Posts from the “Art” Category

Most Scandalous Art Shows of All Time

Posted on April 27, 2017

Gran Fury for ACT UP

The best art upends expectations and social mores, challenging the status quo by transgressing the boundaries of polite society. Because, let’s face it, truth isn’t kind to those who lie to themselves. But like the sun and the moon, the truth will always out.

Great art is a vessel for truth, allowing artists to speak freely without ever uttering a word. The immediacy of sight and the way it work on the brain allows it to change the way we perceive the world by upending the power of words to articulate and explain. “Seeing is believing” as the old proverb goes, and with that in mind, artists can change your mind without giving you a chance to argue. In celebration of the power of art, Crave has compiled a list of the most scandalous art shows of all time.

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

Jamel Shabazz: Crossing 125th

Posted on April 26, 2017

Photo: Style and Finesse, 2010. Digital chromogenic print, 16 × 20 in. Courtesy the artist. © Jamel Shabazz

Harlem is the heart and soul of New York, the epicenter of African-American life, culture, history, and hustle. At the turn of the twentieth-century, this vast tract of land in upper Manhattan quickly became the destination for black folks leaving the South en masse during the Great Migration. Here, folks created a town within a city entirely its own, dominating the wide boulevards and stately homes with a style and approach to life that combined the very best of the North and the South.

It was during this first wave that the Harlem Renaissance was born, giving rise to a flourishing movement of a wide array of arts from literature, poetry, and drama to music, dance, and theater. Visual artists also took root, creating images that bespoke not just the times but also the rich and textured history of African-American life as seen through the eyes of the people.

Among the great artists of the era was James Van DerZee, one of the premier photographers of the twentieth century. During the 1920 and ‘30s, he crafted a compelling pictures of Harlem’s emerging middle class that employed the elements of traditional Victorian portraiture—but took them to new heights but connecting with the spirit of his subjects and bringing out their glamorous inner light. Van DerZee’s photographs came to define Harlem in a way that few other photographers ever could, and in doing so, he influenced generations to come—including the great Jamel Shabazz.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Double Exposure, 1990. Digital chromogenic print, 16 × 20 in. Courtesy the artist. © Jamel Shabazz.

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

Wall Writers: Graffiti in Its Innocence Exhibition

Posted on April 26, 2017

Photo: COCO 144, 1974. Photo by Michael Lawrence. Courtesy Roger Gastman.

Graffiti is a basic human impulse. From the oldest known cave paintings, going back 40,000 years in the Maros region of Indonesia to a toddler in 2017 who has discovered the magic of crayons and walls, the desire to leave a mark speaks to a fundamental tool of communication. The visual and the verbal commingle and merge in its purest form, continuing to speak for the person who may since be long gone.

Graffiti, in its contemporary form, found its footing in New York and Philadelphia during the Summer of Love as the idea of writing on the wall transformed from a primitive impulse to craft an anonymous message took shape as an increasingly stylized representation of a specific personage. As it did so, it became more than act of rebellion; it became a form of art, a flourish of a handstyle that was as unique as a signature and as bold as an autograph.

The earliest practitioners of the form have been left largely to the underground, to the myths of history or fallen into the cracks of the past. As pioneers and innovators, their work could be rudimentary, as it was more invested in discovery than perfection. It wouldn’t be until the second generation came along with its top-to-bottom whole train car masterpieces that many sat up and took notice. But the first generation certainly made waves, inspiring newspaper and magazine stories, books, and later collaborations and films. But quick as they came up, they disappeared, moving on with their lives as they aged out, from boys to men.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Photograph by Jon Naar, 1973. Courtesy Roger Gastman.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Crave, Graffiti, Manhattan, Photography

Frieze A to Z of Contemporary Art

Posted on April 25, 2017

Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans, Lutz and Alex, sitting in the trees, 1992, photograph. © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

In June 1991, frieze magazine appeared on the scene. A slim 32 pages, the pilot issue gave a taste of things to come. Inspired by the great British style magazines like Arena, The Face, and i-D, editors Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover decided to bring the same sensibility to the world of art. In doing so, the revolutionized the art world on two fronts, with publishing leading the way for art fairs on both sides of the pond.

With the sixth edition of Frieze New York coming up for May 5-7, 2017, we’re celebrating a look back at the magazine’s first 25 years in print with the publication of the handy new guide, Frieze A to Z of Contemporary Art (Phaidon). Drawing on the magazine’s incredible back catalogue of work, the book is organized in a simple to follow collection of essays that take you from Avant-garde to Zeitgeist, with stops along the way in a marvelous potpourri of topics that run the gamut, from Critics, Economics, and Jargon to Nostalgia, Taste, and Visionaries.

With essays like Glenn O’Brien on Andy Warhol for the chapter on Fame, Christian Haye on Kara Walker for History, and Jim Lewis on “Ren & Stimpy” for Television, there is something for everyone. Because that’s what frieze does best of all: it takes the obscure and the sublime and makes them accessible.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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

Ryan McGinley: The Kids Were Alright

Posted on April 24, 2017

Photo: “Red Mirror”, 1999. Courtesy Ryan McGinley and team (gallery, inc.) © Ryan McGinley.

On a chilly night back in February 2003, Ryan McGinley: The Kids Are Alright opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ryan McGinley, then just 25-years-old, was the youngest artist to have a solo show in the museum’s seven decades on Madison Avenue.

I’m not entirely sure the Whitney knew what to expect, as the denizens of downtown piled into the tiny gallery. I overheard a security guard say, “Excuse me, ma’am. Do not lean against the art,” to blonde in a faux-fur coat with slurry eyes. Moments later a security guard said, The blonde shoved on, disappearing into the throngs that jostled their way in and out of the exhibition. The lurid, glamorous and grizzled characters in McGinley’s photographs were there in the flesh, celebrating the artist’s quicksilver rise to the top. In a period of just five years, McGinley documented the luminous tail of the bohemian comet that swept New York throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

McGinley hung with a squadron of graffiti writers, artists, and personalities that made their own rules – and what remains of those days and nights are the photos. Some 1,600 pictures made between 1998 and 2003, most never-before-seen, have just been released in the new book, The Kids Were Alright, (Rizzoli) to time with an exhibition of the same name now at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver through August 17, 2017.

The documentary-style photographs and Polaroids are raw, sexy images of intense intimacy. Whether partying, having sex, or just hanging out, McGinley’s photos present a portrait of his generation at their most uninhibited peak. McGinley spoke with Dazed about coming of age in True York.

Read the Full Story at Dazed Digital

Photo: “Fireworks”, 2002. Courtesy Ryan McGinley and team (gallery, inc.) © Ryan McGinley.

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Exhibitions, Graffiti, Manhattan, Photography

Art Pioneer Carolee Schneemann Looks Back at 50 Years of Work

Posted on April 21, 2017

Photo: Still from performance of “Up to and Including Her Limits” (June 1976). Photo: Henrick Gaard

Artist. Feminist. Revolutionary. Carolee Schneemann, now 77 years old, has been traversing the sacred spaces of female sexuality and gender in the name of truth, liberation, and freedom from the patriarchy for more than half a century. Raised on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, Schneemann learned not to fear viscera, injury, or death. Instead, she embraced the creative and destructive forces of Mother Nature and fused them into work that challenged every assumption about women in the art world.

A multidisciplinary artist, Schneemann has created groundbreaking paintings, photographs, performance-art pieces, and installations that expose deep female secrets, pleasures, fears, and taboos. Using her body as a starting point, Schneemann also challenges cultural norms that discourage female artists from using their own nude bodies as the subjects of their work. Most memorably, in her landmark piece, Interior Scroll (1975), Schneemann stood on a table, assumed “action poses,” then slowly extracted and read from a scroll tucked neatly inside her vagina.

Her work shocked the establishment, but over the past 50 years, it has also become the foundation upon which generations of artists and pop-culture figures stand. From Matthew Barney to Lady Gaga, Schneemann’s influence is vast, yet she remains a solitary figure in the world of art, constantly reinventing her methodologies to examine the beauty and horrors of life in equal measure. On the cusp of her first United States retrospective, “Kinetic Painting,” at MoMA PS1 (running from October 22, 2017 to February 1, 2018), Schneemann spoke with BUST about her iconoclastic life in art.

Read the Full Story at BUST Magazine

Photo: Still from performance of “Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera” (1963), photo: Erró

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Women

Larry Fink on Andy Warhol

Posted on April 20, 2017

Photo: Fashion Shoot, New York, 1966 © Larry Fink

In the early 1960s, the shadow of the post-war boom cast a dark shadow upon streets across the United States as the illusion of The American Dream was shattered by the truth of how it came to be.

Amid the fight for human rights, Andy Warhol emerged with a body of work that celebrated the most superficial mythologies of the time. By appropriating images of famous people and products, Warhol positioned himself as the champion of all that was American, fully embracing its anti-intellectual bent. With the establishment of The Factory, his quasi-bohemian Manhattan studio filled with self-titled Superstars, Warhol created an alternate universe to rival Hollywood while simultaneously infiltrating the posh art world.

In 1965, Warhol announced his retirement from painting in order to focus on filmmaking. With a coterie that included Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Ingrid Superstar, Susanna Campbell, and Gerard Malanga, the media could not get enough of these apolitical characters driven by a lust for fame and wealth.

At the same time, photographer Larry Fink was honing his skills, making pictures that embraced the proletariat and rebuked the haute-bourgeoisie. A self-described “revolutionary communist,” Fink worked as a journalist, creating images for the cause. In 1966, his friend Khadeja Mccall, who sold African prints on St. Mark’s Place, invited Fink to photograph a fashion shoot she was styling for a new publication titled The Eastside Review. The kicker was: the models were Warhol and his Superstars.

Fink took the assignment, adding his own twist. He brought Warhol and his coterie down to the streets of the Lower East Side, a working-class neighborhood infused with poverty – the very antithesis of Warhol’s Pop Art fantasies. The Eastside Review folded before the issue was published, and the photographs were shelved for fifty years, no further thought given to the work…until now.

Read the Full Story at Dazed Digital

Photo: Fashion Shoot, New York, 1966 © Larry Fink

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Dazed, Manhattan, Photography

Enter the Fantastical Realm of Photographer Karen Knorr

Posted on April 17, 2017

Photo: Love at First Sight, Palazinna Cinese, 2016. 48 x 60 inches. Edition of 5. © Karen Knorr

On Saturday, as April the Giraffe gave birth to a male giraffe at Animal Adventure Park in Harpursville, New York. An estimated 1.25 million people watched the miracle of life unfold on livestream, Tweeting up a storm, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this poor creature will be separated from April once he is weaned. Unable to live in the wild, the baby giraffe is destined to live his entire life in captivity and kept on display as fodder for the insatiable human appetite to consume the natural world.

The birth comes at a time when the Giraffe Conservation Foundation has warned that the giraffe population has plummeted more than 40% over the past three decades, placing it on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s “Red List,” with the threat of extinction looming on the horizon.

Giraffes are but one of the countless creatures being brought to the brink of death, whether hunted down by poachers or dealing with the tragic loss of natural habitats. At the same time, animals are continuously kidnapped and forced into captivity, forced to live in unnatural conditions until the day they die, their only purpose to serve as sources of “entertainment” for an unempathetic populace.

The disjunction between nature and culture is so vast that people take pleasure and pride in casting animals in manmade scenarios taken to narcissistic heights. German photographer Karen Knorr understands this, and has created a body of work that both critiques this perversion, while simultaneously playing it up.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

“Black Mirror” Explores Our Dystopian World

Posted on April 17, 2017

Artwork: Claudia Parducci WHERE TO RUN, 2007, Pencil, watercolor on paper 22×30 inches

We have reached a time when science fiction appears as fact, as prescient warning of the perils of human nature and its love for technology. “Just because we can does not mean we should” is the underlying moral of this realm of fantastical thought.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” Albert Einstein hypothesized. “For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” But, of course, this was the man who signed his name to shore up political support for the Manhattan Project.

Einstein’s belief is tellingly flawed. Evolution happens naturally; it does not need imagination to occur. “Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters,” the painter Francisco Goya understood. Perhaps what is missing from the conversation is a discussion of reason itself.

One can logically proceed from an irrational premise—as so much technology does. The idea that technology is an “improvement” is presumptuous at best, and stems from acute cognitive dissonance. The underlying ethos of science fiction is to see into the future with the knowledge that the more things change, they more they remain the same.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: Cole M. James, Manchego, Compiled visual experiences captured between 2011-2016 2min 36 sec 2016

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions

Hiba Schahbaz: Self Portraits

Posted on April 13, 2017

Hiba Schahbaz, Self Portrait as Grand Odalisque (after Ingres), 2016. Tea, watercolor, and ink on indian paper 60 x 83 in.

Growing up in a family of artists in modern Pakistan, Hiba Schahbaz intuitively picked up a brush and began to paint. As she entered her pre-teen years, she became interested in painting the female nude, as her art began to explore more mature themes that reflected her own physical, emotional, and spiritual growth from child to adolescent.

But in the conservative Muslim country, it was impossible to find a woman willing to pose so Schahbaz did what any enterprising visionary would do: she used herself as the subject of her work. At the same time, Schahbaz was well aware of the prohibitions against her work. “There was a stigma attached to painting myself nude,” she told Crave. So to avoid being identified, she painted her body, but not her face.

“It was bad enough that all there were all these nudes. I’m sure people were aware that it was a self-portrait but if I put in my face, it would be very troublesome to my family,” she recalls. “It was a survival tactic. You paint what you need to paint but not get into too much trouble and make sure everyone is safe.”

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Hiba Schahbaz, Self-Portrait as Eve (after Dürer), 2016. Tea, watercolor, ink, poster paint on twinrocker 88 x 39 in

Hiba Schahbaz, Self Portrait as Sleeping Venus (after Giorgione) , 2017. Tea, watercolour, ink and poster paint on Twinrocker 48 x 99 in

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting, Women

Bruce Gilden: Go

Posted on April 12, 2017

JAPAN. Asakusa. 1998. Two members of the Yakuza, Japan’s mafia. The Yakuza’s 23 gangs are Japan’s top corporate earners. They model themselves on American gangster fashion from the 1950s. © Bruce Gilden.

Daido Moriyama, Kikiuji Kawada, and Eikoh Hosoe: these are just a few of the Japanese photographers born in the 1930s, mere children when the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on their country. Growing up in the shadows of war, these men took to photography to mediate this brave new world. Caught between the strong traditions of the past, the vestiges of trauma and carnage, and the push towards modernization that had begun under the Meiji period, each of these artists pictured Japan as it had never been seen before—a raw, radical place of free thought that comes from the avant garde.

In 1974, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented New Japanese Photography, the first major survey of work outside the island nation. Curated by John Szarkowski and Shoji Yamagishi, the exhibition presented 187 photographs made between 1940 and 1973 by 15 photographers that traced the evolution of Japanese life through the war to the then-present day.

Brooklyn-native Bruce Gilden went to see the show. The hours he spent as a child looking out of the second-story window of his home, watching the local toughs so their thing shaped his attraction to the characters he would come to photograph. In 1968, while studying sociology at Penn State, he saw Michelangelo Antonini’s film Blow-Up. The die was cast, so to speak.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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