this week in art

THOMAS STRUTH

Thomas Struth’s 2013 chromogenic print “Mountain, Anaheim, California” gives a different perspective on Disneyland (photo courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery)

Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Extended through February 28, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-977-7160
www.mariangoodman.com

The men and women who built the Walt Disney theme parks that the public has been flocking to for more than fifty years were known as imagineers. In his latest show at Marian Goodman, Düsseldorf-based German photographer Thomas Struth examines the intersection of human invention, engineering, and what he specifically calls “constructed imagination” by bringing together large-scale pictures he took while visiting Disneyland in California as well as several unique urban landscapes and other sites around the world that are invested in technological innovation. Each work stands on its own in a lush visual splendor, inviting the viewer into their beauty and mystery, even though some depict a fake world created for family vacations while others reveal cutting-edge technology that could change the future of humanity. In previous series, Struth has shown people looking at paintings or gathering in tourist spots, but there clearly are no men, women, or children to be seen in these 2009–13 photographs, even though the viewer is nonetheless compelled to search the chromogenic and inkjet prints for signs of life. Instead, Struth includes a robot in “Golems Playground, Georgia Tech, Georgia,” and there might or might not be a body under the blue sheet in “Figure, Charité, Berlin.”

Thomas Struth, “Measuring, Helmholitz-Zentrum, Berlin,” chromogenic print, 2012 (photo courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery)

“The surprise of what we have collectively created becomes more evident when one takes a more general perspective,” Struth points out in the exhibition press release. “Showing real experimental physics, a twenty-first-century urban landscape, or a surgical robot in action reinforces the question: How should we judge what we see? More intimately, let us consider the vulnerability of the human body and soul under these circumstances. It’s all creation; it’s made. It’s not a given.” Once again, Struth has challenged us to reevaluate our expectations while also asking us to reexamine how we look at and experience both fantasy and reality, art and artifice.

BURGER JOINT 5! NEW YORK: THE CIRCUS

“Under the Big Top — Above the Clouds” looks at New York City as a real-life circus (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

UNDER THE BIG TOP — ABOVE THE CLOUDS
Burger Joint
33 West Eighth St. at McDougal St.
Opened Wednesday, February 19
Admission: free
212-432-1400
www.facebook.com/events
www.burgerjointny.com

Amid yet more animal rights controversies, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus comes to town today, kicking off an eight-day stand at the Barclays Center, followed by stops at the Nassau Coliseum, the Prudential Center in Newark, and the IZOD Center in East Rutherford. (That’s right, there will be no circus at the Garden this winter — and no elephants marching through the Midtown Tunnel — just the Knicks and the Rangers at the World’s Most Famous Arena.) In addition, in a sad side story, it seems that there is a clown shortage, as the next generation doesn’t seem interested in putting on the crazy makeup and floppy shoes. Another, far more important, controversy involves just who makes the best burger around (not to mention the continuing case against red meat in general).

Well, all that comes to a head, in a way, at Burger Joint 5, the fifth art show organized by New York-based painter and Philadelphia Flyers fan Ari Lankin and Cole B at the West Village outpost of the popular Le Parker Meridien burger restaurant. “Under the Big Top — Above the Clouds” consists of more than forty works by a dozen artists interpreting New York as a real-life circus all its own; the pieces are spread throughout the heavily wood-designed eatery, where a burger, fries, and beer will set you back about sixteen bucks. The art on display is relatively inexpensive as well, with works going from $40 and $50 to $2,500 but mostly in the $100 to $300 range. Some of the artists stick to the theme more than others — yes, you should know that there are indeed some paintings with clowns, courtesy of Cole B. Paul Zepeda uses the subway as a major inspiration in his small works on canvas, while Flye Lyfe riffs on the New York sports teams in a series of playful hats and hoodies (the New York Bangers, the Brooklyn Cassettes). Lankin’s “Circus” features six framed one- or two-dollar bills that spell out the title, appropriately placed on a gold brick wall. While the quality of the works differs wildly, two of the standouts are street artist Joseph Meloy (Vandal Expressionism), whose oil and spray paint “Figurative Apparatus” evokes a robotic juggler, and Michael Serafino, who explores scientific themes in such dazzling encaustics as “Lunar EVA 5” and “Abstract Winter” and goes even more abstract in the oil-on-panel “Pull Painting One.” Art and meat? We consider burgers, fries, and beer to be a major art form, so it’s not really much of a stretch for other types of art to be hanging in a place that serves one of New York City’s deservedly favorite burgers.

THE ARMORY SHOW AT 100: MODERN ART AND REVOLUTION

Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” oil on canvas, 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection)

New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (77th St.)
Daily through February 23, $18 (pay-as-you-wish Friday 6:00 – 8:00)
212-873-3400
www.armory.nyhistory.org

It was a seminal moment in the way contemporary art was introduced to the American public. “New York will never be the same again,” Arthur B. Davies said, while Walt Kuhn proclaimed, “We will show New York something they never dreamed of.” On February 17, 2013, the Armory Show opened at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Ave. and Twenty-Sixth St.; organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which was headed by Davies, the show brought the European avant-garde to the America public. The New-York Historical Society is celebrating the transformative event’s centennial with “The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution,” a wide-ranging exhibition that includes approximately one hundred works from the original presentation, by such innovative and influential European artists as Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Edvard Munch in addition to such American painters and sculptors as Childe Hassam, George Bellows, Stuart Davis, James McNeill Whistler, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Sloan, and Charles R. Sheeler. “The Armory Show at 100” delves into the fascinating behind-the-scenes battles between Davies, Kuhn, J. Alden Weir, Walter Pach, Guy Pène du Bois, and the National Academy through quotes, postcards, and letters that detail the controversial selection process and purpose of the show while also placing it firmly within the context of the sociopolitical climate and evolving culture (including literature and film) of early-twentieth-century New York City as WWI loomed on the horizon.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, “Pastoral Study,” oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard, 1897 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

Many of the works on view, arranged thematically in clever ways, are simply sensational: Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” Matisse’s “Blue Nude,” “The Red Studio,” and “Goldfish and Sculpture,” van Gogh’s “Mountains at Saint-Rémy” and “La salle de danse à Arles,” Redon’s “Silence,” Bellows’s “Circus,” Ryder’s “Pastoral Study,” Eugène Delacroix’s “Christ on the Lake of Genesareth,” Degas’s “After the Bath,” Munch’s “Madonna,” Charles Henry White’s “The Condemned Tenement,” and Francis Picabia’s “The Procession, Seville.” The free audioguide adds additional insight to the lasting importance of “The Armory Show,” while the catalog features thirty-one essays, with contributions from curators Marilyn Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt along with Leon Botstein, Avis Berman, Barbara Haskell, Francis M. Naumann, Casey Nelson Blake, and others. “Criticism, both for and against modern art in the exhibition — now considered one of the most important art exhibitions ever mounted in the United States — was impassioned, and it seemed as if everyone from the most seasoned collector or established artist to the uninitiated viewer had an opinion,” Kushner writes in her piece, “A Century of the Armory Show: Modernism and Myth.” The thoughtful, well-organized show continues through February 23, with timed tickets available in advance, which is definitely the way to go to avoid the lines. As a bonus, the New-York Historical Society will be open on Monday, February 17. (Next month, the Armory Show comes back to town, running March 6-9 at Piers 92 and 94 as part of Armory Arts Week, but it’s nothing like its namesake.)

RIVER OF FUNDAMENT

Matthew Barney’s five-and-a-half-hour epic debuts at BAM this week (photo by Hugo Glendinning)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
February 12-16, $25-$50
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

“Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before,” Norman Mailer writes at the beginning of his 1983 novel, Ancient Evenings. “Is this the fear that holds the universe? Is pain the fundament? All the rivers veins of pain? The oceans my mind awash? I have a thirst like the heat of earth on fire. Mountains writhe. I see waves of flame. Washes, flashes, flashes, waves of flame.” New York-based visual artist Matthew Barney and Berlin-based composer and musician Jonathan Bepler have transformed Mailer’s seven-hundred-page epic about death and rebirth in Egypt into the five-and-a-half-hour cinematic spectacle River of Fundament, which is making its debut February 12-16 at the BAM Harvey. In his five-part, seven-hour Cremaster Cycle, Barney explored the ascension and descension of the cremaster muscle, which determines sexual differentiation, with a cast that included Mailer as Harry Houdini and Barney as Gary Gilmore in a section inspired by Mailer’s book The Executioner’s Song while focusing on cars and petroleum jelly in others.

RIVER OF FUNDAMENT is built around episodes in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Detroit (photo by Ivano Grasso)

River of Fundament begins with Mailer’s wake at an intricate reconstruction of his Brooklyn Heights home, with Mailer’s son John Buffalo Mailer playing his father’s spirit. The second act follows the reincarnation of Mailer (Milford Graves) as he is born in the River of Feces and meets medium Hathfertiti (Maggie Gyllenhaal). The third act returns to Brooklyn, with Mailer’s next reincarnation played by a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor and Ellen Burstyn taking over as Hathfertiti. The primary cast also features Paul Giamatti, Cremaster star Aimee Mullins, Elaine Stritch, Lila Downs, Chief Dave Beautiful Bald Eagle, Joan La Barbara, and Madyn G. Coakley, with a multitude of cameos by Dick Cavett, Luc Sante, Larry Holmes, Salman Rushdie, Lawrence Weiner, Fran Lebowitz, Marti Domination, James Toback, David Amram, and dozens of others.

Cars once again are featured prominently in epic new Matthew Barney film (photo by Ivano Grasso)

The action, much of which consists of filmed performance art presentations that were held in public spaces, moves from New York City to Los Angeles to Detroit as Egyptian mythology and ritual play out in unusual ways. Barney, whose multidisciplinary Cremaster exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2002-3 was one of the best of the decade, has given New Yorkers a sneak peek at the making of River of Fundament via the ”DJED” show at the Gladstone Gallery in the fall of 2011 and the wide ranging ”Subliming Vessel” at the Morgan Library last summer. Not that they gave any real indication of what to expect, because with Barney, the only thing to expect is the unexpected. And even then, don’t expect to understand what is unfurling before you.

T. J. WILCOX: IN THE AIR

T. J. Wilcox’s “In the Air” gives visitors a panoramic view of New York City both past and present (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Whitney Museum of American Art
Mildred and Herbert Lee Galleries, second floor
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Through Sunday, February 9, $16-$20 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays, 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

In his Whitney installation “In the Air,” Seattle-born, New York-based artist T. J. Wilcox invites visitors into his Union Square rooftop studio for a swirling look at his view of the city, past and present. Upon entering the second floor galleries, people can duck into a 360-degree panorama of the city composed of shots from six projectors. Over the course of one day compressed into thirty-five minutes, the film breaks into half a dozen short narratives on individual panels, each of which explores a part of New York history associated with that area. The short documentaries look at heiress and jeans designer Gloria Vanderbilt, the plan to have zeppelins dock on top of the Empire State Building, Andy Warhol preparing silver Mylar balloons to greet Pope Paul VI’s motorcade passing by the Factory, Manhattanhenge glowing in the distance, fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, and Wilcox’s building super describing in detail how he watched 9/11 unfold from the roof. In the short pieces, Wilcox, a pop-culture junkie who has previously made short films about Marie Antoinette, Jerry Hall, and Marlene Dietrich, relates how the subject influenced him as an artist and a human being. “I became really interested in this idea that I was seeing the view in the present tense as I was looking at the New York City scape but that I was also looking across time,” Wilcox says in a video about the piece on the Whitney website. Part of the fun of “In the Air” is spinning around, wondering where the next of the six documentaries is going to appear; it also makes viewers create their own narratives, peering out at a section of the city and being hit with a personal memory. Wilcox supplements the installation with fifteen works selected from the Whitney’s permanent collection that all involve ways of looking (in general and at New York specifically), including videos, assemblages, photographs, and paintings by Charles Atlas, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Helen Levitt, Joseph Cornell, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joan Jonas, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, and Gordon Matta-Clark.

NYC FABMANIA WEEK

On February 7, 1964, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr landed at JFK to a wild welcome as they came to America for the first time to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. New York City is paying tribute to that seminal moment in the history of the Fab Four with Fabmania Week, featuring a host of special events celebrating this golden anniversary. The centerpiece of it all is the fortieth anniversary of the Fest for Beatles Fans, taking place February 7-9 at the Grand Hyatt in Midtown ($32.50-$225). Among the many guests are Cousin Brucie (broadcasting live), Donovan, Billy J. Kramer, Peter Asher, Chad & Jeremy, Freda Kelly, Bob Guren, and Allan Tannenbaum; the Fest also features a re-creation of the Cavern Club, screenings of Ryan White’s Good Ol’ Freda, a marketplace of memorabilia, look-alike and costume contests, and yoga sessions in an ashram, in addition to book signings, art exhibitions, and other tributes. On February 6, Donovan, Asher, Kramer, Kelly, Vince Calandra, and moderator Martin Lewis will take part in the friends-of-the-Beatles panel discussion “It Was 50 Years Ago Today . . . Celebrating 50 Years of the Beatles in the USA” at the 92nd St. Y ($15-$29, 8:15). The Morrison Hotel Gallery exhibit “50th Anniversary of the Beatles’ First US Tour,” curated by Julian Lennon, opens on February 7 and runs through February 28, consisting of twenty-five images, some never before shown in public, of John, Paul, George, and Ringo taken by such photographers as Ken Regan, Charles Trainor, Curt Gunther, Robert Whitaker, Rowland Scherman, and Terry O’Neill.

Curt Gunther’s photograph of the Beatles playing with slot cars is included in Morrison Hotel Gallery exhibit curated by Julian Lennon (photo © Curt Gunther, 1964)

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts will be home to the multimedia exhibition “Ladies and Gentlemen . . . the Beatles!” from February 6 through May 10, examining the effects Beatlemania had on American pop culture during the mid-1960s, comprising interviews, instruments, posters, music, and an oral history booth where fans can share their own memories; there will also be a free symposium on February 9 in the library’s Bruno Walter Auditorium with presentations by Bruce Spizer (“The Beatles Are Coming! The Birth of Beatlemania in America”), Dennis Elsas (“It Was 50 Years Ago Today — The Beatles Invade America”), Chuck Gunderson (“Some Fun Tonight! The Backstage Story of the 1964 Summer North American Tour”), Allan Kozinn (“Studio Days / Touring Years”), and Russ Lease (“The Drop-T Logo and the Most Significant Drumkit in Popular Music History”), emceed by curator Robert Santelli. On February 8, the Town Hall will hold the “America Celebrates the Beatles’ 50th Anniversary All-Star Concert” ($63-$272, 7:30), with a wide-ranging lineup playing songs by and inspired by the Liverpudlian quartet, including Melissa Manchester, Tommy James, Al Jardine, Danny Aiello, Marshal Crenshaw, Larry Kirwin, Aztec Two-Step, Melanie, along with appearances by such Beatles fans as Dick Cavett, Len Berman, the Amazing Kreskin, and Charles Grodin. And on February 8 & 9 at 1:00, the Paley Center will present “The Beatles Invasion 50-Year Celebration: See the Fab Four on the Big Screen, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” with showings of the complete Ed Sullivan Show broadcast from February 9, 1964, and the Maysles brothers’ original What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. documentary.

FIRST SATURDAY: LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD

Shukree Hassan Tilghman’s MORE THAN A MONTH is part of free Black History Month celebration at Brooklyn Museum on February 1

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, February 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The February edition of the Brooklyn Museum’s free First Saturdays honors Black History Month with programs related to African American art and culture. The evening will include pop-up gallery talks focused on works by African American artists currently on view at the museum, a camera phone workshop by Instagram activist Ruddy Roye, a Hands-On Art workshop in which participants learn how to hand-color historical photographs, a screening of Shukree Hassan Tilghman’s 2012 documentary More Than a Month about Black History Month, live music by Tysmé, Honey Larochelle, and Chris Faust, a dance performance by Niles Ford Urban Dance Collective, a movement workshop led by the Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory, a fashion show hosted by Global Village, and a talk by transgender activist Janet Mock about her new book, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More, moderated by Michaela Angela Davis. In addition, the galleries will be open late, giving visitors plenty of opportunity to check out “Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey,” “War / Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath,” “Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry’s Letters to ‘The Ladder,’” “Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt,” “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas,” “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn,” “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” and other exhibits.