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

From exhibition - Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada’s Impossible Conversations at Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute

From exhibition - Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada’s Impossible Conversations at Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute

ElsaSchiaparelli,Vogue,September15,1938 Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photograph by Horst Horst / Vogue; © Condé Nast

From exhibition - Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada’s Impossible Conversations at Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute

Wallis Simpson in Elsa Schiaparelli, British Vogue, July 10, 1935 Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cecil Beaton/Vogue © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.; Courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby's

Miuccia Prada, spring/summer 2004 Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photograph © Toby McFarlan Pond

Surreal Body Gallery View Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The exhibition features almost 100 designs and 40 accessories by Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973) from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, and by Miuccia Prada from the late 1980s to the present

Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada’s Impossible Conversations at Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute
Exhibition dates: Exhibition location: Press preview:
MMay 10–August 19, 2012 Special exhibition galleries, first floor Monday, May 7, 10 a.m.–1 p.m.

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.”

Still from Whores' Glory - Thailand - A Kino Lorber release. Photo Credit: Vinai Dithajohn

It took Glawogger a bit of negotiating to film in these sin cities, and 2 years to gain permission in Thailand. “The King of Thailand, a very adored figure, said there is no prostitution in Thailand. So you have to apply [to shoot] about something else.” Glawogger returned over and over again, gaining his contacts’ trust, giving them photos, money and gifts.  “Slowly, we became part of it…”

He selected girls that knew each other enough to gossip freely. “I usually give them a task – to have a conversation while they wash, lice each other, do make-up, so it comes naturally.” Sometimes they show-off for the camera: “I caught them often lying to me, telling different stories, but I made a contract to myself, whatever they say is truth, because even if they do come up with funky lies – it’s part of their job to fake it, so why shouldn’t they fake it with me?”

“Thai girls don’t make such a fuss about sex, they are playful,” says Glawogger speaking about their Buddhist take on life. Workers mainly cater to Thais, though there’s a big industry catering to foreigners. “Thais are quite racist about it because they don’t like girls that have been touched by foreigners. The Japanese are even worse about it. Very high-class brothels in Bangkok are exclusively Thai. If you’re a white guy, they’ll politely say you can only take girls with the red numbers, and if you asked why, they’d say the others are students, or that foreigners have too big dicks.”

“From prostitutes you can get a world geography of dick sizes,” says Glawogger laughing.

Bangladesh, Still from Whores' Glory - A Kino Lorber release.

Now, even Asian girls learn to imitate western ways of being ‘sexy,’ and with Internet chat-rooms and gay apps like Grindr being used in Bangkok and Goa, geo-tagged hookups have gone global. I tell him that in Thailand I get mistakenly approached, as I’m told my breasts are big by Thai standards. “Yes in Thailand you’d be good, but not so good in Bangladesh, because they all want bigger bellies. They really power-feed the girls – with steroids sometimes. They even bleach them.”

I notice that they say penis in English even when speaking in Bangla. “Yes pay-nis, pay-nis…they have no word. No word for fuck, only the word work, doing work,” says Glawogger having gotten to know their girl-talk.

In her on-camera monologue a Bangladeshi girl coyly suggests, Allah did not make her mouth to suck dick. “Oh it’s very tame,” he explains, “she puts up her sari and it takes 5 minutes, there is no undressing. But of course they are lying about this dick-sucking because they do it for special money. Also, it’s interesting in terms of linguistics because they don’t have a word for it in Bangla, and it’s called doing ice-cream,” Glawogger quips.

Still from Whores' Glory - Thailand - A Kino Lorber release. Photo Credit: Vinai Dithajohn

He gets the johns, who are usually stigmatized, to unload on camera. “Many people go to brothels – and they’re not the kind that rape young girls or are horrible people.  The only huge injustice is it doesn’t work both ways, [except] in Thailand. Young men in the subcontinent want to brag, be manly…either they do some gay stuff or go to brothels. As a young man in Bangladesh you can go nowhere, the house is full of family; the park is full of policeman. You can only have sex when you’re married. They go in and the conquest costs 50 takas. [US 60 cents]

Bangladesh - Still from Whores' Glory - A Kino Lorber release.

Whorehouses seem to be the most democratic of places. “But there are also many bad things,” says Glawogger, “When a young woman is alone on the street she’s already considered a whore, so they can just grab and sell her. In some social areas, if these girls fall in love, and if the guy finds a way to sleep with her, she’s fucked, then he can sell her as a prostitute because she had sex before marriage.”

In a visceral and poignant scene, a woman wails at her own misery: The desperation makes one question how fate conspires to place them there – trapped and ‘born to die’ as one mused in Workingman’s Death. But Glawogger questions my patronizing view, “I am not so sure about the no-future thing – it’s more about the moment, of how and when we do things.  There is no right life. What’s powerful is how they cope. I’d probably be happier working in a shipbuilding yard than in an office in Manhattan…” he says, looking at the caged midtown skyline around us. “A lot of people say, I could never live like that, but I totally disagree. Everybody can live like that when they have to. Going to an office and swallowing pills and seeing a shrink to make you happy is also not the solution.”

I suggest that in every human culture prostitution is the oldest alternative and by-product of mainstream monogamous culture. “I think it makes men utterly happy when they can just choose, and say No.33 – now! And the second aspect is they can go away afterwards,” says Glawogger frankly. “We are a pseudo-monogamous culture, enjoying the pretense of being monogamous and doing the opposite. The brothel is nothing more than a playground for easy access.”

Glawogger, who has shot in other Islamic countries, says sometimes the industry is ambiguous, “In Iran you can marry a prostitute for 2 hours, or marry her for a week and take her on vacation.” And then you can divorce them: “There are imams sitting in the brothel doing it,” he says.

Still from Whores' Glory - Mexico - A Kino Lorber release. Photo Credit: Maya Goded

In Mexico, Glawogger filmed a consensual sex scene between a prostitute and her preferred customer. I asked him what the difference was between pornography and prostitution with issues of privacy.

“In the process [of filming] I got turned down by many women who were otherwise quite frank, but said ‘listen I have an old daddy and he’s going to get a heart attack if he sees me.’”

After completing all three segments he traveled back to preview the film with the prostitutes in each country. “It was amazing, especially with the Mexican women because they were getting so angry about Thailand.” The Mexicans pitied the Thai in their fishtanks not being able to connect to their customers.  “They hated it, saying, thank god I live in Mexico,” he chuckled, “The Bangladeshis were totally uninterested about everyone else and just wanted to watch themselves. From an ethnographical sense they were amazed. For instance Hassina, the mother, saw herself, and pointing to the TV said, ‘what this woman says is true…what she says, the whole world should hear!’” Amused, Glawogger tells me they liked the film so much they gave him ‘permission’ to take them to the market and buy them new saris – he obliged.

What were his next projects, I ask.  “I’m always traveling the world hunting after a theme. Now, I’ll try to make a film about nothing.”

Every ten years a filmmaker comes along and takes the genre to the next level … Watching footage of the slaughterhouses in Nigeria in Workingman is tough on the eye, but remains a devastating depiction of death, showing how close animals and human come in their abjectness. I tell him I would love to seem more from Africa next. “I think Africa really shocks me,” says Glawogger, “and I am not easily shocked. And I haven’t even seen the worst. …Those are happy guys with good jobs [in the slaughterhouses]; it’s a strange beauty; can death be beautiful? It’s something unexplained, and those are the moments I am after.”

Director of Whores' Glory, Michael Glawogger

For more information:
http://www.whoresglory.com/
http://www.glawogger.com/

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 60^th 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

Isabella Rossellini as Mary and William Hurt as Adam (Photos by Olive Films)

A still from Isabella Rossillini's Green Porno Films

Rossellini was one of a pair of twins of the late actress Ingrid Bergman, who died in her 60s. I wondered if reaching 60 made Rossellini reevaluate her life and career. “There are moments, when one has these realizations, these page-turners: At 18 you can drive in Europe and that seems to be a landmark, and then you can vote, or you can retire, or when your parents die, events can create a very strong break…” said Rossellini.

Were the dilemmas of ageing something you related to when you chose the role?

“Well I am 60, and I would not have been offered a film to play 20. There is very little in common between me and Mary besides the fact that we are 60. I don’t use films to be my therapist if I need one. I didn’t do Blue Velvet because I was a sado-masochist; I do a film because it is a narrative that is interesting.”

But isn’t the film’s narrative also about the anxieties of transitioning from being a useful member of society to becoming obsolete?

“The film is much simpler than that, it is a romantic comedy, charming because it’s about older couple. Generally the audience that go to movies is very young and they want to address their own concerns. The originality of the film was that it had a light touch on a subject addressed in solemn terms.”

You also play an Italian mother in the film, was that role made specifically for you?

“I have an accent in English and they thought it was important that I justify it. Europe is very mixed these days, but (Julie) thought it was important that my children address the fact that I had an Italian background. That was added after I was hired.”

Did you see I am Love with Tilda Swinton?

“Yes, she speaks Italian but you can tell that she speaks it like a foreigner, so once they got Tilda to be in the film they integrated it into the story that she was Russian.”

The film depicts a couple whose views on ageing are so divergent they separate and have infidelities after 40 years of marriage. Would you say it was a sign of their maturity that in the end they choose to stay together with a view of the bigger picture?

“Are you objecting to them making love in the end? During the separation they have affairs…but this does not lead them to fall in love, but makes them nostalgic of what they had together.”

Were you close to your father when he was ageing?

“My parents didn’t age so much, they died relatively young. Dad died of a heart attack in 1971 he was working, and died very quickly, unexpectedly; neither declined. My mum died of cancer at 66.”

The film mentions that there aren’t enough older role models for women. Having been a Lancôme spokesperson, and being in the public eye, many may consider you a model of graceful ageing.

“I age, it just happens; it’s like, tell a baby don’t grow (but) it will grow. Nothing I can do to stop the progress. I don’t see myself as a role model… and I don’t age gracefully to give anybody an example!”

“I age comfortably. Some people are better at it. It depends on how well you are physically. I will die. (It’s) not my choice. You are asking me questions as if ageing or dying is my choice; it isn’t. I have news: it will happen to you, too.”

Ingrid Bergman with twins Isabella and Isotta. 1952

LATE BLOOMERS: Running time: 89 minutes. Not rated (discreet lovemaking). Currently at the Cinema Village, East 12th Street and University Place. New York

Hook and Eyes, LucyandBart - a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess

Lucy McRae and Bart Hess have been bending and revising the body with simple low-tech alterations. Their works builds on fashion forms combining it with everyday technologies like safety-pins, Q-tips.

Bart Hess has been exploring the effect of new materials on the body using animation and photography. And Australian artist, Lucy McRae was trained as a ballerina, which has helped her to become a visual architect of the body, playing with its symmetry to create alien yet organic deviations. Together they play with the human silhouette, the body grows fur or gills, attenuates, hyper-extends, balloons or shrinks. Their work is also inspired by new developments in genetic manipulations & plastic surgery.

Evolution, a Lucy McRae and Bart Hess collaboration

Hunt For High-tech (above)

Chlorophyll Skin is a film experimenting with color, movement, absorption and the body – using Q-tips

A mini music video made by Lucy McRae for a forthcoming book and DVD entitled Black material with music by Spencer Product in collaboration with Champagne Valentine

Dripping Color, LucyandBart - a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess

Bart Hess presents a performance inspired by the Photoshop filter that allows you to “liquify” images at Exit festival in Paris. 2012

Germination Day One, LucyandBart - a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess

Germination Day Eight, LucyandBart - a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess

Lucy Mcrae at 2012′s TED conference

Lucy McRae was invited to participate in 2012’s TED conference in California, where she spoke about using stockings, safety-pins and simple everyday objects to transform or grow a second skin to create animal textures and change colors, chameleon-like. Wanting to blur the edges of her skin, she sprayed her arms with a garden hose to watch how the water dripped and was inspired to create a textile made out of water tubes with different colored waters. She has worked on commercial projects for companies, one of which involved developing ideas on swallowing a perfume pill that would alter the body’s scent.

A collaboration between stylist Alister Mackie, artist duo LucyandBart, and Nick Knight

For more information:

http://lucyandbart.blogspot.com/
www.barthess.nl
www.lucymcrae.blogspot.com

A landscape charted from the rise and fall of the stock market. Michael Najjar 'High Altitudes,' Hangseng-80-09, © Michael Najaar

Michael Najjar 'High Altitudes', Dow Jones 80-09, © Michael Najaar

Artists with access to data from the medical, financial worlds, astronomy labs, global weather stations and geo-tagging services are now mapping data to create visual representations that make us think of invisible dimensions in tangible ways.  Michael Najjar is the first artist scheduled to go to outer space on the Virgin Galactic flights in 2013, and intends to work with NASA to collate data to create art projects based on space travel. Artist Katie Paterson has worked in conjunction with an astrophysics lab to create art based on the qualities of darkness in the universe.

Michael Najjar’s art focuses on the ‘telematic society,’ mapping information technologies that invisibly drive societies. Using financial data from the fluctuations of stock markets, he’s created mountainscapes that reference the Dow Jones and Nikkei indices. The series simulates the development of global stock indices over the last 20-30 years integrated within the visual backdrop of the Argentinian landscape. He creates fictive realities and renders alternative utopias that may aid our imagination in envisioning new futures.

Immaterials - data between visibility and invisibility : Courtesy of Onformative.com

Michael Najjar 'High Altitudes,' Nasdaq 80-09, © Michael Najaar

Immaterials - data between visibility and invisibility : Courtesy of Onformative.com

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby create visual diagrams from abstract information ‘wafting through space,’ which they refer to as the immaterial universe. The designers think of electromagnetic fields as full of data, and they have constructed designs and charted data readily available from geospatial and location-based services.

© Katie Paterson, 100 Billion Suns, Venice, Italy A confetti cannon, each piece of paper matched to the colours of the brightest explosions in the universe.

Katie Paterson has visually mapped fields of dead stars (27,000 of them). Her art uses everyday objects to simulate events of great magnitude that are hard for us to imagine. Her project ‘100 Billion Suns’ captures a Gamma Ray burst, the brightest explosion in the universe, which is 100 billion times brighter than the sun, using explosions of paper confetti. In another project she writes a memoriam letter to commemorate the death of a star, (Dying Star letters) each time she receives notification from the astronomy lab when a star has exploded. She has also collaborated with Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea on a one-minute loop of a telescopic image of ancient darkness which was broadcast from a New York TV station. The image is of the darkness that existed at the time of the Big Bang, 13.2 billion years ago, at the furthest point of the observed universe.

Produced to accompany Katie Paterson’s project ‘100 Billion Suns’, which took place during the vernissage of the 54th Venice Biennale.

More information:

Fictional Radiospaces

Onformative Design group

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

Kate Paterson at Haunch of Venison

Katie Paterson Website

Michael Najjar website

Mike Kelley (1954-2012). The Mobile Homestead in front of the abandoned Detroit Central Train Station, 2010. © Mike Kelley. Photograph by Corine Vermuelen

For this year’s biennial the Whitney Museum is presenting a round-up of the usual suspects, with works by Elaine Reichek, Richard Hawkins, Charles Atlas, peppered with some lesser known emerging artists, and homages to recently dead ones like George Kuchar and Mike Kelley.

The Whitney is also presenting a great array of film and videos, music, ongoing live performances, with films by George Kuchar, Thom Anderson, Wu Tsang, Kelly Reichardt, (Wendy and Lucy), and a specially commissioned film by Werner Herzog. The more interesting departure is a floor dedicated to performance artists, which promises to be at least more moving than the majority of static works on display.

A Georgia Sagri performance at the Whitney Biennial 2012

Of the performances scheduled to take place, is a four-week residency by Modern Dance Club – a dance troupe commissioned by British choreographer Michael Clark. Clark, who radically expanded the role of male dancers from being mere props for pirouetting ballerinas – to exploring gender-defying personas, has famously collaborated on costumes with Leigh Bowery, Vivienne Westwood, BodyMap, and Sarah Lucas. Clark’s W-H-O’S Z-O-O will be performed by both professionals and non-dancers.

Wu Tsang (b. 1982), Production still from WILDNESS, 2012 (in progress). High-definition video, color, sound. © Wu Tsang; courtesy the artist

Sam Lewitt (b. 1981), Untitled (material for Fluid Employment), 2012. Digital photograph, dimensions variable. © Sam Lewitt; courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery

The Whitney Museum readying its floor space for performances.

Rendering of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new building in downtown Manhattan, from the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets facing West towards 10th Avenue

In the near future, the Whitney is threatening to unleash its new downtown quarters at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets, a space designed by Renzo Piano, which hopefully will inject fresh impulses into its curatorial choices.

Michael Clark: In Residence March 14 – April 8 – Performances March 29-April 8
2012 Whitney Biennial will be on view from March 1 to May 27, 2012

Jayson Musson - from his series Miscellaneous Things That Resemble Paintings © Jayson Musson

Brooklyn based Philadephia artist Jayson Scott Musson is better known for his alter ego “Hennessy Youngman,” the cultural art critic of the Internet video series “Art Thoughtz.”

Youngman’s hilarious monologues come from a seemingly naïve and sincere interest in comprehending art world snobiety as an art-outsider, though his fluency in artspeak betrays his institutional pedigree. With an MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania, he humbly says, “I guess I’m just a nigga that loves rap, and digs fine art.”¹ His art-world-nigga persona has garnered him notoriety similar to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G show – whose mock-interviews caught politicians off-guard and paraded celebrities with their pants down.

The Hennessy Youngman moniker is a riff off comedian Henny Youngman and Hennessy cognac and hints at Musson’s ability to simultaneously disarm and deride the art world, and get them to loosen the fuck up.

ART THOUGHTZ: Relational Aesthetics:

Youngman cites the irony in his experience while a museum guard, watching school kids be taught how to interpret Cy Twombly’s scribbles. As Youngman explains, “ART THOUGHTZ, is like the tears of a child in a room full of screaming adults.”

BARACK OBAMA BATTLES THE PINK ROBOTS © Jayson Musson

Youngman’s videos play a humorous role in the democratization of art, releasing art from the confines of galleries and bringing the conversation to the street. “Art doesn’t always have to be this dense bramble of graduate school buzz words, intellectually impenetrable (boring) work, but audiences shouldn’t always assume that if they don’t “get” a work, that the work they’re experiencing is bullshit.”²

“This art shit is niche market. And whether or not artists want to admit it, they all carry a brand within their work. There might be some sincere artist reading this saying “My work isn’t a brand, shithead!” Well you know what? Sincerity is that artist’s brand… And yes, I’m a shithead. You must’ve been talking to my mother earlier…”

Here are some of Musson’s ramblings in text form in “Black Like Me: The State That I am In” from a column in the Philadelphia Weekly that appeared in 2007.

BEING POOR © Jayson Musson

Love is Stupid - From 'Black Like Me: The State That I am In' © Jayson Musson

For his New York gallery premiere, Hennessy Youngman appears in an exhibition curated by Marilyn Minter, at Family Business, a non-profit art space, which is a post-retirement venture of Maurizio Cattelan’s. For the show Youngman has debuted a new video.

Hennessy Youngman spouting forth on the similarities between Joseph Beuys and Jay-Z:

Here is Hennessy Youngman’s ART THOUGHTZ on Damien Hirst:

Here is Damian Hirst proving Hennessy Youngman does not lie -

Early work From his series Juvenilia - Where have my ideals gone. © Jayson Musson

ART THOUGHTZ: The Sublime
Jayson Musson Website
Nigga Purview
http://www.facebook.com/hennessyyoungman
Virgin Family Business: 520 west 21st street, New York City

References: Interview in (1) Art in America and (2) HuffPost

Phlegm painting at an old abandoned school in Sheffield, UK © Phlegm

UK street artist Phlegm has been changing the face of Sheffield’s abandoned lots, transforming them into galleries of black and white murals.

Phlegm has a unique talent for adapting to the surfaces of his dilapidated surroundings, allowing his characters to evolve in situ; the walls appear to have been constructed just to inhabit his creatures.

Phlegm painting at an old abandoned school in Sheffield, UK © Phlegm

In the above images Phlegm painted the walls at an abandoned school in Sheffield. “Spend a week on your own in there and you can literally watch nature eating it’s way through it, claiming it back,” says the artist of his experience of working at the school

Phlegm at Work © Romany WG

Phelgm in Sheffield, UK photo: © Romany WG

“This big robot is painted on the back of some abandoned substation just outside Sheffield,” says Phlegm

Falling - Phlegm, Sheffield, UK, February 2012

This above mural is part of a brilliant series of falling men in which Phlegm’s enigmatic creatures are suspended mid-motion in the act of falling. It recalls Georg Baselitz’s inverted paintings in which the world seems temporarily disrupted and turned upside down.

Phlegm, Outside Sheffield, UK. 2011 - from unurth.com

Phelgm Zombies, Sheffield, UK 2011

Phlegm painted this wall while they were filming a zombie movie at the location.

Phlegm paints a Telescope or Eyeglass at an abandoned site in Sheffield, UK

Phlegm paints a warehouse in Sheffield, UK December 2011

Harnessing of the Giant Squids Sheffield, UK

Read more:
Phlegm Website
Photographer Romany WG

Photographer Roger Ballen is known for his stark, artful montages of South African life: the dirt-poor of rural townships, the beatific scallywags and sooty lowlifes on skid-row that wash up with the detritus from shanties. His new music video with Cape Town band Die Antwoord “I Fink U Freeky,” meshes hip hop beats with his signature style of photography, animating his still images.

The slang used by Die Antwoord is Zef, an Afrikaans term that roughly translates to “common or trashy,” referencing a white trash culture, cheap, tin Ford Zephyrs (zef), trailer park kitsch, cool tough guys with style.

"I Fink U Freeky" - Die Antwoord - Photograph by Roger Ballen

Ballen’s work is a blend of photography and art, combining still life compositions and live portraiture. The artist has been shooting black and white film for nearly fifty years. Having grown up in the era of b&w photography Ballen continues to be one of the last few experimenting exclusively in this media. Explaining his passion for black and white and the constraints it implies, Ballen says, “Black and White is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.”

"I Fink U Freeky" - Die Antwoord - Photograph by Roger Ballen

Ballen’s video with Die Antwoord began with still images he took of the band for their album three years ago that were made popular through youtube circulation. Eventually the growing interest in those images led him to collaborate on a full-length video project with the band. Ballen’s visual aesthetic is unique but compare this also to the musical interpretation and approach to local rhythms by another South African photographer, Pieter Hugo’s cover of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control, a video he did for DJ Spoek Mathambo

From Roger Ballen's book, Shadow Chamber 'Twirling Wires' 2001 © Roger Ballen

More information: Roger Ballen

A still from the short film - Fishing Without Nets, Directed by Cutter Hodierne Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival -

Filmed in Kenya, East Africa, Cutter Hodierne’s 17 minute short ‘Fishing Without Nets’ is a story about Somali pirates.  After being noticed for his self-made short videos Cutter Hodierne dropped out of college in Boston and decided to take a plunge into film-making. With a bit of luck at the age of 22 he was touring the world with U2 as their filmmaker.

With a savvy sense for cultivating his own persona, the director claims his parents sold their possessions just before he was born, quit their jobs and bought a 32‐foot cutter-rigged sailboat from which he was christened Cutter. It was smooth sailing for the next three years of his life at least, around the South Pacific, which might have given him a pirate’s eye for roving and adventure.

A still from the short film - Fishing Without Nets, Directed by Cutter Hodierne

Though not all his upbringing was as exotic, having been raised in Virginia with a mother at NPR, he had enough of a regular education to get a good feel for digital video editing at an early age. Recently his efforts have paid off, and now at 25 years of age, he’s been fortunate to have his short film accepted into Sundance. His film ‘Fishing Without Nets’ is the story of pirates in Somalia, told from the perspective of the pirates. Though the script is fiction, the film has the feel of a documentary, and ripe for the recent interest in renegade pirates of the high seas.

Hodierne along with some of his school-mates took a gambit and flew to Kenya to shoot the film on a shoestring, recruiting his actors from the streets of Mombasa. Shooting the film in Kenya had been tough and the crew even had a run in with the law due to the stringent gun permit laws. With a bit more pirate charm, Hodierne hopes to finish his short in South Africa and turn it eventually into a feature film.

Native - Courtesy of Cutter Hodierne - http://www.mynameiscutter.com

View the Trailer: somalipiratemovie.com
Filmed in Kenya, East Africa, the 17 minute short ‘Fishing Without Nets’ is playing at Sundance Film Festival 2012
DIRECTOR Cutter Hodierne
SCREENWRITER Cutter Hodierne, John Hibey
Kenya, 2011, 17 min, color,
Somalian with English subtitles

http://www.mynameiscutter.com/