David Maurice Smith, “A female resident of Manhattan’s downtown Eastside makes her way past the Police Service Area 4 Station located on the corner of Avenue C and East 8th. The station was the only building in the area with lights, running off of an auxiliary power supply. Officers barricaded themselves inside while the streets flooded with waist deep water. October 30, 2012” (2012) (© Smith/Oculi) (via icp.org)
It’s a big week coming up, so make sure you get lots of rest and drink lots of fluids. Then sit down and plan your time: you’ve got the events for the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, Halloween, and Performa to choose from. Speaking of Halloween, don’t forget to bring your best to our costume competition on Thursday night, hosted with Storefront for Art and Architecture!
This is also a great week for talks, with chances to see Lucy Lippard and Judith Butler and Cornell West, together. And if you feel the need to prep for next week’s mayoral election, we recommend a politics-themed happy hour. If, on the other hand, that sounds like too much of a headache — well, there’s always disco yoga.
Sandy Anniversary
When: Opens Tuesday, October 29
Where: Museum of the City of New York (1220 5th Ave, Upper East Side, Manhattan)
One year ago Hurricane Sandy came and leveled New York City, New Jersey, and much of the East Coast, gripping the city in a rare show of vulnerability. Sorting through over a thousand submissions from professional and amateur photographers, the curators of the exhibition Rising Waters: Photographs of Sandy — presented at the Museum of the City of New York, in conjunction with the International Center of Photography — look to take a multi-angled view of New York, both before and after the storm. —JP
Disco Yoga with a Nightlife Diva
When: Tuesday, October 29, 10:30–11:30pm
Where: The Spectrum (59 Montrose Avenue, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
Hyperallergic’s own Gerry Visco has one hot box, and she wants you to join her for disco yoga. Suggested donation is $6, and Gerry will lead an hourlong class at this East Williamsburg location. While most people may know Visco has a nightlife personality who’s larger than life — and very, very colorful — you can also get in touch with her meditative side. Of course, all the yoga will be done to disco beats and under a disco ball. —HV
Distinguished Critic: Lucy Lippard
When: Wednesday, October 30, 6:30–8 pm
Where: Tishman Auditorium, The New School (66 West 12th Street, Manhattan)
Every year the International Association of Art Critics United States (AICA-USA), along with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, designates a distinguished critic and asks him or her to give a lecture on art criticism. I saw Holland Cotter give one a few years ago, and it was excellent; I have no doubt Lucy Lippard, speaking this year, will do the same. Lippard promises her talk to be “sort of autobiographical,” discussing “what made me do it” and “what I try to do.” We can’t wait.
Public Intellectual Powerhouse
When: Wednesday, October 30, 7–9 pm
Where: Low Library Rotunda at Columbia University (2960 Broadway, Morningside Heights, Manhattan)
To discuss the the significance of one sparkling mind, Columbia University brings together two others. As part of its look back at Edward Said, who died ten years ago this past September, Columbia pairs Judith Butler and Cornel West in what ought to be a fun, reflective, and erudite conversation. Get there early (doors open at 6), because odds are this will be a popular talk. —JP
1970s Performance & Psychodrama
When: Opens Thursday, October 31
Where: Whitney Museum (945 Madison Ave, Upper East Side, Manhattan)
Drawing its title from Jack Smith’s name for the frenzied performance art scene in downtown Manhattan during the 1970s, Rituals Of Rented Island revisits an era when Soho lofts and shops were alive with a teeming, fugitive theater. Some of its artists went on to further art fame — Laurie Anderson, Mike Kelley, John Zorn/Theater of Musical Optics, to name a few — but the scene as a whole has been largely forgotten. Today, few signs of its past vitality remain, making this sort of a ghostly show, perhaps appropriate for its Halloween opening after all. —JP
(via wrongsideoftheart.com)
Halloween with Spanish Horror
When: Thursday, October 31
Where: Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Ave, East Village, Manhattan)
Throttled by the Franco regime, Spanish cinema in the 1960s and ’70s ripped repression inside and outside, grabbing audiences by the throat with a body of horror films peerless in their perversion, eroticism, and fantastic cinematography. The Golden Age was 1967–76, a period the Anthology Film Archives are reanimating for an 11-film, Halloween-approved retrospective (which continues through Nov. 10). Jorge Grau’s great zombie film–cum–satire Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is a standout, as is the deliciously titled The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman, Spain’s box-office smash of 1970 starring Paul Naschy in his iconic role as the unrepressed and wild werewolf Waldemar Daninsky. —JP
The Performance Art Biennial
When: Starts Friday, Nov. 1 (prices and times vary)
Where: Throughout New York City
Performa lands in New York on Friday, taking over venues all around the city with performance of all different kinds. Every time the performance-art biennial is upon us, we could swear it’s expanded, and this year is no exception. The calendar is a doozy. This weekend, we’re particularly looking forward to “experiments in intermedial activism,” a nighttime bus tour of Red Hook, and what’s sure to be a disaster of a soccer game in the Bronx.
Postwar British Graphic Design
Richard Hollis, book cover for “Ways of Seeing” by John Berger, published by BBC and Penguin Books, London, 1972 (courtesy Richard Hollis) (via artistsspace.org)
When: Ongoing (through November 10)
Where: Artists Space: Books & Talks (55 Walker Street, Soho, Manhattan)
The first US overview of work by seminal British graphic designer Richard Hollis, this exhibition contains over 150 items from his personal archive. Hollis was part of the team that produced Ways of Seeing, the seminal text that accompanied John Berger’s 1972 BBC series of the same name and is now a standard art historical text for students worldwide. Hollis’s clients have included the Whitechapel Gallery, the Fleming Collection, Goethe Institute, and the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Mayoral Madness
When: Monday, November 4, 7 pm
Where: Pacific Standard (82 Fourth Avenue, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn)
When we see you next Tuesday, it will be election day — time to decide the fate of the next four years of New York. To prepare, join the Brooklyn Commune‘s mayoral madness happy hour the night before. They’ll be drinking at Pacific Standard and watching Raul Barcelon’s The Promise of New York, a film that follows three fairly ordinary New Yorkers as they attempt to run for mayor (in 2005). As the commune says: “Witness firsthand the corrupting effects of money in politics, then go to the polls on Tuesday hungover and cynical!”
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With listings by Jeremy Polacek and Hrag Vartanian
