(click photos to enlarge)
Archive for the 'Photo diary' Category
Photo diary: January miscellany
January 30, 2016(click photos to enlarge)
Culture Vulture/Photo diary: the Whitney with Bob and Phil, GO FORTH with Keith Hennessy, Laurie Anderson’s Midnight Moment
January 27, 2016(click photos to enlarge)
1.2.16 Andy and I started the new year by having brunch with our friends Bob and Phil at Blenheim in the West Village then moseying over to the Whitney Museum. Bob and Phil had not experienced the new building before, so we walked through the Frank Stella show (eh), donations from the Thea and Ethan Wagner collection, and the Archibald Motley show before settling down to watch Rachel Rose’s mesmerizing 12-minute video “Everything and More.”
1.7.16 Keith Hennessy made his annual visit to New York to participate in the American Realness festival, performing a duet with Jassem Hindi (future friend/ships) and directing his former colleague and mentor Sara Shelton Mann in a valedictory performance called Sara the Smuggler. On his off night, we checked out a show in P.S. 122’s COIL Festival, Go Forth, the directorial debut of Kaneza Schaal, the extraordinary actress who performs with Elevator Repair Service and the Wooster Group. It was an ambitious, dramaturgically complicated piece based on Egyptian funerary texts that didn’t entirely land with me. But I very much admired the photographic installation (by Christopher Myers) that hung along the hallway leading to Westbeth’s intriguingly raw, crypt-like performance space. And who doesn’t enjoy having a free beer handed to you in the midst of a show?
1.12.16 After dinner at La Carafe on Ninth Avenue, Andy and I and David Zinn swung by Times Square to sip hot cider and witness Laurie Anderson’s Midnight Moment. For the month of January, 54 of the 10 zillion LED screens in the heart of the theater district flashed three minutes of Laurie’s film Heart of a Dog at 11:57, thanks to Sherry Ridion Dobbin and Times Square Arts.
Photo diary: Thanksgiving in suburban Minneapolis
December 2, 2015(click photos to enlarge)
Culture Vulture/Photo diary: Friday afternoon at the Whitney Museum
November 16, 2015(click photos to enlarge)
Brent was visiting from San Diego, so we met for lunch at Gansevoort Market, where we chatted up vendors at two different food stalls who were Peruvian. By the time we’d finished our delicious ceviche and arepas, the street outside was on lockdown because a movie crew was running vintage cars up and down Gansevoort.
Eventually released from Manhattan-movie-set bondage, we strolled down to the Whitney Museum to check out the Frank Stella retrospective. I was underwhelmed. The only piece that really excited me greets you when you get off the elevator — the gigantic, textured, psychedelic Earthquake in Chile.
Brent had never been to the Whitney, so I made it a point to show him around. On our way to the spectacular views from the terrace, we came upon an exhibition by a painter I’d never heard of. “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” contains a generous sampling of beautiful portraits and several rooms of Motley’s richly hued scenes from black American life, full of vitality and humor.
By the time we got outside it was a little chilly but the setting sun licked the urban landscape with its golden-hour magic.
Culture Vulture/Photo diary: Picasso Sculpture at MOMA
November 8, 2015(click photos to enlarge)
If you have an hour to kill in midtown between now and February 7, 2016, you could give yourself no better treat than to take a walk through the show of Picasso sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.
The sculptures Picasso created are so free and fun to look at, so simple and so sophisticated at the same time. It makes sense that he was turned on by African and Oceanic work he saw at an ethnographic museum in Paris — many of these pieces remind me of the vivid masks and ritual objects you can see in the Michael Rockefeller collection at the Metropolitan Museum. I especially loved tracking the faces, which are so simple and varied and often comical.
These drawings (part of a series called “An Anatomy”) reminded me of Roz Chast cartoons.
I also had a look at the show by Lebanese multimedia artist Walid Raad, which has two parts, one of which occupies the museum’s central atrium (below) and is called “Scratching on things I could disavow.”
It’s an intriguing, complicated, dense, somewhat impenetrable Borgesian conceptual work involving fictionalized artifacts reflecting real contemporary events. I’m not sure it’s really possible to grasp the work without attending his lecture-demonstration “walkthroughs,” which occur many times in the course of the week. I’ll have to go back for one of those.
another eye opens 