this week in art

THE BROOKLYN RAIL THREE DAY SILENT ART AUCTION

Richard Serra’s “P&E XVII” 2007 litho crayon on Mylar will be one of many works available at Brooklyn Rail auction

Visual Arts Gallery at the School of Visual Arts
601 West 26th St., fifteenth floor
February 17-19, $25 admission, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
Auction February 19, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
718-349-8427
www.brooklynrail.org/auction

Phong Bui, publisher of the free arts paper The Brooklyn Rail, refers to the nonprofit print publication as “absurdly impractical,” noting that “what we’re doing as a collective is entirely removed from any pragmatic notion of supply and demand.” With that in mind, Bui is curating a fundraiser in honor of the Rail’s recent tenth anniversary. Taking place over the next three days at SVA’s Visual Arts Gallery in Chelsea, the works will be on view through Thursday through Saturday from 12 noon to 6:00, after which a live silent auction will be held Saturday night. Admission to the gallery is $25; among the participating artists with works for sale — and it’s quite an impressive list — are Marina Abramovic, Lynda Benglis, Joe Bradley, Paul Chan, Maria Elena Gonzales, Philip Guston, Alfredo Jaar, Alex Katz, Robert Mangold, Shirin Neshat, Philip Pearlstein, Will Ryman, Charles Seliger, Richard Serra, Ben Shahn, Joel Shapiro, Kiki Smith, Mark di Suvero, Terry Winters, and Lisa Yuskavage.

BYE BYE KITTY!!! BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE ART

Makoto Aida, “Ash Color Mountains,” detail, acrylic on canvas, 2009-10 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Through Sunday, June 12 (closed Monday)
Admission: $15 (free Friday from 6:00 to 9:00)
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.byebyekittyart.org

There’s only one week left before Japan Society’s engaging exhibit “Bye Bye Kitty!!!” goes bye-bye, so we highly recommend you do what you can to say hello before it leaves. (Sorry, we were trying to be cute.) Subtitled “Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art,” the small but insightful show offers an alternative take on the cute kawaii and otaku culture that has been so prevalent in Japanese youth over the last few decades. “Bye Bye Kitty!!!” exposes the underside, if not quite dark underbelly, of that groovy scene with a collection of installation, videos, photographs, paintings, drawings, and sculpture that are often cute in their own way — until you look a little deeper. Makoto Aida’s “Harakiri School Girls” sets the tone for the exhibition, mimicking the charming covers found on Japanese manga but upon further examination focuses on a young girl with a samurai sword decapitating her schoolmates. Aida’s massive “Ash Color Mountains” wall painting is composed of hundreds of faceless, dead salarymen jumbled together (along with Wall-E and Waldo). Playing off the “Famous Views of Kyoto” paintings by Hiroshige, Yamaguchi Akira populates his “Narita International Airport” pen and watercolors with scenes of impending environmental disaster. Chiharu Shiota takes that most beautiful and representational of objects, a white wedding dress, and inserts multiple tubes coming out of it, extracting blood that continuously pumps through them, commenting on femininity, tradition, and virginity.

Chiharu Shiota, “Dialogue with Absence,” painted wedding dress, peristaltic pumps, transparent plastic tubing, dyed water, 2010 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Tomoko Shioyasu’s “Vortex” is an ultra-delicate cut-paper installation that hangs in the center of one gallery room, casting wild, intense shadows behind it. Miwa Yanagi’s “My Grandmothers” photos stage scenes where a group of Japanese women think they will be fifty years in the future, not necessarily predicting what would be considered a happy, normal life. Tomoko Yoneda’s simple yet evocative photos depict a location in Seoul that was used as a Japanese military hospital in the first half of the twentieth century and a place for interrogation and torture in the 1970s. The most exquisite pieces in the show come from Manabu Ikeda, whose three heavily detailed pen and acrylic ink drawings are awe-insipring and breathtaking, with “Existence” celebrating life, “History of Rise and Fall” mired in death and destruction, and “Ark” not exactly offering the way to a better world; be sure to spend plenty of time examining the myriad amazing intricacies of this fascinating series. Divided into three sections, “Critical Memory,” “Threatened Nature,” and “Unquiet Dream,” the exhibit also features works by Tomoko Kashiki, Rinko Kawauchi, Haruka Kōjin, Kumi Machida, Kohei Nawa, Motohiko Odani, Hiraki Sawa, Hisashi Tenmyouya, and Yoshitomo Nara, who says good-bye with a fitting farewell.

ANDY WARHOL: MOTION PICTURES

“Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures,” installation shot, 16mm film (black and white, silent), © 2010 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Museum of Modern Art
The International Council of the Museum of Modern Art Gallery, sixth floor
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through March 21, $20 (includes admittance to same-day film programs)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

From 1964 to 1966, Andy Warhol attempted to film nearly everyone who entered the Factory, capturing them in four-minute silent black-and-white segments he called “Screen Tests,” with the subjects usually just staring directly into the camera the entire time. MoMA has turned one of its sixth-floor spaces into a moving-portrait gallery, as twelve of the Screen Tests are being shown concurrently, hung on the walls like a series of large-scale paintings, with visitors feeling like they’ve just walked into a (rather introspective) Factory gathering. Shot at twenty-four frames per second but projected at sixteen, the shorts have a beautiful, slow, loving pace to them, but several of them have tragic elements if you are familiar with the person’s ultimate fate. For this rare display, curator Klaus Biesenbach has selected the following Factory celebrities and would-be Superstars: poet-activist Allen Ginsberg; musician Lou Reed; actor and painter Dennis Hopper; Kathe Dees; actress and art collector Baby Jane Holzer (who brushes her teeth); Japanese actress Kyoko Kishida; writer-activist-theorist Susan Sontag; art patron Ethel Scull; actress and socialite Edie Sedgwick, who died of an overdose of prescription medication and alcohol in 1971 at the age of twenty-eight; model-actress Donyale Luna, who died of an overdose in 1979 at the age of thirty-three; actor Paul America, who died in a car accident in 1982 at the age of thirty-eight; actress and Velvet Underground singer Nico, who died from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1988 at the age of forty-nine; and Italian actor and musician Gino Piserchio, who died in 1989 of an AIDS-related infection at the age of forty-four. The Screen Tests are supplemented by several of Warhol’s heavily influential, controversial films, from the same early 1960s period, that deal with humanity’s deepest needs and desires, including BLOW JOB, EAT, SLEEP, and KISS, the latter shown in the seated back screening room. On March 2, the full five-and-a-half-hour SLEEP will be screened in the rear gallery, while the complete eight-hour EMPIRE will be shown on alternate Fridays, February 18 and March 4 and 18. Also, in conjunction with the exhibit, there will be a MoMA Talk on March 3 at 6:00, “Warhol, On Screen, Off Screen,” with writer John Giorno and artist Conrad Ventur, moderated by curator Klaus Biesenbach. And finally, if you visit the above website, you can even make your own Warhol Screen Test.

OUTSIDER ART FAIR 2011

Just Folk will be exhibiting works by Bill Traylor at the nineteenth annual Outsider Art Fair (Bill Traylor, “Yellow Goat,” poster paint and graphite on cardboard, ca. 1939-42)

The Mart
7 West 34th St. off Fifth Ave.
February 11-13, $20 (includes catalog)
www.sanfordsmith.com

The nineteenth annual Outsider Art Fair gets under way tonight with an advance preview benefiting the Creative Growth Art Center, which “serves adult artists with developmental, mental, and physical disabilities,” and the Fountain Gallery, which “provides an environment for artists living and working with mental illness to pursue their personal visions and to challenge the stigma that surrounds mental illness.” The show, held at the Mart at 7 West 34th St., opens to the general public on Friday, featuring more than thirty galleries displaying works by outsider, visionary, and self-taught artists who paint, draw, and sculpt without specific training and education. Among the exhibitors are the Electric Pencil, Ricco/Maresca, Carl Hammer, Just Folk, Yukiko Koide Presents, Marcia Weber Art Objects, and Maxwell Projects. Special events include a Friday-night after-party ($50), a presentation by Dr. Thomas Röske of the Prinzhorn Collection on Saturday at 1:30 ($25), and a panel discussion on the role of artists with disabilities in outsider and contemporary art on Sunday at 2:00 ($25). Outsider Art Week continues at the American Folk Art Museum, with Anna Panszczyk delivering the Nathan Lerner Annual Lecture, “Reading Ephemera (and Fairies) in the Artworks of Henry Darger,” Friday at 4:30 (free with museum admission), followed Sunday at 10:00 by the Anne Hill Blanchard Symposium, “Uncommon Artists XIX: A Series of Cameo Talks,” with Laurel Gitlen speaking on Michael Patterson-Carver, Brett Littman on Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Kendall Messick on Gordon Brinckle, and Tom Whitehead on Clementine Hunter connoisseurship ($35), and a 1:00 screening of Kendall Messick’s 2003 film, THE PROJECTIONIST, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker (free with museum admission).

SUE DE BEER: THE GHOSTS

Sue de Beer’s hypnotic multimedia installation “The Ghosts” finishes its brief run at the Park Ave. Armory at 3:00 and 4:00 on Sunday

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Sunday, February 6, free, 3:00 & 4:00
347-463-5143
www.armoryonpark.org
www.suedebeer.com

Three years in the making following an elongated creative drought, Sue de Beer’s latest site-specific multimedia installation takes viewers on a mystical journey through the psychic corridors of dream, memory, and reflection. On view through Sunday at the Park Ave. Armory, the work includes several sculptures that supplement the centerpiece, “The Ghosts,” a two-channel video screened in the Veterans Room, complete with a large throw rug and eight silver bean-bag cushions (recalling her 2005 Whitney Altria piece, “Black Sun”) for people to lay on. The thirty-minute film follows a money manager (Jon Spencer of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) who is obsessed with an occult hypnotist (painter and musician Jutta Koether), inspired by Italian giallo films, who practices “material recollection,” which “allows a patient to literally call forth a past event, to repeat a lost length of time, to revisit those things and people lost to absence, death.” The man feels he never achieved satisfying closure with an old girlfriend (Marissa Mickelberg), so he is attempting to reconnect with her through the hypnotist. The hypnotic, emotionally nuanced work features “persistence of vision” effects in which characters are ghosted and linger on-screen, kaleidoscopic images that echo the historic room’s stained-glass windows, text by frequent de Beer collaborator Alissa Bennett, a soundtrack with songs by Paul Simon, the Cure, Leonard Cohen, and John Lennon, and a rainbow and the fluffy white cat Snoebelle, both of which appeared in de Beer’s 2009 video “Sister.” De Beer, a Parsons and Columbia grad and NYU assistant professor who was raised in Salem, Massachusetts, and until recently shuttled back and forth between Berlin and New York, has also designed a praxinoscope that resides at the center of the armory’s Silver Room, showing an Antarctic glacier referenced in the film, while a large-scale painted plywood and steel sculpture casts eerie shadows in the Field & Staff Room. The final two screenings of the physically and psychologically satisfying “The Ghosts,” a project of the Art Production Fund, take place on Super Bowl Sunday at 3:00 and 4:00, to be followed shortly thereafter by de Beer’s “Depiction of a Star Obscured by Another Figure,” a solo exhibition running at Marianne Boesky’s Chelsea gallery from February 18 through March 19.

LUNAR NEW YEAR FESTIVAL

Qi Baishi, “Two Rabbits,” hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, twentieth century (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, in memory of La Ferne Hatfield Ellsworth, 1986)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
February 4-6, most events free with recommended admission of $20 adults (children under twelve free)
212-570-3828
www.metmuseum.org

The celebration of the Year of the Rabbit heads uptown for the Met’s three-day Lunar New Year Festival, beginning tonight at 6:00 with “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Its Survival and Conservation,” a lecture by Henry Tzu Ng held in conjunction with the exhibition “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City.” At 8:00, David Rakoff hosts “Gilded Ink: Write like an Emperor,” an evening of prizewinning short stories by college students, preceded by a tour of “The Emperor’s Private Paradise” at 6:30. Tomorrow the Year of the Rabbit hops all over the museum, with a Sesame Street puppet show at 11:00, Storytime in Nolen Library at 11:45, a lion dance procession at 12:15, a fan and ribbon dance, calligraphy and face painting, a costume demonstration, and a drawing workshop at 1:00, a youth orchestra concert at 1:30, a tea ceremony at 2:15, and Peking Opera performances of LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD at 3:00 (one hour children’s show, $15) and 7:00 (full concert with acrobatics, live music and dance, martial arts, and more, $30). The festivities conclude on Sunday with a special look at “The Emperor’s Private Paradise,” featuring a series of lectures beginning at 2:00, including Maxwell K. Hearn’s “Art, Artifice, and Identity—The World of the Qianlong Emperor,” Nancy Berliner’s “A Chinese Garden in Space and over Time,” and Ben Wang’s “The Musicality of Chinese Poetry and Calligraphy in the World of the Qianlong Emperor.”

FIRST SATURDAYS: FRAMING OUR HISTORY

Hank Willis Thomas will discuss his long-term installation, “Unbranded,” at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday night (Hank Willis Thomas, “Why wait another day to be adorable? Tell your beautician ‘Relax me,’” chromogenic photograph, 1968/2007)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, February 5, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

For its February First Saturdays free program, the Brooklyn Museum is honoring Black History Month with its usual wide-ranging schedule of events. Kicking things off at 5:00 will be the Fat Cat Big Band, with Jade Synstelien leading a group of up to sixteen musicians through jazz and bebop. At 5:30, Denzel Washington’s THE GREAT DEBATERS (2007) will be shown, introduced by author Trey Ells (RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW), who will also participate in a Q&A following the screening. At 6:00, curator and writer Kalia Brooks will discuss the exhibition “Lorna Simpson: Gathered”: Simpson’s photographs will also be the focus of the 6:30 Hands-On Art workshop, and people are encouraged to bring their own photos to add to a collaborative interactive project as well. At 7:00, curator Sharon Matt Atkins will take visitors on a tour of “Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera,” while at 8:00 a student guide will give a Young Voices gallery talk on the installation “American Identities: A New Look.” The always hot dance party gets under way at 8:00, hosted by DJ Stormin’ Norman, who will be playing hip-hop and soul tunes. And at 9:00, Hank Willis Thomas will discuss his long-term installation, “Unbranded,” while at the same time the Smalls Jazz Club All-Stars will take listeners back to the Golden Age of music.