this week in art

AMERICAN REALNESS 2014

Adrienne Truscott moves from her day job at the Kitchen to live performance at Abrons Arts Center in …TOO FREEDOM…

Abrons Arts Center and other venues
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 9-19, $20
212-598-0400
www.americanrealness.com
www.abronsartscenter.org

January in New York City is a veritable feast of live performance festivals, including PS 122’s Coil, the Public’s Under the Radar, Here’s Prototype, and Winter Jazzfest. Over at Abrons Art Center, American Realness will be celebrating its fifth anniversary with seventeen new movement-based shows and encore presentations as well as several off-site events. Tina Satter’s House of Dance (also part of Coil) follows a tense tap-dance competition. Ishmael Houston-Jones and Emily Wexler team up for the world premiere of 13 Love Songs: dot dot dot, which involves deconstructing romantic lyrics by Bryan Adams, Mary J. Blige, Ja Rule, Stephen Merritt, Nina Simone, Madonna, and others. Miguel Gutierrez explores gay sex and lost love in the intimate myendlesslove. Eleanor Bauer combines text, music, and movement in Midday and Eternity (The Time Piece); she’ll also lead the “Dancing, not the Dancer” class and host the anything goes Bauer Hour on January 19. Choreographer Juliana F. May and dancers Benjamin Asriel, Talya Epstein, and Kayvon Pourazar explore the physical and emotional naked body in Commentary=not thing. The Kitchen house manager Adrienne Truscott delves into day jobs and artistic creativity in . . . Too Freedom . . . , which also features Neal Medlyn, Gillian Walsh, Laura Sheedy, and Mickey Mahar. Lucy Sexton (the Factress), Anne Iobst (the Naked Lady), Scott Heron, and DANCENOISE join forces for Prodigal Heroes: An Evening of Legendary New York. Moriah Evans and Sarah Beth Percival play with human-connection tropes in Out of and Into (8/8): Stuff. Medlyn’s King concludes his seven-part foray into iconic stars, this time taking on Michael Jackson. And Melinda Ring’s Forgetful Snow and Roseanne Spradlin’s Indelible Disappearance — A Thought not a Title will be presented together for free on January 12.

Moriah Evans and Sarah Beth Percival team up in OUT OF AND INTO (8/8): STUFF for American Realness festival

Also on the schedule are Adam Linder’s Cult to the Built on What, Michelle Boulé’s Wonder (Boulé will also lead a “Persona & Performance” class on January 17), Rebecca Patek’s ineter(a)nal f/ear, Jillian Peña’s Polly Pocket, and Dana Michel’s Yellow Towel. The festival heads to MoMA PS1 on January 10-12 for Mårten Spångberg’s four-and-a-half-hour La Substance, but in English and to MoMA’s main Midtown location on January 15-16 for Eszter Salamon’s Dance for Nothing, based on John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing. In addition, there will be art exhibits throughout Abrons (Sarah Maxfield’s “Nonlinear Lineage: Over/Heard,” Ian Douglas’s “Instant Realness,” Medlyn and Fawn Krieger’s “The POP-MEDLYN Hall of Fame,” and Ann Liv Young’s interactive “Sherry Art Fair”), and Coil, Under the Radar, Prototype, and American Realness will be copresenting free live concerts every night from January 9 to 19 in the Lounge at the Public Theater, including Invincible, Christeene, Ethan Lipton, Heather Christian & the Arbonauts, Sky-Pony, Timur and the Dime Museum, the Middle Church Jerriesse Johnson Gospel Choir, M.A.K.U. Sound System, DJ Acidophilus, and Nick Hallett, Space Palace, and Woahmone DJs.

LOUISA MATTHIASDOTTIR: PAINTINGS AND WORKS ON PAPER

Louisa Matthiasdottir, “Woman in Reykjavik with Umbrella,” oil on canvas, circa 1980

Tibor de Nagy Gallery
724 Fifth Ave. between 56th & 57th Sts.
Tuesday – Friday through January 11, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-262-5050
www.tibordenagy.com
www.louisamatthiasdottir.com

Looking for a peaceful escape from the bitterly cold weather? The Tibor de Nagy Gallery has just the thing, a beautiful collection of works by Reykjavik-born artist Louisa Matthiasdottir (1917-2000), depicting idyllic scenes in Iceland and Maine. Matthiasdottir concentrates not on the frosty parts there but on the pastoral beauty of the landscape using bright, bold colors in composing pictures that fall somewhere between realism and abstract expressionism. Grass has rarely been so green, the ocean so blue, as in these seventeen oil paintings on canvas and watercolors on paper. Upon entering the gallery, visitors immediately come upon the delightful “Woman in Reykjavik with Umbrella,” in which a faceless woman in brown boots and a blue coat is either opening or closing her red umbrella, with two small houses, the sea, and the sky behind her. None of Matthiasdottir’s figures have faces, yet the works emit a powerful rush of emotion, as in a 1993 self-portrait and “Girl, Sheep, and House.” As poet John Ashbery wrote in a 1982 catalog essay for Matthiasdottir’s show at Schoelkopf House, “One returns to these pictures, as year after year they paradoxically both expand and simplify the world they have chosen to explore, for their strange flavor, both mellow and astringent, which no other painter gives us.” Using long, confident brushstrokes, Matthiasdottir, who also lived and studied in Denmark, Paris, and New York with such teachers as Marcel Gromaire and Hans Hoffman, creates landscapes bursting with color and geometric shapes, most wonderfully in “National Theatre, Reykjavik,” “Harbor Scene,” and the endlessly charming “Icelandic Village.” “Louisa Matthiasdottir: Paintings and Works on Paper” continues at Tibor de Nagy through January 11, along with David Kapp’s far more urban-centric “Collages.” Coincidentally, Matthiasdottir’s husband, Leland Bell — they were married from 1944 until 1991, when Bell passed away at the age of sixty-nine — is one of the featured artists in the National Academy show “See It Loud: Seven Post-War American Painters,” which includes, among other pieces, 1965’s “Croquet Party,” a portrait of six faceless people standing on the grass; Bell was named a National Academician in 1979, Matthiasdottir in 1988.

FIRST SATURDAY: ART ON THE EDGE

Screening of HEAVY METAL IN BAGHDAD is part of free First Saturday program at Brooklyn Museum

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, January 4, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum kicks off its 2014 monthly free First Saturdays program with a diverse collection of events centered around the theme “Art on the Edge.” The evening will include pop-up gallery talks, the Visual AIDS discussion “What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Museum: Art, AIDS, Activism, and the Institution,” an arts workshop with Pioneer Works on innovation and collaboration and another in which participants can make a mosaic tile inspired by the exhibition “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn,” a Center for Urban Pedagogy talk on unique design, Purring Tiger performing excerpts from the multimedia dance work Mizaru, a screening of Suroosh Alvi’s 2007 documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad, live music by Dendê and Band, Idgy Dean, and ScienZe (aka Jamal Monsanto) + the EllaVators, and a book club talk led by Barbara Browning about her dance novel, I’m Trying to Reach You. 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,” “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” and other exhibits.

ROBERT INDIANA: BEYOND LOVE

(© 2013 The Morgan Art Foundation, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Through January 5, $16-$20 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays, 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

Perhaps no other living American contemporary artist has suffered at the hands of an early creation quite the way Robert Indiana has. Robert Clark took on the “nom de brush” Robert Indiana in 1958, naming himself after his home state in tribute to his Midwest roots and shedding the name of the Clarks, who had adopted him as a baby, then divorced when he was eight. In 1965 he created a Christmas card for MoMA in which he painted the word “Love” in red, with blue and green filling the negative space, the first two letters balanced on top of the last two letters, an arrow pointing down in the “V,” the “O” tilted to represent, among other things, the instability of the most human of emotions. The image quickly became a misunderstood icon, eventually appearing on stamps, posters, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia and coming to symbolize the late 1960s and the Summer of Love. All the while, Indiana continued to explore the American Dream, which had let him down in various ways, from his childhood to his problems with the copyright on his “Love” design. The Whitney examines the full scope of Indiana’s career, which is much more than just that one iconic image, in “Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE,” his first major museum retrospective, which finally arrives more than fifty years after his New York solo debut at the Stable Gallery in 1962. Curated by Barbara Haskell, the eye-catching show begins in the lobby with “The Electric LOVE,” a polychrome aluminum sculpture with dazzling electric lights going on and off like a Times Square billboard, taking Indiana’s central image to the extreme while also getting it out of the way before visitors head upstairs to the fourth floor to see more than one hundred paintings and sculptures, only a few of which contain that four-letter word.

Robert Indiana, “The Electric LOVE,” polychrome aluminum with electric lights, 1966/2000 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“I have never made a painting without a message,” Indiana, an air force veteran who is now eighty-five, once said, and indeed, his oeuvre is loaded with meaning. Walking through the exhibit is like taking a trip through twentieth-century America, passing by his herms, cultural mile markers inspired by ancient Greece featuring such stenciled words as “Moon,” “Hub,” “Womb,” and “Hole”; examining maps of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida surrounded by the sentence “Just as in the anatomy of man every nation must have its hind part,” calling out confederate states that seceded from the Union and where violence against blacks took place during the civil rights movement; and hard-edge, text- and numeral-based canvases from his “American Dream” series that explode with advertising-style bold letters, geometric shapes, and colors with such words and phrases as “Eat” and “Die,” “Tilt,” “Take,” and “666.” Indiana also pays tribute to Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, Marsden Hartley, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, and other American artists and writers by incorporating words and/or images associated with them into his works. Also on view are his rarely seen cut-paper costume designs for the Santa Fe Opera’s bicentennial version of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s The Mother of Us All, about Susan B. Anthony and the suffragist movement. In addition, Indiana, who left New York City in 1978 for Vinalhaven, Maine, where he still resides, often hides meaning deep within his work; for example, “The Sweet Mystery” includes veiled references to his parents, his homosexuality, a friend who committed suicide, and other personal elements, none of which are apparent in the graphic depiction of two yellow gingko leaves bordered at top and bottom by a red and black warning pattern. And then there it is again, near the end of the show, the spectacular 1966 “LOVE” painting in all its glory, a beautifully rendered emotion that takes on a whole new light in conjunction with the myriad works around it.

NEW PHOTOGRAPHY 2013: BRENDAN FOWLER

Multidisciplinary artist Brendan Fowler combines photography, sculpture, and performance in latest large-scale work (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

BRENDAN FOWLER: CRASH
Museum of Modern Art
The Robert and Joyce Menschel Photography Gallery, third floor
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 6
Museum admission: $25 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.brendanfowler.com

American visual artist and musician Brendan Fowler, who has recorded free jazz and “deconstructed pop” performance-art compositions under the name BARR (Summary, Beyond Reinforced Jewelcase) and now as And Martin, also tells stories by taking photographs, framing the pigmented inkjet prints, then crashing one through the others to form abstract narratives, like a group of instruments suddenly coming together following a series of solos to arrive at something completely new. Five such pieces are part of MoMA’s “New Photography” exhibit, which continues through January 6. Fowler literally smashes them through each other, creating a three-dimensional sculpture-picture that also references the way computers can tile multiple windows (and, perhaps, crash) and how frantic life’s narrative can be these days. “The ‘Crash’ pieces are super fake and not actually crashed together,” Fowler explains in the accompanying MoMA audio. “They look like an incident that happened quickly, maybe, and suddenly. But in reality, they’re a lot less like a fight and more like a surgery. They’re really slow and procedural and take a lot of steps.” The works are very personal, consisting of photos of friends and relatives that are included in the title; for example, “Summer 2010 (Computer on 20” Slingerland Bass Drum, Accident/The Wood Fell on Me in Studio May 20 2010 #5, ‘Poster for Dialog with the Band Aids Wolf’ Screens in Studio, Flower in Patty’s Gazebo 2)” and “Spring 2011 – Spring 2012 (Colin/Angelo/Dane, Andrea’s Hand on Hat Head in Coronado Ter. House, Graham in Truck, Mirror Reflecting White Flat 1).” Four of the works hang tilted on one wall next to one another, while in the corner stands a large-scale work Fowler made specifically for this show.

Brendan Fowler’s “Crash” series is part of MoMA’s “New Photography” exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Winter 2011–Fall 2012 (Joel and Sean and Carol and Chadwick Installing at Untitled 3, ‘Miles’’ Security Jacket, Andrea Told the People at Café Gratitude That It Was Maxwell’s Birthday When It Wasn’t, Andrea’s Cousin’s Cousin’s House on Easter, Ry Showing New UNTITLED Logo, Photographic Arts Center, Coronado Ter. Screen Door, Proofing ANPQ 16 with Casey, What Wendy Saw)” features no crashing but has the added element of a pair of angled frames facing inward within bigger, otherwise empty frames, adding to the mystery, especially with the word “Security” popping out in two places. It also serves as a different kind of performance. “When I started really trying to make sculptures, the idea was to figure out how to make objects that would function in my absence, because the performance obviously was so much predicated on me being there and really about me engaging with the room and addressing everyone directly.” Fowler’s work certainly achieves that. The show also includes works by Annette Kelm, Lisa Oppenheim, Anna Ostoya, Josephine Pryde, Eileen Quinlan, and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin.

REBIRTH: RECENT WORK BY MARIKO MORI

Mariko Mori, “Transcircle 1.1,” stone, Corian, LED, real-time control system, 2004 (courtesy of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo / photo by Richard Goodbody)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 12, $12 (free Friday from 6:00 to 9:00)
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

For her first museum show in more than a decade, Tokyo-born artist Mariko Mori explores the interconnectedness between humanity and the cosmos, the body and the universe, and the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Continuing through January 12 at Japan Society, “Rebirth” comprises sculpture, video, photography, and installation that celebrates peace and love while delving into a past, present, and future that comes together through primal consciousness. “Why are souls born in this world, and why do we depart to another world? Why have we chosen to leave that world to be born in this world and exist in the here and now?” Mori asked in a 2007 interview with Lida Takayo that the author incorporates into the exhibition catalog essay “Mariko Mori’s ‘Rebirth’: Ancient, Futuristic Visions.” “There can be only one answer. We are here so that we can experience love. I was born here so that my love can bring peace to the world,” Mori concludes. The artist, who lives and works in Tokyo, London, and New York, takes visitors on a journey from the Middle Jōmon period of several thousand centuries BCE to the birth of a star, beginning with the glowing Lucite “Ring,” which hangs over the lobby pond, and “Birds I,” nearly hidden in the bamboo garden above. The pairing of “Primal Memory” with “Mask,” followed by “Flatstone” and “Transcircle 1.1,” meld such ancient traditions as the stone circle with modern technology; for example, the Stonehenge-like “Transcircle 1.1” consists of nine tall monoliths arranged in a circle, glowing in changing LED color schemes based on the orbit of the eight planets and Pluto around the sun. Meanwhile, the ceramic rocks in “Flatstone” are centered by an acrylic version of the Middle Jōmon vase on view nearby.

White Hole, 2008–10. Acrylic and LED lights; 136 1/8 × 103 1/2 inches. Courtesy of SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Tokyo and Sean Kelly, New York. Installation photograph by Richard Goodbody.

Mariko Mori, “White Hole,” acrylic and LED lights, 2008-10 (courtesy SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Tokyo, and Sean Kelly, New York / photo by Richard Goodbody)

In the almost blindingly white Bamboo Room, consciousness is further raised in “Miracle,” comprising eight brightly colored Cibachrome prints on the back wall and a round platform over which a small crystal ball dangles on a chain above the smooth epoxy orb “Tama I” and salt. Walking slowly around the platform offers visitors a changing reality. The exhibition, which also includes the “Journey to Seven Light Bay, Primal Rhythm” video of the first of Mori’s six planned outdoor site-specific environmental sculptural projects, the drawing series “Higher Being” and “White Hole,” and the “Ālaya” digital video (as well as bonus black-and-white archaeological photographs on the lower level), concludes with the consciousness-expanding immersive multimedia installation “White Hole.” In a dark room at the end of a short, winding corridor, a convex circle awaits, looking like a large futuristic eye centered on a low, angled ceiling. Soon a light projection emerges, growing and spiraling as it echoes a star being absorbed into a black hole and being freed from gravity through a white hole. “If the dramas of death and rebirth, as well as new birth, unfold across many parallel dimensions, there exists an eternal time and space that has no beginning and no end,” Mori has said about the piece. “I hope this work serves as a simulacrum of death and rebirth, prompting us to rethink the multidimensional universe that defies our imagination.” To get the full experience, visitors should first lie down on the provided mat, staring into the middle of the hole, but then get up and approach the light, following its dizzying journey. In fact, much of “Rebirth” is rewarded by spending time with the objects, meditating on them while considering the interdependence of humanity and the universe.

CHRIS BURDEN: EXTREME MEASURES

Chris Burden’s “1 Ton Crane Truck” dangles heavy object in lobby gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 12, $10-$16 (pay-what-you-wish Thursdays 7:00 – 9:00)
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

The New Museum has given itself over to performance and installation artist Chris Burden for “Extreme Measures,” his first major U.S. museum retrospective in more than a quarter century, comprising works across five floors, on the building’s facade, and even on the inaccessible roof. The Boston-born, L.A.-based Burden, who received his BA from Pomona College in visual arts, physics, and architecture and whose father was an engineer, incorporates all of those disciplines and more in the show, which continues through January 12. Burden takes things to extremes with installations that were challenging just to get into the museum, including “1 Ton Crane Truck,” a fully restored 1964 Ford F350 that resides in the lobby gallery, dangling a handmade one-ton cast-iron weight; “Twin Quasi Legal Skyscrapers,” a pair of four-ton structures that required a special addition to the roof in order to hold them; “Ghost Ship,” a two-ton, thirty-foot handcrafted sixareen sailboat suspended on the front of the building, its unmanned four-hundred-mile trip documented in the lobby; “Porsche with Meteorite,” a bright yellow two-and-a-half-ton restored 1974 Porsche 914 balanced against a nearly four-hundred-pound rock fragment from space; and “The Big Wheel,” a three-ton cast-iron flywheel that is powered by a 1968 Benelli 250cc motorcycle. (“The Big Wheel” is activated Wednesday – Sunday at 11:30 and 2:30 and 7:30 on Thursday.)

Chris Burden, “Porsche with Meteorite,” restored 1974 Porsche with 390-pound meteorite, steel frame, 5,025 pounds, 2013 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The massive, carefully constructed pieces display Burden’s unique approach particularly to transportation, employing technological and found objects involved with small- and large-scale movement, something that becomes even clearer on the third floor, which features the stainless-steel “Triple 21 Foot Truss Bridge,” the concrete “Three Arch Dry Stock Bridge, ¼ Scale,” the reverse-arched “Mexican Bridge,” and “Tyne Bridge Kit,” a multidrawer chest that reveals some of Burden’s working process, along with “Pair of Namur Mortars,” two beautifully detailed full-size three-ton cannons with cannonballs, the type of weapon that could be used to blow up bridges in olden times. (The smaller bridges also recall the six-story structure “What My Dad Gave Me” that Burden raised in Rockefeller Center in 2008.) Burden investigates the theme of war, power, and authority on the second floor with “L.A.P.D. Uniforms,” fully outfitted, oversized replicas created in response to the Rodney King beating; “Beehive Bunker,” a conical bunker constructed of cement still in its store-bought bags; “All the Submarines of the United States of America,” consisting of 625 miniature cardboard submarines hanging from the ceiling, representing all of the subs launched by the navy between 1897 and 1987, accompanied by a board that identifies each one; and “A Tale of Two Cities,” a spectacularly elaborate battle scene between two warring city-states, built with sand, live plants, more than five thousand children’s toys, and bullets, best viewed with binoculars.

Chris Burden, detail, “A Tale of Two Cities,” two miniature cities with approx. five thousand toys, sand, plants, boulders, approx. 53,000 lbs., 1981 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Each work is accompanied by new or old text from Burden, shedding light on the piece in various ways; for example, for “Rant,” the artist explains, “An extreme close-up of my face is projected onto a wall, several times larger than life-size. Assuming the persona of a ranting xenophobic preacher, I deliver a short, intense monologue in French.” Also on view are eleven of Burden’s seminal performance-art videos (among them “Shoot,” “Bed Piece,” “Deadman,” and “Fire Roll”); three short films documenting his “Beam Drops,” in which he drops dozens of I-beams vertically into wet cement; and “Tower of Power,” which calls into question the whole nature of the value of art, both as commodity and visual pleasure, by allowing one person at a time to view a pyramid of one hundred gold bars surrounded by matchstick men, guarded by an armed NYPD detective. There’s something fundamentally satisfying about “Extreme Measures,” both on its surface and lurking just beneath it, resulting in a vastly pleasurable, thoroughly unusual museum experience.