this week in art

CROSSING THE LINE: CHAMBRE

Jack Ferver reimagines Jean Genet’s THE MAIDS in performance installation at the New Museum (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

New Museum Theater
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Installation: September 23 – October 4
Performances: September 24-25, October 1-2, 7:00, and September 26-27, October 3-4, 3:00, $15
www.fiaf.org
www.jackferver.org

No one tells a story quite like Jack Ferver. In such deeply personal psychodramas as Rumble Ghost, Night Light Bright Light, and Two Alike, the Wisconsin-born, New York-based performer shares intimate, cathartic memories brought to life through a loving pop-culture lens. Melding dance, spoken word, electronic sound scores, and visual art, Ferver explores suicide, abused queer youth, rape, and other serious topics while incorporating references to Tennessee Williams, Poltergeist, Fred Herko, Cleopatra, Madonna, and the 1985 cult film Return to Oz. In Chambre, which runs September 24 to October 4 at the New Museum as part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line festival, Ferver turns to Jean Genet’s The Maids, the 1947 play inspired by a pair of real-life sisters, Christine and Léa Papin, who committed a horrific crime in France in 1933. For the project, which includes eight live performances, Ferver is working with several of his longtime collaborators; the music is composed by Roarke Menzies, the costumes are designed by Reid Bartelme, the art installation (which is on view during museum hours throughout the show’s run) is by Marc Swanson, and Ferver will be joined onstage by Michelle Mola and Jacob Slominski.

Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson will present CHAMBRE as part of FIAFs annual Crossing the Line festival (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Jack Ferver and longtime collaborators will present CHAMBRE as part of FIAF’s annual Crossing the Line festival (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

“While I’ve been mulling over the material for Chambre for years, we started our first residency at Baryshnikov [Arts Center] two years ago this month. It’s been exciting, to say the least, for me to see how much it has changed,” Ferver told twi-ny about the evolution of the show. “This iteration of Chambre at the New Museum is very different from our premiere at Bard [last year]. The context of the museum obviously has factored into it. Marc and I also originally envisioned it for the white cube. The space is more intimate than where we have performed it so far. Marc’s installation becomes a room in a room, and it is changing the performance, creating a more nuanced, vulnerable, and frightening experience for me. Michelle, Jacob, and I have already started rehearsing in the space. The script and choreography are changing as the psyche of the piece changes in the space of the New Museum.” Menzies added, “The evolution of the score for this work was interesting. I wrote maybe three separate scores before arriving at the final version. A lot of the first music cues I created really capitalized on the notion that this is a murder story. Originally, the main theme had this very suspenseful beat and dark, brooding piano melodies — very campy, and very much in the language of Friday the 13th or Halloween, which has one of the great horror scores in cinema. But I think I ended up scrapping all of those references in lieu of much more raw, uncomfortable, barely recognizable sounds that I created by manipulating and contorting recordings of my voice. As we got to the core of the work, it became clear that the real source of the horror in this piece isn’t the murder but the horror of being embodied, the horror of having to live in this cruel, terrible world. All we really have to escape that horror are the endless games we play.” Sounds like classic Jack Ferver to us, so we can’t wait to catch this highly anticipated New York City premiere.

UNTITLED STANZAS: STAFF/UN/SITE

Kevin Beasley will perform new composition on the High Line this week (photo by Jean Vong, courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York)

Who: Kevin Beasley
What: Untitled Stanzas: Staff/Un/Site
Where: High Line at the Rail Yards, on the High Line at West 30th St. & 12th Ave.
When: September 22-24, free, 6:00
Why: Virginia-born, New York-based artist Kevin Beasley has been roaming the High Line for months, recording sounds of traffic, insects, construction, and other aural vibrations. On September 22, 23, and 24 at 6:00, Beasley, who staged I Want My Spot Back at MoMA in 2012, will perform a composition based on these found sounds, taking place at the open-air Twelfth Avenue Overlook on the High Line at Thirtieth St. In addition to layering his prerecorded sounds, he will add a recording of each show to the next performance.

WAYNE McGREGOR, OLAFUR ELIASSON, AND JAMIE xx: TREE OF CODES

Wayne McGregor’s movement, Jamie xx’s music, and Olafur Eliasson’s visual concept come together to reimagine Jonathan Safran Foer’s TREE OF CODES, which reimagines Bruno Schulz’s STREET OF CROCODILES (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. between 66th & 67th Sts.
Through September 21, $30-$90
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org

Choreographer Wayne McGregor, composer Jamie xx, and artist Olafur Eliasson have created quite an audiovisual spectacle with Tree of Codes, their sparkling adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2010 book of the same name, which used die cuts to repurpose Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles. As ticket holders enter the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall, they encounter large screens to the north and south on which their elongated silhouettes are projected in different colors, reminiscent of Nam June Paik’s “Three Camera Participation / Participation TV,” welcoming them to the show while letting them know they are part of it. The performance itself takes place in the center of the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the audience sitting in rising rows on the east side. Over the course of seventy-five dazzling minutes, various mirrored, translucent, and transparent walls descend from above, altering the perception of the highly athletic dancers, who move about virtually nonstop in an impressive array of solos, duets, and trios, set to a multilayered score that ranges from choral singing to soul, from pulsating dance beats to indie pop, sometimes all at the same time. Just as Safran Foer cut into Schulz’s story, Eliasson’s props cut into themselves, altering space and time, with refracted sections, orbiting circles, and spotlights that wander over the audience, and Jamie xx’s diverse score does the same to itself, coming up with new sounds as the music forms a kind of aural palimpsest. The dancers, meanwhile — consisting of Jérémie Bélingard, Julien Meyzindi, Sébastien Bertaud, Lydie Vareilhes, Lucie Fenwick, and the extraordinary Marie-Agnès Gillot from the Paris Opera Ballet and Louis McMiller, Daniela Neugebauer, Anna Nowak, James Pett, Fukiko Takase, and Jessica Wright from Company Wayne McGregor — are reflected multiple times in the mirrors, or fade away in ghostly images. At times, dancers in front of a see-through partition interact with dancers on the other side as if they are physically together; at other times, they appear to be dancing with multiple versions of themselves. The experience changes depending on where you sit, as the reflections and colors shift based on your angle of vision — and you might even get to see yourself in the background mirror as the spotlight hits you. It never gets very deep, but you can’t stop immersing yourself in its splendor. The performance actually begins with some cool but gimmicky Pilobolus-like moments, but don’t let that worry you. It quickly evolves into a beautifully rendered treat.

REVOLUTION OF THE EYE: MODERN ART AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN TELEVISION

Jewish Museum show explores relationship between early television and modern art (photo by David Heald)

The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday – Tuesday through September 27, $7.50-$15 (children eighteen and under free; free admission Saturday 11:00 am – 5:45 pm, pay-what-you-wish Thursday 5:00 – 8:00)
212-423-3200
thejewishmuseum.org

I am a proud TV baby, born into the first generation that treated television like a cherished member of the family. I actually took great offense that my bonus sibling — it was much more than a mere babysitter to me — was referred to as the boob tube and that many people claimed that watching too much of what I even as a kid considered a legitimate art form was bad for your physical and mental well-being. In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) famously explains to his actor pal, Rob (Tony Roberts), and girlfriend, Annie (Diane Keaton), why it’s so clean in California: “They don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.” Which leads me to the Jewish Museum’s fun and fascinating new look at the medium, the informative and entertaining exhibition “Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television,” continuing through September 27. “Rarely is TV discussed in terms of art — and when it is, critics have usually focused on the ways television has influenced high art, or been critiqued and ridiculed by it,” UMBC Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture executive director Symmes Gardner writes in his foreword to the catalog. “Yet as network television now shares the stage with other forms of broadcasting and video dissemination, we can see the ways in which this popular, commercial mechanism aided art, responded to art — and was, many times, itself art.”

Exhibition includes clip of Salvador Dali appearance on WHAT’S MY LINE? (© Fremantle Media)

The multimedia show follows the development of television from the 1940s through the 1970s, tracing the impact that modern art had on the telly, which in turn influenced contemporary American society. Lovingly curated by Maurice Berger — although a bit noisy, with too many of the sounds bouncing off one another — the exhibition explores links between Rod Serling’s anthology series The Twilight Zone and surrealism (including a startling comparison of the opening title sequence to clips of short films by Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, and René Clair), and Ernie Kovacs and Dada (and how the comic master was among the first to exploit the technology of the medium itself while playfully attacking the corporations that sponsored it). The development of television logos, advertising, and title sequences turns out to be quite a tale, involving such cutting-edge graphic designers as Saul Bass and established artists as Ben Shahn. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In is seen in conjunction with Pop, Op, and psychedelic art, while the tongue-in-cheek Batman series is compared to the comic-book Pop art of Roy Lichtenstein. Even Dinah Shore and Ed Sullivan make the cut, the latter’s mod sets matched with sculptures by Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris. The exhibit also has rare clips of artists on television, including Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, John Cage, Duchamp, Shahn, and Lichtenstein, although they are all far too short, but a segment of Aline Saarinen’s Sunday Show with Alberto Giacometti is a real treat. There are also works by Lee Friedlander (mocking the medium), Georgia O’Keeffe, Man Ray, Robert Motherwell, Eero Saarinen (Aline’s husband), Agnes Martin, and others, in addition to sections devoted to Winky Dink and You, which invited kids to be artists using the television screen, and the Museum of Modern Art’s Television Project, which sought to place the medium in a higher art form, something that the Jewish Museum has ably accomplished in this splendid exhibit that justifies my longtime love affair with the boob tube.

AUTUMN MOON FESTIVAL AND MORE

A CELEBRATION OF ASIAN CULTURE
Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden
1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island
Saturday, September 19, $8-$10, 12 noon – 4:00 pm
718-425-3504
snug-harbor.org

On September 19, Staten Island’s beautiful Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden will be hosting its sixteenth annual Autumn Moon Festival, an afternoon of special programs celebrating the Asian harvest. Taking place in the Chinese Scholar’s Garden, the festival will include an arts and crafts family workshop, a performance of Rabbit Days and Dumplings by Elena Moon Park and Friends, traditional music and dance, Asian-inspired food, martial arts and Tai Chi demonstrations, calligraphy lessons, and more. In addition, on Saturday and Sunday, Snug Harbor is holding a party for the grand opening of the Staten Island Museum, with games, live music, crafts, science, food, and more; admission for that is free. And finally, on Saturday at 2:00 and 8:00 and Sunday at 2:00, the Harbor Lights Theater Company will be presenting Rent in the Music Hall ($35-$45); the production continues through October 4.

POETRY UNDER “FATA MORGANA”

Spoken-word performances will take place under Teresita Fernández’s “Fata Morgana” installation in Madison Square Park on September 17 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Madison Square Park
23rd to 26th Sts. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Thursday, September 17, free, 6:00
Installation continues through winter 2015-16
www.madisonsquarepark.org

We still haven’t made up our mind about American artist Teresita Fernández’s “Fata Morgana,” a five-hundred-foot-long sculpture winding through the walkways of Madison Square Park. Consisting of canopies of mirror-polished discs with small sections cut out of them resembling clouds or leaves, the work blocks the otherwise 6.2-acre open area’s access to the sky, creating a claustrophobic feeling despite very cool reflections above and intriguing shadowy forms below. “By hovering over the park in a horizontal band, ‘Fata Morgana’ becomes a ghostlike, sculptural, luminous mirage that both distorts the landscape and radiates golden light,” Fernández explains on the Mad. Sq. Art website. In conjunction with the site-specific installation, the park is hosting a number of special events, so maybe that will shed more light on the project. On Thursday, September 17, “Poetry under ‘Fata Morgana’” will feature spoken-word performances by Sandra María Esteves, Bonafide Rojas, Machete Movement, True, and Emanuel Xavier, who curated the program with Fernández as part of National Hispanic Heritage Month. Among the other free September events in Madison Square Park are Mad. Sq. Reads with Sophie McManus (September 17, 12:30), the Studio Series: Time & Luck Quartet and Kristin Diable (September 19, 3:00), Singapore: Inside Out (September 23-27), and Mad. Sq. Reads with Amanda Lee Koe and Jenny Zang (September 24, 12:30).

TREE OF CODES

Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. between 66th & 67th Sts.
September 14-21, $30-$90
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org

Codes are one-to-one correspondences, messages that have been transformed from one communication into another. Tree of Codes, originally presented earlier this summer at the Manchester International Festival, is a seventy-five-minute contemporary ballet that uses light, sound, color, mirrors, and movement in unique ways, transforming Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2010 book, Tree of Codes, into something entirely other. Foer’s book is a work of art that is both a literary narrative and sculptural object; every page of the paperback boasts a different die-cut as surprising word combinations continually reveal themselves. Foer’s three-dimensional story begins with Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles — which has previously been adapted by the Quay Brothers into a classically creepy stop-motion animation film — and Foer then cut out words to create a whole new tale. British choreographer Wayne McGregor (Infra, Chroma), London-born DJ and music producer Jamie xx (We’re New Here, In Colour), and Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (“The Collectivity Project” on the High Line, “NYC Waterfalls”) have turned Tree of Codes into a site-specific multidisciplinary performance piece, featuring members of the Paris Opera Ballet and McGregor’s company, that will take place in New York City’s most creative space, the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory, from September 14 to 21. “At the armory, we are always encouraging artists to push the limits of their specific disciplines. Wayne McGregor, Olafur Eliasson, and Jaime xx are each pioneers in their respective fields, and their collective vision for Tree of Codes asks us to bend our preconceived notions of traditional ballet and also the world around us,” armory president and executive producer Rebecca Robertson said in a statement. The armory has previously hosted work by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Shen Wei Dance Arts, STREB Extreme Action, Massive Attack, Christian Boltanski, Ann Hamilton, Tom Sachs, Paul McCarthy, Ryoji Ikeda, and many others, who have taken great advantage of the fifty-five-thousand square-foot space. Tree of Codes is likely to do the same.