On Thursday, September 10th, the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery will host In Visible Cities, the second solo exhibition by Barney Kulok.

The large black panels of In Visible Cities represent a departure for Kulok, who has become, in a sense, a photographer without a camera. Taking to the streets of New York, he has mapped the city according to its most ephemeral coordinates: the names of Wi-Fi networks captured easily on an iPhone. From these points, Kulok has created something midway between landscape and photogram—a cartographical representation of a city no one can see.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Kulok is releasing a beautiful hardbound book. Inside one finds not only photographs, but a poem by New York School poet Ron Padgett and an essay by esteemed art historian Svetlana Alpers. Both are excellent accompaniments to Kulok’s work (Alpers’ essay in particular is a refreshingly readable bit of art criticism admirable for its precision and breadth).

In Visible Cities ($35) is available at Dashwood Books, The Dossier Shop, Spoonbill, St. Mark’s Bookshop, Ursus Books, and other reputable bookstores throughout the city. The exhibition opens on September 10th (with a vernissage from 6-8pm) and runs to October 31st.

The photography of Martien Mulder, hitherto featured in a slew of international galleries and magazines, is now on view at Capricious Space. Mulder’s preoccupations appear to be with plantlife and portraiture, pretty much in that order. The former she treats with an almost spiritual reverence—venerating verdant palm trees in Brazilian Mist (2001) and Plant in Black (2008) as though they were avatars of otherworldly beauty. Looking at these photographs, one forgets that there are such things as shopping malls and gas stations—a pleasant notion, indeed.

Many of Mulder’s pieces seem like details taken from larger photographs; they tend to depict small portions of trunk and stem set against clouded sky. Rather than disorienting the viewer, this approach serves to focus attention on the sparse, near-abstract quality of the plantlife itself, as if the world, at this particular moment, consisted of nothing else. Peer closely at something, and it becomes all you see.

Mulder also likes it when the natural world encroaches on the man-made. She is particularly fond of scenes in which bright-green flora overwhelm the geometrical fortifications of modern architecture, as occurs, with great effect, in Building in Green (2001), perhaps the most convincing example of Mulder’s attempt at photographic abstraction. Another piece, Untitled (Escalator) from 2008, works just as well: a group of wispy palms are viewed through the glass of a lobby, while the calligraphical handrails of an escalator overlay the tableaux as if crossing it out.

When it comes to taking portraits, Mulder seems rather less focused, and at times her human subjects elude her. Perhaps this is the point; but if Mulder wishes to convey man’s impunity to photographic observation, she ought to make sure her shots don’t come off as half-hearted. When a photograph looks hastily done, we attribute its inscrutability not to the involvedness of the subject, but to the artist, who has failed to study her subject sufficiently. The best of the bunch, Self Portrait (Honduras), is successful mainly because it capitalizes on Mulder’s strength: paying equal attention to the organic and inorganic. Here, we have Mulder herself lying nude on a couch, her limbs bent at odd angles; outside, through a paneled window, we see the limbs of an evergreen, a sort of arboreal double. It’s difficult to differentiate between Mulder and her surroundings, and as woman and tree mix together the portrait seems strangely complete.

To fully appreciate Mulder’s work, one should consult her new book, also called “From Blue to Blue.” Inside are many photographs not featured in the current exhibit (the landscape pieces in particular help to flesh out Mulder’s reverent vision of the natural world). Viewed in total, the catalog unfolds like the field log of some divinely inspired botanist who has travelled great distances and managed to isolate images of real beauty. Mulder’s talent lies in being able to see the forest for the trees, often one branch at a time—and as any sage will tell you, this in itself is a wonderful thing.

When viewing “Sexy and the City,” a new group photography show at the Yossi Milo Gallery, one may be tempted to trace the historical arc of sexiness. To accomplish this, one need only view the photographs chronologically, paying particular attention to shifts in the popular conception of ‘sexy’ as they occur. Since the photos in the show span the last fifty years, one may walk away feeling as if he’s gained a rather good idea of what Americans find titillating.

Before the 1960s, sexiness meant making out in theaters and subway cars. Thus we have Weegee’s 3-D Lovers in a Movie Theater, circa 1955, a delightful bit of golden-era smut, and Leipzig’s Subway Lovers, 1949. Such images are not sexy in the contemporary sense. Indeed, the oldest photo here, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic V-J Day at Times Square (1945), is less a symbol of sex than a celebration of America’s post-war vitality. The image summons ideas of national innocence just as it stirs thoughts of vigorous procreation (this, after all, is the kiss that sparked the baby-boom). The couple in the picture belongs to the last pre-sexy generation of Americans; that is, unlike Gen Xers, they have not been taught to believe that sexiness (today a marketable commodity) is inextricably linked to their quality of life. It is a blissful image, and makes this reviewer pine for old-fashioned romantic precepts like commitment, modesty, and love—none of which are particularly evident in the rest of the work on hand.

After the Sexual Revolution, we find that expressions of sexuality have become increasingly self-conscious, theatrical, affected. Note, for instance, Garry Winogrand’s Untitled (Topless Woman in Central Park), 1968, whose eponymous subject bares herself to a crowd of attentive men like an aspiring showgirl in a deodorant advertisement; or Arthur Tess’s Man on Bridge, N.Y., 1979, in which a shirtless fellow straddles a suspension cable as if it were…well, you know what. The common thread here is attitude: sexiness is no longer a naturally occurring quality, but a cool expression to be mustered and worn. Looking at these later photographs, one feels that sex has been drained of its spontaneity. Instead of couples in flagrante, we have poses and postures.

Charles Taub’s The Met, New York (2008) serves as a good illustration of this. A matronly tourist contemplates the dangling marble genitals of a Greek kouri. It’s as if the statue’s frank immodesty belongs to antiquity rather than to the woman’s own jaded age, when glimpsing an unselfconscious nude means first traveling to a museum. Of course, the Greeks’ idea of sex was not so removed from our own; they, too, were irrepressibly bawdy (see, for instance, the frescos at Pompeii, which likely gave visiting Victorians heart palpitations), and, if their mythology is any indication, tended to associate sex with power. But whereas the Greeks saw the kouri as representing the ideal of physical perfection, adored as much for its aesthetic appeal as for its Platonic immutability, the modern viewer sees nothing but a comic foil—a figure positioned in stark contrast not only to the unsexy tourist who blanches before it, but to the contemporary sex icon, who can summon his sexiness on command. When viewing The Met, New York we snigger as much at the tourist’s priggishness as at the statue’s lack of pretense.

Most of the pieces in the show were taken before 1980, suggesting that New York experienced a general detumescence during the Koch years from which it has not yet recovered, despite the best efforts of Nan Goldin and Lisa Kereszi. When we look at Mitch Epstein’s Untitled, New York (Woman in Midtown Taxi), 1995, we find a person completely alone. Is her isolation sexy? Is the fact that she can pleasure herself, without resorting to human contact, meant to stimulate our own sense of erotic independence? Can sexiness really be experienced alone? Many of the later photographs in “Sexy and the City” seem to suggest as much, although their self-conscious appeal to solipsism renders the argument unconvincing—if only because there’s no one there to hear it.

A year ago, the mood in Chelsea was rather less glum. Local aficionados, examining their own epoch, might well describe the first eight years of the millennium as an Age of Optimism. Back then there appeared no limit to the curator’s good fortune: galleries thrived, crowds gathered, artists bought homes in East Hampton. Now, as the market continues to dip (at times precipitously), things in Chelsea have become quite a bit quieter. The din of gallery-goers, once a sign of the art world’s good cheer, has been replaced by the eerie sound of a thousand belts being tightened at once.

Depending on how you feel about the art of the last decade, this might strike you as good news. Perhaps it’s for the best, you think, that an unknown painter can no longer sell a soiled napkin for twenty-five grand. (When the art market gets over-stuffed, it tends to regurgitate.) Of course that’s not to say you wish ill on the young artists who came of age in recent years: it’s just that you (and I), perhaps betraying a nostalgic affection for certain honored traditions, prefer our starving artists to be slightly more starving. If the pudgier among them learn from these hard times that it takes more than a well-connected curator or an inflated market to feed yourself as an artist, then might this not mark a return to an Age of Reason?

Let them starve, you say, but don’t let them perish. In response, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), like a vociferous light at the end of a tunnel, announced last week that it will be distributing $917,000 in fellowships to 134 artists living and working in New York State. Each artist will receive $7,000, which may be spent on anything from rent to supplies; a modest sum, to be sure, but presumably enough to encourage continued creativity. And there’s little doubt that the artists on the list will be glad to have it.

This year, the folks at NYFA seem particularly sensitive to the artist’s lot. Their recent press release, a fine example of compassionate PR, is loaded with references to the market’s slump (“With recent contemporary auctions signifying that the art market bubble has finally burst, artists will need funding more than ever to survive”), this slump’s effect on the average artist (“Artists across the state are suffering from substantial losses of income”), and statistical data meant to illustrate exactly how shitty most artists have it (“A recent survey conducted by the NYFA suggested that almost half of the artists living in New York State make less than $25,000 per annum”). Perhaps it’s the fact that many artists have prospered (comparatively) during the last several years that makes the NYFA feel as if they have to win our sympathy. Most of us, as tired as we are of glutted galleries and over-hyped shows, will need little convincing.

Since the fellowship was created in 1985, the NYFA has awarded over $22 million to roughly 3,688 artists. Among them have been future winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, the Academy Award, Guggenheim Fellowships, and MacArthur Fellowships — artists like Tamara Jenkins, Billy Collins, Julie Taymor, Barbara Kruger, Ross Bleckner and Andre Serrano. These names alone are proof of the NYFA’s prescience and good taste. What’s more, rewarding young and mid-career artists for the work they’ve done (rather than for how much they sell it for) seems like a fine way to keep in check the gallery system, which tends sometimes to promote artists rather than help them. The NYFA’s commitment to artists of merit is a tempered stroke of humanitarianism, one powered equally by Optimism and Reason.

If bygone galleries were given funereal services, Bellwether would deserve a sweeping procession down Tenth Avenue. For over ten years, the gallery has been a hallmark of the city’s art scene; as others have come and gone, Bellwether has endured trends and trepidations, from the artists’ rise in Williamsburg to the galleries’ exodus to Chelsea. Now, as the art market undergoes yet another shift, this one constrictive rather than migratory, the gallery is closing its doors for the foreseeable future. Cineres cineribus, pulverem pulveri.

Becky Smith, the gallery’s stalwart owner, promises that Bellwether’s shuttering need not mark the end. In a recent email to patrons, Becky remarks: “I will continue to represent the gallery’s artists privately and I am working on several shows with them in a Bellwether-at-large capacity. Details to follow in the fall.” In the meantime, make sure to catch the gallery’s final exhibition, “A Song for Those In Search of What They Came With,” a group show including work by Michele Abeles, Tony Cox, Raina Hamner, Marc Hundley, James Richards, and Amy Yao. What a nice note to go out on…

The photography of Louise Ingalls Sturges is now on view at Court on Mulberry Street. The exhibit, called Tangled Up In Blue, is a modest collection of color prints, hung in odd, tight groups along two of the store’s interior walls. Despite its confinement, Sturges’s work is remarkably expansive in visual scope. Each photograph, named simply for the place that it depicts, captures one strange locale after another; thus, the show comprises a sort of documented road trip, a compendium of unrelated images which find coherence not in shared subject matter but in common themes and moods.

At her best, Sturges gives us compositions of playful complexity. In Denver, Colorado (2006), we find ourselves in someone’s suburban backyard: in the distance is the corner of a dull cream-colored house, nearer to us the plaster statue of a horse peering over a white picket fence. The shot has been snapped at ankle-height, from amid the tentacular fronds of a cactus, as if we were an insect gazing up at a world overrun by humanity. There is, of course, horror and comedy here.

Besides a hearty sense of composition, Sturges has an eye for color. Several of her photographs are fine studies of complimentary tones. Grand Canyon, Arizona (2007), for instance, depicts a Stephen Shore-esque forest-green Ford parked along a strip of verdant woods. Light shoots through leaves and creates a sort of checkerwork across the ground, as if sky and earth somehow formed a single mesh. Here, as elsewhere, Sturges demonstrates that she has a knack for chromatic layering and a fondness for the droll suburban colors of yesteryear.

She has, too, an undeniable predilection for buttocks. Of the nine photos on display, three depict fleshy posteriors. It must be said that Sturges treats her subjects with reverence, peering at them from odd angles, describing both their natural beauty and bulbous absurdness. In Madrid, Spain (2008) we have a pair of nates wrapped snuggly in a nylon bathing suit, floating buoy-like in marvelously blue pool water; in Hollywood, California (2008) we glimpse a man’s naked back, lithe, brown, terminating in two tan lumps pressed temptingly against a bearskin rug. In Sturges’s only real depiction of a nude, Gloucester, Massachusetts (2007), a callipygian Venus (perhaps one of the young farm girls from Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists) withdraws into an evergreen forest, shapely bottom pale and winsome. These are among the most interesting of Sturges’s photographs, and certainly the most fun to look at. Take them in slowly: unlike the sun,  moons may be observed at length.

Ro Agents’ new album is frighteningly good. Listen to track five, “T.R.A.” Notice how it begins rather gloomily, a sort of co-opted field holler (“I say whoa, lil’ child/ Heaven is watching you”). This, you think, will be a somber affair. Then, midway through, without warning, the song lifts into pop balladry. Pay attention to the introduction of the slide guitar, the fulsome three-chord progression. The transition is sudden, joyful. More importantly, it’s convincing. When Ro’s mood changes, we believe it.

And this is good news. When dealing with the pains and exaltations of folk-western country, the worst thing a band can do is come off as inauthentic. Luckily, Ro nary sings a false note. Her voice, which floats midway between Joplin and Loretta Lynn, carries the band’s simple, easy lyrics. We’re told of lonely lovers, the hazards of “whiskey” and “pills”—classic material for the downtrodden country vixen, but here rendered with fresh remorse. Ro is concerned with the state of her soul, its order and flux, and if your life has been anything like hers, you’ll miss the sound of her voice when it’s not around.

Ro’s singing is accompanied by the instrumentation of Gary Langol, a musician of limitless ability. Seriously, limitless. Langol plays every instrument on the album with the alacrity of a seasoned composer. It’s one thing to master a single instrument, but quite another to master them all. This reviewer’s ear detected guitar, bass, banjo, harmonica, xylophone, and drums—and if one forgets about Langol for a moment, he imagines himself listening to an entire studio band. On “Yellow Roses,” one of the few purely instrumental tracks on the album, Langol’s sad guitarwork says as much as any pageful of lyrics.

The album hits its note early and holds it. We get sixteen tracks, most of them terse, all of them concerned with the same heartache and pain. A few particularly jeremiadic songs attain the high-polish lonesomeness of Roy Orbison’s sweet, grim stuff. Others remind you of Tammy Wynette, Irma Thomas, and Marianne Faithfull. Sometimes Ro can be playful, self-conscious (“I have no chorus, except just to say…”), but mostly she’s all guts. Her songs are bleak, even dark. Again, late in the album, when she growls “I’m ready to kill,” we believe her.

For all but the celibate, fizzled romances are a simple fact of life. When a relationship dies, it casts a pall on everything, even the belongings we cherish. What were once the gifts of a mate—a teddy bear, a favorite T-shirt, a set of apartment keys—quickly become memento mori, grim reminders of the relationship’s fate. A pair of shared socks is never so sinister as when viewed by a lover scorned.

The Museum of Broken Relationships, based in Croatia, acknowledges this truth and here with supplies a solution: Jilted exes are invited to put their stuff on display. Not only does this rid them of the painful object, but it allows others to commemorate it. The result is meant to be cathartic, and judging by the museum’s growing collection—it is.

Exhibits may be viewed online and vary from the quotidian (a cell phone, a wallet, a bitter b&w wedding photo) to the bizarre (a hatchet, a set of fuzzy handcuffs, a prosthetic leg). Each one is accompanied by a story which, however brief, conveys some sense of context or history. The leg, for instance, belonged to a Croatian veteran who fell in love with his nurse while recovering in a Zagreb hospital. Once the couple split, he felt he ought to abandon the limb, which no doubt was sodden with unpleasant memories. As he puts it (rather blackly) on the MBR website: “The prosthesis endured longer than our love. It was made of sturdier material!”

Much of the museum’s collection is currently on-tour, with stops scheduled in Serbia, Croatia, Slovakia, Singapore, the US (San Francisco), and Sweden. Not only can you view it, you can contribute to it. The MBR welcomes submissions, and even offers recovering lovers the opportunity to host the collection in their own studio space. Unlike the pain of breaking up, the elation of getting over it is not confined to two people.

In 1933, musicologist John Lomax traveled through the American South in search of an exotic breed of musician. He visited prisons and back alleys and occluded little towns. He followed rumors through Louisiana backcountry and toured Texas farms that spread like enormous khaki quilts. Lomax was looking for bluesmen.

A decade or two earlier, blues had appeared in the South without obvious cause or proclamation. By the time academics like Lomax had taken notice, no one could explain exactly where the music had come from or how it had spread so thoroughly across the Southern states. None of the musicians interviewed by Lomax had been recorded before. Most of them were unknown outside of their own towns. Determined to document every musician he found, Lomax lugged a 315-pound acetate phonograph disk recorder around in his car; when he met a bluesman of merit, he would simply request a performance.

Today, in good old Brooklyn, NY, bluesman Josh Sullivan records his own music. He is, in a way, continuing Lomax’s musicological tradition, if in a conspicuously self-referential fashion. Sullivan, who performs under the name Perfvigvm, is both music maker and documentarian. He is as much interested in the substance of his music—its lyrics and instrumentation—as he is in the rawness of its recorded sound. Inspired by pre-war American recordings of blues, folk, and gospel, Sullivan aestheticizes Lomax’s work, capturing the dark, grainy quality of those early recordings and applying it to his own compositions. The result is a splendid artifact, as rare as it is public and familiar.

If you’ve ever listened to an early phonographic recording, you’ll know the sort of tinny, distant quality of sound that interests Sullivan. To replicate it the artist must improvise, using different types of equipment (old tape players, defunct speakers), sometimes recording and re-recording until the song sounds right. As Sullivan puts it, “I like to think of recording as a type of alchemy, using different combinations of things and effects, trying to get a particular sound that I have in my head.” It turns out that Sullivan’s sound may be in a lot of our heads.

Sullivan’s recording process seems less focused on nostalgic pining than on establishing a mood. Instead of simply emulating Led Belly or Geeshie Wiley, or harkening back to a low-tech time when music came directly from the folk, Sullivan summons deep emotional associations. When we listen to Perfvigvm’s rendition of “Last Kind Word Blues,” we have not only an original take on the song, but our own thoughts and feelings, linked inextricably to the experience of hearing that brooding old recording in its original. These associations, one finds, tend to be richly sad. Instead of the glow of friendly Americana, Sullivan gives us a sort of afterglow, the kind that manifests itself in the gloomier corners of the mind.

And then there’s the music itself. Most of it isn’t straight blues—it’s darker, harder, more melodic. Listen to “What God Joined Together” and its disturbing twin vocals, or “Feud in the Field,” which resembles nothing so much as European black metal, a genre that Sullivan describes as a direct influence on his own music. These tracks manage to trouble our ears at the same time as they reassure us that history and music, influence and originality, may all cohabit the same few minutes of song.

As Perfvigvm, Sullivan often records alone. Indeed, one can detect a bit of the lonely minstrel in his voice, which sometimes hides behind cloudy instrumentals, and other times shines through with verity and might. On a few tracks, he collaborates with singer Madelyn Robertson, drummer Calvin Robertson, and violist Jenny Moffett. These are particularly rich moments, when the spirit that Sullivan has worked so hard to render contemporary takes hold of more than one musician. Such tracks recall a slew of influences, from the Carter Family and Cleoma & Joseph Falcon to the early rockabilly of Elvis Presley’s Sun Studio recordings and Charlie Feathers.

Like the peripatetic bluesman of Lomax’s day, Sullivan can be difficult to track down. Primarily a recording artist, he has recently begun to play some live shows. A couple of weeks ago he performed at Williamsburg’s Epoh Owl, and before that at the Observatory, where he projected images from his blog while playing guitar and singing. Glad to have an audience, Sullivan prefers house shows—setting up in basements and backyards and playing well into the night. I suggest that you pack your phonographic recorder, take the train to Brooklyn, and find him.

Much has been written on the theater’s relation to cinema. Not long ago, André Bazin suggested that the connection is far older and closer than is generally admitted, and that if we hope to understand one form, we ought to understand the other. But today it is the divergence between theater and cinema that seems ineluctable: seldom do stage and screen occupy the same thought, except perhaps when one encounters a ghastly Broadway-to-Hollywood (or, worse, Hollywood-to-Broadway) remake, in which case all aesthetic concerns are banished and thoughts of artistic suicide prevail.   

It is heartening, then, that there still exists a small bunch of artists concerned with the confluence of theater and cinema. Among them is Andrew Gilchrist, a Brooklyn playwright who has lately begun to incorporate filmic and televisual elements into his stage productions. His newest, James V, which opens on May 13^th at the Tank Theater, is his second play to be preceded by an online video trailer. Gilchrist hopes not only that the trailer—viewable to anyone with a computer—will increase awareness of his theatrical work, but also that it will expand the show’s “landscape” beyond the theater. The former consideration is impressive for its savvy self-marketing, the latter for its artistic scope. Both, as it turns out, may play decisive roles in the reinvigoration of modern drama.

The theater of today is not dead, but it is gasping. The public’s hunger for human drama has long been satisfied by cinema and television, and it is by appealing to those twin sensibilities that a dramatist may now hope to attract his crowd. Gilchrist is not stooping, however—he is merely genuflecting before the mighty hold of contemporary media. Rather than selling out, he is mining film, TV, and the Internet for all they’re worth, and managing to say a thing or two about them in the process. If more playwrights followed Gilchrist’s lead and gave up their cloistral rejection of popular media, the theater as a whole might breathe easier.  

Not surprisingly, Gilchrist’s artistic influences are theatrical as well as cinematic. While one detects the fierce gloominess of Genet and Strindberg in his drama, there are equal parts Lynch and Fassbinder. Gilchrist’s plays delight in the bizarre, exploring that gray zone of dramatic imagination midway between comedy and horror. Lately, the playwright has been blending the two. In a recent work, an adaptation of Maeterlinck’s 1891 The Intruder, a family of slovenly southerners sits beside a flickering television set. The screen plays scenes from an imagined sitcom as banal as any found on network television, but infused with a grim tension that subtly affects the drama onstage. Mood is key, and there’s plenty of it. Like the family, we as audience are tired of knowing the world through 2-dimensional facsimiles—we are now more than ever interested in feeling life rather than watching it. The characters’ strange monologues, their exaggerated gestures, their eerie fixation on the natural world—all help to provoke a sense of dread that feels more real than mediated.

Dealing with film and television in art is a tricky business. No less an eminence grise than Bazin warned against the mixing of theater and cinema. Many have tried it, only to adopt the puerile clichés, hip irony, or superficial surfaces of the commercial screen. The difficulty is in incorporating a potentially salacious, ironic medium into one’s work while preserving the more profound human potentials of higher art. Gilchrist’s attempts have been nothing if not admirable.

James V is written and directed by Andrew Gilchrist, produced by Lucy Kaminsky and Andrew Gilchrist, and featuring Caleb Bark, Hallie Cooper-Novack, Andrew Gilchrist, Lucy Kaminsky, Benjamin Manglos, Richard Saudek and Patrick Vaill.  Designed by Kell Condon.  Video by Benjamin Manglos.  Costumes  by Joanna Spinks.

The play will show ­­­­­­­­­­­­­Wednesday, May 13^th and 27^th at 9:30, Sunday May 17^th at 6pm  and Sunday May 24^th at 7:30pm. The Tank is located at 354 West 45^th Street (between 8^th and 9^th Avenues).