this week in art

PANORAMA: MUSIC • ART • TECHNOLOGY

The Lab hosts interactive installations using cutting-edge technology (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Randall’s Island Park
July 22-24, $125 per day
www.panorama.nyc
randallsisland.org

It was a beautiful day on Randall’s Island for the first day of the inaugural Panorama: Music • Art • Technology festival. It did get rather hot — sweat poured off many of the performers as well as the dancing crowd — but the rains never came, and the sunset cast a brilliant glow over the festivities. Goldenvoice, the company that runs Coachella, tried to bring a world-class alternative music festival to New York City with All Points West in 2008 and 2009, and they’re giving it another shot with Panorama, which opened on Friday with a warm vibe. There were bathrooms everywhere — including numerous cans that were a major step up from standard Porta Potties — and the food and drink lines were fairly manageable. The layout is excellent, leaving room to feel the comfort of green grass and shady trees. Live bands play at three locations, the giant outdoor Panorama Stage and the smaller Pavilion and even smaller Parlor, which are under tents, protected from the blazing sun. DJs also perform in the Parlor as well as the Despacio, a dark, pounding dance space where you can really let go.

All Points West veterans Silversun Pickups returned to Randall’s Island for Panorama festival (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

It was the women who ruled day one, with standout performances from violinist Lindsey Stirling, FKA twigs (unveiling her new show, “Radiant Me²”), Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes, Amy Millan of Stars and Ariel Engle duetting for Broken Social Scene, and Régine Chassagne of Arcade Fire killing it in a spectacular silver outfit. Amid all the joy and dancing, several bands made mention of the troubles going on in America. Howard introduced “Don’t Wanna Fight” by saying how important that song is to her right now, then sang, “My lines, your lines / Don’t cross them lines / What you like, what I like / Why can’t we both be right? / Attacking, defending / Until there’s nothing left worth winning / Your pride and my pride / Don’t waste my time.” Arcade Fire leader Win Butler, who was born in California (the band is based in Montreal), let forth some curse-strewn protests against Donald Trump. But Kevin Drew, from the Toronto-based Broken Social Scene, tried to ease the pains with some jammy fun-time music, expressing the band’s enduring love for its U.S. fans.

Amy Millan pumps up the volume with Broken Social Scene at Panorama (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Art and technology were on display as well at Panorama. A Google Play cube featured live graffiti-making and, up the stairs, a great view of Randall’s Island; in addition, live HD video from the Panorama Stage was projected onto the facade. Concertgoers swung in silk cocoons in Dave & Gabe’s “Hyper Thread,” enjoyed cotton candy under a dome in Emilie Baltz and Philip Sierzega’s “Cotton Candy Theremin,” bounced around in Future Wife’s “Visceral Recess,” and lit up cool animation while playing Red Paper Heart’s “The Art of Pinball.” Interactive installations such as Gabriel Pulecio’s “Infinite Wall” work much better if you put away the cameras and just experience them.

FKA twigs had the Panorama audience eating out of the palm of her hand (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

One major hiccup was the journey to get to the east box office from the ferry, a winding, unmarked trip through construction sites, streets with fast-moving cars but no sidewalks, cops who knew where to tell you not to go but not actually where to go, and other bizarre, at times scary, elements. Use the west entrance from the ferry, the east from the buses, and don’t try to walk around outside the venue. Otherwise, there was a happy feeling throughout Randall’s Island, with good food, good bathrooms, not too many long lines, and, best of all, great music. Saturday’s show features Kendrick Lamar, the National, Blood Orange, and Foals, among others, while Sunday is highlighted by Holy Ghost!, Grace Potter, Sia, and LCD Soundsystem, who played with Arcade Fire on Randall’s Island back in 2007.

PANORAMA NYC: ART

Who: Antfood, Dave and Gabe, Dirt Empire, Emilie Baltz and Philip Sierzega, Future Wife, Gabriel Pulecio, Invisible Light Network, Red Paper Heart, the Mountain Gods, VolvoxLabs, Zach Lieberman
What: Panorama: Music • Art • Technology
Where: Randall’s Island Park, the Lab
When: July 22-24, $125 per day ($230 VIP), $369 for three-day pass ($699 VIP), ferry $25 per day, shuttle $30 per day
Why: In addition to featuring such performers as Arcade Fire, Kendrick Lamar, LCD Soundsystem, Alabama Shakes, Sia, the National, FKA twigs, and Grace Potter and some big-time food vendors, the Panorama Music • Art • Technology festival, taking place this weekend on Randall’s Island, where the popular Frieze fair is held, will host the Lab, a collection of interactive and immersive art installations by New Yorkers that offers a respite from what should be large crowds fighting potential rain. Invisible Light Network, Dirt Empire, and Antfood have collaborated on a 70-foot dome with a 360-degree virtual reality theater. Dave & Gabe’s “Hyper Thread” is a 3D soundscape where you can create your own sounds using silk cocoons. Emilie Baltz and Philip Sierzega turn the making of cotton candy into an orchestral experience with “Cotton Candy Theremin.” Future Wife’s inflatable playground, “Visceral Recess,” allows festivalgoers to bring out their inner child. Gabriel Pulecio’s “Infinite Wall,” consisting of mirrors, lights, and sounds, reacts to visitors’ individual movements. Red Paper Heart’s “The Art of Pinball” reimagines the analog arcade game as a virtual digital wonderland. “Gigantic Gestures,” by the Mountain Gods (Charlie Whitney and Sierzega), invites people to tap and swipe a large-scale smartphone to investigate body language. Kamil Nawratil’s VolvoxLabs has created “The Façade,” which transforms the outside of the Lab into a projection screen. And hacker Zach Lieberman uses refraction and caustics in an interactive light table in “Reflection Study.”

PANORAMA NYC FOOD

panorama food

Panorama: Music Art Technology
Randall’s Island Park
July 22-24, $125 per day ($230 VIP), $369 for three-day pass ($699 VIP), ferry $25 per day, shuttle $30 per day
www.panorama.nyc

Once upon a time, the food at all-day music festivals was little more than hot dogs, burgers, cotton candy, soda, and pretzels. But the foodie revolution has changed all that, and now festivals of all genres rely on artisinal food trucks and booths to feed hungry concertgoers. Panorama NYC is right on top of the trend with some of the best food vendors in the five boroughs. Taking place July 22-24 on Randall’s Island with such performers as Arcade Fire, Sia, LCD Soundsystem, the National, Kendrick Lamar, Alabama Shakes, and Sufjan Stevens, Panorama also boasts a pretty impressive gourmet lineup of nearly four dozen eateries. Among the food purveyors, with gluten-free and vegan options available, of course, are American Cut, Arancini Bros., Asia Dog, Bareburger, the Beatrice Inn, Dough, Khe-Yo, Landhaus, MatchaBar, Melt Bakery, the NoMad, Pasquale Jones, Roberta’s, Sushi Azabu, Tica’s Tacos, and Waffle de Lys. Although you don’t go to such festivals as Panorama for the food, it’s a lot more fun when you can chow down on some quality eats and drinks while watching eleven hours of music in the hot sun.

EDGAR DEGAS: A STRANGE NEW BEAUTY

Edgar Degas, Frieze of Dancers, oil on fabric, ca. 1895, (the Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of the Hanna Fund)

Edgar Degas, “Frieze of Dancers,” oil on canvas, ca. 1895, (the Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of the Hanna Fund)

Museum of Modern Art
Floor 6, Special Exhibitions Gallery North
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Daily through Sunday, July 24, $25
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

The splendidly curated MoMA exhibit “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty” reveals the French artist’s dazzling, experimental work with monotypes, manipulating their tools and processes as if he were using a predigital, hands-on version of Photoshop. Born in Paris in 1834, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas discovered the monotype technique in the mid-1870s, allowing him to expand his creativity and do things that no one else had done before. He “is no longer a friend, a man, an artist! He’s a zinc or copper plate blackened with printer’s ink, and plate and man are flattened together by his printing press whose mechanism has swallowed him completely!” etcher Marcellin Desboutin wrote in an 1876 letter, recounted in curator Jodi Hauptman’s introduction in the exhibition catalog. “The man’s crazes are out of this world. He now is in the metallurgic phase of reproducing his drawings with a roller and is running all over Paris, in the heat wave — trying to find the legion of specialists who will realize his obsession. He is a real poem! He talks only of metallurgists, lead casters, lithographers, planishers!” Degas indeed got his hands dirty, smudging ink, scratching plates, and painting over prints in a whirlwind of artistic fervor. Degas covered many of the same topics he had in his oil paintings and drawings, but employing etching, drypoint, and aquatint gave him a virtual freedom that he took full advantage of. In “Actresses in Their Dressing Rooms,” state 1 of 5 is gray and shady, the characters and interior harder to define than in the fifth state. One of two printings of “An Admirer in the Corridor” is like a ghostly version of the other. The monotype-on-paper “Ironing Women” is cleverly paired with the larger oil on canvas “A Woman Ironing,” capturing Degas’s differing takes on a domestic scene. But it’s not only the multiples that highlight Degas’s process. More abstract works such as “The River” and “Factory Smoke” are filled with a lovely mystery. Other subjects that Degas investigates include women in baths and brothels, putting on stockings, and reclining in bed.

Edgar Degas, “Autumn Landscape,” monotype oil on paper, 1890 (private collection)

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the series of landscapes from the 1890s, stunning monotypes of roads, mountains, and the moonrise that range from figurative to abstract. Of course, it is Degas’s love of performance, particularly of singers and dancers, that stands out. The same trio of dancers is the focus of “Ballet Scene” and “Three Ballet Dancers,” but in the latter Degas has drawn in pastel over the monotype, adding sparkling pinks. The black-and-white “Café Singer” is almost like a negative image of the colorful “Singers on the Stage”; in the pair, one can also see Degas’s passion for light as gas lamps became electric bulbs. Be sure to grab one of the available magnifying glasses to marvel in every little detail. Degas’s obsession with multiple images also found its way into his oil paintings and pastels, as seen in “Frieze of Dancers” and two versions of “Dancer Adjusting Her Slipper.” It’s all a tour de force that delights in this lesser-known aspect of Degas’s oeuvre. “He who is such an anarchist! In art, of course, and without knowing it!” Camille Pissarro wrote in an 1891 letter to his son referenced in Richard Kendall’s catalog essay, “An Anarchist in Art: Degas and the Monotype.” Anarchy may never have looked so good. The exhibition, named after a quote about Degas’s work from poet Stéphane Mallarmé, is supplemented with several of Degas’s sketchbooks in addition to etchings by his friend and fellow artist Ludovic Napoléon Lepic; the show continues through July 24, with the participatory program “Endless Repetition” led by Elisabeth Bardt-Pellerin on July 19 and 21 at 11:30.

TOM SACHS: TEA CEREMONY

“Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” is first solo show not by Isamu Noguchi in thirty-year history of museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Noguchi Museum
9-01 33rd Rd. at Vernon Blvd.
Wednesday – Sunday through July 24, $10 (free all day Fridays)
718-204-7088
www.noguchi.org
tomsachs.com

“In Space Program, we dampen our destabilizing heart-brain feedback system by getting outside of ourselves in service to others through an ancient process called tea ceremony,” narrator Pat Manocchia says in Van Neistat’s 2015 film A Space Program, which details Tom Sachs’s Mars expedition based on his 2012 immersive installation in the Park Avenue Armory. Once on Mars, Lt. Sam Ratanarat and Cmdr. Mary Eannarino reconnect with their earthly ways by sitting down for some tea. That tea ceremony, or chanoyu, is the subject of its own exhibition at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, where “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” continues through July 24. DIY bricolage artist Sachs’s work is structured around process, ritual, and technique, using found objects and items that can be bought in any hardware store or rummaged from the street, including plywood, glue, nails, Con Ed barriers, and latex paint. The Noguchi Museum show features several rooms of works both associated with the tea ceremony directly and representative of Sachs’s oeuvre as a whole; part of the museum’s thirtieth anniversary, it is the first solo show by an artist other than Isamu Noguchi to be mounted there. “Sachs, like Isamu Noguchi, is a cultural synthesizer committed to the traditional American dream of a pluralistic, crazy quilt society,” senior curator Dakin Hart writes in the Tea Manual that serves as a kind of exhibition catalog. “Both believe that our best futures have at least a foot in the past; that technology should affirm craft; that the most sustaining serenities are tinged with chaos; that polarities like East and West can exist harmoniously in productively ambiguous relationships; that the conceptual and the formal are not hand and glove but earth and atmosphere; and that the balkanization of creativity into categories such as ‘art’ and ‘design’ is nonsense.”

Tom Sachs works on “Tea Ceremony” at Noguchi Museum (photo by Genevieve Hanson)

“Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” is divided into such rooms as “Tea Garden,” “Sachs’ Culture of Tea,” “The Prehistory of Tea in Space,” and “A Capsule Retrospective,” with works arranged much like Noguchi’s have been since the museum opened in 1985, largely organized so visitors can walk around the sculptures on the floor. The centerpiece is the Tea Garden, which features an entrance gate, waiting arbors, a hibachi, a bonsai tree, a stupa, a koi pond, an incinerator toilet, and a tea house with a Japanese scroll painting of Muhammad Ali among other objects, in addition to several sculptures by Noguchi. During the run of the exhibition, the museum hosted a handful of live ceremonies with tea expert Johnny Fogg and Sachs, for whom this is no mere lark. “Mourning the loss of spirituality in our capitalist environment, we admire Tea’s integration of humility, prosperity, and spirituality. In the studio, it serves to sanctify our ritual of bricolage,” Sachs writes in the manual. “Despite the elitism, there are many beautiful, transcendental elements in the formality of Tea. Its core values: purity, harmony, tranquility, and respect ring true across time and space.” Of course, this being Sachs, his vast sense of humor is also on display, though always touched with a genuine sincerity and, at times, playful political statements. A tool cabinet holds a fire extinguisher, bottles of vodka topped by Jimi Hendrix heads, and a knife labeled “Beelzebub.” A Yoda Pez dispenser stands like a Buddha surrounded by the candy. “The Eleven Satanic Rules of Earth” advises that “if a guest in your lair annoys you, treat them cruelly and without mercy.” A pair of pieces reference Star Wars and Star Trek, and a white foamcore McDonald’s mop bucket, perhaps the most ergonomically functional example of that object ever made, resides nobly in a corner. It’s all an enchanting combination of fun and reverence, of veneration and mirth. But nothing is included merely for the sake of being included. “I don’t look at art as something separate and sacrosanct. It’s part of usefulness,” states the eighth of ten reasons listed in “Why ‘Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony’ at the Noguchi Museum? A Formal Proof in Noguchi’s Words.” An expanded edition of the exhibition will travel to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in September, where Sachs will also debut “Space Program: Europa,” a bricolage journey to Jupiter’s icy moon. And you can catch “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999-2016” at the Brooklyn Museum through August 14.

BRONX MUSEUM SUMMER SEASON OPEN HOUSE

David Thomson and Jonathan Gonzalez will perform solos as part of summer season open house at Bronx Museum

Bronx Museum of the Arts
1040 Grand Concourse
Wednesday, July 13, free, 6:00 – 8:00
718-681-6000
www.bronxmuseum.org

The Bronx Museum of the Arts’ annual summer open house takes place on July 13 at 6:00, celebrating not only the season but the opening of three new exhibitions. At 6:30, BAX/Dancing While Black Fellow Jonathan Gonzalez will perform Arthur Aviles’s In the Garden of Mi Amigo El id in the galleries, followed at 7:15 by a solo work by artist-choreographer and Bronx native David Thomson in the North Wing on the second floor. Attendees will also get a sneak peek at the new exhibitions “Art AIDS America,” “CAZA: Rochele Gomez, Margaret Lee, Alejandra Seeber,” and “En Foco Presents Mask: Photographs by Frank Gimpaya,” with member tours of the first at 5:00 and the third at 5:30. In addition, the Keith Haring Foundation – Project Street Beat Mobile Medical Unit of Planned Parenthood of New York City will be on hand. (On Saturday, July 16, at 3:00, Robb Hernández, PhD, and Joey Terrill will lead a free public tour of “Art AIDS in America” sponsored by AIDS Center of Queens County and AIDS Healthcare Foundation.)

THE RUBIN BLOCK PARTY

Rubin Block Party will have Nepalese-inspired theme this year (photo courtesy Rubin Museum of Art)

Rubin Museum of Art
West 17th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Sunday, July 17, free (including free museum admission all day), 1:00 – 4:00
rubinmuseum.org

Block parties are a type of social ritual, so it is rather apropos that the Rubin Museum of Art’s annual summer block party, taking place on July 17 on Seventeenth St., is being held in conjunction with the exhibition “Nepalese Seasons: Rain and Ritual,” which runs through March of next year. Hopefully it won’t rain between 1:00 and 4:00, when the museum will host Nepalese-inspired music and dance by Dikyi, Sonam Rinzin with Brooklyn Raga Massive, and Kabina Maharjan Singh and her son; educational activities with KathaSatha, Walung Community of North America, Yulha Fund (“Voice of the Himalayas”), and Mero Gaon; traditional Nepali dress demonstrations with Adhikaar; interactive weaving demonstrations with Grassroots Movement in Nepal; yoga with Susan Verde; art workshops in which participants can make rainsticks, frog masks, pinwheels, prayer flags, flower garlands, and hybrid animals; an interactive “Karma Chain” weather ritual; henna tattoos; Himalayan food from Café Serai; ice cream from Van Leeuwen; and more. In addition, the museum will be open for free all day long (11:00 am – 6:00 pm), so you can check out such exhibits as “Gateway to Himalayan Art,” “Masterworks of Himalayan Art,” “Genesis Breyer P-Orridge,” and “Sacred Spaces” in addition to “Nepalese Seasons: Rain and Ritual,” with museum tours and gallery searches for children. Namaste!