"And with a soft kiss I bid my adieu to Casa Voyageurs and Casablanca, speeding galliantly towards the Atlas Forrest and the ancient Medina of Fes (Fez) with the Brass Tears of Ted Curson in my ear, seat 5f, compartment 1, express train 119. Enshallah."
Text by Dustin Lynn
The Kunstverein Hannover and the Sprengel Museum Hannover present one of the most comprehensive surveys of the work by the concept artist Timm Ulrichs (born 1940). Timm Ulrichs’ oeuvre not only has an undisputed art historical importance, but has also gained a new relevance against the backdrop of contemporary art production. This joint exhibition project is thus not only occasioned by Timm Ulrichs’ 70th birthday and five decades of artistic activities in Hannover, but also by the significance of his work, which is still pertinent in the context of recent contemporary art through the increased recourse to conceptual paradigms. The double exhibition encompasses his early works from the nineteen sixties to recent productions that have been developed especially for this exhibition. November 28, 2010-February 13, 2011 Opening Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 5 pm at the Sprengel Museum Hannover at 7 pm at the Kunstverein Hannover. (SITE)
Ulla von Brandenburg, 'Geister Ghosts,' Image Courtesy of Chisenhale Gallery/ Studio Voltaire
Ulla von Brandenburg's artworks are within the penumbra of tableau vivant, or 'living picture,' a nineteenth century mode of image making that includes costumes, elaborate lighting, and the immutable stillness of one or more actors. Brandenburg was born in Germany in 1978, but now lives and creates in Paris. "Working with drawing, painting, textiles, film and installation von Brandenburg investigates historical socio-cultural practices including the occult, magic, early psychoanalysis and modernist theatre..." Her works are now on display at the London Art Fair - through the 23rd. www.londonartfair.co/uk
Robert Mapplethorpe, White Gauze, 1984
The Scissor Sisters curate an exhibition of the late Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs at the Alison Jacques Gallery in London. (LINK)
"[Self taught artist] Jorge Santos was born in 1959, and spent his childhood in Luanda, Angola on the coast of Africa. In 1975, Angola exploded in the violent political turmoil of decolonization forcing Santos' family to flee the country. At the formative age of 16, Santos found himself thrust into the equally turbulent and unknown culture of Lisbon, Portugal as that country slid into its own revolution. The national struggle paralleled Santos' own personal one and fueled his passion for drawing. At this early stage, pencil drawing, the most simple and direct form of expression, perfectly suited his complicated and dramatic images and expressed his unique vision." The George Billis Gallery will be presenting works by Jorge Santos at the 2011 Los Angeles Art Show which starts today and ends on January 23rd.
Presented in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, this will be the first solo exhibition in New York by Mexican tattoo artist Dr. Lakra (b. 1972, Mexico). For this exhibition, Lakra will create a site-specific wall drawing spanning 360 degrees of the gallery, shown alongside works on paper and selections from the artist’s collections of found objects. In these works, Lakra uses drawing as the most immediate artistic impulse to invoke fundamental human urges like sex and violence. Using a range of source material, from anatomy textbooks to magazine pin-ups and comic strips, Lakra looks to Mexican and international art historical traditions, as well as the contemporary iconography of tattoo art and borrows a rich sense of satire from his early interest in cartooning. Creating a transformative visual overload, Lakra merges representation with an invented universe, as works transcend categorization and challenge social norms. Dr. Lakra is on view from February 25 – April 24, 2011 at the Drawing Center in NYC.
Laurel Nakadate is known for her works in video, photography, and feature-length film. This is Nakadate's first large-scale museum exhibition and will feature works made over the last ten years in all three media, including her early video works, in which she was invited into the homes of anonymous men to dance, pose, or even play dead in their kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms. Laurel Nakadate: Only the Lonely is on view January 23, 2011 - August 8, 2011 at the Moma P.S. 1.
Painted in 1883 by French artist Alexandre Cabanel, the Birth of Venus was immediately purchased by Napolean III. The original painting is now hanging in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris; a small version is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City
Iannis Xenakis, 'Philips Pavilion,' 1958 postcard 4 x 6 in. Iannis Xenakis Archives, Bibliothéque nationale de France, Paris
Now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, this exhibition features the role of drawing in the work of Iannis Xenakis, a major 20th-century figure who brought together architecture, music, and advanced mathematics. A contemporary of fellow avant-garde composers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and John Cage, Xenakis also created revolutionary designs while working with modern architecture pioneer Le Corbusier. Many of Xenakis's innovations in music and architecture were realized first on paper, resulting in hundreds of striking graphic documents that exemplify how the drawing process was used as a means of "thinking through the hand." The exhibition, the first in North America dedicated to Xenakis's original works on paper produced between 1953 and 1984, includes more than 60 rarely seen musical scores, architectural drawings, conceptual renderings, and samplings of his innovative graphic notation. Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary is on view at the MOCA through Feb 4th, 2011.
Nick Veasy "The Finger"
In a "world obsessed with image," UK based artist Nick Veasy is on a peregrination to find the beauty so rumored to be only "skin deep." In a mysterious, fortified radiation safe structure called "the black box" is where Veasy creates most of his X-Ray images. The above fuck you image entitled "The Finger" and other works by Veasy will be on display at the the 11th Annual Los Angeles Art Show that runs from Jan. 19th to the 23rd. www.nickveasy.com
"747" January 5, 1973 Los Angeles, California, at about 8am at a beach near the Los Angeles International Airport, I fired several shots with a pistol at a Boeing 747.
In 1971, during one of his most famous pieces, Chris Burden had his assistant shoot him in the arm from a distance of 5 meters with a riffle. “At 7:45 P.M. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” His life is seemingly an extreme case of Dadaist impulses and an insatiable thirst for danger; as well as the warm hard-on milking of the brain for adrenaline. Burden currently lives and works in Los Angeles. You can find a book, an overview, of his works, here.
53 Art Museum, a new avant-garde contemporary art institution located in Guangzhou China will present an exhibition of three cutting-edge artists, Feng Feng, Qin Jin and Liu Qingyuan. Curated and sponsored by the prominent Asian Art Magazines Art Gallery Magazine / Gallery Sights. On view at the 2011 LA Art Show - Jan 19-23.
Adolf Ziegler 'The Four Elements: Fire, Water and Earth, Air' before 1937
The above painting is one of the works on display at the Guggenheim NY that explores artworks from France, Italy, and Germany between World War I and II. Today is the last day of the exhibit. Adolf Ziegler's The Four Elements was hung in Adolf Hitler's apartment in Munich. To Hitler the painting exemplified his ideal of what art should be: "realist, idealizing, and classical." Hitler despised modernism. The artist Ziegler was hired by Hitler to head the The Reich's "Chamber of Visual Arts." Its chief responsibility was to absquatulate all modernist artworks from German museums. Ziegler, who who was already a member of the Nazi party, met Hitler in the early 1920s. Ziegler became Hitler's "artistic advisor" in 1925. Hitler commissioned Ziegler to paint a portrait of his niece, Geli Raubal, who committed suicide with a single gunshot wound to her lung, after an apparent fight with her uncle, in the same Munich apartment; she was 25. Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 is a fascinating look at an artistic movement in Europe that reverted, with almost wishful thinking, to more idealized forms after one the most brutal, violent wars in human history. Click here for more info.
MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt/Main is showing how fashion changes our view of the world. In the 1990s, the fashion scene fundamentally reinvented specifically the medium of photography. That decade gave rise to a new generation for whom personal identity, individualism and a self-defined style were of crucial importance. Back then, the joie de vivre of the generation of 20-30 year-old creative minds thrived on music, subculture, intimacy and fashion. A new notion of corporeality was being celebrated in the major capitals of the world, such as London, New York, Tokyo, Berlin and Paris. The protagonists of this era sought to distinguish themselves from the established art and fashion scenes, and develop an alternative, lived counter-culture. They felt that the overly artificial images of prêt-à-porter, haute couture and glossy fashion magazines needed to be overcome and replaced with “real life” pictures instead Youth-Culture. They thus collectively dismissed the notion of the beautiful, and tried to elide gender differences and other social conventions. Catch the last few days of this show - more info here.
The second in a series of Tower exhibitions focusing on contemporary art and its roots offers a rare look at the black-on-black paintings that Rothko made in 1964 in connection with his work on a chapel for the Menil Collection in Houston. A recording of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel (1971), the haunting music originally composed for that space, accompanies the exhibition in the spacious East Building Tower Gallery. In the Tower: Mark Rothko closes on January 9th at the National Gallery of Art in Washinton. www.nga.org
Currently in New York for the Rock n' Roll Circus at Lincoln Center. Monday was the first night of this spectacular two day event that includes music, food, ponies and tattoos. It is quite a circus. Tonight, the weirdness ensues, with these Pas Un Autre highlights to look forward to: lo-fi wunderkind Ariel Pink headlines and the amazing Minka Sicklinger is tattooing a specific set of uniquely designed flash for $30. Just like the good old days. www.rocknrollcircusparty.com
Adarsha Benjamin 'Electric Tickle Machine in Cony Island' © 2010
Today is the first day of the Rock n' Roll Circus at Lincoln Center. Exhibiting in the VIP lounge are new polaroid photographs by Adarsha Benjamin, who is also organizing the event which includes two full days of music. See previous post for more info.
"Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures focuses on the artist's cinematic portraits and non-narrative, silent, and black-and-white films from the mid-1960s. Warhol's Screen Tests reveal his lifelong fascination with the cult of celebrity, comprising a visual almanac of the 1960s downtown avant-garde scene. Included in the exhibition are such Warhol "Superstars" as Edie Sedgwick, Nico, and Baby Jane Holzer; poet Allen Ginsberg; musician Lou Reed; actor Dennis Hopper; author Susan Sontag; and collector Ethel Scull, among others. Other early films included in the exhibition are Eat (1963) and Kiss (1963–64). Twelve Screen Tests in this exhibition are projected on the gallery walls at large scale and within frames, some measuring seven feet high and nearly nine feet wide, while Kiss is shown at the rear of the gallery in a 50-seat movie theater created for the exhibition. Warhol's film Empire (1964) will be shown in this theater every other Friday starting January 7, for the duration of the exhibition. Sleep (1963), in its entirety, will be shown in this theater on Wednesday, February 2, and Wednesday, March 2." www.moma.org
I'm sitting at JFK airport waiting for a puddle jumper to Burlington, Vermont. Its new year's day. The great year of the Rabbit has begun. In the Vietnamese zodiac, the cat takes the place of the rabbit. I find it incredibly fascinating the transmutation of animal spirits to interpret our human personalities and the age in which we live. Its as if we live vicariously through their mystery, whilst captivated by their obliviousness to their own power and magic. As we enter the year of the Rabbit I think of one the greatest personalities of the 20th century: Pablo Picasso; and his painting entitled Cat Devouring a Bird and a photograph of him holding his pet owl. Pablo Picasso was born in the year of the Snake. That says a lot. Or does it? I believe that the mystical powers of animals to represent cycles, years, epochs and their cosmic associations is more real than we imagine. If in the Chinese Zodiac the Rabbit is interpreted as agile, versatile, abundant, artistic, and compassionate than why can't we hope that in fact our lives in the the new year will be the same. The motto for the year of the Rabbit is "I Retreat." Hard to do in an airport with thousands of frantic, confused, wanderlust travelers. In the Chinese Zodiac each animal has a ruling hour of the day. The rabbit's ruling hours are between 5 and 7 a.m. Sunrise. Its currently half past 6 in the morning Eastern time. Today we are all Rabbits in one strange momentary paroxysm, in the inexorable gravity, the great miasma, always being pulled closer and farther away.
Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre