New York City in miniature: located at the Queens Museum, the Panorama of the City of New York, originally built in 1964 for the World’s Fair, and since updated, is now a "9,335-square foot architectural model that includes every single building constructed before 1992 in all five boroughs.”
Wondering about the state of things in New York in early 2012? Scottish artist David Shrigley’s billboard How Are You Feeling?, on view in April from the converted railway tracks of the Highline Park in Chelsea, gave some candid answers.
The second of the New Museum’s “generationals,” or triennial surveys, titled “The Ungovernables,” brought together 34 young artists from outside the familiar Euro-American axis of art schools and galleries. On a street-level window facing the Bowery was Manila-based Gary-Ross Pastrano’s splattering of silver dust—a work that was easily mistaken for the city’s grime.
One of the five monitors comprising the Propeller Group’s TVC Communism (2011), a nearly six-hour-long video about a marketing company devising a re-branding of Communism, with Slavs & Tatar’s oversized rahlé (used to hold the Quran), PrayWay (2012), in the background.
A wall of scenes from everyday life by Beirut-based amateur artist and juice-shop vendor Bassam Ramwali—aka Monira al-Solh, working under her fictive alter-ego’s name—with little hand scrawled notes next to them explaining when and where they were made.
Part of “The Ungovernables” was a series of public forums and debates organized by the Tel Aviv-based group Public Movement about the possibility of establishing a “Birthright Palestine” tour for diaspora Palestinians, following the model used by Jews for “Birthright Israel” tours. Here, co-founder Dana Yahalomi introduces the final public session.
Down on the Lower East Side near Delancey Street, Istanbul-based nonprofit Protocinema rented a vacant office space for several weeks to show two videos by Ahmet Öğüt.
Along with the well-traveled Things We Count (2008), showing a field of abandoned military aircraft that Öğüt is counting outloud in Turkish, Kurdish and English, the second of Öğüt’s pieces, Oscar William Sam (2011) was made in Zucotti Park last November before the NYPD evicted residents of the Occupy Wall Street tent-city. In the video, he is pointing out people in the park, arbitrarily assigning them the most common American names.
Uptown at the Guggenheim, “Being Singular Plural” was curator Sandhini Poddar’s ambitious attempt to bring South Asian new-media practices to New York. Here, visitors interact with a Foley pit—used to record sound effects for films—that is part of Kabir Mohanty’s installation In Memory (2009/12), which mixes sounds from inside the gallery and outside the museum.
Desire Machine Collective’s four-channel video projection Nishan (2007– ) made from overlapping footage of a derelict apartment in Srinagar, Kashmir, at various times of the day.
Out in Long Island City, Queens, PS1, after being annexed by the Museum of Modern Art, was given an imposing concrete entrance, clashing with the visitor-friendly spaces of the former public school.
In one of PS1’s former classrooms was Rania Stephan’s installation of boxcovers from the sixty-odd films featuring Egyptian movie icon Soad Hosni (1943–2001), from which the artist appropriated footage that she used to create three-act drama that loosely mirrors the actor’s career and tragic death.
In the adjacent room was Stephan’s montaged film, The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011), commissioned for the 2011 Sharjah Biennial.
In Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, Queens, site of the 1964 World’s Fair, the enormous globe sits in an empty fountain basin, just outside the Queens Museum.
While the Queens Museum continues its renovations, it hosted a small version of its Queens International exhibition, which surveys young artists working in the borough—where almost half the residents are foreign-born, hence the “International” of the title. Here, Carmelle Safdie’s rubbings made from Jewish headstones.
Another of the artists featured in the Queens International, Palden Weinreb in his studio in Long Island City, explaining the difficulties of casting a pyramid in resin.
The Woodside home and studio of Tenzing Rigdol, a Tibetan poet and artist. He explained that he and his brother had to hoist this large canvas from 2004, seen here in the living room, through the window of his third-floor apartment, because it did not fit in the building’s elevator.
This MOCA is not a museum of contemporary art but the Museum of Chinese in America, located on Center Street, near Manhattan’s Chinatown, in a building renovated by artist-architect Maya Lin.
MOCA had organized a small show of Chinese-born photographers who have worked in America. Here in the foreground is an image by Hong Kong-born Tseng Kwong Chi (1950–90) of himself looking across the Grand Canyon, with delicate prints resembling color gradients by AAP’s photo editor Ann Woo in the background.
Historical photographs from MOCA’s collection were shown in small display cases underneath the contemporary images.
A room on the main floor was dedicated to the American media’s coverage of the Beijing and later Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
At MoMA, the Modernist mothership in midtown Manhattan, a display of works from the drawing and prints department defied the museum’s media-based categorizations to include New Zealand-born Len Lye’s 16-mm film projections made in 1979–80, during the last years of his life.
In the same exhibition, a visitor watches Simon Fujiwara’s video Artists’ Book Club: Hakuruberri Fuin non Monogatari (2010), in which the half-Japanese artist exaggerates aspects of both his Asian and European heritage in naively discussing the controversial usage of language in Mark Twain’s famous 19th-century novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Just outside the print room was the remnant of a performance by Nora Schultz and Ei Arakawa, in which over the course of successive days they bend a piece of stainless steel sheeting into a number from ten to zero. This looks like number 9.
On MoMA’s sixth floor, in “Print/Out,” a diverse and dynamic survey of artist books, prints of all varieties and manners of display, was a vitrine of Ai Weiwei’s publications and catalogs, with his ever-sanguine titles, such as “Fuck Off.” To the left are the aptly titled “Gray Cover Book” (1997) and “White Cover Book” (1995).
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 2008–2011 (the map of the land of feeling) I–III (2008–11), a scroll-like print featuring the unfolded length of the many pages of the globe-trotting artist’s passport. In front are remnants—including a rice-cooker full of rice and a backpack full of cooking suplies—from his cooking and camping activities.
