Time Out New York
August 11-17, 2011
On Shuffle
By Joseph R. Wolin
Named after the setting that randomizes audio playlists, this group exhibition includes several figures who straddle the border between the worlds of art and music. English rocker Billy Childish paints classical composers in a manner reminiscent of Edvard Munch, while Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon pours a Minimalist circle of black glitter on the floor, creating a sort of negative spotlight, but also evoking a ring of pulverized LPs.
Dave Muller realistically renders a stack of CDs in watercolor across three large pieces of paper, repeating parts of the image from one sheet to another and lending the whole a stuttering quality, like a filmstrip caught in a misbehaving projector.
Moving images, in fact, steal the show. In his histrionic drag soap opera Conversations wit de Churen VII: L’il Myron's Trade, Kalup Linzy lip-synchs to his own recorded voice as animated sequences recount a tragicomic tale of love on the DL. Likewise, Ryan McNamara's video Trains, Boats and Planes picture the artist lying amid autumn leaves while miming the plaintive Burt Bacharach song loosely referenced in the title. As the camera pulls back, we see that he's missing hi legs, imbuing the wistful ditty with bathos and rather gothic camp.
Tony Oursler's video Synesthesia features some nine hours of interviews with a dozen seminal figures of the 1970s and '80s music and art scenes. These compelling firsthand narratives, like Genesis P-Orridge recalling the early antics of Throbbing Gristle, suggest once more that the line between visual art and musical performance has always been a blurry one.