OPENINGS
THU 12/8 "Play Station" at Postmasters Gallery, 459 West 19th St., 6 p.m. - 8 p.m., free, postmastersart.com
“Play Station” promises to be the most fun you’ll have in a Chelsea gallery this winter. The ever-ambitious Postmasters will host an arcade full of independent art video games ripe for the playing, featuring artists like Jeremiah Johnson, Rafael Rosendaal, and CJ Yeh. Opening night, the gallery will host a riotous bring-your-own-game event for indie gamemakers.
THU 12/8 Dark Christmas at Leo Koenig, 545 West 23rd St., 6 p.m. - 8 p.m., free, leokoenig.com
The ultimate anti-Christmas show, “Dark Christmas” stirs up a salty cocktail of Yuletide naughtiness, ranging from the profane radiance of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” to Paul McCarthy’s unkosher dalliance with a hot dog bun to the Nabokovian perviness of Hans Bellmer’s “Poupee” photographs.
FRI 12/9 Trisha Brown at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 530 West 22nd St., 6 p.m. - 8 p.m., sikkemajenkinsco.com
Postmodern dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown literalizes the conventions of abstract expressionism, creating all-over “action paintings” by tracing her own movements with charcoal or pastel stuck between her hands and feet. Despite her formal engagement with AbEx, Brown kept different company. Instead of urinating into ashtrays at the Cedar Tavern, she collaborated on multimedia performances with Laurie Anderson, Yvonne Rainer, and Robert Rauschenberg.
FRI 12/9 Jeff Wall, "New Photographs" at Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 west 57th St., floor 4, 6 p.m - 8 p.m., mariangoodman.com
In this latest solo show, photographer Jeff Wall continues to explore the semiotics of the still image, replicating “live” scenes, creating stiff, composed portraits, and exploring the potential of documentary photography. Particularly provocative and unusual for the artist are portraits of collectors and objects from their collections.
EVENTS
WEDS 12/7 Artist Talk: A Conversation with Tom Moody at EFA Gallery, 323 West 39th St., December 7, 6:30 p.m., free, efanyc.org
Moody, a respected pillar of the online art community (and notorious Internet troll), will explore some of the more intellectual aspects of online art, considering whether the concrete poetry movement of the 1950s anticipated the mechanics of the Internet or whether the movement still exists in a "street" form on Web sites such as the social network Tumblr and popular GIF art site Dump.fm.
THU 12/8 Artist Talk: Liam Gillick Speaks at NYU, 34 Stuyvesant street, Einstein Auditorium, 5:30 p.m., free, steinhardt.nyu.edu
No longer young, but still British, artist Liam Gillick will enlighten the pliant minds of NYU. If his diverse interests are any indication, topics covered may include — but are no means limited to — corporate strategies, relational aesthetics, game theory, war, “neo-science,” Charles Darwin’s brother, fruity vodka, spies, the Bauhaus, dance music, and time travel.
THU 12/8 Lecture: Linda Nochlin on "Gericault and Goya and Images of Misery", 333 West 23rd St., SVA Visual Arts Theater, 7 p.m., free, sva.edu
Take off your PoMo cool caps and embrace some 18th century batshit craziness: Venerable art Historian Linda Nochlin — who, in 1971, asked the incendiary question, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"— turns her attention to misery and despair in the works of Theodore Gericault and Francisco de Goya. Come nerd out with Nochiln and dusty slides of severed body parts and haggard old ladies rendered in Romantic tenebris.
ON THE RADAR
SUN 12/11 War on Drugs plays Bowery Ballroom, boweryballroom.com
If Neil Young and Thurson Moore had a love child — and if that child trans-morphed into four-piece Philly rock band — it would be War on Drugs. This band summons the Gods of good old American road-trip rock (think Springsteen, Credence, et al.), but through the distorted haze of a dirty rearview mirror.
Francesca Woodman’s Notebook, Silvana Editoriale, $32.97, amazon.com
Francesca Woodman was a photographer who killed herself at the age of 22. Since her death, she has become a legend for her moody, sensitive work that pictured the naked female form in a swirl of symbolism spun from humble domestic surroundings. This facsimile of the artist’s notebooks, created from 100-year-old school books found in Rome, shows Woodman off at her romantic best. She inscribes her notes in Italian and French with perfect cursive, collaging film transparencies over the text. The composite is a loving, poetic journey into the blazingly creative mind of a young, female artist — but the book lacks the symbolic violence and intensity of the artist’s other extant work. For Woodman completists, a must have. For others, not so much.