PaRDeS

Life is all about the journey. After Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, they began what could be considered humanity’s first journey, an endless trip to try to get back to pardes. 

A journey can be a physical foray to foreign lands or an inward search for peace and harmony. It can also be a stopover at the American Museum of Natural History, which currently has four special exhibitions that involve different types of journeys. (Even the trip to the museum has its own unique journey, the “For Want of a Nail” display in the 81st St. B/C subway station, depicting the evolution of extinct, existing, and endangered animals on the walls and floor.) 

In the latest space show in the Hayden Planetarium, Whoopi Goldberg narrates Journey to the Stars, a dazzling documentary that takes viewers to the sun and beyond. In “Traveling the Silk Road,” visitors follow the “Ancient Path to the Modern World,” making their way through X’ian, Turfan, Samarkand, and Baghdad.

It’s a much shorter journey through “The Butterfly Conservatory,” where elaborately colored butterflies interact with people, sometimes landing on their head or attaching themselves to clothing. But the life span of these beautiful insects is only two to three weeks, a very short journey indeed. 

Finally, “Lizards & Snakes: Alive!” contains more than five dozen living, squirming creatures, from a red spitting cobra to a Gabon viper, from a rhinoceros iguana to the eastern green mamba. The many snakes in the exhibition hearken back to the one that tricked Eve into partaking of the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, leading to her and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden – and the never-ending attempt of humankind to return to paradise. 

Mark Rifkin is the managing director of This Week in New York, an arts & entertainment blog that can be found at www.twi-ny.com. 

Photo Caption: A crafty snake -- not necessarily this eastern green mamba, now on view at the American Museum of Natural history -- sent humanity off on its first journey/ Mark Rifkin

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. (Genesis 3:7)

Ever since Adam and Eve first adorned their nether regions with fig leaves, people have been obsessed with nudity. Infants and toddlers are constantly trying to get out of their baby clothes. When summer beckons here in New York City, people walk the streets baring more and more skin, eliciting tacit glances from wide-eyed passersby. Men, women, and children strip down in Central Park, on rooftops, at outdoor concerts, and, of course, at the beach, staring directly in the face of original sin in this biggest of apples. 

Tourists and locals alike are currently lining up at MoMA to slip between two naked actors (“Imponderabilia”) in Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present” retrospective, then staring up at a nude woman balanced on a bicycle seat halfway up a wall (“Luminosity”). For his “Event Horizon” installation, British artist Antony Gormley has placed thirty-one life-size iron-and-fiberglass sculptures of himself, complete with full genitalia, in and around Madison Square Park and on nearby buildings. 

At Victoria’s Secret stores just blocks south of Madison Square Park, Herald Square, and other locations, a new line of undergarments called the Nakeds has just been released. Contrary to their provocative name, they actually cover up women’s naughty bits, like most other bras and panties; they are not see-through but instead “so light, so bare, you’ll wonder if they’re even there.” Fans rush to see the latest celebrity take her clothes off on Broadway or on the silver screen and visit websites that offer all sorts of legal and illegal nudity, especially when it comes to sex tapes of the rich and famous. 

Voyeurs, curiosity seekers, movie lovers, and just plain old ordinary heathens can get their fill of all this and more at the Museum of Sex. The museum opened in October 2002 amid much fanfare and protest, its mission “to preserve and present the history, evolution, and cultural significance of human sexuality.” Mayor Rudy Giuliani might have gotten rid of most of the porno shops in the city (don’t worry, there are still a bunch left if you know where to look), but he was unable to prevent MoSex from spreading its message, despite his threats to cut its funding, hoping its doors would never swing open. (He did manage to prevent it from getting nonprofit status, though.) 

The gift shop alone, which is free to browse through, contains plenty of nudity in books and on postcards, coasters, and glasses. Celebrity skin connoisseurs will have a blast at MoSex ‘s “Action: ‘Sex and the Moving Image,’” a one-room exhibition that features more than a dozen monitors and surfaces revealing the history of sex in the cinema, from early nudist films to hardcore porn, from celebrity sex scenes (THE HUNGER, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, LAST TANGO IN PARIS) to foreign commercials and, yes, home sex videos made by Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Colin Farrell, Rob Lowe, and other stars. 

If that very hot display gets your juices flowing, you’re going to want to next check out “Rubbers: The Life, History & Struggle of the Condom,” which details the history of the condom as protection from STDs and unwanted pregnancy. And if your animal nature is still calling out to you, “The Sex Lives of Animals” includes life-size statues of dolphins, pandas, monkeys, and a deer ménage à trois going at it right there in the galleries, with no shame, sans fig leaves. Finally, the current edition of “Spotlight on the Permanent Collection” includes artwork by Keith Haring and Pablo Picasso hanging not far from bizarre sex toys (don’t miss the masturbatory mixer) and both a male and female RealDoll that you are encouraged to touch in all the wrong places. 

Clearly, New York continues to earn its reputation as the Naked City. In a way, it’s a very different kind of Garden of Eden, a Big Apple offering itself to anyone and everyone who wishes to take a delicious, dangerous bite. 

Mark Rifkin is the managing director of This Week in New York, an arts & entertainment blog that can be found at www.twi-ny.com. Feel free to read it while naked for added enjoyment. 

Captions for photos:
1. British artist Antony Gormley has installed naked sculptures of himself all around Madison Square Park (photo by Mark Rifkin) 
2. This threesome at the Museum of Sex has no shame about getting naked in public and putting on a show for all to see (photo by Mark Rifkin)

At the March 4 MoMA performance of his one-man multimedia presentation “I am not me, the horse is not mine,” originally staged for the 2008 Sydney Biennial, visual artist William Kentridge declared, “Even as utopia starts to disappear and becomes fragmented, we hang on to it, as if it would re-create it through a wish, through a will, through a desire.” Kentridge, who recently participated in Melbourne’s Experimenta Utopia Now International Biennial of Media Art, creates work in which utopia is far, far away.

His drawings, films, and installations are filled with dystopic visions of his native South Africa under apartheid. His series of stop-motion animated films built from charcoal drawings, part of a major retrospective at MoMA, follows the exploits of industrialist Soho Eckstein and his meek alter ego, Felix Teitlebaum, both of whom toil away amid the businesses and beaches of the troubled country. The films also bring back Alfred Jarry’s controversial Ubu figure, placing him right in the middle of Johannesburg’s racial conflict.

To display the many dichotomies he has encountered throughout his life, Kentridge often divides his characters in two, including depictions of himself, subtly reminding us of his roots, having grown up white and Jewish in an ethnically divided nation. Most recently, Kentridge has been making films about Russia (another country that has not been particularly friendly to Jews) that examine the totalitarianism, hierarchy, and anti-futurism that accompanied the 1917 revolution, in preparation for his absurdist production of Dimitri Shostakovich’s absurdist opera The Nose at the Met.

“The utopian thinking of [postrevolutionary Russian artists such as Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich], along with the writer Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) and the filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954), sustained Kentridge as he sought to define a political art,” writes Mark Rosenthal in the outstanding SF MoMA exhibition catalog, which comes with an exclusive behind-the-scenes DVD.

Shostakovich based his second opera on Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist short story about a young man who wakes up to find out that his nose is gone, leaving a flat patch in the middle of his face. The nose, meanwhile, immediately gains a higher position than the man and thus refuses to speak with him, citing the low rank. In Kentridge’s production, the nose is often seen as a projection on the complex background screen, creeping around secretly, and even going to church as he avoids the rest of his body, continuing the artist’s affinity for depicting dystopic situations.

Much of Kentridge’s work might be abstract and surreal—and absurdist in unique ways—but there is no denying its inherently political and societal nature even when it’s not so obvious.

“For me the ‘9 Drawings for Projection’ are clearly drawing from South Africa; the Russian films have an echo in South Africa but they’re about utopia and politics and are not a metaphor for South Africa,” he told the Japan Times last September.

Fortunately, it is a utopia of all things Kentridge, a true mensch, in New York City right now, as MoMA’s “Five Themes” retrospective continues through May 17, “William Kentridge: Sheets of Evidence” runs at Dieu Donné through March 27, The Nose plays the Metropolitan Opera March 23 and 25 (joined by the “Ad Hoc” exhibit at Gallery Met of drawings and other paraphernalia from Kentridge’s preparation for the opera), and “Sounds from the Black Box: The Music of Philip Miller for the Films of William Kentridge” takes place March 21-22 at the World Financial Center, with live music by Ensemble Pi.

Mark Rifkin is the managing director of This Week in New York, an arts & entertainment blog that can be found at www.twi-ny.com.

Amid all the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives, whether we work seventy-hour weeks at a desk, are retired, are still in school, or are stay-at-home parents, we all seek a little peace, a little solace, our own personal Garden of Eden. I work in Midtown, so for me, my own Garden of Eden is visiting any of the myriad free galleries that are all within just a few blocks of my office. Instead of simply ordering in lunch or running across the street to get the same bowl of soup and half sandwich day after day, I walk around the neighborhood, seeking something different to soothe my soul.

It was on one of these jaunts that I came upon the new exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum. Coincidentally enough, it’s entitled “Solace,” consisting of works by sixteen international artists who have their own idea of solace, of peace, of creating unique Gardens of Eden. For Peter Coffin, it’s an unending display of colorful balloons. For Koudlam, it’s a short video of women running into the ocean (and removing their tops). For Mahony, it’s a beautiful image of the moon inside a bedroom dresser.

Tom Marioni’s “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art” is perhaps the most inventive installation, creating an actual bar in the second basement of the building, finding solace in a group of friends, or even strangers, grabbing a brew or two and having a good time. Nearby is Misha Stroj’s “Now That We Can Talk About (Lament as Praise),” which incorporates wood and tree branches, bringing a natural aspect of the Garden of Eden indoors.

The Austrian Cultural Forum will expand on the theme of solace with a series of free programs related to the exhibition. On February 18, Suzanne Hudson will hold a lecture, “In Memory of Painting,” followed by a live presentation and demonstration by lifestyle artists Justin Rancourt and Chuck Yatsuk and a concert by Koudlam. On February 21, Jeff Horn will emcee a Poetry Night at 179 Canal St., featuring poems selected by the artists in the “Solace” exhibition. On March 4-6, several of the artists will lead guided walks around the city, visiting places where they find solace. On March 5, the Palm d’Or Social Club will host what is being billed as “an evening of surprise entertainment,” with such artists as Julien Bismuth. Sebastian Clough, and Christian Jankowski, not all of whom are part of the “Solace” show. Finally, on March 11, Andreas Huber will screen films and videos that offer solace.

So while fighting off the bitter cold and continuing snowstorms, search out your own type of solace, your own private Garden of Eden, a chance to get away from it all for a minute, an hour, or even more. You might find it in taking a short walk around the block, exercising, meditating, or stopping by an art gallery you’ve walked past a thousand times but never before dared enter.

“Solace” runs through May 15 at the Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd St. 212-319-5300, www.acfny.org. Mark Rifkin is the managing director of This Week in New York, an online arts & entertainment guide that can be found at www.twi-ny.com.