diary October 03, 2018

Do You Feel Free Now?

ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, Chelsea Manning arrived at the Royal Institution of Great Britain on Albemarle Street for her first public appearance in the UK.

She had flown into London the morning prior, accompanied by two immigration lawyers in case she was detained. Last year, Manning was denied entry to Canada, and this August an Australian tour had to be conducted via video from Auckland after a “delay” in the decision to grant her a visa. She was met at the airport by ICA director Stefan Kalmár, who arranged the trip and Monday’s conversation with the aid of a cast including Vivienne Westwood; the

print September 2018

REVERIES OF A SOLITARY DANCER

THIS SUMMER, in a spell of mildly toxic certitude and against all good advice, I decided to initiate a check-in with some of our best thinkers about the status of the Enlightenment. I wanted to pose an open question—one that was not just ontological (What is Enlightenment?) but temporal (When . . .), spatial (Where . . .), etc.—departing from the usual suspects like Kant, architect of some of the universalist thinking that subtends our fatigued and fatiguing world order (“in the West,” I initially appended the query, before realizing that the whole idea of a “world order” is more or less an

print September 2018

SANCTUARY: JUDSON’S MOVEMENTS

ON JULY 6, 1962 seventeen members and affiliates of Robert Ellis Dunn’s composition class convened at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village for an unorthodox concert of dance. “There should have been something for everybody, including a nap if desired,” wrote the critic Jill Johnston in her ebullient Village Voice review. “In fact there was so much that special moments arose as expected and at least three dances provoked a big response from everybody.”

That evening and some evenings after collectively became known as the Judson Dance Theater. The program was a signpost for both democracy

previews September 2018

“MICKALENE THOMAS: I CAN’T SEE YOU WITHOUT ME”

The muse is the métier for Mickalene Thomas, the odalisque her great subject. Thomas’s paintings depicting her late mother, Sandra, or her lovers like Maya and Racquel, spin her relations into dazzling reflections on how we look and touch, who we see, what we desire. Rhinestones and glitter and flock and enamel tessellate into marvelous figures; somehow the facture does not look broken, but like a coming together. Thomas’s is a project of schooling art history in the terms of endearment. Her latest museum exhibition, “I Can’t See You Without Me,”

interviews June 19, 2018

Ishmael Houston-Jones

From June 21 through 28, as part of its East Village Series, Performance Space New York is reviving Them, a work the choreographer and dancer Ishmael Houston-Jones made in collaboration with the musician Chris Cochrane and the writer Dennis Cooper in 1986. Below is a reprint of a 2010 interview with Houston-Jones on the occasion of the work’s twenty-fifth anniversary production at PS 122.

THE FIRST TIME I heard about Chris Cochrane was also the first time I saw him play, at a club called 8BC in a destroyed building on Eighth Street between avenues B and C. They had liquor there, but it was more

print January 2018

The Power of Good-Bye

I SHOWED UP on this magazine’s doorstep twelve years ago. I came cold, via a classified ad for an editorial assistant on some antique website called mediabistro.com. I had no connections, was broke and unworthy. I had all the wrong education and just some hot faith in art.

I ditched the education and kept the faith.

That faith has been useful lately, with a predatory tyrant wheezing and emitting bleak transmissions to the world from the control room like some horrible Reddit monster. I think about how he’s really just a tired and sad old man who like so many tired and sad men feels that if he

previews January 2018

“Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016”

She’s the greatest dancer. For more than five decades, Adrian Piper has advanced and everted that great whirl of thinking and form we too neatly call Conceptual art. Piper shows us how to do it right, perhaps most generously through her signature performance and video works. From Funk Lessons, 1983–84, and The Big Four-Oh, 1988, to her more recent Adrian Moves to Berlin, 2007/2017, in which she grooves to postmillennial Berlin house music in sunny Alexanderplatz, Piper kicks open your mind as she steps to the rhythm. It’s been over

slant September 26, 2017

Into the Storm

APRIL 16, 2017 AT 2:24 PM EST

Dearest Bruce,

Today, a resurrection.

On Tuesday, as you recommended, I went to Light Industry to see Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield’s 1984 conversation, or portrait of, Craig Owens, part of Video Data Bank’s incredible interviews with artists and writers. This was some six years before he died, age thirty-nine, of—I rehearse the intolerable boilerplate—AIDS-related complications.

Eighty black-and-white minutes. Owens sits in a director’s chair in front of a makeshift backdrop—the zigzag of a wrinkled moving blanket. He talks and talks, always smoking. Or… he’s

print September 2017

PERSONAL TOUCH

THE LINE to get into Anne Imhof’s German pavilion takes two hours. Dobermans roam behind a twelve-foot-high welded-wire fence. We wait impatiently, a procession of docile tourists, shapeless and slouching in tired linens, sweating in all the wrong places, drawn down by tote bags spelling out the names of other artists, other nations. For those in the know, Germany’s swag is hardest to get and better than the rest—a black polyester drawstring knapsack printed with a topless photo of Eliza Douglas, artist, model, Imhof’s girlfriend, and star of Faust, this stylishly cryptic show.

Inside, the

books March 2017

Douglas Crimp’s Before Pictures

Before Pictures, by Douglas Crimp. New York: Dancing Foxes Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 308 pages.

IT STARTS LIKE a classic bildungsroman from the mighty island-city: It’s 1967, and a young writer from a beautiful, bigoted town called Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, escapes to Manhattan to find himself. A decade later, he’s made his mark: It’s called “Pictures,” and it alters the course of art and its discourses.

What makes Douglas Crimp’s Before Pictures so remarkable is not just its subject—the art historian and AIDS activist’s early years leading up to the epoch-defining 1977

performance November 25, 2016

Thank You for Being a Friend

November 21, 2016 at 8:54 PM EST

Dear Mr. B,

I’ve just come home from an event of much love at the Kitchen, part of the rollout of Douglas [Crimp]’s superb memoir [Before Pictures]. Three exemplary interlocutors from three different dance worlds: Adrian Danchig-Waring (New York City Ballet/Balanchine), Silas Riener (Merce Cunningham), and Yvonne Rainer (Yvonne Rainer).

A little asymmetrical, I suppose, since Rainer got to play herself, though everyone did a very good job representing.

Rainer, at the end, was trying to respond to a question from the audience, and failing a bit. She said her mind

interviews May 27, 2016

Terence Koh

The mythmaker Terence Koh makes the most of big questions. For his show “bee chapel” at Andrew Edlin’s new space on the Bowery, the Beijing-born, Ontario-raised artist has brought upstate New York downtown, covering the gallery’s floors in topsoil, conjuring a living-dying apple tree, and building a wax shrine for a colony of bees. Acrylic tubes connect the “chapel” to the outside, allowing the little ciphers to come and go as they please. This is Koh’s first solo presentation in New York since nothingtoodoo, his memorable performance at Mary Boone Gallery in 2011.

I MOVED UPSTATE about two-and-a-half

interviews May 17, 2016

Kim Brandt

Kim Brandt’s smart, affecting, weird-form dances never take for granted the bodily habits or functional protocols of modern choreography and its users. Here she talks about her latest work, Clear Night, 2016, commissioned by Issue Project Room, comprising eight unique, daily performances from Friday May 20th to Friday May 27th at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.

I LEARNED TO DANCE from a former Rockette in rural New Hampshire. She had a studio that was in the middle of a parking lot that separated two trailer parks. I loved it, and I was in love with her. At some point in my teens I was ready to branch

previews January 2016

Park McArthur

Absorption is a loaded word in art history, but Park McArthur is not an artist who shies away from the loaded. Two of the more remarkable installations in recent memory are her Posey Restraint, 2014, a straitjacket strung drolly across a doorway between galleries in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, and her 2014 Essex Street show consisting of twenty portable ramps, via which the artist, who uses a wheelchair, had accessed various buildings from 2010 to 2013. McArthur’s solo exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery, her first in the UK, takes absorption as its theme, and will comprise four new series of

interviews April 27, 2015

My Barbarian

Making fun may be our best strategy for survival. Or at least the best way to stay cool in the heat of the in-between, the space of interruption where My Barbarian does their most incisive work. Here the notorious collective—founded in 2000 by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade—talks about “Double Agency,” a multipart, multimedia project built on and around the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the institution’s fiftieth anniversary this month. A Double Agency performance featuring My Barbarian with Robbie Acklen, Nao Bustamante, Jibz Cameron, and Adam Dugas takes place at LACMA

interviews February 22, 2015

Claudia La Rocco

As part of its continuing fortieth anniversary celebrations, Danspace Project invited the poet and critic Claudia La Rocco to curate an iteration of its Platform series of performances and events. Titled “Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets” after poet-critic Edwin Denby’s 1965 essay of the same name, La Rocco has produced a wide-ranging catalogue and brought together thirteen dance artists working in the “three nodal points of Balanchine, Cunningham, and the Judson Dance Theater” to engage in dialogues, workshops, and performances. The Platform runs through March 28.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO,

previews January 2015

“Zhana Ivanova: Ongoing Retrospective (Chapter I)”

Until now, I didn’t really know the work of Zhana Ivanova—but it seems that’s sort of the point. And until now, I hadn’t thought much about the way in which now slips into know, a perpetual dialectic of presence and recognition. With “Ongoing Retrospective” (the Bulgarian-born artist’s first institutional solo exhibition and Elena Filipovic’s inaugural gambit at Kunsthalle Basel, where the curator began her directorship this past November), Filipovic asks us to privilege the tenebrous now over the familiar know, to commit to the curious void of an emerging artist’s

interviews September 03, 2014

Trajal Harrell

Trajal Harrell’s Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church, 2009–2013, seven works investigating a speculative collision between the traditions of voguing and postmodern dance, has become one of the most influential dance series of the past five years. From September 14–20 at the Kitchen, as part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line festival, the seven performances will be done in order, at the same theater, one work each day, beginning with (XS) on the 14th and ending with (M2M) Judson Church Is Ringing in Harlem on the 20th.

But before then, on September 4-5, Harrell kicks off “In one step

interviews August 05, 2014

Douglas Coupland

The writer, designer, and artist Douglas Coupland hit the ground running in 1991, when his first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, became an international best seller. In 2000, after much acclaim for his novels and nonfiction, Coupland made a decisive return to visual art, which he’d studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, among other places. Here he discusses his first major survey exhibition, “everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything,” which is curated by Daina Augaitis and is on view through September 1, 2014 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

BY FAR THE

diary May 15, 2014

Pull Up to the Bumper

ART BASEL Miami Basel Hong Kong Basel… Basel Basel Basel.

This year, the third Frieze New York rear-ended the second Art Basel Hong Kong, and like a patchy crossfade some of us went to sleep in one city and woke up two days later in another wondering where on earth we were.

It hardly matters. I’m not yet sure if I love Hong Kong, because I don’t quite know if I’m in Hong Kong or if the “Hong Kong” I’m looking at is just window dressing for another Art Basel. (And it is beautiful, this magic convergence of glass and water and neon and steep ascensions of tropical florae.)

But at least I’m sure we’re

David Velasco