On Friday I took advantage of "summer hours" - summer hours are the best thing that has ever happend to me - and went to Long Island City to do some third borough art perusing. (in case there is any doubt about my numerical system: 1. Bklyn 2. the Mall 3. Qns 4. Bx 5. Shaolin.) Yes, I went to PS1 and saw the show of dirty pictures, ahem, "Into Me/Out of Me, a group exhibition about the imagined, descriptive, and performative act of the passing into, through, and out of the human body," and a boring but significant show of Ron Gorchov's boring but significant pictures. (Best thing at PS1 was a 1959 Stan Brackage film, "window water baby moving", and the most stupid-yet-I-can't-look-away (there were too many to pick a worst) was a RISD-project-looking video of a girl being fucked while boredly and clumsily putting on makeup, by who knows)
But Sculpture Center made my day. First of all, Sculpture center has by far the cutest front desk boy of all arts organizations in the tristate. Second of all, he gave me some free postcards 'cause I told him one of the projectors was broken. Third, the show - Grey Flags - was super. I didn't think I like the Atlas Group, because in the last year they have been a little overexposed and nothing ever resonated with me, and plus I don't really understand if they are telling the truth or not, but in the (scary) sculpture center basement, next to a lovely Tacita Dean film of a sunset, they had a really great little film about a Lebanese security-camera operator who went off his intended target to film the sunset every day, and got fired but was allowed to keep his sunset footage. So the film is his sunset footage. And it's super. And I hope they are telling the truth.
Kelley Walker's installation was also super, and did I mention the front desk boy?
On that note, the Public Theater's MacBeth last weekend was fine, a little on the mediocre side, except for Liev Scheiber in knee high boots. Yow. Worth every penny of the beer, ice cream, starbucks, and lawn chair the 'free' ticket cost. And the agony of yet another dry-ice filled boil, bubble, toil and trouble. Or whatever.
