this week in art

tears become . . . streams become . . .

Performance installation transforms the Park Avenue Armory into a multisensory experience (photo by James Ewing)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Installation: December 11 – January 4, $15, times vary
Performances: December 9-21, $90, 7:00 or 8:00
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

As you enter the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall in the Park Avenue Armory to experience Douglas Gordon and Hélène Grimaud’s absolutely wonderful “tears become . . . streams become . . . ,” you encounter a long rectangular space in front of you, several inches below floor level, with two pianos standing on it and groups of chairs on all four sides. Slowly, water begins seeping into the central area. You take your seat and become mesmerized as water continues coming up through the seams of more than eight hundred dark panels of cement-bonded particle board and spreads across the thirty-three thousand square foot space, filling in ever-dampening circles in extremely satisfying individual narratives. Then the French-born, Switzerland-based Grimaud, seated at the larger of the Steinway grands, begins playing water-inspired works by Debussy, Ravel, Liszt, and others as the lighting turns the floor into a breathtaking reflecting pool, the arched ceiling echoed below in such a way that you feel like you can fall right into its spacious depths, as if the pool below is as vast and open as the space above. The large semicircular vaults of the west entrance and the east wall become complete circles with the reflection, the whole entity resembling a kind of submarine; meanwhile, little gurgles of water occasionally pop up on the surface, making quick sounds and small ripples. In addition, occasional currents create shimmers that add an enticingly surreal quality to the proceedings. At the press preview on December 8, the Turner Prize–winning Gordon sat on the piano bench next to Grimaud, occasionally standing up and determinedly waving his hands and arms, signaling the lighting personnel as if conducting an orchestra. One of the most accomplished classical pianists in the world, Grimaud has synesthesia, a sensory condition that causes her to visualize music as colors, which is ironic given the piece’s decidedly monochromatic appearance; also ironic is that Gordon says he is not a very good swimmer — and in his 2012 installation “The End of Civilisation,” he burned a piano onscreen. (Gordon and Grimaud each has a thing for wolves as well.) Doused in magic and mystery, “tears become . . . streams become . . . ” is yet another major triumph for the armory, which has been presenting many of the city’s most dazzling and innovative performance installations since opening as an arts institution in 2007.

Lights and music lead to reflective moments in “tears become . . . streams become . . . ” (photo by James Ewing)

Grimaud will be performing a one-hour program live December 9-21 ($90); there will be an Artist Talk on December 10 ($15) with Gordon and Grimaud, moderated by armory artistic director Alex Poots, who brought the two together for this very special commission, and Family Day takes place Sunday, December 13, from 10:00 am to 12 noon, specifically for families with children ages six to twelve. The must-see “tears become . . . streams become . . . ” — a title Gordon came up with from a memory of having seen a young boy playing the piano with one hand while wiping away tears with the other — will be open afternoons and some evenings December 11 through January 4 ($15, stay as long as you want), during which times a computerized piano will play Grimaud’s music, but the lighting, which is so integral to the piece, will not change. “A field is endless — it goes on, and on, and on, and on,” Gordon states about the project. “And as the water collects, the space it inhabits will never be the same again.” Indeed, after immersing yourself in “tears become . . . streams become . . . ,” you will never see the armory — or hear Debussy, Ravel, and Liszt — quite the same way again.

THE L.E.S. ART DRIVE BENEFITTING THE BOWERY MISSION

New Museum ground floor space
231 Bowery between Stanton & Rivington Sts.
Sunday, December 14, free, 1:00 – 6:00
www.bowery.org
www.newmuseum.org

For 135 years, the Bowery Mission has been helping hungry and homeless New Yorkers. Now you can help the Bowery Mission by bidding at the first annual L.E.S. Art Drive, a benefit auction for the nonprofit organization whose stated goal is “to be the most effective provider of compassionate care and life transformation for hurting people in New York City.” On Sunday, December 14, the mission’s neighbor, the New Museum will host a fundraising silent auction in its ground-floor space at 231 Bowery from 1:00 to 6:00. Curated by Karline Moeller of the Cy Twombly Foundation, the auction will feature works from $450 to $10,000 donated by more than three dozen Lower East Side galleries and individual artists, including Sperone Westwater (Malcolm Morley), gallery nine5 (Steve Ellis, Jessica Lichtenstein), Patrick McMullan, LMAKprojects (Joan van Barneveld), Robert Aitchison, Invisible-Exports (Philip von Zweck), Maxwell Snow, Wallplay (Luca Chiriani), Rob Wynn, the Keith Haring Foundation (Shepard Fairey), and Cindy Rucker Gallery (Charles Dunn). (You can get a sneak peek at the art here.) In addition, there will be a photography exhibit inside the mission itself, “Through My Lens,” consisting of pictures taken by members of the marginalized local community. Every little bit helps; the Bowery Mission is estimating that a complete Christmas dinner for twelve people costs a mere $19.08 this year.

GINGERBREAD EXTRAVAGANZA: MADE IN NEW YORK

Citarella has re-created the Fulton Fish Market out of gingerbread for annual City Harvest fundraising display at Le Parker Meridien

Le Parker Meridien, 56th St. atrium lobby
119 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Daily through January 4, free ($1 per vote)
212-245-5000
www.giving.cityharvest.org
www.parkermeridien.com

Gingerbread dates back thousands of years, to the time of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians; in the 1500s, Queen Elizabeth I had gingerbread cookies decorated to look like visiting guests, and in 1812, the Brothers Grimm published “Hansel and Gretel,” a story of two children who get trapped by a witch in a house made of gingerbread and candy. Wonderfully designed gingerbread cakes and cookies have been a longstanding Christmas tradition in America — and at Le Parker Meridien in Midtown Manhattan as well, where the annual Gingerbread Extravaganza continues through January 4. This year’s theme is “Made in New York,” with such inventive constructions made out of gingerbread as FIKA’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” centered by a mirror silhouette of Audrey Hepburn; Crave.It’s “Balancing Justice in NYC,” with Spider-Man battling an evil villain atop the Brooklyn Bridge; Great Performances’ “Katchkie Farm Gingerbread Farmhouse,” a tribute to the organic farm in Kinderhook; Citarella’s “Fulton Fish Market,” which smells a lot better than the real thing; Norma’s “The Great White Gingerbread Way,” celebrating Times Square and Broadway; Silk Cakes’ “Cookie Monster Takes a Bite Out of NY,” in which the Sesame Street favorite munches on Manhattan; Rolling Pin Productions and Sotto Voce Restaurant’s “Saturday Night Before Christmas,” with Santa, Mrs. Claus, and the elves partying at the much-lamented Palladium, Limelight, and Studio 54; Baked Ideas’ “City Harvest Holidays,” with the familiar City Harvest truck collecting food for the hungry; and Sullivan St Bakery’s “Domino Sugar Factory,” a snowy-sweet scene depicting the since-demolished refinery. Unfortunately, Cake Alchemy’s “Going Ape over New York,” with King Kong wearing a Santa hat, came tumbling down the other day and is no more. In addition, you can find Roberta’s “Made in Bushwick” at the pizza place on Moore St., “Lady Liberty & the Seven Year Itch” at Colicchio & Sons on East Nineteenth, and “Industrial Gingerbread in the Jazz Age” at Maialino on Lexington Ave. The event is a fundraiser for City Harvest; visitors are encouraged to vote for their favorite gingerbread display, with individual ballots available for one dollar each, either at Le Parker Meridien or online, with each buck representing four pounds of food. All voters will be eligible to win a five-day trip to the Parker Palm Springs in California.

NAM JUNE PAIK: BECOMING ROBOT

Nam June Paik, “Family of Robot: Father” and “Family of Robot: Mother,” single-channel video sculptures with vintage television and radio casings and monitors, tuner, liquid crystal display, color, silent, 1986 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Asia Society Museum
725 Park Ave. at 70th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 4, $12, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm (free Fridays 6:00 – 9:00)
212-288-6400
www.asiasociety.org
www.paikstudios.com

I was on the subway late last week, reading one of the chapters in the “Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot” catalog for the splendid exhibition at Asia Society, when I looked up and saw an ad for a company that proclaimed, “The most powerful inventions are playful. . . . The most playful inventions are powerful,” touting a robot head, a remote pet feeder, and a synthar. The advertisement made me immediately think of the life and work of Paik, who instilled his highly technological, often futuristic sculptures, musical compositions, videos, drawings, installations, and live performances with an innate playfulness. If you’re not ready, willing, and able to have fun with the innovative, visionary Paik, then don’t bother going to Asia Society, because the exhibit, which continues through January 4, is nothing if not a whole lot of fun. The chapter I was reading on the subway was “Ok, Let’s Go to Blimpies: Talking about Nam June Paik,” a lively, informative, and, yes, playful discussion between museum director Melissa Chiu, former Paik studio manager Jon Huffman, former Paik studio assistant Stephen Vitiello, and Paik’s nephew, Ken Hakuta, that gets to the very essence of the international artist. Paik, who was born in Korea in 1932, moved to Hong Kong, studied in Japan, and lived and worked in Germany and New York, was way ahead of his time as he experimented with electronic music and images, television circuitry, and robots that could go to the bathroom, but with a unique, personal, warm touch that predated cell phones, social media, and interactive video games. “He wanted to redefine television [not as a] passive object, but [as] an object that we interact with,” Vitiello, who is a multimedia artist in his own right, says in the catalog. “We control our destiny. He was a humanist; he wanted to humanize everything, and technology was just a way of getting more time in which we could make better artwork, better software, have better lives.”

Nam June Paik, “TV Bra for Living Sculpture,” cello, two television sets, microphone, amplifiers, deflection coils, “fussbedienungsgerate,” cables, 1975 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The exhibition consists of more than five dozen sculptures, photographs, writings, videos, and other ephemera from throughout Paik’s career. The centerpiece is “Robot K-456,” Paik’s first automated, remote-control-operated, hermaphrotidic robot, which initially could poop beans. (It seems to have lost this function after being purposely hit by a car as part of a major 1982 show at the Whitney.) Also on display is “Family of Robot,” a mother, father, and baby created out of television monitors that blast images across their screens; “Golden Buddha,” a statue watching itself on television (and on which visitors can see themselves as well); “TV Chair,” which features a surveillance camera above and a monitor on the seat; a pair of antique television cabinets on which he has drawn over the surface; a robot brain in a glass dome; and “Three Camera Participation / Participation TV,” which gets a room unto itself, inviting everyone to see colorful, psychedelic projections of themselves in a far corner.

Nam June Paik, “Golden Buddha,” video installation with twenty-seven-inch monitor and closed circuit video camera, painted bronze Buddha with the artist’s additions in permanent oil marker, 2005 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Perhaps most fascinatingly, “Becoming Robot” explores the artistic relationship between Paik and classically trained cellist Charlotte Moorman, who would play topless or wearing Paik’s “TV Bra for Living Sculpture” or “Light Bikini.” The show documents various performances, includes a room of many of Moorman’s outfits, and delves into her arrest for indecent exposure while playing Paik’s Opera Sextronique. Nudity also play a role in “Reclining Buddha,” a stone sculpture of a female Buddha relaxing on her side, right hand holding up her head in a classic pose, atop a pair of color monitors depicting a real naked woman in the same position; nearby is a collection of Paik’s decidedly childlike toys. And be sure to allow extra time to watch clips from Paik’s 1984 satellite installation, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a different kind of variety show with Moorman, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, Allen Ginsberg, Merce Cunningham, Philip Glass, and Joseph Beuys, as well as a sampling of Paik’s live performances. In his 1966 Great Bear Pamphlet, “Manifestos,” Paik declared, “Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more important, and the latter need not be cybernated.” Eight years later, Paik coined the phrase “electronic superhighway.” As “Becoming Robot” so ably shows, Paik was at the crossroads of technology and culture long before the rest of us, predicting a world that would become obsessed with broadcasting personal information and images on handheld devices that resemble their own personal television stations. All the while, though, he remained philosophical and hopeful about the future, deeply serious about his work but intent on incorporating an intoxicating playfulness that is just plain fun — and decidedly human.

STEPHEN VITIELLO: LIGHT READINGS

Stephen Vitiello’s site-specific “Light Readings” installation includes a performance on December 9

Baryshnikov Arts Center, Studio 6A
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
December 8-18, free, various times
December 9 performance, $15, 7:00
www.bacnyc.org
www.stephenvitiello.com

Interactive multimedia artist Stephen Vitiello, whose geographic sound installation, “A Bell for Every Minute,” rang out on the High Line back in 2010-11 and was later acquired for MoMA’s sculpture garden, will be adding a glow to the Baryshnikov Arts Center with the New York premiere of “Light Readings,” translating light into sound using photocells. The unique environment will be open for free December 8-18 from 3:00 to 5:00 or 8:00 during the week and 12 noon to 6:00 on Saturday in Studio 6A, where the natural light will keep things ever changing; Vitiello, a Guggenheim Fellow and an associate professor of kinetic imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University, will also be at BAC on December 9 for a special one-time-only forty-five-minute ticketed performance.

SEBASTIÃO SALGADO: GENESIS

Iceberg between Paulet Island and South Shetland Islands on Weddell Sea in Antarctic Peninsula, 2005 (photo © Sebastião Salgado)

International Center of Photography
1133 Sixth Ave. at 43rd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 11, $10-$14 (pay what you wish Fridays 5:00 – 8:00)
212-857-0000
www.icp.org
www.institutoterra.org

In a 2003 International Center of Photography lecture about a year and a half after his “Migrations: Humanity in Transition” exhibit at ICP, Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado said, “I came out of ‘Migrations’ very pessimistic about the prospect, for me, of the survival of the human species because I saw so many tough things on this planet. . . . After seven years on the road, seeing these things, I was a little bit disappointed with all the relations that we create between us and this planet.” Mr. Salgado and his wife, curator Lélia Wanick Salgado, further explore this relationship in “Genesis,” going back to the beginning for his third large-scale series. The eye-opening show, which fills both floors at ICP, consists of more than two hundred fifty primarily black-and-white photos of vast landscapes and indigenous peoples and animals divided into five sections: “Amazonia and Pantanal,” “Northern Spaces,” “Africa,” “Sanctuaries,” and “Planet South.”

Although the Salgados primarily let the dazzlingly composed photos speak for themselves, the images have a very specific mission. “As well as displaying the beauty of nature, ‘Genesis’ is also a call to arms,” they state in the exhibition catalog. “We cannot continue polluting our soil, water, and air. We must act now to preserve unspoiled land and seascapes and protect the natural sanctuaries of ancient peoples and animals. And we can go further: We can try to reverse the damage we have done.” And these are no mere words. Like the Genesis Device in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which brought “life from lifelessness,” the Salgados are reforesting the Valley of the River Doce in Brazil, planting more than two million trees from more than three hundred different species as part of their Instituto Terra project. “‘Genesis’ is a quest for the world as it was, as it was formed, as it evolved, as it existed for millennia before modern life accelerated and began distancing us from the very essence of our being,” Ms. Salgado writes in the catalog. “And it is testimony that our planet still harbours vast and remote regions where nature reigns in silent and pristine majesty.” That “silent and pristine majesty” is on display in full force in the exhibit. Mr. Salgado, whose first large-scale series was “Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age,” goes back to the land for “Genesis,” pointing out that nearly half of the Earth “is still as it was in the time of genesis.” His photos often require extended viewing, as many contain striking details that slowly emerge only as one spends time with them. He frames his images with natural horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines that cut through the pictures like masterful brushstrokes, from a lightning-like river winding in between a mountain range in Alaska to a sweeping expanse of sand dunes in the Namib Desert in Namibia, from thousands of chinstrap penguins on an iceberg in the South Sandwich Islands to a close-up of one leg of a marine iguana in the Galápagos. Heavenly sunlight glows over a herd of lechwe in Botswana, clouds circle the Roraima Tepui in Venezuela, Zo’é women with poturu cones in their lips color their bodies with the urucum in Brazil, and a Yali man forages for food on a tree in West Papua.

Chinstrap penguins on Saunders Island in South Sandwich Islands, 2009 (photo © Sebastião Salgado)

“[‘Genesis’] is a visual tribute to a fragile planet that we all have a duty to protect,” Ms. Salgado points out, and after experiencing this exhibit, which includes a look at the Instituto Terra project, you’ll feel more responsible for the planet as well. In conjunction with the show, which continues through January 11, ICP will be hosting a series of special events. “Friday Evenings with Climate Scientists” features seismologist Arthur Lerner-Lam on December 5 and climate scientist William D’Andrea on December 12 examining specific parts of the exhibition, while Adam Harrison Levy will moderate “Frack Off!” on December 15, a panel discussion on fracking with photographer Nina Berman and Cornell civil and environmental engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea.

FIRST SATURDAYS: BROOKLYN FASHION

Christian Louboutin, “Printz,” Spring/Summer 2013 (courtesy of Christian Louboutin; photograph by Jay Zukerkorn)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, December 6, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum has fun with its new exhibit, “Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe,” in the December edition of its free First Saturdays program. “Brooklyn Fashion” will feature live performances by the Hot Sardines and TK Wonder; a shoe-making art workshop; a talk with Manufacture New York CEO Bob Bland; screenings of Julie Benasra’s 2011 documentary, God Save My Shoes, and Tom Kalin’s Alternate Endings, short films made in collaboration with artists Rhys Ernst, Glen Fogel, Lyle Ashton Harris, Derek Jackson, My Barbarian, and Julie Tolentino in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Visual AIDS’ Day With(out) Art; a talk with “Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe” curator Lisa Small; an interactive story hour with Aunt Helen’s Closet; a “Killer Heels” photo booth; and a social club with dapperQ.com that includes pop-up shops, a Dapper Academy, and a fashion show. In addition, you can check out such exhibitions as “Revolution! Works from the Black Arts Movement,” “Judith Scott — Bound and Unbound,” and “Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond.”