WEDNESDAY
TOKYO
* Sashie Masakatsu "Invisible Hand" @ Mizuma Art Gallery / 2F 3-13 Ichigayatamachi, Shinjuku-ku (Yurakucho/Nanboku Lines to Ichigaya Station). Masakatsu pairs his oil paintings—surrealist orbs of townships and consumer objects floating over ruins—with a huge Japanese sliding door.
* Eikoh Hosoe @ BLD Gallery / 2-4-9 Ginza, Chuo Ward Tokyo (JR Yurakucho Station, Marunouchi Line to Ginza Station). Part 3 of the gallery's retrospective on modernist photographer icon Hosoe: "Man and Woman + Embrace + La Luna Rossa", classic '60s portraits of the human figure and inverted b&w prints from "La Luna Rossa".
THURSDAY
NYC
* Whitney Biennial @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St). The 2012 edition of the big American biennial, organized this time by the Whitney's Elisabeth Sussman and freelance curator/writer Jay Sanders, strikes a sombre note for me in the recent passing of artistic badass Mike Kelley. This would be his eighth Whitney biennial, which is awesome in itself. I look forward to his incredibly personal inclusion, plus the inventive roster of other artists, incl. Michael Clark, LaToya Ruby Frazier, K8 Hardy, Nick Mauss, Forrest Bess (selected by Robert Gober), Wu Tsang (splitting his time w/ "The Ungovernables" at the New Museum), Joanna Malinowska, Sarah Michelson and more.
* Roy Lichtenstein "Landscapes in the Chinese Style" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. This selection of late-period works by the consummate American Pop artist, inspired in part by a '94 exhibition of Edgar Degas' monochromatic prints at the Met, combine Lichtenstein's signature Benday dot patterns with spare, ethereal atmosphere.
* SUPERFLEX "Bankrupt Banks" @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. The electrifying Danish artist collective SUPERFLEX took on troubled financial institutions in a series of vividly titled corporate logo works (like "Bankrupt Banks/Merrill Lynch Bank, Acquired By Bank of America September 14, 2008") at Peter Blum's booth during Art Basel Miami Beach. It totally worked as a criticism of the fair environment itself, so I'm interested to see how it carries over into the gallery setting.
* "FGFt" @ Envoy Enterprises / 131 Chrystie St. A properly LES-style homage to electronic musician-provacateur Frank Tovey, feat. a strong visual roster like Terence Koh, Casey Spooner, Slava Mogutin and VOLTA NY artist Erika Keck–plus most created work specifically for the show.
* Jenny Holzer "ENDGAME" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Holzer's potent return to painting after 30 years of signature LED text should be a bracing encounter, keeping w/ her early investigations in redaction and opacity.
* Chris Consnowski "American Metal" @ Lyons Wier Gallery / 542 W 24th St. The Chicago artist tunes his focus to trophies—that slightly gaudy symbol of victory—in large, photorealistic renderings with assuredly multilayered, unromanticized undertones.
* Ellen Berkenblit @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Berkenblit's large and mid-sized, loosely figurative paintings are just haunting, like pages of a girl's fairytale book streaked with charcoal and soaked in gasoline. Cartoonish animals and doe-eyed girls emerge from clouds of amorphously contoured chroma, or are otherwise obliterated by hazy hues. She hasn't had a solo at the gallery since '08, so I'm considerably stoked for this one.
* Harriet Korman @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. The NY-based abstract artist presents new paintings, sectioning her canvases in bold, tasty color combinations and shape overlaps.
* Corinne Wasmuht @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. I had a mild acid flashback when experiencing the Berlin-based artist's 2008 solo at the gallery, covered with her huge, brightly colored and varnished abstract paintings on wood. Believe me, it was a good feeling. She returns to NYC after a series of exhibitions in Berlin and Nürnberg, celebrating her catalogue "Supracity".
* Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2012 @ Film Society of Lincoln Center and IFC Center. This unbearably chic festival of contemporary French cinema is back. I warn you to reserve your shows, b/c 1) this is a very popular film festival (IMO, third to New York Film Festival and NYAFF) and 2) Film Society members have been on it since FEB 9. Even with the Lincoln Center/IFC Center split (like last year), this dazzling array of like two dozen NYC premieres is gonna draw crowds. So go at it: http://www.filmlinc.com/films/series/rendez-vous-with-french-cinema-2012. THRU MAR 11
* "The Intouchables" (dirs. Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 7:30p. Lincoln Center kicks off "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema" 2012 in style. The second most successful French film of all time locally, this quirkily heartwarming story of a handicapped white millionaire (played by François Cluzet) and his deepening friendship w/ his Senegalese caretaker (played by Omar Sy) just shattered French box-offices…and it looks pretty damn dope to me. w/ directors and star François Cluzet in person!
* P-Pop-Party #3 @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$8. Ready to go nuts? Peelander-Z, the original outer space Japanese art-punks, host the third installment of their psychedelic, sweaty, super-cute bash. Feat. Electric Eel Shock ("garage metal from Japan") and PeeWonder-Z (the adorable "sisters" of Peelander-Z), plus bicontinental Visual-kei dudes The Black Cherry…and who knows what other awesomeness.
FRIDAY
NYC
* Franklin Evans "eyesontheedge" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. A mixed-media process-driven installation incorporating paintings, photographs, sculpture and sound—and if it's anything like his meta-art installation during MoMA PS1's "Greater NY 2010", it'll be covered floor to ceiling in trompe-l'oeil objects.
* Simone Gilges @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. The Berlin-based artist and founding member of publishing house/project space Neue Dokumente returns from her stunning winter 2010 show with a nuanced series of placed found-objects, photographs, and sculptures.
* "Love Will Tear Us Apart" film series @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd St, 6 to 51st St). Note: "this series contains nudity, violence and strong sexual content." OK, sign me up. A wonderful two weeks of some 20-odd super-twisted love stories from Japan and Korea, mostly from the past decade and containing some mind-blowing U.S. premieres. And I gotta get behind the film series' title. THRU MAR 18.
* "Kotoko" (dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, 2011) screening @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 7:30p. The U.S. premiere of Japanese avant-film alchemist Tsukamoto, who won the Venice Horizons Award at the 2011 Venice Film Fest. J-popstar Cocco takes a dark turn as a young mother plunged into psychosis. Suspected of child abuse, her baby is taken from her…and it ain't gettin' any happier after that. Followed by the "Make Love" party—seriously, you'll need it after this downer—feat. Brooklyn-area Japanese riot-grrrls Hard Nips and hopefully lots of alcohol.
* "38 Witnesses" (dir. Lucas Belvaux, 2012) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 7p. Belvaux's haunting film explores the limits of human responsibility. A woman is brutally murdered outside an apartment complex, and the residents don't do a damn thing. Based on Didier Decoin's best-selling novel that itself echoed the infamous '64 Kitty Genovese murder case.
* "17 Girls" (dirs. les soeurs Coulin, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 9:15p. A bunch of teenage girls decide to become pregnant at the same time. Note: this is decidedly NOT like "Village of the Damned", but rather a human choice, set in seaside N. France, and focuses mostly on the adults' reactions, rather than the girls' intentions. w/ directors in person!
* Beach Fossils @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$15. I'd like to say I've been down w/ Brooklyn's hazy surf-rockers Beach Fossils from the start, but if the bio's to be believed that they formed in early '09, and I'm first saw their kinetic live set one sweaty May night, then that's pretty close. I've been waiting for Dustin & crew's next big thing—as guitarist Cole's psych-rock project DIVE has been totally taking off—and we get that tonight. A new 7" and lots and lots of unabashed dancing. w/ Mac DeMarco
AUSTIN
* "Dune" (dir. David Lynch, 1984) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 11:30p. While I consider Lynch's classic adaptation of the sprawling sci-fi saga an uncomfortable bridge between his surrealist art-house years (see "Eraserhead") and saturated-color mainstream success (see "Blue Velvet", "Twin Peaks"…and everything thereafter), no other director could've spiced-up Frank Herbert's novels like the coffee-lover himself. ALSO SUN 9:30p
SATURDAY
NYC
* Albert Oehlen @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. New large-scale semi-abstract paintings, in Oehlen's debut at the gallery. He combines flat, figurative, CAD-aided cut-outs with gestural strokes of oil paint….damn.
* Douglas Huebler "Crocodile Tears" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The gallery begins their representation of the Conceptualist artist's estate with this cross-media survey, derived from a screenplay of the fictional performance artist Jason James.
* Not Vital @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. The Swiss sculptor presents new materials in marble and plaster, plus techniques like hand-welded chased steel, all executed in China.
* "Air Doll" (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, 2009) screening @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 2p. Who else would I trust in making a love story centered on an inflatable sex-doll (played by Bae Doona) come to life? Few but Koreeda can capture that melancholic, bittersweet melody.
* "Vital" (dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, 2004) screening @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 7p. Inky black, mostly linear Tsukamoto flick, starring Tadanobu "Johnny Depp" Asano as a long-haired surgeon-come-lately obsessed w/ dissecting a particular female cadaver ever since an auto accident wiped his memory.
* "A Snake of June" (dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, 2003) screening @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 9p. June is Japan's rainy month, and Tsukamoto coats this blue-tinted b&w film in sheets of downpour, guzzling drains and beads of perspiration across naked flesh. A sorta astringent career woman's hidden sexual desires flood this surreally sexy thriller.
* "17 Girls" (dirs. les soeurs Coulin, 2011) screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 9:30p. A bunch of teenage girls decide to become pregnant at the same time. Note: this is decidedly NOT like "Village of the Damned", but rather a human choice, set in seaside N. France, and focuses mostly on the adults' reactions, rather than the girls' intentions. w/ directors in person!
AUSTIN
* "Absurdities Crept In" @ Grayduck Gallery / 608 W Monroe Dr. Narrative strings—and the odd tales they encompass—flow through this three-artist show, feat. works on paper by Terrence Payne and illustrative paintings from Jennifer Davis and Mark Nelson.
* Saul Williams @ Mohawk / 912 Red River, 8p/$15. Legendary charismatic lyricist and encyclopedic poet Saul Williams graces the 'Hawk in a truly next-level night. Crown Heights agit-punk CX KiDTRONiK opens the event w/ a crackle of electro-rap.
TOKYO
* 「はらぺこヤマガミくん劇場版」(dir. Noboru Iguchi, 2012) @ Humax Cinema / 4-8-7 Ginza, Chuo-ku (Tokyo Metro Marunouchi/Hibiya/Ginza Lines to Ginza Station). Super-hungry Yamagami-kun is a rubber-suited mountain god with a crazy craving for human flesh. And though this is an Iguchi film—he of splatterfied "Machine Girl" ilk—if the online shorts are any indication, it's more a candy-colored surrealist romp for older kids. As in, a solid PG. Plus, this is Iguchi-san, so expect Yamagami-kun to meet up with a bunch of cute girls.
* FOUR GET ME A NOTS @ Fever / 1-1-14 Hanegi, Setagaya-ku (Odakyu Inokashira Line to Shindaita or Shimokitazawa Stations), 4p/2500 yen. Having concluded their cross-country "Silver Lining Tour", Chiba pop-punks FGMAN contribute their caffeinated riffs to a benefit showcase for the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake. w/ Think Again, Slang, Smash Your Face and more.
* Vidulgi OoyoO @ Shibuya O-Nest / 6F 2-3 Maruyamacho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit), 2p/3000 yen. Korean shoegazers Vidulgi OoyoO headline this massive showcase, which also includes Kagoshima-area テスラは泣かない (uh, lit. "Tesla Doesn't Cry"), locals The cold tommy +more.
SUNDAY
NYC
* Brody Condon "LevelFive and Future Gestalt" @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. Condon debuts the two titular films, originated from recent performances projects at the Hammer Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. While I am not expecting any paint-throwing, the psychotherapeutic nature of "Future Gestalt" and "LevelFive"'s durational characteristics (plus the sheer number of performers) should make for an immersive show.
* Sam Moyer "Slack Tide" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. Moyer increases the scale of her media-blending work, featuring dyed and treated fabric mounted on canvas and wood slats. You better believe I'm excited about this.
* "Vibrator" (dir. Ryuichi Hiroki, 2003) screening @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 5:30p. Japan Times named this "Best Film of 2003", plus indie director Hiroki has a knack for nailing Tokyo's lonely erotic backstreets (like his earlier "Tokyo Trash Baby"). Here, a young trucker (Nao Omori, with a goatee!) and a semi-alcoholic freelance writer (Shinobu Terashima) take an impromptu love-in road-trip.
* "The Screen Illusion" (dir. Mathieu Amalric, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6:15p. Actor-director Amalric (perhaps you remember him as the courageous lead in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"?) adapts Corneille's 17th C. tragicomedy into a dusty detective drama. That this is related to an ongoing project sponsored by La Comédie-Française, Amalric added no new lines of dialogue to capture Corneille's spirt (think Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" but WAY less MTV). Plus Amalric attends the screening!
* "The Intouchables" (dirs. Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano 2011) screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 1:05p. The second most successful French film of all time locally, this quirkily heartwarming story of a handicapped white millionaire (played by François Cluzet) and his deepening friendship w/ his Senegalese caretaker (played by Omar Sy) just shattered French box-offices…and it looks pretty damn dope to me. w/ directors and star François Cluzet in person!
MONDAY
NYC
* "18 Years Old and Rising" (dir. Fred Louf, 2011) screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 6p. The director takes us back to '81 France during election season in his debut feature, centered on a love affair b/w a bourgeois Parisian girl and a dude from the provinces.
* "The Screen Illusion" (dir. Mathieu Amalric, 2011) screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 8p. Actor-director Amalric (perhaps you remember him as the courageous lead in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"?) adapts Corneille's 17th C. tragicomedy into a dusty detective drama. That this is related to an ongoing project sponsored by La Comédie-Française, Amalric added no new lines of dialogue to capture Corneille's spirt (think Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" but WAY less MTV). Plus Amalric attends the screening!
TOKYO
* Acid Mothers Guru Guru + Acid Mothers Temple SWR @ Goodman / 55 Kanda-Sakumagashi, Chiyoda-ku (JR Yamanote Line to Akihabara Station), 7:30p/3300 yen. Free-jazz trio SWR (comprising original Acid Mother and guitar-slayer Makoto Kawabata, w/ Atsushi Tsuyama and Ruins drum guru Tatsuya Yoshida) plus Guru Guru, which swaps out Yoshida-san for Krautrocker Mani Neumeier. That's a helluva lotta Acid Mothers!
TUESDAY
NYC
* Bharti Kher "The hot winds that blow from the West" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Kher transforms the townhouse gallery through a series of physical and psychological spaces, playing with notions of domesticity and defunctivity.
* "Paris By Night" (dir. Philippe Lefebvre 2012) screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 10:10p. A tough police commander's tug-of-war w/ the City of Light's darkest twilight, the gang-enforced strip clubs, dives and discos!
AUSTIN
* "The Deadly Spawn" (dir. Douglas McKeown, 1983) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. Homemade horror doesn't get any nastier than this '80s low-budget sloshfest, feat. a carnivorous alien meteorite terrorizing New Jersey and appropriately absurd teenagers out to stop it!
CURRENT SHOWS
NYC
* Cindy Sherman @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd, 6 to 51st). A great element of Sherman's fine career retrospective is its nonchronological arrangements. For though the exhibition flows in groupings of key series–beginning with the wonderful, breakthrough "Untitled Film Stills" from the late '70s (and showing the American Sherman as a convincingly Felllni-esque ingenue)–there are intriguing temporal juxtapositions throughout. Meaning a few prints from the early '80s hung amid Sherman's millenial "Clowns" and still reverberating with energy and beauty. Though technology has changed, her "Erotic Centerfolds" and brilliant "History Portraits" (the latter hung salon-style in a burgundy-walled room, and featuring a few male roles) retain as much impact as her 2008 "Society Portraits" and the show-stopping mural installed outside the exhibition proper. Sherman has more creativity in her left pinkie than most artists' their entire oeuvres (not naming names) and she's got a helluva lot left.
* Zak Prekop @ Harris Lieberman / 508 W 26th St. The young Brooklyn-based artist's suite of ostensibly reductive geometric abstract paintings at 2010 Greater New York at MoMA PS1 piqued my curiosity–not the least of which they were the rare painting in a group exhibition of "other media". Here in his second solo at the gallery, we really get to explore what he's about: paintings utilizing the most minimalist palette, with the occasional shock-blue for contrast, some incorporating paper as a textural and shadowy duality with raw canvas. Consider the excitement ignited by Picasso and Braque by collaging chair caning and newsprint on their Cubist works. That's the vibe I get with Prekop's ingenious use of paper bags, heightening their own distinctive tone and constitution under grids of black lines or diamonds of pastel paint.
* Ellen Harvey "The Nudist Museum Gift Shop" @ DODGEgallery / 15 Rivington St. Harvey explores the art nude in all its permutations, from the glitzily framed portrait to the boob-mug, in these brushy old-school oil paintings of images culled from Ebay. Plus postcards of historical nudes, sourced from NYC art museums and modified by Harvey to depict only the figures—because what is a "museum gift shop" without postcards?
* Paul Graham "The Present" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. Pace debuts the NY-based British photographer's latest body of work, his first exhibition in the States since 2009. "The Present" includes diptych and triptych photographic works, highlighting serendipitous moments of a city constantly in motion. A new monograph, published by MACK, accompanies the exhibition.
* Michiel Ceulers "Des malentendus et le temps perdu" @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. The gallery debuts the young Belgian artist in his first stateside solo show, who focuses on the bare essentials—canvases, wood panels, paint and spraypaint—in his deft exploration of abstraction. Roughly half the works are gridded, abraded monochromes and the other smaller, shaped canvases in glittering spraypaint.
* Adia Millett "Portraits of an Escape" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. The Oakland-based artist revisits her old photographs of sculptural interiors, flipping them inside-out as new 2D façades. Her colorful architectural style holds a lot of personality, too, which is intentional as each structure reflects a portrait of someone in Millett's life.
* Charles Long + Nicole Wermers @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Long continues to twist and elasticize the boundaries of sculpture, in his ninth solo at the gallery. Think organic, semi-translucent resiny drips, a cooler, alienesque echo of his previous works that more closely resembled supersized bird droppings. Upstairs, Wermers accents with a photo series from the Rodin Museum in Paris, contrasted with her own modernist sculpture. It's terribly subtle but works in concert w/ Long's quieter, compelling sculpture.
* Alex Gross "Product Placement" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. LA artist Gross' lush painterly style is kind of like Jim Rosenquist (or Richard Hamilton) for a decidedly 21st C. world, a globe-flattening blend of posh designer labels, a polyglot of languages on adverts, exotic critters and nondescript environments. It's a foreshortened world thrust continuously into hyperdrive, Asia, America and the Middle East coalescing into one postmodern hybrid. Snake-eyed citizens from earlier series now bear reptiles for heads, like the Komodo Dragon in a Mr. Rogers cardigan tempting a PYT with a Coca-Cola in "Original Sin". Or people get their faces pixellated a la Japanese porn in "Best Friends (7-Eleven)" and "The Lover". Gross' super-saturated palette is in full effect here, but his combinations of people and adverts is his most naturalistic yet...like they're meant to be together. A grouping of Gross' manipulated cabinet card series (particularly chi-chi superheroes and monsters) accompany the big canvases.
* Adel Abdessemed "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525-533 W 19th St. A life-sized refugee lifeboat filled cunningly w/ rubbish bags. That's the first thing to greet visitors entering the gallery from the 533 side, but Abdessemed has much more up his sleeve. The show's titular work is a great expanse of forest roadkill, wolves and deer taxidermy flattened across one gallery wall into a sinister terrine. The larger than lifesized resin version of footballer Zidane's infamous headbutt occurs here, but for the show-stopping "Decor"–four human-scale crucified Jesuses composed entirely of razorwire–you'll have to travel down a corridor to 525. Just don't get too close, as these symbols of a savior will harm.
* Jean Dubuffet "The Last Two Years" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. I felt this worked perfectly in NYC and wonder if street artists and the downtown stars (Basquiat, Haring et al) ever got to see Dubuffet's huge, colorful glyphs and graf-abstraction.The man was busting conventions and doing it his way until the end.
* Magnus Plessen @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. A delightful pronouncement of playful, bright colors and positive-negative impressions of a figure, in Plessen's fourth solo at the gallery. I dug his fall 2009 exhibition, but the paintings here are altogether more lively and figurative, and embody a rich depth thanks to his varying brushwork and tension between abstraction and form.
* Tom Friedman @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. To see Friedman's beguilingly matter-of-fact yet exhaustively complex mixed-media work and truly appreciate the labor and love that goes into each, it's best to carry around one of those works guides. They take Friedman's humble descriptions, like "Untitled (sun)", and expand it into "approximately 3,650 12-inch wooden dowels, painted yellow, were stuck and glued into a 12-inch Styrofoam ball at varying angles". He created a lot of wood pieces for this show, like the miniscule carved figure holding a ceiling-spanning monofilament in "Untitled (kite)" or the scatter of Robert Gober-esque apples in "Untitled (apples)". It's a delight for the mind and eyes...and perhaps no less magical if you don't actually know how he made them.
* Will Ryman @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave + W 27th St. I expected something big and bold from Ryman in his debut at the gallery but had to wonder: he's been filling his previous gallery, Marlborough Chelsea, which is like eight times bigger (plus open-airs Park Ave w/ those big-ass flowers), so would he run out of room at Kasmin? No fear, he makes it work, wrapping the front room w/ the hunched form of his sad-sack everyman, comprised evidently of bottle-cap limbs, melted shoes for a body and like miles of denim for his trousers. In the back, Ryman erected a labyrinth of wooden brushes that could be a frottage fanatic's wet dream.
* Marlo Pascual @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. A much subtler show from Pascual than I'd expected, less situations of warped C-prints and situational lighting than easy, cerebral gestures, like turning a print sideways so the waterfall flows horizontally, or hewing a rocky backdrop with a woman's limbs in two and recomposing it to delete most of her figure.
* Robert Grosvenor @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. When Paula Cooper announces a "new work" (note the singular) from one of its heavyweights, you better believe it's a big deal. Particularly when that heavyweight is sculptor Grosvenor, and that new work is a two-part monster, half silvery cinderblocks supporting a honeycomb-like column, half a cloudlike tarp with white vinyl "rocks". He pairs it with a work from the mid-'80s, a chunk of concrete wall sheltered beneath a steel structure with rusty "wheels". You bet it leaves an impression.
* Mary Corse @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. This is a treat: the Light & Space artist debuts five silky new paintings in her inaugural show at the gallery, each of which grabs at ambient and display light and shifts our impressions of them.
* Terry Winters "Cricket Music, Tessellation Figures, & Notebook" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. Confession: I missed Winters' stateside debut of his layered found-photo collages, nearly a decade's worth of work at MM's tiny boutique gallery on 22nd. The reason is b/c I was totally immersed in Winters' massive kaleidoscopic new paintings, Some are watery worlds, others vaguely cosmic, a bit like Jim Rosenquist's more "Water Planet" stuff but less representational. Winters' palette is dazzling and his technique beautiful without reducing to pure decoration.
* Anne Truitt "Drawings" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. The gallery mounted a wonderful retrospective of Truitt's serene, totem-like sculpture two years ago (one my 2010 favorites). They continue the awesomeness w/ four decades of her drawings, a vital part of her daily creative activity. Some of these do resemble her gentle monoliths, but others are fields of brilliant tonal shifts or a single growing line across a white expanse. Pretty awesome.
CLOSING SOON
AUSTIN
* Martin Sztyk "Narratives" @ Big Medium / 5305 Bolm Rd. The practicing architectural designer and researcher draws from his ongoing, narrative-based inhabitation series—including "Urban Forest", "Empty City" and "New London Stock Exchange"—in what looks to be a mind-blowing set of intricate photo-collages. (ENDS FRI)
NYC
* Motoyuki Daifu "Lovesody" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. Last year this young Yokohama-based photographer wowed me and loads others at the gallery's awesome "Minor Cropping May Occur" group show. Daifu returns w/ his debut solo here, a followup to his "Family" series that traces his brief, intense personal relationship with a young single mother.
* Chris Martin @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. BIG Martin fan here — not the Coldplay guy but rather the Brooklyn-based painter. He just got off a solo at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and, in his third exhibition at the gallery, introduces newspaper clipping grids into his wildly textured, colorful paintings. I am stoked.
AUSTIN
* Jill Magid "Failed States" @ AMOA-Arthouse / 700 Congress. So check this: on 1/21/10, a young man named Fausto fired six bullets into the air outside the Texas State Capitol. Jill Magid — whose oeuvre navigates bureaucracy and security/intelligence w/ Mission Impossible deftness — was like steps away, pursuing her own future work, and witnessed it. Now six blocks from the scene and two years later, Magid stages an intriguing Conceptual show that ties Fausto's mysterious actions — and his silence throughout his trial — with that of Goethe's "Faust". The ground-floor gallery is her stage, replete with wall-decal directions ("Enter Fausto", "shots fired skyward", "enter Magid" etc), Magid's own play "Fausto: A Tragedy" (mirroring "Faust"'s original intention as a closet drama, meant to be read and not performed), and contemplative works. Deep encodings here, from six translations of "Faust" silkscreened on top of one another, to six bullet casings and a six-slide projection of the sky over the Capitol. Magid wrote a letter to Fausto, requesting his voice (absent in his trial) to read passages from "Faust" (whose Spanish translation is "Fausto") — his answer is still forthcoming, but it would add an intriguing layer to all this. Finally, there is Magid's family's '93 Mercedes, armored to B4 level and parked in Fausto's spot outside the Capitol, and her writing appearing in the February issue of the "Texas Observer", drawing this dialogue beyond the art-scene realm as it should be.
+ "Evidence of Houdini's Return". A really brilliant group show of fractured and re-envisioned realities, curated by Arthouse's Rachel Adams. I tweeted that it made me miss NYC, because it's precisely that sort of thoughtful exhibition that makes me look twice, thrice, at what I think I already know. Ex: Strauss Borque LaFrance's "BABE", a silvery lacquered wood plank pitched diagonally on the wall like classic John McCracken,…only just around the corner is that same plank, used as a shelf amid LaFrance's complex, mixed-media display. Another: Katja Mater's "Time Passing Objects", chromogenic prints that blur the line b/w photography and geometric drawings. Justin Swinburne's "Echo" works, multiple inkjet scans onto alu-dibond that echo (no pun) Gerhard Richter's signature abstracts while maintaining that sense of disarray like Wade Guyton's inkjet silkscreens. Bravo!
TOKYO
* Ken Matsubara "The Sleeping Water" @ MA2 Gallery / 3-3-8 Ebisu, Shibuya-ku (Yamanote Line to Ebisu Station). Matsubara features the video installation "Mekong Delta", his signature antique-crafted glass dome showing children floating up the titular river, recalling the deaths of children in the many wars and disasters around the world. (ENDS SUN)
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
fee's LIST / through 2/28
WEDNESDAY
NYC
* "Mythology" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. A group exhibition exploring the influence of ancient myths and archetypes on modern artists at their moments of transformation from figuration to abstraction. Feat. Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Mark Rothko, among others.
* "Wildness" (dir. Wu Tsang, 2012) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 8p. Tsang is/will be featured in practically every show in town. That's not exactly an understatement, as the compelling "transguy/transfeminine" artist is in both the New Museum Triennial (opened last week) AND the Whitney Biennial (opening next week). That's the first one-two punch of its calibre in NYC that I can think of anyway. PLUS! Tonight is the debut of Tsang's film, a portrait of eastside LA's historic, LGBT-friendly bar the Silver Platter. Tsang attends the screening for a post discussion.
* FCS: "I Wish/Kiseki" (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 1p. Two boys' cross-country plan to reunite their estranged parents', via the clandestine rendezvous of two bullet trains. Plus Jo "Johnny Depp" Odagiri plays the dad, so I'm game.
THURSDAY
NYC
* "Rembrandt and Degas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). Self-portraits made by the Dutch master portraitist and young French impressionist—from the earliest part of their respective illustrious careers—shown side by side for the first time.
* Paul Graham "The Present" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. Pace debuts the NY-based British photographer's latest body of work, his first exhibition in the States since 2009. "The Present" includes diptych and triptych photographic works, highlighting serendipitous moments of a city constantly in motion. A new monograph, published by MACK, accompanies the exhibition.
* Thomas Schütte @ Peter Freeman Gallery / 140 Grand St. The German artist inaugurates the gallery's new space in his first NY solo exhibition of new work in seven years. Schütte presents monumental installations in bronze, carved wood, ceramic and glass that should incorporate quite nicely w/ the space's former industrial background, plus he adds a set of large colored woodblock prints, new renderings from his '84 suite "Die Burg/The Castle".
* Michiel Ceulers "Des malentendus et le temps perdu" @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. The gallery debuts the young Belgian artist in his first stateside solo show, who focuses on the bare essentials—canvases, wood panels, paint and spraypaint—in his deft exploration of abstraction.
* Ellen Harvey "The Nudist Museum Gift Shop" @ DODGEgallery / 15 Rivington St. Harvey explores the art nude in all its permutations, from the glitzily framed portrait to the boob-mug. Plus postcards of historical nudes, culled from NYC art museums and modified by Harvey to depict only the figures—because what is a "museum gift shop" without postcards?
* Adia Millett "Portraits of an Escape" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. The Oakland-based artist revisits her old photographs of sculptural interiors, flipping them inside-out as new 2D façades. Her colorful architectural style holds a lot of personality, too, which is intentional as each structure reflects a portrait of someone in Millett's life.
* Jonathan Lasker "Early Works 1977-1985" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Twenty seminal paintings reflecting Lasker's unique, divergent abstract sensibility and his skill and combining contradictory elements (brushed/troweled, gestural/flat) in seamless ways.
* FCS: "Silent House" (dirs. Chris Kentis & Laura Lau, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 4p. Elizabeth Olsen plays a young woman terrorized by spirits "in real time" while trapped inside her family's lakeside retreat. I am over the moon excited about this one.
* Prince Rama + Gary War @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8:30p. "Now Age" say the Larson sisters and core of the Brooklyn psych-electro experience. Gary War's garage-rock immersed in a lake is likewise mood-morphing, as is the Gang Gang Dance DJ set.
AUSTIN
* Grimes (Montreal) @ Lamberts / 401 W 2nd St, 9:30p/SOLD OUT. Oh son, I know you wanted to see Claire "Grimes" Boucher enthrall intimate Lamberts w/ her uncanny avant-pop vox and "Darkbloom"-ing sound…but this show's been sold out since forever. Good on you, those w/ tix. w/ Born Gold
TOKYO
* Hajime Hasegawa "Primitive Vehicle" @ Art Front Gallery / Hillside Terrace A, 29-18 Sarugakucho, Shibuya-ku (JR Lines etc to Shibuya). Hasegawa's constructions of curved bamboo with metal and wooden beams emulate Greek mythology in a DIY sensibility.
FRIDAY
NYC
* John Chamberlain "Choices" @ Guggenheim / 1071 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). The great American sculptor passed away late last year, but his signature colorfully crushed auto parts (and their typically equally colorful titles) will forever remained ingrained in modern art history. This isn't the first time the Gugg has decked its space w/ vehicles (Cai Guo-Qiang suspended 'em from the ceiling of his 2008 career survey, plus that critically condemned 2000 show "The Art of the Motorcycle")—but Chamberlain successfully contorted, ripped and shredded his autos in eclectic assemblages, yet each retains that "car essence". Expect about 100 works spanning his entire career.
* Hans-Peter Feldmann @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. You might remember Feldmann winning the 2010 Hugo Boss Award, which he displayed in its $100,000 entirety at the Guggenheim last year as a wallpapering of singles. The German conceptualist stages a new installation at 303, ahead of his upcoming solo at Serpentine Gallery, London, in April.
* "Hindsight" (dir. Lee Hyun-seung, 2011) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 9:15p. Leave it to dependable Korean screen-electrifier Song Kang-ho to draw us deep within this contemporary crime thriller. He plays a retired mob boss trying to make good, but charmed by a young woman a cooking class, he finds that old life grabbing back for him.
* Cut Hands @ Public Assembly / 70 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/$10. Pure decibel destruction! Though this ain't William Bennett's searing Whitehouse act, let's not forget he basically created the punishing subgenre known as "power electronics". As Cut Hands, Bennett's "afro noise" set features heavily on both fronts, from pummeling tribal rhythms that thump at your bowels, chest and throat, to scorching sonics. Stoked, right? w/ Xeno & Oaklander
* Parts & Labor (10-yr anniversary) @ 285 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. Final show for Brooklynite noise rockers, bringing those polyrhythms, wheezy electronics and B.J.'s beard since '02. I'll miss them! They go out in style tonight, joined by local psych-rockers Oneida and onetime P&L guitarist Sarah Lipstate's superlative guitar-drone project Noveller.
AUSTIN
* Quiet Company @ Stubb's / 801 Red River, 8p/$10. Austin's nattiest brass-toned indie-rock stalwarts have been taking requests for fan-fave songs to play at their headlining showcase, which also feat. Ft. Worth's The Orbans and locals The Reynolds Number (enjoying their CD release). How's that for a solid?
TOKYO
* Shoji Ueda "Mode in Dunes" @ Taka Ishii Photography / 2F 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). Ueda fuses fashion photography with Rene Magritte-style surrealism in this classic series of prints in the desert.
SATURDAY
NYC
* Charles Long + Nicole Wermers @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Long continues to twist and elasticize the boundaries of sculpture, in his ninth solo at the gallery. Upstairs, Wermers accents with a photo series from the Rodin Museum in Paris, contrasted with her own modernist sculpture.
* Ryan McNamara "Still" @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. The young performance artist inaugurates his debut solo at the gallery w/ a little help from his friends…or, I mean, YOU. He'll be in the gallery for the first three weeks, and the works you create with him (posted daily on the gallery website, plus a version in your inbox) will reappear as the gallery exhibition in the second half of the show. Expect impromptu performances, collaborations, maybe a dance or two.
* Alex Gross "Product Placement" + Victor Castillo "The Jungle" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. LA artist Gross' lush painterly style is kind of like Jim Rosenquist (or Richard Hamilton) for a decidedly 21st C. world, a globe-flattening blend of posh designer labels, a polyglot of languages on adverts, exotic critters and nondescript environments. It's a foreshortened world thrust continuously into hyperdrive, Asia, America and the Middle East coalescing into one postmodern hybrid. Meanwhile Castillo (also LA-based, born in Chile) takes on the socioeconomic crisis w/ spooky children's tales, rendered in paintings and works on paper.
* Donald Moffett "The Radiant Future" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. I caught Moffett's wonderful career survey "The Extravagant Vein" at CAM Houston this past winter, which just touched down in Saratoga Springs NY for an almost four-month run. He returns to the gallery after his 2010 dual w/ Robert Beck ("Range") w/ a suite of works exploring the roles of texture, mounting, and relief.
* FCS: "Silent House" (dirs. Chris Kentis & Laura Lau, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 10:45p. Elizabeth Olsen plays a young woman terrorized by spirits "in real time" while trapped inside her family's lakeside retreat. I am over the moon excited about this one.
* "Quick" (dir. Cho Beom-goo, 2011) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 9:30p. Think "30 Minutes or Less" but w/ bike messengers on Korean motorcycles and super-cutie Kang Ye-won standing in for Dilshad Vadsaria, only w/ a way more active role.
AUSTIN
* "HONGKONGATHON" (various dirs., curated by Grady Hendrix) @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. Grady Hendrix, genre genius behind NY Asian Film Festival, and local madman Lars Nilsen (Fantastic Fest/Weird Wednesdays at the Ritz) co-curated this rare/secret Hong Kong classics marathon. As Hendrix sez: "five movies, 10 hours, 100 ways to blow your mind." I don't doubt that for a second.
* Cloud Nothings (Cleveland) @ Red 7 / 611 E 7th St, 9p. First time I saw Dylan Baldi, aka "Cloud Nothings" and crew, back in I guess 2010 at a concrete-walled basement in Brooklyn, the whole thing was so damn loud and fuzzy, alt-punk tuned to 15. Not to say he's mellowed a bit in spanking-new second LP "Attack on Memory" (P4K awarded it "Best New Music"), but it's filled out with hooks and almost grunge atonality amid the grinding riffs and pummeling rhythm. Cloud Nothings is a full-out BAND. w/ A Classic Education
* Teengirl Fantasy @ Beauty Ballroom / 2015 E Riverside Dr, 9p/$12. A live set from fractured-house duo Teengirl Fantasy is a fine thing indeed, especially if you like dance like it's 1989. w/ Jacques Renault
* VNV Nation @ Elysium / 705 Red River, 9:30p/$30. Would I drop three Madisons to dial it back to '00 and slam-dance to VNV Nation's thunderous EBM anthems "Darkangel" and "Rubicon"? If I were in Tokyo, hell yeah. Pick yr poison. w/ Straftanz
* Quiet Hooves (ATL) @ Stubb's / 801 Red River, 9p. That weird-pop collective Quiet Hooves (think your favorite garage-rock act and a Gospel group sharing a sheet of acid) know how to get a groove going. w/ Reptar
TOKYO
* Marijke van Warmerdam "Haru" @ Taka Ishii Gallery / 5F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). The Amsterdam-based artist presents a series of paintings based on film stills printed on canvas, like frozen moments.
* Ai Udagawa "Sign" @ Kido Press, Inc / 6F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Toei Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). Udagawa typically incorporates embroidery into her mesmerizing, naturalistic acrylic and mixed-media paintings.
* "Zombie Ass" (dir. Noboru Iguchi, 2011) premiere @ Cinemart Shinjuku / 3-13-3 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku (Tokyo Metro Marunouchi/Fukutoshin/Toei Shinjuku Lines to Shinjuku-sanchome Station). An epic of epic epicness, straight from the bowels of post-NOTLD cinema and thoroughly doused in Iguchi's deviant world of scat zombies, anal alien parasites…and lotsa cute girls. I loved the world premiere (at 2011 Fantastic Fest) so much that I saw the damn film twice, it's that great.
* "Pina" (dir. Wim Wenders, 2011) @ HT Yurakucho / 2-7-1 Yurakucho, Chiyoda-ku (Yurakucho Line to Yurakucho Station). I was cued into the late, great German choreographer Pina Bausch's electrifying performances years ago by my mentor, and they forever changed how I view movement (e.g. by one person, by person to person, in groups) and "modern dance". Plus Bausch was a kind of muse to Yohji Yamamoto. Now Wenders, an old friend, conjures a 3D experience with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch that gives us even a glimpse of what it must be like to be a Bausch dancer, part of her kinetic, romantic world. It sounds like a triumph.
* Incapacitants + K2 @ SOUP / B1F 3-9-10 Kami-Ochiai, Shinjuku-ku (JR Sobu Line to Higashi-Nakano Station), 7:30p/2500 yen. A night of audio fury, feat. legends Incapacitants playing "as loud as possible" (I mean sonically, not necessary their legendary LP) and audio pathologist Kimihide "K2" Kusafuka. w/ Nate Young (of Wolf Eyes)
SUNDAY
NYC
* Cindy Sherman @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St). Sherman quickly created a niche for herself within the contemporary art and photography pantheon—plus that of feminism, self-representation, body politics—by using herself as the model. For over 30 years, Sherman has been director, photographer, stylist and subject, culling images from TV, cinema, magazines, art historical and current to supply her inspiration. This career retrospective features her b&w series "Untitled Film Stills" (1977-80), her history portraits (1989-90), extra-outlandish society portraits (2008) and recent photographic murals, in their American premiere, plus everything in between.
* FCS: "Almayer's Folly" (dir. Chantal Akerman, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 1p. You may know Akerman as I, from her '75 voyage "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles", exploring the ellipses of conventional narrative cinema. Her latest, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's 1895 titular debut novel, re-imagines the time to the 1950s and the Dutch fortune seeker in Malaysia as a critique of the bankruptcy of colonialism.
TOKYO
* Kyoka + Cokiyu + Sawako + 34423 @ SOUP / B1F 3-9-10 Kami-Ochiai, Shinjuku-ku (JR Sobu Line to Higashi-Nakano Station), 7p/2500 yen. Four Japanese soundscape artists create an alchemical improvisational night at the SOUP. Kyoka (Berlin/Tokyo) concocts some crazy beats, plus she's the first female artist on the Raster-Norton label. Cokiyu (Ehime) has performed in Denmark's SPOT FESTIVAL, the Tokyo Motor Show, and Tetsuya Nakashima's "Confessions" (that discreet sonic gloss? that's Cokiyu). I'm totally a fan of Nagoya-born Sawako (Tokyo/NYC) and her lush field recordings. Finally pop sound-collagist 34423 (Tokyo), or "Niyoshi Fumi".
MONDAY
NYC
* "An Evening with Phil Collins" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 7p. To my glamouramas from the '80s, no not THAT Phil Collins. I mean the wonderful artist and mega-photojournalist, who presents a selection of his globally-minded video works, incl. "how to make a refugee" (1999) and "use! value! exchange!" (2010).
TOKYO
* The Naked and Famous @ Club Quattro / 5F 32-13 Udagawa-cho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station), 7p/5500 yen. The Kiwi electro-pop cuties rock the hell outta Shibuya, fueled by crystalline keyboards, ass-shaking bass and Alisa Xayalith's potent vox.
* BobRins @ THREE / B1F 5-18-1 Daizawa, Setagaya-ku (Inokashira Line to Shimokitazawa Station), 7p/2300 yen. Melodic garage-rock from these Tokyo girls BobRins, propelled by Yukie's tight drumming. w/ 虫のしらせ (lit. "Foreboding"!)
TUESDAY
NYC
* "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). MAYJAH. Take Picasso's portrait of Parisian modern art patron Gertrude Stein as the jump-off for this lush grouping, encapsulating Stein and her brothers as tastemakers on 20th C. art. Though the focus is primarily on Matisse and Picasso, the exhibition also includes works by Pierre Bonnard, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Francis Picabia, and others.
* Georg Baselitz @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. The superlative German artist revisits aspects of his own history, but in paintings larger than he's ever created before: huge figures painted in bold colors against a shifting, constrast-y backdrop. Baselitz adds rough-hewn wood and bronze-cast sculpture to this exhibition of new works.
* '"Artist and Publisher: Printmaking and the Collaborative Process" w/ Marina Abramovic and Jacob Samuel of Edition Jacob Samuel @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 6p/$10
* FCS: "Faust" (dir. Aleksandr Sokurov, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 9p. Faust's crazy craving for knowledge and power as the Enlightenment, and thus the source of 20th-century evil? That's the rub in this Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion winner, Sokurov's visual and sonic fiesta. Dig in.
* "White Night" (dir. Park Shin-woo, 2009) screening @ Tribeca Cinemas / 54 Varick St (ACE/1 to Canal St), 7p/FREE. This decadent crime-mystery thriller, replete w/ decade-spanning murders and entangled relationships, is based off Keigo Higashino's Shueisha-published story "Byakuyako" from the late '70s (later compiled into a best-selling novel). Plus Son Ye-jin plays the lead (hello!).
CURRENT SHOWS
AUSTIN
* Tom Molloy "New World" + Noriko Ambe "White Scape" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces St. Molloy strips away the noise and distractions in his historically leaning or contemporarily relevant bodies of work—oftentimes by incredibly meticulous practices—leaving a sort-of podium for us to contemplate, discuss, argue. While he's not explicitly putting his own politics behind the dozens of thrift-store framed Internet-culled b&w images of male world leaders pressing the flesh in "Shake", the works circuitous nature and site-specific installation—where "Hussein/Mubarak" slides into "Mubarak/Bush" and "Bush/Putin", until we're back at "Hussein" again—, plus the fact these nonchronological shots span from 9-11 to the Arab Spring, naturally presents some theories. How these men are friends one minute, wheeling and dealing the next, and sworn enemies separated by several frames of their "friends" after that. Molloy's nine-part titular work features nine different LP sleeves of Dvorák's "New World Symphony", the texts painted over (Molloy's analogue to Photoshop, he said) to show only benign, sunny images of the Western frontier. That "incredibly meticulous practices" bit I alluded to earlier is most clear in "Somewhere", Molloy's hand-painted sheet music to the "Wizard of Oz"'s sweetly optimistic anthem, a work that began with a black sheet of paper and lots and lots of carefully applied white gouache. Noriko Ambe's suite of all-white cut-paper and cut-YUPO (a waterproof synthetic "paper" made from recycled polypropylene) are just sublime, "Tracking II" like footprints in fresh-fallen snow, "Spring 1" the imprint of a tree or a floodplain, "A Piece of Flat Globe Vol. 22" a calmly ancient canyon.
* Jill Magid "Failed States" @ AMOA-Arthouse / 700 Congress. So check this: on 1/21/10, a young man named Fausto fired six bullets into the air outside the Texas State Capitol. Jill Magid — whose oeuvre navigates bureaucracy and security/intelligence w/ Mission Impossible deftness — was like steps away, pursuing her own future work, and witnessed it. Now six blocks from the scene and two years later, Magid stages an intriguing Conceptual show that ties Fausto's mysterious actions — and his silence throughout his trial — with that of Goethe's "Faust". The ground-floor gallery is her stage, replete with wall-decal directions ("Enter Fausto", "shots fired skyward", "enter Magid" etc), Magid's own play "Fausto: A Tragedy" (mirroring "Faust"'s original intention as a closet drama, meant to be read and not performed), and contemplative works. Deep encodings here, from six translations of "Faust" silkscreened on top of one another, to six bullet casings and a six-slide projection of the sky over the Capitol. Magid wrote a letter to Fausto, requesting his voice (absent in his trial) to read passages from "Faust" (whose Spanish translation is "Fausto") — his answer is still forthcoming, but it would add an intriguing layer to all this. Finally, there is Magid's family's '93 Mercedes, armored to B4 level and parked in Fausto's spot outside the Capitol, and her writing appearing in the February issue of the "Texas Observer", drawing this dialogue beyond the art-scene realm as it should be.
+ "Evidence of Houdini's Return". A really brilliant group show of fractured and re-envisioned realities, curated by Arthouse's Rachel Adams. I tweeted that it made me miss NYC, because it's precisely that sort of thoughtful exhibition that makes me look twice, thrice, at what I think I already know. Ex: Strauss Borque LaFrance's "BABE", a silvery lacquered wood plank pitched diagonally on the wall like classic John McCracken,…only just around the corner is that same plank, used as a shelf amid LaFrance's complex, mixed-media display. Another: Katja Mater's "Time Passing Objects", chromogenic prints that blur the line b/w photography and geometric drawings. Justin Swinburne's "Echo" works, multiple inkjet scans onto alu-dibond that echo (no pun) Gerhard Richter's signature abstracts while maintaining that sense of disarray like Wade Guyton's inkjet silkscreens. Bravo!
CLOSING SOON
NYC
* Rashid Johnson "Rumble" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Ahead of the NY artist's 1st major solo museum exhibition "A Message To Our Folks" at MCA Chicago in April, the gallery debuts Johnson's cross-media series w/ boxing mega-promoter Don King as the jumpoff. The show is awesome. It smells...uniquely Johnson, owing to his signature use of soap (appearing here almost like thickly textured, abraded black paint) and lotion. But beyond tortured canvases of black soap and wax are cast bronze standing in as frozen canvas and jagged mirrors throwing our own reflections into Johnson's installations of leather-bound books and objects.
* Doug Wheeler @ David Zwirner / 519 W 19th St. A major new installation from the pioneering "Light and Space" artist, and the first-ever presentation of Wheeler's "infinity environment" in NYC.
* Ai Weiwei, Wang Xingwei, Ding Yi "Persona 3" @ Chambers Fine Art / 522 W 19th St. Ai's big "Sunflower Seeds" installation at Mary Boone Gallery a few blocks north of here may be drawing huge crowds, but I urge you to check this intriguing pairing as well. The three Chinese contemporary artists have created a cooperative work, temporarily exchanging artistic profiles in a demonstration of their mutual admiration for Chinese art scholar Hans van Dijk. Ai focuses Ding Yi's abstract style in iron; Wang channels Ai's furniture-manipulation in a new rosewood sculpture; and Ding Yi hearkens back to his earliest representational style in painting a Shanghai cityscape.
* "Marble Sculpture from 350 B.C. to Last Week" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. First off: props for an awesome group show title and concept. I don't know how the gallery pulled this off, but this does indeed include Greek and Roman antiquities and Neoclassical sculpture, plus Dadaist biomorphic works and recent examples from Ai Weiwei, Barry X Ball and Tom Sachs.
* Udomsak Krisanamis "Space Out" @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. The Thai-born collage alchemist (and avid golfer, apparently) comes off a successful cross-media show at Kunstverein Freiburg w/ a visual and textural panoply.
* Joyce Pensato "Batman Returns" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. It's Batman, dammit! Pensato resurrects her recurring motif, which she's worked w/ since the mid-'70s but ceased in '96, tripping the masked vigilante up in pastels—in addition to her traditional black, white, silver palette—and showing him against other Pop cartoon characters.
AUSTIN
* Daniel Heidkamp "Glow Drops at the Chill Spot" @ Champion / 800 Brazos St. Take a plunge into Heidkamp's latest suite of radiant, textural scenes. He shows these interiors and exteriors completely independent from his ongoing portraiture, a strong move in my opinion. For the Brooklyn-based artist isn't just this accomplished figurative painter who also happens to paint rooms and landscapes en plein air. Rather, he is a strong force in capturing natural environments as he sees them, imbuing them with a resonating life-force and character that draws us into their layers of oil paint and dollops of impasto, confronting us with a disarming nostalgia. I may never have visited that Massachusetts backyard ("Here Glows Nothing") or Florida dockside ("Alligator Alley"), but it's like I can smell the air, feel the lawn beneath my trainers and the sun on my face. There's a physicality to Heidkamp's scenes beyond the presence of actual people, who he deftly folds into scenarios (the fireside "Feel It All Around", the portraitures' meta-effect in "The Night of 1000 Paintings") as accenting players. A very strong exhibition and a bold start to Austin's 2012 gallery season.
TOKYO
* Tatsuo Majima "All the right moves" @ Taro Nasu Gallery / 1-2-11 Higashi-kanda, Chiyoda-ku (Sobu Line to Bakurocho Station). Majima takes on classic Tom Cruise movie posters in the artist's ongoing collision of cultural differences in modern society. (ENDS SAT)
NYC
* "Mythology" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. A group exhibition exploring the influence of ancient myths and archetypes on modern artists at their moments of transformation from figuration to abstraction. Feat. Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Mark Rothko, among others.
* "Wildness" (dir. Wu Tsang, 2012) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 8p. Tsang is/will be featured in practically every show in town. That's not exactly an understatement, as the compelling "transguy/transfeminine" artist is in both the New Museum Triennial (opened last week) AND the Whitney Biennial (opening next week). That's the first one-two punch of its calibre in NYC that I can think of anyway. PLUS! Tonight is the debut of Tsang's film, a portrait of eastside LA's historic, LGBT-friendly bar the Silver Platter. Tsang attends the screening for a post discussion.
* FCS: "I Wish/Kiseki" (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 1p. Two boys' cross-country plan to reunite their estranged parents', via the clandestine rendezvous of two bullet trains. Plus Jo "Johnny Depp" Odagiri plays the dad, so I'm game.
THURSDAY
NYC
* "Rembrandt and Degas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). Self-portraits made by the Dutch master portraitist and young French impressionist—from the earliest part of their respective illustrious careers—shown side by side for the first time.
* Paul Graham "The Present" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. Pace debuts the NY-based British photographer's latest body of work, his first exhibition in the States since 2009. "The Present" includes diptych and triptych photographic works, highlighting serendipitous moments of a city constantly in motion. A new monograph, published by MACK, accompanies the exhibition.
* Thomas Schütte @ Peter Freeman Gallery / 140 Grand St. The German artist inaugurates the gallery's new space in his first NY solo exhibition of new work in seven years. Schütte presents monumental installations in bronze, carved wood, ceramic and glass that should incorporate quite nicely w/ the space's former industrial background, plus he adds a set of large colored woodblock prints, new renderings from his '84 suite "Die Burg/The Castle".
* Michiel Ceulers "Des malentendus et le temps perdu" @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. The gallery debuts the young Belgian artist in his first stateside solo show, who focuses on the bare essentials—canvases, wood panels, paint and spraypaint—in his deft exploration of abstraction.
* Ellen Harvey "The Nudist Museum Gift Shop" @ DODGEgallery / 15 Rivington St. Harvey explores the art nude in all its permutations, from the glitzily framed portrait to the boob-mug. Plus postcards of historical nudes, culled from NYC art museums and modified by Harvey to depict only the figures—because what is a "museum gift shop" without postcards?
* Adia Millett "Portraits of an Escape" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. The Oakland-based artist revisits her old photographs of sculptural interiors, flipping them inside-out as new 2D façades. Her colorful architectural style holds a lot of personality, too, which is intentional as each structure reflects a portrait of someone in Millett's life.
* Jonathan Lasker "Early Works 1977-1985" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Twenty seminal paintings reflecting Lasker's unique, divergent abstract sensibility and his skill and combining contradictory elements (brushed/troweled, gestural/flat) in seamless ways.
* FCS: "Silent House" (dirs. Chris Kentis & Laura Lau, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 4p. Elizabeth Olsen plays a young woman terrorized by spirits "in real time" while trapped inside her family's lakeside retreat. I am over the moon excited about this one.
* Prince Rama + Gary War @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8:30p. "Now Age" say the Larson sisters and core of the Brooklyn psych-electro experience. Gary War's garage-rock immersed in a lake is likewise mood-morphing, as is the Gang Gang Dance DJ set.
AUSTIN
* Grimes (Montreal) @ Lamberts / 401 W 2nd St, 9:30p/SOLD OUT. Oh son, I know you wanted to see Claire "Grimes" Boucher enthrall intimate Lamberts w/ her uncanny avant-pop vox and "Darkbloom"-ing sound…but this show's been sold out since forever. Good on you, those w/ tix. w/ Born Gold
TOKYO
* Hajime Hasegawa "Primitive Vehicle" @ Art Front Gallery / Hillside Terrace A, 29-18 Sarugakucho, Shibuya-ku (JR Lines etc to Shibuya). Hasegawa's constructions of curved bamboo with metal and wooden beams emulate Greek mythology in a DIY sensibility.
FRIDAY
NYC
* John Chamberlain "Choices" @ Guggenheim / 1071 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). The great American sculptor passed away late last year, but his signature colorfully crushed auto parts (and their typically equally colorful titles) will forever remained ingrained in modern art history. This isn't the first time the Gugg has decked its space w/ vehicles (Cai Guo-Qiang suspended 'em from the ceiling of his 2008 career survey, plus that critically condemned 2000 show "The Art of the Motorcycle")—but Chamberlain successfully contorted, ripped and shredded his autos in eclectic assemblages, yet each retains that "car essence". Expect about 100 works spanning his entire career.
* Hans-Peter Feldmann @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. You might remember Feldmann winning the 2010 Hugo Boss Award, which he displayed in its $100,000 entirety at the Guggenheim last year as a wallpapering of singles. The German conceptualist stages a new installation at 303, ahead of his upcoming solo at Serpentine Gallery, London, in April.
* "Hindsight" (dir. Lee Hyun-seung, 2011) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 9:15p. Leave it to dependable Korean screen-electrifier Song Kang-ho to draw us deep within this contemporary crime thriller. He plays a retired mob boss trying to make good, but charmed by a young woman a cooking class, he finds that old life grabbing back for him.
* Cut Hands @ Public Assembly / 70 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/$10. Pure decibel destruction! Though this ain't William Bennett's searing Whitehouse act, let's not forget he basically created the punishing subgenre known as "power electronics". As Cut Hands, Bennett's "afro noise" set features heavily on both fronts, from pummeling tribal rhythms that thump at your bowels, chest and throat, to scorching sonics. Stoked, right? w/ Xeno & Oaklander
* Parts & Labor (10-yr anniversary) @ 285 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. Final show for Brooklynite noise rockers, bringing those polyrhythms, wheezy electronics and B.J.'s beard since '02. I'll miss them! They go out in style tonight, joined by local psych-rockers Oneida and onetime P&L guitarist Sarah Lipstate's superlative guitar-drone project Noveller.
AUSTIN
* Quiet Company @ Stubb's / 801 Red River, 8p/$10. Austin's nattiest brass-toned indie-rock stalwarts have been taking requests for fan-fave songs to play at their headlining showcase, which also feat. Ft. Worth's The Orbans and locals The Reynolds Number (enjoying their CD release). How's that for a solid?
TOKYO
* Shoji Ueda "Mode in Dunes" @ Taka Ishii Photography / 2F 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). Ueda fuses fashion photography with Rene Magritte-style surrealism in this classic series of prints in the desert.
SATURDAY
NYC
* Charles Long + Nicole Wermers @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Long continues to twist and elasticize the boundaries of sculpture, in his ninth solo at the gallery. Upstairs, Wermers accents with a photo series from the Rodin Museum in Paris, contrasted with her own modernist sculpture.
* Ryan McNamara "Still" @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. The young performance artist inaugurates his debut solo at the gallery w/ a little help from his friends…or, I mean, YOU. He'll be in the gallery for the first three weeks, and the works you create with him (posted daily on the gallery website, plus a version in your inbox) will reappear as the gallery exhibition in the second half of the show. Expect impromptu performances, collaborations, maybe a dance or two.
* Alex Gross "Product Placement" + Victor Castillo "The Jungle" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. LA artist Gross' lush painterly style is kind of like Jim Rosenquist (or Richard Hamilton) for a decidedly 21st C. world, a globe-flattening blend of posh designer labels, a polyglot of languages on adverts, exotic critters and nondescript environments. It's a foreshortened world thrust continuously into hyperdrive, Asia, America and the Middle East coalescing into one postmodern hybrid. Meanwhile Castillo (also LA-based, born in Chile) takes on the socioeconomic crisis w/ spooky children's tales, rendered in paintings and works on paper.
* Donald Moffett "The Radiant Future" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. I caught Moffett's wonderful career survey "The Extravagant Vein" at CAM Houston this past winter, which just touched down in Saratoga Springs NY for an almost four-month run. He returns to the gallery after his 2010 dual w/ Robert Beck ("Range") w/ a suite of works exploring the roles of texture, mounting, and relief.
* FCS: "Silent House" (dirs. Chris Kentis & Laura Lau, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 10:45p. Elizabeth Olsen plays a young woman terrorized by spirits "in real time" while trapped inside her family's lakeside retreat. I am over the moon excited about this one.
* "Quick" (dir. Cho Beom-goo, 2011) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave (23/45 to Nevins, C to Lafayette), 9:30p. Think "30 Minutes or Less" but w/ bike messengers on Korean motorcycles and super-cutie Kang Ye-won standing in for Dilshad Vadsaria, only w/ a way more active role.
AUSTIN
* "HONGKONGATHON" (various dirs., curated by Grady Hendrix) @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. Grady Hendrix, genre genius behind NY Asian Film Festival, and local madman Lars Nilsen (Fantastic Fest/Weird Wednesdays at the Ritz) co-curated this rare/secret Hong Kong classics marathon. As Hendrix sez: "five movies, 10 hours, 100 ways to blow your mind." I don't doubt that for a second.
* Cloud Nothings (Cleveland) @ Red 7 / 611 E 7th St, 9p. First time I saw Dylan Baldi, aka "Cloud Nothings" and crew, back in I guess 2010 at a concrete-walled basement in Brooklyn, the whole thing was so damn loud and fuzzy, alt-punk tuned to 15. Not to say he's mellowed a bit in spanking-new second LP "Attack on Memory" (P4K awarded it "Best New Music"), but it's filled out with hooks and almost grunge atonality amid the grinding riffs and pummeling rhythm. Cloud Nothings is a full-out BAND. w/ A Classic Education
* Teengirl Fantasy @ Beauty Ballroom / 2015 E Riverside Dr, 9p/$12. A live set from fractured-house duo Teengirl Fantasy is a fine thing indeed, especially if you like dance like it's 1989. w/ Jacques Renault
* VNV Nation @ Elysium / 705 Red River, 9:30p/$30. Would I drop three Madisons to dial it back to '00 and slam-dance to VNV Nation's thunderous EBM anthems "Darkangel" and "Rubicon"? If I were in Tokyo, hell yeah. Pick yr poison. w/ Straftanz
* Quiet Hooves (ATL) @ Stubb's / 801 Red River, 9p. That weird-pop collective Quiet Hooves (think your favorite garage-rock act and a Gospel group sharing a sheet of acid) know how to get a groove going. w/ Reptar
TOKYO
* Marijke van Warmerdam "Haru" @ Taka Ishii Gallery / 5F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). The Amsterdam-based artist presents a series of paintings based on film stills printed on canvas, like frozen moments.
* Ai Udagawa "Sign" @ Kido Press, Inc / 6F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Toei Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). Udagawa typically incorporates embroidery into her mesmerizing, naturalistic acrylic and mixed-media paintings.
* "Zombie Ass" (dir. Noboru Iguchi, 2011) premiere @ Cinemart Shinjuku / 3-13-3 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku (Tokyo Metro Marunouchi/Fukutoshin/Toei Shinjuku Lines to Shinjuku-sanchome Station). An epic of epic epicness, straight from the bowels of post-NOTLD cinema and thoroughly doused in Iguchi's deviant world of scat zombies, anal alien parasites…and lotsa cute girls. I loved the world premiere (at 2011 Fantastic Fest) so much that I saw the damn film twice, it's that great.
* "Pina" (dir. Wim Wenders, 2011) @ HT Yurakucho / 2-7-1 Yurakucho, Chiyoda-ku (Yurakucho Line to Yurakucho Station). I was cued into the late, great German choreographer Pina Bausch's electrifying performances years ago by my mentor, and they forever changed how I view movement (e.g. by one person, by person to person, in groups) and "modern dance". Plus Bausch was a kind of muse to Yohji Yamamoto. Now Wenders, an old friend, conjures a 3D experience with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch that gives us even a glimpse of what it must be like to be a Bausch dancer, part of her kinetic, romantic world. It sounds like a triumph.
* Incapacitants + K2 @ SOUP / B1F 3-9-10 Kami-Ochiai, Shinjuku-ku (JR Sobu Line to Higashi-Nakano Station), 7:30p/2500 yen. A night of audio fury, feat. legends Incapacitants playing "as loud as possible" (I mean sonically, not necessary their legendary LP) and audio pathologist Kimihide "K2" Kusafuka. w/ Nate Young (of Wolf Eyes)
SUNDAY
NYC
* Cindy Sherman @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St). Sherman quickly created a niche for herself within the contemporary art and photography pantheon—plus that of feminism, self-representation, body politics—by using herself as the model. For over 30 years, Sherman has been director, photographer, stylist and subject, culling images from TV, cinema, magazines, art historical and current to supply her inspiration. This career retrospective features her b&w series "Untitled Film Stills" (1977-80), her history portraits (1989-90), extra-outlandish society portraits (2008) and recent photographic murals, in their American premiere, plus everything in between.
* FCS: "Almayer's Folly" (dir. Chantal Akerman, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 1p. You may know Akerman as I, from her '75 voyage "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles", exploring the ellipses of conventional narrative cinema. Her latest, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's 1895 titular debut novel, re-imagines the time to the 1950s and the Dutch fortune seeker in Malaysia as a critique of the bankruptcy of colonialism.
TOKYO
* Kyoka + Cokiyu + Sawako + 34423 @ SOUP / B1F 3-9-10 Kami-Ochiai, Shinjuku-ku (JR Sobu Line to Higashi-Nakano Station), 7p/2500 yen. Four Japanese soundscape artists create an alchemical improvisational night at the SOUP. Kyoka (Berlin/Tokyo) concocts some crazy beats, plus she's the first female artist on the Raster-Norton label. Cokiyu (Ehime) has performed in Denmark's SPOT FESTIVAL, the Tokyo Motor Show, and Tetsuya Nakashima's "Confessions" (that discreet sonic gloss? that's Cokiyu). I'm totally a fan of Nagoya-born Sawako (Tokyo/NYC) and her lush field recordings. Finally pop sound-collagist 34423 (Tokyo), or "Niyoshi Fumi".
MONDAY
NYC
* "An Evening with Phil Collins" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 7p. To my glamouramas from the '80s, no not THAT Phil Collins. I mean the wonderful artist and mega-photojournalist, who presents a selection of his globally-minded video works, incl. "how to make a refugee" (1999) and "use! value! exchange!" (2010).
TOKYO
* The Naked and Famous @ Club Quattro / 5F 32-13 Udagawa-cho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station), 7p/5500 yen. The Kiwi electro-pop cuties rock the hell outta Shibuya, fueled by crystalline keyboards, ass-shaking bass and Alisa Xayalith's potent vox.
* BobRins @ THREE / B1F 5-18-1 Daizawa, Setagaya-ku (Inokashira Line to Shimokitazawa Station), 7p/2300 yen. Melodic garage-rock from these Tokyo girls BobRins, propelled by Yukie's tight drumming. w/ 虫のしらせ (lit. "Foreboding"!)
TUESDAY
NYC
* "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). MAYJAH. Take Picasso's portrait of Parisian modern art patron Gertrude Stein as the jump-off for this lush grouping, encapsulating Stein and her brothers as tastemakers on 20th C. art. Though the focus is primarily on Matisse and Picasso, the exhibition also includes works by Pierre Bonnard, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Francis Picabia, and others.
* Georg Baselitz @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. The superlative German artist revisits aspects of his own history, but in paintings larger than he's ever created before: huge figures painted in bold colors against a shifting, constrast-y backdrop. Baselitz adds rough-hewn wood and bronze-cast sculpture to this exhibition of new works.
* '"Artist and Publisher: Printmaking and the Collaborative Process" w/ Marina Abramovic and Jacob Samuel of Edition Jacob Samuel @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 6p/$10
* FCS: "Faust" (dir. Aleksandr Sokurov, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 9p. Faust's crazy craving for knowledge and power as the Enlightenment, and thus the source of 20th-century evil? That's the rub in this Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion winner, Sokurov's visual and sonic fiesta. Dig in.
* "White Night" (dir. Park Shin-woo, 2009) screening @ Tribeca Cinemas / 54 Varick St (ACE/1 to Canal St), 7p/FREE. This decadent crime-mystery thriller, replete w/ decade-spanning murders and entangled relationships, is based off Keigo Higashino's Shueisha-published story "Byakuyako" from the late '70s (later compiled into a best-selling novel). Plus Son Ye-jin plays the lead (hello!).
CURRENT SHOWS
AUSTIN
* Tom Molloy "New World" + Noriko Ambe "White Scape" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces St. Molloy strips away the noise and distractions in his historically leaning or contemporarily relevant bodies of work—oftentimes by incredibly meticulous practices—leaving a sort-of podium for us to contemplate, discuss, argue. While he's not explicitly putting his own politics behind the dozens of thrift-store framed Internet-culled b&w images of male world leaders pressing the flesh in "Shake", the works circuitous nature and site-specific installation—where "Hussein/Mubarak" slides into "Mubarak/Bush" and "Bush/Putin", until we're back at "Hussein" again—, plus the fact these nonchronological shots span from 9-11 to the Arab Spring, naturally presents some theories. How these men are friends one minute, wheeling and dealing the next, and sworn enemies separated by several frames of their "friends" after that. Molloy's nine-part titular work features nine different LP sleeves of Dvorák's "New World Symphony", the texts painted over (Molloy's analogue to Photoshop, he said) to show only benign, sunny images of the Western frontier. That "incredibly meticulous practices" bit I alluded to earlier is most clear in "Somewhere", Molloy's hand-painted sheet music to the "Wizard of Oz"'s sweetly optimistic anthem, a work that began with a black sheet of paper and lots and lots of carefully applied white gouache. Noriko Ambe's suite of all-white cut-paper and cut-YUPO (a waterproof synthetic "paper" made from recycled polypropylene) are just sublime, "Tracking II" like footprints in fresh-fallen snow, "Spring 1" the imprint of a tree or a floodplain, "A Piece of Flat Globe Vol. 22" a calmly ancient canyon.
* Jill Magid "Failed States" @ AMOA-Arthouse / 700 Congress. So check this: on 1/21/10, a young man named Fausto fired six bullets into the air outside the Texas State Capitol. Jill Magid — whose oeuvre navigates bureaucracy and security/intelligence w/ Mission Impossible deftness — was like steps away, pursuing her own future work, and witnessed it. Now six blocks from the scene and two years later, Magid stages an intriguing Conceptual show that ties Fausto's mysterious actions — and his silence throughout his trial — with that of Goethe's "Faust". The ground-floor gallery is her stage, replete with wall-decal directions ("Enter Fausto", "shots fired skyward", "enter Magid" etc), Magid's own play "Fausto: A Tragedy" (mirroring "Faust"'s original intention as a closet drama, meant to be read and not performed), and contemplative works. Deep encodings here, from six translations of "Faust" silkscreened on top of one another, to six bullet casings and a six-slide projection of the sky over the Capitol. Magid wrote a letter to Fausto, requesting his voice (absent in his trial) to read passages from "Faust" (whose Spanish translation is "Fausto") — his answer is still forthcoming, but it would add an intriguing layer to all this. Finally, there is Magid's family's '93 Mercedes, armored to B4 level and parked in Fausto's spot outside the Capitol, and her writing appearing in the February issue of the "Texas Observer", drawing this dialogue beyond the art-scene realm as it should be.
+ "Evidence of Houdini's Return". A really brilliant group show of fractured and re-envisioned realities, curated by Arthouse's Rachel Adams. I tweeted that it made me miss NYC, because it's precisely that sort of thoughtful exhibition that makes me look twice, thrice, at what I think I already know. Ex: Strauss Borque LaFrance's "BABE", a silvery lacquered wood plank pitched diagonally on the wall like classic John McCracken,…only just around the corner is that same plank, used as a shelf amid LaFrance's complex, mixed-media display. Another: Katja Mater's "Time Passing Objects", chromogenic prints that blur the line b/w photography and geometric drawings. Justin Swinburne's "Echo" works, multiple inkjet scans onto alu-dibond that echo (no pun) Gerhard Richter's signature abstracts while maintaining that sense of disarray like Wade Guyton's inkjet silkscreens. Bravo!
CLOSING SOON
NYC
* Rashid Johnson "Rumble" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Ahead of the NY artist's 1st major solo museum exhibition "A Message To Our Folks" at MCA Chicago in April, the gallery debuts Johnson's cross-media series w/ boxing mega-promoter Don King as the jumpoff. The show is awesome. It smells...uniquely Johnson, owing to his signature use of soap (appearing here almost like thickly textured, abraded black paint) and lotion. But beyond tortured canvases of black soap and wax are cast bronze standing in as frozen canvas and jagged mirrors throwing our own reflections into Johnson's installations of leather-bound books and objects.
* Doug Wheeler @ David Zwirner / 519 W 19th St. A major new installation from the pioneering "Light and Space" artist, and the first-ever presentation of Wheeler's "infinity environment" in NYC.
* Ai Weiwei, Wang Xingwei, Ding Yi "Persona 3" @ Chambers Fine Art / 522 W 19th St. Ai's big "Sunflower Seeds" installation at Mary Boone Gallery a few blocks north of here may be drawing huge crowds, but I urge you to check this intriguing pairing as well. The three Chinese contemporary artists have created a cooperative work, temporarily exchanging artistic profiles in a demonstration of their mutual admiration for Chinese art scholar Hans van Dijk. Ai focuses Ding Yi's abstract style in iron; Wang channels Ai's furniture-manipulation in a new rosewood sculpture; and Ding Yi hearkens back to his earliest representational style in painting a Shanghai cityscape.
* "Marble Sculpture from 350 B.C. to Last Week" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. First off: props for an awesome group show title and concept. I don't know how the gallery pulled this off, but this does indeed include Greek and Roman antiquities and Neoclassical sculpture, plus Dadaist biomorphic works and recent examples from Ai Weiwei, Barry X Ball and Tom Sachs.
* Udomsak Krisanamis "Space Out" @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. The Thai-born collage alchemist (and avid golfer, apparently) comes off a successful cross-media show at Kunstverein Freiburg w/ a visual and textural panoply.
* Joyce Pensato "Batman Returns" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. It's Batman, dammit! Pensato resurrects her recurring motif, which she's worked w/ since the mid-'70s but ceased in '96, tripping the masked vigilante up in pastels—in addition to her traditional black, white, silver palette—and showing him against other Pop cartoon characters.
AUSTIN
* Daniel Heidkamp "Glow Drops at the Chill Spot" @ Champion / 800 Brazos St. Take a plunge into Heidkamp's latest suite of radiant, textural scenes. He shows these interiors and exteriors completely independent from his ongoing portraiture, a strong move in my opinion. For the Brooklyn-based artist isn't just this accomplished figurative painter who also happens to paint rooms and landscapes en plein air. Rather, he is a strong force in capturing natural environments as he sees them, imbuing them with a resonating life-force and character that draws us into their layers of oil paint and dollops of impasto, confronting us with a disarming nostalgia. I may never have visited that Massachusetts backyard ("Here Glows Nothing") or Florida dockside ("Alligator Alley"), but it's like I can smell the air, feel the lawn beneath my trainers and the sun on my face. There's a physicality to Heidkamp's scenes beyond the presence of actual people, who he deftly folds into scenarios (the fireside "Feel It All Around", the portraitures' meta-effect in "The Night of 1000 Paintings") as accenting players. A very strong exhibition and a bold start to Austin's 2012 gallery season.
TOKYO
* Tatsuo Majima "All the right moves" @ Taro Nasu Gallery / 1-2-11 Higashi-kanda, Chiyoda-ku (Sobu Line to Bakurocho Station). Majima takes on classic Tom Cruise movie posters in the artist's ongoing collision of cultural differences in modern society. (ENDS SAT)
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
fee's LIST / through 2/21
WEDNESDAY
NYC
* The Generational: "Ungovernables", curated by Eungie Joo @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, 6 to Spring St). The New Museum's first Generational iteration, 2009's "Younger Than Jesus", had a cheeky theme and some dope work…but I didn't love it as ecstatically as I'd hoped. This year's, inspired by strategic civil disobedience and self-determination, feat. a strong international roster, as in most of 'em have NEVER exhibited in the U.S. Meaning: we New Yorkers (and many visitors, I suspect) will actually learn a lot.
* "Printin'" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St). The artist Ellen Gallagher co-organized this accompaniment to MoMA's tour-de-force "Print/Out" (opening SUN), using her mind-blowing 60-part mixed-media portfolio "DeLuxe" as the jump-off. "Printin'" includes a sweeping chronology of artists working in multiple disciplines, incl. Vija Celmins, David Hammons, George "Krazy Kat" Herriman, Robert Rauschenberg, Martha Rosler and loads more.
* "Michael" (dir. Markus Schleinzer, 2011) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston). It may well be an odd selling point coming from any other director, but "chilling debut feature from the casting director of Michael Haneke's "White Ribbon"" got MY attention. And from what I've read, Schleinzer's tense observational thriller—on the titular loner and the boy he keeps locked in the basement—is creepier than hell. Missed this one at 2011 Fantastic Fest.
* "Secret Reunion" (dir. Jang Hun, 2010) screening @ Tribeca Cinemas / 54 Varick St (ACE/1 to Canal St), 7p/FREE. Pair up two of Korea's most talented actors, Song Kang-ho as an NIS agent and Kang Dong-won as a sleeper cell newcomer in this thriller on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone, and you get the 2nd highest grossing film in Korea's 2010 box office AND a damn awesome film.
AUSTIN
* "Viewpoints" @ AMOA-Arthouse / 700 Congress, 6p. Andrea Mellard, Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programs leads a discussion on "Evidence of Houdini's Return", the kickass contemporary abstraction group show.
* Cut Hands @ ND501 Studios / 501 N IH-35, 9p/$8. William "Whitehouse" Bennett blazes into the U.S. w/ shards of boiling sonics and ill-ass beats, as his "afro-noise" persona DJ Cut Hands. I am so stoked that I plan to see him twice, in two different noncontiguous states. w/ Eloe Omoe
TOKYO
* Cults @ Unit / 1-34-17 Ebisu-nishi, Shibuya-ku (Tokyu-Toyoko Line to Daikanyama Station, JR Yamanote/Hibiya Line to Ebisu Station), 7p/5000 yen. Brooklyn cuties Cults are a bit like a garage-pop version of Boards of Canada. If that gets you jonesin', Tokyo's got your answer.
THURSDAY
* "The Virgins Show", curated by Marilyn Minter @ Family Business (part of Anna Kustera Gallery, run by Cattelan and Gioni) / 520 W 21st St. feat. "Virgins" (Andrew Brischler, Eric Mistretta, David Mramor, Rebecca Ward etc) & "Born Again Virgins" (Patty Chang, Kate Gilmore, Laurel Nakadate, Wangechi Mutu, Mika Rottenberg, Aïda Ruilova—all very first works on video monitor)… plus supposedly the great Hennessy Youngman (aka Pharaoh Hennessy, aka Mr. Museums, aka The Pedagogic Pimp) joins the lineup as "coming later", so stay tuned! This just got MAYJAH-er!
* Valeska Soares @ Eleven Rivington / 11 Rivington St. Concurrent w/ Soares' exhibition at Galeria Fortes Vilaça in Sao Paulo comes three large-scale works on linen, constructed from vintage dust-jackets and hardcover books, plus works from "Edits", where Soares reproduces pages from Roland Barthes' "A Lover's Discourse".
* Yinka Shonibare, MBE "Addio del Passato" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Shonibare continues his exploration of the British Empire figurehead Lord Nelson in his latest film (lit. "so closes my sad story"), plus new photoworks from the series "Fake Death Pictures"—reenacting famous painterly suicides swathed in Shonibare's signature Dutch patterned fabric. Oh, and some fetish object sculpture from bygone eras, that too.
* "First Look" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 245 Tenth Ave. The photo gallery inaugurates its new 10th Ave space w/ a curated group show, feat. artists whose first solo exhibition was presented at Yossi Milo. Including Mohamed Bourouissa, Pieter Hugo, Yuki Onodera, Sze Tsung Leong, Alessandra Sanguinetti and the mighty Kohei Yoshiyuki—this is an all-star lineup even if it were held in the gallery's old location. Def check it out.
* Marlo Pascual @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Here's what I know about Pascual: 1) I am a huge fan off her 2010 solo at the gallery, her "situations" of warped fashion-y C-prints and objects are super. 2) her press release for this show describes lighting, vegetables, and menswear. Probably a hit.
* Will Ryman @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave + 515 W 27th St. Ryman's debut with the gallery goes off in a big way, w/ site-specific sculptural installations in BOTH gallery spaces, another first for Paul Kasmin. The 10th Ave space holds one of Ryman's outsized, sinewy "everyone", w/ a paintbrush labyrinth in the back gallery. The new 27th St space becomes a gallery-sized stand-in for Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, only made of fabricated nails.
* Lyne Lapointe @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 512 W 20th St. A pictorial installation of new paintings, executed on wood panel via either paint or phosphorescent-coated pins, form the central component of Lapointe's show, focusing on darkness, light and memory.
* Charles Garabedian "Mythologies" @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. Garabedian draws from characters and settings from Homer's epics and other Greek classics in a set of new paintings and works on paper. This exhibition, his third at the gallery , follows his 2011 career retrospective at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
* '"Artist and Publisher: Printmaking and the Collaborative Process" w/ Ellen Gallagher and Two Palms Press @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 6p/$10. Gallagher (who co-organized MoMA's "Printin'" show) in conversation on creative practice and collaboration w/ Two Palms Press. Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books and organizer of "Print/Out" (opens SUN) moderates the talk.
* "The Ungovernables" artists roundtable Q&A, moderated by Eungie Joo @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, 6 to Spring St), 7p/$8. I seriously wish I were in town for this, as curator Eungie Joo joins like TWENTY participating artists in a roundtable informal conversation. I seriously hope the museum tapes this (or streams it live?).
FRIDAY
NYC
* Charles Atlas "The Illusion of Democracy" @ Luhring Augustine Bushwick / 25 Knickerbocker Ave, Bushwick (L to Morgan). Bushwick has a teeming, fertile art-scene, full of creatives and creative gallery spaces. Now W. Chelsea powerhouse Luhring Augustine states its claim in a new space w/ a brilliant exhibition, the American post-punk video artist Charles Atlas, who despite participating in the upcoming Whitney Biennial hasn't shown locally in a long while. The exhibition feat. two video installations never seen before in NYC, "Painting by Numbers" (2008) and "Plato's Alley" (2009), plus a new large-scale video work created specifically for this show and space.
* Breyer P-Orridge "I'm Mortality" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, the mighty voice of the avant-garde, conceives an "inter-dimensional" collaboration between the material and immaterial worlds, in her second solo at the gallery.
* Adel Abdessemed "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf" @ David Zwirner / 525-533 W 19th St. In Abdessemed's debut solo at the gallery in 2009, he shoved three airplane fuselages and tailfins, like a sleeping dragon, into the space. That inherent politicized and spectator violence recurs in his new two-space show, including razorwire sculptures of the crucified Jesus, an installation of an abandoned lifeboat (recreated from one found in the Florida Keys, ostensibly used to transport immigrants)…plus a wall of taxidermy animals. Viewer beware.
* Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev "Brooklyn Bridge" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. The Kyrgyzstan-based duo presents a new 6-channel video installation, a series of interviews on illegal immigration within Brooklyn's Russian-speaking neighborhoods from Central Asia's former Soviet republics, plus experimental projections of Brooklyn Bridge and photos of Brighton Beach, the "bridge" between two societies, so to speak. Sounds awesome.
* Dan Flavin "Drawing" @ Morgan Library & Museum / 225 Madison Ave (6 to 33rd St). Perhaps it's not a total surprise that the modernist alchemist of fluorescent light installations was also an avid draftsman, but this "illuminating" survey constitutes the first retrospective devoted entirely to his drawings, from early watercolors to light installation studies and, uh, landscape sketches? Still, I'm intrigued.
* Film Comment Selects @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St). Rawer than NYFF, more international than the, uh, region-specific film festivals, and 1000% cooler than Tribeca. FCS returns w/ nearly three dozen new productions and classics, some w/o stateside distribution (translation: see 'em now or maybe never see 'em again). The festival lasts through MAR 1 so I'll update w/ my favorites, and read on for this week's picks (each bears a FCS slug).
* FCS: "Faust" (dir. Aleksandr Sokurov, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 8:15p. Faust's crazy craving for knowledge and power as the Enlightenment, and thus the source of 20th-century evil? That's the rub in this Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion winner, Sokurov's visual and sonic fiesta. Dig in. ALSO TUES 3:15p
* "Bullhead" (dir. Michael Roskam, 2011) @ Angelika NY / 18 W Houston ST (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette). YES! Roskam's debut full-length—a seriously dark, bruising crime-thriller centered on Belgium's mafioso cattle industry—is Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. In my opinion, it's a winner, thanks in no small part to burly lead Matthias Schoenaerts, but see it for yourself. His steroidal performance masks a brutal secret too awesome to spoil here. Highly recommended!
* "L'Enfant" (dire. les frères Dardenne, 2005) screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 11a. This is a hard-ass, hard-knocks film, where a newborn's entrance to this world is complicated in that its parents are homeless minors, particularly the sleazy BF who sells the baby on the black market and realizes "hey, I'm an idiot! I need to get the baby back!" THRU SUN
* Saul Williams @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$20. Legendary charismatic lyricist and encyclopedic poet Saul Williams graces the Hall in a truly next-level night. Crown Heights agit-punk CX KiDTRONiK opens the event w/ a crackle of electro-rap.
AUSTIN
* "Bullhead" (dir. Michael Roskam, 2011) @ Alamo Drafthouse S. Lamar / 1120 S. Lamar. YES! Roskam's debut full-length—a seriously dark, bruising crime-thriller centered on Belgium's mafioso cattle industry—is Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. In my opinion, it's a winner, thanks in no small part to burly lead Matthias Schoenaerts, but see it for yourself. His steroidal performance masks a brutal secret too awesome to spoil here. Highly recommended!
* "Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow" (dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2011) @ Violet Crown Cinema / 434 W 2nd St. To witness an Anselm Kiefer work, whether it's an entire installation of mixed-media paintings, dioramas and sculptures or "just" a single piece, is to be thrown into a palimpsest of architectonic history. Fiennes begins with the world-renowned artist's studio and leads us deep within Kiefer's methodology and expression as a postwar master.
TOKYO
* Toshiaki Hikosaka + Takuro Sugiyama "Dead Paintings" @ Radium / 2-5-17 Bakurocho, Chuo-ku (JR Yamanote Line to Bakurocho Station). The two young artists present their own unique styles of abstraction, Hikosaka's systemic grids and Sugiyama's intertwined colors and planes.
* the milky tangerine @ Fever / 1-1-14 Hanegi, Setagaya-ku (Odakyu Inokashira Line to Shindaita or Shimokitazawa Stations), 7p/2000 yen. I fell in love w/ Tokyo indie-rockers the milky tangerine based on a sweetly dissonant single ("Your Beautiful Mind")…then I saw 'em at this very venue in December and fell in even deeper. They're absolutely awesome. w/ bet.
* The Pains of Being Pure at Heart @ Club Quattro / 5F 32-13 Udagawa-cho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station), 7p/5000 yen. Would I pay approx $65 USD to see hometown (Brooklyn) indie-pop cuties—and one of my favoritest bands in the world—The Pains play Tokyo. A: you bet.
* RECORIDE @ Koenji High / 4-30-1 Koenji-Minami, Suginami-ku (Chuo Line to Koenji Station), 7p/2500 yen. Think Miss Kitten crossed w/ Crystal Castles…but that only 1/2 quantifies the sweaty, electro-pop awesomeness of RECORIDE. Slam-dancing in effect. w/ Lily of the Valley
SATURDAY
NYC
* Zak Prekop @ Harris Lieberman / 508 W 26th St. Paper-collaged canvases and monochromes layered with stencils from other paintings factor into Prekop's tonal, textural triumph, his second solo at the gallery.
* Bruce Brosnan "See, hear remember" + Tyler Vlahovich @ Feature Inc / 131 Allen St. Brosnan's candy-pop paintings on cut and shaped MDF and Vlahovich's smoldering, murky palette of oils or gouache on canvas and wood panel may be at opposing ends of the color spectrum, but each artist unearths this cool sense of depth and perspective in their respective abstractions while maintaining a clear flatness.
* "The Ungovernables" artist talk: "Invisible Borders Trans-African Photography Project" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, 6 to Spring St), 3p/$8. The artist-led initiative whose vision is to become a symbol of networking and trans-border association w/in the arts and photography in Africa, discuss their mission and current activities.
* FCS: "Mortem" (dir. Eric Atlan, 2010) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 5p. Think David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" but shot in b&w and French. That got your attention, right? Plus Atlan attends the screening!
* Zola Jesus @ Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NR/L/456 to Union Square), 6p/$15. Highly highly highly recommend enveloping within this super-cute songbird's gossamer soundscapes. I don't know how Zola's disarming croon and experimental roots play against speed-metal openers Liturgy, but I imagine the end result transcendent.
TOKYO
* Shunsuke Taira + Akito Nakai + Shinnosuke Yoshida @ Gallery MOMO Roppongi / 2F 6-2-6 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Toei Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). In my experience, MOMO does a great job showcasing young artists. That's the case here w/ this three-artist show, ahead of their respective graduations from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts. They're all painters of a roughly figurative angle, plus Yoshida and Nakai have both had solos (Yoshida at MOMO's Ryogoku branch).
* "Melancholia" (dir. Lars von Trier, 2011) @ Toho Cinema Shibuya / 2-6-17 Dogenzaka, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit). The denouement of "Melancholia", which rightfully earned a best actress award at Cannes for Kirsten Dunst's role, had me contacting friends in NYC and Tokyo with promises of visiting them as soon as possible. It's the end of the world, beginning with a wedding reception for Dunst and teasing out her…complicated relationship w/ her sister, played pitch-perfectly by Charlotte Gainsbourg, ending w/ among the most emotionally devastating conclusions in my filmic history. Deserves to be seen on the big screen.
* 「大人の喧嘩」/"Carnage" (dir. Roman Polanski, 2011) @ TOHO Cinemas Chanter / 1-2-2 Yurakucho, Chiyoda-ku (Chiyoda/Hibiya Lines to Hibiya Station, Yurakucho Line to Yurakucho Station). Polanski's taut, tittering adaptation of the stage play "God of Carnage"—translated here as "Adults Fight"—works thanks to the electrifying cast of sparring parents Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz vs Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly.
* BiS + current of air @ Fever / 1-1-14 Hanegi, Setagaya-ku (Odakyu Inokashira Line to Shindaita or Shimokitazawa Stations), 7p/2500 yen. See my comments on the milky tangerine under FRI, and relay that into current of air, the pitch-perfect popstars who headlined that show at Fever last December. I'm throwing my bets behind BiS, too, aka "Brand-new Idol Society", three (or four?) PYTs who know how to rock out.
SUNDAY
NYC
* "Print/Out'" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St). Part two of MoMA's tour-de-force on the printed medium (in conjunction w/ "Printin'") is this 200-work treasure trove on classic printmaking techniques, self-published artists' books, and digital technologies—mostly drawn from MoMA's own collection. Feat. Ai Weiwei, Ellen Gallagher, Martin Kippenberger, Lucy McKenzie, SUPERFLEX, Rirkrit Tiravanija and loads more.
* FCS: "I Wish/Kiseki" (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 6:15p. Two boys' cross-country plan to reunite their estranged parents', via the clandestine rendezvous of two bullet trains. Plus Jo "Johnny Depp" Odagiri plays the dad, so I'm game. ALSO MON 8:45p
* FCS: "My Own Private River" (dirs. James Franco & Gus Van Sant) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 9p. Let's take this from the top: one screening. With James "River Phoenix" Franco leading a Q&A. Yeah, this is place to be.
* DJ Krush @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$15. I can proudly state w/o boasting that I've been down w/ this original Japanese hip-hop DJ's smoky, jazzy breaks since '97 and "MiLight". Dude's almost 50 and he STILL brings it, like his monthly single series begun in 2011. Totally a mesmeric "evening with Krush".
TUESDAY
NYC
* Frankie Rose "Interstellar" LP release party @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p/$12. Miss Frankie Ross, a magnetic presence in Brooklyn's indie scene and one tough drummer, sheds her doo-wop garage-rock sound from debut S/T LP and emerges, butterfly-like, as a starry-toned pop star. She retains that voice, oh that awesome awesome melodious voice. w/ DIVE (extra-psychedelic!)
* The Suzan @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. This "second home" homecoming show for Japanese tropic-pop darlings The Suzan (straight in from touring good ol' Nippon) will be undoubtedly MAYJAH. w/ The Can't Tells
AUSTIN
* "Pumpkinhead" (dir. Stan Winston, 1988) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. Schlock 'n roll typifies this cult classic supernatural stunner, the directorial debut of SFX whiz Winston. Feat. the titular bayou boogeyman attacking campers, how can you go wrong??
CURRENT SHOWS
AUSTIN
* Tom Molloy "New World" + Noriko Ambe "White Scape" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces St. Molloy strips away the noise and distractions in his historically leaning or contemporarily relevant bodies of work—oftentimes by incredibly meticulous practices—leaving a sort-of podium for us to contemplate, discuss, argue. While he's not explicitly putting his own politics behind the dozens of thrift-store framed Internet-culled b&w images of male world leaders pressing the flesh in "Shake", the works circuitous nature and site-specific installation—where "Hussein/Mubarak" slides into "Mubarak/Bush" and "Bush/Putin", until we're back at "Hussein" again—, plus the fact these nonchronological shots span from 9-11 to the Arab Spring, naturally presents some theories. How these men are friends one minute, wheeling and dealing the next, and sworn enemies separated by several frames of their "friends" after that. Molloy's nine-part titular work features nine different LP sleeves of Dvorák's "New World Symphony", the texts painted over (Molloy's analogue to Photoshop, he said) to show only benign, sunny images of the Western frontier. That "incredibly meticulous practices" bit I alluded to earlier is most clear in "Somewhere", Molloy's hand-painted sheet music to the "Wizard of Oz"'s sweetly optimistic anthem, a work that began with a black sheet of paper and lots and lots of carefully applied white gouache. Noriko Ambe's suite of all-white cut-paper and cut-YUPO (a waterproof synthetic "paper" made from recycled polypropylene) are just sublime, "Tracking II" like footprints in fresh-fallen snow, "Spring 1" the imprint of a tree or a floodplain, "A Piece of Flat Globe Vol. 22" a calmly ancient canyon.
* Diana Al-Hadid @ Visual Arts Center / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity. The Brooklyn-based sculptural alchemist dropped some heady topics in her talk preceding this exhibition, not only naming a certain Gothic painting of the Visitation from a Spanish museum as her point of departure in this stunning new work "Suspended After Image", but also labyrinths (and Jorge Luis Borges), Peter Bruegel (and Babel), and the Large Hadron Collider. All this clued me into Al-Hadid's remarkable sense of harnessing space and presence in her installations, morphing bulk into something oddly ethereal and organic, though still visually commanding. "Suspended After Image" is Al-Hadid's first instance of using a 3D modeling program and CNC router in her work, and the final flowing, terraced form acts more like a 3D painting than a proper sculpture, with the figure seemingly emerging from the frontal staircase while a flow of media colored like wet Frosted Mini Wheats echoes her opulent robes. Though there is an almost total spectrum of color infused in this work, mostly as frozen drips on the sides and back, the overall is a pristine grayish-white, which is absolutely stunning in the VAC's Vaulted Gallery.
+ "(im)possibilities. Five artists — Michael Stevenson, Erica Baum, Birgit Rathsmann, Patrick Resing, and Ellie Ga — extend Borges' metaphor of the library in this dialogue of narratives and human experience. This plays well with Diana Al-Hadid's installation in the Vaulted Gallery. I was most quickly taken by Baum's series "Dog Ear", utilizing folded pages from paperbacks and photographing them into unique fragmented dialogue. Ga's C-prints of an illuminated fissure within the Arctic ice, shot during her residency at the scientific research vessel Tara, feel otherworldly.
* Daniel Heidkamp "Glow Drops at the Chill Spot" @ Champion / 800 Brazos St. Take a plunge into Heidkamp's latest suite of radiant, textural scenes. He shows these interiors and exteriors completely independent from his ongoing portraiture, a strong move in my opinion. For the Brooklyn-based artist isn't just this accomplished figurative painter who also happens to paint rooms and landscapes en plein air. Rather, he is a strong force in capturing natural environments as he sees them, imbuing them with a resonating life-force and character that draws us into their layers of oil paint and dollops of impasto, confronting us with a disarming nostalgia. I may never have visited that Massachusetts backyard ("Here Glows Nothing") or Florida dockside ("Alligator Alley"), but it's like I can smell the air, feel the lawn beneath my trainers and the sun on my face. There's a physicality to Heidkamp's scenes beyond the presence of actual people, who he deftly folds into scenarios (the fireside "Feel It All Around", the portraitures' meta-effect in "The Night of 1000 Paintings") as accenting players. A very strong exhibition and a bold start to Austin's 2012 gallery season.
CLOSING SOON
* Damien Hirst "The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St + 522 W 21st St + 980 Madison Ave. Ha, I totally forgot to write about this when the exhibitions went up. Now they close a full day before I arrive in NYC to judge them for myself.
* Thomas Scheibitz + Mat Collishaw @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Big awesome two: Scheibitz inaugurates his SEVENTH solo at the gallery, "A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events", w/ a powerful array of paintings, works on paper and sculpture that highlight his knack for classical architecture, urban imagery and pop culture. Collishaw fills the upstairs w/ an installation and photography from his "Insecticide" and "Last Meal on Death Row - Texas" series.
* Jeff Keen @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. The U.S. debut of the UK artist's post-Surrealist paintings and video, focused mainly on his influential body of work from the '60s and '70s.
* Bill Jensen @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. I like Jensen's drizzly, corroded surfaces in his very colorful abstract paintings. He introduces some triptychs here, and some worked-over etchings, in this exhibition of new works. (ENDS SAT)
NYC
* Michael Zelehoski "Secondary Structures" + Daniel Phillips "River Street" @ DODGEgallery / 15 Rivington St. The gallery pairs an alchemist of found objects and wood (Zelehoski) with Phillips' architecture/landscape-attuned video work.
* "FaceTime" @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. A group exhibition focused on the face itself and the pernicious rarity of face-to-face encounters in a ubiquitously digital society. Feat. an international cast, including Maria Petschnig, Debo Eilers, Aleksandra Domanovic and Michel Journiac. Follows the original iteration of the show at IMO Projects, Copenhagen, curated by Toke Lykkeberg & Julia Rodrigues.
* Malcolm Morley "Another Way to Make an Image, Monotypes" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. The seasoned printmaker's first foray into monotype, demonstrating his knack for experimentation and color.
AUSTIN
* "True Story" @ Grayduck Gallery / 608 W Monroe Dr. Three artists — Austinites Paul Beck and Pat Snow, plus Minnesotan Allen Brewer — play with, and off, perception and representation, reminding us as viewers that things aren't always as clear-cut as they first seem. Brewer takes a direct approach by purposefully painting (or drawing) his subjects blind, focusing on who or what he's rendering instead of the resultant object itself. So while some works carry ghostly remnants or shifts of his mark-making, others like the old man "Poopy" are startlingly realized, fully fleshed out like a Lucien Freud painting. Snow's watercolors and drawings mine his personal space, culling from memories, songs in the background and dialogue. Perhaps reflecting his background working alongside Robert Colescott and Howard Finster, many of Snow's works feature enveloping stories, like "Record Shop Girl" (the charming awkwardness hits close to home) and "I Think My Dog Is a Racist". His ecstatically rendered 99 watercolors "Girl Crazy/Crazy Girl" mostly features women artist friends from his former hometown, Birmingham AL, interspersed with silent movie-style title cards like "TOO Bad" and "Sweet Sad True", prompting an imagined (real?) conversation. The figures' range of renderings from classical to cartoonish reminded me a bit of Richard Linklater's classic Austin rotoscoped animation "Waking Life", which is where Beck comes in. He animated for that film and Linklater's "A Scanner Darkly", and his two suites of mixed media works made for this show tread the line b/w realism and almost nightmarish fantasy, soft-contoured figures floating against stark political undertones and lettering, all with a muted reddish palette. What's the message? That our own consciousness is a jumble of memories, daily interventions and environmental/societal irregularities, as mutable as the moments captured in these works.
TOKYO
* "The Scene" @ hpgrp Tokyo / B1F 5-1-15 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku (Chiyoda/Hanzomon/Ginza Lines to Omotesando Station). The show's theme is the power held within a single photograph, featuring the talents of Joy Kawakubo, Takeshi Shimamoto, Michael Stanley, Rich and TARA.
* Kiyomichi Shibuya "Which do you choose?" @ Art Front Gallery / Hillside Terrace A, 29-18 Sarugakucho, Shibuya-ku (JR Lines etc to Shibuya). Point: I dig this guy's name. Point: I dig his visual device, the spirograph, incorporating cast light into tracked out floral patterns that somehow encapsulates both childhood, traditional Japanese imagery, and classic literature. (ENDS SUN)
TOKYO
* Maya Maxx @ Kido Press, Inc / 6F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Toei Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). Maya Maxx is a trip, like a Comme des Garçons outfit come to painterly life. The Pop artist does rainbows here, mixing her calligraphy background w/ bold printmaking techniques. (ENDS TUES)
NYC
* The Generational: "Ungovernables", curated by Eungie Joo @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, 6 to Spring St). The New Museum's first Generational iteration, 2009's "Younger Than Jesus", had a cheeky theme and some dope work…but I didn't love it as ecstatically as I'd hoped. This year's, inspired by strategic civil disobedience and self-determination, feat. a strong international roster, as in most of 'em have NEVER exhibited in the U.S. Meaning: we New Yorkers (and many visitors, I suspect) will actually learn a lot.
* "Printin'" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St). The artist Ellen Gallagher co-organized this accompaniment to MoMA's tour-de-force "Print/Out" (opening SUN), using her mind-blowing 60-part mixed-media portfolio "DeLuxe" as the jump-off. "Printin'" includes a sweeping chronology of artists working in multiple disciplines, incl. Vija Celmins, David Hammons, George "Krazy Kat" Herriman, Robert Rauschenberg, Martha Rosler and loads more.
* "Michael" (dir. Markus Schleinzer, 2011) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston). It may well be an odd selling point coming from any other director, but "chilling debut feature from the casting director of Michael Haneke's "White Ribbon"" got MY attention. And from what I've read, Schleinzer's tense observational thriller—on the titular loner and the boy he keeps locked in the basement—is creepier than hell. Missed this one at 2011 Fantastic Fest.
* "Secret Reunion" (dir. Jang Hun, 2010) screening @ Tribeca Cinemas / 54 Varick St (ACE/1 to Canal St), 7p/FREE. Pair up two of Korea's most talented actors, Song Kang-ho as an NIS agent and Kang Dong-won as a sleeper cell newcomer in this thriller on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone, and you get the 2nd highest grossing film in Korea's 2010 box office AND a damn awesome film.
AUSTIN
* "Viewpoints" @ AMOA-Arthouse / 700 Congress, 6p. Andrea Mellard, Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programs leads a discussion on "Evidence of Houdini's Return", the kickass contemporary abstraction group show.
* Cut Hands @ ND501 Studios / 501 N IH-35, 9p/$8. William "Whitehouse" Bennett blazes into the U.S. w/ shards of boiling sonics and ill-ass beats, as his "afro-noise" persona DJ Cut Hands. I am so stoked that I plan to see him twice, in two different noncontiguous states. w/ Eloe Omoe
TOKYO
* Cults @ Unit / 1-34-17 Ebisu-nishi, Shibuya-ku (Tokyu-Toyoko Line to Daikanyama Station, JR Yamanote/Hibiya Line to Ebisu Station), 7p/5000 yen. Brooklyn cuties Cults are a bit like a garage-pop version of Boards of Canada. If that gets you jonesin', Tokyo's got your answer.
THURSDAY
* "The Virgins Show", curated by Marilyn Minter @ Family Business (part of Anna Kustera Gallery, run by Cattelan and Gioni) / 520 W 21st St. feat. "Virgins" (Andrew Brischler, Eric Mistretta, David Mramor, Rebecca Ward etc) & "Born Again Virgins" (Patty Chang, Kate Gilmore, Laurel Nakadate, Wangechi Mutu, Mika Rottenberg, Aïda Ruilova—all very first works on video monitor)… plus supposedly the great Hennessy Youngman (aka Pharaoh Hennessy, aka Mr. Museums, aka The Pedagogic Pimp) joins the lineup as "coming later", so stay tuned! This just got MAYJAH-er!
* Valeska Soares @ Eleven Rivington / 11 Rivington St. Concurrent w/ Soares' exhibition at Galeria Fortes Vilaça in Sao Paulo comes three large-scale works on linen, constructed from vintage dust-jackets and hardcover books, plus works from "Edits", where Soares reproduces pages from Roland Barthes' "A Lover's Discourse".
* Yinka Shonibare, MBE "Addio del Passato" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Shonibare continues his exploration of the British Empire figurehead Lord Nelson in his latest film (lit. "so closes my sad story"), plus new photoworks from the series "Fake Death Pictures"—reenacting famous painterly suicides swathed in Shonibare's signature Dutch patterned fabric. Oh, and some fetish object sculpture from bygone eras, that too.
* "First Look" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 245 Tenth Ave. The photo gallery inaugurates its new 10th Ave space w/ a curated group show, feat. artists whose first solo exhibition was presented at Yossi Milo. Including Mohamed Bourouissa, Pieter Hugo, Yuki Onodera, Sze Tsung Leong, Alessandra Sanguinetti and the mighty Kohei Yoshiyuki—this is an all-star lineup even if it were held in the gallery's old location. Def check it out.
* Marlo Pascual @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Here's what I know about Pascual: 1) I am a huge fan off her 2010 solo at the gallery, her "situations" of warped fashion-y C-prints and objects are super. 2) her press release for this show describes lighting, vegetables, and menswear. Probably a hit.
* Will Ryman @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave + 515 W 27th St. Ryman's debut with the gallery goes off in a big way, w/ site-specific sculptural installations in BOTH gallery spaces, another first for Paul Kasmin. The 10th Ave space holds one of Ryman's outsized, sinewy "everyone", w/ a paintbrush labyrinth in the back gallery. The new 27th St space becomes a gallery-sized stand-in for Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, only made of fabricated nails.
* Lyne Lapointe @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 512 W 20th St. A pictorial installation of new paintings, executed on wood panel via either paint or phosphorescent-coated pins, form the central component of Lapointe's show, focusing on darkness, light and memory.
* Charles Garabedian "Mythologies" @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. Garabedian draws from characters and settings from Homer's epics and other Greek classics in a set of new paintings and works on paper. This exhibition, his third at the gallery , follows his 2011 career retrospective at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
* '"Artist and Publisher: Printmaking and the Collaborative Process" w/ Ellen Gallagher and Two Palms Press @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St), 6p/$10. Gallagher (who co-organized MoMA's "Printin'" show) in conversation on creative practice and collaboration w/ Two Palms Press. Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books and organizer of "Print/Out" (opens SUN) moderates the talk.
* "The Ungovernables" artists roundtable Q&A, moderated by Eungie Joo @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, 6 to Spring St), 7p/$8. I seriously wish I were in town for this, as curator Eungie Joo joins like TWENTY participating artists in a roundtable informal conversation. I seriously hope the museum tapes this (or streams it live?).
FRIDAY
NYC
* Charles Atlas "The Illusion of Democracy" @ Luhring Augustine Bushwick / 25 Knickerbocker Ave, Bushwick (L to Morgan). Bushwick has a teeming, fertile art-scene, full of creatives and creative gallery spaces. Now W. Chelsea powerhouse Luhring Augustine states its claim in a new space w/ a brilliant exhibition, the American post-punk video artist Charles Atlas, who despite participating in the upcoming Whitney Biennial hasn't shown locally in a long while. The exhibition feat. two video installations never seen before in NYC, "Painting by Numbers" (2008) and "Plato's Alley" (2009), plus a new large-scale video work created specifically for this show and space.
* Breyer P-Orridge "I'm Mortality" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, the mighty voice of the avant-garde, conceives an "inter-dimensional" collaboration between the material and immaterial worlds, in her second solo at the gallery.
* Adel Abdessemed "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf" @ David Zwirner / 525-533 W 19th St. In Abdessemed's debut solo at the gallery in 2009, he shoved three airplane fuselages and tailfins, like a sleeping dragon, into the space. That inherent politicized and spectator violence recurs in his new two-space show, including razorwire sculptures of the crucified Jesus, an installation of an abandoned lifeboat (recreated from one found in the Florida Keys, ostensibly used to transport immigrants)…plus a wall of taxidermy animals. Viewer beware.
* Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev "Brooklyn Bridge" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. The Kyrgyzstan-based duo presents a new 6-channel video installation, a series of interviews on illegal immigration within Brooklyn's Russian-speaking neighborhoods from Central Asia's former Soviet republics, plus experimental projections of Brooklyn Bridge and photos of Brighton Beach, the "bridge" between two societies, so to speak. Sounds awesome.
* Dan Flavin "Drawing" @ Morgan Library & Museum / 225 Madison Ave (6 to 33rd St). Perhaps it's not a total surprise that the modernist alchemist of fluorescent light installations was also an avid draftsman, but this "illuminating" survey constitutes the first retrospective devoted entirely to his drawings, from early watercolors to light installation studies and, uh, landscape sketches? Still, I'm intrigued.
* Film Comment Selects @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St). Rawer than NYFF, more international than the, uh, region-specific film festivals, and 1000% cooler than Tribeca. FCS returns w/ nearly three dozen new productions and classics, some w/o stateside distribution (translation: see 'em now or maybe never see 'em again). The festival lasts through MAR 1 so I'll update w/ my favorites, and read on for this week's picks (each bears a FCS slug).
* FCS: "Faust" (dir. Aleksandr Sokurov, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 8:15p. Faust's crazy craving for knowledge and power as the Enlightenment, and thus the source of 20th-century evil? That's the rub in this Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion winner, Sokurov's visual and sonic fiesta. Dig in. ALSO TUES 3:15p
* "Bullhead" (dir. Michael Roskam, 2011) @ Angelika NY / 18 W Houston ST (BDFM to Broadway/Lafayette). YES! Roskam's debut full-length—a seriously dark, bruising crime-thriller centered on Belgium's mafioso cattle industry—is Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. In my opinion, it's a winner, thanks in no small part to burly lead Matthias Schoenaerts, but see it for yourself. His steroidal performance masks a brutal secret too awesome to spoil here. Highly recommended!
* "L'Enfant" (dire. les frères Dardenne, 2005) screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 11a. This is a hard-ass, hard-knocks film, where a newborn's entrance to this world is complicated in that its parents are homeless minors, particularly the sleazy BF who sells the baby on the black market and realizes "hey, I'm an idiot! I need to get the baby back!" THRU SUN
* Saul Williams @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$20. Legendary charismatic lyricist and encyclopedic poet Saul Williams graces the Hall in a truly next-level night. Crown Heights agit-punk CX KiDTRONiK opens the event w/ a crackle of electro-rap.
AUSTIN
* "Bullhead" (dir. Michael Roskam, 2011) @ Alamo Drafthouse S. Lamar / 1120 S. Lamar. YES! Roskam's debut full-length—a seriously dark, bruising crime-thriller centered on Belgium's mafioso cattle industry—is Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. In my opinion, it's a winner, thanks in no small part to burly lead Matthias Schoenaerts, but see it for yourself. His steroidal performance masks a brutal secret too awesome to spoil here. Highly recommended!
* "Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow" (dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2011) @ Violet Crown Cinema / 434 W 2nd St. To witness an Anselm Kiefer work, whether it's an entire installation of mixed-media paintings, dioramas and sculptures or "just" a single piece, is to be thrown into a palimpsest of architectonic history. Fiennes begins with the world-renowned artist's studio and leads us deep within Kiefer's methodology and expression as a postwar master.
TOKYO
* Toshiaki Hikosaka + Takuro Sugiyama "Dead Paintings" @ Radium / 2-5-17 Bakurocho, Chuo-ku (JR Yamanote Line to Bakurocho Station). The two young artists present their own unique styles of abstraction, Hikosaka's systemic grids and Sugiyama's intertwined colors and planes.
* the milky tangerine @ Fever / 1-1-14 Hanegi, Setagaya-ku (Odakyu Inokashira Line to Shindaita or Shimokitazawa Stations), 7p/2000 yen. I fell in love w/ Tokyo indie-rockers the milky tangerine based on a sweetly dissonant single ("Your Beautiful Mind")…then I saw 'em at this very venue in December and fell in even deeper. They're absolutely awesome. w/ bet.
* The Pains of Being Pure at Heart @ Club Quattro / 5F 32-13 Udagawa-cho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station), 7p/5000 yen. Would I pay approx $65 USD to see hometown (Brooklyn) indie-pop cuties—and one of my favoritest bands in the world—The Pains play Tokyo. A: you bet.
* RECORIDE @ Koenji High / 4-30-1 Koenji-Minami, Suginami-ku (Chuo Line to Koenji Station), 7p/2500 yen. Think Miss Kitten crossed w/ Crystal Castles…but that only 1/2 quantifies the sweaty, electro-pop awesomeness of RECORIDE. Slam-dancing in effect. w/ Lily of the Valley
SATURDAY
NYC
* Zak Prekop @ Harris Lieberman / 508 W 26th St. Paper-collaged canvases and monochromes layered with stencils from other paintings factor into Prekop's tonal, textural triumph, his second solo at the gallery.
* Bruce Brosnan "See, hear remember" + Tyler Vlahovich @ Feature Inc / 131 Allen St. Brosnan's candy-pop paintings on cut and shaped MDF and Vlahovich's smoldering, murky palette of oils or gouache on canvas and wood panel may be at opposing ends of the color spectrum, but each artist unearths this cool sense of depth and perspective in their respective abstractions while maintaining a clear flatness.
* "The Ungovernables" artist talk: "Invisible Borders Trans-African Photography Project" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, 6 to Spring St), 3p/$8. The artist-led initiative whose vision is to become a symbol of networking and trans-border association w/in the arts and photography in Africa, discuss their mission and current activities.
* FCS: "Mortem" (dir. Eric Atlan, 2010) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 5p. Think David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" but shot in b&w and French. That got your attention, right? Plus Atlan attends the screening!
* Zola Jesus @ Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NR/L/456 to Union Square), 6p/$15. Highly highly highly recommend enveloping within this super-cute songbird's gossamer soundscapes. I don't know how Zola's disarming croon and experimental roots play against speed-metal openers Liturgy, but I imagine the end result transcendent.
TOKYO
* Shunsuke Taira + Akito Nakai + Shinnosuke Yoshida @ Gallery MOMO Roppongi / 2F 6-2-6 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Toei Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). In my experience, MOMO does a great job showcasing young artists. That's the case here w/ this three-artist show, ahead of their respective graduations from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts. They're all painters of a roughly figurative angle, plus Yoshida and Nakai have both had solos (Yoshida at MOMO's Ryogoku branch).
* "Melancholia" (dir. Lars von Trier, 2011) @ Toho Cinema Shibuya / 2-6-17 Dogenzaka, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit). The denouement of "Melancholia", which rightfully earned a best actress award at Cannes for Kirsten Dunst's role, had me contacting friends in NYC and Tokyo with promises of visiting them as soon as possible. It's the end of the world, beginning with a wedding reception for Dunst and teasing out her…complicated relationship w/ her sister, played pitch-perfectly by Charlotte Gainsbourg, ending w/ among the most emotionally devastating conclusions in my filmic history. Deserves to be seen on the big screen.
* 「大人の喧嘩」/"Carnage" (dir. Roman Polanski, 2011) @ TOHO Cinemas Chanter / 1-2-2 Yurakucho, Chiyoda-ku (Chiyoda/Hibiya Lines to Hibiya Station, Yurakucho Line to Yurakucho Station). Polanski's taut, tittering adaptation of the stage play "God of Carnage"—translated here as "Adults Fight"—works thanks to the electrifying cast of sparring parents Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz vs Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly.
* BiS + current of air @ Fever / 1-1-14 Hanegi, Setagaya-ku (Odakyu Inokashira Line to Shindaita or Shimokitazawa Stations), 7p/2500 yen. See my comments on the milky tangerine under FRI, and relay that into current of air, the pitch-perfect popstars who headlined that show at Fever last December. I'm throwing my bets behind BiS, too, aka "Brand-new Idol Society", three (or four?) PYTs who know how to rock out.
SUNDAY
NYC
* "Print/Out'" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St). Part two of MoMA's tour-de-force on the printed medium (in conjunction w/ "Printin'") is this 200-work treasure trove on classic printmaking techniques, self-published artists' books, and digital technologies—mostly drawn from MoMA's own collection. Feat. Ai Weiwei, Ellen Gallagher, Martin Kippenberger, Lucy McKenzie, SUPERFLEX, Rirkrit Tiravanija and loads more.
* FCS: "I Wish/Kiseki" (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, 2011) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 6:15p. Two boys' cross-country plan to reunite their estranged parents', via the clandestine rendezvous of two bullet trains. Plus Jo "Johnny Depp" Odagiri plays the dad, so I'm game. ALSO MON 8:45p
* FCS: "My Own Private River" (dirs. James Franco & Gus Van Sant) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 9p. Let's take this from the top: one screening. With James "River Phoenix" Franco leading a Q&A. Yeah, this is place to be.
* DJ Krush @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$15. I can proudly state w/o boasting that I've been down w/ this original Japanese hip-hop DJ's smoky, jazzy breaks since '97 and "MiLight". Dude's almost 50 and he STILL brings it, like his monthly single series begun in 2011. Totally a mesmeric "evening with Krush".
TUESDAY
NYC
* Frankie Rose "Interstellar" LP release party @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p/$12. Miss Frankie Ross, a magnetic presence in Brooklyn's indie scene and one tough drummer, sheds her doo-wop garage-rock sound from debut S/T LP and emerges, butterfly-like, as a starry-toned pop star. She retains that voice, oh that awesome awesome melodious voice. w/ DIVE (extra-psychedelic!)
* The Suzan @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. This "second home" homecoming show for Japanese tropic-pop darlings The Suzan (straight in from touring good ol' Nippon) will be undoubtedly MAYJAH. w/ The Can't Tells
AUSTIN
* "Pumpkinhead" (dir. Stan Winston, 1988) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. Schlock 'n roll typifies this cult classic supernatural stunner, the directorial debut of SFX whiz Winston. Feat. the titular bayou boogeyman attacking campers, how can you go wrong??
CURRENT SHOWS
AUSTIN
* Tom Molloy "New World" + Noriko Ambe "White Scape" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces St. Molloy strips away the noise and distractions in his historically leaning or contemporarily relevant bodies of work—oftentimes by incredibly meticulous practices—leaving a sort-of podium for us to contemplate, discuss, argue. While he's not explicitly putting his own politics behind the dozens of thrift-store framed Internet-culled b&w images of male world leaders pressing the flesh in "Shake", the works circuitous nature and site-specific installation—where "Hussein/Mubarak" slides into "Mubarak/Bush" and "Bush/Putin", until we're back at "Hussein" again—, plus the fact these nonchronological shots span from 9-11 to the Arab Spring, naturally presents some theories. How these men are friends one minute, wheeling and dealing the next, and sworn enemies separated by several frames of their "friends" after that. Molloy's nine-part titular work features nine different LP sleeves of Dvorák's "New World Symphony", the texts painted over (Molloy's analogue to Photoshop, he said) to show only benign, sunny images of the Western frontier. That "incredibly meticulous practices" bit I alluded to earlier is most clear in "Somewhere", Molloy's hand-painted sheet music to the "Wizard of Oz"'s sweetly optimistic anthem, a work that began with a black sheet of paper and lots and lots of carefully applied white gouache. Noriko Ambe's suite of all-white cut-paper and cut-YUPO (a waterproof synthetic "paper" made from recycled polypropylene) are just sublime, "Tracking II" like footprints in fresh-fallen snow, "Spring 1" the imprint of a tree or a floodplain, "A Piece of Flat Globe Vol. 22" a calmly ancient canyon.
* Diana Al-Hadid @ Visual Arts Center / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity. The Brooklyn-based sculptural alchemist dropped some heady topics in her talk preceding this exhibition, not only naming a certain Gothic painting of the Visitation from a Spanish museum as her point of departure in this stunning new work "Suspended After Image", but also labyrinths (and Jorge Luis Borges), Peter Bruegel (and Babel), and the Large Hadron Collider. All this clued me into Al-Hadid's remarkable sense of harnessing space and presence in her installations, morphing bulk into something oddly ethereal and organic, though still visually commanding. "Suspended After Image" is Al-Hadid's first instance of using a 3D modeling program and CNC router in her work, and the final flowing, terraced form acts more like a 3D painting than a proper sculpture, with the figure seemingly emerging from the frontal staircase while a flow of media colored like wet Frosted Mini Wheats echoes her opulent robes. Though there is an almost total spectrum of color infused in this work, mostly as frozen drips on the sides and back, the overall is a pristine grayish-white, which is absolutely stunning in the VAC's Vaulted Gallery.
+ "(im)possibilities. Five artists — Michael Stevenson, Erica Baum, Birgit Rathsmann, Patrick Resing, and Ellie Ga — extend Borges' metaphor of the library in this dialogue of narratives and human experience. This plays well with Diana Al-Hadid's installation in the Vaulted Gallery. I was most quickly taken by Baum's series "Dog Ear", utilizing folded pages from paperbacks and photographing them into unique fragmented dialogue. Ga's C-prints of an illuminated fissure within the Arctic ice, shot during her residency at the scientific research vessel Tara, feel otherworldly.
* Daniel Heidkamp "Glow Drops at the Chill Spot" @ Champion / 800 Brazos St. Take a plunge into Heidkamp's latest suite of radiant, textural scenes. He shows these interiors and exteriors completely independent from his ongoing portraiture, a strong move in my opinion. For the Brooklyn-based artist isn't just this accomplished figurative painter who also happens to paint rooms and landscapes en plein air. Rather, he is a strong force in capturing natural environments as he sees them, imbuing them with a resonating life-force and character that draws us into their layers of oil paint and dollops of impasto, confronting us with a disarming nostalgia. I may never have visited that Massachusetts backyard ("Here Glows Nothing") or Florida dockside ("Alligator Alley"), but it's like I can smell the air, feel the lawn beneath my trainers and the sun on my face. There's a physicality to Heidkamp's scenes beyond the presence of actual people, who he deftly folds into scenarios (the fireside "Feel It All Around", the portraitures' meta-effect in "The Night of 1000 Paintings") as accenting players. A very strong exhibition and a bold start to Austin's 2012 gallery season.
CLOSING SOON
* Damien Hirst "The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St + 522 W 21st St + 980 Madison Ave. Ha, I totally forgot to write about this when the exhibitions went up. Now they close a full day before I arrive in NYC to judge them for myself.
* Thomas Scheibitz + Mat Collishaw @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Big awesome two: Scheibitz inaugurates his SEVENTH solo at the gallery, "A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events", w/ a powerful array of paintings, works on paper and sculpture that highlight his knack for classical architecture, urban imagery and pop culture. Collishaw fills the upstairs w/ an installation and photography from his "Insecticide" and "Last Meal on Death Row - Texas" series.
* Jeff Keen @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. The U.S. debut of the UK artist's post-Surrealist paintings and video, focused mainly on his influential body of work from the '60s and '70s.
* Bill Jensen @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. I like Jensen's drizzly, corroded surfaces in his very colorful abstract paintings. He introduces some triptychs here, and some worked-over etchings, in this exhibition of new works. (ENDS SAT)
NYC
* Michael Zelehoski "Secondary Structures" + Daniel Phillips "River Street" @ DODGEgallery / 15 Rivington St. The gallery pairs an alchemist of found objects and wood (Zelehoski) with Phillips' architecture/landscape-attuned video work.
* "FaceTime" @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. A group exhibition focused on the face itself and the pernicious rarity of face-to-face encounters in a ubiquitously digital society. Feat. an international cast, including Maria Petschnig, Debo Eilers, Aleksandra Domanovic and Michel Journiac. Follows the original iteration of the show at IMO Projects, Copenhagen, curated by Toke Lykkeberg & Julia Rodrigues.
* Malcolm Morley "Another Way to Make an Image, Monotypes" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. The seasoned printmaker's first foray into monotype, demonstrating his knack for experimentation and color.
AUSTIN
* "True Story" @ Grayduck Gallery / 608 W Monroe Dr. Three artists — Austinites Paul Beck and Pat Snow, plus Minnesotan Allen Brewer — play with, and off, perception and representation, reminding us as viewers that things aren't always as clear-cut as they first seem. Brewer takes a direct approach by purposefully painting (or drawing) his subjects blind, focusing on who or what he's rendering instead of the resultant object itself. So while some works carry ghostly remnants or shifts of his mark-making, others like the old man "Poopy" are startlingly realized, fully fleshed out like a Lucien Freud painting. Snow's watercolors and drawings mine his personal space, culling from memories, songs in the background and dialogue. Perhaps reflecting his background working alongside Robert Colescott and Howard Finster, many of Snow's works feature enveloping stories, like "Record Shop Girl" (the charming awkwardness hits close to home) and "I Think My Dog Is a Racist". His ecstatically rendered 99 watercolors "Girl Crazy/Crazy Girl" mostly features women artist friends from his former hometown, Birmingham AL, interspersed with silent movie-style title cards like "TOO Bad" and "Sweet Sad True", prompting an imagined (real?) conversation. The figures' range of renderings from classical to cartoonish reminded me a bit of Richard Linklater's classic Austin rotoscoped animation "Waking Life", which is where Beck comes in. He animated for that film and Linklater's "A Scanner Darkly", and his two suites of mixed media works made for this show tread the line b/w realism and almost nightmarish fantasy, soft-contoured figures floating against stark political undertones and lettering, all with a muted reddish palette. What's the message? That our own consciousness is a jumble of memories, daily interventions and environmental/societal irregularities, as mutable as the moments captured in these works.
TOKYO
* "The Scene" @ hpgrp Tokyo / B1F 5-1-15 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku (Chiyoda/Hanzomon/Ginza Lines to Omotesando Station). The show's theme is the power held within a single photograph, featuring the talents of Joy Kawakubo, Takeshi Shimamoto, Michael Stanley, Rich and TARA.
* Kiyomichi Shibuya "Which do you choose?" @ Art Front Gallery / Hillside Terrace A, 29-18 Sarugakucho, Shibuya-ku (JR Lines etc to Shibuya). Point: I dig this guy's name. Point: I dig his visual device, the spirograph, incorporating cast light into tracked out floral patterns that somehow encapsulates both childhood, traditional Japanese imagery, and classic literature. (ENDS SUN)
TOKYO
* Maya Maxx @ Kido Press, Inc / 6F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Toei Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). Maya Maxx is a trip, like a Comme des Garçons outfit come to painterly life. The Pop artist does rainbows here, mixing her calligraphy background w/ bold printmaking techniques. (ENDS TUES)
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
fee's LIST / through 2/14
WEDNESDAY
NYC
* "Werkmeister Harmonies" (dir. Béla Tarr, 2000) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 6p. A languid, meditative film by even Tarr's standards, combining a provincial Hungarian village with a sinister traveling circus.
* "The Man From London" (dir. Béla Tarr) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 9p. Among Tarr's most gorgeously shot films is this recent exploration of anonymous breakdowns of social order in personal life—replete w/ covert briefcases stuffed with foreign cash and twilit, misty quaysides. Appeared at 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
* JEFF the Brotherhood (TN) @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$12. This is Brooklyn live music 101: sweaty JEFF swamp-rock show at checkerboard tiled DbA, $2 PBR in hand. No brainer. w/ Uncle Bad Touch (Montreal)
* Burning Star Core @ The Stone / 11 E 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave), 10p/$5. Dominick Fernow's Stone curation continues! Dive into C. Spencer Yeh's electronic-enhanced, transporting violin drones and thank me later.
AUSTIN
* "Catherine & Company" (dir. Michel Boisrond, 1975) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 9:30p. Young Jane Birkin in a mid-'70s French softcore film is enough to spark my total attention, but couple that w/ Catherine Breillat's ("Sleeping Beauty", "Bluebeard") screenwriting and Richard Suzuki's ("Emmanuelle") cinematography, and you got a whole 'nother thing, son. Plus the filmic debut of Alexandra Delli Colli ("Zombie Holocaust", "New York Ripper")!
THURSDAY
NYC
* "Happenings New York, 1958-1963" @ The Pace Gallery / 510 W 25th St. The first exhibition to document the origins and historical development of the transient, yet pivotal, "Happenings" movement—so says the Pace press release. Hey, I'm game! As "Happenings" and the group's participants, including Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann and Simone Forti, emphasized the organic connection b/w art and its environment (incl. viewers), documentation had to go beyond the nature of these unique performances and events. The exhibition includes rare archival footage and original ephemera from Happenings' production, plus artworks created during performances and extensive photography by five Happenings documentarians. A special illustrated book (authored by Milly Glimcher, published by The Monacelli Press) accompanies the show and should provide further insight. Probability of an opening-night "happening": 35%.
* James Busby "White and Black" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. BIG Busby fan here and his process-driven meditations on form and texture within stark white or graphite-covered media. He continues to blur that painting/sculpture line w/ shaped MDF and powdered graphite rubbed into formed-gesso surfaces, creating a brilliant dialogue w/ their respective display lighting.
* Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz "Night Falls" @ PPOW / 535 W 22nd St, 3rd Fl. The collaborative duo use the night sky as backdrop, adding firelight and the moon's illumination in dynamic interplay within their dreamlike archival C-prints. They are also participating in the group exhibition "Fairytales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination" at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville.
* Veronica Falls (UK) @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$12. Fell in love with these London indie-pop darlings during 2010's CMJ Fest. They'll provide the sunshine on this February NYC day. w/ local rockers Grooms
AUSTIN
* "Two Ships Passing: w/ Andy Campbell" @ Visual Arts Center / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity, 6:30p. An inspired, reactive dialogue b/w an invited speaker and their guest—a peer, mentor or new acquaintance—about some creative topic. Tonight begins the recurring series, co-presented by VAC and Pastelegram, and features Andy Campbell, lecturer in art history at Texas State University, on navigating today's abundance of images and ephemera vs. a single artwork.
* The Calm Blue Sea + The Sour Notes @ Mohawk / 912 Red River, 7p/$8. Solid Austin indie-rock right here. Consider aptly named The Calm Blue Sea, blending their graceful melodies with absolutely stormy post-rock sonics. They're hard at work on a 2nd LP that could drop sometime after SXSW (stay tuned). Plus The Sour Notes, charismatic pop stalwarts of the highest calibre. w/ Follow That Bird
FRIDAY
NYC
* Juergen Teller @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. A three-part exhibition of the lensman's Pop photography, including a mix of seductive portraits of Kristen McMenamy and Vivienne Westwood, deserted landscapes around Teller's Suffolk home, and shots of Teller's son—all juxtaposed w/ family photos.
* Elaine Reichek "Ariadne's Thread" @ Nicole Klagsbrun PROJECT / 534 W 24th St. Reichek literally weaves the titular Greek myth into her latest serious of embroideries, some hand-sewn, others like a large-scale tapestry woven with computerized technology. Reichek has a similar tapestry on view at the 2012 Whitney Biennial.
* "The Turin Horse" (dir. Béla Tarr, 2011) @ Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center / Lincoln Center & 65th St (1 to 66th St). Will this sombre "remodernist" film, thick with the heaviness of human existence, be Tarr's final feature? It echoes Nietzsche's own witnessing of an overworked horse's death and could well reflect a quiet emergence of the apocalypse. This Jury Grand Prix winner at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival enjoys its NYC theatrical premiere. THRU FEB 16
* George Kuchar Program 1 + 2 @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 7/9:15p. The first two parts of a six-part, three-night extravaganza on the late, great underground filmmaker. Program 1 is "A Package of Stars From George and the VDB Gang" and includes seven shorts from '89's "Point 'n Shoot" through last year's "Hotspell". Program 2 is a tribute from the Film-Maker's Coop and features six classic 16mm shorts from the '60s and '70s, including "I, An Actress" (1977).
* "Eraserhead" (dir. David Lynch, 1977) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Lynch's debut feature is a true surrealist classic, feat. usual suspect Jack Nance as the titular character in a nightmarish industrial landscape that works best when immersed on the big-screen. ALSO SAT
AUSTIN
* "Pina" (dir. Wim Wenders, 2011) @ Violet Crown Cinema / 434 W 2nd St. I was cued into the late, great German choreographer Pina Bausch's electrifying performances years ago by my mentor, and they forever changed how I view movement (e.g. by one person, by person to person, in groups) and "modern dance". Plus Bausch was a kind of muse to Yohji Yamamoto. Now Wenders, an old friend, conjures a 3D experience with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch that gives us even a glimpse of what it must be like to be a Bausch dancer, part of her kinetic, romantic world. It sounds like a triumph.
* "A Separation" (dir. Asghar Farhadi, 2011) @ Violet Crown Cinema / 434 W 2nd St. The film to beat for the Oscar for "Best Foreign Feature" is Farhadi's eye-widening take on contemporary Iran, on the dissolution of a marriage and the earth-rending traumas affecting the whole family.
* "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World" (dir. Edgar Wright, 2010) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 11:30p. Like cocaine for the eyes, this vintage-certified video game come to life delivers 16+ bits of full-color, side-scrolling mayhem. w/ Michael Cera as the mumbly titular character and scream-queen Mary Elizabeth Winstead as his Manic Panic-hued love interest, you totally can't go wrong. ALSO SAT
* Whiskey Shivers & Hello Wheels @ Scoot Inn / 1308 E 4th St, 9p/$8. "A freewheeling', trashgrassin', folk tornado" reads Whiskey Shivers' Facebook page. This is Austin, "y'all". Think upright bass, fiddle, and washboard in addition to that guitar, hard-drinking music of a nontraditional tip. Kindred locals Hello Wheels play "stomp-folk, or what they call "a new sound with an old soul". Get captivated on the bands' split 7" "Friends Do Things Together" release party tonight. w/ Wild Child
TOKYO
* Miila and the Geeks + The Suzan @ Super Deluxe / B1F 3-1-25 Nishi-azabu, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station), 7:30p/2500 yen. The G/R/L/Z showcase features singer/songwriter Moe Wadaka's incredible, indie-pop trio Miila and the Geeks (she's Miila, saxophonist Komori and drummer Ajima the geeks), whose slightly sinister, garage-rock debut "New Age" is a triumph for the indie scene. Plus Moe's behind the band's fractured lovely music videos. That praise extends to tropic-pop quartet The Suzan, who split their time b/w Tokyo and NYC (a dream, right?). w/ Limited Express (has gone?) and The Twee Grrrls Club DJs!
* DODDODO Band @ UFO Club / 1-11-6 Koenji-Minami, Suginami-ku (Marunouchi Line to Higashi-Koenji Station), 8p/2500. What's iller than Kansai noise-sprite Namin Haku, aka DODDODO? Have her on vox fronting a full band (feat. usual-suspect bassist Makoto Inada, drummer Keiko Matsunaga, uh clarinet player Masako Nakao and violinist Tetsuya Umeda), that's what! w/ ECD+ILLICIT TSUBOI
SATURDAY
NYC
* Tom Friedman @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. BOOM! This is the first NYC solo exhibition from the conceptual sculptor since 2005, and I for one am totally stoked. Friedman includes new sculpture—some incorporating ideas of technology, like a a life-sized video camera handcrafted from wood and paint—and works on paper and collages. Think of the mass-produced yet entirely, intricately handmade, the deadpan presentation looming into vertiginous infinity. This exhibit precedes a Friedman monograph, published by the gallery, which I am necessarily stoked about as well.
* George Kuchar Program 3 + 4 @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 6:45/9p. Program 3 on the underground filmmaking legend comes from the shelves of Electronic Arts Intermix, feat. "Cult of the Cubicles", "Rainy Season" and "The Creeping Crimson" (all 1987). San Francisco's Canyon Cinema culls from their archives in Program 4 with three 16mm shorts, including "Ascension of the Demonoids" (1985).
* Heliotropes + Iron Tides @ The Acheron / 57 Waterbury St, Bushwick (L to Montrose), 8p/$7. Heliotropes combine guitar dissonance and a rumbling rhythm section w/ melodious vox. If I had a soul, they'd be melting it right now. Whiskey-drinking metal dudes Iron Tides are loud enough to hang w/ the Heliotropes women. w/ Descender
AUSTIN
* Tom Molloy "New World" + Noriko Ambe "White Scape" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces St. Pretty stoked about this. The Irish artist Molloy returns in his third solo at the gallery, presenting painted LP sleeves from Dvorak's "New World Symphony" w/ the text blended into the background, plus his b&w photographic "Shake" series, of newsy world leaders doing just that. He leads a discussion on his work at 7p. Meanwhile Ambe commands the gallery's Project Room w/ a group of all-white layered cut-paper works, which should be a disarming visual palate cleanser against Molloy's exhibition.
* Martin Sztyk "Narratives" @ Big Medium / 5305 Bolm Rd. The practicing architectural designer and researcher draws from his ongoing, narrative-based inhabitation series—including "Urban Forest", "Empty City" and "New London Stock Exchange"—in what looks to be a mind-blowing set of intricate photo-collages.
TOKYO
* "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" (dir. David Fincher, 2011) @ Toho Cinema Hiho / 2-5-1 Yurakucho, Chiyoda-ku (Yurakucho Line to Yurakucho Station). Fincher's pulse-throbbing English language adaptation of Stieg Larsson's wildly popular novel(s), like a chunk of charred twilight doused in mercury, totally worked for me. The mix of "Se7en"'s legendary punk director w/ composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and leads Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig is just too irresistible. Tokyo, get ready.
* 「すべては『裸になる』から始まって」/"Always Start Out Naked" (dir. Saku Nakamachi, 2012) @ Ikebukuro Cinema Rosa / 1-37-12 Nishi-ikebukuro, Toshima-ku (JR Yamanote Line etc to Ikebukuro Station). AKB48's Risa Narita plays 10-year-reigning AV queen Kurumi Morishita in this biopic from Morishita's humble beginnings in Akita and tentative forays into, uh, taking off her clothes in front of a camera at Soft on Domand studio, to her self-reliant prowess at Dogma under director TOHJIRO.
SUNDAY
NYC
* George Kuchar Program 5 + 6 @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 6:30/8:30p. The final night of Anthology's Kuchar tribute, featuring 16mm shorts from Harvard Film Archive like "The Carnal Bipeds" (1973) and from Anthology's own collection, including "Anita Needs Me" (1983), plus Kuchar's feature-length film "The Devil's Cleavage" (1973), presented by Pacific Film Archive in Program 6.
AUSTIN
* Boy Friend + Love Inks @ Spiderhouse Ballroom / 2906 Fruth St, 10p. Ethereal guitar-pop duo Christa Palazzolo and Sarah Brown are Boy Friend, and they just debuted an extra-fuzzy LP called "Egyptian Wrinkle". Celebrate at their release party w/ kindred pop spirits Love Inks. w/ Missions
TOKYO
* Erebos Party @ Minami-Aoyama Trigram / B1F 4-18-10 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku (Tokyo Metro Chiyoda/Ginza/Hanzomon Lines to Omotesando Station), 4p/4000 yen. Part fetish party, part underground dance party, w/ lots of ace performances. Tokyo hosts stuff like this all the time (you just need to know where to look). Feat. pole-dancing by Aloe & Kikurage (tokyoDOLORES), the phenomenal Alk on aerial ring, plus DJs Rinko (Torture Garden Japan), Groove Patrol (eggworm/Phonika Tokyo) and assuredly other naughtiness.
* "Popbreak" @ Shibuya Glad / 2+3F 2-21-7 Dogenzaka, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit), 3p/3500 yen. Celebrate the venue's second anniversary with a mind-melting array of electro-clash pop cuties. Feat. live sets by personal faves RECORIDE (think Miss Kitten crossed w/ Crystal Castles), DJ/singer-songwriter Saori@destiny, "techno-pop idols" Cutie Pai, Aira Mitsuki and Mai Kotone…I'm sweating just typing this.
TUESDAY
AUSTIN
* "The Burning Moon" (dir. Olaf Ittenbach, 1999) @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. Uncut. Uncensored. Unconscionable. The horror anthology film as a truly vile barrage of nonstop splatter and German nihilism, shot on video in full misanthropic color. Just in time for Valentine's Day.
TOKYO
* TADZIO + DJ Sumire (Twee Grrrls Club) @ Fever / 1-1-14 Hanegi, Setagaya-ku (Odakyu Inokashira Line to Shindaita or Shimokitazawa Stations), 7p/2500 yen. A double-shot of grrrl noise-punk TADZIO? Sign me up! w/ DJ Sumire of the irresistible Twee Grrrls Club
* The Suzan @ THREE / B1F 5-18-1 Daizawa, Setagaya-ku (Inokashira Line to Shimokitazawa Station), 7p/3300 yen. The final night of tropic-pop cuties The Suzan's whirlwind return to Japan. Yes, after playing like a million shows here over a span of…two weeks, they're headed back to NYC. Celebrate w/ 'em. w/ QUATTRO, Pink Politics
* Tokyo Pinsalocks + Merpeoples @ Heaven's Door / 1-33-19 Sangen-jaya, Setagaya-ku (Den-en-toshi Line to Sangen-jaya Station), 7p/2800 yen. All-girl techno-tinged groove-pop to my left (Tokyo Pinsalocks), all-girl breathy indie-rock to my right (Merpeoples). Sounds good to me! w/ (M)otocompo
CURRENT SHOWS
* Diana Al-Hadid @ Visual Arts Center / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity. The Brooklyn-based sculptural alchemist dropped some heady topics in her talk preceding this exhibition, not only naming a certain Gothic painting of the Visitation from a Spanish museum as her point of departure in this stunning new work "Suspended After Image", but also labyrinths (and Jorge Luis Borges), Peter Bruegel (and Babel), and the Large Hadron Collider. All this clued me into Al-Hadid's remarkable sense of harnessing space and presence in her installations, morphing bulk into something oddly ethereal and organic, though still visually commanding. "Suspended After Image" is Al-Hadid's first instance of using a 3D modeling program and CNC router in her work, and the final flowing, terraced form acts more like a 3D painting than a proper sculpture, with the figure seemingly emerging from the frontal staircase while a flow of media colored like wet Frosted Mini Wheats echoes her opulent robes. Though there is an almost total spectrum of color infused in this work, mostly as frozen drips on the sides and back, the overall is a pristine grayish-white, which is absolutely stunning in the VAC's Vaulted Gallery.
+ "(im)possibilities. Five artists — Michael Stevenson, Erica Baum, Birgit Rathsmann, Patrick Resing, and Ellie Ga — extend Borges' metaphor of the library in this dialogue of narratives and human experience. This plays well with Diana Al-Hadid's installation in the Vaulted Gallery. I was most quickly taken by Baum's series "Dog Ear", utilizing folded pages from paperbacks and photographing them into unique fragmented dialogue. Ga's C-prints of an illuminated fissure within the Arctic ice, shot during her residency at the scientific research vessel Tara, feel otherworldly.
* Daniel Heidkamp "Glow Drops at the Chill Spot" @ Champion / 800 Brazos St. Take a plunge into Heidkamp's latest suite of radiant, textural scenes. He shows these interiors and exteriors completely independent from his ongoing portraiture, a strong move in my opinion. For the Brooklyn-based artist isn't just this accomplished figurative painter who also happens to paint rooms and landscapes en plein air. Rather, he is a strong force in capturing natural environments as he sees them, imbuing them with a resonating life-force and character that draws us into their layers of oil paint and dollops of impasto, confronting us with a disarming nostalgia. I may never have visited that Massachusetts backyard ("Here Glows Nothing") or Florida dockside ("Alligator Alley"), but it's like I can smell the air, feel the lawn beneath my trainers and the sun on my face. There's a physicality to Heidkamp's scenes beyond the presence of actual people, who he deftly folds into scenarios (the fireside "Feel It All Around", the portraitures' meta-effect in "The Night of 1000 Paintings") as accenting players. A very strong exhibition and a bold start to Austin's 2012 gallery season.
* Jill Magid "Failed States" @ AMOA-Arthouse / 700 Congress. So check this: on 1/21/10, a young man named Fausto fired six bullets into the air outside the Texas State Capitol. Jill Magid — whose oeuvre navigates bureaucracy and security/intelligence w/ Mission Impossible deftness — was like steps away, pursuing her own future work, and witnessed it. Now six blocks from the scene and two years later, Magid stages an intriguing Conceptual show that ties Fausto's mysterious actions — and his silence throughout his trial — with that of Goethe's "Faust". The ground-floor gallery is her stage, replete with wall-decal directions ("Enter Fausto", "shots fired skyward", "enter Magid" etc), Magid's own play "Fausto: A Tragedy" (mirroring "Faust"'s original intention as a closet drama, meant to be read and not performed), and contemplative works. Deep encodings here, from six translations of "Faust" silkscreened on top of one another, to six bullet casings and a six-slide projection of the sky over the Capitol. Magid wrote a letter to Fausto, requesting his voice (absent in his trial) to read passages from "Faust" (whose Spanish translation is "Fausto") — his answer is still forthcoming, but it would add an intriguing layer to all this. Finally, there is Magid's family's '93 Mercedes, armored to B4 level and parked in Fausto's spot outside the Capitol, and her writing appearing in the February issue of the "Texas Observer", drawing this dialogue beyond the art-scene realm as it should be.
+ "Evidence of Houdini's Return". A really brilliant group show of fractured and re-envisioned realities, curated by Arthouse's Rachel Adams. I tweeted that it made me miss NYC, because it's precisely that sort of thoughtful exhibition that makes me look twice, thrice, at what I think I already know. Ex: Strauss Borque LaFrance's "BABE", a silvery lacquered wood plank pitched diagonally on the wall like classic John McCracken,…only just around the corner is that same plank, used as a shelf amid LaFrance's complex, mixed-media display. Another: Katja Mater's "Time Passing Objects", chromogenic prints that blur the line b/w photography and geometric drawings. Justin Swinburne's "Echo" works, multiple inkjet scans onto alu-dibond that echo (no pun) Gerhard Richter's signature abstracts while maintaining that sense of disarray like Wade Guyton's inkjet silkscreens. Bravo!
CLOSING SOON
TOKYO
* "巧術 2.51" @ Radium / 2-5-17 Bakurocho, Chuo-ku (JR Yamanote Line to Bakurocho Station. AKA "skillful technique", the eponymous serial exhibition held at Spiral yearly since 2010. The third iteration, subtitled "Kowaku/fascination", gets a gallery preview, feat. artists Takuro Sugiyama, Haruo Mitsuda and others. (ENDS FRI)
NYC
* "Corporations Are People Too" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. This evil-sounding group show culls some awesome talent, feat. Berenice Abbott, Ian Davis, CHris Dorland, Kota Ezawa, Louis Faurer, Yevgeniy Fiks, Jacqueline Hassink, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange and Phillip Toledano in respective pointed takes on corporate culture, from the Great Depression and WWII to contemporary society.
* On Kawara "Date Painting(s) in New York & 136 Other Cities" @ David Zwirner / 525-533 W 19th St. Conceptualist Kawara made his first date painting in NYC, "JAN. 4, 1966" — that's over four decades ago, if you're counting, and he's still doing it. Thus, the gallery stages a seminal exhibition of over 150 date paintings, selected by Kawara, accompanied by binders of facsimile newspaper clippings, plus two one-hundred-year calendars for the 20th and 21st centuries. AND! A major catalogue published by Ludion and essayed by Japanese writer Lei Yamabe.
* Michael Snow "In the Way" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 512 W 20th St. Snow, the visual pioneer behind '67's "Wavelength", precedes a solo show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art AND a sculpture retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario (both occurring this year) w/ new projection works and older photo-based installations, all emphasizing the art of looking and viewing through objects.
* "End of Days" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. A dozen artists inaugurate Mixed Greens' new year, working off the notion of apocalyptic and transcendent revelations. Main draw for me is Patrick Jacobs' totally mesmerizing mixed-media dioramas (he was in my Top Ten LIST-worthy Cultural Events of 2011), though Valerie Hegarty's installation sounds dope too.
* Alfred Jensen/Sol LeWitt "Systems and Transformation" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. An intriguing pairing of Jensen's orderly abstract paintings based off grids and color theories vs. LeWitt's basic geometrical open structures. Beyond inclusions in group exhibitions, this is the first show to examine and contrast the artists' oeuvres in depth.
* Shirin Neshat @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Really stoked for this: Neshat unveils her new photographic series "The Book of Kings", composed of b&w portraits of Iranian and Arab youth covered in calligraphic text, plus a new three-channel video installation.
* "Rotary Connection", organized by Loring Randolph @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Pay attention to Julia Dault, an electrifying abstract-ish painter and sculptor featured in both the upcoming New Museum triennial "The Ungovernables" AND this group show, organized by the gallery's director. Also featured: Etienne Chambaud, Isabelle Cornaro, Jose Dávila, Jason Dodge (big fan), Ryan Gander (notch), Liam Gillick (ditto), Andrew Kuo, Mateo López, Benoît Maire, Arthur Ou, Marlo Pascual (HUGE fan) and Pietro Roccasalva.
TOKYO
* Ayano Kaeba "mourning flowers" @ Gallery MOMO Roppongi / 2F 6-2-6 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Toei Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). One of my favorite Tokyo galleries, feat. young Kanagawa-born painter Kaeba in her second solo show, incorporating detailed floral patterns into her figurative silhouettes. (ENDS SAT)
NYC
* "The Displaced Person" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Ron Athey, Walt Cassidy, Jesse Aron Green, Geof Oppenheimer and Sue Williams contribute to this exhibition focused on the delineation b/w public and personal space.
TOKYO
* "Walk up / and down / form / being formed" @ NADiff a/p/a/r/t 1F 1-18-4 Ebisu, Shibuya-ku (JR Yamanote Line/Hibiya Line to Ebisu Station). Feat. Yoichi Sano, Taku Hisamura, Mitsuhiro Yamagiwa, who explore distance, scale and movement in pinhole photography, installation and mixed-media works. (ENDS SUN)
NYC
* "Werkmeister Harmonies" (dir. Béla Tarr, 2000) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 6p. A languid, meditative film by even Tarr's standards, combining a provincial Hungarian village with a sinister traveling circus.
* "The Man From London" (dir. Béla Tarr) screening @ Film Society of Lincoln Center / 65th St & Lincoln Center (1 to 66th St), 9p. Among Tarr's most gorgeously shot films is this recent exploration of anonymous breakdowns of social order in personal life—replete w/ covert briefcases stuffed with foreign cash and twilit, misty quaysides. Appeared at 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
* JEFF the Brotherhood (TN) @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$12. This is Brooklyn live music 101: sweaty JEFF swamp-rock show at checkerboard tiled DbA, $2 PBR in hand. No brainer. w/ Uncle Bad Touch (Montreal)
* Burning Star Core @ The Stone / 11 E 2nd St (F to 2nd Ave), 10p/$5. Dominick Fernow's Stone curation continues! Dive into C. Spencer Yeh's electronic-enhanced, transporting violin drones and thank me later.
AUSTIN
* "Catherine & Company" (dir. Michel Boisrond, 1975) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 9:30p. Young Jane Birkin in a mid-'70s French softcore film is enough to spark my total attention, but couple that w/ Catherine Breillat's ("Sleeping Beauty", "Bluebeard") screenwriting and Richard Suzuki's ("Emmanuelle") cinematography, and you got a whole 'nother thing, son. Plus the filmic debut of Alexandra Delli Colli ("Zombie Holocaust", "New York Ripper")!
THURSDAY
NYC
* "Happenings New York, 1958-1963" @ The Pace Gallery / 510 W 25th St. The first exhibition to document the origins and historical development of the transient, yet pivotal, "Happenings" movement—so says the Pace press release. Hey, I'm game! As "Happenings" and the group's participants, including Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann and Simone Forti, emphasized the organic connection b/w art and its environment (incl. viewers), documentation had to go beyond the nature of these unique performances and events. The exhibition includes rare archival footage and original ephemera from Happenings' production, plus artworks created during performances and extensive photography by five Happenings documentarians. A special illustrated book (authored by Milly Glimcher, published by The Monacelli Press) accompanies the show and should provide further insight. Probability of an opening-night "happening": 35%.
* James Busby "White and Black" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. BIG Busby fan here and his process-driven meditations on form and texture within stark white or graphite-covered media. He continues to blur that painting/sculpture line w/ shaped MDF and powdered graphite rubbed into formed-gesso surfaces, creating a brilliant dialogue w/ their respective display lighting.
* Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz "Night Falls" @ PPOW / 535 W 22nd St, 3rd Fl. The collaborative duo use the night sky as backdrop, adding firelight and the moon's illumination in dynamic interplay within their dreamlike archival C-prints. They are also participating in the group exhibition "Fairytales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination" at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville.
* Veronica Falls (UK) @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$12. Fell in love with these London indie-pop darlings during 2010's CMJ Fest. They'll provide the sunshine on this February NYC day. w/ local rockers Grooms
AUSTIN
* "Two Ships Passing: w/ Andy Campbell" @ Visual Arts Center / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity, 6:30p. An inspired, reactive dialogue b/w an invited speaker and their guest—a peer, mentor or new acquaintance—about some creative topic. Tonight begins the recurring series, co-presented by VAC and Pastelegram, and features Andy Campbell, lecturer in art history at Texas State University, on navigating today's abundance of images and ephemera vs. a single artwork.
* The Calm Blue Sea + The Sour Notes @ Mohawk / 912 Red River, 7p/$8. Solid Austin indie-rock right here. Consider aptly named The Calm Blue Sea, blending their graceful melodies with absolutely stormy post-rock sonics. They're hard at work on a 2nd LP that could drop sometime after SXSW (stay tuned). Plus The Sour Notes, charismatic pop stalwarts of the highest calibre. w/ Follow That Bird
FRIDAY
NYC
* Juergen Teller @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. A three-part exhibition of the lensman's Pop photography, including a mix of seductive portraits of Kristen McMenamy and Vivienne Westwood, deserted landscapes around Teller's Suffolk home, and shots of Teller's son—all juxtaposed w/ family photos.
* Elaine Reichek "Ariadne's Thread" @ Nicole Klagsbrun PROJECT / 534 W 24th St. Reichek literally weaves the titular Greek myth into her latest serious of embroideries, some hand-sewn, others like a large-scale tapestry woven with computerized technology. Reichek has a similar tapestry on view at the 2012 Whitney Biennial.
* "The Turin Horse" (dir. Béla Tarr, 2011) @ Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center / Lincoln Center & 65th St (1 to 66th St). Will this sombre "remodernist" film, thick with the heaviness of human existence, be Tarr's final feature? It echoes Nietzsche's own witnessing of an overworked horse's death and could well reflect a quiet emergence of the apocalypse. This Jury Grand Prix winner at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival enjoys its NYC theatrical premiere. THRU FEB 16
* George Kuchar Program 1 + 2 @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 7/9:15p. The first two parts of a six-part, three-night extravaganza on the late, great underground filmmaker. Program 1 is "A Package of Stars From George and the VDB Gang" and includes seven shorts from '89's "Point 'n Shoot" through last year's "Hotspell". Program 2 is a tribute from the Film-Maker's Coop and features six classic 16mm shorts from the '60s and '70s, including "I, An Actress" (1977).
* "Eraserhead" (dir. David Lynch, 1977) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Lynch's debut feature is a true surrealist classic, feat. usual suspect Jack Nance as the titular character in a nightmarish industrial landscape that works best when immersed on the big-screen. ALSO SAT
AUSTIN
* "Pina" (dir. Wim Wenders, 2011) @ Violet Crown Cinema / 434 W 2nd St. I was cued into the late, great German choreographer Pina Bausch's electrifying performances years ago by my mentor, and they forever changed how I view movement (e.g. by one person, by person to person, in groups) and "modern dance". Plus Bausch was a kind of muse to Yohji Yamamoto. Now Wenders, an old friend, conjures a 3D experience with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch that gives us even a glimpse of what it must be like to be a Bausch dancer, part of her kinetic, romantic world. It sounds like a triumph.
* "A Separation" (dir. Asghar Farhadi, 2011) @ Violet Crown Cinema / 434 W 2nd St. The film to beat for the Oscar for "Best Foreign Feature" is Farhadi's eye-widening take on contemporary Iran, on the dissolution of a marriage and the earth-rending traumas affecting the whole family.
* "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World" (dir. Edgar Wright, 2010) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 11:30p. Like cocaine for the eyes, this vintage-certified video game come to life delivers 16+ bits of full-color, side-scrolling mayhem. w/ Michael Cera as the mumbly titular character and scream-queen Mary Elizabeth Winstead as his Manic Panic-hued love interest, you totally can't go wrong. ALSO SAT
* Whiskey Shivers & Hello Wheels @ Scoot Inn / 1308 E 4th St, 9p/$8. "A freewheeling', trashgrassin', folk tornado" reads Whiskey Shivers' Facebook page. This is Austin, "y'all". Think upright bass, fiddle, and washboard in addition to that guitar, hard-drinking music of a nontraditional tip. Kindred locals Hello Wheels play "stomp-folk, or what they call "a new sound with an old soul". Get captivated on the bands' split 7" "Friends Do Things Together" release party tonight. w/ Wild Child
TOKYO
* Miila and the Geeks + The Suzan @ Super Deluxe / B1F 3-1-25 Nishi-azabu, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station), 7:30p/2500 yen. The G/R/L/Z showcase features singer/songwriter Moe Wadaka's incredible, indie-pop trio Miila and the Geeks (she's Miila, saxophonist Komori and drummer Ajima the geeks), whose slightly sinister, garage-rock debut "New Age" is a triumph for the indie scene. Plus Moe's behind the band's fractured lovely music videos. That praise extends to tropic-pop quartet The Suzan, who split their time b/w Tokyo and NYC (a dream, right?). w/ Limited Express (has gone?) and The Twee Grrrls Club DJs!
* DODDODO Band @ UFO Club / 1-11-6 Koenji-Minami, Suginami-ku (Marunouchi Line to Higashi-Koenji Station), 8p/2500. What's iller than Kansai noise-sprite Namin Haku, aka DODDODO? Have her on vox fronting a full band (feat. usual-suspect bassist Makoto Inada, drummer Keiko Matsunaga, uh clarinet player Masako Nakao and violinist Tetsuya Umeda), that's what! w/ ECD+ILLICIT TSUBOI
SATURDAY
NYC
* Tom Friedman @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. BOOM! This is the first NYC solo exhibition from the conceptual sculptor since 2005, and I for one am totally stoked. Friedman includes new sculpture—some incorporating ideas of technology, like a a life-sized video camera handcrafted from wood and paint—and works on paper and collages. Think of the mass-produced yet entirely, intricately handmade, the deadpan presentation looming into vertiginous infinity. This exhibit precedes a Friedman monograph, published by the gallery, which I am necessarily stoked about as well.
* George Kuchar Program 3 + 4 @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 6:45/9p. Program 3 on the underground filmmaking legend comes from the shelves of Electronic Arts Intermix, feat. "Cult of the Cubicles", "Rainy Season" and "The Creeping Crimson" (all 1987). San Francisco's Canyon Cinema culls from their archives in Program 4 with three 16mm shorts, including "Ascension of the Demonoids" (1985).
* Heliotropes + Iron Tides @ The Acheron / 57 Waterbury St, Bushwick (L to Montrose), 8p/$7. Heliotropes combine guitar dissonance and a rumbling rhythm section w/ melodious vox. If I had a soul, they'd be melting it right now. Whiskey-drinking metal dudes Iron Tides are loud enough to hang w/ the Heliotropes women. w/ Descender
AUSTIN
* Tom Molloy "New World" + Noriko Ambe "White Scape" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces St. Pretty stoked about this. The Irish artist Molloy returns in his third solo at the gallery, presenting painted LP sleeves from Dvorak's "New World Symphony" w/ the text blended into the background, plus his b&w photographic "Shake" series, of newsy world leaders doing just that. He leads a discussion on his work at 7p. Meanwhile Ambe commands the gallery's Project Room w/ a group of all-white layered cut-paper works, which should be a disarming visual palate cleanser against Molloy's exhibition.
* Martin Sztyk "Narratives" @ Big Medium / 5305 Bolm Rd. The practicing architectural designer and researcher draws from his ongoing, narrative-based inhabitation series—including "Urban Forest", "Empty City" and "New London Stock Exchange"—in what looks to be a mind-blowing set of intricate photo-collages.
TOKYO
* "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" (dir. David Fincher, 2011) @ Toho Cinema Hiho / 2-5-1 Yurakucho, Chiyoda-ku (Yurakucho Line to Yurakucho Station). Fincher's pulse-throbbing English language adaptation of Stieg Larsson's wildly popular novel(s), like a chunk of charred twilight doused in mercury, totally worked for me. The mix of "Se7en"'s legendary punk director w/ composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and leads Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig is just too irresistible. Tokyo, get ready.
* 「すべては『裸になる』から始まって」/"Always Start Out Naked" (dir. Saku Nakamachi, 2012) @ Ikebukuro Cinema Rosa / 1-37-12 Nishi-ikebukuro, Toshima-ku (JR Yamanote Line etc to Ikebukuro Station). AKB48's Risa Narita plays 10-year-reigning AV queen Kurumi Morishita in this biopic from Morishita's humble beginnings in Akita and tentative forays into, uh, taking off her clothes in front of a camera at Soft on Domand studio, to her self-reliant prowess at Dogma under director TOHJIRO.
SUNDAY
NYC
* George Kuchar Program 5 + 6 @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 6:30/8:30p. The final night of Anthology's Kuchar tribute, featuring 16mm shorts from Harvard Film Archive like "The Carnal Bipeds" (1973) and from Anthology's own collection, including "Anita Needs Me" (1983), plus Kuchar's feature-length film "The Devil's Cleavage" (1973), presented by Pacific Film Archive in Program 6.
AUSTIN
* Boy Friend + Love Inks @ Spiderhouse Ballroom / 2906 Fruth St, 10p. Ethereal guitar-pop duo Christa Palazzolo and Sarah Brown are Boy Friend, and they just debuted an extra-fuzzy LP called "Egyptian Wrinkle". Celebrate at their release party w/ kindred pop spirits Love Inks. w/ Missions
TOKYO
* Erebos Party @ Minami-Aoyama Trigram / B1F 4-18-10 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku (Tokyo Metro Chiyoda/Ginza/Hanzomon Lines to Omotesando Station), 4p/4000 yen. Part fetish party, part underground dance party, w/ lots of ace performances. Tokyo hosts stuff like this all the time (you just need to know where to look). Feat. pole-dancing by Aloe & Kikurage (tokyoDOLORES), the phenomenal Alk on aerial ring, plus DJs Rinko (Torture Garden Japan), Groove Patrol (eggworm/Phonika Tokyo) and assuredly other naughtiness.
* "Popbreak" @ Shibuya Glad / 2+3F 2-21-7 Dogenzaka, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit), 3p/3500 yen. Celebrate the venue's second anniversary with a mind-melting array of electro-clash pop cuties. Feat. live sets by personal faves RECORIDE (think Miss Kitten crossed w/ Crystal Castles), DJ/singer-songwriter Saori@destiny, "techno-pop idols" Cutie Pai, Aira Mitsuki and Mai Kotone…I'm sweating just typing this.
TUESDAY
AUSTIN
* "The Burning Moon" (dir. Olaf Ittenbach, 1999) @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. Uncut. Uncensored. Unconscionable. The horror anthology film as a truly vile barrage of nonstop splatter and German nihilism, shot on video in full misanthropic color. Just in time for Valentine's Day.
TOKYO
* TADZIO + DJ Sumire (Twee Grrrls Club) @ Fever / 1-1-14 Hanegi, Setagaya-ku (Odakyu Inokashira Line to Shindaita or Shimokitazawa Stations), 7p/2500 yen. A double-shot of grrrl noise-punk TADZIO? Sign me up! w/ DJ Sumire of the irresistible Twee Grrrls Club
* The Suzan @ THREE / B1F 5-18-1 Daizawa, Setagaya-ku (Inokashira Line to Shimokitazawa Station), 7p/3300 yen. The final night of tropic-pop cuties The Suzan's whirlwind return to Japan. Yes, after playing like a million shows here over a span of…two weeks, they're headed back to NYC. Celebrate w/ 'em. w/ QUATTRO, Pink Politics
* Tokyo Pinsalocks + Merpeoples @ Heaven's Door / 1-33-19 Sangen-jaya, Setagaya-ku (Den-en-toshi Line to Sangen-jaya Station), 7p/2800 yen. All-girl techno-tinged groove-pop to my left (Tokyo Pinsalocks), all-girl breathy indie-rock to my right (Merpeoples). Sounds good to me! w/ (M)otocompo
CURRENT SHOWS
* Diana Al-Hadid @ Visual Arts Center / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity. The Brooklyn-based sculptural alchemist dropped some heady topics in her talk preceding this exhibition, not only naming a certain Gothic painting of the Visitation from a Spanish museum as her point of departure in this stunning new work "Suspended After Image", but also labyrinths (and Jorge Luis Borges), Peter Bruegel (and Babel), and the Large Hadron Collider. All this clued me into Al-Hadid's remarkable sense of harnessing space and presence in her installations, morphing bulk into something oddly ethereal and organic, though still visually commanding. "Suspended After Image" is Al-Hadid's first instance of using a 3D modeling program and CNC router in her work, and the final flowing, terraced form acts more like a 3D painting than a proper sculpture, with the figure seemingly emerging from the frontal staircase while a flow of media colored like wet Frosted Mini Wheats echoes her opulent robes. Though there is an almost total spectrum of color infused in this work, mostly as frozen drips on the sides and back, the overall is a pristine grayish-white, which is absolutely stunning in the VAC's Vaulted Gallery.
+ "(im)possibilities. Five artists — Michael Stevenson, Erica Baum, Birgit Rathsmann, Patrick Resing, and Ellie Ga — extend Borges' metaphor of the library in this dialogue of narratives and human experience. This plays well with Diana Al-Hadid's installation in the Vaulted Gallery. I was most quickly taken by Baum's series "Dog Ear", utilizing folded pages from paperbacks and photographing them into unique fragmented dialogue. Ga's C-prints of an illuminated fissure within the Arctic ice, shot during her residency at the scientific research vessel Tara, feel otherworldly.
* Daniel Heidkamp "Glow Drops at the Chill Spot" @ Champion / 800 Brazos St. Take a plunge into Heidkamp's latest suite of radiant, textural scenes. He shows these interiors and exteriors completely independent from his ongoing portraiture, a strong move in my opinion. For the Brooklyn-based artist isn't just this accomplished figurative painter who also happens to paint rooms and landscapes en plein air. Rather, he is a strong force in capturing natural environments as he sees them, imbuing them with a resonating life-force and character that draws us into their layers of oil paint and dollops of impasto, confronting us with a disarming nostalgia. I may never have visited that Massachusetts backyard ("Here Glows Nothing") or Florida dockside ("Alligator Alley"), but it's like I can smell the air, feel the lawn beneath my trainers and the sun on my face. There's a physicality to Heidkamp's scenes beyond the presence of actual people, who he deftly folds into scenarios (the fireside "Feel It All Around", the portraitures' meta-effect in "The Night of 1000 Paintings") as accenting players. A very strong exhibition and a bold start to Austin's 2012 gallery season.
* Jill Magid "Failed States" @ AMOA-Arthouse / 700 Congress. So check this: on 1/21/10, a young man named Fausto fired six bullets into the air outside the Texas State Capitol. Jill Magid — whose oeuvre navigates bureaucracy and security/intelligence w/ Mission Impossible deftness — was like steps away, pursuing her own future work, and witnessed it. Now six blocks from the scene and two years later, Magid stages an intriguing Conceptual show that ties Fausto's mysterious actions — and his silence throughout his trial — with that of Goethe's "Faust". The ground-floor gallery is her stage, replete with wall-decal directions ("Enter Fausto", "shots fired skyward", "enter Magid" etc), Magid's own play "Fausto: A Tragedy" (mirroring "Faust"'s original intention as a closet drama, meant to be read and not performed), and contemplative works. Deep encodings here, from six translations of "Faust" silkscreened on top of one another, to six bullet casings and a six-slide projection of the sky over the Capitol. Magid wrote a letter to Fausto, requesting his voice (absent in his trial) to read passages from "Faust" (whose Spanish translation is "Fausto") — his answer is still forthcoming, but it would add an intriguing layer to all this. Finally, there is Magid's family's '93 Mercedes, armored to B4 level and parked in Fausto's spot outside the Capitol, and her writing appearing in the February issue of the "Texas Observer", drawing this dialogue beyond the art-scene realm as it should be.
+ "Evidence of Houdini's Return". A really brilliant group show of fractured and re-envisioned realities, curated by Arthouse's Rachel Adams. I tweeted that it made me miss NYC, because it's precisely that sort of thoughtful exhibition that makes me look twice, thrice, at what I think I already know. Ex: Strauss Borque LaFrance's "BABE", a silvery lacquered wood plank pitched diagonally on the wall like classic John McCracken,…only just around the corner is that same plank, used as a shelf amid LaFrance's complex, mixed-media display. Another: Katja Mater's "Time Passing Objects", chromogenic prints that blur the line b/w photography and geometric drawings. Justin Swinburne's "Echo" works, multiple inkjet scans onto alu-dibond that echo (no pun) Gerhard Richter's signature abstracts while maintaining that sense of disarray like Wade Guyton's inkjet silkscreens. Bravo!
CLOSING SOON
TOKYO
* "巧術 2.51" @ Radium / 2-5-17 Bakurocho, Chuo-ku (JR Yamanote Line to Bakurocho Station. AKA "skillful technique", the eponymous serial exhibition held at Spiral yearly since 2010. The third iteration, subtitled "Kowaku/fascination", gets a gallery preview, feat. artists Takuro Sugiyama, Haruo Mitsuda and others. (ENDS FRI)
NYC
* "Corporations Are People Too" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. This evil-sounding group show culls some awesome talent, feat. Berenice Abbott, Ian Davis, CHris Dorland, Kota Ezawa, Louis Faurer, Yevgeniy Fiks, Jacqueline Hassink, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange and Phillip Toledano in respective pointed takes on corporate culture, from the Great Depression and WWII to contemporary society.
* On Kawara "Date Painting(s) in New York & 136 Other Cities" @ David Zwirner / 525-533 W 19th St. Conceptualist Kawara made his first date painting in NYC, "JAN. 4, 1966" — that's over four decades ago, if you're counting, and he's still doing it. Thus, the gallery stages a seminal exhibition of over 150 date paintings, selected by Kawara, accompanied by binders of facsimile newspaper clippings, plus two one-hundred-year calendars for the 20th and 21st centuries. AND! A major catalogue published by Ludion and essayed by Japanese writer Lei Yamabe.
* Michael Snow "In the Way" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 512 W 20th St. Snow, the visual pioneer behind '67's "Wavelength", precedes a solo show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art AND a sculpture retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario (both occurring this year) w/ new projection works and older photo-based installations, all emphasizing the art of looking and viewing through objects.
* "End of Days" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. A dozen artists inaugurate Mixed Greens' new year, working off the notion of apocalyptic and transcendent revelations. Main draw for me is Patrick Jacobs' totally mesmerizing mixed-media dioramas (he was in my Top Ten LIST-worthy Cultural Events of 2011), though Valerie Hegarty's installation sounds dope too.
* Alfred Jensen/Sol LeWitt "Systems and Transformation" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. An intriguing pairing of Jensen's orderly abstract paintings based off grids and color theories vs. LeWitt's basic geometrical open structures. Beyond inclusions in group exhibitions, this is the first show to examine and contrast the artists' oeuvres in depth.
* Shirin Neshat @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Really stoked for this: Neshat unveils her new photographic series "The Book of Kings", composed of b&w portraits of Iranian and Arab youth covered in calligraphic text, plus a new three-channel video installation.
* "Rotary Connection", organized by Loring Randolph @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Pay attention to Julia Dault, an electrifying abstract-ish painter and sculptor featured in both the upcoming New Museum triennial "The Ungovernables" AND this group show, organized by the gallery's director. Also featured: Etienne Chambaud, Isabelle Cornaro, Jose Dávila, Jason Dodge (big fan), Ryan Gander (notch), Liam Gillick (ditto), Andrew Kuo, Mateo López, Benoît Maire, Arthur Ou, Marlo Pascual (HUGE fan) and Pietro Roccasalva.
TOKYO
* Ayano Kaeba "mourning flowers" @ Gallery MOMO Roppongi / 2F 6-2-6 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Toei Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). One of my favorite Tokyo galleries, feat. young Kanagawa-born painter Kaeba in her second solo show, incorporating detailed floral patterns into her figurative silhouettes. (ENDS SAT)
NYC
* "The Displaced Person" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Ron Athey, Walt Cassidy, Jesse Aron Green, Geof Oppenheimer and Sue Williams contribute to this exhibition focused on the delineation b/w public and personal space.
TOKYO
* "Walk up / and down / form / being formed" @ NADiff a/p/a/r/t 1F 1-18-4 Ebisu, Shibuya-ku (JR Yamanote Line/Hibiya Line to Ebisu Station). Feat. Yoichi Sano, Taku Hisamura, Mitsuhiro Yamagiwa, who explore distance, scale and movement in pinhole photography, installation and mixed-media works. (ENDS SUN)
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