this week in art

BROOKLYN MUSEUM FIRST SATURDAY: NEW YEAR, NEW FUTURES

Jason Benjamin’s SUITED will be shown at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday night, followed by the discussion “Queer Style as Resistance in Post-Trump Activism”

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

A lot of Americans were glad to bid good riddance to 2016, although there’s plenty of fear for what can happen in 2017. The Brooklyn Museum explores some of those very legitimate concerns in its free First Saturday program on January 7. There will be live performances by Tank and the Bangas, Discwoman (DJs BEARCAT and SHYBOI) and Cakes Da Killa; a Brooklyn Dance Festival workshop; a book club reading, discussion, and signing with Daniel José Older for his latest Bone Street Rumba novel, Battle Hill Bolero; a hands-on art workshop in which participants can make masks inspired by “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt”; a screening of Jason Benjamin’s Suited, followed by a “Queer Style as Resistance in Post-Trump Activism” talkback with Benjamin, dapperQ, Anita Dolce Vita, Daniel Friedman, Debbie-Jean Lemonte, and Rae Tutera; a curator tour of “A Woman’s Afterlife” with Edward Bleiberg; pop-up gallery talks on “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty”; a community resource fair with Active Citizen Project/Project EATS, Caribbean Leadership Empowerment Foundation, Historic Districts Council, Spaceworks, Carroll Gardens Association, and Pioneer Works; Kids Corner storytelling (“Virtuous Journeys”) with Rezz and Mando; and pop-up publishing with DIY feminist publishers Pilot Press, led by Jen Kennedy and Liz Linden. In addition, you can check out such exhibits as “Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller,” “Beverly Buchanan — Ruins and Rituals,” “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas,” “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty,” and “Infinite Blue”; admission to “Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History, 1843 to the Present,” which closes January 8, requires a discounted admission fee of $10.

NO LIMITS: ZAO WOU-KI

Zao Wou-Ki, Hommage à Chu Yun—05.05.55 (Homage to Chu Yun—05.05.55), oil on canvas, 1955 (private collection, Switzerland; photo by )

Zao Wou-Ki, “Homage to Chu Yun — 05.05.55,” oil on canvas, 1955 (private collection, Switzerland; photo by Dennis Bouchard)

Asia Society
725 Park Ave. at 70th St.
Daily through January 8, $7-$12 (free Friday nights from 6:00 to 9:00)
212-288-6400
asiasociety.org

“I like people to be able to stroll in my works, as I do when creating them,” Chinese-French painter Zao Wou-Ki said in 1967. Visitors can continue strolling in Zao’s works at Asia Society’s “No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki” exhibition through January 8, his first museum retrospective in the United States. The show consists of more than four dozen works, from oil paintings and ink drawings to watercolors and etchings. The extremely popular artist — his 1958 painting “Abstraction” sold at auction in December 2013 for nearly $15 million — pushed physical, geographic, psychological, and artistic boundaries through his long career, combining historical and contemporary methods and themes throughout his oeuvre. The Asia Society show is divided into three sections: “Calligraphy Is the Starting Point,” “To Learn Is to Create,” and “A Place to Wander,” each offering its own delights. Postwar abstraction master Zao, who died in 2013 at the age of ninety-three, displayed a unique color sense, contributing to a sense of mysterious welcome in his works. Paintings such as “Homage to Chu Yun — 05.05.55,” “Red Pavilion,” “Chestnut,” and “Water Music” look alive on the canvas, as if tantalizingly drifting through the viewer’s mind. Zao’s influences are often apparent, from Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Paul Cézanne to Marc Chagall, Jean Dubuffet, and Sam Francis, some of whom he got to know during his travels. Born in Beijing, he left Shanghai for Paris in 1948 to immerse himself in art. “His intended two-year adventure turned into a lifetime abroad and culminated in an artistic reputation that defies easy categorization,” cocurators Dr. Ankeney Weitz and Dr. Melissa Walt write in their catalog introduction. “Painter, printmaker, master of brush and ink, Zao was a pioneer who fused disparate influences and techniques and moved easily between the worlds in which he lived, learned, and created.” (The show is also cocurated by Edith K. Jetté and Michelle Yun.) Not everything is so captivating; his later works tend to be more inconsistent, the color schemes not as thrilling. His heyday was clearly from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, a creative epiphany. “It’s that it is not easy to break free,” Zao, the Picasso of China, said in 1964. “Everybody is bound by a tradition — I, by two. To make a good painting, you have to understand.” Thanks to this exhibit, we now do.

YANIRA CASTRO | A CANARY TORSI: PERFORMANCE | PORTRAIT

a canary torsi’s responsive multimedia installation “Performance Portrait” offers visitors a chance to respond to dancers (photo by Julie Wyman)

PERFORMANCE | PORTRAIT @ APAP
The Glass House, the Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen St.
January 5-15, free, 4:30 – 8:30
theinvisibledog.org
acanarytorsi.org

After being exhibited as part of the “Wonderland” group show at the Invisible Dog Art Center, a canary torsi’s latest collaborative project, Performance | Portrait, moves just down the street to the IDAC’s Glass House in conjunction with APAP | NYC, the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference, which features special performances throughout New York City every January. Puerto Rico–born Yanira Castro founded a canary torsi (an anagram of her name) in 2009, specializing in site-adaptive interactive works that blur the boundaries between audience and performer. In Paradis, the audience followed the dancers around the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, occasionally interacting with one another. In Court/Garden, Castro created a space inspired by the court of Louis XIV, exploring image, assembly, presentation, and consumption.

Many of those elements are at the center of Performance | Portrait, which runs at the Glass House from January 5 to 15. The responsive multimedia work, made in conjunction with installation artist Kathy Couch, interaction designer Stephan Moore, and filmmaker Julie Wyman, consists of a projector that is activated once a person steps on a small box in between a screen and a curtain. The projector beams an image of four dancers, one at a time (Anna Azrieli, Leslie Cuyjet, Peter Schmitz, David Thomson), who were previously filmed by Wyman at a different location but in front of the same curtain where the viewer now stands. Each dancer gazes directly into the camera, essentially right into the viewer’s eyes; just as the viewer is waiting for the dancer to do something entertaining, it appears that the often uncomfortable dancers (each was filmed for four hours) are waiting for the viewer to do something entertaining as well. Castro is calling into question the gaze, audience expectation, the interplay before performer and crowd, and performer expectation, the dancers turning the tables on the viewer, who is likely to get antsy rather quickly unless he or she can just settle in and go head-to-head with the dancer for a while. It feels like a different take on the staring contests Marina Abramović held with MoMA visitors in “The Artist Is Present.” As the viewer stands there, the performers change over the course of time, but once the viewer steps off the box, the dancer fades into nothingness, for without an audience, can there be a performance?

DAVID SHRIGLEY: MEMORIAL

David Shrigley’s “Memorial” is a monument to memory, shopping lists, and monuments themselves (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Scholars’ Gate, Doris C. Freedman Plaza
Central Park entrance, 60th St. & Fifth Ave.
Through February 12, free
www.publicartfund.org

In 2008, British artist David Shrigley made “Gravestone,” a granite slab, shaped like a gravestone, on which he carved the words “Bread / Milk / Cornflakes / Baked Beans / Tomatoes / Aspirin / Biscuits” in gold, a memorial to the shopping list. That year he also created “Gate,” a rectangle with geometric shapes that warned passersby, “Do not linger at the gate.” He has now combined the two in “Memorial,” a seventeen-foot-tall granite shopping list that stands at the Scholars’ Gate entrance to Central Park, in Doris C. Freedman Plaza. Inspired by the mysterious 1980 Georgia Guidestones, the forty-eight-year-old painter, sculptor, photographer, illustrator, cartoonist, spoken-word artist, and self-described list lover includes twenty-five items on “Memorial,” from Crackers, Cheese, Peanut Butter, and Ketchup to Tampons, Shower Gel, Cleaning Stuff, and Nutella. There is no text on the back. The Public Art Fund project memorializes the death of the handwritten shopping list in the digital age while also standing as a public monument to memory. In a 2016 text-based drawing, Shrigley wrote, “I am a signwriter / I write signs / I do not decide what the signs say / My job is just to write the signs and nothing more.” That is, of course, an absurdist take on the role of the artist, emblematic of the Turner Prize nominee’s playfully strange oeuvre that incorporates elements of the mundane and the everyday, such as “The Artist,” a robotic head with pens coming out of its nose, drawing on a sheet of paper; “Hanging Sign,” a hanging sign on which is written “Hanging Sign”; the bronze sculpture “Lady Doing a Poop,” a “Thinker”-like statue of, well, a woman going number two; and “How Are You Feeling?,” a 2012 High Line billboard consisting of a conversation in word bubbles. If nothing else, “Memorial” reminded me that I needed to do a little shopping myself; I also suddenly wanted a nutella waffle from the nearby Wafels & Dinges cart.

AGNES MARTIN

Agnes Martin’s work feels right at home in major retrospective at the Guggenheim (photo by David Heald, courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through January 11, $18 – $25 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday, 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

“To be an artist,” Agnes Martin once explained, “you look, you perceive, you recognize what is going through your mind, and it is not ideas. Everything you feel, and everything you see — your whole life goes through your mind, you know. I have to recognize it and go with it.” The same can be said for visitors who attend the absolutely lovely, simply titled retrospective “Agnes Martin,” continuing at the Guggenheim through January 11. As you spiral your way up the chronological exhibit, you are not only connecting with Martin’s life but your own as well, giving you a newfound appreciation of your very existence. Born in March 1912 in Saskatchewan, Canada, Martin lived in New York City and New Mexico during her most productive years, working daily up to her death in 2004 at the age of ninety-two. A former teacher (and onetime driver for John Huston), she never married and never had children; she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, living alone her entire adult life. Her paintings defy categorization, which was fine with her; her canvases incorporated Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism but were much more than that. “I would like [my pictures] to represent beauty, innocence, and happiness,” she proclaimed. “I would like them all to represent that. Exaltation.” And it is indeed exalting walking through the exhibition, which includes more than one hundred works that reveal Martin’s expert control of line, geometric form, grids, and color, delivered in spare, understated style.

Agnes Martin, “Friendship,” incised gold leaf and gesso on canvas, 1963 (© 2015 Agnes Martin /Artists Rights Society, New York)

The paintings feel at home in the Guggenheim bays, complemented by the white walls, lighting fixtures, and horizontal vents, which sometimes appear to have been created just for this show, earning bonus kudos to senior curator Tracey Bashkoff and guest curator Tiffany Bell. The first gallery actually begins with the midcareer suite “The Islands,” a group of nearly identical monochromatic paintings that set the tone for the rest of the show. “You see one canvas after another, and they’re similar until you look at them up close and you see how the artist’s hand has moved through the canvas and the marks that she has made,” notes Bashkoff, referring to Martin’s general oeuvre. “It’s by slowing down and looking at Martin’s canvases individually, taking in all of the details — it’s at those moments that you get close to this thoughtfulness and deliberateness.” Other paintings that reward extra attention are “This Rain,” two rectangles reminiscent of Mark Rothko; the kinetic sculpture “The Wave”; “White Flower,” a white grid on a dark canvas that has ghostly images floating in the background; “Little Sister,” composed of rows of dots; “Friendship,” a mesmerizing canvas of sparkling gold; “Happy Holiday,” boasting alternate stripes of white and peach pastel; “Heather,” consisting of rare vertical rectangles; and “Homage to Life,” from 2003, a floating black trapezoid in the center of a gray ground.

Agnes Martin show at the Guggenheim features beautiful works filled with glorious line, color, and form (photo by David Heald, courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

“I believe in living above the line,” Martin said. “Above the line is happiness and love, you know. Below the line is all sadness and destruction and unhappiness. And I don’t go down below the line for anything.” Those are words to live by, from an artist who approached the world in a unique way, beautifully memorialized in one of the best shows of the year. On January 10 at 6:30 ($15), Quiet: A Poetry Reading for Agnes Martin will feature recitations by poets Ari Banias, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Souvankham Thammavongsa, a reception, and an exhibition viewing, an evening curated by artist Jen Bervin. Martin fans should also make their way to Dia:Beacon, where several rooms of her work are on long-term display.

PIPILOTTI RIST: PIXEL FOREST

Immersive “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest” is most popular exhibition in history of New Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Tuesday through Sunday through January 15/22 (closed January 1-2), $12-$18
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

There’s a very good reason why “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest” has become the most popular exhibit in the history of the New Museum: It’s a splendidly curated, warm and embracing show that invites viewers into a magical world in which nature and humanity are one. The Swiss artist has been trapped under the floor of MoMA PS1’s lobby for decades, her tiny video calling up to passersby from the floorboards in “Selfless in the Bath of Lava,” and she mesmerized MoMA visitors with the Marron Atrium immersive multimedia work “Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)” in 2008, but her first comprehensive U.S. survey is so much bigger, taking up three floors of the downtown institution, each one offering its own charms. Rist doesn’t just design installations; she welcomes you into delightful environments where you can relax, kick off your shoes, and get lost in a display of pure beauty. “In the generous, lush, expansive, and fecund universe created by Pipilotti Rist, we are all but small, organic specks in a massive, corporeal cosmos — ever-connected, always reproducing, endlessly social and intriguing as we move through space and time, colliding with other molecular debris,” Juliana Engberg writes in her catalog essay “A Bee Flew in the Window. . . .”

Pipilotti Rist’s “4th Floor to Mildness” offers a relaxing multimedia journey at the New Museum (photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio)

Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Margot Norton, and Helga Christoffersen, “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest” begins with “Open My Glade (Flatten),” a single-channel video of dreamy colors and Rist pressing up against the New Museum’s front window, as if in a kind of fishbowl that cannot contain her. In the lobby, “Nichts (Nothing)” is a mechanical contraption that emits large soap bubbles filled with smoke, floating through the air until popping on the floor, what Rist calls “peace bombs.” On the second floor, a long, narrow corridor contains several of Rist’s early single-channel videos, set up so only one person can watch each one at a time, as if a personal peepshow, comprising cutting-edge experimental works that play with technology while redefining female identity, including “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much,” “(Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes,” and “You Called Me Jacky,” while “Sexy Sad I” follows a nude man in the woods and “When My Mother’s Brother Was Born It Smelled Like Wild Pear Blossoms in Front of the Brown-burnt Sill” shows a live birth. Those private viewings serve as an introduction to the larger works experienced by groups. In the two-channel “Ever Is Over All,” on the left side a woman marches down a street, gleefully smashing in car windows with a flower stick, being followed by a female police officer, while on the right the camera scans a field of the same flowers. (Yes, Beyoncé took a page from Rist in her “Lemonade” video.) The two-channel cater-corner “Sip My Ocean” is a kaleidoscopic underwater journey set to Rist and Anders Guggisberg singing Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” Nearby, “The Patience” can be seen on a boulder. “Administrating Eternity” forms pathways of moving mirrors and curtains. And in “Suburb Brain,” a miniature model of a suburban home, with life going on inside, sits in front of a two-channel installation, one side projected onto a wall of whitewashed everyday objects.

Pipilotti Rist’s “Open My Glade (Flatten)” can be seen at the New Museum and in Times Square (photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio)

On the third floor, visitors make their way through “Pixel Forest,” three thousand hanging LED lights that change color with the music and images surrounding them, each light representing one pixel, to get to “Worry Will Vanish Horizon,” where viewers relax on cushiony duvets while watching a two-channel video of natural surroundings, hands, eyes, and more. “Mercy Garden” also offers respite, while “Massachusetts Chandelier” is a light covered in underpants. As you venture to the fourth floor, be sure not to step on another iteration of “Selfless in the Bath of Lava,” which resides on the floor of the landing, now showing Rist trapped in a cell phone. The fourth floor consists of “Your Space Time Capsule,” a room in a wooden transport crate, and “4th Floor to Mildness,” a large area that offers visitors single and double beds where they get comfortable while watching two videos projected onto amorphous screens on the ceiling as mirrors reflect the light onto the viewer, resulting in a dreamlike trip into mysterious worlds. It’s a rapturous show that confirms Rist’s description of her art as the “glorification of the wonder of evolution,” as she takes visitors on a psychedelic journey into the body and the mind, into life above and below the sea, merging the natural world and technology, sound and image, into private and shared experiences that are especially hypnotic in these dark times. On January 7 at 10:00 am, the museum will host the workshop “First Saturdays for Families: Crafting Eternity”; on January 12 at 3:30, curator and writer Laura McLean-Ferris will give an Outside the Box gallery talk; and on January 19 at 7:00, there will be a conversation between Rist and New Museum artistic director Gioni. The full exhibition continues through January 15, with the second and third floors open until January 22; in addition, Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment will feature a new version of “Open My Glade (Flatten)” every night in January at 11:57 across multiple billboards.

AI WEIWEI — 2016: ROOTS AND BRANCHES / LAUNDROMAT

A tree grows in Chelsea at the Lisson Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

2016: ROOTS AND BRANCHES
Lisson Gallery
504 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Mary Boone Gallery
541 West 24th St., 745 Fifth Ave. between 57th & 58th Sts.
AI WEIWEI: LAUNDROMAT
Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster St.
Through December 23, free
aiweiwei.com

This past October, Chinese dissident artist and activist Ai Weiwei swept into New York City, giving a talk at the Brooklyn Museum and opening four gallery exhibitions. He had been banned from international travel for four years since his March 2011 arrest and disappearance, and didn’t receive his passport back until July 2015. So it should not be surprising that the works deal with issues of home and planting roots, particularly in relation to the current refugee crisis around the world. At Lisson Gallery, one of three parts of “Ai Weiwei 2016: Roots and Branches” features giant, rusting cast-iron tree trunks and roots, creating a kind of dying forest, surrounded by black-and-white wallpaper depicting friezes of armed soldiers, explicitly referencing warriors on Ancient Greek black-figure vases; the same archaizing style is applied to modern military vehicles hovering around tent cities and rounding up men, women, and children; storms raging above dangerously overcrowded boats; people being carried away on stretchers; and signs on barbed-wire fences proclaiming, “No One Is Illegal,” “Open the Border,” and “#SafePassage.”

Ai Weiwei’s “Tree” rises up at Mary Boone in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

At Mary Boone in Chelsea, Ai has planted “Tree,” a twenty-five-foot-high twisting tree composed of parts of dead trees bolted together to form something new, a totem that evokes how every person is made of DNA from different cultures and traditions (as well as, of course, much of the same DNA). It’s an imposing structure standing in front of gold-and-white wallpaper showing elegant, circular patterns of surveillance cameras. Also on view are a Warhol-like self-portrait and a triptych of Ai’s famous “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” both made using LEGO pieces like pixels, in addition to “Treasure Box,” a large, wooden box resembling a Chinese puzzle.

Ai Weiwei’s “Spouts Installation” gives the finger to China’s past (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

At Mary Boone’s Midtown location, “Spouts Installation” consists of forty thousand ceramic spouts broken off from teapots dating from the Song to Qing dynasties, fracturing China’s past. Kaleidoscopic gray-and-white wallpaper features arms giving the finger, referencing Ai’s “Fuck Off” series, in which he takes photographs of himself flipping the bird in front of historical landmarks around the globe. The juxtaposition also makes the spouts, arranged in a circle around a central pole that is like a tree, look like a shadowy graveyard of broken middle fingers that have been silenced while also recalling Ai’s “Sunflower Seeds” installations at the Tate and Mary Boone in Chelsea. In the back room are the wooden box “Garbage Container,” the porcelain doormat “Blossom,” a glass-encased “Set of Spouts,” and the porcelain “Free Speech Puzzle.”

Ai Weiwei explores the refugee crisis in “Laundromat” at Deitch Projects (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Finally, at Deitch Projects in Soho, “Ai Weiwei: Laundromat” is a large room filled with racks of clothing, rows of shoes, stills from new films lining the walls, social media posts on the floor, a documentary video, and Allen Ginsberg’s poem “September on Jessore Road.” (“Millions of fathers in rain / Millions of mothers in pain / Millions of brothers in woe / Millions of sisters nowhere to go.” Inspired by the conditions at the Idomeni refugee camp on the Greek-FYROM border, the Shariya refugee camp in Iraq, and the Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, Ai has sought to give voice back to these refugees, who are suffering through war and extreme poverty; there is a deeply personal aspect to the work, as Ai’s family was sent to a labor camp when he was a child because his father was a poet and political dissident. The clothing and shoes are the real items worn by Syrian refugees at Idomeni — it’s particularly haunting seeing the racks of children’s clothing and rows of kids’ shoes — now properly cleaned instead of caked with mud and filth, each one individually tagged, as if offering each man, woman, and child a clean, new start, with renewed dignity.