MATTHEW BARNEY | GLADSTONE GALLERY

Matthew Barney, REPRESSIA (decline)--OTTOgate: square hip--engorged iris---stroke-HEMMOROIDAL DISTRACTOR(2)-JIM, 1991. Wrestling mat, Pyrex, cast petroleum-wax and petroleum jelly Olympic curl bar, cotton six, sternal retractors, 192 x 216 x 177 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. Photo by David Regen.

Matthew Barney's "Facility of DECLINE" at Gladstone Gallery, New York September 9–October 22, 2016 Download the art-agenda iPad App Share    "Facility of DECLINE" at Gladstone Gallery, New York, "mirrors but does not reproduce" Matthew Barney's iconic 1991 exhibition of the same name at the gallery's SoHo space.(1) Immediately upon entering, one is immersed in Barney's now familiar yet ever fantastic world of petroleum jelly, mythic characters, seductive hermeticism, and ever-revelatory aesthetic invention: the signature hermetic conceptual drawings in self-lubricating plastic frames and petroleum jelly (rendered in graphite with that gorgeous, light, sinuous, even awkward Old Master hand); Caucasian flesh and bright yellow wrestling mats; football and weightlifting paraphernalia; speculums; cast sucrose capsules and barbells; saltwater pearls; an NFL jersey numbered "00"; thermal retractors, red skeets, binding belts, a hydraulic jack with glucose syrup; a "hubris pill"; various electronic freezing devices; numerous references to Oakland Raiders football star Jim Otto; Harry Houdini, dubbed "the Character of Positive Restraint"; and the melancholy intersex diva TRANSEXUALIS (1991), a weightlifting bench cast in petroleum jelly and enclosed in a walk-in-cooler. Twenty-five years after its first exhibition this critical early work—which transformed Barney from a recently graduated pre-medical student into one of the most astonishing and influential artists of the 1990s—is not only alive and well, but finally has its moment. What was ungraspable, eccentric, and misread in 1991 as merely a rehashing of 1970s performance art via white male hetero/homosexual privilege is, as Maggie Nelson argues, of a body and desire that "has no gender; it is neither male nor female, neither human nor animal, neither animated nor inanimate. Its orientation emphasizes neither the feminine nor the masculine and creates no boundary between heterosexuality and homosexuality or between object and subject (…) It favors no organ over any other, so that the penis possesses no more orgasmic force than the vagina, the eye, or the toe."(2) The re-staging of Barney's '90s debut coincides with a general interest in foundational exhibitions from the era, such as "The Nineties," a section curated by Nicolas Trembley at this year's edition of Frieze London. Returning to groundbreaking exhibitions, not just works, reminds us of the profound ontological transformations of art and objecthood that occurred at this time. In a way the generative effects of trauma (such as Barney's interest in hypertrophy or the death of Houdini by a punch to his abdomen) were not only a major theme of this period but remain its essential presence in the narrative of contemporary art history. Barney's work, as this lag in understanding implies, is not easy. It does not truck with resolutions and wholes but demands attention, synthetic analysis, time, and most of all sensitivity to materials. Storytelling is one of his most inventive forms, and each of his stories is rooted in the associative and formal potential of physical materials. REPRESSIA (1991)—a (white-)flesh-colored wrestling mat with a wound held open as in a surgical operation by a sternal extractor, oozing a life-fluid of petroleum jelly that slides over a pair of twin testicular red skeets, while a cast petroleum-wax and petroleum-jelly Olympic curl bar, punctuated by cotton socks, hangs above—is both a polymorphous pulsating creature and narrative of metabolic process. Like TRANSEXUALISand the transcendent Jim Otto Suite (both works 1991), is all verb rather than noun. We may speak of them as sculptural works but they express the condition of "-ing." Even his drawings are diagrams and embodiments of living systems. Stadium (1991), purposely positioned as the first work of the exhibition, contains a plan of the system you are about to encounter; where football drills on a playing field become the sucrose producing, gonadal, intestinal, rectal, hypertrophic forces of bodies(3) cut from organic chemistry, biology, internally lubricated plastics, rock climbing, physiology, and industrial materials such as the iconic petroleum jelly whose entropic tendencies (stains, discoloring) are not signs of wear so much as testaments to Barney's interest in what happens to physical materials as they are subject to pressures and forces over time. Here is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Barney's work: he does not work on a human but rather a glacial timescale, unafraid to take eight years to make The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) or River of Fundament (2006–2014); the "Drawing Restraint" series began in 1987 and shows no sign of concluding. Each of his works—whether film, sculpture, or video action—should be experienced as an instantiation of an animated, alive, process in time, joints and materials that are always striving to become rather than being. Aligned with this is the necessity of including Barney's titles and lists of materials with, and as, the work. For instance, the full title: TRANSEXUALIS (decline) ---HYPERTROPHY (pectoralis majora) H.C.G. ---JIM BLIND (m.) ---hypothermal penetrator OTTO: Body Temp. 66 degrees (1991) not only links the creation of aesthetic form with the process of weight training (hypertrophy) where muscles are built by tearing and scarring but introduces, as a detail, H.G.C. H.G.C. is Human Gonadotropin Hormone, which is produced during pregnancy, but "when injected intramuscularly, stimulates testosterone production in the male athlete, which in turn enhances athletic performance."(4) It is therefore unfortunate that the gallery maintains the convention of the checklist, which one must ask for at the desk. CONSTIPATOR BLOCK: shim BOLUS – OTTOshaft – (transverse) TFE squat –HEMORRHOIDAL DISTRACTOR (2) (1991) might read like a visual diagram or science experiment, but that is the point. Barney's work does not follow the rules of the white cube—it always exceeds and forces us beyond, challenging the very definition of art and objecthood in times deformed by the art market. But none of this lessens its impact, which is more like being injected into the body of a David Cronenberg film than an afternoon visit to a Chelsea gallery show. It is all guffaws, goose bumps, and goo, infused with the groans of the grotesque. (1) One in a series of exhibitions and bodies of work referred to as the "OTTO Trilogy": "Facility of Incline"(Stuart Regen Gallery, Los Angeles, May—June, 1992); and "Facility of Decline (Gladstone Gallery, New York, October 1991 in New York); OTTOshaft (at documenta IX, 1992). (2) Maggie Nelson, "On Porousness, Perversity, and Pharmacopornographia," in OTTO Trilogy (New York: Gladstone Gallery, 2016), 19. (3) Jim Otto, the center for the Oakland Raiders from 1960 to 1974, "was the first player in the NFL to choose the jersey number 00, a reference to his palindromic name. Otto underwent twenty-eight knee operations, nine of which were performed during his playing career. He was fitted with prosthetic knee joints made from Teflon, a self-lubricating plastic whose chemical makeup lends it an intrinsic resistance to friction." Matthew Barney, "Playbook 91-92," in OTTO Trilogy, 175. (4) Matthew Barney, "Playbook 91-92," in OTTO Trilogy, p. 176. Thyrza Nichols Goodeve is a writer and cartoodlist who lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York. See more images

ONASSIS CULTURAL CENTER | NY

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

XU ZHEN | JAMES COHAN GALLERY

Xu Zhen, Under Heaven -- 2808TR1601 (detail), 2014. Oil on canvas, aluminum, 70 3/4 (diameter) x 5 1/2 inches.Produced by MadeIn Company.

Xu Zhen September 8–October 8, 2016 Opening: Thursday, September 8, 6–8pm James Cohan  533 W26 Street New York www.jamescohan.com James Cohan is pleased to present a solo exhibition by the multi-disciplinary Chinese artist Xu Zhen. The show will be on view from September 8 to October 8, 2016 with an opening reception from 6 to 8pm on Thursday, September 8. In 2009 Xu Zhen subsumed his individual artistic identity and transformed into MadeIn—an "art creation company." Subsequently in 2013, MadeIn launched a brand—Xu Zhen, redundantly making Xu a product of his own corporation. Xu works within many different media and thematic structures, making him an enigmatic yet groundbreaking figure in Chinese contemporary art—a role that he gleefully accepts. Of his work, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, director of the Serpentine Galleries, London, writes, "Xu's sociopolitical appraisals distance him from the herd of contemporary Chinese artists. And the breadth of his practice, in all its seeming spontaneity and surprising inflections and turns, only complicates the attempt to pin him down to any single position within his country's art scene—or, indeed, within cultural production at large." The works in this exhibition examine the human experience of pain, pleasure and desire as well as the aesthetic manipulation of consumers in late capitalist societies. The exhibition will present a large-scale sculpture from the Eternity series, Xu's 1998 film Rainbow, selections from his Under Heaven paintings and a new wall installation, Corporate – (Erected), produced this year. Xu's oeuvre questions the validity of an East-West dichotomy with great skepticism. Xu's Eternity sculptures are a mash-up of Hellenistic and Buddhist statuary, creating three-dimensional, transcultural exquisite corpses. The result is a deftly composed work that carries the weight of history, yet acts as a sly statement about global similarities and differences. Eternity allows the sacred and the profane to exist in the same space, denying neither an ultimate importance.  In Rainbow, which premiered at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, a bare back fills the screen and is repeatedly slapped until the skin turns an alarming shade of red. Although the slapping is audible, the hands themselves were removed through editing. The result is a visceral, aestheticized portrait of pain and endurance. In contrast to Rainbow, the paintings from Xu's ongoing "Under Heaven" series are a voluptuary dream. He applies a thick layer of oil paint to a canvas and then forms delicate petals and flowers using a cake decorator. The resulting impasto creates a striking relief, tempting the viewer to touch or even taste. The expansive title, "Under Heaven," is a literal translation of a Chinese word meaning "the whole world." The sumptuous surfaces as well as the allusive title make the works an intense sensual experience. Corporate – (Erected) is a large-scale wall sculpture incorporating ready-made S&M paraphernalia. From afar, the work appears to be an exercise in gothic formalism; however, upon closer inspection it becomes clear that it is an assemblage of leather accessories and erotic toys. Xu intends the viewer to project his or her own cultural associations onto the sculpture and experience its meaning and associations in a very subjective way. Rarefying these salacious objects in a fine art evokes the idea of sexual pleasure—perhaps to an uncomfortable extent. The works in this exhibition, united in their lush, eye-catching aesthetics, are representative of three primal human sensations—pain, pleasure and desire—and reveal how these emotions are consistently manipulated by the images that surround us. Born in 1977, Xu Zhen has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2015); Long Museum, Shanghai, China (2015); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2014); the Minsheng Museum, Shanghai, China (2012); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2011); and S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium (2009). He was also included in the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), and the 51st Venice Biennale (2005). He lives and works in Shanghai.

GEORGE HENRY LONGLY | RED BULL STUDIOS NY

George Henry Longly, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Red Bull Studios New York.

George Henry Longly
We All Love Your Life

June 9–July 31, 2016

Red Bull Studios New York
220 W 18th St.
New York, NY 10011
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday noon–7pm

redbullstudiosnewyork.com
Facebook / Instagram

Red Bull Studios New York is proud to present We All Love Your Life, the first US solo exhibition of London-based artist George Henry Longly. On view from June 9 until July 31, the exhibition reconfigures Red Bull Studios New York into a series of disorienting, obliquely formal and technological references. As viewers traverse the gallery, they encounter a variety of experiences alluding to subjectivity in outer space, to the coexistence of classical and digital orders, to self-help and reality television, to seeing the earth from space—to space-age subjectivity.

We All Love Your Life germinated from A House in Space, a book about NASA’s Skylab space station written by journalist Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr. in 1976. By matching the existential thrill of viewing Earth from a floating vantage that is moving through space with quotidian details pertaining to diet, clothing, and daily routine, A House in Spaceportrays a world that is exceptional and banal, unique and universal. Longly sets up a structure where the power relations between ground control and the space station are examined—played out through a narrative that includes a public artwork in space and an onsite performance venue housed within the space station.

Refracting the lens through which viewers watch everything from men walking on the moon to cooking food in front of a live studio audience, We All Love Your Life is a thrilling mix of surveillance and exhibitionism, astral focus and deep parallax. A tightly cropped film of snakes slipping across a studio desk; a mutated Dionysus, based on a three-dimensional scan of an Elgin Marble; a web camera and a bedroom: these subjects and settings of We All Love Your Life invert the commonplace and the phenomenal—a spatial reorganization that refers back to the astronauts’ experience aboard Skylab. In the absence of gravity, “local-vertical” orientation between floor and ceiling, up and down, cease to matter. As this most basic binary erodes, it takes with it other structural divisions that once ordered our lives: personal and public space, times and sites devoted to work and leisure, individual and collective subjectivities, the seeing and the seen.
About George Henry Longly
George Henry Longly works with sculpture, video, music and performance. Recent solo exhibitions include; The Smile of a Snake, Valentin, Paris (2016); Volume Excess, Koppe Astner Glasgow (2015); The Moving Museum, Istanbul (2014); Hair Care, Jonathan Viner, London (2014); GHL, Park Nights / Serpentine Gallery, London (2013); Pleats Please, Hanway Place, London (2013). He has been included in the group exhibitions; The Boys, The Girls and The Political, Lisson Gallery London (2015);Septic Finger, Kostyal, Stockholm (2015); Adventures in Bronze, Clay and Stone, Icastica Arezzo, Italy (2015); British Summer, Elizabeth Dee, New York (2015); The Crack-Up, ROOM EAST, New York (2015); A Journey Through London Subculture, ICA (off-site) (2013), London; Reading the Surface, David Zwirner, London (2013); Abstract Cabinet, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2013); Prodigal in Blue, Laura Bartlett, London (2013); and Managing Bounces, Cell project space, London (2013).

About Red Bull Studios New YorkRed Bull Studios New York is a multidisciplinary contemporary art space. Recent projects include BIO:DIP, a two-part exhibition composed of large-scale solo projects by Hayden Dunham and Nicolas Lobo curated by Neville Wakefield (2016); Scenario in the Shade by Justin Lowe, Jonah Freeman, and Jennifer Herrema (2015); NEW INC: End-Of-Year Showcase presented in collaboration with the New Museum (2015); Alone Together by Ryder Ripps (2015); Spaced Out: Migration to the Interior, a group exhibition curated by Phong Bui and The Brooklyn Rail Curatorial Projects (2014);Living: An Exhibition by Peter Coffin (2014); and DISown: Not for Everyone a group exhibition including Lizzie Fitch, Ryan Trecartin, Amalia Ulman, Bjarne Melgaard, Jon Rafman, Carissa Rodriguez, Simon Fujiwara, Antoine Catala, Dora Budor, GCC, Arunanondchai, Nicolas Fernandez, Shanzhai Biennial, Anne de Vries, Timur Si-Qin, Katja Novitskova, Leilah Weinraub, Telfar, and HBA by art collective DIS and curator Agatha Wara (2014).

HELEN MARTEN | TONY CONRAND | GREENE NAFTALI

Helen Marten “Eucalyptus, Let us in”

You + Us

When archaeologists dig with hopes of unearthing nameable fragments, they seek to return latent abstractions to figuration.



Bones, buildings, cups and spoons are entered into a new jig of re-articulation. Gathered and spat back out as collaged chronologies, the collected warmth of real-life perforations sieve these findings out of buried flatness and back into daily language. Once concealed by mud and foliage, sought-out areas become marked sites, places with contemporary traction.

The erased strokes of ancient activity are put back to work: vector grids symbolically allocate meaning or position to animals and humans alike. The enigma of labour necessitated by gravity–the haptic investments in making buildings stand upwards–is provided with a solid topological outline. Handwriting, numbers and vocabulary enter into new formal logic. The discovery might be intense or fragile and it is almost certainly ringed with a hallucinatory outline, which is at once a tracing of signs and alchemical process.

The drawing of a floor plan can also be read as the abstraction of an idea. Fantasy and philology allow mutation: sociological procedure, technological metaphor, erotic image, or surreal apparition bond as a muttering mass.

This might be something to do with making images that have an imposed itinerary quality, but are also disassembled to the point where they can be allowed to be non-committal if required. Flatness allows a literal description of movement, of A to B navigations, with the vector line being a suitably fast mechanism of delivery. But the point at which things become husked down to geometric memories of themselves is also the point when definition gets flabby: this tree is a drunken tree; that house has a pain in its side. Even the dismal colloquialisms of workplace melodrama can be exported, metaphors in essence: think of a spoon, jugs, stones, all invested with personality enough to converse with human crassness.

So of course it is a common idea that if we witness a foreign entity, we perceive it for the pure abstraction of its difference. A visible suspension of particles in the air – the smoggy, wispy blotch of smoke or burning – provides alien stimulation. There is something exotic in the fear and energy possessed by substance so closely linked with an extinguishing of inhalation. The puff-of-smoke is smoke-as-object, a clearly defined spectacle of the miracle of the atomic. So what is the essential nature of smoke? Obfuscator? Comic enabler? Sympathist?

When we apologize, the depth of sincerity can be deliberately fuzzy. A drip–of paint, of piss, of ice–is treacherous, but really sorry too. It is pure tragicomedy. In painterly form, the “apology” is a grim reflection of the human body, a caricature: beaded broken lines, little blobs and libidinous squiggles retain an elastic firmness. They are materially treacherous, with the paint itself playing plasticity made fixed substance; it is immutable and precisely without the warmth of flesh. But it is an extension of intension and we can apologize preemptively on its behalf. This is validation: Apologies! There is calculation and further archaeological gathering. Colour participates as though queered or gendered; the simple action of doubling forces tautological shortcut and collapse of definition; dysfunctional eyes are clouded by an auditory film and ears by a diagrammatic mapping of sensory importance. The mouth, the hand, the tongue are all involved. Our vast gray milkshake of information flexes and bends at will, a planktonic swarm of signs where merchandise, language, and spirituality all participate proudly in the stew of reality.

There are 8 new works in the exhibition.

Eucalyptus is one of three similar genera; many species, but far from all, are known as gum trees because they exude copius “gum” (bloodwood/red gum/kino) from any break in the bark. The generic name is derived from the Greek words “well” and “to cover”, referring to the cap on the stem which usually conceals the flower before it blooms.

Helen Marten

until 25 February 2016

Helen Marten installation views at Greene Naftali, New York, 2016

Courtesy: the artists and Greene Naftali, New York.

Tony Conrad “Undone”

Framing Forms

In storytelling it may be possible to separate the language of the story from the contextualizing “framing” words that say what an author is about to do. This is the story of my “Yellow Movies”. The framing language is an axe blade, a precipice or cusp dividing the voice of the account into the teller and the told. In the “Yellow Movies,” a black edge serves this framing function. What stands within the demarcation formed by the sharp inner framing edge of the screen rectangle is part of the story; everything else is there to play a “helping” role.

Whatever “help” the author may provide, the space inside a screen frame belongs to the viewer. But a screen space is temporally loosened from the viewer’s moment; it is the potent(ial) field for images of the past, of the present, of the future: that is to say, the screen space is the topos of the image/ination.

Just as some other kinds of art are fulfilled only through the co-presence of the viewer—through the visitor’s psychic projection into a social space they share with the work—film frames are doubly-incomplete spaces: incomplete on the one hand in the haptic imagery offered by the work, and on the other hand in the psychic projection which the visitor may wrest from this encounter.

Tony Conrad

until 27 February 2016

Tony Conrad installation views at Greene Naftali, New York, 2016

Courtesy: the artists and Greene Naftali, New York.

http://moussemagazine.it/helen-marte-tony-conrad-greene-naftali-2016/

FELIX GONZALES-TORRES | THREE GALLERIES

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Chemo), 1991. Strands of beads and hanging device, dimensions vary with installation. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Massimo De Carlo, Milan; and Hauser & Wirth, London May–June 2016 andrearosengallery.comhauserwirth.commassimodecarlo.comfelixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org A series of three exhibitions of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres will open in conjunction at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Massimo De Carlo, Milan; and Hauser & Wirth, London in May 2016. Curated by artists Julie Ault and Roni Horn, each exhibition will focus on the dialogue between works within an essential form that Gonzalez-Torres created. In so doing, Ault and Horn hope to underline the specificity and magnitude within particular bodies of the artist's work. By engaging the range of decisions brought to bear in manifesting and installing selected Gonzalez-Torres works, works that require being made anew for each presentation, Ault and Horn underscore vital methods reflected throughout the artist's entire oeuvre. Opening: May 5 Andrea Rosen Gallery New York Opening: May 20 Massimo De Carlo Milan Opening: May 26 Hauser & Wirth London

ROBERT SMITHSON | POP

Robert Smithson, Radio Cyclops, 1964. Plexiglas, steel and mirror on wood, 18 x 26 inches. Image © Holt-Smithson Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy James Cohan, New York.

Robert Smithson's "Pop" at James Cohan Gallery, New York November 21, 2015–January 17, 2016 Robert Smithson grew up collecting rocks, shells, and insects. He adored The American Museum of Natural History, about which he famously said: "There is nothing 'natural' about the Museum of Natural History. 'Nature' is simply another eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction."(1) An iconic figure in what we now know as "Land Art" or "Earthworks," he is best known for the conceptually radical distinction between site and non-site and the brilliant aesthetic repurposing of natural history, industrial decay, geology, cartography, photography ("art that is made out of casting a glance"[2]), entropy, erosion, gravity, the monumental, and the crystalline into tools and methods of conceptual and minimal art. Such works as Asphalt Rundown (1969), Spiral Jetty (1970), Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), and Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan (conceived in 1970 but realized some 30 years after his death by Minetta Brook in collaboration with the Whitney in 2005), have given him an ambiance of neutral colors and earthy hues, tones drawn from the layers of geological sedimentation and industrial waste from which he made his art. For this reason, you wouldn't be the only one who passed through the glass doors of James Cohan's handsome new gallery on the Lower East Side and wondered if someone had pumped laughing gas into your brain. "These are not by Robert Smithson," was a remark overheard amidst the eye-popping psychedelic colors of Smithson's "works on paper and sculptures" from 1962 to '64, "I just refuse to believe it." Not even the exhibition's title, "Pop," prepares one for the shocking psychedelic hues of burning chartreuse, hippie lavender, electric orange, lemon citrine, and bold aquamarine. One stands in marvel, taking in these rarely seen (although previously exhibited in various Smithson retrospectives) drawings, collages, and sculptures that offer little hint of Gravel Mirror with Cracks and Dust (1966), Nonsite—Essen Soil and Mirrors, or Mirror With Crushed Shells (both 1969). Take Untitled [Pink linoleum center] (1964), a hot pink, mottled-patterned laminate floor tile that sits proudly in the center of a 30 x 22 inch piece of paper, like a religious icon or illuminated manuscript, surrounded on all four sides by pencil drawings of winged big busted women, one on horseback, the other supine upon a psychedelic pink jagged lightning bolt. Archetypal homoerotic beefcake nudes expose their genitals proudly, one in classical contrapposto dressed only in biker boots and leather cap, another in hot pink booties, as he sits spread-eagled, penis and testicles prominently displayed, sucking on popsicles that appear to be made with the most toxic neon food coloring imaginable. The floating homoerotic gods produce a chuckle because they do not hang in the air on fluffy white clouds but rest on comic book renditions of dollops of dripping paint, sketched with pink and orange pencil. Out with the abstract expressionist drip and in with the blobby puddles of tears familiar from Roy Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl (1963), derived from DC comic illustrator Tony Abruzzo's "Run for Love!" (Secret Hearts no. 83, November 1962). In Untitled [Pencil write "less work for mother"/telephone cord spells "hello"/man on orange blob] (1963), the divine central image is a Day-Glo citron Op Art vertical square maze, while in Untitled [motel text] (1963) an abstract swirl made of chartreuse lava lamp-like blips outlined in pink fills the center, surrounded by more kitschy porno putti traced from underground pornography, popular male physique pictorials, and nudist magazines. Although the show title orients us to Pop Art, the sensibility of these works is better appreciated by leaving such art historical categories in one's back pocket, available for reference but not explanation. Imagine instead the young man as a mad modernist scientist-engineer constructing garish sci-fi contraptions ("sculptures") such asThe Machine Taking A Wife (1964) out of a girly pin up nude placed under magenta and green fields of Plexiglas, amplified with an actual rectifier tube,(3) or Honeymoon Machine (1964) where the nipples of the mechanical bride are hooked up to electric circuitry. But the gut laugh of it all is Untitled [Record player] (1962)—an open record player that is at once a poor man's Christian altar and kitsch Joseph Cornell box. An ornate pink and metallic plastic crucifixion, glued to the inside of the open lid, is surrounded by black-and-white photographs of celebrities—Warren Beatty, Ann-Margret, Annette Funicello, Elvis Presley—cut out of fan magazines, and plastic flowers. The "record" on the turntable is a white, pink, and green disk made of swirling streams of paint, propped on hay like an Easter Egg, topped with miniature rubber toy ducks. Here is "solid state hilarity" avant la lettre. The phrase appears in Smithson's first published essay—"Entropy and the New Monuments"(4)—in which he sets out to define the new monumentality he finds in the sculpture of his peers Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and the fourth dimensional explorations of the Park Place Group. Riffing on Buckminster Fuller's notion that for scientists the fourth dimension is "ha-ha," Smithson founds a theory of "Generalized Laughter" based on linking six crystal systems with a taxonomy of laughter: "the ordinary laugh is cubic or square (Isometric), the chuckle is a triangle or pyramid (Tetragonal), the giggle is a hexagon or rhomboid (Hexagonal), the titter is prismatic (Orthorhombic), the snicker is oblique (Monoclinic), the guffaw is asymmetric (Triclinic)." Regardless of whether one chuckles, giggles, titter, snickers, or guffaws, it is clear that "Pop" directs us to a material rarely associated with Smithson. As he puts it, "From here on in, we must not think of Laughter as a laughing matter, but rather as the 'matter-of-laughs.'" "Pop" is a welcome initiation into Smithson's delight with "the entropic verbalization" of just such matter. (1) Quoted on the first page of Jack Flam's "Introduction: Reading Robert Smithson" in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), xiii. (2) Robert Smithson, John Perreault, "Nonsites in the News," New York 2, no. 8 (24 February 1969): 46. (3) Rectifier tubes transform voltage from AC to DC which one is inclined to associate with DC as in comics. (4) "Entropy and The New Monuments," (first published in the June 1966 issue of Artforum) in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 21-22, in which Smithson also writes that "The order and disorder of the fourth dimension could be set between laughter and crystal as a device for unlimited speculation" and that "Laughter is in a sense a kind of entropic 'verbalization.'" Thyrza Nichols Goodeve is a writer living in New York. Currently she writes for The Brooklyn Rail.

NEW YORK | FILM SOCIETY | LINCOLN CENTER

Ernst Karel, Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Ah humanity! (still), 2015. Film, 22 minutes. Japan/France/USA.

New York Film Festival
Experimental cinema and artists' moving image at NYFF

Projections: October 2–4, 2015
Retrospective: September 28–October 2, 2015

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65 Street
New York, NY 10023

www.filmlinc.org/nyff




The New York Film Festival's Projections section presents an international selection of film and video work that expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be. Drawing on a broad range of innovative modes and techniques, including experimental narratives, avant-garde poetics, crossovers into documentary and ethnographic realms, and contemporary art practices, Projections brings together a diverse offering of short, medium, and feature-length work by some of today's most vital and groundbreaking filmmakers and artists.

In its second edition, Projections presents 54 films, including the US premiere of two new films by Ben Rivers(A Distant Episode and THE SKY TREMBLES AND THE EARTH IS AFRAID AND THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS). Highlights also include Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's return to the festival after Leviathan with the world premiere of Ah humanity!, co-directed with Ernst Karel. The program also showcases new short-form works by artists and filmmakers returning to the festival, including Peggy Ahwesh, Victoria Fu, Lewis Klahr, Laida Lertxundi, Dani Leventhal, Sara Magenheimer, Jodie Mack, Lois Patiño, Michael Robinson, Ben Russell, and Fern Silva. Projections will also present restorations of the late Chick Strand's Soft Fiction and Curt McDowell's Confessions, both on 16mm and restored by the Academy Film Archive.

Artists making their first appearance at the NYFF this year include James Richards (Radio at Night), Simon Fujiwara (Hello), Michael Bell-Smith (Rabbit Season, Duck Season), Takeshi Murata (OM Rider), Cécile B. Evans (Hyperlinks or It Didn't Happen), Jon Rafman (Erysichthon), Hannah Black (All My Love All My Love),Basim Magdy (The Everyday Ritual of Solitude Hatching Monkeys), Beatrice Gibson (F for Fibonacci),Nicolás Pereda (Minotaur), Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias (Santa Teresa & Other Stories), and Louis Henderson, who has two films in the festival, including the world premiere of Black Code/Code Noir.

Projections is curated by Dennis Lim, Aily Nash, and Gavin Smith. Sponsored by MUBI

Retrospective
This year, the NYFF Retrospective features Luminous Intimacy: The Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler. For the last six decades, Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, partners in life and in cinema, have taken their cameras out into the world and filmed gestures, moods, atmospheres, states of being, light and darkness, movement and stillness. Hiler's register is ecstatic and polyphonic, Dorsky's devotional and poetic. The duo's contemporary, experimental films will be shown in the festival with 33 of Dorsky's works, including world premieres of Intimations and Prelude, and New York premieres of Summer, December, February, and Avraham and six of Hiler's films. All work shot and screened on 16mm. Made possible by the generous support of the Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, Inc. Filmmakers in person!

Visit filmlinc.org/nyff for more program and ticket information.

PHILIP GLASS & TIM FAIN | DAVID ZWIRNER

Richard Serra and Philip Glass, New York, early 1970s. Photograph © Richard Landry, 1975 DAVID ZWIRNER_NEW YORK BENEFIT CONCERT WITH PHILIP GLASS & TIM FAIN to raise funds for House with Heart Kathmandu, Nepal Saturday, June 27, 2015 5 PM David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, New York Philip Glass on piano & Tim Fain on violin This special intimate performance will take place inside the exhibition RICHARD SERRA: EQUAL TICKETS  $300 Performance only, limited seating $1,000 A cocktail reception will be held with the artists in a private gallery space immediately following the performance. This price includes the $300 performance ticket and signed books by the artists. To purchase tickets & for more information, contact Isobel Nash at David Zwirner +1 212 517 8677 or isobel@davidzwirner.com Download PDF

You are receiving this email because you have subscribed to our newsletter. Our mailing address is: 525 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 537 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011 24 Grafton Street London W1S 4EZ