Jeppe Hein will be at the New School on September 29 to discuss his three-part interactive Brooklyn Bridge Park installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
PUBLIC CONTEXT, PRIVATE MEANING
The New School, Tishman Auditorium
63 Fifth Ave. between 13th & 14th Sts.
Tuesday, September 29, $10, 6:30
www.publicartfund.org
Jeppe Hein invites people to experience his work in tactile ways in “Please Touch the Art,” a three-part installation spread across Brooklyn Bridge Park. For the Public Art Fund project, the Danish artist, who lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen, has created “Appearing Rooms,” a dancing water sculpture that visitors are encouraged to walk through and play in; “Modified Social Benches,” sixteen brightly colored red and orange uniquely shaped benches that people can sit on and climb; and “Mirror Labyrinth NY,” a circular maze of mirror-polished stainless-steel vertical planks that offers fun and fascinating reflections as you make your way in and around it, including mimicking the downtown Manhattan skyline across the river. (“Appearing Rooms” is on view until October 4, while the other two will remain in the park through April 17 of next year.) “People can use it; they don’t need to know it’s art or not,” Hein explains in a promotional video. “It’s just something twisting everyday life.” On September 29, Hein will give a participatory talk at the New School as part of the Public Art Fund series “Public Context, Private Meaning,” combining performance, audience interactivity, and interview. The Fall 2015 Public Art Fund Talks at the New School continue October 21 with Hank Willis Thomas and November 18 with Fiona Banner.
Jacques Rivette’s Va Savoir is a long, talky French movie about very beautiful, very complicated, sex-crazed men and women — and it just might be the master filmmaker’s crowning glory, a magnificent masterpiece that deserved its slot as the New York Film Festival’s opening night selection back in 2001. This erotically charged, very funny drama is set around a traveling theater company’s return to Paris to put on Pirandello’s As You Desire Me in the original Italian. Ugo (Sergio Castellitto), the director and costar of the play, is romantically involved with Camille (Jeanne Balibar), the lead actress, who visits her former lover Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé), a philosopher with a thing for Heidegger, who is now living with Sonia (Marianne Basler), a dance instructor who is being chased by Arthur (Bruno Todeschini), a ne’er-do-well whose half sister, Do (Hélène de Fougerolles), has taken a liking to Ugo and offers to help him find an unpublished ghost play by Carlo Goldini, which her mother (Catherine Rouvel) just might have. Every minute of this film is pure magic, and at the center of it all is the fantastique Camille, an instinctual, graceful actress whom everyone — men and women — fall in love with, played by the fantastique, instinctual, graceful Balibar, whom audiences will fall in love with as well. French film enthusiasts should watch for Claude Berri in a small role. Lovingly photographed by William Lubtchansky and edited by his wife, Nicole Lubtchansky, Va Savoir is screening at 4:00 and 7:30 on September 29 in FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Theater & Cinema”; the later show will be introduced by Mathieu Bauer. (FIAF is screening the 154-minute version, not the 220-minute director’s cut.) The Tuesday festival continues through October 27 with such other stage-related dramas as Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, Arnaud Desplechin’s Esther Kahn, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Games of Love and Chance, and François Truffaut’s The Last Metro.
