Capital New York

Looking for a film score, Jim Jarmusch found a music partner and fellow mixed-mystic junkie instead

The performance, held at ISSUE Project Room’s new and improved space at 110 Livingston Street in Downtown Brooklyn, also served as a record release party for Van Wissem and Jarmusch. The album, titled Concerning the Entrance into Eternity, began as a search for a soundtrack.  More

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By Rozalia Jovanovic

The crossover artist: Antony Hegarty's artistic journey culminates in a massive performance tonight at Radio City

In 1987, as a teenaged Hegarty walked along the streets of Angers in northwest France, he said, he was captivated by a poster with an unusual portrait of a middle-aged Japanese man. The man, heavily made up and wearing an elegant woman's outfit with long lace gloves and a wide-brimmed hat, lifted and curled his hands toward his face as if he were gently lifting a veil. Not knowing anything more about the image or what the poster was designed to advertise, Hegarty asked the man putting it up, in his best French, if he could have one.

He took it home and taped it over his bed. A few years later Hegarty, then 21, saw a film by Peter Sempel called Just Visiting this Planet. It showed a man in white-face in a long white dress doing a kind of delicate pantomime interjected with violent bursts of movement around another man standing very still. His movement was inflected with feminine nurturing, but heavy with a tragic sense of suffering, endurance, and affection. Hegarty cried when he saw it. More

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By Rozalia Jovanovic

With blue-chip gallery Luhring Augustine coming soon, the scrappy Bushwick art scene contemplates its future

Back in December of 2010, the Chelsea gallery Luhring Augustine bought a 10,200-square-foot warehouse, in Bushwick, a couple of blocks away from the 56 Bogart complex of galleries and studios, and ever since, the city’s artists, gallerists, and curators have been eagerly awaiting the gallery’s first move in Brooklyn. They don’t have to wait any longer. Luhring Augustine’s Brooklyn outpost is set to have its first exhibition in February, featuring filmmaker Charles Atlas. The question now is what becomes of Bushwick, presently home to an indie, D.I.Y.-driven art scene not too different from what at the turn of the 21st century had begun to spring up in neighboring Williamsburg. More

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By Rozalia Jovanovic

7Eleven gallery spins a little gold out of a lot of rubble with new exhibit 'Alchemy'

“Alchemy has so many definitions,” said Genevieve Hudson-Price, one of the three young curators who run 7Eleven Gallery, “and they’re all metaphorical. But art is the only one that—by definition, all art is alchemy.” Sabrina Blaichman, another of the curators, interjected to clarify that they had specifically selected artists who worked mostly with non-traditional materials. Hence: an intricate bumblebee made of recycled garbage bags; a set of old doors repurposed and turned into functioning guitars with built-in amplifiers; a set of depression-era radioactive glass objects suspended in a chamber and lit by black light so they glowed like Kryptonite. More

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By Rozalia Jovanovic

A pilgrimage to Chelsea for Ai Weiwei's latest show

It wasn’t the average crowd for a Saturday opening in a Chelsea gallery, or average behavior for gallery-goers, but then again it wasn’t an average exhibit either. These pilgrims had come not for some guru but to see the latest installation from Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, a work consisting of a large rectangular grouping of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds, arranged on the gallery. The show, which opened on Saturday at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea and runs through February 4, is the first exhibit of this work in New York (a related show was held at the Tate Modern in October 2010). Of course, the pilgrimage was also to honor Ai, who has emerged as one of the more compelling contemporary artists of our era and, by nature of his political woes, one of the most newsworthy. More

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By Rozalia Jovanovic

Photographer Joel Sternfeld's 'First Pictures,' at Luhring Augustine, offers a straight, stark gaze at Americans in the '70s

At the show’s opening last night one gallery-goer said, “Who knows? Maybe these are all intricately staged to look like snapshots.” Another replied, “What about the one with the boys holding the pictures of Farrah Fawcett?” It was as though nothing so snapshot-ish could ever have been staged, but such is the lingering effect of Cindy Sherman, Philip Lorca di Corcia, Wall, Crewdson and others whose elaborately staged or doctored photos so impacted the genre. Looking at these pictures and imagining, for a moment, that they were staged or manipulated, I realized how much stock I had placed in the authenticity of the subjects and the scenarios not only as evidence of Sternfeld’s ability to create complex and moving images without sets and big budgets, but also because the veracity of the pictures as social documents felt necessary. More

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By Rozalia Jovanovic

On a Sunday afternoon in Greenpoint, 'Avant-Brunch' tests the market for 'grown-ass shit': Music and a sit-down meal

“I wanted to do something that’s not standing at Death By Audio with a P.B.R. in your hand, organizer Chris Weingarten said. "We’ve been doing that for 15 years. This is so rare. You’re in a different state of awake at 1 p.m. on a Sunday than you are at 11 p.m. on a Thursday. I’m stressed because I have to go to work the next day. My feet hurt, my back hurts. Here, you’re more relaxed. There’s nothing getting in the way of you and the music. Sit. Enjoy.” More

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By Rozalia Jovanovic

Billboards on the High Line, Ab-Ex all over town, plus Cattelan, Levine, Holler: A year-end art-crawl

If you’re in town for the stretch before New Year’s with time and/or visiting family on your hands, you can go stir-crazy thinking the city's fast asleep 'til 2012. But right now there’s actually a good deal of great art—in museums and galleries and city parks—still on view and mainly free. But act now, since most of these items are ending soon. More

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By Rozalia Jovanovic

Lola Montes Schnabel debuts on the New York gallery scene, and suddenly it feels like the '80s again

“This isn’t a normal gallery opening, by the way,” said art historian Brian Kirsch. The opening he was talking about was that of Lola Montes Schnabel. Five sensual, splashy, large-scale paintings hung in a large room at The Hole Gallery where Schnabel’s show, "Love Before Intimacy," her first solo painting exhibition in the United States, was having its opening night last Friday.

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By Rozalia Jovanovic

Jeff Wall's new photos are characteristically cinematic, but the script feels a little thin

At Jeff Wall’s new exhibit at Marian Goodman Gallery, true to form, the Canadian artist maintains a preference for technically tight, oversize images of ordinary happenings: a man gets wet; a boy falls from a tree; a man reads a document. Yet while in the past his tableaux were packed with activity and characters, in most of the new work in this show there're far fewer people and really, not much happening at all.

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By Rozalia Jovanovic