Nick Cave Soundsuits, Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery
Artist Nick Cave has been using his wearable Soundsuits in performances, collaborating with locals to create dynamic visual and aural sequences that are unlikely to be confused with the output of the other musician with the same name.
Nick Cave Soundsuits: Untitled, 2009 Digital c, print, Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery
By Kiša Lala
Monegros County, Aragon, Spain 2010 Chromogenic Color Print 60 x 80 inches Edition 2/3 photographed by Edward Burtynsky
Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of mines, quarries, oil fields, ships and airplane graveyards have transformed landscapes of devastation into a thing of beauty. His new photographic series depicts the earth from above, abstracting the terraced farming practices of Spain into a Kandinsky-like painted canvas.
Burtynsky is passionate about the environment, but his work attempts to frame the truth without judgment. Burtynsky spoke in general to me about the farming practices he’s photographed, citing that a country like China had been largely agrarian in the past. “80% used to be involved in growing food for the rest. Now with mechanical advantages…a tractor can create precise patterns with ploughing on gps.”
Burtynsky explained that only a tiny segment of the population, just about 2% in the USA, is now responsible for feeding the rest of the country, my assumption being that the rest of us are in media or finance busy manufacturing paper money… For my more detailed interview with Burtynsky, read here.
Monegros County, Aragon, Spain 2010 Chromogenic Color Print 48 x 64 inches Edition 1/6 photographed by Edward Burtynsky
For more images of Edward Burtynsky’s Dryland Farming photographs click here
By Kiša Lala
Charlotte Rampling: photograph for SPREAD by Kareem Black, 2011
“Being ready at 9am in any country…” sighed Charlotte Rampling, smartly turned out in a black suit after a late night of revelry in the West Village. ‘The Look,’ had just premiered the night before in New York and Gabriel Byrne had popped out to greet her after the show. Byrne recalled how he’d sweated over how to impress her while on a first stroll through Central Park together, and seeing a night guardsman walk past, had quipped, “Ah, Night Porter!” Rampling had ignored his remark and had kept walking.
Later Byrne had asked, but wasn’t that funny?
“You don’t know how many fucking times people have said that to me,” Rampling had replied.
Paul Auster and Charlotte Rampling in a scene from Angelina Maccarone's documentary CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: THE LOOK. Credit: Kino Lorber/Les films d'ici
More prolific than ever, she has recently starred in Lemming, Swimming Pool, Heading South, playing conflicted, reclusive roles or evil, camp cameos, like in the sci fi flick Babylon A.D. She has also appeared in a Marc Jacobs fashion shoot, in an extended love fest with photographer Juergen Teller who played nude antics over a piano and gleefully peed into a flowerpot while Rampling, curled in bed, indulgently looked on. All the excavation and over-blown analysis into her enigma seems redundant when she is, more evidently, an artist committed to questing in life. While “The Look” is a bio-pic, featuring conversations with friends, it is tamer and less confrontational than past roles that explore darker aspects of her nature, revealing instead, a more contented side.
Charlotte Rampling photographed by Kareem Black, 2011 © Kareem Black
We share a couch near a lovely blazing fireplace at a lounge in Soho. I tell her that I wished she’d included a conversation with a younger woman, beautiful and successful as she had been when young, to create a tenser dynamic. Rampling fixes me with her hooded leopard gaze, “Hmm. I didn’t think of it…but it could have been good.” It was a bit early to talk about love, aging and mortality at breakfast, but I struggled to get past the platitudes.
KL: What about a crossover artist like Tilda Swinton?
CR: I don’t know her, though I’ve met her once. She’s certainly someone I would identify with; we are on the same sort of path. I feel in some ways she’s stronger than me, able to take on certain things I can’t take on.
KL: When you’re born beautiful you aren’t expected to do much more in life…
CR: It’s already enormous. What beauty brings is huge. It brings great privilege, great power and potential to do many things. If you are beautiful, doors open for you; people smile at you; you are accepted in places where others aren’t. So the relationship that people have with beauty, in a sense, is almost deforming.
Master manipulator, Erik Sanko Photographed by Bobby Fisher at His Studio, 2011 ©Bobby Fisher
Coming up post-Halloween is Erik Sanko’s pagan puppet premiere at BAM for Phantom Limb’s performance of 69°S.
The production dramatizes the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s harrowing 1914 trans-Antarctic expedition in which his vessel, the Endurance, was stranded amid freezing ice-floes for an entire winter only a few miles from the South Pole. 69°S is the latitude at which the intrepid arctic pioneers struck peril. The ensemble, led by Erik Sanko and Jessica Grindstaff, brings to life Shackleton’s adventure with elaborate hand carved marionettes in a series of tableaux vivants using music, film and photography to create a fantasy Antarctica.
Erik Sanko's marionettes. Photograph © Bobby Fisher, 2011
Elizabeth Taylor Wearing a Chador at the Shah Cheragh Shrine, Shiraz , 1976: © Firooz Zahedi - Courtesy Leila Heller Gallery, New York
© Firooz Zahedi - Dressed as an Odalisque II, 1976, Printed 2011 C-print 48 x 36 in/ 121.9 x 91.4 cm, Courtesy Leila Heller Gallery
The muse of many artists, including Warhol, the late actress Elizabeth Taylor reveals a more candid side in an exhibit of photographs by Firooz Zahedi, in which she returns to the glamorous age of Cleopatra. A show with over 40 photographs from the actress’s travels to Iran in 1976, is on loan from LACMA, and can be seen at Leila Heller’s new downtown gallery till October 29th.
Firooz Zahedi had left Iran as a child, but together with Taylor, he returned to his country to photograph the culture made exotic once more through the lens of a visitor. Together they traveled to Persepolis, the once destroyed ancient Persian capital, to Shiraz, and to the tile-decked town of Isfahan, where Taylor, after visits to the bazaars, purchased the costumes for her transformation to an oriental odalisque.
Elizabeth Taylor in Persepolis with view of the Tent City in the background. © Firooz Zahedi Courtesy Leila Heller Gallery, New York
Fumie Sasabuchi, untitled., 2010, paper, oil on card-board, 50 x 70 cm / 19,7 x 27,5\
Japanese artist Fumie Sasabuchi exposes the decay beneath the surface of vanity in fashion magazines. Her aesthetic reflects a return to a Gothic and necromantic trend in fashion portraiture, and it recalls Alexander McQueen’s flirtation with thanatos, the Freudian concept for the death instinct.
A photo taken at Burning Man, David Art Wales 2010
Festivals have been sprouting love, peace and happiness across the planet, and some like the Festival in the Desert in the Sahara in Mali, Afrikaburn, and Burning Man which take place over several days, become watering holes for artists, musicians and a place to show off distinct styles.
Escape to New York was a festival organized in early August in South Hampton New York with installations, live music, performance art and experimental theatre. The organizers put up private teepees, suitable for glamorous camping, “glamping,” to accommodate the Hampton’s taste for sanitized partying – in contrast to the tents and wagons that spawn chaotically in the crowded fields of Glastonbury.
By Kiša Lala
Gypsy woman showing her golden smile - Romania - © Photo Kisa Lala 2011
Living on the edges of townships in the grey zones between cities, the Gypsies of Central Europe stay off the grid. Myths, rumours, lies cloud their histories for they leave few traces and heed no rules, instead, they live off the land, and sometimes they beg, thieve and steal.
Count Kalnoky tells me, that at his residence, in the village of Miklosvar in Romania, where I was staying as a guest, he was indeed wireless: the gypsies had cut the cables to fence the copper for their lawless trade.
The roving life seems romantic, but it’s not for the timid. To winter in open fields, to bed in barns, wagons, trailers means Gypsies are strong in their will to be free. They barter for work and stow their riches in silver and gold, knowing it can’t burn like paper, or vanish when people stop believing in its value. Gypsies are always on the move but when they halt, they build silvery houses, knowing if all else fails, they can just melt the metals and leave.
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By Aaron Barr
Photo by Jim Wright
East Village, New York City, NY – Walking down a set of concrete steps and stepping into a small shop, you’ll find guitars hanging like trophies and vintage amplifiers leaning patiently against the walls. Cans of paint and various tools give the appearance of usefulness, and a friendly face greets you as you walk through the door.
That’s Jimmy Carbonetti. Born on New York City’s Roosevelt Island, he has found his true calling creating handmade, one-of-a-kind guitars. They are marvelous pieces that are both form and function, pushed to their limits; equal parts precious museum and gritty dive bar.
Jimmy wears this craftsman role quite well and pairs it with a passion for playing music, identifying with iconoclasts before him like Ronnie Wood, John Entwistle, and George Harrison; artists that made their solemn vows to music and kept them through life’s many ups and down.
Performance artist Marina Abramović collaborated with her favourite designer, the creative director of Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci, who she breastfeeds on a photo-shoot for Visionaire’s 60th edition, an issue which the designer has art-directed. Maternal anxieties have been a theme also in her latest project for the Manchester International Festival, ‘Life and Death of Marina Abramović,‘ which launches today. The play is directed by Robert Wilson starring Marina as her own mother, Willem Dafoe as the narrator, and has a soundtrack written by Antony of ‘The Johnsons’ Hegarty, who has also been a close friend of the artist.
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