Must-See Art Events: Jog Your Way to Art Butter

Listen to one of New York’s most respected art critics, Roberta Smith, talk on the perennial topic of art criticism today. She only talks a couple times a year in New York, so this is a lecture to hit.

The ICI Library is the permanent home of the Cleopatra’s Library and host to their book launch and reading.  The anthology Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside is a series of philosophical texts concerned with an anti-theoretical bent in contemporary politics. Serious stuff, guys. Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani will give a lecture entitled “The Labour of the Inhuman (Augmented Rationality and its Cognitive Technologies).”

EAI’s going to host an artist talk with Liz Magic Laser and a screening of her videos in which she identifies and creates work in response to specific audiences. The work often employs the use of polling and focus groups; in 2012, CNN-commissioned Laser to make a video about polls during the 2012 presidential election. That’ll be on view Tuesday night, alongside abbreviated versions of “I Feel Your Pain,” Laser’s monumental, and much-loved performance at 2011’s Performa; and “The Armory Show Focus Group” (2013), which features AFC’s Paddy Johnson. [Admission $ 7.00 / Students $ 5.00  Free for EAI Members]

Feminists! People with a soul! Get mad at yet another male-only show this fall, and one that so neatly wraps up the male gaze in girly accoutrements like kitty cats. Or, enjoy all the Freudian slips among the up-skirts. Up to you.

More of the same as the above, and more fuel to fire this season’s complaints about the paucity of shows by female artists in museums and blue-chip galleries.

Poor Jo Baer. She’s in museum collections the world over, yet remains a less ballyhooed Minimalist than all those hard-edged boys. There’s no good reason for that, and we hope this retrospective will help change the tide of opinion. Organized in conjunction with the octogenarian artist’s son, Josh Baer (of the Baer Faxt), we bet this show’ll be thorough, based on Baer’s firsthand knowledge.

Ang Lee’s The Life of Pi started with art and it was Alexis Rockmann’s watercolors of imagined seascapes and creatures of the deep, that provided the visual inspiration for Lee’s 2012 film. Now his drawings are the focus of The Drawing Center’s latest exhibition. Expect to see dozens of watercolors representing the life aquatic. An exhibition for the Jacques Cousteau in us all.

Tear that aerobics class up while attending a butter-making workshop. It’s all part of a year-long project by Los Angeles-based artist collective Machine Project, premiering this Thursday at the Rauschenberg Foundation. Running with the name PopSoda, “Feel the Churn!” classes run September 26th-29th and promise to “spread the physical delight of artisan practices with a participatory audience, combining food science with music, exercise, performance, and community.”  This remind anyone else of Let’s Paint TV?

Tickets are $10 each, click here reserve.

CLASS SCHEDULE

9/26 Morning 8:30am: Session #1

9/26 Evening 7:30pm: Session #2

9/27 Morning 8:30am: Session #3

9/27 Evening 7:30pm: Session #4 (Featuring Dr. Eric Finzi)

9/28 Mid Morning 10am: Session #5 (Featuring pancakes!)

9/28 Evening 6pm: Session #6 (Featuring Cherie Lily

We haven’t been able to find a press release for this show online, but it would change our reasons for seeing this show regardless; it’s a collection of excellent mid-career artists who have yet to receive their full dues. Time for this to change.

As DUMBO rents rise, artists are moving out of the neighborhood, so it will be interesting to see how this festival evolves. Typically more inclusive than a mere studio crawl, the festival includes live music, street acts, and carousel rides. They also award three cash prizes of $1,000 each to artists who have opened their studios for the duration of the festival, and a grand prize of a free DUMBO studio for a year. That’s a pretty big deal, so we’re curious to see who will take home the prize. We’ll also be the first ones to know: AFC’s Paddy Johnson is on the jury this year.

Phil Niblock turns 80 next week and Anthology Film Archives isn’t fucking around with that milestone. They’ve organized an entire festival in his name. Screenings run throughout the weekend, and track his career chronologically. The first, which takes place at 7 pm on Saturday September 28th, explore a series of non-verbal theater and museum installations and performances that Niblock produced at the turn of the 60’s. Only the last three “Environoments” still exist in their complete versions, and the organization will be projecting each, as 16mm film images, simultaneously and side-by-side. Combined running time: 1 hour. Total running time: 3 hours.

Everyone’s favorite new age, hypochondriac alter-ego, “Cynthia” will perform twice on Saturday night, as part of Shana Moulton’s opening and exhibition premiering her new body of video work. All will feature Cynthia and will be set in an ordinary, techno-fantasy world.

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Grab a seat on the MTA’s vintage bus fleet this Sunday and get ready to buy some serious bus paraphernalia from the museum.

This Sunday, MoMA PS1 will host a marathon screening of all the videos featured in its current exhibition, “Image Employment.” In addition to the screening, the museum will host a mini-conference of sorts, with an afternoon of talks by artists in the show, including Lucy Raven and Michael Bell Smith, and the show’s curators Aily Nash and Andrew Norman Wilson. For those of you who’ll need to escape the VW Dome at some point, don’t worry; a lunch break has been scheduled.