This Week’s Must-see Art Events: Kara Walker Strikes Back

If you want to purchase tickets the ICI benefit tonight, you have to call them. Support a good cause, network like mad while you’re there. This benefit is usually a who’s-who in the art world.

Hyperallergic, in partnership with the Brooklyn Museum’s Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond, is presenting a series of lectures on performance and activism that should appeal to socially minded artists and art lovers. Tuesday, come hear artists Nobutaka Aozaki, Christen Clifford, Amin Husain, Matthew Jensen, and Dread Scott talk about performance and activism.

It’s November, which in art-world parlance means benefit time! This week, we have The Kitchen’s auction to look forward to. Even if you’re not there to bid, all the hip-hollering of a live auction should be worth it.

Are you familiar with this diagram?
Congratulations! You have a background in structuralist theory and/or you’ve read Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” from which this diagram comes.

If the continued debate between sculpture’s relationship between landscape and architecture is your bag, come hear authors and contributors to the new book, Retracing the Expanded Field, revisit Krauss’s authoritative text, as well as discuss sculptural debates today.

Didn’t Dave Hickey retire? Well, yes, but like many retired workers who never quit retire, he’s come out retirement to have a one-on-one talk with artist Darren Waterston at DC Moore Gallery. Conversations on the table include wealth and patronage; Waterston currently has an exhibition recreating James McNeill Whistler’s luxurious “peacock room.”

What Yves Klein did for blue, Aldo Tambellini did for black. One of New York’s better-known experimental filmmakers, Tambellini was obsessed with the possibilities of working within the void.

This doesn’t mean that black isn’t boring; for Tambellini’s newest film, “NO NAME FILM,” Alyse Lamb, called a “demonic cheerleader” by emusic, will perform a live original score. That’ll be different from your regular ol’ screening.

Following the 70-minute-long screening will be a Q&A with Tambellini.

Remember dickface.me? Artist Nicolas Guagnini (and Bill Hayden) were responsible for the phallic font, and now, you’ll see it again, this time writ large, with phrases of Guagnini’s choice, on Bortolami’s walls. Also on view: “monumental heads made of majolica-glazed stoneware; vitrified glazed ceramics resting on books and raw cedar pedestals; photographs of defaced Greek and Roman heads, printed on silk, cut, sewn together, and stretched to a uniform height.” Sounds like contemporary art.

The last time we saw Letha Wilson’s concrete-photograph wall-reliefs was at Hauser & Wirth during their summer show, Fixed Variable. Paddy liked ‘em:

Also clever: the curators decision to include Letha Wilson’s floor sculpture, which is a flat piece of steel with a corner curled up, as if it were paper. There’s a real play between this fold and the Kolbos which is very satisfying. In Wilson’s case, the underside of her piece reveals a c-print replicating what looks like skin or a subtle gradient of some kind. For what it’s worth, I think Letha Wilson’s folded sunset photograph, which is transformed into something resembling mounted blinds and then cemented over is one of the strongest works in the show. I mean, she chose to cover a view of a sunset up with cement! There’s no ambiguity in that gesture.

According to the gallery’s PR, we’ll see her largest concrete sculptures to date. Wear a hard hat?

Pole dancing lessons on the museum’s fifth floor. Enough said.

Nearly five months after Kara Walker’s Domino Sugar Factory installation came to a close, we get to see the artist’s perspective on the exhibition and the 130,000 visitors who Instagrammed her sugar sphinx. At a talk in Los Angeles this October, Walker mentioned she was well-aware of the public response. “I put a 10-foot vagina in the world and people responded to giant 10-foot vaginas the way they do,” she said, then admitting she had been shooting video all along. We’ll get to see those videos at Aftermath’s opening.

You never know what you’re going to get with filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh. Her career contains moments that nod to Kenneth Anger, “Trick Film” (1996), or Tomb Raider, “She Puppet” (2001). For her second exhibition at Microscope Gallery, Ahwesh uses a range of digital and appropriated images in multi-channel installations, all related to the “kissing point” of where the West Bank and Palestinian territories meet. With this exhibition, the artist herself has noted how the sex overlaps with politics, saying that the “Erotic undertones flavor the meaning of the term [kissing point]…giving these junctures a psychological dynamic and more than a bit of ironic interplay.”

This exhibition’s press release includes just two texts: 1) A 1987 article by Roberta Smith on artist royalties and 2) Seth Siegelaub’s transfer agreement. Are the artists in this show all adherents to Siegelaub’s contract? Haacke is, but we’ll have to get back to you on that one after the show opens.