Koto Bolofo: La Maison

Koto Bolofo is the first photographer to have been granted unlimited access to the secret workshops of Hermès, the house famous for its leather goods, scarves and other beautiful objects. La Maison, a new book by Steidl, itself an elaborate object comprising eleven volumes and the result of seven years' work, showcases Bolofo's painstaking documentation of the Hermès universe.

Corrine Day: The Face

It is testament of Day’s talent as a photographer that she was able to capture an air of informality in her images. Her photographs do not feel staged or posed, and the people she chose to work with do not feel removed from the everyday world. In their familiarity, Day captured the zeitgeist of early 90s Britain. As Sheryl Garrett editor of The Face explained, the magazine “set out a new editorial task of expressing the underground movements of the 90’s. Acid house, ecstasy and the massive, rapid rise of rave culture was the magazine’s inspiration. It felt like a time for smiling rather than pouting, for bright colours and openness and also for something more natural and real - which Corinne Day’s images tapped into very clearly”. Corinne Day’s daring and provocative images burst into collective consciousness through the pages of The Face magazine in the early 1990s. An exhibition Gimpel Fils gallery in London revisits some of Day’s earliest photographs created for The Face, providing an opportunity to assess the on-going artistic legacy of her exceptional vision. On view until October 1.

Under the Big Black Sun

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Film still from experimental filmmaker Bruce Connor's Marilyn Times Five.  As part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, MOCA Los Angeles will present Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981, on view at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA from October 1, 2011 – featuring works by more than 130 artists, this exhibition is the most comprehensive survey to examine the exceptional diversity of art practices in California during the mid- to late 1970s.

Art Meets Rock

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RICHARD KERN, Nirvana, Courtney Love
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left: WILLIAM ENGLISH, Vivienne Westwood in Sex, 1975, courtesy of Maggs Brothers, London right: URS LÜTHI, Un'isola dell'aria, 1975, particolare, 28 fotografie, cm60x50 cad, Collezione Fabio e Virginia Gori
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IAIN FORSYTH & JANE POLLARD, A Rock'N'Roll Suicide, 1998, Live performance, Photo: David Cowlard courtesy Kate MacGarry, London

Museo Pecci di Prato in Florence, Italy presents an exhibition entiled LIVE! Art Meets Rock. The exhibition, curated by Luca Beatrice and Marco Bazzini, adopts a suggestive perspective to show how the history of contemporary art and of rock music have followed parallel paths to contribute to the construction of the cultural universe of the last forty years. Music and the visual arts have crossed and overlapped, over time, engendering a unified and consistent landscape; what draws them together is the performative dimension, articulated according to the specific occasion within an exhibition or a concert. LIVE!offers a parallel and original reading of historic events by exhibiting paintings, sculptures, installations, video clips, artworks, LPs, graphic works, photographs, magazines and films. Artists include Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, William English, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, David LaChapelle and more. The exhibition will be accompanied by Live!, a book published by Rizzoli with contributions by Luca Beatrice and Marco Bazzini. LIVE! Art Meets Rock view at the Museo Pecci di Prato until September 16.  

1000 Kisses

On view now at The MAMBO (museum of modern art in Bogotá) – works by Colombian artist Ruven Afanador. The exhibition has been awaited for more than twenty years and features his greatest works. The exhibition, entitled “I’ll be your mirror, Ruven Afanador: 80 Portraits”, features pictures from the artist’s books: Torero (2001), Shadow (2004) and Thousand kisses (2009). In his last book, Thousand Kisses, the photographer drew his attention to various flamenco dancers. The artist is fascinated by staging the body, so he did not choose any old dance at random. Ruven Afanador was born in Columbia in the sixteenth century city fo Bucaramanga, La Ciudad de los Parques high in the scenic plateau above Rio de Oro. Afanador's photography is a celebration of the poetry of bodies motion. Exhibition is on view until October 9.

Elite of the Obscure

Harry Gamboa, Jr, Cruel, 1975. Super-8 film. Showing Willie Herrón III

This September, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987, the first retrospective to present the wide-ranging work of the Chicano performance and conceptual art group Asco. Geographically and culturally segregated from the still-nascent Los Angeles contemporary art scene and aesthetically at odds with the emerging Chicano art movement, Asco members united to explore and exploit the unlimited media of the conceptual. Creating art by any means necessary — often using their bodies and guerilla tactics—Asco merged activism and performance and, in doing so, pushed the boundaries of what Chicano art might encompass. Asco: Elite of the Obscure includes nearly 150 artworks, featuring video, sculpture, painting, performance ephemera and documentation, collage, correspondence art, photography (including their signature No Movies, or invented film stills), and a series of works commissioned on occasion of the exhibition. Asco: Elite of the Obscure  is on view at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art September 4 to December 4.

[ART] Pacific Standard Time

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Post-war Los Angeles was like a subtropical greenhouse where art flourished – a movement emerged that would define the second half of twentieth century contemporary art in America – artists like Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari, and major events like Warhol's first exhibition, and Marcel Duchamp's first retrospective. But most of what we know about this time is only the very tip of the iceberg and the Getty Research Institute has been tirelessly diligent: "Through archival acquisitions, oral history interviews, public programming, exhibitions, and publications, the Research Institute is responding to the need to locate, collect, document, and preserve the art historical record of this vibrant period."  And as a result of these efforts one of the more monumental series of art exhibitions, collectively entitled Pacific Standard Time, will be on view this fall and winter at 60 venues across Southern California, including the Getty, the Hammer and LACMA.  The above photograph, by Julian Wasser, is of a nineteen year old Eve Babitz – considered a muse or a midwife to the Los Angeles art movement – nude and playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at his retrospective. She won.

Rebel on Certosa Island

As part of the Venice Biennale in Italy, James Franco's site–specific film installation, entitled Rebel, will open on the island of Certosa.  Rebel is a collaboration with artists Douglas Gordon, Harmony Korine, Paul McCarthy, Ed Ruscha, Aaron Young that "unites the myth-making allure of cinema and contemporary art, and acts as interrogative ode to Hollywood iconography." Rebel will be on view on Certosa Island from September 4 to November 27. Photo by Adarsha Benjamin

Causes and Spirits: William Carter

“Watch any mother kneeling beside her toddler, pointing and explaining what they are looking at. Our urge to see, and to connect, starts there.” William Carter.  This book is both an autobiography of William Carter and a study of people. Carter’s photographs, beginning in 1960, take the viewer on his travels throughout the world, from home to New York and Kurdistan, from Dublin to Gaza. Whether working as a photojournalist or purely for himself, Carter focuses on the gestures and expressions of people (sometimes charming, sometimes unsettling), and on streets and landscapes that often long for human presence. The subtitle “Photographs from Five Decades” might seem misleading as it implies a “typical” photobook where the sequence of images is primary. For Carter, however, it is the interplay between his photographs and writings that allows him to see into himself and his subjects: indeed he calls himself a “photographer-writer”. In Carter’s words, his work aims to capture the “hidden implications, eye-blink compositions, odd ironies and happy accidents” of the world. – Steidl