[BOOKS] Adventures in the Orgasmatron

Released only a few days ago, Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex: How Renegade Europeans Conceived the American Sexual Revolution and Gave Birth to the Permissive Society (Fourth Estate) is the untold story of Wilhelm Reich and the dawn of the sexual revolution. An illuminating, startling, at times bizarre story of sex and science, ecstasy and repression. In the middle of the 20th century, the United States became an adoptive home for dozens of expatriated European thinkers, who saw this rich, young country ripe for sexual liberation. One of the most left-field of them was the Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, a disciple of Freud’s who had broken with the master. Reich’s own approach was based on his theories of the orgasm and sexual energy, which he dubbed ‘orgone energy’. Instead of the couch, he made use of a tall, slender construction of wood, metal, and steel wool, which he called the orgone box. A highly sexed man himself, Reich thought that a person who sat in the box could elevate their ‘orgastic potential’ ridding the body of repressive forces, improving sexual potency, and enhancing overall health. After World War Two, Reich’s theories caught on among writers and artists, the early adopters of the counter-culture. Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow were amongst those for whom the orgone box represented a yearned-for synthesis of sexual and political liberation, and of physical science and psychology. Meanwhile, Reich himself faced one debacle after another. Albert Einstein heard him out before rebuffing him. The FBI investigated him as a Communist sympathizer: it turned out that they were hunting the wrong man. The federal government banned the orgone box and tagged Reich as a fraud. There were claims of sexual misdeeds, and bouts of Reich’s own mental instability. This is the story of the blossoming of the 20th century’s sexual revolution, and the unshackling of a repressed society, and sex before science.

Dalí: Mind of a Genius

The aphrodisiac telephone by Salvador Dali

SINGAPORE: Explore over 250 artworks which highlight the creativeness of Dalí across different mediums, including bronze sculptures, rare graphics, furniture, gold jewelry and crystal pieces in three themed areas – Femininity and Sensuality, Religion and Mythology, Dreams and Fantasy. Highlights include Dance of Time I (Dalí's famous representation of melted clocks), Woman Aflame (sculpture uniting two of Dalí's obsessions - drawers and fire), Spellbound (a huge painting featured in Alfred Hitchcock's movie of the same name) and the Mae West Lips Sofa (inspired by actress Mae West's sensual lips). Now on view at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore until October 11. 

[BOOKS] PATTI SMITH & TOM WAITS

Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story by author Dave Thompson – Dancing Barefoot is a measured, accurate, and enthusiastic account of Smith’s career. Guided by interviews with those who have known her—including Ivan Kral, Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, John Cale, and Jim Carroll—it relies most of all on Patti’s own words. This is Patti’s story, told as she might have seen it, had she been on the outside looking in. You can purchase the book here. 

tom_waits_holding_cat_by_scruff

Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Paul Maher, Jr. – Tom Waits on Tom Waits is a selection of over fifty interviews from the more than five hundred available. Here Waits delivers prose as crafted, poetic, potent, and haunting as the lyrics of his best songs. Available on Chicago Review Press

Ingrid Calame at the Edinburg Art Festival

Calame’s paintings and drawings all begin with Calame tracing marks, stains and cracks on the ground. She then combines, layers and retraces the tracings before transforming them into drawings in coloured pencil or pure pigment and paintings in enamel or, more recently, oil paint. The works that result from this singular process are beautiful and intelligent abstractions. Displayed in a gallery, they retain their connection with the world outside at several removes, exerting an oddly insistent presence. Ingrid Calame's solo show is now on view at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburg until October 9.

Lost Film of 24 Year Old Hitchcock Found in New Zealand

hitchcock

A lost 1920s Alfred Hitchcock film that provides clues into the legendary director's early working style has been discovered in New Zealand, archivists said on Wednesday. Recently uncovered film "The White Shadow" features a 24 year-old Hitchcock's work as a writer, assistant director, art director and editor. The film was first released in 1924. It is considered to be the earliest surviving feature film in which Hitchcock received a credit, according to the U.S.-based National Film Preservation Foundation. Only the first three of the movie's six reels survive. That adds to the movie's mystery, which some film buffs see as fitting for Hitchcock, because he was famous for creating mysterious stories full of suspense.

[MOMENTO MORI] Chalkboard Skulls

Momento mori and momento to pick up the milk, some things are better said written on a human skull. Chicago-based artists and designers Sarah Belknap and Joseph Belknap's matt colored plastic chalkboard skulls should replace post-it notes all together. www.iamhome.us

All Hail Kimiko Yoshida

Since I fled my homeland to escape the mortifying servitude and humiliating fate of Japanese women, I amplified, through my art, a feminist stance of protest against contemporary cliches of seduction, against voluntary servitude of women, against “identity” defined by appurtenances and “communities”, against the stereotypes of “gender” and the determinism of heredity....Art is above all the experience of transformation. Transformation is, it seems to me, the ultimate value of the work. Art for me has become a space of shifting metamorphosis. My Self-portraits, or what go by that name, are only the place and the formula of the mutation. The only raison d’être of art is to transform what art alone can transform. All that’s not me, that’s what interests me. To be there where I think I am not, to disappear where I think I am, that is what matters.....

Text by Kimiko Yoshida

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.