Professor Richie Has Ponderous Urges

The Old West: Myth, Character, and Reinvention

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Tall tales of the Old West loom over our imaginations like the Sequoias out yonder. Many of these myths were self-invented: folks like Phoebe Ann Mosey, William Cody, Martha Jane Cannary-Burke, and William Hickok mined the Wild West's rough-and-tumble reputation to create characters that still represent the American frontier — these four are better known as Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane, and Wild Bill. To supplement its current Into the Sunset photography exhibit, MoMA examines representations of our "unofficial national epic" through an eclectic slate of films, including perpetuate-the-legend portrait Buffalo Bill (1944), musical Annie Get Your Gun (1950), and a few fascinating Edison reels, such as Sioux Ghost Dance and Annie Oakley (1894).

Notes on Conceptualisms: An Evening With Ugly Duckling Presse

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To appropriate a line from Gertrude Stein, conceptual writers know: "To write is to write is to write is to write…" This distinctly un-literary movement — defined by borrowing, self-reflexivity, and near-mathematical liguistic logic — traces its avant-garde practice to test-the-limit innovators like Stein, John Cage, and Andy Warhol. Examples include an edition of the New York Times copied verbatim, and John Baldessari's winking lithograph, "I will not make any more boring art." Tonight, Brooklyn-based publisher Ugly Ducking Presse commemorates the release of Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman's soon-to-be essential Notes on Conceptualism with performances by Nada Gordon, Kim Rosenfield, and Lytle Shaw, among other linguistic gymnasts.

Mike Nichols

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When Mike Nichols debuted in the late '50s as one half of the improv duo Nichols and May, few could've predicted his current, grand-old-man status — although being married to Diane Sawyer for the past two decades can't hurt. After irreconcilable creative differences led to a 1961 split with collaborator Elaine May, Nichols directed his multiple talents elsewhere: revolutionizing the movie soundtrack with Simon and Garfunkel; staging Beckett and Neil Simon on Broadway; and, since the millennium, garnering prime-time gold with made-for-cable pieces like Wit (2001). For April's remainder, MoMA pays tribute to his ironic, big-issue films, including Dustin Hoffman's infamous double-dip into the Robinson family and career checkpoints such as Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Silkwood (1983).

Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel

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For all its fundamental utility, language can also warp into an abstract whatsit — at least in the artful hands of theorist Roland Barthes and those other Left-Bank brains of yesteryear. During the tempestuous '60s and '80s, conceptual artists León Ferrari (Argentina) and Mira Schendel (Brazil) took on a similar, linguistics-focused approach, and the many textual drawings, sculptures, and paintings that materialized make up Tangled Alphabets. Along with scraps of poetry, articles from local media, and a military letter here and there, the South Americans' symbolic word art — variously handwritten, heaped, or swirled into dense gray shapes that resemble bird's nests — bring into focus the countless ideological messages coded into language.

The Color Palate Project

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Curated by Brooklyn-based Swedish designer Helena Fredriksson, the rousing Color Palate Project enlists ten international artists to riff on an assigned tint — inspired more by Goethe's Theory of Colours than that grade-school aid of Roy G. Biv. Starting with white and shading towards black, viewers are immersed in luminous color through multi-screen, monochromatic projections. Each color also serves a culinary interpretation, resulting in a polychromatic, ten-course feast: Orange materializes as lobster bisque, dal, and carrot marmalade; purple as Peruvian potatoes, cabbage, and vinegar. Contributors to this conceptual rainbow include the art/design studio Double Triple, Ana Matronic (of Scissor Sister notoriety), her partner Seth Kirby, and Brooklyn-based sound artist Mike Skinner.

Nashville

NASHVILLE trailer Robert Altman
by NilbogLAND

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Of Robert Altman's many heterodox masterworks, Nashville is the easy pick for the proverbial desert island. Just as Joyce believed that Dublin could be rebuilt, scrap for scrap, from Ulysses' descriptions, Altman's best saves '70s America from the ether by mashing the era's complex artistic, social, and political moods into a rich, electric, panoramic sprawl. Forget narrative: The 24 characters that the omnivorous camera tracks — image-conscious stars, populists, aspiring Patsy Clines, a babbling BBC correspondent — fit together like tectonic plates and the matter-of-fact action emerges from their long weekend of agitation, crossed paths, politics, and gospel/country music. Brimming with life's messy permutations, Altman's critique of celebrity appropriately ends on an unsettling (and notorious) note.

Lloyd Kaufman: Direct Your Own Damn Movie!

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Lloyd Kaufman sits atop a garbage-piled dais as the prince of pulp cinema. His success traces back to his cult B-movie company, Troma Entertainment, which has traded in ketchup-packet violence and gratuitous sex for over three decades. By spinning off-color dialogue and campy twists into a typical, paint-by-number storyline — such as a chump-to-hero turnaround (The Toxic Avenger) or a conventional romance (Tromeo and Juliet) — Kaufman has contrived a low-budget aesthetic that's as distinctive and amusing as any in cinema. Tonight, the director reads from his latest DIY tome, Direct Your Own Damn Movie!.

Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West

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From Zane Grey's far-etched dime novels to homespun images that describe a seemingly limitless stretch of adventure, the American West — as abstraction before actual space — has been a bottomless wellspring for artists. The region's many representations — whether exalted as the Land of the Free Will or examined as a lawless free-for-all with two-fisted hombres — contain, to echo Fitzgerald, "something commensurate to [our] capacity for wonder." Using photographs dating as far back as 1850, Into the Sunset surveys how the medium has enlarged imaginations for better or worse — after all, it helped manifest our windswept concept of destiny. Over 70 photographers have a say, including Edward Weston, Cindy Sherman, and Timothy O'Sullivan, who shot his unadorned, Go-West landscapes during a government expedition.

Gimme Shelter

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Let it bleed, indeed. Albert and David Maysles' immersive Rolling Stones doc Gimme Shelter — titled after the brooding lead track on the band's legendary 1969 album — captures the buildup to the bloody, era-ending concert at Altamont Speedway. While the rock annals indicate that 18-year-old Meredith Hunter was knifed by a Hell's Angel during the Stones' set (the band illogically hired the Oakland chapter as muscle for this 300,000-person-capacity gig), the Maysles' searching camera shows the fateful act. Tonight, multimedia artist Doug Aitken presents the wild classic, which, despite its eventual elegiac tone, electrifies with intimate footage of band recording sessions and (obviously) Mick Jagger restlessly strutting and shimmying in his now-dowdy costumes.

DREYER

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The great Danish early-cinema auteur Carl Theodor Dreyer produced otherworldly art out of basic, reactive elements — namely faith, family, and that age-old arc towards redemption. With its stark aesthetic and brown-study takes, a Dreyer film achieves an oceanic emotional effect through the director's belief in intensive technique. Take The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927): Dreyer transforms his sullen martyr into cinema's Mona Lisa through repeated, haunting close-ups — a near-wordless buildup that reduced Anna Karina (among many) to tears. Beginning with his assured debut The President (1918) and bracketed by his last experimental opus Gertrud (1964), BAM's Dreyer-til-you-drop retrospective also features his supreme expressionist horror movie Vampyr (1931), and Ordet (1954), which tracks a pious father and his schismatic sons.

L'avventura and Blowup

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Tonight marks the third installment of Poisson Rouge's sample-sized film-appreciation series, Deeper Into Movies, (a nod to Pauline Kael's influential 1973 tome) and the subject happens to be a minefield: Michelangelo Antonioni. As part of the arthouse scene in the '60s with Fellini, Bergman, et al., the Italian modernist's spare, architectural reels on alienation left some stumped with its pretentiousness (Andrew Sarris lambasted him with the byname "Antoni-ennui") and others stumping for more of his lovely, long-take compositions. Back to back, Antonioni's two legendarily elliptic opuses, Blowup (and its unsolved mystery in Swinging London) and L'Avventura (and its set-aside mystery in the Great Outdoors), offer a perfect four-and-a-half-hour litmus test.