Dear Merce Cunningham,
As your company comes to a close this winter, I have been on the look out for all things Merce. Wanting to understand you better and hoping that I could still understand you even after you have passed, I visited Charles Atlas’s video tribute to you now at the New Museum not just once, but twice.
The specter of communism currently haunts the New Museum in its summer “bloc-buster” exhibition “Ostalgia.” It’s an ambitious project that consumes most of the galleries with a swirling conglomeration of disparate mediums, artists, scales and concepts that reflect the miasmic atmosphere of post-Soviet territories.
Seven on Seven is an annual conference hosted by Rhizome and the New Museum that pairs seven artists together with seven technologists to collaborate on projects created in a 24-hour period. The event’s second outing was last Saturday, May 14. The first question that came to my mind while attending the event was — what exactly is a technologist? Through the presentation speeches and Q+A sessions that showed off the series of thought-provoking collaborative artworks, I began to get an inkling of what the word might mean, and what its implications could be. But at a time when new media artists are technological innovators and software developers are artistic creators, where do we draw the line?
Can’t figure out how to fill up your culture diet this weekend? We’ve got your back, with Williamsburg Gallery Night going down tonight and Man Bartlett’s 140 hour-long Berlin performance streaming all weekend, plus Su Friedrich’s MICROSCOPE Gallery opening and the Seven on Seven art-tech collaborative event on Saturday.
As part of the Festival of Ideas For the New City anchored by the New Museum, a group of major artists have sprinkled the Bowery with murals. In collaboration with the Art Production Fund, painters including Mary Heilmann, Richard Prince and Jacqueline Humphries created murals for the roll-down metal gates of restaurant supply stores on the historic street. The trick is that these murals are only visible at night, after the stores close. Over the course of one evening’s sunset, I went on a scouting mission to photograph the works in their native habitat. Click through for the photo essay.
Obama laid a wreath at the base of the former World Trade Towers right after Osama had been buried at sea. And, as if on cue the utopian “Festival of Ideas For the New City” launched, vowing to “harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore the ideas destined to shape it.” Starchitects, visionaries, the homeless, mayors, artists, foodies, freegans, the playskool crowd, beggars, actors, bakers, and 100 plus organizations bulwarked by the combined might of the New Museum, The Architectural League, The Bowery Poetry Club, C-Lab, Columbia University Center for Architecture, Cooper Union, The Drawing Center, NYU Wagner, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and the Swiss Institute looked around their own post-recession backyards to tackle sustainability and revitalization, declaring “yes we can.” And for four days, they did.
Even with New York City’s constantly-full calendar of art events, this weekend is packed with shows, activities and sights for the whole family to enjoy. Check out the Festival of New Ideas around the New Museum, plus their Condo show ending this weekend, and see a new public sculpture by sculptor Jaume Plensa.
At a preview of the New Museum’s George Condo retrospective, I was struck by the painter’s relentless engagement with all sorts of art historical genres, from Baroque portraiture to abstract expressionism and back again. Here’s a photo essay covering the entire Condo exhibition, from the salon style portrait start to the abstract expressionist finish.
It’s the New Year all over again, and aside from going out and partying, there’s not much in the New Year to look forward to yet. I’m finding myself starting at empty calendar and wondering what to fill it up with. Why not schedule in some art? It’s never to early to start that exhibition calendar going, so here are five exhibitions that I think will light up this new year in New York City.
We’ve all been curious about what David Wojnarowicz’ video looks like installed in the lobby of the New Museum. Well, check it out! Click through for more photos.
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