Courtesy AC Institute

Let’s get it on — an interactive installation at AC Institute

Dancers and demons in the domains of art
Movement sound open galleries to more rhythm and soul

SPIRIT AND MATTER
Pascal Benichou
The Phatory
Through October 19
618 E. Ninth Street
(212) 358-0028; thephatory.com

AQUA ALTA
China Blue
AC Institute
Sept. 25-Oct. 19t
547 W. 27th Street, Suite 529
(212) 731-2405; artcurrents.org

BY JEFFREY CYPHERS WRIGHT

As John Ashbery wrote forty years ago, “The academy of the future is / Opening its doors.” The graphic possibilities of figurative and conceptual art are expanding. At the Phatory, in the East Village, a dancer has mixed landscape, photography and choreography; in Chelsea, there’s a new space dedicated to performance, video, installation art, sound art (and all things that are outré art). In the words of director Holly Crawford: It’s not just stuff hanging on the wall.

At the Phatory, Pascal Benichou has done something simple and pure. A former principal dancer with the Joffrey Ballet, he has photographed his poses and motions in an attractive and innovative way. “I’m finding new ways of moving,” he says. “When the body completely surrenders, it starts to speak poetically. Ballet dancers work so hard to do the opposite, this is like a decomposition or a reversal.”

In the rural woods of Vermont, Benichou gets naked and captures double exposures of himself in a dance with nature. First, he chooses a spot, like a big rock or a stream, and then opens the shutter and enters into the scene. Sometimes he holds still, his body draped into the underlying shape. Alternately, he moves fluidly creating a blurred, flesh tone ghost. In places you can see through his ribs to the ferns below. Flecks of leafs show through the skin imparting an antique classicism and painterly demeanor.

A whole host of associations generously appears. There’s a pre-Raphaelite glow to the handsome figures with their submissive attitudes. There’s a Bacon moment as the corporeal grows surreal and the body becomes unreadable. The stones project an undertone, amplifying the sculptural qualities. We pick out a pose from Michelangelo, the dying slave.

Thus far, Pascal has produced compositions with one, two and up to three figures. When he shoots himself in a duet or trio, the works take on a frieze-like quality, glowing with an heroic patina. They carry the echoes of returning soldiers in a monument to sacrifice even as the artist is far removed from society and history.

Further isolating him, the saturated greens of the ferns and the variegated grays of the rocks form a cocoon. At home in his body and in the atmosphere, Benichou impulsively feels his way into positions that complement the surroundings. He reclines in the same angle as a descending row of ferns. His outthrust arm mirrors a diagonal slab of broken granite. In this seemingly easy grace, Benichou gives us a double dose of aestheticism — in his composition and in his stance as both an artist and a model. Take a good look and it looks good.

Looking “outside the box,” Holly Crawford, author, scholar, performer, and promoter extraordinaire, bought a skeleton to grace her new Chelsea art lab, AC (Art Currents) Institute. In keeping with her focus on the intersection of pop culture, mass media and high art, the skeleton suggests the monetary as well as the momentary. The bones (made of plastic in China) hint at the marketplace influences on art, Crawford contends.

Crawford has been doing conceptual/critical pieces for a decade. Her “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” made of black balloons, opened at Riverside Art Museum and traveled internationally. She recently curated a sound art show in Melbourne’s International Art Fair. Using real life critics and curators like Peter Frank and Anne Barlow of Art in General, Crawford has also hosted and filmed several “Critical Conversations in a Limo.”

Now this dynamic shaker has expanded her installation space at 547 West 27th to include what she deems as “the Art Chapel.” The space, she says, “is designated to have a meditative, communal and ephemeral look in that type of installation sense.” In the two regular gallery spaces Crawford is scheduling videos, performances and sound art pieces. “But the chapel is different. I opened this one calling for participation.”

The chapel will be dark with white benches and white pillows bathed in blue light for its opening, September 25 from 4 to 6. Recorded in Venice by the sound artist China Blue, tinkling and sloshing water babble will spill into the room. The audience members are invited to sit and listen in an ambient subdued space. Ms. Blue has been reviewed in the Times as possessing a little “Duchampian mischievousness” so I imagine this environment will hold some special auditory and sensory surprises.

If art is about feeling, this “sounds” like a winner.