Artists Unite Issue

What’s the most boring date of the year?! It has to be the Monday between Christmas and New Years. But not this year!

Join Artists Unite on Monday, December 29 for the finale of Now:Here:This along with performances by dance/installation artists robot hands and spoken word artist Angela Jones. Plus drinks and snacks. No boring Monday for you!

Details
Monday December 29, 7-10 pm
720 Fort Washington Ave #2K
A Train to 190th and take elevator up to Ft. Washington
1 Train to 190th and take steps at 187 or A elevator above 192 to Ft. Washington Ave.
click here for map

Now:Here:This
The final exhibition of work from artists around New York and beyond who make work at the same moment in time.
A catalog of the project for 2008 will be available

robot hands
meditations of a french hipster.

Drawing from the pop culture phenomenon of Yelle and tektoniks, robot hands once again blurs the line between party and performance, artist and audience, art and fun. In their newest work, meditations of a french hipster, the dynamic duo seeks out to explore the societal boundaries set up when a performer takes the stage and how the french dance sensation, tektoniks, broke those pretensions. Employing heavily inspired tektonik vocabulary, robot hands twists and turns to the self-mashed mixes of Yelle and Santogold. Mainly, we just want to take your picture. Visit ihaverobothands.blogspot.com for more info.

Angela Jones
with her own unique (out)spoken word performance!

SEE YOU THERE!!!

This would be in the ‘absurd’ category, except for the fact that I’ve taken a few of these photos myself!

THE ART MUSEUM TOILET MUSEUM OF ART - NOW ACCEPTING IMAGES

World-renowned Collection’s First-Ever Call For Submissions

New York, NY, — The Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art, the world’s largest collection of images of art museum toilets taken at various art museums around the world, is seeking to add to its unique collection through a call for submissions from other art museum art toilet aficionados.

more details at their web site: www.artmuseumtoilet.org

As a writer, Charlie Kaufman has given us some of my favorite movies of the last 10 years: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In his writing/directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, he reaches for the highest levels of cinematic creation and gives us something to put on our shelves next to other visions that have made it to mainstream theaters in spite of their daring (2001 A Space Odyssey comes to mind).

Synecdoche means a specific part of something that is used to describe the whole, as in using “the screen” to describe the movies; or a whole that is used to describe a specific incidence, e.g., “the law” to describe a police officer. In this case, from his beginnings in Schenectady, New York, Kaufman’s protagonist, director Caden Cotard, goes on to create a theater piece that fills a New York City warehouse with a life-sized version of his life, complete with actors playing himself. The result of his attempt to create something authentic is an ever-evolving play that examines how powerful players in the dance of life make waves in spite of themselves; and how, to quote Dorothy in Oz, the answer is always right there with you. Would that Caden Cotard could figure that out.

The reflexions and parallels this structure provides are both confusing and clarifying, and the whole thing, which could verge on groaning darkness, stays even-keeled due to Kaufman’s biting sense of humor. The cast — Phillip Semour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Hope Davis, Katherine Keener, Diane Weist, Jennifer Jason Leigh, — and a great supporting cast — is outstanding.

I am reluctant to give away any of the devices Kaufman uses, because they are audacious enough to be worth slaps in the face. You can look to other reviews if you crave that before seeing it yourself. Let me limit myself to accolades, and end with the quote that got me to the theater, from Manohla Dargis’s review in the New York Times:

To say that Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now…