The Lost Rolling Stones Photographs

A revealing look at the earliest days of the legendary band, captured in a collection of personal, never-before-seen photographs—the largest single trove of such important rock images ever uncovered. You can find The Lost Rolling Stones Photographs: The Bob Bonis Archive, 1964-1966 here.

Laurel Nakadate: Only the Lonely

Laurel Nakadate is known for her works in video, photography, and feature-length film. This is Nakadate's first large-scale museum exhibition and will feature works made over the last ten years in all three media, including her early video works, in which she was invited into the homes of anonymous men to dance, pose, or even play dead in their kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms. Laurel Nakadate: Only the Lonely is on view January 23, 2011 - August 8, 2011 at the Moma P.S. 1.

Fingerbanging Amelia Earheart

If there was anything in the world to denote the end of artistic sanctity, it would be the work of photographer Jason Levins. Using old point and shoot cameras and disposable film has been done a million times. In the bleary eyed dystopic fantasy Jason Levins captures through his lens there is a sense of irony that peers through, like light through cracks in a pitch black church. And in the columns of  light we  find illuminated our youth like rats scurrying in the putrid rot of some alternate zeitgeist: pulling their balls out under tables, drinking pabst blue ribbon, breasts, diy tattoos, camping.  But this raises a serious question: was there ever sanctity in art in the first place?  I have grappled for a little while now on how to fairly criticize Levins' photography, because, not only are his photographs deserving of questions, they are also worthy of analytical review.  If we look close enough we can find small, dazzling gems of humanity peering back out through the cracks, in small private moments of a youth grappling with their identity in an age of war and catastrophe.  In this light, Jasons Levins works become a highly critical essay on the condition of youth in our post modern society. We must fuck all to get us through the strange and frightening condition of the world, but fuck all with love - and that just might be the moral of the story.  www.staticonthebrain.com

The Great Search for Lady Day

With the all out indifference of New York City suffocating, I found myself barricaded  inside, listening to Billie Holiday's rendition of the jazz standard 'Solitude' over and over again. "In my solitude.....you haunt me." Her voice in the song sounds as if she's grasping at a wall, pleading. Who was haunting Billie Holiday?  The specter on the other side of the wall?   When I was a kid my mother gave me a Billie Holiday record as a gift. When I heard Billie's voice  for the first time, it was one of those mystical moments where I felt alive in a beautiful universe of nothingness and just as long as this woman was singing, oblivion was mine for the taking. I entered parallel dimensions.  Billie Holiday was haunting me - certainly.  Just a few days ago, after a long nocturnal blizzard blanketed much of New England, I decided to search for Billie Holiday. On a hot summer day in 1959 Billie was laid to rest in Saint Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx. She was 44.  I took a train uptown.  I spent close to two hours in a frozen, snowed over cemetery looking for her grave stone.  I was waist deep in snow, trudging about, losing my breath, and at the moment I decide to take a break to rethink my strategy I find her final resting place.  Billie Holiday was buried next to her mother, which I found fascinating and touching.   Earlier that day I had bought Billie a little seahorse and left it for her as a gift  (sailors used give each other seahorses for good luck before embarking on long odysseys).  So there I was - I had found Billie Holiday.

Text and photograph by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

IANNIS XENAKIS: COMPOSER, ARCHITECT, VISIONARY

Iannis Xenakis, 'Philips Pavilion,' 1958 postcard 4 x 6 in. Iannis Xenakis Archives, Bibliothéque nationale de France, Paris

Now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, this exhibition features the role of drawing in the work of Iannis Xenakis, a major 20th-century figure who brought together architecture, music, and advanced mathematics. A contemporary of fellow avant-garde composers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and John Cage, Xenakis also created revolutionary designs while working with modern architecture pioneer Le Corbusier. Many of Xenakis's innovations in music and architecture were realized first on paper, resulting in hundreds of striking graphic documents that exemplify how the drawing process was used as a means of "thinking through the hand." The exhibition, the first in North America dedicated to Xenakis's original works on paper produced between 1953 and 1984, includes more than 60 rarely seen musical scores, architectural drawings, conceptual renderings, and samplings of his innovative graphic notation. Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary is on view at the MOCA through Feb 4th, 2011.

Jet Set: Marc Marmel

The idea came to Marc Marmel whilst vacationing in the French Riviera: "There was a time in history when travel was about the journey, not the destination.  A time when custom made luggage was a privilege only afforded by the wealthy. A time when luggage traveled to exotic locations by steamship, railroad, and horse drawn carriage."  So Marmel, based in Los Angeles, began to design and construct, by hand, one of kind luggage. Beautiful leather bags that undoubtably stand out in large contrast to the ubiquitous and ever so homogeneous black rolling suitcase: the exact opposite of unique.  What with rolling sidewalks and flight attendants with an ever changing job title and muffin tops who serve bad coffee, I think soon we'll see a small revolution in the way we travel. Oh lord that blows the wild wind: bring back a time that hearkens back to Pan-Am, luxury ocean liners, and the great discovery of mysterious flora and fauna; all with a gorgeous blond at our sides,  a ridiculously tiny unsafe car that reeks of leather and petrol, and a Marc Marmel bag in the trunk.  www.marcmarmel.com

X-Ray Art: Nick Veasy

Nick Veasy "The Finger"

In a "world obsessed with image," UK based artist Nick Veasy is on a peregrination to find the beauty so rumored to be only "skin deep." In a mysterious, fortified radiation safe structure called "the black box" is where Veasy creates most of his X-Ray images. The above fuck you image entitled "The Finger" and other works by Veasy will be on display at the the 11th Annual Los Angeles Art Show that runs from Jan. 19th to the 23rd. www.nickveasy.com

"Vicissitude of Water" by Dustin Lynn

Vicissitude of Water by Dustin Lynn

The Vicissitude Of Water (Tennis Court No. 2) Minneapolis, USA Photo Dustin Lynn

Vicissitude of Water by Dustin Lynn

The Vicissitude Of Water (Goal Post) Minneapolis, USA Photo Dustin Lynn

New photographs by artist, filmmaker, traveler Dustin Lynn.  To elucidate the hidden meaning behind these haunting, frigid images, in Dustin Lynn's own words: "[The] highest level of ascension in water is when it becomes snow - then it can take other forms like the branches of a tree, an alfa romeo, or a playing field." Isolated and glamorous with overwhelming quietude, these images are still-frames of a morbid, parallel nirvana in Middle America.

Performance Art: Chris Burden

"747" January 5, 1973 Los Angeles, California, at about 8am at a beach near the Los Angeles International Airport, I fired several shots with a pistol at a Boeing 747.

In 1971, during one of his most famous pieces, Chris Burden had his assistant shoot him in the arm from a distance of 5 meters with a riffle. “At 7:45 P.M. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” His life is seemingly an extreme case of Dadaist impulses and an insatiable thirst for danger; as well as the warm hard-on milking of the brain for adrenaline. Burden currently lives and works in Los Angeles.  You can find a book, an overview, of his works, here.

Contemporary Art In China: Feng Feng

Feng-Feng-2_gold_skull_2

53 Art Museum, a new avant-garde contemporary art institution located in Guangzhou China will present an exhibition of three cutting-edge artists, Feng Feng, Qin Jin and Liu Qingyuan. Curated and sponsored by the prominent Asian Art Magazines Art Gallery Magazine / Gallery Sights. On view at the 2011 LA Art Show - Jan 19-23.

Chaos & Classicism

Adolf Ziegler 'The Four Elements: Fire, Water and Earth, Air' before 1937

The above painting is one of the works on display at the Guggenheim NY that explores artworks from France, Italy, and Germany between World War I and II. Today is the last day of the exhibit.  Adolf Ziegler's The Four Elements was hung in Adolf Hitler's apartment in Munich. To Hitler the painting exemplified his ideal of what art should be: "realist, idealizing, and classical." Hitler despised modernism. The artist Ziegler was hired by Hitler to head the The Reich's "Chamber of Visual Arts." Its chief responsibility was to absquatulate all modernist artworks from German museums.  Ziegler, who who was already a member of the Nazi party, met Hitler in the early 1920s.  Ziegler became Hitler's "artistic advisor" in 1925. Hitler commissioned Ziegler to paint a portrait of his niece, Geli Raubal, who committed suicide with a single gunshot wound to her lung, after an apparent fight with her uncle, in  the same Munich apartment; she was 25. Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 is a fascinating look at an artistic movement in Europe that reverted, with almost wishful thinking, to more idealized forms after one the most brutal, violent wars in human history.  Click here for more info.

UNSEEN: NEVER BEFORE PRINTED WORKS OF HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mexico (girl with braids), 1934. Peter Fetterman Gallery.

The 16th Annual Los Angeles Art Show, taking place January 19-23 at the Los Angeles Convention Center will debut a special exhibit of never before seen works by master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Titled “Rarely/Unseen” the exhibit is curated by Peter Fetterman, owner of Peter Fetterman Gallery and will feature more than 35 photographs that have never been printed before. www.laartshow.com