this week in art

MIKE KELLEY — SUNDAY SESSIONS: KIM GORDON AND JUTTA KOETHER

Mike Kelley, “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites,” plush toys sewn over wood and wire frames with styrofoam packing material, nylon rope, pulleys, steel hardware and hanging plates, fiberglass, car paint, and disinfectant, 1991/1999 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Sunday, February 2, $18 in advance, $20 day of show, 4:00
Exhibition continues through February 2, suggested admission $10 (free with paid MoMA ticket
within fourteen days), 12 noon – 6:00 (9:00 on Saturday)
718-784-2084
www.momaps1.org

A few weeks ago, an art-world friend who was at MoMA PS1 posted on Facebook, “OK, sell me on Mike Kelley.” Most of the respondents agreed with her that they just didn’t get all the hullabaloo over the influential multimedia artist who committed suicide on February 1, 2012, while in the midst of participating in his career retrospective, which posthumously took over all of the Long Island City institution on October 13, 2013. The show, the largest at MoMA PS1 since 1976, features more than 250 works by the Detroit-born Kelley, who was an original member of the punk band Destroy All Monsters while at the University of Michigan before moving to Los Angeles and studying at CalArts under such teachers as John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, Jonathan Borofsky, and Douglas Huebler. On February 2, the last day of the show, Sonic Youth cofounder and visual artist Kim Gordon and German artist, musician, and critic Jutta Koether are creating a special farewell event in the VW Dome that may or may not help sell yet more people on Kelley. The two women have previously collaborated on such projects as “Her Noise”; Kelley created the cover image for Sonic Youth’s Dirty album, while the band contributed music to his “Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile” performance piece. “Mike dug a huge hole, but his sculptures, videos, recordings, writings, and drawings fill it in, heaped so high that they stand like a formidable mountain of gifts, rewards, like a monument to getting out from under,” Gordon, a close friend of Kelley’s, wrote in Artforum a few months after his death.

Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether will bid farewell to Mike Kelley exhibit with special performance at MoMA PS1

The sprawling exhibition contains sculptures, videos, recordings, writings, drawings, and more, offering many different types of rewards. It all begins in the courtyard VW Dome, where Kelley’s nearly-three-hour epic, Day Is Done, screens continuously, a subversive spectacle that sets the tone for the rest of the show, highlighting Kelley’s obsessions with childhood imagery and pop culture, his unique spirituality, his repurposing of found objects, and the low-budget, DIY nature of his work, which can often have an amateurish feel that turns off viewers. Inside the former school, there is art everywhere, from the hallways to the boiler room, displaying Kelley’s vast range. His Kandor series consists of numerous multicolored, glowing versions of the Krypton city from the Superman comics, each one existing in a glass bottle hooked up to a kind-of life-support system, with accompanying video. “Pay for Your Pleasure” is a narrow corridor with banners on either side containing portraits of writers and philosophers, along with a quote from each one about art, crime, law, and civilization; at the end is an artwork by a local murderer.

Mike Kelley, “John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972, Wayne/Westland Eagle),” mixed media, 2001 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

One large gallery space is dedicated to several of Kelley’s “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction” installations, in which he starts with a photograph from a high school yearbook and turns it into a short film, screened on a set with architectural elements echoing what is happening in the imagined story. (“Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 [A Domestic Scene]” is also being shown at MoMA in Midtown.) “John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project” is centered by a tall mosaic statue of astronaut John Glenn made out of broken glass, pottery, plates, ceramic figures, and other detritus, delving into another regular subject of Kelley’s, repressed memory syndrome. In “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites,” colorful stuffed animals have been formed into orbs that hang from the ceiling like a planetary system as futuristic wall pieces shoot out disinfectant. Two small crawlspaces allow non-claustrophobics to wind their way to a peephole where they can see the famous locker-room peeping scene from Porky’s. And “Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms” consists of videos of traumatic scenes taken from the internet, then shown on monitors attached to the back of a wall of fence posts of different colors and sizes. Not everything will work for everyone, but there’s bound to be at least a handful that any person would at least find fascinating and intriguing, thought-provoking and challenging. In response to our friend’s Facebook request, we proffered, “The Michigan-born multimedia artist created fantastical worlds using found objects that reexamined mass culture through DIY installations that can be playful and nonsensical as well as cutting and poignant.” At the end of the thread, she readily admitted that having seen the show, she has a greater appreciation for his work. And sometimes, that’s all one can ask for.

THE WIND UP: BRIGHT WINTER NIGHT

Marc Chagall, “Exodus,” oil on canvas, 1952-66 (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou)

The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday, January 30, $13-$18, 8:00
Chagall and threeASFOUR exhibitions continue through February 2, $15 (free on Saturday)
212-423-3200
www.thejewishmuseum.org

“Should I paint the earth, the sky, my heart? / The cities burning, my brothers fleeing? / My eyes in tears. / Where should I run and fly, to whom?” So wrote Russian painter Marc Chagall in a poem when considering what subjects he should explore on canvas. That poem, among others written by the artist, appear high on the walls of the powerful, deeply personal Jewish Museum exhibit “Chagall: Love, War, and Exile.” People have been lining up outside in the freezing cold to experience the intimate show, which zeroes in on the period just before, during, and immediately following WWII, when Chagall and his beloved wife, Bella, were forced to first leave their home in Russia, then flee France for the United States as German power spread across Europe. The exhibition ends on February 2, and because of its popularity, the museum will be open on Wednesday, when it’s usually closed. In addition, the Chagall show, along with the small, sparkly fashion exhibit “threeASFOUR: MER KA BA,” will get an official public farewell Thursday evening in the special program “The Wind Up: Bright Winter Night,” which will include guided tours, an international beer tasting, and a live performance by Philly-born, Brooklyn-based indie singer-songwriter Mirah (Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn), who will soon be releasing her follow-up to such previous records as You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This, Advisory Committee, and C’mon.

Marc Chagall, “Self-Portrait with Clock,” oil on canvas, 1947 (private collection)

“Chagall: Love, War, and Exile” consists of thirty-one paintings, twenty-two works on paper, and vitrines of photographs, illustrated books, letters, and other ephemera. The show is divided into four parts: “Time Is a River,” “War and Exile,” “The Jewish Jesus,” and “The Colors of Love,” in which Chagall incorporates his unique iconography and color palette — religious men holdings Torahs, a cow playing the violin, a glowing moon, mothers holding babies, angels floating in the sky, pendulums swinging on clocks — on canvases filled with pain, fear, and dread as he first watched the horror of the Nazis, then lost Bella to a sudden illness in 1944. “The Fall of the Angel” encapsulates Chagall’s oeuvre of the time, a painting that he began in 1923 and reworked in 1933 and 1947, centered by an angel in red, looking like a twisting fire, spiraling uncontrollably toward earth. In the right background is Christ on the cross; the crucifixion is seen in many of these works as Chagall, who was raised in an Orthodox family, uses the figure to represent Jewish suffering not only during the Holocaust but throughout time, as well as relating it to his own tortured soul, first tortured by guilt for having been able to escape the Nazis while his brethren were murdered, then by grief upon losing his wife on the eve of their starting a new life together. In “Exodus” (1952-66), a haloed, crucified Jesus looks over a mass of men, women, and children running from a burning shtetl, linking the escape from Egypt with the pogroms and the Holocaust. And in “Self-Portrait with Clock,” Chagall’s second wife, Virginia, bathed in blue, is leaning on the artist, who portrays himself as a red goat working on a canvas of a crucified Jesus being sorrowfully embraced by Bella in ghostly white as a winged clock flies away in the distance. It’s a haunting image, one of many in this haunting show.

SEE IT LOUD: SEVEN POST-WAR AMERICAN PAINTERS

Albert Kresch, “Conversation,” oil on panel, 1994 (Collection of the Center for Figurative Painting, New York)

National Academy Museum
1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Through Sunday, January 26, $15, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-369-4880
www.nationalacademy.org

“You can’t escape your time,” Paul Resilka says in a promotional video for the National Academy exhibit “See It Loud: Seven Post-War American Painters,” continuing, “Some embrace it. Some fight it. As for myself, I suppose I had a contrarian streak in me.” The show, hung throughout the entire museum, consists of nearly eighty landscapes, portraits, still-lifes, and other paintings by Leland Bell (1922-91), Paul Georges (1923-2002), Neil Welliver (1929-2005), Peter Heinemann (1931-2010), Albert Kresch (1922-), Stanley Lewis (1941-), and Resika (1928-), dating from 1963 to 2011. The seven men broke away from the Abstract expressionists and turned toward a more representational style, resulting is dazzling canvases with bold use of line and color, inspired by such artists as Hans Hoffmann, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Jean Helion, and Pierre Bonnard. Eight works by Bell, who was married to fellow painter and National Academician Louisa Matthiasdottir, combine figuration and abstraction, particularly two versions of “Figure Group with Bird,” as geometric patterns give way to men, women, and animals. Paul Georges’s “The Mugging of the Muse,” a cartoonlike rendering of a street-corner attack, led to a libel suit brought by two men who believe they were the ones being maligned in the work; however, Georges’s “Artist in Studio” is a more impressive canvas, the artist standing defiant in the center, brush in his left hand, a seated nude in the right foreground. Ten self-portraits by a never-smiling Heinemann feature unique framing devices except for the final one, in which he wears sunglasses and a hat and is accompanied by a cat.

Leland Bell, “Croquet Party,” oil on canvas, 1965 (Collection of the Center for Figurative Painting, New York)

Welliver concentrates on rocky areas, woods, and winding rivers; his “Blueberries in Fissures” gives a dizzying sense of space. The baby of the group, Lewis incorporates his sculpture background into canvases rich with texture, in addition to several splendid drawings on paper. New York City native Resika’s peaceful works often include the moon and small houses in gorgeous coloration, while “Dark Lady” begs for meditative moments. But Kresch nearly steals the show with his mostly small, horizontal landscapes with glowing patches of sunlight and faceless figures; you can practically hear what the two women are saying to each other in “Conversation,” while “Landscape with House” couldn’t be more inviting. Painting, especially figurative, may have been declared dead many times during the twentieth century, but these seven men — several of whom are still at work in this new century — kept it alive with bold, daring works that knowingly spit in the face of the Abstract Expressionists.

VISUAL AIDS: POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE 2014

Art lovers and collectors crowd in and take notes at VIP preview for sixteenth annual Postcards from the Edge benefit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
January 24 preview party: $50 (includes two raffle tickets), 5:00 – 8:00
January 25-26, suggested admission $5 (all works $85)
www.visualaids.org

On your mark, get set . . . The sixteenth annual Visual AIDS Postcards from the Edge benefit sale takes place this weekend, offering art connoisseurs, beginning collectors, and just about anyone else the opportunity to purchase an original piece of art by a major, internationally renowned artist — for a mere eighty-five dineros. On Saturday from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm and Sunday from 12 noon to 4:00, folks will be lining up to get into Luhring Augustine in Chelsea, where upwards of 1,500 postcard-size works of art are expected to be available. The only catch is that you find out who the artist is after you buy the 4×6 drawing, painting, photograph, collage, sculpture, print, etc., as the creator signs the back, not the front, and you need to pay for it before seeing which artist you got. On Saturday, if you buy four, you get a fifth free; on Sunday, every two purchases gain you a free third postcard. Admission is a suggested five dollars on Saturday and Sunday; you can get a sneak peek at the art on Friday night at the VIP Preview, where for fifty bucks you can check out the works on display, write down the numbers of the ones you want, and make a beeline straight to the cashier on Saturday while everyone else is surveying the merchandise and making their choices. (Stay away from #1000, as that one’s ours.) You also get raffle tickets that could get you first pick or allow you to ask one question about any work of art on the wall. (There’s a silent online auction going on right now as well.) Of course, it’s hard to go wrong when the participating artists include Vito Acconci, Catherine Opie, Glenn Ligon, Justin Vivian Bond, Ed Ruscha, Zarina Hashmi, Lorraine O’Grady, Trevor Winkfield, Fred Wilson, Sarah McEneaney, Robert Longo, Penelope Umbrico, Joel Shapiro, Julie Mehretu, John Baldessari, Roger Hiorns, Rob Wynne, Lesley Dill, John Kelly, Kerry James Marshall, William Wegman, Guido Van Der Werve, Matthew Buckingham, Donald Baechler, Jim Hodges, John Waters, Maria Elena Gonzalez, Marcel Dzama, Kiki Smith, Ernesto Pujol, Milton Glaser, Kay Rosen, Lawrence Weiner, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Harmony Hammond, Danh Vo, and Barbara Takenaga. All proceeds go to Visual AIDS, whose mission for more than twenty-five years has been to “utilize art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.”

DUKE RILEY: SEE YOU AT THE FINISH LINE

Duke Riley, “Pigeon Coop,” reclaimed wood, roofing, and construction materials, 2012-13 (photo courtesy Magnan Metz Gallery)

Magnan Metz Gallery
521 West 26th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Extended through January 25, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-244-2344
www.magnanmetz.com
www.dukeriley.info

There are only a few more days left to see Duke Riley’s intensely fascinating “See You at the Finish Line” as it races toward its twice-extended conclusion on Saturday. The fourth solo exhibition by the Boston-born, Brooklyn-based multimedia installation artist is divided into two parts, both filled with exacting details and, well, flights of fancy. In “Trading with the Enemy,” Riley investigates the relationship between Cuba and Key West, which includes smuggling because of the continued U.S. embargo. After four years of planning, Riley bred and trained fifty homing pigeons for eight months in a Key West loft. The pigeons, with tiny cameras attached to them, were released, with some eventually returning to their home coop bearing Cohiba cigars. He named the birds after such smugglers as Jean Lafitte, Whitey Bulger, Billy Hayes, Margaret Sanger, and Pablo Escobar and such controversial filmmakers as Mel Gibson and Larry Clark and reports which ones survived and which ones didn’t. The display includes such elements as the cigars that were brought across the Atlantic, the harnesses the pigeons wore, and the date and cause of death of those that died. Riley has transplanted the entire pigeon coop to the middle of the gallery, an astonishing piece, still an active home to several of the live birds who successfully made the journey. A trio of mosaics made out of found seashells and wood proclaim, “To Have,” “To Have Not,” and “Forget Me Not When Far Away,” while the trip is also documented in the three-channel video See You at the Finish Line, consisting of footage shot by several pigeons equipped with the cameras. It’s hysterical to see how one family responds when a pigeon lands on its boat.

In a back room, visitors can immerse themselves in “The Rematch,” in which Riley restaged the mythological Chinese race that established the zodiac and the measurement of time in a yearly cycle, a race that was won by a cheating rat. Riley went to the Caogang River in Zhujiajiao, China, where a dozen gondolas with live animals, a person wearing an animal mask, and an opera singer performing a song told from the animal’s perspective raced to the Fengshang Bridge, passing by areas where new development has displaced long-standing communities. The exhibit includes video footage of the race, the masks with the legends behind them, the songs, and raffle tickets spread over the floor. Among the songs are the Rabbit’s “I’ve Been Walking Around for 500 Years Depressed with a Broken Nose,” the Rat’s “How Dare They Question My Title,” and the Goat’s “I Probably Would Have Done Something Irresponsible with the Prize.” The exhibit seemingly explores the nature of legend, but Riley explains, “No calendars will be reset at the finish line nor will any closer understanding of that mythical day be realized. The only realization will be a brief moment of divine absurdity between two shores.” Both “The Rematch” and “Trading with the Enemy” deal with animals, history, contemporary issues, and water, a regular theme of Riley’s, displayed as only Riley can, examined from multiple angles through a variety of media. As he says in his artist statement, “I combine populist myths and reinvented historical obscurities with contemporary social dilemmas, connecting past and present, drawing attention to unsolved issues. Throughout my projects I profile the space where water meets the land, traditionally marking the periphery of urban society, what lies beyond rigid moral constructs, a sense of danger and possibility.” In “See You at the Finish Line,” Riley has created another endlessly intriguing, imaginative, and entertaining exhibit, one that requires lengthy attention but is well worth the time.

MLK DAY 2014

MLK Day features a host of special events and community-based service projects throughout the city (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Multiple venues
Monday, January 21
www.mlkday.gov

In 1983, the third Monday in January was officially recognized as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, honoring the birthday of the civil rights leader who was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Dr. King would have turned eighty-five this month, and you can celebrate his legacy tomorrow by participating in a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service project or attending one of several special events taking place around the city. BAM’s twenty-eighth annual free Brooklyn Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. includes a keynote speech by Angela Davis, live performances by José James and the Christian Cultural Center Choir, the NYCHA Saratoga Village Community Center student exhibit “Picture the Dream,” and a screening of Shola Lynch’s 2012 documentary Free Angela and All Political Prisoners. The JCC in Manhattan will host an MLK Day blood drive and “The Living Legacy of Dr. King,” consisting of the panel discussion “Leading a Socially Responsible Life” with Ruth Messinger, Harrie Bakst, and Rabbi Joanna Samuels, interactive workshops for teens, and the “Artists Celebrate the Living Legacy of Dr. King” performance with Judith Sloan, Susannah Heschel, and Joshua Nelson, the Prince of Kosher Gospel. (Admission is free but preregistration is recommended.)

The Museum of the Moving Image is screening THE NEGRO AND THE AMERICAN PROMISE on MLK Day

The Museum of the Moving Image will be open on MLK Day, with two screenings of the 1963 documentary The Negro and the American Promise as part of its “Changing the Picture” series (free with museum admission). The Children’s Museum of Manhattan will teach kids about King’s legacy with the “Martin’s Mosaic” workshop, the “Heroic Heroines: Ruby Bridges” book talk, and live performances by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem All Stars Band, while the Brooklyn Children’s Museum has such special hands-on crafts programs as “Let’s March!,” “Let’s Join Hands,” and “Dream Clouds” and live music from the Berean Community Drumline. And the Museum at Eldridge Street will be hosting a free reading of Eloise Greenfield and Jan Spivey Gilchrist’s picture book The Great Migration: Journey to the North.

VERMEER, REMBRANDT, AND HALS: MASTERPIECES OF DUTCH PAINTING FROM THE MAURITSHUIS

Johannes Vermeer, “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” oil on canvas, ca. 1665 (Mauritshuis, The Hague)

The Frick Collection
1 East 70th St. at Fifth Ave.
Through January 19, $20
212-288-0700
www.frick.org

Numerous blockbuster shows in the past year have created massive crowds waiting hours to get into museums and galleries. Among the most popular have been “Yayoi Kusama” at David Zwirner, “Jean-Michel Basquiat” at Gagosian, “Rain Room” at MoMA, and Christian Marclay’s The Clock at MoMA and other locations. The current hottest art spot in New York is the Frick, which cautions on its website, “Please expect to wait in line outside since we are experiencing unprecedented crowds.” (The blocks-long line starts at the Seventieth St. entrance and can wrap around Fifth Ave. onto Seventy-First.) Why are people waiting hours outside in a freezing-cold January to get in? For a chance to get up close and personal with one of the world’s most famous, and most beautiful, works of art.

The centerpiece of “Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis” is Johannes Vermeer’s mid-seventeenth-century painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” Considered the Dutch Mona Lisa, the glorious tronie resides by itself in the Oval Room, where it can be seen by only small groups of visitors at a time. Restored in 1994, it’s a dazzling tour de force by Vermeer, who sets the fictional subject’s penetrating eyes, soft red lips, shadowy cheeks, blue and yellow turban, and glittering pearl earring against a black background, making the details all the more mesmerizing. The painting is on loan from the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague, which is undergoing a major expansion and renovation; among the other fourteen works on view at the Frick are Gerard ter Borch’s “Woman Writing a Letter,” Nicholas Maes’s “Old Lacemaker,” Jan Steen’s “As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young,” Jacob van Ruisdael’s “View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds,” and four canvases by Rembrandt, including “Susanna” and “Simeon’s Song of Praise,” along with “The Goldfinch,” Carel Fabritius’s lovely little painting that plays a key role in Donna Tartt’s current bestselling novel of the same name. As a bonus, the Frick has also brought together three Vermeers from its permanent collection, “Officer and Laughing Girl,” “Girl Interrupted at Her Music,” and “Mistress and Maid,” which can be seen side-by-side-by-side in the East Gallery. Meanwhile, in the Multimedia Room, Rob and Nick Carter re-create every aspect of Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder’s “Vase with Flowers in a Window” in the animated digital film Transforming Still Life Painting. Although online timed tickets for “Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals” are sold out, a limited number of same-day and advance tickets are available at the admissions desk. And be prepared; there’s even a line to get into the special gift shop.