This Week’s Must-see Art Events: Edit Your Heart Out

The first time I saw Paris, Texas (1984), directed by Wim Wenders, I was playing hooky from school, i.e. “staying home sick.” Flipping through the channels, I landed on IFC to find the sprawling desert sky, an empty blueness dotted with the loneliest cowboy (Harry Dean Stanton) and his equally estranged ex-wife (played by model Nastassia Kinski). After Paris, Texas, I watched Wings of Desire (1987), another film about the gulfs of human loneliness, then gave up when it came to his 1990s work.

If you’re not even remotely familiar with Paris, Texas (hint, hint: it has a 100-percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so you should), this is the week to get started. Wim Wenders will be in person to introduce several of his films exhibiting at MoMA. Ranging from his short-films of the 1960s to his nearly five-hour long opus Until the End of the World (1991/94), Wenders’ full range of loneliness and desire. (Corinna)

Swiss artist Valentin Carron, who represented the country at the 2013 Venice Biennale, will bring a cornucopia of “quirky Swiss-ness” to New York; he’s curating an exhibition of work by (mostly) Swiss artists, focused on the country’s stereotypes and mythologies as they relate to labor. I ~really~ hope to see cuckoo clocks, fondue, and Kanye’s secret bank-account numbers. JK.  (Corinna)

Having been to this event before, I can tell you it’s mostly young collectors, booze and celery sticks. Nobody talks about art, even though it’s a party to celebrate the combined awesomeness of the fair and MoMA. This year, the reason to attend is the VIP preview from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. that allows early access into Bjork’s retrospective.  We don’t expect this show to be much different than the David Bowie traveling retrospective—a mythologizing clusterfuck designed to bring in foot traffic and insight the anger of those of us who have the audacity to use our brains every once and a while. (Paddy)

“Something smelled off in the gallery. Something ruined, or bad. The distinctive, slightly sickening odor turned out to be emanating from a plain cardboard box: Inside were stacks of clear plastic petri dishes, each flush with its own living, burgeoning bloom. Anicka Yi was growing bacteria, and the microbial cultures were spreading, metastasizing, like an unholy contagion in crimson and black and pink.” — Michelle Kuo, “Portfolio: Anicka Yi”
Artforum Editor Michelle Kuo describes the materials in artist Anicka Yi’s upcoming exhibition at the Kitchen as if they were part of a science fiction experiment gone wrong. In fact, Anicka Yi’s portfolio makes the cover of Artforum this month with her petri dishes, filled with swabs of bacteria from 100 women. Exhibition collaborators include a synthetic biologist, so there should be more science than fiction. (Corinna)

Pyromanics rejoice. Sculptures of sperm, a drawing of a fallen angel, and an installation of “stars” cover the floor of this pyromaniac-fetish-inspired exhibition. Sex, fire, and religion—like a contemporary Paradise Lost. Sounds dramatic. (Corinna)

On Friday, come see critic and Canadian Art editor David Balzer discuss his book Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Artworld and Everything Else with New York critics and curators Ben Davis, Orit Gat, David Everitt Howe, and Zoë Salditch.

Curationism comes with a series of rave reviews, the kind any author would want tattooed on their memory, if not their forearm. Dave Hickey’s praises are very nice:

“This is an unusual art book. It is a book you should read and one that you can. Balzer traces the history and current hegemony of curationism, a practice of jumped-up interior decorators who double as priests explaining the gospel to the unlettered masses. A good read, if you don’t mind reading things that you don’t want to know.”

Considering that “curating” has become a catch-all phrase for any type of selection—one can “curate” a Pinterest just as feasibly as an art exhibition—a thorough explanation of the term’s missives seems long overdue. (Corinna)

Cybernetic music? Yes, please. Saturday’s I/O performance will show how feedback is a central part of electronic music being made today: Data Garden will attach bio-sensors to a percussion instrument, translating that into midi data for other musicians; Glitch Lich creates music across the network, with musicians playing simultaneously across the globe. Performances by The Median Movement and Fan Letters also involve performing the network.
Go, and at the very least you’ll hear some rad beeps and bloops.

Organized by Flux Factory’s Alex Nathanson and Will Owen (Corinna)

Another fuck the fairs event: the 2015 Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. This global event, hosted by institutions across the world, brings together Wikipedia “experts” who’ll be available to assist anyone who wants to update Wikipedia. In New York, we have MoMA, Babycastles, Barnard College, and the Brooklyn Museum for meet ups; across the world, Wikipedians will be busy at official Art + Feminism events in Dublin, Moscow, and Lima, among other major cities across the globe. The event has taken off since 2014. When I attended last year, at Eyebeam, there were maybe two dozen willing Wikipedians who had brought their own books or were scouring the ‘net. I say let it take off! 90 percent of Wikipedia’s editors are still male. (Corinna)

Art F City’s Paddy Johnson helms “Art and the Cloud,” a discussion about collecting digital art with controversial art advisor and collector Stefan Simchowitz, collector David Diamond, independent curator and consultant Myriam Vanneschi, and Transfer Gallery founder Kelani Nichole. Topics include: Why collect digital art?Why do we care what collectors buy? If Terence Koh can sell a rotting chocolate wedding dress, is digital art any less problematic to conserve?  (Paddy)