Autre Magazine and Jeffrey Deitch Host A Dinner To Celebrate Frieze Week in Los Angeles at Ardor at The West Hollywood Edition

Last night we kicked off the LA art week with Jeffrey Deitch Gallery and friends at Ardor with a vegetable forward menu by world-renowned chef John Fraser before heading downstairs to the West Hollywood Edition’s signature club, Sunset. Guests included Sharon Stone, Kembra Pfahler, Mykki Blanco, Beck Hansen, Bibbe Hansen, Neville Wakefield, Jordan Wolfson, Ariana Papademetropoulos, Tony Kaye and artists from the groundbreaking group show At the Edge of the Sun, on view now at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery.

Read A Conversation Between Paul Reubens & Nadia Lee Cohen From Autre 15: Losing My Religion →

 

Autre Magazine, Vol. 2 Iss. 15 F/W 2022: Losing My Religion

 

Paul Reubens is one of the most brilliant comedic talents of our era. His character, Pee-wee Herman, a maniacal man child with a famous red bowtie, hypernasality, and a predilection for mischief, is a Saturday morning cartoon come to life. Invented on the stage of The Groundlings, Pee-wee Herman is equally iconic and archetypal as Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. Socially defective with the decency to wear a suit, both characters are rife with hilarious contradictions, and both characters are perfect representations of their respective zeitgeists. Whereas the Tramp was a silent and prophetic emblem of the forthcoming economic devastation of two global wars, Pee-wee may as well have been a louder-than-bombs manifestation of the late-capitalistic dreamscape of the 1980s. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (Tim Burton’s directorial debut) and later Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which aired on CBS and saw an average of ten million viewers per episode, was a fantasy of talking furniture in a supersaturated world that harkened back to 1950s diners and primetime dance competitions, a satirization of Post-War Americana as a frenzied pastiche. This pastiche was a siren call for rising artist and photographer Nadia Lee Cohen, who also trades in the currency of alter egos and the milieu of consumerist reverie through the lens of humor. Raised in the English countryside, a self-professed wild child, the technicolor stagecraft of Hollywood had an irresistible allure. Her solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, which was an unabashed sensation, included two large bodies of work from two sold out monographs published by IDEA Books. Women includes over 100 portraits of a diverse cast of female characters fictionalized by Cohen, at work and at play, all under the banner of Los Angeles’ disparate socio-economic milieu. Reminiscent of movie stills, the images are freeze frames in moments of action, repose, or seductive enchantment. In her most recent series,  HELLO, My Name Is, Nadia utilizes extensive prosthetics and makeup to embody a vast array of characters inspired by found corporate name tags—each character has an invented story, thoughts, dreams, and desires. It is a Hitchcockian character study of self-portraiture. Jean Baudrillard talked about this escape from the self in an age of simulation and hyperreality: "Never to be oneself, but never to be alienated: to enter from the outside into the form of the other." Both Paul Reubens and Nadia Lee Cohen take immense pleasure in this metamorphosis. Currently in production is a two-part HBO documentary on the life of Paul Reubens, directed by Matt Wolf (Spaceship Earth) and produced by the Safdie Brothers. In a time of shapeshifting realities and alternative facts, a time when we don’t even recognize the reflection in our mirrors, what can two masters of disguise teach us about who we really are? Read more.

Pussy Riot Presents Putin's Ashes @ Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles

photographs by Morgan Rindengan

On January 27, Pussy Riot brought its radical performance art to Jeffrey Deitch's Los Angeles gallery, inviting everyone to join their protest against the authoritarian leader of Russia who started the biggest war in Europe since World War II. This was the first presentation of Pussy Riot’s political performance art at a gallery in Los Angeles.

Putin's Ashes was initiated in August 2022 when Pussy Riot burned a 10 x 10 foot portrait of the Russian president, performed rituals, and cast spells aimed to chase Putin away. Twelve women participated in the performance. In order to join, women were required to experience acute hatred and resentment toward the Russian president. Most of the participants were either Ukrainian, Belarusian or Russian.

Pussy Riot's founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova bottled the ashes of the burnt portrait and incorporated them into her objects that were being presented alongside her short art film, Putin's Ashes, directed, edited, and scored by Tolokonnikova.

"While working with artifacts, bottling ashes and manufacturing the faux furry frames for the bottles, I used skills that I learned in the sweatshops of my penal colony. I was forced to sew police and army uniforms in a Russian jail. I turned what I learned in my labor camp against those who locked me up. Putin is a danger to the whole world and he has to be stopped immediately," says Tolokonnikova.

In 2012, Tolokonnikova was sentenced to two years imprisonment following an anti-Putin performance. She went through a hunger strike protesting savage prison conditions and ended up being sent far away to a Siberian penal colony, where she managed to maintain her artistic activity and with her prison punk band made toured around Siberian labor camps. Tolokonnikova published a book Read and riot: Pussy Riot's guide to activism in 2018.

Pussy Riot stands for gender fluidity, inclusivity, matriarchy, love, laughter, decentralization, anarchy and anti-authoritarianism.