Deconstructing Cinema in Order to Reveal It : Manohla Dargis on Ken Jacobs
That evening, after some conversation and homemade sorbet, I watched a world of wonders unfold on a screen hanging from the ceiling. As the recorded sounds of city traffic and a distant voice filled the air, sharply etched black-and-white geometric shapes of undecipherable provenance begin to rotate on screen first right, then left and back, creating what looked like shifting whirlpools. Parts of the image pulsed and eased in and out of focus. I thought I was looking at oil on water, flowing lava, lichen, dying embers or a reference to 9/11, which had happened five blocks away. My eyes searched for something familiar. I tried to grasp the story. My eyes started watering, less from emotion than strain.
“I have no idea what I’m watching,” I scribbled into my notebook. I was more right than I knew.
What I watched was beautiful, hypnotic, mysterious and as close to a representation of three-dimensional imagery as I’ve ever seen without wearing funny glasses. It was pure cinema. As it happens, it was so pure that no celluloid had threaded its way through a projector. I hadn’t been watching a film, after all, or digital images, only light and shadow. Using an illusion machine of his own invention that he calls the Nervous Magic Lantern — an apparatus containing a spinning shutter, a light and lenses that he hides behind a black curtain when he isn’t performing what he calls “live cinema” — he had taken the experience of watching moving images back to its origins. We weren’t watching shadows on the cave wall, but we were close.” Read the rest here.
At MoMA, ‘Permanent’ Learns to Be Flexible: Ted Loos profiles chief curator Ann Temkin
“It was convention to have the frames,” Ann Temkin explained recently as she walked around the gallery and stopped in front of Kline’s “Painting Number 2” (1954). That convention, Ms. Temkin felt, had domesticated the paintings in a way that obscured how radical they were, what a “profound break with the past,” and last fall she ordered the frames removed in one of her first acts as the Modern’s new chief curator of painting and sculpture.
“Now these strokes explode off the canvas,” she said happily, pointing to Kline’s signature black slashes. “It has a freedom now.”
In the year and two months since she succeeded John Elderfield in the job, Ms. Temkin, 49, has been working to break with the past herself — most surprisingly, perhaps, in her approach to the so-called permanent collection. Ranging from van Gogh’s “Starry Night” (1889) and Matisse’s “Dance (I)” (1909) to de Kooning’s frenzied “Woman, I” (1950-52) and Andy Warhol’s “Gold Marilyn Monroe” (1962), this collection — or rather a selection from it that has been on view for decades — has done more than any other to define modern art and shape the public’s understanding of its history. The 26 rooms of the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Painting and Sculpture Galleries, which have housed these highlights of the collection on the fourth and fifth floors of the Modern’s “new” building since it opened in 2004, might reasonably be regarded as sacrosanct: the heart of the museum and of modern art generally.
But under Ms. Temkin, the permanent collection display is quickly becoming less permanent. Galleries that once changed only when works were loaned out are now subject to frequent renewal. For the first time, media other than painting and sculpture appear frequently throughout the Barr galleries. Artists who never quite made it into official “schools” are getting more play, and schools that the museum once passed up are getting pride of place.
Even small changes, like swapping out a single well-known artist for another, can make for major shifts in the museum’s familiar and stately narrative of modernism’s progress. The fourth floor, covering the early 1940s to the early 1970s, used to begin with Jackson Pollock’s “Stenographic Figure” (1942). Now Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture “Quarantania I” (1947-53) sets the tone for the entire era.” Read the rest here.
Creatively Committed to Cool: Gia Kourlas profiles coreographer Karole Armitage
“Choreography — even for someone as skilled as Ms. Armitage, who has been creating dances since the 1970s and was recently a Tony Award nominee for “Hair” — doesn’t get easier with experience. She described “Itutu,” which will be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starting Wednesday, as an African ballet and “one of the biggest challenges of my life.”
Part of the struggle has to do with the free-spirited sensibility of her musical collaborators. The production features music written and performed by the West African pop-electronica group Burkina Electric and the composer Lukas Ligeti, who is a member of the band.
“One day a song is five minutes, and the next day it’s eight minutes,” Ms. Armitage said. “And still to this day, they don’t understand how difficult that is for us. It’s kind of hilarious. But we’ve figured out this elaborate cuing system.”
“Itutu” translates as “cool” in Yoruba. For the work, which includes 15 dancers (11 from her company and 4 musician-dancers from Burkina Electric), Ms. Armitage was inspired by the art historian Robert Farris Thompson’s notion that itutu is related to the American aesthetic of cool.” Read the rest here.
of the new Mexican generation. This exhibition, the first-ever survey of Ortega’s work, will show the arc of his artistic output with a range of sculpture, installation, video, and photography. 
floor with works drawn from every department of The Museum of Modern Art. Exploring a cross section of art made during a period marked with revolution and socio-political tumult, this exhibition also will embrace five interventions by a current generation of artists whose work reflects the concerns of 1969 and brings the exhibition into the present. These younger artists will be given free reign to respond to the works on view and to the time period in general.
Mr. Crumb is known almost as much for his bawdy underground comix featuring characters like Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural as he is for “Crumb,” the 1994 documentary about him. But he has been driven less by his sexual impulses in recent years and more by the 45 minutes he spends in seated meditation every morning in the medieval town house he shares with his wife, Aline (they became grandparents this month), in the south of France.
devoted to the arts of the samurai. Arms and armor is the principal focus, bringing together the finest examples of armor, swords and sword mountings, archery equipment and firearms, equestrian equipment, banners, surcoats, and related accessories of rank such as fans and batons. Drawn entirely from public and private collections in Japan, the majority of objects date from the rise of the samurai in the late Heian period, ca. 1156, through the early modern Edo period, ending in 1868, when samurai culture was abolished. The martial skills and daily life of the samurai, their governing lords, the daimyo, and the ruling shoguns will also be evoked through the presence of painted scrolls and screens depicting battles and martial sports, castles, and portraits of individual warriors. The exhibition concludes with a related exhibition documenting the recent restoration in Japan of a selection of arms and armor from the Metropolitan Museum’s permanent collection. This is the first exhibition ever devoted to the subject of Japanese arms and armor conservation.
exhibition to be mounted on the west coast and the first in New York for more than twenty years. Arranged chronologically, it approaches Burchfield’s work with a new perspective facilitated in part by the curatorial sensibilities of Robert Gober. Working with Hammer coordinating curator Cynthia Burlingham, Gober has augmented a large selection of watercolors with the inclusion of extensive biographical material that continually infuses Burchfield’s own thoughts about his work and artistic practice. An obsessive collector, organizer, and archivist, Burchfield left a treasure trove of well-maintained sketches, notebooks, journals, and doodles spanning his entire career. This material is now part of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College, which houses more than twenty five thousand objects by this visionary American artist. The exhibition will travel to the Whitney Museum of America Art in New York and the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
proliferation of photo- and video-based work exploring the uses of style, image, and personal presentation.