Posts from the “1990s” Category

Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work

Posted on March 20, 2017

No title (This feeling is), 2011. Pen and ink on paper, 37 1/4 x 49 1/2 in (94.6 x 125.7 cm). Aishti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon. Photography courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

No Title (Fight for freedom!), 1981. Pen and ink on paper, 11 x 8 ½ in (27.9 x 21.6 cm). Private collection. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

“I don’t make art with grandiose delusions. I do know there are limits to what art is capable of. That makes it all the more appealing to me. And I can do as I will whenever I choose,” American artist Raymond Pettibon has said, revealing the essence of the continuous appeal of his work. A populist without pretense who came up in the West Coast punk scene, Pettibon honed the D.I.Y. ethos of the era into a fine art career.

Now, in celebration of his phenomenal body of work, the New Museum, New York, presents Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work, the first major museum retrospective of his work, currently on view through April 9, 2017. The exhibition takes America to task for its truths, providing a perspective that is equal parts poignant, witty, and subversive.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

No Title (Lieutenant! There’s our), 2008. Pen, ink, and gouache on paper, 22 1/4 x 30 in (57.2 x 76.2 cm). Aishti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon. Photography courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions

Eternal Youth

Posted on March 15, 2017

Photo: Larry Clark American, b. 1943 Untitled (KIDS) 1995 Chromogenic development print 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm) Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Gift from The Howard and Donna Stone Collection 2002.16.8 Photo: Michal Raz-Russo, © MCA Chicago

When Larry Clark released Kids in 1995, he set the silver screen ablaze with his vision of New York City youth as it tore itself apart through sex, drugs, and manipulation. He thrust a new cast of characters onto the world stage, taking us through a day in the life of a group of kids who embodied a combination of sexual precociousness and racial dysmorphia.

Kids was designed to wreak havoc and cause fright, playing with paranoid fears of HIV in a new generation of adolescents coming up just a few years after the disease had decimated a generation right before their eyes. In the ‘80s and ‘90s sex did not create life; it created a death sentence from which there was no recourse at that time. In light of this apocalyptic vibe, the film embodied fully embodied the nihilistic existentialist crisis of the times. Not surprisingly, not everyone in the cast survived. Two of the film’s biggest stars Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter would die young—while Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson would go on to become Hollywood stars.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Digging in the Crates for the Best “Art Record Covers” Ever Made

Posted on March 14, 2017

art: Takashi Murakami / music: Kanye West / record: Graduation / year: 2007 / label: Roc-A-Fella Records / format: Album 2×12 ̋, CD / artwork: Digital compositing

Once upon a time, just a couple of decades ago, new albums used to be released on vinyl, which was carefully stored inside 12 x 12 inch record sleeves. In the days before video killed the radio star, all you’d have available was what you held in your hands. You’d pop the record on the turntable, drop the needle and then sit back, gazing upon the album cover searching for some sort of understanding.

There was something profound about the simplicity of it all, the single image becoming an icon all its own. Sight and sound complemented each other, like yin and yang, striking the perfect balance of substance and style. Then, everything began to change. The record gave way to the CD and the image scaled down tremendously. But that was nothing compared to the current lay of the land, where the album cover appears as a thumbnail image in the upper half of our smart phone.

If you missed it, c’est la vie. Times change, invariably. But if you miss it, and you want that good thing back, Taschen has just released Art Record Covers, a 448-page compendium of the finest collaborations between musicians and artists. Edited by Francesco Spampinato and Julius Wiedemann, the book is perfectly sized at 12 x 12 inches, capturing and recreating the visual impact each image once possessed.

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art: Andy Warhol / music: The Velvet Underground and Nico / record: The Velvet Underground and Nico / year: 1967 / label: Verve Records / format: Album 12 ̋ / artwork: Screen print / special: Vinyl released with three variations of front cover with banana sticker to peel off

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Music

Jeffrey Henson Scales: House

Posted on March 1, 2017

Photo: House’s Barber Shop series, 1987-1992, by Jeffrey Henson Scales.

Located just half a block from the legendary home of bebop, Minton’s Playhouse, House’s Barber Shop did business inside a plate-glass storefront in Harlem, New York, for nearly 70 years. Luminaries such as Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Lee Morgan and Max Roach would come to House’s for a fresh cut before a show. Word had it that Malcolm X, whose mosque was on Lenox Avenue and West 116th Street, would frequent the spot. House’s served everyone from musicians, artists and scientists, to bus drivers, postal workers and scoundrels for the better part of the 20th century.

Founder Jesse House set up shop on Seventh Avenue and West 118th Street when he returned to the neighborhood after serving as a GI during World War II. When he retired, his son, David, kept the shop going until David’s own retirement in 2004. David died a year ago, but before he died, he learned that House’s Barber Shop would be preserved for future generations in a book of photographs.

The book, simply titled House (SPQR Editions), presents the work of Jeffrey Henson Scales, currently the photography editor of The New York Times Sunday Review. His pictures, shot between 1986 and 1992, provide a front-row view of life inside the barbershop. With jazz music wafting through the room, we enter a world where men of all ages share their lives while getting a shape-up, a fade, or even a conk.

Read the Full Story at The Undefeated

Photo: House’s Barber Shop series, 1987-1992, by Jeffrey Henson Scales.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Manhattan, Photography, The Undefeated

Acts of Intimacy

Posted on February 28, 2017

Photo: Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, from “101 Works for Robert Frank (Private Diary),” 1993. Courtesy The Walther Collection.

Sometimes the most sexy moments are surreptitious instances that you stumble upon, filled with the tantalizing, tingly sensation of transgressing societal norms. In Japan, voyeurism is considered extremely erotic, for it delves beneath the pristine surface of respectability politics. No longer required to don the mask of polite society, the true self emerges as something vulnerable yet bold, something that we only experience through the intimate world.

In celebration of this distinctive way of seeing the world, The Walther Collection, New York, presents Acts of Intimacy, a yearlong series devoted to contemporary photography and video art from Asia, to be presented in thematic exhibitions exploring ideas of performance, social identity, sexuality, and urban transformation.

The first exhibition, Acts of Intimacy: The Erotic Gaze in Japanese Photography, presents the work of Crave faves Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, and Kohei Yoshiyuki. Organized by guest curator Christopher Phillips, with support from Daniela Baumann and Oluremi C. Onabanjo, the exhibition is a sensual meditation on sexual subcultures in Japanese society, with each photographer sharing a distinct perspective that complements each other.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Daido Moriyama, Untitled, from “a room,” 2015. Courtesy The Walther Collection

Categories: 1990s

The David Hockney Takeover!

Posted on February 16, 2017

Artwork: David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1971 Private Collection© David Hockney. Courtesy of Tate Britain.

Has there ever been a painter of modern life as celebrated as David Hockney? The British artist, who celebrates his 80th birthday this July, is being fêted with the largest retrospective of his career at the Tate Britain and a flurry of fabulous new art books celebrating his incredible body of work.

While a student at the Royal College of Art in London, Hockney was included in the 1963 exhibition Young Contemporaries, which signaled the arrival of British Pop art. A year later, he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived for four years, creating his seminal painting, A Bigger Splash (1967), which has been knocked off with reckless abandon.

Over a period of six decades, Hockney has transformed the nature of picture making through his relentless questioning of conventions, always seeking to go deeper to connect with art’s very essence. The exhibition at the Tate, simply titled David Hockney, starts with the Love paintings, early work made in 1960 and ’61, in which he subverted the macho language of abstract expressionism and subverted it into a vehicle to express homoerotic ideas and experiences.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: David Hockney. English 1937–. The group XI, 7-11 July 2014. acrylic on canvas. 122.0 x 183.0 cm. Collection of the artist. © David Hockney. Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt. rom David Hockney: Current (Thames & Hudson, May 2017).

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

Dr. Octagon Returns!

Posted on February 15, 2017

In 1996, Hip Hop had reached new heights, achieving crossover success with music coming out of the East and the West. With labels like Bad Boy and Death Row leading the way, the Golden Age of Hip Hop was about to enter the Age of Bling. In many ways, ’96 was a turning point: the culture, now 23 years old was had begun a schism between the mainstream and the underground, with the more innovative cats keeping close to the roots of the movement, creating something entirely new.

That extra fresh style and sound was the hallmark of Dr. Octagon, a group so innovative it left many confused for it went beyond Hip Hop’s outer limits. Dr. Octagon came together in 1996 through an unusual combination of fate and serendipity.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1990s, Crave, Music

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors

Posted on February 13, 2017

Artwork: Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013. Wood, metal, glass mirrors, plastic, acrylic panel, rubber, LED lighting system, acrylic balls, and water, 113 ¼ x 163 ½ x 163 ½ in. Courtesy of David Zwirner, N.Y. © Yayoi Kusama

“Art is like an endless ocean. I can feel a sense of infinity, the heaven and sky—all a sense of infinity that I can feel through the ocean,” Yayoi Kusama tells Melissa Chiu in a conversation in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, the exhibition catalogue published by DelMonico Books/Prestel that accompanies an exhibition by the same name at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. this February. The Hirschhorn is the first stop on a two-year, five-city tour; a full list of venues and dates appears at the end of this story.

Infinity Mirrors is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of 2017, as it includes six of Kusama’s mindblowing Infinity Mirror Rooms. By now you’ve seen them in countless selfies taken by museum attendees around the world. Kusama has constructed magical spaces that capture the captivating expanse of vast, unknowable universe in rooms filled with multi-colored LED lights. All the surfaces are mirrors so that the result is a gloriously expansive sense of being launched into outer space.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Japan

Signs of Our Times

Posted on January 28, 2017

Farah Behbehani, Love rests on no foundation II. Courtesy of Merrell Publishers

We are witnessing acts of ignorance and arrogance so epic they are nothing short of crimes against humanity. When I wrote a review of Signs of Our Times: Calligraphy to Calligraffiti (Merrell) just a couple of days ago for Crave Online, I didn’t foresee the Muslim Ban figuring into things. I just wrote a few words about the beauty of a people that honored the Second Commandment to the letter of the law, one that was born of a grace and beauty that elegantly combines with the subversive eloquence of questioning the status quo–for it is the realm of artists to subvert assumptions that have grown stale and old. But here we are on the precipice, pushed to the edge by a psychopath who speaks for the descendants of Columbus. I don’t have answers but I am inclined to break free of the paradigm built on ignorance, arrogance, and the privilege that suggests the crimes of this country do not fall on my shoulders.

Read the Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave

Joseph A. Rosen: Blues Hands

Posted on January 23, 2017

If the soul of America made a sound, it would sing the Blues from dusk til dawn. It is, deep beneath the plastic veneer of appearances, the truth about the human condition: joy and pain, love and grief, triumph and tragedy mixed together into a sparkling cocktail of art. The Blues pulls you under and it makes you realize that you are not the only one who has ever been done dirty and gotten hurt. The blues pulls you up out of your funk, keeping you company as it soothes your weary heart.

Photographer Joseph A. Rosen has been photographing Blues musicians for 40 years, taking portraits of the legends of our time including James Brown, B.B. King, Al Green, Les Paul, Mavis Staples, Eubie Blake, Maxine Brown, Buddy Guy, Gary Clark Jr., and Pete Seeger, among others. He has compiled these photographs in Blues Hands (Schiffer), which hones in on the visual expression of music through the way they play their instruments. Rosen speaks with Crave Online about his work on this project.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1990s

Whose Streets? Our Streets!

Posted on January 20, 2017

Photo: Squatters attempt to defend their building by blocking the street with overturned cars and trash before an expected attack by the police on East 13th Street. 1995 © Andrew Lichtenstein

As we enter a brave new world filled with threats unfolding against the citizens of this nation by the very hand of the government it purports to serve, we can look to the recent past to find inspiration in the power of the people and their will to speak truth to power by any means necessary.

From race relations, policy brutality, and war to gay rights, abortion, and housing, ever issue facing the common man and woman was addressed by organizers who understood the power of mass protests. Civil disobedience, a term coined by no less that Henry David Thoreau in an essay of the same name penned in 1849, takes the high road of political activism. Grounded in the moral welfare of the people, it is a practice that is American at its core, for this country was founded upon the refusal to accept state-sanctioned abuse that openly violated human rights.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography