Birds and Beans

For two years, multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird and aritst Ian Schneller have been planning a "sonic arboretum" of different-sized horns.

"The horns kind of evolved from being more this Victrola aesthetic to more a plant-like shape, some sort of prairie flowers, kind of facing toward the sky," said Bird, in an interview in advance of his performance at the Guggenheim Thursday night. "So I kind of like this idea of possibly modeling different environments through these horns. I'm interested in the acoustics of different environments: If you're in Zion National Park and you're surrounded by these canyon walls and these trees, what kind of sounds fill this space? Or if you're in a field of soy beans, what does that sound like?"
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The Lush History of the Lower East Side

 

Lush Life, Richard Price's 2008 novel based on a real unsolved robbery-shooting, is full of all the peculiar inflections of cop talk that made the HBO drama he co-wrote, The Wire, such a hit. Considered by some the Raymond Chandler of our generation, his gritty dialogue and urban characters are tempered by postmodern equivocation, where criminals and police alike face questions of culpability.

The novel takes place in New York's colorful Lower East Side, and is as much a meditation on that neighborhood's fluctuation as it is a crime story. It's a fascinating read, and for curators Omar Lopez-Chahoud and Franklin Evans, the perfect foil for a multi-venue exhibition to showcase the latest group to call the neighborhood home—the gallery world. Also titled "Lush Life," the exhibition takes place in nine galleries, each organized to correspond to the novel's nine chapters. Spanning emerging and more established galleries venues, it's a temporary and productive alliance befitting its turbulent neighborhood.

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Making Your Market: Baibakov's Moscow Project

Russian art center owner and heiress Maria Baibakova is racking up frequent flier miles these days, not that she needs them. (Her father is mining oligarch Oleg Baibakov.) While traveling this year, the 24-year-old founder of Baibakov Art Projects, a private, non-profit contemporary art center in Moscow, has scoped out art scenes in India; Cairo, Egypt; the UAE; and Cape Town, South Africa. Baibakova said she sees similarities between developing art scenes in the places she's visited and in Moscow, a city that's not exactly thought of as a contemporary art destination, though Baibakova would like to make it one. One similarity: a need to cultivate better-informed audiences.

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Hit Repeat

Eight weeks into Greater New York Cinema, P.S.1's 20-week sidebar highlighting the past five years in film and video, comes a reprise of Brooklyn-based Jessie Stead's 2006 "structuralist road movie," Foggy Mountains Breakdown More than Non-Foggy Mountains. The title refers to the blistering 1949 banjo instrumental by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," which is iconic hillbilly Americana, and used as the score to Bonnie and Clyde's car chases. Stead's film is a chase of sorts: the personal pursues the universal, as Stead mixes enigmatic diaristic texts and Super-8 footage of globetrotting dalliances with renditions of the infinitely diffuse song: the original recording; MIDI versions found online; abstracted covers and antecedents, composed and performed by the famous and non-famous alike.

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