It's that time of year when seemingly every publication, art- and otherwise, does a 'best-of', 'year-end', 'top ten' list. Artforum did like a thousand of these. And so can I. While my writing is far more rudimentary than what you may read elsewhere, you can rest assured it is my highly subjective, slang-riddled, personally-experienced opinion. And with that:
My TOP TEN LIST-worthy cultural events of 2011 (in chronological order, b/c further ranking would be too masochistic)
1. Patrick Jacobs "Familiar Terrain" @ Pierogi Gallery
What I said then:
01/25/11: I love this exhibition's title: it felt totally appropriate as I practically dove face-first into the warm, endless meadows realized in Jacobs' awesome works — they're a combo of meticulous diorama and convex Claude glass lenses, so they appear as 3D photographs. I count myself the requisite city-dweller, a hardcore urbanite who likes his parks but is most comfortable on pavement, transit platforms and structures several stories off the ground. But I was beyond charmed by these swaths of greenery, recalling everything from some English glade to upstate New York, just off the beaten path. "Fairy Ring with English Daisies" (2010) bears a flattened oval of grass in its foreground. The tiny "Dandelion Cluster" (a 2-inch lens) is stuffed to the brim w/ thistles and that blossoming weed, like seeing it from the POV of tall grass. Water features, distant powerlines, water-towers, and other elements slowly reveal themselves in Jacobs' compositions, as our eyes soar back toward the horizon. This Cali-born, Brooklyn-based enchanter is featured in the upcoming "Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities" group exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design — but those feelings of delight when peering into a Jacobs' lens are totally natural.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Jacobs' works — blurring sculpture, photography, painting (kinda), collage, installation — put you at ease. I could stare at and into these hemispheres for hours, off, off into the distance, of rain-matted grass, of trees and flowers, of cloud patterns and, possibly, landmarks. Everything is purposefully vague yet gently familiar. I look forward to Jacobs' inclusion at VOLTA NY 2012.
2. Laurel Nakadate "Only the Lonely" @ MoMA PS1
What I said then:
02/01/11: The fact I can't come up with an easy explanation of my feelings when walking through Nakadate's first comprehensive museum exhibition speaks to the power of what's on display. And what's on display, to put it bluntly, is the artist herself. Here goes: many of Nakadate's video works and photography features her play-acting for the camera w/ older, single, anonymous men. They may be acting out exorcisms in the guy's house — like "Little Exorcisms" (2009) — or having mock-birthday parties, "Happy Birthday" (2000), the earliest here, three videos of the guy serenading Nakadate in front of a candlelit cake. They could be reenacting the heroine's cinematic death, like in "Beg For Your Life" (2006) or kinda dancing w/ her to Britney Spears in "Oops!" (2000). Or they could be like the wild-haired artist, sketching her for "Lessons 1-10" (2002) while Nakadate poses in her panties or less, staring at us while we and the guy stare at her. These videos and related photography bear the triple assault of deep unease, gnawing loneliness and tentative comfort — most evident as her comforting them, stepping into these socially-awkward men's lives for an hour or whatever, however long it takes to film the project, though I don't suspect it to be entirely one-sided. The strong sense of voyeurism (the men's lustful or innocent demeanor around her, Nakadate's magnetic presence in the frame) is tempered by Nakadate controlling the camera. Like "Good Morning, Sunshine" (2009), where she's the off-camera voice in young women's bedrooms, coaxing them to strip to their underwear. And her self-portraits, like the new series "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears", an overwhelming array of C-prints capturing her crying all throughout 2010, in the U.S.-Canada sojourn via Amtrak "Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind" (2006), where she throws her underwear out the moving train's window, and in "Love Hotel" (2005), a video of her coupling w/ an invisible, absent lover in Tokyo's love hotel sprawl. And, furthermore, in her project videos. She is undeniably courageous to enter a stranger's flat, but the ensuing invigoration and mutual respect and emotions may be to everyone's benefit, hers and the guys. I'm not trying to understand the thoughts going through these guys heads, having an attractive young woman artist creating a project with them, or if they ever see the final results of her respective work. Nakadate, however, is trying to understand, sharing a little face-time and a little human interaction. Both Nakadate's full-length films "Stay the Same Never Change" (2009, w/ its Sundance premiere) and "The Wolf Knife" (2010, which I hadn't seen until now) are included in the exhibition.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
There's no easy answer how you're "supposed" to feel in this survey exhibition. As a straight man, catching myself gawking (for lack of a better word) at Nakadate's varying stages of undress in her performative videos and photography, I felt no more excused from criticism as many middle-aged sad cases populating her works, tentatively joining in the performances with her. At times I found the whole lot numbing, particularly "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears", while her videos bore a necessarily more visceral interplay between Nakadate, the camera, sometimes her guests, and us the viewers. But I kept thinking about it, and tumbling over my own feelings, long after I'd met Nakadate at her opening and walked through the show. Even after the second and third visits, I was still thinking it over. That reverberation is crucial to any good exhibition. This one doesn't just let you go.
3. Glenn Ligon "AMERICA" @ Whitney Museum
What I said then:
03/22/11: This is essential. Glenn Ligon's textured, language-imbued works encapsulate the experience of growing up Black in America, specifically a Black male in America (and even more specifically, a gay Black male in America), and bridges this nation's troubled cultural history from the slave-owning Old South to President Obama, w/ special emphasis on race relations in the '90s. The Bronx-born, NY-based Ligon begins the experience w/ a huge silkscreen "Hands" (1996), a truncated image from the previous year's Million Man March. Think about that time period for a moment: I was in middle school, the Republican Party had overtaken the House during Pres. Clinton's first term, economic disparity and unemployment for African Americans were at terrible heights, and there was an alarm of the media's fixation on O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson and the ensuing Black male targeted image. I was young but I realized there was a hell of a mess going down. Ligon felt that exponentially more acutely, and this one striking, almost abstract rendering of a sea of outstretched hands beneath a twilit horizon acts like a flag and snapshot of what's to come w/in his exhibition. His early text-only painting "Untitled (I Am a Man)" (1988), recalling the famous placards carried by Memphis sanitation workers in '68 — which, incidentally, Sharon Hayes recreates as part of her "IN the Near Future" (2009) slide-project installation at the Guggenheim (their "Found in Translation" multi-artist show) — is evident of his manipulation and control of words and texture. The type is shrunken in its heavily enameled backdrop and the leading (space between lines) is spaced out, punctuating the words: "I AM - A - MAN". The next room is lined with door-sized canvases from 1990, each roughly painted white and filled w/ repeated stenciled sentences, like a massive typewriter gone haywire. The sources range from Jean Genet's incendiary play "The Blacks", as Ligon's work "I'm turning into a specter before your very eyes and I'm going to haunt you"; to Jesse Jackson's poem "I Am Somebody" and it's neighbor "I Was Somebody" (the only one w/ white-on-white type); to Zora Neale Hurston's essay "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background"—they read over and over ad infinitum, 'til the letters bleed black. I read the placard in the next room, installed w/ four shipping crates, for help: Ligon combines his '93 series "To Disembark" (based on a 19th-century account by a slave named Henry Brown, who escaped by mailing himself to Philadelphia in a wooden crate) w/ actual crates emitting the soft refrains of Billie Holiday ("Strange Fruit", her anti-lynching anthem) and KRS-One ("Sound of da Police") and frightening, stylized fugitive slave 'wanted' posters w/ Ligon as the fleeing subject. It's a full-on, sensorial, visceral installation that exemplifies his deftness in conveying a pan-generational Black experience, from colonial days to early '90s police brutality, in one focused gut-punch. More from Ligon's Million Man March series follows, plus a room of images from Robert Mapplethorpe's complicated and provocative "Black Book" publication, notated w/ a melange of critical commentary (both pro and con). He calls a broader scope of Black male imagery into play: whether you're "turned on" or offended by Mapplethorpe's sexually charged (or exploitative?) subject matter, whether you find traditional film roles and typecasting (the hyperbolized comedian, the sullen action hero, the sole Black guy who dies w/in 15 minutes of that slasher film etc etc) significantly troubling or you're ambivalent towards them — the "correct answer" is indeed infinitely more complicated. His series on James Baldwin's 1953 essay "Stranger in the Village" — the writer's experience staying in an Alpine hamlet that had never seen a dark-skinned person before — soaks Baldwin's chilling words in black paint and coal dust, turning "the world is white no longer, and will never be white again" into impenetrable, twinkling darkness. One of these works even represents Ligon's self-portrait, as he excised stenciled text from one, leaving a black and amorphously bordered void. Finally there's the neon, one striking installation of three imperfect neon signs spelling out AMERICA, in backward letters, in flickering tones and a third painted over in black, coolly retaining the power of the word. Sit amongst these for a few moments and let the experience of the previous rooms settle in: America's a dazzling place but mixed up, still not on the righteous path for all its people. America flickers like a caution sign, America's at half-power, struggling to get back on track. America's a big place and a symbolizes an epic many things, success, freedom, power and plight. What does it mean to you?
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
In a season of awesome retrospectives and surveys came one of the Whitney's best, at least in my recent memory and my favorite since Jenny Holzer's in 2009. Ligon's exhibition is expertly put together, not precisely chronologically, so that the gut-punch opening silkscreen recurs in context about midway through, ending with a quiet yet powerful neon installation at the conclusion. Throughout, we are reminded how much America has changed since Ligon was a boy, from the '60s Civil Rights marches onward. Yet, in this late year of Pres. Obama's first term, it's not exactly roses and bluejays, either. America has imperfectly improved, there is still hate towards people of color, the President is still vilified for his race (though critics will claim it's "not that"). Ligon reminds us the narrative is still open. It's the rare exhibit where I spent time reading his text-heavy works, for he does some incredible alchemy with words.
4. "Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art" @ Japan Society
What I said then:
032911: Hello Kitty dies in the end, surmounting a gravestone for pet animals and photographed — I'd like to think innocuously, like the gravestone actually exists in a cemetery somewhere — by Yoshitomo Nara, the punk-rocker of Japan's contemporary art world. I trust I didn't spoil the whole exhibition for you (the clue's in the title, hello!), because besides the general flow through rooms, or "Critical Memory", "Threatened Nature" and "Unquiet Dream" as Japan Society calls 'em, there is no right or wrong way to progress through this exhibition. Though I do advise you to begin at the conventional entryway, at least to face Makoto Aida's heavy "Ash Color Mountains" (2009-11) and put that past you. It would be a disturbing painting anyway, a massive hazy landscape broken up by hills of office workers, not ostensibly gory like his notorious 2001 work "Blender" (not shown here, but you'll find it in the catalogue!!! A little warning: this show as a whole is NOT kid-friendly. Maybe the last third is…hence the other entrance, but the Nara photograph is liable to freak them out too) but imbued with this unseen, unimaginable disaster, it cannot help but conjure images of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan. I suggest you give it a closer look, at the endless multitude of ONLY corporate staff, like a landfill to Japan's salaryman way of life, and the title's meaning may resonate truer to Aida's original intent. Its neighbor, the feverishly colorful and shiny "Harakiri School Girls" (2002), its grouping of saturated-toned sailor-suited students lavishly committing seppuku (which any jidaigeki aficionado knows was originally reserved only for samurai, as part of the bushido honor code), is a blunter and therefore more immediately accessible Aida. The whole print is on this holographic sticker, and he's inscribed his name and the title in cute futuristic type whilst echoing in shodo-style Japanese cursive, bookending the brutality ritualistically enacted by these trendy ko-gals. Maybe he's commenting on teenagers' blind lust for following the next hot new thing (I mean, take director Yoshihiro Nishimura's hyperbolized version, the wrist-cut "Ge" fake commercial, during his film "Tokyo Gore Police"), or his general disdain for moralistic suicide and belligerent schoolgirls. If you can get past the gore — and believe me I can — it's damn beautiful to look at. Now it's to my understanding that Aida's slasher-film-crossed-with-a-rave style tends to dominate a room, but he shares it here w/ Kyoto-based photographer Miwa Yanagi. She is one of EIGHT women artists in this 16-person show, so fully half the artists. Way to go, Japan Society! Plus, I am sorely lacking on the Japanese women photographer front, and we've got three of 'em here. Anyway: Yanagi shows four stylized C-prints from her "My Grandmother" series, depicting college-age girls under SFX makeup and Photoshop manipulation, as they see themselves in 50 years. In essence, they free themselves of youth's societal restrictions to think big and project themselves in limitless (but attainable?) fantasy scenarios. She represented Japan w/ her recent monumental series "Windswept Women" at the 53rd Venice Biennale, and though "My Grandmother" aren't nearly as massive, nor generational-mixed (lithe, youthful bodies and prematurely aged faces), they still draw a strong, if complex reaction. Tomoko Kashiki is nearly a full generation younger than Yanagi, and depicts women too but in slightly amorphous, slow-blurred animation, retaining trails of their movement as they disintegrate in woodgrain floor ("In a Box", 2008) — there's a lucid dreamlike element to it, like they're trying to rouse themselves back into reality. Maybe that's why the landscapes they embody seem a bit too perfect. Yamaguchi Akira (who I should note retains the Japanese way of ordering his family-name Yamaguchi first, even in English text) and the slightly younger Manabu Ikeda both create wildly detailed, environmentally imbued imagery. Yamaguchi's approaches that traditional "Floating World" cutaway style but sets his pens and watercolors on Tokyo's bustling Narita International Airport, thronged with businessmen and tourists and eclipsed in yellow smog clouds. I've encountered Ikeda before in group shows and art fairs (his "Foretoken" re-imagines Hokusai's famous "Great Wave off Kanagawa" as a tidal wave of traditional architecture), and I'd like to believe his huge diptych pen-and-acrylic-ink renderings embody some utopian arcology thinking. The swelling "History of rise and fall" (2006), an infinite-pagoda-roofed structure populated with cherry blossoms, Buddha hands and waterfalls that towers over stamp-sized rice fields and its primeval forest neighbor "Existence" (2004) imagine worlds proscribing the metropolis. Though considering the devastation wrought upon Miyagi Prefecture's farmland and townships, Ikeda's organic works feel like pastoral time capsules. Or to continue the arcology idea, these fantastical environments perpetuate their existences above and away from the modernization and disasters, man-made and natural, though on the other hand they appear to crumble under their own wildly unrealistic structures. It's here the exhibition switches gears into "Threatened Nature" (I think??), as a corridor separates the previous pairing of classical technique and super-contemporary pop with an overall naturalistic angle. Chiharu Shiota's installation "Dialogue with Absence" (2010, eschewing her telltale hairlike black-yarn tangles for transparent plastic tubes, siphoning red-dyed liquid from peristaltic pumps into a painted wedding dress. Surface-level, it reminded me of Tony Feher's lyrical "Next On Line" installation at The Pace Gallery crossed w/ Anselm Kiefer's history-steeped, ruined dioramas. It does embody some of Shiota's ongoing dialogues with an individual's ties to their ancestors, peers and environment — quite literally in the attached "blood supply" — but for me it didn't have that unnerving 'oomph' factor like her earthier, hairier installations. Though it segues well enough into Motohiko Odani's set of malformed Noh masks, purposefully imbalanced with sections of lifelike human bone and flesh, and with Kohei Nawa's "PixCell-Deer #24" (2011), a taxidermy buck covered in different-sized plastic globes. Stare into the sculpture, discerning that indeed it used to be a living creature, and you'll see yourself — many dozens of you, actually — locked w/in its beaded "skin", staring back at you. That interconnectivity with nature reappears throughout Rinko Kawauchi's "AILA" series, over a dozen picture-portrait-sized C-prints of natural forms, dead and alive. I was fortunate to experience Tomoko Shioyasu's thrillingly meticulous cut-paper shadow installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo last year, and am stoked she reappears here with 'Vortex" (2011), a new screen-sized whirlpool that places viewers within this channel, linking history, environment, experience. Shioyasu's conduit propels us into the third phase of the exhibition "Unquiet Dream". Kumi Machida's Nihonga-based figures, created entirely from traditional pigments on handmade paper, exist in like a half-womb half-sensory deprivation chamber. Tomoko Yoneda's series of sparse interiors, like windows into unpopulated worlds (or, again, echoes of the quake and tsunami devastation), are centered in infamous history, taken in the former HQ of Korea's Defense Security Command in Seoul. I fortuitously first experienced this series at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, during that same trip last April. The past charges of torture and political unrest unleashed in Yoneda's stark photographs mutes Haruka Kojin's beautifully conceived artificial flower mirrored installation (it's lovely and a bit disorienting, how she's crafted this Rorschach effect, but almost requires its own space to breathe). We conclude with two video works by London-based Hiraki Sawa (whose wonderful "O" installation, originally commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery for the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, ends this Saturday at James Cohan Gallery), his borderless fantasy "Within" (2010) and his superb early work "Elsewhere" (2003), a poetic silent video of household objects with lives of their own. Do the materials we own control us? Are we so attached to our 'stuff' that we forfeit 'real' relationships? I'm not sure if that's fully Sawa's intent here, but there is a duality to his whimsical display. And yes, here occurs Nara's aforementioned C-print, the Hello Kitty duo holding court as guardians in a pet cemetery. This is a show that benefits from unhurried visits, because small as the overall gallery space is, there is quite a bit of layered meaning to distill. That so much here seems to preempt and visualize the wrath of Mother Nature makes it all the more emotive. And considering my deep affinity for Japan, for my awesome friends there and my ongoing studies in the language, I feel extra connected to the exhibition.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
I've little to add to the above emotional discourse (continued here for NY Art Beat) besides reiterating the deep feelings I have toward this group exhibition and Japan's art world in general. The artists' reception was easily the weirdest, heaviest I've ever attended, occurring just days after the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake. Then I visited Tokyo weeks later. I am reiterating everything I've written already. I was back in Tokyo for a week in December 2011, checking up on artists, galleries and friends. "Bye Bye Kitty!!!" would have undoubtedly left an impact on me anyway — and it totally aided me deeper appreciation of the Japanese contemporary art scene (Kumi Machida and Miwa Yanagi in particular) — but the terrible coincidence of this past March made its mark that much more indelible.
5. NYC Popfest 2011 @ Cake Shop
What I said then:
05/24/11: Yep, it's a guilty pleasure, but I attend Popfest every year. And the kickoff show at Cake Shop (feat. local lovelies Dream Diary, Georgia's Gold-Bears, Cali's Sea Lions) just got a helluva lot awesomer when Popfest announced last week that the secret headliners are none other than my favorite band The Pains of Being Pure At Heart! Devoted LIST-readers will recall these NYC jangle-pop champs just sold out Webster Hall, so to have 'em playing tiny Cake Shop (my fourth time seeing 'em at this venue) is super special. If you were lucky enough to nab a ticket, join me up front.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
On practically the eve of my departure from NYC, I attended the awesomest Popfest show in Popfest history. It would've been dope anyway, considering the announced lineup, but when my favorites The Pains of Being Pure At Heart (aka NYC's cutest indie-pop band) became the secret headliners, I was ecstatic, over the moon. See, I'd seen 'em in a sold-out show at a much bigger venue like two weeks earlier, and I was coming to terms w/ the truth that they are so good now, and so popular now, that I'll never see 'em like I did two years ago at tiny basement Cake Shop. Well, here they were, practically tearing the roof off with their amped-up dream-pop noise, smashing through oldies like "Everything With You" and second LP tracks "Heart In Your Heartbreak" with panache. Honorable mention to Georgia's Gold-Bears for onstage kineticism. They whipped the crowd into a frenzy with "Record Store", and I was right there in front. I had my favorite spot from the get-go, and once The Pains took the stage and rocked out, I was transported back to their headlining spot at the "Twee as Fuck" Cake Shop show two years prior. Absolute bliss.
6. "Wild Beasts" @ Champion
What I said then:
09/13/11: Who's afraid of color, of paintings? Of vibrantly colorful, physically rendered, representational paintings…of stuff like portraiture and interior scenes? NYTimes' Roberta Smith writes of the Painting and Sculpture reconfigurings at MoMA, injecting those hallowed halls w/ key contributions from women artists (an EXCELLENT move) and lots and lots of experimental and increasingly non-painterly combinations. She quotes from Douglas Crimp's '81 essay "The End of Painting" in remarking on the Conceptual, Process and Video Art filling the latter part of the (newer) 4th Fl, along w/ stylistic liberties on the (older) 5th Fl, like reducing the (iconic, primary-colored) Piet Mondrian holdings and upping the biomorphic sculptures. Meanwhile in Austin, the young NY-based painter Ryan Schneider culled a potent five-artist exhibition reveling in color and canvas, in realism refracted through a 21st century prism. Check Atlanta native Shara Hughes (who's spent a lot of time in NY, plus is featured in the Saatchi Collection), whose entire current output is based on interiors — for her, "total paintings", encapsulating all her ideas and giving each of us something juicy and personal to grasp hold of. These ain't 19th Century European, I can tell you that much, though like the Met exhibition "Rooms with a View", Hughes uses outside illumination to intriguing effect. The vaguely cosmic, multiplanar composition "You Don't Know, I Can't Tell You" opens up to floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking an autumnal backyard and a smaller De Chirico-metaphysical doghouse casting long shadows. Daniel Heidkamp — who I've seen paired w/ Schneider before, at Priska Juschka Gallery's "Big Picture" show — pairs surroundings w/ posed portraiture (hell, his ongoing modus is "en plein air"), teasing out unusual and unexpected color combinations by painting these from life. The dry, washed out Texas sun affects his "Carte Blanche" series of portraits painted in situ at Champion, particularly when compared w/ his NY portraits. Schneider throws jeweled patterns over some of his newer compositions, maintaining Skittles-hued palettes he's been championing since I've been familiar w/ his work. The new canvas "Not to Sleep Just Rest" is one of his most exciting I've seen, cropping a nude (except for socks) female form into a wall-to-wall menagerie of floral mosaic tiles and chevron drapes; even the tabby cat's stripes play into it. While Joshua Abelow's ostensibly reductive works (think graphic symbols, numerals and shapes painted on burlap) might seem at odds w/ their wildly vivacious kindred, the geometries in Hughes' spacier interiors and particularly in Schneider's patterned compositions are totally in play here, along w/ some very intriguing, if limited, color combos. Finally Ezra Johnson reveals two painterly stop-frame animations, like 2009's "The Time of Tall Statues" (shown at Asya Geisberg Gallery this summer). His technique reminded me of vintage painted-cel animations, circa Windsor McKay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland", and if that sounds untrendy and potentially brilliant, it very much is.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
This group show of old and new NY friends definitely made my transition from NYC to ATX a lot easier. Plus, painting is awesome. Finally: Champion is among my favorite galleries, anywhere, and its tight, smart programming renews my faith that the South holds as much impact in the contemporary art world as either East or West Coasts, or Europe or Asia. It was around this time in Austin when I decided YES, this place works for me. Here's my review for New American Paintings.
7. Fantastic Fest 2011 @ Alamo Drafthouse S. Lamar
What I said then:
I didn't! Beyond this early courtesy warning!
And subsequent reviews!
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
So epic. My favorite film festival, b/c it's a film festival for film buffs and film freaks. You'll have the odd buttoned-up journalist or PR type, but the majority are very cool people, very devoted people, who are pretty fun to geek out with. I caught "only" 24 unique films this time (25 if you count seeing the world-premiere of Noboru Iguchi's guilty pleasure "Zombie Ass" twice), but they were majorly awesome. From the long-overdue "Livid" by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, to Michael R. Roskam's lauded and buzzworthy "Bullhead", to the decimating "Melancholia" from Lars von Trier, to a helluva lotta awesome Sushi Typhoon titles, Iguchi's almost family-friendly "Karate-Robo Zaborgar" and Yudai Yamaguchi & Tak Sakaguchi's "Yakuza Weapon"…and yes, even the world premiere of Tom Six's "The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence". I drank way too much, slept way too little, befriended a bunch of directors, actors, and Japanese film journalists, made many new friends from such encounters, and hung out for long periods of time with team Sushi Typhoon. A splatter-loving boy's dream, right?
8. Battles + Nisennenmondai @ Emo's East
What I said then:
10/25/11: I've been hotly anticipating this team-up for a good long while, a rhythmic square-off b/w Battles' man-machine John Stanier and Nisennenmondai's thrash goddess Sayaka Himeno. This is the latter's first U.S. showing in like SIX years: the ladies have honed their hypnotic math-rock sets to almost ESP precision — but Himeno keeps it kinetic and improvisational. Plus, this is my 1st Battles show post-Tyondai. Stoked!
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Full disclosure: my entire draw to this show was Nisennenmondai. I'd seen Battles twice already, though with Tyondai Braxton both times. And Battles didn't disappoint as a trio, no way, they whipped up a slinky, robotic dance-off with a set of mostly "Ice Cream"-era tracks, with a laudable light-show to boot. But I was beyond floored by Nisennenmondai, beginning with their Kraut-rock opener "appointment", leading with Yuri Zaikawa's sludge bass, followed by Sayaka Himeno's percolating hi-hat and, finally, Masako Takada's synth melody. Then just…epic…versions of "fan", "mirrorball" and the ferocious "ikkyokume" (turning Himeno from a jazz drummer to pure thrash and back again). The kind of jams that get lodged deep within your cerebral cortex. I met them afterward and shot the shit for a long time w/ Zaikawa. Next goal: see 'em live in Tokyo.
9. Maurizio Cattelan "All" @ Guggenheim
What I said then:
11/15/11: Maybe you've heard of Maurizio Cattelan, that Italian artist-provocateur whose two decades'-plus oeuvre contains a superrealistic effigy of Pope John Paul II attacked by a meteor ("La Nona Ora"), a squirrel lying face-down at the kitchen table after an apparent bullet-administered suicide ("Bidibidobidiboo"), and a taxidermy racehorse hoisted in midair ("Novacento"). That last part's key, as in his supposed swan-song feat, he's hoisted about 130 of his nearly complete works up, suspending them like gaudy Pop-culture sausages within the iconic museum's iconic Rotunda, leaving some six floors of ramps totally bare. Does this detract from the experience, seeing Cattelan's mostly elusive (at least stateside), alarming works from more than an arm's span distance? I say NO: we see his entire output in concert, not just non-chronological but nonlinear, crashing, competing and (at times) quite intriguingly combining in 3D space. So while the site-specific version of JFK in funereal reverence, as "Now", doesn't apply here, seeing him from above contextualizes it in surreal reverie. Or approaching the sinister mini-Hitler "Him" from below only to then effectively supersede him one ramp higher. In sinister terms, his ironic entry to the Gugg's international show "theanyspacewhatever", Pinocchio floating facedown in the Rotunda fountain ("Daddy Daddy") recurs here hovering 10 feet ABOVE the fountain, in frozen free-fall. Taken as whole, it's one massive echo of the trickster's own multifaceted contribution to and dialogue with the art world and society.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
I loved loved LOVED this. It is subversive Cattelan at his very best. You want a career retrospective? Fine, suspend all of my artwork (sans like two) from the ceiling, out of order, out of synchrony, out of hierarchy. At the very least, this unorthodox installation "de-staticizes" Cattelan's oeuvre, forming new narratives. So what if coffined JFK "Now" is usually shown in small, solitary rooms, and now it's hanging in midair alongside over a hundred pop culture kindred? Is the message not even broader now, more impactful, that JFK is suspended over an entire American Dream? Or dream of the western world?…shown here with trussed foes (Hitler, the Klan-sheeted elephant) and "friends" (Picasso, children, the Pope)? I wrote about Cattelan's retrospective for …might be good (link here) too. Yeah it's spectacle. But it will probably leave a much deeper impression than you expect.
10. tokyoDOLORES "赤頭巾/dear my red hunter" @ Ebisu livingroom
What I said then:
I didn't! Though I did have a long buildup to tokyoDOLORES' huge winter performance, themed after Little Red Riding Hood (or "Akazukin" in Japanese). The troupe's leader and my good friend Cay had clued me into Akazukin's mythology since this past summer, and that coincided toward their Lucca, Italy preparations. See, before this major, hour-long original production, tokyoDOLORES were embarking on their first-ever European tour, playing at Lucca's Comics and Games Festival in November. Huge!
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Akazukin is the second major tokyoDOLORES performance I've seen this year. I caught their bracing, fascinating "Eline the Mermaid" in April, which featured 12 dancers, four poles, aerial silk, floor routines and an ass-rattling bass-heavy soundtrack. I loved it. Akazukin focused it down to six dancers — pole-aficionados Cay Izumi, Aloe, Nancy Kikurage and JILL, plus contemporary dancers Sayano Ichinohe and Yukika Masai — and a very clear story most of us know, i.e. Little Red Riding Hood, the woods, Grandma's house, and of course the Big Bad Wolf. So there was Cay as Akazukin/Red Riding Hood, moving from floor routines with "flower" dancers and pole gymnastics, and there was little Aloe, stunningly transformed into this lurching, demonic wolf, crawling about the stage, slinking up poles, owning the darkness. The music was bard-friendly until dissolving into like Lords of Acid rage, the lighting and background images excellent, the costumes and makeup superlative. The girls were AWESOME. Like I told Aloe and Cay after their performance, I sincerely hope they tour this show. The buzz they received upon completing Italy has opened many many new avenues, w/ possibilities in Paris, Russia, Korea, Shanghai…and of course the U.S. For any naysayers doubting the possibility of pole-dancing as an art form, tokyoDOLORES elevated it once again, in a cascade of contemporary styles stronger than ever. For these girls, 2012 will be amazing.
Annnnnd that's it for 2011, at least to the tune of regular blog posts. 2012 will be mayjah. I'll be in NYC, ATX and Tokyo...if not equally, then at least regularly. Hell, March 2012 equals the Whitney Biennial, the New Museum Triennale, major retrospectives at the Guggenheim and MoMA. And that's just NYC. You want more burlesque, more international art, more live music and crazier film premieres? Strap yourselves in tight, girls and boys. Or do like I do, o-shibari style (: 'Til 2012!
