Dope Director: Yoshihiro Nishimura (part 2)

Yoshihiro Nishimura, one of the young leaders of this nascent Japanese nouveau body-horror movement (which includes frequent collaborator Noboru Iguchi and action/stunt wizard Tak Sakaguchi), has an extensive background in SFX and SFX makeup. This is clear to anyone who saw Tokyo Gore Police with me at the IFC Center that night, in its world premiere at NYAFF 2008. But when I revisited my catalogue of J-Horror (both the "yurei" stuff like Juon by Takashi Shimizu and the deviant family-drama oeuvre of Sion Sono), I realized Nishimura's bloody thumbprint was everywhere. He started his own SFX company, 西村映造／Nishimura Eizo (shortened to Nishi-Zo, and w/ the wildly effective logo of a blood-drenched "西", the 1st character in Nishimura's last name, which I've seen as a t-shirt and I WANT ONE), back in 2005, w/ the tagline "special molding, special makeup, gore effect". That's his specialty.
For instance: the tidal wave of blood a few minutes into Sono's controversial 自殺サークル/Suicide Club — the notorious, cringe-inducing 'money shot' — plus the skin-carvings and whatnot, much of that is thanks to Nishimura. He collaborated in Sono's loose followup, the (in my opinion superior) 紀子の食卓/Noriko's Dinner Table and other Sono films (the darkly comedic エクステ/Exte w/ Chiaki Kuriyama, had a definite Nishimura undercurrent), and even the mostly restrained violence in Sono's opus 愛のむきだし/Love Exposure involves Nishimura's blood-letting. Of note: none of these aforementioned titles have that cherry sno-cone blood and gore I detailed in my previous post on Nishimura. Sono's style (even in Exte) is far more realistic, and Nishimura can adjust as appropriate.


Throw him together w/ the irreverence of Iguchi and Sakaguchi, though, and he shines. I caught Iguchi's 片腕マシンガール/The Machine Girl straight after seeing Tokyo Gore Police and learning Nishimura had a role in it (plus the cover art of Minase Yashiro w/ her slightly, ahem, modified school uniform, hoisting a badass gatling gun attached to her severed left arm, against a hellfire sky, had me sold. The mix of deep family ties w/ veins of feudal Japanese culture (here this ninja/Yakuza confab) and off-kilter dialogue (it helps if you understand Japanese, but the conversations are VERY funny in Noguchi's films) touched on a bunch of recurrent, typical Noguchi elements, and the gore (shuriken to the face, sawing people in half, and of course Yashiro's gatling arm) were the charmed combo of these two directors. Think Shinya Tsukamoto's Testuo, only less artsy and eons more splatter, in a schlocky, profane way.


Then I heard about 吸血少女対少女フランケン/Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl, Nishimura's awesomely titled new film, from a trailer posted on Nippon Cinema. If Tokyo Gore Police's trailer had me going, THIS one made me almost wet myself, metaphorically speaking. The music sounded like proper Quentin Tarentino, and then the arterial spray begins, w/ new star (and gravure idol) Yukie Kawamura (as Monomi, in schoolgirl uniform, natch) dancing in front of a salaryman's spouting jugular like he's a lawn sprinkler on a hot summer's day and she's attempting to cool off. 0:30 in and she lunges at the camera, fangs out, we get the absurd film title, and then the gore guru takes it even further. Like: one girl's skeleton pops out top her head, another girl's face peels off like an apple skin, Keiko the Frankenstein Girl (Eri Otoguro) leaps in, wielding massive matte knives, another girl's head bursts (the camera lens is continually soaked in saturated red fluid) and then, back to the jugular-sprinkler scene, to a chorus of trumpets, Monomi opens her mouth wide and lets the bloodspray wash allllllll over her. She eyes a skull (w/ eyes still in it) and smiles so sweetly that I almost forgot she 1) pulled the skull through a girl's head and 2) there's perpetual blood-spurting all around her. And Keiko is supposed to be the antagonist??


Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl is ostensibly a high-school romantic feud, b/w new student Monomi and Keiko, leader of the Gothic Lolitas, the trendy girls, as they both liked the sleepy heartthrob Mizushima (Takumi Saito, who goes on to star as another despicable heartthrob in Noguchi's Robogeisha, the bastard). Nishimura hyperbolized the Japanese high-school setting and subcultures w/ the garish Ganguro girls (who must be taken w/ an enormous grain of salt, and they're still barely watchable) and the Lolitas. Plus, there was a wrist-cutting group, extended from a commercial in Tokyo Gore Police to a club at this twisted high-school, which even included some sort of slash-off rally (Sayako Nakoshi, 'penis-nose girl' from Tokyo Gore Police, loses, slicing completely through her forearm). Kanji Tsuda (a prevalent nervy figure in contemporary Japanese cinema, like Steve Bucemi but younger and less profane) plays Keiko's father, who of course is a mad scientist a la Victor Frankenstein, only he dons this Kabuki garb before performing his gruesome wetwork. Jiji Bu (Tokyo Gore Police's medical examiner) returns as groundskeeper Igor, which I fear has become his typecast character, though he does it so well. And to really push it over the top, plus synthesizing it w/ Nishimura's previous work, Eihi Shiina cameos as Monami's mom. We learn quite quickly that Keiko is a back-stabbing (no pun) bitch, out to ruin Monami and win Mizushima over. And though Monami is, ahem, exceedingly violent in full vampiric mode (the face-peel and arterial spray are both her doing), she is an incredibly empathetic and cute character. Her dialogue w/ Mizushima in particular, saying "ピンポン！" (sounds like "Ping Pong!" but means "bingo!") to one of his assertions, is signature girlishness. When Keiko becomes Frankenstein Girl, thanks to her dad, outfitted w/ Gaguro girl legs (for stamina and speed) and wrist-cutter girl arms (endurance and weaponry), and she and Monami have it out atop Tokyo Tower, I found myself thinking: 'this is even more out-there than Tokyo Gore Police. Nishimura's done it.'


I saw the other Nishimura-contributing films at the 2009 NYAFF. Takanori Tsujimoto's duet Hard Revenge Milly and Hard Revenge Milly: Bloody Battle (think Luc Besson's Nikita, only ultraviolent and shot mostly in parking garages) screened back-to-back (the only way, IMO, to see 'em), w/ Nishimura's obvious makeup SFX, straight after Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl, and by then my brain had melted from all the gore. And b/c I couldn't help myself, I caught Kengo Kaji's ero-guro サムライプリンセス 外道姫/Samurai Princess (the extra characters in the Japanese title translate to roughly "demon woman") as well, which was replete w/ blood geysers (and again featured that weird melding of genres in alternate-universe feudal Japan). So what's next after becoming a Nishimura fanatic? Answer: a proponent. One who follows his oeuvre and professes it to others, enlightening them to the dopeness found amid the ruined bodies and bloodspray. Viewing a Nishimura production is akin to riding the "Twilight Zone Tower of Terror" at Walt Disney World: you know the free-fall is coming and when it happens you gasp and scream with a delighted terror, realizing deep w/in your subconscious that you're about to be dropped a second time. It's this nervous, giddy anticipation of that SECOND DROP that is most like a Nishimura film.


Iguchi's feudal mashup Robogeisha screened as just a teaser trailer at the 2009 NYAFF. In it we see Nishimura's droll cameo, as a customer of lead actress (and gravure idol) Aya Kiguchi's (he swiftly receives a blade to the jaw). Robogeisha's belated NY premiere came earlier this month (http://subwaycinemanews.com/archives/925) at Japan Society, where the Subway Cinema crew announced some of the upcoming titles to this year's NYAFF/Japan Cuts. Two very particularly awesome things (amid many, many awesome things) occurred here: 1) Nishimura's short film 吸血少女フランケン/Vampire Frankenstein Girl, a spin-off of...well, you know and 2) the trailer for 戦闘少女/Mutant Girls Squad, the combo Nishimura/Iguchi/Sakaguchi feature that is like a very cruel, very bizarro all-girl "X-Men", kind of, and is the centerpiece presentation of the 2010 NYAFF (last year's centerpiece was Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl). I've little to go on thus far regarding the latter, except w/ three directors we can expect an ensemble cast from their previous films (Kanji Tsuda already features rather skittishly in the trailer). And you KNOW I'm going to see it at the NYAFF. Vampire Frankenstein Girl felt more in Tokyo Gore Police's near-future Tokyo, a neon-drenched, nearly dialogueless 15-minute hand-held short, w/ Tsugumi Nagasawa ('croc-girl' from Tokyo Gore Police) as the titular character. Though she wore a Monami-style sailor suit, Nagasawa styled it more like a Kegadol ("injured idol", eyepatch and bandage fetish) and seemed uncomfortable w/ her role in life as a vampire. In her soliloquy at the beginning, she vowed to only target violent cases, like this pink-haired weirdo kidnapping and mutilating girls. His target? Two Ganguro girls and one wrist-cutter girl (Sayako Nakoshi), like they came straiiight from Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl. The pervert is also some sort of biomechanics wizard (or more appropriately, an "Engineer", like from Tokyo Gore Police), attacking the girls and hacking off various limbs. Nagasawa drops in to obliterate the pervert, like an afterthought, and is mauled by the now composite Ganguro/wrist-cutter. One highly-stylized fight scene and Nagasawa leaps through the torso of the Frankenstein Girl, lodging midway through. And so we have the titular character, fully realized, Vampire Frankenstein Girl, out to assassinate societal perverts. And as messed up as that image may be, by the credits role Nagasawa looks pretty pleased w/ herself.

fee's LIST (through 6/1)

WEDNESDAY
* Michael Asher's Biennial Project "Open All Day and Night" @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St). We're fast approaching the end of the 2010 Whitney Biennial, which I dug loads more than 2008's. So for two days, beginning midnight WED and ending 11:59p FRI, the LA-born conceptualist opens the doors for those stragglers and night-owls to see what's good at the Whitney.

* Aki Sasamoto "Strange Attractors" @ Whitney Museum (part of 2010 Whitney Biennial), 6a, 9a, 4p, 7p. Sasamoto, the hardest-working NY-based performance artist, IMO (outside Marina Abramovic's durational work at MoMA, but even so), creates FOUR Beuys-ian performances during Michael Asher's 24-hrs Biennial. She'll also be at MoMA PS1 (as part of "Greater New York") in June.

* "Provacateurs of Japanese Photography" @ Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts / 526 W 26th St #605. The title alone got my attention! This show, spanning the '70s (Shuji Terayama and Kohei Yoshiyuki) through the present (Tomoko Sawada, Miwa Yanagi), plus lots of Araki, もちろん.

THURSDAY
* Leslie Wayne "One Big Love" + Jonathan Seliger "Spoils" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Small shaped-canvas oil and mixed media paintings, like painted reliefs really, by Wayne and steel/enamel fabrications of the mundane (supersized milk carton, Hermes bag) by Seliger.

* KRATOS - ABOUT (ILLEGITIMATE(D) POWER @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. Raphael Gygax curates this exhibition investigating the exchange of power in a social context, feat. Maja Bajevic (film), Maria Eichhorn (re-photographed manipulated photography, does that make sense?), Teresa Margolles (installation, + coming off a stunning role in last year's Venice Biennale), Gianni Motti (photography of staged events) and Artur Zmijewski (documentary visual diaries, set in Berlin and Mexico City).

* Dan Deacon + Eternal Summers + Big Troubles @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p/$10. Want to see insanity? Come to Cake Shop's basement venue late THU when Dan Deacon — you know, the guy w/ the tabletop electronics who plays off the stage w/ the crowd amassed around him, pogoing like they're on sweet sweet acid and having a blast — shows up. I don't recall the last time he played such a not-large space, but it should be dope, in a sweaty way.

* Noveller + unFact @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7:30p/$7. A killer voyage into ambient metal and noise, led by drone-guitar maestro Noveller (Sarah Lipstate) and surprisingly calming unFact (that would be David Wm. Sims of The Jesus Lizard). Are you ready?

FRIDAY
* Sarah Walker "Edge of Everywhere" @ Pierogi / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg, 7-9p. Lovely, dirtily abstract acrylics on panel — a super-duper marriage of Mark Bradford's razed, reappropriated signage w/ Gerhard Richter's 'signature' abstraction. Seriously: Walker may well have that edge, carrying the torch of the 'new abstraction'.
+ Ken Weathersby "Perfect Mismatch. Weathersby 'attacks' and intervenes in his generally minimalist canvas works, modifying the mountings and space to create intriguing double-sided results.

* "Breathless" (dir. JLG, 1960) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). The 50th anniversary restoration of the landmark Nouvelle Vague classic. The super-adorable, pixie-cut Jean Seberg paired w/ thuggish hangdog Jean-Paul Belmondo on the run in the sexiest "Bonnie & Clyde" motif, ever. And if you ever wondered where the jump-cut came from, you have JLG to thank for that.

* "Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies" (dir. Arne Glimcher, 2010) screenings @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (L/NRQW/456 to Union Square). Martin Scorsese narrates not a doc on Cubism but rather cinema's (and 20th c. aviation's) effect on dual Modern Masters Picasso and Braque, and their resonating effects on future artists.

* "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" (dir. Werner Herzog, 2009) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), part of 'Cage Heat: Nicolas Cage at Midnight'. Now it gets fun: fake Louisiana-accent drawling Cage getting increasingly unhinged in one of the most convoluted film titles I've ever heard.

* Twin Sister record release party @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/$8. Twin Sister's starry nouveau trip-hop thing is magnetic. They are SO HOT right now, and deservedly so: their live shows are even more captivating than what's on album.

* Tony Castles + Darlings @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Annnd just down the street from the Twin Sister party is the Famous Class Records showcase, brimming with fun (Darlings) and funk (Tony Castles). Fingers crossed Curren$y joins Tony Castles for a bit of that old-school hip-hop.

* Sour Notes + SUSU @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/. What I'm denoting the 'sleeper hit' of Wsburg tonite: Austin's deeply wicked Sour Notes (boy-girl harmonies, taut melodies) are touring, hitting Webster Hall (*shiver*) tomorrow. Come to Bruar Falls instead, where they share the bill w/ SUSU, one of Brooklyn's fiercest art-rock acts.

SATURDAY
* SkowheganTALKS presents Judy Pfaff, Jessica Stockholder and Cheryl Donegan @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave), 3p/$8. WOW, I like all these artists, in conversation together about...installation, maybe? Pfaff, w/ her kinetic, floating-dragon-style mixed media installations, I've adored for a long time. Stockholder's bright amalgams challenge my thinking on sculptural composition. Donegan I know best for her 'physical' static works v. her performances, but I dig the pairing.

MONDAY
* Moonmen on the Moon, Man (rotating sets) + My Teenage Stride @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 6:30ish/$5. For me, this is an ace way to conclude Memorial Day weekend: get out of town, hit the beach, whatever, then return to the city late-ish MON and catch the final night of Cake Shop's 5-year anniversary, feat. the house contingent Moonmen... playing revolving sets w/ loads other bands, for cheap!

TUESDAY
* Le Sphinxx + Omega Jarden @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$6. (almost) All-girl New Wave? I'm down! They're all Brooklyn-based and the Omega Jarden contingent prove that breathy EBM can be VERY fierce live.

CURRENT SHOWS
* "Greater New York" @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/V to 23rd/Ely, 7 to Courthouse Rd). NYC is one of the most fertile grounds for artists and creative collectives in the world. Just step foot on the grounds of PS1, in the third iteration of this quinquennial (means 'five years') exhibition, and you'll know what I mean. All the artists (an international-background cast) live in the metropolitan area, and all the works are w/in 5 years old. And there are relatively few 'traditional wall-mounted' paintings. That much is clear, so let's have some fun:
- installation: many of the artists took on the schoolhouse atmosphere of PS1 (lots of odd chambers) and ran w/ it. Ranging from David Brooks' news-garnering 'rainforest', composed of nursery-grown trees totally coated in ashy cement, to Maria Petschnig's "Uninvited" (a carpeted domestic quarters replete w/ framed S&M photography, oops!) to David Adamo's "Untitled (Rites of Spring)", a floor-filling array of baseball bats; Franklin Evans' "Timecompressionmachine" is like Dash Snow + Dan Colen's "Nest", but made out of gallery PR materials!
- photographic series: Hank Willis Thomas's "Unbranded Reflections on Black Corporate America, 1968-2008", comprised of familiar media w/ all taglines removed; LaToya Ruby Frazier's (New Museum triennial alum) uninhabited urban decay v. Alice O'Malley's b&w portraits of edgy NYers
- interplay: b/c many artists share a room, Amy Yao's acid-colored doorways bound off David Benjamin Sherry's color-saturated photography; sparse corporate media installation by Vlatka Horvat against Tala Madani's brutal animations and small works on paper; the DAS INSTITUT pairing of Adele Roder and Kerstin Bratsch, which wins the award for most color-intense room, maybe
And more, much much more. There is a revolving gallery on the 1st floor, currently hosting "The Baghdad batteries", curated by Olivia Shao and feat. a relatively conceptual arrangement of new (Reena Spauldings, Josef Strau) and old (Walter de Maria, Robert Breer). There is also a 'best of' room, highlights of five years of NY gallery (and museum) scene, the site of Terence Koh's whirlwind 500+ years cultural lecture opening day. There are ongoing performances (Aki Sasamoto, the hardest working performance artist perhaps aside from Marina Abramovic, though Sasamoto's take a decidedly more Beuysian vibe) and films. And as this organic exhibition demands, I will be revisiting and filing new reports. So check "Greater NY" out, and often.

* Haeri Yoo "Body Hoarding" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. A fantastic physicality exists w/in the realm of Yoo's kinetic mixed media paintings. While she may be moving away from total representation, you still get beautiful glimpses of that, most directly in the really tiny canvases in this fine show, like the sensual "Kiss" and "Back Rub". The blurred "Family Unit" could be a reimagined Arshile Gorky, while the absolutely fantastic, bluish "Honeymoon Island" looks to me like animated gestures and poses, brimming with life beneath the paint.

* William Pope.L "landscape+object+animal" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. This is the 1st Pope.L exhibition I recall where the artist — "the friendliest Black artist in America" — is not present for his typically enduring performances. That said (and there is an ongoing performance here, w/ volunteers, called "Cusp" that involves a figure in oversized PJs, clutching a brimming cup w/ green ink on a mound of soil), Pope.L's presence is palpable in this installation, from the scattered and ripped stuffed animals to the paintings and slogans that cover the walls ("Green People Are a New Kind of Shit"). It's like he visits the gallery every night, his 2nd studio, and moves things around unbeknownst to us.

* Richard Hughes @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Talk about disturbing. The centerpiece of Hughes' sculptural installation (made of convincingly realistic casts of objects, in glass, cloth and artificial materials) is the floor of like a gutted house, insulation and brick dust powdering the ground. This plays off "Dead Flies", cast-resin shoes slung over 'power lines' shoefiti-style and the Robert Gober-esque particleboard-looking slabs (a mix of paint, fiberglass, and resin) — to equal a very unsettling vibe.

* "Fleurs: 1880-2010" @ Benrimon Contemporary / 514 W 24th St 2nd Fl. You might not believe me when I say an exhibition on 130 years of flowers in art has something for everyone. The sweep here is vast, from gorgeous and representational (Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Marc Quinn, Andre Derain) to Pop-inflected (Andy Warhol, Donald Baechler, Tom Wesselman) to wildly abstract (Vik Muniz, Natalia Goncharova, Niki de St Phalle). And for every delicate arrangement in a vase, there is a macho counterpart (Jim Dine, Ori Gerscht). And everything, these dozens of canvases lining the perimeter of the gallery, has equal footing. I mean, who hates flowers anyway? That's just cruel.

* Carsten Nicolai "moiré" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. The many iterations and eye-trickeries of the interference pattern. Nicolai takes us from the deceptively simple (film tape stretched in a grid between two points, creating these bending shadows and varying thicknesses) to the installation-complex (a darkened room illuminated by whirling coils of light, or at least I think they were moving...). Sculpture (a Dan Graham-esque semi-reflective block in the main gallery) and works on paper are quieter overall but nothing is entirely 'static' here.

* John Zurier, Jason Fox, Richard Allen Morris @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. An excellent interplay b/w these three artists, all ostensibly abstract. I loved Morris' most quickly, his straight-from-the-tube squeezes and spreads across certain delineated portions of otherwise pristine painted canvas. Zurier's room of subdued bluish-purplish-greens, striping massive canvases, slightly recalls the Rothko Chapel w/o the reverence (and somehow gloomier). And Fox's mostly monotone (reds) set echoes both artists, w/ his stripes (Zurier) and his carefully pared-down canvases (Morris).

* Bill Beckley "Etcetera" @ Tony Shafrazi Gallery / 544 W 26th St. A great headlong dive into Beckley's color-conscious abstract photography, from the cheeky '70s stuff to the super-saturated, non-representational current works. Think flower stems as tall as you are, set against a gradient backdrop. Think photographic juxtapositions, sort of like James Rosenquist (usually incl an abbreviated body part) w/ poetry. And the most head-scratchingly sharp captures of glistening water and reflections, everything juicily colored like the sexiest product adverts.

* Jim Nutt "'Trim' and Other Works: 1967-2010" @ David Nolan NY / 527 W 29th St. This is a delightful little gem buried 'way up' on 29th St. One of the more...twisted of the Hairy Who movement, who balanced their grotesqueness w/ psychedelic color and intriguing media pairings. The acrylic portraitures on MDF, the new stuff, bears that weird, almost Picasso-style abstraction that Nutt does so well, but it's the back room that got me going. It contains a stash of old works, the iconic "Miss Sue Port", an acid-colored acrylic on plexiglas, and other plexiglas-painted works and works on paper of gender-vagues and quirky personages.

* Stuart Cumberland "Gone/There" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. Some of my favorite 'painterly' elements, all in one place. Take Roy Lichtenstein's Ben Day dots and recontextualize those for today, filtered through a Keith Haring palette w/ bold black squiggles and washes from Christopher Wool's world.

* Judith Schaechter "Beauty and the Beef" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. Nobody is doing what Schaechter is doing, in her trademark stained glass lightboxes. The figures and arrangements are as sumptuous as ever (and her skill in composition is unparalleled), but she's created a fantastic depth to these new works, like "Cold Genius Study" and "You Are Here", where the backdrop recedes far out as the subjects float in space.

* "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.
+ Justin Allen. His trompe l'oeil paintings on wood panel of the most banal (plastic bags and rubbish bags) are beautiful, if banal, and tiny.

* Romain Bernini "Despite Walls and Landscapes" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. The setting of Bernini's new suite of large oil paintings is an anonymous, barren landscape w/ a poisonous wrong-colored sky, sparsely populated by anonymous figures trudging along and attempting to surmount a fortress-like wall. Dig it? Cues on immigration, Arizona's current laws, border patrol, and the broader world (Israel/Palestine, Russia/Georgia) — this couldn't be more timely.

* Martin Creed @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. The Scottish conceptualist created a very tactile, very IDably beautiful installation this time, blanketing the floor of the gallery w/ marble planks in varying colors. That's essentially "it", but the work stretches beyond the perimeters of the public space, into the offices and further back, organically.
+ Jonathan Horowitz. The artist restages his notorious "Go Vegan!" installation at La Frieda Meats, at 601 Washington and just around the corner from Creed's show. His work, a combo of screenprinted cute animals, portraits of vegan celeb, and video of cows being bled in a slaughterhouse work brilliantly off the steel walls, hooks, and rubbery doors of the empty meat-market. I wonder, though, if it were like in a white-box space if it would have the same propulsion. Here, though, it's excellent (though I'm still carnivorous).

* Dina Recanati "Gathering Winds" @ Flomenhaft Gallery / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. If you've ever wondered the legacy left by Piero Manzoni, whose terribly brief art career ended decades ago, just check the wrapped-linen canvases in Recanati's great exhibition. They totally reminded me of Manzoni's early "Achromes" (read: rumpled bedsheets). She furthers these w/ twisted and painted linen and gauze in all sorts of creations, but it is the simplest that really do it for me.

* Anna Gaskell "Turns Gravity" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Gaskell ups the haunting, cinematic factor in this vaguely religious set of large photographic prints shot in some snowy forest in Iowa, though it could be anywhere, at a vague time period too. Young, suited boys leap out of frame or pull another (who could be either resisting or injured, I can't quite tell). Another, truncated at the waist as he kneels behind a tree (is he sick?). Just what ritual are they performing?

* Bjarne Melgaard "The Synthetic Slut" @ Greene Naftali / 508 W 26th St 8th Fl. Caution, dear reader, if you've never experienced a Melgaard installation, and 'experience' is the apropos word here. We talk about 'experiencing' art; well that's precisely the thing when diving into the gritty, paint-soaked, malodorous, dark realm of his oeuvre. His show at Greene Naftali, inundated w/ images of Serbian-set atrocities and hard-porn sex, w/ a liberal dousing of squeezed paint, violent pickup lines and detritus everywhere, will linger under your skin long after you take the lift back down from this shocker.

* Liz Magic Laser "chase" @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Laser videotaped a rather creative bunch and their soliloquies (ranging from the comedic to unhinged) to ATM booths inside banks — get the show-title now? Also: check Laser at MoMA PS1, her film on the Da Vinci Surgical System (robot-assisted surgery) on her handbag is not as immediately gratifying as the gallery show, but dope anyway.

* Burt Barr + Valérie Belin @ Sikkema, Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Nice duality here: Barr's films focus on either a barely moving or rapidly-repeating subject (a moored ship, a lawn sprinkler), so they look like static b&w prints. The deliquescing bubbles at the bottom of a sink is a charmer, though. Belin's lush C-prints of mostly floral arrangements and objet are pulled out of context and abstracted.

LAST CHANCE
* 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.

* Amy Yao "Come to My Opening!" @ Jack Hanley Gallery/ 136 Watts St. Evidence of Yao's past performances riddle the gallery space, the peanut shell-covered floor in the side gallery and the paint splashes and discarded oil pastel nubs in the main room. These work well off the conceptual installation, Yao's 'doorways' w/ shock-bright painted accents (check some of these at her room in "Greater NY") and wood dowels w/ newsprint clippings ("An Enigma", "Don't Cry").

* "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.

* 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.

* Alex Guofeng Cao @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. Digital photo-mosaics of classic celebrities, composed of a related figure (like Chairman Mao made of tiny Andy Warhol faces, or Mother Theresa of Ghandi). The smaller the mosaic, the smoother and more 3D quality the final portrait (the larger mosaics tend toward jagged, pixellated versions of lesser renown).

* Fernando Botero "Monumental Sculpture" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. I'm all for massive sculpture, when it works, but quite honestly I prefer Botero's sumptuous oil paintings of chubby characters (in both classical and timely situations) then these hefty, slightly scandalous bronzes.

* 2010 Whitney Biennial @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St). A fine biennial, smaller-scale, unthemed, and yet way cooler than 2008's seam-busting array. Loads of great moments here, incl: Jessica Jackson Hutchins' Pres. Obama-newspapered sofa w/ ceramics and David Adamo's just-happened split wood scattering (check Adamo at PS1's "Greater NY"); Charles Ray's ink-drawn flowers, mutant-'Avatar'-world dandelions, childishly conceived but so perfectly rendered, and in such an array that they produce a much-needed calming effect; The Bruce High Quality Foundation (the collective whose NY-themed piece, projected on the windshield of a car, somehow combines the vibe of Youtube clips w/ poetic narrative, to captivating results — they've got a way minimal installation at "Greater NY"); Josephine Meckseper (her red/blue-tinted 'Mall of America' piece; Roland Flexner's ink-inundated works are determined by gravity and his breath, rather than a brush (think Max Ernst's decalcomania landscapes); Jim Lutes masks his portraits in smoky swaths of colorful egg tempera (check 'Piece of Barbara', those eyes...); and of course Aki Sasamoto's performances. ENDS SUN

* Marina Abramovic "The Artist is Present" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Sitting across from Abramovic, the most powerful contemporary performance artist, IMO, is indescribable, the light filtering from overhead, the pervasive calm emanating from her, though she's been enduring this for 2+ months. If you've not experienced this, I do encourage to to sit w/ her, queue up (there will be a queue, no doubt, but it's worth the way). Then check out the upstairs, the volunteer performers re-performing "Point of Contact" (1980) and the much talked about "Imponderabilia" (1977) and the videos of Abramovic's collaborative works with Uday and her solo projects, plus the singular "Seven Easy Pieces", Abramovic re-performing pivotal works from six renowned performance artists (Joseph Beuys, Gina Pane, Vito Acconci), plus one of her own, at the Guggenheim in 2005. ENDS MON

Dope Director: Yoshihiro Nishimura (part 1)

Subway Cinema's announcements for this year's NYAFF are rolling in, and w/ the excellent news of the inclusion of Mutant Girls Squad, the madcap collaboration b/w directors Yoshihiro Nishimura, Noboru Iguchi and Tak Sakaguchi — apparently conceived over one very drunken night in NYC at last year's festival, though I could see such a collaboration as fated, in the stars — it is my duty to inform on the absolute dopeness of these directors and this fascinatingly violent underworld of extreme Japanese cinema.
There is a renowned, or notorious, contingent of directors called "The Splat Pack", including Eli Roth and James Wan, who, since 2002, have embodied this hellishly violent torture-porn movement where an MPAA 'R' rating is like the low end of the spectrum. I marginally compare this w/ New French Extremity, which is more blurredly demarcated and contains such transgressive (yet, in many instances, critically acclaimed) features as Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-moi and Pascal Laugier's Martyrs, though the greater sweep of this movement (and its other European peers), unlike "The Splat Pack" is broader than 'just' torture-porn.
So trust me when I write that there's a global market for extreme films (just check the power of Tom Six's The Human Centipede (First Sequence) — that such a feature could even exist in certain mainstream circulation, let alone the multiple sequels to Saw and Hostel, is evidence in itself). And Nishimura's oeuvre is decidedly extremely violent, but it's totally NOT torture-porn. His features don't have the elaborate budgets of "The Splat Pack", nor, I believe, would he go the torture-porn, super-realist route if he had the budget. Let me break this down for you: Nishimura's oeuvre is body-shock horror (splatterpunk a la David Cronenberg), laced w/ requisite Japanese motifs (the schoolgirl, the samurai), and it's incredibly dope. Stay with me on this!


My first exposure to Nishimura was Tokyo Gore Police (his first solo feature film after a string of collaborations, including w/ Iguchi and Sakaguchi, where Nishimura added SFX — geysers of blood and gore — to their respective films), which screened at the 2008 NYAFF. Oh it looked fierce, I mean "gore" is its middle name! (actually, the title, 東京残酷警察, directly translates to something like "Tokyo Brutality Police", which is incredibly effective for the angle of the film, but of that later) More precisely, I saw an extended trailer of Tokyo Gore Police on Twitch ahead of the festival. That he'd picked Eihi Shiina (notoriously of Takashi Miike's Audition, which remains one of the scariest films I've ever seen, and undoubtedly ever will see) as the lead for Tokyo Gore Police was reason enough to hook my attention. Her onscreen presence as Asami in Audition was so singular, so...lasting, well, I wondered what she would be like in another film, and if she could effectively dispel that Asami aura. The Tokyo Gore Police trailer opened that door.
Slow-building industrial techno soundtrack. Shots of Shiina (as character Ruka) driving a modded squad car through neon-drenched new-future Tokyo's streets at night, cut w/ shots of gore straight out of Return of the Living Dead. Then came the blood. The appearance of blood in Nishimura's world is signature and greatly contributes to this unrealism. Blood looks like diluted cherry sno-cone syrup, and when it comes it geysers, showers, spurts in all directions like an open fireplug in summertime. The camera-lens on the trailer was soaked in this blood spraying from either a woman's or a long-haired man's (I couldn't place the gender in this non-sequential shot) head. A bondage club scene, replete w/ rubber-suited characters and grotesquely modified girls. Then Ruka in some sort of modified kimono (as in, super-short) in a swordfight with a black-cloaked man, perfectly in synch w/ the soundtrack. Then a car-crash through a pile of cadaver limbs, again a brilliant knock to the realism quotient while echoing '80s zombie films. Then the title screen — Tokyo Gore Police — and I'm left wondering 'what in the hell just happened?'. It was obviously ultraviolent, but in an almost comedically extreme way, like live-action "Itchy and Scratchy" only more-so and more Japanese. Like the director wasn't even trying to get near the ballpark of believability. But what kind of story could rest on such a coked-up splatter film? Like I wrote before: I was hooked. I had to see it.
I doubt I was the only one at the IFC Center that night who was surprised that Nishimura created not only a solvent plot but also a rather emotive back-story for Tokyo Gore Police. Shiina's character, Ruka, the lead "Engineer Hunter" (these twisted, bloodthirsty, genetically-modified humans) was a self-harmer, a cutter. Her family life, shown in flashback, seemed to be both loving and painful, as her mother tried to commit suicide on Ruka's birthday. Her father, a clean-cut Keisuke Horibe (who I knew for his thuggish, misfit roles in Katsuhito Ishii's Sharkskin Man and Peach-Hip Girl and Party 7), was a police officer, Ruka's role model and an upstanding figure for civic duty. He was murdered in front of Ruka's eyes — which we later learn was like a double-cross — and that propelled her to join the police force. By this point, the Tokyo Police Force is like this all-invasive Shogun-slash-SWAT brigade, supposedly protecting the citizens from the onset of these "engineers", who were apparently behind Ruka's father's murder. And w/ the impetus for Ruka joining the force, Nishimura cuts loose.


The first few minutes of Tokyo Gore Police are major-intense for first-timers to this particular realm of extremism. The unhinged juxtaposition of Ruka, sitting in her squad car and slashing her wrist, against shots of this snarling violent tumbleweed (amazingly cameo'd by Tak Sakaguchi), wielding a gore-soaked chainsaw in sped-up animation, is enough to separate the hardcore from the not. And that's not to say Nishimura makes it any easier on us once the action settles down (no way, many of his gems, like the exploding head, leg-geysers, and acidic breast-milk, show up in this film). But trust me, once the balletic choreographed action b/w Ruka and this crazed engineer begins (courtesy of action/stunt guru Sakaguchi), particularly the point where the engineer grows a meat-and-bone chainsaw from a truncated limb (like the combination nightmare of early William Gibson w/ Darren Lynn Bousman) and the two go at it in a full-on chainsaw fight — like 10 minutes into the film, a chainsaw fight!! — then we're cruising. And then Ruka wields TWO chainsaws, re-appropriating the engineer's fashioned limb, carving the baddie up ice-sculpture style in slo-mo, blood splashing in all directions as the music crescendos and she strikes a pose.
The world of "Tokyo Gore Police" dwells mostly at night, in a Chiba City-like neon Tokyo, captured by Nishimura's saturated-color lens. And besides the closet-sized bar, where Ruka confides w/ her fast-friend bartender, played by Ikuko Sawada, most of its locations are discomfiting alien. Police HQ resembles an empty parking garage, the setting for Ruka's surreal birthday party, surrounded by the hulking, armored chief (Shun Sugata, rasping through a speaker on his throat to offset his character's ruined larynx), the grotesque "Igor"-like medical examiner (Jiji Bu, a fixture in Nishimura's world), and a bunch of salacious-looking dudes (who I'll bet wouldn't dare lay a finger on Ruka, knowing her penchant for swift retribution). The only other woman in this motley group is the Chief's "pet gimp",  (pole dancer and frequent collab Cay Izumi, who's a tengu in Iguchi's Robogeisha), rubber-masked and -suited and plodding along on her limbless stubs, until the Chief removes her mask so we see her prismatic hair and pierced tongue before she begins pleasuring him. The gimp takes on Ruka in a wild fight-scene near the end, again thanks to Sakaguchi, where she's outfitted w/ katanas for limbs and coked up on stimulants, careening off the concrete walls and pirouetting at Ruka like a kinetic Ray Caesar creation. Sakaguchi also contributed the swordplay scene b/w Ruka (bedecked in the modded kimono, which while benefiting her flat stomach and long leg, and looking generally badass, tripped me up as an odd uniform choice, but, hell, she worked it) and the Key Man, the black-cloaked dude and head engineer in the trailer.


Nishimura punctuates this gore rollercoaster with commercials, adding a bit of bright, twisted levity to the stew. And yeah, they're gory, too (one is a 'wrist-cut kit' for high-school girls, another cautions against seppuku, directed by Noguchi and Yudai Yamaguchi). These plus the soprano-cooings of Marie Machida, the DJ/police correspondent (I'm still not quite sure, but her HQ seems to be the bondage club) further this darkly humorous atmosphere. And we have Nishimura entirely to thank for the heady trip down the S&M rabbit hole, the bondage club doubling as an engineer base, where particularly lecherous officer Yukihide Benny (omnipresent in basically all Nishimura/Noguchi films) frequents. Kariwanz, aka Ms Karin and her "dog" partner Wanco, created the eye-popping, hazardware-colored fetishwear for the club (plus the outfit and mask for "dog girl"). Here we meet the three performers (actually Key Man's henchwomen), all young Japanese actresses and recurring Nishimura characters: Cherry Kirishima ("snail girl"), Sayako Nakoshi ("penis nose"? her face is reshuffled w/ an eye for a mouth and vice-versa, plus the penis-nose. She reappears prominently as a "wrist-cutting" champion in Nishimura's other films, sans penis nose, of course), and the lovely Tsugumi Nagasawa ("teeth-breasts", think of The Corinthian from Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman", but fang-laden breasts instead of eyes). The sex-addled cop picks Nagasawa, and after a bit of fellatio and gunfire — and in perhaps the most iconic moment of the film, if I had to pick one — her lower half morphs into crocodile jaws, a Venus Flytrap-like vaginal dentata, sicced on Tanaka's manhood and other limbs. It's to Nishimura's credit that, despite the budget, this incredibly unlikely morphing actually looks pretty convincing...you know, in a completely wacked-out sort of way. And when it's all over, the city burning just like the poster claims, w/ the Key Man taken down and the corrupted police force in shambles, our heroine Ruka emerges alongside her new recruit, the "dog girl" now with machineguns for limbs, and I became a devoted Nishimura fanatic.


(Nishimura-san PART TWO — on Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl and more — coming soon!)

fee's LIST (through 5/25)

WEDNESDAY
* 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 a few other chances)

* "Two in the Wave" (dir. Emmanuel Laurent, 2009) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston). A suitably jumpy doc on Nouvelle Vague, w/ its lens focused on JLG + François Truffaut, feat. period footage plus classic scenes from their oeuvre, incl. the overlap w/ recurring lead actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. I thrilled myself several times just WRITING this.
N.B. this is a week ahead of the 50th Anniversary restoration of JLG's classic "Breathless", appearing in next week's LIST.

* "Cremaster Cycle" (dir. Matthew Barney, 1994-2002) screenings @ IFC Center / 343 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). Oh it's back, again, Barney's epic, nonsequential art-film(s) on the process of transformation, via spermatogenesis, Vaseline, racecars, uh...satyrs, the Guggenheim...um, Houdini, speed-metal...yeah, I've seen 'em all and I still can't concisely tell you what it's about. BUT now is your chance (again!) to see them all. They play as follows: 1-2 together, 3 alone (the long player and 'newest' of the lot) and 4-5 together. THRU JUN 3
*** Note: Barney IN PERSON at THU 7p screening (of "Cremaster 4-5") so if you want to see the whole thing in one fell swoop and coincide that w/ Barney, start w/ "Cremaster 3" at 3:30p, then see "Cremaster 4-5" straight after and then "Cremaster 1-2" at 9:25p. YES I realize this is completely out of order but that's the beauty w/ these nonlinear art-films innit?

THURSDAY
* Carsten Nicolai "Moiré" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. The test-pattern artist, Nicolai's visual interference interventions take on the moiré, overlapping dot-patterns, via installations and works on paper.

* Romain Bernini "Despite Walls and Landscapes" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. I LOVE dystopian landscapes, b/c w/ every future cultural passing they can morph into something relevant to the times. Bernini's migrants fight through a particularly metaphysical realm, though the undertones of it could be applied to immigration (and anti-immigrant sentiment).

* Haeri Yoo "Body Hoarding" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. An essential exhibition, esp. for those high on all the (deserved) praise for Amy Sillman's show at Sikkema, Jenkins, which closed last week. Yoo is (in my opinion) a way under-appreciated 'bodily' artist, whose abstract paintings reveal loads of vulnerability and memory beneath the rough physicality of the media.

* John Zurier, Jason Fox, Richard Allen Morris @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. Three takes on painting from three abstract-delving artists. Zurier's fall along the most minimalist, w/ Morris' heavy on impasto (despite their small sizes) and Fox's loosely geometric and industrial.

* "The Piano Teacher/La Pianiste" (dir. Michael Haneke, 2001) screenings @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p/9:30p. A truly disturbing film from Haneke's truly disturbing oeuvre. Isabelle Huppert as the titular character is equally self-demoralizing and bloodthirsty, and the director keeps it minimally violent while still hammering the dread deep into your skull.

* NYC Popfest @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p/$12. Annnnd thus it begins, 2010's NYC Popfest, and opening night is where it's at. Veronica Falls (UK) headline + Horowitz (also UK, who have this dreamy song titled "Sweetness, I Could Die in your Arms") and locals Dream Diary and Elephant Parade.

FRIDAY
* Anna Gaskell "Turns Gravity @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. This new suite of photographs from the artist are as psychologically-imbued and cinematic as ever, and if we're able to actually piece them together into a running sequence we'd probably have a dope short film.
+ Christian Vetter "The Presence of Absence". Very moody grayscale paintings from the Swiss artist should be a properly sombre accompaniment to Gaskell's photography.

* Liz Magic Laser "Chase" @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Laser reinterprets Bertolt Brecht's "Man equals Man", filming the performance in ATM vestibules, which have always tended to creep me out just slightly. Check Laser at MoMA PS1's 'Greater New York', opening SUN.

* Burt Barr + Valérie Belin @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Video from the former, photography from the latter, both mostly b&w (except for Barr's punnily titled "Black and White", feat. two dancers of those respective races) and both relatively isolated from narrative context.

* Matthew Barney "Ancient Evenings" Storyboards discussion @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p/$8. Barney is everywhere! If you missed his appearance at THU's "Cremaster Cycle" @ IFC Center, don't worry. This one is a totally different deal: he previews his new project, a seven-act opera based on Norman Mailer's "Ancient Evenings", only in this reincarnation takes the form of a '67 Chrysler. Thank you for not making it explicitly Vaseline-related, Barney, though I'm sure it'll appear somewhere.

* "The Rock" (dir. Michael Bay, 1996) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 343 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), part of "Cage Heat: Nicolas Cage at Midnight". Yeah, let's one up this "Cremaster" business w/ this week's installment of ALL NIC CAGE, ALL THE TIME* (*at midnight Friday and Saturday only). Alcatraz w/ explosions and gaping plotholes, w/ Cage as a particularly strung-out FBI agent against Sean Connery. I WILL, however, caution you from seeing this straight after a "Cremaster" film, b/c the doubling effect may be too much for anyone, even a seasoned gonzo/giallo film-goer such as myself, to handle.

* NYC Popfest @ Don Hill's / 511 Greenwich St (1 to Christopher St, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), 7p/. This is a tough one for me, as it's Pants Yell! (MA)'s last show, so show support + say sayonara to their pitch-perfect indie-rock w/ style. w/ the thoroughly addicting Tender Trap and Allo Darlin' (both UK, and both cute).

* ALL THAT! '90s Dance Party @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave (G to Greenpoint), 10p/FREE. I was devoted to '80s night back in uni, but now that I'm a bit older it's all about the '90s, like Tone Loc + Dinosaur Jr '90s. Peggy (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) and Shirley (NYNoise) wield the turntables like nobody's business. You're not afraid to dance, yeah?

SATURDAY
* Judith Schaechter "Beauty and the Beef" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. Another incredible exhibit by Schaechter, a mind-melting collection of stained glass works mixing traditional technique (what else is there?) w/ the artist's own pioneering improvisations.

* "If You See Nothing Say Something" @ The Invisible Dog / 51 Bergen St, Cobble Hill (F/G to Bergen), 6-10p. Kiya Kim curated this exhibition on exploration and discovery, w/ Julie Evanoff, Sea Chang Chun, Woolga Choi, Megan Prince and others.

* Rodney Graham "Music and Dance" @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Staged lightbox-mounted prints on the mythos of the performer and audience (everything from the saloon and dive-bar to 14th c. concert-halls).

* NYC Popfest @ Bell House / 149 7th St, Gowanus (F/M/R to 4th Ave/9th St), 6:30p/$18. The 'big' night of Popfest, as it includes the super-classic The Wake, UK's post-punk-turned-indie-pop sensation, annnnnd they've never played stateside before. w/ My Teenage Stride (NYC), Very Truly Yours (IL), BOAT (WA) + more.

* The Beets + German Measles @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/. My pick for #1 NYC Popfest 'alternative'. The Beets, Jackson Heights' finest garage-rock singalong trio, are back, finally, and bring the drama w/ party-rockers German Measles. w/ Psychic Flowers.

SUNDAY
* "Greater New York" @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/V to 23rd St/Ely Ave, G to 21st St). The 3rd iteration of this 'quinquennial', which means it occurs every five years, will be HOT. A trove of NY-based artists (feat. Ei Arakawa, Tauba Auerbach, William Cordova, Tala Madani, Zak Prekop, Aki Sasamoto and about 60 more) open their respective creative processes, which beyond new works incl. works-in-residence and creative interventions in the museum space.

* Chainsaw Brunch Show @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey), 1p/$3.50 (all-you-can-cook brunch). Help w/ the food and listen to some sick-ass bands, like Nonhorse (the twisted tape DJ from Woods) and noisy no-wave becostumed Globular Cluster. For the ultimate, go to this for a few hrs then head to MoMA PS1.

* NYC Popfest @ Littlefield / 622 Degraw St, Park Slope (M/R to Union, D/M/NR to Pacific) 2p/$12. Full lineup for the last day of Popfest, feat. For Ex-Lovers Only (FL), Bunnygrunt (MO), Neverever (CA), The Embassy (Sweden) and loads other cute-sounding bands.

TUESDAY
* "The Accidental Gangster and the Mistaken Courtesan" (dir. Yeo Kyun-dong, 2008) screening @ Tribeca Cinemas / 54 Varick St (ACE/1 to Canal St), 7p/FREE. Take a Korean period drama (set during the Gibang Riot of 1724) and lace that w/ acid-neon colors, a hip-hop soundtrack straight out of "Step Up" (you know, that Channing Tatum dance-off romance, and no I didn't just make that up), and lots of necessarily coked-up action scenes.

* Depreciation Guild @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/$12. The shimmering marriage of shoegaze w/ 8-bit undertones, feat. two of the cuties from The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. If this sounds impossible, it's not b/c Depreciation Guild do it, giant-style. w/ Wild Nothing.

CURRENT SHOWS
* Darren Almond "Sometimes Still" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. Almond's new six-screen film, tracing the path of a Tendai monk engaging in a rigorous process toward Buddhahood near Kyoto, is a thrillingly immersive video experience. Though your arrival during this 25-min film will vary person to person, hopefully it'll go somewhat like mine: you feel your way into the pitch-dark room, to the echoing chants of a Buddhist monk. Suddenly five of the screens light up w/ flashes of the forest, tree trunks at night spanning all cardinal directions as, in the center screen, the camera tracks a solitary nascent monk ascending a stone staircase.

* "Like a Rolling Stone" @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Nice trio of relative newbies — at least on American shores. I particularly liked the juxtaposition from young, NY-based painter Peter Gerakaris (surreal, acid-toned paintings and works on paper) w/ German-based Alexander Esters (metaphysical mixed media paintings, mining Di Chirico and early Ernst).

* Sungmi Lee "Behind My Door" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Lee's 1st exhibition at the gallery is a meditation on her father's death, spanning sculpture and paintings created w/ resin and — shall we say — more tenuous mediums. The effect of "Crying For You", a life-size, mushroom-shaped (or I guess frozen fountain-shaped) whitish resin form, lengthened by dripping stalactites that formed the adjacent 'painting' "Painting By Sculpture" (which is fitted on plywood and looks like a tactile whirlpool), is major. Then she starts incorporating crushed automobile glass and blown incense smoke into dangerous pillow-shapes and Plexiglas boxes. She's got my attention.
+ Sun-Tai Yoo. Metaphysical still-lifes, feat. tiny cyclists and Di Chirico-esque distended shadows and shapes against crowded, complimentary objects.

* Andy Coolquitt "We Care About You" @ Lisa Cooley Fine Art / 34 Orchard St. I hesitated when walking into the gallery, filled as it was w/ these fragilely composed, kooky assemblages — epoxied lighters, bent rods, lightbulbs, fabric — all w/ a heavy emphasis on 'found' objet. They're great, super-colorful and cheekily titled (the seat cushion on the wall is "A nice soft place for meeting people", while this double metal-and-lightbulb mechanism is "l___i", recalling the shape) and create a seamless installation. And for the naysayers, check the assemblages replete w/ little lewd-gesturing hands, and quit being so bloody snobbish.

* Scott Musgrove "How is the Empire?" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. I think I'd love to live in Musgrove's un-Darwinian world, full of lush big-eyed (and usually long-necked) critters, sumptuously rendered in oil-on-panel dioramas. His exhibition is furthered by sculpture in varying forms, from the massive bronze to wee carvings out of wood, plastic and other media, to a stunning wood-inlay motif w/ meandering glass 'river', to a furry composite called "Abominable Backhoe" (complete w/ googly eyes), like the baddest-ass toy you ever wanted but couldn't have.
+ Louie Cordero "Sacred Bones". The Manila-based artist mixes Filipino mythology w/ what looks like classic Bollywood imagery and American cult classics in feverishly colored acrylics.

* "A Vernacular of Violence" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. A fierce, tightly composed show that distills ubiquitous media imagery to throw us a bit off balance. Lisa Kirk and Walid Raad lead the fray w/ their charged emphasis on the banal, via her video and his printmaking. Other highlights include a hypnotic car-fire from the collective Claire Fontaine and Rita Sobral Campos' disturbing mechanical drawings.

* Johannes VanDerBeek "Another Time Man" @ Zach Feuer LFL / 530 W 24th St. Compare/contrast VanDerBeek's room-filling mix-matched craft objects w/ Coolquitt's offering. Though in this case, they're more traditionally linear and artsy. VanDerBeek works in such diverse throwaway mediums as painted paper towels (shuffling out a slew, rabbit-breeding-like to put Josh Smith's productivity to shame) and painted aluminum mesh, formed into lifesize figures like a trippy hippie.

* John Grade "Circuit" @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 534 W 24th St 2nd Fl. Grade's room-filling sculpture is like the meandering carapace of some megafauna. The combination of ceramic and gypsum gives it a bewilderingly organic affectation.

LAST CHANCE
* 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.

* Katherine Bernhardt @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. Take a trip w/ the artist to Tombouctou, shimmering in the heat in her large acrylic paintings, rendered as angular figures and brightly patterened fabrics.

* Guo Hongwei "Things" @ Chambers Fine Art / 522 W 19th St. Isolated or fragmented articles, in discreet arrangements and painted against expanses of white.

* 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.

I dig: Ghada Amer

(Ghada Amer The Black Bang 2010. Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas. 72 x 64" (182.9 x 162.6 cm). CR# GA.21006. Image courtesy Cheim & Read.)

If this is your first up-close encounter w/ Ghada Amer's ecstatically colored and embroidered canvases, you may well have a few blush-worthy moments when you stare through the psychedelically patterned aura in her new exhibition, "Color Misbehavior", on now at Cheim & Read. For instance, the magnetic The Black Bang (2010), with its Mandalic sequences of white and yellow thread on a solid black canvas, like a false-colored nebula shot by the Hubble Space Telescope, that one is sure to draw you in, deep w/in its repeating layers of embroidery until the figures emerge and — oops! it's a girl in platform heels throwing a naughty gesture, repeated ad infinitum, because once you see her, you cannot help but see the many, many twins emerging from the noise like a landscape in haze. That right there is the hinge of this suite of beautiful new works, and it should intrigue those well-versed in Amer's oeuvre just as much as newcomers.

(Ghada Amer The Black Bang 2010, detail shot.)

Besides the three 2009 canvases in the smaller gallery adjacent to the front desk, Amer's subject matter (mined prodigiously from Hustler and Club) doesn't proclaim itself w/ the immediacy of her earlier works. The women are as sensual and sexual as ever, replete w/ spread legs and intimate positions and autoeroticism, each lovingly, carefully rendered in Amer's signature broken-line stitching. Though here entire meters of loose string stick to and pool on the canvases like bright tendrils of some poisonous tropical plant, half-obscuring the figures. In one instance, D As In Drips (2010), the bolder painted blond, like a pinup wallpaper, is echoed by another woman ensnared in multicolored string. This is further complicated by the vertically streaming acrylic drips. In another, Sunset in Isfahan - RFGA (2010) — hint: the acronym in the title refers to the recurring collaboration b/w Amer and Reza Farkhondeh — the two reclining women float amidst squiggles of embroidery, like just-showered hair, and a burst of petal-shaped peaches and yellows. Farkhondeh's background has as much immediacy and interplay as the foreground action. He rendered a blurred pool as backdrop to Paradise Girls - RFGA (2010), like the rippling reflection of a tree canopy in water, beneath a symphony of spread legs patterned over it.

(Ghada Amer Paradise Girls - RFGA 2010. Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas. 66 x 77" (167.6 x 195.6 cm). CR# GA.21070. Image courtesy Cheim & Read.)

This artistic collaboration has existed for over a decade, Farkhondeh's classical organic painted backdrops under Amer's respectively spare or chaotic needlework. Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt and has been showing in New York for nearly 20 years, though my first close encounter w/ the artist in person was just last year, at Film Forum's premiere of Chiara Clemente's documentary Our City Dreams, based on five NY-based women artists (the other four were Nancy Spero, Marina Abramovic, Kiki Smith and Swoon). Farkhondeh was born in Iran and began showing in New York around the same time, and their face-to-face residency at Pace Prints last year was an absolute artistic knockout.

It would be facile to say that the "painterly" canvases in this new exhibition are all due to Farkhondeh's "interventions" — especially with his melodious, Matisse-like flora from the Pace Prints show fresh in my head. Amer pushes the line in experimentation, like the aforementioned D As In Drips and the streaking, rosy smudges of One Night In London (2010). It's clear that the canvas was oriented one way for the acrylic paint to pool and run off the edges, Morris Louis style, then once dry the canvas was flipped on its side and hung. This manifests a dynamic visual gridwork between the horizontal drips and the vertical embroidery. Or for immediate impact, check her series of works on paper in the back gallery, which are ingeniously hung adjacent to the RFGA canvases. These include several embroideries on paper, dismissing the matted strings and enveloping acrylics for the simple, direct statement of spiky, dotted figures. If you are unable to sift the explicit imagery from Amer's busier canvases, these works drain the excess so you can see ONLY the subjects — like E-Mae and E-Nicole (both 2009). Her formidable figurative technique is further exemplified by mixed embroideries and watercolors and, wondrously, by the several watercolor-only works. Like in Lisa and Britney (2009), Amer exerts incredible control over the medium, filling the paper with the aqueous bleed-through mottling characteristic of watercolor whilst maintaining opaque, Fauvist outlines of the two women, exploring their erogenous zones. I was reminded of her collaborative printmaking with Farkhondeh from the Pace Prints show, like Rose Me Not (2008), but that sharply-outlined figuration was conceived in woodcut, avoiding the particularly demanding requirements of watercolor technique. I don't quite know how she achieved these divergent results, the diluted softness typical of the medium w/ the monotype-like precision, but I think it is best left for her to enact and us to enjoy.

(Ghada Amer Lisa and Britney 2009. Watercolor on paper. 11 3/4 x 9" (29.8 x 22.9 cm). CR# GA.19858. Image courtesy Cheim & Read.

Amer's abstraction is more prevalent than ever, furthering the ostensibly Abstract Expressionist style from her 2006 exhibition at Gagosian. Like the starburst pattern of The Black Bang, seen from across the gallery, and like the drenched shimmer of The Waterfall (2010). Though she embroidered this large piece on raw canvas, the overall effect gleams like a rainbow refracted through, well, a waterfall, as a spectrum of threads cascades over the repeating three badass women, like a nouveau Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. And with a bit of a stretch, I was oddly reminded, of all things, of David Mack's Kabuki essence hidden w/in The Black Bang, specifically from his Metamorphosis series. Maybe it's due to Mack's creative use of mixing mediums and repetition in his own renderings. This is always a surprise when seeing Amer's works up close and a perennial thing I must persuade first-time viewers: beneath the sea of pedagogic hetero-male porno imagery is something quite beautiful. My take: Amer strips the male exploitative intent from her subjects, the crudeness of the skin mags and other media she appropriates, extracting out the gratuitous so only this naturally tender essence remains. Their explicit nature doesn't harbor the blatant charge of Julian Opie's abstract renderings (and I'll leave John Currin out of this beyond dropping his name). With Amer's art, we are left with resplendent women, self-pleasuring and mutually pleasuring, celebrating sexuality amid a diaphanous wash of paint and thread.

fee's LIST (through 5/18)

WEDNESDAY
* "Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo" (dir. Jessica Oreck, 2009) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). This doc cleverly, carefully investigates Japan's centuries-old reverence for insects, from firefly gatherings to household pets subjects of fine art and museums. w/ dir. Oreck in person w/ live exotic insects (seriously!) at WED/FRI 6:30/8:20p shows.

* "Metropia" (dir. Tari Saleh, 2009) screenings @ Tribeca Cinemas / 54 Varick St (1/ACE to Canal), 9:30p. This super-duper eerie realist animated film voiced by Vincent Gallo and Juliette Lewis in an economic-strifed London hits a bit too close to home. But I've been reading about it on Twitch since its inception and can't wait to see the real thing. (also THU, MON, TUE 9:30p, SAT 10:30p)

* WIERD presents Blank Dogs @ Home Sweet Home / 131 Chrystie St (FV to 2nd Ave), 10p/$5. The particular vintage sound of Blank Dogs really comes alive in dark rooms, when Mike's voice is buried under layers of distortion, bass, and fractured beats, so I consider this location a plus.

THURSDAY
* "Like a Rolling Stone" @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. If the title alone doesn't get you into the show, the benefit of seeing three wicked artists you probably have never seen before should. Two are practically having their stateside debut, Justen Ladda (who hasn't shown here since the early '90s) and Alexander Esters (he mines the modern masters and is huge in Germany), plus the young NY-based painter Peter Gerakaris.

* Justin Allen "Turquoise Afternoon" @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St, in the project room. Small-format trompe l'oeil paintings of the most banal everyday objects. I'm down.

* Sungmi Lee "Behind My Door" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Lee works in translucent media, specifically various resin sculptures in this new exhibition as tribute to her father.
+ Sun-Tai Yoo, in his stateside debut, methodically collected still-lifes against dreamy landscapes.

* Katsuyuki Sakazume @ Ippodo Gallery / 521 W 26th St . Few handcrafted things get me going like Japanese ceramics, in particular this high-fired, unglazed "yakishime", which is the decorative art Sakazume-san excels at. Trust me on this, it'll be dope.

* John Grade "Circuit" @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 534 W 24th St 2nd Fl. One impressive cagelike site-specific installation, which Grade will then transport to an outdoors location to further transform the creation.

* My Teenage Stride + Knight School + Big Troubles @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. So the facebook invite reads, this is "a royal evening of music from a hastily cherrypicked roster of Brooklyn groups", i.e. some of the dopest talent out there.

* Joshua Light Show w/ Woods + MV & EE @ Abrons Art Center / 466 Grand St (BD to Grand), 8p/$20. The iconic multimedia improv Joshua Light Show provide the effectively trippy backdrop to psych-folk rockers Woods (whose have a new album out) and Vermont's equally 'stimulating' MV & EE.

FRIDAY
* "A Vernacular of Violence" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. The six artists here, like the riveting Lisa Kirk and Walid Raad, diffuse and reconstruct violence in prevalent source imagery to circumvent our dulled-sense exteriors and cause us to take a closer look.

* Joseph Montgomery "Lie lay lain Lay; laid laid" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) / 261 Broome St. Extensively 'worked over' paintings, canvases equally built up and abraded with various media for prolonged periods of time — that is, until Montgomery is satisfied.

* ROA @ Factory Fresh / 1053 Flushing Ave, Bushwick (L to Morgan), 7-10p. The Belgian-based artist's massively rendered animals (likely NY contenders like the rat plus domesticated creatures) on garage doors and the gallery walls should call into sharp-focus the natural world around us.

* Fresh & Only's + Babies @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$8. San Fran's ultra-catchy Fresh & Only's (in town for a few days!) + motley-crew Babies = a dope night. w/ rockers Coasting.

* Twin Sister + Rooftop Films @ Open Road Rooftop / 350 Grand St (BD to Grand, F to Essex), 8p/$10. Opening night of the 14th Annual Rooftop Films Summer Series! Yes it's a bit cool out but we're practically on beach season. And what a way to begin, w/ Brooklyn's trip-pop darlings Twin Sister performing, along w/ "This is What We Mean by Short Films" (which features "Star Wars: Retold" by Joseph Nicolosi, "Logorama" by François Alaux and Herve de Crecy, "Voice on the Line" by Kelley Sears — which reminds me a bit of Solzhenitsyn, and more).

* "Leaving Las Vegas" (dir. Mike Figgis, 1995) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). Part of "Cage Heat: Nicholas Cage at Midnight". Oh this just gets better and better, this Cage at midnight thing at IFC Center. It runs thru early July, culminating w/ the singular "Con Air" ("put the bunny [dramatic pause] back in the box") — but I'm getting ahead of myself. What we have here is a tender look at an alcoholic (Cage) and a prostitute in freefall. (also SAT at midnight)

SATURDAY
* Scott Musgrove "How is the Empire?" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. The artist's sumptuously painted longnecked animals and other curiosities.
+ Louie Cordero "Sacred Bones". Psychedelic, highly-detailed paintings and sculptures, of a generally disquieting nature.

* Veronica Falls + Crystal Stilts @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$12. Who are Veronica Falls, you ask? Erm, just the CUTEST London nouveau shoegazers who landed stateside yesterday for a slew of local shows (culminating in NYC Popfest next week, details w/ next week's LIST). They are joined tonite by the ineffable Crystal Stilts, Brooklyn's finest groovy art-rockers. w/ Home Blitz

* Darlings + Fresh & Onlys @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$10. Leave it to mini-tours to mess up my schedule: San Fran's Fresh & Onlys are in town a few days as well (see THURS), and they're joined by my favorite Brooklyn-based indie-rockers Darlings (who really are, darling). Decisions!

SUNDAY
* "Monkey Shines" (dir. George Romero, 1988) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins, G to Fulton), 4:30/9:30p. The '80s was a classic age of wicked scary-ass films. Like this one, the suave quadriplegic w/ his maniacal helper-monkey.

* Veronica Falls + Frankie & The Outs + German Measles @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Night #2 of Veronica Falls' systematic takeover of NYC is a winner! The London darlings share Bruar Falls' stage w/ party boys German Measles and Frankie Rose's ultra-fierce all-girl rockers The Outs. I'll be the bloke up front losing his mind. w/ The Surprisers.

* Aa + Wild Yaks @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. Cake Shop isn't holding back in their programming, what w/ this their month-long 5-Yr Anniv. All bets are off when the full-out percussive assault of the Aa contingent take the stage (or better: the dancefloor).

* Silver Apples + Burning Star Core @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave, Greenpoint (G to Greenpoint), 8p. I have to drop the MAYJAH line here: this is the singular Simeon Coxe III, aka Silver Apples, the seminal psych-electronic NY music outfit circa late '60s. He's inspired legions of acts and he's back, w/ C. Spencer Yeh (aka Burning Star Core) and his tortured violins and electronics.

MONDAY
* Daniel Pujol + McDonalds @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Singer-songwriter Pujol, perhaps the hottest thing on the Nashville scene, headlines a hard-rockin' show, incl. the jammily dissonant McDonalds, straight outta BKLYN.

TUESDAY
* "Robogeisha" (dir. Noboru Iguchi, 2009) screening @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (6 to 51st, E/V to Lexington/53rd), 7:30p. Someone, a greater power, has answered my pleas for "Robogeisha" to screen in NYC, after it was noticeably absent from last year's fab NYAFF. Someone answered them in a BIG way: besides Iguchi-san's latest (the unstoppable titular character v. the evil Kageno Corp and their geisha army), this special night feat. the director's unseen spinoff "Scary Geisha Army: Welcome to Hell!" + cohort Yoshihiro Nishimura's beyond-crazy short "Vampire Frankenstein Girl" (which apparently starts w/ the craziness of his long-player "Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl" and then 'takes it there').

CURRENT SHOWS
* Thomas Struth @ Marian Goodman Gallery / 24 W 57th St. Struth's gorgeous new massive C-prints are lovely, abound w/ super-crisp color and form. I have little idea what most of them are, despite their super-descriptive titles ("Stellarator Wendelstein 7-X Detail Max Planck IPP, Greifswald", "Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Periphery Max Planck IPP, Garching"), which look like chrome and wires and hazard yellows and reds, out of a James Rosenquist ultra-abstract, but I like 'em all the same.

* Andy Goldsworthy "New York Dirt Water Light" @ Galerie Lelong / /528 W 26th St. An overall quiet show for the discreet landscape-manipulator, as he documents his interventions in Manhattan's busy streets. The inkjet suites depicting the public's complete obliviousness to the evaporating gutter water on the sidewalk around them is typical, but one series in particular — "Gutter Water – Night, West 43rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, New York, March 5, 2010" — bathed in neon, as blurred crowds totally miss the magnificent water spiral on the ground as it dissipates into nothingness, really struck a chord w/ me. How many of these seemingly innocuous, though secretly pleasing, 'interventions' exist out there for us to discover?

* Uta Barth "...to walk without destination and to see only to see" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. 'Walking trips' sounds like such a simple concept, when the artist decided to take her camera with her and document them, including her own shadow in the diptychs and triptychs against close-ups of sun-drenched leaves. But looking at these print pairings carries a feeling not unlike waking from reverie, as the soft-blurred shapes pull into arresting focus, all the while against the elongated shadow of Barth's legs or, in one example, as foam from seawater pools around her feet. It's a mesmerizing feat, and it links beautifully w/ the special series of unseen vintage works (some of her earliest, circa '79) in the back gallery.
+ Ian Kiaer. The 'discreet installation' artist (my description) uses Alexandre Dumas' "The Black Tulip" as inspiration for this textural show, a mix of black and white elements of varying reflective qualities and mediums. Bend down for closer views, step all the way back, look from angles, interact w/ these quiet 'still-lifes' to fully experience them.

* Edward Kienholz "Roxys" @ David Zwirner / 519 W 19th St. The character of nostalgia is to bring bittersweet emotions to the surface, but Kienholz's installations draw out decidedly dark and grimy dread, leaving you searching for a shower after viewing. This classic half-room-sized work, modeled after a 1943 brothel in Vegas, emanates w/ musty cigarettes and perfume and smut, as the motley-composed 'girls' and their horrific, boar-skull-headed matron stand transfixed and the jukebox plays.

* Osang Gwon @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. A great four-piece show demonstrating Gwon's range and maturation in his 'Deodorant Type' series, striking 3D all-over photo-sculptures. The earliest work, "A statement of 540 pieces on twins", predates the glossy, slickened look of the later sculptures, like the semi-surreal "Garden" (2007), a woman buried under a pile of clothes, and the brand-new "Jangular", a hipster juggling overflowing bags of Whole Foods groceries, who I would say resembles me in activity if not appearance (the red jeans and patterned T are a 'no').

* Ghada Amer "Color Misbehavior" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. More like 'color exuberance', which doesn't quite have the same ring, though it rings true to Amer's fantastic 1st show at the gallery. Her signature embroidered and acrylic-wash renderings of female nudes, from cheeky juvenile posturing to straight out of a porno mag, take on richly patterned, Manala-like forms in such psychedelic works as "Waterfall" and "The Black Bang". A series of works on paper, showcasing both her deftness w/ just needle and thread and her unique take on watercolor, complete the exhibition.

* Alex Guofeng Cao @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. Digital photo-mosaics of classic celebrities, composed of a related figure (like Chairman Mao made of tiny Andy Warhol faces, or Mother Theresa of Ghandi). The smaller the mosaic, the smoother and more 3D quality the final portrait (the larger mosaics tend toward jagged, pixellated versions of lesser renown).

* Julian Faulhaber "Lowdensitypolyethylene" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. Faulhaber's long-exposure, saturated color lambda prints or totally real, fake-looking spaces remind me of Thomas Demand's meticulous all-paper reconstructions of 'real' places. You can forgive me for looking at "V.I.N.C.I." (blue and metal security gates) and "Rows" (a bird's eye of perfectly-lined seating, like in a library or testing center) and thinking them photographs of paper models. This eye-trickery is great, though.

* "Now Through a Glass Darkly" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St. Cornell DeWitt organized this show reflecting (get it?) the mirror, and the results are generally moody and discomfiting. Jason Gringler's abstract agglomerates, all jagged-angled colored Plexiglas and mirrors, emanates a certain danger. Glenn Ligon's charcoal-dusted 'drawing' and Yiva Ogland's mirrored visual trickery play off Tallur LN's resonating sculpture, which looks like a stack of birds dipped in oil and, considering the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, is incredibly timely. It's rare that a classic Andy Warhol "Shadows" is the cheeriest work in a show, but that's the case here, perhaps due to the effervescent colors.

* Sherrie Levine @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. This is a great elegant take on Levine's redoubling, in a classic look at her oeuvre. The standout "Newborn (Black/White)" installation, four cast-glass Brancusi redoes on borrowed pianos (taken in spirit from a Brancusi home installation photo), is soothing: the relative scales of the delicate sculpture against their super-sized 'display platforms' works well. Levine's cheeky answer to Duchamp in "Fountain (Buddha)" is a shiny, cast-bronze wonder, esp. when you observe the reflections in the interior surfaces. And her framed and painted wood works from the mid-'80s show a hand-crafted Levine that you just might not be that familiar with.

* David Salle "Some Pictures from the '80s" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. The innocuous exhibition title belies the gravity of this 'Pictures Generation' maestro, whose massive, multilayered 'nonrepresentational' canvases are like catapulting head first into a surrealist pre-Youtube-generation stew. If the imagery of "Gericault's Arm" and "His Brain" don't totally blow you away, you're lying.

* Robert Morris "New Felts" @ Sonnabend Gallery / 536 W 22nd St. Anytime Morris is working with industrial felt, you've got my attention. The four new works on view are his first new felts since the '90s, and they're beauties in black and blood-red. The gigantic 20-prong behemoth draped in the entry room reminds me, somehow, of a watermelon, so much so that I can't see anything else but that. In the interior room, the vividly red felt feels quite womanly to me, the all-black like the long Comme des Garçons A/W 2009 menswear skirt and the final red/black sort of tuliplike — so I guess there's underlying femininity in all these. In addition: two pigment drawings in answer to the U.S.'s current world conflicts, done by Morris while blindfolded.

* Alison Elizabeth Taylor "Foreclosed" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Taylor's singular mastery of marquetry (intarsia wood inlay, circa the Court of Versailles) continues to amaze. Her works in this show are (on the whole) sparer, as she zeroes in on the grim details of foreclosed homes (check the sunny titles: "Shotgun Hole with Additional Vandalism", "Hole Kicked", "Pickaxe Swing"). There is a great depth to these subtler works, though, in a 3D sense, esp. in "Wires Ripped", which really looks like a gash in the wall. Several larger works, like the stunning "Security House" (which deftly renders foliage, sand, rock and feathers in various woods) round out the exhibition.

* Anne Truitt "Sculpture 1962 2004" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. Dally about the 'forest' of Truitt totem sculptures — acrylic on wood all, except for the enameled earliest — and it's like being in your own constructed painting. The works (mixed unchronologically by date) do resemble human-sized oil pastels, but there's lots of little Easter eggs hidden in these seemingly minimalist pylons. Check the sharp white cap, like salty foam, atop "The Sea, The Sea" (2003) and the cool energy in "First Spring" (1981), which looks exactly THAT, like Truitt managed to capture the sky in sculpture. This is a beautiful retrospective and primer and a joy to visit.

* Roy Lichtenstein "Still Lifes" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. We have Lichtenstein, the maestro of Ben Day dotted comic book panel blowup Pop Art, to thank for resuscitating that old chestnut the 'still life' whilst simultaneously stripping it of ambience and realism. This massive collection of over a decade of work feat. the artist's characteristic razor-sharp representation (lines are hard, shadows have degradations only as dots or crosshatches, colors are generally primary and bold) in a diverse set of suitably banal subject matter. He reduces fruit to abstraction while elevating office equipment to beauty, and his work w/ reflections in metal and glass and his bold Cape Cod still lifes (juicy red lobster and all) are gorgeous. Several sculptures of note too, like the enamel "Little Glass" (1979) and the pun-titled painted bronze "Picture and Pitcher" (1978), which particularly exemplify Lichtenstein's deftness w/ negative space.

* "Twenty-Five" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Dropping the term 'greatest hits' is not to knock this exhibition, celebrating the gallery's 25th year of doing it right, putting on dope shows w/ a great roster of artists (and guests). Nearly everything's a highlight, incl. Janine Antoni's suitably visceral "Lick and Lather" (1993), Michelangelo Pistoletto's "Metrocubo d'infinito" (1966, the old dog in the show, and probably not what you're used to seeing from the artist, though he does use mirrors), Jon Kessler's enigmatic "Noriko" (1994) and Christopher Wool's bloody "Minor Mishap II" (2001).

* Karla Black + Nate Lowman @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Throw these disparate young artists together might sound like mixing oil and water, but it works, Black's sugary-or-powdery color-field works (incl. an allergenic-looking installation) play well off Lowman's grungier alkyd-upped figurative paintings and sloganeering.
+ "She Awoke With a Jerk", curated by Nigel Cooke. The double entendre in the title is intentional, and I give it to Cooke for contributing the coolest cat (a Bozo-ish burnout) in this mini-show, which also includes a suitably vile Sean Landers, a chic George Grosz and (surprise) a Picasso.

* Hans Op de Beeck "Silent Movie" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. It's a wonder what gray-painted walls, charcoal carpets and crown moulding will do, transforming Boesky gallery into the interior of one of the artist's sparse, creepy landscapes. His large grayscale watercolors are augmented by "A house by the sea", a diorama that reminds me, of all things, of the setting of Mario Bava's classic giallo film "The Whip and the Body". The general unrest in this dollhouse-sized work requires careful viewing.

* Ryan Humphrey "Early American" @ DCKT Contemporary / 195 Bowery. Humphrey mashes up the museum period room with classic dude culture. Sounds wicked impossible? You've obvs not stepped foot in his installation, bereft w/ wing-back chairs coated in truck liners, soda-can-made candlesticks on faux wood-panel console tables (replete w/ bottle-openers) and storefront signage incorporated into an American Revolution flag.

* Richard Prince "Tiffany Paintings" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. At 1st blush, Prince's latest output doesn't have the sort of 'meat' one can visually latch onto like his fab "Canal Zone" show two years ago (or his various "Nurses", "Hoods", "Cowboys" etc). But when you slow down and take in these overall minimalist paintings — the basic formula is a Tiffany's ad in the upper right corner, surrounded on two sides by swaths of monochromatic haze — it all starts to make sense. Underneath layers of paint lie obits, some barely readable, to Richard Pryor and Bob Richardson (in "Even Lower Manhattan"), to Tom Wesselmann (in "Christmas"), to Karel Appel ("The Motor") — to the incredibly touching one for Dash Snow ("The Finish" — in which Prince selected words from the NY Times, not included in Roberta Smith's Snow obit, for emphasis: 'nice', 'good', 'happy', 'beautiful'). These are incredibly personal — and personalized — works. And the most abstract of the lot, "Stranded" and "Will Be Girls", where any text is lost in the noise of acrylic washes, find us most captivated as we stare deep into Prince's canvases, searching for just who he made them.

* Mike Kelley "Arenas" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Bring a hankie: Kelley's classic circa-1990 'Arenas', aka stuffed toys with blankets on the gallery floor, conjure powerful sensations of nostalgia, let alone transgressive anthropomorphizing. Seven of the eleven originals assembled here for the 1st time since their debut installation. Don't miss it.

* Thomas Eggerer "The Rules of the Fence" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. I see doomsday in Eggerer's new acrylic and oil paintings, reproducing the same collage-y figures against wrong-color backdrops recalling nuclear fallout as filtered through "The Simpsons" (or Radiohead's "Kid A" album art).

* Jorge Pardo @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Pardo relegates himself to nearly strictly MDF and acrylic, to incredible results. The showpiece is a mazelike, interlocking series of honeycombed MDF structures, what the gallery calls a 3D library, full of Pardo's web-image reproductions (random stuff, from tigers and Princess Diana to Che Guevara and lowbrow Mike Kelley-ish humor).

* Hany Armanious "Birth of Venus" @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. At the offset, Armanious' 2nd solo show at the gallery may seem quite a bit quieter (and smell better) than his alarming "Year oft the Pig Sty" installation in 2007, but his core practice of meticulous object-castings is in full form here. Don't miss checking everything from all angles, like the underside of the metaphysical "Effigy of an Effigy with Mirage" or the charmingly named "Party Pooper". Things, as they say, are NOT always what they appear.

* "American ReConstruction" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. Michael Hoeh curated this contemporary photography show, which showcases a LOT of pre- and post-printing trickery. Jowhara AlSaud's stunning aluminum-mounted works feel more like combo line-drawings and acrylics and Jeremy Kost's, while ostensibly untreated, do a cheeky collage effect a la David Hockney, only with Polaroids.

LAST CHANCE (ending this weekend)
* Robert Morris @ Leo Castelli / 18 E 77th St. Q: What's cooler than seeing Morris' seminal 1969 scatter piece back in Castelli's gallery? A: I don't know!!! Is that a trick question?? This is brilliant: a room you can navigate through full of juicy metal angles and slabs (from shiny brass to textured Cor-Ten steel to deep zinc and lead), w/ the walls piled high by blocks and floppy triangles of black felt. This recreated work is augmented by nine original work drawings related to the piece.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* Guo Hongwei "Things" @ Chambers Fine Art / 522 W 19th St. Isolated or fragmented articles, in discreet arrangements and painted against expanses of white.

* 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.

* "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.

* Dominic McGill "FuturePerfect" @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. McGill's still challenging his frustration at contemporary society in oversized, highly-detailed text-based graphite drawings, but his further incorporation of collage (in a painterly, vintage-y Richard Prince vibe) helps a lot to 'pretty' the seriousness. But it doesn't take away from the message, particularly in the hallucinogenic "Desert of the Real". For further evidence, don't miss the canvas-mounted drawing in the back, a cylindrical work you can step inside to fully immerse in McGill's world.

* William Kentridge "Five Themes" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). It is a most delightful feeling to go into an exhibition (here, a three-decade survey of the S. African's sociopolitically-themed oeuvre) w/o expectations and even w/ tangential knowledge of their art (he does charcoal-drawing animations) and then be TOTALLY BLOWN AWAY. I very much enjoyed the trip, both Kentridge's superior dreamlike animated narratives and his drawings/works on paper/set designs. One thing, taking the title of that awesome Olafur Eliasson exhibition two years ago: take your time. You need to watch at least some of Kentridge's vignettes (preferably all nine of his early "9 Drawings" series (feat. sort-of personas Soho Eckstein, the wealthy white industrialist and alter-ego Felix Teitelbaum) to 'get it'. They screen in pairs of three (ranging from like 3 to 9 min each, so you CAN see them all). Eckstein is evil incarnate, all pinstripe-suited and cackling against streams of miners and laborers, watching his empire grow and erecting a monument to an indentured worker (who, incidentally, is chained to said monument). Teitelbaum, nude throughout, steals away Eckstein's wife and the fat-cat falls into depression, bombing his factories and standing sullenly in a room flooded w/ his tears (Kentridge notably uses charcoal and blue pastels almost exclusively). Eckstein gets his wife back and, in the mesmerizing 'Felix in Exile', the alter-ego pines for Nandi, a surveyor of a landscape strewn with bodies. She soon joins this scene. I was riveted. The suites of drawings are like 'best-of' moments from these films, Eckstein in a flooded room, Eckstein and his wife seated back to back, Nandi against a starry night sky.