Rainer Werner Fassbinder, still from ‘Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands’ (photo by Dino Raymond Hansen, via fassbindermovie.com)
LOS ANGELES — This week, a museum hosts an estate sale, Max Hooper Schneider mounts a semi-scientific installation, Clarissa Tossin traces connections between Brazil and the US, and more.
Santa Monica Museum of Art’s Epic Estate Sale
When: Tuesday, May 26, 9am–2pm; Wednesday, May 27, 8am–2pm; Thursday, May 28, 9am–noon
Where: Santa Monica Museum of Art (2525 Michigan Avenue, G1, Santa Monica, California)
For 17 years, the Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMoA) has been an integral part of the Bergamot Station Arts Center. However, after recent conflicts over competing development proposals, museum director Elsa Longhauser has decided to leave the complex, relocating to an interim space in Century City while SMMoA considers options for the future. As a result, the museum will have almost two decades of stuff to unload, including furniture, books, tech and AV equipment, and art supplies. The three-day epic estate sale is a great way to pick up some bargains while helping a worthwhile institution.
Santa Monica Museum of Art Epic Estate Sale (via smmoa.org)
Fassbinder and His Friends
When: Thursday, May 28—Saturday, May 30, 7:30pm nightly
Where: Egyptian Theater (6712 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, Los Angeles)
Prolific German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed forty-four films over a career that lasted barely fifteen years — all before his death at age 37 from an overdose. One of the seminal filmmakers of the New German Cinema, Fassbinder unflinchingly explored themes of sex, money, race, and class in a diverse oeuvre that ranged from avant-garde theater to Douglas Sirk-style melodrama. Fassbinder’s turbulent life, marked by drug use and volatile relationships with both men and women, shared a kinship with the broken, desperate, and eccentric outsiders who populated his films. On the occasion of his 70th birthday, this mini-retrospective put on by the American Cinematheque and the Goethe-Institut presents some of his most famous films including Fox and his Friends (1975), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), as well as Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands (2015), a new documentary made by his longtime friend Christian Braad Thomsen.
Clarissa Tossin, “When two places look alike” (2012), photograph series, 40in. x 27in. (via samuelfreeman.com)
Clarissa Tossin: How Does It Travel?
When: Opens Friday, May 29, 6–9pm
Where: Samuel Freeman (2639 South La Cienega Blvd, Culver City, California)
Brazilian-born artist Clarissa Tossin explores the movement of people, objects, and ideas around the globe, and their accompanying transformations. For her first exhibition at Samuel Freeman Gallery, How Does it Travel? Tossin focuses on the history and legacy of the rubber industry in Brazil, exhibiting a rubber cast of a Volkswagen Brasilia car she brought to LA folded in her carry-on luggage and a rubber tree on loan from Pasadena’s Huntington Garden, representing a double dislocation. Other works include “Point Zero,” a wall coated in red soil taken from Brazil’s modernist capital Brasilia, as well as “Work damaged by customs during search for cocaine upon reentry to the United States from Colombia,” which is exactly what it sounds like.
Max Hooper Schneider: Accidental Menagerie
Max Hooper Schneider, ‘Accidental Menagerie’ (via kaynegriffincorcoran.com) (click to enlarge)
When: Opens Friday, May 29, 7–9pm
Where: Kayne Griffin Corcoran (1201 South La Brea Avenue, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles)
In the works of Max Hooper Schneider, markers of civilization are overtaken by flora and fauna, as snails make a home in a popcorn machine and crabs scuttle over obsolete laptops.
For his upcoming show at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Accidental Menagerie, Schneider will present a vertical installation of 25 trays — “a late 20th century Wunderkammer” — filled with organic specimens, as well as human detritus such as an old band t-shirt or a stopped clock. In another gallery, “Blackwater Jacuzzi” repurposes a symbol of conspicuous leisure as a living ecosystem.
Obscura Day
When: Saturday, May 30
Where: venues all over Los Angeles and beyond
As amazing as the internet is, there are still some strange and wonderful places that you just have to experience IRL, and Atlas Obscura has been chronicling the world’s most curious locations since 2009. This Saturday the organization has organized events at 150 of these sites in 25 countries for Obscura Day. Highlights in the LA area include the International Printing Museum in Carson, Noah Purifoy’s Desert Museum in Joshua Tree, and the Bob Baker Marionette Theater.
Bhagavad-gita Museum in Culver City (via atlasobscura.com)
Dance for the Marginalized
When: Saturday, May 30—Sunday, May 31, 7pm nightly
Where: The Bowtie Project (2800 Casitas Avenue (approx), Glassell Park, Los Angeles)
Sandwiched between the river and the rails, the Bowtie Project provides a fitting location for Taisha Paggett’s choreographed performance evereachmore, which addresses the troubling trend of violence against the marginalized. Performed by WXPT, a temporary dance company founded by Paggett, evereachmore counters despair by attempting “to enact new economies of resistance and new sensations of time, space and togetherness.”
‘evereachmore’ (via clockshop.org)
