You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Art and Performance.”
Pictures by Josh Gilbert I dropped by the New York Academy of Art with my spiffy digital camera, feeling like an artist and ready to snap a few pics while I waited for my friend, Beag. Needless to say, it didn't take long for me to feel like a fraud. For one thing, my friend was taking an exam. An [...]
Esteban Vicente died in January, 2001, shortly before his 98th birthday. He was one of the last surviving members of the famed New York School of Abstract Expressionists. We visited him in his studio in 1993 and are proud to present him as the first our or "Studio Visit" series. Esteban Vicente arrived into the world in Turegano, Spain, in [...]
It's not easy to ask for a picture from a fireman's widow or a mother who has just lost a child. That's the worst aspect of my high-pressure job as a member of the New York City working press. I step into people’s lives, often for less than an hour, usually in moments of great joy or sorrow. My job [...]
Ann Magnuson begins her new one-woman show, Rave Mom, standing in a hotel room in Las Vegas, high on ecstasy, staring at the radiantly naked form of a young, blonde man with "the body of a surfer." He reaches out to touch her, and though Magnuson refrains from describing what happens next, peals of another kind of ecstasy follow. She [...]
Claude was smart and talented and I was beautiful but both of us were too boring to hang around with. That was what they thought at the Playhouse of the Ridiculous where we were each featured members of the chorus in a play called, "The Moke Eater" that ran most midnights at Max's Kansas City. I suppose we were boring [...]
There is a cohesive community of would-be slam poets, could-be greeting card writers and should-remain computer programmers in New York City, and they meet at various open mic nights around town. I happened upon one of these amateur slams when a friend of mine admitted to being a closet writer of poems (she wasn’t sure if she could actually call [...]
Early 1980's. Alphabet City. Segments are airing on national TV about drugs, guns, general life-threatening disorder. Yet, still and all, it's where the artists live. Coax a cab east and try your luck. On Avenue B, half-windowed buildings. Puerto Rican mafia guys lurking. Street lights, but they do little more than rattle and buzz. Rats. You carefully watching your footsteps [...]
I'm not much of a TV person. I am completely unfaithful to any one show or annual event, certainly anything like the Academy Awards. My theory has always been, why watch a three-hour awards show when I can watch E!, or some other all-celebrity network, and get the highlights in thirty minutes? But this year was different. Still suffering from [...]
One would be inclined to describe Jen Miller's 5'3'' frame as pixyish, were it not for her very strong self- identification with another sort of sprite. Miller, a 29-year-old Lower East Side performance artist, would love to wake up one morning to find she'd become an elf. Barring that unlikely miracle, she'll have to settle for wearing her prosthetic elf [...]
Another morning at the Bedford L stop, reluctant professionals line the platform waiting, not saying much. Several dozen yards into the crowd, you hear screaming -- a high-pitched, angry sound -- against the tinny sound of recorded music. People closer to the commotion direct their attention towards the center of the platform, next to the bench; typically, this is where [...]
Late last year the 78-year-old filmmaker and archivist Jonas Mekas debuted his new diary film. The title, awkward but precise, is, "As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty." Its running time is around five hours, so it can only play once in an evening. On the first night of its run, Mekas held a little [...]
Across the street from the MOMA’s big, new, blue home is The Factory, a mall/office space building unremarkable for its commerce—but more than remarkable for its sculpture. The 5,000 square feet of floor, wall, and ceiling were, until recently, covered in a dense and quirky collage, made from fifty tons of recycled industrial garbage: bathtubs, water pipes, rebar, boilers, cogs [...]
This is a re-appreciation of Alfred Kazin's classic Brownsville memoir, "A Walker in the City." Published in 1951, the book captures the summer of 1932 before he went off to college. Some books practically walk on their own, as if borne from the streets they describe. None, perhaps, leaps from their pages quite as emphatically, as lovingly, as Alfred Kazin’s [...]
I went straight for the headliners, Sylvester and Bellamy: two huge pieces of weatherproofed steel, each 16 feet high and a few inches thick curved into two distinct gigantic spirals about 50 feet in diameter. You can walk into both, in the spaces between the huge curves of steel, and you keep going until you the material runs out, at [...]
Anton sells photographs on Fifth Avenue and 81st Street in front of the museum. He arrives at his spot at nine o'clock in the morning six days a week - the Metropolitan Museum of Art is closed on Mondays and so the sidewalks are just too empty for business. The photographs come from the eye, camera and studio of Alex [...]
Stephanie Black does not want to talk about the September 11th World Trade Center attack in the context of her movie, "Life and Debt." "I'm still processing it, like everyone else," she said on the phone the other day, speaking from her apartment in downtown Manhattan. But her film, which is currently playing at the Cinema Village (12th Street and [...]
Last night, I attended a memorial service for an artist I knew, Michael Richards. He was fortunate to have been selected for the lower Manhattan cultural council's program "world views’ (or something like that). He was unfortunate in that his studio was on the 92nd floor of Tower One. I met Michael two years ago when I first came to [...]
As soon as Alicia Keys and her band arrive at the front gate of Prince’s house it is apparent to all that there is no paisley in Paisley Park. Prince’s compound looks, from the outside, like the athletic facility of a state University, a big boxy building with gates around it that gives no hint of what lies inside. “You [...]
I found this lovely pamphlet at the Union Square Market. Or rather, it found me: Carla Gahr approached me amidst the bustle of The Union Square market. She has pale skin and tends towards dramatic make up, and her handsflutter when she speaks. She is, on the whole, somewhat less than relaxed, but the small, brightly colored photograph book she [...]
"Congratulations!" read the subject heading of the e-mail. But no, I hadn’t won a free cruise, or a much larger penis. My short novel, Northern Gothic had made the final ballot for the Bram Stoker Award. The Stokers, managed by the Horror Writers Association, celebrate horror fiction, poetry, comics and "alternative media" by holding a banquet and giving out statuettes [...]
I was at the bar of Florent very late Sunday night. A snow storm was raging outside. Pastis, that seat of slutty mayhem, sat up the block. There are now tastefully bright lights all over the meat packing district, where there was once just meat and the people who packed it. It was strange to sit at Florent, whose entrance [...]
I sometimes see a crowd gathered in front of a storefront on Broadway, between 88th and 89th Street, staring with rapt concentration into the window. Occasionally they break out in laughter. They are a random looking group--some in suits, some with groceries, some in shorts with baseball caps turned backwards--and they hardly ever look at each other. Most of [...]
Newer Entries »
