this week in art

DATA POETICS

“Flickr Flow,” Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg,” print and interactive, 2009

DIGITAL ART @ GOOGLE
Google, Inc.
75 Ninth Ave.
Exhibit runs through August 13
Artist Talks: Thursday, July 29, August 5, August 12, free with RSVP to rsvp@chelseaartmuseum.org, 6:00
www.chelseaartmuseum.org

Google has teamed up with the Project Room for New Media at Chelsea Art Museum to stage an exhibit of digital art in the company’s Ninth Ave. offices, curated by the museum’s Nina Colosi. During the show’s run, there will be three Thursday-night artist talks, beginning tonight with Mark Napier and John F. Simon Jr. and continuing on August 5 with R. Luke DuBois and Scott Draves and August 12 with W. Bradford Paley, Martin Wattenberg, and Fernanda Viégas. In addition to those artists, the exhibition also includes digital-technology-based work by Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk, Lincoln Schatz, and Thomson & Craighead.

HARLEM WEEK

Multiple locations in Harlem around 135th St.
Through August 29
Admission to most events: free
www.harlemweek.com

Harlem Week is under way, and it’s much more than just seven days of special events and cultural activities; it actually continues through the end of August, featuring health and job fairs, a college expo, swimming, tennis, basketball, charity runs, and farmers markets in addition to film screenings and live music and dance, most of which is free. Tonight, Jazzmobile presents Houston Person in U.S. Grant National Memorial Park, while tomorrow the Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series continues with a performance at the Jackie Robinson Park Bandshell. On August 3, National Night Out will feature outdoor concerts, followed the next night by Tia Fuller in the Jazzmobile. (Future Jazzmobile musicians include Wycliffe Gordon on August 10, Akiko Tsuruga on August 18, and Jimmy Heath on August 21.) On August 7-8, ArtCrawl Harlem ($40-$55) will take art lovers on a trolley tour of such galleries as Casa Frela, the Dwyer Cultural Center, the LeRoy Neiman Art Center, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, followed by a reception with food, wine, and music. August 14 (“Summer in the City”) and 15 (Harlem Day), the NYC Children’s Festival is chock-full of special events and activities, with “Dancing in the Street” paying tribute to Bob Marley, the annual “Uptown Saturday Nite” celebration, free outdoor film screenings in St. Nicholas Park, “A Salute to the Children of Haiti,” a business expo, crafts markets, fashion shows, and more.

CLEANING THE CLOUDS

Michael Alan’s “Harmonious Opposites” exhibition will conclude with a six-hour living installation performance on July 29 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MICHAEL ALAN: HARMONIOUS OPPOSITES
Gasser / Grunert
524 West 19th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Thursday, July 29, free to watch, $17-$20 to participate, 6:00 pm – 12 midnight
6460944-6197
www.michaelalanart.com/art

Multimedia artist Michael Alan investigates what he refers to as “chronic time exaggerators” in his work, commenting on time and space as well as art history through drawings, paintings, sculpture, video, happenings, and performance. The New York City native, born during the 1977 blackout, is most well known for his Draw-a-Thon events, which combine art, theater, and music with live models and an audience. His latest “living installation,” titled “Cleaning the Clouds,” in which eight Draw-a-Thon veterans will play the beautiful yet mysterious, always moving white objects, takes place July 29 at Gasser / Grunert in Chelsea, concluding Alan’s first solo show at the gallery. “Harmonious Opposites,” which opened July 8, features line drawings and a pair of videos spread across two floors of a cavernous, post-industrial space. Alan believes in “artistic revolution,” so there’s no telling what will go on at this unique live closing.

MULTIPLE PLEASURES

A multitude of well-known artists offer “Multiple Pleasures” at Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)



FUNCTIONAL OBJECTS IN CONTEMPORARY ART
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Monday – Friday through July 30
Admission: free
212-414-4144
www.tanyabonakdargallery.com

A few months back, Sabrina Blaichman, Caroline Copley, and Genevieve Hudson-Price, of 7Eleven Gallery, put together “Make Yourself at Home,” in which they turned a Chelsea garage into a sort of home showcase, featuring works by a multitude of artists arranged in different “rooms,” with nearly every chair, table, lamp, tire swing, and fake shower available for sale, sitting, and touching. Curator Nathalie Karg, the founder of Cumulus Studios, has now organized “Multiple Pleasures: Functional Objects in Contemporary Art,” a two-floor exhibit of reimagined useful household items by such artists as Doug Aitken, Ross Bleckner, Olaf Breuning, Peter Doig, Sarah Sze, William Kentridge, Douglas Gordon, Barbara Kruger, Yoshitomo Nara, Andrea Zittel, Ernesto Nara, and Richard Prince, among more than eighty others, one big name after another. As opposed to the 7Eleven show, you can’t touch most of the pieces here, which tend to be somewhat more expensive on the whole. But at the front counter, Tanya Bonakdar is selling a number of far more affordable items, including magnets, T-shirts, salt-and-pepper shakers, and towels by the likes of Kenny Scharf, Ed Ruscha, and Damien Hirst. In addition, you can obtain a unique digital screensaver by Olafur Eliasson by making a small donation to Maternity Worldwide, a nonprofit organization seeking to reduce the maternal mortality rate in Ethiopia and around the world.

NEW MUSEUM BLOCK PARTY 2010

New Museum will be hosting annual block party Saturday in Sara D. Roosevelt Park

Sara D. Roosevelt Park, Houston & Chrystie Sts.
New Museum, 235 Bowery at Prince St.
Saturday, July 24, free, 12 noon – 5:00 pm
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

This Saturday, the New Museum will be hosting its annual block party, an afternoon of art and family activities held in Sara D. Roosevelt Park and the museum theater on the Lower East Side. There will be live performances by poet and storyteller Pappa Susso, beatboxer Adam Matta, dance company LoVid, and Hisham Akira Bharoocha in addition to workshops, a walking tour of the neighborhood focusing on art and architecture, screenings presented by the REDCAT International Children’s Film Festival, and more. Free passes to the museum will be given out in the park, good for that day only, so you can head over to the Bowery and check out the current exhibits, including “Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other,” “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine,” and “Amy Granat: Light 3 Ways.”

ZOMBO ITALIANO: DEMONS 2

Zombies invade museum at MAD screening Saturday night

DEMONS 2 (DÈMONI 2: L’INCUBO RITORNA) (Lamberto Bava, 1987)
Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Broadway
Saturday, July 24, $7-$10, 7:00
212-299-7777
www.madmuseum.org

Written by Dario Argento and director Lamberto Bava, DEMONS 2 (DÈMONI 2: L’INCUBO RITORNA) will be screening on Saturday night at the Museum of Arts & Design as part of “Zombo Italiano: The Italian Zombie Film Movement, 1972-1985.” (The first DEMONS film will be shown Friday night, July 23, at 7:00.) A sweet sixteen party goes terribly wrong in this loud, bloody film, which stars David Edwin Knight, Nancy Brilli, Asia Argento, and Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni. Tickets are $10, but you’ll save three bucks at the door if you come in a zombie costume or just happen to be a zombie yourself. Cataldi-Tassoni will introduce the screening and participate in a Q&A afterward. And for even more of the actress/artist, be sure to check out her latest exhibit, “Smart Innocence,” on view at the Tuscan Mexican restaurant Matilda on East Eleventh St. through September 30. “Zombo Italiano” concludes on July 29 with a rare presentation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 flesh-eater, PIGSTY (PORCILE).

MIKE BIDLO: NOT WARHOL (BRILLO BOXES, 1964)

Mike Bidlo appropriates master appropriator Andy Warhol at Lever House (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through September 11
Admission: free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
flickr slideshow

As Walter Benjamin noted nearly seventy-five years ago, “In principle a work of art has always been reproducible.” Andy Warhol built much of his artistic legacy around this idea, appropriating pop-culture images, from Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Mao to Campbell’s Soup cans and Brillo Soap Pad boxes, and creating multiples, most of which were untouched by his own hand yet eventually sold for record prices. Since the 1980s, Chicago-born artist Mike Bidlo, who lives and works in New York City, has been appropriating iconic images by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Warhol himself, producing exact replicas of the original. No mere art forger, Bidlo works from reproductions, furthering the theoretical and physical distance between himself and the initial artist, questioning the entire nature of art and the creator. At Lever House on Park Ave., Bidlo has installed his 2005 work “Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964),” a replica of the original 1964 Warhol piece that consisted of forty-seven wooden boxes that in themselves replicated the cardboard packing boxes Brillo used to ship its product. “I thought it would be interesting to appropriate a work by another appropriator,” Bidlo explains in the exhibition handout, “so in a way I just kept the proverbial snowball rolling.” Bidlo’s pyramidlike construction rises in the northeast corner of the Lever House lobby, its bright red, white, and blue color scheme bringing light to the dark corner. Of course, it is rather appropriate that the appropriated piece is in Lever House, continuing the work’s connection to commercialism and the art world, as William and James Lever started their company in 1885 by making soap products. It all combines for a dizzying prospect, but it helps that the sculpture is really cool to look at, regardless of its history and the grand statements behind it. “Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964),” which includes an original Brillo packing box in a nearby vitrine, will be on view at Lever House through September 11; Warhol fans will also want to check out “Andy Warhol: The Last Decade,” at the Brooklyn Museum through September 12.