this week in art

GREGG BORDOWITZ: I WANNA BE WELL / BENYAMIN ZEV’S SUCCOS SPECTACULAR!

Gregg Bordowitz, Pestsäule (after Erwin Thorn), mixed media, 2021 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

GREGG BORDOWITZ: I WANNA BE WELL
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens
Virtual performance lectures September 17-19, free with advance RSVP
Exhibition continues Thursday – Monday through October 11, $5-$10 (free for NYC residents)
www.moma.org
www.greggbordowitz.com

At the heart of the MoMA PS1 exhibition “Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well” are two disparate images. On your way into the building itself and in the gallery, you will see a large banner declaring, “The AIDS Crisis Is Still Beginning.” Meanwhile, at the top of Bordowitz’s 2021 mixed-media sculpture Pestsäule (after Erwin Thorn), inspired by a seventeenth-century plague monument in Vienna as well as the murder of George Floyd, the AIDS epidemic, and the Covid-19 pandemic, is a blank protest sign, raised up by a man in a medical mask surrounded by a maelstrom of bodies, a murderous cherub, and sandbags on the floor, like a warped scene from Les Miz. “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” Mildred (Peggy Maley) asks Johnny (Marlon Brando) in the 1954 film The Wild One. “Whadda you got?” Johnny replies.

Born in Brooklyn in 1964 and raised in Queens — home base for the Ramones, whose 1977 song “I Wanna Be Well” from the Rocket to Russia album gives the exhibit its name — Bordowitz, who has been living with HIV/AIDS for more than three decades, was an early member of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which was founded in 1987. He has been documenting his own life and the global AIDS crisis through film and video, poetry, sculpture, lectures, and poetry, much of which is on view at MoMA PS1 through October 11. His 2014 twenty-four-part poem Debris Fields lines the walls of the galleries, amid such works as self-portraits in mirror, Tom McKitterick’s black-and-white photographs of Bordowitz and others at AIDS protests in the late 1980s, the corner wall drawing and sculpture installation Kaisergruft (centered by the word Sympathy), and Drive, a repurposed vintage derby car stickered with Big Pharma logos.

The show also features several of Bordowitz’s films, including the 1993 autobiographical documentary Fast Trip, Long Drop, which deals with his contracting HIV, coming out to his parents, a friend getting breast cancer, and the tragic deaths of his grandparents; the 2001 documentary Habit, about the AIDS epidemic in South Africa; the five-minute The Fast That I Want video he made last year with Morgan Bassichis for his family’s virtual Yom Kippur; and the vastly entertaining Only Idiots Smile, a 2017 lecture commissioned for the New Museum presentation “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” and that, at only twenty-two minutes, is far too short as Bordowitz discusses his relationship with his father, Judaism, Eastern European men kissing on the lips, and homophobia.

You can see much more of Bordowitz this week when MoMA hosts several special events held in conjunction with “I Wanna Be Well.” On September 13 (and available on demand through September 27, for members only), “Modern Mondays: An Evening with Gregg Bordowitz and Jean Carlomusto” consists of a live discussion between the longtime friends, artists, collaborators, and activists, along with videos they made in the late 1980s for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City. From September 14 to 28, MoMA Film will stream Bordowitz’s 1996 reimagination of Nicolai Erdman’s 1932 long-banned play The Suicide, also for members only.

From September 17 to 19, Benyamin Zev’s Succos Spectacular! comprises a trio of livestreamed performances, free with advance RSVP, specifically taking place after Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), the ten Days of Awe (meditation and reflection), and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) and before Sukkot (the Harvest Festival and the Feast of Tabernacles). The three shows — “The Rock Star” on Friday at 7:00, “The Rabbi” on Saturday at 7:00, and “The Comedian” on Sunday at 4:00 — feature Bordowitz as his alter ego, Benyamin Zev (his Hebrew name), a Jewish entertainer, stand-up comic, and tummler, hanging out in a Sukkah, joined by special guests and the klezmer ensemble Isle of Klezbos. “Any laughter is purely accidental,” Bordowitz says on the MoMA website. “My performances disturb, upset, and resist the pressures to conform and align genders and ethnicities within a fascist phantasy of American nationalism.” And finally, on October 2 at 5:00, in person and online, Bordowitz will launch his new book from Triple Canopy, Some Styles of Masculinity, at the Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore, where he will speak with poet, professor, and cultural theorist Fred Moten.

A SNAIL’S TALE: A PERFORMANCE BY KRIS LEMSALU AND KYP MALONE ON THE HIGH LINE

Kris Lemsalu Malone and Kyp Malone Lemsalu will perform on the High Line this week (photo by Eric Martin)

Who: Kris Lemsalu, Kyp Malone, others
What: Live performance in seven parts
Where: The High Line, between Fourteenth & Thirtieth Sts.
When: September 13-15, free, 6:30
Why: For the 2017 Performa Biennial, Estonian multidisciplinary artist Kris Lemsalu and New York–based musician and artist Kyp Malone (TV on the Radio, Rain Machine) collaborated on Going, Going, which took place on a kinetic bed. In February 2020, they collaborated on the exhibition “Love Song Sing-Along” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The two are teaming up again for A Snail’s Tale, a seven-part site-specific performance installation that runs the length of the High Line, from Fourteenth St. to the Thirtieth St. Spur.

Admission is free and no advance RSVP is necessary; the audience will walk across the gorgeous park, making seven stops, each offering a chapter in the story, featuring musicians Lara Allen, Kate Farstad, Forrest Gillespie, Andi Maghenheimer, and Katy Pinke as well as Lemsalu and Malone, in celestial costumes designed by Malone, and joined by a mobile snail shell fabricated by Tarvo Porroson. “A Snail’s Tale is a never-before-heard fairy tale,” High Line Art associate curator Melanie Kress said in a statement. “Kris Lemsalu and Kyp Malone’s phantasmagorical performance is an invitation to slow down and connect to the natural world during this moment of global instability and transition.” Along the way, you will also encounter the current High Line exhibition “The Musical Brain,” consisting of pieces by Rebecca Belmore and Osvaldo Yero, Vivian Caccuri, Raúl de Nieves, Guillermo Galindo, David Horvitz, Mai-Thu Perret, Naama Tsabar, and Antonio Vega Macotela, in addition to commissions by Ibrahim Mahama, Hannah Levy, and Sam Durant.

5 INDICES ON A TORTURED BODY

5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Quarantine Body will conclude performance series on October 24 (photo by Bones)

5 INDICES ON A TORTURED BODY
Bronx Museum
1040 Grand Concourse
September 8 – October 24, free with advance RSVP
718-681-6000
www.bronxmuseum.org

Since July, the Bronx Museum of the Arts has been hosting “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” a series of five live performances held in conjunction with the excellent exhibition “Wardell Milan: Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You.” The small but powerful show by Harlem-based artist Wardell Milan, continuing through October 24, is part of the institution’s special fiftieth anniversary programming, focusing on social justice. “Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You” consists of collages, photographs, and works on paper that address white supremacy and ask the question “What do terrorists do when they’re not terrorizing?” One end of the exhibit contains a ritual room inspired by the Rothko Chapel in Houston; for “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” Milan is collaborating with Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Zachary Tye Richardson and sculptor and designer Billy Ray Morgan to present the live events, which explore the disenfranchised and marginalized in search of a place of refuge. “The Chapel of Five Indices serves as a ‘Safe Space’ for these tortured bodies — interlinked through histories of violence, to be affirmed and celebrated,” Milan explains in a museum brochure. “Within this chapel, these irrepressible bodies cannot be flattened but must be reckoned with.” Below is the remaining schedule (“The Black Male Body” had its last performance September 4, with Richardson and Milan, written by Casey Gerald); admission is free with advance RSVP.

Wednesday, September 8
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Female Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, Catherine Fisher, and Trinity Dawn Bobo, written by Fisher, 6:00

Saturday, September 25
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Trans Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, B. Hawk Snipes, and Mae Eskenazi, written by Snipes and Richardson, 2:00

Wednesday, October 13
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Migrant Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, DJ Chappel, and Brittany Bringuez, written by Jabu Ndlovu, 6:00

Sunday, October 24
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Quarantine Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, written by Noah Wertheimer, 2:00

“Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,” features dazzling work by Chitra Ganesh, Saya Woolfalk, Huma Bhabha, and others (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Also on view at the Bronx Museum, through September 26, is the phenomenal “Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,” inspired by Lizzie Borden’s seminal 1983 underground classic film, Born in Flames, which is shown on a loop along with recent works by Caitlin Cherry, Chitra Ganesh, Clarissa Tossin, Firelei Baez, Huma Bhabha, Maria Berrio, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Rose B. Simpson, Saya Woolfalk, Sin Wai Kin (fka Victoria Sin), Shoshanna Weinberger, Tourmaline, and Wangechi Mutu.

BANKSY: GENIUS OR VANDAL?

Unauthorized “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?” exhibit is selling out fast (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

BANKSY: GENIUS OR VANDAL?
526 Sixth Ave. at West Fourteenth St.
Wednesday – Monday through November 28, children $19.90, adults $29.50 ($5 additional for VIP)
banksyexpo.com
online slideshow

“There’s no such thing as good publicity,” Banksy wrote on a wall in a lot on West Broadway and McDougal in October 2008, accompanied by an image of a giant rat whitewashing over an ad for a Fox television show. The mysterious British artist and activist was in New York City for the opening of his free, immersive exhibition “The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill,” consisting of animatronic animals that were not available as either pets or meat.

There has not been a lot of good publicity for “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?,” an unauthorized exhibition of screenprints, photographs, and only a handful of original works by Banksy, one of three such traveling shows. (The others are “The Art of Banksy: ‘Without Limits’” and “The Art of Banksy: Unauthorized Private Collection.”) When told about the Moscow edition of one of the exhibits, he posted online, “What the hell is that? I wish I could find it funny. What’s the opposite of LOL? You know it’s got nothing to do with me, right? I don’t charge people to see my art unless there’s a fairground wheel.” When asked what he was going to do about it, he slyly replied, “Hmm — not sure I’m the best person to complain about people putting up pictures without permission.” Meanwhile, the Seoul edition of “Without Limits” offered visitors refunds once it became known that most of the works in the show were reproductions.

Among the replicas at the New York show is a reproduction of Banksy’s studio, based on the 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. Since we still don’t know who Banksy is, the exhibition has to go to extreme lengths to come up with some form of biography.

The fairground wheel the Bristol-born Banksy was referring to was one of the attractions in his massive 2015 “Dismaland Bemusement Park,” a dark reimagination of Disneyland on the Somerset seaside for which he charged a mere three pounds for entry. “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?” includes a trailer for the park and a series of photographs. (Many of the items on view have been lent by Steve Lazarides, who worked with Banksy for more than a decade.) Of course, it’s not the same as being there, which is the essential problem when staging a show of site-specific street art in a gallery, in this case a large two-floor space on the corner of West Fourteenth St. and Sixth Ave. — and charging $19.90 for children and $29.50 for adults. “Genius or Vandal?” falls somewhere in between “Beyond the Streets,” which comprised works by graffiti artists hung on walls and standing on plinths, and the two immersive van Gogh experiences, which turned Vincent’s life and paintings into an Instagram-friendly fiasco.

Divided into thematic sections, “Genius or Vandal?” explores some of Banksy’s most famous pieces, which take on consumerism, police brutality, government surveillance, the health-care system, immigration, the royals, art history, and the art market. Among the images on display are Banksquiat, a rebuke of a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibit about which Banksy wrote, “Major new Basquiat show opens at the Barbican — a place that is normally very keen to clean any graffiti from its walls”; Golf Sale, an image of a man holding up a “Golf Sale” sign in front of three tanks, referencing the individual famously refusing to move as tanks made their way through Tiananmen Square; Napalm, which brings together Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald holding hands with “Napalm Girl” Phan Thi Kim Phuc in the center; several of Banksy’s rats, declaring, “Get Out While You Can,” “If Graffiti Changed Anything It Would Be Illegal,” and “Welcome to Hell!”; and Pulp Fiction, in which the John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson characters from the Quentin Tarantino film hold bananas instead of guns.

I have to admit that even with all my misgivings with the exhibit, I enjoyed seeing such originals as Welcome, a welcome mat made out of material from life jackets; Smiley Copper, a panel showing a heavily armed police officer with a yellow smiley face; and Grappling Hook, Banksy’s unique version of the crucifixion.

Exhibit features the words and images of mysterious British street artist and activist Banksy (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

There is also video of Girl with a Balloon shredding itself after being auctioned off for more than one million dollars in 2018 (which is widely available online); the resulting work, retitled Love Is in the Bin, is expected to be sold for more than five million at an October auction. For an additional five bucks, you can take a ten-minute virtual reality tour through suburban British streets, where numerous Banksy works suddenly appear as you fight off nausea. In an enclosed room, dozens of images are projected onto four walls, immersing you in Banksy’s oeuvre. And you can record yourself on live CCTV; Banksy might have been pointing out the fascist nature of video surveillance, asking, “What are you looking at?,” but now you can add footage of yourself directly to social media.

The mostly inane wall text and audioguide do the exhibition no favors. In discussing the 2011 Los Angeles wall piece Fire Starter, in which Charlie Brown is an arsonist, cigarette dangling from his mouth, the text defines the round-faced boy as “the protagonist of the animated film A Boy Named Charlie Brown.” Delving into Banksy’s fascination with primates, as in Monkey Parliament, Monkey Queen, and Laugh Now (in which a monkey wears overalls that proclaim, “Laugh now but one day we’ll be in charge”), the text notes that “the imagery is also well documented in cinematography. . . . [An] iconic film is Planet of the Apes by Tim Burton. This film tells us about a world in which monkeys have evolved so much so that they have enslaved humans.” And in discussing No Ball Games, in which two children are playing with a red sign that says “No Ball Games,” the text criticizes a previous unauthorized exhibition by pointing out, “Banksy had nothing to do with this company, nor with the exhibition that was held. Those are the ones who should be considered real vandals!”

Police brutality is one of several Banksy themes explored in exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In many ways, all you need to know about the exhibition — which is unlikely to attract anyone who believes Banksy is in fact a vandal, making the title somewhat moot — is at the beginning and end. The show opens with a replica of Pasquino, a fifteenth-century Roman “talking statue” that was a precursor to political street art; it bears no relationship to Banksy or his work. And, in an ironic twist, you cannot exit through the gift shop, because there is none. Since “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?” is unauthorized, the creators don’t have any legal rights to the images they could otherwise plaster on hats, T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc., although you do get a poster with VIP admission.

Nonetheless, the narration does seem to be obsessed with Banksy’s “GrossDomesticProduct” temporary installation and online store, where you can purchase reproductions of some of the items in the New York show but includes the following warning: “The artist would like to make it clear that he continues to encourage the copying, borrowing, and uncredited use of his imagery for amusement, activism, and education purposes. Feel free to make merch for your own personal entertainment and nonprofit activism for good causes. However, selling reproductions, creating your own line of merchandise, and fraudulently misrepresenting knock-off Banksy products as ‘official’ is illegal, obviously a bit wrong, and may result in legal action. In the event of prosecution all funds will be donated to charity.”

LOUISE BOURGEOIS, FREUD’S DAUGHTER

“Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter” continues at the Jewish Museum through September 12 (© The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Ron Amstutz.)

LOUISE BOURGEOIS, FREUD’S DAUGHTER
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday – Monday through September 12, $12-$18 (free on Saturdays)
212-423-3200
thejewishmuseum.org

To paraphrase something Dr. Sigmund Freud most likely never said, sometimes a white marble penis is just a white marble penis. In the exhibition “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter,” continuing at the Jewish Museum through September 12, curator Philip Larratt-Smith attempts to explore the French-American artist’s work through a psychoanalytic lens based on her thirty-three years of analysis with Freud disciple Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, beginning in 1952, shortly after the death of her father. The exhibit reverses the standard setup; most of the fifty pieces by Bourgeois are in vitrines, while excerpts from her extensive notes — from personal thoughts to dream diaries — are framed and hanging on the walls. Above the facsimiles and original sheets are dual quotes from Bourgeois and Freud.

“Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings profoundly recalibrate our understanding of her artistic trajectory and motivational impulses,” Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois’s literary archivist, said in a statement. “They do not explain or demystify her art but rather represent a freestanding corpus of writing that display her unusual literary gifts and underline her enduring engagement with analysis. They highlight the centrality of her Oedipal deadlock as the traumatic kernel of her psychic organization. And they complicate the narrative of early childhood trauma which the artist herself fostered, encouraging instead a more nuanced appreciation of this relationship which she often spoke about.”

Bourgeois’s writings are extraordinary. “The fear of success is a misconception of the fear of responsibility. Perhaps fear of men. Refusal to accept to grow up / Refusal to accept reality / Refusal to accept what I am / Refusal to accept my lot / Refusal to look at oneself to measure, judge / Refusal to grow up. Refusal to accept being a woman. I accept on my own terms,” one begins. “Guilt is the Product of envy,” she writes in another. “There is essentially no difference between the Penis envy and the Oedipus complex . . . it is not him that I love it is what he has — it is not him that I love it is his money — The only thing that gives me hope is that millions of people women have suffered from this mystery.” And in a screed against her father and the family’s British au pair, Sadie Gordon Richmond, who became her father’s mistress (and was only six years older than Louise), Bourgeois declares, “I can prove that he loves me / that he loves me more than anybody else / that his wife is unbearable / that he doesn’t love her / that I deserve to be loved / that I deserve him more than Sadie does / that Sadie loves me / that Sadie loves him / that Sadie doesn’t want him any longer / so he is free / so there is hope.” You can listen to actress Rachel Weisz reading eighteen of Bourgeois’s selected writings here.

The works on view are equally extraordinary. Couple III entwines two people in fabric and leather, one with a steel prosthetic arm. (“The prosthesis recalls a theme that was important to Louise. Louise saw herself as a survivor but also as radically incomplete,” Larratt-Smith says on the audioguide.) Hysterical is a small sculpture of a nude woman with three heads looking off in different directions. The tomblike Venthouse (Cupping Jar) features two slabs of dark marble, with glass cupping jars on the top one, lit with lights from within, a manifestation of the procedure Louise would perform on her mother to help ease her back pain. (Bourgeois’s mother, Joséphine, died in 1932 when Louise was twenty.) The Destruction of the Father is a large tableaux in a wall, bathed in hellish bloodred lighting, that is essentially the aftermath of a cannibalistic feast, made in 1974, a year after the death of Bourgeois’s husband, Robert Goldwater, at the age of sixty-five. The hanging sculpture Janus Fleuri is a bronze melding of male and female genitalia.

The centerpiece of the show is Passage Dangereux, the largest of Bourgeois’s Cells, a room-size installation that explores memory and desire, with dozens of elements representing sex and death incorporating all five senses, a journey into deep-seated trauma locked behind the bars of a physical and psychological prison. And finally, there’s Sleep II, a 1967 white marble sculpture that strongly resembles the top of an enormous penis, above which hangs Fillette (Sweeter Version), a biomorphic latex-over-plaster depiction of genitalia about which Bourgeois said, “From a sexual point of view I consider the masculine attributes to be extremely delicate. They’re objects that the woman, myself, must protect.” She was famously photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe carrying the sculpture in her right arm, like a treasured pet.

“Life is so funny. Life is so ridiculous,” Bourgeois once said. Throughout her life and career, she revealed a dry sense of humor and had fun with how she was categorized as an artist and a person. “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter” delves into the impact decades of psychoanalysis had on her and her art, particularly exposing her writings that emerged from deep inside her soul. But don’t get too caught up in trying to find answers for all her words and images. “Her writings reveal the extent to which Freudian concepts and practices — whether directly or indirectly, whether through his own writings, those of his followers, or Bourgeois’s longstanding analysis — informed and enriched her art making,” Larratt-Smith argues. “To call Bourgeois ‘Freud’s daughter’ is thus to invoke filiation and resistance, likeness and dissent, and to highlight the central importance of psychoanalysis in the making of her mysterious and idiosyncratic oeuvre.” And sometimes a white marble penis is just a white marble penis.

(For more on the exhibit, you can watch the related lectures “Elisabeth Bronfen: Family Entanglements,” “Gary Indiana: The Artist as Writer and Analysand,” and “Jamieson Webster: Louise Bourgeois’s Hysterical Love of Psychoanalysis.”)

ART ALIVE IN THE FISHER DOLLHOUSE

The Chocolate Genius will lead an interactive demonstration at MAD in conjunction with new chocolate bar inspired by Fisher Dollhouse (photo courtesy Museum of Arts & Design)

Who: Paul Joachim, the Chocolate Genius
What: Chocolate-making demonstration and hands-on activity
Where: Museum of Arts & Design, 2 Columbus Circle
When: Saturday, September 4, free with museum admission of $12-$18, noon–2:00
Why: Paul Joachim, the Florida-based artist known as the Chocolate Genius, has a simple but critical mission: “to transform one billion people or more through chocolate.” Joachim believes that “chocolate creates a visceral, personal response in everyone. It’s a bridge between classes, gender, religion, races — all labels of culture. In other words, chocolate creates a deep human connection — often missing in our divisive world.” Joachim will increase that deep human connection on September 4 when he he will lead an in-person, interactive chocolate-making demonstration at the Museum of Arts & Design, launching a new chocolate bar in conjunction with the exhibition “The Fisher Dollhouse: A Venetian Palazzo in Miniature.”

Chocolate demo takes place in Fisher Dollhouse exhibit at MAD (photo by Jenna Bascom)

On view through September 26, the dollhouse was created by New York–based arts patron and collector Joanna Fisher during the pandemic as a place of refuge; it was designed and built by dozens of craftspersons, with miniature works of art by Dustin Yellin, Ryan McGinness, Hunt Slonem, and others. On September 4 at noon, Joachim will show visitors how to make silicone molds, cast edible works, and temper chocolate at home, along with discussing the history of chocolate and cacao. The milk chocolate bars feature the facade of the dollhouse on their front. “When most people think of chocolate, it’s simply a chocolate bar,” Joachim’s mission statement continues. “I have the gift of transforming chocolate into a mystifying, inspirational experience, live and in front of audience’s eyes. Inspiring them with joy, awe, and love, disrupting the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible within each viewer’s point of view and own life.” Entry to this “Art Alive” presentation is free with museum admission. Also on view at MAD are “Craft Front & Center,” “Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times,” “Beth Lipman: Collective Elegy,” and “45 Stories in Jewelry: 1947 to Now.”

WU TSANG: ANTHEM

Beverly Glenn-Copeland bares his heart and soul in Guggenheim installation Anthem (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

RE/PROJECTIONS: VIDEO, FILM, AND PERFORMANCE FOR THE ROTUNDA
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Thursday – Monday through September 6, $18 – $25 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org
anthem online slideshow

Philly-born Canadian composer and Black trans activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland has had quite a wild ride the last few years. In 2017, his 1986 cassette, Keyboard Fantasies, melding ambient, jazz, classical, folk, world, and New Age sounds, was rediscovered and rereleased, followed by his 2004 album, Primal Prayer, originally recorded under the name Phynix. In 2019, Posy Dixon’s documentary Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story came out, followed by a brief tour that brought Glenn-Copeland and his band, Indigo Rising, to MoMA PS1 that December. Despite the newfound popularity, in 2020, shortly after the pandemic lockdown began, Glenn-Copeland — the musician added the last part of his name in honor of American composer Aaron Copland, and he prefers to go by Glenn — and his wife, artist Elizabeth Paddon, were nearly homeless, resorting to a GoFundMe page to raise nearly $100,000.

This year, a projection of the seventy-seven-year-old musician is appearing on an eighty-four-foot diaphanous curtain hanging from the top of the Guggenheim Museum to nearly the base of the rotunda, like an enormous living tapestry. Glenn-Copeland, a Buddhist, performs the century-old spiritual “Deep River” along with additional a cappella vocalizations; he also plays percussion and keyboards in the film-portrait, titled Anthem. A live version of the song appears on his 2020 compilation, Transmissions; it has previously been sung by Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Johnny Mathis, Bobby Womack, and many others — Chevy Chase delivered an excerpt in the first Vacation movie, and Denyce Graves sang an operatic version at the Capitol memorial service for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Anthem is one of several projects in the Guggenheim series “Re/Projections: Video, Film, and Performance for the Rotunda,” which has also featured works by Ragnar Kjartansson, Christian Nyampeta, and others as the institution reconsiders how to present shows to the public during the coronavirus crisis and beyond.

Tsang bathes Glenn-Copeland in a warm blue light as she depicts the performer in full view as well as in close-up, singing into an old-fashioned microphone, playing the piano, and holding out his hands as if trying to embrace us. The Guggenheim’s bays are empty except for occasional small vertical speakers, which broadcast different sections of the music, and in a few places the projection passes through the translucent curtain and can be seen against the back wall. (Musician Kelsey Lu and DJ, producer, and composer Asma Maroof collaborated on the piece, with assistant curator X Zhu-Nowell.) Thus, as you make your way up and down the Guggenheim’s twisting path, you get different audio and visual perspectives, like Glenn-Copeland is wrapping his arms around you with a spiritual lullaby: “Deep River / My home is over Jordan / Deep River, Lord / I want to cross over into campground,” he sings.

“When I first heard Glenn’s music, I remember thinking to myself, it sounded like an anthem. And then I was — I immediately corrected myself,” Tsang, who calls the installation a “sonic sculptural space,” says in a Guggenheim video. “Like, oh, what kind of — it’s not that I’m so patriotic. It’s just his voice was sort of conjuring a place I wish I lived. It was giving me this tonal quality of, like, I wish that there was an anthem of a place that we could all exist in. And that, for me, is the world that Glenn kind of puts out there as a possibility.”

Continuing through September 6, Anthem is accompanied by a documentary that concentrates on the intimate personal relationship between Glenn and Elizabeth, but it doesn’t feel organic in conjunction with the installation. Also on view at the Guggenheim are “Off the Record,” consisting of works by Sarah Charlesworth, Glenn Ligon, Lisa Oppenheim, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and others inspired by official documentation; “The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy,” featuring the Rochester native’s sculpture, holograms, and photography exploring the African diaspora; and “Away from the Easel: Jackson Pollock’s Mural,” anchored by Pollock’s 1943 Mural, his largest painting ever, commissioned for Peggy Guggenheim for her East Sixty-First St. townhouse.