David Zwirner
525 West 19th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through December 21, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm (line stops around 4:00)
212-727-2070
www.davidzwirner.com
infinity room slideshows
No one knows lines like we New Yorkers do. We line up for burgers, advance movie screenings, new sneaker releases, free Shakespeare in the park. When we see a line, our first thought is to find out what it’s for because it might be something really cool. We particularly pride ourselves on getting on lines to see such lofty, high-culture things as art, and the biggest such line these days is for “I Who Have Arrived in Heaven,” Yayoi Kusama’s dazzling exhibition at David Zwirner in Chelsea. (See below to find out how one lucky twi-ny reader and a guest can get a chance to skip the line to see two of Kusama’s spectacular infinity rooms without having to wait.) Kusama’s first show at Zwirner occupies all three spaces of the Nineteenth St. location, consisting of twenty-seven new paintings, two immersive installations, and a video projection. The canvases, all nearly six feet by six feet square, feature a bright, bold color palette laid out in playful, childlike geometric shapes and patterns, with smiling faces and floating eyes, profiles, green landscapes, blue rivers, and obsessive accumulations of small dots, all coming together in ritualistic compositions that are instantly happy-making, which is Kusama’s intent. “As I’m getting closer to death, I’m still full of big hope that we all have the power to spread the love and peace, and I can do so with my work,” the wheelchair-bound Kusama said through a translator at a press conference held at the gallery the day before the opening. “If you can be happy through my artwork, there’s nothing more joyous than that.” Many of the paintings’ titles have that same positive energy, from “Everything About My Love” and “Praying for Peace in the World” to “Brilliance of Life” and “All the Love Overflowing,” bringing much happiness to the viewer.
“Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” wood, metal, glass mirrors, plastic, acrylic panel, rubber, LED lighting system, and acrylic balls, 2013 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Now eighty-four, Kusama lives by choice in a psychiatric facility in Japan, and as she makes clear in the title of the exhibit as well as in some of the names of some of the new works, her ultimate fate awaits. While walking around her tantalizingly gorgeous “Love Is Calling” Mirrored Infinity Room, a wondrous forest of light-up spotted leglike rubber and acrylic objects that change colors, she can be heard reciting, in Japanese, the love poem “Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears,” which begins, “When the time comes around for people to encounter the end of their life / having put on years, death seems to be quietly approaching / It was not supposed to be my style to be frightened, but I am / In the shadows of my loved one’s footprints, distress revisits me at the dead of the night refreshing my memories / Being in love with and longing for you, I have locked myself up in this ‘castle of shed tears.’” The serious words play off the scintillating delight of wandering through the room, which extends ad infinitum in all directions. The exhibit is highlighted by her latest Infinity Room: “The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” which, like “Fireflies on the Water” in her otherwise underwhelming 2012 Whitney retrospective, puts visitors at the center of a vast, unending universe filled with LED lights sparkling on the water and across the galaxies, playing with the mind as it lifts the spirits, evoking life, death, and the afterlife on three physical planes.
Still from “Manhattan Suicide Addict,” video projection and mirrors, 2010-present (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
After waiting as much as three hours or more, visitors are allowed forty-five seconds in “Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” and approximately twice that in “Love Is Calling,” which can fit about eight to ten people at a time. There is no wait to see the paintings or the short music video Manhattan Suicide Addict, in which Kusama sings such lines as “Swallow antidepressants and it will be gone” and “Amidst the agony of flowers, the present never ends,” the single projection being reflected off to the right and the left in an endless succession of Kusamas singing in front of her art. But despite all the mentions of death, “I Who Have Arrived in Heaven” is primarily about life and love, peace and hope, and it is certainly the most happy-making art exhibit in town right now.
SKIP THE LINE! The wait to see “Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” and “Love Is Calling” is currently estimated to be between one and three hours, and it is likely to only grow longer as the exhibition reaches its closing date of December 21. But twi-ny can offer one lucky couple special access to the two remarkable rooms without having to wait on line. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and all-time-favorite Yayoi Kusama work of art to contest@twi-ny.com by Tuesday, December 10, at 5:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; one winner will be selected at random.
Once upon a time, there was a little cult movie that so perfectly captured the real Christmas spirit that it was a special holiday gift for those few who knew of its myriad charms. But when word got out, it sure got out, making A Christmas Story more ubiquitous in December than It’s a Wonderful Life. In fact, TBS will once again host a twenty-four-hour marathon of the film beginning at 8:00 on Christmas Eve, and 
William A. Wellman’s rarely screened 1931 doozy, Night Nurse, is the first of five collaborations between Wellman and Barbara Stanwyck. Based on Dora Macy’s 1930 novel, Night Nurse stars Stanwyck as Lora Hart, a young woman determined to become a nurse. She gets a probationary job at a city hospital, where she is taken under the wing of Maloney (Joan Blondell), who likes to break the rules and torture the head nurse, the stodgy Miss Dillon (Vera Lewis). Shortly after treating a bootlegger (Ben Lyon) for a gunshot wound and agreeing not to report it to the police, Lora starts working for a shady doctor (Ralf Harolde) taking care of two sick children (Marcia Mae Jones and Betty Jane Graham) whose proudly dipsomaniac mother (Charlotte Merriam) is being manipulated by her suspicious chauffeur (Clark Gable). Wellman pulls out all the stops, hinting at or simply depicting murder, child endangerment, rape, alcoholism, lesbianism, physical brutality, and Blondell and Stanwyck regularly frolicking around in their undergarments. It’s as if Wellman is thumbing his nose directly at the soon-to-be-in-place Hays Code in scene after scene. Although far from his best film — Wellman directed such classics as Wings (1927), The Public Enemy (1931), A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Beau Geste (1939), and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) — Night Nurse is an overly melodramatic, dated, but entertaining little tale with quite a surprise ending. Night Nurse is screening twice on December 8 as part of Film Forum’s epic “Stanwyck” series and will be shown in a double feature with the uncensored, dastardly sordid version of Alfred E. Green’s 1933 Baby Face, in which Stanwyck plays a woman who was pimped out by her father in her early teens and now knows how to use her body to get exactly what she wants. The festival is being held in conjunction with the first major biography of the glamorous star, Victoria Wilson’s A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940; Wilson will be introducing several films over the course of the series, which runs December 6-31, and will give the illustrated talk “Stanwyck Before Hollywood” on December 8 at 3:30 before the screening of Baby Face.
Yasujirō Ozu’s first film in color, at the studio’s request, is another engagingly told exploration of the changing relationship between parents and children, the traditional and the modern, in postwar Japan. Both funny and elegiac, Equinox Flower opens with businessman Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi) giving a surprisingly personal speech at a friend’s daughter’s wedding, explaining that he is envious that the newlyweds are truly in love, as opposed to his marriage, which was arranged for him and his wife, Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka). Hirayama is later approached by an old middle school friend, Mikami (Ozu regular Chishu Ryu), who wants him to speak with his daughter, Fumiko (Yoshiko Kuga), who has left home to be with a man against her father’s will. Meanwhile, Yukiko (Fujiko Yamamoto), a friend of Hirayama’s elder daughter, Setsuko (Ineko Arima), is constantly being set up by her gossipy mother, Hatsu (Chieko Naniwa). Hirayama does not seem to be instantly against what Fumiko and Yukiko want for themselves, but when a young salaryman named Taniguchi (Keiji Sada) asks Hirayama for permission to marry his older daughter, Setsuko (Ineko Arima), Hirayama stands firmly against their wedding, claiming that he will decide Setsuko’s future. “Can’t I find my own happiness?” Setsuko cries out. The widening gap between father and daughter represents the modernization Japan is experiencing, but the past is always close at hand; Ozu and longtime cowriter Kōgo Noda even have Taniguchi being transferred to Hiroshima, the scene of such tragedy and devastation. Yet there is still a lighthearted aspect to Equinox Flower, and Ozu and cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta embrace the use of color, including beautiful outdoor scenes of Hirayama and Kiyoko looking out across a river and mountain, a train station sign warning of dangerous winds, the flashing neon RCA Victor building, and laundry floating against a cloudy blue sky. The interiors are carefully designed as well, with objects of various colors arranged like still-life paintings, particularly a red teapot that shows up in numerous shots. And Kiyoko’s seemingly offhanded adjustment of a broom hanging on the wall is unforgettable. But at the center of it all is Saburi’s marvelously gentle performance as a proud man caught between the past, the present, and the future. Equinox Flower is screening December 8-12 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center festival “Ozu and His Afterlives,” which honors the 110th anniversary of the master filmmaker’s birth and the 50th anniversary of his death; he died on his birthday at the age of sixty in 1963. The series also features Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon in addition to seven works that were either directly or indirectly inspired by Ozu and his unique style, including Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl, Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room, and Wim Wenders’s Tokyo-Ga.