Lebbeus Woods, Architect?

San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City, 1995

Architect is an insistent title for a show of Lebbeus Woods' work at the Drawing Center (through June 15), since he was never overly concerned with practical environments. He was trained in architecture and engineering, and taught at the Cooper Union, although apparently he never received his architectural license in New York. More importantly, his fantastic creations are often at odds with human use, evocative of the results of natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, or landslides. In all of the works in the show, hardly a person is depicted, and only then seemingly for scale. Then again, his recalcitrance at designing functional buildings helped allow him to expound on his vivid, sometimes terrifying imagination.

Photon Kite

His obsessive renderings at times recall steampunk inventions, or the literature of writers such as Jules Verne or contemporary sci-fi visionary China Miéville. They may mash together the built and organic worlds, often depicting what feels like a post-apocalyptic scape in which the machines and buildings regenerated and rose to life without, or by ingesting, humans. Many of Woods' designs looked to have accreted, or collapsed from once stable positions. Structures arc and soar away from the earth, or appear to have bubbled up from magma and cooled into edifices. 

His oeuvre is most reminiscent of the genre of sci-fi film. In fact, one of his designs influenced Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys enough to garner Woods a settlement. And Woods, who passed away in 2012, consulted as a designer for Alien 3. It's a shame that he never pursued a full-blown career in scenic design, where his creations could have been "built" and found immortality through CGI (bringing to mind films such as the Star Wars prequels, John Carter, and even Battleship). Never mind—they exist in his meticulous graphic work, models, and obsessive postcard-sized notebooks, fertile source material for dreams and nightmares.

Corrected April 28, 2014.

Ken Price—Catchy Visual Hooks

Ken Price, Liquid Rock, 2004. Acrylic & ink on paper, 17-3/4"x13-7/8".
Estate of Ken Price, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Ken Price (1935—2012) produced work that feels like a guilty pleasure, in part because it's so relatable and appealing. It doesn't make you feel stupid, or shallow, or like you're not in on some great secret. That said, he had his share of quirks and obsessions, but let's face it—coffee mugs, with which he experimented extensively, are pretty easy to connect with. His 2D work is currently on view at The Drawing Center in Ken Price: Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Works on Paper, 1962—2010; a show of his sculpture at the Met Museum.  

Untitled, 1992. Acrylic and ink on paper, 20-1/4"x25-3/4". MoMA: The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection

The drawings, primarily acrylic and ink on paper, have the graphic impact of great album cover designs of yore that might have been translated into highbrow posters. Dense black lines or fields frame neon shapes. Compositions can evoke the woodcuts of Hiroshige—not just the dramatic lava pieces, but the LA interiors with a chair or simple object. His LAscapes include an unexpected note of realism—a convincing pall of sepia smog hovers above the earth; mineral particulate suspended in the air we breath. In several lava pictures, molten rock courses through cooled magma, and spews into the air like a hellish aerosol. Everything is malleable, mutable, and subject to transformation in a moment, and that of course includes us.

Notebook Roundup: Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, Drawing Center

Fabulous Beast. Clockwise from top left: Eithne Ní Chatháin, Liam Ó Maonlaí, Emmanual Obeya, Ino Riga. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, Rian

• From Ireland, NY debut in Lincoln Center's White Light Festival, performance at Lynch Theater (John Jay College), seen on Nov 10
• Directed and choreographed by Michael Keegan-Dolan who also just directed/choreographed Julius Caesar for English National Opera
• Title means "to trace or etch," after music director Liam Ó Maonlaí's album from 2005 (he is also a member of the band Hothouse Flowers)
• Eight dancers, half women, of widely varying nationality; all dance very differently
• Standouts: Louise Mochia, velvety and fluid; Emmanual Obeya, irrepressibly exuberant
• Four musicians playing an array of traditional instruments including uilleann pipes (like bagpipes) and a small harp
• Folk music and dance performance made up of a string of traditional songs ranging from melancholic instrumental, a cappella ballads, to rousing ensemble numbers, most featuring Ó Maonlaí, who demonstrated his certified rock-star cred 
• Akin structurally to the format of a flamenco performance, where the dance and music are equally important and either can take center stage
• Usually, the music would begin and the dancers filter on one by one to join in
• The repeating refrains in the music paralleled in the dancers' simple, repeating phrases done barefoot or in street shoes
• Movement is unmannered, not based on any sort of classical vocabulary; not ballet nor traditional Irish step dancing
• At times feels more related to some African forms that emanate from the torso, firmly grounded feet, with lyrical movement pulling the extremities diametrically
• The costumes—unique green patterned dresses and white shirts, trousers and suspenders—were held hostage in a container during Hurricane Sandy, released in time only for the last couple shows
• A wonderful performance that connected the performers and audience in a festive communal celebration

Guillermo Kuitca, Diario (3 Dec 2007-1 July 2008). Mixed media on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York

The Drawing Center in Soho 

• Reopened after renovation doubling exhibition space
• Main gallery: Guillermo Kuitca: Diarios—a series of canvases that the Argentinian stretched on a table and marked on over time
• The results are more time-based than formal, echoing journal-keeping
• Some compositions cohere better than others, at least in the context of a pristine gallery setting
• Back gallery: José Antonio Suárez Londoño's The Yearbooks, notebooks he has drawn in daily since 1997, resonates perfectly with Kuitca's "exploded journals"
• Fascinating minutiae and pockets of thought recorded
• New "Lab" exhibition space downstairs, connected by two different, nifty staircases
• Compact show of a variety of certificates of authenticity, a necessary evil in the art world
• Humorous, wry, ironic, or simply serious
• These shows run through Dec 9 at 35 Wooster St