Remember actor/singer/dancer Joel Grey (from Cabaret)? Well, over the last couple of years he's been busily carving out another string to his bow by taking camera phone photos. Joel Grey: 1.3: New Color Images just opened at the Steven Kasher Gallery.
One film from the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival that never made it onto anyone's must-see lists was J.B.Ghuman's Spork. A young adolescent (an outstanding performance from Savannah Stehlin), Spork is brought up in a trailer park by her older brother after her mom dies, For some, this comedy/musical may prove just too cutsy, derivative and naive. But soul, wit and imagination abound in this film. If you're the sort of kid (for real or grown-up) who sorta wanted to like the escapism and empowerment of High School Musical but was sorta repelled cringing at the film's commodity conformity, then Spork will be for you.
An alternative to that might be the videos of Nina Yuen having just closed at Lombard Fried. "My work ...engages with the production of false personal memories and with the stirring disagreements about the past in the accounts of my family and friends," writes Yuen. There's little that smacks of 'art-house' in this work rather it's the honest intelligent play of a child attempting to create a context for the tiny observations that he/she/it knows to be true but can't quite comprehend. The gallery's previous show, equally worth the visit, was Iranian-American artist Tala Madani who also showed at Saatchi and Pilar Corrias in London.
Nina Yuen & Sabina Mar
TV spot
Silently watching Nina's face on a camera phone (3.2) is also quite beautiful and fascinating.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
nineteeneightyfour
.......Artist Stefan Eins in front of Florian & Michaël Quistrebert's work
More photos from the opening of NineteenEightyFour at the Austrian Cultural Forum NYC can be found HERE. Most interesting about the show is its premise of Aldous Huxley that we are all complicit in our new world of surveillance and privacy infringement rather than innocent Orwellian victims.
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Thursday, May 27, 2010
GREATER NEW YORK 2010 - MoMA PS1
Every 5 years (for the 3rd time), curators gather together in what they term "a war room" for Greater New York and this year whittled down 800 artists to just under 70 showing work made within the last 5 years. Included are Ryan McNamara inviting well-known dancers to teach him ballet throughout the run of the exhibition, David Brooks who displaces a section of a simulated tropical rainforest encasing it in concrete and Tommy Hartung's video installation on memory, The Ascent of Man (in the style of East European animators). There is also a gallery devoted to a choice of the most important artistic events in a 5 Year Review. A substantial live performance schedule every weekend from the artists is concurrent as are cinema screenings including Andrew Lampert who recently showed at Anthology's Migrating Forms. But more of that great festival in a post or two.
Click HERE for VIVA'S impressions of the Greater New York show:
Part One
Part Two
A much nicer HD version of this video is also available upon request.
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,
Click HERE for VIVA'S impressions of the Greater New York show:
Part One
Part Two
A much nicer HD version of this video is also available upon request.
-&)
%)(
.
,
Monday, May 24, 2010
JOHN GIORNO at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
John Giorno's Black Painting and Drawings currently show at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery (until June 12). On Saturday night, he performed Lorca, please help me! and other poems. In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist he admitted that (given the influence of Warhol, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns) he began to see “the possibilities of found images through words. The way I found and used the material, . . . became a poetic form.”
Photos and video of the live performance available HERE.
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Photos and video of the live performance available HERE.
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Cherry blossoms, International Geophysical Year, and Sue de Beer
Down the corridor from Nicole Klagsbrun, Michael Mazzeo's gallery of weird photo processes showed Yong Hee Kim's 7days - cherry blossoms as you've never seen them photographed before.
And on Sunday, Marianne Boesky artist Sue de Beer screened The Quickening and Sister followed by a Q & A (available to watch here). (organised by AKTIONSART)
While on Saturday, the second show opened at Marianne's uptown gallery: International Geophysical Year" (or I.G.Y.) - 1 July 1957 through 31 December 1958 where cycles of solar activity would reach a high point. Curated by Todd Levin, the show ties in two concurrent art events of the time: The Guggenheim Museum's Inaugural Selection on 21 October 1959, and the Museum of Modern Art's Sixteen Americans (16 December 1959). Artist Richard Lytle remarked how surprised he was that his painting (bounding off the wall with colour) worked so well in this confined domestic townhouse space. And many other works also seemed remarkably at home here too. To the point where the spatial relationship to even the skirting board appeared almost inevitable.
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>
And on Sunday, Marianne Boesky artist Sue de Beer screened The Quickening and Sister followed by a Q & A (available to watch here). (organised by AKTIONSART)
While on Saturday, the second show opened at Marianne's uptown gallery: International Geophysical Year" (or I.G.Y.) - 1 July 1957 through 31 December 1958 where cycles of solar activity would reach a high point. Curated by Todd Levin, the show ties in two concurrent art events of the time: The Guggenheim Museum's Inaugural Selection on 21 October 1959, and the Museum of Modern Art's Sixteen Americans (16 December 1959). Artist Richard Lytle remarked how surprised he was that his painting (bounding off the wall with colour) worked so well in this confined domestic townhouse space. And many other works also seemed remarkably at home here too. To the point where the spatial relationship to even the skirting board appeared almost inevitable.
^
"""
>
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Liberal arts
On BBC Radio 3's Night Waves, Martha Nussbaum discusses her new book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities - looking at why she believes what Americans call "the liberal arts" are under real threat.
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Saturday, May 15, 2010
i spy me tiny eye
Celebrating her 80th birthday with a show at Bruce Silverstein, the self-reflexive nature of American photographer Rosalind Solomon's images was once described thus: "It would not be wrong to assert that for Solomon, every portrait is truly a self-portrait, a test of the self against another self” (Rosenheim, Rosalind Solomon: Disconnections). Exhibited together with the mask-like Fanø headdresses photographed in Vermeer fashion over three years by Danish artist Trine Søndergaard Strude, this exhibition engenders a hot debate in one's mind together with the many other photographic shows that have just opened in New York the last week or so. Does Susan Sontag's argument of a "chronic voyeuristic relation" (On Photography, 1977) on the proliferation of photographic images still hold true? Is our voyeurism now totally numbed by the gazillions of web photos and thus in wanting to see everything in one's relatively small world we end up seeing nothing in particular? Or as Sontag wrote about our aspiration to have "the whole world in our heads - as an anthology of images"? In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
she writes of "our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities...Images anesthetize”.
The New York Photo Festival was founded in January 2007 to give New York a platform for younger emerging photographic talents. (Interesting about the recent AIPAD show at the Armory was that though it was much to do with the 'fineness' of photography as art, the overall effect made one realise that this work was only ever truly 'affecting' in any way if it still smelt of its grass roots.) NY Photo Fest utilises the thriving galleries of Brooklyn's new residential district DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass - the bridges looming above the pathways below as if a Godzilla movie were about to begin) in this 4-day event (May 14-18th). Last night at St. Ann’s Warehouse 12 major awards were publicly presented and 24 artists given Honorable Mention certificates. As you'd expect, the festival as a who;e is a mixed bag of treats and agendas. At the Warehouse Hidden Books, Hidden Stories is curated by musician Lou Reed (who's composed an original score for a series of projected photos) and is one of 4 main themed exhibitions in the festival. There's also an installation of Doug and Mike Starn's photographs and videos for Big Bambú now atop the Met roof.
Curator Erik Kessels’ show Use Me, Abuse Me explores several questions, including: Where will image-making take us? Will all existing photography be endlessly recycled? What is most beguiling, though, both here and in other spaces is when the work on show emanates from the personal and the soul rather than existing as an abstraction - as in the simplicity of Claudia Sola's ring binder album 1974-1999. It seems like nothing new and yet it just is. Or Chantal Rens' child-like collages.
Bodies in Question curated by Fred Ritchin is headlined by the first U.S. exhibition of Marc Garanger’s controversial 1960 portraits of Algerian women, His job as a French combat photographer was to force Algerian women to be photographed without their veils ( often for the first time) to create army identity cards. Linn Underhill in No-Man’s Land restages George Platt Lynes's portraits of writers and artists casting herself in the title role: T.S. Eliot, Joan Miro, Marsden Hartley, Tennessee Williams, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others. "Mimicking the glamorous style and subtle lighting of Lynes's black and white images, Underhill draws attention to the homoerotic gaze of Lynes’s photographs." And how affected are we by Michael Wolf's Google street views? Does he provoke questions that we are just too lazy or busy to ask? Robbie Cooper's Alter Ego project pairs in the same frame a reality portrait of gamers alongside their cyber avatar. Raphaël Dallaporta (Parker Stephenson's gallery - French radio interview and much more) was recent recipient of Young Photographer at this year's ICP (International Center of Photography) Infinity Awards for his eerily beautiful landmines and cluster bombs - photographing them as if they were perfume bottles. His Domestic Slavery is on show at Photo Fest in which "he depicts the affluent residences of people accused and often convicted of keeping housekeepers and nannies (typically young women immigrants) in slavery."
Elsewhere in the satellite spaces, there is Véronique Bourgoin's Magic Trick of Polaroids, and FotoVisura's Latin American Pavilion is also worth checking out with Susan Bank's B/W photos creating a memory of reality in the observer that perhaps never was but is nonetheless palpable and provoking.
Meantime over the bridges in Manhattan at Robert Mann's gallery, Laurent Millet's The Last Days of Immanuel Kant takes Kant's waning powers as the inspiration for his own explorations of phenomenological doubt. His ephemeral sculptural tableaux are made only to be photographed. Most often, remarked little Viva to the artist, photos of art work so often remain only that with no dialectic between the work, the image and the observer. Millet agreed that his work was engaged in being "only a photo but" - the but being the quiet yet dynamic meeting place of the three aforementioned positions.
Last day of Adrian Paci's Gestures at Peter Blum (a great Chris Marker show last year) with video work where one second of footage is slowed down so that it stretches to 5 minutes and 18 seconds creating a watercolour fall of memory. MoMA's Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography has 200 works by approximately 120 artists occupying the third-floor Edward Steichen Photography Galleries. Many familiar names here to those in the moderate 'know' - Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Annette Messager, Kiki Smith, Hannah Wilke. But quite a few that aren't or rather who don't often get as much of an airing as this such as turn of the 20th century American photographers Frances Benjamin Johnston (her school photos of contemporary African American life) and Gertrude Käsebier. One is initially greeted to the exhibition by Yoko Ono and George Maciunas's large Fluxus Wallpaper (early 1970s) buttocks endlessly repeating (from her 1966 film). Recent acquisitions on view for the first time include Claude Cahun's self-portrait in drag (1921) (one subject in the Wellcome Institute London's Identity show) and Helen Levitt (last year's memorial tribute show at the Laurence Miller Gallery that included her rarely seen silent film, In the Street (1944). Look out too for Germaine Krull and Margaret Bourke-White.
Laurence Miller's current show is Philippe Halsman's Jump (did Vogue purloin and homage Halsman when Grace Coddington had the idea of photographing the guy behind the camera documenting her at Vogue in The September Issue?) If one needs more Kant then there's Adrian Piper's self-portrait series Food for the Spirit (1971), a meditation on transcendental being through an analysis of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
MoMA's publication of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art is available in June 2010 and there's an audio tour podcast.
At Sputnik Anton Litvin in The Shining allows photography to question the nature of using synthetic gilding in the domes of Orthodox Russian churches. He represented Russia at the Venice Biennale a few years ago and it was no surprise that he responded when asked about his 'art expo' experineces that the surface of such events often got just too much for him. The magazine/gallery Esopus currently have a show (including a a new John Baldessari work Foot and Stocking Series - this artist's photos from the '70s have never lost any of their quiet power of observation). Worth noting is Erica Allen's Untitled Gentleman - a series of fictional portraits created using anonymous faces from contemporary barbershop hairstyle posters combined with figures from discarded studio photographs. (Her blog). Online, her friend Lissa Rivera has some interesting work too.
Not photographic, but the inaugural show at Marianne Boesky's new uptown gallery closing today (over 3 floors of this old townhouse) seems almost a photo of some invisible event. There's a tingy ghostly feel to the place as if the house's occupant(s) abandoned quickly allowing the art work to quietly take up temporary residence - a continuum of Lucio Fontana with Robert Beck and Donald Moffet (Beck had a long overdue show at the Wexner in 2007).
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--
she writes of "our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities...Images anesthetize”.
The New York Photo Festival was founded in January 2007 to give New York a platform for younger emerging photographic talents. (Interesting about the recent AIPAD show at the Armory was that though it was much to do with the 'fineness' of photography as art, the overall effect made one realise that this work was only ever truly 'affecting' in any way if it still smelt of its grass roots.) NY Photo Fest utilises the thriving galleries of Brooklyn's new residential district DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass - the bridges looming above the pathways below as if a Godzilla movie were about to begin) in this 4-day event (May 14-18th). Last night at St. Ann’s Warehouse 12 major awards were publicly presented and 24 artists given Honorable Mention certificates. As you'd expect, the festival as a who;e is a mixed bag of treats and agendas. At the Warehouse Hidden Books, Hidden Stories is curated by musician Lou Reed (who's composed an original score for a series of projected photos) and is one of 4 main themed exhibitions in the festival. There's also an installation of Doug and Mike Starn's photographs and videos for Big Bambú now atop the Met roof.
Curator Erik Kessels’ show Use Me, Abuse Me explores several questions, including: Where will image-making take us? Will all existing photography be endlessly recycled? What is most beguiling, though, both here and in other spaces is when the work on show emanates from the personal and the soul rather than existing as an abstraction - as in the simplicity of Claudia Sola's ring binder album 1974-1999. It seems like nothing new and yet it just is. Or Chantal Rens' child-like collages.
Bodies in Question curated by Fred Ritchin is headlined by the first U.S. exhibition of Marc Garanger’s controversial 1960 portraits of Algerian women, His job as a French combat photographer was to force Algerian women to be photographed without their veils ( often for the first time) to create army identity cards. Linn Underhill in No-Man’s Land restages George Platt Lynes's portraits of writers and artists casting herself in the title role: T.S. Eliot, Joan Miro, Marsden Hartley, Tennessee Williams, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others. "Mimicking the glamorous style and subtle lighting of Lynes's black and white images, Underhill draws attention to the homoerotic gaze of Lynes’s photographs." And how affected are we by Michael Wolf's Google street views? Does he provoke questions that we are just too lazy or busy to ask? Robbie Cooper's Alter Ego project pairs in the same frame a reality portrait of gamers alongside their cyber avatar. Raphaël Dallaporta (Parker Stephenson's gallery - French radio interview and much more) was recent recipient of Young Photographer at this year's ICP (International Center of Photography) Infinity Awards for his eerily beautiful landmines and cluster bombs - photographing them as if they were perfume bottles. His Domestic Slavery is on show at Photo Fest in which "he depicts the affluent residences of people accused and often convicted of keeping housekeepers and nannies (typically young women immigrants) in slavery."
Elsewhere in the satellite spaces, there is Véronique Bourgoin's Magic Trick of Polaroids, and FotoVisura's Latin American Pavilion is also worth checking out with Susan Bank's B/W photos creating a memory of reality in the observer that perhaps never was but is nonetheless palpable and provoking.
Meantime over the bridges in Manhattan at Robert Mann's gallery, Laurent Millet's The Last Days of Immanuel Kant takes Kant's waning powers as the inspiration for his own explorations of phenomenological doubt. His ephemeral sculptural tableaux are made only to be photographed. Most often, remarked little Viva to the artist, photos of art work so often remain only that with no dialectic between the work, the image and the observer. Millet agreed that his work was engaged in being "only a photo but" - the but being the quiet yet dynamic meeting place of the three aforementioned positions.
Last day of Adrian Paci's Gestures at Peter Blum (a great Chris Marker show last year) with video work where one second of footage is slowed down so that it stretches to 5 minutes and 18 seconds creating a watercolour fall of memory. MoMA's Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography has 200 works by approximately 120 artists occupying the third-floor Edward Steichen Photography Galleries. Many familiar names here to those in the moderate 'know' - Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Annette Messager, Kiki Smith, Hannah Wilke. But quite a few that aren't or rather who don't often get as much of an airing as this such as turn of the 20th century American photographers Frances Benjamin Johnston (her school photos of contemporary African American life) and Gertrude Käsebier. One is initially greeted to the exhibition by Yoko Ono and George Maciunas's large Fluxus Wallpaper (early 1970s) buttocks endlessly repeating (from her 1966 film). Recent acquisitions on view for the first time include Claude Cahun's self-portrait in drag (1921) (one subject in the Wellcome Institute London's Identity show) and Helen Levitt (last year's memorial tribute show at the Laurence Miller Gallery that included her rarely seen silent film, In the Street (1944). Look out too for Germaine Krull and Margaret Bourke-White.
Laurence Miller's current show is Philippe Halsman's Jump (did Vogue purloin and homage Halsman when Grace Coddington had the idea of photographing the guy behind the camera documenting her at Vogue in The September Issue?) If one needs more Kant then there's Adrian Piper's self-portrait series Food for the Spirit (1971), a meditation on transcendental being through an analysis of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
MoMA's publication of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art is available in June 2010 and there's an audio tour podcast.
At Sputnik Anton Litvin in The Shining allows photography to question the nature of using synthetic gilding in the domes of Orthodox Russian churches. He represented Russia at the Venice Biennale a few years ago and it was no surprise that he responded when asked about his 'art expo' experineces that the surface of such events often got just too much for him. The magazine/gallery Esopus currently have a show (including a a new John Baldessari work Foot and Stocking Series - this artist's photos from the '70s have never lost any of their quiet power of observation). Worth noting is Erica Allen's Untitled Gentleman - a series of fictional portraits created using anonymous faces from contemporary barbershop hairstyle posters combined with figures from discarded studio photographs. (Her blog). Online, her friend Lissa Rivera has some interesting work too.
Not photographic, but the inaugural show at Marianne Boesky's new uptown gallery closing today (over 3 floors of this old townhouse) seems almost a photo of some invisible event. There's a tingy ghostly feel to the place as if the house's occupant(s) abandoned quickly allowing the art work to quietly take up temporary residence - a continuum of Lucio Fontana with Robert Beck and Donald Moffet (Beck had a long overdue show at the Wexner in 2007).
*.*
.*.
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--
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Exhibition #3 at The Emily Harvey Foundation
Last night's opening of Exhibition #3 at The Emily Harvey Foundation was probably the closest Cosmic Viva has ever got or will ever get to be a 'rock chic'. See video and photos of the event on her other site COSMIC VIVACE.
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Saturday, May 8, 2010
New York Gallery Week (NYGW)
The inaugural New York Gallery Week (NYGW) 2010 includes 50 solo gallery exhibitions and associated events throughout the city. And if you've been horologically challenged because they've never been open Sunday and Monday now is your chance this weekend. This afternoon there's a catalogue signing by the photographer Thomas Struth at Marian Goodman. His new work, according to the final line of the press release is "a visual record of the unfathomable". Which is exactly what strikes you traversing the walls of physics institutes, pharmaceutical plants "and other edifices of technological production". The mystery lies here in the density of these objects. Unlike Bernd and Hilla Becher's photos of industrial relics, Struth captures a quietly dangerous world betwixt the dead, the divine and the delirious.
Gallery Week opened last night with Hauser & Wirth's first US exhibition devoted exclusively to the drawings of artist Roni Horn. Artistic celebs including Björk, Matthew Barney and Rachel Weisz pondered over Roni Horn's strange patternations. And in many ways one felt a sense of Gaia about the work - a monadic dialectic between an inner volatility and inner peace. An earth seen from far above or microscopically through plankton beneath.
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Gallery Week opened last night with Hauser & Wirth's first US exhibition devoted exclusively to the drawings of artist Roni Horn. Artistic celebs including Björk, Matthew Barney and Rachel Weisz pondered over Roni Horn's strange patternations. And in many ways one felt a sense of Gaia about the work - a monadic dialectic between an inner volatility and inner peace. An earth seen from far above or microscopically through plankton beneath.
'_
_<
_
_'
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Malaysian digital filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad who died last year has a Filmmaker in Focus retrospective at MoMA (until May 12). She was also the executive creative director at Leo Burnett Kuala Lumpur.
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