this week in art

FIRST SATURDAYS: CONNECTING CULTURES

Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman mans the staff desk at new long-term “Connecting Cultures” installation

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, May 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 will celebrate the opening of its latest long-term installation, “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn,” at this month’s First Saturdays program. The exhibit juxtaposes works in three sections, “Connecting Places,” “Connecting People,” and “Connecting Things,” with a desk where people can interact with a museum staffer. Saturday night features live performances by Los Colombian Roots, Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, Brown Rice Family, and Stone Forest Ensemble. Ann Agee will discuss her period room in “Playing House,” chief curator Kevin Stayton will give a talk on “Connecting Cultures,” and visitors can climb the rooftop of Heather Hart’s “Raw/Cooked” installation “The Eastern Oracle: We Will Tear the Roof Off the Mother.” (Be sure to wear flat, rubber-soled shoes.) Haley Tanner will read from and sign copies of her debut novel, Vaclav & Lena, and DJ Spooky will lead the traditional dance party. As always, the galleries will be open late, giving visitors plenty of opportunity to check out “Keith Haring: 1978-1982,” “Playing House,” “Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin,” “Raw/Cooked: Heather Hart,” “Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913–1919,” “Question Bridge: Black Males,” and “Body Parts: Ancient Egyptian Fragments and Amulets.”

PULSE CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR

Fairgoers can take part in Inner Course’s psychic playroom “Knowing Me, Knowing You” at Pulse

The Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
May 3-6, $20 per day, $25 four-day pass
www.pulse-art.com
pulse favorites slideshow 2012

In order to avoid the mad rush of art fairs that took over the city, several regulars moved their dates to the first week of May. While Red Dot ended up canceling the 2012 edition because of labor union disputes, you can still check out Verge NYC, NADA is holding its inaugural fair, and there’s a deafening buzz about the Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s Island. But one of our annual favorites, Pulse, will be at the Metropolitan Pavilion May 3-6, with its usual highly manageable mix of painting, sculpture, video, installation, and performance. This year’s special projects include Shannon Gillen & Guests’ “BOTLEK,” Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo’s “City Surface,” Jennie C. Jones’s “Rest, Dopamine Rising,” Kristofer Porter’s “Tappan Zee Burro,” Risa Puno’s interactive “Good Faith & Fair Dealing,” Fred Wilson’s “Sneaky Leaky” and “Reign,” and Inner Course’s participatory “Knowing Me, Knowing You.” The selection committee of Stefan Roepke, Thomas Von Lintel, and Cornell DeWitt have invited nearly fifty galleries, which will be showing works by such artists as Kim Dorland, Vik Muniz, Jim Campbell, Marco Breuer, William Eggleston, Deborah Kass, Matthias Meyer, David LaChapelle, Courtney Love, Tracey Moffatt, Andrew Masullo, and Ed Ruscha, but the most intriguing lineup comes courtesy of Creative Capital, which will be presenting an all-star grouping of Ralph Lemon, Dread Scott, Eve Sussman, Stephen Vitiello, Zoe Leonard, Futurefarmers, and others. The Pulse Play lounge will feature video, video game, and technology works, while the Impulse section highlights recent solo shows.

Update: The 2012 edition of Pulse is another highly satisfying, well-organized fair boasting a fine collection of contemporary international artists. Andreas Bauer’s (balzerARTprojects) cut-paper collages of comic books and magazines, in which he excises all words, are little architectural wonders. At RH Gallery, Soledad Arias’s text-based acoustic prints and neon sculptures give a preview of her current show on Duane St. Works by Chuteppa, Clemencia Labin, Daniel Verbis, Graciela Sacco, Michael Scoggins, and others emerge from the walls at Diana Lowenstein. The New Jersey-born, Oakland-based Chris Duncan (Halsey McKay) creates a dazzling effect with string, mirrors, and wood in “Mirror, Mirror.” An alluring physicality emerges from Ralph Fleck’s (Purdy Hicks) thickly painted cityscapes. Reinier Gerritsen’s (Julie Saul) Wall Street subway photos are composites of multiple images, resulting in an exact moment that actually never occurred inside trains, while Eve Sussman’s (Creative Capital) 3D panoramic view finders reveal trains from outside. Matt Haffner (Pentimenti) uses cut paper and acrylic to create silhouetted scenes. Paul Paddock’s (frosch&portmann) watercolors are significantly more devious upon closer inspection, while you’ll get a surprise when you delve deeper into Mary Tsiongas’s (Richard Levy) “Vanish II.” You can take a break by playing Risa Puno’s (Galerie Stefan Roepke) “Good Faith & Fair Dealing” maze game. If you missed Dare Wright’s recent show at Fred Torres, you can still see the star photograph from “The Lonely Doll.” Geoff McFetridge’s (Cooper Cole) stylized acrylic paintings are graphic charms. Sigrid Viir’s (Temnikova & Kasela) photographs of constructed scenes set up like paintings won the Pulse Prize for the Impulse section. And Andrew Masullo’s (Daniel Weinberg) brightly colored small canvases of different geometric shapes, which unfold as he paints them, not knowing which way they will eventually hang, are a highlight of Pulse just as they are one of the standouts at the current Whitney Biennial.

PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

Salman Rushdie will deliver the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture at this year’s PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Multiple locations
April 30 – May 6, free – $75
www.pen.org

This year’s PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature celebrates the ninetieth anniversary of the organization, which is dedicated to freedom of speech and human rights around the globe, with a bevy of events beginning April 30 and continuing through May 6. Here are just some of the many highlights: On Monday night, Graydon Carter, Victor S. Navasky, George Packer, and Katha Pollit will pay tribute to the late Christopher Hitchens at the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, and Hank Dutt, Onome Ekeh, Emily Howard, and Beth Levin will take part in the U.S. premiere of Kevin Malone’s thirty-five-minute Clockwork Orange operetta at the Top of the Standard. On Tuesday, Mike Daisey will host “Revolutionary Plays Since 2000: The Future of Political Theater” at the CUNY Graduate Center, an evening of readings, discussion, and live music with Lasha Bugadze, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, Laila Soliman, and the Civilians. On Wednesday, the amazing trio of Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, and E. L. Doctorow will gather together for a TimesTalk at the Times Center, while the Kronos Quartet presents “Exit Strategies” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Rula Jebreal, Tony Kushner, and Marjane Satrapi. There are more than a dozen programs on Thursday, including Elevator Repair Service performing the site-specific Shuffle, a mash-up of classic novels at NYU’s Bobst Library, screenings of Satrapi’s Persepolis and Chicken with Plums at MoMA, and “Herta Müller on Silence” at Deutsches Haus. On Friday, Jennifer Egan will talk about “How to Create Your Own Rules” with Jacob Weisberg at the New School, seventeen writers will come together for “A Literary Safari” at the Westbeth Center, and the all-day “John Cage: How to Get Started” at Symphony Space will feature David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet, Aleksander Hemon, Etgar Keret, Sonia Sanchez, and audience performers. On Saturday, “An Evening with Doon Arbus, Francine Prose, and Michael Cunningham — and Diane Arbus” consists of readings from the recent biography Diane Arbus: A Chronology and a screening of A Slide Show and Talk by Diane Arbus at MoMA, author-illustrator Brian Selznick will be in conversation with David Levithan at the New School, Egan, Teju Cole, Karl O. Knausgaard, Riikka Pulkkinen, Luc Sante, and others will interact with R. Justin Stewart’s art installation at the Invisible Dog Art Center for “Messiah in Brooklyn,” and Sanchez, Keret, Adam Mansbach, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Marcus Samuelsson, and Tracy K. Smith will discuss “Memory in Harlem” at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The festival concludes on Sunday with Cunningham, Deborah Eisenberg, Daniel Kehlmann, and Edmund White at the Museum of Jewish Heritage for “A Place Out of Time: Gregor von Rezzori’s Bukovina Trilogy” and Salman Rushdie delivering the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture at the Cooper Union, followed by a pop Q&A led by Gary Shteyngart.

LUMINANCE

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo’s “Tube” takes television characters outside the box (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

WORK FROM THE INTERACTIVE TELECOMMUNICATIONS PROGRAM AT NYU
Paley Center for Media
25 West 52nd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through April 29, free with general admission of $10
212-621-6600
www.paleycenter.org
luminance slideshow

Six NYU students and alumni from the Interactive Telecommunications Program have fun reimagining television and video in creative and unusual ways in “Luminance,” running through this weekend at the Paley Center in Midtown. Curated by ITP adjunct professor Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, the exhibition features works that expand viewing into three-dimensional space, influenced by the participation of the viewer, with each piece accompanied by an artist statement and commentary by the Paley Center’s Ron Simon. In Toby Schachman’s “Time Travelers,” visitors can see their image merge on-screen with Creative Commons scenes of flowers, strawberries, sunrises, and sunsets. Rui Pereira’s “IEM” brings back the HAL 9000, as color patterns and clips from 1980s music videos directly answer personal questions. (Try not to inquire if he loves you.) In “Golden Treasures of Snows,” Molly Schwartz invites visitors to drive animated images of nature ― what she calls “a hierarchy of animals and vehicles, representing confidence, mischievousness, silence, concentration, messengers, and rogues” ― using a ship’s wheel to control what appears on-screen. In “Little Memories,” Andrea Wolf employs miniatures and super-8 home movies projected onto the wall to create a trio of realistic situations, including a car traveling down a long road in “Movement.” The highlight is Barcia-Colombo’s “Tube,” in which two characters have escaped the confines of a 1964 RCA television set, only to find themselves trapped in a glass case on top of it, digital and analog coming together to enter another, still limiting, space. And downstairs, Martín Bravo’s “Skittish Tree” is a projection that responds to sound, illuminated branches seemingly shaking in the wind. Although computers and handheld devices have changed the way people watch movies and television programs, these engaging works take the technology outside the box, instead of the box taking the technology outside.

YANG FUDONG

Yang Fudong’s seven-channel THE FIFTH NIGHT continues at Marian Goodman through Saturday

Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through April 28, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-977-7160
www.mariangoodman.com

In the spring of 2009, Chinese artist Yang Fudong presented the five-hour, five-part Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest at Asia Society in addition to the six-screen Tate Liverpool commission East of Que Village at Midtown’s Marian Goodman Gallery. The Shanghai-based Yang is back at Marian Goodman with three new works that further his unique investigation of the process of visual storytelling. In the North Gallery, The Fifth Night unfolds like a Chinese scroll painting, with seven monitors lined up one after another on a parallel line in an otherwise dark room. Set in a 1930s-like Shanghai square, the film, made with seven cameras shooting at once, offers different angles of the same general scene. Characters wander around dreamlike, climb up a spiral staircase that goes nowhere, and pass by blacksmiths at work in the middle of the night. Yang has created a mysterious atmosphere where gangster cars and rickshaws pass through multiple screens in the background as lonely men and women move slowly through the surreal goings-on. Shot in black-and-white and using natural sound, The Fifth Night upends traditional narrative, toying with time, space, and reality while examining the very process of filmmaking itself. In the South Gallery, the nearly twenty-minute Ye Jiang (The Nightman Cometh) focuses on an ancient, scarred warrior considering his fate in a snow-covered landscape where an overturned cart hints at something gone terribly wrong. Dressed in an old-fashioned uniform, he evokes both fairy tale and history, contemplating his future as the place, a kind of spiritual way station, is visited by ghostly people and animals. Set to a minimalist elegiac score by Jin Wang, The Nightman Cometh is a beautifully realized, meditative film with gorgeous painterly imagery, which should come as no surprise, as Yang studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Hangzhou. Also on view is “International Hotel,” a small series of black-and-white photographs taken at the Art Deco swimming pool at the International Hotel in Shanghai that evoke post-WWII propaganda campaigns.

IT’S THE POLITICAL ECONOMY, STUPID

Institute for Wishful Thinking, “Post-Fordist Variations,” detail, mixed media, 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Austrian Cultural Forum
11 East 52nd St. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Daily through April 22, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-319-5300
www.acfny.org

During his 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton famously declared, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Austrian-American curators Oliver Ressler and Gregory Sholette have taken that statement and added a slight twist for “It’s the Political Economy, Stupid,” a group show running through Sunday at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Midtown. Through sculpture, installation, drawing, video, and photography, the artists fight back against the growing economic crisis encircling the globe as governments do nothing to prevent it ― or in fact make it worse. In the lobby, Dread Scott continually calls out, “Money to Burn,” in a video depicting him in the Financial District burning actual money while asking passersby to help. The Institute for Wishful Thinking goes back to 1975 in their multimedia display focusing on the iconic Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” supplementing it with cards that make such proclamations as “Paulson to City: Banks First” and “Blankfein to City: No Worries.” Linda Bilda’s “Labor and Capital” sculpture projects the two performing a ghostly dance on a wall, while flo6x8’s “Body Versus Capital” documents Spanish flashmobs dancing inside banks. Julie Christensen’s slide show, “How Communities Are Reusing the Big Box,” reveals how big box stores that have gone out of business are being repurposed by local neighborhoods. Zanny Begg and Ressler’s “The Bull Laid Bear” video does an excellent job of explaining the economic crisis, using cartoon bears as talking heads. Ira Rosenberger’s “Espiral ― A Dance of Death in 8 Scenes” harkens back to Kurt Jooss’s 1932 ballet, “The Green Table,” as a woman in black-and-white face paint moves ominously behind quotes detailing the history of Austrian finance. And Bilda’s large wall mural, “The Future and End of the Golden World,” features male and female prolls, rightist perverts, unprincipled media, bureaucrats, political activists, Bill Gates, Sam Walton, Warren Buffet, Henry Paulson, NGOs, and others, with politicians being tempted by lobbyists at the center. “It’s the Political Economy, Stupid” offers an intriguing, varied look at how artists are dealing with the financial crisis, employing a creative blend of humor and anger to make their salient points.

ANNUALS, BIENNIALS, TRIENNIALS

Lesley Dill’s “Woman in Dress with Star” and Glenn Ligon’s untitled oil painting are cleverly juxtaposed at 2012 Annual (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

THE ANNUAL: 2012
National Academy Museum
1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through April 29, $12, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-369-4880
www.nationalacademy.org

In an artistic convergence that occurs only once every six years, the National Academy’s annual, the Whitney’s biennial, and the New Museum’s triennial are all on view at the same time. And in a perhaps unexpected convergence, all three reveal that less is more with shows that avoid jam-packing galleries with brand-name artists and instead concentrate on fewer works with a focus on installation. At the National Academy, a mix of cross-generational academicians and invited non-academicians makes for an effective examination of contemporary American art, albeit through a more traditional lens than at the biennial and the triennial, using juxtaposition as a means to an end. Figurative paintings by Burton Silverman, Daniel Bennett Schwartz, Gillian Pederson-Krag, and Philip Pearlstein are seen alongside abstract works by Dorothea Rockburne, Richard Mayhew, David Driskell, and Eric Aho. Sculptures by Barbara Chase-Riboud, Jeffrey Schiff, and Arlene Shechet line the center of a hallway of paintings. Lesley Dill’s “Woman in Dress with Star” stands in front of Glenn Ligon’s untitled oil painting, each incorporating text. The annual also includes a trio of video installations: Joan Jonas’s “Lines in the Sand,” Kate Gilmore’s “Break of Day,” and Carrie Mae Weems’s three-channel “Afro-Chic,” which keeps the funk pumping on the second floor. The 2012 Annual is the best the National Academy has put on in several years.

Gisèle Vienne with Dennis Cooper, Stephen O’Malley, and Peter Rehberg, “Last Spring: A Prequel,” mixed-media installation, 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2012
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Fifth Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through May 27, $12, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm (pay what you wish Fridays 6:00 -9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

“Art discourse serves to maintain links among artistic subfields and to create a continuum between practices that may be completely incommensurable in terms of their economic conditions and social as well as artistic values,” Andrea Fraser writes in “There’s no place like home,” an essay that serves as her contribution to the 2012 Whitney Biennial. “This may make art discourse one of the most consequential—and problematic—institutions in the art world today, along with mega-museums that aim to be all things to all people and survey exhibitions (like the Whitney Biennial) that offer up incomparable practices for comparison.” As it turns out, curators Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders have not turned the biennial into all things for all people, instead putting together a manageable collection of contemporary American art that leans heavily toward performance and installation, showing off the space of the Marcel Breuer building instead of cluttering every nook and cranny with anything and everything. Visitors can walk through Oscar Tuazon’s “For Hire,” Georgia Sagri’s “Working the No Work,” and Wu Tsang’s “Green Room” and watch the New York City Players get ready for Richard Maxwell’s new site-specific play in an open dressing room. Gisèle Vienne’s “Last Spring: A Prequel” features a young animatronic teen standing in a corner, mumbling text by Dennis Cooper. More traditional art forms like painting and photography tend to get lost in these kinds of shows, but the disciplines are well represented by Nicole Eisenman’s uneasy figures, Andrew Masullo’s eye-catching small canvases filled with bright colors and geometric patterns, and Latoya Ruby Frazier’s photographic examination of her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. If you’re thirsting for some music, there’s Lutz Bacher’s “Pipe Organ,” Lucy Raven’s “What Manchester Does Today, the Rest of the World Does Tomorrow” player piano, and Werner Herzog’s “Hearsay of the Soul,” a four-channel video installation that brings together Hercules Segers’s etchings with music by Ernst Reijseger. And then there’s Robert Gober’s exploration of the career of Forrest Bess, which has to be seen to be believed. For a closer look at the myriad live performances, talks, and workshops, visit here.

Triennial visitors can take a seat on Slavs and Tatars’ “PrayWay” while contemplating Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

THE UNGOVERNABLES: 2012 NEW MUSEUM TRIENNIAL
New Museum
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Wednesday – Sunday through April 22, $12, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm (free Thursdays 7:00 -9:00)
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

Three years ago, the New Museum’s inaugural triennial featured international artists who were all younger than Jesus was at his death at age thirty-three. The 2012 edition, “The Ungovernables,” comprises sculpture, painting, video, and installation that challenge the status quo often in subtle ways, commenting on world economics, corporatization, and politics through creative methods. In Amalia Pica’s “Eavesdropping,” a group of drinking glasses stick out from a wall, referencing both the surveillance and the digital age. Danh Vo’s “We the People” consists of sheets of pounded copper that are actually re-creations of the skin of the Statue of Liberty, a different way to look at freedom. Pratchaya Phinthong’s “What I learned I no longer know; the little I still know, I guessed” is a square collection of Zimbabwean paper money whose specific value continually decreases. Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado’s O Século (The Century) shows debris being thrown from a building, resulting in a visual and aural cacophony of chaos. The Propeller Group’s multichannel “TVC Communism” details the creation of a modern advertising campaign selling communism. Slavs and Tatars’ “PrayWay” is a folded prayer carpet on which visitors are invited to sit and get lost in contemplation that need not be religious. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings examine race and gender. Hassan Khan’s short video, Jewel, depicts two men dancing using signifiers set to a propulsive Cairene song. José Antonio Vega Macotela’s “Time Exchange” details a four-year collaboration with Mexican prisoners in which tasks are exchanged instead of money. Pilvi Takala’s riotous “The Trainee” follows the Finnish-born artist’s intervention as she pretends to be working in a Deloitte office. And Gabriel Sierra’s interventions involve placing such objects as a ladder and a level, which he refers to as devils, directly into the walls of the museum. As with the National Academy’s Annual and the Whitney Biennial, “The Ungovernables” avoids clutter and overt political statements, steering clear of the obvious and instead offering a varied and intriguing look at the contemporary art world