
Kate Gilmore appeared in this year's Whitney Biennial with the installation Standing Here, for which the artist videotaped from above her attempts, and ultimate success, breaking out of a drywall monolith. The video was paired with a sculptural prop, the broken wall. In Walk the Walk architecture returns, resilient and cumbersome as ever.
Walk the Walk took place in Bryant Park as part of the Public Art Fund's "In the Public Realm" program. It's Gilmore's first public performance, and the first in which she herself does not appear. Atop a ten-by-ten-foot yellow platform elevated eight feet from the ground, seven women pace the perimeter of the structure. The structure is populated from 8:30 until 5:30, the workday, during the show's week-long run. The women wear yellow dresses, with beige "career woman" pumps that gently pummel the cube's top. At 1:30 each day (lunch time, of course), the women switch shifts. One group descends by ladder; momentarily, the second group takes its place atop the block.
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When reviewing a show, one concern is how much or how little to refer to the press release. As a rule, these texts are not generated by the artists involved, and they proffer descriptions more restricted than the work itself. The recent collaboration of performance artist Tamy Ben-Tor and painter Miki Carmi, however, requires translation. Ben-Tor's performances and video work here are conducted in several languages, including the little-spoken Georgian. The nature of the artists' collaboration is unclear even with the aid of outside texts; the release's claims that "It is through irrationality that the senses grasp truth" and "The performance of the poet is a daily act of repetitious rituals that embodies the intensified condition of being," do little to penetrate the confusion. The show is accompanied by an artist's book put out by Regency Arts Press in 2009, where the artists' intentions begin to take shape.
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Filmmaker Lena Dunham treads the turbid shallows of post-college fallout. In her latest, Tiny Furniture, the artist turns the camera on herself and her immediate family. Dunham favors a sort of hybrid of allegory and docudrama, evidenced in her collaborative shorts Delusional Downtown Divas (in which childhood friends Joana Avillez, Isabel Halley and Gabriel Held play childhood friends). In her first full-length feature, Dunham again casts her own ambitions and insecurities as the star of the show. Tiny Furniture depicts a girl adrift and attempting to moor herself; the film is that moor that rescues Dunham from the ennui of a directionless year after college.
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