This weekend is bang on a can’s annual all day event at the Winter Garden
An amazing lineup, including Yo La Tengo, Mark Stewart, Iva Bittova, and Ethel — and a performance by the Bang on a Can Allstars of Eno’s “Music for Airports.”
Complete schedule at www.bangonacan.org/marathon
Via Art Market Blog:
The Indian company Osian recently started an art investment fund for Indian investors which is one of two art investment funds to be started in India…Â (read the whole story at the link above.)
The fifth annual Uptown Arts Stroll takes place June 1-16 in Northern Manhattan. The stroll offers an easy-to-navigate sampling of many of the visual and performance artists working uptown. The complete schedule and more is available by following the link above. If the current weather holds out, it will be a great opportunity to check out the vibrant communities of Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill, visit some artist studios, try some local food and catch a performance –from comedy at Coogan’s Restaurant to Shakespeare in Inwood Park (the site of Manhattan’s only remaining natural woodland).
BX1: Second Bronx Artist Biennial info.:
http://www.bronxarts.org/2007BRIOWinners.asp
Holland Cotter’s review of the Whitney’s “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era†in the New York Times hits on a topic of major interest to me lately: cultural amnesia (which is the title of my current read, a book of essays by Clive James).
Having been aware of goings on during the 70’s, I always bristled at the “put-downs” of the next generations, coming up in the 80’s and 90’s, as those scornful remarks always focused on style over substance. “What’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding,” was always my incredulous reaction. And when first bell bottoms and flowing Indian tops, and now aviator glasses and afros made their way back in fashion, I felt not vindicated, but saddened that the social and political thought didn’t come with it. Republican youth wearing hippie clothing?! Of course it’s not their fault, but whose is it?
Mr. Cotter finds the same superficiality with the Whitney’s look back at the 60’s, and he finds it the curators’ fault (originally by the Tate Liverpool and enhanced by the Whitney’s Henriette Huldisch). The review shows a refreshing depth of social commentary for any current mainstream writing, and is much appreciated for providing the broader cultural and historical context for this show.
image via the Whitney’s web site: Albert Alotta, Peacemeal, 1967, Film still.
Call For Submissions:
Perfect 8 is looking for artwork and/or writing relating to Empathy and Resonance.
Works are currently being reviewed for Perfect 8: A publication and website dedicated to the deobjectification of people. All works must encourage the growth of empathy in people through an artistic medium. Please view artworks and read the mission statement found at www.PerfectEight.com before submitting work. The second issue is currently under-construction. The work currently posted provides a framework for the kind of work appropriate for submission. If your work clearly relates to the mission, please forward writing or jpegs (no larger than 72dpi 500 x 500 pixels) to Diana at dianaSchmertz@hotmail.com
The federal government is on the verge of turning over a huge portion of our public airwaves to companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast–who will use them for private enrichment instead of the public good.These newly available airwaves are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to revolutionize Internet access — beaming high-speed signals to every park bench, coffee shop, workplace, and home in America. Phone and cable companies don’t want this competition to their Internet service–they’d rather purchase the airwaves at auction and sit on them.
You can sign MoveOn.org’s petition here - urging the government to make sure the public airwaves are used for the public good:
http://civic.moveon.org/airwaves/?r_by=10433-3914062-TMqQvN&rc=paste
Rooftop Roars & Riverside Revolutions
writers reading from their own works and the works of banished writers…
Patricia Eakins (and Pedro Mir)
Rodrigo Toscano (and Mahmoud Darwish)
Amir Parsa (and Sadegh Hedayat)
Monica de la Torre (and Gerardo Deniz)
Thursday, June 14, 6:30 - 9:30
Rio Penthouse Gallery
10 Fort Washington Avenue
(between 159th and 160th streets)
Reception Follows
Admission free and open to the public
A 2007 Washington Heights Art Stroll Event
via the New York Times:
Italian consumer groups, incensed by ticket prices of $200 to $1,200, are urging the authorities to cancel a concert by Barbra Streisand, scheduled for the 24,000-seat Stadio Flaminio in Rome on June 15, The Associated Press reported. In an appeal to the City of Rome, which owns the stadium, and the Italian Olympic Committee, which manages it, the consumer groups Adusbef and Codacons called the ticket prices “absurd and shameful.†Their statement said the stadium was “public property and cannot be used for immoral deals that are shameful to a civilized country.†Concert organizers were not immediately available for comment. The performance in Rome, at the start of Ms. Streisand’s European tour, would be her first in Italy. Tickets for her London shows in July, also with a top price of $1,200, sold out within minutes this month, organizers said.
Dancers and choreographers do you feel like you have to choose between have an artistic life and making a living? How do you stay true to your goals while being practical?
Managing an Artistic Life: A Conference for the Dance Community
Monday June 11th 4-9pm
$20 before May 24th, $25 until June 7th
Registration Deadline: Thursday June 7th, 5pm
Register on-line at nyfa.org
This afternoon conference will combine practical financial and goal setting advice with an opportunity to speak as a community over dinner about the issues we all face.
Look on-line for more details on conference schedule or location.
Questions? Â Contact Christa at cblatchford@nyfa.org or 212 366 6900 x 338
Tell me what’s going on in your town.
Tell me your top 5 inspirations.
Tell me your assessment of something.
Review a show.
Write a manifesto.
Get paid.
Send an inquiry describing your article idea to editor@artistsunite-ny.org. Do it now…
I received a note today reminding us that it’s the 30 year anniversary of the May 19, 1977 action by a group of artists who wanted to get the media off the topic of — guess what: terrorism. They planned the scaling of seven of New York’s bridges as part of a “sculpture.” There’s an interesting movie about it on this site, which is the work of artist John Halpern (whose film company MDS Productions happens to reside in my soon to be abandoned studio in Union Square). Halpern is also known for his fresh air machine and other eco-social action/installation projects. All good reminders of the power of artists’ influence in the public sphere.
I know most people are debating whether they should see spiderman 3 or shrek 3, but for anyone who prefers intelligence, wit, irony, great acting, and beautiful cinematography, I’d recommend Hal Hartley’s latest, which just opened. It’s a sequel, too — to his film Henry Fool. Fay Grim, played beautifully by Parker Posey gets tangled up with CIA agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) in what I think is a postmodern look at global relations, humanity, and James Bond movies.
Catch it soon, because the one or two cinemas in town that will show it need to make more room for dreck — I mean Shrek. (It’s at New Yorks IFC Cinema, along with a delightful short in the Short Attention Span festival, but only ’til Tuesday.)
It was nice to see that moviefone.com is offering an alternative cinema page. Sorry that this one isn’t on the list. Check out our interview with Hal Hartley, who talks about making Fay Grim.
Moscow’s version of the art fair, now in its 11th year, is taking place this week. We had the chance to hit the opening day, and will have a short review next week when I’m back in the states.
I conducted the first TransAction this week (see the essay/manifesto of that name in our articles section). I hope those of you who get a chance to experience the human side of globalization will post a record of it in our upcoming registry.
I spent yesterday evening at a performance in the theater of legendary director Kama Ginkas. It was a production of Peter Pan, which honors the names of myself and wife Wendy, with a new twist and plenty of jokes that were explained to me later. Amazingly, the theater audience included hundreds of children who were the best behaved and most interested kids I’ve ever seen. Ginkas explained that his theater (one of Russia’s permanent government-supported repertory companies) spent years identifying the way to accomplish this feat of child behavior:
The architecture in Moscow is as beautiful as ever. I’ll post some pictures next week.
Das vedanya!
The power of Doug Aitken’s installation work lies in his ability to capture the essence of place, the elemental quality of a particular landscape, and in “Sleepwalkersâ€, his first public art-work in the US, he does just that.
“Sleepwalkers†is comprised of five movies projected on eight exterior surfaces of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The multi-screen moving image installation is enormous in scale yet it makes way for a most intimate personal experience.
The videos tell the tale of five (larger than life) would-be New Yorkers, an office worker, a business man, a postal worker, an electrician and a bicycle messenger, portrayed respectively by Tilda Swinton, Donald Sutherland, Chan Marshall (Cat Power), Seu Jorge, and Ryan Donowho.
Each character has his or her own thirteen-minute film but they all share the same exact storyline. They do their thing independently of one another but at the same time they trade or borrow images and elements from one another’s stories. They also trade places on the screens as the individual films move from one exterior surface to another, sometimes abruptly sometimes seamlessly.
You can leave the action at any point in any one of the stories and pick it up at the same or equivalent point in any other of the stories. The five get up as the sun goes down, they get ready to leave their rooms, they leave their rooms, they go out into the New York night, and they go on to their work or job, and somewhere in there each character has his or her own moment of spinning virtuosity before the end of the night.
Tilda Swinton’s office worker’s character lands on a performing stage where she plays a violin. Donald Sutherland’s highly successful businessman jumps on the roof of the cab that’s just run him down and joyously performs a tap dance. But these moments of departure are treated less as departure from the character’s set nocturnal routine than a continuum of the style of visual story building that incorporates or at least speaks to the idea of New York City as a cultural community.
Aitken’s imagery captures the intensity and the energy of moving through New York at night. There are several stunning sequences of images of the city that slide visually from one enormous viewing surface onto the adjacent viewing surface. So while though story or storyline itself is not remarkably interesting the work is riveting. The installation has power of what’s going on in Times Square at the same time engages the public audience in a provocative and meaningful way.
There’s a lot of talk about Aitken’s deconstruction of the narrative but here the narrative remains intact, moving forward in full linear fashion. Interjecting a series of still images is not a tool of deconstruction but rather serves to change pace and move the story forward in a visually interesting way. Spreading the narrative out on a number of different screens, even if they’re facing different directions, and repeating them in different sequences doesn’t change the essential linear qualities of the narrative.
Does tearing the pages out of a novel and laying them out on the floor in two different rooms alter the actual narrative’s linear qualities? No of course not. But what it does do is involve the reader in a different manner by altering the way the reader might approach the accessibility of that novel. And this is what Aitken does, alters the accessibility of his visual narrative. He fractures the vehicle then asks the viewer to climb on board where or when they might as it moves along.
There is no soundtrack beyond what the streets of New York have to offer. Curiously though all those sounds drop out until you hear what sounds and feels like silence. The silence is visceral, perhaps because it’s an internal silence as the sirens and the horns don’t really go away. Somehow when standing on 53rd street, or in the middle of mid-town block in the empty lot just west of MoMA, or in the confines of the museum’s walled in outdoor sculpture garden looking up at Aitken’s enormous moving images, the noises of the city dim. They dim in the exact same way they do in that moment of the passing subway cars or in the same stillness created by the glimpse through an apartment window of another New Yorker’s life from the safe distance of the backseat of taxi stopped at a traffic light.
“Sleepwalkers†is very much like that moment when your subway train passes another in the tunnel and you see the passengers in the other train. You always look and you look in earnest as if you’ll see something worth seeing. And you do, sort of. You never look in earnest at what’s going on in your own subway car. You don’t want to actually interact with strangers on a subway: you want the safe barrier that will allow you to “look†and “peer.†It’s almost voyeuristic but not really since it’s unsolicited by you, plus it’s really a moment in your life. That’s the lure of “Sleepwalkers.â€
In a way we’re not seeing anything we can’t see anywhere anytime in our own lives but that’s not the point - or maybe it is. Maybe it’s exactly the point and the job or a job of art: to show us what we can see in our life. And Aitken does that poetically.
His work creates the opportunity of an approach, an alternate approach, to narratives of our own or of our own making. As viewers we deconstruct Aitken’s narrative, he gives us the vehicle and we construct or reconstruct the story ourselves because we have the freedom to.
Aitken’s elemental narrative of the big New York City landscape — bright lights, big city – abstracted, entwines itself with the narrative of the internal landscape of the New Yorker, that 8 million stories in the naked city thing and the alone in a crowd thing, the most essential elements of the New York narrative, giving the giant “Sleepwalkers†their monumental authority equal to the experience of what is New York.
“Sleepwalkersâ€, jointly presented by the Museum of Modern Art and Creative Time, screened January 16 - February 12, 2007, viewing was limited to night times.
Curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator of Media, MoMA and Peter Eleey, Curator and Producer, Creative Time.
http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/aitken/index.html
http://www.dougaitkenworkshop.com/
Pamela A. Popeson is a playwright, multimedia artist, and art critic living in New York City. Her new play “Women’s Work” will premiere at Dramarama in New Orleans on April 14th, 2007. Popeson is a frequent contributor to NYArts Magazine and Cover Magazine, writing articles on art and art culture.
There’s been a convergence of some of my favorite indie film actors & directors, all making for some good viewing opportunities. Hal Hartley’s new film “Fay Grim” opens next week. Sarah Polley directed “Away from Her,” which hit Manhattan last week (Polley starred in Hartley’s “No Such Thing”). Polley stars with Sam Shepard in Wim Wender’s “Don’t Come Knocking,” co-written by Wenders and Shepard, which is out on DVD (Wenders and Polley both debuted their films last year at Sundance). Adrienne Shelly’s “Waitress” opens this week. (Shelly, who was murdered last year, starred in two of Hartley’s early features). And while I’m free associating, Shepard’s main squeeze, Jessica Lange, turns out to be an impressive photographer. Her work is featured this month in Aperture.
May 20th, 4:00 P.M.
Return of the Repressed: Performance Poet MIkhail Horowitz with guitarist maudit Gilles Malkine
Hosted by Patricia Eakins
The Lounge at Hudson View Gardens
116 Pinehurst Avenue @ 183rd Street
$5 + free reception | 212-923-7800 X1342 | fabulara@earthlink.net
Subway: A train to 181st Street
In honor of Bjork’s performance tonight, I’m putting up one of my favorite duo/ cover tune/ girl group/ performances ever. Enjoy…
While we’re mostly a virtual reality here at Artists Unite, we call northern Manhattan home, and a local venue is becoming a place where top artists are performing. WNYC’s Soundcheck show covered The Palace in Washington Heights, where Iggy Pop celebrated his birthday with a show recently. The venue is hosting Matthew Barney’s better half, Bjork, in a sold-out show tomorrow. NPR is broadcasting it. Here are the details from her Icelandicship’s web site:
NPR Music and WNYC (New York’s Public Radio) will offer a live Web stream of Björk’s sold-out performance from the United Palace in New York City on Saturday, May 5. The concert will be streamed live at www.NPR.org/music. WNYC will offer an encore broadcast on Monday, May 14 at 7 p.m. EST both on the radio and via Web stream at www.WNYC.org. Contrary to reports a free mp3 is not on the cards.
from Leonard Lopate’s WNYC interview with Paul Mazursky:
“I was speaking with Sven Nykvist, who worked on one of my movies, and I asked him if [Ingmar] Bergman had a sense of humor. Sven said, ‘Oh, ya…sometimes he has a humorous nightmare.’”