Recession Art

On Saturday August 11th, RAC | Recession Art at CULTUREfix presents

               ART + ANGER: a Kenneth Anger Screening Party

August 11th 10pm to 1am, RAC | Recession Art at CULTUREfix, 9 Clinton Street NY, NY 10002

Prolific filmmaker of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Kenneth Anger created a body of the most influential avant garde films. Totaling at 3 hours, RAC will play nine of his most critically-acclaimed completed works in a relaxed ambiance with an informal seating area. Anger’s films center on and critique the dangerous allure of popular culture and Hollywood through their spectacle-based narrative structure. Visually, his pieces strongly draw on imagery from the occult, 70’s countercultures, and eroticism and are soundtracked by artists such as The Dells, A Raincoat, Jimmy Page, Elvis Presely, The Angels, Vivaldi, Ricky Nelson and the Shangri-Las. Self-described as a magician who uses cinematography as a magical power, Anger’s main goal in his filmmaking is to seduce the audience into entering an alternative construction of artistic realities and create an enigmatic atmosphere for the viewer that goes beyond the screen.

Anger famously screened his films in his windowless apartment in the Lower East Side to a small community that included notable creative minds such as Alfred Kinsey, Mick Jagger, and Tennessee Williams. RAC aims to recreate this intimate screening experience thirty years later in their Lower East Side location. With a gallery space, extensive beer selection, and communal tables with ample seating, enjoy RAC’s relaxed and social ambiance while viewing a selection of Anger’s most influential films.

Kenneth Anger (b. 1927, Santa Monica, California) has been creating films since the 1940s with his first being Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat (1941). Anger’s six-decade-long oeuvre includes most notably Fireworks (1947), Puce Moment (1949), Eaux d’artifice (1953), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954-66), Scorpio Rising (1963), Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), Lucifer Rising (1970-81)), Rabbit’s Moon (1950-79), Mouse Heaven (2004), Elliot’s Suicide (2004), and the recent Ich Will! (2008) and Foreplay (2008). His films have inspired contemporary filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. Anger now resides in New York City and continues to work in filmmaking.

RAC is a project of the arts organization Recession Art and the alternative arts space CULTUREfix. Recession Art connects emerging artists with aspiring collectors and provides an affordable and accessible alternative to the traditional art market. CULTUREfix is a bar, gallery, and event space that combines food, art, and performance to offer a different idea of a public space. RAC is located on 9 Clinton Street between Houston and Stanton streets, accessible from the Second Avenue F Station and Essex Street JMZ trains. RAC is open 2-8 pm Tuesday - Sunday.  Visit www.RecessionArtShows.com for more information.

Image: KENNETH ANGER, Hollywood Babylon, Neon and Plexiglass, 1975.

RAC presents a screening of Kenneth Anger’s Short Films

Come party with us at Recession Art at Culturefix and enjoy the films of an artist who defined american avant garde!

Kenneth Anger, making films since 1947 and working primarily in the 1960’s and 1970’s, created a body of some of the most influential avant garde films. Totaling at 3 hours, RAC will play nine of his most influential completed works, with informal seating and a bar atmosphere. Angers films are critiques of Hollywood, its narrative structure and the lure that dangerously surrounds popular culture. Anger sets non-narratively driven images of the occult, counterculture and eroticism to popular musical scores by artists such as The Dells, A Raincoat, Jimmy Page, Elvis Presely, The Angels, Vivaldi, Ricky Nelson and the Shangri-Las.

Bring your friends, have a few drinks, watch the films and casually converse with other Anger fans! Casual ambiance and fun times ahead!

Hosted by Erin Kean, RAC

ART + ANGER: a Kenneth Anger Screening Party

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Sara Bouchard and Careful - once fellow artists-in-residence, sometimes collaborators and always kindred song-spinners - bring their solo projects together for an evening of eclectic, avant-garde folk.

Careful – 7pm

Careful has played a blend of electronics and experimental folk aroundNYC for about 4 years, and releases its third album August 21st. Sadder and more broken than Sufjan Stevens, more cohesive thanXiu-xiu, and more electronically inflected than Will Oldham, bothrecorded and live versions of the music tend toward surreal, tragicomic elegy the New York Times calls “gorgeous.”

Sara Bouchard – 8pm

Sara Bouchard’s song cycle “The News: Monday-Friday” is a futuristic folk tale of migration which she performs on acoustic guitar, mandolin and autoharp. By collaging words and phrases from two Monday-Friday spans of the newspaper, Bouchard has created a historical account of a future civilization, in ten songs. Uprooted from their homeland by a string of natural disasters, a community is forced to

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Submissions are now open for Prolonged Exposure curated by Kaegan Sparks.

Deadline Wednesday August 1, 11:59pm

Selections will be conducted by the Recession Art Jury led by Guest Curator Kaegan Sparks and Art Director Ani Katz. Prolonged Exposure will be held November 3-10 at The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn. Accepting Work in All Media Including Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Performance, Installation, and Video.

About Prolonged Exposure

“I will not make any more boring art.”   
–John Baldessari

Prolonged Exposure will ask how we can remain curious and speculative in a culture of desensitizing barrage and static. The exhibition will concentrate on artworks that plumb boredom’s latent energy, provoking a restlessness which precipitates a desire for change.

In scholar Sianne Ngai’s investigation of minor affects or ‘ugly feelings’– diffusive, non-cathartic states like irritation, paranoia, anxiety, or envy which seem increasingly endemic to contemporary culture and aesthetics– she posits a surprising parallel between shock and boredom. Though antithetical in intensity and duration (shock is immediate and staggering, while boredom is tedious and numbing), both emotions induce states of suspended agency: “both are responses that confront us with the limitations of our capacity for responding in general.”

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