Three Way: A Trilogy of Vintage Erotica
"It's rarely a bad idea to show some sex films. I mean...really. This is a small series and is intended, certainly, to entertain. But it's also intended to investigate both the fantasies and realities of sexual representation — that uncomfortable space where we so often find a huge gap. When you place a slick, erotic daydream like Camille 2000 against the gritty reality of A Labor of Love, the difference becomes all the more stark. And then there's The Wild Pussycat, a masterpiece of what-the-fuck-is-this-ism. It combines erotic scenes with some pretty rough sadism — but somehow becomes an intense, unintentional black comedy instead of a just another crappy 60s sexploitation picture. Combined, I hope the three films illustrate some of the perils and positives of depicting sex, and raise questions about how, or if, anything has ultimately changed. Stay tuned for 'Three-Way Redux: A Trilogy of Contemporary Erotica,' coming soon." — Joel Shepard, Film & Video Curator, Three Way: A Trilogy of Vintage Erotica is showing the weekend at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. www.ybca.org
Nino Migliori
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Nino Migliori, Il tuffatore, 1951
Nino Migliori's photography is the epitome of a definitively Italian cultural movement during postwar Italy called neorealismo, or neorealism. Its the stark black and white photography of an Italy that seems to sizzle to the touch. Whilst Migliori captured still images of Northern and Southern Italy's street life, neorealism can also be exemplified with film–for example, Vittorio De Sico's 1948 classic The Bicycle Thief. Nino Migliori, who was born in Bologne in 1926, is still alive and well–a new exhibit Nino Migliori "Neorealism" opens this july at the La Mar de Musicas Festival in Cartagena, Spain. Nino Migliori "Neorealism–July 11 to August 31 at the Palacio Molina–www.lamardemusicas.com
James Franco by Adarsha Benjamin for Pas Un Autre
Test polaroid of James Franco for the first issue of Autre Quarterly, the print edition of Pas Un Autre. Shot earlier today in New York by the brilliant Adarsha Benjamin–styled by Paloma Perez–make-up/hair by Jordan Bree Long. Shot on location at the KDU Studios in Brooklyn.
Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want
Love Is What You Want
"People like you should fuck people like me," reads one her famous neon sign installations. "Good smile, Great come," reads another. Tracey Emin, a celebrated contemporary English artist, who has a retrospective of sorts opening today in London, is labeled a "wild child" of the art world with no chance of taming. Her neon scribbles are honest and personal, and speak of the post modern human condition on a profound level. Emin has had her fair share of hard knocks–growing up poor, raped at 13, and an abortion of twins at 18–so now, with her trademark lopsided smile and sexy glint in her eyes, she's appropriately getting back at this fucked up mess we call a world–in a beautiful way.
Good Smile Great Come
Emin's rise to prominence culminated with a special exhibit at the Tate Gallery in 1999, in which she presented her unmade bed in the museum exactly as it was in her home–after spending countless suicidal days in it following a fight in relationship. Yellowed sheets, cigarette butts, stained underwear, and condoms strewn about the bed was a shocking, visceral site to behold–a strange reminder of the fragile, intricacies of the human psyche. A famous photograph, a self-portrait of the artist herself, from a gallery show I've Got it All Now (2000) - displays Emin clutching bank notes and coins into her crotch - an analytical critique for man's unquenchable desire for money.
"Oh Christ, I Just Wanted You to Fuck Me, And Then I Became Greedy, I Wanted You To Love Me." from a Tracey Emin Installation
The exhibition, Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want, opens today at the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre in london and features painting, drawing, photography, textiles, video and sculpture, in works that are "by turns tough, romantic, desperate, angry, funny and full of longing." Seldom-seen early works and recent large-scale installations are shown together with a new series of outdoor sculptures created especially for the Hayward Gallery.
On view at the Hayward Gallery May 18 to August 29, 2011 - find tickets here.
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Eduardo Chillida's Rebellion Against Gravity
The limbs of Eduardo Chillida's (1924-2002) sculptures were monolithic gangplanks to nothingness - fingers that never touch - concrete testaments to humanities eternal, unrequited connectivity. His metal and stone sculptures, for which the Basque sculptor and former soccer player is most famous for, are like beautiful ruins, much like the labyrinthian formation of air-ducts after a building is blown away by a hurricane.
"My work is a rebellion against gravity."
Chillida had a romance with Space - nothingness wasn't really nothingness at all, but a disassembled puzzle waiting to be put together. Eduardo Chillida in the early 1960's engaged in a dialogue with the German Philosopher Martin Heidegger. When the two men met, they discovered that from different angles, they were "working" with Space in the same way. Heidegger wrote: "We would have to learn to recognize that things themselves are places and do not merely belong to a place," and that sculpture is thereby...the embodiment of places." This June marks the beginning of a large retrospective of Chillida's works at the Maeght Foundation in France. Almost 140 works are on display: 80 sculptures and 60 works on paper that include some Chillida's brilliant multi-media collages and drawings. On view June 26 to November 13 at the Maeght Foundation - www.fondation-maeght.com
The New Woman International
Germaine Krull by Eli Lotar
Images of flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, and trampky—all embodiments of the dashing New Woman—symbolized an expanded public role for women from the suffragist era through the dawn of 1960s feminism. Chronicling nearly a century of global challenges to gender norms, The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (University of Michigan Press) is the first book to examine modern femininity's ongoing relationship with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' most influential new media: photography and film. You can find the book here.
Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams
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Victor Brauner, Romania/France 1903–66, Loup-table (Wolf-table) 1939, 1947, Wood and taxidermied fox
This June marks the beginning of a unique, expansive exhibit of surrealist artwork in Queensland, Australia. The Gallery of Modern art in Queensland, a land far from the birth of surrealism, is borrowing "the core" of one of the finest and largest collections held at the The Musée national d’art moderne in at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Its a rare occasion in that the collection rarely leaves Paris. The exhibition presents more than 180 artworks by 56 artists, including paintings, sculptures, ‘surrealist objects’, films, photographs, drawings and collages. Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams is on view June 11 to October 2 at the The Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland - www.qag.qld.gov.au.
PAUL THEK: Diver, A Retrospective
Paul Thek: Diver, a Retrospective is the first retrospective in the U.S. devoted to the legendary American artist Paul Thek (1933–1988). A sculptor, painter, and one of the earliest artists to create environments or installations, Thek was first recognized when he showed his sculpture in New York galleries in the 1960s. These early works, which he began making in 1964 and called “meat pieces,” resembled flesh and were encased in Plexiglas boxes that recall minimal sculptures. With his frequent use of highly perishable materials, Thek accepted the ephemeral nature of his works—and was aware, as writer Gary Indiana has noted, of “a sense of our own transience and that of everything around us.” With loans of work never before seen in the U.S., this exhibition is intended to introduce Thek to a broader American audience. On view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles - May 22 to August 28 - website.
Steve McQueen For Sale
Steve McQueen may have died thirty years ago, but his eternal cool has not. You can start the bidding now, but on Saturday the auction is on - from McQueen's famous 1971 Husqvarna 400 motorcycle to a wooden trunk of personal effects. In conjunction with the third annual Quail Motorcycle Gathering, Bonhams & Butterfields will conduct a live auction of authentic Steve McQueen artifacts. The auction takes place May 14 2011 at the Quail Lodge in Carmel, California. www.bonhams.com
Benjamin Péret's Leg of Lamb
Benjamin Péret was a founding member of surrealism, a card carrying surrealist - if there ever was such a thing - and he was Salvador Dali's favorite poet; as well as a revolutionary and a rabble rouser who stirred the pot of literary movements as well as political ones. Péret, like his writing, led an almost automatic life. Entering world war one in order to avoid persecution for defacing a statue and whilst in a fox hole one day he discovers the writings of Dadaist Guillaume Apollinaire - a Dadaist poet who coined the word surrealism. After the war Péret found his way in to the heart of the burgeoning surrealist movement and subsequently into the heart of its founder Andre Breton. The surrealists found it best to stay close in the early years of its founding in order to protect their brilliant, insane, and sometimes infantile visions of the world - a vision that if proclaimed by a solitary person would most likely lead to confinement for insanity in a world that saw if perfectly fine without all the sliced eyeballs and flying tigers.
“...a smorgasbord of automatic writing.”
But Benjamin Péret was one of the only surrealists, beside Andre Breton, who stayed a surrealist even after the mirage wore off. Péret's Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works, which is available now on Wakefield Press, is a "foundational classic of Surrealist literature." Almost entirely written in the 1920s, Leg of Lamb is a collection of brilliant, absurdist visions - twenty-four narratives in short prose - a "smorgasbord of automatic writing." Visit the the Wakfield Press website and pick up a copy for your collection - its a must for your library. www.wakefieldpress.com
David Bowie, Artist
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This summer, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York presents David Bowie, Artist, a multi-platform retrospective re-framing Bowie’s daring, multi-discipline career as that of an artist working primarily in performance. From his roots in such performance-based practices as cabaret, mime, and avant-garde theater, to Ziggy Stardust, his revolutionary tour that synthesized theater, music, and contemporary art into a rock spectacle, as well as his innovative video collaborations, and his work in cinema and theater, David Bowie, Artist presents Bowie as one of the most iconoclastic cultural producers of the 20th century. On view until July 15th - www.mademuseum.org
In the Light of Mexico
Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were stealing back Mexico for the people. Freedom was being won with blood. Mexico was in the throes of a revolution. The great first quarter of the twentieth century Mexico was fertile ground for not only revolutionaries, but also artists. Mexico was indeed succeeding to a modern world. Mexico, always the symbol and champion of the underdog, the poor, the hungry has always held on strong to its icons. They were roughhewn in their prismatic, threadbare ponchos, sombreros, and dark mestizo skin that glowed amber under a romantic, warm desert sun in a landscape of infinite flowers, cobble stone, and chirping monkeys. And like inventing memories from photographs, our images of Mexico have been always invented by this imagery. It's the murals of Diego Rivera, the gardens and portraits of Frida Kahlo and the poems of Octavio Paz that paint of landscape of a bygone Mexico - poorly preserved by kitsch, refrigerator magnates, and theme restaurants. We always wonder what happened to the good old days when they're seemingly gone forever. Certainly one of the most influential icons of Mexico's good old days is the photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo, whose work is being exhibited alongside the poetry of another symbol of Mexico's heritage Octavio Paz, at the Mexican Embassy in India, captured the spirit of a Mexico experiencing the pangs of a revolution and the dialectic of an artistic movement mirroring back its angst. Screaming in a fulmination of dust, Bravo's photographs are as journalistic as they are erotic. Bravo was born in 1902 to a family of artists and writers, and met several other prominent artists who encouraged his work when he was young, including Diego Rivera. Bravo, who was inspired by the burgeoning surrealist movement in France, starting taking pictures at 18 whilst working a government job. Bravo would become a profoundly influential figure in contemporary Mexican and Latin American photography, but he would not become largely known in the rest of the world. Bravo died in 2002 at the age of 100, but his photographs are a significant part of Mexico’s history.
An exhibition, entitled In the Light of Mexico, curated by Conrado Tostado Gutierrez, the cultural attaché of the Embassy of Mexico in Delhi, comprises a substantial body of images that evokes the era of the Mexican Revolution of early 1907 to 1911, the newly independent Mexico and its people. Bravo’s daughter Aurelia Alvarez Bravo and his widow Collette Urbajtel have painstakingly developed the original negatives from the photographer’s work to make this exhibition possible. Bravo's photographs are coupled with the poems of poet and former Mexican Ambassador to India, Octavio Paz.
On view until June 30th in New Delhi, India. More info.
Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre
Dark Night
"they say nothing is wasted: either that or it all is." Dark Night Poem, Charles Bukowski
Houdini: Art & Magic
Magician, escape artist, and showman extraordinaire Harry Houdini (1874–1926) has remained an object of fascination for generations. Combining biographical and historical artifacts with contemporary art inspired by his physical audacity and celebrity, Houdini: Art and Magic explores Houdini as an individual and an enduring cultural phenomenon, documenting the period in American history when the young Jewish immigrant helped shape the cultural landscape and became an acknowledged mass-market star. Featuring more than 150 objects—including film clips, stunning period posters, dramatic theater ephemera, rare photographs, original props (including a straitjacket, milk can, and Metamorphosis Trunk used by Houdini), and the work of select avant-garde artists—the exhibition reveals Houdini’s legacy as an iconic figure, both in his time and in ours, who has inspired artists today to reconsider his role as a daring persona. On view at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles until September 4. www.skirball.org
The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy
The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy features thirty-seven sculptures from the tomb of John the Fearless (1342–1404), the second duke of Burgundy. His elaborate tomb, once housed at a monastery on the outskirts of Dijon, is now one of the centerpieces of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon. On view until July 31 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. www.lacma.org
Inspiration Dior
A this one to the list of the growing phenomenon of designer retrospectives being held around the world. Inspiration Dior, an exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, explores the birth of the legendary fashion house. Christian Dior was born in the seaside town of Granville on the coast of France, the second of the five children of Maurice Dior, a wealthy fertilizer manufacturer and his wife. His family had hopes that the young Dior would become a diplomat, but his artistic sensibilities would obviously prevail. In 1947 his 'new look' collection is established and the House of Dior is born. The exhibition explore not only Dior, but the inspiration behind Dior, guiding the visitor "through the Dior artistic creative sources of fashion and its links to history, nature, painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and film. It reveals how an idea, a feeling, an era, a garden, a perception or even a smell can instill an idea in the heart and mind, giving rise to a unique creation." Inspiration Dior is on view until July 24 2011. www.arts-museum.ru
Not Another Business Card
Pas Un Autre photographer Adarsha Benjamin's transparent business card. Look out for her editorials in the first issue of Autre Quarterly, a quarterly print edition of Pas Un Autre, coming out this summer. Please sign up for our newsletter and we'll send an invitation to receive a free copy of the first issue to your doorstep.
Adarsha Shoots Voxhaul Broadcast
Behind the scenes. Adarsha Benjamin Shoots Voxhaul Broadcast in Venice, California. Footage by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre. Music by Voxhaul Broadcast
Fritz Lang, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
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After director Fritz Lang vaulted to prominence with such masterpieces of German cinema as Metropolis and M, he brought his art to Hollywood films, including Fury, Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window and more trenchant tales of innocents caught in a web of seeming guilt. His last U.S. movie is this intriguing film noir about a novelist (Dana Andrews) out to expose the injustices of capital punishment. Working with his fiancée’s (Joan Fontaine) father, a newspaper publisher (Sidney Blackmer), he frames himself for murder, intending to produce exonerating evidence at the last moment. But the publisher suddenly dies, the evidence is lost… and that’s only the first twist in a brilliantly layered plot ideally suited to Lang’s talents. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt has been recently restored and is available on DVD.