Dalí: Mind of a Genius

The aphrodisiac telephone by Salvador Dali

SINGAPORE: Explore over 250 artworks which highlight the creativeness of Dalí across different mediums, including bronze sculptures, rare graphics, furniture, gold jewelry and crystal pieces in three themed areas – Femininity and Sensuality, Religion and Mythology, Dreams and Fantasy. Highlights include Dance of Time I (Dalí's famous representation of melted clocks), Woman Aflame (sculpture uniting two of Dalí's obsessions - drawers and fire), Spellbound (a huge painting featured in Alfred Hitchcock's movie of the same name) and the Mae West Lips Sofa (inspired by actress Mae West's sensual lips). Now on view at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore until October 11. 

[BOOKS] PATTI SMITH & TOM WAITS

Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story by author Dave Thompson – Dancing Barefoot is a measured, accurate, and enthusiastic account of Smith’s career. Guided by interviews with those who have known her—including Ivan Kral, Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, John Cale, and Jim Carroll—it relies most of all on Patti’s own words. This is Patti’s story, told as she might have seen it, had she been on the outside looking in. You can purchase the book here. 

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Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Paul Maher, Jr. – Tom Waits on Tom Waits is a selection of over fifty interviews from the more than five hundred available. Here Waits delivers prose as crafted, poetic, potent, and haunting as the lyrics of his best songs. Available on Chicago Review Press

LYNDA BENGLIS Retrospective at the MOCA Los Angeles

This is Lynda Benglis' first retrospective in 20 years–this one held at the MOCA Los Angeles.This travelling exhibition spans the range of Lynda Benglis's career, including her early wax paintings, her brightly colored poured latex works, the Torsos and Knots series from the 1970s, and her recent experiments with plastics, cast glass, paper, and gold leaf. It features a number of rarely exhibited historic works, including Phantom (1971), a dramatic polyurethane installation consisting of five monumental sculptures that glow in the dark, and the installation Primary Structures (Paula's Props), first shown in 1975. Alongside her sculptural output, Benglis created a radical body of work in video, photography, and media interventions that explore notions of power, gender relations, and role-playing. These works function in tandem with her sculpture to offer a pointed critique of sculptural machismo and suggest a fluid awareness of gender and artistic identity. They also contribute to an understanding of the artist's objects as simultaneously temporal and physically present, intuitive, and psychologically charged. On view until October 10 at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. 

The Lost Footage of Ken Kesey's Magic Ride

Psychologist Timothy Leary and Neal Cassady in Bus
Timothy Leary and Neal Cassady in MAGIC TRIP, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo © Allen Ginsberg, CORBIS.
Ken Kesey
right: Ken Kesey in MAGIC TRIP. Photo © Ted Streshinsky, CORBIS. right: The Bus in MAGIC TRIP. Photo © Ted Streshinsky, CORBIS.

In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, shooting footage on 16MM, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen. With MAGIC TRIP, Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage by the Kesey family. They worked with the Film Foundation, HISTORY and the UCLA Film Archives to restore over 100 hours of film and audiotape, and have shaped an invaluable document of this extraordinary piece of American history. Magic Trip opens this month.

[ART] In The Labyrinth

The exhibition by Àngels Ribé at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, covers a period of her production from 1969 to 1984. This period is particularly significant for it marks the appearance of a new aesthetic model that would have a fundamental influence on the creation of new ways of conceiving the artistic practice. The associative and symbolic functions of art are renegotiated: the artwork ceases to be an autonomous entity, as was the norm in the modernist tradition, and its meaning becomes dependent on an interchange with the spectator. In this way, the ambiguity and the multiplicity of references and readings that are an intrinsic part of the work of art are revealed. Àngels Ribé, having begun her artistic career at that time and within those parameters, consolidated a language of her own that has continued until today through various supports and media.  In the labyrinth. Àngels Ribé, 1969-1984 in on view until October 23. www.macba.cat

Richard Phillips: Point of Purchase

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"My pictures involve a kind of wasted beauty - that's always been a thread in my work."  - Richard Phillips

Richard Phillips' tongue in cheek, slightly pornographic, gritty, but oxymoronically glossy paintings have made him an artist among elite of pop art's Mount Olympus that includes the like of Evelyne Axell  and pop art's Zeus Andy Warhol. Richard Phillips was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1962 and now lives and works in New York.  On view for another week at John McWhinnie bookstore in East Hampton, NY is Point of Purchase, "the first full-scale presentation of [Richard Phillips'] commercial interventions." John McWhinnie: "Phillips extends his brand of artmaking into the non-gallery world, colonizing commercial space, manipulating products and displays, from album covers and posters to designer handbags and beach towels." On view until August 8 www.johnmcwhinnie.com

THE ROAD OF HOPE - YOKO ONO

Photo: Annie Leibovitz

Congratulations to Yoko Ono who is the winner of the 8th Hiroshima Art Prize for her efforts in spreading world peace.  An awards ceremony is scheduled together with an exhibition commemorating the presentation of the award to Yoko Ono at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. "It is greatly anticipated that this commemorative exhibition will help communicate, from Hiroshima to the world, the messages of Yoko Ono that are rich with the inspiration of the abolition of nuclear weapons and the creation of a world without war, and it is thought that the exhibition will have a great effect on garnering attention to this Hiroshima Art Prize across the globe." The 8th Hiroshima Art Prize: THE ROAD OF HOPE - YOKO ONO 2011,  Saturday July 30th to Sunday October 16. www.hcmca.cf.city.hiroshima.jp

Magic for Beginners

Olaf Breuning, Emmanuelle 2009

Jesse McLean, Magic For Beginners 2010, 20 min video

Ten artists are a part of a group show entitled Magic For Beginners at P.P.O.W. Gallery in NYC–including Bas Jan Ader and Olaf Breuning. "Their works concern themselves with an intensely personal present tense, with lives lived and documented in real time. These works are inward, solipsistic, and in some instances, similar to an occult experience or an exercise in ritualized revelation." Magic for Beginners  is on view from July 28 to August 27. www.ppowgallery.com

Pulp Art: The Robert Lesser Collection

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Robert Lesser began collecting pulp paintings, comic books, and comic-character toys in the 1950s. As a student at the University of Chicago, Lesser’s literature studies combined with his fascination with popular culture kindled his interest in studying and collecting pulp art and comic memorabilia....In 1975 he wrote A Celebration of Comic Art and Memorabilia, an informational collectors guide; in 1997 he published Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines, a full-color collection of pulp paintings and history that includes expert interpretation. The style of artwork created for pulp magazines is often compared to Norman Rockwell’s cover designs for the “Saturday Evening Post,” but the character of the paintings was quite disparate from Rockwell’s jovial depictions of everyday life. Pulp Art flaunted unsettling images of violence, racism, sex, and crime. The publishing houses that produced pulp fiction such as Popular Publications, Street & Smith, Condé Nast, and Frank A. Munsey Company destroyed much of the artwork produced for the magazines after printing. The images weren’t suitable for display in homes or museums so artists and auctioneers deemed them worthless. Tens of thousands of pulp paintings were created, out of which only a small number survive today.The 90 works on display at the Museum of American Illustration are now a part of the collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art, promised gift of Robert Lesser. Now on view until July 31. www.societyillustrators.com

Polka Dots Are a Way to Infinity: Yayoi Kusama

In the next year we'll be hearing a lot about Yayoi Kusama.  The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who Yoko Ono sites as an influence, was born in Japan in 1929 and at the age of ten started to paint her infamous polka-dots and net motifs. In a Yayoi Kusama universe things would look like what the world would look like if an obsessive compulsive God on a mushroom trip created it.  Yayoi Kusama says about polk-dots: "...a polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots become movement... Polka dots are a way to infinity." Kusama has also published many books including Manhattan Suicide Addict - a photographic and typographic treatise on the isolation of exile through the pure formation of art.   On view now at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid many of Yayoi Kusama's most personal works on view until September. The exhibition will then move to the Centre Pompidou in París, then to the Tate in London, and finally to the Whitney in New York.  www.museoreinasofia.es

Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre

MATTHEW STONE / RULES FOREVER (PART II)

In Stone's last exhibition at Union Gallery Forever Rules (Part I), Stone presented a single sculpture in the center of the gallery and 3 photo-collage works on wood. The sculpture and also main focus of the exhibition was an oak and birch floor-based sculpture, a structure entirely hand built by the artist, titled “Forever Rules”. The sculpture was formed in part by an open sided, oak dodecahedron, its pentagonal facets creating a complex, net-like form. In Plato's divine geometry, the dodecahedron is described as a perfect solid. Historically it has been attached to the concept of a fifth element, namely Ether (Aether) or Universe. It has represented the perfect mediation of the infinite and the finite, the sphere and the cube.  For his second part exhibition Rules Forever (Part II), Stone will continue honoring Plato and will present a much larger sculptural element comprising four oak structures, but instead of a large photographic nude, cut into hundreds of wooden squares that passes through the structure, as in the show before, the artist has decided to cluster the structure with photographic collages, printed directly onto birch plywood. These digitally collaged configurations of torso and limb, show bodies intertwined and connected. Unmistakable as Stone's work, the gestures and classical poses of his languorous figures are intersected by areas of new color, cut, if only to reconnect, along unnatural, directional and geometric bias. On view until July 30 at the Union Gallery in the UK. www.union-gallery.com

HENNESSY X KAWS

Hennessy, the number one selling cognac in the world, just announced their exclusive Hennessy V.S bottle collaborative project with the artist KAWS, which will hit shelves in September 2011. In addition to the limited edition bottle, the duo will create multiple digital shorts, which will be distributed throughout the year. There will also be a private launch party in NYC this month. Stay tuned for an interview with KAWS in the first issue of Autre Quarterly. www.hennessy.com

Todd Eberle: Empire of Space

...The Empire of Space is a lavish look at Eberle’s career and features many rare and never-before-published portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and interiors. In the spirit of Walker Evans, Eberle creates an enduring and poetic portrait of America, the arts, and architecture through thoughtfully contrasting and analogous photographs. This exciting and definitive book on Eberle’s illustrious legacy is sure to rank among the most important publications to mix modernism, minimalism, and photography. www.rizzoliusa.com

POLLY MORGAN 'Burials'

....Polly Morgan is at the very forefront of modern taxidermy. She has contributed to a shift in public perception that has taken ‘the art of preparing, stuffing and mounting the skins of animals with lifelike effect’ to places never dreamed of by its original Victorian practitioners. The vitrines are still there but little else remains. Birds are taken out of their natural habitat and are reassembled, often in mass, creating sculptures of astonishing and often disquieting beauty. For ‘Psychopomps’ at Haunch of Venison last year, this theme of disintegration and recomposition was keenly explored. ‘Burials’ takes this idea to its logical end, interment and then potential rebirth elsewhere. ‘The coffin’ (Carrion Call), with its shrieking chicks, makes a welcome return, this time transported to the dimly-lit backroom of a Venetian palazzo; Count Dracula’s transportation of his own coffins from Transylvania to Carfax Abbey in London, performs an almost perfect reverse. A sense of imprisonment and the futility of escape dominates this exhibition, escape is actually, both metaphorically and physically, an unlikely possibility. Three new-style works adorn the walls, in the shapes of a spade, a coffin-lid and a headstone respectively. Other large-scale pieces that further celebrate the themes of rebirth and spring are also included in the form of an ancient (much twisted) maypole and a scorched flying machine held aloft by flame-orange finches and canaries. Polly Morgan 'Burials,' her first solo show in Italy, is on view until July 22 at the Workshop Arte Contemporanea in Venice - www.workshopvenice.com

[ART IN THE DESERT] Holographic Heart

Curated by Maximilla Lukacs the Red Arrow Gallery in Joshua Tree hosts Holographic Heart: Images of Ecstatic Tradition and Ritual from the HERE and NOW. On view will be photography by Eliot Lee Hazel, Logan White, Alison Scarpulla, Adarsha Benjamin, Yelena Yemchuk, Todd Weaver, Galen Pehrson, Jena Malone and more.  July 9 at the Red Arrow Gallery from 7 to 9 p.m 61597 29 Palms Hwy Joshua Tree, CA.

Glamour of the Gods

Leo (John Gilbert) kisses Felicitas (Greta Garbo) in Flesh and the Devil (1926)

Glamour of the Gods is a celebration of Hollywood portraiture from the industry's 'Golden Age', the period 1920 to 1960. From Greta Garbo and Clark Gable to Audrey Hepburn, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, it is these portraits that transformed actors and actresses into international style icons. In many cases these are the career-defining images of Hollywood's greatest names and help to illustrate their enduring appeal. Featuring over 70 photographs, most of which are exquisite vintage prints displayed for the first time, the exhibition is drawn from the extraordinary archive of the John Kobal Foundation and demonstrate photography's decisive role in creating and marketing the stars central to the Hollywood mystique. Now on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London until October 23. www.npg.org.uk

[NOVELS] A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

"Based on a real case whose lurid details scandalized Americans in 1927 and sold millions of newspapers, acclaimed novelist Ron Hansen's latest work is a tour de force of erotic tension and looming violence. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Ruth Snyder is a voluptuous, reckless, and altogether irresistible woman who wishes not only to escape her husband but that he die—and the sooner the better. No less miserable in his own tedious marriage is Judd Gray, a dapper corset-and-brassiere salesman who travels the Northeast peddling his wares. He meets Ruth in a Manhattan diner, and soon they are conducting a white-hot affair involving hotel rooms, secret letters, clandestine travels, and above all, Ruth's increasing insistence that Judd kill her husband. Could he do it? Would he? What follows is a thrilling exposition of a murder plan, a police investigation, the lovers' attempt to escape prosecution, and a final reckoning for both of them that lays bare the horror and sorrow of what they have done. Dazzlingly well-written and artfully constructed, this impossible-to-put-down story marks the return of an American master known for his elegant and vivid novels that cut cleanly to the essence of the human heart, always and at once mysterious and filled with desire." More...