This Week’s Must See Events: Plant Consciousness and Tailgating

Scroll through the calendar at random, and pretty much everything at Light Industry will be highly enriching.

On Tuesday, you can see the 1988 cult Indian film “Om Dar Ba Dar”, of critical acclaim and “mythic notoriety.” It’s been described as “the trippiest film made in Indian cinema,” and due to its “adults only” rating, it was just released in theaters for the first time this year.

This is followed by the 15 minute 2012 short I am micro, by Shumona Goel and Shai Heredia.

With all the star street artists, it can be easy to forget that street art was once cool and for everybody.
Relive graffiti’s glory days with a panel of famous early graffiti documentarians Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant, Flint Gennari, and Jon Naar.

Before the ubiquity of “selfies” would unleash itself on the world, people used camera timers to stage group shots and self-portraits. “Self-Timer Stories” is a look at that practise through the lens of self portraiture. “Self-Timer Stories” pulls from the Federal Austrian Photography collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg to examine this practice.

Artists include: AA Bronson, Renate Bertlmann, Katrina Daschner, Carola Dertnig, VALIE EXPORT, Sharon Hayes, Matthias Herrmann, Birgit Jürgenssen, Friedl Kubelka, Roberta Lima, Anja Manfredi, Dorit Margreiter, Michaela Moscouw, Laurel Nakadate, Lilo Nein, Carolee Schneemann, Peter Weibel, Hans Weigand, Martha Wilson, Francesca Woodman
Curator: Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein
Exhibition Design: Dorit Margreiter

Peter Coffin is an endearing oddity, and you can tell he gets a kick out of it. He’s released UFOs over the Baltic sea, he’s instructed the penniless on how to sneak into pricey museums, and has avidly researched plant consciousness. In LIVING, an installation that will act as a recording studio for his Music for Plants album series, Coffin is sure to entertain in a charmingly playful way.

For eleven days straight, the BAM Cinemafest is rolling out about three independent films per night, with one outdoor screening at the Brooklyn Bridge Park. The festival ends with a 25th anniversary screening of “Do The Right Thing,” a film that tracks rising racial tensions in Bed-Stuy over the course of the day. This feels about right given the rapid gentrification of nearby Bed-Stuy, and the enduring friction in the neighborhood.

If you want to stay on track with what’s changing in the world at large, “Internet Subjects,” a new series of flash panel conversations presented by Rhizome, might be the way to do it. It works on Internet time; A topic that has been getting internet buzz is chosen just a week before the event, and experts come together to discuss. This week’s subject: Uber, AirBnB, and the new sharing economy. The experts: panelists Denise Cheng (MIT Center for Civic Media), Rob Horning (New Inquiry), writer Kate Losse, and Melissa S. Fisher (Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU)

If you’re tired of the New York art world constantly shutting you down, this show should be a morale boost. Failing to Levitate is about viewing failure in art as a productive part of a process. This should be a show about practice, community, and the unappreciated love of things not going perfectly.

Curated by Kerry Downey and Natasha Marie Llorens, artists include Anhoek School (orchestrated by Mary Walling Blackburn and Rafael Kelman), A Pattern, Malin Arnell, Ethan Breckenridge, Dillon de Give, Bill Dietz, Danyel Ferrari, Rachel Higgins, Mitch McEwen, Glendalys Medina, Jen Rosenblit, and with guest speaker Heather Love.

Outsider art. Neuroscience. Curation. All these topics come together when we talk about artists with cognitive disabilities, many of whom have influenced the art world in unsuspecting ways. But how are the works made? How can they be presented? What will we think of these artists in the future? A panel of experts will talk about these artists and their roles the world. It should be more than interesting!

The panel includes Tom Di Maria, Director, Creative Growth Art Center; Valérie Rousseau, PhD, curator of Art of the Self-Taught and Art Brut at the American Folk Art Museum and Jacolby Satterwhite, artist and participant in When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South. The conversation will be moderated by Adrienne Edwards, Associate Curator, Performa.

Interstate Projects’ annual curatorial challenge U:L:O is a big mystery bag. We’re pretty sure U:L:O (Upper: Lower: Outside) refers to the three spaces in Interstate Projects: Upper= top floor, Lower= basement, and Outside=the parking lot. Artists Cameron Rowland, Sara Ludy, and Sol Hashemi either have work in the show or they’re curating; you gotta go to find out which, but we think Sara Ludy’s second life study and Sol Hashemi’s empty consumer spaces would gel well together.
The themes for Part 1 are:
U: Queer Thoughts
L: Important Projects
O: Zachary Davis

Want to feel like you’re at a Nascar tailgate on a hot summer day but still see a ton of art? Come down to M-WOW; there will be high-speed cars, automobile art, fried things, performances on wheels, metal bands, the smell of burnt rubber, sledge hammers, and more!!

Check out this guitar heavy ad announced by kids for the event. Need we say more?

Half of New York will be in Basel Switzerland this week for the mother of all art fairs Basel Switzerland. This is the fair that takes three days to see, and where all the best gallery art lands. If you can go to any fair, this is the one to see.