Matt Bollinger, “The Reading Room,” flashe, acrylic, collage on unstretched canvas, 2014
Zürcher Studio
33 Bleecker St. at Mott St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 30, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm (Sunday 2:00 – 6:00)
212-777-0790
www.galeriezurcher.com
www.mattbollinger.com
Matt Bollinger’s latest exhibit at Zürcher Studio, “Reading Rooms,” is highlighted by a pair of stunning large-scale canvases, “The Reading Room” and “The Reservoir,” that depict old bookstore shelves; in the former, the shelves are collapsing in on themselves, books, paper, magazines, and garbage strewn about, while in the latter, the shelves are still standing and full, with books piled on the floor, but in both cases it feels like it’s been quite some time since someone has been there. The two works set the stage for the rest of the show, as if all the other paintings are pages from books from these shelves, each merging Bollinger’s — and the viewer’s — past and present. “I used to work in a bookstore,” Bollinger says in a catalog interview for his spring 2014 show at Zürcher in Paris, which also included “The Reservoir.” He continues, “It had a mold-riddled basement that I was always eager to explore; you could find all sorts of stuff down there. I want this picture of a bookstore to operate as a reservoir. A holder, a backdrop, for all the other reservoirs in the show.” Now Bollinger has symbolically transformed Zürcher’s Bleecker St. gallery into a kind of psychological library, with works that are like pages from a book. Among the chapters of Bollinger’s tome are “Mayhem,” “Nancy (Reflection),” “Odd Jobs,” “Brian in Nancy’s Room,” and “Sheet Rock,” featuring repeating characters. In the back room, “Renovations” consists of twenty-eight smaller pieces arranged in rows, creating another kind of narrative; nearby is a painting of the book’s torn cover. However, despite the serious nature of the paintings and how they bring up thoughts of the future of libraries and bookstores and hard copy, Bollinger, who was born in Kansas City and is based in Brooklyn, also says in the catalog, “I’ve been thinking about the obsolescence of the paper book, but I don’t want the pieces to be laments. I want the work to present treasures, private discoveries.” There are many treasures and private discoveries to be found in “Reading Rooms.”
Greg Vander Veer’s Miss Hill: Making Dance Matter is a charming celebration of a woman who had a tremendous impact on the development of modern dance but is still little known outside her tight-knit circle. Born in 1900 in a small town in Bible Belt Ohio, Martha Hill danced with Martha Graham before concentrating on teaching the art form, which as a child she was told was sinful, at Bennington and NYU. But she created her legacy as the first director of dance at Juilliard, where she taught from 1951 to 1985, balancing instruction in both modern dance and classical ballet. Vander Veer (Keep Dancing) and coordinating producer Vernon Scott, who graduated from Juilliard in 1985 and is currently president of the board of directors of the Martha Hill Dance Fund, combine wonderful archival footage of Hill as both a dancer and a teacher, along with old clips of many of her students, including Pina Bausch, Lar Lubovitch, Bessie Schönberg, Hanya Holm, José Limón, and Doris Humphrey, as well as fellow teacher Antony Tudor; there are also new interviews with Paul Taylor, Martha Clarke, Francis Patrelle, Robert Battle, Ohad Naharin, Dennis Nahat, H. T. Chen, and others. “She’s created the dancers of the twenty-first century,” says former Boston Ballet artistic director Bruce Marks. One of the most fascinating parts of the eighty-minute documentary is Hill’s fight to preserve Juilliard’s dance program during the building of Lincoln Center, which pitted her against George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and Lincoln Kirstein. Miss Hill displays its subject with clarity, smartly exploring her understanding that dance is more than just language and movement. “Modern dance is not a system, it is a point of view,” Hill explains. Meanwhile, Patrelle gets right to the heart of the matter: “She was dance. She defined it.” A lovely treat for dance fans, Miss Hill opens January 23, at the Quad, with Vander Veer and Scott participating in Q&As following the 7:00 shows Friday and Saturday and the 4:30 shows Saturday and Sunday.
Carol Reed’s thriller is quite simply the most entertaining film you’re ever likely to see, the best Orson Welles film not directed by the man who gave us Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. Set in a divided post-WWII Vienna amid a thriving black market, The Third Man is heavy in atmosphere, untrustworthy characters, and sly humor, with a marvelous zither score by Anton Karas. Joseph Cotten stars as Holly Martins, an American writer of Western paperbacks who has come to Vienna to see his old friend Harry Lime (Welles), but he seems to have shown up a little late. While trying to find out what happened to Harry, Martins falls for Harry’s lover, Anna (Alida Valli); is told to get out of town by Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and Sergeant Paine (Bernard “M” Lee); meets a stream of Harry’s more interesting, mysterious friends, including Baron Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch) and Popescu (Siegfried Breuer); and is talked into giving a lecture to a literary club by old Mr. Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White). Every scene is a finely honed work of art, filled with long shadows, echoing footsteps, dripping water, and unforgettable dialogue about cuckoo clocks and other strangeness. SPOILER: The shot in which Lime is first revealed, standing in a doorway, a cat brushing by his feet, his tongue firmly in cheek as he lets go a miraculous, knowing smile, is one of the greatest single moments in the history of cinema. “Orson Welles 100” continues through February 3 with such other gems as Othello, Macbeth, Chimes at Midnight, and A Man for All Seasons as well as such rarities as It’s All True and Too Much Johnsons.
How can you go wrong with a Japanese monster movie with such alternate titles as Attack of the Mushroom People and Fungus of Terror, directed by the man who gave us Godzilla, Rodan, Destroy All Monsters, and The Human Vapor? Well, you can’t. Ishirō Honda’s 1963 cult classic, Matango, is a postwar apocalyptic tale that evokes Lord of the Flies, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Antonioni’s L’Avventura while predicting Lost and, yes, Gilligan’s Island. Written by frequent Honda collaborator Takeshi Shimura based on William Hope Hodgson’s 1907 short story “The Voice in the Night” (which was included in the 1958 compilation Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 12 Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV), Matango also has its fair share of social commentary, as seven characters on a yachting outing end up stranded on a seemingly deserted island: the first mate, Senzô (Kenji Sahara), the skipper, Naoyuki (Hiroshi Koizumi), the wealthy Kasai (Yoshio Tsuchiya), the writer, Yoshida (Hiroshi Tachikawa), the sultry singer, Mami (Kumi Mizuno), the professor, Kenji (Akira Kubo), and the mousy Akiko (Miki Yashiro). Mushrooms are thriving on the island, but it’s best not to eat them, because they are not exactly the psychedelic fungi beloved by hippies in the mod movies of the ’60s. The film touches on jealousy, resentment, loneliness, hunger, and sanity in the nuclear age, with special effects (courtesy of Eiji Tsuburaya) that make the early years of Doctor Who — and Gilligan’s Island itself —seem like a technological marvel.