I heard a story that Frieze Director Amanda Sharp found Randall’s Island on Google Earth – the perfect location to introduce New York to the art wonderland she created with Matthew Slotover almost a decade ago in London. It was a clever move to have visitors leave the main island by ferry or school buses to reach the airy white snake lying by the river (actually a tent, designed by SO-IL, Brooklyn, for the occasion). Both clients and exhibitors seemed refreshed by the mini-adventure and in the right mood for business. And business is good, especially for local emerging galleries who see the additional costs that come with being present in a major art fair drop dramatically, while their contacts with potential buyers and curators increase. For Gabrielle Giattino, owner and director of Bureau, less economic pressure means more agency over the work she chooses to present,“With having the fair in our home city, we can show exactly what we want at this point, without worrying about shipping costs.” Hence the massive sculpture by American artist Justin Matherly displayed in her booth. The work, cast in concrete, involves both the building up and the “unearthing” of material. It carries a sense of deep melancholy, and the uncanny beauty of something missing or lost.

For Mathew Higgs, director of White Columns, participating in the fair is about the possibility of proposing something different to a larger international audience. The mythical, downtown, non-profit art space decided to work with members of Creative Growth, an art center in California providing professional studios to adult artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities. “We are not a commercial gallery and don’t have to look after the career of our artists. We made a conscious choice to signal the fact that there are other contexts for art by showing the work of artists who entertain a different relationship to art-making. It allows another set of ideas in the narrative of the fair.”

Outside the tent, yet another narrative takes place with the Frieze Projects curated by Cecilia Alemani and sponsored by Mulberry. Responding to the fair’s location, the program includes eight artworks displayed across the lawns and in between the trees, almost playing hide and seek with visitors. Among them, the displaced landscape of Latifa Echakhch, dealing with the iconography of the American West, and consisting of two hundreds tumble weeds from Utah, frozen over the lush grass of Randall’s Island, as if the desert wind had stopped for a moment. The program also welcomes the shadow theater of Ulla von Brandenburg, which echoes in the booth of Parisian gallery Art Concept, with a series of drawings on paper. For Olivier Antoine, director of the gallery, and a regular of international art fairs, this first edition is extremely well put together and functions efficiently, but the space feels slightly too big. The structure of the tent, lingering from the north to south entrance like a long ribbon, reminds him of Manhattan. And indeed, the fair offers something similar to a wandering day in the city: walking from neighborhood to neighborhood, not feeling the distance, the eye constantly caught up by a new image, a new shape, by something never seen before that creates instant desire. Born and raised in London, Frieze may just have found its match in the islands of New York.

When photographer Jordan Sullivan returned to New York City after spending 12 months in “middle-of-nowhere Texas,” working construction in the land of ranches and wide-open places, the urban setting proffered a profound jolt, placing him on a new path of artistic investigation.

“I wanted to explore our relationship with nature at a time when I was feeling particularly disconnected from it,” Jordan says about curating “The Wild & The Innocent,” the photography exhibition currently at Clic Gallery in Manhattan. So through the unique perspectives of 30 photographers, he investigated this modern dichotomy, which in fact had interested him since his teenage days. The resulting featured images reflect the duality that exists in this rapport. Rather than taking the simplistic solution of damning one side (urbanity) or sanctifying the other (nature), the images express the infinitely nuanced ways in which we experience opposing realities.

Humanity becomes part of nature and nature is represented in a very human way. If Skye Parrott’s picture of a palm tree speaks a lively language, the objectification of Brea Souders‘ sun-burnt back emits a sense of peace. Bodies are juxtaposed with landscapes in a thoughtful way, redefining the conflict rather than marking it; Alexis Gross’ provocative shot of a naked female in a men’s workshop perfectly balances Samantha Casolari’s dreamy, abstract flower prints.

Jordan’s curation is lighthearted, and the juxtaposition of purity and darkness reads as a gentle reminder that the beautiful is beautiful principally because the ugly exists. Further underscoring the exhibition’s theme is the wide array of photographers—both established and up-and-coming—featured, bestowing the show with a true sense of community and exploration. “I selected work that not only fit with the theme but also that I had some sort of emotional or spiritual connection with,” Jordan explained. “I think this show brings together a small group of people whose work exemplifies what’s really great about photography right now.”

The Wild & The Innocent runs through April 15 at Clic Gallery. 255 Centre Street, New York, New York.
Above image by Samantha Casolari.

Left: Image by Brea Souders. Right: Image by Kohey Kanno.

Tintin is a god to me.

Surely this imaginary globetrotter seems real to most of us. He is also the most beloved of all comic-book heros worldwide – except in America, where he is inevitably confused with the dog, Rin Tin Tin - as well as the first literary boho “backpacker.”

Too, Tintin’s second book, Tintin Au Congo, proved misaligned with Yankee tastes with its racist-seeming stereotypes of large-lipped “negroes.” I’m afraid they’re much worse than Al Jolson in blackface singing My Little Mammie or Little Black Sambo turning tigers into ghee, although the amusingly obsolete and offensive tome is still wildly popular in Africa.

Indeed, the cowlicked androgynous-looking (but supposedly not gay, even considering the dearth of dames in the series) boy reporter represents wanderlust in the first degree, inhabiting an extreme alt universe grounded in graphic colorized geography, both real and imagined.

Tintin, a native son beloved by the weepy Walloons of Belgium (but known in Germany with typical Teutonic efficiency as “Tim”), has stumbled upon the Incas in Peru, smoked cigars with the Pharoahs in Egypt, played cowboy in America, and even rocketed to the moon. Also, he uncovers a smuggling ring in The Crab with the Golden Claws, goes hunting for “booty” in Red Rackham’s Treasure, and wows us in the imaginary kingdom of Syldavia (loosely based upon any Balkan country).

No doubt, there is nothing that this young millionaire adventurer, once he departs the luxurious safety of his beloved mansion Marlinspike Hall, that is, can’t do — especially with the help of his loyal cronies Snowy (known as “Minou” in France), Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, and the Thom(p)son Twins.

In fact, so big a fan am I, one of my proudest possessions is a carved wooden Tintin statue with a fey smile I acquired in Grand Bassam, Cote d’Ivoire, which I deemed perfect for smuggling diamonds or heroin. Hence, I was keenly interested on getting the skinny on his somewhat sketchy creator, the Belgian artist Georges Remi (a.k.a, Hergé). Despite his success as a cartoonist – the Tintin series comprises twenty-four books and has sold millions of copies in dozens of languages – Hergé was often criticized during World War Two for being a “collaborator” with the Nazis only after Belgium was occupied, though in fact the false accusation is assuredly apocryphal.

Pierre Assouline’s recent biography Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin, though simple, even sketchy (perhaps because the translator Charles Ruas might have rushed it to press to beat the Ruas rushed to beat the clock on the new Spielberg/Jackson Tintin film adaptation) still answered many of my questions. But the elegantly weird Francophone diction, as well as the wealth of extraneous detail, is nevertheless somewhat distracting.

But boring the book is not.

Born in Brussels in 1907, Hergé started his career, like Tintin, as a cub reporter. For all his accolades, Hergé nevertheless maintained meekly, “I was just happy drawing little guys, that’s all.” But Assouline asserts Hergé used his alter ego to champion some of his so-called sociopolitical causes: his love for the Boy Scouts, Catholicism, and the Monarchy, countered by his distrust of Communism and the Soviet Union. Hergé’s first book Tintin in the Land of the Soviets was both a surprising commercial success and a scathing critique of totalitarianism.

Sure, Hergé was also a raging alcoholic who suffered from painful bouts of depression, miserable meals of “moules frites,” and “disappearances” for extended periods of time without explanations, but what artist doesn’t?

Dead as a dodo in 1984, Hergé was self-consciously oblivious to his fame while alive, not only among schoolchildren dreaming of impossible adventures in exotic climes (I initially discovered the series as a youngster in Bermuda), but among adult artistic fantasists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. As we all dust off our collected Tintin oeuvre – with its paternalistic patina of “comic” (funny ha-ha) neo-colonialism and unadulterated intrigue (but hardly any women) – we wonder if the “little guy” in all of us will stand up to wrong and cry out in a cartoon bubble, like Tintin’s uber-“British” seafaring saltydog Captain Haddock, “Bashi Bazouks!”

Here’s hoping that the “surreal” Hollywood film, which Hergé’s wife Fanny helped negotiate, doesn’t negate our subconscious myths and isn’t an egregious flop in DVD sales.

Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin, written by Pierre Assouline and translated by Charles Ruas, is available through Oxford University Press.

The pieces in Jim Hodges’ show at Gladstone Gallery cast transient beams of light onto the walls and into your eyes. Each work considers and consists of bits of color and reflective materials (chips of mirrors, washes of metallic and spills of shine).

Mirror Ball, on view at Gladstone’s 24 St. space, is the piece that best exemplifies the artist’s ability to transfigure stock materials into poetic installations. It comprises a large sphere – cloaked with a mosaic-like dusting of tiny mirrors – suspended from the ceiling by a cord. The glittered orb hangs above a large, ominous crater in the ground. The concrete-lined cavity is filled to its brim with a liquid that appears to be, at first glance, an all-absorbing black. Look closely as this liquid brushes against the rough edges of the crater, like an ebbing rush of ocean water, and you will see that it is actually a very dark, syrupy purple—a gothic puddle of a melted popsicle-like substance. The mirrored sphere is lowered slowly through space, until it eventually becomes submerged in the liquid. When, finally, the ball sinks completely into the ground, the liquid looks like a puddle of impenetrable, hardened, shining plastic. Tiny flashes of light continue to gleam off of its shell and break through the top of the liquid, but these eventually flicker out.

Mirror Ball feels celebratory and secret; walking into the room is like stumbling into some sort of celestial ceremony. Visitors to the gallery gather around the gash in the ground, speculating about the mechanics (the size of the crater, the temperature of the liquid) of the piece. Sitting at the edge of this pit to watch the sphere is comparable to staring into a bonfire—both have a very distinctive magnetism that makes them almost impossible to look away from. The searing beauty of Mirror Ball, like that of a bonfire, is complicated and enhanced by its constant state of flux and, eventually, its ephemerality.

Also on view is an enormous, mechanized wooden light box that sounds like a mammoth hole-puncher and smells like sawdust. The box, inspired by the throwing of colored powders and waters in the Indian Holi celebration, systematically drops streams of highly pigmented paint—violet, neons, pink, and blue—onto the ground. The ever-evolving floor is a thick, gluey accumulation of these dried and fresh globs of color.

The gallery space on 21 St., meanwhile, contains monstrous organic boulders. The inward-facing sections of these rocks’ skins have been painted with Jeff Koons-esque layers of metallic paint in different colors. Their shining aluminum facades reflect off each other and allow you to see yourself and those around you as you weave through the hulking formations.

Jim Hodges’ works explore the overwhelmingly huge notions of love, temporality, loss and death. Mirror Ball, which feels both noble and mythological, is meant to evoke all of these themes. Some of these intended concepts – especially loss – are felt in the heaviness of your anticipation as you watch the drawn out submersion of the ball into the liquid. You are then reminded of fragility and impermanence by the fleeting confetti-like flashes of refracted light that quiver and dart around the gallery walls. In the same way that the artist’s works are often evocative of natural earth wonders, these manmade art objects also allude, with reverence, to the inimitable and superhuman capability of nature.

Mirror Ball is on display at the Gladstone Gallery, 515 W. 24 St, NYC, through December 23.

burn·ing adjective 1. aflame; on fire. 2. intense; passionate: a burning desire. noun the state, process, sensation, or effect of being on fire, burned, or subjected to intense heat.

Both the characters and the actors in Thomas Bradshaw’s newest, and most nuanced play to date, Burning, are aptly on fire. These people respond heatedly to their impulses, as creatures fleeing from buildings aflame.

The play tracks three seemingly disparate, and eventually inter-connected story lines, wherein a black artist, Peter, who has consciously obscured his race, ends up travelling to Berlin to appear in a gallery show run, in part, by a neo-Nazi rebel, Michael. Simultaneously depicted, a young wannabe actor named Chris is taken in by a gay New York theater couple and eventually becomes their houseboy/sexual plaything/son. The narratives eventually converge, bad behavior ensues.

Yes, there is graphic sex portrayed and titillating nudity – vividly exposing almost every primary character (which may be enough to bring you to the theater or not) – but unlike some other shock-value invested (and thereby predictable) work, the sexual content merely supports the theme of human destruction and regeneration that is woven throughout the piece. Case in point, the eloquent “destroy and re-build” speech, sincerely imparted by the character of Peter (the aforementioned black artist, married to a devoted and pregnant – and white – Josephine, and elegantly played by Stephen Tyrone Williams). Here Peter marvels at his and others’ human fallibility, and finds true beauty in his own frailty. All this is sincerely realized while his cock still resides in a Sudanese hooker’s ass.

Fittingly, the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) is invoked repeatedly, interestingly by the four gay characters in the play, but relevant to each of the three story lines.

Can such impulses be natural? Does nature recommend what offends her? The question of acting on human desire versus remaining within what is, perhaps, a synthetic social construct burns through the undercurrent of the piece. Where does reasonably living one’s truth reside?

Thomas Bradshaw has built a career on shocking his audiences. A downtown provocateur, whose plays have earned him many distinctions including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), academic positions (Northwestern) and international productions (playwright in residence, The Soho Theater in London, et al), Bradshaw has never been produced for such an “uptown” New York audience as The New Group’s, until now.

The playwright includes some autobiographical conflicts, such as when the seasoned actor Jack (shrewdly drawn by the great Andrew Garman) argues that what works for a downtown house can’t be transported so easily to an uptown crowd.

Furthermore, young Chris (Evan Johnson) exclaiming, in his adulatory propositioning of the older playwright Donald (Adam Trese):“This idea that people can’t relate to certain types of material is bullshit.” These words appear to stand for Bradshaw’s direct theater philosophy, and this writer is in agreement.

Secondary characters and principals alike are confronted with, and generally succumb to, consuming desire for that which they cannot have, or feel they should not have. From Heinz the bone-headed neo-Nazi to Peter the ebony anal-craver to Donald the HIV positive playwright, untoward impulses acted upon lead to the sweetest of release. And while sexual release is most overtly explored in the play, and is frequently presented with the experience of getting closer to God, the release in violence and death brings upon these same sublime comparisons.

The irony of finding God in our darkest of human foibles rings true. Go see this play for its mind and its body. A philosophical quandary wrapped in an ass-eating, finger licking, sister-diddling provocation. Alive with heat indeed.

Burning by Thomas Bradshaw, directed by Scott Elliott, produced by the New Group is running through December 17 at the New Group at Theater Row, Acorn Theater, 410 West 42 St., NYC. Tickets can be purchased by calling (212) 239-6200 or through Telecharge. Running time is 2 hours 45 minutes.

When I was in grade school, New York City was heralded as the world’s “melting pot,” an anthropomorphic melding of cultures. Today, word is that teachers have moved onto a “salad” analogy, arguing that while the various human ingredients harmoniously mix and mingle, they retain their separate identities. Whichever school you subscribe to, one of the most esteemed attributes of our city is its acceptance of all types.

Within New York, each of these distinct individuals carves out his or her niche, the place that becomes “home.” For native New Yorkers, home is usually the vicinity around which they grew up. For transplants, it’s more often than not the neighborhood of their first apartment. This is part of what makes the city endlessly fascinating: it is a different place for everyone. There are the occasional shared experiences, but for the most part your New York is as unique as your fingerprint.

New York:The Pegleg, the most recent installment in the WhaiWhai guidebook series, highlights this diversity, presenting an entertaining and educational tool that crosses eras, classes and ethnicities to offer a unique look at the iconoclasts, visionaries and dreamers who created and continue to inhabit New York.

The term “whaiwhai” comes from a Maori word meaning “to search for,” and consequently the guidebook is structured around the search for “the pegleg,” a particularly powerful prosthesis that first arrived in New York in 1647 on the leg of Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant (true story). After Governor Stuyvesant’s death, the wooden leg, which was wrapped in bands of supposedly supernatural silver, was hidden in the family crypt in the East Village, where the governor was actually buried. The WhaiWhai story goes that before the crypt was permanently sealed, the leg vanished and has been missing since. The fictional narrator of The Pegleg, Shlep Wallace, is a longtime prop specialist who recently found the notebook of deceased scientist Nikola Tesla. Inside the notebook are clues speaking to the pegleg’s powers. Therefore, Shlep is calling upon the reader (you) to help recover the absconded appendage.

A text message exchange later (each book contains a unique code ) and you are on your way to exploring corners of New York that even the most seasoned city-goer has overlooked, which is why this guidebook is as entertaining for residents as it is for visitors. Each of the obscure sites featured contains a historical anecdote that exemplifies the eccentric personalities—past and present—who make up our eclectic “salad.”

My first stop was the spot where hotelier David Weissberg jumped to his death in 2002. Today it’s the Gramercy Park Hotel, a place I last visited for a luxury sunglasses launch. Next, I was led to 49 Irving Place, the former residence of interior design maven and style trailblazer Elsie De Wolfe and her partner Elisabeth “Bessy” Marbury, who entranced early 20th-century Manhattan society with their raucous parties. At each location you search for the answer to the riddle in the given story. Once found, you send it via text message and receive the code—which corresponds to the book’s tri-fold pages—to the next site. The ultimate goal, of course, is to find the elusive pegleg. And you can play as many times as you like; each adventure is different than the last.

Shlep may be the imaginary storyteller, but the real raconteur behind The Pegleg is Timothy Speed Levitch (who goes by Speed) a longtime New Yorker, writer, tour guide and actor whose descendants arrived via Ellis Island. Here, he reveals a bit about the creation of The Pegleg and offers an insight into his New York.

Erin Dixon: Tell us a bit about your background—how did you come to learn so much about New York?

Speed Levitch: I’m still learning about New York, of course. It’s an endless field of study. I started in the Bronx, lived in Riverdale and attended Horace Mann High School, but I barely knew my way around Manhattan until I went to NYU for college. I’m a flaneur and I’ve been appreciating the scenery and the stories of the city my whole life.

Erin: What was something you learned about New York during your research that surprised you?

Speed: That the Mercury Theater Company of players and their director/star Orson Welles all thought that the script for “War of The Worlds” was stupid, and right before they went on air Orson Welles apologized to his actors for burdening them with such dull, insipid material. Apparently, the actors were making fun of the script right up until air. Even as they were performing it live (as half of New Jersey freaked out), they were locked away in a little studio room in Midtown—just having fun with what they assumed was campy, overly sentimentalized material.

Erin: How did you decide which stories to incorporate?

Speed: In school, I studied playwriting and I was drawn to tour guiding due to the theatricality of the job—the performance aspect. When I’m looking at the history of the city, choosing stories about the city, I’m looking for a good play script I can perform. Mostly, I prefer comedy. I like funny stories most of all. Of course, a good play needs stories that are filled with passion, epiphany, surprise and dynamic human characters, which live through anecdotes we can all identify with and learn from. Hopefully, at the end of the stories there’s some kind of catharsis or healing for the reader.

Erin: Which is your favorite story or character in The Pegleg?

Speed: I’m a little bit fickle… The story I would choose for my favorite would be different depending on my mood and the time of day, etc. But I can answer for tonight. Tonight, my favorite story is “Flight of the Missouri Rockets.” It’s the story about how the Rockettes were invented and about the rite of passage that Radio City Music Hall had to go through in order to fully realize its potential as a music hall. Roxy, the visionary behind Radio City, is an amazing character and he stars in this beautiful tale about self-realization, the creative spirit and invention. (It’s also my favorite story because it features the Missouri Rockets, the dance troupe of 64 gorgeous ladies out of St. Louis.)

Erin: How did you come up with the character Shlep Wallace? Was he based on anyone you know?

Speed: Yes, Shlep is certainly an amalgam of several wise old men I’ve listened carefully to over the years, but, of course, Shlep is also his own man. I could hear his unique, rasping voice in my mind’s ear as I wrote the stories. While writing the stories, I often felt as if Shlep were giving me dictation.

Erin: Does the pegleg really exist, hidden somewhere in NY? Will the reader ever arrive at the true end?

Speed: I wouldn’t want to say for sure. I want to preserve the mystery and the fun of the game. Let me just say this: The stakes couldn’t be more raised! The pegleg really did exist. What really happened to it? Impossible to say for sure. It’s very possible that it’s buried with Stuyvesant’s body in his crypt underneath St. Mark’s Church. There are all sorts of historic images and artistic renditions of Peter Stuyvesant’s pegleg. Many of his contemporaries called it “silver leg” because it was a fancy pegleg that had silver bands. There is a Stuyvesant family crypt where his corpse was put, apparently with both his real and fake leg, but the family crypt wasn’t sealed until the last Stuyvesant went in there in the 1950s.

Erin: What is your favorite neighborhood in Manhattan?

Speed: Lately, my favorite neighborhood is the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mainly, I think, just because it is such a mad mix of events. Another good name for that hood would be “unlikely.” It is a zany collection of events that birthed that current, unique place. It’s also a great place for nosh—the small, delicious immigrant foods you can enjoy as you walk. New York’s specialty is great food that moves with you.

Erin: If there is one place in Manhattan that everyone should see, what is it?

Speed: Rush hour. I enjoy viewing rush hour in and around Grand Central, of course. Penn Station is also excellent. Downtown, in general is good and the Staten Island Ferry Terminal…along the bridges, especially the Brooklyn Bridge. Really, I think the one landmark of New York that everyone should see is some perch where they can view and be properly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the city mobilizing during the two rush hours, daily. Of course, it’s always great people watching, too.

Erin: What makes Manhattan unique from other cities?

Speed: I tend to think that all cities and places are teachers. There’s something to learn from all real estate, basically. I’m writing a piece right now about Lawrence, Kansas and although Lawrence and its stories have different lessons to teach and certainly create a different tone and atmosphere than New York does with its stories, I’m still certian that both cities—the sixth largest city of the state of Kansas and New York—are equally themselves, equally unique. I think of them both as two great gurus, only very different gurus, who advise me on very different subjects.

Surface contains and carries valuable information in art. Glenn Ligon’s mid-career retrospective, titled America, is on exhibition another three weeks at the Whitney, and allows for an expanded view of his art practice through evaluation of his surfaces. The exhibition’s stark order and his works predominant absence of color heighten the surface’s importance in its contribution to the political content.

Beginning his work in the cross fires of language and the remnants of abstract expressionism, the Dream Books series and early handwritten works are on gushy, built-up, and cancelled out surfaces with text laid on top. Additionally Ligon marked his early investment in the terrain in the Black American landscape and homosexuality as subject matter. Each piece in the Dream Book series has a subject stated at the top with a statement following that acts as a dream interpretation for that topic, all sampled from dream pamphlets popular in Ligon’s youth. The composition then creates a large space in the middle for the eye to travel before coming upon an opposite statement below that carries a tone of foreboding or warning. This begins Ligon’s use of the stencil, which becomes paramount in following works. There’s a clear influence and battle with Rauschenberg’s surfaces and in the next body of work John’s process of image making. The paint handling indicates a struggle for some strokes to claim their space as they cancel each other out while others quietly hide and peak out of overlapping layers.

Identity is often built over time through experiences and ideas in your particular society; the built surfaces of a series of doors from the early 90’s utilizing stenciled text to create an image of repeated words and phrases, quoting from James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and him-self become a totemic presence of personhood and speak to this process of identity building. One reads, “I do not always feel colored.” Each start out smooth and legible at the top, in reading down the repetition of these short statements you lose your place on the line, especially as the text legibility deteriorates, you repeat yourself as the text transforms into pure image and mark. The weathered, rained, used, and smeared accumulation of oil stick as the words become smudged on their transference down the door brings a sense of time, the time of lying down letter-by-letter, row-by-row. There’s a time that’s often evoked in the text as well, “I remember the day I became colored.” Time and process in the work also provoke questions about this built identity through the surface, how does the accumulation of these experiences relate to the accumulation of the oil on the canvas?

In the Runaway Series, a suite of prints mimic posters a slave owner would create when they were seeking their “runaway property.” Every poster repeatedly describes Glenn through a set-up in which he charged his friends with the task of generating the short concise verbal portraits of him. While you are reading these, four large wooden crates stand in the middle of the room, emanating from three are songs by KRS One, Billy Holiday, and Bob Marley while the other is Glenn’s voice telling the story of Henry “Box” Brown, a black man that shipped himself to freedom in 3’x2’ wooden crate in 1849. As you’re reading these sweet, quirky, and awkward portraits of Ligon the history of slavery in which he’s placed as the context creates a hard opposition in which to experience the artist.

Returning to the process of text laid down through stencils in oil stick is a gallery full of harsh and unyielding jokes sourced from Richard Pryor from the early 2000’s. Ligon returns to color as well, which is just as ratcheted up as the jokes. Equal in their employment of color is the Coloring Book series. Images from black history coloring books in the 1970’s find their way back into children’s hands for this project. The freedom of coloring something in without learned social constraints and conventions is epitomized in Malcolm X’s rouge cheeks, blue eye shadowed lids, bright pink lips, and frosted white hair.

The retrospective leaves us with three recent works in neon light. All different iterations of America spelled out in neon; one in which the letters are individually flipped backwards so that the symmetrical ones still read correctly while the others lead to a de-familiar textual experience, one is blacked out and only through small cracks can you detect light, and another in which the surface is blacked out but white light is dispersed on the wall behind it. This presentation of America through varying uses of light reflects back the never constant or unified ephemeral relationship that Americans have to their country and to each other. Ligon’s treatment of America and its history is critical and examined over, this labor reflects back and opens up a dialog that stimulates essential conversation about who we have been as a country and who we are to each other.

Glenn Ligon: America closes June 5 at The Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave, NY, NY.

Angela Aux is really a man, the title of his new album (recently released on Red Can Records) is Whatever You Guess It’s Not, and the press info provided reads that the identity of the 27-year-old singer/songwriter/producer/younameit is pretty mysterious and that the album deals with the feeling of being lost in a forest of signs. All this seems like an unnecessarily extensive effort to brand Angela Aux as unclassifiable in a time where unclassifiable has long become a classification unto itself.

Yes, the album has folk elements and hip hop elements and field recordings and movie samples and a singer/songwriter attitude, but everything on the record is absolutely coherent and intelligently arranged and forms a homogeneous entity. So let’s just forget about the forest of signs and lets go for a walk in the real forest, because that is what the album really is – a beautiful spring album that makes you forget your winter blues. It the  vision of an artist that had locked himself up in his room and imagined sunshine and green leaves and budding flowers when outside there were only gray skies, ice, snow and cold wind. It’s an album to listen to in parks, by lakes and rivers and in cars that have been warmed by the sun in the parking lot outside the supermarket. It’s easy listening for easy days, composed and arranged during sleepless nights. It’s an album that makes you forget about the albums you liked in December, January and February.

Angela Aux is the brainchild of a man who wants to disappear behind the music, but for those who know the south German independent scene it is no big secret who Angela really is, especially when you know Ms. Aux’s other bands and his feature guests. So let’s just call him a multitasking Vishnu with a thousand arms who plays in several other bands, organizes a multimedia literature festival, works on the photography and literature magazine Der Greif, and has somehow found the time to produce Whatever You Guess It’s Not.

And one thing I guess, even though the title of the album tells me not to do so, is that this album is going to make a lot of people very happy and that it might even be able to conserve some happy thoughts for the time of the year that calls for sadder and gloomier music.

It’s been almost a year since Mos Def released his latest solo album “The Ecstatic” – a year in which a lot of other records have hit the market. Twelve months in which many new artists have appeared on the scene. 365 days in which the music industry has gone further down the drain. But unlike many other productions that are here today and gone tomorrow, Mos Def’s work still remains worth talking about.

How is it that this album, that on first sight seems much less easily accessible than Mos Def’s previous releases, became a critics favorite, earned the artist a Grammy nomination, entered the US Charts #9 and was named one of the most important albums of 2009 by Rolling Stone?

To answer this question, one has to take a closer look at the controversy that evolved around the highly underrated album “True Magic”, that was released on Geffen Records in 2006.

After the release date of the album had been changed innumerable times and  strong tensions between the label management and the artist had grown, the album was finally released in a plain box, with no cover, no booklet, and very limited artwork printed on the CD and vinyl. It also contained the controversial “Katrina Clap”, which earned Mos Def an arrest while doing an impromptu performance of the song outside the VMAs in 2006. These moves were interpreted by many as a big fuck you in the face of Jimmy Iovine, chairman of Geffen Records, especially since it was the last record that legally bound Mos Def to the label.

Now, as a result of all this, “The Ecstatic” takes these developments one step further and seems to go against anything that the politics of major labels represent.

First off, one wonders why Mos Def didn’t simply release his album on Stones Throw Records, because 7 of the 16 songs on the album were produced by producers who are currently signed to the LA label. Four songs were contributed by Madlib, two songs by Oh No and one song by Georgia Anne Muldrow.

It also came as a surprise that some of the instrumentals on the album had already been released on other records of the beatmakers. The instrumental of “Auditorium” could already be heard on Madlib’s 2007 release “Beat Konducta Volume 3&4 – Beat Konducta in India” and was then titled “Movie Finale”. The instrumental  of “Supermagic” was released on Oh No’s record “Dr. No’s Oxperiment” as “Heavy”, the sounds of “Revelations” could be found on the 2008 Madvillain Album “Madvillainy 2 – The Madlib Remixes” under the title “Savage Beast” and “Life in Marvelous Times” uses the same beat that Mr. Flash had produced for his collaboration with french HipHop crew TTC, called “Champions”.

This re-use of beats is really not a common technique in hip hop, unlike, for example, in dancehall, where many different MCs can spit over one rhythm, so the use of the instrumentals caused some astonishment, both positive and negative, amongst Mos Def’s fans.

But the most surprising thing about “The Ecstatic” is that none of the songs on the record really seem to have any serious hit potential. Sure enough, three singles were released – “Life in Marvelous Times”, “Casa Bey” and “Quiet Dog” – but none of them entered the charts.

In a time where iTunes exclusives have become more important as a source of income for musicians than the sales of the actual record ,and where the attention span of the average customer seems to have shrunk to a mere three minutes, it seems like a big risk for any record label to release an album that does not immediately reward the listener and that, on the contrary, demands something from her or him.

The whole album seems a lot like one big jam session, like a product of improvisation. It really feels like a record, that needs to be listened to and seen as a whole, as an entity. And while one could argue that most of the tracks on the record are pretty short, and are thus made for exactly the before mentioned type of listener, they really need to be understood as little episodes that are being fused together by clever use of ingenious skits, smart lyrics and the order of the songs to form one continuous piece, an artistic method also used in the 2007 Charles Burnett movie “Killer of Sheep”, of which a shot of a scene got chosen for the album cover.

All these steps seems especially surprising, considering that Downtown Music, Mos Def’s current label, is far from an independent label (it is home to many other big names, such as Amanda Blank, Gnarls Barkley, Justice and French First Lady Carla Bruni) and that none of the album’s singles have been released in physical form.

But in this truest core of the album lies what makes it special and, as some might argue, what makes it somehow old fashioned.

And, of course, this improvised character of the album means that it also has it’s weak moments.

For example “History”, the Black Star reunion track with Talib Kweli, is much too short and Kwelis line “I’m down with the crew, like Mussolini in Italy” is just unbearable and idiotic. Also the chorus lines of “Flowers”, sung by Georgia Anne Muldrow, are terribly cheesy and one really has to wonder why Mos Def chose Slick Rick as a feature partner for the track “Auditorium”, because you’d really need a lot of fantasy to see any connection between the parts of the two rappers. Maybe Mos simply is a big fan of the Ruler, but it seems that there was no lyrical exchange whatsoever going on between the two of them.

But even if these imperfections cannot be denied, they only contribute, on the artist’s side, to the whole process of formation of the album and, on the listener’s side, to the process of appreciation of Mos Def’s work.

“The Ecstatic” has certainly conserved some of its raw sides and simply does not want to be as sleek and perfect as any album you’d expect to be dropped by a major record label. It is a strong statement about what is still possible in today’s music industry for artists that have not lost their integrity and that is one of the reasons this album is so appealing.

“The Ecstatic” marks a new start for this exceptional musician called Mos Def – a new start into a future that hopefully holds a lot more great records and that every fan can feel ecstatic about.

The beginning of bobrauschenbergamerica opens with a giant American flag set and a cast of nine characters moving around, coming and going, re-arranging props, roller skating by flirtatiously, making eyes at one another, climbing in boxes and bath tubs- all preparing you for the ruckus ahead. I was struck by a voice-over that seemed to represent the artist Robert Rauschenberg saying amongst other things, “tie a string together and see where it goes.” Prompting me early on that I would be asked to make irrational leaps from one notion and event to the next as the piece would unfold, like Rauschenberg’s work. I was presented with the absurd (random song and dance, a monologue of chicken jokes, a psycho pizza delivery guy) along with dramas and philosophical questions that enter our lives naturally through our relationships with one another and the world (how do we pick who to love, how light travels, how we comfort ourselves).

Being familiar with Rauschenberg’s work helped to get funny jokes through out the piece, like the life size deer mounted on wheels with a tutu around it’s mid-section clearly was referencing one of his most famous combines, of a stuffed angora goat with a tire around its mid-section entitled “Monogram.” That’s just funny!

This piece activated two separate times- one being a nostalgic 60’s tone of small town America, this tone predominately lead by a character that was Robert mother and consistently went down memory lane telling you stories about her son from his childhood. Additional cultural references from the 60’s were passed of in the present but are linked to the images and sources that Rauschenberg was working with. There was a flipping though to the present time with references to the internet and contemporary lives.

The level of play inherent amongst this performance group, SITI Company, was enthralling. There was a quality through out the piece in which they would fill a moment, scene, or movements and then empty it out. A silly dance that all would be engaged in joyfully would abruptly end and hollow out all the apparent joy and feelings that were present calling into question that which was taken as reality moments before. This aspect connected back to how I feel we experience life and its temporality and it was beautiful to witness.

Dance Theatre Workshop presents bobrauschenbergamerica through May 16th.

Image by Lisa Kereszi via New Yorker.