This Week’s Must-See Art Events: A Synth Workshop for Your Fair Week

We posted about this today, but the Art Basel of rent reform will happen tonight, when activists will pack the Rent Guidelines Board’s preliminary vote on rent increases for rent-regulated apartments. Will this affect you? If you moved to New York after 1980 then probably not, but a freeze would be the first in a really long list of needed changes.

Some may know Andrew Kuo for his wildly popular Instagram account. He posts funny pictures of animals. Others may know Kuo for his yoga mats, twitter account, and his infographic like art work. For those interested in the latter, Half Gallery opens a show of his work tonight.

Ed Ruscha’s High Line mural is unveiled, for anybody who wants to be there for that.

AFC friend José Lerma debuts new work at Andrea Rosen’s Gallery II. From the looks of it, he’s making new paintings and carpets, this time inspired by Palissot’s Critique de la Tragédie de Charles IX, a light comedy about a historical tragedy that became a catalyst for the French Revolution and tennis. Four well-known tennis stars from the 1980s will be cast as characters from the play.

We’ve only got two images to go on and since one of the two figurative works reminds us a little of careful brushwork and delicate landscapes Echo Eggebrecht has become known for (minus the figure), this show gets a nod. The small multicolored stars in the sky behind this red tree have a lightbrite feel to them, challenging the otherwise somber mood of the piece.

Anthology Film Archive’s much anticipated video reconstruction of The Wooster Group’s 1977 theatre piece RUMSTICK ROAD debuts Tuesday. Composed by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte in response to the suicide of Gray’s mother, RUMSTICK ROAD is made up of Gray’s personal recorded conversations, family letters, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, 35mm slides, music, and dance. It is described in the press release as an invaluable document of its time. Considering the participants, we’re inclined to believe the hype.

The Wooster Group’s RUMSTICK ROAD – Alex & Ada Katz, Joan Jonas, Tony Oursler, Nayland Blake, David Reed and more IN PERSON. 

There’s so much good abstraction within the field of weaving even a show roster of 14 artists like this one can feel a little inadequate. Dianna Molzan, Danielle Mysliwiec, Sheila Hicks, Polly Apfelbaum, and Michelle Grabner are all making great work that fits this theme as well. We recommend this show, because we think there’s some important work being done in the field right now, but we also hope to soon see a museum show on the subject. It’s worth it.

Participating artists: Alek O., Ayan Farah, Evan Robarts, Gabriel Pionkowski, Graham Wilson, Hank Willis Thomas, Henry Krokatsis, Johnny Abrahams, Kadar Brock, Moffat Takadiwa, Nika Neelova, Penny Lamb, Shinique Smith, Tonico Lemos Auad

Curated by Toby Clarke and Kathy Grayson

Last year, no critic could keep quiet about how much they liked Ragnar Kjartansson’s immersive installation at Luring Augustine, “The Visitors”. Now the New Museum will give us a chance to see more of his work. “Me, My Mother, My Father and I” will draw on stage traditions, film music and literature and will explore the stereotypes of actors and artists as cultural heroes. The show will also include a series of drawings and new performance and video piece called “Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage”.

Art students think they can make a living simply by getting gallery representation. How do we change this perception? This has come up more than once during Sharon Louden’s book tour, “Living and Sustaining a Creative Life” which asks professionals to tell their survival stories. How do we get by? AFC’s Paddy Johnson, Christian Viveros-Faune of the Village Voice, and artists and contributors to the book Sean Mellyn and Jennifer Dalton discuss these issues with Louden one day before fair madness sets in.

Ai Yamaguchi is very picky about Japanese words and has chosen to translate the ones she doesn’t like to hiragana characters—the simplest alphabet in Japanese. These characters are considered “feminine” and more “Western” in shape so she shapes her canvases in their shape. Then she paints naked anime girls on them because her work is about “feminine beauty”.

We’re pretty uncomfortable with this show, in no small part because the gallery describes this process as one of beautification. We wouldn’t call this a recommendation so much as a listing made from dark curiosity.

“Hard Talks” is described as the Jewish Museum’s hard-hitting opinionated panel series, which should make it a nice break from the friendly, say-nothing panels that pervade the city.

Communications scholar Liel Leibovitz moderates a debate about whether the Internet is bad for us. We hesitate to recommend this, though, because speakers aren’t listed. That usually plays a pretty big role in whether or not Internet conversations go well.

Is the city still a sexy creative muse, or is it ultimately a money-sucking abusive relationship? We’ll probably think about this on Friday, in an evening of performances, music, conversations, etc. at Issue Project Room. Most people in this lineup have lived in the city for many years, so, they’ll have some perspective on the issue.

Drinks will be offered after the program.

Contributors include: Vito Acconci, designer; Kai-Uwe Bergmann, Partner, Business Development at BIG; Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University; Ariane Lourie Harrison, principal of Harrison Atelier and a critic and lecturer at the Yale School of Architecture; Seth Harrison, principal of Harrison Atelier and founder of Apple Tree Partners; media artist Brian House; poet Rachel Levitsky; artist, designer and founder of The Center for Urban Pedagogy Damon Rich; artist Martha Rosler; Associate Professor of Architectural History and Theory at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture, Meredith Tenhoor; modular synthesizer artist Ben Vida; and musician C. Spencer Yeh.

The Kitchen targets a synth workshop for women. The afternoon of talks and demos will be held by experimental synth leaders including Alice Cohen, Rose Kallal, Delia Gonzalez, Lori Napoleon, Abby Echiverri, Liz Wendelbo, and Xeno and Oaklander. We will go hoping to channel them and Laurie Anderson.

When we visited Recess’s storefront residency last month, Takahiro Morooka was covered in paint and excitedly telling us everything he could about Soho’s history, which he and Nina Horisaki-Christens have been collecting through extensive neighborhood interviews. On Saturday, we get to see the results of that painting and research when Morooka performs with Julia Oldham.

How has the “digital removal” genre progressed since Cory Arcangel’s clouds pioneered the genre back in 2002? We’ll find out with a new show by Justin Berry, whose digitally-manipulated book covers and video game stills are, according to Paddy Johnson, more promising than most.

Berry’s show is titled “Lorem Ipsum”, the placeholder text used in word document templates, which comes from the Latin phrase for “pain itself”. The Latin text’s full translation is a lot darker than you’d expect.

Andrei Koschmieder has been known to make digital images with epoxy columns, digitally-printed scarves, and resin-covered digital prints– an old bag of tricks at this point for the post-Internet crew. But the imagery itself looks more compelling and expressive, with bomb-like distress and what look like finger marks smearing the images. It’s the feeling that makes us want to see them in person.