this week in art

TWI-NY TALK — JANET BIGGS: AUGMENTATION AND AMPLIFICATION

ary Esther Carter reunites with A.I. Anne, Richard Savery, and Janet Biggs for Fridman Gallery pandemic commission (photo courtesy Janet Biggs)

Mary Esther Carter reunites with A.I. Anne, Richard Savery, and Janet Biggs for site-specific Fridman Gallery commission (photo courtesy Janet Biggs)

Who: Mary Esther Carter, Richard Savery, A.I. Anne, Janet Biggs
What: Final presentation of “SO⅃OS: a space of limit as possibility”
Where: Fridman Gallery online
When: Thursday, July 30, $5 for access to all twelve performances, 8:00
Why: In July 2019, I experienced multimedia artist Janet Biggs’s workshop presentation of her work-in-progress performance of How the Light Gets In, an extraordinary collaboration at the New Museum exploring the ever-growing relationship between humans and technology, with singer and dancer Mary Esther Carter; machine learning program A.I. Anne; composer and music technologist Richard Savery; drummer Jason Barnes, who lost an arm in an accident so uses a robotic prosthesis; marathon runner Brian Reynolds, a double (below-knee) amputee who is fitted with carbon fiber running prostheses; and violinists Earl Maneein and Mylez Gittens.

The Pennsylvania-born, Brooklyn-based Biggs has traveled to unusual places all over the world for her video installations, including a sulfur mine in the Ijen volcano in East Java (A Step on the Sun), the Taklamakan desert in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China (Point of No Return), a coal mine in the Arctic (Brightness All Around), the crystal caverns below the German Merkers salt mine (Can’t Find My Way Home), and the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah (Vanishing Point). She’s also all set to go to Mars after several simulated adventures.

During the pandemic lockdown, Biggs has been hunkering down at home with her her husband and occasional cinematographer, Bob Cmar, and their cat, Hooper, but that hasn’t kept her from creating bold and inventive new work. On July 30, she will debut the site-specific multimedia performance piece Augmentation and Amplification, concluding the Fridman Gallery’s terrific “SO⅃OS” series, cutting-edge performances made during the coronavirus crisis that incorporate the empty gallery space on Bowery, delving into the feeling of isolation that hovers over us all. (The program also features Daniel Neumann’s Soundcheck, Luke Stewart’s Unity Elements, Abigail Levine’s Fat Chance, Hermes, and Diamanda Galás’s Broken Gargoyles, among others; a five-dollar fee gives you access to all the works.)

In her third conversation with twi-ny, Biggs takes us behind the scenes of her latest innovative, boundary-pushing project.

twi-ny: You’re so used to traveling. What’s it been like being stuck at home?

janet biggs: Working on the performance has been a saving grace for me — to have something to focus on that feels exciting. But it has also had its share of interesting challenges.

twi-ny: How did it come about?

jb: I was asked by experimental sound artist and audio engineer Daniel Neumann if I would be interested in doing a performance for the series he was organizing for Fridman Gallery. The premise was that he would set up the gallery space with audio mics, projectors, and cameras, clean the whole space, and leave. The performer would be given a code to the lock on the gallery so they could safely enter the space by themselves and perform within shelter-in-place guidelines. During the performance, Daniel mixes the sound remotely from his home and livestreams it.

I loved his premise, but I don’t perform. I direct. I said I was eager to figure out a way to direct from home and send both a live performer and an Artificial Intelligence entity into the space. Both Daniel and gallery owner and director Iliya Fridman were excited about my proposal and gave complete support to the idea.

twi-ny: And then you turned to Mary Esther Carter and Richard Savery.

jb: Yes, I reached out to Mary and Richard, both of whom I worked with on the performance you saw at the New Museum. Happily, they were up for the challenge.

Richard Savery, Janet Biggs, and Mary Esther Carter rehearse Augmentation and Amplification over Zoom (photo courtesy Janet Biggs)

twi-ny: Which led you back to A.I. Anne.

jb: Richard has been working on expanding A.I. Anne’s abilities and neural diversity. A.I. Anne was trained on Mary’s voice and named for my aunt, who was autistic and had apraxia. Since the performance last year, A.I. Anne has gained more agency through deep machine learning and semantic knowledge. The entity can now express and respond to emotion. We are also using phenotypic data and first-person accounts of people on the autism spectrum for vocal patterning.

We want to explore neural diversity and inclusion in creative collaborations between humans and machines. Our challenge was how to get A.I. Anne in the gallery so she could perform live. A.I. is a disembodied virtual entity. Richard lives in Atlanta. While A.I. Anne is autonomous, Richard needed to be able to receive a single audio channel of Mary’s voice from the gallery and then send back a single channel audio response from A.I. Anne. With strong wifi and the right software, our tests from Atlanta to the gallery have been successful, so keep your fingers crossed for Thursday.

twi-ny: What was it like collaborating long distance?

jb: I’ve been having rehearsals with Mary and Richard for the last couple weeks via Zoom. We have been able to work out the choreography remotely and even developed some new camera angles due to the constraints of cellphone cameras and apartment sizes. The percussive soundtrack that Mary will dance to was generated by EEG sonification, the process of turning data into sound. Richard developed a process where he could use his brainwaves to control a drumset, creating a kind of brain-beat.

And lastly, I’ve been editing video images. Some will be projected on walls in the gallery and some will be a video overlay, run by the streaming software so that we essentially will have multiple layers of images and live action. If all goes well, I think this will be a pretty exciting performance.

twi-ny: Is that all? You don’t exactly make things easy for yourself.

jb: I’ve been to the gallery myself to see the layout and make some staging/lighting decisions. I will send Daniel a floor plan marked with my staging decisions and a tech-script. Daniel will set up the space (projector angles, lighting, camera and microphone placements) during the day on Thursday and then completely clean the space. Thursday evening, Mary will enter the space alone. Richard will run A.I. Anne from his computer in Atlanta. Daniel will mix the sound and images remotely into a livestream Vimeo channel that the audience can access from their homes. And I’ll be watching from home, holding my breath that everything works!

42nd ANNUAL BRIC CELEBRATE BROOKLYN! FESTIVAL: LIVE EVERYWHERE

celebrate brooklyn

Who: Kes, Lila Downs, Junglepussy, Madison McFerrin, Shantell Martin, ?uestlove, Angelique Kidjo, Yemi Alade, Buscabulla, Glendalys Medina, the Tallest Man on Earth, Common, Robert Glasper, Karriem Riggins, Michelle Buteau
What: BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival
Where: BRIC Facebook, YouTube
When: Saturday, July 25, and Sunday, July 26, free, 8:00
Why: Every summer I make sure to return to the borough of my birth, in the park where my parents used to push me around in a stroller, to revel in the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, a months-long party of music, dance, art, food, and camaraderie. Of course, with New York City in pandemic lockdown, the in-person festival has been canceled; however, you can get a taste of what you’re missing when Celebrate Brooklyn! goes virtual this weekend. A wide-ranging collection of international performers will be taking part, with Kes, Lila Downs, Junglepussy, Madison McFerrin with Shantell Martin, and ?uestlove (DJ set) on Saturday night and Angelique Kidjo, Yemi Alade, Buscabulla with visual artist Glendalys Medina, the Tallest Man on Earth, and Common joined by Robert Glasper and Karriem Riggins on Sunday evening. The event will be hosted live on Facebook, YouTube, and Brooklyn cable channels by comedian and actress Michelle Buteau. In addition, there will be an all-star finale celebrating the greatest borough in the world. The festival is free, but donations will be accepted for the BRIC Creative Future Relief Fund here.

SO⅃ OS 10 — DIAMANDA GALÁS: BROKEN GARGOYLES

Diamanda Galás will present work-iin-progress piece from empty Bowery gallery on July 23 (photo by Austin Young, graphic design by Robert Knoke)

Who: Diamanda Galás
What: Livestreamed broadcast from empty gallery
Where: Fridman Gallery
When: Thursday, July 23, $5, 8:00
Why: Fridman Gallery and CT::SWaM (Contemporary Temporary:: Sound Works and Music) continue their SO⅃OS livestreamed performance series on July 23 with experimental musician, lecturer, activist, and visual artist Diamanda Galás. The San Diego-born Galás, who has released such albums as Plague Mass, Defixiones: Orders from the Dead, Vena Cava, Schrei X, and The Refugee, will present Broken Gargoyles, an audiovisual installation recorded in the empty Fridman Gallery on Bowery and offsite and mixed remotely, featuring music, script, video, and photography by Galás and two expressionist poems by Georg Heym, “Das Fieberspital” and “Die Dämonen der Städte”; Galás willl read an excerpt from the latter. (You can see a clip from her 2013 performance of the poem here.) A work in progress made with artist and sound engineer Daniel Neumann, video artist Carlton Bright, and artist Robert Knoke, Broken Gargoyles takes its name from the phrase used in WWI to describe facially disfigured soldiers and includes a war-era photo by Ernst Freidrich. Tickets are five dollars to watch the livestream or any time thereafter; you can also still catch earlier SO⅃OS installments by such artists as Neumann, Luke Stewart, Mendi and Keith Obadike, and Marina Rosenfeld / Ben Vida (solos). The series concludes July 30 with the multidisciplinary Augmentation and Amplification with Janet Biggs, Mary Esther Carter, Richard Savery, and A.I. Anne.

A CONVERSATION WITH DARA BIRNBAUM: SCREENING AND LIVE Q&A

Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry (still), 1979. Dara Birnbaum (American, born 1946). Color video, sound; 6:50 min. Courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Dara Birnbaum, Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, still, color video, sound, 1979 (courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York)

Who: Dara Birnbaum, Alex Kitnick, Asad Raza, Marianna Simnett
What: Special streaming and live conversation with Q&A
Where: Marian Goodman Gallery Zoom
When: Thursday, July 23, free with registration, 2:00
Why: New York native Dara Birnbaum has been making video and installation art since the 1970s, at the cutting edge of the emerging discipline. On July 23, Marian Goodman Gallery will host a screening of the pioneer’s breakthrough five-minute 1978-79 video, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, which welcomed visitors to the contemporary galleries at the new MoMA prior to the pandemic lockdown (it was initially displayed in a SoHo storefront), and Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, a seven-minute video from 1979 in which Birnbaum uses clips from the popular Hollywood Squares game show to explore coded gestures, pop culture imagery, and gender representation. (The setup for the show is like a modern-day Zoom meeting come to life in three dimensions.) The screening will be followed by a live conversation and audience Q&A with Birnbaum, art historian Alex Kitnick, and artists Asad Raza and Marianna Simnett.

VIRTUAL BOOK LAUNCH EVENT: RAPHAEL MONTAÑEZ ORTIZ

El Museo del Barrio will celebrate the publication of Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s first monograph on July 22

Who: Javier Rivero Ramos, Chon Noriega, Kevin Hatch, Ana Perry, Marcos Dimas, Pedro Reyes, Juan Sanchez
What: Virtual book launch of Raphael Montañez Ortiz monograph with conversation and live Q&A
Where: El Museo en Tu Casa Zoom
When: Wednesday, July 22, free with RSVP, 7:00
Why: In 1969, Brooklyn-born artist and educator Raphael Montañez Ortiz founded and became the first director of El Museo del Barrio. “The cultural disenfranchisement I experience as a Puerto Rican has prompted me to seek a practical alternative to the orthodox museum, which fails to meet my needs for an authentic ethnic experience. To afford me and others the opportunity to establish living connections with my own culture, I founded El Museo del Barrio,” he said. In 2014, El Museo honored Ortiz with the exhibition “Museum Starter Kit: Open with Care”; on July 22, they’ll pay tribute to the eighty-six-year-old Nuyorican multidisciplinary deconstructionist with a virtual launch party for his first monograph, featuring a live conversation on Zoom, followed by a Q&A; among the participants are monograph editor Javier Rivero Ramos, contributors Chon Noriega, Kevin Hatch, and Ana Perry, and artists Marcos Dimas, Pedro Reyes, and Juan Sanchez.

“One of the most radical creators and pioneers of his generation, Raphael Montañez Ortiz offers El Museo del Barrio an opportunity to push the boundaries of identities, showcase moments of harmony and tension in our lived history as a museum, and challenge and expand limited visual art narratives. Entropy speaks about the need for transformation, about the irreversible changes that are generated within complex systems. This spirit is evidenced in El Museo del Barrio today and for years to come,” El Museo executive director Patrick Charpenel said in a statement. Ramos added, “For far too long, canonical art history devoted to American art of the second half of the twentieth century neglected one of its most innovative artists. Premised on the Eurocentric myth of the homo faber, it failed to comprehend the trailblazing character of Raphael Montañez Ortiz and his lifelong endeavor to harness the human condition’s primal energies. At once a painter, performance artist, sculptor, filmmaker, teacher, community organizer, and writer, the work of Raphael Montañez Ortiz defies disciplinary categorization. This publication offers for the first time a panoramic view of a prolific career spanning more than six decades.”

CARMEN ARGOTE’S LAST LIGHT SCREENING AND Q&A

Carmen Argote goes for a haunting walk in new short film Last Light

Who: Carmen Argote, Erin Christovale
What: Livestream premiere and live Q&A
Where: The Hammer Museum at UCLA
When: Tuesday, July 21, free with RSVP, 9:00 EDT
Why: Mexican-born, LA-based multidisciplinary artist Carmen Argote was scheduled to open her latest exhibition, “Hand Dog Glove,” at Clockshop in Los Angeles, but the Covid-19 pandemic has put that on hold. In the interim, Argote, the gallery, and the Hammer Museum at UCLA have teamed up to present the livestream premiere of Argote’s haunting twelve-minute film, Last Light, which she started making just before the lockdown and continued during the crisis. “Is this fear so paralyzing?” she asks as she walks through the emptying streets of her city, considering ideas of loneliness, childhood, and demolition. “I feel like I’m not made to last; I’m not the one who’s gonna make it.” Argote, who was hospitalized early in the crisis for a non-cornonavirus-related illness, takes walks as part of her discipline. In her artist statement she explains, “I explore notions of home and place. I respond to architecture and site to reflect on personal histories and on my own immigrant experience. My practice uses the act of inhabiting as a starting point, working within a space and its cultural, economic, and personal context as a material. I work at a human scale and in relationship to how my body inhabits space.” The premiere will be livestreamed on July 21 at 9:00, followed by a Q&A with Argote and Hammer associate curator Erin Christovale. (Click on the above photo to watch the trailer.)

GALERIE LELONG CONVERSATIONS: JAUME PLENSA WITH MARY SABBATINO

Jaume Plensa is back in his Barcelona studio, where he will take part in the inaugural “Galerie Lelong Conversation” (photo courtesy Galerie Lelong)

Who: Jaume Plensa, Mary Sabbatino
What: Artist talk inaugurating “Galerie Lelong Conversations”
Where: Galerie Lelong Zoom
When: Thursday, July 9, free with advance registration, 2:00
Why: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” So begins T. S. Eliot’s epic 1922 poem, “The Waste Land.” Spanish artist Jaume Plensa uses that quote for the title of his new online exhibition, “Jaume Plensa: April is the cruelest month,” which continues on Galerie Lelong’s website through July 10. The show consists of drawings on Super Alfa Guarro paper from his new “STILL” series, created during the month of April, when Plensa was sheltering in place at home, unable to get to his studio. Each of the works contains letters, either arranged randomly, in the shape of a heart, or forming such words as panic, dementia, suicide, insomnia, and anxiety on the fingers of a hand. In the exhibition text, gallery vice president and partner Mary Sabbatino explains, “Language is not the only means to communicate and can sometimes work against comprehension. ‘We are best when together,’ says Plensa. In the contemplation of these drawings, we see a world both intimate and expansive, expressive of shared human experience during a time when the world was ‘still.’”

On July 9 at 2:00, in conjunction with the closing of the exhibition the next day, Sabbatino will host a live Zoom “Galerie Lelong Conversation” with Plensa, who is back in his Barcelona studio. Plensa is best known in New York City for his large-scale works Echo in Madison Square Park and Behind the Walls at Rockefeller Center; for more on the artist, check out the trailer for Pedro Ballesteros’s new documentary, Jaume Plensa: Can You Hear Me? The next “Galerie Lelong Conversation” will take place in August with Brooklyn-based artist Leonardo Drew, who had a solo show at the gallery last year. And as Eliot also wrote in “The Waste Land”: “There is shadow under this red rock, / (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), / And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”