Carsten Höller: Experience at the New Museum

Before it closed this past weekend, I visited the Carsten Höller: Experience at the New Museum. More entertainment than art, the exhibit included a mirror carousel, a slide that cut through two stories of the museum, upside-down glasses, a relaxation tank, and some suspect pills you could take with water. I’m not sure if was a great exhibit or groundbreaking for the museum, but it was definitely an experience.

The start of the “experience” required the signing of many waivers and the receipt of a wrist band, which would allow you on the art rides. The line was a little ridiculous, so we did not in fact ride the slide, which is okay, because I’m a generally edgy person and you were thrown out into a room with a pounding strobe light and prone, soft-looking creatures:

Startling, right? My iPhone camera seems to have been freaking out a little with the strobe lights. Don’t stare too long at the edges of that photo… or at the walrus’ eyes.

We did ride the mirror carousel, which went slowly, but quick enough to make it a little nauseating with its swaying motion, as you stared into the rides above and below you. We also went into a room that made you look like a ghost.

If you rode the slide, you were also prey to the camera vultures (like me) as they waited for your figure to streak by.

I wasn’t able to see Carsten Höller’s installation of slides at the Tate in London, but at least from photos it looks like a little more exciting. Oddly, even with everything being geared towards interaction, there was oddly little exuberance in the exhibit. Maybe it was all the wristbands and lines. Maybe it was also that I was visiting near the end of the exhibit and things were looking a little beat up. Anyway, I am glad that I went, and it’s always exciting when a museum tries something a bit different. Now if they put a slide on the Guggenheim ramp, that would be exciting!

Under the Radar Festival

I’m rediscovering my love of theatre this year, and what better way than with the Under the Radar Festival? The January festival is an international program of emerging talent, with each of the performances affordably priced so that you can take a gamble on something without caring entirely about what you’re getting yourself into. For the 2012 festival, I ended up seeing the one-woman show Chimera, the glam rock musical GOODBAR, and the group dance/poetry performance Word Becomes Flesh.

Chimera was an unsettling piece about a woman who finds out she is her own twin, or more specifically, she absorbed her twin in the womb and contains her DNA. That DNA of her unborn sister is what is in her son, making him effectively her nephew. The three characters in the piece, including a sardonic narrator, the mother, and her son, were all played by one actress, Suli Holum, who created Chimera with Deborah Stein. It was all played out in the tiny HERE theatre, with a kitchen backdrop that had many secret openings. The digital effects and lighting were also surprisingly good, creating a strange sort of atmosphere and fit with the scientific/medical focus. As a fan of medical oddities, I was also interested in the exploration of chimerism and what that would do to your sense of self, to be technically to people at once, to have a child who was not your own, but that of someone who you never allowed to be born. Like I said, unsettling.

The next Under the Radar performance I saw was GOODBAR, created by Bambï & Waterwell. It was my favorite of the festival, an over-the-top glam rock musical based on the 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, about a schoolteacher who was brutally murdered, and turned out of have a double life, one that brought her close to many dangerous men in many shady clubs. I’ve been wanting to see the band Bambï again ever since I saw them as the house band at Littlefield’s talent shows, where I was blown away by the two singer’s: Hanna Cheek and Kevin Townley. (Watch their video for “Primatology,” filmed in the Natural History Museum, that’s a factually accurate and glammed out rock tribute to Jane Goodall.) Both Cheek and Townley have amazing, chameleon voices, especially Townley who plays the series of increasingly lecherous, growling men in the show. There were also video cameos by Ira Glass, Reggie Watts, and Moby, as well as enthusiastic backup dancers to the band. I’ve been listening to the GOODBAR EP on Spotify at work all week, and hope to be able to catch the NYC-based Bambï again soon.

The last performance I saw was Word Becomes Flesh, a piece by Marc Bamuthi Joseph based around dance and poetry. It was originally a one-man show performed by Joseph, but for Under the Radar it was staged as a collaborate performance. Different actors would come forward to embody fathers composing letters to their unborn sons, focused mainly on black male identity and played out with dance punctuations. There was also a great DJ, which will always get points from me.

This month, I was also able to see Looking for a Missing Employee at the COIL theatre festival (read my review for Hyperallergic here), and have tickets to the spring performance of Gatz at the Public, which I’m thrilled about. (It’s a six-hour performance that revolves around a reading of the Great Gatsby.) And, well, I’m seeing Sleep No More for the eighth time in February. Maybe 2012 will be the year of theatre for me!

One Great City: OKC!

I haven’t been back in New York for two weeks, yet Oklahoma City and the wondrous long vacation of the winter holidays already feels far away. I suppose part of it is the quick shift from lazing around my parents’ house watching football and drinking scotch, to returning to the hectic life of subways and 9-5 work days in New York. It was great to have such a long visit to Oklahoma, and I did find time for some adventure, which will all be recapped soon. I thought I would start with some photos from wandering around Oklahoma City, beginning with this shot of the Devon Tower at night. It’s astonishingly tall for Oklahoma City, like some sort of alien ship that plummeted into the center of the city. It’s still not quite finished, but it’s at its final height, dwarfing the surrounding buildings.

Right across from the Devon Tower is the newly renovated Myriad Gardens with its Crystal Bridge. For the holidays, there were changing colored lights inside the greenhouse. Although it was quite cold (luckily no blizzards like in past Christmases), there were people out wandering among the lights and ice skating in a small rink in the gardens.

The best lights, of course, were at Chesapeake. The natural gas company meticulously covers all the trees on its campus with lights, creating a sharply illuminated forest.

Here is another view of the Chesapeake lights.

My parents and I visited the State Capitol building while I was in town (always a fun and free attraction), and explored its empty halls. Everyone, including visitors, it seemed, was on vacation. Here are some iPhone cheating photos I took with the Hipstamatic Disposable camera app:

Although the Oklahoma State Capitol was designed with a dome, it didn’t get a dome until 2002, over eight decades after the rest of the building was completed in 1919. The money that was originally going to fund the dome was diverted to WWI, and the dome that is now standing was finally funded with private donations. The colors are meant to mimic the blue skies of Oklahoma and the vibrant hues of the Indian Blanket, the official state wildflower.

The Oklahoma State Art Collection in the capitol building is pretty impressive, with works by Okies like Ed Ruscha, Woody Crumbo, Nan Sheets, and Doel Reed. The metal animal mask shown above is by Ken Little.

Here’s an exterior shot of the capitol, where you can just make out the American Indian sculpture that stands on top of the dome. It’s called “The Guardian,” and although he might look small from here, he is actually 17.5 feet tall. He also makes the Oklahoma Capitol five feet taller than the US Capitol.

In addition to “The Guardian,” there are a few other statues on the grounds of the capitol, including this dynamic cowboy sculpture.

I’ll end with a shot of Lake Hefner, which was built in 1947. Yes, this lake was built. Most lakes in Oklahoma are manmade, and Hefner was set up as a city reservoir. It’s popular with windsurfers and kite boarders because the wind on the plains just never stops in Oklahoma City.

More Oklahoma posts soon!