It’s already been a big week for the New Museum and now the staff is gearing up for an eventful weekend. On the heels of this week’s opening of “Ghosts in the Machine,” a sweeping survey addressing the relationships between art and technology, the museum is getting ready for its annual block party, which will be held tomorrow in Sara D. Roosevelt Park.
We’ll have more of the exhibition in a moment. But first, here are the details for tomorrow’s free community event. It will be held from noon-5 p.m. along Chrystie Street from Delancey to Broome. There will be hands-on workshops for the kids plus live performances. Everyone who attends will get free passes to the museum.
It’s definitely a good to to visit the New Museum, since “Ghosts in the Machine” just opened on Wednesday. Earlier this week we attended the press preview, along with photographer Tim Schreier who supplied us with the photos you see in this story.
In this morning’s New York Times, Roberta Smith calls the show, featuring more than 140 works, “an ambitious, multitasking, somewhat austere exhibition” that is “smart and thought stirring” but also “a little short on living, breathing artworks and slightly overloaded with rather stale ones and other objects and diagrams that, altogether, function primarily as interesting period pieces or historical artifacts.”
One of the more attention-grabbing pieces in the exhibition is filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, mid-1960’s “Movie-Drome.” Visitors to the museum are drawn inside to gaze up at the ceiling, where they are bombarded with a variety of projected films, drawings and other images. The “Movie-Drome” has rarely been seen by the public int the past 40 years.
“Ghosts in the Machine” was curated by Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s associate director, and Gary Carrion-Murayari. It was not meant to be a traditional survey but as the catalog states as “an encylopedic cabinet of wonders, bringing together an array of artworks and non-art objects to create an unsystematic archive of man’s attempt to reconcile the organic and the mechanical.”
In conjunction with “Ghosts in the Machine,” the museum is presenting a separate show in its lobby gallery — “Pictures from the Moon: Artists’ Holograms 1969-2008.” You can read more about it here.
Both exhibitions will be at the New Museum through the end of September.
