Tag Archives: pawel althamer

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE NEW NOW? 40 ARTISTS IN DIALOGUE

Allen Ruppersberg, Who’s Afraid of the New Now?, from the series Preview Suite, 1988. Lithograph, image: 21 3/8 × 13 1/4 in (54.1 × 33.5 cm), sheet: 22 × 13 7/8 in (56 × 35.1 cm). Edition of thirty. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

Allen Ruppersberg, “Who’s Afraid of the New Now?” from the series Preview Suite, lithograph, 1988 (courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Saturday, December 2, and Sunday, December 3, $5 per conversation, 10:00 am – 8:00 pm
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

The New Museum continues its fortieth anniversary celebration with “Who’s Afraid of the New Now? 40 Artists in Dialogue,” two days of free admission to the downtown institution and a fab series of five-dollar artist conversations that require advance purchase here. On Saturday beginning at ten o’clock, every hour on the hour (except for the two o’clock lunch break), you can catch Judith Bernstein and Linda Montano, Paweł Althamer and Cally Spooner, Ragnar Kjartansson and Carolee Schneemann, Hans Haacke and Carsten Höller, Donald Moffett and Nari Ward, George Condo and Jeff Koons, Paul Chan and Carroll Dunham, Thomas Bayrle and Kerstin Brätsch, Raymond Pettibon and Kaari Upson, and Simone Leigh and Lorraine O’Grady. Sunday’s lineup features Cheryl Donegan and Mary Heilmann, Jeremy Deller and Martha Rosler, Paul McCarthy and Andra Ursuta, Elizabeth Peyton and Allen Ruppersberg, Nicole Eisenman and Neil Jenney, Howardena Pindell and Dorothea Rockburne, Bouchra Khalili and Doris Salcedo, Camille Henrot and Anri Sala, Sharon Hayes and Faith Ringgold, and Carol Bove and Joan Jonas. It’s a crazy-good roster of artists who have shown at the museum, which was founded in 1976 by Marcia Tucker and opened at C Space in 1977 before moving to the New School and then 583 Broadway before its grand reopening at 235 Bowery on December 1, 2007. Currently on view are “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” “Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play,” “Petrit Halilaj: RU,” “Helen Johnson: Ends,” “Alex Da Corte: Harvest Moon,” and “Pursuing the Unpredictable: The New Museum 1977–2017” in addition to a special window reinstallation of Bruce Nauman’s 1987 video No, No, New Museum from his Clown Torture series.

SUMMER SOLSTICE CELEBRATION 2014

Socrates Sculpture Park celebrates summer solstice with tenth annual festival

Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Blvd.
Saturday, June 21, free, 5:00 – dusk
718-956-1819
www.socratessculpturepark.org

It’s time to celebrate the longest day of the year, midsummer, on June 21, as festivals take place all over the Northern Hemisphere. In Long Island City, the tenth annual Summer Solstice Celebration in Socrates Sculpture Park consists of a bevy of free activities from 5:00 to dusk, offering the opportunity for the mind, body, and soul to restore their connection to the natural and spiritual worlds. There will be face painting by Agostino Arts, art workshops sponsored by Free Style Arts Association, Materials for the Arts, the Noguchi Museum, and the Queens Museum, a solstice ritual with Urban Shaman Mama Donna, live performances by Andrew Hurst and Shona Masarin, and site-specific sound performances presented by Norte Maar, featuring Tristan Perch; Lesley Flanigan, Maria Chavez, and MV Carbon; Audra Wolowiec; and David Tudor’s Rainforest I by Composers Inside Electronics. While at Socrates, be sure to check out the current exhibitions as well: Žilvinas Kempinas’s “Scarecrow,” Paweł Althamer’s “Queen Mother of Reality,” Meschac Gaba’s “Broadway Billboard: Citoyen du Monde,” and Austin+Mergold’s “Folly: SuralArk.”

PAWEŁ ALTHAMER: THE NEIGHBORS

Visitors can contribute to “Draftsmen’s Congress” through Sunday, then take a piece home with them April 23-27 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Second & fourth floors: Wednesday – Sunday through April 20, $16
Thursday, April 17, 11:00 am – 9:00 pm: one-day exhibition of new sculptures, 231 Bowery, free
April 23-27, “Draftsmen’s Congress” disassembled and distributed to public for free
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

The work of Polish artist Paweł Althamer is very much about collaboration, cooperation, and community, fostering a positive sense of togetherness and sharing without getting treacly. As his first U.S. museum retrospective, “Paweł Althamer: The Neighbors,” winds down at the New Museum, Althamer still has a few surprises in store, as he says in the exhibition catalog, “to share the experience of what we are doing — to see people doing one thing together. . . . The idea is to switch the rules of the game a little so that everybody is included.” Since the show opened back in February, museum visitors and local organizations have been contributing in its evolution, painting on the walls and floors in the participatory, palimpsestual “Draftsmen’s Congress.” The painting will come to a stop on Easter Sunday, but that’s not the end of the piece; from April 23 to 27, the work will be disassembled, cut into pieces, and handed out to visitors free of charge, furthering Althamer’s democratization not only of the creation of art but of its ownership. On April 17, Althamer, whom Joanna Mytkowska’s catalog essay calls “The People’s Artist,” has collaborated with Dogon sculptor Youssouf Dara, the Bowery Mission, and other neighbors for a free one-day exhibition that will be held in the New Museum’s next-door space at 231 Bowery. (Dara’s work can also be seen in the museum’s window display.)

Paweł Althamer’s “Venetians” mix with visitors on the second floor (Courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley)

In addition, the second floor of “The Neighbors” will remain on view through April 20, where museumgoers can walk among dozens of Althamer’s “Venetians,” gray, life-size steel-and-plastic skeletal sculptures of strangers he encountered in the Italian city and made face casts of, with a specific focus on those who often find themselves excluded or marginalized in one way or another. “It’s about being with them and identifying with them,” Althamer tells cocurator Massimiliano Gioni in the catalog. “People are generally scared of outsiders, but if we can confront and then lose our fear, it’s fantastic.” It’s no accident that the figures, which have gathered around eight video screens showing Althamer’s “So-Called Waves and Other Phenomena of the Mind,” in which he films himself in various altered mental states, have an alienlike quality. (The third floor, which closed April 13, featured many sculptural portraits, which he refers to as “totems,” of the artist himself and members of his family, as well as the miniature landscape “Mezalia” and an accompanying film.) Social collaboration is at the heart of Althamer’s practice, and that extends even to museum admission, as visitors can get in free if they bring a new or gently used men’s coat, which will be donated to the Bowery Mission.

STATUESQUE

Aaron Curry’s “Big Pink” and “Yellow Bird Boy” are among ten works in City Hall Park that comment on the history of public statuary (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

City Hall Park
Intersection of Broadway, Chambers St., Centre St., and Park Row
Through December 3
Admission: free
www.publicartfund.org/statuesque
twi-ny slideshow tour

The Public Art Fund’s current exhibition in City Hall Park, “Statuesque,” consists of ten large-scale sculptures by six international artists that look at the tradition of figurative sculpture in different ways. “We’re sort of working in an uncanny oscillation between likeness and abstraction, sort of living history in reverse,” Californian Matthew Monahan said at a Public Art Fund talk about the exhibit in March, “so that sculpture’s walking backwards from abstraction back into a sort of lovely mortal skin.” Monahan’s “Nation Builder” plays off the military statue, as a man carrying a huge weapon and missing the bottom of his legs stands atop two disjointed cubes. English artist Thomas Houseago’s “Red Man” and “Lumpy Figure” are a far cry from classical Greek sculpture, eschewing smoothness for, well, lumpiness, while Polish sculptor Pawel Althamer’s aluminum “Sylwia” strikes an erotic pose lying across the grass. Texas native Aaron Curry creates brightly colored abstract figures reminiscent of Alexander Calder in such pieces as “Big Pink” and “Yellow Bird Boy,” while Pakistani Huma Babha takes on the classic pose of a famous man sitting proudly in a chair in “The Orientalist,” creating a decrepit bronze Dorian Gray character. And London’s Rebecca Warren contributes an out-of-proportion comic-book-like figure in “Large Concretised Monument to the Twentieth Century,” which actually stands guard at one of the park’s entrances, warning everyone who enters that they are not going to be seeing the usual kind of honorary monuments that can be found in parks. The exhibit also includes a cell phone audio tour, with the specific numbers on the green sign accompanying each work.