this week in art

MUSEUM DAY LIVE! 2013

Multiple venues
Saturday, September 28
Admission: free for two people with printed ticket
www.smithsonianmag.com/museumday

The ninth annual free museum day, sponsored by Smithsonian magazine, takes place on Saturday, September 28, with institutions all over the country opening their doors to people who have downloaded a free ticket for two from the above website. There’s only one ticket allowed per household/e-mail address, so be careful before filling out the online form; some of the museums are free anyway, either all the time or on Saturdays, while others might be between exhibits so there won’t be all that much to see. The participating venues in the five boroughs include the Asia Society Museum (“Iran Modern”), the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine (“Dog Bless You: The Photography of Mary Bloom”), the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (“Red Grooms’ New York City”), El Museo del Barrio (“La Bienal: Here Is Where We Jump!”), the Fraunces Tavern Museum (“Rating the Attic: A Crowdsourced Exhibit”), the Hispanic Society, Historic Richmond Town, the Jewish Museum (“Chagall: Love, War, and Exile”), the Morgan Library (“Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings”), the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden, the Museum of American Finance (“The Fed at 100”), the Museum of Arts & Design (“Body & Soul: New International Ceramics”), the Museum of Chinese in America (“Shanghai Glamour: New Women 1910s-40s”), the New York City Fire Museum, the Noble Maritime Collection (“Tides of 100 Years”), the Rubin Museum of Art (“Flip Side”), the Skyscraper Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (“Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes”), the Staten Island Museum (“They’re Baaack! Return of the Seventeen-Year Cicadas”), the Ukrainian Museum (“Out of Tradition: Contemporary Decorative and Applied Art”), the U.S. Lighthouse Tender LILAC (“Industrial Waters”), the Van Cortlandt House Museum, the Vilcek Foundation (“Brian Doan: hôme hôme home”), and the Waterfront Museum (“Pollywogs and Shellbacks: Marine Paintings by Frank Hanavan”). Of course, if you pair up with friends and relatives, you can get more tickets for different places.

LAST CHANCE: BILL TRAYLOR

Bill Traylor, “Untitled (Man with Cane on Construction, with Dog),” poster paint, pencil, and colored pencil on cardboard, 1939-42 (Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection)

American Folk Art Museum
2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Ave. at 66th St.
Sunday, September 22, suggested donation $5, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
212-595-9533
www.folkartmuseum.org

Today is the last day to see a pair of splendid exhibitions on self-taught superstar Bill Traylor at the American Folk Art Museum. “Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts” and “Traylor in Motion: Wonders from New York Collections” together feature more than one hundred works by Traylor, who was born into slavery on an Alabama plantation in the mid-1850s, where he continued to work after being freed. The drawings date from 1939 to 1942, when he began looking back at his life after moving to Montgomery. He developed a unique visual style involving dark silhouetted figures on cardboard, with occasional blues and reds, that form a kind of memory dance of the black experience in America. They are both charming and frightening, evoking today a kind of mix of Jacob Lawrence and Kara Walker. Seeing so many of Traylor’s works filling the walls at the museum immerses you in his fascinating artistic world, which included between 1,200 and 1,500 drawings made in that whirlwind three-year period. Traylor died in 1949, but his reputation as a fine artist continues to grow, as ably shown by these two exemplary exhibitions.

WHO IS JACK GOLDSTEIN?

Jack Goldstein, A BALLET SHOE, 16mm film, color, silent, 1975 (Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne and the Estate of Jack Goldstein)

The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Sunday, September 22, $12, 12:30 – 4:30
Exhibition continues Thursday – Tuesday through September 29, $15 (free admission Saturday 11:00 am – 5:45 pm, pay-what-you-wish Thursday 5:00 – 8:00)
212-423-3200
www.thejewishmuseum.org
www.jackgoldstein-artist.com

In 1973, multimedia artist Jack Goldstein made the short film Jack, in which he, as cameraman, backs away from a man in a desolate landscape who repeatedly calls out, “Jack,” over and over and over again as he fades into the distance. It’s a critical piece in the first American museum retrospective of Goldstein’s work, “Jack Goldstein x 10,000,” which continues through September 29 at the Jewish Museum. The self-destructive Goldstein was known for disappearing during the course of his career, both in his art and in his life, and the Jewish Museum has been examining the iconoclastic figure in a series of programs that have included the exhibition walk-through “What Is Jack Goldstein?” and the panel discussions “Where Is Jack Goldstein?” and “How Is Jack Goldstein?” The museum has saved the best for last, as the final program takes place on September 22, the afternoon symposium “Who Is Jack Goldstein?,” which features a prestigious collection of artists and historians talking about Goldstein’s influence and legacy: Morgan Fisher, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Troy Brauntuch, Kathryn Andrews, and Paul Pfeiffer, moderated by Julia Robinson and Claire Bishop. The exhibition itself comprises many of Goldstein’s films in addition to sculpture, sound installations, paintings, and writings. The works display Goldstein’s unique mix of wit and anxiety: In the eight-minute video A Spotlight, Goldstein runs around a room trying to avoid a spotlight, while in the “Burning Window” installation, flickering candles make it seem like a fire is raging behind a window, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Jack Goldstein, “Untitled,” acrylic on canvas, 1981 (collection Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond J. Learsy)

Goldstein strips things down to their bare elements in such shorts as Shane, in which a German shepherd barks for three minutes, and A Ballet Shoe, in which two hands tie a ballet shoe on a ballerina’s foot. A series of instructions explains how others can stage some of Goldstein’s performances and installations, once again adding to his theme of the artist’s disappearance. In the mid-to-late-1980s, Goldstein, a heroin addict who was born in Canada in 1945 and spent time in New York before moving to California, where he studied with John Baldessari and became associated with the Pictures Generation, created colorful abstract canvases using appropriated images, the works melding science, computer technology, and psychedelia. The exhibit ends with extracts from Goldstein’s writing — influenced by his penchant for reading philosophy books backward — in which he experimented with new word-processing techniques and repurposed words from other writers in order to form his own personal narrative. In a 1985 interview with the Tate’s Chris Dercon, Goldstein, who hanged himself in his backyard in 2003 at the age of fifty-eight, said, “You wake up in the morning and look at yourself and go, ‘Who is that?’ and ‘What is that?’ and ‘What do you call it?’ and ‘What’s my name?,’” later adding, “My name, it’s the name of a name. It’s not my name. . . . Imagine, if you look in the telephone book, there must be ten thousand Jack Goldsteins.” This revealing survey goes a long way toward establishing just who this Jack Goldstein is, although all of the mysteries are likely never to be solved.

JAMES TURRELL

James Turrell’s “Aten Reign” bathes the Guggenheim in meditative colored light display (photo by David Heald / © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through September 25, $18-$22 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

During the last few years, the Guggenheim has staged several exhibitions in which the bays that line the winding interior have remained empty. In 2010, Tino Sehgal had trained men and women speak with visitors making their way to the top, with no physical art present at all. In 2011, Maurizio Cattelan’s career retrospective, “All,” consisted of an amalgamation of his works hung from the ceiling like a massive mobile, with nothing in the bays. Now James Turrell has created the site-specific “Aten Reign,” a dazzling, meditative spectacle in which five rings of light that echo the museum’s shape, beginning at the oculus at the top of the rotunda, slowly change colors in mystifying and intoxicating ways. Visitors have access only to the main floor and the first section of the spiraling ramp, with special arched benches at the bottom for more comfortable viewing, but make sure to walk around, as the display, which explores light, space, and perception, seemingly shifts form ever so slightly when seen from different positions and angles, affected by the natural daylight as well. Constructed with interlocking cones and LED fixtures, “Aten Reign” is like one of Turrell’s Skyscapes (such as his open-air “Meeting” at MoMA PS1) mixed with more subdued elements of the psychedelic Joshua Light Show while incorporating the Gazfeld effect. “I really felt to be using light as a material [is] to work or affect the medium of perception,” the L.A.-born Turrell explains in a promotional video. “For me, it’s trying to orient toward what the perception really is, rather than the object of perception, to actually, sort of, remove that. I have an art that has no image. It has no object. And even very little a place of focus, or one place to look. So, without image, without object, without specific focus, what do you have left? Well, a lot of it is this idea of seeing yourself see, understanding how we perceive.” The overall individual, hallucinatory experience grows the more you immerse yourself in its splendor, allowing it to take you to other places in your mind, body, and spirit. Take your time and let it envelop you, not worrying about anything else anywhere in the world.

James Turrell, “Afrum I (White),” projected light, 1967 (photo by David Heald / © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)

The show is supplemented with several rooms of other works, including a series of white-light pieces from the late 1960s that play with physical space and altered reality; “Prado (White)” appears to be a rectangular hole in the wall, “Afrum I (White)” looks like a floating cube, and the vertical “Ronin” has a special trick to it. Expect a ridiculously long line to see 1976’s “Iltar,” a mysterious wall piece that you’re not allowed to get too close to; don’t ask the guard what it actually is, because he’s not allowed to tell you. The Guggenheim is also screening a pair of short exhibition-related films, David Howe’s James Turrell, Second Meeting Art21 Exclusive and Peter Vogt and Erin Wright’s James Turrell’s Roden Crater, which examine other works by the artist; on September 20 they will be joined by Carine Asscher’s Passageways: James Turrell. Also on September 20, the afternoon symposium “James Turrell: Sensing Space” will feature presentations by Thomas Crow, Miwon Kwon, and Mark Taylor and a panel discussion moderated by exhibition co-curator Nat Trotman. Expect extended wait times for the last week of the much-talked-about show, which closes September 25, but it’s well worth it.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF ORDER: THE ICP TRIENNIAL

Gideon Mendel, “Shopkeeper Suparat Taddee, Chumchon Ruamjai Community, Bangkok, Thailand,” chromogenic print, November 2011 (photo courtesy the artist)

International Center of Photography
1133 Sixth Ave. at 43rd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 22, $10-$14 (pay what you wish Fridays 5:00 – 8:00)
www.icp.org

For the International Center of Photography’s fourth triennial, curators Kristen Lubben, Christopher Phillips, Carol Squiers, and Joanna Lehan have organized “A Different Kind of Order,” a powerful survey of sociopolitical and environmentally conscious work from around the world with a focus on digital technology and manipulation and the widespread reuse of internet images. In “Touch Parade,” A. K. Burns re-creates five odd fetish videos she found on YouTube. Mishka Henner’s “Dutch Landscapes” series at first appear to be aerial shots of the countryside overlaid with abstract splotches but turn out to be actual Google images that the Dutch government has censored. Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Touching Reality” video depicts a hand scrolling through photos of victims of war, from bloody corpses to bodies missing limbs, occasionally stopping to pinch the shot into close-up, not usually the kind of images people look at on their phones. Gideon Mendel’s “Drowning World” photos and video (in the gallery as well as in a window display) show people in communities that have been devastated by massive flooding, as men, women, and children, each of whom she specifically identifies, wade through environmental calamities in England, India, Nigeria, Thailand, and other locations.

Mishka Henner, “Unknown Site, Noordwijk aan Zee, South Holland,” from the series “Dutch Landscapes,” archival inkjet print, 2011 (photo courtesy the artist)

For his “Blow Up” project, Rabih Mroué narrates frightening scenes of Syrians risking their lives taking camera-phone pictures of the military firing on its citizens, and them, found images that might or might not be real. Mikhael Subotzky captures contemporary Johannesburg in a trio of lightboxes (“Windows,” “Doors,” “Televisions”) that examines the psyche of the city that reveal what is going on in each room of the fifty-four-floor Ponte City building, which Subotzky and collaborator Patrick Waterhouse explain “has always been a place of myth, illusion, and aspiration. Sohei Nishino creates maps of New York and Jerusalem by combining thousands of photographs he takes while making his way through those cities. Meanwhile, Lucas Foglia’s photographs of people living off the land harken back to a time pre-internet. The exhibition also includes intriguing works by Luis Molina-Pantin, Andrea Longacre-White, Oliver Laric, Elliott Hundley, Jim Goldberg, Wangechi Mutu, Trevor Paglen, Walid Raad, and others that explore the nature of images — both how they are made and how they are viewed — in a technology-obsessed world.

ART SEEN / LOCAL COLOR: CUTIE AND THE BOXER

Documentary tells the engaging story of a pair of Japanese artists and the life they have made for themselves in Brooklyn

CUTIE AND THE BOXER (Zachary Heinzerling, 2013)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Thursday, September 19, 7:30
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com
www.facebook.com/cutieandtheboxer

Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer is a beautifully told story of love and art and the many sacrifices one must make to try to succeed in both. In 1969, controversial Japanese Neo Dada action painter and sculptor Ushio Shinohara came to New York City, looking to expand his career. According to the catalog for the recent MoMA show “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde,” which featured four works by Ushio, “American art had seemed to him to be ‘marching toward the glorious prairie of the rainbow and oasis of the future, carrying all the world’s expectations of modern painting.’” Four years later, he met nineteen-year-old Noriko, who had left Japan to become an artist in New York as well. The two fell in love and have been together ever since, immersed in a fascinating relationship that Heinzerling explores over a five-year period in his splendid feature-length theatrical debut. Ushio and Noriko live in a cramped apartment and studio in DUMBO, where he puts on boxing gloves, dips them in paint, and pounds away at large, rectangular canvases and builds oversized motorcycle sculptures out of found materials. Meanwhile, Noriko, who has spent most of the last forty years taking care of her often childlike husband and staying with him through some rowdy times and battles with the bottle, is finally creating her own work, an R. Crumb-like series of drawings detailing the life of her alter ego, Cutie, and her often cruel husband, Bullie. (“Ushi” means “bull” in Japanese.) While Ushio is more forthcoming verbally in the film, mugging for the camera and speaking his mind, the pig-tailed Noriko is far more tentative, so director and cinematographer Heinzerling brings her tale to life by animating her work, her characters jumping off the page to show Cutie’s constant frustration with Bullie.

Ushio Shinohara creates one of his action paintings in CUTIE AND THE BOXER

During the course of the too-short eighty-two-minute film — it would have been great to spend even more time with these unique and compelling figures — the audience is introduced to the couple’s forty-year-old son, who has some issues of his own; Guggenheim senior curator of Asian Art Alexandra Munroe, who stops by the studio to consider purchasing one of Ushio’s boxing paintings for the museum; and Chelsea gallery owner Ethan Cohen, who represents Ushio. But things never quite take off for Ushio, who seems to always be right on the cusp of making it. Instead, the couple struggles to pay their rent. One of the funniest, yet somehow tragic, scenes in the film involves Ushio packing up some of his sculptures — forcing them into a suitcase like clothing — and heading back to Japan to try to sell some pieces. Cutie and the Boxer is a special documentary that gets to the heart of the creative process as it applies both to art and love, focusing on two disparate people who have made a strange yet thoroughly charming life for themselves. Cutie and the Boxer is screening September 19 at 7:30 as part of two Nitehawk Cinema monthly series, “Art Seen” and “Local Color,” and will be followed by a Q&A with the director. “Art Seen” continues September 21-22 with Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Ben Rivers’s Slow Action, while “Local Color” returns October 30 with Amy Nicholson’s Zipper.

FIAF FALL FSTVL: CROSSING THE LINE

Eliane Radigue and Xavier Veilhan’s SYSTEMA OCCAM kicks off FIAF’s seventh annual Crossing the Line festival

French Institute Alliance Française and other locations
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Le Skyroom and FIAF Gallery, 22 East 60th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
September 19 – October 13, free – $30
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

Curators Lili Chopra, Simon Dove, and Gideon Lester have once again put together an impressive, wide-ranging program for the Crossing the Line festival, now in its seventh year. Sponsored by the French Institute Alliance Française and taking place there as well as at other venues around the city, CTL features cutting-edge art, dance, music, theater, discussion, and more from an international collection of multidisciplinary performers, with many events free and nothing costing more than $30. The twenty-five-day festival begins September 19 with electronic music composer Eliane Radigue and artist Xavier Veilhan collaborating on Systema Occam (Florence Gould Hall, $30), a multimedia performance installation that is part of CTL’s “New Settings” series, a joint venture with Hermès; the fashion company will be hosting Martine Fougeron’s “Teen Tribe” photo exhibition at the Gallery at Hermès from September 20 to November 8. In Capitalism Works for Me! True/False (September 20, October 6-9, free), Steve Lambert will keep score in Times Square as people vote on whether capitalism indeed works for them. The award-winning Nature Theater of Oklahoma presents episodes 4.5 and 5 at FIAF of their massive undertaking, Life and Times (September 20-21, $30), accompanied by the FIAF Gallery show “10fps,” consisting of 1,343 hand-colored drawings (September 21 – November 2, free). For “The Library,” Fanny de Chaillé invites people to FIAF’s Haskell Library on September 24 and 26 and the NYPL’s Jefferson Market Branch on September 27 (free), where they can choose books that are actually men and women who will share their stories verbally one on one.

Boyzie Cekwana and Panaibra Canda look at postcolonial Africa in THE INKOMATI (DIS)CORD

In The Inkomati (dis)cord (September 25-26, New York Live Arts, $20), Boyzie Cekwana and Panaibra Canda use contemporary dance to examine postcolonial Africa. De Chaillé teams up with Philippe Ramette for Passage à l’acte / Acting Out (September 26-28, Invisible Dog, $30), using absurdist human sculpture to “rationalize the irrational.” Dancer and choreographer Nora Chipaumire will perform the CTL-commissioned solo piece rite riot (October 3-5, Le Skyroom, $30), exploring African stereotypes, collaborating with writer Teju Cole and visual artist Wangechi Mutu. Pascal Rembert’s large-scale A (micro) history of world economics, danced (October 11-13, La MaMa, $20) features New Yorkers discussing how the financial crisis impacted their lives. The festival also includes works by Annie Dorsen, Ernesto Pujol and Carol Becker, Bouchra Ouizguen, Tim Etchells, and Kyle deCamp and Joshua Thorson, in addition to a series of talks and conversations.