Posts from the “1980s” Category

Marisa Scheinfeld: The Borscht Belt

Posted on November 25, 2018

Postcard, The Concord Hotel, Kiamesha Lake, NY, Undated.

The Borscht Belt, otherwise known as the Jewish Alps, was America’s premier getaway during the 20th century. Established in response to abject displays of anti-Semitism nationwide, the Borscht Belt consisted of resort hotels bungalow colonies, summer camps, and boarding houses nestled into the Catskill Mountains of New York state.

At its height, the Borscht Belt was the height of a glamour all it’s own — an all-inclusive vacation replete with indoor and outdoor pools, golf, tennis, skiing, ice-skating, dance, and live entertainment from no less than Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Billy Crystal, and Rodney Dangerfield. While many Jewish-Americans born before the ’80s know the area well, the 1987 film Dirty Dancing became the cultural touchstone for all who had never lived it for themselves.

But like the Rust Belt, the Borscht Belt has disappeared, lost to the massive socioeconomic shifts that have taken place in recent years. For photographer Marisa Scheinfeld, the shift quite literally hit home.

Read the Full story at Huck Online

Lobby, Grossinger’s Catskill Resort and Hotel, Liberty, New York. © Marisa Scheinfeld

Poker chips and cards, Grossinger’s Catskill Resort and Hotel, Liberty, New York. © Marisa Scheinfeld

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Yasumasa Morimura: Ego Obscura

Posted on November 15, 2018

Yasumasa Morimura, “Doublonnage (Marcel)” (1988)Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. © Yasumasa Morimura

“In the end, what is history? And what is historical truth? These are questions that do not have ready answers,” Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura asks in “egó sympósion”, the preface he pens in the catalogue for Ego Obscura, a 30-year retrospective of photographic work in which he transforms iconic works of art and pop culture into self-portraits.

Whether presenting himself as Marilyn Monroe in the famous Playboy centerfold, appearing as Frida Kahlo standing bare-breasted in her brace, or portraying Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy, Morimura surgically deconstructs the concept of “the self” to explore the perils of binary thinking that accompany our assumptions of race, gender, sexuality, and identity, and the ways in which we ensconce them in the pantheon of cultural memory and art history.

“Various truths are concealed in many paintings,” Morimura continues. “On the other hand, a painting can be seen as a fake, something caked with falsehoods and misunderstandings. A painter’s testimony is at once a confession of a hidden truth and an attempt to overwrite their life with a false statement.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Yasumasa Morimura, “Une moderne Olympia” (2018)Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. © Yasumasa Morimura

Yasumasa Morimura, Still from Ego Obscura

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Exhibitions, Japan, Painting, Photography

Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again

Posted on November 14, 2018

Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Self-Portrait, 1964. The Art Institute of Chicago. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) is a bigger star in death than he was in life. His paintings sell for sums he could have only dreamt of, and his images are licensed and reproduced all over the globe. His ascension to the pantheon of genius reveals that Warhol knew America better than we know ourselves.

Warhol transformed pop culture into high art, subverting both in the process. He took Walter Benjamin’s essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to its logical conclusion, making art out of the very act of repetition itself. In doing so, he planted the seeds for everything from celebrity worship, reality TV, personal branding, and meme culture.

Warhol set himself apart with his trademark silver wig and classic uniform—a white Brooks Brothers oxford cloth button-down, unwashed navy Levis, and a black leather Perfecto jacket—and assumed the position of an oracle. In public, he was a man of few words, saving it all for the spectacle he would unleash in his art, photography, films, books, magazines, record covers, and happenings.

“Andy is connected with quintessentially American things—he didn’t look towards Europe, and that’s why it feels contemporary,” Christopher Makos, a Warhol friend and collaborator, told VICE. “Whether it’s Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley, Coca-Cola or Campbell’s Soup, Andy always has a built-in PR machine going for him. He doesn’t even have to be around.”

More than three decades after his death at the age of 58, Warhol’s legacy is being celebrated in a major museum exhibition, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again , the first American retrospective since 1989. Senior Curator Donna De Salvo organized more than 350 of the most influential works that illustrate Warhol’s ability to bridge the paradoxes of American life, like fame and privacy, democracy and elitism, innovation and conformity, and truth and propaganda.

The traveling show, with an accompanying catalogue from Yale University Press, just opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where it’s on view through the end of March, before heading to San Francisco and Chicago in 2019. In anticipation, VICE tracked down a handful of Warhol’s friends and collaborators to find out what Andy Warhol was really like.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Marilyn Diptych, 1962. Tate, London; purchased 1980 © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York

Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Ladies and Gentlemen (Wilhelmina Ross), 1975. Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography, Vice

Anthony Friedkin: The Surfing Essay

Posted on November 6, 2018

At the tender age of eight, Anthony Friedkin discovered what would become the two greatest passions of his life: photography and surfing. Growing up in Los Angeles, Friedkin enjoyed weekends and summers at the family beach house in Malibu, where he developed an unquenchable love for the ocean.

In 1970, at the age of 21, Friedkin began The Surfing Essay, a visual diary of his life as a member of California’s celebrated surf scene – a project that has continued for more than 45 years. After a near-death accident two years ago, Friedkin decided to organise the work into an exhibition and book.

Now, a selection of 50 hand-printed black and white photographs will be on show at Anthony Friedkin: The Surfing Essay, opening November 8 at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York. The consummate insider, Friedkin delved beneath the Hollywood stereotype of the blonde, bronzed Adonis to reveal the extremely individualistic athletes who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of the perfect wave. Here, he shares his journey of discovery, celebration, and triumph over circumstance.

Read the Fill Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography

Posted on November 2, 2018

John M. Valadez, Brooklyn and Soto, from the East Los Angeles Urban Portrait Portfolio, ca. 1978

In the years following World War II, America’s Latinx communities were becoming increasingly marginalised and misrepresented. The Latinx immigrants joined African Americans who fled the South during the Great Migration, one of the largest, most rapid movements in history. Cities became the point of arrival for millions of migrants, who entered into established communities where their cultures took root, such as Spanish Harlem, the South Bronx, and East Los Angeles.

Many of their stories have largely gone untold, and E. Carmen Ramos, Smithsonian American Art Museum’s deputy chief curator and curator of Latino art, aims to correct this. In Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography, Ramos has organised the work of 10 Latinx photographers – Manuel Acevedo, Oscar Castillo, Frank Espada, Anthony Hernandez, Perla de Leon, Hiram Maristany, Ruben Ochoa, John Valadez, Winston Vargas, and Camilo José Vergara – who documented their communities as insiders.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

John M. Valadez, Couple Balam, from the East Los Angeles Urban Portrait Portfolio, ca. 1978

Camilo José Vergara, 65 East 125th Street, Harlem, 1977

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

Patrick Potter: Skins – A Way of Life

Posted on October 29, 2018

A group of skinheads sitting on the steps of Thomson House, works entrance, Newcastle on September 12, 1970. Photography NCJ

Skinhead culture emerged on the streets of London in 1969, as Mod scene was dying out and a new wave of bourgeois bohemians revelled in the “turn on, tune in, drop out” rhetoric of Timothy Leary. The self-indulgent pretensions of the hippie scene were an affront to Britain’s working-class youth; they created the figure of the skinhead, a back-to-basics rebel who was largely misunderstood.

The original skinheads were the first generation to be moved from historic East End slums and into then-new 1960s brutalist estates. Angry to be cut off from the old networks of support, skins sought to honour this devastating loss by creating their own utopian mythology of a shared working-class past.

Embracing their feeling of marginalisation from the mainstream, skins adopted a uniform that begins with a shaved head and ends in Doc Marten boots, with a nod to the style and sound of the Windrush Generation. Quintessential rebels in search of a good time, skins decamped en masse to pubs, football games, and gigs featuring ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dub DJs and bands.

Skins overtly rejected the historic codes of working-class deference, modesty, and rigid morality and, in the process, became a perfect target for both police harassment and fascist tactics during the 1970s and 80s, forever tainting the image of skinhead culture with the spectre of hooligans and neo-Nazis.

In the new book Skins: A Way of Life (out today via Carpet Bombing Culture), author Patrick Potter sets the record straight with a phenomenal history skinhead culture in the UK. Here, Potter gives a guide to the truth about this subculture.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Skinhead couple Glenda Peake and Tony Hughes. October 7, 1969.
Photography Doreen Spooner, Daily Mirror

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Music, Photography

Stephane Raynor: All About the BOY

Posted on October 25, 2018

BOY Poster designed by Peter Christopherson 1978

In 1976, Stephane Raynor opened BOY on King’s Road, and it quickly became the Mecca for the punk scene that was taking London by storm. The store created a cohesive brand identity long before anyone was thinking on those terms, drawing its name from provocative tabloid headlines like “Boy Stabs PC” and “Boy Electrocuted at 30,000 Volts,” which had been clipped and hung as décor.

“The ‘70s were awesome. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, but the world knew I’d arrived,” recalls Raynor. “Imagine a wasteland of a city like London where we could do whatever we wanted. There was no capitalism and that was fine for a small bunch of renegades like us.”

“I was an art anarchist. I didn’t believe in much. I wanted to create and destroy at the same time. I was living in a bubble, taking everything in around me but not knowing if I would succeed or crash and burn —and for some reason, it didn’t matter. I had no fear of consequences.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Punks at the Roxy, London, 1977 Photo by Derek Ridgers

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Books, Fashion, Huck, Music, Photography

David Bailey: Peru

Posted on October 21, 2018

Photo: © David Bailey

David Bailey is at home anywhere he goes. Driven by a profound sense of curiosity and a desire to engage, the photographer’s observant eye and quick intellect allow him entrée into just about any situation he chooses for himself; his calm confidence combined with an easy laugh span any chasm where language might otherwise be a barrier.

“They probably think I am mad for wanting to take a picture of them,” Bailey tells AnOther, reflecting on his experiences travelling through Peru in 1971 and 1984, with Grace Coddington for British Vogue and the Wool Board, and for Tatler, respectively.

Bailey made a practice of shooting fashion in the morning and evening so that he had the day to himself. He made his way through the cities and the towns, travelling across the plains and into the mountains, to create a captivating portrait of a people and a place collected in the new exhibition David Bailey: Peru, opening October 19 at Heni Gallery, London, and accompanying book publishing November 1.

Bailey’s Peru unfolds like an epic poem filled with magic and mystery, history and myth, as scenes of daily life evoke a sense of timeless wonder and awe. Now in his 80th year, Bailey laughs, “You ask me to remember what, 60 years ago?” – only to do just that for us.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther, Art, Books, Fashion, Latin America, Photography

Mike Miller: California Love

Posted on October 18, 2018

A fourth generation native of Los Angeles, photographer and director Mike Miller has been repping the West Side since the early ’70s. His story reads like a Hollywood film: a young upstart who went on to find his calling in art – with no less than supermodel Linda Evangelista gifting him his first camera, a Nikon F2, formerly owned by Peter Lindbergh.

Yet it’s not the gloss of high fashion for which Miller is best known. Instead, it’s the grit, glory and glamour of the LA hip hop scene – a legacy that’s being celebrated in new exhibition California Love, currently on view at M+B Photo in Los Angeles.

Growing up in Hollywood, Miller and his brothers got into enough trouble for his mother to pack the family up and head out to Santa Monica when he was 12. Living on the beach changed his life. “I wanted to be a director, with no clue how to get there,” he recalls. “Some of my neighbours were big producers and they put me on at Warner Brothers and Fox Studios when they started as 20th Century Fox. My friends from the beach were 50, 60 years old and I was like 15 but they were my bros. We connected on different levels because back in the day, that’s the way it was.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Music, Photography

Contact Warhol: Photography Without End

Posted on October 9, 2018

Andy Warhol (U.S.A., 1928–1987), Detail from Contact Sheet [Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Halston, Diane de Beauvau, Bethann Hardison in the back of a limousine], 1976. Gelatin silver print. Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 2014.43.3622. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Andy Warhol (U.S.A., 1928–1987), Detail from Contact Sheet [Photo shoot with Andy Warhol with shadow], 1986. Gelatin silver print. Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 2014.43.2893. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

In 1976, Andy Warhol began using a Minox 35EL camera to document his world – much in the same way he would call Pat Hackett every morning to report and record the previous day’s activities. Taking his camera wherever he went, Warhol shot over 3,600 rolls of film for an impressive total of 130,000 exposures over the following years, creating a meticulous record of New York City during its most decadent era. Through these images, we encounter the luminaries of the day including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Grace Jones, Debbie Harry, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Halston, Elizabeth Taylor, and Diane Von Furstenberg, with whom he seamlessly blended work and play.

In 2014, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University was chosen as the permanent home for the Andy Warhol Photography Archive, selections from which are currently on view in the new exhibition Contact Warhol: Photography Without End and its accompanying catalogue from The MIT Press. Here, project archivist Amy DiPasquale takes us on a deep dive inside the days and nights of Andy Warhol during the last 11 years of his life.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Andy Warhol (U.S.A., 1928–1987), Detail from Contact Sheet [Jean-Michel Basquiat photo shoot for Polaroid portrait; Andy Warhol, Bruno Bischofberger], 1982. Gelatin silver print. Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 2014.43.1547. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Manhattan, Photography

Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply

Posted on October 8, 2018

Ar the age of 16, New York native Dawoud Bey traveled from his home in Queens to see Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, the controversial exhibition that opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969.

As he gazed upon the portraits that James Van Der Zee made during the Harlem Renaissance, Bey recognised the profound power of the photograph to become both a repository for communal memory and a portal into another era – one that informs the way we live and think today.

This innate understanding of the portrait at a young, formative age, provided the foundation upon which he has built a tremendous, transformative body of work. Over the past half a century, Bey’s photographs have become both art and artifact, evidence and testimony, document of the moment and letter to the future.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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