Posts from the “Art” Category

Pieter Hugo: La Cucaracha

Posted on January 27, 2020

*Pieter Hugo. Muxe portrait #3, Juchitán de Zaragoza, 2018.*

At the invitation of curator Francisco Berzunza, South African photographer Pieter Hugo arrived in Mexico to work on a new exhibition. The project, originally titled Hacer Noche (‘Crossing Night’), was set to be a visual exploration of sex and death in the country.

The commission quickly became an obsession for the artist. Between 2018-19, Hugo made four month-long trips to Mexico to create a collection of captivating portraits that combine mysticism, beauty, humour and horror. The result was La Cucaracha, an exhibition which is now on view at New York’s Yossi Milo Gallery.

“I wanted the work to stay true to a Mexican aesthetic and make pictures that have an original and authentic voice,” Hugo says. Drawing upon the understanding that tragedy is a pervasive fact of life, Hugo embraces the anarchic and surreal sides of Mexican life.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Pieter Hugo. The wedding gift, Juchitán de Zaragoza, 2018. Archival Pigment Print.*

Categories: Art

Jonas Mekas: I Seem to Live: The New York Diaries 1950-1969, Volume 1

Posted on January 24, 2020

*Jonas Mekas. Filming Guns of the Trees by the Harlem River, 1960. Adolfas, Frances Stillman, Sheldon Rochlin, myself*

January 23 marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Jonas Mekas, known as “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema”. In celebration of his singular life, Spector Books will release I Seem to Live: The New York Diaries 1950-1969, Volume 1, a whirlwind chronicle of the Lithuanian-American artist’s transformative impact on the New York art scene.

“Jonas was a very open-minded person, fast, very sharp, and at the same time,” says publisher Anne König who edited the book, which picks up where I Had Nowhere Left to Go, his extraordinary account of survival in a Nazi labour camp during World War II, left off. Writing was an instinct Mekas always possessed, a way to chart his life and make sense of it.

Working from a 2,000-page document spanning 60 years, Mekas shaped the diaries into a two-part series that offers a vibrant tour of the New York underground featuring stories of friends and colleagues such as Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, John Cage, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, Barbara Rubin, Maya Deren, and Jack Smith, to name but a few.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Jonas Mekas. At the Filmmakers Cooperative, 1962

Categories: Art

Karen O’Sullivan: Somewhere Below 14th & East

Posted on January 24, 2020

By the ’80s, New York’s Lower East Side (LES) had been decimated by the ravages of drugs, “benign neglect” and landlord-sponsored arson. As squatters took over abandoned buildings, living side by side with Black and Latinx residents, they immersed themselves in the sound of hardcore, punk, and hip hop exemplified by bands like The Clash, Beastie Boys, Bad Brains, Black Flag, the Misfits and Minor Threat.

The LES became the Mecca of all things anti-glamour and glitz, raging against the Reagan-fueled yuppification of Manhattan. As the centre of resistance from the coming onslaught of gentrification, the neighbourhood welcomed outcasts into the mix, giving them an outlet for creativity and self-expression in an increasingly neoliberal city.

Native New Yorker Karen O’Sullivan quickly found a place for herself in this rough and tumble world. Making her way to Alphabet City in 1977, she would hang out with a college classmate who lived in the projects on Avenue D, and go to CBGB to see bands like the Dead Boys. “Growing up on the Upper West Side was not my cup of tea so as soon as I could move downtown, I did,” O’Sullivan remembers.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art

Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980

Posted on January 23, 2020

In the days before digital technology, mass-market paperback books were one of the most effective ways of introducing radical new political and cultural paradigms into the mainstream.

Using accessible language to craft vivid characters in compelling plots, authors could take on revolutionary themes. Often, their stories would address issues of race, gender, sexuality, class and militarism.

“The political and social upheaval of the time had such an impact,” say Andrew Nettie and Iain McIntrye, editors of Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980 (PM Press). “It couldn’t help but be reflected in the work of people involved in creative endeavours, and the industries tied to them.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art

Anastasia Samoylova: FloodZone

Posted on January 22, 2020

*Anastasia Samoylova. From “FloodZone” (Steidl).*

Madame de Pompadour’s foreboding epigram, “Après nous, le déluge” (“After us, the flood”), has become eerily sinister in light of climate change. The excesses of Western modernism rival that of the court of Louis XIV—only this time the vast accumulation of wealth and wastefulness are rapidly decimating not just the peasantry but the planet and the very life it supports.

The United States may desperately need a wall—but the last place it should be located is inland, along the desert keeping asylum seekers out. In a June 2019 report, the Center for Climate Integrity predicted the nation needs to build seawalls along 50,000 coastal miles across 22 states by the year 2040 to stave off the impact of rising sea levels. Estimated to cost $400 billion in total, Florida, the most at-risk state, faces costs of $76 billion alone.

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

Categories: Art

Jane Dickson: Hot, Hot, Hot

Posted on January 22, 2020

*Jane Dickson. Paradise Alley, 1983, oil stick on canvas.*

With the legalization of pornography and the unconscionable perils of “benign neglect,” Times Square became the red light capital of the Eastern Seaboard in the 1970s. As a sense of lawlessness took hold, the Great White Way quickly became the ultimate den of iniquity, where any desire could be satisfied—for a price. Brothels, strip clubs, XXX theaters, and sex shops beckoned visitors with the promise of pleasures of the flesh, while pimps, prostitutes, and hustlers strolled the streets all hours of the day and night, turning tricks for a quick buck.

In 1978, Jane Dickson and Claudia Summers arrived in New York, and though they were often on the same scene for years, they wouldn’t formally meet until 2019. Dickson, a young artist, immediately got a gig working weekend nights as an animation designer operating the first computer lightboard at the Spectacolor Billboard at 1 Times Square. Summers, a musician and actress, wanted a flexible gig that would give her time to herself and began working in Times Square strip clubs in 1980. That same year, Guy Trebay commissioned Dickson to illustrate scenes from the Melody Burlesque for a series he was doing on Times Square for The Village Voice. It was Dickson’s first foray into strip clubs but it would not be her last.

The following year, Dickson and her husband Charlie Ahearn moved into a dilapidated building on the corner of 42 Street and Eighth Avenue, where they lived until 1992, when it was finally slated for demolition. It was then that Dickson decided to return to strip clubs as a “working girl” on The Deuce to explore the clandestine world that catered to the fantasies of men, while lining the pockets of the mafia. In time, she would visit Show World, Scores, Chippendales, the Gaiety, the Melody Burlesque, Billy’s Topless, and Scores to create a series of paintings that have never been shown together—until now in the new exhibition, Hot, Hot, Hot. Here, Dickson and Summers share a multi-layered perspective of strip clubs as seen through the female gaze.

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

*Jane Dickson. /Peep, 1993, oil and pumice on canvas.*

Categories: Art

How Cindy Sherman Revolutionized Portrait Photography

Posted on January 21, 2020

*Untitled #574 by Cindy Sherman, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York*

The camera acts as a proxy for consciousness: observing, distilling, and recording fragments of time for futures to come. Awareness of its presence often creates a schism on the person being photographed — a heightened awareness and sense of self-regard that make prompt posturing and performance, a desire to take on a persona and act the part. We wish to be as we appear, rather than appear as we are, hoping that expression and body language will convey our aspirations or indifference those who may later gaze upon our visage.

Throughout her career, Cindy Sherman has used the portrait as a space for reinvention of the self, taking on new characters as an actor would take on roles, submerging herself inside a series of curious, quirky, and unsettling facades. For more than 40 years, Sherman has conducted a fascinating masquerade, using photography to ensnare and unravel the complex relationships between the camera and the self.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

*Cover Girl (Vogue) by Cindy Sherman, 1976 / 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York*

*Untitled Film Still #15 by Cindy Sherman, 1978. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York*

Categories: Art

Andy Warhol Photography: 1967–1987

Posted on January 20, 2020

Andy Warhol often referred to the camera as his “date”, taking it with him to countless social functions from the late 1960s until his death in 1987. The camera gave him the ability to be in the middle of the action, watching others shamelessly, while simultaneously providing a barrier between himself and the world.

“It is interesting to think about the camera as a middle ground that helped Warhol navigate the public sphere while maintaining a bit of privacy,” says gallerist Jack Shainman, who is currently showing Andy Warhol Photography: 1967–1987, the first comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s photographic practice.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: Art

Roberta Bayley: She Just Takes Pictures

Posted on January 20, 2020

*Roberta Bayley. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein at an early appearance on cable TV about Punk.*

After living in London in the early ’70s, California native Roberta Bayley arrived in New York in 1974 because it was the only return ticket she could afford back to the States.

Serendipity served Bayley well. She soon met a young musician by the name of Richard Hell and was asked to work the door when his band Television played at CBGB, a new club on the Bowery. Bayley fell in love with the emerging punk scene of the Lower East Side and began working at CBGB five nights a week.

In 1975, Bayley bought a camera and adopted the punk attitude to making art: sheer nerve. As chief photographer for Punk magazine, she would amass a singular archive of artists like Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry and Blondie, the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Clash, the New York Dolls, X-Ray Spex and the Dead Boys, among others.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Roberta Bayley. Richard Hell in his apartment for the “Destiny Street” album cover session 1980.*

*Roberta Bayley. Iggy Pop at the Ramones loft on E. 2nd Street at a shoot for Punk magazine. A few days later, Iggy would leave for Berlin with David Bowie.*

Categories: Art

The Pioneering Color Photography of Harry Gruyaert

Posted on January 17, 2020

*Harry Gruyaert, Washington, USA, 1986 © Harry Gruyaert. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery*

If all the world is a stage, Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert is dancing through life, choreographing his own signature blend of visual poetry. As one of the pioneers of colour photography, Gruyaert has travelled the globe creating an archive of atmospheric portraits of places, evocative landscapes of life that both define and transcend the times in which they were made.

“I’m very interested in the magnetic things about photography: how things are attracting and how things attract me,” Gruyaert, now 79, says from his home in Paris, where he has lived since the 1960s. “There’s a little mystery that I find fascinating.”

That sense of the enigmatic, ambivalent, not entirely knowable world infuses his work. This month, a selection of photographs made in France, Spain, Belgium, Morocco, Japan, India, Russia and the US between 1981 and 2017 can be seen in Gruyaert’s first US solo exhibition.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Harry Gruyaert, Crossing in the Ginza district, Tokyo, Japan, 1996 © Harry Gruyaert. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery*

Categories: Art

Illicit Histories: Mel Roberts

Posted on January 17, 2020

*Cliff and Robert, 1979/printed 2001 © Estate of Mel Roberts (1923–2007), Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City.*

Photographer and filmmaker Mel Roberts (1923–2007) lived and worked as an openly gay man at a time when it was illegal to do so. Hailing from Toledo, Ohio, Roberts started shooting 16mm films of his friend as a teen before being drafted in 1943, where he served as a cameraman documenting World War II in the South Pacific.

Like so many gay men of the era, he migrated to California after the war, drawn to the heady mix of freedom of expression and career opportunities. After getting his degree in filmmaking from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Roberts worked as a film editor and soon discovered Physique Pictorial magazine at a newsstand near the studio.

Inspiration struck and Roberts set forth to create a portrait of fun in the sun, California style. From the 1950s until 1981, he amassed an archive of 50,000 photographs of almost 200 male models. Eschewing the classic bodybuilder archetype popularised by Bruce of Los Angeles and Bob Mizer, Roberts preferred the boy-next-door aesthetic. He began publishing his work in Young Physique magazine in 1963, offering light and fun pictures made on day trips to picturesque towns like Yosemite, Idlewild, and La Jolla.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

*Ron Brouillette, Mulholland Drive, 1966© Estate of Mel Roberts (1923–2007), Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City*

Jimmy Stone, 1962 © Estate of Mel Roberts (1923–2007), Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

Categories: Art