Mariko Mori inside her universal “time capsule” : collage by Janeth Davalos
We know you’re worried. We’re worried too. So, let’s all do ourselves a favor and take a break to work it all out. We hope you enjoy these bangers for a world in danger.
Tea Hacic-Vlahovic's Debut Memoir-Cum-Milanese Fever Dream Is Now Available
Tea Hacic is an MDMA-fueled Oscar Wilde with fake eyelashes and this book is a Fear and Loathing for the late Berlusconi-era; a deep walk of shame that tiptoes between a bewildering Bildungsroman and a fever dream of social climbing and social embarrassment. Click here to order now online and in print.
Full Autre Archive Available For Digital Download →
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Mine's On The 45: A Guide For Masturbation & Sex To Get You Through The Quarantine →
Tom Sachs, Knoll Turntable
1999
duct tape, phone books, steel
26 x 49 x 27 inches
Masturbating is a lot like writing a song. I guess sex is in general, but you can’t compose a complete sexual event with another person if you don’t know how to build the structure on your own.
You want to start out with a strong open. You don’t want to just jump into the chorus with all instruments fired up in full swing. You want to find something minimal and seductive to whet the palette—like the opening bassoon in Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” It’s a singular, sumptuous gesture that drips of sex. Be sure to slowly mine that gesture for all it’s worth, check the reaction, and then slowly add each layer of stimulation in an intuitive sort of fashion—teasing in a hook from time to time and then easing back into the groove. Click here to read more.
Read An Interview Of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge By Hans Ulrich Obrist →
Click here to read more.
Watch John Baldessari's Short Experimental Film "Title" (1973)
Baldessari progresses from simple, static images, such as a rock in an empty room, to complex narrative scenes, like a woman eavesdropping on her next-door neighbor. Through the gradual integration of cinematic techniques—motion, color, sound, acting, editing and arc—the artist inverts the traditional Hollywood model, stressing structure over narrative coherence.
Read Our Review Of Cristine Brache's Solo Exhibition @ Fierman Gallery by Adam Lehrer →
Artist Cristine Brache has developed an interest in surrealism. For her recent exhibition, Commit Me, Commit to Me (Cázame, Cásame) at New York’s Fierman Gallery, the artist has created a sculptural installation rife with references to some of the surrealist movement’s most important female practitioners. In particular, the anthropomorphic forms and hybridity between body and object of the figurative sculpture that functions as the installation’s centerpiece, Woman Getting Reupholstered, recalls those soft sculptures of Dorothea Tanning such as Nue Couchée, 1969. Click here to read more.
Watch Jack Hazan's 1974 Feature Length Film "A Bigger Splash" About David Hockney And His Muse
A Bigger Splash is a 1973 (sometimes cited as 1974) British biographical documentary film about David Hockney's lingering breakup with his then partner Peter Schlesinger, from 1970 to 1973. Directed by Jack Hazan, and edited by David Mingay, it has music by Patrick Gowers. Featuring many of Hockney's circle, it includes designers Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark, artist Patrick Procktor, gallery owner John Kasmin and museum curator Henry Geldzahler. It is a fly on the wall documentary, intercut with fictionalised and fantasy elements. It was groundbreaking and remains notable for its treatment of gay themes and its insights into his life and work during an important period in Hockney's life. The film takes its title from A Bigger Splash, perhaps Hockney's best known Californian swimming pool picture. Hockney was initially shocked by its intimacy but later changed his mind. Click here to watch.
Read A Conversation Between Sasha Grey and Maurizio Cattelan →
SASHA GREY How do you deal with doubt?
MAURIZIO CATTELAN I doubt myself all the time. I consider it a friend of mine. It grounds me and I question myself a lot. In the end, I always go with my gut. I move forward even when I feel like I am skating on thin ice. I have come to find: the thinner the ice, the less I doubt myself.
Click here to read the full conversation.
Read The Third Chapter Of Gideon Jacobs' & Brad Phillips' New Serial Novella →
Over the next year, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 3: Luridly Liminal / Liminally Lurid.
Read Our Review Of Kim-Anh Schreiber's New Book Fantasy
text by Summer Bowie
When planning a pregnancy or discussing the process of birth, we often hear about the rebirth that the mother experiences—her renaissance as woman with child, giver of life, and newborn unto herself. It’s such a beautiful image when you ignore the suicide that was planned for the woman who once was. Thus is the balance of life and death, and it's one that some of us contend with more readily than others. Nothing is more apparent than this in Kim-Anh Schreiber’s Fantasy, wherein the book’s titular figure is the daughter of a mother who never stops mourning the life she should have had; her inescapable Karma.
This cross-genre novel is a disembodied lung desperately inflating and deflating itself with stale cigarette smoke and the decades-old dust of whatever room you’re sitting in. It’s a work of autofiction that is equally exposed and pregnable as it is a fictitious hallucination woven like a cosmic braid with scenes from Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 film, House. The intergenerational sorority of aunts, mother, and grandmother that represent the author’s Vietnamese refugee matrilineage become interchangeable with Obayashi’s highly Westernized depiction of archetypal Japanese schoolgirls and the dubious matriarchs who haunt them. The spaces within the house hold formative and traumatic memories alike. They contain cultures of sexually repressed, sisterly perversions that are devoid of sexuality, yet brimming with desire. Schreiber is wont to illustrate scenes in much the same way as Obayashi—little comedic horrors that drip with Agent Orange and irradiated uranium (respectively) over postwar rubble both seen and unseen. House makes a perfect companion for this book in the way that it depicts the domicile as a metaphor for the body. A cell that contains the bodies of all the women who have kept it.
In Fantasy, mother tongue is laced with the mysterious motherland in a braid that spans the Pacific Ocean. A language spoken between grandmother and granddaughter flourishes and fades in this boat they call home, its orbit so wide one forgets that it’s indeed moving. Only her mother’s constant motion is detected as she skirts in and out on an outlet designer dingy, leaving an inexplicably large wake each time on her way out. You can trace the roots of words that have died in the wisps that fly out of one loop or the next, having provided the foundation of their intercontinental bridge, they take an unceremonious bow and quietly escape the lexicon of their nomadic identity. “Ever since I was a little girl, I have lived in a fantastic theatron: a seeing place whose walls keep disappearing, transforming to mask, fly, tease, or torment, and beyond the walls are nothingness, and three generations of women live with me, entering through the door to rehearse their magical future, every character brought down by their character, by the desire to look good as themselves for themselves, and I alone see them, I alone beholding my house, my body, my ghosts and my gods, and my screen that is suddenly a cannibal.”
Am I really so porous that someone could just bleed into me? asks Khaos, a recurring figure whose only identifying characteristics are Daughter Flower, pregnant. Flowers constitute the form of certain characters at times, nourish them at others, and press their withering bodies into the pages of a history book from a forgotten land. Having meticulously studied a smorgasbord of allegories that portray women stuck in houses such as Mekong Hotel, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Pretty Little Liars, The Virgin Suicides, and so on, Schreiber takes an incisive look at the corporal quality of our deepest psychic understandings and the umbilical cord that carries our identity from one body to the next. She is indefatiguably distinguishing one X from the other in her chromosomal set, knowing that there isn’t a corpus callosum dividing her dual identities, but rather an extensive sequence of yins and yangs swirling; an infinite loop of chain-smoking daisies propelling the turbine of life and death. Like the avatars of an ancient goddess, they circulate the dust that gathers in the corners of the epigenetic house, floating ubiquitously through the air, carrying traces of every dead and living thing that ever graced it with their presence.
Fantasy features cover art by Sojourner Truth Parsons and is published by Sidebrow Books. Click here to preorder. Follow Kim-Anh Schreiber on Instagram.
Mamma Andersson "The Lost Paradise" At David Zwirner In New York
David Zwirner presents an exhibition of recent paintings by Mamma Andersson, to be on view at 533 West 19th Street in New York. This will be the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery. Characterized as a unique combination of textured brushstrokes, loose washes, stark graphic lines, and evocative colors, Mamma Andersson’s works embody a new genre of landscape painting that recalls late nineteenth-century romanticism while also embracing a contemporary interest in layered, psychological compositions. Her often panoramic scenes draw inspiration from a wide range of archival photographic source materials, filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors, as well as the sparse topography of northern Sweden, where she grew up: mountainous backdrops, trees, snow, and wooden cabins are recurrent elements within her works. Yet, rather than conveying specific spatial or temporal reference points, they revolve around the expression of atmospheres and subjective moods and frequently appear to merge the past, the present, and the future. Mamma Andersson "The Lost Paradise" At David Zwirner In New York will be on view until April 11 at David Zwirner in New York. Installation images Courtesy David Zwirner
FRIENDS: A Sustainably-Minded Fashion Editorial By Byron Jesus
Shot by Allison Nguyen, featuring (model) Cameron Rose, (painter/model) Lila Doliner, (photographer) Bradley J Cooper, (designer/Model) Kristian Kane, styled by Marilyn Monroy and Byron Jesus, creative direction by Byron Jesus, casting by Büst Agency.
Featured brands: Bonfire of the Vanities @bonfireofthev, PHLEMUNS @phlemuns, Comme des Garçons @commedesgarcons, Boy Kloves @boyagainstthesea. @blk_pr, @jjjordandouglas,
No Sesso Runway Presentation Of "A Vignette of the Renaissance on 24th Street" At MOCA Los Angeles
photographs by Michelle Genevive Gonzales
Opening Of "All Of Them Witches" Organized by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles
photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Arcmanoro Niles First Solo Show On The West Coast At UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles
UTA Artist Space presents Arcmanoro Niles’ first solo show on the West Coast, titled I Guess By Now I’m Supposed To Be A Man: I’m Just Trying To Leave Behind Yesterday.
In the central gallery space, Niles debuts a series of seven large-scale paintings that explore personal journeys at various stages of life. Underscoring how our relationships and experiences shift our attitude over the course of our lifetime, the series opens with a child absorbed in the workings of a model train set and ends with an elderly man in a doctor’s office, hands clasped as he weighs the heavy notion of mortality.
Niles takes us room-by-room through his highly saturated interiors to show figures in states of deep introspection: a young adult is slumped against a bathtub; a couple is in the intimate surroundings of their bedroom; and a middle-aged man contemplatively faces his reflection in a mirror. Some seem aware of our presence and meet our gaze with a challenging stare, while some appear more vulnerable with heads bowed or turned away. Each painting is disrupted by Niles’s signature “seekers”—small, outlined creatures representing an impulsive force influencing his characters—that break Niles’s traditional portraiture compositions and add to the otherworldly feel.
Niles additionally presents a series of new small-scale portraits depicting friends and family members, and a number of paintings he has made over the past three years. While his other paintings offer cinematic narratives, often rendered to human scale, these intimate portraits allow a closer examination of his subjects as individuals.
On view until March 14 at UTA Artist Space, 403 Foothill Rd. Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Sam Anderson's I Never Loved Your Mind @ Tanya Leighton in Berlin
Sam Anderson’s sculptures resemble prototypes, directly expressed and emptied of unnecessary detail that might over-define their meanings. The show’s title implies a potential, singular narrative, yet Anderson privileges a plurality in which no one protagonist drives the plot. Objects and ideas are collected and arranged in spite of their differences in materiality and characterisation.
Sculptures with titles such as ‘Imagination’ and ‘Opportunists’ illustrate these hard to depict concepts. They do not narrativise them, aiming rather to define them visually. The faceless figures strung together in ‘Opportunists’ move backward and forward, both entering and exiting an open door frame. Likewise, the features of the two sandwich-board men, who serve as the emblem for ‘Imagination’ are so rounded that it is easy to confuse which direction they face. A negotiation takes place between determinate and indeterminate elements. The implication of language paired with minimal gesture creates an evocative psychological space wherein the audience fills in the finer details.
I Never Loved Your Mind will be on view throughout March 7 at Tanya Leighton Kurfürstenstraße 156 & 24/25 10785 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery
Read The Second Chapter Of Brad Phillips' & Gideon Jacobs' Serial Novella →
Over the course of 2020, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 2: Guillermo’s Funeral.
Highlights From The 2020 ALAC Art Fair At The Hollywood Athletic Club in Los Angeles
photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Highlights From The 2020 Felix Art Fair At The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel In Los Angeles
photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper