The Week’s Must-See Art Events: The Nutty Performers

Klaus von Nichtssagend is now “The Flooded Room,” aka, a marsh-like setting for daily performances by painter/performance artist Shaun Krupa. Beats us what that’s going to mean, but based on Klaus artists’ foraging skills, and Krupa’s prior exploration of water-related performance– we have high hopes. Krupa’s performances go Tuesdays-Saturdays, through August 15th, and range from a few minutes to hours. Here are this week’s titles:

Tuesday, Aug 6 1PM: Talking Plants

Wednesday, Aug 7 1PM: Reorganizing

Thursday, Aug 8 1PM: The Raft

Friday, Aug 9 1PM: Rain Barrel

Saturday, Aug 10 1PM: Backyard Mud Cleanup

AFC’s Rhett Jones rates Spectacle “the most consistently original programming in the city,” so we’re not surprised to see drone violinist and vocalist C. Spencer Yeh curating here.  Yeh’s search results on ubu web, a self proclaimed home for the avant-garde and beyond are several pages long, and he’s cited in almost every mainstream music source we’ve encountered. Here, he curates a screening of similarly avant-garde minds: Frank Heath, JJ Peet, Rachel Mason, and Robert Beatty. This includes, for example, video of Rachel Mason’s 2001 performance “Wall,” in which Mason climbed the side of an eight-story building at UCLA, from which she was subsequently expelled. You won’t find these works online, so don’t miss this.

In 2007, the Bruce High Quality Foundation staged its own rendition of the musical “CATS,” on Broadway– except that was the Broadway in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and their “CATS” was tailored to reflect neighborhood gentrification. As part of its Bruce High Quality survey, the Brooklyn Museum will be screening the documentary of the making of “CATS” and the Bruces’ reflections a year later. We’ll be curious to hear what they think of production, because when we saw it, it barely made any sense.

If you wanna know about the recent cultural life of the Lower East Side, then talk to Clayton Patterson. The documentarian and artist runs the Outlaw Art Museum on Essex (here he is in a VICE feature with outlaw artist Anthony Dominguez), and incidentally authored Animal New York’s “I Should Have Shot That”: bloodless bullet hole edition. On Thursday he’ll present some of his documentaries, including footage of the notorious 1988 Tompkins Square Park riot.

If you’re sick of this summer’s themeless group shows, then this may be your bag: an exploration of sound “as ideology and ontology” curated by field experts Justin Luke, of the East Village sound art gallery Audio Visual Arts, and Lawrence Kumpf, artistic director of the experimental performance space Issue Project Room. On Friday, from 12-6 PM, Eve Essex and Juan Antonio Olivares will create a performance based on the corporate start-up soundtrack. On Saturday at 5 PM, Hong-Kai Wang presents a phone interview performance, with interventions by Marina Rosenfeld and C. Spencer Yeh.

The Rockaways have had a lot of work done since Hurricane Sandy last fall, but if you needed another reason to hit the beach before Labor Day, maybe the Second Annual Artist Sandcastle Competition will be the excuse you were waiting for. Will our recommendations for the competitors take the blue ribbon? Castle building will commence at 2 PM and judging will begin at 5 PM.

57 Cell is a magazine that features 3-D space  installations of imagined and improbable environments. On Friday they’ll have a launch party for the second issue. And there will be snacks. Among the artists featured is AFC friend Juliette Bonneviot. From what we’ve seen on her site, the magazine looks pretty great.

Last week, we spoke with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer about “Voice Tunnel,” a sound and light installation in the Park Avenue tunnel. Between its 300 spotlights and 150 loudspeakers, it’ll be quite the spectacle. And it opens again this Saturday, so get pumped.

George W. Bush isn’t the only president to put art-implement to paper. To complement their “Extreme Drawings” exhibitions, the Aldrich presents a talk by editor Sina Najafi, of Cabinet Magazine, on presidents’ doodles while in office. I wonder: will the adeptness of the doodles inversely relate to the presidents’ productivity?