In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945–1980

Gary Winogrand

The Getty presents 30 photographs from the Museum’s permanent collection made in Los Angeles between 1945 and 1980. Both iconic and relatively unknown works are featured by artists whose careers are defined by their association with the city, who may have lived in Los Angeles for a few brief but influential years, or whose visit inspired them to create memorable images. Works by Robert Cumming, Joe Deal, Judy Fiskin, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Heinecken, Anthony Hernandez, Man Ray, Edmund Teske, William Wegman, Garry Winogrand, Max Yavno and others are loosely grouped around the themes of experimentation, street photography, architectural depictions, and the film and entertainment industries. In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945–1980 will be on view from December 20 to May 6, 2012. 

[FIRST LOOK] POST x BLK DNM Perfume 11

A video by POST, an Ipad only arts and culture publication, for BLK DNM Perfume 11 which premiered at The Webster Miami for Art Basel; with sound design by Twin Shadow. "BLK DNM Perfume 11 molecules mixed with water - and in one scene, paint....The inspiration was a re-imagining of a birth of a nebula in an alternate universe, and then how planets, rocks, land, water and clouds - an atmosphere - may form in an alternative gravitational field.....It was important for us to use the actual perfume within the liquid mix so as to imbue the video with a special energy and integrity as an artwork."

MICHAËL BORREMANS: The Devil’s Dress

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David Zwirner gallery in New York presents an exhibition of new works by Michaël Borremans, The Devil’s Dress. Borremans’ drawings, paintings, and films present an evocative combination of solemn-looking characters, unusual close-ups, and unsettling still lifes. There is a theatrical dimension to his works, which are at once highly staged and ambiguous, just as his complex and open-ended scenes lend themselves to conflicting moods—simultaneously nostalgic, darkly comical, disturbing, and grotesque. His paintings display a concentrated dialogue with previous art historical epochs, however their unconventional compositions and curious narratives defy expectations and lend them an indefinable yet universal character. On view until  December 17, 2011 - 525 West 19th Street.

Fuyuki Yamakawa at Big in Japan

Avant-garde khoomei singer and performance/installation artist Fuyuki Yamakawa at the Ksubi X Kirin presented Big In Japan events last month i. Yamakawa's performances use light bulbs, yogic breath, antiquated medical equipment, and modified musical instruments and involvesoutputting bodily functions (like his heartbeat, amplified with an electronic stethoscope) in synch with external sound and light so the space becomes an extension of his body.

You, Me, Something Else

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A piece entitled Strive To Set the Record Straight by artist James McLardy now on view at the exhibition You, Me, Something Else in Glasgow celebrating sculpture.

Warhol's Empire

In celebration of the opening of Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964–1977, the Art Institute of Chicago will project Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire—a single, eight-hour-long nighttime take of the Empire State Building—from the museum’s Bluhm Family Terrace across Millennium Park to the upper stories of the Aon Center. Warhol’s work thus sets the stage for the artists featured in Light Years who redrew the boundaries of both photography and contemporary art. On view December 9 through December 10.

I Like Pigs & Pigs Like Me

Lately, artist Miru Kim has been spending a lot of time with pigs for her project entitled The Pig That Therefore I Am. Pictured above, Miru Kim spent 104 hours, nude, behind glass with two hogs for Miami, Basel. Part live performance, and part photographic series, Kim writes in her artist statement about the project: "Both a pig and I carry our exteriorized memories on our cutaneous garment–scars, blemishes, wrinkles, and rashes that manifest markings of time, anguish of the soul, wounds of love and war. We all live at the same time, naked and not quite naked. Underneath our exterior coverings, whether they are silk, cotton or leather, we humans carry our own skin, just as pigs do. Born with a blank canvas enveloping us, we accumulate more and more brushstrokes of memories as years pass, on our garment that cannot be literally cast off until death."

John Baldessari, The First $100,000 I Ever Made

High Line Art, presented by Friends of the High Line, today unveiled The First $100,000 I Ever Made, a new work created by legendary artist John Baldessari for the 25-by-75 foot billboard next to the High Line on 10th Avenue at West 18th Street. This is the first of three works to be presented as part of a new series called HIGH LINE BILLBOARD. The First $100,000 I Ever Made will remain on view until Friday, December 30, 2011.

Liquide Vermeil

Liquid_Vermeil_da_end_gallery_CENDRINE_ROVINI

Cendrine Rovini’s exhibition, Liquide Vermeil, takes us into an emphatically feminine world where female images reign. First off the proverbial relationship between women and blood. A rich and intimate mystery which has the power to fascinate man but whose deepest meaning constantly eludes him. The artist presents her creatures as strangely beautiful women who play with and enjoy their own femininity to the point of intoxication. An overflow of blood become flowers, a flow of tears become hair, a face rain, horns erupt in the shape of delicate, wild plants. Liquide Vermeil is on view at the Da-End gallery in Paris from December 15 to February 15, 2012, 17 rue Guénégaud 75006.

Psycho

Die Stimmungsbombe, 2000. Courtesy Sammlung Falckenberg

At the end of this year, the Sammlung Falckenberg will bring together seemingly poetic-surrealist images by US painter Ena Swanser and subversive-enigmatic works by Finnish artist Robert Lucander who now lives in Berlin.  The exhibition’s title of Psycho is a reference to the eponymous horror classic by Alfred Hitchcock and calls to mind the disturbed nature of schizophrenics, psychopaths and other psychologically disturbed persons. Psycho is Greek for soul and the term referring to insanity is derived from the notion that a human’s spirit or soul can become ill; psychoanalysis, for example, is used to treat deep-rooted psychological traumata and behavioral disorders. Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho exposed, for example, the ugly face of unquestioning materialism but left the reader in doubt as to whether the gruesome scenes depicted in the novel emanate from the protagonist’s psychotic fantasies or whether he actually carries out these excessively violent acts. Colloquially, psycho is used to describe a mentally disturbed person who displays behavioral problems and a tendency towards aggressive conduct, thus having an unsettling and threatening effect on their environment. The use of this term leads one to expect a confrontation with art that takes non-conformism, insanity and thus the threatening and the sinister as its theme. This exhibition is on view at the Falckenberg Collection in Hamburg, from December 18 through