this week in art

COSMOPOLIS: 49 WALTZES FOR THE WORLD

Roberta Friedman and Daniel Loewenthal follow John Cage’s advice and take a waltz around the world in COSMOPOLIS

A VIDEO INSTALLATION BY ROBERTA FRIEDMAN + DANIEL LOEWENTHAL
Baryshnikov Arts Center, Studios 4A + 4B
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
December 11-15, free, times vary
866-811-4111
www.bacnyc.org

In 1977, avant-garde composer John Cage published the graphic score 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs: For Performer(s) or Listener(s) or Record Maker(s), a map of forty-nine triangles marking locations in New York City where people were encouraged to go to experience, take part in, or record the natural, everyday sounds there. The score also offered the following enticement: “Transcriptions may be made for other cities (or places) by assembling through chance observations a list of 147 addresses and then, also through chance operations, arranging these in 49 groups of three.” Experimental filmmaker Roberta Friedman and documentarian Daniel Loewenthal have done just that to create the video installation Cosmopolis: 49 Waltzes for the World, on view December 11-15 at Baryshnikov Arts Center. Friedman and Loewenthal visited such cities as Cairo, Beijing, Graz, Detroit, and New York, filming street scenes, capturing pure, unadulterated human life, then bringing them all together in an installation designed for BAC by Andrew Matusik that immerses the viewer into multiple cultures, sort of a day in the life of the world. Also on display will be Friedman and Loewenthal’s 49 Waltzes for the Gated City, 49 Waltzes for Graz, 49 Waltzes for the Motor City, the work-in-progress 49 Waltzes for Al-Qahira, and the original 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs. Admission is free, and no advance reservations are required.

GIVEAWAY: SKIP THE LINE TO SEE YAYOI KUSAMA’S “I WHO HAVE ARRIVED IN HEAVEN”

David Zwirner
525 West 19th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through December 21, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm (line stops around 4:00)
212-727-2070
www.davidzwirner.com
infinity room slideshows

No one knows lines like we New Yorkers do. We line up for burgers, advance movie screenings, new sneaker releases, free Shakespeare in the park. When we see a line, our first thought is to find out what it’s for because it might be something really cool. We particularly pride ourselves on getting on lines to see such lofty, high-culture things as art, and the biggest such line these days is for “I Who Have Arrived in Heaven,” Yayoi Kusama’s dazzling exhibition at David Zwirner in Chelsea. (See below to find out how one lucky twi-ny reader and a guest can get a chance to skip the line to see two of Kusama’s spectacular infinity rooms without having to wait.) Kusama’s first show at Zwirner occupies all three spaces of the Nineteenth St. location, consisting of twenty-seven new paintings, two immersive installations, and a video projection. The canvases, all nearly six feet by six feet square, feature a bright, bold color palette laid out in playful, childlike geometric shapes and patterns, with smiling faces and floating eyes, profiles, green landscapes, blue rivers, and obsessive accumulations of small dots, all coming together in ritualistic compositions that are instantly happy-making, which is Kusama’s intent. “As I’m getting closer to death, I’m still full of big hope that we all have the power to spread the love and peace, and I can do so with my work,” the wheelchair-bound Kusama said through a translator at a press conference held at the gallery the day before the opening. “If you can be happy through my artwork, there’s nothing more joyous than that.” Many of the paintings’ titles have that same positive energy, from “Everything About My Love” and “Praying for Peace in the World” to “Brilliance of Life” and “All the Love Overflowing,” bringing much happiness to the viewer.

“Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” wood, metal, glass mirrors, plastic, acrylic panel, rubber, LED lighting system, and acrylic balls, 2013 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Now eighty-four, Kusama lives by choice in a psychiatric facility in Japan, and as she makes clear in the title of the exhibit as well as in some of the names of some of the new works, her ultimate fate awaits. While walking around her tantalizingly gorgeous “Love Is Calling” Mirrored Infinity Room, a wondrous forest of light-up spotted leglike rubber and acrylic objects that change colors, she can be heard reciting, in Japanese, the love poem “Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears,” which begins, “When the time comes around for people to encounter the end of their life / having put on years, death seems to be quietly approaching / It was not supposed to be my style to be frightened, but I am / In the shadows of my loved one’s footprints, distress revisits me at the dead of the night refreshing my memories / Being in love with and longing for you, I have locked myself up in this ‘castle of shed tears.’” The serious words play off the scintillating delight of wandering through the room, which extends ad infinitum in all directions. The exhibit is highlighted by her latest Infinity Room: “The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” which, like “Fireflies on the Water” in her otherwise underwhelming 2012 Whitney retrospective, puts visitors at the center of a vast, unending universe filled with LED lights sparkling on the water and across the galaxies, playing with the mind as it lifts the spirits, evoking life, death, and the afterlife on three physical planes.

“Manhattan Suicide Addict,” still (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Still from “Manhattan Suicide Addict,” video projection and mirrors, 2010-present (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

After waiting as much as three hours or more, visitors are allowed forty-five seconds in “Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” and approximately twice that in “Love Is Calling,” which can fit about eight to ten people at a time. There is no wait to see the paintings or the short music video Manhattan Suicide Addict, in which Kusama sings such lines as “Swallow antidepressants and it will be gone” and “Amidst the agony of flowers, the present never ends,” the single projection being reflected off to the right and the left in an endless succession of Kusamas singing in front of her art. But despite all the mentions of death, “I Who Have Arrived in Heaven” is primarily about life and love, peace and hope, and it is certainly the most happy-making art exhibit in town right now.

SKIP THE LINE! The wait to see “Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” and “Love Is Calling” is currently estimated to be between one and three hours, and it is likely to only grow longer as the exhibition reaches its closing date of December 21. But twi-ny can offer one lucky couple special access to the two remarkable rooms without having to wait on line. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and all-time-favorite Yayoi Kusama work of art to contest@twi-ny.com by Tuesday, December 10, at 5:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; one winner will be selected at random.

FIRST SATURDAY: WANGECHI MUTU

Wangechi Mutu (Kenyan, b. 1972). The End of eating Everything (still), 2013. Animated video, color, sound, 8 min. Courtesy of the artist. Commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. © Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu, still from “The End of eating Everything,” animated video, color, sound, 8 min., 2013 (courtesy of the artist / © Wangechi Mutu)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, December 7, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The December edition of the Brooklyn Museum’s free First Saturdays program takes a look at Brooklyn-based Kenyan visual artist Wangechi Mutu in conjunction with the midcareer survey “Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey.” The evening will include a curator talk by Saisha Grayson on the Mutu show, an arts workshop demonstrating how to make Mutu-inspired collages, pop-up gallery talks, an artist talk by Nigerian-born Njideka Akunyili, a screening of Arthur Jafa and Kahlil Joseph’s 2013 documentary Dreams Are Colder Than Death about being black in America, live music by Pegasus Warning and Rebellum, a spoken-word performance by Saul Williams, and book club readings by Kiini Ibura Salaam and Bridgett M. Davis, followed by a discussion examining their work in the context of Mutu’s art, moderated by Tayari Jones and presented by Bold as Love magazine. In addition, the galleries will be open late, giving visitors plenty of opportunity to check out “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.

SOUND: THE ENCOUNTER, NEW MUSIC FROM IRAN AND SYRIA

Naghib Shanbehzadeh, Basel Rajoub, and Saeid Shanbehzadeh will team up with Kenan Adnawi for “Sound: The Encounter” at Asia Society

NEW SOUNDS FROM IRAN
Asia Society, Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium
725 Park Ave. at 70th St.
Saturday, December 7, $30, 8:00 (free preshow lecture at 7:00)
212-288-6400
www.asiasociety.org

Asia Society will conclude its New Sounds from Iran series on December 7 at 8:00 with “Sound: The Encounter, New Music from Iran and Syria.” Held in conjunction with the Aga Khan Music Initiative and the exhibition “Iran Modern,” which comprises more than one hundred works from twenty-six artists dating from the three decades prior to the 1979 revolution, “Sound” features new compositions and arrangements from Iranian musician and dancer Saied Shanbezadeh (on ney-ban, neyjoti, boogh horns, and voice) and Syrian performer Basel Rajoub (on sax and duclar), joined by Saied’s son Naghib on tombak/zarb and darbuka and Kenan Adnawi on oud. Part of Asia Society’s continuing Creative Voices of Muslim Asia program, the evening will be preceded by a free lecture by Dartmouth music professor Theodore Levin at 7:00.

STEPHEN WESTFALL ON NEIL WELLIVER

Neil Welliver, “Blueberries in Fissures,” oil on canvas, 1983

National Academy Museum
1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Tuesday, November 26, $15, 6:30
212-369-4880
www.nationalacademy.org

The National Academy’s current exhibition, “See It Loud: Seven Post-War American Painters,” on view through January 26, examines a lesser-known group of U.S. artists who, in the years following World War II, walked the fine line between representation and abstraction. “There was very nearly a moral dimension to the opposition between the two aesthetics,” notes senior curator Bruce Weber. The seven artists featured in the exhibition are Leland Bell, Paul Georges, Peter Heinemann, Albert Kresch, Stanley Lewis, Paul Resika, and Neil Welliver. On November 26 at 6:30, Schenectady-born painter, critic, professor, and National Academician Stephen Westfall, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow and winner of a 2009 Rome Prize in the visual arts, will discuss the work of Welliver (1929-2005), whose large-scale landscapes, including the beautifully composed and somewhat dizzying “Blueberries in Fissures,” are a highlight of the show. The talk will be followed by a screening of artist and collector Rudy Burckhardt’s half-hour documentary, Neil Welliver Painting in Maine. (Also in conjunction with the exhibition, Lewis will be teaching the “Working from the Masters” painting class on December 5; tuition is $200.)

THE CONTENDERS 2013: 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)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday, November 26, 8:00
Series continues through January 16
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
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 November 26 at 8:00 as part of MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders” and will be followed by a discussion with Heinzerling. “The Contenders,” which consists of exemplary films that MoMA believes will stand the test of time and continues with such films as Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda, Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, and Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight.

WORKS BY HANNA SCHAICH AND JANET BIGGS

Hanna Schaich’s EVELYN is one of three of her works that will mark her New York debut on November 23

Microscope Gallery
4 Charles Pl. at Myrtle Ave.
Saturday November 23, free (suggested donation $6), 7:00
347-925-1433
www.microscopegallery.com

Earlier this year, Brooklyn-based visual artist Janet Biggs teamed up with French-born Montréal installation artist Aude Moreau on a dual show at Smack Mellon as part of the “Brooklyn/Montréal” cultural exchange. Now Biggs is collaborating with German artist Hanna Schaich on a one-night-only project November 23 at Microscope Gallery in Bushwick. The evening will consist of three short films by Schaich, in her New York debut, and two by Biggs, selected by Schaich, followed by an in-depth conversation. The two works by Biggs, Brightness All Around and In the Cold Edge, were both shot during trips to the Arctic and investigate individual identity amid unique, dangerous environments. “There is clearly a performative side to my work that has to do with me physically and psychologically pushing myself or assuming some kind of risk in order to capture the images and action needed for a piece,” Biggs told us in a 2011 twi-ny talk. “I didn’t realize I was such a thrill seeker until I set out to make this kind of work. This part of my process is compelling enough that I often find myself looking for new challenges, although my exploration of the addictive nature of risky behavior is primarily as a witness to someone else’s action and off-camera.”

Janet Biggs fires a warning shot in the frozen north in her short film IN THE COLD EDGE

Schaich, who was born and raised in Berlin but is now based in Brooklyn as well, will be showing Evelyn, a portrait of an elderly woman going for a swim in a pool; Taking Over, which involves an ice-cream truck and an ice-skating rink; and Falling Into, which also deals with ice skating (and the Central Park Zoo). The latter two films evoke Biggs’s journeys to freezing zones, finding a common language between the filmmakers. “My artistic work focuses on body-related video performances and installations,” Schaich explains in her official artist statement. “My body is my tool in my artwork and takes up a large and important part of my conceptual work. Paradoxical action sequences and storylines, and playing with gender and gender roles, are key to my work.” Schaich and Biggs met earlier this year and have become fast friends, so this should be an intimate, fun, and fascinating evening.