Posts from the “1990s” 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

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

Lyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs

Posted on February 8, 2018

M. Lamar, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 1993. © Lyle Ashton Harris.

In the early morning on 17 October 1997, Lyle Ashton Harris wrote a poem “For Lawrence,” which he printed out and pasted into his journal, asking, “is there other ways to know thyself? / I guess in a sense I am still waiting / peaking through / I cry / fear, wondering, what, if I let it go, / to discover, to unveil another, to write, / to share myself with another, to trust myself. / i am still that little boy.”

The poem goes on to reflect on dying and death, on fear and desire, on the nerve it takes to be true to one’s self. It is something we all face in one way or another in this life – though the artist may grapple with these issues openly in their work, taking vulnerability to new heights of the sublime.

For Harris, the ascent began in 1993, when his exhibition Face: Lyle Ashton Harris opened at the New Museum. Here, he used photography, video, and audio to examine race, sexuality, and gender during a period when multiculturalism, globalisation, and AIDS activism dominated the world stage, transforming the conversation around black masculinity to expand beyond the rigid boundaries proscribed for African-American men.

The following year, Harris exhibited The Good Life, his first solo show, at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, where he subverted markers of identity to show just how vast blackness is when seen from the inside looking out. The show solidified Harris’s place in a new generation of artists transforming the art world.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Essex Hemphill, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1992. © Lyle Ashton Harris.

“Altar, Koreatown (Journal #1)”, 1997. © Lyle Ashton Harris.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Photography

Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Dianne Brill

Posted on January 12, 2018

Photo: Space Bride on The Mugler runway, 1990. Photography Marc Baptiste.

Photographed by everyone from Robert Mapplethorpe, Steven Klein, and Mario Testino to Annie Leibovitz, Michel Comte, and Bill King, to name just a few, Dianne Brill was at the very heart and soul of the New York scene in the 1980s and 90s as a creative coterie of artists, musicians, and writers forever changed the world of pop culture. As Andy Warhol wisely observed, “If you were at a party and Dianne Brill was there, you knew you were at the right party!”

Brill’s star rose in the club world but it didn’t end there. Whether serving as a muse for Warhol and Keith Haring, working with fashion designers Thierry Mugler, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Vivienne Westwood, designing clothes for rock stars and actors, or penning a bestselling self-help book, Brill was at the top of the game.

Now the art world pays tribute to the Queen of the Night in the new exhibition, To the Future Through the Past, which will be on view at PHOTO 18 in Zurich, through January 12-16, 2018. Featuring hundreds of images of Brill at her best, the exhibition celebrates her roles as It Girl, model, designer, and the bon vivant of your dreams.

Here Brill shares the secrets of her success, revealing how you can spin your social life into stellar opportunities.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Pony girl, The Roxy, NYC, 1988. Photo from the estate of Dianne Brill.

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat at an Outlaw party in NYC 1986 – was set up in an abandoned subway station, which was totally illegal and so fun. The party lasted 20 minutes before it was closed down. Photo from the estate of Dianne Brill.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Dazed, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography, Women

Michael Lavine: Nirvana

Posted on December 26, 2017

New York City, January 11, 1992. © Michael Lavine

During the summer of 1990, an unknown band flew from Seattle to New York to gig in the underground punk scene. While they were in town they dropped by photographer Michael Lavine’s Bleecker Street studio for a session arranged by Sub Pop Records owner Bruce Pavitt. Going by the name Nirvana, the group featured singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Chad Channing. They had been playing together for a few years but hadn’t yet broken through. As Lavine’s photos from that fateful day reveal, they were just a couple of kids living life on their terms.

Lavine would shoot the band a total of four times, including for cover of their seminal Nevermind album, which they released the following year. The album blew up, selling over 30 million copies worldwide and bringing grunge to a mainstream audience. But for Nirvana, success had a tumultuous effect, and as their star rose, the band began to plummet into the abyss. By the time Lavine photographed the final studio sessions on a weekend in 1992, the group was reaching breaking point.

Lavine’s photographs tell the story of a rise and fall, of paradise and perdition. To celebrate what would have been Cobain’s 50th year on earth, Ono Arte Contemporanea in Bologna, Italy presents Kurt Cobain 50: The Grunge Photographs of Michael Lavine, a selection of iconic and never-before-seen images from his archive, which runs from now through to January 31, 2018. Lavine shares his memories of this historic chapter of music history.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Nevermind session, Los Angeles, May 23, 1991. © Michael Lavine

Categories: 1990s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Music, 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

Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo

Posted on December 12, 2017

Photo: Still Kicking, a Polaroid of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat taken shortly before his death from a heroin overdose in 1988.Taken from Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo

Weed. Acid. Coke. Opium. Erotica. The Occult. There are many paths to achieve an altered state where mind and body blast off, leaving behind the mind-numbing banality of everday life. Fascinated by the possibilities of achieving transcendence on earth, Julio Santo Domingo (1957-2009) amassed the greatest private collection of sex, drugs, rock, and magic in the world – featuring some 100,000 books and objects by luminaries from Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, and the Marquis de Sade to Charles Baudelaire, The Rolling Stones, and Aleister Crowley to name just a few.

Writer Peter Watts teamed up with designer Yolanda Cuomo to create Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo (Anthology Editions), the definitive book drawn from the collection, which now resides at Harvard University. Here, alongside a preview of images from the book, which has just been released, Watts tells us about Santo Domingo’s passion for enchantments of all sorts.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Office wall in Geneva illustrating both Julio Santo Domingo’s eclectic, unorthodox hanging style and the wide range of material in the library. Note the stone phallus in the center of the pictureTaken from Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Painting, Photography

Magnum Contact Sheets

Posted on December 11, 2017

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

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

Avram Finkelstein: After Silence – A History of AIDS Through Its Images

Posted on December 11, 2017

Kissing Doesn’t Kill, Gran Fury, 1989–1990, For Art Against AIDS On The Road.

During the early years of the AIDS crisis, when an HIV positive diagnosis meant certain and gruesome death, Avram Finkelstein became a pivotal figure in ACT UP, the direct action advocacy group that worked tirelessly to combat U.S. government silence around the disease.

“Power structures count on our silence, but that doesn’t mean we’re obliged to give it to them,” Finkelstein remembers. “Raising your voice is a tremendous threat, and it’s the only threat you ever have to make.”

As co-founder of the collective Silence = Death and member of the art group Gran Fury, Finkelstein worked tirelessly to raise awareness and fight the power through a powerful combination of art and activism. “When words and images are combined, their power increases exponentially,” Finkelstein explains. “We thought: Why not just sell political agency the same way everything else is sold to us?”

During his years in the trenches, Finkelstein kept a journal documenting his work, which became the basis for After Silence: A History of AIDS Through Its Images (University of California Press). “I wrote After Silence so activists in the middle of the 21st century might be able to reinvigorate the political lessons these images contain, and see them as acts of strategic resistance that relate to struggles we have yet to imagine,” Finkelstein reveals.

Here, Finkelstein shares tips for artist-activists working today to fight the power.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Artwork: Silence = Death, The Silence = Death Project, 1987, poster, offset lithography.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Huck

Roger Ballen: Ballenesque

Posted on December 8, 2017

When Roger Ballen graduated from high school in 1968, his parents gave him a Nikon FTn camera. It was flown over from Hong Kong by a friend and lost in customs for several weeks before it finally arrived. The day that Ballen received it, he headed to the outskirts of Sing Sing prison to take photographs, a prescient moment to launch a journey in photography like no other before or since.

His name alone conjures up curious and disturbing visions of an uncanny world, one that recalls the spaces of the dreamscape, theaters of the unconscious. Here reality is a construction, but it is also something else: it is the space where our minds are released from rational sensibilities. To describe the work as unnerving would be polite. It is as though the non-linear spaces of the mind are given full flight.

“A shadow runs through my work,” Ballen observes in the magnificent new book, Ballenesque: A Retrospective (Thames & Hudson). “The shadow spreads, grows deeper as I move on, grow older. The shadow is no longer indistinguishable from the person they call Roger. I track my shadow (life) through these images.”

Ballenesque provides a road map through this life, bringing us along the trail that the shadow has traveled over the past five decades. One of his most telling photographs was taken at the very start, a photograph of a dead cat lying on a street in New York. Made in 1970, it has all the hallmarks of what is to come: the strange un-reality of this dead creature, a line that suggested the presence of the entry to a netherworld, an a car driving into the distance, into the great beyond.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

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