Posts from the “Art” Category

Brian “B+” Cross: Ghostnotes – Music of the Unplayed

Posted on November 2, 2017

Jay Electronica, Pyramids of Giza, Cairo, Egypt. August 2011 / Nas, Los Angeles, California, US. November 2010. Photography Brian “B+” Cross

From left to right, Beni B, Chief Xcel, and Lyrics Born at Records, downtown Sacramento, California, US. May 1995. This is the cover of “Endtroducing” by DJ Shadow. Photography Brian “B+” Cross.

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana, US. August 1998 / Grand Wizard Theodore, Manhattan, New York, US. February 1996. Theodore is the first person to ever scratch a record. His hands started a revolution in music. Photography Brian “B+” Cross.

Life moves in circles, though we may not notice until the revolution is complete. In 1996, DJ Shadow released Endtroducing…, his debut studio album on Mo’ Wax Recordings, with curious photo on the cover. It showed two guys inside a record store: one in profile, the other’s face blurred – neither were DJ Shadow.

It was a scene from everyday life, the very thing you’d recognize as a fellow hip hop head. It stood out for it unpretentiousness, it’s lack of glamour and glitz. Just as hip hop was going pop, Endtroducing… was taking it back to the earliest days of the art form when the DJ was king and crate digging was everything.

Five years later, an editor at C Photography in Spain reached out to Brian “B+” Cross, the photographer who created this seminal image. They wanted to feature it in their annual. Cross agreed – then sent along more images turning their request into a 15-page spread. When it was published, David Hamrick put a Post-It note on the page. Then, in 2015, when he was the director of the University of Texas Press, he reached out to Cross to see if he had more work, thinking it could make an excellent book.

The inevitable does not need a plan; it simply arrives. Cross had been working on Ghostnotes, a collection of photographs made throughout his career, for nearly two decades. The book was conceived as a mixtape, a visual corollary to the sounds of the African diaspora that flow through hip hop, uniting generations of people from all walks of life in the rhythms of the drums, the heartbeat of the art form.

Weaving together threads the combine documentary and portrait photography, Cross guides us through a musical landscape, crafting a composition as brilliantly conceived as a work by Miles Davis. Conceptualized with “A” and “B” sides, Ghostnotes takes us on a journey around the world, brilliantly synthesizing hip hop, Jamaican dub, Brazilian samba, Ethiopian jazz, Cuban timba, and Colombian cumbia. The book features portraits of everyone from The Notorious B.I.G., Eazy-E, and Kendrick Lamar to George Clinton, Brian Wilson, and the Watts Prophets, among so many more. Cross speaks with us about his journey bringing Ghostnotes to life.

Read the Full Story at Miss Rosen

The Notorious B.I.G., Beverly Hills, California, US. April 1995. Biggie was murdered outside this building three weeks later, and there is still no plaque or monument to commemorate his death. Photography Brian “B+” Cross

Forest Lawn, Glendale, California, US. February 14th, 2006. J Dilla’s funeral. Photography Brian “B+” Cross.

Categories: 1990s, Africa, Art, Books, Bronx, Dazed, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

Sean Maung: The Vaqueros of Santa Monica Boulevard

Posted on November 2, 2017

Photo: Copyright Sean Maung

Photo: Copyright Sean Maung

Santa Monica Boulevard is one of Los Angeles’ most fabled thoroughfares, running West from Silver Lake, through Hollywood and Beverly Hills all the way to Ocean Avenue, just off the Pacific.

“There are different areas on Santa Monica that have different flavours,” photographer Sean Maung, an LA native, explains. “When you say ‘Santa Monica Boulevard,’ most people think of West Hollywood, which has a very strong gay and lesbian scene. But I’ve always been really attracted to Santa Monica Boulevard in East Hollywood.”

The random mix of people from local Russian, Thai, and Latino communities appealed to Maung, who has been documenting the street culture of his hometown for over a decade. While photographing transgender prostitutes working the street late at night, Maung saw the words “Club Tempo” on an orange sign in front of a mall and thought to himself, “What’s Club Tempo?And why is it in the back of a strip mall in East Hollywood?’”

He would soon find out.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Photo: Copyright Sean Maung

Photo: Copyright Sean Maung

Categories: Art, Huck, Photography

Laurence Rasti: There Are No Homosexuals in Iran

Posted on October 31, 2017

Photo: From There Are No Homosexuals In Iran. Photography Laurence Rasti

In February 1979, the Persian Empire came to an end. After 2,500 years of a continuous monarchy, Iran became an Islamic Republic governed by Sharia Law – making homosexuality a crime subject to the imprisonment, corporal punishment, and execution.

At its core the issue is intercourse. Any activity outside heterosexual marriage is viewed as a violation of religious law. Interestingly, transgender people are considered heterosexual and will not be persecuted if they complete gender confirmation surgery, which may be partially funded by the state. As a result, Iran ranks as second in the world, following Thailand, for gender realignment surgeries. Many gay men have been pressured by their families to become transgender – or are forced to flee the country in order to save themselves.

Many come to Denizli, an industrial city in southwest Turkey that acts as a transit zone, allowing Iranian refugees to live in a state of purgatory while they wait patiently for a visa to live in yet another country. Since the U.S. travel ban was implemented and Canada stopped accepting Iranian refugees, their circumstances are becoming increasingly dire and difficult. While homosexuality is legal in Turkey, homophobia remains an issue that all LGBTQI people must face. Although free from the Kafkaesque struggles of their native land, the Iranians must remain anonymous in order to protect themselves

It is here in Denizli that Swiss-born Iranian photographer Laurence Rasti began her work. While pursuing her BA in photography from Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne, Rasti began focusing on issues of gender and identity. As a first-generation Swiss woman, she began using photography to examine the cultural codes of both the East and the West. Between 2014 and 2016, Rasti made ten trips to the city to photograph men and women driven to hide in plain sight. By befriending the people and earning their trust, Rasti created a series of intimate portraits that were singled out for distinction to the Magnum Photography Awards 2016 by juror Amy Pereira, Director of Photography at MSNBC.

On November 4, Rasti will publish her first book There Are No Homosexuals in Iran (Edition Patrick Frey). The title was inspired by the words of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a speech given at Columbia University on September 24, 2007. “In Iran, we do not have homosexuals like in your country,” the then President proudly declared, failing to shed light on the circumstances that enabled him to make this claim.

Rasti shares her experiences making this work, offering insights on how to photograph invisible people with compassion, dignity, and respect.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: From There Are No Homosexuals In Iran. Photography Laurence Rasti

Photo: From There Are No Homosexuals In Iran. Photography Laurence Rasti

Categories: Art, Books, Dazed, Photography

James Rieck: Rapture

Posted on October 28, 2017

James Rieck. One: Number 31, 2017. Oil on canvas, 24 x 72 in / 61 x 183 cm.

A disembodied voice floats through the room, a soft falsetto that sweetly croons, Step into a world / where there’s no one left / but the very best / No MC can test.

And then the beat drops. One, two. One, two. You snap out of the reverie, back to the here and now, as your heart throbs, your blood flows, the bass pounds. You’re flush, radiating heat, feeling alive, overcome by the moment. Rapture.

It is everywhere you want to be, this sensuous feeling of release. Of being and becoming, of presence so compete it feels like a disembodied experience. It is that moment when body, mind, and soul are one, the ephemeral made eternal. It is so intense it only last a moment but it feels as though time has stopped. It is being high in its greatest sense, released from the mortal realm.

It is here that we are free from the banality of daily life, connecting the sacred and the profane through the experience of art. As American artist James Rieck observes, “It’s easy to lose yourself in a painting, or any form of art, as a means to escape from the world or the self. There is no limit to where it can take you, if you let it.”

James Rieck. Le Bonheur de Vivre, 2017. Oil on canvas, 24 x 72 in / 61 x 183 cm

In his Rapture, his newest series of work currently on view at Lyons Wier Gallery, New York, through November 4, Rieck evokes the feeling of bliss that exists in the intersection between art and archetype. Rieck’s subjects are models extrapolated from mid-twentieth century magazines that evoke bourgeois ideals, and sets them inside museums and galleries alongside classic masterpieces of Western art that use sex as their subject.

By juxtaposing these figures of pristine Puritanical splendor beside works like Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bather Drying Herself, and Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, we step into a world where art’s power and influence in both demystified and amplified at the same time.

This is in large part due to Rieck’s framing of the work, tight crops that leave everything above the nose out. The eyes, being the windows to the soul, are invisible, and in doing this, not only is the subject rendered anonymous but makes space for us to participate. The model is not a person but a vessel into which we can slip, breathing in the rarefied air of the work of art.

James Rieck. Jeune Garçon au Cheval, 2017. Oil on canvas, 24 x 72 in / 61 x 183 cm.

But perhaps more than the framing it is Rieck’s color palette that renders us in a state of limpid titillation. Each work is a symphony of hues and tones that create an intense feeling of synesthesia. Does anyone else want a cupcake or an ice cream cone, a lemon tart or a slice of strawberry shortcake?

The high is so sumptuous you can literally taste it, smell, it, breathe it in. It is like a bouquet of violets and a tall glass of lemonade. It is a spell the whisks you away, like the loveliest lust. It is the safest sex, non me tangere, yet you still can’t help but feel like something has transpired.

Rieck explains, “Museums and art galleries are designed for you to let yourself ‘go’ in public. They are vehicles for the art experience of private passions in shared settings…. We can all want to feel the real pleasures that come from art and the places that hold it.”

Amen.

James Rieck. Baigneuse S’Eessuyant, 2017. Oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in / 61 x 91 cm.

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Painting

City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection

Posted on October 27, 2017

The Death of Graffiti by LADY PINK, 1982, acrylic on masonite, 19×22.” Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

DUMP KOCH painted by Spin, photograph by Martha Cooper, 1982.

It began in the stacks. Sean Corcoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, came across a collection of black books Martin Wong had donated to the Museum in 1994, just five years before he would die from AIDS in San Francisco. The black books were the site of sketches and drawings, works on paper that were passed from head to head, giving writers a look at what their contemporaries were doing with marker in hand and giving them a space to contribute to the conversation.

In total, Martin Wong (1946-1999) donated 55 black books and more than 300 mixed media paintings on canvas, cardboard, paper, and plywood. The work Wong collected includes early permutations of designs that would later appear on trains and buildings throughout New York City. And though those paintings are long gone, their legacy lives on.

Opening February 4 at the Museum of the City of New York, City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection presents 105 works by legendary writers DAZE. DONDI, FUTURA 200, Keith Haring, LADY PINK, LEE, and SHARP among others, alongside historical photographs by Charlie Ahearn, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, Jon Naar, and Jack Stewart. Paired together, the paintings, drawings, and photographs take us back to a time and a place that, though not far away at all, no longer exists in our daily lives.

It is the photographs that create the context, a context that may be difficult to imagine for those who did not live it. Trains were bombed with spray paint and marker both inside and out, as masterpieces ran the entire length of whole cars and tags decorating the interiors. This was the era of an artistic impulse made manifest as by any means necessary, of going down to the yards after dark or walking through live and dead tunnels to paint. This period in New York City history marks the creation of a style and a culture that has swept the world with anti-authoritarian delight. It was here in these black books and paintings that a new world was born, and it is here in these photographs that this world remains forever more.

Graffiti Kids, photograph by Jon Naar, 1973. ©Jon Naar

Redbird (Stay High 149) photograph by Jon Naar, 1973. ©Jon Naar

Corcoran observes, “We decided to show the Martin Wong Collection because we thought it had real cultural significance to New York’s story over the last thirty, forty years. Graffiti was such an omnipresent part of life in New York. It was loved and hated, there was no in between. Whatever you thought of it, theirs is not doubt it had an affect on the culture in general. Style writing as it is known today was born in New York and became a worldwide phenomenon.”

Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue of the same name, published by Skira Rizzoli with the Museum of the City of New York, featuring essays by Charle Ahearn, Carlo McCormick, Sacha Jenkins, Lee Quiñones, Chris “Daze” Ellis, Aaron “Sharp” Goodstone, and Sean Corcoran. The essays create a context for Wong’s obsession for the art, an obsession that adds intimacy and understanding to his need to collect, to document, to preserve. Twenty years ago, Wong knew, intuitively, that neither he nor the graffiti of the era would be with us today. And it is in this way that “City as Canvas” is more than an exhibition of art, but it stands as a monument to an era that has come and has gone. And era that is preserved forevermore in the photographs that show what had come of these preparations for masterpieces that once dotted the subway lines and crowned Kings.

For those who once witnessed the world that lives in these photographs, City as Canvas is like a teleportation device into the past. The raw, live energy of the letterform set against a backdrop of freedom at an cost beings us back to that old school D.I.Y. vibe of the 1970s and 80s New York. And for those who missed it, the Museum exists, as a place of honor and veneration to the legacy we as New Yorkers carry forth.

First Published in L’Oeil de la Photographie
March 20, 2014

Howard the Duck Handball Court photograph by Charlie Ahearn. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

Lion’s Den Handball Court photograph by Charlie Ahearn. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

Martin Wong, photograph by Peter Bellamy, 1985.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Graffiti, Photography

Meg Hewitt :Tokyo Is Yours

Posted on October 27, 2017

Photo: Meg Hewitt. Johnny, Golden Gai 2015

Photo: Meg Hewitt. Legs – after Daido, 2016

In March 2011, disaster befell Japan as the Great Earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster hit the nation in record time. Five years later, Japan’s prime minister Naoto Kan revealed that the country came within a “paper-thin margin” of nuclear destruction that would have required the evacuation of 50 million people – a feat he acknowledged was near impossible.

As this science-fiction horror story played out in real time, Australian photographer Meg Hewitt began to imagine the density of Tokyo, the feeling of being trapped as a cloud of nuclear fallout spread, and the disturbing question of whether or not to trust the government and big business. For Hewitt, thinking was not enough: she needed to experience life in Tokyo for herself.

Over a period of two years, Hewitt created a body of photographs inspired by the curious co-existence of darkness and light, trauma and innocence, death and life – which she crafted into the newly released monograph, Tokyo Is Yours. Hewitt combines the raw edge of Anders Petersen with the knowing glance of Daido Moriyama, the haunting glamour of Fritz Lang with the graphic traditions of Manga through a careful edit and sequencing that pairs unlikely moments to sublime effect.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Japan, Photography

Lilla Szasz: Mother Michael Goes to Heaven

Posted on October 26, 2017

Lilla Szasz fell into the underworld when she began documenting teen girls living in a detention home in Budapest. Here, she met girls who had turned to sex work to survive. While they were locked up, pimps waited outside the gates for their release, with ample supplies of drugs to keep them caught in a cycle of addiction and debt.

Their tragic stories spoke to Szasz. She yearned to know more about the people living on the edge, on the margins of society. In 2008, she travelled to downtown Budapest, where she met Monica and Michael, young sex workers who shared a flat. Their neighbours had been extorting them, threatening to call the police, so they moved to a larger place in the slums, where no one cared what they did.

At the age of 23, Monica left her home in the countryside, having been regularly abused by her alcoholic father. She met a man that she wanted to marry, discovered he visited sex workers, and broke up with him. To get revenge, she became a sex worker, and like her father, she began to drink. She met Michael, 31, who was already hustling, in a bar. She moved in with him, and together they were able to cover all orientations and needs of their clients. A drag queen named Alexander, 22, later joined them. The two men became a couple, highly volatile in nature, marked by physical abuse and mind games.

Their years together were filled with love and strife, by jealousies, betrayals, poverty, and fights. Yet they were a family, a deeply unhappy family, but bonded to each other all the same. Szasz’s photographs tell the story of three people trying to create a home, searching for love that they are unable to sustain or nourish. Trapped in a cycle of pain and addiction, they struggle to survive.

The toxicity of the environment eventually caused Szasz to end the project, which she titled “Mother Michael Goes to Heaven” – after Michael committed suicide in the flat in 2010. Like so many people who have never known a good family, these three found their way to each other and held on as long as they could. Szasz speaks with us about her experiences with people who were living on the edge, desperately trying to create a family yet unable to meet their own basic needs.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

All Photos: Lilla Szász: Mother Michael Goes to Heaven, part from series (2008-2010)

Categories: Art, Dazed, Photography

Art Oracles: Creative & Life Inspiration from the Great Artists

Posted on October 22, 2017

I’ve been reading Tarot cards for more than a decade and it never fails to impress upon me the significance of the relationship between the message and the messenger, further heightened by the illusion of chance; the mind never fails to reveals itself in its need to believe. Even the most doubtful personality invariably comes around; the fears of witchcraft and hokum immediately dissolves as a sense of wonder and faith in a higher power is restored.

But, to be perfectly honest, it’s clear that it’s not a matter of fortune or fate; it is simply a matter of speaking to the mind in its own language, crossing the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Here’s how it works: all the messages are true. You cannot choose the wrong card. But what the cards reveal is the message is not strong enough on its own: logical insight does not compel us to action.

The physical object of the card and its selection creates the mystique, playing into the ego’s desire for singularity and acknowledgement of this. It becomes the perfect messenger: a lifeless object with no ulterior motive or thing to gain. It can speak, in both image and word, acting as the perfect medium. Suddenly, the message registers. Now, it will be heard and connected with a deeper, unresolved conflict within the soul. But it was all true, anyway: what has happened is people have still themselves to listen and receive the word.

I am reminded of this truth as a I peruse the Art Oracles: Creative & Life Inspiration from the Great Artists (Laurence King) a beautiful new deck of cards not affiliated with the Tarot but speaking truth to those who wish to listen. Writer Katya Tylevich and illustrator Mikkel Sommer have created a deck featuring renderings of 50 artists from Michelangelo to Louise Bourgeois, Caravaggio to Yves Klein, Francisco Goya to Diane Arbus, offering bits of basic advice of life, work, and creative inspiration.

The deck is a touch campy, grounding itself in the reminder that it is helpful to maintain an ongoing balance between the serious and the playful. Growth can be painful as progress challenges us to forgo false paradigms in search of truth, flailing in the void until a sense of patience envelops us in the release of not-knowingness. It is here, many people lash out, desperate for quick fixes and instant gratification, unable to come to terms with the trials of self-mastery. This is where well timed advice can be of greatest use, presenting a new perspective by which to consider the situation.

“Discipline is a both a noun and a verb,” is the work advice from the Marina Abramović card, a wise reminder that every single artist in the deck has put nose to grindstone in order to surmount both personal and professional conflicts writ large.

But how to get to where you want to go? “There’s more than one way to read a map,” Alighiero Boetti advises, providing inspirational advice – channeling the spirit of the old proverb, “There are many paths to the same place.” The best, most effective path is the one that is authentic to us, rooted in integrity and nourished with kindness and love.

Because, ultimately, we’re all out here making it up as we go along. The thing to remember is solutions are neither black nor white, but an ever-changing shade of grey. That ain’t easy, but nothing worthwhile in life ever came without transcendence, particularly for those who need to overcome that which holds them back on the path to greatness.

The best part about being great is that it is entirely determined by one’s own aims: some of the great successes have never been told. While art out lives its creator, it also reminds us that more significant than fame and fortune is inner peace. Too many in this deck have lived tragic lives. “Look directly at whatever you’re avoiding” is the life advice of Diane Arbus. The life you save might be your own.

Artwork: From Art Oracles: Creative & Life Inspiration from the Great Artists by Katya Tylevich and Mikkel Sommer Christensen (Laurence King Publishing, 2017).

Categories: Art

Judy Chicago: The Roots of “The Dinner Party”

Posted on October 20, 2017

Artwork: The Dinner Party, 1974‒79. Ceramic, porcelain, textile, 576 x 576 in. (1463 x 1463 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, 2002.10. © 2017 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Photo © Donald Woodman)

Artwork: Sojourner Truth #2 Test Plate from The Dinner Party, circa 1978. Porcelain and China paint, diameter: 14 in. (35.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, gift of Judy Chicago, 82.165. © 2017 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © 2017 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum)

When Judy Chicago unveiled “The Dinner Party” in San Francisco in 1979, she turned the art world upside down with the first epic work for the Feminist Art movement. Around an equilateral triangle table, she crafted elaborate place settings for 39 female figures from the history of western civilisation, beginning with the Primordial Goddess and ending with Georgia O’Keeffe. Along the way, viewers encounter Ishtar, Hatshepsut, Sappho, Theodora, Elizabeth I, Sacajawea, Soujourner Truth, Emily Dickinson, and Margaret Sanger, travelling from prehistoric times through the women’s revolution.

For each woman given a seat a the table, a place was set, her name embroidered on a table runner accompanied by symbols of her accomplishments. Then, for the piece de resistance, Chicago served up handmade plates of china, meticulously painted with the main dish: a vulva reminiscent of a flower or a butterfly. The table is situated on The Heritage Floor, composed of 2,000 white triangle-shaped tiles that bare then names of an additional 999 women who contributed to history.

When I first learned of the work in a “Women in Art History” class, the professor asked for reactions. Everyone was silent, agog or agape, lost in thought. But not me. My hand shot up and I blurted out, “The work is about going down – eating out – and I support that.”

The class tittered. My teacher blushed and quickly changed the subject, focusing on how “The Dinner Party” embraces the textile arts (weaving, embroidery, sewing) and china painting, all of which were traditionally relegated to the realm of crafts or, more plainly, women’s art. At the time of “The Dinner Party”, these modes of production had not been accorded parity with the male-dominated realm of drawing, painting, and sculpture, which were considered superior as forms of “fine art.”

In 2007, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art opened at the Brooklyn Museum with “The Dinner Party” as its foundation. Now, to mark its ten-year anniversary, the Museum introduces Roots of The Dinner Party: History in the Making (October 20-March 4, 2018). The exhibition provides insight into the making of this historic work, which took six years to complete, and involved the work of nearly 400 women and men.

Featuring more than 100 objects including rarely seen test plates, research documents, ephemera, notebooks, and preparatory drawings, we are lead inside the creation of this phenomenal project. Chicago speaks with us about “The Dinner Party”, which has become her most influential work and one that, decades on, continues to inspire and provoke a wide array of responses from people from all walks of life.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Christina of Sweden (Great Ladies Series), 1973. Sprayed acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm). Collection of Elizabeth A. Sackler
© 2017 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Photo © Donald Woodman

Artwork: Study for Virginia Woolf from The Dinner Party, 1978. Ink, photo, and collage on paper, approx. 24 × 36 in. (61 × 91.4 cm). National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Gift of Mary Ross Taylor in honor of Elizabeth A. Sackler. © 2017 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Photo: Lee Stalsworth)

Categories: 1970s, Art, Brooklyn, Dazed, Women

I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish

Posted on October 19, 2017

Invariably a day will come where I put “How Soon Is Now” and get into my feelings. The highs, the lows, the fighting the air blows, I’m absolutely consumed with a maudlin mania that overcomes and nestles me in its clasp. One time is never enough. Play it again, Sam.

And – I’m not even a Smith’s fan. Coming up, I found them morose. But as time goes by, I can’t front. Where so many other bands faded away, The Smiths and Morrissey live on. In celebration, These Days, Los Angeles, presents, I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish: The Smiths & Morrissey Collection, now on view through October 22. The exhibition takes you back to the days when poster art was errythann.

The exhibition features a selection of vintage, 40 x 60 inch duotone posters made between 1985 and 1995 originally displayed in the UK and around Europe in train stations and record stores (Remember those? I’m sayinn). From the start, lead singer and co-songwriter Morrissey ran the show when it came to the band’s artwork, working alongside Rough Trade art coordinator Jo Slee.

At a time when everything was neon colors and punch pop graphics, Morrissey opted out and when vintage. Coming of age during the Pictures Generation, appropriation was de rigeur. Rather than take use of the band Morrissey chose images like Cecil Beaton’s famed photo of Truman Capote mid-jump, just as his career was taking off and the world was his oyster. It was evocative, if not provocative in part, a comment on popular culture and the spaces between high and low art. Stephen Zeigler of These Days shares his reflections on the power of the band here with us.

What was the inspiration for the show?

Stephen Zeigler: To be honest it was quite unplanned and came about very happenstance.

Do go on…

Stephen Zeigler: A good friend of ours is a huge fan of both The Smiths and Morrissey. He is a compulsive collector of all sorts of band merchandise (not just Smiths/Moz) and came to a point where he needed to downsize some of his collections. When he told us he would be selling off the Smiths and Morrissey posters, we thought it would be a great opportunity for the rabid Los Angeles Smiths/Moz community to be able to view the collection in it’s entirety before it was pieced out.

Everything is for sale and been selling quite well. We have had buyers from across the country purchase pieces. We even had an awesome couple drive over 400 miles from Oakland to see the exhibition and purchase a piece.

The Smiths are the perfect definition of a cult band. How would you describe their appeal?

Stephen Zeigler: Wow, that’s such a tough question and something I have been thinking about a lot during the shows run. I don’t think it can really be stated definitively but I think that Morrissey’s lyrics are intensely personal and yet the melancholy, anger, and emotions are universal and can mean something different to everyone.

I think for the average listener who grew up in the 1980s their music was always present and brings people back to certain points in their lives, and for the devoted super fans it’s deeply personal. I have spoken to visitors who tell me that Morrissey and The Smiths saved their lives, showed them another life besides gangbanging, or they were going through a rough time in their lives (even to the point of suicide) when they heard a song or lyric that showed them they weren’t alone in their emotions.

I love how music has the power to reach people who are on the brink. I’m very intrigued by the fact they continue to be so popular now, as so few groups from that era have such a prominent presence in the culture today. Why is it about their work that makes their appeal transcend time?

Stephen Zeigler: I think The Smiths are one of those unique bands, like The Clash, The Jam, The Specials, or Public Enemy who come from a specific era and time but are able to speak to an audience who may not have even been born yet when the band was together.

Specifically to The Smiths it was really a perfect storm of Morrissey’s voice and lyrics and Johnny Marr’s innovative guitar playing.

Morrissey said, the artwork needed to “take images that were the opposite of glamour and to pump enough heart and desire into them to show ordinariness as an instrument of power—or, possibly, glamour.” Could you expand on how these images do just this?

Stephen Zeigler: The Smiths have always been sort of down played in their appearance. Coming from working class Manchester where pretentiousness can get you an ass beating, the band embraced the common, hence the name “The Smiths.” With the artwork, they took images from many common looking British elements and personalities and the act of repurposing them as record covers or blowing them up as huge stage backdrops, in itself gives the images an importance never before imagined.

I’ve always loved the visuals they used for their campaigns. Could you speak of what the works have in common and how it defines their aesthetic?

Stephen Zeigler: Morrissey selected still images from little known or remembered mid-century films and photos of authors and artists that influenced him. The images were then stripped down and taken out of their original context to become a visual poetry of their own.

All photos courtesy of Stephen Zeigler, These Days.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions

Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting

Posted on October 19, 2017

Artwork: Eye Body, Transformative Actions For The Camera, 1963. Courtesy of Carolee Schneemann

You may remember Lady Gaga’s meat dress as something of a scene – but it doesn’t hold a candle to Meat Joy, the Carolee Schneemann happening from 1964 that inspired it. Where Gaga took an existing idea and transformed it into a publicity stunt, Schneemann invented something that had never been seen or done – and it nearly cost her life.

Picture a group of young men and women clad in their undergarments experiencing the pleasures of the flesh: of the carcasses of fish and chicken, along with sausages, touching their bare skin. Imagine being in the same room as they gathered on the floor to engage in an experience of sensuality the likes of which had never been realised before. Envision a man in the audience becoming so enraged he leaped from his seat, dragging Schneemann off to the side, and beginning to strangle her.

This happened during the Paris edition and went on until two bourgeois women jumped from their seats and fought off the attacker until he stopped. Then Schneemann got back into the happening and continued on with the knowledge that her explorations could unleash a cataclysmic storm. But Schneemann is an unstoppable force – she is freedom incarnate. Uninhibited and unafraid, she has been challenging the patriarchy by virtue of being true to herself.

Born in 1939 to a country doctor and a farm wife, Schneemann grew up close to nature, embracing the life and death cycle of the earth. When her father refused to support her decision to go to college, she won a full scholarship to study painting at Bard College, in New York, which she attended until she was expelled on the grounds of “moral turpitude.” Where others might have given up, Schneemann persevered, creating a body of work so singular and so challenging that to this day she has no equal in the field.

Her pioneering investigations into the female body, sexuality, and gender have tapped into archaic visual traditions and wrestled with social taboos, transforming Schneemann into a vessel of transgression and subversion in search of truth. In celebration, MoMA P.S. 1, New York, presents Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting (October 22, 2017- March 11, 2018), the first comprehensive retrospective spanning her prolific six-decade career.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Prestel has released a catalogue of the same name, while the Artists Institute has published Carolee’s Issue 02, which illustrates the ways in which other artists, advertisers, and pop culture figures have drawn heavily from her work. Schneemann speaks with us about Meat Joy as well as her career as “both image and image maker.”

Read the Story at Dazed

Artwork: Meat Joy 1964, chromogenic color print. Photo by Al Giese. From performance at Judson Church, November 16-18, 1964 New York. Courtesy of C. Schneemann and P.P.O.W, New York

Artwork: Nude on Tracks,1962-1977. Courtesy of Carolee Schneemann.

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