In Hanna Liden’s Ghost Town, a wonderful new series of  photographs now on view at Maccarone, everything is covered with some kind of downtown detritus. Faces are masked in Have A Nice Day plastic bags, bodies clothed Canal Street Fuck You t-shirts, flowers painted Terrence Koh Black, classical busts etched with graffiti. Even the images of umbrellas and leather jackets, the most austere and abstracts works on view, bulge with hidden goods. There is always beauty to found in your surroundings, even in the knocked-off, rat-trodden world below Houston.

Hanna Liden: Ghost Town
May 2nd – June 16th, 2012
Maccarone
630 Greenwich Street
New York

Photography by Hanna Liden

Ryan McGinley: Grids / Animals
May 2nd – June 2nd 2012
Team Gallery

Animals
83 Grand Street
New York, NY 10013

Grids
47 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10013

One of the best shows currently up in Chelsea, Paul Graham: The Present is a thrilling, engaging, and slightly frightening mediation on how we understand and experience day-to-day life in the city. Many pairs are hung near the floor of the gallery, which explicitly inserts the viewer into the scene pictured, and challenges the viewer to question how he or she experiences everyday travels through a bustling city.

Graham’s large-format photographs function in pairs, each showing the same location (outside a Citibank, or an office building), at different times. The lighting and composition of the images have a distinctly cinematic quality, and the poses could be staged, but the picture’s veracity never quite seems in question.

Graham’s photos are like portraits of the films we daydream our lives (and the lives of others) to be. They are our inner monologues, externalized, and as such are meditations on the role photography plays in how we construct our personal identities.

Paul Graham: The Present
On view until April 21st
The Pace Gallery
545 West 22nd Street
New York

“Llik your Idols is an intimate survey of a VERY particular time in downtown NYC – the mid 1980s – when the fallout of a decrepit city manifested itself through the psyches of young and wild artists, musicians and filmmakers banging into each other in the scum drenched streets. Sex, drugs, violence and rock’n’roll took its final leap out the window before the clean up crew came to town. They were good times, lovely times and this documentary brings it back in all its cheap rent psychosis.”
(Thurston Moore)

Tonight, March 10, 2012 at 7.30 pm:
Film Screening of Llik your Idols (free entrance)
KW Institute for Contemporary Art , Auguststrasse 69, 10117 Berlin
In the frame of the exhibition YOU KILLED ME FIRST – The Cinema of Transgression

Llik your idols
France 2007, 70 Min., engl. OV
Documentary about the Cinema of Transgression by Angélique Bosio
Film screening in the presence of the director

Last June, we talked to artists Colin Snapp and Daniel Turner about how their solo practices have evolved out of their collaborative outfit Jules Marquis. It seems they’ve been on quite a roll since then. Last September, Turner had a solo show at the Journal Gallery, where he showed site-specific works that expanded on his interest in the temporality of primal elements.

Tomorrow, the first half Snapp’s new solo show opens at Journal. It will feature a massive still taken from his new video Continental Drift, as well as a series of photographs taken on disposable cameras. These works are a mediation on the tourist’s position as perennial Other, confined to tour buses, opulent pools, and pristine beaches sanitized for Western consumption.

Screening next week at the gallery’s new space, Continental Drift expands on these themes; the video was filmed entirely out of vehicles transporting Snapp from one tourist landmark to the next. The separation imposed by the tour buses’ and taxis’ windshields is palpable; through them, you glimpse a unknowable land and culture. But the work is not a comment on any culture war between the West and Islam; though filmed in a Muslim country, it highlights how travelers can never truly know the land they visit if they confine themselves to prepackaged tours  and familiar-feeling hotels.

The video is accompanied by a dissonant soundtrack, composed from the artist’s extensive archive of audio tracks, recordings made on site, and ambient noise from the video. As in Snapp’s previous work, the effect is eerie, and uncannily perfect. The viewer is reminded both of the constructed reality of any guided trip abroad, and of the double falsehood of any visual record (so often video or photography) produced there.

Continental Drift
Opening March 6, 6-9 PM
through April 29, 2012
The Journal Gallery
168 North 1st Street
Brooklyn

Video stills and photography by Colin Snapp

Here is what they have to say about it, since we couldn’t put it any better: ‘This survey of experimental art and design magazines published since 2000 explores the various ways in which contemporary artists and designers utilize the magazine format as an experimental space for the presentation of artworks and text. Throughout the 20th century, international avant-garde activities in the visual arts and design were often codified first in the informal context of a magazine or journal.’

Perceptive as ever, who else but our friends at It’s Nice That will be this week introducing themselves and you to some of the magazines featured in the exhibition.

A hurray for that, and don’t let snow or rain get in your way to the MoMA Library.

Millennium Magazines
February 20–May 14, 2012

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019

Even though the movement has remained largely unknown, the Cinema of Transgression has been a significant influence for later generations of artists.

YOU KILLED ME FIRST at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin is the first exhibition on the Cinema of Transgression.

There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined.
Nick Zedd

YOU KILLED ME FIRST
The Cinema of Transgression
Opening: February 18, 2012, 5 – 10 pm
Dates: February 19, 2012 – April 9, 2012

KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststrasse 69
10117 Berlin

Program accompanying the exhibition:

Tuesday, February 21, 2012, 7.30 pm: Talk with Nick Zedd

Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 7.30 pm: Talk with Richard Kern

Saturday, March 10, 2012, 7.30 pm: Llik your idols, documentary about the Cinema of Transgression by Angélique Bosio (France 2007, 70 min., OV, Film screening in the presence of the director)

Thursday, March 15, 2012, 7.30 pm: Lydia Lunch reads from her novel Paradoxia, A Predator’s Diary

Tuesday, March 27, 2012, 7.30 pm: Talk with Tessa Hughes-Freeland

Weegee is having quite a moment. Right on the heels of the new West Coast Weegee exhibition Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles, the International Center of Photography has put up a new show called Weegee: Murder is My Business. Focusing on the pioneering photographer’s most productive decade, between 1935 and 1946, Murder is My Business showcases the gritty, rough, and utterly arresting images that defined an tabloid sensibility for decades to come. These are tremendous photographs, showing Weegee’s innate understanding of how composition and tone can both document and manipulate. They also make clear how far tabloid  photography has fallen.

Weegee: Murder is My Business
January 20 – September 2, 2012
The International Center of Photography
1133 Avenue of the Americas
New York

Anthony Esposito, booked on suspicion of killing a policeman, New York, by Weegee

Helen Frankenthaler, second-generation Abstract Expressionist and painterly innovator, has passed away. After studying art at Bennington College, Frankenthaler met and dated the preeminent modernist critic Clement Greenberg, and found her way into the burgeoning New York art scene of the 1950s. She met leading artists Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and her future husband, Robert Motherwell, and quickly developed her artistic practice. Inspired in part by Pollock’s drip paintings, Frankenthaler began pouring paint directly onto raw canvas, staining it with large swathes of color. This technique galvanized subsequent generations of painters, including Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and other members of the Color Field movement. Frankenthaler was 83.

Above: Canyon, 1965, acrylic on canvas