WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13

Discussion: "When Cancellations Become Form," at the Center for Book Arts
As part of her exhibition at CBA, "Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures," curator Lauren van Haaften-Schick joins with artist-lawyer Sérgio Muñoz Sarmiento, who attended law school as an artwork, to discuss recent collisions of art and law, like Mass MoCA v. Büchel and Steinkamp v. Rhona Hoffman. (Fans of Dan Duray's recent article on Prince v. Cariou, which featured Mr. Muñoz Sarmiento, may be especially interested.) —Andrew Russeth
Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, 6:30 p.m., $10 suggested donation

Lecture: Eleonora Luciano, "Antico in Mantua: Friends and Foes," at the Frick Collection
Eleonora Luciano, co-curator of the Frick's current Antico exhibition, will talk about the sculptor's artistic circle, notably the presence of Andrea Mantegna. --Michael H. Miller
The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, New York, 6–7 p.m.

THURSDAY, JUNE 14

Opening: "Musique Plastique," at Agnès B. Gallery Boutique
Jean François Sanz curates a group show of artists and musicians that sounds like a Fort Thunder redux for the high-fashion crowd. The artists include David Shrigley, Hisham Bharoocha, Thurston Moore, Daniel Johnston, Alan Vega, Ben Vida, Brian DeGraw, Etienne Charry, Jonas Mekas, Liz Wendelbo and Tobias Bernstrup. —Rozalia Jovanovic
Agnes b. Gallery New York, 50 Howard Street, New York, 6-9 p.m.

FRIDAY, JUNE 15

Opening: Luther Price at Callicoon
The experimental filmmmaker, fresh from the Whitney Biennial, offers "projections of handmade slides and a selection of ink on wax paper paintings, some of the materials associated with Price’s practice, ongoing since the 1980s, as an artist and filmmaker." Great gallery, cool artist. Go already! —Dan Duray
Callicoon Fine Arts, 124 Forsyth Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Screening: Santiago Sierra, "No, Global Tour," at Team Gallery
Beginning on June 15, No, Global Tour, the feature-length film by artist Santiago Sierra, will have a special evening screening each Friday. Mr. Sierra commissioned the sculptural construction of the word “NO” and then took the 6-foot-tall, 14-foot wide work on a worldwide tour across Western Europe, the U.S. and Japan. This kind of reminds us of when Horst Wackerbath photographed his red couch as it toured the U.S. and the world, getting very personal portraits of the people and locations visited. Or, more recently, like Michael Heizer’s traveling boulder—Mr. Sierra’s “NO” becomes a film star as its journey is chronicled. While this exhibition opened June 7 with screenings at 10:15 a.m., 1 p.m., and 4 p.m., Friday is the only day for that special 7 p.m. slot. —R.J.
Team Gallery, 83 Grand Street, New York, 7 p.m.

SATURDAY, JUNE 16

Performance: Josiah McElheny at Andrea Rosen Gallery
As part of Mr. McElheny's third exhibition at Andrea Rosen, "Some thoughts about the abstract body," the artist will perform using his sculptural assemblages as props. The work explores the relation between clothing and abstraction through the use of historical examples of fashion and costume design. --M.H.M.
Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 West 24th Street, New York, 2 p.m., 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.

SUNDAY, JUNE 17

Lecture: Jorg Heiser at MoMA PS1
The Berlin-based Frieze magazine co-editor heads to MoMA PS1 to discuss his book All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art, part of the museum's "A Short Course on Resistance" lecture series. —D.D.
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, 3–4 p.m.

Opening: Gina Beavers at James Fuentes
Ms. Beavers will present her "Body Works"—painted nude bodies that she has culled from Internet images and rendered in luscious, disturbing, meaty relief. For instance, a lithe woman covered in a faux-Mondrian design and—why not?—posed in front of a red curtain with a gold frame slung around her body. Breasts, bellies protrude; any standard notion of taste is pretty much defenestrated. Daring stuff. —A.R.
James Fuentes, 55 Delancey Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

TUESDAY, MAY 1

"Science on the Back End" at Hauser & Wirth
The artist Matthew Day Jackson selects five artists--Larry Bamburg, Marc Ganzglass, Rosy Keyser, Erin Shirreff and Nick van Woert--gives each of them their own room in Hauser & Wirth's Upper East Side location. As Mr. Jackson states in the press release: "I am not a curator. I merely selected the five artists for this exhibition and left to them the decision of which artworks to present. These artists inspire me." --Michael H. Miller
Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: “Lucian Freud Drawings,” at Acquavella
On May 1, Acquavella Galleries will present “Lucian Freud Drawings,” the most comprehensive exhibition of the late artist’s drawings ever to be shown in the U.S., including intimate portraits of family and friends as well as landscapes, many of which were selected from Freud’s sketchbooks and have never before been seen. —Rozalia Jovanovic
Aquavella, 18 East 79th Street, New York, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 2

Opening: Noam Rappaport at James Fuentes
Mr. Rappaport makes relentless invention look easy. He makes each his (usually) spare paintings—hardly an adequate term here—with just a few components: perhaps a slab of wood, an unusually shaped swath of canvas, some touches of paint. Those elements become bewilderingly complete and handsome works that stretch strangely across walls or jut out magically into space. Fans of no-more-than-necessary artists, from Blinky Palermo to B. Wurtz, will swoon. —Andrew Russeth
James Fuentes, 55 Delancey Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Dana Schutz, "Piano in the Rain," at Petzel
For her first outing at Petzel, Ms. Schutz makes her characters "build a boat while sailing it, ignite themselves, pass on a contagious yawn, flash the audience with various craft-making tools and play a concerto in the rain," according to the gallery's (frankly tantalizing) news release. No doubt more of her inimitable pleasures await. Schutz fans can visit the Metropolitan Opera's Arnold & Marie Schwartz Gallery through May 12 to catch her "Götterdämmerung" show of watercolor monoprints informed by Wagner's opera of the same name. —A.R.
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 537 West 22nd Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Ryan McGinley, "Animals" and "Grids," at Team Gallery
Ryan McGinley has two new shows opening simultaneously at Team Gallery, "Animals" and "Grids."  For "Animals," Mr. McGinley took studio portraits of marmosets and parakeets. But as these are Ryan McGinley photos, the animals are posed with nude models. This coincides with "Grids," another opening of Mr. McGinley’s work at Team Gallery’s Wooster Street space, featuring three large grids composed of portraits of fans taken at concerts.—R.J.
83 Grand Street, and 47 Wooster Street, New York, 6 p.m.

Party: MoMA PS1 Opens Frieze
The party will include "a full concert by Martha Wainwright, including renditions as Edith Piaf, original songs, and a climactic tribute to Kraftwerk." Given how climactic those performances at the museum already were, this should, in so many words, be a good party. — Dan Duray.
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City

THURSDAY MAY 3

Opening: Courtney Love, "And She’s Not Even Pretty," at Fred Torres Collaborations
You know Courtney Love as a musician, actress and wife of Kurt Cobain. You may not know the Hole front-woman studied fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1980’s. Apart from practicing celebrity as an art from, she’s also been drawing throughout her life and will be presenting her work for the first time. Whether or not David LaChapelle and Julian Schnabel are her mentors, which they are, Ms. Love’s foray into visual art is going to be a celebrity shit show. —R.J.
Fred Torres Collaborations, 527 West 29th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.


SATURDAY MAY 5

Opening: Tauba Auerbach, "Float," at Paula Cooper Gallery
Tauba Auerbach's much-anticipated first solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery will include words from the artist's "Weave" and "Fold" series, as well as new photographs and sculptural objects. --M.H.M.
Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Kehinde Wiley "An Economy of Grace" at Sean Kelly Gallery
Painter Kehinde Wiley branches out with his first ever portraits of women. For the clothes, he's collaborated with Riccardo Tisci, Creative Director of Givenchy, and of "Watch the Throne" cover fame. — D.D.
Sean Kelly Gallery, 528 West 29 Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

The Frieze tent being constructed. (Photo by Andrew Russeth)

Up until the announcement last spring that London’s Frieze Art Fair would be coming to New York for the first time, there were maybe five main reasons for a person to be on Randall’s Island: You are a high school student on an organized sports team—probably lacrosse or track or, perhaps, soccer—and you are utilizing the island’s athletic fields for practice; you have tickets to Electric Zoo or Cirque du Soleil; you like golf, but you do not want to leave the city to play it; you are a patient at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on the adjoining Wards Island; you are John McEnroe, it is 2010 and you are inaugurating the John McEnroe Tennis Academy at the Sportime Randall’s Island Tennis Center.

Frieze, which runs May 4-7, is now on New York’s home turf, but Randall’s Island feels a long way from Chelsea, or even the Upper East Side, even though that neighborhood is connected to the island by the Wards Island Footbridge, which is sea foam green, intriguingly Art Deco and, somewhat inconveniently for Frieze, closed for construction until later this summer.

There’s something ever so slightly off about the island. During a visit there last week, I saw high school students jogging past patients from the psychiatric center who were out for an afternoon walk accompanied by attendants. For every sign that says “Golf Center,” there’s one that says “Neurochemistry.” That attractive white brick, Roman-style building over by where the island connects to Queens? It turned out to be a sewage treatment plant. From Harlem, I walked across the RFK Bridge, which deposited me behind the driving range in a tangle of barbed-wire fencing beneath the shadow of the overpass. There were rust-covered dumpsters, old bleachers, unattached snowplows and more dumpsters. The Frieze tent, glossy and bright and snaking along the Harlem River, is located at the end of a service road. I’d come out to Randall’s Island in part to catch a glimpse of the Frieze tent while it was under construction, but also just to figure out how one gets there. I’ve lived in New York for seven years and, like a lot of New Yorkers, I’ve never had any cause to go to Randall’s Island.

I was also looking for a rat. Before going out to the island, I saw that The Art Newspaper’s website published a photograph of a giant inflatable rat, a symbol of union protests, installed at the Frieze tent’s construction site. The week before my trip, the New York District Council of Carpenters—an organization used by New York’s other major fairs, the Armory Show and the ADAA Art Show—announced a labor dispute with Frieze. The fair, so they claimed, was not using any of the local signatory contractors that employ the council. Not long after that, members of Occupy Wall Street announced a plan for a protest in front of the fair because, as Noah Fischer, one of the founders of Occupy Museums told me, “Frieze is a sort of hyper commercialized spectacle for the art economy” (the group also staged a small protest in front of the Armory Show, in March). Frieze denied that it was in a labor dispute with anyone. So what accounted for the photo of the rat?

Usually, when a New York art dealer has to cross water to get to an art fair, it’s because they’re in Basel. Or Paris, strolling along the Pont Alexandre III to the Grand Palais, for FIAC. There’s something almost more exotic about an island no one goes to in the East River with a giant asylum sitting in the middle of it.

“What we tend to do when we’re involved in a local New York fair is not going to work,” said dealer Jane Cohan, who runs the James Cohan Gallery with her husband, when I called her the day after my trip. “We tend to split our days. We figure there’s more people in New York and more people coming to the gallery and we want to be there for that. But with Frieze that’s not going to work logistically. It’s going to be a longer trip. We’ll have to come up with a different rotating system of sales associates.”

“I went out there yesterday on foot,” I said.

“Really?” she said. “Across the Triboro Bridge? That must have been an experience. I once walked across the George Washington Bridge but it was 4 in the morning and I was 17. Somehow, I don’t think a lot of our clients are going to do that.”

Chances are the Horts and Rubells of the world will probably not be walking across any bridges. Holders of the fanciest of Frieze’s VIP tickets—the one that gets you in at 11 a.m.—will have access to BMW sedans that will shuttle them from the island to wherever in Manhattan they need to go. Each car is equipped with sound installations by Martin Creed, Rick Moody and Frances Stark, which a press release from BMW boasts “will make the journey to Randall’s Island more enchanting.” (Reading this made me think of the empty vial covered in cocaine residue that I saw on the ground while walking across the bridge.) A Frieze spokesperson told me a ride from the BMW fleet will probably have to be booked in advance.

As a journalist, my own VIP card gets me in only as early as 2 p.m. Frieze will be running its own bus from the 4,5,6 train stop at 125th Street in Harlem, as well as a ferry that leaves every 15 minutes from East 35th Street. The other option is to take the M35 bus, which is basically a shuttle from Harlem. I took it on a second trip last week. With the exception of the guy sitting next to me who kept nodding off on my shoulder, it wasn’t an unpleasant ride. Still, it’s amusing to imagine Larry Gagosian—or even most art journalists—in a fit of desperation taking public transportation.

“I’m wondering at what point people will raise enough of a fuss that they’ll have to start having helicopter shuttles from Chelsea to the island,” said Alex Provan, a founder of Triple Canopy who will have a booth at Frieze. It’s the organization’s first art fair and it was given a booth for free because of its nonprofit status (as was White Columns; the Occupy Museums people weren’t aware of this when I spoke to them. One of them responded angrily, “We don’t think these small gestures work,” and then didn’t really elaborate.) Mr. Provan, whose organization doesn’t have the financial resources of a commercial gallery, said, “Hopefully most of the dealers that can afford to do Frieze can afford cab fare.”

“Helicopter,” the dealer Andrew Kreps responded quickly when I asked him how he was getting out to the island. He was joking, but I bet we can expect a lot of Frieze-related helicopter jokes in the coming weeks. I can think of more than a few art world machers who would likely consider it the most practical mode of transport, given that the island is a little too close to Teterboro to get to by private jet, never mind the lack of runway. “It’s hard to believe,” Mr. Kreps continued, “but I’ve actually been there before. For like a weird camp reunion thing. A touch football kind of deal. It’s really not that hard, I know people might think that sounds crazy. You just go up the FDR and you go over a bridge and you’re there. I know it’s intimidating, but it’s actually a pretty amazing place.”

“Do you have a car?” I asked.

“I was just gonna take a taxi,” he said. “I’m lacking a driver.”

Bridget Donahue, a director at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, reiterated this point to me when she said “I think since we’re all New Yorkers, we’re just assuming we’ll get in a yellow cab.” As far as I can tell, most cabs have less of a problem going to Randall’s Island than they do to, say, Brooklyn, so long as you agree to pay the $6.50 bridge toll. But Oliver Newton, co-owner of the gallery 47 Canal—who is one of the lucky exhibitors with his own car—conjured a truly horrifying image: “What worries me is the situation at the end of the fair, when everyone is trying to leave at once.”  Then again, that nightmare scenario may be mitigated by people like dealer James Fuentes, who lives downtown near the East River and plans to take his bike.

For now, getting on and off the island is relatively painless. On Tuesday a group of around 20 journalists got on a yellow water taxi at 35th Street with Frieze cofounders Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover. Tea was served, and everyone headed for the top deck and started snapping photos of Manhattan. “I really like this trip,” Ms. Sharp said to me as we passed the Upper East Side. “It’s very seductive.” When we arrived at the construction site, security guards made us put on neon-yellow vests that said FRIEZE ART FAIR. Mine didn’t really fit over my jacket.

Last week on one of my trips out there, after scouring the art fair grounds looking to no avail for the inflatable rat, I found myself waiting at the bus stop near the parking lot (this is as good a time as any to say that the lot fits about 1,500 cars). The bus comes roughly four times an hour in the afternoon. A yellow cab with its light on pulled up instead and stopped. I looked around, hesitated slightly, and then jumped in.

“Do you take a lot of fares to Randall’s Island?” I asked the driver.

“Things happen,” he said coldly. “You take a lot of cabs from bus stations on Randall’s Island?” That was the end of that conversation. The cab back to Midtown took 20 minutes and cost $25.92, with a 20 percent tip.

As for the inflatable rat, it turns out that by the time I got there it was long gone. I found out later from a Council of Carpenters representative that the protest symbol was basically a photo-op, installed for a few hours and swiftly taken down after someone called security. There weren’t a lot of people around to see it anyway.

mmiller@observer.com

Stack Piece sets a three-and-a-quarter-inch length of iron rod--just a hair shorter than what a Tammany-era hoodlum might have carried--horizontally on a finely finished brown wooden block, which itself sits on a rectangular piece of copper. The whole, not more than an inch thick, is fastened to the wall like a crucifix, with the rod extending past the edges of the wood, and the wood, in turn, both thicker and wider than the copper. This stacking of heavy textures points as directly as a plumb line at the earth’s iron core. Like a figure heavily stamped into a penny, the piece creates an impression of force and weight unrelated to its size.

In Complex Roads, a rectangular, scuffed sheet of lead about six inches long is folded once around a length of silver wire with a yellowish tarnish. (If Stack Piece alludes to an old-fashioned blackjack, maybe this is a 1920s dollar bill.) The fold is at an angle, making seven separate edges: the fold’s long edge on the right, and the rectangle’s two straight ends splayed left. The wire winds through the fold and then behind the back, hidden except where it sticks out.

A single fold can create an exponential increase in formal complexity; here it results in gestures that fill the available space absolutely. (Jasmin Tsou, who curated the show for Fuentes as well as in her own gallery, made a good choice in showing as many pieces as she does: since techniques like Walton’s can risk looking twee, but his own pieces have such singular presence, it’s just as well not to give the pieces too much space. But when he doubles a form, the effect is often to make it seem cut in half, or even to put the viewer inside it. In Concrete/Tin, for example, a shiny, unlabeled tin can sits next to a concrete casting of the same shape on a thick wooden shelf. Making a solid concrete duplicate of a mass-produced tin container--who knows what’s inside?--and setting the two side by side brings up any number of ideas, but the ideas are all neatly dispatched again by the thickness of the shelf. It’s more than half as high as the cans, and darker, which makes it part of the piece--which welds over the distinction between art object and support so completely that all the other distinctions are welded over, too. It’s like seeing into the mechanics of consciousness or of intimacy, or being in a place that has no outside.

Folded Signs #5 consists of two objects side by side. On the left, a linen napkin, folded in thirds into a stretched-out irregular pentagon--like Superman upside down, or a very old fashioned Japanese kimono--is painted or soaked in clay-colored gesso and held up by a little copper rod that is nailed right through it, affixing it to the wall. On the right is a small, thick, greenish black panel with a piece of paper towel, painted the same color and folded unevenly in half, attached to its front. The paper towel extends just barely past the edges of the panel at four points, exemplifying the expressive power of the extreme end of understatement: if you have the courage to pitch your voice low enough, you may have your point both ways and come out even louder. The weave of the linen napkin and the quilted pattern of the paper towel are not obscured by their colors.

White Glass, one of several “white glass” pieces in the show, consists of a partially rusted, irregularly severed rectangular piece of iron screwed to the wall with a single screw; a block of brass attached perpendicularly, to make an upside-down L-shaped bracket; a small, flat piece of wood, a quarter of an inch high, exactly as deep as the brass and half as wide, sitting on top, grain forward; and a hand-cast piece of white glass, shaped like a shot glass or tea candle, propped at an angle on the wood, flush to the right side of the bracket. The slightest disturbance could knock the glass off, but the piece is no more fragile than an atom bomb. The bomb, after all, uses only the weak nuclear force, while White Glass partakes of the full splendor of gravity. The tilting, likewise, serves only to emphasize all the right angles by contrast.

To make Sue’s Coat (#4), Walton cut a long vertical notch halfway down the side of a rectangular brass plate and drilled two small holes in the upper corners so it could be nailed to the wall. Underneath, like an underline, he nailed a thicker copper bar. Matte and black, the piece looks at first like it’s been burnt into the wall. Most of Walton's sculptures consist of multiple pieces that aren’t attached, and he left many of them behind disassembled, in custom-built boxes, with meticulous notes and diagrams. Among other things, he noted the two most important points about Sue’s Coat: “Copper bar is level. No edge on brass sheet is level.”