SPREAD | ArtCulture » Kisa Lala

Roger Ballen’s South African Rap Rave

KisaLala — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:35:52 +0000

By Kiša Lala

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 slums and 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

Making Celestial Waves: Artist Mariko Mori

KisaLala — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:36:02 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Artist Mariko Mori’s Journey to Seven Light Bay is a digital project that transports visitors to Miyako Island in Okinawa, Japan, where Mori has installed the first part of her monumental earthwork ‘Primal Rhythm’. The installation consists of a sun pillar and the egg-shaped ‘Tida Dome’ that changes colour with tidal movements.

Inspired by the caves of Okinawa in Japan, the digitally rendered ‘Tida Dome’ is a hollow shell through which light enters as it floats in the bay, shifting colour from red at low tide to blue at high tide, with many gradations in between. Mori has chosen exact coordinates such that at the moment of winter solstice, the lengthening shadow of the ‘sun pillar’ will penetrate the actual moonstone, once it is physically installed in the bay, uniting the celestial with the terrestrial, the masculine with the feminine.

Sun Pillar Miyako Island in Okinawa, Japan © Mariko Mori

Mariko Mori - Tida Dome, Courtesy of Adobe Museum of Digital Media

Construction of the Sun Pillar Miyako Island in Okinawa, Japan © Mariko Mori

Mori intends the site of this symbolic work to be a place for future performances that will engage viewers to participate in the surrounding environment. This installation, like many of her earlier works, integrates art, technology and Buddhism, engages circadian patterns, and celebrates the primary rhythms of the universe, which urban life largely erases from our consciousness.

Mariko Mori, Série "Present" (détail), Times Square, New York, 1997

The art world often sidelines humanist works for their accessibility and for their campaigns of universal mantras, but Mori has a history of meshing modern technology with ancient practices in a way that engenders contemplation for our place in the natural world. Predating Lady Gaga by many years, her pod performances in Times Square and other landscapes around the world, engaged public awareness using grand spectacles. Her Lucite stone circles were inspired by earthworks of the Jomon period in Japan, drawing on the astronomical wisdoms of the ancients to create connections that transcend time and cultural differences.

The Japanese born artist, commutes between her homes in Tokyo and New York for her projects, and also heads a non-profit organization, the Faou Foundation with a mandate to create a series of site-specific earthworks across six continents to engage local communities and enhance public interactions with the natural environment.

Mariko Mori, Wave UFO, 1999-2002, Courtesy of Adobe Museum of Digital Media

Mariko Mori - Oneness, Courtesy of Adobe Museum of Digital Media

A virtual demo of the installation of the Tida Dome, entitled ‘Journey to Seven Light Bay’ can be viewed at Adobe Museum of Digital Media site.

Faou Foundation

Video Courtesy of Ministry of Culture

Stand in Line: Out of the Ordinary

KisaLala — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:18:59 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Nineteen year old street photographer Shane Vincent has an eye for capturing those ephemeral moments when the changing light transforms the mundane into the sublime.

The project, Stand in Line, came about when Vincent began photographing utility poles in the streets of North London where he lives: “The series started at a time where the sky looked pretty cool,” he says. “It was autumn so it would change constantly. It caused me to look up a lot.” The outcome of his first photograph, Stay connected of a utility pole “with wires coming out at all directions,” was captivating enough, recollects the young photographer, that it caused him to pay more regard to the perpendicular poles and lampposts which most take for granted and which habitually punctuate the urban horizon. By isolating them against the vivid autumnal sky, and shooting them from an anamorphic perspective, Vincent enhanced their geometric abstractions.

Never having been formally trained in the field, Vincent fell into photography as a hobby. Soon, his spontaneous street images brought him enough attention as a photographer to develop his dabbling to a more serious professional level. Initially, he says, he began by experimenting with 35mm because he liked the grain and quality of the images, but because of the expenses of printing, he later gave way to digital, whose more crisp, modern feel led him towards a contemporary vision.

“Visually, film has had the greatest influence,” the photographer tells me, remarking on his inspirations, “mainly those that show futuristic visions.”

“The interest in the future, dystopian and utopian sides is shown in the series, in the colours and moods particularly,” Vincent elaborates. “I decided to shoot them from a similar angle, straight up through the centre, fading and distorting towards the peak. It struck me as a most intimidating perspective.”

For more information on Shane Vincent’s photography: www.shaneellisvincent.com

Sitting Pretty: Remastering Renaissance Portraits

KisaLala — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:12:05 +0000

Untitled, from 'Existing in Costume' series © Chan-Hyo Bae

Stiff styles of portraiture were common practice in Elizabethan times – three contemporary artists re imagine the formal poses through photography.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, using his minimalist approach creates a series of austere portraits of Henry VIII’s six wives. Christian Tagliavini’s subjects are attired in garments handcrafted from paper and fabric the artist creates himself. And South Korean artist Chan-Hyo Bae creates a series of self-portraits identifying himself in the strangely foreign, militaristic poses of royalty.

Artemisia © Christian Tagliavini

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jane Seymour (detail from Henry VIII and Six Wives), 1999 - © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy The Pace Gallery

Untitled, from 'Existing in Costume' series © Chan-Hyo Bae

The royal subjects in Chan-Hyo Bae’s photographs appear isolated and estranged; the Queen appears as a misfit in her role of monarch, separated from others by the very elaborateness of her garments which imbue her with special status. Posing as a queen is not just a play on queeniness as a cross-dressing artist for Bae, who is here expressing the idea of foreignness as a South Korean living in London.

In his first solo UK exhibition ‘Cut Out & Keep’ photographer, Christian Tagliavini created a series entitiled ‘1503’ which was inspired by masters of the Renaissance, (the year the art patron, Agnolo di Cosimo was born). Using cardboard constructions Tagliavini creates a flat caricature that enhances both the severe puritan aesthetic as well as the otherworldliness of a digitally enhanced reality.

Portrait of a Lady in Green © Christian Tagliavini

Anne of Cleves (detail from Henry VIII and Six Wives), 1999 © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy The Pace Gallery

Bartolomeo © Christian Tagliavini

Untitled, from 'Existing in Costume' series © Chan-Hyo Bae

Lucrezia © Christian Tagliavini

Christian Tagliavini, ‘Cut Out & Keep’ – 03 Nov 2011 – 07 Jan 2012 – Diemar Noble Photography
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Courtesy of Pace Gallery: http://thepacegallery.com
Chan-Hyo Bae, Courtesy of Saatchi Online

Ape and Super-Ape: A Chat with Walton Ford

KisaLala — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:19:27 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Walton Ford photographed by Bobby Fisher © Bobby Fisher, 2011 -- Arabian proverb from beginning of King Kong: 'And the Prophet said, ‘And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.'

A witty narrative of thwarted simian desire is the theme of Walton Ford’s new series of watercolor paintings at Paul Kasmin Gallery. Ford’s obsession with King Kong, the super-sized movie monster came from his childhood viewings of the 1933 cinematic tale of abduction depicting the clash of the beastly brute Kong and delicate, blonde sophisticate, famously played by Faye Wray.

The story is less Beauty and the Beast, more unrequited love akin to Nabokov’s Lolita in which Kong, the faux monster gorilla, is trapped by unnatural desire and vanity towards an act unacceptable to consummate.

In his other series, displayed like a comic strip narrative on the gallery walls, Ford returns to his earlier Audubon inspired style, depicting a scenario described in the naturalist’s journals about his pet parrot. I chatted to Ford about his new work and flipped through his past drawings in my old copy of Pancha Tantra, a collection inspired by the ancient Sanskrit book of animal fables, possibly the oldest on the planet.

Walton Ford wearing one of his collection of gorilla masks, photographed by Bobby Fisher for Spread © Bobby Fisher, 2011

I asked Ford about his inspiration behind the story of the dead parrot and masturbating monkey, and Ford explained that Audubon’s father was a ship’s Captain: “He used to bring exotic animals home to France,” recounted Ford, “Audubon himself was born out of wedlock: the Captain had a mistress in Haiti, and after Audubon was born from this mistress, the Captain brought the young boy home to his wife in France who raised Audubon.”

“My mother had several beautiful parrots and some monkeys; one of the latter was a fully-grown male of a very large species. One morning, while the servants were engaged in arranging the room I was in, ‘Pretty Polly’ asking for her breakfast as usual, “Du pain au lait our le perroquet Mignnone,’ the man of the woods probably thought the bird [was] presuming upon his rights in the scale of nature be this as it may, he certainly showed his supremacy in strength over the denizen of the air, for, walking deliberately and uprightly toward the poor bird, he at once killed it, with unnatural composure.” John James Audubon

Ford reimagined the scenario from the few torrid tidbits left in Audubon’s diaries, “I thought, how Freudian! I made it hyper sexualized. The incident actually traumatized him and led to him painting birds.”

Walton Ford's studio, photographed by Bobby Fisher © Bobby Fisher, 2011

Walton Ford’s drawings recall a time when explorers roamed uncharted oceans, when rumors of primeval lands and exotic creatures fed our fears and dreams. Ford is attracted to the most documented of these journeys, which were accounts by western colonialists ‘discovering’ the east – the Orientalists.

In the film King Kong, travelers reach Skull Island, a lost world of colossal beasts and dinosaurs. The goliath jaws of Kong, which greets guests entering the gallery is an anachronistic caricature, no longer fearsome, and out of date. Kong’s face, full of pathos, seems just as decontextualized now as he was misplaced then, out of the jungle, climbing the Empire State. He’s molded from our fear of the wild, which lives as part of our psychic inheritance in the primordial fear of being eaten. On the other hand, one might say the nemesis of our modern fears comes from not what’s lurking in the jungle but from aliens in outer space.

Animals have lost their potency and magic, their power over our subconscious. Hunting for sport replaces hunting for survival. Animals are ‘game’ on a planet where we’re the dominant species. Zoos and safaris are the last remaining places left for modern man to face off against wild beasts, as some feel inclined to do, in macho, drunken bravado, foolishly discovering that their place in the food chain is not unconditionally secure.

But Ford believes there are still places where animals command mythic status. Wolves still prey on our imagination as werewolves and vampires, possessing supernatural powers, haunting villages of rural France and Eastern Europe.

Walton Ford's Studio, photographed by Bobby Fisher © Bobby Fisher

I asked the artist why in many of his drawings in the Pancha Tantra the animals are chained or trapped, and the landscapes are burning – were humans always a threat? “It’s not about man being destructive to nature, but about exploring the relationship, which often is violent. The pet monkey is chained… they are supposed to be surrogate humans, like court jesters and keep within certain rules of cute monkey behavior. If they behave like a monkey, it’s upsetting.”

Ford studied 19^th century books of gun traps and snares on camp life and the tricks of trapping. “They are fables on the costs of pleasure, instant gratification.” Ford points to a drawing of a tapir, “He is shot and photographed at the same time. They were destroyed as ‘pests,’ or trapped for their feathers and fur. Birdlime (a kind of glue) was used to trap hummingbirds inside flowers,” says Ford, an avid connoisseur of odd animal trivia and arcane folklore.

Man of the Woods, © Walton Ford, 2011 Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery

Ford’s watercolor paintings have evolved from a clinical stylized, technically perfect aesthetic that made his select pincered specimens appear as though isolated from their habitats, suspended within faux antique landscapes – and thus removed, the artist rendered his creatures exotic and extinct. “I like the idea of creating an artifact that isn’t real; that couldn’t have been made when it says it was,” explains Ford.

Ford’s later work turned towards wittier allegories taken from more extensive narratives, such as the lives of Richard Burton, explorer and first infidel in Mecca, Lord William and Emma Hamilton’s Neapolitan society of debauched dandies, and the bawdy Earl of Rochester. Finally in the new Kong series, Ford has abandoned his predilection for the pre-photographic era with excessive detailing and marginalia borrowed from esoteric manuscripts, and courageously leaped into the early 20^th century cinematic imagination. Though some anecdotal and literary diversions fire our reveries, the Kong portraits tackle emotions of love and rejection on our egos, (a gorilla’s face is suitably more empathic and anthropomorphic for this purpose), and also allude to Ford’s personal travails and recent divorce

Walton Ford wearing one of his collection of gorilla masks, photographed by Bobby Fisher © Bobby Fisher, 2011

Not a real silverback gorilla, Kong’s face was a Hollywood rendering made to elicit fear.

“It’s from a mixture of film stills,” Ford tells me. “They used a scale model for close-ups, and an animation model for stop motion. The proportions of the head are the same as I paint here. These are emotional portraits of what he was going through.”

In the Hollywood parable Kong is a cornered savage; the girl gets rescued and civilization scores a victory against the barbaric jungle. It would be more typical today to side with the animal – so totally vanquished and non-threatening has the wilderness become in our imagination. Ford also, takes the animal’s point of view and makes Kong’s emotions human.

“He has this overwhelming desire and lust for her and she’s screaming, it’s the worst kind of violation, he undresses her…” Ford says, building to the climax, “She escapes him and his reaction is rage. I imagine him heart broken. He kills everybody but he never sheds a tear, but goes through rage and grief.”

The text refers to the end when Kong is chained up and the girl says, ‘I don’t like to look at him, it makes me think of that awful day on the island’. Ford finds the moment, ironically poignant, “And for him the awful day on the island was the best day for him – he had his girl, it was wonderful for him. They are so far apart at this point – her rejection of him is so complete. So it starts out with disbelief, then grief and rage, and an acceptance phase, when the romance is over.”

Kong’s been dumped, and Ford sees parallels in human behavior using the animal kingdom. The way we see nature as a mirror of ourselves – is what fascinates Ford. It is the inauthentic, artificial frame we’ve imposed around nature. “They are animals in the human imagination rather than animals in nature. Generally, when you see animals in nature they are not doing very much they are running or resting, it’s not terribly interesting. There’s a lot of ‘animal nature’ art, but almost all romanticize moments where there isn’t a human viewer included in the image.”

Keeping Time with Tom Sachs

KisaLala — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:38:26 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Tom Sachs, Photograph by The Selby

After a few years of tinkering in his studio, Tom Sachs has resurfaced with a new show entitled Work at New York’s Sperone Westwater gallery filling three floors with art exploring as many creative tangents: a series of pyrographic works, using a wood burning-etching technique; a foamcore crafted collection based on Sevres porcelain; and a series that pays homage to James Brown, with a JB listening station, his Last Supper packed in a microwave, and a framed array of JB’s hair products.

Sachs had cited James Brown’s work ethic as an inspiration for the show, so I took him to task for being late for our meeting and disappointing Brown’s high standards for punctuality.

“When Brown fined his workers for being late it was contributing to a culture of punctuality,” explained Sachs in defense of the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. “He fined them for missing a beat, he used punctuality as a percussive element: to be on time, to keep time; not miss a beat.”

Sachs runs his Vulcan smithy of tinkerers like a boot camp, with red beans and rice every Monday. “Rather than a prison fantasy it’s more a utopian fantasy. More Amish. You can leave,” he forewarns me, “but you might find that the outside world may not be as inviting.”

Tom Sachs' tribute to James Brown: © Tom Sachs 'Please, Please, Please', 2011 mixed media 64 x 22 x 14 inches 162,6 x 55,9 x 35,6 cm overall Courtesy Sperone Westwater Gallery

Tom Sachs James Brown's Last Supper, 2009 mixed media 68 x 42 x 22 1/2 inches 172,7 x 106,7 x 57,2 cm Courtesy of Sperone Westwater Gallery

Tom Sachs, Photograph by The Selby

Many of Sachs’ artworks retain a quasi-functional element, and he often appropriates objects to demonstrate rituals in people’s lives. I ventured that his use of diagrams, maps, floor plans and lists might hark back to his childhood, playing with models perhaps?

“I want to use this opportunity to debunk the myth immediately that I’m as organized as I might look,” he tells me, further shattering any suspicions I might have had of his discipline. “It’s my way of battling entropy. I live an incredibly chaotic life. In recent years, I’ve made an incredible effort to eliminate chaos from my life. But it’s also where I find inspiration, so it’s a question of finding balance. I don’t know what Donald Judd’s life was really like because I never met him – but I imagine someone with furniture like that would have a very ascetic existence.”

“I grew up very unhappy and learning disabled, a terrible athlete, failing classes constantly, always having to go to summer schools, profoundly unsuccessful,” Sachs summed up his childhood, “It might have been diagnosed as dyslexia or ADD – but when I think back, it’s really that I hadn’t found my calling yet.”

Might he have found his calling in architecture school to channel his wavering interests? Sachs scoffed at this, “No, architecture training was completely worthless. Sculptural building is where I learned all that…and I spent some time as a construction worker.”

Sachs can afford to thumb his nose now at architects too lofty to get their hands dirty with any kind of actual building. At the Architectural Association in London, where he studied, Sachs remembers how his classmates tried bribing him to finish their technical studies project for them. “I told them to fuckoff, so they probably hired someone else to do it. But I bet those are the bitches out their making terrible buildings.”

Tom Sachs Spade, 2010 - 2011 camouflage cloth 78 3/4 x 4 x 3/4 inches 200 x 10 x 1,9 cm Courtesy of Sperone Westwater Gallery

Our conversation meandered into Ant Farm, the Design Build movement and the corrosive action of urine on corner walls of fancy architecture, but I thought James Brown might have disapproved of our attention dissipating, parenthetical digressions so I returned our swerving line of query back to the ubiquity of branding, and its impact on our cultural consciousness: Sachs, has a scaled-up version of a Macdonald’s coffee stirrer in the show – it’s like a paddle with a weaponized spade-tip that could be used in agriculture or war… but Sachs is likely taking a dig at its proletarian usage, “for cocaine.”

“I’ve been repulsed by the promises and the perceived obsolescence that advertising creates in our lives, the insecurities of not having something – and that buying the product might make our lives better – but simultaneously, I’m attracted by the glamor, beauty and power of brands. I’m not exclusively critical of them – I’m a complicit critic. A participant in the cycle.”

Tom Sachs, Photograph by The Selby

If not entirely immune to the latest Prada handbag then, Sachs is far more consumed by his next project of a make-belief odyssey, ‘Space Program 2.0: Mars,‘ about to transform the cavernous interior of the Park Avenue Armory in New York next year. Sachs also makes seductive cabinetries for his NASA projects, with knobs and dials exquisitely detailed from an era of machine hardware, rendering them as fetishized historical artifacts. He speaks wistfully about the golden age of machine design, which he considers to have been dead by 1974. “So discouraging for me to see how amazing the software has become and how degraded the hardware has become, and how we’ve kind of given up.”

“When I was in architecture school – I thought I could contribute to the world by making beautiful buildings. I got discouraged and dropped out and said fuck it – I was going to enjoy my life and make what I really love to do…make the best sculptures I can – and communicate the way I do things as ethically as possible – building things to last,” said Sachs earnestly. “I make things out of paper, foam-core and non-durable materials but I do everything in my power to imbue them with value and meaning so that they can live on beyond me.”

Tom Sachs Swans, 2011 epoxy resin on mixed media 14 x 16 x 16 inches 35,6 x 40,6 x 40,6 cm Courtesy of Sperone Westwater Gallery

Coming full-circle, back to Sachs’ original cobbled-together hot-wired artifacts he’s best known for, is his new series of beautiful foam-core bricolage that imitates the highly coveted 18^th c. porcelain collections produced by a factory in Sevres, founded by Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV (c. 1745). Known for her fashionable tastes, she set the Jones’ ablaze with envy, starting a mad collecting rush that inflated prices and resulted in buyers paying more for a tea set than an entire farm. The huge inequity eventually led to the Goldman Sachs 1% of the 18^th c. losing their heads in the revolution. But later, even Napoleon, not without vanity, ordered his customized set in Empire style for his empress Josephine.

The value of cultural artifacts will rise and fall with the times, and Sachs is particularly interested in why. At the Met, the value of objects, ornamental and functional, many thousand years old, seem to converge. “So many hierarchies shift,” says Sachs, “History paintings were the most valuable, like Oath of the Horatii, a work by French artist Jacques-Louis David (1784), then below that were landscape paintings and portraits, and below that, the genre paintings of poor people. It wasn’t until Manet did a portrait of a prostitute, elevating her, that it threw that hierarchy on its head…today, anything functional is super downgraded.”

“If I use something that can be used as a chair, it’s worth a lot less than a painting I would make.” A chair is more accessible to the public, lacking the mystique associated with art.

Tom Sachs, Photograph by The Selby

How did you manage to get James Brown’s hairbrushes? I asked, referring to another set of functional objects, their value skewed by another form of mystical reverence.

“That’s something that happened accidentally because when the vampiric auction house took the worldly possessions of a historic figure to capitalize on his infamy – letters from prison, shameful objects that should have been thrown away, I tried to rescue some of the things that capture his greatness. It was a garbage bag full of crappy hair products.”

“The entire piece is a frame for that photograph of the top of JB’s head. And you can imagine him taking it to his hairdresser, telling him to make it look like this…”

I blasphemously questioned whether it was all his real hair. Not a wig, then? Though Brown hadn’t been feeling well he was a man that visited his dentist the day he died; it was real hair.

“He said all man needs is good hair and good teeth,” said Sachs approvingly. “They are like reliquaries – it’s not about the artist recontextualizing it – it’s all about him and his greatness,” said Sachs, reflecting on the divinity of the Grandfather of Soul. “It’s no difference than going to Turin and seeing the shroud – putting a euro in the box at church so it lights up…” JB would no doubt have found Sachs’ tribute a perfect stage for a second coming.

James Brown memorabilia - Tom Sachs, Photograph by The Selby

At Tom Sachs' studio, Photograph by The Selby

A Mudbath with Marilyn Minter

KisaLala — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:46:37 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Marilyn Minter, Cheshire (Wangechi) - 2011 enamel on metal - 60 x 96 inches (152.4 x 243.8 cm) , Courtesy of Salon 94 gallery

Sublime soapy bubbles of goo slide down baby, frolicking in a playpen of silver slime. The slow-motion video, shot with a Fantom, plays at Salon 94’s exhibition of Marilyn Minter’s latest works, coming at the ‘heels’ of her last series of slippery stilettos and video project Green Pink Caviar. The baby’s atavistic slide into pleasure is impulsive and contagious, and implicates our adult world of sophistication and restraint.

In Cheshire Minter does an extreme close-up of grinning teeth that would delight any dentist with a desire for detail. I asked Minter about her use of close-ups, which left no narrative clues as to gender, and she said she liked the implied mystery and the multi-readings this made possible.

Though not averse to snot, drool, sweat, and licking, Minter is not interested in gratuitously shocking the viewer. Instead she gleefully celebrates the many visceral oozings of effluvium that accompany our human package. Minter paints the messy issues of our lust and hunger, portraying simultaneously the erotic and the abject.

Marilyn Minter, Meltdown - 2011 enamel on 2 metal panels - 120 x 96 inches (304.8 x 243.8 cm) , Courtesy of Salon 94 gallery

Marilyn Minter Play Pen - 2011 Video - Courtesy of Salon 94 gallery

Marilyn Minter Glisterine - 2011 enamel on 2 metal panels - 84 x 120 inches (213.4 x 304.8 cm) - Courtesy of Salon 94 gallery

Interview with Marilyn Minter for SPREAD

Marilyn Minter’s exhibition is on view at Salon 94 Bowery, 243 Bowery New York, NY 10002 – Oct 28 – Dec 4

The Manufactured Earth

KisaLala — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 23:02:44 +0000

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

Edward Burtynsky - Aragon, Spain 2010 Chromogenic Color Print 39 x 52 inches Edition 2/9 photographed by Edward Burtynsky

Monegros County, Aragon, Spain 2010, Chromogenic Color Print, 48 x 64 inches Edition 1/6 photographed by Edward Burtynsky

Monegros County, Aragon, Spain_ 2010 Chromogenic Color Print 60 x 80 inches Edition 1/3 photographed by Edward Burtynsky

The exhibition at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery features works shot in the gypsum hills of Monegros in northeastern Spain where the farmlands of barley and corn carve painterly patterns into the arid terrain. Farming the earth brings the white mineral to the surface which seem like dustings of fallen snow, but in fact are nutrients that enrich the dry land, helping the crops to grow without irrigation.

A second exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery Pentimento contains a retrospective of Burtynsky’s photographs exploring the tension between industry and nature.

Burtynsky’s work is also appearing in a group show Being American organized by School of Visual Arts (SVA) presenting responses by visual artists to ’some of the most pressing social issues in America today’, ranging from recent environmental catastrophes to the pervading effects of the economic crisis.

Castile-La Mancha, Spain 2010 Chromogenic Color Print 48 x 64 inches Edition 1/6 photographed by Edward Burtynsky

Monegros County, Aragon, Spain 2010 Chromogenic Color Print 39 x 52 inches Edition 4/9 photographed by Edward Burtynsky

Castile-La Mancha, Spain 2010 Chromogenic Color Print 39 x 52 inches 99.1 x 132.1 cm. Edition 3/9 photographed by Edward Burtynsky

Until December 10th 2011:
Dryland Farming: http://www.brycewolkowitz.com and
Pentimento at http://www.howardgreenberg.com/

From November 22 — December 21:
“Being American” at Visual Arts Gallery,
School of Visual Arts, 601 West 26 Street, New York City

The Art of Being Looked At: A Conversation with Charlotte Rampling

KisaLala — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:29:35 +0000

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

Charlotte Rampling’s films do not flash across neon-lit marquees in middle America, but her carefully culled oeuvre (“Sort of my artistic choice…a way of living, of evolving for me,” she tells me) has garnered a cult of swooning devotees who admire her courage in picking unconventional roles spanning four decades of cinema.

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.

Charlotte Rampling in 1974 film by Italian director Liliana Cavani, Night Porter

Anthony Palliser and Charlotte Rampling in a scene from Angelina Maccarone's documentary CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: THE LOOK. Credit: Kino Lorber/Les films d'ici

KL: Your older sister’s suicide gave you a sense of mortality at a very young age…

CR: Yes, because you know there’s a brutal end. However it will be. Her death was brutal and I had that in the face very young.

It sent me on a very deep search. Not necessarily to be rebellious or provocative. But it so happened, within that journey … it led me to get to the depth of something – a feeling, a life, or philosophy; to get my teeth into something, which made some sense, and which wasn’t just [sighs] beautiful and suddenly finished – and what are we here for, and what on earth is going on in the world and how are we supposed to live… I started to quest, and began my journey into life then.

KL: And you surrounded yourself with challenging men. Dirk Bogarde coined that expression about ‘The Look,’ you had. Was the film, in a certain sense, an homage to him?

CR: Yes, you’re completely right. The meeting of me and Dirk… it is an homage, this film almost could be made because of him. And because of the circumstances in my life then, I started something with him… And he was older. He became my master, my trusted friend, he and Tony [Bogarde’s partner]. They were that side of my family that were gone.

KL: Being in a place of vulnerability you had protection from the right people perhaps?

CR: Perhaps…and is it because one has the animal instinct to seek out the people that suits one – you see people that go on life’s journeys and get muddled along the way. If you look at their lives they’ve always gone with the wrong people… can you say it’s the wrong people – I don’t know…

I was working with these very iconic people, [like Visconti] who were able to inspire me into a way. You can choose many ways can’t you? Again, if you are beautiful and talented, and I had made films, and people were looking at me, and so I could choose.

Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling in 1974 film by Italian director Liliana Cavani, Night Porter

Louis XV by Juergen Teller, Charlotte Rampling

KL: Dirk Bogarde also explored a spectrum of sado-masochistic and gay roles … the Night Porter, the Servant, the Victim…

CR: He’s gone into dangerous areas that at that time had not been exploited; not been seen with homosexuality; with things that were beginning to come into the open.

KL: You are lucky you share this rich cinematic history with your public and with younger generations; it’s now part of collective memory. What about the personal impact of memory – is it a gift or a burden?

CR: I think you can choose…you don’t need the painful memories, because either you’ve resolved them – Denying always makes them want to come back. Denial is a mechanism that doesn’t work. But allowing them to come back in little by little, those memories, you can begin to be quite comfortable with them, and it’s even nice to have that as part of the map of your life.

KL: That’s wise…

CR: But as human beings, we do need to learn to become wise… because we all can, and it’s not something only given to wise old men with beards sitting on top of mountains.

KL: Letting go of the fear of exposure can be liberating – and you were finally public about your father trying to suppress what your mother knew about your sister’s death, and having to go along with that for so long.

CR: By trying to control everything we become very neurotic, more and more desperate. It’s a huge tragic thing. The reason I talked about that when my mother died – because I wouldn’t say anything till she died, and then I realized in some ways, bizarrely, I did want to talk about it … but then you know, it’s always going to be talked about – but that’s what I needed to do, and I couldn’t not.

Now what happens with a lot of information is that it keeps coming back and back and back…[beating the couch emphatically] and soon as it’s out there, it sort of loops back through all the different channels and all the networks.

But what we need to do is go back to each time we do something and remember and respect why we did it.

KL: As long as it was a conscious decision and you weren’t drunk…

CR: Yes! And you weren’t forced into it.

KL: In the age of the internet, you’re not just separated from your public by film critics, people can access your films online, give immediate feedback, has that affected your relationship with the public.

CR: I find that a bit confusing and I suppose I am not that generation. Even for other things I don’t look at it. I get dizzy. Not even about myself, but generally. [laughs] It’s dizzying all this information.

KL: Do you think you’re more of a rebel in films than in real life?

CR: No, I am the same person.

KL: But perhaps you are straighter in terms of love; a serial monogamist? Are you a believer in true love?

CR: Ya, I believe – well I say now, because each love evolves very much over the years. I’ve always been monogamous – [within it] I’ve been in love with people, but very platonically. For me, monogamous love is about learning how to be able to trust someone completely; so you need to be able to think you can trust them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have extraordinary feelings for other people and not feel guilty about them, but not necessarily go and wreck marriages and consummate, and you don’t have to do all that.

KL: It can be platonic, perhaps like with the chimpanzee in Max? I like the idea of living in solitude, but together. With desire though, it doesn’t necessarily change with age does it?

CR: That’s right, exactly. But I am able to somehow work through that differently because sexual desire, it’s not a priority…well it’s just less complicated, but I can quite understand why for other people it is.

KL: I am curious about your paintings. I often write about art, and it says more about a person’s emotions than asking them to be literal about who they are in conversation.

CR: Those are my funny strange creatures I live with. One of my favorite artists is Giacometti. And I didn’t even realize that I was doing it, but those sort of Giacometti creatures come out of me…it’s the spirit of him, it could be his family. They are not sculptures but I work on materials with wood. I bring these people out of them that are rather like very strange lonely creatures that come out of the darkness. A person will come out… I’ve been asked to expose them, and I might, but I need to be more diligent and work on them a bit more.

KL: I am wondering about the film’s reception in the UK.

CR: I know, in your own country, you always sort of wonder – so it’s going to be very interesting.

KL: Hmm… a tough audience there, but perhaps next, a knighthood is in the cards?

CR: Knighthood! [chuckles] I am not qualified to be a Dame. To be Dame you have to represent England in a way that I don’t. No, I got the O.B.E because I represent England outside of England more…but thinking of me as an actor, I haven’t done all the classical theatre, all the great roles. Think of Helen Mirren and me. Helen, who I adore, is a friend – should be Dame. I am the rebel, the revolutionary on the side.

KL: The edgy icon? The daring Dame Rampling, you definitely deserve it…

Well, thank you, that’s very sweet. [peals of laughter]

Charlotte Rampling: The Look, Directed by Angelina Maccarone, A Kino Lorber Release

Photography by Kareem Black: www.ba-reps.com/artists/kareem-black

Stylist: Jessica Van Niel at BA-REPS.com

A Mass Hanging at the Guggenheim

KisaLala — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 22:16:50 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Maurizio Cattelan, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2011

Tragicomic poet-prankster Maurizio Cattelan has turned the Guggenheim’s rotunda into a hanging carousel of colorful characters, effigies, surrogates and stuffed dead things that dangle from their gallows in chaotic companionship. Cattelan has also announced his retirement and, in this final exhibition, his magnum opus, he unites ‘All’ his lively, eccentric offspring, staging the ultimate mass execution.

Nancy Spector, the chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, worked with Cattelan in putting the show together. I asked Spector if the artist’s use of taxidermy was to inspire empathy in his audience. “Absolutely, the animals are anthropomorphic and they are self-portraits and surrogates of him, they have a humanizing quality, if you think of Aesop’s fables – where there is usually a moral to the story – it is very much on that level.”

“Where does he get the animals from?” I asked, imagining him picking through the dead pigeons piling up in Venice’s Piazza San Marco.

Installation View - Maurizio Cattelan, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2011

Maurizio Cattelan, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2011

Maurizio Cattelan, Stephanie, 2003, Guggenheim Museum 2011

Maurizio Cattelan, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2011

“They all have certificates from the taxidermists that they died natural deaths,” said Spector, careful to defend the artist in advance, adding, “Or in the case of the pigeons, from a civic-level eradication program; so everything has been carefully documented and preserved. We do have the paperwork on everything if that may become a concern…”

“In Venice, where they have a huge pigeon population, Maurizio gets permission from the city if they are killing the pigeons, to [acquire them] for his artwork.”

Cattelan’s work has a heavy infusion of mea culpa, that include his suicidal squirrels and the homo-nuanced We – to his genuflecting and supplicant sculpture Him, depicting Hitler on his knees begging for forgiveness.

I asked Spector if she thought his Roman-Catholic upbringing had inspired any sense of anti-authority or had affected any anti religious sentiments.

“He just deals with his anxiety in being brought up with a religion that promotes a certain level of guilt, and Maurizio is very guilt prone – his mother was extremely religious and she was very ill during his entire childhood; she died of lymphatic cancer in his early twenties – during her disease, she became an inspirational religious person in her radio show, and his sister is also a nun – so it is something that is deeply personal; he has a respect for it, but at the same time there is also a healthy dose of a questioning of authority.”

The pope struck down by a meteorite above in La Nona Ora, Maurizio Cattelan, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2011

Maurizio Cattelan, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2011

Spector also explained her involvement in engineering the show, beginning with a scale model to correctly identify weight distribution, and meeting all the safety requirements for works on loan to the museum.

Maurizio Cattelan, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2011

Maurizio Cattelan, All, November 4, 2011–January 22, 2012. Guggenheim Museum New York
All photos: Kisa Lala