Stephen Shore, Ryan McGinley’s Xeroxes in “Hard Copy New York”
All the pictures in “Hard Copy New York,” a big two-floor show at the International Center of Photography (through May 4), were made with photocopy machines. They have that streaked, velvety, platinum-gray tone familiar from old Xeroxes, and they’re pinned or stapled right to the wall. But there’s nothing nostalgic or romantic about this throwback look. Instead, the work has the immediacy of a poster on a pole, and, even if some of the material documents old history, it feels like news. Alongside work by Thomas Ruff, Ryan McGinley, Zoë Ghertner, and Takashi Homma, Stephen Shore shows ninety-three grainy copies of his photographs from the Factory, many of which were published in the catalogue for Andy Warhol’s 1968 Moderna Museet exhibition, in Stockholm—pictures of Andy, Nico, Edie Sedgwick, and Lou Reed just hanging out. At the other end of the size scale, John Divola’s images of dogs running in the desert, each one made of nine huge panels, come at you fierce and frothing.
The curator Aaron Stern, working with I.C.P.’s David Campany, made (and “reinterpreted”) all of these copies from files that the photographers provided. (He includes a tabletop collage piece that’s both index and art work.) The process involved a high level of collaboration and trust. Only Ari Marcopoulos, a master of the photocopy as art, made his own prints, including a gang of friends-and-family portraits and several densely worked text pieces. He’s on a wall with the always unpredictable Collier Schorr, whose dance and performance documentation, inspired by Chantal Akerman’s film “Je Tu Il Elle,” from 1974, includes a number of self-portraits and sprawls into the space next to the elevator.
Daniel Arnold—whose street work picks up from Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz, but with a ragged edge of comic mayhem—goes wild on one of the show’s large walls. Exploding out from the central image, of a woman in high heels sprinting down the sidewalk, away from the cameraman, are dozens of torn and cut-up fragments: the chaos of the urban street, completely out of control. Arnold has tough competition for the show’s knockout punch in Gray Sorrenti’s even larger work, papered end to end with hundreds of FaceTime captures: pictures within pictures, everyone looking, including us. “This is my heart,” Sorrenti writes on the wall label; it’s wide open and irresistible. But there’s another picture here I can’t forget. One of just three big enlargements by Jerry Hsu, it’s a man’s hand, raised as if to warn someone or to ward off a blow. Beads of blood collect at the base of two fingers. It could be the first shot of a film by Luis Buñuel, or the last.—Vince Aletti
About Town
American Ballet Theatre’s New York seasons have been limited to summer and fall, but this year the company adds a two-week spring run. The first portion is devoted to a full-evening story ballet, Lar Lubovitch’s dark and stormy “Othello,” from 1997. The latter portion consists of two alternating mixed bills, both of which include Alexei Ratmansky’s 2012 staging of Stravinsky’s “The Firebird.” This version is set in a seemingly poisonous, post-nuclear wasteland, filled with flaming tree trunks. The firebirds come in a menacing flock. The role of the lead bird—whose magical feather saves the day—was originally made for the high-flying Natalia Osipova. This time, it will be shared by three ballerinas, Catherine Hurlin, Chloe Misseldine, and the up-and-coming Léa Fleytoux.—Marina Harss (David H. Koch Theatre; March 6-21.)
Across more than five decades, the singer-songwriter and guitarist Jonathan Richman has made unpretentious, whimsical music, both solo and as a founder of the proto-punk band the Modern Lovers. His songs reflect an awestruck sense of wonder and an adventurous creative spirit, combining croaking, boyish lyrics with simple rock arrangements that roam widely—he has made a country album, sung another entirely in Spanish, and interpreted Earl Zero, Tom Waits, and Sam Cooke. The lo-fi 1992 record, “I, Jonathan,” explored the mundane aspects of everyday life with a soft touch, and more than thirty years later, on his most recent release, “Only Frozen Sky Anyway” (2025), he remains just as curious.—Sheldon Pearce (Baby’s All Right; March 12-15.)
The downtown performance artist David Cale’s latest play, a one-man show called “The Unknown,” begins as a crisp, spooky psychological thriller about a blocked writer with a stalker. Then that story unravels. Sean Hayes plays Elliott, our Cale-ish narrator, with a liquid charm; he's a skilled mixologist who pours his charisma into multiple molds, among them a likable Texan who appears to be Elliott’s dream man and a straight best friend, who, ditto. Over seventy minutes, it becomes less and less clear who is stalking whom, as mirror selves proliferate like tribbles. At the play’s heart is a refrain, one that applies to artists and to lovers alike: “I wish you’d wanted me.” Staged with shrewd economy by Leigh Silverman, the one-hander doubles as noirish dark comedy and, fuelled by Hayes’s seductive ease, a sad fable about how need makes you nutty.—Emily Nussbaum (Studio Seaview; through April 12.)
It’s wonderful to be in James Rosenquist’s imagination again—or to discover it. If you’re not familiar with the American Pop artist’s historical, mural-size paintings, such as the rich and powerful Vietnam-era “F-111” (1964-65), or the beautifully drafted drawings he made throughout his career, such as “Fleurs de Voo Doo” (1989), his new show, “Waiting for an Idea,” is a great place to start. Several lithographs are elegantly presented, and display the artist’s precision with narrative abstraction, and the emotional heat in his always jolting (in the best possible way) reds, oranges, and blues. What you walk away with is how much of an American surrealist Rosenquist was and, despite the epic scale of a lot of his work, how delicate.—Hilton Als (Off Paradise; through April 21.)
Though Agnès Varda, who died in 2019, was widely acclaimed late in her career, she was a precocious filmmaker, releasing her first feature, “La Pointe Courte,” at twenty-six, in 1955. She was then already a successful photographer, and, aptly, a key aspect of her film work would be portraiture, whether of her neighbors in Paris (“Daguerréotypes”), of herself (“The Gleaners and I,” “The Beaches of Agnès”), or of an even more precocious filmmaker—her husband, Jacques Demy, whose childhood as an ambitious and accomplished animator she dramatizes in “Jacquot de Nantes.” It’s a passionate portrayal of a budding director’s struggles with family life and the forces of history, along with the material details of filmmaking itself; it’s among the highlights of a nearly complete retrospective of Varda’s films.—Richard Brody (Film Forum; March 13-April 2.)
In the works that Lucinda Childs made in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the vocabulary tends to be limited to basics—walks, hops, turns, half-turns—and the spatial design diagrammatically explicit: this dance in rings, that one on a diagonal. Some complexity accumulates through small adjustments, but these are patterns, performed at a steady tempo in silence, that you can follow, or nearly. It’s hard to imagine a better place to do so than the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. In “Early Works”—presented by “Works & Process” and the Dance Reflections festival—seen from above at vertiginous vantage points along the spiral ramp, Childs’s mathematical systems might look less like postmodern ballet blanc and more like minimalist Busby Berkeley.—Brian Seibert (March 14-15.)
Pick Three
“The Bride!”-related recommendations from Rachel Syme.
I’ve long been anticipating Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new film, “The Bride!” Loosely inspired by the 1935 flick “Bride of Frankenstein,” the movie follows Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) as he enlists the scientist Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) to help engineer a companion for him. Together, they reanimate the body of a murdered woman (Jessie Buckley), who comes back to life seeking vengeance.
1. No film these days is immune from tie-in merch, and though most of it is hokey, I am genuinely intrigued by Heretic Parfum’s limited-edition “The Bride!” collaboration, a solid perfume called ’Til Death that smells of jasmine and musk and comes in a pleasing little tin.
2. Gyllenhaal’s film looks at the “Frankenstein” story through a decidedly feminist lens, with much precedent: Mary Shelley, the 1818 novel’s author, was a staunch defender of women’s rights; her mother was the noted feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. I cannot recommend enough Charlotte Gordon’s 2015 dual biography, “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley,” which explores this fascinating matrilineage.
3. I will take any excuse to revisit Ken Russell’s 1986 film, “Gothic,” a sumptuous, bawdy imagining of the fateful weekend that Mary Shelley (a gorgeous and glorious Natasha Richardson) and her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands), visit Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) at a villa on Lake Geneva, where, during a competition to compose the best scary story, Mary wrote “Frankenstein.” It’s decadent, silly, and dripping with beeswax.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: