Guillaume Apollinaire's Little Auto

Guillaume Apollinaire – whose writings ranged from plays to experimental poetry, from art criticism to erotica – was at the heart of literary and artistic life in early 20th-century Paris. Both his work and his flamboyant personality had a defining influence on the development of Surrealism, Dadaism and other artistic movements. In late 1914 Apollinaire swapped the high life of avant-garde Paris for the mud and desolation of war in the trenches. But his poems of this period are wholly different from those that for English readers have come to define the genre of war poetry: exploding shells are compared to champagne bottles, and juxtaposed with the orgy of destruction are nostalgia for antiquity, impatience for the future, melancholy and exuberance. Apollinaire died in 1918. The new translations in this bilingual edition, entitled The Little Auto comprise mostly poems written after 1914, but include ‘Zone’ (in the first English version since Samuel Beckett’s to match the original’s use of rhyme) and some other pre-war poems. A century later, they remain as daring and alive as when they were written. [purchase]

Billy Monk's Nightclub Photography

A new book is available of Billy Monk's nightclub photography. Billy Monk worked as a bouncer in the notorious Catacombs club in the dock area of Cape Town, South Africa, during the 1960s. He originally began taking pictures in the club with the intention of selling the photographs to the customers – the people he was photographing. His aim was not to make a social statement, but his money-making scheme quickly turned into something else as he increasingly captured the raw energy of the club, its decadence and tragedy, its humanity and joy. As someone who shared the experiences of those club-goers he was trusted by them and was able to convey their world and their experience with great energy and honesty. As photographer David Goldblatt has written in the forward: “These are photographs by an insider of insiders for insiders. If inhibitions were lowered by the seemingly vast quantities of brandy and Coke that were imbibed, trust, nevertheless, is powerfully evident. Not simply in the raucous tweaking of bared breasts, or the more guarded but evident ‘togetherness’ of two bearded men, as well as the open flouting of peculiarly South African sanctions such as prohibitions on interracial sex. It is also present in the quiet composure of many of the portraits. People seemed to welcome and even bask in Monk’s attentions.” Monk stopped photographing at the club in 1969. Ten years later his contact sheets and negatives were discovered and in 1982 the work was exhibited at the Market Gallery in Johannesburg. Monk could not make the opening and two weeks later, en route to seeing the show, he became involved in an argument. A fight broke out, Monk was fatally shot in the chest and never saw his work exhibited. The book, Billy Monk: Nightclub Photographs, is now available.

Palm Springs Modernism Week

Today is the second day of the 2012 Modernism Week in Palm Springs, a 10-day festival that celebrates mid-century modern design, architecture and culture, and features over 80 events including home tours, films, lectures, fashion, and swank receptions at locations rarely-seen by the public. Modernism Week will commence on February 26.

Oliviero Toscani Launches New Calender

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Italian shock photographer Oliviero Toscani has released a new calendar at an unveiling in Florence, Italy -- a calendar featuring 12 penis close-ups in an ad for a group of companies that make naturally-tanned leather. The flamboyant photographer launched the calendar at an event in Florence also attended by famously well-endowed Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi, who said that people should "de-dramatise" sex and put an end to "bigotry". Toscani last year focused on women's genitalia for a calendar for the same Vera Pelle consortium, which brought censure from Italy's advertising watchdog.  Toscani is best known for his controversial ad campaigns for the Italian clothes maker Benetton, which itself courted controversy last year with a series of photo montages of rival world leaders kissing each other.

Catherine Deneuve Honored

Catherine Deneuve will receive the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 39th Chaplin Award on Monday, April 2, 2012 in New York City. The annual gala is the Film Society's largest annual fundraiser, benefiting the ongoing programs of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. At an Alice Tully Hall ceremony, an array of notable guests and celebrities will salute Catherine Deneuve. The evening will include films clips and a party to celebrate Deneuve's career in cinema.

Coming of Age in America

Coming of Age in America: The Photography of Joseph Szabo is the first museum retrospective of this Long Island photographer whose work presents a dual portrait of adolescence on Long Island and summers on the Island’s iconic Jones Beach. Szabo poignantly portrays teens on the cusp of adulthood, documenting his subjects in moments of uncertainty, reflection, longing, bravado, and exuberance. The restless teens and unselfconscious bathers seen in Szabo’s black and white photographs evoke timeless memories of our own, similar teenage years and summers at the beach. This exhibition opens tomorrow January 14 at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York and runs until March 25 (Heckscher Museum of Art 2 Prime Avenue Huntington, NY 11743).

Experimental Film in Los Angeles

Los Angeles Film Forum presents Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945 - 1980, an exploration of the community of filmmakers, artists, curators and programmers who contributed to the creation and presentation of experimental film and video in Southern California in the postwar era. This website is the culmination of three years of research into the archives of film venues and organizations, the recording of 35 oral histories, and the creation of a database, the first of its kind, which catalogs the films, exhibitions, organization, and people active during this prolific era in experimental film and video making. Alternative Projections is part of Los Angeles' sweeping exhibition of art in Los Angeles called Pacific Standard Time. Upcoming screenings of note include Strange Notes and Nervous Breakdowns: Punk and Media Art, 1974-1981, a collection of rarely screened performances by punk bands of the era, performance art, and D.I.Y. works by the Screamers, X, Suburban Lawns, Black Flag, Los Plugz, Johanna Went, and more (MOCA Ahmanson Theater, MOCA, 250 South Grand Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90012) on view January 12 at 7 p.m.

Photo50 at London Art Fair

Found photograph by Julie Cockburn

London Art Fair presents Photo50, its  annual showcase of contemporary photography at the  Business Design Centre, Islington, from 18–22 January 2012. With the title The New Alchemists: contemporary  photographers transcending the print, curator Sue Steward  has selected 50 works by contemporary artists whose practice sees them adorn, transform, subvert or deface the  photographic print. They are: Veronica Bailey, David Birkin, Aliki Braine, Julie Cockburn, Melinda Gibson, Noemie Goudal, Joy Gregory, Walter Hugo, Lesley Parkinson, Jorma Puranen, Esther Teichmann and Michael Wolf.  This exhibition focuses on new techniques and approaches to re-presenting the photographic image and how artists are involving other media. Whether reclaiming traditional techniques, exploiting digital developments or employing other forms of craft and media, the work presented in Photo50 challenges our assumptions about what a photograph is, or can be. London Art Fair is on view at the Design Center in Islington, London, January 18 to January 22, 

McQueen Motorcycles to Vegas Auction

Steve McQueen motorcycles are up for auction at the 21st Annual Las Vegas Motorcycle Auction and Races at the South Point Hotel & Casino Jan. 12-14 in Las Vegas. Not only will two of McQueen's classic motorcycles (1938 Triumph Speed Twin and 1940 Indian Four Cylinder) and a personal Bell (1970) helmet be on the block for the MidAmerica Auctions, but his widow, Barbara McQueen, will be serving as the guest of honor.

Funeral Songs

What song do you want played at your funeral? Daniel Mudie Cunningham has been asking that question of artists and art workers since 2007. Hundreds of people answered it in all manner of ways that ranged from the profound to the playful. The idea for Funeral Songs is based in personal experience. Weeks before the artist’s brother unexpectedly died in 2001, he’d mentioned what song should be played at his funeral. Amid the grief, the song choice was forgotten. Now recalled several years on, the song features in the Cunningham’s jukebox archive of music you can live or die to. Funeral Songs will be on view at the MONA (Museum of Old New Art) in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia,from January 13 to February 13, 2011 – the exhibition will also be a part of the annual MONA FOMA event (curated by Brian Ritchie, bass player for the Violent Femmes) which includes performances, art, and the like.

[BOOKS] The Last Nude

A stunning story of love, sexual obsession, treachery, and tragedy, about an artist and her most famous muse in Paris between the world wars. Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara's most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished-and coveted-works of art. A season as the painter's muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by history's darkening tide. Inspired by real events in de Lempicka's history, The Last Nude is a tour de force of historical imagination. Ellis Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives. Spellbinding and provocative, this is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance. [Find it here.]

Jacque Katmor is Wishing You a Good Death

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Sex, eroticism and Judaism – Israeli artist Jacque Katmor, who is all but forgotten today, is the subject of a retrospective of sorts at the Nachum Gutman Museum of Art in Tel Aviv starting January 13. Katmor, who died in 2001, will undoubtably be an artist posthumously appreciated for his genius.  Somewhat of a Kenneth Anger of the Israeli unground cinema movement in the 1960s, Katmor was a leader of the artist collective Third Eye. Erotically charged, drug induced, and psychedelic, Katmor's art and films dealt with not only a rapidly changing zeitgeist, but also Jewish identity and Kabbalistic mysticism. "Jacque Katmor is Wishing You a Good Death" is on view at the Nachum Gutman Museum of Art from January 13 to May 19, Shimon Rokach st 21, Neve Tzedek, Tel Aviv.

Marina Abramović: An Artist's Life Manifesto

On Saturday, November 12, renowned performance artist Marina Abramović brought her manifesto to Grand Avenue, as the artistic director of MOCA’s 2011 gala, An Artist’s Life Manifesto. Abramović arrived with 85 performers to serve as human centerpieces on dinner tables and enough white lab coats, her prescribed gala-tent attire, to outfit the 750 guests who attended.

CATHERINE OPIE

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents an exhibition of early and recent work by Catherine Opie. Opie is considered to be one of the most important American photographers of her generation. This is her fourth solo exhibition at the gallery and follows her highly acclaimed solo mid-career surveys at the Guggenheim, New York in 2008-2009 and at the ICA, Boston, earlier this year. Shown here for the very first time is an early group of portraits from the artist's black and white 'Girlfriends' series and a major new body of landscape photographs, taken at sea. On view until January 23, Stephen Friedman Gallery, 25-28 Old Burlington Street, London.

The Protest Box by Martin Parr

Martin Parr’s collection of photobooks is one of the finest to have ever been assembled and The Protest Box, published by Steidl, is a box set which brings together five books from that collection as facsimile reprints. Parr has selected diverse books which each deal with the subject of protest in quite different ways. From the documentation of various protest movements to the actual book being a form of protest, all these reprints are gems within the history of photographic publishing. A few are known but many are new, even to the connoisseur of photography books. All these books are virtually impossible to locate, so these reprints will make a substantial contribution to our understanding of this sub-genre of the photobook. The box set is accompanied by a booklet which includes an introduction by Martin Parr, an essay discussing the wider context of these books by Gerry Badger, and English translations of all the texts in the books.

The Syphilis of Sisyphus

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Fredericks & Freiser gallery in New York presents The Syphilis of Sisyphus,  a new short film by Mary Reid Kelley with artist Patrick Kelley. The exhibition includes a wall-sized projection with costumes and drawings used in the film’s creation. Reid Kelley’s second solo exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser encompasses a heightened level of visual complexity as it continues her exploration of language, history, anomie and sexual politics. On view until January 7.

Comics Stripped

Comics Stripped, an ongoing exhibition at the museum of sex in New York, examines the history and cultural significance of the illustrators, icons and images that have entertained and educated (as well as equally misinformed) the basics of sex. From the coquettish to the most explicit “dirty drawings,” the exhibit presents the ultimate homage to sexual fantasy uninhibited by the constraints of reality. From simple titillation to hardcore representations, comics have a long history of incorporating humor, scandal, fantasy and fun with sex. Originally used as a form of amusement and satire intended for adults, the societal perception of comics as wholesome entertainment geared toward children has made the inclusion of sexual content particularly jarring. Comics Stripped is on view at the Museum Of Sex until January 8, 2012, 233 5th Avenue, New York