George Condo, “Red Antipodular Portrait,” oil on canvas, 1996
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Festival of Ideas for the New City: May 4-8
“George Condo: Mental States” through May 8
“Lynda Benglis”: through June 19
Wednesday – Sunday, $12 (Thursdays free 7:00 – 9:00)
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org
www.festivalofideasnyc.com
If you’ve been experiencing difficulty with your mental state these days — and who hasn’t — you can find relief at the New Museum, where “George Condo: Mental States” continues through Sunday. The engaging work of the influential East Village painter is spread across two floors, from the “fake old masters” of his 1980s heyday to lush, large-scale acrylic, charcoal, and pastel on linen pieces that dazzle the mind. Condo displays his expert skill in mimicking, mocking, melding, and honoring myriad styles, whether it’s creating creepy, comic-book-like characters in his Pathos (“The Janitor’s Wife”) and Mania (“Nude Homeless Drinker”) series or a collection of stirring Abstractions (“Nothing Is Important,” “Dancing to Miles”). But the really head-spinning part of the show is on the fourth floor, where dozens of portraits are arranged on one wall in a dizzying array of colors and styles, one after another, serving as a kind of art history course all its own, part Name That Influence, part, well, whatever is going on inside Condo’s brain at the time. If you stare at it long enough, it is sure to blow your mind.
Lynda Benglis, “Phantom,” detail, polyurethane foam with phosphorescent pigments, five elements, 1971 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Lynda Benglis takes visitors on a different kind of head trip with an exciting retrospective — surprisingly, her first in New York — on the New Museum’s second floor and in the lobby gallery, comprising some fifty works, including photography, video, sculpture, and various ephemera. Be careful where you walk, because many of Benglis’s abstract creations, composed of such materials as wax, wood, glitter, latex, paper, cotton bunting, wire, plaster, polyurethane foam, aluminum, lead, and bronze, jut out from the walls and lie across the floor, forming a delicate maze closely watched by guards who will definitely let you know when you get too close. Be on the lookout for “Untitled (VW),” a pigmented polyurethane foam piece that is cut away, giving an inside look at Benglis’s creative process. There are a number of her delightful “fallen paintings,” but the highlight of the show, which runs through June 19, is 1971’s “Phantom,” which consists of five large polyurethane foam abstract works with phosphorescent pigments that glow in the dark when the lights go down.
“After Hours: Murals on the Bowery” is part of Festival of Ideas for the New City
The New Museum is also one of the hosts of this week’s Festival of Ideas for the New City, which begins today with a series of lectures and panel discussions at NYU and the Cooper Union, with such participants as Rem Koolhaas, Vito Acconci, Elizabeth Diller, David Byrne, Kurt Andersen, Jonathan Bowles, Suketu Mehta, Jonathan F. P. Rose, Sergio Fajardo, Antanas Mockus, and Pedro Reyes examining such topics as “The Heterogeneous City,” “The Networked City,” “The Sustainable City,” “Built Environment,” and “Downtown NYC Policy Issues.” On Saturday and Sunday, there will be special projects at locations all over the Lower East Side and the East Village, featuring live performances, film screenings, workshops and demonstrations, site-specific installations, and more. At the New Museum, OMA/Rem Koolhaas’s “Cronocaos” opens May 7, examining the past, present, and future of preservation, construction, and urbanism, while Maya Lin reimagines the Hudson River system in “Pin River-Hudson.” The New Museum is a central part of Saturday’s StreetFest: The institution has collaborated with the Rockwell Group to create “Imagination Playground,” a special area for family activities; teenagers from City-as-School will serve as roving reporters covering the festival; “Let Us Make Cake” will feature video interactions with scale models of the New Museum by such artists as Acconci Studio, Mia Pearlman, Dustin Yellin, Jon Kessler, and Marilyn Minter, projected onto the building’s facade; and, in conjunction with the Art Production Fund, “After Hours: Murals on the Bowery” will be unveiled, in which artists such as Matthew Brannon, Ellen Gallagher, Amy Granat, Mary Heilmann, Barry McGee, Sterling Ruby, Glenn Ligon, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Lawrence Weiner have created murals on roll-down security shutters along Bowery.
In 1961, Barry Mann and Gerry Goffin wrote, “I’d like to thank the guy / who wrote the song / that made my baby / fall in love with me.” The title of that be-bop song, “Who Put the Bomp,” inspired one of music’s first fanzines and later the punk record label Bomp! Records. In their 1999 song “Deceptacon,” the riot grrrl group Le Tigre flipped that question around, asking, “Who took the bomp from the bompalompalomp? / Who took the ram from the ramalamadingdong?” In the song they also dare, “Let me hear you depoliticise my rhyme.” Formed in 1998 by former Bikini Kill leader Kathleen Hanna, zine writer Johanna Fateman, and visual artist Sadie Benning, who was replaced in 2000 by DJ and projectionist JD Samson, Le Tigre challenged the male-dominated world of rock and punk, championing individuality and sexual freedom while redefining gender roles. In 2004, Hanna, Fateman, and Samson set out on a world tour in support of their third and final album, This Island, and asked their lighting designer, Carmine Covelli, to capture it all on film. The result is the engaging Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour, in which Covelli and director Kerthy Fix go onstage, backstage, and behind the scenes as the influential trio heads across four continents and ten countries, playing exciting live shows, meeting the media, taking pictures with Slipknot, revealing what they pack in their luggage, exercising in the gym, and talking about facial hair. They also discuss more serious issues such as gender identity, lesbianism, and their DIY mentality, which flew in the face of the music industry. The seventy-two-minute film, which features live multimedia performances of such songs as “Hot Topic,” “Keep on Livin’,” “Viz,” and “Deceptacon,” is screening on June 7 at 7:30 as part of the Maysles Institute’s monthly “Under the Influence of” series and will be followed by a Q&A with Fix, Hanna, and Fateman.
