This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Spooooky Edition

One of the qualities we love about Brenna Murphy’s work is that it so frequently looks like it was beamed down by medieval aliens. Inspired by celtic lattice work, labyrinths and a variety of synthetic materials, Murphy’s new book promises the same old-meets new fusion we like so much. The video preview makes the book seem like it’s barely a book—pages stream by as though streaming through an ipad—and the sound track makes it seem like it’s from the future. We get the sense the book will include a few lenticulars, but past that it’s hard to say. We definitely want to know more!

Here’s a video preview of the book: 

In our experience, there are few people as clear and articulate as Matthew Deleget. Deleget makes minimalist work and runs a gallery that shows the same. An incredibly dedicated and passionate community has emerged through this work, and though we’re a little outside it ourselves, we think its worth some attention. Nerdy at the level Deleget brings almost always yields good discussion.

The New Museum’s Annual Members Halloween Party is pretty legendary. Expect great costumes, prizes, and some art-world-celebrity appearances. As its name suggests, the event is only for museum members. But this event alone is pretty much worth the $70 entry-level membership (which obviously involves other perks, too).

Tom Burr’s photography and installations cast a critical eye towards the public/private division of space, gentrification, and other strategies for mediating who gets to do what and where. This exhibition feels perfectly suited to Chelsea in the Autumn of 2015—in the shadow of both the High Line and Greater New York’s urgent nostalgia for a less elitist, more wild city of cruisy piers and untamed streets. Alongside new work, Burr will appropriately be displaying pieces from the 1990s which themselves were eulogies for an ending era. “Circa “77” was first installed in Zurich in 1995 as a recreation of a “seedy” corner of a city park that was used as a cruising ground by gay men prior to a major revamp. It reads as a humble monument to a fading bastion of queer autonomous space.

Also on display, a series of never-before-shown Polaroids that Burr shot in Times Square throughout the 90s. These document the “Giulianization” of the area from a gloriously sleazy neighborhood of sex stores and porn theaters to the dystopian Disneyland we have today. These Polaroids—a medium that itself feels somehow sleazy, honest, and nostalgic all the same time—chronicle the systematic dismantling and rebranding of the area in unedited, unflinching squares. Alongside that series, an installation modelled on private viewing booths recalls the days when there were places to masturbate (or have anonymous sex) in Midtown. These, though, offer no privacy—functioning instead as ruins of a sort-of-anti-forum.

The opening of the exhibition also doubles as a publication release party, so you can take home a souvenir to remember a time when Manhattan was still terrifying to tourists.

At first glance, the painters in this show seem to fall into two camps: minimalists like Shawn Stipling or Michael Rouillard and maximalists like Chris Fennell. who’s obsessively-dotted canvases bring to mind contemporary Aboriginal Australian art. But really the show presents a survey of abstraction as a spectrum without neat categories—Emma Langridge’s minimalist compositions comprise many individual lines, each bearing a distinct trace of the artist’s hand while Alain Biltereyst’s hard-edged abstractions bear surprisingly painterly surfaces as well as allusion to decorative motifs and pattern. While so much of Bushwick’s process-base abstraction looks the same, it’s nice to see an international show that reminds us that mark-making (or lack thereof) doesn’t have to be boring or similar.

Artists: Aimée Terburg (NL), Alain Biltereyst (BE), Chris Fennell (USA), Danielle Mysliwiec (USA), Emma Langridge (AUS), Michael Rouillard (USA), Shawn Stipling (UK)

Lev Manovich is best known for his book The Language of New Media, which has been translated into more than 10 different languages and examines the conventions of software and the media content produced with it. According to a CAA review cited in wikipedia, the book offers “the first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of the subject.” It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that he will be speaking on the subject of Selfiecity.net. We assume the scholar will explore the conventions of the selfie.

I’m not sure if this is a recommendation so much as an account of our recoiling in fear after we viewed the lead image for Nolan Hendrickson’s show. Beware of the Simpsons-like rendering of gaping anus filled with cigarette butts! There’s no press release to tell us anything else. Consider yourself warned.

And so it begins: the performance biennial Performa kicks off its programming this Sunday with a performa commission by Francesco Vezzoli and David Hallberg
. No word on what the performance will actually be, but the promo image shows lots of buff men without their tops on. So far, we have nothing bad to say about this performance.