WEDNESDAY
* Kenneth Snelson "New York City Panoramas" @ Marlborough NY / 40 W 57th St. Eight wide-angle, startlingly symmetric views of iconic NYC, captured in Snelson's vintage 1917 16" Cirkut camera.
* Dara Birnbaum "Before Wonder Woman: Early Performance Video" @ Electronic Arts Intermix / 535 W 22nd St, 5th Fl (CE to 23rd St), 6:30p. Hopefully you've seen Birnbaum's classic video "Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman", which is currently screening at MoMA PS1's "Modern Women: Single Channel" group exhibition. It is undoubtedly her most famous work, so EAI put it in context w/ a selection of Birnbaum's earlier b&w performance-based videos, highlighting themes that recur in her later works. Plus Birnbaum joins Lori Zippay, Executive Director of EAI, for a conversation and signing of her comprehensive catalogue "Dara Birnbaum: The Dark Matter of Media Light".
* "Tyrannosaur" (dir. Paddy Considine, 2011) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 6p. If I'm doing "New Directors/New Films", the co-presentation b/w Lincoln Center and MoMA, I'm going for the jugular. Hence Considine's debut full-length, about a violent and self-destructive bloke named Joseph in Leeds falling for a charity worker named Hannah, whose got her own devastating secrets.
* "8 Women (8 femmes)" (dire. François Ozon, 2002) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins St, G to Fulton St), 6:50/9:15p. Possibly the contemporary quintessential French musical comedy murder-mystery film? I didn't make up that last part: everything beginning w/ "French" onward is totally legit, a quixotic subgenre of French cinema…I mean, someone dies and everyone breaks out into song and dance. The cast is bonkers too, what w/ Ludivine Sagnier as the bob-cut younger sister (singing "Papa T'es Plus Dans Le Coup, which OK is adorable), Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert acting all fierce, Emmanuelle Béart as the forever typecast vengeful girl and lesbian, Virginie Ledoyen caught in lies (full disclosure: I initially watched this film due to Ledoyen - HELLO)… it's uncannily addicting, though.
* Cults @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p/SOLD OUT. You should know better by this point. Cults — that ineffable duo, his guitar arrangements, her uncanny songbird's voice — and their long-haired friends are so hot right now. Good luck getting in. w/ Magic Kids
* Warpaint @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 6p/LIMITED. The other hottest show in Williamsburg is also technically sold out — that paisley psychedelic LA all-girl quartet — but you might luck out on a ticket if you queue up early (doors 6p). Is it worth it? Check "Undertow", which keeps building into a bass-driven, starry-guitar blitz, replete with an uncannily Nirvana-sounding lyric. Hell yes it's worth it.
THURSDAY
* Elizabeth Murray "Paintings in the '70s" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. The gallery brings it back to the earlier stages of this pioneering painter's career, in an exhibition of works crackling with electrical creativity and formalist nuance. Her touchstone multi-canvas geometric compositions would occur in the next decade, shapeshifting until her untimely passing in 2007, but the seeds of this progress (the bold colors and increasing sizes) are evident.
* Julia Jacquette "Water, Liquor, Hair" @ Anna Kustera Gallery / 520 W 21st St. Fetishized consumerism, culled from subway adverts and magazines, recreated and enlarged to daunting, hyperrealistic proportions. James Rosenquist keeps his billboard-sized abstracts slightly blurred up close, but Jacquette maintains a dizzying sheen to these new tangles of hair, cocktail images etc.
* Hannah van Bart @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. New drawings and paintings of "mood portraits", with a strong color palette shift from her earlier muted style.
* Robert Barry "Recent Mirrorpieces" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. Lovely: new mirrored geometric glass panels, inscribed with block-letter words and negotiating Barry's classic balance b/w Minimalism and Conceptualism.
+ Malcolm Morley "Rules of Engagement". Fighter planes, lots & lots of 'em, incl the classic humongous work "Rat Tat Tat" (2001) from the British artist's 'Picture Plane' series.
* Marilyn Minter "Paintings from the '80s" @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. The downtown artist finally received due attention for her eye-wincingly sharp renderings, taking the fashion advert and drawing out the grime, sweat and imperfections to the surface. This exhibition follows two early bodies of work, "Big Girls/Little Girls" and "Porn Grids" (i.e. the money shot, in dripping enamel), that form Minter's foundation as an iconoclast and breathtaking rule-breaker.
* Juan Uslé "Desplazado" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. The northern Spanish artist's last solo show at the gallery in 2008 reveal small-scale and large canvases evocative of flickering TV sets, a plethora of colors emanating from layers of translucent paint. His latest paintings turn that flicker into dynamic gestural tumbles, like Uslé's captured the air and light of his homeland in paint.
* "Gumption" @ ZieherSmith / 516 W 20th St. Artists who give it their all in their respective painterly mediums (or works on paper), feat. Melissa Brown, Tomoo Gokita, Trent Doyle Hancock, Kirk Hayes, Keegan McHargue and Gary Panter.
* Cosima von Bonin "The Juxtaposition of Nothings" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Fabric wall works and large sculptures from the Cologne-based artist, w/ special soundtrack compositions by Moritz von Oswald accompanying the installation.
* Stephen Prina + Wade Guyton @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. The exactor of text and gesture vs. the inkjet glitch-prone reunited once again for what I'm hoping to be another daft match in artsy heaven.
* Saul Fletcher @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. The London-based artist's photographs compress a lot of weighty human emotion belying their smallish sizes, revealing deeply personal undertones that remain universally relatable.
* Andreas Gefeller "The Japan Series" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. When does landscape photography become so abstracted — shot from high POVs, digitally reassembled to show multiple POVs — that it requires a new sub-genre? Gefeller's style demands this, covering the series he shot last spring in Tottori Prefecture. The proliferation of power lines and orderly rows of fruit trees both feature heavily.
* Almagul Menlibayeva "Transoxiana Dreams" artist talk/catalogue launch @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St, 6:30p. The Kazakh artist brought me up to speed on the dire situation facing the Aral Sea — the focus of her new body of work in Western Kazakhstan — in literally seconds flat. Hear it from her at this talk, coinciding with Asian Contemporary Art Week 2011, plus the good news: the release of her major catalogue.
* Miru Kim "The Pig That Therefore I Am" artist talk @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St, 6p. Hear from the NY-based artist on her intriguing methodology, becoming one with the city's industrial underbelly and her latest series in an industrial pig farm.
* Steven Reker "People Get Ready" @ The Kitchen / 512 W 19th St (CE to 23rd St), 8p/$10. Indeed, combining indie rock with contemporary dance freaks me out as well, but I trust in choreographer/musician Reker and this program, a live scored "mixtape" to movement pieces. Feat. Megan Byrne (choreographer with Dance Lab NYC and Dixon Place), Jessica Cook, Edward Crichton, Luke Fasano, Jen Goma (one of A Sunny Day in Glasgow's transcendent vocalists) and James Rickman (swapping his axe for a Gibson Grabber), w/ Jim Byrne's video work. (ALSO FRI, SAT)
* Cults @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave), 7:30p/SOLD OUT. See what I wrote about the lovely Cults on WED, then cross your fingers and try to get in.
* JEFF the Brotherhood + Screaming Females @ Santos Party House / 96 Lafayette St (NR/6/JMZ to Canal St), 7p/$10. Massive lineup tonight, capped off by the one-two punch of NJ's underground stalwarts Screaming Females (blistering punk like no other) and Nashville's scene-leaders JEFF the Brotherhood, doing riff-rock proud. w/ Teen Witch and Juiceboxxx
FRIDAY
* Masako Inkyo "Brush" @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 5:45-8:30p. Japan Society's eminent shodo instructor (and, incidentally, one of my professors) unfurls her latest body of work, a deft interplay between traditional and contemporary calligraphic works, from passages of Buddhist texts to semi-abstract brushed compositions.
* Alice Channer, Jamie Isenstein & J. Parker Valentine @ Lisa Cooley Fine Art / 34 Orchard St. The 'body' may not be physically present in these there artists' works, but its ever-elusive nature has a knack for making itself felt. The London-based Channer utilizes textile and sartorial elements, Valentine matches abstraction with her own present gestures, and Isenstein's sleight-of-hand style consistently veils and reveals the figure — which is usually her own.
* Tom Fruin "Sign of the Times" @ Y Gallery / 165 Orchard St. The tiny LES gem inaugurates its new (larger?) gallery space w/ a surreally manipulated grouping from Fruin. He twists and remixed what we know, via neon tubes and signage, into an array that requires contemplation and reassessment.
* Folkert de Jong "Operation Harmony" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. This Dutch sculptor's unsettling tableaux, typically composed in lurid styrofoam and polyurethane foam, tend to get under my skin. If the charred figures and reveling grotesquerie in his monumental eponymous work don't mess w/ your head, then you aren't looking closely enough.
* "A Light in the Basement" @ Stanhope Cellar Studios / 286 Stanhope St, Bushwick (L to Dekalb, M to Knickerbocker), 7-10p. Nicholas Chatfield-Taylor curated this dynamic group exhibition, feat. 20 artists working with light, each occupying their own room in the studios. w/ Brock Fetch, Jen Shear, Rachel Willey, Double Rainbow, Adriana Atema and more. ALSO SAT noon-8p.
* Ben Patterson "Please Wash Your Face" @ Third Streaming / 10 Greene St, 2nd Fl, 6p. Very awesome! The original Fluxus co-founder, who "retired from art" in '65 and reemerged w/ incredible vitality in '88, performs a new amalgamation of his mid-'60s classics, based in music and performance, and yes it'll involve audience participation. Concurrent w/ the Studio Museum in Harlem's Patterson retrospective "Born in the State of FLUX/us: Scores", organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
* "Insidious" (dir. James Wan, 2011) screenings in wide release. Consider Wan, the creator of "Saw", back in super-scary form w/ his haunting with-a-twist. I'm hoping to be pushed to the limits, something that hasn't happened in a 'mainstream' horror film since "The Last Exorcism".
* "Rubber" (dir. Quentin Dupieux, 2010) @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (NQR/456/L to Union Square). This Goodyear's gone real bad, in Mr. Oizo's bonkers meta-film, starring a marauding tyre w/ psychokinetic powers in dusty California, with an in-film "audience" and of course a beguiling love interest. Ranks WAY up there with "strangest films I've ever seen."
* "Super" (dir. James Gunn, 2010) @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave). Shut up, crime! So sayeth Rainn Wilson, the antihero lead (along with Ellen Page as the inappropriate sidekick Boltie) in this middle-finger to, and reversely rah-rah anthem for, superhero films. You there, about to key that car? Maybe you'd better quit while y'r ahead, or face the wrath of the Crimson Bolt!
SATURDAY
* Sheila Gallagher "That Which Remains…" @ DODGEgallery / 15 Rivington St. Gallagher takes a melange of seemingly disparate and innocuous objects from her history and teases out their intrinsic relations, rendering them in smoke, plastic and ink.
* "Notes on Notes on 'Camp'" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. The curious case of camp: the artists featured here may well shed light on those savvy and swish. Feat. Duke & Battersby, Mike Bouchet, Nichole Cherubini, Jeremy Kost, Jessica Labatte, Cary Liebowitz, Robert Melee, Bob Mizer, Brent Owens, John Waters and Karlheinz Weinberger.
* Chris Marker "Passengers" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St + Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. The influential postwar photographer and filmmaker turns his lens to the Paris Métro, teasing out disengagement within an urban climate and intimate moments.This series, shot between 2008 and 2010, is Marker's color debut.
* Michael Velliquette "Awaken and Free What Has Been Asleep @ DCKT Contemporary / 237 Eldridge St. Masklike figures composed in mixed media on watercolor paper and even wilder sculptures cut and assembled from heavyweight paper, inducing a ceremonial aesthetic.
* "Hospitalité" (dir. Koji Fukada, 2010) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 5:15p. Think about Dominik Moll's "With a Friend Like Harry", practically as ominous but set in sunny working-class Tokyo.
SUNDAY
* "Drawings, Drawings, Photographs" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. The gallery delineates b/w Marmie Tinkler's watercolors of everyday subjects, Margaret Lee's (and her collaborators') small-scale photo "accents", and C.F.'s works on paper that conjure a fantastical narrative.
* "Roofless Motifs" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) / 261 Broome St. The title steps from a slide lecture by Robert Smithson to architecture students in '72, and there are traces of Smithson in the cross-media works by the three artists here. They each use improvisation and chaos to methodically jell an interesting blend of formalism. Harrell Fletcher re-narrates Smithson's original lecture in a video. Corin Hewitt scans dirt and leaves, pushes their neutral color limits in Photoshop, prints them out, then covers them again with dirt and leaves. Finally Elizabeth McAlpine's recurring performance "Words & Music (Headlines)", transcribing the day's headlines into piano chords. This is its debut stateside performance (which premiered at the Barbican, then in London's Laura Bartlett Gallery), and McAlpine enacts it at 4:45, 5:45 and 6:45 today (and again at those times on MAY 1 if you miss this one).
TUESDAY
* Julia Chiang "Security is Mostly a Superstition" @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. I'm a fan of this Brooklyn-based artist and her intense installations, imbued w/ nostalgia and this…strong human essence. I hesitate to call it "feminine" b/c she's a woman artist, but it doesn't disregard the power of her work. Despite exhibitions at Deitch and Tina Kim Gallery, this marks her solo debut in NY.
* Wire + Weekend @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$20. Major team-up here, the UK punk formalists Wire (epic since '76) and San Fran's blistering shoegaze youngsters Weekend, who do it loud and do it right (w/ strong basslines reminding me of quintessential Brit bands).
CURRENT SHOWS
* "German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). I'd meant to attend this epic survey of German printmaking, a joyous and quickly brutal journey through WWI and its grim aftermath, on the first day of members' previews, i.e. before the NYTimes' Roberta Smith's column. I'd missed that chance, read her article, and knew going in that the grueling juggernaut also known as Otto Dix's "The War" (1924), some 50 desiccated etchings, aquatints and drypoints rivaling current-day torture porn in their shocking (yet all too real) imagery, was awaiting me against a blood-red wall like midway into the show. Now don't YOU worry that I just revealed the big plot-twist, as it's not like that at all. Enjoy the lyrical buildup and we'll get through the rocky stages together. The exhibition begins with a two-pronged flourish, devoting two galleries to Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter. To one-up the experience, the museum's included E.L. Kirchner's woodcut manifesto from Die Brücke (1906), which 'til now I'd only seen in catalogue images. Kirchner's woodcut "Dancer with Raised Skirt" (1909) and Brücke member Erich Heckel's "Girl with a Doll" (1910), actually Fränzi, a recurring figure in their renderings, exude a bliss that gets caught in your throat. If only they could have seen the war that would come crashing down several years later. Amid Franz Marc's vividly colored woodcuts of horses and other fauna is his co-illustrated "Der Blaue Reiter" book (1912-14) w/ Vasily Kandinsky. Another 'whoa' moment for me. Plus Kandinsky's outstanding "Klänge" (1913) a 'musical album' of some 56 woodcuts — the exhibition contains loads of these type of series, it's fantastic. Let's keep it moving! In the Austrian portion of the show comes some more sexiness, courtesy Egon Schiele (a selection from his 1914-18 portfolio, including some of the last works of his brief lifetime, like the 1918 lithograph "Girl") and Oskar Kokoschka, whose "Die Träumenden Knaben" (1908) illustrated book and haunting poster for "Murderer Hope of Women" (1909), apparently the 1st Expressionist play, tussle for emotive responses. Printmaking is in full swing by this point, evinced by copies of Der Strurm (Kirchner, Marc, Kokoschka) and Die Aktion (Conrad Felixmüller and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff), plus Emil Nolde's prolific, varying mediums (lithographs here, woodcut there, intaglio elsewhere), like his energetic "Dancer" (1913 lithograph). It and Kirchner's sumptuous "Street, Berlin" (1913, a rare painting in the lot, from Kirchner's own exhibition here back in autumn 2008) do nothing to prepare us for what follows, i.e the war and Dix's "War". I'd caught "War" in the Neue Galerie's survey on Dix, but its darkened lair kept many of Dix's first-hand atrocities obscured. Not at MoMA! In this well-lit room nothing goes hidden, the skulls crawling with vermin, the shattered bodies in ditches, the dead horses, the strife and peril everywhere. The postwar period doesn't ease tension, either, considering Heinz Fuchs' agitprop graphic design posters, like "Workers. Famine. Death is Approaching. Strike Destroys. Work Nourishes. Do your Duty. Work." (1919), a Tyrannosaur-sized Death glowering over a street in disarray, the words burnt into the sky. Nor with Max Beckmann's "Hell" (1919) eleven transfer lithographs detailing social disintegration and violence in postwar Berlin. His later series "Trip to Berlin" (1922) and Dix's "Nine Nightlife Woodcuts" (1922-4) reveal the changed landscape, populated with boozers, the sex-seeking and -addled, and alley cats.
* Cristina Iglesias @ Marian Goodman Gallery / 24 W 57th St. I'm of the opinion that seeing Cristina Iglesias' art in NY, specifically in a gallery setting, is a rare and auspicious treat. The Madrid-based artist hasn't shown here since 2005, and I had no idea what to expect going into this exhibition (more mind-bending sculpture?). So imagine my surprise when stepping into the main room, empty but for five tall granite blocks w/ that Donald Judd-like starkness and sameness, coupled w/ a curious whoosh of…water? Now it gets fun: peering over and into these "Pozos" (wells), we see Iglesias has achieved yet another spellbinding sculptural technique, casting vegetative bas-reliefs from stainless steel and resin, then filling the structures with different water sequences. One bubbles like a primordial tidal pool, another rumbles along in foaming gouts. I felt like plunging into them — they appear bottomless, or at least bearing undersea tunnels to somewhere else…like into the next gallery, lined w/ a dozen silkscreens echoing her sculpture and surrounding her "Garden Piece (Moat)" scale model, a grove of trees surrounding a serene pavilion. She plays w/ scale further, creating her own Zen-like piazza "Bajo la Superficie" in the back gallery, including a plank-sized sunken floor bearing more rushing water, more steel vegetation.
* "Foil" @ hpgrp NY / 529 W 20th St 2nd Fl. An auspicious collab b/w the gallery and Tokyo's FOIL, the creative super-house (both gallery and art book publisher), feat. a quartet of four emerging contemporary Japanese photographers. The flow here is superb. Rinko Kawauchi presents a suite of large-scale prints from her "AILA" series (also viewable en masse, though different works, at Japan Society's stellar "Bye Bye Kitty!!!" exhibition), following the organic and interconnected cycle of life and death. Shoin Kajii's "KAWA" series bear the essence of his Esoteric Buddhism degree from Koyasan University in Mikkyo: his sublime captures of water, in drip-drops and sluices, mimic human existence. I loved Eye Ohashi's soap-bubble compositions, rendering nature scenes and Shinto shrines even more otherworldly. Yoichi Nagano, the elder in this grouping, includes two series, his older "SHIMA-JIMA" (islands), a big breath of fresh air in the sandy couplings, and "Breath", single figures holding their breath within the placid blue void.
* "Involuntary", curated by Neville Wakefield @ Ford Project / 57 W 57th St, Penthouse. I suppose a site-specific installation is inherently "site-responsive", but Wakefield's group exhibition is specifically subtitled as being "site-responsive". Even guests who know zero about this building and penthouse's history — the medical arts facility during the Prohibition era, the luxe private accommodations that followed, the corporate offices today — will tease out some of those memories in this pretty neat, pretty weird grouping. Naama Tsabar's installation "Sweat (2)", a grid of half-filled liquor bottles and bedsheets run through several levels of shelving, boldly references the speakeasy days, as does Parisian art collective Claire Fontaine's "Untitled (Suspended Battering Ram)", a so-called 'big key' by the British Police, used in forcing entry upon illegal occupants. Olympia Scarry's slo-mo two-channel video "Yawn" and Laurel Nakadate's "Exorcism in January" (also viewable in her 10-year survey at MoMA PS1) have some medical undertones, the "open up and say Ah" bit and non-mainstream quackery. Michael Sailstorfer's "Modell - Reaktor" microphone plunged into concrete elicits a response from the building's foundation.
* Almagul Menlibayeva "Transoxiana Dreams" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St. The Kazakh artist turns her lens from her native Steppe to the sickeningly arid Aral Sea, which might sound like a misquote but that region — Aralkum — is so devastated from past Soviet irrigation policies that it's practically a desert. There's an animation on the Aral Sea's wikipedia page that is absolutely haunting: the water is literally sucked away between like the '50s and today, to where despite new damming and replenishing efforts it's expected to totally dry up in a few years. Menlibayeva's new film shows the aftermath via folklore, a young girl imagining her fisherman father's odyssey across the desolate land to the sparkling sea, seduced along the way by beautiful women "centaurs" (mimicking the legend of ancient Greeks mistaking Steppe nomads for the mythical creatures). In accompanying duratrans prints in lighboxes and lambda prints on aluminum, her usual cast of lovely figures set against rusted wrecks and concrete blocks, the horizon extended threateningly in all directions, embody an even weightier immediacy and impending dread.
* Chie Fueki @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. A fantastic grouping of nearly life-size renderings, toeing the line b/w representational and geometric abstracts, reaffirming Fueki's multicultural upbringing in Japan and Brazil. Figures emerge and recede in her refreshing mixed-media compositions, like "Josh", half hidden behind patterned foliage, or "Aiko and John", a charming domestic scene (he with his book, she with her laptop), in a kitchen filled with pets.
* Rachel Whiteread "Long Eyes" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Whiteread's eighth exhibition w/ the gallery is another foray into awesomeness, as she casts doors and windows in resin and creates sculptures of beverage containers in her exploration of space pervaded with memory and history.
* Robert Mangold "Ring Paintings" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. The great voids within Mangold's shaped canvases — two C's joined together as huge rings — heighten the intense, orbital activity of their respective paintings. Monochromatic washes of acrylic paint (a great palette of lemon yellow, burnt orange, soft gray) reveal pencil lines and heavier graphite circles that spin off, caressing the boundaries of the canvas like comets orbiting the sun. One teal-colored canvas bears an almost heart-shaped (or I guess cardioid?) pattern enveloping the painting's open center.
* James Siena @ The Pace Gallery / 510 W 25th St. Three years of work from this methodical artist, renowned and feared for his "visual algorithms" — OK the feared I made up, but it sounds good — equals a significant output, dozens of small-scale enamel on aluminum paintings and works on paper that line the gallery walls, even the unbound artist's proof to "Sequence I" (2009), some 36 pages of mutating geometric patterns. Yet this is rigorous work, exacting work. Nothing feels dashed off or half-assed. Siena's triangle-based geometric abstractions in particular, the practically flashing "Untitled (iterative grid, second version)" (2009), a diagonal flock of cobalt, black and tan triangles, and the deeply reddish "Untitled (first triangle painting)" (also 2009) are carefully constructed. Even the maddeningly detailed "Sawtoothed Angry Form" (2010), a bramble patch executed in graphic b&w, is a deft exercise in precision. His necessarily looser, organic works, like the long-limbed "Flat Red Girl" (2008) sacrifice none of Siena's painstaking brushwork in their snaking curves.
* Kate Shepherd "And Debris" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. The compositional control that Shepherd exerts, creating these sublimely featureless monochromes and then incising jittery, overlapping polygons on top, spinning them into unease, is practically unparalleled.
* Tim Rollins and K.O.S. @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. The previous collab b/w Rollins and student collective K.O.S. was a riveting combination of geometric minimalism and sociopolitical awareness, seeded in the words of Malcolm X, Langston Hughes and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Their new exhibition engages literature and historical texts, too, focusing on Twain, Fitzgerald and Weill and those works' original illustrations. Their interpretation of "The Great Gatsby" is intriguingly abstract, covering book-pages with powdery monochromatic acrylic representing the novel's color-themes.
* Stan Douglas "Midcentury Studio" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 + 533 W 19th St. I realize Douglas has been recreating these incredible period-specific photographs since the '80s, utilizing outmoded equipment from the time — and I'm lacking historically when it comes to photography — but you put me amid these grimy, postwar-looking prints and I'll tell you they look like they're archives from the late '40s, no lie. Douglas captures it down to the guys' slightly ostentatious suits, to the women's jewelry, the tense energy percolating in a craps game or the laconic dread in a newspaper-covered corpse. A favorite was "Cricket Pitch, 1951" (shot in 2010, obvs), with its diagonal POV and rush of motion, as white-shirted men dash at the ball (or however you play the game) in a meadow aside a tree-line. You can practically hear the cheers, the wind through the pines.
* Lee Kit "1, 2, 3, 4…" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. A neat temporal exhibition in the Hong Kong artist's stateside solo debut. I was initially lured in by his hand-painted cloths, revealing song lyrics from My Bloody Valentine, The Style Council, Velvet Underground… but seeing these in concert w/ his other work, like neatly-folded striped cloths reappearing in photographs, even his pastel-toned acrylic and inkjet-printed cardboard works, riffing off skincare products and this European correction fluid Tipp-Ex, obliterating the cartons' designs and text to echo their "cleansing" modicums. Lee's included in Art Hong Kong 11 (with gallery artists Lee Mingwei, Cao Fei, amid others).
* Sandra Cinto "After the Rain" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Cinto's last solo exhibition recalled Gericault's difficult journey via a flotilla of paper sailboats and digital prints of tumultuous waves. She returns with imagery of the sea, to a far more visceral effect. The front gallery is ensconced w/ a wonderful wall drawing, silvery lines undulating against a midnight blue core, affecting rippling waves or even rainfall depending on how the piece moves you. The back gallery breaks up the effect over medium-sized canvases, with a monochromatic blue canvas anchoring the multi-panel work and acting as visual palate cleanser to prepare our eyes for the silvery effects elsewhere.
+ A Gentil Carioca (Rio de Janeiro). Complementing the Sao Paolo-based Cinto is this artist-run gallery based in Rio, feat. works by five artists in the program: Ricardo Basbaum, Carlos Contente, Laura Lima (a co-founder of the gallery), Maria Nepomuceno and Thiago Rocha Pitta. I was most immediately taken by Lima's contribution, "Naked Musician", which she premiered at Frieze in 2009. In this messy, fantastical corner installation, revolving actors don a short-sleeved magician's outfit and casually (though intensely methodically) go about articulating little curiosities out of cards, cut paper, etc. Pitta's video of viscous, sun-dappled honey cascading down rocks, "Danae in the gardens of Gorgona", is vivid in its life-giving effects (though if it were, say, motor oil, that would be a far more disconcerting message). Nepomuceno's sprawling soft-sculptural work, a brightly colored melange of woven rope forms, hanging ceramic spheres and beads, echoes both Rio itself and, in its organic nature, the gallery's senior co-founder, Ernesto Neto.
* Miru Kim "The Pig That Therefore I Am" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. Perhaps you remember Kim's riveting photo series "Naked City Spleen", self-shot in NY's industrial catacombs, profiled in a NYTimes article a few years ago. I sure as hell do! That was my intro to this local artist and her latest series, shot amongst pigs in an industrial animal farm, underscores the cycle of life and consumption. Sometimes you have to squint to make out her hunched up nude figure amidst the flocks of pigs, an intentional effect in highlighting our interconnections to these tasty mammals — and perhaps to overcrowding, to anonymity, to imprisonment as well.
* "Paper A-Z" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. A quite literally A-Z representation of over 75 multigenerational artists based in the states (from Olive Ayhens to Michael Zahn) and their various processes of working with paper. The array itself is daunting, but take your time perusing it and you'll undoubtedly be pleased w/ the many jewels that emerge from this infinitely adaptable medium. A few I dug: Jason Jagel's "Quiet Season", a layered pop-up book-styled fantasy that wouldn't be out of place amid Jonathan LeVine Gallery's lot; Katherine Bowling's "Underwear Series" (guilty pleasure, sure, but gorgeously rendered in powdered charcoal and gesso); Olive Ayhens "Urban Leap", as detailed and perception-screwed as her larger paintings; the tiny "Toothy Slab" pencil drawing by James Siena; Kirsi Mikkola's prickly painted-paper construction — and there's like 100 more.
* Jonathan Monk "Your Name Here" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. An impressively low-spectacle show from Monk, focused mainly on his time spent in SoCal and narrated via small marble slabs carved w/ the words "YOUR NAME HERE" that punctuate his '98 "Room 11" series of Polaroids and fantastical related (imagined?) texts. His ongoing series "Rew-Shay Hood Project", classic car hoods (Plymouths of all types abound) airbrushed w/ grayscale renderings of Americana fix-up garages sides nicely with the lot.
* Christopher Daniels "People Doing Different Things" @ Number 35 / 141 Attorney St. This young NY-based artist wowed my pants off at 2010 VOLTA NY w/ his incredible, large-scale crayon landscapes on canvas. You read that correctly: super-detailed, pop cultural-referential CRAYON works. His new series incorporates some pencil too and is way starker, but his deftness in encapsulating the mundane and everyday in these vividly conceived renderings is super fantastic. Many come straight from Daniels' photography — guy with a push-cart, woman drinking wine, dude being chased by a hippopotamus…?
* Kota Ezawa "City of Nature" @ Murray Guy / 453 W 17th St. Ezawa's public-commissioned installation in Madison Square Park, which shares its name w/ this exhibition, opened March 31. It's a video collage of familiar landscapes from 20 films ("Deliverance" to "Brokeback Mountain"), drawn frame-by-frame in Ezawa's vector-based style, only entirely devoid of people. His gallery exhibition acts as workshop and background, feat. lightboxes and individual wood-carved stereoscopic viewers revealing each setting. And for those of us pining for personableness, Ezawa sweetens the exhibition w/ his new video "Beatles über California", his animation of The Beatles' famous '64 performance on the Ed Sullivan Show, w/ soundtrack to the Dead Kennedys' song "California Über Alles".
* David Dupuis "Green, Green Grass of Home" @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Dupuis' personal reactions to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus other current events, filter into his exploration of the human condition in new emotive works on paper. It's a sublimely emotive array, beginning with a realistic graphite drawing of (what I took to be a) tattooed shirtless guy, then large-scale color-pencil and graphite renderings of fields imbued abstractly w/ Army camouflage patterns — which was where I realized that was grass clippings on the guy, like he'd been rolling around in the field (or alternatively, thinking war context, had been found shot dead in the grass).
* Sascha Braunig @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. It's like the young artist composed these saturated-color "portraits" while seated within a Brion Gysin "Dream Machine" (possibly on psylocibin at the time). I like 'em, they way they maintain both a strong realism and their respective sculptural undertones. "Chameleon" nearly acts as a hologram, w/ its competing perspectives of shiny metallic buttons swathing the drapes and the foregrounded figure.
* Mel Kendrick "jacks" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Did you catch Kendrick's monolithic "Markers" installation at Madison Square Park in 2009? I love public art. He's installed four blocky b&w sculptures in the gallery, which despite its hangar-like space is nearly filled by the supersized quartet. Maybe it's b/c I'm still adjusting to the conclusion of the gallery's previous occupant: one stoic salt hill and silent Terrence Koh circling it, but Kendrick's typically large-scale sculpture feels particularly big and bulky this time.
LAST CHANCE
* Gary Basement "Walking Through Walls" + Andy Kehoe "Strange Wanderings" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. Both these guys transport you somewhere, via their environmentally-charged figurative styles. LA-based Baseman moves you through the walls, whether that's an old house or social boundaries, via his somber and spooky set of paintings and mixed media works. Protagonist "Lil Miss Boo" figures throughout, culled from a vintage b&w photograph and repeated here, even reflected (stand with your back to "The Unveiling of La Petite Mort", a large silkscreen of our girl on a cotton shroud, and stare at gallery's glass doors. You'll see what I mean). His crowded acrylic paintings veer from "The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror" tension to that suicidal Mickey Mouse vibe, deceptively cartoonish. Definitely not for kids. Pittsburgh's Kehoe plunges you straight into America's national parks, in a set of stunning small and mid-size paintings on wood panels. Call it Teton mythology, Sequoia folklore, images of forest spirits ("Under the Gaze of the Glorious") and huge-ass acorns ("Forest Elder", peering out of a grove of goldenrod trees), each with exquisitely rendered foliage and glowing translucent hues. I love 'em.
* Sze Tsung Leong "Cities" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. This New York-based photographer's previous exhibition "Horizons" wowed the crowds: a wraparound horizon-line of all sorts of different worldly landscapes. This time Leong focuses on urban formations, ancient to contemporary, shooting them from high above in context of their surrounding natural environments to highlight the geometries of city planning. My eye kept locking onto intriguing details: like the freshly mowed tracks in the laws of "Linkeroever, Antwerpen", the winding blocks of "Sablon, Bruxelles" (and there's a Tokyo shot too).
* John Chamberlain @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. Walking amid Chamberlain's beautiful crushed-auto sculpture, spanning four decades of his career, reminds me that — though I've got to get back upstate to Dia:Beacon — having his works in close proximity to my flat is the next best thing to taking the train up the Hudson. I am quite impressed with the array exhibited here and their relation w/ one another. That the gallery shows "Wylie's Island 1" (1997), one of Chamberlain's creepy muslin-wrapped urethane sculptures (think a tank-sized ghost) is awesome — Dia:Beacon has one too, in their basement, and it never ceases to freak me out. Chamberlain's smaller twisty relief "Druid's Cluster (Swish)" (1975) hangs above "Wylie's Island 1", like a big-game trophy over a sofa. Adjacent to that is "Bacchanalia Regalia" (1992), its steel glittering in oil-slick colors. I dug "Marilyn Monroe" (1963), too, its jet-black carapace augmented by convex mirrors.
* Miriam Cahn @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. This important Swiss artist last exhibited in NY in 1984, coinciding with her representation at that year's Venice Biennale. We've got a hell of a lot catching up to do, so luckily Dee's culled together a wonderful survey, from Cahn's raw '80s charcoal works on paper to brand-new mixed media diptychs. Let's make up for lost time: her handling of various mediums in her compositions is excellent: the sooty charcoals and whitish backdrops radiate this primeval, folkloric power, while her nuanced introductions of color are totally Fauvist, like planting yourself against your favorite Matisse canvas. Her figuration's superb, too, from a blocky pseudo-Cubism to sharply naturalistic in the more colorful works, wispily framed throughout the charcoal drawings. One large watercolor in the project room, titled "Atomic Bomb" and dated '88, echoes both the American Abstract Expressionists doing that soaked-canvas thing (especially Helen Frankenthaler) whilst conveying the wicked strength of that weapon.
* José Manuel Ciria "The Execution of the Soul" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. This is the first instance in a U.S. exhibition that the Spanish painter presents figurative works, enormous masklike portraits against his famed vividly lyrical backgrounds. The color palette pairs hot reds and yellows with ashen grays and blacks, so that the haunting mugs practically vibrate off the canvases, their coal-black eyes burning holes in your skull.
* Joan Mitchell "Paintings from the 1950s" @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. There is a big ONE Mitchell painting in MoMA's "Abstract Expressionist NY" exhibition, her lovely '57 canvas "Ladybug". If you're like me and wanting more of that, before she switched from allover brushwork to focused saturated fields (though I love her sunflowers, who doesn't?), you must see this show. It culls together over a dozen paintings, punctuated by the glorious "Untitled (La Fontaine)" (1957), an asymmetric whirlwind steeped in oceanic blue. Compare that w/ the structured nuance of "Untitled" (1954-5), a companion to her "City Landscape", which does in fact look like that, scaffoldings of cool gray around a blur of textured marks.
* Caroline Walker "Vantage Point" @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. There's a subtle kinky undercurrent in this British artist's stateside debut. Her oil paintings connect mundane domesticity with resonating voyeurism, both via her painting female models, in the prolific use of mirrors in these settings, and then from us the viewers. We see what she sees, multiplied and reflected from various POVs like in "Second Opinion" or abstracted in "Upstairs Downstairs" and "Vantage Point".
* Maya Bloch "Hello Stranger" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Bloch has great control of her mediums, mixing acrylic, oil and graphite to create phantasmagoric figures cohabiting in either realistic or obliterated landscapes.
* Ivan Navarro "Heaven or Las Vegas" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. Confession: when I think of "Heaven or Las Vegas", I hear the Cocteau Twins' iconic '90 album. Navarro has other things in mind w/ his mirrored and neon-ed relief sculptures, describing the footprints of various Vegas landmarks whilst conveying one-liners ("Shelter", "Decay", "Surrender") in their impossible depths. Pretty stuff, but w/o that familiar thrill of his neon fence installation at this year's Armory Show.
* Fahamu Pecou "Art History NeXt" @ Lyons Wier Gallery / 542 W 24th St. The Brooklyn-based artist figures into all his works, his angular face, asymmetric hairdo and razor-sharp shades riffing off and commenting on 20th C. art and pop. Take "The Treachery of (media) Images", with Pecou clad in a gunmetal-colored power suit, the words "Ceci nest pas Fahamu" echoing Rene Magritte's iconic "This is not a pipe". It's neighbor "Whatcha (don't) see, is whatcha get…" has the artist chomping down on a green apple, referencing the great Belgian Surrealist's "The Son of Man" whilst retaining that mid-'80s synthpop imagery.
* Shinichi Maruyama "Gardens" @ Bruce Silverstein Gallery / 535 W 24th St. A brilliant series of extra-wide pigment prints, furthering Maruyama's frozen-action splashes (like his "Kusho" sumi-e works) to a whole 'nother dimension. Think Yves Tanguy's alien landscapes, populated by Joan Miro's filigree impossible forms (or perhaps Salvatore Dali), slippery and slithering and throwing shadows in their wake.
* Ian Francis "Fireland" @ Joshua Liner Gallery / 548 W 28th St, 3rd Fl. If I had a million dollars, I'd commission British artist Ian Francis (marking his solo debut here) to do portraits of all my best girl friends. Or hell, even ONE portrait of ONE girl. I'm admittedly totally about this show, its moody and scintillating mixed media paintings that couple this easy cyberpunk vibe amid rainy London and after-hours Roppongi. Francis composites angular planes of almost flat color, creating architectural bases and swooping perspectives, then layers w/ semi-blurred, semi-nude hotties, rocker types, softcore starlets, and indie kids. Check the frozen surrealism in "Three People Lose Track of Time in the Financial District of San Francisco", the sweaty environs of "A New Band Gets Tired of Their Own Song", the almost pixel-evaporating nature of "Girl on a Park Bench". Some haunting works on paper (another beguiling mix, but mostly charcoal) and razor-sharp pen and ink drawings fill out the lot, accentuating Francis' gift for rendering sexy human forms.
* Nick van Woert "Breaking and Entering" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. The first solo stateside exhibition by this young Brooklyn-based artist is visually stunning and technically beguiling. There are a few singular works, the drenched words "We're In This Together" drizzled like candle-wax on a metal plane, a hulking spectre hanging from the ceiling and colorized like a 64-count Crayola crayon box (w/ built-in sharpener!) left in the Phoenix sun for like three days, for two. But the majority feat. riffs on classical figurative religious sculpture, perforated by holes and saturated w/ crystallized pools of resin. A Madonna with child hidden in a cloud of Antifreeze blue begins the experience in the main room; a whole slew of busts gnashing at and struggling against that same ooze in a plethora of sickly hues greets us in the side gallery.
+ Charles Sandison "Body Text". I dunno, seeing a slo-mo LCD animation of millions of tiny colored numbers floating out against a black expanse to slowly, algorithmically reveal the naked back of a Finnish model is, ah, hot.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
my TOP TEN shocking films
I have languished over creating this list for quite some time, but I felt it important. I am a devotee of genre, a lover of splatterpunk and slasher films. If I haven't seen it yet, it's probably in my Netflix queue. I relish in back-to-back (-to-back, as the case may be) brutal flicks at film festivals — and I'm specifically talking about genre-heavy fests, like New York Asian Film Festival and Fantastic Fest. I've yet to hit Sitges but believe me, it's way up on my list. So trust me when I write that I can "handle it". Been there, seen that. But there are occasionally those films that burn so indelibly into my retinas that I can't quite shake 'em, that I have to think thrice before viewing them again. Those films make up this dectet of shocking films I've seen, maybe once, maybe two dozen times, but regardless each time I wince a bit. You'll note the lot is from 2000 onward. That's somewhat intentional, though Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo is definitely one of those envelope-pushers. As is Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust — and I did consider adding at least one giallo film to this, but I can't help but love Dario Argento et al a bit too much. There are MANY honorable mentions to the below ten, which I'll mention later, and a few glaring omissions — mainly b/c I've not seen those films yet. More on that later as well. But first, a proper ranking of shocking films I've seen, from unequivocally MOST down to #10. Enjoy!
1. Martyrs (dir. Pascal Laugier, 2008)
Painfully terrifying and brutal. New French Extremity is one subgenre I drink thirstily from (see the proliferation of French films in this list), but Laugier pushed the limits, to nightmarish places that even Eli Roth hasn't approached. In very brief: something terrible happens to Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) as a child, harsh imprisonment and physical (but not sexual) abuse, and she escapes. She's haunted terribly by flashes of a wraithlike figure that continues to harm her, so she teams w/ friend Anna (Morjana Alaoui) to seek out her former abusers and exert retribution. But revisiting that former house, and its basement of horrors, comes at a dear price. Think of a train full of explosives. It screeches to a cumbersome halt when Lucie first frees herself, but it's ready to start up at the slightest push. Once Lucie and Anna return to that chamber, the train's already hurtling toward disaster and there's no stopping it until the final transcendently violent conclusion.
2. Philosophy of a Knife (dir. Andrey Iskanov, 2008)
A grueling four hours of unblinking violence await you, should you take Iskanov's offer and watch this monster. It's based in reality, following the Japanese Army's Unit 731, the covert biological and chemical warfare and research development unit during the Second Sino-Japanese War and WWII. That's something to think about when going in, as the b&w reenactments of atrocities on Russian or Chinese prisoners (nearly all young women and men), a daunting bazaar of pain, flood at you scene by scene w/ very little time to recover. I hesitate to spoil anything, but just to see if YOU can handle it, here's a typical moment: they bind a pretty girl in a chair, hook her up to a machine to monitor her brainwaves (and "pain threshold" before she blacks out), and proceed to methodically rip each and every tooth from her jaw. She doesn't fall unconscious until it's far too late. I could only just barely handle it myself, and I've only watched this film once.
3. Haute Tension (dir. Alexandre Aja, 2003)
Aja's early film sawed-off shotgun blasted New French Extremity as a reckoning force in contemporary genre film. And thanks to his makeup FX artist Giannetto De Rossi (favored by the late giallo master Lucio Fulci), the shocking intensity goes off the charts and left even me surprised. Lovely Cécile de France goes out to the French countryside w/ her girlfriend Alex's family — one of many reasons why I fear le paysage — but late at night a truck w/ floodlights drives up, carrying a boilersuited killing machine who brutally dispatches the family (he's got a penchant for his straight razor, but he'll use practically anything), kidnaps Alex and pursues Cécile. It's worth seeking out the international (i.e. NC-17) version, and if you caught Piranha 3D like I recommended, that's Aja too and the eye-popping gore in that is just a tease for the significant sequences in Haute Tension.
4. À l'intérieur (dirs. Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury, 2007)
This duo's debut film, along w/ Pascal Laugier's Martyrs, signified the second wave of New French Extremity, maintaining the intensity wrought by Alexandre Aja's Haute Tension. One point for brilliant casting of Béatrice Dalle as the nameless killer, cloaked in black and wielding a big-ass pair of scissors. One point for plot tension: Dalle's out to eviscerate Alysson Paradis and steal the unborn baby from her womb, so the action happens almost entirely w/in Paradis' house, at night. One more point for blood-soaked SFX, much of it from makeup and modeling that adds a raw back-to-basics intensity. This one was sort of a toss-up w/ Aja's for placement, but it's lower ranking should not dissuade you from passing it up as a "gentle view" by any means…wouldn't you be surprised!
5. Audition (dir. Takashi Miike, 2000)
I have lovingly referred to Miike's surrealist shocker as the scariest film I've ever seen. And it totally ranks up there — hell, it's #5 on this list! — which may be due to my fears as a straight man pissing off some mystery woman, who returns with piano wire and a strong sedative. But the real reason is Miike's brilliant orchestration of good-natured date film that, like 75 minutes in, suddenly cartwheels off the road into very brutal territory, very very quickly. Audition marked my tentative, then deep, affection for lead Eihi Shiina (who shocked me years later in Yoshihiro Nishimura's Tokyo Gore Police). There's one scene in particular, which I'll not spoil here, that still makes me noticeably flinch, or scream, depending.
6. Red, White & Blue (dir. Simon Rumley, 2010)
This was top on my anticipation list at Fantastic Fest 2010 as a VERY heavy film, like you're not prepared for it. And brother, was it ever…left me winded in the end. I compared the three leads to spinning tops, each doing well enough on their own in downtown Austin, TX, but you put 'em together — or worse, send all three coursing into each other's orbits — and they'll collide and fracture off into opposite directions. Like a match to kindling, when the killing begins, it doesn't cease until retribution has thoroughly, exhaustively concluded. Wow.
7. Frontière(s) (dir. Xavier Gens, 2007)
Damn - another heavy New French Extremity feature, another shocker from the countryside, and yet another instance of torture-porn and revenge that one-ups anything created stateside. Gens doesn't shy from the gore incurred upon lead Karina Testa and her young friends as they fight to escape psycho neo-Nazis, but he does an exceedingly good job of blanketing the grime- and rust-encrusted farm compound with inescapable dread. I felt like taking a long, hot shower after viewing this one.
8. Irreversible (dir. Gaspar Noé, 2002)
You've probably heard of Noé's notorious film even if you've never seen it. So you may be wondering why it's not higher on my list. It still remains a challenging film for me to sit through, and believe me that fire extinguisher bludgeoning at the beginning (coupled w/ the spinning camerawork and infrasoundtrack) is fatiguing, but it doesn't hold a candle to Monica Bellucci and her rape. Since the film moves in reverse, her "first" onscreen appearance is virtually unrecognizable, a battered and bloodied stand-in for her striking self. It's the aftermath of the daunting rape scene, which is so unpleasant I've only seen it once. And I'm in no hurry to sit through those nine minutes again. Though I'll admit the unpleasantly fresh and blissful denouement (i.e. the beginning, before the long night of horrors) is a great middle-finger to "Hollywood endings".
9. I Spit on Your Grave (dir. Steven R. Monroe, 2010)
Have you seen the original, uncut, one-time banned rape/revenge film, cut over 30 years ago? This nearly shot-by-shot remake takes the violence, humiliation and revenge even further, if you can believe it. Jennifer's kills are so satisfying, exerted w/ ingenuity, decisiveness and definitely without mercy (unlike the original's sex-appeal tactics), but the disgusting "good ol' boys" put her through hell first. Only way I made it through was knowing those bastards were getting theres in hell.
10. Ju-on (dir. Takashi Shimizu, 2003)
The original filmic version of Shimizu's The Grudge franchise, scares the hell outta me for three reasons: 1. the first time I saw this film, I had a bad copy so the beginning kept skipping, which I thought was intentional and was so freaked out I never watched it. 2. the haunted kid in the closet (you know what I mean). 3. the ending, not so much the ghost of Kayako creeping down the stairs to nail Megumi Okina once and for all, but who follows her, the blood-streaked figure of the murderer, Takeo, source of the grudge.
I've necessarily left many films from this list, including Srdjan Spasojevic's sickening A Serbian Film, which I've not seen. That exercise in hell almost absolutely "deserves" a spot, but it's currently so banned I may never see it. Maybe that's a good thing? Also, for films I have seen: Eli Roth's Hostel; Tom Six's The Human Centipede (you're shocked, right, that I didn't include this on my list? Only reason: I attended premiere where Six and the entire main cast attended, which did wonders for "humanizing" a film about a sicko German doctor grafting three people to one another); Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure (super scary); Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer; Kim Ji-woon's A Tale of Two Sisters and I Saw the Devil (the former remains the best K-Horror film ever, IMO, and the latter receives honorable mention for being one of the heaviest revenge films out there); Kim Jin-won's ultra-indie and ultraviolent The Butcher; Daniel Stamm's The Last Exorcism; Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms (trust me, wait 'til the last 10 minutes); Kiim Chapiron's Sheitan; Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-moi; Ilya Khrjanovsky's 4 (incredibly his 1st feature film); and basically anything scary from John Carpenter (to be perfectly honest, his Prince of Darkness still gives me the heebie-jeebies). I caution you from seeing anything I've listed, either in this honorable mention section or specifically my top ten, unless you know you can handle it.
Painfully terrifying and brutal. New French Extremity is one subgenre I drink thirstily from (see the proliferation of French films in this list), but Laugier pushed the limits, to nightmarish places that even Eli Roth hasn't approached. In very brief: something terrible happens to Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) as a child, harsh imprisonment and physical (but not sexual) abuse, and she escapes. She's haunted terribly by flashes of a wraithlike figure that continues to harm her, so she teams w/ friend Anna (Morjana Alaoui) to seek out her former abusers and exert retribution. But revisiting that former house, and its basement of horrors, comes at a dear price. Think of a train full of explosives. It screeches to a cumbersome halt when Lucie first frees herself, but it's ready to start up at the slightest push. Once Lucie and Anna return to that chamber, the train's already hurtling toward disaster and there's no stopping it until the final transcendently violent conclusion.
A grueling four hours of unblinking violence await you, should you take Iskanov's offer and watch this monster. It's based in reality, following the Japanese Army's Unit 731, the covert biological and chemical warfare and research development unit during the Second Sino-Japanese War and WWII. That's something to think about when going in, as the b&w reenactments of atrocities on Russian or Chinese prisoners (nearly all young women and men), a daunting bazaar of pain, flood at you scene by scene w/ very little time to recover. I hesitate to spoil anything, but just to see if YOU can handle it, here's a typical moment: they bind a pretty girl in a chair, hook her up to a machine to monitor her brainwaves (and "pain threshold" before she blacks out), and proceed to methodically rip each and every tooth from her jaw. She doesn't fall unconscious until it's far too late. I could only just barely handle it myself, and I've only watched this film once.
Aja's early film sawed-off shotgun blasted New French Extremity as a reckoning force in contemporary genre film. And thanks to his makeup FX artist Giannetto De Rossi (favored by the late giallo master Lucio Fulci), the shocking intensity goes off the charts and left even me surprised. Lovely Cécile de France goes out to the French countryside w/ her girlfriend Alex's family — one of many reasons why I fear le paysage — but late at night a truck w/ floodlights drives up, carrying a boilersuited killing machine who brutally dispatches the family (he's got a penchant for his straight razor, but he'll use practically anything), kidnaps Alex and pursues Cécile. It's worth seeking out the international (i.e. NC-17) version, and if you caught Piranha 3D like I recommended, that's Aja too and the eye-popping gore in that is just a tease for the significant sequences in Haute Tension.
This duo's debut film, along w/ Pascal Laugier's Martyrs, signified the second wave of New French Extremity, maintaining the intensity wrought by Alexandre Aja's Haute Tension. One point for brilliant casting of Béatrice Dalle as the nameless killer, cloaked in black and wielding a big-ass pair of scissors. One point for plot tension: Dalle's out to eviscerate Alysson Paradis and steal the unborn baby from her womb, so the action happens almost entirely w/in Paradis' house, at night. One more point for blood-soaked SFX, much of it from makeup and modeling that adds a raw back-to-basics intensity. This one was sort of a toss-up w/ Aja's for placement, but it's lower ranking should not dissuade you from passing it up as a "gentle view" by any means…wouldn't you be surprised!
I have lovingly referred to Miike's surrealist shocker as the scariest film I've ever seen. And it totally ranks up there — hell, it's #5 on this list! — which may be due to my fears as a straight man pissing off some mystery woman, who returns with piano wire and a strong sedative. But the real reason is Miike's brilliant orchestration of good-natured date film that, like 75 minutes in, suddenly cartwheels off the road into very brutal territory, very very quickly. Audition marked my tentative, then deep, affection for lead Eihi Shiina (who shocked me years later in Yoshihiro Nishimura's Tokyo Gore Police). There's one scene in particular, which I'll not spoil here, that still makes me noticeably flinch, or scream, depending.
This was top on my anticipation list at Fantastic Fest 2010 as a VERY heavy film, like you're not prepared for it. And brother, was it ever…left me winded in the end. I compared the three leads to spinning tops, each doing well enough on their own in downtown Austin, TX, but you put 'em together — or worse, send all three coursing into each other's orbits — and they'll collide and fracture off into opposite directions. Like a match to kindling, when the killing begins, it doesn't cease until retribution has thoroughly, exhaustively concluded. Wow.
Damn - another heavy New French Extremity feature, another shocker from the countryside, and yet another instance of torture-porn and revenge that one-ups anything created stateside. Gens doesn't shy from the gore incurred upon lead Karina Testa and her young friends as they fight to escape psycho neo-Nazis, but he does an exceedingly good job of blanketing the grime- and rust-encrusted farm compound with inescapable dread. I felt like taking a long, hot shower after viewing this one.
You've probably heard of Noé's notorious film even if you've never seen it. So you may be wondering why it's not higher on my list. It still remains a challenging film for me to sit through, and believe me that fire extinguisher bludgeoning at the beginning (coupled w/ the spinning camerawork and infrasoundtrack) is fatiguing, but it doesn't hold a candle to Monica Bellucci and her rape. Since the film moves in reverse, her "first" onscreen appearance is virtually unrecognizable, a battered and bloodied stand-in for her striking self. It's the aftermath of the daunting rape scene, which is so unpleasant I've only seen it once. And I'm in no hurry to sit through those nine minutes again. Though I'll admit the unpleasantly fresh and blissful denouement (i.e. the beginning, before the long night of horrors) is a great middle-finger to "Hollywood endings".
Have you seen the original, uncut, one-time banned rape/revenge film, cut over 30 years ago? This nearly shot-by-shot remake takes the violence, humiliation and revenge even further, if you can believe it. Jennifer's kills are so satisfying, exerted w/ ingenuity, decisiveness and definitely without mercy (unlike the original's sex-appeal tactics), but the disgusting "good ol' boys" put her through hell first. Only way I made it through was knowing those bastards were getting theres in hell.
The original filmic version of Shimizu's The Grudge franchise, scares the hell outta me for three reasons: 1. the first time I saw this film, I had a bad copy so the beginning kept skipping, which I thought was intentional and was so freaked out I never watched it. 2. the haunted kid in the closet (you know what I mean). 3. the ending, not so much the ghost of Kayako creeping down the stairs to nail Megumi Okina once and for all, but who follows her, the blood-streaked figure of the murderer, Takeo, source of the grudge.
I've necessarily left many films from this list, including Srdjan Spasojevic's sickening A Serbian Film, which I've not seen. That exercise in hell almost absolutely "deserves" a spot, but it's currently so banned I may never see it. Maybe that's a good thing? Also, for films I have seen: Eli Roth's Hostel; Tom Six's The Human Centipede (you're shocked, right, that I didn't include this on my list? Only reason: I attended premiere where Six and the entire main cast attended, which did wonders for "humanizing" a film about a sicko German doctor grafting three people to one another); Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure (super scary); Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer; Kim Ji-woon's A Tale of Two Sisters and I Saw the Devil (the former remains the best K-Horror film ever, IMO, and the latter receives honorable mention for being one of the heaviest revenge films out there); Kim Jin-won's ultra-indie and ultraviolent The Butcher; Daniel Stamm's The Last Exorcism; Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms (trust me, wait 'til the last 10 minutes); Kiim Chapiron's Sheitan; Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-moi; Ilya Khrjanovsky's 4 (incredibly his 1st feature film); and basically anything scary from John Carpenter (to be perfectly honest, his Prince of Darkness still gives me the heebie-jeebies). I caution you from seeing anything I've listed, either in this honorable mention section or specifically my top ten, unless you know you can handle it.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
fee's LIST (through 3/29)
WEDNESDAY
* Stan Douglas "Midcentury Studio" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 + 533 W 19th St. Douglas commands two galleries with this awesome installation, constructing a postwar period-specific studio lined with hypothetical "caught-in-the-moment" prints from the imagined late '40s, documented with outdated equipment particular to the time.
* Lee Kit "1, 2, 3, 4…" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. The debut stateside solo show of the Hong Kong-based artist. I discern something temporal about his oeuvre, but sort of rockstar too, evident in his hand-painted cloths revealing song lyrics of like Yo La Tengo, My Bloody Valentine, The Lemonheads etc. Plus his work in cardboard paintings and image-transfer "stickers" sound pretty awesome too.
* Jennifer Riley "Fire-Fangled Feathers" @ Allegra LaViola Gallery / 179 E Broadway. New kinetically abstract paintings, solid colors encapsulated in thin white-lined slashes and strokes. Riley begins by producing intuitive pastel drawings, then reinterpreting them freehand as much larger line drawings on canvas.
* "I Am Still Alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Expressions of personal existence, from the deceptively mundane to the utterly emotive, spanning the '50s through present day and feat. On Kawara, León Ferrara, Lee Lozano, Robert Morris, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and more.
+ "Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now". Printmaking culled entirely from the museum's collection and packing a sociopolitical wallop from antagonizing Apartheid's rule to contemporary circumstances. With Conrad Botes, Sandile Goje, Claudette Schreuders, Senzeni Marasela, Kudzanai Chiurai and others.
* Glenn Ligon "On the Death of Tom" @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison (6 to 77th St), 8p. Ligon is subject of a wonderful career survey "AMERICA". His latest video piece "The Death of Tom" — an abstractionist recreation of the ending of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (Edwin S. Porter's 1903 silent film) screens tonight with a live, improvised score by jazz composer Jason Moran, followed by a conversation with the artists and Terrance McKnight.
* Fujiya & Miyagi @ Santos Party House / 96 Lafayette St (ACE/NR/6/JZ to Canal St), 8p/$15. Magnetizing krautrock rhythms, ass-shaking grooves and deadpan Brighton humor = Fujiya & Miyagi. w/ locals Body Language (proponents of the live neo-disco circuit)
* The Beets @ Union Hall / 702 Union St, Park Slope (D/NR to Union St), 7:30p/$8. Few rock a party w/ the woozily raw energy harnessed by the mighty Beets, Jackson Heights' own garage-rock trio. w/ indie super (duper) group Beachniks and Las Robertas (garage-punk all the way from San José, Costa Rica!)
THURSDAY
* Almagul Menlibayeva "Transoxiana Dreams" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St. The transporting nature of the Kazakh artist's oeuvre, like her previous exhibition at the gallery "Daughters of Turan", places us viewers securely w/in the steppe, stretching as far the eye can see, imbued w/ history, folklore and blended cultures. She tells stories via the titular new video, from the POV of a young girl observing a fast-changing landscape, w/ accompanying fantastical prints.
* Sandra Cinto "After the Rain" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Cinto's last solo exhibition recalled Gericault's difficult journey via a flotilla of paper sailboats and digital prints of tumultuous waves. She returns with more sea and sky imagery, including a transcendent wall mural, and I'm hoping the journey is a bit calmer this time.
+ A Gentil Carioca (Rio de Janeiro). Complementing the Sao Paolo-based Cinto is this artist-run gallery based in Rio, feat. works by five artists in the program: Ricardo Basbaum, Carlos Contente, Laura Lima, Maria Nepomuceno and Thiago Rocha Pitta.
* Miru Kim "The Pig That Therefore I Am" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. Perhaps you remember Kim's riveting photo series "Naked City Spleen", self-shot in NY's industrial catacombs, profiled in a NYTimes article a few years ago. I sure as hell do! That was my intro to this local artist and her latest series, shot amongst pigs in an industrial animal farm, underscores the cycle of life and consumption.
* Chie Fueki @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. Fueki combines essences of her Japanese background and upbringing in Brazil in life-sized, mixed-media abstract renderings of her friends.
* Kate Shepherd "And Debris" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. The compositional control that Shepherd exerts, creating these sublimely featureless monochromes and then incising jittery, overlapping polygons on top, spinning them into unease, is practically unparalleled.
* "Foil" @ hpgrp NY / 529 W 20th St 2nd Fl. As the name hints, this is a collab with Tokyo's Foil gallery, which began in '04 as a cutting-edge photography magazine, w/o text! Feat. works by Rinko Kawauchi (showing in "Bye Bye Kitty!!!" at Japan Society, see under CURRENT SHOWS), Shoin Kajii, Yoichi Nagano and Eye Ohashi.
* Jonathan Monk "Your Name Here" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. A time capsule of Monk's photographs and drawing output from southern California, juxtaposed against new sculptures in marble, neon, fabric and leather, plus the second installment of work-in-progress "Rew-Shay Hood Project".
* Stas Orlovski "House and Garden" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Orlovski collapses the exterior and interior in his history-mining works, blending Japanese landscapes, Russian abstraction, Victorian engravings, Modernism and nostalgia.
* Tim Rollins and K.O.S. @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. The previous collab b/w Rollins and student collective K.O.S. was a riveting combination of geometric minimalism and sociopolitical awareness, seeded in the words of Malcolm X, Langston Hughes and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Their new exhibition engages literature and historical texts, too, focusing on Twain, Fitzgerald and Weill and those works' original illustrations.
* PAT "Unseen, unheard, unexplained" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. The debut U.S. exhibition of Mumbai photographer PAT, presenting some two decades of his identity-based work.
* Xiaoze Xie "Layers" @ Chambers Fine Art / 522 W 19th St. Photorealistic closeups of stacked Chinese periodicals and library books, a vivid representation of both the physicality of and blending between histories.
* SEOULSONIC: Vidulgi OoyoO + Idiotape @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 7:30p/$15. Brace yourselves for one wild and sweaty night straight from Korea's underground scene. Scorching shoegazers Vidulgi OoyoO lead the charge, channelling Lush and your other favorite mid-'90s classics w/ uncanny aplomb. Idiotape plunge into Seoul's club scene, but expect brutal electro-punk riffs over canny K-Pop tracks. w/ Galaxy Express and Kite Operations
* Charlene Kaye @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Come early for local spellbinding chanteuse Kaye, straddling folk and gospel with rockin' panache to spare. Stay for the midwest, incl. Akron, OH's White Pines, Chicago's Cains & Abels and that local Aussie Paul Dempsey.
FRIDAY
* James Siena @ The Pace Gallery / 510 W 25th St. Recent paintings, drawings and prints from the past three years, a mix of the artist's technical "visual algorithms" (resulting in vividly complex pictures) to biomorphic figurative forms.
* Jimbo Blachly "Lanquidity" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. After a 30-year hiatus, the NY-based sculptor and installation artist returned to painting, and these small-scale sublime abstracts are part of the result of his labors. The presentation of these works should echo Blachly's own intuitive angle toward installation.
* David Dupuis "Green, Green Grass of Home" @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Dupuis' personal reactions to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus other current events, filter into his exploration of the human condition in new emotive works on paper.
* Lordy Rodriguez "The Map is not the Territory" @ Hosfelt Gallery / 531 W 36th St. Three huge bodies of new ink drawings, like visual cartographies on acid. His abstracted map-making forces us to discern our own subjective locations and references in their vivid renderings.
* Hermann Nitsch "Die Apotheke" @ Leo Koenig, Inc / 545 W 23rd St. He's going to freak you out, Nitsch — few living artists today embody the Austrian's existential, even sinister, actionist style. Beyond nearly 30 years of large-scale paintings in this exhibition, the gallery has included a virtual "cabinet of curiosities", which Nitsch will cull from in a performance this evening and SAT midday. I'm not expecting any lamb crucifixions or orgiastic bacchanals (which Nitsch did in his notorious "6-Day Play"), but the inclusion of his Quintetto (five musicians who have collaborated with him for several years) should keep the vibe theatrical, if not so shocking.
* "R. Crumb "Lines Drawn on Paper" @ Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators / 128 E 63rd St (F to 63rd/Lexington, NR/456/7 to 59th St). The humble title is just a guise for a wonderful career-spanning survey of the ineffable underground artist's career! Chock full of original artwork, from "ZAP", "Head Comix", "Bijou Funnies", "Motor City Comics" etc and feat. an all-Crumb all-star counter-culture cast, like Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Lenore Goldberg and Her Girl Commandos, and loads more.
* "Sucker Punch" (dir. Zack Snyder, 2011) screenings in wide release. I'm pretty sure I haven't been looking forward to a "mainstream" film this long since "Piranha 3D". OK, so maybe "Rango", but that's a cartoon. "Piranha 3D" had Jessica Szohr — HELLO. "Sucker Punch", mind you, directed by the same bloke behind "300", feat. a whole host of cuties incl. Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung (and even the babydoll lead Emily Browning), vs. samurai, dragons AND robots. Yes, I'm stoked…so stoked it hurts.
* "Miral" (dir. Julian Schnabel, 2011) @ Angelika NY / 18 W Houston St (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette, 6 to Bleecker). Growing up during the turbulent '80s Israeli-Palestinian conflict, told through the sensationally gorgeous eyes of Freida Pinto. As tempers flare and people invariably die, Schnabel never ceases to capture the quiet beauties of this fast-changing landscape.
* "Potiche" (dir. François Ozon, 2010) @ Angelika NY / 18 W Houston St (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette, 6 to Bleecker). Straight off this year's "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema", is Ozon's adaptation of the comedic 1970s play, w/ the ineffable Catherine Deneuve playing a trophy wife taking over her wicked husband's factory during a strike.
* "Irreversible" (dir. Gaspard Noé, 2002) midnight screening @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave). Not for the remotely faint of heart, seriously. From the lolling camera and nausea-inducing soundtrack rumblings, to the backwards storytelling, to the viciously conceived onscreen violence — if the bludgeoning with a fire extinguisher doesn't do it, the traumatizing, drawn-out rape absolutely will. The naively calm, hindsight-20/20 "ending" only makes for more unease. ALSO SAT
* Jacuzzi Boys + Web Dating @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. Sigh…oh, to be a Jacuzzi Boy. They're young, they like the sun, and the want to have fun — and by fun I mean rocking your socks off w/ their psych-tinged Miami rock. And despite my hesitation to embrace Total Slacker, frontman Tucker's other band Web Dating is the kind of taut post-punk I can dig w/o hesitation. w/ Outer Minds (Chicago)
* Light Asylum @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8:30p/$10. Shannon Funchess saved '80's soul-house. She and Bruno (the bloke behind the decks) will get that body grooving in no time flat, all right, but it's Funchess' formidable vox that rule the night. w/ SHAMS
* Violent Bullshit + Open Ocean @ Union Pool / 484 Union St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 9p/$10. What do you get when you combine local hardcore dudes Violent Bullshit w/ local ethereal post-punk girls Open Ocean? Totally different, yet similar, question: what do you get when you combine Mexican beer w/ tomato juice and hot sauce? A: a refreshing Michelada, of course.
SATURDAY
* Rachel Whiteread "Long Eyes" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Whiteread's eighth exhibition w/ the gallery should be another foray into awesomeness, as she casts doors and windows in resin and creates sculptures of beverage containers in her exploration of space pervaded with memory and history.
* Romare Bearden "Collage" @ Michael Rosenfeld Gallery / 24 W 57th St. A centennial celebration of the powerful, socially conscious artist, specifically his stunning collage narratives of civil rights and Black communities.
* Mel Kendrick "jacks" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Four new blocky b&w sculptural works from the NY-based artist, whose last big one in the city was his idolic "Markers" installation at Madison Square Park in 2009.
* Peter Moore "Pictures of George" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 465 W 23rd St. The 'George' here is Fluxus founder George Maciunas, captured in photos taken by NY art-world's celebrated documentarian Moore throughout the '60s, up until Maciunas' passing in 1978.
* Christopher Daniels "People Doing Different Things" @ Number 35 / 141 Attorney St. This young NY-based artist wowed my pants off at 2010 VOLTA NY w/ his incredible, large-scale crayon landscapes on canvas. You read that correctly: super-detailed, pop cultural-referential CRAYON works. His new series incorporates some pencil too and is way starker, but his deftness in encapsulating the mundane and everyday in these vividly conceived renderings should be super fantastic.
* Moon Duo + Jacuzzi Boys @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/$10. That Miami trio Jacuzzi Boys: love 'em (see FRI), but their energetic psych-rock gets all whole hell of a lot psych-ier when San Fran's Moon Duo (that would be Ripley from Wooden Shjips, wielding his searing guitar and echoing vox, and Sanae Yamada) take the stage. You'll get a contact high from the distortion alone.
* Year of the Tiger @ Fat Baby / 112 Rivington St (F/JMZ to Rivington), 10p/$8. Why would I ever send you out to Fat Baby? When Year of the Tiger mount that stage, exuding the sexiest and hardest vocal-driven electro I've heard since…uh…the late '90s, that'll answer all your doubts. Yes it's more than totally worth it.
SUNDAY
* "German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). I am so glad to be a MoMA member (shameless plug) b/c I get to preview this exhibition before the ensuing throngs of tourists. I have a love affair w/ German Expressionism belying my affinity for Minimalism and super-contemporary art. Something about E.L Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel that get me going, the arresting, troubling works around WWI, the collisions of glamour and postwar chaos in decadent Berlin. This entirely printmaking-based exhibition should be a destination show.
* Rochelle Feinstein "The Estate of Rochelle F." @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. The NY-based artist created 13 graphic paintings during 2009's economic crisis w/ whatever unfinished/unused materials she already had in her studio, then indexed them via ink drawings and texts in a separate catalogue.
* Moon Duo @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p/$12. I tend to drop Moon Duo's trippy sound-scaping firmly w/in the realm of mind-frying psychedelia, but their latest LP "Mazes" (or at least the previewable title track) is kinda pop, in a good way! Or at least it's a bit more accessible, whilst remaining spacey and sonically enveloping. w/ Coconuts
MONDAY
* Ushio Shinohara + Tomokazu Matsuyama "Neo-Dada Mix/Remix" @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (6 to 68th St0, 6:30p/FREE. A matchup b/w the legendary Japanese Neo Dadist Shinohara (who I'll always remember for dipping boxing gloves in paint and punching canvases) and the Pratt-grad Matsuyama, contemporary and colorful, continually reshaping classical Japanese motifs. The two fiercely pioneering artists conversate w/ the museum's Associate Curator Miwako Tezuka.
* LUX presents "The Artists Cinema" @ E-Flux / 41 Essex St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 7p/FREE. Benjamin Cook, dir. of LUX London, showcases 35mm shorts by Bonnie Camplin, Keren Cytter, Aurélien Foment, Amar Kanwar, Deimantas Narkevicius, Rosalnd Nashashibi, Catherine Sullivan w/ Farhad Shamini, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Akram Zaatari.
TUESDAY
* Joseph Kosuth @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. The pioneering Conceptualist reveals a new installation work "Texts (Waiting for—) for Nothing" that incorporates two works on Samuel Beckett (based on "Waiting for Godot" and "Texts for Nothing"), plus Kosuth's classic installations "Nothing" (1968), his seminal dictionary definition works, and a neon from '98 based on James Joyce's "Ulysses".
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art" @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd, 6 to 51st St). Hello Kitty dies in the end, surmounting a gravestone for pet animals and photographed — I'd like to think innocuously, like the gravestone actually exists in a cemetery somewhere — by Yoshitomo Nara, the punk-rocker of Japan's contemporary art world. I trust I didn't spoil the whole exhibition for you (the clue's in the title, hello!), because besides the general flow through rooms, or "Critical Memory", "Threatened Nature" and "Unquiet Dream" as Japan Society calls 'em, there is no right or wrong way to progress through this exhibition. Though I do advise you to begin at the conventional entryway, at least to face Makoto Aida's heavy "Ash Color Mountains" (2009-11) and put that past you. It would be a disturbing painting anyway, a massive hazy landscape broken up by hills of office workers, not ostensibly gory like his notorious 2001 work "Blender" (not shown here, but you'll find it in the catalogue!!! A little warning: this show as a whole is NOT kid-friendly. Maybe the last third is…hence the other entrance, but the Nara photograph is liable to freak them out too) but imbued with this unseen, unimaginable disaster, it cannot help but conjure images of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan. I suggest you give it a closer look, at the endless multitude of ONLY corporate staff, like a landfill to Japan's salaryman way of life, and the title's meaning may resonate truer to Aida's original intent. Its neighbor, the feverishly colorful and shiny "Harakiri School Girls" (2002), its grouping of saturated-toned sailor-suited students lavishly committing seppuku (which any jidaigeki aficionado knows was originally reserved only for samurai, as part of the bushido honor code), is a blunter and therefore more immediately accessible Aida. The whole print is on this holographic sticker, and he's inscribed his name and the title in cute futuristic type whilst echoing in shodo-style Japanese cursive, bookending the brutality ritualistically enacted by these trendy ko-gals. Maybe he's commenting on teenagers' blind lust for following the next hot new thing (I mean, take director Yoshihiro Nishimura's hyperbolized version, the wrist-cut "Ge" fake commercial, during his film "Tokyo Gore Police"), or his general disdain for moralistic suicide and belligerent schoolgirls. If you can get past the gore — and believe me I can — it's damn beautiful to look at. Now it's to my understanding that Aida's slasher-film-crossed-with-a-rave style tends to dominate a room, but he shares it here w/ Kyoto-based photographer Miwa Yanagi. She is one of EIGHT women artists in this 16-person show, so fully half the artists. Way to go, Japan Society! Plus, I am sorely lacking on the Japanese women photographer front, and we've got three of 'em here. Anyway: Yanagi shows four stylized C-prints from her "My Grandmother" series, depicting college-age girls under SFX makeup and Photoshop manipulation, as they see themselves in 50 years. In essence, they free themselves of youth's societal restrictions to think big and project themselves in limitless (but attainable?) fantasy scenarios. She represented Japan w/ her recent monumental series "Windswept Women" at the 53rd Venice Biennale, and though "My Grandmother" aren't nearly as massive, nor generational-mixed (lithe, youthful bodies and prematurely aged faces), they still draw a strong, if complex reaction. Tomoko Kashiki is nearly a full generation younger than Yanagi, and depicts women too but in slightly amorphous, slow-blurred animation, retaining trails of their movement as they disintegrate in woodgrain floor ("In a Box", 2008) — there's a lucid dreamlike element to it, like they're trying to rouse themselves back into reality. Maybe that's why the landscapes they embody seem a bit too perfect. Yamaguchi Akira (who I should note retains the Japanese way of ordering his family-name Yamaguchi first, even in English text) and the slightly younger Manabu Ikeda both create wildly detailed, environmentally imbued imagery. Yamaguchi's approaches that traditional "Floating World" cutaway style but sets his pens and watercolors on Tokyo's bustling Narita International Airport, thronged with businessmen and tourists and eclipsed in yellow smog clouds. I've encountered Ikeda before in group shows and art fairs (his "Foretoken" re-imagines Hokusai's famous "Great Wave off Kanagawa" as a tidal wave of traditional architecture), and I'd like to believe his huge diptych pen-and-acrylic-ink renderings embody some utopian arcology thinking. The swelling "History of rise and fall" (2006), an infinite-pagoda-roofed structure populated with cherry blossoms, Buddha hands and waterfalls that towers over stamp-sized rice fields and its primeval forest neighbor "Existence" (2004) imagine worlds proscribing the metropolis. Though considering the devastation wrought upon Miyagi Prefecture's farmland and townships, Ikeda's organic works feel like pastoral time capsules. Or to continue the arcology idea, these fantastical environments perpetuate their existences above and away from the modernization and disasters, man-made and natural, though on the other hand they appear to crumble under their own wildly unrealistic structures. It's here the exhibition switches gears into "Threatened Nature" (I think??), as a corridor separates the previous pairing of classical technique and super-contemporary pop with an overall naturalistic angle. Chiharu Shiota's installation "Dialogue with Absence" (2010, eschewing her telltale hairlike black-yarn tangles for transparent plastic tubes, siphoning red-dyed liquid from peristaltic pumps into a painted wedding dress. Surface-level, it reminded me of Tony Feher's lyrical "Next On Line" installation at The Pace Gallery crossed w/ Anselm Kiefer's history-steeped, ruined dioramas. It does embody some of Shiota's ongoing dialogues with an individual's ties to their ancestors, peers and environment — quite literally in the attached "blood supply" — but for me it didn't have that unnerving 'oomph' factor like her earthier, hairier installations. Though it segues well enough into Motohiko Odani's set of malformed Noh masks, purposefully imbalanced with sections of lifelike human bone and flesh, and with Kohei Nawa's "PixCell-Deer #24" (2011), a taxidermy buck covered in different-sized plastic globes. Stare into the sculpture, discerning that indeed it used to be a living creature, and you'll see yourself — many dozens of you, actually — locked w/in its beaded "skin", staring back at you. That interconnectivity with nature reappears throughout Rinko Kawauchi's "AILA" series, over a dozen picture-portrait-sized C-prints of natural forms, dead and alive. I was fortunate to experience Tomoko Shioyasu's thrillingly meticulous cut-paper shadow installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo last year, and am stoked she reappears here with 'Vortex" (2011), a new screen-sized whirlpool that places viewers within this channel, linking history, environment, experience. Shioyasu's conduit propels us into the third phase of the exhibition "Unquiet Dream". Kumi Machida's Nihonga-based figures, created entirely from traditional pigments on handmade paper, exist in like a half-womb half-sensory deprivation chamber. Tomoko Yoneda's series of sparse interiors, like windows into unpopulated worlds (or, again, echoes of the quake and tsunami devastation), are centered in infamous history, taken in the former HQ of Korea's Defense Security Command in Seoul. I fortuitously first experienced this series at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, during that same trip last April. The past charges of torture and political unrest unleashed in Yoneda's stark photographs mutes Haruka Kojin's beautifully conceived artificial flower mirrored installation (it's lovely and a bit disorienting, how she's crafted this Rorschach effect, but almost requires its own space to breathe). We conclude with two video works by London-based Hiraki Sawa (whose wonderful "O" installation, originally commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery for the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, ends this Saturday at James Cohan Gallery), his borderless fantasy "Within" (2010) and his superb early work "Elsewhere" (2003), a poetic silent video of household objects with lives of their own. Do the materials we own control us? Are we so attached to our 'stuff' that we forfeit 'real' relationships? I'm not sure if that's fully Sawa's intent here, but there is a duality to his whimsical display. And yes, here occurs Nara's aforementioned C-print, the Hello Kitty duo holding court as guardians in a pet cemetery. This is a show that benefits from unhurried visits, because small as the overall gallery space is, there is quite a bit of layered meaning to distill. That so much here seems to preempt and visualize the wrath of Mother Nature makes it all the more emotive. And considering my deep affinity for Japan, for my awesome friends there and my ongoing studies in the language, I feel extra connected to the exhibition.
* Günther Uecker "The Early Works" @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. Things that get me going: indie art counterculture groups seeing retrospectives/proper surveys in NY galleries. Case in point: the Chicago Imagists and The Hairy Who last year (incl. Karl Wirsum, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke and Peter Saul) and now German Informel-opposites ZERO group members like Heinz Mack. Enter Günter Uecker and his cache of nails. His background in optical phenomena and light as medium are evident in the shadows and visual patterns thrown off and created by gorgeous, plainly textural selection from the '50s through '70s, from the tombstone-like rows and ashen hues of "Untitled Painting Nailed Over" (1957), the medium itself fingerpainted by Uecker, to the cloudlike shadow of "Nailed-Over Table" (1964), which as the name suggests is a side-table mimicking a blowfish in repose. Then we get "New York Dancer" (1965), a classic kinetic sculpture — oh yes, I mean kinetic, as this human-sized sailcloth form, drenched in long nails, spins wildly on its base when activated like some Torture Garden bondage performer. It's frightening, but you probably won't be able to look away, either. Quick: check out "Black Lung" (1957), a nailless inky monochrome, bearing sensual gestures from the artist's fingers. Also: "String Chair" (1969), which to me looks like a Wookiee crossed w/ a chair. Upstairs contains an incredibly sublime kinetic sculpture incorporating strings, "Sand Mill" (1970), the ropes dragging circular patterns recalling a Japanese Zen garden, plus the huge "Five Light Disks, Cosmic Vision" (1961-81), five rotating nailed circles spotlit and emanating rays of light.
* "Unpainted Paintings", curated by Alison Gingeras @ Luxembourg & Dayan / 64 E 77th St. Way to go Gingeras! The chief curator of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and prolific writer has turned all four floors of this UES townhouse into a visual wonderland. Fighting somehow balletically for wall-space is several dozen postwar and contemporary international artists, some known better for their paintings but nearly everyone here eschewing that medium for other methods of mark-making. Where to begin? Dive right in: Andy Warhol's bed-sized "Piss Painting" (1978) and Dan Colen's similarly sized "Psychotic Reaction" (2011), gesso-drenched flower petals matted on canvas, greet us upon entry. Straight ahead and beyond this tunnel of sensationalism lies David Hammons' power-packed "Untitled (Kool Aid)" (2007), a double-stroke of compositional genius and sharp wit, a miasma of Kool-Aid stains soaked through paper, framed in gilded gold. The imagery at play here — the blending of synthetic hues into a dull brown, the history of this unhealthy beverage's marketing to African-American children, the fancy Abstract Expressionist language subsumed by racial and cultural meanings — is super potent. Ascend the stairs to the 'dirty pictures', like a nailed rhombus by Günther Uecker, a reddish fabric snarl by Otto Muehl and Alex Hubbard's toxic (and OK, intoxicating; I'm impressed what he did w/ just beach rubbish and sludgy resin) "Garbage Painting 3" (2011). Paul McCarthy cheekily contributed a nasty clay-muddied carpet to this room. Beyond that some slashed and tortured mixed media (think Lucio Fontana, Steven Parrino, Alberto Burri), and a rather gorgeous array of knitted and sewn 'paintings'. If you've never witnessed a Blinky Palermo in person, this massive, Mark Rothko-sized "Untitled (Stoffbild)" (1969), a vibrating duel b/w midnight and cobalt blue cotton fabrics, is a joyous encounter. It precedes Palermo's overdue retrospective at Dia:Beacon by three months. Palermo's faux colorfield faces a lovely thick-knit wool composition from Rosemarie Trockel, which she topped off w/ spraypaint, and a typically giant Julian Schnabel shag carpet "Nil" (1981), aping a high-textured Minimalism. I didn't understand the third floor's 'meta-painting' modus, but the inclusion of Lynda Benglis ("Baby Contraband", a 1969 pour like the Whitney Museum's epic wave, only child-sized), Paola Pivi (pearl dreadlocks) and a sinister Kishio Suga (his "Ultimate Limit Defining Elements" from 2007, which due to post-tsunami Miyagi Prefecture instills imagery of hazard fencing and ensnared rubble, at least in my mind) totally works. Some final brutality on the 4th Fl, courtesy Salvatore Scarpitta's strapped and pierced canvas "Tishamingo (for Franz Kline)" (1964) and my brain immediately experienced a stimulation overload. Revisits are necessary.
* "Longing for Identity: Postwar Japanese Photographers" @ Yoshii Gallery / 980 Madison Ave. An array of equally rare, important and jaw-droppingly gorgeous prints, via seven of Japan's heavyweights from the '50s through '70s, replete w/ advances onto unpaved paths of modernism, experimentation and expressionism. Daido Moriyama's vintage prints from "Tokyo, Meshed World" ensnare your gaze with their glimpses of flesh amid contrasty b&w, whereas Shoji Ueda's pair "A Nude on a Sand Dune" (from nearly three decades earlier) embodies some surreal, timeless realm, though he took them less than 10 years after the atomic bomb. Perhaps that's precisely the reason for this displaced vibe. Shomei Tomatsu's neighborhood prints are all very 'of the moment', like "Oh Shinjuku" (1969), the sunglass-wearing tough guy having a smoke next to Coca-Cola and Fanta adverts. That Western signage reappears in Nobuyoshi Araki's restrained compositions from "Theater of Love", including some naturalistic (and thus slightly voyeuristic) beach-crowd shots. These "New Wave" artists and their kindred were making the rules in this new era of Japanese photography.
* Martin Kippenberger "Eggman II" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. OK so I didn't get into this electrifying postwar German artist's mega retrospective at the MoMA a few years back. Joke's on me, of course: this exhibition is dope. Nine paintings, some very large and incorporating Kippenberger's knack for odd media (coins, shards of Plexiglas), plus a ridiculous kinetic sculpture like out of some "Jurassic Park" lab and fun related drawings (on hotel stationery!) round out the show. Everything here was last shown together in the final exhibition of Kippenberger's lifetime, in Städtisches Museum Abteilberg, in Mönchengladbach, Germany. So I already covered the coins and Plexiglas bit, but how about an emotive portrait of a bleary-eyed dog, balancing an egg on its head against a pseudo colorfield backdrop? Or its sorta kinky neighbor "Egg Sock", the titular object stuffed into a tartan plaid sock like a bulging condom, framed by an eye-popping tartan plaid screen? In Kippenberger's own words: "In painting you must look what fallen fruit is left that you can paint…The egg is white and insipid, how can a colorful picture come from that?" Two seconds into his show and that answer becomes quite evident.
* David Altmejd @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Altmejd's previous solo show here was mainly about huge scale: monumental frost giants and forest spirits rendered in his confoundedly dazzling mixed media style. He's concentrated these cyclical notions of rebirth and the environment in three automobile-sized Plexiglas boxes, self-contained worlds of wildly abstract organisms. I'll do my best to describe (but if you dug Jim Henson's "Labyrinth", you know the one w/ David Bowie as that sorta androgynously hot vampiric lord, then you'll be just fine) what he's done: "The Vessel" contains like a swooping swanlike diaphanous form, or a frozen wormhole, bearing an assembly line of human ears, noses etc. "The Swarm" contains bees made of wire and assorted minerals plus lots more kelplike diaphanous forms, in rainbow hues. Meanwhile "Spectre" is a methodical progression of mineral stones, which I'll not fully name but include aragonite, spessartite garnet, rose quartz and amethyst. He includes sculptural elements outside the Plexiglas, like the winged "The Architect 1" tearing through a gallery wall (its kindred unfurls knifelike wings in the smaller gallery w/ "Spectre"). Creation and destruction and recreation.
* Claudette Schreuders "Close, Close" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 512 W 20th St. The Cape Town-based artist uses old family photos and literature as source material for her incredible carved-wood sculpture and lithographs, which continue a narrative on the complexities of family life. She includes the porosity of race relations within families, too, as her ancestors were white colonists in Apartheid-era South Africa. The striking "Abba", of a Black woman cradling a white baby on her back, is blended from images of Schreuders' grandmother, mother and aunt and their childhood maids, plus carved from the same block of wood. "Both Hands" could be a mixed-race young mother, holding up her white-featured twin infants. Everything is smaller than life, like the artist imparted the souls and histories of her figures in these child-sized sculptures.
* Gary Hill "of surf, death, tropes & tableaux: The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Brace yourself for disorientation! The pioneering multimedia artist returns, manipulating sound, speed and sequence in his concern over homogenized video culture and creating a very sensorial experience. If his backwards-talking lecture in a spikily soundproofed gallery doesn't grab you, I suggest you plunge into the pitch-black back space. But hang close to the walls: there's a huge floating chemical-structure in the center of the room. Every 10 seconds or so a strobe pops on, flooding the room in light before reverting to "perfect" darkness, which for you should now be marred with wild aftereffect visions! How fun, right? Check the endless tide, a soothing video projection just outside, to calm yourself.
* Marcia Kure "Dressed Up" @ Susan Inglett Gallery / 522 W 24th St. In Kure's debut solo exhibition at the gallery, she unfurls huge photomontage portraits, collaged from contemporary hip-hop figures and Victorian couture, like pan-gendered, multigenerational knights. I never realized before how closely Victorian fashion resembles armor. It's as if the structured bodices and gathered skirts have colonized the (mostly) men confined in their layered fabrics. The finery of the outfits contradicts that era's oppression, and in its cruel mashup forces its "wearers" into easy targets for social derision. Don't miss Kure's concurrent works on paper exhibition "Fashionable Hybrids" at BravinLee Programs, a potent all-women brigade that evolved from her "Dressed Up" series.
* Kenneth Noland @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. We draw from our own experiences when looking at art, right? Yes, very much yes. That's how I do it. So when I write that looking at Noland's "Highlight" (1961) — one of a dozen in this grouping of the pivotal postwar painter's early geometric works — I'm totally reminded of 'Simon', that '80s electronic game from Milton Bradley. Or that the orangey crescent in "Epigram" (also 1961) looks like a lovingly applied McDonalds 'orange drink' stain. This is written with all due respect. I REALLY like these: how one gets lost in the rippling concentric pours of "Askew" (1958) or the massive chevrons of "Morning Span" (1964), whose golden yellow, orange and red-orange colors remind me — yes! — a bit of McDonalds again. That Noland's works illicit both nostalgic feelings yet remain timeless, or at least unchallenged in their respective ages (50+ years old for the earliest), reflects his awesomeness.
* Ian Francis "Fireland" @ Joshua Liner Gallery / 548 W 28th St, 3rd Fl. If I had a million dollars, I'd commission British artist Ian Francis (marking his solo debut here) to do portraits of all my best girl friends. Or hell, even ONE portrait of ONE girl. I'm admittedly totally about this show, its moody and scintillating mixed media paintings that couple this easy cyberpunk vibe amid rainy London and after-hours Roppongi. Francis composites angular planes of almost flat color, creating architectural bases and swooping perspectives, then layers w/ semi-blurred, semi-nude hotties, rocker types, softcore starlets, and indie kids. Check the frozen surrealism in "Three People Lose Track of Time in the Financial District of San Francisco", the sweaty environs of "A New Band Gets Tired of Their Own Song", the almost pixel-evaporating nature of "Girl on a Park Bench". Some haunting works on paper (another beguiling mix, but mostly charcoal) and razor-sharp pen and ink drawings fill out the lot, accentuating Francis' gift for rendering sexy human forms.
* Marc Handelman "Geological Sketches at Home and Abroad" + Elizabeth Neel "Leopard Complex" @ Sikkema, Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Handelman situates landscape painting w/in various manipulated contexts, from a foreground-less "matte painting" film loop to large-scale framed paintings of dimension stones. Meanwhile, Neel (who had a solo exhibition in Long Island City's SculptureCenter last year) also works between paintings and 3D objects in a visually arresting grouping of chaotically patterned works.
* Ali Banisadr "It Happened and It Never Did" @ Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects / 535 W 22nd St. The Tehran-born, Cali-based artist draws recollections of the Iran-Iraq War, the literature of Umberto Eco (which I've GOT to get on) and a medieval English text on the Middle East's "odd, magical and barbaric" inhabitants, in liquidly abstract, gestural canvases. Think a bit of Hieronymous Bosch but on century-blended battlefields, combined with Bacchanalian festivities and fantastical landscapes. The personages' movements are fluid and blurred, their insignia impossible to make out, as his brush swipes, hews and traces paint.
* "Elemental" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Subtle perception changes and patterns can go a very long way in producing a heady viewing experience. The gallery has assembled a beautifully sublime group show to achieves just this. Donald Judd's four brushed aluminum crates, their interior element angled differently to reveal a toffee-yellow Plexiglas backing, like the sun through clouds, is incredibly organic despite its industrial materials. Likewise Sherrie LeVine's series of hugely pixellated prints recalling Paul Cezanne and Carl Andre's line of 13 cedar timbers, alternated vertical and horizontal like the turrets of a castle. And there's an interesting interplay b/w Robert Wilson's "Snow Owl" trio's asynchronous nature: ostensibly it's the same owl perched in front of a polkadot curtain in each plasma screen, but their 'independent' movements suggest otherwise.
LAST CHANCE
* Hiraki Sawa "O" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. There was this super-popular show in Chelsea for awhile, Christian Marclay's durational filmic work "The Clock", which screened at Paula Cooper Gallery and included 24-hr marathon runs on Fridays that drew queues down the block. Guess what: there is another fascinating time-themed video work, a multi-channel audio/visual installation by Sawa, that you should definitely pay attention to. He's compressed and abstracted time here, presenting perpetually spinning, silent objects, their respective clatters and rollings echoing elsewhere, punctuated by organ ebbs and flows that mimic the visuals of birds, shadows across an arid landscape, fluttering leaves. Sawa initially created this installation for Queensland Art Gallery's 2009 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane. It's so smoothly enveloping, like the moon's cycles, that your notion of time vanishes.
* Wei Dong @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. The artist reaches for the jugular in his satirization of Maoist China and its contemporary effects in phantasmagoric groupings of gender-blended people, performing ceremonial motions like "The Newleywed 2" or half-clothed like "Sunset 2" and "The Mystery 1". It's not mermaids, I can tell you that much — so it's even more disturbing, pseudo-utopian and vaguely sinister.
* 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 worked quite perfectly off the once-snowy field.
* Donald Judd "Works in Granite, Cor-ten, Plywood & Enamel on Aluminum" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. I can always do with more Judd, and an exhibition showcasing over a dozen of the industrial "minimalist"'s classics from 1978 to 1992, each one an envelope-pusher on non-traditional mediums and inspired constructions, is pure aesthetic catnip to this writer. What is evident here for even the nascent Judd-viewer is his ingenious incorporation of mediums. His Douglas Fir plywood crates are handsome (check their meditative array upstate at DIA:Beacon), but a pronouncement of glossy red enamel-painted aluminum adds a human warmth. I love his forays in Cor-Ten — feels very different than Richard Serra's epic torqued forms and Mark di Suvero's paleolithic-like sculpture, for two — but was particularly impressed by Judd's addition of black aluminum in several stacked Cor-Ten boxes, echoing off the steel's weathered patina. And that bomb-shelter granite construct, four slabs menacingly balanced on/against one another? It's a receptacle of brooding potential energy.
* Pat Steir "Winter Paintings" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. The fruits of Steir's laborious, meditative, monolithic abstract paintings are their jewellike surfaces, resulting from layers and layers of poured and dripped paint, like the luxurious fizz of "Winter Group 3: Red, Green, Blue and Gold" (2009-11), where the latter asserts itself strongest on half the canvas against a deep blackish rectangle, or the silvery panes recurring in other works. Spending time losing yourself in Steir's paintings — they're like 11' tall, each — is an effortless task.
* Heimo Zobernig @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. New grid and monochrome paintings and two new sculptures, bearing some reference to Yves Klein and Zobernig's continued trawling of post-Modernism, Geometric Abstraction and Minimalism. The latter are raw and particulate, "prop-like" as curator Martin Clark says. Zobernig's paintings, however, command the room, pulsing w/ not just Klein's "Anthropométries" but even, kind of, Brice Marden's whiplike style, as if Zobernig distilled Klein's "living brushes" down to their simplest serpent-like forms.
* Chuck Webster "My Small Adventures" @ ZieherSmith / 516 W 20th St. This Brooklyn-based artist's small-size oil on panel abstracts carry an interesting vocabulary of shapes and creatures, floating above or stacked within roughly painted, stark landscapes.
* Maria Lassnig "Films" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. The gallery follows up Lassnig's bodily, figurative paintings from last autumn w/ an exhibition of her raw animation works, an important facet of the Vienna-based artist's oeuvre and a major blindspot for this writer. I like 'em: I stayed for the brief animated vignettes out of "Shapes", amorphous pseudo-figures preempting Amy Sillman's style, dancing and dissolving to a harpsichord soundtrack.
* Stan Douglas "Midcentury Studio" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 + 533 W 19th St. Douglas commands two galleries with this awesome installation, constructing a postwar period-specific studio lined with hypothetical "caught-in-the-moment" prints from the imagined late '40s, documented with outdated equipment particular to the time.
* Lee Kit "1, 2, 3, 4…" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. The debut stateside solo show of the Hong Kong-based artist. I discern something temporal about his oeuvre, but sort of rockstar too, evident in his hand-painted cloths revealing song lyrics of like Yo La Tengo, My Bloody Valentine, The Lemonheads etc. Plus his work in cardboard paintings and image-transfer "stickers" sound pretty awesome too.
* Jennifer Riley "Fire-Fangled Feathers" @ Allegra LaViola Gallery / 179 E Broadway. New kinetically abstract paintings, solid colors encapsulated in thin white-lined slashes and strokes. Riley begins by producing intuitive pastel drawings, then reinterpreting them freehand as much larger line drawings on canvas.
* "I Am Still Alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Expressions of personal existence, from the deceptively mundane to the utterly emotive, spanning the '50s through present day and feat. On Kawara, León Ferrara, Lee Lozano, Robert Morris, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and more.
+ "Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now". Printmaking culled entirely from the museum's collection and packing a sociopolitical wallop from antagonizing Apartheid's rule to contemporary circumstances. With Conrad Botes, Sandile Goje, Claudette Schreuders, Senzeni Marasela, Kudzanai Chiurai and others.
* Glenn Ligon "On the Death of Tom" @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison (6 to 77th St), 8p. Ligon is subject of a wonderful career survey "AMERICA". His latest video piece "The Death of Tom" — an abstractionist recreation of the ending of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (Edwin S. Porter's 1903 silent film) screens tonight with a live, improvised score by jazz composer Jason Moran, followed by a conversation with the artists and Terrance McKnight.
* Fujiya & Miyagi @ Santos Party House / 96 Lafayette St (ACE/NR/6/JZ to Canal St), 8p/$15. Magnetizing krautrock rhythms, ass-shaking grooves and deadpan Brighton humor = Fujiya & Miyagi. w/ locals Body Language (proponents of the live neo-disco circuit)
* The Beets @ Union Hall / 702 Union St, Park Slope (D/NR to Union St), 7:30p/$8. Few rock a party w/ the woozily raw energy harnessed by the mighty Beets, Jackson Heights' own garage-rock trio. w/ indie super (duper) group Beachniks and Las Robertas (garage-punk all the way from San José, Costa Rica!)
THURSDAY
* Almagul Menlibayeva "Transoxiana Dreams" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St. The transporting nature of the Kazakh artist's oeuvre, like her previous exhibition at the gallery "Daughters of Turan", places us viewers securely w/in the steppe, stretching as far the eye can see, imbued w/ history, folklore and blended cultures. She tells stories via the titular new video, from the POV of a young girl observing a fast-changing landscape, w/ accompanying fantastical prints.
* Sandra Cinto "After the Rain" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Cinto's last solo exhibition recalled Gericault's difficult journey via a flotilla of paper sailboats and digital prints of tumultuous waves. She returns with more sea and sky imagery, including a transcendent wall mural, and I'm hoping the journey is a bit calmer this time.
+ A Gentil Carioca (Rio de Janeiro). Complementing the Sao Paolo-based Cinto is this artist-run gallery based in Rio, feat. works by five artists in the program: Ricardo Basbaum, Carlos Contente, Laura Lima, Maria Nepomuceno and Thiago Rocha Pitta.
* Miru Kim "The Pig That Therefore I Am" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. Perhaps you remember Kim's riveting photo series "Naked City Spleen", self-shot in NY's industrial catacombs, profiled in a NYTimes article a few years ago. I sure as hell do! That was my intro to this local artist and her latest series, shot amongst pigs in an industrial animal farm, underscores the cycle of life and consumption.
* Chie Fueki @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. Fueki combines essences of her Japanese background and upbringing in Brazil in life-sized, mixed-media abstract renderings of her friends.
* Kate Shepherd "And Debris" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. The compositional control that Shepherd exerts, creating these sublimely featureless monochromes and then incising jittery, overlapping polygons on top, spinning them into unease, is practically unparalleled.
* "Foil" @ hpgrp NY / 529 W 20th St 2nd Fl. As the name hints, this is a collab with Tokyo's Foil gallery, which began in '04 as a cutting-edge photography magazine, w/o text! Feat. works by Rinko Kawauchi (showing in "Bye Bye Kitty!!!" at Japan Society, see under CURRENT SHOWS), Shoin Kajii, Yoichi Nagano and Eye Ohashi.
* Jonathan Monk "Your Name Here" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. A time capsule of Monk's photographs and drawing output from southern California, juxtaposed against new sculptures in marble, neon, fabric and leather, plus the second installment of work-in-progress "Rew-Shay Hood Project".
* Stas Orlovski "House and Garden" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Orlovski collapses the exterior and interior in his history-mining works, blending Japanese landscapes, Russian abstraction, Victorian engravings, Modernism and nostalgia.
* Tim Rollins and K.O.S. @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. The previous collab b/w Rollins and student collective K.O.S. was a riveting combination of geometric minimalism and sociopolitical awareness, seeded in the words of Malcolm X, Langston Hughes and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Their new exhibition engages literature and historical texts, too, focusing on Twain, Fitzgerald and Weill and those works' original illustrations.
* PAT "Unseen, unheard, unexplained" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. The debut U.S. exhibition of Mumbai photographer PAT, presenting some two decades of his identity-based work.
* Xiaoze Xie "Layers" @ Chambers Fine Art / 522 W 19th St. Photorealistic closeups of stacked Chinese periodicals and library books, a vivid representation of both the physicality of and blending between histories.
* SEOULSONIC: Vidulgi OoyoO + Idiotape @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 7:30p/$15. Brace yourselves for one wild and sweaty night straight from Korea's underground scene. Scorching shoegazers Vidulgi OoyoO lead the charge, channelling Lush and your other favorite mid-'90s classics w/ uncanny aplomb. Idiotape plunge into Seoul's club scene, but expect brutal electro-punk riffs over canny K-Pop tracks. w/ Galaxy Express and Kite Operations
* Charlene Kaye @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Come early for local spellbinding chanteuse Kaye, straddling folk and gospel with rockin' panache to spare. Stay for the midwest, incl. Akron, OH's White Pines, Chicago's Cains & Abels and that local Aussie Paul Dempsey.
FRIDAY
* James Siena @ The Pace Gallery / 510 W 25th St. Recent paintings, drawings and prints from the past three years, a mix of the artist's technical "visual algorithms" (resulting in vividly complex pictures) to biomorphic figurative forms.
* Jimbo Blachly "Lanquidity" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. After a 30-year hiatus, the NY-based sculptor and installation artist returned to painting, and these small-scale sublime abstracts are part of the result of his labors. The presentation of these works should echo Blachly's own intuitive angle toward installation.
* David Dupuis "Green, Green Grass of Home" @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Dupuis' personal reactions to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus other current events, filter into his exploration of the human condition in new emotive works on paper.
* Lordy Rodriguez "The Map is not the Territory" @ Hosfelt Gallery / 531 W 36th St. Three huge bodies of new ink drawings, like visual cartographies on acid. His abstracted map-making forces us to discern our own subjective locations and references in their vivid renderings.
* Hermann Nitsch "Die Apotheke" @ Leo Koenig, Inc / 545 W 23rd St. He's going to freak you out, Nitsch — few living artists today embody the Austrian's existential, even sinister, actionist style. Beyond nearly 30 years of large-scale paintings in this exhibition, the gallery has included a virtual "cabinet of curiosities", which Nitsch will cull from in a performance this evening and SAT midday. I'm not expecting any lamb crucifixions or orgiastic bacchanals (which Nitsch did in his notorious "6-Day Play"), but the inclusion of his Quintetto (five musicians who have collaborated with him for several years) should keep the vibe theatrical, if not so shocking.
* "R. Crumb "Lines Drawn on Paper" @ Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators / 128 E 63rd St (F to 63rd/Lexington, NR/456/7 to 59th St). The humble title is just a guise for a wonderful career-spanning survey of the ineffable underground artist's career! Chock full of original artwork, from "ZAP", "Head Comix", "Bijou Funnies", "Motor City Comics" etc and feat. an all-Crumb all-star counter-culture cast, like Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Lenore Goldberg and Her Girl Commandos, and loads more.
* "Sucker Punch" (dir. Zack Snyder, 2011) screenings in wide release. I'm pretty sure I haven't been looking forward to a "mainstream" film this long since "Piranha 3D". OK, so maybe "Rango", but that's a cartoon. "Piranha 3D" had Jessica Szohr — HELLO. "Sucker Punch", mind you, directed by the same bloke behind "300", feat. a whole host of cuties incl. Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung (and even the babydoll lead Emily Browning), vs. samurai, dragons AND robots. Yes, I'm stoked…so stoked it hurts.
* "Miral" (dir. Julian Schnabel, 2011) @ Angelika NY / 18 W Houston St (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette, 6 to Bleecker). Growing up during the turbulent '80s Israeli-Palestinian conflict, told through the sensationally gorgeous eyes of Freida Pinto. As tempers flare and people invariably die, Schnabel never ceases to capture the quiet beauties of this fast-changing landscape.
* "Potiche" (dir. François Ozon, 2010) @ Angelika NY / 18 W Houston St (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette, 6 to Bleecker). Straight off this year's "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema", is Ozon's adaptation of the comedic 1970s play, w/ the ineffable Catherine Deneuve playing a trophy wife taking over her wicked husband's factory during a strike.
* "Irreversible" (dir. Gaspard Noé, 2002) midnight screening @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave). Not for the remotely faint of heart, seriously. From the lolling camera and nausea-inducing soundtrack rumblings, to the backwards storytelling, to the viciously conceived onscreen violence — if the bludgeoning with a fire extinguisher doesn't do it, the traumatizing, drawn-out rape absolutely will. The naively calm, hindsight-20/20 "ending" only makes for more unease. ALSO SAT
* Jacuzzi Boys + Web Dating @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. Sigh…oh, to be a Jacuzzi Boy. They're young, they like the sun, and the want to have fun — and by fun I mean rocking your socks off w/ their psych-tinged Miami rock. And despite my hesitation to embrace Total Slacker, frontman Tucker's other band Web Dating is the kind of taut post-punk I can dig w/o hesitation. w/ Outer Minds (Chicago)
* Light Asylum @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8:30p/$10. Shannon Funchess saved '80's soul-house. She and Bruno (the bloke behind the decks) will get that body grooving in no time flat, all right, but it's Funchess' formidable vox that rule the night. w/ SHAMS
* Violent Bullshit + Open Ocean @ Union Pool / 484 Union St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 9p/$10. What do you get when you combine local hardcore dudes Violent Bullshit w/ local ethereal post-punk girls Open Ocean? Totally different, yet similar, question: what do you get when you combine Mexican beer w/ tomato juice and hot sauce? A: a refreshing Michelada, of course.
SATURDAY
* Rachel Whiteread "Long Eyes" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Whiteread's eighth exhibition w/ the gallery should be another foray into awesomeness, as she casts doors and windows in resin and creates sculptures of beverage containers in her exploration of space pervaded with memory and history.
* Romare Bearden "Collage" @ Michael Rosenfeld Gallery / 24 W 57th St. A centennial celebration of the powerful, socially conscious artist, specifically his stunning collage narratives of civil rights and Black communities.
* Mel Kendrick "jacks" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Four new blocky b&w sculptural works from the NY-based artist, whose last big one in the city was his idolic "Markers" installation at Madison Square Park in 2009.
* Peter Moore "Pictures of George" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 465 W 23rd St. The 'George' here is Fluxus founder George Maciunas, captured in photos taken by NY art-world's celebrated documentarian Moore throughout the '60s, up until Maciunas' passing in 1978.
* Christopher Daniels "People Doing Different Things" @ Number 35 / 141 Attorney St. This young NY-based artist wowed my pants off at 2010 VOLTA NY w/ his incredible, large-scale crayon landscapes on canvas. You read that correctly: super-detailed, pop cultural-referential CRAYON works. His new series incorporates some pencil too and is way starker, but his deftness in encapsulating the mundane and everyday in these vividly conceived renderings should be super fantastic.
* Moon Duo + Jacuzzi Boys @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/$10. That Miami trio Jacuzzi Boys: love 'em (see FRI), but their energetic psych-rock gets all whole hell of a lot psych-ier when San Fran's Moon Duo (that would be Ripley from Wooden Shjips, wielding his searing guitar and echoing vox, and Sanae Yamada) take the stage. You'll get a contact high from the distortion alone.
* Year of the Tiger @ Fat Baby / 112 Rivington St (F/JMZ to Rivington), 10p/$8. Why would I ever send you out to Fat Baby? When Year of the Tiger mount that stage, exuding the sexiest and hardest vocal-driven electro I've heard since…uh…the late '90s, that'll answer all your doubts. Yes it's more than totally worth it.
SUNDAY
* "German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). I am so glad to be a MoMA member (shameless plug) b/c I get to preview this exhibition before the ensuing throngs of tourists. I have a love affair w/ German Expressionism belying my affinity for Minimalism and super-contemporary art. Something about E.L Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel that get me going, the arresting, troubling works around WWI, the collisions of glamour and postwar chaos in decadent Berlin. This entirely printmaking-based exhibition should be a destination show.
* Rochelle Feinstein "The Estate of Rochelle F." @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. The NY-based artist created 13 graphic paintings during 2009's economic crisis w/ whatever unfinished/unused materials she already had in her studio, then indexed them via ink drawings and texts in a separate catalogue.
* Moon Duo @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p/$12. I tend to drop Moon Duo's trippy sound-scaping firmly w/in the realm of mind-frying psychedelia, but their latest LP "Mazes" (or at least the previewable title track) is kinda pop, in a good way! Or at least it's a bit more accessible, whilst remaining spacey and sonically enveloping. w/ Coconuts
MONDAY
* Ushio Shinohara + Tomokazu Matsuyama "Neo-Dada Mix/Remix" @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (6 to 68th St0, 6:30p/FREE. A matchup b/w the legendary Japanese Neo Dadist Shinohara (who I'll always remember for dipping boxing gloves in paint and punching canvases) and the Pratt-grad Matsuyama, contemporary and colorful, continually reshaping classical Japanese motifs. The two fiercely pioneering artists conversate w/ the museum's Associate Curator Miwako Tezuka.
* LUX presents "The Artists Cinema" @ E-Flux / 41 Essex St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 7p/FREE. Benjamin Cook, dir. of LUX London, showcases 35mm shorts by Bonnie Camplin, Keren Cytter, Aurélien Foment, Amar Kanwar, Deimantas Narkevicius, Rosalnd Nashashibi, Catherine Sullivan w/ Farhad Shamini, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Akram Zaatari.
TUESDAY
* Joseph Kosuth @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. The pioneering Conceptualist reveals a new installation work "Texts (Waiting for—) for Nothing" that incorporates two works on Samuel Beckett (based on "Waiting for Godot" and "Texts for Nothing"), plus Kosuth's classic installations "Nothing" (1968), his seminal dictionary definition works, and a neon from '98 based on James Joyce's "Ulysses".
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art" @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd, 6 to 51st St). Hello Kitty dies in the end, surmounting a gravestone for pet animals and photographed — I'd like to think innocuously, like the gravestone actually exists in a cemetery somewhere — by Yoshitomo Nara, the punk-rocker of Japan's contemporary art world. I trust I didn't spoil the whole exhibition for you (the clue's in the title, hello!), because besides the general flow through rooms, or "Critical Memory", "Threatened Nature" and "Unquiet Dream" as Japan Society calls 'em, there is no right or wrong way to progress through this exhibition. Though I do advise you to begin at the conventional entryway, at least to face Makoto Aida's heavy "Ash Color Mountains" (2009-11) and put that past you. It would be a disturbing painting anyway, a massive hazy landscape broken up by hills of office workers, not ostensibly gory like his notorious 2001 work "Blender" (not shown here, but you'll find it in the catalogue!!! A little warning: this show as a whole is NOT kid-friendly. Maybe the last third is…hence the other entrance, but the Nara photograph is liable to freak them out too) but imbued with this unseen, unimaginable disaster, it cannot help but conjure images of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan. I suggest you give it a closer look, at the endless multitude of ONLY corporate staff, like a landfill to Japan's salaryman way of life, and the title's meaning may resonate truer to Aida's original intent. Its neighbor, the feverishly colorful and shiny "Harakiri School Girls" (2002), its grouping of saturated-toned sailor-suited students lavishly committing seppuku (which any jidaigeki aficionado knows was originally reserved only for samurai, as part of the bushido honor code), is a blunter and therefore more immediately accessible Aida. The whole print is on this holographic sticker, and he's inscribed his name and the title in cute futuristic type whilst echoing in shodo-style Japanese cursive, bookending the brutality ritualistically enacted by these trendy ko-gals. Maybe he's commenting on teenagers' blind lust for following the next hot new thing (I mean, take director Yoshihiro Nishimura's hyperbolized version, the wrist-cut "Ge" fake commercial, during his film "Tokyo Gore Police"), or his general disdain for moralistic suicide and belligerent schoolgirls. If you can get past the gore — and believe me I can — it's damn beautiful to look at. Now it's to my understanding that Aida's slasher-film-crossed-with-a-rave style tends to dominate a room, but he shares it here w/ Kyoto-based photographer Miwa Yanagi. She is one of EIGHT women artists in this 16-person show, so fully half the artists. Way to go, Japan Society! Plus, I am sorely lacking on the Japanese women photographer front, and we've got three of 'em here. Anyway: Yanagi shows four stylized C-prints from her "My Grandmother" series, depicting college-age girls under SFX makeup and Photoshop manipulation, as they see themselves in 50 years. In essence, they free themselves of youth's societal restrictions to think big and project themselves in limitless (but attainable?) fantasy scenarios. She represented Japan w/ her recent monumental series "Windswept Women" at the 53rd Venice Biennale, and though "My Grandmother" aren't nearly as massive, nor generational-mixed (lithe, youthful bodies and prematurely aged faces), they still draw a strong, if complex reaction. Tomoko Kashiki is nearly a full generation younger than Yanagi, and depicts women too but in slightly amorphous, slow-blurred animation, retaining trails of their movement as they disintegrate in woodgrain floor ("In a Box", 2008) — there's a lucid dreamlike element to it, like they're trying to rouse themselves back into reality. Maybe that's why the landscapes they embody seem a bit too perfect. Yamaguchi Akira (who I should note retains the Japanese way of ordering his family-name Yamaguchi first, even in English text) and the slightly younger Manabu Ikeda both create wildly detailed, environmentally imbued imagery. Yamaguchi's approaches that traditional "Floating World" cutaway style but sets his pens and watercolors on Tokyo's bustling Narita International Airport, thronged with businessmen and tourists and eclipsed in yellow smog clouds. I've encountered Ikeda before in group shows and art fairs (his "Foretoken" re-imagines Hokusai's famous "Great Wave off Kanagawa" as a tidal wave of traditional architecture), and I'd like to believe his huge diptych pen-and-acrylic-ink renderings embody some utopian arcology thinking. The swelling "History of rise and fall" (2006), an infinite-pagoda-roofed structure populated with cherry blossoms, Buddha hands and waterfalls that towers over stamp-sized rice fields and its primeval forest neighbor "Existence" (2004) imagine worlds proscribing the metropolis. Though considering the devastation wrought upon Miyagi Prefecture's farmland and townships, Ikeda's organic works feel like pastoral time capsules. Or to continue the arcology idea, these fantastical environments perpetuate their existences above and away from the modernization and disasters, man-made and natural, though on the other hand they appear to crumble under their own wildly unrealistic structures. It's here the exhibition switches gears into "Threatened Nature" (I think??), as a corridor separates the previous pairing of classical technique and super-contemporary pop with an overall naturalistic angle. Chiharu Shiota's installation "Dialogue with Absence" (2010, eschewing her telltale hairlike black-yarn tangles for transparent plastic tubes, siphoning red-dyed liquid from peristaltic pumps into a painted wedding dress. Surface-level, it reminded me of Tony Feher's lyrical "Next On Line" installation at The Pace Gallery crossed w/ Anselm Kiefer's history-steeped, ruined dioramas. It does embody some of Shiota's ongoing dialogues with an individual's ties to their ancestors, peers and environment — quite literally in the attached "blood supply" — but for me it didn't have that unnerving 'oomph' factor like her earthier, hairier installations. Though it segues well enough into Motohiko Odani's set of malformed Noh masks, purposefully imbalanced with sections of lifelike human bone and flesh, and with Kohei Nawa's "PixCell-Deer #24" (2011), a taxidermy buck covered in different-sized plastic globes. Stare into the sculpture, discerning that indeed it used to be a living creature, and you'll see yourself — many dozens of you, actually — locked w/in its beaded "skin", staring back at you. That interconnectivity with nature reappears throughout Rinko Kawauchi's "AILA" series, over a dozen picture-portrait-sized C-prints of natural forms, dead and alive. I was fortunate to experience Tomoko Shioyasu's thrillingly meticulous cut-paper shadow installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo last year, and am stoked she reappears here with 'Vortex" (2011), a new screen-sized whirlpool that places viewers within this channel, linking history, environment, experience. Shioyasu's conduit propels us into the third phase of the exhibition "Unquiet Dream". Kumi Machida's Nihonga-based figures, created entirely from traditional pigments on handmade paper, exist in like a half-womb half-sensory deprivation chamber. Tomoko Yoneda's series of sparse interiors, like windows into unpopulated worlds (or, again, echoes of the quake and tsunami devastation), are centered in infamous history, taken in the former HQ of Korea's Defense Security Command in Seoul. I fortuitously first experienced this series at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, during that same trip last April. The past charges of torture and political unrest unleashed in Yoneda's stark photographs mutes Haruka Kojin's beautifully conceived artificial flower mirrored installation (it's lovely and a bit disorienting, how she's crafted this Rorschach effect, but almost requires its own space to breathe). We conclude with two video works by London-based Hiraki Sawa (whose wonderful "O" installation, originally commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery for the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, ends this Saturday at James Cohan Gallery), his borderless fantasy "Within" (2010) and his superb early work "Elsewhere" (2003), a poetic silent video of household objects with lives of their own. Do the materials we own control us? Are we so attached to our 'stuff' that we forfeit 'real' relationships? I'm not sure if that's fully Sawa's intent here, but there is a duality to his whimsical display. And yes, here occurs Nara's aforementioned C-print, the Hello Kitty duo holding court as guardians in a pet cemetery. This is a show that benefits from unhurried visits, because small as the overall gallery space is, there is quite a bit of layered meaning to distill. That so much here seems to preempt and visualize the wrath of Mother Nature makes it all the more emotive. And considering my deep affinity for Japan, for my awesome friends there and my ongoing studies in the language, I feel extra connected to the exhibition.
* Günther Uecker "The Early Works" @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. Things that get me going: indie art counterculture groups seeing retrospectives/proper surveys in NY galleries. Case in point: the Chicago Imagists and The Hairy Who last year (incl. Karl Wirsum, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke and Peter Saul) and now German Informel-opposites ZERO group members like Heinz Mack. Enter Günter Uecker and his cache of nails. His background in optical phenomena and light as medium are evident in the shadows and visual patterns thrown off and created by gorgeous, plainly textural selection from the '50s through '70s, from the tombstone-like rows and ashen hues of "Untitled Painting Nailed Over" (1957), the medium itself fingerpainted by Uecker, to the cloudlike shadow of "Nailed-Over Table" (1964), which as the name suggests is a side-table mimicking a blowfish in repose. Then we get "New York Dancer" (1965), a classic kinetic sculpture — oh yes, I mean kinetic, as this human-sized sailcloth form, drenched in long nails, spins wildly on its base when activated like some Torture Garden bondage performer. It's frightening, but you probably won't be able to look away, either. Quick: check out "Black Lung" (1957), a nailless inky monochrome, bearing sensual gestures from the artist's fingers. Also: "String Chair" (1969), which to me looks like a Wookiee crossed w/ a chair. Upstairs contains an incredibly sublime kinetic sculpture incorporating strings, "Sand Mill" (1970), the ropes dragging circular patterns recalling a Japanese Zen garden, plus the huge "Five Light Disks, Cosmic Vision" (1961-81), five rotating nailed circles spotlit and emanating rays of light.
* "Unpainted Paintings", curated by Alison Gingeras @ Luxembourg & Dayan / 64 E 77th St. Way to go Gingeras! The chief curator of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and prolific writer has turned all four floors of this UES townhouse into a visual wonderland. Fighting somehow balletically for wall-space is several dozen postwar and contemporary international artists, some known better for their paintings but nearly everyone here eschewing that medium for other methods of mark-making. Where to begin? Dive right in: Andy Warhol's bed-sized "Piss Painting" (1978) and Dan Colen's similarly sized "Psychotic Reaction" (2011), gesso-drenched flower petals matted on canvas, greet us upon entry. Straight ahead and beyond this tunnel of sensationalism lies David Hammons' power-packed "Untitled (Kool Aid)" (2007), a double-stroke of compositional genius and sharp wit, a miasma of Kool-Aid stains soaked through paper, framed in gilded gold. The imagery at play here — the blending of synthetic hues into a dull brown, the history of this unhealthy beverage's marketing to African-American children, the fancy Abstract Expressionist language subsumed by racial and cultural meanings — is super potent. Ascend the stairs to the 'dirty pictures', like a nailed rhombus by Günther Uecker, a reddish fabric snarl by Otto Muehl and Alex Hubbard's toxic (and OK, intoxicating; I'm impressed what he did w/ just beach rubbish and sludgy resin) "Garbage Painting 3" (2011). Paul McCarthy cheekily contributed a nasty clay-muddied carpet to this room. Beyond that some slashed and tortured mixed media (think Lucio Fontana, Steven Parrino, Alberto Burri), and a rather gorgeous array of knitted and sewn 'paintings'. If you've never witnessed a Blinky Palermo in person, this massive, Mark Rothko-sized "Untitled (Stoffbild)" (1969), a vibrating duel b/w midnight and cobalt blue cotton fabrics, is a joyous encounter. It precedes Palermo's overdue retrospective at Dia:Beacon by three months. Palermo's faux colorfield faces a lovely thick-knit wool composition from Rosemarie Trockel, which she topped off w/ spraypaint, and a typically giant Julian Schnabel shag carpet "Nil" (1981), aping a high-textured Minimalism. I didn't understand the third floor's 'meta-painting' modus, but the inclusion of Lynda Benglis ("Baby Contraband", a 1969 pour like the Whitney Museum's epic wave, only child-sized), Paola Pivi (pearl dreadlocks) and a sinister Kishio Suga (his "Ultimate Limit Defining Elements" from 2007, which due to post-tsunami Miyagi Prefecture instills imagery of hazard fencing and ensnared rubble, at least in my mind) totally works. Some final brutality on the 4th Fl, courtesy Salvatore Scarpitta's strapped and pierced canvas "Tishamingo (for Franz Kline)" (1964) and my brain immediately experienced a stimulation overload. Revisits are necessary.
* "Longing for Identity: Postwar Japanese Photographers" @ Yoshii Gallery / 980 Madison Ave. An array of equally rare, important and jaw-droppingly gorgeous prints, via seven of Japan's heavyweights from the '50s through '70s, replete w/ advances onto unpaved paths of modernism, experimentation and expressionism. Daido Moriyama's vintage prints from "Tokyo, Meshed World" ensnare your gaze with their glimpses of flesh amid contrasty b&w, whereas Shoji Ueda's pair "A Nude on a Sand Dune" (from nearly three decades earlier) embodies some surreal, timeless realm, though he took them less than 10 years after the atomic bomb. Perhaps that's precisely the reason for this displaced vibe. Shomei Tomatsu's neighborhood prints are all very 'of the moment', like "Oh Shinjuku" (1969), the sunglass-wearing tough guy having a smoke next to Coca-Cola and Fanta adverts. That Western signage reappears in Nobuyoshi Araki's restrained compositions from "Theater of Love", including some naturalistic (and thus slightly voyeuristic) beach-crowd shots. These "New Wave" artists and their kindred were making the rules in this new era of Japanese photography.
* Martin Kippenberger "Eggman II" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. OK so I didn't get into this electrifying postwar German artist's mega retrospective at the MoMA a few years back. Joke's on me, of course: this exhibition is dope. Nine paintings, some very large and incorporating Kippenberger's knack for odd media (coins, shards of Plexiglas), plus a ridiculous kinetic sculpture like out of some "Jurassic Park" lab and fun related drawings (on hotel stationery!) round out the show. Everything here was last shown together in the final exhibition of Kippenberger's lifetime, in Städtisches Museum Abteilberg, in Mönchengladbach, Germany. So I already covered the coins and Plexiglas bit, but how about an emotive portrait of a bleary-eyed dog, balancing an egg on its head against a pseudo colorfield backdrop? Or its sorta kinky neighbor "Egg Sock", the titular object stuffed into a tartan plaid sock like a bulging condom, framed by an eye-popping tartan plaid screen? In Kippenberger's own words: "In painting you must look what fallen fruit is left that you can paint…The egg is white and insipid, how can a colorful picture come from that?" Two seconds into his show and that answer becomes quite evident.
* David Altmejd @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Altmejd's previous solo show here was mainly about huge scale: monumental frost giants and forest spirits rendered in his confoundedly dazzling mixed media style. He's concentrated these cyclical notions of rebirth and the environment in three automobile-sized Plexiglas boxes, self-contained worlds of wildly abstract organisms. I'll do my best to describe (but if you dug Jim Henson's "Labyrinth", you know the one w/ David Bowie as that sorta androgynously hot vampiric lord, then you'll be just fine) what he's done: "The Vessel" contains like a swooping swanlike diaphanous form, or a frozen wormhole, bearing an assembly line of human ears, noses etc. "The Swarm" contains bees made of wire and assorted minerals plus lots more kelplike diaphanous forms, in rainbow hues. Meanwhile "Spectre" is a methodical progression of mineral stones, which I'll not fully name but include aragonite, spessartite garnet, rose quartz and amethyst. He includes sculptural elements outside the Plexiglas, like the winged "The Architect 1" tearing through a gallery wall (its kindred unfurls knifelike wings in the smaller gallery w/ "Spectre"). Creation and destruction and recreation.
* Claudette Schreuders "Close, Close" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 512 W 20th St. The Cape Town-based artist uses old family photos and literature as source material for her incredible carved-wood sculpture and lithographs, which continue a narrative on the complexities of family life. She includes the porosity of race relations within families, too, as her ancestors were white colonists in Apartheid-era South Africa. The striking "Abba", of a Black woman cradling a white baby on her back, is blended from images of Schreuders' grandmother, mother and aunt and their childhood maids, plus carved from the same block of wood. "Both Hands" could be a mixed-race young mother, holding up her white-featured twin infants. Everything is smaller than life, like the artist imparted the souls and histories of her figures in these child-sized sculptures.
* Gary Hill "of surf, death, tropes & tableaux: The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Brace yourself for disorientation! The pioneering multimedia artist returns, manipulating sound, speed and sequence in his concern over homogenized video culture and creating a very sensorial experience. If his backwards-talking lecture in a spikily soundproofed gallery doesn't grab you, I suggest you plunge into the pitch-black back space. But hang close to the walls: there's a huge floating chemical-structure in the center of the room. Every 10 seconds or so a strobe pops on, flooding the room in light before reverting to "perfect" darkness, which for you should now be marred with wild aftereffect visions! How fun, right? Check the endless tide, a soothing video projection just outside, to calm yourself.
* Marcia Kure "Dressed Up" @ Susan Inglett Gallery / 522 W 24th St. In Kure's debut solo exhibition at the gallery, she unfurls huge photomontage portraits, collaged from contemporary hip-hop figures and Victorian couture, like pan-gendered, multigenerational knights. I never realized before how closely Victorian fashion resembles armor. It's as if the structured bodices and gathered skirts have colonized the (mostly) men confined in their layered fabrics. The finery of the outfits contradicts that era's oppression, and in its cruel mashup forces its "wearers" into easy targets for social derision. Don't miss Kure's concurrent works on paper exhibition "Fashionable Hybrids" at BravinLee Programs, a potent all-women brigade that evolved from her "Dressed Up" series.
* Kenneth Noland @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. We draw from our own experiences when looking at art, right? Yes, very much yes. That's how I do it. So when I write that looking at Noland's "Highlight" (1961) — one of a dozen in this grouping of the pivotal postwar painter's early geometric works — I'm totally reminded of 'Simon', that '80s electronic game from Milton Bradley. Or that the orangey crescent in "Epigram" (also 1961) looks like a lovingly applied McDonalds 'orange drink' stain. This is written with all due respect. I REALLY like these: how one gets lost in the rippling concentric pours of "Askew" (1958) or the massive chevrons of "Morning Span" (1964), whose golden yellow, orange and red-orange colors remind me — yes! — a bit of McDonalds again. That Noland's works illicit both nostalgic feelings yet remain timeless, or at least unchallenged in their respective ages (50+ years old for the earliest), reflects his awesomeness.
* Ian Francis "Fireland" @ Joshua Liner Gallery / 548 W 28th St, 3rd Fl. If I had a million dollars, I'd commission British artist Ian Francis (marking his solo debut here) to do portraits of all my best girl friends. Or hell, even ONE portrait of ONE girl. I'm admittedly totally about this show, its moody and scintillating mixed media paintings that couple this easy cyberpunk vibe amid rainy London and after-hours Roppongi. Francis composites angular planes of almost flat color, creating architectural bases and swooping perspectives, then layers w/ semi-blurred, semi-nude hotties, rocker types, softcore starlets, and indie kids. Check the frozen surrealism in "Three People Lose Track of Time in the Financial District of San Francisco", the sweaty environs of "A New Band Gets Tired of Their Own Song", the almost pixel-evaporating nature of "Girl on a Park Bench". Some haunting works on paper (another beguiling mix, but mostly charcoal) and razor-sharp pen and ink drawings fill out the lot, accentuating Francis' gift for rendering sexy human forms.
* Marc Handelman "Geological Sketches at Home and Abroad" + Elizabeth Neel "Leopard Complex" @ Sikkema, Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Handelman situates landscape painting w/in various manipulated contexts, from a foreground-less "matte painting" film loop to large-scale framed paintings of dimension stones. Meanwhile, Neel (who had a solo exhibition in Long Island City's SculptureCenter last year) also works between paintings and 3D objects in a visually arresting grouping of chaotically patterned works.
* Ali Banisadr "It Happened and It Never Did" @ Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects / 535 W 22nd St. The Tehran-born, Cali-based artist draws recollections of the Iran-Iraq War, the literature of Umberto Eco (which I've GOT to get on) and a medieval English text on the Middle East's "odd, magical and barbaric" inhabitants, in liquidly abstract, gestural canvases. Think a bit of Hieronymous Bosch but on century-blended battlefields, combined with Bacchanalian festivities and fantastical landscapes. The personages' movements are fluid and blurred, their insignia impossible to make out, as his brush swipes, hews and traces paint.
* "Elemental" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Subtle perception changes and patterns can go a very long way in producing a heady viewing experience. The gallery has assembled a beautifully sublime group show to achieves just this. Donald Judd's four brushed aluminum crates, their interior element angled differently to reveal a toffee-yellow Plexiglas backing, like the sun through clouds, is incredibly organic despite its industrial materials. Likewise Sherrie LeVine's series of hugely pixellated prints recalling Paul Cezanne and Carl Andre's line of 13 cedar timbers, alternated vertical and horizontal like the turrets of a castle. And there's an interesting interplay b/w Robert Wilson's "Snow Owl" trio's asynchronous nature: ostensibly it's the same owl perched in front of a polkadot curtain in each plasma screen, but their 'independent' movements suggest otherwise.
LAST CHANCE
* Hiraki Sawa "O" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. There was this super-popular show in Chelsea for awhile, Christian Marclay's durational filmic work "The Clock", which screened at Paula Cooper Gallery and included 24-hr marathon runs on Fridays that drew queues down the block. Guess what: there is another fascinating time-themed video work, a multi-channel audio/visual installation by Sawa, that you should definitely pay attention to. He's compressed and abstracted time here, presenting perpetually spinning, silent objects, their respective clatters and rollings echoing elsewhere, punctuated by organ ebbs and flows that mimic the visuals of birds, shadows across an arid landscape, fluttering leaves. Sawa initially created this installation for Queensland Art Gallery's 2009 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane. It's so smoothly enveloping, like the moon's cycles, that your notion of time vanishes.
* Wei Dong @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. The artist reaches for the jugular in his satirization of Maoist China and its contemporary effects in phantasmagoric groupings of gender-blended people, performing ceremonial motions like "The Newleywed 2" or half-clothed like "Sunset 2" and "The Mystery 1". It's not mermaids, I can tell you that much — so it's even more disturbing, pseudo-utopian and vaguely sinister.
* 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 worked quite perfectly off the once-snowy field.
* Donald Judd "Works in Granite, Cor-ten, Plywood & Enamel on Aluminum" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. I can always do with more Judd, and an exhibition showcasing over a dozen of the industrial "minimalist"'s classics from 1978 to 1992, each one an envelope-pusher on non-traditional mediums and inspired constructions, is pure aesthetic catnip to this writer. What is evident here for even the nascent Judd-viewer is his ingenious incorporation of mediums. His Douglas Fir plywood crates are handsome (check their meditative array upstate at DIA:Beacon), but a pronouncement of glossy red enamel-painted aluminum adds a human warmth. I love his forays in Cor-Ten — feels very different than Richard Serra's epic torqued forms and Mark di Suvero's paleolithic-like sculpture, for two — but was particularly impressed by Judd's addition of black aluminum in several stacked Cor-Ten boxes, echoing off the steel's weathered patina. And that bomb-shelter granite construct, four slabs menacingly balanced on/against one another? It's a receptacle of brooding potential energy.
* Pat Steir "Winter Paintings" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. The fruits of Steir's laborious, meditative, monolithic abstract paintings are their jewellike surfaces, resulting from layers and layers of poured and dripped paint, like the luxurious fizz of "Winter Group 3: Red, Green, Blue and Gold" (2009-11), where the latter asserts itself strongest on half the canvas against a deep blackish rectangle, or the silvery panes recurring in other works. Spending time losing yourself in Steir's paintings — they're like 11' tall, each — is an effortless task.
* Heimo Zobernig @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. New grid and monochrome paintings and two new sculptures, bearing some reference to Yves Klein and Zobernig's continued trawling of post-Modernism, Geometric Abstraction and Minimalism. The latter are raw and particulate, "prop-like" as curator Martin Clark says. Zobernig's paintings, however, command the room, pulsing w/ not just Klein's "Anthropométries" but even, kind of, Brice Marden's whiplike style, as if Zobernig distilled Klein's "living brushes" down to their simplest serpent-like forms.
* Chuck Webster "My Small Adventures" @ ZieherSmith / 516 W 20th St. This Brooklyn-based artist's small-size oil on panel abstracts carry an interesting vocabulary of shapes and creatures, floating above or stacked within roughly painted, stark landscapes.
* Maria Lassnig "Films" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. The gallery follows up Lassnig's bodily, figurative paintings from last autumn w/ an exhibition of her raw animation works, an important facet of the Vienna-based artist's oeuvre and a major blindspot for this writer. I like 'em: I stayed for the brief animated vignettes out of "Shapes", amorphous pseudo-figures preempting Amy Sillman's style, dancing and dissolving to a harpsichord soundtrack.
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