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Homage to Yves Klein
Through 11 paintings, 9 of which have been created for the show, Takashi Murakami juxtaposes his work directly with Klein’s in an new exhibition presented by Perrotin Gallery in Paris, entitled Takashi Murakami: Homage to Yves Klein, on view until July 2012.
ED WOOD'S SLEAZE PAPERBACKS
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"LET ME DIE IN DRAG!" Ed Wood, cinema auteur of the ultimate b-grade weird in the Hollywood miasma of sleaze and degradation, best known for his films Plan 9 from Outer Space or Glen Or Glenda, was also a writer of dirty books. Next week in New York a collection of Wood's rare X-rated fiction will be on display in New York at the Boo-Hooray gallery in New York City. The antiquarian mystique surrounding Edward Davis Wood Jr.’s career as an author of pornographic pulp fiction is legend. He wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, books were published and re-published under different titles, and occasionally under different author names. Multiple authors would share the same pseudonym, and the companies that published the titles weren’t the kind of operations that kept any kind of records, nor paid royalties, nor really existed in the manner that most are to expect of book publishers. His descent into alcoholism and poverty was mirrored by the publishers that employed him. Towards the end of his life he wrote pornography with decreasing amounts of the strange flourishes of his eccentric personality. He died in 1978 of an alcohol-induced heart attack. His friends say the porn killed him. Ed Wood's Sleaze Paperbacks will be on view at the Boo-Hooray Gallery in NYC from November 2 to December 1.
Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties
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How did American artists represent the Jazz Age? The exhibition Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties at the Brooklyn Museum brings together for the first time the work of sixty-eight painters, sculptors, and photographers who explored a new mode of modern realism in the years bounded by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression. Throughout the 1920s, artists created images of liberated modern bodies and the changing urban-industrial environment with an eye toward ideal form and ordered clarity—qualities seemingly at odds with a riotous decade best remembered for its flappers and Fords. Artists took as their subjects uninhibited nudes and close-up portraits that celebrated sexual freedom and visual intimacy, as if in defiance of the restrictive routines of automated labor and the stresses of modern urban life. Reserving judgment on the ultimate effects of machine culture on the individual, they distilled cities and factories into pristine geometric compositions that appear silent and uninhabited. American artists of the Jazz Age struggled to express the experience of a dramatically remade modern world, demonstrating their faith in the potentiality of youth and in the sustaining value of beauty. Youth and Beauty will present 140 works by artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Demuth, Aaron Douglas, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Luigi Lucioni, Gerald Murphy, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston. Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties is on view until January 29, 2012 at the Brooklyn Museum.
Watch Alexander McQueen's Short Film for the Autumn/Winter 2011 Scarf Collection
Alexander McQueen presents a short film created by Paris-based director/photographer Babette Pauthier, featuring Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 2011 seasonal scarf collection. Visit the Alexander McQueen online Scarf Boutique.
Mummy, I’m scarrred!
Japan electro-pop sensation Trippple Nippple will perform
Tokyo – Art Gig 2 – with the theme Mummy, I'm Scarrred, by curator Shai Ohayon: "The ghosts themed art happening will be presented at an abandoned hospital in Hatsudai, Shibuya ward, Tokyo. The hospital, which has been abandoned now for a few years, is still intact with the original furniture, equipment and fixtures and is usually let to film crews to shoot on location. We are intending to use the basement of the hospital which consists of a large furnished room in the center of the basement for performances, while the interconnected rundown rooms and corridors will be used as exhibition spaces. We intend for the exhibition rooms and the corridors to be left pitch-black and visitors will be instructed to bring torches (flashlights) to negotiate through the space. The venue is truly creepy and surreal. We aim to present some 15 local and international artists along with music and performance art pieces and transform the entire venue into an improvised art gallery. Artworks will include pieces of many disciplines and site-specific installations, using the walls, the hospital beds, old equipment, decaying tatami rooms, old kitchen and morgue. Artists are asked to present works that reflect their practice and that deals directly with their notion or understanding of the theme. Attendance to the event is free-of-charge to the public and visitors will be encouraged to explore the space, engage with the artworks and to enjoy the array of performances that will be featured as part of the event. As we did in the last event, we will have at the end of the night also a raffle with gifts from a variety of art and culture related organisations and businesses. In addition, with the proximity of the event to Halloween we will also host a costume competition in collaboration with Impossible Project." On view this Sunday, October 30. www.artgigtokyo.com
MURDER AND MANSLAUGHTER: AN EXHIBITION ABOUT LIFE
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The commandment “Thou shalt not kill” is a value deeply rooted in our culture. And yet murder and manslaughter are committed every day, everywhere in the world. Whether in the media, in films or in literature, we are continually confronted with descriptions of capital crimes, real or invented, which bring us face to face with taboo or extreme areas of human behavior. On the one hand, these stories satisfy a widespread morbid curiosity and craving for sensation. On the other, they encourage discussion within society about how to deal with murderers and other killers, and about the causes of the crime. On view now at the Historisches Museum Bern, an exhibition entitled Murder and Manslaughter. An Exhibition About Life– 15 separate display areas, you can learn more about the subject of murder and manslaughter: the topics range from the question of the value of human life via murderous gods, war, terrorism, killing sprees, and spectacular murders and murderers, to detection and the problems of punishment and prevention. Exhibits from the Historisches Museum Bern and from the collections of a number of very different institutions at home and abroad have been combined with photographs, excerpts from documentary and feature films, texts, audios, sounds and music, to encourage reflection. The exhibition “Murder and Manslaughter” illuminates the phenomenon of violent crime in its different dimensions, in history and today. The subtitle: “An Exhibition about Life” sets the tone: “Murder and Manslaughter” is life-affirming. In the face of testimony from the past and the present, you will become more aware of the value of life.
Glenn Ligon: AMERICA
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Now on view at the LACMA in Los Angeles – Glenn Ligon: AMERICA is the first mid-career retrospective of Ligon’s work in the United States. The exhibition includes unknown early material and the reconstruction of seminal bodies of work such as the Door paintings, the coal dust Stranger canvases and the Coloring series. Ligon was born in the Bronx in 1960 and continues to live and work in New York. He has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across a body of work that builds on the legacies of modern painting and more recent conceptual art, working in a variety of media, including painting, neon, installation, video and print. In the late 80s and early 90s, Ligon became known for work that explores race, sexuality, representation and language. On view until January 22, 2012.
LOCK, STOCK, AND, TEARDROPS
DUVE Berlin is presents a two-person exhibition premiering new artworks by artists ALI KEPENEK and MAX SNOW. For this exhibition, entitled, Lock, Stock & Teardrops Kepenek and Snow have created work that calls an attention to the theme of pain, a theme so universal yet greatly personal. A constant duality exists in Ali Kepenek and Max Snow’s recent work of photography, installation, sculpture and collage. Under the theme of pain, both artists address their life experiences from physical existence, through installation and sculpture, as well as the internal and emotional realm, as depicted in their portrait photographs and collages. On view at Duve Berlin Gallery from October 29 to December 10.
The Artistic Vision of Shen Wei
On view tonight in Reggio Emilia, Italy, is a very special site specific dance performance by choreographer Shen Wei, held in the galleries of the Collezione Maramotti – a beautiful collection of art founded by the by the family of the Max Mara fashion house. Shen Wei, master of the art of total dance, miraculously balanced between East and West, is an accomplished choreographer, director, dancer, painter, photographer and artistic director of Shen Wei Dance Arts, one of the most interesting groups in the world of dance. In Shen Wei's latest work, developed specifically for the Collezione Maramotti, Shen Wei presents (21 and 23 October) a new, site-specific creation, an original choreographed piece inspired by works in the permanent collection. In this new piece, the conventional perspective of the gallery visitor is redirected, spectators instead become witnesses and participants in a dialogue that feeds off the exchange of energies between the dancers and the works. Shen Wei's intention is thus to reveal a different framework that might enable visitors to consider works of contemporary art from a new and personal point of view.
Erotic Da Vinci
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Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian renaissance polymath, genius, is widely reported to be gay, but his portraits of the women in his lifetime have the subtly sexualized charge of a man infatuated. If you stare closely Da Vinci's portrait of Cecilia Gallerani stroking an ermine, as part of series painted in the Court of Milan, is suggestive in and of its hinting of the ermine's phallic symbolism, but also the thematic ambiguous grin of the girl herself. ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan,’ now on view at the National Gallery in London, is the most complete display of Leonardo’s rare surviving paintings ever held. This unprecedented exhibition – the first of its kind anywhere in the world. On view from November 9 to February 5.
Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch: ANY EVER
Under the title Any Ever the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is presenting the first major exhibition in France by American artists Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch. For over five years now the duo's videos, installations and sculptures have been blowing consumer culture and intergenerational relations up to absurd proportions. Any Ever will be on view until January 8, 2012.
It's a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards
S.M.A.K. presents the first Belgian retrospective by the filmmaker and artist Johan Grimonprez, entitledIt's a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards: On Zapping, Close encounters, and the Commercial Break. In the course of several sections, Grimonprez brings his works face to face with contemporary and historical counterparts, some taken from the Internet. He enters into dialogue with the artists Roy Villevoye and Jan Dietvorst and also with other makers of film and television including Adam Curtis, Brian Springer, the Yes Men, Dr. John Mack and Adbusters. His constantly expanding ‘vlogging installation’ runs through the exhibition like a referential thread and, as a sort of artistic sketchbook, it offers an insight into the way Grimonprez broaches new topics and develops visual associations. On view at S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in Ghent, Belgium until January 29, 2012.
GEORGE CONDO: Mental States
Since his arrival on New York’s East Village art scene in the early 1980s, George Condo has developed a unique and provocative style of painting. But, for all its outlandish humour and outrageousness, his work is deeply engaged withthe memory of European and American traditions of painting. His ‘imaginary portraits’ conjure varied mental states with a mixture of comic absurdity and heart-rending pathos, and his larger abstract paintings re-imagine the work of modern Masters. On view now at the Southbank Center in London, a major retrospective, entitled George Condo: Mental States, offers a comprehensive survey of three decades of Condo’s art.
De Kooning at the MOMA
Willem de Kooning retrospective on view at the MOMA until January 9.
Haute Culture
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General Idea was founded in Toronto in 1969 by Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson. The collective interrogated media image culture through now legendary projects like File magazine, as well as paintings, installations, sculptures, mail art, photographs, videos, ephemera, TV programs and even a beauty pageant. The group’s transgressive concepts and provocative imagery challenged social power structures and traditional modes of artistic creation in ever-shifting ways, until Partz and Zontal’s untimely deaths from AIDS-related causes in 1994. Curated by Paris-based independent curator Frédéric Bonnet, Haute Culture: General Ideais the first comprehensive retrospective devoted to the collective. The exhibition is organized around five themes, each central to the trio’s production: “the artist, glamour and the creative process”; “mass culture”; “architects/archaeologists”; “sex and reality”; and “AIDS." Haute Culture: General Idea is on view until January 1 at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
The Kiss At Turner
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Auguste Rodin’s life-size marble sculpture The Kiss (1901-04) will be installed at the Sunley Gallery at Turner Contemporary. On loan from the Tate collection and one of the most iconic images of sexual love, The Kiss was voted the nation’s favorite work of art in a 2003 poll. The embracing couple come from a true thirteenth century story of forbidden love, which was immortalized in Dante’s Inferno and by many artists since. The couple are the adulterous lovers Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, who were slain by Francesca’s outraged husband. They appear in Dante’s Inferno, which describes how their passion grew as they read the story of Lancelot and Guinevere together. At the time, the perceived eroticism of Rodin’s sculpture was controversial leading to instances where the work was removed from public view.
New Paintings by Lisa Yuskavage
Over the past two decades, Lisa Yuskavage has developed her own genre of the female nude: lavish, erotic, cartoonish, vulgar, angelic young women cast within fantastical landscapes or dramatically lit interiors. They appear to occupy their own realm while narcissistically contemplating themselves and their bodies. Rich, atmospheric skies frequently augment the psychologically-charged mood, further adding to the impression of theatricality and creative possibility. On view now, David Zwirner gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Lisa Yuskavage, at the gallery’s 519 West 19th Street space. This will be the artist’s third solo show since her first exhibition at the gallery in 2006. On view until November 5th.
Rock n' Roll Photography
Rock & Roll music provided the soundtrack to American culture and shifting social dynamics in the late 20th century. While the genre has undergone many shifts since its origination mid-century, Rock & Roll and its outgrowths have continued to define and shape the social relations and culture of future generations. Drawn from the largest private collection of photographs of rock musicians in the United States, Backstage Pass: Rock & Roll Photography now on view at the Currin Museum of Art in New Hampshire, captures the intimate relationship between photographer and musician. Featuring 175 photographs—many rarely seen by the public—this exhibition provides a portal into the musical and cultural history of Rock & Roll, from its development in the 1950s to its influence on the sounds and styles of future generations. Photographs will be on view of artists as disparate as Kurt Cobain to Chet Baker. Backstage Pass: Rock & Roll Photography will be on view until January 7, 2012.
The Art of Playboy
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