WEDNESDAY
* "Anton Chekhov's The Duel" (dir. Dover Kosashvili, 2010) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston). Did you know this year is the Russian writer/playwrite's sesquicentennial? "The Duel" is probably my favorite novella from the master of starkly emotive prose: the foppish aristocrat v. the abrasive scientist, set in wonderful sea- and countryside locations. I hope the British cast in Kosashvili's film does the master justice.
* "Silvestre" (dir. Joao César Monteiro, 1982) screenings @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins), 6:50/9:30p. I'm sold on the fact alone this is loosely based on "Bluebeard", though it combines that w/ a 15th C. Portuguese legend of a young woman disguised as a knight, which makes me hope she (in knight garb) is the one who beheads the murderous king.
* Frightened Rabbit @ Sound Fix / 44 Berry St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 6:30p. Glasgow rockers play the cavernous dungeon that is Webster Hall later in the evening, but the doper option is to check them at an in-store performance at my fav Wsburg record store! Show up early.
THURSDAY
* Mark Ryden "The Gay 90's: Old Tyme Art Show" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. Erm...new Ryden show in NY? Yes please!!!!! The decade in the title is, natch, the 1890s, fin de siecle Paris w/ contemporary kitsch, bereft w/ religious imagery and tasty meats. I'm there.
* Fernando Botero "Monumental Sculpture" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Big-ass sculpture, curvy, sumptuous bronze figures in Botero's typically beguiling style — a hefty departure from his Raphaelite oil paintings.
* "Daughters of Turan" – Almagul Menlibayeva w/ Leeza Ahmady + Priska Juschka conversation @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl, 7p/RSVP: gallery@priskajuschkafineart . Part of the ArteEast, Across Histories series of dialogues, the artist Menlibayeva (whose show I'm totally all about) is in conversation w/ independent curator Ahmady and gallerist Juschka.
* "Reprise" @ Paula Cooper Boutique / 465 W 23rd St. Wayne Gonzales, Christian Marclay, Walid Raad, cool newish combo Seth Price + Kelley Walker and others focus on recordings and re-presentaiton, underlying concepts in all their respective works.
* Shirazeh Houshiary "Light Darkness" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Veiled and layered abstract paintings, like the sky at dusk, plus her related video animation and works on paper.
* Mamma Andersson + Jockum Nordstrom "Who is sleeping on my pillow" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525-533 W 19th St. The first concurrent U.S. exhibition by the Swedish couple, who thus far have maintained mutually individual artistic practices. Andersson's classic landscape and interiors paintings v. Nordstrom's 2- and 3D paper sculptures and collages, plus two collaborative works.
* 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).
* "Tron" (dir. Steven Lisberger, 1982) screening @ 92Y Tribeca / 200 Hudson St (1/ACE to Canal St), 8p. This is the SECOND circa-'82 film in my LIST this week. And: apparently Disney's making a 2010-quality sequel to the classic '80s cyber drama, replete w/ Daft Punk soundtrack and Jeff Bridges back in his lead role. Is this a cool idea? I can't answer that! I'm skeptical of a reboot/sequel whatever, but what I am CONFIDENT about is the original, the synthesizer-heavy, early CGI stunner, which you should see tonight.
FRIDAY
* Kiki Smith "Lodestar" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. Stunning: Smith's 1st major NY gallery show in eight years, and concurrent w/ her exhibition at Brooklyn Museum, centers on the woman's life-cycle via stained-glass panels.
* "Mercy" (dir. Patrick Hoelck, 2010) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). I know Hoelck for his music videos (like Alicia Keys "Girlfriend", which was my JAM back in the day), and this is the director/photographer's 1st feature: the cynical young emotionless bastard (actor/writer Scott Caan) and the titular Mercy (Erika Christensen, who suffice to say shakes everything up).
SATURDAY
* Claude Monet "Late Work" @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. Tough as it was for me to let go of MoMA's 'Waterlilies' show closing, I'm pleased that Gagosian brings together the heat — "the most significant gathering of Monet's late paintings to take place in New York in more than thirty years", so says the promo materials! Strong statement, but I believe it.
* Shepard Fairey "May Day" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. And here we are, the final show at LES stalwart Deitch Projects. And while I wish for a blowout bash courtesy of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black and/or Mika Tajima's New Humans (since Dash Snow's untimely passing, we can't have another 'Nest'), I've got a feeling Fairey's pro-worker, pro-activist exhibition should be a resonating conclusion — love him or hate him — to the gallery.
SUNDAY
* "Rites of Spring", a benefit for Haiti @ Above the Auto Parts Store / 600 Bushwick Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle/Bushwick), 8p/$15 — tix avail. at Record Grouch Records / 441 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford). Auspicious characters like Bjork, David Longstreth and Tyondai Braxton play DJ sets and all proceeds benefit Partners in Health. But to get in, you need a ticket (see info above), and considering the gravity of this show you'd better book ahead of time.
* Themselves + Buck 65 @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Delancey), 8p/$16. A who's who of furiously avant-garde Anticon Records, led by Doseone + Jel (Themselves) and folksy old bastard Buck 65, w/ live DJ face-off b/w Jel & Odd Nosdam (Nosdam all the wayyy!!) and Stabbing Eastwood (aka Mr. Adebimpe from TV on the Radio, perhaps you've heard of 'em?).
* "Knight's Move" @ SculptureCenter / 44-19 Purves St, Long Island City (E/V to 23rd/Ely, G to Court Square), 7-9p. Fionn Meade curates a dynamic group show of young and prominent artists working in the themes of modernity and progression: leaping forward, feints and dodging if you will. feat. Mika Tajima, Tamar Halpern, Sara VanDerBeek, Allyson Viera, Esther Klas and more, w/ related performances (many of these artists have ties to music, incl. Tajima's New Humans) throughout the duration of the show. Stay tuned to future LISTs for updates.
MONDAY
* New Russian Literature @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St, 6 to Bleecker), 7p/FREE. Since I cannot live on art/film/music alone, I stumbled upon this little gem, four contemporary Russian authors (Inga Kuznetsova, Pavel Nastin, Natalia Sannikova and Sergei Sokolovskiy) straight off the PEN World Voices Festival, reading selections of their poetry and prose w/ translation. If you know me, you know I am a FIEND for 19th- (and in tenuous degrees 20th-) C. Russian lit, so this could be a good one.
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Picasso in the Met" @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). Part three of the Picasso compendium (parts one and two, if you've been paying attention, are lovely print-based shows at the MoMA and Marlborough Gallery, respectively) is the weightiest, not just b/c of the inclusion of paintings but b/c this is the Met and the art on view are ALL the Met's Picasso works. This is major in the sense of the word, a timeline of the master's fin-de-siecle-esque pastels, through his Blue and Rose Periods (of note: "The Actor" is back, and so big we would've missed it had it not been repaired in time for the previews), past Cubism and the '30s (though the Met doesn't own a decade piece like "The Three Musicians" or "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon", they have some NICE surprises in both fronts), into an entire room of linocut and other prints (the Met one-ups my favorite "Luncheon on the Grass (After Manet)" from the MoMA by including a wicked terracotta plaque of the scene in standard view), and to the master's final, effervescent Musketeer-and-nudes-laden works. Oh it's major, all right. I'm still wrapping my head 'round it, like the prevalence and mutability of Picasso's "Head of a Woman" theme, as an example. That the Picasso show is in the same galleries of the overcrowded Francis Bacon retrospective means foot-traffic and lines-of-sight will be issues, but this is one of the best exhibitions in town, so you know you can't miss it.
* "Tanguy/Calder: Between Surrealism and Abstraction" @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. The subtitle reads like my life, half the time. But seriously: this is a match-made exhibition. That 'museum-quality' show has been dropping in the news constantly of late, and this is further evidence of that: the friendship of perhaps unlikely artists — boisterous American Calder and terribly French Tanguy — but the blurring here, w/ the former's spidery abstract sculpture and the latter's lonely, subconscious landscapes, practically bristles w/ symbiosis. Seeing the two artists' work simultaneously elevates them both. Essential show.
* Lee Bul @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. I'm all about the flotilla of compressed/abstracted wood-and-metal architecture hanging in Lee's new exhibition. It's a great 'next step' for the artist, moving beyond the highly-accessorized glitz of her previous show into something cleaner, sharper and much darker.
* Carrie Mae Weems "Slow Fade to Black" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Lots to see here, in Weems' multimedia take on the historical drama, and extending far beyond her solid command of the portrait-photograph, from her blurred inkjet prints of Eartha Mae Kitt and a whole panoply of Black actresses and singers (the show's titular piece), incl. Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and Josephine Baker, who despite the Gaussian blurs are inherently recognizable via their poise and dress, to "Afro Chic" video installation, the fiercest runway you've probably ever seen.
+ Lynette Yiadom-Boakye "Essays and Documents". Large, expressionistically painted figures, each embodying an intense spirit and lifelike quality, which is tricky b/c they're all from the artist's imagination. Her very painterly approach, reminding me a bit of Alice Neel's style, really engages the eye.
* Mohamed Bourouissa "Périphéries" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. A powerful show from the young Paris-based photographer, of cinematic scenes set in 'the other France', the multicultural suburbs of Paris and elsewhere. "Périphérique" sums up the message: two white girls staring warily at a group of black men at night, as they walk through an underpass. There are many beautiful works here, like "The Window" (a tattooed boxer and his trainer) and "The Hand", a moment of intimacy (and perhaps suggested pregnancy) between two lovers — and the banal titles are intentional, drawing our gaze to the (you guessed it) peripheries of the images.
* Joan Linder "Cost of Living" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Linder continues to amaze viewers w/ her brilliant large-scale pen-and-ink drawings. Her lovingly meticulous renderings of weeds are fantastic, one-upped by her recreation of a bunch of junkmail, in ink, assembled like a swath of rubbish on a desktop.
* Patrick Lee "Deadly Friends" @ Ameringer McEnery Yohe / 525 W 22nd St. Startlingly detailed graphite portraiture of dangerous-looking men in downtown LA, conveyed masterfully via Lee's hand. Features fade out from the paper like through mist, and yet when they hit sharp-focus, every pore and every hair, every tattered bit of fabric and tattoo-line is photograph-clear.
* Lia Halloran "The Only Way Out is Through" @ DCKT Contemporary / 195 Bowery. Paintings of crystal caves and icebergs w/ dope titles. But wait! Halloran has a lot of metaphors going on here (partially transmitted by work titles, like "You're the Best/Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Me" and "The Things We Never Said") and the works, specifically the diluted ink layers on drafting film (a vellum-like medium) are fascinating, painstakingly imagined.
* "Landscape and Solitude" @ Kumukumu Gallery / 42 Rivington St. Mako Wakasa curates this smart group show around a seemingly chestnut of a concept: the landscape. But it's dope! There's a range of mediums and ideas here: Yusuke Nishimura's hazy sunset C-prints, Ofer Wolberger's slightly off-putting staged photography (remember the masks in "The Strangers"?) and particularly Amy Bennett's "Trespassers", a resined and reflective oil painting of a quiet cove that is disarmingly photorealistic.
* Allyson Vieira "Oxymandias" @ Laurel Gitlen/Small A Projects / 261 Broome St. Vieira's plaster and concrete reliefs reminded me of the 'hands' in Jim Henson's "Labyrinth", but the knockout installation in the main gallery, "If I was a...but then again, no (1-18)", a series of adult-sized plinths that literally fill the space, echoes Rachel Whiteread in the coolest way.
LAST CHANCE
* 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.
* Miao Xiaochun "Microcosm" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St. 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.
* Ursula von Rydingsvard "ERRATUS" @ 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.
* 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 Gallery 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.
* Charline Von Heyl @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 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.
* Susan Philipsz "I See a Darkness" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. I'll admit, I wondered going into this show how a sound-artist — though Philipsz is the PREMIERE sound-artist — could carry a ground-level solo show. I mean, it's a room full of speakers. But she does, in a truly brilliant sculptural sound journey, converting the main gallery into a cavernous lair filled w/ her voice, such a rush each time it streams out the speakers that, like Odysseus's men, we're transfixed through her choral refrains. Absolutely brilliant.
+ Siobhan Hapaska "The Nose that Lost its Dog". But what to counter the wonderfully ethereal Philipsz show? Hapaska's earthy, cheekily-titled mixed media sculpture. Coyote pelts (and glass eyes) and an entire upturned olive tree are just some of her organic v. machinelike materials, coming from her residency at Glasgow Sculpture Studios.
* André Butzer "Nict furchten: Don't be scared!" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Super-sized gooey oil abstracts at Metro Pictures — are we at the right gallery? Oh yes, and why is it this strong photo-showing joint has perhaps the dopest abstract show in town? Think if Kazuo Shiragawa was into pop colors. Oh I'm taking it there: think blow-ups of finger-paint renderings, layers and layers of impasto and rivulets of congealed paint, whole tube's-worth spend on lines and curves. A lovely all-black piece must have like a million gallons of the glistening stuff just hanging out there, waiting to pull you in.
* Antony Gormley "Breathing Room II" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. This is a terribly disturbing experience, this exhibition. Gormley, whose 'Event Horizon' 2doz+ bronze sculptures you've probably seen (or at least read about) hanging out on Flatiron-area rooftops, composed this 'light' sculptural piece in a very, very dark room of the gallery. It fills the space, to the extent that you have to hug the wall and shimmy around it. Due to its glow, your eyes never adjust to the surrounding space. Cautionary for both agoraphobes and claustrophobes.
* Keita Sugiura @ Max Protetch / 511 W 22nd St. Super subtle C-prints of cloud formations, whitish-blue rectangles that seem to shimmer and change color depending on your POV to each piece. I'm not sure how much of Sugiura's compositions are chance-related, but he achieves something pretty cool here, and totally mellow.
* Fiona Rae "Special Fear!" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. I tweeted that Rae's exhibition reminded me of manga on acid, shortly after viewing the show, even though I don't read manga. But I think the comparison is appropriate, since these exuberant, large-scale, many-colored and -textured canvases conceal in their cloudy swooshes stuff like speed-lines, flowers and PANDAS. There's even like butterflies or something in the violet-hued "Build a fairyland for you" — all Rae's works have lovely names like this. Bit sugary viewing, but very very cool.
* "If My Soul Had A Shape..." @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. How you do a group show 101: check Paula Cooper Gallery. I couldn't decide my favorite shape-conscious piece here, the four-array of Kelley Walker cast-chocolate, spinning disco balls; or the Carl Andre aluminum ingot stacked pyramid. But maybe beyond these (and a superb brushstroked Sol LeWitt and a fantastic 'removed' Dan Walsh) is the essential McDonalds 'Orange Drink'-colored Donald Judd painting, a textural mix of plywood, painted sandpaper, and obsidian-glossy black mirror.
* Barbara Kruger "The Globe Shrinks" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. One of the most exciting shows I've seen this year! An incredible approx-10-min video installation, people throwing out declarations, intercut w/ glimpses of violence, disembodied voices and Kruger's signature running sans serif type commands. Even the funny parts — and there are some jokes, of the Richard Prince type — are unsettling.
* Joe Zucker "Tales of Cotton" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Classic large-scale works done in Zucker's signature applied-cotton style, dabs and tears of the stuff heaped into wetly textured gobs that, from across the room, reveal themselves into chilling antebellum scenes, and the beauty of "Amy Hewes" paddleboat can't quite overcome the visions of the slaves laboring w/ carts of cotton.
* Donald Baechler @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Lots of fun Baechler's having: massive pastel-toned acrylics of colorful balls and cartoonish flowers on drop-cloth 'canvases', plus a set of gesso and mixed media flowers on collaged paper.
* Gabriel Vormstein "Baby abc" @ Casey Kaplan / 525 W 21st St. Tasty stuff: Vormstein blew up and colored enormous Egon Schiele portraits on newsprint backdrops.
* Eric Swenson @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Perhaps you remember Swenson's unnerving installation from the 2004 Whitney Biennial, a porcelain-skinned young deer thrashing against an afghan rug? That's here, along w/ a few other deer in varying states, incl the new piece "Ne Plus Ultra", tucked away in its own gallery, a completely disturbing half-decomposed carcass that I caution you against: photos don't do the real thing justice, it is intense.
+ Beatriz Milhazes "Gold Rose Series". A good palate cleanser after Swenson's disturbing output, colorful woodblock and screenprints of geometric and curvy abstract shapes, named after seasonings.
* Roy Lichtenstein "Homage to Monet" @ Benrimon Contemporary / 514 W 24th St 2nd Fl. The inaugural exhibition in this W.Chelsea space doesn't waste any time! What w/ the impending Gagosian one-two Lichtenstein still-lifes and Monet late-works, let's get our fix NOW w/ Lichtenstein's reverence to the plein-air Impressionist, which in itself is further testament to the Pop artist's inventive techniques. His 'Cathedral' and 'Haystack' multiples are effectively trippy, but its his takes on the beloved water lilies, w/ and w/o Japanese footbridge, that really knock this show up several million notches. The works were silkscreened onto stainless steel, but not before Lichtenstein took a drill-bit to the metal, hand-carving this whorl pattern (not entirely unlike enlarged Ben-Day dots) that trippily echo rippling water, integrating rather effortlessly w/ the water lilies.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
My Hopes and Dreams for the 2010 New York Asian Film Festival — Take One
So I've been hyped up since the 1st news of this year's NYAFF hit, courtesy of Subway Cinema. I tweeted it:
here we go!!! 1st notes on 2010 NYAFF http://subwaycinemanews.com/archives/910
2:12 PM Apr 20th via web
and have begun my ocular exercises, like watching daisy-chained Youtube clips of strange Japanese comedy shows, anything to prep myself for some heavy viewing this June.
I dig the location's move to the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theatre. It's not the hop-skip-jump subway ride but it'll do in a pinch, and leaving the theatre at like 1a after several hrs of screenings back-to-back = not a super-dodgy neighborhood, and Bar Boulud just down the block (though, conversely, the midnight screenings at IFC are a fab addition). And the stadium theatre isn't as meat-locker-cold as IFC's. That said, I had a seating strategy at IFC's stadium theatre, plus I dug the aisles and the angle to the screen. Not quite the same w/ Walter Reade. I'll need to show up early (natch) and sit far front, I think, for the most enjoyment. And as long as the Subway Cinema guys keep the energy levels up, it's going to be a dope experience as ever.
The super-preliminary lineup, thus far, is good: Hong Kong's new martial arts cinema? Hello! Wilson Yip's "Ip Man" was a game-changer last year, and the sequel is the opening night selection for this year's festival. Excellent choice. The inclusion of "Kung Fu Chefs" (dir. Ken Yip, 2009, and starring Sammo Hung and Vanness Wu) plus "The Storm Warriors" (dir. Pang Bros, 2009) — honestly, tell me it's by the Pang Bros and I'll watch it + Subway Cinema describes it as "visually bonkers", which sounds like something I'd write — ups the dopeness factor. From the Japanese underground, "Annyong Yumika" (dir. Tetsuaki Matsue, 2009), an uh historic porn documentary, warrants my attention on conception alone. So far so good, and so early!
Now it's my turn, to express my hopes and dreams for a no doubt ace 2010 NYAFF, bigger and better than 2009's full-throttleness, full-on comedy and incredibly diverse ultraviolence. Maybe the greater powers that be will hear my aspirations and track down these directors and films and screen them for the adoring public. B/c (and this is the beauty part of the NYAFF) where else will we see them stateside?
1. A Pen-Ek Ratanaruang mini-retrospective
Pen-Ek's arthouse classic "Last Life in the Universe" (2003), starring Tadanobu Asano and gorgeous sisters Sinitta and Laila Boonyasak, remains one of the deepest, most moving films I've ever seen. The entire production is very close to perfection, in my opinion, and so emotive that I have to be in a particular state of mind to view it. I love introducing people to it, though, and watching it w/ them. But besides "Last Life in the Universe", I'll bet you few Westerners (specifically Americans) have seen ANYTHING ELSE by this Thai New Wave auteur. I'm lucky to have caught "Invisible Waves" (2006), debatably a sequel to "Last Life..." but strongly surreal to stand on its own (think the relationship b/w Haruki Murakami's "A Wild Sheep Chase" v. "Dance Dance Dance"), at a Thai film festival in the city a few years back. Guess what: "Invisible Waves" never had U.S. distribution so you can't find it! Ditto to Pen-Ek's other two full-lengths that succeeded this, "Ploy" (2007), which did well at 2007 Cannes but was heavily censored in Thailand due to its sexual nature, and "Nymph" (2009), which coincided w/ Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" as the spooky forest-set film at Cannes, only "Nymph" is sexy w/o being so grossly violent. I would LOVE to see either of these at NYAFF — both a serious, artsy twist to the norm — or better yet a stint of Pen-Ek's oeuvre, these + "Invisible Waves" and "Last Life..." (I've never seen it on the big-screen) and his earlier quirky crime drama "6ixtynin9" (1999), which I'm quite fond of for its many surprises and foreshadowing of technique in "Last Life..."
2. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" (2010). I'll continue the Thai New Wave idea for a bit. Weerasethakul's oeuvre is super trippy, in a dreamlike, nonlinear, long-take sense. Compared quickly to Taiwanese New Wave, Weerasethakul's remind me of Tsai Ming-Liang. His new film is participating in 2010 Cannes, which is a month before the NYAFF. Can it come here next?
3. "My Darling of the Mountains" and "Sorasoi" (both dir. Katsuhito Ishii, both 2008). My favorite Japanese director, no question. I love Ishii's richly considered films, whether it's unusual family drama ("Taste of Tea", 2004), unusual crime caper ("Sharkskin Man and Peach-hip Girl", 1999, and "Party 7", 2000) or like that daisy-chained Japanese Youtube clips I alluded to earlier ("Funky Forest", 2005, which has no equal is ANY other country). And while "Funky Forest" STILL resonates w/ me, I've yet to come across either of his 'new' films in the states.
4. "Mutant Girls Squad" (dirs. Yoshihiro Nishimura, Noboru Iguchi and Tak Sakaguchi, 2010). I've been wondering, since the conclusion of last year's festival, how Subway Cinema would trump the Nishimura bloodfest-as-highschool-romance "Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl" (2009). I mean, the name alone is ridiculous, let alone the concept and "Kill Bill"-quality trailer. What would trump this, you ask? Team Nishimura w/ action expert Sakaguchi and otherworldly FX whiz Iguchi and voila. Essential to this year's lineup!
5. "Robogeisha" (dir. Noboru Iguchi, 2009), and speaking of Iguchi-san... sure the TRAILER for "Robogeisha" debuted at last year's festival, but not the film! It's out! Nishimura cameos! We need it!!
6. "The Big Tits Zombie 3D" (dir. Takao Nakano, 2010). Oh, I'm taking it there.
7. "Instant Numa" (dir. Satoshi Miki, 2010), long-shot since it's just coming out in Japan, but I LOVED "Adrift in Tokyo" (2007), from last year's festival, which of course has no U.S. distribution...
8. "GS Wonderland" (dir. Ryuichi Honda, 2008) — w/ Chiaki Kuriyama. I mean, have you SEEN the teaser clip???
9. "Parade" (dir. Isao Yukisada, 2010) w/ its chatty ensemble cast (incl. Tatsuya Fujiwara) and extremely dark undertones
and that's only Japan (off the top of my head) and Thailand. A boy can hope, non?
here we go!!! 1st notes on 2010 NYAFF http://subwaycinemanews.com/archives/910
2:12 PM Apr 20th via web
and have begun my ocular exercises, like watching daisy-chained Youtube clips of strange Japanese comedy shows, anything to prep myself for some heavy viewing this June.
I dig the location's move to the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theatre. It's not the hop-skip-jump subway ride but it'll do in a pinch, and leaving the theatre at like 1a after several hrs of screenings back-to-back = not a super-dodgy neighborhood, and Bar Boulud just down the block (though, conversely, the midnight screenings at IFC are a fab addition). And the stadium theatre isn't as meat-locker-cold as IFC's. That said, I had a seating strategy at IFC's stadium theatre, plus I dug the aisles and the angle to the screen. Not quite the same w/ Walter Reade. I'll need to show up early (natch) and sit far front, I think, for the most enjoyment. And as long as the Subway Cinema guys keep the energy levels up, it's going to be a dope experience as ever.
The super-preliminary lineup, thus far, is good: Hong Kong's new martial arts cinema? Hello! Wilson Yip's "Ip Man" was a game-changer last year, and the sequel is the opening night selection for this year's festival. Excellent choice. The inclusion of "Kung Fu Chefs" (dir. Ken Yip, 2009, and starring Sammo Hung and Vanness Wu) plus "The Storm Warriors" (dir. Pang Bros, 2009) — honestly, tell me it's by the Pang Bros and I'll watch it + Subway Cinema describes it as "visually bonkers", which sounds like something I'd write — ups the dopeness factor. From the Japanese underground, "Annyong Yumika" (dir. Tetsuaki Matsue, 2009), an uh historic porn documentary, warrants my attention on conception alone. So far so good, and so early!
Now it's my turn, to express my hopes and dreams for a no doubt ace 2010 NYAFF, bigger and better than 2009's full-throttleness, full-on comedy and incredibly diverse ultraviolence. Maybe the greater powers that be will hear my aspirations and track down these directors and films and screen them for the adoring public. B/c (and this is the beauty part of the NYAFF) where else will we see them stateside?
1. A Pen-Ek Ratanaruang mini-retrospective
Pen-Ek's arthouse classic "Last Life in the Universe" (2003), starring Tadanobu Asano and gorgeous sisters Sinitta and Laila Boonyasak, remains one of the deepest, most moving films I've ever seen. The entire production is very close to perfection, in my opinion, and so emotive that I have to be in a particular state of mind to view it. I love introducing people to it, though, and watching it w/ them. But besides "Last Life in the Universe", I'll bet you few Westerners (specifically Americans) have seen ANYTHING ELSE by this Thai New Wave auteur. I'm lucky to have caught "Invisible Waves" (2006), debatably a sequel to "Last Life..." but strongly surreal to stand on its own (think the relationship b/w Haruki Murakami's "A Wild Sheep Chase" v. "Dance Dance Dance"), at a Thai film festival in the city a few years back. Guess what: "Invisible Waves" never had U.S. distribution so you can't find it! Ditto to Pen-Ek's other two full-lengths that succeeded this, "Ploy" (2007), which did well at 2007 Cannes but was heavily censored in Thailand due to its sexual nature, and "Nymph" (2009), which coincided w/ Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" as the spooky forest-set film at Cannes, only "Nymph" is sexy w/o being so grossly violent. I would LOVE to see either of these at NYAFF — both a serious, artsy twist to the norm — or better yet a stint of Pen-Ek's oeuvre, these + "Invisible Waves" and "Last Life..." (I've never seen it on the big-screen) and his earlier quirky crime drama "6ixtynin9" (1999), which I'm quite fond of for its many surprises and foreshadowing of technique in "Last Life..."
2. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" (2010). I'll continue the Thai New Wave idea for a bit. Weerasethakul's oeuvre is super trippy, in a dreamlike, nonlinear, long-take sense. Compared quickly to Taiwanese New Wave, Weerasethakul's remind me of Tsai Ming-Liang. His new film is participating in 2010 Cannes, which is a month before the NYAFF. Can it come here next?
3. "My Darling of the Mountains" and "Sorasoi" (both dir. Katsuhito Ishii, both 2008). My favorite Japanese director, no question. I love Ishii's richly considered films, whether it's unusual family drama ("Taste of Tea", 2004), unusual crime caper ("Sharkskin Man and Peach-hip Girl", 1999, and "Party 7", 2000) or like that daisy-chained Japanese Youtube clips I alluded to earlier ("Funky Forest", 2005, which has no equal is ANY other country). And while "Funky Forest" STILL resonates w/ me, I've yet to come across either of his 'new' films in the states.
4. "Mutant Girls Squad" (dirs. Yoshihiro Nishimura, Noboru Iguchi and Tak Sakaguchi, 2010). I've been wondering, since the conclusion of last year's festival, how Subway Cinema would trump the Nishimura bloodfest-as-highschool-romance "Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl" (2009). I mean, the name alone is ridiculous, let alone the concept and "Kill Bill"-quality trailer. What would trump this, you ask? Team Nishimura w/ action expert Sakaguchi and otherworldly FX whiz Iguchi and voila. Essential to this year's lineup!
5. "Robogeisha" (dir. Noboru Iguchi, 2009), and speaking of Iguchi-san... sure the TRAILER for "Robogeisha" debuted at last year's festival, but not the film! It's out! Nishimura cameos! We need it!!
6. "The Big Tits Zombie 3D" (dir. Takao Nakano, 2010). Oh, I'm taking it there.
7. "Instant Numa" (dir. Satoshi Miki, 2010), long-shot since it's just coming out in Japan, but I LOVED "Adrift in Tokyo" (2007), from last year's festival, which of course has no U.S. distribution...
8. "GS Wonderland" (dir. Ryuichi Honda, 2008) — w/ Chiaki Kuriyama. I mean, have you SEEN the teaser clip???
9. "Parade" (dir. Isao Yukisada, 2010) w/ its chatty ensemble cast (incl. Tatsuya Fujiwara) and extremely dark undertones
and that's only Japan (off the top of my head) and Thailand. A boy can hope, non?
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
fee's LIST (through 4/27)
WEDNESDAY
* Lee Bul @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. Lee's sculpture remains as meticulously constructed as before, but she continues to eschew her earlier super-futuristic motif for a decidedly metaphysical, abstract direction.
* Micachu & The Shapes @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (FV to 2nd Ave), 9:30p/$10. FINALLY some good news of Eyjafjallajökull, the volcanic ash spewing out the Icelandic glacier that locked down trans-European travel for like a week and, in LIST-related events, caused many many band cancelations. In the case here, Sweden's The Mary Onettes are stuck in Europe + UK's Micachu are stuck stateside SO...we lucky ducklings get a fab, poppy Micachu & The Shapes show!
THURSDAY
* Lynette Yiadom-Boakye "Essays and Documents" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Large Expressionist-ish portraits locked in by flowing brushstrokes and the subjects' intense gazes.
+ Carrie Mae Weems "Slow Fade to Black". The historical drama as portraiture, via soft-focus, treated photography.
* Shirazeh Houshiary "Light Darkness" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Veiled and layered abstract paintings, like the sky at dusk, plus her related video animation and works on paper.
* Mohamed Bourouissa "Périphéries" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. The French photographer's (and member of the 'Younger Than Jesus' triennial at the New Museum) subject is the suburbs of France, where W. and N. African-descended youth take on classical poses in their environment.
* Joan Linder "Cost of Living" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Linder's mastery of the large-scale ink drawing — her sprawling duplication of a dive bar at a previous exhibition comes to mind — is peerless. This time, a pun on the show title, she takes on her junk mail and garden weeds w/ the same loving detail.
* Garder Eide Einarsson "Another Modern Moment Completed" @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. The reappropriated image, specifically in terms of reproduction as theft, are as much a subject of Einarsson's new paintings as is the history of modern art, w/ themes of Malevich, Lichtenstein and Parrino throughout.
* Patrick Lee "Deadly Friends" @ Ameringer McEnery Yohe / 525 W 22nd St. Draftsman-quality graphite works on paper of 10 years worth of Lee's LA-based subjects: a Noah's Ark of roughly masculine dudes.
* We Are Country Mice + White Wires @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$10. The final week of We Are Country Mice's twangy-rock residency at Cake Shop/Bruar Falls is a biggie, w/ inclusion of Ottawa effusive garage-rockers White Wires, whose catchy "Ha Ha Holiday" is on constant repeat at my place.
FRIDAY
* Ryan Mrozowski @ Pierogi / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg, 7-9p. There's a certain strange folklore to Mrozowski's slightly twisted oil on panel paintings: crowds of people, everywhere, at the theatre, yes, but then paired w/ cattle floating in the sky and against much taller, Daliesque versions of themselves. It's a bit like the urban lore in Jonathan Weiner's moody portraiture, only w/ a middle-Europe twist.
* Jeon Soo-il Retrospective @ NYU (various locations). I great primer for the cerebral Korean director's oeuvre. I've only seen his 2007 film "With a Girl of Black Soil", during the 2008 New York Korean Film Festival, but it still resonates in me and I'm totally planning to check out the other two in the show. Visit the event site for further info.
* "With a Girl of Black Soil" (dir. Jeon Soo-il, 2007) screening @ Cantor Film Center / 36 E 8th St (RW,6 to Astor Place), 6p. Part of the NYU Cinema Studies' retrospective on Jeon, who will attend the screening for a Q&A (always dope). I've copied, verbatim, my take from the 2008 NYKFF on the film: I think the choice for first proper film of the 2008 NYKFF (bypassing the historic drama "Hwang Jin Yi" only because that was a one-off gala event 'off campus' and featured cocktails and all sorts of non-film hubbub) is especially telling of the climate of contemporary Korean cinema. As in, it is an independently produced feature by a realist director, it features mostly non-actors (including the lead Yoo Yeon-mi as the wonderful, precocious Yeong-rim), and it is set in a mining town in the Gangwon-do region (not exactly metropolitan Seoul). And while there is the requisite K-horror feature, the hyper-saccharine romance, the over-the-top action flick, this stark, docu-style drama is the lead film. Jeon uses a lot of sustained and tracking shots in this somber portrait of a little girl (the cutest thing, really) who has to act as parent to her elder, mentally handicapped brother and her ex-miner, spiraling alcoholic father. 'Tough viewing' doesn't even cut it here, and the barren landscape of snow, rocks and soot doesn't give us much to escape the painful family situation. Nor is there much of a soundtrack, though Jeon is deft with the occasional piano chords and fretlass bass lines. The buildup to the conclusion reminded me of Pedro Costa's docu-style "Colossal Youth" and the changing Fontainhas neighborhood in Lisbon. Jeon was on-hand for a great Q&A following the feature, which brought the audience back to reality quite gently, I think, since we were all feeling a bit emotionally fragile when the screen blacked out. And to the girls sitting next to me with the shrimp crisps: thank you for sharing!
* "The Good, The Bad, The Weird" (dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2010) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). The Korean Spaghetti Western isn't an entirely unknown art-form — think Ryu Seung-wan's "Dachimawa Lee", sort of — but Kim's gunpowder-lit caper, starring the multifaceted Song Kang-ho as 'The Weird', should set the standard.
* No Fun Productions presents Noveller, Okkyung Lee, MV Carbon + more @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave (G to Greenpoint), 9p/. I'm coming to terms w/ the fact that No Fun Fest is not happening in NY this year. But this night, feat. noise-inclined artists who really pull everything out of their respective instruments (Noveller's searing/enchanting drone guitar, improv cellists Lee and Carbon) will help me deal.
* MEN @ Death By Audio / 149 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p$6. Are you ready for MEN, the Brooklyn-based art/performance collective feat. members of Le Tigre and other delightfully noisy projects, as they celebrate their album release party? w/ Nomos and Nashville's Mlu, appropriately punk for the occasion.
SATURDAY
* Simon English "Full English" @ Robert Goff Gallery / 537B W 23rd St. Delicious show-title aside, this abstract-ish collection of oil paintings and mixed media works on paper remind me a bit of George Condo's twisted portraiture, only w/ the appropriately cheeky resonance of this Londoner.
* Bruar Falls 1 Year Anniversary w/ Beach Fossils + special guests!! @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. Has it really been a year? Bruar Falls, the little-sister to LES stalwart indie venue Cake Shop (while lacking a bit in floor-space but never in ace programming), throws a bash, w/ easy-breezy surf-rockers Beach Fossils (debut album out in May), "twin" DJ cuties Peggy Wang (of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) and Shirley Braha (of NY Noise) + special guests (quiiiite possibly Micachu & The Shapes!). MAYJAH (and, resurrecting the adjective, kick-ass)
* Saturday Sessions feat. Real Estate @ PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E to 23rd St/Ely Ave, G/7 to Courthouse Square) 4p/FREE w/ admission. PopRally hosts this new weekly performance series, which sounds artsier and hopefully enduringly cooler than Warm-Up — which I dig, mind you, esp. in the height of summer, when it avoids the weak rave-like mentality. Artists incl. Glen Baldridge, Donna Chung and Tim Lokiec take inspiration from the Christian Marclay "2822 Records" installation at PS1, screen-printing on blank LP sleeves w/ participants (maybe you??). And at the same time, NJ's finest surf-rockers Real Estate provide live audio! An afternoon of printmaking and surf tunes sounds like just the thing for an early summer.
MONDAY
* Child Abuse + Grooms @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Album release party for anarcho-noiseheads Child Abuse (think grindcore amplified by a Casio keyboard). And the mighty Grooms, amid the sludge and atonal chords, are sounding wickeder each time I see them live.
TUESDAY
* "Picasso in the Met" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). What I'm calling 'part three' or 'the compendium' of the Picasso shows of late (two fab printmaking shows at MoMA and Marlborough NY, read under CURRENT SHOWS) is, almost undoubtedly, the best for last. This is the Met, after all, and they've pulled out all the stops, i.e. their ENTIRE COLLECTION of Picasso's paintings, sculpture, and ceramics, plus loads more drawings to total 250 works. And considering the roof installation, opening the same day (weather permitting!!), the Met is going to get some mad traffic, son. See you there.
+ Doug + Mike Starn on the roof "Big Bambú". The Met's roof installations are super-dope, ushering forth the official beginning of warm weather, in my opinion. The sun blazing on your face as you traverse whatever it is up there, drinking some sort of alcoholic beverage as Central Park extends out in three directions. Where else can you get this experience? The Starn Bros present, in full title, "Big Bambú: You Can't, You Don't, and You Won't Stop", an always-in-progress monumental bamboo architectural marvel, that you can climb! And that name! It sounds like something I would have come up with.
* Anamanaguchi + Soft Circle @ Death By Audio / 149 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p$6. Feed your addiction for punk-NES jams (Anamanaguchi) and trippy psych grooves (Hisham Akira Bharoocha aka Soft Circle) tonight!
CURRENT SHOWS
* Nina Yuen "White Blindness" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. I was transfixed for about 20 minutes in this show, Yuen's four new short-film works. Maybe it's her honeyed voiceover, even when she reads Virginia Woolf's suicide note or a missing person's report. Maybe it's the artist acting onscreen as a stand-in for her mother ('Don') or idiosyncratically concocting new laborious hygiene methods ('Clean'). Or it's the dreamy soft-focus that pervades all these tightly edited, surreal encounters, over like a daydream just as you're falling deep into them.
* Almagul Menlibayeva "Daughters of Turan" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Consider me totally enlightened to the contemporary video art scene. Menlibayeva's enchanting, emotive duet "Milk For Lambs" and the pop-ish "Butterflies of Aisha Bibi" marry mythological narratives of the artist's heritage in Kazakhstan. The spiritual cycle of life on the steppe and an ancient love story like C. Asian Romeo & Juliet, staged in two vivid short films, w/ a strong selection of C-prints and lightbox prints in the adjacent gallery. Girls w/ flowers in their mouths, wrapped in iridescent patterned fabrics. Little kids holding goats. It's dope.
* Pablo Picasso "Celebrating the Muse" @ Marlborough NY / 40 W 57th St. Part two of the triumvirate Picasso shows descending on NYC, the others being the FIRST print-related delight at MoMA (see my write-up here) and the forthcoming collection-related exhibition at the Met. This is a golden time for art-lovers and casual art-goers: if your working knowledge of the imminent artist is "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon" (and/or "Three Musicians"), these exhibitions, particularly, in my opinion, the gorgeous variety of printmaking, are a blessing. As it's billed, the Marlborough show — museum-worthy in all ways — is full of women, focusing on Picasso's many muses/lovers throughout his oeuvre. And while that's so, there's a lot of bleedover w/ the MoMA show (which necessarily has the muses in it as well), incl. the recurrence of bulls, Minotaurs and saltimbanques. As in: there's a fine "Minotauromachy" etching/grattoir here, just as there's an extensive look at "La Feeme qui pleure" (aka Dora Maar, abstracted). Unlike MoMA, this one contains a brilliant early-career etching "Tete de femme" and a haunting series of artists and muses in varying aquatints and other mediums, like "Femme assiste dans un fauteuil". See this one and MoMA's broader show in tandem — they're only so many blocks apart — and you'll have a fine grasp of Picasso's printmaking.
* Amy Sillman "Transformer" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. If you don't count the rather wittily rendered series of lightbulb-transformation works on paper in the side gallery, about half Sillman's paintings are a lovely huge squarish size, blurring the architecturally geometric and figurative path w/ crisscrossed lines that could signal a human form, and lots of bold expanses of color. They're enough to lose yourself in but not overly, unapproachably large.
+ Anna Sew Hoy "Holes". With a glance, I could see the relation b/w Hoy's utilitarian sculpture and Sillman's expansive works, primarily in the latter's works on paper, like Hoy is transmitting those images into her denim- and fabric-works.
* Jim Campbell "Exploded View" @ Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery / 505 W 24th St. The man is doing some wild stuff w/ LEDs. Take the 'standard' Campbell, a bustling street-scene in grayscale that looks like a blurred photograph, and upgrade that to still photography (a rocky beach) w/ 'waves' or 'rolling mist' composed of a crafty LED sequence. Then knock that sucker totally out of the park w/ a suspended grid of exposed lights, blinking on and off that, from a distance reveal themselves to be a figure running down a hill.
* Joel Shapiro @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. I've felt that Shapiro's soaring 'stacked box' sculpture had a certain weightless to it, regardless of the heavy medium he used in its construction. That's entirely appropriate here, in this excellent exhibition of his new works. Using brightly painted wood planks, wire and — at least indirectly — ambient space, he has achieved a sort of graceful, exploding ballet, or tropical birds in flight, from these five powerful pieces. The larger ones, like "Was Blue", you can actually walk into, around the planks suspended in space, as your shadow interacts w/ the multitude of the work's own.
* Karel Funk @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Funk's portraiture continues to disquiet, in that the hoodie'd subjects are always turned away, and the backdrop remains stark white, but the lighting effects on the folds and wrinkled fabric deserve a second look.
* Jennifer Poon "A Temporary Space" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. A really impressive exhibition of Poon's (self) portrait watercolors, incorporating collaged paper into a like Garden of Eden landscape. Maybe its the preponderance of lush foliage as Poon's semi-abstracted nude figures cavort and explore. But then we have her 'Untitled Dream' installation, a cast-muslin figure w/ her explicitly rendered eviscera nailed to the wall behind her. That aside, her dreamy cut-paper gouache- and watercolors have me convinced she's very dope.
* Tatiana Trouvé @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. 1st thing that should tip you off to Trouvé's installation on the gallery's 5th fl is the exposed pipes in the entryway. Maybe that or the collection of shoes. Don't make the mistake of removing YOUR shoes too! Inside, she has created a sort of industrial portrait (slightly a la Mark Manders, w/ "Being John Malkovich" thrown in for good measure), mattresses and shoes lashed against pillars, oil-spattered glass sheets and little un-enterable cubbyholes.
* Roy Lichtenstein "Homage to Monet" @ Benrimon Contemporary / 514 W 24th St 2nd Fl. The inaugural exhibition in this W.Chelsea space doesn't waste any time! What w/ the impending Gagosian one-two Lichtenstein still-lifes and Monet late-works, let's get our fix NOW w/ Lichtenstein's reverence to the plein-air Impressionist, which in itself is further testament to the Pop artist's inventive techniques. His 'Cathedral' and 'Haystack' multiples are effectively trippy, but its his takes on the beloved water lilies, w/ and w/o Japanese footbridge, that really knock this show up several million notches. The works were silkscreened onto stainless steel, but not before Lichtenstein took a drill-bit to the metal, hand-carving this whorl pattern (not entirely unlike enlarged Ben-Day dots) that trippily echo rippling water, integrating rather effortlessly w/ the water lilies.
* Joe Zucker "Tales of Cotton" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Classic large-scale works done in Zucker's signature applied-cotton style, dabs and tears of the stuff heaped into wetly textured gobs that, from across the room, reveal themselves into chilling antebellum scenes, and the beauty of "Amy Hewes" paddleboat can't quite overcome the visions of the slaves laboring w/ carts of cotton.
* Siobhan Liddell "Ordinary Magic" @ CRG Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. I sensed a kindred spirit in Liddell's delicate cut-paper objects to the intimate late-career works of Eva Hesse at Hauser & Wirth (ending this weekend, read below in LAST CHANCE). There's a deliberateness to Liddell's works, whether the tautness of string augmenting a clay or paper work or extending through one of the artist's handmade tables, a plinth supporting the work plus an inherent link to the piece as a whole. Also: her choice in colors: gold-leaf folded paper with a royal blue underside, a textured acrylic- and cut-paper canvas like a shark's epidermis, nearly monochrome white w/ sneaky dabs and undersides in green.
* Jac Leirner "Osso" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Make what you will of the Brazilian artist's hoarding of plastic bags, stuffing them and cutting them into a stylized cross b/w designer handbags and photo frames, and displaying these valueless objet behind plexiglas. Think Freitag (thanks to the bold colors) only recycled into art. Leirner display is overlong but she manages a surprising range w/ the bags, some of which are relegated to handles and sewn bases only, leaving a great void and only an impression of containment.
* Fiona Rae "Special Fear!" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. I tweeted that Rae's exhibition reminded me of manga on acid, shortly after viewing the show, even though I don't read manga. But I think the comparison is appropriate, since these exuberant, large-scale, many-colored and -textured canvases conceal in their cloudy swooshes stuff like speed-lines, flowers and PANDAS. There's even like butterflies or something in the violet-hued "Build a fairyland for you" — all Rae's works have lovely names like this. Bit sugary viewing, but very very cool.
* Adrian Paci "Gestures" @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. Paci is focusing on brief, unscripted 'everyday life' occurring at ritualistic festivities, specifically those from his Albanian heritage. But one of the most compelling pieces — and one of the two video works, the strongest of the various mediums on display here — is two kids chasing a car. Though what Paci's done that relates it, in a greater sense, to the rest of his exhibition is snagging a second of the action, the kids on a dirt path, forest behind them, in mid-dash, and stretched the 'event' out to over five minutes. It reminded me of Jacco OlivierTKTK's show at Marianne Boesky Gallery that just concluded a few weeks ago. Paci's video takes on an incredible painterly effect, as the two figures blur out and draw back into sharp focus, as the road and trees stipple out into a Van Gogh-textured landscape before smearing off into total abstraction. His other video, "Last Gestures", more closely relates to the subject of 'off-moments' caught on camera, here an Albanian wedding as the bride says goodbye to her family. The four screens run in super slo-mo, though, amplifying the rift forming as she receives a kiss on the cheek from her brother and embraces a baby.
LAST CHANCE
* 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.
* Marlene Dumas "Against the Wall" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Meg Webster @ Paula Cooper Boutique / 465 W 23rd St. I'm calling this 'sensory minimalism'. Webster coated squares of paper w/ various kitchen ingredients and other media — ranging from onion powder, chocolate and wasabi to cement and soil — into ostensibly 'monotone' works. The textured surfaces, think Yves Klein stippled (chocolate) or Brice Marden flat (cement), are half the fun. The smell, the unique bouquets embodied in each work, welcome interaction and deep breaths.
* Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. A full-frontal assault of Abakanowicz's deconstructed-human sculptures in cast aluminum from the late-'80s march toward the windows facing 25th St, an artillery of smaller-to-larger than lifesize torsos and legs. It's a pleasantly off-putting experience, as is the rest of the show, composed of her newest pieces (a creepy morgue-like space of cast-burlap appendages, a wall of crudely welded steel bird 'paper-airplanes'), incl a massive cast-alumimum seated figure, run through w/ poles.
* "Pastiche" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. AKA a group show of a bunch of colorful stuff slopped together. The roster is only heavyweights but that doesn't mean it can't quickly veer into nauseous eye-numbing territory. I preferred the older works as a whole (a fine watery Jim Dine, a strong-lined Jean Dubuffet, a Cubist sewn-fabric Lucas Samaris) to the newer models (gratuitous Keith Tyson and much as it pains me to write I cannot get down w/ James Rosenquist's motorized canvases).
* Liz Craft "Past and Present" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. A sort of 'best-of' from the super creative figurative sculptor, from her gorgeous bronze "Tree Lady" to a distorted field of checkered fiberglass and an outsized porcelain egg in a bronze baby carriage.
* Keith Haring @ Tony Shafrazi Gallery / 544 W 26th St. The 20th Anniv. of the downtown NY icon. You can't hate on Haring unless you're an absolute Philistine, but if you are you're probably not reading this LIST. Shafrazi created a career-spanning exhibition of Haring's oeuvre, the Day-Glo paintings, the silkscreens and works on paper, the graffiti, Haring's bent-metal sculpture — and despite the fact I've seen a lot of this stuff (and probably you have too, if you followed Haring), there are some nice additions. One: the totemic carved-wood monoliths, painted in searing Day-Glo orange or yellow, and two: the black-light room. Oh yes, a black-light room, way out on the north gallery, outfitted w/ several of Haring's particularly psychedelic works and an '80s techno soundtrack, interspersed w/ Haring's commentary. But beware: you enter the black-light room, you might spend 15+ minutes in there like me b/c, even though I was born in the 80s and missed much of this stuff, it still acted as a sudden flashback.
* Lee Bul @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. Lee's sculpture remains as meticulously constructed as before, but she continues to eschew her earlier super-futuristic motif for a decidedly metaphysical, abstract direction.
* Micachu & The Shapes @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (FV to 2nd Ave), 9:30p/$10. FINALLY some good news of Eyjafjallajökull, the volcanic ash spewing out the Icelandic glacier that locked down trans-European travel for like a week and, in LIST-related events, caused many many band cancelations. In the case here, Sweden's The Mary Onettes are stuck in Europe + UK's Micachu are stuck stateside SO...we lucky ducklings get a fab, poppy Micachu & The Shapes show!
THURSDAY
* Lynette Yiadom-Boakye "Essays and Documents" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Large Expressionist-ish portraits locked in by flowing brushstrokes and the subjects' intense gazes.
+ Carrie Mae Weems "Slow Fade to Black". The historical drama as portraiture, via soft-focus, treated photography.
* Shirazeh Houshiary "Light Darkness" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Veiled and layered abstract paintings, like the sky at dusk, plus her related video animation and works on paper.
* Mohamed Bourouissa "Périphéries" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. The French photographer's (and member of the 'Younger Than Jesus' triennial at the New Museum) subject is the suburbs of France, where W. and N. African-descended youth take on classical poses in their environment.
* Joan Linder "Cost of Living" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Linder's mastery of the large-scale ink drawing — her sprawling duplication of a dive bar at a previous exhibition comes to mind — is peerless. This time, a pun on the show title, she takes on her junk mail and garden weeds w/ the same loving detail.
* Garder Eide Einarsson "Another Modern Moment Completed" @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. The reappropriated image, specifically in terms of reproduction as theft, are as much a subject of Einarsson's new paintings as is the history of modern art, w/ themes of Malevich, Lichtenstein and Parrino throughout.
* Patrick Lee "Deadly Friends" @ Ameringer McEnery Yohe / 525 W 22nd St. Draftsman-quality graphite works on paper of 10 years worth of Lee's LA-based subjects: a Noah's Ark of roughly masculine dudes.
* We Are Country Mice + White Wires @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$10. The final week of We Are Country Mice's twangy-rock residency at Cake Shop/Bruar Falls is a biggie, w/ inclusion of Ottawa effusive garage-rockers White Wires, whose catchy "Ha Ha Holiday" is on constant repeat at my place.
FRIDAY
* Ryan Mrozowski @ Pierogi / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg, 7-9p. There's a certain strange folklore to Mrozowski's slightly twisted oil on panel paintings: crowds of people, everywhere, at the theatre, yes, but then paired w/ cattle floating in the sky and against much taller, Daliesque versions of themselves. It's a bit like the urban lore in Jonathan Weiner's moody portraiture, only w/ a middle-Europe twist.
* Jeon Soo-il Retrospective @ NYU (various locations). I great primer for the cerebral Korean director's oeuvre. I've only seen his 2007 film "With a Girl of Black Soil", during the 2008 New York Korean Film Festival, but it still resonates in me and I'm totally planning to check out the other two in the show. Visit the event site for further info.
* "With a Girl of Black Soil" (dir. Jeon Soo-il, 2007) screening @ Cantor Film Center / 36 E 8th St (RW,6 to Astor Place), 6p. Part of the NYU Cinema Studies' retrospective on Jeon, who will attend the screening for a Q&A (always dope). I've copied, verbatim, my take from the 2008 NYKFF on the film: I think the choice for first proper film of the 2008 NYKFF (bypassing the historic drama "Hwang Jin Yi" only because that was a one-off gala event 'off campus' and featured cocktails and all sorts of non-film hubbub) is especially telling of the climate of contemporary Korean cinema. As in, it is an independently produced feature by a realist director, it features mostly non-actors (including the lead Yoo Yeon-mi as the wonderful, precocious Yeong-rim), and it is set in a mining town in the Gangwon-do region (not exactly metropolitan Seoul). And while there is the requisite K-horror feature, the hyper-saccharine romance, the over-the-top action flick, this stark, docu-style drama is the lead film. Jeon uses a lot of sustained and tracking shots in this somber portrait of a little girl (the cutest thing, really) who has to act as parent to her elder, mentally handicapped brother and her ex-miner, spiraling alcoholic father. 'Tough viewing' doesn't even cut it here, and the barren landscape of snow, rocks and soot doesn't give us much to escape the painful family situation. Nor is there much of a soundtrack, though Jeon is deft with the occasional piano chords and fretlass bass lines. The buildup to the conclusion reminded me of Pedro Costa's docu-style "Colossal Youth" and the changing Fontainhas neighborhood in Lisbon. Jeon was on-hand for a great Q&A following the feature, which brought the audience back to reality quite gently, I think, since we were all feeling a bit emotionally fragile when the screen blacked out. And to the girls sitting next to me with the shrimp crisps: thank you for sharing!
* "The Good, The Bad, The Weird" (dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2010) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). The Korean Spaghetti Western isn't an entirely unknown art-form — think Ryu Seung-wan's "Dachimawa Lee", sort of — but Kim's gunpowder-lit caper, starring the multifaceted Song Kang-ho as 'The Weird', should set the standard.
* No Fun Productions presents Noveller, Okkyung Lee, MV Carbon + more @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave (G to Greenpoint), 9p/. I'm coming to terms w/ the fact that No Fun Fest is not happening in NY this year. But this night, feat. noise-inclined artists who really pull everything out of their respective instruments (Noveller's searing/enchanting drone guitar, improv cellists Lee and Carbon) will help me deal.
* MEN @ Death By Audio / 149 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p$6. Are you ready for MEN, the Brooklyn-based art/performance collective feat. members of Le Tigre and other delightfully noisy projects, as they celebrate their album release party? w/ Nomos and Nashville's Mlu, appropriately punk for the occasion.
SATURDAY
* Simon English "Full English" @ Robert Goff Gallery / 537B W 23rd St. Delicious show-title aside, this abstract-ish collection of oil paintings and mixed media works on paper remind me a bit of George Condo's twisted portraiture, only w/ the appropriately cheeky resonance of this Londoner.
* Bruar Falls 1 Year Anniversary w/ Beach Fossils + special guests!! @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. Has it really been a year? Bruar Falls, the little-sister to LES stalwart indie venue Cake Shop (while lacking a bit in floor-space but never in ace programming), throws a bash, w/ easy-breezy surf-rockers Beach Fossils (debut album out in May), "twin" DJ cuties Peggy Wang (of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) and Shirley Braha (of NY Noise) + special guests (quiiiite possibly Micachu & The Shapes!). MAYJAH (and, resurrecting the adjective, kick-ass)
* Saturday Sessions feat. Real Estate @ PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E to 23rd St/Ely Ave, G/7 to Courthouse Square) 4p/FREE w/ admission. PopRally hosts this new weekly performance series, which sounds artsier and hopefully enduringly cooler than Warm-Up — which I dig, mind you, esp. in the height of summer, when it avoids the weak rave-like mentality. Artists incl. Glen Baldridge, Donna Chung and Tim Lokiec take inspiration from the Christian Marclay "2822 Records" installation at PS1, screen-printing on blank LP sleeves w/ participants (maybe you??). And at the same time, NJ's finest surf-rockers Real Estate provide live audio! An afternoon of printmaking and surf tunes sounds like just the thing for an early summer.
MONDAY
* Child Abuse + Grooms @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Album release party for anarcho-noiseheads Child Abuse (think grindcore amplified by a Casio keyboard). And the mighty Grooms, amid the sludge and atonal chords, are sounding wickeder each time I see them live.
TUESDAY
* "Picasso in the Met" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). What I'm calling 'part three' or 'the compendium' of the Picasso shows of late (two fab printmaking shows at MoMA and Marlborough NY, read under CURRENT SHOWS) is, almost undoubtedly, the best for last. This is the Met, after all, and they've pulled out all the stops, i.e. their ENTIRE COLLECTION of Picasso's paintings, sculpture, and ceramics, plus loads more drawings to total 250 works. And considering the roof installation, opening the same day (weather permitting!!), the Met is going to get some mad traffic, son. See you there.
+ Doug + Mike Starn on the roof "Big Bambú". The Met's roof installations are super-dope, ushering forth the official beginning of warm weather, in my opinion. The sun blazing on your face as you traverse whatever it is up there, drinking some sort of alcoholic beverage as Central Park extends out in three directions. Where else can you get this experience? The Starn Bros present, in full title, "Big Bambú: You Can't, You Don't, and You Won't Stop", an always-in-progress monumental bamboo architectural marvel, that you can climb! And that name! It sounds like something I would have come up with.
* Anamanaguchi + Soft Circle @ Death By Audio / 149 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p$6. Feed your addiction for punk-NES jams (Anamanaguchi) and trippy psych grooves (Hisham Akira Bharoocha aka Soft Circle) tonight!
CURRENT SHOWS
* Nina Yuen "White Blindness" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. I was transfixed for about 20 minutes in this show, Yuen's four new short-film works. Maybe it's her honeyed voiceover, even when she reads Virginia Woolf's suicide note or a missing person's report. Maybe it's the artist acting onscreen as a stand-in for her mother ('Don') or idiosyncratically concocting new laborious hygiene methods ('Clean'). Or it's the dreamy soft-focus that pervades all these tightly edited, surreal encounters, over like a daydream just as you're falling deep into them.
* Almagul Menlibayeva "Daughters of Turan" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Consider me totally enlightened to the contemporary video art scene. Menlibayeva's enchanting, emotive duet "Milk For Lambs" and the pop-ish "Butterflies of Aisha Bibi" marry mythological narratives of the artist's heritage in Kazakhstan. The spiritual cycle of life on the steppe and an ancient love story like C. Asian Romeo & Juliet, staged in two vivid short films, w/ a strong selection of C-prints and lightbox prints in the adjacent gallery. Girls w/ flowers in their mouths, wrapped in iridescent patterned fabrics. Little kids holding goats. It's dope.
* Pablo Picasso "Celebrating the Muse" @ Marlborough NY / 40 W 57th St. Part two of the triumvirate Picasso shows descending on NYC, the others being the FIRST print-related delight at MoMA (see my write-up here) and the forthcoming collection-related exhibition at the Met. This is a golden time for art-lovers and casual art-goers: if your working knowledge of the imminent artist is "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon" (and/or "Three Musicians"), these exhibitions, particularly, in my opinion, the gorgeous variety of printmaking, are a blessing. As it's billed, the Marlborough show — museum-worthy in all ways — is full of women, focusing on Picasso's many muses/lovers throughout his oeuvre. And while that's so, there's a lot of bleedover w/ the MoMA show (which necessarily has the muses in it as well), incl. the recurrence of bulls, Minotaurs and saltimbanques. As in: there's a fine "Minotauromachy" etching/grattoir here, just as there's an extensive look at "La Feeme qui pleure" (aka Dora Maar, abstracted). Unlike MoMA, this one contains a brilliant early-career etching "Tete de femme" and a haunting series of artists and muses in varying aquatints and other mediums, like "Femme assiste dans un fauteuil". See this one and MoMA's broader show in tandem — they're only so many blocks apart — and you'll have a fine grasp of Picasso's printmaking.
* Amy Sillman "Transformer" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. If you don't count the rather wittily rendered series of lightbulb-transformation works on paper in the side gallery, about half Sillman's paintings are a lovely huge squarish size, blurring the architecturally geometric and figurative path w/ crisscrossed lines that could signal a human form, and lots of bold expanses of color. They're enough to lose yourself in but not overly, unapproachably large.
+ Anna Sew Hoy "Holes". With a glance, I could see the relation b/w Hoy's utilitarian sculpture and Sillman's expansive works, primarily in the latter's works on paper, like Hoy is transmitting those images into her denim- and fabric-works.
* Jim Campbell "Exploded View" @ Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery / 505 W 24th St. The man is doing some wild stuff w/ LEDs. Take the 'standard' Campbell, a bustling street-scene in grayscale that looks like a blurred photograph, and upgrade that to still photography (a rocky beach) w/ 'waves' or 'rolling mist' composed of a crafty LED sequence. Then knock that sucker totally out of the park w/ a suspended grid of exposed lights, blinking on and off that, from a distance reveal themselves to be a figure running down a hill.
* Joel Shapiro @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. I've felt that Shapiro's soaring 'stacked box' sculpture had a certain weightless to it, regardless of the heavy medium he used in its construction. That's entirely appropriate here, in this excellent exhibition of his new works. Using brightly painted wood planks, wire and — at least indirectly — ambient space, he has achieved a sort of graceful, exploding ballet, or tropical birds in flight, from these five powerful pieces. The larger ones, like "Was Blue", you can actually walk into, around the planks suspended in space, as your shadow interacts w/ the multitude of the work's own.
* Karel Funk @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Funk's portraiture continues to disquiet, in that the hoodie'd subjects are always turned away, and the backdrop remains stark white, but the lighting effects on the folds and wrinkled fabric deserve a second look.
* Jennifer Poon "A Temporary Space" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. A really impressive exhibition of Poon's (self) portrait watercolors, incorporating collaged paper into a like Garden of Eden landscape. Maybe its the preponderance of lush foliage as Poon's semi-abstracted nude figures cavort and explore. But then we have her 'Untitled Dream' installation, a cast-muslin figure w/ her explicitly rendered eviscera nailed to the wall behind her. That aside, her dreamy cut-paper gouache- and watercolors have me convinced she's very dope.
* Tatiana Trouvé @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. 1st thing that should tip you off to Trouvé's installation on the gallery's 5th fl is the exposed pipes in the entryway. Maybe that or the collection of shoes. Don't make the mistake of removing YOUR shoes too! Inside, she has created a sort of industrial portrait (slightly a la Mark Manders, w/ "Being John Malkovich" thrown in for good measure), mattresses and shoes lashed against pillars, oil-spattered glass sheets and little un-enterable cubbyholes.
* Roy Lichtenstein "Homage to Monet" @ Benrimon Contemporary / 514 W 24th St 2nd Fl. The inaugural exhibition in this W.Chelsea space doesn't waste any time! What w/ the impending Gagosian one-two Lichtenstein still-lifes and Monet late-works, let's get our fix NOW w/ Lichtenstein's reverence to the plein-air Impressionist, which in itself is further testament to the Pop artist's inventive techniques. His 'Cathedral' and 'Haystack' multiples are effectively trippy, but its his takes on the beloved water lilies, w/ and w/o Japanese footbridge, that really knock this show up several million notches. The works were silkscreened onto stainless steel, but not before Lichtenstein took a drill-bit to the metal, hand-carving this whorl pattern (not entirely unlike enlarged Ben-Day dots) that trippily echo rippling water, integrating rather effortlessly w/ the water lilies.
* Joe Zucker "Tales of Cotton" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Classic large-scale works done in Zucker's signature applied-cotton style, dabs and tears of the stuff heaped into wetly textured gobs that, from across the room, reveal themselves into chilling antebellum scenes, and the beauty of "Amy Hewes" paddleboat can't quite overcome the visions of the slaves laboring w/ carts of cotton.
* Siobhan Liddell "Ordinary Magic" @ CRG Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. I sensed a kindred spirit in Liddell's delicate cut-paper objects to the intimate late-career works of Eva Hesse at Hauser & Wirth (ending this weekend, read below in LAST CHANCE). There's a deliberateness to Liddell's works, whether the tautness of string augmenting a clay or paper work or extending through one of the artist's handmade tables, a plinth supporting the work plus an inherent link to the piece as a whole. Also: her choice in colors: gold-leaf folded paper with a royal blue underside, a textured acrylic- and cut-paper canvas like a shark's epidermis, nearly monochrome white w/ sneaky dabs and undersides in green.
* Jac Leirner "Osso" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Make what you will of the Brazilian artist's hoarding of plastic bags, stuffing them and cutting them into a stylized cross b/w designer handbags and photo frames, and displaying these valueless objet behind plexiglas. Think Freitag (thanks to the bold colors) only recycled into art. Leirner display is overlong but she manages a surprising range w/ the bags, some of which are relegated to handles and sewn bases only, leaving a great void and only an impression of containment.
* Fiona Rae "Special Fear!" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. I tweeted that Rae's exhibition reminded me of manga on acid, shortly after viewing the show, even though I don't read manga. But I think the comparison is appropriate, since these exuberant, large-scale, many-colored and -textured canvases conceal in their cloudy swooshes stuff like speed-lines, flowers and PANDAS. There's even like butterflies or something in the violet-hued "Build a fairyland for you" — all Rae's works have lovely names like this. Bit sugary viewing, but very very cool.
* Adrian Paci "Gestures" @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. Paci is focusing on brief, unscripted 'everyday life' occurring at ritualistic festivities, specifically those from his Albanian heritage. But one of the most compelling pieces — and one of the two video works, the strongest of the various mediums on display here — is two kids chasing a car. Though what Paci's done that relates it, in a greater sense, to the rest of his exhibition is snagging a second of the action, the kids on a dirt path, forest behind them, in mid-dash, and stretched the 'event' out to over five minutes. It reminded me of Jacco OlivierTKTK's show at Marianne Boesky Gallery that just concluded a few weeks ago. Paci's video takes on an incredible painterly effect, as the two figures blur out and draw back into sharp focus, as the road and trees stipple out into a Van Gogh-textured landscape before smearing off into total abstraction. His other video, "Last Gestures", more closely relates to the subject of 'off-moments' caught on camera, here an Albanian wedding as the bride says goodbye to her family. The four screens run in super slo-mo, though, amplifying the rift forming as she receives a kiss on the cheek from her brother and embraces a baby.
LAST CHANCE
* 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.
* Marlene Dumas "Against the Wall" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Meg Webster @ Paula Cooper Boutique / 465 W 23rd St. I'm calling this 'sensory minimalism'. Webster coated squares of paper w/ various kitchen ingredients and other media — ranging from onion powder, chocolate and wasabi to cement and soil — into ostensibly 'monotone' works. The textured surfaces, think Yves Klein stippled (chocolate) or Brice Marden flat (cement), are half the fun. The smell, the unique bouquets embodied in each work, welcome interaction and deep breaths.
* Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. A full-frontal assault of Abakanowicz's deconstructed-human sculptures in cast aluminum from the late-'80s march toward the windows facing 25th St, an artillery of smaller-to-larger than lifesize torsos and legs. It's a pleasantly off-putting experience, as is the rest of the show, composed of her newest pieces (a creepy morgue-like space of cast-burlap appendages, a wall of crudely welded steel bird 'paper-airplanes'), incl a massive cast-alumimum seated figure, run through w/ poles.
* "Pastiche" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. AKA a group show of a bunch of colorful stuff slopped together. The roster is only heavyweights but that doesn't mean it can't quickly veer into nauseous eye-numbing territory. I preferred the older works as a whole (a fine watery Jim Dine, a strong-lined Jean Dubuffet, a Cubist sewn-fabric Lucas Samaris) to the newer models (gratuitous Keith Tyson and much as it pains me to write I cannot get down w/ James Rosenquist's motorized canvases).
* Liz Craft "Past and Present" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. A sort of 'best-of' from the super creative figurative sculptor, from her gorgeous bronze "Tree Lady" to a distorted field of checkered fiberglass and an outsized porcelain egg in a bronze baby carriage.
* Keith Haring @ Tony Shafrazi Gallery / 544 W 26th St. The 20th Anniv. of the downtown NY icon. You can't hate on Haring unless you're an absolute Philistine, but if you are you're probably not reading this LIST. Shafrazi created a career-spanning exhibition of Haring's oeuvre, the Day-Glo paintings, the silkscreens and works on paper, the graffiti, Haring's bent-metal sculpture — and despite the fact I've seen a lot of this stuff (and probably you have too, if you followed Haring), there are some nice additions. One: the totemic carved-wood monoliths, painted in searing Day-Glo orange or yellow, and two: the black-light room. Oh yes, a black-light room, way out on the north gallery, outfitted w/ several of Haring's particularly psychedelic works and an '80s techno soundtrack, interspersed w/ Haring's commentary. But beware: you enter the black-light room, you might spend 15+ minutes in there like me b/c, even though I was born in the 80s and missed much of this stuff, it still acted as a sudden flashback.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
I dig: Joel Shapiro
Picture tropical fish (or birds, either work equally well) in suspended animation. Or how about a freeze-frame, 'bullet-time' animation from "The Matrix"? Better yet: any of the Bowser's castle levels on Super Mario 64. Joel Shapiro's exhibition of new works at The Pace Gallery would make an ill Mario Bros 3D platform game.
OK here's the deal: Shapiro is presenting an important and thoroughly enjoyable show. Amid the museum-quality posthumous exhibitions of influential artists — just this year alone, two for Joseph Beuys (incl. one at The Pace Gallery), Ed Paschke's at Gagosian and, though brief, the Eva Hesse late-works show at Hauser & Wirth — there have been solid showings for living artists too, in particular Ken Price, who achieved near-ubiquity for a time, incl. a strong go at Matthew Marks. Shapiro's got that going now, too, only his one-two punch this year happened months apart: the delightfully eerie exhibition of early, small-scale works at Paula Cooper Gallery back in January (his original gallery in NY) and now, appropriately, this five-piece at Pace, all new works, all quite large, and yet all literally lighter than air. Art-bloggers, critics, and gallery-goers (plus you general aesthetes like me) better take note.
Shapiro's last solo show at Pace was in late 2007, a mix of large- to massive-scale bronze and painted-wood sculpture that, while stretching out and exploring the greater gallery space (and in Pace's hangar-like 22nd St gallery, that's a lot of space), remained firmly anchored to the earth. Yet in Shapiro's signature way, these structures, ranging from artist's dummies to blocky Hasbro iDogs to Star Wars droids, conveyed a lightness belying their respective composed weights. Even the really big one, a bronze spanning almost 28' in width and appearing somewhat like a super-simplified Picasso bullfight abstract, looked somehow like a super-enlarged model in photographs. In person, their gracefulness succeeded their respective gravities.
Shapiro takes this theme of lightness w/ large materials way further in this new show, working with painted rough wood panels and variously tensile fishing line w/ industrial fastenings. That's it, plus the ambient space that becomes another element in each piece. Intense!! Now compare this to his previous Pace show and it sounds like quite a departure — a furthering of an idea, yes, interacting w/ space w/o the constraint of rigid architecture, but still smallish wood elements floating about? Naturally, I'm going to tell you this is not unheard of from Shapiro. That's why I mentioned his early-works show above, as it included, besides a selection of intimate-scaled bronze figurative works, two rather startling wood works, a sort of balsa-wood-looking scatter incl. a ramp and either a canoe or a coffin (your take) and what appeared to be a dismantled draftsman's dummy, both from the early '70s. In the '80s, Shapiro would enlarge such scattered objects and suspend them in the air via metal rods, honing this further into hanging constructions at the turn of the millennium, while working up his balletic earthbound sculpture simultaneously. The new exhibition at Pace is just another rung of Shapiro's evolutionary ladder as an artist, continually challenging us to the resonance and buoyant beauty of large-scale sculpture, even the nature of sculpture itself.
The 2009 piece "Float", a four-plank sculpture located in line-of-sight to the gallery entrance, is a good primer for the show. The four wood elements — a strong kelly-green board at horizontal eye-level, over a goldenrod plank angled toward the floor, plus a vertical brown and a seafoam-painted board pitched at the ceiling — create a neat vertical composition, plus Shapiro's use of mostly white fishing line creates a great ethereal effect as the connecting elements blend into the wall and ceiling, like the sun's glare through fog. The planks really look as though they are hanging unfettered in space. I suggest you pick up a schematic from the front desk before proceeding further. I sometimes ignore these things and just 'go it alone', but Shapiro collaborated with Pace's exhibition team in creating the layout of the map and it's very very dope. It's a topographic, bird's-eye line-drawing of the gallery, w/ the five pieces reduced to a network of lines and colored polygons designating the wood. Since this is a top-down view, everything is literally flattened out and, while it's all there (you can count the lines and shapes), elements are skewed and reduced, cloaking the wonderful volume of the works. It's rather fascinating to see the dichotomy between the static drawing and the real-life hanging works. "Was Blue" (2010) rests in about half of the main gallery space, though its fishing lines cross-cut back to the front desk in the far corner and nearly to the entryway. It's a satisfyingly big work, a mostly planar collection of blues bisected by a strong sky-blue vertical (which alerts then refocuses the eye on the inherent overall horizontal-ness. An eye-level McDonald's Orange Drink-colored plank, slung on two connectors, hangs off to one side, echoed by an abbreviated high-hung teal on the other, like satellites to the greater central bluish form. The duo in the gallery off to the side of "Was Blue" — the horizontal, self-descriptive "Plank" (2010) and the tautly vertical "Blue/Cad Red Deep" (2009) — bear an ingenious interplay as a pair while maintaining their respective individualities. I particularly dug "Plank", a cinnamony squarish, coffee-table-sized slab, w/ its weathered surface and dull glimmer that could have been a Richard Serra if it were Cor-Ten steel and propped against the wall. Plus the paint markings on the white fishing line is evidence that this is probably one of the works Shapiro painted 'in situ', instead of applying the dry pigment in casein emulsion beforehand and then hanging. The harlequin effect of "Blue/Cad Red Deep" — in what I'm calling oil-pastel cyan and bitter-chocolate — echoed Jasper Johns' forays with that pattern. I left the side gallery left of the entrance for last on purpose, as the experience of walking through "For Anna" (2009) is a continuation of, and an alternative to, "Was Blue". "For Anna" is the other six-plank piece in the exhibition, two pairs of narrow brown and teal boards floating at eye-level and ascending to the ceiling and, with a very visual moat between, a low-slung yellow and brown board (I've exhausted crafty color descriptors). The network of dark-colored fishing lines is more frenetic here, w/ each cable exploring and grappling into the reduced dimensions of the room, particularly the strong diagonal lines off the high vertical teal plank. Think Fred Sandback crossed w/ a super-sized cat's cradle. The line system is way more conspicuous here, too, as the black string bounds off the white walls instead of receding into them. It's like we're meant to see the interconnectivity here, the way the fishing line crisscrosses and articulates the space that the boards, and "For Anna" in its entirety — and we the viewer, entering that space — inhabit.
(many thanks to The Pace Gallery for permission to run my above photos of "Was Blue", 2010)
OK here's the deal: Shapiro is presenting an important and thoroughly enjoyable show. Amid the museum-quality posthumous exhibitions of influential artists — just this year alone, two for Joseph Beuys (incl. one at The Pace Gallery), Ed Paschke's at Gagosian and, though brief, the Eva Hesse late-works show at Hauser & Wirth — there have been solid showings for living artists too, in particular Ken Price, who achieved near-ubiquity for a time, incl. a strong go at Matthew Marks. Shapiro's got that going now, too, only his one-two punch this year happened months apart: the delightfully eerie exhibition of early, small-scale works at Paula Cooper Gallery back in January (his original gallery in NY) and now, appropriately, this five-piece at Pace, all new works, all quite large, and yet all literally lighter than air. Art-bloggers, critics, and gallery-goers (plus you general aesthetes like me) better take note.
Shapiro's last solo show at Pace was in late 2007, a mix of large- to massive-scale bronze and painted-wood sculpture that, while stretching out and exploring the greater gallery space (and in Pace's hangar-like 22nd St gallery, that's a lot of space), remained firmly anchored to the earth. Yet in Shapiro's signature way, these structures, ranging from artist's dummies to blocky Hasbro iDogs to Star Wars droids, conveyed a lightness belying their respective composed weights. Even the really big one, a bronze spanning almost 28' in width and appearing somewhat like a super-simplified Picasso bullfight abstract, looked somehow like a super-enlarged model in photographs. In person, their gracefulness succeeded their respective gravities.
Shapiro takes this theme of lightness w/ large materials way further in this new show, working with painted rough wood panels and variously tensile fishing line w/ industrial fastenings. That's it, plus the ambient space that becomes another element in each piece. Intense!! Now compare this to his previous Pace show and it sounds like quite a departure — a furthering of an idea, yes, interacting w/ space w/o the constraint of rigid architecture, but still smallish wood elements floating about? Naturally, I'm going to tell you this is not unheard of from Shapiro. That's why I mentioned his early-works show above, as it included, besides a selection of intimate-scaled bronze figurative works, two rather startling wood works, a sort of balsa-wood-looking scatter incl. a ramp and either a canoe or a coffin (your take) and what appeared to be a dismantled draftsman's dummy, both from the early '70s. In the '80s, Shapiro would enlarge such scattered objects and suspend them in the air via metal rods, honing this further into hanging constructions at the turn of the millennium, while working up his balletic earthbound sculpture simultaneously. The new exhibition at Pace is just another rung of Shapiro's evolutionary ladder as an artist, continually challenging us to the resonance and buoyant beauty of large-scale sculpture, even the nature of sculpture itself.
The 2009 piece "Float", a four-plank sculpture located in line-of-sight to the gallery entrance, is a good primer for the show. The four wood elements — a strong kelly-green board at horizontal eye-level, over a goldenrod plank angled toward the floor, plus a vertical brown and a seafoam-painted board pitched at the ceiling — create a neat vertical composition, plus Shapiro's use of mostly white fishing line creates a great ethereal effect as the connecting elements blend into the wall and ceiling, like the sun's glare through fog. The planks really look as though they are hanging unfettered in space. I suggest you pick up a schematic from the front desk before proceeding further. I sometimes ignore these things and just 'go it alone', but Shapiro collaborated with Pace's exhibition team in creating the layout of the map and it's very very dope. It's a topographic, bird's-eye line-drawing of the gallery, w/ the five pieces reduced to a network of lines and colored polygons designating the wood. Since this is a top-down view, everything is literally flattened out and, while it's all there (you can count the lines and shapes), elements are skewed and reduced, cloaking the wonderful volume of the works. It's rather fascinating to see the dichotomy between the static drawing and the real-life hanging works. "Was Blue" (2010) rests in about half of the main gallery space, though its fishing lines cross-cut back to the front desk in the far corner and nearly to the entryway. It's a satisfyingly big work, a mostly planar collection of blues bisected by a strong sky-blue vertical (which alerts then refocuses the eye on the inherent overall horizontal-ness. An eye-level McDonald's Orange Drink-colored plank, slung on two connectors, hangs off to one side, echoed by an abbreviated high-hung teal on the other, like satellites to the greater central bluish form. The duo in the gallery off to the side of "Was Blue" — the horizontal, self-descriptive "Plank" (2010) and the tautly vertical "Blue/Cad Red Deep" (2009) — bear an ingenious interplay as a pair while maintaining their respective individualities. I particularly dug "Plank", a cinnamony squarish, coffee-table-sized slab, w/ its weathered surface and dull glimmer that could have been a Richard Serra if it were Cor-Ten steel and propped against the wall. Plus the paint markings on the white fishing line is evidence that this is probably one of the works Shapiro painted 'in situ', instead of applying the dry pigment in casein emulsion beforehand and then hanging. The harlequin effect of "Blue/Cad Red Deep" — in what I'm calling oil-pastel cyan and bitter-chocolate — echoed Jasper Johns' forays with that pattern. I left the side gallery left of the entrance for last on purpose, as the experience of walking through "For Anna" (2009) is a continuation of, and an alternative to, "Was Blue". "For Anna" is the other six-plank piece in the exhibition, two pairs of narrow brown and teal boards floating at eye-level and ascending to the ceiling and, with a very visual moat between, a low-slung yellow and brown board (I've exhausted crafty color descriptors). The network of dark-colored fishing lines is more frenetic here, w/ each cable exploring and grappling into the reduced dimensions of the room, particularly the strong diagonal lines off the high vertical teal plank. Think Fred Sandback crossed w/ a super-sized cat's cradle. The line system is way more conspicuous here, too, as the black string bounds off the white walls instead of receding into them. It's like we're meant to see the interconnectivity here, the way the fishing line crisscrosses and articulates the space that the boards, and "For Anna" in its entirety — and we the viewer, entering that space — inhabit.
(many thanks to The Pace Gallery for permission to run my above photos of "Was Blue", 2010)
Friday, April 16, 2010
Emotional Resonance from 'Simple' Forms
Much of the benefit of viewing art — whether or not we necessarily 'get it' — is the emotional feedback it provides. Besides the recurring fear of head-scratching bewilderment at this season's most popular neo-Conceptualist or what-have-you, there is the reward of calming meditation, of gentle bemusement, of occasional revulsion and hopefully more commonly joy. I sense much of the above (minus the revulsion) at two ace group shows concurrently in West Chelsea, the stellar "\ (Lean)" at Nicole Klagsbrun (ending Saturday the 24th) and "If My Soul Had A Shape..." at Paula Cooper Gallery (through the beginning of May). Both focus their roster of artists on deceptively simple means: stuff that leans, in Klagsbrun's case, and shapes in Cooper's. You can't get much more apparent than that. In fact, a show based around, oh a color for example, I could see becoming extremely fussy. And it's not that the artists in both shows are inherently minimalist, either. (though we do get some of that, it's definitely not a prerequisite for inclusion)
Stuff that leans. It's a brilliant notion. Art that isn't meant to be hung or rest on its own, like on a base or suspended from the ceiling, may need to be propped up against the wall. That's what the 20 artists in Klagsbrun's show achieve — all except Bas Jan Ader, whose action photograph of his falling (you could call it leaning, since it's frozen in time) appropriately sets the bar and is the oldest piece on show. The 1st thing you'll probably see upon entering the gallery is Nari Ward's visceral "Fourteen Burnt Bats with Ironed Cotton (2 Weeks)", an earlyish work from 1993 (N.B. don't miss Ward's fab solo show at Lehmann Maupin, ending THIS Saturday). The scorched bats w/ matted streaks of cotton embody an unsubtle violence echoed in Ader's tumble to the earth. And w/ the gallery lights casting sharp bat-shaped shadows against the wall and floor, akin to prison bars, it produces an unnerving vibe that I didn't mention in the opener but is essential to a piece meant to make us think a bit harder.
The side gallery just off Ward's wall features my favorite pieces in the show, led by Robert Gober's drawbridge-sized "Plywood", a bit of a chestnut itself in its 1987 date. Now Gober is noted for his lovingly crafted pieces that closely resemble one thing (a banged up paint can, a bag of kitty litter) but are another (painted wood, usually) — though these tend to maintain the artist's handiwork, so while they are quite realistic there is still evidence of his methodology there. Well, pardon me but "Plywood" looks exactly like plywood, like a sheet of the stuff one finds at Home Depot in great fragrant stacks, wood's workhorse. I don't work closely with the stuff to tell the difference between the real deal and Gober's piece (which is laminated fir, by the way), let alone Grades A-D, but he's achieved something sublime here. Once again Gober takes a lowly material, an essential ingredient in construction, elevates it w/ his detailed craftsmanship, and has the work leaning against a gallery wall just like any other 4x8' sheet of plywood. It's quite fascinating — and funny to note, too, that another work in the show that uses actual plywood, "UFO" (2002) by John McCracken, resembles nothing of the sort. In McCracken's usual prismatic way, the resin- and fiberglass-augmented "UFO" comes off like a teal-colored, glossy, thick rectangle. Susan Collis elevates her subjects too, with precious materials as much as attention to detail, so her block of wood entitled "The sum of my parts" (2008) glimmers with 18-carat yellow gold (screws), amber, black diamonds, smoky topaz, and a trickle of mother of pearl. The other tricky element in this room, carried out into the larger gallery, is this unexpected vein of minimalism from artists whose modus operandi isn't quite that. I'm referring specifically to flocking, seen in Keith Sonnier's new "Stock Prop" (2010), a Pepto-pink polystyrene and flocking puzzle piece, and Mary Heilmann's wicked "Sculpture of Night" (spanning 1968-2007), which could in some instances reference a Richard Serra prop piece, only this one is made of styrofoam and bamboo w/ a black nylon flocking throughout. Now, I know Sonnier quite well for his neon-incorporated sculpture. I mean, he just had a show of new works at Mary Boone Gallery, his 'Oldowan Series', and if anything the man is known for his inventive use of twisty neon. Same deal for Heilmann, whose admittedly varied abstract paintings (whether psychedelic and color-field or geometrically abstract or palette-reductive) always echo her and only her. Though there is a certain softness to "Sculpture of Night", and not just due to the flocking: it's this, plus the wavy stick supporting the styrofoam form high in the air, that carry Heilmann's essence, lightening up what w/ different materials could be construed as a weightily dangerous work. And like I wrote above about the shadows in Ward's work, it's interesting to look at these pieces from the side to see the interplay w/ their shadows and how certain ones (the misshapen cloud of styrofoam, courtesy of Richard Tuttle) belie their respective masses.
Eight artists at Paula Cooper arranged by shape: square, rectangle, triangle, circle, squiggle and squircle (the latter two sound appropriate to Sol LeWitt, on display here, w/ his vernacular of 'not-straight lines', though only squiggle is attributed to him). The categories (I think w/ the exception of 'squircle') stem from Dr. Susan Dellinger's 1978 comments on the psycho-geometric test, where each shape acts as a broad definition of who you are.
This is fun enough, but I missed the Dr. Dellinger placard at the front desk the 1st time I visited the show, and I had a blast anyway. The psycho-geometric test isn't essential to enjoying the art — though, for posterity, I am either a 'circle' or a 'triangle', no surprise there, if you read the words attributed to Dr. Dellinger. I should note, too, that the exhibition title actually comes from a Pavement song, "Blue Hawaiian", which is exceedingly cool. As the lyric goes, according to the gallery write-up: "If my soul had a shape, then it would be an ellipse." The piece I was magnetically drawn to, in this array of fine works, was Kelley Walker's four-part "Circle in circle" from 2006, cast-chocolate 'disco-balls' (that's my description), in degrading diameters of 24", 20", 16" and 12", respectively, suspended from the ceiling via chains and spinning in tandem like satellites locked in tidal motion around an unseen planet. The piece neatly bisects the room, coming at it from an angle as it were, dividing the other two heavyweight standing pieces in the room, both newish works by Carl Andre. These include my other favorite work, the seductive and somehow soft-textured "Base 7 Aluminum Stack" from 2008, composed of 49 powdery aluminum ingots in a sort of low pyramid. 
As much as I dig Andre's aluminum-related floor pieces, slabs of the material on the gallery floor, there is something resounding in this array, in its casting to resemble gold bars while remaining a utilitarian multi-use metal. I could tangentially compare this to the Gober piece at Klagsbrun, the prelation and celebration of a pragmatic medium. The other Andre, "3x11 Hollow Rectangle", from the same year, is a self-descriptive arrangement of western red cedar timbers that could be either a deep grave or bathing trough, depending on your inclinations, but it smells wonderful. Compare with the fine Meg Webster "Contained Asphalt" (1988) near the front desk, a tall glass triangular prism filled to the brim with bits of bituminous asphalt, which smell like the roadwork that just concluded on W 23rd St. (cheekily incongruous to some of Webster's delicious-smelling spice-on-paper works) Webster's piece also, in my opinion, throws a wrench in Dr. Dellinger's neat five- (or six-) shape hypothesis: is it a triangle? (meaning the container, as the asphalt itself has a notably irregular shape) Hence, no need to stress over the shapes; enjoy for what they are. And do not miss the coup de grace here, the Donald Judd "Untitled" work (1962-90) in the side gallery, a tangerine-colored squarish plywood block, enhanced on the front w/ a dermal-like sandpaint surface and, in the center, a lustrous glass circle. This might be that dodgy 'squircle' as described in the psycho-geometric test, the "unusual individualist who could not fit into a niche of his society". Considering Judd's hallmark art processes — industrial fabrication, use of humble materials (plywood, plexiglas, aluminum), eschewing representation and categorization — and the many artists he inspired and influenced, I could find this definition apropros.
(many thanks to Nicole Klagsbrun and Paula Cooper Galleries, respectively, for permission to run the above photos)
Stuff that leans. It's a brilliant notion. Art that isn't meant to be hung or rest on its own, like on a base or suspended from the ceiling, may need to be propped up against the wall. That's what the 20 artists in Klagsbrun's show achieve — all except Bas Jan Ader, whose action photograph of his falling (you could call it leaning, since it's frozen in time) appropriately sets the bar and is the oldest piece on show. The 1st thing you'll probably see upon entering the gallery is Nari Ward's visceral "Fourteen Burnt Bats with Ironed Cotton (2 Weeks)", an earlyish work from 1993 (N.B. don't miss Ward's fab solo show at Lehmann Maupin, ending THIS Saturday). The scorched bats w/ matted streaks of cotton embody an unsubtle violence echoed in Ader's tumble to the earth. And w/ the gallery lights casting sharp bat-shaped shadows against the wall and floor, akin to prison bars, it produces an unnerving vibe that I didn't mention in the opener but is essential to a piece meant to make us think a bit harder.
The side gallery just off Ward's wall features my favorite pieces in the show, led by Robert Gober's drawbridge-sized "Plywood", a bit of a chestnut itself in its 1987 date. Now Gober is noted for his lovingly crafted pieces that closely resemble one thing (a banged up paint can, a bag of kitty litter) but are another (painted wood, usually) — though these tend to maintain the artist's handiwork, so while they are quite realistic there is still evidence of his methodology there. Well, pardon me but "Plywood" looks exactly like plywood, like a sheet of the stuff one finds at Home Depot in great fragrant stacks, wood's workhorse. I don't work closely with the stuff to tell the difference between the real deal and Gober's piece (which is laminated fir, by the way), let alone Grades A-D, but he's achieved something sublime here. Once again Gober takes a lowly material, an essential ingredient in construction, elevates it w/ his detailed craftsmanship, and has the work leaning against a gallery wall just like any other 4x8' sheet of plywood. It's quite fascinating — and funny to note, too, that another work in the show that uses actual plywood, "UFO" (2002) by John McCracken, resembles nothing of the sort. In McCracken's usual prismatic way, the resin- and fiberglass-augmented "UFO" comes off like a teal-colored, glossy, thick rectangle. Susan Collis elevates her subjects too, with precious materials as much as attention to detail, so her block of wood entitled "The sum of my parts" (2008) glimmers with 18-carat yellow gold (screws), amber, black diamonds, smoky topaz, and a trickle of mother of pearl. The other tricky element in this room, carried out into the larger gallery, is this unexpected vein of minimalism from artists whose modus operandi isn't quite that. I'm referring specifically to flocking, seen in Keith Sonnier's new "Stock Prop" (2010), a Pepto-pink polystyrene and flocking puzzle piece, and Mary Heilmann's wicked "Sculpture of Night" (spanning 1968-2007), which could in some instances reference a Richard Serra prop piece, only this one is made of styrofoam and bamboo w/ a black nylon flocking throughout. Now, I know Sonnier quite well for his neon-incorporated sculpture. I mean, he just had a show of new works at Mary Boone Gallery, his 'Oldowan Series', and if anything the man is known for his inventive use of twisty neon. Same deal for Heilmann, whose admittedly varied abstract paintings (whether psychedelic and color-field or geometrically abstract or palette-reductive) always echo her and only her. Though there is a certain softness to "Sculpture of Night", and not just due to the flocking: it's this, plus the wavy stick supporting the styrofoam form high in the air, that carry Heilmann's essence, lightening up what w/ different materials could be construed as a weightily dangerous work. And like I wrote above about the shadows in Ward's work, it's interesting to look at these pieces from the side to see the interplay w/ their shadows and how certain ones (the misshapen cloud of styrofoam, courtesy of Richard Tuttle) belie their respective masses.Eight artists at Paula Cooper arranged by shape: square, rectangle, triangle, circle, squiggle and squircle (the latter two sound appropriate to Sol LeWitt, on display here, w/ his vernacular of 'not-straight lines', though only squiggle is attributed to him). The categories (I think w/ the exception of 'squircle') stem from Dr. Susan Dellinger's 1978 comments on the psycho-geometric test, where each shape acts as a broad definition of who you are.
This is fun enough, but I missed the Dr. Dellinger placard at the front desk the 1st time I visited the show, and I had a blast anyway. The psycho-geometric test isn't essential to enjoying the art — though, for posterity, I am either a 'circle' or a 'triangle', no surprise there, if you read the words attributed to Dr. Dellinger. I should note, too, that the exhibition title actually comes from a Pavement song, "Blue Hawaiian", which is exceedingly cool. As the lyric goes, according to the gallery write-up: "If my soul had a shape, then it would be an ellipse." The piece I was magnetically drawn to, in this array of fine works, was Kelley Walker's four-part "Circle in circle" from 2006, cast-chocolate 'disco-balls' (that's my description), in degrading diameters of 24", 20", 16" and 12", respectively, suspended from the ceiling via chains and spinning in tandem like satellites locked in tidal motion around an unseen planet. The piece neatly bisects the room, coming at it from an angle as it were, dividing the other two heavyweight standing pieces in the room, both newish works by Carl Andre. These include my other favorite work, the seductive and somehow soft-textured "Base 7 Aluminum Stack" from 2008, composed of 49 powdery aluminum ingots in a sort of low pyramid. 
As much as I dig Andre's aluminum-related floor pieces, slabs of the material on the gallery floor, there is something resounding in this array, in its casting to resemble gold bars while remaining a utilitarian multi-use metal. I could tangentially compare this to the Gober piece at Klagsbrun, the prelation and celebration of a pragmatic medium. The other Andre, "3x11 Hollow Rectangle", from the same year, is a self-descriptive arrangement of western red cedar timbers that could be either a deep grave or bathing trough, depending on your inclinations, but it smells wonderful. Compare with the fine Meg Webster "Contained Asphalt" (1988) near the front desk, a tall glass triangular prism filled to the brim with bits of bituminous asphalt, which smell like the roadwork that just concluded on W 23rd St. (cheekily incongruous to some of Webster's delicious-smelling spice-on-paper works) Webster's piece also, in my opinion, throws a wrench in Dr. Dellinger's neat five- (or six-) shape hypothesis: is it a triangle? (meaning the container, as the asphalt itself has a notably irregular shape) Hence, no need to stress over the shapes; enjoy for what they are. And do not miss the coup de grace here, the Donald Judd "Untitled" work (1962-90) in the side gallery, a tangerine-colored squarish plywood block, enhanced on the front w/ a dermal-like sandpaint surface and, in the center, a lustrous glass circle. This might be that dodgy 'squircle' as described in the psycho-geometric test, the "unusual individualist who could not fit into a niche of his society". Considering Judd's hallmark art processes — industrial fabrication, use of humble materials (plywood, plexiglas, aluminum), eschewing representation and categorization — and the many artists he inspired and influenced, I could find this definition apropros.(many thanks to Nicole Klagsbrun and Paula Cooper Galleries, respectively, for permission to run the above photos)
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
fee's LIST (through 4/20)
WEDNESDAY
* Huma Bhabha in a Public Art Fund Talk @ The New School / 66 W 12th St (ACE/1/FV to 14th St), 6:30p/$10. Absolutely wicked: Bhabha, she of the disturbing and emotive junk-assemblaged figurative sculpture (incl. a fab stately piece at the 2010 Whitney Biennial) speaks about her works themes and the underlying essence of death.
* "Mad, Bad...& Dangerous to Know: Three Untamed Beauties" @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (6 to 51st St, E/V to Lex/53rd St). OK, so nearly this entire festival, on beautiful, transgressive mid-century Japanese screen-starlets, occurred when I was in Japan (incl the no doubt kick-ass 'Dressed to Kill' party). How ironic. Luckily, the third arm of the festival, Mariko Okada (aka 'The Discreet Charm of the Adulteress') is this week! Read on through my LIST for her three films.
* "Impasse" (dir. Kiju Yoshida, 1967) @ Japan Society (part of "Mad, Bad...& Dangerous to Know"), 7:30p. A middle-class couple's breakdown, as Okada rebels off her sterile, bland husband and yearns for the biological father to her artificially inseminated son.
THURSDAY
* Nina Yuen "White Blindness" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. The 1st solo stateside exhibition of the Amsterdam-based artist's films, a combination of fiction based on Yuen's childhood and multiple-POV encounters w/ people in her life, w/ Yuen playing each character.
* Barbad Goishiri "Nothing Is Left To Tell" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. The conceptual artist's 1st US solo show, w/ echoes of looping and 'Aktion' via video pieces, a sound installation and works on paper.
* Amy Sillman "Transformer" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Sillman hits her rhythm b/w figurative and abstract in this exhibition of new paintings and drawings. Bodies are fractured by thick lines and reappear like wireframe shapes, and everything is bathed in Sillman's typically rich color palette.
+ Anna Sew Hoy "Holes". Found-object sculptural conglomerates, at once recalling the figure (probably due to Hoy's use of sunglasses and denim) yet disfigured w/ gaping holes. It sounds like a good match to Sillman's show.
* Almagul Menlibayeva "Daughters of Turan" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Photography and video based on mythological themes of the artist's native Kazakhstan.
* Matthias Schaller "Elfering - 1642" @ Danziger Projects / 534 W 24th St. An exhaustive documenting of German collector Gert Elfering's major sale to Christie's in Oct '05. Schaller's forte is interiors devoid of human activity, so it should be interesting to see his photographs of portraiture.
* Jim Campbell "Exploded View" @ Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery / 505 W 24th St. A pioneer of LED technology, Campbell augments his series of pointillist-style LED photographic works w/ the titular piece, a 3D grid of a street-scene.
* "The Affair" (dir. Kiju Yoshida, 1967) @ Japan Society (part of "Mad, Bad...& Dangerous to Know"), 7:30p. I've heard this compared to a Japanese Lady Chatterley, w/ Okada creating a love triangle w/ a sculptor (and her mother's former lover) and a day laborer.
* Sisters + Darlings @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. The dissonant one-two thump of Sisters is tempered by the absolutely kick-ass indie-pop harmonies of Darlings. NB: in celebration of "Kick-Ass" (see FRI), I will attempt to use the word, whenever possible, throughout this LIST.
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).
* Hanna Liden "As Black as Your Hat" @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. The NY-based photographer sucks out the color of her usually moody prints for a by-the-numbers-Goth (though no less beautiful) exhibition.
* "Northern Exposures: Social Change and Sexuality in Swedish CInema, 1913-2010" @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St). Wow, sounds good to me! Long-spanning scope to this festival, but a lot of jewels buried in there too. Some of my picks:
- "The Girl Who Played With Fire" (dir. Daniel Alfredson, 2009)
- "Prison" (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1949)
- "I Am Curious (Yellow)" (dir. Vilgot Sjoman, 1967)
- "Kisses & Hugs" (dir. Jonas Cornell, 1967)
- "Sebbe" (dir. Babak Najafi, 2010)
Full festival details and showtimes here. THRU MAY 4
* "Kick-Ass" (dir. Matthew Vaughn, 2010) screenings in wide release. It takes exceedingly unique circumstances for me to hype a mainstream film, but I've been digging "Kick-Ass" since I caught the 1st trailer way way back, w/ Chloe Moretz doing just what the title says. I mean, have you SEEN the trailer, where she slo-mo leapfrogs over a table and double-kicks the dude in the chest, nabbing his gun and firing it into the guys behind him? Think of the smartest high-school awkward-funny film you've ever seen, but extremely violent. I don't even mind that Nick Cage is in this! And McLovin too, for added enticement.
* Beach Fossils + Total Slacker + Air Waves @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Friday is like the night for newbies to the indie Brooklyn-area scene. This is my pick: bliss-pop by Air Waves, stoner-pop by Total Slacker, and the maddest, dopest surf-pop you've ever experienced, ever, by Beach Fossils. I hope y'r ready to dance!
* Real Estate w/ Family Portrait @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$9. My 2nd pick for dope music: this is the Ridgewood scene, surf-psychedelia from Family Portrait and Real Estate's knockout pop-surf summery haze. I'd totally be at this if the Bruar Falls show (above) wasn't already so essential. w/ Big Troubles
* Pterodactyl + Fiasco @ Death By Audio / 149 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p$6. Pick #3 for dope music, now on the noisier end of the spectrum. Guitar mayhem from Fiasco and the trundling, riff-spewing, falsetto-spitting Pterodactyl, prepared to incite mosh-pits and all that. w/ psych-rockers Dinowalrus.
* "All That! Mega '90s Dance Party @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave (G to Greenpoint), 10p/FREE. Annnnnd to cap off your night of Wsburg indie rock, head to this most-essential dance party, courtesy of the fiercest DJs Peggy Wang (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) + Shirley Braha. All the 'alt-90s, hi-nrg, eurodance' you can take — and I hope they play "How Bizarre"! Kick-ass!
SATURDAY
* Joel Shapiro @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. I've always thought of Shapiro's heavily formed stacked boxes as graceful and architectural, spanning and exploring the greater space they occupy. This suite of new works takes that notion further: painted wood planar shapes suspended from the walls, floor and ceiling in like exploded balletic motion.
* Karel Funk @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Funk's deceptively simple C-print portraiture goes a long way into our discomfit level, in that the subjects, set against stark backdrops, are never looking at us.
* Jennifer Poon "A Temporary Space" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. I'm really digging Poon's roughly figurative watercolors, composed of fragmented paper and, in her new show, acting more as an installation than a bunch of wall-based works.
* "Sebbe" (dir. Babak Najafi, 2010) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "Northern Exposures"), 9:15p. A challenging neorealist film set in a Gothenberg housing complex and centered on a junk-collecting boy. The debut full-length from the Iranian-born Najafi.
* The Beets + German Measles @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 10:30p/$7. The programming at this show would make an ace mixtape for art-music lovers: Eternal Summers and German Measles deliver the catchy refrains and good vibes before The Beets bring the roof down w/ their three-part harmonies, trashcan beats, and surf-inflected refrains.
SUNDAY
* Nancy Spero, A Public Commemoration of Her Life and Work @ Cooper Union / 7 E 7th St (6/RW to Astor Place), 3p. Feat. Kiki Smith, Donna De Salvo, Hans Ulrich Obrist and others in talks on the exceedingly influential 20th- and 21st-C artist, whose encompassing oeuvre — from her early 'Black Paintings' and 'War Series' to her figure-imbued scroll works and fantastic later paintings — explored Feminism and Postmodernism w/ a pervasive personal attitude and emotion. She was the linchpin, too, of Chiara Clemente's moving doc "Our City Dreams", the engaging, approachable matriarch of the five NY-based women artists.
* "Woman of the Lake" (dir. Kiju Yoshida, 1966) @ Japan Society (part of "Mad, Bad...& Dangerous to Know"), 6:30p. This sounds like a combination of Michelangelo Antonioni — the hazy, somnambulant journey w/ unfulfilled sexuality — and Shinya Tsukamoto's "A Snake of June", though I wonder if Tsukamoto took reference from Yoshida's film?
* North Highlands + The Charming Youngsters @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Lots of earnest folk-tinged indie rock tonight, headlined by L Magazine's "10 Bands You Need to Know 2010" winner North Highlands.
MONDAY
* Darlings + The Sneaks @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. If you're like me and can't get enuff of Darlings' breezy, jangly-guitars indie-pop, it gets even better w/ inclusion of New Zealand's Casio-pop quartet The Sneaks. w/ possible BBQ early, I hear, so don't sleep on this!
TUESDAY
* Knyfe Hyts @ Death By Audio / 149 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p. Massive lineup at this show, incl Xray Eyeballs and Telecult Powers, but the draw are the headliners, Brooklyn's sharp-edged no-wavers Knyfe Hyts in their original lineup.
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Utagawa Kuniyoshi" @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (456 to Grand Central, 6 to 51st, E/V to Lex/53rd). Tattooed dudes fighting giant octopi, tigers, massive spiders, uh crocodile-sharks? Women too! As many gorgeous color woodblock prints of "Woman in a Hilltop Teahouse", there seems to be its equivalent "Woman Taking Down a Marauding Dragon Spirit" — or something like that. And if you get this 'pulp-comics' vibe from the lot — or you manga lovers, you see a lot of familiar images — that's b/c Utagawa-san was endlessly influential to loads of today's artists. These works hail from like 150 years ago but it's a good glimpse at pop culture of the time, tall-tales, debauchery, heroism (there is a sequence from the classical "Water Margin" on display) and poetry. Plus a lot of super trippy stuff, like Kabuki actors and this gigantic cat spirit, or, uh "Octopus Games", which has Utagawa-san replacing humans w/ dancing octopi in a festive scene (there's one like this too only it's got a bunch of cats instead of octopi). I can't make this stuff up, I'm not that creative.
* Susan Philipsz "I See a Darkness" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. I'll admit, I wondered going into this show how a sound-artist — though Philipsz is the PREMIERE sound-artist — could carry a ground-level solo show. I mean, it's a room full of speakers. But she does, in a truly brilliant sculptural sound journey, converting the main gallery into a cavernous lair filled w/ her voice, such a rush each time it streams out the speakers that, like Odysseus's men, we're transfixed through her choral refrains. Absolutely brilliant.
+ Siobhan Hapaska "The Nose that Lost its Dog". But what to counter the wonderfully ethereal Philipsz show? Hapaska's earthy, cheekily-titled mixed media sculpture. Coyote pelts (and glass eyes) and an entire upturned olive tree are just some of her organic v. machinelike materials, coming from her residency at Glasgow Sculpture Studios.
* Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. A full-frontal assault of Abakanowicz's deconstructed-human sculptures in cast aluminum from the late-'80s march toward the windows facing 25th St, an artillery of smaller-to-larger than lifesize torsos and legs. It's a pleasantly off-putting experience, as is the rest of the show, composed of her newest pieces (a creepy morgue-like space of cast-burlap appendages, a wall of crudely welded steel bird 'paper-airplanes'), incl a massive cast-alumimum seated figure, run through w/ poles.
* James Welling "Glass House" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. So Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House in New Canaan CT is SO DONE, not quite ubiquitous but well-photographed, but Welling's luminous experimentation makes the experience of these familiar images fun. Like the field of snow beneath a red-Jello sky, this wonderful prismatic scene w/ a rainbow cutting through the lower centre of the image, and a landscape scene bisected into warm autumnal and bluish deep-sea colors.
* Antony Gormley "Breathing Room II" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. This is a terribly disturbing experience, this exhibition. Gormley, whose 'Event Horizon' 2doz+ bronze sculptures you've probably seen (or at least read about) hanging out on Flatiron-area rooftops, composed this 'light' sculptural piece in a very, very dark room of the gallery. It fills the space, to the extent that you have to hug the wall and shimmy around it. Due to its glow, your eyes never adjust to the surrounding space. Cautionary for both agoraphobes and claustrophobes.
* "Great Photographs of the 20th Century: Staged and Startled" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. I mean, where to begin here, in this century's-worth of brilliant photography? The classic Richard Avedon "Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent" (enamoring and huge) or the Avedon "Marella Agnelli" from three decades earlier? The lonely Harry Callahan, echoing Di Chirico (and if I may, the beginning of Michelangelo Antonioni's "Red Desert")? The singular Irving Penn (of his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in Marrakech) and the surreal Lee Friedlander prints?
* Guo Hongwei "Things" @ Chambers Fine Art / 522 W 19th St. Isolated or fragmented articles, in discreet arrangements and painted against expanses of white.
* Eric White, Nicola Verlato, Fulvio di Piazza "Three-Handed" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. Whoever said figurative oil painting was dead is an asshole. LeVine Gallery's 'Pop Surrealism' is the real deal, as is the case w/ these three talented painters. di Piazza's skews the most fantasy-like, wetly green living garden-sculpture beasts/landscapes in a near-future scenario. Verlato's tightly composed scenarios of race and cultural struggle are all-too-familiar surreal manifestations. White's broad monochrome crowds feel urgent and cinematic at the same time.
* "If My Soul Had A Shape..." @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. How you do a group show 101: check Paula Cooper Gallery. I couldn't decide my favorite shape-conscious piece here, the four-array of Kelley Walker cast-chocolate, spinning disco balls; or the Carl Andre aluminum ingot stacked pyramid. But maybe beyond these (and a superb brushstroked Sol LeWitt and a fantastic 'removed' Dan Walsh) is the essential McDonalds 'Orange Drink'-colored Donald Judd painting, a textural mix of plywood, painted sandpaper, and obsidian-glossy black mirror.
* Josef Bolf "The Wolf" @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Inky, disturbing paintings of figures in desolate urban environments from this superstar young Czech artist. Think Di Chirico's settings, only set in formerly Communist Czech Republic: parking garages and housing blocks, occupied by solitary characters or pairs, offset by close-ups of the artist as a long-haired, androgynous character, eyes blacked out. At least half the works here look either decayed by rust or stained w/ blood. All said, kick-ass.
* Gabriel Vormstein "Baby abc" @ Casey Kaplan / 525 W 21st St. Tasty stuff: Vormstein blew up and colored enormous Egon Schiele portraits on newsprint backdrops.
* Keita Sugiura @ Max Protetch / 511 W 22nd St. Super subtle C-prints of cloud formations, whitish-blue rectangles that seem to shimmer and change color depending on your POV to each piece. I'm not sure how much of Sugiura's compositions are chance-related, but he achieves something pretty cool here, and totally mellow.
* André Butzer "Nicht furchten: Don't be scared!" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Super-sized gooey oil abstracts at Metro Pictures — are we at the right gallery? Oh yes, and why is it this strong photo-showing joint has perhaps the dopest abstract show in town? Think if Kazuo Shiragawa was into pop colors. Oh I'm taking it there: think blow-ups of finger-paint renderings, layers and layers of impasto and rivulets of congealed paint, whole tube's-worth spend on lines and curves. A lovely all-black piece must have like a million gallons of the glistening stuff just hanging out there, waiting to pull you in.
* Liz Craft "Past and Present" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. A sort of 'best-of' from the super creative figurative sculptor, from her gorgeous bronze "Tree Lady" to a distorted field of checkered fiberglass and an outsized porcelain egg in a bronze baby carriage.
* Jonathan Prince + Wang Tao @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 535 W 24th St 2nd Fl. Another deft pairing from the gallery, in Price's seductively rendered polished granite forms (think Jean Arp, but as huge sculpture) against Wang's vivid acrylics on antique Chinese paper.
* "Pastiche" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. AKA a group show of a bunch of colorful stuff slopped together. The roster is only heavyweights but that doesn't mean it can't quickly veer into nauseous eye-numbing territory. I preferred the older works as a whole (a fine watery Jim Dine, a strong-lined Jean Dubuffet, a Cubist sewn-fabric Lucas Samaris) to the newer models (gratuitous Keith Tyson and much as it pains me to write I cannot get down w/ James Rosenquist's motorized canvases).
* Barbara Kruger "The Globe Shrinks" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. One of the most exciting shows I've seen this year! An incredible approx-10-min video installation, people throwing out declarations, intercut w/ glimpses of violence, disembodied voices and Kruger's signature running sans serif type commands. Even the funny parts — and there are some jokes, of the Richard Prince type — are unsettling.
* Donald Baechler @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Lots of fun Baechler's having: massive pastel-toned acrylics of colorful balls and cartoonish flowers on drop-cloth 'canvases', plus a set of gesso and mixed media flowers on collaged paper.
* Kim In Sook "Inside Out" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. The astute art-goer surely remembers Kim's scintillating large C-print "Saturday Night" from the 2008 Armory Show, that jewel-toned voyeuristic look into the happenings at a hotel (incl the artist's self-portrait as a 'hanging victim'). That's on display here, in her 1st US solo show, plus a lot of her other signature outside-looking-in captures of metropolitan life.
* "In Praise of Shadows", Dirk Braeckman & Bill Henson @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. A moody, sexy photo duet, of figures and empty spaces. I preferred the inky grayscale of Braeckman's the best, whether the flutter of a curtain or the mist-lined scene of a naked woman's back on a bed, to Henson's dusky landscapes filled w/ Ryan McGinley's style of androgynous youth.
* Eric Swenson @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Perhaps you remember Swenson's unnerving installation from the 2004 Whitney Biennial, a porcelain-skinned young deer thrashing against an afghan rug? That's here, along w/ a few other deer in varying states, incl the new piece "Ne Plus Ultra", tucked away in its own gallery, a completely disturbing half-decomposed carcass that I caution you against: photos don't do the real thing justice, it is intense.
+ Beatriz Milhazes "Gold Rose Series". A good palate cleanser after Swenson's disturbing output, colorful woodblock and screenprints of geometric and curvy abstract shapes, named after seasonings.
LAST CHANCE
* Nari Ward "LIVESupport" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. An intense multilinear solo offering from the artist, incl. enlarged X-ray images bordered w/ ink-covered shoes, ink-stained church pews modded into like a divided wheelchair, an entire ambulance w/ whited-out signage and fogged up windows. The more subtle works include vintage photography that Ward recontextualized w/ black ink and the short-film 'Fathers and Sons', which creates a palpable tension b/w its long silences and layered, rushed dialogue.
* 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.
* 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.
* Robert Adams "Summer Nights, Walking" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. The gallery writes that Adams' nocturnal landscape photography (this series is from '76-'82) 'vacillates between quiet foreboding and tranquil domesticity', but I'd take that one step further and call some of it tipping toward voyeurism. But don't mistake me: they're gorgeous, this lot, including the slightly creepy ones: a barely lit porch, a rather striking garage door, covered by the massive shadow of an unseen tree (trees in particular and foliage in general figure into most of Adams' works). Another fab instance: shrubbery in the foreground backlit by the flooding glare of headlights, as if someone enacted their revenge on his sneaking lens. A few others show a faraway cityscape caught b/w the shadowy trees and the multitudinously gray night sky, which is the closest to me to a warm summer's night.
* Joseph Smolinski @ Mixed Greens Gallery / 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'.
* R. Crumb "The Bible Illuminated" @ David Zwirner / 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.
* "The Drawings of Bronzino" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). It is my duty, as curator of my LIST, to inform you of current dope cultural events, no matter the degree to which I can conceivably explain them. Hence is the case w/ this brilliant exhibition of Agnolo Bronzino at the Met, nearly all the lush, sensual drawings attributed to him (60 here), the leading Italian Mannerist. The Times' Holland Cotter and The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl, amid others surely, have already done a far more eloquent job than I'll ever muster. SO, I will do my very best of being Bronzino's hype-man and encourage you, nay, entreat you to this very essential, very beautiful show. The vast majority of these drawings were made in black or red chalk on paper (sometimes prepared w/ a color wash), though Bronzino took what sounds to me like a cumbersome medium and totally elevated it. His lines are masterful, confident, tracing out figures then shading in their supple musculature. Richard Hawkins, for one, would have a field day deconstructing the fleshy amorousness in the posing nude youths. Bronzino depicts women, too, incl. personal fave 'Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View', whose exacting title belies the riveting rendering, her downward-cast eyes, the highlight on her cheekbone. He also does draping, which by that I mean like folded cloth, and if that sounds simplistic you need to take a look at his drawings, the incredible capture of shadows. A few 'modellos' are included in the show, drawings augmented by 16th C. ink and washes that are jarringly intense when seen alongside his singular, concentrated figure studies. And while I've just skimmed the surface her, trust me when I say Bronzino is where it's at. (ENDS SUNDAY)
* Huma Bhabha in a Public Art Fund Talk @ The New School / 66 W 12th St (ACE/1/FV to 14th St), 6:30p/$10. Absolutely wicked: Bhabha, she of the disturbing and emotive junk-assemblaged figurative sculpture (incl. a fab stately piece at the 2010 Whitney Biennial) speaks about her works themes and the underlying essence of death.
* "Mad, Bad...& Dangerous to Know: Three Untamed Beauties" @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (6 to 51st St, E/V to Lex/53rd St). OK, so nearly this entire festival, on beautiful, transgressive mid-century Japanese screen-starlets, occurred when I was in Japan (incl the no doubt kick-ass 'Dressed to Kill' party). How ironic. Luckily, the third arm of the festival, Mariko Okada (aka 'The Discreet Charm of the Adulteress') is this week! Read on through my LIST for her three films.
* "Impasse" (dir. Kiju Yoshida, 1967) @ Japan Society (part of "Mad, Bad...& Dangerous to Know"), 7:30p. A middle-class couple's breakdown, as Okada rebels off her sterile, bland husband and yearns for the biological father to her artificially inseminated son.
THURSDAY
* Nina Yuen "White Blindness" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. The 1st solo stateside exhibition of the Amsterdam-based artist's films, a combination of fiction based on Yuen's childhood and multiple-POV encounters w/ people in her life, w/ Yuen playing each character.
* Barbad Goishiri "Nothing Is Left To Tell" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. The conceptual artist's 1st US solo show, w/ echoes of looping and 'Aktion' via video pieces, a sound installation and works on paper.
* Amy Sillman "Transformer" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Sillman hits her rhythm b/w figurative and abstract in this exhibition of new paintings and drawings. Bodies are fractured by thick lines and reappear like wireframe shapes, and everything is bathed in Sillman's typically rich color palette.
+ Anna Sew Hoy "Holes". Found-object sculptural conglomerates, at once recalling the figure (probably due to Hoy's use of sunglasses and denim) yet disfigured w/ gaping holes. It sounds like a good match to Sillman's show.
* Almagul Menlibayeva "Daughters of Turan" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Photography and video based on mythological themes of the artist's native Kazakhstan.
* Matthias Schaller "Elfering - 1642" @ Danziger Projects / 534 W 24th St. An exhaustive documenting of German collector Gert Elfering's major sale to Christie's in Oct '05. Schaller's forte is interiors devoid of human activity, so it should be interesting to see his photographs of portraiture.
* Jim Campbell "Exploded View" @ Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery / 505 W 24th St. A pioneer of LED technology, Campbell augments his series of pointillist-style LED photographic works w/ the titular piece, a 3D grid of a street-scene.
* "The Affair" (dir. Kiju Yoshida, 1967) @ Japan Society (part of "Mad, Bad...& Dangerous to Know"), 7:30p. I've heard this compared to a Japanese Lady Chatterley, w/ Okada creating a love triangle w/ a sculptor (and her mother's former lover) and a day laborer.
* Sisters + Darlings @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. The dissonant one-two thump of Sisters is tempered by the absolutely kick-ass indie-pop harmonies of Darlings. NB: in celebration of "Kick-Ass" (see FRI), I will attempt to use the word, whenever possible, throughout this LIST.
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).
* Hanna Liden "As Black as Your Hat" @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. The NY-based photographer sucks out the color of her usually moody prints for a by-the-numbers-Goth (though no less beautiful) exhibition.
* "Northern Exposures: Social Change and Sexuality in Swedish CInema, 1913-2010" @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St). Wow, sounds good to me! Long-spanning scope to this festival, but a lot of jewels buried in there too. Some of my picks:
- "The Girl Who Played With Fire" (dir. Daniel Alfredson, 2009)
- "Prison" (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1949)
- "I Am Curious (Yellow)" (dir. Vilgot Sjoman, 1967)
- "Kisses & Hugs" (dir. Jonas Cornell, 1967)
- "Sebbe" (dir. Babak Najafi, 2010)
Full festival details and showtimes here. THRU MAY 4
* "Kick-Ass" (dir. Matthew Vaughn, 2010) screenings in wide release. It takes exceedingly unique circumstances for me to hype a mainstream film, but I've been digging "Kick-Ass" since I caught the 1st trailer way way back, w/ Chloe Moretz doing just what the title says. I mean, have you SEEN the trailer, where she slo-mo leapfrogs over a table and double-kicks the dude in the chest, nabbing his gun and firing it into the guys behind him? Think of the smartest high-school awkward-funny film you've ever seen, but extremely violent. I don't even mind that Nick Cage is in this! And McLovin too, for added enticement.
* Beach Fossils + Total Slacker + Air Waves @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Friday is like the night for newbies to the indie Brooklyn-area scene. This is my pick: bliss-pop by Air Waves, stoner-pop by Total Slacker, and the maddest, dopest surf-pop you've ever experienced, ever, by Beach Fossils. I hope y'r ready to dance!
* Real Estate w/ Family Portrait @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$9. My 2nd pick for dope music: this is the Ridgewood scene, surf-psychedelia from Family Portrait and Real Estate's knockout pop-surf summery haze. I'd totally be at this if the Bruar Falls show (above) wasn't already so essential. w/ Big Troubles
* Pterodactyl + Fiasco @ Death By Audio / 149 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p$6. Pick #3 for dope music, now on the noisier end of the spectrum. Guitar mayhem from Fiasco and the trundling, riff-spewing, falsetto-spitting Pterodactyl, prepared to incite mosh-pits and all that. w/ psych-rockers Dinowalrus.
* "All That! Mega '90s Dance Party @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave (G to Greenpoint), 10p/FREE. Annnnnd to cap off your night of Wsburg indie rock, head to this most-essential dance party, courtesy of the fiercest DJs Peggy Wang (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) + Shirley Braha. All the 'alt-90s, hi-nrg, eurodance' you can take — and I hope they play "How Bizarre"! Kick-ass!
SATURDAY
* Joel Shapiro @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. I've always thought of Shapiro's heavily formed stacked boxes as graceful and architectural, spanning and exploring the greater space they occupy. This suite of new works takes that notion further: painted wood planar shapes suspended from the walls, floor and ceiling in like exploded balletic motion.
* Karel Funk @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Funk's deceptively simple C-print portraiture goes a long way into our discomfit level, in that the subjects, set against stark backdrops, are never looking at us.
* Jennifer Poon "A Temporary Space" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. I'm really digging Poon's roughly figurative watercolors, composed of fragmented paper and, in her new show, acting more as an installation than a bunch of wall-based works.
* "Sebbe" (dir. Babak Najafi, 2010) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "Northern Exposures"), 9:15p. A challenging neorealist film set in a Gothenberg housing complex and centered on a junk-collecting boy. The debut full-length from the Iranian-born Najafi.
* The Beets + German Measles @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 10:30p/$7. The programming at this show would make an ace mixtape for art-music lovers: Eternal Summers and German Measles deliver the catchy refrains and good vibes before The Beets bring the roof down w/ their three-part harmonies, trashcan beats, and surf-inflected refrains.
SUNDAY
* Nancy Spero, A Public Commemoration of Her Life and Work @ Cooper Union / 7 E 7th St (6/RW to Astor Place), 3p. Feat. Kiki Smith, Donna De Salvo, Hans Ulrich Obrist and others in talks on the exceedingly influential 20th- and 21st-C artist, whose encompassing oeuvre — from her early 'Black Paintings' and 'War Series' to her figure-imbued scroll works and fantastic later paintings — explored Feminism and Postmodernism w/ a pervasive personal attitude and emotion. She was the linchpin, too, of Chiara Clemente's moving doc "Our City Dreams", the engaging, approachable matriarch of the five NY-based women artists.
* "Woman of the Lake" (dir. Kiju Yoshida, 1966) @ Japan Society (part of "Mad, Bad...& Dangerous to Know"), 6:30p. This sounds like a combination of Michelangelo Antonioni — the hazy, somnambulant journey w/ unfulfilled sexuality — and Shinya Tsukamoto's "A Snake of June", though I wonder if Tsukamoto took reference from Yoshida's film?
* North Highlands + The Charming Youngsters @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Lots of earnest folk-tinged indie rock tonight, headlined by L Magazine's "10 Bands You Need to Know 2010" winner North Highlands.
MONDAY
* Darlings + The Sneaks @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. If you're like me and can't get enuff of Darlings' breezy, jangly-guitars indie-pop, it gets even better w/ inclusion of New Zealand's Casio-pop quartet The Sneaks. w/ possible BBQ early, I hear, so don't sleep on this!
TUESDAY
* Knyfe Hyts @ Death By Audio / 149 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p. Massive lineup at this show, incl Xray Eyeballs and Telecult Powers, but the draw are the headliners, Brooklyn's sharp-edged no-wavers Knyfe Hyts in their original lineup.
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Utagawa Kuniyoshi" @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (456 to Grand Central, 6 to 51st, E/V to Lex/53rd). Tattooed dudes fighting giant octopi, tigers, massive spiders, uh crocodile-sharks? Women too! As many gorgeous color woodblock prints of "Woman in a Hilltop Teahouse", there seems to be its equivalent "Woman Taking Down a Marauding Dragon Spirit" — or something like that. And if you get this 'pulp-comics' vibe from the lot — or you manga lovers, you see a lot of familiar images — that's b/c Utagawa-san was endlessly influential to loads of today's artists. These works hail from like 150 years ago but it's a good glimpse at pop culture of the time, tall-tales, debauchery, heroism (there is a sequence from the classical "Water Margin" on display) and poetry. Plus a lot of super trippy stuff, like Kabuki actors and this gigantic cat spirit, or, uh "Octopus Games", which has Utagawa-san replacing humans w/ dancing octopi in a festive scene (there's one like this too only it's got a bunch of cats instead of octopi). I can't make this stuff up, I'm not that creative.
* Susan Philipsz "I See a Darkness" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. I'll admit, I wondered going into this show how a sound-artist — though Philipsz is the PREMIERE sound-artist — could carry a ground-level solo show. I mean, it's a room full of speakers. But she does, in a truly brilliant sculptural sound journey, converting the main gallery into a cavernous lair filled w/ her voice, such a rush each time it streams out the speakers that, like Odysseus's men, we're transfixed through her choral refrains. Absolutely brilliant.
+ Siobhan Hapaska "The Nose that Lost its Dog". But what to counter the wonderfully ethereal Philipsz show? Hapaska's earthy, cheekily-titled mixed media sculpture. Coyote pelts (and glass eyes) and an entire upturned olive tree are just some of her organic v. machinelike materials, coming from her residency at Glasgow Sculpture Studios.
* Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. A full-frontal assault of Abakanowicz's deconstructed-human sculptures in cast aluminum from the late-'80s march toward the windows facing 25th St, an artillery of smaller-to-larger than lifesize torsos and legs. It's a pleasantly off-putting experience, as is the rest of the show, composed of her newest pieces (a creepy morgue-like space of cast-burlap appendages, a wall of crudely welded steel bird 'paper-airplanes'), incl a massive cast-alumimum seated figure, run through w/ poles.
* James Welling "Glass House" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. So Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House in New Canaan CT is SO DONE, not quite ubiquitous but well-photographed, but Welling's luminous experimentation makes the experience of these familiar images fun. Like the field of snow beneath a red-Jello sky, this wonderful prismatic scene w/ a rainbow cutting through the lower centre of the image, and a landscape scene bisected into warm autumnal and bluish deep-sea colors.
* Antony Gormley "Breathing Room II" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. This is a terribly disturbing experience, this exhibition. Gormley, whose 'Event Horizon' 2doz+ bronze sculptures you've probably seen (or at least read about) hanging out on Flatiron-area rooftops, composed this 'light' sculptural piece in a very, very dark room of the gallery. It fills the space, to the extent that you have to hug the wall and shimmy around it. Due to its glow, your eyes never adjust to the surrounding space. Cautionary for both agoraphobes and claustrophobes.
* "Great Photographs of the 20th Century: Staged and Startled" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. I mean, where to begin here, in this century's-worth of brilliant photography? The classic Richard Avedon "Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent" (enamoring and huge) or the Avedon "Marella Agnelli" from three decades earlier? The lonely Harry Callahan, echoing Di Chirico (and if I may, the beginning of Michelangelo Antonioni's "Red Desert")? The singular Irving Penn (of his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in Marrakech) and the surreal Lee Friedlander prints?
* Guo Hongwei "Things" @ Chambers Fine Art / 522 W 19th St. Isolated or fragmented articles, in discreet arrangements and painted against expanses of white.
* Eric White, Nicola Verlato, Fulvio di Piazza "Three-Handed" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. Whoever said figurative oil painting was dead is an asshole. LeVine Gallery's 'Pop Surrealism' is the real deal, as is the case w/ these three talented painters. di Piazza's skews the most fantasy-like, wetly green living garden-sculpture beasts/landscapes in a near-future scenario. Verlato's tightly composed scenarios of race and cultural struggle are all-too-familiar surreal manifestations. White's broad monochrome crowds feel urgent and cinematic at the same time.
* "If My Soul Had A Shape..." @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. How you do a group show 101: check Paula Cooper Gallery. I couldn't decide my favorite shape-conscious piece here, the four-array of Kelley Walker cast-chocolate, spinning disco balls; or the Carl Andre aluminum ingot stacked pyramid. But maybe beyond these (and a superb brushstroked Sol LeWitt and a fantastic 'removed' Dan Walsh) is the essential McDonalds 'Orange Drink'-colored Donald Judd painting, a textural mix of plywood, painted sandpaper, and obsidian-glossy black mirror.
* Josef Bolf "The Wolf" @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Inky, disturbing paintings of figures in desolate urban environments from this superstar young Czech artist. Think Di Chirico's settings, only set in formerly Communist Czech Republic: parking garages and housing blocks, occupied by solitary characters or pairs, offset by close-ups of the artist as a long-haired, androgynous character, eyes blacked out. At least half the works here look either decayed by rust or stained w/ blood. All said, kick-ass.
* Gabriel Vormstein "Baby abc" @ Casey Kaplan / 525 W 21st St. Tasty stuff: Vormstein blew up and colored enormous Egon Schiele portraits on newsprint backdrops.
* Keita Sugiura @ Max Protetch / 511 W 22nd St. Super subtle C-prints of cloud formations, whitish-blue rectangles that seem to shimmer and change color depending on your POV to each piece. I'm not sure how much of Sugiura's compositions are chance-related, but he achieves something pretty cool here, and totally mellow.
* André Butzer "Nicht furchten: Don't be scared!" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Super-sized gooey oil abstracts at Metro Pictures — are we at the right gallery? Oh yes, and why is it this strong photo-showing joint has perhaps the dopest abstract show in town? Think if Kazuo Shiragawa was into pop colors. Oh I'm taking it there: think blow-ups of finger-paint renderings, layers and layers of impasto and rivulets of congealed paint, whole tube's-worth spend on lines and curves. A lovely all-black piece must have like a million gallons of the glistening stuff just hanging out there, waiting to pull you in.
* Liz Craft "Past and Present" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. A sort of 'best-of' from the super creative figurative sculptor, from her gorgeous bronze "Tree Lady" to a distorted field of checkered fiberglass and an outsized porcelain egg in a bronze baby carriage.
* Jonathan Prince + Wang Tao @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 535 W 24th St 2nd Fl. Another deft pairing from the gallery, in Price's seductively rendered polished granite forms (think Jean Arp, but as huge sculpture) against Wang's vivid acrylics on antique Chinese paper.
* "Pastiche" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. AKA a group show of a bunch of colorful stuff slopped together. The roster is only heavyweights but that doesn't mean it can't quickly veer into nauseous eye-numbing territory. I preferred the older works as a whole (a fine watery Jim Dine, a strong-lined Jean Dubuffet, a Cubist sewn-fabric Lucas Samaris) to the newer models (gratuitous Keith Tyson and much as it pains me to write I cannot get down w/ James Rosenquist's motorized canvases).
* Barbara Kruger "The Globe Shrinks" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. One of the most exciting shows I've seen this year! An incredible approx-10-min video installation, people throwing out declarations, intercut w/ glimpses of violence, disembodied voices and Kruger's signature running sans serif type commands. Even the funny parts — and there are some jokes, of the Richard Prince type — are unsettling.
* Donald Baechler @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Lots of fun Baechler's having: massive pastel-toned acrylics of colorful balls and cartoonish flowers on drop-cloth 'canvases', plus a set of gesso and mixed media flowers on collaged paper.
* Kim In Sook "Inside Out" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. The astute art-goer surely remembers Kim's scintillating large C-print "Saturday Night" from the 2008 Armory Show, that jewel-toned voyeuristic look into the happenings at a hotel (incl the artist's self-portrait as a 'hanging victim'). That's on display here, in her 1st US solo show, plus a lot of her other signature outside-looking-in captures of metropolitan life.
* "In Praise of Shadows", Dirk Braeckman & Bill Henson @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. A moody, sexy photo duet, of figures and empty spaces. I preferred the inky grayscale of Braeckman's the best, whether the flutter of a curtain or the mist-lined scene of a naked woman's back on a bed, to Henson's dusky landscapes filled w/ Ryan McGinley's style of androgynous youth.
* Eric Swenson @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Perhaps you remember Swenson's unnerving installation from the 2004 Whitney Biennial, a porcelain-skinned young deer thrashing against an afghan rug? That's here, along w/ a few other deer in varying states, incl the new piece "Ne Plus Ultra", tucked away in its own gallery, a completely disturbing half-decomposed carcass that I caution you against: photos don't do the real thing justice, it is intense.
+ Beatriz Milhazes "Gold Rose Series". A good palate cleanser after Swenson's disturbing output, colorful woodblock and screenprints of geometric and curvy abstract shapes, named after seasonings.
LAST CHANCE
* Nari Ward "LIVESupport" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. An intense multilinear solo offering from the artist, incl. enlarged X-ray images bordered w/ ink-covered shoes, ink-stained church pews modded into like a divided wheelchair, an entire ambulance w/ whited-out signage and fogged up windows. The more subtle works include vintage photography that Ward recontextualized w/ black ink and the short-film 'Fathers and Sons', which creates a palpable tension b/w its long silences and layered, rushed dialogue.
* 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.
* 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.
* Robert Adams "Summer Nights, Walking" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. The gallery writes that Adams' nocturnal landscape photography (this series is from '76-'82) 'vacillates between quiet foreboding and tranquil domesticity', but I'd take that one step further and call some of it tipping toward voyeurism. But don't mistake me: they're gorgeous, this lot, including the slightly creepy ones: a barely lit porch, a rather striking garage door, covered by the massive shadow of an unseen tree (trees in particular and foliage in general figure into most of Adams' works). Another fab instance: shrubbery in the foreground backlit by the flooding glare of headlights, as if someone enacted their revenge on his sneaking lens. A few others show a faraway cityscape caught b/w the shadowy trees and the multitudinously gray night sky, which is the closest to me to a warm summer's night.
* Joseph Smolinski @ Mixed Greens Gallery / 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'.
* R. Crumb "The Bible Illuminated" @ David Zwirner / 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.
* "The Drawings of Bronzino" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). It is my duty, as curator of my LIST, to inform you of current dope cultural events, no matter the degree to which I can conceivably explain them. Hence is the case w/ this brilliant exhibition of Agnolo Bronzino at the Met, nearly all the lush, sensual drawings attributed to him (60 here), the leading Italian Mannerist. The Times' Holland Cotter and The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl, amid others surely, have already done a far more eloquent job than I'll ever muster. SO, I will do my very best of being Bronzino's hype-man and encourage you, nay, entreat you to this very essential, very beautiful show. The vast majority of these drawings were made in black or red chalk on paper (sometimes prepared w/ a color wash), though Bronzino took what sounds to me like a cumbersome medium and totally elevated it. His lines are masterful, confident, tracing out figures then shading in their supple musculature. Richard Hawkins, for one, would have a field day deconstructing the fleshy amorousness in the posing nude youths. Bronzino depicts women, too, incl. personal fave 'Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View', whose exacting title belies the riveting rendering, her downward-cast eyes, the highlight on her cheekbone. He also does draping, which by that I mean like folded cloth, and if that sounds simplistic you need to take a look at his drawings, the incredible capture of shadows. A few 'modellos' are included in the show, drawings augmented by 16th C. ink and washes that are jarringly intense when seen alongside his singular, concentrated figure studies. And while I've just skimmed the surface her, trust me when I say Bronzino is where it's at. (ENDS SUNDAY)
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