twi-ny recommended events

ILYA AND EMILIA KABAKOV: ENTER HERE

Emilia and Ilya Kabakov discuss their life and work in new documentary (photo by Jacques De Melo)

ILYA AND EMILIA KABAKOV: ENTER HERE (Amei Wallach, 2013)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 13-26
212-727-8110
www.kabakovfilm.com
www.filmforum.org

“Epic and boring,” Russian newspaper Vedomosti wrote in a review of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s highly anticipated 2008 Moscow exhibition; the same can be said about Amei Wallach’s documentary about the renowned Russian art couple, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here. Wallach assembled the same team she worked with on 2008’s Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (except for her late codirector, Marion Cajori) to follow the Kabakovs as they prepare for a major series of shows in six venues in Moscow, marking Ilya’s return to the city for the first time since fleeing the country twenty years earlier. Wallach is given virtually unlimited access to Ilya, a soft-spoken conceptual artist filled with fascinating and unusual ideas, and Emilia, whom he married in 1992 and who handles his business affairs and assists her husband in the studio. Wallach delves into Ilya’s past as a struggling artist who was rarely allowed to show his work publicly and became part of an underground avant-garde that also included Oleg Vassiliev, Igor Makarevich, and Andrei Monastyrsky, all of whom appear in the film, as does Robert Storr, Matthew Jesse Jackson, and other scholars. Much of Ilya’s work is innately, if not overtly, political, evoking a changing Russia / Soviet Union as it evolved through such leaders as Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, quietly exploring many sociopolitical elements of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The film’s emotional high point involves a voiceover reading a letter from Ilya’s mother that she wrote to him when she was eighty, as the camera takes viewers through such monumental yet intimate and personal installations as “Red Wagon” and “The Toilet.” Among the other works featured are “The Palace of Projects,” “Life of Flies,” “Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album),” “School No. 6,” “How to Meet an Angel,” and “Alternative History of Art,” in which Ilya is joined by his past and future alter egos, Charles Rosenthal and Igor Spivak.

The Kabakovs attend the opening of their 2008 Moscow exhibition, marking their highly anticipated return to the city

Unlike such other recent art documentaries as Cutie and the Boxer and Gerhard Richter Painting, which focused on unique and engaging characters, the Kabakovs are not particularly entertaining in and of themselves; it’s their work that makes them fascinating, so some stretches of the documentary drag on a bit, and it is difficult for Wallach and editor-cinematographer Ken Kobland to capture on film the feeling of what it is like to experience one of the Kabakovs’ massive installations. (However, it is possible for New Yorkers to see “Catch the Little White Man,” which is on view along with seven paintings at Pace Gallery in Midtown through December 21.) But Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here is still a treat, offering an inside look at a husband and wife who are considered the most important Russian artists alive today. “The first thing to say is that art is another world,” Ilya explains early on. “And one must leave one’s body and one’s mentality, and one’s blah, blah, blah . . . and one’s everyday element, and enter another world. This is the major purpose and aim of our work. Leave and come with me to another world.” That’s a difficult offer to pass up. Enter Here begins a two-week run at Film Forum on November 13, with Ilya and Emilia on hand to talk about the film at select screenings on November 13, 16, 23, and 24; the 7:50 show on November 23 will be followed by a Q&A with Wallach and Kobland.

MEET THE DOC NYC SHORT LIST

Morgan Neville, director of 20 FEET FROM STARDOM, will be part of free DOC NYC panel discussion about the art of documentary filmmaking

20 FEET FROM STARDOM director Morgan Neville will be part of free DOC NYC panel discussion about the art of documentary filmmaking

DOC NYC
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Wednesday, November 13, free, 5:00
Festival runs November 14-21
212-924-7771
www.docnyc.net
www.ifccenter.com

The annual DOC NYC festival, which celebrates documentary storytelling with a week of screenings at the IFC Center and the SVA Theatre, kicks off on November 13 at 5:00 with the free panel discussion “Meet the DOC NYC Short List.” The Short List category consists of ten recently released nonfiction films that festival organizers Raphaela Neihausen, Thom Powers, John Vanco, and Harris Dew believe are the ones to watch come awards season. Moderated by Powers, the talk will feature eight of the directors whose work has been selected for the Short List: Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom), Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing), Gabriela Cowperthwaite (Blackfish), Lucy Walker (The Crash Reel), Richard Rowley (Dirty Wars), Alan Berliner (First Cousin Once Removed), Dawn Porter (Gideon’s Army), and Roger Ross Williams (God Loves Uganda). Free tickets will be available at the box office thirty minutes before the event, first come, first served, after Insider Pass holders have entered. The festival runs November 14-21, with Errol Morris’s The Unknown Known, about Donald Rumsfeld, the opening night selection; John Maloof and Charlie Siskel’s Finding Vivian Maier the centerpiece film; and Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky the closing night pick. The stated mission of DOC NYC is to “curate, cross-fertilize, cross generations, cultivate new audiences, expand distribution, create social space, and make the most of NYC,” which it has been doing now for nine years.

THE JACKSONIAN

Beth Henley’s southern Gothic THE JACKSONIAN features an all-star cast and a pair of mysterious murders (photo by Monique Carboni)

The Acorn Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through December 22, $75-$95
212-560-2183
www.thenewgroup.org
www.theatrerow.org

Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz aren’t the only real-life husband and wife playing a troubled married couple onstage these days. (They’re currently in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal at the Barrymore). A few blocks southwest, Ed Harris and Amy Madigan have troubles of their own in the New York premiere of Beth Henley’s The Jacksonian. As the play opens, Bill Perch (Harris) is covered in blood, filling up a bucket of ice at the Jacksonian Motel in Jackson, Mississippi. Standing front and center, wrapped in a blanket, his sixteen-year-old daughter, Rosy (Juliet Brett), tells the audience, “There’s been an accident there’s going to be I need to stop an accident at the motel.” The action then shifts between May 1964 and December of that year, on Walt Spangler’s two-part stage, the motel bar on the left, the interior of Bill’s tiny room on the right; Daniel Ionazzi’s lighting signals scene changes. Bill, a successful local dentist, has moved into the motel temporarily while dealing with his wife Susan’s (Madigan) psychological problems. He hangs out at the bar, drinking and talking with creepy bartender Fred Weber (Bill Pullman, looking like an Elvis impersonator gone seriously wrong), who is trying to avoid the advances of motel employee and local floozy Eva White (Glenne Headly), a racist who wants to marry Fred. Bill’s daughter, Rosy, visits him on and off, an extremely strange, mannered, and lonely girl who attracts Fred’s attention, if not her parents’. Later, Susan (Madigan) arrives, a confused woman who still doesn’t know what she wants out of life. Meanwhile, there’s been a robbery and shooting at a local gas station, blamed on a black man who is probably innocent, but Eva can’t wait to see him fried. Everyone’s story converges in a crazy night of Lynchian sex and violence that reveals the darker side of humanity. “Everything in our family is fine,” Rosy tells Eva. Um, not quite.

Husband and wife Amy Madigan and Ed Harris play a couple in the midst of some serious problems in Beth Henley’s gripping thriller (photo by Monique Carboni)

Pulitzer Prize winner Henley (Crimes of the Heart, The Miss Firecracker Contest), who was born in Jackson, has crafted a gripping southern Gothic black comedy with sharp, unpredictable dialogue and heavily stylized direction by Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls (Desire Under the Elms, Talk Radio). An actor’s actor, Harris (Pollock, Fool for Love) gives an exceptional performance as the seemingly stalwart dentist who just wants to have a normal family. Madigan (Twice in a Lifetime, A Lie of the Mind) plays Susan with a tension ready to explode at any moment. Pullman (The Last Seduction; The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?) is nearly unrecognizable as the bartender harboring more than a few secrets, while Headly (Dick Tracy, Balm in Gilead) has fun chewing some scenery as the scheming Eva. But it’s Brett (Admission, Still Life with Iris) who packs the biggest punch in a breakout role as Rosy, an unusual, complex, but insightful character in the tradition of such southern truth-telling adolescents as Harper Lee’s Scout and Carson McCullers’s Frankie Adams. The Jacksonian is a quirky, offbeat drama with dark surprises around every corner, a Broadway-caliber production that can be seen through December 22 in a small, intimate theater just down the street from the Great White Way.

PUBLIC WALKS: CAROL BOVE’S “CATERPILLAR” ON THE HIGH LINE

(photo by Juan Valentin / courtesy of Friends of the High Line)

Free public walk will take ticket holders to wild part of High Line to see Carol Bove’s “Caterpillar” installation (photo by Juan Valentin / courtesy of Friends of the High Line)

High Line at the Rail Yards
Saturdays & Sundays, November – December, free with advance RSVP, 10:00 am, 11:00, 12 noon, 2:00, 3:00
December RSVPs start November 12 at 4:00 pm
“Caterpillar” remains on view through May 2014
www.art.thehighline.org

Red Hook–based artist Carol Bove has installed a specially commissioned series of large-scale sculptures across a three-hundred-yard section of the High Line that is still in its wild, self-seeded state, scheduled to become the third part of the park’s miraculous renovation project next year. Bove, who was born in Geneva and raised in Berkeley, has presented the site-specific “Caterpillar,” seven pieces that alternate between white powder-coated twisting steel (“Celeste,” “Prudence”), a silicon bronze and stainless-steel platform (“Monel”), a brass and concrete vertical object (“Visible Things and Colors”), and rigid, rusted steel beam constructions (“14,” “Cow Watched by Argus”). A kind of contemporary Zen garden on the West Side of Manhattan, “Caterpillar” can only be seen up close as part of public walks being held on Saturdays and Sundays at 10:00, 11:00, 12 noon, 2:00, and 3:00. Tickets are free but must be obtained in advance; RSVPs for the December walks can be made beginning at 4:00 on November 12. To go on the forty-five-minute walk, you’ll have to sign a safety waiver, and it is recommended that you wear sturdy shoes, because you’ll be going over uneven terrain. No one under eighteen will be allowed on the tour. The High Line has been transformed into a glorious outdoor elevated park with wonderful views, cutting-edge art, live performances, food and drink stations, and more, but this is a rare opportunity to experience what it was like before the change. The walks fill up quickly, so don’t hesitate to reserve your spot. (Through January 2014, you can also catch Bove’s indoor installation “The Equinox” on the fourth floor of MoMA.)

VIDEO OF THE DAY: “FIRE” BY ANNA CALVI

On December 23, sultry British-Italian singer Anna Calvi will release the single “Suddenly” from her sophomore album, One Breath (Domino, October 2013), backed by a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Fire.” But you don’t have to wait till Christmastime to hear the Bruce cover, as you can check out her recent solo performance of the song above, and maybe she’ll play it when she appears November 11 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg with DC duo GEMS. On the new record, the classically trained, London-born Calvi melds together wide-ranging genres to create a haunting cinematic atmosphere on such tracks as “Suddenly,” “Eliza,” and “Sing to Me.” “I’ve got one / one breath to give / I’ve got one / one second to live / before I say / what I’ve got to say / before I breathe / It’s gonna change everything,” Calvi seductively whispers on the title track, while on the emotionally powerful “Cry” she cuts loose ever so briefly with her intense, unique guitar style. The Brooklyn show is only one of three in America (Los Angeles and San Francisco are the other two) before Calvi heads out to France, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Scandinavia, Slovenia, and other European destinations. You can get another taste of Calvi in a recent concert streaming here.

2013 AMERICA’S PARADE: VETERANS DAY

The Veterans Day will march up Fifth Ave. on November 11 (photo courtesy United War Veterans Council)

Fifth Ave. from 26th to 52nd Sts.
Monday, November 11, free, 11:15 am – 3:30 pm
www.americasparade.org

“To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations.” So declared President Woodrow Wilson in making Armistice Day a federal holiday to be held annually on November 11. On June 4, 1926, Congress followed suit with a resolution that said, in part: “Whereas the 11th of November, 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations. . . .” It is anticipated that the 2013 America’s Parade, also known as the Veterans Day Parade, will attract more than six hundred thousand spectators lining Fifth Ave. as thousands of men and women in uniform march, led by Grand Marshals General Raymond Odierno, Anthony Principi, and Ann E. Dunwoody, along with Medal of Honor recipients Woody Williams, Roger Donlon, Thomas Kelly, and Leroy Petry. For a full list of Veterans Week events, go here.

SARAH SZE IN CONVERSATION WITH JENNIFER EGAN: TRIPLE POINT

192 Books
112 Tenth Ave. at Twenty-First St.
Tuesday, November 12, free, 7:00
212-255-4022
www.192books.com
www.sarahsze.com

Boston-born, New York-based visual artist Sarah Sze creates fragile, intricately constructed architectural environments using such materials as string, bottle caps, colored tape, Styrofoam cups, paper, and other items that combine elements of painting and sculpture. Sze, whose “Infinite Line” show ran at Asia Society in 2011-12, is currently representing America at the U.S. Pavilion at the fifty-fifth Venice Biennale with the massive installation “Triple Point,” about which she said in a statement, “Central to the exhibition is the notion of the ‘compass’ and how we locate ourselves in a perpetually disorienting world.” In May 2012, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Keep) began posting her New Yorker short story “Black Box” on Twitter in paragraphs of no more than 140 characters, weaving together a written narrative that echoes the ones that Sze builds with objects. On November 12 at 7:00, Sze and Egan will be at 192 Books in Chelsea, celebrating the release of the new book Triple Point (Gregory R. Miller / Bronx Museum of the Arts, October 2013, $45), which examines the installation in detail, featuring an introduction by Biennale co-commissioners Holly Block and Carey Lovelace, an essay by curator Johanna Burton, a conversation between Sze and Egan, and the complete text of Egan’s “Black Box.”