Left: The Radio City Music Hall marquee. (Photo: Matthew Carasella) Right: Antony and the Johnsons onstage. (Photo: Todd Eberle)
IT’S OFFICIAL! The Museum of Modern Art is now in the entertainment business. Mark Thursday, January 26, as the night MoMA departed its acoustically challenged home for the sacred ground of Radio City Music Hall. The reason: a one-night-only performance of Swanlights, a visually and vocally elevating concert by Antony and his Johnsons, a sextet that expanded into a sixty-piece orchestra for their appearance on one of the biggest and most storied stages on earth.
Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Liberace, Liza with a z, the Grammys, the Tonys, and, of course, the Rockettes have all trodden its boards (along with the camels and goats in its Christmas and Easter pageants). Personally, I regard David Bowie’s spectacular, drop-from-the-flies entrance as Ziggy Stardust there in 1973 as one of the great thrills of my life—an event also recalled on Thursday by Tilda Swinton, for whom it is less memory than legend.
The striking We Need to Talk About Kevin star, clad in a silky, red plaid, Haider Ackermann jacket and white blouse, was among a select group of fifty or so guests invited to a preshow reception in a breathtaking, triple-height, Deco lounge upstairs. In town to help promote a show of celebrity portrait paintings that her paramour Sandro Kopp had opened at Lehmann Maupin Gallery’s Chrystie Street outpost the night before, she spoke of her upcoming vampire movie with Jim Jarmusch and her delectable sense of style. “I’ve been wearing all white lately,” she told Terence Koh, who dressed for the occasion in a fluffy white angora coverlet of his own design. “Yeah, me too,” he said.
Left: MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach with artist Sandro Kopp, Antony, and Tilda Swinton. Right: Artist Terence Koh. (Except where noted, all photos: Linda Yablonsky)
“Have you seen the kitchen here?” asked Michael Stipe, sidling up to MoMA’s associate director Kathy Halbreich, who produced the show with MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach. “It’s fabulous.”
So was everything else about this high-wattage, Downtown Goes to Heaven evening, the social event of the year (so far). With it, Biesenbach may now claim to be the Sol Hurok of performance art. (Rumor has it that he snagged Kraftwerk for an appearance at MoMA later this year.) Rubbing shoulders with collectors Dasha Zhukova and Beth Swofford, choreographer Michael Clark, actor Alan Cumming, hotelier André Balazs, and MoMA director Glenn Lowry, the white-haired museo-showman worked the room as if born to schmooze.
According to Halbreich, Radio City had been Antony’s choice of venue for the show, advertised as “a meditation on light, nature, and femininity.” The decision followed two years of discontent centering on the singer’s wish to perform as a body floating among large crystals in a pool set in the museum’s atrium. “I think he is divine and heartbreaking,” Halbreich said. She also displayed an e-mail Hegarty had sent earlier in the day. “This could be my Hindenburg,” it said of the show.
Not a chance. At curtain time, ushers were still wrangling a capacity crowd of six thousand rain-soaked ticket holders into the amber glow of the theater, accompanied by William Basinski’s celestial electronica. Biesenbach and Halbreich slipped into the row in front of me, beside Wendi Murdoch and Zhukova. Matthew Barney and Björk were a few seats away, in front of Swinton and Kopp, Thomas Dozol and Stipe, with Jennifer McSweeney, Roberta Smith, and Jerry Saltz behind them and Biesenbach’s mentor Alanna Heiss a few rows forward.
Left: MoMA director Glenn Lowry, MoMA deputy director Kathy Halbreich, and Björk. Right: Adi from threeASFOUR.
The house lights went down and a heavily made-up Dr. Julia Yasuda, Ph.D., came onstage to read a missive from the star that dedicated the show to Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender figure active in the Stonewall days who inspired the name of Antony’s band. Johanna Constantine, a dancer, stepped before the immense gold curtain, flapping the white, wing-like appendages affixed to her arms with increasing velocity, as if she were a bird revving for takeoff. She raised her arms triumphantly, the curtain went up, and rotating skeins of green light expanded and contracted in the air above the stage like constellations of undulating green nets. “Reminds me of Pipilotti Rist,” someone sitting nearby whispered.
A giant mobile that suggested a loose aggregate of white and metallic box kites—crystalline forms from drawings by Antony, who has a show of them at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles now—descended from the flies behind the projections, as the unseen orchestra sounded the first notes of “The Rapture.” Antony’s ethereal voice wafted through the hall, but it was a few minutes before his statuesque figure, clad in a flowing white robe by Ohne Titel, and dwarfed by the mammoth mobile, emerged from a shadowy murk beneath it.
Though hardly self-conscious as a vocalist, Antony may be the shyest performer in show business, so determined is he to avoid the glare of a spotlight. There wasn’t one. (“No one wants to see the face of an old drag queen,” Antony, forty-one, has said to friends.) Standing alone onstage, he sang in shadow for most of the two-hour concert, frustrating those longing for a better look at the source of his emotive vocals, and pleasing others happy to find themselves in the realm of pure spirit.
Clearly, it was Antony’s intent to make his inimitable, sweet voice the star of the show, while the laser blasts (by Chris Levine) and the lighting design (by Paul Normandale) provided the visual dazzle. Running through torch songs, ballads, and laments at a leisurely pace, Antony sang of love, ghosts, darkness, and grace, reaching transcendent moments during favorites like “Cripple and the Starfish,” or “I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy,” when Antony became a stark silhouette against a backlit scrim.
Antony performs Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” at Radio City Music Hall in New York, January 26, 2012.
His surprise cover of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” delivered a dreamy meditation instead of a thumping rouser. It drew cheers from an audience so rapt and reverent, it might as well have been in church. For the final two numbers, the scrims that had so far shortened the stage lifted, as did the pendulous mobile, revealing the orchestra and bathing Antony in bright light at last. “It worked!” exclaimed Biesenbach. “The curtain went up! It actually worked!” (At rehearsal, he said, nothing had gone according to plan.) The show ended with “The Crying Light,” an aching love song that fades out on the lines “I was born to adore you / As a baby in the blind / I was born to represent you / To carry your head into the sun / To carve your face into the back of the sun.”
The audience rose from its trance and the hall erupted in bravos. “Thank you,” Antony said. “That’s the show—and I’m so fucking glad it’s done!” That got a very big laugh—relief all around. “It was so ambitious, this production,” he added. More cheers. The curtain fell but everyone remained on their feet, applauding and waiting for an encore. None came.
“It’s $8,000 a minute for overtime here,” Halbreich said, as the aisles filled with lingerers. Union stagehands started striking the set.
Left: Rufus Wainwright. Right: Artists Space director Stefan Kalmar with Clarissa Dalrymple.
In the downstairs lounge, Lady Bunny, Joey Arias, Agosto Machado, Taboo!, and several drag queens made the afterparty feel like a reunion of Antony’s Blacklips pals at the Pyramid Club of the early 1990s. Rufus Wainwright scooted through the room, recalling his own past show at Radio City. Filmmaker Charles Atlas, who recently completed a feature-length performance documentary with Antony, was all smiles. Steven Hegarty, Antony’s brother, introduced himself to Björk, who will soon bring her whiz-bang, iPad-driven show, Biophilia, to Roseland. “Wasn’t Antony great?” Hegarty asked. “I think this is a big step up for him,” the Icelandic diva replied.
Finally, Antony descended the stairs and was immediately showered with flowers and hugs. “Isn’t it amazing? My whole family is here!” said Antony, looking dazed. Asked if I could photograph them together, he retreated behind a column. “Oh, but that’s so private,” he said.
Yet this very public evening reminded me of New York in the old days, when such glam gatherings—the American premiere of Einstein on the Beach at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976, or the 1981 opening of Diego Cortez’s “New York/New Wave” show at PS1—marked seismic shifts in our culture. Swanlights didn’t quite do that. But it did make magic—no small feat in a world so badly in need of it.
— Linda Yablonsky
Left: Lady Bunny with artist Charles Atlas. Right: Artist Laurel Nakadate.
Left: Artist Francesco Vezzoli with Kate Moss. Right: Alexandre and Victor Carril. (All photos courtesy of Prada)
AT 8:30 PM LAST TUESDAY, I arrived at the invitation-only dinner for the 24 h Museum behind two good-looking fellows who also had forgotten their invites and thus had to wait outside for the keeper of the guest list. There was something nice—can we call this consolation?—in knowing that for at least a brief moment an art critic was on equal footing with twins Alexandre and Victor Carril, Paris’s latest enfants terribles. Their attendance was not surprising. During the recent men’s fashion week in Milan, the brothers had walked the catwalk for Prada alongside other actors in a show the fashion house had described as a “parody of male power.”
“Parody” was the theme of this evening, the opening of a fly-by-night museum, conceived by Francesco Vezzoli and Rem Koolhaas’s OMA/AMO with the support of Prada, inside Auguste Perret’s Palais d’Iena, just around the corner from the venerable Musée d’Art Moderne. “Conceptually speaking, this is a parody of a baroque feast.” That’s how Vezzoli described the project to Hans Ulrich Obrist in an interview from the slick press pamphlet. The OMA/AMO team made similar comments. The four spaces of gallery, staircase, cinema, and “Salon des refuses” were meant to destabilize the austere neoclassicism of the Palais (erected between 1936 and 1946), a building whose staid appearance befitted its use for government bureaucracy. You have to hand it to Prada, OMA, and Vezzoli for consistency across the brand.
Inside, the first casualty in a night practically defined by them was some poor woman whose ravishing heels did not agree with the fuchsia shag carpet laid on the concrete entrance stairs (no doubt as a parody of the red carpet). Her crash seemed like pay dirt for the scores of trigger-happy paparazzi.
Left: Vogue editor Anna Wintour, Condé Nast chairman Jonathan Newhouse, and Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani. Right: Marianne Faithfull and Kate Moss.
Whatever its guise, the concept of parody always implies a distance from the object of ridicule. Without this separation, the parodist risks becoming his or her own subject. Upon entering the pink, fluorescent cage that was the theatrical backdrop for the evening’s meal, I looked around for this elusive parody. Was it sitting next to Catherine Deneuve, cigarette in hand? Or maybe at the table with Miuccia Prada and Louis Garrel? Or perhaps it was hiding in Kate Moss’s stunning gray fur jacket or in Salma Hayek’s six-inch stilettos?
Eventually, though, it became clear that the whole spectacle was no different from any other opening dinner I’ve had the honor of attending, save for the fact I was seated with fashion editors (Anna Wintour, Alexandra Shulman), actors (Isabelle Huppert, Diane Kruger), and models rather than dealers, curators, and artists (apologies to Alfred Pacquement and Carsten Höller, who were among the token representatives of the art world). That and the food and tableware were better. This Milanese cenacolo via Paris and Rotterdam made no mockery of the baroque feast outside of the caricature already inherent in such art-fashion gatherings; it was its contemporary updating, gluttony and egomania included.
Around 11 PM, as the B-list invitees began to congregate outside the cage for the nightlong party and as the A-listers snuck away to their drivers, I saw some curious onlookers snapping pictures of those of us still lingering inside. It was only at this awkward conjunction of la foule with le demimonde that the tragedy of the 24 h Museum truly emerged. Beyond the fact that navel-gazing here had reached such epic proportions that you didn’t even need the semblance of a critical project—just the three D’s (dinner, drinks, and dancing)—to create a work of art, the descending hierarchy of events from VIP dinner to members-only party to press walkthrough to public tours replicated seamlessly and without comment the unjust inequity of society at large. Um . . . Parody?
Left: The crowd at the 24 h Museum. Right: Catherine Deneuve and Melvil Poupaud.
It remains an open question whether 24 h Museum is no more than highly stylized party decor organized around the theme of the museum or a cynical artwork that riffs on artists’ installations by the likes of Duchamp or Fontana or Broodthaers to prop up a dystopian “museum without walls” in which Fashion is both the beginning and the end.
However, I’ll give one thing to Signora Prada and Signori Koolhaas and Vezzoli. They throw a great party. At some point between midnight and 4 AM, when the music was driving and the alcohol flowing, a friend asked me if I wanted to check out Kate Moss at the turntables or instead get another (free) drink. I didn’t even have to think: Given the choice between celebrity and champagne, I’ll take du champ every time.
— Paul Galvez
Left: Judy Chicago's fireworks. Right: Artist Judy Chicago.
“LOS ANGELES IS POTENTIAL,” said dealer Thomas Duncan. It was the first weekend of his new gallery as well as his first fair, Art Los Angeles Contemporary. “New galleries open every week in New York, but starting in LA feels special.” This past weekend was marked by a whole host of beginnings, including the launch of the Getty and LAXART’s Pacific Standard Time Performance Festival and the opening of Matthew Marks’s pristine new West Coast space.
This array of special events is a new turn for Los Angeles, another coming of age in what’s becoming a series of coming of ages. Ours is, after all, a city perpetually in the throes of self-realization. The fair, now in its third edition, felt downright manageable this year—in a good way. And the dealers seemed to be selling: Thomas Solomon’s booth was hectic, to say the least, and Night Gallery, with its raspberry sherbet carpet and broken-mirrored bed (the latter by Samara Golden), attracted its own (buying) crowds, with both the Hammer Museum and Dean Valentine gunning for a Peter Harkawik light box. (Valentine got there first.)
I saw (almost!) every booth before heading to catch the much-anticipated opening of Matthew Marks’s LA gallery in West Hollywood. Inaugurated with a show by Ellsworth Kelly, the new space is all Space Odyssey—nearly totemic in its futuristic coolness, with its high ceilings cut with long narrow shafts for the skylights. I walked across the street with the building’s architect, Peter Zellner, to admire the Kelly-designed facade: The gallery’s long white front is graced with a forty-foot-wide, five-thousand-pound black bar floating along the top. Zellner parlayed a story about a little old Russian lady who pointed out the black bar as she walked by: “So, what’s it going to say?”
Left: The crowd at the opening of the new Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles. (Photo: Amy Duran/Juxtapoz Magazine) Right: Exterior view of Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles with sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly. (Photo: Joshua White/Matthew Marks Gallery)
Back in the car, I headed to the classy Tower Bar along the trashy Sunset Strip for the dinner in honor of the eighty-eight-year-old luminary. This was one of a whole series of prandial celebrations that also included a luncheon at LACMA for a retrospective of Kelly’s prints and a more intimate dinner in which Kelly painted actress Catherine Keener’s face. At the Tower Bar, I sat at a back table and tried to register who was who: artists Jeff Wall, Robert Gober, and Jennifer Bolande were present, as were collectors Tony Ganz, the Rales, and Rosette Delug; writers A. M. Homes and Rachel Kushner; and a quartet of museum directors: the Getty’s James Cuno, LACMA’s Michael Govan, the Hammer’s Annie Philbin, and the Guggenheim’s Richard Armstrong. I slipped out a little early alongside artist Mark Bradford around the time Kelly’s partner Jack Shear commenced a hearty Happy Birthday to collector Alan Hergott.
Saturday found me rushing to Pomona to catch three performances as part of the PST Performance Festival. This particular triad was set in conjunction with Glenn Phillips and Rebecca McGrew’s three-exhibition gem “It Happened in Pomona,” which chronicles Pomona College’s incredibly rich anni mirabiles, 1969–73. I sadly missed John White’s piece, featuring football players stripping and then playing up close inside the gym. And since I arrived too late to secure a seat in the public bleachers, I instead made my way to the other side of the field where the bleachers looked empty. (Apparently we weren’t actually supposed to be there, but if you look like you know where you’re going when you trot past security guards, it sort of works.) Curator McGrew was kind enough not to toss us out, and we ended up watching Judy Chicago’s pyrotechnic extravaganza with Chicago herself, who, in case you didn’t know, is a totally badass lady. She shot off stories and cracked jokes as we waited for the spectacle to start.
Left: Dealer Thomas Duncan. Right: Artists Jedediah Caesar and Stanya Kahn.
The stadium lights flicked off and seconds later the flares sparked in unison, revealing the shape of a butterfly writ large across the field. As the first fireworks exploded bright and white in the air, Chicago called out, “That’s the biggest orgasm in the world!” The butterfly flapped and fluttered with occasional (orgasmic) firework fusillades.
As the lights flicked back on in the stadium, I rushed to the next performance, a re-creation of a site-specific piece that James Turrell made at Pomona in the early 1970s. Huddled in a field, we watched as flares flickered on behind the neoclassical building’s columns. Hearing some fire truck sirens, I followed Turrell as he strode down to the road. He was met there by former Pomona professor Roland Reiss in a kind of jokey reenactment of the fire department showing up the last time Turrell did this piece (in 1971). After exchanging a few friendly words with the firemen, Turrell was beset by old friends and well-wishers. A question, surely a common one, arose from the crowd about Turrell’s long-delayed, forty-year, multimillion-dollar Roden Crater. “I swore I was going to open it in the year 2000,” Turrell said, “and I’ll be damned if I’m not sticking to it.”
Left: Roland Reiss and James Turrell. Right: Night Gallery's Mieke Marple and Davida Nemeroff.
I got back in the car and headed west again to Chinatown to catch Eli Hansen’s opening at the Company and then scurried to a dinner at the elegant townhouse of M+B gallery’s Benjamin Trigano, hosted by Trigano himself along with China Art Objects and American Contemporary. The walls of his Hancock Park place are festooned with vintage photographs and works of contemporary art (Walead Beshty, Raymond Pettibon, Rashid Johnson), with waist-high towers of books throughout; it’s the kind of place you (or at least I) want to live in when you grow up.
I ate quickly and then bolted over to Liz Glynn’s Black Box, a speakeasy and performance venue open late every night of the PST festival, arriving just in time to catch artist-musician Brendan Fowler perched over his keyboard before a packed house. I looked around and recognized nearly every face—some of my favorite artists, curators, writers, musicians, and scoundrels from around Los Angeles, all in one place. Getty curator Glenn Phillips was surrounded by artists: Glynn next to Ry Rocklen next to Stephen Prina next to Stanya Kahn next to Mateo Tannatt next to Eli Langer. Fowler began to play a doleful piano number, the kind of wistful melody that feels both like the beginning and the end to something. Half-drunk on a warm January night, Los Angeles felt ready, after so much posturing and growing, to finally and unapologetically celebrate itself. We all clapped loudly at the end.
— Andrew Berardini
Left: Artist Brendan Fowler. Right: Artist Liz Glynn and Getty curator Glenn Phillips.
Left: The crowd at The Last Word in the Guggenheim's Peter B. Lewis theater. Right: A video of Tracey Emin. (All photos: Andy Guzzonatto)
WHO DOESN’T SHOW UP to their own funeral? And who, in god’s name, sends friends and strangers as surrogates? Maurizio Cattelan, that’s who. The ostensible occasion for The Last Word, Saturday’s seven-hour-long endurance “symposium”/roast at the Guggenheim, was the end to Cattelan’s much-ballyhooed retrospective and the beginning of his early retirement from artmaking. Too bad the artist wasn’t present. (He and many of the advertised speakers were probably at a better party).
You want to die. Me too. Especially when the incentive of the main event is a cash bar, and I’m on antibiotics. By the way, this is being live-streamed, so please powder your nose in advance, and if you’ve got to go to the loo, bring your iPad with you. The Wi-Fi password is cattelan. (True.)
I kept asking myself: Is this tragedy or comedy? The Last Word was made for you to crave its ending, and for some, I suppose, to mourn, process, and frame. If only the organizers had asked, “What would Tinguely do?” A literally self-destructing event could have been at least more. As one of the evening’s most entertaining speakers, Matmos’s Drew Daniel, put it, “How best to end, and why strive to end well, rather than poorly?”
Left: Artist Tehching Hsieh. Right: Matmos.
This theatrical toast to morbidity played out as three rings of a hellish circus. It is still undetermined who exactly was the biggest dunce—the eager spectators vying for free admission in a queue that wrapped around the block into the cold wintery void (ring 1!); those who snaked up and around the Cattelan merry-go-round to be rewarded with the vertigo and nausea normally saved for an amusement park (ring 2!); or those of us in the belly of the beast (the Peter B. Lewis Theater) who sat through seven hours of speeches, plays, pontifications, performances, Freudian case studies, fertility council (yes, tubal ligation), and critical analyses. This overwrought eulogy was set to a dirge by philosopher and ringleader Simon Critchley, his slow and refined cadence tiredly trying to keep the procession going.
His mission proved futile in advance, especially when many of the thirty-odd speakers subscribed to the romantic construct of the artist, exemplified by Arthur Danto’s use of John Ruskin and his Pre-Raphaelite brothers. Sorry Arthur, I’m more interested in other brethren. Anyway, wasn’t it Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson who wryly coined the term “museum as mausoleum”?
The night may have peaked at 7:45 PM, with sports guru George Vecsey, who had all the chutzpah of a good NFL commentator. He educated us on the mucho macho ritual known as “hanging it up,” i.e., the retiring of one’s old jock strap, an uplifting celebration consecrated with copious amounts of beer. Need to burp? #Nobigdeal.
Vecsey’s quick-witted, cute commentary had me on the edge of my seat. It effortlessly matched Dada scholar Francis Naumann’s reminder that Duchamp did it first, and did it better—both the hanging, and the quitting. We always return to the daddy of Conceptual art, who slung his readymades from the ceiling to, um, differentiate them from the prosaic non-readymades in the studio. (Ceci n’est pas une pipe! Right on, Magritte!) Duchamp also “quit” art for other activities, such as chess and product packaging.
Left: A video by Harmony Korine for Proenza Schouler. Right: Not an Alternative.
Q: When you get down to it, Maurizio Cattelan is not dead, so what do we have to mourn? A: This tome of an exhibition, sepulchered by Frank Lloyd Wright. The Gugg opened its homestead and offered light snacks to the public, so we could process and supplicate our soon-to-be-departed (but also, actually, not even here) Maurizio.
And why do we have to grieve anyway? I suppose there wasn’t that much to be upset about—except perhaps the unfortunate juxtaposition of an #ows speech followed by Proenza Schouler fashion videos. Thanks, Harmony Korine. In the end, though, as economist Stephen Schwartz (not an artist) and Courtney Love (artist, rock star, movie star) reminded us, it’s all about the Benjamins: the potential profit and power of any practitioner rests in recognizing their choice—to be or not to be . . . an artist, or, conversely, editor of a magazine called Toilet Paper. In her closing remarks, Love noted, “No matter the yacht, oligarch, my-dick-is-so-big bullshit—isn’t there this thing called ‘enough’? But our dealers, our agents, our lawyers want us to die, because when we do, they’ll be so much richer.” So it goes, Eros and Thanatos. Before the end of the evening, I managed to wander up the ramp, where I overheard the lamentations of a gray-haired Upper East Sider:
“See that Zoro painting? I tried to buy it, but I was too late. It already went at auction for $500,000.”
The end is nigh. The end is here. You want to die? Me and Maurizio too.
— Piper Marshall
Left: Courtney Love. Right: Sina Najafi and Simon Critchley.
Jennifer Lacey, Gattica, 2011. Photo: Ian Douglas.
“I’M GOING TO HAVE MY EYES CLOSED for a little bit. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not with you.”
So spoke Jennifer Lacey, the highly regarded American choreographer who has been based in Paris for the past twelve years. It was a line from her whimsical, agile solo Gattica, which had its American premiere here last week as part of the American Realness festival at Abrons Arts Center.
Her words could have been the slogan for APAP, the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference in New York, where there aren’t enough hours in the day or shots at the bar to manage the absurd onslaught of performance and performance-related events. APAP might in fact consider printing this disclaimer on the lanyards sported by its members; it would perhaps sensitize everyone to such awkward moments as when, say, the artistic director of a certain theater was observed taking ever-longer “blinks” while sitting next to the artist whose work he was, at that very moment, presenting.
Officially, APAP lasted for five days this year, from January 6 to 10 at the midtown Hilton. But for increasing numbers of presenters, artists, writers, and the odd civilian, especially those interested in contemporary work, the unofficial APAP is the main—even the only—APAP. And this one lasts for a good deal longer, thanks to the festivals, such as Under the Radar, COIL, and American Realness, that have sprung up around the conference to capitalize on booking opportunities, and which now stretch days and, in some cases, weeks beyond it.
The out-of-towners are mostly in attendance that first weekend, of course, and mostly in a constant state of flight. There goes PICA’s recently appointed artistic director Angela Mattox, breezing through the Abrons lobby. Here comes the Walker Art Center’s Philip Bither or On the Boards’ Sarah Wilke sprinting up the theater steps as the lights dim for an Under the Radar show.
Elastic City, Salve, 2011. Photo: Ian Douglas.
One theater director mentioned that, not surprisingly, pretty much every artist on his roster wanted to open on that first weekend; at least one of his companies threatened to go elsewhere otherwise. But how much are these curators actually able to take in, and is this frenzied environment really where we want them to be making decisions about what will fill their stages? As I filed into La MaMa for an afternoon UtR showing on day four of APAP, I overheard this exchange:
Woman: “It was the Heather Kravas.” Pause. “No. I have to check my calendar so I know what I saw. It was Heather Lang.”
Man: “Oh. So I can cross that off the list?”
Woman: “Yes.”
I didn’t catch their names. But they both wore lanyards.
“It’s a little easier this week,” an exhausted-looking Ben Pryor said when asked how he was weathering the second half of his American Realness festival. Of course, now he had a new problem: filling his houses with audience members who had already overdosed on performances and were now spending more time questioning their sanity than actually, you know, paying attention to art.
As one beleaguered writer texted to her editor, midperformance: “What are we doing?!?”
Response: “Where are we???”
“Art purgatory,” the writer answered.
Counter: “Group therapy.”
Davis Freeman, Too Shy to Stare, 2011. Megan Harrold and Matthew Morris. Photo: Ryan Jensen.
I had the eerie sensation I was at the intersection of both while at a 9 PM showing of Davis Freeman’s Too Shy to Stare. Part of COIL, the work is meant for only ten audience members at a time, all of whom must have their pictures taken a day or so in advance of the piece. The work unfolds through minishows in little rooms for solo audience members, who sit watching anonymous performers, their faces covered with photographs of, you guessed it, the faces of their respective audience members.
(“Davis Freeman creates an intensely intimate environment where you sit down, relax, and discover who is left confronting you at the end of the day,” the advance press read. The answer: Some stranger papered in pictures of you?)
A day or so later, at an 11 PM run of the Elastic City walking tour Salve, it was we ourselves who were the performers. We walked barefoot (outside). We made up a sound score for the street (inside). We ended by offering our best silent performances, cocooned within the silence and darkness of the stage under the pit at Abrons. Artist and curator Andrew Dinwiddie mimed slow-motion escape, to no avail.
The Portland-based singer-songwriter and performing artist Holcombe Waller might have had such traumas in mind when he devised his gentle concert Visions of a song man, performed with Ben Landsverk at American Realness. “It’s the restorative yoga” session of the festival, he joked after the show.
If only Keith Hennessy had been tuned in to that. The magnetic, sophisticated artist had traveled out from San Francisco to perform Almost, with the composer Jassem Hindi.
“I have been ripping my nails to shreds in the last week,” he informed his audience. “It’s been a lot of anxiety. That’s my American Realness.”
— Claudia La Rocco
Left: New Museum associate director Massimiliano Gioni. Right: Artists Darren Bader and Uri Aran with Gavin Brown associate director Bridget Donahue. (All photos: Kate Sutton)
SLATER BRADLEY’S most recent video, Don’t Let Me Disappear, casts the artist’s doppelgänger as a contemporary flâneur, à la Baudelaire (or Holden Caulfield). From the looks of it, “botanizing the pavement” today resembles lots of stoned, slow-motion wandering around Chelsea, an allegorical frame that seemed more and more apt last weekend as I braved the cold for the second round of season gallery openings.
Early Thursday evening began in SoHo with Team Gallery’s exhibitions of Bradley and Ross Knight, but quickly moved on to Chelsea, where the sudden chill had done nothing to discourage the crowds. While it was a surprise to count the puffy coats pouring out of Jeff Keen’s supposedly “private” opening at Elizabeth Dee, they were nothing compared to the movie theater–like lines forming outside Gladstone Gallery, where Shirin Neshat was debuting her most recent portrait series, “The Book of Kings.” Those who made it inside found themselves pressed between the photographs and their subjects, many of whom had flown in for the opening. “I’ve never seen so many Iranians in one room in New York,” one patron whistled, admiringly.
Across the street at C24, Amy Smith-Stewart had curated the politically charged group show “Campaign,” featuring artists like Hank Willis Thomas, Kate Gilmore, and K8 Hardy. The art’s everything-goes vibe did not carry over to the front door, where bouncers manned a velvet rope. I would have sworn the rope was a piece itself, except for the fact that artist Glen Fogel was waving his smartphone at the security detail: “Look, I have all the invitations. I have work in the show . . . ” But the doorman did not budge, shooting back a grim, “Everyone’s saying something tonight.” I was grateful for the refuge of the Gladstone reception around the corner at Moran’s, where guests Cindy Sherman, RoseLee Goldberg, and Warhol Foundation president Joel Wachs made gentle use of the open bar.
Left: Writer Nikki Columbus with artist Nick Mauss and Artists Space director Stefan Kalmár. Right: Artist Shirin Neshat and New Museum curator-at-large Richard Flood.
Friday, I started off at the Swiss Institute, where curator Massimiliano Gioni shared his thoughts on Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, whom he touted as a kind of genial anti-Beuys. “If Beuys taught that every man is an artist, Schnyder reminds us that every artist is still just a man.”
Or a woman. Back up in Chelsea, the lovely ladies of Wallspace had joined forces with Kelly Taxter to present a group show whose roster was more than half female. The wind was so bitingly cold that by the time I made it indoors, the beer bottle pressed into my hand actually felt warming. Greeting artists Sanya Kantarovsky and Leigh Ledare, I burrowed further into the masses, nearly knocking into Anthea Hamilton’s splay-legged sculpture. I cast a nervous glance at Lisa Williamson’s thin sliver of canvas, which scrolled down the wall and onto the floor. The press release describes the work as “quietly asserting” itself, but it might have been too quiet for this crowd. “That’s what touching up is for,” Williamson shrugged.
Even more hazards abounded at 303 Gallery, where Nick Mauss had installed a mix of glazed ceramic tiles and screenprinted aluminum sheets that curled up and around the room. I picked my way to the corner where curators Clarissa Dalrymple and Stefan Kalmár and collector Andy Stillpass were standing at a safe distance between two floor pieces. “This stuff looks like it bends, you know,” Stillpass warned, with a raised eyebrow. “I think I’m just going to enjoy it from back here.”
Left: Artists Amy Sillman and Collier Schorr. Right: MoMA associate curators Christian Rattemeyer and Doryun Chong.
Guests were more relaxed at the dinner held next door in a rustic, open space that reminded me of a chic college co-op. Under the quaint lighting of a mason-jar chandelier, artists Lorraine O’Grady and Emily Sundblad shared the center table with curators Jenny Schlenzka and Peter Eleey, while over on the couches, a cluster of young artists picked at plates of flatbread, olives, and mini gherkins. I claimed a chair beside Visionaire’s Cecilia Dean and writers Nikki Columbus and David Colman at a table near the bar. (Christopher Bollen and actress Natasha Lyonne must have had the same idea, staking out the table adjacent.)
Saturday night, Doug Wheeler brought one of his “infinity environments” to David Zwirner, but I opted for the cozier-sounding “Interiors” show at Andrew Kreps. A refreshingly bold gambit eight years in the making, the exhibition pairs works by the elusive Marc Camille Chaimowicz with paintings by Pierre Bonnard, William Copley, and Édouard Vuillard (several of which are on loan from the Brooklyn Museum). “My director Liz Mulholland and I have been working on this show for years now,” Kreps recounted. “You’d be amazed how much work it takes.” I was more amazed at how effortless they made it all seem.
George Ortman’s exhibition at Algus Greenspon was another breath of fresh air, despite (or because of) the fact that the median age of the turnout for the eighty-six-year-old artist was remarkably higher than any other show that weekend. (To be fair, this may have had something to do with the presence of painter Will Barnet, who is pushing 102.) Around the block, the young and the restless had gathered at Gavin Brown, where Udomsak Krisanamis had transformed the back room into a sanctuary of teak golf tees, planted upside down in front of a series of collages. More difficult to decipher was the rest of the gallery, which Uri Aran had mapped with tables, each bearing complicated arrangements of junk, from shellacked photographs to cookie dough.
Left: Dealers Andrew Kreps and Liz Mulholland. Right: MoMA PS1 associate curator Jenny Schlenzka with artist Lorraine O'Grady.
“I understand Uri’s process as similar to those people who have to rearrange the saltshakers and ketchup bottles on diner tables,” associate director Bridget Donahue explained. “It’s all according to his own sense of order.” It was clear that the artist had his hand in everything, from the artificial nooks to the purposefully low lighting. “I always thought exhibition openings should be candelit,” artist Mae Fatto mused. “So long as everyone is just here to see everyone else, they might as well all look good.”
The see-and-be-seen aspect was a bit dampened by the fact that the majority of the attendees—including Darren Bader, Elizabeth Neel, and Negar Azimi—already saw-and-were-sawn by one another the previous two evenings and were therefore woefully short on small talk. Nabbing a spot with Cay Sophie Rabinowitz and Christian Rattemeyer at the afterparty later at Westway, I nodded across the room at Stillpass. “At this point, do we even need to exchange greetings?” he called back grinning.
Sunday, geography proved just as foreboding as the below-freezing temperatures. While I missed the opening at SculptureCenter, I was able to catch the kickoff of “Bulletin Board,” a new series of salon events spearheaded by Pati Hertling, which launched in an upstairs space on the Bowery with a screening of Ulrike Meinhof’s 1970 film Bambule, preceded by a short intro film by Silvia Kolbowski.
Left: Dealer Joe Sheftel. Right: Writer Alex Gartenfeld with collector Andy Stillpass and artist Matt Keegan.
Bundling back up against the cold (with the “Real-Feel” temperature holding steady at 6ºF), I dashed over to Orchard Street, where Untitled Gallery was hosting its first solo show of Ian Tweedy and dealer Joe Sheftel was inaugurating his first space at 24 Orchard with “Specifically Yours,” a selection of works by freshly minted gallery artists Alex da Corte, Adam Henry, and Rory Mulligan. With no time for trains, I took a taxi up to the newly conjugated gallery Alex Zachary Peter Currie. (“We’re still working on the name,” Currie confessed. “The initials could be good, though. Sort of like ‘easy-peasy.’ ”) By this point in the weekend, most of the crowd had already been gallery-hopping together for four days straight—“We’re all on the same meal plan this week,” Currie cracked—but the knowledge that this would be the last event for a spell gave the evening a familial aura. Besides, Jordan Wolfson’s two new films provided ample reason to skip the small talk.
After the opening, guests braved the wind for the two-block walk to the Ukrainian Institute, a slightly defunct architectural wonder, made all the more mysterious by faux candlelight. (“I’ve been unscrewing lightbulbs all day to give it more of a haunted house feel,” Zachary admitted.) “Will there be Ukrainian food?” Laura Mitterrand ventured cautiously, eyeing the platters of cheese, salami, and pickled vegetables. “Actually, we brought in this vegan restaurant from Brooklyn.” Currie explained, before following our dubious looks toward the charcuterie. “Well maybe not vegan, but, you know, organic and local and all of that.”
Left: Artist Jordan Wolfson with Milt Wolfson. Right: Independent codirector Laura Mitterrand and dealer Peter Currie.
Whatever it was, it was good, capped off with a series of increasingly enthusiastic toasts. Wolfson was first, thanking his animators before announcing his resolution to take himself less seriously. Wolfson’s mother, Patty Burrows, was on hand to help him out, and she followed curator Linda Norden’s smart speech with some choice words of her own. Burrows opened by sharing the artist’s very first joke (Q: “What’s the one part of your body you should never move while dancing?” A: “Your bowels.”) before praising her son for “recognizing that art and real life are two separate things.” Wolfson’s father, Milt, was next: “Well, in this family, we always have to one-up each other, but all I can say is this: I’ve never understood one fucking thing about Jordan’s work.” He paused, beaming proudly, “But it is interesting.” At my table, artists Cory Arcangel and John Trembley grinned in complete agreement: “These dinners just keep getting better and better, don’t they?”
