Lena Dunham's Open House

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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Inside/Outside the Brucennial

The revolving and evolving group of young men who go by the moniker Bruce High Quality Foundation espouses the credo, "Professional Challenges. Amateur Solutions." The group's own forays into that most impractical of professions—the contemporary artist—have taken a highly un-amateur turn. BHQF has consistently positioned itself as a hybrid, showing work as a collective while directing the grassroots educational program BHQFU whose clarion call, "That's where U come in," resounds with put-on juvenilia. The line outside last night's Brucennial opening suggests both the nameless hoards of energized youth approaching Woodstock, and the Topshop opening last year, just a few blocks due East.
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Fact Sheet: Ida Applebroog

Theorist Julia Kristeva once described Modernist romantic melancholy: "Abjection, recognized as welded to narcissism, has in Proust something domesticated about it." Kristeva might well have been referring to artist Ida Applbroog's most recent exhibition, Monalisa, on view now at Hauser & Wirth in New York. Here, the domesticated pets are mostly ink drawings of female genitalia. The salon- and grid-hung works featured in Monalisa feature more "whole" portraits to eerie, even pathetic figures with smudged cheeks and uncannily open eyes. This investigation is not entirely for our benefit—or, it seems, for anyone's. Monalisa presents a series of vaginal self-portraits (all 1969) made during a period of personal crisis, and one senses Applebroog's ennui in the repeated line drawings. The artist, now nearing 81, is showing at Hauser & Wirth for the first time.
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