this week in art

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.

MetLiveArts: MULATU ASTATKE

Mulatu Astatke will bring the unique sounds of Ehtio-jazz to the Temple of Dendur on September 9

Mulatu Astatke will bring the unique sounds of Ethio-jazz to the Temple of Dendur on September 9

Who: Mulatu Astatke
What: Live concert in the Temple of Dendur
Where: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St., 212-535-7710
When: Friday, September 9, $65, 7:00
Why: Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatke, the Father of Ethio-jazz, will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the release of his first records, the two-volume Afro-Latin Soul, which were recorded in New York City, with a special performance in the Temple of Dendur at the Met Fifth Avenue on September 9. It should prove to be a fascinating venue for the seventy-two-year-old Astatke, who mixes traditional Ethiopian music with American improvisational jazz to create his unique, experimental sound, which can be heard on such albums as Yekatit, Assiyo Bellema, Mulatu Steps Ahead, and Sketches of Ethiopia. Part of the MetLiveArts program and a collaboration with the World Music Institute, the show will feature Astatke on vibraphone, wurlitzer, and percussion, Adam O’Farrill on trumpet, James Arben on saxophone, Jason Lindner on keyboards, Tal Massiah on bass, and Daniel Freedman on drums.

MOHOLY-NAGY: FUTURE PRESENT

László Moholy-Nagy, “Room of the Present” (Raum der Gegenwart), mixed media, constructed in 2009 from plans and other documentation dated 1930 (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, © 2016 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society, New York, photo by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Daily through September 7, $25 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:45 – 7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

“For a new ordering of a new world the need arose again to take possession of the simplest elements of expression, color, form, matter, space,” László Moholy-Nagy wrote in 1922’s “On the Problem of New Content and New Form.” That belief is on spectacular display in “Moholy-Nagy: Future Present,” which continues at the Guggenheim through September 7. The first major U.S. retrospective of the Austria-Hungary–born utopian modernist in nearly half a century, the show is a natural fit for the swirling ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, unfurling chronologically as Moholy-Nagy (1895 – 1946; pronounced “muh-HOH-lee nahj) experimented with an ever-widening range of artistic disciplines, melding art, technological innovation, utilitarian design, science, and social transformation. The exhibit begins with a kind of preface, Moholy-Nagy’s “Room of the Present,” which was never realized in his lifetime. The Gesamtwerk (“total work”) features films by Viking Eggeling, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov, photographic slides, posters, sculptures, architectural designs, and, in a box in the center, a re-creation of Moholy-Nagy’s most famous work, the kinetic “Light Prop for an Electric Stage.” It’s an excellent preparation for what follows, more than three hundred diverse works that appear tailor made for the Guggenheim space — in fact, his work is part of the museum’s founding collection (courtesy of Hilla Rebay) and was included at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the forerunner of the Guggenheim.

László Moholy-Nagy, “A II (Construction A II),” oil and graphite on canvas, 1924 (© 2016 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society, New York)

Moholy-Nagy, who was also a writer and Bauhaus teacher who left Europe for good in 1937 and moved to Chicago, where he started the New Bauhaus, today’s Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, produced enamel paintings with abstract geometric forms, haunting camera-less photograms, striking typography, avant-garde film, theater and opera stage design, collages using cut-outs resulting in seemingly impossible perspective, and three-dimensional works using such industrial materials as Trolit, Formica, Plexiglas, and Galalith. The exhibition is like marching in a parade of eye-opening creativity, all from the vision of one man. “Dual Form with Chromium Rods” hangs from above, like an imaginary space station. The oil and graphite painting “A 19” captures the essence of Moholy-Nagy’s fascination with color and geometry. “Photogram,” from 1926, reveals the large hand of the artist. “Space Modulator” (1939-45) and “Papmac” feature lines incised on Plexiglas and paint on both the inside and the outside of the plastic. “Slide” is a manipulation in which the Tiller Girls dance troupe appears to be racing down an imaginary slide in a way that would make Busby Berkeley proud. And finally, when you arrive at the top, you get to go back down again, experiencing Moholy-Nagy’s breathtaking oeuvre in reverse; while that is true, of course, for every Guggenheim show, it’s a real joy going backward through this particular artist’s forward-thinking process. “If the unity of art can be established with all the subject matters taught and exercised, then a real reconstruction of this world could be hoped for — more balanced and less dangerous,” Moholy-Nagy wrote in 1943’s “The Contribution of the Arts to Social Reconstruction.” The exhibit, one of the best of 2016, is on for only a few more days; it would be a shame to miss it. It’s also a shame that Moholy-Nagy died of leukemia in 1946 at the age of fifty-one; it would have been thrilling to see what he could have done in the ensuing years, as technological innovation spiraled in the aftermath of WWII.

UNFINISHED: THOUGHTS LEFT VISIBLE

Vincent van Gogh, “Street in Auvers-sur-Oise,” oil on canvas, 1890 (Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Collection Antell)

The Met Breuer
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 4, suggested admission $12-$25
212-731-1675
www.metmuseum.org

In Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s 2014 biopic about British artist J. M. W. Turner, the controversial landscape painter (played with a splendid curmudgeonly gruffness by Timothy Spall) examines a canvas of his hanging at the Royal Academy, approaches it with his brush, and dabs on one last bit of color, as if adding a period to complete the painting. But what really determines whether a work of art is finished? That is the question asked by the Met Breuer in its inaugural exhibition, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” The show, which features nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and sculptures, explores various aspects of completion while referencing the Met’s takeover of Marcel Breuer’s building, originally built for the Whitney, which recently moved to its new home in the Meatpacking District. (At the very least, the downstairs of the Met Breuer has not been finished.) “A work is complete if in it the master’s intentions have been realized,” Rembrandt said. However, Pablo Picasso asserted, “To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul.” The exhibition, spread across two floors, includes several canvases by Rembrandt and Picasso as well as works by Titian, Pollock, Velázquez, Monet, Homer, Whistler, Friedrich, Hesse, Gericault, Ruscha, Bourgeois, Cézanne, Sargent, Matisse, Szapocznikow, Tuymans, Richter, Johns, Twombly, Dumas, and many others, from the Renaissance to the present, a fascinating journey into the creative process. But the majority of the pieces on view — divided into such sections as “The Infinite: Art Out of Bounds,” “To Be Determined: Painting in Process,” and “Decay, Dwindle, Decline” — are not immediately identifiable as being incomplete, especially given curators Andrea Bayer, Kelly Baum, and Nicholas Cullinan’s wide employment of the concept of “unfinished.”

Janine Antoni, “Lick and Lather,” chocolate and soap, 1993-94 (collection of Jill and Peter Kraus)

Edouard Manet kept repainting the face of “Madame Edouard Manet” and eventually gave up, not satisfied with the results. James Tissot’s “Orphan” etching was made from a painting that is now lost. Elizabeth Peyton’s “Napoleon (After Louis David, Le General Bonaparte vers 1797)” was based on an unfinished portrait by Jacques Louis David. Lucian Freud continually reworked the face in a 2002 self-portrait with oil paint, leaving the rest of the canvas as a charcoal sketch. Gustave Courbet chose not to give definition to his visage in “The Homecoming.” Alberto Giacometti made significant changes to “Annette” after it was first shown publicly. Edvard Munch’s “Self-Portrait with Wounded Eye” is an unsigned piece that mirrors the vision problem the artist was suffering from. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “The Dirty Bride or The Wedding of Mopsus and Nisa” was a design for a woodcut. Gustav Klimt’s “Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III” was commissioned half a dozen years after the subject committed suicide, and then Klimt died before it was complete. Janine Antoni licked and washed with the two busts of “Lick and Lather,” but the materials she used (chocolate and soap) will eventually disintegrate on their own. It is not known why Albrecht Dürer did not finish “Salvator Mundi” after he fled Nuremberg for Venice and later returned. Camille Corot’s “Boatman among the Reeds,” a finished work, looks unfinished when seen from up close; one critic noted, “When you come to a Corot, it is better not to get too close. Nothing is finished, nothing is carried through. . . . Keep your distance.” Meanwhile, X-radiographs have revealed an earlier state underneath Corot’s signed “Sibylle.” Vincent van Gogh committed suicide before completing “Street in Auvers-sur-Oise.” Edgar Degas reworked the 1866 “Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey” in 1880-81 and again around 1897; the artist reportedly said to Katherine Cassat, mother of Mary Cassat, “It is one of those works which are sold after a man’s death and artists buy them not caring whether they are finished or not.” Indeed, the nature of death, the ultimate finality, hovers over many of the works. “The painting raises fundamental questions regarding the transitional nature of the moment of death and the inherent ‘unfinishedness’ of human life,” the wall label says about Ferdinand Hodler’s “Valentine Godé — Darel on Her Deathbed,” a poignant oil depicting the Swiss artist’s ailing lover.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, “Rough Sea,” oil on canvas, ca. 1840-45 (Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856)

The centerpiece of the show is a side room — missed by many museumgoers — that contains five glorious later canvases by Joseph Mallard William Turner, abstract seascapes and landscapes painted between 1835 and 1845. Pre-Impressionist, they seem to stand at a sort of gateway to the modern and a transition between earlier ideas of “unfinished” related to product and later notions associated with process. There are few definable objects in the works — “Margate (?), from the Sea,” “The Thames above Waterloo Bridge,” “Rough Sea,” “Sun Setting over a Lake,” and “Sunset from the Top of the Rigi” — and there is debate over whether they are non finito (intentionally unfinished), never completed for various reasons, or in fact finished paintings. Given the experimental nature of the glowing canvases, it wouldn’t have surprised me if Spall walked into the room, carefully surveyed the canvases, then added a dab of paint here, a splotch of color there. It also makes one question whether it even matters if a work is finished or not; without knowing any of the background behind these five Turner paintings, you’d be hard-pressed to consider them unfinished; Turner’s magnificent use of light and color and exquisite brushwork take your breath away, filling every bit of you with emotion, leaving nothing untouched, even if, to Turner, they were not done. As Barnett Newman said, “The idea of a ‘finished’ picture is a fiction.”

The exhibition finishes September 4; be sure to also check out Tatsuo Miyajima’s first-floor installation, “Arrow of Time (Unfinished Life),” which was specially commissioned as a companion piece for the show; it consists of approximately 250 red, numeric LEDs hanging from the ceiling, counting down from nine to one over and over at different intervals, an endless cycle evoking life, death, and rebirth. Miyajima named the piece after Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s theory concerning thermodynamics and entropy and was inspired by the Buddhist notion of samsara, which fits right in with the theme of the Breuer’s first major exhibit.

TOM FRIEDMAN: LOOKING UP

Tom Friedman’s “Looking Up” gazes up at the sky in the middle of busy Park Ave. (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

SCULPTURE ON PARK AVE.
Park Ave. & 53rd St.
Extended through September 5
www.luhringaugustine.com
looking up slideshow

These are some tough times, but Tom Friedman insists things are looking up with his large-scale sculpture, “Looking Up,” which is standing tall on the Park Ave. mall at Fifty-Third St. Rising 33.3 feet high, “Looking Up” depicts an elongated figure bending his head back almost impossibly to get a look at the sky, which everyone in New York gazes up at a little differently since 9/11. The work is made using styrofoam, stainless steel, crushed aluminum foil roasting pans, and lost wax casting to achieve its retro feel; the Giacometti-like man hovers near Lever House, where Friedman’s site-specific “Aluminum Foil” exhibition was on view in 2007; one of the pieces from that show, “Aluminum Foil Buddha,” is back in Lever House, meditating in a glass case, creating quite a dichotomy with his rather larger compatriot outside. Friedman previously staged a memorable show in 2001 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art using such found objects as toothpicks, aspirin, pencil shavings, sugar cubes, and soap. “He’s actually an analog artist in a digital world,” curator Robert Hobbs says in a video about the piece before noting the Zen-like quality of his work. Make sure to get up close and personal with “Looking Up” (a joint project of Luhring Augustine, Stephen Friedman Gallery, the Fund for Park Avenue, and NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program) to check out the strange but cool detail of the roasting pans, consider the balance between humor and earnestness, and wonder what the giant might be looking at; just beware of the busy Park Ave. traffic.