Watch Faith Wilding's Performance Of "Waiting" From Her 1974 Film Womanhouse

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Faith Wilding’s vanguard art installation and performance space, Womanhouse, Anat Ebgi in partnership with LAND (Los Angleles Nomadic Division), is presenting an eponymous solo exhibition with the artist. Seen here is a performance of “Waiting” from the documentary film Womanhouse produced by Johanna Demetrakas (1974). Below is an excerpt from Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interview with Wilding in our forthcoming BODY issue.

“HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You did two very legendary works at Womanhouse. You did the “Waiting” performance—an almost Beckettian performance about waiting, but very different from Beckett. And then, you also did an installation called “Womb Room.” Can you tell me about these two works? What kind of reaction did they get? 

FAITH WILDING: Yeah, well we had a performance group that Judy Chicago led. Because that was our plan from the beginning—that we would do some performances as part of the house. I was at dinner with Arlene [Raven] and Judy one night, and suddenly I was like, I wanna do something about waiting—about what we've waited for, what I've waited for all my life. And so, we started making a list. I still have that list. Out of that, I crafted the “Waiting” monologue, which we worked on as a group; other people tried out how they would perform the piece. But you know, I have given permission to anybody who wants to perform it, and lots of people have performed it all over the world in all different kinds of ways, which I think is really cool…”

Womanhouse is on view through April 16 @ Anat Ebgi 4859 Fountain Avenue, Los Angeles

“The Tenth Muse” Group Show @ Case Gallery Celebrates Womanhood and Female Power

CASE presents “The Tenth Muse” curated by Ludovica Capobianco. Featuring Miriam Cahn, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Nicolette Mishkan, Alexis Myre, Olga Ozerskaya, Cait Porter, Fawn Rogers, Samantha Rosenwald, Sydney Vernon and Valentina Von Klencke, “The Tenth Muse” is a celebration of womanhood, showing the innate female power through delicacy, sensuality, and the intricacies that bestow the strength of femininity. The Tenth Muse refers to the poetess Sappho, the first known female artist and an epitome of how intellectual women have striven to have a voice of their own over the centuries. Despite arduously achieved freedom and independency, women still find themselves confined within social and cultural stereotypes. Women tend to be defined based on dichotomized characters and are expected to walk around wearing multiple hats and high heels. Bringing together a group of strong female artists with various practices and aesthetics, this exhibition aims at showing the beautiful and unique complexity of the female being. The Tenth Muse will be on view until March 27, at CASE Gallery, 154 S Robertson Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90048.

Intersect Art and Design Presents Intersect Palm Springs

Intersect Palm Springs, which ran from February 10-13, 2022, brought together a dynamic mix of more than 50 established and emerging contemporary and modern art and design galleries.

The Fair featured two Curated Spaces:

Good Vibrations, organized by Shana Nys Dambrot (Arts Editor, LA Weekly) and Hunter Drohojowska-Philp (Author, Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s), offered an expanded view of geometric abstraction as it has evolved in Southern California from the 1950s to include the properties of light and the emotional and transcendent uses of color. Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin, John Miller, Peter Lodato, Jim Isermann, Patrick Wilson, Dani Tull, Yunhee Min, Knowledge Bennett, and Jen Stark are among the artists to be included in this multi-generational show.

ZZyzx Redux, curated by Bernard Leibov (Director, BoxoPROJECTS), and presented with support from The Art Collective Fine Art Services, was inspired by that remote corner of the Mojave Desert which demonstrates the full cycle of modern Southern Californian desert history: from Indigenous trade route; to gold rush era federal fort; to railroad outpost; to a much hyped health resort; and finally an environmental research station. These cycles have spurred optimism, creative development, and new technologies as well as related aspects of dislocation, exploitation, and environmental damage. The exhibition looks at the sustainability of the current land rush in the local area through artworks both inspired by the attractant qualities of the region (light, space, architecture, nature, lifestyle) and those reminding us where history has taken us before. The exhibition includes work by artists Blake Baxter, Diane Best, Ryan Campbell, Gerald Clarke Jr., Sofia Enriquez, Kim Manfredi, Carlos Ramirez, Cara Romero, Aili Schmeltz, Ryan Schneider, Phillip K. Smith III, and Kim Stringfellow.

 

Tear by Richard Hudson. Presented by Michael Goedhuis at Intersect Palm Springs 2022 Focus on Form: Sculpture Garden

 

Focus on Form: Sculpture Garden provided a spotlight on sculpture at the entry to the Fair, featuring 18 large-scale works by such artists as Stephanie Bachiero (Peter Blake Gallery), Michael DeJong (New Discretions), Andy Dixon (Over the Influence), Tara de la Garza (bG Gallery), Richard Hudson (Michael Goedhuis), Robert Indiana (Galerie Gmurzynska), Dominique Labauvie (Bleu Acier), Robert Raphael (SITUATIONS), Alex Schweder (Edward Cella Art & Architecture), Jesse Small (Nancy Hoffman Gallery), Julian Voss-Andreae (HOHMANN), and Ben Allanoff.

Works from the Fair will be online at Artsy.net, Intersect’s exclusive online marketplace partner, through March 3, 2022.

Shrinking Away To Nothingness: A Review Of Francis Bacon's Man And Beast @ The Royal Academy Of Arts

 

Francis Bacon, Head VI, 1949
Oil on canvas, 91.4 x 76.2 cm
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

 

The Royal Academy presents Francis Bacon: Man and Beast, an impressive showcase of the Northern Irish artist. It reveals his unquestionable skill and craftsmanship as well as the infinitely dark depths of his imagination. 

Banished at sixteen from his Catholic family in 1926 for being openly gay, Bacon left Ireland for Berlin, then Paris until landing in London in 1929 to establish himself as an acclaimed artist. Exempt from military service in 1939 because of his asthma, Bacon spent time in London and Hampshire, surrounding himself with artists that included Lucian Freud. 

Walking through Man and Beast makes you ponder the shifting tides of post-war England and how it inspired individuals such as Joe Orton, the Kray Twins, Philip Larkin, and Bacon himself. Similar to Edvard Munch's Scream, Bacon’s work prompts an unsettling effect of synesthesia. Perhaps this is no surprise for an artist who strove to render the “brutality of fact.”

Profound and moving, his figurative works focus on the human form; crucifixions, self-portraits, and portraits of friends. Faces appear as if covered with nylon stockings, or cut away to expose the tendon and bone beneath; figures are reduced to a tiny space on the canvas, suggestive of being tortured in a shell, or shrinking away to nothingness.  

Many of these images accompany the show's exploration into his unerring fascination with animals. Be it chimpanzees, bulls, dogs, or birds of prey, Bacon felt he could get closer to understanding the true nature of humankind by watching the uninhibited behavior of animals. We see carnality, appetite and decay, raw expression of anxiety and instinct through his anthropomorphic forms. From his Picasso influenced bio-morphs from the ‘30s, male heads isolated in rooms, or geometric structures in the ‘40s to animals and lone figures in the late ‘50s, Man and Beast highlights his existential approach to painting and why he presented his unique human forms the way that he did. Francis Bacon: Man and Beast is on view through April 17 @ The Royal Academy of Arts. Text by Lara Monro

 
 

Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright: A Review Of Luncheon On The Grass At Jeffrey Deitch Gallery

 
 

Who said, “Painting is dead?” You’d be surprised to learn that this line was uttered by French painter Paul Delaroche in 1840 after seeing the first photographic image. Twenty-three years later, Édouard Manet painted his masterwork, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), or Luncheon on the Grass, and modernism was born. Painting wasn’t dead, it was finally in dialogue with the zeitgeist. With Luncheon, Manet was deliberately trying to ruffle the feathers of the traditionally neoclassical establishment. Painted on a large canvas, a scale usually reserved for gods, mythic figures, and biblical representations, Luncheon was rendered with harsh, sometimes visible brushstrokes and a nearly hallucinatory depth of field. The background bather looks primordially copy and pasted, and the starkly illuminated female nude in the foreground, next to two formally dressed men, ambiguously gazes at the viewer with an uncertain contract of consent. Like Bob Dylan’s songbook, Luncheon has been covered and remixed ad infinitum, almost from the onset of the painting’s public unveiling. And now, three centuries after Manet shocked French society, more than thirty of today’s leading painters reinterpret this modernist asteroid in oil pigments at “Luncheon on the Grass— Contemporary Responses to Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. The group exhibition is an electric vision of a new zeitgeist, a new cosmological panoply of race, gender, class and sexuality. Many of the paintings, like Ariana Papademetropoulos’ It Becomes Blurry In The Moment (2022), are so new they are virtually wet and hang with a particular urgent immediacy, like a song coming out of the speaker for the first time. Caitlin Cherry’s Mixed Clout Relationships—Feast of the Ass (2022), is a pornographic dreamscape of famous, full-frontal rappers and clout chasers depicted in a dark fragmentation of orgiastic bodies, like a fractured plasma screen television. Other recent paintings include 57-year-old Chinese painter Liu Xiaodong's Newcomers in the Village - Response to Manet (2021), which was painted on location in Changchun in Northern China and depicts a group of friends and collaborators. Newcomers, and also a work by rising artist, Dominique Fung, called Sans Les Mains (2022), offers a fresh and rare depiction of AAPI visibility along the white hegemonic power structures of modernism. There is also Vaughn Spann’s incredible Juneteenth on the grass—after lunch (2022), which features the artist’s double-headed figures with the bather almost lost in the large expanse of a bay as fireworks explode overhead. The oldest work in the show is by the late, French New Realist, Alain Jacquet—a silkscreen on canvas entitled Le dejeuner sur l’herbe (1964)—and depicts our nude muse in the foreground, our two fully-dressed men, and our bather in the background, but in the context of a typically midcentury constellation of saturated Ben Day dots and a crystalline blue pool that harkens Cannes or some other Provençal locale on a sizzling summer day. Then there is Somaya Critchlow’s dynamic and evocative Mr. Peanut!—The Picnic (2020-2021), a delicately small painting that is a grenade packed with the ammonium nitrate and TNT of racial undertones. Mr. Peanut, whose full name is the rather colonial sounding Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smythe and was created in the image of the slave owning plantation masters of the Virginian and North Carolina peanut farms, is pictured with his white gloves, monocle, and top hat cupping the breast and kissing a Black woman. But perhaps the most direct response to Manet’s modernist masterpiece comes from Iranian-born painter Tala Madani with her 15x12 inch oil on linen, entitled Pickled (2022), which features a turd swimming in a jar that is half filled (or is it half empty?) with urine—our bather is mysterious, fecal and anonymous—there is no gender, no race—thousands of years of art history boiled down to a single piece of shit in a mason jar. Luncheon on the Grass will be on view until May 7, 2022 at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. text by Oliver Kupper

Tori Wrånes Presents Mussel Tears @ Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles

 
 

As a synesthete, a person with a condition of combining senses such as seeing color and form in sound and language, Tori Wrånes visualizes sound into a sculptural and physical dimension. This experience allows the artist to use sound to dictate the form of painting and sculpture and, in turn, she also visualizes objects through vocal projection. Mussel Tears premiers sculptures, paintings, sound, and performance together to evoke dream-like narratives, where the familiar becomes fantastical. The exhibition has developed from the artist’s ongoing observation of what she describes as “the quiet outcasts of society,” referring both to elements of nature and personal relationships. The works in the show visualize a sensory experience of the world.

Wrånes’ unique method of communication, using sound and form to convey primal emotions and truths, bypasses the structural hierarchies of language and rational thought. The result is a wide-ranging, experimental, and ritualistic practice that guides us outside of our known world. The works in Mussel Tears situates the self in relation to other beings, both human and non-human, and illustrates how our understanding of the world is constantly mediated by our own bodies. Throughout her practice, Wrånes sews together our senses, asking us to consider how we might privilege the overlooked in any form.

Tori Wrånes is on view now through March 12 @ Shulamit Nazarian 616 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles.

Yuri Yuan Presents "The Great Swimmer" @ Make Room in Los Angeles

In the past year, Yuri Yuan has often dreamed about water. Sometimes she sees a sinking ship, sometimes in a quiet ocean. Often, she finds herself on a diving board, perched over a blue swimming pool. Yuan’s latest body of work is titled "The Great Swimmer" after Kafka’s fragment of the same title. These limpid canvases explore different aquatic landscapes, but they most often return to the landscape of the swimming pool, with its diving boards, tiles, and changing rooms. Yuan tapped into her memories of swimming lessons she took at age 13, having just moved to Singapore from China. These classes were a minefield of linguistic, bodily, and emotional alienation– not unlike the alienation expressed by Kafka’s swimmer.

"The Great Swimmer" marks a watershed moment in Yuan’s practice. Working in a consistently larger format, the works showcase the influence of cinematic narrative on the artist’s practice. Fascinated by the intricate visual constructions of filmmakers such as Wes Anderson and Wong Kar Wai, Yuan’s new works seek to understand the innate connections between narrative and aesthetics. "The Great Swimmer" also takes influence from the deep ultramarine palettes of the Italian Renaissance, as well as the figural masterwork of French Romantics such as Géricault. "The Great Swimmer" presents a narrative in two sets of fragments, hopping between visions of the internal and external, the literary and the cinematic, the real and the dream.

Yuri Yuan is on view now through February 12 at Make Room 5119 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles.

Brian Wills Presents New Wall Works @ OCHI Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

In his first solo exhibition with OCHI Projects, Brian Wills presents twelve new wall works intentionally placed throughout both galleries. Building upon the artist’s unique visual vocabulary of thread, paint, and wood, Wills’ new work evokes experiential understandings of line, color, space, and object as he aligns his practice with minimalist abstraction, the subversive history of the monochrome, California Light & Space, and other art historical paradigmatic shifts. Singular strands of thread are delicately wrapped around wooden substrates, eventually creating surfaces that appear to vibrate and shift depending on available light, thread density, the architecture of the panel, and the motion of the viewer.

Wills is acutely aware of how a viewers’ brain will react to his work. The visual cortex interprets received visual data—color, motion, texture, and depth—precisely the fundamental properties that Wills engages. When exposed to pattern, the brain extrapolates as it habituates, for example when assuming that a vertical line of brown thread will repeat as it did thousands of times in a row—the works in OCHI Aux exemplify these principles. Deliberately skipped threads or a shift from warm to cool red thread are intended to reveal moments of intuition and intention, while indicating methods of construction. Expectations are constantly at play. Engaging with one’s own perception is always a gift, offering moments of joy, wonder, and self-reflection—in other words, investments in observation are rewarded handsomely.

Brian Wills is on view through March 12 @ OCHI 3301 W Washington Blvd Los Angeles.

First Look: Amor Corp Presents "Salon" A Curation Of Art and Design by Noemi Polo

AMOR CORP presents SALON, a site-specific collection of art and design curated by Noemi Polo in a domestic environment featuring works from both local and internationally established artists and collaborators. Set in a newly completed residential project by SCI-ARC grad collective, PENTAGON, this exhibition occupies Milwood Avenue, arguably one of the most architecturally relevant residential neighborhoods in both Venice and Los Angeles. On public view from Tuesday February 1st through February 14th, SALON features over 100 objects from more than 50 artists and collaborators- a collection resembling that of an imaginary persona that would potentially inhabit the home. Understanding PENTAGON’s focus on new, speculative approaches to building design, pragmatic inquiry into context and location, SALON plays as both a showroom and conceptual art exhibition, including works that are in direct conversation with the home’s unique design through their textures and forms. Notable artists include Jordan Wolfson, Gaetano Pesce, Cody Critcheloe and more. Race Service, as a partner in the exhibition, will showcase a rare NASCAR vehicle alongside a custom painted race car in the garage. Click here to make an appointment. Photos by Ed Mumford

Theodoulos Polyviou & Dakis Panayiotou Present Transmundane Economies @ Künstlerhaus Bethanien In Berlin

Bellapais Abbey, a ruin of a monastery in northern Cyprus built in the 13th century, is the subject of investigation for the site-specific virtual installation Transmundane Economies. A relic of many lives, following the different colonial periods over the centuries, the monastery went through changes, architectural but also cultural, organizational and operational.

Theo & Daki address the long-lasting shape-shifting history of Bellapais Abbey to discuss the codes and hierarchies that over the years have been established and inscribed on it. Starting from the architectural structure as well as the ceremonial use of the place while examining its narratives, liturgy and history, the artists speculate on the relation-ship between queerness, restoration and reinvention.

Visitors to the exhibition are immersed in the partial reconstruction — based on drawings by George Jeffrey from 1912 — of the Gothic refectory of the monastery by means of VR technology. Alternative paths and possible uses that deviate from colonial interventions of the past, become free and accessible in this way. The virtual architecture, which in its digital translation appears to be sacred, yet free of Christian intentions, in turn, exposes the socio-political fabrication of the monastery. Next to this conceptual grounding, by virtually transposing the site into the gallery space, the artists turn the ruin into an event rather than an object, proposing in this way an alternative to acquisition.

The Cypriot Orthodox Church exerts a strong influence on the political affairs of the island and participates in the instrumentalization of the national collectivity, often through the superintendence of gender and sexuality by claiming to protect the Greek Cypriots from ‘the ethnic other’ as described by Nayia Kamenou in her text Sexuality, Gender and Nationhood in Cyprus and hence exploiting the country’s postcolonial milieux. The queer community on the whole island is therefore not only subjected to marginalization based on their sexuality but all the processes of identity formation that constitute their bodies; race, class and gender. Transmundane Economies is an offer to discuss mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and think of the potentiality of any place to transcend its own physicality and hence escape its embodied ideological charge and power. Writer Jazmina Figueroa has been commissioned to arrange a sound piece for the installation.

Transmundane Economies is on view through February 6 @ Künstlerhaus Bethanien Kottbusser Straße 10
10999 Berlin.

Bedtime Stories In A Mental Asylum: Get In Bed With Tobias Spichtig →


interview by Janna Shaw
photographs courtesy the artist

When was the last time you stood up on a mattress, off-kiltered, aware of your balance, or lack thereof?  When was the last time you jumped on a bed with friends? When was the last time you jumped on a bed with strangers?  When was the last time you played childhood games? Cuddled in a group clad in coats and cloaks? Watched a couple kissing horizontally? Were read a bedtime story late into the evening, with snow falling gently outside?  

The KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin is hosting Die Matratzen, a week-long exhibit by Tobias Spichtig, with a nightly changing cast of poets and text-based artists reading their works aloud to an audience perched upon mattresses and sheets, sourced from friends and various collaborators of the artist.

Over the course of Spichtig’s installation, the mattresses are lived in and take on new forms, shifting from their original placement, absorbing the shapes and sounds of their dwellers and run-uponers. In one corner of a mattress, a tiny faded blood stain. Next to it, a rip from a Balenciaga heel, courtesy of that evening’s impromptu game of Tag. The sheets themselves have a collective abstract quality to them, marred with scuffs, prints, and static marks of movement. On view from above, the blocks of foam and springs morph into a perfectly assembled jigsaw puzzle, spanning the full space in its entirety, corner to corner. From here, one can clearly see that the work does not consist of objects in a room, it is the presence and experience of the guests that are on top of them that complete the work. It is an interactive performance.

Janna Shaw spoke with Tobias Spichtig on his opening night of Die Matratzen after a kickoff reading with Karl Holmqvist. Read more.

Temporal Vertigo: Read Isabelle Albuquerque's Interview Of Nicolas G. Miller →

 

Everett Sloane in Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000
photograph courtesy ofstudio photography

 

interview by Isabelle Albuquerque
photographs by ofstudio photography

If you look up close and if you have an exceptional memory for Old Hollywood character actors, you will clearly make out the distinctive face of Everett Sloane with his signature wide-set eyes and crooked nose. Known primarily for his roles in The Twilight Zone, The Andy Griffith Show, and Citizen Kane, the actor, songwriter, and theatre director took his life by way of barbiturate overdose in 1965 at the age of 55. Here, he is immortalized and miniaturized by artist Nicolas G. Miller in the form of a bronze statuette. He appears to move with a brisk, yet cool stride walking down an imaginary runway wearing Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000. In the following interview, Isabelle Albuquerque sits down with Miller to discuss the temporality of fashion, the process of sculpting in bronze, and the act of breathing life into the deceased. Read more.

Wolfgang Tillmans "Concrete Column" @ Regen Projects In Los Angeles

Installation view of Wolfgang Tillmans Concrete Column at Regen Projects, Los Angeles November 6 – December 23, 2021. Photo: Evan Bedford, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

German artist Wolfgang Tillmans is arguably one of the most important photographers of the past thirty years. But what many people don’t know is that his musical ambitions are what led to his career as a fine art photographer who captured the ecstatic decadence of youth culture with a serious and discerning eye. On view now at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, an exhibition entitled Concrete Column focuses on some of Tillmans’ most recognized body of work, along with new photographs, and a dedicated listening room for his first full-length album Moon In Earth Light. The album, a collection of spoken word, field recordings, and pulsating electronic beats, is a culmination of a life long obsession with music and music making. Below is an excerpt from a conversation between writer and musician, Sasha Frere-Jones, and Wolfgang Tillmans on the occasion of his current exhibition in Los Angeles that will be published in full in an upcoming print issue of Autre. Concrete Column will be on view until December 23 at Regen Projects. 

SASHA FRERE-JONES How long did it take to make the new record? 

WOLFGANG TILLMANS Some of the first bits are four-years-old. The lockdown was kind of productive because the musician I work with, Tim Knapp, his studio is on the same street as mine. And we were able to use time very fruitfully. Otherwise it's been sort of a process over two, three years. But then in the last few months it came together within a couple of weeks—this composition of the eighteen elements that make up the album. It was a bit of a full circle moment from when I started to make music again around 2015. I had collected an archive of field recordings that I've been doing over the previous five years, which I had sort of just stocked up because I saw them as audio photographs, photographing sound. But I never really had time, or peace and quiet, to do something about it. And then I finally committed time to it, and put together these different sources, from spoken word to field recordings and jams and proper studio productions.

FRERE-JONES  Do you just open up a particular machine and start singing or how—what’s your way of composing? What's your way of putting this stuff down?

TILLMANS  It usually starts with a word or words, a line, and a melody that comes with it. For example, “Device Control,” the song that made it onto Frank ocean's Endless album, I recorded it in one take on an iPhone in one morning, slightly hungover. I had mused and thought about the new technology and sort of weird transfer—this shift from living life to broadcasting life for some time. But then one morning these words just came out and that happens sometimes with sentences that stayed with me over decades. For example, the line,  “We can't escape into space, we're in it." And the other line is, “He wants to change, but not be seen changing." That's something that sort of stayed with me all my life. It's about myself, but it's about seeing others as well. But I work with a sort of notes that in sessions become a particular melody. So it always usually starts with a melody, a vocal melody, and a line. I don’t always get the verse so often— more the hook only [laughs]. 

FRERE-JONES  You know, people don't have a lot of time now, the hook is all they want. I'm really curious about your whole journey. I’m somebody who does two things. I make music and I write. I’m not saying you only do two things, but I know you have a specific history of making music. You started pretty young if I'm not mistaken, is that correct?  

TILLMANS Yeah, there was a short year and a half, two years, when I was seventeen to nineteen, which is when I was very productive with some songs, which I actually then later put them out in 2016. But we never performed, we never did anything. And I stopped for 25 years. 

FRERE-JONES  What kind of stuff was it? 

TILLMANS  It was 1985, so various electronic, post punk, new wave, pre-house. This was right before house music hit. 

FRERE-JONES Was there somebody you wanted to emulate or you wanted to be, or you wanted to play like? Who were your heroes? 

TILLMANS  I mean, clearly, Soft Cell and New Order, and Pet Shop Boys and Psychedelic Furs.  I always had a strong affinity to two poles: the more serious electronic, industrial, stuff. And on the other hand, Italo Disco, which was a genre that is nowadays held in great esteem, and consider one of the coolest things, but not then.


FRERE-JONES I'm also curious about—where were you hearing this stuff? What was the mood where you grew up? Was that the popular music? Was it the unpopular music and all the kids were all listening to something else? 

TILLMANS  In the mid-80s, there was still a very large divide between serious guitar music made by hand and electronic music that was considered not so serious because it's easy to make. Currently, it's only pressing a few buttons. It seems ridiculous nowadays that there was such value value system applied. But I was from a medium, small industrial city in the larger area of the Ruhr in Germany, near Cologne and Düsseldorf, which is an area of rich culture and musical history. Kraftwerk are from Düsseldorf and Karlheinz Stockhausen is from  Cologne. And a lot of English bands would come through the area to play. So I feel really blessed by having grown up in, at that time in that neighborhood where Sigmar Polke, Joseph Beuys, and lots of great artists were just living and working. I was a little bit too young for that, but when I left the Rhineland and moved to Hamburg after school I found myself, for the first time, old enough and actually located near enough to a burgeoning scene, which was a house scene, acid house music. That was a tectonic shift, definitely in Europe music. To a lesser extent, all across America, but it also had a huge impact in the big cities.  

FRERE-JONES  Is that when you made those first recordings? 

TILLMANS  I did at them in my hometown, which was before Hamburg. 

FRERE-JONES  I think we all have our, we all have our ideal cities when we’re young. Wherever it is, it’s not where we are. 

TILLMANS  I once had an assistant in Berlin who was born on Tottenham Court in London, the street where I first saw Boy George and Culture Club play when I was 15. And I thought like, wow, it must have been so incredible to be born in the West End. Or I had an assistant who was born 200 meters from Alexanderplatz in Berlin. I mean, I find it glamorous in itself, but on the other hand, I don't, I don't envy them because they never had this sort of imaginary space, this place to project into, because they come from a place where other people project their dreams and ambitions to. 

FRERE-JONES  But you stopped for 20 years—why did you stop? 

TILLMANS  Because my musical partner, surprisingly, left literally overnight. There was some personal drama with his girlfriend and he literally just left. I didn't muster up the courage to find somebody else to work with. But then I was in Hamburg and wanted to capture the energy of this newfound solidarity and democracy on the dance floor. It had a very egalitarian spirit and that totally inspired me. I wanted to communicate that and communicating that meant preserving it in pictures. And that’s when I took my first editorial photographs. 

Francesco Clemente "Twenty Years of Painting: 2001-2021" Presented By Vito Schnabel At The Old Santa Monica Post Office

Twenty years of painting. Twenty years of ecstatic, radical sensuality. A romantic paroxysm of western and eastern imagination with a tinge of Italian anarchism. Francesco Clemente 20 Years of Paintings: 2001-2021, the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles in nearly 20 years—presented by Vito Schnabel Gallery at the Old Santa Monica Post Office—is a love letter to the medium, to the brush stroke, to paint, to materiality, to size, scale, and beauty itself. In one large painting, easily the pièce de résistance, an ancient Grecian helmet is haloed by a bright red glow, a formidable metaphor for the psychosis of frantic empires, symbolized by a single, imposing hieroglyph of war, protection and survival. It connotes an impending sense of decline, but also hope in triumphant renewal. Painted during the pandemic, the work might also be something of a glorified self-portrait. The title, Our Backs to the Sea Far From Our Native Land 4-3-2021 is a reference to the Ilyad, but also to Homer’s Odyssey, the epic that depicts the hero Odysseus’ ten-year journey home from fighting the allegorical Trojan War, which lasted a preceding ten years. Twenty years of war and return, twenty years of painting. The painter as mythic hero, Clemente’s 20 Years of Paintings is more opus than oeuvre, that feeling of the quiet moment just after a symphonic crescendo, when the last note dies out and there is a pure kind of silence. Clemente proves that he is an artist of the body and the mind, a rare twin quality belonging to only a few painters before him. His paintings proof of the artists existential pain and exuberance and exhilaration. Francesco Clemente "Twenty Years of Painting: 2001-2021” will be on view until January 16 at Vito Schnabel Gallery at the Old Santa Monica Post Office, click here to make an appointment.

Wicker Man: Chris Wolston’s “Temperature’s Rising” At Casa Perfect in Los Angeles

 New York and Medellín-based artist and designer Chris Wolston’s new series of sculptural domestic objects are a high Fahrenheit, alchemical fever dream of organic forms, materiality and erotic cheekiness. Most known for his anatomically enhanced woven rattan chairs featuring their striking embonpoint and delectable gluteal rotundness, Temperature’s Rising brings a new breed of beasts to the bestiary. A standing mirror rests on its generous bondonkadonk, a cabinet is aortal and coral-like, a snaking sofa is upholstered with rich bouclé and upcycled animal hides, there are metallurgic vessels, and even a leafy fireplace screen. Wolston’s newest generation of Nalgona Chairs (nalgona is Spanish slang for someone with a great ass) has taken on a new dimension of celebratory gestures, colors and forms—a post-pandemic, post-apocalyptic tropical wedding of form and function where the punch has possibly been spiked with the hallucinogenic secretions of some shamanic monkey frog. Brightly colored red, blue and purple outdoor Nalgonas look like sex dolls for giant pool nymphs. A multi-limbed chandelier, with palms holding lightbulbs, is nucleic and yet at the time is reminiscent of hands peaking out above the fog on a dance floor at an Ibizan foam party. All in all, Temperature’s Rising is also an example of how to make furniture conscientiously: by using ethically sourced 100% Colombian mimbre (wicker) and weavers that are compensated using a profit sharing model. Make sure to bring a bucket and a mop—Wolston’s world is a wet dream during a nap under an ancient Incan temple. Temperature’s Rising will be on view at Casa Perfect through December 2021. Make an appointment here. Photos: William Jess Laird

Sterling Ruby And More Guest Artists Team Up With Prison Arts Collective

Huxley, the global talent agency announce their collaboration with the California-based organization Prison Arts Collective (PAC), a university-based, non-profit program offering a multidisciplinary arts curriculum in 12 California State prisons. PAC is headquartered at San Diego State University. Throughout 2021, Huxley has worked with PAC to design a guest artist program, made up of 15 individual lessons over 15 weeks. This fall, PAC will teach the new program in one prison, and eventually bring it to the 12 men’s and women’s California State Prisons where PAC holds programming. By providing multidisciplinary arts programming in correctional institutions, PAC supports the development of self-expression, reflection, communication, and empathy through collaboration and mutual learning. Guest artists include photographer Tyler Mitchell, creator of the Wim Hof Method Wim Hof, American artist Sterling Ruby, British fine artist Issy Wood, cartoonist David Ostow, creative and art directors Willo Perron and Brian Roettinger, and more as contributors. Guest artist lessons focus on a range of topics, including logo design and typography, scriptwriting and creative storytelling, cartooning and illustration, collage making, creative mindfulness, and more. Click here to learn more.