It's that time of year when seemingly every publication, art- and otherwise, does a 'best-of', 'year-end', 'top ten' list. Artforum did like a thousand of these. And so can I. While my writing is far more rudimentary than what you may read elsewhere, you can rest assured it is my highly subjective, slang-riddled, personally-experienced opinion. And with that:
My TOP TEN LIST-worthy cultural events of 2011 (in chronological order, b/c further ranking would be too masochistic)
1. Patrick Jacobs "Familiar Terrain" @ Pierogi Gallery
What I said then:
01/25/11: I love this exhibition's title: it felt totally appropriate as I practically dove face-first into the warm, endless meadows realized in Jacobs' awesome works — they're a combo of meticulous diorama and convex Claude glass lenses, so they appear as 3D photographs. I count myself the requisite city-dweller, a hardcore urbanite who likes his parks but is most comfortable on pavement, transit platforms and structures several stories off the ground. But I was beyond charmed by these swaths of greenery, recalling everything from some English glade to upstate New York, just off the beaten path. "Fairy Ring with English Daisies" (2010) bears a flattened oval of grass in its foreground. The tiny "Dandelion Cluster" (a 2-inch lens) is stuffed to the brim w/ thistles and that blossoming weed, like seeing it from the POV of tall grass. Water features, distant powerlines, water-towers, and other elements slowly reveal themselves in Jacobs' compositions, as our eyes soar back toward the horizon. This Cali-born, Brooklyn-based enchanter is featured in the upcoming "Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities" group exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design — but those feelings of delight when peering into a Jacobs' lens are totally natural.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Jacobs' works — blurring sculpture, photography, painting (kinda), collage, installation — put you at ease. I could stare at and into these hemispheres for hours, off, off into the distance, of rain-matted grass, of trees and flowers, of cloud patterns and, possibly, landmarks. Everything is purposefully vague yet gently familiar. I look forward to Jacobs' inclusion at VOLTA NY 2012.
2. Laurel Nakadate "Only the Lonely" @ MoMA PS1
What I said then:
02/01/11: The fact I can't come up with an easy explanation of my feelings when walking through Nakadate's first comprehensive museum exhibition speaks to the power of what's on display. And what's on display, to put it bluntly, is the artist herself. Here goes: many of Nakadate's video works and photography features her play-acting for the camera w/ older, single, anonymous men. They may be acting out exorcisms in the guy's house — like "Little Exorcisms" (2009) — or having mock-birthday parties, "Happy Birthday" (2000), the earliest here, three videos of the guy serenading Nakadate in front of a candlelit cake. They could be reenacting the heroine's cinematic death, like in "Beg For Your Life" (2006) or kinda dancing w/ her to Britney Spears in "Oops!" (2000). Or they could be like the wild-haired artist, sketching her for "Lessons 1-10" (2002) while Nakadate poses in her panties or less, staring at us while we and the guy stare at her. These videos and related photography bear the triple assault of deep unease, gnawing loneliness and tentative comfort — most evident as her comforting them, stepping into these socially-awkward men's lives for an hour or whatever, however long it takes to film the project, though I don't suspect it to be entirely one-sided. The strong sense of voyeurism (the men's lustful or innocent demeanor around her, Nakadate's magnetic presence in the frame) is tempered by Nakadate controlling the camera. Like "Good Morning, Sunshine" (2009), where she's the off-camera voice in young women's bedrooms, coaxing them to strip to their underwear. And her self-portraits, like the new series "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears", an overwhelming array of C-prints capturing her crying all throughout 2010, in the U.S.-Canada sojourn via Amtrak "Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind" (2006), where she throws her underwear out the moving train's window, and in "Love Hotel" (2005), a video of her coupling w/ an invisible, absent lover in Tokyo's love hotel sprawl. And, furthermore, in her project videos. She is undeniably courageous to enter a stranger's flat, but the ensuing invigoration and mutual respect and emotions may be to everyone's benefit, hers and the guys. I'm not trying to understand the thoughts going through these guys heads, having an attractive young woman artist creating a project with them, or if they ever see the final results of her respective work. Nakadate, however, is trying to understand, sharing a little face-time and a little human interaction. Both Nakadate's full-length films "Stay the Same Never Change" (2009, w/ its Sundance premiere) and "The Wolf Knife" (2010, which I hadn't seen until now) are included in the exhibition.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
There's no easy answer how you're "supposed" to feel in this survey exhibition. As a straight man, catching myself gawking (for lack of a better word) at Nakadate's varying stages of undress in her performative videos and photography, I felt no more excused from criticism as many middle-aged sad cases populating her works, tentatively joining in the performances with her. At times I found the whole lot numbing, particularly "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears", while her videos bore a necessarily more visceral interplay between Nakadate, the camera, sometimes her guests, and us the viewers. But I kept thinking about it, and tumbling over my own feelings, long after I'd met Nakadate at her opening and walked through the show. Even after the second and third visits, I was still thinking it over. That reverberation is crucial to any good exhibition. This one doesn't just let you go.
3. Glenn Ligon "AMERICA" @ Whitney Museum
What I said then:
03/22/11: This is essential. Glenn Ligon's textured, language-imbued works encapsulate the experience of growing up Black in America, specifically a Black male in America (and even more specifically, a gay Black male in America), and bridges this nation's troubled cultural history from the slave-owning Old South to President Obama, w/ special emphasis on race relations in the '90s. The Bronx-born, NY-based Ligon begins the experience w/ a huge silkscreen "Hands" (1996), a truncated image from the previous year's Million Man March. Think about that time period for a moment: I was in middle school, the Republican Party had overtaken the House during Pres. Clinton's first term, economic disparity and unemployment for African Americans were at terrible heights, and there was an alarm of the media's fixation on O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson and the ensuing Black male targeted image. I was young but I realized there was a hell of a mess going down. Ligon felt that exponentially more acutely, and this one striking, almost abstract rendering of a sea of outstretched hands beneath a twilit horizon acts like a flag and snapshot of what's to come w/in his exhibition. His early text-only painting "Untitled (I Am a Man)" (1988), recalling the famous placards carried by Memphis sanitation workers in '68 — which, incidentally, Sharon Hayes recreates as part of her "IN the Near Future" (2009) slide-project installation at the Guggenheim (their "Found in Translation" multi-artist show) — is evident of his manipulation and control of words and texture. The type is shrunken in its heavily enameled backdrop and the leading (space between lines) is spaced out, punctuating the words: "I AM - A - MAN". The next room is lined with door-sized canvases from 1990, each roughly painted white and filled w/ repeated stenciled sentences, like a massive typewriter gone haywire. The sources range from Jean Genet's incendiary play "The Blacks", as Ligon's work "I'm turning into a specter before your very eyes and I'm going to haunt you"; to Jesse Jackson's poem "I Am Somebody" and it's neighbor "I Was Somebody" (the only one w/ white-on-white type); to Zora Neale Hurston's essay "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background"—they read over and over ad infinitum, 'til the letters bleed black. I read the placard in the next room, installed w/ four shipping crates, for help: Ligon combines his '93 series "To Disembark" (based on a 19th-century account by a slave named Henry Brown, who escaped by mailing himself to Philadelphia in a wooden crate) w/ actual crates emitting the soft refrains of Billie Holiday ("Strange Fruit", her anti-lynching anthem) and KRS-One ("Sound of da Police") and frightening, stylized fugitive slave 'wanted' posters w/ Ligon as the fleeing subject. It's a full-on, sensorial, visceral installation that exemplifies his deftness in conveying a pan-generational Black experience, from colonial days to early '90s police brutality, in one focused gut-punch. More from Ligon's Million Man March series follows, plus a room of images from Robert Mapplethorpe's complicated and provocative "Black Book" publication, notated w/ a melange of critical commentary (both pro and con). He calls a broader scope of Black male imagery into play: whether you're "turned on" or offended by Mapplethorpe's sexually charged (or exploitative?) subject matter, whether you find traditional film roles and typecasting (the hyperbolized comedian, the sullen action hero, the sole Black guy who dies w/in 15 minutes of that slasher film etc etc) significantly troubling or you're ambivalent towards them — the "correct answer" is indeed infinitely more complicated. His series on James Baldwin's 1953 essay "Stranger in the Village" — the writer's experience staying in an Alpine hamlet that had never seen a dark-skinned person before — soaks Baldwin's chilling words in black paint and coal dust, turning "the world is white no longer, and will never be white again" into impenetrable, twinkling darkness. One of these works even represents Ligon's self-portrait, as he excised stenciled text from one, leaving a black and amorphously bordered void. Finally there's the neon, one striking installation of three imperfect neon signs spelling out AMERICA, in backward letters, in flickering tones and a third painted over in black, coolly retaining the power of the word. Sit amongst these for a few moments and let the experience of the previous rooms settle in: America's a dazzling place but mixed up, still not on the righteous path for all its people. America flickers like a caution sign, America's at half-power, struggling to get back on track. America's a big place and a symbolizes an epic many things, success, freedom, power and plight. What does it mean to you?
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
In a season of awesome retrospectives and surveys came one of the Whitney's best, at least in my recent memory and my favorite since Jenny Holzer's in 2009. Ligon's exhibition is expertly put together, not precisely chronologically, so that the gut-punch opening silkscreen recurs in context about midway through, ending with a quiet yet powerful neon installation at the conclusion. Throughout, we are reminded how much America has changed since Ligon was a boy, from the '60s Civil Rights marches onward. Yet, in this late year of Pres. Obama's first term, it's not exactly roses and bluejays, either. America has imperfectly improved, there is still hate towards people of color, the President is still vilified for his race (though critics will claim it's "not that"). Ligon reminds us the narrative is still open. It's the rare exhibit where I spent time reading his text-heavy works, for he does some incredible alchemy with words.
4. "Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art" @ Japan Society
What I said then:
032911: Hello Kitty dies in the end, surmounting a gravestone for pet animals and photographed — I'd like to think innocuously, like the gravestone actually exists in a cemetery somewhere — by Yoshitomo Nara, the punk-rocker of Japan's contemporary art world. I trust I didn't spoil the whole exhibition for you (the clue's in the title, hello!), because besides the general flow through rooms, or "Critical Memory", "Threatened Nature" and "Unquiet Dream" as Japan Society calls 'em, there is no right or wrong way to progress through this exhibition. Though I do advise you to begin at the conventional entryway, at least to face Makoto Aida's heavy "Ash Color Mountains" (2009-11) and put that past you. It would be a disturbing painting anyway, a massive hazy landscape broken up by hills of office workers, not ostensibly gory like his notorious 2001 work "Blender" (not shown here, but you'll find it in the catalogue!!! A little warning: this show as a whole is NOT kid-friendly. Maybe the last third is…hence the other entrance, but the Nara photograph is liable to freak them out too) but imbued with this unseen, unimaginable disaster, it cannot help but conjure images of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan. I suggest you give it a closer look, at the endless multitude of ONLY corporate staff, like a landfill to Japan's salaryman way of life, and the title's meaning may resonate truer to Aida's original intent. Its neighbor, the feverishly colorful and shiny "Harakiri School Girls" (2002), its grouping of saturated-toned sailor-suited students lavishly committing seppuku (which any jidaigeki aficionado knows was originally reserved only for samurai, as part of the bushido honor code), is a blunter and therefore more immediately accessible Aida. The whole print is on this holographic sticker, and he's inscribed his name and the title in cute futuristic type whilst echoing in shodo-style Japanese cursive, bookending the brutality ritualistically enacted by these trendy ko-gals. Maybe he's commenting on teenagers' blind lust for following the next hot new thing (I mean, take director Yoshihiro Nishimura's hyperbolized version, the wrist-cut "Ge" fake commercial, during his film "Tokyo Gore Police"), or his general disdain for moralistic suicide and belligerent schoolgirls. If you can get past the gore — and believe me I can — it's damn beautiful to look at. Now it's to my understanding that Aida's slasher-film-crossed-with-a-rave style tends to dominate a room, but he shares it here w/ Kyoto-based photographer Miwa Yanagi. She is one of EIGHT women artists in this 16-person show, so fully half the artists. Way to go, Japan Society! Plus, I am sorely lacking on the Japanese women photographer front, and we've got three of 'em here. Anyway: Yanagi shows four stylized C-prints from her "My Grandmother" series, depicting college-age girls under SFX makeup and Photoshop manipulation, as they see themselves in 50 years. In essence, they free themselves of youth's societal restrictions to think big and project themselves in limitless (but attainable?) fantasy scenarios. She represented Japan w/ her recent monumental series "Windswept Women" at the 53rd Venice Biennale, and though "My Grandmother" aren't nearly as massive, nor generational-mixed (lithe, youthful bodies and prematurely aged faces), they still draw a strong, if complex reaction. Tomoko Kashiki is nearly a full generation younger than Yanagi, and depicts women too but in slightly amorphous, slow-blurred animation, retaining trails of their movement as they disintegrate in woodgrain floor ("In a Box", 2008) — there's a lucid dreamlike element to it, like they're trying to rouse themselves back into reality. Maybe that's why the landscapes they embody seem a bit too perfect. Yamaguchi Akira (who I should note retains the Japanese way of ordering his family-name Yamaguchi first, even in English text) and the slightly younger Manabu Ikeda both create wildly detailed, environmentally imbued imagery. Yamaguchi's approaches that traditional "Floating World" cutaway style but sets his pens and watercolors on Tokyo's bustling Narita International Airport, thronged with businessmen and tourists and eclipsed in yellow smog clouds. I've encountered Ikeda before in group shows and art fairs (his "Foretoken" re-imagines Hokusai's famous "Great Wave off Kanagawa" as a tidal wave of traditional architecture), and I'd like to believe his huge diptych pen-and-acrylic-ink renderings embody some utopian arcology thinking. The swelling "History of rise and fall" (2006), an infinite-pagoda-roofed structure populated with cherry blossoms, Buddha hands and waterfalls that towers over stamp-sized rice fields and its primeval forest neighbor "Existence" (2004) imagine worlds proscribing the metropolis. Though considering the devastation wrought upon Miyagi Prefecture's farmland and townships, Ikeda's organic works feel like pastoral time capsules. Or to continue the arcology idea, these fantastical environments perpetuate their existences above and away from the modernization and disasters, man-made and natural, though on the other hand they appear to crumble under their own wildly unrealistic structures. It's here the exhibition switches gears into "Threatened Nature" (I think??), as a corridor separates the previous pairing of classical technique and super-contemporary pop with an overall naturalistic angle. Chiharu Shiota's installation "Dialogue with Absence" (2010, eschewing her telltale hairlike black-yarn tangles for transparent plastic tubes, siphoning red-dyed liquid from peristaltic pumps into a painted wedding dress. Surface-level, it reminded me of Tony Feher's lyrical "Next On Line" installation at The Pace Gallery crossed w/ Anselm Kiefer's history-steeped, ruined dioramas. It does embody some of Shiota's ongoing dialogues with an individual's ties to their ancestors, peers and environment — quite literally in the attached "blood supply" — but for me it didn't have that unnerving 'oomph' factor like her earthier, hairier installations. Though it segues well enough into Motohiko Odani's set of malformed Noh masks, purposefully imbalanced with sections of lifelike human bone and flesh, and with Kohei Nawa's "PixCell-Deer #24" (2011), a taxidermy buck covered in different-sized plastic globes. Stare into the sculpture, discerning that indeed it used to be a living creature, and you'll see yourself — many dozens of you, actually — locked w/in its beaded "skin", staring back at you. That interconnectivity with nature reappears throughout Rinko Kawauchi's "AILA" series, over a dozen picture-portrait-sized C-prints of natural forms, dead and alive. I was fortunate to experience Tomoko Shioyasu's thrillingly meticulous cut-paper shadow installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo last year, and am stoked she reappears here with 'Vortex" (2011), a new screen-sized whirlpool that places viewers within this channel, linking history, environment, experience. Shioyasu's conduit propels us into the third phase of the exhibition "Unquiet Dream". Kumi Machida's Nihonga-based figures, created entirely from traditional pigments on handmade paper, exist in like a half-womb half-sensory deprivation chamber. Tomoko Yoneda's series of sparse interiors, like windows into unpopulated worlds (or, again, echoes of the quake and tsunami devastation), are centered in infamous history, taken in the former HQ of Korea's Defense Security Command in Seoul. I fortuitously first experienced this series at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, during that same trip last April. The past charges of torture and political unrest unleashed in Yoneda's stark photographs mutes Haruka Kojin's beautifully conceived artificial flower mirrored installation (it's lovely and a bit disorienting, how she's crafted this Rorschach effect, but almost requires its own space to breathe). We conclude with two video works by London-based Hiraki Sawa (whose wonderful "O" installation, originally commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery for the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, ends this Saturday at James Cohan Gallery), his borderless fantasy "Within" (2010) and his superb early work "Elsewhere" (2003), a poetic silent video of household objects with lives of their own. Do the materials we own control us? Are we so attached to our 'stuff' that we forfeit 'real' relationships? I'm not sure if that's fully Sawa's intent here, but there is a duality to his whimsical display. And yes, here occurs Nara's aforementioned C-print, the Hello Kitty duo holding court as guardians in a pet cemetery. This is a show that benefits from unhurried visits, because small as the overall gallery space is, there is quite a bit of layered meaning to distill. That so much here seems to preempt and visualize the wrath of Mother Nature makes it all the more emotive. And considering my deep affinity for Japan, for my awesome friends there and my ongoing studies in the language, I feel extra connected to the exhibition.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
I've little to add to the above emotional discourse (continued here for NY Art Beat) besides reiterating the deep feelings I have toward this group exhibition and Japan's art world in general. The artists' reception was easily the weirdest, heaviest I've ever attended, occurring just days after the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake. Then I visited Tokyo weeks later. I am reiterating everything I've written already. I was back in Tokyo for a week in December 2011, checking up on artists, galleries and friends. "Bye Bye Kitty!!!" would have undoubtedly left an impact on me anyway — and it totally aided me deeper appreciation of the Japanese contemporary art scene (Kumi Machida and Miwa Yanagi in particular) — but the terrible coincidence of this past March made its mark that much more indelible.
5. NYC Popfest 2011 @ Cake Shop
What I said then:
05/24/11: Yep, it's a guilty pleasure, but I attend Popfest every year. And the kickoff show at Cake Shop (feat. local lovelies Dream Diary, Georgia's Gold-Bears, Cali's Sea Lions) just got a helluva lot awesomer when Popfest announced last week that the secret headliners are none other than my favorite band The Pains of Being Pure At Heart! Devoted LIST-readers will recall these NYC jangle-pop champs just sold out Webster Hall, so to have 'em playing tiny Cake Shop (my fourth time seeing 'em at this venue) is super special. If you were lucky enough to nab a ticket, join me up front.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
On practically the eve of my departure from NYC, I attended the awesomest Popfest show in Popfest history. It would've been dope anyway, considering the announced lineup, but when my favorites The Pains of Being Pure At Heart (aka NYC's cutest indie-pop band) became the secret headliners, I was ecstatic, over the moon. See, I'd seen 'em in a sold-out show at a much bigger venue like two weeks earlier, and I was coming to terms w/ the truth that they are so good now, and so popular now, that I'll never see 'em like I did two years ago at tiny basement Cake Shop. Well, here they were, practically tearing the roof off with their amped-up dream-pop noise, smashing through oldies like "Everything With You" and second LP tracks "Heart In Your Heartbreak" with panache. Honorable mention to Georgia's Gold-Bears for onstage kineticism. They whipped the crowd into a frenzy with "Record Store", and I was right there in front. I had my favorite spot from the get-go, and once The Pains took the stage and rocked out, I was transported back to their headlining spot at the "Twee as Fuck" Cake Shop show two years prior. Absolute bliss.
6. "Wild Beasts" @ Champion
What I said then:
09/13/11: Who's afraid of color, of paintings? Of vibrantly colorful, physically rendered, representational paintings…of stuff like portraiture and interior scenes? NYTimes' Roberta Smith writes of the Painting and Sculpture reconfigurings at MoMA, injecting those hallowed halls w/ key contributions from women artists (an EXCELLENT move) and lots and lots of experimental and increasingly non-painterly combinations. She quotes from Douglas Crimp's '81 essay "The End of Painting" in remarking on the Conceptual, Process and Video Art filling the latter part of the (newer) 4th Fl, along w/ stylistic liberties on the (older) 5th Fl, like reducing the (iconic, primary-colored) Piet Mondrian holdings and upping the biomorphic sculptures. Meanwhile in Austin, the young NY-based painter Ryan Schneider culled a potent five-artist exhibition reveling in color and canvas, in realism refracted through a 21st century prism. Check Atlanta native Shara Hughes (who's spent a lot of time in NY, plus is featured in the Saatchi Collection), whose entire current output is based on interiors — for her, "total paintings", encapsulating all her ideas and giving each of us something juicy and personal to grasp hold of. These ain't 19th Century European, I can tell you that much, though like the Met exhibition "Rooms with a View", Hughes uses outside illumination to intriguing effect. The vaguely cosmic, multiplanar composition "You Don't Know, I Can't Tell You" opens up to floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking an autumnal backyard and a smaller De Chirico-metaphysical doghouse casting long shadows. Daniel Heidkamp — who I've seen paired w/ Schneider before, at Priska Juschka Gallery's "Big Picture" show — pairs surroundings w/ posed portraiture (hell, his ongoing modus is "en plein air"), teasing out unusual and unexpected color combinations by painting these from life. The dry, washed out Texas sun affects his "Carte Blanche" series of portraits painted in situ at Champion, particularly when compared w/ his NY portraits. Schneider throws jeweled patterns over some of his newer compositions, maintaining Skittles-hued palettes he's been championing since I've been familiar w/ his work. The new canvas "Not to Sleep Just Rest" is one of his most exciting I've seen, cropping a nude (except for socks) female form into a wall-to-wall menagerie of floral mosaic tiles and chevron drapes; even the tabby cat's stripes play into it. While Joshua Abelow's ostensibly reductive works (think graphic symbols, numerals and shapes painted on burlap) might seem at odds w/ their wildly vivacious kindred, the geometries in Hughes' spacier interiors and particularly in Schneider's patterned compositions are totally in play here, along w/ some very intriguing, if limited, color combos. Finally Ezra Johnson reveals two painterly stop-frame animations, like 2009's "The Time of Tall Statues" (shown at Asya Geisberg Gallery this summer). His technique reminded me of vintage painted-cel animations, circa Windsor McKay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland", and if that sounds untrendy and potentially brilliant, it very much is.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
This group show of old and new NY friends definitely made my transition from NYC to ATX a lot easier. Plus, painting is awesome. Finally: Champion is among my favorite galleries, anywhere, and its tight, smart programming renews my faith that the South holds as much impact in the contemporary art world as either East or West Coasts, or Europe or Asia. It was around this time in Austin when I decided YES, this place works for me. Here's my review for New American Paintings.
7. Fantastic Fest 2011 @ Alamo Drafthouse S. Lamar
What I said then:
I didn't! Beyond this early courtesy warning!
And subsequent reviews!
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
So epic. My favorite film festival, b/c it's a film festival for film buffs and film freaks. You'll have the odd buttoned-up journalist or PR type, but the majority are very cool people, very devoted people, who are pretty fun to geek out with. I caught "only" 24 unique films this time (25 if you count seeing the world-premiere of Noboru Iguchi's guilty pleasure "Zombie Ass" twice), but they were majorly awesome. From the long-overdue "Livid" by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, to Michael R. Roskam's lauded and buzzworthy "Bullhead", to the decimating "Melancholia" from Lars von Trier, to a helluva lotta awesome Sushi Typhoon titles, Iguchi's almost family-friendly "Karate-Robo Zaborgar" and Yudai Yamaguchi & Tak Sakaguchi's "Yakuza Weapon"…and yes, even the world premiere of Tom Six's "The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence". I drank way too much, slept way too little, befriended a bunch of directors, actors, and Japanese film journalists, made many new friends from such encounters, and hung out for long periods of time with team Sushi Typhoon. A splatter-loving boy's dream, right?
8. Battles + Nisennenmondai @ Emo's East
What I said then:
10/25/11: I've been hotly anticipating this team-up for a good long while, a rhythmic square-off b/w Battles' man-machine John Stanier and Nisennenmondai's thrash goddess Sayaka Himeno. This is the latter's first U.S. showing in like SIX years: the ladies have honed their hypnotic math-rock sets to almost ESP precision — but Himeno keeps it kinetic and improvisational. Plus, this is my 1st Battles show post-Tyondai. Stoked!
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Full disclosure: my entire draw to this show was Nisennenmondai. I'd seen Battles twice already, though with Tyondai Braxton both times. And Battles didn't disappoint as a trio, no way, they whipped up a slinky, robotic dance-off with a set of mostly "Ice Cream"-era tracks, with a laudable light-show to boot. But I was beyond floored by Nisennenmondai, beginning with their Kraut-rock opener "appointment", leading with Yuri Zaikawa's sludge bass, followed by Sayaka Himeno's percolating hi-hat and, finally, Masako Takada's synth melody. Then just…epic…versions of "fan", "mirrorball" and the ferocious "ikkyokume" (turning Himeno from a jazz drummer to pure thrash and back again). The kind of jams that get lodged deep within your cerebral cortex. I met them afterward and shot the shit for a long time w/ Zaikawa. Next goal: see 'em live in Tokyo.
9. Maurizio Cattelan "All" @ Guggenheim
What I said then:
11/15/11: Maybe you've heard of Maurizio Cattelan, that Italian artist-provocateur whose two decades'-plus oeuvre contains a superrealistic effigy of Pope John Paul II attacked by a meteor ("La Nona Ora"), a squirrel lying face-down at the kitchen table after an apparent bullet-administered suicide ("Bidibidobidiboo"), and a taxidermy racehorse hoisted in midair ("Novacento"). That last part's key, as in his supposed swan-song feat, he's hoisted about 130 of his nearly complete works up, suspending them like gaudy Pop-culture sausages within the iconic museum's iconic Rotunda, leaving some six floors of ramps totally bare. Does this detract from the experience, seeing Cattelan's mostly elusive (at least stateside), alarming works from more than an arm's span distance? I say NO: we see his entire output in concert, not just non-chronological but nonlinear, crashing, competing and (at times) quite intriguingly combining in 3D space. So while the site-specific version of JFK in funereal reverence, as "Now", doesn't apply here, seeing him from above contextualizes it in surreal reverie. Or approaching the sinister mini-Hitler "Him" from below only to then effectively supersede him one ramp higher. In sinister terms, his ironic entry to the Gugg's international show "theanyspacewhatever", Pinocchio floating facedown in the Rotunda fountain ("Daddy Daddy") recurs here hovering 10 feet ABOVE the fountain, in frozen free-fall. Taken as whole, it's one massive echo of the trickster's own multifaceted contribution to and dialogue with the art world and society.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
I loved loved LOVED this. It is subversive Cattelan at his very best. You want a career retrospective? Fine, suspend all of my artwork (sans like two) from the ceiling, out of order, out of synchrony, out of hierarchy. At the very least, this unorthodox installation "de-staticizes" Cattelan's oeuvre, forming new narratives. So what if coffined JFK "Now" is usually shown in small, solitary rooms, and now it's hanging in midair alongside over a hundred pop culture kindred? Is the message not even broader now, more impactful, that JFK is suspended over an entire American Dream? Or dream of the western world?…shown here with trussed foes (Hitler, the Klan-sheeted elephant) and "friends" (Picasso, children, the Pope)? I wrote about Cattelan's retrospective for …might be good (link here) too. Yeah it's spectacle. But it will probably leave a much deeper impression than you expect.
10. tokyoDOLORES "赤頭巾/dear my red hunter" @ Ebisu livingroom
What I said then:
I didn't! Though I did have a long buildup to tokyoDOLORES' huge winter performance, themed after Little Red Riding Hood (or "Akazukin" in Japanese). The troupe's leader and my good friend Cay had clued me into Akazukin's mythology since this past summer, and that coincided toward their Lucca, Italy preparations. See, before this major, hour-long original production, tokyoDOLORES were embarking on their first-ever European tour, playing at Lucca's Comics and Games Festival in November. Huge!
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Akazukin is the second major tokyoDOLORES performance I've seen this year. I caught their bracing, fascinating "Eline the Mermaid" in April, which featured 12 dancers, four poles, aerial silk, floor routines and an ass-rattling bass-heavy soundtrack. I loved it. Akazukin focused it down to six dancers — pole-aficionados Cay Izumi, Aloe, Nancy Kikurage and JILL, plus contemporary dancers Sayano Ichinohe and Yukika Masai — and a very clear story most of us know, i.e. Little Red Riding Hood, the woods, Grandma's house, and of course the Big Bad Wolf. So there was Cay as Akazukin/Red Riding Hood, moving from floor routines with "flower" dancers and pole gymnastics, and there was little Aloe, stunningly transformed into this lurching, demonic wolf, crawling about the stage, slinking up poles, owning the darkness. The music was bard-friendly until dissolving into like Lords of Acid rage, the lighting and background images excellent, the costumes and makeup superlative. The girls were AWESOME. Like I told Aloe and Cay after their performance, I sincerely hope they tour this show. The buzz they received upon completing Italy has opened many many new avenues, w/ possibilities in Paris, Russia, Korea, Shanghai…and of course the U.S. For any naysayers doubting the possibility of pole-dancing as an art form, tokyoDOLORES elevated it once again, in a cascade of contemporary styles stronger than ever. For these girls, 2012 will be amazing.
Annnnnd that's it for 2011, at least to the tune of regular blog posts. 2012 will be mayjah. I'll be in NYC, ATX and Tokyo...if not equally, then at least regularly. Hell, March 2012 equals the Whitney Biennial, the New Museum Triennale, major retrospectives at the Guggenheim and MoMA. And that's just NYC. You want more burlesque, more international art, more live music and crazier film premieres? Strap yourselves in tight, girls and boys. Or do like I do, o-shibari style (: 'Til 2012!
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
fee's LIST / through 12/20
WEDNESDAY
AUSTIN
* AMOA/Arthouse Talks @ Arthouse / 700 Congress Ave, 6p. Erin Gentry, Manager of Education Programs, leads a discussion on Arthouse's pretty awesome "The Anxiety of Photography" grip exhibition, which ends later this month.
* "Emanuelle In Prison" (dir. Bruno Mattei, 1983) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10:30p. AKA "Violence in a Women's Prison", AKA "Caged Women" — and indeed member of the ostentatious subset 'women-in-prison films' — this French-Italian episode from the "Black Emanuelle" series stars Laura Gemser, ever the enterprising, globe-trotting, hedonistic investigative journalist, exposing corruption w/in a women's prison.
THURSDAY
NYC
* "Extraterrestrial" (dir. Nacho Vigalondo, 2011) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center at 65th St (1 to 66th St), 9p. An enchanting and super-quirky romantic comedy, set within what could be an alien invasion. A fan favorite at this year's Fantastic Fest film festival, Vigalondo's latest also spearheads "Spanish Cinema Now" at the Lincoln Center.
* Ducktails + Big Troubles @ 285 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. 285 Kent's holiday party, but really anytime Matt Mondanile's guitar-loopy outfit Ducktail (plus fuzzed-out Slumberland alums Big Troubles) are on the roster, you know it's gonna be a good time. w/ Amen Dunes and Hard Bop
FRIDAY
NYC
* "Out of Nowhere" @ Julie Saul Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Back at this indie coffeeshop during uni, one of the baristas always had The Weakerthans on repeat, meaning that slightly goofy track "I Hate Winnipeg". Not to be outdone, Winnipeg-born breakcore maestro Venetian Snares released an album entitled "Winnipeg Is a Frozen Shithole", containing tracks like "Winnipeg Is a Boiling Pot of Cranberries" and the title track. Who knows? I've never had the pleasure of visiting. This group show of Winnipeg artists, curated by Sarah Anne Johnson and Meeka Walsh, may well shed some celestial light to the far northern city.
* "Carnage" (dir. Roman Polanski, 2011) @ Angelika NY / 18 W Houston St (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette). This taut dramedy, adapted from Yasmina Reza's acclaimed play "God of Carnage", boasts a killer cast as warring couples: Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly in one corner, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz in the other. You think their kids have issues: just wait 'til the adults are locked in a Brooklyn apartment together to "sort things out".
* Parts & Labor @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 7p/$10. Brooklyn math-punk kings perform their 2006 classic "Stay Afraid", strewn with noisy thrashers like "A Great Divide" and "New Buildings", ahead of their early 2012 retirement. w/ kindred speed-rock kings Pterodactyl
* Quiet Hooves + Bubbly Mommy Gun (ATL) @ Shea Stadium / 20 Meadow St, E. Williamsburg (L to Grand), 8p. This is WEIRD Atlanta, care of Party Party Partners and amorphous psych-rock ensemble Quiet Hooves, which shares some members w/ equally psych-rock group Bubbly Mommy Gun. The experience of seeing these dudes and girls live is (to my estimation) akin to attending a charismatic Christian service, but w/o the religious intonations. Love in for all!
AUSTIN
* "Shame" (dir. Steve McQueen, 2011) @ Violet Crown Cinema / 434 W 2nd St. Props for Violet Crown for featuring this notorious anti-rom-com, unflinchingly focused on one man's (McQueen regular Michael Fassbinder) dirty sexual proclivities.
* Man or Astroman? @ Emo's / 603 Red River, 9p/$20. Surf-rock pioneers from deep space (really: Auburn, AL but who's counting?) beam down to Emo's to rock us hard w/ sci-fi samples and new wave crunch. w/ Fuckemos
TOKYO
* Nisennenmondai @ Shibuya O-West / 2-3 Maruyamacho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit), 6p/$4000. Japan's finest math-rock women electrify synapses with their pulsing kraut-rock groove and relentless, thrash rhythms. w/ Sick Team
SATURDAY
NYC
* Twin Sister + Widowspeak @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/$8. Brooklyn's darkly opulent disco-rock lovelies Twin Sister, augmented by Captured Tracks' mesmeric signees Widowspeak (check this summer's jam "Nightcrawlers") convert the Ballroom into a twilit dance party. w/ Ava Luna, who get the groove on early
TOKYO
* Masumi Sakamoto "Good-bye Idols" @ Gallery MOMO Ryogoku / 1F 1-7-15 Kamezawa, Sumida-ku (Toei Oedo/JR Sobu Line to Ryogoku Station). The Osaka-born artist fuses an Impressionistic style and landscape with entirely nude youths.
* Ei Arakawa + Sergei Tcherepnin @ Taka Ishii Gallery / 5F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). An A/V performance installation by NY-based collaborative spirit Arakawa (he's slaying at the Tate Modern in 2012 as well) and Brooklyn-based Tcherepnin, who you might've seen at Performa11 at the New Museum this year. w/ special duo performances on DEC 24 + JAN 14 (check here for updates).
* DODDODO @ Sound Studio DOM / 3F 4-25-7 Koenji-Minami, Suginami-ku (Marunouchi Line to Higashi-Koenji Station), 1p/1000 yen. The "Communications in Hell" showcase, a full afternoon and night of experimental music for like $12 USD! Kansai cutie DODDODO headlines the lot, perched over her samplers, snarling off-kilter raps whilst cueing howling Aphex Twin-esque drum loops. Plus JAH EXCRETION, FACIALMESS, ACIDWHITEHOUSE Drastik Adhesive Force, and a bunch other really ill-sounding artists.
SUNDAY
NYC
* Sanja Iveković "Sweet Violence" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). YES. The first stateside museum exhibition of the pivotal Croatian feminist and video pioneer, plus she's a member of the Nova Umjetnička Praksa (New Art Practice). Iveković's exhibition includes media installation and single-channel videos from throughout her career, including the titular work and "Personal Cuts", plus photomontages from her series "Double Life" and much more. She's also participating in VOLTA 2012, which is doubly awesome.
AUSTIN
* "Enter the Void" (dir. Gaspar Noe, 2009) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 3. Ever wondered what a DMT trip would feel like? Watch this 2.5 mind-melter and you'll have a pretty good idea! Or at least the epic title sequence and Nathaniel Brown's float over a flickering, neon-lit Tokyo nightscape. That and Paz de la Huerta's go-go dancing in a throbbing underground club elevates the other rather normal plot sequences, in Noe's psychedelic melodrama. Also MON, 9:15p
* "Drunken Tai Chi" (dir. Yuen Woo-ping, 1984) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. Donnie Yen's ass-kicking debut, where he learns the finer martial arts under the influence of alcohol.
TUESDAY
NYC
* Digable Planets @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. You can't mess w/ Ladybug Mecca, man (or Butterfly and Doodlebug for that matter). Look: $10 is on the cheap for this talented, original Brooklyn-based jazz-rap trio. Can't nothing touch their '94 elevator "Blowout Comb". Despite breakups in the late '90s, they're totally back again, in an unmissable set for heads and newbies alike. w/ F. Stokes
AUSTIN
* "Love Actually" (dir. Richard Curtis, 2003) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 7p. Normally you can't get me near these wretched holiday ensemble films. See: Garry Marshall's heinous "Valentine's Day" and disgusting upcoming followup "New Year's Eve". No doubt the Brits do it better, but honestly I dig most everything about "Love Actually". I mean, we have über-hotties Keira Knightley (and, if you like, her onscreen beau Chiwetel Ejiofor), Heike Makatsch and Martine McCutcheon. We have Hugh Grant pretending to be the new Prime Minister whilst BILLY BOB THORNTON plays the U.S. President, Martin Freeman is a body double for sex scenes… and Bill Nighy an aging rock 'n roll legend! Sign me up to see this again, seriously.
CURRENT SHOWS
NYC
* Uta Barth + Jack Strange @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. This is the most painterly Barth show I've seen yet. She consistently pushes the envelope on lighting and perception in photography, but by focusing on sunlight and shadow piercing through linen-y curtains, she effectively creates a canvaslike texture to her polyptych works. Upstairs, that trickster Strange immerses a neon FENNEL sign in dirt and iPod Touches feat. animated, talking sea creatures in water-filled baggies, plus acrylic soda-straw rods on flatscreen monitors and cut veggies with headphones.
* Bianca Beck "Body" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. I've encountered this young NY-based artist's intriguing, very physical oeuvre (gestural, abraded abstract mixed-media paintings, small painted-wood sculpture) in group shows only, so I'm totally psyched to see a larger showing of it. In her solo debut here, she includes ripped canvases in "body colors" (makes me think of Ana Mendieta), small-scale sculpture and works that incorporate sculptural and 2D elements. The figurative elements imbued in these, whether a rough-hewn wood block like a feminine torso, or a burned oil on panel.
* Nan Goldin "Scopophila" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. This is Goldin's first solo exhibition in NYC since 2007 (not counting, obvs, her dreamy/sinister contributions to "New Works" at this gallery last year), and it's a biggie. She unveils the titular slide installation — stay with me here! it's doper than it sounds! —, commissioned by the Louvre Museum last year, nearly a half-hour of over 400 photographs from Goldin's life intermingled w/ classic Louvre paintings and sculpture. Beyond that, she includes a bunch of image pairings, reclining "Odalisque" versus her own nudes, "Veiled" figures decadent and dreamy, for an entirely intoxicating encounter.
* Tommy Hartung "Anna" @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. Bit of nostalgia here: my 1st (belated) gallery-viewing at On Stellar Rays (now one of my favorite LES spots) was Hartung's debut solo exhibition, the sublime and utterly beguiling "The Ascent of Man" video/installation, which recurred at MoMA PS1's "Greater NY". I've high expectations for Hartung, in this new stop-motion and historical verity video "Anna" (recalling Anna Karenina, naturally), with related and expanded sculptural and installation materials.
AUSTIN
* Mads Lynnerup "Help is on the way" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces. This is one of those rare occasions when I visit a multidisciplinary artist's show and am most immediately drawn to the videos. These things take time, and doubly so when paired w/ Lynnerup's candy-colored "Exercise Your Artist" collages and neon cut-paper "Astrobright" arrangements, like infinitely adaptable (and flashier) Ellsworth Kelly's. But its beyond these and the Franz West-style spraypainted plywood and foam exercise "blocks" that the videos really shine. One, "Demonstration", features Lynnerup's muscly trainer in a studio space working out with the West-ish blocks and angular wall relief "Exercising Grill", pulling a Matthew Barney of exertion and stamina but towards a more relatable, self-improving goal. Or at least when he starts doing headstands, it made ME want to hit the gym. The other far quieter video, "Untitled (Shadow)", follows Lynnerup's hands and paper as he traces out a shadow-y landscape in rays of sunlight, a spontaneous flip-book executed in the simplest, and thus most thrilling, gestures.
* Jonathan Faber "Idle" @ Champion / 800 Brazos St. Memory is a tricky thing, subject to re-tweeks and reinterpretations depending on circumstance, outside encounters, time of day. Faber channels this idea vividly in depicting things very natural, like a landscape or a childhood backyard, painting the bare essentials and piling on tangles of brushwork as in the titular work, creating a curtain of swamp-vines that partially obscure the minimalist, geometric form (a boat?) idling in the background. Or he'll add an almost solid, vertical wipe of paint (like a Barnett Newman "zip"), executing a literal blind-spot in the foresty "Blind Spot". Or a grove of graffiti-like renderings that consume a shed?…or some small-frame building in "Veneer", like living language and memories consuming a forgotten dwelling.
TOKYO
* Aki Eimizu "birth" @ MA2 Gallery / 3-3-8 Ebisu, Shibuya-ku (Yamanote Line to Ebisu Station). I was speechless when previewing Eimizu's second outstanding solo exhibition at the gallery. Or rather, I was talking a lot, to her and to gallerist Matsubara, but all short phrases of giddy bemusement. Eimizu's talent is layering tiny, tiny methodically applied paint-dots to canvas or paper, or covering a panel with so many thinly translucent washes of paint that the end result is preserved in a resin-like history. Or, alternately, becomes three-dimensional, swirling or stretching out depending on your angle to the canvas. Her palette of opal-ish whites and grays extends here with seductive traces of firefly yellow, both cosmic and entirely earthly, like seeing will o' the wisps in the fog.
* Photographer Hal "Flesh Love" @ Gallery Tosei / 5-18-20 Chuo, Nakano-ku (Marunouchi Line to Shin-Nakano Station, Exit 1 or 2). Funny (but true) story: I met Photographer Hal at a Kabukicho basement bar called Bikini Machine this past April. He's a total badass, photographing embracing couples in Love Hotels, area bars within their own bathtubs, all in lurid, gloriously saturated color. His new series skrinkwraps his subjects. Intimacy is a plus.
* Yoshiko Fukushima "spring snow" @ Gallery MOMO Roppongi / 2F 6-2-6 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Toei Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). A stunning FIFTH solo exhibition for this young Nagano-born painter, equally versed in runny watercolors and opulent, Rembrandt-ish oils. Fukushima has increasingly incorporated sunny colors to her dramatic, burnt palette here, eking out cheery yellows and opalescent pastels within her squadron of (self)-portrait nymphettes.
* Asuka Ito "欲望という名のワタシー/My name is desire" @ Galerie Sho Contemporary / B1F 3-2-9 Nihonbashi, Chuo-ku (Ginza/Tozai Lines to Nihonbashi Station). Awesome, awesome, awesome… I spent way too long here but I couldn't help myself. Ito magnifies notes of femininity and sexuality in her works by pairing photorealistic self-portraits (in soft-core poses: licking a sweet, tied up etc) against glittery large-scale blooms. She then covered the whole gallery floor with bright red rose petals, streaked one wall with watered-down acrylic drips and added a red bed and several paintings — like an offering — to the smaller gallery in the back. As intense as it is, Ito reappears in almost every canvas, staring out at us and daring us to return the gaze.
* Junichi Mori "trinitite" @ Mizuma Art Gallery / 2F 3-13 Ichigayatamachi, Shinjuku-ku (Yurakucho/Nanboku Lines to Ichigaya Station). Mori packs a wallop in his debut solo exhibition here, sparsely outfitting the high-ceiling gallery with fantastically, deftly carved wood and ceramic. The centerpiece is the large titular work, his largest to date, practically on its own surmounting a plinth in the main gallery, recalling both the holy trinity and the artificial mineral generated by the Trinity Test during America's nuclear bomb testing in '45. The several "birds" included around it appear more like intricately carved and arranged leaves, or the framework of some vicious beast conjured by the bomb's mighty impact.
* Larry Clark @ Taka Ishii Photography / 2F 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). Ten of the famed lensman's vintage b&w prints from '63, each executed way before "Kids" and his developing forays into teenage lust. But that impassioned indulgence figures into these oddly cropped scenarios, occupied sometimes by one, other times multiple figures, young men and women.
CLOSING SOON
NYC
* Andreas Gursky @ Gagosian Gallery / 522 W 21st St. The Düsseldorf-based epic photographer debuts his "Bangkok" series, focusing his abstracting lens on the Chao Phraya, as much a prescient waterway through the city-center as a notorious dumping ground for manmade detritus. Compound that w/ the devastating monsoon floods affecting the Chao Phraya and the Mekong River basins NOW…and it's much more unsettling. Displaying "Bangkok" against his nuanced 2009-10 series "Oceans" only highlights the benevolence and destructive unpredictability of water.
* Jim Isermann @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. The Palm Springs-based artist goes after the gallery's iconic trussed-roof ceiling and skylight, installing a modular drop-ceiling grid with tilting planes, transforming the entire space into a Op-Minimalist event throughout the day.
* Jacob Hashimoto "The End of Gravity" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Hashimoto's previous solo exhibition at Mary Boone (the Chelsea location) was a sublime event, a vivid coupling of ethereal "woven" kite reliefs. He furthers their figurative potential in this new series, moving away from his kaleidoscopic cut-paper collage into mimicking graphic drawings.
* Richard Pousette-Dart "East River Studio" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. I usually gloss over press releases "to get the vibe", relying more on my instincts and history w/ the mentioned artist. But I'm glad I read this show's, as a crucial detail just blew my mind: Christopher Wool (the mighty, the Xerox-looking abstractor) organized this exhibition alongside Joanna Pousette-Dart. See, Wool studied w/ Richard, the youngest member of the Abstract Expressionists, in college! The body of work on view, pairing Pousette-Dart's paintings and wire sculptures, comes from the late 40s to 1951 and mostly hasn't been exhibited in NY again since its initial show at Betty Parsons Gallery in the '50s.
* "Masked Portrait Part II" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. Back in early 2008, Midori Nishizawa curated a fantastic grouping of Japanese avant-garde artists, from the Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Gutai Art Association) like Atsuko Tanaka and Jiro Yoshihara to realist photographers Daido Moriyama and Eikoh Hosoe and contemporary contributors (from Aya Takano to Yuichi Higashionna) — plus a related Atsuko Tanaka and Akira Kanayama dual exhibit at Paula Cooper Gallery. I REALLY dug the exhibition. Now we have part two.
* George Condo "Drawing Paintings" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Condo furthers his aggressively graffiti-like abstracts from his New Museum survey with even wilder, lyrical renderings, piling up cartoonish heads in rubber-stamp formation (or Andy Warhol misguided silkscreen-style), to where they obliterate one another in intermingling colors.
* Michaël Borremans "The Devil's Dress" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. "Moody", "creepy", "dramatic" — or better yet, "cinematic" — are apt describers to Borremans' murky, ageless portraits and ambiguously staged scenes. He doesn't make the going any easier for us, in this new series of paintings w/ purposefully subtle/sinister titles and a variant three-part work on paper.
* Neo Rauch "Heilstaetten @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St. I had a significantly belated psylocibin flashback upon experiencing Rauch's latest. The social realist (and subtle surrealist) unveils new oils (in both large-format and intimate flavors), plus a bronze sculpture "Falknerin". Spatial perceptions dissolve in multi-figure renderings like "Ware", w/ seemingly giant men (with greatly distended arms) intermingle w/ reduced figures, and in the much smaller "Rota", where either a Golden Age UFO or carnival ride breaks up an otherwise typical country landscape. Heavy, lovely works.
* Byron Kim @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Kim's debut at the gallery exemplifies his exercise of the "abstract sublime". Previous exhibitions (the UN meditations at Max Protetch, his famous "Synecdoche" at MoMA) had a soothing planar regularity, like emotive Ellsworth Kelly or even flatter Brice Marden. Kim's new one, inspired by his viewings of the nighttime sky, is even sparser, moodier, almost impenetrable fields of black or midnight blue.
* Jim Lambie @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Lambie, who inaugurated MoMA's new building (and even some moneyed homes) w/ his site-specific multicolored vinyl tape ZOBOP, cuts into gallery walls w/ "Vortex"es and layers crushed sheets of colorful metal (like very stiff craft paper) elsewhere. His continued usage of nontraditional and industrial media is a riot to our senses.
AUSTIN
* "Looking for a Fight" @ Visual Arts Center / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity. Three studio art undergrads and members of the all-female Deluscious Group, Lucy Parker, Isabella Burden and Layne Bell, split this cross-media exhibition highlighting gender discourse and their respective feminine identities in a continually male-prone society. Each takes an ultrafeminine approach (think lots of pink, frilly cloth materials and truncated womanly forms) to hook us in and cerebrally wallop us to attention, as there's depth in all the surface-level cuteness. Bell walks the figurative tightrope most deliberately, suspending two pairs of scissors over an inflated balloon in "Emptied IV" (the fourth of a series of subtly simple assemblages, which also included the aforementioned frilly cloth elbow gloves and a Tooth Fairy-sized sewn pillow clothespinned to a wooden tray) and naming another "All Tits and Legs" after like a Bravo plastic surgery reality show stereotype. Though with this one, a pair of vaguely ghostly forms surmounting barstool legs, I got Rene Magritte vibes (both the Belgian surrealist's penchant for masking his figures and painting lingerie with erogenous zones plainly visible), but then I thought of Rebecca Horn's "Finger Gloves" performance from the early '70s, particularly in the elongated 'stems', as it were. In any case, Bell's assemblage is topped by sewn multicolored beads as the titular 'tits'. Burden included both video/sculptural assemblages (her "Upskirt Series"), augmenting cropped body parts with distended branchlike physicality, and two photographic prints (her "Tongue-in-Cheek Series"). The prints struck me more deeply, as I was reminded of both Ana Mendieta and Adrian Piper's very physical, conceptual oeuvres. Though the one artist she directly references is Joseph Beuys, the granddaddy of conceptual and philosophical performance, via the icky sculpture "Boys, Beuys, Boys!!!", combining a loglike beaver muff with glistening, white lard, tangentially recognizable to Beuys' style while superseding him in pronounced decadence. Parker unveils only two works, but this editing makes their underlying force that much stronger. The one, "Suspended Bean Bag Chair (after Bruce Nauman)", is an older work, the titular smallish pink chair stretched painfully in four directions overhead by metal accoutrements, is like Nauman's own self-portrait face-pulling, highlighting artificial elasticity and how the gesture can easily twist from affectionate to torturous. Her other, "Funk Trunk (including artist as Vito Acconci)", begins with Parker's disembodied voice emanating from a coffin-sized box. Kneel down and peer inside, and amid bedsheets and acid-pink fluorescent lighting is a video projection of Parker reenacting Acconci's perversely intimate "Theme Song" in her own spin on 'pillow talk'. "You could be anybody out there, but there's gotta be somebody watching me. Somebody who wants to come in close to me…Come on, I'm all alone..I'll be honest with you, OK. I mean you'll have to believe me if I'm really honest…" Parker-as-Acconci monologues, shifting on her bed as she stares straight into us.
+ Mika Tajima "The Architect's Garden". Tajima's the artist-in-residence this fall, and she adapts her modular chromatic chaos to fill and cover the VAC's Vaulted Gallery. She pairs a grid of candy-colored spray-painted acrylic frames, her "Furniture Art" (after Erik Satie's "Musique d'ameublement"), on one gallery wall, flat-boards "The Roundabout" covered in paint and tacked-on adverts, and wheeled scaffolds lined w/ geometric silkscreens and huge letters, "Detour (1-7)" and "Untitled (Go)".
(ENDS SAT)
AUSTIN
* AMOA/Arthouse Talks @ Arthouse / 700 Congress Ave, 6p. Erin Gentry, Manager of Education Programs, leads a discussion on Arthouse's pretty awesome "The Anxiety of Photography" grip exhibition, which ends later this month.
* "Emanuelle In Prison" (dir. Bruno Mattei, 1983) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10:30p. AKA "Violence in a Women's Prison", AKA "Caged Women" — and indeed member of the ostentatious subset 'women-in-prison films' — this French-Italian episode from the "Black Emanuelle" series stars Laura Gemser, ever the enterprising, globe-trotting, hedonistic investigative journalist, exposing corruption w/in a women's prison.
THURSDAY
NYC
* "Extraterrestrial" (dir. Nacho Vigalondo, 2011) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center at 65th St (1 to 66th St), 9p. An enchanting and super-quirky romantic comedy, set within what could be an alien invasion. A fan favorite at this year's Fantastic Fest film festival, Vigalondo's latest also spearheads "Spanish Cinema Now" at the Lincoln Center.
* Ducktails + Big Troubles @ 285 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. 285 Kent's holiday party, but really anytime Matt Mondanile's guitar-loopy outfit Ducktail (plus fuzzed-out Slumberland alums Big Troubles) are on the roster, you know it's gonna be a good time. w/ Amen Dunes and Hard Bop
FRIDAY
NYC
* "Out of Nowhere" @ Julie Saul Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Back at this indie coffeeshop during uni, one of the baristas always had The Weakerthans on repeat, meaning that slightly goofy track "I Hate Winnipeg". Not to be outdone, Winnipeg-born breakcore maestro Venetian Snares released an album entitled "Winnipeg Is a Frozen Shithole", containing tracks like "Winnipeg Is a Boiling Pot of Cranberries" and the title track. Who knows? I've never had the pleasure of visiting. This group show of Winnipeg artists, curated by Sarah Anne Johnson and Meeka Walsh, may well shed some celestial light to the far northern city.
* "Carnage" (dir. Roman Polanski, 2011) @ Angelika NY / 18 W Houston St (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette). This taut dramedy, adapted from Yasmina Reza's acclaimed play "God of Carnage", boasts a killer cast as warring couples: Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly in one corner, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz in the other. You think their kids have issues: just wait 'til the adults are locked in a Brooklyn apartment together to "sort things out".
* Parts & Labor @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 7p/$10. Brooklyn math-punk kings perform their 2006 classic "Stay Afraid", strewn with noisy thrashers like "A Great Divide" and "New Buildings", ahead of their early 2012 retirement. w/ kindred speed-rock kings Pterodactyl
* Quiet Hooves + Bubbly Mommy Gun (ATL) @ Shea Stadium / 20 Meadow St, E. Williamsburg (L to Grand), 8p. This is WEIRD Atlanta, care of Party Party Partners and amorphous psych-rock ensemble Quiet Hooves, which shares some members w/ equally psych-rock group Bubbly Mommy Gun. The experience of seeing these dudes and girls live is (to my estimation) akin to attending a charismatic Christian service, but w/o the religious intonations. Love in for all!
AUSTIN
* "Shame" (dir. Steve McQueen, 2011) @ Violet Crown Cinema / 434 W 2nd St. Props for Violet Crown for featuring this notorious anti-rom-com, unflinchingly focused on one man's (McQueen regular Michael Fassbinder) dirty sexual proclivities.
* Man or Astroman? @ Emo's / 603 Red River, 9p/$20. Surf-rock pioneers from deep space (really: Auburn, AL but who's counting?) beam down to Emo's to rock us hard w/ sci-fi samples and new wave crunch. w/ Fuckemos
TOKYO
* Nisennenmondai @ Shibuya O-West / 2-3 Maruyamacho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit), 6p/$4000. Japan's finest math-rock women electrify synapses with their pulsing kraut-rock groove and relentless, thrash rhythms. w/ Sick Team
SATURDAY
NYC
* Twin Sister + Widowspeak @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/$8. Brooklyn's darkly opulent disco-rock lovelies Twin Sister, augmented by Captured Tracks' mesmeric signees Widowspeak (check this summer's jam "Nightcrawlers") convert the Ballroom into a twilit dance party. w/ Ava Luna, who get the groove on early
TOKYO
* Masumi Sakamoto "Good-bye Idols" @ Gallery MOMO Ryogoku / 1F 1-7-15 Kamezawa, Sumida-ku (Toei Oedo/JR Sobu Line to Ryogoku Station). The Osaka-born artist fuses an Impressionistic style and landscape with entirely nude youths.
* Ei Arakawa + Sergei Tcherepnin @ Taka Ishii Gallery / 5F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). An A/V performance installation by NY-based collaborative spirit Arakawa (he's slaying at the Tate Modern in 2012 as well) and Brooklyn-based Tcherepnin, who you might've seen at Performa11 at the New Museum this year. w/ special duo performances on DEC 24 + JAN 14 (check here for updates).
* DODDODO @ Sound Studio DOM / 3F 4-25-7 Koenji-Minami, Suginami-ku (Marunouchi Line to Higashi-Koenji Station), 1p/1000 yen. The "Communications in Hell" showcase, a full afternoon and night of experimental music for like $12 USD! Kansai cutie DODDODO headlines the lot, perched over her samplers, snarling off-kilter raps whilst cueing howling Aphex Twin-esque drum loops. Plus JAH EXCRETION, FACIALMESS, ACIDWHITEHOUSE Drastik Adhesive Force, and a bunch other really ill-sounding artists.
SUNDAY
NYC
* Sanja Iveković "Sweet Violence" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). YES. The first stateside museum exhibition of the pivotal Croatian feminist and video pioneer, plus she's a member of the Nova Umjetnička Praksa (New Art Practice). Iveković's exhibition includes media installation and single-channel videos from throughout her career, including the titular work and "Personal Cuts", plus photomontages from her series "Double Life" and much more. She's also participating in VOLTA 2012, which is doubly awesome.
AUSTIN
* "Enter the Void" (dir. Gaspar Noe, 2009) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 3. Ever wondered what a DMT trip would feel like? Watch this 2.5 mind-melter and you'll have a pretty good idea! Or at least the epic title sequence and Nathaniel Brown's float over a flickering, neon-lit Tokyo nightscape. That and Paz de la Huerta's go-go dancing in a throbbing underground club elevates the other rather normal plot sequences, in Noe's psychedelic melodrama. Also MON, 9:15p
* "Drunken Tai Chi" (dir. Yuen Woo-ping, 1984) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. Donnie Yen's ass-kicking debut, where he learns the finer martial arts under the influence of alcohol.
TUESDAY
NYC
* Digable Planets @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. You can't mess w/ Ladybug Mecca, man (or Butterfly and Doodlebug for that matter). Look: $10 is on the cheap for this talented, original Brooklyn-based jazz-rap trio. Can't nothing touch their '94 elevator "Blowout Comb". Despite breakups in the late '90s, they're totally back again, in an unmissable set for heads and newbies alike. w/ F. Stokes
AUSTIN
* "Love Actually" (dir. Richard Curtis, 2003) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 7p. Normally you can't get me near these wretched holiday ensemble films. See: Garry Marshall's heinous "Valentine's Day" and disgusting upcoming followup "New Year's Eve". No doubt the Brits do it better, but honestly I dig most everything about "Love Actually". I mean, we have über-hotties Keira Knightley (and, if you like, her onscreen beau Chiwetel Ejiofor), Heike Makatsch and Martine McCutcheon. We have Hugh Grant pretending to be the new Prime Minister whilst BILLY BOB THORNTON plays the U.S. President, Martin Freeman is a body double for sex scenes… and Bill Nighy an aging rock 'n roll legend! Sign me up to see this again, seriously.
CURRENT SHOWS
NYC
* Uta Barth + Jack Strange @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. This is the most painterly Barth show I've seen yet. She consistently pushes the envelope on lighting and perception in photography, but by focusing on sunlight and shadow piercing through linen-y curtains, she effectively creates a canvaslike texture to her polyptych works. Upstairs, that trickster Strange immerses a neon FENNEL sign in dirt and iPod Touches feat. animated, talking sea creatures in water-filled baggies, plus acrylic soda-straw rods on flatscreen monitors and cut veggies with headphones.
* Bianca Beck "Body" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. I've encountered this young NY-based artist's intriguing, very physical oeuvre (gestural, abraded abstract mixed-media paintings, small painted-wood sculpture) in group shows only, so I'm totally psyched to see a larger showing of it. In her solo debut here, she includes ripped canvases in "body colors" (makes me think of Ana Mendieta), small-scale sculpture and works that incorporate sculptural and 2D elements. The figurative elements imbued in these, whether a rough-hewn wood block like a feminine torso, or a burned oil on panel.
* Nan Goldin "Scopophila" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. This is Goldin's first solo exhibition in NYC since 2007 (not counting, obvs, her dreamy/sinister contributions to "New Works" at this gallery last year), and it's a biggie. She unveils the titular slide installation — stay with me here! it's doper than it sounds! —, commissioned by the Louvre Museum last year, nearly a half-hour of over 400 photographs from Goldin's life intermingled w/ classic Louvre paintings and sculpture. Beyond that, she includes a bunch of image pairings, reclining "Odalisque" versus her own nudes, "Veiled" figures decadent and dreamy, for an entirely intoxicating encounter.
* Tommy Hartung "Anna" @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. Bit of nostalgia here: my 1st (belated) gallery-viewing at On Stellar Rays (now one of my favorite LES spots) was Hartung's debut solo exhibition, the sublime and utterly beguiling "The Ascent of Man" video/installation, which recurred at MoMA PS1's "Greater NY". I've high expectations for Hartung, in this new stop-motion and historical verity video "Anna" (recalling Anna Karenina, naturally), with related and expanded sculptural and installation materials.
AUSTIN
* Mads Lynnerup "Help is on the way" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces. This is one of those rare occasions when I visit a multidisciplinary artist's show and am most immediately drawn to the videos. These things take time, and doubly so when paired w/ Lynnerup's candy-colored "Exercise Your Artist" collages and neon cut-paper "Astrobright" arrangements, like infinitely adaptable (and flashier) Ellsworth Kelly's. But its beyond these and the Franz West-style spraypainted plywood and foam exercise "blocks" that the videos really shine. One, "Demonstration", features Lynnerup's muscly trainer in a studio space working out with the West-ish blocks and angular wall relief "Exercising Grill", pulling a Matthew Barney of exertion and stamina but towards a more relatable, self-improving goal. Or at least when he starts doing headstands, it made ME want to hit the gym. The other far quieter video, "Untitled (Shadow)", follows Lynnerup's hands and paper as he traces out a shadow-y landscape in rays of sunlight, a spontaneous flip-book executed in the simplest, and thus most thrilling, gestures.
* Jonathan Faber "Idle" @ Champion / 800 Brazos St. Memory is a tricky thing, subject to re-tweeks and reinterpretations depending on circumstance, outside encounters, time of day. Faber channels this idea vividly in depicting things very natural, like a landscape or a childhood backyard, painting the bare essentials and piling on tangles of brushwork as in the titular work, creating a curtain of swamp-vines that partially obscure the minimalist, geometric form (a boat?) idling in the background. Or he'll add an almost solid, vertical wipe of paint (like a Barnett Newman "zip"), executing a literal blind-spot in the foresty "Blind Spot". Or a grove of graffiti-like renderings that consume a shed?…or some small-frame building in "Veneer", like living language and memories consuming a forgotten dwelling.
TOKYO
* Aki Eimizu "birth" @ MA2 Gallery / 3-3-8 Ebisu, Shibuya-ku (Yamanote Line to Ebisu Station). I was speechless when previewing Eimizu's second outstanding solo exhibition at the gallery. Or rather, I was talking a lot, to her and to gallerist Matsubara, but all short phrases of giddy bemusement. Eimizu's talent is layering tiny, tiny methodically applied paint-dots to canvas or paper, or covering a panel with so many thinly translucent washes of paint that the end result is preserved in a resin-like history. Or, alternately, becomes three-dimensional, swirling or stretching out depending on your angle to the canvas. Her palette of opal-ish whites and grays extends here with seductive traces of firefly yellow, both cosmic and entirely earthly, like seeing will o' the wisps in the fog.
* Photographer Hal "Flesh Love" @ Gallery Tosei / 5-18-20 Chuo, Nakano-ku (Marunouchi Line to Shin-Nakano Station, Exit 1 or 2). Funny (but true) story: I met Photographer Hal at a Kabukicho basement bar called Bikini Machine this past April. He's a total badass, photographing embracing couples in Love Hotels, area bars within their own bathtubs, all in lurid, gloriously saturated color. His new series skrinkwraps his subjects. Intimacy is a plus.
* Yoshiko Fukushima "spring snow" @ Gallery MOMO Roppongi / 2F 6-2-6 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Toei Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). A stunning FIFTH solo exhibition for this young Nagano-born painter, equally versed in runny watercolors and opulent, Rembrandt-ish oils. Fukushima has increasingly incorporated sunny colors to her dramatic, burnt palette here, eking out cheery yellows and opalescent pastels within her squadron of (self)-portrait nymphettes.
* Asuka Ito "欲望という名のワタシー/My name is desire" @ Galerie Sho Contemporary / B1F 3-2-9 Nihonbashi, Chuo-ku (Ginza/Tozai Lines to Nihonbashi Station). Awesome, awesome, awesome… I spent way too long here but I couldn't help myself. Ito magnifies notes of femininity and sexuality in her works by pairing photorealistic self-portraits (in soft-core poses: licking a sweet, tied up etc) against glittery large-scale blooms. She then covered the whole gallery floor with bright red rose petals, streaked one wall with watered-down acrylic drips and added a red bed and several paintings — like an offering — to the smaller gallery in the back. As intense as it is, Ito reappears in almost every canvas, staring out at us and daring us to return the gaze.
* Junichi Mori "trinitite" @ Mizuma Art Gallery / 2F 3-13 Ichigayatamachi, Shinjuku-ku (Yurakucho/Nanboku Lines to Ichigaya Station). Mori packs a wallop in his debut solo exhibition here, sparsely outfitting the high-ceiling gallery with fantastically, deftly carved wood and ceramic. The centerpiece is the large titular work, his largest to date, practically on its own surmounting a plinth in the main gallery, recalling both the holy trinity and the artificial mineral generated by the Trinity Test during America's nuclear bomb testing in '45. The several "birds" included around it appear more like intricately carved and arranged leaves, or the framework of some vicious beast conjured by the bomb's mighty impact.
* Larry Clark @ Taka Ishii Photography / 2F 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). Ten of the famed lensman's vintage b&w prints from '63, each executed way before "Kids" and his developing forays into teenage lust. But that impassioned indulgence figures into these oddly cropped scenarios, occupied sometimes by one, other times multiple figures, young men and women.
CLOSING SOON
NYC
* Andreas Gursky @ Gagosian Gallery / 522 W 21st St. The Düsseldorf-based epic photographer debuts his "Bangkok" series, focusing his abstracting lens on the Chao Phraya, as much a prescient waterway through the city-center as a notorious dumping ground for manmade detritus. Compound that w/ the devastating monsoon floods affecting the Chao Phraya and the Mekong River basins NOW…and it's much more unsettling. Displaying "Bangkok" against his nuanced 2009-10 series "Oceans" only highlights the benevolence and destructive unpredictability of water.
* Jim Isermann @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. The Palm Springs-based artist goes after the gallery's iconic trussed-roof ceiling and skylight, installing a modular drop-ceiling grid with tilting planes, transforming the entire space into a Op-Minimalist event throughout the day.
* Jacob Hashimoto "The End of Gravity" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Hashimoto's previous solo exhibition at Mary Boone (the Chelsea location) was a sublime event, a vivid coupling of ethereal "woven" kite reliefs. He furthers their figurative potential in this new series, moving away from his kaleidoscopic cut-paper collage into mimicking graphic drawings.
* Richard Pousette-Dart "East River Studio" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. I usually gloss over press releases "to get the vibe", relying more on my instincts and history w/ the mentioned artist. But I'm glad I read this show's, as a crucial detail just blew my mind: Christopher Wool (the mighty, the Xerox-looking abstractor) organized this exhibition alongside Joanna Pousette-Dart. See, Wool studied w/ Richard, the youngest member of the Abstract Expressionists, in college! The body of work on view, pairing Pousette-Dart's paintings and wire sculptures, comes from the late 40s to 1951 and mostly hasn't been exhibited in NY again since its initial show at Betty Parsons Gallery in the '50s.
* "Masked Portrait Part II" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. Back in early 2008, Midori Nishizawa curated a fantastic grouping of Japanese avant-garde artists, from the Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Gutai Art Association) like Atsuko Tanaka and Jiro Yoshihara to realist photographers Daido Moriyama and Eikoh Hosoe and contemporary contributors (from Aya Takano to Yuichi Higashionna) — plus a related Atsuko Tanaka and Akira Kanayama dual exhibit at Paula Cooper Gallery. I REALLY dug the exhibition. Now we have part two.
* George Condo "Drawing Paintings" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Condo furthers his aggressively graffiti-like abstracts from his New Museum survey with even wilder, lyrical renderings, piling up cartoonish heads in rubber-stamp formation (or Andy Warhol misguided silkscreen-style), to where they obliterate one another in intermingling colors.
* Michaël Borremans "The Devil's Dress" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. "Moody", "creepy", "dramatic" — or better yet, "cinematic" — are apt describers to Borremans' murky, ageless portraits and ambiguously staged scenes. He doesn't make the going any easier for us, in this new series of paintings w/ purposefully subtle/sinister titles and a variant three-part work on paper.
* Neo Rauch "Heilstaetten @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St. I had a significantly belated psylocibin flashback upon experiencing Rauch's latest. The social realist (and subtle surrealist) unveils new oils (in both large-format and intimate flavors), plus a bronze sculpture "Falknerin". Spatial perceptions dissolve in multi-figure renderings like "Ware", w/ seemingly giant men (with greatly distended arms) intermingle w/ reduced figures, and in the much smaller "Rota", where either a Golden Age UFO or carnival ride breaks up an otherwise typical country landscape. Heavy, lovely works.
* Byron Kim @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Kim's debut at the gallery exemplifies his exercise of the "abstract sublime". Previous exhibitions (the UN meditations at Max Protetch, his famous "Synecdoche" at MoMA) had a soothing planar regularity, like emotive Ellsworth Kelly or even flatter Brice Marden. Kim's new one, inspired by his viewings of the nighttime sky, is even sparser, moodier, almost impenetrable fields of black or midnight blue.
* Jim Lambie @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Lambie, who inaugurated MoMA's new building (and even some moneyed homes) w/ his site-specific multicolored vinyl tape ZOBOP, cuts into gallery walls w/ "Vortex"es and layers crushed sheets of colorful metal (like very stiff craft paper) elsewhere. His continued usage of nontraditional and industrial media is a riot to our senses.
AUSTIN
* "Looking for a Fight" @ Visual Arts Center / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity. Three studio art undergrads and members of the all-female Deluscious Group, Lucy Parker, Isabella Burden and Layne Bell, split this cross-media exhibition highlighting gender discourse and their respective feminine identities in a continually male-prone society. Each takes an ultrafeminine approach (think lots of pink, frilly cloth materials and truncated womanly forms) to hook us in and cerebrally wallop us to attention, as there's depth in all the surface-level cuteness. Bell walks the figurative tightrope most deliberately, suspending two pairs of scissors over an inflated balloon in "Emptied IV" (the fourth of a series of subtly simple assemblages, which also included the aforementioned frilly cloth elbow gloves and a Tooth Fairy-sized sewn pillow clothespinned to a wooden tray) and naming another "All Tits and Legs" after like a Bravo plastic surgery reality show stereotype. Though with this one, a pair of vaguely ghostly forms surmounting barstool legs, I got Rene Magritte vibes (both the Belgian surrealist's penchant for masking his figures and painting lingerie with erogenous zones plainly visible), but then I thought of Rebecca Horn's "Finger Gloves" performance from the early '70s, particularly in the elongated 'stems', as it were. In any case, Bell's assemblage is topped by sewn multicolored beads as the titular 'tits'. Burden included both video/sculptural assemblages (her "Upskirt Series"), augmenting cropped body parts with distended branchlike physicality, and two photographic prints (her "Tongue-in-Cheek Series"). The prints struck me more deeply, as I was reminded of both Ana Mendieta and Adrian Piper's very physical, conceptual oeuvres. Though the one artist she directly references is Joseph Beuys, the granddaddy of conceptual and philosophical performance, via the icky sculpture "Boys, Beuys, Boys!!!", combining a loglike beaver muff with glistening, white lard, tangentially recognizable to Beuys' style while superseding him in pronounced decadence. Parker unveils only two works, but this editing makes their underlying force that much stronger. The one, "Suspended Bean Bag Chair (after Bruce Nauman)", is an older work, the titular smallish pink chair stretched painfully in four directions overhead by metal accoutrements, is like Nauman's own self-portrait face-pulling, highlighting artificial elasticity and how the gesture can easily twist from affectionate to torturous. Her other, "Funk Trunk (including artist as Vito Acconci)", begins with Parker's disembodied voice emanating from a coffin-sized box. Kneel down and peer inside, and amid bedsheets and acid-pink fluorescent lighting is a video projection of Parker reenacting Acconci's perversely intimate "Theme Song" in her own spin on 'pillow talk'. "You could be anybody out there, but there's gotta be somebody watching me. Somebody who wants to come in close to me…Come on, I'm all alone..I'll be honest with you, OK. I mean you'll have to believe me if I'm really honest…" Parker-as-Acconci monologues, shifting on her bed as she stares straight into us.
+ Mika Tajima "The Architect's Garden". Tajima's the artist-in-residence this fall, and she adapts her modular chromatic chaos to fill and cover the VAC's Vaulted Gallery. She pairs a grid of candy-colored spray-painted acrylic frames, her "Furniture Art" (after Erik Satie's "Musique d'ameublement"), on one gallery wall, flat-boards "The Roundabout" covered in paint and tacked-on adverts, and wheeled scaffolds lined w/ geometric silkscreens and huge letters, "Detour (1-7)" and "Untitled (Go)".
(ENDS SAT)
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
fee's LIST (through 12/6)
WEDNESDAY
NYC
* Assume Vivid Astro Focus "Cyclops Trannies" @ The Suzanne Geiss Company / 76 Grand St. So this has actually been open since NOV 8 but… you need to totally check AVAF if you've not already. It's in the former Deitch Space, run now by the Projects' former executive director Suzanne Geiss, so that's a biggie. Plus AVAF (a Deitch mainstay) debuted Geiss' first iteration of the company, at 2011 Art Basel Miami Beach w/ their "Acid Flashback" installation. AND they collaborated w/ Lady Gaga in Barneys store windows for the 2011 holiday campaign. Mayjah.
AUSTIN
* "Collecting Women: What We Treasure and Why" @ Women & Their Work Gallery / 1710 Lavaca St, 7p. Dr. Melinda Barlow, an Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, leads a lecture and screening in how women have used art, film, found objects, and personal mementos to express aspects of personal identity. An audience discussion follows Dr. Barlow's presentation.
* "Utopia London" (dir. Tom Cordell, 2010) screening @ Arthouse / 700 Congress Ave, 7:30p. Bundle up for the last of 2011's Rooftop Architecture Film Series. Cordell's documentary observes the method and practice of Modernist architects who rebuilt London after WW2.
TOKYO
* Kazuhiro Ito "unknown touches" @ hpgrp Tokyo / B1F 5-1-15 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku (Chiyoda/Hanzomon/Ginza Lines to Omotesando Station). Ito pushes bronze sculpture to even further dimensions, exploring liquid-like abstraction and elongated forms in series "Dear Blind Phantom", "Liquid Golden Baby" and "Starman Loves You".
THURSDAY
NYC
* "Alpha's Bet Is Not Over Yet: Steffani Jemison and Friends" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, BD to Grand St, 6 to Spring St), 7p/FREE w/ RSVP: museumashub@newmuseum.org. Way above the hubbub of Carsten Höller's mind-altering "Experience" survey is this fantastic Black history reading room. Co-curator Jemison joins guests Firelei Baez, Mildred Beltre, Aisha Cousins and Zachary Fabri in reading from selections of the displayed periodicals.
* Dum Dum Girls + DIVE @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. Just announced! Dee Dee and crew form Dum Dum Girls, the fiercest quartet of '60s girl-group-channelers possibly EVER. Beach Fossils' guitarist Cole keeps DIVE shoegaze-hazy and totally psychedelic. w/ underground locals Xray Eyeballs, tying in the bicoastal thing quite nicely.
AUSTIN
* "Part One" artist talk @ Visual Arts Center / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity, 6:30p. Lee Chesney, Interim Chair of the Dept of Art and Art History at UT Austin, moderates this forum and Q&A feat. Sarah Canright, Elizabeth Chiles, Lawrence McFarland, Rob Verf, Susan Whyne and Barna Kantor — all faculty artists and participants in the exhibition "Part One" (see my review under CURRENT SHOWS).
* "Die Hard" (dir. John McTiernan, 1988) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 7p. Bruce Willis as John McClane is the ultimate '80s tough guy. Like the classic VHS cover tagline screams in this 40-story thriller: "Twelve terrorists. One cop. The odds are against John McClane…That's just the way he likes it." Strap in tight.
TOKYO
* Deerhoof @ Liquidroom / 3-15-5 Higashi, Shibuya-ku (JR Yamanote Line/Hibiya Line to Ebisu Station), 7p/4800 yen. Art-rock vets Deerhoof command one of the tightest live acts I've ever seen…and that's in spite of their almost improv-y sound: Greg Saunier's jazzy drumming, shards of guitar punctuating Satomi Matsuzaki's lyricism. Hard to believe it's been nearly a year since their P-Vine-released LP "Deerhoof vs. Evil". w/ Kirihito
FRIDAY
NYC
* "Sleeping Beauty" (dir. Julia Leigh, 2011) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). The Australian novelist's erotic debut feature reflects the titular fairytale in name only (though admittedly I'm more familiar w/ the Disney adaptation than the original Brothers Grimm…which could be totally sinister). In Leigh's, Emily Browning is a uni student who performs the role of "sleeping beauty" to old suitors.
* "Outrage" (dir. Takeshi Kitano, 2010) @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (NR/L/456 to Union Square). Good ol' bruised-knuckle violence in this Yakuza crime thriller as tangled and double-crossing as a Dostoevsky novel. Kitano returns to form from his comedy-film forays as the reliable right-hand trigger-man in a duel between crime bosses for who's gonna be on top…and if that means Kitano has to assume that role, then so be it. Plus: a PERFECT, uncanny cameo from Eihi "Audition/Tokyo Gore Police" Shiina (look out for it!).
AUSTIN
* "P^4" @ ART 4.418 / UT Austin Campus, 23rd St at Trinity, 6-8p. A one-night only salon of Painting 4 talent, feat. over a dozen artists including Lucy Parker (one-third of the awesomeness "Looking for a Fight" at the VAC), Nick Griffin, Ashley Collingnon, Allie Underwood, Ally Acheson-Snow, Suzanne Lewis, Jade Abner, Yusuke Ito, Francesca Giamona, Liz Williams, Anne Riley, Christina Macal, Leah Flippen, Sarah Milbrath, Gillian Rhodes and Clayton Westmeier.
* "Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale" (dir. Jalmari Helander, 2010) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 11p. This is my kind of holiday film. Think all the magic of X-mas, like hard-working widowed dad baking cookies for his son and taking him hunting…only Saint Nick's a naked vagrant with a taste for child-blood! ALSO SAT
* "The Yellow Sea" (dir. Na Hong-jin, 2011) @ Alamo Drafthouse S. Lamar / 1120 S. Lamar. This breakneck cross-Korean thriller is like an out of control bullet train of mob hits, police chases and shattered bones. Na's film screened in the Un Certain Regard section of 2011 Cannes, plus it was a box office hit in S. Korea and overwhelmingly lauded at the NYAFF and diverse other film festivals.
* Love Inks @ Mohawk / 912 Red River, 9p/$10. Pitch-perfect pop in three-minute morsels, courtesy one of the finest local acts in the scene. w/ Awkward Robot
* Rachael Yamagata + Mike Viola @ The Parish / 214 E 6th St, 8p/$16. Consider this the softer side of Fee's LIST. I.e. an illuminating night of singer-songwriterly talent, with the bluesy Rachael Yamagata and hardest working indie musician Mike "Candy Butchers" Viola.
TOKYO
* Sakan Kanno "Quantize" @ Radium / 2-5-17 Bakurocho, Chuo-ku (JR Yamanote Line to Bakurocho Station). Kanno channels musical improvisation into his visual compositions, beginning with deconstructed templates and then layered with paint.
* Photographer Hal "Flesh Love" @ Gallery Tosei / 5-18-20 Chuo, Nakano-ku (Marunouchi Line to Shin-Nakano Station). Funny (but true) story: I met Photographer Hal at a Kabukicho basement bar called Bikini Machine this past April. He's a total badass, photographing embracing couples in Love Hotels, area bars within their own bathtubs, all in lurid, gloriously saturated color. His new series skrinkwraps his subjects. Intimacy is a plus.
* Mayumi Hosokura "Kazan" @ G/P Gallery / 2F 1-18-4 Ebisu, Shibuya-ku (JR Yamanote Line/Hibiya Line to Ebisu Station). The second floor of this awesome art bookstore and gallery hosts the young photographer Hosokura and her "Volcano" series. She was recently on the cover of the Dutch photography publication FOAM and was in the Fotografia Festival in Rome this September.
* Keiko Matsumoto "Panoramic Bowl" @ INAX Gallery / 2F 3-6-18 Kyobashi, Chuo-ku (JR Yamanote Line to Yurakucho Station). Takes something special to get me all jazzed on a ceramics show, esp. one that promises to be more than "arts and crafts". Enter young glaze-whiz Matsumoto, who combines traditional firing techniques and imagery in very intriguing ways, like that five-story pagoda bursting from a Celadon vase.
* Cut Hands + Incapacitants @ Unit / 1-34-17 Ebisu-nishi, Shibuya-ku (Tokyu-Toyoko Line to Daikanyama Station, JR Yamanote/Hibiya Line to Ebisu Station), 6p/5000 yen. Brutal noise on the eve of my Tokyo trip. I can't believe I am missing this. Pairing veteran Tokyo duo Incapacitants, pioneers of "hard noise" (think hard-bop but with feedback and voice, primarily) with William "Whitehouse" Bennett in his ferocious guise Cut Hands (his new LP "Afro Noise 1" is just so good) means an unmissable show. w/ RAMLEH
* oh my god, you've gone @ Koiwa BushBash / 7-28-11 Minami-Koiwa, Edogawa-ku (Sobu Line to Koiwa Station), 7p/1300 yen. Perhaps Tokyo's finest example of fiercely indie, ultra-dissonant noise-rock is this charmingly named trio oh my god, you've gone. Don't miss 'em! w/ EGO and MEKARE-KARE
SATURDAY
NYC
* Mark Ryden "Editions" book signing @ Paul Kasmin SHOP / 511 W 27th St, 4-6p. Dress to the Gay Nineties nines and prepare to queue up as subversive illustrator/painter Ryden inaugurates Paul Kasmin SHOP with his signature eerie meats, nymphs and Lincoln heads.
* Winter Formal 2011 & Goth Prom 1986 @ Barnard College / 3009 Broadway at 117th St (1 to 116th St), 7p/FREE. That title might give you pause, or might make you go bonkers with enjoyment, but check this: WBAR Barnard College Radio features four acts that definitely fall along the "Goth Prom 1986" range, like RL Grime, Leather, the fantastic Purling Hiss and hot newish thing Balam Acab, who blissed out (le) poisson rouge last month (hopefully he brings that female vocalist w/ him to this show!). Though keep the first part of the show's title in mind, as dressing to the nines is totally encouraged.
AUSTIN
* Mads Lynnerup "Help is on the way" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces St. Art object as exercise equipment, intellectual heft vs physical exertion. Lynnerup eschews funnily worded signs for manipulated photography of weight trainers lifting Franz West-ish…stuff…plus collages of shock-bright cut paper and "Demonstration", a video adding some reality to these "virtual sculptures"…plus Lynnerup performs (demonstrates) at the opening. Who's in for some self-improvement?
TOKYO
* "Suzune: Genesis x Evolution" (dir. Ryu Kaneda, 2011) @ Ikebukuro Cinema Rosa / 1-37-12 Nishi-Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku (JR Yamanote Line to Ikebukuro Station). Twitchfilm is one of my go-to film resources, and their sole blog post for this film had a headline reading "Suzune Battles Sex Parasites With Leather-Bound Cleavage". Rei Yoshii plays the titular bondage-garbed lead (actually a doctor!), fighting off desire-inducing parasites controlled by "Cold Fish" star Megumi Kagurazaka. Uh, see you there?
* "Never-ending Blue" (dir. Takaomi Ogata, 2010) screening @ Shibuya Uplink / 37-18 Udagawa-cho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit), 7p. A truly disturbing high-school/family drama, centered on Sushi Typhoon regular Maki Mizui as a too-beautiful girl in up against impossible odds: her classmates tease or ignore her, her father beats and molests her. She's a self-harmer, too. This is Ogata's feature film debut, and he crafts a taut, minimalist thriller uniquely Japanese and harrowing in its realism.
* 「ピザボーイ史上最凶のご注文」 (dir. Ruben Fleischer, 2011) @ HT Cinema Shibuya / 1-23-16 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, East Exit). The Japanese title loosely translates to: "Pizzaboy: Most Dangerous Order Ever", but this is just "30 MInutes or Less", that madcap crime-comedy with Jesse Eisenberg as the overly-thinking delivery boy w/ a bomb strapped to his chest, forced to rob a bank with buddy Aziz "Funniest Man on Earth" Ansari or else. Inclusion of Dilshad Vadsaria as Ansari's "twin sister" is reason enough to see this film dozens of times.
* "50/50" (dir. Jonathan Levine, 2011) @ TOHO Shibuya / 2-6-17 Dogenzaka, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit). I found this a very thoughtful telling of life on the line, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt the hale young dude diagnosed with a rare, terminal form of cancer, and Seth Rogen in the awkward role of funnyman in a VERY un-funny situation. Both gents pull it off w/ panache. (P.S. even though I cannot stand Anna Kendrick, playing a psychologist here, I still advise seeing this film)
SUNDAY
NYC
* Black Pus @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Brian Chippendale, the manic, masked man-machine drummer behind Black Pus (and one-half of speed-punk outfit Lightning Bolt) will maul your skull with his thrash acrobatics. You will sweat, you will mosh, and you will love it. w/ Witch Hat
AUSTIN
* "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" (dir. Joe Dante, 1990) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St. w/ Dante in person! Though the violence is increasingly slapstick and the action more cartoon-like and parodying of other films, I still feel this one superior to the far darker original. Hell, Mohawk and crew are scary enough on their own!
TOKYO
* Plastic Girl In Closet @ Fever / 1-1-14 Hanegi, Setagaya-ku (Odakyu Inokashira Line to Shindaita or Shimokitazawa Stations), 7p/3500 yen. Some of the indie scene's best local shoegazers PGIC coat Fever in a gauzy haze of feedback-sonics and ethereal vox. w/ an acoustic set from Shokichi Ishida
* Merpeoples + THE GIRL @ Shibuya Milkyway / 3F 3-7 Udagawa-cho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit), 5p/2500 yen. Super-indie Tokyoite grrrls Merpeoples temper their twee affections with great slabs of guitar noise, though their bouncy 2011 cover of classic '80s J-glam-rock sets the bar on scene-making experimentation. Just to make this awesomer, they're joined by girl-trio THE GIRL, Pop Chocolat and kinbaku-bi (rope-bondage artist) Hajime Kinoko.
MONDAY
NYC
* Lana Del Rey @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/SOLD OUT. So singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey (né Elizabeth Grant) is trendy as hell right now, despite having "just" an EP out, but listen to her smoldering delivery on "Video Games" and "Blue Jeans" and…well…it's obvious.
* Jamie Woon (UK) + Erika Spring (Au Revoir Simone) @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave), 6:30p/$12. These nouveau-R&B cats are almost a dime a dozen these days, but Londoner Jamie Woon excels in synth virtuosity and charisma. Expect bittersweet loveliness from Erika Spring, co-frontwoman of keyboard contingent Au Revoir Simone and a dazzling singer-songwriter in her own right.
TOKYO
* Asuka Ito "A Desire/欲望" @ Galerie Sho Contemporary / B1F 3-2-9 Nihonbashi, Chuo-ku (Ginza/Tozai Lines to Nihonbashi Station). The young Nara-born artist's debut solo exhibition at the gallery presents her name in two ways, as artist of lushly painted, sexually-charged portraits of flowers and women, and as subject and spectator. She inaugurates her show with a live painting from 6-8p. Yeah, I'll be there.
TUESDAY
AUSTIN
* "Love Actually" (dir. Richard Curtis, 2003) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 7p. Normally you can't get me near these wretched holiday ensemble films. See: Garry Marshall's heinous "Valentine's Day" and disgusting upcoming followup "New Year's Eve". No doubt the Brits do it better, but honestly I dig most everything about "Love Actually". I mean, we have über-hotties Keira Knightley (and, if you like, her onscreen beau Chiwetel Ejiofor), Heike Makatsch and Martine McCutcheon. We have Hugh Grant pretending to be the new Prime Minister whilst BILLY BOB THORNTON plays the U.S. President, Martin Freeman is a body double for sex scenes… and Bill Nighy an aging rock 'n roll legend! Sign me up to see this again, seriously.
* "Nightmare City" aka "City of the Walking Dead" (dir. Umberto Lenzi, 1980) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. A somewhat self-explanatory dose of spastic cinema courtesy the director of cannibalistic lovelies "Eaten Alive!" and "Cannibal Ferox" (aka "Make Them Die Slowly"). Think your favorite low-budget zombie film but a million times more gruesome!
TOKYO
* Kazuma Koike "Repetitions and variants", 2nd half @ Aisho Miura Arts / B1F 2-17-3 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku (JR lines etc to Shibuya Station). Part two of Koike's two-month-long exhibition focuses on transformative methods in three-dimensional works (he's got a BFA in sculpture from Nihon University College of Art) and video.
* Yuka Namekawa "A Place of innocence" @ Art Front Gallery / Hillside Terrace A, 29-18 Sarugakucho, Shibuya-ku (Toyoko Line to Daikanyama Station). Somewhat interestingly, this is the 2nd exhibition in a row at the gallery featuring cubes forming artwork. In Namekawa's case, she builds up translucent plastic cubes into half-formed structures that both channel this past year's Tohoku earthquake (and anticipate it, since she completed most in 2010) and the potential for rebirth.
CURRENT SHOWS
NYC
* Byron Kim @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Kim's debut at the gallery exemplifies his exercise of the "abstract sublime". Previous exhibitions (the UN meditations at Max Protetch, his famous "Synecdoche" at MoMA) had a soothing planar regularity, like emotive Ellsworth Kelly or even flatter Brice Marden. Kim's new one, inspired by his viewings of the nighttime sky, is even sparser, moodier, almost impenetrable fields of black or midnight blue.
* Bianca Beck "Body" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. I've encountered this young NY-based artist's intriguing, very physical oeuvre (gestural, abraded abstract mixed-media paintings, small painted-wood sculpture) in group shows only, so I'm totally psyched to see a larger showing of it. In her solo debut here, she includes ripped canvases in "body colors" (makes me think of Ana Mendieta), small-scale sculpture and works that incorporate sculptural and 2D elements. The figurative elements imbued in these, whether a rough-hewn wood block like a feminine torso, or a burned oil on panel.
* George Condo "Drawing Paintings" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Condo furthers his aggressively graffiti-like abstracts from his New Museum survey with even wilder, lyrical renderings, piling up cartoonish heads in rubber-stamp formation (or Andy Warhol misguided silkscreen-style), to where they obliterate one another in intermingling colors.
* Michaël Borremans "The Devil's Dress" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. "Moody", "creepy", "dramatic" — or better yet, "cinematic" — are apt describers to Borremans' murky, ageless portraits and ambiguously staged scenes. He doesn't make the going any easier for us, in this new series of paintings w/ purposefully subtle/sinister titles and a variant three-part work on paper.
* Neo Rauch "Heilstaetten @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St. I had a significantly belated psylocibin flashback upon experiencing Rauch's latest. The social realist (and subtle surrealist) unveils new oils (in both large-format and intimate flavors), plus a bronze sculpture "Falknerin". Spatial perceptions dissolve in multi-figure renderings like "Ware", w/ seemingly giant men (with greatly distended arms) intermingle w/ reduced figures, and in the much smaller "Rota", where either a Golden Age UFO or carnival ride breaks up an otherwise typical country landscape. Heavy, lovely works.
* Uta Barth + Jack Strange @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. This is the most painterly Barth show I've seen yet. She consistently pushes the envelope on lighting and perception in photography, but by focusing on sunlight and shadow piercing through linen-y curtains, she effectively creates a canvaslike texture to her polyptych works. Upstairs, that trickster Strange immerses a neon FENNEL sign in dirt and iPod Touches feat. animated, talking sea creatures in water-filled baggies, plus acrylic soda-straw rods on flatscreen monitors and cut veggies with headphones.
AUSTIN
* Jonathan Faber "Idle" @ Champion / 800 Brazos St. Memory is a tricky thing, subject to re-tweeks and reinterpretations depending on circumstance, outside encounters, time of day. Faber channels this idea vividly in depicting things very natural, like a landscape or a childhood backyard, painting the bare essentials and piling on tangles of brushwork as in the titular work, creating a curtain of swamp-vines that partially obscure the minimalist, geometric form (a boat?) idling in the background. Or he'll add an almost solid, vertical wipe of paint (like a Barnett Newman "zip"), executing a literal blind-spot in the foresty "Blind Spot". Or a grove of graffiti-like renderings that consume a shed?…or some small-frame building in "Veneer", like living language and memories consuming a forgotten dwelling.
* "Part One" @ Visual Arts Center / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity. In a group exhibition showcasing artist-professors from UT's Department of Art and Art History, one might go in w/ some predispositions. Viz. studio art profs probably really know how to draw/paint, photography profs excel at their craft etc. I found some surprises, however, which really clinched this as a dope, worthwhile show. 1) Sarah Canright, contributing easily the earliest works in the show, like a woven cut-paper duet from 1975 and 1977. 2) A veritable array of Conceptualism from Rob Verf going beyond his painterly ways. He has one still-life like painting "the beginning of a Vanitas" that looks like Paul Cezanne crossed with Francis Bacon, plus a collage cheekily titled "Spicy Peach" that (to me anyway) resembles Max Ernst's classic "Ambiguous Figures (1 copper plate, 1 zinc plate, 1 rubber cloth…)" run through a contemporary hardware store, AND a disarmingly addictive video work of pingpong balls in water. Beyond these, I rather dug Susan Whyme's shattered ceramics and torn plastic conglomerates, from her "Perpetuity/Wall Flower" series, and Margaret Meehan's equal deftness with sculpture (butterfly-winged revolvers composed of ceramic and liquid graphite) and drawing media (the modified cabinet card duo "Sugar" and "Shit").
+ "Looking for a Fight". Three studio art undergrads and members of the all-female Deluscious Group, Lucy Parker, Isabella Burden and Layne Bell, split this cross-media exhibition highlighting gender discourse and their respective feminine identities in a continually male-prone society. Each takes an ultrafeminine approach (think lots of pink, frilly cloth materials and truncated womanly forms) to hook us in and cerebrally wallop us to attention, as there's depth in all the surface-level cuteness. Bell walks the figurative tightrope most deliberately, suspending two pairs of scissors over an inflated balloon in "Emptied IV" (the fourth of a series of subtly simple assemblages, which also included the aforementioned frilly cloth elbow gloves and a Tooth Fairy-sized sewn pillow clothespinned to a wooden tray) and naming another "All Tits and Legs" after like a Bravo plastic surgery reality show stereotype. Though with this one, a pair of vaguely ghostly forms surmounting barstool legs, I got Rene Magritte vibes (both the Belgian surrealist's penchant for masking his figures and painting lingerie with erogenous zones plainly visible), but then I thought of Rebecca Horn's "Finger Gloves" performance from the early '70s, particularly in the elongated 'stems', as it were. In any case, Bell's assemblage is topped by sewn multicolored beads as the titular 'tits'. Burden included both video/sculptural assemblages (her "Upskirt Series"), augmenting cropped body parts with distended branchlike physicality, and two photographic prints (her "Tongue-in-Cheek Series"). The prints struck me more deeply, as I was reminded of both Ana Mendieta and Adrian Piper's very physical, conceptual oeuvres. Though the one artist she directly references is Joseph Beuys, the granddaddy of conceptual and philosophical performance, via the icky sculpture "Boys, Beuys, Boys!!!", combining a loglike beaver muff with glistening, white lard, tangentially recognizable to Beuys' style while superseding him in pronounced decadence. Parker unveils only two works, but this editing makes their underlying force that much stronger. The one, "Suspended Bean Bag Chair (after Bruce Nauman)", is an older work, the titular smallish pink chair stretched painfully in four directions overhead by metal accoutrements, is like Nauman's own self-portrait face-pulling, highlighting artificial elasticity and how the gesture can easily twist from affectionate to torturous. Her other, "Funk Trunk (including artist as Vito Acconci)", begins with Parker's disembodied voice emanating from a coffin-sized box. Kneel down and peer inside, and amid bedsheets and acid-pink fluorescent lighting is a video projection of Parker reenacting Acconci's perversely intimate "Theme Song" in her own spin on 'pillow talk'. "You could be anybody out there, but there's gotta be somebody watching me. Somebody who wants to come in close to me…Come on, I'm all alone..I'll be honest with you, OK. I mean you'll have to believe me if I'm really honest…" Parker-as-Acconci monologues, shifting on her bed as she stares straight into us.
* Jasmyne Graybill "Home Sweet Home" @ Women & Their Work / 1710 Lavaca St. Ceramics ain't exactly the kind of art that generally gets my aesthetic juices flowing. But Graybill excels in pairing vintage china, decorative spoons and cut-glass platters — like you'd find in the back of your grandmother's servingware cabinet — with methodically applied dabs and patterns of colorful polymer clay. The result is period-piece objects afflicted with sculpted fungus, lichen, and mold, some of which incorporates quite well amid rosebud details or painted flowers, or elsewhere mimics silk in a site-specific wallpaper installation. Graybill keeps the new lot untitled, but a 2008 combo of actual muffin pan with cake batter-colored clay standing in for burned sweets is "Crested Buttercream Polyps", my favorite of the show.
CLOSING SOON
NYC
* Georges Braque "Pioneer of Modernism" @ Acquavella Gallery / 18 E 79th St. This retrospective on the co-founder of Cubism, curated by Dieter Buchhart, is filled with two floors and 75% of paintings you've probably never seen before, not even in art catalogues. Because despite Braque's seminal forays with papier collé and mechanical Cubism (in my strong opinion equalling his better-known peer Picasso), his legacy in Fauvism and his lasting impression on the post-Cezanne generations is just not shown stateside. So his more typically Braque-ish works resonate like cannonballs in placid waters, like the stunning "Glass, Bottle and Newspaper" (a collage of charcoal and faux-bois wallpaper on paper) and the vertically-oriented beauties "The Mantlepiece" and "Still Life with Metronome", all shards of awesomeness. Though I was taken by works completed decades after his internationally recognized heyday, like "Woman at an Easel (Yellow Screen)" from '36, texturized with sand and enlightened by figuration, but only just so. (ENDS WED)
NYC
* Rene Magritte "Dangerous Liaisons" @ Blain-DiDonna / 981 Madison Ave. Define 'dream come true'. If you're a surrealist buff like yours truly, then seeing a swath of your personal hero Rene Magritte's oeuvre up close and personal is just that: overwhelmingly emotive and sheer art-viewing perfection. The gallery inaugurates its presence above the Waldorf-Astoria with a survey of 30 oil paintings, gouaches and drawings by the Belgian Surrealist, the largest Magritte show in NYC in years (decades?) and culled almost entirely from private collections. It leads off w/ "Cinéma Bleu", aka Magritte's first mighty plunge into dreamland's embrace and includes such heady offerings as "La Mémoire" (the marble head w/ her bloodstained temple), "L'Empire des Lumieres" (one of his massive twilit dwellings beneath a blue sky) and "Cosmogonie élémentaire" (where his familiar skittlepin imagery becomes a fire-belching odalisque). Also: the titular painting, a seductive nude whose reflection turns the opposite direction in a mirror and gouaches of the bowler-hatted man with a green apple floating in front of his face and that famous pipe-not-a-pipe. Now define 'mayjah'. (ENDS THURS)
NYC
* Rashaad Newsome "Herald" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Newsome walks a thin line b/w gaudy and glamorous, but he does so with panache. In his debut w/ the gallery, he unveils a bunch of signature collages — wildly detailed conglomerates of bling and reverence, Rosetta stones of hip-hop culture and neo-Baroque imagery — each in a lavish, customized antique frame. I'm not totally surprised I was drawn immediately to "Black Barbie", for its underlying Nicki Minaj resonance, but in all I think these are Newsome's strongest collages yet. He also contributes a rap video-style animation "Swag" and, to contrast, a fascinating video installation "Herald", shot in b&w at NYC's St. Patrick's Basilica, chronicling the artist's ceremonial coronation.
* Rebecca Horn "Ravens Gold Rush" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. I consider a Horn exhibition an EVENT, perhaps due to her kinetic, gestural ethos. That the show's title references her '86 NY exhibit "The Gold Rush" (which occurred during international financial uncertainty), plus contains a rarely-seen early sculpture alongside new poignant paintings and a large sculptural installation — plus! the N. American premiere of Horn's film "Moon Mirror Journey", playing at the Rubin Museum a few blocks away — means we're in for something very special. (for Rubin info, read on under SAT)
* Llyn Foulkes @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Wow. This incredible LA-based artist and musician (who came of age w/ John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha, plus played in a band w/ R. Crumb) is almost purposefully indescribable. His early contributions to assemblage and American Pop are as deep as his ever-changing oeuvre. This isn't his first time here, either, as Foulkes' meta-work w/in the Dec 2009 artist/curator group show "The Perpetual Dialogue" is still burned into my memory.
* Sarah Braman "Yours" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. Few years back, Braman had a really dope dual exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery w/ Joel Shapiro — a tiny one in the side gallery, inspired by a dialogue b/w Rita Ackermann and Rosen. It wasn't my first Braman encounter but I felt it totally worked, her angular, intersecting planes of wood and glass against Shapiro's cascading blocks. I'm interested to see her debut w/ M-I&N, as she deconstructed an entire camper to incorporate it in the other works, mindful of Plexiglas (for light, volume, that pop of color) and cardboard (time, wear).
AUSTIN
* Bradney Evans "Still" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces St. I sense that LA-based artist Bradney Evans is an alchemist with paper, viz. earlier work "Phoenix" as the titular mythological bird folded origami-style from magician's paper (i.e. quick-burning, no ash). He pulls a hat-trick in his debut in the gallery's Project Room, in a suite of three works on paper that ostensibly "look" like torn packing paper (that fibrous brown workhorse) with bits of light emanating from behind them, viz. "Constellation", "Eclipse" and personal favorite "Sunset". Thing is, they're each stunning, meticulous trompe-l'oeil renderings in acrylic, each "tear" and "crinkle" the result of some laborious brushwork. Same deal w/ the "light". The effect is like a combo between Tauba Auerbach's beguiling "rippled" Op-art paintings and Robert Gober's lovingly articulated household recreations, perhaps slanting even closer to Gober's style. Evans instills an intensity to these three works, as if the light were really pushing through the "torn paper", as the paper tenuously attempts to hold the illumination back. Displayed with these is an earlier single-channel video "Exposure", spotlit owls, with a sound element, disjointed page-turnings and an occasional sub-bassline that sounds like it's coming from another room.
TOKYO
* Diego Singh "Table for One" @ Tomio Koyama Gallery / 7F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-Shirakawa Station). The Argentinian artist lays on the abstraction, muting his palette in moody blues and grays, a departure from the neon shards in "The Indirect Man", his prior solo exhibition here.
* Kae Higuchi @ Kido Press, Inc / 6F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Toei Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). The Sendai-based artist's second exhibition here, featuring soft-toned portraits in oil tempera and mixed media on canvas and paper.
* Kazuma Koike "Repetitions and variants", 1st half @ Aisho Miura Arts / B1F 2-17-3 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku (JR lines etc to Shibuya Station). As the title precludes, this is the first half of Koike's new body of work, with this section concentrating on two-dimensional works, vividly executed, textural acrylic paintings on cotton. (ENDS SAT)
NYC
* Terry Richardson "Mom Dad" @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth. The iconic (and iconoclastic!) downtown lensman celebrates the release of his titular two-volume monograph (launched at Paris' Colette in late Sept) w/ an intimate selection of portraits of his mother Annie and late father, fashion photographer Bob Richardson.
* Jeronimo Elespe @ Eleven Rivington / 11 Rivington St. Ahead of his big solo exhibition at the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo in Malaga, Spain, the Madrid-based artist unveils a set of new small and very VERY tiny, meticulously brushy paintings on aluminum panels. Figures coalesce with and disappear into light-infused fog.
TOKYO
* Okazaki, Onishi, Object (2) @ MA2 Gallery / 3-3-8 Ebisu, Shibuya-ku (Yamanote Line to Ebisu Station). An intriguing collaboration between two incredibly detail-focused trompe-l'oeil sculptors, Kazuo Okazaki and Nobuaki Onishi (some 40 years Okazaki's junior). I am familiar w/ Onishi after he represented the gallery w/ his intricate, resin-based sculptures at VOLTA NY 2010, and look forward to where these two take their mutual figuration.
* Takeshi Abe "幽玄/Subtle Grace" @ Art Front Gallery / Hillside Terrace A, 29-18 Sarugakucho, Shibuya-ku (Toyoko Line to Daikanyama Station). Abe executes wonderful, figurative "paintings" utilizing a cube grid printed with bits of the subject — think 3D pixels or a 21st century version of Roy Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots. Abe includes a proper sculpture w/ these 3D prints. (ENDS SUN)
TOKYO
* Shiro Matsui "Like when you miss button your shirt" @ BLD Gallery / 2-4-9 Ginza, Chuo Ward Tokyo (JR Yurakucho Station, Marunouchi Line to Ginza Station). The Kansai-born artist works in vividly colorful silicone rubber, tricking us with his works' sculpted liquidity and mix of flatness and three-dimensionality, whether they intentionally present themselves as "sculpture", "relief" or both. (ENDS TUES)
NYC
* Assume Vivid Astro Focus "Cyclops Trannies" @ The Suzanne Geiss Company / 76 Grand St. So this has actually been open since NOV 8 but… you need to totally check AVAF if you've not already. It's in the former Deitch Space, run now by the Projects' former executive director Suzanne Geiss, so that's a biggie. Plus AVAF (a Deitch mainstay) debuted Geiss' first iteration of the company, at 2011 Art Basel Miami Beach w/ their "Acid Flashback" installation. AND they collaborated w/ Lady Gaga in Barneys store windows for the 2011 holiday campaign. Mayjah.
AUSTIN
* "Collecting Women: What We Treasure and Why" @ Women & Their Work Gallery / 1710 Lavaca St, 7p. Dr. Melinda Barlow, an Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, leads a lecture and screening in how women have used art, film, found objects, and personal mementos to express aspects of personal identity. An audience discussion follows Dr. Barlow's presentation.
* "Utopia London" (dir. Tom Cordell, 2010) screening @ Arthouse / 700 Congress Ave, 7:30p. Bundle up for the last of 2011's Rooftop Architecture Film Series. Cordell's documentary observes the method and practice of Modernist architects who rebuilt London after WW2.
TOKYO
* Kazuhiro Ito "unknown touches" @ hpgrp Tokyo / B1F 5-1-15 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku (Chiyoda/Hanzomon/Ginza Lines to Omotesando Station). Ito pushes bronze sculpture to even further dimensions, exploring liquid-like abstraction and elongated forms in series "Dear Blind Phantom", "Liquid Golden Baby" and "Starman Loves You".
THURSDAY
NYC
* "Alpha's Bet Is Not Over Yet: Steffani Jemison and Friends" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, BD to Grand St, 6 to Spring St), 7p/FREE w/ RSVP: museumashub@newmuseum.org. Way above the hubbub of Carsten Höller's mind-altering "Experience" survey is this fantastic Black history reading room. Co-curator Jemison joins guests Firelei Baez, Mildred Beltre, Aisha Cousins and Zachary Fabri in reading from selections of the displayed periodicals.
* Dum Dum Girls + DIVE @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. Just announced! Dee Dee and crew form Dum Dum Girls, the fiercest quartet of '60s girl-group-channelers possibly EVER. Beach Fossils' guitarist Cole keeps DIVE shoegaze-hazy and totally psychedelic. w/ underground locals Xray Eyeballs, tying in the bicoastal thing quite nicely.
AUSTIN
* "Part One" artist talk @ Visual Arts Center / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity, 6:30p. Lee Chesney, Interim Chair of the Dept of Art and Art History at UT Austin, moderates this forum and Q&A feat. Sarah Canright, Elizabeth Chiles, Lawrence McFarland, Rob Verf, Susan Whyne and Barna Kantor — all faculty artists and participants in the exhibition "Part One" (see my review under CURRENT SHOWS).
* "Die Hard" (dir. John McTiernan, 1988) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 7p. Bruce Willis as John McClane is the ultimate '80s tough guy. Like the classic VHS cover tagline screams in this 40-story thriller: "Twelve terrorists. One cop. The odds are against John McClane…That's just the way he likes it." Strap in tight.
TOKYO
* Deerhoof @ Liquidroom / 3-15-5 Higashi, Shibuya-ku (JR Yamanote Line/Hibiya Line to Ebisu Station), 7p/4800 yen. Art-rock vets Deerhoof command one of the tightest live acts I've ever seen…and that's in spite of their almost improv-y sound: Greg Saunier's jazzy drumming, shards of guitar punctuating Satomi Matsuzaki's lyricism. Hard to believe it's been nearly a year since their P-Vine-released LP "Deerhoof vs. Evil". w/ Kirihito
FRIDAY
NYC
* "Sleeping Beauty" (dir. Julia Leigh, 2011) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). The Australian novelist's erotic debut feature reflects the titular fairytale in name only (though admittedly I'm more familiar w/ the Disney adaptation than the original Brothers Grimm…which could be totally sinister). In Leigh's, Emily Browning is a uni student who performs the role of "sleeping beauty" to old suitors.
* "Outrage" (dir. Takeshi Kitano, 2010) @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (NR/L/456 to Union Square). Good ol' bruised-knuckle violence in this Yakuza crime thriller as tangled and double-crossing as a Dostoevsky novel. Kitano returns to form from his comedy-film forays as the reliable right-hand trigger-man in a duel between crime bosses for who's gonna be on top…and if that means Kitano has to assume that role, then so be it. Plus: a PERFECT, uncanny cameo from Eihi "Audition/Tokyo Gore Police" Shiina (look out for it!).
AUSTIN
* "P^4" @ ART 4.418 / UT Austin Campus, 23rd St at Trinity, 6-8p. A one-night only salon of Painting 4 talent, feat. over a dozen artists including Lucy Parker (one-third of the awesomeness "Looking for a Fight" at the VAC), Nick Griffin, Ashley Collingnon, Allie Underwood, Ally Acheson-Snow, Suzanne Lewis, Jade Abner, Yusuke Ito, Francesca Giamona, Liz Williams, Anne Riley, Christina Macal, Leah Flippen, Sarah Milbrath, Gillian Rhodes and Clayton Westmeier.
* "Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale" (dir. Jalmari Helander, 2010) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 11p. This is my kind of holiday film. Think all the magic of X-mas, like hard-working widowed dad baking cookies for his son and taking him hunting…only Saint Nick's a naked vagrant with a taste for child-blood! ALSO SAT
* "The Yellow Sea" (dir. Na Hong-jin, 2011) @ Alamo Drafthouse S. Lamar / 1120 S. Lamar. This breakneck cross-Korean thriller is like an out of control bullet train of mob hits, police chases and shattered bones. Na's film screened in the Un Certain Regard section of 2011 Cannes, plus it was a box office hit in S. Korea and overwhelmingly lauded at the NYAFF and diverse other film festivals.
* Love Inks @ Mohawk / 912 Red River, 9p/$10. Pitch-perfect pop in three-minute morsels, courtesy one of the finest local acts in the scene. w/ Awkward Robot
* Rachael Yamagata + Mike Viola @ The Parish / 214 E 6th St, 8p/$16. Consider this the softer side of Fee's LIST. I.e. an illuminating night of singer-songwriterly talent, with the bluesy Rachael Yamagata and hardest working indie musician Mike "Candy Butchers" Viola.
TOKYO
* Sakan Kanno "Quantize" @ Radium / 2-5-17 Bakurocho, Chuo-ku (JR Yamanote Line to Bakurocho Station). Kanno channels musical improvisation into his visual compositions, beginning with deconstructed templates and then layered with paint.
* Photographer Hal "Flesh Love" @ Gallery Tosei / 5-18-20 Chuo, Nakano-ku (Marunouchi Line to Shin-Nakano Station). Funny (but true) story: I met Photographer Hal at a Kabukicho basement bar called Bikini Machine this past April. He's a total badass, photographing embracing couples in Love Hotels, area bars within their own bathtubs, all in lurid, gloriously saturated color. His new series skrinkwraps his subjects. Intimacy is a plus.
* Mayumi Hosokura "Kazan" @ G/P Gallery / 2F 1-18-4 Ebisu, Shibuya-ku (JR Yamanote Line/Hibiya Line to Ebisu Station). The second floor of this awesome art bookstore and gallery hosts the young photographer Hosokura and her "Volcano" series. She was recently on the cover of the Dutch photography publication FOAM and was in the Fotografia Festival in Rome this September.
* Keiko Matsumoto "Panoramic Bowl" @ INAX Gallery / 2F 3-6-18 Kyobashi, Chuo-ku (JR Yamanote Line to Yurakucho Station). Takes something special to get me all jazzed on a ceramics show, esp. one that promises to be more than "arts and crafts". Enter young glaze-whiz Matsumoto, who combines traditional firing techniques and imagery in very intriguing ways, like that five-story pagoda bursting from a Celadon vase.
* Cut Hands + Incapacitants @ Unit / 1-34-17 Ebisu-nishi, Shibuya-ku (Tokyu-Toyoko Line to Daikanyama Station, JR Yamanote/Hibiya Line to Ebisu Station), 6p/5000 yen. Brutal noise on the eve of my Tokyo trip. I can't believe I am missing this. Pairing veteran Tokyo duo Incapacitants, pioneers of "hard noise" (think hard-bop but with feedback and voice, primarily) with William "Whitehouse" Bennett in his ferocious guise Cut Hands (his new LP "Afro Noise 1" is just so good) means an unmissable show. w/ RAMLEH
* oh my god, you've gone @ Koiwa BushBash / 7-28-11 Minami-Koiwa, Edogawa-ku (Sobu Line to Koiwa Station), 7p/1300 yen. Perhaps Tokyo's finest example of fiercely indie, ultra-dissonant noise-rock is this charmingly named trio oh my god, you've gone. Don't miss 'em! w/ EGO and MEKARE-KARE
SATURDAY
NYC
* Mark Ryden "Editions" book signing @ Paul Kasmin SHOP / 511 W 27th St, 4-6p. Dress to the Gay Nineties nines and prepare to queue up as subversive illustrator/painter Ryden inaugurates Paul Kasmin SHOP with his signature eerie meats, nymphs and Lincoln heads.
* Winter Formal 2011 & Goth Prom 1986 @ Barnard College / 3009 Broadway at 117th St (1 to 116th St), 7p/FREE. That title might give you pause, or might make you go bonkers with enjoyment, but check this: WBAR Barnard College Radio features four acts that definitely fall along the "Goth Prom 1986" range, like RL Grime, Leather, the fantastic Purling Hiss and hot newish thing Balam Acab, who blissed out (le) poisson rouge last month (hopefully he brings that female vocalist w/ him to this show!). Though keep the first part of the show's title in mind, as dressing to the nines is totally encouraged.
AUSTIN
* Mads Lynnerup "Help is on the way" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces St. Art object as exercise equipment, intellectual heft vs physical exertion. Lynnerup eschews funnily worded signs for manipulated photography of weight trainers lifting Franz West-ish…stuff…plus collages of shock-bright cut paper and "Demonstration", a video adding some reality to these "virtual sculptures"…plus Lynnerup performs (demonstrates) at the opening. Who's in for some self-improvement?
TOKYO
* "Suzune: Genesis x Evolution" (dir. Ryu Kaneda, 2011) @ Ikebukuro Cinema Rosa / 1-37-12 Nishi-Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku (JR Yamanote Line to Ikebukuro Station). Twitchfilm is one of my go-to film resources, and their sole blog post for this film had a headline reading "Suzune Battles Sex Parasites With Leather-Bound Cleavage". Rei Yoshii plays the titular bondage-garbed lead (actually a doctor!), fighting off desire-inducing parasites controlled by "Cold Fish" star Megumi Kagurazaka. Uh, see you there?
* "Never-ending Blue" (dir. Takaomi Ogata, 2010) screening @ Shibuya Uplink / 37-18 Udagawa-cho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit), 7p. A truly disturbing high-school/family drama, centered on Sushi Typhoon regular Maki Mizui as a too-beautiful girl in up against impossible odds: her classmates tease or ignore her, her father beats and molests her. She's a self-harmer, too. This is Ogata's feature film debut, and he crafts a taut, minimalist thriller uniquely Japanese and harrowing in its realism.
* 「ピザボーイ史上最凶のご注文」 (dir. Ruben Fleischer, 2011) @ HT Cinema Shibuya / 1-23-16 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, East Exit). The Japanese title loosely translates to: "Pizzaboy: Most Dangerous Order Ever", but this is just "30 MInutes or Less", that madcap crime-comedy with Jesse Eisenberg as the overly-thinking delivery boy w/ a bomb strapped to his chest, forced to rob a bank with buddy Aziz "Funniest Man on Earth" Ansari or else. Inclusion of Dilshad Vadsaria as Ansari's "twin sister" is reason enough to see this film dozens of times.
* "50/50" (dir. Jonathan Levine, 2011) @ TOHO Shibuya / 2-6-17 Dogenzaka, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit). I found this a very thoughtful telling of life on the line, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt the hale young dude diagnosed with a rare, terminal form of cancer, and Seth Rogen in the awkward role of funnyman in a VERY un-funny situation. Both gents pull it off w/ panache. (P.S. even though I cannot stand Anna Kendrick, playing a psychologist here, I still advise seeing this film)
SUNDAY
NYC
* Black Pus @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Brian Chippendale, the manic, masked man-machine drummer behind Black Pus (and one-half of speed-punk outfit Lightning Bolt) will maul your skull with his thrash acrobatics. You will sweat, you will mosh, and you will love it. w/ Witch Hat
AUSTIN
* "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" (dir. Joe Dante, 1990) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St. w/ Dante in person! Though the violence is increasingly slapstick and the action more cartoon-like and parodying of other films, I still feel this one superior to the far darker original. Hell, Mohawk and crew are scary enough on their own!
TOKYO
* Plastic Girl In Closet @ Fever / 1-1-14 Hanegi, Setagaya-ku (Odakyu Inokashira Line to Shindaita or Shimokitazawa Stations), 7p/3500 yen. Some of the indie scene's best local shoegazers PGIC coat Fever in a gauzy haze of feedback-sonics and ethereal vox. w/ an acoustic set from Shokichi Ishida
* Merpeoples + THE GIRL @ Shibuya Milkyway / 3F 3-7 Udagawa-cho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit), 5p/2500 yen. Super-indie Tokyoite grrrls Merpeoples temper their twee affections with great slabs of guitar noise, though their bouncy 2011 cover of classic '80s J-glam-rock sets the bar on scene-making experimentation. Just to make this awesomer, they're joined by girl-trio THE GIRL, Pop Chocolat and kinbaku-bi (rope-bondage artist) Hajime Kinoko.
MONDAY
NYC
* Lana Del Rey @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/SOLD OUT. So singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey (né Elizabeth Grant) is trendy as hell right now, despite having "just" an EP out, but listen to her smoldering delivery on "Video Games" and "Blue Jeans" and…well…it's obvious.
* Jamie Woon (UK) + Erika Spring (Au Revoir Simone) @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave), 6:30p/$12. These nouveau-R&B cats are almost a dime a dozen these days, but Londoner Jamie Woon excels in synth virtuosity and charisma. Expect bittersweet loveliness from Erika Spring, co-frontwoman of keyboard contingent Au Revoir Simone and a dazzling singer-songwriter in her own right.
TOKYO
* Asuka Ito "A Desire/欲望" @ Galerie Sho Contemporary / B1F 3-2-9 Nihonbashi, Chuo-ku (Ginza/Tozai Lines to Nihonbashi Station). The young Nara-born artist's debut solo exhibition at the gallery presents her name in two ways, as artist of lushly painted, sexually-charged portraits of flowers and women, and as subject and spectator. She inaugurates her show with a live painting from 6-8p. Yeah, I'll be there.
TUESDAY
AUSTIN
* "Love Actually" (dir. Richard Curtis, 2003) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 7p. Normally you can't get me near these wretched holiday ensemble films. See: Garry Marshall's heinous "Valentine's Day" and disgusting upcoming followup "New Year's Eve". No doubt the Brits do it better, but honestly I dig most everything about "Love Actually". I mean, we have über-hotties Keira Knightley (and, if you like, her onscreen beau Chiwetel Ejiofor), Heike Makatsch and Martine McCutcheon. We have Hugh Grant pretending to be the new Prime Minister whilst BILLY BOB THORNTON plays the U.S. President, Martin Freeman is a body double for sex scenes… and Bill Nighy an aging rock 'n roll legend! Sign me up to see this again, seriously.
* "Nightmare City" aka "City of the Walking Dead" (dir. Umberto Lenzi, 1980) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. A somewhat self-explanatory dose of spastic cinema courtesy the director of cannibalistic lovelies "Eaten Alive!" and "Cannibal Ferox" (aka "Make Them Die Slowly"). Think your favorite low-budget zombie film but a million times more gruesome!
TOKYO
* Kazuma Koike "Repetitions and variants", 2nd half @ Aisho Miura Arts / B1F 2-17-3 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku (JR lines etc to Shibuya Station). Part two of Koike's two-month-long exhibition focuses on transformative methods in three-dimensional works (he's got a BFA in sculpture from Nihon University College of Art) and video.
* Yuka Namekawa "A Place of innocence" @ Art Front Gallery / Hillside Terrace A, 29-18 Sarugakucho, Shibuya-ku (Toyoko Line to Daikanyama Station). Somewhat interestingly, this is the 2nd exhibition in a row at the gallery featuring cubes forming artwork. In Namekawa's case, she builds up translucent plastic cubes into half-formed structures that both channel this past year's Tohoku earthquake (and anticipate it, since she completed most in 2010) and the potential for rebirth.
CURRENT SHOWS
NYC
* Byron Kim @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Kim's debut at the gallery exemplifies his exercise of the "abstract sublime". Previous exhibitions (the UN meditations at Max Protetch, his famous "Synecdoche" at MoMA) had a soothing planar regularity, like emotive Ellsworth Kelly or even flatter Brice Marden. Kim's new one, inspired by his viewings of the nighttime sky, is even sparser, moodier, almost impenetrable fields of black or midnight blue.
* Bianca Beck "Body" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. I've encountered this young NY-based artist's intriguing, very physical oeuvre (gestural, abraded abstract mixed-media paintings, small painted-wood sculpture) in group shows only, so I'm totally psyched to see a larger showing of it. In her solo debut here, she includes ripped canvases in "body colors" (makes me think of Ana Mendieta), small-scale sculpture and works that incorporate sculptural and 2D elements. The figurative elements imbued in these, whether a rough-hewn wood block like a feminine torso, or a burned oil on panel.
* George Condo "Drawing Paintings" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Condo furthers his aggressively graffiti-like abstracts from his New Museum survey with even wilder, lyrical renderings, piling up cartoonish heads in rubber-stamp formation (or Andy Warhol misguided silkscreen-style), to where they obliterate one another in intermingling colors.
* Michaël Borremans "The Devil's Dress" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. "Moody", "creepy", "dramatic" — or better yet, "cinematic" — are apt describers to Borremans' murky, ageless portraits and ambiguously staged scenes. He doesn't make the going any easier for us, in this new series of paintings w/ purposefully subtle/sinister titles and a variant three-part work on paper.
* Neo Rauch "Heilstaetten @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St. I had a significantly belated psylocibin flashback upon experiencing Rauch's latest. The social realist (and subtle surrealist) unveils new oils (in both large-format and intimate flavors), plus a bronze sculpture "Falknerin". Spatial perceptions dissolve in multi-figure renderings like "Ware", w/ seemingly giant men (with greatly distended arms) intermingle w/ reduced figures, and in the much smaller "Rota", where either a Golden Age UFO or carnival ride breaks up an otherwise typical country landscape. Heavy, lovely works.
* Uta Barth + Jack Strange @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. This is the most painterly Barth show I've seen yet. She consistently pushes the envelope on lighting and perception in photography, but by focusing on sunlight and shadow piercing through linen-y curtains, she effectively creates a canvaslike texture to her polyptych works. Upstairs, that trickster Strange immerses a neon FENNEL sign in dirt and iPod Touches feat. animated, talking sea creatures in water-filled baggies, plus acrylic soda-straw rods on flatscreen monitors and cut veggies with headphones.
AUSTIN
* Jonathan Faber "Idle" @ Champion / 800 Brazos St. Memory is a tricky thing, subject to re-tweeks and reinterpretations depending on circumstance, outside encounters, time of day. Faber channels this idea vividly in depicting things very natural, like a landscape or a childhood backyard, painting the bare essentials and piling on tangles of brushwork as in the titular work, creating a curtain of swamp-vines that partially obscure the minimalist, geometric form (a boat?) idling in the background. Or he'll add an almost solid, vertical wipe of paint (like a Barnett Newman "zip"), executing a literal blind-spot in the foresty "Blind Spot". Or a grove of graffiti-like renderings that consume a shed?…or some small-frame building in "Veneer", like living language and memories consuming a forgotten dwelling.
* "Part One" @ Visual Arts Center / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity. In a group exhibition showcasing artist-professors from UT's Department of Art and Art History, one might go in w/ some predispositions. Viz. studio art profs probably really know how to draw/paint, photography profs excel at their craft etc. I found some surprises, however, which really clinched this as a dope, worthwhile show. 1) Sarah Canright, contributing easily the earliest works in the show, like a woven cut-paper duet from 1975 and 1977. 2) A veritable array of Conceptualism from Rob Verf going beyond his painterly ways. He has one still-life like painting "the beginning of a Vanitas" that looks like Paul Cezanne crossed with Francis Bacon, plus a collage cheekily titled "Spicy Peach" that (to me anyway) resembles Max Ernst's classic "Ambiguous Figures (1 copper plate, 1 zinc plate, 1 rubber cloth…)" run through a contemporary hardware store, AND a disarmingly addictive video work of pingpong balls in water. Beyond these, I rather dug Susan Whyme's shattered ceramics and torn plastic conglomerates, from her "Perpetuity/Wall Flower" series, and Margaret Meehan's equal deftness with sculpture (butterfly-winged revolvers composed of ceramic and liquid graphite) and drawing media (the modified cabinet card duo "Sugar" and "Shit").
+ "Looking for a Fight". Three studio art undergrads and members of the all-female Deluscious Group, Lucy Parker, Isabella Burden and Layne Bell, split this cross-media exhibition highlighting gender discourse and their respective feminine identities in a continually male-prone society. Each takes an ultrafeminine approach (think lots of pink, frilly cloth materials and truncated womanly forms) to hook us in and cerebrally wallop us to attention, as there's depth in all the surface-level cuteness. Bell walks the figurative tightrope most deliberately, suspending two pairs of scissors over an inflated balloon in "Emptied IV" (the fourth of a series of subtly simple assemblages, which also included the aforementioned frilly cloth elbow gloves and a Tooth Fairy-sized sewn pillow clothespinned to a wooden tray) and naming another "All Tits and Legs" after like a Bravo plastic surgery reality show stereotype. Though with this one, a pair of vaguely ghostly forms surmounting barstool legs, I got Rene Magritte vibes (both the Belgian surrealist's penchant for masking his figures and painting lingerie with erogenous zones plainly visible), but then I thought of Rebecca Horn's "Finger Gloves" performance from the early '70s, particularly in the elongated 'stems', as it were. In any case, Bell's assemblage is topped by sewn multicolored beads as the titular 'tits'. Burden included both video/sculptural assemblages (her "Upskirt Series"), augmenting cropped body parts with distended branchlike physicality, and two photographic prints (her "Tongue-in-Cheek Series"). The prints struck me more deeply, as I was reminded of both Ana Mendieta and Adrian Piper's very physical, conceptual oeuvres. Though the one artist she directly references is Joseph Beuys, the granddaddy of conceptual and philosophical performance, via the icky sculpture "Boys, Beuys, Boys!!!", combining a loglike beaver muff with glistening, white lard, tangentially recognizable to Beuys' style while superseding him in pronounced decadence. Parker unveils only two works, but this editing makes their underlying force that much stronger. The one, "Suspended Bean Bag Chair (after Bruce Nauman)", is an older work, the titular smallish pink chair stretched painfully in four directions overhead by metal accoutrements, is like Nauman's own self-portrait face-pulling, highlighting artificial elasticity and how the gesture can easily twist from affectionate to torturous. Her other, "Funk Trunk (including artist as Vito Acconci)", begins with Parker's disembodied voice emanating from a coffin-sized box. Kneel down and peer inside, and amid bedsheets and acid-pink fluorescent lighting is a video projection of Parker reenacting Acconci's perversely intimate "Theme Song" in her own spin on 'pillow talk'. "You could be anybody out there, but there's gotta be somebody watching me. Somebody who wants to come in close to me…Come on, I'm all alone..I'll be honest with you, OK. I mean you'll have to believe me if I'm really honest…" Parker-as-Acconci monologues, shifting on her bed as she stares straight into us.
* Jasmyne Graybill "Home Sweet Home" @ Women & Their Work / 1710 Lavaca St. Ceramics ain't exactly the kind of art that generally gets my aesthetic juices flowing. But Graybill excels in pairing vintage china, decorative spoons and cut-glass platters — like you'd find in the back of your grandmother's servingware cabinet — with methodically applied dabs and patterns of colorful polymer clay. The result is period-piece objects afflicted with sculpted fungus, lichen, and mold, some of which incorporates quite well amid rosebud details or painted flowers, or elsewhere mimics silk in a site-specific wallpaper installation. Graybill keeps the new lot untitled, but a 2008 combo of actual muffin pan with cake batter-colored clay standing in for burned sweets is "Crested Buttercream Polyps", my favorite of the show.
CLOSING SOON
NYC
* Georges Braque "Pioneer of Modernism" @ Acquavella Gallery / 18 E 79th St. This retrospective on the co-founder of Cubism, curated by Dieter Buchhart, is filled with two floors and 75% of paintings you've probably never seen before, not even in art catalogues. Because despite Braque's seminal forays with papier collé and mechanical Cubism (in my strong opinion equalling his better-known peer Picasso), his legacy in Fauvism and his lasting impression on the post-Cezanne generations is just not shown stateside. So his more typically Braque-ish works resonate like cannonballs in placid waters, like the stunning "Glass, Bottle and Newspaper" (a collage of charcoal and faux-bois wallpaper on paper) and the vertically-oriented beauties "The Mantlepiece" and "Still Life with Metronome", all shards of awesomeness. Though I was taken by works completed decades after his internationally recognized heyday, like "Woman at an Easel (Yellow Screen)" from '36, texturized with sand and enlightened by figuration, but only just so. (ENDS WED)
NYC
* Rene Magritte "Dangerous Liaisons" @ Blain-DiDonna / 981 Madison Ave. Define 'dream come true'. If you're a surrealist buff like yours truly, then seeing a swath of your personal hero Rene Magritte's oeuvre up close and personal is just that: overwhelmingly emotive and sheer art-viewing perfection. The gallery inaugurates its presence above the Waldorf-Astoria with a survey of 30 oil paintings, gouaches and drawings by the Belgian Surrealist, the largest Magritte show in NYC in years (decades?) and culled almost entirely from private collections. It leads off w/ "Cinéma Bleu", aka Magritte's first mighty plunge into dreamland's embrace and includes such heady offerings as "La Mémoire" (the marble head w/ her bloodstained temple), "L'Empire des Lumieres" (one of his massive twilit dwellings beneath a blue sky) and "Cosmogonie élémentaire" (where his familiar skittlepin imagery becomes a fire-belching odalisque). Also: the titular painting, a seductive nude whose reflection turns the opposite direction in a mirror and gouaches of the bowler-hatted man with a green apple floating in front of his face and that famous pipe-not-a-pipe. Now define 'mayjah'. (ENDS THURS)
NYC
* Rashaad Newsome "Herald" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Newsome walks a thin line b/w gaudy and glamorous, but he does so with panache. In his debut w/ the gallery, he unveils a bunch of signature collages — wildly detailed conglomerates of bling and reverence, Rosetta stones of hip-hop culture and neo-Baroque imagery — each in a lavish, customized antique frame. I'm not totally surprised I was drawn immediately to "Black Barbie", for its underlying Nicki Minaj resonance, but in all I think these are Newsome's strongest collages yet. He also contributes a rap video-style animation "Swag" and, to contrast, a fascinating video installation "Herald", shot in b&w at NYC's St. Patrick's Basilica, chronicling the artist's ceremonial coronation.
* Rebecca Horn "Ravens Gold Rush" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. I consider a Horn exhibition an EVENT, perhaps due to her kinetic, gestural ethos. That the show's title references her '86 NY exhibit "The Gold Rush" (which occurred during international financial uncertainty), plus contains a rarely-seen early sculpture alongside new poignant paintings and a large sculptural installation — plus! the N. American premiere of Horn's film "Moon Mirror Journey", playing at the Rubin Museum a few blocks away — means we're in for something very special. (for Rubin info, read on under SAT)
* Llyn Foulkes @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Wow. This incredible LA-based artist and musician (who came of age w/ John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha, plus played in a band w/ R. Crumb) is almost purposefully indescribable. His early contributions to assemblage and American Pop are as deep as his ever-changing oeuvre. This isn't his first time here, either, as Foulkes' meta-work w/in the Dec 2009 artist/curator group show "The Perpetual Dialogue" is still burned into my memory.
* Sarah Braman "Yours" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. Few years back, Braman had a really dope dual exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery w/ Joel Shapiro — a tiny one in the side gallery, inspired by a dialogue b/w Rita Ackermann and Rosen. It wasn't my first Braman encounter but I felt it totally worked, her angular, intersecting planes of wood and glass against Shapiro's cascading blocks. I'm interested to see her debut w/ M-I&N, as she deconstructed an entire camper to incorporate it in the other works, mindful of Plexiglas (for light, volume, that pop of color) and cardboard (time, wear).
AUSTIN
* Bradney Evans "Still" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces St. I sense that LA-based artist Bradney Evans is an alchemist with paper, viz. earlier work "Phoenix" as the titular mythological bird folded origami-style from magician's paper (i.e. quick-burning, no ash). He pulls a hat-trick in his debut in the gallery's Project Room, in a suite of three works on paper that ostensibly "look" like torn packing paper (that fibrous brown workhorse) with bits of light emanating from behind them, viz. "Constellation", "Eclipse" and personal favorite "Sunset". Thing is, they're each stunning, meticulous trompe-l'oeil renderings in acrylic, each "tear" and "crinkle" the result of some laborious brushwork. Same deal w/ the "light". The effect is like a combo between Tauba Auerbach's beguiling "rippled" Op-art paintings and Robert Gober's lovingly articulated household recreations, perhaps slanting even closer to Gober's style. Evans instills an intensity to these three works, as if the light were really pushing through the "torn paper", as the paper tenuously attempts to hold the illumination back. Displayed with these is an earlier single-channel video "Exposure", spotlit owls, with a sound element, disjointed page-turnings and an occasional sub-bassline that sounds like it's coming from another room.
TOKYO
* Diego Singh "Table for One" @ Tomio Koyama Gallery / 7F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-Shirakawa Station). The Argentinian artist lays on the abstraction, muting his palette in moody blues and grays, a departure from the neon shards in "The Indirect Man", his prior solo exhibition here.
* Kae Higuchi @ Kido Press, Inc / 6F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Toei Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). The Sendai-based artist's second exhibition here, featuring soft-toned portraits in oil tempera and mixed media on canvas and paper.
* Kazuma Koike "Repetitions and variants", 1st half @ Aisho Miura Arts / B1F 2-17-3 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku (JR lines etc to Shibuya Station). As the title precludes, this is the first half of Koike's new body of work, with this section concentrating on two-dimensional works, vividly executed, textural acrylic paintings on cotton. (ENDS SAT)
NYC
* Terry Richardson "Mom Dad" @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth. The iconic (and iconoclastic!) downtown lensman celebrates the release of his titular two-volume monograph (launched at Paris' Colette in late Sept) w/ an intimate selection of portraits of his mother Annie and late father, fashion photographer Bob Richardson.
* Jeronimo Elespe @ Eleven Rivington / 11 Rivington St. Ahead of his big solo exhibition at the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo in Malaga, Spain, the Madrid-based artist unveils a set of new small and very VERY tiny, meticulously brushy paintings on aluminum panels. Figures coalesce with and disappear into light-infused fog.
TOKYO
* Okazaki, Onishi, Object (2) @ MA2 Gallery / 3-3-8 Ebisu, Shibuya-ku (Yamanote Line to Ebisu Station). An intriguing collaboration between two incredibly detail-focused trompe-l'oeil sculptors, Kazuo Okazaki and Nobuaki Onishi (some 40 years Okazaki's junior). I am familiar w/ Onishi after he represented the gallery w/ his intricate, resin-based sculptures at VOLTA NY 2010, and look forward to where these two take their mutual figuration.
* Takeshi Abe "幽玄/Subtle Grace" @ Art Front Gallery / Hillside Terrace A, 29-18 Sarugakucho, Shibuya-ku (Toyoko Line to Daikanyama Station). Abe executes wonderful, figurative "paintings" utilizing a cube grid printed with bits of the subject — think 3D pixels or a 21st century version of Roy Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots. Abe includes a proper sculpture w/ these 3D prints. (ENDS SUN)
TOKYO
* Shiro Matsui "Like when you miss button your shirt" @ BLD Gallery / 2-4-9 Ginza, Chuo Ward Tokyo (JR Yurakucho Station, Marunouchi Line to Ginza Station). The Kansai-born artist works in vividly colorful silicone rubber, tricking us with his works' sculpted liquidity and mix of flatness and three-dimensionality, whether they intentionally present themselves as "sculpture", "relief" or both. (ENDS TUES)
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