Experimental Film in Los Angeles

Los Angeles Film Forum presents Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945 - 1980, an exploration of the community of filmmakers, artists, curators and programmers who contributed to the creation and presentation of experimental film and video in Southern California in the postwar era. This website is the culmination of three years of research into the archives of film venues and organizations, the recording of 35 oral histories, and the creation of a database, the first of its kind, which catalogs the films, exhibitions, organization, and people active during this prolific era in experimental film and video making. Alternative Projections is part of Los Angeles' sweeping exhibition of art in Los Angeles called Pacific Standard Time. Upcoming screenings of note include Strange Notes and Nervous Breakdowns: Punk and Media Art, 1974-1981, a collection of rarely screened performances by punk bands of the era, performance art, and D.I.Y. works by the Screamers, X, Suburban Lawns, Black Flag, Los Plugz, Johanna Went, and more (MOCA Ahmanson Theater, MOCA, 250 South Grand Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90012) on view January 12 at 7 p.m.

Diane Arbus: A Chronology

Diane Arbus: A Chronology is the closest thing possible to a contemporaneous diary by one of the most daring, influential and controversial artists of the twentieth century. Drawn primarily from Arbus' extensive correspondence with friends, family and colleagues, personal notebooks and other unpublished writings, this beautifully produced volume reveals the private thoughts and motivations of an artist whose astonishing vision derived from the courage to see things as they are and the grace to permit them simply to be. Further rounding out Arbus' life and work are exhaustively researched footnotes that amplify the entire chronology. A section at the end of the book provides biographies for 55 family members, friends and colleagues, from Marvin Israel and Lisette Model to Weegee and August Sander. Describing the Chronology in Art in America, Leo Rubinfien noted that "Arbus... wrote as well as she photographed, and her letters, where she heard each nuance of her words, were gifts to the people who received them. Once one has been introduced to it, the beauty of her spirit permanently changes and deepens one's understanding of her pictures." The texts in Diane Arbus: A Chronology originally appeared in Diane Arbus: Revelations. This volume makes this invaluable material available in an accessible, unique paperback edition for the very first time.

Photo50 at London Art Fair

Found photograph by Julie Cockburn

London Art Fair presents Photo50, its  annual showcase of contemporary photography at the  Business Design Centre, Islington, from 18–22 January 2012. With the title The New Alchemists: contemporary  photographers transcending the print, curator Sue Steward  has selected 50 works by contemporary artists whose practice sees them adorn, transform, subvert or deface the  photographic print. They are: Veronica Bailey, David Birkin, Aliki Braine, Julie Cockburn, Melinda Gibson, Noemie Goudal, Joy Gregory, Walter Hugo, Lesley Parkinson, Jorma Puranen, Esther Teichmann and Michael Wolf.  This exhibition focuses on new techniques and approaches to re-presenting the photographic image and how artists are involving other media. Whether reclaiming traditional techniques, exploiting digital developments or employing other forms of craft and media, the work presented in Photo50 challenges our assumptions about what a photograph is, or can be. London Art Fair is on view at the Design Center in Islington, London, January 18 to January 22, 

Classic Photographs Los Angeles

Los Angeles this weekend: Classic Photographs Los Angeles show. Pieces by master photographers such as Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Frantisek Drtikol, Elliott Erwitt, André Kertész, Wayne Miller, Joseph Sterling, Edmund Teske and Garry Winogrand. We'll have work contemporary photographers such as Raymond Meeks, Mark Steinmetz and Jason Langer as well as by a number of Japanese photographers including Emi Anrakuji, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Daido Moriyama, Harry Shigeta and Issei Suda. On view January 14 & 15, 2012, Helms Daylight Studio, 3221 Hutchison Ave. #E, Los Angeles.

NORMA MARKLEY: Yes No

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Y Gallery presents an exhibition of Norma Markley’s recent work—neon, silkscreen prints, and sewn drawings—inspired by the rhythm and language from literary sources and images from a film to explore the notions of sex, on the one hand, and the concept of answering questions with a yes or no, on the other hand. Yes, No is on view until February 5 2012.

Zoe Strauss: Ten Years

Daddy Tattoo

Zoe Strauss: Ten Years is a mid-career retrospective of the acclaimed photographer’s work and the first critical assessment of her ten-year project to exhibit her photographs annually in a space beneath a section of Interstate-95 (I-95) in South Philadelphia. Strauss’s subjects are broad but her primary focus is on working-class experience, including the most disenfranchised people and places. Her photographs offer a poignant, troubling portrait of contemporary America. Strauss (American, born 1970) states that her ambition is “to create an epic narrative that reflects the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” Zoe Strauss: Ten Years will offer one version of that narrative, presenting approximately one hundred and fifty of her photographs, along with slideshows displaying more of her imagery, and installations on billboards throughout Philadelphia that will extend the exhibition beyond the Museum. Zoe Strauss: Ten Years is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from January 14 to April 22, 2012.

McQueen Motorcycles to Vegas Auction

Steve McQueen motorcycles are up for auction at the 21st Annual Las Vegas Motorcycle Auction and Races at the South Point Hotel & Casino Jan. 12-14 in Las Vegas. Not only will two of McQueen's classic motorcycles (1938 Triumph Speed Twin and 1940 Indian Four Cylinder) and a personal Bell (1970) helmet be on the block for the MidAmerica Auctions, but his widow, Barbara McQueen, will be serving as the guest of honor.

Funeral Songs

What song do you want played at your funeral? Daniel Mudie Cunningham has been asking that question of artists and art workers since 2007. Hundreds of people answered it in all manner of ways that ranged from the profound to the playful. The idea for Funeral Songs is based in personal experience. Weeks before the artist’s brother unexpectedly died in 2001, he’d mentioned what song should be played at his funeral. Amid the grief, the song choice was forgotten. Now recalled several years on, the song features in the Cunningham’s jukebox archive of music you can live or die to. Funeral Songs will be on view at the MONA (Museum of Old New Art) in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia,from January 13 to February 13, 2011 – the exhibition will also be a part of the annual MONA FOMA event (curated by Brian Ritchie, bass player for the Violent Femmes) which includes performances, art, and the like.

[BOOKS] The Last Nude

A stunning story of love, sexual obsession, treachery, and tragedy, about an artist and her most famous muse in Paris between the world wars. Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara's most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished-and coveted-works of art. A season as the painter's muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by history's darkening tide. Inspired by real events in de Lempicka's history, The Last Nude is a tour de force of historical imagination. Ellis Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives. Spellbinding and provocative, this is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance. [Find it here.]

Bertien van Manen: Let's Sit Down Down Before We Go

"I have to like the people I photograph. I need to feel an attraction, a fascination." Bertien van Manen. Buried deep in Bertien van Manen's images is an intimacy between photographer and subject. The viewer trespasses on the private moments in the frame, catching a glare over breakfast, unheard words between friends, both party to the action and intruding on it. Between 1991 and 2009 van Manen travelled across Asia and Eastern Europe with a small, analogue camera, learning the local language and engaging with the people who would become the subject of this collection. Let's sit down before we go is a portrait of the places van Manen visited and the people she met, stayed with and became friends with during her travels across Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Siberia, Tatarstan and Uzbekistan. Across nearly two decades, with the exception of big cities, little about the scenery in van Manen's photographs has changed. The relative sameness of Russia's appearance binds the images together, leaving us no indication of the time lapse from one photograph to another. The title, Let's sit down before we go represents an old Russian tradition, the practice of taking a moment, stopping to think before embarking on a journey, to consider where we will be travelling to and why. A special edition of  Let's Sit Down Before We Go has recently been released by Mack Books and includes a hand made c-type print and first edition copy housed in a bespoke embossed linen clam-shell portfolio box.  Let's Sit Down Before We Go, the series, is also on view at the In Camera gallery in Paris until January 21. 

Cry Along With The Babies

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Recorded by Kevin Morby, of the band Woods, and Cassie Ramone, of Vivian Girls, The Babies prep a new 12" inch EP of demos.  The twenty minutes of music onCry Along with the Babies invites you into the kitchen, art studio, and bedroom where it was recorded in 2010 and early 2011. Intended to be an immediate document of new ideas, the six songs sound fresh, loose and vulnerable all at once.

The Babies - Trouble

Jacque Katmor is Wishing You a Good Death

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Sex, eroticism and Judaism – Israeli artist Jacque Katmor, who is all but forgotten today, is the subject of a retrospective of sorts at the Nachum Gutman Museum of Art in Tel Aviv starting January 13. Katmor, who died in 2001, will undoubtably be an artist posthumously appreciated for his genius.  Somewhat of a Kenneth Anger of the Israeli unground cinema movement in the 1960s, Katmor was a leader of the artist collective Third Eye. Erotically charged, drug induced, and psychedelic, Katmor's art and films dealt with not only a rapidly changing zeitgeist, but also Jewish identity and Kabbalistic mysticism. "Jacque Katmor is Wishing You a Good Death" is on view at the Nachum Gutman Museum of Art from January 13 to May 19, Shimon Rokach st 21, Neve Tzedek, Tel Aviv.