Riding the Hoods With Maripol

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Maripol moved to New York from France in 1976, where she became a part of the New York club and music scene, styling Madonna and working on films such as Downtown 81 (starring Jean-Michel Basquiat and Deborah Harry). In the mid-1980s, she opened her own boutique, Maripolitan, in the NoHo area of New York. Maripol has also been art director on music videos for Cher, D'Angelo and Elton John, among others. Riding the Hoods With Maripol, a collection of her photographs, are on view at the Clic gallery in New York until June 19. www.clicgallery.com

Vivienne Westwood Shoes at the Sursock Palace in Beirut

Vivienne Westwood's collections of shoes since the seventies have been on whats shaping out the be a world wide tour after the success of a show in London last year. You could also contribute the success to the rash of designer retrospectives. Right now the exhibition is on view at the Sursock Palace in Beirut. Vivienne Westwood Shoes, An Exhibition 1973 – 2011, which has opened in Beirut, will be followed by a stop in the north of England then on to Hong Kong, China and Japan. www.viviennewestwood.co.uk

RICHARD PRINCE, first solo exhibition in Asia

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Since the late 1970s, Prince has been mining images from mass media, advertising, and entertainment. Working in the tear-sheet department at TIME/LIFE in New York, he took magazine ads for jewelry, furniture, fashion, and cigarettes, and gave them new potency by cropping, removing ad copy from the images, reshooting black and white images on color film, and configuring them in generic groups. With these “rephotographs”, he redefined the artistic act and its related concepts of authorship, ownership, and the aura of the image. Applying his understanding of the complex transactions of representation to the making of art, he has crafted a unique signature filled with echoes of other signatures but that is unquestionably his own.

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An exhibition, that opened yesterday at the Gagosian gallery in Hong Kong, explores the role and representation of women in the male imaginary and in American culture, a principal theme in Prince’s oeuvre since the outset of his career and one that is charged with ambiguity and provocation. By locating, appropriating, and manipulating popular depictions of feminine types – from the aloof fashion model and the glamorous celebrity to the fetishistic nurse and the bold biker girlfriend - Prince explores how visual definitions of gender form in popular culture through repetition and reiteration. Gleaned from a variety of highbrow, lowbrow, and subcultural sources, Prince’s women abound with a diversity of stereotyped erotic appeal.

On view until July 16, 2011 www.gagosian.com

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The Erotic World of Harri Peccinotti

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Harri Peccinotti, who is nearly eighty years old and looks almost exactly like a wizard, is most well known for his erotic images of women–often cropped and close up focusing in on the delicious details, instead of giving away the whole picture. Peccinotti also has the distinction of shooting the Pirelli calendar two years in a row and is oft credited with upping its raunch factor to the level it stands today. This June 14 marks the opening of an exhibit at the Tethys gallery in Florence, Italy–the exhibition will run until July 4 2011. www.tethysgallery.com

[Blood Bath] The Art of Hermann Nitsch

In the Denver-MCA  through the end of May are the “relicts” (relics) of one of Nitsch’s abreactive performances, enacted to liberate the repressive drives in himself and participants in his “aktions.” Instead of film, however, these are Schuttbilder paintings (poured) composed of animal blood and pigment, capturing the gestures and off-body splatters of the original performance.

Part Artaud’s idea of psychoanalytical cure through certain abject formations of theatre, part Golden Bough-type worship and slaughtering of Dionysius, Nitsch’s work is about the trace of an event, not the finished painting. Drips, clots, spatters and smears all attest to a “relic” of a non-repeatable memory or aktion. But the frenzy of the performance is always dictated by the frame: the Nietzschean reintegration of primal and social. This is repeated again in the museum’s display: in the center are a number of Catholic vestments perfectly pressed and placed upon vestibules. But on the walls is the bloodwork, surrounding the repressed pagaentry of transubstantiation, recalling the pagan roots of Christianity, when the blood was never reduced to wine.

Bloodlines: Paintings by Hermann Nitsch is on view at the MCA in Denver until May 29. www.mcadenver.org

Text by Dreux Moreland for Pas Un Autre

The Return of the Fiat Cinquecento

Fiat 500, Cinquecento, 1957

The Fiat Cinquecento, originally designed by automotive designer Giorgetto Giugiaro–famous for the De Lorean and Alfa Romeo–was recently introduced to the American driving public. The Fiat 500 originally hit Italian streets in 1957 and was the quintessential Italian driving machine. www.fiatusa.com

We Are Handsome, The Memoirs

"This season, We Are Handsome takes you to the far reaches of your imagination, your minds eye, your memory. The Memoirs collection inspires thoughts of vacations past, memorable experiences and those moments in life when time seemed to stand still, just for an instant." Jeremy Somers from We Are Handsome, on the new collection for the Australian swimwear line, entitled The Memoirs. www.wearehandsome.com

[Craft, Utility and Luxury] Serum Versus Venom

Serum Versus Venom (SVSV), which was created in 2003, as a "interconnectedness of craft, utility and luxury" is re-launching after several years in hiatus. SVSV is built on a philosophy called Futurecraft - an "ideological framework for creating high and sustainable value in an over-saturated consumer landscape by colliding elements of hype modernity with traditional product development philosophies, techniques and values." www.serumvenom.com

[OPENING] Nancy Grossman: Heads

"They speak to the malice and subservience of both psychology and worldly conflict. Though the works are often rendered blind and mute, they still allude to the role of the silent witness amid cruelty and disorder." MoMA PS1 in New York presents Nancy Grossman: Heads, a solo exhibition that focuses on the artist's evocative head sculptures. On view May 22, 2011 - August 15 www.ps1.org

Three Way: A Trilogy of Vintage Erotica

"It's rarely a bad idea to show some sex films. I mean...really. This is a small series and is intended, certainly, to entertain. But it's also intended to investigate both the fantasies and realities of sexual representation — that uncomfortable space where we so often find a huge gap. When you place a slick, erotic daydream like Camille 2000 against the gritty reality of A Labor of Love, the difference becomes all the more stark. And then there's The Wild Pussycat, a masterpiece of what-the-fuck-is-this-ism. It combines erotic scenes with some pretty rough sadism — but somehow becomes an intense, unintentional black comedy instead of a just another crappy 60s sexploitation picture. Combined, I hope the three films illustrate some of the perils and positives of depicting sex, and raise questions about how, or if, anything has ultimately changed. Stay tuned for 'Three-Way Redux: A Trilogy of Contemporary Erotica,' coming soon." — Joel Shepard, Film & Video Curator, Three Way: A Trilogy of Vintage Erotica is showing the weekend at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. www.ybca.org

[ON VIEW] The Portraits Richard C. Miller

Richard Crump Miller was a true American working class photographer. From photographing airplanes for service manuals during WWII, to his snapshots of the construction of the Hollywood freeway–and all the way to his unique, saturated carbro prints of celebrities, assignments for various magazines, and covers of the Saturday Evening Post, Miller is a photographer who has captured the pathology and false paradise of the American dream. Miller's photographs ooze with a tenderness of a country still in the cocoon of its innocence.  Moreover, Miller's iconic portraits of James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Giant show not only a human side to celebrity, but the boredom suffered in the manufacture of our idols.  Richard C. Miller -- Portraits is on view at the Craig Krull Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica until June 11. www.bergamotstation.com

Shunga: Erotic Art in a Comparative Context

Series: The Prelude to Desire, 1799, Utamaro

It was a time when Japan was ruled by military dictators called Shoguns and much of the East was just large swaths of bucolic countryside, with flowing grass, and a certain mysticism you can only associate with "the Orient."  For centuries it was like this. Seemingly perfect and serene. The artistic output from this time is extremely recognizable: ornate woodcuts painted on scrolls, called ukiyo-e, that depicted the quotidien routine of Japanese life: work, play, love, theater, history, and  pleasure.  Shunga, a Japanese form of erotic art, that most think was deemed immoral, but was actually morally accepted, was common and many artists, without risking their reputations, dipped their pens in this type of ink. It was all the same–work and sex–it still followed a classifiable aesthetic of the quotidien. It begs the question–what did you do last night?

Series: The Prelude to Desire, 1799, Utamaro

This weekend, the University of London's School of Oriental and African studies will hold a workshop and a list of speakers on the topic of Shunga art.  Talks are ranging and include introductions on the history of Shunga art  to how to present and curate Shunga art. The talks are free and is being held at the Brunei Gallery May 20 and 21.  www.soas.ac.uk/

Marc Swanson: The Second Story

Marc Swanson, Untitled Boxer, 2010

Marc Swanson constructs sculptures out of found iconographic sources, from taxidermy to tattoos, fabricating them from culturally-loaded materials so that the resulting sculptures in both form and content reveal the conspicuous constructedness of our personas in the modern mediated world. For example, taxidermy forms relating to his own father’s fantasy of an outdoorsy hunter’s life—one his dad never really lived but simulated—are overlaid with the glittered mirrored surfaces associated with the demimonde of the after-midnight nightclub world the artist inhabited for many years.

Marc Swanson, Untitled Black Fighting Bucks, 2009

Swanson’s allusions often refer simultaneously to both the austere, rarefied, and serious history of minimal art and the legacy of cheesy metal and self-consciously decadent glam rock bands. In stating the equal importance of both in his work, Swanson makes viewers aware of the complex negotiations between high and low culture in everyone’s lives. An exhibition, curated by Bill Arning, Director, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston opens this July. Marc Swanson: The Second Story–July 2 to October 9, 2011, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston–www.carmh.org

Nino Migliori

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Nino Migliori, Il tuffatore, 1951

Nino Migliori's photography is the epitome of a definitively Italian cultural movement during postwar Italy called neorealismo, or neorealism. Its the stark black and white photography of an Italy that seems to sizzle to the touch. Whilst Migliori captured still images of Northern and Southern Italy's street life, neorealism can also be exemplified with film–for example, Vittorio De Sico's 1948 classic The Bicycle Thief.  Nino Migliori, who was born in Bologne in 1926, is still alive and well–a new exhibit Nino Migliori "Neorealism" opens this july at the La Mar de Musicas Festival in Cartagena, Spain. Nino Migliori "Neorealism–July 11 to August 31 at the Palacio Molina–www.lamardemusicas.com