this week in art

TONY MATELLI: SLEEPWALKER

Tony Matelli’s “Sleepwalker” sculpture at Wellesley became a crime scene when vandals struck

Marlborough Chelsea
545 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through August 8, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-463-8634
www.marlboroughchelsea.com
www.wellesley.edu/davismuseum

Several weekends ago, after coming home from a jaunt through Chelsea galleries, I showed my wife photos I’d taken of some of my favorite works. Upon seeing one of them, she immediately said, “I think that’s the same piece that caused such a furor at Wellesley.” Indeed, I had shown her a photo of Tony Matelli’s “Sleepwalker,” a life-size painted bronze sculpture of a zombielike middle-aged white man in his underwear, eyes closed, arms outstretched, standing on the outdoor deck of the Marlborough Gallery on West 21st St. Being a sucker for lifelike sculpture — I can spend hours checking out works by Ron Mueck, Paul McCarthy, Mark Jenkins, and others — I got a huge kick out of the piece, which I found intriguing and humorous, not threatening at all, perhaps even symbolic of an America that often seems to be half asleep. However, context is everything. My wife quickly pointed out that a significant number of Wellesley students were aghast when a fiberglass cast of “Sleepwalker” had been placed outside, on campus, in February as part of the “Tony Matelli: New Gravity” exhibition at the university’s outstanding Davis Museum, the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based sculptor’s first solo museum show. Coincidentally, we were going to Wellesley the following weekend, where we looked forward to seeing the sculpture for ourselves in an environment very different from the Chelsea deck, but sadly it had had to be removed in May, ahead of the July 20 conclusion of the exhibition, for a very surprising reason.

Shortly after the unveiling of “Sleepwalker,” which was placed outside in a wooded area near the Davis, where it could be seen from a window, hundreds of Wellesley students signed an online petition calling for the work to be moved inside the museum. The petition read in part, “Within just a few hours of its outdoor installation, the highly lifelike sculpture . . . has become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for some members of our campus community. While it may appear humorous, or thought provoking to some, the ‘Sleepwalker’ has already become a source of undue stress for a number of Wellesley College students, the majority of whom live, study, and work on campus.” Davis Museum director Lisa Fischman defended the installation, explaining, “Art has an extraordinary power to evoke personal response, and to elicit the unexpected. . . . Art provokes dialogue, and discourse is the core of education. In that spirit, I am enormously glad to have your response.”

“Sleepwalker” will stay up at the Marlborough Chelsea through August 8 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Matelli himself chimed in on the debate, telling CBS Boston, “I think that these people are misconstruing this work. I think they’re seeing something in this work that isn’t there. But who am I to say how people should react to this?” He added, “I don’t think they’ll take the statue down. But if they make that decision, that’s fine with me.” I’m not sure it’s fine with Matelli why it ultimately had to be taken down; first, a student (since suspended) spray-painted the statue yellow, her class color (she did the same to Matelli’s nearby small dog sculpture), then a still-unidentified perp broke the five-foot, nine-inch-high “Sleepwalker” at its ankles, apparently in an effort to kick it down. I was shocked when I saw photos of the damage, which totaled the work, leaving it irreparable; was this really possible at such a liberal, free-thinking college as Wellesley? Is this type of censorship any different from Attorney General John Ashcroft and deputy director of public affairs Monica Goodling using a blue curtain to cover up the partially nude “Spirit of Justice” Art Deco aluminum statue in the Great Hall of the Justice Department in 2002? Or when performance artist Alexander Brener spray-painted a green dollar sign over Kazimir Malevich’s “Suprematisme 1920-1927” in 1997 in protest of the commercialism of art? (“I view my act as a dialogue with Malevich,” Brener said in court.) During the Wellesley reunion weekend, I spoke with numerous current and former students of all ages, and each had an individual reaction to the installation of “Sleepwalker” itself and to the eventual damage. Some felt that art is art and people should “get a life” and not interpret everything so personally. Others believed it was a gross error on the part of the museum and the school to put a statue so suggestive to survivors or victims of sexual abuse outside, near a wooded area, at a woman’s college. Fortunately, no one was in favor of the vandalism. Yes, it’s encouraging that a work of art elicited such strong personal feelings on many fronts, but have we become a bunch of whimpering souls, not able to look the other way when it comes to an inanimate sculpture that means different things to different people? If something is displeasing to some but not to others, must it be wished away into the cornfield, hidden where no one will ever see it? Or is it further evidence that the gender divide is still much larger than we imagined, even at such an illustrious college as Wellesley? You can check out Matelli’s “Sleepwalker” at the Marlborough through August 8, but, of course, you’ll never be able to see the Wellesley version.

MIKA ROTTENBERG: BOWLS BALLS SOULS HOLES

Mika Rottenberg’s latest multimedia architectural installation links bingo with global climate change (photo courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery)

Mika Rottenberg’s “Bowls Balls Souls Holes” is another unique, fascinating, fun, and complex installation (photo courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery)

Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday — Saturday through June 14, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-627-6000
www.andrearosengallery.com

BedStuy-based multimedia artist Mika Rottenberg explores chance, luck, environmental concerns, and mass production on a global scale in her latest architectural video installation, “Bowls Balls Souls Holes.” Born in Argentina and raised in Israel before moving to Brooklyn, Rottenberg creates immersive pieces that combine video and sculpture focusing on wildly imaginative Rube Goldberg-like experimental contraptions that bring together radically diverse labor-intensive elements, along with a cast of men and mostly women who can do extreme things with their bodies. In “Tropical Breeze,” the characters (including professional body builder Heather D. Foster) made an actual product, Lemon-Scented Tropical Breeze Moist Tissue Papers; in “Mary’s Cherries,” various women (including fetish wrestler Rock Rose) perform household-like tasks that use red fingernails to make maraschino cherries. In “Cheese,” which was part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, old-fashioned Rapunzel-esque farm girls use their very long hair to help make the title product. In one of Rottenberg’s crazier setups, “Squeeze” involves butt misting, wall tongues, and the stomping of iceberg lettuce. And in 2011, Rottenberg teamed up with Jon Kessler for the Performa 11 commission “Seven,” a unique chakras juicer that linked a New York lab with an African community.

Mika Rottenberg’s latest multimedia architectural installation links bingo with global climate change (photo courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery)

In the twenty-eight-minute “Bowls Balls Souls Holes,” Rottenberg links a Harlem bingo parlor with polar icebergs and a large sleeping woman who dreams of the moon and wakes up every time a drop of water falls from above and sizzles on her bare shoulder. Occasionally, the bingo caller releases a colored clothespin down a hole, sending it on a journey through multiple trapdoors until it is caught way below by a man (Guinness Book of World Records champion face stretcher Garry “Stretch” Turner, who has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome) who attaches it to his face. The idea of things coming full circle is central to the work, which features many kinds of round objects while also evoking a highly unusual assembly line. As with her other pieces, “Bowls Balls Souls Holes” is filled with some hysterical bits, in addition to some out-and-out confusing ones, which is always part of the fun. (Don’t try too hard to figure everything out.) The video is supplemented with related sculptures, from the bingo board and jars with boiling water to a trio of swirling ponytails and an air conditioner dripping water onto a hot frying pan.

MUSEUM MILE FESTIVAL 2014

Uptown institutions stay open late and open their doors for free for Museum Mile Festival

Multiple locations on Fifth Ave. between 82nd & 105th Sts.
Tuesday, June 10, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Admission: free
www.museummilefestival.org

There’s really only one main problem with the annual Museum Mile Festival: It’s too short. On Tuesday, June 10, from 6:00 to 9:00, nine uptown art and cultural institutions will open their doors for free and fill Fifth Ave. between 82nd & 104th Sts. with family-friendly activities for the thirty-fifth year. There will be live outdoor performances by the Asphalt Orchestra, Sammie & Trudie’s Imagination Playhouse, Silly Billy the Very Funny Clown, Avenida B, Josh the Juggler, Bill Ferguson, and Magic Brian, in addition to face painting, art workshops, chalk drawing, the Museum of Motherhood, and more. The participating museums (with at least one of their current shows listed here) are El Museo del Barrio (“Presencia: Works from El Museo’s Permanent Collection”), the Museum of the City of New York (“Palaces for the People: Guastavino and the Art of Structural Tile,” “In a World of Their Own: Coney Island Photographs by Aaron Rose”), the Jewish Museum (“Other Primary Structures,” “Mel Bochner: Strong Language”), the National Academy (“The Annual 2014: Redefining Tradition”), the Guggenheim (“Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe”), the Neue Galerie (“Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937”), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“Charles James: Beyond Fashion,” “Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy”), along with the Africa Center / Museum (which is building a new home) and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (which is undergoing a major renovation). Don’t try to do too much, because it can get rather crowded; just pick one or two exhibitions in one or two museums and enjoy.

FIRST SATURDAYS: BROOKLYN LGBTQ PRIDE

Judy Chicago, “Birth Hood,” sprayed automotive lacquer on car hood, 1965/2011 (Courtesy of the artist. © Judy Chicago. Photo © Donald Woodman)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, June 7, free, 5:00 – 11:00 ($10 discounted admission to “Ai Weiwei: According to What?”)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum is currently home to four temporary exhibitions that deal with different types of activism, which together fit in extremely well with its June free First Saturdays program, a tribute to “Brooklyn LGBTQ Pride.” Now on view are “Ai Weiwei: According to What?,” a stirring retrospective that examines social, historical, and political elements of art and freedom in China ($10 discounted admission on Saturday after 5:00); the expansive “Swoon: Submerged Motherlands,” which incorporates feminist ideals into such environmental issues as climate change and waste; the gripping “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties,” which looks at the depiction of the civil rights movement in painting, sculpture, and photography; and the colorful “Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Works, 1963–74,” which follows Judy Chicago before she became a feminist icon. On June 7, there will be live performances by the Shondes, Rivers of Honey, and AVAN LAVA, a movement workshop led by Benny Ninja Training Academy in memory of voguing master Willi Ninja, an excerpt from The Firebird, a Ballez by Katy Pyle and the Ballez, the drag-oriented BUSHWIG festival hosted by Horrorchata and Macy Rodman, a talk by multidisciplinary artist and activist Alexander Kargaltsev on being a gay Russian artist, a hands-on art workshop in which participants will create a dancing figure in clay, a discussion with members of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and pop-up gallery talks. (Some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center.)

SWOON: SUBMERGED MOTHERLANDS

Swoon’s “Submerged Motherlands” fills the Brooklyn Museum’s fifth-floor rotunda (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Brooklyn Museum
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, fifth floor
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Wednesday – Sunday through August 24, $12 ($15 including “Ai Weiwei: According to What?”)
Art Off the Wall: Swoon’s “Submerged Collaborations,” June 12, $15, 6:30
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
www.facebook.com/SwoonStudio

“Is this insane? Is this dangerous? Should I not do this?” Brooklyn-based artist Caledonia Dance Curry, aka Swoon, asked an engineer when she first began putting together “Submerged Motherlands,” her enormous, environmentally conscious installation at the Brooklyn Museum. Filling much of the institution’s fifth-floor rotunda, the site-specific exhibit features two rickety-looking handmade junk rafts, Alice and Maria, that Swoon constructed using found materials, then sailed in New York waters for “Miss Rockaway Armada” and along Venice’s Grand Canal as part of her “Swimming Cities of Serenissima” project. At the center is a tall tree, made of dense layers of dyed fabric and elaborately detailed white cut-paper leaves, that rises to the rotunda’s seventy-two-foot-high circular skylight. The walls of the room suggest water and submersion, splattered with swoops of blue and green paint applied using fire extinguishers, interacting with light and shadow. “Submerged Motherlands” references climate change, Hurricane Sandy, and Doggerland, the Ice Age-era landmass that connected Great Britain and Europe and was destroyed by a tsunami; it also has conceptual ties to the Konbit Shelter sustainable building project in Haiti begun by Swoon and other artists shortly after the 2010 earthquake, as well as Swoon and art collective Transformazium’s Braddock Tiles community-based microfactory being built in an abandoned church in Pennsylvania. “Submerged Motherlands” also includes a healing gazebo decorated with corrugated cardboard honeycombs and wasp nests, and large-scale prints and drawings that recall Swoon’s wheatpastes, which dotted the streets of the city in recent years; here she depicts mothers and children and taliswomen, from a homeless Buddha figure to a friend breast-feeding to depictions of Swoon’s mother’s life cycle; her drug- and alcohol-addicted mother passed away from lung cancer last year.

There’s a distinctly feminist quality to Swoon’s site-specific installation at the Brooklyn Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Is it insane and dangerous? Probably, but we’re all the better for Swoon’s having gone ahead with “Submerged Motherlands,” an intimate, compelling, and welcoming exploration of life, death, and rebirth. The exhibition continues through August 24; on June 12, Swoon will participate in “Art Off the Wall: Swoon’s ‘Submerged Collaborations,’” which will include a screening of Flood Tide, Todd Chandler’s fictional film about the “Swimming Cities” project; a talk with Swoon and some of her collaborators; and a silent procession from the auditorium to the installation for a live performance by the Submerged Motherlands Orchestra (consisting of Mirah, Marshall LaCount, Chandler, the band North America, and violinist Chloe Swantner).

OUT OF HAND: MATERIALIZING THE POSTDIGITAL

Richard Dupont’s digitally created “Going Around by Passing Through” greets people outside the Museum of Arts & Design as part of “Out of Hand” exhibition (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Broadway
Through June 1, $12-$18 (pay-what-you-wish Thursday & Fridays, 6:00 – 9:00)
800-838-3006
www.madmuseum.org

Exhibitions at the Museum of Arts & Design often feature handcrafted objects, often with a folkie appeal. But “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital” changes that dramatically, gathering more than 120 works from the past nine years that have been created using cutting-edge digital technology. Divided thematically into “Modeling Nature,” “New Geometries,” “Rebooting Revivals,” “Remixing the Figure,” “Pattern as Structure,” and “Processuality,” the pieces range from chairs, tables, and lamps to clothing, jewelry, and abstract and figurative sculptures. Artists have employed such techniques as 3D printing, digital scanning, and manipulated computer animation to create the objects, and nearby videos show how some of the works have been made, while the labels list the exact methods used. Barry X Ball reimagines Giusto Le Court’s seventeenth-century “La Invidia” in the golden honeycomb calcite sculpture “Envy.” Michael Schmidt’s “Fully Articulated 3D-Printed Dress” is made of laser-cut Strathmore. HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts offers a new form of transportation with “Rapid Racer,” which was made in one solid piece using 3D printing. Nick Hornby references art history and uses algorithms in making the white marble resin composite “I Never Wanted to Weigh More Heavily on a Man than a Bird (Coco Chanel).” Marc Newson used mathematical formulas to create the fractal “Doudou Necklace.” The exhibition also features works by Frank Stella, Chuck Close, Anish Kapoor, Ron Arad, Wim Delvoye, Maya Lin, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Roxy Paine, Zaha Hadid, and Richard Dupont, who uses himself as a virtual model in an untitled, heavily distorted full-body sculpture on the fifth floor and the large-scale head, “Going Around by Passing Through,” that resides outside the museum. “There’s this deep resistance to the idea that a digitally sourced thing can be an art piece,” Dupont says in a promotional video for the exhibition that explores his process. “Out of Hand” should significantly reduce such resistance in the future. (The show ends June 1, but on June 14, Andrew Payne of LIFT Architects will lead an afternoon workshop showing how to use 3D printing in design and programming.)

TONY OURSLER: VOX VERNACULAR

PERFORMANCE ARTS SERIES
New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwartzman Building
South Court Auditorium
Fifth Ave. at 42nd St.
Wednesday, May 21, free, 6:00
www.nypl.org
www.yalepress.yale.edu

For more than thirty years, multimedia installation artist Tony Oursler has been creating eye-catching works that examine unique aspects of the human experience, often involving videos projected onto miniature environments and larger-scale sculptures. The new book Tony Oursler / Vox Vernacular (Yale, February 25, $65) takes a look at a different side of the native New Yorker, focusing on the language and text that accompanies his pieces — for example, “L7-L5,” “Spillchamber,” “Lock 2,4,6” and “The Influence Machine” — which often play out like tiny dramas. On May 21, a group of his friends will gather at the South Court Auditorium at the New York Public Library for a performance and book launch, with Tony Conrad, Constance DeJong, Jim Fletcher, Joe Gibbons, Kim Gordon, Josie Keefe, Tracy Leipold, Brandon Olson, Jason Scott, and Holly Stanton presenting transcripts from Tony Oursler / Vox Vernacular, bringing these works, dating from 1977 to 2013, to life in a new, poetic way, accompanied by video clips. After the event, Oursler will sign copies of the book, which also includes two hundred illustrations (190 in color) and contributions by Laurent Busine and Denis Gielen of the Musée des Arts Contemporains au Grand-Hornu and Billy Rubin. This one-night-only free event should offer a fascinating perspective on one of the art world’s most consistently inventive and entertaining creators.