New York. In Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good), a show at the Public Theater through Sunday, the German/British collective Gob Squad reconstructs a batch of films by Andy Warhol, in particular, of course, Kitchen (1965). Amy Taubin files a terrific report at Artforum, recalling an early-ish assessment of the film by Norman Mailer and noting "the Warhol/Godard connection." At the outset of the performance, the audience is taken on a tour of the set and told "that the black-and-white video projections which comprise almost the entire performance (and which resemble the texture and tonalities of Warhol's black-and-white 16mm films) are a simulcast of the performance taking place in the colorful, three-dimensional space behind the screens — and not a prerecorded video. The strategy works. Paradoxically, the video, which is larger than life but also ghostly, is more convincing than seeing flesh-and-blood performers moving around a three-dimensional space imitating Warhol superstars could possibly be." Here's the trailer; maybe you have to be there.
Beijing. Apichatpong Weerasethakul: For Tomorrow for Tonight is on view at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art through next Friday. For Artforum, Brian Curtain calls the exhibition "a largely enigmatic and often humorous take on Weerasethakul's concerns with superstition and animism in Thailand. Consisting of three video projections, a monitor, and a series of photographs, these beautifully composed works depict a woman (played by Jenjira Pongpas) in a dilapidated interior spooked by otherworldly presences, the same woman in repose, a mud-splattered man, and a guy emanating colored light amid a nighttime landscape."
Berkeley. The African Film Festival is on through February 29 at the Pacific Film Archive and Frako Loden has an overview at the Evening Class.
In the works. "American Horror Story's Kate Mara has been cast in Netflix's first original series, David Fincher's drama House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey," reports Deadline's Nellie Andreeva. "The political thriller, based on Michael Dobbs's novel and the 1990 British series it spawned, stars Spacey as Rep Frank Underwood, the Majority Whip of the US House of Representatives who, after getting is passed over for Secretary of State, hatches a plot to bring down the new President."
"Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin will star in Stand Up Guys, an action comedy being directed by Fisher Stevens, who won an Oscar for producing The Cove." Borys Kit has more in the Hollywood Reporter.
"John Hawkes and Yasiin Bey (you trained yourself not to call him Mos Def anymore, right?) are set to star in an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's 1978 novel The Switch, a predecessor to Rum Punch, the book Quentin Tarantino adapted into Jackie Brown," blogs Zach Dionne at Vulture. Dan Schechter will direct. Dionne notes that Hawkes and Bey will be playing "15-years-younger versions of Robert De Niro's stoner ex-con Louis Gara and Samuel L Jackson's imminently quotable Ordell Robbie from Tarantino's film."
Reading. The new Brooklyn Rail features Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa on Paul Sharits, Rachael Rakes on artist and activist Dara Greenwald and Phil Coldiron on Ben Wheatley's Kill List.
Sheila Heti talks with Joan Didion about her famous 1979 piece on Woody Allen and more in the new Believer.
Scrolling. Triple Canopy's Occupy Wall Street issue, "Call and Response."
Obits. Dorothea Tanning died yesterday at the age of 101, "and pieces of history die with her," writes New York's Jerry Saltz. "Artist, poet, wife of Max Ernst from 1946 until he died in 1976, and (along with Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Lee Miller, Maya Deren, Remedios Varo, and Leonor Fini) one of a group of great women Surrealists, she was at the center of a movement that was a vicious mill for women. Among the surrealists, females — while 'allowed' to be artists — were often also relegated to the sidelines of neglected or beset mistresses, muses, and madwomen. In her memoir, we hear how she and Ernst fell in love while playing chess, how the two of them lived in Arizona before moving to France, of their double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, of her friendships with Picasso, Breton, Magritte ('sweet'), Duchamp, Tanguy, Truman Capote ('a neat little package of dynamite'), Orson Welles ('scowler'), Joseph Cornell ('the courtly love of the 13th century troubadours'), and how she designed sets and costumes for the great George Balanchine."
"The influential US artist Mike Kelley has died, aged 57," blogs Dan Fox for frieze. "Kelley's singular and wildly imaginative work evolved across a broad spectrum of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance and video, effortlessly colliding the high-minded and serious with the esoteric and profane." More from Jerry Saltz.
Jon Pareles in the New York Times: "With his deep voice, his sharp suits, his aviator glasses and the stage presence of a grown-up music fan," Don Cornelius, who died yesterday at 75, "was every bit the smooth TV personality on Soul Train, the nationally syndicated Saturday-morning show he created, produced, wrote and hosted from 1971 to 1993. Behind his blend of suavity and enthusiasm, and what he called 'the hippest trip in America,' was a cultural mission…. Soul Train kept black musicians visible as pop radio was resegregating itself."
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