[REVIEW] Nicolas Jaar @ Salon Zur Wilden Renate, Berlin

I'm welcomed to the club by my gracious host Tony, who I emailed just a few hours before about checking out the quite sold out Nicolas Jaar show. Nicloas Jaar seems to be a big deal in Berlin. His music plays all around town in the cafes and bars and every time I mentioned him I'm met with warm approval. His father Alfredo Jaar is currently having a retrospective at the Berlinische Galerie. Tony meets me at the door to walk me in, casually asks about who I'm covering the event for and instructs me to have 'the very best time possible.' I walk into a big sun filled courtyard that immediately makes me think about Never Never Land. Gigantic trees blooming with disco balls, a giant swinging viking ship soaring above a dance floor, sunbathers by the kiddie pool, half a dozen 20-somethings spinning on a truck-tire swing, enormous brightly colored balloons bouncing around the crowd, a food truck churning out gooey crepes, and whole lot of dancing going on everywhere you look. I walk through the VIP where the easyJet set are reveling in plumes of smoke and on frosted horizontal mirrors, wearing a mixed bag of 80's future glam, ironic thrift store scores and skinny-fit riviera chic. I wander through the crowds taking in the colorful scenery and allowing myself to get taken in by the by the driving sounds from NY DJ's wolf + lamb. Around dusk Nicolas Jaar comes on with a long rambling intro that silences the crowd before his airtight, signature drop sets off the night. The next couple hours are a pastiche of Nicolas' varying musical ideas and influences turned up past his normal chill level to a velocity better fit for the dance floor. I overhear a tall and serious Italian man saying 'he's really the best of the best, and you know why? He has is own style - completely original.' That seems to be the general sentiment. The open air series at Renate closes early, so by 1am the crowd starts pouring out into the night where many of the clubs stay open throughout the entire weekend. As I get swept out into the street I can't help thinking to myself, this just might be Never Never Land.

Be sure to visit Nicolas Jaar's website for more info and to find our about upcoming shows. You can also click here to listen and download Nicolas Jaar's amazing BBC Essential Mix. Text and photography by Perry Shimon for Pas Un Autre

[Review] Surrealism In The Studio

I’m always up for something whacky to stretch my imagination and feed my thoughts. So when I discovered that in the studio next to me, four girls had started a small publishing company, Humtpy Dumpty Publishing, and were releasing their first title, Topsy Turvy Tales, by Charlotte Boulay-Goldsmith and Laura Hyde, a quirky, off-the-wall collection of surrealist tales, I thought I would give it a go, I managed to swap a copy for a t-shirt and headed back to the studio.

Pushing unopened mail aside, I examined the book. To touch it felt like canvas, with a bold screen printed title, a sort of art-work book, a really strong looking cover I thought, I very much liked the small detail of the Humpty Dumpty logo on the spine, made me think of Penguin, but a bit more fun.

I flipped through the pages. A collection of four tales, each personalized with a different aesthetic, typography, layout and style of illustration. As I like to approach things my own way, wink, wink, I started with the last tale.

What if? What if the story suggested, a man woke up one day only to realize his heart had run away? Left him behind. Abandoned him. Life losing all meaning, purpose, and direction without it, he is forced on a quest to find it. And when he does, he realizes his heart has eloped with another. Naughty heart! Leaving two heartless bodies to learn how to be with one another in order to be whole again. Sounds like oxford street on a Saturday night.

This unusual and imaginative take on the classic love story, gives it a new sense of wonder and perspective. Interestingly, it seems that it is the very surrealism of the tale that allows it to capture the essence of falling in love as something beyond us, which sort of takes us by surprise and sweeps us off our feet.

And then came the tale of Chester the Oyster. The letters wavy on the page as if underwater. Small blue bubbles popping around the text. I am deep at sea, where Oysters dance, write essays and play. The story works as a parable: Chester the Oyster keeping his shell constantly shut and letting life pass him by for fear of losing the pearl which may be inside him. A life crippled by the fear of not living up to his grand idea of himself. The possibility of failure imprisoning him. The tale is an inspiration to face the world and follow your dreams as over time you make your own pearls. And as Beckett said all you can do is: “Fail. Fail Again. Fail Better”.

The pages turn Victorian conjuring images of cobbled streets, lace frocks, spindly fingers and dusty tailcoats. Thin black and white ink drawings, pages adorned with cobwebs and creepy crawlies for this tale of the headless girl which makes me think of a cross between Sleepy Hollow and the Adams Family. Dark, funny, macabre and disturbing.

A deliciously ghoulish story playing with the teenage desire of always wanting to be someone else. In the story both Head and Body think they can do without each other. That they can find better. When one is younger one is very aware of one’s own imperfections. You want to change your teeth. Or have nicer hair. But ultimately our imperfections are what make us individuals so best to make peace with one’s head and get on with it.

And finally The Girl With Liquid Eyes about a girl whose emotional wound takes over her entire world, as the story develops she submerges the world in a sea of tears. A strong image that captures well how sorrow can sometimes become so all encompassing it contaminates everything around us and the only prism through which we come to see the world is that of our own pain. There is no way out but learning to let go and starting anew.

I peered up, outside the book, back at my busying studio where everything was the same, the mail still unopened, bills still unpaid, but just ever so slightly different. I checked my chest, my heart still seemed there. Phew! I could go on and face the 50’s housewife collection.

Topsy Turvy Tales. Humpty Dumpty Publishing. By Charlotte Boulay-Goldsmith, illustrated by Laura Hyde. £12.99. Available in any good bookshop. Text by Philip Colbert (Philip Colbert is the designer of London based fashion label The Rodnik Band).

Rosewater by Charley Greenfield

Rosewater is a series shot for Pas Un Autre by Melbourne, Australia based photographer Charley Greenfield. Charley says she has "a deep, sometimes obsessive love for film, roses & of course, beautiful girls...and has been shooting film since [she] was a little 6 year old girl." The beauty and ethereality of  Charley's photographs is evident in Rosewater. See more photographs after the jump. 

Rosewater Art Direction & Photography by Charley Greenfield. Model: Shona: Make-Up: Kim

Studio Visit With Artist Richard Goldberg

Richard Goldberg is an artist based in San Francisco. I was lucky enough to be invited into the inner sanctum of his studio which holds nearly three decades of his incredible, and mostly never seen to the public, oeuvra. His drawings, paintings, and three dimensional sculptural objects are created with a plethora of mediums and cover a broad range of subject matter ranging from the darkly humorous and extremely violent. Richard Goldberg's website is currently being developed and will show almost his complete works up to date and in color.  See more photos after the jump.

Love Land Invaders

Love Land Invaders is brought to you by the ingeniously creative minds of Cologne, Germany based artists Lagoi & Lace. Inspired by "entertainment and pop/music culture, Japanese culture, nudity and porn, fashion, design and art," Ralph Lagoi and Kate Lace create surreal worlds with vibrant, luxuriously psychedelic palettes that contain a certain pop art poetry that is half cartoonish and half brilliantly absurd, but that collectively represents a broader philosophy of freedom, love and art. Love Land Invaders, one of their latest, wildly inventive photographic stories, was shot in Japan's stunningly decorated love hotel rooms and includes specially designed masks, jewelry, clothing and ribbons. Even the artists themselves posed for the photographs – transforming themselves into elaborate characters with names like "Miss Takehito Quadruple," "Mister Hyde Dobuita Speertraeger," "Mr. Seiuchi Sivuch," "Shika Shika Chan" and "Miss Ayanami Oenshi" who each represent different ideals of beauty - like the the beauty of dark elegance, the beauty of a gentleman, the beauty of play, the beauty of wilderness, and the beauty of pink. Its the kind of blatant campiness that can make one overlook its originality, but if you see if for what its worth you'll notice its extremely original artistic merit as a bold statement on the glossy, hyper-surreal, absurdity of post-modern contemporary art. It brings to mind the the balloon statues and installations of Jeff Koons and art of Murakami as larger than life statements of a philosophy that Lagoi and Lace call Luxurious Pop. 

Be sure to visit the psychedelic world of of Lagoi & Lace to see much more mind-blowing imagery.....

England Uncensored

How they drink, how they fuck, how they love – UK Uncensored is Peter Dench's Matin Parr-esque type of seaside freak show and penultimate survey of British culture. Even if Peter Dench's biography is an unrelenting reminder of his Britishness, his photographs are a reminder of a certain unrelenting brilliance.  Painterly, yet journalistic, Dench's photographs capture a society  and a country with the power to take over the world or shrink backwards and digress into infants too drunk to stand or be appropriate in public. "England has never exactly been glamorous. Many of the English still insist on embarrassing themselves, wearing laughable clothing, eating terrible food and behaving inappropriately." See more photos after the jump.

You can buy the book England Uncensored here.

Peggy Moffitt Exhibition Opening – Pacific Design Center

Jhordan Dahl, co-curator of  The Total Look: the Creative Collaboration Between Rudi Gernreich, Peggy Moffitt and William Claxton with Peggy Moffitt herself at the opening event of the exhibition now on view until May 20 at the Moca - Pacific Design Center. Photography by Brad Elterman. 

Left: Vidal Sassoon & Peggy Moffitt Right:Jhordan Dahl, Jeffrey Deitch, Paige Powell

China Chow & Peggy Moffitt

Left: Jeremy Scott & Peggy Moffitt Right: Jhordan Dahl & Peggy Moffitt

Munch Ado About Nothing

Edvard Munch (pronounced Moonk) is best known for The Scream – the painting itself is an expressionistic exclamation point marking an emotional era in art. After walking through the recent Munch exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Scream seemed to me to be the culmination of a life's work; an exasperated attempt to express the entirety of life's frustrations and anxiety. The exhibition portrayed the work of a man gripped with the beauty and fatality of every moment. Images of vampires, sick women, and the famous painting entitled "two lonely ones" standing by the water's edge (pictured below).

Munch was also obsessed with self-portrait photographs. I was overcome with a sense of earnest loneliness walking past his 4 x 6 washed out photos of Munch in bed, or gazing sternly out the window, or of his own profile. Was he trying to see if others' saw his paintings like he saw them: full of color, visceral objects in constant motion, jumping off the frame, still for a moment, and then gone?

He seemed to be overwhelmed with the beauty and solitude in life – using color and exaggerated reference points to impose a sense of urgency, of tragedy and stillness at the same time. Figures with faces stand out in great detail – serving as the proverbial punctuation marks, while the supporting roles stand as auxiliary auras – holding still in space. Munch instills the unbelievable power to feel within one figure the emotion of the entire room – with empathy to the all-to-common human experience of standing alone in a room and with many.

Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye just concluded at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, but will resume at the Tate Modern in London this summerfrom June 28 to October 14, and in the meantime Edvard Munch's Masterpieces is on view now until May at the Munch Museet in Oslo, Norway which houses a majority of his works including 1,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings and 18,000 prints. Text by Angelina Dreem for Pas Un Autre. 

Photo by Angelina Dreem

Frieka Janssens' Smoking Kids

Beligum based photographer Frieka Janssens' series of children smoking is a stark reminder of the perverted glamour of something that once deemed a symbol of cultural cool, but what is now as good as poison. Janssens says, "A YouTube video of a chainsmoking Indonesian toddler inspired me to create this series, "Smoking Kids". The video highlighted the cultural differences between the east and west, and questioned notions of smoking being a mainly adult activity. Adult smokers are the societal norm, so I wanted to isolate the viewer's focus upon the issue of smoking itself. I felt that children smoking would have a surreal impact upon the viewer and compel them to truly see the acts of smoking rather than making assumptions about the person doing the act.....The aesthetics of smoke and the particular way smokers gesticulate with their hands and posture cannot be denied, but among the different tribes of "Smoking Kids," - Glamour, Jazz, and The Marginal - there is a nod to less attractive aspects, on the line between the beauty and ugliness of smoking." But not to worry, these kids weren't actually smoking.  Much more after the jump. 

September: RENO – The Biggest Little City In The World

Presenting a year in the life of Adarsha Benjamin, part nine: September: Reno – The Biggest Little City in the World. 

July: Here, There, and Everywhere

Presenting a year in the life of Adarsha Benjamin, part seven: July: Here, There, Everywhere. Photographs from Venice, Paris, and New York with a smattering  of self portraits and a visit to Hebrew summer school.

Looking Forward: ART IN 2012

Terry Richardson, Untitled (red lips), 2011

As everyone looks backward – best album, film, book, art exhibition of 2011 – Pas Un Autre looks forward to a few important and exciting exhibitions held around the world in 2012. As you'll see – there will be a trend in Japanese contemporary visual art and Japanese artist's getting their due in major museums, Damien Hirst attempts to take over the world with spots, British artist Gillian Wearing taps into the human psyche, and Terry Richardson has his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. 

1.  The first exhibition of renowned Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama's work at a Los Angeles museum. Fracture: Daido Moriyama, which is on view from April 7 to July 31 2012 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,  highlights the raw power of Moriyama’s work through a selection of photographic prints and books spanning four decades, as well as an installation of more recent color prints.

2. In 2012 British artist Damien Hirst will take over the world with his famous "spot paintings."  From January 12 to February 18 at all ten Gagosian Gallery locations around the world, from Madison Avenue to Hong Kong to Geneva, will be presenting the exhibition Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011.

3.  Japanese artist Yayoi Kusuma, famous too for her repeating dot patterns, but also for her painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installations, will be having a major retrospective at the Tate Modern in London. Kusuma, who grew up in rural Japan and became the center of the New York avante-garde art scene in New York in 60s and has spent the last few decades in a psychiatric institution in Tokyo, will be having a series of major retrospectives in the coming year.  Kusuma's retrospective at the Tate Modern will be on view from February 9 to July 5 2012.

4. Turner Prize-winning British artist Gillian Wearing’s photographs and films explore the public and private lives of ordinary people. Fascinated by how people present themselves in front of the camera in fly-on-the-wall documentaries and reality TV, she explores ideas of personal identity through often masking her subjects and using theatre’s staging techniques.From March 28 to June 17 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London presents a major exhibition that surveys Wearing’s work.

5. Terry Richardson’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, titled Terrywood, presents over 25 of his latest photographs. Inspired by the multiple facets of Hollywood life, Terrywood unveils a series of images of the famous locale, as seen through Richardson’s eyes. Terryworld meets Hollywood, as the local characters, familiar landscapes, and architectural details, now verge on having a new identity. With images such as Untitled (Hollywood), and Untitled (Nude), both photographs of the proverbial chintzy signs that are ubiquitous throughout Hollywood, Richardson illustrates his proclivity for branding whatever subject matter he approaches. Terrywood will be on view at the OH WOW gallery on La Cienaga in Los Angeles from February 24  to March 31, 2012.

June: Lost Weekends and Love At First Sight

Presenting a year in the life of Adarsha Benjamin, part six: June: Lost Weekends and Love At First Sight. Take a trip to Brooklyn to see the So So Glos, who we featured in the first issue of Autre, and then to the Berkshires – North Adams, Massachusetts – where Wilco curated the Solid Sound Festival at an old electrical sprocket factory.

May: The Month of Solitary Sunshine / Summer is Almost Here

Presenting a year in the life of Adarsha Benjamin, part five: May: The Month of Solitary Sunshine / Summer is Almost Here. This time Adarsha takes us to New York City and Coney Island.

March : Rebel Walk – Los Angeles, CA

Presenting a year in the life of Adarsha Benjamin, part three: March : Rebel Walk – Los Angeles, CA which includes behind the scenes photographs of Aaron Young's contribution to James Franco's Rebel where a replica of the car the killed James Dean was dropped from an 80 foot crane in a ditch and motorcycles were crashed along a lonely stretch of highway.