twi-ny recommended events

THE ARMORY SHOW 2011

Some sixty thousand art lovers attended last year’s Armory Show, the centerpiece of Armory Arts Week

Twelfth Ave at 55th St.
Pier 92: Modern
Pier 94: Contemporary
March 3-6, $30 per day, Run of Show Pass $60, Armory/VOLTA Pass $40
212-645-6440
www.thearmoryshow.com

Named after the legendary 1913 Armory Show, the thirteenth Armory Show: The International Fair of New Art begins today on the Far West Side, with eighty galleries at Pier 92 displaying modern and historically significant contemporary art, two hundred booths at Pier 94 featuring new work by living artists, and another eighteen from seven countries taking part in “Armory Focus: Latin America.” Among the special programming is “Open Forum,” held at both the Armory Show and VOLTA and consisting of such free discussions as “In Conversation: Richard Flood and Gabriel Kuri” (the Mexican-born, Belgium-based Kuri was commissioned to give the 2011 fair its unique visual identity) and “Ask Los Artistes” today, “Art Funds: Is Now the Time?” and “Spectacle Against Spectacle” on Friday, “In Conversation: Ivan Navarro and Victor Zamudio-Taylor” and “Post-Conceptual: The Reach of Theory in Contemporary Art” on Saturday, and “Biennials as Barometers of Social Transformation? Dublin Contemporary 2011: Art, Crisis, Change & the Office of Non-Compliance” and “In Conversation: Ed Halter and George Kuchar” on Sunday. We strongly recommend leaving work early to attend “In Conversation: Luis Camnitzer, Deborah Cullen, and Gabriel Perez-Barreiro” on Friday at 4:00, as Camnitzer’s current retrospective at El Museo del Barrio is one of the best shows in the city right now. The centerpiece of Armory Arts Week, the Armory Show runs in conjunction with VOLTA and Artprojx Cinema; a free shuttle bus will take fairgoers between Piers 92 and 94 and Volta (34th St. & Fifth Ave.) and the New Museum (235 Bowery).

NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S FILM FESTIVAL 2011

Japanese director Koji Masumari’s animated WELCOME TO THE SPACESHOW is one of the many movies that will transport kids to other worlds at New York International Children’s Film Festival

Multiple venues in Manhattan
March 4-27, $12-$15
All Access Pass: $250
www.gkids.com

Founded in 1991, the New York International Children’s Film Festival presents cinematic programming for children all year long, anchored by what is now a nearly monthlong festival of films for children ages three to eighteen. Held at Symphony Space, the Cantor Film Center, Asia Society, the Directors Guild of America Theater, the IFC Center, and the Scholastic Theater, the 2011 festival begins on March 4 with the world premiere of Simon Wells’s animated 3D picture Mars Needs Women, based on the book by Berkeley Breathed. The nine feature works in competition range from Gagnol/Felicioli’s A Cat in Paris (France) to Taika Waitit’s Boy (New Zealand), from Alex Law’s Echoes of the Rainbow (Hong Kong) to Ben Stassen’s Sammy’s Adventures: The Secret Passage (Belgium), from Yasuhiro Yoshiura’s Time of Eve (Japan) to Chen Deming’s The Dreams of Jinsha (China), a potent mix of poignant family drama, futuristic animation, and playful adventure from all around the globe. Among the six programs of short films are Shorts for Tots, Flicker Lounge: For Teens & Adults Only…, Heebie Jeebies: Spooky, Freaky & Bizarre…, and Girls’ POV, with all participating works eligible for Oscar consideration. The juried fest has an esteemed panel of judges, including Adam Gopnik, Matthew Modine, Michel Ocelot, Susan Sarandon, James Schamus, Uma Thurman, John Turturro, Christine Vachon, and Gus Van Sant. The festival will host two interactive workshops, “Music & Sound for Film” and “Green Screen,” while the panel discussion “Breaking into the Boys Club: Girls Behind the Camera” will examine women in film, as will special screenings of Christian Laurence’s Aurelie Laflamme’s Diary (Canada) and Arne Birkenstock’s Chandani: The Daughter of the Elephant Whisperer (Sri Lanka). Many of the screenings will be followed by Q&As, and all films are recommended for specific ages so parents can choose the ones most appropriate for their little ones. The festival runs March 4-27, but be sure to check out the official website for other events taking place throughout the year. Programs will sell out, so act quickly.

FRED HERSCH: DUOS & TRIOS +2

Fred Hersch will be at the Jazz Standard this week with an impressive lineup of special guests (photo: Matthew Sussman)

Jazz Standard
116 East 27th St. between Lexington and Park Aves.
March 2-6, $25-$30
212-576-2232
www.jazzstandard.com
www.fredhersch.com

For more than thirty years, three-time Grammy-nominated pianist and composer Fred Hersch has been an innovative force on the jazz scene, whether playing solo, participating in unique collaborations, or reinterpreting Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Celebrating the release of his latest album, Alone at the Vanguard (Palmetto, March 1, 2011), in which he became the first solo pianist to perform for a week at the Village Vanguard (in 2006), Hersch will begin a five-night residency at the Jazz Standard tonight, playing in a changing series of duos and trios. On March 2, he’ll be joined by singer Kate McGarry, the vocalist on the Leaves of Grass project. On March 3, Hersch will team up with guitarist Julian Lage, who recently collaborated with the New Gary Burton Quartet. On March 4-5, tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger, trumpeter Ralph Alessi, bassist John Hebert, and drummer Billy Drummond will take the stage with Hersch, while saxophone legend Joshua Redman will close out Hersch’s Standard stand on March 6.

THE ART SHOW 2011

Jaume Plensa, “Endless III,” stainless steel, 2010, Galerie Lelong / Richard Gray Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
March 2-6, $20
212-488-5550
www.artdealers.org/artshow

The twenty-third annual Art Dealers Association of America Art Show is back at the Park Ave. Armory, where nearly seventy galleries will be selling painting, drawing, sculpture, and more, benefiting the Henry Street Settlement. In general, the Art Show is geared more toward collectors than any of the other fairs; at numerous (but by no means all) galleries, the more you look like a potential buyer, the more forthcoming the men and women working in there can be. With that in mind, the ADAA has made available online a free Collector’s Guide, which will help novices and experienced buyers navigate such topics as “What to Look for in a Work of Art,” “Understanding the Art World,” “How to Buy and Sell Through a Dealer,” and “What About Auctions?” But even if you don’t have deep pockets, there is plenty to see at the show, which is highly manageable, not overstuffed and overloaded with too much art and too-narrow aisles. Ameringer / McEnery / Yohe is displaying all twenty-one drawings that comprise Robert Motherwell’s “The Dedalus Sketchbooks,” what he referred to as “artful doodles” inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses, made on Cape Cod during the summer of 1982. David Opdyke’s “Bit Assemblage,” at Ronald Feldman, consists of sculptures and black-and-white drawings anchored by the large-scale Styrofoam landscape “Zenith.” Knoedler & Company’s “Milton Avery and the Figure” consists of a number of outstanding oils, while Jill Newhouse has beautiful drawings, watercolors, and small sculptures by Auguste Rodin.

David Opdyke’s “Bit Assemblage” is at the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts booth at the Art Show (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

L&M Arts has a splendid collection of Joseph Cornell boxes that look as fresh as if they were made yesterday. Franz Erhard Walther’s “Gesang des Lagers” sewn dyed canvases line the walls and even the floor at Peter Freeman, while Kathy Butterly’s small ceramic sculptures cover a table at Tibor de Nagy. Paintings by Oscar Bluemner and Charles Burchfield mesh surprisingly well at Debra Force, as do paintings and drawings by Richard Diebenkorn at Greenberg Van Doren. Photography fans will find William Klein at Howard Greenberg, Paul Strand at Zabriskie, Diane Arbus at Robert Miller, William Henry Fox Talbot and Eugene Atget at Hans B. Kraus, twelve of Laurel Nakadate’s “365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears” (one from each month) at Leslie Tonkonow, and twenty of Irving Penn’s engaging corner portraits at Pace / MacGill, including Truman Capote, Salvador Dali, John O’Hara, Igor Stravinsky, Jerome Robbins, and Walter Gropius. Among the other featured artists are Rachel Whiteread at Luhring Augustine, Jessica Stockholder at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman, Richard Artschwater at David Nolan, Alice Neel at David Zwirner, and Zhang Huan’s “Ash Paintings” at Pace. There’s also Watteau and Turner at David Tunick, “The Figure: From Old Masters through Contemporary Art” at Odyssia, Picasso at Pace Prints, Schiele at Galerie St. Etienne, and Philip Guston just about everywhere you look.

DENEUVE: CHANGING TIMES

Catherine Deneuve will be at BAM Friday night to kick off twenty-five-film retrospective with REPULSION (above) and POTICHE

BAMcinématek
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
March 4-31
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

They don’t make ’em like Catherine Deneuve anymore. The elegant French superstar, still ravishing at sixty-seven, has had a remarkable career that is still going strong. The longtime Chanel No. 5 spokesmodel has appeared in more than one hundred films, including too many classics to list here, but here are just a few: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964), Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965), The Creatures (Agnès Varda, 1966), Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967), The Last Metro (François Truffaut, 1980), Time Regained (Raoul Ruiz, 1999), and A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008), all of which are part of an exciting twenty-five-film retrospective at BAM running March 4-31, presented in collaboration with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Institut Francais. No mere sex kitten, Deneuve has taken chances from the very beginning, choosing challenging roles and working with such directors as André Téchiné, Louis Malle, François Ozon, Manoel de Oliveira, Marco Ferreri, and others, in addition to those mentioned above. Following last month’s appearance at BAM by her Hunger costar Susan Sarandon, Deneuve will be at the Brooklyn institution Friday to participate in a sold-out Q&A with Ozon and Judith Godrèche after a sneak peek of her latest, Ozon’s Potiche; she will also introduce the 9:40 showing of Repulsion that same night. Deneuve is a marvel to watch on the big screen, mixing intelligence with beauty, vulnerability with a powerful emotional depth and strength that will surprise those who have not seen many of her films. Now is a great time to catch up, and in Brooklyn, of all places.

Catherine Deneuve stars as a bored housewife stalked by an old acquaintance in CHANGING TIMES

CHANGING TIMES (LES TEMPS QUI CHANGENT) (André Téchiné, 2004)
Saturday, March 5, 4:30
www.1000films.com

In 1980, Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu teamed up for the first time in Claude Berri’s Je Vous Aime, followed by François Truffaut’s The Last Metro. They appeared in several more films together but not in dual leading roles since François Dupeyron’s A Strange Place to Meet (1988). Fortunately, in the ensuing years, they have been more successful than the characters they play in André Téchiné’s absorbing drama Changing Times. Deneuve, as beautiful as ever in her early sixties, stars as Cécile, a lonely woman feeling way too settled in her role as wife, mother, and radio host. Depardieu is Antoine, a lonely engineer who has been burning a candle for Cécile, his first love, for more than thirty years. When her grown son, Sami (Malik Zidi), comes to visit, he surprises everyone by bringing his girlfriend, Nadia (Lubna Azabal), and her young son, Said (Jabi Elomri). Both Sami and Nadia have other reasons for coming to Tangier: He wants to see his very good friend Bilal (Nadem Rachati), a groundskeeper for a rich family, and she wants to see her twin sister, Aicha (Azabal), a devout Muslim who works in McDonald’s. Meanwhile, Cécile’s husband, the younger Nathan (Gilbert Melki), hangs around the house, goes for long swims, and takes care of Antoine’s smashed nose. Depardieu is unnerving as a creepy stalker, and Deneuve is enchanting as the bored wife; Téchiné (Scene of the Crime, Alice et Martin) treats their awkward relationship with intelligence and subtlety, allowing it to play out in unexpected ways.

RABBIT MOVIE NIGHTS: PIERROT LE FOU

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina star in Godard’s colorful crime musical, PIERROT LE FOU

PIERROT LE FOU (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
Rabbitholestudio
33 Washington St., Brooklyn
Wednesday, March 2, free (BYOB), 8:00
718-852-1500
www.rabbitholestudio.com

Art, American consumerism, the Vietnam and Algerian wars, Hollywood, and the cinema itself get skewered in Jean-Luc Godard’s fab feaux gangster flick / road comedy / romance epic / musical Pierrot Le Fou. Based on Lionel White’s novel Obsession, the film follows the chaotic exploits of Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina, Godard’s then-wife), former lovers who meet up again quite by accident. The bored Ferdinand immediately decides to leave his wife and family for the flirtatious, unpredictable Marianne, who insists on calling him Pierrot despite his protestations. Soon Ferdinand is caught in the middle of a freewheeling journey involving gun running, stolen cars, dead bodies, and half-truths, all the while not quite sure how much he can trust Marianne. Filmed in reverse-scene order without much of a script, the mostly improvised Pierrot Le Fou was shot in stunning color by Raoul Coutard. Many of Godard’s recurring themes and style appear in the movie, including jump cuts, confusing dialogue, written protests on walls, and characters speaking directly at the audience, which is more or less along for the same ride as Ferdinand. And as with many Godard films, the ending is a doozy.

PULSE CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR 2011

David Ellis’s percussive symphony “True Value (pain fukette)” helped him win the Pulse Prize (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
March 3-6, $20 (children under twelve free)
212-255-2327
www.pulse-art.com

Year in and year out, Pulse Contemporary Art Fair is among the best of the fairs during Armory Arts Week, offering fun and fascinating site-specific installations and special programming. For 2011, Pulse has moved into the Metropolitan Pavilion, where more than fifty international galleries have booths, in addition to another fourteen participating in the upstairs Impulse section. Among the Pulse New York 2011 Projects are a preview of “Assembly,” comprising work by eight emerging Southern California photographers on view March 15 – April 9 at Fred Torres Collaborations on West 29th St.; Craig Damrauer’s vinyl greetings placed throughout the fair; Molly Dilworth’s paint-on-Mylar “Field Test” at the entrance, incorporating X-ray and electron microscopy images; Oskar Schmidt’s HD video “Back Portrait”; and Ben Wolf’s large-scale “Clamber,” centered on an eighteen-foot hull from a salvaged ship abandoned in Newark. Impulse, comprising one-person shows, has some excellent painting, including Jeff Kellar’s “Toler’s Fence,” “Jaded,” and “Barnyard Brawl 1” at Freight + Volume, Sangram Majumdar’s “Behind Things,” “Studio Chair,” and “Nighttree” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, and Pulse Prize finalist Jinny Yu’s exquisite oil on aluminum works, some flat, others folded and scrunched, such as the triptych “Notes (large),” the embedded “Painting, wiped, on the wall,” and the dreamlike “Black Cloud (small).” The winner of the Pulse Prize for “exceptional artist” in the Impulse section was David Ellis of Joshua Liner, whose installation includes “True Value (pain fukette),” a group of metal and plastic paint cans that come alive and give a percussive concert, in addition to a wall sculpture of resin-encased record covers (no Barry Manilow allowed) and animated videos of splashing paint. Among the downstairs highlights are Dilworth’s “Times Square Test Pour” series at David B Smith, preparatory studies for her massive ground painting in Times Square; new black-and-white paintings by Martin Mull at Samuel Freeman; Pablo Zuleta Zahr’s acrylic C-prints of wandering people at Richard Levy; a preview of Eve Sussman’s nextfilm project at Cristin Tierney; Carlos Garacioca’s photo lightboxes at Habana; Brooklyn-based printmaker and sculptor Beka Goedde’s delightfully soothing mixed media on panel and paper “Moment of Transference” works at Christina Ray; and Margie Livingston’s “Paint Objects” and Heather Gwen Martin’s large-scale “Pigeon Hands” at Luis de Jesus. We always look forward to Jeffrey Blondes’s latest water-related meditative video project at Nicholas Metivier, and this year he has brought the twelve-and-a-half-hour “Bay of Fundy, Long Island West.” Be sure to stop by the Jen Bekman Gallery booth to check out her 20×200 project, which offers limited-edition artwork at ridiculously affordable prices. Pulse Presents will feature performance art and discussions, while Pulse Play highlights such video art as Desi Santiago’s “Work for Love.”