WEDNESDAY
NYC
* Shimon Minamikawa @ 47 Canal. The artist's debut US show features works made in residence at gallery this past summer. Minamikawa shows w/ Misako & Rosen, one of the chicer residential Tokyo galleries.
* "Props For Memory" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Joseph Beuys, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Paul P.: sounds dope to me! I'm intrigued by Ross-Ho's recycling of the creative process, which tends to incorporate scans of her parents' commercial photography, plus P.'s portraiture resembles lucid dreams. LIST readers should know my deep admiration for Beuys by now. A thoughtful opener to NY's gallery season.
* "Line Color Space Gesture" @ Site/109 / 109 Norfolk St. Cologne's Galerie Stefan Röpke plunges into the LES with four of its artist heavyweights, incl some locals! Brooklyn-based Jason Gringler, Aleksandar Duravcevic (I've not seen his work in NYC since "Now through a glass darkly" at Arario NY, back in 2010) and Greg Allen-Müller, plus Spain's Jordi Alcaraz, present works with heavy industrial backbones and reflective elements as painterly tools.
AUSTIN
* "Hard Ticket to Hawaii" (dir. Andy Sidaris, 1987) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10:30p. When you have a group of bikini-wearing crimefighters called L.E.T.H.A.L. and a "doobie-smoker" skateboarding on his hands upside down, who needs crafty dialogue and SFX? Guess what: Sidaris' exotic locale schlock-fest has those, too!
THURSDAY
NYC
* Susan Philipsz + Analia Saban @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Take a world-premiere "sound-sculptor" (that's Philipsz: Scottish, Turner Prize winner, does disarming installations with "just" audio) and a fascinating young painting "destructor" (that's Saban: Argentinian, worldwide recognition, enjoying her debut NYC solo) and whaddaya get? Another brilliant Fall gallery season opener for one of my favorite NY galleries. Don't miss it!
* Robert Irwin "dotting the i's & crossing the t's: part II" @ The Pace Gallery / 510 W 25th St + 32 E 57th St. Pace continues its Irwin extravaganza, ahead of the seminal light and perception artist's 85th birthday this month. The Chelsea space contains Irwin's last "studio" works, monumental acrylic columns completed some 50 years ago, while the midtown space features the artist's light installations and a site-conditioned installation utilizing the gallery windows.
* Rosemary Laing "leak" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. Laing focuses her lens on New South Wales in photographic series "leak", exposing suburbanization's threat to the Australian landscape. Four of her moving prints have never been shown, and the entire series makes its U.S. debut here. Laing returns to the gallery on SAT at 3p for a related book signing.
* Liu Ye "Bamboo Bamboo Broadway" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. The artist merges traditional Chinese imagery with modernist edge, like bamboo with Bauhaus, in his third solo exhibition at the gallery.
* Simon Starling "Triangulation Station A" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. Cheeky conceptualist that Starling is, he's staging the "same" show here and at Berlin's neugerriemschneider, commenting on parallax view while mirroring sculpture and film projection.
* Michael Rakowitz "The Breakup" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. Rakowitz unveils a cross-media Beatlemania, centered on a ten-part series for a Ramallah-based radio station in Palestine, a cascading narrative generated from Michael Lindsay-Hogg's documentary "Let It Be".
* "The Feverish Library", organized in cooperation w/ Matthew Higgs @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Expect multilayering on a Jorge Luis Borges level at this group exhibition, inspired by the book as a conceptual, psychological, and cultural device. Feat. Wade Guyton, Sean Landers, Jorge Pardo, Seth Price, Stephen Prina, John Stezaker, and Heimo Zobernig…you know, the heavyweights.
* "Searching" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Ever since I was exposed to Bas Jan Ader at MoMA's wonderful "In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976" back in 2009, I've been increasingly captivated by the elusive conceptualist…I say "elusive" because he disappeared while working on his traveling project "In Search of the Miraculous" back in '75. That unfinished (and still missing) body of work grounds this group exhibition, which also features Arianna Carossa and Mie Olise.
* Kwang Young Chun @ Hasted Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. You gotta see this dude's oeuvre in person to fully understand the badassery present. Check it: what appears to be foliage-covered canvases from across the room — or heavily impastoed canvases, if we're keeping it art-related — transform into intricate sculptural reliefs, thousands of subtly colored, hand-molded paper triangles creating a forest floor, rock wall, sun through the leaves…something naturalistic and mind-blowing.
* Jonah Bokaer & Anthony McCall "Eclipse" @ BAM Fisher / 321 Ashland Place, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins St, G to Fulton St), 7:30p/$20. Choreographer Bokaer and light-sculpting pioneer McCall inaugurate BAM Fisher with a brilliant concert of dance and light. ALSO FRI-SAT 7:30p, SUN 3p.
AUSTIN
* The Sour Notes @ Stubb's / 801 Red River, 10p/FREE. Hometown indie heroes The Sour Notes play their first local show following their summer 2012 US tour…and it's a free one! Way to have it back to school, kids. Rock on.
TOKYO
* Momus + nisennenmondai @ UFO Club / 1-11-6 Koenji-minami, Suginami-ku (Toei Marunouchi Line to Higashi-koenji Station), 7:30p/2500 yen. Wowsers! Globe-trotting performance artist/musician/tender pervert Momus follows Japanese kraut-thrashers nisennenmondai for a truly transcendent performance. w/ OBANDOS
FRIDAY
NYC
* Tony Smith "Source" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. Meet "Source", Smith's dynamic, 12,000-pound steel sculpture that once graced Documenta iV in Kassel, Germany, back in '68. BOOM. Way to open NY's fall gallery season, Matthew Marks.
* Richard Tuttle "Systems, VII-XII" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. Less is more with this pivotal postminimalist. You may know Tuttle for his stretched fabric "reliefs", but he can't be "pinned" down to just one practice. The artist continues his investigation into sculpture with space physicality that maintains the discreetness of his earlier, smaller works. In these "Systems", he focuses on the relationship between the works' horizontal axis and the floor.
* Robert Adams "On Any Given Day in Spring and Light Balances" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. For those seeking a…subtler answer to Tony Smith's monumental "Source" sculpture (at MM's 22nd St space), check these two graceful b&w series, the titular one and "Light Balances", which find Adams training his lens on flocks of seabirds and a forest, respectively.
* Ernst Wilhelm Nay @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave + 541 W 24th St. The first comprehensive stateside exhibition of the powerful, Berlin-born painter is a collaboration between Mary Boone's two spaces and Michael Werner Gallery. Boone's Chelsea hangar features Nay's intensely colorful, brushily abstract paintings from the '50s and '60s, while the midtown gallery features Nay's drawings.
* Al Taylor "Pass the Peas and Can Studys" @ David Zwirner / 519 W 19th St. The cheeky title alludes to its comprehensive study of Taylor's surveys "Pass the Peas" (1991-2) and "Can Studys" [sic] (1993) of deftly abstracted ephemera, plus related works from "Cans and Hoops" (1993).
* Toba Khedoori @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 W 19th St. New hyperrealistic paintings of "virtual" landscapes from the LA-based artist.
* James Welling "Overflow" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 533 W 19th St. The artist presents a hybrid relationship between photography and painting, basing some prints off Andrew Wyeth's classic mid-century compositions. Others are even more malleable and watercolor-like, created by exposing wet photographic paper to light from a color enlarger.
* Guido van der Werve "Nummer veertien, home" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St + 25 Knickerbocker Ave, Bushwick. The Dutch artist's latest film, which shares title with this exhibition, takes its form from a classical Requiem, intertwining Alexander the Great, Frédéric Chopin, and van deer Werve himself. He includes the multimedia work "Nummer dertien: emotional poverty", which features photography, text, and a slide projection with the HD film. The gallery's Bushwick location hosts eight of van der Werve's earlier "Nummer" films, from 2003-2009.
* Chris Dorland "Permanent Vacation" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. The hallucinogenic titular video reminded me of Arboria from "Beyond the Black Rainbow". So expect a seriously hallucinogenic, pop-cultural trip from this dude.
* Xeno & Oaklander + Led Er Est @ 285 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 11:45p/$9. Resident "Wierd"-o's Xeno & Oaklander (Brooklyn analog aficionados) and '80s-obsessed Led Er Est drop the temperature 60 degrees in their chilly pop persuasion. w/ IKE YARD
AUSTIN
* Anthony W. Garza @ Tiny Park / 1101 Navasota St. Garza, an Austinite and heavy presence in Texas' inaugural Biennial, unveils truly humanizing, richly detailed paintings and drawings based on geology and the cosmos.Ties in nicely with the 70mm release of "Baraka" today (read on!).
* Ink Tank "More Awkward Than Heavy" @ UP Collective / 2326 E Cesar Chavez. The local artist collective and 2011-12 winner of the Austin Critics' Table "Outstanding Work of Art: Independent or Public Project" (for Rosewood House's "LAST NEW YEAR" exhibition) carpetbomb their next venue with a fluid, experimental installation, guaranteed to elicit diverging experiences like the members themselves.
* "Compliance" (dir. Craig Zobel, 2012) @ Alamo Drafthouse S. Lamar / 1120 S Lamar. Finally Zobel's sophomore chiller hits Austin, guaranteed to turn you off to fast food — as it's the indirect player in this based-on-true-events thriller of blind obedience. A "cop" (Pat Healy, totally one-upping the creep factor) calls in, blaming cute register girl blamed for stealing. Instructs world-weary female manager to strip-search girl. And it gets wincingly worse, quickly.
* Pujol (TN) @ Stubb's / 801 Red River, 10:30p/$10. Aw yeah, "y'all": Austin gets served up a funky night of southern-fried rock tonight, courtesy Daniel Pujol and his Nashville crew. Now buy those boys a beer!
TOKYO
* Taishi Niimi @ Yumiko Chiba Associates / 2F 4-32-6 Nishi-shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku (Toei Oedo Line to Tochomae Station, JR etc to Shinjuku Station, West Exit). The Nagoya-area artist unveils new illustrations, ranging from intimate to monumental but all totally encapsulating his jiggity-jaggety style.
* Torturing Nurse + NOJIJI @ Ochiai Soup / B1F 3-9-10 Kami-Ochiai, Shinjuku-ku (Tokyo Metro Tozai Line to Ochiai Station), 9p/2000 yen. Straight outta Shanghai come harsh noise performance duo Torturing Nurse (aka Misuzu and Junky, both formerly of no wavers Junkyard). They're joined by Beijing collective NOJIJI, featuring core noisicians Mafeisan and Mei Zhiyong, plus Hong Kong alt-improvisor Sin:Ned. One helluva tight night of noise.f
SATURDAY
NYC
* Audrey Kawasaki "Midnight Reverie" + Jeff Soto "Decay and Overgrowth" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. I thank the gallery for introducing me to both these artists and their fascinating, personal oeuvres. Soto's polluted pop cosmos continues to intrigue, but it's Kawasaki's new series of stunning oil and graphite portraits on wood panel that really have me jazzed.
* Paul Pfeiffer "Playroom" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. Pfeiffer returns in his first solo in NYC since 2007 by recreating the "playroom" from basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain's LA mansion. Film works and photography set the mood.
* Dave Cole @ DODGEgallery / 15 Rivington St. Nostalgia and a personal take on national identity. Cole conveys these in labor-intensive works, like his lead and stainless steel sewn flag and the absolutely bonkers-sounding centerpiece: a functioning music box powered by a steamroller.
AUSTIN
* Jim Torok "There Is Nothing Wrong with You" @ Lora Reynolds Gallery / 360 Nueces. The Brooklyn-based artist's previous exhibition here focused on his hyperrealistic, super-tiny portraiture. This new one turns to Torok's other strength: loosely gestural, "cartoon-y" ink drawings. If the 50-some-odd works on paper overwhelm you, have a perusal through Torok's first major monograph "Portraits", coinciding with this exhibition.
+ Cordy Ryman. The artist son of white-paint nonpareil Robert Ryman — well, one of his artist sons, anyway — gets all visceral in the gallery project room with his genre-blurring conglomerate reliefs.
* "Baraka" (dir. Ron Fricke, 1992) @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 1p/4p. The Drafthouse's ongoing presentation of gorgeous classics in 70mm "Alamoscope" continues w/ this wordless, global journey! ALSO MON 7p.
TOKYO
* "Livid" (dirs. Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury, 2011) @ Theatre N Shibuya / 2F 24-5 Sakuragaoka-cho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, West Exit). Sick shit goes down good in this fairytale for f'ed-up adults. What begins as a robbery heist by a young caregiver and her stupid BF at a Brittany-area estate leads to darker passageways and devilish nastiness.
* Tokyo Decadance "Oedo" @ Christon Cafe / 5-17-13 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku (JR etc to Shinjuku Station, East Exit), 11:30p/3000 yen. This kitschy venue goes supremely old-school, transforming into an Edo-era castle town. UK-based performer/choreographer YUSURA headlines, while the requisite tech-house DJs, Geisha go-go dancers, and more fill out the lineup.
* nisennenmondai @ Shibuya O-Nest / 6F Maruyamacho, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit), 7p/3000 yen. Another outing for Tokyo's esteemed kraut-rock trio, anchored by Sayaka Himeno's ferocious drumming! This is all building towards—spoiler!—nisennenmondai's "Souzousuruneji+" show on SEPT 16 in Ochiai, Tokyo. Stay tuned! w/ AUTORA
* AISHA @ HARLEM / Maruyama-cho 2-4, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station, Hachiko Exit), 10p/3000 yen. Hip-hop cutie AISHA celebrates the release of her new single, with lyrical b-boys Chehon, Richee, and Simon backing her up. Plus DJs and "supa dupa Saturday" opulence, don't miss it!
SUNDAY
NYC
* Bernadette Corporation "2000 Wasted Years" @ Artists Space / 38 Greene St, 2nd Fl. The NY-based conceptual art trio's first major retrospective encompasses signature video works from the mid-'90s to today, plus faux-corporate promotional materials for as-yet unrealized projects, branded gear, "Made in USA" (the magazine!), and a veritable hotbed of other awesomeness.
* Bernadette Corporation "2000 Wasted Years" @ Artists Space / 38 Greene St, 2nd Fl. The NY-based conceptual art trio's first major retrospective encompasses signature video works from the mid-'90s to today, plus faux-corporate promotional materials for as-yet unrealized projects, branded gear, "Made in USA" (the magazine!), and a veritable hotbed of other awesomeness.
* Alex Olson "Palmist and Editor" @ Lisa Cooley / 107 Norfolk St. New paintings with a strong graphic element and emphasis on the works' respective surfaces. Sounds like my style of abstraction.
* Alix Pearlstein "The Drawing Lesson" @ On Stellar Rays / 133 Orchard St. Pearlstein presents two new videos, "Moves in the Field" and the titular work, ahead of her newly commissioned solo exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in January.
* Anya Kielar "WOMEN" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. Large-scale fabric prints boxed within wooden frames and hung from the ceiling, revealing Kielar's ongoing investigation of the female form. A catalogue accompanies her second solo show at the gallery.
* Naama Tsabar "Propagation" @ Thierry Goldberg Gallery / 103 Norfolk St. I've been a huge fan of Tsabar's since her rockin' performances at MoMA PS1's "Greater NY" — her audio-infused sculpture takes on whole new levels. Tsabar contributes a site-specific installation in her debut solo exhibition, featuring sculpture that double as instruments. Plus, she performs at this evening's opening (7:30p!) and will enact other performances with musicians on Sundays throughout the show's run; check the gallery website for further details.
TUESDAY
NYC
* Richard Phillips @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Classical portraiture, pop culture, and La Lohan. Oh yeah, but I can't help myself. See you there?
* Cosmetics @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8:30p/$10. Canada's Cosmetics emerge from the venue's haze (no doubt the smoke machine will be tuned to full blast) with their intoxicating glacial electro-pop. w/ Black Marble + Warm Ghost
AUSTIN
* Emily + Andy's Film Club @ Visual Arts Center Courtyard / UT Art Building, 23rd St at Trinity, 6:30p. Ahead of Emily Roysdon's multimedia survey in the VAC's Vaulted Gallery (opening Sept 21, tune back in!) comes the second iteration of her co-curated film series with art historian Andy Campbell. They pair up with PhD candidate Kara Carmack to screen three short films: Cecilia Barriga's "The Meeting of Two Queens"; Isaac Julien's "Looking for Langston"; and Todd Haynes' "Dottie Gets Spanked".
* "A Burning Hot Summer" (dir. Philippe Garrel, 2011) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse S. Lamar / 1120 S. Lamar, 7p. Reasons to see this: 1) the latest searing drama from French auteur Garrel, 2) his brooding, oft-acting son Louis is the lead, 3) Monica Bellucci plays Louis' wife (what the hell?) and 4) John Cale scored the film. Summer ain't over just yet, kids.
* "Piranha II: The Spawning" (dir. James Cameron, 1981) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 9:45p. Whatta feature film debut, right? Before Cameron, lover of the deepest deep, went transcendent in "The Abyss", he tackled B-Movie bliss with airborne piranhas (did you know the alternate title was "Piranha II: Flying Killers"? sick, right?). 30 years later, John Gulager's "Piranha 3DD" may have had more boobs, but Cameron's sequel wins in good ol' bloodshed.
