Yearly Archives: 2011

CIRCO

A Mexican family takes a hard look at its hard life in CIRCO

CIRCO (Aaron Schock, 2010)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
Opens Friday, April 1
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.firstrunfeatures.com/circo

Setting out to make a film about Mexican corn farmers, Aaron Schock was captivated by a traveling circus and instead decided to tell the fascinating story of the Ponce family. For more than a hundred years, seven generations of Ponces have operated a small circus that makes its way through rural Mexico, delivering such old-fashioned spectacles as contortionism, tightrope walkers, clowns, tiger taming, aerial acts, and the Globe of Death, primarily performed by members of the Ponce clan, including five children. They do everything themselves, from hammering in stakes to put the big top up to driving through local villages announcing their arrival, handing out free tickets to youngsters in the hopes that their parents will buy tickets in order to take them to the show. But what Schock reveals is that the Ponces’ Gran Circo Mexico is not a feel-good, DIY tale of a happy family living and working together in harmony; instead, Tino and his wife, Ivonne, are clashing over their very future. Whereas Tino is dedicated to keeping the family tradition alive, Ivonne wants to have a more normal life, with the kids going to school and making friends. While Tino has passed down the tricks of the trade, most of the Ponces cannot read or write and have received no formal education. And when his brother considers leaving the circus to be with a settled woman, Tino feels the strain of his responsibility even further, forced to decide between the family legacy or starting a whole new life. In his debut feature-length documentary, Schock, serving as director, producer, camera operator, cowriter, and sound man, portrays the difficult lives the Ponces lead, with little money and dwindling audiences, allowing the various family members to tell their moving stories while they prepare for the next performance. Just as Schock doesn’t take sides, audiences will understand Tino’s and Ivonne’s conflicting positions and will feel for both of them in this compelling study of a family in flux. Named Best Documentary at the 2010 Hamptons International Film Festival, Circo opens tonight at the IFC Center; Schock will be on hand to talk about the film Friday and Saturday nights at the 7:50 and 9:40 screenings and Sunday at 4:10.

CHINESE CINEMA CLUB: THREE TIMES

Shu Qi and Chang Chen enjoy a different kind of three-way in THREE TIMES

THREE TIMES (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005)
Museum of Chinese in America
215 Centre St. between Howard & Grand Sts.
Friday, April 1, $10, 7:00
212-619-4785
www.mocanyc.org

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s gorgeous Three Times is an evocative, poetic trilogy of tales about life and love in Taiwan, all starring the mesmerizing Shu Qi (Hou’s Millennium Mambo) and the stalwart Chang Chen (Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 and Happy Together). In A Time for Love, set in 1966 and featuring a repeated soft-rock soundtrack, Chen, about to leave for military service, meets May, a pool-hall girl, and promises to write to her even though they have only just met and barely said a word to each other. When he gets a furlough, he goes to the pool hall only to find that she’s on the move, so with Zen-like cool he tries to track her down. A Time for Freedom, a silent film with interstitial dialogue and period music, takes place in an elegant brothel in 1911, where Mr. Chang regularly visits a beautiful courtesan. But while she dreams of him buying out her contract and marrying her, he seems intent on helping out another couple instead. Hou concludes the trilogy with A Time for Youth, set in fast-paced modern-day Taipei, as Jing, an epileptic singer, and Zhen, a motorcycle-riding photographer, embark on a passionate, nearly wordless affair that has serious consequences for their significant others. Three Times is a rare treat for cineastes, an intelligent though overly long study of relationships between men and women in a changing Taiwan over the last hundred years, focusing on character, time and place, and the art of filmmaking itself. Three Times is screening April 1 at 7:00 as part of the Museum of Chinese in America’s Chinese Cinema Club and will be followed by a discussion with editor Leo Goldsmith, moderated by artist and curator Daryl Chin.

MoMA PS1: SATURDAY SESSIONS AND MORE

Visitors can exhibit their success and failures at PS 1’s latest Saturday Session (David Lamelas, “Limit of a Projection I,” spotlight in darkened room, 1967, collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2009)

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Saturday Sessions free with museum suggested donation of $10 (free with MoMA ticket within thirty days of MoMA visit)
Museum open Thursday through Monday from 12 noon – 6:00 pm
718-784-2084
www.ps1.org

Since the beginning of the year, MoMA PS1 has been hosting “Saturday Sessions,” a series of programs on Saturday afternoons with guest curators putting together special events. On April 2, Triple Canopy and Dalkey Archive Press present “An Afternoon of Failure,” celebrating the release of the Review of Contemporary Fiction’s “Failure” issue, with “attempted readings” by Eileen Myles, Helen DeWitt, Sam Frank, Travis Jeppesen, and Keith Gessen, “mangled covers of pop songs” by US Girls, “a malfunctioning tribute” to American literary classics by Elevator Repair Service, and Derek Lucci trying to resurrect William Gaddis. These works of fiction offer a direct counterpoint to several of the current exhibits at PS1, which turn the concept of participatory reality art and so-called truth inside out and upside down.

In “Only the Lonely” (through August 8), New York-based photographer and filmmaker Laurel Nakadate puts herself front and center as she meets strangers in parking lots and on the road and goes back to these older men’s rooms, taking pictures and videos with them, often involving her shedding much of her clothing. Laced with an overriding fear of potential danger that never happens, Nakadate’s work comments on femininity, loneliness, sexuality, and desire, centering on human contact that is disappearing in this age of social media. The exhibition also features the premiere of her overwhelming “365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears,” comprising photographs Nakadate took of herself crying every day for a year. The pictures line both sides of a long hallway and continue into a back room; just as we all find ourselves watching intensely personal videos posted on YouTube, it is difficult to take your eyes off of these intimate, private, yet clearly staged portraits. Nakadate might bare her body, but she does it with a knowing, tongue-in-cheek candor; interestingly, in her more recent work, she is no longer the main subject, instead directing other women in short films and feature-length narratives.

Laurel Nakadate catalogs her tears and more in intimate exhibition at PS1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The viewer becomes more than just the subject in “The Talent Show” (through April 4), a collection of multimedia installations and performance pieces in which some artists let others help create the work, from making a drawing for Adrian Piper’s “Information” to coming up with slogans for Gillian Wearing’s “Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say” to placing the viewer at the center of the work, where they can stand in the spotlight of David Lamelas’s “Limit of a Projection I,” act for the camera while being beamed onto a screen in Peter Campus’s “Shadow Projection,” or posing atop Piero Manzoni’s “Base Magica — Scultura vivente.” Amie Siegel combines YouTube videos of people singing the same song, while Sophie Calle investigates the men and women listed in an address book she found. Presaging reality television, Hannah Wilke documented the last two and a half years of her battle with cancer on film, resulting in a stirring sixteen-channel installation that holds nothing back. PS1 pays tribute to other early female video pioneers in “Modern Women: Single Channel,” comprising seminal work by such cutting-edge artists as Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, VALIE EXPORT, Joan Jonas, Pipilotti Rist, and Carloee Schneeman, many of whom frequently turned the cameras on themselves well before there was any such thing as American Idol, Survivor, or The Amazing Race. And finally, Feng Mengbo gives the controls over to visitors for “Long March: Restart,” an enormous two-walled video game that mixes Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter II with Chinese militaristic propaganda imagery, allowing the player to succeed or fail in full view of others.

ALMAGUL MENLIBAYEVA: TRANSOXIANA DREAMS

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art
547 West 27th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through May 14, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Catalog Release and Artist Talk: Thursday, March 31, free, 6:30
212-244-4320
www.priskajuschkafineart.com

In Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva’s latest video, “Transoxiana Dreams,” on view through May 14 at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art in Chelsea, a young child dreams of her father driving through the Aralkum, searching for the sea. The vast wasteland was created by controversial Soviet irrigation policies, creating a desert where the Oxus River once fed into the Aral Sea. Menlibayeva captures the indigenous people living in the arid area, including naked women who pose with the bodies of foxes by rusting fishing vessels, wearing Soviet military hats and covering their private parts with fried eggs and big black circles, as if censored by a nonexistent government. She compares the dilapidated metal structures to camels (the ships of the desert), left to rot throughout a region that once thrived along the Silk Road. She also adds a pair of realistic fake legs to a woman, turning her into a centaurlike creature, evoking the ancient Greeks’ confusion of finding nomads on horseback and thinking they were a single entity. The exhibition features eighteen prints in addition to the compelling, surreal film. As part of the Dialogues in Asian Contemporary Art programming for Asian Contemporary Art Week, Menlibayeva will be at the gallery tonight for the release of the exhibition catalog and to give an artist talk on the fascinating project.

TWI-NY TALK: BEN KATCHOR

Since 1988, Brooklyn-born artist Ben Katchor has been exploring urban decay and disappearing aspects of culture and society in such comic strips as Hotel & Farm, The Jew of New York, and Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer as well as in such musical theater pieces as The Rosenbach Company and The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower. He focuses on old-fashioned characters who wander through cities mumbling and grumbling about the way things were, seeking out blue-plate specials and marveling at old signage from a bygone era. Katchor has just released his latest book, The Cardboard Valise (Pantheon, March 2011, $25.95), a collection of “picture-stories” published in Metropolis magazine that detail eccentric xenophile Emile Delilah’s surreal existence, including his journey to the Tensint Islands, an exotic land known for its rest-room ruins and boardwalk ice-cream licker. The book comes with fold-out carrying flaps, mimicking Emile’s valise, which is filled with an array of things, as is Katchor’s book. On April 2 at 2:00, Katchor will present A Checkroom Romance at the New School Presents Noir festival; the free musical production features text and images by Katchor and music by Mark Mulcahy. On April 9, Katchor will be signing copies of his books at the Pantheon booth at the MoCCA Festival of Comic Art at the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington Ave. and 26th St. Katchor recently discussed travel and the future of the book in our latest twi-ny talk.

Ben Katchor’s latest collection is another genius examination of eccentricity in a surreal, old-fashioned world (photo by Jeff Goodman)

twi-ny: Your previous book, The Beauty Supply District, came out more than ten years ago. Why such a long wait?

Ben Katchor: I got involved in working on music-theater productions over the past ten years. In collaboration with composer Mark Mulcahy, we produced four shows: The Slugbearers of Kayrol Island, The Rosenbach Company, A Checkroom Romance, Memorial City, and, premiering in October 2011, Up from the Stacks. All along, I continued my weekly and monthly picture-stories but didn’t feel the need to compile them into a book — until now.

twi-ny: In The Cardboard Valise, Emile Delilah packs a heavy suitcase and heads to the Tensint Islands. You’ve also taken readers on a journey to Kayrol Island. When you go on vacation, do you prefer bustling cities, dusty towns, or exotic islands? Are there certain items that you always pack that you don’t necessarily really need, as Emile does?

BK: I like cities and the countryside of Europe. I tend to bring along piles of research material that I rarely get to use.

twi-ny: One of the major themes of your work has always involved disappearing parts of culture — outdated factories, old-fashioned signage, and people lamenting the way daily life is changing, missing how things were. With the growing success of electronic books, there are some sounding the death knell for the physical book itself. What are your thoughts on ebooks, specifically as it relates to the kind of picture-stories that you tell? Are you afraid the physical book might be a disappearing part of American culture?

BK: The repurposing of physical books for electronic distribution is an awkward and limited activity, mainly for archival purposes. The possibilities of electronic storytelling go far beyond the confines of the printed book and I look forward to seeing what develops. Physical books will be around for a long time — I see them used as window and door props, and as structures to support laptop computers. I’m used to looking at picture-stories on large high-resolution screens; modern printed books seem to me like an unfortunate reduction of the information in the original digital file. The publishing industry began to dematerialize books with the introduction of the disposable paperback — the ebook is the logical expression of this impulse.

TAYLOR KUFFNER: TROMPONGAN GEDE / ANSAMBEL GENDER WAYANG

Zemi17’s GamelaTrons bring meditative music to Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

FACING EAST
Sundaram Tagore Gallery
547 West 27th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through April 2, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-677-4520
www.sundaramtagore.com
www.zemi17.net
gamelatron slideshow

Since March 4, the northern edge of the Chelsea art district has been alive with the sound of an unusual kind of music, and this is the last week to be drawn in by its meditative mystery and magic. The rhythmic chiming is coming from both inside and outside the Sundaram Tagore Gallery on West 27th St., part of the “Facing East” group show focusing on works by contemporary artists from Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India, and Uzbekistan. Interspersed among such paintings as Hiroshi Senju’s “Waterfall” and Natvar Bhavsar’s “Truptya” is a pair of site-specific audiovisual installations by American artist, composer, and musician Aaron Taylor Kuffner, aka Zemi17, who spent several years in Indonesia studying traditional Balinese and Javanese music. In the back room is “Ansambel Gender Wayang,” what Kuffner refers to as “the world’s first fully robotic Gamelan Orchestra,” with a quartet of percussive GamelaTrons, as well as a sharp-toothed turtle, performing a series of computerized scores that allow visitors to watch the various hammers banging up and down. Meanwhile, “Trompongan Gede,” consisting of dozens of gongs, bells, hammers, mallets, and lights placed throughout the rest of the gallery, play numerous compositions that can be both cacophonous and soothing, restful and energizing. “The reactions vary widely,” Kuffner told twi-ny. “Some people are surprised or even frightened; others are elated and seem to turn into curious children just after hearing a couple gongs ring out.” The show continues through April 2.

Developed with the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR), the GamelaTrons come with a spacey sci-fi back story that you don’t need to know about to enjoy the sounds, but in case you’re curious, here’s how Zemi17 describes it: “In the not too distant future, after massive climate change has transformed the earth and made human life as we know it impossible, our descendants — an ethereal synthesis of our human consciousness and highly advanced robot technology — discover a set of bronze percussive instruments buried in the earth. The sounds from striking these gongs and bells awaken memories and dreams from an era long past. These future beings develop a simple set of networked mechanical mallets that mimic the movements of the human musicians they have seen in their dreams. The songs this robot orchestra plays tell joyful, sad, bittersweet, wise, and wondering stories from the time of the human race’s great transformation.”