this week in art

CHAMBRE

Jack Ferver channels Lady Gaga and Jean Genet in brilliant CHAMBRE (photo by Jason Akira Somma)

CROSSING THE LINE: CHAMBRE
New Museum Theater
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Installation: through October 4
Performances: October 1-2, 7:00, October 3, 3:00 & 7:00, October 4, 3:00, $15
www.fiaf.org
www.jackferver.org

Writer, actor, dancer, and choreographer Jack Ferver holds nothing back in his electrifying, emotionally charged performances. In his latest piece, Chambre, he took things to the next level, literally bleeding for his art. In a climactic moment during the work’s official New York City premiere last week at the New Museum, Ferver put his hand through a window in Marc Swanson’s set, shattering the glass and apparently cutting his palm. At first the audience was uncertain, wondering if it was part of the show or just more artifice. Ferver has an innate knack for pushing audiences into bouts of uncomfortable laughter and challenging them to separate the real from the imagined, fact from fantasy. Blood seemed to well on his palm, and his fellow performers, Michelle Mola and Jacob Slominski, very carefully navigated around the sea of glass shards on the floor; the mystery of whether it was real or staged continued into a closing monologue in which a diva-like Ferver complained about barely being able to afford health insurance. Not until later that night did it become clear that it was indeed accidental when Ferver posted a photograph of the broken window on Facebook and publicly apologized to Swanson. But it all fit in rather well with the work itself, a slyly playful and inventive reimagining of Jean Genet’s The Maids, which itself was inspired by the true story of two sisters, Christine and Léa Papin, who perpetrated a horrific crime in France in 1933. At the beginning of Chambre, ticket holders can walk around Swanson’s set, which includes unfinished walls, windows, mirrors, a rack of white dresses (designed by Reid Bartelme), and three statues representing the main characters. After the statues are moved out of the way, Ferver emerges in a glittering, glamorous gold-chained outfit and, with the audience still gathered around him, delivers a deliciously wicked monologue taken verbatim from a bitter deposition Lady Gaga gave in 2013 when being sued by a former personal assistant. It’s a classic celebrity rant: “I’m quite wonderful to everybody that works for me, and I am completely aghast to what a disgusting human being that you have become to sue me like this,” Ferver spits out venomously into a microphone.

Jacob Slominski and Jack Ferver take role-playing to a new level in immersive presentation at the New Museum (photo by Jason Akira Somma)

Meanwhile, the audience can watch him, as well as themselves, in a large horizontal mirror hung from the ceiling behind white-draped rows of seats, multiplying the number of visible Fervers, who is not attacking Lady Gaga as much as celebrity culture. It’s also a terrific lead-in for the role-playing done by Ferver as Christine and Jacob as Léa, mocking how they are treated by Madame (Mola), exaggerating how the wealthy take advantage of and abuse the poor. “I know you are necessary, like ditch diggers and construction workers are necessary, but I hate having to see you,” Slominski-as-Léa-as-Madame says. But soon the sisters take their revenge, doing what so many only fantasize about doing to the rich and privileged. “I’m surprised things like this don’t happen more often,” Ferver says shortly after the opening soliloquy. Eventually, the audience gets to sit down and experience Chambre in a more traditional arrangement, although there’s very little that’s traditional about the thoroughly engaging and entertaining production, which also features a subtly ominous score by Roarke Menzies. Ferver examines class division, sibling rivalry, gender, and the “monetization of performance” as only he can, with a wickedly potent sense of humor loaded with hard-to-swallow truths. In his introduction to Genet’s The Maids and Deathwatch, Jean-Paul Sartre writes, “For Genet, theatrical procedure is demoniacal. Appearance, which is constantly on the point of passing itself off as reality, must constantly reveal its profound unreality. Everything must be so false that it sets our teeth on edge.” Ferver (Rumble Ghost, Night Light Bright Light,), Swanson, Slominski, Mola, and Menzies set our teeth and more on edge with the seriously funny Chambre, which continues at the New Museum through October 3 as part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line festival, an apt name for Ferver’s fiendishly clever work.

FROM MINIMALISM TO ALGORITHM: SEPTEMBER SPRING

“September Spring” combines music, dance, painting, and installation at the Kitchen (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Kitchen
512 West 19th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Installation open Tuesday – Saturday through October 10, free
Performances Tuesday to Thursday at 5:00 and Friday and Saturday at 2:00 & 5:00 through October 3
212-255-5793 ext11
thekitchen.org

Writer, photographer, and installation artist Sam Falls has created a beautifully intimate tribute to his late godbrother, Jamie Kanzler, with “September Spring,” continuing at the Kitchen through October 10. In 2013, Kanzler, who wrote poetry under the name September Spring and recorded music as Oldd News, died suddenly at the age of twenty-four. Falls has teamed up with dancers Hart of Gold, the New York-based duo consisting of Elizabeth Hart and Jessie Gold, for the durational work, which combines music, dance, and art in unique ways. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 5:00 and Saturdays at 2:00 and 5:00 since September 9, Hart of Gold has been performing an intricate dance on two stacks of twenty-four canvas rugs each, representing every year Kanzler was alive, separated by a translucent black scrim with a doorway at the center, in the Kitchen’s upstairs gallery. First, dabs of paint are carefully applied across each canvas. Then Hart and Gold, dressed in white, begin moving on the surface to the lo-fi, scratchy sounds of Oldd News, played on a turntable in another room. The dancers initially form a large yellow circle (Kanzler’s favorite color), then follow Falls’s choreography as they create a kind of action painting with their feet, at times evoking how a needle moves across a record, with Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lighting going from bright to dark to stroboscopic and one of the dancers changing into a black costume. The audience is encouraged to walk around during the show, experiencing it from changing lines of sight. After each performance, which lasts about an hour, the resulting paintings are removed from the stack and hung from cords; although the choreography and color and initial placement of the paint are the same for every performance, each canvas comes out different. The last performance is on October 3, but the exhibition of the paintings will remain on view for another week. Falls, who was partly inspired by Kanzler’s cover version of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” notes in a deeply personal statement, “Jamie had twenty-four dynamic years and over the course of the show the twenty-four rugs become representations of this time, blending the lightness of days to the darkness at the end, the colorful depth of the center, the core of every mortal life.” But despite all the sadness associated with the concept behind the piece, it is an exhilarating experience, focusing much more on life than on death. “September Spring” is part of “From Minimalism to Algorithm,” a series of works curated by Lumi Tan that examine the legacy of Minimalist art in the digital age.

FIRST SATURDAY: HISPANIC HERITAGE

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, October 3, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum’s October free First Saturday program pays tribute to National Hispanic Heritage Month — which actually runs September 15 to October 15 — on October 3, kicking things off with a performance by Garifuna traditionalist Aurelio Martínez, who is not only a singer-songwriter but was the first black member of Honduras’s National Congress. Known simply as Aurelio, he will be highlighting songs from his latest record, 2014’s Lándini, which includes such tracks as “Sañanaru,” “Milaguru,” and “Durugubei Mani.” (You can sample the songs here; Aurelio will also be playing a free show at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center on October 15.) First Saturday also features live performances by Danza Fiesta: Baile y Teatro Puertorriqueno, DJ duo iBomba (DJ Beto and DJ Ushka), the Gregorio Uribe Big Band, the Humberto Ramírez Quintent, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and Cave Canem poets Willie Perdomo, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Rio Cortez. In addition, Richard Aste and Edward J. Sullivan will lead a curator talk on the new exhibition “Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World,” art workshops will teach participants how to paint still lifes like Francisco Oller, you can settle in for a game of dominoes, Raquel Cepeda will read from and discuss her most recent book, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina, with her husband, Sacha Jenkins, and children are invited to sing and dance to Spanish and English songs with ¡Acopladitos! And the galleries are open late so you can check out such other exhibitions as “The Rise of Sneaker Culture,” “Kara Walker: ‘African Boy Attendant Curio (Bananas),’” “KAWS: ALONG THE WAY,” and “Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence.”

PUBLIC ART FUND TALKS AT THE NEW SCHOOL: JEPPE HEIN

Jeppe Hein will be at the New School on September 29 to discuss his interactive Brooklyn Bridge Park installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Jeppe Hein will be at the New School on September 29 to discuss his three-part interactive Brooklyn Bridge Park installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

PUBLIC CONTEXT, PRIVATE MEANING
The New School, Tishman Auditorium
63 Fifth Ave. between 13th & 14th Sts.
Tuesday, September 29, $10, 6:30
www.publicartfund.org

Jeppe Hein invites people to experience his work in tactile ways in “Please Touch the Art,” a three-part installation spread across Brooklyn Bridge Park. For the Public Art Fund project, the Danish artist, who lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen, has created “Appearing Rooms,” a dancing water sculpture that visitors are encouraged to walk through and play in; “Modified Social Benches,” sixteen brightly colored red and orange uniquely shaped benches that people can sit on and climb; and “Mirror Labyrinth NY,” a circular maze of mirror-polished stainless-steel vertical planks that offers fun and fascinating reflections as you make your way in and around it, including mimicking the downtown Manhattan skyline across the river. (“Appearing Rooms” is on view until October 4, while the other two will remain in the park through April 17 of next year.) “People can use it; they don’t need to know it’s art or not,” Hein explains in a promotional video. “It’s just something twisting everyday life.” On September 29, Hein will give a participatory talk at the New School as part of the Public Art Fund series “Public Context, Private Meaning,” combining performance, audience interactivity, and interview. The Fall 2015 Public Art Fund Talks at the New School continue October 21 with Hank Willis Thomas and November 18 with Fiona Banner.

DORIS SALCEDO SYMPOSIUM AND EXHIBITION

“Plegaria Muda” evokes mass graves in Doris Salcedo exhibition at the Guggenheim (photo by David Heald/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Exhibition: Friday – Wednesday through October 12, $25
Symposium: Friday, October 2, $15, 11:00 am – 6:30 pm
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

Colombian artist Doris Salcedo encapsulated her powerful, emotional oeuvre beautifully and succinctly in a recent interview with Marguerite Feitlowitz: “My work is based on the testimonies of victims of violence, on experiences that are alien to me,” she explained. “I am not a direct witness; I am witness to the witness, a secondary witness. I search for an intimate proximity with the victims of violence that will permit me to stand in for them as I actually make the work, but in such a way that their experience takes precedence over my own.” For three decades, the Bogotá native has been creating installations that examine the social injustice and violence experienced in Colombia and other parts of the world. She uses common domestic objects that each visitor can relate to, building on their evocation of memory and loss. Her current retrospective at the Guggenheim is installed on all four tower levels, allowing museumgoers plenty of time as they go from one section to another to process what they have just seen in one gallery before entering the next. “Plegaria Muda,” roughly translated as “silent prayer,” memorializes both mass gang killings in South Central Los Angeles and murders committed by the Colombian army between 2003 and 2009. The piece is a maze made of pairs of handcrafted tables inverted upon each other, with earth sandwiched between them. Blades of grass rise through the earth, life emerging from dozens of anonymous graves.

“La Casa Viuda” is part of haunting retrospective at the Guggenheim (photo by David Heald/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)

For “Atrabilarios,” Salcedo takes shoes left behind by los desaparecidos (individuals “disappeared” by security forces) and places them in wall niches, covering them with rectangles of semitranslucent animal fiber that is hand-stitched into the wall with medical sutures, the shoes fading away like slowly forgotten memories or barely healed scars. “A Flor de Piel” is a large floor piece composed of stitched-together, chemically treated rose petals, forming a kind of burial shroud for a Colombian nurse who was kidnapped, tortured, and killed. Salcedo uses silk thread and nearly twelve thousand burned needles to make “Disremembered,” a collection of barely there tuniclike hair shirts that combine beauty and pain. “Untitled” brings together hospital cots wrapped in animal fiber with stacks of crisply folded white shirts impaled by steel rebar, associating loss and violence with a place meant for healing. And “La Casa Viuda” is a room containing doors, dressers, tables, chairs, and other furniture connected, filled in, or closed off with concrete, a house devoid of people, no longer fit for human occupancy. Individually, the pieces demand silent contemplation and introspection, but as a whole, the exhibition will also make you angry about what is still happening all over the globe, brutal murders and disappearances that seemingly cannot be stopped. The moving exhibition, which also includes a video screening of Salcedo’s public projects, continues at the Guggenheim through October 12; on October 2, the artist will participate in an all-day symposium along with Elizabeth Adan, Carlos Basualdo, Katherine Brinson, Leslie Jamison, Roderick Mengham, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Alexander Nemerov.

ART ON GOVERNORS ISLAND

Mary Ellen Mark’s last photographs are on view on Governors Island (photo courtesy ICP)

Governors Island
September 26-27, free (ferry $2 round trip), 10:00 am – 7:00 pm
212-673-9074
govisland.com

Fall might be upon us, but it will remain summer for one last blowout weekend on Governors Island. On September 26-27, the remainder of the summer art installations and special projects will come to an end, so this is your last chance to see some very impressive and wide-ranging shows. Most prominent is Mary Ellen Mark’s “Picture This: New Orleans,” a powerful exhibit that turned out to be the famous photojournalist’s last assignment, a CNNMoney commission that sent the Philadelphia-born Mark to document life in the Big Easy a decade after Katrina. Presented by ICP, “Picture This: New Orleans” features large-scale photos of current residents with fascinating stories, along with a video that takes you behind the scenes of the shoots. Mark passed away in May at the age of seventy-five.

Take your time while investigating Sean Boggs’s Paper Polygons (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Take your time while investigating Sean Boggs’s mysterious “Paper Polygons” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The eighth annual Governors Island Art Fair is up and running, spread across more than a dozen rooms in decommissioned army barracks and former military residences along Colonel’s Row and outside on the grounds. Sponsored by 4heads, a nonprofit founded in 2008 by Nicole Laemmle, Jack Robinson, and Antony Zito to offer free space to artists to explore their vision, the fair features painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, video, installation, and sound works. Each artist or independent gallery/collective is assigned his or her own room where they can create to their heart’s content. We highly recommend the second floor of 404A, which features Sean Boggs’s “Paper Polygons,” a circle consisting of hand-cut blue and purple paper triangles, squares, pentagons, and hexagons that shift ever-so-slightly as the installation rotates almost imperceptibly; it’s like watching a clock, but it’s oh-so-satisfying when you see one of the small objects move, like catching a shooting star. Down the hall is Jillian Rose’s “two arrowheads a string of beads and a handful of nails,” a room where a ratty chair and table are precariously about to topple over, white paint is peeling and cracking everywhere, and splinters of wood appear to be growing over the wall, fireplace, and furniture; referencing the early history of Governors Island, the piece gives you the eerie feeling that something not so positive happened there, but you don’t quite know what it could be.

One of the highlights of the Governors Island Art Fair is Jillian Rose’s site-specific “two arrowheads a string of beads and a handful of nails” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council is sponsoring several exhibitions in Building 110, including “(Counter)Public: Art, Intervention & Performance in Lower Manhattan from 1978-1993,” which features photographs and video documenting works by John Kelly, Richard Serra, Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, Agnes Denes, and Eiko & Koma, among others. To help celebrate closing weekend, LMCC is hosting open studios with artists in residence, so you’ll be able to meet and talk with Okwui Okpokwasili on Saturday at 1:00, Kyle deCamp at 3:00, and twenty other artists all weekend. A.I.R. Gallery, an advocate for women in the visual arts, has filled a house with work by New York artists while partnering with UnderwaterNewYork. Safe Streets Art Foundation is presenting “Escaping Time: Art from U.S. Prisons,” comprising more than two hundred pieces by inmates from around the country and a look at prison reform. In addition, Brooklyn ARTery is showing “The Art of Mourning: Contemporary Works by Painter John Brendan Guinan” alongside DIY classes and a gift shop of one-of-a-kind items, the New-York Historical Society has the pop-up exhibit “Revolution: Independence and NYC,” local artifacts are on display in “Hidden Beneath Our Feet — Working Archaeology on Governors Island,” the Dysfunctional Collective is presenting “The Paper House,” members of the Sculptors Guild will be on hand for the site-specific “Under Construction Part II,” and the Summer Museum focuses on holographic art. And be sure to come hungry, as Governors Island has a bunch of cool food trucks as well as longtime mainstay, the Caribbean-flavored Veronica’s Kitchen.

ANT HAMPTON: THE EXTRA PEOPLE

The audience takes center stage in Ant Hampton’s THE EXTRA PEOPLE

CROSSING THE LINE
French Institute Alliance Française
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Friday, September 25, and Saturday, September 26, $25
Festival continues through October 4
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org
www.anthampton.com

Swiss-born British multidisciplinary artist Ant Hampton specializes in creating hard-to-categorize immersive performance installations that take place outside of the usual dynamic between performer and audience, making the latter an active participant in the production. Since 2007, Hampton has been presenting his Autoteatro series, works in which audience members and unrehearsed guest performers are given instructions and act out the pieces themselves. For Etiquette, two people sat across from each other in a public space and followed what they were told to do via headphones. For Hello for Dummies, pairs of strangers were sent to sit and interact on outdoor benches. Hampton’s latest work is The Extra People, premiering at FIAF’s Crossing the Line festival. The site-specific piece will take place in Florence Gould Hall, with fifteen audience members onstage and another fifteen sitting in seats. Each person will have a flashlight, a neon vest, and headphones, which will instruct them what to do and where to go. Hampton’s website advises to “avoid eye contact” and explains that “the overall picture is out of your reach: too big, beyond your comprehension, or simply not your job to know. . . . In a challenge to the assumption (often taken for granted) that collectivity is what you find in the theater, the building here reflects society rather differently, with its audience situated as atomized individuals adrift or even asleep among both seating and stage, plugged into their own audio streams, patiently awaiting their call, and eventually acting upon it.” Some of the slots are already sold out, so act fast if you want to have a rather unusual experience in a theatrical setting.