this week in literature

undergroundzero festival

A FESTIVAL OF THEATER ARTISTS
P.S. 122
150 First Ave. at East Ninth St.
Tuesday, July 6, through Sunday, July 25
Tickets: $15-$20
212-352-3101
www.ps122.org/undergroundzero

The fourth annual undergroundzero festival, presented by East River Commedia as a place where artists are encouraged to experiment as part of a creative summer lab experience, returns to P.S. 122 on July 6 for three weeks of innovative, unique, and rather strange theater. Adding an international flavor, this year’s productions come from Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Romania, Wales, and New York. Among the shows are Fabiana Iacozilli’s ASPETTANDO MIL (WAITING FOR NIL), a wedding drama inspired by WATING FOR GODOT; Alexandru Mihaescu’s futuristic THE CONCRETES (AFTER VLADIMIR SOROKIN); Dermot Bolger’s timely THE PARTING GLASS, about Ireland’s attempt to qualify for the 2010 World Cup; John Wesley Zielmann playing Andy Warhol in FOREVER ART; Eliza Bent, Jasmin Hoo, and Elizabeth Stevenson’s multimedia BLUE DRESS REDUCTION; FROM DAWN TILL NIGHT (THE EARTH IS UNINHABITABLE LIKE THE MOON), Dangerous Ground’s adaptation of Fassbinder’s apocalyptic IN A YEAR WITH 13 MOONS; and Performance Lab 115’s THE RING CYCLE: Part 1, set in the world of professional wrestling. You’ll also be able to find Butoh, Henry Miller, magic, James Dean, suicide clubs, Jean Cocteau, a vegan’s foray into the world of meat, Jayne Mansfield, burlesque, Dwight Eisenhower, a Zen garden, and other interesting and unusual themes and characters. In addition, the festival includes three “playgroundzero” staged readings, the most intriguing being Saviana Stanescu’s POLANSKI, in which Grant Neale plays the controversial Polish film director interviewing himself. Every Tuesday night will feature a “commonground” theatrical cultural talk show, and on Fridays at 11:00 the “latenightzero” dance party gets the weekend going in style.

BRONX BOOK FAIR

Bronx Museum of the Arts
1040 Grand Concourse at 166th St.
Sunday, June 27, 12 noon – 5:00 pm
Admission: free
www.bronxmuseum.org

The Bronx Museum of the Arts celebrates small presses at its annual book fair, which this year includes children’s workshops, panel discussions, DJ sets from Wepa Man Victor Vargas, open studios from artists-in-residence Niang Ibrahima and Seydi Samba from Senegal, poetry readings, an ARTfarm site-specific installation, a film screening, and more. Currently the museum is exhibiting “After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy,” “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968,” “Lobby-for-the-Time-Being” by Acconci Studio, and “Urban Archives: Happy Together — Asian and Asian-American Art from the Permanent Collection.”

WORD FOR WORD: SAMANTHA BEE

Bryant Park Reading Room
42nd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, June 9, 12:30
Series continues through September 25
Admission: free
www.bryantpark.org

If Samantha Bee’s debut literary effort, I KNOW I AM, BUT WHAT ARE YOU?, has even a hint of the snarky sarcasm, witty cynicism, and no-holds-barred bawdy humor of her DAILY SHOW reports, her first book is destined for greatness. Over the course of a dozen personal essays, Bee, who is married to DAILY SHOW veteran Jason Jones, takes on “Man-Witch,” “Old Lady Hands,” “Penis Envy,” and “Gurr-Bulls,” among other strange topics. In the opening piece, “Camp Summer Fun,” she dissects her family and their penchant for divorce: “Every once in a while,” she begins, “I think about what my life would be like if my parents had stayed together and not separated while I was still a baby. Obviously, it would involve a regular commute to the maximum-security penitentiary to visit whichever of them had committed the murder that signaled the official end to their marriage.” Bee will be in Bryant Park on June 9 at 12:30 to discuss her book with comedian Ophira Eisenberg as part of the Word to Word series, which also features such upcoming authors as Kelly Cutrone on June 16, Colson Whitehead on June 23, Jennifer Egan and Jane Mendelsohn on July 7, Sebastian Junger on July 14, Gary Shteyngart on July 28, Mona Simpson on August 18, and Rick Moody on August 25.

GRAPHIC HEROES, MAGIC MONSTERS

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, “Morozumi Masakiyo Kills Himself in Battle,” color woodblock print, ca. 1848 (photo © Trustees of the British Museum)


JAPANESE PRINTS BY UTAGAWA KUNIYOSHI FROM THE ARTHUR R. MILLER COLLECTION
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Through June 13
Admission: $12 (free Friday nights 6:00 – 9:00)
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

With the continuing success of manga and graphic novels in the United States, the Japan Society looks back on the career of master visual storyteller Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) in “Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters.” More than 130 color woodblock prints are on view, depicting samurai warriors, elegant women, lush landscapes, kabuki scenes, and comic images. Among the many exciting action-filled vignettes, based on both history and legend, are “Fight on the Roof of Hōryū Tower,” in which Inuzaka Shino tries to single-handedly evade capture by Inukai Kenpachi and his men, and “Ariō-maru Kills a Giant Octopus,” the valiant warrior determined to escape from the clutches of an enormous mollusk. Water figures prominently in many of Kuniyoshi’s pieces; in “Hatsuhana Prays Under a Waterfall,” Hatsuhana prays to a deity for a cure for her warrior husband’s illness, water cascading onto her head and around her body, while in “Three Women with Umbrellas in a Summer Shower,” a trio of women in blue-and-white kimonos playfully avoid a downpour. Kuniyoshi also created peaceful scenes devoid of bloody battles and gruesome characters, including such serene works as “Rainbow at Surugadai,” “Ships Between Maisaka and Arai,” and “Monk Nichiren in the Snow at Tsukahara.”

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, “Monk Nichiren in the Snow at Tsukahara,” color woodblock print, ca. 1835 (photo © Trustees of the British Museum)

Kuniyoshi shows off his absurdist sense of humor in such prints as “Sparrows Impersonating a Brothel Scene,” “Kabuki Actors as Turtles,” and “Cats Parodying the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō.” In the deluxe catalog that accompanies the exhibit, Neil McGregor, director of the British Museum, where the show was a huge hit, writes, “Kuniyoshi was an extraordinarily gifted artist of great versatility, capable by turns of evoking pathos at the doomed fate of a samurai hero, humour with the antics of animals impersonating humans, seduction by feisty-spirited beauties from Japan’s epic past, and calm contemplation of byways in his native city of Edo.” Indeed, Kuniyoshi was a unique and inventive storyteller, displaying immense skill at creating colorful, entertaining, action-packed, and meditative tales. In conjunction with the exhibit, Hiroki Otsuka has created Samurai Beam, a comic book based on Kuniyoshi’s work.

FIRST SATURDAYS: BROOKLYN CHIC

Ronald K. Brown and his Evidence company are part of First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum on June 5

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, June 5, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

On June 5, the Brooklyn Museum’s monthly First Saturdays program celebrates, well, Brooklyn. And why not? The J. C. Hopkins Biggish Band will be playing at 5:00, Ronald K. Brown’s awesome Evidence a Dance Company will be performing at 5:30 (followed by a Q&A with Brown), chief curator Kevin Stayton will discuss “American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection” at 7:00, Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire will put their dancing shoes on for a screening of Stanley Donen’s FUNNY FACE also at 7:00, Keanan Duffy will give a book club talk on his latest, REBEL, REBEL: ANTI-STYLE, at 9:00, the House of Ninja’s Archie Burnett hosts a vogue dance contest at 9:00, and Friends We Love’s DJ Moni will get everyone’s mojo working at the always hot and sweaty dance party (9:00 – 11:00). All of the exhibitions will be open, including “Kiki Smith: Sojourn,’ “Healing the Wounds of War: The Brooklyn Sanitary Fair of 1864,” and “Body Parts: Ancience Egyptian Fragments and Amulets.” Everything’s free, although some of the events require advance ticketing available an hour ahead of time, and the lines do get long, so be prepared.

WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL

Art and physics combine in unique and unusual ways at World Science Festival

Multiple venues
Admission: free – $30
June 2-6
www.worldsciencefestival.com

The World Science Festival is back, seeking to show people the many wonders of science through lectures, dance, art, music, literature, and other disciplines. High school chemistry and biology might not have been fun, but there are plenty of great things to check out at this annual event. The celebration gets under way June 2 with a gala at Alice Tully Hall featuring Alan Alda, John Lithgow, Rebecca Luker, Yo Yo Ma, and many others honoring genius Stephen W. Hawking and witnessing the world premiere of ICARUS AT THE EDGE OF TIME by Brian Greene, David Henry Hwang, and Philip Glass ($250-$10,000). Through Sunday, a full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope will be on view in Battery Park, along with interactive exhibits and a party scheduled for June 4 (free). The Broad Street Ballroom will be home to “Astronomy’s New Messengers: The Exhibit Listening to the Universe with Gravitational Waves,” where visitors can check out a model LIGO, or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory; it’s also free, as is the panel discussion on June 3 at 6:30. At the Museum of Arts and Design, New York City students will be creating designs using pigmented E. coli (free, 3:00), Margaret S. Livingstone, Patrick Cavanagh, and Jules Feiffer will discuss “Eye Candy: Science, Sight, Art” at NYU’s Kimmel Center ($30, 7:00), the Moth gathers writers, scientists, and artists to tell stories in “Grey Matter” ($25, 7:30), and Alda, Kip Thorne, and Robbert Dijkgraaf talk about “Black Holes and Holographic Worlds” at the Skirball Center ($30, 8:00). Thursday through Sunday at Cedar Lake, the innovative Armitage Done! Dance troupe will stage the New York premiere of THREE THEORIES, a series of high-speed duets that uses the principles of physics in their movements; several performances will be followed by a special talk-back with a physicist ($30).

On Friday, “Food 2.0: Feeding a Hungry World” is at the Baruch Performing Arts Center ($30, 7:00), “The Science of Star Trek” is evaluated at Galapagos ($30, 7:00), and Oliver Sacks and Chuck Close team up for “Strangers in the Mirror” at the Kaye Playhouse ($30, 8:00). On Saturday, mathemagician Arthur Benjamin will dazzle the mind at the New School ($15, 11:00 am), John Hockenberry leads a panel discussion at the New School that goes inside the Large Hadron Collider ($30, 3:00), and Hockenberry will then head for the Skirball Center for “Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace” ($30, 8:00). On Sunday, the World Science Festival Street Fair takes place in Washington Square Park, several astronauts land at the Kimmel Center for “Astronaut Diary: Life in Space” (free, 11:30 am), and ICARUS AT THE EDGE OF TIME will be staged at the Skirball, with live narration by Liev Schreiber and live music by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. ($30, 7:00). And believe it or not, those are only some of the forty events going on during the festival, which bills itself as “an unprecedented annual tribute to imagination, ingenuity, and inventiveness [that] takes science out of the laboratory and into the streets, theaters, museums, and public halls of New York City, making the esoteric understandable and the familiar fascinating.”

TWI-NY TALK: BARBARA POLLACK

Barbara Pollack will be discussing her new book about the Chinese art market at Pace Gallery in Chelsea on June 1 (photo by Joe Gaffney)

THE WILD, WILD EAST: AN AMERICAN ART CRITIC’S ADVENTURES IN CHINA (Timezone 8, May 2010, $24.95)
Tuesday, June 1, the Pace Gallery, 545 West 22nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., free, 6:00
Thursday, June 10, China Institute, 125 East 65th St., $15, 6:30
www.barbarapollack.com

Barbara Pollack is not your average art critic. The brash, funny, opinionated New Yorker has a law degree from Northeastern University, has been a professor at SVA for more than ten years, has worked in public relations, is a contributing editor for ARTnews, has written for such publications as Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and knows how to throw a New Year’s Eve party. In addition, she is a visual artist with photography and video work in the collections of such institutions as the Brooklyn Museum, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the New York Public Library.

Pollack is also one of the world’s leading authorities on Chinese art, covering the burgeoning scene since 1997. She’s traveled to the mainland numerous times over the years, meeting with artists, collectors, dealers, and others involved in the exploding Asian art market as research for her just-published book, THE WILD, WILD EAST: AN AMERICAN ART CRITIC’S ADVENTURES IN CHINA. We recently accompanied Pollack on a walk through Chelsea, where gallery owners rushed out of their offices to hug her and share stories about art and life. She’ll be back in Chelsea on June 1 for the official New York City launch of her book, taking place at the Pace Gallery at 6:00. The event is free and open to the public. And on June 10 she’ll be giving a lecture at the China Institute. In between various other speaking engagements, Pollack took the time to answer a few of our questions via e-mail for our latest twi-ny talk.

twi-ny: You’ve traveled to China many times in researching this book and over the course of your career. How does the Chinese art world respond to you specifically, both in person and to the book itself, now that it’s published?

Barbara Pollack: In New York, I am just another person trying to make a living by writing about art. But in China, I get treated like a star critic with a certain degree of power. This is because for a long time there were very few people really writing about the art. That is changing now. Generally, my book was met with excitement but a certain degree of surprise. The Chinese artists — always size queens — expected a bigger book. They are used to publishing these mammoth catalogues, too large to lift, and are not accustomed to this Calvin Tomkins style of reportage. Others, particularly some of the westerners portrayed in the book, thought I did not make them out to be important enough.

twi-ny: In the last twenty years, the Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers — Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, Zhang Yuan, and others — have gained international renown for their work, including making films that are at times critical of mainland China. Is there a similar type of group when it comes to the art world in China? Are they heavily censored, or do they have an evolving freedom of expression as compared with past decades?

BP: As opposed to Chinese filmmakers, Chinese artists are able to produce without the interference of the Ministry of Culture. Not all of their work gets shown in China, though most of it does, but they also are now international art stars producing for galleries and museums all around the world, so restrictions rarely impede their output. The youngest generation, those born after the Open Door Policy and new market economy were in effect, are not taking advantage of their freedom to make political work. Mostly, they reflect a global outlook, heavily influenced by Japanese animation and American pop culture, in what is often called the Me Generation or Spoiled Brat art.

twi-ny: Is the art market’s current obsession with Asian art a fad, or do you think the work warrants it and is here to stay?

BP: Many Chinese artists, such as MacArthur award winner Xu Bing, Guggenheim star Cai Guo-Qiang, and outspoken renegade Ai Weiwei, have proven that they are worthy of international attention, even if there are Chinese artists who have been overhyped. Until the late 1990s, the art world was extremely narrow-minded and unwilling to think that a major talent could come from somewhere other than Europe or North America. That has changed forever, good riddance. So Asian art is not just a fad but the result of a growing awareness of art production throughout the world. Another reason Asian art, especially Chinese art, is not going to go away is that influx of Asian collectors into the international art market. They wield a lot of power and are willing to back artists from their home countries. In the end, they will boost careers of many artists even if we in the West disagree with their taste.

twi-ny: What is America’s greatest misconception about China, especially following the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

BP: I can’t even begin to answer this question. Sometimes, I don’t recognize the China I know from news coverage of the country. Of course, the China that I have come to know is the one packed with new millionaires — both collectors and artists — who have definitely benefited from China’s booming economy. I would have an entirely different understanding if I spent time away from Beijing and Shanghai, looking at the China that exists beyond its art world.

Barbara Pollack will be signing books on June 1 at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, followed by a lecture at the China Institute on June 10.