Tag Archives: john baldessari

MARCEL DUCHAMP’S “FOUNTAIN” TURNS 100

Marcel Duchamp, “Fountain,” (1950 version of 1917 original), Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition, gift (by exchange) of Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, 1998 (© Artists Rights Society, ARS, New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp)

On Sunday, April 9, at 3:00, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has an extensive collection of works by French ready-made Dada master Marcel Duchamp, will host The Richard Mutt Case, a site-specific performance by members of Pig Iron Theatre Company reenacting the scandal over Duchamp’s most famous piece, the upside-down porcelain urinal known as “Fountain,” which the Society of Independent Artists rejected for an open New York exhibition exactly one hundred years ago. In celebration of the centennial, the museum is offering free entry between 3:00 and 4:00 on Sunday to visitors who say “Richard Mutt” or “R. Mutt,” the name used to sign “Fountain” (it actually says “R. Mutt”), at the admissions desk. The event is being held in conjunction with the exhibition “Marcel Duchamp and the Fountain Scandal,” which continues through December 3. So why is a publication entitled “This Week in New York” hyping something happening in Philadelphia? Well, there are numerous museums around the world participating in the free-admission password homage, including institutions in Beijing, Jerusalem, Stockholm, Basel, London, Kyoto, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin. No New York City museum has officially stated that it will be taking part in the program, which is too bad. But that doesn’t mean you can’t try. Getting rejected could make you empathize a bit with Duchamp, who wrote at the time to his sister, “One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; it was not at all indecent — no reason for refusing it. The committee has decided to refuse to show this thing. I have handed in my resignation and it will be a bit of gossip of some value in New York.” One hundred years later, it is still valuable gossip. (For an additional New York City angle, on April 10, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, a major Duchamp collector located on West Fifty-Seventh St., will open “Marcel Duchamp Fountain: An Homage,” consisting of related works by John Baldessari, Marcel Dzama, Sherrie Levine, Sophie Matisse, Richard Pettibone, Ai Weiwei, and more than two dozen others that were directly influenced by “Fountain,” which went missing many years ago.)

TOM SACHS: TRAINING

Tom Sachs, “Training,” synthetic polymer paint on plywood, 2016 (image courtesy the artist)

The FLAG Art Foundation
545 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., ninth floor
Wednesday, July 6, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
212-206-0220
flagartfoundation.org
www.tomsachs.org

In his operation manual for his 2006 installation “The Island,” New York City native Tom Sachs quotes Yoda: “Do, or do not. There is no try.” Sachs does. And he has a lot of fun doing it. The Bennington College graduate takes a DIY approach to his art, displaying a wry sense of humor in such works as “Chanel Guillotine,” “Prada Toilet,” “Nutsy’s McDonald’s,” “Barbie Slave Ship,” and “Hello Kitty Nativity.” In 2008, he went up against the Neistat brothers in a hilarious power boat race. In 2012, he staged an intricately planned trip to the red planet in his massive interactive Park Avenue Armorny exhibition “Space Program: Mars,” which was later turned into a 2016 film. Currently, “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1996 – 2016” welcomes visitors to the Brooklyn Museum, while “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” offers an immersive experience at the Noguchi Museum. On July 6, Sachs will be at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea, activating “Training,” his contribution to the group show “Summer School,” which consists of playful works by such artists as John Baldessari, Dan Colen, Tara Donovan, Mark Grotjahn, Tony Matelli, Marilyn Minter, Vik Muniz, and Ugo Rondinone. “Training” is a helicopter rescue game / wall sculpture that involves riddles and such game pieces as a bag of McDonald’s fries and an Apollo command module. Sachs and his studio team will participate in a live tournament that will put the finishing touches on the work. Admission is free, but advance RSVP is recommended; as a bonus, whiskey and wine will be served. The tournament starts at 7:00, but be sure to get there at 6:30 to check out “Summer School” as well as the tenth-floor exhibit, Patricia Cronin’s “Shrine for Girls, New York.”

MOTION(LESS) PICTURES, PGM. 1: LA JETÉE AND CHAFED ELBOWS

Chris Marker’s LA JETÉE is a postapocalyptic thriller about movies and memory, told almost exclusively through still images

LA JETÉE (Chris Marker, 1962) and CHAFED ELBOWS (Robert Downey Sr., 1966)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Friday, February 28, 7:30
Series runs February 28 – March 4
212-505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

“Photography is truth,” Michel Subor tells Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, “and cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.” Anthology Film Archives explores the relationship between photography and cinema — films are called “movies” for a reason — in the new series “Motion(less) Pictures,” five days of films that make innovative use of still images in telling their stories. The festival begins February 28 at 7:30 with the inspired pairing of two wildly different low-budget, experimental works, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Robert Downey Sr.’s Chafed Elbows. Marker’s nearly half-hour postapocalyptic dystopian thriller is set in a world that calls “past and future to the rescue of the present.” Told almost completely in dark, eerie black-and-white photographs — the camera moves only once, pulling back on the opening establishing shot of the titular pier at Paris’s Orly airport, and at another point a woman opens her eyes in bed — La Jetée explores time and memory as a WWIII survivor (Davos Hanich) in the underground Palais de Chaillot galleries revisits an event that occurred with a woman (Hélène Chatelain) on the jetty. The film, referred to in the credits as “un photo-roman,” is narrated by Jean Négroni, with the only dialogue occasional unintelligible whispering by the German scientists in charge of the mysterious operation; the soundtrack also includes lush music from Trevor Duncan and a repeated thumping that mimics heartbeats. The film explores both art as memory and memory as art as well as the cinema itself; Marker (Sans Soleil, Le joli mai) references Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo when the man and woman look at the rings of a Sequoia tree, while La Jetée has gone on to influence such films as Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, the Matrix trilogy, and countless other movies and videos. It’s a mesmerizing work that brings fresh insight upon each viewing.

Walter Dinsmore (George Morgan) is harassed by a church sock sniffer (Elsie Downey) in Robert Downey Sr.’s hyperactive cinematic collage, CHAFED ELBOWS

“What’s the difference between fiction and nonfiction?” Dr. Oliver Sinfield (Lawrence Wolf), also known as Baldy, asks in Downey’s Chafed Elbows. “About a dollar,” his oddball patient, Walter Dinsmore (George Morgan), responds. Where La Jetée is enigmatic and foreboding, Chafed Elbows is crazy and hyperactive. The hour-long film, consisting of still images and live action that shifts between color and black-and-white in manic collages, follows the wacky adventures of Walter as he suffers through his annual November and January breakdowns in New York City. He has sex with his mother (Elsie Downey, Robert’s wife, who plays all the women in the movie), gives birth to money via a Caesarean through his hip, encounters a sock sniffer, shoots a cop, becomes an actor and a singer, and meets the Virgin Mary and St. Peter. Along the way, Downey (Putney Swope, Greaser’s Palace) takes on art, psychiatry, incest, race relations, sexual obsession, health care, the NYPD (which is thanked in the credits for being a “hindrance”), and the Hollywood system — the film is so low budget that he had it developed at a local drugstore. He also shares an inside joke when Walter stops by a theater that advertises Downey’s Sweet Smell of Sex, prints of which are now lost. Most of the film is dubbed extremely poorly (on purpose), with Wolf providing thirty-four voices, each one more playfully annoying than the last. And Downey is relentless in his skewering of clichés; when Dinsmore comes upon a man painting a white line down the middle of an alley street, the man says, “You gotta draw the line somewhere.” Like La Jetée, Chafed Elbows is also an examination of the past, present, and future of the art of cinema, pushing boundaries while refusing to draw any lines; they are seemingly two widely disparate works that strangely have more in common than one might think when seen together. “Motion(less) Pictures” continues through March 4 with screenings of films by Lynda Benglis, Peter Bo Rappmund, John Baldessari, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Godard, Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow, Morgan Fisher, and others.

VISUAL AIDS: POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE 2014

Art lovers and collectors crowd in and take notes at VIP preview for sixteenth annual Postcards from the Edge benefit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
January 24 preview party: $50 (includes two raffle tickets), 5:00 – 8:00
January 25-26, suggested admission $5 (all works $85)
www.visualaids.org

On your mark, get set . . . The sixteenth annual Visual AIDS Postcards from the Edge benefit sale takes place this weekend, offering art connoisseurs, beginning collectors, and just about anyone else the opportunity to purchase an original piece of art by a major, internationally renowned artist — for a mere eighty-five dineros. On Saturday from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm and Sunday from 12 noon to 4:00, folks will be lining up to get into Luhring Augustine in Chelsea, where upwards of 1,500 postcard-size works of art are expected to be available. The only catch is that you find out who the artist is after you buy the 4×6 drawing, painting, photograph, collage, sculpture, print, etc., as the creator signs the back, not the front, and you need to pay for it before seeing which artist you got. On Saturday, if you buy four, you get a fifth free; on Sunday, every two purchases gain you a free third postcard. Admission is a suggested five dollars on Saturday and Sunday; you can get a sneak peek at the art on Friday night at the VIP Preview, where for fifty bucks you can check out the works on display, write down the numbers of the ones you want, and make a beeline straight to the cashier on Saturday while everyone else is surveying the merchandise and making their choices. (Stay away from #1000, as that one’s ours.) You also get raffle tickets that could get you first pick or allow you to ask one question about any work of art on the wall. (There’s a silent online auction going on right now as well.) Of course, it’s hard to go wrong when the participating artists include Vito Acconci, Catherine Opie, Glenn Ligon, Justin Vivian Bond, Ed Ruscha, Zarina Hashmi, Lorraine O’Grady, Trevor Winkfield, Fred Wilson, Sarah McEneaney, Robert Longo, Penelope Umbrico, Joel Shapiro, Julie Mehretu, John Baldessari, Roger Hiorns, Rob Wynne, Lesley Dill, John Kelly, Kerry James Marshall, William Wegman, Guido Van Der Werve, Matthew Buckingham, Donald Baechler, Jim Hodges, John Waters, Maria Elena Gonzalez, Marcel Dzama, Kiki Smith, Ernesto Pujol, Milton Glaser, Kay Rosen, Lawrence Weiner, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Harmony Hammond, Danh Vo, and Barbara Takenaga. All proceeds go to Visual AIDS, whose mission for more than twenty-five years has been to “utilize art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.”

STATE OF MIND: NEW CALIFORNIA ART CIRCA 1970

Paul Kos, “Sound of Ice Melting,” two twenty-five-pound blocks of ice, eight boom microphone stands, mixer, amplifier, two large speakers, and cables, 1970/2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Bronx Museum of the Arts
1040 Grand Concourse at 165th St.
Thursday – Sunday through September 8, free, 11:00 am – 6:00 (8:00 on Fridays)
718-681-6000
www.bronxmuseum.org

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a group of West Coast artists developed an evolving brand of California Conceptualism that incorporated environmental concerns and social interaction into works that explored consumer culture and the changing political landscape with a wry sense of humor while redefining what art is and could be. Originally mounted as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time series, “State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970” continues at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through September 8, comprising approximately 150 paintings, drawings, photographs, video, performances, and installation from 60 artists. Curators Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss have arranged the splendidly designed exhibit into such thematic sections as “The Street,” “Public and Private Space,” “The Body and Performance,” “Language and Wordplay,” and “Feminism and Domestic Space,” offering an exciting, well-paced tour of a California avant-garde immersed in the counterculture revolution of the era.

Visitors are encouraged to walk through Barbara T. Smith’s “Field Piece” and trip the light fantastic (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

For “Hair Transplant,” Nancy Buchanan exchanged body hair with Robert Walker. For “California Map Project,” John Baldessari spelled out the name of the state using geographic formations. Visitors can walk into Bruce Nauman’s immersive “Yellow Room (Triangular)” and prance through Barbara T. Smith’s “Field Piece,” lighting up nine-foot-tall blades of grass made of translucent resin. For her “Sitting Still” series, Bonnie Sherk took a seat in public places as people passed her by. Lowell Darling offers visitors a diploma from the Fat City School of Finds Art. Allen Ruppersberg Sunset Boulevard “Al’s Grand Hotel” is partially re-created, a 1971 project in which people could actually rent rooms and become part of the art. One of the highlights of the exhibit is a trio of video monitors showing cutting-edge, experimental short films by Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, and Nauman that subvert the traditional nature of the creative process. For “Sound of Ice Melting,” Paul Kos surrounds a block of ice with eight microphones, which make the ice a kind of celebrity with not a whole lot to say. Other artists featured in the show are William Wegman, Martha Rosler, Ed Ruscha, Lynn Hershman, David Hammons, Eleanor Antin, Terry Fox, Allan Kaprow, and Bas Jan Ader, who literally died for his art. Although State of Mind” is a snapshot of a very specific period in the history of twentieth-century American art, it also reveals how these conceptualists not only captured the zeitgeist of the times but opened a wide artistic path for the future. The Bronx Museum is open Thursday through Sundays, and admission is always free. This week’s First Fridays program features live performances and special screenings from participants in the “Bronx Calling” Second AIM Biennial, which consists of works by such emerging New York area artists as Allison Wall, Diana Shpungin, Alejandro Guzmán, Daniele Genadry, and Alan and Michael Fleming. The evening will include Katie Cercone’s ritual-based “Queen$ Domin8tin,” Alicia Grullon’s “Cold War Karaoke Night” in which the audience can reenact cold war speeches, and the Flemings’ “Objects and Extensions,” a dance piece in which the brothers integrate their bodies into the architecture of the museum.

ARTWORK OF THE DAY: “DWARF AND RHINOCEROS (WITH LARGE BLACK SHAPE)” BY JOHN BALDESSARI

John Baldessari, “Dwarf and Rhinoceros (with Large Black Shape),” detail, archival inkjet prints mounted on Lexan with inset aluminum frame, latex paint, archival inkjet print mounted on plexiglass, 1989/2013 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“I’ve got to say, I don’t like being labeled a California artist, or a Los Angeles artist, or a Conceptual artist,” John Baldessari told us last year in a wide-ranging twi-ny talk. “I just like it to be artist.” The artist is back at Marian Goodman with a solo show that reinstalls a trio of works first seen in 1987-89, three rooms that feature Baldessari’s unique way of combining painting, photography, and sculpture; words, image, and meaning; the real world and its cinematic equivalent; and humanity and the animal kingdom. “Dwarf and Rhinoceros (with Large Black Shape)” (“Ni por Esas/ Not Even So: John Baldessari,” Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1989) focuses on a black-and-white photo of a little man, seemingly squeezed into a rectangular frame, looking up and pointing at a rhino in the wild. “Two Stories (Yellow and Blue) and Commentary (with Giraffe)” (“Magiciens de la Terre,” Centre Georges Pompidou and Grande Halle La Villette, Paris, 1989) includes a giraffe emerging from a corner, facing a cross of pop-culture images. And “The Difference Between Fête and Fate” (“John Baldessari,” Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli, Italy, 1987) consists of striking photographs of people and animals, including polar bears, an owl, and a burning man. The eponymously titled exhibition continues in Midtown through August 23.

DO IT (OUTSIDE)

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Sculpture for Strolling” serves as a kind of centerpiece of “do it (outside)” exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Blvd.
Through July 7, free
718-956-1819
www.socratessculpturepark.org

Art is usually not about following the rules, but the “do it” series of international exhibitions is indeed based on specific instructions laid out by an ever-growing number of established artists. Twenty years ago, artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist came up with an idea for an evolving, perennially in-progress exhibition in which these instructions would be interpreted by emerging artists and community groups in local displays. Even the rules have rules, including “There will be no artist-created ‘original’ and “Each interpreted instruction must be fully documented.” The latest such show continues through this weekend at Socrates Sculpture Park, where the very first fully outdoor iteration of “do it” in a public venue opened in May. Set in a white-tented walkway designed by Christoff : Finio Architecture, “do it (outside)” features instructions from more than sixty artists, some of which are meant specifically for the viewer to enact, and others that are interpreted in the park, but all of which are meant to exist only for the length of the show. Lars Fisk has constructed a trio of Ai Weiwei’s “CCTV Sprays,” which can spray-paint over surveillance cameras. Becky Sellinger realizes Paul McCarthy’s backyard trench of silver buckets and body parts used as paintbrushes. An unidentified artist has created Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Sculpture for Strolling,” consisting of wet newspapers formed into a giant sphere; if someone wants to keep the object, they must wire $3,000 into a foreign bank account. Anyone can rent Anibal López’s “For Rent” sign for $20 a day, as long as they replace it with a nondigital picture of it.

Grayson Revoir followed Darren Bader instructions to “glue a [rectangular] table to the sky [table top up, somewhere not too close to the sky’s zenith]” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Katie Mangiardi danced with a large piece of chalk as per Joan Jonas’s “Instruction.” Grayson Revoir built Darren Bader’s description of gluing a table to the sky, cleverly using a mirrored surface. Jory Rabinovitz created David Lynch’s “Do It: How to Make a Ricky Board,” which comes with a poem from the filmmaker. Shaun Leonardo’s interpretation of Bruce Nauman’s “Body Pressure” asks that you press yourself against a cement wall until your mind removes the wall; “This may become a very erotic exercise,” Nauman points out. Ernesto Neto’s “Watching birds fly, the game of the three points” encourages visitors to follow the flight of birds flying above, noting, “flying insects are pretty good too, a bit more nervous though.” There are also instructions from Tracey Emin, John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt, Joan Jonas, Anna Halprin, Yoko Ono, Rivane Neuenschwander, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, William Forsythe, Tacita Dean, Christian Marclay, Robert Morris, Martha Rosler, Tomas Saraceno, Nancy Spero, and others, some more philosophical and less physical than others. The show comes down on Sunday, July 7, when it will have to follow rule number 5: “At the end of each do it exhibition the presenting institution is obliged to destroy the artworks and the instructions from which they were created, thus removing the possibility that do it artworks can become standing exhibition pieces or fetishes.” (Also on view in the park right now are Heather Rowe’s “Beyond the Hedges [Slivered Gazebo],” Chitra Ganesh’s “Broadway Billboard: Her Nuclear Waters,” and Toshihiro Oki architect pc’s “FOLLY: tree wood.”)