this week in art

ANN HAMILTON: THE EVENT OF A THREAD

Ann Hamilton’s interactive “the event of a thread” spreads across the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at Park Avenue Armory (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 6, $12
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
the event of a thread slideshow

First and foremost, Ohio-born visual artist Ann Hamilton’s “the event of a thread” at Park Avenue Armory is fun, fun, fun. Visitors get to push each other on wooden swings that hang seventy feet from the ceiling of the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the movements manipulating an enormous white cloth that dances with the manufactured wind, rising and falling like ocean waves and drifting like clouds, especially when viewed from below, lying on the floor underneath it. But there’s much more to this interactive site-specific commission, curator Kristy Edmunds’s final contribution as the institution’s artistic director. (Edmunds has played a major role in transforming the armory into one of the city’s most exciting spaces for experimental public art.) Hamilton’s multisensory shared experience is about warp and weft, speaking and listening, reading and writing, voice and gesture, music and memory; it’s about interdependence and multiple meanings; it’s about community, connection, crossing, concordance, and communication; and it’s about flying home. Hamilton weaves a different kind of social media web with “the event of a thread,” bringing people physically together to work as a unit to effect change. At the entrance to the hall, two members of Anne Bogart’s SITI Company, wearing bulky animal-hair coats, are seated at a table, reading carefully organized texts by Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aristotle, Susan Stewart, Ann Lauterbach, and others; their voices are broadcast via paper-bag radios scattered throughout the room (which visitors are encouraged to pick up and listen to). Also on the table are dozens of pigeons in small cages, waiting to be released at the end of the day so they can fly home to their roost as a performer sings. At the far end of the hall, a lone woman sits at a second table, writing letters with a pencil while watching the activities going on behind her via a mirror.

One of two readers recites from a concordance scroll as part of Ann Hamilton’s multisensory “the event of a thread” at Park Avenue Armory (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Taking her title from the Encyclopaedia Brittanica article “Weaving, Hand” written by textile artist Anni Albers (wife of Josef Albers), Hamilton explores the nature of crossings, beginning with cross stitching. In an essay in the must-read newspaper that accompanies the project, Hamilton writes that “‘the event of a thread’ is made of many crossings of the near at hand and the far away: it is a body crossing space, is a writer’s hand crossing a sheet of paper, is a voice crossing a room in a paper bag, is a reader crossing with a page and with another reader, is listening crossing with speaking, is an inscription crossing a transmission, is a stylus crossing a groove, is a song crossing species, is the weightlessness of suspension crossing the calling of bell or bellows, is touch being touched in return. It is a flock of birds and a field of swings in motion. It is a particular point in space at an instant of time.” The work takes on yet another crossing when viewed from above; the armory usually does not allow visitors on the upper balcony level, but for “the event of a thread” people can walk up the stairs and stand parallel to the huge sheet, watching the intense pulley system lift and lower it in a thrilling marionette-like dance, comparing the men, women, and children on the swings, who are actually making the cloth move, to the unseen hand of a supreme being. With “the event of a thread,” Hamilton has created an awesome spectacle, a complex combination of elements that can be enjoyed in multiple ways.

DÜRER TO DE KOONING: 100 MASTER DRAWINGS FROM MUNICH

Jacopo Pontormo, “Two Standing Women,” light and dark red chalk, stumped, after 1530? (courtesy of Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Münich)

Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 6, $10-$15 (free Friday 7:00 – 9:00)
212-685-0008
www.themorgan.org

For the 250th anniversary of Munich’s Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in 2008, the Morgan Library sent over one hundred drawings for a special show. The German museum, which has never before lent works to an American institution for a single exhibition, has now returned the favor, sending across the pond one hundred master drawings from its extensive collection. Divided into two galleries by chronology, “Dürer to de Kooning: 100 Master Drawings from Munich” is a treasure trove of exceptional pieces, many by artists rarely seen in the Morgan. The first gallery features works from Italy, Germany, Holland, and France, dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, including Jacopo Pontormo’s red chalk “Two Standing Women,” Rembrandt’s “Saskia Lying in Bed, a Woman Sitting at Her Feet,” and Albrecht Dürer’s “Portrait of Kaspar Nützel,” in addition to sheets by Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Michelangelo, and Friedrich. The modern gallery is highlighted by drawings from an unusually wide range of artists not often displayed together in the same room, from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Nude Girl in Interior” and Arnulf Rainer’s “Adalbert Stifter (Death Mask)” to Willem de Kooning’s “Standing Man” and Georg Baselitz’s “Duck Pond,” as well as works by Bruce Nauman, Franz Marc, David Hockney, Sigmar Polke, Jean Dubuffet, Max Beckmann, Larry Rivers, Georg Baselitz, Emil Nolde, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, and Vincent van Gogh. Also on view at the Morgan right now are “Fantasy and Invention: Rosso Fiorentino and Sixteenth-Century Florentine Drawing,” “Beatrix Potter: The Picture Letters,” and “Happy Holidays from the Morgan!,” consisting of Charles Dickens’s original manuscript of A Christmas Carol, Truman Capote’s handwritten “A Christmas Vacation,” a letter from George Washington written at Valley Forge on Christmas Day, 1777, and other seasonal paraphernalia.

SILVER WIND: THE ARTS OF SAKAI HŌITSU (1761–1828)

Sakai Hōitsu, “Cranes,” two-panel folding screen, ink and colors on paper, circa 1820 (courtesy the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 6, $15 (free Friday from 6:00 to 9:00)
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Born in Edo to an aristocratic samurai family and trained in Kyoto, Sakai Hōitsu became a master artist specializing in gorgeous depictions of nature, particularly birds, plants, waves, and flowers, often painted on gold-leaf backgrounds. Dozens of his dramatic works are on view in the sumptuous “Silver Wind: The Arts of Sakai Hōitsu (1761–1828),” continuing at Japan Society through January 6. This first major American retrospective of Hōitsu, who was also a poet and became a Buddhist monk in 1797, follows his development as a student of the Rimpa school, copying and/or inspired by works by brothers Ogata Kōrin and Ogata Kenzan, and concludes with paintings by Hōitsu’s own pupil, the supremely talented Suzuki Kiitsu. In the two-panel folding screen “Cranes,” Hōitsu portrays five cranes on a gold landscape cut in half horizontally by a winding black river; the detail in the birds’ eyes and feet is dazzling. “Spring and Autumn,” a pair of two-panel screens, and “Maples and Cherry Trees,” two six-panel screens, come alive with spectacular colors so vibrant you can practically smell the grass and flowers spread across them. “Views of Xiao and Xiang” is much subtler, a peaceful purple-gray scene with emptiness leading to the titular Chinese mountains in the background. In the hanging scroll “The Poet Hitamaro,” Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, one of the Thirty-Six Immortal Poets, is shown sitting cross-legged on the right, gently smiling at a forest on the left. The last room dedicated to Hōitsu is the stunning “Birds and Flowers of the Twelve Months,” as he lyrically depicts the changing seasons with grace and beauty, featuring such birds as the white camellia, the Siberian blue robin, the warbler, and the sparrow. The exhibition ends with the work of his primary disciple, Kiitsu, whose lush style predicts the popularity of Japanese manga as a method of visual storytelling. “Silver Wind” is a breathtaking exhibition that holds that much more power as the year finishes up with dreary gray days filled with dank cold and rain.

AGAINST THE SPECIALIST: CONTEMPORARY REFERENCES TO ARNOLD SCHOENBERG IN IMAGE AND SOUND

Robert Howsare, “Drawing Apparatus,” turntables, wood, binding posts, ink, and paper, 2012 (photo courtesy of the artist)

Austrian Cultural Forum
11 East 52nd St. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Daily through January 6, free, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
212-319-5300
www.acfny.org

In 2003-4, the Jewish Museum hosted the revelatory exhibition “Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider,” which, among others, cast legendary Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) as a multidisciplinary experimental artist and theoretician. His work and philosophy have had a profound impact on several generations, including the artists featured in the splendid exhibit “Against the Specialist: Contemporary References to Arnold Schoenberg in Image and Sound,” continuing at the Austrian Cultural Forum through January 6. The show is accompanied by a free newspaper filled with quotes from the eminently quotable Schoenberg, including this beauty: “That which is new and unusual about a new harmony occurs to the true composer only for such reasons: he must give expression to something that moves him, something new, something previously unheard-of. His successors, who continue working with it, think of it as merely a new sound, a technical device; but it is far more than that: a new sound is a symbol, discovered involuntarily, a symbol proclaiming the new man who so asserts his individuality.”

“Against the Specialist” features numerous works by contemporary artists that combine sound and image in ways directly an indirectly referencing Schoenberg, who wrote in 1940, “I am opposed to the specialist.” Robert Howsare’s “Drawing Apparatus” features pieces of wood connected at one end to two spinning records and the other to a pen that creates a colorful drawing based on movement. The duo known as Depart (Leonhard Lass and Gregor Ladenhauf) have created the two-channel video installation “Cloud Chamber Diaries,” in which the viewer stands between two vertical monitors that are almost but not quite mirror images of themselves, as a scientist in a painted face attempts to make and control cloud formations (inspired by Schoenberg’s “War-Clouds Diary”). Kurt Kren’s “11/65 Bild Helga Philipp” is a silent black-and-white video that plays with optical illusions from an Op art work by Helga Philipp, while “Vergence Framed” combines colorful projections by Tina Frank with experimental sound by Florian Hecker. Rainer Kohlberger’s video “Col” uses deliberate randomness in creating an endless visual loop based on Schoenberg’s “Five Pieces for Orchestra Op. 16.” And in the lower level, Gerald Moser’s immersive “a question of space — a time to question” consists of light projections on ten thousand square feet of nylon string hanging from the ceiling in the darkness, as an eerie soundtrack plays; visitors are encouraged to carefully walk through the installation and lie down on the floor, where the images both comfort and energize, at times making it feel as if you’ve just shifted into warp speed and are roaming through space. “Nothing in culture is definitive; everything is just a preparation for a higher stage of development,” Schoenberg wrote, “for a future which at the moment can only be imagined, conjectured.” Some of the imagined, conjectured future, influenced by one of the world’s most eclectic and influential composers, can be found at the Austrian Cultural Forum as another new year arrives.

QUAY BROTHERS: ON DECIPHERING THE PHARMACIST’S PRESCRIPTION FOR LIP-READING PUPPETS

Career retrospective offers a dazzling look into the surreal world of the Brothers Quay (still from STREET OF CROCODILES, 1986)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday–Monday through January 7
Museum admission: $22.50 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

When MoMA Film associate curator Ron Magliozzi first approached twins Stephen and Timothy Quay about putting together a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the brothers weren’t sure why people would be interested in delving into their history and working process, but they opened their London studio to Magliozzi and helped design the appropriately strange and wonderful exhibit “On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets.” Similar in concept to the “Tim Burton” blockbuster a few years back, the Quay Brothers show is filled with paintings and drawings, film and video, early self-portraiture, photographs, collages, book and album covers, etchings, engravings, commercials, and other fascinating paraphernalia associated with their rather eclectic career, spread across several floors. Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1947 to a machinist father and homemaker mother, the Quays were heavily influenced by illustrator and naturalist Rudolf Freund, whom they met in the late 1960s; Polish poster art from the 1960s, which they saw in a 1967 exhibition at the Philadelphia College of Art; and avant-garde, experimental shorts by Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk.

Quay Brothers, detail, “O Inevitable Fatum, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, décor,” wood, fabric, glass, metal, 1987 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The MoMA show is set up like a labyrinth, with treats around every corner, from oil snowscapes done when the brothers were still in single digits to short films made when they were in school, from the creepy Black Drawings of the mid-1970s and stage designs for opera, theater, and dance by Béla Bartók, Eugene Ionesco, Molière, Sergei Prokofiev, Georges Feydeau, E. T. A. Hoffman, and others to their British television documentaries, made with longtime producer Keith Griffiths and including the absolutely insane documentary Igor, the Paris Years Chez Pleyel, in which paper cut-outs of Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, and Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky hang out and do rather odd things in Paris. All of these works lend intrigue and insight to the primary sections of the exhibition, dedicated to the marvelous short films the Quays are renowned for, dark, dazzling stop-motion animations with puppets that relate mesmerizing tales set in a mysterious world of dreams and nightmares that delve into the subconscious. The Quay Brothers’ breakthrough came in 1986 with Street of Crocodiles, adapted from a Bruno Schulz short story, starring eyeless puppets with open heads and taking place in a Kinetoscope, featuring themes and elements that appear in many of their films, including machines, thread, scissors, repetitive movement, screws, bones, metal shavings, and aching, experimental music. Getting its own room, the film is followed by a two-minute outtake that has never been shown before. Among the many other classic Brothers Quay shorts on view in the galleries are In Absentia, The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, The Sandman, and the dazzling color films This Unnameable Little Broom and The Comb (from the Museums of Sleep). Downstairs outside the Titus Theaters is “Dormitorium,” a terrific collection, previously seen at Parsons the New School for Design in 2009, of film décors, glass-enclosed sets from many of the above-mentioned films as well as many others. And on the first floor by the up escalator you can find “Coffin of a Servant’s Journey,” a short film inside a coffin that can be watched by only one person at a time.

Quay Brothers, “Quay Brothers self-portrait,” photographic enlargement (Atelier Koninck QbfZ)

“On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets” is a magical trip inside the bizarre, surreal world of the Quay Brothers, an exhibition that was a long time coming and has been handled splendidly. It’s also an exhibition that requires a lot of time to be properly enjoyed, so don’t rush through it or you’ll miss so many of its myriad hidden treasures. And as far as the title itself goes, we’ll leave that to the Quays to describe themselves, as they do in the catalog in a faux interview with sixteenth-century composer Heinrich Holtzmüller: “In our mind it’s more of a teasing inducement for a journey. Not a grand journey but a tiny one . . . around the circumference of an apple. We’re no doubt gently abusing the anticipation that the prescriptive side is courting both a rational illegibility as well as an irrational legibility. Hopefully the intrigued will engage with the ambiguity. And besides, the prescription is only mildly inscrutable and one certainly won’t die from it, considering that thousands of people a year reportedly die from misread prescriptions.” You were expecting anything different?

(MoMA will be screening the Quay Brothers’ latest full-length film, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, on January 6-7 in Titus Theater 1, with a live musical score performed by Mikhail Rudy. Also on January 7, “The Essential Shorts, Part 2” will screen six shorts in the Education and Research Building, including Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, Nocturna Artificialia, Ex Voto, This Unnameable Little Broom: Epic of Gilgamesh, Maska, and Bartók Béla: Sonata for Solo Violin.)

THE CLOCK

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday–Monday through January 21
Museum admission: $25 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In 2010, the Whitney presented “Festival,” a thrilling interactive retrospective of the work of Christian Marclay, featuring multiple site-specific installations and live performances. The New York-based multidisciplinary artist followed that up with a supreme work of utter brilliance, the captivating twenty-four-hour video The Clock, which was initially shown at Chelsea’s Paula Cooper Gallery in early 2011 and reprised at the David Rubenstein Atrium as part of the Lincoln Center Festival this past summer. The sensational examination of time is now back for another run in the city, at MoMA through January 21. Screened in a large, dark gallery with three rows of roomy, comfortable couches in the Contemporary Galleries on the second floor, the film unfolds in real time, composed of thousands of clips from movies and television that feature all kinds of clocks and watches showing the minutes ticking away, as well as verbal mentions of the time. Masterfully edited so that it creates its own fluid narrative, The Clock seamlessly cuts from romantic comedies with birds emerging from cuckoo clocks to action films in which protagonists synchronize their watches, from thrillers with characters battling it out in clock towers to dramas with convicted murderers facing execution and sci-fi programs with mad masterminds attempting to freeze time. Marclay mixes in iconic images with excerpts from little-known foreign works, so audiences are kept on the edge of their seats, wondering what will come next, laughing knowingly at recognizable scenes and gawking at strange, unfamiliar bits.

A MoMA visitor wonders just how much longer he’ll have to wait to get in to see Christian Marclay’s THE CLOCK (© Christian Marclay)

Part of the beauty of The Clock is that while time is often central to many of the clips, it is merely incidental in others, someone casually checking their watch or a clock visible in the background, emphasizing how pervasive time is — both on-screen and in real life. Americans spend an enormous amount of time watching movies and television, so The Clock is also a wry though loving commentary on what we choose to do with our leisure time. Although it is not necessarily meant to be viewed in one massive gulp, The Clock will be shown in its entirety January 4-6, 11-14, and 18-20, beginning at 10:30 am Friday and continuing through 5:30 Sunday. Since the film corresponds to the actual time, midnight should offer some fascinating moments, although you might be surprised by just how exciting even three o’clock in the morning can be. But expect huge crowds whenever you go — capacity is 170 (130 sitting, 40 standing, first-come, first-served, and you can stay as long as you want) — so be prepared to do something with all that valuable time spent on line. But wait you should — it’s well worth every second.

CHRISTINA MAZZALUPO — PROGNOSIS: DOOM

Christina Mazzalupo plans for the end of the world in apocalyptic exhibit in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Mixed Greens
531 West 26th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through January 5, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-331-8888
www.mixedgreens.com
www.christinamazzalupo.com

If you’re reading this, then most likely the world did not come to an end on December 21, 2012, as supposedly predicted by the end of the ancient Mayan calendar. That would merely be the latest in what has been a long line of individuals and organizations wrongly proclaiming that the end is here. New York–based artist Christina Mazzalupo has compiled an extensive collection of these prophets of the apocalypse throughout history in her latest solo exhibition at Mixed Greens, “Prognosis: Doom.” The rather obsessive Mazzalupo has created wall boxes filled with toe tags detailing in tiny lettering and pictures such purveyors of doom as Cotton Mather, Helena Blavatsky, Edgar Cayce, the Amazing Criswell, Jim Jones, and John Wesley, along with such potential methods of destruction as asteroids, famine, plague, alien invasion, bioterrorism, and global warming. In one corner she has drawn the site-specific mural “And the Sea Was No More: Dependent and Independent Variables,” listing several things that might help one survive the apocalypse, from glowsticks, burn cream, and duct tape to fiskars, armor, and bio-transport modules. She also examines news reports that exaggerate and sensationalize events and includes a pair of videos, one in which she visits a Brooklyn mother who has turned her basement into an extremely well stocked fall-out shelter, while the other blasts a dizzying array of apocalyptic words at the viewer while Harry Partch’s “Delusion of the Fury” plays on the soundtrack. It’s all very funny as well as fascinating, although those with a deep-seated fear of death might not agree. “Presently, the belief that humanity itself is playing a role in its own demise is being taken more seriously,” Mazzalupo writes in an artist statement. “The question arises of whether this shift in mentality is in fact the ‘apocalypse’ we are presently facing. Can a greater awareness and awakening be in store?” Mazzalupo’s show is certain to entertain, educate, and, perhaps, make you go out and buy some supplies just in case one of these myriad predictions ends up having even the tiniest kernel of truth in it.