WEDNESDAY
* German Measles + The Surprisers @ Shea Stadium / 20 Meadow St, Bushwick (L to Grand), 8p, $7. A tried-and-true combo here, w/ the crazy party-rockers German Measles and retro-tinged grooves of The Surprisers, plus some member sharing. w/ the hallucinogenic duo Easter Vomit (which includes Jacob of The Beets).
THURSDAY
* "Centre Stage" (dir. Stanley Kwan, 1992) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 9p. Kwan's sumptuous adaptation of Ruan Lingyu, the "Chinese Garbo", w/ Maggie Cheung in the lead role and Tony Leung Ka-Fai as pre-Communist film director Cai Chusheng.
* Gary War @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave, Greenpoint (G to Greenpoint), 9p/$7. Quintessential Captured Tracks lo-fi beefed up w/ a sinisterly fierce live group, coupled w/ War's hook-laden lyrics buried beneath underwater distortion. Add Prince Rama and Amen Dunes for a druggy experience.
FRIDAY
* "Russellmania!" Ken Russell retrospective @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center at 65th St (1 to 66th St). The "good" period of Britain's cinematic enfant terrible, the classic '60s and '70s works of Russell are really quite beautiful — even when he swings further into rock-opera territory in the mid-70s. The fact that some of the rarer films (incl. "The Boy Friend", which is nearly impossible to find stateside) are screening, and that the subversive master is attending most of the evening screenings, is double reason you should pay attention. THRU AUG 5
* "The Devils" (dir. Ken Russell, 1971) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center at 65th St (1 to 66th St), 7p (part of "Russellmania!"). Panned by critics, unavailable on DVD, w/ Vanessa Redgrave in perhaps her most controversial role (a deformed, sexually repressed Catholic nun) and Oliver Reed as a "bewitching" priest. If you thought the papal runway show in Federico Fellini's "Roma" was a takedown of the Church, wait until you see Redgrave's hallucination of Reed as a brawny, crucified Christ (let alone the denouement). Highly recommended! ALSO SAT 3:45p
* "Regular Lovers" (dir. Philippe Garrel, 2005) screening @ 92Y Tribeca / 200 Hudson St (1/ACE to Canal), 7:30p/$12. A gorgeous, sexily b&w film set in Paris '68, w/ Garrel's floppy-haired son Louis (playing a poet, seriously) and the beautiful Clotilde Hesme (playing an artist), plus a motley crew of musicians, painters and sort-of anarchists during the student riots. The dance party scene w/ The Kinks' "This Time Tomorrow" is crazy good.
* Julian Lynch + Ducktails @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8:30p/$7. The tastiest beach-grooves show in town. Lynch has a dope LP out, "Mare", and Ducktails (Matt Mondanile of Real Estate) has a new loops and guitars full-length debuting now. Some much-needed bliss from all the city rush. w/ Campfires and Big Troubles
SATURDAY
* "Women in Love" (dir. Ken Russell, 1969) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center at 65th St (1 to 66th St), 8:30p (part of "Russellmania!"). One of Russell's earliest, which reminds me a bit of Anton Chekhov's "The Duel", only set in WWI-era England, plus we have a nude Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling "Japanese-style".
* Warm Up: Animal Collective (DJ Set) @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E to 23rd St/Ely Ave, G to Court Square), 2-9p. Get ready for a mind-melting set of atmospheric noodling and songs you've NEVER heard before, ever, but b/c you're such a diehard AC fan (esp. Geologist, who's looking quite good recently) you'll endure it anyway and love it.
* Sonic Youth @ Prospect Park Bandshell / Prospect Park West @ 9th St (F to 7th Ave), 7p/FREE. Haters gonna hate, but seeing New York's own seminal purveyors of '90s No Wave and art-rock, w/ variously noisily indulgent and polarizingly melodic interludes, for free in Prospect Park on an ideally beautiful late-summer's eve is, well, dope. Couple that w/ openers Talk Normal, today's answer for the best of No Wave w/ their seemingly minimalist outfit, and Cali's scratchy lo-fi outfit Grass Widow (who claim Brooklyner Miss Frankie Rose as a former member), and you've got yet another ideal NY free concert experience.
SUNDAY
* "The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Some ideas to keep in mind: sculpture is 3D, photography 2D (I'm not talking holograms here or other visual trickery/installations). The traditional respective definitions of the above state as much. Sculpture should be explored from all angles (unless you have somebody like Anish Kapoor, who can force you to see everything at once or only parts at a time, in a disconnected manner). Photography generally carries a deliberateness to it, the photographer's decided angle, crop, POV etc etc. Here we have a mix of the two, static, deliberate images of 3D forms, and it's an extensive lot, too, as you should preclude from the date span. Lee Friedlander, Man Ray, Hannah Hoch, Robert Gober, Bruce Nauman, Marcel Duchamp and loads others show here.
* "The Boy Friend" (dir. Ken Russell, 1971) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center at 65th St (1 to 66th St), 8:15p (part of "Russellmania!"). Easily my favorite Russell film, and impossible to find stateside (if you've any tips, let me know). Twiggy's super-cute acting debut as the lead in a riotous theatre troupe, a surreal adaptation of the Sandy Wilson musical.
* The Pool Parties Block Party @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy) + thereabouts, 2p/FREE. Jelly NYC just unveiled this afternoon/evening of wildness, feat. twin performances by Ted Leo & the Pharmacists at 110 Kent Ave (aka East River State Park), then at Brooklyn Bowl later in the night. My pick? If you want wild debauchery and dancing to grungy indie rock (a la Black Lips and Apache), stick around 110 Kent. If you want indoors proper face-melting music, from my personal faves Darlings and then Ted Leo, get thee to Brooklyn Bowl early (tunes begin at 6), stopping at N 11th & Kent for a bit of dodgeball and free Zico coconut water (fluid replenishment, people) along the way.
LAST CHANCE
* "Heat Wave" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St 2nd Fl. Lombard-Freid is moving! One of my favorite, international-cast galleries is moving down to 19th St this fall. I think this is quite a nice way for them to conclude their 26th St, 2nd Fl space, a group show of young(ish) artists from the Middle East (and Indonesia). The photography is strong here, Bani Abidi's "Karachi" series of domestic tasks shown outdoors at dusk, after the ritual fast, and Mounira al Solh's "Elvis" series. Eko Nugroho's stunning, shimmering textile and works on paper are cartoon-tinged politics and NY-based Maya Schindler's raw media installation and text-based works strip her language to its barest forms.
* 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).
* "The Evryali Score", curated by Olivia Shao @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525-533 W 19th St. The exhibition began at MoMA PS1, with Shao's "The Baghdad batteries", the first of four rotating galleries during 'Greater NY', before reconfiguring — and tremendously expanding — at Zwirner. The larger space and multiple rooms is definitely to the exhibition's benefit, I think, as though these are incredibly discreet works, they still require room to breathe and for better contemplation. The 525 space contains much of the reconfigured PS1 show, w/ a few swaps (Marcel Broodthaers' gold under glass replaces Walter De Maria's shiny "Power Bar") and additions, like the stunning, subtly shimmering Willem De Rooij wall-spanning canvas. Though I suggest you begin w/ 533 (if you missed the PS1 version, no biggie), w/ the duet of John Knight's wall projection and (rarely exhibiting) Dutch conceptualist Stanley Brouwn's wooden wall piece. Brouwn's structure, like an inverted cube, calls attention to the gallery wall (and floor) itself, causing us to note its levelness (or slant) and the surrounding space. Craig Kalpakjian offers window-like (but windowless) abstract C-prints. Bernadette Corporation (one of several collectives in the show, the cheekily named Reena Spaulings is another) has a multiscreen Fendi video that works in conversation w/ Josef Strau's lamp installations in both galleries. And I'll bet you've never seen a wooden Claes Oldenburg relief before. And those grayed-out names on the show program, coinciding w/ fake birthdates? That's Sonia Lucerne's "Checklist Intervention".
* Bill Beckley "Et Cetera" @ 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.
* Summer show @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. You would think a summer group show (esp. one like this, bearing mostly artists from its roster and w/o a funny title) would be a really unfocused grab-bag. But that's not the case here: there is a great flow from room to room, in small groupings of each artists' work, and the only shrill note is that of Dustin Yellin (only sculpture in the show). The rest, Lee Krasner's lyrical, greenish abstract, early works on paper from Yayoi Kusama and Joan Mitchell, powdery Joseph La Piana facing amorphous Barthelemy Toguo and a chromatic day/night landscape diptych by Glen Rubsamen (straight out of Wong Kar-wai, only this is acrylic paint), are smooth sailing.
* "Swell: Art 1950-2010" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St + Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Surf-art, specifically California art, is a great idea for a mega summer group show in NY. Seriously. These two galleries (plus NYEHAUS) are chock-full of sunny, salty, subversive, and stunning works, some good and others really fantastic. Metro Pictures wins the day w/ a powerful array of California Minimalists (Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell, Helen Pashgian, John McCracken, Peter Alexander) v. the freaky So-Cal lot (Bruce Conner, George Helms), though Petzel had a few surprising, must-see pieces (Ashley Bickerton's classic coral wave, Alex Weinstein's shimmering "block" and the R.Crumb comix). Vast as the ocean.
* Jakub Julian Ziolkowski "Timothy Galoty & the Dead Brains" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. The dark horse in this summer art season is no doubt 30-year-old Ziolkowski's uncategorizable, fleshified, phantasmatastic debut solo NY exhibition. And yes, you practically have to make up a new vocabulary (at least in English, I'm not sure about his native Poland) and even that doesn't encapsulate the special atmosphere at work here. I, like most NY gallery-goers, met him at the New Museum's inaugural triennial, "Younger Than Jesus", where Ziolkowski's genre-defying paintings (like Archimboldo? Like James Ensor? Like, uh, Max Beckmann??) delighted as much as they perplexed. Meaning: he's an incredibly adept artist w/ a fresh POV, but where is he focusing it? On heavily detailed crowd-scenes? On visceral portraiture? His exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, for the most part, is a cohesive, bleeding, respiring landscape, Peter Saul mixed with Ziolkowski's own unique brand of flesh-abstraction. Some of 'em look like the results of the warp and melt tools in Photoshop, only rendered in oil. Others are frenetic, disturbingly lovely messes of bulging organs and eviscerated bodies (the Caligula scene is pure bodily comedy), capillaries and wrinkles proliferating. A few are almost Dali-Surreal, a nearly vacant, ghostly backdrop w/ an elongated sad figure slinking about it. Stunningly perverse.
* "The Fifth Genre: Considering the Contemporary Still Life" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. I dug the challenge behind this group exhibition: hopefully ejecting a bit of cool factor (or at least relevance) into that old art-history chestnut, the still life. And while there are some beauties here, it's not enough. It begins very strong, w/ a postage stamp-sized b&w print from Louise Lawler of a bouquet on a table, across from etchings/aquatints of dried flowers by Kiki Smith and a predictably sumptuous flower "portrait" from Robert Mapplethorpe. Then...I didn't get the inclusion of many other artists. Angelo Filomeno's chromed skull/axe explosion will grab your attention, but that's it. Same deal w/ Jaume Plensa and Petah Coyne. Some strong, moody instances from Alfredo Jaar (appropriately political), Miranda Lichtenstein (appropriately lo-fi and enigmatic) and Marti Cormand (a bit alien landscape-y, but cool) in an overall very uneven show.
* "Lush Life Ch 1: Whistle", curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud & Franklin Evans @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. I will review these shows in turn, based totally on the visual and instinctual as I haven't read Price's book. But the shows give us much to go on. We get a fair sense of the '80s LES immediately w/ David Shapiro's array of handmade "found objects" — the want ad, the 'steal this book', the NY Post. Alice O'Malley's signature C-prints set the scene (the Mexican restaurant El Sombrero, the Ludlow rooftops) and David Kramer brings not only cheeky reconfigured alcohol adverts but an entire bar (which had what looked to be nearly a full bottle of Jack Daniels last time I visited). Take a stroll, get to know your surroundings.
* "Lush Life Ch 2: Liar", curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud & Franklin Evans @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. Thus far, my 2nd favorite of the novel's exhibitions, thanks especially to the strong roster at this show. Ezra Johnson's mural-sized word painting, screaming DOUBT, sets the mood. Tim Davis' politically-toned, sharp C-prints depict neighborhood gentrification, as do Manuel Acevedo's suite of modified Polaroids, each w/ a drawn-on "future structure", which are more subtly echoed by Scott Hug's 'pizza slice' collages.
* "Lush Life Ch 3 "First Bird (A Few Butterflies)", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. This one keeps the bird-theme close to its chest w/ a nearly uniform, avian-related show. In that sense it falls short of the explosive humor and dialogue of On Stellar Rays, but it's got some great stuff as well. My favorites: the haunting, long-pan video "Silent Among Us" by Dana Levy, of a flock of live doves in a taxidermy lab and Karen Heagle's huge acrylic and ink work, of crows on the most beautiful mountain of garbage you've probably ever seen.
* Mark di Suvero @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. The classic 'Nova Albion' is my kind of massive sculpture, a teetering span of tethered logs and steel poles, like a Viking ship's mast, that blends rather elegantly with the ceiling and surroundings of the gallery space. di Suvero's bent-steel 'Totems' in the side gallery (one from just a few years ago) echo this artist's alchemical touch to the rigid medium.
* 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.
* Tim Hawkinson "One Man Band" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. Though who needs a stinkin' group show when you have Hawkinson's uber-creative junk-sculpture assemblages to fill the gallery. Especially if said assemblages make noise! Slide-whistle tree branches, steak-knife music boxes, and other such "Star Wars" cantina-esque mayhem.
* Jeronimo Elespe @ John Connelly Presents / 625 W 27th St. A beautiful new show from Madrid-based Elespe, furthering his scintillating small-scale portraits on aluminum panels. There's a certain sameness to the figures but their requisite elegance is undeniable. Think of Rembrandt's deep black backdrops, styled here as shimmering pool surfaces behind the sitting figure.
* "Christmas in July" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. It's bloody hot out so why not a summer group show themed to the wintry holiday? Matt Keegan's paste-up Google images-esque chart is a tidy comparison: Santa v. a fat beachgoer, Uggs v. flip-flops, fruitcake v. a sand castle, a wrapped package v. a hot male in a Speedo. Beyond this, which is oddly addicting, is a lot of appropriately either garish or attention-demanding works, some nice classics from John Baldessari and Lynda Benglis, a funny Christian Holstad assemblage of a yellowed square of carpet bearing the imprint (and shed needles) of an absent artificial tree, a Marepe ornament sculpture recalling Jeff Koons only way less precious, and loads else.
* Oh Sufan "Variation" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Another instance of a highly-influential Korean abstract painter (think Park Seo-bo showing at Arario in 2008) FINALLY having a NY solo debut (his last time in the city was sometime in the '80s, I think). What we're rewarded with from Oh is a series of newish (he's very prolific) large, squarish oil paintings of vibrant backdrops, the sweeping brushstrokes still visible, overlaid w/ either diluted or inkily opaque streams of black paint, from calligraphic whiplike forms (think Brice Marden's "Cold Mountain" series, sort of) to wavy vertical lines. Very tasty.
* Rackstraw Downes "A Selection of Drawings: 1980-2010 @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. The masterful, draftsman-quality graphite landscapes from Downes is a welcome antidote from the busy, visually overloaded group shows populating the area. Despite one rather muscular rendering of the Henry Hudson Bridge, most of Downes' on-paper works (the George Washington Bridge, a cement plant, Canal St water-main project, a hydroponic tomato plant near Marfa TX) are emotionlessly precise, incredibly conceived but w/o the resonance of his paintings (which, as it happens, are in separate exhibitions that require traveling to the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton and the Aldridch Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield CT). That's not to take away from their visual achievement: the fact must be kept in mind that Downes works from-site on these, drawings AND paintings, and doesn't utilize photography.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
fee's LIST (through 7/27)
WEDNESDAY
* SummerScreen presents "Romeo + Juliet" (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 1996) @ McCarren Park ballfields / Bedford + N 12th St, Greenpoint (L to Bedford, G to Nassau), 6p/FREE. Where were you when this MTV-drenched beachfront gun battle, imbued w/ Catholicism, gang fights and "alternative rock", debuted? The film that made girls (and boys) swoon for cherubic Leo DiCaprio and Claire Danes and featured Mercutio (Harold Perrineau) in drag, Paris (Paul Rudd) as a smirking rich-boy and Tybalt (John Leguizamo) as a posturing badass.
THURSDAY
* Christian Marclay "Sixty-Four Bells and a Bow", performed by o.blaat @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St) , 1p. Keiko Uenishi is an ambient-sound sculptor, so she's possibly the best for handling this array of hand bells (which Marclay stipulated CAN be electronically processed). Also FRI 2p + SUN 4p.
* "Happy Together" (dir. Wong Kar-Wai, 1997) + "Fallen Angels" (dir. Wong Kar-Wai, 1995) double-screening @ 92Y Tribeca / 200 Hudson St (1/ACE to Canal), 7p/$12. Delicious cinema, w/ Wong's crime-riddled, big-city romantic arcs and Christopher Doyle's neon-soaked cinematography! The only thing that would one-up this double-feature is if "Happy Together" (which I dug, mind you) was replaced by the most excellent "Chungking Express", the semi-prequel to "Fallen Angels" and feat. the incomparable Faye Wong.
FRIDAY
* "Audrey the Trainwreck" (dir. Frank V. Ross, 2010) screenings @ reRun / 147 Front St, DUMBO (F to York St), 6:30/9p. Straight out of this year's SXSW and feat. a who's-who of those scruffy mumblecore films (plus Alexi Wasser from "Art School Confidential"), an indie rom-com w/ a burning flame in its center. ALSO: this is the debut of reRun, the "gastropub theatre" owned/cheffed by neighboring reBar. Think Austin, TX's Alamo Drafthouse (film + booze + proper menu, an incredibly effective combo) only DUMBO-style. I'm talking duck fat (or bacon fat, or brown butter) on your popcorn, or a soft pretzel stuffed w/ garlic mashed potatoes. I'm salivating just writing this. And tap beers. I hope it's wicked! (note: space is limited in the theatre, so advance tix are advised by yrs truly. Check it. Screens thru JUL 30.
* Free Energy + Best Coast @ Seaport Music Festival / Pier 17, 80 South St (23/45/JMZ to Fulton St), 6p/FREE. I'm down w/ Free Energy but the draw for me is the sunny, Beach Boys-as-girl Cali-rock of Bethany Cosentino, aka Best Coast, whose debut album "Crazy for You" is super-duper. I'm crazy for her, and I'm glad she's back on the E. Coast, even briefly.
* Whitney Live: Bear Hands + Darlings @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St), 7p. The intensity of a Darlings show, the catchy guitar riffs, smart boy/girl vocals and sheer VOLUME of it all, cannot be contained by a museum setting, but I give props to the Whitney for trying.
* Gary War @ Death by Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$6. When I 1st got into Captured Tracks' lo-fi sound resonating w/ the undeniable essence of pop-flavor buried under suffocatingly murky beats and atmosphere, it was due in no small part to Gary War, which is sort of like listening to Joy Division underwater. w/ Super Vacations
* Unicornicopia + 12000 Trees @ Monster Island / 128 River St, WIlliamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$8. Creative sound ensembles is the key phrase here, w/ the ever-shifting noise-acoustic contingent 12000 Trees and the (mostly) one-woman experimental pop outfit Unicornicopia (aka Natalie Weiss).
SATURDAY
* "Empire" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1964) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 1:30p. Blow eight hours and change in an AC'ed theatre, staring at the Empire State Building at night, alcohol and/or psychedelics not included.
* Heliotropes + deVries @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$6. One of my new fav local bands: Heliotropes balance the dissonant guitars and pounding rhythm of the Rock Video Monthly bands I was hooked on back in the day w/ droning strings and rather stunning vocals. Matched w/ DeVries' mile-high guitars and you've got an ace lineup.
* Aa @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (M to Myrtle/Wyckoff, L to Halsey), 8p, $10. I don't know any other venue in NY throwing this level of affair as Silent Barn (ISSUE, maybe). Aa do the wall-of-percussion thing, like Boredoms on ecstasy (my words). w/ Chat Logs, the noisy duo who (famously) debuted during the Whitney Biennial and drone-core Island's Eyeballs.
* Warm Up: MEN + Dj/rupture @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E to 23rd St/Ely Ave, G to Court Square), 2-9p/$15. How do you dance to MEN, aka JD Samson of Le Tigre et al? The most unfettered way your Opening Ceremony romper or skinny jeans (or jean cutoffs) will permit. B/c she's DJing (only the dirtiest '90s hits...I think) in addition to playing w/ her band. In addition to the insanity onstage and in the courtyard, choreographer Kyra Johannesen leads "Body & Pole", a performance on the ground and, presumably, in the air, w/ SO-IL's "Pole Dance" installation.
* New Museum Block Party 2010 @ Sara D. Roosevelt Park / next to the New Museum, 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave), 12-5p/FREE. Learn about the Bowery! Stare into Brion Gysin's "Dream Machine" and then draw stuff! Talk w/ other Block Party participants whilst crushing bottle-caps or folding napkins like Rivane Neuenschwander's "Ivoluntary Sculptures (Speech Acts)"! Listen to Hisham Akira Bharoocha's performance at 4:30! And get a free pass to the museum, to check Neuenschwander's fab mid-career retrospective. Fingers crossed for beautiful weather to get the most of this.
SUNDAY
* "Centre Stage" (dir. Stanley Kwan, 1992) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 3:30p. Kwan's sumptuous adaptation of Ruan Lingyu, the "Chinese Garbo", w/ Maggie Cheung in the lead role and Tony Leung Ka-Fai as pre-Communist film director Cai Chusheng.
* The Beets + Pujol @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (M to Myrtle/Wyckoff, L to Halsey), 8p. What is it about Nashville and grungy rock'n'roll? Contemporary scene alone, there's JEFF the Brotherhood, Turbo Fruits, Heavy Cream, Natural Child — and of course Mr. Daniel Pujol, bringing his southern rock to Silent Barn. I dig it (as I dig The Beets).
MONDAY
* "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" (dir. Russ Meyer, 1965) screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 8p. Solid exploitation at its hyperbolized finest: three ass-kicking go-go dancers v. like a living He-Man and his wheelchair-bound old man in the Mohave Desert. Sample dialogue:
Tommy: "Look, I don't know what the hell your point is, but—"
Varla: "The point is of no return, and you've reached it!"
* "The Prowler" (dir. Joseph Zito, 1981) screening @ reRun / 147 Front St, DUMBO (F to York St), 11:30p. Today's American-directed and -produced horror films feat. a cast of hotties being brutally murdered via pitchfork and knife at a high-school dance don't hold a candle to this uncut bijou, directed by the man who went on to do "Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter" and inspiration to Eli Roth, amid others of his ilk, I'm sure.
TUESDAY
* "Girl By Girl" (dir. Park Dong-Hoon, 2010) screening at Tribeca Cinemas / 54 Varick St (1/ACE to Canal St), 7p/FREE. I'm still recovering from the end of a fantastic 2010 NYAFF, so this Korean cable TV high-school rom-com might be the ticket, esp. b/c of lead Kwak Ji-Min, who is at war w/ her model student classmate over the same heartthrob.
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). I'm sure of two things after catching a preview of the Matisse show. 1) it will draw the crowds this summer and autumn (or at least MoMA is banking on it, creating a timed-ticket entry thing for nonmembers like the Van Gogh "Colors of the Night" and the Tim Burton) and 2) opinion will be sharply divided on the art, much more so than the decade-spanning Joan Miro exhibition. And while art is expected to have a subjective reaction, I think it'll be more acute here. Even the casual gallery-goer has rubbed elbows w/ a Matisse painting before (whether the early Post-Impressionist still-lifes echoing Cézanne and Signac; the lushly colored studios and ecstatic dancing nudes of his "prime" period in the early 20th C.; or the late-period Jazz-series gouaches and cut-outs, also richly colorful), so most have an opinion of what a Matisse "should" look like. I think a fair degree of those impressions will skew upon viewing this experimental show, which despite a room of lead-in styled works from the turn of the century focuses on 1913-1917, Matisse's time b/w Morocco and departing for Nice.
The large canvas "Bathers with a Turtle" (1907-8) in the opening gallery is a good primer for later on: his characteristic shapely nudes move in front of a startlingly minimalist three-banded color backdrop, emulating a shoreline and horizon in the simplest terms. And the degree of reworking and overpainting! You don't even need to read the accompanying placard to ID it: the background once was quite detailed, and the placement of the nudes (particularly the middle figure) shifted, resulting in a very visible ghosting effect. These elements of reduction and reworking figure into many of the later works, culminating in a grand way w/ the final massive canvas "Bathers by a River", whose dates span 1909 to 1917 and features both a grid system (vertical stripes this time, in a very reduced palette of black, white and blue-gray, plus simplified greenery) and four Cubist-style gray nudes. In between this we get shots of color (several works from his Moroccan days, like the stunning "Zorah in Yellow" (1910), the literally drenched "The Blue Window" (1913), whose blue tones threaten to immolate a vase of flowers by the window) amid increasing degrees of abstraction (check both "Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg" (1914), w/ its scratched white lines and curves on black, and "The Italian Woman" (1916), a heavily painted-over, modelesque Laurette, surrounded on all sides by a flat field of putty-gray). As the years progress, so does the somber nature of Matisee's palette, as black lines ("lines of construction", like in the Landsberg portrait) play more a role, and yellows and reds (beyond a suite of simplified Moroccan-style still-lifes) are omitted for cool grays, blues. Two of the final works in the show really locked me in, though: the startlingly abstract "Shaft of Sunlight, the Woods of Trivaux" (1917), a combination of green planar shapes and black shadow literally evaporating in the foreground in a wedge of silvery gray, and "The Studio, quai Saint-Michel" (1917), my overall favorite and Matisse's final rendering of that iconic, recurring room. In it, the floor-to-ceiling window overlooks the township, the wall is a slickened gray (overpainted many times) w/ abstracted canvases hanging on it, and there's a nude Laurette curled up on the flower-patterened sofa. Adding the nude injects that sensual Matisse touch that I identify most with him.
+ "Contemporary Art from the Collection". The museum restages part of their cache in the 2nd Floor gallery space every other year or so, but this turnaround resonates quite well w/ me. I dug the lot, overall, but to spare you a massive treatise on the exhibition I'll pick 10 works at random and hype them up:
1. Gordon Matta-Clark "Bingo" (1973) - classic building cut from the Anarchitecturalist, three human-sized rectangles from the facade of a to-be-demolished house in Niagara Falls, NY. Walking around this large structure, both totally IDable as a former residence and yet disconcertingly alien, amplifies the effect of contemporaries like Richard Hughes.
2. Lawrence Weiner "Gloss white lacquer, sprayed for 2 minutes at 40lb pressure directly on the floor" (1968/2010) - the effect of nearly walking into this shiny circular blot on the floor (or watching others do same) is hilarious - it has a way more unexpected effect than its hot-pink kindred, like a deliquescing cotton candy, from Weiner's retrospective at the Whitney.
3. Rivane Neuenschwander "A Volta de Zé Carioca" (2004) - the comic book-style blank speech balloons in planes of solid color, one of the pieces not included in her current mid-career retrospective at New Museum
4. Cady Noland "Tanya as Bandit" (1989) - a fab cut-aluminum blowup of that iconic gun-wielding Patricia Hearst publicity photo from the Symbionese Liberation Army
5. Cildo Meireles "Thread" (1990-5) - another Brazilian conceptualist (see: Neuenschwander) I need to get to know better. This gigantic block of hay, cut through w/ gold thread and accompanied, rather cheekily, by a single 18K gold needle tucked somewhere in all that, can be smelled from other galleries
6. Guerilla Girls posters from 1985-1990 - good on MoMA for including them. The sharp, effective graphic design and typography emphasize their eviscerating takes on the museum establishment and the male-artist-dominated gallery scene
7. Gedi Sibony "The Middle of the World" (2008) - incredible how a spread-out vertical blinds on the gallery floor could so easily resemble the skull of some prehistoric baleen whale
8. George Maciunas "One Year" (1973-4) - a case of brightly colored empty boxes and packets of stuff the Fluxus founder consumed that year, like a whopping 36 cartons of cultured buttermilk (for instance)
9. Huma Bhabha "Reconstruction series" (2007) - I don't think I've EVER seen Bhabha's photogravures, I'm more familiar w/ her intense assemblage-like sculpture, and those hulking yet humanistic figures appear in the shimmering b&w landscape images like wire-frame monsters.
10. Robert Morris' iconic Leo Koenig advert from 1974, the "Labyrinths - Voice - Blind Time" ad where he's shirtless and shackled, a huge chain draped across his body in exaggerated bondage mode, which I've NEVER seen the "real" thing before, accompanied quite nicely w/ the famous Lynda Benglis nude ArtForum ad from the same year.
* Rackstraw Downes "A Selection of Drawings: 1980-2010 @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. The masterful, draftsman-quality graphite landscapes from Downes is a welcome antidote from the busy, visually overloaded group shows populating the area. Despite one rather muscular rendering of the Henry Hudson Bridge, most of Downes' on-paper works (the George Washington Bridge, a cement plant, Canal St water-main project, a hydroponic tomato plant near Marfa TX) are emotionlessly precise, incredibly conceived but w/o the resonance of his paintings (which, as it happens, are in separate exhibitions that require traveling to the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton and the Aldridch Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield CT). That's not to take away from their visual achievement: the fact must be kept in mind that Downes works from-site on these, drawings AND paintings, and doesn't utilize photography.
* Oh Sufan "Variation" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Another instance of a highly-influential Korean abstract painter (think Park Seo-bo showing at Arario in 2008) FINALLY having a NY solo debut (his last time in the city was sometime in the '80s, I think). What we're rewarded with from Oh is a series of newish (he's very prolific) large, squarish oil paintings of vibrant backdrops, the sweeping brushstrokes still visible, overlaid w/ either diluted or inkily opaque streams of black paint, from calligraphic whiplike forms (think Brice Marden's "Cold Mountain" series, sort of) to wavy vertical lines. Very tasty.
* "Grass Grows by Itself" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. A way Zen summer group show, one of the most toned-down from this gallery I've ever experienced, and that's a good thing. Hell, anytime you've got a Wade Guyton "U" mirrored sculpture, distorting space (and, seemingly, time) in its alternating concave and convex surfaces, I'm sold. The groupings of Kianja Strobert and Mark Bradford works are like studies in texture and topography, and the inclusion of discreet pieces by Wolfgang Laib (rice, brass cones) and Richard Tuttle (green acrylic, sawdust, wood) were wise inclusions. Upstairs I didn't dig as much (the jolts of color felt gratuitous), but I admittedly loved the Dale Chihuly blown glass, like mutant psychedelic plants out of either Jim Woodring's world or "Alice in Wonderland", which are rather colorful and play well w/ Chakaia Booker's classic wall-spanning, snarling tire structure.
* David LaChapelle "American Jesus" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. I surprised myself in actually liking this LaChapelle show, though I'm notoriously not a fan of the too-slick artist. The titular trio of large-scale C-prints feature Michael Jackson as subject, and though the works (LaChapelle's usual dramatic, crowded staged photography) are all from 2009, parts were initially created way back when. Just check "Thriller"-era Jackson in "Archangel Michael: And No Message Could Have Been Any Clearer", my favorite of the three. The fruition from LaChapelle's decades' collab w/ the deceased pop star resonates here. What set this exhibition to the "like" category for me, was LaChapelle's new, massive "Rape of Africa", a lush and ironic print in its own right, but augmented here by a series of watercolor and collage works on paper, studies for the final C-print. Seeing LaChapelle's methodology struck a tone belying my general complaints of the overall synthetic nature of his photography, a well-studied history and process towards those just-so results. I'd like to see more of LaChapelle's behind-the-scenes works in the future.
* "You Were There", curated by Thomas Duncan @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. This was a cool idea: show the artists' (Rita Ackermann, Justin Adian, Joe Bradley, Sarah Braman, Sara Greenberger Rafferty and Josh Smith) work from 2005 and from 2010, one example of each. w/ someone as prolific as Smith, who may have created like 2,000 unique works in that timespan, it's interesting two see two same-sized canvases from him, the newer looking more screenprint-ish but even so, no massive change. Sarah Braman's is an interesting transformation from stacked and painted cardboard boxes to stacked and spray-painted Plexiglas and steel, a bit like Donald Judd w/ a lot of whimsy (Dan Graham, maybe?). And I absolutely loved the (older) Ackermann "African Nurse", a golden-hued mixed media painting that embodies the sensuality of Matisse and Gauguin, plus Chris Ofili's silver-leaf works, only it's totally Ackermann.
* "In Here" @ Laurel Gitlen/Small A Projects / 261 Broome St. Five artists take on representing the relationship of what is visible and invisible, and if that sounds abstract in words it makes loads more sense in person. Take Michele Abeles' bodily version of still-life photography, b/c what you see, and what she lists, is PRECISELY what you get (esp. "Fuschia, Yellow, Green, Blue, Numbers, Man, Cement, Paper", 2010). She and Uri Aran (who mixes computer renderings w/ inkjet prints, to creatively collaged effect) are both in "Greater NY" at MoMA PS1, but their newish works here are exceedingly superior. Add Jamie Isenstein's continual portrayal of her/the body, Halsey Rodman's assemblage, and Erik Wysocan's marquee installation (hint: view it from multiple angles), and you've got a concise, smart summer group show.
* "Normal Dimensions", curated by Neville Wakefield @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. I'm feeling mono-no-aware here, the permeability of time, in experiencing this four-artist show. Carol Bove's oeuvre traditionally exemplifies that, esp. her impossibly delicate "Woman", little more than a stunning, fluttering peacock feather attached to a steel tether. Olympia Scarry's too, here the disquietingly large slab "Saliva", made of that and lye but mostly rendered fat, in a suspended state of animation (we hope). Susan Collis' luxe interventions require us to look very, very close, at the wall-protectors made of glittering gems and the platinum square staples in a diamond-shaped array. Xaviera Simmons' Xerox print of a barn owl carrying a mouse provides the literal message.
* "Subtle Anxiety: This is How You Feel Now" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. One point for Jiyoon Koo's violently warped and abstracted subject matter in oils, two points for Gyungjin Shin's exercise in self-representation (esp. dug the urethane foam heads, kind of like Richard Dupont, but '80-style 3D), three points for Jong Hyun Oh's fishing-line and PETG-paneled installation, which is nearly invisible besides glimmers of tempera treatment here and there, and felt decidedly dangerous, like an exploding cloud of glass out of "The Matrix".
LAST CHANCE
* Jeff Soto "Lifecycle" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. A delicious step further from the Cali-based artist, in a new series of acrylic paintings and works on paper. He still has that environmental/industrial vibe underlying everything, but the whip-appendaged orbs and fuzzy fantastic creatures now exist in this "Heavy Metal"-like fantasy realm. The details are exquisite. His last solo show, "Storm Clouds" back in 2007, carried an Elements series. This one features the seasons and manages to tie in the cycle of life.
+ Dave Cooper "Mangle". Cooper's fleshy portraiture has become even...wetter, I think that's the word for it, incredibly textured, Impressionist, even, but the figures themselves are nearly abstract, translucent forms. The titular triptych reminds me of the opening shot from Teruo Ishii's disquieting "Screwed" (starring Tadanobu Asano in one of his more non-mainstream roles). If anybody gets that reference, you are insanely cool.
* "Lush Life Ch 5: Want Cards", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Y Gallery / 355A Bowery. The tiniest of the related exhibitions but incredibly to-the-point, w Rudy Shepherd's crude portraiture (are they mugshots or rather pleasant snaps of friends?) and Alisha Kerlin's (also showing at MoMA PS1) scattered deck of cards.
* Tucker Nichols @ ZieherSmith / 516 W 20th St. A fantastic, gallery-filling assortment of tableaux and goodies the artist created while in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA. The sculptural stuff shines, much of it odd, Dadaist conglomerations of unlikely banal objet (bottle caps w/ sealant, rags dyed red to resemble a floral bloom, greenish shredded paper like a vaguely tacky Easter-ish motif, or the super-simple slabs of rock and wood aping books.
* SummerScreen presents "Romeo + Juliet" (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 1996) @ McCarren Park ballfields / Bedford + N 12th St, Greenpoint (L to Bedford, G to Nassau), 6p/FREE. Where were you when this MTV-drenched beachfront gun battle, imbued w/ Catholicism, gang fights and "alternative rock", debuted? The film that made girls (and boys) swoon for cherubic Leo DiCaprio and Claire Danes and featured Mercutio (Harold Perrineau) in drag, Paris (Paul Rudd) as a smirking rich-boy and Tybalt (John Leguizamo) as a posturing badass.
THURSDAY
* Christian Marclay "Sixty-Four Bells and a Bow", performed by o.blaat @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St) , 1p. Keiko Uenishi is an ambient-sound sculptor, so she's possibly the best for handling this array of hand bells (which Marclay stipulated CAN be electronically processed). Also FRI 2p + SUN 4p.
* "Happy Together" (dir. Wong Kar-Wai, 1997) + "Fallen Angels" (dir. Wong Kar-Wai, 1995) double-screening @ 92Y Tribeca / 200 Hudson St (1/ACE to Canal), 7p/$12. Delicious cinema, w/ Wong's crime-riddled, big-city romantic arcs and Christopher Doyle's neon-soaked cinematography! The only thing that would one-up this double-feature is if "Happy Together" (which I dug, mind you) was replaced by the most excellent "Chungking Express", the semi-prequel to "Fallen Angels" and feat. the incomparable Faye Wong.
FRIDAY
* "Audrey the Trainwreck" (dir. Frank V. Ross, 2010) screenings @ reRun / 147 Front St, DUMBO (F to York St), 6:30/9p. Straight out of this year's SXSW and feat. a who's-who of those scruffy mumblecore films (plus Alexi Wasser from "Art School Confidential"), an indie rom-com w/ a burning flame in its center. ALSO: this is the debut of reRun, the "gastropub theatre" owned/cheffed by neighboring reBar. Think Austin, TX's Alamo Drafthouse (film + booze + proper menu, an incredibly effective combo) only DUMBO-style. I'm talking duck fat (or bacon fat, or brown butter) on your popcorn, or a soft pretzel stuffed w/ garlic mashed potatoes. I'm salivating just writing this. And tap beers. I hope it's wicked! (note: space is limited in the theatre, so advance tix are advised by yrs truly. Check it. Screens thru JUL 30.
* Free Energy + Best Coast @ Seaport Music Festival / Pier 17, 80 South St (23/45/JMZ to Fulton St), 6p/FREE. I'm down w/ Free Energy but the draw for me is the sunny, Beach Boys-as-girl Cali-rock of Bethany Cosentino, aka Best Coast, whose debut album "Crazy for You" is super-duper. I'm crazy for her, and I'm glad she's back on the E. Coast, even briefly.
* Whitney Live: Bear Hands + Darlings @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St), 7p. The intensity of a Darlings show, the catchy guitar riffs, smart boy/girl vocals and sheer VOLUME of it all, cannot be contained by a museum setting, but I give props to the Whitney for trying.
* Gary War @ Death by Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$6. When I 1st got into Captured Tracks' lo-fi sound resonating w/ the undeniable essence of pop-flavor buried under suffocatingly murky beats and atmosphere, it was due in no small part to Gary War, which is sort of like listening to Joy Division underwater. w/ Super Vacations
* Unicornicopia + 12000 Trees @ Monster Island / 128 River St, WIlliamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$8. Creative sound ensembles is the key phrase here, w/ the ever-shifting noise-acoustic contingent 12000 Trees and the (mostly) one-woman experimental pop outfit Unicornicopia (aka Natalie Weiss).
SATURDAY
* "Empire" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1964) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 1:30p. Blow eight hours and change in an AC'ed theatre, staring at the Empire State Building at night, alcohol and/or psychedelics not included.
* Heliotropes + deVries @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$6. One of my new fav local bands: Heliotropes balance the dissonant guitars and pounding rhythm of the Rock Video Monthly bands I was hooked on back in the day w/ droning strings and rather stunning vocals. Matched w/ DeVries' mile-high guitars and you've got an ace lineup.
* Aa @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (M to Myrtle/Wyckoff, L to Halsey), 8p, $10. I don't know any other venue in NY throwing this level of affair as Silent Barn (ISSUE, maybe). Aa do the wall-of-percussion thing, like Boredoms on ecstasy (my words). w/ Chat Logs, the noisy duo who (famously) debuted during the Whitney Biennial and drone-core Island's Eyeballs.
* Warm Up: MEN + Dj/rupture @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E to 23rd St/Ely Ave, G to Court Square), 2-9p/$15. How do you dance to MEN, aka JD Samson of Le Tigre et al? The most unfettered way your Opening Ceremony romper or skinny jeans (or jean cutoffs) will permit. B/c she's DJing (only the dirtiest '90s hits...I think) in addition to playing w/ her band. In addition to the insanity onstage and in the courtyard, choreographer Kyra Johannesen leads "Body & Pole", a performance on the ground and, presumably, in the air, w/ SO-IL's "Pole Dance" installation.
* New Museum Block Party 2010 @ Sara D. Roosevelt Park / next to the New Museum, 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave), 12-5p/FREE. Learn about the Bowery! Stare into Brion Gysin's "Dream Machine" and then draw stuff! Talk w/ other Block Party participants whilst crushing bottle-caps or folding napkins like Rivane Neuenschwander's "Ivoluntary Sculptures (Speech Acts)"! Listen to Hisham Akira Bharoocha's performance at 4:30! And get a free pass to the museum, to check Neuenschwander's fab mid-career retrospective. Fingers crossed for beautiful weather to get the most of this.
SUNDAY
* "Centre Stage" (dir. Stanley Kwan, 1992) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 3:30p. Kwan's sumptuous adaptation of Ruan Lingyu, the "Chinese Garbo", w/ Maggie Cheung in the lead role and Tony Leung Ka-Fai as pre-Communist film director Cai Chusheng.
* The Beets + Pujol @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (M to Myrtle/Wyckoff, L to Halsey), 8p. What is it about Nashville and grungy rock'n'roll? Contemporary scene alone, there's JEFF the Brotherhood, Turbo Fruits, Heavy Cream, Natural Child — and of course Mr. Daniel Pujol, bringing his southern rock to Silent Barn. I dig it (as I dig The Beets).
MONDAY
* "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" (dir. Russ Meyer, 1965) screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 8p. Solid exploitation at its hyperbolized finest: three ass-kicking go-go dancers v. like a living He-Man and his wheelchair-bound old man in the Mohave Desert. Sample dialogue:
Tommy: "Look, I don't know what the hell your point is, but—"
Varla: "The point is of no return, and you've reached it!"
* "The Prowler" (dir. Joseph Zito, 1981) screening @ reRun / 147 Front St, DUMBO (F to York St), 11:30p. Today's American-directed and -produced horror films feat. a cast of hotties being brutally murdered via pitchfork and knife at a high-school dance don't hold a candle to this uncut bijou, directed by the man who went on to do "Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter" and inspiration to Eli Roth, amid others of his ilk, I'm sure.
TUESDAY
* "Girl By Girl" (dir. Park Dong-Hoon, 2010) screening at Tribeca Cinemas / 54 Varick St (1/ACE to Canal St), 7p/FREE. I'm still recovering from the end of a fantastic 2010 NYAFF, so this Korean cable TV high-school rom-com might be the ticket, esp. b/c of lead Kwak Ji-Min, who is at war w/ her model student classmate over the same heartthrob.
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). I'm sure of two things after catching a preview of the Matisse show. 1) it will draw the crowds this summer and autumn (or at least MoMA is banking on it, creating a timed-ticket entry thing for nonmembers like the Van Gogh "Colors of the Night" and the Tim Burton) and 2) opinion will be sharply divided on the art, much more so than the decade-spanning Joan Miro exhibition. And while art is expected to have a subjective reaction, I think it'll be more acute here. Even the casual gallery-goer has rubbed elbows w/ a Matisse painting before (whether the early Post-Impressionist still-lifes echoing Cézanne and Signac; the lushly colored studios and ecstatic dancing nudes of his "prime" period in the early 20th C.; or the late-period Jazz-series gouaches and cut-outs, also richly colorful), so most have an opinion of what a Matisse "should" look like. I think a fair degree of those impressions will skew upon viewing this experimental show, which despite a room of lead-in styled works from the turn of the century focuses on 1913-1917, Matisse's time b/w Morocco and departing for Nice.
The large canvas "Bathers with a Turtle" (1907-8) in the opening gallery is a good primer for later on: his characteristic shapely nudes move in front of a startlingly minimalist three-banded color backdrop, emulating a shoreline and horizon in the simplest terms. And the degree of reworking and overpainting! You don't even need to read the accompanying placard to ID it: the background once was quite detailed, and the placement of the nudes (particularly the middle figure) shifted, resulting in a very visible ghosting effect. These elements of reduction and reworking figure into many of the later works, culminating in a grand way w/ the final massive canvas "Bathers by a River", whose dates span 1909 to 1917 and features both a grid system (vertical stripes this time, in a very reduced palette of black, white and blue-gray, plus simplified greenery) and four Cubist-style gray nudes. In between this we get shots of color (several works from his Moroccan days, like the stunning "Zorah in Yellow" (1910), the literally drenched "The Blue Window" (1913), whose blue tones threaten to immolate a vase of flowers by the window) amid increasing degrees of abstraction (check both "Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg" (1914), w/ its scratched white lines and curves on black, and "The Italian Woman" (1916), a heavily painted-over, modelesque Laurette, surrounded on all sides by a flat field of putty-gray). As the years progress, so does the somber nature of Matisee's palette, as black lines ("lines of construction", like in the Landsberg portrait) play more a role, and yellows and reds (beyond a suite of simplified Moroccan-style still-lifes) are omitted for cool grays, blues. Two of the final works in the show really locked me in, though: the startlingly abstract "Shaft of Sunlight, the Woods of Trivaux" (1917), a combination of green planar shapes and black shadow literally evaporating in the foreground in a wedge of silvery gray, and "The Studio, quai Saint-Michel" (1917), my overall favorite and Matisse's final rendering of that iconic, recurring room. In it, the floor-to-ceiling window overlooks the township, the wall is a slickened gray (overpainted many times) w/ abstracted canvases hanging on it, and there's a nude Laurette curled up on the flower-patterened sofa. Adding the nude injects that sensual Matisse touch that I identify most with him.
+ "Contemporary Art from the Collection". The museum restages part of their cache in the 2nd Floor gallery space every other year or so, but this turnaround resonates quite well w/ me. I dug the lot, overall, but to spare you a massive treatise on the exhibition I'll pick 10 works at random and hype them up:
1. Gordon Matta-Clark "Bingo" (1973) - classic building cut from the Anarchitecturalist, three human-sized rectangles from the facade of a to-be-demolished house in Niagara Falls, NY. Walking around this large structure, both totally IDable as a former residence and yet disconcertingly alien, amplifies the effect of contemporaries like Richard Hughes.
2. Lawrence Weiner "Gloss white lacquer, sprayed for 2 minutes at 40lb pressure directly on the floor" (1968/2010) - the effect of nearly walking into this shiny circular blot on the floor (or watching others do same) is hilarious - it has a way more unexpected effect than its hot-pink kindred, like a deliquescing cotton candy, from Weiner's retrospective at the Whitney.
3. Rivane Neuenschwander "A Volta de Zé Carioca" (2004) - the comic book-style blank speech balloons in planes of solid color, one of the pieces not included in her current mid-career retrospective at New Museum
4. Cady Noland "Tanya as Bandit" (1989) - a fab cut-aluminum blowup of that iconic gun-wielding Patricia Hearst publicity photo from the Symbionese Liberation Army
5. Cildo Meireles "Thread" (1990-5) - another Brazilian conceptualist (see: Neuenschwander) I need to get to know better. This gigantic block of hay, cut through w/ gold thread and accompanied, rather cheekily, by a single 18K gold needle tucked somewhere in all that, can be smelled from other galleries
6. Guerilla Girls posters from 1985-1990 - good on MoMA for including them. The sharp, effective graphic design and typography emphasize their eviscerating takes on the museum establishment and the male-artist-dominated gallery scene
7. Gedi Sibony "The Middle of the World" (2008) - incredible how a spread-out vertical blinds on the gallery floor could so easily resemble the skull of some prehistoric baleen whale
8. George Maciunas "One Year" (1973-4) - a case of brightly colored empty boxes and packets of stuff the Fluxus founder consumed that year, like a whopping 36 cartons of cultured buttermilk (for instance)
9. Huma Bhabha "Reconstruction series" (2007) - I don't think I've EVER seen Bhabha's photogravures, I'm more familiar w/ her intense assemblage-like sculpture, and those hulking yet humanistic figures appear in the shimmering b&w landscape images like wire-frame monsters.
10. Robert Morris' iconic Leo Koenig advert from 1974, the "Labyrinths - Voice - Blind Time" ad where he's shirtless and shackled, a huge chain draped across his body in exaggerated bondage mode, which I've NEVER seen the "real" thing before, accompanied quite nicely w/ the famous Lynda Benglis nude ArtForum ad from the same year.
* Rackstraw Downes "A Selection of Drawings: 1980-2010 @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. The masterful, draftsman-quality graphite landscapes from Downes is a welcome antidote from the busy, visually overloaded group shows populating the area. Despite one rather muscular rendering of the Henry Hudson Bridge, most of Downes' on-paper works (the George Washington Bridge, a cement plant, Canal St water-main project, a hydroponic tomato plant near Marfa TX) are emotionlessly precise, incredibly conceived but w/o the resonance of his paintings (which, as it happens, are in separate exhibitions that require traveling to the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton and the Aldridch Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield CT). That's not to take away from their visual achievement: the fact must be kept in mind that Downes works from-site on these, drawings AND paintings, and doesn't utilize photography.
* Oh Sufan "Variation" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Another instance of a highly-influential Korean abstract painter (think Park Seo-bo showing at Arario in 2008) FINALLY having a NY solo debut (his last time in the city was sometime in the '80s, I think). What we're rewarded with from Oh is a series of newish (he's very prolific) large, squarish oil paintings of vibrant backdrops, the sweeping brushstrokes still visible, overlaid w/ either diluted or inkily opaque streams of black paint, from calligraphic whiplike forms (think Brice Marden's "Cold Mountain" series, sort of) to wavy vertical lines. Very tasty.
* "Grass Grows by Itself" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. A way Zen summer group show, one of the most toned-down from this gallery I've ever experienced, and that's a good thing. Hell, anytime you've got a Wade Guyton "U" mirrored sculpture, distorting space (and, seemingly, time) in its alternating concave and convex surfaces, I'm sold. The groupings of Kianja Strobert and Mark Bradford works are like studies in texture and topography, and the inclusion of discreet pieces by Wolfgang Laib (rice, brass cones) and Richard Tuttle (green acrylic, sawdust, wood) were wise inclusions. Upstairs I didn't dig as much (the jolts of color felt gratuitous), but I admittedly loved the Dale Chihuly blown glass, like mutant psychedelic plants out of either Jim Woodring's world or "Alice in Wonderland", which are rather colorful and play well w/ Chakaia Booker's classic wall-spanning, snarling tire structure.
* David LaChapelle "American Jesus" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. I surprised myself in actually liking this LaChapelle show, though I'm notoriously not a fan of the too-slick artist. The titular trio of large-scale C-prints feature Michael Jackson as subject, and though the works (LaChapelle's usual dramatic, crowded staged photography) are all from 2009, parts were initially created way back when. Just check "Thriller"-era Jackson in "Archangel Michael: And No Message Could Have Been Any Clearer", my favorite of the three. The fruition from LaChapelle's decades' collab w/ the deceased pop star resonates here. What set this exhibition to the "like" category for me, was LaChapelle's new, massive "Rape of Africa", a lush and ironic print in its own right, but augmented here by a series of watercolor and collage works on paper, studies for the final C-print. Seeing LaChapelle's methodology struck a tone belying my general complaints of the overall synthetic nature of his photography, a well-studied history and process towards those just-so results. I'd like to see more of LaChapelle's behind-the-scenes works in the future.
* "You Were There", curated by Thomas Duncan @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. This was a cool idea: show the artists' (Rita Ackermann, Justin Adian, Joe Bradley, Sarah Braman, Sara Greenberger Rafferty and Josh Smith) work from 2005 and from 2010, one example of each. w/ someone as prolific as Smith, who may have created like 2,000 unique works in that timespan, it's interesting two see two same-sized canvases from him, the newer looking more screenprint-ish but even so, no massive change. Sarah Braman's is an interesting transformation from stacked and painted cardboard boxes to stacked and spray-painted Plexiglas and steel, a bit like Donald Judd w/ a lot of whimsy (Dan Graham, maybe?). And I absolutely loved the (older) Ackermann "African Nurse", a golden-hued mixed media painting that embodies the sensuality of Matisse and Gauguin, plus Chris Ofili's silver-leaf works, only it's totally Ackermann.
* "In Here" @ Laurel Gitlen/Small A Projects / 261 Broome St. Five artists take on representing the relationship of what is visible and invisible, and if that sounds abstract in words it makes loads more sense in person. Take Michele Abeles' bodily version of still-life photography, b/c what you see, and what she lists, is PRECISELY what you get (esp. "Fuschia, Yellow, Green, Blue, Numbers, Man, Cement, Paper", 2010). She and Uri Aran (who mixes computer renderings w/ inkjet prints, to creatively collaged effect) are both in "Greater NY" at MoMA PS1, but their newish works here are exceedingly superior. Add Jamie Isenstein's continual portrayal of her/the body, Halsey Rodman's assemblage, and Erik Wysocan's marquee installation (hint: view it from multiple angles), and you've got a concise, smart summer group show.
* "Normal Dimensions", curated by Neville Wakefield @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. I'm feeling mono-no-aware here, the permeability of time, in experiencing this four-artist show. Carol Bove's oeuvre traditionally exemplifies that, esp. her impossibly delicate "Woman", little more than a stunning, fluttering peacock feather attached to a steel tether. Olympia Scarry's too, here the disquietingly large slab "Saliva", made of that and lye but mostly rendered fat, in a suspended state of animation (we hope). Susan Collis' luxe interventions require us to look very, very close, at the wall-protectors made of glittering gems and the platinum square staples in a diamond-shaped array. Xaviera Simmons' Xerox print of a barn owl carrying a mouse provides the literal message.
* "Subtle Anxiety: This is How You Feel Now" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. One point for Jiyoon Koo's violently warped and abstracted subject matter in oils, two points for Gyungjin Shin's exercise in self-representation (esp. dug the urethane foam heads, kind of like Richard Dupont, but '80-style 3D), three points for Jong Hyun Oh's fishing-line and PETG-paneled installation, which is nearly invisible besides glimmers of tempera treatment here and there, and felt decidedly dangerous, like an exploding cloud of glass out of "The Matrix".
LAST CHANCE
* Jeff Soto "Lifecycle" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. A delicious step further from the Cali-based artist, in a new series of acrylic paintings and works on paper. He still has that environmental/industrial vibe underlying everything, but the whip-appendaged orbs and fuzzy fantastic creatures now exist in this "Heavy Metal"-like fantasy realm. The details are exquisite. His last solo show, "Storm Clouds" back in 2007, carried an Elements series. This one features the seasons and manages to tie in the cycle of life.
+ Dave Cooper "Mangle". Cooper's fleshy portraiture has become even...wetter, I think that's the word for it, incredibly textured, Impressionist, even, but the figures themselves are nearly abstract, translucent forms. The titular triptych reminds me of the opening shot from Teruo Ishii's disquieting "Screwed" (starring Tadanobu Asano in one of his more non-mainstream roles). If anybody gets that reference, you are insanely cool.
* "Lush Life Ch 5: Want Cards", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Y Gallery / 355A Bowery. The tiniest of the related exhibitions but incredibly to-the-point, w Rudy Shepherd's crude portraiture (are they mugshots or rather pleasant snaps of friends?) and Alisha Kerlin's (also showing at MoMA PS1) scattered deck of cards.
* Tucker Nichols @ ZieherSmith / 516 W 20th St. A fantastic, gallery-filling assortment of tableaux and goodies the artist created while in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA. The sculptural stuff shines, much of it odd, Dadaist conglomerations of unlikely banal objet (bottle caps w/ sealant, rags dyed red to resemble a floral bloom, greenish shredded paper like a vaguely tacky Easter-ish motif, or the super-simple slabs of rock and wood aping books.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
fee's LIST (through 7/20)
WEDNESDAY
* "Normal Dimensions", curated by Neville Wakefield @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. A tasty lot of introspection here. Things are not what they seem...like Susan Collis' signature haute-hardware (platinum staples, bejeweled screws), Carol Bove's incredibly delicate peacock-feather sculpture, w/ Xaviera Simmons and Olympia Scarry.
* "Inspired" @ Steven Kasher Gallery / 521 W 23rd St. You can take the direct homage of these contemporary artists to their generational forebears, but there is enough quality art here to stand firmly on its own. Some gorgeous moments incl. LaToya Ruby Frazier (doing Helmut Newton), Mickalene Thomas (as Manet), Anton Perich (as Steichen), Eric Kroll (as Man Ray).
* "Lisztomania" (dir. Ken Russell, 1975), screening @ Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave), 7p. Oh if you thought Roger Daltrey of The Who as the mute, bare-chested lead in in Russell's psychedelic rock-opera "Tommy" was something else, you'll shriek in either delight or fear at him as the sex-addled Franz Liszt in Russell's prog-rockin' next feature. Case in point: Rick Wakeman (of Yes and the film's composer) appears as Thor and Ringo Starr is the Pope. Yes, really. ALSO SAT 9p.
* Small Black + Beach Fossils @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave), 9:30p/$10. I've been reading of late the terms "chill-wave" or "glo-fi" or whatever in the same breath as Beach Fossils. No: Beach Fossils do bouncey, sugared-up, sun-drenched, surf-inflected indie rock. Small Black, on the other hand, w/ the synths and programmed beats and crooning above all that in a head-nodding groove, THEY are chill-wave, if you absolutely MUST use that term. Dope show, nonetheless.
THURSDAY
* "Subtle Anxiety: This Is How You Feel Now" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. Seoul's Doosan Gallery's emerging artists program continues this summer in NY w/ a three-artist show centered on contemporary social unrest, and considering the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (plus the wars, the global economy etc) there is loads of source material. w/ Jiyoon Koo, Jong Hyun Oh and Gyungjin Shin.
* "Grass Grows by Itself" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. The SECOND of two summer-ish group shows at the gallery. Last one was way trippy, this one sounds way Zen, and that's a good thing, I think, w/ all the overstimulation one is prone to amid a climate of like a million artists showing in over the course of eight W Chelsea blocks. Expect super-sublime works from Carmen Herrera, Wade Guyton, Wolfgang Laib, Kianja Strobert, Cameron Martin + more.
FRIDAY
* Aki Sasamoto w/ Saul Melman "Skewed Lines/Central Governor" + robbinschilds open studios @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to Courthouse Sq), 2p, part of "Greater NY". Sasamoto's cocoon-like performance last month, in the mosquito-net-draped back alcove of the boiler room, was partially a treatise on comedians and mosquitos, partially Sasamoto's Kafka-esque metamorphosis, zapping at the bug-lights with a straw, climbing and hanging from the pipes while belting out "Let It Be". It took her normally athletic lecture/performances to a whole 'nother level, and I'm excited where she takes episode two. Melman, meanwhile, stoically continues gilding the boiler. Performance duo robbinschilds stop in for their work-in-progress "I came here on my own", beginning at 3p upstairs in the galleries. ALSO SAT (during Warm Up) and SUN, same time
* "Inception" (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010) screenings in wide release. From the initial teaser trailer (w/ that chill-inducing echoey bass), to the strong casting (Leo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Ellen Page, Mario Cotillard), to the still-enigmatic subject matter (I "think" I get the plot), to the plain fact Nolan's got some great films under his belt, "Inception" is set up to totally rock our worlds. I sincerely hope it does.
* "Flaming Creatures" + "Scotch Tape" (dir. Jack Smith, 1963/2) screening at Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave), 7:30p/8:45p. One of the most iconic examples of underground American cinema, Smith's blown-out, carnivalesque series of posings, attitude and fierceness set the tone for all those "superstars" that followed it.
* Thee Oh Sees + So Cow @ Seaport Music Festival / Pier 17, 80 South St (23/45/JMZ to Fulton St), 6p. Yeah I'm into Thee Oh Sees' addicting jangly, summery vibe, but I dig So Cow (aka one Irishman Brian Kelly) and his vein of pure guitar-driven indie rock even more.
SATURDAY
* "Lost Highway" (dir. David Lynch, 1997) screening @ 92Y Tribeca / 200 Hudson St (1/ACE to Canal), 7:30p/$12. Watch Bill Pullman grooving out on the tenor sax, see Robert Loggia give driving instructions laced w/ gangsterese. Freak the hell out every time Robert Blake (as the Mystery Man) slinks onscreen, in this classic Lynch neo-noir thriller, which did the video-tape espionage thing way before Haneke's "Cache". Choice interchange, b/w Pullman and Blake at a party:
Blake: "We've met before, haven't we."
Pullman: "I don't think so....where was it you think we met?"
Blake: "At your house. Don't you remember?"
Pullman: "No, no I don't. Are you sure?"
Blake: "Of course. As a matter of fact, I'm there right now."
Pullman: "...what do you mean? You're where right now?"
Blake: "At your house."
* Siren Music Festival @ Coney Island (D/N to Stillwell Ave, F/Q to W 8th St/NY Aquarium), Noon/FREE. I'm all about the indie-inflected lineup this year, not for spastic headliners Matt & Kim or Canadian hardcore lot Holy Fuck (though I dig 'em, the latter). No, I'm going for The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, Surfer Blood and Screaming Females. With my SISTER, b/c she is extremely cool and informed. Dig?
* Saturdays @ Rock Yard w/ The Beets / 354 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 2p/FREE. Jelly NYC's bimonthly free outdoor concert series in Wlliamsburg, held in a lot instead of the Waterfront but hell, as long as the music is dope that's fine w/ me. And if you don't feel like spending about an hour on the train out to Coney Island, stay nearby for The Beets. w/ X-Ray Eyeballs and Gun Outfit.
* Warm Up: Ratatat (DJ set) @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E to 23rd St/Ely Ave, G to Court Square), 2-9p/$15. So Ratatat behind the decks isn't quite the same as Ratatat's rock-infused electronic live show, but if they mix in any of their hotter tracks, like "Wildcat", it's going to be sick. w/ Sweden's Air France.
* So Cow @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p. Perfect Saturday? Catch Siren Fest then jet back to Williamsburg for Brian Kelly's no doubt frenetic headlining show at DbA.
SUNDAY
* "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). I'm reminded of that challenging, genre-busting Joan Miro exhibition nearly two years ago, spanning "just" a decade of the artist's career but neatly usurping everything from Surrealism, early abstraction, Dadaism and just plain PAINTING as a medium. I'm thinking this four-year shot from Matisse's arguably better-known career (at least for the casual art-goer, versed in the lush, vibrant dancing nudes and saturated "Red Studio" and the lot) will carry a similar essence of sea change. Expect a lot of Cubist-style works and a lot of gray and black.
* The Splinters (LA) + Heavy Cream (Nashville) @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, J to Marcy), 8p. Sick lineup! Another chance to catch Cali's all-girl retro indie rock The Splinters, this time w/ nearly all-girl grungy punk Heavy Cream from Nashville.
MONDAY
* The Splinters (LA) + Heavy Cream (Nashville) @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$7. If you missed the DbA show, The Splinters and Heavy Cream team up again for another night of fierceness.
TUESDAY
* Heavy Cream (Nashville) @ Union Pool / 484 Union Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 9p/FREE. I'm attempting to hit all three Heavy Cream shows in Brooklyn, this third one being both 1) a record release party and 2) free.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Jakub Julian Ziolkowski "Timothy Galoty & the Dead Brains" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. The dark horse in this summer art season is no doubt 30-year-old Ziolkowski's uncategorizable, fleshified, phantasmatastic debut solo NY exhibition. And yes, you practically have to make up a new vocabulary (at least in English, I'm not sure about his native Poland) and even that doesn't encapsulate the special atmosphere at work here. I, like most NY gallery-goers, met him at the New Museum's inaugural triennial, "Younger Than Jesus", where Ziolkowski's genre-defying paintings (like Archimboldo? Like James Ensor? Like, uh, Max Beckmann??) delighted as much as they perplexed. Meaning: he's an incredibly adept artist w/ a fresh POV, but where is he focusing it? On heavily detailed crowd-scenes? On visceral portraiture? His exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, for the most part, is a cohesive, bleeding, respiring landscape, Peter Saul mixed with Ziolkowski's own unique brand of flesh-abstraction. Some of 'em look like the results of the warp and melt tools in Photoshop, only rendered in oil. Others are frenetic, disturbingly lovely messes of bulging organs and eviscerated bodies (the Caligula scene is pure bodily comedy), capillaries and wrinkles proliferating. A few are almost Dali-Surreal, a nearly vacant, ghostly backdrop w/ an elongated sad figure slinking about it. Stunningly perverse.
* "Lush Life Ch 1: Whistle", curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud & Franklin Evans @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. I will review these shows in turn, based totally on the visual and instinctual as I haven't read Price's book. But the shows give us much to go on. We get a fair sense of the '80s LES immediately w/ David Shapiro's array of handmade "found objects" — the want ad, the 'steal this book', the NY Post. Alice O'Malley's signature C-prints set the scene (the Mexican restaurant El Sombrero, the Ludlow rooftops) and David Kramer brings not only cheeky reconfigured alcohol adverts but an entire bar (which had what looked to be nearly a full bottle of Jack Daniels last time I visited). Take a stroll, get to know your surroundings.
* "Lush Life Ch 2: Liar", curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud & Franklin Evans @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. Thus far, my 2nd favorite of the novel's exhibitions, thanks especially to the strong roster at this show. Ezra Johnson's mural-sized word painting, screaming DOUBT, sets the mood. Tim Davis' politically-toned, sharp C-prints depict neighborhood gentrification, as do Manuel Acevedo's suite of modified Polaroids, each w/ a drawn-on "future structure", which are more subtly echoed by Scott Hug's 'pizza slice' collages.
* "Lush Life Ch 3 "First Bird (A Few Butterflies)", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. This one keeps the bird-theme close to its chest w/ a nearly uniform, avian-related show. In that sense it falls short of the explosive humor and dialogue of On Stellar Rays, but it's got some great stuff as well. My favorites: the haunting, long-pan video "Silent Among Us" by Dana Levy, of a flock of live doves in a taxidermy lab and Karen Heagle's huge acrylic and ink work, of crows on the most beautiful mountain of garbage you've probably ever seen.
* "Lush LIfe Ch 4: Let It Die", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. The BIG show of the nine, even though it doesn't utilize the upper gallery floor, literally spilling out into the street w/ Robert Buck's "shrine". Lots of fine work here, from Robert Melee's "melted" interventions, Amy Longenecker-Brown's scene-setting paintings contrasted w/ Rashid Johnson's spraypainted text on a mirror. The neighborhood, as I understand it, is in disarray, so the resultant exhibition is suitably in flux.
* "Lush Life Ch 5: Want Cards", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Y Gallery / 355A Bowery. The tiniest of the related exhibitions but incredibly to-the-point, w Rudy Shepherd's crude portraiture (are they mugshots or rather pleasant snaps of friends?) and Alisha Kerlin's (also showing at MoMA PS1) scattered deck of cards.
* "Lush Life Ch 6: "The Devil You Know", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Collette Blanchard Gallery / 26 Clinton St. LaToya Ruby Frazier's b&w portraiture and Chakaia Booker's armored-detritus vest really elevate this chapter. One of the most intense exhibitions in the show.
* "Lush Life Ch 8: "17 Plus 25 is 32", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Scaramouche / 52 Orchard St. My favorite of the lot. Jayson Keeling's glittery-surfaced wordy canvases are beautiful and require the extra introspective necessary for this entire exhibition. Karina Aguilera Skvirsky's childhood photography from Ecuador, Melissa Gordon's multiple-POV painting and Paul Pagk's encoded abstracts round out this destination spot.
* "Year One" @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. One of my favorites of the summer. Four fantastic, moody C. and E. European artists who are still getting little play in NY beyond this gallery. Alexander Tinei is my immediate favorite — his strong showing at NY VOLTA this past year sealed the deal for me — and this trio of new, dreamy nudes is riveting. Same deal w/ Josef Bolf's small, streaky, darker figures. Zsolt Bodoni's large, doomsday-ish industrial scenes and Daniel Pitin's smaller renderings from film stills balance the people with setting to create an all-inclusive haunting diorama.
* "Jo and Jack: Jo Baer and John Wesley in the '60s" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. Baer's son Josh curated this selection of paintings and works on paper by these two seemingly very different artists from their time living and working together in NYC. I've seen them separately many times, so I didn't get the hook: Wesley's flat, simplified, almost minimalist Pop-like figures and nudes v. Baer's extremely minimalist canvases, usually just a colored border around a white or off-white expanse. But the key here, in this beautiful exhibition, is how well the artists play off one another. How Baer's 3D-like "frames" echo the clean lines of a single or repeated Wesley character. Even how they applied the paint to the canvas and the respective sizes of the canvases relate, as if to experience one work you need to see the ones to either side of it.
* "Big PIcture", curated by Tom Sanford and Ryan Schneider @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Artists Sanford and Schneider (exhibiting here as well, w/ some of the more "realistic" compositions) culled together an impressive group show that tends toward loose, muscular semi-abstraction. I'm referring to Lisa Sanditz' melted ice-cream-like addition to a parking lot, to John Copeland's typically texture-heavy brushwork, to Brian Montuori's Bacon-esque snarl of amorphous form against an exacting forest backdrop, to Aaron Johnson's visually pulsating, visceral Adam and Eve portrait to Jeremy Willis' howling dripping Dali-esque landscape of appendages.
* Summer Shows @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. OK, anytime you've got a summer show that includes a bunch of Anselm Reyle works, you've got my attention. Esp. when it's a double-bed-sized shiny silver crinkle under acrylic glass, splashed w/ pink, green and black paint. Or even cooler: when you pair Reyle w/ Mike Kelley's glowing silicone-ish "Cities" and and Florian Maier-Aichen's at once serene and slightly screwed-up landscape C-prints. Unbelievable on paper, how a textured-and-troweled Reyle "monochrome" would work off a Maier-Aichen smeared-color river and a Kelley sea-blue icicles screaming up toward the ceiling, but they totally do.
* "The Pencil Show" @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. Artists doing fun and interesting stuff w/ graphite. OK: more than two dozen artists, cutting-edge and establishment, doing crazy stuff w/ graphite (whether it's their major medium or not). And: like twice that many works, encircling the gallery perimeter and mostly of intimate scale. I suggest you do a circuit, beginning near the front desk w/ Matt Savitsky's glisteningly textured, almost crumbled iron-like works, and take it all in, Kon Trubkovich's night photograph-style, Tomoo Gokita's gathering of loose portraiture, D-L Alvarez' pixellation, Dick Evans' creative minimalism... This was a "like" show for me, overall, but I was surprised but its breadth, so unless you just completely hate pencils there's something in it for you too.
* Jeronimo Elespe @ John Connelly Presents / 625 W 27th St. A beautiful new show from Madrid-based Elespe, furthering his scintillating small-scale portraits on aluminum panels. There's a certain sameness to the figures but their requisite elegance is undeniable. Think of Rembrandt's deep black backdrops, styled here as shimmering pool surfaces behind the sitting figure.
* Jeff Kessel @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Amid this season of group exhibitions, we have the Brooklyn artist's solo debut at the gallery, and it's a beauty not to be missed. I caught him last year in a three-artist abstraction show at Bortolami, and I was quite taken by Kessel's large, troweled-paint canvases. This grouping of ecstatic new works, like the shadowy one invoking Louise Fishman's style, or the grayish, speckled one resembling a drop-cloth (or Josh Smith's style, only paint-on-canvas), is fantastic. For one reason or another, he's not in "Greater NY" (mistake!), but I think we'll be seeing much more of Kessel in the future.
* "Shape Language", organized by Natalie Campbell @ Nicole Klagsbrun / 526 W 26th St #213. An incredible group show amid a veritable sea of summer group shows, centered on the ostensibly simple thesis of color and form. We're rewarded with a very savory exhibition, anchored by Blinky Palermo's ovoidish gray form and peer Imi Knoebel's jagged, colorful collage. From these '70s-era springboards, the rest of the show is a voyage through the creatively minimal and patterned (Ned Vena, Zak Prekop, Joe Bradley) to the luxuriantly colorful (Amy Sillman, Patrick Brennan, Wendy White's particularly entrancing multicanvas work). Yes, it's all artists/styles I easily get into, but I think you will too. Trust me on this one: Klagsbrun's show carries my highest recommendations.
* "Spray!" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. I dug this multigenerational show involving artists using aerosol-based media as their main component, at least in what was featured here. This spans Yayoi Kusama's early '70s signature psychedelia and Dan Christensen's gestural spraypaint-on-canvas from '68 to Jacqueline Humphries, Rosy Keyser and Sterling Ruby today.
* Andy Warhol "Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall)" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. For all the trouble in constructing this installation of eye-popping daisy panels behind a double-layer of running water (its summary destruction in Osaka in '69 and again in LACMA in '71), it's a calming, satisfying experience to see in person, finally fully-functioning and protected. Also: it's a cooling installation, what w/ the faint spray of water, depending on your proximity to it, and it's so bloody hot out as is...
LAST CHANCE
* Leslie Wayne "One Big Love" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. So there's this idea of impasto — thickly applied paint to the surface — then there's Wayne's signature violent, mesmerizingly beautiful version. She slathers the canvas, rips up parts months later, folding them onto themselves and then adds more paint, more layers. The end result are jewel-sized miracles that can resemble impossibly-colored wood-shavings, seashell insides, arctic landscapes, plastic food, and at the most 'simplistic' acid-colored twisted affairs not entirely unlike Steven Parrino. I dig, I dig.
* Gene Davis @ Ameringer McEnery Yohe / 525 W 22nd St. Classic colored-line test-pattern abstracts in acrylic or oil and Magna — to create that colored-pencil effect — incl. one massive wall-spanning canvas that you can get lost in.
* Josephine Meckseper @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. Don't let the chrome and mirrored installation blind you from the hard imagery, as Meckseper takes on the U.S. occupation in Iraq and trends of the U.S. Supreme Court, though all is drenched in hyperbolized luxury, 20" rims here, blinged out wristwatches there. If you've ever thought those alpha car lots lining 11th Ave were a bit...grotesque, you'll dig Meckseper's show.
* "Jack in the Space" @ Dean Project / 45-43 21st St, Long Island City. Heng-Gil Han, visual arts director of the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, curated an excellent six-artist show on diffusing space. Lishan Chang's charred baguette installation assaults you nasally before you even see the loaves, torpedo-like crawling the walls and leading you to Kyung Woo Han's walk-in Mondrian painting/video installation. Hyong Nam Ahn's more seductively sedate "Springtime in Brooklyn", a jagged neon, metal and wood sculpture like a robotic butterfly, deserves several passes.
* 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.
* "Homunculi", curated by Trinie Dalton @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. An appropriately physical show, w/ strong works by Allison Schulnik (doing the impasto thing well, like a 'bouquet of flowers' painting), Matt Greene (and I must say, I'm really impressed w/ his works here) and Ruby Neri, particularly her doll-like duo, resembling like a delicate cross b/w Louise Bourgeois' knit figures and Folkert de Jong.
* "Normal Dimensions", curated by Neville Wakefield @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. A tasty lot of introspection here. Things are not what they seem...like Susan Collis' signature haute-hardware (platinum staples, bejeweled screws), Carol Bove's incredibly delicate peacock-feather sculpture, w/ Xaviera Simmons and Olympia Scarry.
* "Inspired" @ Steven Kasher Gallery / 521 W 23rd St. You can take the direct homage of these contemporary artists to their generational forebears, but there is enough quality art here to stand firmly on its own. Some gorgeous moments incl. LaToya Ruby Frazier (doing Helmut Newton), Mickalene Thomas (as Manet), Anton Perich (as Steichen), Eric Kroll (as Man Ray).
* "Lisztomania" (dir. Ken Russell, 1975), screening @ Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave), 7p. Oh if you thought Roger Daltrey of The Who as the mute, bare-chested lead in in Russell's psychedelic rock-opera "Tommy" was something else, you'll shriek in either delight or fear at him as the sex-addled Franz Liszt in Russell's prog-rockin' next feature. Case in point: Rick Wakeman (of Yes and the film's composer) appears as Thor and Ringo Starr is the Pope. Yes, really. ALSO SAT 9p.
* Small Black + Beach Fossils @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave), 9:30p/$10. I've been reading of late the terms "chill-wave" or "glo-fi" or whatever in the same breath as Beach Fossils. No: Beach Fossils do bouncey, sugared-up, sun-drenched, surf-inflected indie rock. Small Black, on the other hand, w/ the synths and programmed beats and crooning above all that in a head-nodding groove, THEY are chill-wave, if you absolutely MUST use that term. Dope show, nonetheless.
THURSDAY
* "Subtle Anxiety: This Is How You Feel Now" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. Seoul's Doosan Gallery's emerging artists program continues this summer in NY w/ a three-artist show centered on contemporary social unrest, and considering the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (plus the wars, the global economy etc) there is loads of source material. w/ Jiyoon Koo, Jong Hyun Oh and Gyungjin Shin.
* "Grass Grows by Itself" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. The SECOND of two summer-ish group shows at the gallery. Last one was way trippy, this one sounds way Zen, and that's a good thing, I think, w/ all the overstimulation one is prone to amid a climate of like a million artists showing in over the course of eight W Chelsea blocks. Expect super-sublime works from Carmen Herrera, Wade Guyton, Wolfgang Laib, Kianja Strobert, Cameron Martin + more.
FRIDAY
* Aki Sasamoto w/ Saul Melman "Skewed Lines/Central Governor" + robbinschilds open studios @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to Courthouse Sq), 2p, part of "Greater NY". Sasamoto's cocoon-like performance last month, in the mosquito-net-draped back alcove of the boiler room, was partially a treatise on comedians and mosquitos, partially Sasamoto's Kafka-esque metamorphosis, zapping at the bug-lights with a straw, climbing and hanging from the pipes while belting out "Let It Be". It took her normally athletic lecture/performances to a whole 'nother level, and I'm excited where she takes episode two. Melman, meanwhile, stoically continues gilding the boiler. Performance duo robbinschilds stop in for their work-in-progress "I came here on my own", beginning at 3p upstairs in the galleries. ALSO SAT (during Warm Up) and SUN, same time
* "Inception" (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010) screenings in wide release. From the initial teaser trailer (w/ that chill-inducing echoey bass), to the strong casting (Leo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Ellen Page, Mario Cotillard), to the still-enigmatic subject matter (I "think" I get the plot), to the plain fact Nolan's got some great films under his belt, "Inception" is set up to totally rock our worlds. I sincerely hope it does.
* "Flaming Creatures" + "Scotch Tape" (dir. Jack Smith, 1963/2) screening at Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave), 7:30p/8:45p. One of the most iconic examples of underground American cinema, Smith's blown-out, carnivalesque series of posings, attitude and fierceness set the tone for all those "superstars" that followed it.
* Thee Oh Sees + So Cow @ Seaport Music Festival / Pier 17, 80 South St (23/45/JMZ to Fulton St), 6p. Yeah I'm into Thee Oh Sees' addicting jangly, summery vibe, but I dig So Cow (aka one Irishman Brian Kelly) and his vein of pure guitar-driven indie rock even more.
SATURDAY
* "Lost Highway" (dir. David Lynch, 1997) screening @ 92Y Tribeca / 200 Hudson St (1/ACE to Canal), 7:30p/$12. Watch Bill Pullman grooving out on the tenor sax, see Robert Loggia give driving instructions laced w/ gangsterese. Freak the hell out every time Robert Blake (as the Mystery Man) slinks onscreen, in this classic Lynch neo-noir thriller, which did the video-tape espionage thing way before Haneke's "Cache". Choice interchange, b/w Pullman and Blake at a party:
Blake: "We've met before, haven't we."
Pullman: "I don't think so....where was it you think we met?"
Blake: "At your house. Don't you remember?"
Pullman: "No, no I don't. Are you sure?"
Blake: "Of course. As a matter of fact, I'm there right now."
Pullman: "...what do you mean? You're where right now?"
Blake: "At your house."
* Siren Music Festival @ Coney Island (D/N to Stillwell Ave, F/Q to W 8th St/NY Aquarium), Noon/FREE. I'm all about the indie-inflected lineup this year, not for spastic headliners Matt & Kim or Canadian hardcore lot Holy Fuck (though I dig 'em, the latter). No, I'm going for The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, Surfer Blood and Screaming Females. With my SISTER, b/c she is extremely cool and informed. Dig?
* Saturdays @ Rock Yard w/ The Beets / 354 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 2p/FREE. Jelly NYC's bimonthly free outdoor concert series in Wlliamsburg, held in a lot instead of the Waterfront but hell, as long as the music is dope that's fine w/ me. And if you don't feel like spending about an hour on the train out to Coney Island, stay nearby for The Beets. w/ X-Ray Eyeballs and Gun Outfit.
* Warm Up: Ratatat (DJ set) @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E to 23rd St/Ely Ave, G to Court Square), 2-9p/$15. So Ratatat behind the decks isn't quite the same as Ratatat's rock-infused electronic live show, but if they mix in any of their hotter tracks, like "Wildcat", it's going to be sick. w/ Sweden's Air France.
* So Cow @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p. Perfect Saturday? Catch Siren Fest then jet back to Williamsburg for Brian Kelly's no doubt frenetic headlining show at DbA.
SUNDAY
* "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). I'm reminded of that challenging, genre-busting Joan Miro exhibition nearly two years ago, spanning "just" a decade of the artist's career but neatly usurping everything from Surrealism, early abstraction, Dadaism and just plain PAINTING as a medium. I'm thinking this four-year shot from Matisse's arguably better-known career (at least for the casual art-goer, versed in the lush, vibrant dancing nudes and saturated "Red Studio" and the lot) will carry a similar essence of sea change. Expect a lot of Cubist-style works and a lot of gray and black.
* The Splinters (LA) + Heavy Cream (Nashville) @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, J to Marcy), 8p. Sick lineup! Another chance to catch Cali's all-girl retro indie rock The Splinters, this time w/ nearly all-girl grungy punk Heavy Cream from Nashville.
MONDAY
* The Splinters (LA) + Heavy Cream (Nashville) @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$7. If you missed the DbA show, The Splinters and Heavy Cream team up again for another night of fierceness.
TUESDAY
* Heavy Cream (Nashville) @ Union Pool / 484 Union Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 9p/FREE. I'm attempting to hit all three Heavy Cream shows in Brooklyn, this third one being both 1) a record release party and 2) free.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Jakub Julian Ziolkowski "Timothy Galoty & the Dead Brains" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. The dark horse in this summer art season is no doubt 30-year-old Ziolkowski's uncategorizable, fleshified, phantasmatastic debut solo NY exhibition. And yes, you practically have to make up a new vocabulary (at least in English, I'm not sure about his native Poland) and even that doesn't encapsulate the special atmosphere at work here. I, like most NY gallery-goers, met him at the New Museum's inaugural triennial, "Younger Than Jesus", where Ziolkowski's genre-defying paintings (like Archimboldo? Like James Ensor? Like, uh, Max Beckmann??) delighted as much as they perplexed. Meaning: he's an incredibly adept artist w/ a fresh POV, but where is he focusing it? On heavily detailed crowd-scenes? On visceral portraiture? His exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, for the most part, is a cohesive, bleeding, respiring landscape, Peter Saul mixed with Ziolkowski's own unique brand of flesh-abstraction. Some of 'em look like the results of the warp and melt tools in Photoshop, only rendered in oil. Others are frenetic, disturbingly lovely messes of bulging organs and eviscerated bodies (the Caligula scene is pure bodily comedy), capillaries and wrinkles proliferating. A few are almost Dali-Surreal, a nearly vacant, ghostly backdrop w/ an elongated sad figure slinking about it. Stunningly perverse.
* "Lush Life Ch 1: Whistle", curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud & Franklin Evans @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. I will review these shows in turn, based totally on the visual and instinctual as I haven't read Price's book. But the shows give us much to go on. We get a fair sense of the '80s LES immediately w/ David Shapiro's array of handmade "found objects" — the want ad, the 'steal this book', the NY Post. Alice O'Malley's signature C-prints set the scene (the Mexican restaurant El Sombrero, the Ludlow rooftops) and David Kramer brings not only cheeky reconfigured alcohol adverts but an entire bar (which had what looked to be nearly a full bottle of Jack Daniels last time I visited). Take a stroll, get to know your surroundings.
* "Lush Life Ch 2: Liar", curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud & Franklin Evans @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. Thus far, my 2nd favorite of the novel's exhibitions, thanks especially to the strong roster at this show. Ezra Johnson's mural-sized word painting, screaming DOUBT, sets the mood. Tim Davis' politically-toned, sharp C-prints depict neighborhood gentrification, as do Manuel Acevedo's suite of modified Polaroids, each w/ a drawn-on "future structure", which are more subtly echoed by Scott Hug's 'pizza slice' collages.
* "Lush Life Ch 3 "First Bird (A Few Butterflies)", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. This one keeps the bird-theme close to its chest w/ a nearly uniform, avian-related show. In that sense it falls short of the explosive humor and dialogue of On Stellar Rays, but it's got some great stuff as well. My favorites: the haunting, long-pan video "Silent Among Us" by Dana Levy, of a flock of live doves in a taxidermy lab and Karen Heagle's huge acrylic and ink work, of crows on the most beautiful mountain of garbage you've probably ever seen.
* "Lush LIfe Ch 4: Let It Die", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. The BIG show of the nine, even though it doesn't utilize the upper gallery floor, literally spilling out into the street w/ Robert Buck's "shrine". Lots of fine work here, from Robert Melee's "melted" interventions, Amy Longenecker-Brown's scene-setting paintings contrasted w/ Rashid Johnson's spraypainted text on a mirror. The neighborhood, as I understand it, is in disarray, so the resultant exhibition is suitably in flux.
* "Lush Life Ch 5: Want Cards", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Y Gallery / 355A Bowery. The tiniest of the related exhibitions but incredibly to-the-point, w Rudy Shepherd's crude portraiture (are they mugshots or rather pleasant snaps of friends?) and Alisha Kerlin's (also showing at MoMA PS1) scattered deck of cards.
* "Lush Life Ch 6: "The Devil You Know", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Collette Blanchard Gallery / 26 Clinton St. LaToya Ruby Frazier's b&w portraiture and Chakaia Booker's armored-detritus vest really elevate this chapter. One of the most intense exhibitions in the show.
* "Lush Life Ch 8: "17 Plus 25 is 32", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Scaramouche / 52 Orchard St. My favorite of the lot. Jayson Keeling's glittery-surfaced wordy canvases are beautiful and require the extra introspective necessary for this entire exhibition. Karina Aguilera Skvirsky's childhood photography from Ecuador, Melissa Gordon's multiple-POV painting and Paul Pagk's encoded abstracts round out this destination spot.
* "Year One" @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. One of my favorites of the summer. Four fantastic, moody C. and E. European artists who are still getting little play in NY beyond this gallery. Alexander Tinei is my immediate favorite — his strong showing at NY VOLTA this past year sealed the deal for me — and this trio of new, dreamy nudes is riveting. Same deal w/ Josef Bolf's small, streaky, darker figures. Zsolt Bodoni's large, doomsday-ish industrial scenes and Daniel Pitin's smaller renderings from film stills balance the people with setting to create an all-inclusive haunting diorama.
* "Jo and Jack: Jo Baer and John Wesley in the '60s" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. Baer's son Josh curated this selection of paintings and works on paper by these two seemingly very different artists from their time living and working together in NYC. I've seen them separately many times, so I didn't get the hook: Wesley's flat, simplified, almost minimalist Pop-like figures and nudes v. Baer's extremely minimalist canvases, usually just a colored border around a white or off-white expanse. But the key here, in this beautiful exhibition, is how well the artists play off one another. How Baer's 3D-like "frames" echo the clean lines of a single or repeated Wesley character. Even how they applied the paint to the canvas and the respective sizes of the canvases relate, as if to experience one work you need to see the ones to either side of it.
* "Big PIcture", curated by Tom Sanford and Ryan Schneider @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Artists Sanford and Schneider (exhibiting here as well, w/ some of the more "realistic" compositions) culled together an impressive group show that tends toward loose, muscular semi-abstraction. I'm referring to Lisa Sanditz' melted ice-cream-like addition to a parking lot, to John Copeland's typically texture-heavy brushwork, to Brian Montuori's Bacon-esque snarl of amorphous form against an exacting forest backdrop, to Aaron Johnson's visually pulsating, visceral Adam and Eve portrait to Jeremy Willis' howling dripping Dali-esque landscape of appendages.
* Summer Shows @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. OK, anytime you've got a summer show that includes a bunch of Anselm Reyle works, you've got my attention. Esp. when it's a double-bed-sized shiny silver crinkle under acrylic glass, splashed w/ pink, green and black paint. Or even cooler: when you pair Reyle w/ Mike Kelley's glowing silicone-ish "Cities" and and Florian Maier-Aichen's at once serene and slightly screwed-up landscape C-prints. Unbelievable on paper, how a textured-and-troweled Reyle "monochrome" would work off a Maier-Aichen smeared-color river and a Kelley sea-blue icicles screaming up toward the ceiling, but they totally do.
* "The Pencil Show" @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. Artists doing fun and interesting stuff w/ graphite. OK: more than two dozen artists, cutting-edge and establishment, doing crazy stuff w/ graphite (whether it's their major medium or not). And: like twice that many works, encircling the gallery perimeter and mostly of intimate scale. I suggest you do a circuit, beginning near the front desk w/ Matt Savitsky's glisteningly textured, almost crumbled iron-like works, and take it all in, Kon Trubkovich's night photograph-style, Tomoo Gokita's gathering of loose portraiture, D-L Alvarez' pixellation, Dick Evans' creative minimalism... This was a "like" show for me, overall, but I was surprised but its breadth, so unless you just completely hate pencils there's something in it for you too.
* Jeronimo Elespe @ John Connelly Presents / 625 W 27th St. A beautiful new show from Madrid-based Elespe, furthering his scintillating small-scale portraits on aluminum panels. There's a certain sameness to the figures but their requisite elegance is undeniable. Think of Rembrandt's deep black backdrops, styled here as shimmering pool surfaces behind the sitting figure.
* Jeff Kessel @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Amid this season of group exhibitions, we have the Brooklyn artist's solo debut at the gallery, and it's a beauty not to be missed. I caught him last year in a three-artist abstraction show at Bortolami, and I was quite taken by Kessel's large, troweled-paint canvases. This grouping of ecstatic new works, like the shadowy one invoking Louise Fishman's style, or the grayish, speckled one resembling a drop-cloth (or Josh Smith's style, only paint-on-canvas), is fantastic. For one reason or another, he's not in "Greater NY" (mistake!), but I think we'll be seeing much more of Kessel in the future.
* "Shape Language", organized by Natalie Campbell @ Nicole Klagsbrun / 526 W 26th St #213. An incredible group show amid a veritable sea of summer group shows, centered on the ostensibly simple thesis of color and form. We're rewarded with a very savory exhibition, anchored by Blinky Palermo's ovoidish gray form and peer Imi Knoebel's jagged, colorful collage. From these '70s-era springboards, the rest of the show is a voyage through the creatively minimal and patterned (Ned Vena, Zak Prekop, Joe Bradley) to the luxuriantly colorful (Amy Sillman, Patrick Brennan, Wendy White's particularly entrancing multicanvas work). Yes, it's all artists/styles I easily get into, but I think you will too. Trust me on this one: Klagsbrun's show carries my highest recommendations.
* "Spray!" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. I dug this multigenerational show involving artists using aerosol-based media as their main component, at least in what was featured here. This spans Yayoi Kusama's early '70s signature psychedelia and Dan Christensen's gestural spraypaint-on-canvas from '68 to Jacqueline Humphries, Rosy Keyser and Sterling Ruby today.
* Andy Warhol "Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall)" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. For all the trouble in constructing this installation of eye-popping daisy panels behind a double-layer of running water (its summary destruction in Osaka in '69 and again in LACMA in '71), it's a calming, satisfying experience to see in person, finally fully-functioning and protected. Also: it's a cooling installation, what w/ the faint spray of water, depending on your proximity to it, and it's so bloody hot out as is...
LAST CHANCE
* Leslie Wayne "One Big Love" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. So there's this idea of impasto — thickly applied paint to the surface — then there's Wayne's signature violent, mesmerizingly beautiful version. She slathers the canvas, rips up parts months later, folding them onto themselves and then adds more paint, more layers. The end result are jewel-sized miracles that can resemble impossibly-colored wood-shavings, seashell insides, arctic landscapes, plastic food, and at the most 'simplistic' acid-colored twisted affairs not entirely unlike Steven Parrino. I dig, I dig.
* Gene Davis @ Ameringer McEnery Yohe / 525 W 22nd St. Classic colored-line test-pattern abstracts in acrylic or oil and Magna — to create that colored-pencil effect — incl. one massive wall-spanning canvas that you can get lost in.
* Josephine Meckseper @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. Don't let the chrome and mirrored installation blind you from the hard imagery, as Meckseper takes on the U.S. occupation in Iraq and trends of the U.S. Supreme Court, though all is drenched in hyperbolized luxury, 20" rims here, blinged out wristwatches there. If you've ever thought those alpha car lots lining 11th Ave were a bit...grotesque, you'll dig Meckseper's show.
* "Jack in the Space" @ Dean Project / 45-43 21st St, Long Island City. Heng-Gil Han, visual arts director of the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, curated an excellent six-artist show on diffusing space. Lishan Chang's charred baguette installation assaults you nasally before you even see the loaves, torpedo-like crawling the walls and leading you to Kyung Woo Han's walk-in Mondrian painting/video installation. Hyong Nam Ahn's more seductively sedate "Springtime in Brooklyn", a jagged neon, metal and wood sculpture like a robotic butterfly, deserves several passes.
* 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.
* "Homunculi", curated by Trinie Dalton @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. An appropriately physical show, w/ strong works by Allison Schulnik (doing the impasto thing well, like a 'bouquet of flowers' painting), Matt Greene (and I must say, I'm really impressed w/ his works here) and Ruby Neri, particularly her doll-like duo, resembling like a delicate cross b/w Louise Bourgeois' knit figures and Folkert de Jong.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Parting thoughts on 2010 NYAFF/Japan Cuts
This year's NYAFF ended Thursday, and while Japan Cuts continues for another week I've had my fill of fantastic, subversive, entertaining film. Even if everything coming out in America this summer sucks terribly, even if Christopher Nolan's Inception should let me down (though I'm hoping it's awesome), I have this cache of NYAFF/Japan Cuts to carry me through. Thank you, Subway Cinema. Thank you, Japan Society. Thank you, Pink Eiga and thank you, Sushi Typhoon. The festival gets doper every year.
With that, I rank the films I caught this year. I dug everything, all 18, but some I REALLY really dug. I caught 3 of the 4 IFC Center midnight screenings, 2 "REturn to the Old School: Hong Kong's New Martial Arts Cinema", all three Sushi Typhoon releases, one retro screening, both giant monsters, three action films, three "box office monsters", two comedies, two romances, one "one-night stand", no political films (oops!), two feat. award-winning actors, and 4 (of 5 listed) "psychedelic" films, at least according to Subway Cinema's program book. So:
Confessions (NYAFF/Japan Cuts) - Director Tetsuya Nakashima's new film blew everything else away. I still get chills thinking about that one scene, the classroom ablur w/ motion as the girl w/ the sad, knowing eyes stares over her shoulder, at the camera and into our souls. I sincerely hope this gets a full U.S. release.
Mutant Girls Squad (NYAFF/Japan Cuts) - I met two of my favorite directors at this festival, Yoshihiro Nishimura and Noboru Iguchi, plus two A+ awesome actresses, Asami and Cay Izumi, and this team-up film (also directed by action guru Tak Sakaguchi) made me so very happy, in a giddy sugar-rush way.
The Ancient Dogoo Girl: Special Movie Edition (special screening) - Surprised a Kansai-area TV program recut as a film ranks this high on my list? Considering Iguchi and Nishimura both had a hand in it, plus it stars Asami and Cay Izumi (in Nishimura's part) and the effervescent Erika Yazawa as lead in Iguchi's), it makes COMPLETE, TOTAL sense.
Actresses (NYAFF) - Six of Korea's best, brightest, most beautiful actresses playing themselves in a faux-documentary Vogue cover shoot = incredibly, addictingly fun.
Parade (Japan Cuts) - Gold star for one of the hottest young casts in the entire festival, add lots of mumblecore dialogue and a dose of dread.
Sophie's Revenge (NYAFF) - I really surprised myself w/ this one. Escapist rom-com, yes, but Zhang Ziyi is adorable (as is So Ji-Sub, in a boneheaded way) and...well, we need films like this too.
Chaw (NYAFF) - Another instance of a very smart Korean-directed film disguised as a monster movie. The fact the beastie doesn't visually appear until like 1/2-way through should clue you in that there is WAY more important things at work.
The Hanging Garden (Japan Cuts) - An incredibly bracing, family drama experience. I need to familiarize myself w/ director Toyoda's other works, but this one places him firmly at Sion Sono's level, at least in my opinion.
Ip Man 2 (NYAFF) - The perfect way to begin this year's NYAFF. The best action, w/ emotive undertones. Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung going at it produced many heart-stopping, edge-of-your-seat moments. Then the terrible, indelicate Brit barges in.
Alien Vs. Ninja (NYAFF/Japan Cuts) - I am totally sold on Sushi Typhoon. The premise of this film always sounded a bit goofy to me, but the payoff was intense: superb action sequences, actual character development, witty dialogue and banter, and a very good-looking three-actor lead.
Pink Power Strikes Back - Groper Train: School Uniform Hunter (NYAFF) - I know pink films are supposed to be more enjoyable than "smart", maybe, but Asami carries it into a whole higher domain. She's an action actress through and through, true, but her cutesy, naive routine here proves she can ACT.
Castaway on the Moon (NYAFF) - A very sweet, inventive Korean rom-com.
L.A. Streetfighters (NYAFF) - I am so pleased this mid-'80s Korean action-exploitation film is available on Netflix! The whole girlfriend licking ice cream off Tony's face (even beyond the Spikes gang leader w/ his half-shirt) must be seen to be believed.
Yatterman (NYAFF) - Silly film, but w/ Takashi Miike's signature totally deviant moments, and the actresses are gorgeous.
Doman-Seman (NYAFF) - One star for incredible effective soundtrack. One more star for the Kyoto neighborhoods setting.
Death Kappa (NYAFF) - Great, monstrous, stupid fun, w/ props to the amazing rubber-suit costume and extra props to casting Misato Hirata as the uber-cute lead.
Symbol (NYAFF) - Bit New Age-y, but beautiful to look at.
The Storm Warriors (NYAFF) - I had no idea what was going on, but it's a visually stunning film.
Japan Cuts 2010 "Parade"
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
NYAFF/Japan Cuts 2010: "Hanging Garden" + "Doman Seman"
fee's LIST (through 7/13)
THURSDAY
* "Lush Life", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans, @ NINE LES Galleries, 6-9p. An LES art-block-party, based on Richard Price's eponymous novel. Each of the nine galleries took a chapter and formed a group show around it. Three are open already (read on under CURRENT SHOWS) but the full-out opening is tonight. And I'm not saying you need to see 'em in order, as you'll be doing a lot of backtracking, but for the three open it was helpful for me to see them sequentially. Sue Scott's provides a great intro to the entire project.
- Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St: Ch 1: "Whistle"
- On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St: Ch 2: "Liar"
- Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St: "Ch 3: First Bird (a Few Butterflies)"
- Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St: "Ch 4: Let It Die"
- Y Gallery / 355A Bowery: "Ch 5: Want Cards"
- Collette Blanchard Gallery / 26 Clinton St: "Ch 6: "The Devil You Know"
- Salon 94 Freemans / 1 Freemans Alley: "Ch 7: Wolf Tickets"
- Scaramouche / 52 Orchard St: "Ch 8: "17 Plus 25 is 32"
- Eleven Rivington / 11 Rivington St: "Ch 9: She'll Be Apples"
* Kyoung Eun Kang "In & Out" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St, 2nd Fl (part of the "Irrelevant" Group Show), 7p. Kang performs with cotton candy, which is the same medium she's covered w/ in her "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" video screening at the exhibition.
* Oh Sufan "Variation" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Think Franz Kline's action-expressionism and Yves Klein's shimmering monochromes, only w/ Oh's proper background.
* Ala Dehghan "I Can Explain Everything!" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. Debut solo show from the young Tehran-based artist, whose richly narrative works on paper combine traditional miniature painting with her contemporary experiences as an Iranian woman.
* Jennie C. Jones "Electric" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. An incredibly intriguing pairing of minimalism, abstraction and abstract-jazz, in Jones' continued exploration of art history and Black history. Feat. her edit of Miles Davis' "In a Silent Way" (minus his trumpet part) matched w/ John Cage's "4'33"", plus collage and ink drawings mimicking music and sculpture from instrument cable.
* Jorge Pardo "Sculpture Ink" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. If you attended the creative Guggenheim exhibition "theanyspacewhatever", you've seen Pardo's partitioning, silkscreened prints before. But that doesn't make them any less cool in this gallery setting.
* "Big PIcture", curated by Tom Sanford and Ryan Schneider @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Large-scale paintings by large-scale minds, w/ mash-ups of pop culture, politics, social issues — in short, good-looking art w/ a message. Feat. works by Kamrooz Aram, Holly Coulis, Emily Noelle Lambert, Lisa Sanditz, the curators and more.
* Pterodactyl + YellowFever (Austin TX) @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. I don't know what I'm more excited about, seeing the messy indie rockers from my college town back in NY or getting sonically pummeled by Pterodactyl's unrelenting energy. A: both. w/ Dream Diary
* Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival presents "Salute the DJ" @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, WIlliamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. A tribute to the beat-miners and wax-scratchers behind the MC, feat. some absolutely dope local legends incl. Rob Swift (X-Ecutioners), Rhettmatic (Beat Junkies), DJ Spinna (who hosted the original "Soundbombing" album) and Mr. Bobbito Garcia himself.
FRIDAY
* "You Were There", curated by Thomas Duncan @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. The deceptively simple concept, showing an artist's work from 2005 AND from 2010 (the same timeframe as "Greater New York"), could lead to interesting results, esp. considering those involved: Rita Ackermann, Josh Smith, Sarah Braman, Joe Bradley, Justin Adian and Sara Greenberger Rafferty.
* "in here" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects)" / 261 Broome St. Five artists decipher the relation between visible/invisible and pictorial thinking, feat. Michele Abeles and Uri Aran, whose respective photography and works on paper are both at MoMA PS1's "Greater New York", in addition to Jamie Isenstein (sleight of hand), Halsey Rodman (assemblage) and Erik Wysocan (mixed media).
* "Con Air" (dir. Simon West, 1997) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). The Finale of "Cage Heat: Nicholas Cage at Midnight". A Nic Cage festival this huge necessarily end w/ a bang, and if that doesn't mean the atrocious, heavily parodied "Wicker Man", then it must mean the explosive prison transport flick "Con Air", w/ a long-haired, drawling Cage in a sweaty tank top, locking arms w/ baddies like a creepy Steve Buscemi, a brooding Ving Rhames and John Malkovich basically playing himself in prison garb. Must be seen to be believed!! Also SAT at midnight.
* YellowFever (Austin TX) + MINKS @ Monster Island / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$9. Another delicious, though goth/glammier chance to catch YellowFever, as they're matched w/ local Captured Tracks mega-group MINKS (think New Order w/ girl-guy vocals). w/ UK's Wetdog
* ZAZA + Naked Hearts @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$9. One of the many draws to this show, beyond the dope music, is they've all got really ace vocalists. ZAZA are stellar popstars (it's "music to make out to", after all) and Naked Hearts produce concentrated power-pop refrains.
* Real Estate + Kurt Vile (and band) @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 7p/$15. A sunny, ace lineup perhaps best suited for a backyard party, but I'll take it anyway. Real Estate do that surf-rock thing w/ expert songwriting and shimmering refrains. Kurt Vile's rootsy indie rock is augmented by his full band. w/ the ever-lovable Big Troubles
SATURDAY
* Harry Smith program @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 6:15p. A very special screening of Smith's early experimental abstractions, plus the surreal "Oz, the Tin Woodman's Dream" from 1967.
* Wetdog (UK) + Hollows (Chicago) @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/$7. 2nd to catch Captured Tracks' rough-edged all-girl Wetdog, this time w/ Chicago's Hollows, who sound a bit like '60s girl-groups (perhaps due to the great vintage organ front-and-center). w/ Loneliest Monk
SUNDAY
* Xiu Xiu + Deerhoof play Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" @ The Pool Parties / E River State Park, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), . We're dead in the middle of summer, so it's only appropriate the MAYJAHest of outdoor free concerts debuts today, and though I felt last year's lineup was a bit spotty, this year's is solid. Take it from me. And it begins in a huge way w/ art-rockers Deerhoof and other-art-rockers Xiu Xiu covering Joy Division's seminal album "Unknown Pleasures". Picture Satomi singing "She's Lost Control" in that airy voice amid buzzsaw guitars and pummeling drums. Pair that w/ Jamie doing "Shadowplay" against clanging percussion and NES-keyboards. I'm just postulating here, but it's going to be a dope show.
MONDAY
* MINKS + Blissed Out @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p/$8. Great lineup, esp. Captured Tracks' New Wave (in a good way) MINKS.
TUESDAY
* David LaChapelle "American Jesus" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. I am struggling to withhold comment until I see this potential monstrosity. Hell, LaChapelle could surprise me. But I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.
* The Beets + German Measles @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Essential summer lineup of hot local indie, w/ party boys German Measles and the sing-along garage-punk sensations The Beets. w/ Liquor Store
CURRENT SHOWS
* "The Evryali Score", curated by Olivia Shao @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525-533 W 19th St. I am amazed by the crop of inventive summer group shows this year, and Shao's elusive detective story is perhaps the best of all, and will certainly reward you for repeat visits if you've the energy and penchant for a little sleuthing. The exhibition began at MoMA PS1, with Shao's "The Baghdad batteries", the first of four rotating galleries during 'Greater NY', before reconfiguring — and tremendously expanding — at Zwirner. The larger space and multiple rooms is definitely to the exhibition's benefit, I think, as though these are incredibly discreet works, they still require room to breathe and for better contemplation. The 525 space contains much of the reconfigured PS1 show, w/ a few swaps (Marcel Broodthaers' gold under glass replaces Walter De Maria's shiny "Power Bar") and additions, like the stunning, subtly shimmering Willem De Rooij wall-spanning canvas. Though I suggest you begin w/ 533 (if you missed the PS1 version, no biggie), w/ the duet of John Knight's wall projection and (rarely exhibiting) Dutch conceptualist Stanley Brouwn's wooden wall piece. Brouwn's structure, like an inverted cube, calls attention to the gallery wall (and floor) itself, causing us to note its levelness (or slant) and the surrounding space. Craig Kalpakjian offers window-like (but windowless) abstract C-prints. Bernadette Corporation (one of several collectives in the show, the cheekily named Reena Spaulings is another) has a multiscreen Fendi video that works in conversation w/ Josef Strau's lamp installations in both galleries. And I'll bet you've never seen a wooden Claes Oldenburg relief before. And those grayed-out names on the show program, coinciding w/ fake birthdates? That's Sonia Lucerne's "Checklist Intervention". I'm telling you, spend some time with this one, let the clues slowly de-opaque themselves, but don't be surprised if much of it remains elusive even on several visits.
* "Lush Life Ch 1: Whistle", curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud & Franklin Evans @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. I will review these shows in turn, based totally on the visual and instinctual as I haven't read Price's book. But the shows give us much to go on. We get a fair sense of the '80s LES immediately w/ David Shapiro's array of handmade "found objects" — the want ad, the 'steal this book', the NY Post. Alice O'Malley's signature C-prints set the scene (the Mexican restaurant El Sombrero, the Ludlow rooftops) and David Kramer brings not only cheeky reconfigured alcohol adverts but an entire bar (which had what looked to be nearly a full bottle of Jack Daniels last time I visited). Take a stroll, get to know your surroundings.
* "Lush Life Ch 2: Liar", curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud & Franklin Evans @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. Thus far, my favorite of the novel's exhibitions, thanks especially to the strong roster at this show. Ezra Johnson's mural-sized word painting, screaming DOUBT, sets the mood. Tim Davis' politically-toned, sharp C-prints depict neighborhood gentrification, as do Manuel Acevedo's suite of modified Polaroids, each w/ a drawn-on "future structure", which are more subtly echoed by Scott Hug's 'pizza slice' collages.
* "Lush Life Ch 3 "First Bird (A Few Butterflies)", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. This one keeps the bird-theme close to its chest w/ a nearly uniform, avian-related show. In that sense it falls short of the explosive humor and dialogue of On Stellar Rays, but it's got some great stuff as well. My favorites: the haunting, long-pan video "Silent Among Us" by Dana Levy, of a flock of live doves in a taxidermy lab and Karen Heagle's huge acrylic and ink work, of crows on the most beautiful mountain of garbage you've probably ever seen.
* Yuan Yuan "A World of Yesterday and Tomorrow" @ Chambers Fine Art / 522 W 19th St. I loved this show. I'm a big Yuan fan as it is, and the young Beijing artist's foggy, mesmerizing paintings — shown here as small-scale groupings in ceramic frames and larger diptychs — are like the soft-focus scenes from a Sofia Coppola film, only clearly from Yuan's memory.
* "Irrelevant: Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don't Make Work About Being Asian", curated by Joann Kim and Lesley Sheng @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St, 2nd Fl. I recalled the 2007 exhibition "Making a Home" at Japan Society, which featured nearly three dozen Japanese artists living in NY, when I first heard about this multicultural, emerging artists show. Kim and Sheng culled together an even huger grouping, displaying a hotbed of young, creative artists working in none of the mnemonic, typecasting devices many critics and viewers expect of Asian artists: no manga-cartoony stuff, no renderings of Mao, no calligraphy here. As one example, take Tattfoo Tan, whose several years' worth of environmentally conscious endeavors work as a side-gallery-filling installation, from his mobile gardens to his "master composter" certificate. He'll be giving lessons on just that, composting, next week so stay tuned here (there are loads of performances from exhibiting artists through the end of the month. Mai Ueda, who opened the show last week, remains only as a glittery signature and handprint on the gallery wall). Check Kyoung Eun Kang's disquietingly messy video "HAPPY BIRTHDAY", where she pulls a vintage Paul McCarthy, Nancy Kim's and Youngna Park's enigmatic photography (the former recalling Uta Barth), Jason Tomme's cerebral "Cig Scale" assemblage, Jane V. Hsu's noirish "People Were Made to Disappear" short film, and like 40 other artists.
* "Swell: Art 1950-2010" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St + Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Surf-art, specifically California art, is a great idea for a mega summer group show in NY. Seriously. These two galleries (plus NYEHAUS) are chock-full of sunny, salty, subversive, and stunning works, some good and others really fantastic. Metro Pictures wins the day w/ a powerful array of California Minimalists (Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell, Helen Pashgian, John McCracken, Peter Alexander) v. the freaky So-Cal lot (Bruce Conner, George Helms), though Petzel had a few surprising, must-see pieces (Ashley Bickerton's classic coral wave, Alex Weinstein's shimmering "block" and the R.Crumb comix). Vast as the ocean.
* Brion Nuda Rosch @ DCKT Contemporary / 195 Bowery. A stunning solo-show debut for the San Fran-based Rosch. He works w/in a tight color palette — white, chocolatey-brown and a beguiling turquoise (as signature to him as International Klein Blue, only he didn't "patent" the color as his own — and a variety of media, found book pages, angular abstract sculpture, coated figurines, to fantastic effect. Case the gallery very closely and Rosch's many interventions, like the angled sculpture and the robotic "faces" in book pages, slowly and rewardingly reveal themselves. A destination exhibition.
* "Christmas in July" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. It's bloody hot out so why not a summer group show themed to the wintry holiday? Matt Keegan's paste-up Google images-esque chart is a tidy comparison: Santa v. a fat beachgoer, Uggs v. flip-flops, fruitcake v. a sand castle, a wrapped package v. a hot male in a Speedo. Beyond this, which is oddly addicting, is a lot of appropriately either garish or attention-demanding works, some nice classics from John Baldessari and Lynda Benglis, a funny Christian Holstad assemblage of a yellowed square of carpet bearing the imprint (and shed needles) of an absent artificial tree, a Marepe ornament sculpture recalling Jeff Koons only way less precious, and loads else.
* "Shred", curated by Carlo McCormick @ Perry Rubenstein Gallery / 527 W 23rd St. There is quite a range to the concept of collage as fine art, from Brian Douglas' laborious cut-paper rendering that is deeply textured like an Impressionist's painting, to Jess' and Bruce Conner's interventions, to Mark Flood's portrait echoing Jean-Paul Goude, to Dash Snow's deftly impressive pairing, to Judith Supine's elaborate, enigmatic acrylic portrait.
* "Seat-of-the-Pants" @ Museum 52 / 4 E 2nd St at Bowery. A tight little group show of the hot downtown lot (Amy Yao, Siobhan Liddell, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Jacob Robichaux), but the strong personalities of the latter two (esp. Robichaux's tactile "Papier-lacerer" trio) usurp the energy from the former. Liddell's interventions are typically restrained, as they are here, and Yao's discreet, beguiling collages don't embody the same energy as her fantastic installation at MoMA PS1.
* Carol Bove + Sterling Ruby + Dana Schutz @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Q: how to incorporate the respective abilities of these three very different contemporary artists? A: don't even try, just let them do their thing. But in doing so, and w/ some deft planning, the gallery has managed to successfully mute Ruby's atmosphere-sucking quality in his brutal, large-scale sculpture (the slickened, wooden cannon "Consolidator") w/ Bove's pair of scale-defying Plexiglas and metal-mesh boxes. They're elevator car-sized, true, yet the transparent quality and the metallic shimmer tricks the eye and creates an interesting effect w/ the space. Schutz's trio of new paintings are good, primarily the very abstract "Finger in Fan", and adds a color element to the room.
* "...and then some" @ Feature Inc / 131 Allen St. One wall of Tom of Finland's high-performance, works on paper and an audience response on the right, this salon-style mixÚ Mie Yim's fuzzy alien orgy, Bastille's Geiger-esque scenes, Martin of Holland's scatology, Raymond Pettibon's cheeky minimalism, Jeremy Pittu's Richard Prince-esque vintage prints. Lots of penis here, plus some very disturbing subject matter (mainly coming from Martin of Holland), to the point where our hero Tom's works are on the relatively tame edge of the spectrum.
LAST CHANCE
* "Natural Renditions" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Marlborough's massive summer group show is incredibly trippy this go-around, a riot for the senses. It is too much to take in all at once, but worth repeat, brief visits to zero in on the better works. I was pleased to see Rob Wynne's exquisite blown-glass 'shrooms here and Kim Dorland's tortured mixed-media canvases are fantastic, subtly touching on deforestation. It's saying something when Will Ryman contributes one of the more innocuous pieces in a show. Better, and keeping w/ the overall theme of 'natural', are Valerie Hegarty's and Amit Greenberg's branch-incorporated sculpture.
* 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.
* "Lush Life", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans, @ NINE LES Galleries, 6-9p. An LES art-block-party, based on Richard Price's eponymous novel. Each of the nine galleries took a chapter and formed a group show around it. Three are open already (read on under CURRENT SHOWS) but the full-out opening is tonight. And I'm not saying you need to see 'em in order, as you'll be doing a lot of backtracking, but for the three open it was helpful for me to see them sequentially. Sue Scott's provides a great intro to the entire project.
- Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St: Ch 1: "Whistle"
- On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St: Ch 2: "Liar"
- Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St: "Ch 3: First Bird (a Few Butterflies)"
- Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St: "Ch 4: Let It Die"
- Y Gallery / 355A Bowery: "Ch 5: Want Cards"
- Collette Blanchard Gallery / 26 Clinton St: "Ch 6: "The Devil You Know"
- Salon 94 Freemans / 1 Freemans Alley: "Ch 7: Wolf Tickets"
- Scaramouche / 52 Orchard St: "Ch 8: "17 Plus 25 is 32"
- Eleven Rivington / 11 Rivington St: "Ch 9: She'll Be Apples"
* Kyoung Eun Kang "In & Out" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St, 2nd Fl (part of the "Irrelevant" Group Show), 7p. Kang performs with cotton candy, which is the same medium she's covered w/ in her "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" video screening at the exhibition.
* Oh Sufan "Variation" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Think Franz Kline's action-expressionism and Yves Klein's shimmering monochromes, only w/ Oh's proper background.
* Ala Dehghan "I Can Explain Everything!" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. Debut solo show from the young Tehran-based artist, whose richly narrative works on paper combine traditional miniature painting with her contemporary experiences as an Iranian woman.
* Jennie C. Jones "Electric" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. An incredibly intriguing pairing of minimalism, abstraction and abstract-jazz, in Jones' continued exploration of art history and Black history. Feat. her edit of Miles Davis' "In a Silent Way" (minus his trumpet part) matched w/ John Cage's "4'33"", plus collage and ink drawings mimicking music and sculpture from instrument cable.
* Jorge Pardo "Sculpture Ink" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. If you attended the creative Guggenheim exhibition "theanyspacewhatever", you've seen Pardo's partitioning, silkscreened prints before. But that doesn't make them any less cool in this gallery setting.
* "Big PIcture", curated by Tom Sanford and Ryan Schneider @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Large-scale paintings by large-scale minds, w/ mash-ups of pop culture, politics, social issues — in short, good-looking art w/ a message. Feat. works by Kamrooz Aram, Holly Coulis, Emily Noelle Lambert, Lisa Sanditz, the curators and more.
* Pterodactyl + YellowFever (Austin TX) @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. I don't know what I'm more excited about, seeing the messy indie rockers from my college town back in NY or getting sonically pummeled by Pterodactyl's unrelenting energy. A: both. w/ Dream Diary
* Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival presents "Salute the DJ" @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, WIlliamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. A tribute to the beat-miners and wax-scratchers behind the MC, feat. some absolutely dope local legends incl. Rob Swift (X-Ecutioners), Rhettmatic (Beat Junkies), DJ Spinna (who hosted the original "Soundbombing" album) and Mr. Bobbito Garcia himself.
FRIDAY
* "You Were There", curated by Thomas Duncan @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. The deceptively simple concept, showing an artist's work from 2005 AND from 2010 (the same timeframe as "Greater New York"), could lead to interesting results, esp. considering those involved: Rita Ackermann, Josh Smith, Sarah Braman, Joe Bradley, Justin Adian and Sara Greenberger Rafferty.
* "in here" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects)" / 261 Broome St. Five artists decipher the relation between visible/invisible and pictorial thinking, feat. Michele Abeles and Uri Aran, whose respective photography and works on paper are both at MoMA PS1's "Greater New York", in addition to Jamie Isenstein (sleight of hand), Halsey Rodman (assemblage) and Erik Wysocan (mixed media).
* "Con Air" (dir. Simon West, 1997) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). The Finale of "Cage Heat: Nicholas Cage at Midnight". A Nic Cage festival this huge necessarily end w/ a bang, and if that doesn't mean the atrocious, heavily parodied "Wicker Man", then it must mean the explosive prison transport flick "Con Air", w/ a long-haired, drawling Cage in a sweaty tank top, locking arms w/ baddies like a creepy Steve Buscemi, a brooding Ving Rhames and John Malkovich basically playing himself in prison garb. Must be seen to be believed!! Also SAT at midnight.
* YellowFever (Austin TX) + MINKS @ Monster Island / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$9. Another delicious, though goth/glammier chance to catch YellowFever, as they're matched w/ local Captured Tracks mega-group MINKS (think New Order w/ girl-guy vocals). w/ UK's Wetdog
* ZAZA + Naked Hearts @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$9. One of the many draws to this show, beyond the dope music, is they've all got really ace vocalists. ZAZA are stellar popstars (it's "music to make out to", after all) and Naked Hearts produce concentrated power-pop refrains.
* Real Estate + Kurt Vile (and band) @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 7p/$15. A sunny, ace lineup perhaps best suited for a backyard party, but I'll take it anyway. Real Estate do that surf-rock thing w/ expert songwriting and shimmering refrains. Kurt Vile's rootsy indie rock is augmented by his full band. w/ the ever-lovable Big Troubles
SATURDAY
* Harry Smith program @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 6:15p. A very special screening of Smith's early experimental abstractions, plus the surreal "Oz, the Tin Woodman's Dream" from 1967.
* Wetdog (UK) + Hollows (Chicago) @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/$7. 2nd to catch Captured Tracks' rough-edged all-girl Wetdog, this time w/ Chicago's Hollows, who sound a bit like '60s girl-groups (perhaps due to the great vintage organ front-and-center). w/ Loneliest Monk
SUNDAY
* Xiu Xiu + Deerhoof play Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" @ The Pool Parties / E River State Park, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), . We're dead in the middle of summer, so it's only appropriate the MAYJAHest of outdoor free concerts debuts today, and though I felt last year's lineup was a bit spotty, this year's is solid. Take it from me. And it begins in a huge way w/ art-rockers Deerhoof and other-art-rockers Xiu Xiu covering Joy Division's seminal album "Unknown Pleasures". Picture Satomi singing "She's Lost Control" in that airy voice amid buzzsaw guitars and pummeling drums. Pair that w/ Jamie doing "Shadowplay" against clanging percussion and NES-keyboards. I'm just postulating here, but it's going to be a dope show.
MONDAY
* MINKS + Blissed Out @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p/$8. Great lineup, esp. Captured Tracks' New Wave (in a good way) MINKS.
TUESDAY
* David LaChapelle "American Jesus" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. I am struggling to withhold comment until I see this potential monstrosity. Hell, LaChapelle could surprise me. But I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.
* The Beets + German Measles @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Essential summer lineup of hot local indie, w/ party boys German Measles and the sing-along garage-punk sensations The Beets. w/ Liquor Store
CURRENT SHOWS
* "The Evryali Score", curated by Olivia Shao @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525-533 W 19th St. I am amazed by the crop of inventive summer group shows this year, and Shao's elusive detective story is perhaps the best of all, and will certainly reward you for repeat visits if you've the energy and penchant for a little sleuthing. The exhibition began at MoMA PS1, with Shao's "The Baghdad batteries", the first of four rotating galleries during 'Greater NY', before reconfiguring — and tremendously expanding — at Zwirner. The larger space and multiple rooms is definitely to the exhibition's benefit, I think, as though these are incredibly discreet works, they still require room to breathe and for better contemplation. The 525 space contains much of the reconfigured PS1 show, w/ a few swaps (Marcel Broodthaers' gold under glass replaces Walter De Maria's shiny "Power Bar") and additions, like the stunning, subtly shimmering Willem De Rooij wall-spanning canvas. Though I suggest you begin w/ 533 (if you missed the PS1 version, no biggie), w/ the duet of John Knight's wall projection and (rarely exhibiting) Dutch conceptualist Stanley Brouwn's wooden wall piece. Brouwn's structure, like an inverted cube, calls attention to the gallery wall (and floor) itself, causing us to note its levelness (or slant) and the surrounding space. Craig Kalpakjian offers window-like (but windowless) abstract C-prints. Bernadette Corporation (one of several collectives in the show, the cheekily named Reena Spaulings is another) has a multiscreen Fendi video that works in conversation w/ Josef Strau's lamp installations in both galleries. And I'll bet you've never seen a wooden Claes Oldenburg relief before. And those grayed-out names on the show program, coinciding w/ fake birthdates? That's Sonia Lucerne's "Checklist Intervention". I'm telling you, spend some time with this one, let the clues slowly de-opaque themselves, but don't be surprised if much of it remains elusive even on several visits.
* "Lush Life Ch 1: Whistle", curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud & Franklin Evans @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. I will review these shows in turn, based totally on the visual and instinctual as I haven't read Price's book. But the shows give us much to go on. We get a fair sense of the '80s LES immediately w/ David Shapiro's array of handmade "found objects" — the want ad, the 'steal this book', the NY Post. Alice O'Malley's signature C-prints set the scene (the Mexican restaurant El Sombrero, the Ludlow rooftops) and David Kramer brings not only cheeky reconfigured alcohol adverts but an entire bar (which had what looked to be nearly a full bottle of Jack Daniels last time I visited). Take a stroll, get to know your surroundings.
* "Lush Life Ch 2: Liar", curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud & Franklin Evans @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. Thus far, my favorite of the novel's exhibitions, thanks especially to the strong roster at this show. Ezra Johnson's mural-sized word painting, screaming DOUBT, sets the mood. Tim Davis' politically-toned, sharp C-prints depict neighborhood gentrification, as do Manuel Acevedo's suite of modified Polaroids, each w/ a drawn-on "future structure", which are more subtly echoed by Scott Hug's 'pizza slice' collages.
* "Lush Life Ch 3 "First Bird (A Few Butterflies)", curated by Omar Lopez-Chaoud & Franklin Evans @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. This one keeps the bird-theme close to its chest w/ a nearly uniform, avian-related show. In that sense it falls short of the explosive humor and dialogue of On Stellar Rays, but it's got some great stuff as well. My favorites: the haunting, long-pan video "Silent Among Us" by Dana Levy, of a flock of live doves in a taxidermy lab and Karen Heagle's huge acrylic and ink work, of crows on the most beautiful mountain of garbage you've probably ever seen.
* Yuan Yuan "A World of Yesterday and Tomorrow" @ Chambers Fine Art / 522 W 19th St. I loved this show. I'm a big Yuan fan as it is, and the young Beijing artist's foggy, mesmerizing paintings — shown here as small-scale groupings in ceramic frames and larger diptychs — are like the soft-focus scenes from a Sofia Coppola film, only clearly from Yuan's memory.
* "Irrelevant: Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don't Make Work About Being Asian", curated by Joann Kim and Lesley Sheng @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St, 2nd Fl. I recalled the 2007 exhibition "Making a Home" at Japan Society, which featured nearly three dozen Japanese artists living in NY, when I first heard about this multicultural, emerging artists show. Kim and Sheng culled together an even huger grouping, displaying a hotbed of young, creative artists working in none of the mnemonic, typecasting devices many critics and viewers expect of Asian artists: no manga-cartoony stuff, no renderings of Mao, no calligraphy here. As one example, take Tattfoo Tan, whose several years' worth of environmentally conscious endeavors work as a side-gallery-filling installation, from his mobile gardens to his "master composter" certificate. He'll be giving lessons on just that, composting, next week so stay tuned here (there are loads of performances from exhibiting artists through the end of the month. Mai Ueda, who opened the show last week, remains only as a glittery signature and handprint on the gallery wall). Check Kyoung Eun Kang's disquietingly messy video "HAPPY BIRTHDAY", where she pulls a vintage Paul McCarthy, Nancy Kim's and Youngna Park's enigmatic photography (the former recalling Uta Barth), Jason Tomme's cerebral "Cig Scale" assemblage, Jane V. Hsu's noirish "People Were Made to Disappear" short film, and like 40 other artists.
* "Swell: Art 1950-2010" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St + Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Surf-art, specifically California art, is a great idea for a mega summer group show in NY. Seriously. These two galleries (plus NYEHAUS) are chock-full of sunny, salty, subversive, and stunning works, some good and others really fantastic. Metro Pictures wins the day w/ a powerful array of California Minimalists (Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell, Helen Pashgian, John McCracken, Peter Alexander) v. the freaky So-Cal lot (Bruce Conner, George Helms), though Petzel had a few surprising, must-see pieces (Ashley Bickerton's classic coral wave, Alex Weinstein's shimmering "block" and the R.Crumb comix). Vast as the ocean.
* Brion Nuda Rosch @ DCKT Contemporary / 195 Bowery. A stunning solo-show debut for the San Fran-based Rosch. He works w/in a tight color palette — white, chocolatey-brown and a beguiling turquoise (as signature to him as International Klein Blue, only he didn't "patent" the color as his own — and a variety of media, found book pages, angular abstract sculpture, coated figurines, to fantastic effect. Case the gallery very closely and Rosch's many interventions, like the angled sculpture and the robotic "faces" in book pages, slowly and rewardingly reveal themselves. A destination exhibition.
* "Christmas in July" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. It's bloody hot out so why not a summer group show themed to the wintry holiday? Matt Keegan's paste-up Google images-esque chart is a tidy comparison: Santa v. a fat beachgoer, Uggs v. flip-flops, fruitcake v. a sand castle, a wrapped package v. a hot male in a Speedo. Beyond this, which is oddly addicting, is a lot of appropriately either garish or attention-demanding works, some nice classics from John Baldessari and Lynda Benglis, a funny Christian Holstad assemblage of a yellowed square of carpet bearing the imprint (and shed needles) of an absent artificial tree, a Marepe ornament sculpture recalling Jeff Koons only way less precious, and loads else.
* "Shred", curated by Carlo McCormick @ Perry Rubenstein Gallery / 527 W 23rd St. There is quite a range to the concept of collage as fine art, from Brian Douglas' laborious cut-paper rendering that is deeply textured like an Impressionist's painting, to Jess' and Bruce Conner's interventions, to Mark Flood's portrait echoing Jean-Paul Goude, to Dash Snow's deftly impressive pairing, to Judith Supine's elaborate, enigmatic acrylic portrait.
* "Seat-of-the-Pants" @ Museum 52 / 4 E 2nd St at Bowery. A tight little group show of the hot downtown lot (Amy Yao, Siobhan Liddell, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Jacob Robichaux), but the strong personalities of the latter two (esp. Robichaux's tactile "Papier-lacerer" trio) usurp the energy from the former. Liddell's interventions are typically restrained, as they are here, and Yao's discreet, beguiling collages don't embody the same energy as her fantastic installation at MoMA PS1.
* Carol Bove + Sterling Ruby + Dana Schutz @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Q: how to incorporate the respective abilities of these three very different contemporary artists? A: don't even try, just let them do their thing. But in doing so, and w/ some deft planning, the gallery has managed to successfully mute Ruby's atmosphere-sucking quality in his brutal, large-scale sculpture (the slickened, wooden cannon "Consolidator") w/ Bove's pair of scale-defying Plexiglas and metal-mesh boxes. They're elevator car-sized, true, yet the transparent quality and the metallic shimmer tricks the eye and creates an interesting effect w/ the space. Schutz's trio of new paintings are good, primarily the very abstract "Finger in Fan", and adds a color element to the room.
* "...and then some" @ Feature Inc / 131 Allen St. One wall of Tom of Finland's high-performance, works on paper and an audience response on the right, this salon-style mixÚ Mie Yim's fuzzy alien orgy, Bastille's Geiger-esque scenes, Martin of Holland's scatology, Raymond Pettibon's cheeky minimalism, Jeremy Pittu's Richard Prince-esque vintage prints. Lots of penis here, plus some very disturbing subject matter (mainly coming from Martin of Holland), to the point where our hero Tom's works are on the relatively tame edge of the spectrum.
LAST CHANCE
* "Natural Renditions" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Marlborough's massive summer group show is incredibly trippy this go-around, a riot for the senses. It is too much to take in all at once, but worth repeat, brief visits to zero in on the better works. I was pleased to see Rob Wynne's exquisite blown-glass 'shrooms here and Kim Dorland's tortured mixed-media canvases are fantastic, subtly touching on deforestation. It's saying something when Will Ryman contributes one of the more innocuous pieces in a show. Better, and keeping w/ the overall theme of 'natural', are Valerie Hegarty's and Amit Greenberg's branch-incorporated sculpture.
* 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.
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