Posts from the “Books” Category

Olivier Mossett: Wheels

Posted on May 25, 2018

Taken from Wheels by Olivier Mosset © Olivier Mosset, courtesy of Edition Patrick Frey

50 years ago, France was marked by a period of student uprisings known today as ‘May 68’. For nearly two months, millions of people joined in a series of occupations, demonstrations, and general strikes nationwide that brought the country to a halt. The protests ignited an artistic movement that embraced the independent spirit of radicals, rebels, and renegades.

Swiss artist Olivier Mosset was living in Paris at the time and became close with group of bikers who maintained an outlaw lifestyle. When he bought his first motorcycle, a US Army surplus Harley Davidson, he helped start a motorcycle club, a phenomenon wholly unknown in Europe at the time.

Mosset’s studio on the Rue de Lappe doubled up as a hub of radical painting, a garage and a clubhouse for the Marxist-influenced bikers. As a painter, Mosset created monochromatic, geometric abstractions that conceptually reduced the image to its formal roots – and yet he couldn’t deny the allure of the motorcycle. Throughout his career, Mosset found inspiration in its mechanical form, pairing his paintings with sculptural readymades in the mid-90s.

On June 8, Edition Patrick Frey will release Wheels, a retrospective of Mosset’s motorcycle work. Here Mosset looks back on enduring appeal of these icons of outlaw style.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Taken from Wheels by Olivier Mosset © Olivier Mosset, courtesy of Edition Patrick Frey

Categories: 1960s, AnOther Man, Art, Books

Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings

Posted on May 23, 2018

Sally Mann. Bean’s Bottom, 1991. Silver dye bleach print, 49.5 × 49.5 cm (19 1/2 × 19 1/2 in.) Private collection. © Sally Mann

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner wrote in the 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun. He understood the ways in which history is ever present to the point in which it casts a long shadow over our daily lives. It lingers and mingles until it dyes the color of our thoughts, camouflaging itself by hiding in plain sight.

Faulkner understood the nature of the American South, a land shrouded in myth and mystique, nestled in layers of illusion and untold histories. For the novelist, the South was not so much a place as it was an “emotional idea,” one that could be mined endlessly for stories that evoke the truth about who we were – and who we are.

American photographer Sally Mann shares this knowledge of the South. A native Virginia born in a hospital that had once been Stonewall Jackson’s home, Mann’s work is infused with mix of romantic and Gothic sensibilities that underscore her southern roots. In every image there is a sense of a past so profound that it pulls the present backwards until the very sense of when these images were made melts away.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Sally Mann (American, born 1951) On the Maury, 1992, gelatin silver print, Private collection. © Sally Mann

Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Susan Meiselas: Mediations

Posted on May 21, 2018

Self-Portrait, from the series 44 Irving Street, 1971. © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos

For more than 40 years, American photographer Susan Meiselas has grounded her work in the idea of place. Whether working on the front lines of civil war in Nicaragua or backstage with carnival strippers in New England, Meiselas is fully present in the moment, seeing not just the surface of things but that which lies beneath – the spirit within the flesh and bone that continues to live in her photographs long after they are made.

Mediations, her newest book (Damiani/Jeu de Paume/Fundació Tàpies) traces her singular journey across time and space, exploring the ways in which the photograph works as object, art, and evidence. The book, which accompanies a touring exhibition that will open at SFMoMA on July 21, is not so much a catalogue as it is a meditation on the threads that weave the complex tapestry of Meiselas’ career.

In it, a variety of writers offer their take on the issues that inform the questions at the heart of her work; such the language of the body, the meaning of place, the position of the photographer, and the legacy of documentary work. They also begin to consider the ways in which the photograph works as a book or a print, a scan or a memory.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls

Posted on May 11, 2018

Andy Warhol, The Chelsea Girls, 1966. Pictured: Angelina “Pepper” Davis / Eric Emerson. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

During the summer of 1966, while hanging out in the famed backroom of Max’s Kansas City, Andy Warhol took a napkin and began to draw a line down the middle. On one side, he wrote “B,” and on the other “W.” From this simple sketch, the concept of a split screen film, which would become Chelsea Girls, was born.

“I want to make a movie that is a long movie, that is all black one side and white the other,” scriptwriter Ronald Tavel recounts Warhol explaining, in Ric Burns’ documentary film Andy Warhol.

A true radical in the avant-garde cinema community, Warhol’s first major film was Sleep (1963): a five-hour, 20-minute silent film of John Giorno, his boyfriend at the time. It could be described as an endurance test, for nothing much happened. Warhol took this idea of the still camera and the unedited reel of film, combined it with the faux-documentary sensibility of cinéma vérité, added his Superstars into the mix, set them in a simple scenario, and let them do their thing.

The result was Chelsea Girls was born: a split-screen film featuring 22 different 33-minute reels featuring appearances by Nico, International Velvet, Eric Emerson, Brigid Berlin, Mario Montez, Ondine, Gerard Malanga, Susan Bottomly, and Ingrid Superstar that became Warhol’s first commercially successful film – due in no small part to the classic cocktail of sex, drugs, and drama.

“Before, people fell asleep during my films. When they didn’t walk out,” Warhol observes in the new book, Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (D.A.P./The Andy Warhol Museum, May 24). “But Chelsea Girls is packing them in. Why? Because it’s dirty.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Andy Warhol, The Chelsea Girls, 1966. Pictured: Nico / Ondine. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

Andy Warhol, “3 Min. Mary Might”, 1966. Pictured: George Millaway, Ronnie Cutrone, Angelina “Pepper” Davis, unidentified man. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

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

All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party

Posted on May 10, 2018

Endia Beal, Sabrina and Katrina, 2015, from “Am I What You’re Looking For?”, courtesy of the artist, from “All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party,” PCNW 2018.

On October 15, 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton – two students at Laney College in Oakland, California – founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) to protect the citizens of their hometown from abuses of the state.

Under the protection of the Second Amendment, they created armed citizens’ patrols to monitor an almost all white police force that regularly brutalised African Americans citizens with impunity. From their grassroots efforts, a nationwide movement was born – one that radicalised a new generation of youth to fight for their Constitutional rights.

The BPP set up chapters in 68 cities in order to implement the Ten Point Platform and Program, which called for freedom, full employment, reparations, housing, education, military exemption, an end to police brutality and murder, freedom for the incarcerated, Constitutional rights during trial, and full self-determination.

The leaders of the BPP had mastered the law, and knew exactly how to exact the rights granted by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This – combined with their ability to build coalitions with other political groups including the Young Lords, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the American Indian Movement, and the Chicano Workers Movement – created a very real threat to the systemic racism that had kept these groups vulnerable, marginalised, and living under constant threat.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Lewis Watts, Graffiti, West Oakland, 1993, courtesy of the photographer, from “All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party,” PCNW 2018

Lewis Watts, Graffiti, West Oakland, 1993, courtesy of the photographer, from “All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party,” PCNW 2018

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination

Posted on May 10, 2018

Photo: House of Dior (French, founded 1947). John Galliano (British, born Gibraltar 1960). evening ensembLe, autumn/winter 2005–6 haute couture. White silk tulle, embroidered white silk and metal thread

Following on from Monday night’s annual Met Gala, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination opens to the public at The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters in New York today. The largest exhibition in the museum’s history, the exhibition brings together two hundred years of costume and fashion in a monumental endeavour that spans 25 galleries and two buildings. And here, as if you needed any more encouragement, are five reasons to visit.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: Art, Books, Dazed, Exhibitions, Fashion

Ryan Weideman: In My Taxi – New York After Hours

Posted on May 8, 2018

Back in 1978, while living in Oakland, photographer Ryan Weideman saw Midnight Express, a nerve-wracking film that tells the true story of Billy Hayes – a young American who, after being caught smuggling hashish, escapes from a Turkish jail and lives to tell the tale.

“I thought, ‘If this guy can go through that, I am ready for New York!” Weideman says with a laugh.

1970s Manhattan was an outlaw town riddled with violence and crime. It became a magnet for fearless spirits who lived life on their own terms. Although Weideman had taken visual cues from film noir throughout his life, it was the work of photographers William Klein, Diane Arbus, Joel Meyerowitz and Robert Frank that made him aware that something spectacular was happening in New York.

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Danny Fields: My Ramones

Posted on April 24, 2018

Ramones in 1977 playing a festive New Year’s concert at London’s Rainbow Theatre. © Danny Fields / Reel Art Press

The Ramones live at Phase V. © Danny Fields / Reel Art Press

Punk rock might not exist if it hadn’t been for Danny Fields. Born in Queens, the legendary music magnate spent the 60s in the East Village, hanging with the likes of Andy Warhol and his superstars. He championed bands like the Velvet Underground while working as a radio host for WFMU, did publicity for the Doors and the Stooges, and by the 70s, was writing a hugely influential column for the Soho Weekly News. Fields is also the guy who discovered the Ramones.

In 1975, the band begged Fields to hear them play at CBGB, and he was instantly enamored. The Ramones wanted Fields to write about them—but he did them one better and became their manager. He spent the next five years brokering record deals, arranging the band’s first video shoot, and booking their first tours, including a trip to England to play alongside the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned.

But five years in, craving superstardom, the Ramones fired Fields and hired Phil Spector, the manager who notoriously pointed a gun at Johnny Ramone and demanded he play a riff repeatedly. But during his brief tenure, Fields meticulously documented the band’s rise, amassing an incredible archive of photos from the band’s early days. In 2016, Fields released a collection of them as a rare limited edition photo book. But now, My Ramones (Reel Art Press) is being republished and getting a wide release.

VICE tracked Fields down recently to chat about what it was like managing the Ramones in their wildest years.

Read the Full Story at VICE

Ramones first video shoot at M.P.C.’s TV studio. The video contained eight songs in 17-and-a-half minutes and has never been officially released. © Danny Fields / Reel Art Press

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Music, Photography, Vice

Remembering Peggy Cooper Cafritz

Posted on April 18, 2018

Jas Knight, “Summer” (2015). Oil on linen 18 × 22 inches. Photography Jeremy Lawson.

Never let it be said that one person can’t change the world. African-American philanthropist, activist, and collector Peggy Cooper Cafritz (1947–2018) did just this, over and over again. As a doyenne of arts and education in the nation’s capital, Cooper Cafritz was a force of nature.

Hailing from Mobile, Alabama, Ms Cooper Cafritz moved north in 1964 to attend George Washington University, with a mission to fight against segregation at the tail end of Jim Crow. As a senior in 1968, she had a vision of what would become one of her greatest accomplishments: a public high school that served artistically gifted students of colour from disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

In 1974, Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Ellington officially opened, providing professional training in music, theatre, paintings, and dance, along with an academic curriculum. Notable alumni include comedian Dave Chapelle, singer-songwriter Me’Shell Ndegéocello, and operatic mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves.

Ms Cooper Cafrtiz did not stop there. Her dedication to cultivating talent extended far beyond the school grounds as she took a hands-on approach in developing one of the largest private collections of African-American and African art that includes work by Kehinde Wiley, David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Emory Douglas, Barkley L. Hendricks, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, to name just a few.

Tragically, more than 300 pieces of the collection were destroyed in July 2009 after a fire at her home. It was a loss that would have devastated many, but Ms Cooper Cafritz, in her inimitable grace and determination, soldiered on. Working with co-editor Charmaine Picard, Ms Cooper Cafritz created Fired Up! Ready to Go!; Finding Beauty, Demanding Equality: An African American Life in Art (Rizzoli), a stunning volume that showcases 200 of the lost works.

On February 18, just five days before the book’s official release, Ms Cooper Cafritz died at the age of 70. Her death came as a shock to the artists whose careers she helped to nurture and cultivate. Two months on, Ms Picard and a host of leading artists remember the life and legacy of Peggy Cooper Cafritz.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is… (Girlfriends Times Two)” (1983/2009). C-print in 40 parts 16 × 20 inchesCourtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2017 Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Peggy Cooper Cafritz. Copyright Marquéo

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

Do Angels Need Haircuts? Early Poems by Lou Reed

Posted on April 17, 2018

Lou Reed. Copyright Moe Tucker.

In August 1970, when he was 28 years old, Lou Reed quit The Velvet Underground and moved back into his parents’ home in Long Island, where he stayed for the better part of a year in seclusion to write poetry. He vowed never to play rock and roll again and focused on writing verse which eventually found its way into the pages of Rolling Stone, in addition to smaller poetry zines like The Harvard Advocate, The World, Fusion, The Unmuzzled Ox, and Cold Spring Journal.

“I’m a poet,” Reed publicly declared on March 10, 1971, as he took to the stage of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, New York. Standing before the likes Allen Ginsberg and Ted Berrigan, who smiled in support, Reed recited a selection of new poems along with the lyrics by The Velvet Underground.

Six months later, Reed began recording his self-titled debut solo album produced by David Bowie and arranged by Mick Ronson. But his time away from the limelight was not in vain for it had solidified Reed’s gift for penning lyrical verse that lived on the page – and sometime later in song.

In 1974, Reed compiled All the Pretty People, a book of poetry that was never published. It is only now that his verse has been unearthed, collected, and released in Do Angels Need Haircuts? Early Poems by Lou Reed (Anthology Editions, May 1). The book includes 7” record of the 1971 live reading along with a foreword by Anne Waldman, an afterword by Laurie Anderson, archival notes by Don Fleming, and photographs by Mick Rock.

Here, Fleming provides a five-point guide to the poetry of this music icon.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Lou Reed. Photography Andrew Cifranic

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Books, Music, Poetry

John Myers: The Portraits

Posted on April 15, 2018

British artist John Myers first took up photography in 1972 when he began creating portraits of local residents in the town of Stourbridge in the West Midlands. Using a 5 x 4 Gandolfi plate camera, Myers made a series of photographs that combine the classic archetypical studies of August Sander and the quirky psychological profiles of Diane Arbus.

Although a selection of the works were exhibited in London at the time and published in British Image 1 (1974) – the first landmark publication from the Arts Council – most of the photographs had never been printed until now. With the release of The Portraits (RRB Photo Books), Myers returned to his archive to unearth a selection of work made throughout the 1970s.

“In the early ’70s in England, there were very few photography books available,” Myers recalls. “My main interest and influence was August Sander and Diane Arbus. What’s striking about Arbus’ photographs is that you can’t get away from the figure. They are not composed in any composition sense; they are in a box and they intrude on your space. There’s nowhere to hide. Arbus developed this notion of the figure in space from August Sander.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1970s, Books, Huck, Photography