this week in art

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

Time is off the essence in Christian Marclay’s twenty-four-hour film (© Christian Marclay)

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.

LAST CHANCE: GUNTHER UECKER

Günther Uecker explores the state of the world in black-and-white at Haunch of Venison (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Haunch of Venison
550 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Extended through January 12, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
646-715-4593
www.haunchofvenison.com

For more than fifty years — before, during, and after his time with the Zero group, which sought to reset German art for the post-WWII generation — Günther Uecker has been creating multidisciplinary works that explore religion, politics, the military, violence, and human nature by, among other things, hammering nails into canvases. “Art cannot salvage humanity, but with the means of art a dialogue can be enabled, calling out for the preservation of humanity,” he explains in the press release for his first New York City solo exhibition of new work since 1966. The Düsseldorf-based artist and teacher has filled Chelsea’s Haunch of Venison with primarily black-and-white pieces that are hung on the walls and drop from the ceiling. Many feature nails hammered into them, creating shadows that appear to make them move with the light as visitors walk past. Several of the canvases also contain quotations from the Old Testament, while a corner mural includes the same words translated into Farsi. Though produced with violent actions, there is a peaceful quality to the works, as if Uecker, whose 1965 kinetic sculpture “New York Dancer IV” was a highlight of the recent “Ghosts in the Machine” exhibition at the New Museum, is hopeful that the world, especially the Middle East, will come to its senses and find common ground. Yet the eighty-two-year-old artist furthers his abstract examination of various dichotomies by employing such titles as “Scream,” “Injuries Connections,” “Black Rain,” and “White Phantom.” The show, which continues through December 21, offers a fascinating look into the mind of an artist who still takes great pleasure in challenging both the viewer and himself in a world rife with bitter conflict.

100 x JOHN: A GLOBAL SALUTE TO JOHN CAGE IN SOUND AND IMAGE

A four-day program at White Box celebrates the centenary of the birth of revolutionary sound artist John Cage

White Box
329 Broome St. between Grand & Delancey Sts.
December 20-23, suggested donation $10
www.eartotheearth.org
www.whiteboxnyc.org

New York City’s celebration of the centennial of John Cage’s birth continues with an impressive collection of audiovisual programs December 20-23 at White Box. Held in conjunction with Ear to the Earth and MA.P.S (Media Arts, Performance, and Sound), “100 x John: A Global Salute to John Cage” consists of one hundred compositions and sound projects, beginning Thursday at 5:00 with “Phill Niblock: Four Videos from Working Title, in which Niblock will present a multimedia examination of his life and art. At 7:00, “Cagean Mix #1: Sounds from Around the World” is highlighted by a sound collage organized by Joel Chadabe and video improvisation by Luke DuBois, followed at 8:00 by solo soundscapes by Rodolphe Alexis, Adam Gooderham, Walter Bianchi, Warren Burt, Thomas Gerwin, and Arsenije Jovanovic. Friday night’s program includes “Cagean Mix #2: Sounds of Water and the Natural World” at 7:00 and performances by Joseph Kubera, Susan Kaprov and Don Bosley, and David Rothenberg. On Saturday at 12 noon, “Sounds and Images” comprises solo pieces by David de Gandarias, Jovanovic, Alexis, Leah Barclay, and Annea Lockwood, followed by a book talk at 3:00 with Kay Larson, author of Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists; at 8:00, there will be performances by Garth Paine, Guy Barash, and Richard Lainhart. The festival concludes on Sunday with a Christmas party and “Cagean Mix #3: Sounds of New York City” at 5:00 and “Shelley Hirsh, Katherine Liberovskaya, Gil Arno: New York Stories” at 8:00. To get a sneak peek at some of the “100 x John” soundscapes, go here.

OLAFUR ELIASSON: VOLCANOES AND SHELTERS

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through December 22, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-414-4144
www.tanyabonakdargallery.com

Although best known for his colorful, dramatic installations using various combinations of glass, mirrors, metal, water, and light, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has also been taking photographs of Iceland, the home of his parents’ birth, for two decades, capturing its unique natural landscapes and putting them together in fascinating grids. His latest exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar is highlighted by three such grids on separate walls in the Chelsea gallery’s main space, enveloping visitors with their looming physicality. “The hut series” consists of fifty-six photographs of “micro-parliaments,” small, remote cabins set against earth and sky. “The hot springs series” collects forty-eight photos of one of Iceland’s most distinctive natural elements, geothermal hot springs that bubble beneath the ground. And “The volcano series” captures sixty-three shots of volcanic craters from around the country. In the back room, “The large Iceland series” features bigger, individual portraits of more natural phenomena. Upstairs, Eliasson, who works in Berlin and Copenhagen and was the subject of the terrific 2008 MoMA/PS1 retrospective “Take Your Time,” has installed “Your disappearing garden,” filling nearly half a room with volcanic obsidian rocks, as if he shipped a part of Hrafntinnusker to New York City. And behind a curtain are three works that dazzle the senses, a trio of tabletop fountains that slowly spin in a dark room illuminated by strobe lights that make it look as if the cascading water is momentarily frozen in time; visitors will actually feel dizzy as they walk around these “anti-gravity experiments,” which Eliasson has titled “Object defined by activity (now),” “Object defined by activity (soon),” and “Object defined by activity (then).”

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI: ACCATTONE

Franco Citti stars as the title character in Pier Paolo Pasolin’s directorial debut, ACCATTONE

ACCATTONE (THE SCROUNGER) (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, December 14, 4:30, and Thursday, December 27, 4:30
Series runs December 13 – January 5
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

After collaborating on a number of works by such auteurs as Mauro Bolognini and Federico Fellini, poet and novelist Pier Paolo Pasolini made his directorial debut in 1961 with the gritty, not-quite-neo-realist Accattone (“scrounger” or “beggar”). Somewhat related to his books Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta, the film is set in the Roman borgate, where brash young Vittorio “Accattone” Cataldi (Franco Citti) survives by taking crazy bets — like swimming across a river known for swallowing up people’s lives — and working as a pimp. After a group of local men beat up his main money maker (Silvana Corsini), he meets the more naive Stella (Franca Pasut), whom he starts dating with an eye toward perhaps converting into a prostitute as well. Meanwhile, he tries to establish a relationship with his son, but his estranged wife and her family want nothing to do with him. Filmed in black-and-white by master cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, Accattone is highlighted by a series of memorable shots, from Accattone’s gorgeous dive from a bridge to a close-up of his face covered in sand, many of which were inspired by Baroque art and set to music by Bach. Written with Sergio Citti and featuring a production assistant named Bernardo Bertolucci, the story delves into the dire poverty in the slums of Rome, made all the more real by Pasolini’s use of both professional and nonprofessional actors. Accattone is screening December 14 and 27 as part of MoMA’s “Pier Paolo Pasolini” series, a full career retrospective that runs December 13 to January 5 and includes such special events as “Recital: An Evening Dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini the Poet” at MoMA on December 14 and the Sunday Sessions program “Pier Paolo Pasolini: Intellettuale” at MoMA PS1 on December 16 with Paul Chan, Ninetto Davoli, Emi Fontana, Barbara Hammer, Alfredo Jaar, Lovett/Codagnone, and Fabio Mauri. In addition, there will be a number of other Pasolini celebrations around the city, including the December 13 seminar “Pasolini’s Languages” at the Italian Cultural Institute and the exhibition “Pier Paolo Pasolini, Portraits and Self Portraits” at Location One, opening December 15. Pasolini, who was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1975 at the age of fifty-three, was a brilliant, iconoclastic, enigmatic figure who looked at the world in a unique way, filling his films and writings with fascinating explorations of religion, politics, social conditions, and even romance, well deserving of this extensive reexamination.