The teenage stars of an Oscar-nominated short film from Afghanistan arrived in Los Angeles on Wednesday for the Academy Awards after an Internet campaign raised enough money to pay for their trip. "Buzkashi Boys" actors Fawad Mohammadi and Jawanmard Paiz will walk the red carpet and rub shoulders with Hollywood's biggest stars at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday night.
On October 29, 2012, water rushed in from the Hudson River, spilling down the stairs into the basement of the Westbeth complex, an artist’s residence in the West Village that the Martha Graham Dance Company currently calls home. In preparation of what we now know as Hurricane Sandy, company manager Faye Rosenbaum reportedly had many of the costumes and set pieces, located in the basement, placed on pallets two feet off the ground. Little did she, or anybody else, know that the water would almost reach the ceiling, approximately nine feet off the ground.
“It’s a terribly difficult job, and terribly expensive, reclaiming the sets and costumes we need immediately,” Janet Eilber, the company’s artistic director, told ARTINFO in a recent phone conversation. “It’s going to be a long-term job to reclaim them all. But on the other hand, it has given us an opportunity in a number of ways.”
The upcoming season for the Martha Graham Dance Company, which runs at the Joyce Theater from February 20 to March 3, reflects these opportunities. Under the heading “Myth and Transformation,” the company will present a series of commissions and reconstructions of classic Graham works in a new context, often times stripping down the original choreography to its bare essentials. Original sets and costumes, when they haven’t been abandoned all together, will be scaled back considerably.
One of the featured productions is a reconstruction of “The Show (Achilles Heels),” choreographed by Richard Move and originally commissioned by Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project in 2002. “The Show” draws inspiration from Homer’s “The Iliad,” but places its characters in a contemporary setting of voyeur celebrity culture and reality television filled with pop culture references.
“I realized that this idea of the mortal hero was very appropriate, and metaphoric, for a dancer’s life,” Move told ARTINFO. “I’m imagining, where does that happen today in contemporary culture? We see these people like Whitney Houston, we see these people melt down, we see them peak and we see them fall in real time on reality TV. I kind of conflated this game show meets reality television show, hosted by Athena, as a way of both advancing the story line and also placing Achilles in a contemporary context. Where would this happen to this kind of figure? He would be on Bravo or something, melting down before our very eyes.”
Since its inception with Baryshnikov, “The Show” continues to evolve. Move is adamant about the nebulous nature of art, placing a great emphasis on each dancer’s ability to use the source material to customize their roles.
“It’s always about what the individual qualities are that they can bring to the piece that make it come to its most authentic, full, rich life,” Move explained. “It’s got to be individual.”
Eilber, a former dancer in the company, sees a connection between this method and Martha Graham’s. “Each new cast that went into a new reconstruction of one of her works, she would change the choreography,” she said. “She had no compunction about that. I think it’s the mark of a great director.”
Move recruited downtown New York legend Arto Lindsay to compose the score, which includes work by Blondie singer Debbie Harry. Both musicians are old friends of Move, and he was intrigued by their experimentation and constant need to push themselves in new directions.
“The very important thing about Debbie’s music in Blondie, and this production in the score, is her ballads. People know her best for ‘Maria,’ and the big hits with the beat and things, but her body of work as a chanteuse and lyricist of the ballad is extraordinary,” Move said. “So all of the songs we’re using are essentially love ballads. Romantic with a capital R.”
Another important collaborator is the painter Nicole Eisenman, who designed the sets for “The Show.” Move felt a kinship with her work, which uses similar forms of appropriation from popular culture to the old masters.
“Her sets sculpt the space and become the walls of the city of Troy. They become different things; the company actually transports them through the space at key moments in the drama,” Move said. “So they are very integrated into the staging and choreography.” He added that they have “totally simpatico aesthetics.”
“The Show” will share a program with Graham’s “Phaedra,” the late choreographer’s 1962 similar rendering of Greek myth into modern dance that was deemed obscene by the United States Congress.
“Graham is the Picasso of dance, she’s the Stravinsky, and that I get to show my little piece on a program with Graham masterpieces is a dream come true.”
http://www.artinfo.com/photo-galleries/slideshow-alternatives-rabbit-islandDo you know of an alternative space in the United States that would be a good fit for our series? E-mail us at newseditors[at]artinfo.com with the word ALTERNATIVES in the subject line.
On a privately owned 90-acre island in Lake Superior, a budding organization aims to create an environmentally sustainable, off-the-grid artist residency.
ORIGIN
Having spent childhood summers in the copper country of Northern Michigan, Rob Gorski, now a doctor in New York, began looking to purchase a piece of land to re-connect with his roots in 2009 when he happened upon a Craigslist ad for Rabbit Island: an uninhabited island three miles off the coast of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, owned by a local German-American woman who had left it undeveloped since purchasing it in the ’60s.
Gorski immediately saw that it was a special place; as an environmentalist, he also felt it important that the island retain its wild beauty. With the owner and with Keweenaw Land Trust, he began working to set up a conservation easement that would ensure that the island would remain un-subdivided into perpetuity. The easement also greatly reduced the tax rate, making it affordable for Gorski to purchase in 2010.
“Writing the conservation easement was almost like [writing] the constitution of the entire place. It facilitates what we can do and also honors the natural character of the land,” Gorski explained. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until shortly after he’d purchased it that he and a friend, London-based artist Andrew Ranville, came up with the idea of turning it into a location for an artist residency.
Three years later, it’s become a haven for anyone content to trade rough living for the joys of creating away from the distractions of civilization. Rabbit Island now contains two simple living structures made from local cedar, with a third under development, without running water or electricity. Around 15 artists have now visited Rabbit Island for varying periods of time, and Northern Michigan’s DeVos Art Museum has agreed to host a yearly group show of work created on the residencies.
ALTERNATIVE HOW
From its foundations to its guiding ideology, Rabbit Island challenges the status quo. Its environmental easement removes it from the realm of financial profit; it can never be divided or developed, preserving it indefinitely as a space for creative and scientific inquiry.
The limited resources require visitors and artists-in-residence to carefully consider what to bring onto the island: everything from what to cook and tools for creation. “Nothing can have a by-product that is going to mar the landscape, so it makes it an interesting place to contemplate one’s practice,” Gorski said.
Gorski asks artists, as producers, to evaluate the ethics and merits of their work. “You can take whatever you’ve learned, whatever intellect you’ve gathered from the world, but then what are you going to when there’s nothing there?” he said. “Will it be interesting, or will it not be?”
WHY IT WORKS
While the island’s purchase was funded entirely by Gorski, additional financial support for the residency program was facilitated by Kickstarter, which raised over $14,000 to go towards power tools and materials for the structures.
For the most part, artists pay their own way onto the island — some through crowdsourcing, and others through personal funds — but once they’ve arrived, the lack of expenses makes it a relatively low-cost experience. Additionally, Gorski and Ranville are creating a platform for artists to sell work created on the island online, as a source of revenue to cover their expenses from the residency and donating the remainder to support additional conservation endeavors.
Rabbit Island has already attracted an eclectic group of artists and thinkers, from Michigan musicians who have come to the island to record to multimedia artist and open-water swimmer Sara Maynard, who trained for a swim and worked on photography while in residence last summer. This year’s residency will include Liz Clark, a professional surfer who has been sailing solo around the world since 2006 and is planning to begin writing a book on the island.
Gorski doesn’t expect that the projects that come out of the island will or should necessarily relate to conservancy; rather, that they underscore the importance of having wild places to create in. “I’m aware that in the end works produced out there could not be relevant,” he said, “but there is a potential, given the right interpretation, for it to be really special.” He added, “I want it to be a social project that can reflect back on society.”
To see images of Rabbit Island, click on the slideshow.
LOS ANGELES — It’s been well over two decades since Bruce Willis portrayed the character John McClane, a relentless NYC police officer and reluctant hero, in “Die Hard,” the a movie that made him the action star and household name he is today.
The franchise has been entertaining audiences with its relatable main protagonist and witty humor since the ’80s, and just last week the fifth installment, “A Good Day to Die Hard,” opened and brought in $25 million, making it the number one movie at the box office.
Willis, who typically doesn’t talk to press often, chatted with enthusiasm about his latest project at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills with a throng of journalists who eagerly asked why he believes fans still love “Die Hard.”
“I think that over the past 25 years, there’s been a certain amount of good will that has been visited on these films that the character and the characters engender,” he said. People root for you. People wanna see you because you know someone like me. Somebody that thinks he’s too smart. Somebody who thinks he has everything figured out when, in truth, he doesn’t have anything figured out.”
He added: “But no one here and no one on Earth really has everything figured out. It’s fun to watch people try to figure it out and get out of each other’s way.”
In addition to audiences wanting to see Willis pull off incredible stunts and engage in intense fight scenes, people love hearing him sarcastically utter the words “Yippee Ki-Yay” — now one of the most repeated catch phrases in pop culture.
“It was an ad-lib. Alan Rickman was such a good bad guy. He was constantly picking on me. He said something to me and I just happen to let that line slip out and it just became part of the fabric of the film,” Willis explained.
“It’s just amazing to me that the line has lasted this long. Kids say it to me on the street. Grandmoms. It’s a little awkward. But I’m happy that they say it.”
Nicholas Hytner’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Don Carlo” returns to the Metropolitan Opera on Friday evening, with the Mexican tenor Ramón Vargas singing the title role under the baton of Lorin Maazel. The elaborate production made its debut at the Met in 2010, with Roberto Alagna cast as Carlo, and was greeted with a standing ovation and favorable reviews. Writing for the New York Times, Anthony Tommasinisaid, “New productions are always grist for debate in the opera world. But it is hard to imagine what opera buffs might object to in this one…. Mr. Hytner’s impressively fluid staging places the cast in evocative period costumes (by Bob Crowley) against the backdrops of spare, modern-looking sets (also by Mr. Crowley).”
Verdi’s five-act opera, which clocks in at around four and a half hours, is set in Spain circa 1560 against the dark backdrop of the Inquisition. It tells the story of Carlo, heir to the throne, whose beloved Elisabeth, the daughter of King Henry II, marries Carlo’s father, King Phillip II, in order to broker a peace treaty between France and Spain. Based on the play by Friedrich Schiller, the opera cleverly weaves known historical figures and facts with a fictional narrative that involves two love triangles, soap opera-worthy family drama, betrayal, heartbreak, religious oppression, and political rebellion.
Originally written in French but subsequently translated and commonly performed in Italian (as it will be at the Met), “Don Carlo” is the longest of Verdi’s 28 operas. It was premiered by the Paris Opera in 1867, though Verdi revised the work numerous times over the course of two decades. It was not performed at the Met until 1920, at which point it was virtually unknown in the United States.
This season’s Metropolitan Opera production, which features Barbara Frittoli, Anna Smirnova, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Ferruccio Furlanetto, and Eric Halfvarson, runs at Lincoln Center from February 22 through March 16.
Aleksei Guerman, whose five completed films as a director constituted a scathing critique of life in the former Soviet Union, has died at the age of 74. According to the Associated Press, his son, Aleksei Guerman, Jr., wrote in a blog post on the Ekho Mosky radio website that Guerman succumbed to heart failure in his hometown of St. Petersburg. He had nearly finished his sixth film (see below).
Guerman was the son of Yuri Guerman (1910-67), the novelist, playwright, and World War II correspondent for TASS and the Soviet Information Bureau. The father’s screenplays included those for “Pirogov” (1947) and “Belinsky” (1951), both directed by Grigori Kozintsev. Aleksei Guerman was apprenticed to Kozintsev in 1960.
After working in theater, he joined Lenfilm, the state-owned production unit, as an assistant director. In time, he would adapt two of his father’s novels into movies, “Trial on the Road” (completed 1971) and “My Friend Ivan Lapshin” (completed 1982).
“Trial on the Road,” his second film, was banned from theaters until 1986 when perestroika sanctioned its screening and led to its acclaim. “Ivan Lapshin” was begun in 1979 but denounced as “disgusting” by Lenfilm’s studio paper. According to Tony Wood, writing for New Left Review in 2001, Guerman was ordered to reshoot half of the movie, and when he asked, “Which half?,” he was told: “‘Either. Leave half of your crap and do half as we want you to.” Nothing was reshot, however, and the film was released in 1984.
Both films were adapted by Edouard Volodarksy, a writer who unflinchingly departed from the Soviet Union’s official history of World War II. Volodarksy’s death at 71 preceded Guerman’s by just four months.
Guerman was a formidable visual stylist, a director as noted for his bleakly poetic handling of exteriors as much for his claustrophobic interior compositions. “Khrustalyov, My Car!” was his masterpiece – a grotesque, hallucinatory satire of the paranoia and resulting anti-Semitic persecution that characterized the last years of Stalin’s dictatorship. It’s channeled through the downfall of a distinguished army general who, arrested as a conspirator in the 1952-53 “Doctor’s Plot,” is raped on his way to the Gulag. Seven years in the making, it was re-shot and re-edited before being released in 1998. A Palme d’Or nominee, in 1999 it was voted Best Film by the Russian Guild of Film Critics.
With his wife Svetlana Karmalita (who contributed to the script of “Khrustalyov”), Guerman co-wrote the 1991 Kazahk epic “The Fall of Otrar” (1991), directed by Ardak Armirkulov. It’s not only the most brutal film about Genghis Khan, but a persuasive allegory of Stalinism.
Guerman's son (himself a director) noted in his blog that his father’s swansong is nearly complete:
“The film ‘It Is Hard to Be a God’ is in effect finished,” he wrote. “All that remains is the audio dubbing. Everything else is finished. It will be completed in the foreseeable future.
"The making of the film was long and painful,” he added, referring to his father’s physical decline. “It was made without government money.”
AP says that the film “has generated a lot of public expectations and intense discussion, with some seeing it as a stinging satire on President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, full of grim predictions for the future.”
As well as his son, Guerman is survived by Karmalita. His funeral will take place in St. Petersburg on Sunday.
I wrote on the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s March 2012 retrospective of Guerman’s work for artinfo here. My colleague J. Hoberman's 1999 essay on “Khrustalyov, My Car!” was republished in Film Comment here. Read the magazine’s 2012 essay on Guerman by Anton Dolin, film critic for Moskovskie Novosti, here.
LOS ANGELES — Seth MacFarlane, the creator of the satirical animated show “Family Guy,” is not only hosting the 85th Academy Awards this Sunday, but he will show off his stupendous singing skills in a duo with actress and powerhouse vocalist Kristin Chenoweth.
“After the Best Picture award has been given, Seth and Kristin will perform a special number and we think it will be a 'can't miss' moment,” the producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron said in a statement to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
However, not everyone is convinced that is a good idea.
“It's unusual for them to have a closing number since the climax of the show is usually the Best Picture winner acceptance speech. It'll be interesting to see if audiences at the Dolby [Theatre where the Oscars are held] will stay in their seats or start getting up, not to mention the poor tired viewers on the East Coast, who will likely see the sun come up as the show closes,” Angela Dawson, a veteran Hollywood journalist who has covered the Academy Awards for 13 years, told ARTINFO.
The Oscars will have an added element of musical and dance routines throughout the telecast, which is something we haven’t seen before, with big names scheduled to take the stage like Adele and Barbra Streisand, but it could be too over the top.
“The Academy can't seem to figure out whether less is more or more is too much when it comes to singing and dancing on the show. Obviously, the show becomes longer by adding dance numbers, and yet the audience feels kind of ripped off if they are eliminated or abbreviated,” Dawson said.
While it’s not clear yet as to whether people are excited for this new aspect of the show, Hollywood is fervent about one thing: Seth hosting.
“It's a smart move for the Academy to pick someone like Seth MacFarlane, who proved himself a good host on "SNL." He's well-spoken and can think on his feet. He's sort of the kinder, gentler version of Ricky Gervais (who has hosted the Golden Globes). He will poke fun at the stars but won't be cruel. The Anne Hathaway/ James Franco thing was a fiasco, but I think MacFarlane will appeal to younger viewers but not turn off older viewers,” Dawson added.
The Academy Awards will air live this Sunday February 24, on ABC.
Last summer the space shuttle Enterprise arrived at its new home aboard the USS Intrepid in New York City. But a few short months later, the shuttle was damaged by Hurricane Sandy. ARTINFO’s Vanessa Yurkevich went on board the Intrepid to check out the shuttle’s temporary exhibit when it reopened.
The 2013 Oscars, the most preeminent of cultural award shows (or at least the one that the most people care about), will be held at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles this Sunday. It goes without saying that winning an Oscar is a big deal, the highest profile way for an actor or filmmaker to be recognized for their work. Because of that, reactions to winning the golden statuette tend to be memorable for audience and awardee alike. From the euphoric, to the crazed, to the utterly bizarre, here are our five favorite Academy Award acceptance speeches of the last 85 years.
Marlon Brando, Best Actor, “The Godfather” (1973)
This is the quintessential anti-acceptance speech. Brando didn’t even bother to show up to the event, sending in his place Native American civil-rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather, who, upon taking the stage, announces that Brando will not be accepting the award as a form of protest against the siege at Wounded Knee and the misrepresentation of Native Americans in film and television. In typical Hollywood fashion, half the crowd boos.
Vanessa Redgrave, Best Supporting Actress, “Julia” (1978)
Poor John Travolta: so wide-eyed and innocent, just happy to be on the stage presenting an award among his idols. Little does he know things are about to get very, very real. Redgrave is smiling as she gets on stage to accept the award, but as the applause winds down, the actress launches into a speech where she celebrates the Academy for not giving in to the demands of “Zionist hoodlums” who had been protesting the ceremony due to the her support of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Her peers did not accept the praise: angry boos persist throughout her speech and, moments later, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky openly criticized Redgrave for the comments she made on stage.
Sally Field, Best Actress, “Places in the Heart” (1985)
From the moment the cameras started focusing on her while the nominees were being read, you just knew this was going to be something special. Though she'd won a Best Actress award for her performance in “Norma Rae” five years prior, this time around Field was overcome with emotion because, as she says so many times, she finally understood just what this meant. And, of course, there's the famous quote: “I cannot deny the fact that you like me. Right now! You really like me!” There's a reason why this is the most famous Oscar speech of all time.
Gwyneth Paltrow, Best Actress, “Shakespeare in Love” (1999)
There's being overcome with emotion and then there's this. The second Jack Nicholson read out her name, Paltrow burst into tears, barely pulling herself together enough to deliver a breathless recitation of thanks and appreciation for her fellow nominees, the members of the cast and crew, her agent, and then, just as she gets to her family, it all comes crashing down, as the actress can barely contain herself while delivering a heartfelt thanks to her entire family. Memorable for sure, but she was outdone later during the very same ceremony...
Roberto Benigni, Best Actor, “Life is Beautiful” (1999)
Benigni’s famous walk over the audience (notice Steven Spielberg struggling to hold the actor up) has been replayed thousands of times, but that’s only the beginning what is a great performance: he bunny hops up the stairs, uncomfortably hugs Sophia Loren for longer than usual, quotes William Blake, and thanks his parents for being poor. He might not have deserved the Oscar, but we’ll happily take a speech like this over the usual boring platitudes.
French neurosurgeon Bernard Massini owns an art collection that would be the envy of many lifelong connoisseurs: including 450 works and encompassing paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, and sculpture. Nevertheless, the 59-year-old Massini came into collecting from a relatively inauspicious background. The grandchild of Russian and Italian immigrants to France, he was raised modestly in Nice, where his father worked as a musician and his mother as a laborer. Having developed a passion from an early age for works ranging from Old Masters to modern art — from Titian and Vermeer to Goya, to Matisse, to Picasso to Golub — along with a devoted interest in philosophy, he began amassing works from the young age of 19, with a particular taste for figurative paintings (which make up 90 percent of his works).
Today, he keeps some in his home and others in his extensive office space, renovated by architect Marc Barani. Currently, however, 70 pieces from his collection are on view at the Maeght Foundation in the southern French town of Saint Paul de Vence, selected by Massini and the foundation’s director Olivier Kaeppelin, where they will be displayed through March 17.
Massini otherwise plays an active role in the arts, having served on the jury for the Prix Marcel Duchamp at FIAC in 2006, and currently as president of the Friends of theMusée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice. ARTINFO France spoke with him recently about building a collection, the themes of war and suffering he finds himself drawn to, and what’s good and bad in contemporary painting.
What do you think of contemporary painting?
Contemporary painting? [It's] a proliferation of images that are worked over and reused, an overflow of images, usually talkative ones, which leads to a kind of confusion. It seems important to me to show works that contain silence, and intelligence. It’s very rare. Today, the quality of an artwork is often reduced to its market value, but parallel histories are being constructed patiently and stubbornly. I don’t really like the frenetic quality that dominates fairs, since the appreciation of an artwork needs time, dialogue, and an exchange of ideas.
Why do you appreciate figurative art in particular?
People often ask me, “Since you’re a neurosurgeon, why don’t you go for conceptual and minimalist artists?” I always give the same answer: the absolute concept that touches the sublime is in mathematics. Mathematics are the quintessence of the concept. I love mathematics and especially arithmetic. Also, remember that Marcel Duchamp, rather than condemning retinal pleasure and painting in general, was only criticizing the painting of his time.
How did you put together your collection?
My collection grew from conversations and connections that I was able to make with artists, with Alun Williams and Denis Castellas in particular, but also Gérard Garouste and Djamel Tatah. I still remember fragments from these conversations that have enriched my understanding of the world. Moreover, beyond the perceptible surface of their works, I try to understand their intelligible content and to get a hold of the works which seem essential to me. I am not a compulsive collector and my collection is quite thought-out. What I’m looking for in a work is accuracy.
Have you ever thought of leaving neurosurgery for the art world?
Yes, of course. And I was gullible and naïve enough to open a gallery, in Nice and Paris. After two years, I stopped. I had a pretty romantic idea of this profession, which is far from the reality.
Are there particular themes that motivate your collection?
I was born in the ’50s, so I couldn’t help but be marked by the war. The suffering inflicted on other humans is a subject that overwhelms me. I’m interested in themes such as sadness, or how a man can have a family life, get up in the morning, kiss his children, and go massacre other men. The status of the victim, the status of the persecutor, oppression, the mechanisms of genocide, tyranny, violence, and injustice are subjects that stagger me. Leon Golub’s work is at the heart of these subjects, as is that of Ronald Ophuis. In these themes there’s a form of lucidity, a realism, that enlightens us about what human beings are, their relationships to others, and their relationship to the world. These are works that try to translate being and its relationship to others — this notion of alterity that Levinas teaches us about. These people have affected me greatly — it’s a whole part of my life.
Why such large formats?
I like the idea of entering the painting. The works are mostly large formats because history painting has always impressed me and also because my first experiences of art were in museums. You’re in a very realistic representation with a scale of one to one. The work hits you like a fist.
For you, is accuracy connected to truth?
Truth is difficult to perceive in an artwork because by definition it’s a fiction. So I prefer to speak about an accurate work revealing truth through fiction. Believing and sticking to your statement. Showing a work means saying not to forget it. Art is also there to bear witness.
To see works from Bernard Massini's collection on view at the Maeght Foundation, click on the slideshow.
Once again, ARTINFO has sent its intrepid staff into the streets of New York, charged with reviewing the art they saw in a single (sometimes run-on) sentence. (To see our One-Line Reviews as an illustrated slideshow, click here.)
Amy Cutler, “Brood” at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks, 535 West 22nd Street, 6th Floor, through March 9
Rather than her well-known mythical narratives, which feature mysterious female figures engaged in odd and esoteric tasks, here Cutler hones in on portraits of the female characters who will later populate her fantastic landscapes: exquisitely rendered gouache paintings, hung under dim lighting suggestive of a haunted manor's library, detailing line-drawn brows, sagging wattles, venous skin, and expressions ranging from contempt to arrogance to neurotic suspicion — each figure equally troubled by an enigmatic yet specific inward misery that, detached from narrative and context, makes her seem all the more disturbingly real. — Lori Fredrickson
Dan Flavin and Donald Judd at David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, through March 16
With all due respect to Donald Judd, Dan Flavin's eight-foot-tall squares of fluorescent lamps — which project diffuse purple and green light into the gallery’s entryway like stained-glass windows in a cathedral — steal the show even before you enter the main space. — Julia Halperin
Ragnar Kjartansson, “The Visitors” at Luhring Augustine Gallery, 531 West 24th Street, through March 16
Stepping into the dark, curtained-off Luhring Augustine space currently hosting Ragnar Kjartansson’s immersive, nine-channel video installation puts you right in the middle of a melancholic folk concert simultaneously being performed by the individual musicians on each screen that quietly slows down time to the relaxed pace of the earnest, eerie music. — Ashton Cooper
Michael Riedel, “PowerPoint,” at David Zwirner Gallery, 533 West 19th Street, through March 23
This sentence could become a future work of art by Michael Riedel, who reduces digital content to raw information by lifting material from webpages that reference his work, arranging it into geometric forms via PowerPoint, and then setting the infographics loose across huge swaths of wallpaper and canvas. — Rachel Corbett
Frederico Solmi’s “Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth” at Postmasters Gallery, 459 West 19th Street, through March 16
Part videogame, part drawing, and part 3D animation, Federico Solmi's “one man film manifesto” takes viewers on a dizzying ride through a not-so-far-off world of war strategies and branding campaigns that dramatize the ridiculous nature of mankind's self-destructive ways, our addiction to commodities, and submission to power figures through satirical commentary and over-the-top caricatures. — Terri Ciccone
Despina Stokou, “bulletproof” at Derek Eller Gallery, 615 West 27th Street, through March 16
Evoking Basquiat in the chaos and verbosity of her scrawled, painted, and collaged text compositions on dark canvases (and one of the gallery's white walls), Greek artist Despina Stokou skewers the art world's practiced grandiloquence in paintings that mix humor — as in a transcribed conversation about Martin Creed — cynicism, and outright anger, and which remain legible even when the words overlap, have been worn away, or completely and furiously obliterated. — Benjamin Sutton
With “Skyfall” nominations at this year’s upcoming Oscars marking the 50th anniversary of the James Bond franchise, ARTINFO took a look back at one of the most stylish companions of the dashing MI6 officer — his automobile. While various models of the Aston Martin will most forever be affiliated with His Spyness, (not least the machine-gun and revolving number-plates equipped 1965 DB5, which can still be yours for £3 million), tricked-out vehicles ranging from the perky Citroën of “For Your Eyes Only” to the deep-sea diving Lotus Esprit in “The Spy Who Loved Me” have helped seal Bond’s status as a legend — with or without the martini. Here are our picks for the top ten most iconic.
In Pablo Larrain’s “No,” which opened last week and competes for the Best Language Film Oscar on Sunday, the advertising hotshot played by Gael Garcia Bernal is tasked with designing a TV campaign to bring down Augusto Pinochet in Chile’s 1988 plebiscite. Unlike his ex-wife, Véronica (Antónia Zegers), whose absence he mourns, Bernal’s René Saavedra is not a leftist radical but an opportunist whose career has thrived under the regime’s neo-liberal economic policies. The challenge of achieving the near impossible appeals to him infinitely more than moral outrage motivates him.
A brilliant salesman of panaceas, Saavedra knows that positivity rather than negativity will sway the populace to vote “No” to eight more years of Pinochet. In a meeting with opposition leaders, he quietly suggests that the campaign should promote the idea that “happiness” will be the result of ending the barbarous military dictatorship. It’s hardly a counterintuitive notion, but the older leftists want a campaign filled with images of persecution and brutality, and they reject Saavedra’s apolitical approach – one of them angrily stomping out of the room.
Saavedra wins the day, however, and comes up with an array of Coke-style images to hammer home his message: young people riding galloping horses and smiling in mountaineering gear, kids jumping on their parents’ bed, beautiful women dancing in leotards, a smiling teenage boy wearing a “No” t-shirt. One shot is of three mimes in straw boaters and facepaint, smiling inanely at the camera. It echoes an earlier Saavedra ad that featured a mime and causes Saavedra’s boss (Alfredo Castro), who’s in cahoots with the government but desperate not to lose his smartest executive and meal ticket, to question it.
What is a mime but a mute, a symbol for those who’ve been silenced? There’s a Dadaist meta-irony in that image. Since Saavedra’s so opaque, who’s to say he’s not aware of the delicious absurdity of using the tools of capitalism to bring down a leader who fostered capitalism to the lasting detriment of the people – an ideology that will stay in place once Pinochet’s gone?
“To me, the NO campaign is the first step towards the consolidation of capitalism as the only viable system in Chile,” Larrain said in an interview published in the film’s production notes.
Had “No” been a Hollywood movie, it’s likely that a hot young alpha male actor – an equivalent of Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire mode – would have been cast, and that his gradual political education would have been foregrounded as the NO vote was won (which it was, of course, in Chile). But Larrain was blessed in his leading man, Bernal being a reserved actor whose facial expressions seldom disclose what he’s feeling or thinking – and he’s seen thinking a lot in “No,” whether he’s with his colleagues, his young son, or skateboarding around Santiago.
The only times I can recall him showing emotion are when he reacts tearfully to seeing Véronica at home with her current man, and when he flinches at the violence that police inflict on her in a protest. That flinching (courageous for a movie star) corresponds with his character’s shocking, spontaneous act of self-preservation – which threatens to destroy his relationship with his fiancée (Hani Furstenberg) – in Julie Loktev’s “The Loneliest Planet,” one of last year’s most memorable films. Because Bernal is so seldom a readable presence, such illuminating moments make him much more than conventionally appealing – and much less of a salesman.
Through the pulsing lights and crowds of people pushing up against the runway in MoMA PS1’s Performance Dome, Sara Jordenö was barely discernible. It was October 7, 2012, and The Movement Ball she co-organized with Twiggy Pucci Garçon was well under way. Standing against the far wall, the demure Swedish artist kept a low profile as the mostly black and Latino members of the House of Pucci, the House of Unbothered-Cartier, the House of Bangy Cunt, and others dipped, rolled, spun, and fell to throbbing dance music. In one memorable performance, Jordan Pucci, full of attitude, took the stage to shouts of “Oh shit, you got that Pucci fired up!” Leaning back on the long platform with outstretched arms, he crossed his legs dramatically before shuffling down the catwalk in a crouched position, arms and hands wildly striking the swift, angular poses so characteristic of voguing — a kind of dance derived from New York City’s house/ballroom community, made famous by Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning and by Madonna’s “Vogue” music video.
While the pop star’s choreography reduced the dance form to a series of redundant gestures, this was the real thing: sharp, pronounced, militaristic voguing that supplanted real street violence in the house communities of 1980s Harlem. Ostracized and bullied by mainstream urban culture, young gay, lesbian, and trans youth banded together under leaders during that period to form houses, such as House of Dior and House of LaBeija, which served as makeshift families and support groups for those abandoned by their own. In competitions, or balls, that featured categories like Evening Wear and Butch Queen Realness, contestants tried to emulate fashion models and heterosexual archetypes, such as “executive” and “schoolboy,” to claim these unattainably mainstream, mainly wealthy, white ideals as their own.
The Movement Ball was affiliated with the Kiki scene, a more socially conscious and activist subset of house culture tailored specifically to 12- to 24-year-olds, with an HIV/AIDS and substance-abuse prevention and education program provided by Faces NY, Harlem United, and other organizations. Over the past year or so, Jordenö and her collaborator Garçon have been shooting a feature-length documentary about the scene — including The Movement Ball — titled Gesture, a clip of which was shown in the dome just prior to the ball. Many months in, this is still a work in progress, proving that the at-risk community has become more than a pet project for Jordenö. The fact that she’s an educated, and in many ways privileged, Swedish white woman working with a predominantly low-income black community makes her vulnerable to charges of exploitation, not so dissimilar to the fallout from Paris Is Burning, when many in the ballroom community sued Livingston, claiming she came in, used them for personal gain, and then left.
While Jordenö’s race in this regard may be problematic, in many ways it’s not; playing that card is an easy — and reactive — accusation considering she was asked by Faces NY director Antonio Rivera to work with the Kiki scene. He and Garçon were impressed by Jordenö’s work interviewing Harlem pimps, a project instigated mainly by happenstance by her partner, Amber Horning, a Ph.D. student in criminology. What began as a part-time job helping Horning conduct interviews for her dissertation — a skill Jordenö had acquired through almost a decade of video work — led to a headfirst immersion in an overlooked, and often misrepresented, New York City subculture: the sex industry.
Here, too, race was a thorny if almost comical issue. Jordenö and Horning, leveraging the latter’s considerable contacts in the Harlem community, were able to conduct more than 100 meetings with current or former pimps over a six-month period. The duo’s encounters at several locations in Harlem, including notoriously dangerous low-income housing projects, can be compared jokingly to the scenes between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. They asked each interviewee to draw a map of his or her daily business routine, including what corners women stood on and where the police lookout was located. In the process, Jordenö had to face sometimes aggressive and direct sexual overtures intended to intimidate her. Though she is quiet, soft-spoken, and eloquent, she held her own. As a result, she was able to display the maps, as well as a collection of animated videos stemming from her research, in the group show “Matter Out of Place” last summer at the Kitchen, in New York. Her installation Time and Motion Studies(NYC maps), 2012, documented some of the most illicit and charged correlations between race, gender, and income inequality in the city.
The maps were installed on the wall in a loose grid with a roughly geographic arrangement. Stretching several feet, they represented, in varying degrees of clarity, the entire width of Harlem. Some featured detailed images of streets and local landmarks, others were simply gestural scribbles, but each took on the vagaries of its subject’s memory to document the sex trade’s particularly suspect form of labor. Using the drawings as a guide, Jordenö subsequently animated street-level views of the neighborhood with gestural marks. Looped on a cluster of monitors, the animations further grounded the spatial and temporal dimensions of sex trafficking. As Jordenö explains, before this project she had been “very interested in the idea of the formal economy,” referring in part to her interest in financial-district employees, with whom she worked in close proximity while in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2010–11; she could also be talking about a number of her works. Persona Project, 2000–10, comprises film, video, and interviews about a small island economy now dominated by tourism resulting from Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film, Persona. In Diamond People—Instructions for a film, 2010, Jordenö profiled one of her former employers, a synthetic diamond factory in Robertsfors, Sweden, and its subsidiary factories in South Africa and China. Moving between text and image, video and interview, Diamond People explores the effects of global economies through an anthropological investigation into far-flung diamond communities. With Time and Motion Studies (NYC maps), she continues, “I became interested in the structure of the informal economy, which I think is — not to excuse it — oppressive. It’s part of this constant need for money.” Tying all this together is Jordenö’s sustained, detailed, and interdisciplinary attention to disparate micro-communities: who they are, how they function, and in what ways they are beholden to larger financial mechanisms. The Movement Ball and Time and Motion Studies look at two very different — if geographically proximate — subcultures in many ways defined, if not emboldened, by their lack of financial resources. Persona Project and Diamond People, meanwhile, investigate two equally peripheral European communities under the demoralizing sway of global capitalism. In each instance, Jordenö casts a critical, clinical eye on market forces — and in the process makes the global both local and personal.
To see images, click on the slideshow.
This article was published in the February issue of Modern Painters.
