NADA NYC
Pier 36 at Basketball City
299 South St. on the East River
May 10-12, free
www.newartdealers.org
Back in March, Armory Arts Week featured the Armory Show, Volta NY, Scope, the Independent, Moving Image New York, ADAA the Art Show, New City, Fountain, and Spring/Break art fairs. Now that we’ve all gotten the chance to catch our breath, the second part of the season is up and running this weekend with another slew of art shows around the city. While the main event might be the second edition of Frieze, held on Randall’s Island and charging a whopping $42 admission fee, there are numerous lower-cost options. At NADA, it does indeed cost nada to see more than seventy exhibitors at Basketball City, including Eleven Rivington, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Marlborough Chelsea, Churner and Churner, Feature Inc., and SculptureCenter. Among the special events and projects are Merkx & Gwynne’s “King Arthur Green Room,” a LittleCollector tour, a Lower East Side gallery tour, and an Eat up NY in the LES food tour at this show sponsored by New Art Dealers Alliance, which “believes that the adversarial approach to exhibiting and selling art has run its course . . . that change can be achieved through fostering constructive thought and dialogue between various points in the art industry from large galleries to small spaces, nonprofit and commercial alike.”
PARALLAX “ART” FAIR
Prince George Ballroom
15 East 27th St.
May 11-12, free with advance registration, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
www.parallaxaf.com
Parallax is a self-described “non-art fair that makes a uniquely refreshing conceptual statement about subjectivity and the commoditization of taste, offering an intellectual framework where visitors can dare to be themselves for a change.” Created by Dr. Chris Barlow, Parallax features works from more than two hundred international emerging and established artists celebrating “the luxury of objects” and examining new forms of acquisition.
Jani Ruscica’s “Screen Test (for a Living Sculpture)” is among the special projects at Pulse (courtesy of Otto Zoo)
PULSE
The Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th St.
May 9-12, $20 (run of show $25)
www.pulse-art.com/new-york
The always enjoyable Pulse is back at the Metropolitan Pavilion, with nearly fifty international galleries part of its main exhibition and another thirteen in its Impulse cutting-edge section. This year’s Pulse Projects features Tristin Lowe’s “Comet Nature,” Lisa Lozano and Tora Lopez’s “We Couldn’t Remember What We Came to Forget,” Franco Mondini-Ruiz’s “Spring Flings & Pretty Things,” Russell Maltz’s “Painted/Stacked,” Jason Rogenes’s “CH1M3R4,” and Tim Youd’s “Typing Tropic.” The multimedia Pulse Play lounge will be showing Jani Ruscica’s Screen Test (for a Living Sculpture), Robbie Cornelissen’s The Labyrinth Runner, and Lars Arrhenius’s The Street, there will be a Pulse New York Chelsea Gallery Walk and after-party on Thursday night, and a free shuttle bus will take people between Pulse and the Frieze ferry stop.
The cutlog fair makes New York debut with indoor and outdoor events
CUTLOG NY
Clemente Soto Vélez Center
107 Suffolk St. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
May 9-13, $15 (run of show $25)
www.cutlogny.org
Making its New York debut, cutlog is a whirlwind event focusing on collaboration and innovation in multiple disciplines. Held at the Clemente on the Lower East Side, cutlog NY includes such exhibitors as Tel Aviv’s Art Connections, Paris’s Galerie Dix9 and Olivier Watman, Antwerp’s Marion de Cannière, London’s House of the Nobleman, Milano’s Edward Cutler, Lyon’s Céline Moine, Istanbul’s Gama, and Vancouver’s the Apartment, but it’s the special projects that highlight this highly anticipated fair. There will be projected images outdoors on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights; such live performances and installations as Movement Research re-creating Anna Halprin’s “Mirror Piece,” the Fantastic Nobodies’ “Free Car Wash,” Tyler Matthew Oyer’s cabaret “Gone for Gold,” Marni Kotak’s exercise-obsessed “Calorie Countdown,” a site-specific dance by Netta Yerushalmy, and Phoebe Rathmell’s “Visceral Transcendence,” among others; and talks with Harvey Stein and John Lurie.
Gaetano Pesce will be at Collective .1 Design with new installation and conversation
COLLECTIVE .1 DESIGN FAIR
Pier 57 at 15th St. and the West Side Highway
May 8-11, $25 (run of show $30)
www.collectivedesignfair.com
Another newbie is the Collective .1 Design Fair, founded by Steven Learner to present a curated examination of new and historical design. Approximately two dozen galleries will gather at Pier 57, including Demisch Danant, Jousse Entreprise, Lost City Arts, Maison Gerard, Mondo Cane, and Sebastian + Barquet, with installations by Gaetano Pesce, Sebastian Errazuriz, and Dana Barnes, tours, book signings with Christopher Bascom Rawlins and Jeffrey Head, and such Collective Conversations as “Inside the Design Market,” “Obsessed — Collecting in the 21st Century,” and “In Dialogue” with Gaetano Pesce and curator Daniella Ohad Smith.
When we caught U2’s Vertigo Tour at the Garden in June 2006, we were up in the rafters, looking down at tiny dots that just happened to be drummer Larry Mullen Jr., bass player Adam Clayton, guitarist the Edge, and singer Bono. But the World’s Most Important Band is front and center for everyone to see in U2 3D, the first-ever full-length film shot in Digital 3-D, directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington. Using as many as eighteen specially equipped digital cameras and recording decks, Owens, who has been U2’s visual content director since ZooTV, captures the Irish band during stadium shows in South America and Mexico, focusing on the March 1-2 concerts at Estadio la Plata in Buenos Aires. The new technology, previously used for sporting events, has a fascinating layered effect that sucks in viewers — yes, who are wearing special glasses (not unlike the specs Bono used to wear as the Fly) — placing them right in the middle of the action as the band powers through an exultant setlist that, if not quite ideal, includes “Vertigo,” “New Year’s Day,” and “Pride (In the Name of Love).” You can’t help but reach out for Bono as he seemingly jumps out of the screen while singing “Touch me” during “Beautiful Day,” and then you’ll swear he’s reaching out only to you when he stares into the camera during “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and promises to “wipe your tears away.” And when tens of thousands of fans all bop up and down in unison to “Where the Streets Have No Name,” forming a propulsive wave, you’ll feel a rush beneath your seat that moves up into your gut. Owens and Pellington (Arlington Road) incorporate the band’s hypertextual stage show into the new format, as digitized figures, words, symbols, and letters from the large screens behind the band seem to float right in front of your face. The concert footage is supplemented with extreme close-ups shot onstage without an audience, and the energy level severely drops at these times, although Mullen’s drum kit looks amazing in 3-D. As straight-ahead concert movies go, U2 3D is among the best ever made, a unique theatrical experience that will blow you away. U2 3D is screening in Dolby Digital 3-D at the Museum of the Moving Image on May 7 at 7:00 as part of the series “Play This Movie Loud!” and “Sonos and VEVO Present: The Director’s Studio” and will be preceded by a discussion with Pellington and chief curator David Schwartz.
Japanese genre king Takashi Miike, who has made more than one hundred films in his twenty-two-year career, outdoes himself in The Happiness of the Katakuris, an endlessly inventive tale of the Katakuris, a family that moves to the middle of nowhere to run a country inn. The only problem is that when guests finally arrive, they all end up dead — in bizarre, ridiculous ways — and the father decides to bury them instead of reporting the incidents, in order to protect the inn and the family’s future. Miike (Ichi The Killer, Audition, Thirteen Assassins) masterfully mixes comedy, romance, Claymation, music, murder, and mayhem in this enormously entertaining and highly original movie that is filled with a never-ending bag of surprises. The Happiness of the Katakuris is screening in a 35mm print May 7 at 8:15 as part of the IFC Center series “The Modern School of Film” and will be followed by a discussion with Brooklyn-based choreographer Mark Morris; the series continues May 9 with John M. Stahl’s 1945 melodrama Leave Her to Heaven, with Neil LaBute on hand to talk about it, May 13 with Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror and Bill T. Jones, and May 28 with Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan and Laurie Anderson.
Charlie Chaplin’s first feature, The Kid, was a breakthrough for the British-born silent-film star, a touching and tender sixty-eight-minute triumph about a poor soul getting a second chance at life. When a baby arrives at his doorstep, a Tramp (Chaplin) first tries to ditch the boy, but he ends up taking him to his ramshackle apartment and raising him as if he were his own flesh and blood. Although he has so little, the Tramp makes sure the child, eventually played by Jackie Coogan, has food to eat, clothes to wear, and books to read. Meanwhile, the mother (Edna Purviance, Chaplin’s former lover), who has become a big star, regrets her earlier decision and wonders where her son is, setting up a heartbreaking finale. In addition to playing the starring role, Chaplin wrote, produced, directed, and edited the film and composed the score for his company, First National, wonderfully blending slapstick comedy, including a hysterical street fight with an angry neighbor, with touching melodrama as he examines poverty in post-WWI America, especially as seen through the eyes of the orphan boy, played beautifully by Coogan, who went on to marry Betty Grable, among others, and star as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family. Chaplin’s innate ability to tell a moving story primarily through images reveals his understanding of cinema’s possibilities, and The Kid holds up as one of his best, alongside such other silent classics as 1925’s The Gold Rush and 1931’s City Lights. The Kid is screening on May 5 at 11:00 am as part of the Film Forum Jr. series for kids and families and will be preceded by a Little Rascals short and a Chaplin Dress-Alike Contest; the series continues May 12 with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and May 19 with François Truffaut’s Small Change.