What's up for four more days..

Lots of good shows but I hope to get back to this next week, as I'll be offline again for a few days. just what's ending..

Piri' Miri Muli' readers venturing to guess I prefer Helen Lundeberg's Surrealist period to her later minimalist works find me predictable again - these are representational Western US motifs influenced by O'Keefe, bu t well worth a visit at 540 27.

Ernesto Neto's theme is that we wouldn't be here but for the serpent in Eden and the fall of man, illustrated by textile works for which you have to take off your shoes, but my the time I had tied mine back on I realized that my ski cap was missing on a cold day, but for some reason I felt the need to visit the second floor with my shoes on before removing them against to find, as I suspected , that my hat was knocked off by the exit from the duct of yarn. 521 21st..  near Eggleston photos from the 80s at 537 20th.



Nolan Gallery's copy suggesting Jonathan Meese 'seeks to adopt ideological symbols and empty them of meaning' fits too smoothly into the flow of Postmodernnism for my tastes. But what's not to like - there's a John Wayne themed enclosure (above) + a Western themed diorama for Americans strollers to derive self satisfaction from - and some of the Meesian poetic oeuvre is on display (527 29). I don't generally upload the same video twice but sometimes I can never get enough..

Picasso's family portraits at 976 Madison. On the third floor next door, if you missed Hauser and Wirth's recent presentation of Mike Kelley's Kandor series Venus has a similar show. H&W uptown has moved on to Kelley's Memory Wares, downtown they proffer Kelly chum Paul McCarthy in what appears to be a drive through dilapidated Orlando theme parks, and perhaps the best and most timely show in town: Guston's Nixon series (right) started soon after he switched to figuration.

Mr. Yau wants "to believe that this is the beginning of the art world’s real and enduring appreciation of Brenda Goodman’s hard-won achievement".. there's three of her canvases at 58 Bogart in Bushwick which inspired my own curiosity. Near there definitely make time - I think it runs 20 hours or so - for Ragnar Kjartansson's four channel adaptation of Halldór Laxness' World Light, which I hope to type more about.. also showing in DC til Jan 8 along with his video where the sings the line 'sorrow conquers happiness' over and over to a twelve piece jazz band (quite a good musical composition).

I have been offline..

Premier Kosygin and President Johnson

la ent

ran

able
tran

sp
are

ñ

cia







“..some people asked.. ‘Why didn’t they send a plane?’ 3:3 There are people incapable of understanding that some things can be done, and some things can’t be done. 3:4 There are things that are not real. 3:5 There are things that come from someone’s imagination. 3:6 In one’s imagination, I can take off and leave our planetary system, and roam around who-knows-where, in the infinity of space. 3:7 But that’s not possible in reality, at least not in the present time.”

he
r

ma
no

s y
her

man
as

.....

Pilger

What's up for a few more hours v. XIV

Two weeks ago I thought I had fixed my computer and reflected on the quaint, pastoral joys of having been offline, until I realized after a day that I hadn't fixed my computer, but the second phase has been even more full of usefulness and reverie, especially as I don't follow the minutiae of Killary Versus Don (Deport) Juan (as much).  It would however be uncharacteristic of Piri' Miri Muli' not to note the many shows ending this week or thereafter, here at the community library,

especially uncharacteristic not to note a room full of George Groszes ending today (David Nolan 527 29) including works from Gott Mit Uns and replete with a selection of more recent artists in a similar vein, like Martha Rosler's photocollage (above) of male models descending on an Iraqi village, a corrugated steel construction by Ian Hamilton Finlay ("The revolution is frozen, all principles are weakened.."), an Immendorff from the Café Deutschland series, two Nancy Speros from the 60s, Rivera, Rauchenberg, Abramovic, and two works by Sandra Vasquez de la Horra who shows there.

Two blocks south, it's the last day to see a retrospective of Carol Rama "censored as obscene by the Italian government in 1945" at 514 26.  Also on 26th, Walther's new group show of African photos includes three videos by Simon Gush on John Calvin and "by extension, the concept of 'work ethic' that spread from Protestant Europe to South Africa and became part of apartheid ideology" (526 26 suite 718).  On 25th, Lynda Benglis' paper and aluminum works are ending today (547 25).  Across from the Big Black Baselitzes up for another week (522 21) you can get free Turkish style yogurt after looking at carpets inspired by Mayakovsky drawings.

Between those at 547 27 til Oct 26 Alex Webb's color photos from Mexico culled from thirty years there take the ironic juxtaposition route, including one from 1979 Boquillas del Carmen with a boy jumping high enough against a rural, sun soaked building he looks like he's flying, with two silhouettes of birds nearby, a cross, the name of the building 'Juarez School,' a gate framing the picture, and the shadow of a tree.  That's just one of three (and counting) shows of Mexican photos in town - Throckmorton (145 57 3rd floor) has 60 works by Hector Garcia, including a portrait of Orozco with only his hand in focus, and last but not least a retrospective of Kati Horna at the Americas Society (680 Park), which despite the curators making tactical critiques and historically inaccurate statements about the CNT in Barcelona during the civil war to please the hosting organization, a caption to Leonora Carrington's wedding photo that does not identify Benjamin Peret standing squarely in the middle, is nonetheless with copies of the Catalan publications, documentation of a stage set by Alberto Gironella, and an essay of Carrington posing as a necrophiliac, not a gift horse to look in the mouth.

The recent black in abstraction show got me into Oscar Murillo's recent graphite works on paper and there's a wonderful example (above) in his show ending today (525-533 19th), plus a sculptural installation, a family scrapbook with drawings you can page through, and a room of his large scale oil on linen and canvas works taking up themes of globalization. Your humble correspondent stumbled into Oscar the day after the opening 'A few years ago when you were getting people angry, I liked it. We exist.'

If you're downtown you have through Sunday to see Alex Prager's La Grande Sortie about a dancer trying to please herself. At some point in the next two weeks a visit to Victor Burgin's UK76, (below) forty years after its creation but no less relevant, is highly recommended (99 Bowery 2nd floor).  Slought in Philly has a Burgin show ending the same time (4017 Walnut).

Julie Mehretu's two story show at 24 57th 4th floor is up til the 29th. The gallery notes "evidence of an evolved vocabulary of abstraction.. a gestural force unseen in her work before."  It seems a mishmash of Matta's layering, figurative elements that look like Guston, and Twombly - that is, she has for the moment traded her signature style for large, expensive apprentice works, which I find admirable in a way. The Damascus-themed photogravure and etching in the third floor project room is more in keeping with the old Julie and the strongest work in the show, as she has otherwise decided to get worse to get better which may lead to an unforeseen payoff.  Also down the hall on the 3rd floor is a Man Ray retrospective.  Gagosian uptown has in the book store Sally Mann photos of Twombly's studio in its last years, but if you stare straight ahead there's a Mark Strand poem.  Also near there it's the last day to screen Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart without the soundtrack at Buchholz' Douglas Crimp tribute. (17 82nd).

What's up for three more days

A note that London's Lisson Gallery has opened an outpost on 24th St and in what I believe is their second show there at no. 504 through Saturday screens two of Ghanese documentarian John Akomfah's 2016 multiscreen projections, totaling a bit under two hours, about which he's confirmed the influence of Angelopoulis and Kubrick's photography of humans and beasts. The time image of both directors is compressed and scattered: in Kubrick's case, with 2001's primate and the astronaut in successive shots in the slightly longer three screen The Airport, filmed in an abandoned airport in Greece and on a pedestal overlooking the Parthenon over Athens, recalling Godard's visual citation of Greek theater in Film Socialisme.  Voice overs of episodes of Greek history chronicle the modern nation's interactions with colonizers by war and finance, but omits its turbulent internal politics in what appears to be in keeping with Akomfah's subject matter derived from his perch in the Brexit-era empire he emigrated to.  The soundtrack reminds me of Cage's Europera but with the obligatory mixing in of Arvo Pärt excerpts.  Acts of Faith on two screens intersperses the landscape of Barbados with actors dressed as religious migrants and freed slaves. Nearby Tina Kim's group show has a wonderful Anselm Kiefer in the back til the end of the month (525 West 21st Street), a Paul Outerbridge retrospective til Sept 17 at 535 24th, and Robert Mann at 525 West 26th has for sale a print of Cartier-Bresson's On the Banks of the Marne (below), various Harry Callahans and other summer beach fare til August 19.

orr
or
s plat

e
do
nations

pl
at
form

What's up for two more days

"The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”
- Andrey Tarkovsky

Martha Rosler adorns the wall with Peter Marcuse's "Homelessness exists not because the housing system is not working but because of the way it works" in her update on the gentrification theme explored the world over by artists that she first took up at Dia in 1989, through Saturday at Michell-Innis & Nash 534 W 26th Street, across the street from the construction site of Zaha Hadid's "39 generous loft-like residences.. each with the artist’s signature mark woven into the design" from $4.9M to $50M (right).  The focus is on community struggles but it also brings clarity to some of the problems of how art is experienced nowadays, mapping the NYC Metro galleries and displaying photos of art communities in China, including townhouses surrounding a smaller Eiffel Tower and an island replicating Hallstatt.  A day can be spent there watching videos and making use of the library and computer programs.

"Bakasura, the Crane Demon, Disgorges Krishna," Bhagavata Purana, ca. 1680, in Met show

Previously noted, highly recommended: Terrence Koh extended til July 29 at 212 Bowery; Bruce Conner til July 15 at 521 W 21st Street, Sigmar Polke at Zwirner 20th St extended til July 22, Asger Jorn extended til July 29 at 35 E 67th Street, Unifinished at the Met Breuer til Sept 4.  Conner's show at MoMA is open as is a new Dada exhibition.  Also Michael Werner now has AR Penck's work before he first showed at Werner Cologne in 1969 (4 e 77th til Sept 3), Punjabi and Rajistani paintings at the Met til Sept 12, Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, and Ghada Amer headline 'Women Look at Men' at 547 w 25th til Sept 2, and Rabin Mondal, about whom the shorthand 'the Bengali Francis Bacon' inevitably and imperfectly comes to mind is at DAG Modern 41 e 57th 7th floor til Sept 3.

Rabin Mondal, King as Manipulator, 1976

Oscar Aguilar Ramírez, 25, Andrés Sanabria García, 23, Anselmo Cruz Aquino, 33, Yalit Jiménez Santiago, 28, Oscar Nicolás Santiago, Omar González Santiago, 22, Antonio Perez García, and Jesús Cadena Sánchez, 19

The 2006 protests in Oaxaca.. were precipitated by the misappropriation of 920 million US$ of the state's public funds and extremely underfunded schools..

..from Televisa, the people who brought you the Enrique Peña Nieto serial..

"By cozying up to this new face of reaction in the region, Obama sends a clear message.."

re: Dubuffet show: Will to Power ( Volonté de puissance ) could be released from the Guggenheim storage every election year, or saved especially for this one..

What's up

Lelong in Chelsea affords the opportunity to see works by Cuban Cubist Amelia Peláez but Gary Nader has, I'm certain, the best overview of Cuban art in town, up for a few more days (less certain), at 24 w 57, including a José Bedia depicting St Lazarus who is likened on the island to Babalú Aye, a Yoruba orisha, surrounded by soldiers and artillery of an unknown army; a Wifredo Lam, Manuel Mendive, and many others. There are actually two Mendives up in the hallway where people line up for performances at the Rubin (to follow up a wonderful room of recent works at Robert Miller a few months ago), and the actual lines there can enact the indifference to one of Cuba's most famous living painters in the US ushered in by the anti-Castro exiles, but there is no such indifference for the maestro babalao here at Piri' Miri Muli'! An NYU site has a 14 minute clip of one his Havana processions and this one has additional footage:


1.2  (2012 Biennial, M) Manuel Mendive’s 100 bare-naked ladies (‘Las Cabezas’) from CubaAbsolutely on Vimeo.

Speaking of processions, Terrence Koh dreamed of a bee chapel and recreated it at 212 Bowery til July 1; this figure was carried to the opening:

..whle Mario Merz is at 257 Bowery. Back at the Gary Nader elevator, Gerhard Richter's show is all abstract, including drawings, save for paint squeegeed onto photographs of landscapes and gallery interiors, similar to G. Richters seen before. I just saw the dvd where a historian said he 'grew up' as a painter in 1985 (when his work gets more repetitive, self-satisfied and expensive) and he has a scale model of Goodman gallery to better decorate with a track record.

Fazal Sheikh's 'Independence | Nakba' pairs Israeli faces with those of Palestinians of the same age, and there's early James Turrells there.  DAG's Masterpieces of Indian Modern Art has a Avenash Chandra canvas of the Himalayan Raj resort Shimla to go with several Husains (right) and Souzas. Throckmorton has stone sculptures from the State of Guerrero. Through June 6 MoMA has a Jean-Marie Straub/ Danièle Huillet extravaganza consisting of the pair's prolific Brechtian readers theater style films, for those who complain about fast cutting, of Kafka, Duras, Mallarmé, Hölderlin etc.. a related show is at 88 Eldridge.  After visiting Ubu (currently featuring George Hugnet) the Hungarian woman at Andre's assured me that the cheese in the Danish (Kierkegaard's vice) was the same as in the strudels. "You wouldn't make it if it wasn't good." "I would make it but I wouldn't sell it." Life outside writing!

The influence of Giacometti can be seen in several outposts of the Upper East Side, with a quite enjoyable retrospective of Fausto Melotti which also seems to quote the sculpture of Miro and Ernst, and Cesar in Context which makes the point more directly with a sketch by the bambino from Stampa.  A few Asger Jorns can be seen nearby.  Nahmad's claim to have 'some of the most seminal' Basquiats up can be ignored but the textual theme extends to a tribute to William S. Burroughs. Werner has "the first comprehensive showing in New York" of Allen Jones, breaking a good streak the city had.  Acquavella has two floors of early Dubuffets til June 10 (best gallery show in town, near Titians at Met Breuer) including several portraits of French cultural figures.  Next door, Eric Fischl seems to be riffing Tim Eitel's large canvases of gallery goers from a decade ago but fellow Leipziger Christoph Ruckhäberle, who studied in California, seems to have riffed off Fischl a bit.

The Met Breuer's Unfinished show saves you the trip to the Eastern Czech Republic to see Titian's "The Flaying of Marsyas", Iris Murdoch's favorite painting, ("something to do with human life and all its ambiguities and all its horrors and terrors and misery, and at the same time there’s something beautiful, the picture is beautiful, and something also to do with the entry of the spiritual into the human situation and the closeness of the gods … I regard Dionysus in a sense as a part of Apollo’s mind … and want to exalt Apollo as a god who is a terrible god, but also a great artist and thinker and a great source of life”), and has several other major Titians to go with a bounty of old masters.  It's also quite a nice building once you get the Whitney out of there.  I recently visited Breuer's Central Library in Atlanta, much hated by locals and filled with edgy lumpenproles (who graciously didn't descend the spiraling central stairwell nude) and the occasional crusty librarian, characteristically poorly maintained and not stocking a book on Breuer. That, MLK's grave and the playground by Noguchi makes for its own sort of day.

Met curator John S. Guy first found out about the early 18C wooden ceremonial masks from Tamil Nadu on display until June 5 when he was at the Victoria and Albert Museum over a decade ago and after asking around and checking all the museums in India, concluded that no similar relics, typically destroyed after the ritual, existed anywhere. The owner turned down his offer then, having previously listed them at a pittance at a gallery and not finding a buyer.  The recent acquistiions include a Ganesha with a flexible trunk and a Narasimha, the lion avatar of Vishnu, with flexible arms for the dancer to tear out Hiranhakashipu's entrails (left). A room of Turners combines whaling oils culled solely from their collection and the Tate's and features Melville's handwritten citation of Turner in one of his books; one should visit Melville's personal effects in the Pittsfield, MA library if around those parts.

Back at Chelsea, a highlight is Jorinde Voigt's Jungian works on paper (527 29th), as well as Zwirner's huge travel-related Sigmar Polke feature where Jordon Wolfson's installation and Luc Tuymans can also be beheld. Anish Kapoor works out his admiration for Paul Thek from his school days at 515 24th while at 530 21 he seems to be gunning for a Rome commission after London and Chicago have been nailed down, Bruce Conner has Christian tapestries at 521 21th, Mike Kelley mostly sticks to secular themes at 530 21st, Thornton Dial paintings at 519 24th, more early Turrell at 534 West 25th.

Notes to April poems

Late this summer I will confront Riopelle's statue again, beside the Palais des congrès which though convening no congress was I believe on Shelley's mind when he wrote "the world is the provincial legislature of the poem" or was that Byron? and I will imagine it admonishing "a mass of references" about the above/ below at which time I will invoke my recurring villains: deadlines and Tom Eliot.  The second time I did this Silliman posted turkeys on his blog on April 1, which got me googling to Charles Bernstein's essay from 1999 which I read for the first time that day.  I decided I had written the first poem and had to finish up, and didn't do it for five years afterwards.  Thanks to Maureen Thorson for creating the stunt.  The first of the three series is here.

4-3 Julia Ward Howe "Battle Hymn of the Republic"; 4-6 Joyce, Finnegans Wake if you didn't get that far; 4-9 Obama, then Sanders; 4-10 A Midsummer Nights' Dream, Act 2 Scene 1; 4-12 Ramayana; 4-13 Verne's Rayon Vert; 4-14 Nilamata Purana; 4-15 Rig Veda; 4-18 Pound's Canto 74; 4-25 Chaucer's "Legend of Ariadne''; 4-29 Mallarme's Throw of the Dice crossed out by Broodthaers.

dawn y
ou t
ake it

fro
m w
ho y

ou were, wh
o won't ne
ed it

'faux man
o
ir

tout de suite é
vapor
é en

brumes
qui impos
a une born

e à l'in
fin
i'

o
r w

hen
horace

w
al

pole
wake

s you up f
or gas m

one
y

After a silence
The conjurer tells me
Which face is mine
I am proud of my chickens

our
me
la

n
chola
i d

if
furs
but t

hat
one
's ours

'-ret
urn
e a

noon, F
o
l

wing
awa
y th th

read' c
hauce
r run,

net
h over
a ko

ra o
ver

desc
end,ing
cup

c
anoni

c
al haig

io
graph

ic
mikh

a
il ki

l
led by

an
im

i
tator

chica
go
sun

time
s st

one c
ir
cle


(for 4/23; will be offline a couple days)

he
ll

o

ray o
ver


(for 4/22)

fly,ing
hear
t hat
drop

for
m an
d con

tent
ur
anal

ysis
fly,ing
cup

citizen
s un
it

ed e
no
ugh

a
bout
me

oxen, s
tone
eye
s carved

I don’t know how nature stands it
with a body at its center
without one

n
ox an
i
mae, grass

home
r thy m
olar

s the m
oral

major
it
y

ma
chine
s o

f sen
time
nt

flame of m
it
h

ra o
ver

dawn's m
irr
or

cuck
oo sing
s to ligh

t th
flame
tree

rayo
n vert

in t
he jule

s
ver

ne th
ey do

n't see
it but s

o
me

thing
else

wings o
f mount main
aka flee ind

ra o
ver

restless se
as, hanu
man sleeping

he
r su
n bo

at a
lex
and

er
ra o
ver

he
ar c
raft

hi
ll

o

f orest
es ta

les of
elect

ra o
ver

pale s
o

me

dew dr
ops

he
ll

o

i
an

s
pea

k l
ike

a nat
i

ve: "al
l op

ti
on

s are o
n th

e ta
ble

two s
lip

ped
on a

ban
an

a po
rt

sauce
r run,

net
h over

a void
place

fly,ing
cup

ass-
who

le-cul-d
e-sa

c-up
on-pl

astic
-fant

astic
-bag

mine
e

yes
ha

ve see
n th

e go
uging

w
hat

no on
e cho

kes on do
es

n'
t ex

is
t

en
nu

i
w

hen
ben

j
o

n
son

ha
s a

ll yr
8

tr
ax

En
gl

is
h

What's up

Opening Friday for a month at Zwirner is Stan Douglas' one hour, six channel film setting Conrad's Secret Agent to the sectarian violence in the period between the Portuguese Carnation Revolution and the ratification of their new constitution.

Someone uploaded Douglas' Monodramas, which "interrupted the usual flow of advertising and entertainment when broadcast nightly in British Columbia for three weeks in 1992... When the videos were aired unannounced during commercial breaks, viewers called the station to inquire about what was being sold.."

As Thaipusam was last month, I had heard this Tamil song for Murugum on the radio a while back and was much taken by its percussion parts. The DJ had taken the song from Youtube..



The Mahabharata says Murugum was a son of the Pleiades, the sisters whom the ancient Greeks thought Orion pursues through the winter sky. It would seem mythologies relating to the constellation developed independently in Mesoamerican, Bronze Age Celtic, and other ancient cultures, and the constellation was important to Mediterranean navigation, but I wonder if the importance of the sisters to Alexandrian poetry had anything to do with their empire's wanderings to the Ganges. The Balinese percussion that partially inspired Xenakis' Pléïades, like the observance of the constellation, predated the arrival of Hindu narratives there..



In Tantrism the hunter chases Shakti through the universe until sound and speech transcends thought and intuition to attain 'the transcendental level called para-vac, or "supreme speech," which is Shakti in perfect union with Shiva' (Feuerstein). These vocals backed only by percussion from last year's Thaipusam in Singapore sound good played at the same time as the Pléïades.

Diego Velázquez, Kitchen Scene, 1618/20

"If we fiddle with shadows and ignore the forms, we do not realize that forms are the roots of the shadows.. To try to head for nirvana by getting rid of affectations is like removing forms to look for shadows.. So we know illusion and enlightenment are one road.." (Layman Hsiang, 6thC)

Tuesday, Wednesday..

What's up

I forgot to mention Tabor de Nagy's presentation of Jess Collins' Ernst-inspired collages as well as quite a few paintings (thumbnails) while a committee struggles to preserve his murals in the Berkeley house once owned by Pauline Kael. The show includes movie posters he made for Kael's repertory, of movies I mostly don't care for save for Renoir's Golden Coach and The River...

..and speaking of movies, DC's Smithsonian American will remain even more Smithsonian til around the end of March, screening the 1970 Robert Smithson/ Nancy Holt 32 minute Spiral Jetty: The Movie on a loop wherein he discloses that he perceives the sun to be a labyrinth, only excerpted online:

What's up

I have enjoyed PS1's Greater New York in the past, full of inspired, original artists I have no recollection of seeing later in a gallery, but this one (til March 7) has rooms of fashion design to go with the other galleries discerning what is fashionable, my first visit there since the Dutch-curated Mike Kelley show.  Local history enthusiasts can play the 'Which Whitney Biennial does this most resemble' game.  Yesterday it helped me reiterate how the flyover assemblage of intersections of ethnic kitsch (Kiosk) and repetitive* commentary on it (Liene Bosquê) contrasts with the therapeutic bricolage of the Ecuadoran botánicas in Little Guayaquil when you get off at 103rd where..

..Zhang Hongtu is up one more day and a few hours at Queens Museum.  Propitiously he has beckoned to the wall space of Asian-themed dining rooms in Long Island with pastiches of post-impressionists painting Chinese landscapes to go with his riffs on Picasso, Lichtenstein, Baselitz, Baldessari etc painting Mao, against whom his all-encompassing anger cannot be appreciated by Americans even as it is welcomed by some collectors and not others.  Graham Greene's critique of the aesthetics of revenge doesn't appeal to this former Party member. His "Kim Chi Chanel," (right) evokes my memory of accidently organizing the car trunk so someone's wardrobe smelled of it, but the period that interests me is when he first came to the US, took classes where he was encouraged to pick any brush stroke and color palette he wanted and express his inner feelings, leading to a room here of ambitiously brutal psychological self-portraits by a master painter.

Regina Silveira describes her symbol of imaginary frogs (below) being absorbed by a real metal grate, a floor above her latest poetry collaboration, as awakening its descendants to "improbable and extraordinary happenings, as well as openings for the territory which can give rise to invasions and irruptions of every sort," til March 28.

 * In the highly Piri' Miri Muli' recommended Broodthaers show, his first use of ethnic kitsch (below) was (1) in 1964, after CoBrA had gone first; (2) an unflinching critique of Belgian colonialism, after the anti-nationalist Québécois Borduas had painted his final works in black and white. MoMA's contemporary selections til April 10 go in the direction of the international and political, mostly with what I regard as misses to go with the showstoppers: a decade-old Nalini Malani screen projection contemplating Western symbolism in the nuclear age, and Alfredo Jaar relating in 2002 the visual impairment of Mandela after his prison tenure to media coverage of the Afghan war.

'Le problème noir en Belgique'

"- aren't the birds frozen Socialists.."
Aren't the Socialists frozen birds?

What's up

Today is the last day of Lari Pittman's NUEVOS CAPRICHOS series (left) at 530 w 21 St Gladstone, which, like his past shows (I, II) is well worth checking out if you haven't - these augment the Goya theme with cel vinyl calligraphy of Emily Dickenson's pain poems, by someone who suffered near fatal gunshot wounds a while back.  They also have Marisa Merz up for another week at 130 e 64.  

Update: Forgot to mention the Dzama and Pettibon show at Zwirner another week, featuring the likenesses of James Joyce, David Bowie and Dzama's Flower of Evil trailer. Also, Lelong at 528 w 26 has two large Ana Mendieta projections and other works of hers another month and a half.

Sundaram Tagore's group show at 547 West 27 has five Sohan Qadris spread around for another two weeks, with Mickalene Thomas' Haitian and Diana Ross-themed photo portraits upstairs at Aperture.  Tagore's Steve McCurry show is up for two more weeks in Singapore, but New Yorkers can check out his photos of India at the Rubin til April 4, ending a day after Philly's photography of India show.

Valentine's Day brings Marcel Broodthaers at MoMA to go with his Écriture show at Michael Werner 4 e77.  Werner's gifts to the Phillips are up another two months, with two politically symbolic Immendorfs.  Also in DC the Hirshhorn's Surrealism and Sculpture show ends Sunday, Louise Bourgeois (below) has a room at the NGA, and there's quite a long line in front of the Renwick for their new installations. Darren Waterston's state-approved, art historical referencing vandalism of Whistler's decor led to a morning exchange..
Guard: Did you do this?
Ian: ..hmm..
G: You'll have to come with me.
I: (2nd guard enters) I can take you both. (leaving) Have you used that line before?
G: It works on smaller guys.

onto NH..

May be dusting off WKMA a little on 2016 US Presidential and other preoccupations..

Recent musical deaths

I've been listening to Alfredo "Chocolate" Armenteros, the Cuban trumpeter who played for Arsenio Rodriguez, Conjunto Chappottín, Benny Moré, etc. and just passed away at the age of 88, for a couple of years now after someone here finally told me to.. "La Brocha" is currently my favorite with him as a band leader..



Posts on Boulez here and here.. hopefully more to come including a longwinded draft I wrote after an irritating review of another composer's concert a while back and something else.. + Paul Bley if you haven't heard.

Update: + Mr Bowie 





my favorite Bowie song