Bongorama Art Club

HuskMitNavn @ LaViolaBank Gallery

2009-02-18T09:41:00.000-08:00

Aka Ana

2008-11-08T01:01:00.000-08:00

"Argentinian Asses" (Photos by Rodolfo Asin)

2008-08-08T10:20:00.001-07:00

Picasso, Cezanne, Magritte, Bacon – London prepares for £500m art auctions

2008-02-05T23:26:00.001-08:00

London's auction houses are gearing up for the start of what could be Britain's biggest ever art sale, with Sotheby's and Christies set to sell works worth a record £500m in the coming weeks.

Art investors from around the world are expected to descend on the capital as rarely seen masterpieces, including works by Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol and Picasso, go under the hammer.

This month's sales of Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art works will be closely watched by experts, who are wondering how long prices can continue to rise following the sub-prime mortgage crisis and talk of a looming US recession.

Charles Dupplin, the head of the Fine Art and Private Client division of Hiscox, the largest insurer of fine art in Europe, said that this month's sales could be a good indicator of things to come.

"The main sales in New York in 2007 were very strong but that was just before the credit crunch. It will be interesting to see whether the actual depth of the market is still there now in terms of the number of bidders and the percentage of lots that sell.

"There are some exceptionally lovely things on sale in London this month. It will be interesting to see whether people's love or art ... outweighs the general negativity bidders might be feeling."

Today, Christie's Impressionist and Modern Art sale will put eight works by Egon Schiele under the hammer, as well as 35 pieces by Surrealists such as René Magritte and Marc Chagall.

Tomorrow, works by Picasso, Jawlensky, Sisley, Monet, Cézanne and Renoir will be auctioned at Sotheby's. Among the most valuable works on the list is a portrait by Picasso of Dora Maar, the photographer and painter who became his lover in the late 1930s. The work is expected to fetch between £6.5m and £8.5m, while the most important triptych by Bacon ever to appear on the open market is expected to set a record when it leads Christie's post-war and contemporary art sale on Wednesday. It could fetch £25m.

The piece, Triptych 1974-77, is the fourth and last in the Black Triptychs series painted by Bacon in response to the death of his lover, George Dyer, who committed suicide in their hotel room on the eve of the artist's retrospective at Paris's Grand Palais in 1971.

None of the other triptychs by the artist, who died in 1992, has ever appeared on the open market and only one is in private hands.

Later this month, a 1969 work by Bacon, Study of a Nude with Figure in a Mirror, is estimated to sell for between £18m and £25m at Sotheby's. The auction house has guaranteed it will sell for £18m – a record for a London auction.

"These sales will be a bellwether," said Melanie Gerlis, art market editor at The Art Newspaper. "Some people argue that art is like gold – it's a safer investment than property or shares because it doesn't fluctuate in the same way. But it looks to me that there are lots of people trying to sell things at the moment. Maybe people want to sell before the market falls. My view is that it's probably only a matter of time before art prices are affected."

***

Peter Hujar @ Howard Yezerski Gallery

2007-12-20T00:16:00.000-08:00

Banks Violette

2007-12-20T00:06:00.000-08:00

Banks Violette
Black Hole (single Channel)
2004
sculpture and wall drawing mixed media
45.7 x 213.4 x 214.4 cm

Death metal, ritual murder, and teenage suicide are mere starting points for Banks Violette; his gothic installations construct operatic analyses of the dark side of American culture. In works such as Black Hole, Violette aptly portrays this phenomenon of excess. Heavy-metal aesthetics become a mirror of youth culture anxiety, an adopted language compensating and empowering sensations of immense sorrow and despair. Citing examples where musical lyrics become instigating factors to real-life violence, Violette refers to an over-identification with fiction where artistic expression exceeds critical confinement, and fantasy and reality are blurred. Black Hole lingers on this edge of transition: its aestheticised destruction offers both horrific contemplation and potential for misuse.

***

Peter Hujar @ Matthew Marks Gallery

2007-12-19T14:41:00.000-08:00

New (real) album inspired by David Shrigley's (fake) album

2007-11-28T13:39:00.000-08:00

Noodle Doodles - David Shrigley and a Bunch of Bands Make Fake Songs Real

In 2005, the pretty famous Glaswegian artist David Shrigley released Worried Noodles (The Empty Sleeve)—a 12-inch record sleeve with no record inside, just a booklet of doodles and lyrics. The doodles were things like a man with a giant bottom holding a rat, with the caption, “If I were hungry enough I would eat a rat/No doubt about it.” And the song lyrics were like a retarded Shel Silverstein, minus the creepy hippie-beard vibes.

Everyone went bazonkers. They went four-car rectangles. They lined up in two rotations to buy. Then the guys from Deerhoof, Grizzly Bear, Franz Ferdinand, Islands, Liars, Dirty Projectors, Hot Chip, Les Georges Leningrad, and a bevy of other notable music dorks (David Byrne) recorded 39 songs from the booklet and now you can hear it.

“I guess it was logical,” Shrigley said, “but there are obviously way too many people in the music industry because the whole thing seemed to happen in about a week. Everyone got in arguments about who got to do what track.”

So, what more to say? The other day I was at a party where a man who edits cartoons for national syndication was explaining how he had one comic writer who was always trying to sneak the word “butt” into his comic. This is not related, maybe… We just wanted to reproduce a bunch of Shrigley’s funny drawings is all.

JAMES KNIGHT
David Shrigley’s Worried Noodles is available as a double CD or triple LP on Tomlab Records.

Moderna Museet's Warhol Brillo Boxes Are Fake

2007-11-21T02:38:00.000-08:00

Six wooden Brillo boxes in the collection of a Swedish museum are fakes that were made in 1990, three years after Warhol died, the New York Times reported (via the Associated Press) on Saturday. The Moderna Museet in Stockholm said it had investigated the six Brillo boxes, donated in 1995 by its former director, Pontus Hultén, after a Swedish newspaper claimed that they were copies. In a letter to the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board in New York, the museum director, Lars Nittve, confirmed the claims. “These boxes are not authorized by the artist and should be removed from the official list of Andy Warhol Brillo boxes,” Nittve wrote. The Swedish paper Expressen reported in June that Hultén, who was director of the museum in the 1960s and the Pompidou Center in Paris in the 1970s and 1980s, had Swedish carpenters build 105 copies of the box for an exhibition in Russia in 1990. Expressen claimed that Hultén, who died last year, sold a number of the copies with certificates falsely stating that they were made for a Warhol exhibition in Stockholm in 1968.

[via artforum.com]

***

Antony Gormleys first big Lithograph project in 16 years

2007-11-14T05:05:00.001-08:00

Antony Gormley made hirst first big Lithograph project in 16 years

during hes stay at edition Copenhagen in august 2007.

Antony Gormley

Space

Original lithograph

111 x 77 cm

Printed on 250 gr. Velin d´Arches paper

40 ex. numbered and signed by the artist

Price: EUR 4.300,00 + VAT

See all 10 works HERE.

A book will be published about the project in February 2008 with a text by Poul Erik Tøjner.

The project is co-published by Edition Copenhagen and World House Editions.

***

Devendra Banhart - Some Drawings

2007-11-08T09:51:00.000-08:00

Opening reception: Friday, November 9, 2007, 6-8pm
November 9, 2007 - December 15, 2007

Known mostly for his catalogue of folk music songs that some have described as “psychedelic,” Devendra Banhart is a San Francisco-based artist and musician whose small, fine-line ink drawings combine strange and sometimes beastly human and animal figures, ornamental framing devices, abstract symbols and bits of language to create oddly charming works that defy definition. Intimate and hypnotic, Banhart’s works on paper share affinities to Tantric diagrams and Indian narratives, giving rise to fantastic private worlds.

DiverseWorks

Address:
1117 E. Freeway
Houston, Texas 77002

Phone:713.223.8346
Fax: 713.223.4608
PhoneWorks: 713.335.3443
Ticket Line: 713.335.3445 (24 hours)

***

Banksy, the celebrated graffiti artist, is caught in the act for first time

2007-11-08T07:10:00.000-08:00

His works command tens of thousands of pounds at auction and he counts Hollywood actors among his fans, yet his agent claims never to have met him.

Now it appears that Banksy, the elusive graffiti artist, has let his cover slip by being caught on camera at work for the first time.

He was pictured extending double yellow lines from a road on to the wall of an East London house to form a big yellow flower. To the left of the horticultural daubing sits a stencilled street-worker, sitting on a tin of paint and holding a roller. The picture was taken by a passer-by with a camera phone.

***

Bob Dylan's Pictures Shown in Germany

2007-10-30T00:38:00.000-07:00

CHEMNITZ, Germany (AP) — An exhibition of a unique collection of artworks by Bob Dylan, including variations of previously published drawings and sketches, has opened at a museum in this eastern German city.

Visitors flocked to the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz museum Sunday to see the 170 colored versions of pictorial motifs by Dylan called, "The Drawn Blank Series."

The exhibit consists of drawings that Dylan produced between 1989 and 1992 and published in a book. Curator Ingrid Moessinger had 332 of the works specially reprinted and painted, and Dylan then selected 170 works for display.

"Bob Dylan selected the works for the exhibit himself," Moessinger said.

The pictures show scenes from daily life: portraits of women and men, still lifes, cityscapes and other places that Dylan, 66, observed during his travels. The exhibit runs through Feb. 3.

Art historian Frank Zoellner said the works reflect Dylan's music.

"The landscapes are very peaceful," said Zoellner, while noting depictions of interiors often lacked a center, giving them a sense of restlessness.

A guiding theme in the drawings are variations of the same motives — much in the way Dylan performs his music, Zoellner said.

"On stage, Dylan never plays any song the same way twice," Zoellner said.

***

The Carnegie Art Award 2008

2007-10-24T23:03:00.000-07:00

The Carnegie Art Award 2008-website will be released in connection with the opening in Helsinki, October 25, 2007.

WINNERS OF THE CARNEGIE ART AWARD 2008!
We are happy to announce the prize winners of the Carnegie Art Award 2008. The first prize of 1 million Swedish kronor will go to Torsten Andersson from Sweden. Danish Jesper Just will receive the second prize of SEK 600.000 and John Kørner, also from Denmark will receive the third prize of SEK 400.000. The scholarship to a young artist of SEK 100.000 will go to Nathalie Djurberg from Sweden.

The award ceremony will take place at the opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki on 25 October 2007.

The artists participating in the Carnegie Art Award 2008 have now been selected!
Out of 143 nominated Nordic artists 26 artists have now been chosen. In the end of June 2007 the jury will gather for their second meeting to compile the exhibition and select the prize winners. The recipients of the awards will be announced on June 29 2007.

The 26 artists of the Carnegie Art Award 2008
Out of 143 nominated Nordic artists 26 artists were chosen by the Jury to participate in the touring exhibition.
Thordis Aðalsteinsdóttir (IS), Torsten Andersson (SE), Nathalie Djurberg (SE), Gardar Eide Einarsson (NO), Anette H. Flensburg (DK), Jens Fänge (SE), Else Marie Hagen (NO), Ellen Hyllemose (DK), Jarl Ingvarsson (SE), Kristina Jansson (SE), Jesper Just (DK), Pertti Kekarainen (FI), Jukka Korkeila (FI), Ferdinand Ahm Krag (DK), John Kørner (DK), Tor-Magnus Lundeby (NO), Jussi Niva (FI), Fie Norsker (DK), Allan Otte (DK), Vesa-Pekka Rannikko (FI), Silja Rantanen (FI), Kirstine Roepstorff (DK), Thorbjørn Sørensen (NO), Anna Tuori (FI), Thór Vigfússon (IS), Karin Wikström (SE).

Preliminary exhibition tour 2008
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki: 26 October 2007 - 6 January 2008
Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo: 1 February 2008 - 30 March 2008
Den Frie Udstilling, Copenhagen: 18 April 2008 - 25 May 2008
Listasafn Kópavogs, Kópavogur / Reykjavík: 18 June 2008 - 10 August 2008
Konstakademien, Stockholm: 5 September 2008 - 26 October 2008
Royal College of Art, London: 15 November 2008 - 23 November 2008
Göteborgs konstmuseum: 5 December 2007 - 1 February 2008

The Jury of the Carnegie Art Award 2008
Tuula Arkio, Counselor for Cultural Affairs, honorary PhD in Visual Arts, Helsinki (Chairman)
Gunnar J. Árnason, Lecturer at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and art critic, Reykjvik
Ina Blom, Associate Professor, IFIKK - Dept. of Art History, University of Oslo
Mikkel Bogh, Rector of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen
Maaretta Jaukkuri, Senior curator, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki
Lars Nittve, Museum Director, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
María de Corral, Art critic and independent curator, Madrid

***

Strange Gusts and Aluminum Giants from Ugo Rondinone

2007-10-20T14:02:00.000-07:00

Poets and artists have long given voice and shape to the incongruous—seeking to make sense of it, or simply to underscore its mystery. Some, like Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, manage to do both, turning the absurd into a kind of de facto logic, and vice versa, primarily through visual means. Still, language, sound, and a penchant for the lyrical often figure prominently in Rondinone's work.

Big Mind Sky, Rondinone's latest exhibition, for example, incorporates several poems by the artist, stenciled on the walls between a series of small-scale paintings in graphite and white gesso. "I-want-to-be-air-or-wind-to-be-at -ease-in-outer-space -but-in-the-world" reads one hermetic text, the reference to wind echoed in the actual air that blows out at unsuspecting viewers from a keyhole sculpture on the back wall.

In juxtaposition to these enigmatic texts, the paintings are quite mundane, recording daily snippets of landscape and architecture gleaned by the artist through various windows on his travels, as well as objects from his studio. But the vagaries of mood and outlook that attended their making is in full evidence: in the myriad vantage points Rondinone conveys (exterior and interior, close-up and panorama); the choice of imagery (empty windows, solitary trees, busy streets); and their stylistic variations, ranging from the quick and minimal to the florid and wobbly. Each painting contains on its backside a collage of newspaper clippings from the date of its execution, hidden from the viewer like a secret door to some parallel existence.

Looming among these lilliputian meditations of the everyday are 12 cast-aluminum gentle giants whose goofy grins, oblong heads, and finger-stroked surfaces were originally modeled in clay. Standing nearly nine feet tall on plinths of old, weathered wood, these friendly monster-heads look like a cross between Nordic folklore masks and the cutesy characters of Where the Wild Things Are. Full of mythic aura, and yet about as portentous as a potato, they proclaim once again that inexplicable link between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the empirical and the strange. If it all seems a bit fuzzy, Rondinone, the poet-conjurer, would have it no other way.

***

The Frieze art fair in London

2007-10-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

LONDON: "I thought it was some kind of strange feminist piece," said Jessica Stockdale, a 21-year-old photography student, pondering "Untitled (Original)" by the American artist Richard Prince at the Frieze Art Fair. "But I do like her boots."

The boots in question were adorning the shapely legs of the skimpily attired young woman in the installation, whose job is to rub Prince's bright yellow, souped-up 1970 Dodge Challenger provocatively with a cloth while the whole thing rotates on a silver disk. While the Frieze program describes Prince's work as offering "the ultimate vehicle in which to pursue the combined fantasies of upward and lateral mobility," it is equally true to say that interpretation is in the eye of the beholder.

"I like the color," said Janice Thompson, who is 43 and a recent art school graduate. "The fact that it can be driven away — that's important. The use of the iconography of the girl; for me it would be like the old masters in some ways, especially because she's quite ... "

Read the full article on iht.com here.

***

Kohei Yoshiyuki captures Japanese voyeurism

2007-10-10T12:43:00.001-07:00

Why are the Japanese couples in Kohei Yoshiyuki's photographs having sex outdoors? Was 1970s Tokyo so crowded, its apartments so small, that they were forced to seek privacy in public parks at night? And what about those peeping toms? Are the couples as oblivious as they seem to the gawkers trespassing on their nocturnal intimacy?

If the social phenomena captured in these photographs seem distinctly linked to Japanese culture, Yoshiyuki's images of voyeurs reverberate well beyond it. Viewing his pictures means that you too are looking at activities not meant to be seen. We line up right behind the photographer, surreptitiously watching the peeping toms who are secretly watching the couples. Voyeurism is us.

The series, titled "The Park," is on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea, the first time the photographs have been exhibited since 1979, when they were introduced at Komai Gallery in Tokyo. For that show the pictures were blown up to life size, the gallery lights were turned off, and each visitor was given a flashlight. Yoshiyuki wanted to reconstruct the darkness of the park. "I wanted people to look at the bodies an inch at a time," he has said.

The oversize prints were destroyed after the show, and the series was published in 1980 as a book, one now difficult to find. Last year Yoshiyuki made new editions of the prints in several sizes, which have brought renewed interest in his work. Since April images from the series have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Yoshiyuki was a young commercial photographer in Tokyo in the early 1970s when he and a colleague walked through Chuo Park in Shinjuku one night. He noticed a couple on the ground, and then one man creeping toward them, followed by another.

"I had my camera, but it was dark," he told the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki in a 1979 interview for a Japanese publication. Researching the technology in the era before infrared flash units, he found that Kodak made infrared flashbulbs. Yoshiyuki returned to the park, and to two others in Tokyo, through the '70s. He photographed heterosexual and homosexual couples engaged in sexual activity and the peeping toms who stalked them.

"Before taking those pictures, I visited the parks for about six months without shooting them," Yoshiyuki wrote recently by e-mail, through an interpreter. "I just went there to become a friend of the voyeurs. To photograph the voyeurs, I needed to be considered one of them. I behaved like I had the same interest as the voyeurs, but I was equipped with a small camera. My intention was to capture what happened in the parks, so I was not a real 'voyeur' like them. But I think, in a way, the act of taking photographs itself is voyeuristic somehow. So I may be a voyeur, because I am a photographer."

Yoshiyuki's photographic activity was undetected because of the darkness; the flash of the infrared bulbs has been likened to the lights of a passing car.

"The couples were not aware of the voyeurs in most cases," he wrote. "The voyeurs try to look at the couple from a distance in the beginning, then slowly approach toward the couple behind the bushes, and from the blind spots of the couple they try to come as close as possible, and finally peep from a very close distance. But sometimes there are the voyeurs who try to touch the woman, and gradually escalating — then trouble would happen."

Yoshiyuki's pictures do not incite desire so much as document the act of lusting. The peeping toms are caught in the process of gawking, focused on their visual prey. Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum, suggested in a telephone interview that this phenomenon was not uncommon in Japan. She cited the voyeurism depicted in Ukiyo-e woodblock erotic prints from 18th- and 19th-century Japan, in which a viewer watches a couple engage in sexual activity. "It's a consistent erotic motif in Japanese sexual imagery and in Japanese films like 'In the Realm of the Senses,' " she said.

Karen Irvine, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, said Yoshiyuki's work is important because "it addresses photography's unique capacity for observation and implication." She locates his work in the tradition of artists who modified their cameras with decoy lenses and right-angle viewfinders to gain access to private moments. Weegee, for example, rigged his camera to capture couples kissing in darkened New York movie theaters. Walker Evans covertly photographed fellow passengers on New York subways.

"Like the work of these artists," Irvine said, "Yoshiyuki's photographs explore the boundaries of privacy, an increasingly rare commodity. Ironically, we may reluctantly accommodate ourselves to being watched at the ATM, the airport, in stores, but our appetite for observing people in extremely personal circumstances doesn't seem to wane."

Milo also noted a connection between Yoshiyuki's work and surveillance photography. "The photographs are specifically of their time and place and reflect the social and economic spirit of the 1970s in Japan," he wrote in an e-mail message. "Yet the work is also very contemporary. With new technologies providing the means to spy on each other, a political atmosphere that raises issues about the right to privacy and a cultural climate obsessed with the personal lives of everyday people, themes of voyeurism and surveillance are extremely topical and important in the U.S. right now."

Yet earlier artists also went to great lengths to capture transgressive behavior. In the 1920s Brassai photographed the prostitutes of Paris at night; his camera was conspicuously large, but his subjects were willing participants. More recently, in the early 1990s, Merry Alpern set up a camera in the window of one New York apartment and photographed the assignations of prostitutes through the window of another.

Susan Kismaric, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, agrees that Yoshiyuki's work falls into a photographic tradition. "The impulse is the same," she said. "To bring forth activity, especially of a sexual nature, that 'we' don't normally see. It's one of the primary impulses in making photographs — to make visible what is normally invisible."

"The predatory, animalistic aspect of the people in Yoshiyuki's work is particularly striking," she continued. "The pictures are bizarre and shocking, not only because of the subject itself but also because of the way that they challenge our clichéd view of Japanese society as permeated by authority, propriety and discipline."

Sandra Phillips is organizing an exhibition on surveillance imagery for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art next year. "A huge element of voyeuristic looking has informed photography and hasn't been studied as it should be," she said. "Voyeurism and surveillance are strangely and often uncomfortably allied. I think Yoshiyuki's work is amazing, vital and very distinctive.

"It is also, I feel, strangely unerotic, which I find very interesting since that is the subject of the pictures. I would compare him to Weegee, one of the great photographers who was also interested in looking at socially unacceptable subjects, mainly the bloody and violent deaths of criminals."

The raw graininess in Yoshiyuki's pictures is similar to the look of surveillance images, but there is an immediacy suggesting something more personal: that here is a person making choices, not a stationary camera recording what passes before it. As Vince Aletti writes in the publication accompanying the current show, Yoshiyuki's pictures "recall cinéma vérité, vintage porn, frontline photojournalism and the hectic spontaneity of paparazzi shots stripped of all their glamour."

Surveillance images, so far, do not have that signature.

[via iht.com]

***

STELLA VINE: paintings

2007-09-19T12:21:00.000-07:00

STELLA VINE: paintings
17 JULY TO 23 SEPTEMBER - FREE ADMISSION

‘Her colours are a cake-maker’s – girlie pinks, Alice-band blues – and the way she writes on her pictures has been learnt from a bakery. But there is something there, nevertheless: a combination of empathy and cynicism that can be startling’
The Sunday Times

Stella Vine’s paintings are exuberant, funny and irreverent. She is notorious for her portraits of Kate Moss and disturbing images of Princess Diana and the heroin victim Rachel Whitear, but she also paints her mother and her son from photographs and memory. Stella Vine: paintings is the first opportunity to see a major exhibition of her work. Many rarely seen paintings will be on display. New work, made especially for the exhibition, includes a series of paintings of Princess Diana.

Born in 1969 in Northumberland, Stella Vine studied painting part-time at Hampstead School of Art in 1999. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in the UK and internationally, notably ‘New Blood’ at the Saatchi Gallery in 2004 when she first came to public attention. Stella Vine currently lives and works in London.

A limited edition, illustrated hardback book has been specially created by the artist with designers FUEL. Essay by Germaine Greer. Price during the exhibition £9.95.

***

Matthew Barney @ Serpentine Gallery

2007-09-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

There was one dreadful moment during my interview with the artist and film-maker Matthew Barney when I thought I’d lost him. I was asking him why he has felt it necessary to perform, variously, as Gary Gilmore, General MacArthur and a kind of mythical Manx satyr. And why, in his latest film, Drawing Restraint 9, he attends a traditional tea ceremony alongside Björk (his real-life partner with whom he has a four-year-old daughter, Isadora) while on the mothership of the Japanese whaling fleet, with a shell on his back and the shoulder blades of elks clamped to his feet.

“I was educated to avoid . . .” he says, and pauses. He does this often. “. . . to avoid the mannerisms of . . .” he says, and pauses.

Barney has come to London this week from the riverside studio he inhabits in Brooklyn, New York, for the British premiere tomorrow of Drawing Restraint 9, which will then have a short run at the Gate Picturehouse in Notting Hill, West London. It’s an ocean love story, but one played out alongside a more esoteric, emblematic narrative in which a sculpture made of petroleum jelly is formed and reformed on the ship’s deck. It’s the first big film that he has produced since the conclusion of his epic five-film Cremaster cycle, a series of narratives exploring the biological process of creation, made between 1994 and 2002, and for which he is best known.

It’s also the first screen role and soundtrack that Björk has worked on since Dancer in the Dark,the Lars von Trier film released in 2000. And it was while Björk was in New York promoting that film that the couple first met.

As well as attending the film premiere, Barney will open an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery of all his work to date on the Drawing Restraint series. It’s a body of art about creativity and form, freedom and restriction, and at the Serpentine it will unfold through a range of materials, from documents relating to the first instalment in the series to the 16th, which will actually involve Barney clambering about among the Serpentine’s exhibits. There will be more films, drawings and artefacts and also sculptures such as Ambergris, a recreation of the long, stony, undigested matter that is vomited up by whales and that plays a symbolic role in Drawing Restraint 9.

All this might seem strange territory for a boy who grew up in the American heartland of Idaho. In fact, his mother is an abstract painter, yet it was only after Barney gave up football, and then a medical degree, that he moved to Yale’s art department. He matured fast, and when he arrived in New York in 1989, he attracted instant attention; by 1991 he was international news.

The last instalment of his Cremaster cycle was screened in London in 2002, accompanied by a display of related sculptures. Barney says it was his work on those sculptures that seeded ideas for his latest film. “I made large cast petroleum-jelly pieces which collapse under their own weight,” he explains. “They were very like the Drawing Restraint sculptures in that they were put into a completely uncontrollable situation – you had no idea how they would behave. They each had a different ratio between the jelly and the microcrystalline wax that it’s cut with and they’re affected by the temperature of the room – all these factors change the behaviour of the sculptures. It was then that I began to think about making one of these sculptures on a boat, where the movement of the ocean would affect the behaviour of the casting.”

For some, Barney’s success is to have found ways to talk about subjects such as sex and gender through fabulous allegories and slick films.

Others are attracted to his persuasive yoking of film and sculpture. But for others, Barney’s work is tediously hermetic and self-indulgent. Had he been at all concerned about such accusations, though, he surely would not have engaged Björk to work on this new film, but he says that it simply made sense. “The subject matter was something we were both interested in – Japan, the relationship to Shinto that whaling has. Also, making a love story out of a Drawing Restraintwork seemed preposterous to me at first, but when I decided I wanted to do that, it seemed logical to work with Björk. The collaborative aspect of working with a composer is familiar to me, and that aspect of working with a visual artist is familiar to her – so it felt natural.”

Drawing Restraint 9 is actually less revealing of the couple’s relationship than it might promise. It is a love story, and a beautiful one, but it is also abstracted. Cremaster was far more revealing, Barney says. “It’s much more autobiographical. For instance, Cremaster 1 features the town I grew up in and the field I played football on from the time I was 12 to the time I left Idaho.”

It may be autobiographical, but that’s not the same thing as being revealing, and Barney remains intriguingly distant about some matters. It was noticeable that that lengthy pause he took came when I asked him why, being someone who seems reticent as a personality, he is drawn to such flamboyance in performance. He appeared ready to respond to this – and say something about his upbringing – but then wouldn’t, and rather wilfully bent his answer around once again to address his sculpture.

Even in talking about that, Barney can be cautious, but he did reveal that travel is what always spurs new work. He likes island cultures: hence he was drawn to Japan for Drawing Restraint 9, and in the past he has filmed in Ireland and the Isle of Man. So, any holiday plans?

“Well, I will say this about what I’m working on. I’m planning to go down the Nile soon.” I think he’ll find some material there.

— Matthew Barney, Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, W2 (020-7402 6075), tomorrow until Nov 11. Drawing Restraint 9 is at the Gate Picturehouse, W11 (0871 7042058), from Sept 28

***

Dash Snow and Dan Colen's Nest

2007-08-02T07:52:00.000-07:00

Ever since Led Zeppelin’s 1969 “Mudshark Incident” at the Edgewater Inn, hotel debauchery has been de rigueur behavior for the belligerent and famous. A consistently popular form of conspicuous destruction, it’s surprising that it’s taken so long for the practice to hit the gallery circuit. (Adam Dade and Sonya Hanney’s “Stacked Hotel Rooms” don’t count.) Enter Nest, Dan Colen and Dash Snow’s tribute to counterculture heroics, an installation at Deitch Projects re-creating their ritual “hamster nests,” in which the artists get a hotel room, tear up phone books, roll around in their mess, and do drugs until they feel like hamsters. Deleuze and Guattari would surely well up at such earnest commitment to “becoming animal.”

Last Tuesday’s private preview of Nest was an unusually intimate affair, the result of a tightly monitored guest list—fifty people, no switcheroos, no gate-crashing. By official accounts, that’s just five more than the number that actually worked to build the exuberant installation. Photographs of its construction had been popping up for weeks on Deitch director Kathy Grayson’s MySpace blog—from documentation of the thirty Pratt students who shredded twenty-five hundred New York yellow pages to provide the nest’s foundation, to the antics of the “fifteen fellow artists” (such as Jack Walls and Aaron Bondaroff) who infused it with mirth and (literal) spirits. “Isn’t it great?” Jeffrey Deitch, relaxed in jeans and a blue cotton dress shirt, asked me on entering the relatively snug confines of his Grand Street space. “It’s hard to keep the crowd this small.”

Read the full diary on artforum.com here.

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Video Artist Chen Chieh-jen's Mesmerizing Take on Image-Making

2007-07-29T05:47:00.000-07:00

Video artist Chen Chieh-jen offers a mesmerizing take on the politics of image-making.

Globalization, we've been told, creates new markets and wealth, even as it causes widespread suffering, disorder, and unrest. At home, we've come to know the effects of globalization through campaigns like Live Earth and the United Colors of Benetton. But how is globalization pictured from abroad? What images are artists in marginalized countries marshaling to describe their experiences, and what do these say about us?
One answer is contained in "Condensation," an exhibition of five films by the Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen, now on view at the Asia Society. Chen's first major solo outing in the U.S., this exhibition heralds the arrival of a major new talent. An artist deeply committed to investigating the politics of image-making, this show demonstrates Chen's especially canny ability to recover haunting, memorable images from stories vastly underrepresented by the politics of mechanical reproduction.

Going where Magnum and AP have rarely gone before, Chen represents his native land as an isolated place, a nation unable to write its own narrative and largely excluded from the dominant flow of world history. "Taiwan has become a fast-forgetting consumer society that has abandoned its right to self-narration," the artist declares in the museum press release, "and this has spurred me to resist the tendency to forget."

A diagnosis that invokes less the "difference" of postcolonial academics than a trade unionstyle universalism, Chen's overt politics of image-making are of the kind once associated with the old humanist left. Examinations, even critiques of our present global economic system, Chen's films—whose work with non-actors recalls the neorealism of Vittorio De Sica while echoing the stylings of Michelangelo Antonioni—mesmerize the eye through long pans and gorgeous attention to human detail, while giving the ear what amounts to the silent treatment.

Deploying a brilliant strategy that activates the expressive possibilities of silent film, Chen amplifies the work's meditative nature by eschewing all spoken lines, voice- overs, and music. The opposite of an MTV video, Chen's works bulk up their sparse action with added, subtle symbolism, the better to underline correspondences between his poetic representations and the hardscrabble conditions they portray.

One work, for example, The Route, re-edits the 1995 Liverpool dockworkers strike—an event that gained transnational importance when longshoremen from around the world refused to unload a U.K. cargo ship in solidarity with English workers—while providing an alternative ending: a staged picket line staffed by Taiwanese dockworkers, many of whom participated in breaking the original boycott. Another video, Factory, is a textbook example of how to meaningfully dramatize real-life events and make extremely abstract phenomena, like multinational industry's relentless quest for cheap labor, painfully concrete. Containing footage of former garment workers perambulating inside their previous place of employ, Factory portrays its fiftysomething seamstresses through the kind of detail—nearly five unforgettable minutes are spent on one woman's futile attempt to thread a needle—that turns the essentially documentary nature of Chen's films epic.

But of all of Chen's works on view, one in particular is capable of an extended commentary on the nature and history of both the still and moving image. Titled Lingchi—Echoes of a Historical Photograph, the piece pitilessly reenacts a Chinese torture that in the West came to be known as "death by a thousand cuts." Based on a group of 1904 photographs taken by French sailors that Georges Bataille, among others, notoriously reproduced in his book The Tears of Eros, Chen's film takes as its subject a particularly nasty bit of history situated solidly within a clusterfuck of cultural misconceptions.

Images of a gruesome death sentence, photographs of lingchi traveled throughout Europe as shocking postcards whose purpose was both perverse entertainment and ideological education. Souvenirs of brutality, they proved uniquely capable of condemning those portrayed—torturer, victim, and spectator alike—to the status of inferior beings. The subjects of these pictures remained backward and exotic nearly until our present day. Rescuing them from objecthood via film is part of Chen's artistic mission; so is his querying of our contemporary ambivalence to the unending stream of real and fictional media violence.

An excruciating if gorgeous 24 minutes long, Chen's Lingchi makes affecting art from material that, despite its historical remoteness, is much more present now than it has been in decades. Crafted from images that echo the digital age's snuff stuff—think repeating 9/11 footage and beheading videos on the Internet—Chen portrays the dismemberment of a person as something happening not to abstract concepts (like white devils or Orientals) but to a human being, with both savagery and empathy (and everything in between) left intact.

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Death Metal Artist Banks Violette's First NY Solo Show in Five Years

2007-07-29T05:45:00.000-07:00

Banks Violette tones down the death metal, but still torches drums.

Metaphorically speaking, the artist Banks Violette is hunkered down in the parental basement done up like a dungeon. The door is locked, and he refuses to come out. Faithful to a youthful romanticism that makes a cult of destructive musicians, violence, satanic imagery, and monks' robes, the 34-year-old artist has not outgrown the Death Metal thing that has made him a sort of art anti-hero. In a colloquy published recently in Flash Art, he claimed to be "just as involved with that subculture as I am in the art world." He mixes the two freely. His previous installations have alluded to a church burning, Kurt Cobain's suicide, the ritual killing of a teenage girl by three male classmates who were inspired by Slayer, and the murder of a musician by two members of a Norwegian Black Metal band (he also collaborated with one of the two convicted musicians, Snorre Ruch, for a piece at the Whitney). Yet what distinguishes Violette from the usual horde of skull-mad goth artists is his ability to turn cheesy adolescent rebellion into something sexy. And, more perverse, to do it thoughtfully.
Mounted in two galleries—Team in Soho and Gladstone in Chelsea—Violette's first New York solo show in five years draws its energy less from Death Metal than from recent art history, especially the hyper-intellectualized, anti-romantic Minimalist and post-Minimalist '60s art you might imagine him hating. The music has evolved, too—as he did last year in London, Violette has collaborated on a soundtrack with Stephen O'Malley, of the drone-metal band Sunn O))), and vocalist Attila Csihar. In London, the band played inside the gallery—Csihar singing from inside a coffin—while the audience was kept outside to listen. This time, they recorded the soundtrack—a sort of chanted throat song-—at Team, though you can hear it only at Gladstone, the well-deep droning buzzing your bones. Still, O'Malley's music isn't the most dramatic effect Violette has conjured: That award must go to Team's smashed and flaming drum kit—yes, real flames—strewn before a wall of fluorescent light tubes shooting out in rays from an upside-down fluorescent deer's head, which shelters an inverted cross in its antler rack.

In fact, Violette's over-the-top theatrics link him intimately with the austere Minimalism to which his installations so often refer. The big critical gripe against Minimalism was that it was theatrical: It included the "beholder," the audience, in the experience of the work. Violette transforms this abstract theory into something bluntly literal and lavish: He makes sculptural objects out of the theatrical elements—except that his theater is the concert hall. And, like any good headbanger who's also an aficionado of post-Minimalist artist Robert Smithson, Violette relishes entropy. It's not the pristine apparatuses of a concert that will become his sculptural objects, but destroyed amps and drum kits.

In both galleries, the floors are painted a shiny black, and the entirety of the show is rigorously monochromatic: The objects are black, white, or silver, shiny or matte. Everywhere, modernist grids are disorganizing. At Gladstone, a refrigerated, wall-size grid of rectangular aluminum sheets seems to fall apart, its plates crumpling onto the floor while ice and fog form on its edges. The white ice crystals also visually echo a grid of corrugated soundproofing board, made entirely of salt, that hangs in an adjoining room. The salt forms seem to be eroding; the ice on the aluminum grid gradually evaporates. Near another grid—this one inadvertently formed by the garage door serving as the gallery wall—a low stage of black epoxy supports the shattered remains of an amplifier cast in salt. The dispersed pieces of the amplifier, as well as those of the drum kit at Team, seem like hyper-dramatized versions of the scatter pieces that Minimalists Barry Le Va and Robert Morris created some 40 years ago.

Not that you need to get the show's many references to enjoy the spectacle. Consider, for instance, the fluorescent light tubes hung in a rectangle above an elegant frame structure that looks like a jungle gym built from black four-by-fours in one room at Gladstone. You could ponder the allusion to Keith Sonnier or Dan Flavin ('60s artists who used tube lighting), or simply groove on how, at one end, the rigid structure falls apart into a tangled wreck of wire, glowing tubes, and black beams.

For all the entropic decay here, there is no disorder: Violette constructs an installation as precisely as a stage set, with none of the shaggy qualities one might expect from someone in a concert T-shirt. Sure, some of it—like the flaming drum kit—is a little overblown, and some feels a little slick. But all this calculated drama makes for a killer performance, one that reverberates long after you've left the show.

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Jes Brinch @ V1 Gallery, Copenhagen

2007-07-27T05:21:00.001-07:00

V1 Gallery presents:
The Perversions of Mechanical Normality

An exhibition by:
Jes Brinch
Opening day: August 10, 2007
Opening period: August 10, 2007 - September 2, 2007

V1 Galllery proudly presents The Perversions of Mechanical Normality, Jes Brinch’s first solo show at V1.

On August 10th the notoric outsider Jes Brinch lands in V1 Gallery with a comprehensive solo exhibition entitled The Perversions of Mechanical Normality. The exhibition, questioning the abiding norms of society, is a distillation of the artistic experiences Jes Brinch has made throughout his career. At the same time The Perversions of Mechanical Normality bears the stamp of Jes Brinch’s life in both Vietnam and Denmark.

The Perversions of Mechanical Normality is a humdrum of materials and themes joined together by a red thread of thoughts on – and critique of – modern life. The monumental and majestic marble of the antique style intertwines with the concrete of modernity, colourful tapestries of silk and nylon, see-through sound installations and paintings while existentialist contemplations merge with (gallows) humoristic reflections on absurd everyday situations.

In The Perversions of Mechanical Normality the viewer meets Self-Hate, the man in marble scolding his own mirror reflection: ”Don’t ever funcking do that again you fucking idiot!”, Colonial Romance, an elderly marble man in trunks trying to kiss a young asian woman (a commix of a classic motif by Gauguin and Jes Brinch’s own observations of the sex turism in Vietnam) and Head, a surreal portrait of a meditative state where the mind literally flows out of the cranium. The viewer can ascend the three Chinese concrete mountains Mountain of Tradition, Moutain of Love and Mountain of Friendship, manifesting the hypocritical aspects of the words: tradition, love and friendship. And she can get lost in modern society’s sometimes incomprehensible authority and status systems, that Jes Brinch has mapped out on soft tapestries – e.g. Lifestyle Suicide, in which you catch a glimpse of a man who has to stand on his Wegner chair in order to get a noose around his neck. All of the physical works are framed by a soundtrack produced specifically for the exhibition.

Today Jes Brinch is officially recognised as one of Denmark’s most important contemporary artists. He is currently living in Vietnam with his vietnamese girlfriend. The Perversions of Mechanical Normality was produced in Vietnam in 2007 with the support of the Danish Arts Council. The day after The Perversions of Mechanical Normality opens at V1 Gallery, the exhibition The Human Mind by Jes Brinch og Per Elbke opens on VesterfÊlledvej 7A.

We are looking forward to seeing you.

V1 Gallery. Absalonsgade 21B. 1655 Kbh V. www.v1gallery.com
Wed-Fri: 2pm –6pm. Sat: 12pm – 4pm. Jes Brinch will be available for interviews in the week prior to the opening. For more information on the exhibition please contact V1 Gallery:
+(45) 33 31 03 21 / +(45) 26 82 81 66 / elg@v1gallery.com.
Thank you Danish Arts Council, Tuborg, Pernod & Nanna Thylstrup for text.

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Spielberg sued over painting on FBI's list

2007-07-17T07:03:00.001-07:00

The Oscar-winning film-maker Steven Spielberg is facing a courtroom battle over a valuable painting that he bought in good faith 18 years ago, only to learn this year that it was on the FBI’s list of the most-wanted stolen works.

The director of some of cinema’s biggest box-office successes, including Jaws, ET and Jurassic Park, avidly collects the 20th-century American artist Norman Rockwell, whose Russian Schoolroom was one of his prized works – until he discovered that it was stolen 34 years ago. The oil painting, measuring 16 by 37 inches (6.3cm by 14.6cm), was taken from Arts International, a gallery in Missouri, part of a chain of US galleries that belonged to Jack Solomon.

It disappeared without trace until 1988, when it surfaced at a New Orleans auction, changing hands for $70,000. Mr Spielberg bought it a year later from Judy Goffman Cutler, a Rhode Island art dealer, for a reported $200,000.

Today, its value has soared to about $700,000 (£350,000) and it is the subject of two lawsuits. In the first, filed in the Nevada federal court, Mr Solomon – whose gallery chain went bankrupt in 1996 – is suing both Mr Spielberg and the FBI, claiming that the work belongs to him.

He alleges that the FBI wrongly allowed Mr Spielberg to keep the painting despite knowing of the theft.

In the second case, Ms Goffman Cutler has filed suit in New York against Mr Solomon and the Art Loss Register (ALR), the British agency with an international database of 200,000 stolen artworks, which Mr Solomon asked to assist in recovering the painting. She asserts that Mr Spielberg severed his business relationship with her shortly after Mr Solomon made his accusations and is demanding $25 million (£12.3 million) for losing Mr Spielberg “as a client” and damage to her reputation.

She claims that she has acquired good title in the work and that Mr Solomon’s interest in the work ended when his business went bankrupt – although he maintains he never gave up title to the work. Mr Spielberg’s spokesman, Marvin Levy, told The Times yesterday: “We are the innocent victim in all of this. [Steven] bought it in good faith.”

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Linda Yablonsky on Banks Violette and Lydia Lunch

2007-07-10T23:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the most ordinary events can seem historic. Witness the divine convergence of punk and punter last Thursday, when spoken-wordsmith Lydia Lunch performed live in New York for the first time in more than a decade, and Prince of Darkness Banks Violette greeted his opening at both Barbara Gladstone and Team with a disappearing act.

ARTFORUM.COM: The call came from the Gladstone gallery about an hour before its doors were to open on Violette’s blue-chip Chelsea solo debut. “Banks is still working on the installation,” Miciah Hussey told me with studied nonchalance. “So the show will open next Friday, but we’re going ahead with the dinner tonight.” I couldn’t help but wonder about the delay; something to do with propane. I had been planning to see the show, of course; I wasn’t planning to rush. Now I was dying to go. Alas, I would have to occupy myself till dinner.

“My problem . . .” Lydia Lunch was saying when I got to Leo Koenig. “My problem is that I have too much fucking e-lec-tri-ci-ty.” The onetime punk priestess, briefly in town from her home in Barcelona, actually did electrify old-guard New Wavers who turned out for her single performance at the gallery, where she also had several color photo montages on display. Filmmaker Scott B was there to video her program, serendipitously titled “Hangover Hotel,” for possible use in a kind of where-they-are-now documentary that he is making about the East Village Super-8 movie scene of the late ’70s. That was when the cool people expected to spend at least one night of the week watching semiamateur but oddly compelling films by the B’s (Scott and his then partner Beth B, who made New Wave noirs in which Lunch frequently starred), Jim Jarmusch, James Nares, Vivienne Dick, Amos Poe, and Becky Johnston.

Lunch is a voluptuous tattooed beauty who, if memory serves, is the daughter of a Bible salesman and arrived in New York at sixteen to take the underground music scene by storm with Teenage Jesus & the Jerks.

She formed a few other bands before reinventing herself as a ’90s fetish feminist who spoke out for the resistance to violence against women, collaborated with Nick Cave and Thurston Moore, took up with composer J. G. Thirwell (aka Foetus), and left town to write books, start a record label, tour her shows, and make art. She is a compelling subject for a film, but she remains most effective on a stage, and it didn’t take long for her to find a groove at Koenig. You could see it in the upturned faces of other performers in attendance, Karen Finley and Reno, Bush Tetras guitarist Pat Place (who costarred with Lunch in Vivienne Dick’s 1978 short She Had Her Gun All Ready), and musician Pat Irwin, from the Raybeats, Eight-Eyed Spy, and the B-52’s.

Then it was time for dinner. Or at least I thought it was, but dinner was still a long way off when I arrived at Indochine. Making my way through the bar, I spotted Maureen Paley and Joel Wachs, Richard Flood and Barbara Jakobson, Clarissa Dalrymple and Neville Wakefield, and Keith Sonnier and Jane Rosenblum. I did not see Banks Violette. “Barbara has too much class to start without Banks,” I heard Dalrymple say of Gladstone. “I don’t think he’s going to make it,” Times Style man David Colman reckoned. “I think he might be embarrassed the show didn’t open,” ventured Gladstone Gallery director Rosalie Benitez. I asked Team Gallery owner Jose Freire what was going on. “It’s been a very complicated installation,” he told me, blaming himself for spreading his artist too thin. There were lights it had taken a master electrician two weeks to wire. There was refrigeration. And there was that nasty propane.

By now, a couple of hours in, the evening had acquired a mystique it would never have achieved had the guest of honor or his art been within easy reach. “Brilliant marketing,” I told Gladstone. “Yes,” she agreed with a nervous laugh. “We’ve been planning it for weeks!” Finally, even Gladstone had to admit defeat. Violette wasn’t coming; dinner was served. Collectors Eileen and Michael Cohen were at my table, hidden behind a column with their collector friend Wendy Goldberg, a senior vice president at Six Flags. A moment later, Nancy Spector came over to join us, saying there was no room at her table. Violette’s good-looking bad-boy compadres Dan Colen and Aaron Young soon followed, in the company of Yvonne Force. It seems that the inner circle does just fine without its center. “Oh, I own a work of yours,” said Goldberg when she was introduced to Young. “And I have work of yours,” Eileen Cohen told Colen. They were meeting for the first time, too—sitting there was very copacetic. Later, I heard that Violette had spent the night at a Brooklyn bar. I don’t know whether it’s true, but I will bet that if he were a female artist, few people would be so amused.

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