Posts from the “Art” Category

Margaret Durow

Posted on November 29, 2020

Without thinking we find ways to distance ourselves from the discomforts and indignities of life, denying the horrors that befall strangers, downplaying those may touch our lives, for trauma is one of the most difficult tragedies to manage and heal when it befalls our lives.

Though it surrounds us in countless forms, we seek ways to buffer its relentless effect, trying to mediate the toll it takes on our physical, psychological, and spiritual state. Whether we keep ourselves disconnected and numb or become volatile and reactionary, the wound often goes untreated, festering and growing worse while the pain seeps deeper into our being with the passage of every day, month, and year.

It is only when we have the courage to expose our most vulnerable selves that we may begin to transform the harrowing nightmares we have lived into something greater than ourselves for understanding requires mutuality. We must lay ourselves open to other people’s pain if we ever hope to heal our own.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Celebrating the Overlooked Legacy of Downtown Artist Jimmy DeSana

Posted on November 27, 2020

*Diego Cortez, Anya Phillips, 1977 © Jimmy DeSana. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.*

By the late 1970s, New York’s downtown avant garde rejected the corporate efforts to capitalize on the rebellious spirit of punk rock. Desperate to distance themselves from the horrific death of the Sex Pistols groupie Nancy Spungen at the hands of Sid Vicious at Chelsea Hotel, music industry executives attempted to rebrand the anarchistic music as “New Wave.”

In turn, art radicals adopted the moniker “No Wave” to assert the independence and integrity of the movement. No Wave became an integral part of the burgeoning East Village art scene that emerged in the 1980s as a new generation came of age. Intoxicated by the sweet elixir of fresh blood, MoMA PS1 opened New York/New Wave, a landmark group show organized by Diego Cortez showcasing the work of 118 artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Stephen Sprouse, FUTURA 2000, and DONDI in February 1981.

As soon as that show came down, Couches, Diamonds and Pie went up. Curated by Carol Squiers, the exhibition embraced the emerging photography movement known as the Pictures Generation. Featuring Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals, Sheila Metzner, Richard Prince, William Wegman, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, the show also included the work lesser-known artists like Nan Goldin and Jimmy DeSana, both of whom were name checked by Andy Grundberg in his review for The New York Times.

While most of the artists would go on to international success, Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) never quite received his proper due. Described as “anti-art,” DeSana’s work was extremely classical at a time when such a style had become démodé among vaunted members of the Pictures Generation.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Ronnie Cutrone, 1979 © Jimmy DeSana. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.*

*Eric Mitchell, 1978 © Jimmy DeSana. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Blind, Photography

Alan Lodge: Stonehenge

Posted on November 26, 2020

The Free Festival Movement of the 1970s took the UK by storm, offering a mélange of music, arts, and cultural activities at no cost. Beginning with Woodstock in 1969, the possibility of creating a mini utopia became a dream come true – that was until they became too popular, and the state got involved.

“’Free Festivals’ developed from people being fed up with the exploitation, rules, squalor and overall rip-off that so many events had become. They discovered something… a powerful vision,” says British photographer Alan Lodge, author of the new book Stonehenge (Café Royal Books).

“People lived together: a community sharing possessions, listening to great music, making do, living with the environment, consuming their needs and little else,” Lodge says. “Life on the road in an old £300 1960s bus, truck or trailer seemed like a bloody good option, weighed against the prospect of life on the dole in some grotty city under the Tory Government.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Dian Hanson: Sexy Books

Posted on November 26, 2020

Art books publishing has long been a rarified field, a niche within a niche with a rich tapestry of extraordinary houses known by a select few. Over the past century, only a few of these houses have succeeded at becoming brands – though one stands out: Taschen, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.

Founded in 1980 by Benedikt Taschen, the company started out as a comic book publisher before expanding into fashion, art, photography, film, design, advertising, architecture and, most famously, erotica. In 1999, Taschen made headlines when it released Helmut Newton’s SUMO, a lavishly oversized volume of the master’s work so vast that it came with its own stand designed by Phillippe Starck. Priced at $1500, the critics gasped – but industry insiders knew Taschen was on the cutting edge when they pre-sold 70 per cent of the 10,000 copy print run.

With its exquisite mix of high production values and clean design, Taschen books are for everyone, with prices starting at £10. But it’s what’s beneath the covers that counts. Sexy Book Editor Dian Hanson, who has been on staff since 2001, quotes Benedikt Taschen’s ethos with pride: “There is no forbidden art. There is good art and bad art and we will not publish bad art no matter what the subject, and we will publish all good art no matter what the subject.”

It’s a sentiment that has guided Hanson beginning with her very first Taschen book, Naked as a Jaybird, a collection of photographs taken from Jaybird, a 1960-70s porn magazine that capitalised the decriminalisation of nudist photography in the United States. The magazine’s timeline mirrors Hanson’s own singular path, one that is worthy of a Hollywood biopic in its own right.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Photography

Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer

Posted on November 26, 2020

*Michael Clark during the opening of Derek Jarman, ICA, London, February 1984 © Steve Pyke*

*Michael Clark & Company with The Fall in I Am Curious, Orange, 1988 Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London © Richard Haughton*

With the conviction that actions speak louder than words, Michael Clark has transformed the face of the contemporary dance world since launching his own company in 1984.

“Rock is my rock. It has been vital to me at a personal level; it has shaped me as an individual as well as an artist,” says Clark. His collaborations with individualistic musicians like Wire, Laibach, The Fall, Jarvis Cocker and Scritti Politti, as well as boundary-breaking fashion designers and visual artists including BodyMap, Leigh Bowery, Trojan, Sarah Lucas, Charles Atlas, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Peter Doig have marked him as “British dance’s true iconoclast”.

“Michael’s choreography was like nothing I had ever seen – the movement and musicality, the props and costumes, it was so edgy, brave, creative, sexy, and fluid – at a time when fluidity wasn’t fluid. It just set you alight,” says musician Brix Smith Start, who fondly recalls the joys of Clark’s friendship and collaboration. “Michael was part of a very fabulous London scene. We hung out, partied hard, and lived the most decadent, debauched, and penniless life. We were all just scraping around but we were rich in everything, it didn’t matter about money. Our friendship shaped me as a person today.”

In conjunction with Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer, a new Barbican exhibition and Prestel catalogue, we speak with four of Clark’s many collaborators over the years for an insight into the enfant terrible of contemporary dance.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Wolfgang Tillmans, man with clouds, 1998 © The artist, Courtesy Galerie Buchholz Berlin / Cologne, Maureen Paley, London / Hove, David Zwirner, New York*

Leigh Bowery and Rachel Auburn in Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan, 1986 Still, 16mm film transferred to video, sound, duration: 84:54 minutes © Charles Atlas, courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art

Frances F. Denny: Major Arcana – Portraits of Witches in America

Posted on November 25, 2020

*Frances F. Denny, “Sallie Ann (New Orleans, LA),” Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City*

When the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 the English Protestants separatists cast a dark shadow on the pristine land, their arrival foreboding horrors to come. By 1692, their extremist ideology reached a fevered pitch as mass hysteria gripped the town of Salem, MA and beyond. Charges of witchcraft spread like wildfire, with more than 200 men and women accused of conspiring with the devil. With no separation between church and state, the colonizers used the courts to incarcerate, try, and execute the innocent for crimes they did not commit. In total, 30 were found guilty, 19 were hung, and at least five died in jail during the ordeal. It was far from the last time the government would be on the wrong side of history.

In 2012, American photographer Frances F. Denny made a startling discovery: not only was she the direct descendant of Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, who presided over the infamous Salem Witch Trials — but Denny also had another relative, Mary Bliss Parsons, who had been accused and found not guilty of witchcraft in 1674.

“Thank goodness I wasn’t born 400 years ago because I absolutely would have been burned at the stake,” says Denny, who has just published Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America (Andrews McMeel), a captivating collection of portraits and first person accounts of witches living and practicing across the nation today. “The discovery of being a descendant of both oppressor and oppressed is a hard thing to reconcile, but it feels very appropriate because I come from a long line of privileged white people. That coincidence felt like an honest way to dig into something uncomfortable.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Frances F. Denny, “Meredith (Moretown, VT),” Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography, Women

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph

Posted on November 24, 2020

Throughout her extraordinary life, Ming Smith has blazed a trail, becoming a pioneering figure in front of and behind the camera. Hailing from Columbus, Ohio, Smith grew up amid the horrors of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. Her high school guidance counselor discouraged her to attend college, advising Smith her future lay as a domestic, scrubbing floors. Undeterred, Smith enrolled in Howard University and received a BS in microbiology before moving to New York City in 1973.

To pay the rent, Smith took up modeling and worked alongside Grace Jones, B. Smith, and Toukie Smith as part of the first generation of Black models in beauty and fashion. But the limelight held no particular charm for Smith. Possessed with acute sensitivity to joy and pain, she found solace in being alone, camera in hand, guided by a desire to bearing witness to the spirit made flesh. Whether on the streets of Harlem or Dakar, making portraits of photographer Gordon Parks, writer James Baldwin, and musician Sun Ra, or photographing a field of sunflowers in West Germany, Smith used the camera to preserve the fleeting and fragile beauty of the world.

“When I’m shooting, I usually have a sense: ‘This is the photograph that I’m going to print. This is the moment,’” Smith says in the new book, Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph. “I like catching the moment, catching the light, and the way it plays out…The image could be lost in a split second. I go with my intuition.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Ming Smith, Amen Corner Sisters, Harlem, New York, 1976, from Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture/Documentary Arts, 2020) © Ming Smith, courtesy the artist and Aperture*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Photography, Women

Tom Wood: 101 Pictures

Posted on November 24, 2020

*Tom Wood. ‘Anyone got any hairspray’ 1983.*

Hailing from County Mayo, Ireland, Tom Wood fell in love with photography as a young man when he began visiting a local charity shop filled with glossy picture magazines, abandoned family albums, and vintage postcards from the turn of the century, which he purchased for a penny apiece.

He never thought of making photographs until he was an art student at Leicester Polytechnic in the mid-1970s. “After I shot a few rolls at school, I saw the same camera in a chemist shop, a Rolleicord, and bought that,” Wood says.

“I suddenly felt I could take pictures and it was dead easy. When I left college, all I wanted to do was make underground avant-garde films but 16-millimetre film was really expensive, so I thought I would just do photography for a little while.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Tom Wood. Fashion sisters (sunglasses and platforms), 1973.*

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

Joseph Szabo: Hometown

Posted on November 19, 2020

*Hometown © Joseph Szabo, Courtesy of Damiani*

Following World War II, suburban hamlets began to spring up across the United States; like fields of dandelions they spread like weeds as the emerging middle class bought into the “American Dream” — a private home on a plot of land where they could raise a nuclear family with all the comforts of mid-century modernism. As real estate developments rolled out across previously pristine lands, acres of cookie-cutter homes dotted the landscape making it difficult to distinguish one region of the country from another.

But for American photographer Joseph Szabo, individuality found a way to make itself known, bursting through the beige like a splash of color. In his latest book, Hometown (Damiani, October 13), Szabo offers a topography of suburbia with a distinctive twist, as a sense of personal style emerges within a serene landscape replete with manicured lawns and muscle cars, sagging porches and lawn furniture.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1944, Szabo is just a touch older than the Baby Boomers whose lifestyle has come to define the image of mainstream American culture over the past seven decades. After receiving his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Szabo taught photography at Malverne High School in Long Island from 1972-1999 and began documenting his students’ lives, creating a mesmerizing portrait of teen romance, angst, adventure, and rebellion in critically acclaimed monographs including Teenage, Jones Beach,Lifeguard, Almost Grown, and Rolling Stone Fans.

“You try to capture life in the moment that speaks to you. They are fleeting—one moment it’s there and then its gone,” Szabo revealed in The Joseph Szabo Project, a 2011 documentary film that explores 1970s suburban life through his eyes.

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography

Paul Smith: The Human Curve

Posted on November 13, 2020

An integral part of the downtown New York art scene in the 1980s, American artist Paul Smith got involved with the legendary Lower East Side gallery ABC No Rio in 1983 exhibiting work from the civil war in Guatemala. Primarily a painter making panoramic works, Smith began using a homemade pinhole camera to experiment with perspectives, creating a series of black and white landscapes and sensuous scenes of sexual self-discovery made during the height of the AIDS crisis.

In the new exhibition, The Human Curve opening Saturday, November 14 at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York, Smith brings together a selection of these works, some of which were first exhibited in Bodily Fluids at Greathouse Gallery in the East Village in the 1980s.

“It was an exciting time for me,” Smith recalls. “Through Tim Greathouse I met David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Zoe Leonard, and Marcus Leatherdale. I had three solo shows at Greathouse Gallery, but Bodily Fluids was the least commented on show at the time. It wasn’t so common then for people to exhibit sexually intimate and frank work then.”

Here, Smith takes us back to the streets and rooftops of New York for a tender look at beauty, desire, and love.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: 1980s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Lyle Ashton Harris: Ecktachrome Archive

Posted on November 13, 2020

*Lyle Ashton Harris. ké, L.A. Eyeworks, 1985.*

In 1985, Lyle Ashton Harris travelled to Amsterdam to visit his brother, where he had an epiphany. Harris – then an economics major in his junior year at Wesleyan College – was truly an artist.

“I went over a wannabe Izod prep, came back with orange hair, and dropped out of [econ] school,” he says. “My South African stepfather encouraged my family to let me do what I needed to do.”

Harris had switched majors, studied photography, and received his MFA before pursuing his masters at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. “Cal Arts was on the cutting edge, contemporary thinking around art theory, AIDS activism, feminism, and the like,” Harris says.

“It was a ripe period where not only were these ideas being discussed in the classroom, but the activism spilled out into the street around communities like ACT Up and Gran Fury.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Lyle Ashton Harris. Marlon Riggs, Black Popular Culture conference, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, December 8-10, 1991.*

*Lyle Ashton Harris. Vaginal Davis, Spew 2, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, February 2- March 3, 1992.*

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