DON’T MISS: On the occasion of the exhibition DARKNESS DESCENDS: Norwegian Art Now at Chashama and the Pulse Art Fair during Armory Week, the Norwegian invasion continues with a weekend-long musical extension at the experimental performance venue Monkeytown, organized by Signe Prøis and Christina Vassallo. 

The Norwegian preoccupation with darkness is a common thread uniting the musicians and artists included in this showcase. Of special note are this Saturday’s performances by Eivind Opsvik and Aaron Jennings, and visuals by Michelle Arcila:

Eivind Opsvik 
Bassist/composer/record label owner Eivind Opsvik blends a daring variety of jazz, progressive rock, classical, ambient and electronic influences—from Neil Young and Pink Floyd to Brian Eno—in his music. His main projects consist of his band Overseas, his duo Opsvik & Jennings, and his solo bass project.  He’s also currently a member of a number of other cutting-edge New York bands like The UP, Kris Davis Quartet, David Binney’s Out of Airplanes w/ Bill Frisell, Tone Collector, Tony Malaby’s Paloma Recio, Rocket Engine and Ben Gerstein Collective. 

Eivind Opsvik has an unusual gift for writing small, poignant pieces of music. The color and mood of his music, along with its rhythmic patterns, bleed over into pop, and the sound has a sheer, weightless quality.  -Ben Ratliff, New York Times

The solo set will be accompanied by visuals by Michelle Arcila.

Opsvik & Jennings

Led by the bassist Eivind Opsvik and the guitarist Aaron Jennings, with Brian Drye on Farfisa organ and Dave Christian on drums, this group advanced a series of tuneful provocations, self-contained and pregnant with detail. And appropriately… balanced precision against a spirit of wonder. -Nate Chinen, New York Times, March 4, 2009

Accompanied by a slideshow of photographs by Beathe Rønning.

Halvor Bodin
Artist and graphic designer Halvor Bodin is known for his visual work with Satyricon, Darkthrone, Thorns and Bjarne Melgaard. Combining a fierce visual aesthetic with a danceable and eclectic mix of electronic music, dubstep, nu jazz, dub and electrois, his DJ set will be accompanied by live mixed black & white excerpts from his own video works and found imagery. 

Bathroom Sound Series: Thora Dolven Balke’s The Wave, 2008. 6 min.

MONKEYTOWN 

Admission: $10, $10 minimum
Showtimes: 8 & 10:30pm
Reservations are recommended

Tags: Aaron Jennings, Armory week, Art, Beathe Rønning, Brian Drye, Chashama, Christina Vassallo, Darkness Descends, Dave Christian, DJ, Eivind Opsvik, Halvor Bodin, jazz, Michelle Arcila, Monkeytown, music, New York Times, Norway, Norwegian, Opsvik and Jennings, Pulse, Signe Prøis, Thora Dolven Balke.

Alex Bag, still from GladiaDaters, 2005, video. 30 minutes. Image courtesy Elizabeth Dee Gallery

I became a fan of Alex Bag’s too-infrequently seen work while in art school, the moment I saw her biting, too-close-to-home impression of an art school student in Untitled Fall ‘95. Bag’s unerring ability to observe and recreate the awkwardly humorous, often inappropriate moments that lurk behind the walls of our public personas is one of the reasons her newly-commissioned video installation for the Whitney Museum is a must-see.

The work opened to the public this past weekend in the lobby gallery of the museum, and is comprised of a large single-channel video screening continuously on one wall, with viewer seating made up of large, primary-colored low blocks atop a giant white shag rug in the center of the room.  In a corner stands a desk, puppet and wheelchair used in the video. (side note: Pipilotti Rist also designed participatory, comfortable seating that was conducive to lingering for her recent exhibit at MoMA, a trend I’m hoping will carry over to more lengthy video installations.)

Carol Corbett, from the Carol Corbett show. Image courtesy Bill Cappello.

The video consists of several interconnected segments inspired by a 1970s children’s syndicated television show, The Patchwork Family, and its predecessor, The Carol Corbett Show. Both shows were hosted by Bag’s mother, sitting behind a desk with a puppet; Alex was a guest on the show as a child. Bag herself plays host in her new work, which includes real children but subverts the familiar tropes of children’s television programming by introducing dark themes and adult subjects.

Alex Bag, still from Coven Services - Demo Reel, 2004, DVD with sound, 19 minutes. Image courtesy Elizabeth Dee Gallery

I was only able to catch about 40 minutes of the video, which included scenes of a depressed, suicidal Bag being verbally abused by a sadistic red dragon puppet, a children’s fingerpainting session with a lighthearted Bag dressed in a leotard, a guest musician in a wheelchair leading a sing-and-play-along, and best of all, Bag in a black gothic dress and wig reading a violent novel aloud to three young children superimposed onto footage of apocalyptic destruction. Among the additional characters in the piece that I did not get to see are an animal wrangler, a wizard, and a psycho-pharmacologist, according to the press release. Another visit is definitely warranted.

On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Related: Alex Bag on her new work, in last week’s Artforum.com

Tags: Alex Bag, Art, art school, artforum, Carol Corbett, children, contemporary, installation, kids, Museum, Patchwork Family, puppet, show, video, Whitney.

transPOP: KOREA VIETNAM REMIX is a sprawling and ambitious cross-section of works by sixteen contemporary Korean and Vietnamese artists, which recently opened at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco after traveling from Seoul, Ho Chi Minh City, and southern California.

Manh Hung Nguyen, Go To Market, (2004). Acrylic on canvas, 39 1/4 x 39 1/4 in. Courtesy of artist.

Curators Viet Le and Yong Soon Min chose to focus on the two countries’ “shared history of a highly accelerated modernization process with militarized roots and the Cold War”, and the “increased cross-pollination of cultural influence and exchange” between Vietnam, Korea and the United States.

Because of my background, an American child of Chinese parents who were part of the Vietnamese diaspora of the late 1970s, I’m aware of arriving at the gallery with a certain amount of expectation. Having visited Vietnam some years ago, I frequented museums in Ho Chi Minh City filled with nationalistic artwork rendered in a range of perfectly-studied techniques, which either glorified the pastoral, agricultural lifestyle we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in travelogues, or categorically condemned the atrocities of the Vietnam War.

With transPOP, I was especially interested in seeing artworks that reflected a homegrown, post-embargo Vietnamese popular culture, artworks which explored or critiqued a described spirit of “accelerated modernity” that, if not completely independent of propagandist bent, at least had subtlety of message. What I found was that, perhaps despite the best efforts of the curators, a well-edited timeline and even an addition of a resource room with relevant books, posters and media about the current “Viet-Pop” and “Korean Wave” movements, I couldn’t get past how much of the actual artwork in the show centered around the nations’ distinctive wartime past, rather than on a present-day exchange of contemporary cultural elements. For example, a majority of Min-Hwa Choi’s paintings that were exhibited referenced events like the 1972 napalm bombing of Trang Bang, and the aftermath of Fascism. The aim of these paintings seemed too similar to the sort of overt, literal critique of Communism evident in the recent wave of contemporary Chinese art, and were not as successful as Choi’s figurative portraits of disaffected, modern Koreans from her To the Rocker series.

Min-Hwa Choi, Lying on Fascism, 2005. oil on canvas. Courtesy of artist.

There were a number of works which were exceptions. My favorite piece in the show was Yong-Baek Lee’s Angel Soldier, a wall-sized video projection of a floral print backdrop with suspended “vines” of flowers blending into the backdrop, accompanied by a soundtrack of forest sounds. Several minutes into the video, soldiers dressed in floral-printed camouflage slowly, inexorably traveled carefully across the frame, hunched as if stalking an enemy. Lee’s other video, Steaming Out (Post-IMF), channels the self-administered obstacles of early Nauman videos; created in response to the Asian Economic Crisis of 1997, it now reads as a prescient comment on our current economic climate.

Yong-Baek Lee, Angel Soldier, 2005. Single Channel Video Projection. ArtNet.com image, Courtesy Arario Gallery

Manh Hung Nguyen’s pop-colored canvases, which poked light fun at the blending of Western technology with Vietnamese agricultural life, were also enjoyable. “Building” depicts a high-rise condo mash-up of the country’s traditional tin awnings and huts in the sky, commercial planes flying by.

Manh Hung Nguyen, Building, 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 39 1/4 x 39 1/4 inches. Courtesy of artist

Eventually, the realization came that the shadow of the Cold War that I’d expected transPOP’s artists to have shed was intrinsic to their practice, as inescapable as the paintings of fields and farmers in the museums of Ho Chi Minh City. Yet there were still many provocative works in the exhibition which successfully managed to both acknowledge the historical impact of the war, as well as leave room for the viewer to meditate on its repercussions in Korean and Vietnamese society today.

An-My Lê’s documentation of the U.S. military’s training exercises in preparation for combat in Iraq (29 Palms) alludes to the parallels between the wars, eerily blurring our ability to discern the difference between real and staged battles.

An-My Lê, From 29 Palms, 2005, © An-My Lê, Courtesy of Murray Guy

In his powerful film, The Farmers and The Helicopters,  Dinh Q. Le examines the potent symbolism of the helicopter as both a tool of destruction and the embodiment of his countrymen’s dreams of economic and community revival. While the current pop music and film industry of Korea and Vietnam reflects the cultural progress that these countries have achieved, it is video pieces like Le’s and Baek’s that contribute something much more substantive towards a real dialogue about its future.

Dinh Q. Lê, Tran Quoc Hai and Le Van Danh, The Farmers and the Helicopters, 2006. Three channel video installation. In collaboration with Ha Thuc Phu Nam and Tuan Andrew Nguyen. ©Stills: Dinh Q. Lê

Among the elements of Lin + Lam’s Unidentified Vietnam series, a remixed clip from a South Vietnamese propaganda film is spliced with clips of one of the artists dressed as the protagonists in the film. Quotes from the novel The Quiet American appear onscreen, in ambiguous contrast to the nature of the video being watched.

Lin + Lam, detail from Unidentified Vietnam (Invisible Like Peace), 2003-present. Multi-media installation. Image courtesy of artists.

“In way you could say they died for democracy, he said. “I wouldn’t know how to translate that into Vietnamese.”

The twenty-four abstract, black and white film stills from a second of this footage “(24 Frames=1 Second)”, implies, at least to this viewer, that while the world continues to fix this nation to a singular political or cultural moment, those events too will become transient, as Vietnam’s story continues to evolve.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Dec 6, 2008 – Mar 15, 2009

Tags: An My Le, Art, California, Chinese, Cold War, contemporary art, Dinh Q. Le, Film, Ho Chi Minh City, Korea, Korean, Korean Wave, Lin + Lam, Manh Hung Nguyen, military, Min Hwa Choi, music, painting, political, popular culture, remix, San Francisco, Seoul, transPOP, United States, video, Viet Le, Viet Pop, Vietnam, Vietnam War, Vietnamese, Yerba Buena Center, Yong Baek Lee, Yong Soon Min.

Via Gothamist.com:

Politicker NY reports today that New York City cultural institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, and the American Museum of Natural History are losing up to 42 percent of their municipal funding due to budget cutbacks by Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. This news comes in on the heels of Bloomberg’s press conference touting the free activities available to residents in our city’s museums, parks, theaters, etc..

Facade of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, New York. Photo by Paul Masck, released with a Creative Commons license, July 2005.

With drastic cuts being made or proposed at many city-funded agencies, it’s not unusual to see arts funding slashed at the Department of Cultural Affairs. However, Bloomberg’s cuts seem to be in opposition to a commitment the city made at the Creative New York Conference just two years ago, to establish a dedicated industry desk for cultural nonprofits overseen by the city’s Economic Development Corp. The desk focuses on recruiting and helping nonprofit groups get financing, real estate and workforce training.

Despite the cuts, the mayor himself has a had a long-standing history of personal philanthropy, funding cultural programs of all sizes in New York City out of his personal fortune, and through significant “anonymous” gifts to the Carnegie Corporation. According to the New York Times, in 2005, Bloomberg had donated over 140 million to many local institutions during the last years of his first term alone, leading critics to speculate that the donations were an effective way to stifle dissent and influence voting constituencies that benefited from his largesse.

What are the ramifications of substituting large sums of private money for public funds in support of government-backed programs and institutions? Can the artistic community, and others who rely on, or run nonprofits be bought?

This year, with the end of the mayor’s second term approaching in 2009, the Times reported that Bloomberg and his aides finally called in the favor last month. The administration asked organizations who have received donations from the mayor to show their support for his bid for a hotly contested third term in office, a move which was met with harsh disapproval from top political figures in the city.

Supplied with testimony from leaders at cultural organizations like the Public Art Fund and the Alliance of Resident Theaters, the City Council voted to extend term limits for all elected officials in the five boroughs on October 22nd.

It’s payback time, and except for Bloomberg, I’m not sure who wins.

Tags: Alliance of Resident Theaters, Art, arts, Bloomberg, budget, Carnegie, city, City Council, corporation, cultural institution, Department of Cultural Affairs, funding, Gothamist, Lincoln Center, mayor, Metropolitan, Museum, Natural History, New York, New York Times, philanthropy, Politicker NY, Public Art Fund, term limits, third term.

Yesterday was the last day to see Tom Sachs‘ Hello Kitty and co. at the Place du Trocadero, a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower. The giant Hello Kitty, Miffy, and My Melody fountains created by Sachs shed their “tears” as the saddest trio of Sanrio characters Paris has seen.

Tags: Art, Eiffel Tower, Hello Kitty, Paris, Sanrio, Tom Sachs.