this week in art

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.

ANDREAS GURSKY: NOT ABSTRACT II / EDWARD BURTYNSKY: ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS

Andreas Gursky Amazon, 2016 C-print 81 1/2 × 160 1/4 × 2 7/16 inches, framed (207 × 407 × 6.2 cm) © Andreas Gursky/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Andreas Gursky, “Amazon,” C-print, 2016 (© Andreas Gursky/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

Gagosian Gallery
522 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through Friday, December 23, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-741-1717
www.gagosian.com

A pair of stirring, unrelated photography exhibits in Chelsea close this week, both featuring awe-inspiring large-scale prints that turn manufactured landscapes into gargantuan, thought-provoking spectacle. “My photographs are ‘not abstract.’ Ultimately they are always identifiable. Photography in general simply cannot disengage from the object,” German artist Andreas Gursky says about his latest show, “Not Abstract II,” an extension of his recent survey exhibition “nicht abstract” at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. Continuing at Gagosian’s vast Twenty-First St. space through December 23, the exhibit consists of twenty-one C-prints and inkjet prints accompanied by a specially commissioned subtle soundscape designed by Canadian electronica DJ Richie Hawtin. The majority of the photographs, some stretching more than eleven feet high and more than sixteen feet wide, were taken between 2008 and 2016, highlighted by a trio of recent untitled vertical works that look like Agnes Martin melded with Mark Rothko, C-prints with horizontal lines of bold colors that are impossible to identify as aerial views of tulip fields without additional information. In “Review,” the backs of the heads of current and former German chancellors Gerhard Schröder, Helmut Schmidt, Angela Merkel, and Helmut Kohl are in the foreground, Barnett Newman’s “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” in front of them. “Amazon” takes visitors inside a vast warehouse of endless packages, the scope of the company’s reach instantly evident and overwhelming, while another exploration of consumerism, “Mediamarkt,” gets its own room. “Les Meés” depicts a rolling landscape covered in rows of solar panels. Meanwhile, the shining gold room in “Qatar” practically glows throughout the gallery. Two examples from Gursky’s superhero series, one depicting Batman against a coming ship, the other Spider-Man dwarfed by a building, are too gimmicky alongside these other breathtaking works that, essentially, take humans but not humanity out of the picture.

Rice Terraces #5 Western Yunnan Province, CH, 2008 Chromogenic Color Print

Edward Burtynsky, “Rice Terraces #5, Western Yunnan Province, CH,” chromogenic color print, 2008 (photo courtesy Bryce_Wolkowitz_Gallery_)

Bryce_Wolkowitz_Gallery_
505 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through Friday, December 23, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-243-8830
brycewolkowitz.com

The abstract, or “not abstract,” nature of reality and humankind’s intervention is also on view a few blocks west at Bryce_Wolkowitz_, where Canadian native Edward Burtynsky’s mini-retrospective, “Essential Elements,” also runs through December 23. The show comprises nineteen chromogenic color prints ranging from 1981’s “Grasses, Bruce Peninsula, Ontario” to a pair of Salt Pan photos taken earlier this year in Gujarat, India. Like Gursky, Burtynsky takes large-scale photographs of vast interiors and exteriors, with Burtynsky concentrating more on the impact technology and resource extraction has had on the environment, as evidenced in such series as “Water,” “Oil,” “Pivot Irrigation,” and “Dryland Farming.” In “Essential Elements,” the branching “Colorado River Delta #12” resembles the L.A. traffic patterns in “Highway #2, Intersection 105 & 110.” “Rice Terraces #5” looks like shimmering mirrored waves. “Oil Refineries #8” is brethren to Gursky’s later “Storage.” It’s a real treat seeing “Third Floor Gallery, Art Gallery of Alberta,” a shadowy, deep photo that has never been shown before in the United States. A photograph of Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” is too obvious, and the kaleidoscopic 1999 “Borromini #21, Vault, San Ivo della Sapienze, Rome,” feels too gimmicky in an otherwise small but solid round-up.

MANIFESTO

Cate Blanchett plays multiple characters in Julian Rosefeldt’s MANIFESTO

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Daily through January 8, $20
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

As visitors go from screen to screen in Julian Rosefeldt’s thirteen-channel installation, Manifesto, at the Park Ave. Armory, they’re bombarded with declarations from cultural missives by artists and philosophers dating back more than 150 years. Various words and phrases stick out, hanging in the air like bees buzzing around flowers: “originality,” “conflict,” “infinite and shapeless variation,” “decay,” “revolution,” “recklessness,” “absolute reality,” “glorious isolation,” “obsession,” freedom,” “everlasting change,” “the unconsciousness of humanity.”

I am against action; I am for continuous contradiction: for affirmation, too. I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense. I am writing a manifesto because I have nothing to say.

Art requires truth, not sincerity.

Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong.

The words are all spoken by Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett (Notes on a Scandal, Blue Jasmine), who plays thirteen characters in twelve of the films, which each runs ten and a half minutes and are looped concurrently. She does not appear in the shorter prologue but does provide the narration. Among the characters she portrays are a homeless man, a grade school teacher, a factory worker, a punk rocker, a scientist, a news anchor, a choreographer, and a puppeteer.

Our art is the art of a revolutionary period, simultaneously the reaction of a world going under and the herald of a new era.

Originality is nonexistent.

Purge the world of intellectual, professional, and commercialized culture!

Rosefeldt (Trilogy of Failure, Deep Gold, The Ship of Fools), a photographer and filmmaker who was born in Munich and lives and works in Berlin, has an MA in architecture, so location plays a key role in the films, many of which take place in spectacular surroundings, interiors and exteriors, that would make Andreas Gursky drool, including an abandoned Olympic village, the Klingenberg CHP Plant, the Palasseum housing project, a former fertilizer factory, the ZDF Hauptstadtstudio, and the Humboldt Universität Department of Engineering Acoustics (in which a 2001-like monolith floats in the air). Each film begins and ends with Christoph Krauss’s camera lingering on the often jaw-dropping visuals.

We must create. That’s the sign of our times.

Fluxus is a pain in art’s ass.

Existence is elsewhere.

Julian Rosefeldt, Manifesto, 2015 © Julian Rosefeldt and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

The statements are delivered in unique and inventive ways, with Blanchett, looking vastly different in each scene courtesy of Bina Daigeler’s costumes, Morag Ross’s makeup, and Massimo Gattabrusi’s hairstyling, playing a mourner giving a eulogy, a mother saying grace, a teacher presenting a lesson, a choreographer yelling at her troupe, a financial analyst spouting data, a crane operator incinerating garbage, and a CEO offering a new concept at a private board meeting in a seaside villa.

I am for art that is put on and taken off, like pants; which develops holes, like socks; which is eaten, like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt, like a piece of shit.

No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic.

Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden.

Each section is dedicated to a separate artistic theory, discussing Pop Art, Conceptual Art / Minimalism, Fluxus, Surrealism / Spatialism, Dadaism, Suprematism / Constructivism, Stridentism / Creationism, Abstract Expressionism, Architecture, Futurism, Situationism, and Film. Heard today in this context, the statements range from the very funny to the extremely dry and boring, from the downright elitist to the realistic and relevant, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Farewell to absurd choices.

Nothing is original.

In this period of change, the role of the artist can only be that of the revolutionary: it is his duty to destroy the last remnants of an empty, irksome aesthetic, arousing the creative instincts still slumbering unconscious in the human mind.

Close-ups of Cate Blanchett appear simultaneously in thirteen-screen installation at Park Ave. Armory (photo by James Ewing)

The quotations come from a wide variety of sources, from little-known essays to major influential texts. They include Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party, Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Manifesto, Dziga Vertov’s WE: Variant of a Manifesto, André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, Lucio Fontana’s White Manifesto, Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision, Elaine Sturtevant’s Man Is Double Man Is Copy Man Is Clone, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogma 95, and Claes Oldenburg’s I am for an art . . . , in addition to writings by Francis Picabia, Barnett Newman, Yvonne Rainer, Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara, Sol LeWitt, Paul Eluard, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Werner Herzog.

The past we are leaving behind us as carrion. The future we leave to the fortune-tellers. We take the present day.

All of man is fake. All of man is false.

I believe in the pure joy of the man who sets off from whatever point he chooses, along any other path save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can.

About two-thirds of the way through each film, all of the characters portrayed by Blanchett, seen in extreme close-up, suddenly speak their lines in monotone unison, a kind of choral cacophony of chanting and singing that echoes throughout the massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, an exhilarating moment that makes up for some of the pompous diatribe and intellectual masturbation that preceded it. It also is a grand statement for the critical importance of art, especially during tough times when countries face cultural and sociopolitical battles that threaten personal freedoms and liberties. But the best reason to experience Manifesto, which continues through January 8, is to watch a remarkable actress in a marvelous and memorable tour de force; Blanchett fans will also want to catch her in Anton Chekhov’s The Present, which is running on Broadway through March 19.

ERNESTO NETO: THE SERPENT’S ENERGY GAVE BIRTH TO HUMANITY

Ernesto Neto’s “The Serpent’s Energy Gave Birth to Humanity” welcomes visitors into its soothing passageways (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through December 16, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-414-4144
www.tanyabonakdargallery.com

For his first gallery exhibition in four years, Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto has created another happy-making installation grounded in ritual, tradition, and custom. Inspired by his recent collaborations with the indigenous, shamanistic Huni Kuin (Kaxinawá) of South America, “The Serpent’s Energy Gave Birth to Humanity” contains several living sculptures that welcome visitors into their inviting warmth. Neto’s trademark hand-dyed, crocheted work can be found throughout the two floors of Chelsea’s Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, dangling from the ceiling, hanging on the walls, and spread across the floor. The centerpiece is “Adam Boa Eve Apple Egg,” a large-scale, snakelike passage that leads to a communal womblike area where people can relax, lie down, play a bongo or guitar, and even put on a hat. “The spirit of the boa is an energy . . . It’s a vibration that is inside all the matter, and in all life,” Neto says of the work. That positivity, and Neto’s belief in humanity’s connectivity with nature, is evident in the titles of several of the wall pieces, including “Cosmic roots of the earth,” “Sprouting life,” “Life is love, love energy, from dark earth to light sky D L D L D L,” and, simply, “Joy.” Upstairs, visitors are greeted by a twisting helix ladder titled “e twin serpents, the stairway to life a”; in a small room, you can get comfy on “I am, yo soy, mantra light,” which evokes an umbrella at a beach resort. And in the bigger upstairs room, you can breathe in “Flying fern, cater-boa-pillar, cleaning air, cleaning earth,” a collection of potted plants and stones hanging from the ceiling, and and then stick your arm deep in the far wall piece for a special surprise. With “The Serpent’s Energy Gave Birth to Humanity,” Neto — who dazzled crowds with his giant, immersive “Anthropodino” at the Park Ave. Armory in 2009 — once again melds mind and body, earth and spirit in an energetic treat for the senses.