fee's LIST (through 6/1)

WEDNESDAY
* Michael Asher's Biennial Project "Open All Day and Night" @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St). We're fast approaching the end of the 2010 Whitney Biennial, which I dug loads more than 2008's. So for two days, beginning midnight WED and ending 11:59p FRI, the LA-born conceptualist opens the doors for those stragglers and night-owls to see what's good at the Whitney.

* Aki Sasamoto "Strange Attractors" @ Whitney Museum (part of 2010 Whitney Biennial), 6a, 9a, 4p, 7p. Sasamoto, the hardest-working NY-based performance artist, IMO (outside Marina Abramovic's durational work at MoMA, but even so), creates FOUR Beuys-ian performances during Michael Asher's 24-hrs Biennial. She'll also be at MoMA PS1 (as part of "Greater New York") in June.

* "Provacateurs of Japanese Photography" @ Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts / 526 W 26th St #605. The title alone got my attention! This show, spanning the '70s (Shuji Terayama and Kohei Yoshiyuki) through the present (Tomoko Sawada, Miwa Yanagi), plus lots of Araki, もちろん.

THURSDAY
* Leslie Wayne "One Big Love" + Jonathan Seliger "Spoils" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Small shaped-canvas oil and mixed media paintings, like painted reliefs really, by Wayne and steel/enamel fabrications of the mundane (supersized milk carton, Hermes bag) by Seliger.

* KRATOS - ABOUT (ILLEGITIMATE(D) POWER @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. Raphael Gygax curates this exhibition investigating the exchange of power in a social context, feat. Maja Bajevic (film), Maria Eichhorn (re-photographed manipulated photography, does that make sense?), Teresa Margolles (installation, + coming off a stunning role in last year's Venice Biennale), Gianni Motti (photography of staged events) and Artur Zmijewski (documentary visual diaries, set in Berlin and Mexico City).

* Dan Deacon + Eternal Summers + Big Troubles @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p/$10. Want to see insanity? Come to Cake Shop's basement venue late THU when Dan Deacon — you know, the guy w/ the tabletop electronics who plays off the stage w/ the crowd amassed around him, pogoing like they're on sweet sweet acid and having a blast — shows up. I don't recall the last time he played such a not-large space, but it should be dope, in a sweaty way.

* Noveller + unFact @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7:30p/$7. A killer voyage into ambient metal and noise, led by drone-guitar maestro Noveller (Sarah Lipstate) and surprisingly calming unFact (that would be David Wm. Sims of The Jesus Lizard). Are you ready?

FRIDAY
* Sarah Walker "Edge of Everywhere" @ Pierogi / 177 N 9th St, Williamsburg, 7-9p. Lovely, dirtily abstract acrylics on panel — a super-duper marriage of Mark Bradford's razed, reappropriated signage w/ Gerhard Richter's 'signature' abstraction. Seriously: Walker may well have that edge, carrying the torch of the 'new abstraction'.
+ Ken Weathersby "Perfect Mismatch. Weathersby 'attacks' and intervenes in his generally minimalist canvas works, modifying the mountings and space to create intriguing double-sided results.

* "Breathless" (dir. JLG, 1960) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston, ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). The 50th anniversary restoration of the landmark Nouvelle Vague classic. The super-adorable, pixie-cut Jean Seberg paired w/ thuggish hangdog Jean-Paul Belmondo on the run in the sexiest "Bonnie & Clyde" motif, ever. And if you ever wondered where the jump-cut came from, you have JLG to thank for that.

* "Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies" (dir. Arne Glimcher, 2010) screenings @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (L/NRQW/456 to Union Square). Martin Scorsese narrates not a doc on Cubism but rather cinema's (and 20th c. aviation's) effect on dual Modern Masters Picasso and Braque, and their resonating effects on future artists.

* "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" (dir. Werner Herzog, 2009) midnight screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), part of 'Cage Heat: Nicolas Cage at Midnight'. Now it gets fun: fake Louisiana-accent drawling Cage getting increasingly unhinged in one of the most convoluted film titles I've ever heard.

* Twin Sister record release party @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/$8. Twin Sister's starry nouveau trip-hop thing is magnetic. They are SO HOT right now, and deservedly so: their live shows are even more captivating than what's on album.

* Tony Castles + Darlings @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Annnd just down the street from the Twin Sister party is the Famous Class Records showcase, brimming with fun (Darlings) and funk (Tony Castles). Fingers crossed Curren$y joins Tony Castles for a bit of that old-school hip-hop.

* Sour Notes + SUSU @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/. What I'm denoting the 'sleeper hit' of Wsburg tonite: Austin's deeply wicked Sour Notes (boy-girl harmonies, taut melodies) are touring, hitting Webster Hall (*shiver*) tomorrow. Come to Bruar Falls instead, where they share the bill w/ SUSU, one of Brooklyn's fiercest art-rock acts.

SATURDAY
* SkowheganTALKS presents Judy Pfaff, Jessica Stockholder and Cheryl Donegan @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave), 3p/$8. WOW, I like all these artists, in conversation together about...installation, maybe? Pfaff, w/ her kinetic, floating-dragon-style mixed media installations, I've adored for a long time. Stockholder's bright amalgams challenge my thinking on sculptural composition. Donegan I know best for her 'physical' static works v. her performances, but I dig the pairing.

MONDAY
* Moonmen on the Moon, Man (rotating sets) + My Teenage Stride @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 6:30ish/$5. For me, this is an ace way to conclude Memorial Day weekend: get out of town, hit the beach, whatever, then return to the city late-ish MON and catch the final night of Cake Shop's 5-year anniversary, feat. the house contingent Moonmen... playing revolving sets w/ loads other bands, for cheap!

TUESDAY
* Le Sphinxx + Omega Jarden @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$6. (almost) All-girl New Wave? I'm down! They're all Brooklyn-based and the Omega Jarden contingent prove that breathy EBM can be VERY fierce live.

CURRENT SHOWS
* "Greater New York" @ MoMA PS1 / 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City (E/V to 23rd/Ely, 7 to Courthouse Rd). NYC is one of the most fertile grounds for artists and creative collectives in the world. Just step foot on the grounds of PS1, in the third iteration of this quinquennial (means 'five years') exhibition, and you'll know what I mean. All the artists (an international-background cast) live in the metropolitan area, and all the works are w/in 5 years old. And there are relatively few 'traditional wall-mounted' paintings. That much is clear, so let's have some fun:
- installation: many of the artists took on the schoolhouse atmosphere of PS1 (lots of odd chambers) and ran w/ it. Ranging from David Brooks' news-garnering 'rainforest', composed of nursery-grown trees totally coated in ashy cement, to Maria Petschnig's "Uninvited" (a carpeted domestic quarters replete w/ framed S&M photography, oops!) to David Adamo's "Untitled (Rites of Spring)", a floor-filling array of baseball bats; Franklin Evans' "Timecompressionmachine" is like Dash Snow + Dan Colen's "Nest", but made out of gallery PR materials!
- photographic series: Hank Willis Thomas's "Unbranded Reflections on Black Corporate America, 1968-2008", comprised of familiar media w/ all taglines removed; LaToya Ruby Frazier's (New Museum triennial alum) uninhabited urban decay v. Alice O'Malley's b&w portraits of edgy NYers
- interplay: b/c many artists share a room, Amy Yao's acid-colored doorways bound off David Benjamin Sherry's color-saturated photography; sparse corporate media installation by Vlatka Horvat against Tala Madani's brutal animations and small works on paper; the DAS INSTITUT pairing of Adele Roder and Kerstin Bratsch, which wins the award for most color-intense room, maybe
And more, much much more. There is a revolving gallery on the 1st floor, currently hosting "The Baghdad batteries", curated by Olivia Shao and feat. a relatively conceptual arrangement of new (Reena Spauldings, Josef Strau) and old (Walter de Maria, Robert Breer). There is also a 'best of' room, highlights of five years of NY gallery (and museum) scene, the site of Terence Koh's whirlwind 500+ years cultural lecture opening day. There are ongoing performances (Aki Sasamoto, the hardest working performance artist perhaps aside from Marina Abramovic, though Sasamoto's take a decidedly more Beuysian vibe) and films. And as this organic exhibition demands, I will be revisiting and filing new reports. So check "Greater NY" out, and often.

* Haeri Yoo "Body Hoarding" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. A fantastic physicality exists w/in the realm of Yoo's kinetic mixed media paintings. While she may be moving away from total representation, you still get beautiful glimpses of that, most directly in the really tiny canvases in this fine show, like the sensual "Kiss" and "Back Rub". The blurred "Family Unit" could be a reimagined Arshile Gorky, while the absolutely fantastic, bluish "Honeymoon Island" looks to me like animated gestures and poses, brimming with life beneath the paint.

* William Pope.L "landscape+object+animal" @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26th St. This is the 1st Pope.L exhibition I recall where the artist — "the friendliest Black artist in America" — is not present for his typically enduring performances. That said (and there is an ongoing performance here, w/ volunteers, called "Cusp" that involves a figure in oversized PJs, clutching a brimming cup w/ green ink on a mound of soil), Pope.L's presence is palpable in this installation, from the scattered and ripped stuffed animals to the paintings and slogans that cover the walls ("Green People Are a New Kind of Shit"). It's like he visits the gallery every night, his 2nd studio, and moves things around unbeknownst to us.

* Richard Hughes @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Talk about disturbing. The centerpiece of Hughes' sculptural installation (made of convincingly realistic casts of objects, in glass, cloth and artificial materials) is the floor of like a gutted house, insulation and brick dust powdering the ground. This plays off "Dead Flies", cast-resin shoes slung over 'power lines' shoefiti-style and the Robert Gober-esque particleboard-looking slabs (a mix of paint, fiberglass, and resin) — to equal a very unsettling vibe.

* "Fleurs: 1880-2010" @ Benrimon Contemporary / 514 W 24th St 2nd Fl. You might not believe me when I say an exhibition on 130 years of flowers in art has something for everyone. The sweep here is vast, from gorgeous and representational (Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Marc Quinn, Andre Derain) to Pop-inflected (Andy Warhol, Donald Baechler, Tom Wesselman) to wildly abstract (Vik Muniz, Natalia Goncharova, Niki de St Phalle). And for every delicate arrangement in a vase, there is a macho counterpart (Jim Dine, Ori Gerscht). And everything, these dozens of canvases lining the perimeter of the gallery, has equal footing. I mean, who hates flowers anyway? That's just cruel.

* Carsten Nicolai "moiré" @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. The many iterations and eye-trickeries of the interference pattern. Nicolai takes us from the deceptively simple (film tape stretched in a grid between two points, creating these bending shadows and varying thicknesses) to the installation-complex (a darkened room illuminated by whirling coils of light, or at least I think they were moving...). Sculpture (a Dan Graham-esque semi-reflective block in the main gallery) and works on paper are quieter overall but nothing is entirely 'static' here.

* John Zurier, Jason Fox, Richard Allen Morris @ Peter Blum Chelsea / 526 W 29th St. An excellent interplay b/w these three artists, all ostensibly abstract. I loved Morris' most quickly, his straight-from-the-tube squeezes and spreads across certain delineated portions of otherwise pristine painted canvas. Zurier's room of subdued bluish-purplish-greens, striping massive canvases, slightly recalls the Rothko Chapel w/o the reverence (and somehow gloomier). And Fox's mostly monotone (reds) set echoes both artists, w/ his stripes (Zurier) and his carefully pared-down canvases (Morris).

* Bill Beckley "Etcetera" @ Tony Shafrazi Gallery / 544 W 26th St. A great headlong dive into Beckley's color-conscious abstract photography, from the cheeky '70s stuff to the super-saturated, non-representational current works. Think flower stems as tall as you are, set against a gradient backdrop. Think photographic juxtapositions, sort of like James Rosenquist (usually incl an abbreviated body part) w/ poetry. And the most head-scratchingly sharp captures of glistening water and reflections, everything juicily colored like the sexiest product adverts.

* Jim Nutt "'Trim' and Other Works: 1967-2010" @ David Nolan NY / 527 W 29th St. This is a delightful little gem buried 'way up' on 29th St. One of the more...twisted of the Hairy Who movement, who balanced their grotesqueness w/ psychedelic color and intriguing media pairings. The acrylic portraitures on MDF, the new stuff, bears that weird, almost Picasso-style abstraction that Nutt does so well, but it's the back room that got me going. It contains a stash of old works, the iconic "Miss Sue Port", an acid-colored acrylic on plexiglas, and other plexiglas-painted works and works on paper of gender-vagues and quirky personages.

* Stuart Cumberland "Gone/There" @ Nicholas Robinson Gallery / 535 W 20th St. Some of my favorite 'painterly' elements, all in one place. Take Roy Lichtenstein's Ben Day dots and recontextualize those for today, filtered through a Keith Haring palette w/ bold black squiggles and washes from Christopher Wool's world.

* Judith Schaechter "Beauty and the Beef" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. Nobody is doing what Schaechter is doing, in her trademark stained glass lightboxes. The figures and arrangements are as sumptuous as ever (and her skill in composition is unparalleled), but she's created a fantastic depth to these new works, like "Cold Genius Study" and "You Are Here", where the backdrop recedes far out as the subjects float in space.

* "In Praise of Shadows", Dirk Braeckman & Bill Henson @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. A moody, sexy photo duet, of figures and empty spaces. I preferred the inky grayscale of Braeckman's the best, whether the flutter of a curtain or the mist-lined scene of a naked woman's back on a bed, to Henson's dusky landscapes filled w/ Ryan McGinley's style of androgynous youth.
+ Justin Allen. His trompe l'oeil paintings on wood panel of the most banal (plastic bags and rubbish bags) are beautiful, if banal, and tiny.

* Romain Bernini "Despite Walls and Landscapes" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. The setting of Bernini's new suite of large oil paintings is an anonymous, barren landscape w/ a poisonous wrong-colored sky, sparsely populated by anonymous figures trudging along and attempting to surmount a fortress-like wall. Dig it? Cues on immigration, Arizona's current laws, border patrol, and the broader world (Israel/Palestine, Russia/Georgia) — this couldn't be more timely.

* Martin Creed @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. The Scottish conceptualist created a very tactile, very IDably beautiful installation this time, blanketing the floor of the gallery w/ marble planks in varying colors. That's essentially "it", but the work stretches beyond the perimeters of the public space, into the offices and further back, organically.
+ Jonathan Horowitz. The artist restages his notorious "Go Vegan!" installation at La Frieda Meats, at 601 Washington and just around the corner from Creed's show. His work, a combo of screenprinted cute animals, portraits of vegan celeb, and video of cows being bled in a slaughterhouse work brilliantly off the steel walls, hooks, and rubbery doors of the empty meat-market. I wonder, though, if it were like in a white-box space if it would have the same propulsion. Here, though, it's excellent (though I'm still carnivorous).

* Dina Recanati "Gathering Winds" @ Flomenhaft Gallery / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. If you've ever wondered the legacy left by Piero Manzoni, whose terribly brief art career ended decades ago, just check the wrapped-linen canvases in Recanati's great exhibition. They totally reminded me of Manzoni's early "Achromes" (read: rumpled bedsheets). She furthers these w/ twisted and painted linen and gauze in all sorts of creations, but it is the simplest that really do it for me.

* Anna Gaskell "Turns Gravity" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Gaskell ups the haunting, cinematic factor in this vaguely religious set of large photographic prints shot in some snowy forest in Iowa, though it could be anywhere, at a vague time period too. Young, suited boys leap out of frame or pull another (who could be either resisting or injured, I can't quite tell). Another, truncated at the waist as he kneels behind a tree (is he sick?). Just what ritual are they performing?

* Bjarne Melgaard "The Synthetic Slut" @ Greene Naftali / 508 W 26th St 8th Fl. Caution, dear reader, if you've never experienced a Melgaard installation, and 'experience' is the apropos word here. We talk about 'experiencing' art; well that's precisely the thing when diving into the gritty, paint-soaked, malodorous, dark realm of his oeuvre. His show at Greene Naftali, inundated w/ images of Serbian-set atrocities and hard-porn sex, w/ a liberal dousing of squeezed paint, violent pickup lines and detritus everywhere, will linger under your skin long after you take the lift back down from this shocker.

* Liz Magic Laser "chase" @ Derek Eller Gallery / 615 W 27th St. Laser videotaped a rather creative bunch and their soliloquies (ranging from the comedic to unhinged) to ATM booths inside banks — get the show-title now? Also: check Laser at MoMA PS1, her film on the Da Vinci Surgical System (robot-assisted surgery) on her handbag is not as immediately gratifying as the gallery show, but dope anyway.

* Burt Barr + Valérie Belin @ Sikkema, Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Nice duality here: Barr's films focus on either a barely moving or rapidly-repeating subject (a moored ship, a lawn sprinkler), so they look like static b&w prints. The deliquescing bubbles at the bottom of a sink is a charmer, though. Belin's lush C-prints of mostly floral arrangements and objet are pulled out of context and abstracted.

LAST CHANCE
* Nina Yuen "White Blindness" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. I was transfixed for about 20 minutes in this show, Yuen's four new short-film works. Maybe it's her honeyed voiceover, even when she reads Virginia Woolf's suicide note or a missing person's report. Maybe it's the artist acting onscreen as a stand-in for her mother ('Don') or idiosyncratically concocting new laborious hygiene methods ('Clean'). Or it's the dreamy soft-focus that pervades all these tightly edited, surreal encounters, over like a daydream just as you're falling deep into them.

* Amy Yao "Come to My Opening!" @ Jack Hanley Gallery/ 136 Watts St. Evidence of Yao's past performances riddle the gallery space, the peanut shell-covered floor in the side gallery and the paint splashes and discarded oil pastel nubs in the main room. These work well off the conceptual installation, Yao's 'doorways' w/ shock-bright painted accents (check some of these at her room in "Greater NY") and wood dowels w/ newsprint clippings ("An Enigma", "Don't Cry").

* "If My Soul Had A Shape..." @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. How you do a group show 101: check Paula Cooper Gallery. I couldn't decide my favorite shape-conscious piece here, the four-array of Kelley Walker cast-chocolate, spinning disco balls; or the Carl Andre aluminum ingot stacked pyramid. But maybe beyond these (and a superb brushstroked Sol LeWitt and a fantastic 'removed' Dan Walsh) is the essential McDonalds 'Orange Drink'-colored Donald Judd painting, a textural mix of plywood, painted sandpaper, and obsidian-glossy black mirror.

* Joan Linder "Cost of Living" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Linder continues to amaze viewers w/ her brilliant large-scale pen-and-ink drawings. Her lovingly meticulous renderings of weeds are fantastic, one-upped by her recreation of a bunch of junkmail, in ink, assembled like a swath of rubbish on a desktop.

* Alex Guofeng Cao @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. Digital photo-mosaics of classic celebrities, composed of a related figure (like Chairman Mao made of tiny Andy Warhol faces, or Mother Theresa of Ghandi). The smaller the mosaic, the smoother and more 3D quality the final portrait (the larger mosaics tend toward jagged, pixellated versions of lesser renown).

* Fernando Botero "Monumental Sculpture" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. I'm all for massive sculpture, when it works, but quite honestly I prefer Botero's sumptuous oil paintings of chubby characters (in both classical and timely situations) then these hefty, slightly scandalous bronzes.

* 2010 Whitney Biennial @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St). A fine biennial, smaller-scale, unthemed, and yet way cooler than 2008's seam-busting array. Loads of great moments here, incl: Jessica Jackson Hutchins' Pres. Obama-newspapered sofa w/ ceramics and David Adamo's just-happened split wood scattering (check Adamo at PS1's "Greater NY"); Charles Ray's ink-drawn flowers, mutant-'Avatar'-world dandelions, childishly conceived but so perfectly rendered, and in such an array that they produce a much-needed calming effect; The Bruce High Quality Foundation (the collective whose NY-themed piece, projected on the windshield of a car, somehow combines the vibe of Youtube clips w/ poetic narrative, to captivating results — they've got a way minimal installation at "Greater NY"); Josephine Meckseper (her red/blue-tinted 'Mall of America' piece; Roland Flexner's ink-inundated works are determined by gravity and his breath, rather than a brush (think Max Ernst's decalcomania landscapes); Jim Lutes masks his portraits in smoky swaths of colorful egg tempera (check 'Piece of Barbara', those eyes...); and of course Aki Sasamoto's performances. ENDS SUN

* Marina Abramovic "The Artist is Present" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Sitting across from Abramovic, the most powerful contemporary performance artist, IMO, is indescribable, the light filtering from overhead, the pervasive calm emanating from her, though she's been enduring this for 2+ months. If you've not experienced this, I do encourage to to sit w/ her, queue up (there will be a queue, no doubt, but it's worth the way). Then check out the upstairs, the volunteer performers re-performing "Point of Contact" (1980) and the much talked about "Imponderabilia" (1977) and the videos of Abramovic's collaborative works with Uday and her solo projects, plus the singular "Seven Easy Pieces", Abramovic re-performing pivotal works from six renowned performance artists (Joseph Beuys, Gina Pane, Vito Acconci), plus one of her own, at the Guggenheim in 2005. ENDS MON

fee's LIST (through 5/4)

WEDNESDAY
* "Anton Chekhov's The Duel" (dir. Dover Kosashvili, 2010) screenings @ Film Forum / 209 W Houston St (1 to Houston). Did you know this year is the Russian writer/playwrite's sesquicentennial? "The Duel" is probably my favorite novella from the master of starkly emotive prose: the foppish aristocrat v. the abrasive scientist, set in wonderful sea- and countryside locations. I hope the British cast in Kosashvili's film does the master justice.

* "Silvestre" (dir. Joao César Monteiro, 1982) screenings @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (23/45 to Nevins), 6:50/9:30p. I'm sold on the fact alone this is loosely based on "Bluebeard", though it combines that w/ a 15th C. Portuguese legend of a young woman disguised as a knight, which makes me hope she (in knight garb) is the one who beheads the murderous king.

* Frightened Rabbit @ Sound Fix / 44 Berry St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 6:30p. Glasgow rockers play the cavernous dungeon that is Webster Hall later in the evening, but the doper option is to check them at an in-store performance at my fav Wsburg record store! Show up early.

THURSDAY
* Mark Ryden "The Gay 90's: Old Tyme Art Show" @ Paul Kasmin Gallery / 293 10th Ave. Erm...new Ryden show in NY? Yes please!!!!! The decade in the title is, natch, the 1890s, fin de siecle Paris w/ contemporary kitsch, bereft w/ religious imagery and tasty meats. I'm there.

* Fernando Botero "Monumental Sculpture" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Big-ass sculpture, curvy, sumptuous bronze figures in Botero's typically beguiling style — a hefty departure from his Raphaelite oil paintings.

* "Daughters of Turan" – Almagul Menlibayeva w/ Leeza Ahmady + Priska Juschka conversation @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl, 7p/RSVP: gallery@priskajuschkafineart . Part of the ArteEast, Across Histories series of dialogues, the artist Menlibayeva (whose show I'm totally all about) is in conversation w/ independent curator Ahmady and gallerist Juschka.

* "Reprise" @ Paula Cooper Boutique / 465 W 23rd St. Wayne Gonzales, Christian Marclay, Walid Raad, cool newish combo Seth Price + Kelley Walker and others focus on recordings and re-presentaiton, underlying concepts in all their respective works.

* Shirazeh Houshiary "Light Darkness" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Veiled and layered abstract paintings, like the sky at dusk, plus her related video animation and works on paper.

* Mamma Andersson + Jockum Nordstrom "Who is sleeping on my pillow" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 525-533 W 19th St. The first concurrent U.S. exhibition by the Swedish couple, who thus far have maintained mutually individual artistic practices. Andersson's classic landscape and interiors paintings v. Nordstrom's 2- and 3D paper sculptures and collages, plus two collaborative works.

* Aki Sasamoto "Strange Attractors" @ Whitney Museum (part of 2010 Whitney Biennial), 4p. I caught Sasamoto last year at Zach Feuer and I was hooked. I have this vision in my head about Joseph Beuys' chalkboard 'teaching' performances, and to me Sasamoto's stream-of-consciousness forays into the sociopolitical, the mathematical and the mundane (somehow she balances all this, coherently) is, to me, like a Beuys. Her lair @ the Whitney, astrewn w/ video cameras and hanging net bags containing microphones and water glasses, is the site of her shows, performed at 4p on dates incl the numerals '6' and '9' (so if you can't make this one you've other chances).

* "Tron" (dir. Steven Lisberger, 1982) screening @ 92Y Tribeca / 200 Hudson St (1/ACE to Canal St), 8p. This is the SECOND circa-'82 film in my LIST this week. And: apparently Disney's making a 2010-quality sequel to the classic '80s cyber drama, replete w/ Daft Punk soundtrack and Jeff Bridges back in his lead role. Is this a cool idea? I can't answer that! I'm skeptical of a reboot/sequel whatever, but what I am CONFIDENT about is the original, the synthesizer-heavy, early CGI stunner, which you should see tonight.

FRIDAY
* Kiki Smith "Lodestar" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. Stunning: Smith's 1st major NY gallery show in eight years, and concurrent w/ her exhibition at Brooklyn Museum, centers on the woman's life-cycle via stained-glass panels.

* "Mercy" (dir. Patrick Hoelck, 2010) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St). I know Hoelck for his music videos (like Alicia Keys "Girlfriend", which was my JAM back in the day), and this is the director/photographer's 1st feature: the cynical young emotionless bastard (actor/writer Scott Caan) and the titular Mercy (Erika Christensen, who suffice to say shakes everything up).

SATURDAY
* Claude Monet "Late Work" @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. Tough as it was for me to let go of MoMA's 'Waterlilies' show closing, I'm pleased that Gagosian brings together the heat — "the most significant gathering of Monet's late paintings to take place in New York in more than thirty years", so says the promo materials! Strong statement, but I believe it.

* Shepard Fairey "May Day" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. And here we are, the final show at LES stalwart Deitch Projects. And while I wish for a blowout bash courtesy of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black and/or Mika Tajima's New Humans (since Dash Snow's untimely passing, we can't have another 'Nest'), I've got a feeling Fairey's pro-worker, pro-activist exhibition should be a resonating conclusion — love him or hate him — to the gallery.

SUNDAY
* "Rites of Spring", a benefit for Haiti @ Above the Auto Parts Store / 600 Bushwick Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle/Bushwick), 8p/$15 — tix avail. at Record Grouch Records / 441 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford). Auspicious characters like Bjork, David Longstreth and Tyondai Braxton play DJ sets and all proceeds benefit Partners in Health. But to get in, you need a ticket (see info above), and considering the gravity of this show you'd better book ahead of time.

* Themselves + Buck 65 @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Delancey), 8p/$16. A who's who of furiously avant-garde Anticon Records, led by Doseone + Jel (Themselves) and folksy old bastard Buck 65, w/ live DJ face-off b/w Jel & Odd Nosdam (Nosdam all the wayyy!!) and Stabbing Eastwood (aka Mr. Adebimpe from TV on the Radio, perhaps you've heard of 'em?).

* "Knight's Move" @ SculptureCenter / 44-19 Purves St, Long Island City (E/V to 23rd/Ely, G to Court Square), 7-9p. Fionn Meade curates a dynamic group show of young and prominent artists working in the themes of modernity and progression: leaping forward, feints and dodging if you will. feat. Mika Tajima, Tamar Halpern, Sara VanDerBeek, Allyson Viera, Esther Klas and more, w/ related performances (many of these artists have ties to music, incl. Tajima's New Humans) throughout the duration of the show. Stay tuned to future LISTs for updates.

MONDAY
* New Russian Literature @ (le) poisson rouge / 158 Bleecker St (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St, 6 to Bleecker), 7p/FREE. Since I cannot live on art/film/music alone, I stumbled upon this little gem, four contemporary Russian authors (Inga Kuznetsova, Pavel Nastin, Natalia Sannikova and Sergei Sokolovskiy) straight off the PEN World Voices Festival, reading selections of their poetry and prose w/ translation. If you know me, you know I am a FIEND for 19th- (and in tenuous degrees 20th-) C. Russian lit, so this could be a good one.

CURRENT SHOWS
* "Picasso in the Met" @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 Fifth Ave (456 to 86th St). Part three of the Picasso compendium (parts one and two, if you've been paying attention, are lovely print-based shows at the MoMA and Marlborough Gallery, respectively) is the weightiest, not just b/c of the inclusion of paintings but b/c this is the Met and the art on view are ALL the Met's Picasso works. This is major in the sense of the word, a timeline of the master's fin-de-siecle-esque pastels, through his Blue and Rose Periods (of note: "The Actor" is back, and so big we would've missed it had it not been repaired in time for the previews), past Cubism and the '30s (though the Met doesn't own a decade piece like "The Three Musicians" or "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon", they have some NICE surprises in both fronts), into an entire room of linocut and other prints (the Met one-ups my favorite "Luncheon on the Grass (After Manet)" from the MoMA by including a wicked terracotta plaque of the scene in standard view), and to the master's final, effervescent Musketeer-and-nudes-laden works. Oh it's major, all right. I'm still wrapping my head 'round it, like the prevalence and mutability of Picasso's "Head of a Woman" theme, as an example. That the Picasso show is in the same galleries of the overcrowded Francis Bacon retrospective means foot-traffic and lines-of-sight will be issues, but this is one of the best exhibitions in town, so you know you can't miss it.

* "Tanguy/Calder: Between Surrealism and Abstraction" @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. The subtitle reads like my life, half the time. But seriously: this is a match-made exhibition. That 'museum-quality' show has been dropping in the news constantly of late, and this is further evidence of that: the friendship of perhaps unlikely artists — boisterous American Calder and terribly French Tanguy — but the blurring here, w/ the former's spidery abstract sculpture and the latter's lonely, subconscious landscapes, practically bristles w/ symbiosis. Seeing the two artists' work simultaneously elevates them both. Essential show.

* Lee Bul @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. I'm all about the flotilla of compressed/abstracted wood-and-metal architecture hanging in Lee's new exhibition. It's a great 'next step' for the artist, moving beyond the highly-accessorized glitz of her previous show into something cleaner, sharper and much darker.

* Carrie Mae Weems "Slow Fade to Black" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Lots to see here, in Weems' multimedia take on the historical drama, and extending far beyond her solid command of the portrait-photograph, from her blurred inkjet prints of Eartha Mae Kitt and a whole panoply of Black actresses and singers (the show's titular piece), incl. Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and Josephine Baker, who despite the Gaussian blurs are inherently recognizable via their poise and dress, to "Afro Chic" video installation, the fiercest runway you've probably ever seen.
+ Lynette Yiadom-Boakye "Essays and Documents". Large, expressionistically painted figures, each embodying an intense spirit and lifelike quality, which is tricky b/c they're all from the artist's imagination. Her very painterly approach, reminding me a bit of Alice Neel's style, really engages the eye.

* Mohamed Bourouissa "Périphéries" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. A powerful show from the young Paris-based photographer, of cinematic scenes set in 'the other France', the multicultural suburbs of Paris and elsewhere. "Périphérique" sums up the message: two white girls staring warily at a group of black men at night, as they walk through an underpass. There are many beautiful works here, like "The Window" (a tattooed boxer and his trainer) and "The Hand", a moment of intimacy (and perhaps suggested pregnancy) between two lovers — and the banal titles are intentional, drawing our gaze to the (you guessed it) peripheries of the images.

* Joan Linder "Cost of Living" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Linder continues to amaze viewers w/ her brilliant large-scale pen-and-ink drawings. Her lovingly meticulous renderings of weeds are fantastic, one-upped by her recreation of a bunch of junkmail, in ink, assembled like a swath of rubbish on a desktop.

* Patrick Lee "Deadly Friends" @ Ameringer McEnery Yohe / 525 W 22nd St. Startlingly detailed graphite portraiture of dangerous-looking men in downtown LA, conveyed masterfully via Lee's hand. Features fade out from the paper like through mist, and yet when they hit sharp-focus, every pore and every hair, every tattered bit of fabric and tattoo-line is photograph-clear.

* Lia Halloran "The Only Way Out is Through" @ DCKT Contemporary / 195 Bowery. Paintings of crystal caves and icebergs w/ dope titles. But wait! Halloran has a lot of metaphors going on here (partially transmitted by work titles, like "You're the Best/Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Me" and "The Things We Never Said") and the works, specifically the diluted ink layers on drafting film (a vellum-like medium) are fascinating, painstakingly imagined.

* "Landscape and Solitude" @ Kumukumu Gallery / 42 Rivington St. Mako Wakasa curates this smart group show around a seemingly chestnut of a concept: the landscape. But it's dope! There's a range of mediums and ideas here: Yusuke Nishimura's hazy sunset C-prints, Ofer Wolberger's slightly off-putting staged photography (remember the masks in "The Strangers"?) and particularly Amy Bennett's "Trespassers", a resined and reflective oil painting of a quiet cove that is disarmingly photorealistic.

* Allyson Vieira "Oxymandias" @ Laurel Gitlen/Small A Projects / 261 Broome St. Vieira's plaster and concrete reliefs reminded me of the 'hands' in Jim Henson's "Labyrinth", but the knockout installation in the main gallery, "If I was a...but then again, no (1-18)", a series of adult-sized plinths that literally fill the space, echoes Rachel Whiteread in the coolest way.

LAST CHANCE
* Catherine Opie "Girlfriends" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. I'm quite fond of this sweet, portraiture-driven exhibition. Opie's new body of work, portraits of friends and lovers of the 'butch-dyke' persona, is elevated by an array of square-format b&w prints from her archive, never before printed before now. The latter acts almost diary-like, recalling Opie's ties to the S&M community in LA and San Francisco from the early '90s, and some of its subjects (like the riveting Pig Pen) recur in the new series, nearly 15 years later. Among the portraits include a regal k.d. lang against a Canadian wilderness, Jenny Shimizu in leather on a pristine white-sheeted bed and Idexa, tattooed and barechested, crouching on a rock. But I kept going back to Pig Pen, from her almost waifish figure in '94, wearing a play-piercing 'crown of thorns' for a performance in Mexico City, to her tanned, mature figure in '09, a thorn-wrapped heart tattoo emblazoned on her chest.

* Miao Xiaochun "Microcosm" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St. This extensive multidisciplinary exhibition — full of computer renderings transferred to canvas and multi-panel wire-model etching-like drawings — center around the titular piece, Miao's take on Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights", a ridiculously detailed nine-panel C-print of a world utopian and chaotic, and its related extra-psychedelic film. You've GOT to watch the film, or at least part of it, where Miao's legions of self-rendered naked men prance about the landscape and dunk in shimmering ponds and, um, take on the impression of potatoes and cucumbers and get sliced up, so wire-model birds can sneak off w/ a piece? It was about here that I felt like I'd dosed a heady hallucinogen, but no it's all part of Miao's process.

* Ursula von Rydingsvard "ERRATUS" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. There is a complex awe and elegance to von Rydingsvard's rough-hewn cedar sculpture — the sort that follows Louise Bourgeois' non-spider sculpture (like the Personages) rather than the steel/cubular/mobile stuff of other large-scale sculptors. Her works tower and crawl, ripple and bend. The wavelike "Droga", for instance...OK permit me to geek out a bit, but it TOTALLY reminded me of the massive 'land worm' beast from Final Fantasy VI (anyone get the ref?). The incredible "Blackened Word" is canyon-like, smoothly flowing on one side and replete w/ gullies and Paleolithic nooks on the other. I encourage you to peer into this one: besides the fact it smells good, the closeness to the wood mutes outside sounds.

* Elliot Hundley "Agave of the Bacchae" @ Andrea Rosen Gallery / 525 W 24th St. I got strong echoes of Dave McKean's "Sandman"-era cover work, specifically the 'Brief Lives' series, from Hundley's stunning large-scale collage works (paint swooshes, multiple photographs of the actors, and cut-out lettering amid forests of pins), which takes cues from Euripides.
+ Inez Van Lamsweerde + Vinoodh Matadin & Eugene Van Lamsweerde "Sculptographs". I thought back to the power photog couple's knockout show at Matthew Marks Gallery back in 2005, and recalled they collaborated w/ Inez's uncle Eugene in that one too, but this show, filled w/ the couple's discreet, lovely bodily works augmented by Eugene's metal and mixed media, is way more thorough and fine-figured. Nearly all these pieces are very small, locket-sized prints w/ dabs of enamel or wax and reedlike appendages of scrap metal, like mechanical fairies.

* Charline Von Heyl @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 535 W 22nd St. Lots of great abstract shows in W Chelsea, and von Heyl's pairing linework w/ splashes of color and undulating shapes (to sometimes collage-y effect) is a winner. Check especially "Yellow Guitar", w/ vibes of Picasso/Braque Cubism and "Black Stripe Mojo", a chimeric figure laying over a precise jaillike b&w grid.

* Susan Philipsz "I See a Darkness" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. I'll admit, I wondered going into this show how a sound-artist — though Philipsz is the PREMIERE sound-artist — could carry a ground-level solo show. I mean, it's a room full of speakers. But she does, in a truly brilliant sculptural sound journey, converting the main gallery into a cavernous lair filled w/ her voice, such a rush each time it streams out the speakers that, like Odysseus's men, we're transfixed through her choral refrains. Absolutely brilliant.
+ Siobhan Hapaska "The Nose that Lost its Dog". But what to counter the wonderfully ethereal Philipsz show? Hapaska's earthy, cheekily-titled mixed media sculpture. Coyote pelts (and glass eyes) and an entire upturned olive tree are just some of her organic v. machinelike materials, coming from her residency at Glasgow Sculpture Studios.

* André Butzer "Nict furchten: Don't be scared!" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Super-sized gooey oil abstracts at Metro Pictures — are we at the right gallery? Oh yes, and why is it this strong photo-showing joint has perhaps the dopest abstract show in town? Think if Kazuo Shiragawa was into pop colors. Oh I'm taking it there: think blow-ups of finger-paint renderings, layers and layers of impasto and rivulets of congealed paint, whole tube's-worth spend on lines and curves. A lovely all-black piece must have like a million gallons of the glistening stuff just hanging out there, waiting to pull you in.

* Antony Gormley "Breathing Room II" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. This is a terribly disturbing experience, this exhibition. Gormley, whose 'Event Horizon' 2doz+ bronze sculptures you've probably seen (or at least read about) hanging out on Flatiron-area rooftops, composed this 'light' sculptural piece in a very, very dark room of the gallery. It fills the space, to the extent that you have to hug the wall and shimmy around it. Due to its glow, your eyes never adjust to the surrounding space. Cautionary for both agoraphobes and claustrophobes.

* Keita Sugiura @ Max Protetch / 511 W 22nd St. Super subtle C-prints of cloud formations, whitish-blue rectangles that seem to shimmer and change color depending on your POV to each piece. I'm not sure how much of Sugiura's compositions are chance-related, but he achieves something pretty cool here, and totally mellow.

* Fiona Rae "Special Fear!" @ The Pace Gallery / 32 E 57th St. I tweeted that Rae's exhibition reminded me of manga on acid, shortly after viewing the show, even though I don't read manga. But I think the comparison is appropriate, since these exuberant, large-scale, many-colored and -textured canvases conceal in their cloudy swooshes stuff like speed-lines, flowers and PANDAS. There's even like butterflies or something in the violet-hued "Build a fairyland for you" — all Rae's works have lovely names like this. Bit sugary viewing, but very very cool.

* "If My Soul Had A Shape..." @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. How you do a group show 101: check Paula Cooper Gallery. I couldn't decide my favorite shape-conscious piece here, the four-array of Kelley Walker cast-chocolate, spinning disco balls; or the Carl Andre aluminum ingot stacked pyramid. But maybe beyond these (and a superb brushstroked Sol LeWitt and a fantastic 'removed' Dan Walsh) is the essential McDonalds 'Orange Drink'-colored Donald Judd painting, a textural mix of plywood, painted sandpaper, and obsidian-glossy black mirror.

* Barbara Kruger "The Globe Shrinks" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. One of the most exciting shows I've seen this year! An incredible approx-10-min video installation, people throwing out declarations, intercut w/ glimpses of violence, disembodied voices and Kruger's signature running sans serif type commands. Even the funny parts — and there are some jokes, of the Richard Prince type — are unsettling.

* Joe Zucker "Tales of Cotton" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Classic large-scale works done in Zucker's signature applied-cotton style, dabs and tears of the stuff heaped into wetly textured gobs that, from across the room, reveal themselves into chilling antebellum scenes, and the beauty of "Amy Hewes" paddleboat can't quite overcome the visions of the slaves laboring w/ carts of cotton.

* Donald Baechler @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Lots of fun Baechler's having: massive pastel-toned acrylics of colorful balls and cartoonish flowers on drop-cloth 'canvases', plus a set of gesso and mixed media flowers on collaged paper.

* Gabriel Vormstein "Baby abc" @ Casey Kaplan / 525 W 21st St. Tasty stuff: Vormstein blew up and colored enormous Egon Schiele portraits on newsprint backdrops.

* Eric Swenson @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Perhaps you remember Swenson's unnerving installation from the 2004 Whitney Biennial, a porcelain-skinned young deer thrashing against an afghan rug? That's here, along w/ a few other deer in varying states, incl the new piece "Ne Plus Ultra", tucked away in its own gallery, a completely disturbing half-decomposed carcass that I caution you against: photos don't do the real thing justice, it is intense.
+ Beatriz Milhazes "Gold Rose Series". A good palate cleanser after Swenson's disturbing output, colorful woodblock and screenprints of geometric and curvy abstract shapes, named after seasonings.

* Roy Lichtenstein "Homage to Monet" @ Benrimon Contemporary / 514 W 24th St 2nd Fl. The inaugural exhibition in this W.Chelsea space doesn't waste any time! What w/ the impending Gagosian one-two Lichtenstein still-lifes and Monet late-works, let's get our fix NOW w/ Lichtenstein's reverence to the plein-air Impressionist, which in itself is further testament to the Pop artist's inventive techniques. His 'Cathedral' and 'Haystack' multiples are effectively trippy, but its his takes on the beloved water lilies, w/ and w/o Japanese footbridge, that really knock this show up several million notches. The works were silkscreened onto stainless steel, but not before Lichtenstein took a drill-bit to the metal, hand-carving this whorl pattern (not entirely unlike enlarged Ben-Day dots) that trippily echo rippling water, integrating rather effortlessly w/ the water lilies.

fee's LIST (through 4/20)

WEDNESDAY
* Huma Bhabha in a Public Art Fund Talk @ The New School / 66 W 12th St (ACE/1/FV to 14th St), 6:30p/$10. Absolutely wicked: Bhabha, she of the disturbing and emotive junk-assemblaged figurative sculpture (incl. a fab stately piece at the 2010 Whitney Biennial) speaks about her works themes and the underlying essence of death.

* "Mad, Bad...& Dangerous to Know: Three Untamed Beauties" @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (6 to 51st St, E/V to Lex/53rd St). OK, so nearly this entire festival, on beautiful, transgressive mid-century Japanese screen-starlets, occurred when I was in Japan (incl the no doubt kick-ass 'Dressed to Kill' party). How ironic. Luckily, the third arm of the festival, Mariko Okada (aka 'The Discreet Charm of the Adulteress') is this week! Read on through my LIST for her three films.

* "Impasse" (dir. Kiju Yoshida, 1967) @ Japan Society (part of "Mad, Bad...& Dangerous to Know"), 7:30p. A middle-class couple's breakdown, as Okada rebels off her sterile, bland husband and yearns for the biological father to her artificially inseminated son.

THURSDAY
* Nina Yuen "White Blindness" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. The 1st solo stateside exhibition of the Amsterdam-based artist's films, a combination of fiction based on Yuen's childhood and multiple-POV encounters w/ people in her life, w/ Yuen playing each character.

* Barbad Goishiri "Nothing Is Left To Tell" @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. The conceptual artist's 1st US solo show, w/ echoes of looping and 'Aktion' via video pieces, a sound installation and works on paper.

* Amy Sillman "Transformer" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Sillman hits her rhythm b/w figurative and abstract in this exhibition of new paintings and drawings. Bodies are fractured by thick lines and reappear like wireframe shapes, and everything is bathed in Sillman's typically rich color palette.
+ Anna Sew Hoy "Holes". Found-object sculptural conglomerates, at once recalling the figure (probably due to Hoy's use of sunglasses and denim) yet disfigured w/ gaping holes. It sounds like a good match to Sillman's show.

* Almagul Menlibayeva "Daughters of Turan" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Photography and video based on mythological themes of the artist's native Kazakhstan.

* Matthias Schaller "Elfering - 1642" @ Danziger Projects / 534 W 24th St. An exhaustive documenting of German collector Gert Elfering's major sale to Christie's in Oct '05. Schaller's forte is interiors devoid of human activity, so it should be interesting to see his photographs of portraiture.

* Jim Campbell "Exploded View" @ Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery / 505 W 24th St. A pioneer of LED technology, Campbell augments his series of pointillist-style LED photographic works w/ the titular piece, a 3D grid of a street-scene.

* "The Affair" (dir. Kiju Yoshida, 1967) @ Japan Society (part of "Mad, Bad...& Dangerous to Know"), 7:30p. I've heard this compared to a Japanese Lady Chatterley, w/ Okada creating a love triangle w/ a sculptor (and her mother's former lover) and a day laborer.

* Sisters + Darlings @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. The dissonant one-two thump of Sisters is tempered by the absolutely kick-ass indie-pop harmonies of Darlings. NB: in celebration of "Kick-Ass" (see FRI), I will attempt to use the word, whenever possible, throughout this LIST.

FRIDAY
* Aki Sasamoto "Strange Attractors" @ Whitney Museum (part of 2010 Whitney Biennial), 4p. I caught Sasamoto last year at Zach Feuer and I was hooked. I have this vision in my head about Joseph Beuys' chalkboard 'teaching' performances, and to me Sasamoto's stream-of-consciousness forays into the sociopolitical, the mathematical and the mundane (somehow she balances all this, coherently) is, to me, like a Beuys. Her lair @ the Whitney, astrewn w/ video cameras and hanging net bags containing microphones and water glasses, is the site of her shows, performed at 4p on dates incl the numerals '6' and '9' (so if you can't make this one you've other chances).

* Hanna Liden "As Black as Your Hat" @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. The NY-based photographer sucks out the color of her usually moody prints for a by-the-numbers-Goth (though no less beautiful) exhibition.

* "Northern Exposures: Social Change and Sexuality in Swedish CInema, 1913-2010" @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St). Wow, sounds good to me! Long-spanning scope to this festival, but a lot of jewels buried in there too. Some of my picks:
- "The Girl Who Played With Fire" (dir. Daniel Alfredson, 2009)
- "Prison" (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1949)
- "I Am Curious (Yellow)" (dir. Vilgot Sjoman, 1967)
- "Kisses & Hugs" (dir. Jonas Cornell, 1967)
- "Sebbe" (dir. Babak Najafi, 2010)
Full festival details and showtimes here. THRU MAY 4

* "Kick-Ass" (dir. Matthew Vaughn, 2010) screenings in wide release. It takes exceedingly unique circumstances for me to hype a mainstream film, but I've been digging "Kick-Ass" since I caught the 1st trailer way way back, w/ Chloe Moretz doing just what the title says. I mean, have you SEEN the trailer, where she slo-mo leapfrogs over a table and double-kicks the dude in the chest, nabbing his gun and firing it into the guys behind him? Think of the smartest high-school awkward-funny film you've ever seen, but extremely violent. I don't even mind that Nick Cage is in this! And McLovin too, for added enticement.

* Beach Fossils + Total Slacker + Air Waves @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Friday is like the night for newbies to the indie Brooklyn-area scene. This is my pick: bliss-pop by Air Waves, stoner-pop by Total Slacker, and the maddest, dopest surf-pop you've ever experienced, ever, by Beach Fossils. I hope y'r ready to dance!

* Real Estate w/ Family Portrait @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$9. My 2nd pick for dope music: this is the Ridgewood scene, surf-psychedelia from Family Portrait and Real Estate's knockout pop-surf summery haze. I'd totally be at this if the Bruar Falls show (above) wasn't already so essential. w/ Big Troubles

* Pterodactyl + Fiasco @ Death By Audio / 149 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p$6. Pick #3 for dope music, now on the noisier end of the spectrum. Guitar mayhem from Fiasco and the trundling, riff-spewing, falsetto-spitting Pterodactyl, prepared to incite mosh-pits and all that. w/ psych-rockers Dinowalrus.

* "All That! Mega '90s Dance Party @ Coco 66 / 66 Greenpoint Ave (G to Greenpoint), 10p/FREE. Annnnnd to cap off your night of Wsburg indie rock, head to this most-essential dance party, courtesy of the fiercest DJs Peggy Wang (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) + Shirley Braha. All the 'alt-90s, hi-nrg, eurodance' you can take — and I hope they play "How Bizarre"! Kick-ass!

SATURDAY
* Joel Shapiro @ The Pace Gallery / 534 W 25th St. I've always thought of Shapiro's heavily formed stacked boxes as graceful and architectural, spanning and exploring the greater space they occupy. This suite of new works takes that notion further: painted wood planar shapes suspended from the walls, floor and ceiling in like exploded balletic motion.

* Karel Funk @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Funk's deceptively simple C-print portraiture goes a long way into our discomfit level, in that the subjects, set against stark backdrops, are never looking at us.

* Jennifer Poon "A Temporary Space" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. I'm really digging Poon's roughly figurative watercolors, composed of fragmented paper and, in her new show, acting more as an installation than a bunch of wall-based works.

* "Sebbe" (dir. Babak Najafi, 2010) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre (part of "Northern Exposures"), 9:15p. A challenging neorealist film set in a Gothenberg housing complex and centered on a junk-collecting boy. The debut full-length from the Iranian-born Najafi.

* The Beets + German Measles @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 10:30p/$7. The programming at this show would make an ace mixtape for art-music lovers: Eternal Summers and German Measles deliver the catchy refrains and good vibes before The Beets bring the roof down w/ their three-part harmonies, trashcan beats, and surf-inflected refrains.

SUNDAY
* Nancy Spero, A Public Commemoration of Her Life and Work @ Cooper Union / 7 E 7th St (6/RW to Astor Place), 3p. Feat. Kiki Smith, Donna De Salvo, Hans Ulrich Obrist and others in talks on the exceedingly influential 20th- and 21st-C artist, whose encompassing oeuvre — from her early 'Black Paintings' and 'War Series' to her figure-imbued scroll works and fantastic later paintings — explored Feminism and Postmodernism w/ a pervasive personal attitude and emotion. She was the linchpin, too, of Chiara Clemente's moving doc "Our City Dreams", the engaging, approachable matriarch of the five NY-based women artists.

* "Woman of the Lake" (dir. Kiju Yoshida, 1966) @ Japan Society (part of "Mad, Bad...& Dangerous to Know"), 6:30p. This sounds like a combination of Michelangelo Antonioni — the hazy, somnambulant journey w/ unfulfilled sexuality — and Shinya Tsukamoto's "A Snake of June", though I wonder if Tsukamoto took reference from Yoshida's film?

* North Highlands + The Charming Youngsters @ Glasslands / 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Lots of earnest folk-tinged indie rock tonight, headlined by L Magazine's "10 Bands You Need to Know 2010" winner North Highlands.

MONDAY
* Darlings + The Sneaks @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. If you're like me and can't get enuff of Darlings' breezy, jangly-guitars indie-pop, it gets even better w/ inclusion of New Zealand's Casio-pop quartet The Sneaks. w/ possible BBQ early, I hear, so don't sleep on this!

TUESDAY
* Knyfe Hyts @ Death By Audio / 149 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p. Massive lineup at this show, incl Xray Eyeballs and Telecult Powers, but the draw are the headliners, Brooklyn's sharp-edged no-wavers Knyfe Hyts in their original lineup.

CURRENT SHOWS
* "Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Utagawa Kuniyoshi" @ Japan Society / 333 E 47th St (456 to Grand Central, 6 to 51st, E/V to Lex/53rd). Tattooed dudes fighting giant octopi, tigers, massive spiders, uh crocodile-sharks? Women too! As many gorgeous color woodblock prints of "Woman in a Hilltop Teahouse", there seems to be its equivalent "Woman Taking Down a Marauding Dragon Spirit" — or something like that. And if you get this 'pulp-comics' vibe from the lot — or you manga lovers, you see a lot of familiar images — that's b/c Utagawa-san was endlessly influential to loads of today's artists. These works hail from like 150 years ago but it's a good glimpse at pop culture of the time, tall-tales, debauchery, heroism (there is a sequence from the classical "Water Margin" on display) and poetry. Plus a lot of super trippy stuff, like Kabuki actors and this gigantic cat spirit, or, uh "Octopus Games", which has Utagawa-san replacing humans w/ dancing octopi in a festive scene (there's one like this too only it's got a bunch of cats instead of octopi). I can't make this stuff up, I'm not that creative.

* Susan Philipsz "I See a Darkness" @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. I'll admit, I wondered going into this show how a sound-artist — though Philipsz is the PREMIERE sound-artist — could carry a ground-level solo show. I mean, it's a room full of speakers. But she does, in a truly brilliant sculptural sound journey, converting the main gallery into a cavernous lair filled w/ her voice, such a rush each time it streams out the speakers that, like Odysseus's men, we're transfixed through her choral refrains. Absolutely brilliant.
+ Siobhan Hapaska "The Nose that Lost its Dog". But what to counter the wonderfully ethereal Philipsz show? Hapaska's earthy, cheekily-titled mixed media sculpture. Coyote pelts (and glass eyes) and an entire upturned olive tree are just some of her organic v. machinelike materials, coming from her residency at Glasgow Sculpture Studios.

* Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. A full-frontal assault of Abakanowicz's deconstructed-human sculptures in cast aluminum from the late-'80s march toward the windows facing 25th St, an artillery of smaller-to-larger than lifesize torsos and legs. It's a pleasantly off-putting experience, as is the rest of the show, composed of her newest pieces (a creepy morgue-like space of cast-burlap appendages, a wall of crudely welded steel bird 'paper-airplanes'), incl a massive cast-alumimum seated figure, run through w/ poles.

* James Welling "Glass House" @ David Zwirner / 525 W 19th St. So Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House in New Canaan CT is SO DONE, not quite ubiquitous but well-photographed, but Welling's luminous experimentation makes the experience of these familiar images fun. Like the field of snow beneath a red-Jello sky, this wonderful prismatic scene w/ a rainbow cutting through the lower centre of the image, and a landscape scene bisected into warm autumnal and bluish deep-sea colors.

* Antony Gormley "Breathing Room II" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. This is a terribly disturbing experience, this exhibition. Gormley, whose 'Event Horizon' 2doz+ bronze sculptures you've probably seen (or at least read about) hanging out on Flatiron-area rooftops, composed this 'light' sculptural piece in a very, very dark room of the gallery. It fills the space, to the extent that you have to hug the wall and shimmy around it. Due to its glow, your eyes never adjust to the surrounding space. Cautionary for both agoraphobes and claustrophobes.

* "Great Photographs of the 20th Century: Staged and Startled" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. I mean, where to begin here, in this century's-worth of brilliant photography? The classic Richard Avedon "Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent" (enamoring and huge) or the Avedon "Marella Agnelli" from three decades earlier? The lonely Harry Callahan, echoing Di Chirico (and if I may, the beginning of Michelangelo Antonioni's "Red Desert")? The singular Irving Penn (of his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in Marrakech) and the surreal Lee Friedlander prints?

* Guo Hongwei "Things" @ Chambers Fine Art / 522 W 19th St. Isolated or fragmented articles, in discreet arrangements and painted against expanses of white.

* Eric White, Nicola Verlato, Fulvio di Piazza "Three-Handed" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. Whoever said figurative oil painting was dead is an asshole. LeVine Gallery's 'Pop Surrealism' is the real deal, as is the case w/ these three talented painters. di Piazza's skews the most fantasy-like, wetly green living garden-sculpture beasts/landscapes in a near-future scenario. Verlato's tightly composed scenarios of race and cultural struggle are all-too-familiar surreal manifestations. White's broad monochrome crowds feel urgent and cinematic at the same time.

* "If My Soul Had A Shape..." @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. How you do a group show 101: check Paula Cooper Gallery. I couldn't decide my favorite shape-conscious piece here, the four-array of Kelley Walker cast-chocolate, spinning disco balls; or the Carl Andre aluminum ingot stacked pyramid. But maybe beyond these (and a superb brushstroked Sol LeWitt and a fantastic 'removed' Dan Walsh) is the essential McDonalds 'Orange Drink'-colored Donald Judd painting, a textural mix of plywood, painted sandpaper, and obsidian-glossy black mirror.

* Josef Bolf "The Wolf" @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Inky, disturbing paintings of figures in desolate urban environments from this superstar young Czech artist. Think Di Chirico's settings, only set in formerly Communist Czech Republic: parking garages and housing blocks, occupied by solitary characters or pairs, offset by close-ups of the artist as a long-haired, androgynous character, eyes blacked out. At least half the works here look either decayed by rust or stained w/ blood. All said, kick-ass.

* Gabriel Vormstein "Baby abc" @ Casey Kaplan / 525 W 21st St. Tasty stuff: Vormstein blew up and colored enormous Egon Schiele portraits on newsprint backdrops.

* Keita Sugiura @ Max Protetch / 511 W 22nd St. Super subtle C-prints of cloud formations, whitish-blue rectangles that seem to shimmer and change color depending on your POV to each piece. I'm not sure how much of Sugiura's compositions are chance-related, but he achieves something pretty cool here, and totally mellow.

* André Butzer "Nicht furchten: Don't be scared!" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Super-sized gooey oil abstracts at Metro Pictures — are we at the right gallery? Oh yes, and why is it this strong photo-showing joint has perhaps the dopest abstract show in town? Think if Kazuo Shiragawa was into pop colors. Oh I'm taking it there: think blow-ups of finger-paint renderings, layers and layers of impasto and rivulets of congealed paint, whole tube's-worth spend on lines and curves. A lovely all-black piece must have like a million gallons of the glistening stuff just hanging out there, waiting to pull you in.

* Liz Craft "Past and Present" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. A sort of 'best-of' from the super creative figurative sculptor, from her gorgeous bronze "Tree Lady" to a distorted field of checkered fiberglass and an outsized porcelain egg in a bronze baby carriage.

* Jonathan Prince + Wang Tao @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 535 W 24th St 2nd Fl. Another deft pairing from the gallery, in Price's seductively rendered polished granite forms (think Jean Arp, but as huge sculpture) against Wang's vivid acrylics on antique Chinese paper.

* "Pastiche" @ The Pace Gallery / 545 W 22nd St. AKA a group show of a bunch of colorful stuff slopped together. The roster is only heavyweights but that doesn't mean it can't quickly veer into nauseous eye-numbing territory. I preferred the older works as a whole (a fine watery Jim Dine, a strong-lined Jean Dubuffet, a Cubist sewn-fabric Lucas Samaris) to the newer models (gratuitous Keith Tyson and much as it pains me to write I cannot get down w/ James Rosenquist's motorized canvases).

* Barbara Kruger "The Globe Shrinks" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. One of the most exciting shows I've seen this year! An incredible approx-10-min video installation, people throwing out declarations, intercut w/ glimpses of violence, disembodied voices and Kruger's signature running sans serif type commands. Even the funny parts — and there are some jokes, of the Richard Prince type — are unsettling.

* Donald Baechler @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Lots of fun Baechler's having: massive pastel-toned acrylics of colorful balls and cartoonish flowers on drop-cloth 'canvases', plus a set of gesso and mixed media flowers on collaged paper.

* Kim In Sook "Inside Out" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. The astute art-goer surely remembers Kim's scintillating large C-print "Saturday Night" from the 2008 Armory Show, that jewel-toned voyeuristic look into the happenings at a hotel (incl the artist's self-portrait as a 'hanging victim'). That's on display here, in her 1st US solo show, plus a lot of her other signature outside-looking-in captures of metropolitan life.

* "In Praise of Shadows", Dirk Braeckman & Bill Henson @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. A moody, sexy photo duet, of figures and empty spaces. I preferred the inky grayscale of Braeckman's the best, whether the flutter of a curtain or the mist-lined scene of a naked woman's back on a bed, to Henson's dusky landscapes filled w/ Ryan McGinley's style of androgynous youth.

* Eric Swenson @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Perhaps you remember Swenson's unnerving installation from the 2004 Whitney Biennial, a porcelain-skinned young deer thrashing against an afghan rug? That's here, along w/ a few other deer in varying states, incl the new piece "Ne Plus Ultra", tucked away in its own gallery, a completely disturbing half-decomposed carcass that I caution you against: photos don't do the real thing justice, it is intense.
+ Beatriz Milhazes "Gold Rose Series". A good palate cleanser after Swenson's disturbing output, colorful woodblock and screenprints of geometric and curvy abstract shapes, named after seasonings.

LAST CHANCE
* Nari Ward "LIVESupport" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. An intense multilinear solo offering from the artist, incl. enlarged X-ray images bordered w/ ink-covered shoes, ink-stained church pews modded into like a divided wheelchair, an entire ambulance w/ whited-out signage and fogged up windows. The more subtle works include vintage photography that Ward recontextualized w/ black ink and the short-film 'Fathers and Sons', which creates a palpable tension b/w its long silences and layered, rushed dialogue.

* Ross Rudel "Burgeon" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Rudel's flexible mastery of organic sculpture (sans the gorgeous bronzed 'Ouroboros 2', the 1st in that media for him, most of the works are various woods) is tempered by his thoughtful acrylic resin 'collages' on wood, which incorporate carrion blossoms into lush nighttime scenes. He handles abstraction well (the walnut-carved 'Ouroboros' and the disquietingly damp-looking 'Phantom', a knot of resin-slickened bed linen on wood) but I'll bet you've never seen Los Angeles river algae handled quite like his shamanic 'Green Man Resurrection'.
+ Todd Hebert. Paintings and works on paper in a hyperrealistic style that somehow, probably due to the lighting (cityscapes, christmas lights etc) and the use of blurring, become cleverly abstract, in a fogged-window, "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" sort of way.

* Ryan McGinley "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" @ Team Gallery / 83 Grand St. Much as I can get down w/ McGinley's ecstatically-tinged soft-focus C-prints of naked youth romping about in fields just after a spring rain (sounds great, right?), I really dig the starkness of this b&w portrait show, part of the 150 subjects the photographer chose and snapped from around the world over a two-year period. Perhaps strains of Robert Mapplethorpe run in these nude, generally androgynous youths (bare breasts and cocks aside), but Mapplethorpe was before my time; I am experiencing McGinley NOW and I find a freshness to it. Now, his subjects aren't entirely anonymous — I picked out Rila Fukushima straight off the bat, but then again how many other enamoring platinum blond, high-cheekboned Japanese women does one know? — but they're suitably 'clean-slate'. Roughly half have some piercing or tattoo, or several, and many are lean to the point of 'waifish' or 'gangly'. But there's a lot of beautiful moments here, like Rila's, like India's clasped hands, Chloe (who could be a young French starlet), Sal (whose sculptural contortion nearly hides his wrist-brace), Owl (either that's the girl's 'name' or the name of the wide-eyed bird on her ass), Janelle (another classic starlet's visage) and Christina's lithe physique and gentle Afro crown.

* Robert Adams "Summer Nights, Walking" @ Matthew Marks Gallery / 523 W 24th St. The gallery writes that Adams' nocturnal landscape photography (this series is from '76-'82) 'vacillates between quiet foreboding and tranquil domesticity', but I'd take that one step further and call some of it tipping toward voyeurism. But don't mistake me: they're gorgeous, this lot, including the slightly creepy ones: a barely lit porch, a rather striking garage door, covered by the massive shadow of an unseen tree (trees in particular and foliage in general figure into most of Adams' works). Another fab instance: shrubbery in the foreground backlit by the flooding glare of headlights, as if someone enacted their revenge on his sneaking lens. A few others show a faraway cityscape caught b/w the shadowy trees and the multitudinously gray night sky, which is the closest to me to a warm summer's night.

* Joseph Smolinski @ Mixed Greens Gallery / 531 W 26th St. Smolinski continues his dialogue on American wildlife w/ infringing technologies w/ these creepy mobile phone towers, disguised in his detailed works on paper as trees. You'd better believe the bison, kodiaks, wolves, woodpeckers (and non-native beasts, like an elephant) know what the jig is and do everything in their power to dismantle said shady devices. I especially dug "Disconnected - Beaver Dam", where said animal grins toward the viewer liked 'don't worry about us, mate, we've got it under control'.

* R. Crumb "The Bible Illuminated" @ David Zwirner / 519 W 19th St. This is indeed the entire Crumb book of pen & ink woodcut-like drawings based on the Book of Genesis, but just b/c you've seen the whole thing laid out on the gallery walls doesn't mean the publication deserves a 2nd look. I was a bit skeptical going in, that the show would reveal everything and leave the publication irrelevant, but Crumb's work — each and every one of these text and image pages — is so lastingly detailed that, if you're engaged w/ it, you need something portable to refer back to, multiple times, to fully appreciate it.

* "The Drawings of Bronzino" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). It is my duty, as curator of my LIST, to inform you of current dope cultural events, no matter the degree to which I can conceivably explain them. Hence is the case w/ this brilliant exhibition of Agnolo Bronzino at the Met, nearly all the lush, sensual drawings attributed to him (60 here), the leading Italian Mannerist. The Times' Holland Cotter and The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl, amid others surely, have already done a far more eloquent job than I'll ever muster. SO, I will do my very best of being Bronzino's hype-man and encourage you, nay, entreat you to this very essential, very beautiful show. The vast majority of these drawings were made in black or red chalk on paper (sometimes prepared w/ a color wash), though Bronzino took what sounds to me like a cumbersome medium and totally elevated it. His lines are masterful, confident, tracing out figures then shading in their supple musculature. Richard Hawkins, for one, would have a field day deconstructing the fleshy amorousness in the posing nude youths. Bronzino depicts women, too, incl. personal fave 'Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View', whose exacting title belies the riveting rendering, her downward-cast eyes, the highlight on her cheekbone. He also does draping, which by that I mean like folded cloth, and if that sounds simplistic you need to take a look at his drawings, the incredible capture of shadows. A few 'modellos' are included in the show, drawings augmented by 16th C. ink and washes that are jarringly intense when seen alongside his singular, concentrated figure studies. And while I've just skimmed the surface her, trust me when I say Bronzino is where it's at. (ENDS SUNDAY)