RICHARD HAMILTON 1922 - 2011
British artist Richard Hamilton died yesterday London. His most well know artwork, a collage entitled Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, is considered one of the earliest examples of pop art. The above work, entitled Swingeing London 67, was a response after his his art dealer Robert Fraser was arrested and imprisoned for the possession of heroin. On 12 February 1967 the police raided a party at the Sussex farmhouse of Keith Richards where they found evidence of the consumption of various drugs. On 27 June 1967, Fraser and Mick Jagger were found guilty of the possession of illegal drugs. The following day the two men were handcuffed to each other and driven to court in a police van, where they were sentenced to six months and three months respectively. After the defence lawyer’s appeal, Jagger’s sentence was reduced to a fine but Fraser’s appeal was rejected and he spent four months in jail. The painting is derived from a press clipping. Richard Hamilton was preparing for a major traveling retrospective before he died.
Speaking in Tongues
Wallace Berman (1926-1976) was born in Staten Island, NY and came to Los Angeles with his parents when he was four years old. In 1955 he founded the small but influential mail art publication Semina – a brilliant, loose-leaf compilation of the most advanced artists and poets of his time, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jess (Collins) to name a few. Today, Berman is best known for his Verifax collages, softly sepia-colored works created with a forerunner of the photocopy machine. Influenced by surrealism, assemblage, and contemporary artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Andy Warhol, Berman produced multi-layered works that combined the picture of a hand-held transistor radio with images culled from newspapers and popular magazines. An exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California, entitled Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, brings two seminal yet under-studied Los Angeles artists into close conversation with one another for the first time. This exhibition is concurrent with the Pacific Standard Time showing across Los Angeles in an en masse celebration of the Los Angeles art scene. Speaking in Tongues will on view October 2 to January 22, 2012.
Plugged In
Daniele Buetti is a Swiss artist working in photography, video, sound, drawing, light box, sculpture, and digitally assisted work. Buetti makes use of advertising tools to expose the frailty of popular culture, explore our perceptions of beauty, and reveal the omnipotence of the media in our society. In Buetti’s works, beautiful colors and figures merge with light reveal unspoken feelings of ambivalence and despair, asking what function the role of media plays in the formationof identity, and questioning whether society can form identity without the media’s influence. Buetti uses light to attract the viewer in the same seductive way that the media uses beauty, forcing us to realize the inherent manipulation.Jenkins Johnson Gallery is presents Plugged In, a group exhibition of forward-thinking artists working with the electronic arts. All of the artists, including Buetti, Jeremy Bert, and Andrew Bovasso, take contemporary approaches to their conceptual missions and use non-traditional media. Plugged in opens September 15 and runs through October 29.
Jack Smith: A Feast for Open Eyes
Jack_Smith_A_Feast_for_Open_Eyes
The ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) presents a fortnight of films, events and symposia dedicated to the legendary American artist, filmmaker and actor, Jack Smith (1932-1989). Working in New York from the 1950s until his death in 1989, Smith unequivocally resisted and upturned the world of accepted conventions, whether artistic, moral or legal. Irreverent in tone and delirious in effect, Smith’s films, such as the notorious Flaming Creatures (1961), are at once wildly camp and subtly polemic. Although best known for his contributions to underground cinema, Smith’s influence also extends across the realm of performance art, photography and experimental theatre. Jack Smith: A Feast for Open Eyes is on view until September 18.
[Sculpture] Zac Nelson
Zac Nelson is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. To create his sculptures, he uses ingredients such as bones, pig intestines, moss, wood, and metal.
Photography by Megan McIsaac
Icons of the Invisible
06LaMexicanaMarket_Oscar_Castillo_icons_of_the_invisible
As part of the Pacific Standard time art exhibitions in Los Angeles, the Fowler Museum at UCLA presents Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo. Since the late 1960s, Oscar Castillo has documented the Chicano community in Los Angeles, from major political events to cultural practices to the work of muralists and painters. This exhibition will present rarely seen photographs from 1969-1980 exploring major themes (social movement, cultural heritage, urban environment, and everyday barrio life) and approaches (photojournalism, portraiture, art photography) that have guided Castillo’s work. Complementing the concurrent exhibition on Chicano art groups, Mapping Another L.A., the exhibition will provide another level of contextualization of L.A. history during this pivotal period. Icons of the Invisible will be on view from September 25 to February 26, 2012.
Thaweesak Srithongdee: Bruised
thai_art_Thaweesak_Srithongdee_bruised
Thaweesak Srithongdee "War"
Thaweesak_Srithongdee_sex_death_art
Thaweesak Srithongdee: left "Sex" right "Love"
Thaweesak Srithongdee, or Lolay as he is commonly known, is a thirty year old artist from Thailand. His style echoes the influence of Surrealism and Pop Art. Lolay is a keen observer of people, their physical and mental characteristics. Having previously engineered a spurious race of Adonic, pectoral defined, super-beings that played with perceptions of body image Lolay expands his fascination with the human condition to question our existence and ultimate survival. Bruises and scars bear the physical trace of individual fallibility, but they also provoke assumptions as to the history and determiners behind such inflictions. A selection of Lolay's work will be on view at an exhibition, entitled Bruised, the Thavibu Gallery in Bangkok, Thailand from September 17 to October 15.
[FASHION WEEK] Electric Feathers
Electric Feathers spring/summer 2012. Designer: Leana Zuñiga
Kurt Vile in London
Photo by Adarsha Benjamin
LAY LOW
Artwork by Devendra Banhart
GUY BOURDIN, An Introduction
Sadist, genius, artist, monster – call him what you will – Guy Bourdin's titillating images changed fashion photography forever. A new book by Phaidon makes a small, but generous introduction to the work of Guy Bourdin with an introductory essay by Alison Gingeras that provides a fresh perspective on Bourdin’s life and work, including his considerable influence on the world of commercial and fine art photography.
[BOOKS] BALLET RUSSES
The Ballets Russes introduced an unprecedented freedom into the arts, influencing not only ballet and theater, but also fashion, visual arts, and interior design. An unprecedented, oversized special edition, out this November by luxury publisher Assouline, celebrates the explosion of creativity in Western Europe created by Serge Diaghilev and his collaborators—including Igor Stravinsky, Leon Bakst, and Pablo Picasso. Over 200 pages feature photography and drawings tipped on watercolor cotton paper. You can purchase the book here.
[fashion week] BLK DNM "Film 2"
Johan Lindeberg, designer of the BLK DNM label, premiered a new fashion film, entitled "Film 2", this week during fashion week with a private screening at the SOHO store in New York. Directed by Martin de Thurah – starring Raina Hammer.
God Bless Yoko Ono
In 1974 John & Yoko briefly separated, John moving to L.A., Yoko staying in New York. During this period, John released two LPs, 'Walls & Bridges' and 'Rock and Roll'. Though it appeared at the time that Yoko was not doing anything, in reality she was touring her native Japan and recording this album, entitled Story. Pictured on the cover is an adorable photograph of a young Yoko. The album was shelved after her reconciliation with Lennon.
Malerie Marder: Carnal Knowledge
Carnal Knowledge (Violette Editions) is the first collection of Marder's works in print. A seminal early experience for Malerie Marder was when a family friend invited her to photograph her with her lover, naked and in the anonymous setting of a motel room. This set the tone for Marder's work for the next decade. Her photographs of nudes are composed simply, her subjects sitting plainly near the centre of the frame, often set against the bleak anonymity of motel rooms, their impassive gazes almost daring a viewer to interpret their bodies. Beautifully illustrated with more than 70 works by Marder – described by Charlotte Cotton in her introduction as an ‘episodic drama of adjacencies’ – Carnal Knowledge also contains a preface by Gregory Crewdson, a text by novelist James Ellroy, short stories inspired by Marder's works by A. M. Homes, James Frey and Bruce Wagner, as well as a written and photographic correspondence between Marder and Philip-Lorca diCorcia.
[SERBIAN DIARY] "Nobody differs from me, but myself"
Photo by Marija Mandic who is a photographer based in Novi Sad, Serbia
[FASHION WEEK] WARBY PARKER Guerrilla Eyewear Show
WARBY PARKER eyewear invades the NY Public Library yesterday – models sat quietly reading the classics, but the covers were replaced with labels specifying the style of glasses the models were wearing, such as the Thatcher and Everett. Brilliant.
Erotique
Photography by Adarsha Benjamin
PATTI SMITH: Babelogue + Outside Society
PATTI_SMITH_Babelogue_Outside_Society
PATTI SMITH: BABELOGUE: The Hunter College Art Galleries present Patti Smith: 9.11 Babelogue – on view from September 8-December 3, 2011 – twenty-six works on paper by the esteemed poet, performer, and visual artist Patti Smith as a response to the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001. The artist’s elegiac homage does not align the Twin Towers with one nation, religion, or race, but instead offers them as symbols of the universal resiliency of the human spirit. Smith’s “9.11” series was created between 2001 and 2002 and will be shown in its entirety for the first time in New York, in the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, to coincide with the tenth anniversary of 9/11.
PATTI SMITH: OUTSIDE SOCIETY: Patti Smith raises the curtain on Outside Society, a new collection of her signature songs on the Arista and Columbia labels. The landmark 18-song release marks the first single-CD collection to span Patti's entire body of recorded work. The chronologically arranged tracks move from 1975 (her debut album, Horses, with "Gloria" and "Free Money") through 2007 (Twelve, with her cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit").