capturing sculpture that I can't quite compare that to anyone else (Blass marginally). That is one thing so fresh, so invigorating about Hutchins' shows. This newness. The titular piece in the exhibition is a gouged out kitchen table, bequeathed from Hutchins' home and bearing a large, open-ended vase (think a massive, picked over hunk of crusty French bread) in the gaping middle, in place of a table-leaf. This piece has a pleasing lived-in vibe emanating from it. W/o too much imagination, you can infer the bread broken, the stories shared (and the collages/monoprints created!)... "Settee", near the entrance to the gallery, is a bit sexy. Trust me on this. Despite the typically 'well-loved' settee itself, which may not look too sexy to you, take the larger form, bisected in one part by ruffled fuchsia satin, and the smaller form, and pretend its two parents and their kid on the settee, and there's a bit of naughtiness here, but it's implied the kid doesn't realize it — or you could take it a step further, that the larger form is a couple embracing and the kid is zoning out off to the side... Take these and add "Frontal" (the overly descriptive title belies the so-considered simplicity of it: a lump of glaze on a chair-caning seat) and "Orange Bowl", which could be called "Frontal" as it looks quite a bit like a kneeling figure from the ass downward, though pair it w/ the seated shape in "Frontal" maybe... Get the picture? The overall vibe @ Derek Eller is a happier place, replete w/ love-making and togetherness (even the recliner-shaped plaster collage "Recliner" doesn't give off a desolate impression, as its blanketed w/ what looks to be vacation photos). This balances the sombre atmosphere of Hutchins' show on the LES, and they work so nicely together. We need to have both. A just-happy show would be fine but perhaps not as memorable w/o its lonely counterpart. And after taking in the emotion hanging in the pottery and under the layers of paper in Laurel Gitlen's gallery, this homey human presence is a comforting relief.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
fee's LIST (through 3/23)
Bit lite on music; all the bands are going to Texas...
IN PROGRESS
* Rendez-Vous with French Cinema @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St). This unbearably chic festival of contemporary French cinema is back. I warned you two weeks ago to begin reserving your shows, b/c 1) this is a very popular film festival (IMO, third to New York Film Festival and NYAFF) and 2) Film Society members were already reserving their tix since the last week of Feb. So go at it. THRU MAR 21
THURSDAY
* Ed Paschke @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. A bristling career look at the gritty Pop artist, whose seductively rendered oil paintings, in increasingly sickly, hallucinogenic hues, reveal the shady underside of the 'cool'. Jeff Koons, Paschke's asst in the mid-70s, curates this exhibition.
+ Alberto di Fabio. Vivid acrylic abstracts of stuff that looks like supernovas and plant cells, paintings to lose yourself in.
* Marlene Dumas "Against the Wall" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 533 W 19th St. New paintings and other works taking reference from media imagery of Israel and Palestine, but w/ a broader theme of isolation and lack of communication, w/ Dumas' typical stripped-down and ghostly figurative brush.
* Ursula von Rydingsvard "ERRATUS" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. How do you immediately make W 26th St cooler, and thereby answer the male-artist large-scale-sculpture shows @ Gagosian nearby? Drop three monumental new works by von Rydingsvard, epic carved, undulating cedar walls and waves. I cannot wait!
* Todd Hebert @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Paintings and works on paper in a hyperrealistic style that somehow, probably due to the lighting (cityscapes, christmas lights etc) and the use of blurring, become cleverly abstract.
+ Ross Rudel "Burgeon", new mixed media sculptural works, adding a bit of grounding to the show.
* Ryan McGinley "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere" @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. McGinley takes on the raw studio portrait. Result: a slew of b&w photos, piercing gazes, oddly spontaneous despite the behind-the-scenes meticulousness of McGinley's work. w/ a few large-scale, exuberant color photos to buoy the mood a tad.
* Joseph Smolinski @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Environmentally-conscious works on paper and video, related to American wildlife and infringing technologies and industry.
* Charline von Heyl @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. New almost collage-y mixed media abstract paintings, marrying Von Heyl's intricate linework w/ sensuous undulating shapes, drips and splashes of color.
* Charles Sabba "If You Don't Want Your Thoughts Stolen Don't Open Your Mind" @ Y Gallery / 355A Bowery. Artist/police officer Sabba brings an intriguing medium to the mix, as in fingerprint ink, used in renderings of art-thieves and recreations of infamous related events, created on FBI and New Jersey PD fingerprint cards.
* Warren Isensee @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. The laborious, multicolored bands of rounded-corner rectangles return, but it looks like Isensee has injected even more humor into his works on paper and paintings beyond their witty titles. Dare I even call them: musical?
* "Restless (Le Bel âge)", (dir. Laurent Perreau, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "Rendez-vous with French Cinema"), 8:45p. Debut film by Perreau, w/ young actress Pauline Étienne as a rebellious orphan sent to live w/ an exceedingly gruff grandfather (legendary Michel Piccoli) — and the cross-generational bond that forms in the process. w/ Perreau in attendance.
FRIDAY
* Aki Sasamoto "Strange Attractors" @ Whitney Museum (part of 2010 Whitney Biennial), 4p. I caught Sasamoto last year at Zach Feuer and I was hooked. I have this vision in my head about Joseph Beuys' chalkboard 'teaching' performances, and to me Sasamoto's stream-of-consciousness forays into the sociopolitical, the mathematical and the mundane (somehow she balances all this, coherently) is, to me, like a Beuys. Her lair @ the Whitney, astrewn w/ video cameras and hanging net bags containing microphones and water glasses, is the site of her shows, performed at 4p on dates incl the numerals '6' and '9' (so if you can't make this one you've other chances).
* Catherine Opie "Girlfriends" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. A combined experience of new color photographs and vintage b&w prints of the butch-dyke identity, via celebrity (k.d. lang, Eileen Myles), friends and partners.
* Jim Torok "You Are a Vibrant Human Being" @ Pierogi / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg. Torok provides a two-for-one in this exhibition of his new portraitures, w/ realistic miniatures of friends and neighbors v. cartoon-like renderings of clowns w/ accompanying loose-brush, text-only paintings.
* Elliot Hundley "Agave of the Bacchae" @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Taking cues from Euripides, Hundley has created something of an installation, backgrounded by loads of photographs of costumed players and zooming off from there. I'd imagine the opening reception to be appropriately 'Bacchanal'.
+ Inez Van Lamsweerde + Vinoodh Matadin & Eugene Van Lamsweerde "Sculptographs". I mean...this just SOUNDS cool non?
* Simon Hantai @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. Fantastically patterned 'folded' canvases from Hantai's heyday in the '60s onward. IMO he's way underexposed here so this should be a treat for a genre-pushing Abstract artist from the mid-20th C who wasn't a NYer (or even an American for that matter).
* "Making Plans for Lena (Non ma fille, tu n'iras pas danser)", (dir. Christophe Honoré, 2009), screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "Rendez-vous with French Cinema"), 8:45p. Classic Honoré, w/ Chiara Mastrioianni in a riveting single-mom performance. Oh, and that tousled-haired heartthrob Louis Garrel has a cameo. Honoré AND Mastrioianni attend for the Q&A.
SATURDAY
* Janet Cardiff & George Burnes Miller @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Several great (happier) multisensory encounters from the duo, incl the large installation "The Carnie" (a sonically-treated carousel) and something billed as a DJ mix-station called "The Cabinet of Curiousness", which sounds like a circuit-bent card catalog that must be scene — and 'played' — to be believed. You know I'm down!
* Meg Webster @ Paula Cooper Boutique / 465 W 23rd St. Trust me in this absolutely calming, sensorial minimalist show. Webster coats square sheets of paper w/ various spices, ingredients or industrial media to create fragrant 'monotone' pieces. Another instance where experiencing in person is WAY better than just photos.
* "Debris" @ PPOW / 511 W 25th St #301. Three artists make beautifully intense works out of discarded stuff. Aurora Robson's ink and junk mail collages could be some twee Pop Surrealist masterwork. Her works come off way cheerier than the full-on assault of Sarah Frost's derelict keyboards and Portia Munson's show-stopping 'Pink Project' and 'Green Piece', which are a whole bunch of stuff in those colors.
* "Le Refuge", (dir. François Ozon, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "Rendez-vous with French Cinema"), 6:15p. Never one to avoid a tricky subject, Ozon delivers: ex-junkie awakens from coma, realizes she is preg w/ dead lover's child. Keeps baby and chills on beach, dead lover's brother visits her. w/ Ozon for a Q&A. ALSO SUN 8:45p
* "Making Plans for Lena (Non ma fille, tu n'iras pas danser)", (dir. Christophe Honoré, 2009), screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette St, Ft Greene (B/M/QR to DeKalb, 23/45 to Nevins), 5:30p. So BAM took on a few of the Lincoln Center's "Rendez-vous with French Cinema" screenings, like this bijoux w/ Chiara Mastrioianni in a riveting single-mom performance. Oh, and that tousled-haired heartthrob Louis Garrel has a cameo.
* "The Mirror/Zerkalo" (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 9p. The circular, non-chronological, loosely autobiographical centerpiece of Tarkovsky's oeuvre, bookended by the trippy futurist affairs "Solaris" and "The Stalker".
* Peter Kruder @ Littlefield / 622 Degraw, Boerum Hill (M/R to Union), 10p/$20. Like a really nice bit of k.b. I had in university, the hazy, sexual music of Kruder (aka Peace Orchestra, and one 1/2 of Kruder & Dorfmeister) comes rushing back into my lungs. I had NO IDEA he has a 'new' album out, "Private Collection" from last summer (it's a mix, true, but a sexy mix). This could be scintillatingly hot.
SUNDAY
* Japan Nite @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/$15. Bright, swingy pop from Tokushima? Check: CHATMONCHY. Chorus-y power-pop? Check: Red Bacteria Vacuum. Psych-rock crossed w/ Ramones? Check: Okamoto's. 3rd Wave ska played by a bunch of REALLY cute Osaka girls? Check: JinnyOops! OK, I'm there.
* "Hadewijch" (dir. Bruno Dumont, 2009) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette St, Ft Greene (B/M/QR to DeKalb, 23/45 to Nevins), 3p. The new film of the challenging Fanders-based, New French Extremity director, about a young girl banished from a super-duper strict Catholic convent and her ensuing relationship with and Arab boy and his fundamentalist brother.
* "Solaris" (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 4p. Haven't decided which '70s-era Tarkovsky film is the trippiest: "Solaris", "The Mirror" or "The Stalker" (sadly not screening here). The latter is truly a psychedelic affair, w/ a journey akin to that of Ilya Khrzhanovsky's "4" (see TUES), but you can't beat "Solaris"' incredibly thoughtful, emotive sci-fi.
MONDAY
* CHATMONCHY @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$7. "Three Girls from Japan Who Rock", so sez CHATMONCHY's Myspace page. OK I'm convinced! They also play Japan Nite (SUN) @ Bowery Ballroom. w/ Sky White Tiger, aka Louis Schwadron, a rather tripped out dude from Polyphonic Spree.
* Fruit Bats @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/$15. Positive vibes, love songs, shimmery folk-rock. Well...I am an unabashed fan of twee-pop, no? Add Eric Johnson + crew, like a dash of The Association crossed w/ Allman Bros, to the mix. I can dig.
TUESDAY
* "4" (dir. Ilya Khrzhanovsky, 2005) screening @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 6:30p/$5. A harrowing, psychedelic journey into a particular taiga hell. The first 1/2 of this unparalleled mind-trip is a brooding three-POV dialogue in a dark Moscow bar. Witty, wry, sexy, slightly twisted — all that. Then it quickly spirals way out into a frightening, yet not totally unbelievable, landscape.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Marina Abramović "The Artist is Present" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). There she is, performing the shows titular new piece, seated in an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair at a similarly wooden table in the centre of Marron Atrium, surrounded on four sides by massive softboxes and a few video cameras. She's probably wearing an incredible flowing dress and, besides the queue of people waiting to sit across from her, fulfilling the 2nd part of "The Artist is Present", there's probably a bunch of people milling around, maybe trying to snap a photo on their iPhone, perhaps sitting against the wall, taking in the spectacle, then slowly relaxing as Abramovic's spirit pervades the space, as fully and effectively as Pipilotti Rist's "Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)".
This is how I suggest you take in the show. Note Abramović, walk about the atrium, then head upstairs. The 6th Fl opens w/ a cacophony, throwing you off your senses. There are video screens lining one wall (you catch her wrenching howl emitted from "Freeing the Voice", 1976, where she screams until she loses her voice), another screen overhead (the disquieting "Art must be Beautiful, Artist must be Beautiful", 1975, where she furiously brushes her hair, drawing blood), and prints and slideshows on the other wall of her "Rhythm" series. The room is dark, a deafening vocal soup bounds off all corners, and in the distance, flanking a narrow doorway, is the 1st reperformance piece, "Imponderabilia" (1977), two nude performers that you must pass between before proceeding further into the show. I dare you not to lose your balance! It's an effective juxtaposition, the initial jolt of the room w/ the shimmy b/w the performers. Further in we get Abramović's many collaborative works w/ Ulay, her longtime lover and artistic equal, two of which are reperformed here: "Point of Contact" (1980), done in a spotlit nook, where the two performers point their index juuust to the point of not touching whilst staring into each other's eyes, and "Relation in Time" (1977), done here in a clinical all-white chamber, where the two sit back to back w/ their hair tied together. The palpable tension in the former (no doubt due to the fact that they're 1) standing and 2) pointing) doesn't translate to the latter, which was originally performed for like 17 hours straight by Abramović and Ulay. Bypass the video explanations/installation of "Balkan Baroque" (1997, which obviously doesn't hold the same visceral impact as the original — better is the installation for "House With An Ocean View", show at Sean Kelly Gallery in 2002 and feat. here w/ a new voiceover soundtrack) and catch "Nude with Skeleton" (2005), situated on a platform, in a room w/ some of Abramović's later Balkan Erotic Epic videos. In the adjacent room is the strenuous "Luminosity" (1997), where the nude performer is suspended high up on the wall, caught in the glow of a spotlight that just LOOKS hot. Besides "Point of Contact", this seems for me to be the toughest reperformed piece. The MoMA included two fine informative installations here as well, one a timeline of Abramović, childhood to present day, w/ related photography and info, and also Abramović's singular "Seven Easy Pieces", performed at the Gugg in Nov 2005, w/ a video of each work. This was my 1st close contact w/ the artist, doing Joseph Beuys' "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" (1965). It's a fab way to pull the show together, as most NYers will remember it, even if they didn't attend it. I advise you to retrace your steps back to the entrance (though note: you can't pass through "Imponderabilia" the opposite way; it's a one-way gate) and you just might catch the performers switching spots. The reperformances last 2.5 hours and the changeover, something like the performers waking from a dream, donning robes, and sleepwalking off whilst the the person/duo deftly glides into place, is mesmerizing.
Now return to the atrium, your mind probably overwhelmed as mine was by what you experienced on the 6th fl, the five performances and loads of video and stills. Return to the light-drenched space, abuzz with museum guests yet somehow quiet, somehow calming. Go over to the queue and then sit with Abramović. She's like RIGHT THERE. She didn't shy away from an audience after "Rhythm 0" (1974), when that one bastard placed a loaded gun at her head. She was there in 2005 at the Guggenheim, performing Vito Acconci's "Seedbed" (1972) as an endless legion walked over her. And she's here now, bringing all this incomparable energy to the space. Sit with her for a bit, look into her eyes and share some of that energy, give some of that back to her so she can continue being one of the finest artists alive.
* Otto Dix @ Neue Galerie / 1048 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). I hesitate to begin this review on the 1st Dix show of its kind and calibre in N. America w/ complaints, but I've got two: 1) the absence of his early Cubo-Expressionist works (one is included in the show, "Memory of the Halls of Mirrors in Brussels" from 1920, and it's a psychedelic beaut) and other glaring omissions ("The Skat Players", also in Cubo-Expressionist style, and the trippy "Matchbook Seller" from the same period are represented here by loose drawings, not the knockout paintings they would become) and 2) the lack of chronology, though this makes for a slightly disorienting viewing and perhaps an overall fulfilling experience, so long as you make the rounds at least twice. I guess the thing is, this is the 1st N. American Dix show of its kind, the purveyor of Neue Sachlichkeit, and it is enormously amazing, but if there is anything lacking it comes all the more glaringly obvious. That said, this show packs a punch, most evidently from the "Der Krieg" (The War) installation of 50 etchings from a much larger suite. Dix made these haunting, disquieting works as a soldier in WWI and the atrocities on and off the battlefield — imagery of ravaged corpses, dark barren ground, lecherous men w/ prostitutes, and above all skulls, skulls everywhere — are a grueling viewing. I mean I THOUGHT I knew Dix delved into troubling subject-matter but these are truly intense and, as they all come from the same 1916-7 period, indelibly coherent. Upstairs is looser, selections of realist portraits (personal faves "Portrait of the Laryngologist Dr. Mayer-Hermann", w/ its mirrored backdrop, "Portrait of the Lawyer Dr. Hugo Simons" against a nondescript color, a recurring theme of Dix's, and of course the dramatic "Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber", where he's captured the highlights in each and every silky fold of her scarlet-red, form-hugging dress), self-portraits (check esp the juxtaposition on "Self-Portrait with Nude Model") and landscapes — which I've never seen before, Dix's landscapes, which span into miles in the distance. This isn't 'light' subject matter, either, b/c for every mother w/ child, buttoned-up dandies, or sexy nude woman we have messy watercolors of prostitutes and soldiers, etchings of lustmord, and one watercolor titled "Dedicated to Sadists" w/ a pair of whip-wielding dominatrixes.
* "\ (Lean)" @ Nicole Klagsbrun / 526 W 26th St #213. YES, a brainy group show w/ a varied cast based around a taut li'l theme that, on the surface is easily illustrated (stuff leaning) but, in execution allows for so many different things. Case in point: Nari Ward's line of fourteen burnt baseball bats, each coated w/ a mottling of cotton. It's a disturbing piece on many levels and cuts to the crux of the artist's dynamic, informed style. I suppose the opposite end, at least in mindless eye-candy, would be John McCracken's stunning "UFO", mirrored quite funnily by Rashid Johnson's "Pink Lotion Box", a surfboard-sized lozenge of plexiglass filled w/ Pepto Bismol-colored lotion. The blunt use of packing materials is in high form here, ranging from Gedi Sibony's typically discreet works and Robert Gober's drawbridge-sized "Plywood", which is exactly that but painted so subtly that it glows at a distance — and of course the double-take provided by Mitzi Pederson and Sam Moyer's buoyant choices (sand and glitter for her, moving blankets for him). And special mention to Bas Jan Ader, contributing I think the oldest piece here (1970), a performance still of him falling against a sawhorse — he was perhaps the most tantalizing figure in MoMA's "In & Out of Amsterdam" show (which LIST readers will note I'm still obsessed w/ that knockout show).
* Jessica Jackson Hutchins "Over Come Over" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) / 261 Broome St. Hutchins does a fine job of conveying the beguiling impression of human presence and absence via her trade glazed ceramic vessels and roughly composed plaster forms (and deftly chosen other media). Her Pres. Obama-newspapered sofa at this year's Whitney Biennial is one of the stronger pieces in an overall solid show, AND she had an echo-y presence at this year's Armory Show (repped by this gallery and Derek Eller's) — so 2010 has been a particularly good year to 'get to know' this Portland-based artist's dynamic mixed media works. This show works excellently as an installation, w/ pieces involving chairs (the striking "Sweater Arms", incl. a sweater pinned to a chair by a ceramic vase) or chair-like forms (the disarming "Leaning Figure") referenced in collage works on paper. Same deal in the side gallery, w/ a crouching ceramic blob, "Disgraced Skater", echoed w/ collaged newsprint works about the same subject.
* Robert Morris @ Leo Castelli / 18 E 77th St. Q: What's cooler than seeing Morris' seminal 1969 scatter piece back in Castelli's gallery? A: I don't know!!! Is that a trick question?? This is brilliant: a room you can navigate through full of juicy metal angles and slabs (from shiny brass to textured Cor-Ten steel to deep zinc and lead), w/ the walls piled high by blocks and floppy triangles of black felt. This recreated work is augmented by nine original work drawings related to the piece.
* Tara Sinn "XANAX" + Rafaël Rozendaal "Broken Self" @ Spencer Brownstone Gallery / 39 Wooster St. NICE. Multimedia (aka web-based) artist Rozendaal was one of my favorites from this year's VOLTA NY w/ good reason: his super-creative (and often endearingly simple) 'sites' carried emotion far beyond the typical source-code. One of those pieces, "Broken Self", is recreated in the gallery as a (by now) very patina'd painted screen of a brick wall, the floor littered w/ glass shards. There's a barrier like 20' away and a bunch of empty liquor bottles. You sign a waver, don the gloves and protective eyewear, and hurl a bottle at said screen (I did a Brooklyn Brewery IPA; it felt GREAT). Wayyy different than the mouse-click thing from the original site. I'd love to see more of these Rozendaal-concocted interactives. Sinn's contribution of XANAX involves Mylar balloons and is a cheeky counterpoint to Rozendaal.
* Rosson Crow "Bowery Boys" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. The penultimate show at Deitch is a fierce summary of classic (and in blurred ways, contemporary) naughty downtown NYC culture, so infused in Deitch itself, wielded w/ hallucinogenic panache by Crow. Her works are huge and familiar by degrees (even if you've never been to The Cock, you'll no doubt recognize its facade, or white-neon titular animal, unless you've like never been on the Bowery before. In some works, she combines the 'old' bad boy-type w/ the new, like "The Bang Bang Room", overlaying Andre Balazs' Boom Boom Room w/ Bruce Nauman's neon copulating figures. Others have particular timing, like the riff on the Dakis show at the New Museum. Or there's "The Nest", named after the Dash Snow + Dan Colen famous installation at Deitch, perhaps the gallery's pivotal show and, considering Snow's premature passing, definitely the coda to an era.
* Josef Albers "Formulation: Articulation, 1972" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St. The sumptuous collection of 127 silkscreened plates, finished shortly before Albers' death and acting as a summation of his ongoing investigation into color and perception. The exhibition is laid out as a portfolio — oh how I would have LOVED to see the originals, on the wall where they belong — and there is so much beauty here it's out of control. Albers took shapes, his beloved square, prisms, lines, curves, and built, rebuilt endlessly. Nothing feels overdone, nothing fussy or unnecessary. But intriguing objects emerge, like treble clef curves in one instance, blocky owl faces in various complementary colors in another. And there's nothing quite like his cascading lines, which I so enjoyed as the glass reliefs seen at the MoMA's "Bahaus" show.
LAST CHANCE
* 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.
* 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.
* Superflex "Flooded McDonald's" @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. The 21-minute allure of this Danish collective's titular video rivals many of the long-players in theatres right now. Picture this: they mocked up a true-to-life McDonalds (that iconic fast-food institution that has metastasized globally) then inundated it w/ water. Said deluge first appears to come from the loo (hilarious), but then its everywhere, rising w/in minutes. One of the 1st casualties, funnily enough, is the life-size Ronald McDonald statue (made of plastic, I'm guessing, as it floats buoyantly amidst the waves). Then you have the trays of uneaten food sweeping off the tables (the lead-up is palpable, you're like 'oh I canNOT wait to see what happens'). Finally, the electric signage (golden arches et al) fizzle out, and we're left w/ a few minutes of creepy submerged darkness, the odd fry or soda can floating by... Superflex's other two videos don't hold the same power, though their cinematic 'Burning Car' will satiate action-movie freaks.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
IN PROGRESS
* Rendez-Vous with French Cinema @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St). This unbearably chic festival of contemporary French cinema is back. I warned you two weeks ago to begin reserving your shows, b/c 1) this is a very popular film festival (IMO, third to New York Film Festival and NYAFF) and 2) Film Society members were already reserving their tix since the last week of Feb. So go at it. THRU MAR 21
THURSDAY
* Ed Paschke @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. A bristling career look at the gritty Pop artist, whose seductively rendered oil paintings, in increasingly sickly, hallucinogenic hues, reveal the shady underside of the 'cool'. Jeff Koons, Paschke's asst in the mid-70s, curates this exhibition.
+ Alberto di Fabio. Vivid acrylic abstracts of stuff that looks like supernovas and plant cells, paintings to lose yourself in.
* Marlene Dumas "Against the Wall" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 533 W 19th St. New paintings and other works taking reference from media imagery of Israel and Palestine, but w/ a broader theme of isolation and lack of communication, w/ Dumas' typical stripped-down and ghostly figurative brush.
* Ursula von Rydingsvard "ERRATUS" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. How do you immediately make W 26th St cooler, and thereby answer the male-artist large-scale-sculpture shows @ Gagosian nearby? Drop three monumental new works by von Rydingsvard, epic carved, undulating cedar walls and waves. I cannot wait!
* Todd Hebert @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Paintings and works on paper in a hyperrealistic style that somehow, probably due to the lighting (cityscapes, christmas lights etc) and the use of blurring, become cleverly abstract.
+ Ross Rudel "Burgeon", new mixed media sculptural works, adding a bit of grounding to the show.
* Ryan McGinley "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere" @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. McGinley takes on the raw studio portrait. Result: a slew of b&w photos, piercing gazes, oddly spontaneous despite the behind-the-scenes meticulousness of McGinley's work. w/ a few large-scale, exuberant color photos to buoy the mood a tad.
* Joseph Smolinski @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Environmentally-conscious works on paper and video, related to American wildlife and infringing technologies and industry.
* Charline von Heyl @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. New almost collage-y mixed media abstract paintings, marrying Von Heyl's intricate linework w/ sensuous undulating shapes, drips and splashes of color.
* Charles Sabba "If You Don't Want Your Thoughts Stolen Don't Open Your Mind" @ Y Gallery / 355A Bowery. Artist/police officer Sabba brings an intriguing medium to the mix, as in fingerprint ink, used in renderings of art-thieves and recreations of infamous related events, created on FBI and New Jersey PD fingerprint cards.
* Warren Isensee @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. The laborious, multicolored bands of rounded-corner rectangles return, but it looks like Isensee has injected even more humor into his works on paper and paintings beyond their witty titles. Dare I even call them: musical?
* "Restless (Le Bel âge)", (dir. Laurent Perreau, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "Rendez-vous with French Cinema"), 8:45p. Debut film by Perreau, w/ young actress Pauline Étienne as a rebellious orphan sent to live w/ an exceedingly gruff grandfather (legendary Michel Piccoli) — and the cross-generational bond that forms in the process. w/ Perreau in attendance.
FRIDAY
* Aki Sasamoto "Strange Attractors" @ Whitney Museum (part of 2010 Whitney Biennial), 4p. I caught Sasamoto last year at Zach Feuer and I was hooked. I have this vision in my head about Joseph Beuys' chalkboard 'teaching' performances, and to me Sasamoto's stream-of-consciousness forays into the sociopolitical, the mathematical and the mundane (somehow she balances all this, coherently) is, to me, like a Beuys. Her lair @ the Whitney, astrewn w/ video cameras and hanging net bags containing microphones and water glasses, is the site of her shows, performed at 4p on dates incl the numerals '6' and '9' (so if you can't make this one you've other chances).
* Catherine Opie "Girlfriends" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. A combined experience of new color photographs and vintage b&w prints of the butch-dyke identity, via celebrity (k.d. lang, Eileen Myles), friends and partners.
* Jim Torok "You Are a Vibrant Human Being" @ Pierogi / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg. Torok provides a two-for-one in this exhibition of his new portraitures, w/ realistic miniatures of friends and neighbors v. cartoon-like renderings of clowns w/ accompanying loose-brush, text-only paintings.
* Elliot Hundley "Agave of the Bacchae" @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Taking cues from Euripides, Hundley has created something of an installation, backgrounded by loads of photographs of costumed players and zooming off from there. I'd imagine the opening reception to be appropriately 'Bacchanal'.
+ Inez Van Lamsweerde + Vinoodh Matadin & Eugene Van Lamsweerde "Sculptographs". I mean...this just SOUNDS cool non?
* Simon Hantai @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. Fantastically patterned 'folded' canvases from Hantai's heyday in the '60s onward. IMO he's way underexposed here so this should be a treat for a genre-pushing Abstract artist from the mid-20th C who wasn't a NYer (or even an American for that matter).
* "Making Plans for Lena (Non ma fille, tu n'iras pas danser)", (dir. Christophe Honoré, 2009), screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "Rendez-vous with French Cinema"), 8:45p. Classic Honoré, w/ Chiara Mastrioianni in a riveting single-mom performance. Oh, and that tousled-haired heartthrob Louis Garrel has a cameo. Honoré AND Mastrioianni attend for the Q&A.
SATURDAY
* Janet Cardiff & George Burnes Miller @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Several great (happier) multisensory encounters from the duo, incl the large installation "The Carnie" (a sonically-treated carousel) and something billed as a DJ mix-station called "The Cabinet of Curiousness", which sounds like a circuit-bent card catalog that must be scene — and 'played' — to be believed. You know I'm down!
* Meg Webster @ Paula Cooper Boutique / 465 W 23rd St. Trust me in this absolutely calming, sensorial minimalist show. Webster coats square sheets of paper w/ various spices, ingredients or industrial media to create fragrant 'monotone' pieces. Another instance where experiencing in person is WAY better than just photos.
* "Debris" @ PPOW / 511 W 25th St #301. Three artists make beautifully intense works out of discarded stuff. Aurora Robson's ink and junk mail collages could be some twee Pop Surrealist masterwork. Her works come off way cheerier than the full-on assault of Sarah Frost's derelict keyboards and Portia Munson's show-stopping 'Pink Project' and 'Green Piece', which are a whole bunch of stuff in those colors.
* "Le Refuge", (dir. François Ozon, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "Rendez-vous with French Cinema"), 6:15p. Never one to avoid a tricky subject, Ozon delivers: ex-junkie awakens from coma, realizes she is preg w/ dead lover's child. Keeps baby and chills on beach, dead lover's brother visits her. w/ Ozon for a Q&A. ALSO SUN 8:45p
* "Making Plans for Lena (Non ma fille, tu n'iras pas danser)", (dir. Christophe Honoré, 2009), screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette St, Ft Greene (B/M/QR to DeKalb, 23/45 to Nevins), 5:30p. So BAM took on a few of the Lincoln Center's "Rendez-vous with French Cinema" screenings, like this bijoux w/ Chiara Mastrioianni in a riveting single-mom performance. Oh, and that tousled-haired heartthrob Louis Garrel has a cameo.
* "The Mirror/Zerkalo" (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 9p. The circular, non-chronological, loosely autobiographical centerpiece of Tarkovsky's oeuvre, bookended by the trippy futurist affairs "Solaris" and "The Stalker".
* Peter Kruder @ Littlefield / 622 Degraw, Boerum Hill (M/R to Union), 10p/$20. Like a really nice bit of k.b. I had in university, the hazy, sexual music of Kruder (aka Peace Orchestra, and one 1/2 of Kruder & Dorfmeister) comes rushing back into my lungs. I had NO IDEA he has a 'new' album out, "Private Collection" from last summer (it's a mix, true, but a sexy mix). This could be scintillatingly hot.
SUNDAY
* Japan Nite @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/$15. Bright, swingy pop from Tokushima? Check: CHATMONCHY. Chorus-y power-pop? Check: Red Bacteria Vacuum. Psych-rock crossed w/ Ramones? Check: Okamoto's. 3rd Wave ska played by a bunch of REALLY cute Osaka girls? Check: JinnyOops! OK, I'm there.
* "Hadewijch" (dir. Bruno Dumont, 2009) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette St, Ft Greene (B/M/QR to DeKalb, 23/45 to Nevins), 3p. The new film of the challenging Fanders-based, New French Extremity director, about a young girl banished from a super-duper strict Catholic convent and her ensuing relationship with and Arab boy and his fundamentalist brother.
* "Solaris" (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 4p. Haven't decided which '70s-era Tarkovsky film is the trippiest: "Solaris", "The Mirror" or "The Stalker" (sadly not screening here). The latter is truly a psychedelic affair, w/ a journey akin to that of Ilya Khrzhanovsky's "4" (see TUES), but you can't beat "Solaris"' incredibly thoughtful, emotive sci-fi.
MONDAY
* CHATMONCHY @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$7. "Three Girls from Japan Who Rock", so sez CHATMONCHY's Myspace page. OK I'm convinced! They also play Japan Nite (SUN) @ Bowery Ballroom. w/ Sky White Tiger, aka Louis Schwadron, a rather tripped out dude from Polyphonic Spree.
* Fruit Bats @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/$15. Positive vibes, love songs, shimmery folk-rock. Well...I am an unabashed fan of twee-pop, no? Add Eric Johnson + crew, like a dash of The Association crossed w/ Allman Bros, to the mix. I can dig.
TUESDAY
* "4" (dir. Ilya Khrzhanovsky, 2005) screening @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 6:30p/$5. A harrowing, psychedelic journey into a particular taiga hell. The first 1/2 of this unparalleled mind-trip is a brooding three-POV dialogue in a dark Moscow bar. Witty, wry, sexy, slightly twisted — all that. Then it quickly spirals way out into a frightening, yet not totally unbelievable, landscape.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Marina Abramović "The Artist is Present" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). There she is, performing the shows titular new piece, seated in an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair at a similarly wooden table in the centre of Marron Atrium, surrounded on four sides by massive softboxes and a few video cameras. She's probably wearing an incredible flowing dress and, besides the queue of people waiting to sit across from her, fulfilling the 2nd part of "The Artist is Present", there's probably a bunch of people milling around, maybe trying to snap a photo on their iPhone, perhaps sitting against the wall, taking in the spectacle, then slowly relaxing as Abramovic's spirit pervades the space, as fully and effectively as Pipilotti Rist's "Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)".
This is how I suggest you take in the show. Note Abramović, walk about the atrium, then head upstairs. The 6th Fl opens w/ a cacophony, throwing you off your senses. There are video screens lining one wall (you catch her wrenching howl emitted from "Freeing the Voice", 1976, where she screams until she loses her voice), another screen overhead (the disquieting "Art must be Beautiful, Artist must be Beautiful", 1975, where she furiously brushes her hair, drawing blood), and prints and slideshows on the other wall of her "Rhythm" series. The room is dark, a deafening vocal soup bounds off all corners, and in the distance, flanking a narrow doorway, is the 1st reperformance piece, "Imponderabilia" (1977), two nude performers that you must pass between before proceeding further into the show. I dare you not to lose your balance! It's an effective juxtaposition, the initial jolt of the room w/ the shimmy b/w the performers. Further in we get Abramović's many collaborative works w/ Ulay, her longtime lover and artistic equal, two of which are reperformed here: "Point of Contact" (1980), done in a spotlit nook, where the two performers point their index juuust to the point of not touching whilst staring into each other's eyes, and "Relation in Time" (1977), done here in a clinical all-white chamber, where the two sit back to back w/ their hair tied together. The palpable tension in the former (no doubt due to the fact that they're 1) standing and 2) pointing) doesn't translate to the latter, which was originally performed for like 17 hours straight by Abramović and Ulay. Bypass the video explanations/installation of "Balkan Baroque" (1997, which obviously doesn't hold the same visceral impact as the original — better is the installation for "House With An Ocean View", show at Sean Kelly Gallery in 2002 and feat. here w/ a new voiceover soundtrack) and catch "Nude with Skeleton" (2005), situated on a platform, in a room w/ some of Abramović's later Balkan Erotic Epic videos. In the adjacent room is the strenuous "Luminosity" (1997), where the nude performer is suspended high up on the wall, caught in the glow of a spotlight that just LOOKS hot. Besides "Point of Contact", this seems for me to be the toughest reperformed piece. The MoMA included two fine informative installations here as well, one a timeline of Abramović, childhood to present day, w/ related photography and info, and also Abramović's singular "Seven Easy Pieces", performed at the Gugg in Nov 2005, w/ a video of each work. This was my 1st close contact w/ the artist, doing Joseph Beuys' "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" (1965). It's a fab way to pull the show together, as most NYers will remember it, even if they didn't attend it. I advise you to retrace your steps back to the entrance (though note: you can't pass through "Imponderabilia" the opposite way; it's a one-way gate) and you just might catch the performers switching spots. The reperformances last 2.5 hours and the changeover, something like the performers waking from a dream, donning robes, and sleepwalking off whilst the the person/duo deftly glides into place, is mesmerizing.
Now return to the atrium, your mind probably overwhelmed as mine was by what you experienced on the 6th fl, the five performances and loads of video and stills. Return to the light-drenched space, abuzz with museum guests yet somehow quiet, somehow calming. Go over to the queue and then sit with Abramović. She's like RIGHT THERE. She didn't shy away from an audience after "Rhythm 0" (1974), when that one bastard placed a loaded gun at her head. She was there in 2005 at the Guggenheim, performing Vito Acconci's "Seedbed" (1972) as an endless legion walked over her. And she's here now, bringing all this incomparable energy to the space. Sit with her for a bit, look into her eyes and share some of that energy, give some of that back to her so she can continue being one of the finest artists alive.
* Otto Dix @ Neue Galerie / 1048 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). I hesitate to begin this review on the 1st Dix show of its kind and calibre in N. America w/ complaints, but I've got two: 1) the absence of his early Cubo-Expressionist works (one is included in the show, "Memory of the Halls of Mirrors in Brussels" from 1920, and it's a psychedelic beaut) and other glaring omissions ("The Skat Players", also in Cubo-Expressionist style, and the trippy "Matchbook Seller" from the same period are represented here by loose drawings, not the knockout paintings they would become) and 2) the lack of chronology, though this makes for a slightly disorienting viewing and perhaps an overall fulfilling experience, so long as you make the rounds at least twice. I guess the thing is, this is the 1st N. American Dix show of its kind, the purveyor of Neue Sachlichkeit, and it is enormously amazing, but if there is anything lacking it comes all the more glaringly obvious. That said, this show packs a punch, most evidently from the "Der Krieg" (The War) installation of 50 etchings from a much larger suite. Dix made these haunting, disquieting works as a soldier in WWI and the atrocities on and off the battlefield — imagery of ravaged corpses, dark barren ground, lecherous men w/ prostitutes, and above all skulls, skulls everywhere — are a grueling viewing. I mean I THOUGHT I knew Dix delved into troubling subject-matter but these are truly intense and, as they all come from the same 1916-7 period, indelibly coherent. Upstairs is looser, selections of realist portraits (personal faves "Portrait of the Laryngologist Dr. Mayer-Hermann", w/ its mirrored backdrop, "Portrait of the Lawyer Dr. Hugo Simons" against a nondescript color, a recurring theme of Dix's, and of course the dramatic "Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber", where he's captured the highlights in each and every silky fold of her scarlet-red, form-hugging dress), self-portraits (check esp the juxtaposition on "Self-Portrait with Nude Model") and landscapes — which I've never seen before, Dix's landscapes, which span into miles in the distance. This isn't 'light' subject matter, either, b/c for every mother w/ child, buttoned-up dandies, or sexy nude woman we have messy watercolors of prostitutes and soldiers, etchings of lustmord, and one watercolor titled "Dedicated to Sadists" w/ a pair of whip-wielding dominatrixes.
* "\ (Lean)" @ Nicole Klagsbrun / 526 W 26th St #213. YES, a brainy group show w/ a varied cast based around a taut li'l theme that, on the surface is easily illustrated (stuff leaning) but, in execution allows for so many different things. Case in point: Nari Ward's line of fourteen burnt baseball bats, each coated w/ a mottling of cotton. It's a disturbing piece on many levels and cuts to the crux of the artist's dynamic, informed style. I suppose the opposite end, at least in mindless eye-candy, would be John McCracken's stunning "UFO", mirrored quite funnily by Rashid Johnson's "Pink Lotion Box", a surfboard-sized lozenge of plexiglass filled w/ Pepto Bismol-colored lotion. The blunt use of packing materials is in high form here, ranging from Gedi Sibony's typically discreet works and Robert Gober's drawbridge-sized "Plywood", which is exactly that but painted so subtly that it glows at a distance — and of course the double-take provided by Mitzi Pederson and Sam Moyer's buoyant choices (sand and glitter for her, moving blankets for him). And special mention to Bas Jan Ader, contributing I think the oldest piece here (1970), a performance still of him falling against a sawhorse — he was perhaps the most tantalizing figure in MoMA's "In & Out of Amsterdam" show (which LIST readers will note I'm still obsessed w/ that knockout show).
* Jessica Jackson Hutchins "Over Come Over" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) / 261 Broome St. Hutchins does a fine job of conveying the beguiling impression of human presence and absence via her trade glazed ceramic vessels and roughly composed plaster forms (and deftly chosen other media). Her Pres. Obama-newspapered sofa at this year's Whitney Biennial is one of the stronger pieces in an overall solid show, AND she had an echo-y presence at this year's Armory Show (repped by this gallery and Derek Eller's) — so 2010 has been a particularly good year to 'get to know' this Portland-based artist's dynamic mixed media works. This show works excellently as an installation, w/ pieces involving chairs (the striking "Sweater Arms", incl. a sweater pinned to a chair by a ceramic vase) or chair-like forms (the disarming "Leaning Figure") referenced in collage works on paper. Same deal in the side gallery, w/ a crouching ceramic blob, "Disgraced Skater", echoed w/ collaged newsprint works about the same subject.
* Robert Morris @ Leo Castelli / 18 E 77th St. Q: What's cooler than seeing Morris' seminal 1969 scatter piece back in Castelli's gallery? A: I don't know!!! Is that a trick question?? This is brilliant: a room you can navigate through full of juicy metal angles and slabs (from shiny brass to textured Cor-Ten steel to deep zinc and lead), w/ the walls piled high by blocks and floppy triangles of black felt. This recreated work is augmented by nine original work drawings related to the piece.
* Tara Sinn "XANAX" + Rafaël Rozendaal "Broken Self" @ Spencer Brownstone Gallery / 39 Wooster St. NICE. Multimedia (aka web-based) artist Rozendaal was one of my favorites from this year's VOLTA NY w/ good reason: his super-creative (and often endearingly simple) 'sites' carried emotion far beyond the typical source-code. One of those pieces, "Broken Self", is recreated in the gallery as a (by now) very patina'd painted screen of a brick wall, the floor littered w/ glass shards. There's a barrier like 20' away and a bunch of empty liquor bottles. You sign a waver, don the gloves and protective eyewear, and hurl a bottle at said screen (I did a Brooklyn Brewery IPA; it felt GREAT). Wayyy different than the mouse-click thing from the original site. I'd love to see more of these Rozendaal-concocted interactives. Sinn's contribution of XANAX involves Mylar balloons and is a cheeky counterpoint to Rozendaal.
* Rosson Crow "Bowery Boys" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. The penultimate show at Deitch is a fierce summary of classic (and in blurred ways, contemporary) naughty downtown NYC culture, so infused in Deitch itself, wielded w/ hallucinogenic panache by Crow. Her works are huge and familiar by degrees (even if you've never been to The Cock, you'll no doubt recognize its facade, or white-neon titular animal, unless you've like never been on the Bowery before. In some works, she combines the 'old' bad boy-type w/ the new, like "The Bang Bang Room", overlaying Andre Balazs' Boom Boom Room w/ Bruce Nauman's neon copulating figures. Others have particular timing, like the riff on the Dakis show at the New Museum. Or there's "The Nest", named after the Dash Snow + Dan Colen famous installation at Deitch, perhaps the gallery's pivotal show and, considering Snow's premature passing, definitely the coda to an era.
* Josef Albers "Formulation: Articulation, 1972" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St. The sumptuous collection of 127 silkscreened plates, finished shortly before Albers' death and acting as a summation of his ongoing investigation into color and perception. The exhibition is laid out as a portfolio — oh how I would have LOVED to see the originals, on the wall where they belong — and there is so much beauty here it's out of control. Albers took shapes, his beloved square, prisms, lines, curves, and built, rebuilt endlessly. Nothing feels overdone, nothing fussy or unnecessary. But intriguing objects emerge, like treble clef curves in one instance, blocky owl faces in various complementary colors in another. And there's nothing quite like his cascading lines, which I so enjoyed as the glass reliefs seen at the MoMA's "Bahaus" show.
LAST CHANCE
* 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.
* 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.
* Superflex "Flooded McDonald's" @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. The 21-minute allure of this Danish collective's titular video rivals many of the long-players in theatres right now. Picture this: they mocked up a true-to-life McDonalds (that iconic fast-food institution that has metastasized globally) then inundated it w/ water. Said deluge first appears to come from the loo (hilarious), but then its everywhere, rising w/in minutes. One of the 1st casualties, funnily enough, is the life-size Ronald McDonald statue (made of plastic, I'm guessing, as it floats buoyantly amidst the waves). Then you have the trays of uneaten food sweeping off the tables (the lead-up is palpable, you're like 'oh I canNOT wait to see what happens'). Finally, the electric signage (golden arches et al) fizzle out, and we're left w/ a few minutes of creepy submerged darkness, the odd fry or soda can floating by... Superflex's other two videos don't hold the same power, though their cinematic 'Burning Car' will satiate action-movie freaks.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
fee's LIST (through 3/16)
WEDNESDAY
* "The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Mythological references in works on paper, spanning over 200 years and feat. artists not always known for their visual-representational tenacity. How ever will MoMA do it? w/ usual suspects and some nice surprises, incl. Odilon Redon, Mark Rothko, Richard Prince, Ana Mendieta, Paul Cezanne and Arshile Gorky.
* Dream Diary + Fluffy Lumbers + McDonalds @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Classic ToddP lineup here. We've got Dream Diary (feat. Madison, the singer/guitarist of rockin' duo Coasting), Fluffy Lumbers (Samuel Franklin, who drums and sings a la Phil Collins, w/ a full band), and the punkish McDonalds (Liam from caUSE co-MOTION!). w/ openers Free Kisses, perfect non?
* Total Slacker + Prince Rama @ Silent Barn / 9-15 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/$7. If Monster Island didn't have such an overloadedly dope lineup, I'd be here. Slacker reverb-heavy indie + electronics paired w/ Hindustani devotional.
THURSDAY
* Otto Dix @ Neue Galerie / 1018 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). 1st solo exhibit of the major German artist EVER in N. America. His particular style of portraiture, ranging from the wildly surreal to the lovingly emotive, is unparalleled — wittily rendered, graphically intense, spanning WWI, sexuality, religion, and of course the 'Golden Weimar Years'.
* "Unspecified Objects" Group Show @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Minimalist art — the show title is taken from Donald Judd's 1965 essay — reinterpreted w/ six contemporary voices. Like Jona Bechtolt (1/2 the band YACHT) and his animated test-pattern (Bruce Nauman?), Rashawn Griffin's 'nostalgia composites' (Joseph Beuys?), David Scanavino's pared-down sculpture (Walter de Maria?).
* Standard Fare @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. Twee as Standard Fare, you say?? Straight out of Sheffield, in town a few days before hitting SXSW. Don't miss these cuties! w/ Diehard (delish NY indie rock).
* Blissed Out + Miho Hatori + Fluffy Lumbers @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle), 7p/$8.Let's take a trip. I mean, the inclusion of always-unpredictable Hatori just won me over. Now if only this didn't conflict w/ Standard Fare at Cake Shop...
* Rendez-Vous with French Cinema @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St). This unbearably chic festival of contemporary French cinema is back. I warned you last week to begin reserving your shows, b/c 1) this is a very popular film festival (IMO, third to New York Film Festival and NYAFF) and 2) Film Society members were already reserving their tix since the last week of Feb. So go at it. THRU MAR 21
FRIDAY
* "\ (Lean)" @ Nicole Klagsbrun / 526 W 26th St #213. Sometimes my pre-review write-ups create themselves, spontaneously, based on superb lineups. Hence: Susan Collis, Robert Gober, Adam McEwen, Gedi Sibony, Nari Ward, Matthew Day Jackson, Richard Tuttle, Keith Sonnier + more
* Josef Albers "Formulation: Articulation, 1972" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St. The sumptuous collection of 127 silkscreened plates, finished shortly before Albers' death and acting as a summation of his ongoing investigation into color and perception.
* 'Brooklyn v. Osaka' @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. YES this will be intense: hard-rockin' all-girl groups from the two cities. w/ Talk Normal (Brooklyn's finest no-wave duo), Moon Mama (one-half of Osaka's freak-rock Afrirampo), Water Fai (Osaka psych-pop) + more.
* "Mother" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2009) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). 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
* Sam Durant "Dead Labor Day" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. Durant's recent work on capital punishment, incl. a large sculpture based on the scaffold use to hang famous Chicago anarchists 'Haymarket Martyrs' in 1887, plus related small-scale sculpture and drawings.
* "Art Museums, Private Collectors, and the Public" symposium @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave), 12:30p/$10 (FREE for members, RSVP here). WOW 'Skin Fruit', the Dakis Joannou collection show, curated by Jeff Koons, has received some interesting press, way before the show opened last week. As in, critics questioning the validity of a private collector showing their wares in a public institution, esp. in the glaring fact that the private collector is blue-chip Joannou and the public institution the assumedly anti-mainstream New Museum. But I am telling you the combo works, here (check my review of the exhibition, under CURRENT SHOWS). For those still doubting, the museum provides two panels tracing the history of patronage and partnerships in American art museums and the future of such collaborations. Richard Flood (Chief Curator of the New Museum) moderates the 1st panel (historic partnerships) and Lisa Phillips (New Museum director) hosts the 2nd panel (future collaborations) at 3p.
* PopJew's Pre-SXSW Showcase @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p/$12 (or $10 w/ food for the road). Rachel, one of my fav NY-area promoters, is throwing a beast of a party before heading down to Austin to cause a musical ruckus. Feat. Darlings (some of the coolest, smart indie-pop I've ever encountered), Sundelles, Total Slacker, My Teenage Stride, Big Troubles + MORE.
* Sissy Spacek @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (F/M/R to 9th St-4th Ave), 8p/$10. A rather auspicious night, I'd say, as I don't recall the last time Cali noisicians Sissy Spacek graced our presence (that's right, 2007 No Fun Fest). Well, it's been awhile and apparently no 2010 No Fun in NYC...
SUNDAY
* Marina Abramović "The Artist is Present" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). All I can say is EPIC. Peerless performance artist Abramović returns to NY w/ a new duration piece — her longest ever and named after the show-title — and five of her classic time-related works, re-performed for the 1st time by a group of carefully selected people (incl. Maria José Arjona, the Columbian performance artist who captivated me at this year's VOLTA NY).
* Standard Fare @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$6. See my Thursday's hyping of Sheffield twee-rockers Standard Fare, then see them twice!
TUESDAY
* Eva Hesse @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. A very special exhibition, focused on Hesse's late-period 'non-art' objects, at once intimate, experimental and challenging.
* Pika & Yuka + Water Fai + Moon Mama @ Pianos / 158 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. In case you missed those hard-rockin' Osaka girls at Bruar Falls Friday nite, you've another chance, only this time Pika & Yuka (meaning, Pika from Afrirampo aka Moon Mama + Yuka Honda) headline. Yikes, this should be dope.
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, curated by Jeff Koons" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave). I'm not here to postulate on the compromise created by hosting New Museum trustee (and Greek multimillionaire) Joannou's collection in a distinctly non-mainstream, anti-establishment complex. Nor am I here to postulate on the swelling value of Joannou's exquisite, eyebrow-raising collection, by hosting it here on American shores, in this selection, for the first time. No, I am an aesthete. I am not aloof to such controversies, but I see the reasons and ingenuity for 1) hosting Joannou's collection here and 2) Koons' fine job of dispersing these A-list artists' raucous works, the type that tend to dominate a room. There's been much said about how overly-busy and stimulus-overloading this show is, that Koons as an art-history-minded collector made a super-crowded show. No he didn't, and that I WILL defend.
Don't miss the side gallery space by the café: it's a great teaser for what's ahead (a text-y joke abstract from Richard Prince, a vibrant pinkish sprayed-silkscreen from Christopher Wool, the creepy "Inochi" figure from Takashi Murakami) plus the busted up body of a camper-like van, outfitted w/ soft toys and a TV and dominating 1/2 the room. This is John Bock's "Malträtierte Fregatte", or rather the installation related to his performance piece of the same name, playing on the TV screen. It adds a good bit of sudden violence that carries, in varying ebbs and flows, in the floors above.
Up the lifts and out the 2nd Fl, we have Koons' only piece in the show, the seductively simple "One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank" aka the 1st Koons artwork Joannou acquired, like 25 years ago, and the spark that set aflame this hyper-visual collection. While the body is a recurring topic in all the works here, and in Joannou's many others in his collection, I found the 2nd Fl to be particularly body-driven, in a fleshy, visceral, lusty sense. The old Ashley Bickerton "F.O.B." exemplifies this at an atomic level, as it looks like an orb of rippling alienesque skin — like a million light-years from his psychedelic tropical imagery now. Maurizio Cattelan's "All", a suite of carved-marble 'body-bags', is truncated from the rest of the floor in a narrow hall, accompanied only by a melodious museum employee replicated Tino Sehgal's "This is Propaganda" and one of two super-freaky Andro Wekua sculptures. This one, "Sneakers", appears to be a long-haired nude girl clad in running shoes, w/ a harlequin pattern tattooed on her bare back, but her head is tucked into her knees, hidden from view. In the main room, Chris Ofili's portraiture,from the trippy cloisonné-appliquéd (and elephant-dunged) to the ecstatic shimmery blue (and chromed) Matisse-like, are some of the most beautiful on the floor (and indeed in the entire show, compare/contrast w/ the, ahem, 'earthy' Tim Noble & Sue Webster 'silhouette' installation on the other side of the lifts). Urs Fischer (another recurring figure in the show, and the only artist to figure into three floors) and Mark Manders 'remix' the body, via Fischer's signature candle figure and Manders' wet-clay-like epoxy torso in an oversized cardboard box. David Altmejd's "Giant", one of the finer of the artist's series of Norse-like gods and heroes, peers away from the action — into a Robert Gober room. Something is up here, in this little installation of Gober's waxy, Puritanical works: the crooked "Scary Sink", the wallpaper of rolling hills and a highway off to nowhere, and the distorted baby's crib, pointed into the wall as being tugged into a black hole. It's off somewhere, and we are meant to follow.
3rd Fl: if the 2nd was 'The Flesh', this one is 'The Dream' (somehow I think Cattelan would be pleased w/ this). Or...is it 'The Nightmare'? Gone is the mellifluous Sehgal piece, replaced here w/ the pervading creak of Wekua's second piece, the wholly disturbing "Wait and Wait", which looks like a partied-out transvestite sitting splay-legged on a rocking chair, their face still half-painted from the previous night, in a multicolored greenhouse-like chamber. Pawel Althamer's duet — an installation based on Jesus and the crucifixion but performed, sporadically, by a male actor, and "Nomo", this gold-plated figure w/ a staff, fighter-jet-nose-like helmet, and briefcase (somehow astronaut, medieval warrior and Pope all in one) that luckily is NOT a performer — are fittingly here, as is Franz West's "Gartenpouf", a strawberry astronaut ice-cream-colored cross-like shape. Cattelan's "Now" fittingly ends the floor w/ its own narrow chamber, filled w/ a 'dead' wax dummy in a coffin. A dream of death? Ascension awaits.
4th Fl: to....Heaven? Nirvana? A spiritual plane? Lots has been written on this floor, beginning w/ the Roberto Cuoghi monstrosity "Pazuzu", but that nearly-20-ft piece somehow recedes into the wall compared to the women guardians of the floor: Charles Ray's "Fall '91" (a larger-than-lifesize businesswoman) and Liza Lou's jewel-encrusted "Super Sister". And while I emphasize that this exhibition is NOT crowded, the 4th Fl in particular has an eerie sparseness to it (like so many of the New Museum's full-museum shows, I've noticed). I encourage you to walk through and around Terence Koh's megalith "Untitled (Chocolate Mountains)", taking in the sickly sweetness of the sculpture whilst perusing the sins of American history, in Kara Walker's powerful half-dozen watercolors. The creaking continues, too, only from Ray's show-stopping "Revolution Counter-Revolution", a grayscale full-sized carnival ride, slowly spinning in both directions simultaneously (meaning the horses go one way, the top the other). And this, a nostalgic yet somehow fractured recollection of childhood, leads us way off to the corner of the floor, to Gober's "Side Bed", ascetically simple, child-sized, awaiting its occupant.
Perhaps you need to see this again.
* Joseph Beuys "Make the Secrets Productive" @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St. NYC was not totally sated by the brilliant, thorough, info-packed survey at Mary Boone Gallery at the threshold of 2010, what w/ its chockablock vitrines of Beuys' famous multiples and press materials. PW got this and presents to us a dozen rare sculptures from the German artist, incl. "Feldbett" (a felt covered block of electric transistors), "Doppelaggregat" (entirely cast-bronze, but like two tables turned upside down and welded to two right-side-up, outfitted w/ these bronzed spools) and "OFEN", a half-dozen massive cylinders of felt stapled to the wall, sucking the sound out of its corner of the gallery. This in itself would be a dope show, but PW goes further in the adjacent gallery, feat. nearly 100 of Ute Klophaus' photos documenting Beuys' "Aktions", incl. the famous "I Like America and America Likes Me" (accompanied by the video, which MoMA also has in their collection but it's too wicked not to pass up, Beuys cavorting w/ a coyote and all), "Eurasienstab", "Filz-TV" (w/ incl. video, feat. Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman) and the bracing "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare". AND IF THAT WASN'T ENOUGH...the gallery opened part of their back-gallery space to footage from Beuys' lecture "Public Dialogue at the New School for Social Research" (1974, his 1st trip to NY) and other films.
* Miao Xiaochun "Microcosm" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St 2nd Fl. This extensive multidisciplinary exhibition — full of computer renderings transferred to canvas and multi-panel wire-model etching-like drawings — center around the titular piece, Miao's take on Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights", a ridiculously detailed nine-panel C-print of a world utopian and chaotic, and its related extra-psychedelic film. You've GOT to watch the film, or at least part of it, where Miao's legions of self-rendered naked men prance about the landscape and dunk in shimmering ponds and, um, take on the impression of potatoes and cucumbers and get sliced up, so wire-model birds can sneak off w/ a piece? It was about here that I felt like I'd dosed a heady hallucinogen, but no it's all part of Miao's process.
* R. Crumb "The Bible Illuminated" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 519 W 19th St. This is indeed the entire Crumb book of pen & ink woodcut-like drawings based on the Book of Genesis, but just b/c you've seen the whole thing laid out on the gallery walls doesn't mean the publication deserves a 2nd look. I was a bit skeptical going in, that the show would reveal everything and leave the publication irrelevant, but Crumb's work — each and every one of these text and image pages — is so lastingly detailed that, if you're engaged w/ it, you need something portable to refer back to, multiple times, to fully appreciate it.
* Esko Männikkö "Harmony Sisters" @ Yancey Richardson Gallery / 535 W 22nd St 3rd Fl. Super-vivid C-prints framed mostly on close-ups of animal eyes; the show opens w/ a horse's closed eye, either at rest or in a wink, yet it particularly feels somehow sad or ashamed. There's a lot here, and the other animal crops (closeup of a cow's muzzle, tongue out, backside of a zebra) break up the otherwise intense gazes of the subjects. It's like you can see into their souls and they, these monkeys, horses, cattle, are staring straight back into you.
* "10th Anniv. Invitational, Part 1" @ Frederieke Taylor Gallery / 535 W 22nd St, 6th Fl. 1st of two 'invitational' group shows, feat. gallery artists and works selected by friends, before the gallery relocates in May. Highlights incl. quite a bit of eye-trickery, courtesy of Mel Chin (think Urs Fischer's "Noisette" but in cast bronze), Long-Bin Chen (a Buddhist head composed of NYC phone-books, there's recycling for you!), tricked out mixed media pieces by Franco Mondini-Ruiz (which mostly involved a figure stuck in some sort of trompe l'oeil food/drink) and abstracts by Mary Lum and Justin Valdes.
+ Marion Wilson "Artificially Free of Nature". Tiny oil paintings deftly rendered on glass slides, each a sparsely attended landscape from a contaminated waste bed near the artist's home in upstate NY. Magnifying glasses included and necessary.
* James Siena @ Pace Prints Chelsea / 521 W 26th St. Geometric woodcuts and engravings in monotone colors, plus some wildly skewed topographical-like drawings to add a bit of flavor to all the straight lines and corners.
* Allen Ruppersberg @ Greene Naftali / 526 W 26th St 8th Fl. The West Coast Conceptualist had, in my opinion, the standout piece in MoMA's overall fab "In & Out of Amsterdam, 1960-1976" exhibition last year, the wall of polaroid-sized C-prints and index cards entitled "Where's Al?" (1972). This two-piece installation, his 1st show at Greene Naftali, requires a bit more digging for immediate gratification but it's a winner. "Big Trouble", a blown-up rendering of a vintage 'Ducktails' comic (evil Scrooge McDuck etc), is Ruppersberg's revisitation and revitalization of a mail-art piece he'd conceived in '69, shown here w/ cut-out mockups from the comic and the entire strip itself. Against this is "The Never-Ending Book Part Two/Art and Therefore Ourselves" (which is cheekily subtitled, in the signage, as 'Songs, Recipes, and the Old People'), a wall mural of color-copied found vintage images (which also fill various boxes in the room), sheet music, Depression-era recipes and these albums that you can actually buy if you want, w/ a bartering system of 50 pre-1970 images for an LP, to continue the journey of this organic work.
LAST CHANCE
* 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 (also ending this weekend).
* 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.
* 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'?'
* 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.
* 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.
* "The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Mythological references in works on paper, spanning over 200 years and feat. artists not always known for their visual-representational tenacity. How ever will MoMA do it? w/ usual suspects and some nice surprises, incl. Odilon Redon, Mark Rothko, Richard Prince, Ana Mendieta, Paul Cezanne and Arshile Gorky.
* Dream Diary + Fluffy Lumbers + McDonalds @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Classic ToddP lineup here. We've got Dream Diary (feat. Madison, the singer/guitarist of rockin' duo Coasting), Fluffy Lumbers (Samuel Franklin, who drums and sings a la Phil Collins, w/ a full band), and the punkish McDonalds (Liam from caUSE co-MOTION!). w/ openers Free Kisses, perfect non?
* Total Slacker + Prince Rama @ Silent Barn / 9-15 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/$7. If Monster Island didn't have such an overloadedly dope lineup, I'd be here. Slacker reverb-heavy indie + electronics paired w/ Hindustani devotional.
THURSDAY
* Otto Dix @ Neue Galerie / 1018 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). 1st solo exhibit of the major German artist EVER in N. America. His particular style of portraiture, ranging from the wildly surreal to the lovingly emotive, is unparalleled — wittily rendered, graphically intense, spanning WWI, sexuality, religion, and of course the 'Golden Weimar Years'.
* "Unspecified Objects" Group Show @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Minimalist art — the show title is taken from Donald Judd's 1965 essay — reinterpreted w/ six contemporary voices. Like Jona Bechtolt (1/2 the band YACHT) and his animated test-pattern (Bruce Nauman?), Rashawn Griffin's 'nostalgia composites' (Joseph Beuys?), David Scanavino's pared-down sculpture (Walter de Maria?).
* Standard Fare @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. Twee as Standard Fare, you say?? Straight out of Sheffield, in town a few days before hitting SXSW. Don't miss these cuties! w/ Diehard (delish NY indie rock).
* Blissed Out + Miho Hatori + Fluffy Lumbers @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle), 7p/$8.Let's take a trip. I mean, the inclusion of always-unpredictable Hatori just won me over. Now if only this didn't conflict w/ Standard Fare at Cake Shop...
* Rendez-Vous with French Cinema @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St). This unbearably chic festival of contemporary French cinema is back. I warned you last week to begin reserving your shows, b/c 1) this is a very popular film festival (IMO, third to New York Film Festival and NYAFF) and 2) Film Society members were already reserving their tix since the last week of Feb. So go at it. THRU MAR 21
FRIDAY
* "\ (Lean)" @ Nicole Klagsbrun / 526 W 26th St #213. Sometimes my pre-review write-ups create themselves, spontaneously, based on superb lineups. Hence: Susan Collis, Robert Gober, Adam McEwen, Gedi Sibony, Nari Ward, Matthew Day Jackson, Richard Tuttle, Keith Sonnier + more
* Josef Albers "Formulation: Articulation, 1972" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St. The sumptuous collection of 127 silkscreened plates, finished shortly before Albers' death and acting as a summation of his ongoing investigation into color and perception.
* 'Brooklyn v. Osaka' @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. YES this will be intense: hard-rockin' all-girl groups from the two cities. w/ Talk Normal (Brooklyn's finest no-wave duo), Moon Mama (one-half of Osaka's freak-rock Afrirampo), Water Fai (Osaka psych-pop) + more.
* "Mother" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2009) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). 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
* Sam Durant "Dead Labor Day" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. Durant's recent work on capital punishment, incl. a large sculpture based on the scaffold use to hang famous Chicago anarchists 'Haymarket Martyrs' in 1887, plus related small-scale sculpture and drawings.
* "Art Museums, Private Collectors, and the Public" symposium @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave), 12:30p/$10 (FREE for members, RSVP here). WOW 'Skin Fruit', the Dakis Joannou collection show, curated by Jeff Koons, has received some interesting press, way before the show opened last week. As in, critics questioning the validity of a private collector showing their wares in a public institution, esp. in the glaring fact that the private collector is blue-chip Joannou and the public institution the assumedly anti-mainstream New Museum. But I am telling you the combo works, here (check my review of the exhibition, under CURRENT SHOWS). For those still doubting, the museum provides two panels tracing the history of patronage and partnerships in American art museums and the future of such collaborations. Richard Flood (Chief Curator of the New Museum) moderates the 1st panel (historic partnerships) and Lisa Phillips (New Museum director) hosts the 2nd panel (future collaborations) at 3p.
* PopJew's Pre-SXSW Showcase @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p/$12 (or $10 w/ food for the road). Rachel, one of my fav NY-area promoters, is throwing a beast of a party before heading down to Austin to cause a musical ruckus. Feat. Darlings (some of the coolest, smart indie-pop I've ever encountered), Sundelles, Total Slacker, My Teenage Stride, Big Troubles + MORE.
* Sissy Spacek @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (F/M/R to 9th St-4th Ave), 8p/$10. A rather auspicious night, I'd say, as I don't recall the last time Cali noisicians Sissy Spacek graced our presence (that's right, 2007 No Fun Fest). Well, it's been awhile and apparently no 2010 No Fun in NYC...
SUNDAY
* Marina Abramović "The Artist is Present" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). All I can say is EPIC. Peerless performance artist Abramović returns to NY w/ a new duration piece — her longest ever and named after the show-title — and five of her classic time-related works, re-performed for the 1st time by a group of carefully selected people (incl. Maria José Arjona, the Columbian performance artist who captivated me at this year's VOLTA NY).
* Standard Fare @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$6. See my Thursday's hyping of Sheffield twee-rockers Standard Fare, then see them twice!
TUESDAY
* Eva Hesse @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. A very special exhibition, focused on Hesse's late-period 'non-art' objects, at once intimate, experimental and challenging.
* Pika & Yuka + Water Fai + Moon Mama @ Pianos / 158 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. In case you missed those hard-rockin' Osaka girls at Bruar Falls Friday nite, you've another chance, only this time Pika & Yuka (meaning, Pika from Afrirampo aka Moon Mama + Yuka Honda) headline. Yikes, this should be dope.
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, curated by Jeff Koons" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave). I'm not here to postulate on the compromise created by hosting New Museum trustee (and Greek multimillionaire) Joannou's collection in a distinctly non-mainstream, anti-establishment complex. Nor am I here to postulate on the swelling value of Joannou's exquisite, eyebrow-raising collection, by hosting it here on American shores, in this selection, for the first time. No, I am an aesthete. I am not aloof to such controversies, but I see the reasons and ingenuity for 1) hosting Joannou's collection here and 2) Koons' fine job of dispersing these A-list artists' raucous works, the type that tend to dominate a room. There's been much said about how overly-busy and stimulus-overloading this show is, that Koons as an art-history-minded collector made a super-crowded show. No he didn't, and that I WILL defend.
Don't miss the side gallery space by the café: it's a great teaser for what's ahead (a text-y joke abstract from Richard Prince, a vibrant pinkish sprayed-silkscreen from Christopher Wool, the creepy "Inochi" figure from Takashi Murakami) plus the busted up body of a camper-like van, outfitted w/ soft toys and a TV and dominating 1/2 the room. This is John Bock's "Malträtierte Fregatte", or rather the installation related to his performance piece of the same name, playing on the TV screen. It adds a good bit of sudden violence that carries, in varying ebbs and flows, in the floors above.
Up the lifts and out the 2nd Fl, we have Koons' only piece in the show, the seductively simple "One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank" aka the 1st Koons artwork Joannou acquired, like 25 years ago, and the spark that set aflame this hyper-visual collection. While the body is a recurring topic in all the works here, and in Joannou's many others in his collection, I found the 2nd Fl to be particularly body-driven, in a fleshy, visceral, lusty sense. The old Ashley Bickerton "F.O.B." exemplifies this at an atomic level, as it looks like an orb of rippling alienesque skin — like a million light-years from his psychedelic tropical imagery now. Maurizio Cattelan's "All", a suite of carved-marble 'body-bags', is truncated from the rest of the floor in a narrow hall, accompanied only by a melodious museum employee replicated Tino Sehgal's "This is Propaganda" and one of two super-freaky Andro Wekua sculptures. This one, "Sneakers", appears to be a long-haired nude girl clad in running shoes, w/ a harlequin pattern tattooed on her bare back, but her head is tucked into her knees, hidden from view. In the main room, Chris Ofili's portraiture,from the trippy cloisonné-appliquéd (and elephant-dunged) to the ecstatic shimmery blue (and chromed) Matisse-like, are some of the most beautiful on the floor (and indeed in the entire show, compare/contrast w/ the, ahem, 'earthy' Tim Noble & Sue Webster 'silhouette' installation on the other side of the lifts). Urs Fischer (another recurring figure in the show, and the only artist to figure into three floors) and Mark Manders 'remix' the body, via Fischer's signature candle figure and Manders' wet-clay-like epoxy torso in an oversized cardboard box. David Altmejd's "Giant", one of the finer of the artist's series of Norse-like gods and heroes, peers away from the action — into a Robert Gober room. Something is up here, in this little installation of Gober's waxy, Puritanical works: the crooked "Scary Sink", the wallpaper of rolling hills and a highway off to nowhere, and the distorted baby's crib, pointed into the wall as being tugged into a black hole. It's off somewhere, and we are meant to follow.
3rd Fl: if the 2nd was 'The Flesh', this one is 'The Dream' (somehow I think Cattelan would be pleased w/ this). Or...is it 'The Nightmare'? Gone is the mellifluous Sehgal piece, replaced here w/ the pervading creak of Wekua's second piece, the wholly disturbing "Wait and Wait", which looks like a partied-out transvestite sitting splay-legged on a rocking chair, their face still half-painted from the previous night, in a multicolored greenhouse-like chamber. Pawel Althamer's duet — an installation based on Jesus and the crucifixion but performed, sporadically, by a male actor, and "Nomo", this gold-plated figure w/ a staff, fighter-jet-nose-like helmet, and briefcase (somehow astronaut, medieval warrior and Pope all in one) that luckily is NOT a performer — are fittingly here, as is Franz West's "Gartenpouf", a strawberry astronaut ice-cream-colored cross-like shape. Cattelan's "Now" fittingly ends the floor w/ its own narrow chamber, filled w/ a 'dead' wax dummy in a coffin. A dream of death? Ascension awaits.
4th Fl: to....Heaven? Nirvana? A spiritual plane? Lots has been written on this floor, beginning w/ the Roberto Cuoghi monstrosity "Pazuzu", but that nearly-20-ft piece somehow recedes into the wall compared to the women guardians of the floor: Charles Ray's "Fall '91" (a larger-than-lifesize businesswoman) and Liza Lou's jewel-encrusted "Super Sister". And while I emphasize that this exhibition is NOT crowded, the 4th Fl in particular has an eerie sparseness to it (like so many of the New Museum's full-museum shows, I've noticed). I encourage you to walk through and around Terence Koh's megalith "Untitled (Chocolate Mountains)", taking in the sickly sweetness of the sculpture whilst perusing the sins of American history, in Kara Walker's powerful half-dozen watercolors. The creaking continues, too, only from Ray's show-stopping "Revolution Counter-Revolution", a grayscale full-sized carnival ride, slowly spinning in both directions simultaneously (meaning the horses go one way, the top the other). And this, a nostalgic yet somehow fractured recollection of childhood, leads us way off to the corner of the floor, to Gober's "Side Bed", ascetically simple, child-sized, awaiting its occupant.
Perhaps you need to see this again.
* Joseph Beuys "Make the Secrets Productive" @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St. NYC was not totally sated by the brilliant, thorough, info-packed survey at Mary Boone Gallery at the threshold of 2010, what w/ its chockablock vitrines of Beuys' famous multiples and press materials. PW got this and presents to us a dozen rare sculptures from the German artist, incl. "Feldbett" (a felt covered block of electric transistors), "Doppelaggregat" (entirely cast-bronze, but like two tables turned upside down and welded to two right-side-up, outfitted w/ these bronzed spools) and "OFEN", a half-dozen massive cylinders of felt stapled to the wall, sucking the sound out of its corner of the gallery. This in itself would be a dope show, but PW goes further in the adjacent gallery, feat. nearly 100 of Ute Klophaus' photos documenting Beuys' "Aktions", incl. the famous "I Like America and America Likes Me" (accompanied by the video, which MoMA also has in their collection but it's too wicked not to pass up, Beuys cavorting w/ a coyote and all), "Eurasienstab", "Filz-TV" (w/ incl. video, feat. Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman) and the bracing "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare". AND IF THAT WASN'T ENOUGH...the gallery opened part of their back-gallery space to footage from Beuys' lecture "Public Dialogue at the New School for Social Research" (1974, his 1st trip to NY) and other films.
* Miao Xiaochun "Microcosm" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St 2nd Fl. This extensive multidisciplinary exhibition — full of computer renderings transferred to canvas and multi-panel wire-model etching-like drawings — center around the titular piece, Miao's take on Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights", a ridiculously detailed nine-panel C-print of a world utopian and chaotic, and its related extra-psychedelic film. You've GOT to watch the film, or at least part of it, where Miao's legions of self-rendered naked men prance about the landscape and dunk in shimmering ponds and, um, take on the impression of potatoes and cucumbers and get sliced up, so wire-model birds can sneak off w/ a piece? It was about here that I felt like I'd dosed a heady hallucinogen, but no it's all part of Miao's process.
* R. Crumb "The Bible Illuminated" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 519 W 19th St. This is indeed the entire Crumb book of pen & ink woodcut-like drawings based on the Book of Genesis, but just b/c you've seen the whole thing laid out on the gallery walls doesn't mean the publication deserves a 2nd look. I was a bit skeptical going in, that the show would reveal everything and leave the publication irrelevant, but Crumb's work — each and every one of these text and image pages — is so lastingly detailed that, if you're engaged w/ it, you need something portable to refer back to, multiple times, to fully appreciate it.
* Esko Männikkö "Harmony Sisters" @ Yancey Richardson Gallery / 535 W 22nd St 3rd Fl. Super-vivid C-prints framed mostly on close-ups of animal eyes; the show opens w/ a horse's closed eye, either at rest or in a wink, yet it particularly feels somehow sad or ashamed. There's a lot here, and the other animal crops (closeup of a cow's muzzle, tongue out, backside of a zebra) break up the otherwise intense gazes of the subjects. It's like you can see into their souls and they, these monkeys, horses, cattle, are staring straight back into you.
* "10th Anniv. Invitational, Part 1" @ Frederieke Taylor Gallery / 535 W 22nd St, 6th Fl. 1st of two 'invitational' group shows, feat. gallery artists and works selected by friends, before the gallery relocates in May. Highlights incl. quite a bit of eye-trickery, courtesy of Mel Chin (think Urs Fischer's "Noisette" but in cast bronze), Long-Bin Chen (a Buddhist head composed of NYC phone-books, there's recycling for you!), tricked out mixed media pieces by Franco Mondini-Ruiz (which mostly involved a figure stuck in some sort of trompe l'oeil food/drink) and abstracts by Mary Lum and Justin Valdes.
+ Marion Wilson "Artificially Free of Nature". Tiny oil paintings deftly rendered on glass slides, each a sparsely attended landscape from a contaminated waste bed near the artist's home in upstate NY. Magnifying glasses included and necessary.
* James Siena @ Pace Prints Chelsea / 521 W 26th St. Geometric woodcuts and engravings in monotone colors, plus some wildly skewed topographical-like drawings to add a bit of flavor to all the straight lines and corners.
* Allen Ruppersberg @ Greene Naftali / 526 W 26th St 8th Fl. The West Coast Conceptualist had, in my opinion, the standout piece in MoMA's overall fab "In & Out of Amsterdam, 1960-1976" exhibition last year, the wall of polaroid-sized C-prints and index cards entitled "Where's Al?" (1972). This two-piece installation, his 1st show at Greene Naftali, requires a bit more digging for immediate gratification but it's a winner. "Big Trouble", a blown-up rendering of a vintage 'Ducktails' comic (evil Scrooge McDuck etc), is Ruppersberg's revisitation and revitalization of a mail-art piece he'd conceived in '69, shown here w/ cut-out mockups from the comic and the entire strip itself. Against this is "The Never-Ending Book Part Two/Art and Therefore Ourselves" (which is cheekily subtitled, in the signage, as 'Songs, Recipes, and the Old People'), a wall mural of color-copied found vintage images (which also fill various boxes in the room), sheet music, Depression-era recipes and these albums that you can actually buy if you want, w/ a bartering system of 50 pre-1970 images for an LP, to continue the journey of this organic work.
LAST CHANCE
* 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 (also ending this weekend).
* 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.
* 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'?'
* 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.
* 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.
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