Benjamin H. Sutton: April 2008

"When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold" by Atmosphere

(Rhymesayers)

Over their recent albums (including the outstanding Strictly Leakage, free at rhymesayers.com) Minneapolis duo Atmosphere – producer Ant and MC Slug – have relentlessly re-made their brand of indie hip hop. On the two previous discs Ant has been the duo’s shape-shifter, his production working through contemporary rap staples into a funk-suffused golden era Heavy D-like style. His latest mutation features stripped melodic beats, with a small core of live instruments providing a backdrop for Slug.

The MC is more obviously the focus on When Life Gives You Lemons’ minimalist soundscapes (some tracks feature only one or two instruments), and Slug steps up accordingly. His voice is more musical, his cadence more varied, and his narratives continually subvert the conventions he’s set up over the years. “The Skinny,” for instance, stories a woman’s addiction to cigarettes as if she were an abused sex worker. Indeed, this album marks a shift towards adulthood, where alternating self-deprecation and boasting gave previous efforts the tinge of prolonged late-adolescence that’s all-too commonplace in rap today. So for example, “Yesterday” sounds like a ballad for an alienated friend (think 2Pac’s “I Ain’t Mad Atcha”), but turns out to be about the rapper’s recently-deceased father.

Parenthood is undoubtedly among the album’s main themes. Even more promising, though, is Slug’s feminism, which has been implicit in Atmosphere albums for a while, but now takes center stage. After all, the opener features the line “we made her drown in a lake full of patriarchy,” and roughly half the 15 tracks on When Life Gives You Lemons are about women or feature female protagonists. If this album’s not as immediately gratifying as Atmosphere’s previous work, it’s certainly more rewarding. And, after all, what musical genre needs a talented feminist voice more than hip hop?

A similar version of this review appears in the May 14 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Tamara Kostianovsky: Actus Reus

Black & White Gallery

Turning this Maritime Building gallery into a meatpacking plant for beef cuts made of tightly bound discarded clothing, the Israeli artist stages a critique of consumerism as exemplified in the manufacturing of garments and meat products. Familiar labels intimating sweatshop labor jut from simulated bovine innards hanging unceremoniously on meat hooks. The visceral violence of the meat imagery completely overpowers the DIY softness of the medium.

Closes 5/24.

This review will appear in the May 7 issue of The L Magazine.

Kim Simonsson: Invisible World

Nancy Margolis Gallery

The Finish sculptor’s set of characters culled from Saturday morning cartoons and Japanese anime become utterly trippy in these life-size incarnations (some are platinum-clad). For all their iconic cuteness, the emotions and subjects conveyed by these smoothed statues of young girls, animals and rabbit-eared cyborgs are surprisingly complex. Adolescent defiance and socialization emerge as recurring concerns in their alternately proud, humbled and mournful poses.

Closes 5/24.

This review will appear in the May 7 issue of The L Magazine.

Yoko Ono: touch me

Galerie Lelong

Ono’s first show in five years mixes conceptual art and audience participation, probing our embodiment. A panel series transcribes Ono’s life into a timeline of physical interventions on her body by mostly male (often medical) agents. The centerpiece is a wall of punctured fabric where viewers photograph body parts as contributions to the exhibition. The participatory format lets viewers contemplate their attitudes towards bodies alongside Ono’s.

Closes 5/31.

This review will appear in the May 7 issue of The L Magazine.

Yong Ho Ji: Mutant Mythos

Gana Art

Yong creates mythic creatures – fusing elements of Damien Hirst and Brian Jungen – by molding tire strips onto wooden frames. The undulating black surfaces evoke movement and life, making Yong’s threatening animals – a shark, jaguar, and room-sized spider are among the works here – exponentially more terrifying. Whether intentional or not, the gallery’s overpowering smell of rubber gives the impression of being in some terrifying monster’s layer – or our collective unconscious.

Closes 5/24.

This review will appear in the May 7 issue of The L Magazine.

Anne Hardy

Bellwether Gallery

A photographer for CSI fans, Hardy’s elaborately organized empty rooms are saturated with lights, colors, and signs of recent activity. Teasing our instinct to string causal chains where there may be none, Hardy even baits images with labels and cues. But being lured into her work is less like getting trapped than being put on a stage and left to play with props and costumes.

Closes 5/17.

This review will appear in the May 7 issue of The L Magazine.

Stuff and Dough (2001)

Directed by Cristi Puiu

Puiu’s debut (followed in 2005 by The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) is ambitious beyond its means. All handheld long takes with crisp colors and sharp edges, Stuff and Dough initially seems a straight-forward realist exposé of the frustrated expectations of Romania’s first post-Soviet generation. Budding capitalist Ovidiu (Alexandru Papadopol) accepts a shady delivery job to finance his business. A buddy and his girlfriend come for the ride, and their dashboard discussions alternately reveal disenchantment, ambition and sexism. The early sentiment is of Romania’s youth driving into new territory without completely understanding where it’s coming from.

That’s before the narrative jolt comes – in the form of a big red SUV and its thuggish occupants – and Stuff and Dough swerves adroitly into the chase movie lane. The ensuing tension – that terrifying urge to look back – recalls the genre’s most elemental entry, Spielberg’s Duel, but Puiu’s conclusion is more quizzical than cathartic. Beyond its specifically Romanian resonances, Stuff and Dough portrays everyday characters reacting to a kind of primal and irrepressible violence (just imagine what Freud would say about that red SUV).

This review appears in the April 23 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Viva

Directed by Anna Biller
Jared Sanford, Bridget Brno

This periodically hilarious feminist revision of seventies sexploitation movies frustrates expectations of raunchy parody. Viva spreads itself thin as creator and star Biller’s suburban housewife covers a checklist of generic conventions (modeling, sex work, nudists, hippies, orgies, etc). If the narrative is demanding, the colorful awesomeness and ultra-tackiness of the set, costume and make-up design provide constant gratification. Better for an art gallery than a movie theater, Viva restores honest sexual politics to a genre that frequently masqueraded misogynist blackmailing as sexual liberation. (NR, 2:00)

This review will appear in the April 23 issue of The L Magazine.

Constantine’s Sword

Directed by Oren Jacoby

Based on James Carroll’s book of the same title, he and Jacoby scour Europe and North America detailing the 1700-year old tradition (begun by Constantine) of bending Christian myths to justify killing. The materials cohere very persuasively (and prettily), creating a strong argument from testimony by religious scholars, local historians, military officials, politicians, and, most creepily, evangelists. The film hits hardest when Carroll reveals the fictions behind so many Christian ‘truths,’ and exposes the evangelizing of today’s U.S. military. (NR, 1:36)

This review appears in the April 16 issue of The L Magazine.

Car crashes, beheadings, and a sober look at the incongruities of contemporary family and religion!

Quite early on in Tehilim (playing at MoMA until Wednesday), the father of an orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem crashes while driving his two sons to school. It is one of the most mundane car crashes ever filmed: a spectacle of twisting metal and physics-defying vehicular projectiles this is not. Rather, the father’s glazed-over eyes and somnambular responses suggest he may have had a seizure (here we go, I immediately thought, The Diving Bell of Bethlehem). Instead, the father disappears in the ensuing confusion, and it’s his family that’s left paralyzed and brain-dead.

Without its symbolic head, financially debilitated, and unable to mourn or move on for lack of closure, the family lurches onward like, well, a headless chicken. Throughout the rest of Tehilim, the older son Menachem (Michael Moshonov) and the mother Alma (Limor Goldstein) explore different (often conflicting) coping strategies. French-born director and co-writer Raphaël Nadjari and cinematographer Laurent Brunet create a mood of sober realism with long handheld takes and washed-out colors. The narrative is similarly restrained: there are no epiphanies for the audience or the characters. For the latter, time, apparently, is the best medicine. For viewers too, Tehilim has no easy answers, but certain provocative questions emerge from the mechanics of the family drama.

The rituals of the orthodox Jewish household and extended family, for instance, do not come across well. Alma’s authority over her children is continuously rebuked, her wishes ignored by older male relatives. As Alma’s opinions and desires are repeatedly undermined, a feminist sensibility emanates from Tehilim. The teenage Menachem is similarly bound by the strictures of the male-centric orthodox family. The pressure to fill the stoic patriarch role left vacant by his father threatens to cut his adolescence short, and he lashes out accordingly. The film does not, for all this questioning of familial and religious practices, turn into an agnostic assault on organized religion (this is a restrained film, remember).

If Nadjari’s style is grounded in realism, so are his film’s aspirations: he very subtly calls certain fundamental religious and family structures to question. So while you shouldn’t go into Tehilim expecting all high-speed chases and car crashes, don’t walk into it brain-dead either.

This review appears on The L Magazine blog, and can be read here.

Victoria Sambunaris: Yet All Remains

Yancey Richardson Gallery

Impacts of industrial and economic expansion in Sambunaris’s photographs are undeniable, but she foregrounds the escallation of those impacts. One mountain-scape features no human markings save a line of telephone poles; in another image a sun-splashed valley shelters a small town. Finally, a Wyoming asphalt mine’s expansive moonscape brings Sambunaris’s narrative to today’s extreme environmental devastation. Closes 5/17.

Tue-Sat 10am to 6pm. 535 W 22nd St, between Tenth and Eleventh Aves (C,E to 23rd St) 646-230-9610 yanceyrichardson.com

This review will appear in the April 23 issue of The L Magazine.

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung: Residential Erection

Postmasters

Agent provocateur extraordinaire Tin-Kin Hung’s installations and videos are what you’d get if the creators of South Park were commissioned to make political cartoons using CNN screen grabs and bad web art. Parodying American political culture, Tiin-Kin Hung’s work is relentlessly sarcastic, hyper-sexual, grotesque, clever, and shameless. Closes 5/10.

Tue-Sat 11am to 6pm. 459 W 19th St, between Ninth and Tenth Aves (C,E to 23rd St) 212-727-3323 postmastersart.com

This review will appear in the April 23 issue of The L Magazine.

Gregory Crewdson

Luhring Augustine

The suburban settings of Crewdson’s magical realist photographs could easily be movie sets caught between takes. Stagy lighting, dramatic poses and lush but banal décors suggest lives unfolding like a series of scripted scenarios. Crewdson’s isolated characters seem invariable uncomfortable in their surroundings, yearning to move on but unsure where to go next. Closes 5/3.

Tue-Sat 10am to 6pm. 531 W 24th St, between Tenth and Eleventh Aves (C,E to 23rd St) 212-206-9100 luhringaugustine.com

This review will appear in the April 23 issue of The L Magazine.

Whiting Tennis

Derek Eller Gallery

This series of two- and three-dimensional variations on a kind of tool shed-dog house-shanty structure exploits our tendency to see dwellings as reflections of the person inhabiting them. A looming tar-covered contraption titled “Boogeyman,” for example, evokes a terror inside and teases our desire to let it loose. Closes 5/10.

Tue-Sat 11am to 6pm. 615 W 27th St, between Eleventh and Twelfth Aves (C,E to 23rd St) 212-206-6411 derekeller.com

This review will appear in the April 23 issue of The L Magazine.

Smart People

Directed by Noam Murro

Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker

The insecurities and coded aggressions of academia turned this middle-class home into a house of horrors. Quaid’s miserable professor-father has raised a monstrous daughter (Ellen Page), who performs her deceased mother’s tasks between devastating put-downs and obsessive studies. Murro and novelist-screenwriter Mark Poirier nail the banter of an academic household wonderfully, but stay couched in the quirks of character types (though Parker’s romantic interest is initially spirited). Complexity (see The Squid and the Whale) is eschewed for campus-film conventions.

This review appears in the April 9 issue of The L Magazine.

The Visitor

Directed by Thomas McCarthy

Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman

As a widowing professor, Jenkins (Six Feet Under’s passed-on patriarch) first appears looking through a window, a visual expression of detachment that recurs throughout the film. Befriending an immigrant couple living in his Manhattan apartment, however, Jenkins gradually discards such emotional armor. This trajectory of a white middle-class man’s salvation via exotic foreigners could have lapsed into orientalism (as in The Darjeeling Limited), but McCarthy (The Station Agent) invests characters with enough complexity and political discontent to avoid that quandary.

This review appears in the April 9 issue of The L Magazine.

David Claerbout: Then Came This

Yvon Lambert

In the first of four works, night falls quickly while a woman moves extremely slowly. Neat trick, and questions raised about narrative time recur throughout the show. Two projections show brief events from innumerable angles. Aesthetically, each image could stand alone, but together they reveal a story. While bridging still and moving images, Claerbout adopts techniques from both. Closes 4/26.

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm. 550 W 21st St, between Tenth Ave and West St 212-242-3611, yvon-lambert.com