DON’T MISS: Our City Dreams, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, April 9-12, 2009

(This review is from the New York theatrical premiere at the Film Forum, February 4-27:)

Chiara Clemente’s film opens with grainy, 16mm establishing shots of New York as we see it for the first time, driving into it with our chins tilted up to the sun, looking at the sky rush between the skeleton cables of the Brooklyn Bridge as we’re pumped along the vein, toward the corporeal city. The sun shimmers pink and red along the length of the bridge and the camera turns to the streets, tracking city buses, milling crowds, Columbus Circle, uniformed schoolchildren along the Museum Mile, and the evening lights on the water as night falls. These are the people and places of today’s Manhattan, but through Clemente’s lens, they could just as well have been filmed thirty or fifty years ago, previous generations performing seemingly eternal New York City rituals to the mournful woodwinds and piano of Thomas Lauderdale’s score.

It is in the context of the perpetual metropolis that the filmmaker introduces us to the subjects of her documentary Our City Dreams, a portrait of five iconic female artists representative of the five most recent generations of contemporary women artists, whose creative lives and aspirations have been nurtured and sometimes subsumed by the place they call home.

While following Nancy Spero, Marina Abramovic, Kiki Smith, Ghada Amer, and Swoon in New York and abroad, Clemente was fortunate enough to have made her documentary over a period of time (2005-07) that coincided with a number of important milestones in each woman’s career. During these two years, Swoon had her first solo exhibition, with works commissioned by MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum, and traveled along the Mississippi River with the Miss Rockaway Armada project. Amer began a new body of artwork in Egypt, in addition to becoming a Harlem homeowner for the first time. The Turin Winter Olympics commissioned an installation by Smith, as her retrospective traveled across the country. Abramovic reprised seven seminal performance pieces of the 1970s at the Guggenheim Museum and created a site-specific work during the aftermath of the tsunami in Southeast Asia. Eighty year-old Spero’s installation Kill Commies/Maypole is included in the Venice Biennale for the first time, and she returns to Paris after a thirty-year absence.

We often assume that younger people are more open-minded about the choices they make in life than their forebears, yet the most remarkable element of these artists’ stories as they unfolded was the increasing willingness of each successive, older generation to embrace disparate aspects of their personal and artistic lives. Our City Dreams begins by documenting the immediacy of Swoon’s nascent post-college years, told without much autobiographical background, and concludes with a segment on Spero that encompasses the whole of her family life, artistic background, and career.

The interviews are fluid, not confrontational or staged- it’s as if we are getting to see and hear the best parts of long, ongoing conversations between friends. Clemente seems to have chosen her subjects not only for what their works add to the historical evolution of contemporary or feminist art, but with the awareness that these women’s stories are simply compelling to watch. Her interviews are personal and lovingly conducted, not academic in tone, and she uses different, deliberate visual and musical cues when introducing each artist into the film. For example, at the start of Kiki Smith’s segment, the camera moves around slowly in an impressionistic, close-up study of the colors in Smith’s doorways, and returns to stills of the delicate and contemplative textures in her work throughout- wax casts, closeups of feathers, ‘Eve’ sculptures, crystal stars and delicate chalk drawings on black paper.

There is a satisfying joy in watching long, uninterrupted takes of each artist preparing for and making work in their homes and studios. The camera lingers just as much on the technical aspects of pieces being created as it does upon the presentation of completed works; the repositioning of a collaged mouth, a maquette for a carpet, bodies training in harsh weather, the repetition of a printmaking roller across linoleum or wood, and the carving and cutting of paper, clay and metal. The artists’ familiarity with Clemente, combined with the filmmaker’s intuitive understanding of the creative process, goes beyond what is normally seen in documentaries on artists, providing us with a heightened sense of communion with her subjects.

Smith speaks about not having the confidence to become an artist until after her father passes away, and the experience of casting her mother’s fingers at her funeral. Amer discusses her mother’s legacy of oppression, Abramovic belittles the physical weakness of the women students who had come to Thailand to participate in a performance, and Swoon freely admits that being represented by an art dealer has changed the course of her work “quite a bit”.

However, despite the frank nature of these conversations, the idea of companionship for the women Clemente follows is not directly addressed until she reaches Spero’s story. This choice may have been made in order to more clearly delineate their artistic achievements, but in constructing intimate portraits of their lives, leaving out their thoughts about finding or not finding meaningful partnerships is somewhat puzzling.

With the exception of Leon Golub’s major role in Spero’s life as fellow artist, activist, husband and father (and to a lesser extent, the inclusion of clips featuring the performer Ulay in Abramovic’s story,) none of the other women elaborate on the idea of companionship, instead choosing to make statements about the sacrifice of personal relationships that seem to promulgate the singularity of their vision:

“I need to be alone- I’m a strange person- I feel that a family becomes your life…. I’m too consumed, I’m too in love with making things.” - Swoon

“Then I realized that… art was my priority. And my mom was telling me, you’ll never get married! You are too involved in art.” - Ghada Amer

Perhaps by growing up the daughter of a successful male artist with access to the kind of support network that few women receive, and that many men take for granted, Chiara Clemente has been able to see alternatives to forfeiting companionship and family for one’s work. There is subtle, yet notable evidence of a wistfulness for a more comprehensive resolution to this dilemma when we see her camera pan over the images of happy neighborhood children featured in Swoon’s work, and follow a small child playing in the empty gallery at Amer’s show while the artists rebuff the notion of having families of their own in voiceover.

There are additional autobiographical details incorporated as we move from Amer’s to Smith’s to Abramovic’s segments; we hear Smith’s receptiveness to making changes in her life when she says, ”I’m much more comfortable with myself now, than I was when I was twenty-something…you don’t want to stay the same- you don’t want to be attached to your past in a way that you try to stay there…life is moving along and you’re kind of moving along with it.” But because Spero was the only artist to expound upon the realities of supporting a family, making work that was independent of her husband’s, and being a feminist activist against the war, each artist whose story led up to Spero’s seemed to lack a similar consummation of what it might mean to fully realize the possibility, as Spero has, of achieving a balance between art and life. In the narrative arc of Clemente’s gorgeous film, Nancy Spero’s story reads as an ideal resolution of the challenges and choices that younger generations of women continue to face while attempting to stay true to their creative vision.

Our City Dreams trailer and website

Tickets online or at Yerba Buena Center box office

Tags: April 2009, Chiara Clemente, documentary, female artists, Film Forum, generations, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Leon Golub, Marina Abramovic, Nancy Spero, Our City Dreams, Swoon, Yerba Buena Center.

Lot #16, Mary Temple, Corner Light (Miami), 2008. Hand-cut translucent abaca on Arches, colored pencil on verso. Courtesy of Artist and Mixed Greens Gallery.

A week’s worth of heartfelt culture picks…

TONIGHT: Lower East Side Printshop benefit. Works donated include pieces by Jim Dine, Robert Longo, Dana Schutz, James Siena, Nancy Spero, among others. We love the Mary Temple piece being auctioned, above. 6-9pm.

Thursday, February 12th: Voting closes for Reel 13’s Valentine’s week short film competition for the NYC area. We’ll be casting our ballots for Gibson Frazier’s delightful taxicab/toreador romance, Yellow. Voting closes at 5pm.

Sound-art pioneer Bill Fontana’s Spiraling Echoes opens in San Francisco’s City Hall Rotunda. Spiraling Echoes uses echolocation via ultrasound beams to carry a soundtrack of contemporary and historic sounds from various San Francisco events and locations around the Rotunda’s space. Opening reception, 5:30-7:30pm. free

Friday, February 13th: Social Media Week closing party at Santos Party House. 7-10pm. free

Also tonight: Gregory de la Haba’s pagan horse installation, Equus Maximus, opens at Jack The Pelican. NSFW!

Saturday, February 14th: the last weekend to catch Tadashi Kawamata’s wooden “Tree Huts” at Madison Square Park. Grab a burger at Shake Shack with your date and imagine spending your Valentines day like the Swiss Family Robinson. Free (burger not included).

Two of Tadashi Kawabata's Tree Huts, 2008. (Madison Sq. Park Conservancy)

If you’re in a more literary mood, check out the Bushwick Reading Series every second Saturday of the month, co-curated by Bushwick residents Niina Pollari and Parker Phillips at the Bushwick library, housed in a beautiful 1908 Carnegie building. 3-5pm. Free

MoMA presents Third World Newsreel’s (TWN) New Work from New Filmmakers, including Lottie Porch and Vanara Taing’s Beyond the Music, about the Inspirational Choir of New York’s Riverside Church. TWN fosters independent film and video by and about diverse communities, with a focus on people of color and social justice issues. 8pm.

Monday and Tuesday, February 16th and 17th: Dan Graham (2/16) and Shirin Neshat (2/17) speak about their work as part of the San Francisco Art Institute’s Spring 2009 Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series. 7:30pm, Free.

Tuesday, February 17th: Don’t miss Chiara Clemente’s Our City Dreams, a love letter to New York City through the eyes of five generations of women artists. Today’s screening includes a Q&A with Clemente and Ghada Amer. At the Film Forum, 1:15, 3:15, 6:00, 8:00, 10:00pm.

Additional: The Foundation Vevey Ville d’Images has opened their call for entries for its 7th Vevey International Photo Awards. Projects that receive the approximately $25,000 worth of awards will be completed and shown at the next edition of the festival Images in September 2010. Deadline for the submission of projects is April 30, 2009.

Tags: Bill Fontana, Bushwick Reading Series, City Hall rotunda, Dan Graham, documentary, Film, Lower East Side Printshop, Madison Square Park, MoMA, Reel 13, romance, Shake Shack, Shirin Neshat, Social Media Week, Tadashi Kawamata, Third World Newsreel, tree huts, Yellow.

As dire economic straits trigger institutions to sell big-ticket items in order to raise cash*, The Totam recommends a selection of thrifty events for frugal New Yorkers to attend during the week ahead. There may even be a few items worth dropping some hard-earned dollars upon….

Bradley Peters, Untitled, (mother and son with shopping cart), 2008. c. Bradley Peters

TONIGHT: Bradley Peters‘ Home Theater opens @ Melanie Flood Projects, a salon-style project space doubling as the tasteful Brooklyn apartment of Melanie Flood. Peters, a recent graduate of the Yale School of Art, documents his suburban Nebraskan hometown life in a series of fraught photographic moments reminiscent of Philip Lorca-DiCorcia’s staged images, with the added emotional weight of Peters’ personal connection to his subjects. Curated by Amani Olu. FREE, 7-10pm, RSVP required.

Left, Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor in John M. Stahl’s film of the 1929 novel “Magnificent Obsession” (1935); Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in Douglas Sirk’s remake (1954). (Criterion Collection)

Thursday, January 29th: Stahl vs. Sirk @ the Anthology Film Archives. Anthology presents some of celebrated director Douglas Sirk’s finest melodramas alongside John M. Stahl’s seldom-seen, and arguably masterful originals; Universal Pictures had given both filmmakers the same source material to adapt from over a span of two decades- see the NY Times review of the differences in Sirk vs. Stahl’s version of The Magnificent Obsession, which screens tonight at 6:45 and 9pm. $9

left: c. Eric Hairabedian, 2008. right: c. Peter Mallo, 2008. Courtesy Kris Graves Projects

• Friday, January 30th: Opening reception for the inaugural exhibit of Kris Graves Projects in DUMBO; featuring the work of photographer Eric Hairabedian and artist Peter Mallo. Like Peters, Hairabedian’s photographs are set in unidealized middle-class environs, but his stark examination of his subjects, mostly members of his family, comes closer to the iconographic, subtly bleak portraiture of photographers like Gillian Laub. The shapes and shades in Mallo’s new Soft Black drawing series recalls the delicate, enigmatic pencilwork recently seen in Gino De Dominicis’ survey at PS 1. 6-9pm. FREE

(The gallery will have excellently priced (we are talking $10-$40 here!) 11×14″ and postcard-portfolio limited editions on hand for the budget-minded collector.)

• Saturday, January 31st: Pulitizer-winning poet Gary Snyder, called “‘the Thoreau of the Beat Generation’” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, reads and talks about his influences @ the New York Public Library, 3-5pm, Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street; Enter at Fifth Avenue- South Court Auditorium. FREE, first come, first served.
• Sunday, February 1st: Catch the last weeks of Keith Haring’s monumental Ten Commandments at Deitch Studios in Long Island City. FREE

Installation view, Keith Haring, The Ten Commandments, 1985, Deitch Studios

• Also: See Dan Hurlin’s Disfarmer @ St. Ann’s Warehouse, a haunting biographic work about American rural portrait photographer Mike Disfarmer, done with puppets and a wonderful dust-bowl banjo score by Dan Moses Schreier. 4pm.

• Tuesday, February 3rd: Joy Dragland with St. Cloud @ Pete’s Candy Store, 9pm. Don’t miss St. Cloud’s monthlong residency every Tuesday night in February; Dragland’s enveloping, always-sympathetic voice carries her listeners along a winding journey of musings on subjects as varied as the Mona Lisa, sisters, homesickness, and cocaine escapism. FREE

Tags: Amani Olu, Anthology Film Archives, Beat Generation, Bradley Peters, collector, Dan Hurlin, Dan Moses Schreier, Deitch, Disfarmer, documentary, drawing, DUMBO, Eric Hairabedian, Gary Snyder, Home Theater, Joy Dragland, Keith Haring, Kris Graves Projects, limited editions, Magnificent Obsession, Melanie Flood Projects, murals, New York Public Library, New York Times, Pete's Candy Store, Peter Mallo, photographs, portraiture, Rose Museum, Sirk, St. Ann's Warehouse, St. CLoud, Stahl, Ten Commandments, Universal.

I remember my first encounter with James Castle’s handmade books in college, at the AIGA gallery on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The carefully printed, often reversed alphabets and illustrated block panels on found paper, ads and magazines gave the sense that I was looking at rare artifacts from a universe parallel to our own. They seemed like personal journals, graphic novels recorded by an alien scribe observing our world from a distance, and in a sense, this was the case. Deaf since birth, Castle chose imagery over speech as the primary method of understanding and communicating with the world around him.

James Castle, Untitled, 20th c. (calendar/double sided). 8.5 x 10" Courtesy Greg Kucera Gallery

The documentary film, James Castle: Portrait of an Artist, by writer-director Jeffrey Wolf, produced by the Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists, is one of the highlights of the artist’s recently-opened  retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Wolf’s documentary gives an insightful introduction into Castle’s life, and a well-organized overview of his work. The film includes interviews with Castle’s relatives, and wonderful commentary by John Yau and Robert Storr. A DVD of the documentary is enclosed with every copy of the exhibition catalog, which I highly suggest you run out and buy in addition to seeing the retrospective.

The hundreds of drawings, collages and assemblages exhibited in the Philadelphia Museum are only a fraction of the works that Castle created in his lifetime, and are inspiring on many levels. Castle’s inventive compositions and constructions, and his constant rethinking of the familiar spaces in his life are apparent in his work, taking it beyond what we have come to think of as the work of an untrained “outsider.”

James Castle, Untitled, Not dated. Found paper, soot, string, graphite. 15.5 x 14.5". Courtesy J Crist Gallery

James Castle, Untitled (Shed Interior with Drawings, Constructions, Books, and Objects), n.d. Soot and spit on found paper Sheet (irregular): 8.5 x 10". Collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Ann and John Ollman in memory of Maurice and Kathryn Hammond, 1998. Photo by Lynn Rosenthal and Andrea Simon

James Castle, Untitled (Morton Salt Girl), n.d. found paper, color of unknown origin. 7.5 x 6" Collection of Susan Chereskin. Photo courtesy J Crist Gallery, Boise

October 14, 2008 - January 4, 2009
www.philamuseum.org

Tags: AIGA, assemblage, books, collage, documentary, drawing, Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists, James Castle, Jeffrey Wolf, John Yau, New York, outsider art, paper, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, retrospective, Robert Storr, soot.