Posts from the “1960s” Category

Daido Moriyama and the Aesthetics of Punk

Posted on February 26, 2018

“Pachinko”, 1982. © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery

Born in 1938 in Osaka, Japan, Daido Moriyama has become one of the pre-eminent fine art photographers of our times. As witness to the changes that transformed Japan after World War II, Moriyama used the camera to expose a side of his native land that few outsiders know, creating a body of work that is gritty and jarring, yet profoundly beautiful.

Moriyama first arrived in Tokyo in 1961 and began working as a freelance photographer in 1964. It was during the ’60s that he developed his distinct style, stripping the photograph down to its bare bones, embodying the pure D.I.Y. ethos of punk in visual form and providing a fresh new way of seeing the world.

He first came to the attention of the world in 1974, when his work was included in the New Japanese Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Since then, his profile has continued to grow, with his work influencing generations of artists who can’t help but imitate the iconoclastic master of the form.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Hawaii, 2007/2008 © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Japan, Photography

Under Cover: A Secret History of Cross-Dressers

Posted on February 22, 2018

Photo: Guilda, [one of a triptych]. New York, United States, circa 1950.

At the tender age of 10, Sébastien Lifshitz began collecting found photographs of men and women who refused to conform to the strictures of gender roles that demanded dressing according to an arbitrary set of rules. Here, in the privacy of their own space, they were free to don whatever clothing they wished and created a picture that stood as evidence to who they knew themselves to be.

Over the years, Lifshitz haunted flea markets, garage sales, junk shops, and eBay, amassing an impressive collection of amateur photographs of mostly anonymous men and women from Europe and the United States that date between 1880 and 1980. A selection of these works is on view in Under Cover: A Secret History of Cross-Dressers at The Photographer’s Gallery (February 23 – June 3, 2018).

“The subject of gender non-conformity and trans identity is something that feels very urgent right now: in our press, our social consciousness,” observes Karen McQuaid, Senior Curator at The Photographers’ Gallery. “We live with socially cultivated assumptions that men are one way and women are another when it comes to our dress, our actions, our accessories, our ambitions even – and historically there hasn’t been a lot of freedom in how we respond to these things. The more these issues are discussed openly, the more we educate each other and see gender as a spectrum.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

René Boivin photographer, Paris, France, circa 1930.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck

A Portrait of the Legendary Barkley L. Hendricks

Posted on February 15, 2018

“YOCKS”, 1975© Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

In October 1968, Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, made it plain in a court of law, when he faced conspiracy charges as part of the Chicago 8, stating: “We’re hip to the fact that Superman never saved no black people. You got that?”

Seale gave voice to a fact that was widely understood. So long as black folks are denied the opportunity to share their vision with the world, their lives and stories would be marginalised, misrepresented, or eradicated from the historical record.

Seale’s words were not lost on African American artist Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017), who donned a novelty Superman t-shirt, sunglasses, and nothing else for a self-portrait titled “Icon for My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved any Black People – Bobby Seale)” in 1969. The North Philadelphia native embodied the height of cool, a sensibility that dates back to 15th-century Nigerian Empire of Benin and has found its way across the African diaspora for six centuries.

Adopting the “cool pose,” with his arms folded across his chest against a simple grey backdrop framed in red, white, and blue, Hendricks tells it like it is. He is calm, fearless, and aloof, fully in control, poised, and dignified. Such is the strength of the painting that it was chosen as one of the primary images to promote Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, the landmark traveling exhibition which originated at Tate – opening just a couple of months after Hendricks’ death on April 16 at the age of 72.

“If you’re gonna do it, you might as well be memorable,” Hendricks told Thelma Golden, the Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, in the seminal 2008 monograph, Birth of the Cool (Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University), which has just been republished to include a memoriam to the artist and a selection of new images from his oeuvre.

The book, edited by Trevor Schoonmaker, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher, brilliantly presents a masterful look at the figurative painting, a selection of which can be seen in the next iteration of Soul of a Nation, which opened earlier this month at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, as well as in the exhibition catalogue, available from the Tate, which features Hendricks’ painting “What’s Going On” (1974) on the cover.

But Hendricks’ genius goes far beyond the known. In his death, a wealth of previously unseen works have been revealed. Today, at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, will present Barkley L. Hendricks, Them Changes, the first ever exhibition of newly discovered works on paper made contemporaneously with his famous portrait paintings.

These works take us inside Hendricks’ process, giving us a look at the way he crafted and mastered a visual language entirely his own. “While best known for his bold life-sized portraits, Hendricks is also an accomplished photographer, landscape painter, watercolourist, draftsman, assemblage artist, carpenter, and jazz musician,” Schoonmaker wrote in the introduction to Birth of the Cool, reminding us that the man behind the easel was just as fascinating as the subjects he painted.

Here Elisabeth Sann, Director of Jack Shainman Gallery, shares insights into Hendricks’ singular career that never fails to surprise and delight people from all walks of life.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Misc. Tyrone (Tyrone Smith)”, 1976© Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

“Noir”, 1978© Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Painting

Mr Chow: 50 Years

Posted on February 15, 2018

“Michael Chow, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Basquiat’s mother and friends” (1984). Silver gelatine print; 77/8 x 97/8 inches.Artwork by Andy Warhol. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Portrait of Michael Chow” (1984). Polymer silkscreened on canvas; 80 x 80 inches.Artwork by Andy Warhol. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Restauranteur. Designer. Architect. Art Collector. World Traveler. Icon of style and substance Michael Chow – or M, as he is known – has transformed fine dining into an art at Mr Chow, providing a magical bridge between the East and the West for the past fifty years.

M was born Zhou Yinghua in 1939 in Shanghai to Zhou Xingfang (1895-9175), a leading figure in the Peking Opera who wrote and acted in more than 650 titles during his illustrious career, and Lilian Qui (1905-1968), who hailed from a wealthy family whose fortune was made in tea.

At the age of 13, everything changed when M was sent to boarding school in London. What he didn’t know at the time was that he would never see or communicate with his father again. “Suddenly there was a void within me,” M reveals.

Into that chasm, M plunged – first in despair, then finding himself in art. He studied at St. Martins and went on to paint for a decade before the market forces made it apparent that it was not receptive to a Chinese artist. Once again, M turned to art to guide the way, launching the very first Mr Chow in Knightsbridge in February 1968.

From the very outset, Mr Chow was not just a restaurant – it was theatre: a stage for pleasure, passion, and intrigue, where Italian waiters served fine Chinese cuisine to sophisticated clientele and artworks by Allen Jones, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, and Jim Dine became an integral part of the experience. He established three restaurants in London before setting a course to conquer America.

Over the past half-century, M has opened restaurants in Beverly Hills, New York, Miami, and Las Vegas, always bringing glamour and theatre to the dining experience. Now, on the occasion of Mr Chow’s golden anniversary, M has released, Mr Chow: 50 Years (Prestel/Delmonico), a beautifully illustrated volume that explores a singular life in art, architecture, design, and cuisine, combining the very best of the east and the west.

Featuring works by Helmut Newton, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Kenny Scharf, Francesco Clemente, and Ed Ruscha, just to name a few, the book reveals the significant role Mr Chow has played in the art world over five decades. Here, M speaks with us about a life in art: the past, present, and future vision of a man whose magic has touched countless hearts.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Manhattan, Photography

Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful

Posted on January 22, 2018

Untitled (Naturally ’68 photo shoot in the Apollo Theater featuring Grandassa models and founding AJASS members Kwame Brathwaite, Frank Adu, Elombe Brath, and Ernest Baxter 1968, printed 2016. Photography by Kwame Brathwaite, Image courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

Untitled (Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs) 1968, printed 2017. Photography by Kwame Brathwaite, Image courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

On the evening of January 28, 1962, a massive crowd gathered outside Harlem’s Purple Manor, eager to gain entrance to Naturally 62 – the landmark event that introduced the ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement to the world.

The brainchild of photographer Kwame Brathwaite (born in 1938) and his older brother Elombe Brath (now deceased), Naturally 62 presented Blackness in its natural state through a powerful combination of fashion, music, and politics. The brothers, who were born in Brooklyn to a politically active family, had embraced Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement and co-founded the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios (AJASS), a collective of artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and fashion designers. “Our mission was to reach the folks so that they could see their own work,” Brathwaite reveals. “It was a time when people were trying to organize and improve the community, to get themselves in order so that they would not be the low man on the totem pole.”

The brothers worked on two fronts, supporting the African independence movement while embracing Black business at home, producing jazz concerts at legendary locales including Club 845 in the Bronx and Small’s Paradise in Harlem. But it was a local beauty contest that gave the brothers the inspiration for Naturally 62. A year earlier, while attending the annual Marcus Garvey Day Celebration, they watched ‘The Miss Natural Standard of Beauty Contest’, wherein models came to the stage without make-up, their hair free from heat press.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Untitled (Self Portrait) 1964, printed 2017. Photography by Kwame Brathwaite, Image courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

Categories: 1960s, Africa, AnOther, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography

Stephen Shore at the Museum of Modern Art

Posted on December 20, 2017

American photographer Stephen Shore, now 70, began his career as a child prodigy, getting his start at just 14 years old when Edward Steichen, then the director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired his work. Three years later, in 1965, he walked into Andy Warhol’s famed silver Factory and spent the next two years fully immersed and documenting the scene, thinking about how artists worked and applying those lessons to his career.

By the age of 24, Shore had fully arrived, with his first solo photography exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ushering in a new era of photography. By this time, Shore was working in colour – which, hard to imagine now, was an extremely radical move. Using a wide array of photographic formats and mediums, he created monumental scenes from everyday life. Shore’s America is a portrait of the grandeur that lies in the most mundane of moments.

As a result of the inscrutable nature of his work due to its level of detachment, Shore’s work has been largely misunderstood, for in his seeming objectivity he captures the enigmatic qualities of the vernacular world. Curator Quentin Bajac makes sense of it all in the new exhibition Stephen Shore, currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art through May 28, 2018.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Huck, Photography

Magnum Contact Sheets

Posted on December 11, 2017

Photo: Iran. Tehran. 1986. Veiled women practice shooting on the outskirts of the city. © Jean Gaumy/Magnum Photos

We would like to believe that photographs convey an element of truth, that in the fraction of a second recorded for posterity, we have captured something that lies beyond mere celluloid of digital technology – something we can gaze upon and discover verifiable facts, unearth an ineffable aspect of reality that lies beneath the surface.

Perhaps this is possible, in as much as we wish to believe it so, but when we consider that the single frame lies in a larger body of work can we be absolutely sure that we’re not being guided by the aesthetic power of the form. Are we not sentient beings whose powers and perceptions of sight heavily influenced by the perfection of the art?

It may be the best way to know is to consider the context, in as much as it is available to us: the circumstances of the moment, the players, the photographer themselves. And, if we are to consider the artist, where does this image fall, not only within their oeuvre but more specifically in project from which it is drawn? This is where the contact sheet comes in.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Photo: Iran. Tehran. 1986. Veiled women practice shooting on the outskirts of the city. © Jean Gaumy/Magnum Photos

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968

Posted on November 22, 2017

In April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam” at Riverside Church in New York City. Turning the focus from civil rights to human rights, he called for an end to the war, and renewed focus on fighting the enemies within the United States borders: poverty, injustice, and insecurity. One year later, to the day, he was assassinated – a crime for which the US government was finally found guilty in a court of law in 1999.

In the final month of his life, Dr. King called for a national demonstration that would “confront the power structure massively.” Following his death, “The Last Crusade” went forward, and 3,000 people came from across the land to set up a camp called “Resurrection City” on the Washington Mall. They lived in wooden shanties that stood for six weeks in 1968.

The Poor People’s Campaign, as it was officially known, was organised to draw attention to the poverty affecting people of all ethnicities in the United States. “They murdered Dr. King and I was furious,” photographer Jill Freedman remembers. “I had to go.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography, Women

Constance Hansen: Brooklyn c. 1969

Posted on November 15, 2017

In the wake of riots that began after the United States government ordered the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an urban affairs adviser to President Nixon, introduced a policy called “benign neglect” that would change the course of American history. The policy proposed systemic denial of basic government services to African-American and Latinx neighbourhoods across the nation, resulting in a massive collapse that decimated the people for well over a decade. The Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, home to the Pratt Institute, was one such neighbourhood to fall into disrepair. Yet from the destruction, a new culture was coming to bear.

Constance Hansen, one half the husband-and-wife team of Guzman, has just unearthed photographs of this pivotal era taken while she was a student at the Pratt Institute from 1969- 1971. “There was a whole other thing going on then,” she remembers. “The 60s vibe, the music, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights – everything was exploding. It was anarchistic. You just did your thing. There were a lot of artists, writers, poets, and people creating, very free and they were all deep in their work. I would be floating through and taking pictures.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Brooklyn, Huck, Photography

Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting

Posted on October 19, 2017

Artwork: Eye Body, Transformative Actions For The Camera, 1963. Courtesy of Carolee Schneemann

You may remember Lady Gaga’s meat dress as something of a scene – but it doesn’t hold a candle to Meat Joy, the Carolee Schneemann happening from 1964 that inspired it. Where Gaga took an existing idea and transformed it into a publicity stunt, Schneemann invented something that had never been seen or done – and it nearly cost her life.

Picture a group of young men and women clad in their undergarments experiencing the pleasures of the flesh: of the carcasses of fish and chicken, along with sausages, touching their bare skin. Imagine being in the same room as they gathered on the floor to engage in an experience of sensuality the likes of which had never been realised before. Envision a man in the audience becoming so enraged he leaped from his seat, dragging Schneemann off to the side, and beginning to strangle her.

This happened during the Paris edition and went on until two bourgeois women jumped from their seats and fought off the attacker until he stopped. Then Schneemann got back into the happening and continued on with the knowledge that her explorations could unleash a cataclysmic storm. But Schneemann is an unstoppable force – she is freedom incarnate. Uninhibited and unafraid, she has been challenging the patriarchy by virtue of being true to herself.

Born in 1939 to a country doctor and a farm wife, Schneemann grew up close to nature, embracing the life and death cycle of the earth. When her father refused to support her decision to go to college, she won a full scholarship to study painting at Bard College, in New York, which she attended until she was expelled on the grounds of “moral turpitude.” Where others might have given up, Schneemann persevered, creating a body of work so singular and so challenging that to this day she has no equal in the field.

Her pioneering investigations into the female body, sexuality, and gender have tapped into archaic visual traditions and wrestled with social taboos, transforming Schneemann into a vessel of transgression and subversion in search of truth. In celebration, MoMA P.S. 1, New York, presents Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting (October 22, 2017- March 11, 2018), the first comprehensive retrospective spanning her prolific six-decade career.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Prestel has released a catalogue of the same name, while the Artists Institute has published Carolee’s Issue 02, which illustrates the ways in which other artists, advertisers, and pop culture figures have drawn heavily from her work. Schneemann speaks with us about Meat Joy as well as her career as “both image and image maker.”

Read the Story at Dazed

Artwork: Meat Joy 1964, chromogenic color print. Photo by Al Giese. From performance at Judson Church, November 16-18, 1964 New York. Courtesy of C. Schneemann and P.P.O.W, New York

Artwork: Nude on Tracks,1962-1977. Courtesy of Carolee Schneemann.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Exhibitions, Painting, Women

Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco

Posted on October 12, 2017

Photo: Antonio Lopez, Pat Cleveland, Paris (Blue Water Series), 1975. Copyright, 2012, The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos. From Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump.

Photo: Antonio Lopez, Corey Tippin and Donna Jordan, Saint-Tropez, 1970. Photograph by Juan Ramos. © Copyright The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos, 2012. From Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump.

Deep in the mountains of Puerto Rico lies Utuado, built by Spanish imperialists nearly 300 years ago. It is here that Antonio Lopez (1943–1987) was born. The son of a father who crafted mannequins and a mother who made dresses, Lopez was a child prodigy who began to sketch at the age of two, revealing a gift that would revolutionise the fashion industry and prefigure the times in which we currently live.

At the age of seven, Lopez and his family moved to New York City, where he grew up living a double life, making mannequins with his father but playing with dolls out of sight. His burgeoning bisexuality would soon drive a wedge between Lopez and his family, inspiring him to create his own centered in his artist studio at Carnegie Hall.

As the civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements made space for those who had been previously marginalized by the mainstream, Lopez and his creative partner Juan Ramos (1942–1995) introduced goddess-like visions of his muses to the world in the pages of Vogue, WWD, and The New York Times. His discoveries, known as “Antonio’s Girls” included Grace Jones, Pat Cleveland, Cathee Dahmen, Tina Chow, Jessica Lange, Jerry Hall and Warhol Superstars Donna Jordan, Jane Forth and Patti D’Arbanville – women who not merely beautiful but were extraordinary characters and artists in their own right.

In celebration of his glorious career, Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump, will make its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 12. The documentary charts Lopez’s rise from the streets of the Bronx to the pinnacle of the Parisian demimonde. As the dominant fashion illustrator of the late 1960s and 70s, Lopez arrived on the scene just as ready-to-wear came into existence, bringing his distinctive Afro-Latinx sensibilities into the mix.

Antonio Lopez 1970 brings us back to a pivotal period in fashion history when the aristocratic hierarchy of the couture houses was falling away. In its place, Lopez emerged with a vision so modern that he was boldly ahead of his time – James Crump reflects on the ways in which Lopez’s Afro-Latinx roots transformed the fashion industry.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Eija Vehka Ajo, Juan Ramos, Jacques de Bascher, Karl Lagerfeld and Antonio Lopez, Paris, 1973. From Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Dazed, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography