Pauline Adamek
To celebrate The Broad’s first summer, the museum today announced two major public programming series, inspired by artists in the Broad collection and The Broad’s first special exhibition, Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life. The late-night series Nonobject(ive): Summer Happenings at The Broad will animate important influences of leading contemporary artists through music and performance, fluctuating between happenings, salons and scenes. The film series Doll Parts, inspired by Cindy Sherman’s darker works, will examine the iconography of the artist’s photographic practice, showcasing influences, like minds and apparent heirs to her evolving body of work.
Co-curated by independent curator and writer Bradford Nordeen and director of editorial operations at Pitchfork Brandon Stosuy, the Nonobject(ive): Summer Happenings at The Broad series will be held one Saturday night per month, and will occupy various spaces throughout the museum and public outdoor plaza. A constellation of thrilling musicians, performers and multimedia artists will take their thematic calling from the many guises of Cindy Sherman, as well as Pop art and works of the 1980s and 1990s that helped shape the underground, rave and downtown Manhattan cultures. The series features performances by Rostam Batmanglij, the Haxan Cloak (DJ Set), Richard Hell, Perfume Genius, Sophie and more.
Tickets to Nonobject(ive): Summer Happenings also include access to the museum, including the Cindy Sherman special exhibition.
Also curated by Bradford Nordeen, the Doll Parts film series will take place every other Thursday night throughout the summer in The Broad’s Oculus Hall. The series looks to reframe the Cindy Sherman exhibition, expanding on ideas present in Sherman’s work through an innovative program of international films, artists’ tapes and music videos. Film highlights include Sherman’s Office Killer, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (for which the Cindy Sherman exhibition was named), Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hausu and many more. Tickets to the Doll Parts films also include same-night access to the Cindy Sherman exhibition.
Tickets for Nonobject(ive): Summer Happenings at The Broad and the Doll Parts film series will go on sale on the 15th of each month for the following month.
May 15 at noon PT, tickets for June programs on sale
June 15 at noon PT, tickets for July programs on sale
July 15 at noon PT, tickets for August programs on sale
Aug. 15 at noon PT, tickets for September programs on sale
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From the press release:
THE BROAD PROGRAMMING IN DETAIL
NONOBJECT(IVE): SUMMER HAPPENINGS AT THE BROAD
Nonobject(ive): Summer Happenings at The Broad is a series of late-night performances that will be held one Saturday night a month from June through September 2016. Nonobject(ive): Summer Happenings is inspired by art in the Broad collection, while shifting focus toward the immersive and immaterial, including performance, dance, music and spoken word. Occupying various spaces throughout the museum and plaza, Nonobject(ive): Summer Happenings will orchestrate a constellation of thrilling musicians, performers and multimedia artists. The artists will take their thematic calling from Pop art and works of the 1980s and 1990s that helped shape the underground, rave and downtown Manhattan cultures, as well as the many guises of Cindy Sherman, whose work will be featured in The Broad’s first special exhibition, Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life. These events fluctuate between happenings, salons and scenes and will animate important influences of the leading artists of our time.
Nonobject(ive): Summer Happening at The Broad—-Magnificent Obsession
Saturday, June 25 | 8:30 p.m.
Location: The Broad
Tickets are $35 and will be available beginning May 15 at 12 p.m. PT at thebroad.org
The first program in Nonobject(ive): Summer Happenings at The Broad is inspired by The Broad’s Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life special exhibition. The evening of performance and music will feature the lush beauty of Perfume Genius’s orchestrations and the ever-changing masked choreography of Narcissister. In the spirit of Cindy Sherman’s photographs, performance collective Mutant Salon will transform visitors’ hair, make-up and minds in a lavish pop-up beauty parlor and hive for creative collaboration and self-care. Lotic will create dark beats in The Broad’s distinctive architecture, and Cindytalk will perform electronic soundscapes that blend rhythmic dissonance with ethereal vocals.
Nonobject(ive): Summer Happening at The Broad—-Strange Forest, Downtown Manhattan and the Broad collection
Saturday, July 30 | 8:30 p.m.
Location: The Broad
Tickets are $35 and will be available beginning June 15 at 12 p.m. PT at thebroad.org
The second program in Nonobject(ive): Summer Happenings at The Broad mines the museum’s investment in “downtown” art sensibilities for an evening inspired by the asphalt jungle. Witness a reading by Richard Hell in collaboration with the ecstatic, minimalist droning thrum of the Haxan Cloak. The warm, vast analog synthesizers of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith will hover over the intense, churning rhythms of Mas Ysa. Dance and visual art collaborations, which figured centrally in the New York scene, will be created by Ryan Heffington and Brontez Purnell within the galleries and the veiled architecture, reconsidering site-specific performance within the context of contemporary Los Angeles.
Nonobject(ive): Summer Happening at The Broad—-Bling Bling, Pop Sensibilities in the Broad collection
Saturday, Aug. 20 | 8:30 p.m.
Location: The Broad
Tickets are $35 and will be available beginning July 15 at 12 p.m. PT at thebroad.org
Jeff Koons’s metallic balloon animals and the graphic paintings of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein spring to life with an evening of pop music, Footwork and yoga in the third program in Nonobject(ive): Summer Happenings at The Broad, titled Bling Bling, Pop Sensibilities. Debuting new solo material for the first time on the West Coast, Rostam (Discovery, producer for Vampire Weekend and various artists) will perform with both contemporary dancers and a string quartet. His performance will reside at the intersection of pop art and music in The Broad’s open-air plaza. William Basinski’s new project Sparkle Division makes its premiere with swinging sexy lounge music. Jlin dazzles with her angular approach to the popular Footwork genre, while Macy Rodman struts to tunes like “Lazy Girl” and “Clanging.” New media artist Tabita Rezaire leads an African yoga session with a distinctive slant in which the audience becomes the performance.
Nonobject(ive): Summer Happening at The Broad—-Shifting Horizon Exploding Star, Underground and Rave Cultures at The Broad
Saturday, Sept. 24 | 8:30 p.m.
Location: The Broad
Tickets are $35 and will be available beginning Aug. 15 at 12 p.m. PT at thebroad.org
Taking inspiration from the large-scale photography of Andreas Gursky to the sculptural installations of Mike Kelley, the celebration of rave and club cultures courses an unlikely if ecstatic pulse through the Broad collection in Shifting Horizon Exploding Star, Underground and Rave Cultures, the fourth installment of Nonobject(ive): Summer Happenings at The Broad. Lasers up, as Sophie will take to the stage to share his high-octane sounds made for late-night dance floors. The pitch will pique as Vessel engages the crowd in a multimedia electronic performance and a live video mix by Charles Atlas graces the lush, looping echolalia of Julianna Barwick. DJs Lauren Bousfield and Elysia Crampton permeate the space with smart, complex electronic music that will bring a true crescendo to the summer nights series.
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Guest Curators:
Bradford Nordeen is an independent curator and writer who lives in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, NY. The founder of Dirty Looks, a bicoastal platform for queer experimental film and video, and its site-specific, offshoot series Dirty Looks: On Location, Nordeen is the platinum programmer for Outfest Los Angeles. His writing has been published in Art in America, Afterimage, Lambda Literary, X-TRA, Little Joe and BUTT Magazine. He is the author and co-editor of three Dirty Looks publications: Dirty Looks at MoMA, Check Your Vernacular and the Dirty Looks Volumes series.
Brandon Stosuy is director of editorial operations at Pitchfork. He is also a music curator for MoMA PS1 and organizes the Tinnitus music series with Adam Shore. For the past several years, he and artist Matthew Barney have collaborated on an ongoing series of live events and publications. ADAC, their most recent book-length project, was published in 2013 by Dashwood. He curated the multimedia art/music exhibition Rural Violence , which opened in August 2015 in Troy, NY. It has since been expanded and re-staged at Barney’s studio and will travel to Jackson Hole, WY, this summer. He collaborated on exhibitions and books with German artist Kai Althoff and American artist Brody Condon, and worked as a music curator for artist Doug Aitken. He writes a monthly metal column at Pitchfork called Show No Mercy, and presents live events under that name. His anthology, Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974—1992, was published by NYU Press in 2006, and he has a children’s book, Music Is…., forthcoming by Simon & Schuster in October 2016.
FILM SERIES: DOLL PARTS
Tearing through underground and pop landscapes from Maya Deren to Hole, Doll Parts reframes the special exhibition Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life as a moving-image feast of international films, artists’ tapes and music videos. From fairy tales to horror, femme fatales to “office killers,” Doll Parts examines the iconography of Sherman’s photographic practice, showcasing influences, like minds and apparent heirs to the artist’s evolving body of work. Outré artifice, feminist trailblazers and plasticine appendages reign supreme.
Cindy Sherman, Doll Clothes, 2:23 min., 1975
Samuel Bayer, Doll Parts, 4 min., 1994
Cindy Sherman, Office Killer, 95 min., 1997
Thursday, June 23 | 7 p.m.
Location: The Oculus Hall at The Broad
Tickets are $12 and will be available beginning May 15 at 12 p.m. PT at thebroad.org
Released in 1997, Office Killer is Cindy Sherman’s sole foray into feature filmmaking. An explosion of B-Hollywood film tropes, film noir aesthetics and cult filmmaking practices, Office Killer presents a cast to die for, and a screenplay penned by Sherman and New Queer Cinema auteurs Todd Haynes and Tom Kalin. Something is not right at the office when moody lurker Dorine (Carol Kane) accidentally offs a coworker, inspiring a loner killing spree that jeopardizes the lives of her colleagues, played by Molly Ringwald, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Barbara Sukowa. Evoking a staunch feminist stance on identity politics of the 1990s, the film is paired with the promotional video for Doll Parts, taken from Hole’s second masterful album, Live Through This , and Sherman’s early animated short Doll Clothes.
Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon, 14 min., 1943
Georges Franju, Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face), 88 min., 1960
Thursday, July 7 | 7 p.m.
Location: The Oculus Hall at The Broad
Tickets are $12 and will be available beginning June 15 at 12 p.m. PT at thebroad.org
Maya Deren inaugurated the American avant-garde with Meshes of the Afternoon, her iconic short film shot in the Hollywood Hills with her husband and co-director, Alexander Hammid. The Lynchian psychodrama follows a woman’s dream quest down a rabbit hole of multiple personas and mirror-faced apparitions. In George Franju’s seminal horror feature, Les yeux sans visage , a prominent surgeon is driven to seclusion after the “death” of his daughter. He becomes the target of a police investigation when the bodies of faceless women are discovered; their faces removed in a horrific experimental transplant procedure. His daughter is alive, of course, hidden in their Victorian mansion. Physically maimed from the accident in which she was allegedly killed, she is forced to wear an expressionless porcelain mask, heightening the emotional turmoil that her fallen beauty brings to the unsuspecting victims at the hands of her maniacal father.
Jack Smith, Yellow Sequence, 15 min., 1963—65
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Arabian Nights, 155 min., 1974
Thursday, July 21 | 7 p.m.
Location: The Oculus Hall at The Broad
Tickets are $12 and will be available beginning June 15 at 12 p.m. PT at thebroad.org
Echoed in the lurid, plastic fairy tales of artist Cindy Sheman’s mid-career work, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poetic visions are set upon the mythological Middle Eastern text One Thousand and One Nights for the third film in his acclaimed Trilogy of Life. Distraught at the abduction of his paramour Zumurrud, Nur-e-Din embarks on an epic journey, ultimately arriving upon a lavish kingdom that Zumurrud has come to rule under the guise of a long-lost king. This elaborate blend of eroticism and slapstick humor interweaves tales of love and loss against a glistening desert backdrop. The classic is paired with Jack Smith’s Yellow Sequence, an addendum reel to his sprawling feature Normal Love. Smith’s lavishly hued color film traces various creatures (including perennial Smith starlet Francis Francine and “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” Tiny Tim) through the junk heaps of popular culture in characteristically manic performances.
Paul McCarthy, Cultural Soup, 6:55 min., 1987
David Schmoeller, Tourist Trap, 90 min., 1979
Thursday, Aug. 4 | 7 p.m. Location: The Oculus Hall at The Broad
Tickets are $12 and will be available beginning July 15 at 12 p.m. PT at thebroad.org
Paul McCarthy’s performance document Cultural Soup presents a familial nightmare in two parts; “the son begets the daddy and the daddy begets the son,” all by way of mayonnaise, dolls and Astroturf. An early feature production from cult film icon Charles Band (Puppet Master, Subspecies), Tourist Trap is a bizarre slasher film, a deranged step-cousin to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , set in a doll-filled roadside attraction. Unlike Leatherface, however, the psychotic masked protagonist creates casts of his prey to create mannequins of their likeness. Aesthetically reflective of the abject turn in artist Cindy Sherman’s work with dolls and prostheses, Tourist Trap is a cult document of the late-1970s horror film boom, with a fantastic score to round out its off-kilter onscreen antics.
Luther Price, Clown, 30 min., 1991
Nobuhiko Obayashi, Hausu (House), 88 min., 1977
Thursday, Aug. 18 | 7 p.m.
Location: The Oculus Hall at The Broad
Tickets are $12 and will be available beginning July 15 at 12 p.m. PT at thebroad.org
Shot in varying domestic interiors that emulate Cindy Sherman’s playful studio environments, Luther Price’s Clown is a manic Super 8 reel showcasing his startling clown personas that range from the Gar Har to the F**k It Suck It clowns. First released in 1977 in an attempt to capitalize on the success of Jaws, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hausu couldn’t be further from its progenitor. Featuring a predominantly amateur cast, the acid-hued haunted house film is a Pop art explosion of innovative animation, absurdist paranormal trickery and one demonically possessed house cat. Rereleased to midnight audiences in the late 2000s, Hausu found its true calling, continuing in midnight theater runs to this day.
Matthias Müller, Home Stories, 6 min., 1990
Ida Lupino, The Bigamist, 80 min., 1953
Thursday, Sept. 1 | 7 p.m.
Location: The Oculus Hall at The Broad
Tickets are $12 and will be available beginning Aug. 15 at 12 p.m. PT at thebroad.org
Like Cindy Sherman, Ida Lupino made her mark on both sides of the camera, a defiant siren of film noir, but also one of the first female auteurs, directing and producing independent features that delved into hot-button cultural topics like abortion and polyamory. For The Bigamist, Lupino positioned herself opposite Joan Fontaine, in a subtle and gorgeously photographed potboiler about a traveling salesman who takes on two wives. In Matthias Müller’s short Home Stories, the filmmaker distills gestures of the classic Hollywood melodrama, collecting the moonlit sighs and dramatic departures, shot in 16mm off of a television screen.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, The Electronic Diary: Binge, 30 min., 1987
Narcissister, Mannequin, 5 min., 2009
Narcissister, Self-Gratifier, 4 min., 2010
Narcissister + Josef Kraska, Every Woman, 4 min., 2010
Narcissister, Upside Down (on “America’s Got Talent”), 2 min., 2011
Narcissister + Josef Kraska, The Basket, 5 min., 2013
Narcissister + A.L. Steiner, Winter/Spring Collection, 13 min., 2013
Thursday, Sept. 15 | 7 p.m.
Location: The Oculus Hall at The Broad
Tickets are $12 and will be available beginning Aug. 15 at 12 p.m. PT at thebroad.org
In her electronic video diary, Binge, artist Lynn Hershman Leeson continues her analysis of the constructed nature of feminine mystique, turning the lens inward in a tragicomic attempt to lose weight after being abandoned by her husband. Performance artist Narcissister deploys the prosthetic appendages strewn about Cindy Sherman’s mid-1990s photographic work in virtuosic videos that expose her body in strip teases and burlesque-styled pieces of high-feminist performance.
Ming Wong, Life of Imitation, 5 min., 2009
Douglas Sirk, Imitation of Life, 125 min., 1959
Thursday, Sept. 29 | 7 p.m.
Location: The Oculus Hall at The Broad
Tickets are $12 and will be available beginning Aug. 15 at 12 p.m. PT at thebroad.org
Douglas Sirk’s epic Imitation of Life was the filmmaker’s intentional Hollywood swan song. Steeped in emotional tension and full-blown melodrama, the film traces the career of struggling actress Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) as she ascends into stardom, leaving behind her daughter (Sandra Dee) and suitor (John Gavin) for the Broadway and Hollywood elite. By her side throughout the years is her faithful servant Annie (Juanita Moore), who has her own drama to contend with as her light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), passes for white in order to make a “finer” life for herself. Imitation of Life is the ultimate melodrama, from which The Broad’s Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life exhibition takes its name. Paired with the feature, Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation restages a key scene from Sirk’s film, casting three male actors from the three main ethnic groups in Singapore to alternate in the roles of Annie and Sarah Jane.
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Guest Curator:
Bradford Nordeen is an independent curator and writer who lives in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, NY. The founder of Dirty Looks, a bicoastal platform for queer experimental film and video, and its site-specific, offshoot series Dirty Looks: On Location, Nordeen is the platinum programmer for Outfest Los Angeles. His writing has been published in Art in America, Afterimage, Lambda Literary, X-TRA, Little Joe and BUTT Magazine. He is the author and co-editor of three Dirty Looks publications: Dirty Looks at MoMA, Check Your Vernacular and the Dirty Looks Volumes series.
About The Broad:
The Broad is a new contemporary art museum founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The museum is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler and offers free general admission. The museum is home to the 2,000 works of art in the Broad collection, which is among the most prominent holdings of postwar and contemporary art worldwide. With its innovative “veil-and-vault” concept, the 120,000-square-foot, $140-million building features two floors of gallery space to showcase The Broad’s comprehensive collection and is the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library.
Brian Sonia-Wallace
