It’s Frieze Week, Bitch!

Dearly beloved, we have gathered here this week (in New York) to reaffirm our faith in aesthetic truths (art) and renew our vows to place culture before nature (sleep). May Day is as good a place to start as any, so let’s begin with your morning. I hope you arose in time to make the previews of Anna Boghiguian’s collages and paintings, Aaron Fowler’s scavenged assemblages, and Hiwa K’s videos at the New Museum, since, as they say, you snooze, you lose. For anyone who needs a deeper cut, the Iraqi-Kurdish Hiwa K—whose pieces often address the history and politics of his native region broadly, as well as his hometown of Sulaymaniyah in Iraq specifically—also has work included in the latest display at SculptureCenter.

You can head to a lot at Tenth Avenue between West Thirtieth and Thirty-First, where A Prelude to The Shed will kick off at a temporary structure for performance that architecture and urban planning firm NLÉ Works’s founder Kunlé Adeyemi has collaborated on with artist Tino Sehgal. Seghal’s medium of choice is “situations,” and as The Shed itself won’t won’t be finished until next year, sets by ABRA, Arca, Azealia Banks, and Asmara—among others throughout the next two weeks—are a Christmas-in-July situation for fans of live performance. A Sehgal effort, This variation, will also diversify Pas de Deux Cent Douze, a new work by legendary choreographer William Forsythe, which itself updates a lovely duet from his seminal 1987 ballet In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. I’m sure it will be fully elevating.

If looking (as opposed to watching) is more your style, the white cube has so much to offer you this week. A show at Ortuzar Projects downtown spanning three years of the German artist Peter Roehr’s output—his career itself spanned less than ten years, given his untimely death at age twenty-four in 1968—makes the case that he prefigured the techniques of appropriation that became all the rage in art of the 1980s. A precocious prodigy, and an ancestor all in one—see for yourself! And as long as you’re down there too, the last days of Milano Chow’s meticulous graphite, flashe, and ink drawings at Chapter NY are worth slowing your roll for, along with Jacolby Satterwhite’s new video and retail installation (isn’t every gallery show though?) at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and paintings on paper by Mark Van Yetter at Bridget Donahue.

Peter Roehr, FO-24 A, 1965. Photo courtesy of Ortuzar Projects.

Zip up to Chelsea and catch shows by Maren Hassinger—a crucial link between performance art and sculpture—at Susan Inglett Gallery, Tommy Hartung at C24 Gallery, Nancy Shaver at Derek Eller, Harmony Hammond at Alexander Gray Associates, and an addendum survey to the authoritative 2013 Guggenheim show of the Japanese post-war avant-garde movement Gutai at Fergus McCaffrey. If you’re dressed right, continue uptown to the retrospective of Peter Hujar’s photography at the Morgan Library & Museum, Keith Sonnier’s delightful neon sculptures at Castelli Gallery, and the playful showcase of Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s furniture, collages, and curtains at the Jewish Museum. Frieze, and other fair-weather friends, will arrive on Thursday (Wednesday, for those with more peers than friends) so I’d advise you get your seeing schedule sorted prior.

Milano Chow, Exterior with Checkerboard, 2018. Photo courtesy of Chapter NY.

Then, should you need a little darkness (as I do), mosey down to Metrograph this weekend for the ongoing series they’re hosting on documentarian Emile De Antonio, whose films chronicled the sturm und drang of Vietnam War-era America. I know it sounds heavy, but what true Smiths fan wants to be caught not having seen In the Year of the Pig, the barn-burning 1968 film that covered their 1985 album Meat is Murder? Plus, if you go to Saturday’s screening, you’ll get out just in time to scoot over to evening festivities for mega-Smiths fan Phil Collins’s collab with Creative Time at the Firehouse, Engine Company 31, a decommissioned fire station in Lower Manhattan’s Civic Center. Titled Bring Down The Walls and running every weekend throughout this month, the initiative “operates as a school for radical thought and political exchange” during the day and by nightfall promises a dance club “inspired by the ethos of early house music venues, which often functioned as hubs of political engagement as much as spaces of personal liberation and collective transcendence.” I hope you can fit that Foucault in your fanny pack.

Harun Farocki, An Image, 1983. Still courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.

And after all this, you’ll need a rest, so why not get ready for your nigh-nigh with the late German filmmaker Harun Farocki’s 1977 video Bedtime Stories 1-3: Cats, screening on Sunday as part of an ongoing program between NYU’s 80WSE galleries and Anthology Film Archives? Stuff a sheet mask into your crossbody bag and slouch on in. A bonus: Cats prefaces a later digital short film and Farocki’s landmark 1983 meditation An Image, documenting four days of putting together a centerfold for Playboy. As Mr. F himself said of this operation: “The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living! (It’s impossible to either look or film into the sun.)” Heed that, and be judicious in your viewings this week.