New World Hoarder

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Spoke Art Gallery presents New World Hoarder, an exhibition featuring new work by Los Angeles based artist Casey Weldon. For his San Francisco solo show debut, Weldon will be debuting fantastical and beautifully painted images meant to inspire, question, parody, and evoke laughter.New World Hoarder takes you on a surreal adventure ripe with four-eyed animals, majestic woods people, and chalk full of acerbic pop culture jabs. On view until June 23, 2012 at Spoke Art Gallery, 816 Sutter Street, San Francisco 

[AUTRE TV] Maria - Conception - Action by Hermann Nitsch

With the recent rise of purported "zombie attacks," its sort of like we're all living in the sick wet dream of Ed Gein. And after watching a recent live performance by the artist Bruce LaBruce at a gallery in New York – where actors portrayed some sort of rebel faction and then execute a hostage all in one of LaBruce's signature bloodbaths – I started thinking of shock and extreme violence in art as a baptism of our consciousness. In 1909, at the very birth of modernism, Italian writer Filipo Tommaso Marinetti's published in France's leading newspaper Le Figaro his seminal piece entitled The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism which declared that "Art can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice." To Marinetti violence was not only as a means of producing an aesthetic effect, but was also inherent to life itself. There is certainly a palpable depravity underneath our gossamer thin surface – the dark, primitive recesses of our unconscious can sit only so long under the heat until it snaps. Since 1963, the Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch has created a series of live happenings, which combine cruelty, sexuality, defilement, and visual shock for "purposes of purification, and "ab-reaction" of sado-masochist impulses." In these performances we can see the amazing creative lineage between Nitsch and artists like Bruce LaBruce who don't necessarily make this type of art for the sake of shock alone, but to reawaken our unconscious from a permanent state embryonic paralysis and to exact revenge on our general sense of collective torpescence. This is a film record, entitled Maria - Conception - Action, of Nisch's most controversial creation: the crucifixion of a young woman, the disembowelling of a lamb carcass, and her defilement with it. Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. (warning: film is EXTREMELY graphic, if you are under the age of 18, at work, or squeamish about real blood do not watch).

[NEW] Baby by Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

Photograph by Terry Richardson

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti will release its new album, Mature Themes, on Aug. 21, it's the band's second album for 4AD and the official follow-up to its 2010 breakthrough album, Before Today. The first single from the album is a cover of Donnie and Joe Emerson's "Baby," and features guest vocals from Dam-Funk. The song will also be released on July 10 as a limited edition one-sided 12" via 4AD. Dam-Funk will also open up several dates of APHG's Fall tour.

Yoko Ono: TO THE LIGHT

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To The Light, a major exhibition of celebrated artist Yoko Ono, on view later this month in London, reflects upon the enormous impact that she has made on contemporary art, exploring her influential role across a wide range of media. This exhibition, her first in a London public institution for more than a decade, includes new and existing installations, films and performances, as well as archive material relating to several key early works. Ono's continuing interest in the relationship between the roles of artist and viewer is evident throughout the exhibition. A number of works in To The Light position both artist and viewer as agents of change. For example, a series of instruction pieces written especially for the Serpentine Gallery can be completed physically or mentally by the viewer, while the large-scale installation AMAZE transforms the viewer from the observer to the observed. To The Lightwill be on view from June 19 to September 9 at the Serpentine Gallery in London, Kensington Gardens, London

40 Years of Camp

Ken Weaver, AB Astra Lumina (To the Stars Light), 2007, Oil pastel on paper, two panels

Opening today, Schroeder Romero in New York presents the exhibition Summer Camp featuring James Bidgood, Brice Brown, Tom of Finland, Scott Hunt, Heather Johnson, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Cary Leibowitz/Candyass, Jean Lowe, Robert Mapplethorpe, Uzi Parnes, Carl Plansky, John Waters, and Ken Weaver representing over forty years of work about and within ‘camp’ culture and aesthetic—an aesthetic, according to Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp (1964), focused on artifice, frivolity, naïve middle-class pretentiousness, and ‘shocking’ excess. Summer Camp will be on view from June 7 to August 12, 2012 at Schroeder Romero, 531 West 26th Street New York NY

SCREW YOU

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SCREW YOU, curated by David Platzker of Specific Object, shines a light on the intersection of counterculture publishing, tabloid pornography and the art world which occurred in the creatively fertile years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. SCREW YOU draws its title and inspiration from the notorious pornographic tabloid Screw: The Sex Review, which came onto the New York scene November 29, 1968. Nestling porn and fine art side by side between the sheets, content ranged from spreads of large breasted women illuminating such erudite articles as “The Art of Buying Dirty Books” to centerfolds conceived by and featuring artist Yayoi Kusama. Issues of Screw throughout the late 1960s and the early 1970s embraced a cultural breadth spanning art, advertising and editorial. Contributors from the realm of visual culture included leading movers and shakers Dan Graham, Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.While Screw, Kiss, Pleasure, and Kusama’s own tabloid, Kusama’s Orgy of Nudity, Love, Sex Beauty, played to the strengths of the genre, contemporaneous periodicals such as New York Review of Sex and Politics, Other Scenes, The East Village Other and artist Les Levine’s Culture Hero favored a merging of literature and art in addition to its pansexual content. Notable contributors to these loftier publications included the writers Gregory Battcock, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski and artists Brigid Berlin, R. Crumb, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Carolee Schneemann, Bob Stanley, Walasse Ting, and Tadanori Yokoo, along with many others working in the realm of sex and sexual identity. SCREW YOU will be on view at Susan Inglett Gallery 31 May to 13 July.

Bittersweet Moments in Blazing Colors: Caro Niederer in NYC

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Hauser & Wirth New York will present an exhibition of eighteen new paintings by Caro Niederer – the first New York solo show for an internationally admired Swiss artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, tapestries, photography and video. Caro Niederer. Paintings will open to the public on June 27th and remain on view at the gallery through July 27th, 2012, Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street New York NY

Yayoi Kusama for Louis Vuitton

Princess of polka dots Yayoi Kusama has teamed up with Louis Vutton for a special capsule collection. The collection, entitled Infinitely Kusama, is set to be unveiled on July 10, conveniently timed with Kusama’s major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. The goods will be available in Vuitton’s 461 stores starting July 11, with a second line arriving in October.

Flaming Lips Feat. Erykah Badu "Western Esotericism"

After releasing and taking the video down a few times over the last two days, The Flaming Lips finally premier the music video for their collaboration with Erykah Badu, a cover of the standard The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, which appears on the collab-heavy release The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends to be released June 26 on Warner Brother Records. The clip was directed by George Salisbury and features a naked Nayrok Badu, Erykah's sister, covered in glitter and a plethora of other liquids.

DESTE & Barneys New York Public Art Collaboration

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Beginning June 6, 2012 the Barneys New York Madison Avenue flagship store’s windows will be transformed into dymamic vitrines for a public art exhibition organized in collaboration with DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, based in Athens, Greece. Conceived by DESTE’s founder, the internationally admired collector and patron Dakis Joannou, and Barneys Creative Director Dennis Freedman, this exhibition will present five ambitious site- specific installation projects by prominent artists in different disciplines. Each of the artists has participated since 2007 in destefashioncollection-- a DESTE Foundation special initiative devoted to investigating, interpreting and celebrating the complex relationships between art, fashion, and the culture at large. On view through July 4th, the project at Barneys New York will be the first U.S. presentation of destefashioncollection. The five participating artists are M/M (Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak) Paris; photographer Juergen Teller; artist Helmut Lang; poet Patrizia Cavalli; and filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari.

Mikael Kennedy: Between Wolf & Dog

Clic Gallery in New York presents Between Wolf & Dog, an exhibition of new Polaroids by New York photographer Mikael Kennedy. Fresh off the heels of Kennedy's internationally-lauded Passport to Trespass series which documented over a decade of the artist's travels via Polaroids, Between Wolf & Dog is an exploration of the dual ferity and domesticity of human existence. Derived from the French saying "L'heure entre chien et loupe" (the hour between dog and wolf) which refers to the golden hour right after sunset, Between Wolf & Dog presents photos of the people in Kennedy's life at moments when their innate liminality is fully exposed. According to the artist, "At the time that I shot these pictures I was starting to feel that border between domestic and wild and I started to look for it in my friends." Featuring new Polaroids, Between Wolf & Dog will open on Thursday, June 7 and remain open through July 8 @ Clic Gallery, 255 Centre Street, New York

Larry Clark in Berlin

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Adolescent beauty, sexuality and drug-induced action – Larry Clark radically and realistically documents the everyday  life of US teenagers, transgressing bourgeois moral concepts. From the drug scene in his hometown of Tulsa in the  early 1960s to contemporary skaters in Los Angeles his works capture extremely intimate moments. The authenticity  of Clarke’s images expose the consequences of a dysfunctional society and question the social responsibility and moral stance of its members.  Larry Clark uses a direct visual language that is both touching and disturbing and creates a fascinating dynamic  between classical pictorial composition and a special choice of themes. His work focuses on the experience of a completely uninhibited sexuality. By exposure it, the artist never denounces or accuses but allows the viewers to  make their own judgement.  C/O Berlin, International Forum For Visual Dialogues, will present for the first time in Germany approx. 200 works of Larry Clark. In addition to his series  “Teenage Lust” and “Los Angeles”, as well as videos, the main focus of the monographic exhibition is on collages, in  which the artist combines found objects. In a similar way to a film or photo series, new associations and implications  are created by supplementing the collages with newspaper cuttings, letters, posters and other objects. The exhibition will be on view until August 12 at C/O Berlin, Postfuhramt at Oranienburger Straße 35/36 in Berlin-Mitt

Song Kun: A Thousand Kisses Deep

The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing, China presents an exhibition of new work by Song Kun, one of China’s most prominent young female artists. Song Kun: A Thousand Kisses Deep, opened yesterday. Hung salon-style across the twin walls of UCCA’s Nave, the exhibition features a new cycle of 28 shimmering paintings, technical studies of drifting light evoking a sinister, sensual beauty and the dual themes of carnality and spirituality. Paired with an immersive video installation, this presentation showcases the latest practice of one of China’s most interesting young painters. Song Kun: A Thousand Kisses Deep is on view until July 15 at the The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art,  798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China