We are too distracted, too stressed out to listen to music properly. That’s the idea behind Goldberg, the music concert/installation/participatory performance art piece currently at the Park Avenue Armory. Conceived by Marina Abramović and performed by Igor Levit, Goldberg seeks to get the audience better attuned to listen to classical music.
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Bach But Were Afraid to Ask Marina Abramović
Tree of Codes, the current modern dance production at the Park Avenue Armory, brings together the efforts of three major names from three different disciplines: Wayne McGregor, the award-winning British choreographer; Danish-Icelandic visual artist and light wizard Olafur Eliasson; and electronic music producer Jamie xx, one third of the band the xx. Make that four notables, actually, if you count the author Jonathan Safran Foer, whose book Tree of Codes served as the point of departure for the one-hour, 20-minute-long extravaganza, which made its US premiere last night.
When they’re dormant and separate, Philippe Parreno’s works at the Park Avenue Armory are reduced to their crude basics: a set of lightbulbs screwed into a plastic crate, concrete-gray steel bleachers, huge blank screens, empty chairs scattered across the monstrous Wade Thompson Drill Hall. But once a person enters the room — whether it’s a viewer, technician, or Parreno himself — the components of H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS begin to emit strange, disjointed streams of sound, light, and film which flow together, setting off the next few hours of narrative-resistant exhibition experience.
How do you take a form of street dance and bring it, for the first time, to the theatrical stage — and not just any stage, but a 160-foot-long one? That’s the question underpinning FLEXN, a new, commissioned production of flex dancing that opened Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory. It hasn’t been fully answered.
A Brooklyn-Born Street Dance Goes Uptown, with Mixed Results
Last month, ART21 hosted an intricately interdisciplinary affair: Creative Chemistries: Radical Practices for Art + Education, a conference designed to probe the intersections of art and education. Jessica Hamlin, ART21’s director of educational initiatives, and Joe Fusaro, the organization’s senior education advisor, outlined some of the questions the event sought to tackle in an article for ART21 Magazine:
In Claude Debussy’s 1910 prelude “La cathédrale engloutie” (“The Sunken Cathedral”), shuddering waves of chords grow and then drown out in tribute to a mythical cathedral rising out of the sea and then disappearing again. In Douglas Gordon’s new “tears become… streams become…” installation at the Park Avenue Armory, the rippling notes are provided each night by pianist Hélène Grimaud, who plays a Steinway encircled by a reflecting pool of 122,000 gallons of water. In the mirror of water conjured by the Scottish artist, Grimaud’s notes evoke the rising of some magical copy of the Armory’s soaring archways.
The Unremarkable Death of Marina Abramović
Marina Abramović in “The Life and Death of Marina Abramović” (photo by James Ewing)
Marina…
Massive Attack V Adam Curtis: A Missed Opportunity for Confrontation on Park Avenue
Adam Curtis and Robert Del Naja perform “Massive Attack V Adam Curtis” at the Park Avenue Armory…
Deep Blue vs. Kasparov: Machine’s Triumph Over Man
Hadley Fraser and Kenneth Lee in “The Machine” at the Park Avenue Armory (all images by Stephanie…