Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island Charts Coco Fusco's Radical Path of Social Reckoning @ KW Institute in Berlin

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is the first major retrospective of Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco (b. 1960, US). For more than three decades, she has been a key voice in discourses on racial representation, feminism, postcolonial theory, and institutional critique. The exhibition seeks to trace the profound influence that Fusco’s work has had on contemporary art discourses in the Americas and Europe. To do so, it features a broad selection of the artist’s videos, photography, texts, installations, and live performances from the 1990s to the present day.

With her multidisciplinary practice, Fusco explores the ways that intercultural dynamics affect the construction of the self and ideas about cultural otherness. Her work is informed by multicultural and postcolonial discourses as well as feminist and psychoanalytic theories. Her investigation of intercultural dynamics has led her to develop art projects about ethnographic displays, animal psychology, sex tourism in the Caribbean, labor conditions in free trade zones, suppressed colonial records of Indigenous struggles, and the military interrogation techniques used in the war on terror. Her more recent work focuses on the relationship between poetry and revolutionary politics in Cuba.
The exhibition is loosely structured along these various interconnected themes. As such, Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island shows the breadth of Fusco’s artistic practice that is highly relevant considering current political and cultural debates in Germany and beyond.

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is on view through January 24th, 2024, at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin at Auguststraße 69, 10117 Berlin, Germany

Mine's On The 45: A Guide For Masturbation & Sex To Get You Through The Quarantine →

Tom Sachs, Knoll Turntable
1999
duct tape, phone books, steel
26 x 49 x 27 inches

Masturbating is a lot like writing a song. I guess sex is in general, but you can’t compose a complete sexual event with another person if you don’t know how to build the structure on your own. 

You want to start out with a strong open. You don’t want to just jump into the chorus with all instruments fired up in full swing. You want to find something minimal and seductive to whet the palette—like the opening bassoon in Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” It’s a singular, sumptuous gesture that drips of sex. Be sure to slowly mine that gesture for all it’s worth, check the reaction, and then slowly add each layer of stimulation in an intuitive sort of fashion—teasing in a hook from time to time and then easing back into the groove. Click here to read more.

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles Presents Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019

The first comprehensive survey in the United States of drawings and works on paper by the Los Angeles–based artist Paul McCarthy (b. 1945, Salt Lake City), Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019, reveals a rarely examined aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. Produced in thematic cycles, McCarthy’s drawings share the same visual language as the artist’s sculptural and performance works, addressing themes of violence, humor, death, sex, and politics, and featuring extensive art historical and pop-cultural references. By presenting his expansive career of more than five decades through the focused lens of drawing, the exhibition offers a greater understanding of this influential artist and social commentator.

Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019 features 600 works on paper selected from McCarthy’s archive. The works incorporate and utilize a variety of mediums, including charcoal, graphite, ink, marker, and collage, as well as more unorthodox materials such as ketchup and peanut butter. A consummate and accomplished draftsperson, McCarthy approaches his daily drawing practice as a way of thinking—a blueprint for projects and a tool to flesh out complex ideas. Since the 1970s, McCarthy has also incorporated drawing into his performances, implementing it as part of an action and often drawing in character. In recent years, this practice of drawing in character has become central to his large-scale video performance projects, such as WS White Snow (2012–13), CSSC Coach Stage Stage Coach (2017), and NV Night Vater (2019–). In a process McCarthy terms “Life Drawing, Drawing Sessions” the artist and his actors produce drawings in costume among the props and simulacrum of his film sets. These works bring together the materials and crude gestures that have been present in the artist’s work for the greater part of his career.

Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019 will be on view throughout May 10, 2020 at The Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Homeward Bound Group Show @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

Homeward Bound is a domestic setting where all the skeletons are let out of the closet and allowed to play on the furniture, to stomp each other’s grapes. With the eye of noted designer Oliver M. Furth, the gallery space has been transformed into a literal home, complete with a living room, dining room, bedroom, bathroom, beyond. Karon Davis’s Bianca sits plaintively by a front room window, drinking, smoking, waiting for a lover who will never return. Bjarne Melgaard cross-dresses in the skins of other species as if he was never quite comfortable in his own, while Lisa Anne Auerbach is very comfortable lounging around the house, reading bondage magazines in her underwear. Chris Burden’s first wife informs him in a letter that not only won’t she crucify him to their VW Bug, but that the suggestion has destroyed her relationship with the vehicle. Gold-leafed snails carry their mobile homes to the apexes of an organic landscape—the tips of Ruben Verdu’s nose and erect phallus—and both artist and travelers achieve climax simultaneously. Within the walls of this house, faces become chairs, vaginas become toothy faces, jello moulds become temples and orifices, music becomes sex itself. Homeward Bound will be on view until December 9th at Nicodim Gallery, 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2 Los Angeles

Cult Chinese Photographer Ren Hang Debuts His New Series, Athens Love, This Week In New York

“Athens Love” consists of snapshots Ren Hang took in Athens and other parts of Attica, Greece, during an artist residency in April, 2015. The images evoke faded memories of escapades with friends and lovers against the saturated backdrop of the Mediterranean. An incandescent face rises from a tumble of long black hair, bordered by a blue sky and sea; protruding genitals cheekily reflect the surrounding natural landscape. Linking these images is a narrative Ren Hang subtly pursues in all his work, in which man and nature each react to the other’s magic. Ren Hang will be signing copies of monograph, Athens Love, at New York’s Dashwood Books on March 25, 2016 with an exhibition at Klein Sun Gallery  in New York from 24 March 2016 to April 30, 2016. Click here to read Autre's short interview with the photographer. 

Sistaaz of the Castle Explores Transgender Sex Workers That Roam The Streets of Cape Town, South Africa

Photographer Jan Hoek and fashion designer Duran Lantink present Sistaaz of the Castle, a project about the style and fashion of transgender sex workers in Cape Town, South Africa. Together they created a series of photographs and a fashion collection around their fashionable appearances, and their ability to make the most exuberant creations of everything they find. The project will be shown during FashionWeek Amsterdam and an exhibition at Foam Photography Museum Amsterdam. The local sex workers’ organization, S.W.E.A.T., gave Jan and Duran the opportunity to meet and collaborate with their transgender support group Sistaazhood. For this project, Jan and Duran zoom in on six girls from the community: Coco (25), Cleopatra (23) Sulaiga (30), Gabby (29) Flavinia (33) and Joan Collins (57). Most of the girls are homeless, living under a bridge beside the castle of Cape Town. Jan Hoek made photographs of them, their lives and their outfits. The documentary images serve as a lookbook for the collection of Duran Lantink. The designer was inspired by the creative ability of the girls to produce beautiful creations from found garments. He recognized a similarity to his own process, using different recycling methods and collage techniques. Along with the creations, the artists were interested in how the girls would like to look if they had unlimited possibilities. One of the girls would like to work in a luxurious Victorian brothel. The 57-year-old Joan Collins dreams of a wedding dress and a third wants to become Miss Africa. All these fantasies are translated into a dream-couture capsule collection by Duran, which is also photographed by Jan. In addition to the fashion show and exhibition, a printed publication (APE) will be published and distributed worldwide in March 2016. Eventually, Jan and Duran will return to South Africa to present the Sistaaz of the Castle project on its original site. Usually, transgender sex workers are presented as perpetrator or victim in the South African media. The girls of Sistaazhood expressed their wish to be seen positively in the news. The collection will be presented during FashionWeek Amsterdam at the Gashouder on January 16 at 7p.m.. The Foam exhibition will be on view until January 20.

When Good Sex Goes Bad: Audra Wist Writes About Sex With No Strings Attached and The Perils Therein →

My sexual freedom had turned into burgeoning co-dependency and like a shark sniffing out blood in the water, my eyes went white and I could no longer see the world as I once had. I fiended for that good stuff and locked myself away gnawing at the fence of sexual satisfaction. I started getting attached, paranoid, neurotic. This was a real problem for me. I am interested in sex, I write about sex, I think about sex, I like sex very much. I don’t even have to question it—I’m just there, fucking. And therein lied the problem: reckless, automatic over-investment. By diving head first into something that was supposed to be on particular terms, did I lose the ability to create the framework in the first place? Click here to read more. 

Sophie Calle Installs Safes For Storing Lovers' Secrets At Fraenkel Gallery In San Francisco

"Find a couple. Have each of them tell me a secret. Install two safes in their home. Lock each secret up in its own safe. Keep the codes to myself. The lovers will have to live with the other’s secret close at hand but out of reach." Fraenkel Gallery presents an exhibition of work by Sophie Calle. Calle uses photography, text, and video to pursue her sociological and autobiographical investigations. Her exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery focuses on four bodies of work in which the artist delves into the nature of love, violence, secrets, and death. Among the works on view will be Secrets—a pair of working safes for storing a couple’s secrets, accompanied by a plaque engraved with the above text and the artist’s contract stipulating how these mysteries will remain secured. Writing is often integral to Calle’s work, as in her 2014 triptych Suicide (also on view), in which photographs of dark ripples on the surface of black water are accompanied by text sandblasted on glass: “They say the police can distinguish between people who drown themselves for love and those who drown themselves for money…” Featured in this exhibition will be two series incorporating portraits from ‘ready-made’ sources and addressing themes of privacy and violence. Calle’s Cash Machine photographs are made from ATM video surveillance footage, and each work is exhibited as a sequence of two to eleven images. Collateral Damage, Targets is a series comprised of images of petty criminals’ mugshots, which were used for police target practice. The exhibition will be on view until December 24, 2015 at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. photographs by Bradley Golden

In the Veil of Cashmere: Poet and Photographer Thomas Roma Takes Tender Portraits of A Secret Erotic Eden

Steven Kasher Gallery presents Thomas Roma: In the Vale of Cashmere. This exhibition of Roma’s most recent project consists of an intricate sequence of 75 black and white portraits and landscapes photographed in a secluded section of Prospect Park, a meeting place where black, Latino and other gay and bisexual men have long sought one another out to fulfill their wish for community and to satisfy sexual desire. This is Roma’s first major New York exhibition of new photographs since his acclaimed solo exhibition Come Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art in 1996. The book In the Vale of Cashmere will be published by powerHouse Books in conjunction with the exhibition. Thomas Roma: In the Vale of Cashmere will be on view starting today and running until December 19, 2015 at Steven Kasher Gallery, 515 W. 26th St., New York, NY

Read Audra Wist's Essay On the Demystification Of Sexual Urges And Why Men Need To Be Touched More →

“I love to be caressed,” he said to me, my hand on his chest. Color me impressed. As I get older, I continually notice the need for men to be touched. I’ve been a long time proponent of strip clubs, sex work, and so forth – physical sites designed for and marketed to men for sexual pleasure – even before I could really justify it legally or intellectually. I always had a hunch that something was going on there that was good for women and for sex, and that the usual bad mouthing on the grounds that men were sniveling tit-obsessed cretons was ill considered and lacked any constructive thought about the potential of these venues for sexual progress. Click here to read the full essay. 

Creamed His Corn: Read Luke Goebel's Newest Stream Of Lascivious Consciousness In A Short Story About Desire, Fantasy And Wanting a Bigger Everything →

photograph by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

He was a “he,” which meant the dummie knew already that there was only two things in the world that mattered and he wasn’t either of them. Were, were! There was the online world of instagram photos and sexiness. Everything that was young or female and sexy or famous and rich and arching its back in a photo, which he wasn’t and then there was the physical world of problems, such as taking a shit and what was written on the wall, and having to go upstairs to take a shit because someone was already in the bathroom, which was the janitor, probably, and him being on campus, and him being in his office, and his being on campus, and him being a fuckhead professor, which you shouldn’t and couldn’t really even say as a fuckhead who was a professor. Fuckhead. click here to read the full story

Read Audra Wist's Disquisition On Voyeurism and the Erotic Thrill of Watching

Kohei Yoshiyuki from the "Park" series

Flipping my roles, cuckolding is a favorite. To have someone watch me fuck is an honor and a privilege yet enormously humiliating and/or exciting for them. I am enjoying myself thoroughly while you watch and pine. Click here to read the full essay. 

A Fatal Personality: An Interview With Artist Brian Kokoska On Knives, His Inspirations, and His Current Must See Show in Paris →

Brian Kokoska, who can often be found with a knife clutched between his teeth or with a devious, wide-grinned smile, is one of our favorite artists working today. His paintings almost look like they belong to the hand of a child in art class working out some kind of trauma caused by alien abduction, but when you look closer, there is unexplainable magic going on. Perhaps Kokoska’s paintings are mirrored reflections of our own demons, or the artist’s – who really knows or cares – but what you will find amongst his crude oil painted visages is a sense of primordial familiarity. Maybe these creatures are our friends, or maybe they are out to kill us. Click here to read our interview with the artist. 

Read Audra Wist's Sumptuous Masturbatorial Meditation on Facesitting →

I just masturbated to the thought of sitting on someone’s face. I figured whatever came to mind I’d write about. And really, what better way to begin writing about facesitting than right after getting off to the thought. What is it about the act? Just a few minutes ago before writing these words, I was lying in bed rubbing myself to the thought of my ass coming down gently on a particular face, me “triumphantly” above him, as he often remarks. The pressure and weight of my ass resting on his face, suffocating him temporarily and squeezing my thighs against his neck and head. I like the way he gasps for air as I release his face from the grip of my derriere. The image alone sets off a fantastic wank — a vision of ivory softness, large and overwhelming, looming above his face, which is soon to be smothered into erogenous bliss. Click here to read more.