this week in art

JAMES LEE BYARS: PERFORMANCES

Performance of James Lee Byars’s The Mile-Long Paper Walk (1965-2014) at The Museum of Modern Art, August 17, 2014. Performed by Katie Dorn; choreographic construction by Lucinda Childs. © 2014 Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Sunday, September 7, free with museum admission, 12 noon – 5:00
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In conjunction with the closing of the MoMA PS1 retrospective “James Lee Byars: 1/2 an Autobiography” — which includes the glittering “World Flag,” the short film The Perfect Epitaph, and the pitch-black room “The Ghost of James Lee Byars,” among many other tantalizing and intriguing works — MoMA’s Midtown Manhattan location will be restaging five of Byars’s performances on September 7, honoring the long history the museum shared with the Detroit-born multidisciplinary artist who passed away in 1997 in Cairo at the age of sixty-five. “James Lee Byars: Performances” will take place between 12 noon and 5:00 pm in several locations. In the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, Jimmy Robert will re-create “The Mile-Long Paper Walk,” with choreographic instruction by original performer Lucinda Childs. On the fourth-floor landing, “Four in a Dress” will put four people in a dress; “Are we one or four?” Byars asked when he was in it. Nearby, in the fourth-floor Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Lobby Gallery, “Dress for Two” brings together a pair of people facing each other, joined in an unusual way. All afternoon long, you can check out “Ten in a Hat,” involving performers wearing interconnected chapeaux. And in the sixth-floor gallery, you can see the very brief piece “The Perfect Kiss,” which Byars called “a prayer a poem and a play.”

JIM RENNERT: THINK BIG / PERSPECTIVE

Jim Rennert’s “Perspective” offers passersby a chance to reflect on their life and career (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Union Square Park
14th St. & Union Square East
17th St. & Broadway
Through October 31, free
www.nycgovparks.org/art
jim rennert slideshow

Sculptor Jim Rennert examines the fast-paced nature of corporate culture in his work, offering passersby the opportunity to take a step back and reconsider their goals and how to achieve them. A recent show at Project 3W57 featured small bronze sculptures of men in suits with such titles as “Decisions Decisions,” “Steady,” “Second Chance,” “A Reasonable Man,” and “Clean Slate.” That same businessman figure can now be found at opposite corners of Union Square Park, a pair of sculptures that Rennert, who was raised in Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, intends to bring to people a positive outlook on life. In the island off the southeast corner of the park is “Think Big,” a twelve-foot-tall man in a suit, his hands at his side, his mouthless face gazing up at the heavens, imagining the American dream that might still be within his reach. Meanwhile, in the pedestrian plaza just off the northwest end of the park, is “Perspective,” in which the businessman, only slightly larger than a Wall Street executive, is looking up at the sky, his hands clasped behind his back, considering what awaits him as people hurry past. Rennert, who uses the lost-wax casting method in creating his sculptures, sees the pieces as inspirational in nature while also being contemplative and reflective. “The work has evolved into developing a consistent character and creating an environment in which the interaction between the two brings in the viewer,” he explains in his artist statement. “This approach seems to allow the audience an opportunity to relate to the work in a very personal manner. While not everyone wears a suit, I feel the themes transcend to the everyman.” The sculptures, part of the New York City Department of Transportation’s Art Program, will continue peering up at the future through October 31.

RACHEL FEINSTEIN’S “THE LAST DAYS OF FOLLY” PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL

“Rococo Hut” is one of three sculptural pieces that make up Rachel Feinstein’s “Folly” in Madison Square Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

FOLLY
Madison Square Park
23rd to 25th Sts. between Madison Ave. & Broadway
Wednesday, September 3, free, 5:30 – 8:30
Exhibition continues through September 7
www.madisonsquarepark.org
folly slideshow

At first look, Rachel Feinstein’s site-specific “Folly” installation in Madison Square Park appears to be a trio of fragile ornamental structures, seemingly crudely made out of paper (they began life as handmade paper models), that could serve as backdrops for a high school play. Echoing fairy-tale-like nonfunctional garden decoration from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe as well as Nymphenburg porcelain, the three pieces — “Cliff House,” inspired by Ballets Russes sets; “Rococo Hut,” influenced by Marie Antoinette’s château Le Petit Triannon; and “The Flying Ship,” based on a Commedia dell’arte skit about Punchinello — are actually constructed from powder-coated aluminum. The works, which also give nods to Federico Fellini, Marlene Dietrich’s portrayal of Catherine the Great in The Scarlet Empress, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s real and imagined landscapes, might look like they could collapse at any moment — “Rococo Hut” features crooked steps, “The Flying Ship” uses a tree for balance, and “Cliff House” looks supremely unsafe — but they are sturdy enough to be home to a wide-ranging collection of performances on September 3. “The Madison Park Conservancy has given me the opportunity to marry my early interest in theater and performance with my later obsession with the handmade in one of the most spectacular settings. I picture ‘Folly’ as an empty Fellini-esque set dropped into the middle of a lush green wonderland in the historical Flatiron district of New York City,” the New York City-based Feinstein (“The Snow Queen”), who was born in Defiance, Arizona, and raised in Miami, said in a statement. “I have always been driven by the stark contrast between good and evil in old fairy tales. Having this setting, a hidden natural jewel situated within the tall skyscrapers of yesterday and today, will be the perfect backdrop for my theater, where the real people who occupy the park every day will stand in as Commedia dell’arte performers.”

Rachel Feinstein’s “Folly” will be home to a wide-ranging performance festival on September 3 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

On Wednesday, “The Last Days of Folly” will consist of My Barbarian performing its “Broke Baroque Suite”; a procession through the park led by artists Allison Brainard and Cara Chan; musical segues by Jarvis Cocker based on Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé for the Ballets Russes; Sofia Coppola directing six Joffrey Ballet School ballerinas dancing to Isao Tomita’s version of one of Claude Debussy’s Arabesques; a sound-and-movement piece from multidisciplinary artist Tamar Ettun; Little Did Productions’ magic lantern interpretation of parts of the Ramayana with Luke Santy on sitar and Jessica Lorence on vocals; an improvised dance by Lil Buck set to music by Paul Cantelon and cellist Wolfram Koessel; Kalup Linzy’s “Romantic Loner” and “One Life to Heal,” with live music by Mike Jackson; Molly Lowe’s nude costume incorporating numerous performers; a music set by Angela McCluskey and Cantelon, joined by Lil Buck and others; a puppet show from Shana Moulton; a new video work by Tony Oursler collaborating with Constance DeJong; a sound installation by Carlos Vela-Prado; and “Folly”-inspired fashion from Giles Deacon, Duro Olowu, Zac Posen, Narciso Rodriguez, Cynthia Rowley, Proenza Schouler, and Madeline Weinrib. We have no idea how this is all going to be squeezed into a mere three hours, but we can’t wait to find out.

CROSSING THE LINE 2014

Fernando Rubio’s “Everything by My Side” takes place on seven beds in Hudson River Park as part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line festival

French Institute Alliance Française and other locations
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
FIAF Gallery, 22 East 60th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
September 8 – October 20, free – $35
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

One of the best multidisciplinary arts festivals every year, FIAF’s Crossing the Line is back for its eighth season, featuring another exciting lineup of dance, theater, music, installation, exhibitions, and hard-to-describe events. Cocurators Lili Chopra, Simon Dove, and Gideon Lester explain it thusly: “This year’s edition of Crossing the Line brings together fifteen extraordinary international artists and companies, each of them offering unique perspectives on the world we all share. We invite New Yorkers to explore their meticulous and deeply considered work, both the familiar and the unknown, and find inspiration, provocation, and pure pleasure.” Hosted by the French Institute Alliance Française and taking place there as well as several other locations, CTL offers numerous opportunities to “find inspiration, provocation, and pure pleasure.” Palais Galliera director Olivier Saillard gets seven former supermodels to open up in Models Never Talk, a world premiere at Milk Studios. Trajal Harrell continues his Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church with a week of special performances at the Kitchen. Justin Vivian Bond is joined by special guest Miguel Gutierrez for the one-night-only Love Is Crazy, consisting of songs and stories about love and romance.

Prune Nourry’s “Terracotta Daughters” will stand guard at 104 Washington St. for eighth edition of CTL

Patti Smith, her daughter, Jesse, and Soundwalk Collective examine the death of Nico in unique ways in Killer Road at FIAF. Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin and German visual artist Julius von Bismarck use motion-sensor technology and lighting to delve into physics in Quantum at BAM Fisher. Jessica Mitrani and Pedro Almodóvar regular Rossy de Palma pay tribute to Nellie Bly in Traveling Lady at FIAF. The audience is encouraged to participate in Aaron Landsman’s free Republic of New York: Perfect City Discussions at Abrons Arts Center. Fernando Rubio’s Everything by My Side is a fifteen-minute rotating performance on seven beds in Hudson River Park. The works of French choreographer Xavier Le Roy will be re-created at MoMA PS1. Prune Nourry’s “Terracotta Daughters” exhibition at 104 Washington St. challenges gender roles in China and the world. Julie Béna’s site-specific “T&T Consortium: You’re Already Elsewhere” at the FIAF Gallery puts visitors into a fantastical setting. The star of the festival is Japanese electronic artist Ryoji Ikeda, whose Park Avenue Armory installation “The Transfinite” dazzled New York back in 2011; the mathematical mastermind will present the immersive, multimedia Superposition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a gallery exhibition at Salon 94, and “Test Pattern [Times Square],” which can be seen on nearly four dozen screens in Times Square as part of the “Midnight Moment” program each night in October from 11:57 pm to midnight. CTL is also one of the most affordable festivals, with nothing costing more than $35, so you have no excuse not to check out at least a few of these ultracool events.

CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Thursday – Monday through September 1, suggested admission $10
718-784-2084
www.momaps1.org
www.schlingensief.com

Staging a retrospective of a late performance artist whose work was very much of the moment can be a daunting, difficult task, but curators Klaus Biesenbach, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, and Susanne Pfeffer have done a terrific job with the simply titled “Christoph Schlingensief,” MoMA PS1’s exciting exploration of the career of the German multidisciplinary artist who died in 2010 at the age of forty-nine. Over the course of thirty years, Schlingensief produced experimental films, cutting-edge operas, radical theater pieces, and public actions and interventions that shattered the boundaries between audience and performer and challenged the social and political status quo of his native country and beyond. The expansive exhibition examines Schlingensief’s working process and the reaction to his pieces through film and video clips, photographs, documentation, installation, related paraphernalia, and lots of wall text that puts his oeuvre in context. For “Chance 2000,” Schlingensief formed a political party that fought for the rights of the marginalized; for one event, Schlingensief called for people to bathe in a lake at Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s summer home, hoping to get enough participants to flood the house. In “Please Love Austria — First Austrian Coalition Week,” Schlingensief mocked right-wing anti-immigration zealots by placing twelve supposed asylum seekers in containers and filming them Big Brother-style. For Parsifal, Schlingensief reimagined Richard Wagner’s opera at the Bayreuth Festival, incorporating contemporary religious symbolism and a decomposing rabbit.

Christoph Schlingensief, The Stairlift to Heaven. 2007. Installation view in Christoph Schlingensief at MoMA PS1, 2014. © 2014 MoMA PS1; Photo Matthew Septimus

The audience became protesters in Rocky Dutschke ’68, following Schlingensief into the street as he re-created a famous shooting while declaring, “No Power for Anyone.” MoMA PS1 visitors can get involved themselves in several interactive installations. You can take a seat in a comfy living-room set to watch Schlingensief’s unique television show Talk 2000, which challenged the conventions of the genre. You most definitely should walk all around “The Animatograph,” a rotating multimedia house of bizarre horrors with surprises at every turn. And in “Stairlift to Heaven,” individuals strap themselves into a chairlift that takes them up past a projection of excerpts from Schlingensief’s 2007 film, The African Twin Towers, and to a private viewing booth. Schlingensief’s legacy continues with “Opera Village Africa,” an “artistic reservoir for the future” that is an actual village he and his wife, Aino Laberenz, built in Burkina Faso, complete with a hospital, a primary school, a theater group, a birthing clinic, and more, overseen by Laberenz since her husband’s death from lung cancer in 2010. “What kind of art is it that no longer has any access, no longer lets anyone in, and also doesn’t step out of itself?” Schlingensief asked. “Here the idea is to finance an art platform which is to serve as a basis for children and teenagers. So we can learn again how creativity comes about and develops. That’s the idea of the Opera Village.” It’s also the central focus of most of his work, the intersection of art and activism, producing public actions and interventions — with a wicked sense of humor and an anarchic distaste of authority — that can impact complacency and conventionality potentially on a global scale, even after his death. “Nothing is certain because I show it. Everything describes itself, overwrites and dissolves,” he once said. “This is not fatalism; this is my principle of pleasure.” There is much pleasure to be found in this dazzling display, especially for those who invest the time to soak in all the thrilling details.

LAST CHANCE TICKET ALERT: NEW YORK COMIC CON

Crowds keep getting bigger and bigger every year for New York Comic Con (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

NEW YORK COMIC CON / NEW YORK SUPER WEEK
Jacob K. Javits Convention Center
655 West 34th St. (11th Ave. between 34th & 39th Sts.)
Thursday, October 9, $35, 12 noon – 7:00
Con continues through October 12; New York Super Week runs October 3-12
888-605-6059
www.newyorkcomiccon.com
www.newyorksuperweek.com

New York Comic Con continues to get more and more popular every year, with bigger and bigger guests and longer and longer lines. Tickets for the ninth annual event, running October 9-12 at the Javits Center, are already sold out for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and the organizers haven’t even announced the full slate of activities for any of the days. So your only chance for getting in will be to go on Thursday, when there will be appearances by such spotlight guests as Giancarlo Esposito of Breaking Bad, Hollows series author Kim Harrison, and Kristian Nairn (Hodor) and Natalia Tena (Osha) of Game of Thrones and such featured guests as Jason David Frank of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Ben Templesmith, Bob McLeod, Dustin Nguyen, Jimmy Palmiotti, Peter David, Stuart Moore, and Terry Moore, and dozens of special guests as well. In conjunction with NYCC, New York Super Week runs October 3-12 at various locations throughout the city, consisting of related events, including a thirtieth anniversary screening of The Karate Kid at the 92nd St. Y with Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, and Martin Kove; metal monsters X Japan at Madison Square Garden; Neil Gaiman as the subject of host Ophira Eisenberg’s “Ask Me Another” live show at the Y; “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog Sing-Along and Whedonverse Party” at Union Hall; “The First (and Probably Last) Annual New York Feline Film & Video Festival for Humans” at Galapagos Art Space; a “Dr. Who Trivia and Costume Contest” at the Way Station; “Cure You or Kill You: 19th Century Medical Science and Quackery” at the Museum of Morbid Anatomy; and “Rave of Thrones,” a DJ set by Nairn with special guests Zedd Stark and Trance Rayder at B. B. King’s.

THE GREEK MONSTERS

The Minotaur hangs out with Medusa and Scylla in “Greek Monsters” show at Onassis Cultural Center (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Onassis Cultural Center NY
Olympic Tower Atrium
641 Fifth Ave. between 51st & 52nd Sts.
Daily through August 24, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.onassisusa.org
www.beetroot.gr

Who let the monsters out? While the downstairs Onassis Cultural Center is undergoing renovation, the Olympic Tower Atrium in Midtown has been overrun with mythical creatures of all shapes and sizes. But there’s nothing scary about these adorably cute black, orange, and white symbolic figures that hail from Ancient Greek literature and evoke Athenian vase painting of the fourth to sixth centuries BCE. Created by the award-winning design firm Beetroot as a response to the European demonization of Greece because of its severe financial problems, the exhibition “The Greek Monsters” has been traveling for several years, including stops at the Alte Münze Berlin and the Benaki Museum in Athens. Consisting of big and small sculptures, bas-reliefs, and a stenciled mural, the show will remain on view in the atrium through Sunday, August 24. Polyphemus, the Cyclops who is the son of Poseidon and Thoosa, stands guard over the revolving doors of the south entrance, attended by three of his sheep, while man-eating Stymphalian birds, who battled Hercules, fly over the north doors. The giant Minotaur, one hand covering his right eye, the other on his left knee, seemingly hides in a corner (in front of Medusa and Scylla), not looking nearly as menacing as he probably did when he fought Theseus. Among the other “misunderstood monsters,” purposely humanized by Beetroot, are Cerberus, Pan, Chimera, and the Sirens. Poems and verse accompany many of the figures; the Lernaean Hydra is described with the couplet “Her breath reeked of fire and poison / But her middle head was immortal,” while the Cyclops declares, “I have one eye / Although it looks at everything / It captures only what I wish.” And as a whole, they proclaim in unison, “We are the monsters in your head / We are your monsters.” And we wouldn’t be the same without them.