Bruce LaBruce Celebrates MoMA Retrospective @ Nowhere Bar

Transgressive queercore director  Bruce LaBruce is flying high right now; his first MoMA exhibition opened up last night and Bruce went out to party. The exhibition itself is a monumental achievement; LaBruce may be one of the more extreme artists to ever have work shown at MoMA. Depicting scenes of sexual fetish and paraphillia, BDSM, gang rape, racially-motivated violence, amputee fetishism and more, LaBruce has managed to turn controversy into his own brand of queer celebrating and sex positive art. MoMA itself has compared LaBruce favorably to Robert Altman and Federico Fellini as a true auteur when discussing the choice for the exhibition. So where did LaBruce go out to celebrate his achievement? Nowhere Bar, of course. The infamous gay bar proved to be a perfect setting for LaBruce to party and dance with friends and muses like performance artist Kembra Phahler and writer and nightlife personality Ladyfag , as well as many more adoring friends and fans.  One half expects extreme things to be surrounding Bruce at all times, but tonight was actually a mellow night where Bruce drank, hugged friends, danced and basked in the glory. Text and photographs by Adam Lehrer

Kembra Pfahler's Fuck Island

Opening night of Kembra Pfahler's solo exhibition Fuck Island which was on view until October 14 at Participant Inc. in New York. Fuck Island is a protest anthem, love song, and manifesto written for her band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. As Pfahler describes this song-as-exhibtion: “It’s the first annual Karen Black cock festival. But it’s really more like a happy funeral. We are celebrating the death of the patriarch, and you are all party to this secret.” photograph by Walter Wlodarczyk

Giverny

The Hole gallery in New York presents the exhibition Giverny, a collaboration between E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler. The artists created photographic works in the famous French gardens built and immortalized in paint by Claude Monet, and will be exhibiting them for the first time here on the Bowery. Playboy.com has generously funded this massive exhibition, for the duration of which the Hole will be transformed into a living, breathing garden—with a lily-padded pond traversed by Monet’s signature green Japanese arched bridge, and scattered with the indigenous plants he is famous for painting. The walls of the exhibition will be printed with the almost claustrophobically green willow trees that surround this historic French site, and your first step into the gallery will be onto grass. Giverny will be on view until April 24 at the Hole Gallery.

You Killed Me First

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Nightmarish scenarios of violence, dramatic states of mind, and perverse sexual abysses – the films of the Cinema of Transgression that were consciously aimed at shock, provocation, and confrontation, bear witness to an extraordinary radicality. In the 1980s a group of filmmakers from the Lower East Side in New York went on a collision course with the conventions of American society. Transcending all moral or aesthetic boundaries, the low budget films reveal social hardship met with sociopolitical indifference. Sometimes shot with stolen camera equipment, the films contain strident analyses of life in the Lower East Side defined by criminality, brutality, drugs, AIDS, sex, and excess. On view at the  KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, until April 9, is the first exhibition on the Cinema of Transgression.