this week in art

RABINDRANATH TAGORE / U-RAM CHOE / SARAH SZE

Rabindranath Tagore, “Untitled (Architectural setting with a silhouetted figure),” ink on paper, 1929

Asia Society
725 Park Ave. at 70th St.
Tuesday – Sunday, $10, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-288-6400
www.asiasociety.org

Although Rabindranath Tagore might be most well known for being the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, having given Mohandas Gandhi the name Mahatma, composing the national anthems of both Bangladesh and India (among more than two thousand other songs), and being a subject in Philip Glass’s epic opera Satyagraha, he also became a painter in his later years, beginning at the age of sixty. Several dozen of his paintings and drawings are on view at Asia Society through December 31 in the fascinating exhibition “Rabindranath Tagore: The Last Harvest.” Tagore once said, “Love is kindred to art, it is inexplicable. Duty can be measured by the degree of its benefit, utility by the profit and power it may bring, but art by nothing but itself. There are other factors of life which are visitors that come and go. Art is the guest that comes and remains. The others may be important, but art is inevitable.” Tagore’s works are filled with love, focusing on the human body, nature, animals, portraiture, and the environment, together forming a kind of captivating visual poetry. The exhibit, which runs through December 31, is supplemented with biographical information, music, and a documentary on Tagore made by India’s greatest filmmaker, Satyajit Ray. Also on view through the end of the year is “U-Ram Choe: In Focus,” a large kinetic sculpture of a fantastical creature the Korean artist calls “Custos Cavum.” Composed of steel, stainless steel, brass, aluminum, resin, CPUs, and motors, it at times seems to come alive, its myriad antenna-like extremities rising and twisting, its body appearing to breathe in and out. The excellent triumvirate of exhibitions at Asia Society is completed by the lightweight “Sarah Sze: Infinite Line,” but we don’t mean that in a negative way. The Boston-born, New York City-based artist, whose “Corner Plot” was installed at the Scholars’ Gate entrance to Central Park in 2006, uses paper, string, tape, twigs, mirrors, and found objects galore in creating fragile alternate universes built on memory. “I am interested in an object or image that plays with the state of its own existence,” she says. “In both drawing and sculpture I’m interested in the depiction of gravity and weightlessness as both an operative and a disorienting force.” Be careful where you walk when making your way around Sze’s engaging world, which continues at Asia Society through March 25.

HANUKKAH AT THE MUSEUM OF JEWISH HERITAGE

Husband-and-wife-team Aaron Hartman and Alicia Jo Rabins, the leaders of Girls in Trouble, will give a special Hanukkah concert at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on December 21

Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
36 Battery Pl.
646-437-4202
www.mjhnyc.org

The Museum of Jewish Heritage will be celebrating the Festival of Lights with two special presentations this week. On December 21 at 7:00 ($15), Brooklyn’s Girls in Trouble, led by singer-violinist Alicia Jo Rabins and her husband, bassist Aaron Hartman, will play dark tales of biblical women featured on their two JDub albums, their eponymous 2009 debut and this year’s Half You Half Me, which include such songs as “I Was a Desert,” “I Fell Off My Camel,” “We Are Androgynous,” “Bethesda,” and “Waltz for a Beheading.” (Sadly, JDub Records, which focused on music by Jewish artists, recently announced it is closing because of financial difficulties.) The concert is being held in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibit “Emma Lazarus: Poet of Exiles.” On Christmas Day, MJH will be hosting “I Lift My Lamp: A Statue-esque Hanukkah,” with arts and crafts for children ages three to ten, family-friendly tours, and a trio of film screenings, beginning at 11:00 with An American Tail (Don Bluth, 1986) and continuing at 1:00 with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 espionage thriller Sabaoteur and at 3:00 with Ghostbusters II (Ivan Reitman, 1989). In addition to the Emma Lazarus exhibition, also on view are “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” “Voices of Liberty,” and “Let My People Go! The Soviet Jewry Movement, 1967-1989.”

WALTON FORD: I DON’T LIKE TO LOOK AT HIM, JACK. IT MAKES ME THINK OF THAT AWFUL DAY ON THE ISLAND.

Walton Ford imbues King Kong with strong emotions in current exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Paul Kasmin Gallery
293 Tenth Ave. at 27th St.
Tuesday – Saturday through December 23, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-563-4474
www.paulkasmingallery.com

When King Kong is brought to New York City and put onstage in the original 1933 film, Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) says to Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot), “I don’t like to look at him, Jack. It makes me think of that awful day on the island.” Walton Ford uses that line as a jumping-off point, as well as the title, for his latest exhibition, continuing at Paul Kasmin Gallery through December 23. In the first room of the 293 Tenth Ave. space, a trio of large-scale watercolors breathes powerful emotion into the beast, as he goes from worried (“I don’t like to look at him, Jack”) to angry (“It makes me think of that awful day”) to sad (“On the Island”). Measuring nine feet high and twelve feet wide, the three works focus in on King Kong’s expressive face, presenting him with humanist qualities that dominate the room. “These paintings are about Kong’s heartbreak,” Ford explains in the press release. “I wanted to reveal the monster’s grief, his enormous sadness, the sorrow that the original Kong kept hidden from view.” In the back gallery, Ford references an excerpt from John James Audubon’s memoirs, in which the ornithologist relates a dark tale of having witnessed one of his mother’s monkeys kill “Pretty Polly,” to create six natural-history-style paintings that detail smaller monkeys terrorizing beautiful parrots, including “Unnatural Composure,” in which a bird’s head has just been ripped off and held out to be admired. “The sensations of my infant heart at this cruel sight were agony to me,” Audubon writes. Thus, Ford, who was born in Larchmont and lives and works in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, has infused the paintings of Kong, a fictional character, with deep emotion, while the smaller watercolors of the monkeys and birds, inspired by actual events, are much colder, as if taken from a textbook, and they require extra attention to pick up on some of their more gruesome aspects, free of “enormous sadness.”

XYZ:NYC 10 DOWNING

Visitors get an altered perspective on reality at No Longer Empty interactive exhibition (twi-ny/mdr)

No Longer Empty
10 Downing St. at Bleecker St. & Sixth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 23, free, 1:00 – 8:00
December 27-30, 1:00 – 5:00
www.nolongerempty.org
xyz:nyc slideshow

Australian artists Leslie Eastman and Natasha Johns-Messenger play with light and space in illuminating, entertaining ways in the phenomenological — and extremely fun — exhibition “XYZ:NYC 10 Downing.” Using both natural and electric light, mirrors, and stretched mirror film and employing Cartesian geometry, Eastman, who lives and works in Melbourne, and the New York City-based Johns-Messenger create a unique experience for each visitor through a series of site-responsive areas. Referencing Matisse, Magritte, and Vermeer as well as Eliasson, Graham, and even Höller, “XYZ:NYC” consists of five architectural works that literally turn perception upside down and inside out. In Johns-Messenger’s “Vertical Neon,” a narrow, angled passageway contains numerous mirrors that confuse and delight on the way to the source of a glowing light. Eastman’s “Event Horizon Far” is a live video stream of the beautiful view from the artist’s Melbourne studio projected onto a small screen hanging from the ceiling, while “Event Horizon Near” is a camera obscura presentation of the traffic passing by on Sixth Ave., lighting up a rectangular frame in the shape of a Vermeer painting. Eastman and Johns-Messenger, who have been collaborating since 2004, team up on “Pointform,” a pair of triangular corner spaces that alter reality and perception, one seemingly cutting the body out in the middle, the other, “Synoptic 3,” including a headset worn by two people that, well, to say any more would be giving it away, so make sure to RSVP for a specific time as soon as you can. “XYZ:NYC” is not merely a group of optical illusions and gimmicky tricks; instead it is a carefully constructed interventionist installation that subverts and disrupts classical perspective, depending on viewer engagement to bring it all together. The show is an excellent example of the work done by No Longer Empty, a nonprofit organization that curates site-specific exhibitions in temporary public spaces, working with the community through education and cultural programming to help promote new ways of looking at and experiencing art. This child-friendly installation also includes a “No Longer Bored” scavenger hunt for kids, featuring art activities and interesting facts and questions.

SUPER SABADO: SUPER HOLIDAYS!

Three Kings Day will be the focus of free Saturday programs at El Museo del Barrio (photo by Gary Santana)

FREE THIRD SATURDAYS
El Museo del Barrio
1230 Fifth Ave. at 104th St.
Saturday, December 17, free, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-831-7272
www.elmuseo.org

El Museo del Barrio’s free Super Sabado program for December celebrates Christmas on December 17 with a full slate of holiday fun, beginning at 11:00 as members of the musical groups Balún and Tepeu will lead a holiday sing-along in El Teatro. From 12 noon to 3:00, kids can take part in an art workshop inspired by the Three Kings puppets and costumes in El Café and El Taller or make maracas in the Black Box Theater in preparation for the annual Three Kings Day Parade. At 3:00 in El Café, this year’s madrinas and padrinos in the parade will be on hands to talk about the festivities. And at 4:00 in the Black Box, the Peace Poets will get teens to speak their mind in the monthly spoken-word workshop “Oh Snap!” In addition, there will be tours of the museum’s two current exhibits, “Voces y Visiones: Signs, Systems & the City” and “El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files 2011.” And as always, be sure to come hungry, because there’s always something interesting cooking in El Café.

CAROLING AT THE MORGAN

Charles Dickens’s original marked-up manuscript of A CHRISTMAS CAROL is on view at the Morgan

Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Friday, December 16, free, 6:30 – 8:30
212-685-0008
www.themorgan.org

As part of its free Friday programming on December 16, the Morgan Library will feature singers from the Mannes College the New School for Music performing Christmas carols throughout the museum from 6:30 to 8:30. And you can continue the holiday spirit at the Morgan exhibition “Charles Dickens at 200,” which celebrates the Christmas Carol scribe’s life and career with original manuscripts, letters, books, photographs, illustrations, caricatures, and more. There will be a docent tour of the show, which runs through February 12, on Sunday at 2:00. As Dickens wrote in the preface to the book in 1843, “I have endeavoured, in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it!” To which we add, “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”

SEE THE LIGHT(S): HANUKKAH AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM

Maurice Sendak has gathered together menorahs for the Jewish Museum exhibition “An Artist Remembers” (photo of final illustration of GRANDPA’S HOUSE courtesy the Maurice Sendak Collection, Rosenbach Museum & Library)

Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
December 15-27, free – $20
212-423-3337
www.thejewishmuseum.org

What better place to celebrate Hanukkah than at the Jewish Museum? The stately Fifth Ave. institution will be partying up for the Festival of Lights with a series of programs and exhibitions over the next two weeks. On Thursday night, December 15 ($12-$15, 8:00-11:00), “Cheryl Does Chanukah” will feature techno dreidels, sweet sufganiot, a one-hour open bar, a dance party hosted by DJ Nick, and a live performance by Brooklyn-based quartet Cheryl. On Saturdays, admission to the museum is free, so be sure to check out the special exhibition “An Artist Remembers: Hanukkah Lamps Selected by Maurice Sendak,” a group of lamps chosen by the children’s book legend from the Jewish Museum’s permanent collection. Sunday is Hanukkah Family Day, with a menorah workshop for children three and up and live music by Ben Rudnick and Friends. On Monday (free with museum admission, 12 noon – 3:00), there will be a tour of “An Artist Remembers,” followed by Hanukkah-themed tours of the permanent exhibition, “Culture and Continuity,” at 1:15 on December 22, 23, 26, and 27. The Macaroons will perform three holiday shows on Sunday ($15-$20, 11:00, 1:00, 3:00); look for such seasonal favorites as “Dreidel Bird” and “Hurry Up and Light the Candles.” And Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Band Allstars will say goodbye to Hanukkah by rocking out on December 27 ($45, 7:30) with their inspiring brand of Jewish roots music.