
For four sweltering evenings in July, New York artist and musician Sadie Laska hot-boxed the Lower East Side's CANADA Gallery. The sessions she curated, called "Slummer Nights," were music and visual art performances that seemed impartial to polish and were all the better for it. The night Art in America visited, a selection of short films chosen by Brooklyn project space Cleopatra's were buttressed by two dark comedy performances.
Frankie Martin, an artist who works in both comedy clubs and art venues, was on first, pitching a routine of carefully botched stand-up. "Who here wants me to give them a tattoo? I don't have my license yet!" Was her opener. A nervous laugh was her audience's response. Martin's performances are usually a trial of endurance: for a recent project at the NADA Callicoon Art Fair—a "one-on-one" stand-up show taking place in a tiny teepee—she offered free admission, but only allowed those paying an exit fee to escape before the show ended.
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I entered the Guggenheim Museum this past Saturday for New York-based Sharon Hayes' performance as the second half of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historic 1963 speech, "I Have a Dream," echoed through the museum's rotunda. It's Twentieth Century America's most famous bit of rhetoric, although it's unlikely many Americans can recall more than a few lines. As a part of Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, the museum's collection show that examines how artists' photo-based works test and invigorate the image's famous relationship to death, Hayes installed behind a DJ booth on the ground floor of the rotunda and spun spoken-word records.
Hayes is best known for her politically charged performances and installations that use the strategy of "respeaking" (a term associated with her often direct recitation of non-fiction dialogues and political addresses) that calls for participation poignantly provoked but not seized upon. Stemming from the artist's similar but only 20-minute performance in 2004, Hayes' five-hour DJ set here included It highlighted speeches from the Civil Rights Movement and poems, dating primarily from the 1960s.
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Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's ten-month solo exhibition, "chronotopes & dioramas," commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation and on view at Manhattan's Hispanic Society, concluded Sunday. Located in a medium-sized gallery within the former Museum of the American Indian that was recently renovated by Dia, the work consisted of a 50-foot wide floor to ceiling structure, consisting of a wall decorated with literary quotations on one side, and containing three large meticulously constructed environmental dioramas rendered by a team of specialists from the American Museum of Natural History on the other.
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