this week in art

BROOKLYN MUSEUM FIRST SATURDAY: ELECTION SEASON

First Saturday workshop participants can make their own “I want a president” speech based on Zoe Leonard’s original 1992 text

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, November 6, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

There’s no escaping the election, so the Brooklyn Museum has given in as well and is dedicating its free November First Saturday program to the upcoming vote. There will be live performances by Slavic Soul Party!, DJ Chela, and Brown Girls Burlesque (the adult Strip the Polls); the curator tour “I See Myself in You,” led by assistant curator of contemporary art Rujeko Hockley, focusing on the use of the body in art; a hands-on workshop in which participants will make their own campaign buttons; presidential pop-art talks in the American Art galleries; a workshop updating the text of Zoe Leonard’s 1992 text “I want a president,” which can currently be seen on the High Line; and Laugh the Vote comedy with Baratunde Thurston, Sherrod Small, and Christian Finnegan. In addition, you can check out such exhibits as “Beverly Buchanan — Ruins and Rituals,” “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas,” “I See Myself in You: Selections from the Collection,” and “Philippe Parreno: My Room Is Another Fish Bowl”; the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries will close at eight o’clock except for “Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History, 1843 to the Present,” which will be open all night and requires a discounted admission fee of $10.

TWI-NY TALK: GRADY GERBRACHT

Grady Gerbracht, “#incidentalart No. 08,” #incidentalart #found #painting #composition #abstract #texture #color #marks #Nola #alley #neworleans #street #photography #poons #buffed #swastika (photo © 2016 by Grady Gerbracht)

#incidentalart
Senaspace Art & Tattoo
229 Centre St.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 6, free, 12 noon – 8:00 pm
212-966-5151
www.senaspace.com
www.gradygerbracht.info

For the past twenty years, New York native Grady Gerbracht has been making the most of his daily commute, taking photographs of unique elements he finds on city streets and walls, what he refers to as “incidental” works of art. He can be moved by rust, an unusual splotch of color, a piece of tape, stains, cigarettes in mud, and unusual surface textures. He posts the photographs on Instagram and Facebook, numbering each one and identifying them with pertinent information as well as adding his own interpretation; for example, “#incidentalart No. 18” is described as “#incidentalart #wrap #sculpture #architecture #christo #jeanclaude #form #stretch #storefrontforartandarchitecture,” while “#incidentalart No. 26” features the labels “#incidentalart #found #painting #composition #color #texture #patina #pattern #duct tape #grid #surface #marks #abstract.” As he notes in his hashtags, various pieces are reminiscent of the work of Mark Rothko, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Larry Poons.

A teacher, curator, “sonic sculptor,” and “spontaneous composer,” Gerbracht, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their two children, has previously created such projects as “viaDUCT,” “Commutes: NJ Transit Series,” and “Site & Sound,” involving photography, sound, performance, and intervention in relation to architectural space. He’s had solo exhibitions and been in group shows at Sculpture Center, Smack Mellon, the International Festival of Performance Art in Toronto, the Queens Museum, the Drawing Center, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, and the Anarchist Art Fair. His current solo exhibit, “#incidentalart,” consisting of twenty-six of his #incidentalart photographs, continues at Senaspace through November 6.

twi-ny: You’ve been taking these “incidental” pictures for twenty years. What got you started?

Grady Gerbracht: I have been doing this for a long time, so it’s hard to say when it began. There was not a landmark event or aha! moment which started it all. It was more of a gradual evolution of personal formal style in confluence with certain conceptual concerns. I think every artist has a particular aesthetic sensibility which is unique to them. Each of us is compelled to make certain kinds of marks or forms, or make certain kinds of pictures, which is how we can tell one artist’s hand from another. I am sure that my openness to aesthetic sensibilities that are not my own has been influenced by a lifetime of learning and teaching about art. To teach, one has to be familiar with art history in all its variety. One also has to be able to get inside the mind of other artists during critiques and studio visits in order to provide constructive criticism. Chance operations (as per John Cage and others) are of interest to me as well. It seems that all of these elements add up to my interest in finding and calling attention to things that look like art in my everyday surroundings.

twi-ny: Why did you decide to call the series “incidental”?

GG: I chose the term Incidental Art because it is the best way I can explain my interests. There are other terms being used to describe similar ideas, such as involuntary painting and found objects. I find this nomenclature too limiting. Though I deliberately selected the works in this show to be based on ideas of two-dimensional painting for the sake of simplicity, my concept of Incidental Art is broader than that. The next exhibition could easily be images of things that look like sculptures, or of found situations that look like performance art or happenings.

twi-ny: The photos in the show were mostly taken in New York City, with a few from Chicago as well. Have you documented other cities in your travels, or is there something unique about the streets in these two metropolises?

GG: Another conceptual strand that runs through my work is the idea of turning the “wasted time” of my daily commute into productive studio time by actively making art during my travels between home and day job workplace. I made a commitment to do just that years ago when I had a three-hour commute to my first teaching job and I noticed that I was spending more time commuting than I was actually teaching. I could explain this through Marxist critical theory (and I have in academic journals) but quite honestly, it is just a practical way to make the best use of my time and it allows me to express myself creatively while on the go. I live in Brooklyn and my office is in Manhattan, so the majority of the images are from these boroughs. Sometimes I travel for my work, so there are images from Chicago and New Orleans in this exhibition because I have traveled to those cities recently.

twi-ny: Photography has changed a lot since 1996. What kind of cameras have you used over the years? Has that had any impact on the photos you take?

GG: Technology has changed a lot. I have made photos that fit into the umbrella term of Incidental Art with everything from professional 35mm and medium-format film cameras and DSLRs to my iPhone. The current exhibition is called “#incidentalart” because all of the images were made with an iPhone and uploaded to @gradygerbracht on Instagram with the hashtag #incidentalart. All of the images were produced actual size for the maximum resolution possible on my phone — that is why they are 15″ square. I wanted to be honest about what they are.

twi-ny: You post your photos on Instagram as well as Facebook, which have become repositories for amateur and professional photographers. Do you think that helps or hinders the concept of photography as art?

GG: Because of my commitment to make work during my commutes, I had been using the tools at hand to facilitate my process. I was not taking it very seriously, so I had no problem using the iPhone and Instagram feed. The images became very popular among social media friends and acquaintances, and many times people would ask when I was going to exhibit these images “IRL.” I was not planning to do it, but eventually it became clear that there was a demand so I decided to go ahead and show them.

I could have used fractal software to blow them up larger and look more like “contemporary art,” but I wanted to acknowledge what they are and where they came from. I did not want to stray too far from the immediacy of this pocket-sized studio technology. I still make pictures with my high-resolution DSLR, but that is not what this exhibit is about. The gallery space is relatively small and the venue is not a slick, commercial Chelsea warehouse-sized space, so it seemed appropriate to produce the images at this size for many reasons. I come from a tradition of conceptual art and institutional critique, so I can’t show anything without some consideration of context. I always think about it when I show my work; in fact, many of my projects make direct references to the spaces they are shown in.

Multimedia artist and teacher Grady Gerbracht peeks through Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled (Golden)” (photo by Kerry Gaertner Gerbracht)

twi-ny: Is there a kind of aha! moment when you come upon something that you want to photograph? Are you looking for something specific? For example, many of the photographs in the show share a visual theme of looking like textured paintings, with three-dimensional qualities.

GG: I shoot things I am attracted to, but I also try to shoot things that look like art that I would not make — some of the images in the current exhibition look like Rothko paintings and I like his work, but the one used on the invitation card [ed. note: see top of page] looks very much like a Larry Poons painting and I never really liked the overly worked gobs of paint in his work. The fact is that I saw it on the street while traveling for work in New Orleans and thought, Hey, that wall in the alley looks like a Poons painting, so I framed it that way and the rest is history. I have been doing this so long my kids have begun to stop me on the street and say things like, “Dad, do you want to take a picture of that?” when they see some kind of peeling paint or some rich texture. They know what kind of surfaces I am attracted to — mostly things that look like paintings.

twi-ny: You’ve helped install many art shows in a professional capacity; did that make it harder or easier to install your own work?

GG: It is never easy for the artist to install his or her own work. It helps to have others whose opinions you trust to help with editing and placement decisions. Physically it is just math, so that part is easy.

twi-ny: The mounted photographs are hanging in very specific groupings. What was the reasoning behind how you decided to group them?

GG: I was not planning on hanging them in groups, but when I laid them out in the gallery and started looking at them, considering which should go where, I noticed that certain ones complemented each other, so the final groupings evolved out of aesthetic resonance. I also wanted to show that they could be purchased in groups or in pairs because they are small and affordable works one could compose with them, like tiles.

CORNELIA PARKER: TRANSITIONAL OBJECT (PSYCHOBARN)

Cornelia Parker has added “Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)” to New York City skyline on Met roof (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

THE ROOF GARDEN COMMISSION
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Daily through October 31, recommended admission $12-$25
MetFridays: Friday, October 28, 6:30
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org
rooftop slideshow

Don’t let Halloween pass by without a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In her Guardian nomination for 2016 Visionary, British artist Cornelia Parker hinted at her upcoming Met Roof Garden commission, saying, “I always think of New York as Europe on steroids, so I’m celebrating American culture, but through European eyes. I’ll make something that adds to the view.” Her site-specific installation went up in April, and it will remain as a temporary addition to the view of the New York City skyline visible from the roof through, appropriately enough, Halloween. “Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)” is a multilayered construction that melds fiction with reality, a soothing work that is just the right amount of twisted. Using materials obtained from a dismantled Dutch red barn in Schoharie in Upstate New York, Parker has re-created the facade of the creepy Victorian house from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, where Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) lived with his mother. The Psycho house, which itself was just a facade on a Hollywood studio set, was inspired by Edward Hopper’s “House by the Railroad,” so Parker, who was raised on a farm in rural Cheshire, where there were black barns, is referencing American pop culture, art history, and her own personal story. She’s also combining a kind of good and evil duality; barn raisings, for example, are a joyous community event, while the Psycho house evokes gloom and doom, murder and madness.

Cornelia Parker opens back of installation to reveal inner psyche of structure (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

As if revealing the twenty-eight-foot-tall work’s inner psyche, Parker keeps the back open so visitors can see the scaffolding and heavy water tanks that keep the facade from collapsing, which relates to her new artist book, Verso, in which she explores the front and back of button holes. “Transitional Object” is named for the medical term for a security blanket, an item that brings children comfort as they grow up and spend less time with their mother — except maybe for Norman Bates, who created a rather unique transitional object for himself. The structure blends in well with the city skyline, which features many a building that just might be haunted, while also offering fun-house-style reflections in the Met’s mirrored wall by the rooftop bar. Parker, who has previously placed Tilda Swinton in a glass case at the Serpentine Gallery for “The Maybe” and blew up a garden shed for “Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View,” will be at the Met on October 28 at 6:30 to talk about the project as part of the MetFridays presentation “Artists on Artworks — Cornelia Parker,” which is free with museum admission and is first-come, first-served; stickers will be handed out twenty minutes before the event. For more Halloween joy, MetLiveArts is screening the Peanuts holiday classic It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown on October 29 at 11:00 am and 1:00 pm, with live music by Rob Schwimmer and his ensemble, followed by costume parades.

TRANSIT ETIQUETTE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP SPITTING AND STEP ASIDE IN 25 LANGUAGES

Transit Museum show in Grand Central explains the right way to ride subways and buses (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New York Transit Museum
Annex & Store at Grand Central Terminal
Off main concourse in Shuttle Passage
Daily through October 30
www.nytransitmuseum.org

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you probably know that I am rather a stickler for common decency on mass transportation. As long as you understand that you’re not the only person on this train or bus, then we’re good. But if you don’t respect me or others, you’re going to hear about it. Of course, I’m far from the only New Yorker who documents his or her transit travails, as insensitive clods have been a part of public transportation since buses and trains first started running in cities around the world, as evidenced in the New York Transit Museum’s wonderfully cathartic exhibition “Transit Etiquette or: How I Learned to Stop Spitting and Step Aside in 25 Languages,” which continues at the Grand Central Annex Gallery through October 30. The display features black-and-white and color posters from London, Chicago, Tokyo, Montreal, Toronto, Taipei, Brussels, Madrid, New York, and other cities, organized into such sections as “Step Aside, Please,” “Be a Space Saver,” “Say It with Safety,” “Keep It Personal,” “Don’t Be a Seat Hog,” and “This Is Your Train, Take Care of It.” One of our new heroes is Amelia Opdyke “Oppy” Jones, who designed posters for The Subway Sun, using playful fonts and cartoony drawings to warn straphangers, “Don’t Sit Where You Can’t Fit!,” “If You Expect to Rate, Please Don’t Expectorate,” “Lady! Pul-Ease,” “Love Thy Neighbor, Even in the Subway,” and, getting right to the point, “No No a 1000 Times No.” A half dozen posters by Tokyo graphic artist Hideya Kawakita boast such figures as John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Superman, and Adolf Hitler telling passengers not to smoke, spit out gum on the platform, or monopolize seats.

Amelia Opdyke “Oppy” Jones shares her many messages about transit etiquette (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Trinh Loi tells SEPTA riders, “No One Is Interested in Your Conversation — Trust Us” and “Two Seats — Really?,” while the Chicago Transit Authority similarly wants to know, “Did Your Bag Pay a Fare Too?” and also points out that “the Middle of the Car’s Not So Scary!” and “Your Maid Doesn’t Work Here.” Blocking the door has always been a major faux pas, as depicted in the 1939 Toronto sign “Move Over” and the 1944 London poster “Please Let Passengers off the Car First.” One of the grandest works in the exhibition is the 1960 New York City four-part poster “Hayyy, Mr. Zookeeper, Now We Know What to Call Them,” a dictionary defining various offenders as “Litter Critter,” “Seat Cheetah,” “Hassen Ben Taughtwell,” “Mr. Noregard,” and “Crodwy Doody.” The Guangzhou Metro takes a more empathetic view of problems, tenderly explaining, “Small Conflicts, Tolerate Them.” Yeah, right. And a 1978 animated short from Madrid, Attention! Vehicles in Motion, graphically depicts ways people can die if they don’t watch out. It is all summed up beautifully in the title of W. K. Haselden’s 1920 London sign “We Are All Equals in Tube and Bus . . .”; no matter your social status, wealth, employment, race, religion, gender, place of birth, etc., we all paid the same amount to get on this bus or subway, so we all have the same exact rights. A lovely primer that everyone should study intensively, “Transit Etiquette or: How I Learned to Stop Spitting and Step Aside in 25 Languages” feels particularly at home in Grand Central Terminal, one of the busiest train stations in the world, where nearly everyone is always in such a rush. So the next time you’re taking public transportation, don’t be any of the above abusers; respect your fellow human being, who has somewhere to get to just like you do, and, in doing so, please stay the hell out of my way.

TARA DEAL READING AND BOOK SIGNING

tara-deal

Who: Tara Deal
What: Reading and book signing
Where: Sideshow Gallery, 319 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn
When: Tuesday, October 25, free with advance RSVP (info@causeycontemporary.com) by October 23, 6:30
Why: New York City-based writer Tara Deal will be at Williamsburg’s Sideshow Gallery on October 25 for a reading and signing of her latest book, That Night Alive. Winner of the 2016 Novella Prize from Miami University Press, the novella mixes fiction and memoir, poetry and prose as a crypto-reporter goes back in time, from her last day alive on earth. Deal, who was born in Georgia and raised in South Carolina, has previously written the novella Palms Are Not Trees After All, and her short stories and poems can be found in numerous publications. In conjunction with Causey Contemporary, the gallery is currently showing “Persons of Interest,” featuring new portraits by painter, printmaker, costume designer, and voodoo doll maker Carri Skoczek, who explains in her artist statement, “My work has been an exploration in expressing female sexuality and allure as a vehicle of power.”

TICKET ALERT — IN CONVERSATION: IGGY POP AND JEREMY DELLER

“Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller,” organized by the Brooklyn Museum, February 21, 2016 (photo by Elena Olivo, © Brooklyn Museum)

Who: Iggy Pop, Jeremy Deller, Tom Healy
What: Thursday Nights Brooklyn Talks discussion
Where: Brooklyn Museum, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, 200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St., 212-864-5400
When: Thursday, November 3, $40-$85, 7:00
Why: On February 21, twenty-one artists gathered at the New York Academy of Art, participating in a special life-drawing class led by Michael Grimaldi. The model that Sunday afternoon was Muskegon native James Newell Osterberg Jr., better known as punk icon Iggy Pop. The artists, ranging in age from nineteen to eighty, were selected by Jeremy Deller and Brooklyn Museum vice director Sharon Matt Atkins. “For me it makes perfect sense for Iggy Pop to be the subject of a life class; his body is central to an understanding of rock music and its place within American culture,” Deller explains on his website. “His body has witnessed much and should be documented.” The resulting exhibition, “Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller,” featuring nudes from the class as well as selections from the Brooklyn Museum collection, will open on the fifth floor of the museum on November 4 and run through March 26. On Thursday, November 3, Iggy and Deller will be at the museum for a discussion about art, music, and nudity, moderated by writer and educator Tom Healy. Tickets are $40 for general admission, $65 with a copy of the catalog, and $85 with a copy of the catalog signed by Pop and Deller. Pop was also recently at the New York Film Festival, chatting up the Jim Jarmusch documentary Gimme Danger; the film, which documents the history of Iggy and the Stooges, opens October 28 at IFC Center.

MATERIAL CULTURES

Lucia Cuba’s “Ejercicios en salad” was inspired by people with cancer (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

BRIC Arts | Media House
647 Fulton St.
Through October 23, free
718-683-5600
www.bricartsmedia.org

Fort Greene-based BRIC Arts has teamed up with Tatter for a creative look at fabric and textile in art in the beautifully understated exhibition “Material Cultures.” The show follows Tatter’s mission “to promote the consciousness of cloth by considering, and celebrating, cloth’s intrinsic and essential relationship in human life.” The exhibit consists of colorful, imaginative works by eight mostly Brooklyn-based artists who use materials in inventive, sustainable ways. “Long before words, perception reflects the tactile,” cocurator and Tatter founder Jordana Munk Martin writes in her catalog essay, “Materiality, and the Primacy of Touch,” continuing, “Through intense materiality, [the artists collected here] ignite our own deeply personal associations with material. We view, but in viewing, we feel.” Mexican native Laura Anderson Barbata’s “Intervention: Indigo” features eleven ritualistic costumes (Manotas, Diablo I, Indigo Angel, Rogue Cop, others) bathed in indigo, a colored dye that has social significance for its use in the slave trade, on British military uniforms, and early American flags; a video shows the costumes being used in a parade. Lima-born fashion designer and social researcher Lucia Cuba sees clothing as cultural signifiers that define who we are in “Ejercicios en salad” (“Exercises on Health: Conversation I – Exercise II”), a trio of seated people dealing with cancer, covered from head to ankle in cotton rope, embroidery, and tapestry weaving, their individual identities as human beings stripped away from them. Sophia Narrett’s embroidered wall hangings look cute and adorable until you get up close and witness their “stories of embodiment, beauty, eroticism, personality, fear, and resignation,” where bad things are happening to women, based on photographs the Concord-born artist found on social media and reality television.

Laura Anderson Barbata’s “Intervention: Indigo” references ritual and the slave trade (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

El Paso’s Adrian Esparza searches for home in “Luna Park,” a deconstructed Mexican sarape whose colored threads, are nailed to the wall in circles and other ovular shapes that reference a 1916 Luna Park postcard. Toronto-born Elana Herzog’s untitled piece from her “Civilization and Its Discontents” series has been seemingly partially ripped from the wall, with tears, rips, and remnants of a Persian rug; across the gallery, her “Felled” is composed of logs and thick branches lying on a disintegrating rug. (You can watch her talk about her process here.) The show, curated by Martin with BRIC’s Elizabeth Ferrer and Jenny Gerow, is very much about process — stapling, gluing, ripping, weaving, knitting, dyeing, crocheting — and process is at the heart of Mexico City native Marela Zacarias’s awe-inducing “Mitochondrial Eve,” a labor-intensive construction, named for the ancient woman who just might be the mother of humankind, made of wood, window screens, joint compound, polymer, and acrylic paint. She folds window mesh as if she is dancing freely, then layers and sands the emerging shape, which in this case she paints in stark white that jumps off a black background. “Material Cultures” is a splendid collection of fabric-based art, one of the most compelling and involving exhibitions in the city right now. There will be free gallery tours of the show, which also includes work by Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia and Xenobia Bailey, on Wednesday at 10:30 and 11:30 am.