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Winner of the Grand Jury Award last January at Sundance and opening here Friday, Ira Sach’s “Keep the Lights On” raises an interesting issue regarding what one brings to a film in that "Keep the Lights On" is, in a sense, two movies.

There's the "Keep the Lights On" for people familiar with its backstory and the "Keep the Lights On" for those who are, so to speak, in the dark. I was basically one of the latter when I first saw this episodic “Scenes From a Marriage”-style saga of a stormy decade-long romantic relationship, although, given that one protagonist is a filmmaker, I assumed there were some autobiographical elements. (To maintain your unspoiled innocence, stop reading after third — or even the second — paragraph.

Initially engrossing, I found “Keep the Lights On” ever more meandering and, despite one or two powerhouse scenes, only intermittently touching — not to mention curiously averse to ending on the tragic note that the material seemed to demand. Erik (Thure Lindhardt), a Danish documentarian living in New York, and his lover Paul (Zachary Booth), would seem to be antithetical types when they first hook up. Erik is emotionally open, sexually expressive, and handsome as a model albeit when it comes to his career, something of a slacker; Paul is uptight, closeted, and a successful workaholic, with a job in publishing. He’s also petulant, whiny, and a secret crack-head. After five years and a stint of couple therapy, Erik gets Paul to go into rehab. But that’s not the movie’s happy ending.

Loved by men and admired by women, Erik finally enjoys a measure of professional success (his documentary on an underground gay photographer wins the Teddy for best LGBT movie at the Berlin Film Festival). Paul meanwhile jumps off the wagon and down the rabbit hole of degradation. The movie’s most wrenching scene has Erik tracking his partner to the expensive hotel where he’s been on a weeks-long crack and hustler binge and holding Paul’s hand as Paul is roughly serviced by a smirking young stud. But that’s not the movie’s devastating closer.

And here the spoiling begins. One need only read Variety’s review to learn that “Keep the Lights On” is a film a clef: “It’s no secret that, with Erik standing in for Sachs, Paul is a version of his former longtime partner, literary agent Bill Clegg, and that in 2010, Clegg published a memoir of his condition, “Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man." Thus, “Keep the Lights On” is not just two movies, but also the other half of a known story.

Unaware of any possible score-settling, I took it for granted that Sachs was invested in his filmmaker protagonist, and that was why, despite his initial difficulties, Erik was so much more attractive, caring, confident and together than Paul, even though Paul is by far the more compelling character. More puzzling was the mysterious connection between Erik’s inability to leave Paul and Sachs’ disinclination to wrap up and end his movie. Whose pathology was at work here, the character’s or the filmmaker’s. Turns out that they’re identical.

As filmmaking, “Keep On the Lights” has definite qualities. There’s some pungent local color, an effective absence of conventional transition scenes, and a pleasingly hazy quality to the interactions. Still, the movie’s elaborately failed closure only makes sense once you understand that the filmmaker’s all-too-human desire for self-justification apparently trumped the ruthless self-control required to make a work of art.

Read more J. Hoberman on Movie Journal.

This week, the fall art season kicked off, and our trusty staff made it outdoors, tasked, as usual, with summarizing what they saw in the form of a single (sometimes run-in) sentence. (To see our One-Line Reviews in illustrated slide show format, click here.)

* “Aggro Crag,” at BOSI Contemporary, 48 Orchard Street, September 1-23

The New York painters in this group show take palpable joy in their medium, whether it’s Joyce Pensato with her monolithic “Punk Homer” drenched in black paint, Austin Eddy creating creepy faces from cardboard and oil paint, or Trudy Benson building dimensional layers in “Monolith,” so it's no loss if the “digital culture” that the press release claims to be highlighted seems missing. — Allison Meier

* Leonardo Drew, at Sikkema Jenkins Co., 530 West 22nd Street, September 6-October 13

Winding through the gallery like a giant snake, Leonardo Drew's burnt wood construction “Number 161” isn't for the claustrophobic, pushing the viewer against the wall and forcing her to yield personal space to its looming, clapboard body, which towers overhead like a demonic, charred Noah’s Ark. — Julia Halperin

“The Feverish Library,” curated by Matthew Higgs, at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 537 West 22nd Street, September 6-October 20

It may be a mildly audacious move to start the new art season with a group show, even one organized by the redoubtable Matthew Higgs —but this pungent selection of artworks by figures interrogating “the book as a conceptual, psychological, and cultural form” proves that the smell and feel of actual, physical print is as much of a draw as any art star. — Ben Davis

* Jesper Just, “This Nameless Spectacle,” at James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, September 6-October 27

The gallery has added a series of darkened alcoves that provide intimate silent environments to get lost in this Danish artist’s diverse film works, from “Sirens of Chrome,” a sensual portrait of African-American women set against seductive music and the shining surfaces of cars, to “Llano,” a meditative look back at a dried-up century-old Utopian community outside of Los Angeles, which failed due to lack of access to water, but that the artist now films under a rain machine for what amounts to an act of cinematic reanimation. — Alanna Martinez

* Sandi Slone, “Quick Mettle Rich Blood,” at Allegra LaViola Gallery, 179 East Broadway, September 5-October 6

Pour paintings are having a big year, and Slone — who has been making them for decades — proves that she is still one of the splashy technique's best practitioners in this show of recent compositions, whose pools of glowing pinks, reds, and blues conceal the faintly visible linear forms below. — Benjamin Sutton

* “Shift,” at Lesley Heller Workspace, 54 Orchard Street, September 5-October 14

Landscape is the subject uniting the diverse works in this group show where, put together, the works form a panorama of the delirious, funny, and mundane reaches of the artists’ minds. — Rachel Corbett

WHAT: “A Visual Essay on Gutai at 32 East 69th Street”

WHEN: September 12-October 27

WHERE: Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, New York.

WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: In this monumental exhibition, Hauser & Wirth will survey the 12 members of the Gutai Art Association, a radical post-World War II Japanese art movement that advocated for the creation of new ideas, aesthetics, and practices meant to renew life and culture in the war-torn country.

Jiro Yoshihara founded the association (which included about 20 other members) in 1954, and cemented the group’s credo with a manifesto in 1956, which encouraged artists to blaze new trails with their work, disregard the rigid traditions of art history, and search for higher forms of inspiration. The show will feature 30 works from a 20-year period, spanning performances, paintings, and music made mostly of simple materials, from mud to light bulbs, and exploring thematic relations between art, the body, space, and time.

One of the more widely recognized female members, Atsuko Tanaka, used bright color and chaotic patterned shapes in vinyl paintings on canvas, which rsemble the electricity passing between atoms and particles. Kazuo Shiraga’s abstract works, exemplified by “Green Fan” (1965), expressed a furious abstract vision manifested through the physical force of his body — he even painted some pieces with his feet.  Yoshihara’s “Work,” (part of his “Circle” series) best embodies the collective's ethos, a fusion of Zen ideals and styles used in response to the physical and social destruction caused by WWII.

Gutai pre-dated Abstract Expressionism, Arte Povera, and Conceptual Art, though its story is seldom referenced in 20th Century art history classes and texts. However, the positive and liberating message of its artists undoubtedly has paved the way for many Western artists.

To see works from “A Visual Essay on Gutai at 32 East 69th Street,” click the slide show. 

Fall may have just begun, but Art Basel Miami Beach is already gearing up for December. The mother of all American art fairs has compiled its exhibitor list for its 11th edition, which runs December 6-9, and ARTINFO snagged an early peek. Over 680 galleries competed for 257 spots — slightly fewer than last year’s total of 264. They hail from 31 countries and include new faces from New York, Paris, Berlin, and London. Meanwhile, some familiar dealers — including Tony Shafrazi, Zach Feuer, and Marc Jancou, all of New York — will not be returning.

Among the 17 new names in the main gallery section are Paris’s Art:Concept, Galerie Daniel Templon, and Torabuoni Art; Henrique Faria Fine Art, Hammer Galleries, and Craig F. Starr Gallery of New York; and Galerie Mehdi Chouakri, Esther Schipper, and Buchmann Galerie of Berlin. (Some of these galleries may have participated in earlier editions of the fair, but all were absent from last year’s event.)

As usual, the Art Nova and Art Positions sections — dedicated to younger galleries or newer artworks — had the largest turnover. Among the highlights are Galerie Michel Rein of Paris, which will offer a solo presentation of Whitney Biennial star LaToya Ruby Frazier in the Art Positions section, and Eleven Rivington Gallery of New York, which is showing Katrin Sigurdardottir, Iceland’s choice for the 2013 Venice Biennale, alongside Hilary Berseth and Michael DeLucia in the Art Nova section.

Who didn’t make the cut? Los Angeles’s International Art Objects Galleries and Richard Telles are out, while the city’s Gemini G.E.L. LLC is in. Notably, Marc Jancou and Tony Shafrazi, both of whom have been at the center of controversies this year, are not returning. (Jancou is locked in a protracted legal battle with artist Cady Noland and Sotheby’s, while Shafrazi ruffled some feathers at this year’s Art Basel when he decided to fill his booth with his own artwork.) Moeller Fine Art of New York and Christian Nagel of Berlin will also stay home this year.

ARTINFO has reproduced the full exhibitor list below. Start building your Art Basel Miami itineraries now, won't you?

Art Galleries

303 Gallery | New York

A Gentil Carioca | Rio de Janeiro

Miguel Abreu Gallery | New York

Acquavella Galleries, Inc. | New York

Alexander and Bonin | New York

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe | New York

Andréhn-Schiptjenko | Stockholm

Art:Concept | Paris

Alfonso Artiaco | Naples

Galerie Guido W. Baudach Wedding | Berlin

Galería Elba Benítez | Madrid

Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte | Buenos Aires

John Berggruen Gallery | San Francisco

Gallery Bernier/Eliades | Athens

Blum & Poe | Los Angeles

Marianne Boesky Gallery | New York

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery | New York

Mary Boone Gallery | New York

Niels Borch Jensen Galerie | Berlin

Bortolami | New York

BQ | Berlin

Luciana Brito Galeria | São Paulo

Gavin Brown’s enterprise | New York

Galerie Daniel Buchholz | Cologne

Buchmann Galerie | Berlin

Campoli Presti | London

Valerie Carberry Gallery | Chicago

carlier gebauer | Berlin

Casa Triângulo | São Paulo

Cheim & Read | New York

Chemould Prescott Road | Fort, Mumbai

Galerie Mehdi Chouakri | Berlin

James Cohan Gallery | New York

Sadie Coles HQ | London

Contemporary Fine Arts | Berlin

Galleria Continua | San Gimignano

Paula Cooper Gallery | New York

CRG Gallery | New York

Galerie Chantal Crousel | Paris

D'Amelio | New York

DAN Galería | São Paulo

Thomas Dane Gallery | London

Maxwell Davidson Gallery | New York

Galleria Massimo De Carlo | Milan

Galería Guillermo de Osma | Madrid

Galerie Eigen + Art | Berlin

Henrique Faria Fine Art | New York

Konrad Fischer Galerie | Düsseldorf

Galeria Fortes Vilaça | São Paulo

Peter Freeman, Inc. | York

Stephen Friedman Gallery | London

Gagosian Gallery | New York

Galerie 1900-2000 | Paris

Gemini G.E.L. LLC | Los Angeles

Gladstone Gallery | New York

Galerie Gmurzynska | Zurich

Galería Elvira González | Madrid

Marian Goodman Gallery | New York

Goodman Gallery | Johannesburg

Graça Brandão | Lisboa

Galerie Bärbel Grässlin | Frankfurt Main

Alexander Gray Associates | New York

Richard Gray Gallery | Chicago

Howard Greenberg Gallery | New York

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery | New York

Greene Naftali Gallery | New York

Galerie Karsten Greve | St. Moritz

Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art | Lisbon

Galerie Michael Haas | Berlin

Hammer Galleries | New York

Harris Lieberman | New York

Hauser & Wirth | Zurich

Helly Nahmad Gallery | New York

Herald St | London

Galerie Max Hetzler | Berlin

Hirschl & Adler Modern | New York

Rhona Hoffman Gallery | Chicago

Edwynn Houk Gallery | New York

Xavier Hufkens | Brussels

Bernard Jacobson Gallery | London

Alison Jacques Gallery | London

Galerie Martin Janda | Vienna

Rodolphe Janssen | Brussels

Annely Juda Fine Art | London

Casey Kaplan | New York

Paul Kasmin Gallery | New York

kaufmann repetto | Milan

Sean Kelly Gallery | New York

Anton Kern Gallery | New York

Kewenig Galerie | Köln

Kicken Berlin | Berlin

Galerie Peter Kilchmann | Zurich

Klosterfelde | Berlin

Galerie Sabine Knust | Munich

Michael Kohn Gallery | Los Angeles

Johann König, Berlin | Berlin

David Kordansky Gallery | Los Angeles

Tomio Koyama Gallery | Tokyo

Andrew Kreps Gallery | New York

Galerie Krinzinger | Vienna

Kukje Gallery | New York

kurimanzutto | Mexico City

L & M Arts | New York

Galerie Yvon Lambert | Paris

Landau Fine Art | Montreal

Simon Lee Gallery | London

Lehmann Maupin | New York

Galerie Lelong | New York

Lisson Gallery | London

Long March Space | Beijing

Luhring Augustine | New York

Magazzino | Rome

Mai 36 Galerie | Zurich

Galería Jorge Mara -La Ruche | Buenos Aires

Matthew Marks Gallery | New York

Marlborough Gallery, Inc. | New York

Mary-Anne Martin / Fine Art | New York

Barbara Mathes Gallery | New York

Galerie Hans Mayer | Düsseldorf

McCaffrey Fine Art | New York

McKee Gallery | New York

Anthony Meier Fine Arts | San Francisco

Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne | Lucerne

kamel mennour | Paris

Metro Pictures | New York

Meyer Riegger | Karlsruhe

Galeria Millan | São Paulo

Robert Miller Gallery | New York

Victoria Miro Gallery | London

Mitchell-Innes & Nash | York

Stuart Shave Modern Art | London

The Modern Institute | Glasgow

Galerie nächst St. Stephan | Vienna

Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art | New York

Francis M. Naumann Fine Art | New York

Galeria Leandro Navarro | Madrid

Galerie Nelson-Freeman | Paris

neugerriemschneider | Berlin

Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art | New York

Galleria Franco Noero | Turin

David Nolan Gallery | New York

Galerie Nordenhake | Berlin

Galería OMR | Mexico City

The Pace Gallery | New York

The Paragon Press | London

Parkett Verlag | Zurich

Franklin Parrasch Gallery | New York

Perrotin | Paris

Friedrich Petzel Gallery | New York

Polígrafa Obra Gráfica | Barcelona

Praz -Delavallade |Paris

Galerie Eva Presenhuber |Zurich

Galerie Almine Rech | Paris

Regen Projects | Los Angeles

Regina Gallery | Moscow

Anthony Reynolds Gallery | London

Roberts & Tilton | Culver City

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac | Paris

Andrea Rosen Gallery | New York

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery | New York

Lia Rumma | Milan

Salon 94 | New York

SCAI The Bathhouse | Tokyo

Esther Schipper | Berlin

Galerie Thomas Schulte | Berlin

Jack Shainman Gallery | New York

ShanghART & H Space | Shanghai

Sicardi G | Houston

Sies + Höke | Düsseldorf

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. | New York

Bruce Silverstein | New York

Skarstedt Gallery | New York

Fredric Snitzer Gallery | Miami

Sperone Westwater | New York

Sprüth Magers Berlin London | Berlin

Nils Staerk | Copenhagen

Standard (OSLO) | Oslo

Craig F. Starr Gallery | New York

Galleria Christian Stein | Milan

Stevenson | Cape Town

Galeria Luisa Strina | São Paulo

Galería Sur | Punta del Este

Team Gallery | New York

Galerie Daniel Templon | Paris

Galerie Thomas | Munich

Galerie Barbara Thumm | Berlin

Tilton Gallery | New York

Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects | New York

Tornabuoni Art | Paris

Two Palms | New York

Van de Weghe Fine Art | New York

Vermelho | São Paulo

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects | Culver City

Waddington Custot Galleries | London

Galleri Nicolai Wallner | Copenhagen

Washburn Gallery | New York

Michael Werner | New York

White Cube | London

Zeno X Gallery | Antwerp

Zero... | Milan

David Zwirner | New York

Art Nova

Jessica Bradley Art + Projects | Toronto: Sara MacKillop, Derek Sullivan, and Zin Taylor

Bugada & Cargnel | Paris: Étienne Chambaud; Cyprien Gaillard; Julio Le Parc

Pilar Corrias | London: Julião Sarmento, Leigh Ledare

Silvia Cintra + Box4 | Rio de Janeiro: Rodrigo Matheus; Nelson Leirner; and Carlito Carvalhosa

Cherry and Martin | Los Angeles: T. Kelly Mason; Erik Frydenborg

Galerie Frank Elbaz | Paris: Davide Balula and Gyan Panchal

Eleven Rivington Gallery | New York: Hilary Berseth; Michael DeLucia; and Katrin Sigurdardottir

Gaudel de Stampa | Paris: Dove Allouche; Jonathan Binet; and Jessica Warboys

i8 Gallery | Reykjavík: Egill Saebjornsson, Janice Kerbel

Ibid Gallery | London: David Adamo; Marianne Vitale

Galerie Michael Janssen | Berlin: Anne Chu, Meg Cranston, and Rose Wylie

Galerie Kamm | Berlin: Kate Davis and Kathrin Sonntag

Karma International | Zurich: Agnieszka Brzezanska; Tobias Madison

Kavi Gupta Gallery | Chicago: Theaster Gates; Curtis Mann; and Angel Otero

Galeria Leme | São Paulo: Zilvinas Kempinas, Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, and Jessica Mein

Ignacio Liprandi Arte Contemporáneo | Buenos Aires: Pablo Accinelli; Mathieu Mercier; and Jore

Pedro Nunez

Lombard Freid Projects | New York: Kemang Wa Lehuiere, Lee Kit, and Nina Yuen

Maisterravalbuena | Madrid: A Kassen; Karmelo Bermejo; and Nestor Sanmiguel Diest

Galerie Mezzanin | Vienna: Thomas Bayrle; Peter Kogler; and Mandla Reuter

Meessen De Clercq | Brussels: Evariste Richer; Fabrice Samyn; and José Maía Sicilia

Mendes Wood | São Paulo: Tunga; Adriano Costa

Francesca Minini | Milan: Becky Beasley, Simon Dyebbroe Möller

Nogueras Blanchard | Barcelona: Anne-Lise Coste; Rubén Grilo; and Ignacio Uriarte

Overduin and Kite | Los Angeles: Ei Arakawa, Nikolas Gambaroff

ProjecteSD | Barcelona: Raimond Chaves; Gilda Mantilla

Proyectos Monclova | Mexico City: Tania Pérez Cordova; Nina Beier

Rampa | Istanbul: Nevin Aladag; Güclü Seymen

Galeria Marilia Razuk | São Paulo: Débora Bolsoni; Wagner Malta Tavares, and Raquel Garbelotti

Revolver Galería | Lima: Jerry B. Martin; José Carlos Martinat; and Giancarlo Scaglia

Galeria Nara Roesler | São Paulo: Brigida Baltar; Lucia Koch; and Melanie Smith

Galerie Micky Schubert | Berlin: Marieta Chirulescu; Lydia Gifford; and Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili

Thomas Solomon Gallery | Los Angeles: Ry Rocklen; Analia Saban; and Mitchell Syrop

Sommer Contemporary Art | Tel Aviv

Travesía Cuatro | Madrid: Jorge Méndez-Blake; Jose Dávia

UNTITLED | New York: N. Dash; Ian Tweedy

Galerie Valentin | Paris: Luca Francesconi; David Douard

Vitamin Creative Space | Guangzhou: Hao Liang; Yangjiang Group; and Zheng Guogu

Wallspace | New York: Walead Beshty; John Divola; and Harry Dodge

Wentrup | Berlin: Florian Meisenberg; Cristian Andersen

Art Positions

Altman Siegel Gallery SF | San Francisco: Matt Keegan

Arratia, Beer | Berlin: Pablo Rasgado

Galería Casas Riegner | Bogotá: Leyla Cárdenas

Galeria Fonti | Naples: Christian Flamm

Fitzroy Gallery | New York: Colby Bird

La Central | Bogotá: Felipe Arturo

Labor | Mexico City: Irene Kopelman

Galeria Laura Marsiaj | Rio de Janeiro: Paulo Vivacqua

Galerie mor.charpentier | Paris: Julieta Aranda

Mother’s Tankstation | Dublin: Atsushi Kaga

NON Gallery | Istanbul: Asli Cavusoglu

PSM | Berlin: Nathan Peter

Galerie Michel Rein | Paris: Latoya Ruby Frazier

RaebervonStenglin | Zurich: Ivan Seal

Ramiken Crucible | New York: Andra Ursuta

Galerie Michel Rein | Paris: Latoya Ruby Frazier

Spinello Projects | Miami: Agustina Woodgate

SEPTEMBER

9/7–11/11: Gwangju Biennale

9/7–12/9: São Paulo Bienal

9/18–12/31: “Regarding Warhol: 60 Artists, 50 Years,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

9/24–25: Sale of property from the estate of Brooke Astor, Sotheby’s, New York

9/25–1/20: “Impressionism and Fashion,” Musee d’Orsay, Paris

9/30–1/27: Edgar Degas, Fondation Beyeler, Basel

OCTOBER

10/6–1/14: “Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

10/7–2/24: “Ai Weiwei: According to What?,” Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

10/11–14: Frieze, Frieze Masters, London

10/13–12/12: Istanbul Design Biennial

10/15: Americans for the Arts, National Arts Awards, New York

10/18–21: Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC), Paris

10/26–29: Art Toronto

10/30: Whitney Museum annual Gala and Studio Party, New York

NOVEMBER

11/1: Performa fall party: Relâche, New York

11/1–4: Shanghai Art Fair

11/3–2/3: “Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind’s Eye,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

11/7–10: Abu Dhabi Art

11/7–12: Paris Tableau

11/8: Guggenheim International Gala, New York

11/9: Broad Art Museum opens East Lansing, Michigan

11/9–11: Artissima, Turin

11/9–12: The Salon: Art + Design, New York

11/10: Parrish Art Museum opens in new location Water Mill, New York

11/14–2/18: George Bellows, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

11/15–18: Paris Photo

11/19: Independent Curators International annual benefit, honoring Dasha Zhukova, New York

11/23–28: Christie’s Hong Kong Fall sales

DECEMBER

12/3: Turner Prize, London

12/5–3/10: “Bill Viola: Liber Insolarum,” Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

12/6–9: Art Basel Miami Beach and satellite fairs

12/7: Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev

12/10–14: Design sales: Phillips de Pury & Co., Christie’s, Sotheby’s, New York

12/13: Kandinsky Prize, Moscow

This article appears in the September issue of Art+Auction magazine.

On a wall of his retrospective, a stubby length of wood — perhaps six inches, oriented vertically, and sanded smooth — hangs beside a written narrative of a tree’s birth on the Slovenian-Croatian border, leading to the discovery, by the artist, of a piece of that tree floating in the water off the Lido in Venice. Jimmie Durham understands that art objects are things about which we tell stories.

Such stories may be theoretical, historical, or fictional, as in the case of “The Piece of Wood,” 2005; and they need not be written in order to be transformative. But Durham harbors intense feelings for his materials, and since in his case these include both language and objects, he often writes. In an essay in the exhibition catalogue, he says, “Only now, however, preparing for this retrospective, do I realize that I have never made a separation between writing and making sculptures.” One can think of the show, “A Matter of Life and Death and Singing,” as a dance for stories and objects; sometimes they take the floor singly, at others in tandem.

If his stories represent our human relationship to objects, for Durham, objects are no less lively without us. The earliest pieces on view at M HKA evince his lifelong enchantment by stone, bone, and wood. And it is tempting to describe Durham’s early work, with its animal skulls and Paleolithic-looking implements, as shamanic or totemic — but doing so would fail to convey both their humor and their sophistication. His skulls grin, his masks vamp, and objects appear with witty captions: Above two lathe-turned pieces of wood wound with thread is pinned a sheet of paper offering the phrase “Une machine désire de l’instruction comme un jardin désire de la discipline” [A machine desires instruction as a garden desires discipline].

The reason one might want to describe such objects as totemic is that Durham was born a Wolf Clan Cherokee in Arkansas, and has long been involved with the plight of indigenous peoples. “On every continent we are oppressed,” he writes in his catalogue essay, “and at best at the whims and mercy of the nations founded against us. What, I might say, refusing romanticism, makes us different? We are stateless peoples. Stateless with no wish, no possibility to make our own nation-states.” Durham has been plurally stateless for decades, and it is for this reason that he remains virtually unknown in the country founded against him, the United States. He moved to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1969, where he received a BFA from L’Ecole des beaux-arts. From 1973 until 1980, he ceased making art while he worked as a political organizer for the American Indian Movement and as the United Nations representative for the International Indian Treaty Council. He’s lived abroad (some say in exile) since 1987, first in Mexico and, since 1994, in Europe. Currently he resides in Berlin and Naples.

His work, while drawing on his indigenous American heritage, is equally rooted in a European conceptual tradition. In style and temperament it bears some comparison with the work of his friend David Hammons. Yet where Hammons’s politics tend to be pointed, Durham approaches the political obliquely, most frequently through a critique of architecture — by which he means visual manifestations of state ideology. His methods are metaphorical and performative, rooted in comedic theater, and extend from sculpture to photography, video, writing, painting, and installation. A collapsible arch in cheery red, blue, and yellow, “Arc de Triomphe for Personal Use,” 1996–2007, can be erected anywhere, anytime one feels like celebrating a victory. Durham clearly relishes mocking national pretensions. He also seeks to liberate objects from their grip and from various roles imposed upon them. For the sculpture “St Frigo,” 1996, he threw cobblestones at an old refrigerator, freeing the cobblestones from the street and saving the life of the fridge, “by making it a martyr,” as he explained in an interview. “It was going into the trash, now it is eternal, now it’s art.” Such is his feeling for things that he even seeks to disturb artistic roles imposed upon them. “A Stone Bra for the Venus de Milo,” 1998, couples a photograph of the classical sculpture with a plaster bra hung on a nail.

Although some of his actions, such as smashing an object with rocks (he’s done it to televisions and a glass case, too) might seem violent, Durham’s nature is empathetic and his politics nonviolent. As Richard William Hill notes in the exhibition catalogue, “Durham is not transgressive. His boundary-crossing is not designed to shock or scandalize... His intention is not to demolish monuments but to disrupt our faith in them at the deepest level.” Hill gets at a paradox fundamental to Durham’s work: He consistently sets himself “against belief  ” — which is a chapter title in the catalogue — yet does so in a mode, art, that operates through belief. Take one of the recent pieces on view, “Rocks Encouraged,” 2010, which consists of a soundproofed room with a number of large pieces of petrified wood. Visitors could enter only one at a time, “no matter how theatrical or impractical that might turn out... I wanted the most thoughtful, meditative piece,” he explains in an accompanying text. Outside hangs a poem by Durham from the early 1980s with the same title, but there it is clear that the rocks are encouraging “us.” It is typical of Durham’s wit that the title of an artwork is richly ambiguous. Is it that the rocks are encouraged to believe they are pieces of wood? Or vice versa? Or is it that these rocks masquerading as wood ought to encourage the lone visitor to believe she or he can be other than what we might appear to be?

By smashing old beliefs with new ones, Durham sends off sparks of understanding.

To see more works by Jimmie Durham, click the slide show.

This article will appear in the October issue of Modern Painters magazine.

“Alright, let’s get all Creme Brulee around the table,” says artist Jonah Freeman, prompting a procession of tux-clad gents and flapperized ladies to crowd a buffet teeming with plastic crustaceans, tropical fruits, and flowers, all of which surround his artistic collaborator, Justin Lowe, who lies recumbent on the table in a navy pin-striped suit, black ascot, and werewolf makeup. Assistants armed with spray adhesive apply tufts of hair to Lowe’s hands and face. Freeman, in his uniform of black skinny jeans, black monk-strap shoes, and a black vintage rock T-shirt, climbs onto the back of a horseshoe-shaped booth, a fully kitted Canon in hand.

“Smoke!” he says.

“Smoke,” shouts photo assistant Steven Perilloux.

“Smoke,” echoes Jhordan Dahl, a curator who serves as the stylist, photo booker, and general fixer for Freeman/Lowe, as they’re known professionally. Within seconds, a dense white fog creeps over the shoulders of this utterly bizarre party at L.A.’s Hemingway’s Lounge. Owned by a collector of their work who also owns Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Hemingway’s is a Tinseltown facsimile of a salon from “A Moveable Feast,” only in this version, the next-door neighbor is the Roxbury, a bottle-service nightclub that seems to trade on the “Saturday Night Live” parody of its namesake. Nothing here is quite what it appears to be—and that is exactly the point.

Welcome to the scene behind the mise-en-scène of the next Freeman/Lowe installation extravaganza, “Stray Light Grey,” opening September 13 at Marlborough Chelsea, in New York. Today’s tableau is meant to evoke a private club in Weimar-era Berlin, where three groups of characters — monocle-wearing, cigarette-holder-puffing aristos known as Crème Brûlée; half-naked femmes fatales clad in wire-and-circuitry bustiers and their androgynous male counterparts, called the Dada Cyborg; and Haitian voodoo street gangsters capped with papier-mâché animal masks, called the Shade — engage in a polyamorous bacchanal before an industrialized war machine snuffs out their pleasure palace. “You can think of the Shade as the Hells Angels at a Leonard Bernstein party,” Freeman says. “It’s this hedonistic, nihilistic scenario.”

As for Weimar Berlin, “that was the beginnings of the Dadaist movement and the concept of the hybridized identity — cross-dressing, androgyny, and really the first inklings of the man and machine merger,” Freeman explains. “One of the main themes of this show is hybridized identities, spaces, environments, cities.” It’s Otto Dix meets cyberpunk, with Carnival-going thugs “reenacting their colonial oppressors at a ritualistic food banquet.”

While the scene is a product of acting, the hedonism is quite real. Almost everyone has been sloshing wine since the morning hours. Some may have physically (and psychically) entered a Temporary Autonomous Zone, those last remaining pockets of pure, unadulterated freedom described in Hakim Bey’s titular text, a copy of which is sitting on a table beside “Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti.” It isn’t quite Burning Man, but for many here it is a welcome reprieve from the strictures of the outside world. One belligerent groper has already been tossed from the set.

“Finally, something to eat,” says a sash-wearing Laurence Olivier look-alike as he takes in the Lowe centerpiece.

“Does he have rigor mortis?” asks a crony, looking for a laugh. Not getting one, he bursts out, “He’s got a crab on his balls.”

Before things get too wild, Freeman, who has been shooting a series of group portraits of the Brûlées idiosyncratically mugging for a page in art history, shouts over the crowd, “No horsing around — this is a very somber moment. No smiles. All eyes on me.” Then, motioning to photographer Donya Fiorentino, who’s playing a Brûlée, he asks, “Can you take your arm off of him?”

She reaches for Lowe again as Freeman snaps pictures. Behind Freeman, Perilloux whisper-shouts, “Donya! Donya!” Looking at me plaintively, he explains, “Donya’s petting the werewolf. She’s a little drunk.”

Dahl and prop stylist Sonja Kroop, the artists’ neighbors in Laurel Canyon, usher in members of the Dada Cyborg and of the Shade for subsequent shots. Lowe shakes off his rigor mortis, and Freeman disbands the group for a series of individual portraits with a stuffed wolf. “The idea is to create a scenario so Jonah can get a reportage type of photography, but to do it in a way so it has a pageantry to it,” says Lowe, who at 36 is a year younger than Freeman. “If enough of a situation is created, documentation is no problem. I think we created quite a situation today.”

Remarkably, this heavily staged scene, complete with hair, makeup, and fashion stylists, a craft services table, and a small army of interns, represents just one facet of “Stray Light Grey,” which refers to the haze one sees right after looking away from a bright light. It’s a hallucinated light. “Stray Light Grey” will be the fifth (and largest) in Freeman/Lowe’s series of ever-expanding multiroom environments, which have incorporated secret societies in Manhattan and Hollywood, meth labs, hippie communes, pirate radio stations, off-track betting sites, pornography (print and video), Mexican swap meets, William Gibson novels, modernist architecture, uptown art galleries, Chinatown pharmacies, Situationist psychogeography, and homeopathic medicine. The duo’s oeuvre constitutes an evolving, seemingly limitless, and unified body of work, beginning with “Hello Meth Lab in the Sun,” their now legendary 2008 debut collaboration (with Alexandre Singh) at Ballroom Marfa, in Texas, and continuing with “Hello Meth Lab with a View,” 2008, at the Station, in Miami; “Black Acid Co-Op,” 2009, at the now defunct Deitch Projects, in New York; and “Bright White Underground,” 2010, at Country Club Projects’ temporary home at Rudolph Schindler’s Buck House, in West Hollywood.

“They’re among a small group of artists who are really inventing something new,” says Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art director Jeffrey Deitch. “It’s a new form, and it’s extending collage into a realm of performance and experience that I haven’t seen before in the visual arts.”

“Black Acid Co-Op,” which completely transformed Deitch’s former Wooster Street gallery space, was larger and more complicated than their previous installations. “We obliterate spaces, so it doesn’t really matter what was there before we got there,” says Lowe.

People returned to “Black Acid” repeatedly, spending hours there each time, says Deitch, “the way you might go to a theater, then go out for intermission, then go back in. We were able to give them the platform to go all the way.” For that show, Freeman/Lowe firebombed two trailers (outside city limits and with a pyrotechnician, which wasn’t the case in Marfa, where they burned the trailer themselves with a Red Dragon torch kit in the gallery’s backyard), converted the basement office into a Chinatown pharmacy, and enlisted the services of production wizard Meghan Coleman, a former director of Deitch Projects who played a pivotal role installing Michel Gondry’s sets for his movies “Be Kind Rewind” and “The Science of Sleep” in the gallery. Now a freelance production designer, she has rejoined the artists for the Marlborough show. “On 'Black Acid Co-Op' I was daunted and easily overwhelmed, but having gone through that, it’s easier for me to regiment this organism, which can grow like crazy,” says Coleman. She seems to tread the line between construction foreman and movie producer, one now working with a six-figure budget. “My goal in working for them, and what I keep in the back of my mind, is to do as much as possible and think one step ahead so they don’t have to worry about the logistics and can just continue to be artists.”

The Freeman/Lowe experience is performative sculpture on steroids, laced with acid. The trip, as it were, comes courtesy of embedded paintings, photos, postmodernist sculpture, faux commercial items (backpacks, posters, cakes, psychotropic toiletries, books, flyers), custom wallpaper, mildewed ceiling tiles, dumpster-scavenged bathtubs, scrap lumber, WASP-approved wainscoting, wall treatments replicating smoke and fire damage, manufactured astrological charts, light tubes wrapped in sheet aluminum, exposed insulation, slinky air vents, fabric-clad geodesic dome ceilings, crystallized cacti, and taxidermy (wild and domestic). “The sources get so deep I tend to forget them,” says Freeman. It’s exhaustive and exhausting. The audience is meant to be disoriented by the decontextualized white cubes and modernist houses, to feel the dissonance, hear the echo machine, and feel the distortion of the feedback.

While the two artists admit to taking their share of drugs in the past, they insist the installations aren’t so much biographical as historical materialism meets materialist fiction. “It’s a little too complicated a project for us to be all flipped out,” jokes Lowe. “There are too many people involved to take off and come back later.” Still, the work leaves you feeling altered and hungover, as if trapped in the aftereffect of some drug. You may not be high, so to speak, but you are changed. “It sort of embeds this mind state, and people start to see the world in some ways as we’ve been seeing it,” says Lowe. “And they start to communicate back.” At Deitch, some viewers went so far as to bring household items to add to the installation.

Justin Lowe didn’t grow up by the train tracks, but he did spend a lot of time on them, scavenging for his sculptor mother’s assemblages. His half brothers, actors Rob and Chad, were much older and spent most of their time making movies in Hollywood. Lowe remembers them “coming to Dayton [Ohio] in the summers, but mostly we would visit California.” Despite his early introduction to various artistic processes, Lowe didn’t fully comprehend the idea that he too could be a professional artist until he started frequenting Chelsea galleries while attending Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts.

After moving to New York for grad school at Columbia, he worked as an art handler for numerous galleries (Matthew Marks, Lehmann Maupin, David Zwirner) and artists (Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, Rachel Feinstein) while bartending at dealer Gavin Brown’s now defunct art world watering hole Passerby. At the bar, he was once tasked with running the out-of-sync “Leprechaun 2” video sequences for Kelley’s “Better Than Nauman” show, which he likens to a “quadraphonic head fuck.” While these experiences helped order his own studio practice, it was the late installation artist Jason Rhoades who left the biggest impression on Lowe.

“It was pretty awesome when Jason came to town because everyone made money,” he says, recalling his work on Rhoades’s “PeaRoeFoam” installation, which catalogued Kevin Costner’s film oeuvre in 1,000 glass jars. The experience clearly had an effect, because the Drop City room in “Meth Lab” — inspired by the mid-1960s artist commune in southern Colorado, which also inspired the eponymous T.C. Boyle novel — features a veritable tinker library of jars cataloguing such mundane items as Christmas-tree ornaments, social psych texts, and glue sticks. When Rhoades ducked out of openings, Lowe says, “I just hung out with him in the back and talked about going to grad school and him studying under Paul McCarthy. That seemed totally intriguing to me. I was just trying to navigate a plan that wasn’t duck-duck-goose.” Lowe learned there was “value to hanging out and staying up late,” so he worked the crowd at Passerby and befriended other artists. Freeman met him while scouting locations for a film at the graduate studio at Columbia.

A Santa Fe, New Mexico, native, Freeman was raised in Damariscotta, Maine (pop. 2,218), a tiny crabbing hamlet that was home to the late Hilton Kramer. During that time, Freeman got turned on to the 1980s graffiti, skate, and punk scenes by visiting New York, riding the subway, and trekking to the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art with his design-obsessed father. “My dad brought me an airbrush, so I spray-painted my room,” recalls Freeman, demurring when asked about his tag. “I wasn’t good.”

“That’s why [L.A. artist] Nick [McGee] is airbrushing the cakes,” jokes Lowe, referring to the fake confections that will travel to Marlborough for the show.

After getting kicked out of Vermont’s Putney School, Freeman enrolled in the prestigious Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts, where his classmates included artist Cheyney Thompson and musician Alex Waterman. “There were no sports; it was just art, so you had classical musicians and ballet dancers and studio art and theater,” he says. “When you’re only around that, it becomes your reality.”

He eventually graduated from NYU film school but was more interested in experimental cinema than commercial filmmaking. In 2004, Freeman showed “The Franklin Abraham,” a 56-minute film shot inside Manhattan’s Municipal Building, at Andrew Kreps Gallery. “It was about a building, the Franklin Abraham, that had two million people in it, that was being built for 50 years and just added onto and added onto, this agglomeration of styles,” explains Freeman. “So I made this film, a roving camera moving through the interior of this building, and you got a sense of the scale through this voyeuristic eye.”

Soon thereafter, he and Lowe each began working out of, and living in, a communal loft space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, owned by artist Alexandre Singh. It was there that the three began swapping ideas for what would become “Hello Meth Lab.”

“I was listening to a lot of Neil Young and misinterpreting the lyrics of ‘Cowgirl in the Sand,’ which became ‘Hello Meth Lab in the Sun,’ ” says Lowe. “It’s just a stupid associative thing.” Lowe had also been talking to the artist Andrea Zittel, who’d suggested doing a project on the meth culture down in Joshua Tree, California, where she lives. He and Freeman realized that the notion of cooking applied not only to meth but also to the culinary revolution that sprang from the hippie culture of the ’60s. Within that culture, they traced two strands of drug users: the transcendentally motivated idealists and the apocalyptic nihilists who would give birth to the meth scene. To complement a meth lab (which uses readily available industrial products) and a hippie commune (the rejection of industrial society), the notion of an industrial complex became the third component that created, says Freeman, “a trinity of things in the way they were linked in their historical and cultural context.”

Of the 5,000 photos snapped at Hemingway’s Lounge and Milk Studios the following day, maybe a few dozen will make it into the exhibition. At Milk, Freeman shot a series of Tiger Beat-style portraits featuring two manufactured pop stars, Agnes Nago and Spencer Dean, posing with a bevy of new products such as the DNA Recalibrator (motto: “Change Is Now!”) and Bioluminescence Elixir (“Light Up the Night!”). The models portrayed icons such as Grace Jones in a sequined jumpsuit; funk diva Betty Davis; the bisexual drug addict and German cabaret legend Anita Berber, half naked with a taxidermied monkey; “American Psycho”’s Patrick Bateman; a Lands’ End poster boy; and a magenta-mulleted Ziggy Stardust. These will all become swag (backpacks, posters) and such propaganda items as “news” photos in fictional broadsheets. The Hemingway’s images will end up in the installation’s final room, an Art Deco cabaret/museum called Villa Straylight, named after the Tessier-Ashpool residence in William Gibson’s “Neuromancer.”

“We want the first space you walk into to mimic the environment in the neighborhood. So in Marfa, we did a country-doctor waiting area, and at Deitch we tried to do a Canal Street T-shirt shop with the slat wall and fluorescent lighting,” explains Freeman. “Because this one is in Chelsea, it’s going to look like you’re at an art show.” From there, viewers will flow through a double bathroom (literally two bathrooms right next to each other) emptying onto a dank, condensation-ridden tenement hallway, dumping into a mind-bending OTB site where wagers are placed on novelty pastimes like fast-food pornography (which will be playing on the in-house monitors). Once the bets are on the table, it’s off to another hallway, this one meant to resemble those in Kowloon’s now leveled Walled City. It will be outfitted with pipes ripped from the old Acme Sandblasting Co. on Great Jones Street, which currently doubles as Freeman/Lowe’s Manhattan studio. In that studio they will shoot the fast-food porn video, with interns and friends simulating sex while dressed as parodies of Burger King and Ronald McDonald-type characters.

Amid the maelstrom of Kowloon, visitors will sneak a peek at a self-contained crystallized pirate radio station; then it’s up the stairs to a two-level, slat-walled Chinatown bazaar/Mexican swap meet zone kitted out with caged booths hawking everything from custom rims and fighting fish to strange Asian roots and the Dean/Nago swag. There will also be cakes featuring airbrushed portraits of sci-fi baboons, Charles Manson, a blood diamond, and the cover of late Southern humorist Lewis Grizzard’s book “It Wasn’t Always Easy, But I Sure Had Fun.” From there, it’s down to the library, parts of which made its way into Marlborough’s Armory booth, overflowing with fake books exploring the depths of art (“Modernist Monsters”), drugs (“Black Magic Shabu”), war (“Kandy Korn Parade”), metafiction (“Martin Amis Presents: Honkies on Holiday”), municipalities (“Karmageddon!” ), sex (“Kamikaze Fun Machine”), social psychology (“The Narrow Brain”), religion (“The Religion of New Monsoon”), and personal identity (“Pam.Sam.Glam.Ram”). Things wind down in Villa Straylight before one exits through the modern industrial lobby of the Chelsea Arts Tower, which will undoubtedly take on
a surreal, if anticlimactic, air.

Hopefully it won’t be too anticlimactic, since the Marlborough show marks the first time a New York gallery has represented the duo (Country Club Projects represents them in Los Angeles), as well as the inauguration of Marlborough Chelsea’s programming focused on more experiential multimedia artists like Rashaad Newsome and Valerie Hegarty. In addition to selling individual prints, photos, and sculptures, gallery director Max Levai wants to streamline the artists’ de-installation and cataloguing process, which previously resulted in a lot of work going to the dump.

“I think the idea is to sell the installation as a whole, and it would be great for people to commission rooms, but there’s also a way of bringing contained work into the installations [such as a large crystallized alligator with rock-crystal teeth] and being able to create revenue that way. But it goes beyond just making installations into saleable objects,” says Levai, who anticipates a Deitch-level block party vibe for the opening. “Ideally, we’d like to see the next iteration of this installation in Europe, so it’s really a priority for us that the installation be contained so it can travel to other places in the future.”

In the hills of Laurel Canyon, just up the street from the Chateau Marmont, Freeman and Lowe have been living together for the past year and a half in a house previously occupied by porn star Sasha Grey. Over coffee and cigarettes they expound on the logistics of their collaborative process. “It’s a constant discussion,” says Lowe. “I guess it’s probably like how the creatives in an agency would work.” The division of labor is such that Freeman works the computers (he’s got two, to Lowe’s one) and handles the graphic design and photography. Lowe gets his hands dirty with the physical process of silkscreening, cake painting, and the like. The two make decisions by committee.

“We don’t tend to disagree about what we want in the end,” says Freeman. “There might be some disagreements about how we get there along the way, but we don’t have divergent aesthetics or tastes.”

Only time will tell whether Freeman/Lowe will remain in New York, where they will soon move to work on the show. On a tour of the bougainvillea-ensconced property, Lowe explains they never planned on living in Los Angeles past the “Bright White” show. Peering over Laurel Canyon Boulevard, he points out Jim Morrison’s old “Love Street” chalet, wondering whether they’ll return to this funky live-work scenario. And if their friends will still “love us when we get back.”

“We’re shaking things up, we’re moving,” he says. “These projects have a way of changing your life.”

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe's exhibition at Marlborough Chelsea, “Stray Light Grey,” runs from September 13-October 27. To see images of Freeman/Lowe's previous installations, click the slide show.

This article appears in the September issue of Modern Painters magazine.

On Friday, Thomas Demand opened his first ever exhibition of photographs of architectural models he didn't built himself. The images shift from representational images of politically charged interiors to abstract compositions whose referents are virtually unrecognizable. His subjects at Berlin’s Esther Schipper are various models by the late West Coast architect John Lautner, whose “Jetsons”
-like constructions dot the California coastline. Some works feature dual or triple views of the same cardboard work, while larger photographs hone in on a single angle from which the eye focuses on abstract, painterly constructions of line and color, rather than the objects' original function as sales tools.

Meanwhile, at Sprüth Magers, Demand presents three photographs: a Fukushima control room, a hidden storage facility for paintings in Paris, and the empty shelves of one of Berlin’s recently disused Schlecker drug stores. ARTINFO Germany’s Alexander Forbes sat down with Demand the week leading up to both openings, to speak about the Lautner series and the slippery slope from abstract photography to water colors.

What spurred the shift from making your own models to working with Lautner’s?

It’s just a detour, really. When I finished the show at the National Gallery in Berlin, I had a couple of other projects like curating a big group show for a museum in Monte Carlo that went on to New York. I was busy with things but had to shelve some of them for a time. Amongst those, the Getty had invited me to L.A. as a research scholar. I had always wanted to go there, but never built up the critical mass to do so. While I was there, I saw these models that were in a special storage facility in the north of Los Angeles, and began thinking about photographing them. The tricky thing is that usually architectural models are very representational, and I’m not interested in display-oriented models, but in models for understanding and producing some sort of knowledge — a model of DNA or even a weather forecast is more interesting than a doll house. Architectural models are often produced to convince someone to buy a certain building. But apparently Lautner’s practice was to a large part based on making models in order to design and communicate the structures he wanted to create. Nowadays they’re all fairly fragile and run down. They were never supposed to last for more than two weeks but were found on the top of a cupboard or something when he died. They all represent buildings that were never realized. If they had been, he would have gotten rid of them after finishing the project. I found it really interesting to make images of buildings that never existed and will never exist, using the models as objects rather than representations.

At the same time, you have always had this practice of using photography to document sculptural constructions. Has the journey to finding them somehow precluded the sculptural aspect?

I usually do take a certain pleasure in building them myself. But in this case, coming to a model is a different thing than making the model. I’m trying to understand it and find a viewpoint rather than construct that viewpoint as I build the model itself, where I know more or less what the picture should be like ahead of time. So here, working with someone else’s model, you have to look at it from every direction, and really study the form to decide from where and how it should be shot.

Compared to what you’ve done in the past, which is much more clean, here you’re looking at more asymmetrically shaped forms and old models, which results in a roughness and abstract quality that formally differentiates this series from your previous work.

Well, what the camera does best is to capture things with a central perspective, which follows the same laws of representation as is seen in the European architectural tradition. When you look at a photograph of a Mies [van der Rohe] pavilion, you see a few vertical lines and two horizontal lines and you infer: OK, that’s the ceiling, that’s the floor, here you can go in and out. It’s no coincidence it’s called rational architecture. But this sort of rationalism does not work in Lautner’s work. It’s a kind of architecture that changes profoundly if you stand 10 meters to the left or right. It’s a space that’s best experienced from walking through rather than by standing and finding the nicest viewpoint. On a still image it can look rather clunky, really. But it isn’t clumsy at all. They’re amazing spaces and experiences. I didn’t understand it at the beginning and really didn’t like it originally. I’m still very ambivalent, but that doesn’t matter. It’s about working with something that has a particular referent, which is a somehow utopian vision; it will never exist, but has a contextual meaning. The architecture is secondary. It’s mostly about the object. The pictures are very abstract as well. Sometimes I go a little bit back so that you see it’s a spatial arrangement, but more often I stay very close so you only see material and some sort of composition.

Right, they’re suddenly a lot more painterly than previous works.

Exactly, but the problem with abstract photography is that you miss a referent. Part of the idea of photography is that there is something that records and something that is in front of that recording device. If the thing in front of the recording device is becoming dubious or opaque in some way, you lose what’s photographic about the whole process and you’d be just as well to make a watercolor or something. You need to have a certain indexicality or it quickly becomes like applied arts, design, or a formal experiment. These models gave me the chance to get very abstract, but at the same time, they still have a root in the real world, even if it’s not completely straightforward, like looking in the newspaper and recognizing something. It gives me possibilities in my other work that I previously didn’t have.

It’s funny that the thing that allows you to make abstract photographs is actually a very abstract entity in and of itself. It’s arranged cardboard that doesn’t represent anything in reality.

But I think it’s a fine line. It cannot be too abstract. You still need to have the understanding that they mean something. What I hope that you see is a certain doubt within the pictures: that it could be one way, or like that, or maybe even like this. There is no, boom: this is how it should be, end of story. Yet, it still represents something specific, it’s not just a heap of cardboard that’s been photographed from different sides. It has a certain inner coherence and consequence.

Thomas Demand's exhibitions at Sprüth Magers Berlin and at Esther Schipper both continue through October 20.

– Eric Clapton's Richter Heads to Sotheby's: Sotheby's October 12 contemporary art evening sale in London will have a particularly high-profile consignor: Eric Clapton. The former Cream musician is selling Gerhard Richter's punchy red "Abstraktes Bild (809-4)" during Frieze Week. The abstract painting carries an estimate of $14 million to $19 million, just south of Richter's $21.8 million auction record. Whether or not the sale rises above its estimate, however, Clapton will make a profit: He purchased "Abstraktes Bild" along with two other paintings at Sotheby's in 2001 for a total cost of $3.4 million. [Reuters]

– Gagosian and Billionaire Collector Sue Each Other: The 64th richest person in the world, billionaire Ron Perelman, has entered a legal duel with mega-dealer Larry Gagosian after each filed separate lawsuits against the other in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday stemming from the gallerist's sale of a $25 million painting and two sculptures — including a granite "Popeye" by Jeff Koons — to the East Hampton-based mogul. Gagosian's suit claims Perelman failed to make scheduled payments on an unfinished sculpture and refused to pay agreed-upon prices for the two other works, while Perelman accused the gallery-owner of using his art-world influence to manipulate the prices of the artworks, making it harder for him to resell the pieces for a profit. "The gallery prides itself on its relationships and has never sued a client in its over 30 years of business," Gagosian Gallery said in the complaint. [Bloomberg, Daily News]

– Met Goes Punk: After blockbuster shows on Alexander McQueen, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Miuccia Prada, the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute will turn to punk for its next major summer exhibition. "Punk broke all rules when it came to fashion, and everything became possible after punk," said Andrew Bolton, curator of "Punk: Chaos to Couture," which will run from May 6 to August 11 2013. [WWD]

– Artists Attack Documenta for Ignoring Kassel's Arms Trade: Artists from the group Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty) are criticizing the organizers of Documenta 13 for not addressing Kassel's long history as a hub of weapons manufacturing, one whose largest company, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW), recently signed a deal to export tanks to Saudi Arabia. "We cannot tolerate that,” said Philipp Ruch, an artist and member of the group, which launched an open call for information that might lead to the arrest of KMW executives two weeks before Documenta opened. [TAN]

– Public School Kids Land Show at Zwirner: Students from New York City public schools who participated in an art competition organized by the Studio in a School and Word Above the Streets programs to create designs for the Water Tank Project will have a group show at Chelsea's David Zwirner from September 27 to October 6. Select student designs will eventually be featured alongside water tank installations by John Baldessari, Julie Mehrtu, Lawrence Weiner, and more when the Water Tank Project opens on May 31, 2013. [Press Release]

– Cai Guo-Qiang and Philip Glass Snag Japanese Art Award: Artist Cai Guo-Qiang, known for his work with gunpowder and fireworks, and composer Philip Glass are among this year's recipients of the Praemium Imperiale art awards. The awards, which recognize lifetime achievement in the arts and are given out by the Japan Art Association, carry a $187,000 purse. An award ceremony will be held in Tokyo on October 23. [NYT]

– Rediscovered Picasso Will Change Museum's Finances Forever: The Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science's recently-discovered layered glass mosaic by Picasso will have a colossal impact on its finances. "Seated Woman With Red Hat" is headed to Guernsey's auction house with an estimate of $30 million to $40 million. That's more than five times the museum's entire $6 million endowment and more than three times the value of its entire collection. [NYT]

– Stones and Madness Tap Art Stars for Album Covers: The tongue-y cover art for the Rolling Stones's forthcoming greatest hits album, "GRRR!" (in stores November 12), features a portrait painting of a King Kong-like gorilla by the American artist Walton Ford, who shows with Paul Kasmin. Meanwhile, across the pond, Britpop legends Madness unveiled a text-heavy cover by Sir Peter Blake — whose cover for the Beatles's "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album is among the most recognizable ever produced — for their new record "Oui, Oui, Si, Si, Ja, Ja, Da, Da" (out on October 29). [Rolling Stones, Telegraph]

– Canadian Mint and Folk Singer Duel Over Album Art: The Royal Canadian Mint is nickel-and-diming a Nova Scotia folk musician who used an image featuring pennies on the cover of his latest album. (The soon-to-be released record is titled "No More Pennies" and is an homage to the humble coin, which the mint plans to stop producing this fall, according to musician Dave Gunning.) The mint argues that the album infringes its copyright, and is asking for a fee of $1,200. Gunning is asking his fans to help him pay the fee in pennies. [Globe and Mail]

– Cincinnati Art Museum Gets a Boost From the State: The Cincinnati Art Museum has received $1.5 million from the state of Ohio for a renovation of its three-story Romanesque Revival-style former Art Academy building. The $111.1 million project, currently underway, will centralize administrative offices and archives and enable the public to access to the museum's library. [Cincinnati.com]

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Probably the oldest color films in existence have been discovered by the National Media Museum in Bradford, England. Believed to date from 1901-02, the rolls of test film depict a little girl and two boys in Edwardian dress playing with sunflowers as they sit behind a gleaming goldfish in a bowl, the girl on a swing, a brightly plumaged macaw, a panning shot from one of Brighton’s piers to the promenade, vehicles traveling on Knightsbridge to and from Hyde Park Corner, and marching soldiers.

The films were made by the cinematographer and inventor Edward Raymond Turner (1873-1903), the father of the three children, who had become a photographer at the age of 15 and had worked for the American color photography pioneer Frederick Eugene Ives. According to the museum’s website (the link shows the footage), Turner, of Hounslow, Middlesex, and his financial backer Frederick Marshal Lee patented Turner’s color movie process in 1899.

The museum’s site says that it was “a complicated process” involving photographing successive frames of black-and-white film through blue, green and red filters. Using a special projector…these were combined on a screen to produce full-color images,” the museum states.

After Turner’s premature death from a heart attack at the age of 29, the Anglo-American film producer, distributor, and documentary pioneer Charles Urban sponsored George Albert Smith to perfect the process. Because of the tendency of the images to blur, Smith concluded that it wasn’t functional. Working in Southwick, Sussex, near Brighton, Smith invented in 1906 a simpler two-color process that involved black and white film being projected behind alternating red and cyan filters. It was marketed by Urban as Kinemacolour from 1909 and became cinema's first commercially successful color process.

Turner’s test films were kept by Urban in his collection, which he donated to the London Science Museum in 1937 and, according to The Guardian’s Mark Brown, “the films were discovered when the collection was relocated from London to Bradford about three years ago. The museum’s curator of cinematography, Michael Harvey, recalls recognizing straight away that they were Lee and Turner films because they were 38mm with two perforations in the frames.

“With ‘a mixture of excitement and trepidation’ he then led the team on the complicated job of seeing whether the films could be reconstructed into color footage following the precise method that Lee and Turner had patented in 1899,” Brown reports. The museum link shows how Turner’s films were converted into digital files with the help from the British Film Institute’s National Archive.

“We believe this will literally rewrite film history,” said Paul Goodman, the museum’s head of collections. “I don’t think it is an overstatement. These are the world’s first color moving images.”

After 110 years in storage, Turner’s footage went on display at the National Media Museum today.

The bar was raised for Hollywood high-flyers when the two big ones were launched last weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival: “The Master,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s aptly named account of a cult leader and his disciple, and “The Cloud Atlas,” collectively directed by the Wachowski sibs and Tom Tykwer from David Mitchell’s bigger than cult novel of the same name.

“The Master,” which was evidently ineligible for the Gold Lion in Venice because it won everything else and starts rolling out in the US on Friday, is a 70mm movie with comparable ambitions — already so critically acclaimed that it risks suffering something of a backlash. “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia” were sprawling ensemble pieces that begged comparison to Robert Altman; “The Master,” like “There Will Be Blood,” is a big, bold meditation on a larger-than-life American character with intimations of Theodore Dreiser and his brawny Hollywood analogue King Vidor.

As the only Hollywood director to ever tackle an Ayn Rand screenplay, Vidor seems due for revaluation; the eponymous subject of “The Master” is, like Rand (or his assumed model L. Ron Hubbard), a writer who founds a religion known as “The Cause.” The movie is set in the aftermath of World War II. Newly demobilized from the Navy, Freddy Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) has his difficulties adjusting to civilian life, if not life in genera l— the man is one strange dude and Phoenix’s grimacing, mumbling performance is up to the challenge. (Hunched and lurching through his strongest performance ever, the actor suggests a troglodyte Montgomery Clift.)

Freddy meets the charismatic Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) when, after selling bad booze to some fellow migrant workers, he takes it on the lam and finds himself on Dodd’s yacht — or rather a yacht that the irrepressible Dodd, half literary swami, half vaudeville performer, is using as a training center for The Cause. Soon, Freddy is playing Igor to Dodd’s Dracula — variously as a subject for hypnosis, an enforcer, and a barely socialized surrogate son.

Dodd is not exactly L. Ron Hubbard. (Nor is The Cause identical with Scientology although there do seem to be some references, as when Dodd holds forth on his cosmology or tells Freddy that his sense of fear was “an imprint from millions of years ago.”) The main thing is that Hoffman’s mind-fucking swami is great a character as Phoenix’s useful, if not always controllable, idiot — and so “The Master” has a balance lacking from the Daniel Day Lewis show that “There Will Be Blood” ultimately became. Indeed, as its title suggests, “The Master” can be read as a dramatization of Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic in which Dodd recognizes his mastery through Freddy’s subservience and Freddy achieves consciousness through becoming Dodd’s disciple.

That said, the movie hardly feels so weighty. Disorienting or slightly off-kilter, perhaps — in fact, it’s almost a comedy. Does it work? I’d need to see it again to be sure. The main thing is that “The Master” is so unlike anything else in its seriousness and so admirable in its vitality that one has to support it.

If “The Master” is novelistic in form and old-school 20th century in design, “Cloud Atlas” is rooted in the montage-madness of D.W. Griffith’s 1916 “Intolerance.” Mitchell’s six, wildly divergent nested stories are given an all-over simultaneity accentuated by the recirculation of key actors (Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant) through multiple roles, sometimes in drag.

The movie, which runs nearly three hours and spans a period of some hundreds of years (from the mid 19th to the 22nd century and beyond into some post-apocalyptic future), has many big ideas concerning freedom and slavery and love and greed and art and karma and eternity (“nay, the dead never stay dead”), but it’s mainly an exercise in action and editing.

I can’t speak about the novel but the movie is a grand symphony of distraction — and not just because you see Tom Hanks in an ill-fitting orange Beatles wig revealing corporate secrets to ace reporter Halle Berry in one scene and jabbering in an invented patois (also to Halle Berry) while wrapped in a moth-eaten macramé cloak in the next. The chases and explosions are fine, but best thing is the montage — the often witty match- or ludicrous shock-cuts that transport the viewer back and forth in time from one epoch to another.

I wouldn’t call “The Cloud Atlas” pure cinema, but there are times when it resembles on Oscar night montage composed of clips from “Blade Runner,” “A Clockwork Orange," “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest," “The Matrix," and “One Million BC” with odd intimations of Monty Python and Andrzej Żuławski’s “On the Silver Globe." The mix and mash trumps the balderdash. “I believe there’s another world and I’ll be waiting for you there,” some says towards the end. Moi aussi… with a big bag of popcorn.

Read more of J. Hoberman's writing on Movie Journal. 

Like Einstein himself, “Einstein on the Beach,” the iconic collaboration between Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs, was a radical departure from everything that came before it. When the work debuted in 1976, it inspired an alteration in the perception of performance that was as groundbreaking as atomic energy. This Friday, the first staging of “Einstein on the Beach” to be produced in 20 years returns to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it was previously performed in 1984 and 1992. The event brings back the dream-like tableaus directed and designed by Wilson that slowly morph beneath dance choreographed by Childs set to Glass’s mesmerizing score.

Last night at BAM, Glass engaged in a discussion with his former editor and fellow composer Nico Muhly. The talk was often lighthearted, with Glass opening by saying, “We’re going to do what we usually do, except in front of a lot of people.”

The talk featured screenings of archival footage of Glass’s work, leading the audience through the composer’s long history at BAM. Clips included “Geologic Moments” from 1986 and “Hydrogen Jukebox” from 1991, all the way to “Galileo Galilei,” staged in 2002, exploring his experimentations with the language of music and how it can communicate ideas and narrative without words, through performance.

The current revival of “Einstein” is an international touring production, and Glass, Wilson, and Childs­ — along with members of the Philip Glass Ensemble — are all reprising their involvement. The opera premiered at the Festival d’Avignon in France, which Glass said was the first time they had actually played through the piece without stopping — up until then, they weren’t even sure how long it was. It has now “settled” into about four-and-a-half hours, during which the audience can come and go as they please, engaging as much as they wish with the plays on time and space that characterize “Einstein.”

Because it has been so long since a full production of “Einstein” has been staged, it’s become something of a mythic experience. Glass also discussed how returning to a monumental work at this point in his career is a rare opportunity. Glass and Wilson were both involved in the experimental New York arts scene of the 1960s, and as the composer celebrates his 75th birthday this year, there have been several restagings of his work, including “Another Look at Harmony — Part IV” (1975) at the Tune-in Music Festival at the Park Avenue Armory. 

“As composers, we don’t really write for posterity, we’re writing for right now,” he said. “There are a lot of things we don’t get right the first time — it’s kind of a luxury, a rarity, that a composer would live long enough to hear his early work, and hear it as someone who’s 40 years older.”

The Tune-in Festival also included the groundbreaking “Music in 12 Parts” from 1974, which Glass called “a compendium of the techniques that were to be used within the language I was creating.” That language was the basis for “Einstein,” in which the “music is very simple, the procedure of the music is really radical.”

“For music to be truly new, there has to be a new way to play it,” he said. “By the time we got to ‘Einstein,’ we had learned how to play it.”

The only words that the audience can understand in “Einstein” are spoken over a chorus repeating numbers and solfège syllables (do, re, mi, etc.), which Glass said were originally used as a way for the performers to memorize the music — it was later decided to keep them as the singing text. The rhythm and structure of the repeated lines can still feel shockingly new, and multiple listenings only bring out more details of the subtle variations that coil through each phrase. Combined with the spectacle of dance and light, it becomes a transformative tidal wave of a performance. “I was really thinking of the work in terms of image and movement,” he said. In the opera’s world, “music is a template in terms of time, and stage is a template in terms of space.”

“Einstein” moves the audience through the production without story — it is a dreamy, abstract representation of the ideas of Albert Einstein’s theories on relativity and time.

In a 1984 documentary on the opera, Einstein’s quote, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” is repeated as a reference for this poetic experience. The revival of “Einstein” finally lets a wider audience in on this mysterious experience, in all its mind altering glory.