this week in art

MOVIE IN MY HEAD: BRUCE CONNER AND BEYOND

Bruce Conners A MOVIE is centerpiece of film exhibition at MoMA

Bruce Conner’s A MOVIE is centerpiece of revelatory film exhibition and retrospective at MoMA

MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
September 16-30
Tickets: $12, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

I first saw Bruce Conner’s seminal film A Movie in college, when I was studying with Amos Vogel, the Austrian-born founder of Cinema 16 and cofounder of the New York Film Festival. Conner’s 1958 twelve-minute marvel consists solely of found black-and-white footage edited into a fascinating tale of life on Earth in the post-WWII era, with an epic, boisterous soundtrack. “One of the most original works of the international film avant-garde, this is a pessimistic comedy of the human condition, consisting of executions, catastrophes, mishaps, accidents, and stubborn feats of ridiculous daring, magically compiled from jungle movies, calendar art, Academy leaders, cowboy films, cartoons, documentaries, and newsreels,” Vogel wrote in his 1974 book, Film as a Subversive Art, placing the film in his section about death. “Amidst initial amusement and seeming confusion, an increasingly dark social statement emerges which profoundly disturbs us on a subconscious level. . . . The entire film is a hymn to creative montage.” Watching A Movie can be a transformative experience; it was for me, showing me a whole new purpose behind filmmaking and leading me to further study cinema at NYU. So it’s fitting that A Movie is the first thing you see upon entering the MoMA exhibition “Bruce Conner: It’s All True,” a revelatory survey of Conner’s fifty-year career as a visual artist, including drawing, sculpture, photography, collage, photograms, performance, and, of course, film, continuing through October 2. It’s a stunning retrospective that ranges from his early “Ratbastard” hanging constructions to his obsession with the mushroom cloud and the atomic bomb, from his creepy “Child” sculpture to his punk-rock photographs for the music magazine Search and Destroy, from collages using found print materials to spectacularly detailed inkblot drawings, from his ghostly photograms using his own body to buttons declaring, “I Am Not Bruce Conner.” But at the center of it all are Conner’s films, scattered throughout the exhibition but also screening in the exciting film program “Movie in My Head: Bruce Conner and Beyond,” which runs September 16-30 and consists of nearly all of Conner’s cinematic output seen alongside work by many of his contemporaries.

Toni Basil gets all groovy in Bruce Conner’s dazzling short film, BREAKAWAY, a precursor to the MTV video

A leading counterculture figure, Conner was born and raised in Kansas and spent most of his life in San Francisco, where he met up with the Beats, hippies, and punks; he died in 2008 at the age of seventy-five, leaving behind a legacy of cutting-edge short films that offer a unique look at America and its values, commenting on consumerism, war, religion, pop culture, and film itself — the mechanics of the medium, including the countdown leader and the physical filmstrips themselves, were often visible and part of the subject matter — in precisely edited works embedded with subliminal messages and featuring surprising soundtracks to match. “In my opinion, Bruce Conner is the most important artist of the twentieth century,” his friend, collaborator, and fellow native Kansan Dennis Hopper said. Hopper was on the set of Conner’s Breakaway with actor Dean Stockwell; Conner honored Hopper with the three-volume work “The Dennis Hopper One Man Show,” twenty-six collage etchings actually made by Conner. The MoMA exhibition includes that as well as Hopper’s photograph “Bruce Conner’s Physical Services” and Conner’s 1993 collage “Bruce Conner Disguised as Dennis Hopper Disguised as Bruce Conner at the Dennis Hopper One Man Show.” That’s all part of Conner’s modus operandi, where the art is more important than the artist, even though his hand is so evident in his works (although his name is often not). Breakaway is a frenetic short in which Antonia Basilotta, aka Toni Basil (later of “Mickey” fame), dances wildly in various black-and-white costumes (and naked) as Conner’s handheld camera keeps pace. Conner, considered by some (but not him) to be the father of MTV because of his editing style, also made videos for Devo (“Mongoloid”) and Brian Eno and David Byrne (“Mea Culpa,” “America Is Waiting”) in addition to Cosmic Ray, set to Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” Conner made two versions of Looking for Mushrooms, about his time in Mexico (and his search for psychedelic fungi), one silent, a later edit boasting the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Two of his most political works are Report, which incorporates the Zapruder footage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with clips from advertising and industry films, and Crossroads, in which he repurposes the military’s Operation Crossroads film about the atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. And in 2008’s Easter Morning, Conner’s last completed major film, he reworks his 1966 Easter Morning Raga, creating a hypnotic compilation of abstract Kodachrome shots of nature set to Terry Riley’s “In C.”

CROSSROADS explores the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests, which fascinated Bruce Conner

“Movie in My Head: Bruce Conner and Beyond” begins with “Opening Night,” featuring A Movie and Conner’s Marilyn Times Five, which combines Marilyn Monroe’s performance of “I’m Through with Love” from Some Like It Hot with existing porn shots of a Marilyn look-alike, and Crossroads, introduced by chief curator Stuart Comer. Each program starts off with Conner’s Ten Second Film, a commissioned trailer for the 1965 New York Film Festival, under the leadership of Vogel, that was ultimately rejected for being too experimental. The series is arranged into eleven programs that encompass nearly all of Conner’s films along with works by Fernand Léger, Joseph Cornell, Carolee Schneeman, Christian Barclay, Stan Vanderbeek, William S. Burroughs, Robert Frank, Wallace Berman, Ron Rice, Cauleen Smith, Bruce Baillie, and others. On September 28, “Dreamland: An Evening with Peggy Ahwesh and Julie Murray,” the two filmmakers will show their own works along with Conner’s Take the 5:10 to Dreamland and Valse Triste, and on September 30, Michelle Silva of the Conner Family Trust will present “Revisitations,” consisting of rare and unfinished Conner films, shorts by George Kuchar and Ben Van Meter, and a talk with Brooklyn-based artist and archivist Andrew Lampert. The title of the MoMA series is taken from a 2003 interview in which artist Doug Aitken sat down with Conner for the nonprofit group Creative Time: “One of the reasons I made A Movie was because it’s what I wanted to see happen in film. Ever since I was fifteen years old, I’d been watching movies and thinking of ways to play with their storylines. For instance, I would imagine taking a backlit shot of Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus walking through a doorway and overlaying it with something like the final words from King Kong: ‘Beauty killed the beast.’ Then I’d imagine the next shot being something else entirely using different sound. Basically for years, I’d been playing with bits and pieces of different films in my head, and I kept assembling and reassembling this immense movie using pictures and sounds and music from all sorts of things. I’d been waiting for someone to come up with a movie like this. And nobody did.” So Conner did, as this MoMA exhibition and film series so effectively display.

TARYN SIMON: AN OCCUPATION OF LOSS

Taryn Simon’s Park Ave. Armory installation resembles both a memorial pipe organ and a semicircle of crematorium chimneys (photo © Naho Kubota)

Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. between 66th & 67th Sts.
September 13-25, daytime installation: Tuesday – Sunday, $10, 12 noon – 4:00
September 13-25, evening performances: Tuesday – Sunday, $45, 6:20, 7:10, 8:00, 8:50, 9:40, 10:30, 11:20
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
tarynsimon.com

New York–based conceptual artist Taryn Simon has primarily used text and image and exhaustive research to document, collect, catalog, categorize, and classify multiple aspects of the human condition, examining such issues as politics, justice, governance, immigration, economics, and religion in such previous works as “A Living Man Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII,” “Contraband,” “Paperwork and the Will of Capital,” and “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.” In her latest piece, “An Occupation of Loss,” Simon takes on all that and more in a compelling and deeply involving interactive performance installation continuing its world premiere at the Park Ave. Armory through September 25. Co-commissioned by the armory and London’s Artangel, “An Occupation of Loss” is an intimate exploration of the ritual of grief and the marginalization of professional mourners. Each evening, there are seven thirty-five-minute performances that begin with a group of fifty ticket holders waiting outside the armory on Sixty-Seventh St. At the designated start time, they are led up the stairs and into the massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where they line up on the balcony, overlooking eleven forty-eight-foot concrete wells (composed of eight six-foot rings apiece), arranged in a semicircle, each with a walkway leading to a small entrance. Slowly and quietly, up to three professional mourners enter each structure (designed by OMA / Shohei Shigematsu for maximum acoustical effect), which evoke Zoroastrian Towers of Silence as well as crematorium chimneys and a pipe organ. The audience is then led downstairs onto the floor of the 55,000-square-foot drill hall, through two long, narrow vertical white lights that echo the “Tribute in Light” homage to the Twin Towers (the lighting is by Urs Schönebaum), and are then permitted to enter the small, tight-fitting spaces where the mourners perform their laments. Wearing traditional clothing (except for a trio of Greeks who are in contemporary dress), the men and women sing, chant, cry, wail, and play instruments as they would at a funeral in their native country; however, in this case, since they are not mourning for any specific person, it is as if they are mourning for us all. “I was looking at the space that grief and loss generate and how it is performed and that line between something that is scripted and authentic,” Simon explains in an armory video, “and how we process that when the object of loss is not present — when there’s no body at the center. Is there a space where one actually has individual emotion, and where are our emotions governed and part of a program, and when are they liberated and something of our own? And questioning if that space even exists.” In addition to the evening performances ($45), the installation will be open Tuesday through Sunday from noon to four o’clock ($10), when visitors can walk around the wells and lament in their own way without the professional mourners, who only appear at night. The piece challenges viewers to consider such dualities as life and death, absence and presence, sound and silence, day and night, bona fide and staged, the private and the public, and light and dark.

Visitors can enter small spaces where professional mourners perform their laments (photo © Naho Kubota)

Taryn Simon’s “An Occupation of Loss” offers a fascinating look at how several cultures deal with grief in a public setting (photo © Naho Kubota)

As detailed in a booklet that visitors receive on their way out, the mourners come from Burkina Faso, India, Azerbaijan, Greece, France, Cambodia, Ghana, Ecuador, China, Romania, Russia, Malaysia, and Venezuela. The extensive information Simon had to provide in order to get the performers nonimmigrant visas forms a fascinating overview of their historic and cultural context. For example, Dr. Boureima T. Diamitani writes, in support of Burkina Faso mourners known as masks, “For many years, performers of mourning rituals are taught sacred practices to protect them from malefic powers of external enemies.” Dr. Sarah Laursen notes, “It is also customary throughout China to hire professional mourners to inspire attendance at funeral ceremonies, as it is believed that the number of attendees at a funeral is reflective of the importance of the deceased in the community.” And Juan Mullo Sandoval points out, “Along with its poetic structure and morphological system, the telluric, sentimental, and lamentation aspects of yaravíes represent the affliction that has characterized marginal sectors of the Ecuadorian population since the colonial times: problems of exclusion, economic deprivation, and exploitation.” “An Occupation of Loss” is particularly poignant in the wake of last weekend’s fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but there’s a timeless quality to it as well, given the many military actions going on around the globe right now, the frightening number of mass shootings in America, the fierce battle over immigration, and the national controversy over the killings of unarmed black men, women, and children by white police officers. Also, Simon was very careful to omit the graceful ambience of the armory, with its decorated period rooms, portraits, and plaques honoring veterans and military dead, from visitors’ experience. Thus, no one exits or enters through the main lobby; instead, a side and back door are used, allowing the installation to stand on its own. “An Occupation of Loss” might be about death and grief, but it is also a celebration of unique and different cultures at a moment when fear of the other is so prevalent in America’s psyche, and Simon doesn’t want anything else to get in the way of that.

Taryn Simon’s “An Occupation of Loss” offers a fascinating look at how many cultures deal with grief in a public setting (photo © Naho Kubota)

Visitors can enter small spaces where professional mourners perform their laments (photo © Naho Kubota)

The thirty-five minutes pass by very fast, so be sure to save some time to relax near the center of the semicircle, where all of the sounds of mourning come together to form an entrancing cacophony of lament. You will then be led out through a surprise exit that will delight those who attended the armory’s previous exhibition, Martin Creed’s “The Back Door.” And the booklet itself is also extremely worthwhile, identifying each of the professional mourners and sharing engrossing information on their specific forms of lamentation and how they relate to social, political, and economic issues in their country; over the years, many of the mourners have risked their own lives in order to help honor those that have already lost theirs, adding yet more power to this wholly original experience. [Note: Simon will be at the armory on September 24 for an artist talk moderated by scholar Homi K. Bhabha ($15, 6:00).]

REMBRANDT’S FIRST MASTERPIECE / HANS MEMLING: PORTRAITURE, PIETY, AND A REUNITED ALTARPIECE

Rembrandt van Rijn, “Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver,” oil on panel, 1629 (© Private Collection, photo courtesy of the National Gallery, London, 2016)

Morgan Library
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
“Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece” through September 18
“Hans Memling: Portraiture, Piety, and a Reunited Altarpiece” through January 8
Tuesday – Sunday, $13-$20 (free Friday nights from 7:00 to 9:00)
212-685-0008
www.themorgan.org

Like the Morgan Library’s spring 2013 exhibition “Degas, Miss La La, and the Cirque Fernando,” an expansive look at Edgar Degas’s thrilling 1879 painting “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando,” a pair of splendidly curated current shows take viewers deep inside two other remarkable works by two very different artists. Closing on September 18, “Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece” is a thorough examination of Rembrandt van Rijn’s powerful 1629 oil painting “Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver,” which has never previously been shown in the United States. The canvas depicts the biblical event in which a remorseful Judas Iscariot gives back to the Sanhedrin the reward he received for betraying Jesus. Rembrandt, only twenty-three when he finished the work, displays a masterful use of light and color in relating the narrative, the darkness on the right side and the glowing anachronistic open book on the left flanking a shadowy central section where Judas, hands clasped, begs for forgiveness from suspicious elders. “All this I compare with all the beauty that has been produced throughout the ages. All honor to thee, Rembrandt!” ambassador and diplomat Constantijn Huygens wrote of the work at the time; Huygens’s original manuscript is on view along with other related etchings, drypoints, and ephemera, including rare preparatory drawings for “Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver,” which have never been seen publicly together with the painting. Also in the show are Rembrandt’s stunning, tiny etching and drypoint “Self-Portrait in Cap, Wide-Eyed and Open-Mouthed,” the etching “Self-Portrait with Curly Hair and White Collar: Bust,” multiple renditions of such biblical scenes as the circumcision of Christ, the presentation in the temple, the crucifixion, and the descent from the cross, and two studies after Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” a theme that Rembrandt never painted, as well as Jan Lievens’s “Portrait of Constantijn Huygens.” It all makes for a fascinating exploration of what is considered Rembrandt’s first mature work.

Hans Memling, “The Triptych of Jan Crabbe,” oil on panel, ca. 1467–70 (center panel: image courtesy of Pinacoteca Civica di Palazzo Chiericati, Vicenza. Left and right panels: © the Morgan Library & Museum, photo by Graham S. Haber)

About 160 years earlier, Flanders-based German painter Hans Memling created “The Triptych of Jan Crabbe,” a dazzling altarpiece that is being seen in full for the first time in more than two centuries. Running through January 8, “Hans Memling: Portraiture, Piety, and a Reunited Altarpiece” packs a whole lot of information into the small Thaw Gallery, comprising the complete triptych, which was commissioned by Cistercian abbot Jan Crabbe around 1470, when Memling was forty, along with other works by Memling and his contemporaries. The inner wings of the altarpiece — one depicting Crabbe’s mother, Anna Willemzoon, with St. Anne, the other pairing his half-brother, Willem de Winter, with St. William — were acquired by J. Pierpont Morgan in 1907 and have been consistently on view in his study ever since. They are now joined by the central panel, in which Crabbe kneels beneath the cross, his hands together, St. John the Baptist and St. Bernard of Clairvaux behind him, the Virgin Mary, St. John the Evangelist, and St. Mary Magdalene on the other side of Jesus on the cross, a foreboding skull in the lower corner. The outer wings, known as the Annunciation Panels, show the Angel Gabriel and Mary. Infrared and X-radiography reveal some of Memling’s working process through images of his underdrawing and various changes he made while painting. The exhibit is supplemented by such other works by Memling as the Frick’s extraordinary “Portrait of a Man” and the Morgan’s “Portrait of a Man with a Pink,” examples of Book of Hours illuminated manuscripts that both influenced and were influenced by Memling, oil paintings and drawings by the Master of the St. Ursula Legend and artists from the Netherlandish school, and an exquisite metalpoint by Gerard David. Perhaps what is most impressive in both the Rembrandt and Memling exhibits are the precise, masterful techniques they utilized in order to bring such striking humanity and emotional depth to the works as a whole as well as to the individual characters, who seem to be alive with breath as they contemplate their fate in the wake of the crucifixion of Jesus. There will be a gallery talk led by Morgan assistant curator Ilona van Tuinen on September 16 (free with museum admission, 6:00), Met curator Maryan Ainsworth will deliver the lecture “A Closer Look at Hans Memling’s Working Methods” on October 4 ($15, 6:30), and the Morgan will host the concert “Flanders Remembers: Music and Words from WWI” on November 17 ($35 including gallery visit, 7:00).

TICKET ALERT: THE DREAM-OVER 2016

Dream-Over participants sleep under a specially selected work of art at the Rubin Museum chosen to impact their dreams

Rubin Museum
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Tickets go on sale Tuesday, September 13, $125, 11:00 am
Event takes place October 15, 8:00 pm – 9:00 am
212-620-5000
www.rubinmuseum.org

Tickets go on sale September 13 at eleven o’clock for a uniquely satisfying and rewarding program at the Rubin Museum. The Dream-Over, which began in 2011, offers adults the opportunity to spend a special evening inside the museum, exploring the inner workings of their mind in a fascinating way. Each lucky participant fills out a Dreamlife Questionnaire in advance, giving details about themselves that will help consultants, under the leadership of dream facilitator Dr. Vanessa Sinclair, who curates the “Art and the Occult” series at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, select a specific work of art in the museum under which they will sleep; hopefully the painting, photograph, or sculpture will influence their dreams. The evening will begin with a talk on the significance of dreams with Khenpo Lama Pema Wangdak and Dr. Sinclair and include lullabies and bedtime stories. Dreamers are required to arrive at the Rubin already in pajamas, robe, and slippers and must bring their own bedding. Food and drink are not allowed; there will be a midnight snack and a Tibetan breakfast. Couples can sleep and dream under the same work of art (each paying full price). In the morning, Dream Gatherers and Dream Interpreters will speak individually with the participants to figure out what their dreams might mean. Tickets for the Dream-Over sell out immediately, so don’t hesitate if you want to take part in this ultracool event.

THE ENCHANTED REALM OF RENE MAGRITTE

Georgette Magritte (Anya Krawcheck) receives a balloon from Fantomas (Danny Wilfred) in THE ENCHANTED REALM OF RENE MAGRITTE (Al Rodriguez Photography)

A JOURNEY THROUGH THE MIND OF THE SURREALIST PAINTER
Governors Island
Nolan Park House 17
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through September 25 (except 9/9), $15
www.exquisitecorpsecompany.com

Brooklyn-based Exquisite Corpse follows up last summer’s Secession 2015, which took place in House 17 in Nolan Park on Governors Island and told the story of several artists and their muses in early twentieth-century Vienna, with The Enchanted Realm of Rene Magritte, set in the same building but now following the tempestuous relationship between Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte (Max Henry Schloner) and his wife and muse, Georgette (Anya Krawcheck). The play features ten vignettes, each written by one of eight writers (T. Adamson, Blake Bishton, Simon de Carvalho, Eric Marlin, Matthew Minnicino, Ran Xia, Emily Zemba, and Laura Zlatos), and is set in various rooms featuring Magritte-inspired designs. Forget about the silly, unnecessary frame story in which an annoying Realtor is trying to sell Magritte’s house and instead let yourself get swept up in the surreal love story between Rene and Georgette, from their first meeting, when he was fifteen and she was thirteen, through their later courtship and blatant infidelities. Following his father’s death, Rene is deciding whether to sell the house; the oddball Mr. Fish (Lee Collins) is desperate to buy it, but Rene’s deceased mother, Regina (company producing director Blaine O’Leary), a former milliner, has emerged from the river where she drowned herself years before to return to her son, begging him not to part with the home. After a disappointed Mr. Fish exits, Rene leads approximately fifteen guests on a tour of the house, each room relating to a piece of his personal past.

Rene Magritte (Max Henry Schloner) gets down with new friend Sheila Legge (Blaine O’Leary) in THE ENCHANTED REALM OF RENE MAGRITTE (Al Rodriguez Photography)

In the parlor, Fantomas features no dialogue, instead relying on shadow puppets, masked dancers, WWII sound effects, Paul Simon’s “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War,” and a red balloon to poetically show the couple’s relationship blossoming. In The Surrealist Phantom, Rene introduces Georgette and Paul (choreographer Danny Wilfred), his best friend, to Sheila Legge (O’Leary,), his new girlfriend. For Out of the River, Regina scampers up and down steps, sharing her deepest thoughts with the audience. Day Trip is set in the sun room, where Georgette and Paul are at the beach, talking about their affair. The costumes, dialogue, and design of each room boast little Magritte-like flourishes referencing his paintings, from intersecting empty frames to fish, from an apple to a pipe, from a bowler hat to masks and a tree. Not all of it makes sense; you’ll be scratching your head a lot, trying to figure out just what is happening, but director and creator Tess Howsam maintains a relatively smooth flow from scene to scene. Schloner plays Magritte with a soft-spoken sense of wonder, the artist’s mind always wandering, his words flowing like one of his surreal paintings. “I worry that one day I will look out the window and, instead of the hill and the river below, I will see just a big wall of grey, translucent and covered in scales, like the belly of a giant trout, blocking out everything else,” he says. “So I’ve been keeping the blinds closed, because I never know when I might see the fish instead of the river.” The excellent O’Leary is intense as Regina and playful as the limber Sheila. Krawcheck is a revelation as the dedicated but confused Georgette, giving a tour-de-force performance that should soon have her busting out of the Nolan Park house and into bigger digs. She commands each scene she’s in with a sweetly infectious confidence and a natural artistic grace that is a delight to watch. The ninety-minute show continues September 10-11, 16-18, and 23-25; art lovers might also want to check out the ninth annual Governors Island Art Fair, which takes place in several houses along Colonels Row as well as at Fort Jay and Castle Williams.

MICHAEL RICHARDS: WINGED

Michael Richards’s “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian” stands in the shadows of the World Trade Center across the river, where he lost his life on September 11 (photo by Etienne Frossard)

The Arts Center at Governors Island, Building 110
Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays through September 25
Admission: free, 12 noon – 5:00
212-219-9401
lmcc.net/event/winged

It’s one of the most haunting and memorable works of contemporary art you’re ever likely to see. Michael Richards’s 1999 “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian,” on view weekends through September 25 in the powerful “Winged” retrospective at the LMCC Arts Center on Governors Island, is a life-size rendition of the artist, cast in resin and fiberglass, wearing a gold-painted Tuskegee Airman uniform. The sculpture is suspended a bit off the ground, on a steel shaft, showing Richards with his eyes closed, his hands just below his hips, palms open in a sign of both peace and acceptance of his fate, as a barrage of airplanes crash into him. Two years later Richards died on the morning of September 11, 2001, in his LMCC “World Views” studio on the ninety-second floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center. The title references the Christian saint and martyr who was tied up and lanced with arrows and the controversial character from the Uncle Remus stories that was involved in trapping and escaping, an ever-present battle for survival. It was originally feared that “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian” was destroyed in the terrorist attacks, but it was later discovered in a cousin’s garage. Curators Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin have placed the breathtaking sculpture with its back to the east window, where One World Trade Center, built at Ground Zero to replace the Twin Towers, can be seen in the distance, across the river. It’s utterly unforgettable, especially with the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 taking place this weekend.

Michael Richards stands with “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian” in 1999 (photo by Frank Stewart)

But “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian” is only one of several stunning works by Richards in the one-room exhibition, the largest ever survey of the artist, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and was only thirty-eight when he was killed. “A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo,” cast in 1994, consists of five plaster busts, four on solid bases and featuring a newspaper image of white police officers in the midst of brutality, the sentence “When I was young I wanted to be a policeman” on the plinth, while in the center another bust spins around, a small image of Rodney King on his forehead. In 1998’s “Air Fall 1 (His Eye Is on the Sparrow, and I Know He’s Watching Me),” fifty black airplanes are heading down from a black cloud of hair, spiraling toward a mirrored bull’s-eye on the ground. Hair, which Richards associated with black identity and racist stereotypes, also plays a role in “The Great Black Airmen,” five pilot helmets in which kinky hair peeks out from straightened hair, and “Travel Kit,” in which seven fingers emerge from bronze hairbrushes. “Fly Away O’ Glory” comprises seven pairs of cast-bronze arms on the floor, each hand gripping a spinning feather in a desperate, unsuccessful attempt to fly.

Michael Richards, “A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo,” resin, marble dust, wood, motor, photo transfer, 1994 (photo by Etienne Frossard)

Ephemera including photographs, letters, journal pages, exhibition catalogs and invitations, and testimonials from friends and colleagues paint Richards as both an extraordinary man and artist. “Michael was a poetic soul,” El Museo del Barrio executive director Jorge Daniel Veneciano says. “His interest in metaphors of flight adds a confounding layer of irony to his life and passing. Like Icarus, perhaps he flew too close to the sun — too close to the truth. And the dark poetry of the universe answered in an unforgiving way.” Lowery Stokes Sims, former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, adds, “Like the legendary Icarus, artists dare to defy the limitations set by time and gravity. But even if they fall, they allow us to glimpse the possible so that we can soar there with them.” Given the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 and the current debate over the Black Lives Matter movement and systemic racism in general, this is just the right time to take another look at Richards’s awe-inspiring work. “In a lot of my work the metaphor of escape is a recurring one. It’s about societal escape. Trying to transcend the societal boundaries that we set up as an invisible trap around us,” he said in a 1997 interview. “The idea of flight relates to my use of pilots and planes, but it also references the black church, the idea of being lifted up, enraptured, or taken up to a safe place — to a better world.” It’s fascinating to wonder just what he’d be creating today were he still alive, commenting on the state of society in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

BRIDGE OVER MUD

Norway’s Verdensteatret pulls into the BAM Fisher this week with the U.S. premiere of experimental, immersive multimedia production (photo courtesy of the artist)

Oslo’s Verdensteatret combines experimental sound and kinetic imagery in BRIDGE OVER MUD (photo courtesy of the artist)

BROEN OVER GJØRME
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 7-10, $25, 7:30 & 9:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
verdensteatret.com

BAM’s 2016 Next Wave Festival got under way September 7 with the U.S. premiere of Bridge over Mud, a dazzling hour-long audiovisual experience that transforms the Fishman Space into a unique electroacoustic adventure. Oslo-based arts collective Verdensteatret has created an open-ended work that made me imagine what it would be like if Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy were to take over the controls of the Joshua Light Show, combining avant-garde music and live experimental imagery with cutting-edge and DIY technology. Video of abstract gray industrial faces and slow-moving taxicabs are joined with screeching, droning sounds. Model-train-like cars mounted with lights and cameras and Russian Constructivist-inspired geometric cutouts motor across 195 feet of winding tracks, passing by plastic dishes and wiry kinetic sculptures that resemble dogs and dinosaurs, casting bizarre shadows evoking futuristic landscapes onto cardboard screens as a man blasts away on a tuba and a woman mutters hard-to-decipher dialogue.

Perplexing abstruse eyes look back at the audience. Blacks and grays are enlivened with greens, reds, and yellows. Plastic cups rise from the tracks like alien communicators. Thin metal rods descend from the ceiling, forming angular shapes. There’s a frisson of representation in the shadowy movement and the intense sound emerging from sixty speakers, but it’s more atmospheric and suggestive than plaintively narrative, enveloping the audience in a mysterious emotional resonance as it reaches an exciting, thrilling crescendo that explodes in the intimate space. A collaboration between Asle Nilsen, Lisbeth J. Bodd, Piotr Pajchel, Eirik Blekesaune, Ali Djabbary, Martin Taxt, Espen Sommer Eide, Torgrim Torve, Elisabeth Gmeiner, Niklas Adam, Kristine Sandøy, Thorolf Thuestad, Janne Kruse, Laurent Ravot, and Benjamin Nelson, Bridge over Mud is a captivating multimedia symphony, more performance installation than traditional theatrical presentation, “a work where one sees the music and listens to the images,” as Verdensteatreter (Louder, And All the Question Marks Started to Sing) explains in the program. What’s it all about? It doesn’t really matter. Just sit back and enjoy.