Daily art news

NEW YORK.- NYU photography professor Wafaa Bilal displays the digital camera mount which he has had implanted in the back of his head as part of a year long art project at his apartment in New York, December 7, 2010. The concept of the project, titled The 3rd I, is based on the idea of capturing things subjectively, without the interference of a viewfinder, according to Bilal. For the next year, images from the camera will be streamed over the internet and at a museum in Qatar which commissioned this project. 

The Museum of Modern Art’s Performance Exhibition Series continues with Performance 9: Allora & Calzadilla, which will bring Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano (2008) to the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium for performances throughout the day, from December 8, 2010, through January 10, 2011. The piece, which was acquired by MoMA in 2009 and is being publicly performed in the Museum for the first time, was created by the artist duo Jennifer Allora (b. 1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla (b. 1971), who have been named the United States representatives for the 2011 Venice Biennale. Blending sculpture and performance, the artists have carved a hole in the center of an early twentieth-century Bechstein piano, creating a void in which the performer stands to play the Fourth Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, usually referred to as “Ode to Joy.”

For each 30-minute performance, the pianist will lean over the piano’s keyboard, playing upside down and backwards, while moving the instrument around the Atrium. These performances will take place hourly beginning at 11:30 a.m. each day. Performance 9: Allora & Calzadilla is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Director, MoMA PS1, and Chief Curator at Large, MoMA, with Jenny Schlenzka, Assistant Curator for Performance, Department of Media and Performance Art, MoMA.

On view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, at the Getty Center, December 7, 2010 —April 24, 2011, Photography from the New China displays a selection of Chinese photographs produced since the 1990s, when People's Republic leader Deng Xiaoping introduced the current period of Opening and Reform. Photography from the New China is shown concurrently with Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road, an exhibition featuring nineteenth-century views of China and other parts of East Asia, creating a powerful contrast with the contemporary works.