Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu of the Dutch architecture firm OMA will lead the design and construction of Marina Abramović’s performance center, the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (MAI). The Institute, for which funding is currently being procured, will be located in a former theater in Hudson, New York. The large space is designed to host long-duration performances as well as workshops, lectures and festivals, all centered on time-based, performance, or otherwise fleeting art—the work that can’t be stored in a museum. The purpose of MAI is to preserve the history of immaterial art while also creating a laboratory to explore new collaborations and cross-genre practices.

OMA seems a proper fit for Abramović’s institute. Founded in 1975 by Koolhaus and others, the firm has designed many innovative art spaces around the world, including the irregular, inverted Casa da Música in Porto (2005), and the vertically “stacked” Wyly Theater in Dallas (with REX, 2009). Besides the stadium-like main performance space, which will seat an astonishing 650 people, MIA will have rooms specifically designed for study, meditation, exercise, and crystals.

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Originally published in 1987 and described by David Byrne as the “flowering of our civilization,” the updated and expanded version of Lynne Cohen’s Occupied Territory offers a stark commentary on how we have—and have not—progressed in our occupation of the world. When compared with the original Occupied, the re-publication feels more representative of a de-flowering of civilization, or a glance at old magazines and newspapers that subtly hint at how we have arrived at our current social and political milieu.

The timely shift of the connotation of the word occupy—both in general terms and in relation to Occupied Territories—creates an interesting twist in the current significance of this work. In 1987, to occupy politically was an act of aggression, a means of control and domination. With the Occupy movement of 2011, the popular implication of occupation has come to be a mixture of hope, anger, and a determination to undo the management-centric, ultimately vapid cultural practices and social aesthetics Cohen captures in her work. The Occupy movement, with its fluid structure and spontaneity, seems in many ways a direct response to the hollow occupation Cohen’s photographs captured 25 years ago. The movement’s terms seem like an attempt to overcome it.

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After five years in seclusion, Holton Rower is emerging with a solo show in New York City. His pour paintings, on display at The Hole through May 26th, are vibrant displays of acrylic paint left mostly to its own devices. Standing above large planks, Rower pours paint down thick wooden protrusions, allowing the paint to grow, or not, as wood blocks and other obstacles permit. Though at first the method seems simple, Rower has refined the process and his technical skills to an extent that intention and spontaneity are evident in equal measure in the work.

Upon entering The Hole, visitors are welcomed by the simplest of Rower’s works. The paintings in this room consist of fewer colors, layered in rings up to an inch wide. The paint retains its separateness from the surrounding rings, resulting in smoother lines and more definition. The works in the second room employ more colors applied in thin rings, with colors mixing and forming intricate designs, begetting a comparison to a topographical map of mountainous lands. The third room contains five titanic works, some with protrusions, cut-outs, and seemingly several points from which paint was applied, creating contiguous, vaguely defined abstract rings of color. This room feels a bit like the grand finale on the Fourth of July; the biggest, brightest and most complex work of the show is here, though these are not necessarily the most thoughtful or compelling pieces.

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Playing with notions of time, veracity, and photojournalistic accuracy, Stan Douglas’s latest exhibition Disco Angola ‘documents’ both the emergence of disco in New York City and the end of the Portuguese colonization of Angola and its subsequent civil war. To create the staged images in the exhibit, Douglas assumed the persona of a NYC-based photojournalist who travels regularly to Angola. He draws on disco’s African influences in order to equate the movement’s rejection of mainstream values with the Angolan fight for liberation. While the images themselves are clearly works of art, what is perhaps more interesting are the larger questions Douglas raises regarding the reliability of photographs to document truthfully and to alter what we remember as history.

Disco Angola will be at David Zwirner from March 9 – April 21. In May, Douglas will be awarded the prestigious Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography.

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For two consecutive summers, photographer Cass Bird visited Sassafras, Tennessee with a group of beautiful, masculine young women from New York City. She brought along party dresses and tutus, and asked the women to forego cutting their hair in the months leading up to the second summer’s shoot. Rewilding, Bird’s new book, is the photographic story of these summers – an inquiry into and observation of the broadening paradigms through which we understand gender. The photographs in Rewilding are intriguing; they evoke a sense of the ethereal while exploring the spaces beyond the generally accepted confines of masculinity and femininity.
     As with all of Bird’s work, Rewilding’s depth is uncontrived, its beauty authentic. Bird will be at the Lead Apron in Los Angeles on March 15 and at Dashwood Books in New York City on March 22.

In the introduction to the book, Jack Halberstam writes about how you depict gender as contrast. What do you think of this idea?
I had actually never thought about it in those terms. I think that gender is expressed as a contrast, and I am curious about how that contrast or that divide fades away at times. There’s a hetero concept where if you put a masculine girl into a hetero-dress, she’ll be cured of her masculine nature. But it actually does the opposite: if you stick a masculine girl in a tutu or a dress, she looks even more masculine.

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Despite a cold and rainy night, the Yossi Milo Gallery was barely navigable at the opening for First Look, the inaugural show in the gallery’s new space. A group exhibition of photographers whose first solo shows in New York were presented at Yossi Milo, First Look brings together disparate images in a way that highlights their similarities and elucidates their shared truths.
     Welcoming visitors to the gallery are two photographs by Pieter Hugo; in one a slum-dwelling Ghanaian girl clad in all white looks out from atop a gigantic mound of smoldering electronic waste, a bowl balanced on her head for the collection of valuable debris. Hanging opposite are three portraits of pink-lipped, primly dressed children taken by Loretta Lux. They are so wan their blue blood is almost visible beneath their skin, while their empty eyes render the images eerie, rather than the portraits of young idyll they may seem at first. This juxtaposition of Hugo’s and Lux’s images tempts the viewer to imagine that the girl on the garbage mound and the children in the portraits could look outside their frames to see each other across the room, and find some solace in their very different, yet equally terrifying worlds.

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Part poetry, part memoir, part journey into the ethereal spaces between reality and fantasy, Woolgathering is Patti Smith’s story of being a child, and becoming an artist. Moving from her working-class childhood to her years of poverty and burgeoning creativity in Greenwich Village, Smith recounts her life through its curiosities and epiphanies, sentient experiences and ardent images. Rather than tell the linear tale of her life, she brings the readers into the intimate, personal moments that have shaped her as an artist. Like the child’s discovery Smith describes, Woolgathering is ‘a crazy quilt of truths– wild and wooly ones, hardly bordering on truth at all.’
     Woolgathering, originally published in 1992, was recently re-published by New Directions with additional writing, photos and illustrations. Smith will be reading and signing Woolgathering at St. Mark’s Bookshop on January 3, 2012 at 7pm.