A pop-up exhibition and zine release by UK photographer Dan Boulton showing work from his long term project documenting the skateboards at London's notorious rough and ready Southbank. On view for one night, August 24, at Book and Job Gallery, 838 Geary Street, San Francisco.
The Belgian photographer Martine Franck, widow of the famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), died of cancer at the age of 74 in Paris last week.
Russian punk band and feminist collective Pussy Riot are facing up to 7 years in prison for "hooliganism on the grounds of religious hatred" after singing a peaceful protest song in Russia's main orthodox church. The detained include Maria Alekhina, 24, poet and student at the Institute of Journalism and creative writing; she is also a mother of 5 year-old boy, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 23, visual artist and 4th year philosophy student, and mother of 4 year-old girl, and Ekaterina Samucevich, 29, visual Artist, degree from the Alexander Rodchenko school of photography and multimedia. To help in the legal defense to release three young women simply standing up for their beliefs and freedom click here.
Visionaire (the limited-edition multi-format art and fashion publication) and Paddle8 (the online art market) have together commissioned ten 3D photographs of legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer most iconic work -- built from the 1940s through 90s in Sao Paolo, Brasilia and Rio -- that will be released in September 2012 (coinciding with the opening of the Sao Paolo Biennial) as a limited-edition slide portfolio designed to accompany the new Visionaire 62 RIO issue, which comes packaged with a stereoscope in a lenticular case. The idea is to experience these iconic buildings via sophisticated 3-D photography, as never before seen. The slide portfolio, produced in an edition of 200, will be available for pre-order exclusively at Paddle8.com beginning today. Also on this date, Paddle8.com will release a web-only exhibition featuring the 3D photos as well as a rare, exclusive audio interview with the 104-year-old architect and archival materials from his studio like blueprints and family photos.
Film still from Stephen Dwoskin's short experiment film Dirty. Dwoskin recently died in London at the age of 73.
The Humping Pact was developed by two venture fiction entrepreneurs, Diego Agullo and Dmitry Paranyushkin, in the field of polysingularity, during a residency at PACT Zollverein center for performance and choreography in Essen, Germany. What is a venture fiction entrepreneur? Venture fiction is "a practice of creating enterprises in order to communicate ideas and not the other way round. Each enterprise proposes its own system of perception with multiple solutions. It is not there to make a statement or to generate profits. It is there to propose its own world, behavior, and episteme." Diego Agullo and Dmitry Paranyushkin's mission is to get their humpers to hump all around the world as an "aesthetic meditation on the human desire to believe in the futile and to conceive the impossible." The Humping Pact's mission is spread by a number of mediums which include exhibitions, live performances, film showings, projections, photo prints and press publications. The Humping Pact's new "mission" will premiere at Beursschowburg in Brussels on October 5 2012.
In 1973, An American Family was the most controversial and talked-about television program of its era. Anticipating the current deluge of ‘reality TV’ programming by three decades. The program chronicles seven months in the lives of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California. The Louds were selected as an emblematic nuclear family pulled apart by the cultural shifts that marked America’s transition into the 1970s. Filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond captured 300 hours of film that were edited to 12 one-hour episodes aired weekly on PBS. The series quickly became a national media event viewed by an audience of 10 million people. The ensuing depictions of divorce, West Coast affluence, and open homosexuality provoked a fervent public debate about the nation’s value system, its attitudes towards family and sexuality. An American Family was among the first television series to transform ‘ordinary people’ into media celebrities. During the series’s second episode, Lance Loud, who had left Santa Barbara to pursue a more bohemian life in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, became arguably the first openly gay man on American television. On 22 December 2001, aged 50, Loud died of liver failure caused by hepatitis C and HIV co-infection. Having lived his youth onscreen in living rooms across America, several months before his death Loud asked Alan and Susan Raymond to film one final episode in the Loud story up until his death. The resulting documentary, Lance Loud! A Death in An American Family, commemorates the 30th anniversary of the original broadcast and explores Loud’s legacy. On July 4, presented by The Hepatitis C Trust and Tate Modern, celebrates the life of television and underground icon Lance Loud to raise awareness about HIVand hepatitis C co-infection. The screening of An American Family, episode 2 (1973, 60 min) and Lance Loud! A Death in An American Family (2003, 60 min) will be followed by a discussion with filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond. Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium, Wednesday July 4, Bankside, London, SE1 9JE
Last night at a fête in Los Angeles Dom Pérignon unveiled its newest collaboration with cult auteur David Lynch. Dom Pérignon presents the "Dom Pérignon by David Lynch" limited edition. After photographing the bottles of Dom Pérignon and Dom Pérignon Rosé, David Lynch has reinvented them. The "Dom Pérignon by David Lynch" limited edition takes the form of two gift boxes: one for Dom Pérignon Vintage 2003, the other for Dom Pérignon Rosé Vintage 2000. They will be available at the end of the year.
In Quantum Light, artist David Benjamin Sherry’s second publication, he continues his exploration of vivid color, ramping up the saturation and expanding his subject matter, in works incorporating landscapes, collage, still life, abstraction, portraiture and sculpture. A conversation between Sherry and Collier Schorr serves as preface to this beautifully produced clothbound volume, which is published to coincide with the artist’s first New York solo show at Salon 94. Sherry will be signing his new book this Thursday, June 21, at Ooga Booga bookstore in Los Angeles.
James Franco and merry band of pranksters, including Adarsha Benjamin, covered in red paint and feathers during a performance at the Rebel exhibition now on view through June 23 at the MOCA, 941 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90038.
Premiering today as part of Art Unlimited at Art Basel 2012, pop artist Richard Phillips’ short film entitled First Point featuring Lindsay Lohan. Richard Phillips has been exploring the production of film and photographic media as a means of expanding beyond the appropriation strategies that have defined his work in the past by painting unique portraits from his own films which he stages and shoots himself. He completed his first two films, Lindsay Lohanand Sasha Grey, in the spring of 2011 for the Commercial Break film project presented concurrently to the Venice Biennale. First Point–Phillips' third film—is a collaboration between the artist, Lindsay Lohan, and the legendary surf filmmaker Taylor Steele. The film visits two locations: a private beach surf compound and Malibu's iconic Surfrider Beach, accessible to the public, which boasts some of California's most perfect waves. First Point presents a postmodern take on the surf film genre through an abstract framework of imagery in which the actress engages in cinema performance tropes inspired by contemporary film noir. Presented by Gagosian Gallery, First Point will premier as part of Art Basel's Art Unlimited which will see its invitation only, VIP release today and a public opening on June 14 until June 17.
SCREW YOU, curated by David Platzker of Specific Object, shines a light on the intersection of counterculture publishing, tabloid pornography and the art world which occurred in the creatively fertile years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. SCREW YOU draws its title and inspiration from the notorious pornographic tabloid Screw: The Sex Review, which came onto the New York scene November 29, 1968. Nestling porn and fine art side by side between the sheets, content ranged from spreads of large breasted women illuminating such erudite articles as “The Art of Buying Dirty Books” to centerfolds conceived by and featuring artist Yayoi Kusama. Issues of Screw throughout the late 1960s and the early 1970s embraced a cultural breadth spanning art, advertising and editorial. Contributors from the realm of visual culture included leading movers and shakers Dan Graham, Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.While Screw, Kiss, Pleasure, and Kusama’s own tabloid, Kusama’s Orgy of Nudity, Love, Sex Beauty, played to the strengths of the genre, contemporaneous periodicals such as New York Review of Sex and Politics, Other Scenes, The East Village Other and artist Les Levine’s Culture Hero favored a merging of literature and art in addition to its pansexual content. Notable contributors to these loftier publications included the writers Gregory Battcock, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski and artists Brigid Berlin, R. Crumb, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Carolee Schneemann, Bob Stanley, Walasse Ting, and Tadanori Yokoo, along with many others working in the realm of sex and sexual identity. SCREW YOU will be on view at Susan Inglett Gallery 31 May to 13 July.
Beginning June 6, 2012 the Barneys New York Madison Avenue flagship store’s windows will be transformed into dymamic vitrines for a public art exhibition organized in collaboration with DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, based in Athens, Greece. Conceived by DESTE’s founder, the internationally admired collector and patron Dakis Joannou, and Barneys Creative Director Dennis Freedman, this exhibition will present five ambitious site- specific installation projects by prominent artists in different disciplines. Each of the artists has participated since 2007 in destefashioncollection-- a DESTE Foundation special initiative devoted to investigating, interpreting and celebrating the complex relationships between art, fashion, and the culture at large. On view through July 4th, the project at Barneys New York will be the first U.S. presentation of destefashioncollection. The five participating artists are M/M (Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak) Paris; photographer Juergen Teller; artist Helmut Lang; poet Patrizia Cavalli; and filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari.
Last Tuesday The Hole Gallery in New York City presented the one night only photo exhibition by iO Tillett Wright entitled Self Evident Truths hosted by Terence Koh with a performance by CocoRosie. Prints on the wall sold for $10 each to support the continuing efforts of Self Evident Truth project. In 2010, Tillett Wright began a project titled Self Evident Truths, photographing anyone that felt like they qualified to fall on some part of the LGBTQ spectrum, from bisexual, to transgender. Shot in simple black and white, in natural light, with no makeup or styling, the photos emulate Avedon’s In The American West and August Sander’s People of the 20th Century, and are intended to humanize the very varied face of gays in America today.
by Danny Sangra
Artist Galen Pehrson's animated short, entitled El Gato, an erotic reinterpretation of Rebel Without a Cause, voiced by the likes of James Franco, Jena Malone, and Devendra Banhart is on view now as part of James Franco's Rebel.
James Franco & Adarsha Benjamin wearing Future Eyes last weekend in Los Angeles for Rebel festivities...
MOCA presents Rebel, conceived by James Franco with Douglas Gordon, Harmony Korine, Damon McCarthy, Paul McCarthy, Terry Richardson, Ed Ruscha, Aaron Young and more. Rebel will be on view from May 15 through June 23, 2012, at JF Chen, a newly emerging contemporary art and design space, located at 941 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90038. Photograph by Adarsha Benjamin
Vidal Sassoon, who died yesterday in Los Angeles, cuts Mia Farrow's famous pixie hair-style during filming of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby.