Nathaniel Mellors: Progressive Rocks

The fantastical and wryly comical videos, sculptures, and installations by Los Angeles– and Amsterdam-based artist Nathaniel Mellors (b. 1974, Doncaster, UK) employ absurdist satire to incisively critique morality, national identity, religion, and power structures in contemporary society.

Conflating narrative tropes and methods from television sitcoms, theater, science fiction, mythology, and anthropology, Mellors writes the scripts for each of his projects, which he also directs, edits, and produces. His raucous films feature a book-eating creature named “The Object” who literally digests a family’s library in Ourhouse (2010–ongoing); a Neanderthal in perpetual free-fall over the San Joaquin Valley in Neanderthal Container, (2014); and two messianic beings, in the form of a cardboard box and a giant egg, who attempt to make sense of a culture that they created millions of years prior in The Aalto Natives (2017, in collaboration with Erkka Nissinen, originally conceived for the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale). For his exhibition at the New Museum, Mellors will create a new environment including video projection and animatronic sculpture.

2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage

“Songs for Sabotage,” the fourth New Museum Triennial, questions how individuals and collectives around the world might effectively address the connection of images and culture to the forces that structure our society.

Together, the artists in “Songs for Sabotage” propose a kind of propaganda, engaging with new and traditional media in order to reveal the built systems that construct our reality, images, and truths. The exhibition amounts to a call for action, an active engagement, and an interference in political and social structures, and will bring together works across mediums by approximately thirty artists from nineteen countries, the majority of whom are exhibiting in the United States for the first time.

“Songs for Sabotage” explores interventions into cities, infrastructures, and the networks of everyday life, proposing objects that might create common experience. The exhibition takes as a given that these structures are linked to the entrenched powers of colonialism and institutionalized racism that magnify inequity. Through their distinct approaches, the artists in “Songs for Sabotage” offer models for dismantling and replacing the political and economic networks that envelop today’s global youth. Invoking the heightened role of identity in today’s culture, they take on the technological, economic, and material structures that stand in the way of collectivity.

These artists are further connected by both their deep engagements with the specificity of local context and a critical examination—and embrace—of the internationalism that links them. Their works range widely in medium and form, including painted allegories for the administration of power, sculptural proposals to renew (and destroy) monuments, and cinematic works that engage the modes of propaganda that influence us more and more each day. Viewed in ensemble, these works provide models for reflecting upon and working against a system that seems doomed to failure.

Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making

Since the 1970s, Judy Chicago has been a pioneer in the development of feminism as an artistic movement and an educational project that endeavors to restore women’s place in history. Her most influential and widely known work is the sweeping installation The Dinner Party (1974–79), celebrating women’s achievements in Western culture in the form of a meticulously executed banquet table set for 39 mythical and historical women and honoring 999 others. One of the most important artworks of the twentieth century, and one of the most popular in our collection, upon its public debut in 1979 it immediately became an icon of feminist art. The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art was established in 2007 with The Dinner Party as its foundation.

Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making is the first museum exhibition to examine Chicago’s evolving plans for The Dinner Party in depth, detailing its development as a multilayered artwork, a triumph of community art-making, and a testament to the power of historical revisionism. Chicago’s ambitious research project combatted the absence of women from mainstream historical narratives and blazed the trail for feminist art historical methodologies in an era of social change.  It also validated mediums traditionally considered the domain of women and domestic labor, as the artist studied and experimented with China painting, porcelain, and needlework.

The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago

The Dinner Party, an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art, is presented as the centerpiece around which the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is organized. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored. The names of another 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table. This permanent installation is enhanced by rotating Herstory Gallery exhibitions relating to the 1,038 women honored at the table.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s landmark painting Untitled was created in 1982, considered a breakout year in the artist’s meteoric career. It depicts a crowned, spectral head rendered with a painterly ferocity remarkable even amid the artist’s other vigorously expressive images. The exhibition One Basquiat is the first museum presentation of Untitled.

Assyrian Reliefs

These twelve massive carved alabaster panels, on view together for the first time, dominate the walls of our Hagop Kevorkian Gallery of Ancient Near Eastern Art. Originally brightly painted, they once adorned the vast palace of King Ashur-nasir-pal II (883–859 B.C.E.), one of the greatest rulers of ancient Assyria. Completed in 879 B.C.E.at the site of Kalhu (modern Nimrud, slightly north of what is now Baghdad, Iraq), the palace was decorated by skilled relief-carvers with these majestic images of kings, divinities, magical beings, and sacred trees.

The Cathedral of St. Patrick (commonly called St. Patrick’s Cathedral) is a decorated Neo-Gothic-style Roman Catholic cathedral church in the United States and a prominent landmark of New York City. It is the seat of the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, and a parish church, located on the east side of Fifth Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets in Midtown Manhattan, directly across the street from Rockefeller Center and specifically facing the Atlas statue. It is considered one of the most visible symbols of Roman Catholicism in New York City and the United States.

 

P.P.O.W.

Chris Daze Ellis

Daze first emerged in the late 1970s as a graffiti artist, working largely with a community centered around the alternative arts space Fashion Moda. During that period, Daze was included in the seminal “Beyond Words” exhibition at the Mudd Club, which connected graffiti with work more traditionally considered fine art.

Since then, Daze has developed a studio practice, making works that are inspired by the iconography of New York City and his time as a street artist.

PACE

Robert Ryman

Ryman (b. 1930, Nashville, TN) attended the Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville. After enlisting in the United States Army (1950–52), he moved to New York to play jazz. In 1953 he took a temporary job—where he would ultimately work for seven years—as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art. Soon after, he would decide to devote his career towards painting. For more than five decades, Robert Ryman has been engaged in an ongoing experiment with painting. He constantly seeks to modify his approach, resisting the comfort of tendency and maintaining the freshness of an unchartered territory. From each experience Ryman gleans the variables for a revised proposition and the impetus to propel him towards his next move. Since Ryman’s first solo exhibition in 1967, his work has been the subject of over 100 solo exhibitions in 12 countries.

Yancey Richardson

Rachel Perry

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Rachel Perry’s Soundtrack to My Life, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. Throughout her career, Perry has used familiar materials such as register receipts, produce stickers, shopping bags and voicemail messages to comment on what she calls “the business of living.” Comprised of a series of large-scale collages based on the lyrics of popular songs, Soundtrack To My Life continues Perry’s interest in observing, collecting and utilizing the pedestrian materials and experiences of daily life to comment on the permeation of daily existence by consumer culture.

Mathew Marks Gallery

Robert Gober

Robert Gober (b. 1954) has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including Documenta, the Whitney Biennial, and the Carnegie International. Other one-person exhibitions have been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the Schaulager in Basel. Currently “An Untitled Installation Conceived by Robert Gober,” originally presented in 1988 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, has been recreated by the Aspen Museum of Art, where it remains on view through May.

Thomas Demand

The first room is installed with a new wallpaper created by Demand for the exhibition. On it several new Dailies photographs are hanging. Each Daily depicts an everyday scene originally captured by the artist on his cell phone. Re-created in paper and cardboard, each scene was then photographed and printed using the dye-transfer process. Elsewhere, on a pair of separate video monitors suspended from the ceiling, two short films play on continuous loop. The films were created through a similar process, starting out as paper models before being photographed and animated in stop motion.

The exhibition’s second room, accessed through a door at the back of the space, includes four new large-scale photographs. Ruine / Ruin(2017), nearly ten feet wide, is based on a news photo of a domestic interior filled with debris from an aerial bombardment. The only sign of the home’s residents is a stray sandal visible in the rubble. Werkstatt / Workshop (2017) presents the orderly interior of a violin-maker’s studio. Based on historical photos from a Bavarian village celebrated since the seventeenth century for its exceptional violins, the image includes racks of tools and dozens of instruments in various stages of completion.

Jack Shainman Gallery

Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks was one of the seminal figures of twentieth century photography. A humanitarian with a deep commitment to social justice, he left behind a body of work that documents many of the most important aspects of American culture from the early 1940s up until his death in 2006, with a focus on race relations, poverty, civil rights, and urban life. In addition, Parks was also a celebrated composer, author, and filmmaker who interacted with many of the most prominent people of his era – from politicians and artists to celebrities and athletes.

Barkley Hendricks

Barkley L. Hendricks was a painter and photographer best known for his realist and post-modern portraits of people of color living in urban areas beginning in the 1960s and 70s and continuing to the present. Trevor Schoonmaker, the organizing curator for Hendricks’ traveling exhibition Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool said, “His bold portrayal of his subject’s attitude and style elevates the common person to celebrity status. Cool, empowering, and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks’ artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today’s younger generation of artists.”

Movement Research at the Judson Church

Movement Research’s mission statement:

“Movement Research is one of the world’s leading laboratories for the investigation of dance and movement-based forms. Valuing the individual artist, their creative process and their vital role within society, Movement Research is dedicated to the creation and implementation of free and low-cost programs that nurture and instigate discourse and experimentation. Movement Research strives to reflect the cultural, political and economic diversity of its moving community, including artists and audiences alike”

The movement research events take place in the historic Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. The church was first built in 1888. The church has been a supporter of the arts since the 1950s using parts of the building as art exhibits for various artists, including Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Daniel Spoerri, Red Grooms, and Yoko Ono

On March 6th at 8:00 PM we will be attending a free of charge dance performance at the church. It is a part of events that are described as free, high visibility low-tech forum for experimentation, emerging ideas and works-in-progress that are held in the Fall and Spring seasons.
Artists are selected by a rotating committee of peer artists, and join Movement Research Artists-In-Residence and international guests each season in performing at the historic Judson Memorial Church.

While not much is told in the preview for the performance, it is safe to assure that anything could be expected at this historical venue for experimental arts.

The Dream House

The Dream House, while being an exhibit focused on sounds and visuals, is almost indescribable. The Dream House is an exhibit located in on the 3rd floor of a regular looking apartment on church street. However, once you enter through the front door of the “Dream House”, you are immersed in something that’s anything but regular.

The dream house is lit with odd, ambient lighting while music/sounds play that match with the mood of the lighting. There are pieces of art scattered throughout the room for the visitors to see. While popular, the dream house has mixed reception from it’s viewers. Some call it wonderful and peaceful, and some even use it as a place to meditate. Others call it brash and a “try hard” attempt to capture a visual representation of 70’s subculture. A reviewer for the New York Times even fell asleep in the museum while writing down notes for their eventual review. While it may be hard to come up with the words needed to describe this place, all of those who visit it (whether they enjoyed it or not) usually come up with at least one word to describe it: bizarre.

Tony Oursler:  Imponderable

Oursler creates 5-D images that allow the viewer to plunge into the experience.  His pieces are influenced by “mysticism, psychedelia, popular culture, and media history,” and surrealism.  The film characters, as well as story, that is similar to his own history.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1650?locale=en

Nan Goldin:  The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

The artist, Nan Goldin, elaborates the hidden life between the sheets.  Her emphasis is on the sex, drugs, and violence no one thinks about.  However, she also contradicts them by showing the relationship between children, as well as dancing and other activities.  It appeared to me that she is playing with the idea of the forms of pleasure and pain.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1651?locale=en

Teiji Furuhashi:  Lovers

An interactive room, Teiji has created the images of embrace and motion.  The computer generated figures never touch though.  When you walk into the room, the loop on the figures resets, creating a new experience for each viewer.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1652?locale=en

Marisa Merz:  The Sky is a Great Space

Merz was a follower of the avant-garde movement, which aided her in the creation of this collection.  She tends to use metal tin, wire, clay, and many other things to make soft waves with sharp corners.

http://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2016/marisa-merz

I looked at PS-1 and I did not see anything that seemed interesting other than Mark Leckey that ends on March 5th. Some interesting places to eat around the Moma are: M. Wells Dinette and Mu Ramen

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Sculpture Center: Current Exhibitions:Places to eat: Tuk Tuk, Shi, Blend, Casa Enrique, Blend on the Water, Bella Via.

Paula Cooper Gallery – 21st Street

Carl Andre – February 11 – March 11, 2017
Carl Andre is an American minimalist artist recognized for his ordered linear format and grid format sculptures. His sculptures range from large public artworks to more intimate tile patterns arranged on the floor of an exhibition space.
Andre is a sculptor who neither carves into substances, nor models forms. His work involves the positioning of raw materials – such as bricks, blocks, ingots, or plates. He uses no fixatives to hold them in place. Andre has suggested that his procedure for building up a sculpture from small, regularly-shaped units is based on “the principle of masonry construction” – like stacking up bricks to build a wall.

 

Julian Lethbridge – February 18 – March 18, 2017

Julian Lethbridge is a British Ceylon-born, US-based, British abstract painter and drawer. His work is in permanent collections of museums in North America and Europe.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery – 21st Street

Uta Barth – February 9 – March 11, 2017

Throughout the past two decades, Uta Barth has made visual perception the subject of her work. Regarded for her “empty” images that border on painterly abstraction, the artist carefully renders blurred backgrounds, cropped frames and the natural qualities of light to capture incidental and fleeting moments, those which exist almost exclusively within our periphery. With a deliberate disregard for both the conventional photographic subject and point-and-shoot role of the camera, Barth’s work delicately deconstructs conventions of visual representation by calling our attention to the limits of the human eye.

 

303 Gallery – 21st Street

Sue Williams – March 2 – April 15, 2017

Sue Williams explores issues of gender inequality and injustice through her semi-abstract paintings that depict forms of sexual violence, rape, battery, and emotional abuse. Forsaking the hyper-masculine themes and methods of Abstract Expressionism, she introduces figures of genitalia, severed body parts, and internal organs into her large, frenetic, compositions. Though influenced by cartoons, her later work has moved towards a purer abstraction, devoid of the more explicitly brutalized and mutilated forms of her earlier work and evoking the compositions of Jackson Pollock’s gestural paintings with her sweeping tangles of entrails.

 

Gladstone Gallery – 21st Street

Wangechi Mutu – January 27 – March 25, 2017

Wangechi Mutu is an artist and sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Mutu is considered by many to be one of the most important contemporary African artists of recent years, and her work has achieved much global acclaim.