this week in art

CHAKAIA BOOKER: THE SENTINELS

Chakaia Booker’s “Take Out” offers a new perspective in the Garment District (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Broadway Public Art
Garment District Plazas
Broadway between 36th & 41st Sts.
Through mid-November 2014, free
www.garmentdistrictnyc.com
the sentinels slideshow

We feel a special affinity for Chakaia Booker’s new installation “The Sentinels,” five works that line Broadway’s Garment District Plazas just north of Macy’s. When we were growing up, our family ran a tire and auto repair business on Utica Ave. in Brooklyn, so the smell and touch of vulcanized rubber is in our veins. The project, sponsored by the Garment District Alliance and the New York City Department of Transportation, consists of five pieces that the Newark-born, New York City-based Booker, working with fabricator Alston Van Putten Jr., fashioned by first employing design software to come up with a scale model, then using stainless-steel tubing, recycled rubber tires, and power tools to put it all together. Situated along the pedestrian plazas on Broadway, the pieces evoke industrialism, labor, and environmentalism while honoring the African American experience; it also serves as a reminder that the area was formerly open to cars, but the only rubber currently allowed on that part of the street is Booker’s art.

Chakaia Booker’s “The Sentinels” is quite a sight to see on Broadway pedestrian plaza (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The five works — “Shapeshifter,” “Gridlock,” “Take Out,” “One Way,” and the brand-new “LBD Duty Free,” created for this installation — offer a welcoming presence that invites passersby to investigate their intricate details (though no touching is allowed), as Booker and Van Putten Jr. were able to turn the tires into all kinds of twisting shapes that recall sewing and patchwork quilts as well as a kind of unique playground (but no climbing allowed). Particularly effective is 2008’s “Take Out,” which recalls a wonderfully framed painting looking up or down bustling Broadway as well as a mirror that makes it feel like you’re looking at yourself. “Placing these sculptures in the Garment District suggests a cross pollination, and cultivation of current, past, and future behavior,” Booker explained in a statement. “I hope this installation helps create a sense of community progression, symbolizing how this neighborhood has grown into the vibrant, creative, and artistic center it is today.” The black and gray color palette is also quite a contrast to the artist herself, who wears colorful head wraps and dresses. When we were at the Domino Sugar Factory last month seeing Kara Walker’s spectacular Creative Time project “A Subtlety,” we suddenly found ourselves standing next to Booker, whose dazzling outfit provided a stark contrast to Walker’s central white “mammy” sculpture. (You can see a photo of Booker at the show here.) Booker, whose “Manipulating Fractions” was part of the recent “Fact of the Matter” off-site Socrates Sculpture Park exhibition at the 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, will be at the actual Socrates park in Queens from July 28 to August 1 leading the children’s outdoor art workshop “Build a Meal,” in which participants will sculpt a balanced meal using clay and other materials; preregistration is highly advised at 718-956-1819.

CHUCK JONES MATINEES: DUCK AMUCK AND OTHER CARTOONS

Bugs and Daffy go at it in RABBIT SEASONING, part of special Museum of the Moving Image tribute to Chuck Jones this weekend

Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, July 19, 1:00 & 2:30, and Sunday, July 20, 1:00, free with museum admission
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Some people learn about life from their parents, others from books and movies, and still others from religion. We discovered everything we ever wanted to know about the world from one primary source: Warner Bros. cartoons. And the mastermind behind it all was one of our heroes, Charles Martin “Chuck” Jones, who was a director at Warner Bros. from 1939 to 1962. The Spokane-born Jones ended up making more than 250 films, earning eight Academy Award nominations and three wins as well as an honorary Oscar in 1996, presented to him by Robin Williams. “Like my contemporaries Wile E. Coyote and Daffy Duck, I have little time and no inclination to find fault or failure in others, for I have too many abundant and stimulating faults and failures of my very own,” Jones explained in his 1999 memoir, Chuck Amuck, offering words to live by that continued, “Recognition of my own ineptitudes has always led me to better understanding of my trade. Jumblings, mistakes, and errors in judgment are the essence, the very fabric of humor.” There will be plenty of humor, and no noticeable faults or failures, this Saturday and Sunday at 1:00 when the Museum of the Moving Image presents “Chuck Jones Matinees: Duck Amuck and Other Cartoons,” a program of eight of Jones’s best animated works, being shown in conjunction with the exhibition “What’s Up, Doc? The Animation Art of Chuck Jones,” which opens July 19 and runs through January 19. And what a lineup of seven-minute classics they are. In Rabbit Seasoning, Bugs and Daffy confuse Elmer Fudd as to which of them it’s legal to hunt. In Feed the Kitty, big, tough dog Marc Anthony can’t help but be charmed by a cute but devious little kitten. Bugs ends up in the ring taking on an angry toro in Bully for Bugs, in which he famously declares, “I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque” and “Of course you realize this means war.” Someone is having an awful lot of fun drawing and erasing Daffy in the masterpiece Duck Amuck as Jones gets right to the heart of his creative process. Bugs meets Marvin the Martian and the Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator in Hare-Way to the Stars. The Road Runner keeps getting the best of Wile E. Coyote in Zoom and Bored. Michigan J. Frog belts out, “Hello, my baby / Hello, my honey / Hello, my ragtime gal,” but only at certain times, in One Froggy Evening. And Bugs and Elmer do Wagner in What’s Opera, Doc?, one of the greatest short films ever made, wonderfully displaying Jones’s take on high and low culture, his sly humor, and his contagious exuberance.

RYAN McNAMARA: MISTY MALARKY YING YANG

Ryan McNamara’s latest performance piece will explore Jimmy Carter’s Malaise Speech (photo courtesy Ryan McNamara)

The High Line, beginning at Gansevoort St.
July 15-17, free, 7:30
www.art.thehighline.org
www.ryanmcnamara.com

On July 15, 1979, President James Earl Carter gave what became known as his Malaise Speech, in which he shook a finger at the American people and said, “I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. I do not mean our political and civil liberties. . . . The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” Arizona-born, Brooklyn-based performance artist Ryan McNamara is using the thirty-fifth anniversary of Carter’s famous speech about energy overconsumption as the starting point of his latest immersive project, “Misty Malarky Ying Yang.” On July 15, 16, and 17, McNamara will begin a choreographed procession on the High Line, beginning at 7:30 pm at the south end at Gansevoort St. and heading north to West Thirtieth St., joined by other performers along the way. “President Carter’s speech is still relevant today, and ‘Misty Malarky Ying Yang’ will provide a stark contrast to the tone of the speech,” explained High Line Art director and curator Cecilia Alemani in a statement. Admission is free, and no advance RSVP is required. The questions Carter asked thirty-five years ago — including “Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don’t like it, and neither do I. What can we do?” — are still clearly relevant today. It should be fascinating to see how McNamara translates that on the High Line this week.

WARM UP 2014 / HY-FI BY THE LIVING

Expect major crowds at weekly MoMA PS1 Warm Up dance party (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Warm Up: Saturdays through September 6, $18-$20, 3:00 – 9:00
“Hy-Fi”: Thursday – Monday through September 7, suggested admission $10 (free with paid MoMA ticket within fourteen days except during Warm Up), 12 noon – 6:00
718-784-2084
www.momaps1.org/warmup
www.momaps1.org/yap

The summer’s sweatiest dance party takes places every Saturday in Long Island City, as thousands of people gather in MoMA PS1’s courtyard for the weekly Warm Up celebration. Now in its seventeenth year, Warm Up features an international roster of prominent DJs and live performances on Saturdays from 3:00 to 9:00 on the dance floor located between the winning Young Architects Program urban design installation in the courtyard and the entrance to the old school building that became an arena for cutting-edge art back in 1971. During Warm Up, M. Wells Dinette serves alcoholic drinks indoors and hot food and cold drinks outdoors, including fried chicken, grilled mackerel yellow bean salad, a grilled veal heart hero, and maple water. On Saturdays, the exhibitions on the second and third floors close at 3:00, but the first-floor and basement shows (“Maria Lassnig,” “Korakrit Arunanondchai,” “Gavin Kenyon: Reliquary Void”) continue through 6:00. This week boasts one of the best lineups of the summer, with DJ sets by Mister Saturday Night (Eamon Harkin and Justin Carter) and Auntie Flo and live music by Cibo Matto, Archie Pelago, and Gabriel Garzón Montano; July 19 brings together Robert Hood, Objekt, Rrose, Vatican Shadow, Conatiner, and Young Male, while July 26 sees Cashmere Cat, Total Freedom, GoldLink, UNiiQU3, and Suicideyear take the stage at the top of the steps, joined by a rotating series of installations by CONFETTISYSTEM, Nightwood, the Principals, and others. Tickets are available for $18 in advance and $20 at the door; be prepared for some long lines the later you go. It’s incredibly easy to get to MoMA PS1, which is the third stop on the 7 from Grand Central. Once you get off the train, just follow the thumping music, which reverberates throughout the neighborhood.

Environmentally friendly organic towers rise in MoMA PS1 courtyard (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Next to the Warm Up area, in the center of the courtyard, stands “Hy-Fi,” the winner of MoMA PS1’s fifteenth annual Young Architects Program. Created by New York-based firm the Living headed by 2013 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow David Benjamin, the three conjoined towers were made using nearly 100% fully compostable and environmentally sustainable biological technologies in collaboration with Ecovative, 3M, Advanced Metal Coatings, Shabd Simon-Alexander and Audrey Louisere, Build It Green Compost, Brooklyn Digital Foundry, Columbia University (where Benjamin is an assistant professor in the Living Architecture Lab), and others. “Hy-Fi” contains approximately ten thousand remarkably light handmade bricks consisting of such organic waste materials as cornstalks and mushroom mycelium, held together by mortar. The shiny, glittering bricks at the top are actually the molds in which the rest of the bricks were grown. (There are also several vertical wooden beams that hold up the entryways, primarily as protection against strong winds and storms, which came in handy last week.) The small gaps between some of the bricks are strictly artistic, resulting in streams of sunlight and shadows. Construction required no energy (except for human) and almost zero carbon emissions; when the installation, which also provides much-needed cooling, is brought down after September 7, the entire structure will be recycled. Unfortunately, because of the size and unpredictability of the crowds during Warm Up, on Saturdays visitors are not allowed inside the twisting structure, which was influenced by the designs of Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí, but you can take a break in the small pool and sit in other circular areas while drinking wine, beer, and other cocktails. The Living, which was founded in 2006 with “the mission of creating the architecture of the future,” won the YAP commission this year over Collective-LOK, LAMAS, Pita + Bloom, and Fake Industries Architectural Agonism; you can currently see an exhibition on all five submissions, as well as finalists from similar competitions in Italy, Chile, and South Korea, at MoMA’s midtown location.

MOVIE MEDICINE — A FILM SERIES ABOUT THE HEALING FACTOR IN CINEMA: NIGHT NURSE

Joan Blondell and Barbara Stanwyck play daring nurses in William A. Wellman’s pre-code doozy

CABARET CINEMA: NIGHT NURSE (William A. Wellman, 1931)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, July 11, free with $10 K2 minimum, 9:30
212-620-5000
www.rubinmuseum.org/cabaretcinema

It’s hard to believe that the Hays Code, a set of standards initiated by two religious figures and named after chief censor Will H. Hays, was enacted and enforced, to varying degrees, in Hollywood from 1934 all the way up to 1968. One of the best examples of the racier pre-code films is William A. Wellman’s rarely screened 1931 doozy, Night Nurse. The first of five collaborations between Wellman and Barbara Stanwyck, Night Nurse, based on Dora Macy’s 1930 novel, stars Stanwyck as Lora Hart, a young woman determined to become a nurse. She gets a probationary job at a city hospital, where she is taken under the wing of Maloney (Joan Blondell), who likes to break the rules and torture the head nurse, the stodgy Miss Dillon (Vera Lewis). Shortly after treating a bootlegger (Ben Lyon) for a gunshot wound and agreeing not to report it to the police, Lora starts working for a shady doctor (Ralf Harolde) taking care of two sick children (Marcia Mae Jones and Betty Jane Graham) whose proudly dipsomaniac mother (Charlotte Merriam) is being manipulated by her suspicious chauffeur (Clark Gable). Wellman pulls out all the stops, hinting at or simply depicting murder, child endangerment, rape, alcoholism, lesbianism, physical brutality, and Blondell and Stanwyck regularly frolicking around in their undergarments. It’s as if Wellman is thumbing his nose directly at the upcoming Hays Code in scene after scene. Although far from his best film — Wellman directed such classics as Wings (1927), The Public Enemy (1931), A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Beau Geste (1939), and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) — Night Nurse is an overly melodramatic, dated, but entertaining little tale with quite a surprise ending. Night Nurse is screening July 11 as part of the Rubin Museum’s Cabaret Cinema series “Movie Medicine: A Film Series about the Healing Factor in Cinema,” being held in conjunction with the “Bodies in Balance: The Art of Tibetan Medicine” exhibition, and will be introduced by Edna Igoe of the New York Professional Nurses Union. The series continues July 18 with Woody Allen’s Sleeper, introduced by psychotherapist Maggie Robbins, July 25 with Arthur Hiller’s The Hospital, introduced by Dr. Kenneth Perrine, and August 1 with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, introduced by award-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker.

CONTEMPORARY POETRY TOO

Andrew Edlin Gallery
134 Tenth Avenue between 18th & 19th Sts.
Thursday, July 10, free, 6:00
212-206-9723
www.edlingallery.com

On May 10, Sam Gordon curated a marathon poetry reading as part of the NADA New York art fair, presented with BOMB magazine. Gordon, NADA, and BOMB have joined forces again with the follow-up, “Contemporary Poetry Too,” taking place July 10 at Andrew Edlin Gallery in Chelsea. Held in conjunction with the group exhibition “Purple States,” which explores the differences between insiders and outsiders and the merging of blue and red states, and “Café Dancer Pop-Up,” in which Jessie Gold and Elizabeth Hart have turned Edlin’s reception area into a “Gone Fishin’” party space, “Contemporary Poetry Too” will feature approximately eighteen poets reading their works in combination with performance and video art; the participants include Alina Gregorian, Angelo Nikolopoulos, Bianca Stone, Emily Skillings, Jameson Fitzpatrick, Juliana Huxtable, not_I (Ana Boziĉević & Sophia Le Fraga), and Sampson Starkweather. DJs S&M (Shannon Michael Cane and Matt Conners) will provide the music.

DANH VO: WE THE PEOPLE

Danh Vo’s “We the People” offers visitors an alternate view of Lady Liberty’s famed drapery in Brooklyn Bridge Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

City Hall Park and City Hall
Brooklyn Bridge Park, Granite Terrace, Pier 3 Uplands
Through December 5, free
www.publicartfund.org
we the people slideshow

Danish installation artist Danh Vo, who was born in Vietnam in 1975 and lives and works in Berlin and Mexico City, deconstructs a treasured American landmark and international symbol of freedom in unique ways in “We the People.” The Public Art Fund project is named after the first three words of the preamble of the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified on June 25, 1788. Using the same technique nineteenth-century French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi employed to construct the 3/32-inch-thick copper drapery that envelops eighty percent of the 305-foot-high, 225-ton “Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World,” Vo, winner of the 2012 Hugo Boss Prize, re-created Lady Liberty’s clothing at scale in Shanghai, dividing it into approximately 250 pieces. Even the fresh copper color is faithful to the original, as the Grand Dame’s well-known green hue is the result of 128 years of weathering in New York Harbor.

Sections of Danh Vo’s “We the People” are scattered throughout City Hall Park and inside City Hall itself (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

A true international affair, “We the People” has been seen in more than fifteen countries over the last few years and now has finally come to America, with select sections on view in City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park through December 5. The latter installation features three large-scale parts taken from thirteen individual pieces from the sleeve of the Lady on a Pedestal’s torch-raising right arm; as a not-coincidental bonus, the actual statue is visible in the distance. The pieces on display in City Hall Park include various segments on the grass and hidden among the trees; the broken chains and ear are inside City Hall itself, and a flower garden at the southern end further evokes the late-19th-century period in which the statue was built, referencing colonialism and missionary work. Vo has said that the full sculpture will likely never be put together to form a complete whole, metaphorically leaving Liberty naked and fragmented, representing the continuing struggle for freedom throughout the world and the inability of so many nations to unite in peace. The work also has deep personal meaning to Vo, whose family escaped from Vietnam in the late 1970s on a boat his father made, floating toward eventual freedom in Denmark just as so many people still take ships to Ellis Island, passing by the Statue of Liberty on their way to a new life in America.