Justine Kurland’s Photographs Keep Us on Edge
As one of the most arresting, provocative, and unpredictable photographers around, Justine Kurland, at fifty-six, deserves to have her mid-career retrospective in a museum. Instead, it’s at the small, scrappy gallery Osmos, in the East Village (through Nov. 21), where it is both comfortably at home and quietly overwhelming. The gallery describes Kurland as seeing her subjects “through a queer feminist lens,” which is immediately evident in the works on view, but can’t begin to account for their range, wit, or depth of feeling. She’s not always subtle—see the collage series she calls the “SCUMB Manifesto,” after Valerie Solanas, in which she cuts up the work of white male artists—and is far too present in the moment to be a cool observer. Even the classic Western landscape images that include the trains her young son was obsessed with are more dream than document: wonder realized, simply sublime.
The show opens with two pictures from the color series that introduced Kurland to the world and became known as the “Girl Pictures”—cinematic shots of adolescent girls playing at being runaways. Under the photographer’s rapt gaze, theatricality melts away and we’re caught up in the sweet, casually intimate camaraderie of girls on an adventure. Although most of the other women here are naked, the vision isn’t always Edenic. Communal life, a frequent subject, includes hard work; motherhood, even in a seemingly idyllic group of ten women with babies, isn’t any easier. Hung between these larger color photographs are smaller black-and-white images that feel like diary entries. In one, Kurland is lying naked with her mother; in another, she’s masturbating, body contorted, head thrown back, suspended between agony and ecstasy. Throughout her show, Kurland keeps us both fascinated and on edge—anywhere but in our comfort zone.—Vince Aletti
About Town
A spiky analogue to American teen films, Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play” is set at a boarding school in Ghana in 1986, where a clique of excitable students has been gearing up to compete in the Miss Ghana pageant. Their cruel leader is Paulina (an excellent, layered Denée Benton), who is sure the crown is hers until a light-skinned newcomer from the U.S. (the fabulous Jasmine Amy Rogers) steals her followers and her thunder. With its fusillade of queen-bee zingers and blunt-force plot mechanics, “School Girls” is an unabashedly didactic project, its themes of colorism heavily underlined. But, under the crisp, fluid direction of Whitney White (“Liberation”), the cast achieves impeccable chemistry, allowing each actress—including sweet standouts such as Erin Morton, as the shy Nana—to shine. When they harmonize on “The Greatest Love of All,” you could almost hear Whitney herself cheer.—Emily Nussbaum (Samuel J. Friedman; through Nov. 15.)
A mute ballet about a master of verbal wit such as Oscar Wilde might seem an odd idea, but the appeal of the subject for the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, who’s scaled the heights of ballet and Broadway, lies in the possibility of creating something all too rare: a full-length narrative ballet centered on romance between men. Created in 2024 for the Australian Ballet, which now gives the work its New York première, Wheeldon’s “Oscar” braids parts of Wilde’s life with two of his writings, “The Nightingale and the Rose” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The forty-eight-piece Orchestra of St. Luke’s plays Joby Talbot’s score live.—Brian Seibert (New York City Center; Oct. 8-11.)
For much of her career, the progressive artist Kelela has toyed with the idea of genre in an intuitive way, hardwiring electronic music into the DNA of an R. & B. sound. Across several records, she has conscientiously adapted her music to fit its context, letting both margin and intention dictate its immediate form. Her latest album, “new avatar,” ventures further, blending shoegaze and grunge into her existing palette. Influenced by her days in Washington, D.C.,’s indie scene, the record compels her practice toward a more guitar-driven substratum of her intersectional songcraft, seeking to expand the parameters of what “alternative” can even mean.—Sheldon Pearce (Brooklyn Paramount; Oct. 9-10.)
We’ve stepped into some kind of deep, three-dimensional painting: in the exhibition “You Red the Shirt Off My Back,” Eric N. Mack leads us through layer after layer of fabric, cutting a nimble economy of angles and gestures across the gallery floor. Huge swaths of cloth play between differing registers of opacity and transparency. The shape most prevalent in the gallery is caused by gravity, the parabolic curve of fabric sinking toward the ground: cloth is tempted to droop and fall, weight traces a line in the air, the physics of lightness and heaviness become formal elements. In several of the pieces, Mack drapes fabric from steel armatures that resemble bodies. The works lay claim to our own bodies, their drapery becoming adornments sweeping from limb upon limb.—Zoë Hopkins (Paula Cooper; through Oct. 24.)
In “Elf Lyons Is the Woman on the Edge,” Lyons, a virtuosic physical performer who trained as a clown, uses the breakup, via WhatsApp, of her engagement as a starting point for her latest show, which débuted at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. With smoke wafting from the décolletage of her cocktail dress, a bewigged Lyons, balancing on her toes like a life-size doll (a feat of arch endurance with a payoff), runs at a rapid clip through genres of performance and registers of emotion. She channels a Hitchcockian lady in distress and riffs on the movie “Apollo 13”; there are two banana phones and a brilliant running bit about the opera “Pagliacci.” The show is a genuine, absurd, and furious exploration of love and heartbreak.—Mengfei Chen (SoHo Playhouse; through Oct. 18.)
The formidable artistry of Dakota Johnson and Anne Hathaway is squandered in their stalwart efforts to keep “Verity” afloat. This melodrama, based on a novel by Colleen Hoover, involves an obscure young novelist named Lowen (Johnson) who is hired to complete a series of books by the famous titular author (Hathaway), who has been left catatonic after a grave accident. Lodged in Verity’s rural home to study her preliminary notes, Lowen becomes romantically involved with the incapacitated writer’s husband (Josh Hartnett) while starting to suspect Verity of a crime, and deciding to administer punishment. The setup is strong, but the working-out is absurd, and the director, Michael Showalter, neither builds a world nor fleshes out the characters; all that’s left is star power in a dim void.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)
Pick Three
Hilton Als on the art of Jessica Lange.
1. In 2016, I was one of the folks lucky enough to see Jessica Lange’s extraordinary performance in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” It taught me what was at the core of Lange’s greatness—her authenticity. As one of the four “haunted” Tyrones, Lange’s matriarch, Mary, was torn by her dream of family and her equally strong desire to be alone. Moving between guilt and recrimination, flirtatiousness and despair, Lange played Mary largely with her back to the audience. Now Lange stars in the film adaptation (currently in L.A.). By turns furious and ravishing in her beauty and need, Lange is so distinctly American in her understanding of loneliness that she stuns you with Mary’s self-knowledge—and her, at times, smug martyrdom.
2. The real reason I started watching “American Horror Story” again is to see Lange do what her brilliance directs her to do: bring a level of reality to whatever situation she finds her character in, no matter how surreal. Lange is a very physical actress; her hands speak as she speaks, sometimes contradicting what her character is saying by seeming to wave things away while she plots something else. She finds the truth of character, and her physicality, in playing with the words, not in anticipation. That would be mugging, and where’s the truth in that?
3. On a recent episode of “The View,” Lange talked about how, as a little girl, she would act out various parts of “Gone with the Wind,” and about how she always longed for community. All of her characters want to connect, if they only knew how. In 2023, Lange published a book of photographs she took during COVID, called “Dérive.” (I contributed an introduction.) There, in the photographs, was Jessica’s sensibility as a performer, too: haunting and haunted, as lonesome as a breeze.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: