this week in music

FIRST SATURDAY: LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD

Shukree Hassan Tilghman’s MORE THAN A MONTH is part of free Black History Month celebration at Brooklyn Museum on February 1

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, February 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The February edition of the Brooklyn Museum’s free First Saturdays honors Black History Month with programs related to African American art and culture. The evening will include pop-up gallery talks focused on works by African American artists currently on view at the museum, a camera phone workshop by Instagram activist Ruddy Roye, a Hands-On Art workshop in which participants learn how to hand-color historical photographs, a screening of Shukree Hassan Tilghman’s 2012 documentary More Than a Month about Black History Month, live music by Tysmé, Honey Larochelle, and Chris Faust, a dance performance by Niles Ford Urban Dance Collective, a movement workshop led by the Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory, a fashion show hosted by Global Village, and a talk by transgender activist Janet Mock about her new book, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More, moderated by Michaela Angela Davis. In addition, the galleries will be open late, giving visitors plenty of opportunity to check out “Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey,” “War / Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath,” “Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry’s Letters to ‘The Ladder,’” “Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt,” “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas,” “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn,” “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” and other exhibits.

MIKE KELLEY — SUNDAY SESSIONS: KIM GORDON AND JUTTA KOETHER

Mike Kelley, “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites,” plush toys sewn over wood and wire frames with styrofoam packing material, nylon rope, pulleys, steel hardware and hanging plates, fiberglass, car paint, and disinfectant, 1991/1999 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Sunday, February 2, $18 in advance, $20 day of show, 4:00
Exhibition continues through February 2, suggested admission $10 (free with paid MoMA ticket
within fourteen days), 12 noon – 6:00 (9:00 on Saturday)
718-784-2084
www.momaps1.org

A few weeks ago, an art-world friend who was at MoMA PS1 posted on Facebook, “OK, sell me on Mike Kelley.” Most of the respondents agreed with her that they just didn’t get all the hullabaloo over the influential multimedia artist who committed suicide on February 1, 2012, while in the midst of participating in his career retrospective, which posthumously took over all of the Long Island City institution on October 13, 2013. The show, the largest at MoMA PS1 since 1976, features more than 250 works by the Detroit-born Kelley, who was an original member of the punk band Destroy All Monsters while at the University of Michigan before moving to Los Angeles and studying at CalArts under such teachers as John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, Jonathan Borofsky, and Douglas Huebler. On February 2, the last day of the show, Sonic Youth cofounder and visual artist Kim Gordon and German artist, musician, and critic Jutta Koether are creating a special farewell event in the VW Dome that may or may not help sell yet more people on Kelley. The two women have previously collaborated on such projects as “Her Noise”; Kelley created the cover image for Sonic Youth’s Dirty album, while the band contributed music to his “Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile” performance piece. “Mike dug a huge hole, but his sculptures, videos, recordings, writings, and drawings fill it in, heaped so high that they stand like a formidable mountain of gifts, rewards, like a monument to getting out from under,” Gordon, a close friend of Kelley’s, wrote in Artforum a few months after his death.

Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether will bid farewell to Mike Kelley exhibit with special performance at MoMA PS1

The sprawling exhibition contains sculptures, videos, recordings, writings, drawings, and more, offering many different types of rewards. It all begins in the courtyard VW Dome, where Kelley’s nearly-three-hour epic, Day Is Done, screens continuously, a subversive spectacle that sets the tone for the rest of the show, highlighting Kelley’s obsessions with childhood imagery and pop culture, his unique spirituality, his repurposing of found objects, and the low-budget, DIY nature of his work, which can often have an amateurish feel that turns off viewers. Inside the former school, there is art everywhere, from the hallways to the boiler room, displaying Kelley’s vast range. His Kandor series consists of numerous multicolored, glowing versions of the Krypton city from the Superman comics, each one existing in a glass bottle hooked up to a kind-of life-support system, with accompanying video. “Pay for Your Pleasure” is a narrow corridor with banners on either side containing portraits of writers and philosophers, along with a quote from each one about art, crime, law, and civilization; at the end is an artwork by a local murderer.

Mike Kelley, “John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972, Wayne/Westland Eagle),” mixed media, 2001 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

One large gallery space is dedicated to several of Kelley’s “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction” installations, in which he starts with a photograph from a high school yearbook and turns it into a short film, screened on a set with architectural elements echoing what is happening in the imagined story. (“Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 [A Domestic Scene]” is also being shown at MoMA in Midtown.) “John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project” is centered by a tall mosaic statue of astronaut John Glenn made out of broken glass, pottery, plates, ceramic figures, and other detritus, delving into another regular subject of Kelley’s, repressed memory syndrome. In “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites,” colorful stuffed animals have been formed into orbs that hang from the ceiling like a planetary system as futuristic wall pieces shoot out disinfectant. Two small crawlspaces allow non-claustrophobics to wind their way to a peephole where they can see the famous locker-room peeping scene from Porky’s. And “Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms” consists of videos of traumatic scenes taken from the internet, then shown on monitors attached to the back of a wall of fence posts of different colors and sizes. Not everything will work for everyone, but there’s bound to be at least a handful that any person would at least find fascinating and intriguing, thought-provoking and challenging. In response to our friend’s Facebook request, we proffered, “The Michigan-born multimedia artist created fantastical worlds using found objects that reexamined mass culture through DIY installations that can be playful and nonsensical as well as cutting and poignant.” At the end of the thread, she readily admitted that having seen the show, she has a greater appreciation for his work. And sometimes, that’s all one can ask for.

THE WIND UP: BRIGHT WINTER NIGHT

Marc Chagall, “Exodus,” oil on canvas, 1952-66 (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou)

The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday, January 30, $13-$18, 8:00
Chagall and threeASFOUR exhibitions continue through February 2, $15 (free on Saturday)
212-423-3200
www.thejewishmuseum.org

“Should I paint the earth, the sky, my heart? / The cities burning, my brothers fleeing? / My eyes in tears. / Where should I run and fly, to whom?” So wrote Russian painter Marc Chagall in a poem when considering what subjects he should explore on canvas. That poem, among others written by the artist, appear high on the walls of the powerful, deeply personal Jewish Museum exhibit “Chagall: Love, War, and Exile.” People have been lining up outside in the freezing cold to experience the intimate show, which zeroes in on the period just before, during, and immediately following WWII, when Chagall and his beloved wife, Bella, were forced to first leave their home in Russia, then flee France for the United States as German power spread across Europe. The exhibition ends on February 2, and because of its popularity, the museum will be open on Wednesday, when it’s usually closed. In addition, the Chagall show, along with the small, sparkly fashion exhibit “threeASFOUR: MER KA BA,” will get an official public farewell Thursday evening in the special program “The Wind Up: Bright Winter Night,” which will include guided tours, an international beer tasting, and a live performance by Philly-born, Brooklyn-based indie singer-songwriter Mirah (Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn), who will soon be releasing her follow-up to such previous records as You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This, Advisory Committee, and C’mon.

Marc Chagall, “Self-Portrait with Clock,” oil on canvas, 1947 (private collection)

“Chagall: Love, War, and Exile” consists of thirty-one paintings, twenty-two works on paper, and vitrines of photographs, illustrated books, letters, and other ephemera. The show is divided into four parts: “Time Is a River,” “War and Exile,” “The Jewish Jesus,” and “The Colors of Love,” in which Chagall incorporates his unique iconography and color palette — religious men holdings Torahs, a cow playing the violin, a glowing moon, mothers holding babies, angels floating in the sky, pendulums swinging on clocks — on canvases filled with pain, fear, and dread as he first watched the horror of the Nazis, then lost Bella to a sudden illness in 1944. “The Fall of the Angel” encapsulates Chagall’s oeuvre of the time, a painting that he began in 1923 and reworked in 1933 and 1947, centered by an angel in red, looking like a twisting fire, spiraling uncontrollably toward earth. In the right background is Christ on the cross; the crucifixion is seen in many of these works as Chagall, who was raised in an Orthodox family, uses the figure to represent Jewish suffering not only during the Holocaust but throughout time, as well as relating it to his own tortured soul, first tortured by guilt for having been able to escape the Nazis while his brethren were murdered, then by grief upon losing his wife on the eve of their starting a new life together. In “Exodus” (1952-66), a haloed, crucified Jesus looks over a mass of men, women, and children running from a burning shtetl, linking the escape from Egypt with the pogroms and the Holocaust. And in “Self-Portrait with Clock,” Chagall’s second wife, Virginia, bathed in blue, is leaning on the artist, who portrays himself as a red goat working on a canvas of a crucified Jesus being sorrowfully embraced by Bella in ghostly white as a winged clock flies away in the distance. It’s a haunting image, one of many in this haunting show.

CULTUREMART 2014

HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
January 28 – February 9, $15
212-647-0202
www.here.org

The January performance festival season might be winding down, but HERE’s annual CULTUREMART is just getting under way. From January 28 to February 9, the downtown arts organization will present thirteen multidisciplinary workshop productions from current and former participants in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), with all tickets only $15. The festival kicks off January 28-29 with Bora Yoon’s Sunken Cathedral, a multimedia journey through several rooms, exploring the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Matt Marks and Paul Peers’s Mata Hari, an opera-theater piece about the WWI spy’s last month, is paired with mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn’s Science Fair, which is told through songs, slides, and live experiments. In Restless Next, choreographer Rebecca Davis examines the body’s ability to change. Joseph Silovsky uses video, oratory, robotics, and puppetry to relate the story of Sacco and Vanzetti in Send for the Million Men. Stefan Weisman and David Cote’s multimedia opera of James Hurst’s The Scarlet Ibis will be stripped down to a concert version consisting of the piano and vocal score; at two hours and fifteen minutes, it’s the longest show of the festival. (Most run between twenty and sixty minutes.)

Soomi Kim’s CHANG(E) examines the performance artist and political activist Kathy Change’s bizarre end (photo by Hunter Canning)

Soomi Kim and Mei-Yin Ng’s Chang(e), a dance-theater work about controversial performance artist Kathy Change, shares a bill with Ng’s Lost Property Unit, which deals with surveillance and robotics. Dancer-choreographer Laura Peterson is back with The Futurist, a collaboration with the very busy composer Joe Diebes that uses sound and movement to investigate what lies ahead. In Genet Porno, Yvan Greenberg and Laboratory Theater update Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers into a contemporary tale about porn and a gay prostitute. Leyna Marika Papach’s opera/movement-theater piece Glass Mouth (Part 2) delves into the nature of personal identity, with visuals by Jerry Smith Jr. CULTUREMART concludes with LEIMAY’s Frantic Beauty, in which dancer choreographer Ximena Garcia and video installation artist Shige Moriya look at dreams and desires, and Michael Bodel’s there are caves and attics, which uses Michel Foucault’s Corps Utopique to probe the concept of place. As usual, CULTUREMART provides a potpourri of intimate, experimental works from creators who are willing to take chances while both entertaining and challenging audiences.

BEAUTIFUL: THE CAROLE KING MUSICAL

Don Kirshner (Jeb Brown) oversees intense songwriting competition between Goffin/King (Jake Epstein and Jessie Mueller) and Mann/Weil (Jarrod Spector and Anika Larsen) in BEAUTIFUL (photo by Joan Marcus)

Stephen Sondheim Theatre
124 West 43rd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 5, $75 – $252
www.beautifulonbroadway.com

Theatergoers are in for treat after treat as the hits just keep on coming in the first act of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. Rising star Jessie Mueller (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever) excels in the role of Manhattan-born, Brooklyn-raised Carole Klein, beginning as the teen dreams of becoming a successful songwriter (and changes her last name to King). That dream becomes a reality when she meets lyricist Gerry Goffin (Jake Epstein) at Queens College and soon the two have an office on Broadway, where they work for Don Kirshner (Jeb Brown), composing hit songs for such popular groups as the Drifters, the Shirelles, and others. The musical, directed by Marc Bruni (Old Jews Telling Jokes, The Explorers Club) and with a book by playwright and filmmaker Douglas McGrath (Bullets over Broadway, Infamous), soars as Goffin and King do battle with office neighbors Barry Mann (Jarrod Spector) and Cynthia Weil (Anika Larsen), competing over which team can top the Billboard charts more often. Derek McLane’s dazzling multilevel set feeds the Brill Building-era frenzy with nonstop action; the focus and the set narrow down when the talented ensemble performs full versions of songs the audience just watched Goffin/King or Mann/Weil put together, bringing their exacting craft to lovely life in scenes appealingly choreographed by Josh Prince.

Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s personal and professional partnership is the focus of new Broadway musical (photo by Joan Marcus)

Unfortunately, the second act is pretty much a bore, as Goffin and King suffer through marital problems and move to the suburbs as the audience waits and waits for the plot to finally get to King’s breakout masterpiece, Tapestry, but by the time it arrives, it’s too late, baby, it’s just too late. But that thrilling first act makes it all worthwhile, succeeding where such other jukebox musicals as Motown and A Night with Janis Joplin fail, combining a compelling (mostly true) story with electrifying music. The charming cast is led by engaging performances by Epstein, Larsen, Spector, and especially, of course, Mueller, who make palpable the excitement of creating a hit song, while Brown wonderfully captures Kirshner’s nuttiness running his musical asylum. Do yourself a favor and don’t read up on the hits that Goffin/King and Mann/Weil wrote, and skip the page in the Playbill that lists all the tunes in the show, because no matter how much you think you know about the songs, you’ll be surprised by the two duos’ vast, diverse catalog.

NYCHILIFEST

Chili lovers will descend on Chelsea Market on January 26 for chili, beer, and bands at annual cook-off

CHILI, BANDS & BEER AT CHELSEA MARKET
Chelsea Market
Tenth Ave. entrance between 15th & 16th Sts.
Sunday, January 26, $50-$75, 7:00 – 9:00
www.nychilifest.com

Chili has a fabulous way of repeating on you, and this weekend the NYChiliFest will do just that in a big way at Chelsea Market. On Sunday, January 26, chefs from more than two dozen local eateries and food trucks will take part in a chili cook-off, including Cannibal, Mile End, Num Pang, Jeepney, Bubby’s, Jimmy’s No. 43, Roberta’s, Pies ‘n’ Thighs, Los Tacos 1, Morris Grilled Cheese, and Mexicue, going after the coveted Golden Chili Mug. Their fare will be judged by Umami Burger’s Adam Fleischman, Wrighteous Organics’ Martin Tessarzik, Catherine Lederer of Chop’t, and chefs Amanda Freitag and Heather Carlucci, along with multitudes of chili fanatics who, for a mere fifty bucks, can enjoy unlimited meaty, spicy delights throughout the eight-hundred-foot-long concourse — and can wash it all down with four varieties of Samuel Adams beer for only five dollars more. The primary ingredient in the dishes, one-hundred-percent dry-aged, locally raised beef, is supplied by Chelsea Market’s own Dickson’s Farmstand Meats. In addition, there will be live music by the honky-tonk band the Dixons and street-singing legend Super Bad Brad.

NHL STADIUM SERIES

The Rangers, Islanders, and Devils take their heated rivalries to the freezing Bronx for NHL Stadium Series

Yankee Stadium
1 East 161st St.
Rangers vs. Devils: Sunday, January 26, 12:30
Rangers vs. Islanders: Wednesday, January 29, 7:30
Tickets: $88-$358
www.rangers.nhl.com

Local hockey rivalries take it outside next week for the NHL Stadium Series, as the Rangers, Devils, and Islanders do battle at Yankee Stadium. The Blueshirts, led by a resurgent Henrik Lundqvist and Rick Nash, are in the thick of the playoff race, lifting their record to 27-23-3 even with two recent losses. The Devils, meanwhile, are only two points behind, at 55, while the Islanders are climbing with 49, after a surprisingly awful start. There are still tickets left for both games, available on TicketMaster for $88 to $358, but the seating is odd because of the placement of the rink in the new House That Ruth Originally Built, which holds more than fifty thousand for baseball. TicketMaster explains: “Please note that the scaling of the venue is not typical of an indoor hockey game. Due to sight lines, the higher priced seats will be in the highest levels of the building and similarly, the lower priced seats will be closest to the field.” The series will also feature live entertainment; the January 26 contest between the Broadway Blues and the Devils will include a preshow concert by the cast of Jersey Boys, three-time Tony nominee Marin Mazzie will sing the National Anthem, and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes will help the crowd reach up and touch the sky during the first intermission, while on January 29, when the Rangers face off against the soon-to-be Brooklyn Islanders, CeeLo Green will take the stage before the game, Michelle Williams will handle the National Anthem, and Beatles tribute band Strawberry Fields will bring back memories during the second intermission, probably with a much better sound system than the Fab Four had when they played Shea back in 1965. The Stadium Series is also going on in California, where the Ducks and the Kings are meeting up at Dodger Stadium, and in Chicago, where the Penguins will duke it out with the champion Blackhawks at Soldier Field.