WEDNESDAY
* "The Woodmans" (dir. C. Scott Willis, 2010) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Embark on an entrancing faded-memories trip w/ this incredible experimental film - slash - documentary. Key subject is young Francesca Woodman, an amazing late-20th C. b&w photographer (hauntingly self-portraitist) who committed suicide at age 22. Her oeuvre is interwoven in the narrative, remarking on her artistic parents and the ambitious, suffocating NY art scene.
* Cloud Nothings + Toro Y Moi @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/SOLD OUT oops! Talk about red-hot talent. My goodness, it's like the entire roster is barely drinking age, and it puts the smeary electro-pop of Chaz Bundick (aka Toro y Moi, aka frontman for The Heist) firmly in the "adult" category. That's when you place him against Dylan Baldi, brainchild behind the noisy indie outfit Cloud Nothings, and NY-by-way-of-Michigan Indian Rebound, the likes of whom are humblingly young and humblingly talented. Hence why the show's sold out.
* WIERD presents The Soft Moon @ Home Sweet Home / 131 Chrystie St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), midnight. Picture The Cure's "Mixed Up" album, but only the echoey bits of "A Forest (Tree Mix)" and "The Caterpillar (Flicker Mix)", w/ Robert Smith's super whispery vocals. That's a bit like San Fran's The Soft Moon, bringing their somberly gorgeous '80s-bent pop to HSW. Fog machines in full effect, people.
THURSDAY
* "L'insoutenable L'égerèté de L'être" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Translation "The unbearable lightness of being", but it sounds way cooler en Français. This is a joint group show at the gallery's NY and Paris locations, named after Milan Kundera's 1984 novel, and feat. a genre- and generational-spanning cast of the sublime and nightmarish.
* "A Room, In Three Movements: Katy Heinlein, Sheila Pepe, Halsey Rodman" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. The three sculptors here, Brooklyn-based Pepe and Rodman and Houston, TX's Heinlein will have their works rotated in different parts of the gallery throughout the exhibition, prompting unique responses and modifications as needed. This should be especially interesting w/ Pepe's site-specific maneuvers and Heinlein's kinetic assemblages, and worth multiple visits after the opening.
* Jose Luis Farinas "Skirting the Apocalypse" @ Miyako Yoshinaga art prospects / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. A beastly marriage of Bosch and Bacon that would make Clive Barker shriek with joy. If you like your renderings demon-tiffic and dripping with Dante steez, sell your soul to the discomfiting seduction of Farinas.
* "Gantz" (dir. Shinsuke Sato, 2011) screening @ Regal Union Square 14 / 850 Broadway (NRW/L/456 to Union Square), 8p. OK here's the good news: this promisingly blockbuster Japanese film (part one of two), based off a wildly popular manga I've never read and a TV series I've never seen, debuts in Japan AND here on the same day. The plot is about two reincarnated young blokes assassinating aliens, or something. The bad news: "Gantz"'s U.S. premiere is DUBBED. Take your chances (though I wonder when/if it'll properly screen here, w/ subtitles).
* Satoshi Takeishi & Shoko Nagai @ The Stone / 16 Ave C (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$10. AKA Vortex, the starred pairing of electronics/percussion whiz Takeishi and pianist/sonic sculptor Nagai, conjuring ghost stories and ephemeral landscapes in their magnetizing duets.
* Knyfe Hyts @ Secret Project Robot / 210 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Get on this: Brooklyn's classic no-wavers Knyfe Hyts perform on the 20th of every month this year (until November, I think?), leading an avant-art party until the venue's…close? I seriously hope this graffiti-covered, icebox cold (or alternatively furnace-hot) basement space lives on, either here or somewhere equally as cool. I've seen way too many dope shows here for it to be otherwise. But still: Knyfe Hyts = awesome, & they release a super-limited cassette at this show. w/ Liturgy & K-Holes
* Weird Wives + Weekends @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p. Can't go wrong w/ Miami's Weird Wives, which feat. Thomas Fekete and Marcos Marchesani (guitarist and keyboardist/percussionist, respectively, of Surfer Blood), but they're loads more psychedelic, w/ an early-'90s grime over the whole thing. Plus Baltimore's Weekends, who promise to knock you straight into the weekend w/ those riffs of theirs.
FRIDAY
* Patrick Jacobs "Familiar Terrain" @ Pierogi Gallery / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7-9p. Jacobs' warm, watery worlds blur the line b/w photography, sculpture and other media in his mind-blowing convex-glass dioramas of like the softest rolling meadows you've ever seen, you want to dive face-first into 'em and roll around, and they stretch miles into the distance and it almost feels as though you could.
* Christian Marclay "The Clock" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. The U.S. premiere of multimedia maestro Marclay's 24-hr long video work "The Clock" — an array of time-pieces from film excerpts — that unfolds in realtime. Meaning the 1st screening begins at the opening 6p and continues through SAT 6p. This isn't Marclay's first brush w/ A/V collage (think 1995's "Telephones", itself a study of Hollywood film phone convos), but it's the most durational.
* Rebecca Morales "While There's Calm" @ BravinLee Programs / 526 W 26th St #211. Smeared-color watercolors and mixed media undersea-like renderings on vellum.
* "The Housemaid" (dir. Im Sang-soo, 2010) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Who isn't up for some bourgeoisie voyeurism and mania-fueled murder. Im amps up the dark depravity of the 1960 original, of an au pair and a cruel upper-class family. Competed for the Palme d'Or at 2010 Cannes, loved at 2010 Fantastic Fest (where it screened against the original). The games rich people play...
* "Mamma Roma" (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962) @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). You don't mess w/ Mamma Roma, aka Anna Magnani, in this classic tough-love Pasolini feature. Magnani owns the screen, portraying an ex-prostitute making good for her thieving teenage son. Her eerie night walks, the camera ahead of her as gaslights bloom and disappear in the twilight, are pure cinematic transcendence.
* "Maboroshi" (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, 1995) screenings @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Koreeda-san's first feature film, whose full title is "Maboroshi no Hikari" (or "Phantasmic Light") and strikes a tone very close to the core of this vulnerable feature, about a young Osaka couple, loss, remorse. It'll stun you to the core, and it's terribly beautiful. Also SAT & SUN
* "Lemmy" (dir. Greg Olliver & Wes Orshoski, 2010) @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (NRW/L/456 to Union Sq). Hell yes, a proper hard-livin' documentary on Motörhead frontman Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, a living legend in speed-metal and music history. Snake-eyes watching you, baby.
* "Hell" (dir. Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960) screening @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (E/M to Lexington/53rd, 6 to 51st St), 7:30p. Way to cut to the chase: naming your experimental labyrinthine horror film "Hell".
* "Bad Biology" (dir. Frank Henenlotter, 2008) midnight screening @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave). I love these "adults only" features! This one sounds extremely over the top. Think I'm joking? Henenlotter notoriously directed "Basket Case" (you bio-creature feature freaks know what I mean), and the grimy-ass RA the Rugged Man (the Suffolk County deep underground MC) co-produced it (along w/ Vinnie Paz of Jedi Mind Tricks, an indie hip-hop outfit I dig). But that's just the beginning! Our two leads incl. an insatiable woman who births mutant offspring and a dude w/ a drug-addicted member. Think about that for a minute. Also SAT.
* MINKS (album release party) @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JZ to Marcy), 8:30p/$10. Super-smart, '80s-dredging indie-pop that works in cemeteries and runway shows. Meet MINKS, who I've hyped since I had a sonic love affair w/ 'em back when (I think it was at Glasslands, in fact…). w/ Big Troubles & Widowspeak, so expect a properly glamish bash.
* ELKS + Heliotropes + Mirror Queen @ Local 269 / 269 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave, F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 8p/$7. I hope you like it heavy! B/c are YOU ever in luck. Where to begin: show up early for Heliotropes, the toughest all-girl doom-pop band in the known universe. Stay for the psych metal of Mirror Queen and (gasp) ELKS, for extra-majorness.
SATURDAY
* Ellen Gallagher "Greasy" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. MAYJAH. Gallagher hasn't had a solo show here since 2005, so her return to NY has got me all excited. We'll find her still mining pop culture and historical references, utilizing Black-interest magazines as raw media for collaged, modified, cut-up, inked over "jams", eruptions of obliterated text and disassembled figures.
* Ray Caesar "A Gentle Kind of Cruelty" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. Impeccable Maya-modeled babydoll chimeras, now with an even more dreamy, painterly approach. I swear, if Caesar ever created a 3D short film (or something) from his digital oeuvre, that would be mayjah.
+ Erik Mark Sandberg "Get Pretty Now". Think like "Harry and the Hendersons", only rainbow-furred and clad eye-popping tourist outfits. That's one facet of Sandberg's style, along w/ his furiously rendered abstract works.
* On Line/Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker "Violin Phase from Fase: Four movements to the Music of Steve Reich" (1982) performances @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). a good portion of the Marron Atrium is covered in sand for this, contemporary dance choreographer De Keersmaeker's excerpt from her seminal early work "Fase" (created when she was 22!). You scan see her dizzying video "Top Shot" (2002) up in the "On Line" exhibition. This performance is like that, spinning on the beach, brought to life. Performances at 2/4p, also SUN 2/4p.
* The Vaccines + Oberhofer @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JZ to Marcy), 9p/$10. Check this out: I know literally two things about The Vaccines. 1) one of their two Myspace promos, "Wreckin' Bar", is 84 seconds of concentrated pop. 2) this is their American debut. Or rather, it is at Bowery Ballroom on THU, w/ local powerhouse Oberhofer, but I'd go for the sweatier, tinier Glasslands if I were you. The leap of faith just might equal the best concert you've ever attended.
* Purling Hiss @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), 8p/$10. LIST-certified Philly psychedelia, courtesy of Birds of Maya frontman Mike Polizze. I'm talking Purling Hiss. Good and groovy. w/ Home Blitz
SUNDAY
* Ursula von Rydingsvard "Sculpture 1991-2009" @ SculptureCenter / 44-19 Purves St, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq), 5-7p. I am so stoked for this. Von Rydingsvard is one of my favorite contemporary sculptors. She reworks cedar beams into hewn, rippling monoliths, petrified dragons, cavernous entrances. A very cool thing about them is they retain their organic nature: seen outdoors, they fit well into the landscape; indoors, they burst alive from the gallery floor and/or walls. So it's particularly cool that SculptureCenter hosts the beginning of this touring mid-career retrospective, as its indoor/outdoor enough to balance the energy of von Rydingsvard's monumental wood figures. Plus, there's a non-touring cast-resin entity specially installed in the venue's exhibition court.
+ "Vide-Poche". Six artists — Michele Abeles, Samuel Clagnaz, Isabelle Cornaro, Miles Huston, Charles Mayton and Valerie Snobeck — empty form and content through their diverse practices, from Abeles' nouveau still-life photography to Clagnaz's video work.
* Sergej Jensen @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq). The Berlin-based artist's 1st solo NY show, a sublime affair of stained and reductive textile-based abstract paintings.
+ Laurel Nakadate "Only the Lonely". Nakadate's 1st large-scale museum exhibition, feat. a decade's worth of voyeuristic and deeply personal video (incl. the recent "Good Morning, Sunshine" and "The Wolf Knife") plus new durational photo series "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears".
+ "Modern Women: Single Channel". From the MoMA's collection, eleven women artists in single-channel video from the '60s through '90s. Feat. Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, VALIE EXPORT, Mako Idemitsu, Joan Jonas, Kristin Lucas, Mary Miss, Pipilotti Rist, Carolee Schneemann and Steina Vasulka.
MONDAY
* "Santa Sangre" (dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1989) sneak preview @ reRun Theatre / (F to York St, AC to High St), 10p. The surrealist psychological horror classic you've probably never seen. Severin Films is FINALLY releasing Jodorowsky's cult classic on DVD, so catch this flashback/flash-forward strange circus of abuse, hallucinations and unrequited love — I mean, it's not ALL dark and scary.
* MAP Magazine presents "Difficult Gifts" @ E-Flux / 41 Essex St (F/JMZ to Essex/Delancey), 7p/FREE. A program on art as gift, feat. works by Andrea Buttner, BS Johnson, Duncan Marquiss, Shahryar Nashat, Laure Prouvost and Stephen Sutcliffe. The contemporary art quarterly MAP feat. Nashat in their winter issue, which coincides w/ the screening.
* Year of the Tiger @ Union Hall / 702 Union St, Park Slope (D/NR to Union St), 8p/$8. Think Alec Empire mixed w/ Karen O, The Prodigy's air-raid synths crossed w/ Amanda Ghost's searing lyricism. Now meet NY's Year of the Tiger, a melodiously abrasive electro trio, and dance your faces off.
TUESDAY
* Yuck @ Mercury Lounge / 217 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave), 9:30p/$10. I really really want to love Yuck. They're a youngish coed UK-based lot, they make that addictive indie-pop filtered through raindrops and cigarettes like only a Londoner (like vocalist Daniel, though the group hails international) can…and the last time they were supposed to play here, during CMJ, they had to cancel the tour. So I'm super-duper stoked to see them. w/ Total Slacker
* Suuns @ The Rock Shop / 249 4th Ave, Park Slope (D/NR to Union St), 8p/$10. Those creepy, creepy Canadians, w/ their loop-riddled guitar riffs and whispery vocals and schizo performing. Love 'em.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Lee Lozano "Tools" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Just plain excellent. Put this exhibition high on your must-see list and do just that. Lozano was a brilliantly tortured soul, brimming with genius, whose life WAS her art, as she pursued stricter conceptualist practices in the '70s that drew her away from the art-world (and thereby the public eye). So her surviving physical oeuvre is limited, but terribly intense, and it is fortuitous of the gallery for hosting this rare collection of drawings and paintings of tools from 1963-4, during Lozano's raw expressionist "comix" period in NYC. Think massive clamps and shadowed screws, a hammer-head blurred into motion, wrenches so biomechanical to make Giger blush. One hardcore razorblade titled "hard". More macho and sexier than Claes Oldenburg's suggestive tools. Lozano would eventually turn to Minimalism, in her late-'60s "Wave" paintings, and then fully into the Conceptual practices that moved her into obscurity. I really wish she were alive today, or had still been "making art" in the '70s and '80s. While Eva Hesse died young (against her control) and therefore had a brief career and Lozano self-truncated her own career, I still strongly note this connection of originality and vitality b/w the two artists. Few exhibits move me like this one.
* Tony Feher "Next On Line" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. Now Feher's no stranger for pushing commercially available materials to their limits — I'm thinking his meditative arrays of tinted water-filled PET bottles — but this new array of snaking vinyl tubing, at once sculpture and static 3D line "drawings", is particularly exacting in its emotional resonance. The works exhibited here, about 871 ft of clear vinyl tubing split amongst five pieces, plus x-amount of food coloring drops mixed into distilled water, everything hung alarmingly (charmingly?) by office-grade binder clips, are lyrical beauties, their intrinsic grace belying their vague respective weights (I mean, we're talking 200-300 ft of water-filled vinyl tubing per, that must weigh something). The opening figure is a great mess of reddish Silly String, enlarged to Claes Oldenburg proportions. A curvy-edged blue one naturally mimics cresting waves, but with a Hokusai clarity. And then there's the big one in the back, a cascade of five separate tubes, intermingling on the floor like the butterscotch topping liberally and artistically applied as some restaurant's dessert de resistance. So don't be surprised if you cull out your own nostalgic imagery whilst viewing Feher's latest: they've a tendency to do just that.
* Jennifer Bartlett "Recitative" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. Walking amid Bartlett's largest-scale, eponymous painting, a color celebration over 372 steel plates and 158 feet, spanning three gallery walls, is like a journey through modern and contemporary art history. I encourage you to explore this mammoth from a clockwise direction, beginning at the show-title near the gallery doors and guiding along toward its stunning denouement. That "art history" description has a two-prong meaning: Bartlett mines Minimalism, filtering notions of Jasper Johns (the warm foresty-colored chevron patterns), Sol LeWitt (orderly primaries), Brice Marden (a kinetic whiplike form in black enamel — though its movement over multiple plates reminded me of Elizabeth Murray, too) and Gerhard Richter (in a brilliant "color-chart" array near the "end") through her own unique visual language. She also recalls some of her other seminal wall-works, MoMA's "Rhapsody" (1976, first exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery) and Cleveland Museum of Art's "Song" (2007) (their media accompanies "Recitative", which is cool to see the recurrence of those orderly primaries, that whiplike black enamel form, plucked from their prior incarnations). It's an animating experience, walking forward and backward around this snaking piece, acting as a visual palimpsest to the power of color, the energy of reduction and reintroduction.
* Ulf Puder @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Neo Rausch might be the best-known name of the 1st Gen. Leipziger Hochschule, but Puder's debut stateside puts him firmly in the need-to-know for younger Eastern European artists. I love these stark, uninhabited landscapes, filled w/ ramshackle buildings seemingly poised at either post-aftermath or approaching unseen destruction.
* Amy Rathbone "suchness" @ Priska Jusckha Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Rathbone further develops her "flocks" vocabulary (little wire loops or ink pigment exploding on the gallery walls) w/ a blend of natural and artificial materials. She covers a wall w/ conifer branches (recycled from old Christmas trees!), some yanked towards a focal point via wire extensions, terminating w/ a collection of little wire-hung concrete spheres (which made me think of Eva Hesse). She includes some mixed-media works mounted on birch panel, like the "scaffolds", 2D versions of a hanging wood sticks and branches installation in a corner of the gallery, plus these sprayed clouds of ink, watercolor and gouache, like dried raindrops on a windshield.
* Patrick Hill "Clumsy Angels" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Hill has a handle on gorgeous/dangerous combos, and he elevates that in a double-layered way w/ this inherently naughty exhibition. His latest sculpture utilizes wood beams for structural support in riffs on Classical figurative sculpture, but the cut-marble legs and lower bodies are all spread eagle or appropriating fin-de-siecle burlesque posture, plus he painted the wood acid-glow tones, all yellows, magentas and oranges, to contrast sharply off the marble "skin".
* Piotr Uklański "Discharge!" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. I wanted to like this exhibit way more than I did, in the end. It's been a few years since NY had an Uklański show (his last, "Biało-Czerwona", lit. "white-red", practically christened the gallery's 21st St space), so I was ready. There's some spectacle here, but no mammoth resiny paintings, no soaring sculpture, no gruesome mixed-media installation (nor any thought-provoking video). No, this chameleon's entire output is a bunch of nouveau tie-dyed paintings. Not that spin art that Damien Hirst did (or still does): stretched cotton bedsheets attacked with fiber-reactive dyes and bleach, producing saturated starbursts and corrosive pattens. He sourced his fabrics at Ikea and Bloomingdales (according to the gallery's press release) and made these eye-watering works — plus had fun naming them, if "Orgasmatron" and "Atomic Ovum" are to be believed. The odd one out, a garish pottery relief called "Kinda Kinky", echoes the tie-dyes in 3D, and it's meaty enough to sink ones teeth into. Overall, not my cup of tea. Maybe yours?
* Gia Edzgveradze "Stolen Blanket & Other Short Stories" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. A career-spanning exhibition from the Georgian-born, German-based Conceptualist, the 1st of its kind in N. America — indeed yet again an instance of a challenging, creative artist who shows widely across Europe (and Russia!) but not in the states. Don't miss it: Edzgveradze tiptoes on gender-bending and patriarchy-busting anthems in his "Dancing Bride" series (from the late '90s), his mammoth, brushwork-like "The Big Bra" (1990), even his stunning, mixed media triptych, created from sketched projected enlargements of other sketches, perforated paper and confetti on wood panel, the entire effect mimicking Georgian calligraphic script. He continually superimposes image over image, and himself into these images, resulting in a blanketed text so interwoven with history and personal reflection that, like alluded in the show-title, you might want to claim it for yourself.
* Robbin Hill "Case Discussions" @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. I like the concept: Hill incorporates decommissioned lab equipment from the University of California at Davis' flea market (she's a member of studio faculty) in this exhibition, turning out wax- and cloth-filled projectors and desks reminiscent of Piero Manzoni crossed w/ Rona Pondick. Only thing is, Hill's telltale cyanotypes (a few are present here) are totally lost in the noise.
* Irvin Morazan "Temple of the Bearded Man" @ DCKT / 237 Eldridge St. The standout work in Morazan's christening of the gallery's inaugural debut on Eldridge is definitely the enormous mixed media headdress he wore during the opening reception/procession from the Bowery to the gallery. It's part-cloud, part-coyote pelts, with a neon beast crowning the top, and it recurs in Morazan's collaged photography, reflecting him as a folkloric shaman.
* Yeni Mao "Dead Reckoning" @ Collette Blanchard Gallery / 26 Clinton St. Mao works efficiently in mixed media installation and photography, the former referencing explorer Zheng He in a flotilla of upturned boats, the latter "The Battle Wizard" feat. almost flip-book-styled Wuxia action.
* Brendan Flanagan "Sightlines" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Flanagan's debut stateside solo show is a B-movie success, far as I'm concerned. He's got an excellent handle on controlling his media, coating panels with hazy gradients of oil paint, then introducing his melty, multicolored figures on top, oozily ominous monsters and victims in wet acrylic, practically sliding off the surface. The tiny gallery echoes the creepshow factor, making this more a cohesive installation than just a bunch of paintings hung in a white-box space. Really dope.
* "Paintings & Sculpture" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. Beyond that innocently vague title lies a monster, in the form of Mike Kelley's classic "Torture Table" (1992) his macho do-it-yourself woodworking apparatus grounded in pain and emasculation. Upstairs is relatively kinder, a rather gorgeous (if perhaps quite visceral) Carroll Dunham "Sixth Pine" (1987), painted on pine veneer, a textural Christopher Wool enamel on aluminum, crackling with dark energy, plus a ghostly Albert Oehlen from '89.
* Joe Bradley "Human Form" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. The second of concurrent Bradley solo shows in NYC (the other Paleolithic affair is at Gavin Brown's Enterprise) is way subtler, but still ballsily masculine. It's a set of black-ink silkscreened silhouettes in full-on Bangles posing on white canvas. He alluded to this in a billboard outside Gavin Brown, but the arrangement and potential movement of the figures in Canada's bunker-like space (everyone poised in stop-animation like Keith Haring characters) amplifies the experience.
* "Offset Summary" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. Oh I dug this. The exhibition title and concept stems from spatial intervention and reconfiguration. Back in the day, a different space occupied this gallery, and in it was a Lawrence Weiner work "A 36" x 36" Removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard from a Wall" (1968). That 40+year old Weiner remains here, sort of, as a covered-over remnant, and it's the jumpoff for a five-artist intrigue. Begin w/ Yves Klein's iconic "Le Saut dans le Vide/Leap into the Void" (1960), retained here as yellowed newsprint from the front page. The literal removal and doubling in this early photomontage harkens back to the semi erasure of the Weiner. LA-based Kathryn Andrews adds some contemplative action w/ one heavy-metal sculpture, a mirrored dresser described w/ a b&w portrait seemingly discarded/forgotten on its surface. Zak Kitnick's metal-on-MDF 'collages' are like Constructivist-style microchips blown up to memoir-size. Mary Simpson collaborates w/ curator/writer Fionn Meade on the very short film "Marsyas", its own abstract of the music-savvy satyr from Greek mythology.
LAST CHANCE
* "Einfluss: 8 From Dusseldorf" @ Hosfelt Gallery / 531 W 36th St. A fertile grouping of young contemporary artists from the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, some of whom bear undeniable marks from their teachers, like Gerhard Richter and A.R. Penck, and most of whom have never shown in the States before. Bernard Lokai's rugged, small-scale abstracts preclude Richter's studies, especially w/in the supposed representational nature of these brilliantly colorful works. Cornelius Volker's (student of Penck) does gestural, realistic little oil paintings, and his nine-part "Meerschweinchen" of long-haired guinea pigs on Pop-monochrome backdrops is half-kitsch, half-cute. Luka Fineisen, the sole sculptor of the lot, blurs that line too in her resin-coated "Milk" relief, which looks exactly like that. Introducing the Next Wave from Germany. Are you ready?
* "Filmschonheit", curated by Albert Oehlen @ Greene Naftali / 508 W 26th St, 8th Fl. Oehlen (w/ some tete a tete by art photographer Christopher Williams) culled together this fab film-minded traveling show, which reached NY's shores after a stint in Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna. And it's Oehlen who contributed the most exacting representation of the filmic beauty theme: a large sparse silkscreened abstract painting, overlaid w/ the video "Untitled (9 1/2 Weeks)", filling the mostly white canvas w/ a ghostly animation. Williams' characteristically super-sharp film prints (plus Josephine Pride's gorgeous silver gelatin prints) are literal, beautiful additions. The combo of Richard Artschwager (two classic "Black Beauty" monochromes on celotex) and John Miller (a maze-like wallpaper and color-sucking carpet installation) contribute both deconstructed film references and visual eye-flickering (stare at the Artschwager, then move immediately to the nearby Miller).
* Jeff Koons "Made in Heaven" @ Luxembourg & Dayan / 64 E 77th St. On the 20th anniversary of Koons' notorious/iconic contribution to the 1990 Venice Biennale, we get nine of his pornographic, photorealist canvases and a sculpture of the artist and his then-wife and former porn-star Ilona Staller. I'll call 'em "controversial", but the gallery does a fine job of making that literal, by hanging these massive silkscreened canvases opposite one another over two floors of a very narrow space. We look one way and we're swimming in powdery blues and pinks of "Hand on Breast" (probably the most mainstream media-friendly of the lot). Turn around and there's the blood-orange saturation of "Red Doggy" or the shimmering white of "Ilona's House Ejaculation", too big to fully escape our view. It's probably the only way to really experience these works.
* "Sculpture: 12 Independent Visions" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. This gallery knows sculpture. It's got the roster of house artists (Magdalena Abkanowicz's creepy cast-burlap hands and bronzed "Standing Figures"; Fernando Botero's naughty inflated figures; Beverly Pepper's ingenious sliced rock "Grey Silence") and some specials, like the doubly visually dwarfing and mesmerizingly perfumed "Twisting Bowl II" cedar block by Ursula Von Rydingsvard (ahead of her mid-career retrospective at SculptureCenter) and a Giger-esque spinal bronze lipstick "Colonna Recisa Trasversalmente" by Arnaldo Pomodoro.
* Felix Gonzalez-Torres + On Kawara "Amnesia" @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. Careful you don't miss Gonzalez-Torres' '92 billboard "untitled (Es ist nur eine Frage der Zeit/It's Just a Matter of Time)", rendered in his characteristically stripped down and inherently relatable style. That's the jump-off. Kawara's contribution is one day per month of the year 1994, w/ related news clippings from the NY Times, the Yomiuri Shinbun, from Hamburg or whatever he happened to be. Rebecca Cleman and Josh Kline, both of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), supply a revolving media program on the basis of memory and history, a flotilla of videos lost in the static of media space. The program through 12/24 includes such gems as Joan Jonas' "Double Lunar Dogs" (1984), Takeshi Murata's disturbing "Infinite Doors" (2010), culled entirely from "The Price Is Right" prize reveals, plus exploitation clips, film trailers, and Dan Graham's "Past Future Split Attention" (1972).
* Brice Marden "Letters" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 522 W 22nd St. Might sound a bit weird for me to claim nostalgia for Kyoto when traversing this sublime series of related new works, as Marden drew inspiration from his travels to the National Palace Museum in Taipei (when his own retrospective was on at the MoMA). But that is the feeling I get, climbing up the wide, uneven stone stairs of Ginkaku-Ji in Kita-Higashiyama, amid bamboo forests and burbling brooks. The paintings themselves are fascinating, incorporating blank fields of muted color (usually a combination of grays) as framing devices to either side of the action, Marden's complexly layered calligraphic whips of thoughtfully paired colors. The end effect is even more 3D than his earlier works and involving a range of climates and emotions beyond his 1991 Cold Mountain series. Check the foggy warmth inherent to "First Letter", the cloaking rainstorm over "Letter About Books #3, Blue Ground", the punctuating gold emerging from "Third Letter". These seven large canvases are paired w/ a slew of works on paper in an adjacent gallery, rivulets of Kremer ink and either shellac ink or gouache on thick paper. A truly transporting experience.
* Brice Marden "Paintings 1961 - 1964" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 526 W 22nd St. Don't miss this tiny, thoughtful show from Marden's early career, six small- to medium-scale works w/ either impenetrably waxy or intriguingly kinetic surfaces, like the brownish "Arizona", its regular permutations interrupted by almost Abstract Expressionist drips and dribbles of black paint. It's of interest to note that after this work he segued into those quietly regal monochromes, their surfaces flattened out w/ beeswax, and didn't revisit this lyrical brushwork for another 20+ years.
* Djordje Ozbolt @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. I felt I needed to be stoned to truly take in Ozbolt's latest beguiling lot, sumptuous oils done in the mannerism of the Old Masters, w/ these surreal, druggy little add-ons throughout. Not that one necessary HAS to be stoned to appreciate them, though I dare you to stare at "Fear" for longer than 30 seconds, but it could help.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
fee's LIST (through 1/18)
WEDNESDAY
* Lee Lozano "Tools" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Good ol' NYTimes spilled the beans on one of my most anticipated shows this winter: a rare exhibition of "art punk" Lozano's intense tool paintings and drawings from the '60s. Don't miss this one, even if you can't make the opening.
* Piotr Uklanski "Discharge!" @ Gagosian Gallery / 980 Madison Ave. The Warsaw-born media alchemist hasn't had a proper solo show in NY since his red/white splash back in spring 2008, a graveyard of charged decorative imagery and resinous paintings. The experimenter's latest begins w/ tie-dye works, which sounds banal on paper but, at least in visuals, carries a transfixed explosiveness, like the aftermath of Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder 'drawings'. Brave the snow remnants for this one.
* "Paintings & Sculptures" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. An innocently titled group show like this shouldn't be taken for granted, esp. if you're aware of Skarstedt's primo list of ferocious contemporary artists. Mike Kelley sets the tone w/ a seminal do-it-yourself woodworking apparatus from 1992, his "Torture Table". Plus newish George Condo (ahead of his big exhibition at New Museum), biomorphic Carroll Dunham (the kind I can get into), textural Christopher Wool and others.
* "Performance 11: On Line/Trisha Brown Dance Company" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 2 & 4p. Wicked! MoMA's performance series feat. a bunch of classic and new shows related to "On Line", the historical and fascinating exhibition on the 6th Fl. Choreographer Trisha Brown kicks it off w/ four works in the atrium, performed by her dance company (which also marks its 40th year in existence). Includes early works "Sticks" (1973), "Scallops" (1973), "Locus Solo" (1975) and brand-new "Roof Piece Re-Layed" (2011, based on her "Roof Piece" from '71). Performances also recur SAT & SUN, 2 & 4p.
* Kordan, deVries, Invisible Days @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Tiny artsy Glasslands will be full to the ceiling w/ amps and guitar noise tonight, w/ this local three-pack. Kordan veers a bit electro, but their enveloping sound is irresistible.
* Grooms + Fiasco @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/$7. What do you get when you pair melodic sludge-rockers Grooms w/ the skronk instrumentals of Fiasco? A: a delirious sweaty mess of fun, is what you get.
THURSDAY
* Ulf Puder @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Neo Rausch might be the best-known name of the 1st Gen. Leipziger Hochschule, but Puder's debut stateside solo exhibition puts him firmly in the need-to-know realm of Eastern European artists. His stark, uninhabited landscapes of ramshackle buildings seems poised at either post-aftermath or approaching some unseen destruction.
* Tony Feher "Next On Line" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. OK, so a line of everyday PET bottles or stacked milk-crates (color-coded, naturally) might not grab you, so how about a ginormous sculpture of vinyl tubing, filled w/ colored water and tumbling from the ceiling in arabesque designs? Feher is all about pushing commercial materials to their limits, and this installation should make believers out of us.
* Amy Rathbone "suchness" @ Priska Jusckha Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Rathbone further develops her telltale 'flocks' vocabulary (think a bunch of little wire loops, or ink markings, exploding on the gallery walls) w/ a blend of natural and artificial materials, like conifer branch interventions and spraypainted mist, mounted on birch.
* Jonggeon Lee & Buhm Hong "I Was There" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. NY-based Lee and Hong both seek to transport the viewer via their own personal nostalgias, Lee's in poetic wood sculpture and Hong's fantasy-laden drawings.
* Patrick Hill "Clumsy Angels" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Hill has a handle on gorgeous/dangerous combinations, enormous cut-glass circles bisected by steel plates, usually incorporating concrete or some natural mineral block. His latest utilizes wood beams for structural support in riffs on Classical figurative sculpture.
* R. Luke DuBois "A More Perfect Union" @ bitforms / 529 W 20th St, 2nd Fl. The NY-based A/V artist comes off his traveling "Hindsight is Always 20/20" project (focused on the 2008 U.S. presidency) w/ a sharp look at American self-identity through online dating, combining Congressional District stats to create regional 'romantic atlases'.
* "Tuesday", curated by Mr. & Mrs. Amani Olu @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. The mastermind behind the annual "Young Curators, New Ideas" exhibition culls nine emerging artists whose work in recontexualizing the 'usual' may make us jaded art-goers look at the world a bit differently.
* Joe Bradley "Human Form" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. A potentially MUCH softer 180 from Bradley's primal physicality at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, this suite of silkscreens feat. posed human silhouettes getting down Bangles style.
* Marcel Odenbach @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. The artist's latest film short film "Turning Circles", a study of the Majdanek Mausoleum designed by Polish sculptor Woktor Tolkin and erected in 1969 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Lublin Concentration Camp's liberation.
* Gia Edgveradze "Stolen Blanket & Other Short Stories" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. The debut stateside solo show by the Georgian-born, German-based artist is a cross-media affair, reflecting his homage to Malevich, Constructivism, Conceptualism and incorporation of Georgian calligraphic script.
* Robbin Hill "Case Discussions" @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. Neat concept: Hill is a member of the studio faculty at University of California at Davis and centers her latest gallery exhibition on decommissioned lab equipment from the university's flea market. She incorporates her cyanotype patterns throughout.
* Bridget and the Squares + Anna Haas @ R Bar / 218 Bowery (J to Bowery, 6 to Spring, F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$5. Brooklyn's pop darlings Bridget and the Squares plus local bluesy singer-songwriter/pianist Haas (catch her last NY show for some time), b/c it's cold out there, baby, and their vocal-driving songs will take care of that quite nicely.
* Xray Eyeballs + Sweet Bulbs @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5. This is totally rad: pop-punks Xray Eyeballs (track "Egyptian Magician" is constantly stuck in my head) and fuzzy noise-popsters Sweet Bulbs (ditto to "Kissing Clouds") epitomize why I get down w/ the local scene so well. w/ Slow Animal
FRIDAY
* "Readykelous: The Hurtful Healer" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Get ready: the organic Ridykeulous collective, founded in 2005 by A.L. Steiner & Nicole Eisenman, descends on Invisible-Exports, feat. works by Allyson Mitchell, David Wojnarowicz, Glen Fogel, Kara Walker, K8 Hardy, Jack Smith, Mike Albo (incl. an open-mic, or "Open Mike", by the man on FEB 12) and loads others from the archives.
* Stuart Hawkins "Broken Welcome" @ Zach Feuer Gallery / 548 W 22nd St. Nepal-based photographer Hawkins imagines the day-to-day in failed Indian millennial planned community 'Newtown', using low-tech props to 'complete' the unfinished residential landscape.
* 2011 Maximum Perception Performance Festival, curated by Peter Dobill & Phoenix Lights @ English Kills / 114 Forrest St, Bushwick (L to Morgan), 7p-12a. Two nights (tonight & SAT) of contemporary performance art from a local and international cast, in the festival's fourth iteration. The full lineup and schedule is here but some standouts: Sindy Butz (Berlin, now studying butoh in NY, produces wearable sculpture), duo Holly Faurot & Sarah H. Paulson (Brooklyn, shared choreographies and frequent performers at NURTUREart), Akiko Ichikawa (Brooklyn, well-versed in Fluxus practice), Rafael Sanchez (NY, time- and endurance works) and Anya Liftig (Brooklyn, whose own "The Anxiety of Influence" art-savvy people and scenesters may recall as an intervention during Marina Abramovic's retrospective at MoMA).
* "The Green Hornet" (dir. Michel Gondry, 2011) screenings in wide release. Adapting Golden Age stories is an immensely tricky maneuver, but when you've got Gondry at the helm, Seth Rogen and Jay Chou as mismatched heroes, and the silver-tongued Christoph Waltz as supervillain, you've got the makings of LIST-certified dopeness.
* "Enter the Void: Original Uncut Version" (dir. Gaspar Noe, 2010) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Damn it! Are you telling me, seriously, that the version of "Enter the Void" I caught at IFC, less than a week after it debuted, wasn't Noe's full 163-minute downtown Tokyo acid trip? According to the man himself, the cut stuff includes more astro-visions & an orgy feat. Paz de la Huerta and one of the Japanese dancers… so I guess it's worth it?? If you've not seen "Enter the Void" yet, then you definitely should. I am not sure I could sit through it again, w/o at least some light hallucinogenic, but the title sequence does kick some major electric typeface ass, cannot lie.
* Anamanaguchi + Peelander-Z @ Studio at Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NRW/L/6 to Union Square), 8p/$12. Catching NES-hacking, Four Loko-quaffing punks Anamanaguchi in sweaty Webster Hall's studio epitomizes dope, but then add Japan-by-way-of-E.Vill art-punks Peelander-Z to the drunk & disorderly mix and you've got the recipe for best live show of the 2011, thus far.
* Liturgy + Controlled Bleeding @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/. The Barn's culled together an incredible night of 'tough' music, epitomized best by seminal Boston outfit Controlled Bleeding, who have done post-everything since 1978. They're joined by Brooklyn's blackest black metalheads Liturgy. w/ PAK (new to harsh label Tzadik) and Cellular Chaos
SATURDAY
* Yuichi Higashionna @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. Fluorescent light sculpture that mimics graffiti, Op art and trompe l'oeil, filled out w/ mirrors and cut glass. Expect a lot of extra badassness here.
* Stephen G. Rhodes @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Rhodes takes Immanuel Kant as inspiration for his gallery debut, kinda, as the lederhosen-and-wigged philosopher reappears throughout this labyrinthine mixed-media installation.
* Kai Althoff "Punkt, Absatz, Bluemli" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. I have a feeling Althoff's latest installation will elicit something of a spiritual reaction, whether that means an awakening or glossolalia or whatever depends on the viewer and their experience w/ the Cologne-based artist's particular style. Proceed w/ caution.
* "112 Greene St: The Early Years (1970-4) @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St, gallery talk w/ curator Jessamyn Fiore, 11:30a. RSVP to Lauren O'Donnell: lodonnell@davidzwirner.com. Fiore is daughter to Jane Crawford, widow of Gordon Matta-Clark, and assists in managing his estate while directing The Writing Workshop and Dublin's not-for-profit gallery space Thisisnotashop — and she curates, like this enriching stunner at Zwirner Gallery (read on under CURRENT SHOWS).
* Saturday Sessions @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq), 4p. feat. Brandon Stosuy hosts convo b/w artist Adam Helms & curator Klaus Kertess, performance by Wolf Eyes (Nate Young/John Olson) in "STARE CASE" project
* Signal to Noise Party @ Museum of the Moving Image / 3601 35th Ave, Astoria (NQ to 36th Ave/Washington Ave, EM/R to Steinway St), 8p/$20. As the Museum describes it: a three-ring circus of live electronic music, moving image performances and interactive art. Incl. Martha Colburn's double-projected "Dolls vs. Dictators", w/ live band accompaniment (Deerhoof's Greg Saunier and Michael Evans scored it), plus chiptune acts Bit Shifter and nullsleep, Victoria Keddle on prepared violin, VJ Shantell Martin's visuals and loads else ecstatic messiness.
* The Beets, Eternal Summers, Sweet Bulbs @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. Here's a primer on the hot local indie scene. If you only catch ONE live show this month (sad for you!), may I recommend the stripped-down barbershop rock of Jackson Heights' The Beets, accompanied by fuzz-popstars Eternal Summers and Sweet Bulbs? CanNOT miss w/ this one.
* Trap Them + Black Anvil @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), 5p/$12. Cake Shop's recurring hardcore shows have always frightened me — something about the tiny, sweaty basement venue, w/o any safe hiding spots — but if I wanted to attend a show w/ the very refreshing reality of being hit over the head w/ a guitar, the combo of speedfreaks Trap Them and Relapse's Black Anvil would definitely be worth it. w/ Psychic Limb (show up early, get messed up!)
SUNDAY
* Michael Patterson-Carver "Loose Lips Do Sink Ships" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) / 261 Broome St. In Patterson-Carver's 2nd solo w/ the gallery, a meditation on Wikileaks! His approachable drawing style permits for many well-timed, skewering takedowns, so expect to learn something too.
* "A Strange Affinity to the Beautiful and the Dreadful", curated by Maureen Sullivan @ Hendershot Gallery / 195 Chrystie St. This large group show's title sounds like me, sometimes… Feat. cinematic Sue de Beer, some meditative strewn pieces by Julia Chiang, plus other happy characters like Ghost of a Dream, Alexa Gerrity, Nelson Loskamp, Galia Offri and, yes, Marilyn Manson.
* "Offset Summary" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. Reconfiguration and spatial intervention — hallmarks of conceptual art — form the backbone of this auspicious five-artist show. Feat. the original renegade Yves Klein, plus Cali's Kathryn Andrews, local artists Zak Kitnick and Mary Simpson, plus a collaboration b/w Simpson and writer/curator Fionn Meade.
* The Toasters @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 7p/$15. The Toasters?? What you thought ska was "over", totally co-opted by the '90s punkish overtones and then obliterated? This is the NY band's 30th anniversary tour, brother! Don't let the bastards grind you down, indeed.
MONDAY
* "Performance 12: On Line/Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). The line in motion, via untitled dance performance works from 2004-2009, enacted throughout the day in the Marron Atrium. This also recurs WED & THUR.
** SPECIAL MENTION **
* "Fireworks From the Heart" (dir. Masahiro Kunimoto, 2010) U.S. debut @ Big Cinemas Manhattan / 239 E 59th St (456/NR to 59th St), WED Jan 26, 3:30/6:30p. First off, here's what you have to do to get in: go here and RSVP by JAN 23. You'll receive a confirmation. I preview this b/c 1) it stars Kengo Kora (a hottie NY film freaks might know from Yoshihiro Nakamura's "Fish Story" -- he was in the badass punk band -- but I will always equate him w/ the rakish, deviant costar to materialistic/piercing-obsessed Yuriko Yoshitaka in Yukio NInagawa's "Snakes and Earrings") and 2) most importantly, IMO, it stars Mitsuki Tanimura, the cutie in Akihiko Shiota's exquisite film "Canary", who plays Kora-kun's tough and caring sister. (3. would be incredible character actor Ren Osugi as their dad) The plot: he's a hikkikomori, she's got a terminal illness, and the action's centered around a famous Katakai firework festival in Niigata Prefecture…and it's based on a true story. Plus, I wonder aloud if this film will EVER be properly screened in the states (possibly at Japan Society, but I'm not holding my breath).
CURRENT SHOWS
* Mika Tajima @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. A lovely chromatic chaos, as Tajima deconstructs a 1970's Herman Miller Action Office system into a modular installation of mini painted cubicles (or prisons), some doubling as bulletin boards for additional paintings, and vintage ergonomic kneeling chairs. Accessibility denied! Her gridded spray-painted acrylic frames lining the gallery walls, "Furniture Art" (after Erik Satie's "Musique d'ameublement") are as much architectural references as mindless visual eye-candy, meant perhaps to make office hell a bit more bearable. Though if she were called in to redesign a proper office, I would be down for that.
* "QuietlyLoud" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St, 4th Fl. Pay attention to these three twentysomething artists, painters Alisha Kerlin (contributed to PS1's "Greater NY") and Natasha Conway (shortlisted for Saatchi Gallery's 'New Sensations 2009' Prize) and sculptor Cassie Ralhl (part of "Knights Move" show at SculptureCenter). The 'handmade' qualities in their respective works, plus their own undeniable talents, position the art world's winds to their backs. This is Conway's debut stateside, and her somehow masked geometric abstract paintings simultaneous tie Kerlin's stark canvases and Ralhl's equally stark assemblages together, whilst maintaining a certain autonomous semblance about the respective works.
* Deville Cohen, Andrei Koschmieder, Joe Winter @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. The interaction b/w Koschmieder's screenprinted series "Catnip High" and Winter's malfunctioning cubicle hell — if you've ever had to change a toner cartridge, you now what I mean — tie quite nicely, but hang out a bit for Cohen's video installation "The Wall", complete w/ a Xeroxed brick wall.
* Adam Marnie + Tom Thayer @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Both artists take on the cut-and-glue medium, w/ Marnie riffing endlessly off a vase of flowers photographed in his studio and Thayer's Arte Povera-style puppets and collages (elements to his stunning lo-fi animations) framed here like bizarre family ephemera.
* Ayako Wakahara "Tenkoku" @ Onishi Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Wakahara takes the traditional Japanese practice of stone seal engraving and spins that into her contemporary blending of calligraphy and painting.
* Ann Craven @ Maccarone Gallery / 630 Greenwich St. Five years' worth of Craven's watercolors — a very rarely shown facet of her oeuvre — plus several large oil on linen paintings. Many of her thematic elements (watery and saturated blooms, cats, owls, songbirds) recur here in great numbers, providing like a hand-drawn animated element when hung in multiples.
* Joe Bradley "Mouth and Foot Painting" @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. Bradley goes Paleolithic with his debut at Gavin Brown, slathering on the paint and scraping out brutally figurative abstracts on raw, dropcloth canvas. He worked the elements out on his studio floor, hence the dribbles, foot-tracks, markings and other loving, historical elements imbued in their respective surfaces.
* Leslie Thornton "Binocular" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. The experimental film pioneer — her several-decade opus "Peggy and Fred in Hell" had a special screening during PS1's "Greater New York" — debuts at Winkleman w/ a deceptively simple, and therefore thoroughly amazing, exhibit. She presents a series of flat-screen, two-channel monitors, each bearing a circular field of some animal, filmed in the wild, plus a second circular field, projecting the same image but remapped as a kaleidoscope. The resulting diptych — a regal black parrot preening along against its jewellike abstraction, a lizard on a branch vs. its geometric opposite — may cause us to recast our feelings on which field, the legit or the manipulated, contains the most life.
* Jesse McCloskey "New World Nightmares" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. McCloskey's inclusion at last year's "The Antidote" group show was a teaser for his fascinating debut solo at the gallery. His media — layered vinyl, paint and paper collages, in super-saturated, constrasty colors — resembles woodcuts, and their Old World mythologies echoes that.
* Ezra Stoller @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. A succulent exhibition of the architecturally-cognizant photographer's classic gelatin silver prints, depicting various triumphant structures around NY. The TWA Terminal at JFK is particularly otherworldly: Eero Saarinen's creation all supple alien curves and fins. Against that, Mies van deer Rohe and Philip Johnson's Seagram Building is both capacious and cozy.
* David Stephenson "Light Cities" @ Julie Saul Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. This veteran photographer's management of light over nighttime urban skies is really enthralling. The triptych of Melbourne around the Rialto Tower bears a "Blade Runner" luminescence, and Tokyo seen from its bay and Tokyo Tower is a futuristic wonderland.
* Deborah Luster "Tooth for an Eye" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. This photographic archive of contemporary and historical homicide sites in New Orleans is a punishing feat, but well deserving a close look. Luster achieves this on multiple levels. She frames her large b&w prints as circular images, pitching the viewer forward into the city's landscape itself, and she exhaustively titles each work based on the crime's location, date and descriptions on the violence committed. Finally, the breadth of works on display, the dozen or so leading into the main room are just the tip of the iceberg. Check the installed bookshelf, lined w/ bound oversized volumes, and the several ledgers open for perusal, feat. a dizzying array besides those framed.
* Sam Samore "The Dark Suspicion" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. This cinematically conceptual photographer's style is intrinsically seductive, at least to my eyes. It's precisely what I get into as far as art-photography: "widescreen" prints, transferred from film, beautiful star-like women, lots occurring in the margins, multiple points of reference, thoughtful cropping — OK the last bit in particular was a bit geekish but you see what I mean. Check Samore's classic "Allegories of Beauty (Incomplete)" series from the '90s as the jump-off of what to expect here.
* Miguel Palma "In Image We Trust" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. The cycle of war (or militarism, if you want to take it there) proliferates the Portuguese artist's debut at the gallery. From the gadgetry and whiz-bang detailing of the titular moving (literally) diorama, to the mix of nostalgia and evacuation maneuvers underpinning "Action Plan" and "Nautical Installation".
* Seth Price @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Take your pick in Price's latest A/V installation, a bank of video booths containing the artist's own narrated ghost stories (like "The Rolling Skull", shown against religious extremist video) and music videos (like "Happy Boots" a cheery psychedelic 2 1/2 minutes).
* Hiroyuki Doi @ Ricco Maresca Gallery / 529 W 20th St 3rd Fl. Debut stateside show for the amazing Tokyo-based veteran Doi, who creates organic, billowing ink abstracts on handmade textured Japanese paper. His pulsing renderings of thousands of teeny-tiny orbs resonate like their own parallel universe — or our own universe, perhaps (I've been reading a lot of Borges, and "The Library of Babel" came to mind when viewing Doi's lush cloudlike forms).
* Johannes Wohnseifer "Another Year" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. The show's title is indicative of the artist's thought process: mutability, the passage of time, mortality. The standout seems to be a series of sleep-cycle influenced "Light Sleeper" abstract paintings and related "Stacked Studio Lights", a sculpture of fluorescent lightbulbs attuned to Wohnseifer's REM/NREM cycles.
* "112 Greene St: The Early Years (1970-4)" @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St. The gallery reunites a group show from one of NY's first alternative artist-run venues. Mastermind and "mad scientist" Gordon Matta-Clark's contributions figure throughout, from his photography (the wall-spanning "Graffiti Scroll" of tagged subway cars and related "Small Graffiti: Truck Fragment" bit of steel) to cast-lead objects, paster and construction ingredients and melted beer bottles, to these really incredible, delicate ink and crayon drawings ("Carmen's Fan" and "Three Forms"), the latter totally unlike my general impressions of his excavation-style art gathering. Plus some intriguing sculptures by Alan Saret (the wicked "Four Piece Folding Glade", turning wire into 'trees' decades before Roxy Paine's coated aluminum works) and Richard Nonas (these cerebral "Blocks of Wood") and short films by Rachel Wood, Suzanne Harris and Richard Serra. Brain food for 2011.
* Christopher Williams "For Example: Dix-Huit Lecons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 12)" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 W 19th St. I looked back at my notes on Williams' last solo show at the gallery (a similarly titled affair, though "Revision 7") to glean any insight on what I could add to this one. Guess what: I can't! That 2008 entry, in a dozen sentences, amounted to "well I really like what I see but I can't describe it". There's less camera bifurcation going on here, (in one instance, there's an actual window set cutaway in place of destroyed machinery) and there's a lot of repeating red, in a sock or developing trays or advert-luscious fruits. Plus a lone haystack (rendered as a gelatin silver print), adding some innocence to his otherwise ultrasharp renderings. Photography lovers (particular film devotees) will love this.
* Dave Miko + Tom Thayer "New World Pig" @ The Kitchen / 512 W 19th St. Miko's enamel on aluminum abstract paintings and Thayer's lo-fi stop-motion animations are match-made. The arcing narrative here, a folktale about a hunter, his dog and a pig, is tenuous at best unless you really spend time watching them, but a cursory perusal of the flickering, melting landscapes and toxic-bright color saturation is quite lovely, to scrape it surface-level anyway.
* Mona Vatamanu & Florian Tudor "Land Distribution" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. The Romanian duo reexamine a '50s socialist concept of wealth distribution by literally blocking out the main gallery space in teetering rebars and VHS tape. Their materials were inspired by actual contemporary land redistribution in Venezuela, and there's a sense that if you dared to attempt to cross these plots, you'd inadvertently pull the whole structure down. The adjacent sewn banner "LONG LIVE AND THRIVE CAPITALISM" in the room reappears in their video "Poem" (2009), showing a bunch of art students working 'assembly-line style' to create it, while another video "Surplus Value" (2009) is simply a block of metal being filed away, by hand, wasted effort to create nothing. The end effect of these related works resonates long after you leave the gallery's domain.
* John Stezaker @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Two incredible, pivotal series — "Dark Star" (1979-1983, off Stezaker's 'city of voyeurs' opinion of NYC) and silkscreens (1979-1992) — from the London-based Conceptualist. I could spend hours in this exhibit. The silkscreens incorporating pure black (or in a few cases white) fields act like visual windows to some uncertain realm, promising to pull you inward if you lose balance and pitch toward them. A few of the more recent versions, from the early '90s, utilize skewed quadrilateral canvases (think warped Ellsworth Kelly). Triangular canvases, like a three-peat of a man's profile, cover his face w/ his hands, or another of a female nude, her head cropped from view, embody an invigorating sense of surrealism. His "Dark Star" figures are literally cut out from their scenes, leaving "backlit" collages in their absence.
* Martin Boyce "Winter Palms" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Welcome to post-armageddon 2011, or so you might think walking through Boyce's latest exhibition. Think twisted metal park benches, reconfigured as undulating screens, overturned bike racks bearing some sort of coded language, and jesmonite and steel "collages". I wiki'ed jesmonite: it's a gypsum-based material in acrylic resin, used in sculpture — here Boyce has turned it into a wood slats-like mentality.
* "Untitled (Painting") @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Want hot abstract paintings? The gallery sets the tone of dope group shows this year w/ a stunner: Josh Smith (who's got a solo opening here in February) reworks his name-only paintings into an even more twisted soup. There's a badass Christopher Wool in the main room, sharing the space w/ a pixellated (and Wool-esque) Albert Oehlen plus a vicious big-X Wade Guyton and another Tauba Auerbach "Fold" painting, bearing a subtle, shimmering gradient. I've never counted myself a Bernard Frize fan, but his "Fabia" acrylic in the 2nd room, a fuzzed-out network of spraypaint-like lines, will blur your vision in the coolest way.
* "Here and Now" @ Lyons Weir Gallery / 542 W 24th St. The inaugural group exhibition in the gallery's new location injects a good jab of badassness (and solid, representational works) to the W.Chelsea scene. Both Tim Okamura, Mary Henderson and Fahamu Pecou work in stunningly realistic portraiture, w/ Okamura's in particular emanating a strong, meditative beauty, plus Henderson's photorealistic nostalgia. A bit of sexiness from James Rieck (again with realism, but enlarged and cropped for maximum ratio of skin to fire engine red shirt) and Ryan Bradley (an ace of spades-patterned nude, evaporating into its Arches paper background), and a bit of notable, intriguing sculpture (Andres Basurto cobbled up a bottle-green, horned skull of broken glass and epoxy putty, Jan Huling's "Steampunk Willy" is, I think, a beaded riff on the Kewpie doll). The exhibition brims w/ creativity and attitude: I look forward to concentrated doses now from individual artists. W.Chelsea, I hope you're ready.
LAST CHANCE
* Robert Rauschenberg @ Gagosian Gallery / 522 W 21st St. The first sentence of Gagosian's press release for this show, after Rauschenberg's quote on art as communication and its inherent ability to change, is the description "a major exhibition". I'd rephrase that "a MAYJAH exhibition". Goodness, there is a lot of art here, and I hate to use the shortcut phrase "career-spanning retrospective", but that's in the works here, from Rauschenberg's John Cage-era, infamous "White" paintings (one of those, plus a triptych in black, which I'd title "void" paintings instead, as they're sinisterly devoid of anything, active in their starkness) to the deliciously battered-but-luxe "Watchdog" sculpture, shown in the same room as the White painting and appearing as a series of seven battered and rusty pails (a la friend Jasper Johns) over chromed aluminum. "Watchdog" is from 2007 and the adjacent White canvas is 1951. Do the math. In between, we get a little bit of everything, meaning Combines (the humorous "Short Circuit" from '55, featuring a Sturtevant reproduction of a Johns flag painting inside one of its cupboards), Spreads (the vivid "Palladian Xmas" fro 1980, w/ illuminated washboards amid the screenprints of cats and fabric stripes), ROCI (aka Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, incl "Caryatid Cavalcade II", a threateningly huge five-canvas mixture of acrylic washes and larger-than-life screenprints, of Chilean imagery and building facades), and Runts (amid his last works, sprawling Americana pigment transfers). Plus a lot of Rauschenberg I've NEVER seen before, not in my memory anyway, like his Early Egyptian works (check the pyramidal work from '73, its cardboard stacks painted Day-Glo on the reverse, projecting an orangey aura against the wall, plus its sand-encrusted neighbor from '74 w/ spoke-wheels embedded in the boxes) and the Jammer series, little more than layered, ethereal cloth works w/ rattan poles, and two Borealis works from '90 and '91 of tarnished shadowy objects on brass. Think Andy Warhol's oxidation series but way cooler. I am still taking all this in, but the essential nature of this MAYJAH exhibition should be a given, even if you didn't read this far.
* Peter Saul "Fifty Years of Painting" @ Haunch of Venison NY / 1230 Ave of Americas, 20th Fl. So 2010 was pretty fierce for dueling American art trends. If you've been paying attention, you might recall MoMA overhauled their 4th floor w/ a luxurious Abstract Expressionist (New York) exhibition, culled entirely from the museum's vast holdings. Roy Lichtenstein has enjoyed several focused shows (incl. an extensive still-life extravaganza at Gagosian and a scholarly look at his work in reflections at Mitchell-Innes & Nash) and his "Ohh…Alright…" took top dollar (over $38 million of 'em, actually) at Christie's. And because I must: Gagosian's thrown a museum-worthy look at Robert Rauschenberg's entire oeuvre at their 21st St space (see above). And yet, and yet. That same gallery, in their Madison Ave space, devoted a retrospective to Ed Paschke, the electrifying Chicago Imagist whose Pop-themed art goes way more garish than Warhol ever took it (and whose grip of neon and early-cyber in the '80s is, well, incredibly '80s-looking). Related Hairy Who stalwarts Karl Wirsum and Jim Nutt also appeared in solo gallery shows (Nutt's incl. a mix of classics and new works), all fiercely removed from NY art world trends of the day. So it's fitting, then, not quite an answer to these Pop Art/Abstract Expressionist rock-star shows, but rather an alternative to the heavy-NY presence, that we get an inspired survey of Cali grotesque-Pop artist (and tie-in to the Chicago scene) Peter Saul. The highlight, in all its contorted, lurid Day-Glo glory, is the massive "Typical Saigon" from 1968, Saul's biting retort to the Vietnam War. The cruelty depicted — American G.I.'s sodomizing and crucifying Vietnamese women — is intensified by the painting's plasticky surface, the stinging contrast of the colors and the warped, twisting movement of the figures. Its torturous energy still resonates. Though Gen. Custer, Christopher Columbus, the death penalty, and even the NY subway system are targets of Saul's cold-shock techniques. His "Icebox" series from the early '60s, echoed in new work "Refrigerator Breakdown", are benign by comparison. Saul's most recent style, pairing acrylic with oil paint in powdery-edged renderings, have this melted-3D effect, popping off their canvases with the threat of spilling into our laps. Bad taste rarely looks this good.
* Huma Bhabha @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. A stunner, as Bhabha continues her forays into reapplying ink, paint and collage onto vintage photography. Imagery of Achilles — or more specifically heels — trod massively across arid landscapes and highways, grillwork hands grapple with the earth and half-completed structures, a two-headed dog (or the blurred, Francis Bacon-like motion of a normal canine) seems to visibly shiver furiously in front of a large government facade. Elements extend beyond the borders of the photographs, Bhabha colorizes b&w prints, in a riotous cycle of destruction and creation.
* Joan Miro "The Dutch Interiors" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). In late-fall 2008, the MoMA held a stunning decade-spanning show of Miro's genre-busting oeuvre entitled "Painting and Anti-Painting", a sliver of the artist's oeuvre but a richly beautiful, cerebral wealth of technique and experimentation, that still strongly resonates in my consciousness. The Met takes a scalpel to that exquisite exhibition, mining out his three "Dutch Interior" paintings from his time in Montroig (near Barcelon), plus one of the two related canvases from that trip ("The Potato"), work studies, sketches, several delicious earlier works and — because this is the Met we're talking about — the two Dutch Golden Age paintings that inspired "The Dutch Interiors". An exemplary feat. Miro visited the Rijksmuseum during a 1928 trip to Amsterdam and, taking postcards back of two works that struck a chord w/ him, Hendrick Sorgh's "The Lute Player" (1660) and Jan Steen's fanciful "Children Teaching a Cat to Dance" (1660), distorted, abstracted, exaggerated, and updated them into three lyrical, poetic paintings. The first, based deceptively closely off "The Lute Player", is a riot of semi-figurative forms on an eye-popping green backdrop, w/ the window overlooking a smeared blue and yellow town scene. Miro played more w/ the second canvas, deemphasizing the dancing cat and lutist in favor of the foregrounded hound and an onlooking child's rapt gaze. The third interior is the loosest, floating planes of color and predated Calder-esque mobile forms on a sea of bright yellow and yellow-green. In essence, this is more than enough, seeing Miro's marriage of structure and experimentation w/ the Dutch compositions, but the Met augments it w/ several works from its own collection, incl. the stunning, gradient- and texture-rich "Animated Landscape. Study this one closely after viewing "The Dutch Interiors" and their work drawings, as the truths hidden in this lovely work are far more opaque.
* Lee Lozano "Tools" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. Good ol' NYTimes spilled the beans on one of my most anticipated shows this winter: a rare exhibition of "art punk" Lozano's intense tool paintings and drawings from the '60s. Don't miss this one, even if you can't make the opening.
* Piotr Uklanski "Discharge!" @ Gagosian Gallery / 980 Madison Ave. The Warsaw-born media alchemist hasn't had a proper solo show in NY since his red/white splash back in spring 2008, a graveyard of charged decorative imagery and resinous paintings. The experimenter's latest begins w/ tie-dye works, which sounds banal on paper but, at least in visuals, carries a transfixed explosiveness, like the aftermath of Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder 'drawings'. Brave the snow remnants for this one.
* "Paintings & Sculptures" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. An innocently titled group show like this shouldn't be taken for granted, esp. if you're aware of Skarstedt's primo list of ferocious contemporary artists. Mike Kelley sets the tone w/ a seminal do-it-yourself woodworking apparatus from 1992, his "Torture Table". Plus newish George Condo (ahead of his big exhibition at New Museum), biomorphic Carroll Dunham (the kind I can get into), textural Christopher Wool and others.
* "Performance 11: On Line/Trisha Brown Dance Company" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 2 & 4p. Wicked! MoMA's performance series feat. a bunch of classic and new shows related to "On Line", the historical and fascinating exhibition on the 6th Fl. Choreographer Trisha Brown kicks it off w/ four works in the atrium, performed by her dance company (which also marks its 40th year in existence). Includes early works "Sticks" (1973), "Scallops" (1973), "Locus Solo" (1975) and brand-new "Roof Piece Re-Layed" (2011, based on her "Roof Piece" from '71). Performances also recur SAT & SUN, 2 & 4p.
* Kordan, deVries, Invisible Days @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Tiny artsy Glasslands will be full to the ceiling w/ amps and guitar noise tonight, w/ this local three-pack. Kordan veers a bit electro, but their enveloping sound is irresistible.
* Grooms + Fiasco @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/$7. What do you get when you pair melodic sludge-rockers Grooms w/ the skronk instrumentals of Fiasco? A: a delirious sweaty mess of fun, is what you get.
THURSDAY
* Ulf Puder @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Neo Rausch might be the best-known name of the 1st Gen. Leipziger Hochschule, but Puder's debut stateside solo exhibition puts him firmly in the need-to-know realm of Eastern European artists. His stark, uninhabited landscapes of ramshackle buildings seems poised at either post-aftermath or approaching some unseen destruction.
* Tony Feher "Next On Line" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. OK, so a line of everyday PET bottles or stacked milk-crates (color-coded, naturally) might not grab you, so how about a ginormous sculpture of vinyl tubing, filled w/ colored water and tumbling from the ceiling in arabesque designs? Feher is all about pushing commercial materials to their limits, and this installation should make believers out of us.
* Amy Rathbone "suchness" @ Priska Jusckha Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Rathbone further develops her telltale 'flocks' vocabulary (think a bunch of little wire loops, or ink markings, exploding on the gallery walls) w/ a blend of natural and artificial materials, like conifer branch interventions and spraypainted mist, mounted on birch.
* Jonggeon Lee & Buhm Hong "I Was There" @ Doosan Gallery / 533 W 25th St. NY-based Lee and Hong both seek to transport the viewer via their own personal nostalgias, Lee's in poetic wood sculpture and Hong's fantasy-laden drawings.
* Patrick Hill "Clumsy Angels" @ Bortolami / 520 W 20th St. Hill has a handle on gorgeous/dangerous combinations, enormous cut-glass circles bisected by steel plates, usually incorporating concrete or some natural mineral block. His latest utilizes wood beams for structural support in riffs on Classical figurative sculpture.
* R. Luke DuBois "A More Perfect Union" @ bitforms / 529 W 20th St, 2nd Fl. The NY-based A/V artist comes off his traveling "Hindsight is Always 20/20" project (focused on the 2008 U.S. presidency) w/ a sharp look at American self-identity through online dating, combining Congressional District stats to create regional 'romantic atlases'.
* "Tuesday", curated by Mr. & Mrs. Amani Olu @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. The mastermind behind the annual "Young Curators, New Ideas" exhibition culls nine emerging artists whose work in recontexualizing the 'usual' may make us jaded art-goers look at the world a bit differently.
* Joe Bradley "Human Form" @ Canada / 55 Chrystie St. A potentially MUCH softer 180 from Bradley's primal physicality at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, this suite of silkscreens feat. posed human silhouettes getting down Bangles style.
* Marcel Odenbach @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. The artist's latest film short film "Turning Circles", a study of the Majdanek Mausoleum designed by Polish sculptor Woktor Tolkin and erected in 1969 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Lublin Concentration Camp's liberation.
* Gia Edgveradze "Stolen Blanket & Other Short Stories" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. The debut stateside solo show by the Georgian-born, German-based artist is a cross-media affair, reflecting his homage to Malevich, Constructivism, Conceptualism and incorporation of Georgian calligraphic script.
* Robbin Hill "Case Discussions" @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. Neat concept: Hill is a member of the studio faculty at University of California at Davis and centers her latest gallery exhibition on decommissioned lab equipment from the university's flea market. She incorporates her cyanotype patterns throughout.
* Bridget and the Squares + Anna Haas @ R Bar / 218 Bowery (J to Bowery, 6 to Spring, F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$5. Brooklyn's pop darlings Bridget and the Squares plus local bluesy singer-songwriter/pianist Haas (catch her last NY show for some time), b/c it's cold out there, baby, and their vocal-driving songs will take care of that quite nicely.
* Xray Eyeballs + Sweet Bulbs @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5. This is totally rad: pop-punks Xray Eyeballs (track "Egyptian Magician" is constantly stuck in my head) and fuzzy noise-popsters Sweet Bulbs (ditto to "Kissing Clouds") epitomize why I get down w/ the local scene so well. w/ Slow Animal
FRIDAY
* "Readykelous: The Hurtful Healer" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. Get ready: the organic Ridykeulous collective, founded in 2005 by A.L. Steiner & Nicole Eisenman, descends on Invisible-Exports, feat. works by Allyson Mitchell, David Wojnarowicz, Glen Fogel, Kara Walker, K8 Hardy, Jack Smith, Mike Albo (incl. an open-mic, or "Open Mike", by the man on FEB 12) and loads others from the archives.
* Stuart Hawkins "Broken Welcome" @ Zach Feuer Gallery / 548 W 22nd St. Nepal-based photographer Hawkins imagines the day-to-day in failed Indian millennial planned community 'Newtown', using low-tech props to 'complete' the unfinished residential landscape.
* 2011 Maximum Perception Performance Festival, curated by Peter Dobill & Phoenix Lights @ English Kills / 114 Forrest St, Bushwick (L to Morgan), 7p-12a. Two nights (tonight & SAT) of contemporary performance art from a local and international cast, in the festival's fourth iteration. The full lineup and schedule is here but some standouts: Sindy Butz (Berlin, now studying butoh in NY, produces wearable sculpture), duo Holly Faurot & Sarah H. Paulson (Brooklyn, shared choreographies and frequent performers at NURTUREart), Akiko Ichikawa (Brooklyn, well-versed in Fluxus practice), Rafael Sanchez (NY, time- and endurance works) and Anya Liftig (Brooklyn, whose own "The Anxiety of Influence" art-savvy people and scenesters may recall as an intervention during Marina Abramovic's retrospective at MoMA).
* "The Green Hornet" (dir. Michel Gondry, 2011) screenings in wide release. Adapting Golden Age stories is an immensely tricky maneuver, but when you've got Gondry at the helm, Seth Rogen and Jay Chou as mismatched heroes, and the silver-tongued Christoph Waltz as supervillain, you've got the makings of LIST-certified dopeness.
* "Enter the Void: Original Uncut Version" (dir. Gaspar Noe, 2010) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Damn it! Are you telling me, seriously, that the version of "Enter the Void" I caught at IFC, less than a week after it debuted, wasn't Noe's full 163-minute downtown Tokyo acid trip? According to the man himself, the cut stuff includes more astro-visions & an orgy feat. Paz de la Huerta and one of the Japanese dancers… so I guess it's worth it?? If you've not seen "Enter the Void" yet, then you definitely should. I am not sure I could sit through it again, w/o at least some light hallucinogenic, but the title sequence does kick some major electric typeface ass, cannot lie.
* Anamanaguchi + Peelander-Z @ Studio at Webster Hall / 125 E 11th St (NRW/L/6 to Union Square), 8p/$12. Catching NES-hacking, Four Loko-quaffing punks Anamanaguchi in sweaty Webster Hall's studio epitomizes dope, but then add Japan-by-way-of-E.Vill art-punks Peelander-Z to the drunk & disorderly mix and you've got the recipe for best live show of the 2011, thus far.
* Liturgy + Controlled Bleeding @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey, M to Myrtle/Wyckoff), 8p/. The Barn's culled together an incredible night of 'tough' music, epitomized best by seminal Boston outfit Controlled Bleeding, who have done post-everything since 1978. They're joined by Brooklyn's blackest black metalheads Liturgy. w/ PAK (new to harsh label Tzadik) and Cellular Chaos
SATURDAY
* Yuichi Higashionna @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. Fluorescent light sculpture that mimics graffiti, Op art and trompe l'oeil, filled out w/ mirrors and cut glass. Expect a lot of extra badassness here.
* Stephen G. Rhodes @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Rhodes takes Immanuel Kant as inspiration for his gallery debut, kinda, as the lederhosen-and-wigged philosopher reappears throughout this labyrinthine mixed-media installation.
* Kai Althoff "Punkt, Absatz, Bluemli" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. I have a feeling Althoff's latest installation will elicit something of a spiritual reaction, whether that means an awakening or glossolalia or whatever depends on the viewer and their experience w/ the Cologne-based artist's particular style. Proceed w/ caution.
* "112 Greene St: The Early Years (1970-4) @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St, gallery talk w/ curator Jessamyn Fiore, 11:30a. RSVP to Lauren O'Donnell: lodonnell@davidzwirner.com. Fiore is daughter to Jane Crawford, widow of Gordon Matta-Clark, and assists in managing his estate while directing The Writing Workshop and Dublin's not-for-profit gallery space Thisisnotashop — and she curates, like this enriching stunner at Zwirner Gallery (read on under CURRENT SHOWS).
* Saturday Sessions @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/M to 23rd St/Ely Ave, 7 to 45th Rd/Courthouse Sq), 4p. feat. Brandon Stosuy hosts convo b/w artist Adam Helms & curator Klaus Kertess, performance by Wolf Eyes (Nate Young/John Olson) in "STARE CASE" project
* Signal to Noise Party @ Museum of the Moving Image / 3601 35th Ave, Astoria (NQ to 36th Ave/Washington Ave, EM/R to Steinway St), 8p/$20. As the Museum describes it: a three-ring circus of live electronic music, moving image performances and interactive art. Incl. Martha Colburn's double-projected "Dolls vs. Dictators", w/ live band accompaniment (Deerhoof's Greg Saunier and Michael Evans scored it), plus chiptune acts Bit Shifter and nullsleep, Victoria Keddle on prepared violin, VJ Shantell Martin's visuals and loads else ecstatic messiness.
* The Beets, Eternal Summers, Sweet Bulbs @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. Here's a primer on the hot local indie scene. If you only catch ONE live show this month (sad for you!), may I recommend the stripped-down barbershop rock of Jackson Heights' The Beets, accompanied by fuzz-popstars Eternal Summers and Sweet Bulbs? CanNOT miss w/ this one.
* Trap Them + Black Anvil @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), 5p/$12. Cake Shop's recurring hardcore shows have always frightened me — something about the tiny, sweaty basement venue, w/o any safe hiding spots — but if I wanted to attend a show w/ the very refreshing reality of being hit over the head w/ a guitar, the combo of speedfreaks Trap Them and Relapse's Black Anvil would definitely be worth it. w/ Psychic Limb (show up early, get messed up!)
SUNDAY
* Michael Patterson-Carver "Loose Lips Do Sink Ships" @ Laurel Gitlen (Small A Projects) / 261 Broome St. In Patterson-Carver's 2nd solo w/ the gallery, a meditation on Wikileaks! His approachable drawing style permits for many well-timed, skewering takedowns, so expect to learn something too.
* "A Strange Affinity to the Beautiful and the Dreadful", curated by Maureen Sullivan @ Hendershot Gallery / 195 Chrystie St. This large group show's title sounds like me, sometimes… Feat. cinematic Sue de Beer, some meditative strewn pieces by Julia Chiang, plus other happy characters like Ghost of a Dream, Alexa Gerrity, Nelson Loskamp, Galia Offri and, yes, Marilyn Manson.
* "Offset Summary" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. Reconfiguration and spatial intervention — hallmarks of conceptual art — form the backbone of this auspicious five-artist show. Feat. the original renegade Yves Klein, plus Cali's Kathryn Andrews, local artists Zak Kitnick and Mary Simpson, plus a collaboration b/w Simpson and writer/curator Fionn Meade.
* The Toasters @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 7p/$15. The Toasters?? What you thought ska was "over", totally co-opted by the '90s punkish overtones and then obliterated? This is the NY band's 30th anniversary tour, brother! Don't let the bastards grind you down, indeed.
MONDAY
* "Performance 12: On Line/Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). The line in motion, via untitled dance performance works from 2004-2009, enacted throughout the day in the Marron Atrium. This also recurs WED & THUR.
** SPECIAL MENTION **
* "Fireworks From the Heart" (dir. Masahiro Kunimoto, 2010) U.S. debut @ Big Cinemas Manhattan / 239 E 59th St (456/NR to 59th St), WED Jan 26, 3:30/6:30p. First off, here's what you have to do to get in: go here and RSVP by JAN 23. You'll receive a confirmation. I preview this b/c 1) it stars Kengo Kora (a hottie NY film freaks might know from Yoshihiro Nakamura's "Fish Story" -- he was in the badass punk band -- but I will always equate him w/ the rakish, deviant costar to materialistic/piercing-obsessed Yuriko Yoshitaka in Yukio NInagawa's "Snakes and Earrings") and 2) most importantly, IMO, it stars Mitsuki Tanimura, the cutie in Akihiko Shiota's exquisite film "Canary", who plays Kora-kun's tough and caring sister. (3. would be incredible character actor Ren Osugi as their dad) The plot: he's a hikkikomori, she's got a terminal illness, and the action's centered around a famous Katakai firework festival in Niigata Prefecture…and it's based on a true story. Plus, I wonder aloud if this film will EVER be properly screened in the states (possibly at Japan Society, but I'm not holding my breath).
CURRENT SHOWS
* Mika Tajima @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. A lovely chromatic chaos, as Tajima deconstructs a 1970's Herman Miller Action Office system into a modular installation of mini painted cubicles (or prisons), some doubling as bulletin boards for additional paintings, and vintage ergonomic kneeling chairs. Accessibility denied! Her gridded spray-painted acrylic frames lining the gallery walls, "Furniture Art" (after Erik Satie's "Musique d'ameublement") are as much architectural references as mindless visual eye-candy, meant perhaps to make office hell a bit more bearable. Though if she were called in to redesign a proper office, I would be down for that.
* "QuietlyLoud" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St, 4th Fl. Pay attention to these three twentysomething artists, painters Alisha Kerlin (contributed to PS1's "Greater NY") and Natasha Conway (shortlisted for Saatchi Gallery's 'New Sensations 2009' Prize) and sculptor Cassie Ralhl (part of "Knights Move" show at SculptureCenter). The 'handmade' qualities in their respective works, plus their own undeniable talents, position the art world's winds to their backs. This is Conway's debut stateside, and her somehow masked geometric abstract paintings simultaneous tie Kerlin's stark canvases and Ralhl's equally stark assemblages together, whilst maintaining a certain autonomous semblance about the respective works.
* Deville Cohen, Andrei Koschmieder, Joe Winter @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. The interaction b/w Koschmieder's screenprinted series "Catnip High" and Winter's malfunctioning cubicle hell — if you've ever had to change a toner cartridge, you now what I mean — tie quite nicely, but hang out a bit for Cohen's video installation "The Wall", complete w/ a Xeroxed brick wall.
* Adam Marnie + Tom Thayer @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Both artists take on the cut-and-glue medium, w/ Marnie riffing endlessly off a vase of flowers photographed in his studio and Thayer's Arte Povera-style puppets and collages (elements to his stunning lo-fi animations) framed here like bizarre family ephemera.
* Ayako Wakahara "Tenkoku" @ Onishi Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Wakahara takes the traditional Japanese practice of stone seal engraving and spins that into her contemporary blending of calligraphy and painting.
* Ann Craven @ Maccarone Gallery / 630 Greenwich St. Five years' worth of Craven's watercolors — a very rarely shown facet of her oeuvre — plus several large oil on linen paintings. Many of her thematic elements (watery and saturated blooms, cats, owls, songbirds) recur here in great numbers, providing like a hand-drawn animated element when hung in multiples.
* Joe Bradley "Mouth and Foot Painting" @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. Bradley goes Paleolithic with his debut at Gavin Brown, slathering on the paint and scraping out brutally figurative abstracts on raw, dropcloth canvas. He worked the elements out on his studio floor, hence the dribbles, foot-tracks, markings and other loving, historical elements imbued in their respective surfaces.
* Leslie Thornton "Binocular" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. The experimental film pioneer — her several-decade opus "Peggy and Fred in Hell" had a special screening during PS1's "Greater New York" — debuts at Winkleman w/ a deceptively simple, and therefore thoroughly amazing, exhibit. She presents a series of flat-screen, two-channel monitors, each bearing a circular field of some animal, filmed in the wild, plus a second circular field, projecting the same image but remapped as a kaleidoscope. The resulting diptych — a regal black parrot preening along against its jewellike abstraction, a lizard on a branch vs. its geometric opposite — may cause us to recast our feelings on which field, the legit or the manipulated, contains the most life.
* Jesse McCloskey "New World Nightmares" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. McCloskey's inclusion at last year's "The Antidote" group show was a teaser for his fascinating debut solo at the gallery. His media — layered vinyl, paint and paper collages, in super-saturated, constrasty colors — resembles woodcuts, and their Old World mythologies echoes that.
* Ezra Stoller @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. A succulent exhibition of the architecturally-cognizant photographer's classic gelatin silver prints, depicting various triumphant structures around NY. The TWA Terminal at JFK is particularly otherworldly: Eero Saarinen's creation all supple alien curves and fins. Against that, Mies van deer Rohe and Philip Johnson's Seagram Building is both capacious and cozy.
* David Stephenson "Light Cities" @ Julie Saul Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. This veteran photographer's management of light over nighttime urban skies is really enthralling. The triptych of Melbourne around the Rialto Tower bears a "Blade Runner" luminescence, and Tokyo seen from its bay and Tokyo Tower is a futuristic wonderland.
* Deborah Luster "Tooth for an Eye" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. This photographic archive of contemporary and historical homicide sites in New Orleans is a punishing feat, but well deserving a close look. Luster achieves this on multiple levels. She frames her large b&w prints as circular images, pitching the viewer forward into the city's landscape itself, and she exhaustively titles each work based on the crime's location, date and descriptions on the violence committed. Finally, the breadth of works on display, the dozen or so leading into the main room are just the tip of the iceberg. Check the installed bookshelf, lined w/ bound oversized volumes, and the several ledgers open for perusal, feat. a dizzying array besides those framed.
* Sam Samore "The Dark Suspicion" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. This cinematically conceptual photographer's style is intrinsically seductive, at least to my eyes. It's precisely what I get into as far as art-photography: "widescreen" prints, transferred from film, beautiful star-like women, lots occurring in the margins, multiple points of reference, thoughtful cropping — OK the last bit in particular was a bit geekish but you see what I mean. Check Samore's classic "Allegories of Beauty (Incomplete)" series from the '90s as the jump-off of what to expect here.
* Miguel Palma "In Image We Trust" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. The cycle of war (or militarism, if you want to take it there) proliferates the Portuguese artist's debut at the gallery. From the gadgetry and whiz-bang detailing of the titular moving (literally) diorama, to the mix of nostalgia and evacuation maneuvers underpinning "Action Plan" and "Nautical Installation".
* Seth Price @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Take your pick in Price's latest A/V installation, a bank of video booths containing the artist's own narrated ghost stories (like "The Rolling Skull", shown against religious extremist video) and music videos (like "Happy Boots" a cheery psychedelic 2 1/2 minutes).
* Hiroyuki Doi @ Ricco Maresca Gallery / 529 W 20th St 3rd Fl. Debut stateside show for the amazing Tokyo-based veteran Doi, who creates organic, billowing ink abstracts on handmade textured Japanese paper. His pulsing renderings of thousands of teeny-tiny orbs resonate like their own parallel universe — or our own universe, perhaps (I've been reading a lot of Borges, and "The Library of Babel" came to mind when viewing Doi's lush cloudlike forms).
* Johannes Wohnseifer "Another Year" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. The show's title is indicative of the artist's thought process: mutability, the passage of time, mortality. The standout seems to be a series of sleep-cycle influenced "Light Sleeper" abstract paintings and related "Stacked Studio Lights", a sculpture of fluorescent lightbulbs attuned to Wohnseifer's REM/NREM cycles.
* "112 Greene St: The Early Years (1970-4)" @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St. The gallery reunites a group show from one of NY's first alternative artist-run venues. Mastermind and "mad scientist" Gordon Matta-Clark's contributions figure throughout, from his photography (the wall-spanning "Graffiti Scroll" of tagged subway cars and related "Small Graffiti: Truck Fragment" bit of steel) to cast-lead objects, paster and construction ingredients and melted beer bottles, to these really incredible, delicate ink and crayon drawings ("Carmen's Fan" and "Three Forms"), the latter totally unlike my general impressions of his excavation-style art gathering. Plus some intriguing sculptures by Alan Saret (the wicked "Four Piece Folding Glade", turning wire into 'trees' decades before Roxy Paine's coated aluminum works) and Richard Nonas (these cerebral "Blocks of Wood") and short films by Rachel Wood, Suzanne Harris and Richard Serra. Brain food for 2011.
* Christopher Williams "For Example: Dix-Huit Lecons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 12)" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525 W 19th St. I looked back at my notes on Williams' last solo show at the gallery (a similarly titled affair, though "Revision 7") to glean any insight on what I could add to this one. Guess what: I can't! That 2008 entry, in a dozen sentences, amounted to "well I really like what I see but I can't describe it". There's less camera bifurcation going on here, (in one instance, there's an actual window set cutaway in place of destroyed machinery) and there's a lot of repeating red, in a sock or developing trays or advert-luscious fruits. Plus a lone haystack (rendered as a gelatin silver print), adding some innocence to his otherwise ultrasharp renderings. Photography lovers (particular film devotees) will love this.
* Dave Miko + Tom Thayer "New World Pig" @ The Kitchen / 512 W 19th St. Miko's enamel on aluminum abstract paintings and Thayer's lo-fi stop-motion animations are match-made. The arcing narrative here, a folktale about a hunter, his dog and a pig, is tenuous at best unless you really spend time watching them, but a cursory perusal of the flickering, melting landscapes and toxic-bright color saturation is quite lovely, to scrape it surface-level anyway.
* Mona Vatamanu & Florian Tudor "Land Distribution" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. The Romanian duo reexamine a '50s socialist concept of wealth distribution by literally blocking out the main gallery space in teetering rebars and VHS tape. Their materials were inspired by actual contemporary land redistribution in Venezuela, and there's a sense that if you dared to attempt to cross these plots, you'd inadvertently pull the whole structure down. The adjacent sewn banner "LONG LIVE AND THRIVE CAPITALISM" in the room reappears in their video "Poem" (2009), showing a bunch of art students working 'assembly-line style' to create it, while another video "Surplus Value" (2009) is simply a block of metal being filed away, by hand, wasted effort to create nothing. The end effect of these related works resonates long after you leave the gallery's domain.
* John Stezaker @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Two incredible, pivotal series — "Dark Star" (1979-1983, off Stezaker's 'city of voyeurs' opinion of NYC) and silkscreens (1979-1992) — from the London-based Conceptualist. I could spend hours in this exhibit. The silkscreens incorporating pure black (or in a few cases white) fields act like visual windows to some uncertain realm, promising to pull you inward if you lose balance and pitch toward them. A few of the more recent versions, from the early '90s, utilize skewed quadrilateral canvases (think warped Ellsworth Kelly). Triangular canvases, like a three-peat of a man's profile, cover his face w/ his hands, or another of a female nude, her head cropped from view, embody an invigorating sense of surrealism. His "Dark Star" figures are literally cut out from their scenes, leaving "backlit" collages in their absence.
* Martin Boyce "Winter Palms" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. Welcome to post-armageddon 2011, or so you might think walking through Boyce's latest exhibition. Think twisted metal park benches, reconfigured as undulating screens, overturned bike racks bearing some sort of coded language, and jesmonite and steel "collages". I wiki'ed jesmonite: it's a gypsum-based material in acrylic resin, used in sculpture — here Boyce has turned it into a wood slats-like mentality.
* "Untitled (Painting") @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Want hot abstract paintings? The gallery sets the tone of dope group shows this year w/ a stunner: Josh Smith (who's got a solo opening here in February) reworks his name-only paintings into an even more twisted soup. There's a badass Christopher Wool in the main room, sharing the space w/ a pixellated (and Wool-esque) Albert Oehlen plus a vicious big-X Wade Guyton and another Tauba Auerbach "Fold" painting, bearing a subtle, shimmering gradient. I've never counted myself a Bernard Frize fan, but his "Fabia" acrylic in the 2nd room, a fuzzed-out network of spraypaint-like lines, will blur your vision in the coolest way.
* "Here and Now" @ Lyons Weir Gallery / 542 W 24th St. The inaugural group exhibition in the gallery's new location injects a good jab of badassness (and solid, representational works) to the W.Chelsea scene. Both Tim Okamura, Mary Henderson and Fahamu Pecou work in stunningly realistic portraiture, w/ Okamura's in particular emanating a strong, meditative beauty, plus Henderson's photorealistic nostalgia. A bit of sexiness from James Rieck (again with realism, but enlarged and cropped for maximum ratio of skin to fire engine red shirt) and Ryan Bradley (an ace of spades-patterned nude, evaporating into its Arches paper background), and a bit of notable, intriguing sculpture (Andres Basurto cobbled up a bottle-green, horned skull of broken glass and epoxy putty, Jan Huling's "Steampunk Willy" is, I think, a beaded riff on the Kewpie doll). The exhibition brims w/ creativity and attitude: I look forward to concentrated doses now from individual artists. W.Chelsea, I hope you're ready.
LAST CHANCE
* Robert Rauschenberg @ Gagosian Gallery / 522 W 21st St. The first sentence of Gagosian's press release for this show, after Rauschenberg's quote on art as communication and its inherent ability to change, is the description "a major exhibition". I'd rephrase that "a MAYJAH exhibition". Goodness, there is a lot of art here, and I hate to use the shortcut phrase "career-spanning retrospective", but that's in the works here, from Rauschenberg's John Cage-era, infamous "White" paintings (one of those, plus a triptych in black, which I'd title "void" paintings instead, as they're sinisterly devoid of anything, active in their starkness) to the deliciously battered-but-luxe "Watchdog" sculpture, shown in the same room as the White painting and appearing as a series of seven battered and rusty pails (a la friend Jasper Johns) over chromed aluminum. "Watchdog" is from 2007 and the adjacent White canvas is 1951. Do the math. In between, we get a little bit of everything, meaning Combines (the humorous "Short Circuit" from '55, featuring a Sturtevant reproduction of a Johns flag painting inside one of its cupboards), Spreads (the vivid "Palladian Xmas" fro 1980, w/ illuminated washboards amid the screenprints of cats and fabric stripes), ROCI (aka Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, incl "Caryatid Cavalcade II", a threateningly huge five-canvas mixture of acrylic washes and larger-than-life screenprints, of Chilean imagery and building facades), and Runts (amid his last works, sprawling Americana pigment transfers). Plus a lot of Rauschenberg I've NEVER seen before, not in my memory anyway, like his Early Egyptian works (check the pyramidal work from '73, its cardboard stacks painted Day-Glo on the reverse, projecting an orangey aura against the wall, plus its sand-encrusted neighbor from '74 w/ spoke-wheels embedded in the boxes) and the Jammer series, little more than layered, ethereal cloth works w/ rattan poles, and two Borealis works from '90 and '91 of tarnished shadowy objects on brass. Think Andy Warhol's oxidation series but way cooler. I am still taking all this in, but the essential nature of this MAYJAH exhibition should be a given, even if you didn't read this far.
* Peter Saul "Fifty Years of Painting" @ Haunch of Venison NY / 1230 Ave of Americas, 20th Fl. So 2010 was pretty fierce for dueling American art trends. If you've been paying attention, you might recall MoMA overhauled their 4th floor w/ a luxurious Abstract Expressionist (New York) exhibition, culled entirely from the museum's vast holdings. Roy Lichtenstein has enjoyed several focused shows (incl. an extensive still-life extravaganza at Gagosian and a scholarly look at his work in reflections at Mitchell-Innes & Nash) and his "Ohh…Alright…" took top dollar (over $38 million of 'em, actually) at Christie's. And because I must: Gagosian's thrown a museum-worthy look at Robert Rauschenberg's entire oeuvre at their 21st St space (see above). And yet, and yet. That same gallery, in their Madison Ave space, devoted a retrospective to Ed Paschke, the electrifying Chicago Imagist whose Pop-themed art goes way more garish than Warhol ever took it (and whose grip of neon and early-cyber in the '80s is, well, incredibly '80s-looking). Related Hairy Who stalwarts Karl Wirsum and Jim Nutt also appeared in solo gallery shows (Nutt's incl. a mix of classics and new works), all fiercely removed from NY art world trends of the day. So it's fitting, then, not quite an answer to these Pop Art/Abstract Expressionist rock-star shows, but rather an alternative to the heavy-NY presence, that we get an inspired survey of Cali grotesque-Pop artist (and tie-in to the Chicago scene) Peter Saul. The highlight, in all its contorted, lurid Day-Glo glory, is the massive "Typical Saigon" from 1968, Saul's biting retort to the Vietnam War. The cruelty depicted — American G.I.'s sodomizing and crucifying Vietnamese women — is intensified by the painting's plasticky surface, the stinging contrast of the colors and the warped, twisting movement of the figures. Its torturous energy still resonates. Though Gen. Custer, Christopher Columbus, the death penalty, and even the NY subway system are targets of Saul's cold-shock techniques. His "Icebox" series from the early '60s, echoed in new work "Refrigerator Breakdown", are benign by comparison. Saul's most recent style, pairing acrylic with oil paint in powdery-edged renderings, have this melted-3D effect, popping off their canvases with the threat of spilling into our laps. Bad taste rarely looks this good.
* Huma Bhabha @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. A stunner, as Bhabha continues her forays into reapplying ink, paint and collage onto vintage photography. Imagery of Achilles — or more specifically heels — trod massively across arid landscapes and highways, grillwork hands grapple with the earth and half-completed structures, a two-headed dog (or the blurred, Francis Bacon-like motion of a normal canine) seems to visibly shiver furiously in front of a large government facade. Elements extend beyond the borders of the photographs, Bhabha colorizes b&w prints, in a riotous cycle of destruction and creation.
* Joan Miro "The Dutch Interiors" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). In late-fall 2008, the MoMA held a stunning decade-spanning show of Miro's genre-busting oeuvre entitled "Painting and Anti-Painting", a sliver of the artist's oeuvre but a richly beautiful, cerebral wealth of technique and experimentation, that still strongly resonates in my consciousness. The Met takes a scalpel to that exquisite exhibition, mining out his three "Dutch Interior" paintings from his time in Montroig (near Barcelon), plus one of the two related canvases from that trip ("The Potato"), work studies, sketches, several delicious earlier works and — because this is the Met we're talking about — the two Dutch Golden Age paintings that inspired "The Dutch Interiors". An exemplary feat. Miro visited the Rijksmuseum during a 1928 trip to Amsterdam and, taking postcards back of two works that struck a chord w/ him, Hendrick Sorgh's "The Lute Player" (1660) and Jan Steen's fanciful "Children Teaching a Cat to Dance" (1660), distorted, abstracted, exaggerated, and updated them into three lyrical, poetic paintings. The first, based deceptively closely off "The Lute Player", is a riot of semi-figurative forms on an eye-popping green backdrop, w/ the window overlooking a smeared blue and yellow town scene. Miro played more w/ the second canvas, deemphasizing the dancing cat and lutist in favor of the foregrounded hound and an onlooking child's rapt gaze. The third interior is the loosest, floating planes of color and predated Calder-esque mobile forms on a sea of bright yellow and yellow-green. In essence, this is more than enough, seeing Miro's marriage of structure and experimentation w/ the Dutch compositions, but the Met augments it w/ several works from its own collection, incl. the stunning, gradient- and texture-rich "Animated Landscape. Study this one closely after viewing "The Dutch Interiors" and their work drawings, as the truths hidden in this lovely work are far more opaque.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
fee's LIST (through 1/11)
WEDNESDAY
* "Pi" (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 1998) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 9:15p. The one that started it all, the neo-noir paranoia chiller, w/ its skin crawling "Kalpol Introl" soundtrack by Autechre, its gritty b&w shots of somewheres Manhattan, its bout b/w mathematics, kabbalah, Wall Street, as the whole taut plot dives into a tailspin, never to fully right itself again. The closest I've seen an American filmmaker come to Shinya Tsukamoto's cyberpunk lens. To newcomers of Aronofsky (like you've only seen "Black Swan" and "The Wrestler"), you owe it to yourself.
* "Tsumugi" (dir. Hidekazu Takaharu, 2004) @ reRun Theatre / 147 Front St, DUMBO (F to York St, AC to High St), 8p/FREE. One of the most winning-est contemporary pink films around — you know, that unique realm of Japanese softcore — due less to its prosaic high-school love-triangle plot than to its leading (G-cup) starlet Sora Aoi.
* WIERD presents Blank Dogs @ Home Sweet Home / 131 Chrystie St (FM/JZ to Delancey/Essex, BD to Grand), 11:30p/$5. Mike Sniper & crew blow the doors off NY's gloomiest goth party w/ their crackling-hot blend of seducing pop. Super stoked!
* Mark Helias + Ray Anderson @ The Stone / 16 Ave C (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$10. A pairing of jazz dynamos, double-bassist and composer Helias and trombonist Anderson, two-thirds of BassDrumBone, a nearly three-decade combo (w/ drummer/composer Gerry Hemingway). Expect The Stone to heat up quite a bit tonight.
* Conspirator @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 9p/$15. Half mid-'90s throwback and half hope for a smarter dance-music future, the live drum-and-bass dynamics of Conspirator (feat. 1/2 of Philly jamtronica legends The Disco Biscuits) keep that groove train going.
THURSDAY
* McDermott & McGough "Of Beauty and Being" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. The duo mines '40s and '50s Americana in tricolor photographs, creating narrative scenes rife w/ pop cultural references.
+ Ghada Amer "100 Words of Love". One epic new sculpture, composed of 100 calligraphed Arabic words for love.
* Jake Berthot @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. Berthot moves away from his haunted-landscape paintings from 2008, lightening his color palette w/ it, but this new exhibition still bears his cultivated eeriness.
* Winston Chmielinski "I Digressed" @ NP Contemporary Arts Center / 131 Chrystie St. There's something effervescent and deeply haunting in Chmielinski's very physical paintings, at once Francis Bacon-esque portraiture yet equally breathless and hopeful. Maybe it's b/c I've got in the back of my conscious that the bloke designs album artwork for Brooklyn fuzz-pop darlings The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, is why I siphon the palpable adorableness from his work. Definitely check this one out.
* "QuietlyLoud" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St, 4th Fl. Pay attention to these three twentysomething artists, painters Alisha Kerlin (contributed to PS1's "Greater NY") and Natasha Conway (shortlisted for Saatchi Gallery's 'New Sensations 2009' Prize) and sculptor Cassie Ralhl (part of "Knights Move" show at SculptureCenter). The 'handmade' qualities in their respective works, plus their own undeniable talents, position the art world's winds to their backs.
* Tedd Nash Pomaski "At the Foot of the Lighthouse" @ Bose Pacia / 163 Plymouth St, DUMBO. The Hilo-born, Brooklyn-based artist initiates his debut at the gallery w/ a series of large, meditative landscapes (urban and natural), fuzzily rendered in graphite.
* Ezra Stoller @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. These luxurious gelatin silver prints of iconic 20th C. landmarks from the master's large-format camera not only makes these well-known structures refreshingly immediate, they also add a stunning degree of three-dimensionality. Hence: photography as art.
* Ayako Wakahara "Tenkoku" @ Onishi Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Wakahara takes the traditional Japanese practice of stone seal engraving and spins that into her contemporary blending of calligraphy and painting.
* Johannes Wohnseifer "Another Year" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. The show's title is indicative of the artist's thought process: mutability, the passage of time, mortality. The standout seems to be a series of sleep-cycle influenced "Light Sleeper" abstract paintings and related "Stacked Studio Lights", a sculpture of fluorescent lightbulbs attuned to Wohnseifer's REM/NREM cycles.
* David Stephenson "Light Cities" @ Julie Saul Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. I dare you to stare at veteran photographer Stephenson's triptych on downtown Tokyo at night and NOT be totally seduced. He's got a gift for long-exposure photography, as this exhibition on the great sprawl exemplifies.
* Deville Cohen, Andrei Koschmieder, Joe Winter @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. Let's see: Cohen's based in Brooklyn. He contributed that sort of freaky, ashy theatre production to PS1's "Greater NY". Koschmieder is like a contemporary printmaker, of the HP sort, and is only just beginning to show in the States. And Winter, of severalprojects, repurposes technologies in kinetic sculpture.
* Hiroyuki Doi @ Ricco Maresca Gallery / 529 W 20th St 3rd Fl. Debut stateside show for the Tokyo-based Doi, who creates organic, billowing ink abstracts on handmade textured Japanese paper.
* Miguel Palma "In Image We Trust" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. Details are key here in the wildly complex mechanical sculptural installations from the Portuguese artist, in his debut stateside solo exhibition.
* Deborah Luster "Tooth for an Eye" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Luster's lens continues its exploration of New Orleans, moving from the prison structure to remnants of homicide sites and violence. She executes these w/ circular prints, echoing the city's architecture whilst drawing our eye ever closer.
* Jesse McCloskey "New World Nightmares" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. McCloskey's inclusion at last year's "The Antidote" group show was a teaser for his fascinating debut solo at the gallery. His media — vinyl, paint and paper collages, in super-saturated, constrasty colors — resembles woodcuts, and their Old World mythologies echoes that.
* Leslie Thornton "Binocular" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. Accomplished abstract filmmaker Thornton (ardent gallery-goers know her multi-decade opus "Peggy and Fred in Hell", which screened at last year's "Greater NY" at MoMA PS1), creates perhaps more physically graspable works here (though totally beautiful), in a series of kaleidoscopic duets on prey and predator.
* Adam Marnie + Tom Thayer @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Neat: Thayer has a collaborative work w/ Dave Miko at The Kitchen on now as well, so his A/V pairing w/ assemblage artist Marnie should be double the fun.
+ Ruby Sky Stiler, in the north room. She pairs relief, screenprinting and sculpture, to intriguing results.
* "Works on Paper" @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. A decade-spanning collection of like 50 artists working in the titular medium, incl Dozier Bell, Valerie Giles, Barry le Va, Hadi Tabatabai, Larry Poons, and Warren Isensee.
* Amanda Burnham "From the Land of Pleasant Living" @ Benrimon Contemporary / 514 W 24th St 2nd Fl. Burnham's urban landscapes, composed of fragmented sketches with emphasis on typography, reminds me a bit of Mark Bradford's repurposed signage, only from a purely representational viewpoint.
* "Groper Train: Search For the Black Pearl" (dir. Yojiro Takita, 1984) @ reRun Theatre / 147 Front St, DUMBO (F to York St, AC to High St), 8p/FREE. 2008 Academy Award winner Takita-san (for "Departures") is/was also a prolific pink film director! Are you shocked? How about the premise of this chapter in the multi-director "Groper Train" series, where the titular object makes like a Ben Wa ball, w/ a world-famous detective and top mystery writer hot on the case?
* "Last Tango in Paris" (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 8p. It's sort of incredible that a notorious pink film is screening at this EXACT TIME in DUMBO, while here to a commercial crowd we get Bertolucci's 'classic' dip into unblinking raunch, a controversial romp b/w a depraved Marlon Brando and a young Maria Schneider. And I LIKE this film. But to the proponents: don't be so quick to judge softcore, esp. when considering the inherent violence in "Last Tango"'s flagrant 'butter scene'.
* Anamanaguchi @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p/$12. The original NES-punks are so hot right now. Yes, they scored "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Videogame". Yes, they've got a playable tune on "Rock Band". But I suspect it's b/c they rock really really hard, chiptunes and guitars in glorious, gritty harmony.
* POPSHOP launch party feat. MNDR & French Horn Rebellion @ Tammany Hall / 152 Orchard St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), 8p/FREE. Pop music. I mean, proper pop music. Maybe I fell off track a bit, but this new monthly happening promises to bring only the bestest curated pop acts to NYC. The debut lineup, incl. French Horn Rebellion and the ineffable MNDR (two acts I DO know) sets the tone.
* Hard Nips @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p. Four Brooklyn-based Japanese women playing distortion-heavy, red-blooded, no-frills rock'n'roll. Hell yes. I'm speaking of Hard Nips, if you didn't pick up on that. w/ Cavex & Antimagic
FRIDAY
* Tony Feher "Next On Line" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. OK, so a line of everyday PET bottles or stacked milk-crates (color-coded, naturally) might not grab you, so how about a ginormous sculpture of vinyl tubing, filled w/ colored water and tumbling from the ceiling in arabesque designs? Feher is all about pushing commercial materials to their limits, and this installation (plus related drawings) should make believers out of us.
* "112 Greene St: The Early Years (1970-4) @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St. Zwirner reunites a group show from one of NY's 1st alternative artist-run venues, w/ a focus on collaborator/"mad scientist" George Matta-Clark and feat. Richard Serra, Larry Miller, Alan Saret, Suzanne Harris and others. Brain food for 2011.
* Christopher Williams "For Example: Dix-Huit Lecons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 12)" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. The beguiling uber-geek photographer last splashed down in the gallery in '08, w/ his "Revision 7" show. He returns w/ more of his gorgeous, spotless compositions, encouraging us to peel back more layers on this enigmatic maestro.
* Dave Miko + Tom Thayer "New World Pig" @ The Kitchen / 512 W 19th St. Trust me when I say that Miko's characteristically stark enamel-on-aluminum paintings and Thayer's stop-motion animated videos coalesce marvelously: I've seen the results during PS1's "Greater NY". This immersive collaboration features a post-apocalyptic narrative, like "The Road" only w/ more vintagey and frightening.
* Irvin Morazan "Temple of the Bearded Man" @ DCKT / 237 Eldridge St. Morazan inaugurates the gallery's new location w/ "Coyote Procession", a performance feat. the artist in a neon coyote headdress and a live Mexican Norteno band, in a procession from the former gallery location. The show itself is a cocktail of pre-Columbian mythologies and urban pop culture.
* Mona Vatamanu & Florian Tudor "Land Distribution" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. A gridded installation collaboration by the Romanian duo, a conversation on Capitalism and socialism in Venezuela and globally, fills the main gallery, accompanied by the artists' recent films "Surplus Value" and "Poem" in the back gallery.
* Folke Koebberling & Martin Kaltwasser "Postautomobilzeitalter" @ Jack Hanley Gallery / 136 Watts St. Berlin/LA have built then pushed a house off an Austrian mountain ("Trash your house") and converted a red Saab 900 into two functional bicycles ("Cars into Bicycles") in Santa Monica, CA. Now they bring their auto manipulation to NY.
* "Continuum: Peter Matthews, Katie Paterson, Karen Seapker" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. The emphasis here is time and space, via Matthews' durational drawings, Paterson's conceptual installations and Seapker's gestural paintings.
* John Stezaker @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Classic silkscreens and "Dark Star" collages from the London-based Conceptualist and appropriation artist.
* Seth Price @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Price narrates ghost stories in this A/V installation, feat. music videos and new album "Honesty", w/ a proper album release party on Jan 14 at Audio Visual Arts (check next week's LIST for that).
* Heinz Mack "Early Metal Reliefs, 1957-67" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. Cofounder of the ZERO group (w/ Otto Piene), and you don't get much more purely industrial than Mack's characteristic shimmering physical works.
* Yeni Mao "Dead Reckoning" @ Collette Blanchard Gallery / 26 Clinton St. Mao works efficiently in mixed media installation and photography, the former referencing explorer Zheng He and the latter, "The Battle Wizard", featuring ethereal transformative situations.
* Ben Durham "Text Portraits" @ Nicole Klagsbrun / 526 W 26th St #213. Renderings of acquaintances and peers, culled from Lexington KY police reports, as bittersweet mugshots. Concurrent w/ the artist's show at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in LA.
+ Sean Bluechel. Some of the artist's more matter-of-fact ceramic sculptures (as opposed to his idiosyncratic style).
* Brendan Flanagan "Sightlines" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Ominous, oozily rendered figurative paintings, recalling both Matisse AND Bacon, amped up w/ B-movies and bravado. This sounds right up my alley. It's also his 1st stateside solo exhibition.
* "Whispering Pines 10" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, BD to Grand St), 4p/$15. This auspicious pairing of Brooklyn-based artist Shana Moulton and composer Nick Hallett is an ecstatic, hallucinogenic opera, w/ Moulton playing an agoraphobe against "live-animated" video and Hallett's soundtrack (performed by vocalist Daisy Press). ALSO SUN, 4p.
* TRASH! w/ Lady Valtronic, Melody Sweets & The Flying Fox @ Webster Hall Basement / 125 E 11th St (NRW/L/6 to Union Square), 11p/$10 (or $5 w/ flyer from DJJESSNYC.COM). Nightlife chameleon DJ Jess throws typically spot-on Trash! parties. If you can groove to '80s glam/goth, you'll have a blast. Tonight is stacked extra-special, however, w/ late-night cabaret by NY's own Melody Sweets and seductress The Flying Fox (original member of Little Minsky's Burlesque in San Francisco), plus go-goisms by Apathy Angel and MCing by the phenomenal Lady Valtronic. If you've never experienced a Trash! party before…
* "Go Go Tales" (dir. Abel Ferrara, 2007) @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 7p. Ferrara, the same director as '70s 'classic' "Driller Killer", does the strip-club in this international rarity, starring Willem Dafoe as the owner and Asia Argento (HELLO!) amid an ensemble cast of gifted stars. (thru TUES, same time)
* "Scott Pilgrim v. The World" (dir. Edgar Wright, 2010) midnight screening @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave). What do I love most about this sugar-high of a cinematic gem? The DDR scene b/w perpetual mutterer Pilgrim and Knives Chau? Pilgrim's band Sex Bob-Omb, which both references a Super Mario Bros villain AND feat. Beck as actual vocalist? Or the happy fact the whole thing is laden w/ retro video-game references? A: all of the above. ALSO SAT
* "The Thing" (dir. John Carpenter, 1982) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Hmm…choice of midnight films: the coin-op/bubble-gum panic of Scott Pilgrim (see above) or Carpenter's Antarctic body-horror classic? Kurt Russell as original badass against a surreal, shape-changing alien enemy might not be YOUR idea of average end-of-week viewing, but that's precisely what makes it so essential. ALSO SAT
* Oberhofer @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave (G to Greenpoint), 9p. One of the scene-stealers at 2010's CMJ was this hot young local bloke Oberhofer and his band, Oberhofer, who played breakneck pop-punk at a bunch of venues throughout Brooklyn, charming everyone w/ his flopping pompadour and charisma in excess. Guarantee you'll have an ace time. w/ Rioux
* Julian Lynch @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. Underwater Peoples Records' stalwart Lynch produced one of the grooviest downtempo albums of 2010 in "Mare" — hearkening back to Boom Bip-styling Anticon, w/ jazzy refrains — and he leads a solid spliff-heavy voyage tonight. Come early for label founders Family Portrait (more psychedelic each time I see 'em) and fuzz-popstars Big Troubles.
SATURDAY
* Mika Tajima @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. Tajima returns w/ a new immersive environment based off an original '70s Herman Miller Action Office System — think the precursor to "cubicle hell". Luckily, her painted panels and modular sculpture makes the topology dope. Plus works called "Furniture Art", which are reverse spray-painted, whatever that means, it also sounds dope.
* Martin Boyce "Winter Palms" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. I feel right at home in Boyce's industrial installations, amid their angular steel panels and hanging fluorescent-tube structures.
+ Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler. The upstairs gallery feat. the 1st two installments of the artists' trilogy on cinema on-location, "Melies" and "Grand Paris Texas", plus a new photo series.
* "Untitled (Painting") @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Conceptual and process-driven international painters, incl. Charline von Heyl, Christopher Wool, Tauba Auerbach, Wade Guyton and Josh Smith. Tasty lot.
* Keiko Tokushima & Shigeko Okada "Time Traveler" @ graphite. / 38 Marcy Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 7-10p. Two SVA graduates w/ strong illustration backgrounds. I've seen Okada's lush pug portraiture at Cafe Grumpy in Chelsea, so I am stoked to view her new dream-imbued compositions. Tokushima works in this warm, luminous color palette in depicting highly detailed interiors, enhanced w/ a lingering nostalgia.
* Joe Zucker "A Unified Theory" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St + 745 5th Ave. A two-gallery extravaganza, putting the artist's process in context. W.Chelsea hold a new series of sailboat, house and volcano paintings on gypsum, scored w/ Zucker's recurring grids. The uptown gallery feat. his "Box" paintings from 2002-5, which look like geometric abstracts from a distance but are actually cleverly situated, paint-filled boxes, layered on top of one another.
* Ann Craven @ Maccarone Gallery / 630 Greenwich St. Craven's exhibitions (indeed entire suites of works per exhibition) tend to follow a certain visual/conceptual iconography, i.e. only flowers (variations thereof), only painted lines etc. Her new show at Maccarone includes many recurrent themes (flora, fauna, nightscapes), but done entirely in watercolor, a new move for the artist.
* Joe Bradley "Mouth and Foot Painting" @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. Considering the NY-based artist works equally well in modular, flimsy monochromes to slashes of grease pencil on raw canvas, guess how he created this new, muscular suite of works? Stay tuned for ANOTHER Bradley show at his gallery, Canada, opening next week.
* Sam Samore "The Dark Suspicion" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. The pioneering conceptual photographer returns from a two-artist presentation at the gallery's booth at Art Basel Miami Beach w/ cinematically derived works.
+ Cornelia Parker "Rorschach (Accidental III)". One doesn't forget Parker's iconic suspended sculptures so easily: like this one, flattened silverware and musical instruments in a Rorschach pattern. Check her inky "Bullet Drawings" at the fab "On Line" show at MoMA, while yr at it.
* "Novacento (1900)" (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 2p. The full 5+ hour historical epic, following Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu through 50 years of Italian history.
* Grooms @ The Rock Shop / 249 4th Ave, Park Slope (D/NR to Union St), 8p/$10. Like a sludgier Sonic Youth, Grooms reminds why NY produces some of the best heavy, angular rock in the world. w/ Acrylics
* Gary War + Ducktails @ Union Pool / 484 Union St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p. One of those essential tune in and zone out shows, it's the "Police Water" EP release party for subsurface rockers Gary War, plus the ever-blissful loop guru Matt Mondinale of Ducktails. Makes you forget how cold it is out there.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Andy Warhol "Motion Pictures" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). One doesn't walk through this installation of Warhol's silver-screen superstars, immortalized in non-narrative, soporific film and seductive screen tests. The experience of locomotion is way more akin to floating, half-swimming half-effortless, past the severe trio "Eat" (1963) and "Blow Job" (1964, whose closeup of DeVeren Bookwalter's blissful face could be misconstrued as a screen test) into the main gallery, lined on all sides by twelve super-sized, flickering "Screen Tests". Gino Piserchio (wicked coif), Susan Sontag (stoically masculine), Dennis Hopper (skittish, mouthing put-ons) and Katha Dees (truly a silver-screen starlet) to the left, Kyoko Kishida (drinking, preening), Baby Jane Holzer (vigorously - uh, tantalizingly? - brushing her teeth), Donyale Luna (modelesque) and Paul America (cloaked in shadows) to the right. Spazzing closeups of Nico and an almost still-frame Allen Ginsburg behind, and the striking duo Lou Reed and transfixing Edie Sedgwick in the front. Behind them a fully outfitted screening room, playing "Kiss" (1963-4), with enough rollicking movement to quadruple the kinetic activity of every other film in the exhibition. It's neat to see "Kiss" through the portal doors from the far side of the "Screen Tests" gallery; it becomes a silent lusty abstraction.
* "Filmschonheit", curated by Albert Oehlen @ Greene Naftali / 508 W 26th St, 8th Fl. Oehlen (w/ some tete a tete by art photographer Christopher Williams) culled together this fab film-minded traveling show, which reached NY's shores after a stint in Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna. And it's Oehlen who contributed the most exacting representation of the filmic beauty theme: a large sparse silkscreened abstract painting, overlaid w/ the video "Untitled (9 1/2 Weeks)", filling the mostly white canvas w/ a ghostly animation. Williams' characteristically super-sharp film prints (plus Josephine Pride's gorgeous silver gelatin prints) are literal, beautiful additions. The combo of Richard Artschwager (two classic "Black Beauty" monochromes on celotex) and John Miller (a maze-like wallpaper and color-sucking carpet installation) contribute both deconstructed film references and visual eye-flickering (stare at the Artschwager, then move immediately to the nearby Miller).
* "Sculpture: 12 Independent Visions" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. This gallery knows sculpture. It's got the roster of house artists (Magdalena Abkanowicz's creepy cast-burlap hands and bronzed "Standing Figures"; Fernando Botero's naughty inflated figures; Beverly Pepper's ingenious sliced rock "Grey Silence") and some specials, like the doubly visually dwarfing and mesmerizingly perfumed "Twisting Bowl II" cedar block by Ursula Von Rydingsvard (ahead of her mid-career retrospective at SculptureCenter) and a Giger-esque spinal bronze lipstick "Colonna Recisa Trasversalmente" by Arnaldo Pomodoro.
LAST CHANCE
* John Baldessari "Pure Beauty" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). A pioneering American Conceptualist w/ the approachable nature of a Pop-minded artist, his vocabulary rich w/ both mass media and thoughtful, open-ended witticisms. This five-decade-spanning retrospective on Baldessari, his first proper U.S. survey in 20 years, coaxes you in w/ bright colors and bold manipulated-photo layouts and then, AND THEN, before you realize it, you're learning something! Whether its the perspectives in space to properly render a realistic street-scene, or the tongue-in-cheek "avant-garde" names paint manufactures dubbed their new shades, or the disarming power of juxtaposing unlikely cinematic imagery. Or, as exemplified by Baldessari's early text-only paintings (which we learn in one room, at least in the "Commissioned Painting" series, involved a sign-letterer actually painting the text, not Baldessari), "Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell" (1966-8). He even breaks it down for us, in obvious cliche (for Baldessari, it's safe to say, was never in the corner of tasteful, standard beauty): "subjects that sell well: Madonna and Child, landscapes, flower paintings, still lifes (free of morbid props…dead birds, etc), nudes, marine pictures, abstracts and Surrealism". Good luck finding any of these banalities in this exhibition, though Baldessari does include a photo series, each very similar, of him waving to arriving ships in a harbor. Another photo series that made me smile, then inspired me, began w/ Baldessari taking a map of the United States and zooming in on California, specifically where the letters in "CALIFORNIA" draped down the state's drawing. He then visited the approximate locations of those letters on the map (detailed in an account accompanying the photographs) and shot a massive letter (in found rocks, in dry paint, in ribbons, in a cunningly conceived shadow of a telephone pole) in each of their respective locations. The end effect from its conception is brilliant. I think my love of Nouvelle Vague helps me quickly embrace Baldessari's cinema-driven Conceptualism. Check his variations on four themes, close-crops of a dapper man's hand doing stuff (pulling out a cigarette, checking his pocket etc), reordered to reflect all possibilities a la Sol LeWitt. In fact, there's a video of Baldessari reciting LeWitt's theories, only he sings them. Another photo series, "Floating: Color" (1972), has the artist tossing big sheets of colored paper as a spectrum out a 2nd story window. It's both Yves Klein 'leaping into the void' (and even the concept, 'throwing color' seems a bit Klein-esque) and a take on hardege artists like Ellsworth Kelly. Once we finally reach the galleries containing Baldessari's famous framed-manipulated-photo montages, it should be totally evident this artist is a Pop-Conceptualist genius. His "Kiss/Panic" (1984) taking two recurring themes of guns and lips and creating a stunning display of onscreen violence (the b&w pistol-holding hands fan out, starburst style, from the color image of a couple's closeup buss). Another of long-horizontal shots of dead men (gangsters, the Wild West etc) is off-set by the lowest image of a man walking, only turned on its side to orient w/ its neighbors. "Heel" (1986) is probably my favorite Baldessari montage, w/ its brutality and vulnerabilities offset by the bottom panel of a young woman's wide-mouthed surprise, the letter or object in her hand (and source of her amusement) concealed by an opaque blue acrylic circle. "The Overlap Series: Jogger (with Cosmic Event)" (2000-1) takes a mundane, saturated-color snap from near the artist's home in California, lined w/ palm trees & whatnot, and juxtaposes it w/ a smoky sky and fighter jets a la some Hollywood doomsday production. The very end of the show dwells just enough on Baldessari's newer forays into truncated imagery, disembodies noses and arms floating over wobbly planes of pure color, and ends w/ a new piece from his "Sediment (Part 2)" series, on at Marian Goodman Gallery in midtown, b&w vector-ish imagery dropped into pristine gray canvases, nearly harkening back to his muted color, text-based canvases from the beginning of the show (and including the early "Pure Beauty", which shares its name w/ the exhibition itself).
* Shag (Josh Agle) "Ambergris" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. I still equate Shag's overall style w/ the lounge-acts album art set: the man paints sexily attenuated figures in fantasy rumpus rooms w/ a sunny SoCal palette. Even w/ the walls broken down in many of these large acrylics (the bubbling lava pits as hot-tubs in "Sea Shanties" and its cooler neighbor "Black Drops"), there's still plenty of reference to mid-century interior design and the cocktail set. But they're totally groovy. Hence the four-panel series "Wahine", a stoic totem and a flowered hottie posing w/ iPod or laptop — they may not have the depth of an aggressive abstract work, but they settle in real nice.
* Pat Steir "The Nearly Endless Line" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. Too bad Steir didn't include this ambitious site-specific work, a disembodied brushstroke w/o canvas, in MoMA's "On Line" show. Though lucky for us, we can track its progress throughout Sue Scott's gallery, as the line sweeps across a grid pattern on the walls and glows under black lights.
* Leah Tinari "Perfect Strangers" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Last Tinari exhibition included a photo booth. Had you snapped a photo of yourself in that (knowing what you were getting yourself into), you might find a painted, brightly lit blow-up in her new show. What we have is a good lot of game participants, pulling faces and striking poses in front of eye-crawling fabric patterns, alone or in small groups. Tinari titled these w/ her own seemingly spontaneous witticisms ("Her Hairstyle Makes For A Great Shape", to a young woman in a just-so bowl-cut; "Seen Through White Frames", to another woman w/ white-plastic-framed glasses; "I Like This!", one guy huffing hot air into another guy's ear).
* "The Last Newspaper" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave). I could detect no apocalyptic end to print media at this cryptically named yet terribly rewarding, accessible and predictably info-packed exhibition. The closest resemblance in name comes from the Latitudes news team's weekly newspaper "THE LAST TKTK" (the one out now is slugged "THE LAST POST"), created/written/edited/printed by the Barcelona-based group, w/ in-residence editors Max Andrews and Mariana Canepa Luna enlisting YOU (yes, you!) for pitches and editorial suggestions (send 'em here: newspaper@lttds.org if you can't find the duo at their desks on the 3rd floor of the museum, typing away). No, print media, specifically newsprint and even more specifically its dissemination, recycling, re-appropriation as a newsmaker, is very much alive here, from its long tradition as a medium for artwork (I still distinctly recall seeing Pablo Picasso's and Georges Braque's early Cubist collages incorporating newsprint) to its persistence as analogue journalism — meaning in addition to Latitudes' publication, we also get "The New City Reader", headed by Joseph Grima of Domus magazine and Kazys Varnelis, the director of Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture. The 3rd Fl has this newsroom setup, w/ a grid of desks, some occupied by the aforementioned project-participants, others vacant of humans but chock-full of their media: Brooklyn's Center For Urban Pedagogy created these visually stunning (and vaguely depressing) toolkits for Affordable Housing (a Velcro-ish graph, directing how your income and rent/mortgage interplay) and a Lego Zoning Toolkit. Another fantastic one, and one of the few video-media, is Jeffrey Inaba and C-Lab's (Inaba's group at Columbia U's architecture grad school) interactive and predicative screens on U.S. weather in 20-odd cities, operating as part-forecast, part-GNP-ticker. I found it fascinating, and while that could be b/c I'm an American who talks extensively about the weather (my emails w/ my parents, both ways, include at least two intro paragraphs about JUST the weather), I think you'll find it fascinating as well. There is little static media in the non-project art. I loved Adrian Piper's three "Vanilla Nightmares", her charcoal and oil crayon drawings directly on yellowing copies of the NY Times, but even the earliest work in the exhibition, Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro's "Pavimento (Tautologia)" (1967) will operate as the artist intended, w/ a large rectangle of newspapers spread out on the floor swapping out daily, throughout the exhibition. Wolfgang Tillman's "Truth Study Center" vitrines, a brilliant and jarring juxtaposition of collaged news clippings and photographs intertwined in broad-stroked explosions of political and religious violence, will update as well. Hans Haacke's seemingly prehistoric "News, 1969/2008" is hooked to an RSS feed and that archaic printer/typewriter will indeed unfurl noisily the international atrocities on a regular basis. Mike Kelley's amalgam broadsheets feature an intriguing, personal twist: the slugs come from places he's lived, the images from high-school yearbooks (though the instances of Goth costuming, neo-Christian evangelism and hot girls could easily stem from Kelley's "Day is Done" opus), and the texts from his own troubled imagination.
* Allora & Calzadilla @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). An absolutely enchanting way to spend like 25 minutes of your time, one afternoon. I was lucky to catch the Conceptual duo's piece "Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on 'Ode to Joy' for a Prepared Piano" in its spanking new stages at Gladstone Gallery, which consisted of a baby grand w/ a hole carved into it, a performer situated inside that hole, playing the etude upside down and backwards, and an empty gallery. Taking that package and depositing it in MoMA's spacious Marron Atrium is another plus under the museum's belt: the sounds carry from this instantly recognizable Beethoven composition all the way up to the sixth floor, as the performer (I've seen three of 'em so far, Amir Khosrowpour, Mia Elezovic and Terezija Cukrov, each w/ their own movements, limitations and flourishes) moves about the space, parting and leading crowds of rapt onlookers w/ 'em. And the clincher w/ the performance is the structurally incomplete ode itself: the recognizable melody is half-reduced to percussive beats only (the missing middle two octaves due to the piano's hole), yet it's still instantly familiar.
* "Pi" (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 1998) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 9:15p. The one that started it all, the neo-noir paranoia chiller, w/ its skin crawling "Kalpol Introl" soundtrack by Autechre, its gritty b&w shots of somewheres Manhattan, its bout b/w mathematics, kabbalah, Wall Street, as the whole taut plot dives into a tailspin, never to fully right itself again. The closest I've seen an American filmmaker come to Shinya Tsukamoto's cyberpunk lens. To newcomers of Aronofsky (like you've only seen "Black Swan" and "The Wrestler"), you owe it to yourself.
* "Tsumugi" (dir. Hidekazu Takaharu, 2004) @ reRun Theatre / 147 Front St, DUMBO (F to York St, AC to High St), 8p/FREE. One of the most winning-est contemporary pink films around — you know, that unique realm of Japanese softcore — due less to its prosaic high-school love-triangle plot than to its leading (G-cup) starlet Sora Aoi.
* WIERD presents Blank Dogs @ Home Sweet Home / 131 Chrystie St (FM/JZ to Delancey/Essex, BD to Grand), 11:30p/$5. Mike Sniper & crew blow the doors off NY's gloomiest goth party w/ their crackling-hot blend of seducing pop. Super stoked!
* Mark Helias + Ray Anderson @ The Stone / 16 Ave C (F to 2nd Ave), 8p/$10. A pairing of jazz dynamos, double-bassist and composer Helias and trombonist Anderson, two-thirds of BassDrumBone, a nearly three-decade combo (w/ drummer/composer Gerry Hemingway). Expect The Stone to heat up quite a bit tonight.
* Conspirator @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 9p/$15. Half mid-'90s throwback and half hope for a smarter dance-music future, the live drum-and-bass dynamics of Conspirator (feat. 1/2 of Philly jamtronica legends The Disco Biscuits) keep that groove train going.
THURSDAY
* McDermott & McGough "Of Beauty and Being" @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. The duo mines '40s and '50s Americana in tricolor photographs, creating narrative scenes rife w/ pop cultural references.
+ Ghada Amer "100 Words of Love". One epic new sculpture, composed of 100 calligraphed Arabic words for love.
* Jake Berthot @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. Berthot moves away from his haunted-landscape paintings from 2008, lightening his color palette w/ it, but this new exhibition still bears his cultivated eeriness.
* Winston Chmielinski "I Digressed" @ NP Contemporary Arts Center / 131 Chrystie St. There's something effervescent and deeply haunting in Chmielinski's very physical paintings, at once Francis Bacon-esque portraiture yet equally breathless and hopeful. Maybe it's b/c I've got in the back of my conscious that the bloke designs album artwork for Brooklyn fuzz-pop darlings The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, is why I siphon the palpable adorableness from his work. Definitely check this one out.
* "QuietlyLoud" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St, 4th Fl. Pay attention to these three twentysomething artists, painters Alisha Kerlin (contributed to PS1's "Greater NY") and Natasha Conway (shortlisted for Saatchi Gallery's 'New Sensations 2009' Prize) and sculptor Cassie Ralhl (part of "Knights Move" show at SculptureCenter). The 'handmade' qualities in their respective works, plus their own undeniable talents, position the art world's winds to their backs.
* Tedd Nash Pomaski "At the Foot of the Lighthouse" @ Bose Pacia / 163 Plymouth St, DUMBO. The Hilo-born, Brooklyn-based artist initiates his debut at the gallery w/ a series of large, meditative landscapes (urban and natural), fuzzily rendered in graphite.
* Ezra Stoller @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. These luxurious gelatin silver prints of iconic 20th C. landmarks from the master's large-format camera not only makes these well-known structures refreshingly immediate, they also add a stunning degree of three-dimensionality. Hence: photography as art.
* Ayako Wakahara "Tenkoku" @ Onishi Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Wakahara takes the traditional Japanese practice of stone seal engraving and spins that into her contemporary blending of calligraphy and painting.
* Johannes Wohnseifer "Another Year" @ Casey Kaplan Gallery / 525 W 21st St. The show's title is indicative of the artist's thought process: mutability, the passage of time, mortality. The standout seems to be a series of sleep-cycle influenced "Light Sleeper" abstract paintings and related "Stacked Studio Lights", a sculpture of fluorescent lightbulbs attuned to Wohnseifer's REM/NREM cycles.
* David Stephenson "Light Cities" @ Julie Saul Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. I dare you to stare at veteran photographer Stephenson's triptych on downtown Tokyo at night and NOT be totally seduced. He's got a gift for long-exposure photography, as this exhibition on the great sprawl exemplifies.
* Deville Cohen, Andrei Koschmieder, Joe Winter @ Foxy Production / 623 W 27th St. Let's see: Cohen's based in Brooklyn. He contributed that sort of freaky, ashy theatre production to PS1's "Greater NY". Koschmieder is like a contemporary printmaker, of the HP sort, and is only just beginning to show in the States. And Winter, of severalprojects, repurposes technologies in kinetic sculpture.
* Hiroyuki Doi @ Ricco Maresca Gallery / 529 W 20th St 3rd Fl. Debut stateside show for the Tokyo-based Doi, who creates organic, billowing ink abstracts on handmade textured Japanese paper.
* Miguel Palma "In Image We Trust" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. Details are key here in the wildly complex mechanical sculptural installations from the Portuguese artist, in his debut stateside solo exhibition.
* Deborah Luster "Tooth for an Eye" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Luster's lens continues its exploration of New Orleans, moving from the prison structure to remnants of homicide sites and violence. She executes these w/ circular prints, echoing the city's architecture whilst drawing our eye ever closer.
* Jesse McCloskey "New World Nightmares" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. McCloskey's inclusion at last year's "The Antidote" group show was a teaser for his fascinating debut solo at the gallery. His media — vinyl, paint and paper collages, in super-saturated, constrasty colors — resembles woodcuts, and their Old World mythologies echoes that.
* Leslie Thornton "Binocular" @ Winkleman Gallery / 621 W 27th St. Accomplished abstract filmmaker Thornton (ardent gallery-goers know her multi-decade opus "Peggy and Fred in Hell", which screened at last year's "Greater NY" at MoMA PS1), creates perhaps more physically graspable works here (though totally beautiful), in a series of kaleidoscopic duets on prey and predator.
* Adam Marnie + Tom Thayer @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Neat: Thayer has a collaborative work w/ Dave Miko at The Kitchen on now as well, so his A/V pairing w/ assemblage artist Marnie should be double the fun.
+ Ruby Sky Stiler, in the north room. She pairs relief, screenprinting and sculpture, to intriguing results.
* "Works on Paper" @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. A decade-spanning collection of like 50 artists working in the titular medium, incl Dozier Bell, Valerie Giles, Barry le Va, Hadi Tabatabai, Larry Poons, and Warren Isensee.
* Amanda Burnham "From the Land of Pleasant Living" @ Benrimon Contemporary / 514 W 24th St 2nd Fl. Burnham's urban landscapes, composed of fragmented sketches with emphasis on typography, reminds me a bit of Mark Bradford's repurposed signage, only from a purely representational viewpoint.
* "Groper Train: Search For the Black Pearl" (dir. Yojiro Takita, 1984) @ reRun Theatre / 147 Front St, DUMBO (F to York St, AC to High St), 8p/FREE. 2008 Academy Award winner Takita-san (for "Departures") is/was also a prolific pink film director! Are you shocked? How about the premise of this chapter in the multi-director "Groper Train" series, where the titular object makes like a Ben Wa ball, w/ a world-famous detective and top mystery writer hot on the case?
* "Last Tango in Paris" (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 8p. It's sort of incredible that a notorious pink film is screening at this EXACT TIME in DUMBO, while here to a commercial crowd we get Bertolucci's 'classic' dip into unblinking raunch, a controversial romp b/w a depraved Marlon Brando and a young Maria Schneider. And I LIKE this film. But to the proponents: don't be so quick to judge softcore, esp. when considering the inherent violence in "Last Tango"'s flagrant 'butter scene'.
* Anamanaguchi @ Knitting Factory / 361 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, G to Lorimer), 8p/$12. The original NES-punks are so hot right now. Yes, they scored "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Videogame". Yes, they've got a playable tune on "Rock Band". But I suspect it's b/c they rock really really hard, chiptunes and guitars in glorious, gritty harmony.
* POPSHOP launch party feat. MNDR & French Horn Rebellion @ Tammany Hall / 152 Orchard St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), 8p/FREE. Pop music. I mean, proper pop music. Maybe I fell off track a bit, but this new monthly happening promises to bring only the bestest curated pop acts to NYC. The debut lineup, incl. French Horn Rebellion and the ineffable MNDR (two acts I DO know) sets the tone.
* Hard Nips @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p. Four Brooklyn-based Japanese women playing distortion-heavy, red-blooded, no-frills rock'n'roll. Hell yes. I'm speaking of Hard Nips, if you didn't pick up on that. w/ Cavex & Antimagic
FRIDAY
* Tony Feher "Next On Line" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. OK, so a line of everyday PET bottles or stacked milk-crates (color-coded, naturally) might not grab you, so how about a ginormous sculpture of vinyl tubing, filled w/ colored water and tumbling from the ceiling in arabesque designs? Feher is all about pushing commercial materials to their limits, and this installation (plus related drawings) should make believers out of us.
* "112 Greene St: The Early Years (1970-4) @ David Zwirner / 533 W 19th St. Zwirner reunites a group show from one of NY's 1st alternative artist-run venues, w/ a focus on collaborator/"mad scientist" George Matta-Clark and feat. Richard Serra, Larry Miller, Alan Saret, Suzanne Harris and others. Brain food for 2011.
* Christopher Williams "For Example: Dix-Huit Lecons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 12)" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. The beguiling uber-geek photographer last splashed down in the gallery in '08, w/ his "Revision 7" show. He returns w/ more of his gorgeous, spotless compositions, encouraging us to peel back more layers on this enigmatic maestro.
* Dave Miko + Tom Thayer "New World Pig" @ The Kitchen / 512 W 19th St. Trust me when I say that Miko's characteristically stark enamel-on-aluminum paintings and Thayer's stop-motion animated videos coalesce marvelously: I've seen the results during PS1's "Greater NY". This immersive collaboration features a post-apocalyptic narrative, like "The Road" only w/ more vintagey and frightening.
* Irvin Morazan "Temple of the Bearded Man" @ DCKT / 237 Eldridge St. Morazan inaugurates the gallery's new location w/ "Coyote Procession", a performance feat. the artist in a neon coyote headdress and a live Mexican Norteno band, in a procession from the former gallery location. The show itself is a cocktail of pre-Columbian mythologies and urban pop culture.
* Mona Vatamanu & Florian Tudor "Land Distribution" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 518 W 19th St. A gridded installation collaboration by the Romanian duo, a conversation on Capitalism and socialism in Venezuela and globally, fills the main gallery, accompanied by the artists' recent films "Surplus Value" and "Poem" in the back gallery.
* Folke Koebberling & Martin Kaltwasser "Postautomobilzeitalter" @ Jack Hanley Gallery / 136 Watts St. Berlin/LA have built then pushed a house off an Austrian mountain ("Trash your house") and converted a red Saab 900 into two functional bicycles ("Cars into Bicycles") in Santa Monica, CA. Now they bring their auto manipulation to NY.
* "Continuum: Peter Matthews, Katie Paterson, Karen Seapker" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. The emphasis here is time and space, via Matthews' durational drawings, Paterson's conceptual installations and Seapker's gestural paintings.
* John Stezaker @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. Classic silkscreens and "Dark Star" collages from the London-based Conceptualist and appropriation artist.
* Seth Price @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Price narrates ghost stories in this A/V installation, feat. music videos and new album "Honesty", w/ a proper album release party on Jan 14 at Audio Visual Arts (check next week's LIST for that).
* Heinz Mack "Early Metal Reliefs, 1957-67" @ Sperone Westwater / 257 Bowery. Cofounder of the ZERO group (w/ Otto Piene), and you don't get much more purely industrial than Mack's characteristic shimmering physical works.
* Yeni Mao "Dead Reckoning" @ Collette Blanchard Gallery / 26 Clinton St. Mao works efficiently in mixed media installation and photography, the former referencing explorer Zheng He and the latter, "The Battle Wizard", featuring ethereal transformative situations.
* Ben Durham "Text Portraits" @ Nicole Klagsbrun / 526 W 26th St #213. Renderings of acquaintances and peers, culled from Lexington KY police reports, as bittersweet mugshots. Concurrent w/ the artist's show at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in LA.
+ Sean Bluechel. Some of the artist's more matter-of-fact ceramic sculptures (as opposed to his idiosyncratic style).
* Brendan Flanagan "Sightlines" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Ominous, oozily rendered figurative paintings, recalling both Matisse AND Bacon, amped up w/ B-movies and bravado. This sounds right up my alley. It's also his 1st stateside solo exhibition.
* "Whispering Pines 10" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave, BD to Grand St), 4p/$15. This auspicious pairing of Brooklyn-based artist Shana Moulton and composer Nick Hallett is an ecstatic, hallucinogenic opera, w/ Moulton playing an agoraphobe against "live-animated" video and Hallett's soundtrack (performed by vocalist Daisy Press). ALSO SUN, 4p.
* TRASH! w/ Lady Valtronic, Melody Sweets & The Flying Fox @ Webster Hall Basement / 125 E 11th St (NRW/L/6 to Union Square), 11p/$10 (or $5 w/ flyer from DJJESSNYC.COM). Nightlife chameleon DJ Jess throws typically spot-on Trash! parties. If you can groove to '80s glam/goth, you'll have a blast. Tonight is stacked extra-special, however, w/ late-night cabaret by NY's own Melody Sweets and seductress The Flying Fox (original member of Little Minsky's Burlesque in San Francisco), plus go-goisms by Apathy Angel and MCing by the phenomenal Lady Valtronic. If you've never experienced a Trash! party before…
* "Go Go Tales" (dir. Abel Ferrara, 2007) @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (F to 2nd Ave), 7p. Ferrara, the same director as '70s 'classic' "Driller Killer", does the strip-club in this international rarity, starring Willem Dafoe as the owner and Asia Argento (HELLO!) amid an ensemble cast of gifted stars. (thru TUES, same time)
* "Scott Pilgrim v. The World" (dir. Edgar Wright, 2010) midnight screening @ Sunshine Cinema / 143 E Houston St (F to 2nd Ave). What do I love most about this sugar-high of a cinematic gem? The DDR scene b/w perpetual mutterer Pilgrim and Knives Chau? Pilgrim's band Sex Bob-Omb, which both references a Super Mario Bros villain AND feat. Beck as actual vocalist? Or the happy fact the whole thing is laden w/ retro video-game references? A: all of the above. ALSO SAT
* "The Thing" (dir. John Carpenter, 1982) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Hmm…choice of midnight films: the coin-op/bubble-gum panic of Scott Pilgrim (see above) or Carpenter's Antarctic body-horror classic? Kurt Russell as original badass against a surreal, shape-changing alien enemy might not be YOUR idea of average end-of-week viewing, but that's precisely what makes it so essential. ALSO SAT
* Oberhofer @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave (G to Greenpoint), 9p. One of the scene-stealers at 2010's CMJ was this hot young local bloke Oberhofer and his band, Oberhofer, who played breakneck pop-punk at a bunch of venues throughout Brooklyn, charming everyone w/ his flopping pompadour and charisma in excess. Guarantee you'll have an ace time. w/ Rioux
* Julian Lynch @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. Underwater Peoples Records' stalwart Lynch produced one of the grooviest downtempo albums of 2010 in "Mare" — hearkening back to Boom Bip-styling Anticon, w/ jazzy refrains — and he leads a solid spliff-heavy voyage tonight. Come early for label founders Family Portrait (more psychedelic each time I see 'em) and fuzz-popstars Big Troubles.
SATURDAY
* Mika Tajima @ Elizabeth Dee / 545 W 20th St. Tajima returns w/ a new immersive environment based off an original '70s Herman Miller Action Office System — think the precursor to "cubicle hell". Luckily, her painted panels and modular sculpture makes the topology dope. Plus works called "Furniture Art", which are reverse spray-painted, whatever that means, it also sounds dope.
* Martin Boyce "Winter Palms" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. I feel right at home in Boyce's industrial installations, amid their angular steel panels and hanging fluorescent-tube structures.
+ Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler. The upstairs gallery feat. the 1st two installments of the artists' trilogy on cinema on-location, "Melies" and "Grand Paris Texas", plus a new photo series.
* "Untitled (Painting") @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. Conceptual and process-driven international painters, incl. Charline von Heyl, Christopher Wool, Tauba Auerbach, Wade Guyton and Josh Smith. Tasty lot.
* Keiko Tokushima & Shigeko Okada "Time Traveler" @ graphite. / 38 Marcy Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 7-10p. Two SVA graduates w/ strong illustration backgrounds. I've seen Okada's lush pug portraiture at Cafe Grumpy in Chelsea, so I am stoked to view her new dream-imbued compositions. Tokushima works in this warm, luminous color palette in depicting highly detailed interiors, enhanced w/ a lingering nostalgia.
* Joe Zucker "A Unified Theory" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St + 745 5th Ave. A two-gallery extravaganza, putting the artist's process in context. W.Chelsea hold a new series of sailboat, house and volcano paintings on gypsum, scored w/ Zucker's recurring grids. The uptown gallery feat. his "Box" paintings from 2002-5, which look like geometric abstracts from a distance but are actually cleverly situated, paint-filled boxes, layered on top of one another.
* Ann Craven @ Maccarone Gallery / 630 Greenwich St. Craven's exhibitions (indeed entire suites of works per exhibition) tend to follow a certain visual/conceptual iconography, i.e. only flowers (variations thereof), only painted lines etc. Her new show at Maccarone includes many recurrent themes (flora, fauna, nightscapes), but done entirely in watercolor, a new move for the artist.
* Joe Bradley "Mouth and Foot Painting" @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. Considering the NY-based artist works equally well in modular, flimsy monochromes to slashes of grease pencil on raw canvas, guess how he created this new, muscular suite of works? Stay tuned for ANOTHER Bradley show at his gallery, Canada, opening next week.
* Sam Samore "The Dark Suspicion" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. The pioneering conceptual photographer returns from a two-artist presentation at the gallery's booth at Art Basel Miami Beach w/ cinematically derived works.
+ Cornelia Parker "Rorschach (Accidental III)". One doesn't forget Parker's iconic suspended sculptures so easily: like this one, flattened silverware and musical instruments in a Rorschach pattern. Check her inky "Bullet Drawings" at the fab "On Line" show at MoMA, while yr at it.
* "Novacento (1900)" (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 2p. The full 5+ hour historical epic, following Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu through 50 years of Italian history.
* Grooms @ The Rock Shop / 249 4th Ave, Park Slope (D/NR to Union St), 8p/$10. Like a sludgier Sonic Youth, Grooms reminds why NY produces some of the best heavy, angular rock in the world. w/ Acrylics
* Gary War + Ducktails @ Union Pool / 484 Union St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p. One of those essential tune in and zone out shows, it's the "Police Water" EP release party for subsurface rockers Gary War, plus the ever-blissful loop guru Matt Mondinale of Ducktails. Makes you forget how cold it is out there.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Andy Warhol "Motion Pictures" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). One doesn't walk through this installation of Warhol's silver-screen superstars, immortalized in non-narrative, soporific film and seductive screen tests. The experience of locomotion is way more akin to floating, half-swimming half-effortless, past the severe trio "Eat" (1963) and "Blow Job" (1964, whose closeup of DeVeren Bookwalter's blissful face could be misconstrued as a screen test) into the main gallery, lined on all sides by twelve super-sized, flickering "Screen Tests". Gino Piserchio (wicked coif), Susan Sontag (stoically masculine), Dennis Hopper (skittish, mouthing put-ons) and Katha Dees (truly a silver-screen starlet) to the left, Kyoko Kishida (drinking, preening), Baby Jane Holzer (vigorously - uh, tantalizingly? - brushing her teeth), Donyale Luna (modelesque) and Paul America (cloaked in shadows) to the right. Spazzing closeups of Nico and an almost still-frame Allen Ginsburg behind, and the striking duo Lou Reed and transfixing Edie Sedgwick in the front. Behind them a fully outfitted screening room, playing "Kiss" (1963-4), with enough rollicking movement to quadruple the kinetic activity of every other film in the exhibition. It's neat to see "Kiss" through the portal doors from the far side of the "Screen Tests" gallery; it becomes a silent lusty abstraction.
* "Filmschonheit", curated by Albert Oehlen @ Greene Naftali / 508 W 26th St, 8th Fl. Oehlen (w/ some tete a tete by art photographer Christopher Williams) culled together this fab film-minded traveling show, which reached NY's shores after a stint in Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna. And it's Oehlen who contributed the most exacting representation of the filmic beauty theme: a large sparse silkscreened abstract painting, overlaid w/ the video "Untitled (9 1/2 Weeks)", filling the mostly white canvas w/ a ghostly animation. Williams' characteristically super-sharp film prints (plus Josephine Pride's gorgeous silver gelatin prints) are literal, beautiful additions. The combo of Richard Artschwager (two classic "Black Beauty" monochromes on celotex) and John Miller (a maze-like wallpaper and color-sucking carpet installation) contribute both deconstructed film references and visual eye-flickering (stare at the Artschwager, then move immediately to the nearby Miller).
* "Sculpture: 12 Independent Visions" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. This gallery knows sculpture. It's got the roster of house artists (Magdalena Abkanowicz's creepy cast-burlap hands and bronzed "Standing Figures"; Fernando Botero's naughty inflated figures; Beverly Pepper's ingenious sliced rock "Grey Silence") and some specials, like the doubly visually dwarfing and mesmerizingly perfumed "Twisting Bowl II" cedar block by Ursula Von Rydingsvard (ahead of her mid-career retrospective at SculptureCenter) and a Giger-esque spinal bronze lipstick "Colonna Recisa Trasversalmente" by Arnaldo Pomodoro.
LAST CHANCE
* John Baldessari "Pure Beauty" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). A pioneering American Conceptualist w/ the approachable nature of a Pop-minded artist, his vocabulary rich w/ both mass media and thoughtful, open-ended witticisms. This five-decade-spanning retrospective on Baldessari, his first proper U.S. survey in 20 years, coaxes you in w/ bright colors and bold manipulated-photo layouts and then, AND THEN, before you realize it, you're learning something! Whether its the perspectives in space to properly render a realistic street-scene, or the tongue-in-cheek "avant-garde" names paint manufactures dubbed their new shades, or the disarming power of juxtaposing unlikely cinematic imagery. Or, as exemplified by Baldessari's early text-only paintings (which we learn in one room, at least in the "Commissioned Painting" series, involved a sign-letterer actually painting the text, not Baldessari), "Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell" (1966-8). He even breaks it down for us, in obvious cliche (for Baldessari, it's safe to say, was never in the corner of tasteful, standard beauty): "subjects that sell well: Madonna and Child, landscapes, flower paintings, still lifes (free of morbid props…dead birds, etc), nudes, marine pictures, abstracts and Surrealism". Good luck finding any of these banalities in this exhibition, though Baldessari does include a photo series, each very similar, of him waving to arriving ships in a harbor. Another photo series that made me smile, then inspired me, began w/ Baldessari taking a map of the United States and zooming in on California, specifically where the letters in "CALIFORNIA" draped down the state's drawing. He then visited the approximate locations of those letters on the map (detailed in an account accompanying the photographs) and shot a massive letter (in found rocks, in dry paint, in ribbons, in a cunningly conceived shadow of a telephone pole) in each of their respective locations. The end effect from its conception is brilliant. I think my love of Nouvelle Vague helps me quickly embrace Baldessari's cinema-driven Conceptualism. Check his variations on four themes, close-crops of a dapper man's hand doing stuff (pulling out a cigarette, checking his pocket etc), reordered to reflect all possibilities a la Sol LeWitt. In fact, there's a video of Baldessari reciting LeWitt's theories, only he sings them. Another photo series, "Floating: Color" (1972), has the artist tossing big sheets of colored paper as a spectrum out a 2nd story window. It's both Yves Klein 'leaping into the void' (and even the concept, 'throwing color' seems a bit Klein-esque) and a take on hardege artists like Ellsworth Kelly. Once we finally reach the galleries containing Baldessari's famous framed-manipulated-photo montages, it should be totally evident this artist is a Pop-Conceptualist genius. His "Kiss/Panic" (1984) taking two recurring themes of guns and lips and creating a stunning display of onscreen violence (the b&w pistol-holding hands fan out, starburst style, from the color image of a couple's closeup buss). Another of long-horizontal shots of dead men (gangsters, the Wild West etc) is off-set by the lowest image of a man walking, only turned on its side to orient w/ its neighbors. "Heel" (1986) is probably my favorite Baldessari montage, w/ its brutality and vulnerabilities offset by the bottom panel of a young woman's wide-mouthed surprise, the letter or object in her hand (and source of her amusement) concealed by an opaque blue acrylic circle. "The Overlap Series: Jogger (with Cosmic Event)" (2000-1) takes a mundane, saturated-color snap from near the artist's home in California, lined w/ palm trees & whatnot, and juxtaposes it w/ a smoky sky and fighter jets a la some Hollywood doomsday production. The very end of the show dwells just enough on Baldessari's newer forays into truncated imagery, disembodies noses and arms floating over wobbly planes of pure color, and ends w/ a new piece from his "Sediment (Part 2)" series, on at Marian Goodman Gallery in midtown, b&w vector-ish imagery dropped into pristine gray canvases, nearly harkening back to his muted color, text-based canvases from the beginning of the show (and including the early "Pure Beauty", which shares its name w/ the exhibition itself).
* Shag (Josh Agle) "Ambergris" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. I still equate Shag's overall style w/ the lounge-acts album art set: the man paints sexily attenuated figures in fantasy rumpus rooms w/ a sunny SoCal palette. Even w/ the walls broken down in many of these large acrylics (the bubbling lava pits as hot-tubs in "Sea Shanties" and its cooler neighbor "Black Drops"), there's still plenty of reference to mid-century interior design and the cocktail set. But they're totally groovy. Hence the four-panel series "Wahine", a stoic totem and a flowered hottie posing w/ iPod or laptop — they may not have the depth of an aggressive abstract work, but they settle in real nice.
* Pat Steir "The Nearly Endless Line" @ Sue Scott Gallery / 1 Rivington St. Too bad Steir didn't include this ambitious site-specific work, a disembodied brushstroke w/o canvas, in MoMA's "On Line" show. Though lucky for us, we can track its progress throughout Sue Scott's gallery, as the line sweeps across a grid pattern on the walls and glows under black lights.
* Leah Tinari "Perfect Strangers" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Last Tinari exhibition included a photo booth. Had you snapped a photo of yourself in that (knowing what you were getting yourself into), you might find a painted, brightly lit blow-up in her new show. What we have is a good lot of game participants, pulling faces and striking poses in front of eye-crawling fabric patterns, alone or in small groups. Tinari titled these w/ her own seemingly spontaneous witticisms ("Her Hairstyle Makes For A Great Shape", to a young woman in a just-so bowl-cut; "Seen Through White Frames", to another woman w/ white-plastic-framed glasses; "I Like This!", one guy huffing hot air into another guy's ear).
* "The Last Newspaper" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (F to 2nd Ave). I could detect no apocalyptic end to print media at this cryptically named yet terribly rewarding, accessible and predictably info-packed exhibition. The closest resemblance in name comes from the Latitudes news team's weekly newspaper "THE LAST TKTK" (the one out now is slugged "THE LAST POST"), created/written/edited/printed by the Barcelona-based group, w/ in-residence editors Max Andrews and Mariana Canepa Luna enlisting YOU (yes, you!) for pitches and editorial suggestions (send 'em here: newspaper@lttds.org if you can't find the duo at their desks on the 3rd floor of the museum, typing away). No, print media, specifically newsprint and even more specifically its dissemination, recycling, re-appropriation as a newsmaker, is very much alive here, from its long tradition as a medium for artwork (I still distinctly recall seeing Pablo Picasso's and Georges Braque's early Cubist collages incorporating newsprint) to its persistence as analogue journalism — meaning in addition to Latitudes' publication, we also get "The New City Reader", headed by Joseph Grima of Domus magazine and Kazys Varnelis, the director of Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture. The 3rd Fl has this newsroom setup, w/ a grid of desks, some occupied by the aforementioned project-participants, others vacant of humans but chock-full of their media: Brooklyn's Center For Urban Pedagogy created these visually stunning (and vaguely depressing) toolkits for Affordable Housing (a Velcro-ish graph, directing how your income and rent/mortgage interplay) and a Lego Zoning Toolkit. Another fantastic one, and one of the few video-media, is Jeffrey Inaba and C-Lab's (Inaba's group at Columbia U's architecture grad school) interactive and predicative screens on U.S. weather in 20-odd cities, operating as part-forecast, part-GNP-ticker. I found it fascinating, and while that could be b/c I'm an American who talks extensively about the weather (my emails w/ my parents, both ways, include at least two intro paragraphs about JUST the weather), I think you'll find it fascinating as well. There is little static media in the non-project art. I loved Adrian Piper's three "Vanilla Nightmares", her charcoal and oil crayon drawings directly on yellowing copies of the NY Times, but even the earliest work in the exhibition, Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro's "Pavimento (Tautologia)" (1967) will operate as the artist intended, w/ a large rectangle of newspapers spread out on the floor swapping out daily, throughout the exhibition. Wolfgang Tillman's "Truth Study Center" vitrines, a brilliant and jarring juxtaposition of collaged news clippings and photographs intertwined in broad-stroked explosions of political and religious violence, will update as well. Hans Haacke's seemingly prehistoric "News, 1969/2008" is hooked to an RSS feed and that archaic printer/typewriter will indeed unfurl noisily the international atrocities on a regular basis. Mike Kelley's amalgam broadsheets feature an intriguing, personal twist: the slugs come from places he's lived, the images from high-school yearbooks (though the instances of Goth costuming, neo-Christian evangelism and hot girls could easily stem from Kelley's "Day is Done" opus), and the texts from his own troubled imagination.
* Allora & Calzadilla @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). An absolutely enchanting way to spend like 25 minutes of your time, one afternoon. I was lucky to catch the Conceptual duo's piece "Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on 'Ode to Joy' for a Prepared Piano" in its spanking new stages at Gladstone Gallery, which consisted of a baby grand w/ a hole carved into it, a performer situated inside that hole, playing the etude upside down and backwards, and an empty gallery. Taking that package and depositing it in MoMA's spacious Marron Atrium is another plus under the museum's belt: the sounds carry from this instantly recognizable Beethoven composition all the way up to the sixth floor, as the performer (I've seen three of 'em so far, Amir Khosrowpour, Mia Elezovic and Terezija Cukrov, each w/ their own movements, limitations and flourishes) moves about the space, parting and leading crowds of rapt onlookers w/ 'em. And the clincher w/ the performance is the structurally incomplete ode itself: the recognizable melody is half-reduced to percussive beats only (the missing middle two octaves due to the piano's hole), yet it's still instantly familiar.
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