this week in art

FELIX BERNSTEIN: BIEBER BATHOS ELEGY

Felix Bernstein and Luke Smithers, Bieber and the Elder (promotional photograph for Bieber Bathos Elegy), 2015. Photograph by Luke Smithers

Felix Bernstein and Luke Smithers, “Bieber and the Elder” (photo by Luke Smithers)

Who: Felix Bernstein, Shelley Hirsch, Gabe Rubin
What: Bieber Bathos Elegy
Where: Whitney Museum of American Art, Susan and John Hess Family Theater, third floor, 99 Gansevoort St., 212-570-3600
When: Friday, January 15, and Saturday, January 16, $10, 8:00
Why: Poet, essayist, and author Felix Bernstein has some artful fun at the expense of the Beeb in Bieber Bathos Elegy. Bernstein, a twenty-three-year-old performance artist who has written such tomes as Burn Book (due out February 2) and Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry, incorporates cabaret, opera, poetry, and more as he deconstructs such notions as anticlimax and mawkishness, turning the twenty-one-year-old “Baby” singer into a prophetic angel. He’ll get help from Brooklyn-born composer and vocalist Shelley Hirsch, installation artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, and director Gabe Rubin, who made the short film Boyland with Bernstein last year. Be on the lookout for such tunes as “Tomorrow” from Annie and Cole Porter’s “Every Time We Say Goodbye.”

STEVE McCURRY SELECTS: SUNSET BOULEVARD

Billy Wilder takes audiences down quite a Hollywood road in SUNSET BLVD.

SUNSET BOULEVARD (Billy Wilder, 1950)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, January 8, $10, 9:30
Series continues Friday nights through February 26
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

“You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big,” handsome young screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) remarks to an older woman in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” the former star (Gloria Swanson) famously replies. It doesn’t get much bigger than Sunset Boulevard, one of the grandest Hollywood movies ever made about Hollywood. The wickedly entertaining film noir begins in a swimming pool, where Gillis is a floating corpse, seen from below. He then posthumously narrates through flashback precisely what landed him there. On the run from a couple of guys trying to repossess his car, the broke Gillis ends up at a seemingly abandoned mansion, only to find out that it is home to Desmond and her dedicated servant, Max Von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim). They initially mistake Gillis for the undertaker who is coming to perform a funeral service and burial for Desmond’s pet monkey. (You’ve got to see it to believe it.) When Desmond discovers that Gillis is in fact a screenwriter, she lures him into working with her on her script for a new version of Salome, in which she is determined to play the lead role. “I didn’t know you were planning a comeback,” Gillis says. “I hate that word,” Desmond responds. “It’s a return, a return to the millions of people who have never forgiven me for deserting the screen.” But just as Desmond was unable to make the transition from silent black-and-white films to color and sound pictures, getting Salome off the ground is not going to be as easy as she thinks. Hollywood can be a rather vicious place, after all.

Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) keeps a close hold on screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) in SUNSET BLVD.

Nominated for eleven Oscars and winner of three — for the sharp writing, the detailed art/set decoration, and Franz Waxman’s score, which goes from jazzy noir to melodrama — Sunset Boulevard wonderfully bites the hand that feeds it, skewering Hollywood while making references to such real stars as Rudolph Valentino, Mabel Normand, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Wallace Reid, and Tyrone Power and such films as Gone with the Wind and King Kong. Actual publicity stills and movie posters abound, in Paramount offices and Desmond’s spectacularly designed home, which was once owned by J. Paul Getty and would later be used for Rebel without a Cause. Cecil B. DeMille, who directed Swanson in many silent films, plays himself in the movie, seen on set making Samson and Delilah. Desmond’s fellow bridge players are portrayed by silent stars Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson. Meanwhile, before Swanson fired him, von Stroheim directed her in the silent film Queen Kelly, which is the movie Max shows Gillis in Desmond’s screening room. (Swanson herself would go on to make only three more feature films; she passed away in 1983 at the age of eighty-four.) John F. Seitz’s black-and-white cinematography and inventive use of camera placement, from underwater to high above the action, makes the most of Hans Dreier’s sets and Swanson’s fabulous costumes and makeup. Sunset Boulevard is the thirteenth and final collaboration between writer-director Wilder and writer-producer Charles Brackett, who together previously made The Lost Weekend and A Foreign Affair. Wilder and Holden would go on to make Stalag 17, Sabrina, and Fedora together. Finally, of course, Sunset Boulevard concludes with one of the greatest quotes in Hollywood history. Sunset Boulevard is screening January 8 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Steve McCurry Selects,” held in conjunction with the photo exhibition “Steve McCurry: India,” and will be introduced by a special guest. The series continues Friday nights through February 26 with such other classics as Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, and Federico Fellini’s Amarcord.

NEW EAR FESTIVAL

Phill Niblock will be at Fridman Gallery for inaugural New Ear Festival on January 9

Fridman Gallery
287 Spring St. by Hudson St.
January 6-12, $10 unless otherwise noted ($50 festival pass), 8:00
www.fridmangallery.com

New to the January performance festivals (COIL, Under the Radar, Prototype, American Realness, APAP) is the New Ear Festival, a celebration of sound art hosted by SoHo’s Fridman Gallery and MC Mona Chromatic. More than fifteen sound artists will be presenting works from January 6 to 12, beginning with the pairing of composer and experimental turntablist Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida, who enjoys recalibrating people’s ears. The impressive lineup on January 7 features Byron Westbrook, who incorporates social engagement into his work, former punk guitarist and Nam June Paik collaborator Stephen Vitiello, and improvisational electric accordionist Andrea Parkins. January 8 brings together Leila Bordreuil with Peter Evans, Jaimie Branch, and Joanna Mattrey. On January 9, multimedia minimalist Phill Niblock will be on hand for a screening of Maurits Wouters’s new documentary, The Movement of Phill Niblock, and the New York premiere of piece by guitarist David First. On Sunday, January 10, a video and sound installation by Cecilia Lopez will be on view (suggested donation, 12 noon – 8:00 pm). On January 11, the event series CT::SWaM (Contemporary Temporary:: Sound Works and Music) will present sound works and discussions. The inaugural festival concludes on January 12 (suggested donation) with Kevin Beasley’s Listening Room with Taja Cheek, Eli Keszler, Malik Gaines, and Yulan Grant. If you miss any of the performances, you can catch them later online here.

COIL 2016

Ranters Theatre’s SONG kicks off COIL 2016 festival (photo by Jorge Lizalde)

Multiple venues
January 5-17, $20 unless otherwise noted
www.ps122.org

Every January, New York City is home to a handful of performance festivals that feature cutting-edge and experimental theater, dance, music, and installation art. PS122’s home at 150 First Ave. is scheduled to reopen this summer following a major renovation, but in the meantime you can experience its innovative programming at COIL 2016, taking place at various venues in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. “COIL 2016 attacks the very concept of boundaries and of limits. The boundaries between ideologies, life and death, the contemporary and historic, human and machine, light and darkness, audience and performer,” PS122 artistic director Vallejo Gantner explains on the event website. “Limitations of time, identity, age, and geography disappear. The work we will see this year deals with evolutionary transformation — personal, social, and artistic.” COIL begins on January 5 with Ranters Theatre’s Song (January 5-8), a sixty-minute immersive sound and visual installation at the New Ohio Theatre in which the audience can sit or lie down on the floor. Composer and vocalist Samita Sinha collaborates with Red Baarat percussionist Sunny Jain, guitarist and sound designer Greg Mcmurray, lighting designer Devin Cameron, visual artist Dani Leventhal, and director Ain Gordon on bewilderment and other queer lions (January 6-10, Invisible Dog Art Center), an intimate investigation of ritual and mythology through music, text, and image. Choreographer Jillian Peña’s Panopticon (January 9-17, Abrons Arts Center), a copresentation with American Realness, uses reflections to give a kaleidoscopic effect to a duet by Alexandra Albrecht and Andrew Champlin.

At the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Australians Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham team up for Morphia Series (January 12-16), an eighteen-minute phantasmal environment for twelve audience members at a time. Annie Dorsen, whose Magical with Anne Juren was a highlight of COIL 2013, is back with Yesterday Tomorrow (January 13-16, La MaMa), in which Hai-Ting Chinn, Jeffrey Gavett, and Natalie Raybould go on a multimedia musical journey from the Beatles’ “Yesterday” to Annie’s “Tomorrow.” Asia Society will be hosting Xi Ban and Po Huang Club’s one-night only Shanghai / New York: Future Histories 2 (January 13, free with RSVP, 7:00 & 9:30), which melds Peking Opera with southern blues. The festival also includes niv Acosta’s Discotropic (January 6-10, Westbeth Artists Community), Frank Boyd’s The Holler Sessions (January 6-17, Paradise Factory), Kaneza Schaal’s Go Forth (January 7-12, Westbeth), David Neumann’s I Understand Everything Better (January 10-16, the Chocolate Factory), Ranters Theatre’s Intimacy (January 11-16, New Ohio Theatre), Chris Thorpe and Rachel Chavkin’s Confirmation (January 13-17, Invisible Dog), Jonathan Capdevielle’s Adishatz / Adieu (January 15-17, Abrons Arts Center), and Michael Kliën’s Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A. (January 15, Martha Graham Studios, 3:00 – 7:00).

NOVA BY SOFTLAB

SOFTlab’s “Nova” installation is winner of second annual design competition (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

North Flatiron Public Plaza
Median at intersection of Broadway, Fifth Ave., and 23rd St.
Through January 4, free
www.flatirondistrict.nyc
nova slideshow

The Flatiron/23rd Street Partnership Business Improvement District’s “23 Days of Flatiron Cheer” may be over, but the centerpiece of the holiday celebration will be delighting visitors through January 4. On North Flatiron Public Plaza, the median at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Ave., and 23rd St., New York City design studio SOFTlab has installed “Nova,” winner of the second annual Flatiron Public Plaza Holiday Design Competition, held in conjunction with the Van Alen Institute. “Nova” is an abstract seven-starred gazebo that people can walk inside to experience colorful kaleidoscopic views of themselves and the surrounding area — Madison Square Park, the Flatiron Building, the Met Life Tower, passing traffic — reflected in cones that are angled toward various local landmarks. The outside of the pavilion consists of aluminum panels, giving it an otherworldly appearance, like an alien space ship, while the arched interior is constructed of crystalline cells composed of acrylic laminated with 3M Dichroic Film. The three-dimensional cells light up at night, giving it an extraterrestrial glow. “Nova” will remain on the plaza until January 4, after which it will beam back home.

THE HOLLYWOOD CLASSIC BEHIND WALKERS: THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd prepare for adulthood in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, December 26, and Sunday, December 27, $12, 7:00
Series runs through December 27
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show is a tender-hearted, poignant portrait of sexual awakening and coming-of-age in a sleepy Texas town. Adapted from the Larry McMurtry novel by the author and the director, the film is set in the early 1950s, focusing on Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms), a teenager who works at the local pool hall with Billy (Timothy’s brother Sam), a simple-minded boy who needs special caring. Sonny’s best friend, Duane Jackson (Oscar-nominated Jeff Bridges), is dating the prettiest girl in school, Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd, in her film debut), who is getting ready to test out the sexual waters, sneaking away on a date with Lester Marlow (Randy Quaid), who takes her to a naked-swimming party in a wealthier suburb of Wichita Falls. Meanwhile, Sonny breaks up with his girlfriend, Charlene Druggs (Sharon Taggart), and becomes drawn to the sad, unhappy Ruth Popper (an Oscar-winning Cloris Leachman), the wife of his football coach (Bill Thurman). The outstanding all-star cast also features Oscar-nominated Ellen Burstyn as Lois, Jacy’s mother; Eileen Brennan as a waitress in the local diner who makes cheeseburgers for Sonny; Clu Gulager as a working man who has a thing for Lois; Frank Marshall, who went on to become a big-time producer, as high school student Tommy Logan; and Oscar winner Ben Johnson as Sam the Lion, the moral center of the town and owner of the pool hall, diner, and movie theater, which shows such films as Father of the Bride and Red River. Cinematographer Robert Surtees shoots The Last Picture Show in a sentimental black-and-white that gives the film an old-fashioned feel, as if it’s a part of Americana that is fading away. Bogdanovich also chose to have no original score, instead populating the tale with country songs by Hank Williams, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Lefty Frizzell, Tony Bennett, and others singing tales of woe.

In many ways the film is the flip side of George Lucas’s 1973 hit American Graffiti, which is set ten years later but looks like it’s from another century; it also has a lot in common with François Truffaut’s 1962 classic Jules and Jim. Nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, The Last Picture Show is an unforgettable slice-of-life drama that will break your heart over and over again. It is screening December 26 & 27 at 7:00 in the Museum of the Moving Image series “The Hollywood Classics Behind Walkers,” which is being held in conjunction with the exhibition “Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact,” consisting of Hollywood-related photography, drawing, sculpture, print, and video by such artists as Francis Alÿs, Richard Avedon, Jim Campbell, Gregory Crewdson, Douglas Gordon, Isaac Julien, Ellen Mark, Tom Sachs, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and many others. Also screening December 26 & 27 is Sam Peckinpah’s classic Western, The Wild Bunch.

MARK BRADFORD: BE STRONG BOQUAN

Mark Bradford, “Waterfall” (foreground), mixed media, 2015, and “Black and White” (background), mixed media on canvas, 2015 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Who: Mark Bradford
What: “Be Strong Boquan”
Where: Hauser & Wirth, 511 West 18th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., 212-790-3900
When: Through Wednesday, December 23, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Why: Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford has had quite a 2015, highlighted by a major exhibition, “Scorched Earth,” at the Hammer Museum; setting a personal record when his painting “Smear” sold for $4.4 million at Sotheby’s in May; being named Artist of the Year by The Week magazine; completing a commission for a lobby work at Rockefeller Center; and having his first New York City solo show at his new gallery, Hauser & Wirth. The H&W exhibit, “Be Strong Boquan,” which continues through December 23, is breathtaking, consisting of nine large-scale mixed-media collages, two short films, a text-based work, and “Waterfall,” which encompasses dozens and dozens of strips of scraps from his studio, all draped over a metal bar. Bradford’s “paintings” are actually palimpsestual collages made out of billboard flyers, colored paper, posters, newsprint, and photographs layered with clear shellac on a stretched canvas; he also adds twine and other objects that he pulls to form rivulets that tear through the pieces. From a distance they look like abstract paintings, but up close you can see the depth and density of the materials, adding a mesmerizing sculptural physicality to the works, which reference urban violence, race riots, the AIDS crisis, gender identity, and other social concerns. Bradford gives the works such titles as “Hunger with Salt and Pepper Tastes Better,” “Killing the Goodbye,” and “Dead Hummingbird,” names that stand in stark contrast to the visceral beauty of the canvases. In the long, horizontal video installation “Deimos,” Bradford brings roller-skate wheels to animated stop-motion life, dancing to the soul funk of Sylvester’s “Grateful,” paying tribute to the “Queen of Disco” who died from AIDS in 1988 at the age of forty-one. (The wheels were left over from the old Roxy nightclub, which previously inhabited the H&W space on Eighteenth St.) Bradford’s “Spiderman” reimagines Eddie Murphy’s controversial 1983 “Delirious” stand-up special; a red spotlight shines on a vacant space as a black comedian can be heard on the film, which shows only the words being said, not the speaker, who discusses Michael Jackson, Eazy-E, and AIDS as an unseen audience laughs at his jokes. “Be Strong Boquan” is a breakthrough exhibit for Bradford, who at the age of fifty-four is experiencing a well-deserved surge in his career.