This Week’s Must-see Art Events: Strange Monuments

Here’s what David Levine and Bruce Nauman’s work have in common: it leaps seamlessly between image, object and performance, it can be funny—not necessarily the ha-ha variety—and it’s bound to piss off those few remaining squares who refuse to get on board with anything primarily conceptual. Who better to lecture on the guy who made “Clown Torture” than the guy who made “Wow,” an opera about pop’s most infamous lip-syncers?

We spend one third of our lives in bed. Given that we do so much more there than sleep, it’s a site that merits more conceptual unpacking and attention than it often receives.

The artworks in Come to Bed! explore the bed as a place that generates all kinds of communication: From nocturnal self-reflection to after-hour chitchat and modern-day technological disruptions, work by Michelle Jaffé, Marta Jovanović and Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos investigate how we occupy this most intimate of places.

Art F City is proud to be one of the sponsors of Flux Factory’s benefit this year—The Long Island City art space is one of our favorite spots for free art viewing and an important resource for artists.

Their ninth annual benefit auction features work by nearly 75 artists, Flux-themed food, DJs, a photobooth, and open bar.

Tickets are available online at a discount or at the door.

Thursday’s a busy day for art—you might as well get an early start by taking lunch on the High Line and taking in an open-air exhibition of works by Mariana Castillo Deball, Olafur Eliasson, Elmgreen & Dragset, Ryan Gander, Kris Martin, Damián Ortega, Gabriel Sierra, and Katrín Sigurðardóttir.

True to its title, Panorama takes vistas and lines of site into account, as well as the “spectacle of nature” and how human impact has changed the way encounter and perceive (what we think of as) the natural world.

If you didn’t get your fill of site-specific public art at Panorama, we suggest you head to the Old Bronx Borough Courthouse. Works by 26 artists occupy the otherwise vacant building. Like the exhibition’s title, pieces housed within reference the cut-up technique, an avant-garde writing approach to appropriation and remix favored by beat poet William Burroughs. Regine Basha curated this exhibition for No Longer Empty, an organization that works with a different kind of cut-up; NLE grafts contemporary art exhibitions onto and into underutilized urban spaces.

The publishing field’s workers—online or otherwise—remains largely unorganized since the industry’s first strike in 1934. Journalism is a precarious occupation, instrumental as it may be to the art world and market. This panel on the state of labor in publishing today is hosted by n + 1, a tri-annual print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and politics.

Panelists include: Aaron Braun, Sarah Jaffe, Maxine Phillips, and Maida Rosenstein. Moderated by n + 1 editor Nikil Saval.

Space is limited, so be sure to RSVP to rsvp@nplusonemag.com.

This documentary celebrates 1960s Chicago as a hotbed for lesser-known artmaking. It’s also a film where the medium is the message–rich animation accompanies straightforward interviews. That’s only appropriate for its subject, the Chicago Imagists, a band of figurative artists holding their own in the age of pop and abstraction.

MODEL HOME [][]> wins AFC’s unofficial ‘weird art event of the week’ contest. It’s an “immersive performance event” collaboratively produced by Secret Robot Project Art Experiment and FlucT, pseudonym for performance duo Sigrid Lauren & Monica Mirabile. More importantly, the performance-event-immersion-whatchamacallit is set in a nearly life-size dollhouse.

Imaginary Monuments is not so much about make-believe megaliths as it is an exhibition of reasonably sized artworks that mimic monumental architecture. Drawings, collages, objects—each are contemporary art voodoo doll versions of larger structures that could maybe, possibly, exist somewhere. The press release suggests that this pseudo-monument-making is part of a current trend in art, which must signify some greater collective urge towards all things not-Twitter. Here’s to wishful thinking.

Artists: Aimée Burg, Mark Dixon, Thale Fastvold, Emily Hass and Matthew Koons.

Curated by Fritz Horstman

This afternoon of performative and scholarly presentations celebrates two liberation movements birthed from the Imperial Elks Lodge. The historic Harlem site once housed Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, laborers who gathered at lodge in secret to fight poor working conditions. You might also recognize it from Paris is Burning—decades after the strike, voguers replaced porters as ball culture crystallized queer identity for people fighting for a different kind of recognition.

Presenter include niv Acosta, dance artist; Davarian Baldwin, a scholar of black urbanism and the Great Migration; Alicia Garza, special projects director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter; and Uri McMillan, a scholar of performance and queer studies.

Organised by historian Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts.