LYNDA BENGLIS Retrospective at the MOCA Los Angeles

This is Lynda Benglis' first retrospective in 20 years–this one held at the MOCA Los Angeles.This travelling exhibition spans the range of Lynda Benglis's career, including her early wax paintings, her brightly colored poured latex works, the Torsos and Knots series from the 1970s, and her recent experiments with plastics, cast glass, paper, and gold leaf. It features a number of rarely exhibited historic works, including Phantom (1971), a dramatic polyurethane installation consisting of five monumental sculptures that glow in the dark, and the installation Primary Structures (Paula's Props), first shown in 1975. Alongside her sculptural output, Benglis created a radical body of work in video, photography, and media interventions that explore notions of power, gender relations, and role-playing. These works function in tandem with her sculpture to offer a pointed critique of sculptural machismo and suggest a fluid awareness of gender and artistic identity. They also contribute to an understanding of the artist's objects as simultaneously temporal and physically present, intuitive, and psychologically charged. On view until October 10 at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. 

[ART] DAVID NOONAN

The Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis is currently organizing the first solo presentation of the work of London-based Australian artist David Noonan in an American museum. Since emerging in the early 2000s, Noonan has developed an international reputation for works that incorporate photographic imagery of costumed performers, groups of figures from utopian collectives, and other elements of theater and stagecraft in collaged, painterly, or sculptural formats. In doing so, he encourages us to consider how documentary images of events and happenings might be transformed into fiction, while suggesting the significant roles that theatricality and performance have played in our recent cultural history. This exhibition will present a survey of recent works in a variety of media as well as numerous new works created especially for this presentation at CAM. The main gallery spaces will feature examples of large-scale works featuring evocative photographic images from various sources such as books about experimental theater or puppetry, as well as Japanese textile designs, all screen-printed onto different fabrics which are layered and stitched together. Noonan’s process of creating these works gives the images a shadowy sense of mystery, while the layering of the figurative and abstract imagery creates a tension between abstraction and representation. The exhibition is set to open on September 9 and will run until January 8. www.camstl.org

[BOOKS] David Bowie – Starman

Photo by Ray Stevenson, David Bowie at Home 1969

Paul Trynka illuminates Bowie's seemingly contradictory life and his many reinventions as an artist, offering over 300 new interviews with everyone from classmates to managers to lovers. He reveals Bowie's broad influence on the entertainment world, from movie star to modern-day icon, trend-setter to musical innovator. You can purchase the book here. 

David Mach DIE HARDER

David Mach, Die Harder, Courtesy of the Artist

LONDON – David Mach, famed for his dynamic large scale collages, sculptures and bold installations, launches his major new project to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in 2011 with the installation of a massive coathanger crucifixion figure, suspended from steel supports, outside St Giles Church in Edinburgh. This is the first of four coat hanger crucifixion figures, including a contemporary sculptural version of Calvary, which will be displayed in the exhibition at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre in the summer of 2011. Central to the project will be a large-scale limited edition artist’s version of the King James Bible. Various elements from the project – collages and coathanger sculptures -will be on show throughout the UK in the coming year.

The late LUCIAN FREUD & DAVID DAWSON in Beijing

The current exhibition at Faurschou Gallery in Beijing presents British painter Lucian Freud and his assistant David Dawson, who is himself a painter and a photographer. The exhibition juxtaposes one of Lucian Freud’s principal works – the masterpiece David & Eli (2003-4) – with ten photographs taken by David Dawson at Lucian Freud’s studio between 2004 -2006, giving us a unique glimpse into the every-day life of one the late great artist. On view until August 14, www.faurschou.com

Forbidden Fruit: Recently Acquired Photographs

Portland, OR—Charles A. Hartman Fine Art is pleased to present a group exhibition of several excellent recently acquired works. Selections Two includes new paintings and photographs by gallery artists as well as a number of modern and vintage pieces recently added to the gallery’s extensive inventory of photographic masterworks. Works by gallery artists Hayley Barker, Jason Langer, Daniel Robinson, Camille Solyagua, Eva Speer and Mark Steinmetz are presented alongside classic photographs by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Frantisek Drtikol, André Kertész, Willy Ronis, Aaron Siskind, Josef Sudek, Brett Weston, Garry Winogrand and others. www.hartmanfineart.net

The Lost Footage of Ken Kesey's Magic Ride

Psychologist Timothy Leary and Neal Cassady in Bus
Timothy Leary and Neal Cassady in MAGIC TRIP, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo © Allen Ginsberg, CORBIS.
Ken Kesey
right: Ken Kesey in MAGIC TRIP. Photo © Ted Streshinsky, CORBIS. right: The Bus in MAGIC TRIP. Photo © Ted Streshinsky, CORBIS.

In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, shooting footage on 16MM, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen. With MAGIC TRIP, Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage by the Kesey family. They worked with the Film Foundation, HISTORY and the UCLA Film Archives to restore over 100 hours of film and audiotape, and have shaped an invaluable document of this extraordinary piece of American history. Magic Trip opens this month.

[ART] In The Labyrinth

The exhibition by Àngels Ribé at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, covers a period of her production from 1969 to 1984. This period is particularly significant for it marks the appearance of a new aesthetic model that would have a fundamental influence on the creation of new ways of conceiving the artistic practice. The associative and symbolic functions of art are renegotiated: the artwork ceases to be an autonomous entity, as was the norm in the modernist tradition, and its meaning becomes dependent on an interchange with the spectator. In this way, the ambiguity and the multiplicity of references and readings that are an intrinsic part of the work of art are revealed. Àngels Ribé, having begun her artistic career at that time and within those parameters, consolidated a language of her own that has continued until today through various supports and media.  In the labyrinth. Àngels Ribé, 1969-1984 in on view until October 23. www.macba.cat

Richard Phillips: Point of Purchase

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"My pictures involve a kind of wasted beauty - that's always been a thread in my work."  - Richard Phillips

Richard Phillips' tongue in cheek, slightly pornographic, gritty, but oxymoronically glossy paintings have made him an artist among elite of pop art's Mount Olympus that includes the like of Evelyne Axell  and pop art's Zeus Andy Warhol. Richard Phillips was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1962 and now lives and works in New York.  On view for another week at John McWhinnie bookstore in East Hampton, NY is Point of Purchase, "the first full-scale presentation of [Richard Phillips'] commercial interventions." John McWhinnie: "Phillips extends his brand of artmaking into the non-gallery world, colonizing commercial space, manipulating products and displays, from album covers and posters to designer handbags and beach towels." On view until August 8 www.johnmcwhinnie.com

An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus

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Diane Arbus, Sword Swallower

"Diane Arbus was one of the most brilliant and revered photographers in the history of American art. Her portraits, in stark black and white, seemed to reveal the psychological truths of their subjects. But after she committed suicide in 1971, at the age of forty-eight, the presumed chaos and darkness of her own inner life became, for many viewers, inextricable from her work....William Todd Schultz's An Emergency in Slow Motion reveals the creative and personal struggles of Diane Arbus. Schultz veers from traditional biography to interpret Arbus's life through the prism of four central mysteries: her outcast affinity, her sexuality, the secrets she kept and shared, and her suicide. He seeks not to diagnose Arbus, but to discern some of the private motives behind her public works and acts. In this approach, Schultz not only goes deeper into Arbus's life than any previous writer, but provides a template with which to think about the creative life in general."  An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus is to be release on August 30th [.....]

Drawn Blank: Bob Dylan to Show Paintings at the Gagosian

Gagosian: "A committed visual artist, Bob Dylan has only recently begun to exhibit his works publicly. Firstly, a collection of multi-media watercolors and gouaches, The Drawn Blank Series, was exhibited in Germany’s Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in autumn 2007. His latest works on acrylic and canvas, The Brazil Series, are currently on exhibit at The National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen." Bob Dylan is set to exhibit artwork at the Gagosian Gallery this September.