For a few hours last Sunday, e-flux’s Chinatown offices were bathed in red light as Free Cooper Union held an interpretive reading of the 41-page trustee meeting transcript first leaked to the Village Voice over the summer.
Reviews
Posted inBooks
From Lucky Magazine to Lyrical Sonnets
CHICAGO — Simone de Beauvoir once said, “Buying is a profound pleasure.” To shop, to consume, to purchase a new look even if it’s temporary — an air of satisfaction accompanies that moment of credit card swiping, or handing over that stack of Ben Franklins.
Posted inArt
The Days of Future Past: Afrofuturism and Black Memory
When you walk into the main gallery of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s current exhibition The Shadows Took Shape, which explores contemporary art through the lens of Afrofuturist aesthetics, one of the first pieces to catch the eye is a glittering procession of black astronauts fanned across a faded landscape.
Posted inArt
Memories of China: Yang Fudong’s Nostalgic Disillusionment
BERKELEY, Calif. — Yang Fudong is known to chronicle contemporary China’s affluent and disaffected urban youth in atmospheric works that evoke Shanghai cinema of the 1930s golden age.
Posted inPerformance
Surrealism’s Fistfights and Adversarial Culture
An evening Dada revue organized by Tristan Tzara, July 6, 1923’s Soirée du Coeur à Barbe (Night of the Bearded Heart) was the site of an infamous altercation between Tzara’s associates and Surrealist don André Breton at the Théâtre Michel in Paris.
Posted inPerformance
A Visual Concert of Gestures
Audience members for Tori Wrånes’s “Yes Nix” performance had to sidestep the artist, who was lying on the floor at the entrance to SIR Stage 37, as they walked in. Her feet were tied in rope, which was strung up to a running track in the ceiling. It was the most confrontational part of the 30-some-minute performance, an otherwise structured and slick series of gestures — a sort of operetta without words.
Posted inArt
The Radical Boundaries of African-American Performance
“Be African-American. Be very African American.” Thus reads a typed instruction on an otherwise blank piece of paper sent by veteran performance artist William Pope.L to Clifford Owens as part of Anthology, the latter’s crowd-sourced performance project staged last year at MoMA PS1.
Posted inPerformance
A Play Without Actors, Only Light and Sound
The idea of a play with no people on stage isn’t new. That is, after all, what the phantasmagoria stage shows of the 18th and 19th centuries were all about, where projections of light with sound conjured a theatrical spectacle of phantoms. In Dutch artist Gabriel Lester’s Super Sargasso Sea (phantom play #1), presented at Abrons Arts Center as part of Performa 13, this experiment was resurrected in a piece of 20 minutes where nothing moved on the angular stage except lights and an occasional door opening and closing.
Posted inBooks
Why I Am a Member of the Ron Padgett Fan Club
One mind-stumping sensation a reader is likely to glean from Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2013) is that the poems wrote themselves, and that he just happened to be in the room when they showed up. There is even a substantial section in Collected Poems that Padgett titled: POEMS I GUESS I WROTE (2001).
Posted inArt
Are We Ready for the News that Peter Young Delivers Us?
In the summer of 1969, Peter Young left New York – and his studio on the Bowery – and set off for the American West, where he drifted around for nearly two years before settling down in Bisbee, Arizona, where he still resides.
Posted inPerformance
The Questions of Performa 13
Marianne Vitale’s “The Missing Book of Spurs,” her commission for Performa 13, features half-naked women in corsets, a man in assless chaps, and “natives” in outfits inspired by traditional Native American clothing; it features blocks of wood, a wooden sculpture that looks like a torpedo, and a large, old-fashioned wooden bar; it features loud music, a smoke machine, and erotic dancing. It is a big spectacle. Unfortunately, I’m not sure it’s anything else.
Posted inMusic
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (November 2013, Part 1)
In part 1 of this month, reviews of Iceage, Parquet Courts, Sleigh Bells, and Mikal Cronin.
