Domenico Gnoli’s Plaits and Pleats
May 16th, 2012
Curly Red Hair 1969 Acrylic and sand on canvas 79x55in. (200x140cm) Private Collection Photo: Alain Speltdoorn
By Kiša Lala
The paintings of Domenico Gnoli are drawn with scrupulous. almost clerical detail – and yet they capture a feeling of wide-eyed wonder and whimsy. In 1970 Gnoli died at the young age of 36, and his legacy lay dormant for four decades – his works having been secreted away in obscure private collections until this rare retrospective at New York’s Luxembourg & Dayan gallery.
Chemisette Verte by Domenico Gnoli, 1967, from a private collection
'What is a Monster? Ostrich in Car' by Domenico Gnoli, 1967, from Fundación Yannick y Ben Jakober Collection, Malllorca, Spain
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Reflections on Keith Haring
May 15th, 2012
By Eric Haze
©Jeannette Montgomery Barron, from her forthcoming book, SCENE, powerHouse Books, Spring 2013.
Four years ago I wrote the following piece on the anniversary of what would have been my friend Keith Haring’s 50th birthday. At the time, it was part of something I had been planning to compile and write for ages, which finally seemed appropriate for not only the anniversary which it signified, but also in regard to some of my own perspectives having recently moved back to New York over a decade later after Keith’s passing.
With an exhibition of Keith’s work from 1978 – 1982 at the Brooklyn Museum this month, hopefully this piece, like Keith’s work itself, will continue to be appreciated in the light of history. Below is the original 50th birthday anniversary piece, reposted again in what now also happens to be my 50th year, unedited and untouched from back in March 2008 :
Last Sunday, May 4th, was the 50th anniversary of Keith Haring’s Birthday.
Read more on Keith Haring
Impossible Conversations
May 10th, 2012
From exhibition - Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada’s Impossible Conversations at Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute
(Left) GeorgeHoyningen-Huené(Russian,1900–1968) Portrait of Elsa Schiaparelli, 1932 Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hoyningen-Huené/Vogue; © Condé Nast (Right) GuidoHarari(Italian,bornCairo,1952) Portrait of Miuccia Prada, 1999 Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guido Harari/Contrasto/Redux
Still from Schiaparelli and Prada in Impossible Conversations at the Metropolitan museum, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute has organized a new show Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations. based on inspirations and similarities between these iconic Italian designers. The curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton have chosen to show a video that simulates a conversation between these two women of different eras in relation to their aesthetic influences and impact on style.
The eight short videos were created by the film director Baz Luhrmann, in which Schiaparelli is played by actress Judy Davis. In the films the two women are seated at a dining table and the dialogue is taken from paraphrased excerpts of Schiaparelli’s autobiography, Shocking Life, and Prada’s filmed remarks. The imaginary conversations are both illuminating and confrontational. Is fashion art? While Schiaparelli says yes, Prada disagrees.
Exotic Body Gallery View Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Read All About It! Gilbert and George – The Double-Headed Beast is Back
May 7th, 2012
By Kiša Lala
Gilbert (right) and George (left) photographed by Douglas Friedman 2012
Gilbert and George are back after six years of trawling the dark seas of the human psyche with hot-off-the-press banners announcing various victims of violent demise. The London Pictures are a compilation of the posters, pinched from local newsagents, that daily titillate passersby with lurid slogans of sex and evil, salacious fodder for a bored public. I caught up with the sartorially prim duo at New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery to explore their fascinations with stabbings, stranglings, rapes and robberies.
“We think it’s extraordinary,” began Gilbert, “We are capable of incredible sins: The headline today is replaced by another tomorrow – to stimulate people, as you say…All our work has a moral dimension – a story to tell. You can like it or dislike it, but it’s not abstract art; we have subjects,” stated Gilbert with gravity, while George interceded, saying, “We even like it when young people say, We don’t know what the fuck to think,” his eye twinkling behind his scholarly-spectacles.
©GILBERT & GEORGE Hanged , 2011 mixed media 118.9 x 100 inches 302 x 254 cm Courtesy the artists and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
George (left) and Gilbert (right) photographed by Douglas Friedman 2012
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Art by the Waterfront – Frieze Takes On New York
May 5th, 2012
Frieze New York art fair on Randall's Island, Manhattan. Photo by Linda Nylind. 4/5/2012.
Frieze New York has camped at Randall’s island with 180 contemporary galleries under its enormous white skeletal snakelike tent designed by SO-IL architects. The fair which is like a pop-up village also includes Frieze Projects, curated by Cecilia Alemani, with artists John Ahearn, Latifa Echakhch, writer Rick Moody and Tim Rollins & K.O.S. among others specially commissioned to create outdoor installations around this unique location.
There is also Frieze Sounds, which features audio works by artists Martin Creed and Rick Moody, and also a Frieze Sculpture Park with works by Christoph Büchel, Ernesto Neto and Tomás Saraceno – who is also on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art currently.
Nicholas Hlobo, 'Tail' Stevenson Gallery Frieze New York 2012
Detail from Damian Hirst's I Want You Too 1993 Melanine, Glass, Perspex, Fish and Formaldehyde 48x96x12 in. Showing at White Cube Gallery Booth at Frieze NY 2012
John Ahearn - Commissioned and produced by Frieze Projects New York 2012 Frieze New York 2012 Photograph by Linda Nylind Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze
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Whoring and Hustling with Michael Glawogger
April 30th, 2012
By Kiša Lala
Bangladesh - Still from Whores' Glory - A Kino Lorber release.
Still from Whores' Glory - Thailand, A Kino Lorber release. Photo Credit: Vinai Dithajohn
Director Michael Glawogger has a knack for shadowing pimps and hookers through the city’s armpits. If he could stick his camera into a sulphur pit, a mining crevice, a slaughterhouse, or a city-sewer while knee-deep in slime, he’d do it. The third part of his existential trilogy that began with Megacities and Workingman’s Death culminates in the whorehouses of three metropolises – in the fishtanks of Bangkok’s red-light districts, at Faridpur, the City of Joy – a whore-ghetto in Bangladesh, and in the Camorra-run brothels and crack-joints in Reynosa’s La Zona in Mexico. Besides the CocoRosie soundtrack what makes Whores’ Glory unique is the girls have separate spins on sin, sex and capitalism through the prisms of their separate faiths, Islam, Buddhism and Catholicism.
One sunny afternoon, we sat at a midtown park chatting about Asian whores, and I recalled the hostile reception I got once when trying to shoot inside Sonagachi, Kolkata’s whorehouses where they were naturally more welcoming of men. “No, women couldn’t go there. It’s the opposite of the world outside. Complete female rule,” stated Glawogger who is Austrian, and shoots with an all-male crew.
Faridpur in Bangladesh, much like Mumbai’s Falkland Road, is an all-female ghetto hundreds of years old, and Glawogger films like a fly on the wall observing some incredibly candid conversations and bitch-fights that makes Zana Briski’s brilliant 2004 doc Born into Brothels appear tame. “When you’re there everyday for so long, they just live their lives. We weren’t sneaky to catch anything – they get angry because they steal customers from each other, and they don’t care about others [watching] – they just want to hit each other,” Glawogger recollected. “Of course, there are limits,” he says, “The mothers are quite brutal, but you don’t see it probably to the extent that it is happening. Also, when the first attraction is over, people get bored of you.”
Read more of my chat with Michael Glawogger director of Whores’ Glory
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Haunting Eye: Tim Hetherington One Year Later
April 27th, 2012
By Kiša Lala
Untitled, Liberia, 2003-2004 Digital C-print, Photo by Tim Hetherington, Courtesy of Tim Hetherington's Estate and Yossi Milo gallery
Untitled, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 2008 Digital C-print, Photo by Tim Hetherington, Courtesy of Tim Hetherington's Estate and Yossi Milo gallery
It’s been a year since my friend Tim Hetherington’s untimely death from a grenade attack in Libya. During this year the country had uprooted its malignant past and concluded a revolution, replacing a forty year-old oppressive regime – one that Tim, as a photo-journalist, had a part in liberating. Images change the world, sometimes one picture at a time, and in retrospect, Tim’s death along with Chris Hondros’, may have been the tipping point for a sea change in public opinion that resulted in the US and NATO’s decision for aerial intervention.
Tim might have lived, some surgeons say, if the blood from his femoral artery had been stemmed for another ten minutes, although it is debatable how much the severity of his groin injury may have left his life altered. With this in mind, his colleague Sebastian Junger launched Reporters Instructed In Saving Colleagues (RISC), an organization providing freelance journalists with emergency medical training, which completed its inaugural session in New York on the first anniversary of Tim’s death on April 20, 2012.
Specialist Tad Donoho, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 2008 Digital C-print, Photo by Tim Hetherington, Courtesy of Tim Hetherington's Estate and Yossi Milo gallery
Untitled, Liberia, 2003-2004 Digital C-print, Photo By Tim Hetherington, Courtesy of Tim Hetherington's Estate and Yossi Milo gallery
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Isabella Rossellini Speaks About Late Bloomers – and Reaching 60
April 22nd, 2012
By Kiša Lala
Isabella Rossellini as Mary and William Hurt as Adam (Photos by Olive Films)
Isabella Rossellini as Mary and Joanna Lumley as Charlotte (Photos by Olive Films)
“There is a not a real place for people between 60 and 80,” remarked Isabella Rossellini just shy of her 60th birthday, as we discussed her role in the film Late Bloomers, directed by Julie Gavras.
Speaking to me from her home in Bellport, New York, Rossellini said that she’d been intrigued to discover, director Julie Gavras was the daughter of another famous film director, Greek-born Costas Gavras, much lauded for his 1969 political thriller, Z. Witnessing her now-octogenarian father receive honors for the 40th anniversary of Z, the younger Gavras realized how society had a way of marginalizing one after a certain age, summing up one’s creative life and deciding it was over, and this inspired her to make her film.
In Late Bloomers, the husband an architect, played by William Hurt, receives a lifetime achievement award, and the wife, Mary, played by Rossellini, has a sudden crisis, realizing that the award signaled the beginning of the end. The architect, who is more in denial, subsequently gets an assignment to design a retirement home, but decides it’s not a ‘cool’ enough project.
“I’m 30 years older than Julie, a completely different generation,” said Rossellini of the director, “but her parents are even older, obviously. Costas is very active and healthy, and would like to direct more films than he is allowed at 80.”
Speaking at the Wolfsonian Museum in December 2010, Isabella Rossellini recalls the first time she modeled - with Bruce Weber © Kisa Lala
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For Goodness’ Sake – Free Arts Auction
April 19th, 2012
© ROBERT LONGO E+ in Arcadia Ego Digital pigment print 22 in x 34 in ( 55.88 cm x 86.36) Estimated Value: $3,500
© STEPHEN BLISS Life Sentence , 2010 Ink on vintage paper 23.75 in x 18 in Estimated value: $1,000
Free Arts NYC will host its 13th Annual Art Auction to benefit their art mentoring programs for underserved youth. This year there will be works by artists Aurel Schmidt, Stephen Bliss, Cecily Brown, Dan Colen, Tara Donovan, Hugo Guinness, Eric Haze, James Nares, Elliott Puckette, Yoko Ono among others.
The show also includes a Sterling Ruby ashtray, a Richard Serra drawing, Massimo Vitali print and an Edward White photo of the veteran New York clubber, the 95 year old Zelda Kaplan who passed away this year.
Paddle8 the online auction platform will be hosting the bidding through noon April 22nd after which the bids will transfer to the live event at Eyebeam to be held on April 23, 2012.
The artworks priced in value from $1,000 – $25,000 will offer a good chance to acquire works well below market prices.
© SPENCER TUNICK Dead Sea , 2011 C-print 11 in x 14 in ( 27.94 cm x 35.56) Estimated Value: $2,000 C-print under plexi 8 in x 10 in - 20.32 cm x 25.4 cm Estimated value: $2,000
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Walk Through a Priapic Eden with E.V. DAY
April 16th, 2012
E.V.Day Photographed by Bobby Fisher at her studio © Bobby Fisher 2012
In the summer of 2010 E.V. Day was invited as artist-in-residence at Monet’s estate in Giverny, France. Her collaboration there with performance artist Kembra Pfahler, (of the band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black) is the focus of an exhibition that constructs a faux Giverny-like habitat at the Hole gallery in NYC.
A hot pink nude Kembra Pfahler, evil Barbie incarnate, appears as a toxic garden-nymph clashing with Monet’s manufactured serenity – and yet lives in harmonic tension with its Edensque backdrop: Like fleurs de mal, Kembra sits poised on the bridge, waiting bait, much like the garden’s radiant blooms that seduce pollinators with vivid sexual displays.
While at the Giverny estate, the artist collected and dried some of the more spectacular flower specimens, exposing their bio-symmetries and vulvic plumbing.
Seducers I (Suite of 6) - Chromogenic archival prints 32 x 32 Crystal Archive Prints Editioned by Carolina Nitsch © E.V.Day
Untitled 21 - Giverny, 2012 a Collaboration with Kembra Pfahler © E.V.Day at Hole Gallery, NYC
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