Rumstick Road; Spaceship Earth

What's happening this week.

Law And Order Party
May 11 – May 17

Myoung Ho Lee at Frieze (Gallery Hyundai)

Nicolas Derné at 1-54 (Espace D'art Contemporain 14N 61W)

Guillaume Pinard at Future Fair NY (Anne Barrault)

It’s only been two months since the last wave of New York art fairs, those crowded hullabaloos that undoubtedly accelerated the spread of the virus that now has us all, if we’re lucky, sitting at home valiantly adapting to newer and clunkier methods of processing art. Even in early March there was a vaguely apocalyptic air to the Spring/Break fair, as we packed into crowded elevators with strangers to walk the labyrinthine booths and cubicles on the eleventh and twelfth floors of a Madison Avenue office building.

Now it’s May, a truly horrifying number of New Yorkers have died or been hospitalized in the meantime, and the fairs are back. Yesterday I sat on my couch watching the pop singer Roisin Murphy “perform” from her living room, part of a daylong Manchester “rave” called Stay Homo which made for good background music as I “attended” three more of these art fairs.

I don’t love the experience, largely because I’m not actually shopping for anything, and the internet is full of other art experiences that don’t feel like hastily cobbled attempts for rich people to recoup lost income. The flattening of physical space in these online fairs means that nothing catches your eye, objects have no real scale or relation to one another, and there’s no one around to answer any questions you might have about the artists or their processes. There’s also no navigational guidance, no one to ask for recommendations, and too often no contextual information.

I gave each fair an hour of my time. Keep reading to find out how it all went.

New at the Bookshop

9 Things To Do Online This Week

AT SPECIFIC TIMESTuesday – Art

RISD Museum and The Center for Experimental Lectures present Naama Tsabar’s lecture-performance “Borders”, which "takes up the subject of borders in their many iterations: political, gendered, national, concrete, sensory, mental, sonic, and linguistic. Written and performed collaboratively with RISD students, “Borders” layers content and meaning into a sonic mass that will be composed live into a musical score by the musician FIELDED."  (5pm; 1 hour)

Wednesday – Theatre

I have no idea how this is even on my radar, but South Florida Irish Theatre is doing staged readings of classic Irish plays this month. Wednesday is Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats's essential one-act Cathleen ni Houlihan, which runs well under an hour, and next week is John Millington Synge's Playboy of the Western World. (Zoom; 7pm)

Saturday - Art

I still don't want to do anything in public for a while, but Skye Gallery has a unique opportunity to remotely meet Ragini Upadhayay Grela, the Nepalese artist whose work is currently on display there. Viewers can book one-on-one appointments at the gallery to virtually meet the artist (who is home in Nepal). I'm reluctant to recommend visits to any non-essential businesses right now, but art galleries are sparsely attended and don't require anyone to touch anything, which is about as safe as one can get venturing out into the world. (10am-12pm)

ANY TIMEWalk

Lace Up for Literacy is a socially distant walking fundraiser where people raise money simply by walking (Well, walking and collecting pledges...) It starts Friday and runs through May 31, with proceeds benefiting Literacy Volunteers of South County. 

Theatre

Before everything got canceled, local film series Wet Gate scheduled a screening of Rumstick Road, Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte's 1977 meditation on the suicide of Gray's mother in Barrington. The Wooster Group is putting archived performances online, and coincidentally released Rumstick Road just a few days ago. (73 minutes) 

Music

The entire Dischord Records catalog is available for free on Bandcamp. The influential forty-year old punk label was founded to promote the Washington, DC punk scene, and their roster includes Minor Threat, Fugazi, and Jawbox among many others.  

Opera

Opera Australia's campy production of The Merry Widow was filmed for television at the Sydney Opera in 1988. Franz Lehár's fluffy operetta is performed in English with Dame Joan Sutherland as the titular widow. (2.5 hours)

Write (Young People Only)

Dorry winners Write Rhode Island! have a call out right now for students in grades 7–12. They're looking for flash non-fiction, a brief "reflection on some experience or observation of the changes in your life and daily routine that have occurred during the Covid-19 outbreak. Submissions must be 400 words or less. Click here for more. The deadline is Friday. 

Film

If two months is getting boring, imagine voluntarily self-quarantining for two years. NewportFILM's summer series of outdoor screenings is canceled, but the organization is still bringing documentaries into our homes every week. Right now it's Spaceship Earth, a documentary about the bizarre BIOSPHERE 2 experiment of the early 90s. It's streaming through Wednesday night, and on Wednesday at 7pm there's a Q&A on Facebook Live with the director and one of the original Biospherians. (Free; $5 suggested donation; 115 minutes)

                        
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