Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
fee's LIST (through 11/23)
WEDNESDAY
* Huma Bhabha @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St + Salon 94 / 1 Freeman Alley. An essential double-header (is that a sports term?) from Bhabha, continuing her reapplication ink, paint and collage elements on vintage photography, creating vivid and sometimes 3D results. Salon 94 focuses on Bhabha's sculpture in a set of six brutal hybrids.
* Wierd 7th Anniversary Party @ Home Sweet Home / 131 Chrystie St (F/JMZ to Delancey, BD to Grand St), 12a. The tasty local label for all things coldwave and neo-industrial brings the chilly, minimalist aesthetics of Xeno & Oaklander from the New Museum Theatre (where they just performed, if you can believe it) to a more fitting venue, the foggy basement domain Home Sweet Home. MUCH better.
THURSDAY
* Marin Majik & Goran Skofic @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Both artists are Croatian, so I'm instantly a fan, obviously. But seriously, Majik's take on photorealism (exposing the canvas' surface through his thin paint application) is like pixellated digital imagery. Skofic mixes video art with photography. This is their joint debut U.S. gallery exhibition. Show some love.
* Focus Shanghai: Lu Chunsheng and Birdhead @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. Michelle Loh and Katy Martin curate this special gathering, featuring Lu's full-length film "History of Chemistry: Vol 2 - Excessively Restrained Mountaineering Enthusiasts", shot in post-industrial landscapes, and a photography installation by the duo Birdhead, Song Tao and Ji Weiyu.
* Lee Krasner "Paintings 1959 - 1965" @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. This sounds very special: Krasner's seminal 'night journey' paintings, not purely abstract works created during bouts of chronic insomnia, all painted at night; plus related gestural works and drawings. An excellent enriching show against the broader Abstract Expressionist NY at MoMA.
* "Einfluss: 8 From Dusseldorf" @ Hosfelt Gallery / 531 W 36th St. The Next Wave from Germany, of young contemporary artists and students of the pioneering artists associated w/ Kunstakademie Dusseldorf (think Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer etc). Feat. Cornelius Volker, Jutta Haeckel, Luka Fineisen, Driss Ouadahi, Bernard Lokai, Stefan Kurten, Stefan Ettlinger and Birgit Jensen.
* Hwang Jai-Hyoung @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Hwang's debut solo show in NY is a survey of the artist's politically-charged, textural oil paintings, based on his self-appointed time as a laborer in the poor town of Taeback, Korea, filled with his hard-working and disenfranchised countrymen.
* Sang-ah Choi "Insatiable Appetite" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. Pop-up book art. Courtesy of resin-coated paintings and sculpture w/ slick, eye-popping (there's that word again) results. Let that stew for awhile.
* Yumi Kori @ Miyako Yoshinaga art prospects / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Kori works in light and shadow in her gallery-filling installations, creating vivid sensorial experiences.
* O Zhang "a splendid future for the past" @ Forever & Today / 141 Division St. I'm a big fan of Zhang's thoughtful observations on Chinese youth and contemporary society. She contributes an installation in this new show, a timeline detailing crimes and accidents in NYC's Chinatowns this past year, plus a pair of rabbits (available for adoption thru Rabbit Rescue & Rehab, really) in a specially constructed living space, a sign of happiness and hope.
* Michael Hurson @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 465 W 23rd St. Selections from Hurson's "Eyeglass" series of drawings and paintings, comic strip-style, from 1969 to 1971.
* Anish Kapoor "Shadows I, II, III" @ Carolina Nitsch / 534 W 22nd St. A portfolio of color etchings from Kapoor, a different angle from his spatial-disrupting and enveloping installations and sculpture.
* Odili Donald Odita "Body & Space" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Dynamic polygonal color abstract paintings by the artist, rhythmic and space-defining.
* Michael Anderson "The Street is My Palette" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. Anderson uses adverts as the basis for his mosaic-style collages, reflecting our daily overdose of Pop culture and materialist solicitations.
* Christopher K. Ho "Regional Painting" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. A conceptual show spurned by the artist's yearlong sojourn in remotest Colorado.
* Anthology's 40th Anniversary - "The Limits of Control" (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2009) screening + Jarmusch in-person, @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 7:30p. The 1st of several notably essential events celebrating Anthology Film Archives' longevity and promotion of the independent and avant-garde. I loved "The Limits of Control", from lead Isaach De Bankolé's sharp suits and knowing focus, to the hiply zen Spanish backdrop, to the smoldering Boris-infused soundtrack, to Christopher Doyle's signature hazy lens, to Paz de la Huerta's bare ass. See it again, meet Jarmusch (and probably Jonas Mekas), and thank Anthology for keeping it cerebral and dope.
* Brian Chippendale & CF signing @ The Strand / 828 Broadway (NRQ/L/456 to Union Square), 7p. Mr. Chippendale aka 1/2 of Lightning Bolt (you know, the furious, masked drummer/vocalist, plus his solo drum-noise project Black Pus, which incidentally sounds a lot like Lightning Bolt w/o the guitars) and surrealist graf-artist CF take over the Strand Bookstore for a dual signing. Chippendale contributes new tome "If 'n Oof" and CF "Power Mastrs 3" (sounds a bit like Moebius-era "Metal Hurlant"). This begs the question: where is the mosh-pit?
* "Death By Baϟϟ" @ K&M / 225 N 8th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 10p. Filthy darkest techno by DJs William Streng & Alex Kasavin, plus projections of Japanese torture porn. Sometimes everything comes together.
* Embarker + Walter Carson & Brian Osborne @ Goodbye Blue Monday / 1087 Broadway, Bushwick (J to Kosciusko, JMZ to Myrtle/Broadway), 8p. The searing aural assault of Carson & Osborne (of Heat Retention Records) is augmented by the inclusion of Embarker (aka Michael Roy Barker), a circuit-bending wizard and ferocious live act.
FRIDAY
* Tabatabai, Schiff, Bell @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. A neapolitan (ice-cream) of minimalism and subtlety. Hadi Tabatabai infuses his stark monochromes w/ woven grids. Karen Schiff's works on paper are meditative patterns. Dozier Bell does charcoal on Mylar renderings of dusky twilight.
* Kadar Brock "Unclaimed Space" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Old works eradicated into new, in highly textural residues of power-sanders and ghostly remnants. The gallery notes Christopher Wool here, so of course it's got my attention.
* James Esber "You, Me & Everyone Else" @ Pierogi Gallery / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg. Esber's style is plasticky and garish, pop-minded but in a Philip Guston style (dedicated readers understand my feelings on Guston). That said, Esber's more psychedelic works garner my attention, and the interconnectivity of these new projects is worth a view.
* "White Material" (dir. Claire Denis, 2009) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). The theatre's Denis retrospective ends with her new work, and full-circle if you will, as she returns to Africa, the setting of her debut "Chocolat" over 20 years ago, and its lead Isaach De Bankolé, here playing a wounded rebel officer to Isabelle Huppert's coffee plantation-owning Maria.
* "Maniac" (dir. William Lustig, 1980) midnight screening @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave). A new 35mm print of this seminal American slasher/splatter flick, which is sure to place all the scalpings (plus Tom Savini's notorious "disco boy scene") in deliciously vivid splendor. Banned (at one point, nearly) everywhere! Adults only! w/ dir. Lustig in person! Also SAT, same time
* "A Brighter Summer Day" (dir. Edward Yang, 1991) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft. Greene (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 7p. A rare one-shot screening of the Taiwanese New Wave director's magnum opus, a filmic bildungsroman on volatile '60s Taiwan.
* "Kati with an i" (dir. Robert Greene, 2010) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 9p. Think like an anti-MTV coming-of-age documentary, following Alabama teen Kati's exit from high-school and aided by Sean Williams' ("Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo") sharp camerawork.
* "Total Badass" (dir. Bob Ray, 2010) screenings @ reRun Theatre / 147 Front St, DUMBO (F to Jay St, AC to High St), 9:30/11:55p. The title, and that this is a documentary set in Austin TX's underground, is enough convincing for me. If you need more, I'll quote directly from "The Austin Chronicle" on Ray's subject Chad Holt: "Holt comes across like a lost John Waters' collaborator, or a real-life version of Nicolas Cage in 'Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans'." Any questions? Also MON 10p, TUE 7p.
* Sweet Bulbs + Darlings @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. Brooklyn's finest. The noisy fuzz-tsunami Sweet Bulbs just released their debut album, and stalwart indie-poppers (w/ just the right degree of curdling feedback) Darlings prove that you can combine the sweet and the dissonant to addictive effect. Also: it's free. Incroyable!
* The Beets + Eternal Summers @ 285 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$8. If you've continually missed out on an indie live music night and you want a condensed, Twitter-length, five-hot-bands roster, well here you go: we've got indie and jangle-rock, mostly local (except Eternal Summers, but they're dope), and beer is cheap.
SATURDAY
* "Einfluss: 8 From Dusseldorf" Artist panel discussion @ Hosfelt Gallery / 531 W 36th St, 2p. Amei Wallach, veteran art critic and curator (plus the director of "Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and the Tangerine") moderates a panel of the young Next Wave German artists in this exhibition.
* Maya Hayuk "Heavy Light" @ Cinders Gallery / 103 Havermeyer St, Williamsburg. The color-consuming Brooklyn-based artist, who tends to work in mural-sized scale, invites us into one of her pieces, via a chandelier-like installation, awash in fractals and spacey color. The press release uses the term "interplanetary beanbags" as seating arrangements for this show, so of course I'll be there.
* Leah Tinari "Perfect Strangers" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Think back to Tinari's last solo show here: she installed a photobooth, where you the gallery-goer could snap a pic of yourself. She adapted a series of those snapshots into her new exhibition, a characteristically glossy reflexive examination and homage to her viewers.
* David Rabinowitch "Birth of Romanticism" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St. This series, begun in 2008, finds Rabinowitch at perhaps his most dynamic, layering geometric and collage works into brilliant, geometric constructions.
* "Littlerock" (dir. Mike Ott, 2010) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 6p. Two Japanese siblings on a U.S. roadtrip get stuck in Cali desert town Littlerock, tentatively befriending the local slackers. Also SUN 6p
* Peelander-Z @ Santos Party House / 96 Lafayette St (NR/JZ/6 to Canal St), 7p/$12. This will be my 1st up-close encounter w/ the Japanese avant-garde punks, whose live act is half-concert, half-performance art. w/ riot-grrls Tsushimamire
* The Raincoats + Kathleen Hanna (DJ set) @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 8:30p/$25. I still can't quite wrap my head around rock performances at MoMA (I don't mean Nick Zinner's DJing, love him though I do), but this one, presented by PopRally and featuring British post-punk legends The Raincoats (Ana da Silva and Gina Birch), plus the ineffable Hanna DJing (I hope she plays ONLY Bikini Kill tracks) is curious, intriguing even.
SUNDAY
* "On Line" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). The transformation of drawing throughout the 20th C., from the most typical of pencil-to-paper to explorations of space, even performance. Only thing: it makes me very sad that this exhibition opens as Gerhard Richter's exquisite, experimental drawing show at The Drawing Center ends (on Thursday!).
* Weekend + MINKS @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JZ to Marcy), 8p/$10. A really stellar lineup tonight, the whole way. San Fran represents w/ Weekend & Young Prisms. Locally, we have MINKS & Big Troubles. Key words: post-punk, fuzzzzz.
MONDAY
* Steven Klein "Stag Film" @ John McWhinnie/Glenn Horowitz Bookseller / 50 1/2 E 64th St (6 to 68th St), 6-8p. The vivid photographer returns to one of his most celebrated subjects, the stallion — or in this instance, horse studding — capturing body movement, pose and the whole, well, penetrating process w/ his sharp lens.
TUESDAY
* Bertrand Lavier @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. The trickster Lavier hasn't had a solo show in NY, according to my sources, in over two decades. His take on the faux, the referential and the meta should be interesting.
+ Joseph Havel "Nothing". I am stoked for the Houston TX-based artist's debut here, another instance of a forward-thinking sculptor sorely overlooked in the NY scene."
* Matthew Dear @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$15. One of the sexiest albums this year had to be Dear's "Black City", stepping back from the pop-scene for a brooding, crackling-energy tech-thump, anchored by Dear's commanding baritone. But the man does rock out live, with a full band here (I've never seen him with a full band), and the inclusion of Noveller (drone-guitarist/filmmaker Sarah Lipstate) as opener makes the night even more irresistible.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Peter Saul "Fifty Years of Painting" @ Haunch of Venison NY / 1230 Ave of Americas, 20th Fl. This has been a pretty fierce year for dueling American art trends. If you've been paying attention, you might recall MoMA overhauled their 4th floor w/ a luxurious Abstract Expressionist (New York) exhibition, culled entirely from the museum's vast holdings. Roy Lichtenstein has enjoyed several focused shows (incl. an extensive still-life extravaganza at Gagosian and a scholarly look at his work in reflections at Mitchell-Innes & Nash) and his "Ohh…Alright…" took top dollar (over $38 million of 'em, actually) at Christie's. And because I must: Gagosian's thrown a museum-worthy look at Robert Rauschenberg's entire oeuvre at their 21st St space. And yet, and yet. That same gallery, in their Madison Ave space, devoted a retrospective to Ed Paschke, the electrifying Chicago Imagist whose Pop-themed art goes way more garish than Warhol ever took it (and whose grip of neon and early-cyber in the '80s is, well, incredibly '80s-looking). Related Hairy Who stalwarts Karl Wirsum and Jim Nutt also appeared in solo gallery shows (Nutt's incl. a mix of classics and new works), all fiercely removed from NY art world trends of the day. So it's fitting, then, not quite an answer to these Pop Art/Abstract Expressionist rock-star shows, but rather an alternative to the heavy-NY presence, that we get an inspired survey of Cali grotesque-Pop artist (and tie-in to the Chicago scene) Peter Saul. The highlight, in all its contorted, lurid Day-Glo glory, is the massive "Typical Saigon" from 1968, Saul's biting retort to the Vietnam War. The cruelty depicted — American G.I.'s sodomizing and crucifying Vietnamese women — is intensified by the painting's plasticky surface, the stinging contrast of the colors and the warped, twisting movement of the figures. Its torturous energy still resonates. Though Gen. Custer, Christopher Columbus, the death penalty, and even the NY subway system are targets of Saul's cold-shock techniques. His "Icebox" series from the early '60s, echoed in new work "Refrigerator Breakdown", are benign by comparison. Saul's most recent style, pairing acrylic with oil paint in powdery-edged renderings, have this melted-3D effect, popping off their canvases with the threat of spilling into our laps. Bad taste rarely looks this good.
* Anton Corbijn "Inwards and Upwards" @ Stellan Holm Gallery / 1018 Madison Ave. Lovely large contrasty b&w digital prints from the photographer (and, lately, filmmaker, considering "Control" and "The American"), whose lens and compositions suit his subjects rather perfectly. From the veiled genius of Alexander McQueen to the measured softness of Gerhard Richter, seen from the back as he contemplates a massive abstract canvas, to an early Kate Moss, where just a masquerade mask transforms her into a fairytale figure.
* Monika Sosnowska @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. I think a key point in the Polish artist's distorted architectural-ish sculpture is their innate relationship w/ the walls they suspend and droop from (or the floors they bow out from and explore three-dimensionally). It might sound odd in print that a bench (metal, painted black) cantilevered and crawling up a wall looks 'natural', but in Sosnowska's talent it looks intentional.
* Bruce Nauman "For Children/For Beginners" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. The pioneering conceptualist continues to set the tone of performative practice in A/V installations. If you caught "Days" (2009), his contribution to the 2009 Venice Biennale, that sonic cocoon of irresistibly simple subject matter (the days of the week, repeated in seven voices), you know what I'm talking about here. He ups that w/ video, counting fingers in various combinations w/ reflective motion. This would be the strongest work in the exhibition if it weren't for the stirring piano melodies playing in the lift-gallery, their speakers hidden so the sound flits back and forth in the small chamber. It elicits a basic emotional reaction intrinsic to music, but that doesn't mean it's no less pronounced here.
* Ana Mendieta "Documentation and Artwork, 1972-1985" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. I really love Mendieta's oeuvre, and the gallery has done a fitting homage to this unparalleled Conceptualist/performance artist in the 25th anniversary of her untimely death at age 36 w/ this trove of Mendieta's archival drawings, photography (incl. contact sheets!) and films, most of which have rarely (if ever) been shown publicly. The whole thing works and is museum-level in its enriching qualities (won't MoMA etc do a proper retrospective on Mendieta? Klaus Biesenbach, looking at you), but the real standout for me were the films. They're brief and silent, so you can watch them all, and you should. It is one thing to see a series of Mendieta's signature "Silueta"s, smoldering or burning shadowy, angelic figures in the ground, and another to see smoke billowing violently from a filmed "Silueta". Same deal w/ "Black Ixchell, Candle Ixchell", a wrapped Mendieta-sized figure w/ a candle burning over it. Another, "Mirage", totally had me transfixed for its 3-min runtime: the camera focuses on a slightly windy field. There's a mirror in the right corner, reflecting the artist in near-silhouette, sitting transfixed for the 1st minute, then systematically ripping a feather pillow (I think??) apart, then sitting still once again. It's somehow peacefully lulling and frightening simultaneously.
* Hiroshi Sugimoto "The Day After" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. In this ineffable experimental photographer's debut solo show at Pace, he includes two 50-ft photographic polyptychs from his "Lightning Field" series, plus related single prints and even a reconstituted Tesla coil, which releases a crackling violet shock every five minutes (that's what Sugimoto-san told me anyway, when I had the pleasure w/ speaking to the artist at his opening reception). So we're thinking electrical storms. What I feel, though, is being deep underwater, safe from the obscene pressure of the depths but in some great undiscovered trench, populated by those deep-sea denizens that use bioluminescence to attract prey and see down in the abyss. Sugimoto worked electrical discharges across unexposed film in the darkroom to create such marvels as "Lightning Fields 177" (could be spacecraft) and the watery "Lightning Fields 168", expelling hot gassy haze and tendrils of light into…nothingness. That's the thing w/ many of these works, incl. the 1st polyptych in the front gallery: the unexposed film is a perfect black, or as close as perfect comes, permitting the flashes and charges of light, like dendrites or cell creation, to float against the surface. The back polyptych, however, while subtler overall, is alive w/ shadow and textures, like briefly illuminated glimpses of a never-before-see seabed, fabric-like, even, roiling and rolling across the prints. There are benches in this room for a reason: I suggest you sit down and take it all in.
* Mickey Smith "Believe You Me" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Smith returns to NY Public Library, specifically the Picture Collection, for her new exhibition, though she brings some of the stacks w/ her, wedging them into a unique floor installation that is strangely ergonomic (though I'll see how well this thing ages, after much foot-traffic) and a literal basis for the new C-prints. She rephotographed images from the archives, played w/ combinations (one, w/ its garage-sale frames, is convincingly "family portrait" circa late '50s) and crops (esp. of more current figures, to playful effect).
* James Casebere "House" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. You might remember two of the lead, large-scale C-prints in the main gallery from this year's Whitney Biennial, taken from Casebere's massive scale-model of Dutchess County NY. They are paired w/ other daytime and twilight "scenes", shots of mowed lawns, varying swim pools and burning logs in this plainly beautiful slice of Americana. Now contrast that w/ the much earlier works in the front gallery, a decidedly creepy selection of gelatin silver prints from the '80s and '90s that appear to be encased in either snow (good!) or ash (spooky!). What's consistent is Casebere's mindful use of lighting for both realistic and dramatic effect.
* Michael Heizer "Works from the 1960s and 70s" @ David Zwirner / 519 W 19th St. Anytime somebody says "Michael Heizer", i.e. the seminal earth-shaping artist, you've got my attention. He's probably best known for his massive land-moving, addition/subtraction works, like the epic work-in-progress "City" in Garden Valley, Nevada, or the yawning polygonal abysses "North, East, South, West" in the floor of DIA:Beacon. Zwirner Gallery fills in the blanks a bit, though, w/ Heizer's rarer, smaller art, geometric abstracts on shaped canvas, little more than asphalt-black latex covering raw canvas, and a handsome gray granite pie-slice set called "Vermont". Set atop two aluminum slabs, one can only imagine what "Vermont" would look like in Heizer's traditional outsized style.
* Adrian Piper "Past Time: Selected Works 1973-1995" @ Elizabeth Dee / 548 W 22nd St. Some of Piper's most political, combustive works, and this is coming from a brilliant artist astute at 'getting to' the viewer, latching onto our thoughts, preempting them, and leaving us w/ a LOT to mull over. "It's Just Art" (1980) will do it: a news broadcast interlaid w/ Piper, in sunglasses and looking fierce, mouthing wordlessly, plus newsprints feat. her thought-bubbles in related dialogue/response. "Ashes to Ashes" (1995) is an intensely personal one, family photos and text reflecting her parents' death, though I liked the balance here w/ "I Am Somebody. The Body of My Friends" (1992-5), 18 photographs of Piper w/ said friends. And a treat here, and (at least on surface-level) lighter in subject matter, is "The Big Four-Oh" (1988), a rare installation work from Piper, involving a deconstructed suit of armor, 40 hardballs, and her diary, plus a looping video of the artist dancing (back to the camera) effortlessly to '80s music. Don't miss it.
* Jenny Holzer "Retro" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Beautiful classic pieces from Holzer's history, centered less on her famous LED screens and more on static text pieces, like the "Survival" series (benches, w/ text carved in indian red granite), "Living" series (benches w/ text carved in bethel white granite) and "Under a Rock" (really knockout gem mist black granite benches). Don't miss her enamel on metal text works from the early '80s, also from the "Living" series, like this gem: "After dark it's a relief to see a girl walking toward or behind you. Then you're much less likely to be assaulted." And this beauty: "When someone is breathing on you, you feel cool air pulled across your skin followed by moist warm air pushed in the opposite direction. This goes on at regular intervals and makes a perfect temperature." Truth.
LAST CHANCE
* Gerhard Richter "Lines which do not exist" @ The Drawing Center / 35 Wooster St. As mayjah as it gets: the 1st proper stateside exhibition on the legendary artist's works on paper, b/c though he's known for his mix of blurred photorealism and oil-slick abstraction, Richter has worked extensively in watercolor, ink and graphite since the mid-60s. This is absolutely essential and a destination exhibition. Richter had a love-hate (or really a general disdain) w/ drawing, eschewing it for photographic studies that led to his paintings or just painting by itself, as it bore the most instances of experimentation and chance. Yet, he drew anyway, on "his own terms" as it were, and the results are equally mind-altering and effortlessly his own. Wavy, rose-bud-like forms in "Untitled" (1966) created w/ graphite on a drill, the field of blurred apparitions amid seismic zaps in "27.4.1999 (5)" (1999), the (exceptionally) realistic "Gebirge/Mountains" (1968), which remains a fury of crosshatchings, the sensual nude in "20.9.1985" (1985), De Chirico-esque and drawn from a photographic source. The majority of the lot is graphite and ink, and they're riveting, but there are several Richter-style colorful examples here and there, glorious saturated worlds more emotional than physical, delving deep w/in the viewer to command our full attention. Intensely delicious. NOTE: THIS ENDS THURSDAY. DO NOT MISS IT!
* Tara McPherson "The Bunny in the Moon" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. Exceedingly stunning new paintings by McPherson, w/ her characteristic lunar-tinged figures now practically radiating blood-warmth in their quests for love. The artist's technique is masterful: her use of transparency and the sheen of skin is prominent here, and the related works on paper display her keen take on figuration, i.e. minimal use of lines = graphic, strong features.
+ Xiaoqing Ding "At the End of a Rainbow". Ding continues the drama in a series of new large-scale oils on paper, blurring Chinese folklore of supernatural foxes w/ Western fairytales. The result is some very pretty paintings, like "Daffodils Field" and its incredible depth (stick w/ that one over the sort of obvious, 'Wizard of Oz'-esque tituar piece). She augments the lot w/ four circular oils on panel, though by 'panel' I mean meticulously carved, ornamental wooden screens. A lovely duet w/ McPherson's show.
* Matt Connors "You Don't Know" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. Connors magnifies idle scribblings into a sort of dynamic lexicon, obliterates color w/ semitranslucent white paint and/or soaks the paint into raw canvas like Kool-Aid stains, in this pretty dope solo show. His experimentation rewards us w/ a unique style of abstraction in an ever-morphing field of abstract artists, a series never as obviously massive as the Abstract Expressionists but not so precisely tiny as his contemporaries Tomma Abts or JJ Peet. The roughly equal assortment of scribbles, erasings and infused-color works are offset by several digital C-prints, two of which sit unadorned, rolled up and precarious on the gallery's uneven floors, in two seemingly solid, vegetal colors.
* Huma Bhabha @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St + Salon 94 / 1 Freeman Alley. An essential double-header (is that a sports term?) from Bhabha, continuing her reapplication ink, paint and collage elements on vintage photography, creating vivid and sometimes 3D results. Salon 94 focuses on Bhabha's sculpture in a set of six brutal hybrids.
* Wierd 7th Anniversary Party @ Home Sweet Home / 131 Chrystie St (F/JMZ to Delancey, BD to Grand St), 12a. The tasty local label for all things coldwave and neo-industrial brings the chilly, minimalist aesthetics of Xeno & Oaklander from the New Museum Theatre (where they just performed, if you can believe it) to a more fitting venue, the foggy basement domain Home Sweet Home. MUCH better.
THURSDAY
* Marin Majik & Goran Skofic @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Both artists are Croatian, so I'm instantly a fan, obviously. But seriously, Majik's take on photorealism (exposing the canvas' surface through his thin paint application) is like pixellated digital imagery. Skofic mixes video art with photography. This is their joint debut U.S. gallery exhibition. Show some love.
* Focus Shanghai: Lu Chunsheng and Birdhead @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. Michelle Loh and Katy Martin curate this special gathering, featuring Lu's full-length film "History of Chemistry: Vol 2 - Excessively Restrained Mountaineering Enthusiasts", shot in post-industrial landscapes, and a photography installation by the duo Birdhead, Song Tao and Ji Weiyu.
* Lee Krasner "Paintings 1959 - 1965" @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. This sounds very special: Krasner's seminal 'night journey' paintings, not purely abstract works created during bouts of chronic insomnia, all painted at night; plus related gestural works and drawings. An excellent enriching show against the broader Abstract Expressionist NY at MoMA.
* "Einfluss: 8 From Dusseldorf" @ Hosfelt Gallery / 531 W 36th St. The Next Wave from Germany, of young contemporary artists and students of the pioneering artists associated w/ Kunstakademie Dusseldorf (think Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer etc). Feat. Cornelius Volker, Jutta Haeckel, Luka Fineisen, Driss Ouadahi, Bernard Lokai, Stefan Kurten, Stefan Ettlinger and Birgit Jensen.
* Hwang Jai-Hyoung @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Hwang's debut solo show in NY is a survey of the artist's politically-charged, textural oil paintings, based on his self-appointed time as a laborer in the poor town of Taeback, Korea, filled with his hard-working and disenfranchised countrymen.
* Sang-ah Choi "Insatiable Appetite" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. Pop-up book art. Courtesy of resin-coated paintings and sculpture w/ slick, eye-popping (there's that word again) results. Let that stew for awhile.
* Yumi Kori @ Miyako Yoshinaga art prospects / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Kori works in light and shadow in her gallery-filling installations, creating vivid sensorial experiences.
* O Zhang "a splendid future for the past" @ Forever & Today / 141 Division St. I'm a big fan of Zhang's thoughtful observations on Chinese youth and contemporary society. She contributes an installation in this new show, a timeline detailing crimes and accidents in NYC's Chinatowns this past year, plus a pair of rabbits (available for adoption thru Rabbit Rescue & Rehab, really) in a specially constructed living space, a sign of happiness and hope.
* Michael Hurson @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 465 W 23rd St. Selections from Hurson's "Eyeglass" series of drawings and paintings, comic strip-style, from 1969 to 1971.
* Anish Kapoor "Shadows I, II, III" @ Carolina Nitsch / 534 W 22nd St. A portfolio of color etchings from Kapoor, a different angle from his spatial-disrupting and enveloping installations and sculpture.
* Odili Donald Odita "Body & Space" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Dynamic polygonal color abstract paintings by the artist, rhythmic and space-defining.
* Michael Anderson "The Street is My Palette" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. Anderson uses adverts as the basis for his mosaic-style collages, reflecting our daily overdose of Pop culture and materialist solicitations.
* Christopher K. Ho "Regional Painting" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. A conceptual show spurned by the artist's yearlong sojourn in remotest Colorado.
* Anthology's 40th Anniversary - "The Limits of Control" (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2009) screening + Jarmusch in-person, @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 7:30p. The 1st of several notably essential events celebrating Anthology Film Archives' longevity and promotion of the independent and avant-garde. I loved "The Limits of Control", from lead Isaach De Bankolé's sharp suits and knowing focus, to the hiply zen Spanish backdrop, to the smoldering Boris-infused soundtrack, to Christopher Doyle's signature hazy lens, to Paz de la Huerta's bare ass. See it again, meet Jarmusch (and probably Jonas Mekas), and thank Anthology for keeping it cerebral and dope.
* Brian Chippendale & CF signing @ The Strand / 828 Broadway (NRQ/L/456 to Union Square), 7p. Mr. Chippendale aka 1/2 of Lightning Bolt (you know, the furious, masked drummer/vocalist, plus his solo drum-noise project Black Pus, which incidentally sounds a lot like Lightning Bolt w/o the guitars) and surrealist graf-artist CF take over the Strand Bookstore for a dual signing. Chippendale contributes new tome "If 'n Oof" and CF "Power Mastrs 3" (sounds a bit like Moebius-era "Metal Hurlant"). This begs the question: where is the mosh-pit?
* "Death By Baϟϟ" @ K&M / 225 N 8th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 10p. Filthy darkest techno by DJs William Streng & Alex Kasavin, plus projections of Japanese torture porn. Sometimes everything comes together.
* Embarker + Walter Carson & Brian Osborne @ Goodbye Blue Monday / 1087 Broadway, Bushwick (J to Kosciusko, JMZ to Myrtle/Broadway), 8p. The searing aural assault of Carson & Osborne (of Heat Retention Records) is augmented by the inclusion of Embarker (aka Michael Roy Barker), a circuit-bending wizard and ferocious live act.
FRIDAY
* Tabatabai, Schiff, Bell @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. A neapolitan (ice-cream) of minimalism and subtlety. Hadi Tabatabai infuses his stark monochromes w/ woven grids. Karen Schiff's works on paper are meditative patterns. Dozier Bell does charcoal on Mylar renderings of dusky twilight.
* Kadar Brock "Unclaimed Space" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Old works eradicated into new, in highly textural residues of power-sanders and ghostly remnants. The gallery notes Christopher Wool here, so of course it's got my attention.
* James Esber "You, Me & Everyone Else" @ Pierogi Gallery / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg. Esber's style is plasticky and garish, pop-minded but in a Philip Guston style (dedicated readers understand my feelings on Guston). That said, Esber's more psychedelic works garner my attention, and the interconnectivity of these new projects is worth a view.
* "White Material" (dir. Claire Denis, 2009) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). The theatre's Denis retrospective ends with her new work, and full-circle if you will, as she returns to Africa, the setting of her debut "Chocolat" over 20 years ago, and its lead Isaach De Bankolé, here playing a wounded rebel officer to Isabelle Huppert's coffee plantation-owning Maria.
* "Maniac" (dir. William Lustig, 1980) midnight screening @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave). A new 35mm print of this seminal American slasher/splatter flick, which is sure to place all the scalpings (plus Tom Savini's notorious "disco boy scene") in deliciously vivid splendor. Banned (at one point, nearly) everywhere! Adults only! w/ dir. Lustig in person! Also SAT, same time
* "A Brighter Summer Day" (dir. Edward Yang, 1991) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft. Greene (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 7p. A rare one-shot screening of the Taiwanese New Wave director's magnum opus, a filmic bildungsroman on volatile '60s Taiwan.
* "Kati with an i" (dir. Robert Greene, 2010) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 9p. Think like an anti-MTV coming-of-age documentary, following Alabama teen Kati's exit from high-school and aided by Sean Williams' ("Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo") sharp camerawork.
* "Total Badass" (dir. Bob Ray, 2010) screenings @ reRun Theatre / 147 Front St, DUMBO (F to Jay St, AC to High St), 9:30/11:55p. The title, and that this is a documentary set in Austin TX's underground, is enough convincing for me. If you need more, I'll quote directly from "The Austin Chronicle" on Ray's subject Chad Holt: "Holt comes across like a lost John Waters' collaborator, or a real-life version of Nicolas Cage in 'Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans'." Any questions? Also MON 10p, TUE 7p.
* Sweet Bulbs + Darlings @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. Brooklyn's finest. The noisy fuzz-tsunami Sweet Bulbs just released their debut album, and stalwart indie-poppers (w/ just the right degree of curdling feedback) Darlings prove that you can combine the sweet and the dissonant to addictive effect. Also: it's free. Incroyable!
* The Beets + Eternal Summers @ 285 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$8. If you've continually missed out on an indie live music night and you want a condensed, Twitter-length, five-hot-bands roster, well here you go: we've got indie and jangle-rock, mostly local (except Eternal Summers, but they're dope), and beer is cheap.
SATURDAY
* "Einfluss: 8 From Dusseldorf" Artist panel discussion @ Hosfelt Gallery / 531 W 36th St, 2p. Amei Wallach, veteran art critic and curator (plus the director of "Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and the Tangerine") moderates a panel of the young Next Wave German artists in this exhibition.
* Maya Hayuk "Heavy Light" @ Cinders Gallery / 103 Havermeyer St, Williamsburg. The color-consuming Brooklyn-based artist, who tends to work in mural-sized scale, invites us into one of her pieces, via a chandelier-like installation, awash in fractals and spacey color. The press release uses the term "interplanetary beanbags" as seating arrangements for this show, so of course I'll be there.
* Leah Tinari "Perfect Strangers" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Think back to Tinari's last solo show here: she installed a photobooth, where you the gallery-goer could snap a pic of yourself. She adapted a series of those snapshots into her new exhibition, a characteristically glossy reflexive examination and homage to her viewers.
* David Rabinowitch "Birth of Romanticism" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St. This series, begun in 2008, finds Rabinowitch at perhaps his most dynamic, layering geometric and collage works into brilliant, geometric constructions.
* "Littlerock" (dir. Mike Ott, 2010) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 6p. Two Japanese siblings on a U.S. roadtrip get stuck in Cali desert town Littlerock, tentatively befriending the local slackers. Also SUN 6p
* Peelander-Z @ Santos Party House / 96 Lafayette St (NR/JZ/6 to Canal St), 7p/$12. This will be my 1st up-close encounter w/ the Japanese avant-garde punks, whose live act is half-concert, half-performance art. w/ riot-grrls Tsushimamire
* The Raincoats + Kathleen Hanna (DJ set) @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 8:30p/$25. I still can't quite wrap my head around rock performances at MoMA (I don't mean Nick Zinner's DJing, love him though I do), but this one, presented by PopRally and featuring British post-punk legends The Raincoats (Ana da Silva and Gina Birch), plus the ineffable Hanna DJing (I hope she plays ONLY Bikini Kill tracks) is curious, intriguing even.
SUNDAY
* "On Line" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). The transformation of drawing throughout the 20th C., from the most typical of pencil-to-paper to explorations of space, even performance. Only thing: it makes me very sad that this exhibition opens as Gerhard Richter's exquisite, experimental drawing show at The Drawing Center ends (on Thursday!).
* Weekend + MINKS @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JZ to Marcy), 8p/$10. A really stellar lineup tonight, the whole way. San Fran represents w/ Weekend & Young Prisms. Locally, we have MINKS & Big Troubles. Key words: post-punk, fuzzzzz.
MONDAY
* Steven Klein "Stag Film" @ John McWhinnie/Glenn Horowitz Bookseller / 50 1/2 E 64th St (6 to 68th St), 6-8p. The vivid photographer returns to one of his most celebrated subjects, the stallion — or in this instance, horse studding — capturing body movement, pose and the whole, well, penetrating process w/ his sharp lens.
TUESDAY
* Bertrand Lavier @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. The trickster Lavier hasn't had a solo show in NY, according to my sources, in over two decades. His take on the faux, the referential and the meta should be interesting.
+ Joseph Havel "Nothing". I am stoked for the Houston TX-based artist's debut here, another instance of a forward-thinking sculptor sorely overlooked in the NY scene."
* Matthew Dear @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$15. One of the sexiest albums this year had to be Dear's "Black City", stepping back from the pop-scene for a brooding, crackling-energy tech-thump, anchored by Dear's commanding baritone. But the man does rock out live, with a full band here (I've never seen him with a full band), and the inclusion of Noveller (drone-guitarist/filmmaker Sarah Lipstate) as opener makes the night even more irresistible.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Peter Saul "Fifty Years of Painting" @ Haunch of Venison NY / 1230 Ave of Americas, 20th Fl. This has been a pretty fierce year for dueling American art trends. If you've been paying attention, you might recall MoMA overhauled their 4th floor w/ a luxurious Abstract Expressionist (New York) exhibition, culled entirely from the museum's vast holdings. Roy Lichtenstein has enjoyed several focused shows (incl. an extensive still-life extravaganza at Gagosian and a scholarly look at his work in reflections at Mitchell-Innes & Nash) and his "Ohh…Alright…" took top dollar (over $38 million of 'em, actually) at Christie's. And because I must: Gagosian's thrown a museum-worthy look at Robert Rauschenberg's entire oeuvre at their 21st St space. And yet, and yet. That same gallery, in their Madison Ave space, devoted a retrospective to Ed Paschke, the electrifying Chicago Imagist whose Pop-themed art goes way more garish than Warhol ever took it (and whose grip of neon and early-cyber in the '80s is, well, incredibly '80s-looking). Related Hairy Who stalwarts Karl Wirsum and Jim Nutt also appeared in solo gallery shows (Nutt's incl. a mix of classics and new works), all fiercely removed from NY art world trends of the day. So it's fitting, then, not quite an answer to these Pop Art/Abstract Expressionist rock-star shows, but rather an alternative to the heavy-NY presence, that we get an inspired survey of Cali grotesque-Pop artist (and tie-in to the Chicago scene) Peter Saul. The highlight, in all its contorted, lurid Day-Glo glory, is the massive "Typical Saigon" from 1968, Saul's biting retort to the Vietnam War. The cruelty depicted — American G.I.'s sodomizing and crucifying Vietnamese women — is intensified by the painting's plasticky surface, the stinging contrast of the colors and the warped, twisting movement of the figures. Its torturous energy still resonates. Though Gen. Custer, Christopher Columbus, the death penalty, and even the NY subway system are targets of Saul's cold-shock techniques. His "Icebox" series from the early '60s, echoed in new work "Refrigerator Breakdown", are benign by comparison. Saul's most recent style, pairing acrylic with oil paint in powdery-edged renderings, have this melted-3D effect, popping off their canvases with the threat of spilling into our laps. Bad taste rarely looks this good.
* Anton Corbijn "Inwards and Upwards" @ Stellan Holm Gallery / 1018 Madison Ave. Lovely large contrasty b&w digital prints from the photographer (and, lately, filmmaker, considering "Control" and "The American"), whose lens and compositions suit his subjects rather perfectly. From the veiled genius of Alexander McQueen to the measured softness of Gerhard Richter, seen from the back as he contemplates a massive abstract canvas, to an early Kate Moss, where just a masquerade mask transforms her into a fairytale figure.
* Monika Sosnowska @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. I think a key point in the Polish artist's distorted architectural-ish sculpture is their innate relationship w/ the walls they suspend and droop from (or the floors they bow out from and explore three-dimensionally). It might sound odd in print that a bench (metal, painted black) cantilevered and crawling up a wall looks 'natural', but in Sosnowska's talent it looks intentional.
* Bruce Nauman "For Children/For Beginners" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. The pioneering conceptualist continues to set the tone of performative practice in A/V installations. If you caught "Days" (2009), his contribution to the 2009 Venice Biennale, that sonic cocoon of irresistibly simple subject matter (the days of the week, repeated in seven voices), you know what I'm talking about here. He ups that w/ video, counting fingers in various combinations w/ reflective motion. This would be the strongest work in the exhibition if it weren't for the stirring piano melodies playing in the lift-gallery, their speakers hidden so the sound flits back and forth in the small chamber. It elicits a basic emotional reaction intrinsic to music, but that doesn't mean it's no less pronounced here.
* Ana Mendieta "Documentation and Artwork, 1972-1985" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. I really love Mendieta's oeuvre, and the gallery has done a fitting homage to this unparalleled Conceptualist/performance artist in the 25th anniversary of her untimely death at age 36 w/ this trove of Mendieta's archival drawings, photography (incl. contact sheets!) and films, most of which have rarely (if ever) been shown publicly. The whole thing works and is museum-level in its enriching qualities (won't MoMA etc do a proper retrospective on Mendieta? Klaus Biesenbach, looking at you), but the real standout for me were the films. They're brief and silent, so you can watch them all, and you should. It is one thing to see a series of Mendieta's signature "Silueta"s, smoldering or burning shadowy, angelic figures in the ground, and another to see smoke billowing violently from a filmed "Silueta". Same deal w/ "Black Ixchell, Candle Ixchell", a wrapped Mendieta-sized figure w/ a candle burning over it. Another, "Mirage", totally had me transfixed for its 3-min runtime: the camera focuses on a slightly windy field. There's a mirror in the right corner, reflecting the artist in near-silhouette, sitting transfixed for the 1st minute, then systematically ripping a feather pillow (I think??) apart, then sitting still once again. It's somehow peacefully lulling and frightening simultaneously.
* Hiroshi Sugimoto "The Day After" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. In this ineffable experimental photographer's debut solo show at Pace, he includes two 50-ft photographic polyptychs from his "Lightning Field" series, plus related single prints and even a reconstituted Tesla coil, which releases a crackling violet shock every five minutes (that's what Sugimoto-san told me anyway, when I had the pleasure w/ speaking to the artist at his opening reception). So we're thinking electrical storms. What I feel, though, is being deep underwater, safe from the obscene pressure of the depths but in some great undiscovered trench, populated by those deep-sea denizens that use bioluminescence to attract prey and see down in the abyss. Sugimoto worked electrical discharges across unexposed film in the darkroom to create such marvels as "Lightning Fields 177" (could be spacecraft) and the watery "Lightning Fields 168", expelling hot gassy haze and tendrils of light into…nothingness. That's the thing w/ many of these works, incl. the 1st polyptych in the front gallery: the unexposed film is a perfect black, or as close as perfect comes, permitting the flashes and charges of light, like dendrites or cell creation, to float against the surface. The back polyptych, however, while subtler overall, is alive w/ shadow and textures, like briefly illuminated glimpses of a never-before-see seabed, fabric-like, even, roiling and rolling across the prints. There are benches in this room for a reason: I suggest you sit down and take it all in.
* Mickey Smith "Believe You Me" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Smith returns to NY Public Library, specifically the Picture Collection, for her new exhibition, though she brings some of the stacks w/ her, wedging them into a unique floor installation that is strangely ergonomic (though I'll see how well this thing ages, after much foot-traffic) and a literal basis for the new C-prints. She rephotographed images from the archives, played w/ combinations (one, w/ its garage-sale frames, is convincingly "family portrait" circa late '50s) and crops (esp. of more current figures, to playful effect).
* James Casebere "House" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. You might remember two of the lead, large-scale C-prints in the main gallery from this year's Whitney Biennial, taken from Casebere's massive scale-model of Dutchess County NY. They are paired w/ other daytime and twilight "scenes", shots of mowed lawns, varying swim pools and burning logs in this plainly beautiful slice of Americana. Now contrast that w/ the much earlier works in the front gallery, a decidedly creepy selection of gelatin silver prints from the '80s and '90s that appear to be encased in either snow (good!) or ash (spooky!). What's consistent is Casebere's mindful use of lighting for both realistic and dramatic effect.
* Michael Heizer "Works from the 1960s and 70s" @ David Zwirner / 519 W 19th St. Anytime somebody says "Michael Heizer", i.e. the seminal earth-shaping artist, you've got my attention. He's probably best known for his massive land-moving, addition/subtraction works, like the epic work-in-progress "City" in Garden Valley, Nevada, or the yawning polygonal abysses "North, East, South, West" in the floor of DIA:Beacon. Zwirner Gallery fills in the blanks a bit, though, w/ Heizer's rarer, smaller art, geometric abstracts on shaped canvas, little more than asphalt-black latex covering raw canvas, and a handsome gray granite pie-slice set called "Vermont". Set atop two aluminum slabs, one can only imagine what "Vermont" would look like in Heizer's traditional outsized style.
* Adrian Piper "Past Time: Selected Works 1973-1995" @ Elizabeth Dee / 548 W 22nd St. Some of Piper's most political, combustive works, and this is coming from a brilliant artist astute at 'getting to' the viewer, latching onto our thoughts, preempting them, and leaving us w/ a LOT to mull over. "It's Just Art" (1980) will do it: a news broadcast interlaid w/ Piper, in sunglasses and looking fierce, mouthing wordlessly, plus newsprints feat. her thought-bubbles in related dialogue/response. "Ashes to Ashes" (1995) is an intensely personal one, family photos and text reflecting her parents' death, though I liked the balance here w/ "I Am Somebody. The Body of My Friends" (1992-5), 18 photographs of Piper w/ said friends. And a treat here, and (at least on surface-level) lighter in subject matter, is "The Big Four-Oh" (1988), a rare installation work from Piper, involving a deconstructed suit of armor, 40 hardballs, and her diary, plus a looping video of the artist dancing (back to the camera) effortlessly to '80s music. Don't miss it.
* Jenny Holzer "Retro" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Beautiful classic pieces from Holzer's history, centered less on her famous LED screens and more on static text pieces, like the "Survival" series (benches, w/ text carved in indian red granite), "Living" series (benches w/ text carved in bethel white granite) and "Under a Rock" (really knockout gem mist black granite benches). Don't miss her enamel on metal text works from the early '80s, also from the "Living" series, like this gem: "After dark it's a relief to see a girl walking toward or behind you. Then you're much less likely to be assaulted." And this beauty: "When someone is breathing on you, you feel cool air pulled across your skin followed by moist warm air pushed in the opposite direction. This goes on at regular intervals and makes a perfect temperature." Truth.
LAST CHANCE
* Gerhard Richter "Lines which do not exist" @ The Drawing Center / 35 Wooster St. As mayjah as it gets: the 1st proper stateside exhibition on the legendary artist's works on paper, b/c though he's known for his mix of blurred photorealism and oil-slick abstraction, Richter has worked extensively in watercolor, ink and graphite since the mid-60s. This is absolutely essential and a destination exhibition. Richter had a love-hate (or really a general disdain) w/ drawing, eschewing it for photographic studies that led to his paintings or just painting by itself, as it bore the most instances of experimentation and chance. Yet, he drew anyway, on "his own terms" as it were, and the results are equally mind-altering and effortlessly his own. Wavy, rose-bud-like forms in "Untitled" (1966) created w/ graphite on a drill, the field of blurred apparitions amid seismic zaps in "27.4.1999 (5)" (1999), the (exceptionally) realistic "Gebirge/Mountains" (1968), which remains a fury of crosshatchings, the sensual nude in "20.9.1985" (1985), De Chirico-esque and drawn from a photographic source. The majority of the lot is graphite and ink, and they're riveting, but there are several Richter-style colorful examples here and there, glorious saturated worlds more emotional than physical, delving deep w/in the viewer to command our full attention. Intensely delicious. NOTE: THIS ENDS THURSDAY. DO NOT MISS IT!
* Tara McPherson "The Bunny in the Moon" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. Exceedingly stunning new paintings by McPherson, w/ her characteristic lunar-tinged figures now practically radiating blood-warmth in their quests for love. The artist's technique is masterful: her use of transparency and the sheen of skin is prominent here, and the related works on paper display her keen take on figuration, i.e. minimal use of lines = graphic, strong features.
+ Xiaoqing Ding "At the End of a Rainbow". Ding continues the drama in a series of new large-scale oils on paper, blurring Chinese folklore of supernatural foxes w/ Western fairytales. The result is some very pretty paintings, like "Daffodils Field" and its incredible depth (stick w/ that one over the sort of obvious, 'Wizard of Oz'-esque tituar piece). She augments the lot w/ four circular oils on panel, though by 'panel' I mean meticulously carved, ornamental wooden screens. A lovely duet w/ McPherson's show.
* Matt Connors "You Don't Know" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. Connors magnifies idle scribblings into a sort of dynamic lexicon, obliterates color w/ semitranslucent white paint and/or soaks the paint into raw canvas like Kool-Aid stains, in this pretty dope solo show. His experimentation rewards us w/ a unique style of abstraction in an ever-morphing field of abstract artists, a series never as obviously massive as the Abstract Expressionists but not so precisely tiny as his contemporaries Tomma Abts or JJ Peet. The roughly equal assortment of scribbles, erasings and infused-color works are offset by several digital C-prints, two of which sit unadorned, rolled up and precarious on the gallery's uneven floors, in two seemingly solid, vegetal colors.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
fee's LIST (through 11/16)
WEDNESDAY
* Pat Steir "The Nearly Endless Line" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. A site-specific wall drawing installation from the NY-based Steir, whose investigations into abstraction and Chinese-style flung ink painting dates back to the late '80s.
* David Armstrong "Mad About the Boy" @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. Emma Reeves curated this look back at the NY-based photographer's sharp-focus portraits of men, lovers or friends.
* "Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour" signing @ Clic Gallery / 255 Centre St (6/NQ/Z to Canal St), 6-8p. A dynamic biography, recounted conversation-style by the seminal photographer's closest friends and celebrity/fashion subjects, courses throughout rare personal and archival photography, plus some of Ritts' most famous art- and fashion-prints. Join Charles Churchward, my mentor and the author of this handsome Ritts book, at the first NY signing.
* "Ne Change Rien" (dir. Pedro Costa, 2009) screenings at Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave). YES!!!!!! I fell in love with this incredible auteurist Portuguese director courtesy of his Anthology-housed retrospective back in '07. His latest film, which played at the 2009 NYFF (and which I sadly expected to NEVER see a proper theatrical run in NY thereafter) receives proper treatment here, for a limited time! Costa moves beyond Lisbon (specifically the Fontainhas ghetto, the backdrop and nearly secondary character in his films "Ossos", "In Vanda's Room" and "Colossal Youth") to focus on chanteuse Jeanne Balibar, from the recording studio to the stage. Costa's subtle filming and sumptuous framing figures throughout this genius feature. Through NOV 16
THURSDAY
* Robert Irwin "Way Out West" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. The gallery's 14th solo exhibition of the pioneering Light and Space artist, whose restrained, naturalistic style (despite last year's "Red Drawing, White Drawing, Black Painting", that didn't hit me as hard as his powerful take on Barnett Newman back in late '06) is incredibly engaging. His sound installation in the garden of DIA:Beacon, for instance, continues to enchant. The new show, centered on the dynamism of light's perceptual qualities, should be dope.
* Bruce Nauman "For Children/For Beginners" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. New A/V works from the renowned Conceptualist, furthering his incorporation of voice and the body in his work. The fact we have new Nauman AND new Irwin (at Pace Gallery midtown) occurring simultaneously is indeed auspicious.
* Avner Ben-Gal "Smackville" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Think about that title for a minute: this second solo show from the Tel Aviv-based artist, over two series of works on paper and paintings, are replete w/ opiate imagery, from craving to withdrawal to rehabilitation.
* "Double Tide" (dir. Sharon Lockhart, 2009) @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 7:30p (+ Q&A w/ Lockhart & Casad). Lockhart's style of discreet filmmaking, focused on human labor and their immediate environment, is as meditative as it is compelling, even gripping. Her installation at Gladstone Gallery last year, "Lunch Break", about Maine shipyard workers and centered around a one-shot, slo-mo take down an industrial corridor, of the men at rest, was visually arresting. Her new film, a single portrait of Jen Casad, digging for clams in Seal Cove, Maine, toiling amid the beautiful landscape, may sound far from 'action-packed', but that's never the reason to see a Lockhart film. Her work is so restrained that it invites us into the subject's unique world. Also FRI (7p), SAT (1:30p), SUN (6p)
* Naked Hearts @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FM/JZ to Delancey), 8p/$8. Amy & Noah pack a LOT of '90s alt-rock energy into their two-piece local act Naked Hearts. I dig 'em. w/ Lovers
FRIDAY
* Sara Greenberger Rafferty "Double Issue" artist book launch @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St, 6-8p. Scope Rafferty's new artist-edition release and the current gallery show, Roger White's beguiling objet-abstracts.
* "Every Man For Himself" (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1980) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Over a decade after Nouvelle Vague, JLG did another sexy, cerebral film that, full disclosure, I haven't seen! Young Isabelle Huppert! Cigar-chomping Jacques Dutronc! Charles Bukowski quotations! Bien sur!
* "I Can't Sleep" (dir. Claire Denis, 1994) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 7/9:20p. I really love this noirish Parisian urban drama: my impetus to see it was due to lead Yekaterina Golubeva (film buffs will know her as 1/2 the 'stars' of Bruno Dumont's notorious "Twentynine Palms"). Having seen it, I wholeheartedly recommend: it's a surreal trip, due in part to the language barriers (Golubeva plays a Lithuanian girl in the film).
* "Three Outlaw Samurai" (dir. Hideo Gosha, 1964) screening @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (6 to 68th St), 6:45p/FREE. I am thrilled Asia Society is hosting this mini-fest of free screenings of wacked-out '60s Japanese films. I mean, they led w/ Nagisa Oshima's "Pleasures of the Flesh" last week! This time we've got the wisecracking ronin unwillingly thrust into a tussle b/w the kindly peasantfolk and the evil magistrate!
* "Skyline" (dirs. Colin & Greg Strause, 2010) screenings in wide release. The little I've seen about this alien invasion sci-fi (the trailer, the posters), of people getting sucked up tractor-beam style into mega spacecraft, have me enamored. (yes, even the extended shot of Eric Balfour moaning and groaning won't dissuade me)
* Heliotropes + Weird Owl @ The Charleston / 174 Bedford Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p. Heavy one tonight: the volatile combo of local stoner-pop girls Heliotropes and local psych-twang boys Weird Owl is hot stuff. Now match 'em w/ WV's Pat Pat (check their album "Wizard of This" on bandcamp.com) and you're got an unmissable one.
* Invisible Days @ Don Pedro / 90 Manhattan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Grand), 8p. Formerly Beloved Rouge, but whatever you call this NY band, they play a hot, enveloping shoegaze (track "Daysleeping" is on constant rotation at my place) out of Swervedriver territory, so I call 'em 'essential'.
* Blank Dogs (album release) @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8:30p/$10. If it weren't for the airtight Charleston lineup (see above), I'd be here, sweating it out in foggy Glasslands to lo-fi master(s) Blank Dogs' new album, containing only the best bits of the '80s, filtered through a contemporary haze. w/ Velvet Davenport + Dead Gaze
SATURDAY
* "Trouble Every Day" (dir. Claire Denis, 2001) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 4:15/8:10p. Normally I wouldn't recommend ANYTHING that stars Vincent Gallo, esp. as a lead, but this harrowing, New French Extremity release from Denis, is worthy of mention. But don't expect "modern day vampire film" to eschew from its frenzied, feral violence, mainly from co-lead Béatrice Dalle.
* Zero Film Festival opening night w/ Asobi Seksu + Oberhofer @ Nutroaster Studios / 119 Ingraham St, Bushwick (L to Morgan), 7p/$12. The kickoff of this authentically independent film festival is a double-hit of dopeness, beginning w/ curated short films in two blocks and followed by "visually enhanced" live performances by caffeinated young hotties Oberhofer (who played like 2 doz. CMJ shows) and dream-poppers Asobi Seksu. Hot!! Note: I bemoan the lack of screenings of post-film festival features, international gems and super-indie works that never see the light of day here. This is triple the case at ZFF, so don't miss out.
* Sweet Bulbs (album release party) + Magic Kids @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/$10. I've fallen hard for local lovelies Sweet Bulbs: the boys kicking up a furious maelstrom of buzzing guitars and trundling percussion, and vocalist Inna stands in the eye of this hurricane, delivering her honeyed, deadpan lyrics. Sweet indeed, essential too. Magic Kids play several dates in NY (straight off Fun Fun Fest in Austin TX), but this is their best night.
* Velvet Davenport + Big Troubles @ Shea Stadium / 20 Meadow St, Williamsburg (L to Grand), 8p. I think I first heard of Minnesota psych-rockers Velvet Davenport off a split they did w/ New Order underwater-ish Gary War entitled "Surfer Girl". They're in town a bit, w/ Blank Dogs on FRI and this great show w/ local fuzz-rockers Big Troubles tonight.
* Open Ocean @ Zebulon / 258 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 9p. Attend an Open Ocean show and you're guaranteed a twilit, glamorous night by the NY quartet, w/ strains of shoegaze and the rock edge of trip-hop in their layered compositions. w/ Anita Fix & the Ecstatic Gestures
SUNDAY
* "Sanjuro" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1962) screenings @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 4:30/6:50/9:15p. The inspired sequel to "Yojimbo", w/ Toshiro Mifune reprising his role of reluctant badass, heading a group of way less badass (but still enthusiastic) young samurai, to take out all the bad guys.
* "35 Shots of Rum" (dir. Claire Denis, 2008) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 4:35/6:30/8:25/10:20p. Denis took inspiration from Yasujiro Ozu's "Late Spring" in this dynamic, introspective film set in Parisian suburbs. If the cannibal/vampire film "Trouble Every Day" left you know, this NYFF/Venice Film Festival winner will warm back up.
* "Inception" (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 5:30p. What, you mean you HAVEN'T seen this mind-melting dream-w/in-a-dream-w/in-a-dream film, which features such memorable imagery as nattily dressed young gentlemen duking it out in a rotating, elevator-lined corridor? w/ Leo DiCaprio in one of his most believable roles (sorry "Shutter Island"), let alone Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard and a random (but welcome) Michael Caine cameo? Get to it!!
* Jen Liu + Maria Chavez "Fugue State" @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St, 7p. The 1st in a series of collaborative performances by artist Liu (who is co-exhibiting w/ Brody Condon in the gallery) on laptop/projector and experimental musician Chavez on her custom treated-turntables, in a semi-improv narrative show.
* Crystal Stilts @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. This Local x Local show features the woozy, glamorous stylings of Crystal Stilts. And for the naysayers calling this a Velvet Underground carbon copy: check shimmery new single "Shake the Shackles" and get back to me on that.
* Grinderman @ Nokia Theatre / 1515 Broadway (ACE/NQR/123 to Times Square), 7p/$37.50. Why would I EVER recommend you to Times Square, for a prohibitively pricey show at a mainstream-y venue whose name is now…Best Buy Theatre? (I think??) Because of Nick Cave and Grinderman, of course, the sexy, depraved, ballsy rockin' quartet whose latest release (surely you've seen the demonic "Heathen Child" teasers, right?) is too good & weird to ignore.
* Suuns @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. Do Suuns do Clinic better than Clinic? Rhetorical question. These guys play a jittery, creepy live set, w/ snarling guitars, relentless rhythm and Ben Shemie's whispery, paranoia-infused vocals. w/ BELL
MONDAY
* Zero Film Festival presents "Lostal ~ Lostat" (dir. Shigeo Arikawa, 2010) @ Invisible Dog Art Center / 51 Bergen St, Cobble Hill (F/G to Bergen St), 8:30p. The meditative full-length feature debut from the young Tokyo-based director. Electric Wolf follow Arikawa's screening w/ a live psych-jam.
TUESDAY
* Maria Chavez w/ Walter Carson & Brian Osborne (Heat Retention Records) @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/$10. NICE: Chavez's tortured turntable experiments vs. the searing noise assault from Carson & Osborne, the 1st of several local-ish shows for the duo (check back on next week's LIST). w/ Daniel Moore & High School Confidential
* Darmstadt's 6th Anniversary "In C" @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (6 to Bleecker, ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 7p/$20 ($15/advance). The sixth installment of Terry Riley's '64 mellifluous experimental work is as gorgeous and subtle as it is mind-alteringly intense. Darmstadt's interpretation always feat. a rock-drummer's pulse to guide the expansive ensemble, and this year's has Jonathan Kane (formerly of Swans and La Monte Young collaborator) behind the set. Also feat. Zach Layton (bass), Ha-Yang Kim (cello), Ben Neil (trumpet), Lesley Flanigan and Nick Hallett (voice) and many, many others, in an incredible, polyphonic performance.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Hiroshi Sugimoto "The Day After" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. In this ineffable experimental photographer's debut solo show at Pace, he includes two 50-ft photographic polyptychs from his "Lightning Field" series, plus related single prints and even a reconstituted Tesla coil, which releases a crackling violet shock every five minutes (that's what Sugimoto-san told me anyway, when I had the pleasure w/ speaking to the artist at his opening reception). So we're thinking electrical storms. What I feel, though, is being deep underwater, safe from the obscene pressure of the depths but in some great undiscovered trench, populated by those deep-sea denizens that use bioluminescence to attract prey and see down in the abyss. Sugimoto worked electrical discharges across unexposed film in the darkroom to create such marvels as "Lightning Fields 177" (could be spacecraft) and the watery "Lightning Fields 168", expelling hot gassy haze and tendrils of light into…nothingness. That's the thing w/ many of these works, incl. the 1st polyptych in the front gallery: the unexposed film is a perfect black, or as close as perfect comes, permitting the flashes and charges of light, like dendrites or cell creation, to float against the surface. The back polyptych, however, while subtler overall, is alive w/ shadow and textures, like briefly illuminated glimpses of a never-before-see seabed, fabric-like, even, roiling and rolling across the prints. There are benches in this room for a reason: I suggest you sit down and take it all in.
* Larry Poons "Radical Surface 1985-1989" @ Loretta Howard Gallery / 525 W 26th St. If I had named it, I'd call this show "Gnarly Surface". It inaugurates Howard's larger exhibition space in a big way. Dig Anselm Reyle's trashy-surface high-relief paintings? Ditch the mutant, new-car colors for opalescence and pearly grays, melted ice-cream, and you've got Poons, the master — and that's just describing the COLOR. The stuff underneath these layers of encrusted, mudslide paint resembles everything from weathered, prehistoric rock to those foam egg-crate sheets used in hospitals. Less jewel-toned than his earlier guano-like canvases, this is pure surface intense and truly radical.
* Anthony Caro "Upright Sculptures" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. Caro just may be the leading force in divergent sculptural alchemy today, blending weathered, rusted steel and wood (here luxuriously chunky railroad ties) like they were always meant for one another, star-crossed. These tall forms were assembled from various found materials w/ extra emphasis on texture, the woodgrain gorgeous and pronounced, the patina REALLY patina'ed. Each embody a powerful nostalgia, again like these forms were meant to pair up, like they were once some operating steampunk creation, transfixed for eternity now in these metaphysical poses. And speaking of textures, the disarming "Up Landscape", while entirely painted steel, looks curiously soft — my first thought was Urs Fischer's painted aluminum "drooping sculptures", but Caro's is more abstract and physical.
* Erwin Wurm "gulp" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Somebody had fun with body-stockings! That someone is the Viennese trickster Wurm, and his idiosyncratic, physical sculpture is in full effect at this gallery, in a set of contorted aluminum sorta-figurative forms either content w/ or struggling against their brightly colored fabric-y bindings. He tempers these w/ fabric pulled over canvas, like the brilliant blue "Mental States", which is some pretty great party lettering for being cut-fabric. Another work is called "Me Under LSD", which features a powdery, acid-yellow brain-cloud over an aluminum limb. Stare at that one long enough, and Wurm's accompanying video "Tell", which features two hot young people having a philosophy discussion straight out of Richard Linklater's "Waking Life", to the point where their auto drives up a wall onto a roof like nothing out of the ordinary, will make TOTAL SENSE.
* Peggy Preheim "the end (final cut)" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Don't be afraid to get close to Preheim's works. If you've heard me (or so many other critics) speak of Preheim's unique take on drawing, well let me exhaust terms like "intimately scaled", "diminutive renderings" and the like now. In sum, she draws very very tiny and very very realistic, vintage photograph quality shrunk to 1x100th of its original size, roughly, hazy-edged but alarmingly vivid and clear. Preheim incorporates currency in her new series, turning "Blind Spot", a pair of girls in sun-dresses and floppy hats, w/ a nickel-sized blank in between them, like a really big hula-hoop. This is drawn in the dead center of a snowy white thick paper, nearly 35" long, so yes you do need to get VERY close. "Twister" features these girls again, or their younger sisters, clasping hands in front of a Mobius strip, an exercise in grayscale. "Hummingbird" combines a real U.S. 1$ bill, its backside augmented w/ circles from another currency and a graphite ear. "Snow White" is even more effective: a truncated U.S. 20$ bill in the bottom left corner, an aloft eagle (w/ deftly rendered feathers) way up and center. That's it, but the vibe is so distinct.
+ Tomas Saraceno "Cloud Cities Connectome". Saraceno is working in a way finer scale w/ his weather-minded installations, outfitting the titular gallery-filling work w/ nylon monofilament that is nearly invisible, and hence impossible to traverse the space and be "one with" the work. The comparatively bulky "Biosphere 06" in the front gallery, w/ its water-drip system and tillandsia plants inside, is enchanting.
* Youssef Nabil @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. Hand-colored gelatin silver prints recalling Egyptian movie posters and films of the '40s and '50s, which is just as mesmerizingly dope as it sounds in print. I quite liked the powdery, painterly nature of Nabil's coloration techniques, particularly in "Amani by window, Cairo", which I could stare at for days.
* Philip Pearlstein "Going Forward" @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. Pearlstein's grasp of physicality in his renderings of voluptuous models, crafting skin and shadow w/ equal care, has few equals in the contemporary art sphere (in my opinion), and the modern master has been honing this for decades. His new large oil on canvas works bear striking sensations of movement, from the strong diagonals of "Model With Speedboat and Kiddie Car Harness Racer" (Pearlstein's works are more detailed than ever) to the westward flow of everything in the backdrop to "Two Models with Weathervane Fox, Fish, Horse and Boat", leaving the two nudes in a calming moment of repose.
* Jenny Holzer "Retro" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Beautiful classic pieces from Holzer's history, centered less on her famous LED screens and more on static text pieces, like the "Survival" series (benches, w/ text carved in indian red granite), "Living" series (benches w/ text carved in bethel white granite) and "Under a Rock" (really knockout gem mist black granite benches). Don't miss her enamel on metal text works from the early '80s, also from the "Living" series, like this gem: "After dark it's a relief to see a girl walking toward or behind you. Then you're much less likely to be assaulted." And this beauty: "When someone is breathing on you, you feel cool air pulled across your skin followed by moist warm air pushed in the opposite direction. This goes on at regular intervals and makes a perfect temperature." Truth.
* Anselm Kiefer "Next Year in Jerusalem" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. How to explain this grueling, thoroughly enriching exhibition (Kiefer's first in NY in eight years) in accessible terms? Think of diving headfirst into an 'Alice in Wonderland' like domain, only its a scorched earth, replete w/ dwarfing glass and steel vitrines enclosing haunting arrangements of dead flora and tattered garments, expansive chilly landscapes rendered abstract in layers of emulsion, shellac and physical media, plus a bus-sized rusted steel chamber outfitted w/ bedsheet-sized burlap and lead panels, screenprinted and suspended on metal hooks. Now step back for a minute: Kiefer's latest is not an easy go, nor even easy to explain, as befits the run-on sentence before this. All his imagery of relics from post-WWII Germany (the steel chamber installation is "Occupations", 76 sheet-sized photographs recalling his seminal series from '69, one of his earliest), the Bible, Kabbalah, folklore, poetry and dreams are brought to a foaming head here — the many, many vitrines, about three dozen, encircle "Occupations" like strange trees; even the polyptych landscape renderings are set in glass and steel. One of the more bracing works, if I had to pick one, is "Sefiroth", a plaster-encased dress, shaped around an invisible figure and pierced porcupine-style by enormous shards of glass (like they're emanating from the fabric itself in an unseen explosion). And yet, and yet: as overwhelming as this may sound (another one, "Johannis-Nacht", bears a lead model-size airplane nearly consumed by resin-coated fern, on a cracked ground of clay, shellac and paint), it's not an impossible, claustrophobic trek. Stay awhile and the pieces begin to spread out, permitting sight-lines to the large landscapes ("Fitzcarraldo", a four-paneler, w/ fang-like synthetic teeth dotting the thorn bushes and resin-ferns, is a beauty) and moments of contemplation amid the vitrines. You need to devote a bit of time to this one, though, but the rewards are totally worth it.
* William Earl Kofmehl III "Dear Father Knickerbocker, i Just Googled You" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. The gallery inaugurated its long-awaited new exhibition space w/ a powerful, challenging show from Kofmehl. The subject matter, a goldmine of historical references (both true and folklorish, even completely fictive) of NYC history, bears the indirect collaboration of Bernard Goetz — you know, the subway vigilante who, during a spike in crime in the '80s, shot four men on a train and had a "Law & Order" episode based on his infamous legacy. Not easy subject matter, hence. But Kofmehl approaches it in two ways, Goetz's squirrel husbandry (seen in a video w/ the artist and Goetz amid squirrels on a park bench, in a life-size bronze of the artist on a bench, surrounded by shiny squirrel sculptures, and in "Trojan Squirrel", a behemoth of claimed wood which contained Kofmehl during the opening reception, delivering a mic-assisted spoken word performance) and the aforementioned bits of historical fact and tall-tales. You can google Goetz (like the exhibition title suggests) to find out more on him. Or take reference from Kofmehl's cache of handmade embroideries, ranging from a smallpox epidemic of 1658 to the 2003 blackout, w/ loads of maps, outdated subway imagery, sports, stats and squirrels throughout. Props to the gallery for beginning the new space w/ a big-thinking exhibition.
* Ugo Rondinone "nude" @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. A relatively spare and human-scaled exhibition from the trickster, which doesn't surprise me b/c I never know what to expect w/ Rondinone. From his ginormous comic heads in roughly composed clay to his rainbow HELL YES! signage for the New Museum's debut on the Bowery, he moves from extremes. This one features seven nude sculptures cast delicately from wax, seated against the gallery walls. The medium makes them both obviously manufactured yet closely realistic (the wax doesn't miss anything, from the wrinkles in the sole of a foot to the calming downward gaze).
* Luc Tuymans "Corporate" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. Tuymans' intentions should be clear in the show title, but his exhibition of new, sparsely colored, veiled paintings span the ages, from feudalism and colonial times to present-day corporate culture. "Speech" cuts most immediately for me, a blurred, suited figure bathed in spotlight on a bare stage, his hands could easily be grasping futilely…for an excuse, an answer, who knows. "Panel" does the same for me, only the perspective is dropped way back, w/ four seated figures blown out in lights on a stage, waves of darkness surrounding them. So while I most immediately ID w/ the contemporary scenarios, I mean look at the current economic climate!
* Adrian Piper "Past Time: Selected Works 1973-1995" @ Elizabeth Dee / 548 W 22nd St. Some of Piper's most political, combustive works, and this is coming from a brilliant artist astute at 'getting to' the viewer, latching onto our thoughts, preempting them, and leaving us w/ a LOT to mull over. "It's Just Art" (1980) will do it: a news broadcast interlaid w/ Piper, in sunglasses and looking fierce, mouthing wordlessly, plus newsprints feat. her thought-bubbles in related dialogue/response. "Ashes to Ashes" (1995) is an intensely personal one, family photos and text reflecting her parents' death, though I liked the balance here w/ "I Am Somebody. The Body of My Friends" (1992-5), 18 photographs of Piper w/ said friends. And a treat here, and (at least on surface-level) lighter in subject matter, is "The Big Four-Oh" (1988), a rare installation work from Piper, involving a deconstructed suit of armor, 40 hardballs, and her diary, plus a looping video of the artist dancing (back to the camera) effortlessly to '80s music. Don't miss it.
* Nicky Nodjoumi "Invitation to Change Your Metaphor" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St, 2nd Fl. Nodjourmi's critical response to contemporary political events in Iran, over haunting narrative-driven paintings and drawings. Grappling w/ my informal art history knowledge, I'd apply Nodjourmi's style to Neue Sachlichkeit, as modernized for the Middle East. His vivid works, combinations of of high-realism figures and biting caricature, look almost like collage or screenprints but are fully rendered in oils. Bearded clerics, besuited figures, veiled women and nudes interact w/ beasts and half-humans on molten, toxic backdrops. The titular work contains a bullet-riddled, burning automobile astride a greatly enlarged beheading, bracketed on either side by suits limply holding a water hose. A third suit (perhaps the soul of the beheaded, or the car victim?) floats in the sky above. That's one canvas. In fact, perhaps the quietest work in Nodjourmi's show is the unmistakably titled "Bloody Ayatolla", a fuzzy portrait of Ali Khamenei that, devoid of other imagery or visible background, almost looks like a Luc Tuymans. In that sense, we can't escape it. A very powerful exhibition.
* Miranda Lichtenstein @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. Photography-as-art that forces you to look twice, three times, to discern the subject and action may not be proprietary to Lichtenstein, but she absolutely has a gift for exploring several divergent perception-disrupting techniques, to great effect. Her "Screen Shadow" works, archival pigment prints all, carry this vivid dynamism w/ their moire patterns, bending and shifting their points of reference. The softer C-prints of still lifes against their reflections are sublime additions.
* Sherrie Levine @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. Experiencing Levine's work in person is crucial to drawing out the emotional impact from the subtleties of her oeuvre. Her large installation "Equivalents", two sets of 18 same-size monochrome paintings based on Alfred Stieglitz's same-titled cloud photo series from the late '20s, is an intriguing sequence of blues and grays seeping into their maple panels, exposing the woodgrain beneath, lining the gallery walls and meeting in the center. Likewise her bronze sculpture, w/ mythological references this time: check the wild texture of "Khmer Torso", reflecting the original's stone cast, and the mirrored shininess of "Les Deux Chevre-Pieds", which could once have been smooth marble. Levine reappropriates and recontextualizes, but she is careful to reveal nuances from the former works.
* Tony Smith "Bronze" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. A treasure trove of Smith's classic small bronze sculptures (finished in signature black), nearly off of which ultimately turned into later monolithic works. Of course I gravitated immediately to "Wall", a sliver of rectangular prism that, if turned on its side, would resemble a sinister (if diminutive) monolith. The adjacent "Trap" next to it, a snaking diamond-prism letter 'e' flipped backwards, is equally impressive. And that's not to forget the kinetic abstraction of "Source" and "The Snake is Out" (love the titles), plus the little evil-droid array cunningly titled "Smog".
* John Currin @ Gagosian / 980 Madion Ave. This notion of Currin's luscious Old Masters style oil paintings of fleshy and at times warped and perverted feminine forms not being everybody's cup of tea, well you didn't hear that from me. I still don't have a 100% solid opinion of him, except that he excels at what he does. I mean, you take a banally titled "The Scream", which look like practically anything, gorgeous even, or scandalous, considering Currin's trove of models, and what does he do w/ it? How about a smallish scale painting of a leering blond, her mouth locked open in rictus, like she's suffering an episode of acute Bell's palsy? Another painting is titled "Big Hands", and brother the model in that rendering has, as you might expect, some big hands! And yet…Currin turns it around in such lovelies as "Mademoiselle" (expertly rendering skin in see-through fabric), "Flora" (creative use of empty space and sweetly posed girl), and "The Reader", a sensual pairing of nude flesh and reflection. This crazy mixture, evident in all Currin shows and sometimes in single, larger works themselves, is why I can't totally make up my mind on him.
* William N. Copley "X-Rated" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. The gallery recreates Copley's infamous '74 installation at former Huntington Hartford Museum on Columbus Circle (can you believe it??) in a riot of libidinous physicality in large acrylics on linen. The overt 'pretty' stuff is few and far between, though that's obvious if you're attending a vintage Copley show, but they're overall accessible, and I found some quick favorites. Number one would be "The Happy Hooker" — of all titles, I swear — a gorgeous woman in half-undress, seemingly out of E.L. Kirschner's time (trust me on this). Also: "Maltese Falcon", for its framing. And note Copley's amusing signature placement, on thighs, ass, even a tube of lubricant ("Last Tango in Paris", obvs).
* Lucas Samaras "Poses" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. Samaras is having fun in this overwhelming exhibition of the artist's Photoshop-manipulated digital portraits of art world stars and posse, about 117 prints (out of like 400+) on display here. He doesn't go too bonkers (instances like "Pose 0253" of Raymond McGuire w/ its drippily psychedelic background and "Pose 0314" of Charles Renfro peeling a lemon-yellow face off his own face are few & far between), exhibiting debonair versions of Jasper Johns — looking every bit the wise, crafty patriarch — plus a gauzy Janet Boris ("Pose 0320") and two of her baby Theo. Also of note: "Pose 0152" of John Mason bears some of the baddest-ass eyeglass frames I've ever seen, and if you know me you know the kind I wear.
* Inaugural Show @ CRG Gallery / 548 W 22nd St. Viva new gallery spaces! It's almost a theme in this LIST (w/ Lombard-Freid's move to ground-floor space on W 19th and all), and the move suits CRG. The show is full of roster stars, incl. impasto-heavy canvases by Tom LaDuke (somehow incorporating a Jack Nicholson background; see it and tell me what you think), Tomory Dodge (it's called "Absolutely Curtains" and it channels Anselm Reyle's media-stripe paintings) and a particularly viscid one by Pia Fries, where the squeezed out paint acts almost like wet clay on the mostly bare wood. Also of note: minimalist assemblage by Colby Bird and Siobhan Liddell, plus Ori Gerscht's enchanting lambda print of cherry-blossoms in Tokyo's twilight.
* Damien Hirst "Medicine Cabinets" @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. Its like the YBA stars aligned for this seminal trove of archival works from Hirst. Let me try to explain: the ground-floor gallery (of this charming multistory town home, bien sur) contains Hirst's "Sex Pistols" medicine cabinets from '89, each bearing a track title from "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistol", while the upper floor features a slew of Sex Pistols ephemera (framed LPs, torn T-shirts w/ paint, assumedly Hirst's, spattering the fabric) AND a four-part cabinet entitled "The Sex Pistols", but that one is from '96 and unrelated to the downstairs cabinets except in 1) name and 2) drugs. Are you following me?? I barely followed that myself.
LAST CHANCE
* Marcel Broodthaers "Major Works" @ Michael Werner Gallery / 74 E 77th St. This career-spanning exhibition contains, as the title would convey, some of the Belgian artist's strongest (yet in instances very rarely seen) works. From his poetic text paintings and Surrealist imagery, to the mesmerizing late-period installation "Dites Partout Que Je L'ai Dit".
* "The Personal Dimension" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St. These four "X Generation" Chinese artists, born during the economic/modernity boom, will tweak your viewpoint on contemporary Chinese art via their depoliticized, fiercely personal works. Gao Lei's voyeuristic, surrealist hyperreal paintings and installations reflect a strong notion of Big Brother surveillance w/o reducing it to cliched Red Army theatrics that occurred in the generation before him. Instead, we get chained and truncated animal combinations in white-tiled rooms, and WE are the ones peering in at their distress. Jia Aili's reductive canvases are far more opaque and devoid of his recurring narrative themes, but the inclusion of Jia's canvas-strewn bookshelf/workspace hints at his methodology. Li Qing's depictions of violence against countrymen and actual/emotional captivity are channeled by bright orange ping-pong balls, of all things, stuck to heavily impastoed "firing squad" silhouettes or inside a Plexiglas-enclosed table-tennis chamber. The WAZA Group collective features one installation, "30 Floating Musicians", devoting a stand, speaker and info card for each absent, traditional musician, amplifying their compositions to a much wider audience.
* Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Mayumi Terada @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. I dove into this three-artist show like one would a serving of Neapolitan ice cream, the striped chocolate-vanilla-strawberry kind, as I didn't immediately glean an underlying theme/tying element b/w the three. Case 1: the Basquiat selection (paintings, screenprints etc) are typically beautiful, particularly the large "Back of the Neck" (1982), a horizontal silkscreen on black w/ contrasty white musculature and shimmering gold accents. The Mapplethorpe center will either be your favorite or least, as it mainly consists of 13 b&w photographs from his graphic "X Portfolio" from '78 (which this gallery represented), shocking even Mapplethorpe in its imagery of fisting, golden showers, bondage and docking (or I guess you could call it "self-docking"? If anyone has the more appropriate word…). The found-object "The Perfect Moment", a pseudo-anti-Christian altar, was supposedly incredibly controversial when it first debuted (1970), but maybe I'm just jaded: it didn't do much for me. Terada's exhibition at the back gallery is stunning when you realize what she's doing: the large C-prints of empty rooms w/ frameless windows and overcast skies evolve from her austere dioramas and mini-sets, several of which are displayed in the show.
* Yoan Capote "Mental States" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. The Cuban artist's first experience of American culture, the subject of his first solo exhibition at the gallery, is both a longing and prickly affair — though "prickly" only half conveys the intrinsic harm in his massive canvases of cake batter-like paint and rusted fish hooks and nails, emulating choppy waves extending out to nowhere and to aerial views of stateside metropolis. That the fish hooks carry b/w the ocean scenes (Capote's childhood memories) and the current-day city-views is something to consider. Another: a suite containing a propped sculpture of bricks and cement in a plywood frame (entitled "The Window" but appearing as a flag) and a lightbox diptych of that brick flag in a wall and bored out, revealing the sea behind. I got a Magritte vibe from this duality (is it here or is it not? what is reality?) and also an acute sense of Capote's feelings, to an extent. See, this prison-like American flag v. the freedom of the ocean and sky asks more questions: where does the dream truly go?
* Julian Stanczak "Color Grid" @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. No, I can't stare at Stanczak's Op art all day long like I can Robert Ryman's austere canvases or, uh, Joan Miro's "Dutch Interiors", but I like 'em anyway. This several decades' spanning exhibition gives Stanczak some staying power in the faddish Op art movement. Though "Sheen" from the '70s, w/ its gridded center obliterated by a flash of white-hot yellowish haze, is one of the strongest in the show, the moody "Echo 2", reds of varying densities on a grid of orange-red, is warm and sensual AND new, completed this year.
* Kwun Soon-chul @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. A series of large oil on canvas works from the Paris-based Kwun, his first solo U.S. show, renderings culled from Korea's postwar history in a weathered, rugged realism. Kwun's "faces" are massive and disembodied, composed of a full spectrum of paint hues and textural techniques, impasto, smears and cut brushstrokes, floating over grayish or black backgrounds. Step far enough back and the figure emerges, but the skull-like end result is as haunting as trying to make it out from the static noise up close.
* "Six Degrees of Separation: A New Generation of Canadian Artists" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. Noah Becker guest-curated this pretty excellent show. I'd seen Alex McLeod's ecstatic 3D computer-rendered lightjet prints before, but his idealized landscapes are still quite exciting. Attila Richard Lukacs intriguing combo of oil, bitumen, polyurethane, enamel and titanium white drips and seismic slashes on skinny panels and Angela Grossmann's large mixed media figurative collages on vintage tent-material canvases were my favorites of the lot.
* Fendry Ekel & Chris Jones @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. A great dichotomy b/w these two artists in their reclamation of mundane subject matter. Ekel's large-scale renderings of familiar imagery (a magnified chess piece, a coin) are lovely but static and quiet in comparison to Jones' works, except for Ekel's smeared gouache representation of the Millennium Hilton's facade at nighttime (that one kicks ass). Jones' assemblages ("rubbish piles") are visually overwhelming and stunningly conceived. These delicate cut-cardboard sculptures are varnished w/ book and magazine images, to the end effect that the larger pieces (like a burned-out arcade game, a defrosting cube fridge, a wrecked TV set) spew oil-slick colors and phantasmagoric landscapes. You'll want to get down low (both these complicated works are on the floor) and investigate them further.
* Bo Bartlett "Paintings of Home" @ PPOW / 511 W 25th St #301. Leave it to me to occasionally wildly misconstrue a work of art. Case in point: Bartlett's super-large-scale "Home", the central oil on linen work in his latest exhibition at the gallery. I'm not that familiar w/ this Americana artist (this is his 10th show w/ the gallery), and I took detected a bit of deviance in this rendering of a woman standing in central frame in front of an old house, w/ a dude crawling on all fours away from her, a baby in the other corner. No, silly, this is Bartlett's life condensed into a single painting, depicted in the backyard of his childhood home in Columbus, Georgia (the crawling figure is Bartlett as a boy, playing around, and the woman is his WIFE). Lesson: reading the gallery PR materials can be a good thing, esp. if you're not up on the artist. But also true: there's a disarming quality to the works here, perhaps that's due to the unflashy subject matter and classical style, but they're beautiful. Size works to advantage, like the also massive square canvas "School of the Americas", four girls lying in daydreaming slumber amid hay, and "Land of Plenty", which seems both country and on a film set (so what is real?). Bartlett also includes smaller portraits on wood panel of early 20th C. figures w/ accompanying texts, like "Ma Rainey, Queen of the Blues (Kianga Ellis)", w/ contemporary figures in the sittings (Ellis leads Avail Art, for instance). It just may move you, too.
* "Plain Air", curated by Brian Willmont @ Cinders Gallery / 103 Havermeyer St, Williamsburg. The artist collective/printmaking contingent Apenest co-presents this riff on the landscape in personal space, ranging from the a/typically figurative to the highly abstract. Mark Chariker's work, which at first looked to me like the night sky as shown through the hole of a crystal, is this visual smear of ships, trains or many-windowed skyscrapers racing towards the center of frame (which still looks to me like a night sky). John Copeland contributes one of the most figurative works here, a work on paper of all things, but it's probably the scariest, a surreally nightmarish narrative of bald, black-cloaked twins advancing on an artist table and disjointed festival/carnival imagery (pennant flags, a child's party game, balloons, a dog) floating in the background. Hilary Pecis' duo of fragile collaged landscapes (cut-up luxury ads etc) are like brutal Max Ernst renderings, and Zac Scheinbaum's highly detailed psychedelic-vegetation worlds, rendered in contrasty graphite, float against a void. And that's just part of the 18 artists showing here.
* Pat Steir "The Nearly Endless Line" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. A site-specific wall drawing installation from the NY-based Steir, whose investigations into abstraction and Chinese-style flung ink painting dates back to the late '80s.
* David Armstrong "Mad About the Boy" @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. Emma Reeves curated this look back at the NY-based photographer's sharp-focus portraits of men, lovers or friends.
* "Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour" signing @ Clic Gallery / 255 Centre St (6/NQ/Z to Canal St), 6-8p. A dynamic biography, recounted conversation-style by the seminal photographer's closest friends and celebrity/fashion subjects, courses throughout rare personal and archival photography, plus some of Ritts' most famous art- and fashion-prints. Join Charles Churchward, my mentor and the author of this handsome Ritts book, at the first NY signing.
* "Ne Change Rien" (dir. Pedro Costa, 2009) screenings at Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave). YES!!!!!! I fell in love with this incredible auteurist Portuguese director courtesy of his Anthology-housed retrospective back in '07. His latest film, which played at the 2009 NYFF (and which I sadly expected to NEVER see a proper theatrical run in NY thereafter) receives proper treatment here, for a limited time! Costa moves beyond Lisbon (specifically the Fontainhas ghetto, the backdrop and nearly secondary character in his films "Ossos", "In Vanda's Room" and "Colossal Youth") to focus on chanteuse Jeanne Balibar, from the recording studio to the stage. Costa's subtle filming and sumptuous framing figures throughout this genius feature. Through NOV 16
THURSDAY
* Robert Irwin "Way Out West" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. The gallery's 14th solo exhibition of the pioneering Light and Space artist, whose restrained, naturalistic style (despite last year's "Red Drawing, White Drawing, Black Painting", that didn't hit me as hard as his powerful take on Barnett Newman back in late '06) is incredibly engaging. His sound installation in the garden of DIA:Beacon, for instance, continues to enchant. The new show, centered on the dynamism of light's perceptual qualities, should be dope.
* Bruce Nauman "For Children/For Beginners" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. New A/V works from the renowned Conceptualist, furthering his incorporation of voice and the body in his work. The fact we have new Nauman AND new Irwin (at Pace Gallery midtown) occurring simultaneously is indeed auspicious.
* Avner Ben-Gal "Smackville" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Think about that title for a minute: this second solo show from the Tel Aviv-based artist, over two series of works on paper and paintings, are replete w/ opiate imagery, from craving to withdrawal to rehabilitation.
* "Double Tide" (dir. Sharon Lockhart, 2009) @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 7:30p (+ Q&A w/ Lockhart & Casad). Lockhart's style of discreet filmmaking, focused on human labor and their immediate environment, is as meditative as it is compelling, even gripping. Her installation at Gladstone Gallery last year, "Lunch Break", about Maine shipyard workers and centered around a one-shot, slo-mo take down an industrial corridor, of the men at rest, was visually arresting. Her new film, a single portrait of Jen Casad, digging for clams in Seal Cove, Maine, toiling amid the beautiful landscape, may sound far from 'action-packed', but that's never the reason to see a Lockhart film. Her work is so restrained that it invites us into the subject's unique world. Also FRI (7p), SAT (1:30p), SUN (6p)
* Naked Hearts @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FM/JZ to Delancey), 8p/$8. Amy & Noah pack a LOT of '90s alt-rock energy into their two-piece local act Naked Hearts. I dig 'em. w/ Lovers
FRIDAY
* Sara Greenberger Rafferty "Double Issue" artist book launch @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St, 6-8p. Scope Rafferty's new artist-edition release and the current gallery show, Roger White's beguiling objet-abstracts.
* "Every Man For Himself" (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1980) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Over a decade after Nouvelle Vague, JLG did another sexy, cerebral film that, full disclosure, I haven't seen! Young Isabelle Huppert! Cigar-chomping Jacques Dutronc! Charles Bukowski quotations! Bien sur!
* "I Can't Sleep" (dir. Claire Denis, 1994) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 7/9:20p. I really love this noirish Parisian urban drama: my impetus to see it was due to lead Yekaterina Golubeva (film buffs will know her as 1/2 the 'stars' of Bruno Dumont's notorious "Twentynine Palms"). Having seen it, I wholeheartedly recommend: it's a surreal trip, due in part to the language barriers (Golubeva plays a Lithuanian girl in the film).
* "Three Outlaw Samurai" (dir. Hideo Gosha, 1964) screening @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (6 to 68th St), 6:45p/FREE. I am thrilled Asia Society is hosting this mini-fest of free screenings of wacked-out '60s Japanese films. I mean, they led w/ Nagisa Oshima's "Pleasures of the Flesh" last week! This time we've got the wisecracking ronin unwillingly thrust into a tussle b/w the kindly peasantfolk and the evil magistrate!
* "Skyline" (dirs. Colin & Greg Strause, 2010) screenings in wide release. The little I've seen about this alien invasion sci-fi (the trailer, the posters), of people getting sucked up tractor-beam style into mega spacecraft, have me enamored. (yes, even the extended shot of Eric Balfour moaning and groaning won't dissuade me)
* Heliotropes + Weird Owl @ The Charleston / 174 Bedford Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p. Heavy one tonight: the volatile combo of local stoner-pop girls Heliotropes and local psych-twang boys Weird Owl is hot stuff. Now match 'em w/ WV's Pat Pat (check their album "Wizard of This" on bandcamp.com) and you're got an unmissable one.
* Invisible Days @ Don Pedro / 90 Manhattan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Grand), 8p. Formerly Beloved Rouge, but whatever you call this NY band, they play a hot, enveloping shoegaze (track "Daysleeping" is on constant rotation at my place) out of Swervedriver territory, so I call 'em 'essential'.
* Blank Dogs (album release) @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8:30p/$10. If it weren't for the airtight Charleston lineup (see above), I'd be here, sweating it out in foggy Glasslands to lo-fi master(s) Blank Dogs' new album, containing only the best bits of the '80s, filtered through a contemporary haze. w/ Velvet Davenport + Dead Gaze
SATURDAY
* "Trouble Every Day" (dir. Claire Denis, 2001) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 4:15/8:10p. Normally I wouldn't recommend ANYTHING that stars Vincent Gallo, esp. as a lead, but this harrowing, New French Extremity release from Denis, is worthy of mention. But don't expect "modern day vampire film" to eschew from its frenzied, feral violence, mainly from co-lead Béatrice Dalle.
* Zero Film Festival opening night w/ Asobi Seksu + Oberhofer @ Nutroaster Studios / 119 Ingraham St, Bushwick (L to Morgan), 7p/$12. The kickoff of this authentically independent film festival is a double-hit of dopeness, beginning w/ curated short films in two blocks and followed by "visually enhanced" live performances by caffeinated young hotties Oberhofer (who played like 2 doz. CMJ shows) and dream-poppers Asobi Seksu. Hot!! Note: I bemoan the lack of screenings of post-film festival features, international gems and super-indie works that never see the light of day here. This is triple the case at ZFF, so don't miss out.
* Sweet Bulbs (album release party) + Magic Kids @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/$10. I've fallen hard for local lovelies Sweet Bulbs: the boys kicking up a furious maelstrom of buzzing guitars and trundling percussion, and vocalist Inna stands in the eye of this hurricane, delivering her honeyed, deadpan lyrics. Sweet indeed, essential too. Magic Kids play several dates in NY (straight off Fun Fun Fest in Austin TX), but this is their best night.
* Velvet Davenport + Big Troubles @ Shea Stadium / 20 Meadow St, Williamsburg (L to Grand), 8p. I think I first heard of Minnesota psych-rockers Velvet Davenport off a split they did w/ New Order underwater-ish Gary War entitled "Surfer Girl". They're in town a bit, w/ Blank Dogs on FRI and this great show w/ local fuzz-rockers Big Troubles tonight.
* Open Ocean @ Zebulon / 258 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 9p. Attend an Open Ocean show and you're guaranteed a twilit, glamorous night by the NY quartet, w/ strains of shoegaze and the rock edge of trip-hop in their layered compositions. w/ Anita Fix & the Ecstatic Gestures
SUNDAY
* "Sanjuro" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1962) screenings @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 4:30/6:50/9:15p. The inspired sequel to "Yojimbo", w/ Toshiro Mifune reprising his role of reluctant badass, heading a group of way less badass (but still enthusiastic) young samurai, to take out all the bad guys.
* "35 Shots of Rum" (dir. Claire Denis, 2008) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 4:35/6:30/8:25/10:20p. Denis took inspiration from Yasujiro Ozu's "Late Spring" in this dynamic, introspective film set in Parisian suburbs. If the cannibal/vampire film "Trouble Every Day" left you know, this NYFF/Venice Film Festival winner will warm back up.
* "Inception" (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 5:30p. What, you mean you HAVEN'T seen this mind-melting dream-w/in-a-dream-w/in-a-dream film, which features such memorable imagery as nattily dressed young gentlemen duking it out in a rotating, elevator-lined corridor? w/ Leo DiCaprio in one of his most believable roles (sorry "Shutter Island"), let alone Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard and a random (but welcome) Michael Caine cameo? Get to it!!
* Jen Liu + Maria Chavez "Fugue State" @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St, 7p. The 1st in a series of collaborative performances by artist Liu (who is co-exhibiting w/ Brody Condon in the gallery) on laptop/projector and experimental musician Chavez on her custom treated-turntables, in a semi-improv narrative show.
* Crystal Stilts @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. This Local x Local show features the woozy, glamorous stylings of Crystal Stilts. And for the naysayers calling this a Velvet Underground carbon copy: check shimmery new single "Shake the Shackles" and get back to me on that.
* Grinderman @ Nokia Theatre / 1515 Broadway (ACE/NQR/123 to Times Square), 7p/$37.50. Why would I EVER recommend you to Times Square, for a prohibitively pricey show at a mainstream-y venue whose name is now…Best Buy Theatre? (I think??) Because of Nick Cave and Grinderman, of course, the sexy, depraved, ballsy rockin' quartet whose latest release (surely you've seen the demonic "Heathen Child" teasers, right?) is too good & weird to ignore.
* Suuns @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. Do Suuns do Clinic better than Clinic? Rhetorical question. These guys play a jittery, creepy live set, w/ snarling guitars, relentless rhythm and Ben Shemie's whispery, paranoia-infused vocals. w/ BELL
MONDAY
* Zero Film Festival presents "Lostal ~ Lostat" (dir. Shigeo Arikawa, 2010) @ Invisible Dog Art Center / 51 Bergen St, Cobble Hill (F/G to Bergen St), 8:30p. The meditative full-length feature debut from the young Tokyo-based director. Electric Wolf follow Arikawa's screening w/ a live psych-jam.
TUESDAY
* Maria Chavez w/ Walter Carson & Brian Osborne (Heat Retention Records) @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/$10. NICE: Chavez's tortured turntable experiments vs. the searing noise assault from Carson & Osborne, the 1st of several local-ish shows for the duo (check back on next week's LIST). w/ Daniel Moore & High School Confidential
* Darmstadt's 6th Anniversary "In C" @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (6 to Bleecker, ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 7p/$20 ($15/advance). The sixth installment of Terry Riley's '64 mellifluous experimental work is as gorgeous and subtle as it is mind-alteringly intense. Darmstadt's interpretation always feat. a rock-drummer's pulse to guide the expansive ensemble, and this year's has Jonathan Kane (formerly of Swans and La Monte Young collaborator) behind the set. Also feat. Zach Layton (bass), Ha-Yang Kim (cello), Ben Neil (trumpet), Lesley Flanigan and Nick Hallett (voice) and many, many others, in an incredible, polyphonic performance.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Hiroshi Sugimoto "The Day After" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. In this ineffable experimental photographer's debut solo show at Pace, he includes two 50-ft photographic polyptychs from his "Lightning Field" series, plus related single prints and even a reconstituted Tesla coil, which releases a crackling violet shock every five minutes (that's what Sugimoto-san told me anyway, when I had the pleasure w/ speaking to the artist at his opening reception). So we're thinking electrical storms. What I feel, though, is being deep underwater, safe from the obscene pressure of the depths but in some great undiscovered trench, populated by those deep-sea denizens that use bioluminescence to attract prey and see down in the abyss. Sugimoto worked electrical discharges across unexposed film in the darkroom to create such marvels as "Lightning Fields 177" (could be spacecraft) and the watery "Lightning Fields 168", expelling hot gassy haze and tendrils of light into…nothingness. That's the thing w/ many of these works, incl. the 1st polyptych in the front gallery: the unexposed film is a perfect black, or as close as perfect comes, permitting the flashes and charges of light, like dendrites or cell creation, to float against the surface. The back polyptych, however, while subtler overall, is alive w/ shadow and textures, like briefly illuminated glimpses of a never-before-see seabed, fabric-like, even, roiling and rolling across the prints. There are benches in this room for a reason: I suggest you sit down and take it all in.
* Larry Poons "Radical Surface 1985-1989" @ Loretta Howard Gallery / 525 W 26th St. If I had named it, I'd call this show "Gnarly Surface". It inaugurates Howard's larger exhibition space in a big way. Dig Anselm Reyle's trashy-surface high-relief paintings? Ditch the mutant, new-car colors for opalescence and pearly grays, melted ice-cream, and you've got Poons, the master — and that's just describing the COLOR. The stuff underneath these layers of encrusted, mudslide paint resembles everything from weathered, prehistoric rock to those foam egg-crate sheets used in hospitals. Less jewel-toned than his earlier guano-like canvases, this is pure surface intense and truly radical.
* Anthony Caro "Upright Sculptures" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. Caro just may be the leading force in divergent sculptural alchemy today, blending weathered, rusted steel and wood (here luxuriously chunky railroad ties) like they were always meant for one another, star-crossed. These tall forms were assembled from various found materials w/ extra emphasis on texture, the woodgrain gorgeous and pronounced, the patina REALLY patina'ed. Each embody a powerful nostalgia, again like these forms were meant to pair up, like they were once some operating steampunk creation, transfixed for eternity now in these metaphysical poses. And speaking of textures, the disarming "Up Landscape", while entirely painted steel, looks curiously soft — my first thought was Urs Fischer's painted aluminum "drooping sculptures", but Caro's is more abstract and physical.
* Erwin Wurm "gulp" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Somebody had fun with body-stockings! That someone is the Viennese trickster Wurm, and his idiosyncratic, physical sculpture is in full effect at this gallery, in a set of contorted aluminum sorta-figurative forms either content w/ or struggling against their brightly colored fabric-y bindings. He tempers these w/ fabric pulled over canvas, like the brilliant blue "Mental States", which is some pretty great party lettering for being cut-fabric. Another work is called "Me Under LSD", which features a powdery, acid-yellow brain-cloud over an aluminum limb. Stare at that one long enough, and Wurm's accompanying video "Tell", which features two hot young people having a philosophy discussion straight out of Richard Linklater's "Waking Life", to the point where their auto drives up a wall onto a roof like nothing out of the ordinary, will make TOTAL SENSE.
* Peggy Preheim "the end (final cut)" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Don't be afraid to get close to Preheim's works. If you've heard me (or so many other critics) speak of Preheim's unique take on drawing, well let me exhaust terms like "intimately scaled", "diminutive renderings" and the like now. In sum, she draws very very tiny and very very realistic, vintage photograph quality shrunk to 1x100th of its original size, roughly, hazy-edged but alarmingly vivid and clear. Preheim incorporates currency in her new series, turning "Blind Spot", a pair of girls in sun-dresses and floppy hats, w/ a nickel-sized blank in between them, like a really big hula-hoop. This is drawn in the dead center of a snowy white thick paper, nearly 35" long, so yes you do need to get VERY close. "Twister" features these girls again, or their younger sisters, clasping hands in front of a Mobius strip, an exercise in grayscale. "Hummingbird" combines a real U.S. 1$ bill, its backside augmented w/ circles from another currency and a graphite ear. "Snow White" is even more effective: a truncated U.S. 20$ bill in the bottom left corner, an aloft eagle (w/ deftly rendered feathers) way up and center. That's it, but the vibe is so distinct.
+ Tomas Saraceno "Cloud Cities Connectome". Saraceno is working in a way finer scale w/ his weather-minded installations, outfitting the titular gallery-filling work w/ nylon monofilament that is nearly invisible, and hence impossible to traverse the space and be "one with" the work. The comparatively bulky "Biosphere 06" in the front gallery, w/ its water-drip system and tillandsia plants inside, is enchanting.
* Youssef Nabil @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. Hand-colored gelatin silver prints recalling Egyptian movie posters and films of the '40s and '50s, which is just as mesmerizingly dope as it sounds in print. I quite liked the powdery, painterly nature of Nabil's coloration techniques, particularly in "Amani by window, Cairo", which I could stare at for days.
* Philip Pearlstein "Going Forward" @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. Pearlstein's grasp of physicality in his renderings of voluptuous models, crafting skin and shadow w/ equal care, has few equals in the contemporary art sphere (in my opinion), and the modern master has been honing this for decades. His new large oil on canvas works bear striking sensations of movement, from the strong diagonals of "Model With Speedboat and Kiddie Car Harness Racer" (Pearlstein's works are more detailed than ever) to the westward flow of everything in the backdrop to "Two Models with Weathervane Fox, Fish, Horse and Boat", leaving the two nudes in a calming moment of repose.
* Jenny Holzer "Retro" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Beautiful classic pieces from Holzer's history, centered less on her famous LED screens and more on static text pieces, like the "Survival" series (benches, w/ text carved in indian red granite), "Living" series (benches w/ text carved in bethel white granite) and "Under a Rock" (really knockout gem mist black granite benches). Don't miss her enamel on metal text works from the early '80s, also from the "Living" series, like this gem: "After dark it's a relief to see a girl walking toward or behind you. Then you're much less likely to be assaulted." And this beauty: "When someone is breathing on you, you feel cool air pulled across your skin followed by moist warm air pushed in the opposite direction. This goes on at regular intervals and makes a perfect temperature." Truth.
* Anselm Kiefer "Next Year in Jerusalem" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. How to explain this grueling, thoroughly enriching exhibition (Kiefer's first in NY in eight years) in accessible terms? Think of diving headfirst into an 'Alice in Wonderland' like domain, only its a scorched earth, replete w/ dwarfing glass and steel vitrines enclosing haunting arrangements of dead flora and tattered garments, expansive chilly landscapes rendered abstract in layers of emulsion, shellac and physical media, plus a bus-sized rusted steel chamber outfitted w/ bedsheet-sized burlap and lead panels, screenprinted and suspended on metal hooks. Now step back for a minute: Kiefer's latest is not an easy go, nor even easy to explain, as befits the run-on sentence before this. All his imagery of relics from post-WWII Germany (the steel chamber installation is "Occupations", 76 sheet-sized photographs recalling his seminal series from '69, one of his earliest), the Bible, Kabbalah, folklore, poetry and dreams are brought to a foaming head here — the many, many vitrines, about three dozen, encircle "Occupations" like strange trees; even the polyptych landscape renderings are set in glass and steel. One of the more bracing works, if I had to pick one, is "Sefiroth", a plaster-encased dress, shaped around an invisible figure and pierced porcupine-style by enormous shards of glass (like they're emanating from the fabric itself in an unseen explosion). And yet, and yet: as overwhelming as this may sound (another one, "Johannis-Nacht", bears a lead model-size airplane nearly consumed by resin-coated fern, on a cracked ground of clay, shellac and paint), it's not an impossible, claustrophobic trek. Stay awhile and the pieces begin to spread out, permitting sight-lines to the large landscapes ("Fitzcarraldo", a four-paneler, w/ fang-like synthetic teeth dotting the thorn bushes and resin-ferns, is a beauty) and moments of contemplation amid the vitrines. You need to devote a bit of time to this one, though, but the rewards are totally worth it.
* William Earl Kofmehl III "Dear Father Knickerbocker, i Just Googled You" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. The gallery inaugurated its long-awaited new exhibition space w/ a powerful, challenging show from Kofmehl. The subject matter, a goldmine of historical references (both true and folklorish, even completely fictive) of NYC history, bears the indirect collaboration of Bernard Goetz — you know, the subway vigilante who, during a spike in crime in the '80s, shot four men on a train and had a "Law & Order" episode based on his infamous legacy. Not easy subject matter, hence. But Kofmehl approaches it in two ways, Goetz's squirrel husbandry (seen in a video w/ the artist and Goetz amid squirrels on a park bench, in a life-size bronze of the artist on a bench, surrounded by shiny squirrel sculptures, and in "Trojan Squirrel", a behemoth of claimed wood which contained Kofmehl during the opening reception, delivering a mic-assisted spoken word performance) and the aforementioned bits of historical fact and tall-tales. You can google Goetz (like the exhibition title suggests) to find out more on him. Or take reference from Kofmehl's cache of handmade embroideries, ranging from a smallpox epidemic of 1658 to the 2003 blackout, w/ loads of maps, outdated subway imagery, sports, stats and squirrels throughout. Props to the gallery for beginning the new space w/ a big-thinking exhibition.
* Ugo Rondinone "nude" @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. A relatively spare and human-scaled exhibition from the trickster, which doesn't surprise me b/c I never know what to expect w/ Rondinone. From his ginormous comic heads in roughly composed clay to his rainbow HELL YES! signage for the New Museum's debut on the Bowery, he moves from extremes. This one features seven nude sculptures cast delicately from wax, seated against the gallery walls. The medium makes them both obviously manufactured yet closely realistic (the wax doesn't miss anything, from the wrinkles in the sole of a foot to the calming downward gaze).
* Luc Tuymans "Corporate" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. Tuymans' intentions should be clear in the show title, but his exhibition of new, sparsely colored, veiled paintings span the ages, from feudalism and colonial times to present-day corporate culture. "Speech" cuts most immediately for me, a blurred, suited figure bathed in spotlight on a bare stage, his hands could easily be grasping futilely…for an excuse, an answer, who knows. "Panel" does the same for me, only the perspective is dropped way back, w/ four seated figures blown out in lights on a stage, waves of darkness surrounding them. So while I most immediately ID w/ the contemporary scenarios, I mean look at the current economic climate!
* Adrian Piper "Past Time: Selected Works 1973-1995" @ Elizabeth Dee / 548 W 22nd St. Some of Piper's most political, combustive works, and this is coming from a brilliant artist astute at 'getting to' the viewer, latching onto our thoughts, preempting them, and leaving us w/ a LOT to mull over. "It's Just Art" (1980) will do it: a news broadcast interlaid w/ Piper, in sunglasses and looking fierce, mouthing wordlessly, plus newsprints feat. her thought-bubbles in related dialogue/response. "Ashes to Ashes" (1995) is an intensely personal one, family photos and text reflecting her parents' death, though I liked the balance here w/ "I Am Somebody. The Body of My Friends" (1992-5), 18 photographs of Piper w/ said friends. And a treat here, and (at least on surface-level) lighter in subject matter, is "The Big Four-Oh" (1988), a rare installation work from Piper, involving a deconstructed suit of armor, 40 hardballs, and her diary, plus a looping video of the artist dancing (back to the camera) effortlessly to '80s music. Don't miss it.
* Nicky Nodjoumi "Invitation to Change Your Metaphor" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St, 2nd Fl. Nodjourmi's critical response to contemporary political events in Iran, over haunting narrative-driven paintings and drawings. Grappling w/ my informal art history knowledge, I'd apply Nodjourmi's style to Neue Sachlichkeit, as modernized for the Middle East. His vivid works, combinations of of high-realism figures and biting caricature, look almost like collage or screenprints but are fully rendered in oils. Bearded clerics, besuited figures, veiled women and nudes interact w/ beasts and half-humans on molten, toxic backdrops. The titular work contains a bullet-riddled, burning automobile astride a greatly enlarged beheading, bracketed on either side by suits limply holding a water hose. A third suit (perhaps the soul of the beheaded, or the car victim?) floats in the sky above. That's one canvas. In fact, perhaps the quietest work in Nodjourmi's show is the unmistakably titled "Bloody Ayatolla", a fuzzy portrait of Ali Khamenei that, devoid of other imagery or visible background, almost looks like a Luc Tuymans. In that sense, we can't escape it. A very powerful exhibition.
* Miranda Lichtenstein @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. Photography-as-art that forces you to look twice, three times, to discern the subject and action may not be proprietary to Lichtenstein, but she absolutely has a gift for exploring several divergent perception-disrupting techniques, to great effect. Her "Screen Shadow" works, archival pigment prints all, carry this vivid dynamism w/ their moire patterns, bending and shifting their points of reference. The softer C-prints of still lifes against their reflections are sublime additions.
* Sherrie Levine @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. Experiencing Levine's work in person is crucial to drawing out the emotional impact from the subtleties of her oeuvre. Her large installation "Equivalents", two sets of 18 same-size monochrome paintings based on Alfred Stieglitz's same-titled cloud photo series from the late '20s, is an intriguing sequence of blues and grays seeping into their maple panels, exposing the woodgrain beneath, lining the gallery walls and meeting in the center. Likewise her bronze sculpture, w/ mythological references this time: check the wild texture of "Khmer Torso", reflecting the original's stone cast, and the mirrored shininess of "Les Deux Chevre-Pieds", which could once have been smooth marble. Levine reappropriates and recontextualizes, but she is careful to reveal nuances from the former works.
* Tony Smith "Bronze" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. A treasure trove of Smith's classic small bronze sculptures (finished in signature black), nearly off of which ultimately turned into later monolithic works. Of course I gravitated immediately to "Wall", a sliver of rectangular prism that, if turned on its side, would resemble a sinister (if diminutive) monolith. The adjacent "Trap" next to it, a snaking diamond-prism letter 'e' flipped backwards, is equally impressive. And that's not to forget the kinetic abstraction of "Source" and "The Snake is Out" (love the titles), plus the little evil-droid array cunningly titled "Smog".
* John Currin @ Gagosian / 980 Madion Ave. This notion of Currin's luscious Old Masters style oil paintings of fleshy and at times warped and perverted feminine forms not being everybody's cup of tea, well you didn't hear that from me. I still don't have a 100% solid opinion of him, except that he excels at what he does. I mean, you take a banally titled "The Scream", which look like practically anything, gorgeous even, or scandalous, considering Currin's trove of models, and what does he do w/ it? How about a smallish scale painting of a leering blond, her mouth locked open in rictus, like she's suffering an episode of acute Bell's palsy? Another painting is titled "Big Hands", and brother the model in that rendering has, as you might expect, some big hands! And yet…Currin turns it around in such lovelies as "Mademoiselle" (expertly rendering skin in see-through fabric), "Flora" (creative use of empty space and sweetly posed girl), and "The Reader", a sensual pairing of nude flesh and reflection. This crazy mixture, evident in all Currin shows and sometimes in single, larger works themselves, is why I can't totally make up my mind on him.
* William N. Copley "X-Rated" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. The gallery recreates Copley's infamous '74 installation at former Huntington Hartford Museum on Columbus Circle (can you believe it??) in a riot of libidinous physicality in large acrylics on linen. The overt 'pretty' stuff is few and far between, though that's obvious if you're attending a vintage Copley show, but they're overall accessible, and I found some quick favorites. Number one would be "The Happy Hooker" — of all titles, I swear — a gorgeous woman in half-undress, seemingly out of E.L. Kirschner's time (trust me on this). Also: "Maltese Falcon", for its framing. And note Copley's amusing signature placement, on thighs, ass, even a tube of lubricant ("Last Tango in Paris", obvs).
* Lucas Samaras "Poses" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. Samaras is having fun in this overwhelming exhibition of the artist's Photoshop-manipulated digital portraits of art world stars and posse, about 117 prints (out of like 400+) on display here. He doesn't go too bonkers (instances like "Pose 0253" of Raymond McGuire w/ its drippily psychedelic background and "Pose 0314" of Charles Renfro peeling a lemon-yellow face off his own face are few & far between), exhibiting debonair versions of Jasper Johns — looking every bit the wise, crafty patriarch — plus a gauzy Janet Boris ("Pose 0320") and two of her baby Theo. Also of note: "Pose 0152" of John Mason bears some of the baddest-ass eyeglass frames I've ever seen, and if you know me you know the kind I wear.
* Inaugural Show @ CRG Gallery / 548 W 22nd St. Viva new gallery spaces! It's almost a theme in this LIST (w/ Lombard-Freid's move to ground-floor space on W 19th and all), and the move suits CRG. The show is full of roster stars, incl. impasto-heavy canvases by Tom LaDuke (somehow incorporating a Jack Nicholson background; see it and tell me what you think), Tomory Dodge (it's called "Absolutely Curtains" and it channels Anselm Reyle's media-stripe paintings) and a particularly viscid one by Pia Fries, where the squeezed out paint acts almost like wet clay on the mostly bare wood. Also of note: minimalist assemblage by Colby Bird and Siobhan Liddell, plus Ori Gerscht's enchanting lambda print of cherry-blossoms in Tokyo's twilight.
* Damien Hirst "Medicine Cabinets" @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. Its like the YBA stars aligned for this seminal trove of archival works from Hirst. Let me try to explain: the ground-floor gallery (of this charming multistory town home, bien sur) contains Hirst's "Sex Pistols" medicine cabinets from '89, each bearing a track title from "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistol", while the upper floor features a slew of Sex Pistols ephemera (framed LPs, torn T-shirts w/ paint, assumedly Hirst's, spattering the fabric) AND a four-part cabinet entitled "The Sex Pistols", but that one is from '96 and unrelated to the downstairs cabinets except in 1) name and 2) drugs. Are you following me?? I barely followed that myself.
LAST CHANCE
* Marcel Broodthaers "Major Works" @ Michael Werner Gallery / 74 E 77th St. This career-spanning exhibition contains, as the title would convey, some of the Belgian artist's strongest (yet in instances very rarely seen) works. From his poetic text paintings and Surrealist imagery, to the mesmerizing late-period installation "Dites Partout Que Je L'ai Dit".
* "The Personal Dimension" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St. These four "X Generation" Chinese artists, born during the economic/modernity boom, will tweak your viewpoint on contemporary Chinese art via their depoliticized, fiercely personal works. Gao Lei's voyeuristic, surrealist hyperreal paintings and installations reflect a strong notion of Big Brother surveillance w/o reducing it to cliched Red Army theatrics that occurred in the generation before him. Instead, we get chained and truncated animal combinations in white-tiled rooms, and WE are the ones peering in at their distress. Jia Aili's reductive canvases are far more opaque and devoid of his recurring narrative themes, but the inclusion of Jia's canvas-strewn bookshelf/workspace hints at his methodology. Li Qing's depictions of violence against countrymen and actual/emotional captivity are channeled by bright orange ping-pong balls, of all things, stuck to heavily impastoed "firing squad" silhouettes or inside a Plexiglas-enclosed table-tennis chamber. The WAZA Group collective features one installation, "30 Floating Musicians", devoting a stand, speaker and info card for each absent, traditional musician, amplifying their compositions to a much wider audience.
* Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Mayumi Terada @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. I dove into this three-artist show like one would a serving of Neapolitan ice cream, the striped chocolate-vanilla-strawberry kind, as I didn't immediately glean an underlying theme/tying element b/w the three. Case 1: the Basquiat selection (paintings, screenprints etc) are typically beautiful, particularly the large "Back of the Neck" (1982), a horizontal silkscreen on black w/ contrasty white musculature and shimmering gold accents. The Mapplethorpe center will either be your favorite or least, as it mainly consists of 13 b&w photographs from his graphic "X Portfolio" from '78 (which this gallery represented), shocking even Mapplethorpe in its imagery of fisting, golden showers, bondage and docking (or I guess you could call it "self-docking"? If anyone has the more appropriate word…). The found-object "The Perfect Moment", a pseudo-anti-Christian altar, was supposedly incredibly controversial when it first debuted (1970), but maybe I'm just jaded: it didn't do much for me. Terada's exhibition at the back gallery is stunning when you realize what she's doing: the large C-prints of empty rooms w/ frameless windows and overcast skies evolve from her austere dioramas and mini-sets, several of which are displayed in the show.
* Yoan Capote "Mental States" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. The Cuban artist's first experience of American culture, the subject of his first solo exhibition at the gallery, is both a longing and prickly affair — though "prickly" only half conveys the intrinsic harm in his massive canvases of cake batter-like paint and rusted fish hooks and nails, emulating choppy waves extending out to nowhere and to aerial views of stateside metropolis. That the fish hooks carry b/w the ocean scenes (Capote's childhood memories) and the current-day city-views is something to consider. Another: a suite containing a propped sculpture of bricks and cement in a plywood frame (entitled "The Window" but appearing as a flag) and a lightbox diptych of that brick flag in a wall and bored out, revealing the sea behind. I got a Magritte vibe from this duality (is it here or is it not? what is reality?) and also an acute sense of Capote's feelings, to an extent. See, this prison-like American flag v. the freedom of the ocean and sky asks more questions: where does the dream truly go?
* Julian Stanczak "Color Grid" @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. No, I can't stare at Stanczak's Op art all day long like I can Robert Ryman's austere canvases or, uh, Joan Miro's "Dutch Interiors", but I like 'em anyway. This several decades' spanning exhibition gives Stanczak some staying power in the faddish Op art movement. Though "Sheen" from the '70s, w/ its gridded center obliterated by a flash of white-hot yellowish haze, is one of the strongest in the show, the moody "Echo 2", reds of varying densities on a grid of orange-red, is warm and sensual AND new, completed this year.
* Kwun Soon-chul @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. A series of large oil on canvas works from the Paris-based Kwun, his first solo U.S. show, renderings culled from Korea's postwar history in a weathered, rugged realism. Kwun's "faces" are massive and disembodied, composed of a full spectrum of paint hues and textural techniques, impasto, smears and cut brushstrokes, floating over grayish or black backgrounds. Step far enough back and the figure emerges, but the skull-like end result is as haunting as trying to make it out from the static noise up close.
* "Six Degrees of Separation: A New Generation of Canadian Artists" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. Noah Becker guest-curated this pretty excellent show. I'd seen Alex McLeod's ecstatic 3D computer-rendered lightjet prints before, but his idealized landscapes are still quite exciting. Attila Richard Lukacs intriguing combo of oil, bitumen, polyurethane, enamel and titanium white drips and seismic slashes on skinny panels and Angela Grossmann's large mixed media figurative collages on vintage tent-material canvases were my favorites of the lot.
* Fendry Ekel & Chris Jones @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. A great dichotomy b/w these two artists in their reclamation of mundane subject matter. Ekel's large-scale renderings of familiar imagery (a magnified chess piece, a coin) are lovely but static and quiet in comparison to Jones' works, except for Ekel's smeared gouache representation of the Millennium Hilton's facade at nighttime (that one kicks ass). Jones' assemblages ("rubbish piles") are visually overwhelming and stunningly conceived. These delicate cut-cardboard sculptures are varnished w/ book and magazine images, to the end effect that the larger pieces (like a burned-out arcade game, a defrosting cube fridge, a wrecked TV set) spew oil-slick colors and phantasmagoric landscapes. You'll want to get down low (both these complicated works are on the floor) and investigate them further.
* Bo Bartlett "Paintings of Home" @ PPOW / 511 W 25th St #301. Leave it to me to occasionally wildly misconstrue a work of art. Case in point: Bartlett's super-large-scale "Home", the central oil on linen work in his latest exhibition at the gallery. I'm not that familiar w/ this Americana artist (this is his 10th show w/ the gallery), and I took detected a bit of deviance in this rendering of a woman standing in central frame in front of an old house, w/ a dude crawling on all fours away from her, a baby in the other corner. No, silly, this is Bartlett's life condensed into a single painting, depicted in the backyard of his childhood home in Columbus, Georgia (the crawling figure is Bartlett as a boy, playing around, and the woman is his WIFE). Lesson: reading the gallery PR materials can be a good thing, esp. if you're not up on the artist. But also true: there's a disarming quality to the works here, perhaps that's due to the unflashy subject matter and classical style, but they're beautiful. Size works to advantage, like the also massive square canvas "School of the Americas", four girls lying in daydreaming slumber amid hay, and "Land of Plenty", which seems both country and on a film set (so what is real?). Bartlett also includes smaller portraits on wood panel of early 20th C. figures w/ accompanying texts, like "Ma Rainey, Queen of the Blues (Kianga Ellis)", w/ contemporary figures in the sittings (Ellis leads Avail Art, for instance). It just may move you, too.
* "Plain Air", curated by Brian Willmont @ Cinders Gallery / 103 Havermeyer St, Williamsburg. The artist collective/printmaking contingent Apenest co-presents this riff on the landscape in personal space, ranging from the a/typically figurative to the highly abstract. Mark Chariker's work, which at first looked to me like the night sky as shown through the hole of a crystal, is this visual smear of ships, trains or many-windowed skyscrapers racing towards the center of frame (which still looks to me like a night sky). John Copeland contributes one of the most figurative works here, a work on paper of all things, but it's probably the scariest, a surreally nightmarish narrative of bald, black-cloaked twins advancing on an artist table and disjointed festival/carnival imagery (pennant flags, a child's party game, balloons, a dog) floating in the background. Hilary Pecis' duo of fragile collaged landscapes (cut-up luxury ads etc) are like brutal Max Ernst renderings, and Zac Scheinbaum's highly detailed psychedelic-vegetation worlds, rendered in contrasty graphite, float against a void. And that's just part of the 18 artists showing here.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
fee's LIST (through 11/09)
WEDNESDAY
* Adam Pendleton "BAND" @ The Kitchen / 512 W 19th St. Pendleton's new video installation tracks Deerhoof's new song "I Did Crimes for You" (+ works from Pendledon's "Black Dada" series, which I was digging at MoMA PS1's "Greater New York").
* "Ne Change Rien" (dir. Pedro Costa, 2009) screenings at Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave). YES!!!!!! I fell in love with this incredible auteurist Portuguese director courtesy of his Anthology-housed retrospective back in '07. His latest film, which played at the 2009 NYFF (and which I sadly expected to NEVER see a proper theatrical run in NY thereafter) receives proper treatment here, for a limited time! Costa moves beyond Lisbon (specifically the Fontainhas ghetto, the backdrop and nearly secondary character in his films "Ossos", "In Vanda's Room" and "Colossal Youth") to focus on chanteuse Jeanne Balibar, from the recording studio to the stage. Costa's subtle filming and sumptuous framing figures throughout this genius feature. Through 11/16
* "Four Lions" (dir. Chris Morris, 2010) sneak preview @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft. Greene (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 6:50p + Q&A w/ Morris. The term "Jihad satire" might not grab you, but this farcical portrait of wannabe radicals in Sheffield, lurching out of their mundane lifestyles w/ highfalutin righteousness, might just be a Trojan Horse to lure you in and wow you in the process. It opens at Angelika on FRI but it's more fun to catch the preview, w/ director Morris in attendance, innit?
* "Throne of Blood" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1957) screenings @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 9:30p. Shakespeare's Macbeth, as remained by Kurosawa in feudal Japan, w/ Toshiro Mifune (who else??) as the titular ruler, whose dramatic demise at the end is as legendary as it is beautiful. Also THU 6:50/9:15p
* "Funny Face" (dir. Stanley Donen, 1957) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6p. The only more incredible thing about this classic haute couture fantasyland, w/ Fred Astaire as the high-fashion photog and Audrey Hepburn at her beatnik best is that Donen will be PRESENT for a Q&A after this screening. I know!
* "Touchable Sound" DJ Night @ Heathers / 506 E 13th St (L to 1st Ave, NR/456 to Union Square), 8p. Ahead of the proper NY-area book release for "Touchable Sound: A Collection of 7-inch Records from the USA" (quite possibly a keystone guidebook for crate-diggers, audiophiles — me — and people who care about dope music alike), the editors Mike Treff & Diego Hadis, plus contributors Brian Price, Julie Williams and Justin Gressley, spin 7"s featured in the book at this daringly eclectic party.
* Blonde Redhead @ Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NR/L/456 to Union Square), 7p/$30. I must come to terms w/ the truth that Blonde Redhead will probably NEVER go back to that lusciously atonal "La Mia Vita Violenta" age; if their new album is any indication, they've added electronic undertones to their increasingly fuzzy indie-rock. But they do rock out live, no question. ALSO THURS (incredibly, too bad not FRI as well, b/c I'd send you down to TRASH! in the basement straight after)
* "Theoretical Music: Rome '78" w/ James Nares @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (MR to Union St), 8p/$10 (3-night package for $25). Art historian Branden W. Joseph and musician David Grubbs organized this fascination three-day event, leading off w/ artist Nares' quintessential film, which is rare enough that I (and probably you) have never seen it, feat. a cast of NY No Wave darlings + more.
THURSDAY
* NY Art Book Fair @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq), PREVUE 6-9p. This is the 2nd year running that PS1's old schoolhouse converts into a Willy Wonka-esque fun factory of limited editions, first-runs, and international pressings in the 5th iteration of Printed Matter Inc's NY Art Book Fair. And like last year, the Fair hosts a Classroom (readings, workshops & other informal artist-led events) and loads of performances, screenings and one-offs throughout. Visit the Fair site for full details and schedule. It runs THRU SUN w/ hours 11a-7p FRI & SAT and 11a-5p SUN.
* Anthony Caro "Upright Sculptures" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. A selection of Caro's latest sculptural works, in his traditional raw pairings of painted steel, cast iron and organic materials, w/ an emphasis on height.
* Jenny Holzer "Retro" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Classic architectural works from the late '70s to '80s, comprised of Holzer's pairing of LED signs and deft slogans w/ benches, painted signs and even a sarcophagus.
* John Currin @ Gagosian / 980 Madion Ave. Few contemporary artists have sustained an uncanny knack for 1) executing Old Masters style painting and 2) using that to warp and pervert the feminine form quite like Currin. Call his works gorgeous or repellant, he's made a style of his own, continuing that here w/ new paintings that add B-movie references to his challenging (and sometimes grotesque) updates to classical, formalist representation.
* Erwin Wurm "gulp" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. For those keeping track, this is the 2nd Erwin Wurp exhibition that just opened (I am also counting the site-specific installation at Jack Hanley Gallery, which opened last SUN). Thanks to the additional space in Lehmann Maupin, Wurm has more room to play, filling the rooms w/ idiosyncratic sculpture.
* Tomas Saraceno "Cloud Cities, Connectome" + Peggy Preheim "the end (final cut)" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. An ambitious duet at the gallery, feat. Saraceno's eco-minded installations and Preheim's super-intimate, highly-realistic pencil drawings and currency collage works.
* Charlotte Dumas "Repose" @ Julie Saul Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Animal photographs, what's not to love about that? Medium-format prints from several of Dumas' series, incl. stray dogs and caged zoo animals.
+ Julie Evans & Ajay Sharma "Cowdust". The artists, NY-based Evans and Indian miniaturist painter Sharma, may seen the unlikely collaborators in print, but the results of their work together, done in Jaipur, sounds wicked.
* Aakash Nihalani "Overlap" @ Bose Pacia / 163 Plymouth St, DUMBO. You've totally seen Nihalani's fluorescent tape 'interventions' about NYC, those 8-bit foreshortened cubes and Atari-esque patterns. He's even cooler in the gallery setting, converting the most drab white-boxes into humorous and inventive (but never gaudy) installations.
* Philip Pearlstein "Going Forward" @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. The gallery furthers its unparalleled coverage of Pearlstein w/ this show of 10 new works from the past two years, retaining the artist's voluptuous physicality in his renderings of skin and shadow, but w/ an even more vivid degree of realism and accompanying color.
* Robert Lazzarini "Friendly-Hostile-Friendly" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 511 W 27th St. New wall-mounted sculptures taking reference from law-enforcement training targets, but warped into surreally new forms.
* Youssef Nabil @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. Hand-colored gelatin silver prints recalling Egyptian movie posters and films of the '40s and '50s, which just sounds mesmerizingly dope.
* Sophie Crumb @ DCKT Contemporary / 195 Bowery. The daughter of underground comix legends R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crump dives into her debut solo show at DCKT w/ raw, realistic portraits of herself and others, w/ imagery culled from mass media.
+ Irvin Morazan, "Introducing Masterblaster" at 7:30p. The 1st of three performances by NY-based Morazan in the gallery, combining pre-Columbian folklore w/ contemporary cultural references, i.e. a sound battle b/w Ghettoblaster and Masterblaster.
* "Four Lions" (dir. Chris Morris, 2010) sneak preview @ reRun Theatre / 147 Front St, DUMBO (F to Jay St, AC to High St), 10p + Q&A w/ Morris. The term "Jihad satire" might not grab you, but this farcical portrait of wannabe radicals in Sheffield, lurching out of their mundane lifestyles w/ highfalutin righteousness, might just be a Trojan Horse to lure you in and wow you in the process. It opens at Angelika on FRI but it's more fun to catch the preview, w/ director Morris in attendance, innit? Also: this screening is FREE, but show up early (I don't know how early! The theatre is connected to a gastropub, have a drink or something) to guarantee your spot.
* "Theoretical Music: Two Panel Discussions" w/ Kim Gordon, Dan Graham, Taro Suzuki, Byron Coley, Thurston Moore, Neb Sublette & more @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (MR to Union St), 5:30p/$10 (3-night package for $25). The organizers of this three-day event, Joseph and Grubbs, moderate two panels of influential, cross-cultural leaders, like those listed above.
* Aki Onda + MV Carbon @ Roulette / 20 Greene St (ACE/NR to Canal St), 8:30p/$15. A pairing of experimental minds, sound technician and cassette maestro Onda and analog sculptor Carbon, who was recently the artist-in-residence at ISSUE Project Room in Gowanus.
FRIDAY
* Hiroshi Sugimoto "The Day After" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. The ineffable experimental photographer's debut show at the gallery should be epically electrifying. He exhibits two 50-ft photographic diptychs from his "Lighting Field" series, created w/ electrical discharges on unexposed film in the darkroom, plus related single photographs. I am stoked.
* Anton Corbijn "Inwards and Upwards" @ Stellan Holm Gallery / 1018 Madison Ave. You may know Corbijn as a filmmaker (a very good one at that, considering "Control" and "The American"). But he's a fantastic photographer, whose subtle lens latches deeper into your emotions than you might expect. This show, feat. contrasty b&w digital prints from the past decade of Alexander McQueen, Gerhard Richter, Kate Moss and others, is characteristic of his brooding talent.
* Monika Sosnowska @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Seven new kinetically architecture-ish sculptures by the Polish artist, in her debut solo show, warped and tangled stairs and seating.
* Jessica Ann Peavy "Emergency Contraception" @ Collette Blanchard Gallery / 26 Clinton St. Do we trust the narrator? Peavy features new single-channel videos of 1st person romantic accountings, both realistic and outrageous, plus culturally- and gender-conscious photography and an opening night performance.
* Miranda Lichtenstein @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. New experimental photography from the NY-based artist, incl. shadowy and moire-patterned archival pigment prints and softened C-prints of flower arrangements.
* Koo Jeong-A "Constellation Congress" @ DIA at Hispanic Society / Audubon Terrace, Broadway b/w 155th & 156th St (1 to 157th St). Koo enacts a three-part exhibition, commissioned by DIA. Her multidisciplinary installation at the Hispanic Society, a truly immersive experience (there's an olfactory element to it, besides the video and architectural stuff) is the tip of the ol' iceberg.
* Koo Jeong-A "A Reality Upgrade & End Alone" @ DIA:Beacon / 3 Beekman St, Beacon NY (Metro North to Beacon). I don't usually profile my favorite upstate gallery, but it's an essential part of Koo's three-part exhibition. In this case, it's a new iteration of her Venice Biennale outdoor installation, 5000+ glittery rhinestones strewn about the grass and trees behind DIA.
* Koo Jeong-A "Drawings" @ Dan Flavin Art Institute / Corwith Ave, Bridgehampton NY. Part three of Koo's DIA-commissioned exhibition is a series of new works on paper at the Flavin Institute's ground-floor gallery.
* "Ne Change Rien" (dir. Pedro Costa, 2009) screenings at Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave) + conversation w/ Costa and Dennis Lim at 5:30. I lavish attention to Costa's latest doc, swapping out his native Portugal for France and Jeanne Balibar, under WED, but this particular screening is super-bonus due to the inclusion of the director himself in attendance.
* "Four Lions" (dir. Chris Morris, 2010) @ Angelika NY / 18 W Houston St (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette). The term "Jihad satire" might not grab you, but this farcical portrait of wannabe radicals in Sheffield, lurching out of their mundane lifestyles w/ highfalutin righteousness, might just be a Trojan Horse to lure you in and wow you in the process. Like the non-Toshiro Mifune characters in "Yojimbo/Sanjuro", only w/ semi-access to explosives. Also: this is a Drafthouse Films release, which in its exhilaratingly indie nature earns my support.
* "Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (dir. Pedro Costa, 2001) at Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave), 9:30p. A glaring blank spot in my inclusive mastery of Costa's oeuvre, where he turns the lens on longtime collaborators Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, part of the series "Cinema of Our Time".
* "Bedazzled" (dir. Stanley Donen, 1967) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 9p. You haven't "really" seen this modish Swingin' London romp until you've seen it big: Dudley Moore's deal w/ the devil, aka Peter Cook cutting a sharp line in a dapper suit and a valise of snide comebacks (and a cameo by Raquel Welch as "Lust", obvs) is mayjah. The sing-off b/w the two leads, Moore belting out "Love Me!!!" and Cook's monotone, psychedelic "I'm Bedazzled" must be seen to be believed.
* "Pleasures of the Flesh" (dir. Nagisa Oshima, 1965) screening @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (6 to 68th St), 6:45p/FREE. I still can't get over the fact that Asia Society is hosting this ambitious series of Japanese New Wave and art-house films, esp. b/c they're leading off w/ Oshima's infamous sexual netherworld AND that the screening is free of charge.
* "127 Hours" (dir. Danny Boyle, 2010) @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston (F to 2nd Ave). A delirious, breakneck adaptation of mountain climber Aron Ralston's accident and self-amputation in remotest Utah canyons, as shown through the twinkling eyes of James Franco. Guilty pleasure, maybe, but whatever, I'll definitely see it.
* "Theoretical Music: UT + Talk Normal" @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (MR to Union St), 8p/$10 (3-night package for $25). Rock out No Wave style for the final night of this three-day event, feat. UT (Nina Canal, Jacqui Ham and Sally Young) in their 1st U.S. concert since '91, plus Brooklyn's leading No Wave duo Talk Normal.
SATURDAY
* William Earl Kofmehl III "Dear Father Knickerbocker, I Just Googled You" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. The inaugural show at this international-strong gallery's new location promises to be an event, thanks to Kofmehl's ambitious exhibition. Besides filling the larger space w/ a cache of embroidered canvases and mixed-media sculpture, he christens the new gallery w/ a performance, from 6:30-8p opening night, extracted from NYC's history.
* Anselm Kiefer "Next Year in Jerusalem" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. OK I saw a bit of the pre-installation for this new show, and what I saw, enormous, labyrinthine glass vitrines, like from a dystopian, high-security future world, which surround Kiefer's new installation "Occupations", many dozen photographs (adapted from his very early '69 series) mounted on lead, then burlap shrouds, enclosed in steel, to brutal effect. Are you ready to dive into Kiefer's complexly dark world?
* Sherrie Levine @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. Levine explores Alfred Stieglitz to a further degree throughout her latest works, a series of tonal monochromes inspired by his "Equivalents" from the mid-20s to '30s. Plus new bronze sculptures, recalling Cambodia and Greece.
* "Inaugural Show" @ CRG Gallery / 548 W 22nd St. Another gallery moves to a ground floor primo spot, this time it's CRG and their forward-thinking roster of talent, incl Siobhan Liddell, Colby Bird, Angela Dusfresne, Ori Gersht and Carmen McLeod.
* Ugo Rondinone "nude" @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. The Swiss artist's conceptual sculptural style is nearly unclassifiable. He works in the highly figurative, true, but he is equally comfortable in the physically cartoonish (like his last "Heads" show at this gallery) and in text ("HELL YES!", recently removed from New Museum's facade). This new show is human-scaled, at least.
* Tony Smith "Bronze" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 532 W 24th St. A treasure trove of classic small bronze sculptures (finished in Smith's trademark black), which ultimately turned into his later monolithic works.
* Luc Tuymans "Corporate" + Raymond Pettibon "Hard in the Paint" @ David Zwirner / 525-533 W 19th St. Tuymans' intentions should be clear in the show title, but his exhibition of new, sparsely colored, veiled paintings span the ages, from feudalism and colonial times to present-day corporate culture. Next door, Pettibon presents a series of new, graphic drawings w/ text elements in his ongoing cultural commentary.
* William N. Copley "X-Rated" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. The gallery recreates Copley's infamous '74 installation at former Huntington Hartford Museum on Columbus Circle, a riot of libidinous physicality in large acrylics on linen.
* "The Hidden Fortress" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1957) screenings @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 3/6/9p. Fanboys lure this Kurosawa epic b/c it influenced George Lucas' "Star Wars: A New Hope". I love "The Hidden Fortress" b/c it freakin' rips, b/w the bumbling peasants/droids to stodgy, athletic Toshiro Mifune as the cooler-than-Jedi hero, and b/c when you think 'jidaigeki' you have to mention "The Hidden Fortress" in the same breath.
SUNDAY
* Jean Pigozzi "Johnny STOP!" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Pigozzi and his all-seeing little Leica have produced an incredible wealth of insidery, intimate photography for decades. Expect many of those off-kilter, humorous and generally warm moments in this exhibition.
* "Of many, one", curated by Erin Sickler @ Scaramouche / 52 Orchard St. Eight young London-based artists work across multiple media platforms in an exercise in broken narratives, incl. Johann Arens, Rehana Zaman, Laura Morrison and Daniel Lichtman.
* "Yojimbo" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1961) screenings @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 4:30/6:50/9:15p. Part one of Kurosawa's loose duo of ronin films, w/ Toshiro Mifune taking the charisma factor to new heights. Only problem is BAM screens the 'sequel' "Sanjuro" next week, but what the hell, see this THEN see that.
* "Singin' in the Rain" (dir. Stanley Donen, 1952) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6:30p. Everyone's heard of this film, even if it's just for Gene Kelly dancing alone in a downpour. I mean, Anna Karina references it, kind of, in JLG's "Une femme est une femme". Essential!
* UT @ Maxwell's / 1039 Washington St, Hoboken NJ (PATH to Hoboken stop), 9p/$10. This is beyond, really. If you missed seminal No Wavers UT (Nina Canal, Jacqui Ham and Sally Young, who haven't played here since '91) at their reunion theoretical music show at ISSUE Project Room on FRI, you (incredibly) have another chance to see 'em. In Jersey. w/ the properly avant-garde Sightings
TUESDAY
* Lucas Samaras "Poses" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. Photoshop-manipulated digital portraits of art world stars, in a fairly consistent creepy style.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Robert Rauschenberg @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. The first sentence of Gagosian's press release for this show, after Rauschenberg's quote on art as communication and its inherent ability to change, is the description "a major exhibition". I'd rephrase that "a MAYJAH exhibition". Goodness, there is a lot of art here, and I hate to use the shortcut phrase "career-spanning retrospective", but that's in the works here, from Rauschenberg's John Cage-era, infamous "White" paintings (one of those, plus a triptych in black, which I'd title "void" paintings instead, as they're sinisterly devoid of anything, active in their starkness) to the deliciously battered-but-luxe "Watchdog" sculpture, shown in the same room as the White painting and appearing as a series of seven battered and rusty pails (a la friend Jasper Johns) over chromed aluminum. "Watchdog" is from 2007 and the adjacent White canvas is 1951. Do the math. In between, we get a little bit of everything, meaning Combines (the humorous "Short Circuit" from '55, featuring a Sturtevant reproduction of a Johns flag painting inside one of its cupboards), Spreads (the vivid "Palladian Xmas" fro 1980, w/ illuminated washboards amid the screenprints of cats and fabric stripes), ROCI (aka Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, incl "Caryatid Cavalcade II", a threateningly huge five-canvas mixture of acrylic washes and larger-than-life screenprints, of Chilean imagery and building facades), and Runts (amid his last works, sprawling Americana pigment transfers). Plus a lot of Rauschenberg I've NEVER seen before, not in my memory anyway, like his Early Egyptian works (check the pyramidal work from '73, its cardboard stacks painted Day-Glo on the reverse, projecting an orangey aura against the wall, plus its sand-encrusted neighbor from '74 w/ spoke-wheels embedded in the boxes) and the Jammer series, little more than layered, ethereal cloth works w/ rattan poles, and two Borealis works from '90 and '91 of tarnished shadowy objects on brass. Think Andy Warhol's oxidation series but way cooler. I am still taking all this in, but the essential nature of this MAYJAH exhibition should be a given, even if you didn't read this far.
* Brice Marden "Letters" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. Might sound a bit weird for me to claim nostalgia for Kyoto when traversing this sublime series of related new works, as Marden drew inspiration from his travels to the National Palace Museum in Taipei (when his own retrospective was on at the MoMA). But that is the feeling I get, climbing up the wide, uneven stone stairs of Ginkaku-Ji in Kita-Higashiyama, amid bamboo forests and burbling brooks. The paintings themselves are fascinating, incorporating blank fields of muted color (usually a combination of grays) as framing devices to either side of the action, Marden's complexly layered calligraphic whips of thoughtfully paired colors. The end effect is even more 3D than his earlier works and involving a range of climates and emotions beyond his 1991 Cold Mountain series. Check the foggy warmth inherent to "First Letter", the cloaking rainstorm over "Letter About Books #3, Blue Ground", the punctuating gold emerging from "Third Letter". These seven large canvases are paired w/ a slew of works on paper in an adjacent gallery, rivulets of Kremer ink and either shellac ink or gouache on thick paper. A truly transporting experience.
* Brice Marden "Paintings 1961-1964" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 526 W 22nd St. Don't miss this tiny, thoughtful show from Marden's early career, six small- to medium-scale works w/ either impenetrably waxy or intriguingly kinetic surfaces, like the brownish "Arizona", its regular permutations interrupted by almost Abstract Expressionist drips and dribbles of black paint. It's of interest to note that after this work he segued into those quietly regal monochromes, their surfaces flattened out w/ beeswax, and didn't revisit this lyrical brushwork for another 20+ years.
* Ana Mendieta "Documentation and Artwork, 1972-1985" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. I really love Mendieta's oeuvre, and the gallery has done a fitting homage to this unparalleled Conceptualist/performance artist in the 25th anniversary of her untimely death at age 36 w/ this trove of Mendieta's archival drawings, photography (incl. contact sheets!) and films, most of which have rarely (if ever) been shown publicly. The whole thing works and is museum-level in its enriching qualities (won't MoMA etc do a proper retrospective on Mendieta? Klaus Biesenbach, looking at you), but the real standout for me were the films. They're brief and silent, so you can watch them all, and you should. It is one thing to see a series of Mendieta's signature "Silueta"s, smoldering or burning shadowy, angelic figures in the ground, and another to see smoke billowing violently from a filmed "Silueta". Same deal w/ "Black Ixchell, Candle Ixchell", a wrapped Mendieta-sized figure w/ a candle burning over it. Another, "Mirage", totally had me transfixed for its 3-min runtime: the camera focuses on a slightly windy field. There's a mirror in the right corner, reflecting the artist in near-silhouette, sitting transfixed for the 1st minute, then systematically ripping a feather pillow (I think??) apart, then sitting still once again. It's somehow peacefully lulling and frightening simultaneously.
* Brody Condon & Jen Liu @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. A great juxtaposing at work here. Condon's straight of "Greater New York" at MoMA PS1, and he elaborates on those works w/ a trio of videos that feat. little more than his hand maneuvering handmade "fantasy role-play" die of various geometric forms, in a repetitive and psychedelic dance. His static work in the show, "Vat Flesh on a Pedestal of Imitation Jade" is blockishly visceral, its many surfaces smeared and pixellated mid-90s graphic design style. Liu's more prickly works shine, then, as you get to know them. Her "Folded Black Cloud" series, sharply folded wall reliefs of sinisterly clouded skies, rendered in fiberglass, are simultaneously dangerous and fragile. Her "Fugue State" works on paper, interconnected found imagery overlain w/ patterns and then "torn", reminded me a bit of James Rosenquist's Pop-culture minings, but w/ a contemporary, representational immediacy.
* Wangechi Mutu "Hunt Bury Flee" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Each time I see Mutu's new large-scale collages on Mylar, she's taken her figures to another level of interpretation and figuration. This time they're ferocious amalgams of flesh, pelt, scales, feathers and foliage, metamorphosing against either celestial or poisonous backdrops. One fashiony woman-figure climbs a woodgrain-patterened tree (bearing tracings of another woman w/in), pursued by an "Alien"-like snaking appendage lashing out from behind her. The ecstatic "Oh, Madonna!" appears to have flowery, anemone-like explosions coming from her torso. Her "Moth Girls" sculptural installation, many dozen porcelain and feathered figures fill the back gallery in four rows, seemingly embodying the spirits of her past works' avatars.
* Paul Lee "Lavender" @ Maccarone Gallery / 630 Greenwich St. We're in for a treat: the towel-sculpture artist stole the show, in my opinion, back in Bortolami's incredible "Parallel" group exhibition in 2009. He returns w/ his 1st solo NY show since 2002, which includes his familiar washcloths, hand-dyed, cut and draped like melting hardedge configurations, accompanied by two films and mixed media collages. The exhibition installation has a soothing, chill-room effect: soft fabrics hung in the corners of painted wood, looped video of backlit shower curtains pulled across a camera lens (w/ a lulling water-droplet-like soundtrack/effect). Traverse the side gallery of "Stills" from '09-2010, nearly 100 unique hand-dyed towels in varying grays and blacks lining the walls, and reemerge in the video room to get the full impact of Lee's exhibition. It's like a spa appointment in an art gallery.
* Mickey Smith "Believe You Me" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Smith returns to NY Public Library, specifically the Picture Collection, for her new exhibition, though she brings some of the stacks w/ her, wedging them into a unique floor installation that is strangely ergonomic (though I'll see how well this thing ages, after much foot-traffic) and a literal basis for the new C-prints. She rephotographed images from the archives, played w/ combinations (one, w/ its garage-sale frames, is convincingly "family portrait" circa late '50s) and crops (esp. of more current figures, to playful effect).
* Chrstiana Soulou "DANCERS" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Sixteen drawings on dance and its models from the Athens-based artist, in her gorgeous, spare style. The result is disarmingly lovely: it's definitely not trendy (there are seductive traces in costuming and pose here and there, but the overall is very classic), but it is rare that such subtle works hit me so deeply. Her line-work recalls printmaking, entirely devoid of additional or trace marks. In a busier show (like "Skin Fruit" at the New Museum) Soulou's delicate works might recede, and it's to our benefit to see them in chorus in this solo exhibition.
* Roger White @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. This new series of paintings and airbrushed acrylics on paper walks the line of semi-representation, as the ordered objects, depicted in their most basic forms, retain their individual identities to the degree that they never become repetitive patterns. Some could even be high aerial views of farming villages, or studies of human motion.
* Paulina Olowska "Applied Fantastic" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. I dug this oblique pairing of high-fashion sensibility w/ its "behind the Iron Curtain" origins. Olowksa adapted sewing instructional postcards from Communist-era Poland into these '80s fashion mag-style large portrait paintings, these severe and sensual women striking poses against amorphous monochrome backdrops, the names of their patterned sweaters ("Landscape" etc) written in Polish like caption info beneath. She also included large collages of source materials as historical reference to her paintings.
* Mika Rottenberg "Squeeze" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Claustrophobes beware: Rottenberg's ambitious, and exhilarating, and miraculous, new film is a close encounter. Wind your way to the small viewing room, but don't miss the framed portrait of Boone herself hoisting a curious cubic amalgam of what appears to be pressed lettuce, cloth and detritus. It's the tongue-in-cheek payoff, the "great work" toiled over in mechanical repetition b/w lettuce farmers in middle America, rubber-sap harvesters in India, and the players in Rottenberg's Harlem studio soundstage. We get a quintet of nail-spa hand-washers, a bored, blond DMV-type smoking cigarettes, a disembodied tongue, a line of disembodied booties, and an obese Black woman who appears to have psychokinetic powers. Everyone does their thing, ad nauseum, toward completion of this mystery product, and Rottenberg threads it all together so well that I swear you won't notice the film has looped over on itself, seamlessly.
* David Thorpe "Peace not Pacifism" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Ornate and handcrafted ceramic tile screens, glazed in intense color, act as framing device to Thorpe's mixed media installations, enormous plaster boxes w/ leather filigree patterns and watercolors on paper.
* Adam Helms "Without Name" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. How about 48 portraits of insurgents, guerillas and subversives (try Norwegian death metal!!!), in charcoal and in response/homage to Gerhard Richter's own "48 Portraits" (1971-2) of iconic 20th C. cultural figures. Helms works w/ identity as well in his flag manipulations, but I think it's portraiture where he really shines.
* Carey Young "Contracting Universe" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The London-based artist shows new manipulated photography, created by exposing light through translucent meteorite fragments (a la negatives), which is pretty dope, plus a text-based work on U.N. documentation about outer space exploration and control.
* James Casebere "House" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. You might remember two of the lead, large-scale C-prints in the main gallery from this year's Whitney Biennial, taken from Casebere's massive scale-model of Dutchess County NY. They are paired w/ other daytime and twilight "scenes", shots of mowed lawns, varying swim pools and burning logs in this plainly beautiful slice of Americana. Now contrast that w/ the much earlier works in the front gallery, a decidedly creepy selection of gelatin silver prints from the '80s and '90s that appear to be encased in either snow (good!) or ash (spooky!). What's consistent is Casebere's mindful use of lighting for both realistic and dramatic effect.
* Storm Tharp "Ashby Lee Collinson" @ Nicole Klagsbrun / 526 W 26th St, 8th Fl. Tharp's incredible control of pooled ink and dry pigment produces equally realistic and terrifying, "Jacobs Ladder"-like results. He focuses entirely on one model here, the titular Collinson, giving her the run of sun-dappled sweetness to blurred-head mania.
* Maria Lassnig @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. A dozen newish paintings from the Vienna-based Lassnig, very physically rendered figures dropped against stark monochromatic backgrounds. The overall effect is discomfiting and unglamorous, but one canvas in particular, "Schlafende/Sleepers", has a gentle calming atmosphere to it.
* Ilene Segalove "The Dissatisfaction of Ilene Segalove", curated by Dean Valentine @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. This is a beautiful, autobiographical little exhibition culled by Valentine of the Cal Arts Conceptualist, both political and (self) deprecating and w/ a media undercurrent. I've seen Segalove's contributions in museum group shows but never to the degree as here, a range of photography and film works from the '70s and '80s, often w/ her family as subject when she isn't in front of the camera herself. The simplest renditions, like "Close But No Cigar", where Segalove mimics a Barbie Doll, down to the featureless torso, are easy convo-starters, but compare to her family photo collage of (she says) Asiaphile Dad and mixed-race daughter dissecting a hard cheese w/ chopsticks, which bears that self-deprecating yet stirringly emotive effect I alluded to above. Don't miss it.
* Mark Leckey + Mark Handforth @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. Leckey's classic "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore" from '99, a video collage of the U.K. underground music scene from the '70s through '90s, complete w/ what should be its custom sound system, the titular "Sound System" from '02, totally steals the show. Miami-based Handforth's spatial-disrupting sculpture comes off properly flaccid once you've experienced the full 15-min "Fiorucci", w/ its booming, throbbing soundtrack and hypnotically edited dance sequences.
* Daniel Hesidence "Autumn Buffalo" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. The titular American beast is abstracted beyond oblivion in this suite of large-scale paintings by Hesidence, but that's OK w/ me: his energetic brushwork, going from these lava-like flows to washing-machine smears and blurred-out fireworks (mostly in earthy, warm reds and oranges, w/ bluish highlights — the sky? — here and there) are impressive.
* Hans Hartung "The Last Paintings" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. There is a stunning breadth of surface techniques and textures to Hartung's final spraypaint-infused, saturated color abstractions. This ranges from a large acrylic work in the back, "T1989-R29", that seriously looks like melted butterscotch-topped ice cream, to the refreshing misting of its neighbor, like a waterfall straight out of "Avatar"'s world, to the color driblets and sprays earlier in the show.
* Elad Lassry @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Lassry's staged, saturated-color C-prints, each in its own artist's frame, aren't my cup of tea, but they might be yours. Consider the blurry line of watermelons (green background), the VERY '80s-style female model (tie-dyed room), the cherries (against graphic white, then against red).
* Michael Heizer "Works from the 1960s and 70s" @ David Zwirner / 519 W 19th St. Anytime somebody says "Michael Heizer", i.e. the seminal earth-shaping artist, you've got my attention. He's probably best known for his massive land-moving, addition/subtraction works, like the epic work-in-progress "City" in Garden Valley, Nevada, or the yawning polygonal abysses "North, East, South, West" in the floor of DIA:Beacon. Zwirner Gallery fills in the blanks a bit, though, w/ Heizer's rarer, smaller art, geometric abstracts on shaped canvas, little more than asphalt-black latex covering raw canvas, and a handsome gray granite pie-slice set called "Vermont". Set atop two aluminum slabs, one can only imagine what "Vermont" would look like in Heizer's traditional outsized style.
* Erwin Wurm @ Jack Hanley Gallery / 136 Watts St. Ahead of the trickster Austrian artist's solo show at Lehmann Maupin (see THUR), this gallery hosts the first U.S. appearance of Wurm's 2008 self-portrait installation "Selbstportrat als Gurken", i.e. 26 uniquely cast and convincingly painted pickles on different-sized white plinths. If you didn't catch that, it's a room full of pickle-sized sculptures. And if you're STILL wondering "well, Brian, does that mean this is an essential, must-see show?" all I can say is "obvs".
LAST CHANCE
* Barry Le Va "Ink on Paper, Cut and Glued to Ink on Paper" @ David Nolan Gallery / 527 W 29th St. I LOVE some Le Va. He's a beguiling artist, IMO, morphing b/w the intrinsic violence in his cleaver installations to his cerebral, contemplative scatters and orderings. I'd definitely put this exhibition of large-scale '80s collages in the latter category, and half the fun of viewing these works is that they LOOK like they're from the '80s, delightfully retro, particularly the yellow-on-black "Plain View/Perspective - North is East", which one-ups the whole 'chiptune' movement in its Atari-era authenticity by 20+ years. The massive "Diagrammatic Silhouettes: Sculptured Activities", meanwhile, resembles the abstracted innards of a massive lifeform, or perhaps the zoomed out view of many lifeforms, furthering Le Va's grasp of the organic in his works.
* "Redressing" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. I had high expectations for this mega-sized group show in the gallery's new larger space, several blocks down from it's original Chelsea haunt. My history w/ the place, dating back to when it was hyphenated "-Dayan" even, has been erratic, w/ the usual gallery highs and lows, but more extreme here b/c the lows just pissed me off and the highs absolutely wowed my pants off, like phenomenal stuff. I'm particularly intrigued w/ how Bortolami will follow up, as "Redressing" is full to the brim, several dozen artists from the gallery's roster, downtown darlings, and some mid-career surprises (but still bearing that edge). All said, there are some lovely things here, most of 'em new, w/ Terence Koh's "History" (2008), a mannequin draped in a lioness and blue wildebeest hide, respectively, opening the experience. A brilliant combo further in begins w/ Daniel Buren's gray and white-striped wallpaper, carrying a new David Salle, "Lookout", and a new Jacki Pierson word-sculpture. Adjacent to this is Jonathan Horowitz's cheeky "Daily Mirror" (2006), a mirrored silkscreen of the 'Cocaine Kate' "Daily Mirror" cover, and if you look at it from a slight angle you get the prison-bars effect from the Buren. Another combo, in the back (and I'm interested in what the gallery does w/ this space, as it is quite obviously beneath their offices), includes Ryan Foerster's new "Julie Night Swimming" abstract C-print, which could be a twilit shoreline from the distance or the smear of a UFO, and the Tim Noble & Sue Webster heavy-metal copulating rats, scrap metal transformed by a spotlight into said vermin. It's one of their more stirring light-and-object examples, in my opinion, which is a bit funny b/c it's about rats.
* Adam Pendleton "BAND" @ The Kitchen / 512 W 19th St. Pendleton's new video installation tracks Deerhoof's new song "I Did Crimes for You" (+ works from Pendledon's "Black Dada" series, which I was digging at MoMA PS1's "Greater New York").
* "Ne Change Rien" (dir. Pedro Costa, 2009) screenings at Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave). YES!!!!!! I fell in love with this incredible auteurist Portuguese director courtesy of his Anthology-housed retrospective back in '07. His latest film, which played at the 2009 NYFF (and which I sadly expected to NEVER see a proper theatrical run in NY thereafter) receives proper treatment here, for a limited time! Costa moves beyond Lisbon (specifically the Fontainhas ghetto, the backdrop and nearly secondary character in his films "Ossos", "In Vanda's Room" and "Colossal Youth") to focus on chanteuse Jeanne Balibar, from the recording studio to the stage. Costa's subtle filming and sumptuous framing figures throughout this genius feature. Through 11/16
* "Four Lions" (dir. Chris Morris, 2010) sneak preview @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft. Greene (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 6:50p + Q&A w/ Morris. The term "Jihad satire" might not grab you, but this farcical portrait of wannabe radicals in Sheffield, lurching out of their mundane lifestyles w/ highfalutin righteousness, might just be a Trojan Horse to lure you in and wow you in the process. It opens at Angelika on FRI but it's more fun to catch the preview, w/ director Morris in attendance, innit?
* "Throne of Blood" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1957) screenings @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 9:30p. Shakespeare's Macbeth, as remained by Kurosawa in feudal Japan, w/ Toshiro Mifune (who else??) as the titular ruler, whose dramatic demise at the end is as legendary as it is beautiful. Also THU 6:50/9:15p
* "Funny Face" (dir. Stanley Donen, 1957) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6p. The only more incredible thing about this classic haute couture fantasyland, w/ Fred Astaire as the high-fashion photog and Audrey Hepburn at her beatnik best is that Donen will be PRESENT for a Q&A after this screening. I know!
* "Touchable Sound" DJ Night @ Heathers / 506 E 13th St (L to 1st Ave, NR/456 to Union Square), 8p. Ahead of the proper NY-area book release for "Touchable Sound: A Collection of 7-inch Records from the USA" (quite possibly a keystone guidebook for crate-diggers, audiophiles — me — and people who care about dope music alike), the editors Mike Treff & Diego Hadis, plus contributors Brian Price, Julie Williams and Justin Gressley, spin 7"s featured in the book at this daringly eclectic party.
* Blonde Redhead @ Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NR/L/456 to Union Square), 7p/$30. I must come to terms w/ the truth that Blonde Redhead will probably NEVER go back to that lusciously atonal "La Mia Vita Violenta" age; if their new album is any indication, they've added electronic undertones to their increasingly fuzzy indie-rock. But they do rock out live, no question. ALSO THURS (incredibly, too bad not FRI as well, b/c I'd send you down to TRASH! in the basement straight after)
* "Theoretical Music: Rome '78" w/ James Nares @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (MR to Union St), 8p/$10 (3-night package for $25). Art historian Branden W. Joseph and musician David Grubbs organized this fascination three-day event, leading off w/ artist Nares' quintessential film, which is rare enough that I (and probably you) have never seen it, feat. a cast of NY No Wave darlings + more.
THURSDAY
* NY Art Book Fair @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq), PREVUE 6-9p. This is the 2nd year running that PS1's old schoolhouse converts into a Willy Wonka-esque fun factory of limited editions, first-runs, and international pressings in the 5th iteration of Printed Matter Inc's NY Art Book Fair. And like last year, the Fair hosts a Classroom (readings, workshops & other informal artist-led events) and loads of performances, screenings and one-offs throughout. Visit the Fair site for full details and schedule. It runs THRU SUN w/ hours 11a-7p FRI & SAT and 11a-5p SUN.
* Anthony Caro "Upright Sculptures" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. A selection of Caro's latest sculptural works, in his traditional raw pairings of painted steel, cast iron and organic materials, w/ an emphasis on height.
* Jenny Holzer "Retro" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Classic architectural works from the late '70s to '80s, comprised of Holzer's pairing of LED signs and deft slogans w/ benches, painted signs and even a sarcophagus.
* John Currin @ Gagosian / 980 Madion Ave. Few contemporary artists have sustained an uncanny knack for 1) executing Old Masters style painting and 2) using that to warp and pervert the feminine form quite like Currin. Call his works gorgeous or repellant, he's made a style of his own, continuing that here w/ new paintings that add B-movie references to his challenging (and sometimes grotesque) updates to classical, formalist representation.
* Erwin Wurm "gulp" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. For those keeping track, this is the 2nd Erwin Wurp exhibition that just opened (I am also counting the site-specific installation at Jack Hanley Gallery, which opened last SUN). Thanks to the additional space in Lehmann Maupin, Wurm has more room to play, filling the rooms w/ idiosyncratic sculpture.
* Tomas Saraceno "Cloud Cities, Connectome" + Peggy Preheim "the end (final cut)" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. An ambitious duet at the gallery, feat. Saraceno's eco-minded installations and Preheim's super-intimate, highly-realistic pencil drawings and currency collage works.
* Charlotte Dumas "Repose" @ Julie Saul Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Animal photographs, what's not to love about that? Medium-format prints from several of Dumas' series, incl. stray dogs and caged zoo animals.
+ Julie Evans & Ajay Sharma "Cowdust". The artists, NY-based Evans and Indian miniaturist painter Sharma, may seen the unlikely collaborators in print, but the results of their work together, done in Jaipur, sounds wicked.
* Aakash Nihalani "Overlap" @ Bose Pacia / 163 Plymouth St, DUMBO. You've totally seen Nihalani's fluorescent tape 'interventions' about NYC, those 8-bit foreshortened cubes and Atari-esque patterns. He's even cooler in the gallery setting, converting the most drab white-boxes into humorous and inventive (but never gaudy) installations.
* Philip Pearlstein "Going Forward" @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. The gallery furthers its unparalleled coverage of Pearlstein w/ this show of 10 new works from the past two years, retaining the artist's voluptuous physicality in his renderings of skin and shadow, but w/ an even more vivid degree of realism and accompanying color.
* Robert Lazzarini "Friendly-Hostile-Friendly" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 511 W 27th St. New wall-mounted sculptures taking reference from law-enforcement training targets, but warped into surreally new forms.
* Youssef Nabil @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. Hand-colored gelatin silver prints recalling Egyptian movie posters and films of the '40s and '50s, which just sounds mesmerizingly dope.
* Sophie Crumb @ DCKT Contemporary / 195 Bowery. The daughter of underground comix legends R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crump dives into her debut solo show at DCKT w/ raw, realistic portraits of herself and others, w/ imagery culled from mass media.
+ Irvin Morazan, "Introducing Masterblaster" at 7:30p. The 1st of three performances by NY-based Morazan in the gallery, combining pre-Columbian folklore w/ contemporary cultural references, i.e. a sound battle b/w Ghettoblaster and Masterblaster.
* "Four Lions" (dir. Chris Morris, 2010) sneak preview @ reRun Theatre / 147 Front St, DUMBO (F to Jay St, AC to High St), 10p + Q&A w/ Morris. The term "Jihad satire" might not grab you, but this farcical portrait of wannabe radicals in Sheffield, lurching out of their mundane lifestyles w/ highfalutin righteousness, might just be a Trojan Horse to lure you in and wow you in the process. It opens at Angelika on FRI but it's more fun to catch the preview, w/ director Morris in attendance, innit? Also: this screening is FREE, but show up early (I don't know how early! The theatre is connected to a gastropub, have a drink or something) to guarantee your spot.
* "Theoretical Music: Two Panel Discussions" w/ Kim Gordon, Dan Graham, Taro Suzuki, Byron Coley, Thurston Moore, Neb Sublette & more @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (MR to Union St), 5:30p/$10 (3-night package for $25). The organizers of this three-day event, Joseph and Grubbs, moderate two panels of influential, cross-cultural leaders, like those listed above.
* Aki Onda + MV Carbon @ Roulette / 20 Greene St (ACE/NR to Canal St), 8:30p/$15. A pairing of experimental minds, sound technician and cassette maestro Onda and analog sculptor Carbon, who was recently the artist-in-residence at ISSUE Project Room in Gowanus.
FRIDAY
* Hiroshi Sugimoto "The Day After" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. The ineffable experimental photographer's debut show at the gallery should be epically electrifying. He exhibits two 50-ft photographic diptychs from his "Lighting Field" series, created w/ electrical discharges on unexposed film in the darkroom, plus related single photographs. I am stoked.
* Anton Corbijn "Inwards and Upwards" @ Stellan Holm Gallery / 1018 Madison Ave. You may know Corbijn as a filmmaker (a very good one at that, considering "Control" and "The American"). But he's a fantastic photographer, whose subtle lens latches deeper into your emotions than you might expect. This show, feat. contrasty b&w digital prints from the past decade of Alexander McQueen, Gerhard Richter, Kate Moss and others, is characteristic of his brooding talent.
* Monika Sosnowska @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Seven new kinetically architecture-ish sculptures by the Polish artist, in her debut solo show, warped and tangled stairs and seating.
* Jessica Ann Peavy "Emergency Contraception" @ Collette Blanchard Gallery / 26 Clinton St. Do we trust the narrator? Peavy features new single-channel videos of 1st person romantic accountings, both realistic and outrageous, plus culturally- and gender-conscious photography and an opening night performance.
* Miranda Lichtenstein @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. New experimental photography from the NY-based artist, incl. shadowy and moire-patterned archival pigment prints and softened C-prints of flower arrangements.
* Koo Jeong-A "Constellation Congress" @ DIA at Hispanic Society / Audubon Terrace, Broadway b/w 155th & 156th St (1 to 157th St). Koo enacts a three-part exhibition, commissioned by DIA. Her multidisciplinary installation at the Hispanic Society, a truly immersive experience (there's an olfactory element to it, besides the video and architectural stuff) is the tip of the ol' iceberg.
* Koo Jeong-A "A Reality Upgrade & End Alone" @ DIA:Beacon / 3 Beekman St, Beacon NY (Metro North to Beacon). I don't usually profile my favorite upstate gallery, but it's an essential part of Koo's three-part exhibition. In this case, it's a new iteration of her Venice Biennale outdoor installation, 5000+ glittery rhinestones strewn about the grass and trees behind DIA.
* Koo Jeong-A "Drawings" @ Dan Flavin Art Institute / Corwith Ave, Bridgehampton NY. Part three of Koo's DIA-commissioned exhibition is a series of new works on paper at the Flavin Institute's ground-floor gallery.
* "Ne Change Rien" (dir. Pedro Costa, 2009) screenings at Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave) + conversation w/ Costa and Dennis Lim at 5:30. I lavish attention to Costa's latest doc, swapping out his native Portugal for France and Jeanne Balibar, under WED, but this particular screening is super-bonus due to the inclusion of the director himself in attendance.
* "Four Lions" (dir. Chris Morris, 2010) @ Angelika NY / 18 W Houston St (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette). The term "Jihad satire" might not grab you, but this farcical portrait of wannabe radicals in Sheffield, lurching out of their mundane lifestyles w/ highfalutin righteousness, might just be a Trojan Horse to lure you in and wow you in the process. Like the non-Toshiro Mifune characters in "Yojimbo/Sanjuro", only w/ semi-access to explosives. Also: this is a Drafthouse Films release, which in its exhilaratingly indie nature earns my support.
* "Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (dir. Pedro Costa, 2001) at Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave), 9:30p. A glaring blank spot in my inclusive mastery of Costa's oeuvre, where he turns the lens on longtime collaborators Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, part of the series "Cinema of Our Time".
* "Bedazzled" (dir. Stanley Donen, 1967) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 9p. You haven't "really" seen this modish Swingin' London romp until you've seen it big: Dudley Moore's deal w/ the devil, aka Peter Cook cutting a sharp line in a dapper suit and a valise of snide comebacks (and a cameo by Raquel Welch as "Lust", obvs) is mayjah. The sing-off b/w the two leads, Moore belting out "Love Me!!!" and Cook's monotone, psychedelic "I'm Bedazzled" must be seen to be believed.
* "Pleasures of the Flesh" (dir. Nagisa Oshima, 1965) screening @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (6 to 68th St), 6:45p/FREE. I still can't get over the fact that Asia Society is hosting this ambitious series of Japanese New Wave and art-house films, esp. b/c they're leading off w/ Oshima's infamous sexual netherworld AND that the screening is free of charge.
* "127 Hours" (dir. Danny Boyle, 2010) @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston (F to 2nd Ave). A delirious, breakneck adaptation of mountain climber Aron Ralston's accident and self-amputation in remotest Utah canyons, as shown through the twinkling eyes of James Franco. Guilty pleasure, maybe, but whatever, I'll definitely see it.
* "Theoretical Music: UT + Talk Normal" @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (MR to Union St), 8p/$10 (3-night package for $25). Rock out No Wave style for the final night of this three-day event, feat. UT (Nina Canal, Jacqui Ham and Sally Young) in their 1st U.S. concert since '91, plus Brooklyn's leading No Wave duo Talk Normal.
SATURDAY
* William Earl Kofmehl III "Dear Father Knickerbocker, I Just Googled You" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. The inaugural show at this international-strong gallery's new location promises to be an event, thanks to Kofmehl's ambitious exhibition. Besides filling the larger space w/ a cache of embroidered canvases and mixed-media sculpture, he christens the new gallery w/ a performance, from 6:30-8p opening night, extracted from NYC's history.
* Anselm Kiefer "Next Year in Jerusalem" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. OK I saw a bit of the pre-installation for this new show, and what I saw, enormous, labyrinthine glass vitrines, like from a dystopian, high-security future world, which surround Kiefer's new installation "Occupations", many dozen photographs (adapted from his very early '69 series) mounted on lead, then burlap shrouds, enclosed in steel, to brutal effect. Are you ready to dive into Kiefer's complexly dark world?
* Sherrie Levine @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. Levine explores Alfred Stieglitz to a further degree throughout her latest works, a series of tonal monochromes inspired by his "Equivalents" from the mid-20s to '30s. Plus new bronze sculptures, recalling Cambodia and Greece.
* "Inaugural Show" @ CRG Gallery / 548 W 22nd St. Another gallery moves to a ground floor primo spot, this time it's CRG and their forward-thinking roster of talent, incl Siobhan Liddell, Colby Bird, Angela Dusfresne, Ori Gersht and Carmen McLeod.
* Ugo Rondinone "nude" @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. The Swiss artist's conceptual sculptural style is nearly unclassifiable. He works in the highly figurative, true, but he is equally comfortable in the physically cartoonish (like his last "Heads" show at this gallery) and in text ("HELL YES!", recently removed from New Museum's facade). This new show is human-scaled, at least.
* Tony Smith "Bronze" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 532 W 24th St. A treasure trove of classic small bronze sculptures (finished in Smith's trademark black), which ultimately turned into his later monolithic works.
* Luc Tuymans "Corporate" + Raymond Pettibon "Hard in the Paint" @ David Zwirner / 525-533 W 19th St. Tuymans' intentions should be clear in the show title, but his exhibition of new, sparsely colored, veiled paintings span the ages, from feudalism and colonial times to present-day corporate culture. Next door, Pettibon presents a series of new, graphic drawings w/ text elements in his ongoing cultural commentary.
* William N. Copley "X-Rated" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. The gallery recreates Copley's infamous '74 installation at former Huntington Hartford Museum on Columbus Circle, a riot of libidinous physicality in large acrylics on linen.
* "The Hidden Fortress" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1957) screenings @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 3/6/9p. Fanboys lure this Kurosawa epic b/c it influenced George Lucas' "Star Wars: A New Hope". I love "The Hidden Fortress" b/c it freakin' rips, b/w the bumbling peasants/droids to stodgy, athletic Toshiro Mifune as the cooler-than-Jedi hero, and b/c when you think 'jidaigeki' you have to mention "The Hidden Fortress" in the same breath.
SUNDAY
* Jean Pigozzi "Johnny STOP!" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Pigozzi and his all-seeing little Leica have produced an incredible wealth of insidery, intimate photography for decades. Expect many of those off-kilter, humorous and generally warm moments in this exhibition.
* "Of many, one", curated by Erin Sickler @ Scaramouche / 52 Orchard St. Eight young London-based artists work across multiple media platforms in an exercise in broken narratives, incl. Johann Arens, Rehana Zaman, Laura Morrison and Daniel Lichtman.
* "Yojimbo" (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1961) screenings @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 4:30/6:50/9:15p. Part one of Kurosawa's loose duo of ronin films, w/ Toshiro Mifune taking the charisma factor to new heights. Only problem is BAM screens the 'sequel' "Sanjuro" next week, but what the hell, see this THEN see that.
* "Singin' in the Rain" (dir. Stanley Donen, 1952) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6:30p. Everyone's heard of this film, even if it's just for Gene Kelly dancing alone in a downpour. I mean, Anna Karina references it, kind of, in JLG's "Une femme est une femme". Essential!
* UT @ Maxwell's / 1039 Washington St, Hoboken NJ (PATH to Hoboken stop), 9p/$10. This is beyond, really. If you missed seminal No Wavers UT (Nina Canal, Jacqui Ham and Sally Young, who haven't played here since '91) at their reunion theoretical music show at ISSUE Project Room on FRI, you (incredibly) have another chance to see 'em. In Jersey. w/ the properly avant-garde Sightings
TUESDAY
* Lucas Samaras "Poses" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. Photoshop-manipulated digital portraits of art world stars, in a fairly consistent creepy style.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Robert Rauschenberg @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. The first sentence of Gagosian's press release for this show, after Rauschenberg's quote on art as communication and its inherent ability to change, is the description "a major exhibition". I'd rephrase that "a MAYJAH exhibition". Goodness, there is a lot of art here, and I hate to use the shortcut phrase "career-spanning retrospective", but that's in the works here, from Rauschenberg's John Cage-era, infamous "White" paintings (one of those, plus a triptych in black, which I'd title "void" paintings instead, as they're sinisterly devoid of anything, active in their starkness) to the deliciously battered-but-luxe "Watchdog" sculpture, shown in the same room as the White painting and appearing as a series of seven battered and rusty pails (a la friend Jasper Johns) over chromed aluminum. "Watchdog" is from 2007 and the adjacent White canvas is 1951. Do the math. In between, we get a little bit of everything, meaning Combines (the humorous "Short Circuit" from '55, featuring a Sturtevant reproduction of a Johns flag painting inside one of its cupboards), Spreads (the vivid "Palladian Xmas" fro 1980, w/ illuminated washboards amid the screenprints of cats and fabric stripes), ROCI (aka Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, incl "Caryatid Cavalcade II", a threateningly huge five-canvas mixture of acrylic washes and larger-than-life screenprints, of Chilean imagery and building facades), and Runts (amid his last works, sprawling Americana pigment transfers). Plus a lot of Rauschenberg I've NEVER seen before, not in my memory anyway, like his Early Egyptian works (check the pyramidal work from '73, its cardboard stacks painted Day-Glo on the reverse, projecting an orangey aura against the wall, plus its sand-encrusted neighbor from '74 w/ spoke-wheels embedded in the boxes) and the Jammer series, little more than layered, ethereal cloth works w/ rattan poles, and two Borealis works from '90 and '91 of tarnished shadowy objects on brass. Think Andy Warhol's oxidation series but way cooler. I am still taking all this in, but the essential nature of this MAYJAH exhibition should be a given, even if you didn't read this far.
* Brice Marden "Letters" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. Might sound a bit weird for me to claim nostalgia for Kyoto when traversing this sublime series of related new works, as Marden drew inspiration from his travels to the National Palace Museum in Taipei (when his own retrospective was on at the MoMA). But that is the feeling I get, climbing up the wide, uneven stone stairs of Ginkaku-Ji in Kita-Higashiyama, amid bamboo forests and burbling brooks. The paintings themselves are fascinating, incorporating blank fields of muted color (usually a combination of grays) as framing devices to either side of the action, Marden's complexly layered calligraphic whips of thoughtfully paired colors. The end effect is even more 3D than his earlier works and involving a range of climates and emotions beyond his 1991 Cold Mountain series. Check the foggy warmth inherent to "First Letter", the cloaking rainstorm over "Letter About Books #3, Blue Ground", the punctuating gold emerging from "Third Letter". These seven large canvases are paired w/ a slew of works on paper in an adjacent gallery, rivulets of Kremer ink and either shellac ink or gouache on thick paper. A truly transporting experience.
* Brice Marden "Paintings 1961-1964" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 526 W 22nd St. Don't miss this tiny, thoughtful show from Marden's early career, six small- to medium-scale works w/ either impenetrably waxy or intriguingly kinetic surfaces, like the brownish "Arizona", its regular permutations interrupted by almost Abstract Expressionist drips and dribbles of black paint. It's of interest to note that after this work he segued into those quietly regal monochromes, their surfaces flattened out w/ beeswax, and didn't revisit this lyrical brushwork for another 20+ years.
* Ana Mendieta "Documentation and Artwork, 1972-1985" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. I really love Mendieta's oeuvre, and the gallery has done a fitting homage to this unparalleled Conceptualist/performance artist in the 25th anniversary of her untimely death at age 36 w/ this trove of Mendieta's archival drawings, photography (incl. contact sheets!) and films, most of which have rarely (if ever) been shown publicly. The whole thing works and is museum-level in its enriching qualities (won't MoMA etc do a proper retrospective on Mendieta? Klaus Biesenbach, looking at you), but the real standout for me were the films. They're brief and silent, so you can watch them all, and you should. It is one thing to see a series of Mendieta's signature "Silueta"s, smoldering or burning shadowy, angelic figures in the ground, and another to see smoke billowing violently from a filmed "Silueta". Same deal w/ "Black Ixchell, Candle Ixchell", a wrapped Mendieta-sized figure w/ a candle burning over it. Another, "Mirage", totally had me transfixed for its 3-min runtime: the camera focuses on a slightly windy field. There's a mirror in the right corner, reflecting the artist in near-silhouette, sitting transfixed for the 1st minute, then systematically ripping a feather pillow (I think??) apart, then sitting still once again. It's somehow peacefully lulling and frightening simultaneously.
* Brody Condon & Jen Liu @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. A great juxtaposing at work here. Condon's straight of "Greater New York" at MoMA PS1, and he elaborates on those works w/ a trio of videos that feat. little more than his hand maneuvering handmade "fantasy role-play" die of various geometric forms, in a repetitive and psychedelic dance. His static work in the show, "Vat Flesh on a Pedestal of Imitation Jade" is blockishly visceral, its many surfaces smeared and pixellated mid-90s graphic design style. Liu's more prickly works shine, then, as you get to know them. Her "Folded Black Cloud" series, sharply folded wall reliefs of sinisterly clouded skies, rendered in fiberglass, are simultaneously dangerous and fragile. Her "Fugue State" works on paper, interconnected found imagery overlain w/ patterns and then "torn", reminded me a bit of James Rosenquist's Pop-culture minings, but w/ a contemporary, representational immediacy.
* Wangechi Mutu "Hunt Bury Flee" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Each time I see Mutu's new large-scale collages on Mylar, she's taken her figures to another level of interpretation and figuration. This time they're ferocious amalgams of flesh, pelt, scales, feathers and foliage, metamorphosing against either celestial or poisonous backdrops. One fashiony woman-figure climbs a woodgrain-patterened tree (bearing tracings of another woman w/in), pursued by an "Alien"-like snaking appendage lashing out from behind her. The ecstatic "Oh, Madonna!" appears to have flowery, anemone-like explosions coming from her torso. Her "Moth Girls" sculptural installation, many dozen porcelain and feathered figures fill the back gallery in four rows, seemingly embodying the spirits of her past works' avatars.
* Paul Lee "Lavender" @ Maccarone Gallery / 630 Greenwich St. We're in for a treat: the towel-sculpture artist stole the show, in my opinion, back in Bortolami's incredible "Parallel" group exhibition in 2009. He returns w/ his 1st solo NY show since 2002, which includes his familiar washcloths, hand-dyed, cut and draped like melting hardedge configurations, accompanied by two films and mixed media collages. The exhibition installation has a soothing, chill-room effect: soft fabrics hung in the corners of painted wood, looped video of backlit shower curtains pulled across a camera lens (w/ a lulling water-droplet-like soundtrack/effect). Traverse the side gallery of "Stills" from '09-2010, nearly 100 unique hand-dyed towels in varying grays and blacks lining the walls, and reemerge in the video room to get the full impact of Lee's exhibition. It's like a spa appointment in an art gallery.
* Mickey Smith "Believe You Me" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Smith returns to NY Public Library, specifically the Picture Collection, for her new exhibition, though she brings some of the stacks w/ her, wedging them into a unique floor installation that is strangely ergonomic (though I'll see how well this thing ages, after much foot-traffic) and a literal basis for the new C-prints. She rephotographed images from the archives, played w/ combinations (one, w/ its garage-sale frames, is convincingly "family portrait" circa late '50s) and crops (esp. of more current figures, to playful effect).
* Chrstiana Soulou "DANCERS" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Sixteen drawings on dance and its models from the Athens-based artist, in her gorgeous, spare style. The result is disarmingly lovely: it's definitely not trendy (there are seductive traces in costuming and pose here and there, but the overall is very classic), but it is rare that such subtle works hit me so deeply. Her line-work recalls printmaking, entirely devoid of additional or trace marks. In a busier show (like "Skin Fruit" at the New Museum) Soulou's delicate works might recede, and it's to our benefit to see them in chorus in this solo exhibition.
* Roger White @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. This new series of paintings and airbrushed acrylics on paper walks the line of semi-representation, as the ordered objects, depicted in their most basic forms, retain their individual identities to the degree that they never become repetitive patterns. Some could even be high aerial views of farming villages, or studies of human motion.
* Paulina Olowska "Applied Fantastic" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. I dug this oblique pairing of high-fashion sensibility w/ its "behind the Iron Curtain" origins. Olowksa adapted sewing instructional postcards from Communist-era Poland into these '80s fashion mag-style large portrait paintings, these severe and sensual women striking poses against amorphous monochrome backdrops, the names of their patterned sweaters ("Landscape" etc) written in Polish like caption info beneath. She also included large collages of source materials as historical reference to her paintings.
* Mika Rottenberg "Squeeze" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Claustrophobes beware: Rottenberg's ambitious, and exhilarating, and miraculous, new film is a close encounter. Wind your way to the small viewing room, but don't miss the framed portrait of Boone herself hoisting a curious cubic amalgam of what appears to be pressed lettuce, cloth and detritus. It's the tongue-in-cheek payoff, the "great work" toiled over in mechanical repetition b/w lettuce farmers in middle America, rubber-sap harvesters in India, and the players in Rottenberg's Harlem studio soundstage. We get a quintet of nail-spa hand-washers, a bored, blond DMV-type smoking cigarettes, a disembodied tongue, a line of disembodied booties, and an obese Black woman who appears to have psychokinetic powers. Everyone does their thing, ad nauseum, toward completion of this mystery product, and Rottenberg threads it all together so well that I swear you won't notice the film has looped over on itself, seamlessly.
* David Thorpe "Peace not Pacifism" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Ornate and handcrafted ceramic tile screens, glazed in intense color, act as framing device to Thorpe's mixed media installations, enormous plaster boxes w/ leather filigree patterns and watercolors on paper.
* Adam Helms "Without Name" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. How about 48 portraits of insurgents, guerillas and subversives (try Norwegian death metal!!!), in charcoal and in response/homage to Gerhard Richter's own "48 Portraits" (1971-2) of iconic 20th C. cultural figures. Helms works w/ identity as well in his flag manipulations, but I think it's portraiture where he really shines.
* Carey Young "Contracting Universe" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The London-based artist shows new manipulated photography, created by exposing light through translucent meteorite fragments (a la negatives), which is pretty dope, plus a text-based work on U.N. documentation about outer space exploration and control.
* James Casebere "House" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. You might remember two of the lead, large-scale C-prints in the main gallery from this year's Whitney Biennial, taken from Casebere's massive scale-model of Dutchess County NY. They are paired w/ other daytime and twilight "scenes", shots of mowed lawns, varying swim pools and burning logs in this plainly beautiful slice of Americana. Now contrast that w/ the much earlier works in the front gallery, a decidedly creepy selection of gelatin silver prints from the '80s and '90s that appear to be encased in either snow (good!) or ash (spooky!). What's consistent is Casebere's mindful use of lighting for both realistic and dramatic effect.
* Storm Tharp "Ashby Lee Collinson" @ Nicole Klagsbrun / 526 W 26th St, 8th Fl. Tharp's incredible control of pooled ink and dry pigment produces equally realistic and terrifying, "Jacobs Ladder"-like results. He focuses entirely on one model here, the titular Collinson, giving her the run of sun-dappled sweetness to blurred-head mania.
* Maria Lassnig @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. A dozen newish paintings from the Vienna-based Lassnig, very physically rendered figures dropped against stark monochromatic backgrounds. The overall effect is discomfiting and unglamorous, but one canvas in particular, "Schlafende/Sleepers", has a gentle calming atmosphere to it.
* Ilene Segalove "The Dissatisfaction of Ilene Segalove", curated by Dean Valentine @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. This is a beautiful, autobiographical little exhibition culled by Valentine of the Cal Arts Conceptualist, both political and (self) deprecating and w/ a media undercurrent. I've seen Segalove's contributions in museum group shows but never to the degree as here, a range of photography and film works from the '70s and '80s, often w/ her family as subject when she isn't in front of the camera herself. The simplest renditions, like "Close But No Cigar", where Segalove mimics a Barbie Doll, down to the featureless torso, are easy convo-starters, but compare to her family photo collage of (she says) Asiaphile Dad and mixed-race daughter dissecting a hard cheese w/ chopsticks, which bears that self-deprecating yet stirringly emotive effect I alluded to above. Don't miss it.
* Mark Leckey + Mark Handforth @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. Leckey's classic "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore" from '99, a video collage of the U.K. underground music scene from the '70s through '90s, complete w/ what should be its custom sound system, the titular "Sound System" from '02, totally steals the show. Miami-based Handforth's spatial-disrupting sculpture comes off properly flaccid once you've experienced the full 15-min "Fiorucci", w/ its booming, throbbing soundtrack and hypnotically edited dance sequences.
* Daniel Hesidence "Autumn Buffalo" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. The titular American beast is abstracted beyond oblivion in this suite of large-scale paintings by Hesidence, but that's OK w/ me: his energetic brushwork, going from these lava-like flows to washing-machine smears and blurred-out fireworks (mostly in earthy, warm reds and oranges, w/ bluish highlights — the sky? — here and there) are impressive.
* Hans Hartung "The Last Paintings" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. There is a stunning breadth of surface techniques and textures to Hartung's final spraypaint-infused, saturated color abstractions. This ranges from a large acrylic work in the back, "T1989-R29", that seriously looks like melted butterscotch-topped ice cream, to the refreshing misting of its neighbor, like a waterfall straight out of "Avatar"'s world, to the color driblets and sprays earlier in the show.
* Elad Lassry @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Lassry's staged, saturated-color C-prints, each in its own artist's frame, aren't my cup of tea, but they might be yours. Consider the blurry line of watermelons (green background), the VERY '80s-style female model (tie-dyed room), the cherries (against graphic white, then against red).
* Michael Heizer "Works from the 1960s and 70s" @ David Zwirner / 519 W 19th St. Anytime somebody says "Michael Heizer", i.e. the seminal earth-shaping artist, you've got my attention. He's probably best known for his massive land-moving, addition/subtraction works, like the epic work-in-progress "City" in Garden Valley, Nevada, or the yawning polygonal abysses "North, East, South, West" in the floor of DIA:Beacon. Zwirner Gallery fills in the blanks a bit, though, w/ Heizer's rarer, smaller art, geometric abstracts on shaped canvas, little more than asphalt-black latex covering raw canvas, and a handsome gray granite pie-slice set called "Vermont". Set atop two aluminum slabs, one can only imagine what "Vermont" would look like in Heizer's traditional outsized style.
* Erwin Wurm @ Jack Hanley Gallery / 136 Watts St. Ahead of the trickster Austrian artist's solo show at Lehmann Maupin (see THUR), this gallery hosts the first U.S. appearance of Wurm's 2008 self-portrait installation "Selbstportrat als Gurken", i.e. 26 uniquely cast and convincingly painted pickles on different-sized white plinths. If you didn't catch that, it's a room full of pickle-sized sculptures. And if you're STILL wondering "well, Brian, does that mean this is an essential, must-see show?" all I can say is "obvs".
LAST CHANCE
* Barry Le Va "Ink on Paper, Cut and Glued to Ink on Paper" @ David Nolan Gallery / 527 W 29th St. I LOVE some Le Va. He's a beguiling artist, IMO, morphing b/w the intrinsic violence in his cleaver installations to his cerebral, contemplative scatters and orderings. I'd definitely put this exhibition of large-scale '80s collages in the latter category, and half the fun of viewing these works is that they LOOK like they're from the '80s, delightfully retro, particularly the yellow-on-black "Plain View/Perspective - North is East", which one-ups the whole 'chiptune' movement in its Atari-era authenticity by 20+ years. The massive "Diagrammatic Silhouettes: Sculptured Activities", meanwhile, resembles the abstracted innards of a massive lifeform, or perhaps the zoomed out view of many lifeforms, furthering Le Va's grasp of the organic in his works.
* "Redressing" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. I had high expectations for this mega-sized group show in the gallery's new larger space, several blocks down from it's original Chelsea haunt. My history w/ the place, dating back to when it was hyphenated "-Dayan" even, has been erratic, w/ the usual gallery highs and lows, but more extreme here b/c the lows just pissed me off and the highs absolutely wowed my pants off, like phenomenal stuff. I'm particularly intrigued w/ how Bortolami will follow up, as "Redressing" is full to the brim, several dozen artists from the gallery's roster, downtown darlings, and some mid-career surprises (but still bearing that edge). All said, there are some lovely things here, most of 'em new, w/ Terence Koh's "History" (2008), a mannequin draped in a lioness and blue wildebeest hide, respectively, opening the experience. A brilliant combo further in begins w/ Daniel Buren's gray and white-striped wallpaper, carrying a new David Salle, "Lookout", and a new Jacki Pierson word-sculpture. Adjacent to this is Jonathan Horowitz's cheeky "Daily Mirror" (2006), a mirrored silkscreen of the 'Cocaine Kate' "Daily Mirror" cover, and if you look at it from a slight angle you get the prison-bars effect from the Buren. Another combo, in the back (and I'm interested in what the gallery does w/ this space, as it is quite obviously beneath their offices), includes Ryan Foerster's new "Julie Night Swimming" abstract C-print, which could be a twilit shoreline from the distance or the smear of a UFO, and the Tim Noble & Sue Webster heavy-metal copulating rats, scrap metal transformed by a spotlight into said vermin. It's one of their more stirring light-and-object examples, in my opinion, which is a bit funny b/c it's about rats.
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