This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Kitsch-Off, Film Festival, and a Weekend of Internet Jailbreaking

If you ever wanted to know more about the mind behind “Ten Bullets” and last year’s “Mars Landing” at the Armory, now you can. Tom Sachs will speak at Pratt. Based on watching Sachs’s studio assistants fly across the Armory while he instructed them over a megaphone, we think art students can expect some tough advice tonight.

Good news for square variation enthusiasts. Canadian-born artist Dorothea Rockburne’s minimalist carbon-based drawings from her “Indications of Installation” exhibition in 1973 are now on view at Jill Newhouse Gallery. We’d be hard pressed to call these drawings anything less than beautiful, but it’s also hard to find much to say about the form. The artist does better in this respect;  “I‘ve always had an enormous impulse to draw, to make drawing that described only itself, that didn’t have any subject matter except itself,” the Canadian-born artist Dorothea Rockburne once reflected.

For those readers who, like us, would appreciate even more verbiage on the subject, we especially appreciated this footnote from the press release: A fully illustrated digital catalogue with essay by Dr Anna Lovatt, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art History, University of Manchester, will be available.

Get ready for some more big dude art this fall. With an exhibition title that sounds like a reality TV show, “Extreme Measures” could very well come close to TV’s spectacular razzle-dazzle. The exhibition will showcase over 40 years of work by Burden, but from the sounds of it, it’ll mostly be installation work. We have the big: weighing in at three tons, The Big Wheel (1979) is a cast iron flywheel turned on by a motorcycle. We have the brutal: A Tale of Two Cities (1981), a child’s desert war game enlarged to the scale of 5,000 toys, and outfitted to look like the desert with houseplants and sand dunes. I’m not sure if EXTREME BURDEN is my favorite type of Burden, but I’m going, hoping some of these bigger works have depth beyond their scale.

Cynthia Daignault’s pink wooly front room gallery in “Which is the Sun and Which is the Shadow” suffers from sameness in surface treatment, whereas the backroom relies too heavily on the appeal of the grid. Still, the content of the ongoing indexing publication A-Z was conceived in conjunction with the exhibition, and they’ve probably thought enough about the subject to make this conversation pretty interesting. Panelists include Cynthia Daignault, Mark Lolacono, Deirdre O’Dwyer, Alan Reid, and Rory Solomon and they will be talking about time, dreaming, prisons, perception, and Shadow and light.

NOTE 10/1/13: “The View” has been rescheduled for Sunday, October 20th at 6pm

The ever-elusive Bruce High Quality Foundation will reveal themselves, at least a little bit, for a roundtable discussion at SVA as part of the school’s “Art in the First Person” series. We’ll be interested to hear what advice they dish out to students since fine art education’s a major topic in their work—they do run a university.

Kick back, have a drink, and support photographer Sara Cynwar’s campaign to build a kitsch encyclopedia. Cynwar contributed to our Indispensable Reading List for the NY Art Book Fair, and we’d like to see her one-of-a-kind book through to completion. All you’ve gotta do is buy a drink, and some of the proceeds will go toward funding the book. Also, it’s Beverly’s, a well-known LES artist haunt, so you might as well check out the bar’s current art exhibition.

Paper doesn’t get enough love in Chelsea, so it’s nice to see that places like Senior & Shopmaker Gallery are putting together intelligently-themed print shows. This exhibition surveys work by artists who mine art history for iconography, styles and techniques and give it a contemporary twist. Artists include: Pablo Bronstein, Vija Celmins, Saul Chernick, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Carlos Garaicoa, Butt Johnson, Ray Johnson, William Kentridge, Lucy McKenzie, Grayson Perry, Ged Quinn, Andrew Raftery, and Kara Walker.

We make sure to stop by et al projects almost every time we’re in Bushwick, but we might make a trip just for Joshua Caleb Weibley’s solo show. The press release (which comes on blue gridded paper with a double-backed playing card) draws you into what looks to be a rabbit hole investigation of the game Solitaire. The repetition and meditation of the game seems to be a symbol for computer navigation, drawing, and 60’s and 70’s art-making. We’ll hash it out over coffee at the opening.

Ann Hirsch performs “Playground,” her two-person performance, set in a 90’s chatroom, about the relationship between a twelve-year-old and twenty-seven-year-old. (If it’s anything like the YouTube disquisition in her installation The Scandalishious Project: Caca Phony current at the show “Hymns for Mr. Suzuki” at Abrons Art Center, it’ll be great). We’re also looking forward to Hirsch’s upcoming ebook Twelve, which she’ll be releasing through Klaus e_books soon.

Like most of this year’s New Yorker profiles, the New Yorker Festival seems more celebrity-driven than ever. Want to know even more about people like Michael Shannon, Michelle Williams, Toni Collette, Brad Paisley, Christoph Woltz, Ethan Hawke, Marina Abramovic, Greta Gerwig, or Miranda July? Neither do we. Most of these people are already so prevalent in the spotlight that we have serious doubts about how much more we could possibly learn from yet another Q & A. As for people who might have something to say:

Saturday, 10 AM: New York Times editor Jill Abramson will hopefully discuss her vision for that paper’s future. I especially want to hear from her after this New York Magazine profile on CEO Mark Thomson’s bold rebranding tactics. 55 East 59th Street, $35 

Saturday, 7 PM: Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon speaks with Alex Halberstadt, who profiled her for the New Yorker in June. You can probably expect them to discuss Gordon’s versatility, in music, writing, and art. Her current show at White Columns deconstructs the language of design. She also just released a new album with Bill Nace, as their new duo Body/Head. 508 West 37th Street, $40

Then again, all of the events are so outrageously overpriced that we doubt many of our readers will go, anyway. This tour of the Frick with Peter Schjeldahl is $100. Good luck scraping together your savings for that.

You can’t escape government surveillance, but Eyebeam sure wants to show you some ways to avoid the brunt of it. Throughout the weekend, the non-profit will host a series of talks and workshops that’ll teach you how to get around surveillance. Learn how to start a small independent internet with programmer/artist Dan Phiffer on Sunday at 4:30 PM, for example, or jailbreak your phone with artist/designer Genevieve Hoffman on Sunday at 6:30. All this is buttressed by a weekend-long exhibition of work that shows you how to opt out. For a full schedule, see the PRISM Break Up site.

We don’t know much about Cleopatra’s upcoming exhibition, excepting there will be “workouts with special guests.” From the Facebook page, it sure looks like there could be BDSM-inspired workout gear, but who really knows. Still, it might be worth checking out on a Sunday afternoon, if you’re near Greenpoint.