this week in art

YAYOI KUSAMA: NARCISSUS GARDEN

Yayoi Kusama’s silver spheres glitter in Rockaway (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

ROCKAWAY! 2018
MoMA PS1
Gateway National Recreation
Fort Tilden
Friday – Sunday through September 3 (and Labor Day), free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
www.moma.org
narcissus garden slideshow

In 1966, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama invited herself to the Venice Biennale, setting up “Narcissus Garden,” a collection of plastic silver spheres, on the lawn outside the Italian Pavilion; she even sold the mirrored balls for about two dollars apiece before being told to stop the vending. Original footage of the intervention is one of the highlights of the excellent new documentary Kusama: Infinity, which opens September 7. In the meantime, visitors can experience “Narcissus Garden” for themselves Friday through Sunday through Labor Day (including that Monday) as part of MoMA’s biannual “Rockaway!,” the free site-specific exhibition started in 2014 by MoMA PS1 curator-at-large Klaus Biesenbach and multidisciplinary artist Patti Smith, both Rockaway residents who were determined to rebuild the area following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. Kusama, who lived in New York City from 1958 to 1973 and staged many controversial art happenings here, has placed fifteen hundred mirror balls in a former train garage in Fort Tilden in the Gateway National Recreation Area. Kusama’s popularity has risen dramatically this century, with record prices paid for her works and fans lining up for hours and hours (and hours and hours) to get thirty seconds inside one of her Infinity Mirror Rooms at Chelsea’s David Zwirner gallery, for example. So don’t be surprised when you arrive at the Rockaway building only to find that there’s a wait even in the middle of nowhere.

Yayoi Kusama’s 1966 “Narcissus Garden” is reimagined in abandoned Rockaway building (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Narcissus Garden” has been displayed around the world over the years, but it is more relevant than ever in the age of social media and selfies. At Venice, Kusama’s installation included a sign that said, “Your Narcisium [sic] for Sale,” and that is very much still true today. The spheres, each of which rests on a small, barely visible stand to keep them from rolling, reflect not only the surrounding area, consisting of other balls, walls covered in colorful graffiti, blown-out windows, and a high, dilapidated ceiling, but the viewer as well. Thus, people snap photos of themselves in the spheres, ready for posting. Others get so caught up in being photographed within the installation that they don’t listen to security guards telling them not to sit on the ground, not to go past the dangling hook, not to touch the pieces, and not to wander down inviting pathways, which are there to tantalize but not follow. There are even some spheres behind a rusted cage, locked away from the rest, segregated as if imprisoned. When we were there, one man muttered about this not being art and actually kicked one of the spheres, causing it to roll away, after which he was ordered to get out, still mumbling as he exited. Thus, “Narcissus Garden,” a presentation of MoMA PS1, the National Park Service, the Jamaica Bay — Rockaway Parks Conservancy, and the Rockaway Artists Alliance, continues to be a reflection of ourselves, now going back more than half a century, although Kusama, an eighty-nine-year-old firm believer in love and peace who still works every single day, is not condemning anyone or criticizing contemporary culture; she just wants us to enjoy the art. And it’s hard not to love it, especially as sunlight filters in and causes one area to suddenly glow.

The balls also are like three-dimensional manifestations of the dots and infinity lights Kusama has been obsessed with since the beginning of her career. “My desire is to measure and to make order of the infinite, unbounded universe from my own position within it, with polka dots,” Kusama said in a 2016 statement for an exhibition at the Glass House in Connecticut. “In exploring this, the single dot is my own life, and I am a single particle amongst billions. — I work with the principal themes of infinity, self-image, and compulsive repetition in objects and forms, such as the steel spheres of ‘Narcissus Garden’ and the mirrored walls I have created.” Don’t get caught up in taking photographs of the installation; instead, experience it for its many wonders, reflecting on your place and the place of others in the universe, contemplating the circularity of life, enjoying the sheer beauty of what is right in front of you. Then snap a bunch of photos and leave, allowing others to come in and get lost in the infinite joy of “Narcissus Garden.” You can then grab a seat and relax as you watch a screening in the main front space of Jud Yalkut’s 1967 seminal counterculture classic, Kusama’s Self-Obliteration.

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION: REMEMBERING THE 60s

NYPL explores the 1960s counterculture movement in multimedia exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwartzman Building
D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall
Daily through September 1, free
917-275-6975
www.nypl.org

The New York Public Library revisits one of the most turbulent eras of American history in “You Say You Want a Revolution: Remembering the 60s,” which continues at the main Manhattan branch through September 1. Part of Carnegie Hall’s citywide “The ’60s: The Years that Changed America,” the show features photographs, art, letters, documents, video, music, propaganda, and more, divided into “Get My Soul Free: Consciousness,” “Wang Dang Doodle: Sexuality and Gender,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall: The New Left,” “Bad Moon on the Rise: War in Vietnam,” “I’m Black and I’m Proud: Civil Rights and Black Power,” and “Back to the Garden: Communal Life,” exploring the counterculture and its legacy. John Updike defends the war in Southeast Asia. Tom Wolfe takes notes for what would become The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Film clips celebrate Woodstock and Hair. Buttons declare, “Black Is Beautiful.” The death of the hippie is memorialized in Haight-Ashbury. Psychedelic posters announce happenings. Patty Hearst reinvents herself as Tania. Gloria Steinem has something to say to the New York Times. And Uncle Sam wants out. There are also listening booths where you can act as your own DJ, choosing songs from hundreds of albums arranged politically. Free tours will be held at 12:30 and 3:30 Monday through Saturday and Sunday at 2:00.

ADAM PENDLETON: what a day was this

Adam Pendleton lays out his manifesto at Lever House gallery in midtown (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through August 21, free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
adampendleton.net

New York City–based multimedia conceptual artist Adam Pendleton makes his manifesto clear in “what a day was this,” an immersive installation continuing at Lever House through August 28. The thirty-four-year-old Pendleton has combined black-and-white text and visuals and mirrors from his series “OK DADA OK BLACK DADA OK” and “System of Display” along with silkscreen works on Mylar. Words such as naive, function, and if can barely be read through redacted-like black blotches on several canvases. Large-scale spiral notebooks contain quotes from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, which declares, “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land,” and Hugo Ball’s Dada Manifesto, which explains, “The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.” A wall of masklike portraits of black faces, newspaper clippings (about the 1930 Congo Crisis and other events), and abstract geometric shapes looks out onto Park Ave. An unfinished question asks, “What is the bla?”

Adam Pendleton’s “what a day was this” confronts visitors inside and outside on Park Ave. (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Pendleton, whose “Black Dada Flag (Black Lives Matter)” recently flew over Scylla Point, previously known as Negro Point, as part of the Frieze art fair on Randall’s Island, started writing poetry as a young boy in Richmond, Virginia. His mother was an elementary school teacher and his father a contractor and a musician. Pendleton, who lives in Brooklyn and Germantown with his husband, Yumami Food Company cofounder Karsten Ch’ien, and works in two studios in Sunset Park, has had such previous one-man and group shows as “shot him in the face; “I am you, you are too”; “Becoming Imperceptible”; and “How to Live Together” around the world. The site-specific “what a day was this” also includes excerpts from Du Bois’s “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” and Pendleton’s Black Dada Reader as well as an interview with choreographer Trajal Harrell. While the mirrors implicate the viewer, Lever House’s glass walls dare people outside to confront the systemic racism staring right at them. “Black Dada is a way to talk about the future while talking about the past. It is our present moment,” Pendleton says.

HARLEM WEEK 2018: SUMMER IN THE CITY / HARLEM DAY

Ashleigh Smith will perform at this year’s annual “Harlem Day” festivities

West 135th St. between Malcolm X Blvd. & Frederick Douglass Blvd.
Saturday, August 18, and Sunday, August 19, free, 12 noon – 10:00 pm
Festival continues through August 25
harlemweek.com

The theme of the 2018 Harlem Week festival is “Women Transforming Our World: Past, Present & Future,” along with the subtheme “The Community within the Community,” saluting LGBTQ rights. The festivities continue August 18 with “Summer in the City” and August 19 with “Harlem Day,” two afternoons of a wide range of free special events along West 135th St. Saturday’s programs include Harlem Senior Citizens Synchronized Swimming, the NYC Children’s Festival in Howard Bennett Playground (with a parade, exhibits, games, arts & crafts, live music and dance, health testing, and sports clinics), the Harlem Week Higher Education Fair (with more than fifty colleges and universities), “Dancing in the Streets” with live performances and WBLS DJs, the International Vendors Village, the Fabulous Fashion Flava Show, the “Uptown Saturday Concert” (with Sarah Vaughan National Competition winner Ashleigh Smith, Bishop Marvin Sapp, Raheem Devaughn, and the Jeff Foxx Band), and the Imagenation Outdoor Film Festival in St. Nicholas Park. Sunday’s “Harlem Day” celebration features live performances on three stages, the International Vendors Village, the Upper Manhattan Auto Show, Our Health Village, the Upper Manhattan Small Business Expo & Fair, USTA Children’s Tennis Clinics, and the second day of the NYC Children’s Festival (with a Back to School theme).

BEING: NEW PHOTOGRAPHY 2018

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through August 19
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

“Photographs can and in many ways should exist to contradict one another and to build out a narrative that is confusing and in some ways sort of compulsive,” explains Carmen Winant, one of seventeen photographers included in MoMA’s biannual look at new photography, this year called “Being,” which asks the question “How can photography capture what it means to be human?” Winant’s large-scale “My Birth,” consisting of more than two thousand found images of women giving birth, lines a narrow passageway in the exhibit, which continues through August 19. “This could be a shared narrative that both collapses time, and also sort of points to the difference between kinds of experience,” she adds in her online statement. That could be said for many of the works in the show, which features photographers from Brazil, America, Ethiopia, Poland, India, Italy, Germany, and Palestine, all between the ages of thirty-one and forty-four. Harold Mendez’s “At the edge of the Necró polis” explores ritual and remembrance. Images of water are central to Matthew Connors’s series “Unanimous Desire,” taken in North Korea. Stephanie Syjuco’s “Cargo Cults: Head Bundle” is a self-portrait of the Philippine immigrant in traditional dress but with an Urban Outfitters shopping bag on her head. In “Gesellschaft beginnt mit drei” (“Society Begins with Three”), Andrzej Steinbach delves into personal identity by having a trio of models change position and clothing. The exhibit, organized by assistant curator Lucy Gallun, also includes work by Sofia Borges, Sam Contis, Shilpa Gupta, Adelita Husni-Bey, Yazan Khalili, Aïda Muluneh, Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương, B. Ingrid Olson, Joanna Piotrowska, Em Rooney, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. “I just want you to really question,” Husni-Bey says about “The Council,” but that relates to all of the photographs in this compelling presentation.

TAUBA AUERBACH: FLOW SEPARATION

The fireboat John J. Harvey pulls into the dock, completing another East River sojourn (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 6 through August 12
Hudson River Park, Pier 25 at West St., August 13 – October 7
Hudson River Park, Pier 66a at Twenty-Sixth St., October 7 – May 12
Admission: free (advance RSVP required for boat trip, through October 7)
www.publicartfund.org
flow separation slideshow

San Francisco-born, New York-based visual artist Tauba Auerbach has added some razzle dazzle to city waterways with the nautical work “Flow Separation.” For this joint project of the Public Art Fund and 14-18 NOW, the British organization honoring the centenary of WWI, Auerbach has turned the fireboat John J. Harvey into a “dazzle ship,” painting the 1931 boat in red and white dazzle camouflage. If you’re not familiar with the style, its history is fascinating. In the First World War, dazzle camouflage, albeit in less-striking colors, was inspired by ideas from British painter Norman Wilkinson and Scottish zoologist John Graham Kerr — Pablo Picasso claimed credit as well — and was used to confuse the enemy by distorting ships’ speed and direction, making them much tougher moving targets. Auerbach, whose previous painting and sculpture exhibitions include “Projective Instrument” and “Float” and whose “Diagonal Press” is a continuing unique open-edition publishing model, has covered virtually every possible surface of the vessel, from floors and ladders to walls and doors, from storage containers and flags to rope and chains, with exuberant red-and-white marbling and patterns adapted from the movement of water, particularly by how eddies can form in a ship’s wake, making it appear that the water is going both backward and forward at once.

Artist Tauba Auerbach has painted a former FDNY fireboat in dazzling red and white, based on the movement of water (photo by twi-ny/mdr)(photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Built in 1931 in a Gowanus plant and decommissioned in 1994, the 130-foot-long Harvey was the first FDNY fireboat with an internal combustion engine. It was named for steam fireboat pilot John J. Harvey, the only casualty of a February 1930 incident involving a fire on a German shipping line and a series of explosions that impacted Harvey’s boat, the Thomas Willett. Before being retired, the Harvey was one of the boats that would shoot out red, white, and blue water immediately prior to the Macy’s July Fourth fireworks display on the East River; it was brought back into action on September 11, 2001, pumping water and helping to evacuate people downtown after the towers fell.

The John J. Harvey lets loose its water cannons by the bridges as part of Public Art Fund project “Flow Separation” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Since then, the Harvey has taken New Yorkers and tourists on short sojourns, but never quite like this. Captain Huntley Gill guides the boat up the East River, passing by Gowanus Bay (where it was built), Red Hook, several bridges, and the Statue of Liberty. Weather permitting, the boat lets loose its water cannons, often with spontaneous rainbows, in a spectacular display that allows you to get as wet as you want to, depending on where you’re standing. Some people choose to get drenched, while others can take cover under a dazzled tarp. Not all the cannons work, so you might get spritzed through old leaks. Most of the ship is accessible, including two lifeboats and one of the lookout towers that features multiple cannons, but there is no available bathroom and no snack bar. It’s a friendly atmosphere, so be ready to interact with your fellow enthusiastic passengers as well as the crew members, who love to talk about the ship, from longtime mates to one young man who recently arrived in New York and was hired on the Harvey as his first job; he even sleeps on the boat and works on his DJ music on off-hours. The captain is happy to share details about the boat and its repainting and upcoming complete restoration, and don’t be surprised if you bump into Florent Morellet, the community activist, artist, and former owner of the favorite Meatpacking District restaurant Florent; he is one of the founders of the group that bought the boat postretirement, and he’s planning on taking trips every weekend.

Tauba Auerbach’s “Flow Separation” will move from Brooklyn Bridge Park to Hudson River Park for boarding and short trips (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Through August 12, the fireboat will be docked at Pier 6 in Brooklyn Bridge Park, where it can be boarded between 12 noon and 4:00 on Saturdays and between 3:00 and 7:00 on Sundays. The boat will also take seventy-five people on a forty-five to sixty-minute trip at 4:30 and 6:00 on Saturdays and 12 noon and 1:30 on Sundays. The Harvey will then move to Pier 25 in Hudson River Park from August 13 to October 7, where the boarding and trips continue. Finally, the boat will dock at Pier 66A in Hudson River Park through May 12, but with no more trips. Tickets for the September 15-16 journeys will become available on September 4 at noon, for September 22-23 on September 11 at noon, and for September 29-30 and October 7 on September 18 at noon. There is a standby line that is worth the wait (get there about an hour early), since there is usually, although not always, a handful of no-shows. It’s a fabulous experience and a must-see, a gorgeous, swirling artwork that provides a thrill-a-minute experience. Of course, it is also a reminder of the horror of battle, from the War to End All Wars to the present fears of nuclear confrontation.

MEL CHIN: ALL OVER THE PLACE

Mel Chin brings together “Safehouse Door” and “Fundred Project” at revelatory exhibit at Queens Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Queens Museum
New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Wednesday – Sunday through August 12, suggested admission $8 adults, $4 seniors, free for children eighteen and under
718-592-9700
queensmuseum.org
www.nolongerempty.org

The name of Houston-born conceptual artist Mel Chin’s current exhibition at the Queens Museum, “Mel Chin: All Over the Place,” is aptly titled. The show, which runs through August 12, features works that involve New Orleans, Washington DC, Minnesota, Chile, North Carolina, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, New York City, Flint, Michigan, and other locations. In addition to pieces at the Flushing Meadows Corona Park institution, Chin, who lived on the Lower East Side for nearly twenty years, also has pieces in Times Square and the Broadway-Lafayette subway station. And this past Sunday, Chin was back at the Queens Museum, where, as a young boy at the 1964-65 World’s Fair, held partly in the same building, he suffered a breakdown that resulted in shock therapy and partial, permanent memory loss; he even had to relearn how to draw. He related this story and many more during a sensational impromptu tour he led that afternoon; he was like the pied piper, as the visitors following him grew from one to three to five to nine to thirty over the course of two very enlightening, rather intimate hours.

Mel Chin shows his tongue was basis of one side of “Shape of a Lie” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The show is spread across the entire museum, which is hosting the exhibit in conjunction with the nonprofit organization No Longer Empty. (Chin has even staged interventions in the Panorama of the City of New York and the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany objects). Every work is layered with deeply personal and political meaning; Chin, the son of Chinese immigrants, occasionally incorporates aspects of his own life into the art while also making sharp, often subtle observations about consumption, marketing, economics, science, democracy, the environment, capitalism, refugees, astronomy, alchemy, corporate greed, racism, ethnocentrism, mythology, history, and war. The pieces first grab you because of their visual splendor, but you need to read the labels to get the full impact — or have Chin with you to talk about them. “Everything has a cultural weight,” he said on the tour. He sees “art as a catalytic motivator” that can make a difference in this world through the “liberation of images.” He also considers his work, which he calls “meditations,” to consist of “lamentations on my life as I’ve come to understand it.”

“Gate of the New Gods” references LeBron James, racism, capitalism, celebrity culture, and Michael Jordan (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

His process and materials are just as important as the final piece itself. “Shape of a Lie” features a Native American pipestone replica of his own tongue on one side of a wall, a bronze representation of a little toe, large gonads, and a twisted gut on the other. “Lecture Ax” is an encased ax with a blade made of pages from notes for a lecture he was giving at the New School; during the class, he drank a six-pack of beer and slammed the ax into the blackboard. “Cabinet of Craving” recalls Louise Bourgeois’s large-scale “Spider” but contains a vitrine with a Victorian teapot that references colonialism, the Opium Wars, and the narcotic’s impact on his family. For “Presence of Tragedy,” Chin re-created his own smile and placed it on the center of a porcelained steel plate that he perforated, a statement on the AIDS crisis and fear.

“Flint Fit” shows art and activism in action and making a difference above “The Relief Map of the New York City Water Supply System” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Divided into four thematic, nonchronological sections — “Destroying Angels of Our Creation,” “Artifice of Facts and Belief,” “Levity’s Wounds and Gravity’s Well,” and “The Cruel Light of the Sun” — the exhibit includes several installations in which Chin takes action, not only pointing out social ills but doing something about it. For “Flint Fit,” one of numerous projects in which Chin investigates lead poisoning, he has partnered with New York fashion designer Tracy Reese, North Carolina textile company Unifi, and the Flint-based St. Luke N.E.W. Life Center to turn recyclable water bottles into rain- and swimwear. He has brought together “Safehouse Door,” a repurposed door that was on a home in a post-Katrina New Orleans neighborhood that had high levels of lead, with the ongoing “Fundred Project,” which consists of hundreds of thousands hundred-dollar-bill templates with drawings by families and schoolchildren across America that are sent to the Fundred Reserve in Washington, DC.

Mel Chin’s “Wake” and “Unmoored” features a shipwreck in Times Square (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Chin, who has double vision that requires him to sometimes wear glasses with the left lens blacked out, gets some of his ideas from dreams, including “Circumfessional Hymenal Sea (Portrait of Jacques Derrida),” “QWERTY-Courbet” (be sure to look at the keyboard side through your camera lens to more clearly see the image), and “Spilled Vision.” He seems downright prescient with “Gate of the Gods,” a wall hanging of rope and basketballs above a re-creation of the gate of LeBron James’s Los Angeles home, which was spray-painted with a racial slur; nearby is a Michael Jordan sneaker, resulting in the piece evoking President Trump’s recent tweet lambasting James and praising Jordan. Chin also can be sneaky; for “Total Proof: The GALA Committee,” he was able to get politically motivated works of art placed on the set of Melrose Place for three seasons without Aaron Spelling’s knowledge. Among the other don’t-miss works are “Our Strange Flower of Democracy,” a bamboo version of a Vietnam War bomb, dangling dangerously overhead; “The Funk & Wag from A to Z,” a room of alphabetical images cut out of twenty-five volumes of 1950s Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias; and “Landscape,” a trio of paintings, which Chin calls “windows,” referencing different time periods, artistic styles, and countries along the thirtieth parallel, along with landfill waste seeping out the bottom of the walls; and “Sea to See,” two huge domes representing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, lit up with digital imagery dealing with endangered species and climate change.

Mel Chin’s rededicated subway installation “Signal” alerts straphangers when trains are arriving (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Curated by Laura Raicovich, and Manon Slome, the exhibit also spreads out to Times Square with “Wake,” a re-creation of the skeleton of a ship based on the USS Nightingale, which had quite a history, fronted by a large-scale robotic replica of opera star Jenny Lind, known as the Swedish Nightingale. “Wake” expands into augmented reality using the “Unmoored” app. And at the Broadway-Lafayette subway station, Chin’s 1990s site-specific “Signal” has been rededicated, giving credit to collaborator Peter Jemison of the Six Nations of the Iroquois and Seneca Tribe. The work relates to the Dutch settlement in New York, the Native American Wickquasgeck Trail, and a wampum-belt-inspired statement about peace while alerting straphangers to the next approaching train. Indoors and outside, indeed all over the place, the sixty-six-year-old Chin’s oeuvre is remarkably well researched and beautifully realized, so make sure you have plenty of time to delve into the myriad details of every piece as Chin explores truth and power in brilliant ways. And don’t be surprised if you feel yourself activated because of it.