Deborah Hay's "Ten" draws a crowd at MoMA

Deborah Hay presents a revival of Ten (1968)
at the Museum of Modern Art's Marron Atrium.
(photo: Ralf Hiemisch)

Heading to MoMA for performances of Deborah Hay's 1968 ensemble piece, Ten, today or tomorrow at 2pm? Be sure to set out early. The audience for postmodern dance exists! I found them at the museum's Marron Atrium (exhibiting Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done through February 3) and on four floors of overlooking balconies. In the atrium, they stood several rows deep, cupping the open performance area with stragglers, like me, struggling for viewing space. Associate Curator Thomas Lax kindly secured a folding stool for me and a vantage point on one extreme end, and I was happy as a clam.

Against the far wall, the band Gang Gang Dance--with guitar, percussion, electronic keyboard--started things off precisely at 2 with a cascading, deepening rumble of sounds, a hot, gradually complicating, poly-ethnic mush that would hold steady through most, though not all, of the lengthy performance. A metal pole--perhaps fifteen feet, if dancer Wally Cardona's height is any gauge--rose from the dove-grey floor, and a metal barre, very low to the ground, stretched across the width of the performance space. Black-clad dancers would attach themselves to these items in various ways, as other dancers--inaudible to us over the loud music--would monitor and coach them into just the right positions. The dancers regularly but unpredictably rotated in and out of these supervisory and performing roles.

These dancers--Cardona, Michelle Boulé, Miguel Gutierrez, Miguel Ángel Guzmán, Malcolm Low, Shelley Senter, David Thomson, Adrienne Truscott, Arturo Vidich and Marýa Wethers--well, let me just say these folks are the equivalent of actors you'd pay to hear read the phone book. Given that Hay basically has them doing a string of tasks like draping themselves over the barre as if sunbathing or gracefully embracing the pole or creating a line or stack-up of dancers in similar poses, that phone book thing might not be too far off. It definitely looked more banal when the music dropped out and I could pick up what a patrolling Gutierrez was actually saying to his charges.

But I was enthralled from the first and stayed that way over more than an hour. I can account for this only in that, for several decades now, my mind has been infiltrated by postmodern artists and that I remain a weird child. This is my tribe--or, at least, one of them.

Ten runs through Saturday with performances at 2pm with limited seating. Free with museum admission. For those with sensitive ears, bring earplugs just in case you end up near the speakers. Today's performance will be followed at 3pm with a conversation between Hay and Ana Janevski, MoMA's Curator of Performance and Media. Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done runs through February 3. For information, click here.

Museum of Modern Art
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MOMA to explore work of Judson Dance Theater artists

Peter Moore. Performance view of Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton
in Brown’s Trillium, Concert of Dance #4, January 30, 1963.
© Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Courtesy Paula Cooper, New York

Museum of Modern Art

announces its upcoming exhibition:

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done

September 16, 2018–February 03, 2019

Ana Janevski, Curator

Thomas J. Lax, Associate Curator

with Martha Joseph, Curatorial Assistant,

Department of Media and Performance Art

For a brief period in the early 1960s, a group of choreographers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers made use of a local church to present performances that Village Voice critic Jill Johnston declared the most exciting new developments in dance in a generation. Redefining the kinds of movement that could count as dance, the Judson participants—Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Philip Corner, Bill Dixon, Judith Dunn, David Gordon, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Rudy Perez, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, and Elaine Summers, among others—would go on to profoundly shape all fields of art in the second half of the 20th century. Taking its name from the Judson Memorial Church, a socially engaged Protestant congregation in New York’s Greenwich Village, Judson Dance Theater was organized as a series of open workshops from which its participants developed performances. Together, the artists challenged traditional understandings of choreography, expanding dance in ways that reconsidered its place in the world. They employed new compositional methods to strip dance of its theatrical conventions, incorporating “ordinary” movements—gestures typical of the street or home, for example, rather than a stage—into their work, along with games, simple tasks, and social dances to infuse their pieces with a sense of spontaneity.

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done highlights the ongoing significance of the history of Judson Dance Theater, beginning with the workshops and classes led by Anna Halprin, Robert Ellis Dunn, and James Waring and exploring the influence of other figures working downtown such as Simone Forti and Andy Warhol, as well as venues for collective action like Judson Gallery and the Living Theatre. Through live performance and some 300 objects including film, photographic documentation, sculptural objects, scores, music, poetry, architectural drawings, and archival material, the exhibition celebrates the group’s multidisciplinary and collaborative ethos as well as the range of its participants. The Work Is Never Done includes a gallery exhibition, a print publication, and an ambitious performance program in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium.

Exhibition information

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
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Kynaston McShine, 82

Kynaston McShine, Curator of Historic Art Exhibitions, Dies at 82
by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, January 12, 2018

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Feel free to use the stairs: Maria Hassabi at MOMA

Mickey Mahar in PLASTIC

Maria Hassabi: PLASTIC

Wednesday, March 16

Site-adaptive work by Maria Hassabi 

at Museum of Modern Art

performed continuously during museum hours

closing Sunday, March 20

All photos ©2016, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Oisín Monaghan

Oisín Monaghan

Maria Hassabi

Niall Jones

Micky Mahar

Michael Helland

Maria Hassabi

PLASTIC information
Museum of Modern Art visitor information

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What I've been seeing at MoMA

Osamu Shiihara (Japanese, 1905–1974). Construction of Hand. 1932–41
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Thomas Walther Collection

At the Museum of Modern Art yesterday, I saw a couple of recent Laura Owens paintings that I enjoyed for their noisy, hyper-caffeinated clash of media, color and dimensions. (One, written across sharp notebook lines on a giant canvas, inscribes a child's brisk and irresistible story about a runaway princess with a mind of her own and a monster with a "fears Gase.") Owens keeps these canvases dynamic, broadcasting on numerous channels at once, inviting while challenging perceptions. One wall plaque quotes her as saying that she does this "so that you can't fall into (the painting) like a window." I don't think this means she's trying to protect you, baby bird, from skyscraper glass. She's hoping you do get tossed around a bit as you try to make your way in.

See Owens's work and a trio of Mark Grotjahn's equally exhilarating Circus series pieces at The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World (through April 5). Also, don't miss Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949 (through April 19) in the Edward Steichen Photography Galleries.

And do I even have to remind you to see Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs? Well, if I do, take heart: You still have time to catch that delightful show (through February 10).

Coming up? Björk (March 8-June 7), Jacob Lawrence (April 3-September 7), Yoko Ono (May 17-September 7) and more. Click here for all the details.

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
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The Pen Thief

Well, actually, from all accounts, there are two of them--Trajal Harrell and Eiko Otake.

Both award-winning, internationally-renowned dance artists. Both of Japanese descent--Harrell by way of one distant ancestor. Both of whom have presented work at the Museum of Modern Art where, last night, they met for the first time for Harrell's much-desired "blind date," introduced and ably chaperoned by LMCC prez Sam Miller.

So, about the pens. Harrell admitted that if he's handed a pen to sign papers, he's liable to just tuck that pen away for safekeeping. Otake, quickly raising her pen in the air, confessed to the same larcenous trait. As a huge fountain pen aficionado, I can tell you, I plan to keep both of these people at arm's length. You do not steal pens from me and live to make art another day. Fair warning.

The most exciting thing about the Harrell-Otake conversation, part of American Realness 2015, was the chance to hear Otake speak at length about her relationship to Japan--apparently, a challenging one. In 1972, with her husband, Koma Otake, she left behind Japan's master-disciple system to craft an independent practice. When she returns to her homeland now, she finds herself getting angry.

"Being angry is very important to me," she said. "It pushes me."

Along with that anger comes feelings of grief and remorse. "And I don't want to be released from that," she added.

Anger can be fuel. I was amazed to hear Otake's statement as I shared the same insight, just hours before, with another choreographer. When we shame and seek to scrub ourselves of these troubling energies--which the viewer can readily see in Eiko and Koma's demanding, uncompromising work--what creativity do we end up washing away?

American Realness: Discourse, now through Sunday, January18

Mary Lea Bandy, 71

Mary Lea Bandy, Film Preservationist for MoMA, Dies at 71
by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, October 3, 2014

Stuart Comer appointed MoMA's Chief Curator of media and performance art

Stuart Comer (photo by Daniel Terna/Light Industry)

Stuart Comer has been appointed Chief Curator of the Department of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art, announced by MoMA Director Glenn D. Lowry. 

Comer, who has served as Curator of Film at Tate Modern, London, since 2004, will oversee the department’s program of special exhibitions, installations from the collection, and acquisitions.  He will begin his new position at MoMA on September 23.

"Artists working across time-based media—from performance to the moving image and all of the many permutations in between—continue to push and reshape artistic practice in fundamentally challenging and exciting ways," said Comer. "I look forward to exploring this dynamic field and its rich history by continuing the development and exhibition of MoMA's distinguished collection. MoMA has become a leading institution redefining the role of media and performance in the museum, and this will be an exciting opportunity to further develop its programs in collaboration with artists, audiences, and colleagues."

Comer is a co-curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art 2014 Biennial, and will be working with both institutions concurrently until next March.

Celeste Bartos, 99

Celeste Bartos, New York Philanthropist, Dies at 99
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, January 10, 2013

"Say, do you happen to have the time?" See Marclay's "The Clock"

Christian Marclay. Detail of The Clock. 2010. Single-channel video with sound, 24 hours. © Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, proudly declared Christian Marclay's The Clock to be "one of the most coveted works of art anywhere in the world." This unique, 24-hour video installation, winner of the Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, now belongs to MoMA's collection. The two men sat in conversation at MoMA's second-floor atrium to introduce a two-hour press preview of the installation.

A fast-paced montage of film clips--some obscure, others easily recognizable--The Clock draws from an international array of film, from the silent through contemporary eras, from Charlie Chaplin to Christopher Walken. This work of sly visual and sound editing unfolds real time before our eyes, each minute synced to our actual time and announced in exact order, each scene or image bearing literal and/or metaphoric connection to time and timepieces.

If you missed The Clock in its European presentations, in Boston or at last summer's Lincoln Center Festival, you've got another chance to catch it this winter from Decemer 21 through January 21, 2013. In addition to showings during public hours as well as some continuous screenings (see schedule here), MoMA will offer a special presentation of The Clock in its Contemporary Galleries on New Year's Eve beginning at 10:30am and running continuously through 5:30pm on New Year's Day. (Click here for information on after-hours admission.)

Marclay--an American-born multimedia artist, now based in London--edited film material, collected by assistants, over a three-year process he describes as "tedious but simple." He used sound to facilitate his enchanting transitions from clip to clip. For instance, for an illusion of continuity, he might overlap the native sound of one scene--say, the resonance of church bells--with the opening of the following scene.

How many discrete clips does The Clock contain? Marclay hasn't a clue and does not care.

"After I was done with the project, I didn't want to sit there and count them," he says. "All those statistics are less important than the actual experience."

That experience can be heady and surreal as well as richly entertaining. Images of clocks and watches, the ordinary and the ornate, alternate with motifs that suggest movement and speed (various types of vehicles) or the fluid possibilities of transition (entrances and exits; sleeping and waking; crossing a street; walking or playing on the sand at water's edge.)

Repeat viewers can tell you their favorite times of day. Moments of wit and humor or gripping suspense abound. Familiar actors and film scenes pop up, here and there, triggering memories that call up your personal experiences of time. Tension builds to a crescendo as the video approaches noon (as I witnessed today) and, reportedly, midnight. Around about the witching hours of three or four in the morning, Marclay says, "things get kind of weird."

Marclay suggests that The Clock is best approached and appreciated not as a marathon event but, rather, a work each viewer can tailor to the rhythm of his or her own life.

"You don't have to see it from beginning to end," he advises. "There is no beginning, and there is no end."

It took me a half-hour to figure out how The Clock was messing with my head--dazzling me while also making me feel antsy. Here's a video installation using bits of film to break amorphous time into its components, lining up each of those bits, one after the next, and insisting on giving each its visualized or spoken time-stamp. While cleverly celebrating the legacy and magic of cinema, The Clock resists acting like film--that is, it does not help us swoon and forget. It keeps us focused on the literal, linear passage of time. In that way it is, like Marclay's editing process, intermittently "tedious but simple," creating, even regimenting, a form of order out of chaos.

Arrive when you can, watch as much as you care to, and leave when it suits you. Each regular showing--free with museum admission--can accommodate 130 visitors and up to 170, if you include standing room.

A few important notes of caution, though. Prepare for a long wait to get in. MoMA promises live online reports on the state of the queue here and via Twitter @TheClockatMoMA.

Also, MoMA's sofas aren't particularly comfy--inadequate back support--but if you race in and grab a corner of a sofa, as I did, you might be able to angle your body in a way that will suffice for an hour or two. Sit on the floor, if you like. You can't bring drinks or snacks. Use the restroom before you enter the gallery; if you go out for a break, you forfeit your place. To re-enter, you'll have to stand on line again. Your youngsters might enjoy The Clock in intervals of reasonable length, but be aware that there is some profanity and nudity. 

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Post-Sandy: Klaus Biesenbach and the Rockaways cleanup

Curating a Relief Effort on the Beach 
by Julia Chaplin, The New York Times, November 14, 2012

When dance and the art world dance close

Performance at the Beginning of the 21st Century
by Aaron Mattocks, The Performance Club, October 2, 2012

Dance moves on: new ADF and MoMA plans

American Dance Festival Unveils New Executive Director's First Lineup
by Julie Bloom, The New York Times, March 28, 2012

Dance Comes to MoMA
by Julie Bloom, The New York Times, March 28, 2012

Filmmaker France tells the history of ACT UP [UPDATE]

How To Survive A Plague
USA 2012; 110 min.
directed by David France
A Sundance Selects release

Peter Staley in action. Photo: William Lucas Walker

That's Peter Staley--former Wall Street bond trader; later, ACT UP's rock-star activist--who not only talked the eloquent talk but walked the kickass walk along with many comrades, putting the media, pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers and politicians on notice that a community terrorized by AIDS was not going to sit quietly, simply hoping for attention and help. It was going to get in people's faces and demand the research and treatments it needed to survive.

David France's exhilarating and moving How to Survive A Plague relates the boisterous history of ACT UP--all the triumphs and missteps--with a personalizing focus on several of its leading activists. These include Staley and Mark Harrington as well as the late Bob Rafsky who died from AIDS complications in 1993. Rafsky will be remembered by most for his confrontation with presidential-hopeful Bill Clinton that led to the famous "I feel your pain" non-answer.

That scene, from a Clinton fundraiser, is highlighted in France's documentary along with many others that retell the progression of HIV/AIDS in New York's gay male community and that community's dramatic, intelligent responses. Although a sprinkling of women and people of color are shown or interviewed, France has concentrated on assembling footage and gathering oral history that reflect ACT UP as an initiative emerging from well-educated gay white men with an inherent sense of empowerment commensurate with their rage and compassion. Along the way, we do get to see and hear from female advocates and activists--media-savvy Ann Northrop, future journalist Garance Franke-Ruta and pharmaceutical chemist Iris Long, PhD, among a few others.

Essential history can easily be lost. In a climate of right-wing backlash, it can get twisted. New generations of social activists working on marriage equality, transgender rights, immigrant rights and many other progressive issues today need to learn about these shoulders upon which they stand. And we all need a blade of truth to disrupt the nasty fog of culture war that has arisen once again in our country.

[Update: Frank Bruni writes about this documentary in the March 17 New York Times--The Living After the Dying.]

See a screening of How to Survive A Plague at the 2012 New Directors/New Films Festival at the following locations:

Saturday, March 24, 9pm
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Monday, March 26, 6pm
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53r Street (between 5th And 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

How to Survive A Plague Web site

How to Survive A Plague Facebook page

Information on New Directors/New Films

Antony Hegarty on "Swanlights"

Antony's "Swanlights"

Antony and the Johnsons: Swanlights

a concert and performance event commissioned by The Museum  of Modern Art

at Radio City Music Hall

January 26, 8pm

Antony
Photo (c)Clive Obsborne

The Museum of Modern Art has commissioned artist/musician Antony to conceive, produce, and perform a large-scale concert and performance event, Swanlights, with Antony and the Johnsons,  at Radio City Music Hall.

Featuring a 60-piece orchestra, the performance piece is conceived as a new commission especially developed for the January 26 performance, and an evolution of the highly acclaimed The Crying Light, which was presented at the Manchester Opera House for the 2009 Manchester International Festival.

Envisioned as a meditation on light, nature, and femininity, Swanlights includes songs from all four of Antony and the Johnsons’ albums (self-titled, I Am A Bird Now, The Crying Light, and Swanlights), set to symphonic arrangements by Nico Muhly, Rob Moose, and Maxim Moston. It is produced in collaboration with light artist Chris Levine, lighting designer Paul Normandale, and set designer Carl Robertshaw. Antony and the Johnsons: Swanlights is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator at Large of The Museum of Modern Art and Director of MoMA PS1, with the assistance of Eliza Ryan, Curatorial Assistant, MoMA PS1.

For more information, visit MOMA here. For tickets, click here.

Brazil's "Chico Xavier"

Chico Xavier
a film by Daniel Filho
(Brazil, 2010; 125 min.)

from Chico Xavier
Photo courtesy of Lereby Produções

Daniel Filho's film--making its U.S. premiere this week at the Museum of Modern Art's Premiere Brazil! festival--traces the life and work of Spiritist medium Chico Xavier (1910-2002). From childhood, Xavier ("Chico" is the diminutive for Francisco) just knew things about people, and his touch could center and calm them. The youngster's abilities unnerved his abusive godmother and ran counter to the teachings of the Catholic Church. But Chico drew widespread support as he grew into a gentle, unassuming young man who dedicated his life to serving the needs of the people, refusing to profit from what he says he had been given by the spirit world. Bringing individual messages and numerous books by way of automatic writing, he toiled--through personal suffering and sacrifice, through family dissension and turmoil--to offer comfort to others. Xavier became an important figure in Brazilian culture where Spiritism--introduced by the writings of the Frenchman Allan Kardec--accounts for a wide swath of spiritual practice, even among people who are, ostensibly, Roman Catholic.

How will non-Brazilian film-goers--especially skeptics or those with little interest in metaphysical practices--take to Filho's moody and languid narrative? The film has a muted, even dark, palette and can often be lulling over its two hours. But it benefits greatly from the presence of sweet-faced Ângelo Antônio who plays Xavier in his young adulthood (1931-1959). Antônio first appears on screen, and we grab him like an anchor. Few things can throw this guy--the character or the actor playing him--off course.

Visit the Chico Xavier movie site.

MoMA screening schedule:

Friday, July 15 (5pm)
Thursday, July 21 (4:30pm)
Friday, July 22 (4pm)

For a complete program information and schedule of Premiere Brazil! screenings (July 14-27), click here.

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

Deborah Feller on German Expressionist graphics

Art Review: German Expressionist Graphics
Art For Our Time: German Expressionism at Galerie St. Etienne and MoMA
by Deborah Feller, News and Views, DeborahFeller.com, July 3, 2011a

Museums band together for Ai Weiwei

Museums Press for the Release of Ai Weiwei
by Carol Vogel, The New York Times, April 8, 2011

MOMA will host Euzhan Palcy retrospective

See the first US retrospective of the work of Martinique-born filmmaker Euzhan Palcy--the first Black woman to have her work produced by a major Hollywood studio--at the Museum of Modern Art, May 18-30.

For program details, click here.

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)