this week in art

FRIEZE ART FAIR NEW YORK

Olaf Nicolai’s “Why women like to buy textiles that feel nice” is part of Frieze’s New York unveiling (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Randall’s Island Park
May 4-7, $40, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
646-346-2845
friezenewyork.com
frieze art fair new york slideshow

The highly touted Frieze Art Fair made its debut in London in 2003, and for the first time it has moved across the Atlantic for a New York edition, which continues through Monday. Taking place on Randall’s Island, Frieze New York is set inside a long white tent, with a handful of specially commissioned projects on the surrounding grass. It’s more or less a standard art fair, with familiar American and British galleries alongside a smattering from other countries, showing contemporary sculpture, painting, drawing, video, photography, and installation. You never know whom you might bump into at these oh-so-chic events; we found ourselves greeting master chef Daniel Boulud and controversial artist Andres Serrano while wandering around on Sunday afternoon. Although there’s a lot to like about Frieze — especially that it’s spread out just enough to not get ridiculously overcrowded — we’re still trying to figure out what all of the excess hubbub is about. At $40 a ticket and an additional $40 if you want the catalog, it is certainly not cheap. Getting there does require either ferry service from Midtown East or special bus service, but it is not nearly as treacherous as one might expect. As for the art itself, you can view our online slideshow here to see some of our favorites. If you do go on Monday, be sure to check out Taryn Simon’s talk at 1:00 about her new MoMA exhibit, “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII,” while map lovers should enjoy the 3:00 panel discussion “Collection Cartographies.”

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN: CHOICES

John Chamberlain, “SPHINXGRIN TWO,” aluminum, 2010 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

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

It is a shame that Indiana-born, Chicago-raised sculptor John Chamberlain didn’t live long enough to see the revelatory career retrospective at the Guggenheim, on view through May 13. While working with the museum on the exhibition, Chamberlain passed away in December at the age of eighty-four, but he left behind a legacy that flourishes at this outstanding show. Chamberlain’s most familiar oeuvre, twisted metal sculptures made from car parts, along with splendid works made from other materials, are laid out chronologically through Frank Lloyd Wright’s twisting passageway, with the first thing that jumps out at visitors being the color. Chamberlain’s automobile sculptures are like three-dimensional Abstract Expressionist and Pop paintings that have jumped off the canvas, breathing with an inner life that is intoxicating. The works, lush with blues, greens, yellows, and reds, are not mere mash-ups of fenders and front quarter panels but are carefully constructed and painted steel sculptures with such playful names as “Lord Suckfist,” “Miss Lucy Pink,” “Hatband,” “Sugar Tit,” and “Rooster Starfoot.” Chamberlain said, “It’s all in the fit,” and the works at the Guggenheim fit together extremely well. “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” resembles a quartet of Balzac-like figures. A series of untitled square collages from the early 1960s hang on the walls like oil canvases, except their various elements jut out into space.

John Chamberlain takes a seat in his studio (photo by Robert McKeever, courtesy Gagosian Gallery)

In the mid-1960s, Chamberlain began experimenting with lacquer, Formica, and foam, resulting in such works as “Untitled #7,” a sculpture of fruit made from urethane foam, cord, cloth, paint, and wooden beads, and “Couch,” a foam installation on which visitors can take a seat or lie down. Chamberlain continued working through to the very end, using materials from vintage cars to create such pieces as “HAWKFLIESAGAIN” and “PEAUDESOIEMUSIC” over the last two years, in addition to the twisted aluminum “SPHINXGRIN TWO,” which stands in the museum’s rotunda, and the steel “C’ESTZESTY” that rises outside on Fifth Ave. In some ways Chamberlain can also be seen as an early recycler, his works reusing materials that were not merely found objects but specifically chosen, now gathered at the Guggenheim in a dazzling display that justly celebrates this great American artist. In conjunction with “John Chamberlain: Choices,” on May 8 artist Amy Sillman will lead an Eye to Eye private gallery tour of the show, on May 10 the Divine Ricochet Music Series concludes with a performance in the rotunda by Zola Jesus with JG Thirlwell, and on May 12 artist and conservator Corey D’Augustine will teach the all-day workshop “AbEx3D: Abstract Expressionism in Sculpture.”

RENOIR, IMPRESSIONISM, AND FULL-LENGTH PAINTING

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, “The Umbrellas (Les Parapluies),” oil on canvas, ca. 1881-85 (courtesy the National Gallery, London)

The Frick Collection
1 East 70th St. at Fifth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 13, $18 (pay-what-you-wish Sunday 11:00 am – 1:00 pm)
212-288-0700
www.frick.org

The Frick takes a unique approach to the work of French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the small but delightful exhibition “Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting.” For the first time ever, nine large-scale figurative Renoir paintings have been brought together from around the world and displayed in the Frick’s East Gallery, which has never before been dedicated to a single show; in addition, it is a one-time-only event, as the Frick will be its only home. Inspired by the Paris Salons of the 1870s and 1880s, Renoir created several long, rectangular canvases that celebrated French fashion and style. Renoir favors solitary figures in “The Dancer,” “La Parisienne,” and “Madame Henriot ‘en travesti’ (The Page),” concentrating on the subjects’ dress, the first two set against an Impressionistic background. In the Frick’s own “La Promenade,” a mother guides her two young daughters through the park, all three elegantly attired amid lush blues and greens. On one wall, an 1883 trilogy of works that focus on dancing couples hang side by side. In “Dance in the City,” a formally dressed man and woman dance demurely, his right hand gently grasping the middle of her back, her gloved left hand placed delicately on his right shoulder. In “Dance in the Country,” a more casually dressed couple seems to be having more fun, the man gazing lovingly at the woman, the woman smiling at the viewer; a straw hat lying in the lower right corner adds to the simplicity and genuineness of the moment. And in “Dance at Bougival,” the most intimate and sensual of the three, the man and woman hold on to each other with bare hands as people in the background chatter on, with glasses of beer on a table and cigarette butts littering the ground. Seen together, the works form a dramatic triptych of love, romance, and class structure in late-nineteenth-century Paris. The most surprising piece in the exhibition is “The Umbrellas (Les Parapluies),” a complex canvas dominated by a woman carrying a picnic basket in the left foreground and facing the viewer, a group of open umbrellas at the top extending deep into the background. A man gazes upon the woman, perhaps about to offer her some cover, while a little girl holding a hoop looks at the viewer from the lower right. The subjects’ faces and the geometric patterns of the umbrellas, the basket, the hoop, and various hats battle for attention in this sharply painted scene. The show also delves into Renoir’s use of models as well as how some of the works changed over time, as revealed by close inspection and x-ray technology. Organized by Frick deputy director Colin B. Bailey, “Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting” is a lovely examination of Renoir’s own artistic dance with size.

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.