Krazy! Anime + Manga + Video Games @ Japan Society, through 6/14

KRAZY!
Delirious World of Anime + Manga + Video Games

Japan Society
Through June 14

KRAZY! is New York’s first major show dedicated to the Japanese phenomenon of Anime, Manga, and Video Games—three forms of contemporary visual art that are exercising a huge influence on an entire generation of American youth. The exhibition, organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, is presented in an environment designed by cutting-edge architectural practice Atelier Bow-Wow, featuring life-size blowups of popular figures from the worlds of anime and manga within an intriguing sequence of spaces that evoke Tokyo’s clamorous cityscape. Co-curated by leading North American and Japanese specialists, KRAZY! gives visitors a direct experience of new forms of cultural production and offers fresh insight into the interdependence of three art forms of the future.

View a full exhibition checklist (PDF)

KRAZY! Catalogue Order Form (PDF)

View KRAZY! architectural diagrams (PDF)

Anime Film Screenings
The anime films that are featured in KRAZY! are shown full-length in the recently upgraded—with digital projectors and 5.1 surround sound—auditorium at the Japan Society. The films are:

Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic, Akira (1988); Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game (2004); Satoshi Kon’s, Paprika (2006); Patlabor 2: The Movie, by Mamoru Oshii (1993); The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004), by Makoto Shinkai; and Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Episode 9, 17, 18, and 27 (1982-83), designed by Ichiro Itano.

Screenings begin Saturday, March 14 and will continue until June 14, 2009. Viewing times are Friday: 3:00 to 9:00 pm; Saturday and Sunday: 11:00 to 5:00 pm in the Japan Society Auditorium.

Gallery hours:
Tuesday through Thursday 11 am – 6 pm
Friday 11 am – 9 pm
Saturday & Sunday 11 am – 5 pm
The gallery is closed on Mondays and major holidays.

Jem Cohen: New York, Still and Moving, through April 18

Jem Cohen: New York, Still and Moving

Robert Miller Gallery
524 West 26th Street
Through April 18

Cohen works in film, video, installation, and photography. He collects street images, portraits, and sounds. The projects built from his ongoing archives thrive on the collision between documentary, narrative, and experimental approaches. Some are personal/political city images and portraits of friends and artists. Many center around daily life and ephemeral moments, seen out of the corner of the eye and pulled into the center. This special project at Robert Miller will include previously unseen stills uniting his interest in the transient with a disappearing format, the discontinued Polaroid. Departures from traditional street photography, they are distillations of a city marked by demolition and disappearance — buildings and people passing through and held in place.

The Alchemy of Tin: The Cultures of Jazz in Downtown New York in the 1970s — April 22 @ 6:30pm

LeBoff Lecture with Brent Hayes Edwards
The Alchemy of Tin: The Cultures of Jazz in Downtown New York in the 1970s

Wednesday, April 22
6:30pm – 8:00pm
NYU Silver Building, Hemmerdinger Hall
(32 Waverly Place, lobby level)
RSVP

Description:
In jazz history, the 1970s have habitually been overlooked or dismissed as a period when the music went into severe decline. But in fact there was a remarkable ferment of activity in the decade, especially in New York — much of it underground, in small clubs, musician-run “lofts,” and independent theaters — and jazz played a central role in the arts scene that developed in NoHo, SoHo, and the East Village. This lecture considers the social and musical space that developed around the Tin Palace, a nightclub that provided from its perch on the Bowery a crucial hub for cross-fertilization among the arts.

A reception will follow the lecture.

Speaker’s bio: Professor Edwards is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which won the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. With Robert G. O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004).

The Geography of Buzz: Visualizing Cultural Space in New York and Los Angeles – April 7 @ 6:30

Elizabeth Currid (University of Southern California, School of Policy, Planning, and Development) and Sarah Williams (Columbia University, GSAPP) took a unique dataset, the Getty Image Database, and transformed it to explain the spatial patterns of cultural industries. By geo-referencing, coding, and performing statistical analysis on 6,000 events and 300,000 photographs taken in New York and Los Angeles, the team has shown that cultural industry events tend to cluster spatially. While the data might illustrate what we already know—that certain “hot spots” in the city exist—investigating them in this way allowed them to gain a better understanding for why clustering occurs in certain localities.

Analysis of the data showed that those actors not conventionally involved in city development (paparazzi, marketers, media) have unintentionally played a significant role in city development. They also argue that the findings on the cultural industries may tell us something important about the geographical form of industrial social clustering more generally. The use of Getty data provides a new spatial dimension through which to understand both cultural industries and city geographical patterns.

To launch this exhibit, Currid and Williams have organized an opening and panel discussion, featuring:

-Erin Aigner, Graphics Editor, New York Times
-Elizabeth Currid, USC School of Policy, Planning and Development
-Harvey Molotch, NYU, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, Sociology
-Jamin Brophy Warren, Wall Street Journal
-Sarah Williams, Director, Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University GSAPP

Sponsored by IZZE Sparkling Juice and Original Sin Hard Cider

The exhibit will be on display from April 7 – May 8, 2009.

Studio-X
180 Varick Street, Suite 1610
Between King and Charleton Streets

1 train to Houston Street

Free and open to the public
RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu

Talks About Buildings w/ TripleCanopy @ The Kitchen, April 7 @ 7pm

More Talks About Buildings

An Evening with Triple Canopy

The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, New York, NY · April 07, 2009

For this event, expanding on an issue devoted to new and old forms of urbanism, Triple Canopy excavates real, unrealized, and potential spaces: a planned mega-eco-city in the desert Southwest, a grand Utahan suburb nurtured by coal-mine tailings, an aerial view of the architecture of Texas oil fields, the spiraling sprawl of Mexico City, the coincidences of megachurches and office spaces, and more. Participants include the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Joseph Clarke, Nine 11 Thesaurus, Lucy Raven, Emily Richardson, Melanie Smith, the VPL Authority (Thomas Moran & Rustam Mehta), and Zs.

Also available: Wrong Place, Right Time (2009), a digital print by José Leon Cerrillo in an edition of 100.

7 pm
Free and open to the public
http://www.thekitchen.org

Literature programs at The Kitchen are made possible with generous support from the Axe-Houghton Foundation and with public funds from The National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

By Way of Broadway: NY Photographs by Cervin Robinson, 3/25-5/6

Municipal Art Society
457 Madison Avenue
Gallery Hours: M-Sat 11am-5pm

MAS is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition, By Way of Broadway: New York Photographs by Cervin Robinson, next Thursday, March 26. One of the most widely-published architectural photographers working today, Cervin Robinson began taking photographs at the encouragement of his father, an architect, when he was twelve, and this collection explores New York’s visual landscape comprising thirty views of the 17-mile length of Manhattan’s main street taken over the course of three decades.

The exhibition opens with a reception at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, March 25, at MAS. The event is free but reservations are required. RSVP online or call 212-935-2075. By Way of Broadway will be on display at MAS galleries through Wednesday, May 6, and the galleries are open to the public Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday: 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., and closed at all other times.

Robinson gravitated toward architectural subjects at a time, in his words, “when the only serious subject to most photographers was people, [and] because pictures of buildings seemed to me as satisfying as pictures of people were frustrating.”  By the mid-1950s, he was working for photographer Walker Evans in New York.  His first magazine commission was a monument of post-war modernism, the Seagram Building.  He was later commissioned to photograph the city of Cleveland for an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art.  The place that has figured most prominently in Robinson’s work is the street where he lives, Broadway.

This exhibition has been curated by Gary Van Zante and organized by the Wolk Gallery at MIT School of Architecture and Planning in Cambridge, MA.  Support for exhibitions at MAS is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York Council on the Arts, a State Agency.   Additionally, MAS gratefully acknowledges the 42nd Street Fund for underwriting this exhibition.

Beka Goedde . Phototropic Dormancy . March 05–29

Beka Goedde . Phototropic Dormancy

Glowlab is pleased to announce Phototropic Dormancy, a solo exhibition by up-and-coming New York artist Beka Goedde. Installed as a site-specific environment at Glowlab, Goedde’s mixed-media sculptures, hand-cast plaster and works on wood panel focus the viewer’s ability to read and create passages through a landscape. Her work provides a three-dimensional point of entry into a dense field of vision marked by layers of textured plywood and plaster, etchings, graphite, pigment and earth-toned encaustic wax.

This exhibition of new works is a study of landscape as time, and the ways movement and decay affect our spatial and psychological construction of imagery. The title refers to the latent potential in plants to obtain energy from and grow toward sources of light. Goedde’s research brings her to ruins in the American southwest, as well as the southeast and other locations where natural disaster or change has inscribed new areas of settlement; the use of building materials reflects the poverty of the inhabitants, who build over unstable ground or water.  By studying the structures built by the very people living within them, and communities that exist together with available resources under local shelters, Goedde finds re-invented stories of creation, patterns of building and natural occurrences of life. She literally constructs her experience by, as she explains, “building a house around myself.” On a more formal level, her pieces often reference the structure of Chinese scroll painting as presence and void, of the painter’s movement across a landscape and the time passed during a journey between places. In this new installation where changes in daylight, pattern and perspective bring forth new spatial experience, the artist’s work re-inscribes our memory with embodied knowledge of the built environment.

Beka Goedde (b. 1982, Seattle) studies the concept of the landscape as a time-frame and movement as the natural decay of structural material. She received her BA from Columbia University, Barnard College, in 2004, with a concentration in behavioral neuroscience and philosophy. Her thesis work focused on the sense of touch, specifically a non-dualist way of conceiving of the space of one’s body and the space surrounding oneself, on both a phenomenal and neurophysiological level. Goedde’s work has been exhibited in New York at the International Print Center, Cheim & Read, Glowlab and Leo Kesting Gallery. Her work is included in numerous private collections, including the Beth Rudin DeWoody collection.

Glowlab is an innovative art gallery and creative catalyst located in New York, collaborating with and presenting the work of artists exploring the convergence of art, technology and the urban environment.

Gail Albert Halaban @ Mann Gallery, through March 28

Gail Albert Halaban

Out My Window
February 5 – March 28, 2009
Robert Mann Gallery

In her latest series, Out My Window, Gail Albert Halaban has ventured into the private spaces of New York City, photographing its inhabitants and the views that define their lives. In a world framed by windows, there is both an intimacy and remoteness in the proximity of so many strangers. Though the archetype of the photographer training her lens on her neighbor is easily associated with the voyeurism of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the experience Albert Halaban records is far less menacing. In as much as we are aware of our display, the city is also on display to us. Window and camera are inextricably bound in the framing of a world.

New York is iconically identified with the view, and particularly the skyline—those swathes of horizon and bands of light pierced by familiar skyscrapers. But as often as not, the everyday life of New Yorkers is visually defined not by these icons, but rather the more quotidian views of each other’s private spaces: the couple across the air shaft, the professional across the street. Proximity both highlights and abolishes such boundaries. Floating thirty stories high above the bustling city below, there is a comfort seeing one’s neighbor. They are strangers perhaps only in the sense that they may not know each other’s names. Though a word may never be spoken between the two, there is an indelible connection offered by a shared, reciprocal view. While adopting the visual language of photojournalism and its anthropological approach, Albert Halaban also finds precedence in the characters of Edward Hopper’s universe, using architecture to suggest the inner psychology of her subject and the subtle interactions of urban life. As with her earlier bodies of work, Albert Halaban has delved into the lives of her subjects, narrating their anxieties and desires through the small gestures, habits, and minor events that make up the rhythm of their lives.

Out My Window is Gail Albert Halaban’s second solo exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery. The project was created for her Photo Urbanism fellowship, an ongoing program of the Design Trust for Public Space to encourage the examination and re-imaging of New York’s public spaces through photography. Albert Halaban’s work has been reviewed and featured in publications including Aperture, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. The artist attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, and Yale University, from which she received a Master of Fine Arts in Photography. Out My Window is co-sponsored by the Design Trust for Public Space (designtrust.org).

Paul Sharits @ Greene Naftali, Through March 21

Paul Sharits
Greene Naftali
508 West 26th Street

Greene Naftali is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Paul Sharits (1943-1993). Widely known for his structural films, Sharits pioneered the use of multiple projectors, infinite film loops, experimental soundtracks, and interventions at the level of the filmstrip in order to realize his elemental mode of cinematic presentation. Sharits was widely acknowledged during his lifetime, with shows at the Bykert Gallery, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Walker Art Center among other institutions, and has been posthumously exhibited at the Whitney Museum, MoMA, and Birchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York. Trained initially as a painter, and a prolific theoretical writer, Sharits’ art-making was in fact wide-ranging, evidenced by his early involvement with Fluxus artists in New York. His many works on paper—from diagrams to abstract film scores, fashion drawings, and hallucinogenic illustrations—have yet to be fully integrated into his better-known body of work. For this exhibition, Greene Naftali will present a selection of these drawings and will debut the restored four-projector “locational” film installation, Shutter Interface (1975), whose two-screen version was realized for the Whitney Museum’s seminal Into the Light exhibition organized by Chrissie Iles in 2001.

Shutter Interface is a room installation that consists of four projectors placed side-by-side on large black pedestals. Their projections partially overlap, so effecting live color mixing, and creating a horizontal flood of changing hues on an infinite loop. Each filmstrip is made up of consecutive frames of solid colors punctuated by single frames of black. The pulsing flashes and disappearances of frames create optical aftereffects and sensations of horizontal currents—an environment that Sharits likened to watching “fireflies or water flowing over a dam—something that’s moving. A fire or candle flame—it’s shifting—but it doesn’t change its form dramatically.” High frequency tones are emitted from the four films’ soundtracks, echoing each appearance of the black frames, so imitating and calling attention to the shutter—a revolving wheel that separates moments of illumination and darkness as the film runs through the projector. Sharits so presents a filmic metaphor for a mechanical element normally eclipsed by the illusion of cinema.

A second gallery presents a wide array of works on paper that display Sharits’ at once intuitive and calculated process. A pairing of the practical with the fantastical (as in his fashion drawings of the early 1990’s) and of mathematically specific formulas with expansive ideals (as in his scores or meditations on Mayan and Aztec monuments) bears Sharits’ metaphorical process. By making a “specimen” of his medium, dealing with the mechanics of light, color, and film to allow room for his audience to perceive meaning, Sharits exhibits his democratic understanding of his own artistic practice: “I am not a ‘filmmaker,’ I am an artist researching the relationship between human consciousness and communication behavior and cinematic reality; I don’t want to hide anything—everything which is part of the conceiving/making of the work should be realized aesthetically and in manners which address themselves to other beings.”

Shutter Interface is a co-presentation of Greene Naftali and Anthology Film Archives, New York and was preserved from the original materials in Anthology’s collection. This exhibition has been possible through the close collaboration of Christopher Sharits/The Estate of Paul Sharits and Anthology Film Archives.

Jenny Holzer: Project Protect @ Whitney, March 12

Jenny Holzer
Whitney Museum
March 12 –> ?

Jenny Holzer’s pioneering approach to language as a carrier of content and her use of nontraditional media and public settings as vehicles for that content make her one of the most interesting and significant artists working today. Alternating between fact and fiction, the public and the private, the universal and the particular, Holzer’s work offers an incisive social and psychological portrait of our times.

This fifteen-year survey exhibition was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Fondation Beyeler, Basel, and is curated by Elizabeth Smith with the participation of Dr. Philippe Büttner.