this week in art

FIRST SATURDAYS: OUTSIDE THE FRAME

Mickalene Thomas will be at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday night to discuss beauty, race, and gender with fellow artist Carrie Mae Weems and curator Eugene Tsai (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, January 5, 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’s free First Saturday program for January is highlighted by what should be a fascinating discussion, with artist Mickalene Thomas and one of her major influences, award-winning photographer and videographer Carrie Mae Weems, in conversation with curator Eugene Tsai; Thomas’s “Origin of the Universe” continues at the museum through January 20, while her smaller gallery shows in Chelsea and on the Lower East Side, “How to Organize a Room Around a Striking Piece of Art,” are on view through January 5. Also on the schedule that night are live music by Ljova and the Kontraband, Lez Zeppelin, Das Racist’s Himanshu “Heems” Suri, Prince Rama’s Taraka and Nimai Larson, who have formed the Now Age, and Company Stefanie Batten Bland, which will perform A Place of Sun, a dance piece inspired by the BP oil spill. In addition, Writers for the 99% will discuss their book, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America, Catherine Morris will give a curator talk on the exhibition “Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art,” an art workshop will teach participants to get creative with frames, and Art House Co-op, Trade School, and the Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory will lead interactive educational activities. Also on view at the museum now are “GO: a community-curated open studio project,” “Raw/Cooked: Duron Jackson,” Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree,” and “Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company” as well as long-term installations and the permanent collection.

CHRISTMAS TREE AND NEAPOLITAN BAROQUE CRÈCHE

The Met’s Christmas tree is filled with peaceful little scenes featuring lovely figures of angels, people, and animals (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Medieval Art Sculpture Hall, first floor
Through January 6
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

Once again the Met’s annual Christmas tree has risen in front of a 1763 Choir Screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid, and it will remain on view through the Epiphany on January 6. The tall spruce is surrounded by eighteenth-century cherubs, angels, and miniature Neapolitan handmade figures, from the collection of Loretta Hines Howard, acting out the Nativity (or crèche), some created by such well-respected sculptors as Giuseppe Sammartino, Salvatore di Franco, Giuseppe Gori, and Angelo Viva. Be sure to walk all around the tree to see all the little scenes that are going on around the bustling town. And the Met now allows non-flash photography of the tree, so you can take pictures as well.

COIL 2013

Multiple venues
January 3-19, $20-$30 per performance, $75 passport for five shows, $122 for ten
www.ps122.org

Every January, Performance Space 122 uncoils its COIL festival, several weeks of cutting-edge experimental dance, theater, art, and music. The 2013 winter celebration runs January 3-19 at multiple venues in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens but not at PS122 itself, which is undergoing a major renovation. COIL actually got an early start last month with Kristen Kosmas’s There There at the Chocolate Factory (through January 12), in which a woman has to suddenly replace Christopher Walken in a one-person show with the help of her Russian translator. Radiohole presents the world premiere of Inflatable Frankenstein at the Kitchen January 5-19, offering an unusual look at Mary Shelley’s book and James Whale’s film. In fall 2011, Emily Johnson brought her dazzlingly original The Thank-You Bar to New York Live Arts; now she and her Catalyst company is bringing Niicugni to the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a work that explores time and place. Annie Dorsen and Anne Juren examine femininity through a magic show with nudity in Magical, making its U.S. premiere January 15-19 at New York Live Arts. The BodyCartography Project follows up its 2011 COIL presentation, Symptom, with Super Nature, an ecological dance at Abrons Arts Center with live music by Zeena Parkins and scenic installation by Emmett Ramstad that is also part of the fourth annual American Realness festival. Other performances include the return of Pavel Zuštiak / Palissimo’s Amidst and Brian Rogers’s Hot Box. From January 15 to 18, COIL will host SPAN, a free noon dialogue with some of the artists, and the annual Red + White Party takes place January 13 at SPiN NYC with Ping-Pong, the Vintage DJ, and the National Theater of the United States of America. COIL offers a great opportunity to experience exciting new directions in the multidisciplinary arts, and with most tickets no more than twenty dollars and running times less than seventy minutes, you can’t give much of an excuse not to check a few things out.

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.