WEDNESDAY
* David Hammons @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. This winter gallery season is rolling out fast and furious, w/ must-see show upon must-see show. Here's another: iconic, provoking cultural installation and sculpture from the powerful and fairly reclusive NY-based Hammons.
* Performance 14: On Line/Ralph Lemon @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 3p. New York-based artist and choreographer Lemon collaborates w/ dancer Okwui Okpokwasili in his exhilarating untitled 2008 composition, utilizing the MoMA's atrium in their camaraderie of exhaustion and reflexive movement. Also SAT & SUN, 3p.
* "Monday" (dir. Sabu, 2000) screening @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd, 6 to 51st St), 7:30p + Q&A w/ Sabu-san. The 1st major U.S. retrospective to Sabu-san's filmic oeuvre, replete w/ hard-up salarymen (mostly played by Shinichi Tsutsumi), wandering dazedly amid Yakuza thugs, love hotels, hostess clubs, combini — you know, the usual Monday blues. The screening follows w/ a boozy bash in Sabu-san's honor.
* Yuck @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JZ to Marcy) 8p/$10. I really really want to love Yuck. They're a youngish coed UK-based lot, they make that addictive indie-pop filtered through raindrops and cigarettes like only a Londoner (like vocalist Daniel, though the group hails international) can…and the last time they were supposed to play here, during CMJ, they had to cancel the tour. So I'm super-duper stoked to see them. w/ Darlings
* Miracles of Modern Science + Ava Luna @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/FREE. Time to take a chance. Symphonic, strings-laden rock that somehow JAMS (Miracles of Modern Science) and groovy post-punk soul (Ava Luna).
* Suuns @ Shea Stadium / 20 Meadow St, Williamsburg (L to Grand), 8p. Brooding rock terror, intertwined w/ loping (and looped) electronic beats like a "Terminator" version of cutting-edge indie music. Suuns play a perhaps subtler show tomorrow night at Mercury Lounge, but expect 'em to go full out fear-factor style tonight.
* WIERD presents The Soft Moon @ Home Sweet Home / 131 Chrystie St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), midnight. Picture The Cure's "Mixed Up" album, but only the echoey bits of "A Forest (Tree Mix)" and "The Caterpillar (Flicker Mix)", w/ Robert Smith's super whispery vocals. That's a bit like San Fran's The Soft Moon, bringing their somberly gorgeous '80s-bent pop to HSW. Fog machines in full effect, people.
THURSDAY
* Kenny Scharf "Naturafutura" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. I gotta give Scharf props: he made his thing during the hard NY '80s alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and goofy as his Day-Glo cartoony psychedelia sways, it's still reminiscent of that pivotal time in this city plus unique from his current peer group. This series is based off Scharf's coastal studio in Bahia, Brazil, and he incorporated elements of the BP Deepwater disaster into two of them (incl. "Oil Painting", currently at MOCA LA).
+ "Three Dozen!" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 511 @ 27th St. A sweetened slew of Scharf's confectionary donut paintings.
* Hurvin Anderson "Subtitles" @ Michael Werner Gallery / 74 E 77th St. The gallery debut for London-based Anderson, after his traveling exhibition "Peter's Series" that was at Studio Museum Harlem after its Tate Modern show. I've heard references to Matisse, Doig and Hockney in Anderson's color-drenched personal renderings, so this new exhibition has the potential to be totally terrific.
* Juan Navarro Baldeweg "Pintar, Pintar" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Recent, vividly colored paintings by the renowned Spanish artist and architect, which is an important point b/c spatial representation figures heavily in his angular semi-abstract renderings, particularly the diamond shaped canvases of figures pouring paint into line crisscrossed rooms.
+ Steven Siegel "Biography". Full disclosure: I misread the artist's name as Steven SEAGAL. But seriously: Siegel works in the monumental, like this wall-spanning, gallery-filling "Biography", a 50-ft serpent of discarded ephemera and textured bits.
* Mark Seliger "Listen" @ Steven Kasher Gallery / 521 W 23rd St. Beauty, decay, the nude female form, New York City. Seilger's large platinum palladium prints will draw a reaction from you, whether it's admiration or repulsion. There is a book-signing for the eponymous Rizzoli-published tome.
* Suuns @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave), 6:30p/$10. Those creepy, creepy Canadians, w/ their loop-riddled guitar riffs and whispery vocals and schizo performing. Love 'em. w/ Julianna Barwick, to maybe temper things juuuust a bit.
* Invisible Days + Strange Rivals @ Party Expo / 929 Broadway, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle/Broadway), 9p/$5. Ah, Invisible Days (formerly Beloved Rogue, and featured on my LIST as that) do shoegaze strikingly well, as do Strange Rivals' dissonant psychedelia. Pair these Brooklyn dudes together and you've got a winner.
FRIDAY
* "Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Performance as art necessitates photographic archiving, if the artist intends it to be shown to a broader, generational audience. But performance FOR photography, the point of this exhibition (culled from MoMA's collection), produces its own unique results, from the cropped framing to the immediacy of action (esp. when the majority are shot w/ film). Feat. the media-hungry Bruce Nauman, the frightening Gunter Brus, some debilitating and still-haunting works of Adrian Piper and Rong Rong, classics from VALIE EXPORT and Ana Mendieta, plus Robert Gober, Tomoko Sawada, Lorna Simpson, Laurel Nakadate (who's got her own dope concurrent solo exhibition at PS1), Ai Weiwei and Bas Jan Ader (a notable one for this genre, as Ader disappeared after one of his photographic journeys).
* "Sculpture" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21St St. A five-artist exhibition of contemporary sculpture, feat. Liz Glynn's "California Surrogates for the Getty" (2008) (her take on looted artifacts returned to Italy by the museum), Justin Matherly's marble "Juno Ludovisi", Amy O'Neill's Victory Gardens-recalling floor sculptures, Nadine Robinson's light and sound experimentation and Michael Sailstorfer's metamorphosing of the reclaimed.
* Pierre Huyghe "The Host and the Cloud" @ Marian Goodman Gallery / 24 W 57th St. The NY-based French artist debuts his latest film, "The Host and the Cloud", filmed at the now-vacant building that used to be the National Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions and relating to three particular experiences observed by tours of that disused museum during Halloween, Valentine's Day and the 1st of May 2010. Plus, there's a rabbit-man, whose mask reappears alone in the exhibition, along with aquariums created by Huyghe.
* Gillian Carnegie @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Carnegie returns to the gallery w/ a sumptuous, meditative array of paintings of interiors, architecture and still lifes. That muted color and oldish style is what makes 'em so compelling, eschewing zingers and spectacle for hushed elegance.
+ "The Flemish Masters: That's Life", curated by Filiep Libeert.
* Jeppe Hein @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. In the Danish-born artist's NY gallery debut in 2008, he included a work that involved nails perpetually spitting out a hole in the wall each time someone passed by. I recall REALLY digging the show (lots of hidden bits). His latest should expand upon this, and our perceptions, considering the press release includes an image of the gallery, flipped upside down.
* Leon Ferrari @ Haunch of Venison NY / 1230 Ave of Americas, 20th Fl. Following Ferrari's enriching dual exhibition "Tangled Alphabets" (w/ the ineffable Mira Schendel) at MoMA in 2009, Haunch of Venison stages the 90-year-old Argentinian artist's next major U.S. retrospective. Think about that for a moment and weigh those words: this seminal Latin American artist's first major museum exhibition was at MoMA, less than two years ago. No time to waste, then: nearly 50 years worth of work, including Ferrari's wire sculptures and "written drawings", including "Opus 113" (seen in the MoMA exhibition) and rare monumental sculpture never exhibited stateside.
* "Postman Blues" (dir. Sabu, 1997) screening @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd, 6 to 51st St), 7:30p + Q&A. Sabu-san's recurring everyman (here a postal worker, played by Shinichi Tsutsumi) mixes up w/ old friend and now-Yakuza thug (a youngish Keisuke Horibe, and a go-to Yakuza thug, if anyone's seen his raspy role in Katsuhito Ishii's "Party 7") & the whole thing dissolves into comedic chase-scenes and misidentification.
* "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders" (dir. Jaromil Jireš, 1970) screening @ Museum of the Moving Image / 3601 35th Ave, Astoria (E/M/R to Steinway St, N/Q to 36th Ave/Washington Ave), 7p. A young woman, come of age, trapped in an impenetrable dream of magic-makers, vampires, salacious men and women. Terribly surreal and, far as I know, VERY rare. Hence why it's part of Moving Image's "Recovered Treasures" series. Plus the director's Czech, and the theatre quotes the film as a "Jodorowsky/Bergman coproduction of a Grimm's fairytale".
* "Rage" (dir. Sebastián Cordero, 2010) @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (NRW/L/456 to Union Sq). Phantasmagoric cinema's maestro Guillermo del Toro produced this nerve-shattering romantic thriller, about a Latin American immigrant who stealths away at his girlfriend's employers' mansion after a violent debacle, unbeknownst to them AND her. He observes her mistreatment as a housekeeper and plots, and you just know this isn't going to turn out pretty.
* "Ip Man II" (dir. Wilson Yip, 2010) @ Village East Cinema / 181 2nd Ave (L to 3rd Ave, NR/L/456 to Union Square). Donnie Yen plays the heroic Wing Chun master and Bruce Lee's teacher, relocated now to Hong Kong after the Japanese occupation of Foshan in '49. All he wants to do is settle in w/ his stunning wife (Lynn Hung, HELLO) and kid and introduce Wing Chun to the locals. Nope: the martial arts in this town are corrupt, and Sammo Hung's (action choreographer AND actor) in charge. You know what's gonna happen. Only then: the evil Brits in town send a right bastard boxer to challenge the local teachers. You know, East v. West, only w/ ass-kicking. But look, here's the thing w/ Ip Man: he doesn't want to fight you. He will happily pace around, critiquing his students and sipping his tea, then go back home to his stunning wife and kid. You challenge him, he'll smile at you then kick your ass.
* Blank Dogs + The Soft Moon @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$8. Nice and dark: if you like your pop muddled in The Cure's "Mixed Up"-era haze but still shimmering with panache, check Captured Tracks headliners Blank Dogs and their San Fran labelmates The Soft Moon. w/ Widowspeak
* Jessica 6 @ Cameo / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 10p/$10. A roof-raising bash before Jessica 6's European Tour and probably the hottest dancefloor in the five boroughs. Just listen to cutie Nomi croon a blistering cover of Bowie's "I'm Deranged". Hot stuff, coming through.
* How To Dress Well + Autre Ne Veut @ Church of the Messiah / 129 Russell St, Greenpoint (G to Nassau), 8p/$12. OK I've been to DIY/alternative venues before (even churches — and I don't mean the Masonic Temples) for live music. But this is a new one for me, and a worthy alternative to the Captured Tracks show in Williamsburg. Tom Krell, aka How To Dress Well, does this vocal-driven dance music straight out a ketamine dream. Similar deal w/ the mysterious Autre Ne Veut, though he veers more bygone-era R&B, though it's just as magnetizing.
* Mephista @ The Stone / 16 Ave C (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$10. An amazing "downtown NY" supergroup, comprised of Swiss pianist/keyboardist Sylvie Courvoisier, laptop electronics queen Ikue Mori and dynamic drummer Susie Ibarra, for an evening of potent improv.
SATURDAY
* Christopher Williams "For Example: Dix-Huit Lecons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 12)" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 W 19th St, gallery talk w/ curator/historian Mark Godfrey, 11:30a (RSVP: lodonnell@davidzwirner.com). Join London-based curator and art historian Godfrey fo a talk on the photographer ne plus ultra. Godfrey had a brilliant conversation w/ Williams in "After all" several autumns ago and is attuned to the artist's rigorous methodology.
* Arturo Herrera @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. The Berlin-based Herrera is a complicated one for me, as his previous gallery shows have been a whole lot of concept over varying media, that I would leave not having a solid grasp of any of it. This time he focuses on works and paper and a wall painting, jumbled message-laden collage. Somehow, I think I'll be able to extract from this. Plus: Americas Society hosts Herrera's "Les Noces" (2007), his first abstract filmic work, based on Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes and scored by Igor Stravinsky, opening FEB 3 (check next week's LIST for the writeup).
* "Non-Stop" (dir. Sabu, 1996) screening @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd, 6 to 51st St), 7:30p + Q&A. If I had to pick ONE Sabu-san film, it'd be this one. It's his debut, and it stars Tomorowo Taguchi (aka the wacked-out titular character from Shinya Tsukamoto's cyberpunk classic "Tetsuo") as a wacked-out middling criminal, chased by a combini clerk (rockstar Diamond Yukai) after a botched robbery, who in turn is chased by a Yakuza thug (Shinichi Tsutsumi), continuously, through Tokyo. All Sabu-san's features drew from this concentrated concoction. Plus, this is the director's last visit/Q&A at the Japan Society during the retrospective.
* Noveller + Grooms @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. The power of the guitar: Grooms temper theirs w/ a sludgy rhythm section (name your favorite five mid-'90s alternative acts) and intriguing harmonies. Noveller is Sarah Lipstate, recurring LIST fav, and she sculpts the wickedest, prettiest soundscapes from her axe.
* Beach Fossils + ARMS @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 7:30p/$14. An absolutely stacked lineup celebrating I Guess I'm Floating's (the eponymous music blog) 5th anniversary. Which means: the songwriterly, driving indie-rock of Todd Goldstein & crew as ARMS, the local and loud A Place to Bury Strangers, and Greenpoint's finest surf-tinged act Beach Fossils, to have you dancing and perspiring super-late.
* Real Estate @ Union Hall / 702 Union St, Park Slope (D/NR to Union St), 8p/SOLD OUT oops! No surprise, there. New Jersey quartet Real Estate practically defined the wave of surf-rock acts that spilled into NYC two summers ago, but these guys have the hook-laden, groove-smart vivacity to keep pioneering. May or may not be some tix at the door.
TUESDAY
* "The Emperor's Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). Define opulence: some of the most mind-meltingly costly decorative works from the Qianlong Emperor's 18th C. private retreat. Since the Met can't like transport the entire lacquer- and cloisonné-laced complex to its Chinese galleries, it did the next best by receiving chairs to humble you, loads of calligraphic panels and landscapes, and an assembled 12-ft tall purple sandalwood partition, on loan from Beijing's Palace Museum.
* Amy Khoshbin "practice" @ The Stone / 16 Ave C (F to 2nd Ave), 10p/$10. Khoshbin is an alumni from my university (UT Austin all the way), now based in Brooklyn and producing a wealth of multimedia acts. Her A/V performance tonight is part of Laurie Anderson's curated month at The Stone (and bonus trivia: Khoshbin is touring as video designer for Anderson's "Delusion", which played in BAM's Next Wave Festival last fall).
CURRENT SHOWS
* Laurel Nakadate "Only the Lonely" @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq). 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.
+ "Modern Women: Single Channel". Nakadate's videos exploring her own body and postfeminist gender dynamics segues into this goldmine from MoMA's film collection (they picked up "Oops!" and "Stay the Same Never Change"), 16 single-channel videos from 11 international women artists. It's an all-star cast, and though it's set firmly in the '60s & '70s (only two break from this, the younger artists Pipilotti Rist and Kristin Lucas), it is commendable (expected, really) that MoMA retains classics from this generation of feminist visual artists. We're particularly lucky w/ VALIE EXPORT, as there are three on view (not the famous '68 performance "Aktionshose:Genitalpanik"), the synth-driven, split-screen "Space Seeing - Space Hearing" (1973-4), the minute-long, guerilla-style "Touch Cinema" (1968) and the grueling "Hyperbulie" (1973), which finds a nude EXPORT navigating a cage of wires hooked to a huge battery and abuzz w/ singeing electricity. Her labored, tortured breathing is the only soundtrack. I'd never seen Steina Vasulka's experimental "Violin Power" (1970-8), a melange of wavy test-patterns, double-exposures and other interventions to the filming, which is of a processed-electric violin solo. Two Carolee Schneemann classics, and the earliest of the group, "Fuses" (1964-6) and the notorious "Meat Joy" (1964), performed by her bathing-suit-clad Kinetic Theatre group w/ lots of raw animal flesh. Dara Birnbaum's "Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman" (1978-9) is a treat, a riveting video-collage of Diana Prince repeated transforming into the titular hero, amid constant explosions and "I Am Wonder" performed by the Wonderland Disco Band. Her other iconic piece here, "Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry" (1979) has a funk soundtrack too, as she dissects the 'looks' of Eileen Brennen and Melissa Gilbert, amid others, on Hollywood Squares. Spend some time w/ this exhibition.
+ Sergej Jensen. This Berlin-based artist — whose style he self-described as "painting without paint" — is a serious visual palate-cleanser from the thrillingly overwhelming Laurel Nakadate exhibition dominating most of the 2nd Fl. Astute gallery-goers will remember Jensen from an Anton Kern Gallery exhibition a few years ago. Some of those works are exhibited here, his first in-depth survey at an American museum, plus a bunch I've never seen. This is tricky if you don't take your time w/ it, like many of them are stretched raw silk, or just burlap, or fabric sewn onto other fabric, or canvas treated w/ bleach (maybe gouache if he feels like laying down marks). Yet, they take on an intriguing span of effects, collage, proto-Cubism, Color Field. I mean, Blinky Palermo was one-upping Ellsworth Kelly at the hardedge game w/o paint back in the '70s. But I quite like Jensen's array here; it's not often I see a contemporary artist approach Minimalism and abstraction in this hand-worked way.
* Ursula von Rydingsvard "Sculpture 1991-2009" @ SculptureCenter / 44-19 Purves St, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq). One of the fun things about von Rydingsvard's massive cedar sculpture, their rippling surfaces prodigiously rubbed w/ graphite, is the artist's own matter-of-fact naming conventions. How else would you describe the monolithic figure with its brooding concave inlet? That would be "Wall Pocket" (2003-4), a wall-sized behemoth w/ a 'pocket' in one of its surfaces. Obviously. Another hanging wall relief, like a magnified plate dotted w/ ridges, its circumference surrounded by a raised collar? "Collar with Dots" (2008). Her titles add a weightlessness to another five-part piece, these barn-door-sized carved and chalk-etched planks leaned against the wall, called "Five Lace Medallions" (2006). And while I love seeing von Rydingsvard's cedar sculpture outdoors, interacting w/ the environment like upstate at Storm King sculpture garden, the Hoovering land-mover "Droga" (2009), cutting across the gallery's concrete floor, and the landscape-like undulations of "Krasawica II" (1998-2001) blend that outside/inside vibe quite nicely. Plus, don't miss her newest work "Elegantka" (2011), a resiny torch in SculptureCenter's courtyard. At dusk, this sculpture illuminates from within, producing a bluish glow that works quite perfectly off the (currently) snowy field.
* George Condo "Mental States" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave). The first U.S. survey of this range for George Condo comes now, nearly three decades in, and it's a CONCEPTUAL survey. Meaning: one floor of "states of mind", truncated into the marginalized cases in Melancholia, the lascivious sex-makin' and trash-talkin' in Manic Society, and the fairly standard room of motion-heavy (and gorgeous) abstracts. One more floor of a salon-style hanging, a symphonic wave of various emotions and vibes as 46 separate portraiture paintings (some almost Miniaturist tiny, others in wingspans of a basketball player) practically leap off the wall. It's a good lot, though, and the curious and purposeful approach resonates. Let's begin at the top: what the salon-style installation loses in individual intimacy (esp. w/ the higher-up paintings, like the brightly hued "The Colorful Banker" (2010) and the disarmingly alluring "Mad Mary" (2004), both affected in Condo's self-described "Pod people" style (think Picasso's biomorphic abstraction crossed w/ a sock-puppet) and hung near the museum's ceiling), it achieves a ratcheted up, almost physical reaction. It's an once a survey of America's collective memory since Condo first began painting (the works in the salon range from 1982's "The Madonna" to 2010) and a test of engaging emotive response. You can extract individual works from the onslaught, like the curious Muppet-like "Red Antipodular Portrait" (1996) and the cleanly beautiful "Mary Magdalene" (2009), which somehow channels Rene Magritte's Fauvism stage. The massive collaged work "Spanish Head Composition" (1998) screams Mosqueteros-era Picasso is front and center, and is particularly notable as it contains 46 A4-sized portraits w/in its borders, echoing the number of salon works. The pathos-inflicting grouping on the 3rd Fl. mostly bear that dank nondescript Rembrandt backdrop — like "The Secretary" (1998) and "The Chinese Woman" (2001), both of which flank the pantsless "Stockbroker" (2002) — while the manic quintet eschew luminous surfaces for flat, garish color, like the speed-lines and bright tangerine of "The Return of Client No. 9" (2008, one guess who they are) and its curiously similar neighbor, "Couple on Blue Striped Chair" (2005). The abstracts room also bears the most breathing-room, which is refreshing when taking in the fluidic action on their massive surfaces. The incredible textures on "Big Red Jam" (1992) and "Black and White Abstraction" (2005) produce almost calligraphic effects, w/ the latter resembling a Joseph Beuys chalkboard, attacked w/ Looney Tunes characters. The three landscape mixed-media works on linen, lined up and spanning one wall (note especially the middle work, "Female Figure Composition" (2009)) caused me to recall Ghada Amer's bustling, animation-like renderings, particularly her collaborative work w/ Reza Farkhondeh, at least stylistically (the hard-edged figures, bearing both Condo's "Pod people" abstraction and high-realism, covered in blurred colorful bursts and patterns). This lot hasn't been displayed together in the U.S. ever, and it evokes an interesting domain between the watery Impressionists and graffiti-laden LES (befitting its installation on the Bowery). It was here that I "got" Condo's power.
* Ellen Gallagher "Greasy" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. The miracles this artist does w/ cut-paper continue to elude and enchant me. Gallagher's latest body of work, bridging the period b/w her 2005 Whitney exhibition and now, somehow channels both density and fragility. Her large "collages" (in the literal sense, as they are indeed composed mostly of ink-soaked strips of paper) come across more as carvings, like she hewed an indigo-stained block of wood and ended w/ these ghostings of Black periodical clippings. Check "OK Corral" (2008) and "Puppy Chow" (2009), both midnight-toned networks of slashed paper. This carries over to "An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity" (2008), acting as backdrop to sinewy arms and distorted physiognomy. In a few cases, like the eponymous new work and the stunning "Unit" (2010), the surface exhibits deep cracks, like Gallagher chipped away at 'em until just the point where they began to shatter. The eight-part series "Morphia" trails about both galleries, transparent, egg-washed and incised paper enclosed in glass like artifacts, their ink- and gouache-markings seeping through to the other side. Her non-representational representation, as it were, is saturated, stained, cleaved and practically obliterated. But it's beautiful, searching through those layers for the figures within.
* Ray Caesar "A Gentle Kind of Cruelty" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. I never thought I'd use "painterly" in the same breath as Ray Caesar, the dark alchemist of macabre babydolls rendered in 3D modeling software, but that adjective is apropos in his latest body of work. He's softened the edges of many of his creepy, biomorphic girls, not so much treated them w/ the blur presets in Photoshop but rather this overall weathered, muted old-style drama. Then again, the varnish treatments on the final UltraChrome on Dibond prints, like "Second Sight" (w/ its amorphous green-gas backdrop) and the diffuse spotlight on "Totentanz", works wonders, too. Though compare w/ the untreated UltraChrome prints, like the fine mist hanging over "Day Trip", and that softness remains. It puts his trademark slick production skills, like on "Silent Partner" (devilishly kinky, but more throwback to Caesar's earlier works), into razor-sharp focus.
* Yuichi Higashionna "Fluorescent" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. As can be gleaned from the show-title, creative light sculpture is Higashionna's modus operandi. He includes some of those twisty circular-bulb "chandeliers" here, but they're augmented by trompe l'oeil black-striped walls and illuminated curtains, throwing moire patterns and "live" Op art stimulation into the mix. His crude Venetian black glass mobiles become lively against the black grids, and this mutant multifaceted sculpture of acrylic-framed mirrors is like a junior-high makeup counter extended to voyeuristic proportions. There's quite a bit of eye-trickery going on here. I'm impressed.
* Kai Althoff "Punkt, Absatz, Bluemli" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Step confidently onto that pollen-looking surface (it's actually water-based yellow paint, already dry) and this Cologne-based artist's latest solo exhibition. There's a Chagall-ian dreaminess to this, in the attenuated figures painted on canvas or fabric, plus the life-size sculpted couple cavorting against a screen of multicolored artisan mugs. The underlying fantasy element is tempered by several very realistic renderings of young Orthodox Jewish men. Add the deep fuchsia curtains and there's something domestic about the whole installation, too — it opens another door into Althoff's imagination.
* McDermott & McGough "Of Beauty and Being" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. I hesitate to effuse on this culture-mining duo, but their latest collection of restructured advert narratives, firmly situated in 1955, is undeniably gorgeous. They used this tricolor carbon photographic process to print these poster-sized gems, a technique instilled by photographer Paul Outerbridge in the '30s for color magazine adverts. Which is what these look like: saturated maraschino-cherry reds and powdery teals, eye-popping primaries and airbrushed skin. Oh yes, there's a lot of female nudes here, homage to Outerbridge (plus Man Ray, Steichen and others), like "My Song of Love", masked and spotlit in front of red-green curtains, and the dreamlike shadowy curves of "A Woman Alone". The patterned "Always Reminding Me That We're Apart", w/ the foregrounded elbow-length blue glove, bejeweled and grasping a shiny compact, must be seen to be believed, like the more restrained beauty of "When Love is Far Away", emphasizing the luminescence in nails and lips, beyond the bling-y earring.
+ Ghada Amer "100 Words of Love". One epic new sculpture, composed of 100 calligraphed Arabic words for love.
* Stephen G. Rhodes @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Last time I saw Rhodes, it was his compact and destroyed presidential chair "Interregnum Repetition Restoration, Upholstered" (2008) at the New Museum's 'Younger than Jesus' group exhibition. The ghostly "portraits" that hung behind this installation recur as "Vacant Portrait: Rousseau" in Rhodes' gallery-filling ode to Immanuel Kant, a labyrinth of curved temporary walls covered in graffiti-like renderings and spotlights, ceramic mugs and extension cords. The central four-channel projection, revolving on a furniture pedestal and punctuated by Rhodes-as-Kant's clomping footsteps amid corridors and grasslands, is either the eye of this sensory-overload hurricane or the center of a particularly pernicious whirlpool. Either way, dive in.
* Jonggeon Lee & Buhm Hong "I Was There" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. There is something intrinsically personal and relatable in both these NY-based artists' respective works. Lee's fragmented woodworking and molding apparatuses, plus his carved flooring "Bridge of Paradise" makes me think of Brooklyn house parties (you know, those flats w/ lots of room to move around and go crazy, rare in Manhattan unless 1) you own a loft or 2) you live in UES luxury). Hong's combination video projection and mixed-media mobile "Hide & Seek II" (whose primary structure comes from a bunch of copper pipes) is another instance of architecture rooted in soirees, or conversely the opposite.
* "L'insoutenable L'égerèté de L'être" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Translation "The unbearable lightness of being", but it sounds way cooler en Français. This is a joint group show at the gallery's NY and Paris locations, named after Milan Kundera's 1984 novel, and feat. a genre- and generational-spanning cast of the sublime and nightmarish. The artists conjure a range of human emotion, and there's no clean path through, so take your chances. Lawrence Weiner's "1/2 Empty, 1/2 Full, Whatsoever", w/ its sharp diagonal plummet into the circled "whatsoever", is typical of some feelings stirred up here. It faces a wall of vivid Andres Serrano prints, some softer portraits but also Klansmen, morgue "portraits" and the unsettling "The Interpretation of Dreams", from the University of Chicago's Renaissance Society's 2008 "Black Is, Black Ain't" exhibition. Of the several videos here (all in TVs placed directly on the gallery floor), if you should accidentally look at Hermann Nitsch's classic grueling bacchanalia "6 Tage-Spiel" (1998) (replete w/ animal slaughter, marching bands, a pseudo crucifixion, mass intoxication), then I encourage you to seek out David Claerbout's lulling "Cat and Bird in Peace" (1996), which is just what it sounds like, a cat and a bird sharing the same space, not messing w/ one another. It's fantastic.
* R. Luke DuBois "A More Perfect Union" @ bitforms / 529 W 20th St, 2nd Fl. I had loads of fun w/ this exhibition, DuBois' mashup of U.S. state maps, Congressional Districts and dating-site profiles, producing "romantic atlases". Thus, dating profile keywords convert into cities, w/ the most popular concentrated as the new capitals. The results are varyingly funny, surprising and kind of sad: Texas is "Clubs" (w/ next largest "Rich", situated in Houston, and "Correct"); Colorado intriguingly is "Light" (w/ "Gods" — yes that's a plural — as number 2); Jersey is easy to dig at, "Train" (w/ "Annoying" and "Cynical" the runners-up), though NY's "Assembly" (w/ "Xerox", "Dinosaur" and "Beef" counting too) is equally dry and scattered. Indiana's "Pacer" (I'm guessing that's a sports team?) would be slyly expected if its 2nd largest wasn't "Unemployed". PA's "Frightening" and "Weird", plus DE's "Clairvoyant", speak to something about those states I didn't know about, apparently. And Kansas kind of speaks for 'em all, w/ "Anyone".
* Heinz Mack "Early Metal Reliefs 1957-1967" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. I like to call this "heavy metal reliefs". But seriously, it's a great array, all shiny steely surfaces that reflect or protrude their pointy edges. The bulk of the exhibition is hung salon-style between the 1st and 2nd Fls (this occurred during Bruce Nauman's show, too, and I wonder if it's a blessing and curse of the gallery's taller, skinnier structure), making so you have to ascend the 2nd Fl to clearly see the top row, and even then you can't get close to them. The range here, shreds of aluminum like a metal-coated piano ("Meine kleine Klaviatur", 1960) or marking a wooden surface like a shark's prickly dermis ("Große Lichtrelief", 1965), or the amusing frozen explosion of shards of glass and aluminum enclosed in Plexiglas ("Grosses Splitter-Bild", 1966), seemingly cueing Anselm Reyle three decades before the fact. The 2nd fl is a quickie, some pretty cool Op-ish works on paper, or rather silver spray on silver foil, and the delicate "Box of Light Spirals", 1966. The 3rd Fl. contains the frightening MOVING Mack sculpture, forays incl. the rough-hewn "Nacht-Licht-Skulptur", 1970 (resembling a screwdriver's head magnifying like 10000), plus the regal "Stele mit Lichtpunkten", 1987, an obelisk of Plexiglas and transparent foil, facing out onto the Bowery's snowy rooftops.
LAST CHANCE
* Lee Krasner "Paintings 1959 - 1965" @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. Krasner's seminal 'night journey' paintings created during bouts of chronic insomnia, all of them necessarily painted at night and most in a coffee-toned palette of cascading letter-like elements and abstract gestural strokes. The epically huge "Another Storm" (1963), w/ its melted cherry ice cream tones, rivals MoMA's collection. Add Krasner's show as a must-see accompaniment to MoMA's "Abstract Expressionist New York".
* "Law of the Jungle", curated by Tiago Carneiro da Cunha @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Survival is key, personal and collective, when navigating the current art scene. This Brazil-heavy show does that nation proud, w/ strong works from Adriana Varejao (a visceral take on Darwin's theory, in "Cannibal Landscape"), Adriana Ricardo's soft, photographic like paintings of Rio de Janeiro's massive Rocinha favela, and Os Gemos' ecstatically patterned figure leaping from a vortex of color. Plus a "Blade Runner"-like psychedelia from Ashley Bickerton (repping Bali).
* "Here and Now" @ Lyons Wier Gallery / 542 W 24th St. The inaugural group exhibition in the gallery's new location injects a good jab of badassness (and solid, representational works) to the W.Chelsea scene. Both Tim Okamura, Mary Henderson and Fahamu Pecou work in stunningly realistic portraiture, w/ Okamura's in particular emanating a strong, meditative beauty, plus Henderson's photorealistic nostalgia. A bit of sexiness from James Rieck (again with realism, but enlarged and cropped for maximum ratio of skin to fire engine red shirt) and Ryan Bradley (an ace of spades-patterned nude, evaporating into its Arches paper background), and a bit of notable, intriguing sculpture (Andres Basurto cobbled up a bottle-green, horned skull of broken glass and epoxy putty, Jan Huling's "Steampunk Willy" is, I think, a beaded riff on the Kewpie doll). The exhibition brims w/ creativity and attitude: I look forward to concentrated doses now from individual artists. W.Chelsea, I hope you're ready.
* Al Held "Concrete Abstraction" @ Ameringer McEnery Yohe / 525 W 22nd St. Some of Held's lesser known brushwork ink drawings on canvas from the '60s, revealing his Abstract Expressonist (specifically Franz Kline-like "action painting") roots before his headlong plunge into Hardedge renderings.
* Nathan Harger @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. Iconic normality of the NY skyline — power-lines, cranes, crisscrossing bridge-work, aluminum-sided buildings — reduces to crisp, constrasty b&w prints.
* Deville Cohen, Andrei Koschmieder, Joe Winter @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. The interaction b/w Koschmieder's screenprinted series "Catnip High" and Winter's malfunctioning cubicle hell — if you've ever had to change a toner cartridge, you now what I mean — tie quite nicely, but hang out a bit for Cohen's video installation "The Wall", complete w/ a Xeroxed brick wall.
* Tony Smith "Bronze" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 532 W 24th St. A treasure trove of Smith's classic small bronze sculptures (finished in signature black), nearly off of which ultimately turned into later monolithic works. Of course I gravitated immediately to "Wall", a sliver of rectangular prism that, if turned on its side, would resemble a sinister (if diminutive) monolith. The adjacent "Trap" next to it, a snaking diamond-prism letter 'e' flipped backwards, is equally impressive. And that's not to forget the kinetic abstraction of "Source" and "The Snake is Out" (love the titles), plus the little evil-droid array cunningly titled "Smog".
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
fee's LIST (through 1/25)
WEDNESDAY
* "The Woodmans" (dir. C. Scott Willis, 2010) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Embark on an entrancing faded-memories trip w/ this incredible experimental film - slash - documentary. Key subject is young Francesca Woodman, an amazing late-20th C. b&w photographer (hauntingly self-portraitist) who committed suicide at age 22. Her oeuvre is interwoven in the narrative, remarking on her artistic parents and the ambitious, suffocating NY art scene.
* Cloud Nothings + Toro Y Moi @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/SOLD OUT oops! Talk about red-hot talent. My goodness, it's like the entire roster is barely drinking age, and it puts the smeary electro-pop of Chaz Bundick (aka Toro y Moi, aka frontman for The Heist) firmly in the "adult" category. That's when you place him against Dylan Baldi, brainchild behind the noisy indie outfit Cloud Nothings, and NY-by-way-of-Michigan Indian Rebound, the likes of whom are humblingly young and humblingly talented. Hence why the show's sold out.
* WIERD presents The Soft Moon @ Home Sweet Home / 131 Chrystie St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), midnight. Picture The Cure's "Mixed Up" album, but only the echoey bits of "A Forest (Tree Mix)" and "The Caterpillar (Flicker Mix)", w/ Robert Smith's super whispery vocals. That's a bit like San Fran's The Soft Moon, bringing their somberly gorgeous '80s-bent pop to HSW. Fog machines in full effect, people.
THURSDAY
* "L'insoutenable L'égerèté de L'être" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Translation "The unbearable lightness of being", but it sounds way cooler en Français. This is a joint group show at the gallery's NY and Paris locations, named after Milan Kundera's 1984 novel, and feat. a genre- and generational-spanning cast of the sublime and nightmarish.
* "A Room, In Three Movements: Katy Heinlein, Sheila Pepe, Halsey Rodman" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. The three sculptors here, Brooklyn-based Pepe and Rodman and Houston, TX's Heinlein will have their works rotated in different parts of the gallery throughout the exhibition, prompting unique responses and modifications as needed. This should be especially interesting w/ Pepe's site-specific maneuvers and Heinlein's kinetic assemblages, and worth multiple visits after the opening.
* Jose Luis Farinas "Skirting the Apocalypse" @ Miyako Yoshinaga art prospects / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. A beastly marriage of Bosch and Bacon that would make Clive Barker shriek with joy. If you like your renderings demon-tiffic and dripping with Dante steez, sell your soul to the discomfiting seduction of Farinas.
* "Gantz" (dir. Shinsuke Sato, 2011) screening @ Regal Union Square 14 / 850 Broadway (NRW/L/456 to Union Square), 8p. OK here's the good news: this promisingly blockbuster Japanese film (part one of two), based off a wildly popular manga I've never read and a TV series I've never seen, debuts in Japan AND here on the same day. The plot is about two reincarnated young blokes assassinating aliens, or something. The bad news: "Gantz"'s U.S. premiere is DUBBED. Take your chances (though I wonder when/if it'll properly screen here, w/ subtitles).
* Satoshi Takeishi & Shoko Nagai @ The Stone / 16 Ave C (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$10. AKA Vortex, the starred pairing of electronics/percussion whiz Takeishi and pianist/sonic sculptor Nagai, conjuring ghost stories and ephemeral landscapes in their magnetizing duets.
* Knyfe Hyts @ Secret Project Robot / 210 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Get on this: Brooklyn's classic no-wavers Knyfe Hyts perform on the 20th of every month this year (until November, I think?), leading an avant-art party until the venue's…close? I seriously hope this graffiti-covered, icebox cold (or alternatively furnace-hot) basement space lives on, either here or somewhere equally as cool. I've seen way too many dope shows here for it to be otherwise. But still: Knyfe Hyts = awesome, & they release a super-limited cassette at this show. w/ Liturgy & K-Holes
* Weird Wives + Weekends @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p. Can't go wrong w/ Miami's Weird Wives, which feat. Thomas Fekete and Marcos Marchesani (guitarist and keyboardist/percussionist, respectively, of Surfer Blood), but they're loads more psychedelic, w/ an early-'90s grime over the whole thing. Plus Baltimore's Weekends, who promise to knock you straight into the weekend w/ those riffs of theirs.
FRIDAY
* Patrick Jacobs "Familiar Terrain" @ Pierogi Gallery / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7-9p. Jacobs' warm, watery worlds blur the line b/w photography, sculpture and other media in his mind-blowing convex-glass dioramas of like the softest rolling meadows you've ever seen, you want to dive face-first into 'em and roll around, and they stretch miles into the distance and it almost feels as though you could.
* Christian Marclay "The Clock" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. The U.S. premiere of multimedia maestro Marclay's 24-hr long video work "The Clock" — an array of time-pieces from film excerpts — that unfolds in realtime. Meaning the 1st screening begins at the opening 6p and continues through SAT 6p. This isn't Marclay's first brush w/ A/V collage (think 1995's "Telephones", itself a study of Hollywood film phone convos), but it's the most durational.
* Rebecca Morales "While There's Calm" @ BravinLee Programs / 526 W 26th St #211. Smeared-color watercolors and mixed media undersea-like renderings on vellum.
* "The Housemaid" (dir. Im Sang-soo, 2010) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Who isn't up for some bourgeoisie voyeurism and mania-fueled murder. Im amps up the dark depravity of the 1960 original, of an au pair and a cruel upper-class family. Competed for the Palme d'Or at 2010 Cannes, loved at 2010 Fantastic Fest (where it screened against the original). The games rich people play...
* "Mamma Roma" (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). You don't mess w/ Mamma Roma, aka Anna Magnani, in this classic tough-love Pasolini feature. Magnani owns the screen, portraying an ex-prostitute making good for her thieving teenage son. Her eerie night walks, the camera ahead of her as gaslights bloom and disappear in the twilight, are pure cinematic transcendence.
* "Maboroshi" (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, 1995) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Koreeda-san's first feature film, whose full title is "Maboroshi no Hikari" (or "Phantasmic Light") and strikes a tone very close to the core of this vulnerable feature, about a young Osaka couple, loss, remorse. It'll stun you to the core, and it's terribly beautiful. Also SAT & SUN
* "Lemmy" (dir. Greg Olliver & Wes Orshoski, 2010) @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (NRW/L/456 to Union Sq). Hell yes, a proper hard-livin' documentary on Motörhead frontman Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, a living legend in speed-metal and music history. Snake-eyes watching you, baby.
* "Hell" (dir. Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960) screening @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd, 6 to 51st St), 7:30p. Way to cut to the chase: naming your experimental labyrinthine horror film "Hell".
* "Bad Biology" (dir. Frank Henenlotter, 2008) midnight screening @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave). I love these "adults only" features! This one sounds extremely over the top. Think I'm joking? Henenlotter notoriously directed "Basket Case" (you bio-creature feature freaks know what I mean), and the grimy-ass RA the Rugged Man (the Suffolk County deep underground MC) co-produced it (along w/ Vinnie Paz of Jedi Mind Tricks, an indie hip-hop outfit I dig). But that's just the beginning! Our two leads incl. an insatiable woman who births mutant offspring and a dude w/ a drug-addicted member. Think about that for a minute. Also SAT.
* MINKS (album release party) @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JZ to Marcy), 8:30p/$10. Super-smart, '80s-dredging indie-pop that works in cemeteries and runway shows. Meet MINKS, who I've hyped since I had a sonic love affair w/ 'em back when (I think it was at Glasslands, in fact…). w/ Big Troubles & Widowspeak, so expect a properly glamish bash.
* ELKS + Heliotropes + Mirror Queen @ Local 269 / 269 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave, F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/$7. I hope you like it heavy! B/c are YOU ever in luck. Where to begin: show up early for Heliotropes, the toughest all-girl doom-pop band in the known universe. Stay for the psych metal of Mirror Queen and (gasp) ELKS, for extra-majorness.
SATURDAY
* Ellen Gallagher "Greasy" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. MAYJAH. Gallagher hasn't had a solo show here since 2005, so her return to NY has got me all excited. We'll find her still mining pop culture and historical references, utilizing Black-interest magazines as raw media for collaged, modified, cut-up, inked over "jams", eruptions of obliterated text and disassembled figures.
* Ray Caesar "A Gentle Kind of Cruelty" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. Impeccable Maya-modeled babydoll chimeras, now with an even more dreamy, painterly approach. I swear, if Caesar ever created a 3D short film (or something) from his digital oeuvre, that would be mayjah.
+ Erik Mark Sandberg "Get Pretty Now". Think like "Harry and the Hendersons", only rainbow-furred and clad eye-popping tourist outfits. That's one facet of Sandberg's style, along w/ his furiously rendered abstract works.
* On Line/Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker "Violin Phase from Fase: Four movements to the Music of Steve Reich" (1982) performances @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). a good portion of the Marron Atrium is covered in sand for this, contemporary dance choreographer De Keersmaeker's excerpt from her seminal early work "Fase" (created when she was 22!). You scan see her dizzying video "Top Shot" (2002) up in the "On Line" exhibition. This performance is like that, spinning on the beach, brought to life. Performances at 2/4p, also SUN 2/4p.
* The Vaccines + Oberhofer @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JZ to Marcy), 9p/$10. Check this out: I know literally two things about The Vaccines. 1) one of their two Myspace promos, "Wreckin' Bar", is 84 seconds of concentrated pop. 2) this is their American debut. Or rather, it is at Bowery Ballroom on THU, w/ local powerhouse Oberhofer, but I'd go for the sweatier, tinier Glasslands if I were you. The leap of faith just might equal the best concert you've ever attended.
* Purling Hiss @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), 8p/$10. LIST-certified Philly psychedelia, courtesy of Birds of Maya frontman Mike Polizze. I'm talking Purling Hiss. Good and groovy. w/ Home Blitz
SUNDAY
* Ursula von Rydingsvard "Sculpture 1991-2009" @ SculptureCenter / 44-19 Purves St, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq), 5-7p. I am so stoked for this. Von Rydingsvard is one of my favorite contemporary sculptors. She reworks cedar beams into hewn, rippling monoliths, petrified dragons, cavernous entrances. A very cool thing about them is they retain their organic nature: seen outdoors, they fit well into the landscape; indoors, they burst alive from the gallery floor and/or walls. So it's particularly cool that SculptureCenter hosts the beginning of this touring mid-career retrospective, as its indoor/outdoor enough to balance the energy of von Rydingsvard's monumental wood figures. Plus, there's a non-touring cast-resin entity specially installed in the venue's exhibition court.
+ "Vide-Poche". Six artists — Michele Abeles, Samuel Clagnaz, Isabelle Cornaro, Miles Huston, Charles Mayton and Valerie Snobeck — empty form and content through their diverse practices, from Abeles' nouveau still-life photography to Clagnaz's video work.
* Sergej Jensen @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq). The Berlin-based artist's 1st solo NY show, a sublime affair of stained and reductive textile-based abstract paintings.
+ Laurel Nakadate "Only the Lonely". Nakadate's 1st large-scale museum exhibition, feat. a decade's worth of voyeuristic and deeply personal video (incl. the recent "Good Morning, Sunshine" and "The Wolf Knife") plus new durational photo series "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears".
+ "Modern Women: Single Channel". From the MoMA's collection, eleven women artists in single-channel video from the '60s through '90s. Feat. Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, VALIE EXPORT, Mako Idemitsu, Joan Jonas, Kristin Lucas, Mary Miss, Pipilotti Rist, Carolee Schneemann and Steina Vasulka.
MONDAY
* "Santa Sangre" (dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1989) sneak preview @ reRun Theatre / (F to York St, AC to High St), 10p. The surrealist psychological horror classic you've probably never seen. Severin Films is FINALLY releasing Jodorowsky's cult classic on DVD, so catch this flashback/flash-forward strange circus of abuse, hallucinations and unrequited love — I mean, it's not ALL dark and scary.
* MAP Magazine presents "Difficult Gifts" @ E-Flux / 41 Essex St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 7p/FREE. A program on art as gift, feat. works by Andrea Buttner, BS Johnson, Duncan Marquiss, Shahryar Nashat, Laure Prouvost and Stephen Sutcliffe. The contemporary art quarterly MAP feat. Nashat in their winter issue, which coincides w/ the screening.
* Year of the Tiger @ Union Hall / 702 Union St, Park Slope (D/NR to Union St), 8p/$8. Think Alec Empire mixed w/ Karen O, The Prodigy's air-raid synths crossed w/ Amanda Ghost's searing lyricism. Now meet NY's Year of the Tiger, a melodiously abrasive electro trio, and dance your faces off.
TUESDAY
* Yuck @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave), 9:30p/$10. I really really want to love Yuck. They're a youngish coed UK-based lot, they make that addictive indie-pop filtered through raindrops and cigarettes like only a Londoner (like vocalist Daniel, though the group hails international) can…and the last time they were supposed to play here, during CMJ, they had to cancel the tour. So I'm super-duper stoked to see them. w/ Total Slacker
* Suuns @ The Rock Shop / 249 4th Ave, Park Slope (D/NR to Union St), 8p/$10. Those creepy, creepy Canadians, w/ their loop-riddled guitar riffs and whispery vocals and schizo performing. Love 'em.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Lee Lozano "Tools" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Just plain excellent. Put this exhibition high on your must-see list and do just that. Lozano was a brilliantly tortured soul, brimming with genius, whose life WAS her art, as she pursued stricter conceptualist practices in the '70s that drew her away from the art-world (and thereby the public eye). So her surviving physical oeuvre is limited, but terribly intense, and it is fortuitous of the gallery for hosting this rare collection of drawings and paintings of tools from 1963-4, during Lozano's raw expressionist "comix" period in NYC. Think massive clamps and shadowed screws, a hammer-head blurred into motion, wrenches so biomechanical to make Giger blush. One hardcore razorblade titled "hard". More macho and sexier than Claes Oldenburg's suggestive tools. Lozano would eventually turn to Minimalism, in her late-'60s "Wave" paintings, and then fully into the Conceptual practices that moved her into obscurity. I really wish she were alive today, or had still been "making art" in the '70s and '80s. While Eva Hesse died young (against her control) and therefore had a brief career and Lozano self-truncated her own career, I still strongly note this connection of originality and vitality b/w the two artists. Few exhibits move me like this one.
* Tony Feher "Next On Line" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. Now Feher's no stranger for pushing commercially available materials to their limits — I'm thinking his meditative arrays of tinted water-filled PET bottles — but this new array of snaking vinyl tubing, at once sculpture and static 3D line "drawings", is particularly exacting in its emotional resonance. The works exhibited here, about 871 ft of clear vinyl tubing split amongst five pieces, plus x-amount of food coloring drops mixed into distilled water, everything hung alarmingly (charmingly?) by office-grade binder clips, are lyrical beauties, their intrinsic grace belying their vague respective weights (I mean, we're talking 200-300 ft of water-filled vinyl tubing per, that must weigh something). The opening figure is a great mess of reddish Silly String, enlarged to Claes Oldenburg proportions. A curvy-edged blue one naturally mimics cresting waves, but with a Hokusai clarity. And then there's the big one in the back, a cascade of five separate tubes, intermingling on the floor like the butterscotch topping liberally and artistically applied as some restaurant's dessert de resistance. So don't be surprised if you cull out your own nostalgic imagery whilst viewing Feher's latest: they've a tendency to do just that.
* Jennifer Bartlett "Recitative" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. Walking amid Bartlett's largest-scale, eponymous painting, a color celebration over 372 steel plates and 158 feet, spanning three gallery walls, is like a journey through modern and contemporary art history. I encourage you to explore this mammoth from a clockwise direction, beginning at the show-title near the gallery doors and guiding along toward its stunning denouement. That "art history" description has a two-prong meaning: Bartlett mines Minimalism, filtering notions of Jasper Johns (the warm foresty-colored chevron patterns), Sol LeWitt (orderly primaries), Brice Marden (a kinetic whiplike form in black enamel — though its movement over multiple plates reminded me of Elizabeth Murray, too) and Gerhard Richter (in a brilliant "color-chart" array near the "end") through her own unique visual language. She also recalls some of her other seminal wall-works, MoMA's "Rhapsody" (1976, first exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery) and Cleveland Museum of Art's "Song" (2007) (their media accompanies "Recitative", which is cool to see the recurrence of those orderly primaries, that whiplike black enamel form, plucked from their prior incarnations). It's an animating experience, walking forward and backward around this snaking piece, acting as a visual palimpsest to the power of color, the energy of reduction and reintroduction.
* Ulf Puder @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Neo Rausch might be the best-known name of the 1st Gen. Leipziger Hochschule, but Puder's debut stateside puts him firmly in the need-to-know for younger Eastern European artists. I love these stark, uninhabited landscapes, filled w/ ramshackle buildings seemingly poised at either post-aftermath or approaching unseen destruction.
* Amy Rathbone "suchness" @ Priska Jusckha Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Rathbone further develops her "flocks" vocabulary (little wire loops or ink pigment exploding on the gallery walls) w/ a blend of natural and artificial materials. She covers a wall w/ conifer branches (recycled from old Christmas trees!), some yanked towards a focal point via wire extensions, terminating w/ a collection of little wire-hung concrete spheres (which made me think of Eva Hesse). She includes some mixed-media works mounted on birch panel, like the "scaffolds", 2D versions of a hanging wood sticks and branches installation in a corner of the gallery, plus these sprayed clouds of ink, watercolor and gouache, like dried raindrops on a windshield.
* Patrick Hill "Clumsy Angels" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Hill has a handle on gorgeous/dangerous combos, and he elevates that in a double-layered way w/ this inherently naughty exhibition. His latest sculpture utilizes wood beams for structural support in riffs on Classical figurative sculpture, but the cut-marble legs and lower bodies are all spread eagle or appropriating fin-de-siecle burlesque posture, plus he painted the wood acid-glow tones, all yellows, magentas and oranges, to contrast sharply off the marble "skin".
* Piotr Uklański "Discharge!" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. I wanted to like this exhibit way more than I did, in the end. It's been a few years since NY had an Uklański show (his last, "Biało-Czerwona", lit. "white-red", practically christened the gallery's 21st St space), so I was ready. There's some spectacle here, but no mammoth resiny paintings, no soaring sculpture, no gruesome mixed-media installation (nor any thought-provoking video). No, this chameleon's entire output is a bunch of nouveau tie-dyed paintings. Not that spin art that Damien Hirst did (or still does): stretched cotton bedsheets attacked with fiber-reactive dyes and bleach, producing saturated starbursts and corrosive pattens. He sourced his fabrics at Ikea and Bloomingdales (according to the gallery's press release) and made these eye-watering works — plus had fun naming them, if "Orgasmatron" and "Atomic Ovum" are to be believed. The odd one out, a garish pottery relief called "Kinda Kinky", echoes the tie-dyes in 3D, and it's meaty enough to sink ones teeth into. Overall, not my cup of tea. Maybe yours?
* Gia Edzgveradze "Stolen Blanket & Other Short Stories" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. A career-spanning exhibition from the Georgian-born, German-based Conceptualist, the 1st of its kind in N. America — indeed yet again an instance of a challenging, creative artist who shows widely across Europe (and Russia!) but not in the states. Don't miss it: Edzgveradze tiptoes on gender-bending and patriarchy-busting anthems in his "Dancing Bride" series (from the late '90s), his mammoth, brushwork-like "The Big Bra" (1990), even his stunning, mixed media triptych, created from sketched projected enlargements of other sketches, perforated paper and confetti on wood panel, the entire effect mimicking Georgian calligraphic script. He continually superimposes image over image, and himself into these images, resulting in a blanketed text so interwoven with history and personal reflection that, like alluded in the show-title, you might want to claim it for yourself.
* Robbin Hill "Case Discussions" @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. I like the concept: Hill incorporates decommissioned lab equipment from the University of California at Davis' flea market (she's a member of studio faculty) in this exhibition, turning out wax- and cloth-filled projectors and desks reminiscent of Piero Manzoni crossed w/ Rona Pondick. Only thing is, Hill's telltale cyanotypes (a few are present here) are totally lost in the noise.
* Irvin Morazan "Temple of the Bearded Man" @ DCKT / 237 Eldridge St. The standout work in Morazan's christening of the gallery's inaugural debut on Eldridge is definitely the enormous mixed media headdress he wore during the opening reception/procession from the Bowery to the gallery. It's part-cloud, part-coyote pelts, with a neon beast crowning the top, and it recurs in Morazan's collaged photography, reflecting him as a folkloric shaman.
* Yeni Mao "Dead Reckoning" @ Collette Blanchard Gallery / 26 Clinton St. Mao works efficiently in mixed media installation and photography, the former referencing explorer Zheng He in a flotilla of upturned boats, the latter "The Battle Wizard" feat. almost flip-book-styled Wuxia action.
* Brendan Flanagan "Sightlines" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Flanagan's debut stateside solo show is a B-movie success, far as I'm concerned. He's got an excellent handle on controlling his media, coating panels with hazy gradients of oil paint, then introducing his melty, multicolored figures on top, oozily ominous monsters and victims in wet acrylic, practically sliding off the surface. The tiny gallery echoes the creepshow factor, making this more a cohesive installation than just a bunch of paintings hung in a white-box space. Really dope.
* "Paintings & Sculpture" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Beyond that innocently vague title lies a monster, in the form of Mike Kelley's classic "Torture Table" (1992) his macho do-it-yourself woodworking apparatus grounded in pain and emasculation. Upstairs is relatively kinder, a rather gorgeous (if perhaps quite visceral) Carroll Dunham "Sixth Pine" (1987), painted on pine veneer, a textural Christopher Wool enamel on aluminum, crackling with dark energy, plus a ghostly Albert Oehlen from '89.
* Joe Bradley "Human Form" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. The second of concurrent Bradley solo shows in NYC (the other Paleolithic affair is at Gavin Brown's Enterprise) is way subtler, but still ballsily masculine. It's a set of black-ink silkscreened silhouettes in full-on Bangles posing on white canvas. He alluded to this in a billboard outside Gavin Brown, but the arrangement and potential movement of the figures in Canada's bunker-like space (everyone poised in stop-animation like Keith Haring characters) amplifies the experience.
* "Offset Summary" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. Oh I dug this. The exhibition title and concept stems from spatial intervention and reconfiguration. Back in the day, a different space occupied this gallery, and in it was a Lawrence Weiner work "A 36" x 36" Removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard from a Wall" (1968). That 40+year old Weiner remains here, sort of, as a covered-over remnant, and it's the jumpoff for a five-artist intrigue. Begin w/ Yves Klein's iconic "Le Saut dans le Vide/Leap into the Void" (1960), retained here as yellowed newsprint from the front page. The literal removal and doubling in this early photomontage harkens back to the semi erasure of the Weiner. LA-based Kathryn Andrews adds some contemplative action w/ one heavy-metal sculpture, a mirrored dresser described w/ a b&w portrait seemingly discarded/forgotten on its surface. Zak Kitnick's metal-on-MDF 'collages' are like Constructivist-style microchips blown up to memoir-size. Mary Simpson collaborates w/ curator/writer Fionn Meade on the very short film "Marsyas", its own abstract of the music-savvy satyr from Greek mythology.
LAST CHANCE
* "Einfluss: 8 From Dusseldorf" @ Hosfelt Gallery / 531 W 36th St. A fertile grouping of young contemporary artists from the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, some of whom bear undeniable marks from their teachers, like Gerhard Richter and A.R. Penck, and most of whom have never shown in the States before. Bernard Lokai's rugged, small-scale abstracts preclude Richter's studies, especially w/in the supposed representational nature of these brilliantly colorful works. Cornelius Volker's (student of Penck) does gestural, realistic little oil paintings, and his nine-part "Meerschweinchen" of long-haired guinea pigs on Pop-monochrome backdrops is half-kitsch, half-cute. Luka Fineisen, the sole sculptor of the lot, blurs that line too in her resin-coated "Milk" relief, which looks exactly like that. Introducing the Next Wave from Germany. Are you ready?
* "Filmschonheit", curated by Albert Oehlen @ Greene Naftali / 508 W 26th St, 8th Fl. Oehlen (w/ some tete a tete by art photographer Christopher Williams) culled together this fab film-minded traveling show, which reached NY's shores after a stint in Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna. And it's Oehlen who contributed the most exacting representation of the filmic beauty theme: a large sparse silkscreened abstract painting, overlaid w/ the video "Untitled (9 1/2 Weeks)", filling the mostly white canvas w/ a ghostly animation. Williams' characteristically super-sharp film prints (plus Josephine Pride's gorgeous silver gelatin prints) are literal, beautiful additions. The combo of Richard Artschwager (two classic "Black Beauty" monochromes on celotex) and John Miller (a maze-like wallpaper and color-sucking carpet installation) contribute both deconstructed film references and visual eye-flickering (stare at the Artschwager, then move immediately to the nearby Miller).
* Jeff Koons "Made in Heaven" @ Luxembourg & Dayan / 64 E 77th St. On the 20th anniversary of Koons' notorious/iconic contribution to the 1990 Venice Biennale, we get nine of his pornographic, photorealist canvases and a sculpture of the artist and his then-wife and former porn-star Ilona Staller. I'll call 'em "controversial", but the gallery does a fine job of making that literal, by hanging these massive silkscreened canvases opposite one another over two floors of a very narrow space. We look one way and we're swimming in powdery blues and pinks of "Hand on Breast" (probably the most mainstream media-friendly of the lot). Turn around and there's the blood-orange saturation of "Red Doggy" or the shimmering white of "Ilona's House Ejaculation", too big to fully escape our view. It's probably the only way to really experience these works.
* "Sculpture: 12 Independent Visions" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. This gallery knows sculpture. It's got the roster of house artists (Magdalena Abkanowicz's creepy cast-burlap hands and bronzed "Standing Figures"; Fernando Botero's naughty inflated figures; Beverly Pepper's ingenious sliced rock "Grey Silence") and some specials, like the doubly visually dwarfing and mesmerizingly perfumed "Twisting Bowl II" cedar block by Ursula Von Rydingsvard (ahead of her mid-career retrospective at SculptureCenter) and a Giger-esque spinal bronze lipstick "Colonna Recisa Trasversalmente" by Arnaldo Pomodoro.
* Felix Gonzalez-Torres + On Kawara "Amnesia" @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Careful you don't miss Gonzalez-Torres' '92 billboard "untitled (Es ist nur eine Frage der Zeit/It's Just a Matter of Time)", rendered in his characteristically stripped down and inherently relatable style. That's the jump-off. Kawara's contribution is one day per month of the year 1994, w/ related news clippings from the NY Times, the Yomiuri Shinbun, from Hamburg or whatever he happened to be. Rebecca Cleman and Josh Kline, both of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), supply a revolving media program on the basis of memory and history, a flotilla of videos lost in the static of media space. The program through 12/24 includes such gems as Joan Jonas' "Double Lunar Dogs" (1984), Takeshi Murata's disturbing "Infinite Doors" (2010), culled entirely from "The Price Is Right" prize reveals, plus exploitation clips, film trailers, and Dan Graham's "Past Future Split Attention" (1972).
* Brice Marden "Letters" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. Might sound a bit weird for me to claim nostalgia for Kyoto when traversing this sublime series of related new works, as Marden drew inspiration from his travels to the National Palace Museum in Taipei (when his own retrospective was on at the MoMA). But that is the feeling I get, climbing up the wide, uneven stone stairs of Ginkaku-Ji in Kita-Higashiyama, amid bamboo forests and burbling brooks. The paintings themselves are fascinating, incorporating blank fields of muted color (usually a combination of grays) as framing devices to either side of the action, Marden's complexly layered calligraphic whips of thoughtfully paired colors. The end effect is even more 3D than his earlier works and involving a range of climates and emotions beyond his 1991 Cold Mountain series. Check the foggy warmth inherent to "First Letter", the cloaking rainstorm over "Letter About Books #3, Blue Ground", the punctuating gold emerging from "Third Letter". These seven large canvases are paired w/ a slew of works on paper in an adjacent gallery, rivulets of Kremer ink and either shellac ink or gouache on thick paper. A truly transporting experience.
* Brice Marden "Paintings 1961 - 1964" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 526 W 22nd St. Don't miss this tiny, thoughtful show from Marden's early career, six small- to medium-scale works w/ either impenetrably waxy or intriguingly kinetic surfaces, like the brownish "Arizona", its regular permutations interrupted by almost Abstract Expressionist drips and dribbles of black paint. It's of interest to note that after this work he segued into those quietly regal monochromes, their surfaces flattened out w/ beeswax, and didn't revisit this lyrical brushwork for another 20+ years.
* Djordje Ozbolt @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. I felt I needed to be stoned to truly take in Ozbolt's latest beguiling lot, sumptuous oils done in the mannerism of the Old Masters, w/ these surreal, druggy little add-ons throughout. Not that one necessary HAS to be stoned to appreciate them, though I dare you to stare at "Fear" for longer than 30 seconds, but it could help.
* "The Woodmans" (dir. C. Scott Willis, 2010) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Embark on an entrancing faded-memories trip w/ this incredible experimental film - slash - documentary. Key subject is young Francesca Woodman, an amazing late-20th C. b&w photographer (hauntingly self-portraitist) who committed suicide at age 22. Her oeuvre is interwoven in the narrative, remarking on her artistic parents and the ambitious, suffocating NY art scene.
* Cloud Nothings + Toro Y Moi @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/SOLD OUT oops! Talk about red-hot talent. My goodness, it's like the entire roster is barely drinking age, and it puts the smeary electro-pop of Chaz Bundick (aka Toro y Moi, aka frontman for The Heist) firmly in the "adult" category. That's when you place him against Dylan Baldi, brainchild behind the noisy indie outfit Cloud Nothings, and NY-by-way-of-Michigan Indian Rebound, the likes of whom are humblingly young and humblingly talented. Hence why the show's sold out.
* WIERD presents The Soft Moon @ Home Sweet Home / 131 Chrystie St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), midnight. Picture The Cure's "Mixed Up" album, but only the echoey bits of "A Forest (Tree Mix)" and "The Caterpillar (Flicker Mix)", w/ Robert Smith's super whispery vocals. That's a bit like San Fran's The Soft Moon, bringing their somberly gorgeous '80s-bent pop to HSW. Fog machines in full effect, people.
THURSDAY
* "L'insoutenable L'égerèté de L'être" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Translation "The unbearable lightness of being", but it sounds way cooler en Français. This is a joint group show at the gallery's NY and Paris locations, named after Milan Kundera's 1984 novel, and feat. a genre- and generational-spanning cast of the sublime and nightmarish.
* "A Room, In Three Movements: Katy Heinlein, Sheila Pepe, Halsey Rodman" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. The three sculptors here, Brooklyn-based Pepe and Rodman and Houston, TX's Heinlein will have their works rotated in different parts of the gallery throughout the exhibition, prompting unique responses and modifications as needed. This should be especially interesting w/ Pepe's site-specific maneuvers and Heinlein's kinetic assemblages, and worth multiple visits after the opening.
* Jose Luis Farinas "Skirting the Apocalypse" @ Miyako Yoshinaga art prospects / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. A beastly marriage of Bosch and Bacon that would make Clive Barker shriek with joy. If you like your renderings demon-tiffic and dripping with Dante steez, sell your soul to the discomfiting seduction of Farinas.
* "Gantz" (dir. Shinsuke Sato, 2011) screening @ Regal Union Square 14 / 850 Broadway (NRW/L/456 to Union Square), 8p. OK here's the good news: this promisingly blockbuster Japanese film (part one of two), based off a wildly popular manga I've never read and a TV series I've never seen, debuts in Japan AND here on the same day. The plot is about two reincarnated young blokes assassinating aliens, or something. The bad news: "Gantz"'s U.S. premiere is DUBBED. Take your chances (though I wonder when/if it'll properly screen here, w/ subtitles).
* Satoshi Takeishi & Shoko Nagai @ The Stone / 16 Ave C (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$10. AKA Vortex, the starred pairing of electronics/percussion whiz Takeishi and pianist/sonic sculptor Nagai, conjuring ghost stories and ephemeral landscapes in their magnetizing duets.
* Knyfe Hyts @ Secret Project Robot / 210 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Get on this: Brooklyn's classic no-wavers Knyfe Hyts perform on the 20th of every month this year (until November, I think?), leading an avant-art party until the venue's…close? I seriously hope this graffiti-covered, icebox cold (or alternatively furnace-hot) basement space lives on, either here or somewhere equally as cool. I've seen way too many dope shows here for it to be otherwise. But still: Knyfe Hyts = awesome, & they release a super-limited cassette at this show. w/ Liturgy & K-Holes
* Weird Wives + Weekends @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p. Can't go wrong w/ Miami's Weird Wives, which feat. Thomas Fekete and Marcos Marchesani (guitarist and keyboardist/percussionist, respectively, of Surfer Blood), but they're loads more psychedelic, w/ an early-'90s grime over the whole thing. Plus Baltimore's Weekends, who promise to knock you straight into the weekend w/ those riffs of theirs.
FRIDAY
* Patrick Jacobs "Familiar Terrain" @ Pierogi Gallery / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7-9p. Jacobs' warm, watery worlds blur the line b/w photography, sculpture and other media in his mind-blowing convex-glass dioramas of like the softest rolling meadows you've ever seen, you want to dive face-first into 'em and roll around, and they stretch miles into the distance and it almost feels as though you could.
* Christian Marclay "The Clock" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. The U.S. premiere of multimedia maestro Marclay's 24-hr long video work "The Clock" — an array of time-pieces from film excerpts — that unfolds in realtime. Meaning the 1st screening begins at the opening 6p and continues through SAT 6p. This isn't Marclay's first brush w/ A/V collage (think 1995's "Telephones", itself a study of Hollywood film phone convos), but it's the most durational.
* Rebecca Morales "While There's Calm" @ BravinLee Programs / 526 W 26th St #211. Smeared-color watercolors and mixed media undersea-like renderings on vellum.
* "The Housemaid" (dir. Im Sang-soo, 2010) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Who isn't up for some bourgeoisie voyeurism and mania-fueled murder. Im amps up the dark depravity of the 1960 original, of an au pair and a cruel upper-class family. Competed for the Palme d'Or at 2010 Cannes, loved at 2010 Fantastic Fest (where it screened against the original). The games rich people play...
* "Mamma Roma" (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). You don't mess w/ Mamma Roma, aka Anna Magnani, in this classic tough-love Pasolini feature. Magnani owns the screen, portraying an ex-prostitute making good for her thieving teenage son. Her eerie night walks, the camera ahead of her as gaslights bloom and disappear in the twilight, are pure cinematic transcendence.
* "Maboroshi" (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, 1995) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Koreeda-san's first feature film, whose full title is "Maboroshi no Hikari" (or "Phantasmic Light") and strikes a tone very close to the core of this vulnerable feature, about a young Osaka couple, loss, remorse. It'll stun you to the core, and it's terribly beautiful. Also SAT & SUN
* "Lemmy" (dir. Greg Olliver & Wes Orshoski, 2010) @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (NRW/L/456 to Union Sq). Hell yes, a proper hard-livin' documentary on Motörhead frontman Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, a living legend in speed-metal and music history. Snake-eyes watching you, baby.
* "Hell" (dir. Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960) screening @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd, 6 to 51st St), 7:30p. Way to cut to the chase: naming your experimental labyrinthine horror film "Hell".
* "Bad Biology" (dir. Frank Henenlotter, 2008) midnight screening @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave). I love these "adults only" features! This one sounds extremely over the top. Think I'm joking? Henenlotter notoriously directed "Basket Case" (you bio-creature feature freaks know what I mean), and the grimy-ass RA the Rugged Man (the Suffolk County deep underground MC) co-produced it (along w/ Vinnie Paz of Jedi Mind Tricks, an indie hip-hop outfit I dig). But that's just the beginning! Our two leads incl. an insatiable woman who births mutant offspring and a dude w/ a drug-addicted member. Think about that for a minute. Also SAT.
* MINKS (album release party) @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JZ to Marcy), 8:30p/$10. Super-smart, '80s-dredging indie-pop that works in cemeteries and runway shows. Meet MINKS, who I've hyped since I had a sonic love affair w/ 'em back when (I think it was at Glasslands, in fact…). w/ Big Troubles & Widowspeak, so expect a properly glamish bash.
* ELKS + Heliotropes + Mirror Queen @ Local 269 / 269 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave, F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/$7. I hope you like it heavy! B/c are YOU ever in luck. Where to begin: show up early for Heliotropes, the toughest all-girl doom-pop band in the known universe. Stay for the psych metal of Mirror Queen and (gasp) ELKS, for extra-majorness.
SATURDAY
* Ellen Gallagher "Greasy" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. MAYJAH. Gallagher hasn't had a solo show here since 2005, so her return to NY has got me all excited. We'll find her still mining pop culture and historical references, utilizing Black-interest magazines as raw media for collaged, modified, cut-up, inked over "jams", eruptions of obliterated text and disassembled figures.
* Ray Caesar "A Gentle Kind of Cruelty" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. Impeccable Maya-modeled babydoll chimeras, now with an even more dreamy, painterly approach. I swear, if Caesar ever created a 3D short film (or something) from his digital oeuvre, that would be mayjah.
+ Erik Mark Sandberg "Get Pretty Now". Think like "Harry and the Hendersons", only rainbow-furred and clad eye-popping tourist outfits. That's one facet of Sandberg's style, along w/ his furiously rendered abstract works.
* On Line/Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker "Violin Phase from Fase: Four movements to the Music of Steve Reich" (1982) performances @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). a good portion of the Marron Atrium is covered in sand for this, contemporary dance choreographer De Keersmaeker's excerpt from her seminal early work "Fase" (created when she was 22!). You scan see her dizzying video "Top Shot" (2002) up in the "On Line" exhibition. This performance is like that, spinning on the beach, brought to life. Performances at 2/4p, also SUN 2/4p.
* The Vaccines + Oberhofer @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JZ to Marcy), 9p/$10. Check this out: I know literally two things about The Vaccines. 1) one of their two Myspace promos, "Wreckin' Bar", is 84 seconds of concentrated pop. 2) this is their American debut. Or rather, it is at Bowery Ballroom on THU, w/ local powerhouse Oberhofer, but I'd go for the sweatier, tinier Glasslands if I were you. The leap of faith just might equal the best concert you've ever attended.
* Purling Hiss @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), 8p/$10. LIST-certified Philly psychedelia, courtesy of Birds of Maya frontman Mike Polizze. I'm talking Purling Hiss. Good and groovy. w/ Home Blitz
SUNDAY
* Ursula von Rydingsvard "Sculpture 1991-2009" @ SculptureCenter / 44-19 Purves St, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq), 5-7p. I am so stoked for this. Von Rydingsvard is one of my favorite contemporary sculptors. She reworks cedar beams into hewn, rippling monoliths, petrified dragons, cavernous entrances. A very cool thing about them is they retain their organic nature: seen outdoors, they fit well into the landscape; indoors, they burst alive from the gallery floor and/or walls. So it's particularly cool that SculptureCenter hosts the beginning of this touring mid-career retrospective, as its indoor/outdoor enough to balance the energy of von Rydingsvard's monumental wood figures. Plus, there's a non-touring cast-resin entity specially installed in the venue's exhibition court.
+ "Vide-Poche". Six artists — Michele Abeles, Samuel Clagnaz, Isabelle Cornaro, Miles Huston, Charles Mayton and Valerie Snobeck — empty form and content through their diverse practices, from Abeles' nouveau still-life photography to Clagnaz's video work.
* Sergej Jensen @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq). The Berlin-based artist's 1st solo NY show, a sublime affair of stained and reductive textile-based abstract paintings.
+ Laurel Nakadate "Only the Lonely". Nakadate's 1st large-scale museum exhibition, feat. a decade's worth of voyeuristic and deeply personal video (incl. the recent "Good Morning, Sunshine" and "The Wolf Knife") plus new durational photo series "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears".
+ "Modern Women: Single Channel". From the MoMA's collection, eleven women artists in single-channel video from the '60s through '90s. Feat. Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, VALIE EXPORT, Mako Idemitsu, Joan Jonas, Kristin Lucas, Mary Miss, Pipilotti Rist, Carolee Schneemann and Steina Vasulka.
MONDAY
* "Santa Sangre" (dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1989) sneak preview @ reRun Theatre / (F to York St, AC to High St), 10p. The surrealist psychological horror classic you've probably never seen. Severin Films is FINALLY releasing Jodorowsky's cult classic on DVD, so catch this flashback/flash-forward strange circus of abuse, hallucinations and unrequited love — I mean, it's not ALL dark and scary.
* MAP Magazine presents "Difficult Gifts" @ E-Flux / 41 Essex St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 7p/FREE. A program on art as gift, feat. works by Andrea Buttner, BS Johnson, Duncan Marquiss, Shahryar Nashat, Laure Prouvost and Stephen Sutcliffe. The contemporary art quarterly MAP feat. Nashat in their winter issue, which coincides w/ the screening.
* Year of the Tiger @ Union Hall / 702 Union St, Park Slope (D/NR to Union St), 8p/$8. Think Alec Empire mixed w/ Karen O, The Prodigy's air-raid synths crossed w/ Amanda Ghost's searing lyricism. Now meet NY's Year of the Tiger, a melodiously abrasive electro trio, and dance your faces off.
TUESDAY
* Yuck @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave), 9:30p/$10. I really really want to love Yuck. They're a youngish coed UK-based lot, they make that addictive indie-pop filtered through raindrops and cigarettes like only a Londoner (like vocalist Daniel, though the group hails international) can…and the last time they were supposed to play here, during CMJ, they had to cancel the tour. So I'm super-duper stoked to see them. w/ Total Slacker
* Suuns @ The Rock Shop / 249 4th Ave, Park Slope (D/NR to Union St), 8p/$10. Those creepy, creepy Canadians, w/ their loop-riddled guitar riffs and whispery vocals and schizo performing. Love 'em.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Lee Lozano "Tools" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Just plain excellent. Put this exhibition high on your must-see list and do just that. Lozano was a brilliantly tortured soul, brimming with genius, whose life WAS her art, as she pursued stricter conceptualist practices in the '70s that drew her away from the art-world (and thereby the public eye). So her surviving physical oeuvre is limited, but terribly intense, and it is fortuitous of the gallery for hosting this rare collection of drawings and paintings of tools from 1963-4, during Lozano's raw expressionist "comix" period in NYC. Think massive clamps and shadowed screws, a hammer-head blurred into motion, wrenches so biomechanical to make Giger blush. One hardcore razorblade titled "hard". More macho and sexier than Claes Oldenburg's suggestive tools. Lozano would eventually turn to Minimalism, in her late-'60s "Wave" paintings, and then fully into the Conceptual practices that moved her into obscurity. I really wish she were alive today, or had still been "making art" in the '70s and '80s. While Eva Hesse died young (against her control) and therefore had a brief career and Lozano self-truncated her own career, I still strongly note this connection of originality and vitality b/w the two artists. Few exhibits move me like this one.
* Tony Feher "Next On Line" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. Now Feher's no stranger for pushing commercially available materials to their limits — I'm thinking his meditative arrays of tinted water-filled PET bottles — but this new array of snaking vinyl tubing, at once sculpture and static 3D line "drawings", is particularly exacting in its emotional resonance. The works exhibited here, about 871 ft of clear vinyl tubing split amongst five pieces, plus x-amount of food coloring drops mixed into distilled water, everything hung alarmingly (charmingly?) by office-grade binder clips, are lyrical beauties, their intrinsic grace belying their vague respective weights (I mean, we're talking 200-300 ft of water-filled vinyl tubing per, that must weigh something). The opening figure is a great mess of reddish Silly String, enlarged to Claes Oldenburg proportions. A curvy-edged blue one naturally mimics cresting waves, but with a Hokusai clarity. And then there's the big one in the back, a cascade of five separate tubes, intermingling on the floor like the butterscotch topping liberally and artistically applied as some restaurant's dessert de resistance. So don't be surprised if you cull out your own nostalgic imagery whilst viewing Feher's latest: they've a tendency to do just that.
* Jennifer Bartlett "Recitative" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. Walking amid Bartlett's largest-scale, eponymous painting, a color celebration over 372 steel plates and 158 feet, spanning three gallery walls, is like a journey through modern and contemporary art history. I encourage you to explore this mammoth from a clockwise direction, beginning at the show-title near the gallery doors and guiding along toward its stunning denouement. That "art history" description has a two-prong meaning: Bartlett mines Minimalism, filtering notions of Jasper Johns (the warm foresty-colored chevron patterns), Sol LeWitt (orderly primaries), Brice Marden (a kinetic whiplike form in black enamel — though its movement over multiple plates reminded me of Elizabeth Murray, too) and Gerhard Richter (in a brilliant "color-chart" array near the "end") through her own unique visual language. She also recalls some of her other seminal wall-works, MoMA's "Rhapsody" (1976, first exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery) and Cleveland Museum of Art's "Song" (2007) (their media accompanies "Recitative", which is cool to see the recurrence of those orderly primaries, that whiplike black enamel form, plucked from their prior incarnations). It's an animating experience, walking forward and backward around this snaking piece, acting as a visual palimpsest to the power of color, the energy of reduction and reintroduction.
* Ulf Puder @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Neo Rausch might be the best-known name of the 1st Gen. Leipziger Hochschule, but Puder's debut stateside puts him firmly in the need-to-know for younger Eastern European artists. I love these stark, uninhabited landscapes, filled w/ ramshackle buildings seemingly poised at either post-aftermath or approaching unseen destruction.
* Amy Rathbone "suchness" @ Priska Jusckha Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Rathbone further develops her "flocks" vocabulary (little wire loops or ink pigment exploding on the gallery walls) w/ a blend of natural and artificial materials. She covers a wall w/ conifer branches (recycled from old Christmas trees!), some yanked towards a focal point via wire extensions, terminating w/ a collection of little wire-hung concrete spheres (which made me think of Eva Hesse). She includes some mixed-media works mounted on birch panel, like the "scaffolds", 2D versions of a hanging wood sticks and branches installation in a corner of the gallery, plus these sprayed clouds of ink, watercolor and gouache, like dried raindrops on a windshield.
* Patrick Hill "Clumsy Angels" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Hill has a handle on gorgeous/dangerous combos, and he elevates that in a double-layered way w/ this inherently naughty exhibition. His latest sculpture utilizes wood beams for structural support in riffs on Classical figurative sculpture, but the cut-marble legs and lower bodies are all spread eagle or appropriating fin-de-siecle burlesque posture, plus he painted the wood acid-glow tones, all yellows, magentas and oranges, to contrast sharply off the marble "skin".
* Piotr Uklański "Discharge!" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. I wanted to like this exhibit way more than I did, in the end. It's been a few years since NY had an Uklański show (his last, "Biało-Czerwona", lit. "white-red", practically christened the gallery's 21st St space), so I was ready. There's some spectacle here, but no mammoth resiny paintings, no soaring sculpture, no gruesome mixed-media installation (nor any thought-provoking video). No, this chameleon's entire output is a bunch of nouveau tie-dyed paintings. Not that spin art that Damien Hirst did (or still does): stretched cotton bedsheets attacked with fiber-reactive dyes and bleach, producing saturated starbursts and corrosive pattens. He sourced his fabrics at Ikea and Bloomingdales (according to the gallery's press release) and made these eye-watering works — plus had fun naming them, if "Orgasmatron" and "Atomic Ovum" are to be believed. The odd one out, a garish pottery relief called "Kinda Kinky", echoes the tie-dyes in 3D, and it's meaty enough to sink ones teeth into. Overall, not my cup of tea. Maybe yours?
* Gia Edzgveradze "Stolen Blanket & Other Short Stories" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. A career-spanning exhibition from the Georgian-born, German-based Conceptualist, the 1st of its kind in N. America — indeed yet again an instance of a challenging, creative artist who shows widely across Europe (and Russia!) but not in the states. Don't miss it: Edzgveradze tiptoes on gender-bending and patriarchy-busting anthems in his "Dancing Bride" series (from the late '90s), his mammoth, brushwork-like "The Big Bra" (1990), even his stunning, mixed media triptych, created from sketched projected enlargements of other sketches, perforated paper and confetti on wood panel, the entire effect mimicking Georgian calligraphic script. He continually superimposes image over image, and himself into these images, resulting in a blanketed text so interwoven with history and personal reflection that, like alluded in the show-title, you might want to claim it for yourself.
* Robbin Hill "Case Discussions" @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. I like the concept: Hill incorporates decommissioned lab equipment from the University of California at Davis' flea market (she's a member of studio faculty) in this exhibition, turning out wax- and cloth-filled projectors and desks reminiscent of Piero Manzoni crossed w/ Rona Pondick. Only thing is, Hill's telltale cyanotypes (a few are present here) are totally lost in the noise.
* Irvin Morazan "Temple of the Bearded Man" @ DCKT / 237 Eldridge St. The standout work in Morazan's christening of the gallery's inaugural debut on Eldridge is definitely the enormous mixed media headdress he wore during the opening reception/procession from the Bowery to the gallery. It's part-cloud, part-coyote pelts, with a neon beast crowning the top, and it recurs in Morazan's collaged photography, reflecting him as a folkloric shaman.
* Yeni Mao "Dead Reckoning" @ Collette Blanchard Gallery / 26 Clinton St. Mao works efficiently in mixed media installation and photography, the former referencing explorer Zheng He in a flotilla of upturned boats, the latter "The Battle Wizard" feat. almost flip-book-styled Wuxia action.
* Brendan Flanagan "Sightlines" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Flanagan's debut stateside solo show is a B-movie success, far as I'm concerned. He's got an excellent handle on controlling his media, coating panels with hazy gradients of oil paint, then introducing his melty, multicolored figures on top, oozily ominous monsters and victims in wet acrylic, practically sliding off the surface. The tiny gallery echoes the creepshow factor, making this more a cohesive installation than just a bunch of paintings hung in a white-box space. Really dope.
* "Paintings & Sculpture" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Beyond that innocently vague title lies a monster, in the form of Mike Kelley's classic "Torture Table" (1992) his macho do-it-yourself woodworking apparatus grounded in pain and emasculation. Upstairs is relatively kinder, a rather gorgeous (if perhaps quite visceral) Carroll Dunham "Sixth Pine" (1987), painted on pine veneer, a textural Christopher Wool enamel on aluminum, crackling with dark energy, plus a ghostly Albert Oehlen from '89.
* Joe Bradley "Human Form" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. The second of concurrent Bradley solo shows in NYC (the other Paleolithic affair is at Gavin Brown's Enterprise) is way subtler, but still ballsily masculine. It's a set of black-ink silkscreened silhouettes in full-on Bangles posing on white canvas. He alluded to this in a billboard outside Gavin Brown, but the arrangement and potential movement of the figures in Canada's bunker-like space (everyone poised in stop-animation like Keith Haring characters) amplifies the experience.
* "Offset Summary" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. Oh I dug this. The exhibition title and concept stems from spatial intervention and reconfiguration. Back in the day, a different space occupied this gallery, and in it was a Lawrence Weiner work "A 36" x 36" Removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard from a Wall" (1968). That 40+year old Weiner remains here, sort of, as a covered-over remnant, and it's the jumpoff for a five-artist intrigue. Begin w/ Yves Klein's iconic "Le Saut dans le Vide/Leap into the Void" (1960), retained here as yellowed newsprint from the front page. The literal removal and doubling in this early photomontage harkens back to the semi erasure of the Weiner. LA-based Kathryn Andrews adds some contemplative action w/ one heavy-metal sculpture, a mirrored dresser described w/ a b&w portrait seemingly discarded/forgotten on its surface. Zak Kitnick's metal-on-MDF 'collages' are like Constructivist-style microchips blown up to memoir-size. Mary Simpson collaborates w/ curator/writer Fionn Meade on the very short film "Marsyas", its own abstract of the music-savvy satyr from Greek mythology.
LAST CHANCE
* "Einfluss: 8 From Dusseldorf" @ Hosfelt Gallery / 531 W 36th St. A fertile grouping of young contemporary artists from the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, some of whom bear undeniable marks from their teachers, like Gerhard Richter and A.R. Penck, and most of whom have never shown in the States before. Bernard Lokai's rugged, small-scale abstracts preclude Richter's studies, especially w/in the supposed representational nature of these brilliantly colorful works. Cornelius Volker's (student of Penck) does gestural, realistic little oil paintings, and his nine-part "Meerschweinchen" of long-haired guinea pigs on Pop-monochrome backdrops is half-kitsch, half-cute. Luka Fineisen, the sole sculptor of the lot, blurs that line too in her resin-coated "Milk" relief, which looks exactly like that. Introducing the Next Wave from Germany. Are you ready?
* "Filmschonheit", curated by Albert Oehlen @ Greene Naftali / 508 W 26th St, 8th Fl. Oehlen (w/ some tete a tete by art photographer Christopher Williams) culled together this fab film-minded traveling show, which reached NY's shores after a stint in Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna. And it's Oehlen who contributed the most exacting representation of the filmic beauty theme: a large sparse silkscreened abstract painting, overlaid w/ the video "Untitled (9 1/2 Weeks)", filling the mostly white canvas w/ a ghostly animation. Williams' characteristically super-sharp film prints (plus Josephine Pride's gorgeous silver gelatin prints) are literal, beautiful additions. The combo of Richard Artschwager (two classic "Black Beauty" monochromes on celotex) and John Miller (a maze-like wallpaper and color-sucking carpet installation) contribute both deconstructed film references and visual eye-flickering (stare at the Artschwager, then move immediately to the nearby Miller).
* Jeff Koons "Made in Heaven" @ Luxembourg & Dayan / 64 E 77th St. On the 20th anniversary of Koons' notorious/iconic contribution to the 1990 Venice Biennale, we get nine of his pornographic, photorealist canvases and a sculpture of the artist and his then-wife and former porn-star Ilona Staller. I'll call 'em "controversial", but the gallery does a fine job of making that literal, by hanging these massive silkscreened canvases opposite one another over two floors of a very narrow space. We look one way and we're swimming in powdery blues and pinks of "Hand on Breast" (probably the most mainstream media-friendly of the lot). Turn around and there's the blood-orange saturation of "Red Doggy" or the shimmering white of "Ilona's House Ejaculation", too big to fully escape our view. It's probably the only way to really experience these works.
* "Sculpture: 12 Independent Visions" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. This gallery knows sculpture. It's got the roster of house artists (Magdalena Abkanowicz's creepy cast-burlap hands and bronzed "Standing Figures"; Fernando Botero's naughty inflated figures; Beverly Pepper's ingenious sliced rock "Grey Silence") and some specials, like the doubly visually dwarfing and mesmerizingly perfumed "Twisting Bowl II" cedar block by Ursula Von Rydingsvard (ahead of her mid-career retrospective at SculptureCenter) and a Giger-esque spinal bronze lipstick "Colonna Recisa Trasversalmente" by Arnaldo Pomodoro.
* Felix Gonzalez-Torres + On Kawara "Amnesia" @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Careful you don't miss Gonzalez-Torres' '92 billboard "untitled (Es ist nur eine Frage der Zeit/It's Just a Matter of Time)", rendered in his characteristically stripped down and inherently relatable style. That's the jump-off. Kawara's contribution is one day per month of the year 1994, w/ related news clippings from the NY Times, the Yomiuri Shinbun, from Hamburg or whatever he happened to be. Rebecca Cleman and Josh Kline, both of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), supply a revolving media program on the basis of memory and history, a flotilla of videos lost in the static of media space. The program through 12/24 includes such gems as Joan Jonas' "Double Lunar Dogs" (1984), Takeshi Murata's disturbing "Infinite Doors" (2010), culled entirely from "The Price Is Right" prize reveals, plus exploitation clips, film trailers, and Dan Graham's "Past Future Split Attention" (1972).
* Brice Marden "Letters" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. Might sound a bit weird for me to claim nostalgia for Kyoto when traversing this sublime series of related new works, as Marden drew inspiration from his travels to the National Palace Museum in Taipei (when his own retrospective was on at the MoMA). But that is the feeling I get, climbing up the wide, uneven stone stairs of Ginkaku-Ji in Kita-Higashiyama, amid bamboo forests and burbling brooks. The paintings themselves are fascinating, incorporating blank fields of muted color (usually a combination of grays) as framing devices to either side of the action, Marden's complexly layered calligraphic whips of thoughtfully paired colors. The end effect is even more 3D than his earlier works and involving a range of climates and emotions beyond his 1991 Cold Mountain series. Check the foggy warmth inherent to "First Letter", the cloaking rainstorm over "Letter About Books #3, Blue Ground", the punctuating gold emerging from "Third Letter". These seven large canvases are paired w/ a slew of works on paper in an adjacent gallery, rivulets of Kremer ink and either shellac ink or gouache on thick paper. A truly transporting experience.
* Brice Marden "Paintings 1961 - 1964" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 526 W 22nd St. Don't miss this tiny, thoughtful show from Marden's early career, six small- to medium-scale works w/ either impenetrably waxy or intriguingly kinetic surfaces, like the brownish "Arizona", its regular permutations interrupted by almost Abstract Expressionist drips and dribbles of black paint. It's of interest to note that after this work he segued into those quietly regal monochromes, their surfaces flattened out w/ beeswax, and didn't revisit this lyrical brushwork for another 20+ years.
* Djordje Ozbolt @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. I felt I needed to be stoned to truly take in Ozbolt's latest beguiling lot, sumptuous oils done in the mannerism of the Old Masters, w/ these surreal, druggy little add-ons throughout. Not that one necessary HAS to be stoned to appreciate them, though I dare you to stare at "Fear" for longer than 30 seconds, but it could help.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
fee's LIST (through 1/18)
WEDNESDAY
* Lee Lozano "Tools" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Good ol' NYTimes spilled the beans on one of my most anticipated shows this winter: a rare exhibition of "art punk" Lozano's intense tool paintings and drawings from the '60s. Don't miss this one, even if you can't make the opening.
* Piotr Uklanski "Discharge!" @ Gagosian Gallery / 980 Madison Ave. The Warsaw-born media alchemist hasn't had a proper solo show in NY since his red/white splash back in spring 2008, a graveyard of charged decorative imagery and resinous paintings. The experimenter's latest begins w/ tie-dye works, which sounds banal on paper but, at least in visuals, carries a transfixed explosiveness, like the aftermath of Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder 'drawings'. Brave the snow remnants for this one.
* "Paintings & Sculptures" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. An innocently titled group show like this shouldn't be taken for granted, esp. if you're aware of Skarstedt's primo list of ferocious contemporary artists. Mike Kelley sets the tone w/ a seminal do-it-yourself woodworking apparatus from 1992, his "Torture Table". Plus newish George Condo (ahead of his big exhibition at New Museum), biomorphic Carroll Dunham (the kind I can get into), textural Christopher Wool and others.
* "Performance 11: On Line/Trisha Brown Dance Company" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 2 & 4p. Wicked! MoMA's performance series feat. a bunch of classic and new shows related to "On Line", the historical and fascinating exhibition on the 6th Fl. Choreographer Trisha Brown kicks it off w/ four works in the atrium, performed by her dance company (which also marks its 40th year in existence). Includes early works "Sticks" (1973), "Scallops" (1973), "Locus Solo" (1975) and brand-new "Roof Piece Re-Layed" (2011, based on her "Roof Piece" from '71). Performances also recur SAT & SUN, 2 & 4p.
* Kordan, deVries, Invisible Days @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Tiny artsy Glasslands will be full to the ceiling w/ amps and guitar noise tonight, w/ this local three-pack. Kordan veers a bit electro, but their enveloping sound is irresistible.
* Grooms + Fiasco @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/$7. What do you get when you pair melodic sludge-rockers Grooms w/ the skronk instrumentals of Fiasco? A: a delirious sweaty mess of fun, is what you get.
THURSDAY
* Ulf Puder @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Neo Rausch might be the best-known name of the 1st Gen. Leipziger Hochschule, but Puder's debut stateside solo exhibition puts him firmly in the need-to-know realm of Eastern European artists. His stark, uninhabited landscapes of ramshackle buildings seems poised at either post-aftermath or approaching some unseen destruction.
* Tony Feher "Next On Line" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. OK, so a line of everyday PET bottles or stacked milk-crates (color-coded, naturally) might not grab you, so how about a ginormous sculpture of vinyl tubing, filled w/ colored water and tumbling from the ceiling in arabesque designs? Feher is all about pushing commercial materials to their limits, and this installation should make believers out of us.
* Amy Rathbone "suchness" @ Priska Jusckha Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Rathbone further develops her telltale 'flocks' vocabulary (think a bunch of little wire loops, or ink markings, exploding on the gallery walls) w/ a blend of natural and artificial materials, like conifer branch interventions and spraypainted mist, mounted on birch.
* Jonggeon Lee & Buhm Hong "I Was There" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. NY-based Lee and Hong both seek to transport the viewer via their own personal nostalgias, Lee's in poetic wood sculpture and Hong's fantasy-laden drawings.
* Patrick Hill "Clumsy Angels" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Hill has a handle on gorgeous/dangerous combinations, enormous cut-glass circles bisected by steel plates, usually incorporating concrete or some natural mineral block. His latest utilizes wood beams for structural support in riffs on Classical figurative sculpture.
* R. Luke DuBois "A More Perfect Union" @ bitforms / 529 W 20th St, 2nd Fl. The NY-based A/V artist comes off his traveling "Hindsight is Always 20/20" project (focused on the 2008 U.S. presidency) w/ a sharp look at American self-identity through online dating, combining Congressional District stats to create regional 'romantic atlases'.
* "Tuesday", curated by Mr. & Mrs. Amani Olu @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. The mastermind behind the annual "Young Curators, New Ideas" exhibition culls nine emerging artists whose work in recontexualizing the 'usual' may make us jaded art-goers look at the world a bit differently.
* Joe Bradley "Human Form" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. A potentially MUCH softer 180 from Bradley's primal physicality at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, this suite of silkscreens feat. posed human silhouettes getting down Bangles style.
* Marcel Odenbach @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. The artist's latest film short film "Turning Circles", a study of the Majdanek Mausoleum designed by Polish sculptor Woktor Tolkin and erected in 1969 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Lublin Concentration Camp's liberation.
* Gia Edgveradze "Stolen Blanket & Other Short Stories" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. The debut stateside solo show by the Georgian-born, German-based artist is a cross-media affair, reflecting his homage to Malevich, Constructivism, Conceptualism and incorporation of Georgian calligraphic script.
* Robbin Hill "Case Discussions" @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. Neat concept: Hill is a member of the studio faculty at University of California at Davis and centers her latest gallery exhibition on decommissioned lab equipment from the university's flea market. She incorporates her cyanotype patterns throughout.
* Bridget and the Squares + Anna Haas @ R Bar / 218 Bowery (J to Bowery, 6 to Spring, F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$5. Brooklyn's pop darlings Bridget and the Squares plus local bluesy singer-songwriter/pianist Haas (catch her last NY show for some time), b/c it's cold out there, baby, and their vocal-driving songs will take care of that quite nicely.
* Xray Eyeballs + Sweet Bulbs @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5. This is totally rad: pop-punks Xray Eyeballs (track "Egyptian Magician" is constantly stuck in my head) and fuzzy noise-popsters Sweet Bulbs (ditto to "Kissing Clouds") epitomize why I get down w/ the local scene so well. w/ Slow Animal
FRIDAY
* "Readykelous: The Hurtful Healer" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Get ready: the organic Ridykeulous collective, founded in 2005 by A.L. Steiner & Nicole Eisenman, descends on Invisible-Exports, feat. works by Allyson Mitchell, David Wojnarowicz, Glen Fogel, Kara Walker, K8 Hardy, Jack Smith, Mike Albo (incl. an open-mic, or "Open Mike", by the man on FEB 12) and loads others from the archives.
* Stuart Hawkins "Broken Welcome" @ Zach Feuer Gallery / 548 W 22nd St. Nepal-based photographer Hawkins imagines the day-to-day in failed Indian millennial planned community 'Newtown', using low-tech props to 'complete' the unfinished residential landscape.
* 2011 Maximum Perception Performance Festival, curated by Peter Dobill & Phoenix Lights @ English Kills / 114 Forrest St, Bushwick (L to Morgan), 7p-12a. Two nights (tonight & SAT) of contemporary performance art from a local and international cast, in the festival's fourth iteration. The full lineup and schedule is here but some standouts: Sindy Butz (Berlin, now studying butoh in NY, produces wearable sculpture), duo Holly Faurot & Sarah H. Paulson (Brooklyn, shared choreographies and frequent performers at NURTUREart), Akiko Ichikawa (Brooklyn, well-versed in Fluxus practice), Rafael Sanchez (NY, time- and endurance works) and Anya Liftig (Brooklyn, whose own "The Anxiety of Influence" art-savvy people and scenesters may recall as an intervention during Marina Abramovic's retrospective at MoMA).
* "The Green Hornet" (dir. Michel Gondry, 2011) screenings in wide release. Adapting Golden Age stories is an immensely tricky maneuver, but when you've got Gondry at the helm, Seth Rogen and Jay Chou as mismatched heroes, and the silver-tongued Christoph Waltz as supervillain, you've got the makings of LIST-certified dopeness.
* "Enter the Void: Original Uncut Version" (dir. Gaspar Noe, 2010) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Damn it! Are you telling me, seriously, that the version of "Enter the Void" I caught at IFC, less than a week after it debuted, wasn't Noe's full 163-minute downtown Tokyo acid trip? According to the man himself, the cut stuff includes more astro-visions & an orgy feat. Paz de la Huerta and one of the Japanese dancers… so I guess it's worth it?? If you've not seen "Enter the Void" yet, then you definitely should. I am not sure I could sit through it again, w/o at least some light hallucinogenic, but the title sequence does kick some major electric typeface ass, cannot lie.
* Anamanaguchi + Peelander-Z @ Studio at Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NRW/L/6 to Union Square), 8p/$12. Catching NES-hacking, Four Loko-quaffing punks Anamanaguchi in sweaty Webster Hall's studio epitomizes dope, but then add Japan-by-way-of-E.Vill art-punks Peelander-Z to the drunk & disorderly mix and you've got the recipe for best live show of the 2011, thus far.
* Liturgy + Controlled Bleeding @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/. The Barn's culled together an incredible night of 'tough' music, epitomized best by seminal Boston outfit Controlled Bleeding, who have done post-everything since 1978. They're joined by Brooklyn's blackest black metalheads Liturgy. w/ PAK (new to harsh label Tzadik) and Cellular Chaos
SATURDAY
* Yuichi Higashionna @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. Fluorescent light sculpture that mimics graffiti, Op art and trompe l'oeil, filled out w/ mirrors and cut glass. Expect a lot of extra badassness here.
* Stephen G. Rhodes @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Rhodes takes Immanuel Kant as inspiration for his gallery debut, kinda, as the lederhosen-and-wigged philosopher reappears throughout this labyrinthine mixed-media installation.
* Kai Althoff "Punkt, Absatz, Bluemli" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. I have a feeling Althoff's latest installation will elicit something of a spiritual reaction, whether that means an awakening or glossolalia or whatever depends on the viewer and their experience w/ the Cologne-based artist's particular style. Proceed w/ caution.
* "112 Greene St: The Early Years (1970-4) @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St, gallery talk w/ curator Jessamyn Fiore, 11:30a. RSVP to Lauren O'Donnell: lodonnell@davidzwirner.com. Fiore is daughter to Jane Crawford, widow of Gordon Matta-Clark, and assists in managing his estate while directing The Writing Workshop and Dublin's not-for-profit gallery space Thisisnotashop — and she curates, like this enriching stunner at Zwirner Gallery (read on under CURRENT SHOWS).
* Saturday Sessions @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq), 4p. feat. Brandon Stosuy hosts convo b/w artist Adam Helms & curator Klaus Kertess, performance by Wolf Eyes (Nate Young/John Olson) in "STARE CASE" project
* Signal to Noise Party @ Museum of the Moving Image / 3601 35th Ave, Astoria (NQ to 36th Ave/Washington Ave, EM/R to Steinway St), 8p/$20. As the Museum describes it: a three-ring circus of live electronic music, moving image performances and interactive art. Incl. Martha Colburn's double-projected "Dolls vs. Dictators", w/ live band accompaniment (Deerhoof's Greg Saunier and Michael Evans scored it), plus chiptune acts Bit Shifter and nullsleep, Victoria Keddle on prepared violin, VJ Shantell Martin's visuals and loads else ecstatic messiness.
* The Beets, Eternal Summers, Sweet Bulbs @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. Here's a primer on the hot local indie scene. If you only catch ONE live show this month (sad for you!), may I recommend the stripped-down barbershop rock of Jackson Heights' The Beets, accompanied by fuzz-popstars Eternal Summers and Sweet Bulbs? CanNOT miss w/ this one.
* Trap Them + Black Anvil @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), 5p/$12. Cake Shop's recurring hardcore shows have always frightened me — something about the tiny, sweaty basement venue, w/o any safe hiding spots — but if I wanted to attend a show w/ the very refreshing reality of being hit over the head w/ a guitar, the combo of speedfreaks Trap Them and Relapse's Black Anvil would definitely be worth it. w/ Psychic Limb (show up early, get messed up!)
SUNDAY
* Michael Patterson-Carver "Loose Lips Do Sink Ships" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) / 261 Broome St. In Patterson-Carver's 2nd solo w/ the gallery, a meditation on Wikileaks! His approachable drawing style permits for many well-timed, skewering takedowns, so expect to learn something too.
* "A Strange Affinity to the Beautiful and the Dreadful", curated by Maureen Sullivan @ Hendershot Gallery / 195 Chrystie St. This large group show's title sounds like me, sometimes… Feat. cinematic Sue de Beer, some meditative strewn pieces by Julia Chiang, plus other happy characters like Ghost of a Dream, Alexa Gerrity, Nelson Loskamp, Galia Offri and, yes, Marilyn Manson.
* "Offset Summary" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. Reconfiguration and spatial intervention — hallmarks of conceptual art — form the backbone of this auspicious five-artist show. Feat. the original renegade Yves Klein, plus Cali's Kathryn Andrews, local artists Zak Kitnick and Mary Simpson, plus a collaboration b/w Simpson and writer/curator Fionn Meade.
* The Toasters @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 7p/$15. The Toasters?? What you thought ska was "over", totally co-opted by the '90s punkish overtones and then obliterated? This is the NY band's 30th anniversary tour, brother! Don't let the bastards grind you down, indeed.
MONDAY
* "Performance 12: On Line/Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). The line in motion, via untitled dance performance works from 2004-2009, enacted throughout the day in the Marron Atrium. This also recurs WED & THUR.
** SPECIAL MENTION **
* "Fireworks From the Heart" (dir. Masahiro Kunimoto, 2010) U.S. debut @ Big Cinemas Manhattan / 239 E 59th St (456/NR to 59th St), WED Jan 26, 3:30/6:30p. First off, here's what you have to do to get in: go here and RSVP by JAN 23. You'll receive a confirmation. I preview this b/c 1) it stars Kengo Kora (a hottie NY film freaks might know from Yoshihiro Nakamura's "Fish Story" -- he was in the badass punk band -- but I will always equate him w/ the rakish, deviant costar to materialistic/piercing-obsessed Yuriko Yoshitaka in Yukio NInagawa's "Snakes and Earrings") and 2) most importantly, IMO, it stars Mitsuki Tanimura, the cutie in Akihiko Shiota's exquisite film "Canary", who plays Kora-kun's tough and caring sister. (3. would be incredible character actor Ren Osugi as their dad) The plot: he's a hikkikomori, she's got a terminal illness, and the action's centered around a famous Katakai firework festival in Niigata Prefecture…and it's based on a true story. Plus, I wonder aloud if this film will EVER be properly screened in the states (possibly at Japan Society, but I'm not holding my breath).
CURRENT SHOWS
* Mika Tajima @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. A lovely chromatic chaos, as Tajima deconstructs a 1970's Herman Miller Action Office system into a modular installation of mini painted cubicles (or prisons), some doubling as bulletin boards for additional paintings, and vintage ergonomic kneeling chairs. Accessibility denied! Her gridded spray-painted acrylic frames lining the gallery walls, "Furniture Art" (after Erik Satie's "Musique d'ameublement") are as much architectural references as mindless visual eye-candy, meant perhaps to make office hell a bit more bearable. Though if she were called in to redesign a proper office, I would be down for that.
* "QuietlyLoud" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St, 4th Fl. Pay attention to these three twentysomething artists, painters Alisha Kerlin (contributed to PS1's "Greater NY") and Natasha Conway (shortlisted for Saatchi Gallery's 'New Sensations 2009' Prize) and sculptor Cassie Ralhl (part of "Knights Move" show at SculptureCenter). The 'handmade' qualities in their respective works, plus their own undeniable talents, position the art world's winds to their backs. This is Conway's debut stateside, and her somehow masked geometric abstract paintings simultaneous tie Kerlin's stark canvases and Ralhl's equally stark assemblages together, whilst maintaining a certain autonomous semblance about the respective works.
* Deville Cohen, Andrei Koschmieder, Joe Winter @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. The interaction b/w Koschmieder's screenprinted series "Catnip High" and Winter's malfunctioning cubicle hell — if you've ever had to change a toner cartridge, you now what I mean — tie quite nicely, but hang out a bit for Cohen's video installation "The Wall", complete w/ a Xeroxed brick wall.
* Adam Marnie + Tom Thayer @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Both artists take on the cut-and-glue medium, w/ Marnie riffing endlessly off a vase of flowers photographed in his studio and Thayer's Arte Povera-style puppets and collages (elements to his stunning lo-fi animations) framed here like bizarre family ephemera.
* Ayako Wakahara "Tenkoku" @ Onishi Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Wakahara takes the traditional Japanese practice of stone seal engraving and spins that into her contemporary blending of calligraphy and painting.
* Ann Craven @ Maccarone Gallery / 630 Greenwich St. Five years' worth of Craven's watercolors — a very rarely shown facet of her oeuvre — plus several large oil on linen paintings. Many of her thematic elements (watery and saturated blooms, cats, owls, songbirds) recur here in great numbers, providing like a hand-drawn animated element when hung in multiples.
* Joe Bradley "Mouth and Foot Painting" @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. Bradley goes Paleolithic with his debut at Gavin Brown, slathering on the paint and scraping out brutally figurative abstracts on raw, dropcloth canvas. He worked the elements out on his studio floor, hence the dribbles, foot-tracks, markings and other loving, historical elements imbued in their respective surfaces.
* Leslie Thornton "Binocular" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. The experimental film pioneer — her several-decade opus "Peggy and Fred in Hell" had a special screening during PS1's "Greater New York" — debuts at Winkleman w/ a deceptively simple, and therefore thoroughly amazing, exhibit. She presents a series of flat-screen, two-channel monitors, each bearing a circular field of some animal, filmed in the wild, plus a second circular field, projecting the same image but remapped as a kaleidoscope. The resulting diptych — a regal black parrot preening along against its jewellike abstraction, a lizard on a branch vs. its geometric opposite — may cause us to recast our feelings on which field, the legit or the manipulated, contains the most life.
* Jesse McCloskey "New World Nightmares" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. McCloskey's inclusion at last year's "The Antidote" group show was a teaser for his fascinating debut solo at the gallery. His media — layered vinyl, paint and paper collages, in super-saturated, constrasty colors — resembles woodcuts, and their Old World mythologies echoes that.
* Ezra Stoller @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. A succulent exhibition of the architecturally-cognizant photographer's classic gelatin silver prints, depicting various triumphant structures around NY. The TWA Terminal at JFK is particularly otherworldly: Eero Saarinen's creation all supple alien curves and fins. Against that, Mies van deer Rohe and Philip Johnson's Seagram Building is both capacious and cozy.
* David Stephenson "Light Cities" @ Julie Saul Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. This veteran photographer's management of light over nighttime urban skies is really enthralling. The triptych of Melbourne around the Rialto Tower bears a "Blade Runner" luminescence, and Tokyo seen from its bay and Tokyo Tower is a futuristic wonderland.
* Deborah Luster "Tooth for an Eye" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. This photographic archive of contemporary and historical homicide sites in New Orleans is a punishing feat, but well deserving a close look. Luster achieves this on multiple levels. She frames her large b&w prints as circular images, pitching the viewer forward into the city's landscape itself, and she exhaustively titles each work based on the crime's location, date and descriptions on the violence committed. Finally, the breadth of works on display, the dozen or so leading into the main room are just the tip of the iceberg. Check the installed bookshelf, lined w/ bound oversized volumes, and the several ledgers open for perusal, feat. a dizzying array besides those framed.
* Sam Samore "The Dark Suspicion" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. This cinematically conceptual photographer's style is intrinsically seductive, at least to my eyes. It's precisely what I get into as far as art-photography: "widescreen" prints, transferred from film, beautiful star-like women, lots occurring in the margins, multiple points of reference, thoughtful cropping — OK the last bit in particular was a bit geekish but you see what I mean. Check Samore's classic "Allegories of Beauty (Incomplete)" series from the '90s as the jump-off of what to expect here.
* Miguel Palma "In Image We Trust" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. The cycle of war (or militarism, if you want to take it there) proliferates the Portuguese artist's debut at the gallery. From the gadgetry and whiz-bang detailing of the titular moving (literally) diorama, to the mix of nostalgia and evacuation maneuvers underpinning "Action Plan" and "Nautical Installation".
* Seth Price @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Take your pick in Price's latest A/V installation, a bank of video booths containing the artist's own narrated ghost stories (like "The Rolling Skull", shown against religious extremist video) and music videos (like "Happy Boots" a cheery psychedelic 2 1/2 minutes).
* Hiroyuki Doi @ Ricco Maresca Gallery / 529 W 20th St 3rd Fl. Debut stateside show for the amazing Tokyo-based veteran Doi, who creates organic, billowing ink abstracts on handmade textured Japanese paper. His pulsing renderings of thousands of teeny-tiny orbs resonate like their own parallel universe — or our own universe, perhaps (I've been reading a lot of Borges, and "The Library of Babel" came to mind when viewing Doi's lush cloudlike forms).
* Johannes Wohnseifer "Another Year" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. The show's title is indicative of the artist's thought process: mutability, the passage of time, mortality. The standout seems to be a series of sleep-cycle influenced "Light Sleeper" abstract paintings and related "Stacked Studio Lights", a sculpture of fluorescent lightbulbs attuned to Wohnseifer's REM/NREM cycles.
* "112 Greene St: The Early Years (1970-4)" @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St. The gallery reunites a group show from one of NY's first alternative artist-run venues. Mastermind and "mad scientist" Gordon Matta-Clark's contributions figure throughout, from his photography (the wall-spanning "Graffiti Scroll" of tagged subway cars and related "Small Graffiti: Truck Fragment" bit of steel) to cast-lead objects, paster and construction ingredients and melted beer bottles, to these really incredible, delicate ink and crayon drawings ("Carmen's Fan" and "Three Forms"), the latter totally unlike my general impressions of his excavation-style art gathering. Plus some intriguing sculptures by Alan Saret (the wicked "Four Piece Folding Glade", turning wire into 'trees' decades before Roxy Paine's coated aluminum works) and Richard Nonas (these cerebral "Blocks of Wood") and short films by Rachel Wood, Suzanne Harris and Richard Serra. Brain food for 2011.
* Christopher Williams "For Example: Dix-Huit Lecons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 12)" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 W 19th St. I looked back at my notes on Williams' last solo show at the gallery (a similarly titled affair, though "Revision 7") to glean any insight on what I could add to this one. Guess what: I can't! That 2008 entry, in a dozen sentences, amounted to "well I really like what I see but I can't describe it". There's less camera bifurcation going on here, (in one instance, there's an actual window set cutaway in place of destroyed machinery) and there's a lot of repeating red, in a sock or developing trays or advert-luscious fruits. Plus a lone haystack (rendered as a gelatin silver print), adding some innocence to his otherwise ultrasharp renderings. Photography lovers (particular film devotees) will love this.
* Dave Miko + Tom Thayer "New World Pig" @ The Kitchen / 512 W 19th St. Miko's enamel on aluminum abstract paintings and Thayer's lo-fi stop-motion animations are match-made. The arcing narrative here, a folktale about a hunter, his dog and a pig, is tenuous at best unless you really spend time watching them, but a cursory perusal of the flickering, melting landscapes and toxic-bright color saturation is quite lovely, to scrape it surface-level anyway.
* Mona Vatamanu & Florian Tudor "Land Distribution" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. The Romanian duo reexamine a '50s socialist concept of wealth distribution by literally blocking out the main gallery space in teetering rebars and VHS tape. Their materials were inspired by actual contemporary land redistribution in Venezuela, and there's a sense that if you dared to attempt to cross these plots, you'd inadvertently pull the whole structure down. The adjacent sewn banner "LONG LIVE AND THRIVE CAPITALISM" in the room reappears in their video "Poem" (2009), showing a bunch of art students working 'assembly-line style' to create it, while another video "Surplus Value" (2009) is simply a block of metal being filed away, by hand, wasted effort to create nothing. The end effect of these related works resonates long after you leave the gallery's domain.
* John Stezaker @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Two incredible, pivotal series — "Dark Star" (1979-1983, off Stezaker's 'city of voyeurs' opinion of NYC) and silkscreens (1979-1992) — from the London-based Conceptualist. I could spend hours in this exhibit. The silkscreens incorporating pure black (or in a few cases white) fields act like visual windows to some uncertain realm, promising to pull you inward if you lose balance and pitch toward them. A few of the more recent versions, from the early '90s, utilize skewed quadrilateral canvases (think warped Ellsworth Kelly). Triangular canvases, like a three-peat of a man's profile, cover his face w/ his hands, or another of a female nude, her head cropped from view, embody an invigorating sense of surrealism. His "Dark Star" figures are literally cut out from their scenes, leaving "backlit" collages in their absence.
* Martin Boyce "Winter Palms" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Welcome to post-armageddon 2011, or so you might think walking through Boyce's latest exhibition. Think twisted metal park benches, reconfigured as undulating screens, overturned bike racks bearing some sort of coded language, and jesmonite and steel "collages". I wiki'ed jesmonite: it's a gypsum-based material in acrylic resin, used in sculpture — here Boyce has turned it into a wood slats-like mentality.
* "Untitled (Painting") @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Want hot abstract paintings? The gallery sets the tone of dope group shows this year w/ a stunner: Josh Smith (who's got a solo opening here in February) reworks his name-only paintings into an even more twisted soup. There's a badass Christopher Wool in the main room, sharing the space w/ a pixellated (and Wool-esque) Albert Oehlen plus a vicious big-X Wade Guyton and another Tauba Auerbach "Fold" painting, bearing a subtle, shimmering gradient. I've never counted myself a Bernard Frize fan, but his "Fabia" acrylic in the 2nd room, a fuzzed-out network of spraypaint-like lines, will blur your vision in the coolest way.
* "Here and Now" @ Lyons Weir Gallery / 542 W 24th St. The inaugural group exhibition in the gallery's new location injects a good jab of badassness (and solid, representational works) to the W.Chelsea scene. Both Tim Okamura, Mary Henderson and Fahamu Pecou work in stunningly realistic portraiture, w/ Okamura's in particular emanating a strong, meditative beauty, plus Henderson's photorealistic nostalgia. A bit of sexiness from James Rieck (again with realism, but enlarged and cropped for maximum ratio of skin to fire engine red shirt) and Ryan Bradley (an ace of spades-patterned nude, evaporating into its Arches paper background), and a bit of notable, intriguing sculpture (Andres Basurto cobbled up a bottle-green, horned skull of broken glass and epoxy putty, Jan Huling's "Steampunk Willy" is, I think, a beaded riff on the Kewpie doll). The exhibition brims w/ creativity and attitude: I look forward to concentrated doses now from individual artists. W.Chelsea, I hope you're ready.
LAST CHANCE
* Robert Rauschenberg @ Gagosian Gallery / 522 W 21st St. The first sentence of Gagosian's press release for this show, after Rauschenberg's quote on art as communication and its inherent ability to change, is the description "a major exhibition". I'd rephrase that "a MAYJAH exhibition". Goodness, there is a lot of art here, and I hate to use the shortcut phrase "career-spanning retrospective", but that's in the works here, from Rauschenberg's John Cage-era, infamous "White" paintings (one of those, plus a triptych in black, which I'd title "void" paintings instead, as they're sinisterly devoid of anything, active in their starkness) to the deliciously battered-but-luxe "Watchdog" sculpture, shown in the same room as the White painting and appearing as a series of seven battered and rusty pails (a la friend Jasper Johns) over chromed aluminum. "Watchdog" is from 2007 and the adjacent White canvas is 1951. Do the math. In between, we get a little bit of everything, meaning Combines (the humorous "Short Circuit" from '55, featuring a Sturtevant reproduction of a Johns flag painting inside one of its cupboards), Spreads (the vivid "Palladian Xmas" fro 1980, w/ illuminated washboards amid the screenprints of cats and fabric stripes), ROCI (aka Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, incl "Caryatid Cavalcade II", a threateningly huge five-canvas mixture of acrylic washes and larger-than-life screenprints, of Chilean imagery and building facades), and Runts (amid his last works, sprawling Americana pigment transfers). Plus a lot of Rauschenberg I've NEVER seen before, not in my memory anyway, like his Early Egyptian works (check the pyramidal work from '73, its cardboard stacks painted Day-Glo on the reverse, projecting an orangey aura against the wall, plus its sand-encrusted neighbor from '74 w/ spoke-wheels embedded in the boxes) and the Jammer series, little more than layered, ethereal cloth works w/ rattan poles, and two Borealis works from '90 and '91 of tarnished shadowy objects on brass. Think Andy Warhol's oxidation series but way cooler. I am still taking all this in, but the essential nature of this MAYJAH exhibition should be a given, even if you didn't read this far.
* Peter Saul "Fifty Years of Painting" @ Haunch of Venison NY / 1230 Ave of Americas, 20th Fl. So 2010 was pretty fierce for dueling American art trends. If you've been paying attention, you might recall MoMA overhauled their 4th floor w/ a luxurious Abstract Expressionist (New York) exhibition, culled entirely from the museum's vast holdings. Roy Lichtenstein has enjoyed several focused shows (incl. an extensive still-life extravaganza at Gagosian and a scholarly look at his work in reflections at Mitchell-Innes & Nash) and his "Ohh…Alright…" took top dollar (over $38 million of 'em, actually) at Christie's. And because I must: Gagosian's thrown a museum-worthy look at Robert Rauschenberg's entire oeuvre at their 21st St space (see above). And yet, and yet. That same gallery, in their Madison Ave space, devoted a retrospective to Ed Paschke, the electrifying Chicago Imagist whose Pop-themed art goes way more garish than Warhol ever took it (and whose grip of neon and early-cyber in the '80s is, well, incredibly '80s-looking). Related Hairy Who stalwarts Karl Wirsum and Jim Nutt also appeared in solo gallery shows (Nutt's incl. a mix of classics and new works), all fiercely removed from NY art world trends of the day. So it's fitting, then, not quite an answer to these Pop Art/Abstract Expressionist rock-star shows, but rather an alternative to the heavy-NY presence, that we get an inspired survey of Cali grotesque-Pop artist (and tie-in to the Chicago scene) Peter Saul. The highlight, in all its contorted, lurid Day-Glo glory, is the massive "Typical Saigon" from 1968, Saul's biting retort to the Vietnam War. The cruelty depicted — American G.I.'s sodomizing and crucifying Vietnamese women — is intensified by the painting's plasticky surface, the stinging contrast of the colors and the warped, twisting movement of the figures. Its torturous energy still resonates. Though Gen. Custer, Christopher Columbus, the death penalty, and even the NY subway system are targets of Saul's cold-shock techniques. His "Icebox" series from the early '60s, echoed in new work "Refrigerator Breakdown", are benign by comparison. Saul's most recent style, pairing acrylic with oil paint in powdery-edged renderings, have this melted-3D effect, popping off their canvases with the threat of spilling into our laps. Bad taste rarely looks this good.
* Huma Bhabha @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. A stunner, as Bhabha continues her forays into reapplying ink, paint and collage onto vintage photography. Imagery of Achilles — or more specifically heels — trod massively across arid landscapes and highways, grillwork hands grapple with the earth and half-completed structures, a two-headed dog (or the blurred, Francis Bacon-like motion of a normal canine) seems to visibly shiver furiously in front of a large government facade. Elements extend beyond the borders of the photographs, Bhabha colorizes b&w prints, in a riotous cycle of destruction and creation.
* Joan Miro "The Dutch Interiors" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). In late-fall 2008, the MoMA held a stunning decade-spanning show of Miro's genre-busting oeuvre entitled "Painting and Anti-Painting", a sliver of the artist's oeuvre but a richly beautiful, cerebral wealth of technique and experimentation, that still strongly resonates in my consciousness. The Met takes a scalpel to that exquisite exhibition, mining out his three "Dutch Interior" paintings from his time in Montroig (near Barcelon), plus one of the two related canvases from that trip ("The Potato"), work studies, sketches, several delicious earlier works and — because this is the Met we're talking about — the two Dutch Golden Age paintings that inspired "The Dutch Interiors". An exemplary feat. Miro visited the Rijksmuseum during a 1928 trip to Amsterdam and, taking postcards back of two works that struck a chord w/ him, Hendrick Sorgh's "The Lute Player" (1660) and Jan Steen's fanciful "Children Teaching a Cat to Dance" (1660), distorted, abstracted, exaggerated, and updated them into three lyrical, poetic paintings. The first, based deceptively closely off "The Lute Player", is a riot of semi-figurative forms on an eye-popping green backdrop, w/ the window overlooking a smeared blue and yellow town scene. Miro played more w/ the second canvas, deemphasizing the dancing cat and lutist in favor of the foregrounded hound and an onlooking child's rapt gaze. The third interior is the loosest, floating planes of color and predated Calder-esque mobile forms on a sea of bright yellow and yellow-green. In essence, this is more than enough, seeing Miro's marriage of structure and experimentation w/ the Dutch compositions, but the Met augments it w/ several works from its own collection, incl. the stunning, gradient- and texture-rich "Animated Landscape. Study this one closely after viewing "The Dutch Interiors" and their work drawings, as the truths hidden in this lovely work are far more opaque.
* Lee Lozano "Tools" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Good ol' NYTimes spilled the beans on one of my most anticipated shows this winter: a rare exhibition of "art punk" Lozano's intense tool paintings and drawings from the '60s. Don't miss this one, even if you can't make the opening.
* Piotr Uklanski "Discharge!" @ Gagosian Gallery / 980 Madison Ave. The Warsaw-born media alchemist hasn't had a proper solo show in NY since his red/white splash back in spring 2008, a graveyard of charged decorative imagery and resinous paintings. The experimenter's latest begins w/ tie-dye works, which sounds banal on paper but, at least in visuals, carries a transfixed explosiveness, like the aftermath of Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder 'drawings'. Brave the snow remnants for this one.
* "Paintings & Sculptures" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. An innocently titled group show like this shouldn't be taken for granted, esp. if you're aware of Skarstedt's primo list of ferocious contemporary artists. Mike Kelley sets the tone w/ a seminal do-it-yourself woodworking apparatus from 1992, his "Torture Table". Plus newish George Condo (ahead of his big exhibition at New Museum), biomorphic Carroll Dunham (the kind I can get into), textural Christopher Wool and others.
* "Performance 11: On Line/Trisha Brown Dance Company" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 2 & 4p. Wicked! MoMA's performance series feat. a bunch of classic and new shows related to "On Line", the historical and fascinating exhibition on the 6th Fl. Choreographer Trisha Brown kicks it off w/ four works in the atrium, performed by her dance company (which also marks its 40th year in existence). Includes early works "Sticks" (1973), "Scallops" (1973), "Locus Solo" (1975) and brand-new "Roof Piece Re-Layed" (2011, based on her "Roof Piece" from '71). Performances also recur SAT & SUN, 2 & 4p.
* Kordan, deVries, Invisible Days @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Tiny artsy Glasslands will be full to the ceiling w/ amps and guitar noise tonight, w/ this local three-pack. Kordan veers a bit electro, but their enveloping sound is irresistible.
* Grooms + Fiasco @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/$7. What do you get when you pair melodic sludge-rockers Grooms w/ the skronk instrumentals of Fiasco? A: a delirious sweaty mess of fun, is what you get.
THURSDAY
* Ulf Puder @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Neo Rausch might be the best-known name of the 1st Gen. Leipziger Hochschule, but Puder's debut stateside solo exhibition puts him firmly in the need-to-know realm of Eastern European artists. His stark, uninhabited landscapes of ramshackle buildings seems poised at either post-aftermath or approaching some unseen destruction.
* Tony Feher "Next On Line" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. OK, so a line of everyday PET bottles or stacked milk-crates (color-coded, naturally) might not grab you, so how about a ginormous sculpture of vinyl tubing, filled w/ colored water and tumbling from the ceiling in arabesque designs? Feher is all about pushing commercial materials to their limits, and this installation should make believers out of us.
* Amy Rathbone "suchness" @ Priska Jusckha Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Rathbone further develops her telltale 'flocks' vocabulary (think a bunch of little wire loops, or ink markings, exploding on the gallery walls) w/ a blend of natural and artificial materials, like conifer branch interventions and spraypainted mist, mounted on birch.
* Jonggeon Lee & Buhm Hong "I Was There" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. NY-based Lee and Hong both seek to transport the viewer via their own personal nostalgias, Lee's in poetic wood sculpture and Hong's fantasy-laden drawings.
* Patrick Hill "Clumsy Angels" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Hill has a handle on gorgeous/dangerous combinations, enormous cut-glass circles bisected by steel plates, usually incorporating concrete or some natural mineral block. His latest utilizes wood beams for structural support in riffs on Classical figurative sculpture.
* R. Luke DuBois "A More Perfect Union" @ bitforms / 529 W 20th St, 2nd Fl. The NY-based A/V artist comes off his traveling "Hindsight is Always 20/20" project (focused on the 2008 U.S. presidency) w/ a sharp look at American self-identity through online dating, combining Congressional District stats to create regional 'romantic atlases'.
* "Tuesday", curated by Mr. & Mrs. Amani Olu @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. The mastermind behind the annual "Young Curators, New Ideas" exhibition culls nine emerging artists whose work in recontexualizing the 'usual' may make us jaded art-goers look at the world a bit differently.
* Joe Bradley "Human Form" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. A potentially MUCH softer 180 from Bradley's primal physicality at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, this suite of silkscreens feat. posed human silhouettes getting down Bangles style.
* Marcel Odenbach @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. The artist's latest film short film "Turning Circles", a study of the Majdanek Mausoleum designed by Polish sculptor Woktor Tolkin and erected in 1969 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Lublin Concentration Camp's liberation.
* Gia Edgveradze "Stolen Blanket & Other Short Stories" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. The debut stateside solo show by the Georgian-born, German-based artist is a cross-media affair, reflecting his homage to Malevich, Constructivism, Conceptualism and incorporation of Georgian calligraphic script.
* Robbin Hill "Case Discussions" @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. Neat concept: Hill is a member of the studio faculty at University of California at Davis and centers her latest gallery exhibition on decommissioned lab equipment from the university's flea market. She incorporates her cyanotype patterns throughout.
* Bridget and the Squares + Anna Haas @ R Bar / 218 Bowery (J to Bowery, 6 to Spring, F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$5. Brooklyn's pop darlings Bridget and the Squares plus local bluesy singer-songwriter/pianist Haas (catch her last NY show for some time), b/c it's cold out there, baby, and their vocal-driving songs will take care of that quite nicely.
* Xray Eyeballs + Sweet Bulbs @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5. This is totally rad: pop-punks Xray Eyeballs (track "Egyptian Magician" is constantly stuck in my head) and fuzzy noise-popsters Sweet Bulbs (ditto to "Kissing Clouds") epitomize why I get down w/ the local scene so well. w/ Slow Animal
FRIDAY
* "Readykelous: The Hurtful Healer" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Get ready: the organic Ridykeulous collective, founded in 2005 by A.L. Steiner & Nicole Eisenman, descends on Invisible-Exports, feat. works by Allyson Mitchell, David Wojnarowicz, Glen Fogel, Kara Walker, K8 Hardy, Jack Smith, Mike Albo (incl. an open-mic, or "Open Mike", by the man on FEB 12) and loads others from the archives.
* Stuart Hawkins "Broken Welcome" @ Zach Feuer Gallery / 548 W 22nd St. Nepal-based photographer Hawkins imagines the day-to-day in failed Indian millennial planned community 'Newtown', using low-tech props to 'complete' the unfinished residential landscape.
* 2011 Maximum Perception Performance Festival, curated by Peter Dobill & Phoenix Lights @ English Kills / 114 Forrest St, Bushwick (L to Morgan), 7p-12a. Two nights (tonight & SAT) of contemporary performance art from a local and international cast, in the festival's fourth iteration. The full lineup and schedule is here but some standouts: Sindy Butz (Berlin, now studying butoh in NY, produces wearable sculpture), duo Holly Faurot & Sarah H. Paulson (Brooklyn, shared choreographies and frequent performers at NURTUREart), Akiko Ichikawa (Brooklyn, well-versed in Fluxus practice), Rafael Sanchez (NY, time- and endurance works) and Anya Liftig (Brooklyn, whose own "The Anxiety of Influence" art-savvy people and scenesters may recall as an intervention during Marina Abramovic's retrospective at MoMA).
* "The Green Hornet" (dir. Michel Gondry, 2011) screenings in wide release. Adapting Golden Age stories is an immensely tricky maneuver, but when you've got Gondry at the helm, Seth Rogen and Jay Chou as mismatched heroes, and the silver-tongued Christoph Waltz as supervillain, you've got the makings of LIST-certified dopeness.
* "Enter the Void: Original Uncut Version" (dir. Gaspar Noe, 2010) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Damn it! Are you telling me, seriously, that the version of "Enter the Void" I caught at IFC, less than a week after it debuted, wasn't Noe's full 163-minute downtown Tokyo acid trip? According to the man himself, the cut stuff includes more astro-visions & an orgy feat. Paz de la Huerta and one of the Japanese dancers… so I guess it's worth it?? If you've not seen "Enter the Void" yet, then you definitely should. I am not sure I could sit through it again, w/o at least some light hallucinogenic, but the title sequence does kick some major electric typeface ass, cannot lie.
* Anamanaguchi + Peelander-Z @ Studio at Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NRW/L/6 to Union Square), 8p/$12. Catching NES-hacking, Four Loko-quaffing punks Anamanaguchi in sweaty Webster Hall's studio epitomizes dope, but then add Japan-by-way-of-E.Vill art-punks Peelander-Z to the drunk & disorderly mix and you've got the recipe for best live show of the 2011, thus far.
* Liturgy + Controlled Bleeding @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/. The Barn's culled together an incredible night of 'tough' music, epitomized best by seminal Boston outfit Controlled Bleeding, who have done post-everything since 1978. They're joined by Brooklyn's blackest black metalheads Liturgy. w/ PAK (new to harsh label Tzadik) and Cellular Chaos
SATURDAY
* Yuichi Higashionna @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. Fluorescent light sculpture that mimics graffiti, Op art and trompe l'oeil, filled out w/ mirrors and cut glass. Expect a lot of extra badassness here.
* Stephen G. Rhodes @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Rhodes takes Immanuel Kant as inspiration for his gallery debut, kinda, as the lederhosen-and-wigged philosopher reappears throughout this labyrinthine mixed-media installation.
* Kai Althoff "Punkt, Absatz, Bluemli" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. I have a feeling Althoff's latest installation will elicit something of a spiritual reaction, whether that means an awakening or glossolalia or whatever depends on the viewer and their experience w/ the Cologne-based artist's particular style. Proceed w/ caution.
* "112 Greene St: The Early Years (1970-4) @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St, gallery talk w/ curator Jessamyn Fiore, 11:30a. RSVP to Lauren O'Donnell: lodonnell@davidzwirner.com. Fiore is daughter to Jane Crawford, widow of Gordon Matta-Clark, and assists in managing his estate while directing The Writing Workshop and Dublin's not-for-profit gallery space Thisisnotashop — and she curates, like this enriching stunner at Zwirner Gallery (read on under CURRENT SHOWS).
* Saturday Sessions @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq), 4p. feat. Brandon Stosuy hosts convo b/w artist Adam Helms & curator Klaus Kertess, performance by Wolf Eyes (Nate Young/John Olson) in "STARE CASE" project
* Signal to Noise Party @ Museum of the Moving Image / 3601 35th Ave, Astoria (NQ to 36th Ave/Washington Ave, EM/R to Steinway St), 8p/$20. As the Museum describes it: a three-ring circus of live electronic music, moving image performances and interactive art. Incl. Martha Colburn's double-projected "Dolls vs. Dictators", w/ live band accompaniment (Deerhoof's Greg Saunier and Michael Evans scored it), plus chiptune acts Bit Shifter and nullsleep, Victoria Keddle on prepared violin, VJ Shantell Martin's visuals and loads else ecstatic messiness.
* The Beets, Eternal Summers, Sweet Bulbs @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. Here's a primer on the hot local indie scene. If you only catch ONE live show this month (sad for you!), may I recommend the stripped-down barbershop rock of Jackson Heights' The Beets, accompanied by fuzz-popstars Eternal Summers and Sweet Bulbs? CanNOT miss w/ this one.
* Trap Them + Black Anvil @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), 5p/$12. Cake Shop's recurring hardcore shows have always frightened me — something about the tiny, sweaty basement venue, w/o any safe hiding spots — but if I wanted to attend a show w/ the very refreshing reality of being hit over the head w/ a guitar, the combo of speedfreaks Trap Them and Relapse's Black Anvil would definitely be worth it. w/ Psychic Limb (show up early, get messed up!)
SUNDAY
* Michael Patterson-Carver "Loose Lips Do Sink Ships" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) / 261 Broome St. In Patterson-Carver's 2nd solo w/ the gallery, a meditation on Wikileaks! His approachable drawing style permits for many well-timed, skewering takedowns, so expect to learn something too.
* "A Strange Affinity to the Beautiful and the Dreadful", curated by Maureen Sullivan @ Hendershot Gallery / 195 Chrystie St. This large group show's title sounds like me, sometimes… Feat. cinematic Sue de Beer, some meditative strewn pieces by Julia Chiang, plus other happy characters like Ghost of a Dream, Alexa Gerrity, Nelson Loskamp, Galia Offri and, yes, Marilyn Manson.
* "Offset Summary" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. Reconfiguration and spatial intervention — hallmarks of conceptual art — form the backbone of this auspicious five-artist show. Feat. the original renegade Yves Klein, plus Cali's Kathryn Andrews, local artists Zak Kitnick and Mary Simpson, plus a collaboration b/w Simpson and writer/curator Fionn Meade.
* The Toasters @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 7p/$15. The Toasters?? What you thought ska was "over", totally co-opted by the '90s punkish overtones and then obliterated? This is the NY band's 30th anniversary tour, brother! Don't let the bastards grind you down, indeed.
MONDAY
* "Performance 12: On Line/Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). The line in motion, via untitled dance performance works from 2004-2009, enacted throughout the day in the Marron Atrium. This also recurs WED & THUR.
** SPECIAL MENTION **
* "Fireworks From the Heart" (dir. Masahiro Kunimoto, 2010) U.S. debut @ Big Cinemas Manhattan / 239 E 59th St (456/NR to 59th St), WED Jan 26, 3:30/6:30p. First off, here's what you have to do to get in: go here and RSVP by JAN 23. You'll receive a confirmation. I preview this b/c 1) it stars Kengo Kora (a hottie NY film freaks might know from Yoshihiro Nakamura's "Fish Story" -- he was in the badass punk band -- but I will always equate him w/ the rakish, deviant costar to materialistic/piercing-obsessed Yuriko Yoshitaka in Yukio NInagawa's "Snakes and Earrings") and 2) most importantly, IMO, it stars Mitsuki Tanimura, the cutie in Akihiko Shiota's exquisite film "Canary", who plays Kora-kun's tough and caring sister. (3. would be incredible character actor Ren Osugi as their dad) The plot: he's a hikkikomori, she's got a terminal illness, and the action's centered around a famous Katakai firework festival in Niigata Prefecture…and it's based on a true story. Plus, I wonder aloud if this film will EVER be properly screened in the states (possibly at Japan Society, but I'm not holding my breath).
CURRENT SHOWS
* Mika Tajima @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. A lovely chromatic chaos, as Tajima deconstructs a 1970's Herman Miller Action Office system into a modular installation of mini painted cubicles (or prisons), some doubling as bulletin boards for additional paintings, and vintage ergonomic kneeling chairs. Accessibility denied! Her gridded spray-painted acrylic frames lining the gallery walls, "Furniture Art" (after Erik Satie's "Musique d'ameublement") are as much architectural references as mindless visual eye-candy, meant perhaps to make office hell a bit more bearable. Though if she were called in to redesign a proper office, I would be down for that.
* "QuietlyLoud" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St, 4th Fl. Pay attention to these three twentysomething artists, painters Alisha Kerlin (contributed to PS1's "Greater NY") and Natasha Conway (shortlisted for Saatchi Gallery's 'New Sensations 2009' Prize) and sculptor Cassie Ralhl (part of "Knights Move" show at SculptureCenter). The 'handmade' qualities in their respective works, plus their own undeniable talents, position the art world's winds to their backs. This is Conway's debut stateside, and her somehow masked geometric abstract paintings simultaneous tie Kerlin's stark canvases and Ralhl's equally stark assemblages together, whilst maintaining a certain autonomous semblance about the respective works.
* Deville Cohen, Andrei Koschmieder, Joe Winter @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. The interaction b/w Koschmieder's screenprinted series "Catnip High" and Winter's malfunctioning cubicle hell — if you've ever had to change a toner cartridge, you now what I mean — tie quite nicely, but hang out a bit for Cohen's video installation "The Wall", complete w/ a Xeroxed brick wall.
* Adam Marnie + Tom Thayer @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Both artists take on the cut-and-glue medium, w/ Marnie riffing endlessly off a vase of flowers photographed in his studio and Thayer's Arte Povera-style puppets and collages (elements to his stunning lo-fi animations) framed here like bizarre family ephemera.
* Ayako Wakahara "Tenkoku" @ Onishi Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Wakahara takes the traditional Japanese practice of stone seal engraving and spins that into her contemporary blending of calligraphy and painting.
* Ann Craven @ Maccarone Gallery / 630 Greenwich St. Five years' worth of Craven's watercolors — a very rarely shown facet of her oeuvre — plus several large oil on linen paintings. Many of her thematic elements (watery and saturated blooms, cats, owls, songbirds) recur here in great numbers, providing like a hand-drawn animated element when hung in multiples.
* Joe Bradley "Mouth and Foot Painting" @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. Bradley goes Paleolithic with his debut at Gavin Brown, slathering on the paint and scraping out brutally figurative abstracts on raw, dropcloth canvas. He worked the elements out on his studio floor, hence the dribbles, foot-tracks, markings and other loving, historical elements imbued in their respective surfaces.
* Leslie Thornton "Binocular" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. The experimental film pioneer — her several-decade opus "Peggy and Fred in Hell" had a special screening during PS1's "Greater New York" — debuts at Winkleman w/ a deceptively simple, and therefore thoroughly amazing, exhibit. She presents a series of flat-screen, two-channel monitors, each bearing a circular field of some animal, filmed in the wild, plus a second circular field, projecting the same image but remapped as a kaleidoscope. The resulting diptych — a regal black parrot preening along against its jewellike abstraction, a lizard on a branch vs. its geometric opposite — may cause us to recast our feelings on which field, the legit or the manipulated, contains the most life.
* Jesse McCloskey "New World Nightmares" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. McCloskey's inclusion at last year's "The Antidote" group show was a teaser for his fascinating debut solo at the gallery. His media — layered vinyl, paint and paper collages, in super-saturated, constrasty colors — resembles woodcuts, and their Old World mythologies echoes that.
* Ezra Stoller @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. A succulent exhibition of the architecturally-cognizant photographer's classic gelatin silver prints, depicting various triumphant structures around NY. The TWA Terminal at JFK is particularly otherworldly: Eero Saarinen's creation all supple alien curves and fins. Against that, Mies van deer Rohe and Philip Johnson's Seagram Building is both capacious and cozy.
* David Stephenson "Light Cities" @ Julie Saul Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. This veteran photographer's management of light over nighttime urban skies is really enthralling. The triptych of Melbourne around the Rialto Tower bears a "Blade Runner" luminescence, and Tokyo seen from its bay and Tokyo Tower is a futuristic wonderland.
* Deborah Luster "Tooth for an Eye" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. This photographic archive of contemporary and historical homicide sites in New Orleans is a punishing feat, but well deserving a close look. Luster achieves this on multiple levels. She frames her large b&w prints as circular images, pitching the viewer forward into the city's landscape itself, and she exhaustively titles each work based on the crime's location, date and descriptions on the violence committed. Finally, the breadth of works on display, the dozen or so leading into the main room are just the tip of the iceberg. Check the installed bookshelf, lined w/ bound oversized volumes, and the several ledgers open for perusal, feat. a dizzying array besides those framed.
* Sam Samore "The Dark Suspicion" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. This cinematically conceptual photographer's style is intrinsically seductive, at least to my eyes. It's precisely what I get into as far as art-photography: "widescreen" prints, transferred from film, beautiful star-like women, lots occurring in the margins, multiple points of reference, thoughtful cropping — OK the last bit in particular was a bit geekish but you see what I mean. Check Samore's classic "Allegories of Beauty (Incomplete)" series from the '90s as the jump-off of what to expect here.
* Miguel Palma "In Image We Trust" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. The cycle of war (or militarism, if you want to take it there) proliferates the Portuguese artist's debut at the gallery. From the gadgetry and whiz-bang detailing of the titular moving (literally) diorama, to the mix of nostalgia and evacuation maneuvers underpinning "Action Plan" and "Nautical Installation".
* Seth Price @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Take your pick in Price's latest A/V installation, a bank of video booths containing the artist's own narrated ghost stories (like "The Rolling Skull", shown against religious extremist video) and music videos (like "Happy Boots" a cheery psychedelic 2 1/2 minutes).
* Hiroyuki Doi @ Ricco Maresca Gallery / 529 W 20th St 3rd Fl. Debut stateside show for the amazing Tokyo-based veteran Doi, who creates organic, billowing ink abstracts on handmade textured Japanese paper. His pulsing renderings of thousands of teeny-tiny orbs resonate like their own parallel universe — or our own universe, perhaps (I've been reading a lot of Borges, and "The Library of Babel" came to mind when viewing Doi's lush cloudlike forms).
* Johannes Wohnseifer "Another Year" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. The show's title is indicative of the artist's thought process: mutability, the passage of time, mortality. The standout seems to be a series of sleep-cycle influenced "Light Sleeper" abstract paintings and related "Stacked Studio Lights", a sculpture of fluorescent lightbulbs attuned to Wohnseifer's REM/NREM cycles.
* "112 Greene St: The Early Years (1970-4)" @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St. The gallery reunites a group show from one of NY's first alternative artist-run venues. Mastermind and "mad scientist" Gordon Matta-Clark's contributions figure throughout, from his photography (the wall-spanning "Graffiti Scroll" of tagged subway cars and related "Small Graffiti: Truck Fragment" bit of steel) to cast-lead objects, paster and construction ingredients and melted beer bottles, to these really incredible, delicate ink and crayon drawings ("Carmen's Fan" and "Three Forms"), the latter totally unlike my general impressions of his excavation-style art gathering. Plus some intriguing sculptures by Alan Saret (the wicked "Four Piece Folding Glade", turning wire into 'trees' decades before Roxy Paine's coated aluminum works) and Richard Nonas (these cerebral "Blocks of Wood") and short films by Rachel Wood, Suzanne Harris and Richard Serra. Brain food for 2011.
* Christopher Williams "For Example: Dix-Huit Lecons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 12)" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 W 19th St. I looked back at my notes on Williams' last solo show at the gallery (a similarly titled affair, though "Revision 7") to glean any insight on what I could add to this one. Guess what: I can't! That 2008 entry, in a dozen sentences, amounted to "well I really like what I see but I can't describe it". There's less camera bifurcation going on here, (in one instance, there's an actual window set cutaway in place of destroyed machinery) and there's a lot of repeating red, in a sock or developing trays or advert-luscious fruits. Plus a lone haystack (rendered as a gelatin silver print), adding some innocence to his otherwise ultrasharp renderings. Photography lovers (particular film devotees) will love this.
* Dave Miko + Tom Thayer "New World Pig" @ The Kitchen / 512 W 19th St. Miko's enamel on aluminum abstract paintings and Thayer's lo-fi stop-motion animations are match-made. The arcing narrative here, a folktale about a hunter, his dog and a pig, is tenuous at best unless you really spend time watching them, but a cursory perusal of the flickering, melting landscapes and toxic-bright color saturation is quite lovely, to scrape it surface-level anyway.
* Mona Vatamanu & Florian Tudor "Land Distribution" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. The Romanian duo reexamine a '50s socialist concept of wealth distribution by literally blocking out the main gallery space in teetering rebars and VHS tape. Their materials were inspired by actual contemporary land redistribution in Venezuela, and there's a sense that if you dared to attempt to cross these plots, you'd inadvertently pull the whole structure down. The adjacent sewn banner "LONG LIVE AND THRIVE CAPITALISM" in the room reappears in their video "Poem" (2009), showing a bunch of art students working 'assembly-line style' to create it, while another video "Surplus Value" (2009) is simply a block of metal being filed away, by hand, wasted effort to create nothing. The end effect of these related works resonates long after you leave the gallery's domain.
* John Stezaker @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Two incredible, pivotal series — "Dark Star" (1979-1983, off Stezaker's 'city of voyeurs' opinion of NYC) and silkscreens (1979-1992) — from the London-based Conceptualist. I could spend hours in this exhibit. The silkscreens incorporating pure black (or in a few cases white) fields act like visual windows to some uncertain realm, promising to pull you inward if you lose balance and pitch toward them. A few of the more recent versions, from the early '90s, utilize skewed quadrilateral canvases (think warped Ellsworth Kelly). Triangular canvases, like a three-peat of a man's profile, cover his face w/ his hands, or another of a female nude, her head cropped from view, embody an invigorating sense of surrealism. His "Dark Star" figures are literally cut out from their scenes, leaving "backlit" collages in their absence.
* Martin Boyce "Winter Palms" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Welcome to post-armageddon 2011, or so you might think walking through Boyce's latest exhibition. Think twisted metal park benches, reconfigured as undulating screens, overturned bike racks bearing some sort of coded language, and jesmonite and steel "collages". I wiki'ed jesmonite: it's a gypsum-based material in acrylic resin, used in sculpture — here Boyce has turned it into a wood slats-like mentality.
* "Untitled (Painting") @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Want hot abstract paintings? The gallery sets the tone of dope group shows this year w/ a stunner: Josh Smith (who's got a solo opening here in February) reworks his name-only paintings into an even more twisted soup. There's a badass Christopher Wool in the main room, sharing the space w/ a pixellated (and Wool-esque) Albert Oehlen plus a vicious big-X Wade Guyton and another Tauba Auerbach "Fold" painting, bearing a subtle, shimmering gradient. I've never counted myself a Bernard Frize fan, but his "Fabia" acrylic in the 2nd room, a fuzzed-out network of spraypaint-like lines, will blur your vision in the coolest way.
* "Here and Now" @ Lyons Weir Gallery / 542 W 24th St. The inaugural group exhibition in the gallery's new location injects a good jab of badassness (and solid, representational works) to the W.Chelsea scene. Both Tim Okamura, Mary Henderson and Fahamu Pecou work in stunningly realistic portraiture, w/ Okamura's in particular emanating a strong, meditative beauty, plus Henderson's photorealistic nostalgia. A bit of sexiness from James Rieck (again with realism, but enlarged and cropped for maximum ratio of skin to fire engine red shirt) and Ryan Bradley (an ace of spades-patterned nude, evaporating into its Arches paper background), and a bit of notable, intriguing sculpture (Andres Basurto cobbled up a bottle-green, horned skull of broken glass and epoxy putty, Jan Huling's "Steampunk Willy" is, I think, a beaded riff on the Kewpie doll). The exhibition brims w/ creativity and attitude: I look forward to concentrated doses now from individual artists. W.Chelsea, I hope you're ready.
LAST CHANCE
* Robert Rauschenberg @ Gagosian Gallery / 522 W 21st St. The first sentence of Gagosian's press release for this show, after Rauschenberg's quote on art as communication and its inherent ability to change, is the description "a major exhibition". I'd rephrase that "a MAYJAH exhibition". Goodness, there is a lot of art here, and I hate to use the shortcut phrase "career-spanning retrospective", but that's in the works here, from Rauschenberg's John Cage-era, infamous "White" paintings (one of those, plus a triptych in black, which I'd title "void" paintings instead, as they're sinisterly devoid of anything, active in their starkness) to the deliciously battered-but-luxe "Watchdog" sculpture, shown in the same room as the White painting and appearing as a series of seven battered and rusty pails (a la friend Jasper Johns) over chromed aluminum. "Watchdog" is from 2007 and the adjacent White canvas is 1951. Do the math. In between, we get a little bit of everything, meaning Combines (the humorous "Short Circuit" from '55, featuring a Sturtevant reproduction of a Johns flag painting inside one of its cupboards), Spreads (the vivid "Palladian Xmas" fro 1980, w/ illuminated washboards amid the screenprints of cats and fabric stripes), ROCI (aka Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, incl "Caryatid Cavalcade II", a threateningly huge five-canvas mixture of acrylic washes and larger-than-life screenprints, of Chilean imagery and building facades), and Runts (amid his last works, sprawling Americana pigment transfers). Plus a lot of Rauschenberg I've NEVER seen before, not in my memory anyway, like his Early Egyptian works (check the pyramidal work from '73, its cardboard stacks painted Day-Glo on the reverse, projecting an orangey aura against the wall, plus its sand-encrusted neighbor from '74 w/ spoke-wheels embedded in the boxes) and the Jammer series, little more than layered, ethereal cloth works w/ rattan poles, and two Borealis works from '90 and '91 of tarnished shadowy objects on brass. Think Andy Warhol's oxidation series but way cooler. I am still taking all this in, but the essential nature of this MAYJAH exhibition should be a given, even if you didn't read this far.
* Peter Saul "Fifty Years of Painting" @ Haunch of Venison NY / 1230 Ave of Americas, 20th Fl. So 2010 was pretty fierce for dueling American art trends. If you've been paying attention, you might recall MoMA overhauled their 4th floor w/ a luxurious Abstract Expressionist (New York) exhibition, culled entirely from the museum's vast holdings. Roy Lichtenstein has enjoyed several focused shows (incl. an extensive still-life extravaganza at Gagosian and a scholarly look at his work in reflections at Mitchell-Innes & Nash) and his "Ohh…Alright…" took top dollar (over $38 million of 'em, actually) at Christie's. And because I must: Gagosian's thrown a museum-worthy look at Robert Rauschenberg's entire oeuvre at their 21st St space (see above). And yet, and yet. That same gallery, in their Madison Ave space, devoted a retrospective to Ed Paschke, the electrifying Chicago Imagist whose Pop-themed art goes way more garish than Warhol ever took it (and whose grip of neon and early-cyber in the '80s is, well, incredibly '80s-looking). Related Hairy Who stalwarts Karl Wirsum and Jim Nutt also appeared in solo gallery shows (Nutt's incl. a mix of classics and new works), all fiercely removed from NY art world trends of the day. So it's fitting, then, not quite an answer to these Pop Art/Abstract Expressionist rock-star shows, but rather an alternative to the heavy-NY presence, that we get an inspired survey of Cali grotesque-Pop artist (and tie-in to the Chicago scene) Peter Saul. The highlight, in all its contorted, lurid Day-Glo glory, is the massive "Typical Saigon" from 1968, Saul's biting retort to the Vietnam War. The cruelty depicted — American G.I.'s sodomizing and crucifying Vietnamese women — is intensified by the painting's plasticky surface, the stinging contrast of the colors and the warped, twisting movement of the figures. Its torturous energy still resonates. Though Gen. Custer, Christopher Columbus, the death penalty, and even the NY subway system are targets of Saul's cold-shock techniques. His "Icebox" series from the early '60s, echoed in new work "Refrigerator Breakdown", are benign by comparison. Saul's most recent style, pairing acrylic with oil paint in powdery-edged renderings, have this melted-3D effect, popping off their canvases with the threat of spilling into our laps. Bad taste rarely looks this good.
* Huma Bhabha @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. A stunner, as Bhabha continues her forays into reapplying ink, paint and collage onto vintage photography. Imagery of Achilles — or more specifically heels — trod massively across arid landscapes and highways, grillwork hands grapple with the earth and half-completed structures, a two-headed dog (or the blurred, Francis Bacon-like motion of a normal canine) seems to visibly shiver furiously in front of a large government facade. Elements extend beyond the borders of the photographs, Bhabha colorizes b&w prints, in a riotous cycle of destruction and creation.
* Joan Miro "The Dutch Interiors" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). In late-fall 2008, the MoMA held a stunning decade-spanning show of Miro's genre-busting oeuvre entitled "Painting and Anti-Painting", a sliver of the artist's oeuvre but a richly beautiful, cerebral wealth of technique and experimentation, that still strongly resonates in my consciousness. The Met takes a scalpel to that exquisite exhibition, mining out his three "Dutch Interior" paintings from his time in Montroig (near Barcelon), plus one of the two related canvases from that trip ("The Potato"), work studies, sketches, several delicious earlier works and — because this is the Met we're talking about — the two Dutch Golden Age paintings that inspired "The Dutch Interiors". An exemplary feat. Miro visited the Rijksmuseum during a 1928 trip to Amsterdam and, taking postcards back of two works that struck a chord w/ him, Hendrick Sorgh's "The Lute Player" (1660) and Jan Steen's fanciful "Children Teaching a Cat to Dance" (1660), distorted, abstracted, exaggerated, and updated them into three lyrical, poetic paintings. The first, based deceptively closely off "The Lute Player", is a riot of semi-figurative forms on an eye-popping green backdrop, w/ the window overlooking a smeared blue and yellow town scene. Miro played more w/ the second canvas, deemphasizing the dancing cat and lutist in favor of the foregrounded hound and an onlooking child's rapt gaze. The third interior is the loosest, floating planes of color and predated Calder-esque mobile forms on a sea of bright yellow and yellow-green. In essence, this is more than enough, seeing Miro's marriage of structure and experimentation w/ the Dutch compositions, but the Met augments it w/ several works from its own collection, incl. the stunning, gradient- and texture-rich "Animated Landscape. Study this one closely after viewing "The Dutch Interiors" and their work drawings, as the truths hidden in this lovely work are far more opaque.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
