WEDNESDAY
* Cao Fei "Play Time" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. Without actually creating a Second Life account of my own, I've still managed to fall deep w/in Cao Fei's virtua-world "RMB City", her richly diverse cross-media series since 2008. Her latest exhibition returns to themes of her pre-RMB works, mixing fantasy, youth and contemporary society. She debuts video work "East Wind", the photo series "PostGarden" and "Shadow Life".
* "Tears" (dir. Chen Wen-tang, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6:15p. OK so I like "binlang xishi" — "betel nut beauties" —, this distinctive Taiwanese phenomenon, PYTs selling cigarettes and betel nuts in neon kiosks on the roadside. That's the center of this crime drama.
* Gruff Rhys @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p/$15. Rhys, the impossibly creative frontman for Welsh psych-rockers Super Furry Animals debuts his 3rd solo LP "Hotel Shampoo" and teams w/ Welsh surf band Y Niwl to play it.
THURSDAY
* Apichatpong Weerasethakul "Primitive" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, BD to Grand St). The acclaimed Palme d'Or-winning Thai director is totally adaptable as a video installation artist — consider his Masters degree from Chicago's Art Institute. Weerasethakul debuts his first NY exhibition, a seven-video installation melding Thai folklore and soap operas, shifting identities and realities, villagers, the working class and the military. This also begins the director-artist's residency at the museum (read on for screenings), plus he's participating in "Blissfully Thai", a contemporary Thai film festival at Asia Society.
+ Gustav Metzger 'Historic Photographs". The first solo U.S. exhibition devoted to the artist-activist's oeuvre, sculptural photographic installations imbued w/ the emotional and intellectual weights of history, from the Warsaw ghetto and Vietnam War, to environmental disasters.
* Razvan Boar @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. The debut U.S. solo show from the Romanian artist, whose dramatic, physical renderings enchanted me in the gallery's previous four-artist group exhibition.
* Rosemarie Fiore "Artificiere" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th st, 2nd Fl. Fiore expands her retinue of fireworks and smoke bomb works on paper (resulting in dazzling abstracts) w/ blown glass sculptural "smoke domes".
* Beverly McIver @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. The gallery debuts a dozen figurative paintings by the North Carolina artist, all expressive autobiographical portraits of the artist, her sister Renee and their interaction — which was heightened after their mother's passing in 2004. McIver hasn't had a solo exhibition in NY since 2006 (at Kent Gallery), though this show is a mix of new and earlier works.
* Ellen Kooi "Out of Sight" @ PPOW / 535 W 22nd St 3rd Fl. Youth interacting in the Dutch landscape isn't a new thing for Kooi, though in her third solo show at the gallery she eschews groups for usually solitary figures, depicted in huge prints out in endless fields or deep woods.
* Nir Hod "Genius" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. Decadent paintings and sculpture of moody young men and women, in the artist's debut solo exhibition at the gallery.
* Hans-Peter Feldmann "In Conversation" w/ Hans Ulrich Obrist @ Guggenheim Museum / 1071 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St), 6:30p/$10. The 2010 Hugo Boss Prize award-winner and super-Conceptualist and the überscribe/critic talk it out. They've been buddies for 20+ years, Feldmann and Obrist — and I'm sort of hoping for a photo w/ both of 'em.
* Rooftop Films: "Sound of Noise" (dirs. Ola Simonsson & Johannes Stfarne Nillsson, 2010) @ Solar One / 2420 FDR Drive at 23rd St (6 to 23rd St), 8p/$10. This was w/o a doubt the wackiest film I saw at 2010 Fantastic Fest, about of group of musically virtuosic "terrorists" vs a tone-deaf detective. It is a million times more enchanting than can be supplied in just text. And to make this screening even awesomer, the percussive actors perform a drum battle w/ the directors post-screening!
* The Short Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, BD to Grand St), 7p. In tandem w/ the internationally lauded Thai director's solo exhibition at the museum, he unveils a program of short films. From early works "Like the Relentless Fury of the Pounding Waves" (1994) to the looping "Emerald" (2007), plus a discussion w/ the director.
* NYC Popfest 2011 @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F/JMZ to Essex), 7p/SOLD OUT oops! Yep, it's a guilty pleasure, but I attend Popfest every year. And the kickoff show at Cake Shop (feat. local lovelies Dream Diary, Georgia's Gold-Bears, Cali's Sea Lions) just got a helluva lot awesomer when Popfest announced last week that the secret headliners are none other than my favorite band The Pains of Being Pure At Heart! Devoted LIST-readers will recall these NYC jangle-pop champs just sold out Webster Hall, so to have 'em playing tiny Cake Shop (my fourth time seeing 'em at this venue) is super special. If you were lucky enough to nab a ticket, join me up front.
* Naked Hearts + She Keeps Bees @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. The one-two punch of local songwriterly rock duos Naked Hearts (Amy & Noah) and She Keeps Bees (Jessica & Andy) makes this a must-see, esp. if you can't make Popfest.
FRIDAY
* "Midnight in Paris" (dir. Woody Allen, 2011) @ Angelika / 18 W Houston St (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette, 6 to Bleecker). Allen's latest love letter to Paris just opened this year's Cannes Film Festival…and here it is! A touching romantic comedy w/ an easy-on-the-eyes ensemble cast (Rachel McAdams, Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard…and yes, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy).
* "I-San Special" (Mingmongkol Sonakul, 2002) screening @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (6 to 68th St), 6:45p. Bit of background on Sonakul: she runs an indie production company in Thailand & produced Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Invisible Waves" and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Mysterious Object at Noon". Her debut film, a dreamlike bus-ride from Bangkok to Isan, was inspired by Weerasethakul.
* Heliotropes + Weird Owl @ Saint Vitus Bar / 1120 Manhattan Ave, Greenpoint (G to Greenpoint), 8p/$8. A bunch of rockers playing a kickass rocker bar in tip-top Greenpoint — sounds like a dream to me! It's the kind of roster that goes well w/ beer-shot combos, like chasing Heliotropes' heavy doom-pop w/ Weird Owl's psychedelia. w/ The Atomic Bitchwax & Mirror Queen
* Real Estate + Julian Lynch @ Bell House / 149 7th St, Gowanus (F/G to Smith/9th St, D/NR to 9th St/4th Ave), 8p/$14. The reason surf-inflected summery bands like Jersey's Real Estate and Mr. Lynch stick around is b/c they exceed those stock sounds for something special — adept songwriting and clever instrumental interplay for Real Estate, intoxicating soundscapes for Lynch. Just in time for summer vacation. w/ Big Troubles
SATURDAY
* "Normal Love" (dir. Jack Smith, 1964-5) screening @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St, 4p. Filmmaker and archivist Jerry Tartaglia presents Smith's only conventional-length film (i.e. running up to 120 min), a psychedelic romp in the Garden of Eden w/ Mario Montez, Diane di Prima, Tiny Tim, Francis Francine, Beverly Grant and many other underground stars.
* Charlene Kaye & the Brilliant Eyes @ Village Lantern / 167 Bleecker St (6 to Bleecker, ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 9p/$10. The ineffable local chanteuse Charlene Kaye's tour kickoff party, w/ Theo Katzman & Love Massive.
* NYC Popfest 2011 @ Spike Hill / 184 Bedford Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 1:30p/FREE. Can't mess w/ free jangle-pop shows at this rocker bar, esp. when they're in the daytime. Feat. locals The Specific Heats, Tiny Fireflies (IL), Smilelove (Japan!) annnnnd more.
* NYC Popfest 2011 @ Santos Party House / 96 Lafayette St (NRQ/JZ/46 to Canal St), 6p/$12. This dance-inducing roster incl. Sweden's Days and the debut of NY duo Chalk & Numbers (aka Sable from Year of the Tiger & Andrew of Nouvellas). Plus show some love for Cuffs (NY), fronted by Andrew Churchman of much-missed Pants Yell! w/ Summer Fiction (PA) and The Sunny Street (UK)
* The Hairs + Sea Lions @ Death by Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Lots of necessary bleedover from NYC Popfest shows this week, and this one incl. ferocious Sea Lions (CA, also playing the sold-out Cake Shop show THU) and locals The Hairs (playing tomorrow at The Rock Shop). w/ Kids on a Crime Spree (SF, also playing tomorrow)
SUNDAY
* Alejandro Jodorowksy "The Holy Mountain" @ PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Court, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Square). Will thrice-daily screenings of the cult Chilean director's trippiest work, plus a related installation of film ephemera, tip this one over the top as the "most like an acid trip" experience for all you jejune straight-edgers? I am thinking: yes.
+ Nancy Grossman "Heads". Grossman created her iconic leather-wrapped busts during the liberation movements of the '60s and in response to the Vietnam War, but their silenced and restrained figures resonate uncannily today.
* "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) screening @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (6 to 68th St), 5p. It has been a long time coming for this surreal and touching bijoux from the Thai indie director, from the buzz to its Palme d'Or win at last year's Cannes to its inclusion in the NY Film Festival. A man at the end of his life contemplates reincarnation, as his family and friends sit bedside with him out in the countryside. Plus Q&A w/ Weerasethakul following the screening!
* The Short Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, BD to Grand St), 3p. The second of two short-film screenings by the director, who's currently enjoying his debut NY solo exhibition at the museum. This program includes the mini-opus "Worldly Desires" (2004), made for the Jeonju International Film Festival and drawn from his memories of shooting the feature "Tropical Malady" in the jungle.
* NYC Popfest 2011 @ The Rock Shop / 249 Fourth Ave, Park Slope (D/R to Union St), 4p/$15. An afternoon-evening-night to close out this year's Popfest, and fingers crossed for awesome weather b/c The Rock Shop has a sweet roof deck. Lots to love here, from Chicago's noisy dream-pop trio Panda Riot to Australia's Motifs and San Fran electro-pop duo Silver Swans.
TUESDAY
* David Goodman "New Painting" @ 162 W 21st St #3N, 7-9p. Goodman is an alchemist of paper: cutting, collaging, marking and taping disparate elements with the intensity of a couture dress, resulting in energetic, archeological landscapes that respire with his movements in life. Writer/curator Saul Ostrow presents a suite of new large-scale works by the local artist.
* Gordon Beeferman "Music for an Imaginary Band" @ Konceptions at Korzo / 667 5th Ave, Park Slope (D/NR to Prospect Ave), 9p/. Don't worry: the tongue-in-cheek title denotes a real, live seven-piece group performing the local composer's refreshingly freeform works, dubbed "…what '60s firebrands such as Albert Ayler would've sounded like set against lush, post-Ellingtonian backdrops" (Time Out NY). Plus, Beeferman's part of that ensemble, adept at the piano as he is. Feat: Rich Johnson (trumpet), Joachim Badenhorst, Catherine Sikora and Ken Thompson (reeds), James Ilgenfritz (bass) and the ineffable Ches Smith (drums).
CURRENT SHOWS
* Debo Eilers "In Your House. X" @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. Eilers opens up his performative practices in this nakedly vulnerable, cross-media exhibition. The ooey-gooey constructs on the main floor, covered in screengrabs and Elmo T-shirts, are just a hint of the main show downstairs. Here, via two carnivalesque videos titled "In Your House. X", Eilers documents his fiercely personal performances, both feat. participants from his "4 Hour Fundamental" during last year's "Greater New York" at PS1: the ritualistic one w/ Seung-eun Lee where Eilers munches cookies and the freeform freakout w/ Aiko Shimada, including sprayed beer, body-paint and costumes purchased at a grocery store en route to Eilers' studio. Oh he ruffles feathers, and this brutally spastic offering might not be your cup of tea, but that's a great thing about art: what we take from it is subjective. I like melted neon colors, not being able to discern what the hell he used to make these laborious mixed-media works (lacquer for one). I really liked his performance w/ Shimada — it has an unfettered messiness, a believable joy to it.
* Soutine/Bacon @ Helly Nahmad Gallery / 975 Madison Ave. This is a fabulous comparative survey on Belarus painter Chaim Soutine and the younger Francis Bacon, and the first of its kind to explicitly pair and compare the two. Bacon was heavily influenced by Soutine's beef carcass paintings whilst living in Paris — and you probably know Bacon better for his screaming Popes and other figures depicted between great sides of cow. But co-curators Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow plunge further, following the two artist's respective gestural brushwork, of their visceral depictions of flesh, their haunting imagery. Think Bacon is the nightmare-inducer? Check Soutine's "Still Life With Ray Fish" (1924) and "The Butcher's Stall" (1919) — paintings with "a direct assault on the nervous system", as Bacon would say.
* Michael Williams "Straightforward as a Noodle" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. I found Williams' latest exhibition of large-scale paintings a two-for-one, in that he blanketed the canvases in gauzy airbrushed scenes, then (using restrained, winding application) added painted meanderings on top.
* Andy Warhol "Colored Campbell's Soup Cans" @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. It is just what it sounds like, 12 of Warhol's original 20 large-format silkscreened tomato soup paintings from 1965. Most on view here are loaned from private sources (which makes me wonder, who got the teal and pink combo, vs. who got the sea-foam and yellow combo?), but also Milwaukee and Houston's Menil Collection include a few of their own.
* Hilary Harkness @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. I'd followed Harkness' exhibition-related blog in anticipation of her latest solo show at the gallery, but that proved to only be a glimpse of what she'd planned. These new, meticulously "Old Master" style paintings, are awesome — and much smaller than I expected! The largest, "Red Sky in the Morning", is at least three times as big as the others and depicts a cross-sectioned WWII Japanese battleship Yamato, filled w/ cavorting geisha and women samurai. The smaller paintings come from around that same period but focus entirely on the relationship b/w Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, including their stunning art collection, like "Girl with a Basket of Flowers", tinged w/ brutal surrealism.
* Willem de Kooning "The Figure: Movement and Gesture" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. A wonderful satiation before the Abstract Expressonist's overdue retrospective at the MoMA — or a big teaser, if you're that hungry for him. The Pace does a museum-worthy mini survey of their own, focusing on de Kooning's knack for combining figure and landscape in flowing, sinewy strokes. This is especially evident in his multiple "Montauk" paintings from the '70s, though his woman in graphite and paint is omnipresent.
* "Heading for a fall: the art of entropy" @ fordPROJECT / 57 W 57th St. Four young NY-based artists interpret the natural movement of order to disorder. I know Naama Tsabar best for her sound-based installations, but she eschews that entirely for "Sweat 2", a grouping of liquor bottles soaking through sheets that also appeared in the gallery's inaugural exhibition. Her intent was a work that would collapse on itself and, considering the stains and funky odor, it's well on its way. Fragility figures into the other three artists' works, w/ Alexander May's black silk triangles wall installation barely held together by glue and Lucy Indiana Dodd's bent canvases encrusted w/ sand and natural pigments. Lisha Bai combines fragile stasis w/ poetry entropy in her blackened sand columns and these almost tie-dyed sand sculptures w/in Plexiglas boxes, their rainbow appearances slowly morphing by gravity.
* William Kentridge @ Marian Goodman Gallery / 24 W 57th St. When the world last saw Soho Eckstein, the pinstriped industrialist in South African artist Kentridge's charcoal animations and related work drawings, he was hanging out on a Cape Town beach. This was "Tide Table" from 2003, though for me it was at MoMA last summer, and I was looking forward to some beach-time myself. Kentridge returns his troubled protagonist to a Johannesburg of street protests and civil violence, w/ shouting crowds struck through w/ red and blue accents. This exhibition also includes a bunch of works related to his collaboration in Shostakovich's "The Nose", which was performed at the Met Opera last spring.
* Louise Bourgeois "The Fabric Works" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. The inimitable and infinitely influential modern artist created fabric "drawings" from scraps of old garments concurrent w/ her late-period (and better known) knitted sculptures. One such assemblage is displayed here, though the majority are intimately scaled collages, like the 2007 suite "The Waiting Hours" (the gleam of a lighthouse on rocky waves), 2006's "Dawn" (I see it as rays of sunlight) and the five-panel "Cinque" from 2005, reddish thistles on indigo backdrops. Of note, many of the more abstract renderings, like a multi-panel non-series grouped salon style, rather resemble spiderwebs.
* Mary Henderson "Bathers" @ Lyons Wier Gallery / 542 W 24th St. Bracingly hyperrealistic paintings that have me yearning for summertime and the beach. Interesting thing: Henderson based these oil paintings and gouaches (which, incidentally, barely lose any of their detail) on composite images from file-sharing sites, so their existence in reality is questionable. That said, she manages an overall vibe that — unless you grew up in some landlocked area and never visited a beach — is quite relatable.
* David Shapiro "Money is No Object" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. This is the result of Shapiro's year spent redrawing and repainting all of his bills and receipts. The funny thing is: though his credit card bills and parking tickets, his film stubs and checks are of the most mundane, I caught myself studying them closely, comparing to my own life. Like: wow, his checking account balance is, uh, MUCH higher than mine, or he REALLY shops at Trader Joe's?, or that's a lot of parking tickets…. Plus the painstaking lettering and attention to detail demands some attention, too.
* "Constructivists: George Rickey and Kenneth Snelson" @ Marlborough NY / 40 W 57th St. Great interplay b/w these two influential 20th C. American sculptors. See, Rickey's oeuvre was characterized by stainless steel needles and boxes & whatnot, but it all moved, gently yet kinetically by either fans or ambient air. Snelson's was aluminum rods and stainless steel wire, stretched taut yet gracefully like supersized DNA. Despite both artists meeting later in life, once their careers had already formulated, the complementary tones b/w both is uncanny.
* Marc Breslin "Casual curses are the most effective" @ Scaramouche / 52 Orchard St. Breslin's ultra-subtle exhibition of odd-media paintings and abstract video projections is so far in the margins that it's decidedly not for most. But if you like a contemplative and beguiling show like I do, you should give this one a chance. The young NYer streaks canvas w/ concrete paint and charcoal, slanting one massive canvas against a doorway like a featherweight Richard Serra prop-piece. One digital video "Untitled (Lighting 1)" looks like an illuminated cone across a gallery wall, playing off the torn glassine on linen monochrome facing it.
* Eli Ping @ Susan Inglett Gallery / 522 W 24th St. An astute blurring of sculpture and painting, in Ping's color-soaked and twisted, shredded and slumped canvases.
* Richard Long "Flow and Ebb" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. I gotta admit, seeing a 29-foot tall mud circle on the gallery's spotless blue-chip wall made me grin. Long executed this supernova-like work days before the opening and, due to the steepness of the gallery's architecture, it feels awesomely big. The remainder of Long's from-nature works, mostly mud-on-slate "drawings" but also a craggy scattering of Cornish slate on the gallery's terrace and some odd text-only works, don't match up to the wall art's intensity; rather, their intimate scales provide a rather peaceful encounter.
* Josh Faught and William J. O'Brien @ Lisa Cooley Fine Art / 34 Orchard St. There's a lot of personal history embedded in these two artists' respective works, which play off as a continuous dialogue between them. I'd seen O'Brien's shattered ceramics at Marianne Boesky Gallery, and he punctuates several relief versions of those w/ enveloping mixed media paintings, like Anselm Reyle but rustic (maybe Bruce Conner's a closer match). Faught's woven patchworks read like laundry lists of what's on his mind: knitting gifts, jewelry and a "guide to dungeon emergencies" into "Blessings and Miracles" or pride pins and scrapbooking letters (you know the kind, that faux cursive stuff) into "Rules to Party Play #6". Neither artist screams for our attention, believe it or not — they calmly assert themselves and thereby draw us further inward.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Strange Films I've Seen: PLOY
Pen-ek uses this beautiful melodic drone as a backdrop to the film's subtle soundtrack. It played a similar presence in scenes from Last Life… but it's nearly constant, an easy tone that drifts in and out of the film like the characters' consciousnesses. He exercises restraint in the filming, too, which is as beautiful as Doyle's cinematography but w/o that glossy sheen. The camera holds back so characters, husband and wife, husband and girl, girlfriend and boyfriend, can just go at it — or better yet, say nothing at all. Their looks, body language and movements in space tell much more than words, adding this palpable tension to Wit and Ploy in bed together, or the almost repeated beginning and end shots of Wit and Dang in a taxi ride, she resting her head on his shoulder.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
fee's LIST (through 5/17)
WEDNESDAY
* Wonderpuss Octopus "Reliquary" @ 200 Ave A (L to 1st Ave), 8-10p. AD Projects have transformed the former Superdive hellhole into a temporary exhibition space of awesomeness, under the series "Reliquary/SUPERDARK". Wonderpuss Octopus (aka PJ Linden) kicks off the fun w/ Alief trainers and Canon 7Ds covered in rainbows of 3D paint that would make Takashi Murakami blush, pus other contemporary "sacred" ephemera. SUPERDARK consists of Friday night performances (coming soon!). This is a quickie, as Octopus' objet only last through SAT.
* Prince Rama + PIKACHU-MAKOTO (Afrirampo/Acid Mothers Temple) @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. Can you hang?? May I introduce PIKACHU-MAKOTO, aka Pikachu the drummer/vocalist from seminal Osaka punk sisters duo Afrirampo. I want to meet her BAD — plus Makoto Kawabata, the axe-slinger and founder of Osaka psychedelic soul collective Acid Mothers Temple. Put these two super-creatives together and you'll literally lose your mind and be happy for that. Which is fine to have your mind all fried when Prince Rama takes the stage. w/ Mugu Guymen
THURSDAY
* Louise Bourgeois "The Fabric Works" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Awesome fabric "drawings" and assemblages from the last decade of this ineffable artist's life, running parallel to her well-known knitted sculptures.
* Mary Henderson "Bathers" @ Lyons Wier Gallery / 542 W 24th St. Hyperreal oil paintings and some gouaches of youth on summer vacation, referenced initially from composite images on photo-sharing websites.
* Simon Evans "Shitty Heaven" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Evans amps up the text-based drawings and floor-maps, unveiling his personal next world as a planned suburban community, which sounds like hell to me. Plus his exploration of the nine circles of Hell in "Lite Evil" and moleskin pages covered in plans.
* "In Our Time" (dirs. Tao Dechen, Edward Yang, Ko Yi-cheng, Chan Yi, 1982) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6:15p. Taiwanese New Wave cinema basically originated from this four-director opus (incl Edward Yang, of "Yi Yi", in his directorial debut here), w/ each working off different generations and backgrounds to depict a realist Taiwan.
* PIKACHU-MAKOTO (Afrirampo/Acid Mothers Temple) @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Oh I FULLY abide by this show. If you missed PIKACHU-MAKOTO at Monster Island or had some conflict in your schedule or whatever, you must make DbA. You've heard of contact highs? This promises to be a sonic contact high of the headiest, "kine bud" sort. w/ PC Worship, Mugu Guymen and more
FRIDAY
* Alice Aycock + E.V. Day @ Salomon Contemporary / 526 W 26th ST #519. Wow. Aycock's oeuvre of kinetic, labyrinthine sculpture and installations make her a living legend in my book. She introduces a new wall relief "Twist of Fate" and drawings from her series "Sum Over Particle Histories". Day I know for her installations of hanging, modified garments (think "Exploding Couture", from 2000 Whitney Biennial). Her "Butterfly" comes from her broader "Divas Ascending" series and recalls the wedding kimono worn by Cio-Cio San in the NY Opera's production of "Madame Butterfly".
* John O'Connor "What is Toronto???" @ Pierogi Gallery / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg. What is Toronto, indeed! Is it ultra-detailed graphite and colored-pencil freakouts, like Mandala portals to some alternate universe?
* Matthew Porter "The Undefeated" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Porter investigates Jane Fonda's and John Wayne's legacies as simultaneous political actors and Hollywood icons.
* "Ploy" (dir. Pen-ek Ratanaruang, 2007) screening @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (6 to 68th St), 6:45p. Anybody remember that awesome Thai Takes film festival, which hasn't been here since 2007? Asia Society incredibly stages a mini survey of their own from now into June, bookended by the international masters of contemporary Thai cinema, Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The fest begins w/ Ratanaruang's surrealist super-sexy drama "Ploy", an absolute must-see coming from this writer. Followed by a Q&A w/ the director!
* "Hesher" (dir. Spencer Susser, 2010) @ Angelika / 18 W Houston St (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette). A grieving suburban family in somewheresville early '90s collides with a metalhead guardian angel/devil — the bare-chested, long-haired burnout effortlessly played by Joseph Gordon Levitt — who compels them, esp. the pre-teen protagonist, via death-threats, light beatings and advice on girls (i.e. Natalie Portman) to confront their emotions.
* "A Serbian Film" (dir. Srdjan Spasojevic, 2011) @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (NR/L/456 to Union Square). Tread lightly, dear readers, if you intend to watch this most disturbing of disturbing films. Think you know torture porn, like literally? I am amazed, frankly, that a stateside cinema would give this devastatingly brutal film a proper screening, even at NC-17 (the original cut is a well-deserved unrated and nearly 10 minutes longer). Plus it's screening ONCE per night. Mind you, I've not seen it yet — missed it at SXSW and it's subsequently been very hard to find — but I aim to see it now, even in edited form. However: caution!!!
* "Hausu" (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). No teen girl ghost story will ever match the Technicolor mayhem of HOUSE. If the high-school-aged beauties trekking off a painted landscape to old auntie's house don't send you for a loop, the creative savageries (and eye-wateringly intense in-camera effects) that await them totally will. This film is LIST-approved for dopeness. ALSO SAT
* "Foxy Brown" (dir. Jack Hill, 1974) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). A legend of blaxploitation and the watermark for gorgeous ass-kicking women, thanks to the ineffable Pam Grier. Can you handle it?? ALSO SAT
* Darlings + My Teenage Stride + Dream Diary @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/$7. Another dope indie primer w/ some particularly strong local acts. Feat. fuzz-popstars Dream Diary, indie stalwarts My Teenage Stride and my faces Darlings, who really are darling and rock really hard, too. w/ ROAR (AZ)
* Dirty Beaches + Pterodactyl @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. So Dirty Beaches play an "early show" Thursday at Mercury Lounge (before John Vanderslice, srsly), so take it from me, you want to see this crazy cat Alex Zhang Hungtai, w/ his room-shaking baritone and his minimalist, yesteryear looped soundscapes, channelling both "Fallen Angels"-era Wong Kar-Wai and Graceland? Come to this Popgun show instead, it's way fiercer.
SATURDAY
* Rebecca Chamberlain "…Wouldn't it be sublime…" @ DODGE Gallery / 15 Rivington St. Chamberlain wowed me and a bunch of people at VOLTA NY 2010, w/ her gorgeous pen and ink compositions of 20th C. interiors. She works w/in modernism but w/ an edgier dynamic this time, creating diptychs and triptychs of stairwells, mirrors and railings, contrasted w/ decorative closeups.
* Timothy Tompkins @ DCKT Contemporary / 237 Eldridge St. Recent paintings from Tompkins' "Reenactment" and "Explosion" series, working off digitally altered photographs and then painting them with commercial enamel on aluminum.
* "There/Not There" @ Number 35 / 141 Attorney St. A group show on illusion, memory and permanence — which despite the vague parameters can lead to some sublime results. Feat. Daniele Genadry, Adam Hayes, Alexa Kreissl, Christian Nguyen, Carlos Sandoval De Leon and Voshardt/Humphrey.
* Jack Smith "Thanks for Explaining Me" film screenings @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St, 4p. Penny Arcade, the teenaged Superstar who co-formed The Plaster Foundation to archive Jack Smith's work after his passing, presents this round of Smith films. Feat. vignette "Hot Air Specialists" (1980s) and longer works "Jungle Island" (1967), "Yellow Sequence" (1963-5) and "I Was a Male Yvonne DeCarlo" (1967-70).
* "Blissfully Thai: A conversation w/ Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pen-ek Ratanaruang" @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (6 to 68th St), 2p. The two forerunners in Thai cinema's contemporary renaissance, the Cannes champion Weerasethakul and the untouchable Ratanaruang (his "Last Life in the Universe" remains one of my favorite films, ever), in conversation w/ the series' curator, La Frances Hui of Asia Society.
* "Montag" (dir. Doze Niu, 2010) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 8:15p. A glossy and messy Triad film and among the newest in this festival, though it's set believably in '80s Taipei. Also: when it opened in Taiwan last year, its weekend gross was higher than that of the "Avatar".
* Oberhofer + Widowspeak @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave, Greenpoint (G to Greenpoint), 8p/$8. Captured Tracks lovelies Widowspeak are playing a bunch of shows over a few days. I suggest this one, pairing 'em before the stripped down post-punk of ultra-charismatic Oberhofer. Winning!
TUESDAY
* "Rebels of the Neon God" (dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 1992) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6:15p. I really dig this early film from Taiwanese New Wave's urban poet. Tsai so boldly conveys the alienation of teenagers within Taipei's neon-drenched nightlife, propelled by the thudding Detroit techno-ish soundtrack.
* Vivian Girls @ 285 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 9p/$10. Big thing as local garage-rock trio Vivian Girls are, it's extra dope they play a DIY venue on their home turf. Even cooler: Captured Tracks' Widowspeak share the bill. w/ Colleen Green (check "I Wanna Be Degraded")
CURRENT SHOWS
* Francis Alÿs "A Story of Deception" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St) + MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to Court Sq/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq). The Belgian-born Conceptualist, who's been based in Mexico City for decades now, is currently enjoying a two-armed mid-career retrospective at both museums across the Queensboro Bridge. In my memory this hasn't happened since Olafur Eliasson, and while I loved Eliasson's dual-borough exhibition I believe it works even better with Alÿs. Or at least Alÿs' "Modern Procession" (2002), a Public Art Fund-sponsored production that documents MoMA's temporary relocation to the Long Island City former schoolhouse during its 2002-4 expansion, is the centerpiece of PS1's excerpt, so there's something relevant and self-referencing in that. I encourage you to do sorta like that parade and take the E from the MoMA to PS1, catching both shows in an afternoon.
MoMA's portion is a big time-waster, at least on a first visit, because Alÿs' style is time-based videos (both in their respective durations and how long it took for him to complete them, usually a span of two years or more), which distract you to the point of transfixing, and scattered ephemera tangentially related to said videos and always riddled with text and explanations. You may well find yourself reading these, dwelling on them — you may well tire quickly and speed through later examples. Sound is an issue here, bleeding through the space from one video installation to another, and I doubt this is purposeful, though it lends a slight disorientation to the exhibition. His big video "When Faith Moves Mountains (Cuando la fe mauve montages)" (2002) contains two projections of that, plus a third video including interviews with some of the 500 volunteers (one pricelessly opines "I don't believe in art just for the sake of art"), the young people marching up a Lima, Peru dune in formation, shoveling away to move the mountain 10 cm. Thus goes Alÿs' saying "Máximo esfuerzo Minimo resultado", or "maximum effort, minimum results" — and don't take it from me, that emblem recurs in this narrow corridor lined with work-tables, transparencies (person walking with buildings strapped to their shoulders), paintings (a car fire), prints, newspaper articles (a lynching in Guatemala), and lots of text. All the while, tolling bells from a video in the opening of the exhibition permeate through, adding an unsettling immediacy to the people shoveling away. Alÿs' little paintings remind me more of another Belgian Surrealist, Rene Magritte, and we get a whole room of 'em in "Le Temps du sommeil" (an ongoing series since 1996), some 111 tile-sized paintings on wood, each a precious moment of weirdness, like windows into some foresty dreamscape. But since the audio element from the opening gallery doesn't carry all the way back here, MoMA installed "Song for Lupita (Mañana)" (1998), a looping filmstrip animation of a woman pouring water from one glass to another, an accompanying turntable's soundtrack melodiously humming "mañana, mañana" — doing without doing, as Alÿs might put it. This odd little piece sums up my Alÿs experience: his aversion to completing stuff, his penchant for drawing things out for years, revising and reconsidering in ever-mutating layers of change. Might as well check out "Tornado" (2000-10) and watch the artist fling himself into a tornado — it's very, VERY loud, and quite frightening, as the dirt around him almost liquifies, whirling around the terrific winds. It's good for a few minutes' viewing. The adjacent video "Politics of Rehearsal" (2005-7) comes with headphones, and it's up to you if you're like me and blow 30 minutes on this grand tease of a striptease. Alÿs filmed it in the LES's Slipper Room, following the perpetual restarts between a pianist (Alexander Rovag), a soprano (Viktoria Kurbatskaya) and a young stripper (Bella Yao) for the night's performance. A voiceover compares the stripper's slo-mo disrobing as a metaphor for Latin America and modernity, always approaching that goal but never quite there. She removes her underwear at least twice. "Rehearsal I" (1999-2001) is funnier and quicker, using the recording of a brass band's practice session to dictate the movements of a car up a sandy hill on the US/Mexico border (they play, the car starts; they screw up, the car stops; they start chattering, the car goes in reverse), plus loads more of requisite transparencies and little paintings.
I found that PS1's open-ended layout, with "The Modern Procession" unofficial centerpiece, worked far better in my Alÿs-going experience. That two-channel video itself, at just 12 minutes long, is a quickie in Alÿs terms, plus its clear start and conclusion and overall narrative — the parade carrying MoMA collection replicas (Picassos "Demoiselles D'Avignon, Giacometti's "Standing Woman", Duchamp's "Readymade") and the real Kiki Smith from 53rd St to Long Island City — make it far more accessible than Alÿs' broader oeuvre. Let the Peruvian fanfare guide you to it — it's one place where I particularly liked the sound carry-over. No videos here rival "The Modern Procession", though "Guards" (2004-5) provides a few unnerving minutes, if you're keen on that. Royal guards clomp about deserted London streets, like straight out of "28 Weeks Later" but much cleaner, their clipped movements linking in succession as they meet their peers. More paintings scattered about, like "Le juice errant" (2011), a fully-conceived version of the character bowing to the weight of buildings strapped to their back (seen in drawings at MoMA) and "Untitled (from Deja Vu)" 2011, a "diptych" on separate walls, a woman carrying a scythe vs a man carrying a hammer. The former appeared on the NYTimes Weekend Arts section, blown up to larger-than-lifesize scale (Alÿs' paintings, this one included, are all like 8x10" or smaller). One brilliantly confusing duplication too, of "Untitled (La Malinche)" (2010), two carved wood figures breaking out of a plastic bag. This work appears twice in the show, in opposite galleries, and its twin is a cheekily disorienting sendoff to the Conceptualist's retrospective.
* Donald Judd @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525-533 W 19th St. Define epic awesomeness with minimalist restraint. If you're thinking Donald Judd's visionary '89 installation at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany…well, you're a clairvoyant b/c that's exactly what I was thinking! But on the real: Zwirner Gallery restages Judd's classic array, the first time this has been executed since its initial realization. And it's a beaut, nine massive floor-mounted anodized aluminum open boxes, i.e. consummate Judd. Approach these slowly, beginning ideally w/ the lone box in the 25th St space's front gallery. Approach and be awed by the contents, vivid colorized Plexiglas in cobalt blue, amber or black occupy some interiors, adding a burst of informed variation. Others are "simply" silvery aluminum but divided at angles in Judd's brilliant vocabulary of angles and dimensions. The pair of boxes in the 533 space's front gallery play off their respective skylights, practically glowing with the orange-y and blue energies contained within. That this is the gallery's inaugural exhibition of this seminal postwar American artist makes me all kinds of stoked for what's coming next.
* Jasper Johns "New Sculpture and Works on Paper" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. The tireless Jasper Johns unfurls like 20+ years of future experimental opportunities in basically five years of fertile work. His waxy gridded numbers set the standard, and though they're riffs on classics he's been doing for decades, these new reliefs remain endlessly complex. Like he'll add some well-placed thumbprints to one, keys to another, and newsprint all around to form densely intriguing results. One bronzed relief is covered in imprinted pages from a book, while a silvery one is furiously bright. But to really "take it there", Johns made a slew of prints based on experimentation with Shrinky Dinks. Think about that for a minute, he takes that circa early '80s child's toy and, like that unseen oven magic, creates intaglios and ink prints bearing what looks like Picasso's "Guernica" in the spin cycle, silly-faced fish, Greek vases and loads else to Johns' recurring vocabulary of sign language terminology, chevrons and silhouetted figures.
* Georg Baselitz "The Early Sixties" @ Michael Werner Gallery / 4 E 77th St. Before this important postwar German artist was inverting portraits and landscapes, he was mining classical motifs from the past to the tune of Italian mannerism and — as the press release so acutely states — "the art of the insane". This body of work occurred during his move to West Berlin and it'll haunt your dreams. Whether it's the paintings, like the organic, body-horror landscape of "The Painting for the Fathers (Landscape for Father)" (1965) and the flesh-colored (plucked?) birds in "Black Garden" (1964) or the works on paper, like the writhing "Untitled (Whip Woman)" (1964) or the suitably insane "Untitled" watercolor from '63, three measles-inflicted, bent-over figures, you can't escape it. It's as if Baselitz focused all his vigorous disdain for the period's dominant Social Realism styles on these works, and they still pack a wallop today.
* Eric Fischl "Early Paintings" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Fischl's playfully debaucherous angle to suburban Americana breathes life in the traditional imagery — traditional, that is, if you spent your summers nude on a boat or sunning by the pool. The barbecue scene in "Barbecue", w/ the grill-master practically breathing fire, bears some immediacy in its perspective, and "Slumber Party" a lack of pretension b/w the two figures.
* Arshile Gorky "1947" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. I am fairly certain this extremely late-works survey on the "master of the gesture", paintings and works on paper completed shortly before he took his own life, will NOT receive the hubbub like Picasso's dazzling and romantic exhibition downtown. And that's a shame, I'm telling you now: go see this show. Gorky's late works are brilliant but come from a very different, darker place than Picasso's rosy dozen years with Marie-Therese. You've got to spend time unraveling these, that even the sunny canvases "Pastoral" (1947) and "The Betrothal I" (1947) embody his troubled soul. Compare w/ the graphite and pastel study for "Pastoral", which swaps the yellows and bare canvas for a consuming layer of brown, or the works related to "Agony" — what began as plein air botanicals were abraded and sanded into awesome, even sinister, experimentation.
+ Joel Morrison. If you're averse to things shiny, specifically seeing your warped reflection in the surface of polished stainless steel, I say keep well enough away from Joel Morrison. However, if you're cool w/ it — and you should be, if you're reading this LIST — then dive right in. He's a trip, casting a weather balloon bursting from a fallen shopping cart in steel and titling it "Weather Balloon Trapped in a Shopping Cart". Also riffing off Salvador Dali's "Retrospective Bust of a Woman", swapping her hairdo for wiffle balls and hanging a spoon from her nose ("Wiffle Ball"). Or he'll just throw a bunch of disparate objet (in this case another shopping cart, a stability ball-sized foam orb, and a chop saw) and coat them in glossy black fiberglass, so it looks like a David Choe 'Munko' only supersized.
* Damian Loeb "Verschränkung and the Uncertainty Principle" @ Acquavella Gallery / 18 E 79th St. Loeb's cooked up some super-sexy photorealistic oil on linen paintings w/ juuuust the right degree of cinematic drama. It'll turn you voyeuristic and elicit a physical dialogue b/w you the viewer and they the subject…but swap out "subject" for "Loeb's wife Zoya" and think about that again. The works, like "Say Hello to the Angels" (w/ Zoya sprawled on the unmade bed, illuminated by an unseen television screen) or "Ghosts I-IV" (Zoya in the bathtub, head turned away from us), come from his photographs and show her in various stages of undress, at ease w/ her husband's gaze. Of course this is US staring at Zoya now that Damian's turned them into paintings. Though like w/ "Say Hello to the Angels", she locks eyes w/ him and w/ us, in a staredown that she'll win.
* Jack Smith "Thanks for Explaining Me" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Never in my lifetime have I been immersed in a Jack Smith exhibition such as this. PS1 mounted a proper retrospective back in '98, nearly a decade after his passing, but I was a youth then, blissfully unaware of this downtown legend. So for my generation this show is essential — and for those of you lucky to be living in NY in the '60s and '70s, it's also essential b/c it totally encompasses his creative oeuvre. I know him best for his films (they're all here, playing in sequence and in proper restored 16mm screenings on Saturdays), but his sketches, collages and related ephemera fill out the picture of the iconoclastic genius. We may never totally "get" Jack Smith, as there is so much to "get", so much that made him who he is, but Neville Wakefield's curated exhibition is an excellent start. Read on in LISTs like this for the Saturday film screening schedule.
* John Chamberlain "New Sculpture" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Casual art-goers may well be totally thrown off by the dual — duel? — Chamberlain exhibits in W. Chelsea, the sort of career retrospective swan song at Pace and this one, proclaiming "new sculpture" (crushed auto works from 2009 through seemingly weeks before the show opened). That's a lot of Chamberlain! And not counting Gagosian's Britannia space, hosting the second wing of Chamberlain's new works, after the blue-chip gallery added him to their roster of luminary postwar and contemporary big-names. Here's an easy way to tell a new Chamberlain from an old one: the name. Mind you, he's incredibly adept at naming his sculpture, but "Gangster of Love" and "Infected Eucharist" are oldies, like from the '80s oldies. "TASTYLINGUS" and "TAMBOURINEFRAPPE" — those are new! The all-caps and shoved together words are a clue. That's if you're not even looking at the works, which do signal a rift b/w the older Chamberlains and the brand-new monumental sculptures. His array at Gagosian bears an overall aggressive vibe, crushed and contused muscle cars twisted into even meaner shapes. Some are exceedingly shiny too, one consisting totally of chromed bumpers like the ribs of some Decepticon, but there's a good bit of rough-and-tumble, rusted and used steel still figuring into Chamberlain's modus. The ultimate for me goes back to the polished, a brand-new "Cloverfield"-sized monolith called "C'ESTZESTY" that's less like the other Chamberlains in the room, yet still retains the artist's irreverent sense of humor.
* Gillian Wearing "People" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. I spent a good long while transfixed by Wearing's seven-channel "Snapshot", an incredible homage to still photography and portraiture via an "actual" timeline of women, from a girlish cutie playing the violin (in contrasty b&w) to a grand-dame in her easychair, seemingly digitalized. Spend some time w/ this one, listening to an anonymous narrator on the provided headsets (culled from Wearing's many interviews and not specifically related to the seven women onscreen) as she recounts a fascinating monologue that, though personal to her, could apply to any of the seven portraits — or all of them. Besides the kid and the elder woman, there is a pretty teen (seemingly uncomfortable and delighted in her own skin), a beauty recalling Antonioni's screen muses, a '50s-era mother with baby, a perma-smiling mature woman (hot mom?), and an older woman alone in her automobile. The faceless narrator's words strike a different cue as you focus on each framed figure. Without ever having met any of them, I sensed their histories and their inherent awesomeness.
* Keith Haring @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. The gallery explores Haring's early drawings, culled from sketchbooks around his enrollment in SVA in '78, from impulsive penis drawings (preempting "Superbad") to mesmerizing inked geometric abstracts. Page after page of what would become Haring's fluidic vocabulary, graphic and graffiti-like but uniquely his. Plus three mural-sized works on paper from '82, created in conjunction with Bill T. Jones performances at The Kitchen.
* Katy Moran @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. A breathless new body of work from the British artist, small-scale gestural abstract paintings in various treatments and washes on MDF board. Several instances incorporate collage with Moran's intense brushwork and reductive mark-making.
* Garth Weiser @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. I've been a Weiser fan since his 2007 summer trio show here, and each subsequent time he's stunned me w/ his exacting geometries and optical crosshatchings. He furthers that visual vibe with a mix of mediums, sometimes as simple as just oil paint on canvas ("Unimark Unlimited", a moire ripping out of a field of hazy circles), others incorporating copper leaf ("Drawing #26", looks like a rattlesnake's skin up close)and dimensional fabric paint, like "Grinder" and "Jam Network", featuring scrawling non-patterns incised into layers of paint, revealing colorful layers beneath.
* Martin Kippenberger "I Had a Vision" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. I'm coming around to Kippenberger. Skarstedt Gallery's exhibition of his "Eggman" paintings this past spring helped, so now I can wade into the broader and weirder side of this German artist. Namely his mixed-media sculptural work, shown here as partially reconstructions of two large-scale exhibitions from the summer (San Francisco) and fall (an unused tunnel b/w two Vienna subway stations) of '91. There's some swapping around for space constraints, like pairing "Broken Kilometer" (1990), a Plexiglas rainbow on stilts, away from its mate "Carousel with ejection seat" (1991), a sort of circular train-track rainbow, and in the same space as the Vienna work, a cast-resin suited guy on a moped. Which makes me wonder what the original San Fran show was like, a wickedly perverse theme park by the looks of the original installation images.
* David Salle @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Salle follows up last year's exhibition of classic '80s paintings w/ new canvases revisiting his depictions of iconic women. Expect the usual deft pairings, as Salle mirrors a woman's contorted posing in bed with "The Mennonite Button Problem"'s two angled deck chairs. Their push-pull exertions echo or precede this boat imagery, a newer thing for the artist adapted from George Caleb Bingham's 19th C river scenes. Another long canvas bisects the woman's movements below with a network of black kelplike lines and actual lightbulbs, like a field of stars overhead.
* Ashley Bickerton "Nocturnes" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Rhetorical question: can Ashley Bickerton's oeuvre get any more acid flashback-y? Obvious answer: hell yes. Welcome to "Nocturnes", his slice of sexy nightlife from some tropical far-future clubland, decked in carved-wood frames (bearing 'Bickerton', shiny decal-style). I'm talking "Neon Bar" and "Red Scooter Nocturne", where tattooed and face-painted PYTs cavort w/ blue-skinned fatmen, the city a neon smear behind them. Or "FITNW3", a portrait composed of many, many 3D prints, bursting from an spiky coral base like fungi. Makes his usual ultra-colorful mixed media paintings look positively calm.
* "Idée Fixe" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. A group show of black and white drawings created from intense, time-consuming gestures, ranging from Man Bartlett's fields of wee circles, repeated freehandedly infinitum, to Astrid Bowlby's seductive dark gardens. Bowlby's duo were my favorites, but Joan Linder and Daniel Zeller eschewed the allover approach for incredibly detailed central objects, a weed for Linder and an organic spiny cross-section for Zeller.
* Ivan Witenstein @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Continuing his political and cultural imagery with Witenstein's takes on "jazz diplomacy" circa WWII, imbued w/ confrontational pop imagery. He's crowded the gallery w/ clashing figures, neo-expressionist paintings hung salon-style and carved oak and poplar sculptures bearing two figures each, in symbiotic embraces.
* Li Songsong @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. This is the debut U.S. solo exhibition of the Beijing-based artist, whose style is heavily impastoed and abstracted large-scale paintings recalling photographs and film stills. Though I dare you to make out even half the subject matter, buried as they are under like cake-frosting layers of somber paint. That said, Li works deftly b/w figurative compositions (like "Couple", half-hidden in a blocky test-pattern of black and gray rectangles) and graphic renderings, like "Escape", obviously taken from an airplane disaster training booklet.
* Sean Landers "Around the World Alone" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. I hope you like clowns! Because you're getting clowns, an entire room full of 'em in apparently the prolific artist's 50th solo exhibition. Landers evokes his signature buffoon on a lifelong journey at sea, clown on a rowboat, clown steering a ship on troubled waters, over and over and over again.
* Richard Tuttle "What's the Wind" @ The Pace Gallery / 510 W 25th St. In my understanding of Richard Tuttle's oeuvre, this lot of "space frame" free-standing sculptures feels very un-Tuttle to me, though it apparently synthesizes decades of his work. Take "System 4, Hummingbird", for me the most Tuttle-esque due to the stretched fabric hanging in the middle of the work like a kidney-shaped kite amid a laundry list of media (painted Styrofoam, aluminum wire, birch plywood, monofilament). Or "System 3, Measurement" in the back gallery, some grouping of misshapen balloons covered in rice paper and suspended over a loose grid of white-coated steel. Their overall vivid fragility is VERY Tuttle, however.
* Laurel Nakadate @ Leslie Tonkonow Art Projects / 535 W 22nd St. Maybe you've been to PS1 to see Laurel Nakadate's exhaustive 10-year survey? You should! Her 2010 series "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears" is an unescapable presence: some hundred same-size 40x50" prints cover the 2nd Fl walls, effectively placing us w/in her captured sadness. She photographed herself crying each and everyday of 2010, in the morning, at night, nude, fully clothed, all over the world. It's but one facet of her PS1 exhibition but it's almost the entire subject of her latest solo exhibition at Tonkonow Projects. The images are smaller here, each 8x10", but it's the full 365, a concentrated blast of forced and actualized emotion running in a grid across two walls. While you could say some of their intensity is lost in the smaller scales, the sheer number of individual, unique prints and the understanding that Nakadate did this daily throughout 2010 is quite overwhelming in its own. She accompanies these with a new video work, "Lost Party Guest", of her blindfolded and groping about empty reception rooms in the Park Avenue Armory. It's a disconcerting vignette but, with "365 Days" behind her, perhaps it signals a reprieve from the sadness.
* Aaron Young "Built Tough" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Young christens the show w/ more Americana, approaching the U.S. flag as Minimalist faded silkscreens on thick belts of linen. They hang regally, some as folded triangles, others as those triangles w/ a bare expanse of raw linen occupying the rest of the rectangle. The adjacent smaller gallery is crowded with seemingly ash-colored child sculptures (coated in winterstone, a mixture of concrete and something), each bearing some war-mongering poster. Dystopian?
* Robert Greene @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. New textural abstract paintings and works on paper, composed on acid-free vellum and mounted on thin aluminum panels. Some like "Luc" and "Jed" are feverishly reductive monochromes, composed entirely of repeated scratchings (the fully colorized "Doug" will force your eyes crossed if you stare at it). Others blow the grid up to inch-sized increments, incorporating dashes of color here and there like he took his old Arcadian landscapes, cut them up, and remixed them to total abstraction.
* Jaume Plensa @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. I realized that in encountering Plensa's four-story-tall "Echo" sculpture in Madison Square Park that I FAR enjoy his timelessly futuristic figures outdoors. Something about them, their anonymity, their impossibility suits them to be among trees and a very natural landscape. So for those expecting that gut-punch in his latest gallery show, you're headed for a letdown. What he's created is a series of mixed-media portraits (I have no idea the media, they appear to be almost photographic from a distance but slippery and multilayered up close) that he debuted last year at the Musée Picasso in Antibes, France. They are admittedly part of his broader body of work (including drawings and etchings) that I'm way less familiar with, so taken together w/ the park's "Echo", I dig it.
* Leon Kossoff @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. This is a very calming and contemplative show considering its neighbors. The British artist reveals new landscape paintings from the last decade, executed in a mottled, textured style and focusing on this old cherry tree in his garden. He offsets every two paintings or so by a smaller-sized portrait on board.
LAST CHANCE
* 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.
* Yuki Onodera @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. Onodera introduces her debut solo stateside show w/ two classic ongoing series. Her "Transvest" began in 2002, featuring silhouetted (yet recognizable) figures, created via a multistep process of finding iconic images, photographing them against strong back-lighting, then collaging their nondescript interior w/ fragmented media and printing it. The thing to keep in mind with "The Eleventh Finger" (from 2006 onward) is Onodera's spontaneity, shooting street-style w/o using the viewfinder, then manipulating the images with lace overlays in the printing process.
* Ruud van Empel "Wonder" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. Mural-sized super-sharp and color-saturated groupings of a veritable UN of cute kids that'll bring tears to your eyes. It's like I KNOW they're photographs, ostensibly, but they're surreally exacted, like they're going to jump off their Plexiglas backings. Van Empel's included some more utopian world imagery, too, with one or several kids set within an almost primordial jungle, thick with shadows, sunlight and an almost palpable humidity.
* Razvan Boar, Christian Schoeler, Alexander Tinei, George Young @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Four youngish male European artists disinterested w/ conveying traditional masculine art. That get you going? That's not to say Londoner George Young and Bucharest's Razvan Boar don't create incredibly sexy paintings — incl. Young's entirely on paper tacked to the wall. Or Tinei's acuity with cropping for maximum impact, like his nearly abstract "Blue Feet". I was introduced to Schoeler's sun-drenched work at VOLTA NY 2011, and his soft-focus, tousle-haired young men resemble mirrors back to the artist himself.
* Nyoman Masriadi @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. Hulking, hyperreal superhero types in the Indonesian painter's debut stateside, each rendered with differing degrees of homoeroticism, depending on your take on those skintight jumpsuits.
* Sarah Frost "Arsenal" @ PPOW / 535 W 22nd St, 3rd Fl. "I fly like paper/get high like planes" — no, but really, this is awesome. Frost took impetus from a series of instructional YouTube videos on paper gun-making, created by a group of boys, and crafted an installation of painstakingly detailed (and entirely paper-made) weaponry, from Western pistols to sci-fi assault rifles. The end result, a dizzying array of fragile faux weaponry, shown only at last year's Great Rivers Biennial in St. Louis, is both a celebration of craftsmanship and ingenuity and a meditation on violence, politics and everything these guns signify.
* Idris Khan @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Idris Khan "The Devil's Wall". Khan represents the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and stone-throwing at the Jamarat walls in two cerebral flavors. He's removed the three-wall essence for one, leaving three glistening aluminum bowls in their wake, etched with words that disappear as they're sucked into the bowls' respective voidlike interiors. Even more effective, Khan represents the inward contemplation of the pilgrims in his drawings "21 Stones", each a rhythmic stamping of his own thoughts and wishes on paper, blurring phrases like "God is great" and "I wish I knew my mother" into metaphysical echoes of sculptural bowls.
* Wonderpuss Octopus "Reliquary" @ 200 Ave A (L to 1st Ave), 8-10p. AD Projects have transformed the former Superdive hellhole into a temporary exhibition space of awesomeness, under the series "Reliquary/SUPERDARK". Wonderpuss Octopus (aka PJ Linden) kicks off the fun w/ Alief trainers and Canon 7Ds covered in rainbows of 3D paint that would make Takashi Murakami blush, pus other contemporary "sacred" ephemera. SUPERDARK consists of Friday night performances (coming soon!). This is a quickie, as Octopus' objet only last through SAT.
* Prince Rama + PIKACHU-MAKOTO (Afrirampo/Acid Mothers Temple) @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. Can you hang?? May I introduce PIKACHU-MAKOTO, aka Pikachu the drummer/vocalist from seminal Osaka punk sisters duo Afrirampo. I want to meet her BAD — plus Makoto Kawabata, the axe-slinger and founder of Osaka psychedelic soul collective Acid Mothers Temple. Put these two super-creatives together and you'll literally lose your mind and be happy for that. Which is fine to have your mind all fried when Prince Rama takes the stage. w/ Mugu Guymen
THURSDAY
* Louise Bourgeois "The Fabric Works" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Awesome fabric "drawings" and assemblages from the last decade of this ineffable artist's life, running parallel to her well-known knitted sculptures.
* Mary Henderson "Bathers" @ Lyons Wier Gallery / 542 W 24th St. Hyperreal oil paintings and some gouaches of youth on summer vacation, referenced initially from composite images on photo-sharing websites.
* Simon Evans "Shitty Heaven" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Evans amps up the text-based drawings and floor-maps, unveiling his personal next world as a planned suburban community, which sounds like hell to me. Plus his exploration of the nine circles of Hell in "Lite Evil" and moleskin pages covered in plans.
* "In Our Time" (dirs. Tao Dechen, Edward Yang, Ko Yi-cheng, Chan Yi, 1982) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6:15p. Taiwanese New Wave cinema basically originated from this four-director opus (incl Edward Yang, of "Yi Yi", in his directorial debut here), w/ each working off different generations and backgrounds to depict a realist Taiwan.
* PIKACHU-MAKOTO (Afrirampo/Acid Mothers Temple) @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Oh I FULLY abide by this show. If you missed PIKACHU-MAKOTO at Monster Island or had some conflict in your schedule or whatever, you must make DbA. You've heard of contact highs? This promises to be a sonic contact high of the headiest, "kine bud" sort. w/ PC Worship, Mugu Guymen and more
FRIDAY
* Alice Aycock + E.V. Day @ Salomon Contemporary / 526 W 26th ST #519. Wow. Aycock's oeuvre of kinetic, labyrinthine sculpture and installations make her a living legend in my book. She introduces a new wall relief "Twist of Fate" and drawings from her series "Sum Over Particle Histories". Day I know for her installations of hanging, modified garments (think "Exploding Couture", from 2000 Whitney Biennial). Her "Butterfly" comes from her broader "Divas Ascending" series and recalls the wedding kimono worn by Cio-Cio San in the NY Opera's production of "Madame Butterfly".
* John O'Connor "What is Toronto???" @ Pierogi Gallery / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg. What is Toronto, indeed! Is it ultra-detailed graphite and colored-pencil freakouts, like Mandala portals to some alternate universe?
* Matthew Porter "The Undefeated" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Porter investigates Jane Fonda's and John Wayne's legacies as simultaneous political actors and Hollywood icons.
* "Ploy" (dir. Pen-ek Ratanaruang, 2007) screening @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (6 to 68th St), 6:45p. Anybody remember that awesome Thai Takes film festival, which hasn't been here since 2007? Asia Society incredibly stages a mini survey of their own from now into June, bookended by the international masters of contemporary Thai cinema, Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The fest begins w/ Ratanaruang's surrealist super-sexy drama "Ploy", an absolute must-see coming from this writer. Followed by a Q&A w/ the director!
* "Hesher" (dir. Spencer Susser, 2010) @ Angelika / 18 W Houston St (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette). A grieving suburban family in somewheresville early '90s collides with a metalhead guardian angel/devil — the bare-chested, long-haired burnout effortlessly played by Joseph Gordon Levitt — who compels them, esp. the pre-teen protagonist, via death-threats, light beatings and advice on girls (i.e. Natalie Portman) to confront their emotions.
* "A Serbian Film" (dir. Srdjan Spasojevic, 2011) @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (NR/L/456 to Union Square). Tread lightly, dear readers, if you intend to watch this most disturbing of disturbing films. Think you know torture porn, like literally? I am amazed, frankly, that a stateside cinema would give this devastatingly brutal film a proper screening, even at NC-17 (the original cut is a well-deserved unrated and nearly 10 minutes longer). Plus it's screening ONCE per night. Mind you, I've not seen it yet — missed it at SXSW and it's subsequently been very hard to find — but I aim to see it now, even in edited form. However: caution!!!
* "Hausu" (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). No teen girl ghost story will ever match the Technicolor mayhem of HOUSE. If the high-school-aged beauties trekking off a painted landscape to old auntie's house don't send you for a loop, the creative savageries (and eye-wateringly intense in-camera effects) that await them totally will. This film is LIST-approved for dopeness. ALSO SAT
* "Foxy Brown" (dir. Jack Hill, 1974) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). A legend of blaxploitation and the watermark for gorgeous ass-kicking women, thanks to the ineffable Pam Grier. Can you handle it?? ALSO SAT
* Darlings + My Teenage Stride + Dream Diary @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/$7. Another dope indie primer w/ some particularly strong local acts. Feat. fuzz-popstars Dream Diary, indie stalwarts My Teenage Stride and my faces Darlings, who really are darling and rock really hard, too. w/ ROAR (AZ)
* Dirty Beaches + Pterodactyl @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. So Dirty Beaches play an "early show" Thursday at Mercury Lounge (before John Vanderslice, srsly), so take it from me, you want to see this crazy cat Alex Zhang Hungtai, w/ his room-shaking baritone and his minimalist, yesteryear looped soundscapes, channelling both "Fallen Angels"-era Wong Kar-Wai and Graceland? Come to this Popgun show instead, it's way fiercer.
SATURDAY
* Rebecca Chamberlain "…Wouldn't it be sublime…" @ DODGE Gallery / 15 Rivington St. Chamberlain wowed me and a bunch of people at VOLTA NY 2010, w/ her gorgeous pen and ink compositions of 20th C. interiors. She works w/in modernism but w/ an edgier dynamic this time, creating diptychs and triptychs of stairwells, mirrors and railings, contrasted w/ decorative closeups.
* Timothy Tompkins @ DCKT Contemporary / 237 Eldridge St. Recent paintings from Tompkins' "Reenactment" and "Explosion" series, working off digitally altered photographs and then painting them with commercial enamel on aluminum.
* "There/Not There" @ Number 35 / 141 Attorney St. A group show on illusion, memory and permanence — which despite the vague parameters can lead to some sublime results. Feat. Daniele Genadry, Adam Hayes, Alexa Kreissl, Christian Nguyen, Carlos Sandoval De Leon and Voshardt/Humphrey.
* Jack Smith "Thanks for Explaining Me" film screenings @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St, 4p. Penny Arcade, the teenaged Superstar who co-formed The Plaster Foundation to archive Jack Smith's work after his passing, presents this round of Smith films. Feat. vignette "Hot Air Specialists" (1980s) and longer works "Jungle Island" (1967), "Yellow Sequence" (1963-5) and "I Was a Male Yvonne DeCarlo" (1967-70).
* "Blissfully Thai: A conversation w/ Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pen-ek Ratanaruang" @ Asia Society / 725 Park Ave (6 to 68th St), 2p. The two forerunners in Thai cinema's contemporary renaissance, the Cannes champion Weerasethakul and the untouchable Ratanaruang (his "Last Life in the Universe" remains one of my favorite films, ever), in conversation w/ the series' curator, La Frances Hui of Asia Society.
* "Montag" (dir. Doze Niu, 2010) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 8:15p. A glossy and messy Triad film and among the newest in this festival, though it's set believably in '80s Taipei. Also: when it opened in Taiwan last year, its weekend gross was higher than that of the "Avatar".
* Oberhofer + Widowspeak @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave, Greenpoint (G to Greenpoint), 8p/$8. Captured Tracks lovelies Widowspeak are playing a bunch of shows over a few days. I suggest this one, pairing 'em before the stripped down post-punk of ultra-charismatic Oberhofer. Winning!
TUESDAY
* "Rebels of the Neon God" (dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 1992) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6:15p. I really dig this early film from Taiwanese New Wave's urban poet. Tsai so boldly conveys the alienation of teenagers within Taipei's neon-drenched nightlife, propelled by the thudding Detroit techno-ish soundtrack.
* Vivian Girls @ 285 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 9p/$10. Big thing as local garage-rock trio Vivian Girls are, it's extra dope they play a DIY venue on their home turf. Even cooler: Captured Tracks' Widowspeak share the bill. w/ Colleen Green (check "I Wanna Be Degraded")
CURRENT SHOWS
* Francis Alÿs "A Story of Deception" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St) + MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to Court Sq/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq). The Belgian-born Conceptualist, who's been based in Mexico City for decades now, is currently enjoying a two-armed mid-career retrospective at both museums across the Queensboro Bridge. In my memory this hasn't happened since Olafur Eliasson, and while I loved Eliasson's dual-borough exhibition I believe it works even better with Alÿs. Or at least Alÿs' "Modern Procession" (2002), a Public Art Fund-sponsored production that documents MoMA's temporary relocation to the Long Island City former schoolhouse during its 2002-4 expansion, is the centerpiece of PS1's excerpt, so there's something relevant and self-referencing in that. I encourage you to do sorta like that parade and take the E from the MoMA to PS1, catching both shows in an afternoon.
MoMA's portion is a big time-waster, at least on a first visit, because Alÿs' style is time-based videos (both in their respective durations and how long it took for him to complete them, usually a span of two years or more), which distract you to the point of transfixing, and scattered ephemera tangentially related to said videos and always riddled with text and explanations. You may well find yourself reading these, dwelling on them — you may well tire quickly and speed through later examples. Sound is an issue here, bleeding through the space from one video installation to another, and I doubt this is purposeful, though it lends a slight disorientation to the exhibition. His big video "When Faith Moves Mountains (Cuando la fe mauve montages)" (2002) contains two projections of that, plus a third video including interviews with some of the 500 volunteers (one pricelessly opines "I don't believe in art just for the sake of art"), the young people marching up a Lima, Peru dune in formation, shoveling away to move the mountain 10 cm. Thus goes Alÿs' saying "Máximo esfuerzo Minimo resultado", or "maximum effort, minimum results" — and don't take it from me, that emblem recurs in this narrow corridor lined with work-tables, transparencies (person walking with buildings strapped to their shoulders), paintings (a car fire), prints, newspaper articles (a lynching in Guatemala), and lots of text. All the while, tolling bells from a video in the opening of the exhibition permeate through, adding an unsettling immediacy to the people shoveling away. Alÿs' little paintings remind me more of another Belgian Surrealist, Rene Magritte, and we get a whole room of 'em in "Le Temps du sommeil" (an ongoing series since 1996), some 111 tile-sized paintings on wood, each a precious moment of weirdness, like windows into some foresty dreamscape. But since the audio element from the opening gallery doesn't carry all the way back here, MoMA installed "Song for Lupita (Mañana)" (1998), a looping filmstrip animation of a woman pouring water from one glass to another, an accompanying turntable's soundtrack melodiously humming "mañana, mañana" — doing without doing, as Alÿs might put it. This odd little piece sums up my Alÿs experience: his aversion to completing stuff, his penchant for drawing things out for years, revising and reconsidering in ever-mutating layers of change. Might as well check out "Tornado" (2000-10) and watch the artist fling himself into a tornado — it's very, VERY loud, and quite frightening, as the dirt around him almost liquifies, whirling around the terrific winds. It's good for a few minutes' viewing. The adjacent video "Politics of Rehearsal" (2005-7) comes with headphones, and it's up to you if you're like me and blow 30 minutes on this grand tease of a striptease. Alÿs filmed it in the LES's Slipper Room, following the perpetual restarts between a pianist (Alexander Rovag), a soprano (Viktoria Kurbatskaya) and a young stripper (Bella Yao) for the night's performance. A voiceover compares the stripper's slo-mo disrobing as a metaphor for Latin America and modernity, always approaching that goal but never quite there. She removes her underwear at least twice. "Rehearsal I" (1999-2001) is funnier and quicker, using the recording of a brass band's practice session to dictate the movements of a car up a sandy hill on the US/Mexico border (they play, the car starts; they screw up, the car stops; they start chattering, the car goes in reverse), plus loads more of requisite transparencies and little paintings.
I found that PS1's open-ended layout, with "The Modern Procession" unofficial centerpiece, worked far better in my Alÿs-going experience. That two-channel video itself, at just 12 minutes long, is a quickie in Alÿs terms, plus its clear start and conclusion and overall narrative — the parade carrying MoMA collection replicas (Picassos "Demoiselles D'Avignon, Giacometti's "Standing Woman", Duchamp's "Readymade") and the real Kiki Smith from 53rd St to Long Island City — make it far more accessible than Alÿs' broader oeuvre. Let the Peruvian fanfare guide you to it — it's one place where I particularly liked the sound carry-over. No videos here rival "The Modern Procession", though "Guards" (2004-5) provides a few unnerving minutes, if you're keen on that. Royal guards clomp about deserted London streets, like straight out of "28 Weeks Later" but much cleaner, their clipped movements linking in succession as they meet their peers. More paintings scattered about, like "Le juice errant" (2011), a fully-conceived version of the character bowing to the weight of buildings strapped to their back (seen in drawings at MoMA) and "Untitled (from Deja Vu)" 2011, a "diptych" on separate walls, a woman carrying a scythe vs a man carrying a hammer. The former appeared on the NYTimes Weekend Arts section, blown up to larger-than-lifesize scale (Alÿs' paintings, this one included, are all like 8x10" or smaller). One brilliantly confusing duplication too, of "Untitled (La Malinche)" (2010), two carved wood figures breaking out of a plastic bag. This work appears twice in the show, in opposite galleries, and its twin is a cheekily disorienting sendoff to the Conceptualist's retrospective.
* Donald Judd @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525-533 W 19th St. Define epic awesomeness with minimalist restraint. If you're thinking Donald Judd's visionary '89 installation at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany…well, you're a clairvoyant b/c that's exactly what I was thinking! But on the real: Zwirner Gallery restages Judd's classic array, the first time this has been executed since its initial realization. And it's a beaut, nine massive floor-mounted anodized aluminum open boxes, i.e. consummate Judd. Approach these slowly, beginning ideally w/ the lone box in the 25th St space's front gallery. Approach and be awed by the contents, vivid colorized Plexiglas in cobalt blue, amber or black occupy some interiors, adding a burst of informed variation. Others are "simply" silvery aluminum but divided at angles in Judd's brilliant vocabulary of angles and dimensions. The pair of boxes in the 533 space's front gallery play off their respective skylights, practically glowing with the orange-y and blue energies contained within. That this is the gallery's inaugural exhibition of this seminal postwar American artist makes me all kinds of stoked for what's coming next.
* Jasper Johns "New Sculpture and Works on Paper" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. The tireless Jasper Johns unfurls like 20+ years of future experimental opportunities in basically five years of fertile work. His waxy gridded numbers set the standard, and though they're riffs on classics he's been doing for decades, these new reliefs remain endlessly complex. Like he'll add some well-placed thumbprints to one, keys to another, and newsprint all around to form densely intriguing results. One bronzed relief is covered in imprinted pages from a book, while a silvery one is furiously bright. But to really "take it there", Johns made a slew of prints based on experimentation with Shrinky Dinks. Think about that for a minute, he takes that circa early '80s child's toy and, like that unseen oven magic, creates intaglios and ink prints bearing what looks like Picasso's "Guernica" in the spin cycle, silly-faced fish, Greek vases and loads else to Johns' recurring vocabulary of sign language terminology, chevrons and silhouetted figures.
* Georg Baselitz "The Early Sixties" @ Michael Werner Gallery / 4 E 77th St. Before this important postwar German artist was inverting portraits and landscapes, he was mining classical motifs from the past to the tune of Italian mannerism and — as the press release so acutely states — "the art of the insane". This body of work occurred during his move to West Berlin and it'll haunt your dreams. Whether it's the paintings, like the organic, body-horror landscape of "The Painting for the Fathers (Landscape for Father)" (1965) and the flesh-colored (plucked?) birds in "Black Garden" (1964) or the works on paper, like the writhing "Untitled (Whip Woman)" (1964) or the suitably insane "Untitled" watercolor from '63, three measles-inflicted, bent-over figures, you can't escape it. It's as if Baselitz focused all his vigorous disdain for the period's dominant Social Realism styles on these works, and they still pack a wallop today.
* Eric Fischl "Early Paintings" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Fischl's playfully debaucherous angle to suburban Americana breathes life in the traditional imagery — traditional, that is, if you spent your summers nude on a boat or sunning by the pool. The barbecue scene in "Barbecue", w/ the grill-master practically breathing fire, bears some immediacy in its perspective, and "Slumber Party" a lack of pretension b/w the two figures.
* Arshile Gorky "1947" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. I am fairly certain this extremely late-works survey on the "master of the gesture", paintings and works on paper completed shortly before he took his own life, will NOT receive the hubbub like Picasso's dazzling and romantic exhibition downtown. And that's a shame, I'm telling you now: go see this show. Gorky's late works are brilliant but come from a very different, darker place than Picasso's rosy dozen years with Marie-Therese. You've got to spend time unraveling these, that even the sunny canvases "Pastoral" (1947) and "The Betrothal I" (1947) embody his troubled soul. Compare w/ the graphite and pastel study for "Pastoral", which swaps the yellows and bare canvas for a consuming layer of brown, or the works related to "Agony" — what began as plein air botanicals were abraded and sanded into awesome, even sinister, experimentation.
+ Joel Morrison. If you're averse to things shiny, specifically seeing your warped reflection in the surface of polished stainless steel, I say keep well enough away from Joel Morrison. However, if you're cool w/ it — and you should be, if you're reading this LIST — then dive right in. He's a trip, casting a weather balloon bursting from a fallen shopping cart in steel and titling it "Weather Balloon Trapped in a Shopping Cart". Also riffing off Salvador Dali's "Retrospective Bust of a Woman", swapping her hairdo for wiffle balls and hanging a spoon from her nose ("Wiffle Ball"). Or he'll just throw a bunch of disparate objet (in this case another shopping cart, a stability ball-sized foam orb, and a chop saw) and coat them in glossy black fiberglass, so it looks like a David Choe 'Munko' only supersized.
* Damian Loeb "Verschränkung and the Uncertainty Principle" @ Acquavella Gallery / 18 E 79th St. Loeb's cooked up some super-sexy photorealistic oil on linen paintings w/ juuuust the right degree of cinematic drama. It'll turn you voyeuristic and elicit a physical dialogue b/w you the viewer and they the subject…but swap out "subject" for "Loeb's wife Zoya" and think about that again. The works, like "Say Hello to the Angels" (w/ Zoya sprawled on the unmade bed, illuminated by an unseen television screen) or "Ghosts I-IV" (Zoya in the bathtub, head turned away from us), come from his photographs and show her in various stages of undress, at ease w/ her husband's gaze. Of course this is US staring at Zoya now that Damian's turned them into paintings. Though like w/ "Say Hello to the Angels", she locks eyes w/ him and w/ us, in a staredown that she'll win.
* Jack Smith "Thanks for Explaining Me" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Never in my lifetime have I been immersed in a Jack Smith exhibition such as this. PS1 mounted a proper retrospective back in '98, nearly a decade after his passing, but I was a youth then, blissfully unaware of this downtown legend. So for my generation this show is essential — and for those of you lucky to be living in NY in the '60s and '70s, it's also essential b/c it totally encompasses his creative oeuvre. I know him best for his films (they're all here, playing in sequence and in proper restored 16mm screenings on Saturdays), but his sketches, collages and related ephemera fill out the picture of the iconoclastic genius. We may never totally "get" Jack Smith, as there is so much to "get", so much that made him who he is, but Neville Wakefield's curated exhibition is an excellent start. Read on in LISTs like this for the Saturday film screening schedule.
* John Chamberlain "New Sculpture" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Casual art-goers may well be totally thrown off by the dual — duel? — Chamberlain exhibits in W. Chelsea, the sort of career retrospective swan song at Pace and this one, proclaiming "new sculpture" (crushed auto works from 2009 through seemingly weeks before the show opened). That's a lot of Chamberlain! And not counting Gagosian's Britannia space, hosting the second wing of Chamberlain's new works, after the blue-chip gallery added him to their roster of luminary postwar and contemporary big-names. Here's an easy way to tell a new Chamberlain from an old one: the name. Mind you, he's incredibly adept at naming his sculpture, but "Gangster of Love" and "Infected Eucharist" are oldies, like from the '80s oldies. "TASTYLINGUS" and "TAMBOURINEFRAPPE" — those are new! The all-caps and shoved together words are a clue. That's if you're not even looking at the works, which do signal a rift b/w the older Chamberlains and the brand-new monumental sculptures. His array at Gagosian bears an overall aggressive vibe, crushed and contused muscle cars twisted into even meaner shapes. Some are exceedingly shiny too, one consisting totally of chromed bumpers like the ribs of some Decepticon, but there's a good bit of rough-and-tumble, rusted and used steel still figuring into Chamberlain's modus. The ultimate for me goes back to the polished, a brand-new "Cloverfield"-sized monolith called "C'ESTZESTY" that's less like the other Chamberlains in the room, yet still retains the artist's irreverent sense of humor.
* Gillian Wearing "People" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. I spent a good long while transfixed by Wearing's seven-channel "Snapshot", an incredible homage to still photography and portraiture via an "actual" timeline of women, from a girlish cutie playing the violin (in contrasty b&w) to a grand-dame in her easychair, seemingly digitalized. Spend some time w/ this one, listening to an anonymous narrator on the provided headsets (culled from Wearing's many interviews and not specifically related to the seven women onscreen) as she recounts a fascinating monologue that, though personal to her, could apply to any of the seven portraits — or all of them. Besides the kid and the elder woman, there is a pretty teen (seemingly uncomfortable and delighted in her own skin), a beauty recalling Antonioni's screen muses, a '50s-era mother with baby, a perma-smiling mature woman (hot mom?), and an older woman alone in her automobile. The faceless narrator's words strike a different cue as you focus on each framed figure. Without ever having met any of them, I sensed their histories and their inherent awesomeness.
* Keith Haring @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. The gallery explores Haring's early drawings, culled from sketchbooks around his enrollment in SVA in '78, from impulsive penis drawings (preempting "Superbad") to mesmerizing inked geometric abstracts. Page after page of what would become Haring's fluidic vocabulary, graphic and graffiti-like but uniquely his. Plus three mural-sized works on paper from '82, created in conjunction with Bill T. Jones performances at The Kitchen.
* Katy Moran @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. A breathless new body of work from the British artist, small-scale gestural abstract paintings in various treatments and washes on MDF board. Several instances incorporate collage with Moran's intense brushwork and reductive mark-making.
* Garth Weiser @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. I've been a Weiser fan since his 2007 summer trio show here, and each subsequent time he's stunned me w/ his exacting geometries and optical crosshatchings. He furthers that visual vibe with a mix of mediums, sometimes as simple as just oil paint on canvas ("Unimark Unlimited", a moire ripping out of a field of hazy circles), others incorporating copper leaf ("Drawing #26", looks like a rattlesnake's skin up close)and dimensional fabric paint, like "Grinder" and "Jam Network", featuring scrawling non-patterns incised into layers of paint, revealing colorful layers beneath.
* Martin Kippenberger "I Had a Vision" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. I'm coming around to Kippenberger. Skarstedt Gallery's exhibition of his "Eggman" paintings this past spring helped, so now I can wade into the broader and weirder side of this German artist. Namely his mixed-media sculptural work, shown here as partially reconstructions of two large-scale exhibitions from the summer (San Francisco) and fall (an unused tunnel b/w two Vienna subway stations) of '91. There's some swapping around for space constraints, like pairing "Broken Kilometer" (1990), a Plexiglas rainbow on stilts, away from its mate "Carousel with ejection seat" (1991), a sort of circular train-track rainbow, and in the same space as the Vienna work, a cast-resin suited guy on a moped. Which makes me wonder what the original San Fran show was like, a wickedly perverse theme park by the looks of the original installation images.
* David Salle @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Salle follows up last year's exhibition of classic '80s paintings w/ new canvases revisiting his depictions of iconic women. Expect the usual deft pairings, as Salle mirrors a woman's contorted posing in bed with "The Mennonite Button Problem"'s two angled deck chairs. Their push-pull exertions echo or precede this boat imagery, a newer thing for the artist adapted from George Caleb Bingham's 19th C river scenes. Another long canvas bisects the woman's movements below with a network of black kelplike lines and actual lightbulbs, like a field of stars overhead.
* Ashley Bickerton "Nocturnes" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Rhetorical question: can Ashley Bickerton's oeuvre get any more acid flashback-y? Obvious answer: hell yes. Welcome to "Nocturnes", his slice of sexy nightlife from some tropical far-future clubland, decked in carved-wood frames (bearing 'Bickerton', shiny decal-style). I'm talking "Neon Bar" and "Red Scooter Nocturne", where tattooed and face-painted PYTs cavort w/ blue-skinned fatmen, the city a neon smear behind them. Or "FITNW3", a portrait composed of many, many 3D prints, bursting from an spiky coral base like fungi. Makes his usual ultra-colorful mixed media paintings look positively calm.
* "Idée Fixe" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. A group show of black and white drawings created from intense, time-consuming gestures, ranging from Man Bartlett's fields of wee circles, repeated freehandedly infinitum, to Astrid Bowlby's seductive dark gardens. Bowlby's duo were my favorites, but Joan Linder and Daniel Zeller eschewed the allover approach for incredibly detailed central objects, a weed for Linder and an organic spiny cross-section for Zeller.
* Ivan Witenstein @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Continuing his political and cultural imagery with Witenstein's takes on "jazz diplomacy" circa WWII, imbued w/ confrontational pop imagery. He's crowded the gallery w/ clashing figures, neo-expressionist paintings hung salon-style and carved oak and poplar sculptures bearing two figures each, in symbiotic embraces.
* Li Songsong @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. This is the debut U.S. solo exhibition of the Beijing-based artist, whose style is heavily impastoed and abstracted large-scale paintings recalling photographs and film stills. Though I dare you to make out even half the subject matter, buried as they are under like cake-frosting layers of somber paint. That said, Li works deftly b/w figurative compositions (like "Couple", half-hidden in a blocky test-pattern of black and gray rectangles) and graphic renderings, like "Escape", obviously taken from an airplane disaster training booklet.
* Sean Landers "Around the World Alone" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. I hope you like clowns! Because you're getting clowns, an entire room full of 'em in apparently the prolific artist's 50th solo exhibition. Landers evokes his signature buffoon on a lifelong journey at sea, clown on a rowboat, clown steering a ship on troubled waters, over and over and over again.
* Richard Tuttle "What's the Wind" @ The Pace Gallery / 510 W 25th St. In my understanding of Richard Tuttle's oeuvre, this lot of "space frame" free-standing sculptures feels very un-Tuttle to me, though it apparently synthesizes decades of his work. Take "System 4, Hummingbird", for me the most Tuttle-esque due to the stretched fabric hanging in the middle of the work like a kidney-shaped kite amid a laundry list of media (painted Styrofoam, aluminum wire, birch plywood, monofilament). Or "System 3, Measurement" in the back gallery, some grouping of misshapen balloons covered in rice paper and suspended over a loose grid of white-coated steel. Their overall vivid fragility is VERY Tuttle, however.
* Laurel Nakadate @ Leslie Tonkonow Art Projects / 535 W 22nd St. Maybe you've been to PS1 to see Laurel Nakadate's exhaustive 10-year survey? You should! Her 2010 series "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears" is an unescapable presence: some hundred same-size 40x50" prints cover the 2nd Fl walls, effectively placing us w/in her captured sadness. She photographed herself crying each and everyday of 2010, in the morning, at night, nude, fully clothed, all over the world. It's but one facet of her PS1 exhibition but it's almost the entire subject of her latest solo exhibition at Tonkonow Projects. The images are smaller here, each 8x10", but it's the full 365, a concentrated blast of forced and actualized emotion running in a grid across two walls. While you could say some of their intensity is lost in the smaller scales, the sheer number of individual, unique prints and the understanding that Nakadate did this daily throughout 2010 is quite overwhelming in its own. She accompanies these with a new video work, "Lost Party Guest", of her blindfolded and groping about empty reception rooms in the Park Avenue Armory. It's a disconcerting vignette but, with "365 Days" behind her, perhaps it signals a reprieve from the sadness.
* Aaron Young "Built Tough" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Young christens the show w/ more Americana, approaching the U.S. flag as Minimalist faded silkscreens on thick belts of linen. They hang regally, some as folded triangles, others as those triangles w/ a bare expanse of raw linen occupying the rest of the rectangle. The adjacent smaller gallery is crowded with seemingly ash-colored child sculptures (coated in winterstone, a mixture of concrete and something), each bearing some war-mongering poster. Dystopian?
* Robert Greene @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. New textural abstract paintings and works on paper, composed on acid-free vellum and mounted on thin aluminum panels. Some like "Luc" and "Jed" are feverishly reductive monochromes, composed entirely of repeated scratchings (the fully colorized "Doug" will force your eyes crossed if you stare at it). Others blow the grid up to inch-sized increments, incorporating dashes of color here and there like he took his old Arcadian landscapes, cut them up, and remixed them to total abstraction.
* Jaume Plensa @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. I realized that in encountering Plensa's four-story-tall "Echo" sculpture in Madison Square Park that I FAR enjoy his timelessly futuristic figures outdoors. Something about them, their anonymity, their impossibility suits them to be among trees and a very natural landscape. So for those expecting that gut-punch in his latest gallery show, you're headed for a letdown. What he's created is a series of mixed-media portraits (I have no idea the media, they appear to be almost photographic from a distance but slippery and multilayered up close) that he debuted last year at the Musée Picasso in Antibes, France. They are admittedly part of his broader body of work (including drawings and etchings) that I'm way less familiar with, so taken together w/ the park's "Echo", I dig it.
* Leon Kossoff @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. This is a very calming and contemplative show considering its neighbors. The British artist reveals new landscape paintings from the last decade, executed in a mottled, textured style and focusing on this old cherry tree in his garden. He offsets every two paintings or so by a smaller-sized portrait on board.
LAST CHANCE
* 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.
* Yuki Onodera @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. Onodera introduces her debut solo stateside show w/ two classic ongoing series. Her "Transvest" began in 2002, featuring silhouetted (yet recognizable) figures, created via a multistep process of finding iconic images, photographing them against strong back-lighting, then collaging their nondescript interior w/ fragmented media and printing it. The thing to keep in mind with "The Eleventh Finger" (from 2006 onward) is Onodera's spontaneity, shooting street-style w/o using the viewfinder, then manipulating the images with lace overlays in the printing process.
* Ruud van Empel "Wonder" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. Mural-sized super-sharp and color-saturated groupings of a veritable UN of cute kids that'll bring tears to your eyes. It's like I KNOW they're photographs, ostensibly, but they're surreally exacted, like they're going to jump off their Plexiglas backings. Van Empel's included some more utopian world imagery, too, with one or several kids set within an almost primordial jungle, thick with shadows, sunlight and an almost palpable humidity.
* Razvan Boar, Christian Schoeler, Alexander Tinei, George Young @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Four youngish male European artists disinterested w/ conveying traditional masculine art. That get you going? That's not to say Londoner George Young and Bucharest's Razvan Boar don't create incredibly sexy paintings — incl. Young's entirely on paper tacked to the wall. Or Tinei's acuity with cropping for maximum impact, like his nearly abstract "Blue Feet". I was introduced to Schoeler's sun-drenched work at VOLTA NY 2011, and his soft-focus, tousle-haired young men resemble mirrors back to the artist himself.
* Nyoman Masriadi @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. Hulking, hyperreal superhero types in the Indonesian painter's debut stateside, each rendered with differing degrees of homoeroticism, depending on your take on those skintight jumpsuits.
* Sarah Frost "Arsenal" @ PPOW / 535 W 22nd St, 3rd Fl. "I fly like paper/get high like planes" — no, but really, this is awesome. Frost took impetus from a series of instructional YouTube videos on paper gun-making, created by a group of boys, and crafted an installation of painstakingly detailed (and entirely paper-made) weaponry, from Western pistols to sci-fi assault rifles. The end result, a dizzying array of fragile faux weaponry, shown only at last year's Great Rivers Biennial in St. Louis, is both a celebration of craftsmanship and ingenuity and a meditation on violence, politics and everything these guns signify.
* Idris Khan @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Idris Khan "The Devil's Wall". Khan represents the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and stone-throwing at the Jamarat walls in two cerebral flavors. He's removed the three-wall essence for one, leaving three glistening aluminum bowls in their wake, etched with words that disappear as they're sucked into the bowls' respective voidlike interiors. Even more effective, Khan represents the inward contemplation of the pilgrims in his drawings "21 Stones", each a rhythmic stamping of his own thoughts and wishes on paper, blurring phrases like "God is great" and "I wish I knew my mother" into metaphysical echoes of sculptural bowls.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
fee's LIST (through 5/10)
Oi! New York Gallery Week returns, bringing over 60 solo exhibitions and loads of related talks, screenings and free stuff, and lasts this FRI through SUN. Check the program site for full info and schedule, and look for entries tagged "+ added awesomeness" for my picks.
WEDNESDAY
* Georg Baselitz "The Early Sixties" @ Michael Werner Gallery / 74 E 77th St. Major paintings and drawings from a pivotal early moment in the postwar Neo-Expressionist's career, following his move to West Berlin.
* Keith Haring @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. The gallery's debut exhibition of this downtown legend's oeuvre is particularly vital: owner Barbara Gladstone commissioned Haring to produce a series of lithographs (the artist's first prints) back in '82. Those and other early, never-before-seen works on paper figure into this exhibition.
* Katy Moran @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. A breathless new body of work from the British artist, small-scale gestural abstract paintings in various treatments and washes on MDF board.
* Pterodactyl + Sweet Bulbs @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle-Wyckoff), 8p/$8. Your NY indie primer split over two levels, w/ the speed-rock and Paleolithic rhythms of Pterodactyl and fuzzy noise-pop quartet Sweet Bulbs upstairs and Human Resources leading the lo-fi drama downstairs. At least six bands and lots of awesomeness await. w/ Guardian Alien and Antimagic
THURSDAY
* John Chamberlain "New Sculpture" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Whoa: depending on your knowledge of and thirst for art-world gossip, this exhibition occurs w/ a loaded meaning. Two avenues away, The Pace Gallery staged a gallery-career survey of Chamberlain's crushed auto classics. Now repped by Gagosian, the gallery unveils their own cache of Chamberlain sculpture, an entirely new body of work (w/ a followup at Gagosian's Britannia St location in a few weeks). Look, I'm an aesthete, so I'll love it.
* Eric Fischl "Early Paintings" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. The postmodern artist's early body of work, eight figurative paintings and two studies on glassine from '79 to '86, many incorporating Fischl's deft take on banal Americana and subversive voyeurism.
* Gillian Wearing "People" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Wearing's big return to NYC since her 2003 solo exhibition fills both gallery floors, w/ the massive seven-channel "Snapshot" video installation on the ground floor, balanced with her latest video work "Bully" (drawing from her feature-length film "Self Made") and the installation "Secrets and Lies" upstairs.
* Subodh Gupta "A glass of water" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Gupta exploration of the transformative quality of everyday objects — in his sculptures, incandescent paintings and installations — segues into measurement devices, from tromp l'oeil "dough" to water brimming off a metal cup.
+ added awesomeness: a discussion w/ Gupta at the gallery on SAT 11a-noon.
* Hilary Harkness @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. A new array of Harkness' impossible paintings — like Hieronymous Bosch cut w/ Prohibition Swing and '50s sci-fi — after her previous solo show three years ago. Even cooler, she's been keeping a blog on the NY Academy of Art's forum leading up to this exhibition, so it sounds extra dope.
* Songsik Min "Two Faces" @ Doosan Gallery NY / 533 W 25th St. Paintings and an installation reflecting Min's creative process, using unassembled toy guns as the jumpoff motif.
* Sonya Biesofsky "Tenement" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. In her debut solo exhibition at the gallery, Biesofsky injects some telltale NYC apartment details, rendered entirely in fragile, subtly transparent paper.
* Robert Greene @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. New textural abstract paintings and works on paper, composed on acid-free vellum and mounted on thin aluminum panels.
* Leon Kossoff @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. New landscape paintings from the last decade by the British artist, focusing on an old cherry tree in his garden.
* Gideon Rubin "Shallow Waters" @ Hosfelt Gallery / 531 W 36th St. A new body of work from the Israeli artist, constituting figurative paintings and a video animation originating from early 20th C found photographs.
* "Thor" (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 2011) preview screening @ Museum of the Moving Image / 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria (E/M/R to Steinway St, NQ to 36 Ave), 7p/$15. Calling all fanboys (and fangirls?), b/c you know you want to attend this, esp. b/c it's in 3D. Take one muscle-bound blond (Chris Hemsworth) as the titular Marvel comic character — not precisely Norse mythology — take one cutie (Natalie Portman) and a huge cast of big-name good guys and big-name bad guys, each in costumes more ridiculous than the last…. it's the Battle for Asgard, baby. Film officially opens tomorrow in wide release (incl IMAX) but you won't see me covering that.
FRIDAY
* Donald Judd @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525-533 W 19th St. Epic awesomeness. The gallery stages its inaugural exhibition of this seminal postwar American artist — call him a Minimalist, call him an philosopher, he's a visionary through and through. The installation recalls Judd's classic '89 exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany and is the first time this array — floor-mounted anodized aluminum open boxes, shot through with vivid Plexiglas color — has been reassembled at the vast '89 scale.
* Jasper Johns "New Sculpture and Works on Paper" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. There are a LOT of awesome 'destination' gallery shows on right now, but I've gotta say this one, Johns' most prolific body of work in a five-year span, transcends in importance. I've got wild hopes for this exhibition, which includes his experimentation w/ Shrinky Dinks (hello '80s!) and his unparalleled gridded numerals. See you there.
* Jack Smith "Thanks for Explaining Me" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Neville Wakefield curates what should be an incredible survey of the creative iconoclast's oeuvre, from his experimental films ("Flaming Creatures" is just the beginning) to drawings, collages and photographs. Three collaborative works by younger artists Ryan McNamara, A.L. Steiner and T.J. Wilcox elucidate Smith's wide-ranging influence on the contemporary generation.
* Arshile Gorky "1947" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. The gallery stages an exhibition on a "master of the gesture" (I'm taking that straight from a Gagosian Beverly Hills group show last year, which incl Gorky's work), focused on his brilliant late-period lyrical abstractions, just before the master hung himself, cutting short his tragic genius.
* Louise Lawler "Fitting" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Lawler takes photographs of art in museums, galleries, homes, and auction houses and stretches them to fit the proportions of Metro Pictures' walls, printing the altered results on adhesive wall vinyl to create some dope wallpaper.
+ added awesomeness: screening of Lawler's "Birdcalls" (1972/81), every 1/2 hour at the gallery, SUN 11a-6p.
* William Kentridge @ Marian Goodman Gallery / 24 W 57th St. The first public exhibition of "Other Faces" from Kentridge's series "Drawings for Projection", created with a 35mm camera and charcoal drawings and feat. that Johannesburg antihero Soho Eckstein.
+ added awesomeness: a book-signing with Kentridge at the gallery on SAT, 11a-1p. (RSVP: rsvp@mariangoodman.com)
* Jesus Rafael Soto "1955-2004" @ Haunch of Venison NY / 1230 Ave of Americas, 20th Fl. The Venezuelan artist's first major NY survey since his '74 exhibition at the Gugg. Expect strong colors and optical illusions, plus works blurring the line b/w painting and sculpture, from this Group Zero champion's oeuvre.
* Garth Weiser @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Razor-sharp geometric abstracts and cunning minimalism from a guy I dig very much b/c he portrays each very well.
+ added awesomeness: discussion b/w Weiser & Charles Wylie (curator of contemporary art at Dallas Museum of Art) at gallery, SUN 1-2p.
* Damian Loeb "Verschränkung and the Uncertainty Principle" @ Acquavella Gallery / 18 E 79th St. New sexy photorealistic paintings that elicit an active dialogue w/ voyeurism and subject...and in this case swap "subject" w/ "artist's wife". Ahem.
* Ashley Bickerton @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. New eye-watering paintings w/ custom carved frames from the Neo-Geo stalwart, all cosmic-y and like "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", visualized.
* "Idée Fixe" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. A group show of black and white drawings created from intense, time-consuming gestures, feat. Man Bartlett, Astrid Bowlby, Jacob El Hanani, Dan Fischer, Shane Hope, Joan Linder, Aric Obrosey, Michael Waugh and Daniel Zeller.
* Ivan Witenstein @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Continuing his political and cultural imagery with Witenstein's takes on "jazz diplomacy" circa WWII, imbued w/ confrontational pop imagery.
+ added awesomeness: conversation b/w Witenstein & rockstar artist Barnaby Furnas at the gallery, SAT noon-1p.
* Olga Chernysheva @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. The contemporary Russian experience, depicted in photography, film, drawings and combinations thereof.
* Li Songsong @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. Pretty neat: this is the debut U.S. solo exhibition of the Beijing-based artist's large-scale paintings, heavily impastoed and recalling photographs and film stills (albeit significantly and texturally transformed).
* Robert Mapplethorpe "50 Americans" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. 50 works by the legendary American artist, selected by 50 Americans from all states, backgrounds and generations, perhaps commenting on the unexpected universality of Mapplethorpe's challenging history.
+ added awesomeness: panel discussion "New Directions in Curatorial Models", at the gallery SAT 3-5p.
* "15 Years" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. A trajectory of the gallery's history through its solo shows, feat. iconic works by Haeri Yoo, Adrian Piper, Jenny Scobel, Tejal Shah, Dona Nelson and many others.
* Martin Kippenberger "I Had a Vision" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Mixed-media sculptural work that partially reconstructs two of the late artist's large-scale exhibitions from the summer (San Francisco) and fall (an unused tunnel b/w two Vienna subway stations) of '91.
* Torben Giehler "Lateralus" @ Leo Koenig Inc / 545 W 23rd St. So I totally hear Tool in this exhibition title, though I realize it's going to be nothing like progressive metal. Rather, think tasty grayscale geometric abstracts.
* Sean Landers "Around the World Alone" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Apparently this is the prolific artist's 50th solo exhibition, and it evokes some of his classic earlier imagery of the solitary clown and the Golden Globes, via paintings, bronze sculptures and more.
* Richard Long "Flow and Ebb" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. Once again the gallery uses its unique layout to an advantageous solo exhibition, permitting the Bristol-based artist to enact a wall-scaling, 27-ft tall site-specific drawing, plus mud-on-slate paintings and earthy sculpture.
* Paul Sietsema @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. New process-driven works, including newspaper drawings and these multistep photo-drawing-sprayed ink compositions that add a strong materiality to digital age renderings.
* Jesse Willenbring "Left to the Darkness" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) / 261 Broome St. What I'm calling 'figurative abstract' paintings, on canvas and mounted tablecloth, by the NY-based artist.
* "Hobo With a Shotgun" (dir. Jason Eisener, 2010) @ Village East Theatre / 181 2nd Ave (L to 3rd Ave), w/ The Plague & dir. Eisener attending nightly screenings FRI & SAT. Eisener's feature-length adaptation of his own "Grindhouse"-winning fake trailer has been blowing up the festival scene in double-barreled bursts since SXSW, and it lands in uncut, Technicolor glory (or should it be "gory"?), w/ action legend Rutger Hauer leading the charge as the titular antihero. "Hobo" carries a LIST-certified badge of dopeness. And to take this over the top, true exploitation style, Eisener joins dir. Jeff Lieberman (of "Blue Sunshine", "Just Before Dawn" etc) FRI at midnight and dir. William Lustig ("Maniac", "Vigilante") SAT at midnight for unfettered post-screening discussions! Splatter buffs (self included) love this.
* "Caterpillar" (dir. Koji Wakamatsu, 2010) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Wow, I am surprised and intrigued that Wakamatsu's latest scorching takedown of right-wing nationalism receives a proper screen-run. It's adapted from Edogawa Rampo's grueling short-story "Imomushi" (1929), though it's perforated w/ Wakamatsu's indictment of Japanese propaganda and militarism — and you better believe it's graphic as hell.
* "The Peach Blossom Land" (dir. Stan Lai, 1992) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 9p. Lai's debut (which premiered here as part of New Directors/New Films in '93) is a psychedelic historical affair, thanks to Christopher Doyle's dreamy cinematography.
* NYU Strawberry Festival @ NYU LaGuardia Place b/w W 3rd & W 4th St (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 1-5p/FREE. So there's like strawberries at this thing, but whatever, loads of dope bands make it a must-go for me (beer or no beer): Lightning Bolt headline the event w/ their broiling blitzkrieg of percussive noise, preceded by Matt Mondanile's lulling Ducktails and the speed-rock harmonics of Pterodactyl. w/ The So So Glos
* The Pains of Being Pure at Heart @ Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NR/L/456 to Union Square), 6p/SOLD OUT!. Frequent LIST-readers know well my love of local darlings The Pains. I've seen 'em over a dozen times now and still wait anxiously for this knockout show. See, they've got a sweet new album out "Belong" that's super fuzzy-scuzzy & I can't wait for these cuties to translate that love live. w/ Big Troubles
SATURDAY
* Richard Tuttle "What's the Wind" @ The Pace Gallery / 510 W 25th St. A far more complex output from Tuttle than I'm used to, six "space frame" free-standing sculptures that incredibly synthesize five decades of Tuttle's oeuvre.
* Laurel Nakadate @ Leslie Tonkonow Art Projects / 535 W 22nd St. Nakadate's thought-provoking career survey is currently running at MoMA PS1 through August 8 and includes part of her yearlong body of work "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears". That's the jumpoff for her latest solo exhibition, large C-prints of her crying each and every day throughout 2010, plus the debut of her newest video "Lost Party Guest" (2011).
* David Salle @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Salle follows up his exhibition of classic '80s paintings last year w/ new works, deftly combining unlikely imagery in feats beyond James Rosenquist (who I consider an unlikely-combining master) and exemplifying his fortitude and influence on younger artists. Here he revisits earlier subject matter of iconic women.
* David Shapiro "Money is No Object" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. This is the result of Shapiro's year spent redrawing and repainting all of his bills and receipts; the innate juxtapositions and ironies should be illuminating.
* Aaron Young "Built Tough" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Though he eschews skidding motorcycles this time (his infamous "Greeting Card" performance at the 7th Regiment Armory in '07), Young christens the gallery w/ his continued take on contemporary American culture, via silkscreens, paintings and sculpture.
* Sheila Gallagher & Robin Nagle "Trash Talk" @ DODGE Gallery / 15 Rivington St, 6p. A discussion b/w gallery artist Gallagher (whose melted plastic trash renderings line the walls and beguile the mind) and Dr. Robin Nagle, an anthropologist focused on rubbish and its labor and infrastructural requirements in urban contexts.
* "Marfa Voices" (dir. Rainer Judd, 2010) screening and talk @ Bumble & Bumble / 415 W 13th St, 3rd Fl, 4p. Donald Judd's daughter (and co-executor of his estate) directed this collage of the incredible Central Texas town, home to the Chinati Foundation. Space is limited, so RSVP: mackie@davidzwirner.com to guarantee your spot.
* "Cape No. 7" (dir. Wei Tei-Sheng, 2008) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6:15p. The directorial debut of this young Taiwanese filmmaker, who's over a generation younger than Hou Hsiao-Hsien, has created a very Hou-like meditation on Taiwanese postwar history, linked by love letters and Taiwanese pop music.
* "A Time to Live, A Time to Die" (dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1985) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 8:45p. The 2nd of the Taiwanese New Wave powerhouse's coming-of-age trilogy, focused on the aftermath of the Chinese Revolution and inspired by Hou's own experiences.
* Japan All Night! @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 10:30p/$15. AWESOME: a punk rock benefit for Japan relief, w/ all proceeds going to Second Harvest Japan, aiding those in the affected Tohoku region. The lineup is all-star and fierce, w/ all-girl knockouts The Suzan (maybe you've heard of them??) headlining, plus Care Bears on Fire, Uzuhi, The Homewreckers and more.
* Peelander-Z + Hard Nips @ STUDIO at Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NR/L/456 to Union Square), 8p/$14. Your favorite color-coded East Village-residing Japanese punks (Peelander-Z) and your other favorite Brooklyn-based Japanese all-girl punks Hard Nips, together again and on a trajectory to rock your socks off.
* Yuck @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/SOLD OUT! These Brits are beyond adorable — it took 'em ages and visa hangups to arrive stateside, but I want 'em here all the time. Listen to like 20 seconds of "Holing Out" (that snarling-yet-bright guitar, Daniel's pitch-perfect slang, Mariko's fashion-y sway) and you'll fall in love, too.
SUNDAY
* Francis Alÿs "A Story of Deception" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St) + MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to Court Sq/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq). Allegory and social action permeate the Belgian artist's Conceptual cross-media oeuvre. I'm talking complete ends of the spectrum here, long-process video performances that take years to make, related communal performances captured in photos and installations, and subtly surreal paintings recalling another famous Belgian artist two generations before him. The related PS1 exhibition focuses on Alÿs' 2002 piece "Modern Procession", which documented MoMA's temporary relocation to that Long Island City former schoolhouse during the museum's 2002-4 expansion project.
* "Time Again" @ SculptureCenter / 44-19 Purves St, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq). A survey of repetition, whose works' results often twist temporal notions of history, generations and our understanding of narratives. Including Emily Roysdon (whose "Untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project)", 2001-7, references and redirects Wojnarowicz's earlier "Arthur Rimbaud in New York" from '78), Troy Brantuch's "Stamps", 1975-2007, a gathering of his used figurative rubber stamps used in works over the past three decades, plus Rosalind Nashashibi, Manon de Boer, Charline von Heyle, Blinky Palermo and many more. You'll necessarily need to spend some time w/ this one, but I am betting that's a good thing.
* Kara Walker NYGW exhibition walkthrough @ Sikkema, Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St, 2-3p. Walker and American theatre critic Hilton Als lead a walkthrough of the artist's latest exhibition, "Dust Jackets for the Niggerati—and Supporting Dissertations, Drawings submitted ruefully by Dr. Kara E. Walker".
* Debo Eilers "In Your House. X" @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. Love Debo Eilers. He's bonkers and that's awesome. The Greater New York alum unfurls more of his "Screengrab" series and elements of his performances (almost like digital cookies).
* Hilary Harnischfeger @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. Wall-based abstractions incorporating rocks and plaster w/ the usual ink and paint, extending the sculptural envelope and relating back to her freestanding sculptures.
+ added awesomeness: discussion b/w Harnischfeger & art historian/writer Suzanne Hudson, on SAT (eve of opening) 1-2p.
* Michael Williams "Straightforward as a Noodle" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. I keep returning to "Big Picture" a visually searing group show held co-curated by artists Ryan Schneider and Tom Sanford and held at Priska Juschka's gallery in W. Chelsea last summer. Williams was part of that exhibition, an eye-watering gaping maw on a mural-sized canvas. He brings that mix of wildly abstract and brutally figurative paintings to his third solo show at Canada.
MONDAY
* Joel Morrison @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Found-object sculptures that force you to look twice (or thrice, or more), everything from a bubblewrapped "McCracken" to a fallen shopping cart, cast in stainless steel or painted fiberglass.
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Rooms With a View" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). It's a wonder what a little wall-paint can do for an exhibition. The Met eschews its usual denser hues (which contribute a shadowed reverence to its spotlit, cerebral special exhibitions, naturally a given for this museum) for a sun-streaked pale gray, the color of bedsheets caught in morning rays. It's totally appropriate, as this exhibition of European paintings and drawings all feature some sort of illumination, in their embodied rooms and open windows. Another point I loved about this exhibition beyond the construction is the scale of the works: little is large-scale here. The installation comes off sparse and regal in that respect, w/ modest-sized renderings adding an airiness to the already light-suffused atmospherics. Georg Friedrich Kersting featured his wife in his single-person compositions, plaiting her hair in "In Front of the Mirror" (1827) and sewing something against a drawn screen in "Young Woman Sewing by Lamplight" (1823). I'm not sure how many compositions young Louise-Adéone Drolling executed — she's daughter of portraitist Martin Drolling — but her "Interior With Young Woman Tracing a Flower" (1820-22) is an achievement in mise-en-scene, from the tulips in the foreground to the urban Parisian backdrop and church out the window. Johann Erdmann Hummel's pen & ink drawings with washes elucidate his deftness in perspectives, like "Sitting Room" (1820) and its various mirrors and reflections. For empty rooms, I quite liked Johann Gottfried Jentzsch's "The Artist's Studio in Dresden" (1820), a watercolor, with a tiny Argand lamp throwing vivid, butterfly-like shadows on the wall and floor. Carl Ludwig Kaaz's "View from Grassi's Villa toward the Plauensche Grund near Dresden" (1807) is probably the largest work here, its central picture window soaring out into the horizon with arches and trees, foregrounded with an open book on the ledge. And to dispel any impressions that the exhibition is too sweet, there's Adolph Menzen's spooky "Staircase by Night" (1848, one of the later works) near the conclusion.
* "Locations" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. The earliest works in this loosely Conceptual group show appeared decades before GPS, but there is still this underlying notion of "here I am" and "this is where I've been" — plus the sociopolitical notions that follow. I have to relinquish the fact that Stanley Brouwn's unarchivable oeuvre is appearing more and more in exhibitions (ever since his part in MoMA's wonderful "In and Out of Amsterdam", I've seen him at least twice a year), as it does in this gallery show. But I'm not complaining! His bound books of his movements and his "This Way Brouwn" series — consider his statement "Ich bin Richtung geworden (I have become direction)" — are the rawest essence of geographical location and mapping as framework for art. John Baldessari's "California Map Project" (reappearing from his "Pure Beauty" retrospective at the Met) is another excellent example. If this is Baldessari's take on "impos[ing] language on nature, and vice versa" (i.e. forming CALIFORNIA in giant letters with local materials in their approx locations as they appear on a map of the state), it's an achievement. In an early Sol LeWitt photograph, he excised an obtuse triangle from a map of Manhattan, removing the locations of where he's lived. Catherine Opie's series of C-prints of Glacier Bay, the remote national park and preserve in SE Alaska, feels otherworldly with its terrifically tall and sharp rocky walls.
* Mark di Suvero @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 465 W 23rd St. Three new small-scale steel twists, each a kinetic sculpture, which totally suits di Suvero's cursive lines and limblike shapes. He includes a series of works on paper in various media from recent years, each surprisingly w/ an acid-toned palette.
LAST CHANCE
* 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. Yes he's still disturbing as hell. That was an easy one! The titular large work, with its headless figures splayed against a pink wood-like structure, let alone the dancing figures entitled "Trader's Deal" elsewhere, will haunt your dreams. Have fun!
* SeaHyun Lee "Between Red" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. At first glance, Lee's crimson multitiered landscapes against a blanked out "sea" are totally fantastical, until you peer through the layers and realize the blend of Koreas here. Lee paints mountains and land fragments from the North and South, alongside Korean architecture and some modernized buildings, representing his recollections of living in the demilitarized zone during his military service, plus his youth before that. Take it as political if you like, this utopian vision of a combined Korea, or as Lee's personal memories and nostalgia for the past.
* 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…?
* "Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). This is less about performance captured in photography than photography involving some sort of performance. Does that make sense?? I liked some of it: Robin Rhode's "Untitled, Dream Houses" (2005) a 28-frame stop-action suite of the artist juggling a cascade of charcoal-drawn objects on a brick wall (table, TV, chair, bed, car) before capitulating under the weight, is both a sharp comment on consumerism and the omnipresent American Dream (though importantly he shot this in his native S. Africa) and brilliant display of technical mastery. There's a lot of nastiness elsewhere: one creepy wall goes from Bruce Nauman's slightly disquieting self-portraits to a Matthew Barney "Cremaster 3" still (its Vaseline frame eliciting a security guard and barrier), to Otto Muehl's painful and kinky "Transparent Packing" (1964). I was surprised to read the 'recent acquisition' tag that accompanied VALIE EXPORT's famous "Genital Panic" (1969) action, but props on MoMA for acquiring nonetheless. Plus there's four polaroids from Laurel Nakadate's "Lucky Tiger" (2009), six shots from Adrian Piper's disquieting series "Food For the Spirit" (1971), and the classic "Man and Woman #20" (1960) from Eiko Hosoe, a contrasty b&w print of the woman's head cupped in a headlock and, for all intents and purposes, appearing to be decapitated, preempting "Tomie" and all sorts of J-Horror classics. ENDS MON
WEDNESDAY
* Georg Baselitz "The Early Sixties" @ Michael Werner Gallery / 74 E 77th St. Major paintings and drawings from a pivotal early moment in the postwar Neo-Expressionist's career, following his move to West Berlin.
* Keith Haring @ Gladstone Gallery / 530 W 21st St. The gallery's debut exhibition of this downtown legend's oeuvre is particularly vital: owner Barbara Gladstone commissioned Haring to produce a series of lithographs (the artist's first prints) back in '82. Those and other early, never-before-seen works on paper figure into this exhibition.
* Katy Moran @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. A breathless new body of work from the British artist, small-scale gestural abstract paintings in various treatments and washes on MDF board.
* Pterodactyl + Sweet Bulbs @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle-Wyckoff), 8p/$8. Your NY indie primer split over two levels, w/ the speed-rock and Paleolithic rhythms of Pterodactyl and fuzzy noise-pop quartet Sweet Bulbs upstairs and Human Resources leading the lo-fi drama downstairs. At least six bands and lots of awesomeness await. w/ Guardian Alien and Antimagic
THURSDAY
* John Chamberlain "New Sculpture" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Whoa: depending on your knowledge of and thirst for art-world gossip, this exhibition occurs w/ a loaded meaning. Two avenues away, The Pace Gallery staged a gallery-career survey of Chamberlain's crushed auto classics. Now repped by Gagosian, the gallery unveils their own cache of Chamberlain sculpture, an entirely new body of work (w/ a followup at Gagosian's Britannia St location in a few weeks). Look, I'm an aesthete, so I'll love it.
* Eric Fischl "Early Paintings" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. The postmodern artist's early body of work, eight figurative paintings and two studies on glassine from '79 to '86, many incorporating Fischl's deft take on banal Americana and subversive voyeurism.
* Gillian Wearing "People" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Wearing's big return to NYC since her 2003 solo exhibition fills both gallery floors, w/ the massive seven-channel "Snapshot" video installation on the ground floor, balanced with her latest video work "Bully" (drawing from her feature-length film "Self Made") and the installation "Secrets and Lies" upstairs.
* Subodh Gupta "A glass of water" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Gupta exploration of the transformative quality of everyday objects — in his sculptures, incandescent paintings and installations — segues into measurement devices, from tromp l'oeil "dough" to water brimming off a metal cup.
+ added awesomeness: a discussion w/ Gupta at the gallery on SAT 11a-noon.
* Hilary Harkness @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. A new array of Harkness' impossible paintings — like Hieronymous Bosch cut w/ Prohibition Swing and '50s sci-fi — after her previous solo show three years ago. Even cooler, she's been keeping a blog on the NY Academy of Art's forum leading up to this exhibition, so it sounds extra dope.
* Songsik Min "Two Faces" @ Doosan Gallery NY / 533 W 25th St. Paintings and an installation reflecting Min's creative process, using unassembled toy guns as the jumpoff motif.
* Sonya Biesofsky "Tenement" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. In her debut solo exhibition at the gallery, Biesofsky injects some telltale NYC apartment details, rendered entirely in fragile, subtly transparent paper.
* Robert Greene @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. New textural abstract paintings and works on paper, composed on acid-free vellum and mounted on thin aluminum panels.
* Leon Kossoff @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. New landscape paintings from the last decade by the British artist, focusing on an old cherry tree in his garden.
* Gideon Rubin "Shallow Waters" @ Hosfelt Gallery / 531 W 36th St. A new body of work from the Israeli artist, constituting figurative paintings and a video animation originating from early 20th C found photographs.
* "Thor" (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 2011) preview screening @ Museum of the Moving Image / 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria (E/M/R to Steinway St, NQ to 36 Ave), 7p/$15. Calling all fanboys (and fangirls?), b/c you know you want to attend this, esp. b/c it's in 3D. Take one muscle-bound blond (Chris Hemsworth) as the titular Marvel comic character — not precisely Norse mythology — take one cutie (Natalie Portman) and a huge cast of big-name good guys and big-name bad guys, each in costumes more ridiculous than the last…. it's the Battle for Asgard, baby. Film officially opens tomorrow in wide release (incl IMAX) but you won't see me covering that.
FRIDAY
* Donald Judd @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525-533 W 19th St. Epic awesomeness. The gallery stages its inaugural exhibition of this seminal postwar American artist — call him a Minimalist, call him an philosopher, he's a visionary through and through. The installation recalls Judd's classic '89 exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany and is the first time this array — floor-mounted anodized aluminum open boxes, shot through with vivid Plexiglas color — has been reassembled at the vast '89 scale.
* Jasper Johns "New Sculpture and Works on Paper" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. There are a LOT of awesome 'destination' gallery shows on right now, but I've gotta say this one, Johns' most prolific body of work in a five-year span, transcends in importance. I've got wild hopes for this exhibition, which includes his experimentation w/ Shrinky Dinks (hello '80s!) and his unparalleled gridded numerals. See you there.
* Jack Smith "Thanks for Explaining Me" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Neville Wakefield curates what should be an incredible survey of the creative iconoclast's oeuvre, from his experimental films ("Flaming Creatures" is just the beginning) to drawings, collages and photographs. Three collaborative works by younger artists Ryan McNamara, A.L. Steiner and T.J. Wilcox elucidate Smith's wide-ranging influence on the contemporary generation.
* Arshile Gorky "1947" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. The gallery stages an exhibition on a "master of the gesture" (I'm taking that straight from a Gagosian Beverly Hills group show last year, which incl Gorky's work), focused on his brilliant late-period lyrical abstractions, just before the master hung himself, cutting short his tragic genius.
* Louise Lawler "Fitting" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Lawler takes photographs of art in museums, galleries, homes, and auction houses and stretches them to fit the proportions of Metro Pictures' walls, printing the altered results on adhesive wall vinyl to create some dope wallpaper.
+ added awesomeness: screening of Lawler's "Birdcalls" (1972/81), every 1/2 hour at the gallery, SUN 11a-6p.
* William Kentridge @ Marian Goodman Gallery / 24 W 57th St. The first public exhibition of "Other Faces" from Kentridge's series "Drawings for Projection", created with a 35mm camera and charcoal drawings and feat. that Johannesburg antihero Soho Eckstein.
+ added awesomeness: a book-signing with Kentridge at the gallery on SAT, 11a-1p. (RSVP: rsvp@mariangoodman.com)
* Jesus Rafael Soto "1955-2004" @ Haunch of Venison NY / 1230 Ave of Americas, 20th Fl. The Venezuelan artist's first major NY survey since his '74 exhibition at the Gugg. Expect strong colors and optical illusions, plus works blurring the line b/w painting and sculpture, from this Group Zero champion's oeuvre.
* Garth Weiser @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Razor-sharp geometric abstracts and cunning minimalism from a guy I dig very much b/c he portrays each very well.
+ added awesomeness: discussion b/w Weiser & Charles Wylie (curator of contemporary art at Dallas Museum of Art) at gallery, SUN 1-2p.
* Damian Loeb "Verschränkung and the Uncertainty Principle" @ Acquavella Gallery / 18 E 79th St. New sexy photorealistic paintings that elicit an active dialogue w/ voyeurism and subject...and in this case swap "subject" w/ "artist's wife". Ahem.
* Ashley Bickerton @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. New eye-watering paintings w/ custom carved frames from the Neo-Geo stalwart, all cosmic-y and like "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", visualized.
* "Idée Fixe" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. A group show of black and white drawings created from intense, time-consuming gestures, feat. Man Bartlett, Astrid Bowlby, Jacob El Hanani, Dan Fischer, Shane Hope, Joan Linder, Aric Obrosey, Michael Waugh and Daniel Zeller.
* Ivan Witenstein @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Continuing his political and cultural imagery with Witenstein's takes on "jazz diplomacy" circa WWII, imbued w/ confrontational pop imagery.
+ added awesomeness: conversation b/w Witenstein & rockstar artist Barnaby Furnas at the gallery, SAT noon-1p.
* Olga Chernysheva @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. The contemporary Russian experience, depicted in photography, film, drawings and combinations thereof.
* Li Songsong @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. Pretty neat: this is the debut U.S. solo exhibition of the Beijing-based artist's large-scale paintings, heavily impastoed and recalling photographs and film stills (albeit significantly and texturally transformed).
* Robert Mapplethorpe "50 Americans" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. 50 works by the legendary American artist, selected by 50 Americans from all states, backgrounds and generations, perhaps commenting on the unexpected universality of Mapplethorpe's challenging history.
+ added awesomeness: panel discussion "New Directions in Curatorial Models", at the gallery SAT 3-5p.
* "15 Years" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. A trajectory of the gallery's history through its solo shows, feat. iconic works by Haeri Yoo, Adrian Piper, Jenny Scobel, Tejal Shah, Dona Nelson and many others.
* Martin Kippenberger "I Had a Vision" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Mixed-media sculptural work that partially reconstructs two of the late artist's large-scale exhibitions from the summer (San Francisco) and fall (an unused tunnel b/w two Vienna subway stations) of '91.
* Torben Giehler "Lateralus" @ Leo Koenig Inc / 545 W 23rd St. So I totally hear Tool in this exhibition title, though I realize it's going to be nothing like progressive metal. Rather, think tasty grayscale geometric abstracts.
* Sean Landers "Around the World Alone" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Apparently this is the prolific artist's 50th solo exhibition, and it evokes some of his classic earlier imagery of the solitary clown and the Golden Globes, via paintings, bronze sculptures and more.
* Richard Long "Flow and Ebb" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. Once again the gallery uses its unique layout to an advantageous solo exhibition, permitting the Bristol-based artist to enact a wall-scaling, 27-ft tall site-specific drawing, plus mud-on-slate paintings and earthy sculpture.
* Paul Sietsema @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. New process-driven works, including newspaper drawings and these multistep photo-drawing-sprayed ink compositions that add a strong materiality to digital age renderings.
* Jesse Willenbring "Left to the Darkness" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) / 261 Broome St. What I'm calling 'figurative abstract' paintings, on canvas and mounted tablecloth, by the NY-based artist.
* "Hobo With a Shotgun" (dir. Jason Eisener, 2010) @ Village East Theatre / 181 2nd Ave (L to 3rd Ave), w/ The Plague & dir. Eisener attending nightly screenings FRI & SAT. Eisener's feature-length adaptation of his own "Grindhouse"-winning fake trailer has been blowing up the festival scene in double-barreled bursts since SXSW, and it lands in uncut, Technicolor glory (or should it be "gory"?), w/ action legend Rutger Hauer leading the charge as the titular antihero. "Hobo" carries a LIST-certified badge of dopeness. And to take this over the top, true exploitation style, Eisener joins dir. Jeff Lieberman (of "Blue Sunshine", "Just Before Dawn" etc) FRI at midnight and dir. William Lustig ("Maniac", "Vigilante") SAT at midnight for unfettered post-screening discussions! Splatter buffs (self included) love this.
* "Caterpillar" (dir. Koji Wakamatsu, 2010) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Wow, I am surprised and intrigued that Wakamatsu's latest scorching takedown of right-wing nationalism receives a proper screen-run. It's adapted from Edogawa Rampo's grueling short-story "Imomushi" (1929), though it's perforated w/ Wakamatsu's indictment of Japanese propaganda and militarism — and you better believe it's graphic as hell.
* "The Peach Blossom Land" (dir. Stan Lai, 1992) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 9p. Lai's debut (which premiered here as part of New Directors/New Films in '93) is a psychedelic historical affair, thanks to Christopher Doyle's dreamy cinematography.
* NYU Strawberry Festival @ NYU LaGuardia Place b/w W 3rd & W 4th St (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 1-5p/FREE. So there's like strawberries at this thing, but whatever, loads of dope bands make it a must-go for me (beer or no beer): Lightning Bolt headline the event w/ their broiling blitzkrieg of percussive noise, preceded by Matt Mondanile's lulling Ducktails and the speed-rock harmonics of Pterodactyl. w/ The So So Glos
* The Pains of Being Pure at Heart @ Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NR/L/456 to Union Square), 6p/SOLD OUT!. Frequent LIST-readers know well my love of local darlings The Pains. I've seen 'em over a dozen times now and still wait anxiously for this knockout show. See, they've got a sweet new album out "Belong" that's super fuzzy-scuzzy & I can't wait for these cuties to translate that love live. w/ Big Troubles
SATURDAY
* Richard Tuttle "What's the Wind" @ The Pace Gallery / 510 W 25th St. A far more complex output from Tuttle than I'm used to, six "space frame" free-standing sculptures that incredibly synthesize five decades of Tuttle's oeuvre.
* Laurel Nakadate @ Leslie Tonkonow Art Projects / 535 W 22nd St. Nakadate's thought-provoking career survey is currently running at MoMA PS1 through August 8 and includes part of her yearlong body of work "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears". That's the jumpoff for her latest solo exhibition, large C-prints of her crying each and every day throughout 2010, plus the debut of her newest video "Lost Party Guest" (2011).
* David Salle @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Salle follows up his exhibition of classic '80s paintings last year w/ new works, deftly combining unlikely imagery in feats beyond James Rosenquist (who I consider an unlikely-combining master) and exemplifying his fortitude and influence on younger artists. Here he revisits earlier subject matter of iconic women.
* David Shapiro "Money is No Object" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. This is the result of Shapiro's year spent redrawing and repainting all of his bills and receipts; the innate juxtapositions and ironies should be illuminating.
* Aaron Young "Built Tough" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Though he eschews skidding motorcycles this time (his infamous "Greeting Card" performance at the 7th Regiment Armory in '07), Young christens the gallery w/ his continued take on contemporary American culture, via silkscreens, paintings and sculpture.
* Sheila Gallagher & Robin Nagle "Trash Talk" @ DODGE Gallery / 15 Rivington St, 6p. A discussion b/w gallery artist Gallagher (whose melted plastic trash renderings line the walls and beguile the mind) and Dr. Robin Nagle, an anthropologist focused on rubbish and its labor and infrastructural requirements in urban contexts.
* "Marfa Voices" (dir. Rainer Judd, 2010) screening and talk @ Bumble & Bumble / 415 W 13th St, 3rd Fl, 4p. Donald Judd's daughter (and co-executor of his estate) directed this collage of the incredible Central Texas town, home to the Chinati Foundation. Space is limited, so RSVP: mackie@davidzwirner.com to guarantee your spot.
* "Cape No. 7" (dir. Wei Tei-Sheng, 2008) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6:15p. The directorial debut of this young Taiwanese filmmaker, who's over a generation younger than Hou Hsiao-Hsien, has created a very Hou-like meditation on Taiwanese postwar history, linked by love letters and Taiwanese pop music.
* "A Time to Live, A Time to Die" (dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1985) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 8:45p. The 2nd of the Taiwanese New Wave powerhouse's coming-of-age trilogy, focused on the aftermath of the Chinese Revolution and inspired by Hou's own experiences.
* Japan All Night! @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 10:30p/$15. AWESOME: a punk rock benefit for Japan relief, w/ all proceeds going to Second Harvest Japan, aiding those in the affected Tohoku region. The lineup is all-star and fierce, w/ all-girl knockouts The Suzan (maybe you've heard of them??) headlining, plus Care Bears on Fire, Uzuhi, The Homewreckers and more.
* Peelander-Z + Hard Nips @ STUDIO at Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NR/L/456 to Union Square), 8p/$14. Your favorite color-coded East Village-residing Japanese punks (Peelander-Z) and your other favorite Brooklyn-based Japanese all-girl punks Hard Nips, together again and on a trajectory to rock your socks off.
* Yuck @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/SOLD OUT! These Brits are beyond adorable — it took 'em ages and visa hangups to arrive stateside, but I want 'em here all the time. Listen to like 20 seconds of "Holing Out" (that snarling-yet-bright guitar, Daniel's pitch-perfect slang, Mariko's fashion-y sway) and you'll fall in love, too.
SUNDAY
* Francis Alÿs "A Story of Deception" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St) + MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to Court Sq/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq). Allegory and social action permeate the Belgian artist's Conceptual cross-media oeuvre. I'm talking complete ends of the spectrum here, long-process video performances that take years to make, related communal performances captured in photos and installations, and subtly surreal paintings recalling another famous Belgian artist two generations before him. The related PS1 exhibition focuses on Alÿs' 2002 piece "Modern Procession", which documented MoMA's temporary relocation to that Long Island City former schoolhouse during the museum's 2002-4 expansion project.
* "Time Again" @ SculptureCenter / 44-19 Purves St, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq). A survey of repetition, whose works' results often twist temporal notions of history, generations and our understanding of narratives. Including Emily Roysdon (whose "Untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project)", 2001-7, references and redirects Wojnarowicz's earlier "Arthur Rimbaud in New York" from '78), Troy Brantuch's "Stamps", 1975-2007, a gathering of his used figurative rubber stamps used in works over the past three decades, plus Rosalind Nashashibi, Manon de Boer, Charline von Heyle, Blinky Palermo and many more. You'll necessarily need to spend some time w/ this one, but I am betting that's a good thing.
* Kara Walker NYGW exhibition walkthrough @ Sikkema, Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St, 2-3p. Walker and American theatre critic Hilton Als lead a walkthrough of the artist's latest exhibition, "Dust Jackets for the Niggerati—and Supporting Dissertations, Drawings submitted ruefully by Dr. Kara E. Walker".
* Debo Eilers "In Your House. X" @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. Love Debo Eilers. He's bonkers and that's awesome. The Greater New York alum unfurls more of his "Screengrab" series and elements of his performances (almost like digital cookies).
* Hilary Harnischfeger @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. Wall-based abstractions incorporating rocks and plaster w/ the usual ink and paint, extending the sculptural envelope and relating back to her freestanding sculptures.
+ added awesomeness: discussion b/w Harnischfeger & art historian/writer Suzanne Hudson, on SAT (eve of opening) 1-2p.
* Michael Williams "Straightforward as a Noodle" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. I keep returning to "Big Picture" a visually searing group show held co-curated by artists Ryan Schneider and Tom Sanford and held at Priska Juschka's gallery in W. Chelsea last summer. Williams was part of that exhibition, an eye-watering gaping maw on a mural-sized canvas. He brings that mix of wildly abstract and brutally figurative paintings to his third solo show at Canada.
MONDAY
* Joel Morrison @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Found-object sculptures that force you to look twice (or thrice, or more), everything from a bubblewrapped "McCracken" to a fallen shopping cart, cast in stainless steel or painted fiberglass.
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Rooms With a View" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). It's a wonder what a little wall-paint can do for an exhibition. The Met eschews its usual denser hues (which contribute a shadowed reverence to its spotlit, cerebral special exhibitions, naturally a given for this museum) for a sun-streaked pale gray, the color of bedsheets caught in morning rays. It's totally appropriate, as this exhibition of European paintings and drawings all feature some sort of illumination, in their embodied rooms and open windows. Another point I loved about this exhibition beyond the construction is the scale of the works: little is large-scale here. The installation comes off sparse and regal in that respect, w/ modest-sized renderings adding an airiness to the already light-suffused atmospherics. Georg Friedrich Kersting featured his wife in his single-person compositions, plaiting her hair in "In Front of the Mirror" (1827) and sewing something against a drawn screen in "Young Woman Sewing by Lamplight" (1823). I'm not sure how many compositions young Louise-Adéone Drolling executed — she's daughter of portraitist Martin Drolling — but her "Interior With Young Woman Tracing a Flower" (1820-22) is an achievement in mise-en-scene, from the tulips in the foreground to the urban Parisian backdrop and church out the window. Johann Erdmann Hummel's pen & ink drawings with washes elucidate his deftness in perspectives, like "Sitting Room" (1820) and its various mirrors and reflections. For empty rooms, I quite liked Johann Gottfried Jentzsch's "The Artist's Studio in Dresden" (1820), a watercolor, with a tiny Argand lamp throwing vivid, butterfly-like shadows on the wall and floor. Carl Ludwig Kaaz's "View from Grassi's Villa toward the Plauensche Grund near Dresden" (1807) is probably the largest work here, its central picture window soaring out into the horizon with arches and trees, foregrounded with an open book on the ledge. And to dispel any impressions that the exhibition is too sweet, there's Adolph Menzen's spooky "Staircase by Night" (1848, one of the later works) near the conclusion.
* "Locations" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. The earliest works in this loosely Conceptual group show appeared decades before GPS, but there is still this underlying notion of "here I am" and "this is where I've been" — plus the sociopolitical notions that follow. I have to relinquish the fact that Stanley Brouwn's unarchivable oeuvre is appearing more and more in exhibitions (ever since his part in MoMA's wonderful "In and Out of Amsterdam", I've seen him at least twice a year), as it does in this gallery show. But I'm not complaining! His bound books of his movements and his "This Way Brouwn" series — consider his statement "Ich bin Richtung geworden (I have become direction)" — are the rawest essence of geographical location and mapping as framework for art. John Baldessari's "California Map Project" (reappearing from his "Pure Beauty" retrospective at the Met) is another excellent example. If this is Baldessari's take on "impos[ing] language on nature, and vice versa" (i.e. forming CALIFORNIA in giant letters with local materials in their approx locations as they appear on a map of the state), it's an achievement. In an early Sol LeWitt photograph, he excised an obtuse triangle from a map of Manhattan, removing the locations of where he's lived. Catherine Opie's series of C-prints of Glacier Bay, the remote national park and preserve in SE Alaska, feels otherworldly with its terrifically tall and sharp rocky walls.
* Mark di Suvero @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 465 W 23rd St. Three new small-scale steel twists, each a kinetic sculpture, which totally suits di Suvero's cursive lines and limblike shapes. He includes a series of works on paper in various media from recent years, each surprisingly w/ an acid-toned palette.
LAST CHANCE
* 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. Yes he's still disturbing as hell. That was an easy one! The titular large work, with its headless figures splayed against a pink wood-like structure, let alone the dancing figures entitled "Trader's Deal" elsewhere, will haunt your dreams. Have fun!
* SeaHyun Lee "Between Red" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. At first glance, Lee's crimson multitiered landscapes against a blanked out "sea" are totally fantastical, until you peer through the layers and realize the blend of Koreas here. Lee paints mountains and land fragments from the North and South, alongside Korean architecture and some modernized buildings, representing his recollections of living in the demilitarized zone during his military service, plus his youth before that. Take it as political if you like, this utopian vision of a combined Korea, or as Lee's personal memories and nostalgia for the past.
* 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…?
* "Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). This is less about performance captured in photography than photography involving some sort of performance. Does that make sense?? I liked some of it: Robin Rhode's "Untitled, Dream Houses" (2005) a 28-frame stop-action suite of the artist juggling a cascade of charcoal-drawn objects on a brick wall (table, TV, chair, bed, car) before capitulating under the weight, is both a sharp comment on consumerism and the omnipresent American Dream (though importantly he shot this in his native S. Africa) and brilliant display of technical mastery. There's a lot of nastiness elsewhere: one creepy wall goes from Bruce Nauman's slightly disquieting self-portraits to a Matthew Barney "Cremaster 3" still (its Vaseline frame eliciting a security guard and barrier), to Otto Muehl's painful and kinky "Transparent Packing" (1964). I was surprised to read the 'recent acquisition' tag that accompanied VALIE EXPORT's famous "Genital Panic" (1969) action, but props on MoMA for acquiring nonetheless. Plus there's four polaroids from Laurel Nakadate's "Lucky Tiger" (2009), six shots from Adrian Piper's disquieting series "Food For the Spirit" (1971), and the classic "Man and Woman #20" (1960) from Eiko Hosoe, a contrasty b&w print of the woman's head cupped in a headlock and, for all intents and purposes, appearing to be decapitated, preempting "Tomie" and all sorts of J-Horror classics. ENDS MON
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