this week in art

DREAM-OVER: A SLEEP-OVER FOR GROWN-UPS

Rubin Museum
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Tickets on sale October 4, $108
Event takes place October 22, 8:00 pm – 9:00 am
www.rmanyc.org/dreamover

The Rubin Museum’s inaugural Dream-over this past March was a unique and wildly successful sleepover party for adults. It’s safe to say that Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s files never contained anything quite like this. Complete with bedtime stories, expertly guided discussions of Freudian dream interpretation and imagery, and a night bedded down in front of an artwork specially selected for each dreamer, the event sold out in minutes as adventurous New Yorkers rushed to spend an evening amid the colorful paintings and mystical sculptures of many-armed buddhas, flying sages, and spectacular contemporary photography in the Rubin’s exceptional collections of Himalayan art. It’s no pipe dream that the Dream-over is back; its October 22 reincarnation will be conducted under the guidance of Lama Lhanang Rinpoche, spiritual teacher of the Nyingma Longchen Nying-Thig order of Tibetan Buddhism, and clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. William H. Braun. Lucky participants will engage in an art meditation workshop, discussions of Tibetan Dream Yoga, and Himalayan tales as well as enjoy a midnight snack, Tibetan breakfast, and no contact with the outside world for more than twelve hours. (Turn those cellphones off!) Lucky participants fill out a detailed Dreamlife Questionnaire in advance, then the Rubin decides which artwork each dreamer will snooze under — one that will hopefully influence your brain’s nighttime wanderings. (If you go as a couple, you will both sleep together under one work of art.) Tickets are a bit pricier than in March ($108 vs. $55) and the event may sell out even more quickly, but you’ll instantly know it’s well worth the money and effort when you arrive in nightclothes and with a sleeping bag and bed down under the eyes of hundreds of compassionate buddhas — or a modern photograph of an Indian street, as we did in March — and see just what one’s subconscious turns up.

ATLANTIC ANTIC

Atlantic Ave. between Hicks St. & Fourth Ave.
Sunday, October 2, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
www.atlanticave.org

It looks like it should be quite a beautiful day for the thirty-seventh annual Atlantic Antic, where more than one million people are expected to enjoy food, art, music, dance, and more along Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn, from Hicks St. to Fourth Ave. On outdoor stages and inside bars and restaurants, you’ll be able to catch live performances by the Winsor Terrors, Les Sans Culottes, Charanga Soleil, the Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band, the Jack Grace Band, BR and Timebomb, the Black Coffee Blues Band, Alex Battles’ Whisky Rebellion, the Brotherhood of the Jug Band Blues, and many more. The afternoon also includes lots of family-friendly activities between Boerum Pl. & Smith St,, with pony rides, magicians, puppet shows, kids’ bands, face painting, inflatable rides, and plenty more. Among the participating establishments are the Chip Shop, the Waterfront Ale House, the Brazen Head, the Flying Saucer, Gumbo, and Hank’s Saloon, and there will be local booths galore selling all kinds of items you won’t find at standard street fairs. And for the eighteenth year, the New York Transit Museum is hosting the Bus Festival on Boerum Pl. between State St. & Atlantic Ave., featuring vintage buses, workshops, free tours, and other fun things.

RED HOOK RAMBLE

Alejandro Teichberg puts the finishing touches on his “Not Out of the Woods Yet” exhibit at the Everbrite Mercantile Co. in Red Hook (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

So you’re finally ready to venture off to that hotbed of Swedish home furnishings, IKEA, prepared to face massive crowds and track down all the parts you need from the nearly endless warehouse section before bringing it home to figure out how to put it all together. If you don’t have a car, the best way to get there is via the Water Taxi that leaves from Fulton Ferry Landing every forty minutes (beginning at 11:00 in the morning) and is free on Saturdays and Sundays. But when you get off in Brooklyn, don’t hurry your way into the superstore. Instead, first take a ramble through Red Hook, another gentrifying nabe that offers some great places to eat, shop, and check out art. And you’re gonna need this foray before foraging through IKEA. Head down Van Brunt and begin your Red Hook ramble at the Red Hook Lobster Pound (284 Van Brunt), where you can order an excellent lobster roll and enjoy it at the next-door inside picnic area. Then stroll to the Everbrite Mercantile Co. (351 Van Brunt), where you can buy all sorts of unusual objects and see Alejandro Teichberg’s “Not Out of the Woods Yet” exhibit, consisting of some wonderful paintings of natural scenes immersed in personal memories. Next up is the Kentler International Drawing Space (353 Van Brunt), which is currently showing Lezli Rubin-Kunda and Ellen Moffat’s collaborative multimedia “Marking Space.” Then stop at Baked (359 Van Brunt) for a ridiculous sweet & salty brownie, a slice of crazy good Red Hook Red Hot red velvet cake, or the insane, heavenly chocolate cloud cookie. Now that you’re stuffed with food and art, you’ll be ready to navigate through IKEA — or else you’ll be so satisfied with your lovely afternoon that you’ll board the free ferry back home and take a good, long nap filled with pleasant dreams instead of facing the nightmare of having to assemble that computer desk, headboard, or kitchen table you don’t really need as much as you originally thought.

BRING TO LIGHT: NUIT BLANCHE NEW YORK 2011

Marcos Zotes’s “CCTV/Creative Control” will look down on “Nuit Blanche” visitors from the Milton St. water tower (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Multiple locations throughout Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Saturday, October 1, free, 6:00 pm – 12 midnight
www.bringtolightnyc.org

Greenpoint will shine bright tonight for “Bring to Light: Nuit Blanche New York,” the second annual multimedia festival featuring site-specific projections and performance art in the gentrifying neighborhood. Begun ten years ago in Paris and now held in numerous cities around the world, “Nuit Blanche” celebrates the community in which it takes place; in the case of Greenpoint, an industrial zone that has seen an influx of artists (and hip bars, restaurants, and music clubs) over the last few years, “Nuit Blanche” seeks to build interest in expanding and opening up more of the waterfront to public use. In fact, executive director Ethan Vogt and director of operations Tom Peyton got the city to allow access, just for one night, to several areas that are usually closed to the public. “Bring to Light” consists of more than fifty installations scattered throughout Greenpoint, from a trio of Richard Serra videos from the 1960s and ’70s to Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “Veterans Flame Greenpoint” (footage of a flame flickering to Afghan war stories told by Polish and English-language veterans), from Jeremy Blake’s Winchester Trilogy to Raphaele Shirley’s light-and-water-based “Light Cloud on a Bender,” from Sean Boggs’s slide sequence “Passerby” to Jeff Desom’s panoramic restaging of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Among the interactive performances are Rita Ackermann’s “A Backwards Walking Flash Mob,” in which one hundred participants will be filmed walking backward; Daniel Canogar’s “Asalto,” in which people are filmed crawling across a green screen, the results of which will be projected onto a tall building across the street, as if dozens of men, women, and children are climbing up the facade toward the heavens; and Ellis & Cuius’s “The Company,” in which visitors can walk under and around an arch of dangling Tungsten lightbulbs that react to sound and movement (and will host live performances in the space). If you take the East River Ferry from Thirty-fourth St., you’ll be greeted by Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s “Soft Sell,” a video of a large lipsticked mouth welcoming visitors to Greenpoint (and which was originally created for Times Square in 1993, just as it was about to undergo massive changes itself), and can later find Alex Villar’s “Splitting Image” in the park, about a commute on the ferry. And keep an eye out for Marcos Zotes’s “CCTV/Creative Control,” a projection of an enormous watching eye under the Milton St. water tower. There’s art just about everywhere you look, so grab a program, follow the map (or just walk around aimlessly), and enjoy what should be a fascinating and fun — and free — evening of unique and unusual art and architecture.

FIRST SATURDAYS: LATINO HERITAGE

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, “Marta Moreno Vega,” pigmented ink-jet print, 2011 (© Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, October 1, 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 be celebrating Latino heritage at its October First Saturday program, centered on the exhibition “Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: The Latino List,” in which the photographer behind “The Black List” turns his camera on such Latino figures as Marta Moreno Vega, Pitbull, Eva Longoria, Cesar Conde, Robert Menendez, and John Leguizamo. Greenfield-Sanders will screen the HBO documentary The Latino List at 7:30 and participate in a discussion following the film. The evening will also include live performances by ABAKUÁ Afro-Latin Dance Company, Jerry Hernandez y La Orquesta Dee Jay, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jose Conde, a book-club talk by Moreno Vega about her memoir When the Spirits Dance Mambo, a curator talk on “Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk — An Introspective,” an art workshop, and more. Also on view are such exhibits as “Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior,” “Raw/Cooked: Kristof Wickman,” “Eva Hesse Spectres 1960,” “Matthew Buckingham: ‘The Spirit and the Letter,’” “reOrder: An Architectural Environment by Situ Studio,” and “Ten Years Later: Ground Zero Remembered.”

THIRTYNOTHING

Dan Fishback looks back at his childhood and the AIDS epidemic in multidisciplinary THIRTYNOTHING at Dixon Place

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Pl. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
Fridays & Saturdays, September 30 – October 22, $15-$20, 7:30 or 9:30
212-219-0736
www.dixonplace.org

A few years ago, we caught Dan Fishback’s outrageously funny You Will Experience Silence at Dixon Place, one of the truly great works about Chanukah. Fishback, who has also presented such shows as The Material World, Absentia Dementia, Waiting for Barbara, and Please Let Me Love You, which take on politics, celebrity, religion, gay culture, and other themes, is staging the solo performance project thirtynothing at Dixon Place on Fridays & Saturdays through October 22. Directed by Stephen Brackett, thirtynothing pulls together stories from Fishback’s childhood along with tales from the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, weaving in work by such seminal artists as Mark Morrisroe and David Wojnarowicz. In conjunction with thirtynothing, Dixon Place will be holding special Sunday conversations ($5 suggested donation, 5:00) on the cultural legacy of AIDS, beginning October 2 with “The Queer Generation Gap” (with Ira Sachs, Jack “Mother Flawless Sabrina” Doroshow, and Carlos Motta) and continuing October 9 with “The Gentrification Age” (with Sarah Schulman), October 16 with “The Films of Mark Morrisroe” (including screenings of Hello from Bertha, The Laziest Girl in Town, and Nymph-O-Maniac), and October 23 with “THIRTYEVERYTHING.” The talks will take place in the lounge, where Fishback has installed a site-specific piece honoring artists who died of AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s. “There is no ritualized means for my generation to mourn our predecessors who were lost to AIDS,” Fishback explains in an online program note. “As a Jew, trained from birth to mourn the obliteration of my ancestors, I feel the impulse to gather my community together, to speak of the dead, to celebrate the triumphs of the past and integrate that history into a sense of who I am. That is the impulse behind this project.”

DAVID BYRNE: TIGHT SPOT / SOCIAL MEDIA

David Byrne, “Tight Spot,” cold air inflatable with audio, 2011 (photo by twi-ny.mdr)

Pace Gallery
510 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
“Tight Spot” through October 1
“Social Media” through October 15
www.thepacegallery.com
tight spot slideshow

In 1983, David Byrne wore a really big suit on the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense tour. In the summer of 2008, he wired the cavernous Battery Maritime Building for “Playing the Building,” in which visitors could sit down at a specially programmed organ and, essentially, play the building. Size is at the center of his latest performance installation as well, “Tight Spot,” a 19.5′ x 46′ x 46′ inflatable globe squeezed into a former garage on West 25th St., directly under the High Line. In fact, sections of the oval orb spill out against the High Line beams, stretching the names of geographic locations featured on the three-dimensional map, from North and South America to Europe and Africa. Meanwhile, a vibrating chant emanates from inside the globe, Byrne’s voice filtered through a computer program to make it sound, among other things, nonhuman. The closer you get to the work, commissioned by the Pace Gallery, the more powerful the sounds, until you can feel it humming in your ear if you place your head against it. Yes, the world has got itself in one tight spot right now, and Byrne makes that abundantly clear in this crowd pleaser, which remains on view through October 1. Meanwhile, Byrne has two pieces next door inside Pace, where “Social Media” continues through October 15. In addition to works by Miranda July, Penelope Umbrico, Christopher Baker, and others that incorporate elements from YouTube, Craigslist, Twitter, Flickr, Google, QR codes, and other forms of computer interactivity, Byrne has contributed “Democracy in Action,” a wall hanging in which twenty digital frames show video of parliamentarians around the world engaging in physical altercations, and four of his Apps, large-scale vertical advertisements for humorous fake apps he made up, including Coverup, which claims to be able to put clothes on you; Buzzclip, which purports to remove body hair by using smartphone vibrations; Weaselface, which promises to “add snark and satire to any text”; and Bigamist, which helps people cheat on their spouse.