Steven Klein: Your Hallucination Is Now Complete

Video still, Courtesy © Steven Klein Studio 2010/ Hyères Festival

Foam presents Your Hallucination Is Now Complete by fashion photographer Steven Klein as part of Amsterdam International Fashion Week. Your Hallucination Is Now Complete is a new video work by Steven Klein specially compiled for Hyères annual fashion and photography festival in 2010. This multimedia presentation is presented in the Westergoud building at Westergasterrein, near the catwalk shows. On view until January 30, 2011. www.foam.nl

Lure of Images: John Strezaker

Mask

John Strezaker 'Mask XXXV' 2007

British artist John Stezaker is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning. By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty. This first major exhibition of John Stezaker offers a chance to see work by an artist whose subject is the power in the act of looking itself. With over 90 works from the 1970s to today, the artist reveals the subversive force of images, reflecting on how visual language can create new meaning. John Stezaker is organized by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Mudam, Luxembourg - on view till March 18, 2011.

Cinema: Santa Sangre

Alejandro Jodorowsky's surreal masterpiece is on DVD for the very first time. A young man is confined in a mental hospital. Through a flashback we see that he was traumatized as a child, when he and his family were circus performers: he saw his father cut off the arms of his mother, a religious fanatic and leader of the heretical church of Santa Sangre ("Holy Blood"), and then commit suicide. Back in the present, he escapes and rejoins his surviving and armless mother. Against his will, he "becomes her arms" and the two undertake a grisly campaign of murder and revenge.

Vivian Maier: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star...

#60 Undated, New York

Between January 27 and April 28, 2011, Hilaneh von Kories Gallery in Hamburg is going to show “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, an exhibit of more than eighty images by Vivian Maier from the 50’s and 60’s. Maier, who in her life time did not publish any of her pictures, has been recently discovered as an enormously talented “street photography” artist who saw the world through the lenses of a Rolleiflex camera and captured hundreds of thousands of telling moments in the gritty streets and shops of Chicago and New York. The show is only the third of her work worldwide and the first in Germany. www.hilanehvonkoriesgallery.com

Objet d'Art: Cupid's Lie

DAMIEN HIRST, Cupid's Lie, Gold

To inaugurate the Hong Kong exhibition space, Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present “Forgotten Promises,” an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Damien Hirst. Forgotten Promises - Jan 18 - Mar. 19, 2011 at the Gasgosian Gallery, Hong Kong.

Exotic Regrets by Aoi Kotsuhiroi

I received an image over the weekend of the fascinating first chapter of sartorial sculptor, poet, and conjurer Aoi Kotsuhiroi's new collection entitled Exotic Regrets. As in past collections, Kotsuhiroi, based in the South of France, releases imagery of her new collections in chapter's to express gravity and anticipation. www.aoikotsuhiroi.com

Naked Study #55

Étude de nu n°577 Print on salted paper from a collodion glass negative Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1855

Very little is known about mid-19th century photographer Louis-Camille d'Olivier.  After the the 1860s the history of this prolific photographer of early erotica simply vanished. We do know he was a progenitor of a nascent art form considered mechanical and superficial. Today, d'Olivier's multiple images of the female form are widely sought after by collectors.

R.I.P. Renfield

Renfield was a good dog who led a good dog life. With the air permeated by sweet saltwater and the sound of crashing waves, Renfield's fourteen years on planet Earth were idyllic and serene.  With the body of a sturdy Shepard and a thousand year old soul, he loved unconditionally, like a good dog should.  Renfield, you will be missed.

Tattoo by Doug at Everlasting Tattoo Photo by Lily Harris Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Naked Eye: The Voice & Life of Ney Matogrosso

Ney_Matogrosso_film_70_anos

Ney Matogrosso was a leather artisan with a rare voice at the right place at the right time.  Brazil, 1966, a polychromatic cultural revolution was taking place called tropicália.  Even more psychedelic and revolutionary than the sexual revolution commencing in the thick white fog of San Francisco, tropicalia pervaded every corner of  Brazilian culture: theater, poetry, dance, and especially music.  You could call tropicália music an evolutionary divergence of psychedelia that amalgamated  traditional America rock n' roll, Afro-Cuban rhythms, and funk.  When the band Secos e Molhados wanted a male leader singer with a high pitched voice they got even more than they asked for.  Enter Ney Matogrosso, and his sopranino voice with tonal ranges beyond a soprano, who helped Secos e Molhados reach explosive success.  When the band dissolved Matogrosso went on with a solo career that has lasted through the present. According to Art Brazil, a documentary on Matogrosso's 40 year carreer is currently in post production.  The documentary, entitled Naked Eye, will be  premiered in August - most likely in Brazil - on Ney Matogrosso's 70th birthday.     Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

mp3:::ney matogrosso - Pedra de Rio

[audio:http://www.pasunautre.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/04-Pedra-de-Rio.mp3|titles=04 Pedra de Rio]

mp3:::ney matogrosso - Barco Negro

[audio:http://www.pasunautre.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/07-Barco-Negro.mp3|titles=07 Barco Negro]

Jen’s New Tattoo

je_ne_regret_rien_jennifer_mulhare

"Je Ne Regrette Rien"  - French chanteuse Edith Piaf's famous song and anthem - the French equivalent of Sinatra's "I Did it My Way." Translated into English it means "No, I don't regret anything." Jen sent this picture over last night from New York. Tattoo is in her grandmother's handwriting.

Big Shots

Paloma Picasso by Andy Warhol

"Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids of Celebrities" provides a look at a lesser-known but seminal body of work by the artist who was dazzled by celebrity and found much of his inspiration in the photographic image. Comprised of over thirty Polaroids of subjects ranging from Debbie Harry to Yves St. Laurent and Giorgio Armani to Yoko Ono, the pictures were taken between 1970 and 1986 on Warhol's favorite camera - the Polaroid Big Shot. Created by Polaroid for practical purposes like the quick creation of I.D. cards and passport pictures, the camera's fixed focal length and point-and-shoot mechanism were perfect for the snapshot-loving artist. www.danzigerprojects.com

Mannerism Versus Modernism

Hans Hoffmann, An Affenpinscher (detail), 1580, watercolor and gouache on vellum. Kasper Collection, New York.

The Morgan Library & Museum presents over one hundred drawings and photographs from the collection assembled by American fashion designer Herbert Kasper—known simply as Kasper. The collection, exceptional for its distinctive character and superb quality, is being exhibited to the public for the first time. Mannerism and Modernism: The Kasper Collection of Drawings and Photographs is being held at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City through May 1st, 2011.

Folk Art: The Clay Skulls of James "Son Ford" Thomas

Photo by William Ferris, 'James "Son Ford" Thomas and Clay Skull, Leland, 1971' Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art

Grave digger, blues musician, and dark, mystic soul of the south, James "Son Ford" Thomas made skulls from clay collected at the banks Mississippi's Yazoo River, often using authentic human teeth. His art mirrored, or was a catharsis, from the constant nearness of death at his job digging graves. "We all end up in the clay" was Thomas' oft quoted philosophy on life. The cemetery was probably a great place to pick up teeth too.  You can find his work at various blues museums throughout the south.

Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper