Big In Japan
Butoh dancer Yuko Kaseki
Big In Japan, which was established in June 2009 in Australia by fashion brand Ksubi and Kirin as a platform for cultural exchange, presents Big In Japan 2011 with art exhibitions and performances by leading experimental Japanese artists in Sydney and Melbourne such as Kyozin Yueni Dekai, OVe-NaXx, Fuyuki Yamakawa, Onnacodomo and Yuko Kaseki. This year the events take place at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney (November 15 and 16) and 1000 Pound Bend in Melbourne (November 18 and 19).
Douglas Gordon Retrospective
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Born in Glasgow in 1966, Douglas Gordon is today among the most important as well as the most influential artists of his generation. While he is famous for his films and large-scale video installations such as 24 Hours Psycho, his oeuvre also encompasses photographs, texts, sculptures and sound installations. In addition to Play Dead; Real Time, one of Gordon’s chief pieces, the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst also has a number of other photo and video works by this artist in its holdings. Together they will provide the point of departure for the first major retrospective to be presented on Douglas Gordon in Europe since his show at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2007. With his analyses of images drawn from the collective memory and everyday culture, Gordon exposes basic patterns of perception. Within this framework, his works often revolve around phenomena of duplication and reflection: the couple, the double, light and dark, guilt and justice, etc. His latest work is entitled k.364, which stands for “Köchelverzeichnis No. 364”, the Köchel catalogue number assigned to the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Vienna in 1779. After hearing this work of chamber music in Poznań (Poland), Gordon organized another performance of it with the well-known musicians Avri Levitan (viola), Roi Shiloah (violin) and the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of Polish Radio. The musicians’ journey from Berlin to Warsaw by way of Poznań and the performance of the symphony in Warsaw account for the major proportion of the film. The two musicians’ conversations on their way to Poland reveal that their pasts, and those of their parents, are complexly interwoven with German-Polish relations, and above all with the history of the Polish Jews during World War II. The new film k.364 will be supplemented with the pieces by Gordon in the MMK collection and a large number of other prominent works of the past years to form a comprehensive exhibition – the first to assemble the latest works and thus to provide a concentrated and impressive overview of this multifaceted artist’s oeuvre. On view from November 19 to March 25 at the Museum für Moderne Kunst.
Hot Voodoo
Short film, by Sarah Keeling and Elva Rodrigruez, shot live at Piers Atkinson's SS12 presentation at the Sanderson Hotel. Pier's showcases his brand new millinery collection, collaborating with Zandra Rhodes for printed swimsuits and Charlotte Olympia for footwear, all styled Kim Howells.
Ancestor Skull
Ancestor skull covered in feathers from Papa New Guinea at the De Young museum. Photograph by Oliver Maxwell Kupper.
Talking Pictures
Talking Pictures brings together over 200 black and white images culled from Ellen Graham’s work for such magazines as People and Time, her personal archives, and her collection of family photographs. Each photograph is accompanied by a personal narrative that takes you behind the scenes of these celebrated images and breathes life into the glamour of Hollywood’s golden age. Each portrait captures a rare and unguarded moment in the lives of these highly-photographed stars, giving a truly intimate and fresh look at such legendary figures as Frank Sinatra, Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, and Prince Albert of Monaco. Whether shooting actors, performers, or European royalty, Graham redefines the resonating myths that have come to surround these iconic characters. Ellen Graham: Talking Pictures is out now on Pointed Lead Press.
Kim Fowley
"A rare and exclusive glimpse" into the bedroom of record producer, and manager of The Runaways, Kim Fowley, and his new act Brianna Garcia. Photograph by Brad Elterman.
California Song
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Exhibition view of Hedi Slimane’s California Song now on view at MoCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. Photograph by Hedi Slimane
No Age
No Age performs at Hedi Slimane’s opening of California Song at MoCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. Photograph by Hedi Slimane
Performance at Hedi Slimane's Opening
Performance at Hedi Slimane's opening of California Song at MoCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. Photograph by Hedi Slimane
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.
FRANCESCA WOODMAN at the SF MOMA
Francesca Woodman retrospective at the SF MOMA.
Raku-Yaki
Raku-yaki means ‘enjoyment’ or ‘ease’. In this exhibition photographer Lena Modigh and illustrator Saga-Mariah Sandberg collaborate to create a unique collection of images inspired by ‘Japanese thinking’ and ‘Purity’. Raku Yaki is on view at the Scarlett Gallery in Stockholm until November 12.
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.
Homage to Yves Klein
Through 11 paintings, 9 of which have been created for the show, Takashi Murakami juxtaposes his work directly with Klein’s in an new exhibition presented by Perrotin Gallery in Paris, entitled Takashi Murakami: Homage to Yves Klein, on view until July 2012.
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
