Thursday night was the VIP Preview for the new exhibit opening at the New Museum, Ostalgia. The entire museum was packed, despite a mini-thunderstorm that struck exactly the moment the doors opened. Museum-goers roamed freely throughout the building taking both the staircase and the elevators to check out the exhibit and the party which went all the way from the lobby to the top floor of the building’s roof deck. Named for the German word “ostalgie,” which references nostalgia for the period before the fall of Communism and the dissolution of the Berlin wall, Ostalgia looks at the vast amount of art produced in these countries whose geographic borders were re-drawn and the people whose lives were up-turned. The exhibit itself was overwhelming in its scope, encompassing over twenty artists from over fifty countries featuring sculptures, video installations, live cameras, paintings, mobiles, posters, magazine covers, drawings, dioramas, found objects, dolls, books, photographs and more- making it hard to fully take in everything even within a three hour time frame. Cocktails for the event were provided by Kanon Organic Vodka, who mixed up three signature drinks that went with the Eastern Bloc theme of the exhibition- The Kanon Kremlin, The Siberian Sipper and The Blushing Babushka. All three drinks were light summer concoctions mixed with ingredients like fresh cucumber juice, lemonade, Pellegrino and cranberry juice. After finishing the exhibit, everyone gathered outside on the roof deck to watch the other show going on- the beautiful sunset over Manhattan, made nicer only by the refreshing cocktail in hand.

Ostalgia is on view at the New Museum, 235 Bowery NYC through September 25.

Polaroids taken by the lovely Amanda Carter at MODE PR.

Left: Justin Charles, Katherine Krause and Johnny Misheff. Right: Hannelore Knuts and Victoria Bartlett.

Left: Nessia Pope and Lisa Phillips. Right: Paris Murray, Argento Gelant and Germano Gelant.

Ostalgia Exhibit

Left: Pati Hertling, Alex Hertling, Kate Sutton, Dmitri Vensky. Right: Stephane Rebillard, Mia O’Malley.

Left: Wataru Shimosato, Rui Yokoo. Right: Ryo Miyamoto.

Left: Albie Hueston with guest. Right: Johnny Misheff and Harry Bee.

Left: Tamas Banovich. Right: Paula Naughton, Helen Toomer-Labzda, Andy Cushman, Jeffrey Teuton.

Left: Kanon Bar Atmosphere. Right: Ostalgia Exhibit.

Left: Matt Kays and guest. Right: Tim Goossens and Julie Ragolia.

Left: Emily Taw, Alexandra Nish, Sara O’Keeffe, Elizabeth Bidart. Right: Ryan Mulcock, Jacu Strauss, Matthew Coody.

Left: Kara Greenwald, Amapola Prada and Linton. Right: Miles Freeland

Left: Justin Charles. Right: Jenna Elizabeth, Carol Han.

Left: Ivy Thompson, David Shapiro. Right: David Graver, Jeffrey Keefe, Joseph Reuben and Guest.

Left: Connie Berg, Ingrid Moe. Right: Kanon Bar Atmosphere

Left: Andrew Blazer. Right: Stephanie Dodes.

Left: Charles Atlas and Lucy Sexton. Right: Katherine Krause and Andrew Blazer.

On Thursday, May 12 we celebrated the launch of Dossier Issue No. 7 on the roof deck at the New Museum with the support of Vans, music by Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear and Neon Indian, drinks by Kombucha Brooklyn, limited edition totes bags by Pamela Love and Caris Reid and a showing of the film Heavy Rays by Josh Slater. Click “Read More” below for additional photos of the night.

above: photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix
below: Andrej Pejic, Kyle Anderson and Andrew Young, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

left: Katherine Krause and Eric Childs (Kombucha Brooklyn); right: Marcelo Gomes and guests, all Fuji polaroids by Amanda Carter

left: Tim Yu and Morgan Collett; right: Christine Messineo and Matt

above: Anna Ahonen and Katariina Lamberg, photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix

above: Andrew Blazer and Chris Taylor, photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix

above: photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix

above: Liz Kabler and Jeremy Malman, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

left: Lissie Trulie and Collier Schorr; right: Katherine Krause, Skye Parrott and Susan Kilkenny

above: Noah Shelley and Johnny Misheff, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

above: Samantha Pleet and guest, photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix

above: photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix

left: Erin Krause; right: Katherine Krause and Hans Longo

above: CJ Swanton, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

left: Ethan Silverman and Alan Palomo (Neon Indian), photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix; right: Chris Taylor, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

above: photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix

above: photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix

left: Emma Reeves, Matt Lenski and guest; right: Ken Miller and guest

left: James Timmins, Johnny Misheff and Alec Friedman; right: Kava Gorna and Annelies de Rouck

above: Grace Min, Jeremy Malman, Skye Parrott and Thuy Tran, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

above: Kariina Rand and Melissa St. Fleur, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

left: Ethan Silverman and guest; right: Skye Parrott and Amanda Carter

above: Kelsey Harper, Morgan Collett, Audrey Gingras and Ryder Robison, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

above: Rogan Gregory, Andrew Feldman and Dani Baum, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

left: Cian Browne and Yara Flinn; right: Sarah Cobb and guest

above: photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix

left: Joe Sheftel, Jonah Fay-Hurvitz and Kyle de Woody; right: Jessica Baxter, Kalika Farmer and Katherine Krause

above: photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix

above: Yael Malka and Cait Oppermann, photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix

above: Par Parekh and Greg Wright, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

above: Leana Zuniga, Stewart Gerard and Caroline Sebastian, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

above: Anette Stephens, Phoebe Stephens, guest, Leana Zuniga, Marina Schindler

above: Erin Beatty, Monique Pean, Steve Glass and Max Osterweis, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

above: Timo Weiland and Matthew Schneier, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

left: Rob Schumann and Andrew Blazer; right: Morgan Colett, Adrian Gaut and Alec Friedman

above: Maggie Harrsen and Tina Marie, photo by Santiago Felipe for Metromix

left: Josh Slater; right:Jonathan Allen and Kristin Gallegos, photos by Billy Farrell Agency

above: Elizabeth Harper, Katherine Krause and Erin Dixon, photo by Billy Farrell Agency

Image courtesy of Benoit Pailley

After being instructed to start at the top of the New Museum and work my way down, I was thrilled to arrive at the 2nd floor exhibition of works by Lynda Benglis.

From lava forms erupting from a wall lit with a black light to knotted steel formations, which remind me of all the yoga poses I will never master, to a room filled with Benglis’ content-heavy new media works tackling gender, the works create a dynamic exhibition. At no point did I know what was coming next, yet the unpredictability of the show wasn’t jarring; it was stimulating. When the lava pieces came off the wall instead of being piled on the ground in the corner, their gravity took a charge that was engaging in an unexpected way. Her sculptures and floor paintings felt extremely contemporary despite being at least three decades old. This feeling was exaggerated after experiencing George Condo’s exhibition on the 3rd and 4th floors, where I was continually shocked that the paintings were made within the last ten to 15 years, because they felt dated.

Many of Benglis’ sculptures seemingly beg to be taken off the wall, to function in some unfamiliar ceremony or ritual. They evoke forms from worship or minimalist abstraction with their inherent seriousness, then the surface sparkles, glitter and lovely colors replace the austerity with a messy vibrating poetry.

The aspect that I appreciate of both Benglis’s art practice and the curation of this exhibition is the inclusion of both objects and ideas, the multi-dimensionality that she’s engaged with is dealt with. Artists can prove difficult to categorize and often work that can’t be reconciled gets left out or turned into fetishized smaller exhibitions. Her practice avoids reduced summations by floating between new media, performance and conceptual works and that of the objects she was making. Even if you don’t really know her work, you might have heard the story from the ’70s when she took out an ad in Art Forum of her naked, oiled, trim and tan-lined body with a rocking double-sided dildo protruding a good 15 inches off her body. She wasn’t going to play nice. She had things she needed to make in the studio and she had work to do within the confines of the art world. Whether she was leaving the stretchers behind to make paintings directly on the floor or running around in a video with a costumed dog flaunting male and female genitalia, Benglis’ work holds formal and conceptual grit that still has traction.

Admittedly, I’m not always quick to cross the East River for a party. But when the Brooklyn Museum and Manhattan’s New Museum held their annual spring galas on the same night last week, I crossed it twice. My first stop was the Brooklyn Museum, where food artist Jennifer Rubbel created an orgiastic feast for all five senses. Guests snacked on crackers garnished with Fontina cheese melting from overhead sculptures and poured their drinks from spigots protruding out of blank canvases. Mario Batali shouted, “Cuba Libre!” as he poured rum and coke into his Ball jar. Meanwhile, Chloe Sevigny and Patrik Ervell opted for dirty martinis.

Despite the Donald Judd influence, the dinner that followed was anything but minimal. 150 rabbits, ten turkeys, two pigs and two cows covered large plywood boxes, at which 600 guests were left to carve their own entree. Afterward, dessert poured from a 20-foot-high piñata of Andy Warhol’s head, which people took turns beating. And while the flood of Hostess snack cakes marked the meal’s decadent end, the after-party (a carnival hosted by Opening Ceremony in the museum’s lobby) was just getting started. I left as the male strippers were giving out lap dances…

Back on the island, the New Museum opted for a Carnival-themed affair, hosted by Brazilian actress Alice Braga and Calvin Klein’s Francisco Costa, and held at the top of 7 World Trade Center. There were no strippers but Forro in the Dark played sultry, street-party music that warranted some grinding. I was a little nervous that my navy Zero + Maria Cornejo dress wouldn’t pass the “anything but black” dress code, but then Aurel Schmidt ignored the request altogether, wearing a black Giambattista Valli minidress and black polka-dot stockings. Several others followed suit, but Terence Koh, outfitted in all white from Comme des Garcons and his own line, KOHTURE for Opening Ceremony, evened out the monochrome palate.

Above: Melting cheese sculptures at the Brooklyn Museum Ball. Image courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

The New Museum is having a video screening of scrap pile poetry – lost and forgotten film footage – Wednesday night starting at 7pm, featuring images and sounds collected by artists, musicians, and poets. Check the website of the Lost & Found archive for more info.

For six weeks in February and March, visitors to Jeremy Deller’s show at the New Museum, It Is What It Is: Conversations about Iraq, could speak with an alternating cast of soldiers, journalists, scholars, and Iraqi nationals and refugees about the situation in Iraq and the country’s culture and history.  The exhibition also featured a car that had been mangled by a suicide bomber attacking a famous book market on March 7th, 2007 (38 people were killed in the explosion).

When the show at the New Museum closed, Deller – together with Iraqi artist and translator Esam Pasha, US veteran of the Iraq War Sergeant Jonathan Harvey, and Creative Time curator Nato Thompson – towed the car on a flatbed trailer from New York to Los Angeles on a three week road trip, making numerous stops along the way to discuss the war with people across the country.

Deller, together with Emanuel Almborg, has recently finished a film featuring six of the participants in this complex and ongoing conversation reflecting both on their experiences in Iraq and on their discussions with visitors to the show. The film can be seen on Emanuel’s website.

The performance group Lewis Forever has just begun their residency at the New Museum for the month of June, and the group, comprised of four siblings, is having their first happening tonight at the New Museum at 7pm.

Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton is the first-ever survey of the artist’s work, which includes over 100 portraits — paintings, drawings and prints — of icons ranging from modern-day musical legends like Kurt Cobain and Liam Gallagher to historic figures and revered monarchs like Napoleon and Queen Elizabeth. Armed with only a petite canvas and an equally small network of colors, Peyton is able to capture the very essence of a person: You will know almost immediately whom you’re looking at.

The show, despite comprising two whole floors, retains a cozy and intimate feel, almost like you’re peaking into someone’s family room — due in large part to Peyton’s usage of miniature canvases and frames. “[The portraits] are beautifully painted and the format is so small –- they’re almost like little baubles,” said Laura Hoptman, the show’s curator.

What is perhaps the most interesting feature of this exhibition, however, is that which can only be revealed in a survey: After walking through the show for no more than ten minutes (or less), one senses a conspicuous commonality between many of the works. The portraits of men (which make up the bulk of the show) are overwhelmingly androgynous, and if you’ve ever seen a photograph of the artist herself, they all a bear a striking resemblance to Peyton. “When looked at as a whole,” said Hoptman, “this show is, in many ways, a collection of self-portraits of the artist.”

Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton is open until January 11 at the New Museum.

Image: “Kurt” (detail), 1995, oil on board, 25.4x 20.3 cm. Collection Glenn Fuhrman. Courtesy the FLAG Art Foundation.

For all of its melancholic overtones and stomach-turning curios, After Nature at the New Museum is an exceptionally fun place to be drunk. And why not? The apocalypse isn’t exactly something that one should face sober.

Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s Director of Special Exhibitions, the show is meant to be, “read as a visual novel, a story of nature after a trauma, a retelling colored by mythology, religion and distress.” On its opening night, however, it felt more like a carnival ride.

After the requisite schmooze and booze on the seventh floor Sky Room, I started my tour of the three-tiered exhibition from the top down and was immediately staggered by the brilliantly executed pairing of Zoe Leonard’s Tree (1997) — a 21-foot tree reconstructed with an elaborate steel support system—and Maurizio Cattelan’s Untitled (2007) — a taxidermied horse hanging dejectedly from its headless neck.

Fueled by the gee-whiz curiosity that often accompanies the initial stages of intoxication, I barreled my way past After Nature’s other dramatic oddities, including a life-sized replica of the Unibomber’s cabin; a vitrine-encased corpse covered in waxy, wooden tentacles; a video of a three-legged, four-armed, two-headed man; and a village of humanoid figures made of patch-worked animal intestines. Blowing a mental kiss to the pink-clad Cattelan (a longtime favorite) as I breezed through the door, I left convinced that wow, I’ve been past the end of the world and it was fun!

There is, however, much more to After Nature than mere spectacle, and, at its core, Gioni’s exhibition feels deeply cerebral. Recently revisiting the show on a sober weekday, I was bewildered and overwhelmed by the visual and ideological clutter of the second and third floor galleries, but I also felt provoked into an instantaneous dialogue with the show’s stronger works.

When viewed within the context of the exhibition, Werner Herzog’s 1992 film And A Smoke Arose—Lessons of Darkness provides an excellent sounding board for classic questions about art and its function: Is it immoral to aestheticize catastrophes? Must art be political? Are human brains hard-wired to weave any collection of images into a cohesive narrative?

The last question begs consideration of After Nature’s status as a “visual novel” –- certainly, it shares some common traits with literary works like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and, of course, the W.G. Sebald poem from which the show takes its name, but the thread that attempts to bind the individual art works is too long and too loose to provide any satisfactory sense of unity. It would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that After Nature is a compilation of compelling objects from which viewers can pick and choose those that fit their own dystopic fantasies and further their own mental inquisitions. Here’s the end of the world. Do with it what you will.