Jill Greenberg's 'Glass Ceiling'

Los Angeles - photo of a billboard that was up until a few days ago on Sunset Boulevard featuring a photograph, as part of a series entitled entitled Glass Ceiling: American Girl Doll,  by Los Angeles based artist Jill Greenberg. Billboard was commissioned by LA><ART, a non-profit arts space, to serve as "a compelling juxtaposition of imagery and pictorial intent" in juxtaposition to the other billboards that line the famous boulevard. In 2010 Greenberg hired professional synchronized swimmers and photographed them while herself scuba diving in a Culver City swimming pool. She was severely physically restricted in a wetsuit, with over 50 pounds of scuba gear including an air tank, weights and a massive and state-of-the-art camera system with underwater lights, which captured the 180 megapixel images allowing for an unprecedented level of information in each image. Glass Ceiling marks Greenberg’s return to her explorations throughout the 90s of the depiction of the female body.

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. 

[BOOKS] WHITE RIOT

White Riot: Punk Rock And The Politics Of Race, a new anthology edited by NYU professor Stephen Duncombe and New School Ph.D. student and Maximumrocknroll writer Maxwell Tremblay, intersperses essays with primary documents like zines, interviews, song lyrics, and letters to tell the complicated story of punk rock and its relationship with race over the decades. Through the words of Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Patti Smith, Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, The Clash, Black Flag, and Tasha Fierce, the story moves from punk’s early articulation of whiteness in the U.S. and U.K. to Afro-Punk and faraway shores where punk has morphed into new, culture-specific forms. You can purchase the book here.

Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost

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Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Ernest Hemingway’s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide — a new book by Paul Hendrickson, entitled Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, traces the writer’s exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar.  We follow him from Key West to Paris, to New York, Africa, Cuba, and finally Idaho, as he wrestles with his best angels and worst demons. Whenever he could, he returned to his beloved fishing cruiser, to exult in the sea, to fight the biggest fish he could find, to drink, to entertain celebrities and friends and seduce women, to be with his children. But as he began to succumb to the diseases of fame, we see that Pilar was also where he cursed his critics, saw marriages and friendships dissolve, and tried, in vain, to escape his increasingly diminished capacities. "All things truly wicked start from innocence," E.H.

[BOOKS] Françoise Hardy by Jean-Marie Périer

I couldn't think of a cooler friend to have than Françoise Hardy. Since the 1960s photographer Jean-Marie Périer has taken over 200 photographs of the French pop icon – which are now presented in a new book, entitled Françoise Hardy par Jean-Marie Périer (Editions Du Chêne). On October 29th an exhibition with the same title will open at Galerie PHOTO12 in Paris: "For the very first time in Paris, an entire exhibition is dedicated to the iconic French singer of the sixties: Françoise Hardy. Through the eye of the famous photographer and long-time friend Jean-Marie Périer. The exhibition shows famous beautiful portraits of the star but also unpublished confidential photographs." 

The Art of Playboy

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NEW YORK, N.Y.- The Comic Art of Playboy: Over Five Decades of Illustration and Cartoons, more than 85 paintings, illustrations and cartoons that graced the legendary men's magazine - led by pieces like Alberto Vargas' Darling, It's My Hat I Want Your Opinion On, Vargas Girl Playboy Pin-Up from April 1963 - will be the draw for collectors, Oct. 22-23, in New York at The Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion (2 East 79th Street, at 5th Ave.)

NEW YORK: BOUNDARIES OBSCURED

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PATRICIA PICCININI, Silicon, fiberglass, human hair, clothing

Haunch of Venison Gallery presents New York: Boundaries Obscured which is on view now. Artists featured in Boundaries Obscured respond to the growing trend of globalization and the blurring of cultural and geographical boundaries as use of technology becomes more prevalent. Major cities and rural enclaves are no longer distinct entities that operate in opposite contexts. Thus the featured artists depict both urban and rural scenes, addressing universal issues such as war, violence, politics, sex and eroticism, drugs, class, science and technology, waste and excess. These works highlight the overwhelming difficulties and/or advantages of being an individual in a relentlessly encroaching mass of information and external pressure. The exhibiting artists represent the world’s global and diversified (yet interdependent) climate. The artists range in age from 32 to 76 years old and hail from a range of countries including Iraq, India, Sierra Leone, Germany and the United States. “By exhibiting a group of artists at different stages in their careers, who come from radically different backgrounds, we intend to create a dynamic dialogue between the artists,” said Steinberger. The exhibition will include a painting by renowned American artist Peter Saul, whose recent solo exhibition at Haunch of Venison received critical acclaim. Saul is celebrated for his politically charged paintings that comment ironically on current events and public figures. Another highlight of the exhibition is German sculptor Günther Uecker’s ‘Aschemensch (Ash Man)’, a seminal painting from the artist’s only figurative series. Uecker created the work in 1986 as a reaction to the Chernobyl catastrophe. The work features an ambiguous human figure engulfed in sporadic black drips of paint, alluding to the radioactive materials that invaded Chernobyl. New York: Boundaries Obscured is on view until November 3 at Haunch of Venison in New York – 550 West 21st Street. 

Hunky Dory

"Strange fascination, fascinating me," quoth David Bowie in his song Changes on the album Hunky Dory. Artist, photographer, online magazine editor, and purveyor of arts and culture Christopher Lusher, based in Huntington, West Virginia, is the progenitor of somewhat of an art scene in one of the oldest states and most forgotten states in America. Like the revolutionary abolitionist John Brown, a West Virginian who murdered slave owners and was ultimately hanged for treason, Lusher carries the same rough-hewn spirit of good old fashion men famous by the annals of American history who know the the true nature of freedom and liberty, and certain inalienable rights. Responsible for bringing Harmony Korine's film Trash Humpers to the 2010 Appalachian Film Festival, contributing to Purple Fashion Magazine's Purple Diary, and editing his own online publication Hillbilly Magazine, Lusher proves it is the power of the innate, inexorable, and mysterious spirit of creation that art can be born in any corner of any part of the world. On October 21 Christopher Lusher's solo art exhibition, entitled  Hunk Dory, will open at the Blank Gallery in West Virginia.

Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion

Vegas, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, 1966

Wet Magazine, April Greiman and Jayme Odgers

Of all movements in art and design history, postmodernism is perhaps the most controversial. This era defies definition, but it is a perfect subject for an exhibition. Postmodernism was an unstable mix of the theatrical and theoretical. It was visually thrilling, a multifaceted style that ranged from the colorful to the ruinous, the ludicrous to the luxurious. What they all had in common was a drastic departure from modernism’s utopian visions, which had been based on clarity and simplicity. The modernists wanted to open a window onto a new world. Postmodernism, by contrast, was more like a broken mirror, a reflecting surface made of many fragments. Its key principles were complexity and contradiction. It was meant to resist authority, yet over the course of two decades, from about 1970 to 1990, it became enmeshed in the very circuits of money and influence that it had initially sought to dismantle. Postmodernism shattered established ideas about style. It brought a radical freedom to art and design, through gestures that were often funny, sometimes confrontational and occasionally absurd. Most of all, postmodernism brought a new self-awareness about style itself. Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970 to 1990 is on view until January 15 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

30 Americans

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Xaviera Simmons, One Day & Back Then (Standing), 2007. Courtesy of Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

30 Americans is a wide-ranging survey of work by many of the most important African American artists of the last three decades. Selected from the Rubell Family Collection, the exhibition brings together seminal figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hammons with younger and emerging artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Shinique Smith. Often provocative and challenging, 30 Americans focuses on issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity in contemporary culture. It explores how each artist reckons with the notion of black identity in America, navigating such concerns as the struggle for civil rights, popular culture, and media imagery. At the same time, it highlights artistic legacy and influence, tracing subject matter and formal strategies across generations. 30 Americans consists of 76 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos, and includes spectacular works of art such as Leonardo Drew’s massive cotton and wax sculpture Untitled #25, several of Nick Cave’s exuberant Soundsuits, and a large-scale silhouette by Kara Walker. On view October 1 to February 12, 2012 at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washinton, DC.

TO LIFE, TO DEATH: Quinzaine Photographique Nantaise

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Nan Goldin - Battle of Sexual Dependency

Every year, by mid September, the city of Nantes celebrates photography. For the 15th year on a row, the Quinzaine Photographique Nantaise will be deployed all around the city from September 16th through October 16th, offering visitors free access to over twenty exhibitions. As many events of this kind, the festival will evolve around the theme “À la vie, à la mort” (To life, to death), the title for the 2011 edition.

Sidi Touré First Ever U.S. Tour

Sidi Touré made his first guitar as a child, constructing it from his wooden writing slate in the ancient town of Gao, Mali. Once the heart of the Songhaï empire and burial place of its Askia kings, the town rests between the Niger and the encroaching ocean of sand known as the Sahara Desert. The Songhai empire was the last of the great empires of the Sahel, reaching its zenith under Soni Alibert (Sunni Ali) in the mid 400’s. Sidi Touré was born here in 1959, but to be born a Touré, a noble family who trace their lineage directly from the Askia kings, carried a significance and onus of a past that reaches directly into the present. Like another Malian noble turned singer, Salif Keita, Sidi Touré faced a conflict between the inexorable pull of music and the expectations of family and society. Touré’s family had been sung about, and sung to, by traditional griots for centuries, but until a small boy challenged the rules, the Touré’s did not sing! Sidi Touré is currently on his first ever US tour in support of his 2011 release, Sahel Folk, via Thrill Jockey Records.

Double Solitaire

The Davis Museum at Wellesley college presents Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, the first major touring exhibition to explore the dynamic exchange of ideas that shaped the astonishing landscapes of these Surrealist artists. This groundbreaking exhibition, which features approximately 25 paintings along with selected ephemera by each artist, provides unprecedented access to the couple’s intertwined artistic and personal lives. Sage and Tanguy were inseparable throughout their 15-year marriage, sharing adjoining studios in Woodbury, CT and communicating only in French until Tanguy’s untimely death in 1955. As Karen Rosenberg writes in the New York Times, this “fascinating” exhibition “intently explores the couple’s sinister dreamscapes of polymorphous pebbles (his) and menacing monoliths (hers).” Both artists sought to create paintings that the French poet André Breton called “peinture-poésie,” a style influenced by poetry and dream-like imagery.  Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy is on view Oct. 19, 2011 - Jan. 15, 2012 - 106 Central Street Wellesley, MA, 02481

This Side of Paradise

From the pages of Jonas Mekas diary: “Unpredictably, as most of my life’s key events have been, for a period of several years in the late 60s and early 70s, I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy’s and her sister Lee Radziwill’s families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship. The time was still very close to the untimely, tragic, death of John F. Kennedy. Jackie wanted to give something to her children to do, to help to ease the transition of life without a father. One of her thoughts was that movie camera would be fun for the children. Peter Beard, who was at that time tutoring John Jr. and Caroline in art history, suggested to Jackie that I was the man to introduce the children to cinema. Jackie said yes. And that’s how it all began. I bought them a very easily operable 16mm movie camera, and even wrote a “mini-textbook” suggesting some simple movie exercises…The images in the exposition, with a few exceptions, they all come from the summers Caroline and John Jr. spent in Montauk, with their cousins Anthony and Tina Radziwill, in an old house Lee rented from Andy Warhol, for a few summers. Andy himself spent many of his weekends there, in one of the cottages, as did Peter Beard, whom the children had adopted almost like their older brother or a father they missed. There were summers of happiness, joy and continuous celebrations of life and friendships. These are ‘Little Fragments of Paradise.’ " Tomorrow night marks the opening of “This Side of Paradise,” an exhibition of photo prints taken from original 16mm film from Jonas Mekas’ celebrated film “This Side of Paradise: Fragments of an Unfinished Biography” (1999). The exhibition will mark the first time these rare and personal images of the Kennedy and Radziwill families are on view in NYC in their entirety. Opens September 24 at the Agnès B Gallerie Boutique - 50 Howard Street New York, NY.

Blooming in the Shadows

Contemporary Chinese art has taken the art world by storm in the last decade through heralded museum exhibitions, well-read publications, and heavily attended art auctions. However, even with all this attention, few exhibitions have asked the question of how, against the background of thirty-five years of Socialist Realism, this internationally-oriented artwork suddenly appeared and why it captured the attention of the international art market. Blooming in the Shadows: Unofficial Chinese Art, 1974 –1985 at the China Institute in New York will introduce the work of three unofficial Chinese art groups who worked in this vein: the No Names, the Stars, and the Grass Society, all of which arose following the end of the Cultural Revolution and helped launch the avant-garde movement in China. These artists pursued creatively diverse paths to personal artistic freedom under the harsh political circumstances of the time. Blooming in the Shadows will examine work produced by these three significant groups of young artists in the critical decade after the end of the Cultural Revolution leading up the Communist Party’s 1985 decision to allow modern artistic practices. On view until December 11 at the China Institute – 125 East 65th Street, New York.

Beyond Limits

CHATSWORTH, ENGLAND - The Duchess of Devonshire views the sculpture Burning Desire by Marc Quinn in the gardens of their home Chatsworth on September 9, 2011 in Chatsworth, England.  The work is part of the Beyond Limits exhibition of modern and contemporary sculpture displayed in the gardens of Chatsworth by Sotherby's between 9th September to 30th October 2011.  (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)