this week in art

HAPPENINGS: NEW YORK, 1958-1963

Milly Glimcher revisits the Happenings movement at Pace Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Pace Gallery
534 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through Saturday, March 17
www.thepacegallery.com

For twenty-five years, the idea of putting on an exhibition detailing the Happenings movement that exploded in New York City during the late 1950s and early 1960s had been percolating inside Milly Glimcher, waiting for the right moment to emerge. That time has come, as the art historian and cofounder of the Pace Gallery (with her husband, Arne) has at last unveiled a surprisingly welcoming show that explores a very specific corner of the development of performance art in downtown Manhattan, complete with all the requisite characters and chaos. Arranged somewhat chronologically by artist, “Happenings: New York, 1958-1963” details extremely low-budget creative gatherings staged by such seminal figures as Red Grooms, Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Carolee Schneeman, and Robert Whitman, with original artwork, photographs, programs, scripts, film clips, advertisements, and other ephemera collected by Glimcher as she met with all of the surviving artists. Many of the photos were taken by Robert McElroy, who died of Alzheimer’s disease shortly after the exhibition opened. Other participants in the events, which took place at such locations as Judson Church, the Reuben Gallery, and the Delancey Street Museum, included Lucas Samaras, Trisha Brown, Tom Wesselman, Yvonne Rainer, and Robert Rauschenberg. Glimcher has done a splendid job curating the exhibition, allowing visitors to delve in as deep as they want as they wander through sections dedicated to Grooms’s “A Play Called Fire,” Dine’s “Car Crash,” Kaprow’s “18 Happenings,” Oldenburg’s “Snapshots from the City,” Schneeman’s “Quarry Transposed,” and others. It would have been easy for “Happenings” to have turned into a “You had to be there” experience, but instead it offers more than just a taste of what it was all like.

PRESIDENT’S FORUM WITH SARAH SZE AND SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE

Sarah Sze’s “Random Walk Drawings” are universes unto themselves at Asia Society (photo courtesy Asia Society)

EXPLORING THE CREATIVE PROCESS — A CONVERSATION
Asia Society
725 Park Ave. at 70th St.
Wednesday, March 14, $20, 6:30
Exhibition continues through March 25
212-288-6400
www.asiasociety.org

For more than fifteen years, New York-based visual artist Sarah Sze has been creating fragile, mysterious environments that are their own little worlds. Using found objects and everyday materials, Sze employs her architectural background to build fascinating structures that combine a Rube Goldberg playfulness with what she calls an “anti-monumental” aesthetic, inspired by Japanese gardens and butoh dance. Her show at Asia Society, “Infinite Line,” delves into her creative process through drawing, sculpture, and installation, spread across two galleries. In the smaller room, such drawings and collages as “Guggenheim as a Ruin,” “Funny Feeling,” “Night,” and “Day” are like architectural plans for fantastical cities while recalling traditional Japanese scroll painting. Visitors have to be careful where they walk in the larger gallery — a security guard will make sure you don’t get too close — which is filled with delicate, expansive pieces made of string, stones, laser-engraved paper, Styrofoam cups, a blinking digital clock, bottle caps, colored tape, and other items that examine the intersection of drawing and sculpture through physical space and perspective. The eight “Random Walk Drawings,” which contain such subtitles as “Compass,” “Window,” “Air,” “Water,” and “Eye Chart,” dangle from the ceiling, spread across the floor, emerge from the wall, and even make their way onto the outside balcony overlooking Park Ave. The Boston-born Sze, who has also treated New Yorkers to such outdoor works as “The Triple Point of Water” in the Whitney’s Sculpture Court in 2003, “Corner Plot” at the Scholars’ Gate entrance to Central Park in 2006, and the current “Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat)” bird feeder on the High Line, will be at Asia Society on March 14 for a discussion with her husband, Indian-born author Siddhartha Mukherjee, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2010 book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, moderated by Asia Society president Vishakha N. Desai. The galleries will remain open until 9:00 that night to allow ticket holders to see the show. If you can’t make it to the event, you can watch the live webcast here.

ARTISTS IN DIALOGUE WITH JOAN JONAS AND KATE GILMORE

Kate Gilmore’s “Break of Day” hangs over the mantelpiece at “The Annual: 2012” at the National Academy (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

National Academy Museum
1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Wednesday, March 14, $12, 6:30
Exhibition continues through April 29
212-369-4880
www.nationalacademy.org

“The Annual: 2012” at the National Academy, which usually focuses on American painting and sculpture, includes several excellent videos in this year’s exhibition, and two of the featured artists will be on hand March 14 to talk about their work. Longtime avant-garde video and performance artist Joan Jonas, who has had recent major shows at the Queens Museum of Art, MoMA, and Yvon Lambert, has been on the cutting edge for five decades. The Annual is displaying her video installation “Lines in the Sand,” a reimagining of the story of Helen of Troy inspired by H.D.’s “Tribute to Freud” and “Helen in Egypt” and transported to Las Vegas. Kate Gilmore, who was born when Jonas’s career was already in full force (in 1975), is represented at the Annual by “Break of Day,” a video in which she climbs up a white cube into which she drops pots of pink paint.

Joan Jonas’s “Lines in the Sand” installation reimagines the story of Helen of Troy (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The two artists will be at the National Academy on Wednesday at 6:30 for an “Artists in Dialogue” session with moderator Marshall Price, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art. Future Annual programs include “On and On and On: Arlene Shechet and Faye Hirsch in Conversation” on March 28 and “Curator’s Insights” on April 11.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: JACCO OLIVIER

Dutch artist Jacco Olivier has made his New York City public art debut by installing six short videos on monitors located throughout Madison Square Park. The display is best seen in the evening, when the colorful animations shine brightly, bringing life to the dark park (and making them easier to find, as they blend more into their surroundings during the day). Consisting of three new works and three older ones, the show highlights Olivier’s playful stop-animation style, in which he creates a painting that he photographs as he continually changes it, resulting in child-friendly narratives of a bug trying to turn over off its back, a deer resting in the woods, and a rabbit hopping through the grass. Stumble, Hide, Rabbit Hole, Bird, Deer, and Home will remain on view through March 12, but you can also catch Olivier’s Revolution at City Center as part of the New Museum’s new video series there.

MOVING IMAGE CONTEMPORARY VIDEO ART FAIR

Daniel Phillips’s three-channel installation RIVER STREET is one of the highlights of Moving Image fair (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Waterfront New York Tunnel
269 11th Ave. between 27th & 28th Sts.
Through March 11, free
212-643-3152
www.moving-image.info

The second annual Moving Image Contemporary Video Art Fair is back in the long, narrow Waterfront New York Tunnel in Chelsea, featuring more than thirty videos and installations from around the world. Upon entering the space from the Eleventh Ave. side, you will find yourself immersed in Janet Biggs’s Predator and Prey, where you can take a seat in the middle of two large screens that follow a polar bear, a horse, and an eagle. For the three-channel River Street, Daniel Phillips documented his rehabilitation of the dilapidated area around his studio and projects the videos on three blocks made from objects and materials he gathered from the construction site. The always playful and innovative Kate Gilmore is represented by Built to Burst, which captures the artist from above as she smashes pots of paint on a series of platforms to create something wholly new. Alex Prager’s Despair, which was recently shown at MoMA, employs colorful, fantasy-like imagery to tell the story of a possible suicide. Martha Wilson uses makeup and camera angles “to deform myself in the way that I fear the most” in the large-screen I have become my own worst fear / Deformation. In Marina Zurkow’s charming black-and-white animation Mesocosm (Northumberland UK), a naked man sits on a tree stump as the seasons pass by around him. There are also creative videos by Sama Alshaibi, Josh Azzarella, Eelco Brand, Susanne Hofer, Jesse McLean, Jenny Perlin, and Yael Kanarek, among others. And be sure not to miss Jesse Fleming’s agonizing The Snail and the Razor, in which a snail ominously attempts to climb over a sharp razor blade. Since you could easily spend much of the day at Moving Image, you can narrow down which videos you want to see by checking out excerpts of every one included in the fair in advance here. On Saturday at noon, Bridgette Howard will moderate the panel discussion “Moving Image Technology of Tomorrow” with Jacob Gaboury, Steven Sacks, and Anne Spalter, followed at 2:00 with Rebecca Cleman moderating the spotlight panel “What Do You Get When You Buy Video Art?” with Lisa Dorin, Jefferson Godard, and Fabienne Stephan.

JON KESSLER: THE BLUE PERIOD

Jon Kessler goes blue at Salon 94 Bowery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Salon 94 Bowery
243 Bowery between Stanton & Rivington Sts.
Through Saturday, March 10
212-979-0001
www.salon94.com
www.jonkessler.com
the blue period slideshow

Yonkers-born multimedia artist Jon Kessler, whose “Seven” collaboration with Mika Rottenberg was one of the standouts of the recent Performa 11 festival, uses cameras and moving parts to create installations filled with unusual perspectives. In “The Blue Period,” which is making its U.S. debut at Salon 94 Bowery through March 10, the New York City–based artist and Columbia professor invites viewers to be more than just spectators as they make their way through the immersive environment, which features two-sided life-size cardboard cutouts of men and women scattered about various cameras, framed collages, and a swirling collection of small moving heads. The color blue abounds, as blue paint has been splattered on the white walls, one side of most of the cardboard figures has been splashed with blue paint, and film and video clips show scenes in which characters are painted blue, including excerpts from Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, Shawn Levy’s Big Fat Liar (an all-blue Paul Giamatti), and Blue Man Group. Those clips alternate with live shots of the room, shown on several flat screens placed throughout the display as well as on a Nam June Paik–like bank of monitors at the front. As you walk around the exhibit, you’ll get the feeling you’re being watched, and you are — either by the rotating cameras, which project your image onto the screens and monitors, by the cardboard cutouts, or by other visitors. There’s no escaping the constant surveillance, either down here at Salon 94 Bowery or, of course, out on the streets of the city. Kessler was inspired by Guy Debord’s 1967 tome The Society of the Spectacle, which offers up such philosophical statements as “Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever” and “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” In “The Blue Period,” Kessler has created an involving, humorous world of moving images that grows just a little more frightening as you realize how pervasive and unreal it all really is. You might be able to get out, but those smiling cardboard cutouts are trapped for the duration.

HIGH LINE ART TALK: CHARLES MARY KUBRICHT AND DR. TIMOTHY O’NEILL

Charles Mary Kubricht’s “Alive-nesses” combines patterns in nature with new forms of pixelated military camouflage (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Bumble and Bumble Recreation Center
415 West 13th St., third floor
Thursday, March 8, free (RSVP required), 7:30
www.thehighline.org

Inspired by Abbott Handerson Thayer’s dazzle camouflage style of art based on protective coloration in nature, Charles Mary Kubricht has painted three large storage containers at the Thirtieth St. end of the High Line. “Alive-nesses: Proposal for Adaptation” consists of a trio of containers covered in abstract black-and-white geometric patterns that help them disappear into the city skyline when seen from a distance, especially at night. They become that much more mysterious because they are located in a still-closed section of the abandoned railway, hovering over the Hudson Rail Yards. They also reference military camouflage used to disguise WWI battleships, an odd sight on such a peaceful urban plateau. On March 8 at 7:30 at the Bumble and Bumble Recreation Center, Kubricht, who divides her time between Texas and New York, will discuss the work with camouflage consultant and retired army officer Dr. Timothy O’Neill, who developed MARPAT (U.S. Marine Corps Disruptive Pattern), a pixelated form of camouflage thought to be more effective than traditional military camouflage. Admission is free with advance RSVP.