this week in art

LILLIPUT

Tomoaki Suzuki’s “Carson” is one of six miniature installations that make up “Lilliput” on the High Line (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The High Line
Gansevoort St. to West Thirtieth St.
Through April 1, free (“Lying Figure” through March 14)
212-381-9349
www.thehighline.org
lilliput slideshow

The High Line has been big news since the first section of the renovated railway opened as a beautiful park in June 2009, and it has been getting bigger ever since, with section 2 having been unveiled in June 2011 and section 3 coming soon. But right now the High Line is also going small, with the art exhibition “Lilliput.” The park, which itself is a kind of urban fantasy world, has taken a page out of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and commissioned six artists from around the world to create miniature works that have been scattered between Gansevoort and West Thirtieth St. Starting at the south end, Italian-born, LA-based artist Alessandro Pessoli’s “Old Singer with Blossoms” is a Giacometti-esque figure with a tiny head wearing a long, knitted cap, serving as a scarecrow among the trees and plants. At West Fourteenth St., Japanese sculptor Tomoaki Suzuki has created “Carson,” a two-foot-tall punk rocker with white hair, dressed in all black, including a New York Dolls T-shirt, standing on the rocks in between the tracks. Just south of Twenty-Third St., New Zealand-born, UK-based Francis Upritchard’s “The Seduction” consists of a pair of small bronze monkeys coming together at the end of the wooden platform overlooking a grassy section. At Twenty-Third St., New York-based Allyson Vieira’s “Construction (Rampart)” is made up of a pyramid of bronze cups piled in a corner, collecting rainwater and debris as the seasons change and the weather affects it. At Twenty-Seventh St., Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti has gone prehistoric with a family of abstract dinosaurs hidden among the sumac and magnolias: “Dino Abacate, Dino Tropical, Dino Pot, and Dino.” And at Thirtieth St., Berlin-based, Austrian-born Oliver Laric has installed the two-faced “Sun Tzu Janus,” evoking war and peace, East and West, beginning and end. As a bonus, the High Line has added its very own Gulliver in the form of UK-born, LA-based Thomas Houseago’s giant, reclining “Lying Figure.” As a whole, “Lilliput” challenges the idea that public sculpture has to be of monumental scale; here, even Houseago’s fifteen-foot-long bronze is not standing tall but stretched out on the ground, nearly hidden by grasses and plants. So part of the fun is finding the works in the first place. “Lying Figure” will remain on view through March 14, while the six miniatures will be up through April 1. The High Line is also currently featuring El Anatsui’s “Broken Bridge II,” Virginia Overton’s “Untitled” piece in the stacked parking lot at Twentieth St., and Spencer Finch’s “The River That Flows Both Ways.”

ARMORY ARTS WEEK 2013

Brooklyn artist Janet Biggs will screen her latest work, A STEP ON THE SUN, at the closing night of the Armory Show, followed by a panel discussion (photo © Janet Biggs)

Armory Arts Week had been getting out of control, with upwards of a dozen different fairs taking place around the city during one crazy weekend. But now the fairs are essentially cut in half, with some scheduled for this week and the rest in May. The centerpiece is the Armory Show at Piers 92 & 94 (March 7-10, $30, run of show $60, dual Volta NY pass $40), which this year will celebrate the centennial of its namesake, the game-changing 1913 Armory Show that introduced modern art to New York. The 2013 edition is broken into two parts, with modern art at Pier 92 and contemporary art at Pier 94, along with a preview party March 6 at MoMA featuring a live performance by Solange Knowles. The Armory Show is once again partnering with Volta NY (March 7-10, $15, dual Armory Show pass $40), which moves to 82Mercer, where it will present more than one hundred solo projects from around the world, including Amy Bennett, Mark Jenkins, Chiho Akama, Patick Lo Guidice, and Regina Scully. The Fountain Art Fair (March 8-10, $10/day, $15 weekend pass) is back at the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington and 25th St., with more than seventy-five exhibitors, including such standard-bearers as the Mighty Tanaka, McCaig + Welles, and the ever-popular Murder Lounge. There will also be a site-specific street art installation curated by Alex Emmart and Robots Will Kill and live performances by Lucas Walters, Musa and Spank Rock, Kamp!, and NSR, and DJ sets by Chances with Wolves and Nina Sky. Meanwhile, Moving Image New York (March 7-10, free) remains in its home in the Waterfront Tunnel at Eleventh Ave. and Twenty-Seventh St., where it will have monitors hanging from the ceiling and other cinematic installations showing videos by Janet Biggs, Cheryl Pope, Tommy Turner, Zhao Zhao, Kota Ezawa, Eva and Franco Mattes, and others.

The special events planned for Armory Arts Week begin on March 5 with Uptown & Museum Mile Day, featuring Harlem Armory Day at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine and a Harlem Biennale “Music in the Air” walking tour led by John T. Reddick. On March 7, Bronx Day & SoHo Night is highlighted by a live spoken-word performance at the Nuyorican Poets Café, an after-hours viewing of Walter De Maria’s “The New York Earth Room” and “The Broken Kilometer,” a presentation of Saya Woolfalk’s “Chimera” at Third Streaming, and Tsipi Ben-Haim and Jessica Diamond’s “Tributes to ‘Kusama: Art Infinity-Net’” at CITYarts, with many SoHo galleries open late. Attention moves to Long Island City on March 8 with performances, workshops, and tours at No Longer Empty’s “How Much Do I Owe You?” in the Clock Tower Building and Andras Borocz live at the “So Real” group show at Radiator Gallery. Chelsea Day and Brooklyn Night on March 9 includes brunch with Tamara K.E. at Johannes Vogt Gallery, a Cut Paste and Sew dialogue with Mia Brownell, Camomile Hixon, Duron Jackson, Jingjing Linn, and Woolfak, ICP curator Christopher Phillips in conversation with Israeli artist Ilit Azoulay at Andrea Meislin, “The World’s First Tumblr Art Symposium” at 319 Scholes Gallery, a silent auction at the Rabbithole, and an installation and performance by Jonathan Schipper at the Boiler. Events conclude Sunday night in the Lower East Side / Downtown with “The Dealer’s Perspective” beginning at Allegra LaViola Gallery, the LES Gallery Stroll, and several art brunches. There will also be special films presented each night at the Armory Show, with some followed by a panel discussion, beginning March 6 at 5:00 with Matthew Day Jackson’s In Search of . . . Zombies, March 7 at 5:00 with Pavel Büchler’s High Noon compilation, March 8 at 3:00 with The Show That Shook the World: Marcel Duchamp and the 1913 Armory Show, March 9 at 5:00 with Liz Magic Laser’s The Armory Show Focus Group, and March 10 at 5:00 with Janet Biggs’s Fade to White and A Step on the Sun.

Al Hamm’s “Untitled . . . Crates” fill the entryway to Scope

Al Hamm’s “Untitled . . . Crates” will fill the entryway to Scope

Over at the Park Avenue Armory, ADAA The Art Show (March 6-10, $25) is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary with more than seventy galleries participating, with such solo exhibitions as Wim Delvoye at Sperone Westwater, Mona Hatoum at Alexander and Bonin, Fred Tomaselli at James Cohan, Thomas Schütte at Peter Freeman, Robert Motherwell at Lillian Heidenberg, Robert Mapplethorpe at Sean Kelly, Sean Scully at Galerie Lelong, Louise Lawler at Metro Pictures, Eadweard Muybridge at Laurence Miller, Jean Arp at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Kiki Smith at Pace, Damien Hirst at Van de Weghe, and Milton Avery at David Zwirner. The Collectors’ Forum consists of a pair of panel discussions entitled “Picturing the Frame: The Art World in the Next Decade,” with Jock Reynolds on Friday at 6:00 and Michael Findlay on Saturday morning at 11:00. The second annual Spring/Break Art Show (March 6-10, $5 suggested donation) will take place in classrooms at the Old School at 233 Mott St., with presentations from such artists and collectives as Jeremy Blake, Jennifer Chan, Grayson Cox, Fall on Your Sword, Ted Gahl, Beka Goedde, Matthew Hassell, Bel Linquist, Rachel Ostrow, and Printed Matter, curated by Marco Antonini, Ted Barrow, Elizabeth Clark, Simon Lee, Patrick Meagher, Aurora Pellizzi, Cecelia Stucker, Maureen Sullivan, Eve Sussman, and others, highlighted by Sussman and Lee’s curation of Car Wash Incident. The New City Art Fair (March 7-10, free) will set up in hpgrp Gallery at 529 West Twentieth St., consisting of works from eleven galleries from Japan in addition to an artists’ studio visit, the opening of a sake barrel, Japanese art food, and more. Also in Chelsea, more than fifty galleries will take part in the Independent (March 7-10, free) at 548 West Twenty-Second St., where the stairway gets crowded as art lovers make their up several floors of creatively and chaotically arranged installations that are generally more cutting edge than what can be found at the other shows. Be sure to get up to the roof, which has been specially designed by Christian Wassmann. But the fair with the best space might just be Scope (March 7-10, $15), which moves into Skylight at Moynihan Station in the 33rd St. post office, where connoisseurs will find shows by more than one hundred international galleries, along with such projects as Ron English’s “Culture Jam Supermarket,” Al Hamm’s “Untitled . . . Crates” entrance, Andrea Stanislav’s “The Vanishing Points,” David Rohn’s performance piece “Contact Walt Whitman,” and Sophie Hirsch’s recycled “Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli.”

THOMAS SCHÜTTE: UNITED ENEMIES

Thomas Schütte carefully watches installation of “United Enemies” at Central Park entrance on March 2 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Scholars’ Gate, Doris C. Freedman Plaza
Central Park entrance, 60th St. & Fifth Ave.
March 5 – August 25
Public Art Fund Talk: Monday, March 4, the New School, 55 West 13th St., $10, 6:30
www.publicartfund.org
united enemies installation slideshow

This weekend, Thomas Schütte’s “United Enemies” was installed on Doris C. Freedman Plaza in front of the Scholars’ Gate entrance to Central Park on Sixtieth St., and the installation itself lent a whole new dynamic to the monumental bronze sculptures. Influenced by political corruption scandals in the Italian government, Schütte has created two pairs of mythical figures bound together forever by tightly knotted rope. These bizarre-looking figures, their faces contorted into impossible forms, resemble twisted versions of Auguste Rodin’s “Monument to Balzac,” their honor long gone. The “United Enemies” series began in the early 1990s when Schütte, who studied with Gerhard Richter at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, started using clay, wood, and wire to compose miniature figures tied together and captured in bell jars. The large-scale statues, which are making their U.S. debut in this presentation of the Public Art Fund, are bold and provocative in their bigger version, calling into question the very nature of celebratory statues and public art. The subjects here don’t seem to enjoy being on display, physically joined to an enemy; imagine a disgraced Republican congressman tied to a dirty Democratic adversary in perpetuity and these are most likely the kinds of faces they’d be making. And they’re not standing on platforms the way most public sculptures are but instead are balancing precipitously on wooden beams that recall the cross. But when the two works were being installed on March 2, with Schütte carefully watching, they took on another dimension. As the works were being lowered into position, the thick cord was wrapped around the necks of three of the men, as if they were being hanged for their crimes; the cord on the fourth man was wound over his mouth, as if he were being censured or had been kidnapped. Schütte will be at the New School on March 4 at 6:30, giving a rare talk that will focus on scale and public sculpture.

FIRST SATURDAY — GRAVITY AND GRACE: MONUMENTAL WORKS BY EL ANATSUI

El Anatsui, “Ozone Layer,” aluminum and copper wire, 2010 (photograph by Andrew McAllister, courtesy of the Akron Art Museum)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, March 2, 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 celebrates the recent opening of “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui,” the first solo museum show by the West African artist who uses recycled material to create dazzling wall pieces, at its March free First Saturday program. (Anatsui’s “Pot of Wisdom” was recently on view at the Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea, and his “Broken Bridge II” can be seen along the High Line through next summer.) There will be African-influenced live performances by the Sway Machinery, Ria Boss, and Zozo Afrobeat; a curator talk on El Anatsui led by Kevin Dumouchelle; a screening of Jareth Merz’s An African Election, which is set in El Anatsui’s native Ghana; pop-up gallery talks honoring the sixth anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art; an artist talk with Fernando Mastrangelo, whose work is featured in “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn”; and interactive collaborative projects including a group photo mosaic and a Brooklyn Kung Fu & Tai Chi Academy workshop.

BROOKLYN / MONTRÉAL: JANET BIGGS / AUDE MOREAU

Aude Moreau’s installation at Smack Mellon contains two tons of refined sugar (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

AUDE MOREAU: SUGAR CARPET
JANET BIGGS: SOMEWHERE BEYOND NOWHERE
Smack Mellon
92 Plymouth St. at Washington St.
Wednesday – Sunday through February 24, free, 12 noon – 6:00
www.smackmellon.org
www.brooklynmontreal.com

This past fall, Brooklyn-based visual artist Janet Biggs showed four of her video works — her Arctic Trilogy, made during an extraordinary trip to the far North, and A Step on the Sun, about a sulfur miner in the Ijen volcano in Indonesia — at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal as part of the “Brooklyn/Montréal” cultural exchange, which involves forty artists and sixteen institutions. In conjunction with that, French-born Montréal installation artist Aude Moreau presented her film of the New York City skyline, Reconstruction. The two have joined forces again for the second part of the exchange, a pair of solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon in DUMBO. Although Biggs’s and Moreau’s pieces reinforce each other so well it seems they might have planned the shows together, actually each artist had no idea what the other was going to do at the Brooklyn gallery. Biggs is very familiar with the area, however; Smack Mellon is just steps from the East River where Biggs staged the impressive Wet Exit for the DUMBO Arts Festival in September 2011. Moreau’s “Sugar Carpet” is a large-scale rectangular Persian rug made from two tons of refined sugar, bordered by an intricate black and red floral design. The piece is installed in the center of the gallery, incorporating eight of Smack Mellon’s structural posts, which pierce into the sides of the sugar, adding to the industrial feel referencing mass production. “Sugar Carpet” also evokes the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, a memorial to a past era, and serves as a splendid introduction, fittingly a white carpet rather than a red one, to the brilliantly bright expanse of Biggs’s latest video.

Janet Biggs fires a flare across a vast white landscape in SOMEWHERE BEYOND NOWHERE (photo courtesy of Janet Biggs)

Somewhere Beyond Nowhere, Biggs’s six-minute, two-channel follow-up to the Arctic Trilogy, which consists of Fade to White, Brightness All Around, and In the Cold Edge, was made during a 2010 art and science expedition aboard a hundred-year-old schooner. Over an electronic score by Will Martina, the camera-shy Biggs, in voice-over, narrates the tale of an early journey gone wrong as she shoots flares across an empty, vast white horizon that immediately makes one think of climate change and the melting of the glaciers. “The act of shooting off a flare became both an aggressive assertion of my presence and a cry for help that implied a condition of emergency,” she explains in an artist statement. “My efforts to either establish power or seek assistance failed as a thousand miles from civilization, I was too far north for anyone to see or respond to my act.” The nearly blinding whiteness of Somewhere Beyond Nowhere echoes that of “Sugar Carpet,” the frozen landscape Biggs walks across providing a stark contrast to the fragility of Moreau’s sugar sculpture, which would be ruined by the trampling of people’s feet. In addition, the pieces work particularly well in tandem during what has been an extremely cold winter, which has featured several powerful snowstorms. Biggs’s and Moreau’s installations continue through February 24; you can also catch Biggs’s In the Cold Edge through March 10 at Present Company as part of the group show “Through This to That,” which also features Biggs’s lightboxes from her Kawah Ijen series. For our 2011 twi-ny talk with Biggs, go here.

FABIO VIALE: STARGATE

Fabio Viale, “Thank you and Goodbye,” detail, white marble, 2012, and “Infinite,” white marble, 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Sperone Westwater
257 Bowery
Tuesday – Saturday through February 23, free
212-999-7337
www.speronewestwater.com
stargate slideshow

A child prodigy, Italian sculptor Fabio Viale has been working in marble since he was sixteen years old. Now thirty-seven, the Cuneo-born Viale is having his first solo show in New York, “Stargate,” a diverse collection of marble works on two floors of Sperone Westwater that are all about juxtaposition and recontextualization, combining the modern world with the art historical. Upon entering the vestibule, visitors are greeted by “Souvenir Gioconda,” a marble casting of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa that appears to be made out of Styrofoam and looking like pieces have been picked off of it. The sculpture is part of Viale’s Souvenir series, which references people’s desire to own great works of art, either in replica, like a souvenir from a gift shop, or by actually taking part of the original, a practice that has become widespread in Italy, with the nose being a particularly favorite target. The gallery’s main space on the first floor contains three statues that form a kind of Pop art trio: “Ahgalla III” is a life-size canoe that Viale has actually taken out on the water; “Stargate” is made up of stacked fruit crates that form a larger crate standing on its side, almost as if a doorway into the commercial world; and “Linea schiacciata” is a twenty-foot-long I-beam that calls into question the very structure of objects. In the back room, bathed in a religious glow, is “Souvenir (Pietá) III,” a gorgeous sculpture of Jesus removed from the arms of his mother, based on Michelangelo’s iconic “Pietá,” instead now spread across a black platform, to be experienced in a completely different way. “I never look back to the past. If you want to run fast, you must never turn around,” the Torino-based Viale tells interviewer Alessandra Galasso in the exhibition catalog. “My main aim is to go beyond tradition. As they are, my sculptures can be interpreted as being academic or nostalgic because they are made of marble, and it is therefore fundamental that I avoid any nostalgic references to the past. For example, when I look at the ‘Pietá,’ I am interested in understanding how Michelangelo managed to achieve certain effects using marble — rather than what this work represents in art history — in order to represent the same semantic values.”

Fabio Viale, “Souvenir (Pietá) III,” white marble, 2006 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The works upstairs continue Viale’s goal of transcending tradition. “Infinite” is a pair of impossibly interlocked white marble Michelin tires cast in great detail. “Anchor” is a fifty-five-inch anchor screw turned into a totem pole. And “Thank you and Goodbye” — made using a computer-controlled robot, while all the other sculptures were made by Viale’s own extremely talented hands — consists of two giant paper bags, one with a pair of eyeholes, the other with a circle for a mouth, on situated on either side of “Infinite,” taking an everyday mundane object and transforming it into something that recalls KKK hoods as well as Klan-like figures found in the work of Philip Guston. A paper bag is also something people use to carry items in, perhaps referencing bags from gift shops where one can buy iconic souvenirs of the Mona Lisa, the “Pietá,” and other classic works of art and take them home, but alas, there are no such objects for sale at Sperone Westwater. “Stargate” is on view through February 23, joined by “A Picture Gallery in the Italian Tradition of the Quadreria (1750 – 1850),” which includes paintings and drawings from the Italian figurative tradition, providing an interesting complement to Viale’s thrilling show.

FELIX DE WELDON: IWO JIMA MONUMENT

Felix de Weldon’s classic Iwo Jima Monument is on view in Midtown prior to Bonhams auction (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

WORLD WAR II: THE PACIFIC THEATER
Bonhams / 590 Atrium
580/590 Madison Ave. at 57th St.
Through February 21, free
Auction begins on February 22 at 1:00 pm
www.bonhams.com
iwo jima monument slideshow

On Friday, February 22, the 281st birthday of the Father of Our Country, a stunning piece of American history is being auctioned off at Bonhams in Midtown. Lot 163, estimated to sell for $1.2-$1.8 million, is the original cast-stone version of Felix de Weldon’s Iwo Jima statue, the sculpture based on the famous Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal on February 23, 1945, of five Marines and one sailor raising the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi after a hard-fought victory on the Japanese island. (Since 2007, the work has been on board the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum.) Part of the “World War II: The Pacific Theater” sale, the five-ton statue, which stands twenty feet high including the flag (twelve feet, two inches without) and is eight feet, one inch long, is the smaller sibling of the statue that resides outside Arlington National Cemetery. Austrian-born American sculptor Felix de Weldon, who served in the navy during WWII and became a U.S. citizen in 1945, sculpted three of the figures from real life, the other three from photos, as they had died in action; the men are Sgt. Michael Strank, Cpl. Harlon Block, PFC Franklin Sousley, PFC Rene Gagnon, PFC Ira Hayes, and PM2 John Bradley. “When I saw the picture of the Iwo Jima flag raising, actually, on the same deadline as the flag raising took place, I was so deeply impressed by its significance, its meaning,” de Weldon told Jerry N. Hess of the Harry S. Truman Library in 1969, “that I imagined that it would arouse the imagination of the American people to show the forward drive, the unison of action, the will to sacrifice, the relentless determination of these young men. Everything was embodied in that picture.” De Weldon captured that same embodiment in his thrilling sculpture, which will spend the next few days on view in the 590 Atrium, amid people having lunch, entrances to various stores, two of Zhan Wang’s shiny silver stainless-steel abstract “Jiashanshi” sculptures, and, oddly enough, several pieces from Bonhams’ March 19 sale, “Fine Japanese Works of Art.”