This Week’s Must-See Art Events: The NY Art Book Fair Might Take Over Your Weekend

Artist and musician Laurie Anderson performs with the American avant-garde string quartet Kronos Quartet. The two will collaborate for the first time on a work inspired by Anderson’s experience of Hurricane Sandy. Expect text, music, and technology, along with descriptions of sunken pianos and Dutch karaoke bars.

Bruno Latour is known more as a philosopher, sociologist, and lecturer than anything else, so we were surprised to find out that he conceived of a play about climate change. This will be the play’s first Stateside performance; it debuted during dOCUMENTA (13).

Warm up for the Art Book Fair a day early at Artists Space’s The Library Vaccine. Organized by decade, the show’s curator Mike Glier takes a look at the tension between book-as-text and book-as-object. Some parts of the show focus on the collection of the library, whereas others focus more on the book. Expect panel discussions and talks throughout the duration of the show.

It’s hard to imagine what this show looks like—the press release tells us the exhibition showcase 10 from a collection of “68 formatted declarations that seem to aim at something pithy but miss.” The works are a document of mental derailment—they record images and text he saw in a half awake state referred to as “hypnopomic hallucinations.” Based on the title alone we bet this will be good, though the show itself may have little to do with the actual esthetics of eeriness.

Richard McGuire’s 1989 comic “Here” is generally recognized as a ground-breaking experiment with the properties of the comic. In it, 35 panels show the same space, depicted at different points of time. What’s more, the panels do not appear chronologically.

This comic is now on view at the Morgan in a show that explores the making of that book. We’ll find original drawings for the strip, the novel with source photographs, books that influenced the book, along with collages and sketchbooks that give a window into his process.

Has the New York Art Book Fair outgrown MoMA PS1? The fair keeps expanding its programming. Now in it’s seventh year, the fair no longer offers just booths of art book and zine sellers, but ongoing musical performances and talks throughout the weekend. Go, support your friends and their new publications, but really beware of the crowds of cool kids who’re there because they can see Brooklyn-based musicians like Prince Rama and Junglepussy for free. Oh, and Thurston Moore is performing during the preview night.

We recommend checking out booths by MATTE Magazine, Oooga Booga—but aside from writing down a few must-see booths, the only way to see this fair is to graze through the booths until you see work that catches your eye. This show needs a librarian.

As for talks, we’ve listed several below that look promising.

Friday, September 26

1:00 – 2:00 PM
Lives and Videotapes launch, with Jon Ippolito and Marit Paasche
Writer and curator Jon Ippolito talks about new media preservation with video art. As a complement, Marit Paasche just published Lives and Videotapes, a history of Norwegian video art—a history most of us here in the states probably know very little about.

2:30 – 4:00 PM
Ceci N’est Pas Une Comic: Graphic Novels, Contemporary Art, and The Public
How does the graphic novel relate to contemporary art? Panelists include artist Chitra Ganesh; cartoonist and illustrator Peter Kuper; and Daniel Norton, NYPL. Moderated by Eric Ingram, SVA, and Lori Salmon, NYPL.

Saturday, September 27

1:00 – 2:00 PM
How to Hack an Abstraction: Google Warhol a conversation with McKenzie Wark
Hacker Manifesto author McKenzie Wark talks about how “the consolidation of finance and art asks for an update” of the hacker class. Presented by e-flux.

Sunday,September 28

1:00 – 2:00 PM
Printed Web #2 with Paul Soulellis
Printed Web #2 presents 176 pages of web-based work that’s printed for a book. Think screen captures, image grabs, et cetera. Contributors include Daniel Temkin, Cory Arcangel, Olia Lialina, Constant Dullaart, and Rafaël Rozendaal. Presented by Library of the Printed Web.

4:00 – 5:00 PM
Borrowing, Poaching, Plagiarising, Pirating, Stealing, Gleaning, Referencing, Leaking, Copying, Imitating, Adapting, Faking, Paraphrasing, Quoting, Reproducing, Using, Counterfeiting, Repeating, Cloning, Translating with The Piracy Project
When cut-and-paste, Photoshopping, and translating is so much a part of any artist’s practice, it’s good to know the legal end about what you’re doing. Eva Weinmayr and Andrea Francke will chat about their book The Piracy Collection and some particular cases that inspired the essays.

Is being an artist giving you the blues? Karen Finley wants to help. She’s formed a 12-step program so that artists can finally admit to being an artist or being addicted to art. Whatever your art-related neurosis, she’ll aim to solve it.

This is the kind of event that attracts performance artists in body suits and balloons, immersive, science fiction inspired light installations, and giant cookie sculptures. Let’s just say it’s not for us. But, it may be a welcome break from the book fair, and it’s certainly a lot more kid-friendly. This year there are 100 studios open, 50 galleries and stages and 100 programming partners. In short, it’s a huge event, and it’s free.

Here at Art F City, we plug ourselves: this coming month, go to Philadelphia’s Vox Populi to see a series that Art F City’s Whitney Kimball has curated. “SCHMARTWORLD” is a series of seven events organized around art that looks beyond the structures of the commercial art world; this week, they’re screening “Pig Story” a film written by inmates at the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Manhattan and made by video artist Miles Pflanz and sound artist Kate Levitt. The screening will be followed by screenings of the artists’ own works, including Pflanz’s made-for-Pornhub video “Mass Arcadia”, inspired by the colorful utopian hedonism of Jack Smith.