this week in art

NORTHSIDE FESTIVAL 2012: DAY TWO

LIssy Trullie will be looking for love and more at Northside tonight (photo by Cory Kennedy)

The third annual Northside Festival heads into day two with its biggest show, an outdoor concert in McCarren Park featuring of Montreal, Jens Lekman, the Thermals, and Beach Fossils that should be hipster central. But don’t pass up the smaller, cheaper events at such venues as Bar Matchless, Cameo Gallery, Europa, Glasslands, Music Hall of Williamsburg, the Knitting Factory, Public Assembly, and Legion. Tonight’s promising roster includes St. Lucia, French Horn Rebellion, Lissy Trullie, Buke and Gase, and a record release party for These United States. In addition, Northside Art begins, with dozens of artists opening up their studios to visitors, and Northside Entrepreneurship continues with such panel discussions as “Fundraising for Niche Startups: Lessons from Urban Agriculture Innovators,” “Make Things Not War,” and “GZA on the Spirit of Disruption and Brooklyn.”

of Montreal, Jens Lekman, the Thermals, Beach Fossils, McCarren Park, $33.50, 5:00

Northside Art: Katie Nielsen, “Many Conversations” group show at Present Company, opening reception 6:00 – midnight, “Space Half Empty” group show at Fowler Arts Collective, opening reception 7:00 – 10:00

Neon Gold Records present: St. Lucia, French Horn Rebellion, Black Light Dinner Party, Slowdance, Lovelife, Nini Fabi, Chrome Canyon (DJ), Cameo Gallery, $15, 7:00

These United States (album release show), Grand Rapids, Your 33 Black Angels, Knitting Factory, $15, 8:00

The Whatever Blog presents: LUFF, Gold Streets, the Planes, Crazy Pills, Alyson Greenfield, Legion, $5, 8:00

PopGun presents: Lissy Trullie, the Young Rapscallions, Motive, Glasslands Gallery, $10, 8:30

LARRY RIVERS: LATER WORKS

Larry Rivers, “Art and the Artist: Mondrian,” oil on canvas mounted on sculpted foamboard, 1992 (courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery)

Tibor de Nagy Gallery
724 Fifth Ave. between 56th & 57th Sts.
Tuesday – Friday through June 15, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-262-5050
www.tibordenagy.com

Born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in the Bronx in 1923, multidisciplinary artist and jazz saxophonist Larry Rivers, who died ten years ago at the age of seventy-eight, was a key influential figure in the ever-changing world of twentieth-century art, impossible to pigeon-hole into any one specific category or movement. This refusal to maintain the status quo is evident in his current solo show at Tibor de Nagy, which focuses on paintings and drawings made between 1975 and 2002. “A number of things strike me about Rivers’s late work. One is its range,” writes American poet and critic John Yau in the exhibition’s hardcover catalog. “He can go from doing a self-mocking send-up of his friend, the French artist Jean Hélion, to sensitively addressing the legacy of the Holocaust. This alone convinces me that his late work needs a longer and deeper look, and that his entire oeuvre needs to be reconsidered.” Indeed, the pieces on view deal with two primary subjects: three-dimensional sculpture paintings that pay homage to other artists, and poignant drawings that address family and loss, especially in regard to World War II. What first jumps out at Tibor de Nagy are brightly colored depictions of Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Hélion, and others at work, painted on intricately sculpted foamboard that gives added life to them without feeling gimmicky. Rivers also re-creates Matisse’s “La Danse” with a more abstract vision. Meanwhile, in the back room, such poignant color pencil drawings as “The Frank Family,” “Four Seasons: Fall in the Forest of Birkenau,” and “Erasing the Past I” and “Erasing the Past II” take on a more serious tone, the yellow stars on the subjects’ tattered clothes emerging as haunting reminders of the Holocaust. While the works might evoke a wide range of emotions, from glee and wonder to sadness and pain, they are all about one thing, a past as remembered by a truly American artist.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN / THE WOODMANS

Francesca Woodman, “Space2, Providence, Rhode Island,” gelatin silver print, 1976 (© George and Betty Woodman)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through June 13, $18 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

Tragically, Francesca Woodman’s story usually begins at the end: The innovative, influential photographer killed herself in 1981 at the age of twenty-two. But by that time she had already amassed an impressive, deeply personal collection of intimate, haunting photographs, something she began when she was just thirteen. The daughter of artists George and Betty Woodman, Francesca attended the Rhode Island School of Design, traveled to Rome and Athens, and moved to New York City during her short lifetime, all the while taking primarily black-and-white photographs in which her often nude body merges with both physical and psychological space, becoming part of the architecture as well as the ether. She huddles in a corner, disappears in a window, and covers parts of herself with detritus. Only hair and a bit of forehead are visible in a cast-iron bathtub. The lower half of her body sits over an impression of herself on a dusty floor. In an outdoor shot, she wears tree bark on her arms, transforming into part of the forest. And in one of her later works, a large-scale purplish diazotype, or blueprint, she poses as a caryatid, her arms covering her face. The retrospective also includes a half dozen recently discovered experimental videos that bring her photographic sensibility to life. Artists from Bruce Nauman and Cindy Sherman to Marina Abramović and Lucas Samaras feature themselves in their work, but in Woodman’s oeuvre, the artist is visible in a completely different way, trapped in a moment of space and time, the past, present, and future mysterious and uncertain. (Woodman’s “Blueprint for a Temple” is also part of the Met’s current “Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film, and Video” exhibition, and some of her later work was recently highlighted at a small but intriguing show at Marian Goodman.)

The tragic life of artist Francesca Woodman and her family is the focus of intriguing documentary (untitled photo by Francesca Woodman, 1977-78, Rome, courtesy Betty and George Woodman)

THE WOODMANS (C. Scott Willis, 2010)
Now available on DVD
www.kinolorber.com

There’s something inherently creepy about The Woodmans, C. Scott Willis’s documentary about an intriguing family of artists. For the first half of his debut theatrical release, Willis, an eleven-time Emmy winner who has spent most of his career working for television news organizations, speaks with successful ceramic sculptor Betty Woodman, who had a terrific retrospective at the Met in 2006; her less-well-known husband, painter and photographer George Woodman; and their son, video artist and professor Charles Woodman, focusing on the missing member of the family, photographer Francesca Woodman, who is heard from through excerpts from her diary and seen in her videos and photographs. For those who don’t know Francesca’s fate, Willis builds the tension like a mystery, although it’s obvious something awful occurred. The Woodmans gets even creepier once Willis reveals what happened to Francesca, a RISD grad who quickly made a name for herself in the late 1970s taking innovative and influential nude black-and-white photographs of herself. As the parents talk about their daughter’s life and career, Betty explains how she got pregnant more to experience childbirth than to actually be a nurturing mother, and George expresses his jealousy at how Francesca was so admired in the art world, outshining both her parents. That they tend to do so with a calm matter-of-factness contributes to the uncomfortable nature of the film.

QUEER NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

Silvia Costa’s LA QUIESCENZA DEL SEME will examine birth and consciousness at the Queer New York International Arts Festival

Abrons Arts Center, Henry Street Settlement (and other locations)
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
June 7-15, $20
212-598-0400
www.abronsartscenter.org
www.queerny.org

In March 2011, Zvonimir Dobrović, the curator and producer of the Eastern European Perforacije Festival, put together the inaugural American Perforations Festival at Club La MaMa, a collection of eclectic theatrical productions from Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Macedonia. Dobrović, who is also the artistic director of Queer Zagreb, has now teamed up with art historian and independent curator André von Ah to present the first Queer New York International Arts Festival. Taking place June 7-15 primarily at the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side, QNYI features multidisciplinary projects that recontextualize and reconsider what constitutes queer art. The opening-night party, held June 7 at the Delancey, includes performances by Carol Pope, Carmelita Tropicana, Eyes Wild Drag, Sarah-Louise Young, Raul de Nieves, Justin Sayre, Kayvon Zand, and others, with DJ sets by JD Samson, DJ R!C, and DJ Malakai. The shows begin with Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte’s Macadamia Nut Brittle, which is inspired by writings by Dennis Cooper and focuses on four characters in search of their identity. In Tadaku Takamine’s Kimura-San installation, the artist documents how he cared for a paraplegic, including sexually. In Auto + Batterie, David Wampach uses dissonant music, live drumming, extreme choreography, and whipped cream to bring together sound and movement. In Guintche, a drawing by Marlene Monteiro Freitas explodes into life and becomes unstoppable. Silvia Costa of Plumes dans la tête examines birth and not-birth in La Quiescenza del seme. Igor Josifov’s 2-Dimensional reconfigures performer and audience, as people walk over the Macedonian artist, who is trapped under a plexiglass structure. Body parts figure significantly throughout the festival; François Chaignaud and Cecilia Bengolea look deep into “a reflection of the denial of the anus in dance” in Paquerette at the Invisible Dog in Brooklyn, while Biljana Kosmogina’s ‘P’ Campaign follows the exploits of the presidential candidate Vagina. And East Village Boys are hosting the art exhibit “For personal use” June 7-16 at the Impossible Project, with specially commissioned works by Mx Justin Vivian Bond, Jeff Hahn, Jayson Keeling, Josh McNey, and others.

ANISH KAPOOR

Anish Kapoor’s monumental Cor-Ten steel creation fills Gladstone’s 21st St. space (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Gladstone Gallery
515 West 24th St., 530 West 21st St.
Tuesday – Saturday through June 9, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.gladstonegallery.com
anish kapoor slideshow

In May 2008, Mumbai-born, London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor inaugurated Gladstone’s second Chelsea space with a solo show at both of the gallery’s locations. He is now back at 515 West 24th St. and 530 West 21st St. with a pair of very different exhibits that continues his exploration of materiality, mass, and form. Best known for such large installations as “Memory,” which blocked off Guggenheim visitors in early 2010, “Sky Mirror,” which dazzled people at Rockefeller Center in fall 2006, and the monumental reflective “Cloud Gate” (familiarly known as “The Bean”) in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Kapoor most often works with mirrored surfaces and Cor-Ten steel, solid materials that emphasize strength and firmness as well as mystery and fun. And so it is at 21st St., where an enormous round steel sculpture, reminiscent of “Memory,” rests against a beam in the center of the space, a vast hole on one side inviting visitors to peer into its darkness. The rust-colored engineering marvel is like a nonthreatening UFO that has somehow impossibly landed indoors in Chelsea, where people can walk around it and stick their head inside, calling out to hear an echo.

Anish Kapoor’s concrete forest winds through Gladstone’s 24th St. gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

It is a striking complement to the installation at 24th St., where Kapoor has created an intriguing forest of nearly two dozen gray concrete sculptures that appear to be light and fragile, making one afraid to get too close for fear of knocking one of the abstract trees over or chipping off some bark when walking through the various pathways. Three years ago, Kapoor teamed with Factum Arte to create a procedure to print cement in three dimensions using an “Identity Engine [that] is a shit machine that farts and craps its way along its ordained path, transforming concrete into stigmergic, self-organised structures. Wounds and gashes, pleats and folds emerge at will and either self-heal or continue to rupture,” he wrote in his book Unconformity and Entropy. While the poured-concrete pieces at Gladstone are not quite as scatological as the earlier concrete sculptures he showed at the Royal Academy, they are like rising, spiral Rorschach tests where you can see what you want to see.

SPACE PROGRAM: MARS

Tom Sachs takes visitors on a trip to Mars in the Park Avenue Armory (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 17, $12, 12 noon – 7:00 pm (open till 9:00 on Fridays)
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
tomsachsmars.com
space program: mars slideshow

You don’t have to have grown up dreaming of becoming an astronaut to get a huge kick out of Tom Sachs’s immersive “Space Program: Mars” experience at the Park Avenue Armory. In September 2007, the New York native and his well-trained team traveled to the moon at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, but this time around he sets his sights much bigger, as Sachs and crew have filled the armory’s expansive Wade Thompson Drill Hall with all the elements needed to journey to and explore the Red Planet. Curated by Creative Time’s Anne Pasternak and the armory’s Kristy Edmunds, “Space Program: Mars” begins with “Working to Code,” a series of short films (10 Bullets, Color, Love Letter to Plywood, Space Camp, How to Sweep, several made with Van Neistat) that detail Sachs’s bricolage DIY artistic process and hysterically precise rules (“When in doubt, leave it out! Or Die!”) that must be followed while toiling in the studio. You need to pay close attention to the very droll and funny movies if you want to pass the indoctrination test that is the only way to gain entrance to the life-size Lunar Excursion Module. (If you want a head start, you can check out all of the films in advance here.) And you’re going to want to get into the LEM, which is loaded with fascinating pieces that playfully evoke the real thing.

The Mission Control station makes sure everything is up and running in immersive space experience (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Working with NASA, Sachs and his crew of thirteen men and women painstakingly, and with a fabulous dose of tongue-in-cheek humor, re-created a multimedia Mission Control station, surveillance cameras, refrigeration units (including the Vader Fridge in the shape of the evil Death Lord), a miniature launch pad and docking target, a Mars Excursion Roving Vehicle, helmets and space suits, an ID station, an Incinolet, a Mobile Quarantine Facility inside a 1972 Winnebago, a cooking area, a clean air room, and other items necessary for achieving and surviving intergalactic travel, all put together with wood, metal, foam core, glue, nails, and other found materials ― resulting in a number of essential parts that actually work. NASA might have canceled the space shuttle program, but Sachs is reaffirming the continuing need for manned missions ― while also displaying his unique and endearing artistic sensibilities. And don’t miss the Museum of the Moon in the Veterans Room out in the hallway, where you can delve into the previous moon mission. The installation is up through June 17 and features several special activities. On June 7, Sachs and his team will conduct live demonstrations of the program’s flight plan. From June 9 through 16, Sachs and his Grummans will be holding mini-demonstrations, including a rescue mission, daily at 1:00 and 3:00, along with a Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse bicycle race scheduled for 6:00 every evening. On June 9-10 at 10:00 am, children ages five to twelve and their parents or guardians can take part in the interactive workshop “Life on Mars: Imagining the Incredible” with members of the Armory Artists Corps. On June 16, you can have “Breakfast with Mars Scientists,” as Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists Gregg Vane, Kevin Hand, and Tommaso Rivellini will join Sachs and moderator Lawrence Weschler for an in-depth conversation. The grand finale takes off immediately following, as Sachs and company will lead a real-time flight-plan endurance demonstration that runs until around midnight, with visitors allowed to come and go as they please, although you’ll have to get back in line for reentry.

BUSHWICK OPEN STUDIOS 2012

Bushwick Open Studios will include such interactive installations as Michelle Jaffe’s “Wappen Field”

Throughout Bushwick
June 2-3, free
artsinbushwick.org

The sixth annual Bushwick Open Studios is under way throughout the Brooklyn neighborhood, with hundreds of local artists opening their doors to visitors and participating in special projects all weekend. This year’s multimedia indoor/outdoor festival will include a Street Art Pop-Up Store hosted by Robin Grearson, record release parties, live art battles, concerts at Lone Wolf, XPO, and Pine Box Rock Shop, site-specific installation performances by jill sigman/thinkdance, Valentina Loseva, and Sophia Cleary, bike tours and safety programming, the “Spread Art Outdoors” Parade of Art, such group shows as “Surreal Estate,” “Figure Fragments,” “Usual Suspects,” “Conceptual Death,” and “True Nature,” panel discussions, interactive participatory exhibits by MG Stillwaggon, Running Rebel Studios, Bushwick Dimensions, Michelle Jaffe, Salon des Fous, Will Bates, the Desert Forest, Jack Aldrich, Roarke Menzies, and Pass Kontrol, and plenty of live music, dance, performance art, and general weirdness.