Town Stages
221 West Broadway
Saturday, January 20, $20 per session, $35 for both, 3:00 & 7:00
baeuprising.splashthat.com
Saturday’s Women’s March on New York City takes place from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm, starting at 72nd St. & Central Park West and continuing to Sixth Ave. & Forty-Fifth St., to speak out for equality. “Over the past year, basic rights for women, immigrants, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, the religious and nonreligious, people of color and even Mother Earth have struggled to survive under the weight of the current administration,” the official march registration website explains. “America’s First Amendment has been challenged and healthcare for millions has been threatened. We must stand together to demand and defend our rights. Let your voice echo from the streets of New York City to the capital city. Show the world that red, white, and blue are colors of tolerance.” Immediately following the march, the collective BAE is hosting “Uprising” at Town Stages, consisting of two sessions of panel discussions (with community leaders, artivists, and change-makers), live art, music, healing modalities, food & drink, and more in support of the Women’s March Alliance. Session 001, “The Women’s Movement: Stages of Evolution,” runs from 3:00 to 7:00, while Session 002, “Cities, Spaces, Sex & Power: How We Evolve,” goes from 7:00 to 11:00. Tickets for each session are $20, or you can pay $35 for both, called “Double Impact.” BAE refers to itself as “a celebration of female creativity and divine feminine energy, before anything else. It is a gathering of our collective evolution and the vitality of tangible sacred spaces curated, produced, and performed by women, for ALL.”
About ten years ago, I was visiting Chelsea galleries on a sunny afternoon when a car pulled up on the corner of Eleventh Ave. and Twenty-second St. A father and a young boy of about five or six got out, and the man led the child to one of the stone sculptures that make up Joseph Beuys’s “7000 Oaks.” The boy relieved himself on the stone; the pair then returned to the car and the family drove off. I always thought that the German avant-garde artist would have gotten a kick out of that scene; after watching Andres Veiel’s new documentary, Beuys, I’m sure of it. If you’re going to make a documentary about Beuys (pronounced boys), one of the most influential artists of the postwar generation, it had better not be a straightforward, talking-heads film but something that pushes the boundaries and challenges the viewer, much like his art. Award-winning director Veiel (Balagan, Black Box Germany) does just that with the film, which concentrates primarily on rarely shown and never-before-seen archival footage of Beuys, including radio and television interviews, art openings, panel discussions, live performances, photographs, and home movies, mostly in black-and-white. Veiel conducted approximately twenty new interviews and met with more than five dozen people who knew Beuys, but he only uses spare clips from art historian Rhea Thönges-Stringaris, publisher Klaus Staeck, collector Franz Joseph van der Grinten, and critic, curator, and writer Caroline Tisdall, who wrote seven books about Beuys and worked with him on several major exhibitions and lecture tours. “The anonymous viewer is back there, yeah?” Beuys says early on, looking straight into the camera, and it’s a critical moment, as the documentary emphasizes how important it was to him that his work be seen. “I want to inform people about the true culprits in our system. I want to inform and educate people,” he says. Beuys, who also taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, is eminently quotable, his speech filled with manifesto-like declarations. “Forget the conventional idea of art. Anyone can be an artist. Anything can be art, especially anything that conserves energy,” he explains. “I’m not an artist at all. Except if we say that everyone is an artist,” he opines. “The concept of what art is has expanded to such a degree that, for me, there’s nothing left of it,” he offers.
Visual artist Laurie Simmons makes her feature-film debut as writer, director, and star of the self-indulgent, pretentious romance My Art, which opens at the Quad on January 12. Part of the Pictures Generation, Simmons, who was born in Queens in 1949, has been creating intriguing photographic series since the mid-1970s, often focusing on such inanimate objects as mannequins and dolls, offering a feminist viewpoint of domesticity. In My Art, she plays Ellie Shine, a sixty-five-year-old teacher and artist who decides to house-sit for an upstate friend in order to take advantage of her large studio and to work on a new project, bringing along her ailing dog, Bing, who is suffering from degenerative myelopathy (and is sometimes played by her real dog, Dean, who had the same illness). Although she is seeking privacy and seclusion, she is soon interacting with three men, local gardeners Frank (Robert Clohessy), a widower, and Tom (Josh Safdie), who is married to Angie (Parker Posey), and an oft-divorced lawyer, John (John Rothman). Instead of using dolls and mannequins, she and the three men dress up to re-create scenes from some of Ellie’s favorite films, including John Huston’s The Misfits, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, and François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, which involve issues of sex, femininity, age, and gender. Inspired by the work of Cindy Sherman and Gulley Jimson, the painter portrayed by Alec Guinness in Ronald Neame’s The Horse’s Mouth, Ellie reimagines herself as Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Malcolm McDowell, Marlene Dietrich, and other characters as the scenes help drive the narrative of her evolving relationships with the three men as well as the upstate community as a whole. She did not come to the house looking for romance, instead wanting to concentrate on her art, but she can’t help but be beguiled by the three men, particularly Frank, while rediscovering her sexuality.
