Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyYou’re perusing the Goings On dispatch, a manual to what we’re observing, hearing, and experiencing this week. Subscribe to get it delivered right to your inbox.
“When Objects Dream,” the striking Man Ray exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (until Feb. 1), is focused on the artist’s elegant explorations with the lensless pictures he dubbed rayographs: the dim imprints imprinted on photographic paper by strewn objects following the paper’s exposure to illumination. It shouldn’t be surprising that his initial endeavors in the art form, issued in 1922, as a collection of a dozen abstract images, rank among his most brilliant. Ray had previously communicated the spirited, revolutionary essence of Dada and Surrealism through a sequence of found-object sculptures that featured a clothes iron affixed with a line of thumbtacks. However, akin to Marcel Duchamp, Ray was a movement all his own. Regardless of the art form—painting, sculpture, motion picture, photography—he reinvented it with a sharp intellect and an impassive humor that still appears decisively cutting-edge.
“Untitled,” 1931.Photograph © Man Ray 2015 Trust / ARS / ADAGP / Courtesy Bluff Collection
At the Met, curators Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson create a dynamic exchange across mediums, revealing how all of Ray’s oeuvre from the nineteen-twenties onward was intricately tied to his photographic trials. Their setup unfolds like a series of enchanting boxes, with portals that usher viewers profoundly into the exhibit, spanning periods and areas. As pledged, numerous of the most astonishing images are photograms that, even when we discern their mundane elements—a lodestone, a smoking pipe, a passkey, a sidearm—gleam as apparitions from an alternate awareness. They invariably cast light on a painting or a sculpture in close proximity. Ray’s “Lampshade” (1921), a coil of painted tin suspended by a slender metallic rod, foreshadows the sophistication and simplicity of many rayographs that materialized subsequently. A collection of solarized images, encompassing some of Ray’s quintessential portraits and nudes, captures the delicate, silvery trait shared by many of the rayographs in a more condensed iteration.
Ray’s most disorganized photograms—disorders that jut from the framework or resemble ticking bombs poised for detonation—resonate in his cinematic works, showcased on the backdrop walls, an occurrence in itself. Anxious, amusing, devoid of narrative, and captivating, his avant-garde shorts are distinguished underground cinema. Their unquiet dynamism doesn’t thoroughly unify everything, but they contribute to underscoring the essence of ingenuity that invigorates the exhibition in its entirety.—Vince Aletti
About Town
Broadway
In James Graham’s “PUNCH,” adapted from Jacob Dunne’s memoir “Right from Wrong,” Jacob (an impressive Will Harrison) emerges as an aggressive youth from Nottingham, accountable for a man’s demise at a bar stemming from a solitary blow. A restorative-justice endeavor forges a bond between Jacob and the victim’s parents, whose concern for him competently balances the inclinations dragging him back toward aggression. Graham’s theatrical work, relocated from the U.K. by Manhattan Theatre Club, serves essentially as a public-service notice for the arrangement that lent assistance to Dunne, its realities infused with energy through director Adam Penford’s traveling choreography. Dunne’s own narrative possesses worth, expressiveness, and affability, yet the play’s broader implication—that societal immobility is susceptible to disruption solely through tragedy—sends a chill down one’s spine.—Helen Shaw (Samuel J. Friedman; through Nov. 2.)
Alt-Pop
The producer and guitar player Nate Amos in tandem with singer Rachel Brown, the twosome driving the indie music group Water from Your Eyes, formerly existed as a couple; ironically, they united only after concluding their relationship. The pair commenced in Chicago, distributing four albums throughout a relocation to Brooklyn, yet they genuinely uncovered their equilibrium on the 2021 LP “Structure,” which Brown credits with assisting their reconnection as friends. Subsequent to enlisting with Matador, the band has refined its sonic identity into a whimsical, animated alt-pop form, excessively peculiar for dance-punk and excessively spirited for slacker rock. “Everyone’s Crushed,” from 2023, unified all of the band’s prior achievements in synchronization with a nihilistic awareness of humor, while Water from Your Eyes’ most recent album, “It’s a Beautiful Place,” is heftier and trickier to categorize, as the duo pursues optimism amid the absurd.—Sheldon Pearce (Bowery Ballroom; Oct. 10.)
Art
“Community Service,” 2024.Art work by Parmen Daushvili / Courtesy the artist / Polina Berlin Gallery; Photograph by Steven Probert
Immersing oneself into the London-based painter Parmen Daushvili’s realm of exquisite understated pigments, complete with its azure blues and greens, bears resemblance to sinking into a pool brimming with eucalyptus-infused liquid—invigorating, revitalizing, and conducive to transformation for both the physical and the mental. While the personages populating several of the grander canvases evoke Lucian Freud’s contorting and revolving models, Daushvili’s most compelling creations aren’t monumental but are petite and personal. The exceptional “Community Service” (2024) showcases a solitary figure who gives the impression of advancing toward us even as they remain static beneath the scrim of the painter’s remarkable aptitude for pigment and his poetic, and finally sympathetic, temperament.—Hilton Als (Polina Berlin; through Oct. 11.)
Off Broadway
The disappearance, during the previous year, of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera” from Broadway (cape flutters mysteriously) clears space for its nearly-equivalent substitute, “Masquerade,” an encompassing edition supervised by Diane Paulus. Theatre attendees, attired in cocktail apparel, pursue—albeit elusively!—the renowned concealed monster in conjunction with his abducted soprano, following them from the vaulted cellar of a Midtown edifice to its apex. Even committed Webber enthusiasts will be compelled to disregard specific blunders, such as a protagonist who seems to have bound himself in a crucial juncture and a Stygian den manifestly denoted with luminous Exit signs. The thrill of extraordinary voices performing nearby diminishes, too, due to the requisite canned accompaniment—somehow it lacks scare factor to be shadowed by a phantom of the karaoke.—H.S. (218 W. 57th St.; through Feb. 1.)
Dance
Paris Opera Ballet performing “Red Carpet.”Photograph by Julien Benhamou
For its maiden sojourn to New York subsequent to 2012, the Paris Opera Ballet is abstaining from presenting any of the celebrated works for which it garners fame, opting instead for a modern composition by the esteemed Israeli-born contemporary choreographer Hofesh Shechter. His “Red Carpet” undeniably furnishes some anticipated Parisian allure: crimson velvet drapes, attire by Chanel, an immense chandelier as in “The Phantom of the Opera.” Yet the manner is his customary earthy reverie, alongside live sonic textures reminiscent of rock festivities and dance venues, clusters of bodies that decrease and creep as limbs hover overhead, and oscillating arrays and rings emanating from some undomesticated communal dance.—Brian Seibert (City Center; Oct. 9-12.)
Movies
Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson, a longstanding celebrated professional wrestler, infuses cleverness and perception into his starring position in “The Smashing Machine,” a biographical depiction concerning the mixed-martial-arts combatant Mark Kerr. The author and helmer, Benny Safdie, showcases the narrative commencing in 1997, coinciding with Kerr’s initial triumphs, until 2000, at which point personal quandaries ensnared him. Safdie shrewdly pinpoints the protagonist’s perplexing internal contradictions—the ancient ferocity propelling his competitive drive and the intense restraint dictated by competition—yet external trials such as opioid reliance and discord with his partner (Emily Blunt) are only depicted schematically. The director’s methodology assumes a detached and restrained essence; even scenarios of bloody conflict inside the ring register merely as informative. Notwithstanding, Johnson’s portrayal manifests as eerily introverted and tightly disciplined; his command over presence resonates from initiation to conclusion.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)
Bar Tab
Dan Stahl locates I.P.A.s, recreational arcade machinery, and gateways in FiDi.
Illustration by Patricia Bolaños
Provided you approach correctly, an excursion to the contemporary FiDi establishment of Barcade—the compound arcade and artisan ale locale commencing in Williamsburg twenty-one years prior—culminates in a virtual inter-dimensional gateway. Upon entry, your initial maneuver entails progress toward the stone surface on your left flank. Scrutinize the slate menu, teeming with I.P.A.s, and designate according to your grit. Should that entail the Evil Twin Pink Pineapple, brace for a chalice of rosy elixir whose piquancy electrifies the palate akin to a ray. Survey your vicinities. Portions could appear familiar: pinball devices, Ms. Pac-Man, Street Fighter. Others might register as outlandish, quite literally, such as 超・ちゃぶ台返し!, a Japanese diversion whose title interprets as “extreme table flipping!” Familiarity with the lingo shall serve advantageously, given the instructions’ composition in kanji. “At the nuptials . . . an incident transpires,” a participant lately ventured to explicate. He set forth thumping on a diminutive table affixed to the apparatus, then victoriously overturned it. Onscreen, a bridezilla dispatched an analogous table ascending throughout a banquet hall, uprooting a minimum of one candelabra. Proceed toward the utmost corner of the watering hole, wherein a stairway declines to a subterranean wood-panelled recess; potentially the supreme arcade amusement of eternity, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; and the aforementioned gateway. Amidst the flickering displays and beaten tabletops, intertwined with a synth-heavy eighties anthem meshing alongside ambient beeps and boops, you might perceive yourself transported four decades in arrears—or, assuming you’ve indulged liberally, into an alternate veracity completely, one wherein you constitute a character enmeshed in the gamified universe enveloping you. However, this state proves evanescent, particularly during family visitation spans on Sunday, when a parental call to defense can promptly revert you to the tangible realm: “Hey, Susan—I must attend to Reesie’s diaper!”
A New Yorker Quiz
The essence of autumn finally permeates. Can you surmise the authorship of these autumnal works?
An ode, from earlier in the year, which begins with the lines, “Black walnuts impacting a barn rooftop / Fairly echoed the morning.”
An ode, from 2017, which encompasses a stanza articulated as, “Autumn approached. / Yet I recollect / it perpetually loomed / following the conclusion of school.”
A narrative, crafted circa 1961, which commences “November. Frigid weather outdoors. It registered as temperate indoors, and the expansive aggregation played twelve exceptional documents uninterrupted.”
P.S. Good stuff on the internet:
- What’s resting atop your nightstand?
- A curated assemblage of tunes fitting for October
- The culinary establishment overseen by nonnas
Sourse: newyorker.com