Louise Lawler, “Still Life (Candle),” digital cibachrome on aluminum museum box, 2003
Metro Pictures
519 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Thursday, February 14, free, 6:00 – 7:30
212-206-7100
www.metropicturesgallery.com
For more than forty years, Pictures Generation artist Louise Lawler has been appropriating works through installation and photography, recontextualizing art and the art market in shots of paintings taken in auction house, in collectors’ homes, and before shows are hung, taking them out of their element, where they are usually seen on walls in galleries and museums. Now sixty-five, the New York-born conceptualist will be at Metro Pictures on Valentine’s Day, where she has shown since 1982, to celebrate the release of Louise Lawler: October Files (MIT Press, February 8, $35) as well as last year’s Louise Lawler and/or Gerhard Richter (Schirmer/Mosel, June 2012, $59.95). She will be joined by Helen Molesworth, editor of the former tome, and Tim Griffin, who contributed an essay for the latter. While at Metro Pictures, be sure to go upstairs to see some early works by Lawler, in addition to the main-floor exhibition featuring Trevor Paglen, which continues through March 9.
Brazilian filmmaker Alejandro Landes’s minimalist Porfirio begins and ends with close-up shots of the title character, Porfirio Ramírez Aldana, taken slightly from below by cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, focusing on the upper half of the man’s bare body, which is paralyzed from the waist done. Porfirio looks around as if he’s lost in a world that has let him down, and indeed it has. In the film, which opens theatrically at MoMA on February 8 for a one-week engagement, Porfirio plays himself, a Colombian father who was paralyzed by a policeman’s bullet and now lives a hard life selling minutes on his cell phone and needing the help of his eldest son, Lissin (played by his youngest son, Jarlisson Ramírez Reinoso), and neighbor/lover, Jasbleidy (real-life neighbor Yor Jasbleidy Santos Torres), just to get through every day. Landes uses natural light and sound and no score to add reality to the true story of a once-proud man now imprisoned in his wheelchair and getting the runaround from the state regarding compensation he feels he is owed. Landes (Cocalero) keeps the tale purposefully vague, never giving the details of the legal case or how and why Porfirio was shot, instead telling the story through Porfirio’s mesmerizing eyes, which are filled with a beguiling mixture of pain and mystery. “In one of the deepest moments of the film, Porfirio gazes out the window of his bedroom and, I dare say, we can peak into his very soul,” Landes, who spent five years with his subject, explains in the film’s production notes. “It was the second shot on the first day of the shoot. Although I think we captured many other fine moments, I must admit none matched a shining innocence I saw in his eyes that first day.” Landes was drawn to Porfirio’s story after reading about the extraordinary thing he did, which made him famous in South America and around the world, earning him the nickname the Air Pirate, but the director doesn’t delve into those details either. There’s no past or future for Porfirio, only the present for a compelling man desperate to regain his dignity. Landes will be at MoMA on opening night to participate in a discussion following the 7:00 screening of this small gem.
Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War is one of the bravest, most explosive investigative documentaries you’re ever likely to see. Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated) busts open the military’s dirty little secret, revealing that episodes of horrific sexual abuse such as the Tailhook scandal are not an aberration but a prime example of a rape epidemic that seems to an accepted part of military culture. Dick speaks with many women and one man who share their incredible stories, describing in often graphic detail the sexual abuse they suffered, then faced further abuse when they reported what had happened. Their superiors, some of whom were the rapists themselves, either looked the other way, laughed off their allegations as no big deal, or threatened the victims’ careers. Dick includes remarkable Defense Department statistics — the government admits that approximately one out of every five female soldiers suffers sexual abuse and that there were nineteen thousand violent sex crimes in 2010 alone — even as such military officials as Dr. Kaye Whitley, Rear Admiral Anthony Kurta, and Brigadier General Mary Kay Hertog make absurd claims that they are satisfied with the way they are handling the alarming trend. The central figure in the film is Kori Cioca, a former member of the Coast Guard whose face was broken when she was raped by a superior and now keeps getting denied necessary medical services from the VA. Such courageous women as USAF Airman 1st Class Jessica Hinves, former Marine Officer Ariana Klay, USN veteran Trina McDonald, USMC Lieutenant Elle Helmer, USN Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, and even Special Agent Myla Haider of the Army Criminal Investigation Command also open up about the physical and psychological damage the abuse has left on their lives and careers. Inspired by Helen Benedict’s 2007 Salon.com article “The Private War of Women Soldiers,” Dick and producer Amy Ziering (The Memory Thief) have presented a searing indictment of an endemic military culture that has to come to an end, and fast. The Invisible War, which earned Dick and Ziering this year’s Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center and has been nominated for a Best Documentary Academy Award, is screening February 10 at 12 noon as part of the third annual Athena Film Festival at Barnard College and will be followed by a Q&A with Dick and executive producers Maria Cuomo Cole and Regina Kulik Scully. 
