Nate Lowman: Thirty Million Dollar Smile

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Triple A is a two-year public art project initiated by Francois Ghebaly, Emma Gray, Mandrake Bar and OHWOW gallery. Eight internationally recognized artists will be asked to create a single color image to be painted at large scale on the exterior wall of a former muffler shop that sits at the corner of Venice Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard, just south of the 10 Freeway in Los Angeles California. The wall, situated in the Culver City gallery district, also sits at one of the most heavily trafficked intersections in Los Angeles.This location offers high visibility to both arts professionals and the larger general public. The eight images painted on the wall over the course of the project will also be used to create a suite of eight individual silkscreen prints in an edition of ten. The inaugural project, a wall painting by New York based artist Nate Lowman, is now on view. Lowman's piece, Thirty Million Dollar Smile, is a halftone transfer of a photograph of Julia Roberts originally taken for a Loreal campaign, but later rejected by Roberts because she felt the image was over-photoshopped. The mural is located at 2600 South La Cienega Blvd.

KC Ortiz & POSE: Whitewash

On Saturday, November 19, graffiti artist POSE and photojournalist KC Ortiz will unveil Whitewash, their second exhibition at Known Gallery in Los Angeles, and their most cohesive to date. For POSE, Whitewash references society’s attempt to eradicate graffiti and stifle human expression. “Shortly after I started writing graffiti, Chicago took an extremely hard-line stance on its eradication, outlawing the sale of spraypaint and implementing Mayor Dayley’s Graffiti Blasters program,” POSE explains. With this exhibition, POSE will recall a time before the buff. “I am digging into my fondest childhood memories of riding the train and seeing all the colors, letters and cartoon characters along the lines. Making these paintings has been an incredibly rich process, and it makes me thankful that no city official can eradicate my memories.” POSE will show 15 new works in the main gallery. For KC, Whitewash is about the people and places he photographs. “Much of the work I do covers those who have been ‘whitewashed,’ so to speak, by history and policy,” KC notes. “Specifically, the work I will be exhibiting is from West Papua and Burma. You won’t find either of those ‘nations’ on the map, as both have been essentially ‘whitewashed’ away. Burma has been renamed Myanmar by its ruling junta in order to establish the fantasy of a unified nation, and West Papua has been occupied by Indonesia since 1963 after a very controversial handover from the Dutch that was orchestrated by the United States.” In the project room, KC will show 12 photographs of West Papua and Burma’s armed struggles. Whitewash will be on view from November 19 to to December 1o at Known Gallery. 

EVA & ADELE Part of Survey of Recent Drawing

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EVA & ADELE claim to have to come to the future and say they have invented a new sex. EVA & ADELE are now part of a survey of artists form London and Berlin, entitled LONDON/BERLIN: Anschlüssel, on view until next month at the Center for Recent Drawing. This survey, curated by Andrew Hewish, seeks to present the vibrancy and depth of drawing production in London and Berlin. From recent graduates to the well established, these artists operate from within an understanding of the complexities of drawing values, of Anschlüssel: speculative, connective, playful - unlocking links wherever a line might lead. In bridging the space between these two metropolises, we find similar polyglot populations, artists from all over the world working in these cities, and with a similar breadth of expressive possibilities that reflect the exchange of ideas and forms in a globalized field.

ED WOOD'S SLEAZE PAPERBACKS

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"LET ME DIE IN DRAG!" Ed Wood, cinema auteur of the ultimate b-grade weird in the Hollywood miasma of sleaze and degradation, best known for his films Plan 9 from Outer Space or Glen Or Glenda, was also a writer of dirty books. Next week in New York a collection of Wood's rare X-rated fiction will be on display in New York at the Boo-Hooray gallery in New York City. The antiquarian mystique surrounding Edward Davis Wood Jr.’s career as an author of pornographic pulp fiction is legend. He wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, books were published and re-published under different titles, and occasionally under different author names. Multiple authors would share the same pseudonym, and the companies that published the titles weren’t the kind of operations that kept any kind of records, nor paid royalties, nor really existed in the manner that most are to expect of book publishers.  His descent into alcoholism and poverty was mirrored by the publishers that employed him. Towards the end of his life he wrote pornography with decreasing amounts of the strange flourishes of his eccentric personality. He died in 1978 of an alcohol-induced heart attack. His friends say the porn killed him. Ed Wood's Sleaze Paperbacks will be on view at the Boo-Hooray Gallery in NYC from November 2 to December 1.

Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties

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How did American artists represent the Jazz Age? The exhibition Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties at the Brooklyn Museum brings together for the first time the work of sixty-eight painters, sculptors, and photographers who explored a new mode of modern realism in the years bounded by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression. Throughout the 1920s, artists created images of liberated modern bodies and the changing urban-industrial environment with an eye toward ideal form and ordered clarity—qualities seemingly at odds with a riotous decade best remembered for its flappers and Fords. Artists took as their subjects uninhibited nudes and close-up portraits that celebrated sexual freedom and visual intimacy, as if in defiance of the restrictive routines of automated labor and the stresses of modern urban life. Reserving judgment on the ultimate effects of machine culture on the individual, they distilled cities and factories into pristine geometric compositions that appear silent and uninhabited. American artists of the Jazz Age struggled to express the experience of a dramatically remade modern world, demonstrating their faith in the potentiality of youth and in the sustaining value of beauty. Youth and Beauty will present 140 works by artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Demuth, Aaron Douglas, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Luigi Lucioni, Gerald Murphy, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.  Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties is on view until January 29, 2012 at the Brooklyn Museum. 

The Mexican Suitcase

Robert Capa, [Ernest Hemingway (third from the left), New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews (second from the left) and two Republican soldiers, Teruel, Spain], late December 1937

The Mexican Suitcase will for the first time give the public an opportunity to experience images drawn from this famous collection of recovered negatives. In December 2007, three boxes filled with rolls of film, containing 4,500 35mm negatives of the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim (David Seymour)—which had been considered lost since 1939—arrived at the International Center of Photography. These three photographers, who lived in Paris, worked in Spain, and published internationally, laid the foundation for modern war photography. Their work has long been considered some of the most innovative and passionate coverage of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Many of the contact sheets made from the negatives will be on view as part of the exhibition, which will look closely at some of the major stories by Capa, Taro, and Chim as interpreted through the individual frames. These images will be seen alongside the magazines of the period in which they were published and with the photographers' own contact notebooks. On view now at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya until January 15.

The Empire of Death

Tonight in Glendale, California – Paul Koudounaris discusses his new book The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses. Paul Koudounaris takes the reader on an unprecedented international tour of macabre and devotional architectural masterpieces in nearly 20 countries. This is the first book to bring together the world's most important charnel sites, ranging from the crypts of the Capuchin monasteries in Italy and the skull-encrusted columns of the ossuary in Évora in Portugal, to the strange tomb of a 1960s wealthy Peruvian nobleman decorated with the exhumed skeletons of his Spanish ancestors. Illustrated with specially taken photographs of sites rarely open to the public and forgotten archive images of others long destroyed, this mesmerising, shocking and deeply moving book is an essential memento mori for our modern age. Tonight, October 27, at the Brand Library Recital Hall – 1601 West Mountain Street – Glendale, California. 

Mummy, I’m scarrred!

Japan electro-pop sensation Trippple Nippple will perform

Tokyo – Art Gig 2 – with the theme Mummy, I'm Scarrred, by curator Shai Ohayon:  "The ghosts themed art happening will be presented at an abandoned hospital in Hatsudai, Shibuya ward, Tokyo. The hospital, which has been abandoned now for a few years, is still intact with the original furniture, equipment and fixtures and is usually let to film crews to shoot on location. We are intending to use the basement of the hospital which consists of a large furnished room in the center of the basement for performances, while the interconnected rundown rooms and corridors will be used as exhibition spaces. We intend for the exhibition rooms and the corridors to be left pitch-black and visitors will be instructed to bring torches (flashlights) to negotiate through the space. The venue is truly creepy and surreal. We aim to present some 15 local and international artists along with music and performance art pieces and transform the entire venue into an improvised art gallery. Artworks will include pieces of many disciplines and site-specific installations, using the walls, the hospital beds, old equipment, decaying tatami rooms, old kitchen and morgue. Artists are asked to present works that reflect their practice and that deals directly with their notion or understanding of the theme. Attendance to the event is free-of-charge to the public and visitors will be encouraged to explore the space, engage with the artworks and to enjoy the array of performances that will be featured as part of the event. As we did in the last event, we will have at the end of the night also a raffle with gifts from a variety of art and culture related organisations and businesses. In addition, with the proximity of the event to Halloween we will also host a costume competition in collaboration with Impossible Project." On view this Sunday, October 30.  www.artgigtokyo.com

MURDER AND MANSLAUGHTER: AN EXHIBITION ABOUT LIFE

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The commandment “Thou shalt not kill” is a value deeply rooted in our culture. And yet murder and manslaughter are committed every day, everywhere in the world. Whether in the media, in films or in literature, we are continually confronted with descriptions of capital crimes, real or invented, which bring us face to face with taboo or extreme areas of human behavior. On the one hand, these stories satisfy a widespread morbid curiosity and craving for sensation. On the other, they encourage discussion within society about how to deal with murderers and other killers, and about the causes of the crime. On view now at the Historisches Museum Bern, an exhibition entitled Murder and Manslaughter. An Exhibition About Life–  15 separate display areas, you can learn more about the subject of murder and manslaughter: the topics range from the question of the value of human life via murderous gods, war, terrorism, killing sprees, and spectacular murders and murderers, to detection and the problems of punishment and prevention. Exhibits from the Historisches Museum Bern and from the collections of a number of very different institutions at home and abroad have been combined with photographs, excerpts from documentary and feature films, texts, audios, sounds and music, to encourage reflection. The exhibition “Murder and Manslaughter” illuminates the phenomenon of violent crime in its different dimensions, in history and today. The subtitle: “An Exhibition about Life” sets the tone: “Murder and Manslaughter” is life-affirming. In the face of testimony from the past and the present, you will become more aware of the value of life.

Tobias Zielony: Manitoba

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On view at the MMK ZOLLAMT – Tobias Zielony's “Manitoba” is a series of works capturing the lives of teenage gang members of Native American origin in their urban surroundings in Winnipeg, the provincial capital of the Canadian state of Manitoba. In the tradition of the classical photojournalistic feature, Zielony makes use here of various pictorial genres, presenting individual portraits and group photos in which the gang members pose, as well as views of the architecture and landscape in Winnipeg and on a reservation. Apart from his subjects’ globalized dress codes and gestures, what interests the artist most are the specific regional histories of the Native Americans in their socio-economic context. Likewise to be shown at the MMK Zollamt, the film The Deboard (2008) is dedicated to the story of a gang member’s withdrawal from his gang. The term “deboard” refers to the exit ritual a person must subject himself to before he can begin a new life as a free man. In his film, Zielony impressively combines coarse-grained black-and-white scenes of the ex-convict’s environment with the subject’s own account of his withdrawal from the gang.The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue documenting the artist’s working process. Tobias Zielony: Manitoba will be on view at the MMK Zollamt from November 12 to January 15.

The Artistic Vision of Shen Wei

On view tonight in Reggio Emilia, Italy, is a very special site specific dance performance by choreographer Shen Wei, held in the galleries of the Collezione Maramotti – a beautiful collection of art founded by the by the family of the Max Mara fashion house. Shen Wei, master of the art of total dance, miraculously balanced between East and West, is an accomplished choreographer, director, dancer, painter, photographer and artistic director of Shen Wei Dance Arts, one of the most interesting groups in the world of dance. In Shen Wei's latest work, developed specifically for the Collezione Maramotti, Shen Wei presents (21 and 23 October) a new, site-specific creation, an original choreographed piece inspired by works in the permanent collection. In this new piece, the conventional perspective of the gallery visitor is redirected, spectators instead become witnesses and participants in a dialogue that feeds off the exchange of energies between the dancers and the works. Shen Wei's intention is thus to reveal a different framework that might enable visitors to consider works of contemporary art from a new and personal point of view.

Erotic Da Vinci

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Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian renaissance polymath, genius, is widely reported to be gay, but his portraits of the women in his lifetime have the subtly sexualized charge of a man infatuated. If you stare closely Da Vinci's portrait of Cecilia Gallerani stroking an ermine, as part of series painted in the Court of Milan, is suggestive in and of its hinting of the ermine's phallic symbolism, but also the thematic ambiguous grin of the girl herself.  ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan,’ now on view at the National Gallery in London, is the most complete display of Leonardo’s rare surviving paintings ever held. This unprecedented exhibition – the first of its kind anywhere in the world. On view from November 9 to February 5.

Haute Culture

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General Idea was founded in Toronto in 1969 by Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson. The collective interrogated media image culture through now legendary projects like File magazine, as well as paintings, installations, sculptures, mail art, photographs, videos, ephemera, TV programs and even a beauty pageant. The group’s transgressive concepts and provocative imagery challenged social power structures and traditional modes of artistic creation in ever-shifting ways, until Partz and Zontal’s untimely deaths from AIDS-related causes in 1994. Curated by Paris-based independent curator Frédéric Bonnet, Haute Culture: General Ideais the first comprehensive retrospective devoted to the collective. The exhibition is organized around five themes, each central to the trio’s production: “the artist, glamour and the creative process”; “mass culture”; “architects/archaeologists”; “sex and reality”; and “AIDS." Haute Culture: General Idea is on view until January 1 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. 

The Kiss At Turner

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Auguste Rodin’s life-size marble sculpture The Kiss (1901-04) will be installed at the Sunley Gallery at Turner Contemporary. On loan from the Tate collection and one of the most iconic images of sexual love, The Kiss was voted the nation’s favorite work of art in a 2003 poll. The embracing couple come from a true thirteenth century story of forbidden love, which was immortalized in Dante’s Inferno and by many artists since. The couple are the adulterous lovers Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, who were slain by Francesca’s outraged husband. They appear in Dante’s Inferno, which describes how their passion grew as they read the story of Lancelot and Guinevere together. At the time, the perceived eroticism of Rodin’s sculpture was controversial leading to instances where the work was removed from public view.

[BOOKS] Journey Into The Abyss

Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918, a collection of fascinating, never-before-published early diaries of Count Harry Kessler—patron, museum director, publisher, cultural critic, soldier, secret agent, and diplomat—present a sweeping panorama of the arts and politics of Belle Époque Europe, a glittering world poised to be changed irrevocably by the Great War. Kessler’s immersion in the new art and literature of Paris, London, and Berlin unfolds in the first part of the diaries. This refined world gives way to vivid descriptions of the horrific fighting on the Eastern and Western fronts of World War I, the intriguing private discussions among the German political and military elite about the progress of the war, as well as Kessler’s account of his role as a diplomat with a secret mission in Switzerland. The diaries present brilliant, sharply etched, and often richly comical descriptions of his encounters, conversations, and creative collaborations with some of the most celebrated people of his time: Otto von Bismarck, Paul von Hindenburg, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Sarah Bernhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Marie Rilke, Paul Verlaine, Gordon Craig, George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville-Barker, Max Klinger, Arnold Böcklin, Max Beckmann, Aristide Maillol, Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, Éduard Vuillard, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Ida Rubinstein, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Pierre Bonnard, and Walther Rathenau, among others. Remarkably insightful, poignant, and cinematic in their scope, Kessler’s diaries are an invaluable record of one of the most volatile and seminal moments in modern Western history. You can purchase the book here.