Art Journalism
LIFE IS STRONGER THAN ALL THIS DESTRUCTION
1931: While Jean Cocteau was furtively smoking opium in a fragrant den, an expedition called La Croisière Jaune was rambling through foggy mountains. Six hundred and twenty-two camels and eleven caravans followed the path of the Silk Road across Central Asia. A National Geographic reporter participated in this epic trek and reported daily through wireless transmissions.
In 2008, The Espace Louis Vuitton gallery honoured La Croisière Jaune with the exhibition “Orients Without Borders.” The show included a collection of maps and photographs lent by The National Geographic Society and a 1930’s Louis-Vuitton equipped half-track vehicle provided by the Citroën Museum. To connect this journey with the present, curator Hervé Mikaeloff selected works by ten contemporary artists from the same countries that were explored in the 1931 voyage. These artists avoid the hedonistic and sensuous views chosen by Orientalist painters of the past, such as Eugene Delacroix and Jean-Leon Gerome. Instead they present the contemporary realities and cultures of the countries visited on the Silk Route. Many avoid obvious political imagery; instead they focus on portraying the subtleties of their daily lives.
“Art is a petition for another world. Art is what gives you an alternative reality,” Lida Abdul stated during our interview in February. The Afghani artist presented three videos stills for the exhibition: White House, White Horse, and Brick Sellers of Kabul. In White House, ruined architecture symbolizes postwar identity. In the second piece, a man paints a sick horse white. Abdul explained,” White is a colour of mourning, but for me it is also a colour of beginning.” Brick Sellers of Kabul shows children selling bricks to construct a future. “Architecture is what remains in a culture-ideologies change-but architecture remains, unless it is destroyed by natural disasters or war.”
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have created a series of fire-altered photographs and postcards titled Wonder Beirut. Postcards of Beirut in the 1970’s are still being sold in tourist shops even though the places depicted have been destroyed by war. To contradict this offensive nostalgia, Hadjithomas and Joreige used these Technicolor holiday postcards and set sections of the image on fire, corresponding to specific bombed areas. The effect is colourful singed pictures, documenting the destruction of a beautiful city. The pair explained “At the end of the war they put war in brackets as if to say nothing happened. This is our way of confirming what happened.”
In the wake of the July War in 2006, Amal Saade wanted to see for herself what the media wasn’t showing. So she journeyed alone across Lebanon filming, photographing, and recording a travel log. In 2007, Saade combined excerpts of her findings into Field, a video, Manal, a photograph, and Vibrating Travel Log, an audio recording. This anti-sensationalist presentation was included in the exhibition. Saade explains her work shows “Life is stronger than all this destruction.” For these people who feel abandoned, this piece “gives them an opportunity to testify, to give them another image from what the media presents.”
Iranian artist’s Malekeh Nayiny’s Travelling Demons consists of primary colour collages and papier mâche masks. The images are abrasive to the eye. Nayiny’s SOS Gandhi is a calming installation where viewers can sit in a dark space and meditate on spiritual awakening.
Bita Fayyazi’s Playground is the exhibition’s funniest work. A small dimly lit room features an unexpected scene: a giant stuffed animal camel in a compromising position with a 1960’s cherry-red Citroën. Hundreds of toys and furry creatures appear to be exploding from the hood of the car. Fayyazi elaborated: “The camel is making love to the car. It’s a love/hate relationship (between East and West).”
Another room features Yin Xiuzhen installation titled Portable City. Four suitcases are propped open. Miniature versions of Chinese cities sprout from the suitcases. Xiuzhen made the soft Oldenburg-like buildings out of second-hand clothing she acquired in each city. Beyond the buildings are sweatshirt mountains and tee-shirt snow. When one peers closely, there is a hole in the surface that reveals a map underneath the scene.
Chen Shaoxiong is a well-known Chinese conceptual artist and one of the founding members of the 'Big Tail Elephant Group' art collective. “Orients Without Borders” includes his non-narrative ink-wash video Ink City. To create Ink City, Shaoxiong first took digital photographs of people and street scenes. He then translated the photographs into ink drawings and watercolours using traditional Chinese painting techniques and materials. The whimsical images were combined with metropolis sounds to show a personal view of urban China.
Iraqi artist Adel Abidin contributed Abidin Travels to the exhibition. The piece consists of two videos, posters, and a satirical tourist brochure. In Common Vocabulary a seven-year old learns vocabulary that is relevant to her daily life in Iraq; the words include mass grave, rations, abduction, and checkpoint. This video is accompanied by a stack of flashcards featuring the same words in Arabic and English. By taking flashcards home, the audience is participating in the artwork.
Mohammad Ali Talpur’s series of delicate concept drawings are spare, abstract, and observational. Leeka and Bird Drawings are subtle and poetic. “I don’t like minimalism,” Talpur told me. Yet when discussing the reductive drawings, he explained “There is no need to do more.”
Orients Sans Frontières, Sur les Traces de la Croisière Jaune took place at the Espace Louis Vuitton from 9 February- 27 April 2008. The Espace Vuitton is located at 60 Rue de Bassano / 101 Avenue des Champs-elysées, 75008 in Paris.
Words: Margo Fortuny, Exit Magazine
FIRE LEAP: THE ARCHIVES OF NAN GOLDIN
Nan Goldin’s early photography combined the drama of Caravaggio with Rothko colours and the realism of Larry Clark and Diane Arbus. Now she is departing from those nocturnal snapshots to portray landscapes and children. Why the change?
In her latest work, Goldin moves away from autobiographical work to focus on the exterior world as opposed to her interior world. The choice of subject matter rebels against the audience that expects those urgent and dark moments of the human condition that Goldin has so eloquently captured in the past.
The landscapes emit an existentialist air of loneliness, which contrast with the ephemeral exuberance of youth in her new slideshow. In a way the landscapes mirror her most famous work in disposition and colour. Instead of people in love and desperate beautiful friends, we see moods abstracted. Like Gerhard Richter’s paintings from hazy portraits transitioning to nonfigurative compositions, Goldin’s landscapes express the indescribable.
The slideshow, ‘Fire Leap’, is almost opposite to her epic slideshow ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.’ Instead of hundreds of searing intimate portraits, Goldin presents her friends’ offspring in light, naïve states.
Following her sister’s suicide, at the age of 15 Nan Goldin began taking pictures as a means of preserving memories and stabilizing reality. She moved to New York City as a young woman and documented her friends and lovers in what was then a groundbreaking style: spontaneous, brutal, and honest snapshots. She extracted shades and textures from bulb-lit interiors and caught instants of fleeting humanity. The artist presented her first slideshow in 1979 at a downtown nightclub. It evolved into ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.’ In the 90s Goldin gained international recognition. Over the following years, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and London’s Whitechapel Gallery hosted major retrospectives of her photographs. ‘The Ballad…’ has also screened at the Tate Modern, and Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. Now it is at the Walker Art Center, through October 2011, proving its enduring fascination.
Goldin’s favourite means of presentation are slides and pictures arranged in grids. A grid echoes a slideshow. It encourages the viewer to make connections between the images and experience them as an ensemble.
While Goldin’s early work often touched on identity, loss, love and addiction, her recent photographs are more contemplative and focused on couples and places. The famous pictures of herself and her friends stir up unforgettable pathos and collective nostalgia. The images of empty rooms and landscapes are more challenging. One has to look harder for something to relate to. Yet it is there- a space devoid of clear significance that lets the imagination wander through personal corridors of experiences and meaning. Goldin’s distinctive vision veering between warmth and disorientation still remains. It is more subtle now.
Nan Goldin is a social historian, archiving vulnerable and quiet moments.
Fire Leap is at the Sprovieri Gallery in London through August 6, 2011.
Words: Margo Fortuny, Exit Magazine
BAUHAUS: ART AS LIFE
On certain evenings men dressed in cloth cages and women in striped contraptions swayed to noise bands. At other parties, art students in duo-chromatic hand-sewn outfits danced with teachers to the sound of bells ringing. During the day, students and faculty, including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Josef Albers, Walter Gropius and Johannes Itten, changed the course of design history.
Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, enabling people practicing various decorative arts and architecture to learn from each other in an experimental setting where the collective creativity extended to both work and leisure time. The school cultivated a functional, geometric style that was applied to architecture, design, textiles, painting and sculpture. Art, technology, and craft were combined and explored in and out of the classroom. After the Nazis forced the school’s closure in 1933, the faculty and students continued to spread the visual and conceptual ideals of Bauhaus around the world. The spare, aesthetically pleasing style influenced Modernist architecture and design. Today the Bauhaus look continues to inspire art, fashion, typography and graphic design.
From May through August 2012 the Barbican Art Gallery is hosting the biggest Bauhaus exhibition in the UK since the 1970s. The extensive exhibition features the movement’s contributions to art, design, fashion, furniture, and textiles. Highlights include the chrome club chair conceptualized by Marcel Breuer as he flew around town on his bicycle, Paul Citroen's collage Metropolis which inspired Fritz Lang’s film, Marianne Brandt's futuristic teapot, Joseph Albers' painting on glass, and photographs of the dapper and exuberant teachers and students. The exhibition brilliantly illustrates how weaving art theory into daily life has the capacity to change visual history.
‘Bauhaus: Art as Life’ is at Barbican Art Gallery, London through 12th August 2012
Words: Margo Fortuny, Exit Magazine
CULTURAL MEMORY:
MOCA REVISITS THE WORKS OF GRAFFITI ARTIST AND
'80s ART WORLD ICON JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
Between the opening of the Basquiat exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the flurry of recent press, suddenly the name Jean-Michel Basquiat is once again on everyone's lips. Just how popular is this long-dead artist?
The extensive MOCA retrospective, "Street to Studio: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat," was heralded with a massive party on July 17th to honor the ‘80s art star, and the line of guests stretched for four city blocks. A man drove by the crowd, hollering “He's dead! Whatchyou waitin' for?" But that didn't seem to matter to most of the people there that night who had almost two hours to ponder the question.
Inside a deejay warmed up the crowd up for Basquiat contemporary, turntablist Grandmaster Flash, as a sea of bodies moved through the front doors and onto a makeshift dance floor. But it was Basquiat's body of work that people really wanted to see. And they weren't disappointed.
Currently on display are more than 100 paintings, photographs, and drawings with artworks ranging from epic - like the multi-paneled piece called “Grillo” (1984), depicting Basquiat’s version of the griot, a revered figure of West African cultures who uses stories and songs to keep the community’s history alive - to stimulating, to merely average. The show also features obscure, entertaining films about the artist, in the nearby Ahmanson Auditorium.
Why does Basquiat have such an immense following? Art critics luxuriate in theorizing about his art career, but few dwell extensively on his legendary personality and the exploration of his own racial identity.
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1960 to an artistic but troubled middle-class family. His father was Haitian and his mother Puerto Rican. From an early age, he tried to distance himself from his accountant father and their bourgeois lifestyle by dressing in raggedy clothes and pretending to be a street kid. He befriended dealers, artists, members of the hip-hop culture and downtown scenesters.
Basquiat rejected his family by embracing delinquency through excessive drug use, breaking rules and literally prostituting himself at a young age. After fleeing his violent but economically stable home as a teenager, he became somewhat of an insider in the New York City graffiti hip-hop movement, even producing a single by Ramalzee, a rapper and graffiti artist, who brought Basquiat to several meetings of Five Percent Nation, a black activist group. As a result of those experiences, Basquiat came to identify himself with New York street culture and African spirituality.
At 17, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz spent time in Manhattan as scenesters and intellectual graffiti artists, spray-painting subway cars and buildings. In 1977, Basquiat was signing his philosophical spray paint musings SAMO, which stood for Same Old Shit, playing in a noise band, and developing as a painter. Young Basquiat once defined SAMO as “an end to mind-wash religion, nowhere politics, and bogus philosophy.”
His paintings during this period introduced his style of imagery and fragmented phrases, arranged without any certain beginning. Around this time, he was discovered - and exploited - by art dealer Annine Nosei, who began exhibiting Basquiat’s early street/sign-inspired work in 1980. During the young artist’s peak years (1982 to 1985) his paintings, such as "The Nile" (1983), focused on black history, jazz and political and spiritual African themes.
He became a famous artist who collaborated with the legendary Andy Warhol, dined in exclusive restaurants, dated beautiful women, modeled for the fashion house Comme des Garcons, and became recognized as an international jet setter. Yet his heroin addiction remained a continual problem throughout his life. Between 1986 to 1988, Basquiat painted large-scale, more literary than graphic works, which were influenced by his excessive heroin use. At the age of 27 in 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a drug overdose, shortly before he was scheduled to fly to Africa to cure his substance abuse problem through a ritual cleansing rite.
Basquiat was a painter, poet and philosopher, as defined by his brilliant creative output and the way he led his life. Influenced by numerous artists, in addition to popular culture, his early style reflected the style of French pop artist Jean Dubuffet in that it resembled the art of children and the mentally ill. Basquiat personalized Dubuffet's crude Art Brut with his own stylistic touches: crossed out letters, oil stick lines, and symbols. The dense overlapping and gestural image-making can be connected to the work of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollack during the 1940s. Cy Twombly’s simultaneous painting and scribbling (especially the 1975 work "Apollo and the Artist") and Leonardo da Vinci and the book “Gray’s Anatomy” were also sources of artistic inspiration, as seen in "Notary" (1983) and the use of x-ray vision in "Gold Griot" (1984.)
Spontaneous and frenetic, Basquiat was unconcerned with naturalism and his paintings were filled with childlike images and symbols, showing that he was influenced by American popular culture as much as European and African-American traditions. Comic book heroes, jazz musicians, classical Italian painters, and a multitude of social signifiers appeared on Basquiat’s canvases. Some of his paintings produced in 1981 show he was politically conscious as well as antiracist. Picasso and his legacy of the avant-garde, familiar imagery, Native American art and “primitive” paintings also traveled from Basquiat’s mind to the canvas.
Recognizing the hybrid nature of American culture, Basquiat pursued complicated identities and political visions, using the tools of the colonial-affected imagination. His art presented scenes of possible futures, referencing oppressed and marginalized people among numerous symbols.
On some level, Basquiat was inspired by the traditions, histories and experiences of these people. However, he was neither Afrocentric nor a folk artist who produced typical images that would create a clear division between the roles of "colonizer" and the "colonized." Rather, his work deals more ambiguously with identity.
Basquiat’s paintings illustrate an acceptance of self through community and history, showing personal struggles which were more concerned with his individual situation than geography or ancestry.
In response to a question about totems and "primitive" signs in his images, Basquiat replied (in 1983), “I’ve never been to Africa. I’m an artist who has been influenced by his New York environment. But I have a cultural memory. I don’t need to look for it; it exists. It’s over there, in Africa. That doesn’t mean I have to go live there. Our cultural memory follows us everywhere, wherever you live.”
Words: Margo Fortuny, Pasadena Weekly
EAT THE EXPERIENCE
Rirkrit Tiravanija first tasted fame with his artwork ‘Untitled 1992 (Free)’ when he set up a fully functioning kitchen and cooked free curry for visitors. The gesture was welcoming, communal, and unexpected in a gallery context. The New York-based Thai artist has repeated this culinary experiment in several gallery spaces. He creates a social set-up and presents it as art. His works are a combination of a Happening and installation that provides a personal experience. Seven years later after ‘Free’ the artist constructed a duplicate of his flat in the Gavin Brown Gallery, with a working bathroom, kitchen, and permission to do as one pleases. He recreated a similar piece, ‘Apartment 21 (Tomorrow Can Shut Up and Go Away)’ at the Liverpool Biennale in 2002. He has also worked on short films and projects such as The Land, in Thailand, where locals can use a plot of land for sustainable development.
Rirkrit Tiravanija has exhibited in the Serpentine Gallery, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and numerous biennales including the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennale.
This month Christine Macel, Chief Curator at Centre Pompidou and Absolut Art Chairman, presented Tiravanija with this year’s Absolut Art Award. The annual prize, an award of 15000 Euros, demonstrates the company’s passion for supporting the arts. Absolut Vodka has collaborated in the past with Andy Warhol, Jean- Michael Basquiat, Damien Hirst, and Spike Jonze.
The day after the award, Tiravanija and his entourage staged a cookout at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, titled Je ne travaille jamais. The title’s translation is I never work, which could be interpreted in several ways, e.g. is he referencing himself? Is art work or a pleasure?
Words: Margo Fortuny, Exit Magazine
THE HOTTER THE SPOT, THE COOLER HE PLAYED IT
Cheap medical romances.
Cowboys heading west.
An underage Brooke Shields in the bathtub.
Half a used car.
Louis Vuitton as pop art.
Jokes that your old man read in Playboy.
This is Richard Prince’s creative milieu. By elevating appropriation into an art form, he is now an internationally renowned painter, photographer, sculptor, and collector. It all began back in 1973 when he cavorted to New York City. Prince went steady with the music and art scenes, and found a job in the advertising department of Time-Life. He transformed the discarded ad pages, by re-photographing them, cutting out the copy, and presenting the formulaic images as his own. This appropriation of advertisements and photographs has sparked a copyright-infringement debate in the art world. Prince’s polemical use of images, combined with witty and aesthetically pleasing subject matter, has only increased his popularity. He also sources magazines and newspapers for gags and cartoons, which he prints onto monochromatic backgrounds or unrelated photographs. His work explores themes of Americana: pop culture, masculinity, literature, language, and sex appeal. Inspired by the covers of saucy pulp novels, Prince began his Nurses series in 2002. The Nurses are partially disguised by dripping paint, and surgical masks cover their faces. In some paintings the lipstick bleeds through the masks. According to the artist, his recent retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York showed us “what we already know about our world, but have yet to really see". The exhibition was a vast showcase of his mediums and styles. His next move? Right now Richard Prince is collaborating with Marc Jacobs.
Inspired by each other, Richard Prince is recontextualizing the Louis Vuitton monogram onto his canvases, and Marc Jacobs has designed a Spring/Summer 2008 Collection influenced by the artist. As the creative director of the fashion powerhouse Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs has already collaborated with Takashi Murakami, Stephen Sprouse, and Vanessa Beecroft. Jacobs asked Prince for a few ideas. In an interview with Richard Prince, the artist explained how one of these ideas became the “after dark” concept:
“ (It’s) based on these cheap paperback books I collected that came out in the Sixties, all with the words "after dark" in them – Hamburg After Dark, Copenhagen After Dark, Paris After Dark, New York After Dark.
“From there, he wanted me to work with the Monogram canvas, which interested me because it is something that exists, and so I decided to try to take it apart. I think what I requested first was the rubber stamps with the monograms on them, and after that I requested silkscreens of the logo, and I just started messing around with it.
“Usually, when you are not familiar with something, or you don't know how to play an instrument, it gives you a certain kind of freedom and you can come up with things that perhaps a virtuoso wouldn't come up with. You can come up with something from another angle or from another point of view.
“This collaboration gave me a chance to do something which I wouldn't normally think about. I knew I would be doing it for a completely different audience,” Prince added.
The pulp paperback “after dark” theme of Louis Vuitton’s latest collection, with its unusual colour combinations and deconstructed garments, echoed Richard Prince’s style. The Vuitton show at Paris Fashion week opened and closed with twelve supermodels dressed as sexy nurses swinging Monogram canvas bags silkscreened with jokes chosen by the artist. Back in the galleries, Prince’s newest colourful paintings feature the Louis Vuitton logo and text emphasized by repetition.
In June 2008, London’s Serpentine Gallery will host an exhibition of Richard Prince’s work. The installation will feature compositions from his famous series, including Nurses, Cowboys, Girlfriends, Jokes, Gangs, and Hoods. Pirated characters or thrilling reflections of contemporary society? It is up to the (paperback-toting) viewer to decide.
Words: Margo Fortuny, Exit Magazine
FROM THE ALLEY TO THE WALL: RICHARD HAMBLETON IS BACK
Before Banksy and Blek le Rat there was Richard Hambleton. Simon de Pury described him as “The King of Street Art.” SAMO (a.k.a. Basquiat) and Keith Haring are long gone, leaving Hambleton the last surviving member of the East Village Art Movement. East Village Art is described in a New York magazine article (22/6/87) as “hot, expressionistic work” that peaked in ‘84/’85 when the small neighborhood had more than seventy galleries. Ultimately the movement was co-opted and gentrified by its own success, thus losing its vitality and frenetic energy. Collectors, eager trendspotters, embraced Conceptual Art instead. The original East Village Art scene has faded away but Hambleton is back.
Now painters from the ‘80s have attained cult status and contemporary artists cite them as inspiration. Street Art is back in style, its reputation revitalized by popular figures such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey.
Richard Hambleton is most famous for his Shadowman series. He painted shadowy silhouettes in the alleys of London, Paris, Rome, and right on the Berlin Wall. In the darkness they looked real; in the light they were the artist’s trademark design. Hambleton went on to paint gestural work on canvas, continuing in the silhouette style. He often depicted ambiguous groups and a cowboy figure reminiscent of the Marlborough Man. Later on, he switched from the shadow figures to create colourful abstract works called “The Beautiful Paintings.” In 2007, The Woodward Gallery hosted a solo show of “The Beautiful Paintings.” Recently the artist has returned to his classic style and continues to paint in New York City.
Hambleton’s paintings are housed in numerous permanent collections, including the MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Harvard University. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1984.
Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld (young gallerist and offspring of French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld) has been a pivotal figure in bringing Hambleton’s work back in the public eye. Collaborating with Andy Valmorbida and Giorgio Armani, Roitfeld has presented several successful exhibitions of the artist’s work in New York, Milan, and this month in London.
The Richard Hambleton Exhibition is open to the public from November 19th to December 3rd, 2010 (Monday – Friday from 10am to 7pm) at The Dairy on 7 Wakefield Street, London WC1. Many works are for sale.
Words: Margo Fortuny, Exit Magazine
ATHLETICISM
Drum & Bass Pioneer. Bjork’s Ex-Boyfriend. Actor in EastEnders. James Bond Villain. Bikram Yoga Devotee. What else is there within Goldie's rich CV? Well, he started out as a B-Boy and graffiti artist in the 80s. His artworks were way ahead of their time and stretched across English cityscapes. In 1986, he appeared in the UK hip hop documentary Bombing (alongside 3D of Massive Attack) where he went to the Bronx with seminal NYC graffiti writer Brim. One of the UK's few truly credible 80s graffiti artists, his work as a painter preceded any of his forays into music.
Years afterwards, he began establishing himself as a Drum & Bass innovator (one of his best known incarnations) and he recently expanded his musical repertoire by conducting and scouting musical talent for the BBC. This autumn he is back to focussing on his visual art with an exhibition of his latest works, titled 'Athleticizm', at the Underdog Gallery in London. To celebrate the current fever for all things sporting here in the UK, the multi-faceted man has created a series of twelve paintings featuring Olympic hopefuls in motion. With the guidance and vision of curator Eddie Lock, Goldie collaborated closely with adidas to bring the project into fruition...with some of his athletic subjects even showing up to the Private View. On your marks, get set for this dynamic take on street art.
Words: Margo Fortuny, Exit Magazine