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WALLS AND BRIDGES — THE ANIMAL VISION: IN CONNECTION WITH THE DRAWING CENTER EXHIBIT “ALEXIS ROCKMAN: DRAWINGS FROM ‘LIFE OF PI’”

Alexis Rockman will discuss his fantastical creations he made, such as the above watercolor, for Ang Lee’s LIFE OF PI in special Walls and Bridges program

The Drawing Center
35 Wooster St. between Grand & Broome Sts.
Thursday, October 17, free, 6:30
www.wallsandbridges.net
www.drawingcenter.org

When making his 2012 hit film Life of Pi, director Ang Lee turned to artist Alexis Rockman to create aquatic species for the central part of the narrative, which takes place on the open sea. Rockman’s watercolor drawings are now on view at the Drawing Center, which is the site for the special October 17 program “The Animal Vision,” part of the third annual Franco-American Walls and Bridges festival. New York native Rockman will discuss his hallucinatory work with Belgian philosopher and ethologist Vinciane Despret; the event will be hosted by Rice University English professor Cary Wolfe (Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory). Rockman’s “Drawings from Life of Pi” continues at the Drawing Center through November 3; in addition, Rockman’s “Rubicon,” consisting of such new paintings as the large-scale “Bronx Zoo” and “Gowanus,” which depict a heavily detailed, surreal animal world, are on view through November 2 at Sperone Westwater. The ten-day Walls and Bridges festival also includes the multimedia presentation “Unrest” October 18 at the Whitney, featuring the live performance “Meurtrière” by Philippe Grandrieux, a screening of Grandrieux’s film White Epilepsy, and a discussion with Grandrieux, Avital Ronell, and Lynne Tillman; “City Shapes,” in which French geographer Michel Lussault and American photographer Matthew Pillsbury discuss the changing urban environment, October 19 at the Aperture Gallery; and the Oh! Oui… company’s music and theater production Stille Nacht October 20 at the Invisible Dog Art Center.

HOPPER DRAWING

Edward Hopper, “Nighthawks,” oil on canvas, 1942 (Friends of American Art Collection, Art Institute of Chicago)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through October 6, $16-$20 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays, 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

There are only five days left to see the most exciting room in any New York City museum right now, the centerpiece of the Whitney’s “Hopper Drawing” exhibit, which continues through Sunday. Although the primary focus of the show is the New York realist’s drawings and preparatory sketches, the well-curated display also includes two of Edward Hopper’s greatest paintings, installed across from each other in a spacious gallery. On one wall hangs Hopper’s most famous work, 1942’s “Nighthawks,” a bravura noir oil of light, shadow, and color in which a lone man and a couple sit at a diner counter being served by a male worker in white. Every detail in the masterful composition, inspired by a Greenwich Village street and, perhaps, the Flatiron Building, is a wonder to observe. Seeing it in this context, the viewer is able to remove all of the meta surrounding the work, the endless parodies, homages, rip-offs, and tributes that keep coming and instead just appreciate the dazzling glory of the original. It’s a genuine treat to see “Nighthawks” in New York, as it’s on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, where it’s been ever since Daniel Catton Rich bought it from Hopper for three thousand dollars shortly after it was completed. On May 13, 1942, Hopper sent a letter to Rich, explaining, “It is, I believe, one of the very best things I have painted. I seem to have come nearer to saying what I want to say in my work, this past winter, than I ever have before.”

Edward Hopper, “Early Sunday Morning,” oil on canvas, 1930 (© Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art)

On the other side of the room, in the corner on a platform, resides one of the other very best things Hopper painted, the Whitney’s own “Early Sunday Morning.” Placed on Hopper’s easel in the corner, echoing the architectural layout in “Nighthawks,” the 1930 oil painting depicts a depression-era Seventh Ave. devoid of people as dawn breaks. Hopper re-creates a horizontal two-story building, the ground floor consisting of closed businesses with blurred names, the second floor comprising apartments with shades drawn at different levels, implying some kind of life going on inside. A fire hydrant and a barbershop pole, along with an unseen element, cast shadows, while an ominous dark rectangle in the upper right corner, contrasting with the blue of the sky, portends to the coming of monstrous skyscrapers that would signal the end of small-town living. The canvas’s deceptive simplicity is both devastating and mesmerizing, worthy of extended viewing that is sure to produce powerful emotional reactions. “Early Sunday Morning” marvelously captures an America teetering between the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal, a moment in time when the future was as uncertain as it’s ever been. Perhaps some of those people missing in “Early Sunday Morning” found themselves still lost a dozen years later, sitting silently in a dark corner diner, wondering where things might have gone wrong. Related drawings, audio, video, and wall text further explore the creative process Hooper employed in both works, including trying to find the precise geographic locations that influenced these majestic paintings, which, seen together, shed even more light on their brilliance.

ROBERT IRWIN — SCRIM VEIL — BLACK RECTANGLE — NATURAL LIGHT, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK (1977)

Robert Irwin’s site-specific “Scrim veil” invites visitors into its many charms and mysteries (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through September 1, $16-$20 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays, 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org
robert irwin photo set

As the Whitney prepares for its move to the Meatpacking District in 2015, it has been combing through its holdings, mounting exhibitions (“Sinister Pop,” “Signs & Symbols,” “Real/Surreal”) that offer new ways to experience works, both familiar and not, from its collection. One significant piece is being brought back for the first and last time, as it was designed specifically for the fourth floor of Marcel Breuer’s building and cannot be shown anywhere else. In 1977, California-based artist Robert Irwin installed “Scrim veil — Black rectangle — Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,” a deceptively simple project made of cloth, metal, black paint, and wood. At one end of the rectangular room is Breuer’s trapezoidal window, streaming in oddly shaped light. A translucent scrim runs the length of the room, hanging from the ceiling, with five and a half feet from the floor to its black metal base, allowing people to easily walk under it. In addition, a black line has been painted along the wall at the same five-and-a-half-foot height, parallel to the base of the scrim. Upon exiting the elevators, visitors are instantly transported into the compelling space, which takes a bit of time to adjust to. “Scrim veil” is something that can’t just be seen but needs to be experienced; it seems to shift with changes in the outside light and as other people make their way around it. The black metal base of the scrim and the black painted line on the walls meld together then break apart, appearing to create morphing physical elements.

Robert Irwin, “Scrim veil — Black rectangle — Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,” cloth, metal, and wood, 1977 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In the original exhibition catalog — “Scrim veil” was part of a larger show — Irwin, who is now eighty-four and still making challenging, fascinating new work, contributed the complex essay “Notes Toward a Model,” in which he explored the nature of form, context, content, perception, abstraction, conception, experience, and response. “There is probably no such thing as a pure naïve perception of the world,” he writes in the heavily illustrated discussion. “As noted earlier, we do not begin at the beginning in such matters but already somewhere in the middle. For example: Conceive in your mind the idea of a straight line (which has only a limited actuality in nature). In extended time consider our ‘straight line’ as the basis for the compounded abstraction known as Euclidean geometry. Again in extended time, consider a world developed and structured in line with our concept — i.e., grid to city; frame and plane to painting — point-to-point as a way of procedure through life. Now, place yourself in the middle of this milieu as the actual (physical) frame of your experiential reference, your reality, and ask yourself, ‘What can I know?’” (The full catalog can be read here.) Indeed, as one travels around the room, losing track of time and space, “Scrim veil” provides personal questions and answers that explore just what it is we might know about our individual and shared environment, both physically and psychologically. Interestingly, although Irwin was against the taking of photographs during the piece’s initial 1977 run, the Whitney is allowing pictures this time around, but don’t get too caught up in trying to snap a good photo and instead just allow yourself to be enveloped in this unique and involving experience, one that will never happen again.

BLUES FOR SMOKE

Rodney McMillian, “Asterisks in Dockery,” mixed-media installation, 2012 (photo by Sheldan C. Collins)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through April 28, $14-$18 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays, 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

In 1960, jazz pianist and composer Jaki Byard released his solo debut, Blues for Smoke, an improvisatory record that features on its cover a train puffing out dark clouds as it makes its way down the tracks. The album lends its name to an exciting multimedia exhibit at the Whitney that examines the impact of the blues on the arts. The show is highlighted by David Hammons’s extraordinary 1989 installation, “Chasing the Blue Train,” which greets visitors on the third floor. A blue train makes its way across tracks that take it through a tunnel covered in coal and a landscape with upturned piano tops as John Coltrane’s 1957 Blue Train album plays from a boom box, the work riffing on Coltrane’s name (coal, train) while celebrating the blues. Zoe Leonard’s “1961, 2002-Ongoing” consists of a row of suitcases of different shades of blue, evoking impermanence and creating a mystery about what might be inside; nearby, Martin Kipperberger’s “Martin, into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself” is a life-size replica of the artist standing in the corner, suffering from a case of the blues. Specially commissioned for the show, Kori Newkirk’s “Yall” consists of a shopping cart nearly completing a circle of blue on the floor, calling to mind exclusion, homelessness, and failed capitalism. Kira Lynn Harris lines a stairwell and entrance with silver Mylar in “Blues for Breuer,” paying tribute to the architect of the Whitney building, which will be taken over by the Met in 2015 when the Whitney moves downtown.

Installation view, Blues for Smoke (photo by Sheldan C. Collins)

Works by Martin Wong, Martin Kipperberger, Zoe Leonard, and others form a blues aesthetic at the Whitney (photo by Sheldan C. Collins)

Curated by Bennett Simpson in consultation with Chrissie Iles, “Blues for Smoke” also features works by Romare Bearden, Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Liz Larner, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rachel Harrison, Mark Morrisroe, Alma Thomas, Beauford Delaney, Kara Walker, William Eggleston, and Lorraine O’Grady, all contributing to the overall examination of the blues aesthetic. A media room includes viewing stations where people can watch classic performances, while Stan Douglas’s “Hors-champs” plays continuously in its own space on the first floor, offering a unique view of a live recording on the front and back of a screen hanging from the ceiling. In addition, the Whitney is hosting a series of live events that continue through the end of the exhibition, which closes April 28, including “Blues for Smoke: Matana Roberts, Keiji Haino, and Loren Connors” on April 20 at 8:00 (featuring a solo performance by Roberts and a duo guitar improvisation by Haino and Connors), “Through the Lens of the Blues Aesthetic: An Evening of Short Films Selected by Kevin Jerome Everson” on April 25 at 7:00, the live concert “Blues for Smoke: Annette Peacock” on April 26 at 7:00, and the three-day “Blues for Smoke: Thomas Bradshaw,” in which the playwright will be creating a new piece that will be shown April 26-28.

WADE GUYTON OS / RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER!

Wade Guyton’s reflective “U” sculptures are a highlight of midcareer survey at the Whitney (photograph by Ron Amstutz)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wade Guyton OS through January 13
Richard Artschwager! through February 3
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

The Whitney is currently home to a pair of splendid exhibitions by two New York City-based artists that relate surprising well to each other despite being, at initial glance, so very different. “Wade Guyton OS” is the first midcareer survey of forty-year-old Indiana native Wade Guyton, who worked with curator Scott Rothkopf to turn the third floor of the Whitney into a kind of three-dimensional personalized computer operating system, featuring more than eighty works, including new site-specific pieces created for the show. The bulk of Guyton’s oeuvre consists of paintings he first develops in Microsoft Word, then prints out on linen using a medium-size Epson UltraChrome inkjet printer. Much is left to chance, as he folds the large-scale linen pieces to fit into the printer, but the material gets caught in the machine, resulting in random rips, tears, streaks, and splotches. He often incorporates letters in his works, including a series of 2006 pieces in which multiple versions of the letter U hover in or over a raging fire, and a 2007 black-and-white series of mangled Xs. He has also used the letter U in a dazzling collection of U-shaped mirrored stainless-steel sculptures containing reflections of one another as well as of the Whitney’s ceiling and floor and the works hanging on the wall nearby, playing with reality and perception, what is real and what is not. Guyton overprints onto pages from books, referencing art history while displaying them in linoleum-lined vitrines meant to evoke the linoleum floor in the kitchen of his studio. In addition, Guyton often uses found objects in his work. “Untitled Action Sculpture (Five Enron Chairs)” comprises five side-by-side Marcel Breuer Cesca chairs that Guyton acquired on eBay. “Untitled Action Sculpture (Chair)” was fashioned from a broken tubular steel Cesca chair he found on the street in the East Village and twisted into a new form. The chairs take on added meaning since Breuer is the architect who designed the Whitney building, which the institution will soon be leaving to head to new digs downtown.

Richard Artschwager, “Exclamation Point (Chartreuse),” plastic bristles on a mahogany core painted with latex, 2008 (© Richard Artschwager / photo by Robert McKeever)

Born in Washington, DC, Artschwager was forty-two when he had his first solo exhibition, at Leo Castelli in 1965, seven years before Guyton was born. Now eighty-nine, Artschwager continues to amass a hard-to-categorize collection of painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation renowned for its use of offbeat materials. His gray paintings on Celotex have a texture that gives them a mysterious sculptural quality. Paintings such as “Plaque” and sculptures such as “Hair Sculpture — Shallow Recess Box” contain rubberized horsehair. And such pieces as “Door II” and “Bookcase III” are made of that classic suburban element, Formica. Guyton’s chairs might actually feel at home at several of Artschwager’s tables, including 1964’s “Description of Table,” composed of melamine laminate on plywood, and 1988’s “Double Dinner,” made of wood, Formica, paint, and rubberized hair that makes it look like it’s alive. In the 1970s, Artschwager concentrated particularly on household objects, compiling nearly one hundred paintings and sculptures of a door, a window, a table, a basket, a mirror, and a rug. Whereas Guyton uses pages from books and magazines in his work, Artschwager has created such pieces as “Bookends,” “Untitled (Book),” and the aforementioned “Bookcase III,” none of which reveals actual pages or covers. And while Guyton uses the letters X and U, Artschwager has fun with quotation marks and, most vibrantly, exclamation points, one of which is composed of plastic chartreuse bristles and dazzles the mind. (Of course, another exclamation point makes its way into the exhibition’s name.) Artschwager also leaves his mark with a series of “blps,” elongated black dots that can be found at various places in the Whitney as well as on and around the High Line, near the Whitney’s future home. While “Wade Guyton OS” and “Richard Artschwager!” are not meant to be a dual exhibition, seeing them together offers fascinating insight into the work of two major artists, several generations apart, who view the world in unique, and at times startlingly similar, ways.

LAST CHANCE: YAYOI KUSAMA

Yayoi Kusama, “Self-Obliteration (Net Obsession Series),” photocollage on paper, ca. 1966

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Sunday, September 30, $18, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org
www.yayoi-kusama.jp
yayoi kusama in new york slideshow

Today’s your last chance to see the Yayoi Kusama retrospective at the Whitney, but you shouldn’t worry too much if you end up missing it, as curator David Kiehl has somehow made the New York edition of this traveling show remarkably dull. Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama moved to New York City in 1957, gaining prominence as a leader in the avant-garde movement through her painting, sculpture, mirror/infinity rooms, and wild happenings. The chronological exhibit begins with such early, more primitive canvases as “Lingering Dream,” “Flower Bud,” and “The Woman,” which only hint at what is to come. The most successful parts of the show feature Kusama’s late-1950s hallucinatory Infinity Net paintings and soft Accumulation sculptures, in which she created a luxurious alternate reality of clothing, furniture, luggage, and other accessories, as well as the photocollages, posters, and twenty-four-minute film associated with her “Self-Obliteration” obsession of putting dots everywhere. In addition, the Whitney has brought back Kusama’s walk-in “Fireflies on the Water” installation, in which individuals get sixty seconds alone in a room of lights, mirrors, plexiglass, and water that seemingly goes on forever. (“Fireflies,” previously displayed at the 2004 Biennial, continues through October 28; be sure to pick up a timed ticket when you enter the museum.) Unfortunately, Kusama’s more recent work, including her acrylic paintings, lack the excitement and originality of much of her previous work, and Kiehl’s decision to focus on all aspects of her career in fairly equal doses makes the show feel less important than it should be. There was more life in the fanciful window displays dedicated to Kusama at the Louis Vuitton flagship store on Fifth Ave., as well as the red and white “Guidepost to the New Space” ladybug-like sculptures along Pier 45 in Hudson River Park and the large “Yellow Trees” billboard on West Fourteenth St. at Ninth Ave. However, there is a lot to be learned about Kusama — who has voluntarily lived in a psychiatric institution since 1977 — in one Whitney gallery that contains letters, photographs, historical information, and other personal paraphernalia, but the works on view just don’t do justice to such an influential and important twentieth-century artist.

SHARON HAYES: THERE’S SO MUCH I WANT TO SAY TO YOU

Sharon Hayes, still from “Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29,” four screen video projection, color, sound 2003 (courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through September 9, $18 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org
www.shaze.info

New York-based multidisciplinary performance artist Sharon Hayes has occupied the third floor of the Whitney with the powerful and engaging “There’s So Much I Want to Say to You.” Comprising older projects with newly commissioned works, all arranged in an invitingly makeshift set designed by Hayes and Andrea Geyer that integrates the private with the public, the installation uses text, video, sound, photography, signage, and spoken-word LPs to expand on Hayes’s idea of “speech acts,” examining the state of political discourse in America since the 1960s. The first thing people see as they enter the space is a long banner that announces, “Now a chasm has opened between us that holds us together and keeps us apart,” but all the words are not visible because of the way the banner is unfurled, setting the stage for a unique journey through the many challenges that accompany free speech. Curated by Chrissis Iles, “There’s So Much I Want to Say to You” includes numerous stations where visitors stop for very different experiences. “Join Us” is a wall of hundreds of political-action flyers dating back more than fifty years and going all the way up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In the four-channel video “Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20, & 29,” Hayes recites audiotapes Patty Hearst made, with Hayes speaking them from memory, an unseen audience correcting every tiny mistake. In “Voice Portraits,” Hayes shows various women on video monitors but has eliminated the sound, taking their voices away, in stark contrast to a nearly hidden piece that projects onto a narrow wall the media’s text-based responses to speeches given by women, concentrating on the quality of the voices instead of the substance of what they said. In “Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time for Love,” Hayes uses speakers and posters to present five lunchtime love letters she performed in front of the UBS building in Midtown Manhattan in September 2007. In “Gay Power,” Hayes and feminist author and activist Kate Millet discuss footage of one of the first gay pride marches through the city. And in “Yard (Sign),” Hayes has reimagined Allan Kaprow’s 1961 “Yard” with political signs ranging from mass-produced declarations of support of political candidates to handwritten cries of help from New Orleans. Intriguingly, Hayes focuses on old-fashioned methods in “There’s So Much I Want to Say to You,” eschewing digital technology in favor of ancient slide projectors and records playing on turntables, with much of the sound crashing together, as if there are many voices trying to speak at once, their messages becoming garbled. The installation closes September 9, right after both conventions have concluded and the race for president heats up, when political discourse reaches massive proportions and the people’s vote, and voice, is, at least in theory, supposed to matter.