Urs Fischer’s “last supper” inaugurates new Gagosian uptown space (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
LAST SUPPER
Gagosian Gallery, Park & 75
821 Park Ave. at 75th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 8, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.gagosian.com
twi-ny online slideshow
Last year at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, in conjunction with a major career survey, Swiss-born, New York City–based artist Urs Fischer created the sprawling sculptural installation “YES,” working with 1,500 volunteers for three weeks on-site to turn 308 tons of clay into all kinds of representational and abstract shapes and figures of their own choosing. Fischer has now taken select parts of the unfired final product, warts and all, and cast them in unpatinated and gilded bronze. The centerpiece of the project is a large-scale “last supper,” a life-size version of Jesus leading a seder that inaugurates Gagosian’s airy new small space, Park & 75. The clay food on the table includes McDonald’s French fries, fruit, cans of beer and “malt licker,” a hot dog in a bun, a slice of pizza, and a chicken. The apostles are joined by miniature people, a boxy smiley face, a rat crawling on a head, a wad of cash, and some playing cards, among other items that probably weren’t part of the actual dinner in which Jesus revealed that he was about to be betrayed. Fischer leaves in every crack and fissure, every hand- and footprint used to mold the work, which still appears to be made out of malleable clay. It is meant to be an outdoor piece, where the weather can further change it over time, but it currently sits perpendicular to Park Ave. in Gagosian’s windowed room, where curious passersby stop in for a look.
Urs Fischer has placed a host of objects and figures throughout former bank on Delancey St. (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
MERMAID / PIG / BRO W/ HAT
104 Delancey St.
821 Park Ave. at 75th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 23, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.gagosian.com
twi-ny online slideshow
Meanwhile, Fischer and Gagosian have populated an abandoned downtown bank with dozens of other cast-bronze pieces from the original “YES” installation, carefully — and often humorously — placing them throughout the various rooms. A miniature bed resides in front of a vault; a one-legged boy relaxes across a chair; a chained lion sits in a corner; a wildly mustached Napoleon bust stands behind a counter, as if about to take care of a customer; train tracks emerge from a fireplace; a mermaid dribbles water into a fountain; and a giant, disembodied foot waits in the back. Perhaps most relevant is a gold sculpture of a man having sexual relations with a pig; this was a bank, after all.
You can reflect on Fischer’s mirrored boxes at Lever House (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
UNTITLED
Lever House Art Collection
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through May 30, free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
twi-ny online slideshow
In addition to the uptown and downtown Gagosian shows, nine of Fischer’s mirrored-boxes-on-pedestals aggregrations can be found at Lever House, across the street from where his giant lamp bear sat back in the fall of 2011. Fischer has silkscreened photographic images on four sides and the top of mirrored cubes of varying dimensions and placed them on white plinths; most of the images do not completely cover the surfaces, so the plants, traffic on Park Ave., and other elements are reflected on many sides, giving them a surreal, Magritte-like quality. The images include a pencil, chess pieces, a bottle of soy sauce, a banana, an alarm clock, a level, a box of mints, a camera, and a twenty-dollar bill. Virtually everything about the show is random, from the shapes and sizes to the positioning and organization to which objects were photographed and how. Much like the downtown Gagosian show equates an art gallery with a bank, this collection turns the gallery into a kind of very clean, austere store, which also evokes the Lever Brothers themselves, who made their fortune in soap.
If all of that’s not quite enough Urs Fischer for you, then you can catch two free documentaries May 19-21 at the SVA Theatre as part of the Zürich Meets New York festival, Iwan Schumacher’s Urs Fischer, about the artist’s 2009-10 solo show at the New Museum, and Feuer und Flamme (The Art Foundry), in which Schumacher reveals the working process of Fischer as well as Katharina Fritsch, Peter Fischli, and David Weiss at Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen.
Based on the Russian novel Yama (The Pit) by Aleksandr Kuprin, protofeminist director Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sisters of the Gion offers a poignant look at the changing desires of women in twentieth-century Japan. In the Gion District, geisha have become one-man prostitutes, taking up with one wealthy patron at a time. When Furusawa (Benkei Shiganoya) loses his business, the bankrupt man turns away from his wife and instead goes to Umekichi (Yōko Umemura), who takes him in, believing that it is her responsibility. Her younger sister, Omocha (Isuzu Yamada), is furious, arguing that geisha, and women in general, should be more than just the playthings of men. She wants her sister instead to find a rich patron who can take care of her in style. Omocha is a manipulative woman, willing to lie to get what she thinks she and Umekichi deserve, but she is not doing it for evil reasons as much as she wants to change the plight of the geisha and give more power to women. But Umekichi cannot break free of the old-fashioned ways as Omocha plays games with successful businessman Jurakudo (Fumio Okura) and his assistant, Kimura (Taizō Fukami), devising a plot that threatens to tear everything apart. Mizoguchi fills Sisters of the Gion with long shots of narrow passageways as characters try to escape from their situations but are unable to. Made in 1936, just before a war that would change Japan’s views on houses of ill repute, the film is virtually timeless for most of its too-brief sixty-nine minutes, until one man decides to take actions into his own hands and suddenly cars and the nearby city shift the overall perspective. In the end, it’s about more than just money, although it’s definitely about that, but it’s also about respect, about common decency, and about humanity, as seen from all sides. Sisters of the Gion is screening May 4 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s five-week tribute to the master auteur — who made more than eighty films, less than half of which still exist — which continues through June with such other works as Song of Home, Oyuki the Virgin, White Threads of the Waterfall, The Downfall of Osen, and Straits of Love and Hate.
In the historical romantic drama Vincere, Italian master filmmaker Marco Bellocchio delivers the little-known real-life story of Ida Alser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), Benito Mussolini’s (Filippo Timi) first wife and the mother of Il Duce’s first-born son, Benito Albino (Fabrizio Costella). Alser and Mussolini first meet in Milan in 1907, when she is a fashion and beauty entrepreneur and he is a newspaper journalist championing a religion-free Socialist. They feel an immediate connection and have passionate meetings. Soon they have a child and are married. But as Mussolini’s power in the Fascist movement grows, he takes a more traditional wife (Michela Cescon) and has another child, disavowing any relationship with Ida and young Benito and going to any lengths to cover up their very existence. Set amid the swirling turmoil that pervaded Italy during the two World Wars, Vincere, featuring an epic score by Carlo Crivelli, is a beautifully shot melodrama (courtesy of cinematographer Daniele Ciprì), able to focus on two strong, unrelenting characters who know what they want – and what they don’t. Bellocchio interweaves archival newsreel footage, lending the film not only more reality but firmly placing it in historical context. Mezzogiorno is brilliant as Alser, a modern-day woman ahead of her time who fought for what she believed in and what she deserved, even if it meant going up against one of the most powerful men in the world. Vincere is screening on May 4 & 7 as part of MoMA’s Bellocchio retrospective, held in conjunction with the upcoming U.S. release of his latest film, Dormant Beauty, which opens June 6 at Lincoln Plaza. The series continues through May 7 with such other Bellocchio works as The Conviction, Vacation in Val Trebbia, A Leap in the Dark, and Dormant Beauty.
Now: In the Wings on a World Stage, the marvelous new documentary that follows a transatlantic company as it performs Richard III around the globe, did not get its name only because it’s the first word of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy — “Now is the winter of our discontent” — nor simply because it takes place in modern times in modern dress with nods to modern technology, but also because it’s a spine-tingling celebration of the immediacy of live theater. In 2009, Sam Mendes’s Neal Street Productions, the Old Vic under the leadership of Kevin Spacey, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, led by Joseph Melillo, formed a partnership in which British and American actors would present five classic plays over three years. Dubbed the Bridge Project, the wildly successful venture concluded in 2012 with Spacey, an American living and working in London, starring in 
“I need to be kind of weird to photograph people all the time without permission, because it’s very aggressive, and I have to do it,” street photographer Matt Weber says at the beginning of Dan Wechsler’s fun documentary More Than the Rainbow, adding, “And you have to be kind of a psycho.” Wechsler — a filmmaker and rare bookseller who, with George Koppelman, has just claimed to have discovered William Shakespeare’s annotated dictionary — follows Weber around New York, primarily in the subways and Coney Island, as the former taxi driver tries to capture the spirit of the city on film, looking for unique shots that can come and go in a flash. Wechsler speaks with such other photographers as Ralph Gibson, who waxes poetic about the art form, sometimes in French; Dave Beckerman, who gave up a successful business career to shoot on the streets; Philadelphia’s Zoe Strauss, whose “10 Years” exhibition was recently at ICP; Jeff Mermelstein, a street photographer who shoots mostly in color; critic and photographer Ben Lifson, who passed away last year; Cuban-born photographer Julio Mitchel; and, most curiously, San Francisco–based fetish photographer Erik Kroll, who doesn’t care for Weber’s work. Weber, who has been photographing the city since 1978, is also shown collaborating with Todd Oldham, who is designing a book on Weber’s subway series. All of the photographers discuss the relative merits of color versus black-and-white, whether they ask people for permission before taking their pictures, and the inherent differences between analog and digital. The film often strays too far from its main subject, Weber, losing sight of itself in its effort to cover too much in a mere eighty-three minutes, but it usually gets back on track, particularly with lovely 35mm interstitial trips through the city, in color and black-and-white, set to the music of Thelonius Monk and Keith Gurland, courtesy of John Rosenberg, who edited the film and music and shot the documentary with Arlene Muller. Especially in an age when everyone thinks he or she is a photographer, snapping photos with camera phones and posting them on social media sites, More Than a Rainbow shows how it’s really done. The film opens at the Quad on May 2, with Wechsler and Weber participating in Q&As following the 8:30 screenings on Friday and Saturday.