this week in art

JASON AKIRA SOMMA: PHOSPHENE VARIATIONS

“Phosphene Variations” performance series will bring together live dancers and performance artists with their holographic versions

Location One
26 Greene St. between Grand & Canal Sts.
Exhibition runs Tuesday – Saturday through October 3, free; weekly Wednesday or Thursday performances, $10
212-334-3347
www.location1.org

Premiered as an experimental work-in-progress in December 2010 at the Watermill Center and later presented at the National Theatre of Paris, Brooklyn-based Virginia native Jason Akira Somma’s “Phosphene Variations” is now on view at Location One in SoHo through November 17. [Ed. note: Due to technical difficulties, the exhibition was forced to close on October 3.] The interactive exhibition features free-floating holograms of such dancers and performance artists as Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Carmen DeLavallade, Bill Shannon, Frances Wessells, Jirí Kylián, and Joan Jonas, who seemingly react when “touched.” In addition, there will be weekly live performances ($10, 7:00) Wednesdays in September and October and Thursdays in November in which several of Somma’s subjects will be on hand to improvise live with their holographic image, with real-time video feedback provided by Somma and live music by electro-acoustic cellist Christopher Lancaster. Curated by dance artist Luke Miller, the schedule includes Flexors on September 26, Miss Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz, and Monstah Black on October 10, Brian Brooks on October 17, Jeanine Durning and Manelich Minniefee on October 24, and Susan Marshall & Company, Bill Shannon, and Vanessa Walters on November 8, concluding on November 15 with Phosphene Redux, a closing party highlighted by the return of various of the artists who previously performed. [Ed. note: The October 10 performance will be the last one, with the others canceled as a result of the unfortunate shutdown of the exhibition.]

TERENCE KOH: ONE PERSON AT A TIME

A silent “guard” is part of Terence Koh’s latest immersive installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

1133 Broadway, Suite 1626
Through Saturday, September 22, free, 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
www.terencekoh.com

New York-based rock-star artist Terence Koh has become famous for creating unique installations and performances filled with mystery and attended by all the right people. Last year the artist formerly known as asianpunkboy staged “nothingtoodoo,” in which, over the course of several weeks, he spent eight hours a day slowly circling a forty-seven-ton, eight-foot-high, twenty-four-foot-wide mound of salt at the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea. Koh’s Asia Song Society has now collaborated with rock-star gallerist Sean Kelly for “One Person at a Time,” an intriguing, fun experience in the Flatiron District. Koh has transformed several rooms on the sixteenth floor of 1133 Broadway into an immersive exploration of, well, to say too much would give it away, but it has to do with body parts, the Freedom Tower, and Koh’s trademark obsession with the color white. From 7:00 to 9:00 at night through September 22, visitors wait on line for their chance to walk (“no shoes pleased,” as it says on Koh’s website) through the rooms by themselves, where they are encouraged to look in every cabinet, open every drawer, leaf through every book, and peer through every hole. A silent “guard” who sits outside the entrance will show you all the rules; he’ll also watch you via surveillance cameras, so try not to do anything too weird while you’re inside. “One Person at a Time” is another fab journey into the whitewashed mind of one of today’s most enigmatic and entertaining artists.

HAPPINESS IS . . . ANNIE HALL

Alvy Singer and Annie Hall discuss the horrible, the miserable, and the search for happiness in ANNIE HALL

CABARET CINEMA: ANNIE HALL (Woody Allen, 1977)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, September 21, free with $7 bar minimum, 9:30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org

“I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories,” says Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) in Annie Hall. “The horrible are like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable.” Allen’s classic 1977 Oscar-winning film — which had the working title “Anhedonia,” a medical term referring to the inability to experience pleasure — is one of the funniest, most-quoted romantic comedies in film history, a pure delight from start to finish. It’s ostensibly a luuuuuurve story about a nebbishy Jew and the ultimate WASPy goy (Diane Keaton as the title character), but it’s really about so much more: large vibrating eggs, right turns on red lights, television, Existential Motifs in Russian Literature, California, slippery crustaceans, driving through Plutonium, dead sharks, Freud, Hitler, Leopold and Loeb, religion, cocaine, Shakespeare in the Park, Buick-size spiders, planet Earth, and, well, la-di-da, la-di-da, la la. The film is screening on September 21 as part of the new Rubin Museum series “Happiness is…,” which consists of movies with a somewhat different idea of joy, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, Federico Fellini’s 8½, and Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. Part of the larger Rubin program “Happy Talk,” the screening will be introduced by Columbia associate professor and filmmaker Dan Kleinman. Alvy Singer: “Here, you look like a very happy couple. Um, are you?” Woman on the street: “Yeah.” Alvy Singer: “Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?” Woman on the street: “Uh, I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.” Man on the street: “And I’m exactly the same way.” Alvy Singer: “I see. Wow. That’s very interesting. So you’ve managed to work out something.” Yes, Annie Hall is also about the search for happiness. And isn’t that what we’re all after?

HAPPY TALK

The Rubin Museum examines the pursuit of happiness with a series of cool programs through December

Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
September 23 – December 21, $20 – $35 (Love Songs $85, Cabaret Cinema free with $7 bar purchase)
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org

Rubin Museum genius programmer Tim McHenry is at it again, coming up with yet another unique and fascinating series at one of the city’s most exciting institutions. “Just how happy are you?” the man behind the perennially thrilling Brainwave festival asks. “The alleviation of suffering is central to Buddhist belief; the result is a form of happiness. The pursuit of happiness is cited as an inalienable right in the Declaration of Independence; the result is what, exactly? Are we talking about the same condition?” We all want to be happy, but happiness is different for every one of us. On September 23, Happy Talk kicks off with a series of inspired pairings, as artists from a variety of disciplines sit down with scientists, philosophers, and other big-time thinkers to discuss what inner and outer, personal and public joy is all about. That first session will feature entertainment legend Elaine Stritch with Duke Institute for Brain Sciences member P. Murali Doraiswamy and will be followed by such promising duos as performance artist Laurie Anderson and Harvard psychiatry professor Daniel Gilbert, meditation expert Sharon Salzberg and visual artist Josh Melnick, Dexter star Michael C. Hall and Cambridge research psychologist Kevin Dutton, playwright Neil Labute and singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, and award-winning actress Julianne Moore and Berkeley philosophy and psychology professor Alison Gopnik, among others. As a sidebar, the Rubin’s Friday-night Cabaret Cinema turns its attention to the theme of “Happiness is…,” with Dan Kleinman introducing Woody Allen’s Annie Hall on September 21, Molly Neuman discussing Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train on September 28, and Lili Taylor talking about Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life on October 5; the series continues through December 21 with such other films that deal with various levels of unhappiness as Five Easy Pieces, 8½, The 400 Blows, Brief Encounter, South Pacific, and Grapes of Wrath. In addition, the Rubin will premiere Victress Hitchcock’s documentary When the Iron Bird Flies, which examines Tibetan Buddhism’s path around the world, October 19-24, with most screenings including special speakers. And finally, on December 7, Rosanne Cash will present “Love Songs,” an evening of music with a trio of happy musical couples: Cash and John Leventhal, Steve Earle and Allison Moorer, and Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams. Wanna know one of the things that makes us happy? Our regular visits to the Rubin Museum, which never fails to ignite our minds and put huge smiles on our faces.

EDOUARD VUILLARD: A PAINTER AND HIS MUSES, 1890-1940

Edouard Vuillard, “Self-Portrait with Waroquy,” oil on canvas, 1889 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Alex M. Lewyt, 1955, 55.173)

The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday – Tuesday through September 23, $12 (free admission Saturday 11:00 am – 5:45 pm)
212-423-3200
www.thejewishmuseum.org

Throughout his career, Edouard Vuillard surrounded himself with people in the art world, from patrons, gallerists, and publishers to poets, musicians, and other artists, men and women who ultimately populated so many of his canvases. A member of the avant-garde Nabis (“prophets” in Hebrew), which also included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Aristide Maillol, and Félix Vallotton, the French painter immersed himself in the emerging Parisian cultural scene, attending salons, designing theater programs, and getting involved in photography. Divided into six sections — “Son, Artist, Prophet,” “The Muse and the Review,” “New Patrons and a New Muse,” “Decorative Murals,” “Later Portraits,” and “The Chateau des Clayes” — the exhibition follows Vuillard’s personal and artistic development in paintings, photographs, books, magazines, and a short home movie as he established an affinity for portraiture and interiors filled with delightful patterns and texture. A key early work, “Self-Portrait with Waroquy,” shows the artist, palette in hand, looking into a mirror, a ghostly apparition of a friend standing over his shoulder, done in earth tones, a bottle in the right foreground almost demanding to be grabbed. But Vuillard spent much more of his time painting others and not himself, displaying his impressive social circle and those who were part of his daily life, concentrating on such figures as his mother, Thadée and Misia Natanson, Jos and Lucy Hessel, and the Bloch family. In “Madame Vuillard at Table,” the artist’s square-shouldered mother is smiling in the back right of the frame, a large bottle battling for attention in the left foreground. In “Thadée Natanson at His Desk,” the subject nearly disappears into the scene. And in “Lucy Hessel at the Seashore,” Lucy is shown lounging front and center, amid brighter though still subdued colors, looking lovingly at the viewer but also at the artist; the two were extremely close for decades. “That idea of the sea and the pink tonalities conspire to give you this idea of love, Vuillard’s confession of love for Lucy Hessel,” assistant curator Stephen Brown says on the exhibition’s Acoustiguide tour. “I don’t think there can be any question that they were lovers and it went on for some forty years.” Vuillard spent much of his later years at Chateau des Clayes, the Hessels’ estate near Versailles, where he painted one of his masterpieces, “Luncheon at Les Clayes.” Using glue-based distemper and charcoal, he depicts a group of figures at one end of a round table, centered by Lucy and also including his mother, with bottles and mirrors, subjects that appear consistently throughout his work, a fine representation of his overall themes and style encapsulated in one gorgeous interior. “Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940” is a fascinating examination of the life and work of a lesser-known but important artist who is well worth another look.

THE JOSHUA LIGHT SHOW

The Joshua Light Show will team up with a diverse series of experimental musicians for six groovy shows at the Skirball Center

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
60 Washington Sq. South
September 13-16, $20-$68
212-998-4941
www.nyuskirball.org
www.joshualightshow.com

A key figure in the psychedelic movement of the late 1960s, the Joshua Light Show created dizzying, kaleidoscopic, all-too-groovy projections at the Fillmore East, Woodstock, Carnegie Hall, and other venues, where their liquid lights exploded in a vast array of colors behind Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, and other legendary musicians. Over the last several years, JLS has returned with a vengeance, performing at Lincoln Center, the Hayden Planetarium, the Hirshorn Museum, Art Basel in Miami, and the recent Transmediale festival in Berlin. This week founder Joshua White and his talented crew, which still primarily uses analog techniques to mix their creations live, will be at the NYU Skirball Center for six performances over four nights, beginning Thursday, when they are joined by Scottish percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie and master harpist Zeena Parkins. Friday night features the minimalist father-and-son duo of Terry Riley and Gyan Riley at 7:30, followed by the inspired quartet of John Zorn, Lou Reed, Bill Laswell, and Milford Graves at 10:00. On Saturday night, MGMT cofounders Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden will play two shows, with GlobalFest closing things out on Sunday with the Boston-based Ethiopian-American Debo Band and the New York-based Brazilian-American Forro in the Dark. Each performance will last approximately one hour, with JLS onstage improvising alongside the musicians; the JLS team includes White, photographer and installation artist Alyson Denny, experimental composer and vocalist Nick Hallett, filmmaker and musician Seth Kirby, Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters, live cinema artist and designer Brock Monroe, painter and comic-book artist Gary Panter, production manager Doug Pope, performance artist and director Bec Stupak, and sound designer Jeff Cook.

BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION: ART HISTORY WITH LABOR / OPEN HOUSE

Bronze rat watches over Bruce High Quality Foundation installation in Lever House (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through October 1
Admission: free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com

When we were photographing the latest display in the Lever House lobby a few days before the official opening, a young man in a suit, seemingly on his way to lunch, stopped us and asked, “What is this?” When we told him it was an art installation by the Bruce High Quality Foundation, he just looked blankly around and said, “Is it finished?” We said that we thought it was probably pretty close to completion, if not done yet, and he sneered. “What the hell! I gotta walk through this every day?” And he stormed off, shaking his head. An arts collaborative formed eight years ago and named for a fictional character, Bruce High Quality, who supposedly died in the September 11 terrorist attacks, BHQF creates multimedia installations and performances that comment on the state of art, politics, and the world. Indeed, “Art History with Labor” at first appears unfinished, with working materials all around the lobby, including a bucket with a mop, a wheelbarrow with a bag of soil, a floor polisher, a ladder, a trash can, and other elements that make it look like a construction site. Meanwhile, outside in the plaza, a giant rat faces the gallery, growling, but instead of his being another blow-up Scabby the Rat seen at so many city construction sites that employ nonunion workers, this twelve-foot-high bronze casting is called “The New Colossus,” directly evoking the 1883 Emma Lazarus poem that is on a plaque within the Statue of Liberty (“‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’”).

The Bruce High Quality Foundation reimagines Martin Luther’s 95 Theses for the modern age (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

But everything is part of the exhibition, along with a lone briefcase, an old watercooler, and a knocked-over filing cabinet spilling out printouts of “Art History with Labor: 95 Theses.” Free for the taking, the stapled-together four pages mimic Martin Luther’s 1517 document, a major force in the arrival of the Protestant Reformation, with quotes from Luther as well as Jean-Luc Godard, Roland Barthes, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Oscar Wilde, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jamie Dimon, Thomas Edison, and Sun Tzu in addition to facts about Ayn Rand, the Art Workers Guild, Auschwitz, Nikola Tesla, Paul Robeson, Iwo Jima, and the Lever Brothers, who built the company town Port Sunlight in 1888 for the men and women working in their soap factory. Each object in the lobby is equipped with a speaker pronouncing the theses, accompanied by a video, examining the nature of art and labor and how they have intertwined through the ages. The exhibit also includes “Double Iwo Jima,” a two-panel painting that raises questions about art, truth, propaganda, and labor by re-creating multiple images of Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. So, is the installation actually finished? One could argue that it’s only a start to further investigation on the part of the visitor. You can find out more about the Bruce High Quality Foundation and their unaccredited art university (a self-described “‘fuck you’ to the hegemony of critical solemnity and market-mediocre despair”) on Sunday, September 9, when they host an open house at their headquarters at 34 Ave. A, and there will be a closing reception for “Art History with Labor” at Lever House on October 1.