this week in art

SIKKEMA JENKINS AND CO. IS COMPELLED TO PRESENT THE MOST ASTOUNDING AND IMPORTANT PAINTING SHOW OF THE FALL ART SHOW VIEWING SEASON!

Kara Walker, “Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might Be Guilty of Something),” cut paper on canvas, 2017 (Photo: © Kara Walker / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
530 West 22nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through October 15, free
212-929-2262
sikkemajenkinsco.com

In the summer of 2014, California-born, New York City–based multidisciplinary artist Kara Walker entered the public consciousness in a big way with “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant,” her massive white-sugar sculpture of a Sphinx-like “mammy” in the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, shortly before the factory was torn down. While the piece worked magnificently on many levels, including artistically, historically, and politically, many visitors entertained themselves by taking selfies and posting photos in which they made fun of various parts of the figure’s body, leading Walker to question the ways people, especially of different races, look at and experience such work. In fact, throughout her career, her oeuvre has been misunderstood and/or taken at face value; her cut-out silhouettes in particular can seem adorable and playful until one zeroes in on their harrowing portraits of Civil War–era rape, violence, child abuse, and more perpetrated by white plantation owners and their families on black slaves. Walker attempts to preempt any such critical or popular misunderstandings or misreadings in her major follow-up exhibition, essentially titled, “Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!,” a timely collection of new paintings, drawings, and collages that closely examine the state of race relations from slavery to the present time, when the president of the United States has declared that some white supremacists are “very fine people,” the media is under attack, and the country is arguing over patriotism and flags that represent different things to different ethnicities.

Kara Walker, “Christ’s Entry into Journalism,” Sumi ink and collage on paper, 2017 (Photo: © Kara Walker / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)

In fact, Donald Trump makes an appearance in the centerpiece of the new exhibit, Walker’s grand “Christ’s Entry into Journalism,” a reimagining of James Ensor’s “Christ’s Entry into Brussels,” complete with depictions of James Brown, a Confederate soldier, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Trayvon Martin, a mummy, black stereotypes, and a wilting flag. Flags also appear in the watercolors “Rebel Flag (with Ghosts)” and “Rebel Flag (with Bows)” and “Libertine Alighting the World,” with a partially undressed, flaming Lady Liberty, a mixed-race couple, and a black female centurion burning the Confederate flag, and “U.S.A. Idioms,” with characters in a winding tree, a stump and a freshly dug grave below. Graves play a role as well in “The (Private) Memorial Garden of Grandison Harris” and “Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit),” death ever present. But some semblance of life emerges in the cut-paper, black-and-white “Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might Be Guilty of Something),” with images of eggs and birth alongside snakes and demons.

Kara Walker, “Paradox of the Negro Burial Ground,” oil stick, collage, and mixed media on paper, 2017 (Photo: © Kara Walker / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)

Walker takes on colonialism in the oil-stick “Brand X (Slave Market Painting),” references classical paintings of Judith holding the head of Holofernes in “Scraps,” takes a shot at French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme and colonialism in “A Piece of Furniture for Jean Leon Gerome,” and shows a black child proudly raising his left fist in the air, his right hand on his heart, in “A Spectacle,” paying no attention to the white man with the lasso near him. This is heavy stuff that demands extended attention, reveling in not only the allegorical and true-to-life scenes but also the majestic skill displayed by Walker, who takes a giant step with her use of paint, oil stick, and cut-outs.

The official press release was prepared for all kinds of reactions, from critics and the public:

“Collectors of Fine Art will Flock to see the latest Kara Walker offerings, and what is she offering but the Finest Selection of artworks by an African-American Living Woman Artist this side of the Mississippi. Modest collectors will find her prices reasonable, those of a heartier disposition will recognize Bargains! Scholars will study and debate the Historical Value and Intellectual Merits of Miss Walker’s Diversionary Tactics. Art Historians will wonder whether the work represents a Departure or a Continuum. Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media. Parents will cover the eyes of innocent children. School Teachers will reexamine their art history curricula. Prestigious Academic Societies will withdraw their support, former husbands and former lovers will recoil in abject terror. Critics will shake their heads in bemused silence. Gallery Directors will wring their hands at the sight of throngs of the gallery-curious flooding the pavement outside. The Final President of the United States will visibly wince. Empires will fall, although which ones, only time will tell.”

Kara Walker, “Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit),” triptych, oil stick and Sumi ink on paper collaged on linen, 2017 (Photo: © Kara Walker / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)

Meanwhile, in her artist’s statement, Walker makes her purpose very clear:

“I don’t really feel the need to write a statement about a painting show. I know what you all expect from me and I have complied up to a point. But frankly I am tired, tired of standing up, being counted, tired of ‘having a voice’ or worse ‘being a role model.’ Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche. It’s too much, and I write this knowing full well that my right, my capacity to live in this Godforsaken country as a (proudly) raced and (urgently) gendered person is under threat by random groups of white (male) supremacist goons who flaunt a kind of patched together notion of race purity with flags and torches and impressive displays of perpetrator-as-victim sociopathy. I roll my eyes, fold my arms and wait. How many ways can a person say racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology, and in how many ways will the racists among our countrymen act out their Turner Diaries race war fantasy combination Nazi Germany and Antebellum South — states which, incidentally, lost the wars they started, and always will, precisely because there is no way those white racisms can survive the earth without the rest of us types upholding humanity’s best, keeping the motor running on civilization, being good, and preserving nature and all the stuff worth working and living for?”

Alive, not Dead, 2017 Sumi ink and collage on paper

Kara Walker, “Alive, not Dead,” Sumi ink and collage on paper, 2017 (Photo: © Kara Walker / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)

Walker’s show at Sikkema Jenkins is bold and in-your-face, daring viewers to feel deeply no matter what part of the political spectrum they find themselves on. It’s both threatening and thrilling, offering little comfort as it lays bare the ills of contemporary society in fearless ways. When I visited the show on a crowded Saturday afternoon, there were a lot of people, black, white, and brown, taking photos, but nobody posing stupidly or making fun of the artwork. Does that mean we have made progress since “A Subtlety”? Just roll your eyes, fold your arms, and wait.

THE LEGACY OF LYNCHING: CONFRONTING RACIAL TERROR IN AMERICA

Rashid Johnson (American, born 1977). Thurgood in the House of Chaos, 2009. Photograph: Rashid Johnson/Brooklyn Museum

Rashid Johnson, “Thurgood in the Hour of Chaos,” 2009 (photograph: Rashid Johnson/Brooklyn Museum)

Brooklyn Museum, Robert E. Blum Gallery, first floor
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Through October 8, $10-$16
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
lynchinginamerica.eji.org

There are only a few more days to see the Brooklyn Museum’s shattering “The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America,” a searing, must-see collaboration with the Equal Justice Initiative and Google that looks at the past, present, and future of the lynching of blacks in the United States. The exhibition is built around a series of short EJI videos in which such men and women as Anthony Ray Hinton, Thomas Miles Sr., James Johnson, Mamie Lang Kirkland, Dee Dee Johnson, and Vanessa Croft share their personal stories about how members of their families were lynched, visiting graveyards and the trees from which the innocent victims were hanged as well as making comparisons between lynching and black and brown men who are or were on Death Row despite substantial evidence against their guilt. The oral histories are vividly photographed by Melissa Bunni Elian, Kris Graves, Raymond Thompson, Andre Wagner, Bee Walker, and Rog Walker and are utterly haunting, ending with explanatory notes from EJI founder and executive director Bryan Stevenson. (To further the discussion, EJI will be opening a national monument in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2018 called the Memorial to Peace and Justice.) The exhibition also features related works from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, including Elizabeth Catlett’s “I Have Special Reservations,” Jacob Lawrence’s “Harlem Street Scene,” Kara Walker’s “Burning African Village Play Set with Big Hour and Lynching,” Rashid Johnson’s “Thurgood in the House of Chaos,” Theaster Gates’s “In Case of Race Riot II,” Jack Whitten’s “Black Monolith II (For Ralph Ellison),” and Titus Kaphar’s “The Jerome Project (My Loss),” which explore slavery, segregation, the civil rights movement, and modern-day racism. A kind of companion piece to such films as Ava DuVernay’s 13th and such books as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, the exhibit is a powerful, gut-wrenching experience that visitors walk through in near-silence — when I went, the only talking was between a white father and his young son, who whispered that he wanted to know what various words and images meant, and the dad told him, thoughtfully and directly. It was a microcosm of what should be happening more today, expanding the conversation about America’s Original Sin.

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY: PHONES

Christian Marclay’s three-part “Phones” exhibition reminds visitors of old times (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Paula Cooper Gallery
534 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through October 7, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-255-1105
www.paulacoopergallery.com

If you didn’t know any better, you might think that Christian Marclay’s “Phones” exhibition at Paula Cooper is a statement about the demise of the old-fashioned corded landline telephone in the face of the mobile phone revolution. But you’re likely to be surprised that the three works all date back to the 1990s, a generation before the latest technology took over. The sixty-two-year-old California-born Swiss and American artist has been exploring the evolving nature of sound and image throughout his career, as highlighted by his multidisciplinary “Festival” show at the Whitney in 2010. The three-part exhibit at Paula Cooper is centered by 1990’s “Boneyard,” a large room filled with 750 white hydrostone casts of handheld telephone receivers, together resembling a graveyard of scattered bones. But here it is the disconnected phone parts that are dead, victims of time. Marclay displays how old phones were used in the seven-minute 1995 video Telephones, consisting of scenes from movies in which phones ring, characters pick them up and say hello, listen to the person on the other end, engage in brief conversations, then say goodbye and hang up, forming mysterious narratives; Marclay would expand the idea to his international favorite The Clock, a captivating twenty-four-hour film of timepieces in movies that played to packed houses at Paula Cooper, MoMA, and Lincoln Center a few years ago. And in another room is “Extended Phone II,” a winding length of dark plastic tubing, evoking a garden hose, that is an outdated, overly thick phone cord. The long separation between base and handset represents the physical distance between callers, which in the modern age is no more because of such apps as FaceTime and Skype. If you have kids, be sure to bring them, as “Phones” is like a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, a trio of renderings of extinct existence, of what once was and will never be again.

112th: DAVID GOODWIN ON LEFT BANK OF THE HUDSON

david goodwin left bank of the hudson

Who: David J. Goodwin
What: Book talk and signing with David J. Goodwin, author of Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street (Fordham University Press, October 2017, $24.95)
Where: Book Culture, 536 West 112th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave., 212-865-1588
When: Tuesday, October 3, free, 7:00
Why: In his blog, Another Town on the Hudson: Jersey City and Its Culture, Fordham University School of Law librarian David J. Goodwin describes himself as “a frustrated fiction writer, aspiring historian, and budding urban homesteader.” A past commissioner and chairman of the Jersey City Historic Preservation Commission and currently a board member of the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy, Goodwin has just written Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artist of 111 1st Street, a detailed examination of an artist colony that took shape at an old tobacco warehouse in Jersey City in the late 1980s when a group of New York City painters, sculptors, photographers, writers, and filmmakers headed across the river in search of affordable studio space. Goodwin will be at Book Culture in Harlem on October 3 at 7:00 to discuss and sign copies of the book, which includes a foreword by D. W. Gibson, author of The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the 21st Century. At the talk, Goodwin will delve into the history of 111 First St., gentrification, geographic and architectural options for artists, interaction with government officials, and more. And you don’t even have to cross the Hudson to get there.

NYFF55: FACES PLACES

JR and Agnès Varda have a blast in the masterful Faces and Places

JR and Agnès Varda have a blast with people and animals in the masterful Faces and Places

FACES PLACES (VISAGES VILLAGES) (Agnès Varda & JR, 2017)
New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center
Sunday, October 1, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 12:30
Monday, October 2, Francesca Beale Theater, $25, 8:30
Festival runs September 28 – October 14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org
cohenmediagroup.tumblr.com

“We’ll have fun making a film,” legendary eighty-eight-year-old Belgian-born French auteur Agnès Varda tells thirty-three-year-old French photographer and street artist JR in Faces Places (Visages Villages), a masterful road movie that may very well be the most fun film you’ll see all year. The unlikely pair first met when Varda, who has made such classics as Cléo from 5 to 7, Vagabond, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Gleaners and I, accepted an invitation from JR, whose practice involves wheat-pasting giant black-and-white photos of men, women, and children on architectural structures, to visit his Paris studio. (JR brought his “Inside Out” art project to Times Square in 2013.) When Varda saw JR’s blow-up of a 1960 self-portrait Varda shot of herself standing in front of a Bellini painting in Venice, the two instantly hit it off and decided to make a film together, heading out in JR’s small photo-booth truck to team up with people in small towns throughout France, including coal miners, dockworkers, farmers, a church-bell ringer, and factory workers. The reactions of the villagers — shrewd, curious, flattered — to JR’s enormous wheat-pasted blow-ups of themselves on their neighborhood walls, barns, abandoned housing, containers, water towers, and other locations are fascinating. “JR is fulfilling my greatest desire. To meet new faces and photograph them, so they don’t fall down the holes of my memory,” Varda, who edited the film with Maxime Pozzi-Garcia, says. Varda and JR make a formidable duo, finding a childlike innocence in their collaboration that is simply captivating to watch.

Cinematic collaboration between Agnès Varda and JR results in stunning visions of humanity

Varda continually tries to get JR to remove his ever-present dark glasses, remembering how her friend and colleague Jean-Luc Godard once let her take pictures of him without glasses, but JR prefers to maintain his mystery, a man who photographs tens of thousands of people’s faces around the world while never fully showing his own. Varda, who relies on the “power of imagination,” even sets up an afternoon with Godard at his home in Switzerland, preparing by having JR roll her furiously through the same Louvre galleries the protagonists run through in Godard’s Band of Outsiders, but of course nothing with Godard ever goes quite as planned. “Chance has always been my best asset,” Varda proclaims in the film, and it is chance, and the willingness to enthusiastically embrace every moment of life, that helps give Faces Places its immeasurable charm. The film, which features a playful score by Matthieu Chedid (‑M-) and was executive produced by Varda’s daughter, Rosalie Varda-Demy, subtly tackles socioeconomic issues but is primarily a marvelous celebration of genuine humanity. Faces Places is screening at the New York Film Festival on October 1 at Alice Tully Hall and October 2 at the Francesca Beale Theater, with both shows followed by a Q&A with Varda and JR.

HÉLIO OITICICA: TO ORGANIZE DELIRIUM

Whitney retrospective offers a journey into Hélio Oiticica’s colorful “Éden” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Through October 1, $18-$25
212-570-3600
whitney.org

In 1971, Brazilian artist and activist Hélio Oiticica proposed “Subterranean Tropicália Projects,” a participatory public artwork for Central Park. While it never was realized, the extensive Whitney retrospective “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium” is a kind of indoor interactive park, offering visitors entry into a communal, collaborative space in New York City. The exhibition, which continues through October 1, comprises painting, sculpture, film, writings, installation, and paraphernalia documenting Oiticica’s too-brief career, which included a seven-year period in the Lower East Side in Manhattan that initially fueled his artistic desires but ultimately left him frustrated and disappointed. “I feel as if I’m in prison in this infernal island,” he wrote to Lygia Clark regarding immigration problems related to his homosexuality. A Neo-Concretist who was also a member of Grupo Frente, he died in Brazil in 1980 from a massive stroke at the age of forty-two. However, “To Organize Delirium” is filled with life, and the more you put into the show, the more you can understand Oiticica’s methods — while having a great time. You can take your shoes off and walk barefoot through water, sand, and gravel in “PN27 Penetrable, Rijanviera” and greet parrots, watch an infomercial, and read poems by Roberta Camila Salgado in “Tropicália,” Oiticica’s groundbreaking 1967 installation that gave its name to the Brazilian musical, artistic, and sociopolitical movement that emerged from South America in the 1960s. You can wave a flag, take a rest on an enclosed mattress, and walk through sand, dry leaves, water, foam flakes, crushed bricks, and straw in “Éden,” while in another room you can put on any of numerous politically tinged Parangolé capes and dance with dissidents in a digital slideshow.

Hélio Oiticica. Installation view. CC5 Hendrix-War,1973.Thirty-three 35mm color slides transferred to digital slideshow, sound, and hammocks. Site Specific Collections of César and Claudio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, N.Y. Photograph by Oto Gillen

Hélio Oiticica, installation view, “CC5 Hendrix-War,” thirty-three 35mm color slides transferred to digital slideshow, sound, and hammocks, 1973 (Site Specific Collections of César and Claudio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, N.Y. Photograph by Oto Gillen)

You can play a game of pool as part of “Appropriation — Snooker Room, after Van Gogh’s ‘Night Café.’” For “Block Experiments in Cosmococa, Program in Progress: CC1 Trashiscapes,” you are encouraged to sit on a mattress or pillow in a large room and file your nails while watching slides and listening to music, combining creativity and leisure, what Oiticica called “creleisure,” which references the artist’s use of cocaine. You can gently swing in a hammock and groove to Jimi as part of “CC5 Hendrix — War,” a collaboration with Neville D’Almeida. Unfortunately, you no longer can interact with such architectural works as “NC1 Small Nucleus 1” and “PN1 Penetrable” because they are too fragile, but you can marvel at how they evoke the geometric patterns Oiticica used in his painting series “Metaesquema” and his plywood “Spatial Reliefs.” There are also unedited films of the Gay Pride Parade, the Fillmore East, the South Bronx, drag performer Mario Montez, and artist Lee Jaffe playing on small monitors. It’s a revelatory show about an important, utterly original twentieth-century artist who immersed his oeuvre in social and political concerns while inviting everyone into a playful world where art is everywhere. To get in the mood for the exhibition, the Whitney has a Tropicália playlist, with music by João Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Os Mutantes, the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and others that you can listen to here.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM FIRST SATURDAY: BEYOND BORDERS

Robert Longo, “Untitled (Dividing Time),” nylon and polyester poplin, hand appliqué, 2017 (courtesy of Creative Time’s “Pledges of Allegiance”)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, October 7, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum’s monthly free First Saturday program returns after its annual September Labor Day weekend break with “Beyond Borders,” an exploration of the immigrant crisis. There will be live performances by Locos por Juana, Batalá New York, and DJ Geko Jones with La Chiquita Brujita and DJ Big Nito; poetry with Cave Canem’s Darrel Alejandro Holnes and Jessica Lanay Moore; an immersive screening of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mind-bending The Holy Mountain with live performances; a salsa party with lessons by Balmir Latin Dance Company; a hands-on workshop in which participants can make clay vessels; pop-up gallery talks with teen apprentices focusing on works that honor Latinx history; a curator tour of “Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo” led by Sara Softness; and a community talk with Movimiento Cosecha about immigrant rights. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Arts of Korea,” “The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” and more.