Once a person enters the room, the components of H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS begin to emit strange, disjointed streams of sound, light, and film which flow together, setting off the next few hours of narrative-resistant exhibition experience.
Park Avenue Armory
Posted inPerformance
A Brooklyn-Born Street Dance Goes Uptown, with Mixed Results
How do you take a form of street dance and bring it, for the first time, to the theatrical stage — and not just any stage, but a 160-foot-long one?
Posted inArt
Teachable Moments from a Conference on Art and Education
Last month, ART21 hosted an intricately interdisciplinary affair: Creative Chemistries: Radical Practices for Art + Education, a conference designed to probe the intersections of art and education.
Posted inArt
Douglas Gordon Goes Swimming in the Shallow End
In Claude Debussy’s 1910 prelude “La cathédrale engloutie” (“The Sunken Cathedral”), shuddering waves of chords grow and then drown out in tribute to a mythical cathedral rising out of the sea and then disappearing again. In Douglas Gordon’s new “tears become… streams become…” installation at the Park Avenue Armory, the rippling notes are provided each night by pianist Hélène Grimaud, who plays a Steinway encircled by a reflecting pool of 122,000 gallons of water.
Posted inPerformance
Kenneth Branagh’s Stab at the Bloody Business of Macbeth
Thunder and rain hurtle over the violent, staged sorrow of this new spectacle of Macbeth, installed heath and all in the gaping drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory.
Posted inPerformance
The Unremarkable Death of Marina Abramović
Marina Abramović, as you may have heard, is dead. She has died at the age of 67 and is being celebrated at the Park Avenue Armory with a production by pioneering theater director Robert Wilson, called The Life and Death of Marina Abramović. She is also starring in the show, quite alive, alongside Willem Dafoe, Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), and a cast of roughly a dozen other performers.
Posted inPerformance
Massive Attack V Adam Curtis: A Missed Opportunity for Confrontation on Park Avenue
Staging a rock-driven video spectacle criticizing wealth and politics might seem like a confrontational thing to do on Park Avenue in Manhattan, where money clusters like stars orbiting a black hole.
Posted inArt
Deep Blue vs. Kasparov: Machine’s Triumph Over Man
The 1997 six-game match between Garry Kasparov — arguably the top chess player of all time — and IBM’s Deep Blue computer was an epochal moment, our blockbuster modernization of John Henry against the train. But it’s not obvious fodder for theater.
Posted inMusic
From Park Avenue to the Moon
One person’s final frontier is another’s impersonal void, or at least those are the two experiences of space you’re likely to have at Oktophonie at the Park Avenue Armory. On the first of its performance run that started this week, the crowd, some grudgingly, took off their shoes and put on white “cloaks” (really more like ponchos) and filed into the circles of chairs on the floor of a raised white stage. What followed was over an hour of what is described as a “ritualized lunar experience,” scored by cold modernist music and shifts of light.
Posted inArt
The ADAA Art Show Celebrated Its 25th Year with a Moody Affair
The ADAA Art Show marked its 25th anniversary this year, and the 2013 edition at the Park Avenue Armory was definitely a very mature, stately fair, with only the slightest of dark undertones to its otherwise unsurprising, but elegantly sleek, presentation.
Posted inNews
An Immersive Hallucination with Massive Attack, Adam Curtis, and Punchdrunk in the 2013 Armory Season
With a fantasy of suburbs and excess from Paul McCarthy, the Robert Wilson-staged The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, and Matt Charman’s play about the chess-master IBM computer Deep Blue, the 2013 Park Avenue Armory season is going to be a theatrical one, to say the least. But the most sensory overload may come from the (tentatively titled) Massive Attack v Adam Curtis.
Posted inArt
The Social Media Footprint of Ann Hamilton’s Park Ave Armory Installation
Did you share a quick Instagram at Ann Hamilton’s “Event of a Thread” (2012)? You were not alone. At the end of the exhibition, visitors had shared 4,640 photos.
