This Week’s Must-See Art Events: None of Them are Poverty-Themed Raves

by Michael Anthony Farley and Rea McNamara on November 2, 2015 Events

DIS for MoMA Ambiguity.

DIS for MoMA Ambiguity.

Don’t get us started on that “Bronx is Burning” rave. (That’s for another post.) This week, as many of us are still cleaning off the paint and glitter from last weekend’s Halloween costume, there’s thankfully a mix of screenings, openings and performances to help ease you back into your regular schedule. Tonight, Ben Coonley organizes a group screening of artists’ first “hard-fought” 3D works at Brooklyn’s Microscope. Then there’s the opportunity to shake the spirits of the past, whether it be Tuesday’s Duane Linklater CUNY talk on museum’s colonialist legacies or Wednesday’s opening at Robert Blumenthal of an ambitious installation from Derek Fordjour evoking childhood-era psychic spaces.

Meanwhile, the rest of the week offers heavy fluxus drone (Thursday, Yoshi Wada) and an online journal launch (Friday, Bard’s aCCeSSions). The weekend promises new directions (Saturday, MoMa’s New Photography opening) and guilty pleasures (Michael’s, specifically, with Sunday’s Jessica Stockholder opening at a Greenpoint storefront space).

  1. M
  2. T
  3. W
  4. T
  5. F
  6. S
  7. S

Mon

Microscope Gallery

1329 Willoughby Avenue, #2B
Brooklyn, NY
7:30 p.m.Website

My First 3D - Part II

Since 2013, Ben Coonley has been organizing screenings showcasing artists’ first forays making stereoscopic 3D video and 3D animations. The media artist, who teaches a course on 3D film at Bard, has long been fascinated with the unruly conditions artists working with the optical and technical demands encounter: basically, the pains (and definitely headaches) of mismatched 3D image pairs. The group screening includes works by artists like Morehshin Allahyarhi, Jacob Ciocci, Kristen Lucas and Takeshi Murata, and, according to Coonley, promises “an autumnal cornucopia of deep space discoveries, hard-fought victories, [and] self-effacing illusions.”

Tue

Centre for Humanities, CUNY Graduate Centre

Skylight Room 9100, 365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY
6:30 p.m.Website

Decolonizing the Collection: A Conversation with Duane Linklater

Duane Linklater is probably one of the most exciting Canadian artists working today. Winner of the 2013 Sobey Art Award, the Omaskêko Cree from Moose Cree First Nation’s body of work studies the migration and inconsistent exchange of ideas, language and memory. One of his most recent works, Salt 11 at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, involved creating 3D printing copies of indigenous objects from the Museum’s permanent collection to bring attention to their transformation as Westernized ethnographic objects. The conversation, happening between Linklater and artist Christopher Stackhouse and anthropologist Audra Simpson, looks at the ways contemporary artists can contend with museum collections and their colonialist legacy.

 

Wed

Robert Blumenthal Gallery

1045 Madison Avenue
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.Website

Derek Fordjour: Upper Room

Remember how, as a child, it was never quite clear if authority figures such as police or God were supposed to instill a sense of security or terror? It turns out adulthood is a lot like that too. This installation—part Southern Christian revival tent, part domestic sanctuary, part sidewalk memorial—conflates rural spirituality, urban anxieties, and the racial tensions and traditions that accompany both. Upper Room is inspired in part by the artist’s mother, who would retreat to a special room in their home to pray for her children’s safety. Here, though, a soundtrack of hymns is interrupted by live updates from an NYPD radio scanner. We haven’t seen (or heard) the piece yet, but it seems equally politically and emotionally loaded, not to mention timely.  

 

Metropolitan Pavilion

123 West 18th St, 4th Floor
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. (Cocktails and Silent Auction) 8:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. (Dinner and Live Auction)Website

CUE Art Foundation 2015 Gala & Benefit Auction

 

There are few organizations in this city who do as much to support emerging artists, nonprofits, and independent curators as the CUE Art Foundation. It’s fitting to their mission of accessibility that they’re offering super-discounted tickets to the event for artists or nonprofit workers. This is a great opportunity to have a fancy night out while giving something back to a great foundation who’ve helped countless members of the city’s art community from the bottom-up.

Thu

3A Gallery

179 Canal St, #3A
New York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Paul McMahon: Me

 

Discussing 321 Gallery’s retrospective of McMahon’s 44 year career, ARTnews correspondent John Chiaverina described the artist as “a bridge between 1970s Conceptual art and the Pictures Generation in New York”. But McMahon’s work is hard to classify—he’s experimented with everything from curation and performance to altering advertisements and bumper stickers. Often, that work has been overlooked by the commercial art world because it didn’t fit a “clean” or “precious” aesthetic that’s been consistently salable. But from what we’ve seen, it’s been smart, irreverent, and funny without sacrificing sincerity. We can only imagine how that translates to self portraiture, which this show will be devoted to.

Emily Harvey Foundation

537 Broadway #2
New York, NY
8:00 p.m.Website

Yoshi Wada: Earth Horns with Electronic Drone

In 1974, Fluxus artist Yoshi Wada recorded live a three hour heavy drone performance showcasing the sounds made from his homemade “pipehorns”, which were basically huge plumbing pipes with mouthpieces attached. For a former student of the legendary Pandit Pran Nath, the album Earth Horns with Electronic Drone has since gone on to be recognized as an early minimalism classic; the sounds are meditative and eerily ancient, sonorous in a low-fi tuba  kind of way. Wada will be reprising in this Issue Project Room event those performances, using the original instruments, with the support of local players Nate Wooley, Dan Peck and Jen Baker, alongside electronic and organ accompaniment from his son, Tashi Wada.

Fri

SculptureCenter

44-19 Purves St
Long Island City, NY
7:00 p.m.Website

aCCeSsions Launch

Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies just launched a new online journal of criticism—aCCeSsions, which has a pretty great user-interface that’s fun but still functional and a first issue devoted to the problems in discourse surrounding “the global”. This is a great opportunity to get a digital tour of the website, meet the editorial team, and catch performances by Deanna Havas and Puppies Puppies. The first issue is titled “The Artworld is Normal”, but based on what little we know about Puppies Puppies, the evening promises to be anything but.

 

Sat

MoMA

11 W 53rd St.
New York, NY
10:30 a.m - 5:30 p.m.Website

Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015

This is the 30th anniversary of MoMA’s New Photography series, and to mark the occasion they’re highlighting just how much has changed in image-making in the past three decades. This iteration features worldwide selections that include born-digital images, “photographs” created with scanners, and pieces that mimic commercial commissions, such as DIS’s contribution “Positive Ambiguity” (above) which credits “beard, lectern, teleprompter, wind machine, confidence” as its material list.

Artists: Ilit Azoulay, Zbyněk Baladrán, Lucas Blalock, Edson Chagas, Natalie Czech, DIS, Katharina Gaenssler, David Hartt, Mishka Henner, David Horvitz, John Houck, Yuki Kimura, Anouk Kruithof, Basim Magdy, Katja Novitskova, Marina Pinsky, Lele Saveri, Indrė Šerpytytė, and Lieko Shiga

Curated by Quentin Bajac, Eva Respini, Ana Janevski, and Sarah Suzuki, with Katerina Stathopoulou

Sun

Cleopatra's

110 Meserole Ave
Brooklyn, NY
12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.Website

Jessica Stockholder

There is virtually no information about what this exhibition is going to be. But Cleopatra’s is a storefront space in Greenpoint that hosts solo projects by artists alongside events. And Jessica Stockholder is a world-renowned sculptor/color theorist/installation artist whose work is so good it somehow feels like a guilty pleasure. Seriously. I don’t care what Jessica Stockholder is showing—I’m probably going to love it. She could literally take a dump on a neon orange closet organizer from Target, spray paint the turd teal, and wrap the whole thing in hot pink fishnets from a store on Knickerbocker and Broadway and it would be beautiful (but raw) and funny (but moving) and lyrical (but accessible) and painterly (but rooted in the concrete) and thought-provoking (but wholly fulfilling as a “mere” aesthetic experience) all at the same time.

MoMA PS1

22-25 Jackson Ave.
Long Island City, N.Y.
12:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.Website

Sunday Sessions: It’s Not What Happens, It’s How You Handle It

As expected, MoMA PS1’s fall Sunday session programming include select events responding to the Greater New York exhibition, a show that Michael thought was pretty great for its direct referencing of the city’s urban fabric, in all its flawed, sprawling glory. So it makes sense for this particular session to be convened by John Giorno, Warhol muse currently in the midst of his first museum retrospective at the Palais De Tokyo. Will this be a NY underground séance? Not likely, since the poetry event promises an inter-generational groundings connecting Dial-A-Poem peers like Fanny Howe with the Text-or-Tweet-A-Poem generation, including Morgan Parker, Bunny Rogers and Sophia le Fraga.

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