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84 articles, 2016-05-21 06:01 1 Morning Links: Greenpeace Edition Must-read stories from around the world 2016-05-20 09:04 1KB (1.04/2) www.artnews.com
2 Wendelien van Oldenborgh Will Represent the Netherlands at the 2017 Venice Biennale Van Oldenborgh. COURTESY MONDRIAAN FOUNDATION The Mondriaan Foundation announced today that Wendelien van (1.02/2) Oldenborgh will represent the Netherlands at the 2016-05-20 11:07 1KB www.artnews.com 3 Art Basel Parcours to Take Over the City Art Basel in Basel will feature site-specific artworks from 19 artists installed all over the city, as part of the Parcours sector. (1.02/2) 2016-05-20 09:45 5KB news.artnet.com
4 Mad. Sq. Art: Martin Puryear Madison Square Park Conservancy and renowned American sculptor Martin Puryear today opened Big Bling, a major sculpture to be on view in Madison Square... 2016-05-21 01:22 9KB www.madisonsquarepark.org 5 7 Genders, 7 Typographies: Hacking the Binary In a recent panel at the New Museum, artist Jacob Ciocci defined technology as “anything that organizes or takes apart reality,” which prompted a realization: gender could be also be understood a... 2016-05-21 01:22 832Bytes blogs.walkerart.org 6 studio mumbai draws on traditional indian craft using brick + bamboo to hand-make furniture for maniera a collection of limited edition, elegant, hand-made furniture pieces produced from their workshop in mumbai, india. 2016-05-21 02:30 6KB www.designboom.com 7 Listening Mix: Devendra Banhart & Friends LISTENING MIX provides a musical preview for artists visiting the Walker. Combining their work with sounds from a variety of contextual sources, LISTENING MIX can be experienced before or after a pe... 2016-05-21 03:12 941Bytes blogs.walkerart.org
8 Opera Team: Valentino and Sofia Coppola Get Ready for ‘La Traviata’ As of Friday had rung up 1.2 million euros, or $1.3 million, in ticket sales against a total cost of almost $2 million for the production. 2016-05-20 22:58 5KB wwd.com 9 Kwiat to Distribute Ashoka Diamond Cut The partnership will launch to retailers at the forthcoming Couture jewelry show in Las Vegas, taking place from June 2 to June 6. 2016-05-20 22:41 882Bytes wwd.com 10 Romancing the Romanovs: Simon Sebag Montefiore Can’t Give Up Mother Russia British writer, novelist talks about his latest book, “The Romanovs: 1613-1918.” 2016-05-20 22:38 6KB wwd.com 11 vinicius araújo's inflated logos turn big brands into pumped-up pool toys for the series 'blow up', brazilian graphic designer vinicius araújo has digitally inflated six of the world's most recognizable logos. 2016-05-20 22:30 1KB www.designboom.com 12 Interview: Antony Micallef on his ‘Raw Intent’ We spoke to Antony Micallef, one of Brangelina's favorite artists, about his latest exhibition. 2016-05-20 22:11 4KB www.blouinartinfo.com 13 Is Vice’s Shane Smith the Modern Oprah or Media’s Donald Trump? Smith talked with Hearst Digital Media president Troy Young about the future of media. 2016-05-20 22:09 7KB wwd.com 14 Antoine Rameau Exhibition Turns Store and Tram Into Pop-Up Galleries Shoppers and commuters in Hong Kong will have the chance to grab a little culture during their busy days, as photo collages from French artist Antoine Rameau go on display at a SOGO department store and in a tram. 2016-05-20 22:04 2KB www.blouinartinfo.com 15 Jimmy Ong Sends Sir Stamford Raffles to Hell at FOST Gallery Jimmy Ong explores imagined histories of his birthplace, Singapore, and his new home of Indonesia in his latest exhibition. 2016-05-20 22:02 2KB www.blouinartinfo.com
16 Second Thoughts: Fred Sandback and the Virtual Line How does an exhibition accrete meaning, gain relevance, or shift shape over time? In the 2016-05-21 00:50 858Bytes blogs.walkerart.org 17 Christy Turlington Burns Celebrates Minted Pop-up Opening To inaugurate this week’s opening of Minted’s first foray into brick and mortar, founder Miriam Naficy celebrated with Christy Turlington Burns with a party in the downtown San Francisco new space.… 2016-05-20 21:50 2KB wwd.com 18 Devendra Banhart + Band* Rodrigo Amarante Hecuba Harold Budd + Brad Ellis + Veda Hille To spark discussion, the Walker invites Twin Cities artists and critics to write overnight reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opi... 2016-05-20 20:00 985Bytes blogs.walkerart.org 19 Handbag Awards to Honor MZ Wallace The event will take place on June 15 in New York. 2016-05-20 20:40 660Bytes wwd.com 20 A Young Filmmaker Gives Love a New Face Get hooked on Chloé Aktas' award-winning short film, 'Fish Hook and Eye.' 2016-05-20 20:30 11KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 21 Grace Coddington Launches Fragrance in London The Vogue editor hosted a signing at the new Dover Street Market in Haymarket to mark the launch. 2016-05-20 20:01 3KB wwd.com 22 Artists Installing: Lee Kit Hong Kong artist Lee Kit spent the past two-and-a-half weeks in the gallery working on his site-specific installation for his first solo museum exhibition in the US, Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance... 2016-05-20 23:40 835Bytes blogs.walkerart.org 23 Building Bridges: Symposium at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo This past weekend, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin hosted Building Bridges, a symposium reflecting upon curatorial practice and how curators move from educational to institutional context... 2016-05-20 20:59 972Bytes blogs.walkerart.org 24 rigorous standards and two years of extensive wind tunnel tests shape heroin's carbon fiber bicycle attaining their goal took more than two years of hard work, during which they had to reinvent everything for the heroin bicycle, from the type of carbon fiber to the shape of the tubes to the finish texture. 2016-05-20 19:15 3KB www.designboom.com 25 Remix Grimes with Your Bare Hands Inside an Interactive Installation Armed with four Kinect devices, Microsoft gives Moogfest attendees the chance to team up and remix Grimes' "Realiti. " 2016-05-20 19:00 3KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 26 Rafael Nadal Suits Up for Tennis The tennis star played a match of futnet against Gregory van der Wiel in a suit from a limited-edition THFLEX collection by Tommy Hilfiger. 2016-05-20 18:59 3KB wwd.com 27 Tony King: Forget ‘E-commerce,’ Just Call It ‘Commerce’ The e-commerce pioneer discusses digital commerce and the importance of narratives. 2016-05-20 18:41 2KB wwd.com 28 Topman Taps Gosha Rubchinskiy to Shoot Summer 2016 Look Book The images shot by the Comme des Garçons protégé were styled by the Topman team. 2016-05-20 18:40 1KB wwd.com 29 Museum of Arts and Design Hosts ‘Garden of Earthy Delights’ Gala MAD museum threw their annual gala, this year themed “garden of earthy delights.” 2016-05-20 18:35 2KB wwd.com 30 Large Scale Prints Blur the Lines Between Painting and Photography Rey Parlá's 'Borderless' is a series of cosmic prints with a mysterious origin story. 2016-05-20 18:30 3KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 31 Retailer Alex Eagle Lands in London’s Soho The new store on Lexington Street is 3,500 square feet over two floors and is located in a former industrial space not far from Oxford and Regent streets. 2016-05-20 18:21 2KB wwd.com 32 Nannette de Gaspé Beaubien Launches Face and Body Masks at Selfridges Invisible masks have slow-release smart delivery technology 2016-05-20 18:16 2KB wwd.com
33 Google Creates Levi’s Jacket With Conductive Yarn Google and Levi’s reveal the first garment that was created through Project Jacquard, a partnership to develop interactive denim woven with conductive fibers. 2016-05-20 17:45 3KB wwd.com 34 See Highlights From London’s Art16 Visitors to London's Olympia exhibition center in Kensington can treat themselves to a visual feast with art from around the world, as Art16 returns for its fourth edition. 2016-05-20 17:36 2KB www.blouinartinfo.com 35 Schilling Takes On FiDi Lunch Business From Former Tenement Building Edi Frauneder’s newest restaurant opens on Monday. 2016-05-20 17:26 3KB wwd.com 36 Is Back with a Vengeance: This Week in Comics #18 This week's release of 'Civil War II #0' threatens to rip the Marvel Universe apart. 2016-05-20 17:25 5KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 37 Kiersey Clemons Quick Takes: Pledging and Halle Berry Kiersey Clemons stars in “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising,” out today. 2016-05-20 17:13 958Bytes wwd.com 38 Vans Launches House of Vans Summer Series in Brooklyn with Art Exhibit To mark the return of the House of Vans summer series, House Parties, the brand tasked artists with creating various installations at its Brooklyn music venue and skate park. 2016-05-20 17:09 1KB wwd.com 39 Sophia Webster Unveils First Stand-Alone Boutique in London The store is located on Mayfair, Mount Street and opens this Saturday. 2016-05-20 16:59 2KB wwd.com 40 tadao ando's remodeled setouchi aonagi hotel opens designed by tadao ando, the building was once an art museum before the architect oversaw its recent remodeling, and transformation into the setouchi aonagi. 2016-05-20 16:34 2KB www.designboom.com
41 Time Inc. Adds Layer to Executive Structure, Taps MaryAnn Bekkedahl as President of Fashion and Luxury Publishers and editors of Time Inc.’s lifestyle, fashion and luxury titles will now report in to Bekkedahl and Charles Kammerer. 2016-05-20 16:16 2KB wwd.com 42 American Impressionist Gardens at the NYBG In its new show, "Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas," the New York Botanical Garden recreates the gardens that inspired the American Impressionists. 2016-05-20 16:11 2KB news.artnet.com 43 Artist Creates 'Rape Representation' Video In her new video "are you ok bob? " Sophia Hewson has sex with a stranger in order to challenge male power. The work is on view at Mars Gallery in Australia. 2016-05-20 16:07 2KB news.artnet.com 44 On the Gaze in the Era of Visual Salamis Our attention is not focused on a singular image, but is distributed along the image’s path. 2016-05-20 17:38 12KB rhizome.org 45 British Creative Industries Back Remain in Europe Campaign Patrick Grant, Katharine Hamnett, Bella Freud and Vivienne Westwood among signatories of campaign letter. 2016-05-20 15:45 2KB wwd.com 46 Il Mulino Celebrates 35 Years With ‘1981’ Menu The anniversary menu launches in May. 2016-05-20 15:35 1KB wwd.com 47 The New Museum Enters a New Dimension | Insta of the Week Fresh off a huge investment, the New Museum's already breaking the basic laws of physics. 2016-05-20 15:25 1KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 48 Pole Dancers Bend Light in Stunning Projection-Mapped Performance If there was a strip club in 'TRON,' this is what it would look like. 2016-05-20 15:20 2KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com
49 Jessica & Ashlee Simpson’s Dad Puts Sincerity in Pop Photography Joe Simpson knows a thing or two about famous daughters and following your dreams. 2016-05-20 15:15 2KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 50 Is This Kinetic Light Sculpture Man or Machine? Random International explores the bare minimum information we need to "see" a human in 'Study for Fifteen Points.' 2016-05-20 15:05 3KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 51 ‘A Plain Steal’: The Theft and Recovery of the ‘Mona Lisa,’ in 1911 and 1913 Vincenzo Peruggia’s mug shot from 1909. VIRGIL FILMS, LLC The Mona Lisa has been the subject of many art crimes, but none have been as major as when Vincenzo 2016-05-20 15:00 3KB www.artnews.com 52 Tea With Satire: Tom Sachs at Noguchi Museum, New York Through July 24 2016-05-20 14:42 3KB www.artnews.com 53 Dawn Richard & Julia Holter Talk Sensations, VR, and Visual Artwork At FORM Arcosanti music festival, we spoke to the talents behind 'Blackheart' and 'Have You In My Wilderness.' 2016-05-20 13:50 6KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 54 Catholic League Targets Mark Ryden's Art The Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach is threatened with losing public funding over a satirical artwork by Mark Ryden. 2016-05-20 13:38 5KB news.artnet.com 55 Alitalia Unveils New Staff Uniform Collection Alitalia this week unveiled the new uniform collection inspired by the glamorous Fifties and Sixties. 2016-05-20 13:32 1KB wwd.com 56 Jon Pestoni at Transformer Station, Cleveland Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday 2016-05-20 13:31 1KB www.artnews.com 57 Karyn Wagner Details Costume Design for ‘Preacher’ AMC’s new series is an adaptation of the “Preacher” comic books. 2016-05-20 13:30 4KB wwd.com 58 Believe It or Not, These Alien-Looking Things are Bubbles Visual effects wizard Joey Shanks is at it with the bubbles again. 2016-05-20 13:30 1KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 59 See and Spin #9: 3 Things to Read, 3 Things to Hear See and Spin, where Real Arters dish on a weekly serving of three things you need to read and three things you need to hear. 2016-05-20 13:29 3KB realart.com 60 Cigarettes & Cake Celebrate the Ballets De Monte Carlo’s 30th Jiří Kylián's 'Oskar' combines tradition and innovation in a universally humorous way. 2016-05-20 13:25 2KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 61 Five Minutes With Kobe Bryant: Starting a Media Company, Editing Life, Getting Style Tips From His Daughters In building Kobe Inc., the Los Angeles Lakers legend loves cold- calling people and hearing only “the bad stuff” in critiques. 2016-05-20 13:00 1KB wwd.com 62 The Six Stages of Drunk | GIF Six-Pack What time is it? Bad decision time. 2016-05-20 13:00 1KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 63 Duchess of Cambridge Heads to Portsmouth The duchess wore an Alexander McQueen navy pencil skirt and cream blouse. 2016-05-20 12:56 1KB wwd.com 64 flying architecture presents HiLoft, a fully transportable high-quality room although the ‘HiLoft’ has a rather small floor area, it provides a very high comfort level generated by accurately designed details, well conceived materials and innovative equipment. 2016-05-20 12:42 2KB www.designboom.com 65 Damian Hackett on the Expanding Aboriginal Art Market Deutscher and Hackett discusses their upcoming sale, what makes contemporary Aboriginal art unique, and how collectors can approach this booming market. 2016-05-20 12:01 4KB news.artnet.com 66 paolo pettigiani sees new york city's central park in pink and blue in new york's otherwise cool grey landscape, paolo pettigiani sees the city saturated in a sea of vibrant color for the photographic series 'infrared NYC'. 2016-05-20 12:00 2KB www.designboom.com 67 Renaissance Society Receives $1.5 M. Through Three Large Gifts, Largest in Museum’s History The Renaissance Society. COURTESY THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY Solveig Øvstebø, the executive director and chief curator of the Renaissance Society at the 2016-05-20 11:48 1KB www.artnews.com 68 A Walk Through the Feuerle Collection in Berlin The Feuerle Collection is a new private museum in Berlin dedicated to the accumulated holdings of collector Désiré Feuerle. 2016-05-20 11:28 3KB www.blouinartinfo.com 69 NADA Announces Inaugural International Exhibitor Prize COURTESY NADA The New Art Dealers Alliance said today that it is now accepting applications for its first-ever International Exhibitor Prize. The winner will 2016-05-20 11:26 1KB www.artnews.com 70 MAD reveals plans for UNIC, a residential building in paris MAD architects has unveiled plans for UNIC, its first residential project to be constructed in europe. 2016-05-20 10:59 2KB www.designboom.com 71 Malaysian Investor Jho Low Sells Off Basquiat- Amid multiple international investigations flashy Malaysian investor Jho Low sells of major artworks and real estate at steep discounts. 2016-05-20 10:51 4KB news.artnet.com 72 Markus Klinko's Unseen Photos of David Bowie LA's Mr MusicHead Gallery shows Markus Klinko's unpublished photographs of the late David Bowie in a new exhibition titled "Bowie Unseen. " 2016-05-20 10:37 2KB news.artnet.com 73 2016 Cannes Film Festival: amfAR Gala Draws Star-Studded Crowd Presenters included Leonardo DiCaprio, Helen Mirren, Uma Thurman and Kevin Spacey, who used the stage to mock Donald Trump. 2016-05-20 10:13 5KB wwd.com 74 penda: magic breeze landscape design in india to be located hyderabad in india, the garden by penda will feature a maze-like landscape with stairwells filled with flowers, herbs and grasses. 2016-05-20 10:10 1KB www.designboom.com 75 Chapter One: Colin de Land & Pat Hearn Colin de Land is the reason I decided to open a gallery. I was never a friend of his. I didn’t know him well, but when I moved to New... 2016-05-20 10:10 5KB www.flashartonline.com 76 aston martin vanquish zagato concept aston martin vanquish zagato concept was designed in close collaboration between the aston martin design team led by marek reichman and andrea zagato and his dedicated design team in milan. 2016-05-20 10:00 3KB www.designboom.com 77 ‘I Don’t Want to Be Part of a Conglomerate’: Julian Schnabel Discusses Leaving Gagosian for Pace at Bruce High Quality Benefit The scene at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University benefit, held at Palazzo Chupi. COURTESY MAX LAKNER/BFA Earlier this year, the Bruce High Quality 2016-05-20 10:00 2KB www.artnews.com 78 With ‘The Nice Guys,’ ‘Lethal Weapon’ Writer Shane Black is Back: Do We Really Want Him? The film, written and directed by Shane Black, has been touted as the “superhero antidote we all need.” 2016-05-20 09:53 4KB www.blouinartinfo.com 79 The Diary of Mark Flood, Part Two: Home Alone Install shot at CAMH. PHOTO BY THOMAS DUBROCK Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a multipart series about Mark Flood’s experience organizing his 2016-05-20 09:45 16KB www.artnews.com 80 ‘The Word Gallery Is No Longer Elastic Enough’: Gavin Brown on His New York Reopening The new address. COURTESY GAVIN BROWN'S ENTERPRISE Like many of New York’s noteworthy gallerists—think Leo Castelli, or Larry Gagosian—Gavin Brown is a 2016-05-20 09:30 9KB www.artnews.com
81 santa teresa house by PF architecture studio reflects porto's rejuvenated city center PF architecture studio were invited to refurbish the 'santa teresa' house in porto with a series of rooms which would be available for temporary lease. 2016-05-20 08:45 2KB www.designboom.com 82 The Top Seven Booths at Art16 Art16 was buzzing with excitement yesterday as art lovers and collectors headed West to Olympia to check out what this year's edition had to offer. 2016-05-20 07:41 5KB news.artnet.com 83 Artists Occupy Cultural Buildings in Brazil Artists in Brazil are occupying cultural institutions across the country to protest the decision of interim president to dissolve the Ministry of Culture. 2016-05-20 07:31 3KB news.artnet.com 84 nura headphones by studio office for product studio office for product design have created a pair nura headphones with built-in microphones that measure the actual audio response from ears at different frequencies. 2016-05-20 06:15 3KB www.designboom.com Articles
84 articles, 2016-05-21 06:01
1 Morning Links: Greenpeace Edition (1.04/2) PROTESTERS A Greenpeace protest forced the British Museum to close for four hours yesterday. [The New York Times] A profile of Pyotr Pavlensky, and how the Russian dissident artist uses his body, and the Russian legal system, as his mediums. [The Economist] Brazilian artists protest the interim president’s dissolution of the culture ministry. [Hyperallergic] ENIGMAS The CIA receives a new painting to add to its clandestine, CIA-themed art collection. [NPR] “An enigmatic businessman closely linked to a controversial Malaysian state fund has liquidated two of his best-known investments in the U. S., including a $35 million painting of a pair of drug addicts by Jean-Michel Basquiat.” [Wall Street Journal] SAN FRANCISCO “Inside the VIP opening of Gagosian Gallery San Francisco.” [SFLUXE] ARTISTS The estate of Josef Albers chose David Zwirner over representation at Pace, Dominique Lévy, and Hauser & Wirth “with a request for proposals akin to an architectural competition.” Zwirner will mount a show of the late artist’s work in November. [The New York Times] David Wojnarowicz, 24 years after his death. [The Guardian] Jim Shaw at Praz-Delavallade in Paris. [Contemporary Art Daily] DADS This dad needs more time with museum plaques! [The Onion] 2016-05-20 09:04 The Editors
2 Wendelien van Oldenborgh Will Represent the Netherlands at the 2017 Venice Biennale (1.02/2) Van Oldenborgh. COURTESY MONDRIAAN FOUNDATION The Mondriaan Foundation announced today that Wendelien van Oldenborgh will represent the Netherlands at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Lucy Cotter will curate the pavilion. Although the Biennale is still about a year away, van Oldenborgh’s pavilion already has a name: “Cinema Olanda.” The artist has planned three video works that will explore Dutch cultural identity by looking at the Netherlands’ post-colonial legacy.“I’m at a loss for words. It’s an honor, a great pleasure and a tremendous responsibility,” van Oldenborgh said in a statement. “This will be a wonderful moment to share the current transformations in Dutch society with an international audience.” 2016-05-20 11:07 Alex Greenberger
3 Art Basel Parcours to Take Over the City (1.02/2)
As the art world prepares to make its annual pilgrimage to Art Basel in Basel , the fair has announced the 19 site- specific artworks that will make up its popular Parcours sector, curated for the first time by Samuel Leuenberger, a Basel native who took up the post of Parcours curator in June 2015. Related: Who's In and Who's Out at Art Basel 2016? Among the works on view will be art that responds to the refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe. Sam Durant 's steel Labyrinth , first shown in Philadelphia, was developed by the artist in conjunction with prisoners at Graterford State Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania. A walk through the chain-link maze raises issues freedom and imprisonment that speaks to both mass incarceration in the US and the current plight of refugees. For his contribution, Alfredo Jaar revisits a 1998 public intervention staged in Stockholm called The Gift. In its original iteration, the piece was a commentary on the Rwanda civil war, and included a "gift" box where people could contribute to Medecins Sans Frontières and Doctors Without Borders. This time around, the box will focus on the immigration crisis. Some Parcours projects will activate unexpected places. Iván Navarro , for instance, will utilize a disused sewage tunnel, as the setting for Traffic , a mobile made from functioning traffic lights. Each evening will see performances, featuring artists such as Anne Imhof, Eva Kot'átková, Pádraic Moore, Nástio Mosquito , Tracey Rose and Chris Martin, and Mathilde Rosier. During part of Martin and Rose's performance/installation, Martin will play the role of Cleopatra, or Mafrica, a black man in white-woman drag, while Rose will sing popular songs that draw on a history of oppression. Jim Dine will also perform during the Parcours opening, reciting poems and inscribing them on the walls of his installation, Muscle and Salt , a room full of classically-inspired sculptures. Here is the complete list of Parcours projects: Trisha Baga, MS Orlando (2015) Greene Naftali (New York), Gió Marconi (Milan), Société (Berlin), Vilma Gold (London) Naturhistorisches Museum Basel, Augustinergasse 2 Michael Dean, ffff (2016) Supportico Lopez (Berlin), Herald St (London), Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo) Rheinsprung Jim Dine, Muscle and Salt, (2008–16) Richard Gray Gallery (Chicago, New York) Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig, St. Alban-Graben 5 Sam Durant, Labyrinth (2015) Blum & Poe (Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo), Paula Cooper Gallery (New York), Sadie Coles HQ (London) Alberto Garutti, The dog shown here belongs to one of the families of Trivero. This work is dedicated to those families and to the people who will sit here and talk about them (2009) Buchmann Galerie (Agra/Lugano, Berlin) Vischer'sche Garten, Rittergasse 29A Alfredo Jaar, The Gift (2016) Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town), Galerie Lelong (Paris, New York), Lia Rumma (Milan, Naples), kamel mennour (Paris), Galerie Thomas Schulte (Berlin) On and around Münsterplatz Hans Josephsohn, 15 sculptures, untitled (half-figures, standing and reclining figures) , 1951–2006 Hauser & Wirth (Zurich, New York, Los Angeles, London, Somerset) Münsterplatz Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Toilet on the River (1996–2016) Sprovieri (London) At the Rhein, below Pfalz Eva Koťátková, CUTTING THE PUPPETEER`S STRINGS WITH PAPER TEETH (brief history of daydreaming and string control) , 2016 Meyer Riegger (Berlin, Karlsruhe) Basler Marionettentheater, Münsterplatz 8 Allan McCollum, The Shapes Project: Shapes Spinoffs (2005–16) Galerie Thomas Schulte (Berlin) Museum der Kulturen Basel, Münsterplatz 20 Iván Navarro, Traffic (2015) Galerie Daniel Templon (Paris, Brussels) Birsigtunnel, below Grand Hotel Les Trois Rois Virginia Overton, Untitled (2016) White Cube (London, Hong Kong) Bau- und Verkehrsdepartement Basel-Stadt, Rittergasse 4 Daniel Guztav Cramer, Coasts (2016) Sies + Höke (Düsseldorf) St. Alban Vorstadt 12 Andrew Dadson, Black Plant Sunset (2016) Galleria Franco Noero (Turin), David Kordansky Gallery (Los Angeles), RaebervonStenglin (Zurich) Lichthof, Bau- und Verkehrsdepartement Basel-Stadt, Münsterplatz 11 Tabor Robak, Dog Park (2015) team (gallery, inc.) (New York, Venice (Los Angeles)), Johan Berggren Gallery (Malmö) Raphael Blechschmidt, Bäumleingasse 22 Tracey Rose, False Flag: A Deed in 2 Acts , Mandela Ball #8 , and MaterPater (2016) Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town) Zivilstandsamt Basel-Stadt, Rittergasse 11 Bernar Venet, Effondrement:Arcs (2016) von Bartha (Basel, S-chanf) Ramsteinerhof, Rittergasse 17 Michael Wang, Basel Münster (2016) Foxy Production (New York) Basler Münster, Katharinenkapelle Lawrence Weiner, MEIN HAUS IST DEIN HAUS DEIN HAUS IST MEIN HAUS WENN DU AUF DEN BODEN SCHEISST GEHT'S AUCH AUF DEINE FÜSSE (2014) Mai 36 Galerie (Zurich) Gymnasium am Münsterplatz, Münsterplatz 15 Art Basel Parcours is opening June 16–19, 2016, with previews on June 14 and 15. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-05-20 09:45 Sarah Cascone
4 Mad. Sq. Art: Martin Puryear Madison Square Park Conservancy and renowned American sculptor Martin Puryear today opened Big Bling, a major sculpture to be on view in Madison Square Park through January 8, 2017. The temporary outdoor work, the thirty-third public art exhibition mounted by Mad. Sq. Art, the free contemporary art program of Madison Square Park Conservancy, is a multi-tier wood structure wrapped in fine chain-link fence. A gold-leafed shackle is anchored near the top of the structure. At forty feet high, Big Bling achieves colossal scale and elicits a range of readings, stimulating diverse and profound interpretations of its meaning. The largest temporary outdoor sculpture Puryear has created, Big Bling is part animal form, part abstract sculpture, and part intellectual meditation. The artist’s signature organic vocabulary appears in a graceful, sinewy outline and an amoeboid form in the work’s center. The piece “will command Madison Square Park in New York like a kind of Trojan horse,” writes Hilarie M. Sheets in the October 1, 2015 issue of The New York Times. Big Bling’s architectural language suggests a building that is accessible by ascension through its levels. Its storeys are obstructed by chain-link fence, a barrier to entry, which covers all visible surfaces of the sculpture. In contrast to the coarse materials employed throughout most of the work, the gold shackle is a shimmering beacon that simultaneously adorns and restrains. (The term “bling” is rooted in urban youth and rap culture of the 1990s and refers to flashy jewelry and accessories.) Martin Puryear (American, b. 1941), an American sculptor known for his devotion to traditional ways of working, typically creates handmade artworks using methods gleaned from carpentry, boat building, and other trades with spare, exacting stylistic dignity. Wood, his signature material, is employed in his Madison Square Park project to anchor the physicality of the tremendous sculpture. Madison Square Park’s 6.2-acre site welcomes more than 50,000 daily visitors – a richly diverse audience including local residents, families, public school groups and day camps, office workers, students, artists, and international tourists. “Mad. Sq. Art is a cultural resource for the general public, exhibiting important commissioned sculpture by acclaimed contemporary artists,” said Keats Myer, Executive Director of Madison Square Park Conservancy. “Our goal is to bring world-class art to the public for free. Madison Square Park is truly a neighborhood park with a far-reaching cultural perspective.” “We are honored to work with Martin Puryear to realize the largest sculpture in his distinguished body of work,” said Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Martin Friedman Senior Curator. “Puryear often balances abstraction with powerful metaphor and Big Bling sits within this trajectory. Public art is a communal activity. Its reach can be significant for communities and neighborhoods, and Puryear has captured this concept with a public sculpture of grand scale and important content.” Following New York, Big Bling will travel for installation in Philadelphia by the Association for Public Art, opening in May 2017 where it will be on view for six months. This is a first-time collaboration between Madison Square Park Conservancy and the Association for Public Art. Both New York and Philadelphia already have permanent public pieces by Puryear: North Cove Pylons, 1995, at Battery Park City, New York and Pavilion in the Trees, 1993, in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. A celebrated series of sculpture exhibitions by living artists, Mad. Sq. Art was launched by the Madison Square Park Conservancy in 2004 to bring free public art programs to New York. The program has received extensive critical and public attention since its inception and has developed into a world-class cultural institution. Its ambition and scale expands each year alongside an increasingly diverse range of innovative, world-class artists. Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram via the hashtags #MadSqArt, #MartinPuryear, and #BigBling. About Martin Puryear: Martin Puryear (American, b. 1941) earned his B. A. from Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C. (1963) and his M. F. A. from Yale University (1971). He served in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone (1964-66) and attended the Swedish Royal Academy of Art (1966-68). Puryear’s 2007 retrospective was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York and traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. An exhibition of his drawings, Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions, will be on view at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum from October 9, 2015 through January 10, 2016. He has received many distinguished awards, including the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (1980), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant (1982), and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1989). He was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1992) and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Yale University (1994). Puryear lives and works in the Hudson Valley region of New York. About Mad. Sq. Art and Madison Square Park Conservancy: Mad. Sq. Art is the free, contemporary art program of Madison Square Park Conservancy. Since 2004, Mad. Sq. Art has commissioned and presented thirty-two premier installations in Madison Square Park by acclaimed artists ranging in practice and media. Mad. Sq. Art has exhibited works by artists including Bill Beirne, Jim Campbell, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Mark di Suvero, Rachel Feinstein, Teresita Fernández, Bill Fontana, Ernie Gehr, Orly Genger, Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder, Antony Gormley, Paula Hayes, Jene Highstein, Tadashi Kawamata, Mel Kendrick, Sol LeWitt, Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Charles Long, Iván Navarro, Jacco Olivier, Roxy Paine, Rachel Feinstein, Giuseppe Penone, Jaume Plensa, Shannon Plumb, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Alison Saar, Jessica Stockholder, Leo Villareal, and William Wegman. Madison Square Park Conservancy is the not-for-profit organization whose mission is to protect, nurture, and enhance Madison Square Park, a dynamic seven-acre public green space, creating an environment that fosters moments of inspiration. The Conservancy is committed to engaging the community through its beautiful gardens, inviting amenities, and world- class programming. Madison Square Park Conservancy is licensed by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to manage Madison Square Park and is responsible for raising 98% of the funds necessary to operate the Park, including the brilliant horticulture, park maintenance, sanitation, security, and free cultural programs for Park visitors of all ages. The Association for Public Art (aPA, formerly Fairmount Park Art Association) commissions, preserves, interprets, and promotes public art in Philadelphia. The aPA is the nation’s first private nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a “Museum Without Walls” that informs, engages, and inspires diverse audiences. Established in 1872, the aPA integrates public art and urban design through exemplary programs and advocacy efforts that connect people with public art. associationforpublicart.org Support: Major exhibition support for Big Bling is provided by the Ford Foundation, Matthew Marks Gallery, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Henry Luce Foundation, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, J. P. Morgan Securities and Unalam of Unadilla, New York. Major support for Mad. Sq. Art is provided by Toby Devan Lewis, Pentagram Design, Sorgente Group of America, Thornton Tomasetti, Tiffany & Co., The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Anonymous. Substantial support is provided by George W. Ahl III, Irving Harris Foundation, The Sol LeWitt Fund for Artist Work, Danny and Audrey Meyer, Ronald A. Pizzuti, and The Rudin Family. Ace Hotel New York is the Official Hotel Partner of Madison Square Park Conservancy. Big Bling is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mad. Sq. Art is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Mad. Sq. Art is supported in part with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. Madison Square Park Conservancy is a public/private partnership with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Image: Martin Puryear, Big Bling, 2016. Pressure-treated laminated timbers, plywood, fiberglass, and gold leaf, 40 x 10 x 38 ft. Collection of the artist, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery. © Martin Puryear. Photo by Rashmi Gill 2016-05-21 01:22 www.madisonsquarepark
5 7 Genders, 7 Typographies: Hacking the Binary In a recent panel at the New Museum, artist Jacob Ciocci defined technology as “anything that organizes or takes apart reality,” which prompted a realization: gender could be also be understood as a kind of technology unto itself. The 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial proposes that the ultimate aim of design is a redesign of the […] 2016-05-21 01:22 By
6 studio mumbai draws on traditional indian craft using brick + bamboo to hand-make furniture for maniera studio mumbai draws on traditional indian craft using brick + bamboo to hand-make furniture for maniera (above) brick study II (bench); marble, brick, rosewood, beeswax, coconut oil; H 71,5 x L 132 x D 55 cm; limited edition of 8 pieces, each numbered and signed all images © filip dujardin, courtesy of MANIERA studio mumbai / bijoy jain employs skilled craftsmen within its practice, where they work alongside trained architects to develop ideas that are almost immediately translated into mock-ups and objects through a range of materials. its collaboration with maniera, expresses their hands-on approach to making and building through a collection of elegant, hand-made furniture pieces produced from their workshop in mumbai, india. the limited edition ‘maniera 06′ is comprised of four series of studies: ‘brick studies’, ‘illumination studies’, ‘charpai studies’ and ‘landscape studies’, all of which run in parallel with the studio’s architectural production. studio mumbai / bijoy jain brick study | A & B (chairs), 2016 marble, brick, rosewood, beeswax, coconut oil H 78 x L&D 49,5 cm limited edition of 12 pieces for each chair, each numbered and signed in ‘brick studies’, studio mumbai explores the possibilities of adapting the universal, and now quite industrial, building material to a more intimate scale in the form of furniture. influenced by the traditional dry-stacked brick formwork used to construct arches or domes, bijoy jain pared them down to mini-bricks, true to scale, that were baked in the studio’s workshop. these have been glued to each other, shaping the backrest of the benches and chairs, following methods examined in building frames. the brick constructions are fixed to simple, unpretentious stools and benches that are made from robust rosewood and marble, both of which are often encountered within indian interiors. standing between models and functional objects, the ‘brick studies’ collection evokes a sense of fragility, despite the solidity of the mediums employed. studio mumbai / bijoy jain brick study III (bench), 2016 teak, brick, melezin, beeswax, coconut oil H 78,5 x L 163,5 x D 53,5 cm limited edition of 15 pieces, each numbered and signed the limited edition ‘maniera 06′ collection utilizes materials such as bamboo and brick ‘landscape studies’ are derived from observations made in the indian agrarian landscape. farmers use kaolin powder to define zones in the rural landscape for different activities—from resting under a tree to emphasizing the steps to climb a small hill. studio mumbai’s sculptural seating objects respond to these definitions, but when they are in use, the white lines remain very abstract in their appearance. built from paper maché, bitumen and cow dung, the pieces are treated with body wax and rubbed with coal to achieve a natural aesthetic; with one bearing white kaolin powder lines, rendering itself as sort of a scale model of the zonal demarcations in the rural terrain of india. the process of making the ‘landscape studies’ pieces were a result of following the instincts of the craftsmen, rather than clear instructions given by the architect. neither has any clear geometry when added to a space, and with the addition of water, their surfaces can be changed in both color and texture, much like the landscapes they refer to. ‘landscape studies’ are derived from observations made in the indian agrarian landscape studio mumbai / bijoy jain rush lounge chair, 2016 rosewood, henna dye bimel tree bark rope, beeswax, coconut oil H 89 x L 56,5 x D 68 cm limited edition of 15 pieces, each numbered and signed studio mumbai / bijoy jain lounge chair, 2016 teak wood, lac dye bimel tree bark rope, beeswax, coconut oil H 91 x L 55,8 x D 78 cm serial edition, each signed the relation to the reference object is almost literal in the ‘charpai studies’. found in half of all indian homes, a charpai is a daybed made from a construction of light wood held together by tenon joints and cotton cords. predating the british era, it changed the way people lived their daily lives. as a furniture piece, it accompanies an individual from birth through marriage to death, and is easy to transport since the lightness of its framework means that even a child is able to carry it. studio mumbai re-introduces the traditional charpai with some minor changes, along with the addition of shellac wood treatment, in a way that was not to create a replica, but rather examine an existing object and continue working on it. studio mumbai / bijoy jain charpai study II – small (daybed), 2016 bamboo, shallac, tumeric, lac dye bimel tree bark rope H 31,5 x L 122,5 x D 62 cm serial editions, each signed studio mumbai / bijoy jain cabinet (bookshelf), 2016 marble, rosewood, beeswax, coconut oil H 200 x L 123,5 x D 48,5 cm limited edition of 8 pieces, each numbered and signed studio mumbai / bijoy jain cabinet (bookshelf), 2016 marble, rosewood, beeswax, coconut oil H 200 x L 123,5 x D 48,5 cm limited edition of 8 pieces, each numbered and signed studio mumbai / bijoy jain folding chair, 2016 rosewood, brass, beeswax, coconut oil H 73 x L 40 x D 49 cm serial edition, each signed studio mumbai / bijoy jain round table, 2016 rosewood, beeswax, coconut oil H 75 x D 99 cm limited edition of 12 pieces, each numbered and signed the final series, makes reference to ‘tazia’—a ceremonial object that was a model of a monument carried on men’s shoulders in processions during muharram month in india, in remembrance of the martyred son of the prophet mohammed. typically made by local communities, they are constructions of natural materials which disintegrate when thrown down the river after the procession. these models of monumental buildings are made from bamboo sticks tied together with colored string, glued with river mud and clad in carved paper; often reaching several metres in height. the ‘illumination studies’ sees the tazia turned into a light fixture without a bulb. measuring approximately a metre high, these contemporary versions are built using thin bamboo sticks covered in gold leaf—reflecting the light when a bulb is hung inside the structure—and tied together with pink silk threads. without the paper cladding applied to the framework, the object liberates itself from its frame of reference, becoming a model of a model, acquiring its own character as a piece of furniture. 2016-05-21 02:30 Andrea Chin
7 Listening Mix: Devendra Banhart & Friends LISTENING MIX provides a musical preview for artists visiting the Walker. Combining their work with sounds from a variety of contextual sources, LISTENING MIX can be experienced before or after a performance. For his two- evening event this weekend, Wind Grove Mind Alone, singer/songwriter Devendra Banhart has gathered a group of collaborators, contemporaries, mentors, and friends. It wasn’t so long […] 2016-05-21 03:12 By
8 Opera Team: Valentino and Sofia Coppola Get Ready for ‘La Traviata’ The unique conjunction of music, fashion and the cinema has already worked wonders for the theater, which as of Friday had rung up 1.2 million euros, or $1.3 million, in ticket sales against a total cost of almost $2 million for the production — way before the first aria had even been sung — and drawing requests for tours to Japan and Valencia, according to the theater’s superintendent Carlos Fuortes. No matter. Valentino had less prosaic issues at heart. “We hope the opera can be less intimidating. I have nothing against rock concerts, but this is much more romantic and visually beautiful,” said Valentino. “Ever since I was a child, I loved the music, the history, how the performers were positioned on the stage.” He confessed “La Traviata” had “remained unquestionably” in his heart, and credited his father for loving and opening him up to the opera. Previously, Valentino designed costumes for an opera in 1994 inspired by Rudolph Valentino and staged at the Kennedy Center in Washington. “Fashion and the movies can bring a new, young audience to the opera,” said Chiuri. “They may find it difficult to approach it, it’s like with haute couture — but you can end up loving what you don’t know,” she said, admitting she and Piccioli were latecomers to the genre, discovering it only in 2014. “And now my daughter is curious about it.” Piccioli remarked: “Cinema, fashion and opera, together they can bring something new with different points of view.” While details of the looks were asked to be kept under wraps on Friday, Valentino did say he designed four gowns for Violetta, the main character, “in one hour and a half,” and “not entirely inspired by the Victorian period,” when the opera is set. He revealed there would be “a touch of red, it’s logical, it’s my color,” he said with a smile. Chiuri and Piccioli designed costumes for Flora Bervoix, Violetta’s friend, and the chorus, for a total of 1,200 looks. “We wanted to interpret them from Sofia’s point of view. We liked that Sofia wanted to enhance the character of Violetta, and make her more contemporary,” said Piccioli. “She wanted a less solemn and more personal tone. It’s a work of subtraction, taking away what is redundant in the historical context of the 1800s.” Smiling, Chiuri said the chorus is “more fashionable, not tied to tradition, timeless, with an image closer to [our view]. There is a lightness that can be recognized as ours.” Violetta and Flora’s gowns were created by the Maison Valentino Haute Couture Atelier, while the designs of the chorus were made in collaboration with the theater’s costume workshop, whose artisans were repeatedly praised by the designers. “How they make the wigs with real hairs on tulle, chosen depending on the color of the flesh, it’s amazing,” marveled Chiuri. “They are true artists.” Describing their efforts to get Coppola on board, Valentino said he and Giammetti “really wanted” the director, her “fresh, new approach.” The designer recalled “the power she injected in [the 2006 movie that Coppola directed] ‘Marie Antoinette.’” “I loved this film, the costumes, the colors, I loved how she mixed slippers in chinchilla when that did not even exist. The first thing I thought was that we must try to get Sofia, she is the perfect person for this,” said Valentino. For her part, Coppola confessed her initial reluctance. “It was a completely different world from what I was used to, and I didn’t know what to expect. I thought I didn’t have the courage, but then I realized what an incredible opportunity this was. They motivated me to do something scary and unfamiliar,” she said, remarking proudly that she was “a distant cousin” of Italian conductor Riccardo Muti, and that she came from a family of musicians. “I approached ‘La Traviata’ keeping the focus on the beautiful music and costumes, trying to find a part of the character [Violetta] I can relate to and connect to, creating something that I would want to watch,” explained Coppola. Giammetti underscored that this was “the first cultural operation” for the Fondazione Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti. He revealed projects in the pipeline with friend Eleonora Abbagnato, director of the Teatro dell’Opera’s ballet. “We have a dream for the foundation, we are looking for a location in Rome to house a Valentino museum,” Giammetti said. “La Traviata,” directed by Jader Bignamini, with scenes by British production designer Nathan Crowley, whose previous work includes “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight,” will be open to the public from Tuesday to June 30. A dinner will be held after the exclusive event on Sunday, expected to draw many of Valentino’s celebrity friends. 2016-05-20 22:58 Luisa Zargani
9 Kwiat to Distribute Ashoka Diamond Cut In New York, the stones will be found at Fred Leighton — owned by Kwiat. The partnership will launch to retailers at the forthcoming Couture jewelry show in Las Vegas, taking place from June 2 to June 6. “Our promise to our clients is to constantly reimagine everything with diamonds — clients want something unique and beautiful and the Ashoka is very unique and special diamond,” Kwiat owner Greg Kwiat told WWD. 2016-05-20 22:41 Misty White
10 Romancing the Romanovs: Simon Sebag Montefiore Can’t Give Up Mother Russia More Articles By The Cambridge Ph. D. with strong Russian Jewish roots has channeled his fascination into Russian- themed fiction and nonfiction. (He did take a momentary detour south, however, in 2011 to pen “Jerusalem: The Biography.”) His latest work, “The Romanovs: 1613-1918” (Knopf) is the colorful culmination of decades of enthusiastic research. The 784-page tome, which landed in U. S. bookstores earlier this month, has already garnered glowing reviews in the U. K. — for its research, chatty style and “sheer Hammer Horror” details, according to the Daily Mail. For the first time, the author has made it onto The New York Times printed bestseller list: The ranking, which will be published on Sunday, shows the “The Romanovs” at No. 15. Indeed, readers can practically hear Montefiore — a British charmer who’s also hosted numerous historical BBC TV documentaries — licking his chops as he launches into the gripping tales of sex, debauchery, violence, power and world — or at least Eurasian — domination. And while the bibliography and notes to the book run for nearly 100 pages, Montefiore’s account is as far from an academic narrative as a Black Sea sunbather from the Siberian tundra. “It was hard to be a tsar,” he writes with great English understatement in the introduction to this often-gory tale of 20 sovereigns, male and female. They were, he writes, “the most spectacularly successful empire-builders since the Mongols. It was in a Romanov’s blood.” During an interview in the sunny, cozy living room of his family’s London home, not far from Notting Hill Gate, Montefiore describes the book as “a saga of every debauchery, as well as of grandeur and majesty and how power affects personalities. It’s a study of psychopaths and megalomaniacs — whom we’ve all worked with many times in our own lives. It can also be read as why Russia is Russia. And why Stalin happened and Putin is happening.” He says Vladimir Putin sees himself as the successor to the great tsars of Russia — “Peter the Great, Nicholas the First, Alexander the First and Stalin — the great successful Russian imperial rulers.” Asked about some of his favorite characters in the book, Montefiore names Peter the Great, the famous cultural reformer who led Russia from 1682 until 1721. “He is the most fascinating, the psychopathic brilliant monster, the ultimate titan. He was incredibly brutal and fascinated with pulling people’s teeth out. He tortured his own son to death.” (True, his eldest son and heir Alexei was suspected of wanting to overthrow him). He also names the empress Elizaveta Petrovna, who ruled Russia from 1741 until 1762: “She’s the first fashionista, obsessed with clothes and hairdos. She had about 15,000 clothes and shoes — much more than the Kardashians,” says Montefiore, who’s dressed for the interview in a vibrant Romanov blue v-neck sweater, which matches the cover of the U. S. edition of the book, and khaki-colored jeans. “The Kardashians are nothing compared to her and she was much more beautiful. She was the most beautiful woman in the whole of Russia — and that’s not a hyperbole. Even by modern standards, she’s hot. She loved men, she had who she wanted. And she was obsessed with French haute couture. If anybody tried to buy something she wanted, she’d threaten them with execution. She was the first — and perhaps the only kind — of haute couture fashionista/tyrant before ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’ It’s like ‘The Tsarina Wears Prada.’” To her credit, said tsarina didn’t execute anyone during her reign, which was marked instead by grandiose balls and luxury worship. Catherine the Great and Potemkin — Montefiore dedicated a whole book to them in 2004, and Angelina Jolie and her production company Jolie Pas have optioned the movie rights to it — also get a shout-out from the author. “They are an amazing couple, intellectually brilliant, with a relationship captured in their letters. And then they marry secretly. And they have a secret pact and arrangement where they each can have young lovers. It’s an open marriage,” he says, adding that there’s also another couple that deserves a mention. “Alexander the Second and his mistress [Princess Yekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukova] — because they had the hottest relationship. And their correspondence is the most sexually explicit correspondence every written by a head of state.” While Montefiore plans to take a break from nonfiction, he won’t leave the Russians behind. Montefiore, whose award-winning books have been translated into scores of languages, is at work on the third novel in a planned trilogy that includes “Sashenka” and “One Night in Winter.” “The fiction books are really love stories. Love, adultery and marriage set in Stalinist Russia. There’s this sort of added jeopardy where if you have an illicit love affair with the wrong person, you can be killed. But they’re really about family and adultery and life and death. This particular one is set around the battle of Stalingrad. It’s about a mission behind enemy lines. It’s been fun writing it. But it’s been hard to get down to.” He’s planning to writing scripts, and has a new TV series on the boil about Middle Europe. He’s also written a children’s book with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, called “The Royal Rabbits of London.” It is currently under development with Twentieth Century Fox Animation, and will become a feature film. While Montefiore has pretty much exhausted his examination of Russian history, he admits there are still a few loose ends. “There’s a lot of things that fascinate me still. I’d like to write a biography of Ivan the Terrible,” he says of the first grand prince to be crowned tsar of Russia. Another extreme character and murderous father, terrible Ivan will no doubt keep Montefiore’s readers tearing through the pages. 2016-05-20 22:38 Samantha Conti
11 11 vinicius araújo's inflated logos turn big brands into pumped-up pool toys for the series ‘blow up’, brazilian graphic designer vinicius araújo has digitally inflated six of the world’s most recognizable logos and turned them into balloon-like versions of their original 2D form. apple, adidas, nike, twitter, mercedes-benz, and DC shoes are rendered with a colorful rubbery texture reminiscent of a pool toy, distended to comic proportions. using computer software such as cinema 4D and physical render, araújo has sculpted the silhouette of each symbol and added ‘air’ within the flat form. with a sharp contrast of glossy lighting and deep shadows, the brand logos appear to be bloated from within — a small plastic nozzle at the base of each inflatable seemingly provides the source of air. the original apple logo in color has been digitally inflated the blue and white striped adidas logo takes on an enlarged form the bright blue twitter bird is digitally enlarged and rendered with a rubbery texture the silver mercedes-benz symbol has been blown up beyond its usual proportions 2016-05-20 22:30 Nina Azzarello
12 Interview: Antony Micallef on his ‘Raw Intent’ Related Venues Pearl Lam Galleries Hong Kong Artists Antony Micallef Antony Micallef , whose latest exhibition runs through June 30 at Pearl Lam Galleries Hong Kong, first came into prominence after winning second place at the 2000 BP Portrait Award. Since then, his work has become highly collectible, appearing in exhibitions in many of London’s most famous museums and in the collections of celebrities including Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (as the PR person who told us this puts it, “this is not particularly relevant but nonetheless juicy”). On top of this, GQ Magazine called him the man who “will change the face of modern portraiture.” Following the opening of his latest exhibition, titled “Raw Intent,” ARTINFO spoke to the English painter to discuss his new work and his relationship to portraiture. Excerpts: There are two types of work in this show. The first is when you have these photo-real backgrounds, similar to Rembrandt’s backgrounds, or those by Velasquez. They’re painted in this “old master” style, and they’re done with loads of layering over very fine glazing, which take weeks to prepare, so it’s a slow and meticulous process. On top of that, once it’s completely dry, you apply the paint to form the figure. The background itself can take weeks to produce, but the figure maybe one or two days. You have to be quick because you have to really try and capture that energy, and the only way in which you can really do that is by painting at a very quick speed. I’m also using a huge amount of paint, applied with foot-long brushes and knives and squeegees, and when these are loaded with paint they become very heavy. It’s physically exhausting and also a reason why there are splashes on the paintings and different types of marks. You really punch into the canvas. The other type of painting is when the whole canvas is covered in this thick paint, in the same physical, fast manner. These have a different feel. The paintings with the photo-real backgrounds are as if they’re staged. They’re calm and abstract. But with the heavy marking painting, the energy is inescapable — it’s all over the canvas. I started painting like this just over a year ago. Since then, I feel like my dexterity is far better and these paintings seem more sophisticated than those I produced before. The red series in this exhibition is totally new, and really something I’d never tried before. My work has changed dramatically over the last 10 years or so. It used to be about social commentary as well as a number of other things, but now, instead of me having to illustrate my work, I feel like the paint is doing the talking. Painting is a language. When you speak you can shout, whisper, or do other things. I could do this work with thinner paint I guess, but it would be saying something completely different than what I want. I’m just using the language to express something. I want people to look at this work however they want, but I think it’s misleading for people to see them as me. They used to be self-portraits, but now they’re just their own things. I just use myself as a vehicle, as information; as a way of seeing how the light is hitting my face etc. Whatever comes out, I’m really happy so long as it feels raw, and I feel it breathes on its own and has its own power. I don’t paint these to look like me, but there’s so much emotion in these paintings, all of which say something different. They feel like when they arrive, I’m meeting someone. I’m painting these pieces and giving them an initial charge. It’s like I’m excavating and uncovering things, rather than building them. It’s like I’ve got my hands in the Earth and I’m pulling things out with my bare hands. Not to mention that if portraits were genuinely how I see myself, my friends would probably be a bit worried about me! 2016-05-20 22:11 Samuel Spencer
13 Is Vice’s Shane Smith the Modern Oprah or Media’s Donald Trump? Is Shane Smith , Vice ’s cofounder and chief executive officer, the Oprah for this generation or is he media’s Donald Trump? Is he a visionary or a bombastic windbag? Those were some of the questions posed Thursday night at Hearst Tower during a Q&A with Smith, who wore a suit and tie for the occasion (and toted a glass of Scotch). Hearst Magazines president David Carey , who noted that his company holds equity stakes and “sometimes board seats” on some of today’s disruptive media companies, including Vice , opened the talk by introducing the panel’s moderator. “You’ll have two men on the stage tonight; one hails from Canada, known to be one of the great digital minds of our business, is known to use profanity on a regular basis, disrespects authority. The other person is Shane Smith ,” Carey said. Carey was of course alluding to Hearst’s very own disruptor, Troy Young , who oversees Hearst digital, and had, at one time, been controversial for his mandate to separate the company’s print and digital operations with its web titles reporting to site directors, not magazine editors in chief. “I’m glad all the kids came out,” Smith said, looking out to the audience, before greeting Young. “I expected Hearst to be old and look like us.” Young began his questioning, but warned the audience that Smith has the tendency to drift off topic, a slight understatement. The interview began with the interesting tidbit that Smith is one of the richest people in Canada, ranked by Canadian Business last year at No. 72 for a net worth of $1.27 billion. Smith deflected a bit and talked about how he found success in such a volatile industry. “I remember when I was young,” he said. “I used to be a fan — I’m still a huge fan — of Graydon Carter. He came from the same neighborhood as me in Ottawa. He came down here and started Spy Magazine and terrified New York. I was like, ‘A kid from Ottawa can terrify people in New York,’ so that was inspiration number one.” Smith explained how he has hustled his whole life for money, but there came an “inflection point” once he became rich. Taking money out of the equation, Smith said he realized: “We’re at a huge inflection point not just for media, but for culture.” Young talked about their shared roots working at rival magazines in Montreal — Young at alternative weekly The Mirror and Smith at Vice magazine. Smith noted, ironically, that even then Young and his colleagues at the other publications were slave to the mentality playing out in traditional media today. Smith, who was living in the office and taking welfare to publish Vice, made deals with Canadian business to springboard his magazine to a national level. “The Mirror stayed in Montreal and tried to consolidate their market. What happened in Montreal, quite frankly, is still happening in media,” he said, noting that the other titles tried to “undercut” each other. “A $50,000 [ad] page would go for 50 bucks and a cup of coffee. You priced yourselves out of profitability…while you guys were fighting the status quo fight, we made a new fight, and that’s how we won. We won the fight that only we were fighting in. We rigged it.” Although Smith’s point may hold some truth, there are many media companies doing exactly what Vice is doing in terms of platform expansion — the question is whether they will be able to do it better than the digital firm, or find an alternative path to success. Young moved on with a barb, noting that Smith has “developed a reputation as a bombastic voice, in some ways not unlike Trump.” “The thing that I find interesting about you, Shane, is that you are an incredible bulls—–r, but also a wonderful truth teller,” said Young. “It’s bulls–t before it happens, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy after it happens,” Smith said. “I’m in the self-fulfilling prophecy era now.” The ceo noted that if you “don’t believe in yourself,” no one else will. “I think that the biggest — no offense to Hearst, you’re very smart and you make a lot of money, but you guys look so successful, that people are, like, Hearst is f—–g cracking,” he said. “I have a lot of people or whatever on the board, and when you sit with them, you go, ‘You don’t really know what you’re talking about.’” Smith then went on to forecast the future of cable, explaining, “You’re going to see Viacom implode and probably something happen between Time Warner and Fox and there are going to be like five major media companies [that will] go to two-and-a-half. And then we’re the largest new media company and we’re going to become the fourth-largest or fifth-largest media company…or the third.” The ceo noted that he hired Josh Tyrangiel from Bloomberg not because he has Vice values — he doesn’t, apparently — but because he’s the “enfant terrible of media.” Tyrangiel came to Smith with a plan to help Vice take on the CNNs and the BBCs of the industry. “Josh is an angry young man who wants to shove it up their asses,” Smith said. “He’s aggressive.” The ceo’s desire to dominate TV with its HBO programming and its Viceland channel is apparent. Despite broad distribution, Viceland has experienced a few ratings bumps to start, not to mention a dearth of programming to fill a 24/7 broadcast. But the company is working on that with a host of new shows and the renewal of “Gaycation” with Ellen Page and “Weediquette,” a series about alternate uses of marijuana. “But you haven’t had a hit,” Young jabbed. “We have,” said a peeved Smith. “Someone said [to me], is he the modern Oprah?” Young mused, unspooling the question to mean whether the modern media mogul must be equal parts talent and ceo. Smith said that isn’t a requisite but noted: “If you’re going to make content you better love content and you’d better understand what it is.” Later, a young man from the audience asked Smith a more pointed question about how digital firms can succeed on YouTube, which shed light on the bigger problem for media companies today. “The problem with YouTube was, much like Facebook now…Facebook has bought two-thirds of the new media companies without spending a dime because they own the majority of their mobile,” Smith said. “That’s why we’re trying to get onto all the platforms. If we can monetize on all the platforms, then we can get away from the hegemony of Facebook.” Smith said Vice sells its own YouTube inventory, but that the video platform takes a fair amount out of the sale to pay their overhead. “You’re giving another company your manifest destiny,” he said, noting that 85 percent of all online video is Facebook and YouTube. “So unless you’re on those platforms, you’re dead. But if you’re not on those platforms, you’re not making money, and so therein lies the rub. And that’s going to be the biggest challenge going forward for media companies.” 2016-05-20 22:09 Alexandra Steigrad
14 Antoine Rameau Exhibition Turns Store and Tram Into Pop-Up Galleries Related Venues Le French May SOGO From May 25 to June 5, shoppers and commuters in Hong Kong will have the chance to grab a little culture while they hurry about the city, as photo collages from Hong Kong–based French artist Antoine Rameau go on display at a SOGO department store and in a Hong Kong Tramways coach. The exhibition “Kosmogonia,” which is showing at SOGO’s Causeway Bay branch as part of the citywide Le French May festival, features images of modern urban life — particularly graffiti-covered walls — assembled in geometric patterns. Some of these photo collages combine images of street art with elements of mythology. “Woman & the Moon,” 2016, consists of repeating images of a talisman with a woman’s figure on it, alongside fragments of graffiti tags. A press release from SOGO describes the scope of Rameau’s ambition, calling his work an attempt to invoke “the origins of the universe, the ultimate root, the primary source of everything.” Also on display at SOGO will be the installation “Cosmogonies,” 2016, a sculpture Rameau created by printing photo collages onto translucent sheets of paper and mounting the paper on lamps. Passengers on Hong Kong Tramways will get their Rameau fix by tracking down coach n.151, which the artist is giving a radical makeover. Rameau’s collages will cover the interior of the coach for much of Le French May, which runs until June 30. 2016-05-20 22:04 Samuel Spencer
15 Jimmy Ong Sends Sir Stamford Raffles to Hell at FOST Gallery Related Venues Fost Gallery Artists Jimmy Ong In a series of recent drawings on display at FOST Gallery through June 26, Jimmy Ong explores imagined histories of his birthplace, Singapore, and Indonesia, his new home. The exhibition, titled “From Bukit Larangan to Borobudur,” Ong continues to explore his own fictionalized version of the life of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, a British statesman who was an integral part of the histories of both Singapore and Indonesia. This project, which was also the subject of “The History of Java,” his last show at FOST, comes to its peak in two works here. Although he began to draw Raffles as a canny move to cash in on the SG50 celebrations (as he said in an interview at the time, “Singapore is 50 this year. I am an opportunist”), the series has since taken a surreal turn. In “Raffles Descends The 7 (Seven) Storey Mountain,” 2016, for example, Ong draws the statesman into a scene straight from Dante’s “Purgatorio,” complete with a Stygian river of souls. Though this exhibition comes with the subtitle “Recent Drawings by Jimmy Ong ,” other Raffles works in the show are actually sculptures. Ong’s “Seamstreses’ Raffleses” group consists of fabric sculptures made out of patchwork by the artist and a trio of Javanese seamstresses. For Ong, each of these works represents “the artist’s perceived torment and thus atonement of Raffles,” according to the gallery. Other drawings in the gallery represent Ong’s take on real historical events. In “Demolition of St. Andrew’s,” 2012, for example, he imagines the razing of the Singaporean cathedral in 1855 following lightning damage, in a charcoal drawing that features another unnamed British figure, perhaps a Raffles stand-in, watching the church fall. 2016-05-20 22:02 Samuel Spencer
16 Second Thoughts: Fred Sandback and the Virtual Line How does an exhibition accrete meaning, gain relevance, or shift shape over time? In the “Second Thoughts” series, Walker curators reconsider earlier presentations of art, articulating new or refined conclusions. Here, Jordan Carter writes about how the discovery of a 1977 book of line drawings by American artist Fred Sandback (1943– 2003) prompts new thinking about the artist’s sculptures made using yarn or elastic cord. […] 2016-05-21 00:50 By
17 Christy Turlington Burns Celebrates Minted Pop-up Opening Opening at 222 Grant Avenue ( the same space which, until recently, housed ModCloth’s Fit Shop ), Minted Local offers art, home goods and stationery, with a particular focus on California artists. Minted, founded in 2007, is a “design marketplace” that uses a crowd-sourced model to feature and produce the work of independent artists. The company began with stationery, and has since expanded into wall art, textiles , digital content and home decor. Naficy said she’ll use this first space as a laboratory of sorts before considering expanding to other permanent physical retail locations. In a move that has become de rigueur for brands moving from online to in-person, the store will include an “experiential” angle with a Stylist Bar where customers can work with Minted designers to craft products. Turlington Burns and Naficy have known each other for years and originally connected in part through Turlington Burns’ film, “No Woman, No Cry” and the corresponding organization she founded, Every Mother Counts, created to help maternal wellness. Naficy sits on the organization’s board, and 50 percent of the first week of sales will go to the charity. The two have traveled together with the organization to Haiti and Tanzania. The two said the partnership — the only charitable organization with which Minted is affiliated — aligned well with Minted’s audience, both because most of the artists are women, but because the customers are well. “These are solvable problems,” said Burns, who will be traveling with Naficy to Guatemala later this year and who regularly works on a series she created on giving birth in America. “It’s incredible what we can do.” 2016-05-20 21:50 Maghan McDowell
18 Devendra Banhart + Band* Rodrigo Amarante Hecuba Harold Budd + Brad Ellis + Veda Hille To spark discussion, the Walker invites Twin Cities artists and critics to write overnight reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Today, Patrick Marschke shares his perspective on Saturday night’s performance of Devendra Banhart & […] 2016-05-20 20:00 By
19 Handbag Awards to Honor MZ Wallace Interactive voting is now taking place on InStyle magazine’s web site, through June 10. Finalists are judged in 10 different categories — the winners of each will receive a yearlong membership to the Accessories Council. This year’s IHDA Iconoclast Award will be given to MZ Wallace . 2016-05-20 20:40 Misty White
20 A Young Filmmaker Gives Love a New Face Every generation of filmmakers has its own depiction of Love. Think: Manufactured dreamgirl Lisa in John Hughes' seminal Weird Science (perhaps a metaphor for 80s inflation?); Vianne's 20th century delicacies in Lasse Hallström's Chocolat ; in the superflat 2000s, it was "Bianca," the love doll opposite Ryan Gosling in Craig Gillespie's Lars and the Real Girl. In young filmmaker Chloé Aktas ' award-winning short film, Fish Hook and Eye , Love has a new look: drawn, pierced, and fatal. Winner of Best Film and Best Screenplay at NYU's New Vision and Voices, and Best in Fest at the NYU Fusion Film Festival, Fish Hook and Eye tells the story of Ramona (Julia Christgau) and Dean (Matteo Eckerle), young lovers reeling in the wake of Love's (Drita Kabashi) first sting. Written by Aktas, with a poetic voiceover accompaniment by Lyndsey Bourne alongside Drita Kabashi, and shot with style by Kevin Rios, it's a student film that aspires to so much more—look no further than its Margaret Atwood-inspired overtones, and Katelyn Rebelo's promising stop-motion animation, to get a sense of its ambition. The Creators Project spoke to writer, director, and editor Chloé Aktas about her inspirations, working with her fellow students, and Love's aftermath in Fish Hook and Eye . Images courtesy Chloé Aktas The Creators Project: First off, what was your development process like? Chloé Aktas: My heart was broken at 16, as a result I began to look at the actualization of love and the “idea” of love in two different forms. I was idealistic and completely devastated when the relationship ended. We dated for almost a year-and-a-half. At the time, a good friend of mine shared with me Margaret Atwood’s poem, “You Fit Into Me”: You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye It stuck with me for a long time. As I grow older, I feel like the idea of love becomes more complex, more muddy than what we originally envisioned the concept to be when we were in high school. The idea that I should make a film about love actually hit me when I was a sophomore in university at NYU. I was falling asleep— in between the two states of being awake and dreaming. I had a visualization of a woman dragging a baseball bat across a chain-linked fence. I decided that this person was Love. I let this idea cogitate in my mind for a year—trying to think of how to tell this story, and more importantly, how to make it personal to my experience. It was important for me to make it personal, to mirror elements of my relationship. The scene where Dean and Ramona share shoes is a moment that I had in real life. Moments where they feel like they have nothing left to say to each other, when the thrill of falling in love is over, are moments I experienced. When it came to write the script, I cannot tell you how many terrible drafts I went through. It was really hard for me to think of how to tell this story. I thought of it through the eyes of a little boy while his parents are getting divorced, of all these crazy scenarios. I kept bringing all these bad drafts into class and forcing students to read them and give me advice, until I finally decided on Dean and Ramona. I wanted to make the story real to me. What was writing the voice-over with Lyndsey Bourne like? Lyndsey Bourne is one of the most talented writers I encountered at NYU. I had the privilege of attending a reading of an original play she wrote—her unique voice stuck with me. Originally, I had written the voice-over myself, but it wasn’t working with the cut of the film. I handed Lyndsey my original script and said, “This is what I’m trying to say, do it your way and take over.” We worked together to determine which dramatic beats I needed to hit, but I allowed her the freedom to mold it to her own voice. What were your visual inspirations per chapter? Love is a traditional subject, so I wanted to take bits of famous artworks and traditional cinematic styles and modify them similar to how I was modifying the audience’s concept of love. For each chapter, I chose a different photographer, painting, or film style from which to draw my inspiration. The beginning of the film has elements of traditional black-and-white cinema with nontraditional visual approaches. I wanted to combine Italian neorealism with the atypical film-of-photographs approach of La Jette. I wanted the audience to feel like they were witnessing fragmentations of film styles and of Love’s voice. For the second chapter, “Attraction,” I was influenced by the photography of Petra Collins. I love the way she uses bright, pink lights. Her photographs feel pieces of candy. It was important that the second chapter felt stylized, almost “too sweet,” like it was too good to be true. Similar to how Dean and Ramona have an instant physical and emotional attraction, but are unable to foresee the difficult times ahead, they relish a moment they think they will last forever. For the third chapter, “Attachment,” I was inspired by Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas. I wanted Love to be dressed in white in the scene where she’s “hooking” the posed Dean and Ramona together. Further, I wanted to redefine the work and give it a different meaning, similar to the audience’s new way of looking at love. Because of the grotesquery of the “hooking,” it was vital to have moments where the audience can breathe and take a break from the gore. This is where Katelyn Rebelo’s animation was vital. Her work shows Dean and Ramona becoming attached, but in a lighter and more poetic fashion. Who are your actors (more than names, of course) and how'd you get your crew together? I was not accepted to NYU the first time I applied, so the majority of my crew were friends I transferred in with from other schools. My director of Photography, Kevin Rios and I met in our first class. I was always impressed by his cinematic eye and wanted to incorporate his talent in this project. I got most of my crew just by bothering my close friends and convincing them to spend three days with me on this crazy project. I cannot say enough amazing things about my cast. Drita Kabashi, who plays Love, is a recent graduate from Tisch’s Drama Department. Casting Love was a challenging process because she had to embody badassery but also an innate sensitivity. Drita has an undeniably strong presence, but once you talk to her, you realize she is one of the most empathetic people you will meet. She had the challenging role of making a concept into an actual human being. Julia Christgau, who plays Ramona, is not only a ridiculously talented actress, she’s a teacher and a singer/songwriter residing in Brooklyn. It was a gift working with her because almost all of our rehearsals were improvised scenes. Watching Julia jump into the process was a great experience. She recommended Matteo Eckerle for the part of Dean. Matteo is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts Drama Program. I attended their High School Drama program, so we already had this connection we weren’t even aware of. Matteo is an extremely captivating and skilled actor. It was a great pleasure to work with him and watch his wheels turn. I have great confidence these actors will be super- famous in the future; I was just lucky enough to work with them. If you could go back in time, what would you change about the film? It’s funny you should ask this, because there was a time when this question was all I would think about. I had shot the film and was sitting down trying to edit it when I realized I was missing an emotional journey with Dean and Ramona. It wasn’t clear what they liked about each other in the beginning, nor how that all falls apart near the end. I essentially began to rewrite the film in post-production through voice-over, editing, animation, and black-and- white still photographs. I basically used every post-production tool I could. The original cut was around 12-15 minutes long. It took me months to finesse and find the rhythm it needed. Because I spent so long in post, I don’t think there’s anything I would change at this point. I know I’ll probably look back five years from now and say “duh, I would change so many things!” But for now, I’m fine with it. That’s where I was in life when I made it. Do you think Dean and Ramona end better off than if they'd have gone through with "unhooking"? First, I think it is important to understand that Love’s duty ended when Dean and Ramona fell in love with one another. As Love says in the film “staying in love, that’s your decision.” I think Dean and Ramona will always have disagreements, but I believe they have a more mature understanding by the end. Dean and Ramona will not make excuses for each other's faults, nor try to change them. They understand that being in love is more than just the “Kodak moments”; they understand the deeper friendship and acceptance involved. I also believe that Dean’s willingness to fight for Ramona in the end displays that he is willing to do this throughout their relationship. We humans are weird because we desire to be individuals, but also to have a deeper connection with someone else. In the end, I like to think that Dean and Ramona have accepted each other's individuality, allowing them to really forge their connection. What's next for you? Unfortunately, gainful employment has not yet materialized; but I keep the faith and I keep knocking on doors. I have so many ideas! I would love to make a web series and music videos. I also love acting and will keep auditioning and taking classes to hone my craft. One of my collaborators, Devon Leaver and I are preparing to start our own production company for music videos for emerging artists and digital branded content. We love music and want to work with up-and-coming artists to give them that creative visual approach they need to stand out. Click here to visit Chloé Aktas' website. Fish Hook & Eye credits: Directed, Edited and Written by Chloe Aktas Co-writers: Lyndsey Bourne and Drita Kabashi D. P. Kevin Rios AC- Joshua Haye Davey Producer: Lucy Ross Animation: Katelyn Rebelo AD-Bridget Greaney Art-Andrew Hebert Location Sound Mixer-Stephanie Eugene Post Sound Designer- Naava Feingold Music: Des Ark and Christopher Paul Stelling CAST Love-Drita Kabashi Ramona-Julia Christgau Dean-Matteo Eckerle Related: Visual Poem Turns the 7 Deadly Sins into Nudes Animated Short Explores Escaping a Father’s Cycle of Hatred 'Lights Out': The Horror Short That Could 2016-05-20 20:30 Emerson Rosenthal
21 Grace Coddington Launches Fragrance in London More Articles By Coddington partnered with Comme des Garçons Parfum on the launch of the fragrance. “I love Comme des Garçons and I love Rei [Kawakubo] and Adrian [Joffe] and what they stand for. When I approached Adrian with the idea of the perfume, it was all really spontaneous and what I appreciate is that when you work with Comme des Garçons, you deal with Adrian, you don’t have to go through a million middle men,” Coddington told WWD. The Vogue editor has had a busy schedule during her trip to the British capital. In addition to launching her perfume, she will be talking with her former assistant and current British Vogue fashion director Lucinda Chambers at the Vogue Festival, taking place this weekend. During the little time she had in between, she made sure to have a peek at Dover Street Market ’s new space, which she described as “extraordinary.” Inspired by childhood memories of her mother’s rose gardens, the fragrance has a light, floral essence with heart notes including Moroccan rose absolute, freesia and peach blossom. The fragrance also includes vetiver and cashmere wood and is topped with cardamom and pink peppercorn to add spice and bergamot oil, which adds a hint of citrus. Coddington worked alongside Christian Astuguevieille to create the fragrance, an artist who works across a variety of mediums from furniture to sculpture and accessories. Astuguevieille has been the creative director of Comme des Garçons Parfum since its inception in 1993. “I’m ashamed I can’t pronounce his surname, but traveling to Paris and working with him was a real delight,” said Coddington. The bottle — designed in collaboration with art director Fabien Baron — features a sleek, minimal design with a top shaped as the head of a cat, paying tribute to the editor’s pets and her well-documented love of the animal. After announcing that she will be stepping down from her full-time position at Vogue to become the magazine’s creative director at large, Coddington has been pursuing a number of other projects, including a documentary and a creative partnership with Tiffany & Co. “I’ve only been styling the campaign for Tiffany, I’m not designing jewelry just yet, but I want to keep pursuing different projects. I just don’t know what they are yet,” added Coddington. Grace by Grace Coddington retails at 70 pounds or $110 for a 50-ml. bottle and at 90 pounds or $145 for a 100-ml. bottle. It is available to purchase at Dover Street Market and at gracecoddington.com, which also includes sketches by Coddington and a narrative of the story behind the perfume. 2016-05-20 20:01 Natalie Theodosi
22 Artists Installing: Lee Kit Hong Kong artist Lee Kit spent the past two- and-a-half weeks in the gallery working on his site-specific installation for his first solo museum exhibition in the US, Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance slowly. The installation features new videos and paintings, as well as everyday objects sourced from Home Depot and IKEA: cabinets, lamps, rugs, chairs, […] 2016-05-20 23:40 By
23 Building Bridges: Symposium at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo This past weekend, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin hosted Building Bridges, a symposium reflecting upon curatorial practice and how curators move from educational to institutional contexts. The conference was held on occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Young Curators Residency Program (YCRP), which annually brings three non-Italian recent graduates of curating courses to […] 2016-05-20 20:59 By
24 rigorous standards and two years of extensive wind tunnel tests shape heroin's carbon fiber bicycle rigorous standards and two years of extensive wind tunnel tests shape heroin's carbon fiber bicycle rigorous standards and two years of extensive wind tunnel tests shape heroin’s carbon fiber bicycle all images courtesy of herion french luxury brand heroin is out to create a bicycle influenced by the ‘modulor’ – an architecture concept, that according to its inventor le corbusier, unlocks the secret of ideal proportions to achieve perfect harmony between humans and the space they live in. adhering to the same rigorous standards, founder marc simoncini and the design team have succeeded in combining raw materials and natural lines to craft an unique bicycle. the project was surrounded by leading experts in carbon, aerodynamics and morphological analysis to ensure every detail payed off. the heroin bike is assembled in france from parts manufactured by craftsmen in italy. driven by their passion for innovation, they have risen to the challenge of making a bicycle that stands out from the pack by reconciling performance and technical prowess with simplicity and style. attaining their goal took more than two years of hard work, during which they had to reinvent everything, from the type of carbon fiber to the shape of the tubes to the finished texture. each part was conceived, designed and developed with the tiniest details in mind. the bike went through several wind tunnel tests its stiffness/weight ratio is attributable to a unique manufacturing technique that combines tube-to-tube assembly with a monocoque frame. made entirely by hand with carbon fiber used primarily in the aerospace industry, each part is calibrated, fine-tuned and assembled according to a top secret process. the honeycombed texture is molded onto each tube in areas that are most exposed to air resistance. the resulting depression modify airflow, thus maximizing the bike’s aerodynamic profile. this discovery, which was made possible by years of work in wind tunnels: at just 12 mph the bicycle drag coefficient was boosted by almost 10%. a few pedal strokes are all it takes to sense the responsiveness of its wheel rims, which can tolerate up to 160 psi, despite weighing a mere 390 grams. even when the rider is barely underway, they will sense the full power of its ultra-light 750 gram frame. only 349 models will be made, each numbered, designed and tuned to perfectly fit the owner. each numbered, designed and tuned to perfectly fit the owner 2016-05-20 19:15 Piotr Boruslawski
25 Remix Grimes with Your Bare Hands Inside an Interactive Installation Image by Basile Shingu, courtesy of Moogfest Making music or sound art into an interactive experience is nothing new. REIFY’s 3D-printed sound sculptures can turn musical data into a material reality, while the Sand Noise Device , which debuted in 2014, allows users to make generative music by moving objects around an augmented reality sandbox. But with Realiti - Inside the Music of Grimes , a new interactive sound installation at Moogfest 2016, festival goers and fans are remixing Grimes’ track “Realiti”—with their bare hands. The interactive installation, powered by four Microsoft Kinects arranged at the space’s four corners, allows participants to manipulate the song by touching black netting which hangs from the ceiling to the floor. The movement of the hands against the mesh, which is illuminated by multi- colored LED lights, allows the four Kinect devices to pick up the motion and turn it into 3D data, which then allows people to remix the various elements of “Realiti.” Image by DJ Pangburn The effect is not so much visual as it is sonic. So the Realiti experience is, at its core, sound art, though of course festivalgoers look quite mesmerized while using their hands and bodies to collectively remix the track. "Moogfest is a destination for innovative creators to share new ideas, so it felt natural to bring Realiti - Inside the Music of Grimes to the festival,” says Amy Sorokas, Director of Brand Partnerships at Microsoft Brand Studios. “With this installation we're exploring the unexpected ways that technology can enhance the music experience and are hoping to inspire the community.” Image by Basile Shingu, courtesy of Moogfest Created by Microsoft’s Music x Technology program, the Kinect system was first used in DELQA , an installation at the New Museum in New York City, which invited the audience to participate in a collaborative experience of manipulating music by electronic artist Matthew Dear . Image by DJ Pangburn Realiti - Inside the Music of Grimes runs at Moogfest until May 22. Click here to check out more Music x Tech collaborations. Related: Insta of the Week: Grimes at the Guggenheim Brutalist Architecture Informs a Series of Sound Sculptures Berlin's Most Notorious Club Gets an Acoustic-Architectural Installation 2016-05-20 19:00 DJ Pangburn
26 Rafael Nadal Suits Up for Tennis More Articles By Ahead of the French Open, which is to begin its first round here on Sunday, tennis star Rafael Nadal faced off PSG defender Gregory van der Wiel in a friendly match of football tennis — sporting a new suit. “I’m more of a jeans-and-polo-shirt kind of guy,” Nadal laughed, “but this piece is really meant to practice sports in,” said the brand ambassador for Tommy Hilfiger Tailored, underwear and fragrance about his ultralight, ultraflexible two-piece suit in charcoal gray from the brand’s TH Flex collection. “It’s the first time I play like this,” he noted, before fighting himself to a final score of 10:10 on the makeshift court built inside Paris headquarters of Tommy Hilfiger . Van der Wiel, who had taken the lead towards the end, gave credit to his opponent. “I like the way he plays with his heart, he never gives up. When a ball is too far, he will go after it and save the point, and I appreciate that as a sportsman,” he noted, adding that the sartorial piece perhaps contributed to speed and agility. “I don’t wear so many suits in real life, but I actually don’t feel like I’m wearing one now either. It’s really comfortable,” he said, ripping his open like Superman. At the VIP tribune Malgosia Bela, Andrés Velencoso, Jérémie Bélingard, Marie-Ange Casta, Fabrice Santoro, Jérémie Elkaïm and Hugo Becker were snapping selfies with their iPhones. Bela came with her son Jozef, both passionate tennis players. “My son is better than me, but I’m left-handed like Nadal,” the model informed. Casta couldn’t believe she was about to meet her idol. “I have a lot of admiration for this kind of athletes. People often don’t realize how much they sacrifice to be where they are.” Bélingard, a ballet dancer at the Paris Opera, said what he admires about Nadal is “the way he puts his personality aside.” “It is pretty much what we do as dancers, so I am very sensitive to that kind of concentration. To get to a point of precision, you have to put your feelings away, and I see that with him, I like it,” said Bélingard, who is about to premier a solo he choreographed for himself, called “Parade for the End of the World,” at the Maison de la Culture du Japon next weekend. Does he also take to the tennis court some time? “I’m a surfer,” he grinned. The limited-edition TH Flex Rafael Nadal capsule collection is available through Tommy Hilfiger stores, on tommy.com and at select retailers. Made of virgin wool with 1 percent spandex, the suits go for 550 euros, or $616 at current exchange. 2016-05-20 18:59 Paulina Szmydke
27 Tony King: Forget ‘E-commerce,’ Just Call It ‘Commerce’ As e-commerce continues its explosive growth across the retail , luxury and fashion apparel market , companies and brands are scrambling to keep up. It’s a daunting task that requires a keen sense of the impact and influence of social media and online consumer behavior — in particular, how shoppers respond to brands online. It also requires producing a lot of digital content as well as having e-commerce platforms that make it easier for people to shop and buy. Meanwhile companies still have to skillfully operate and merchandise their physical stores. And do so in a seemingly seamless way from a consumer-facing perspective. For Tony King, founder and creative director at King & Partners , the challenge for many companies is to create a thoughtfully integrated online and in-store presence that strengthens the attributes of its brand or brands, attracts new consumers and nurtures existing ones. King, who is considered an early pioneer of luxury e-commerce (having launched gucci.com in 2000), works with brands such as Kenneth Cole, Carolina Herrera, Elie Tahari, Mulberry and Mario Testino, among many others, to develop digital flagship sites with fully integrated e-commerce platforms. Here, King discusses digital commerce, the importance of narratives and why the moment a shopper becomes a buyer is so critical. Shoppers have a tendency to shy away from the unknown, so make them feel comfortable by highlighting customers’ positive experiences across your social media pages. And once shoppers do become buyers, be sure to tap into their shopping habits and cater future experiences to fit their preferences. I’d always had an interest in pairing design with technology, but my experience at Gucci really opened my eyes to the need for a solid e- commerce platform that would work well for fashion brands and could double up as a CMS for brand content as well. Right now, my role is as much about creative ideas and content creation as it is about consulting our clients on technology products, languages and solutions. 2016-05-20 18:41 Arthur Zaczkiewicz
28 Topman Taps Gosha Rubchinskiy to Shoot Summer 2016 Look Book More Articles By RELATED STORY: Gosha Rubchinskiy Takes Russian Aesthetic Global >> The images shot by the Comme des Garçons protégé were styled by the Topman team. Rubchinskiy has gained a serious following for his post-Soviet aesthetic and his fans include A$AP Rocky. RELATED STORY: Gosha Rubchinskiy Men’s RTW Fall 2016 >> In the book, models are wearing looks including plaid suits, printed button- down shirts, patterned trousers and washed denim. Rubchinskiy and Topman both declined to comment on the project. Rubchinski is scheduled to be the men’s wear guest designer at the Pitti Uomo trade show that will be held in Florence from June 14 to 17. The designer, photographer and filmmaker will showcase his spring 2017 collection with a presentation, and will stage a photo project. RELATED STORY: Gosha Rubchinskiy, Fausto Puglisi to Make Debuts at Pitti Uomo >> 2016-05-20 18:40 Lorelei Marfil
29 Museum of Arts and Design Hosts ‘Garden of Earthy Delights’ Gala Any excuse to don a flower crown, and the fashion crowd is in. Thursday night was no exception, as the Museum of Arts and Design threw its annual gala, this year sponsored by Roger Vivier and themed “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Guests including Sofia Sanchez de Betak, Lily Kwong, Tali Lennox, Martha Hunt, Britt Maren, Kate Foley, Harley Viera-Newton, Cleo Wade, Indre Rockefeller, Arden Wohl and Leandra Medine gathered inside the Americas Society Upper East Side town house, done up by floral boutique group Putnam & Putnam with a tree constructed of laurel branches as well as tables ripe with cherries, mushrooms and poppies. “I lost my boyfriend,” said a flower-free Wohl, wiggling out of a photo op. Past her, a group of gentlemen in tuxedos, freshly descended by the downtown banks, discussed their television habits (unsurprisingly, the bros like “Game of Thrones”). Harlem-based, Egyptian-born artist Ghada Amer was the honoree for the evening. “I think I understand why they like my work,” she said of MAD, “because I always work with crafts and low art, high art, all of those issues. Why should there be a design museum and an art museum, what’s the difference? What’s art and what’s design? How do you separate this?” Amer is known, and self-identifies, as a feminist artist. “I deal with a lot of women’s issues — for me it’s very important to empower women,” she said. “I mainly deal with issues of desire and love. I always have focused on women’s issues. It was always acceptable for myself.” And feminism’s recent revival into pop culture’s conscience has had little sway on Amer. “It’s not about what’s in or what’s out; for me, it’s more about survival,” she added. “It’s not about fashion. Actually, I’m not even dealing with it – they are dealing with me.” 2016-05-20 18:35 Leigh Nordstrom
30 Large Scale Prints Blur the Lines Between Painting and Photography Listen To Your Universe, Rey Parlá. Courtesy of the artist and happylucky no.1 Unique fragments of illusory worlds dazzle the eyes in Rey Parlá 's mysterious Scratch | Graphs , currently on display at Brooklyn’s happylucky no.1. The cosmic works are part of the artist's solo show, Borderless , a new body of work consisting of unique c-prints inspired by experimental filmmaking and the histories of photography and painting. Each Scratch | Graph begins with Parlá painting onto a large format film negative. Selected for their incredibly high resolution, these negatives are processed and printed in a way that enables their unique abstract output. One of the most striking elements of this body of work is how incredibly different each piece is from the next. Borderless could easily pass as an abstract group show, yet each work is the result of one artist’s brain. Endless Distance, Rey Parlá. Courtesy of the artist and happylucky no.1 In conversation with The Creators Project, Rey Parlá, who is the brother of painter and installation artist José Parlá , maintains an air of secrecy regarding his process: “The paintings are processed in various ways; my methods are borderless,” the artist quickly states, enigmatically referring to the title of the exhibition. Although it is difficult to deduce the entirety of his methods simply by looking at the works, errant geometric marks and lines often appear throughout the c-prints, suggesting etching or mark-making onto the negatives. The rest is shrouded in a veil of artistry and mystery. Although he is understandably covert about his process, the artist is eager to explain why he’s called the show Borderless : “The title for the show is a metaphor for the multiplicity factor inherent in photography, which was born out of experimentation and has continued to sporadically germinate in all forms, methods, processes, and directions,” Parlá explains. “The title is a double entendre on the medium and the times we live in, beyond many other ideas.” Visitors during the opening reception. Courtesy of Zach Hilty & BFA.com Shaping Lines into Light, Rey Parlá. Courtesy of the artist and happylucky no.1 KAWS, José Parlá, Rey Parlá, and JR at the opening reception. Courtesy of Zach Hilty & BFA.com To try your hand at divining Rey Parlá’s process, visit Borderless at happylucky no.1 in Brooklyn through May 29. Check out more of the artist’s mixed media works here. Related: Meet the Soft-Sculpture Artist Making Beaded Paintings | City of the Seekers Abstract Animation Created by Painting On Rotating Tin Cans A Fever Dream Set to the Hand-Painted Films of Stan Brakhage 2016-05-20 18:30 Andrew Nunes
31 Retailer Alex Eagle Lands in London’s Soho More Articles By The new store on Lexington Street is 3,500 square feet over two floors and is located in a former industrial space not far from Oxford and Regent streets. “Moving to Soho is the chance to expand and to move on from the shop front and pioneer a new kind of store,” Eagle told WWD. Leaving behind the three-story, traditional shopfront she had in South Kensington, Eagle has fully embraced the concept store model and is hoping the space will be seen as both a creative hub as shopping opportunity. Alongside the fashion, Alex Eagle’s own-brand products, art, furniture and curiosities, there is also a studio and a showroom, and the store will also operate as an events and gallery space. The idea is similar to the boutique she created on the ground floor of Soho House in Berlin, where the clothes share an open space with a café, hair salon and bookshop. Eagle designed the London store herself, using Dinesen Douglas flooring where every plank is unique; Jean Prouvé shutters, and Erco lighting. A vintage chandelier hangs from the ceiling and all furniture on display is for sale. She designed the rails, fixtures and jewelry cabinet with Benchmark. “The way we shop is changing; Just fashion isn’t enough,” she said. “People want an edit across everything in their lives: Clothes, homeware, furniture, books, food and music. With so much instantly available online, they crave a more inspiring environment when they shop in store. Somewhere they can spend time and relax without the pressure to buy.” The fashion brands stocked include Lemaire, Vita Kin, Pippa Holt, Rosetta Getty, Catherine Quin and Vilshenko. Among the accessories brands are Del Rio London , Anndra Neen, Nathalie Trad, Prism , Thierry Lasry and Le Kasha, while fine jewelry highlights include Rosa de la Cruz, Irene Danilovich and Susan Foster. The beauty lineup features Cosmetics27, Mauli Rituals, Mermaid Perfume and June Ainscough. An e-commerce site is just weeks away. 2016-05-20 18:21 Julia Neel
32 Nannette de Gaspé Beaubien Launches Face and Body Masks at Selfridges More Articles By Youth Revealed Restorative Techstile Masques come in five varieties, targeting eyes, mouth, face, neck and hands. They go on dry and aim to deliver active ingredients that penetrate multiple layers of the skin. De Gaspé Beaubien said the “disruptive technology” of the masks involves the creation of a reservoir under the skin that continues to slow release ingredients for six to eight hours after it’s been administered. Users can wash their hands and face without damaging the efficacy and they don’t have to reapply. She said biomimetic technology is behind the delivery system. De Gaspé Beaubien said while traditional wet masks are made up mostly of water and glycerine, the collection’s includes 87 percent active ingredients and emollients aimed at reducing wrinkles and improving hydration after four applications over four days. “The concept behind the brand is wearable technology meets luxury cosmetics,” she said. “My vision is to empower women with cosmetic solutions that they can use on their terms.” The patented Biomimetic MicroVector technology is owned by Biomod Concepts, in which she is an investor, and her original plan was to market the technology to cosmetics companies. Then she met Selfridges ’ buying and merchandising director Sebastian Manes who convinced her to launch a brand. The masks range in price from 60 pounds, or $88, to 85 pounds, or $124, and are exclusive to Selfridges and selfridges.com. Come Christmas she plans to launch a Pump & Lift mask targeting breasts and buttocks. It’s currently in stability testing with the next phase being clinical studies. There is also a needle-free mesotherapy-like masque in development that uses the dry textile technology to deliver the treatment to the deeper layers of the skin. 2016-05-20 18:16 Stephanie Hirschmiller
33 Google Creates Levi’s Jacket With Conductive Yarn Today, Google and Levi’s reveal the first garment that was created through Project Jacquard, a partnership to develop interactive denim woven with conductive fibers. At Google’s developer conference, the two iconic San Francisco companies — one bred through the gold rush, the other through the digital age — shared the Levi’s Commuter Trucker Jacket, designed for the urban cyclist. As Levi Strauss & Co. vice president of global product innovation Paul Dillinger said, it was important to create something useful with this technology. “Unless there’s a good product, there’s no point.” The jacket’s sleeve includes conductive yarn woven into the fabric, made on a loom just as any other fabric, and allows the wearer to control and connect to services such as music and maps. The wearer can control the functionality with swipes and taps to touch-enabled areas on the wrist portion of the jacket’s sleeve, and uses an app to program functionality. The electronics are stored in a removable smart tag; everything else is washable and looks and acts like a traditional denim jacket. The Jacquard yarn combines thin, metallic alloys with yarns — cotton, polyester or silk — and is strong enough to be woven on industrial looms. In other words, don’t call this a “wearable.” “We think of it as a smart garment — a connected garment,” explained Google’s Ivan Poupyrev, a technical program lead at the company’s Advanced Technology and Projects, or ATAP, division. “We were thinking about enhancing and extending the functionality of a garment, with the same materials and same techniques as any normal Levi’s jacket.” The jacket will arrive in Levi’s stores and web site in the spring of 2017, and although the price will be slightly above the average jacket, it will be within the range of Levi’s current product assortment, Dillinger said. Although this is the first iteration of what is possible, Poupyrev said he is excited about the possibilities and what developers might create. Google has not yet shared the developer kit that will enable creators to apply their own designs and functionality to the technology, as the first focus, he said, was creating a jacket that could stand on its own as a great product. The partnership was introduced at last year’s developer conference, where the two shared their vision of creating garments that acted as a platform . “This isn’t a launch, it’s a platforming opportunity,” Dillinger said. “It becomes a home to new forms and applications that we haven’t thought of yet.” Ultimately, objects with fabrics, from clothes to furniture, can become interactive surfaces. “We want to make a point that it’s a new category of product,” Poupyrev said. “And this is the first product that is emerging.” 2016-05-20 17:45 Maghan McDowell
34 See Highlights From London’s Art16 Related Events Art16 2016 Venues Art16 LONDON — Now through May 22, visitors to the city’s Olympia exhibition center in Kensington can treat themselves to a visual feast with art from around the world, as Art16 returns for its fourth edition. While it may not have the instant name recognition like Frieze or Masterpiece London, Art16 makes up for it with a formidable pedigree. The event was founded in 2013 by art fair giants Sandy Angus and Tim Etchells, who have worked together to create major fairs such as Sydney Contemporary, Art International Istanbul, and Art Central Hong Kong, as well as the former Art HK, which was purchased by Art Basel in 2011. Notable this year is the slightly rearranged and reconfigured layout, designed once again by London’s Stiff + Trevillion. Somehow, the 100-plus exhibitor booths don’t feel crammed together, and the Olympia’s domed glass roof allows some natural sunlight to come into the space (that is, when the terminally rainy city’s weather allows it). On the second floor, two special sections give young galleries — often prevented from appearing at art fairs due to astronomical booth costs — a place to shine. London First and Emerge provide a setting for them to gain a foothold; the former affords galleries younger than 10 years who have not shown in London a booth, while the latter, curated by Ikon Gallery’s Jonathan Watkins, grants the same opportunity to galleries less than six years old. All this, plus many non-profit organizations and a selection of small cafes and a pop-up restaurant, makes touring Art16 a pleasant and less stressful experience than many other art fairs. 2016-05-20 17:36 Danielle Whalen
35 Schilling Takes On FiDi Lunch Business From Former Tenement Building More Articles By Michelin-starred chef Eduard Frauneder is banking on the revitalization of the Financial District to support his newest restaurant. Opening Monday, Schilling is taking a similar approach as his other restaurants — Austrian cuisine coupled with whimsical, bright design, this time set in a historical location. “It’s the last existing tenement building in this area. It has its own Facebook page,” Frauneder said of the intimate space, which is located a few blocks from the World Trade Center buildings. His team took great care in restoring the space from its previously run-down state — they raised the ceiling, exposing barn wood and laid free some of the building’s original features, such as steel columns. “I was looking down here, this is so densely built up there’s not a lot of small commercial space,” he remarked of finding the location. “Everything’s either extremely expensive or extremely large.” The restaurant features the Austrian staples found at his other restaurants: schnitzel, spätzle and the popular Freud burger. The menu is focused on Southern Austria and weaves in a Mediterranean angle, with a few lighter fish dishes. They are catering to the neighborhood with a direct play toward the lunchtime crowd and after work business. Their cocktail program was crafted by his team at The Third Man, and will offer a new take on classics, as well as German beers and a wine list of mostly Austrian wines. Layout-wise, the restaurant mirrors Edi & The Wolf in the East Village, his first restaurant, but is better proportioned and a lot brighter. The front of the restaurant features a glass-paneled garage door that opens onto the sidewalk, and a garden in the back is still in the works. “We did not want something too cavey, too, on the dark side,” he noted. “We wanted to make it a really happy space.” The restaurant is located a few blocks from the World Trade Center towers, and Frauneder is hoping Schilling becomes a go-to for the creative industries that have been filling up the area, as well as the financial institutions nearby. “Do I want this to be a cafeteria for Goldman Sachs? Absolutely,” he remarked, while also calling out the big publishing houses that have moved downtown. The Schilling name is a direct nod to its neighborhood: not only the original Austrian currency, shillings have also been ubiquitous monies worldwide. The Financial District has seen other big-names move in , with many to follow: Eately, Todd English, April Bloomfield and Keith McNally all have projects in the works. “It’s all new territory. We will see what’s in for us,” remarked Frauneder. While many restaurants are taking a massive approach, Frauneder has always eyed the smaller, jewel box restaurant setting. “Listen, you know what they say in the restaurant business: small restaurants small problems, big restaurants big problems,” he said. Frauneder, who grew up in Austria and got his start working in his family’s pastry shop and bakery, originally moved to New York in August of 2011, a few weeks before the September 11 terrorist attacks. “At one point I was thinking, what am I doing here, do I want to be here? This is like despair and destruction,” he recalled. He ended up staying, and has now found himself part of the neighborhood’s revitalization. “Literally 15 years afterward, I’m opening a place down here. Full circle.” 2016-05-20 17:26 Kristen Tauer
36 Is Back with a Vengeance: This Week in Comics #18 Panel from Civil War II #0. Illustrated by Olivier Coipel and Justin Ponsor. Photo courtesy of Marvel Comics. Screencap via the author. The big release this week is, without a doubt, Civil War II. The original Civil War line of Marvel comics asked a big, important question that hadn’t been asked much since Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Namely, should superheroes be held accountable for their actions? But it also raised an even bigger question: Do we want to see superheroes outside of action? After Watchmen , many comics thought they needed to hunker down and bet big on characters with lives, with families, with drug problems, and so on. But the original Civil War , released 20 years after Watchmen , focused specifically on the effect a hero’s actions could have on others. We didn’t follow Captain America home, we saw what happened to the people he punched. This was a severe shift in comics, and it changed the way readers thought about the medium. Will Civil War II have the same impact? Also reviewed: DC’s revival of old Hanna-Barbera characters, and two very well-illustrated indies. Cover for Civil War II #0. Illustrated by Olivier Coipel and Justin Ponsor. Photo courtesy of Marvel Comics. The original Civil War was about the fallout after a group of young, inexperienced superheroes accidentally made a supervillain explode next to an elementary school, killing hundreds of children. From there, Tony Stark and the government decided it was time for self-regulation, and for superheroes to, effectively, surrender their secret identities and become federal agents. Captain America said, “Hell no,” and they drew lines in the sand and fought. This Civil War takes place years after the original, keeping pace with real time. Though this is only Issue #0, a set-up issue to get everyone up to speed, readers can already see the big question that will tear apart the Marvel world: If you could see into the future to prevent disaster, should you? This is elevated writing. Brian Michael Bendis is at his best here asking big questions and promising no big answers. A must-read for Marvel fans, who shouldn’t worry about not feeling “caught up.” Cover for Hanna-Barbera: Future Quest #1. Illustrated by Evan “Doc” Shaner. Photo courtesy of DC Comics. Here’s a comic that will freak out and geek out a very specific type of cartoon fan. Hanna-Barbera, the 59-year-old production company that created classics like The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, The Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound , and more, were also famous for their action cartoons. Future Quest blends some of their best action heroes, creating a world where Jonny Quest, Space Ghost , and Birdman can all interact. This is a bold, brash, colorful, exciting new work for these old properties, and fans of retro-futurism and vintage superheroes should definitely pay attention. Cover for Winken, Blinken and Nod #1. Illustrated by Tim Prettyman. Photo courtesy of Dave Cain Comics. Winken, Blinken, and Nod takes its title from " Wynken, Blynken, and Nod ," a 1889 poem by Eugene Field about three children who sail off into the sky on a wooden shoe. This comic sees Winken and his brother Blinken as fishermen on a shoe-ship, and Nod as a thief on the run after stealing a precious memory. It’s a storybook-styled plot, and the artwork has a wonderful, black-outlined, blocky look to it. The real fun of this comic is the pace, which is like a mix between a classic fairy tale and Looney Tunes on speed. The frenetic comic is unabashedly fun, and highly recommended for readers with a penchant for chaos. Cover for Revenger and the Fog #2. Illustrated by Charles Forsman. Photo courtesy of Oily. Revenger and the Fog #2 is an anarchic, beautiful, and nasty little comic about a woman named Revenger and her crew, The Fog. In the past, Revenger starred in her own solo series set in the 1980s, where she wandered around and helped the downtrodden. This comic takes place before she went solo wandering, and is about how The Fog ended up splitting up. Hearkening back to some of the grimiest comics of coming out of the 1980s indie scene ( Marshal Law comes to mind), Revenger and the Fog isn’t for everyone, but it will be the only comic for some. Find these comics at your local comic store, or shop online at digital retailers like Comixology . What were you reading this week? Let us know on Twitter or Instagram . Related: This Week in Comics #17 This Week in Comics #16 This Week in Comics #15 2016-05-20 17:25 Giaco Furino
37 Kiersey Clemons Quick Takes: Pledging and Halle Berry Kiersey Clemons proves her comedic chops in “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising,” her first in a string of breakout films this year. Clemons joins the cast of Seth Rogen, Zac Efron, Rose Byrne, Chloë Grace Moretz and Selena Gomez in the follow-up, out today, to the 2014 runaway hit “Neighbors.” After getting her start in Disney Channel programs, she transitioned out of teen TV with roles in indie hit “Dope” and Amazon’s “Transparent.” Here, her takes on Greek life, working with Halle Berry and hip-hop. 2016-05-20 17:13 Leigh Nordstrom
38 Vans Launches House of Vans Summer Series in Brooklyn with Art Exhibit More Articles By Starting this month the House of Vans summer series, House Parties, is back for six shows at its Greenpoint, Brooklyn, music venue and skate park. The series of shows, which are all free, will feature 18 different acts including Quicksand, Neon Indian, Rae Sremmurd, Battles, Jon Hopkins and more. As part of the series and its 50th birthday, Vans , which was purchased by VF Corp. in 2009, has partnered with different artists to transform the Brooklyn event space with an art exhibit, curated by Brandon Stosuy and Bradford Nordeen, that honors Vans’ heritage along with New York punk and hip-hop influences. The exhibit includes a wall dedicated to concert flyers and posters colored in shades of neon by Scott Ewalt, a light installation with programmed LEDs by Ken Farmer, a structure comprised of vintage boom boxes built by Bayeté Ross Smith, and a video collage of the New York youth scene that documents early hip-hop and late Seventies punk and hardcore rock by Jill Reiter. A large mural showcases graffiti from artists including Wane One, Stash, and Nick and Matt Z, as well as some who remain anonymous. According to Nordeen the artists will update their murals over the course of the concert series. “We wanted to engage people who were engaged in the scene,” Nordeen said. The concert series began last night and will run through July 6. 2016-05-20 17:09 Aria Hughes
39 Sophia Webster Unveils First Stand-Alone Boutique in London More Articles By At 124 Mount Street, Webster will be down the road from the store belonging to her former boss Nicholas Kirkwood, for whom she once worked as a design assistant. The store is also near a host of other London brands including Simone Rocha, Christopher Kane and Roksanda. The 400-square-foot space will stock Webster’s seasonal footwear collections, her recently launched handbag range, as well as dedicated evening, children’s and bridal collections. The designer, who was announced as the winner of the BFC/Vogue designer fashion fund earlier this year, designed much of the store herself, using virtual 3-D technology provided by StudioXAG, which is located in East London. Her colorful, spirited aesthetic is evident in every aspect of the new space: A neon butterfly decorates the front window, paying tribute to the designer’s popular Chiara pumps that have butterfly appliqués while pastel pink and purple footstools are scattered around the store. Flamingo sculptures decorate the ceiling. Among the highlights is a bespoke, blown-glass chandelier created in collaboration with the Italian artisan Rocco Borghese. Webster was meticulous about every aspect of her store, curating the playlist with her longtime collaborator DJ Katy B, who also created a playlist that customers can listen to while shopping online. The boutique aims to be an extension of the designer’s established e- commerce business, enhancing customer experience and providing synergy when it comes to stock. “I have long dreamt of a physical destination for those who already follow and support my brand online and through social media so they can truly step into my world,” said the designer. “Having a permanent retail outlet will bring me an insightful new connection with my customers, and the process of designing the interior has helped me to refine and create a blueprint for future shops and spaces.” 2016-05-20 16:59 Natalie Theodosi
40 tadao ando's remodeled setouchi aonagi hotel opens with the growth of the setouchi international art festival, the matsuyama area of japan has become very popular in recent years — attracting visitors from across the world. within this region, a boutique luxury hotel with just seven guest rooms has opened, overlooking the seto inland sea. designed by tadao ando, the building was once an art museum before the renowned architect oversaw its recent remodeling and transformation into the setouchi aonagi. the hotel seeks to create an atmosphere of ‘minimal luxury’, where all of the building’s unnecessary interior furnishings have been conscientiously removed. alongside the seven guest suites, the hotel offers a range of exclusive amenities, including: two pools, a hot spring jacuzzi, a sauna, a dining room, and an art gallery. in addition, a further pool, (known as the ‘the cave’), can be reserved for private use. the restaurant offers the best of local cuisine, while access to a private golf course is also provided. see more photos of the luxury setouchi aonagi hotel below. the site was once an art museum before ando oversaw its recent remodeling the hotel contains just seven suites the matsuyama region of japan has become very popular in recent years the hotel seeks to create an atmosphere of ‘minimal luxury’ the restaurant offers the best in local cuisine ando’s trademark use of concrete is apparent throughout the hotel all of the building’s unnecessary furnishings have been removed a waterfall serves as a dramatic backdrop for diners below 2016-05-20 16:34 Philip Stevens
41 Time Inc. Adds Layer to Executive Structure, Taps MaryAnn Bekkedahl as President of Fashion and Luxury In order to speed its e-commerce plans, Time Inc. has added MaryAnn Bekkedahl to the role of president of its fashion and luxury group. Bekkedahl, who joins the company from e-commerce ad-tech startup Keep Holdings, will begin June 1 and report to executive vice president Evelyn Webster. As group president, Bekkedahl will oversee InStyle , StyleWatch, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure and Departures. Charles Kammerer, who served as group publisher of Real Simple, Food & Wine, Cooking Light, My Recipes and Health since May 2015, has been appointed president of lifestyle. His portfolio will now include Real Simple, Cozi, Cooking Light, MyRecipes, Health, Sunset and Coastal Living. Time, Fortune, Money, Essence and Southern Living, and he will continue to report to Webster. Time Inc. said that both group publishers will be responsible for overseeing all aspects of their respective brands’ development, including revenue diversification, digital and video growth and the expansion of new products and services, as well as managing the core business. The editor and publisher of each brand will now report to their president, which denotes a slight change in reporting structure. “This new structure will enable us to significantly accelerate many of the activities we have underway across our portfolio as we transform our business,” said Webster. “MaryAnn and Charlie are talented, proven leaders who will unlock the incredible potential of our brands and the audiences they serve.” In 2010, Bekkedahl cofounded Keep Holdings, a product development firm serving marketers. The company’s first product was AdKeeper, an ad-tech solution designed to let consumers decide when and where to interact with digital advertising. Before that, the executive spent 17 years at Rodale Inc. where she had various jobs, including six years as executive vice president and group publisher, overseeing Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Prevention and Runner’s World. 2016-05-20 16:16 Alexandra Steigrad
42 American Impressionist Gardens at the NYBG Stepping into the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) this spring and summer, visitors may feel as though they've fallen into an Impressionist landscape painting. That's the goal, at least, of " Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas ," which aims to recreate the lush gardens and landscapes that inspired American Impressionists, who dared, like their European counterparts, to paint en plein air. A horticultural team led by Francisca Coelho has planted tens of thousands of flowers, with a wide variety of blooms including peonies, morning glories, and poppies, as well as less familiar varieties such as tree mallows, gillyflowers, and toadflax. The exhibition offers a dramatic contrast to this past summer 's " Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life ," which offered a more desert-like environment, filled with the spiky cacti Frida Kahlo planted at her Mexico City home, the Casa Azul. This year's selections were based on sites in the Northeast where artists painted around the turn of the century, and are accompanied by a recreation of a New England cottage, with a welcoming front porch from where visitors can sit and admire the colorful views. The flower display is accompanied by over 20 Impressionist paintings and sculptures by John Singer Sargent , Childe Hassam , William Merritt Chase , and their contemporaries. The canvases feature such gardens as that of Florence Griswold 's early 20th century artist colony in Old Lyme, Connecticut, where residents were encouraged to help take care of the grounds as they were to paint. Coelho also turned to writer and painter Celia Thaxter's home in Appledore Island, Maine; Maria Oakey and Thomas Wilmer Dewing's rose garden in Cornish, New Hampshire; and John Twachtman's woodland-filled property in Greenwich, Connecticut, to best capture the look and feel of the landscapes that captivated American Impressionists. See more views of the paintings and the flower installation below. "Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas" will be on view at the New York Botanical Garden, May 14–September 11, 2015. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-05-20 16:11 Sarah Cascone
43 Artist Creates 'Rape Representation' Video Australian-based artist Sophia Hewson has released a challenging new video that is a "self-orchestrated rape representation," according to her artist's statement. The three-minute video, titled are you ok bob? , is currently on view at Mars Gallery in Melbourne. It shows Hewson staring dead ahead into the camera, while a stranger she invited into her apartment is largely off-screen during the sexual encounter, with only his arms and hands entering the frame. Hewson, who is 31, described the work to the Sydney Morning Herald as "militant feminist" piece. "The raped woman is nearly always depicted with her face downcast and her eyes averted," wrote Hewson in her artist's statement. Instead, she stares boldly back, confronting the viewer. The work recalls Emma Sulkowicz 's Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol ("This Is Not a Rape"), in which she filmed a sexual encounter in her dorm that turned violent. The artist rose to prominence through her senior thesis project, Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight , where she protested Columbia University's handling of her sexual assault complaint. The question of who is taking of advantage of who is also present in Hewson's work. "I've never had rape fantasy and I didn't enjoy making the work physically," Hewson told the Independent , acknowledging that some viewers may find the video disturbing. A Facebook use r wrote in response, " Rape is not an artistic medium. " Nevertheless, the artist thinks the taboo around sexual assault needs to be overcome. "Perhaps the question is not 'who is using whom in this situation,' but 'why are we forced to choose at all?'" Sophia Hewson's " are you ok bob " is on view at Mars Gallery, 7 James Street, Windsor, Melbourne, Australia, May 19–June 2, 2016. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-05-20 16:07 Sarah Cascone
44 On the Gaze in the Era of Visual Salamis Looking at my.pdf library I recently came across Monte Burch's The Complete Guide to Sausage Making , a book that clearly—and perhaps morbidly—describes some key features of this ancient and mysterious practice. Throughout the reading of this document I somehow realized that I had been learning not only about sausage making as such, but also the mode of existence of some digital images, with whom I coexist. How is such a leapfrog possible? In Burch’s guide, a sausage can be made by grinding and mixing “scraps and trimmings” and, interestingly enough, by also maintaining a prudent period of “seasoning and curing.” The meat’s encounter with a systematic process of recombination and extrusion, say, configures the sausages. Moreover, it is precisely their sausageness that allows us to access them according to polarized protocols: on the one hand, sausage production is analog and continuous—the more meat we add to the grinder, the larger the sausage is. Conversely, its access is developed according to a discrete, digital-like protocol: the slice. Shaping images with our digital gaze An image is no longer a singular thing, but rather it becomes dispersed , distributing its existence along paths, iterations, periplus, and versions provided by both humans and systems. In this sense, images are trajectories through media, devices…and places. Visual characteristics (namely; colors, sizes, textures, compositions, effects, texts, icons, and typographies) are subjected to a large number of recursive and combinatory operations; a memetic modality of some images that supersedes the very notion of internet meme. The world s largest sausage in Kobasicijada Festival (Turija-Serbia) in 2012 This implies that in order to access an image’s narrative, we have to retrace some of its extruded, threadlike trajectories. Our attention is not focused on a singular image, but is distributed along the image’s path. Since the versioning of an image is the image, the increasing accumulation of similar images is nurturing distributed ways of seeing. Slicing images’ sausageness Sausage-like elongation describes the way that images accumulate, but this redundancy of content is not merely piled up, but follows an extruded trajectory that creates threads of dispersed versions. Since any given sausage is not only a sausage, but also the expression of its formal mode of production, what is the shape of our engagement with it? If either sausage and image are being distributed across a potentially endless series of elongated versions, we can only access images by slicing them. Slicing Gucci Mane Capturing the environment with our digital devices creates a discrete, framed incision in our surrounding milieu. Hence, further captures within the digital realm (for instance, by copying, tagging or storing digital files) prefigure the apparition of what I would like to denominate image-slices. These slices have also something that really interests me; an intriguing ability to create their own negative imprint in the form of memory. They remind us that their status as slices conceals the almost invisible process of how our digital gaze deprives images of their own visuality in favor of their memory. If the latter is defined here as a time-based measure of the image's shifting or fading along a trajectory, visuality presents the limits of an image; the contours and deformations produced by its elongation. The shape that a sausage acquires during its extrusion—being limited or arrested by its mold or configuration process—posits visuality as the imprint of energy. The visual cohesion of images is therefore based on modulations; the development of deformations through time. As any salami knows, its own depletion measures its extinction, but its memory increases as the salami diminishes. By day seven in the fridge, the last extant sausage piece compresses a huge amount of time within a narrow meat scrap, which indicates, as if metadata were present, its very process of dwindling. The accumulation of image-slices made by our digital gaze is not indiscriminate; it overlaps and compresses nuggets of visuality seeking an array of coagulated slices, relating images by means of mnemonic paths: spaces, affections, repetition, and desire. In doing so, digital images are increasingly becoming an ancillary verification of memory's circulation through systems and users. Accelerated emblems: when memory eats image The circulation of the digital image is propelled through versioning, elongation, and indexical techniques which optimize access to it by reducing the importance of its immediate visuality. After a certain point, memory’s circulation through systems and users becomes the image’s primary index, pointing to its internal coherence rather than an external frame of reference. Certain images can therefore intertwine themselves toward total memory, devoid of any content apart from their own possible trajectories. Undermining visuality, from Egypt to my smartphone. In an attempt to domesticate the Egyptian landscape during the Napoleonic campaign in the 18 th Century, Nicolas Jacques Conté invented an engraving machine that by virtue of its accuracy brought engineers the possibility of describing the landscape in the most objective way. The free movement of the hand was replaced by up to forty-two possible sequences of lines that guaranteed not only a higher degree of precision, but a faster rendering speed. In the monumental Description de l'Égypte it is possible to find examples of these line patterns; rectangular images that visualize nothing but the expression of their mechanical production. Back in the 21 st century, this undermined type of image reappears in the screen of my smartphone. Whenever I swipe too fast over Google Images’ search results, the accelerated flux of images surpasses by far the device’s ability to display them all. I no longer see images, but an array of plain- colored rectangles. How does this situation correlate with our subtractive digital gaze? My contention is that our digital gaze wants to subsume image within a larger structure of memory. If memory is based on delay—or hysteresis—then our digital gaze must decelerate the image's elongation in order to situate it within memory. In the era of visual salamis, we are no longer pursuing images, but image-slices that allow us to reconstruct their possible trajectories. This implies that the completion of memory is based on the limitation, almost the disappearance of image’s visuality. From a computational standpoint, I imagine that this process erases the constructed distinction between software and hardware to the extent of making both indistinguishable. An example of Core Rope Memory contained in an Olympia 15 digit calculator, circa 1971 The pursuit of memory not only undermines visuality but its interfaces as well. Perhaps digital memory artifacts will no longer need visual access interfaces such as screens…but in the meantime, let us take a look on a particular prehistory of this possibility from 1960s, where NASA's Apollo Program developed a form of ROM memory called Core Rope Memory. This was produced by literally weaving a wire skein along ferrite cores. The method of weaving wires—passing or bypassing the cores—configured the software. Therefore, memory was the outcome of an entangled, self- descriptive weaving motion: memory is what happens along the ferrite cores. Contrary to RAM memory, this Core Rope Memory was a non- volatile repository which keeps all its possible tasks in advance, indefinitely, even without energy supply. David A. Mindell's Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight recalls how the Apollo 12 computer easily rebooted itself after lightning struck the spacecraft. Without tapes or disk drives, Core Rope Memory visually exposes its limits and functions. We can imagine it as an artifact with the ability to keep and describe the totality of its existence, not by upgrading itself further, but through total access to its finite structure. This sheer visuality of its woven core—a kind of hardware— is the software, in absence of any other intermediate symbolic interface. The Core Rope's wire paths undermine images insofar as it constitutes its own memory. To put it simply, its finite woven code exists by itself. A distinct modality of software as the human-readable aspect of the machine is no longer necessary. In the meantime, digital plein-air I have to stress that, although sausage making is a pleasant and mouth- watering activity, is not precisely exempted of risk. Whenever a meat scrap falls off the cutting table, we are in peril of getting a contaminated, even a hairy sausage. As Burch’s guide reminds to us: “the one that eats the most sausage gets the most hair.” Nowadays we are witnessing the process of subsumption of memetic images within memory, but in the meantime, we are finding memetic images in the outdoors as well. The temple of the Seven Dolls in Dzibilchaltun, Yuc. Mexico Despite the fact that the Seven Dolls Temple in Dzibilchaltun (Mexico) perhaps was never conceived as a temporal landmark, during each vernal equinox a multitude of people congregate around the temple. When the Sun emerges, its beams traverse the temple's open door towards a plethora of smartphones, digital cameras, and tablets. The sunlight is not only framed by the door; it continues its trajectory by virtue of the devices’ capturing and the images’ further circulation. After my first visit to this temple in 2012, I became increasingly interested in the particular elongated quality of this sort of memetic images. During the last three years I have been visiting several areas of Southern Mexico, finding along my way a variety of these images: digitally printed cylinders in the shore of Bacalar lagoon, fluorescent hoses in Palenque's jungle, gradient-like car reparations in Merida, polygonal paper dinosaurs in Chicxulub, to name a few. These memetic images incorporate an array of digital textures, patterns, gradients, and even moiré effects, but somehow their physicality produces an interesting disruption in its surrounding milieu. They popped out in our vision by highlighting their obvious digitalness in absence of devices, binary code, or even electricity. How is such a thing possible? If the traits of memetic images can be sustained in spite of devices —or their closeness—we must reconsider them as entities created uniquely by devices. Images linger at a certain distance of them; sometimes closer—even “within”— sometimes too far to be extant. A memetic landscape in Bacalar, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Constituted as trajectories by means of versioning, these memetic images could have existed before the advent of the internet itself. Acknowledging this fact places us in the striking situation whereby the prehistory of digital images comes after their “official” emergence as media; as if in the very moment that we relocate these images from their alleged habitat (digital devices,) devices no longer “create” images. The context of memetic images does not lie in their materiality—for example, their pre-filmic or pre- screening origin—nor in the materiality of the places they represent. Conversely, we find context in the very action of capturing and slicing images, as well as in the device's situational location. The encounter with digital, memetic images in the outdoors and their incorporation within networks and memories denotes also the uneven degree of internet implementation over the Earth. Since bandwidth speed results are affected by geography (and geopolitics!), time is the subsidiary of space. The imbalances in a memetic image's speed of elongation describes real geographical distances between captured places and access to internet networks. This produces a particular phenomenon of historical remoteness, whereby 'antique' memetic images are still in the process of being incorporated, uploaded, elongated. As if the light of a distant sun were rising, we still are receiving and unearthing images pertaining to these memetic realms. — Javier Fresneda is a San Diego-based artist and researcher. His work can be found in www.javierfresneda.com among other places. — References Burch, Monte. The Complete Guide to Sausage Making. New York: Skyhorse, 2011. Mindell, David A. Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. — Share this Article — 2016-05-20 17:38 rhizome.org
45 British Creative Industries Back Remain in Europe Campaign More Articles By A number of designers are among the signatories of the letter released Friday by the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign. They included Vivienne Westwood , Katharine Hamnett, Bella Freud, Patrick Grant , Annoushka Ducas, Kit Neale, Hussein Chalayan and Daniel Fletcher. RELATED STORY: Emerging Designer Daniel Fletcher Talks Louis Vuitton, Politics and Antonia Banderas >> Other members of the British fashion industry such as British Vogue’s editor in chief Alexandra Shulman and Daniel Rubin, executive chairman of the Dune Group, are also backing the cause. Access to different markets within the EU and EU funding, as well as free movement of talent are among the main reasons to stay, according to the letter, which is filled with statistics. It says 56 percent of all overseas trade in the creative sector is done within Europe, and that the country has been benefiting from the European Commission’s 80 million euros, or $117 million, Horizon 2020 innovation fund, which gives money to various creative initiatives. “From the smallest gallery to the biggest blockbuster, many of us have worked on projects that would never have happened without vital EU funding, or by collaborating across borders,” the letter states. “Britain is not just stronger in Europe, it is more imaginative and more creative and our global creative success would be severely weakened by walking away. From the Bard to Bowie, British creativity inspires and influences the rest of the world. We believe that being part of the EU bolsters Britain’s leading role on the world stage,” it added. Other British creatives who have signed the letter include Tracey Emin; Anish Kapoor; Charles Saumarez Smith, chief executive of the Royal Academy of Arts, and actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Helena Bonham Carter and Keira Knightley. The letter describes the referendum as “the biggest democratic decision of our time” and argues that leaving the EU would mean “a leap into the unknown” for the 2.8 million people employed by the creative economies of the country. Simultaneously, Britain’s Creative Industries Federation released a survey stating that 96 percent of its members support the U. K.’s stay in the European Union. 2016-05-20 15:45 Natalie Theodosi
46 Il Mulino Celebrates 35 Years With ‘1981’ Menu More Articles By Il Mulino has reached 35 years in business — an impressive feat when one considers the highly competitive climate of New York dining. It has since expanded from its original West 3rd Street location to several additional outposts in Manhattan, as well as to Orlando, Nashville and Las Vegas. To celebrate the milestone, the restaurant is launching a “1981” prix fixe menu, a nod to the year the original Greenwich Village location opened its doors. The menu offers a “contemporary” and “original” option — each featuring three courses, with the latter option serving up dishes from the original menu. The restaurant held bragging rights for two decades as the Best Italian Restaurant in the Zagat Guide, and has been known to attract a starry clientele throughout the years. Phil Collins, Cindy Crawford, and Bruce Willis are among the names that have made their mark in the restaurant’s guest book. Click here to take a look at several pages from the book. 2016-05-20 15:35 Kristen Tauer
47 The New Museum Enters a New Dimension | Insta of the Week It's been a big week for New York City's New Museum , as the contemporary art institute recently announced a huge financial push to expand their space, amenities, and programming. What they didn't announce was that they entered a whole new freakin' dimension, as documented by Axel de Stampa 's completely real and totally unaltered Instagram post of the museum twisting and writhing like some kind of giant serpent beast. De Stampa is known for "documenting" other anomalies in architecture, like the spinning Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago and the disappearing and reappearing VitraHaus in Germany. Now that the New Museum has raised $40 million and counting , we're sure that these supernatural changes are just the beginning. Check out more of Axel de Stampa's not obviously Photoshopped GIFs of animated architecture in the Instagrams below. See more of Axel de Stampa's work on his website and Instagram. Find your next favorite artist on The Creators Project's Instagram here. Related: Awesome Architecture GIFs Channel Tetris And Bend Reality This Artist Transformed the New Museum into a Swap Meet Artists Display Their Art On (As Opposed To In) The New Museum 2016-05-20 15:25 Beckett Mufson
48 Pole Dancers Bend Light in Stunning Projection-Mapped Performance Screencaps via Like some sort of post- Singularity gentelmen's club, dancers twirl, swirl, and slide around a pole against a projected minimalist grid. This is the video Genèse (Genesis) created by the art group U-Machine , and it has a funny way of sucking viewers into the movement of its dancers. U-Machine sets out to explore what they describe on their Facebook page as, “l'interaction entre l'organique et le numérique,” which translates from French to, “the interaction between the organic and the digital.” With a projected screen that reacts to movement thanks to motion sensors, the dancers in this video are able to seemingly stir up the world around them as they move. Though motion sensors and dance have been done before in the dance performance WITH OUI , inside giant light cubes at the BAM , and even in motion sensor tutus , this piece makes itself unique with its heavy focus on the body. Genèse also seems concerned with the way geometry can highlight, dampen, and distort the human figure. Is this deconstruction of the human form a callback to the dismantling of the spiritual in the opening pages of the Book of Genesis? Maybe… Or, maybe it’s just trippy to watch people pole dance against a bunch of crazy shapes. To find out more and keep up with U-Machine, visit their Facebook . Related: Brooklyn Ballet Hacks "The Nutcracker" With Wearable-Tech Tutus A/V Dance Performance Illuminates the Beauty of Connections Dancer Bends Light in Stunning Projection-Mapped Performance 2016-05-20 15:20 Giaco Furino
49 Jessica & Ashlee Simpson’s Dad Puts Sincerity in Pop Photography Photos courtesy Joe Simpson Joe Simpson , the 58-year- old producer, reality TV star, and father of pop stars Jessica and Ashlee Simpson, opened Dreams Work , a show of his photography at LA's Bruce Lurie Gallery last week. The photographs, which feature models as well as his famous progeny, are heavily treated with Photoshop techniques. But before one asks, Is that it? , there’s another feature these photos have that’s strikingly rare in Pop photography: sincerity. When Joe Simpson speaks about the work, his enthusiasm is infectious. He explains that he’s been taking photographs his whole life. He got his first camera when he was 14, but he didn’t take the work seriously until his (very public) breakup with his wife. “When I separated from my wife, my therapist said I should do things I did before I was married. Well, I’ve been married since I was 20!” Since then he's devoted more attention to photography again, honing his skill by working with fashion photographers. Joe Simpson stands among photographs of his family at his new Dreams Work show. When asked why he chose to include photos of his famous kids, he responds, “I am the father of the girls. For me to not have them in the show would be odd.” He goes on to speak about making art in LA., saying, “California is the perfect place for art, between the weather and the beauty of the country. But Hollywood is known for dreamers; people come here with a dream.” In the end, Simpson is trying to make earnest Pop, free of irony. He talks of blessings, joy, and the power of dreams. “That’s why the show is called Dreams Work. Many people dream, and very few people work for dreams, they just think that dreams happen. Dreams are work. The people that see their dreams come true work really hard to get there. I don’t think it’s ever too late to dream.” Dreams Work opened at display at Bruce Lurie Gallery on May 14, 2016. To check in on Joe Simpson’s dreams, visit his photography site. Related: The Exclusive Story Behind Warhol & Basquiat's Boxing Photos [NSFW] Artist Shatters Pirelli's Ideals of Beauty With Her Own Nudes No Cameras Necessary: 8 Camera-Less Photographers You Need to Know 2016-05-20 15:15 Giaco Furino
50 Is This Kinetic Light Sculpture Man or Machine? GIF via. Photos courtesy the artist When a human being identifies another, various types of facial and body recognition kick in, from recognizing a person’s facial features, to the idiosyncrasies of their gait. But what is the minimal amount of information that is actually necessary for the animated form to be recognized as human? Random International , known for their hugely popular Rain Room installation , attempts to answer this question in a new body of work titled Study for Fifteen Points. The first video in the series, which Random’s Florian Ortkrass and Hannes Koch recently published, showcases custom electronic arms outfitted with LED lights set in motion until the light patterns create an identifiably human form (seen above). The new series can be traced back to 2008. Random International had already been working on kinetic art pieces ( Audience ), and invited cognitive scientist Philip Barnard to participate in one of their early symposia titled Behaviour. Barnard pointed them to the research of Dr. Niko Troje from the Bio Motion Lab at Queens University in Canada. But it wasn’t until several years later in 2015, when Ortkrass and Koch entered a residency at Le Laboratoire and Harvard University, that they developed the framework to realize a series of sculptures exploring biological motion kinetically based on 15 points. “We only started to explore this space and are fascinated in the space between the biological and the mechanistic motion, when the machine becomes human,” Koch tells The Creators Project. “Also, our human need to recognize seemingly human behavior as actually being human seems a very rich and controversial ground for further exploration.” “When arranged and animated in order, the points of light represent the human anatomy,” Koch adds. “Instinctively, the brain is able to stitch the disparate points together and recognize them as one human form.” To create the kinetic sculpture as seen in Study for Fifteen Points , Ortkrass and Koch used motors, custom driver electronics, custom software, laser cut aluminium, LEDs, and a computer. While it’s currently 712 x 552 x 606 mm, Koch says they are launching a life-sized version with Pace Gallery this fall. Click here to see more kinetic work by Random International. Related: The 'Rain Room' Arrives Where Rain Is Scarce: LA Random International Turn 30,000 Liters Of Water Into A Monumental Tower FUTURE SELF Is A Dance Reactive LED Cube 2016-05-20 15:05 DJ Pangburn
51 ‘A Plain Steal’: The Theft and Recovery of the ‘Mona Lisa,’ in 1911 and 1913 Vincenzo Peruggia’s mug shot from 1909. VIRGIL FILMS, LLC The Mona Lisa has been the subject of many art crimes, but none have been as major as when Vincenzo Peruggia stole it in 1911. Below is ARTnews coverage of the theft from 1911, when the painting was stolen, and 1913, when it was recovered in Italy. Note: errors in punctuation and spelling from the original version of this article have been preserved. “Paris Letter” September 16, 1911 Paris, Sept. 6, 1911The interest of the art world and especially in France, is centered in the loss of the “Mona Lisa,” and the Government has been aroused to take prompt action. M. Homelle, director of the national museums, has been removed from his office, and M. Pujalet, who was formerly chief of the cabinet of the Prefect of Police, has been appointed, provisionally to fill his place. He has been instructed to reorganize the administration of the Louvre. Further measures have been taken with a view of placing the national palaces and museums of France under the control of the department of Inspection and Finances. The investigation proved that several guardians of the Louvre have been guilty of negligence in the discharge of their duties and they will be brought before a disciplinary board and punished.…There is a story in circulation that the Duchess de Torlonia, who is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Moore, of New York, is also the owner of a Mona Lisa, which she claims has been in the Torlonia family since Da Vinci painted the painted the “Last Supper.” This makes the fifth Mona Lisa said to be in existence. Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa , ca. 1519. VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS “The Storied Mona Lisa” December 20, 1913 The long anticipated recovery of the now most famous painting in the world, which occurred just after the ART NEWS had gone to press last week, has naturally been the theme of countless stories in the press, the civilized world over. As had been surmised, the theft was accomplished by the Italian workman, Vincenzo Perugia, with comparative ease, and the picture was as easily concealed by him and transported to Italy. Greed, as always, led finally to the capture and recovery of the treasure. The attributing of motives for the theft, ever since the arrest of Perugia in Florence last week, has been the delight of writers for continents. The “desire to revenge Napoleon’s looting of Italian art treasures from Italy,” “love for painting itself,” etc., etc., have with a hundred other motives been given as Perugia’s inspiration, but the transaction would have been simply a plain “steal.”Exhibited in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence the picture had been viewed by thousands whose eagerness to behold the familiar features of “La Gioconda” almost led to a riot the first day she was placed on view and it is now reported that Da Vinci’s heroine will be taken to Rome for exhibition there, before her return to her home in the Louvre. What will be the scenes in Paris when La Gioconda again fills her place of many years in the Louvre? Is it not all a fascinating, extraordinary story in these latter and unromantic days? 2016-05-20 15:00 The Editors
52 Tea With Satire: Tom Sachs at Noguchi Museum, New York Installation view of “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony,” 2016, at the Noguchi Museum. GENEVIEVE HANSON ‘I f you think of Tom as a 21st-century Zen monk, setting up to build a tea garden retreat, and you think of Noguchi as the natural landscape, that’s the kind of mindset being established here,” explained Dakin Hart, curator at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, as he passed through the glass doors separating the entrance vestibule from the outer garden of the exhibition “ Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony.” As glimpses of Sachs’s signature style blossom into a new-age sanctuary—fitted with bricolage works (crafted predominately from plywood, Con Ed barriers, and powder-blue foam core) set against Isamu Noguchi’s basalt and limestone sculptures—it becomes clear that Hart has a point.“Tea Ceremony” is the first solo exhibition to be held at the museum since it opened more than 30 years ago as a site to house and exhibit Noguchi’s work. Sachs—known for his witty cultural appropriations, his interest in precision engineering, and his boyish fascinations—might seem an unlikely choice for this project. Tom Sachs collects water for use in his Tea Ceremony. MARIO SORRENTI Despite the ostensible differences between Noguchi and Sachs—Noguchi focuses on the sublime, Sachs on social systems; Noguchi celebrates the majestic, while Sachs leans toward the satiric—“Tea Ceremony” establishes a correspondence between the artists that seems to push conventional interpretations of their work. The exhibition itself centers on Sachs’s adaptation of chanoyu —the Japanese tea ceremony. Sprawling through four jam-packed galleries—including a large tea garden (fitted with a real koi pond and a model of Mount Fuji), two additional rooms dedicated to handmade artifacts (one specifically for tea tools), and a miniature Sachs retrospective (to provide context)—“Tea Ceremony” makes it evident that this isn’t the first time Sachs has tackled tea. In fact, Tea House (2011–12), the architectural space where the chanoyu is held, was literally excised and recycled from “Tom Sachs: Space Program 2.0: Mars,” a tea ceremony– based exhibition that opened at the Park Avenue Armory in 2012. For those wondering what might connect a tea ceremony to a fictive Mars expedition, as seen in the video A Space Program , or why the artist would choose to meditate on chanoyu again, let’s just say that it’s a long trip to the lonely red planet, and a tea ceremony is an ideal way to resolve tensions between anxious crew members. Matcha—the signature drink—is both a stimulant and a relaxant.“Tea Ceremony” then takes off from where “Mars” left off—a literal launching point for Sachs’s next chapter, an imminent trip to Jupiter’s moon Europa. When the show travels to this distant moon—or the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco—later this summer, the exhibition will be modified and retitled “Space Program: Europa.” However, when it moves to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, the subsequent year, the exhibition will return to its earthly “Tea Ceremony” state. 2016-05-20 14:42 Ella Coon
53 Dawn Richard & Julia Holter Talk Sensations, VR, and Visual Artwork Local Natives perform at FORM Arcosanti. Credit: Jasmine Safaeian As both audience and performer, Hundred Waters adds several rare elements to the festival experience, FORM Arcosanti. Can you name another festival in which audiences may climb up the curved main amphitheater roof and gaze down at their favorite band performing below, or seek out a micro city’s resident cat wandering around for a brief pet before the next set? Over three days in the Arizona desert, camping out and listening to a diverse lineup of artists, architecture and setting played into performers’ sets unlike any festival I’ve seen. The lack of conflicting set times—each day had an hour-to-hour focus on just one band or performer—lent proceedings an unhurried, shared pace: there were few missed connections, since you were largely all going to the same spot. Skrillex performs at FORM Arcosanti. Photo Credit: Jasmine Safaeian On Friday, headliner Skrillex played a storming nighttime DJ set, the beginnings of what would grow into an epic 36-hour sonic journey across the city. The next day, Bing & Ruth provided a serene place on the Arcosanti canyon cliffside, as pianist David Moore progressed through beautiful arrangements to a crowd sitting around his baby grand piano. Dan Deacon, already known for interactivity in his live shows, then made the amphitheater crowd his party putty the same night—he divided them up and started a dance competition, and later organized a human tunnel around the edge of the venue. “Other festivals tend to have a base, this is all the base. It's the stage, it’s where you hang out, it’s everything.” Dawn Richard, a.k.a., D∆WN mentioned from backstage before her set, as her choreographer Anthony Jackson and back up dancers all prepared for the performance. Dawn performs at FORM Arcosanti. Photo courtesy of the author That afternoon, she delivered the first real jolt of energy to FORM, drawing from her acclaimed solo albums Goldenheart and Blackheart to deliver a skillful, physical set that filled the space. Richard has recently cultivated a holistic approach to her output. That’s meant creating striking music videos like “Titans,” which featured her and her dancers turning into obsidian shapes, and “Calypso,” which tapped GIF artist Kyttenjanae to put a utopian spin on the titular myth. It’s also meant branching out into virtual reality—she just performed the first 360° VR concert for YouTube—and speaking with her during FORM, a similar path seems brewing for solo LP number four, RED*emp*tion , in the form of a VR video for every song on the album. “The huge idea with RED*emp*tion is a focus on VR, and a focus on really touching digital design—how you can blend sound the same way you do visually,” she said. “The album is done, but now I gotta create the world around it. That's where the nerd in me comes out, the gamer, the kid that wants to figure out, ‘How do we make the video? How do we make render times shorter? If there's a deadline, how do we make this more efficient?’“ Last year Richard traveled to Sundance’s New Frontier section for research into virtual reality, and was excited by how her questions to filmmakers returned few concrete answers. “Everything in VR is new, very new, and the reason why the new album’s taking so long is because we’re curating something that hasn't been done before,” she explained. “It's untouched; it's trial and error. But I think once we get there it's something that'll be quite amazing. It's gonna get fun. We’re really getting to play with form and the body, and I'm lucky to have a team that lets me do that.” Julia Holter performs at FORM Arcosanti. Photo Credit: Jasmine Safaeian On Sunday, Julia Holter landed at Arcosanti for her FORM set, playing cuts off her most recent record, Have You In My Wilderness , with regular collaborators Andrew Tholl (Violin), Chris Votek (Cello), Corey Fogel (Drums), Devin Hoff (Bass), and Dina Maccabee (viola and vocals). Speaking about her process, Holter said she’s into the first few months where’s she able to write new material, but it’s going to take a lot more “messing around” before hitting that point. Julia Holter performs at FORM Arcosanti. Photo courtesy of the author “I guess at a point with every record I've done there's a point where it feels like ‘something.’ I always think Tragedy [Holter’s first LP] is a good example of that. With that I was making drawings, and trying to evoke this overall shadowy feeling. I was reading these different Greek tragedies all at once for some reason, and when I was reading this one tragedy, Hippolytus , I was like, 'Oh, I want to make this into a record.' It just made sense to me.” For her visual work, Holter says she mostly turns to collaborators’ ideas for how they interpret her music. However, one recent deviation from that was the oddly heartwarming video for “Feel You,” which depicts Holter’s affection with her boyfriend’s canine companion, Frances. “For that one, it was my idea to have Frances in it. Jose [Wolff, the video’s director] had already made this beautiful piece for the song that was really nice, but it was all me, and I didn’t understand the emotion of it,” she said. “I did take control a little, saying ‘Let's have something emotional in here.’ Frances has this melancholy, and a beautiful soul that I love so much. He's such an incredible creature, and I just wanted to document him in that way. Jose did a great job capturing that. The video feels so light and free and casual at the same time.” More information on FORM Arcosanti can be found here . Related Body Paintings and Activist Art In the Arizona Desert I Spent Three Days in the Desert at an Experimental Music and Arts Festival Arts and Arcology Pave the Way for Desert Experiment Arcosanti 2016-05-20 13:50 Charlie Ambler
54 Catholic League Targets Mark Ryden's Art It's a tempest in a tea party. Specifically, it's a crusade over a painting of a tea party, and one that involves threats to revoke a museum's public funding, in the latest battle in the decades-long American culture wars. The outrage this time around is inspired by Rosie's Tea Party , a 2003 painting by the self- professed "pop surrealist" artist Mark Ryden , included in a show opening Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach. " Turn the Page: The First 10 Years of Hi-Fructose Magazine " surveys the work of 51 artists who appeared in the widely read San Francisco quarterly, dedicated to so-called "lowbrow" art. Benito Loyola, CEO of local IT company Loyola Enterprises, is a member of the Virginia Beach Arts and Humanities Commission , and he isn't happy. He's taken issue with two of the Ryden paintings in the show, one of which features an offbeat, satirical take on Catholic ritual. Loyola has even threatened to slash the museum's funding for promoting "anti-Christian bigotry. " As it happens, a meeting about funding for the institution for the coming year is set to happen in the coming weeks. The museum, with an annual operating budget in the neighborhood of $2 million, gets $120,000 a year from the commission. Local media has gotten in on the story , and the kerfuffle has now attracted the attention of hard-right Catholic League head Bill Donohue, who issued a letter targeting museum director Debi Gray. Donohue is a prominent player in a long line of bruising anti-art outrages, from the 1997 Brooklyn Museum protest over Chris Ofili 's The Holy Virgin Mary , which includes elephant dung, to the 2010 attack on the Smithsonian for showing David Wojnarowicz 's video A Fire In My Belly , which includes a few seconds showing ants crawling on a crucifix. (Then-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani failed in his crusade against the Brooklyn Museum; the Smithsonian suffered a black eye when its director peremptorily removed Wojnarowicz's video from an exhibition. ) Drumming up a sense of grievance over art offenses, it seems, is still good business. Yesterday, Svetlana Mintcheva, head of programs at the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), fired back with an open letter to Loyola and his fellow-commissioner Brian Kirwin, who has also spoken out against funding the museum. It reads, in part: As for the contested artwork, Rosie's Tea Party is not exactly Piss Christ , Andres Serrano 's notorious photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine, or even Ofili's woefully misunderstood The Holy Virgin Mary. Ryden generally trades in saccharine cuteness, cut with intentionally outrageous riffs on historical figures and pop-culture icons. One of the paintings in question features an angelic, doe-eyed girl sharing a meal with a slightly crazed-looking stuffed animal. “Look at this—she's got a saw in her hand cutting off a piece of ham with the words on the ham ‘Corpus Christ,'" Loyola told local news station WAVY, unpacking just what it was about the painting's colorful iconography that so enraged him. “That is Latin for 'body of Christ,' and the ham is dropping down and eaten by rats. " He also took issue with another Ryden painting, this one featuring another little girl, holding her own decapitated head in her arm as a cartoonish spurt of blood blossoms from her neck. “She is holding the severed head, and blood is spraying up and showering her in blood," Loyola told WAVY. “I'm like, 'This is what we are subsidizing at MOCA?'" (Loyola might be interested to learn that there is a rather long history of gory depictions of decapitation in Christian art.) More than the rather cryptic imagery, what really cemented the interpretation of Ryden's work as “anti-Christian bigotry," it seems, is a 2006 Hi-Fructose interview with the artist in which he declares, “Someone ought to poke fun at those Christians, though. " That line has been circulating widely in stories about the dust-up. Few commentators—including the reporters at WAVY, who have probably done most to amplify this story—cite the line that follows the offending sentence. The full Ryden quote is as follows: That is, Ryden was making a (rather clumsy) political point, about then- president George W. Bush, who supposedly declared that God instructed him to invade Iraq. As for Rosie's Tea Party , all Ryden says about it in the incriminating interview is that it is a portrait of his own daughter, and that she enjoyed posing for it. More germane to the current affair might be another passage. Asked whether people impose their own interpretations of his works, Ryden says, Or, in this case, an ugly little package. Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of Hi-Fructose opens May 21st at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and remains on view through December 31, 2016; it travels to the Akron Art Museum, Ohio (February 10, 2017-May 7, 2017) and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, June 11, 2017-September 17, 2017. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-05-20 13:38 Ben Davis
55 Alitalia Unveils New Staff Uniform Collection In 2003, Ettore Bilotta also designed the uniforms for Etihad Airlines, which now has a 49 percent stake in Alitalia. The flight attendants will wear red — differentiating them from the previous light green and blue color. Airport staff will wear green. The two colors are obvious references to the Italian flag. The style harks back to the glamorous Fifties and Sixties, defined by tailored suits with fitted jackets worn with pencil skirts or trousers and a mididress. The collection is also enriched with elegant accessories such as pillbox hats and gloves. All made in Italy , the uniforms are tailor-made by a team of nearly 500 people. “Being given the opportunity to design the new uniforms for this much-loved Italian symbol was very exciting and gave me the opportunity to create a special collection which symbolizes Italy and our pride in Alitalia as its ambassador to the world,’’ said Bilotta. 2016-05-20 13:32 Francesca Bonfanti
56 Jon Pestoni at Transformer Station, Cleveland Installation view of “Jon Pestoni: Some Years,” 2016, at the Transformer Station. DAVID BRICHFORD/COURTESY CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday. Today’s show: “Jon Pestoni: Some Years” is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s contemporary art space, the Transformer Station, in Cleveland through Sunday, July 24. The solo exhibition, the artist’s first at a museum, features 32 works made over the past five years. Jon Pestoni, Replica , 2013, oil on canvas. LEE THOMPSON/COURTESY THE ARTIST, DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES, AND REAL FINE ARTS, NEW YORK/THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART, SUNDRY ART- CONTEMPORARY FUND Jon Pestoni, Underbite , 2014, oil and mixed media on canvas. FREDRIK NILSEN/COURTESY DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES AND REAL FINE ARTS, NEW YORK/COLLECTION OF LAURIE ZIEGLER Installation view of “Jon Pestoni: Some Years,” 2016, at the Transformer Station. DAVID BRICHFORD/COURTESY CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART Installation view of “Jon Pestoni: Some Years,” 2016, at the Transformer Station. DAVID BRICHFORD/COURTESY CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART 2016-05-20 13:31 The Editors
57 Karyn Wagner Details Costume Design for ‘Preacher’ More Articles By AMC’s new television series “Preacher” is centered around religious concepts, but it’s the cult following of the original Nineties comic book series that led to its on- screen adaptation. Fandom also brought a key player, costume designer Karyn Wagner, on board for the show’s creation. “I have been a fan of the comic books for 15 or 16 years,” said Wagner, who handled the sartorial look for all of season one after the pilot episode. “This project was originally optioned in 2009, and to be honest I’ve kind of been stalking it, because I really, really wanted to work on it.” She got the job, adding that afterward one of the producers told her, “Well, we didn’t really pick you so much as you picked us.” Produced by a team that includes Sam Catlin, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the show is a dark comedy set against a Western backdrop. The story follows Jesse Cooper, a Texas preacher who becomes taken over by supernatural powers. Jesse is joined by girlfriend, Tulip, and a vagabond named Cassidy as the show follows the trio’s encounters with good and evil. Although the comics are set in the Nineties, Wagner crafted the costumes to look current. “I had to take the humor and the availability of the characters, the way the clothing made the characters available to everybody to understand, and I had to take that through the filter of what people wear now,” she explained. The show was filmed in Albuquerque, N. M., and Wagner sourced much of the clothing from used clothing stores and vintage shops to reflect a small-town vibe. “There’s not a lot of availability to fashion here,” she explained, and added that she asked some people to bring pieces of their own clothing to the set. “Sometimes that worn pair of shoes that you’ve actually had since the early Nineties tells a better story than anything I could out to a store and buy.” The costumes were also as a jumping-off point for the cast. “Some actors come to the fitting room to find their character,” she said. “Whatever I have on the rolling racks to try on, we’ll work through that and find that one piece that defines the character, and we’ll sort of build from there.” The show stars Dominic Cooper in the main role. “Jesse Custer is wearing actually quite fashionable things — he’s wearing Varvatos and Rag & Bone jeans,” Wagner explained. “But the silhouette of them is incredibly simple, so there’s nothing that really draws the eye to the clothing, per se. It gives you a silhouette that’s very simple, very easy to identify with, and very cool. So you just know that this guy is cool, but then you also know he’s a preacher so it makes you wonder about him more.” Joe Gilgun portrays Cassidy, a character whose style Wagner described as eclectic without being intentionally fashionable. “The theory of where he gets his clothes is a charity box in the church closet, and he’ll just put on whatever’s in there,” she said. “The combinations are always really crazy… it’s comical without being too over the top.” While she sourced most of the clothes locally, she also had multiple boxes flown in each week from L. A. for her leading lady. “Tulip is a little more high fashion, she’s been to big cities and she’s gone shopping there,” Wagner detailed. “She doesn’t follow fashion. She takes fashion and makes it her own, and combines things you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see, but that makes her character quirky.” As for the rest of the characters, she said “Everybody else is varying degrees of small town — the mayor who wears kind of inexpensive suits, but he’s wearing a suit, which makes him the mayor. The girl who works at the diner, who is quite a pretty girl, or would be if she wore clothing that fit her well, but nothing quite works.” The pilot episode screened at SxSW earlier this year, and positive reviews for the show have already begun trickling in. If all goes well, Wagner might just find herself employed for a second season. “It’s kind of a job of a lifetime,” she said. The show premieres May 22, and will be distributed through Amazon Prime for the U. K., Japan, Austria and Germany. 2016-05-20 13:30 Kristen Tauer
58 Believe It or Not, These Alien-Looking Things are Bubbles Images courtesy the artist The last we checked in with Joey Shanks, the analog VFX maestro was bending water with vibrations from a 24Hz bass tone. In the time since, he decided to shoot a 4K sequel to his Giant Bubble Explosions video for PBS Digital Studios, in which he used light and motion to make bubbles float, shimmer, and burst in beautifully psychedelic ways. But Shanks didn’t want to just repeat a proven formula. “I was capturing good stuff but felt the video needed a new twist to it,” Shanks explains on his YouTube page for his latest video, Giant Bubble Reflections in 4K . “So randomly I tried mirroring the bubble clips when editing and was amazed with the results.” What Shanks created in the editing process is basically a range of kaleidoscopic bubbles. Even more so than his original video, the bubbles in his latest look like alien entities. Looking at the mirrored bubbles, it’s hard to believe it’s not CGI instead of in-camera effects tweaked with a very simple editing technique. Check out Giant Bubble Reflections in 4K below: Click here to see more from Shanks FX. Related: How to Create Physics-Defying Illusions with Water Get Hypnotized by a Man-Made Cosmos in 8K Sand Paintings Are the New Lava Lamps 2016-05-20 13:30 DJ Pangburn
59 See and Spin #9: 3 Things to Read, 3 Things to Hear See and Spin, where Real Arters dish on a weekly serving of three things you need to read and three things you need to hear. Unlocking the Secrets of New York’s Mass Graves (Nina Bernstein / The New York Times ) Over a million people are buried in the city’s potter’s field on Hart Island. A New York Times investigation uncovers some of their stories and the failings of the system that put them there. It’s the Billionaires vs. the Millionaires in This Hawaiian Resort War (Robert Kolker / Bloomberg Businessweek ) The world’s smallest ukulele is playing for the mere millionaires being humiliated by billionaires in paradise. Lights! Camera! Suction! How A Plastic Surgeon Became A Snapchat Sensation (Marisa Carroll / BuzzFeed ) After almost a decade chasing fame, plastic surgeon Dr. Michael Salzhauer has struck gold Snapchatting boob jobs and butt lifts as Dr. Miami. But can this Orthodox Jewish father of five take his gimmick mainstream and still preserve his identity? Brand New / “I Am a Nightmare” / I Am a Nightmare (2016) Following up last year’s “Mene”—the first track from the Long Island post- hardcore gods in six years—Brand New have graced the masses with “I Am a Nightmare,” again satisfying the one-new-track-a-year quota. But good things come to those who wait, and “I Am a Nightmare” certainly feels like the sonic bridge between Deja Entendu and The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me the band has hinted at venturing back to. Much like “Mene,” the track combines the band’s early stage affinity for massive pop punk hooks (see the earworm chorus) with the harder edge that has dominated the second half of their famously diverse catalog. As usual, underneath the bouncy bassline and anthemic chorus lies lyricism that reflects something deeper. In this case, it may be the at-long-last relief from past demons or acknowledgment for the crushing weight of expectations: from a divine being, from the love of your life, from the band’s cult following. Either way, fingers tightly crossed that our next taste of Brand New is within the calendar year. Modern Baseball / “Just Another Face” / Holy Ghost (2016) Even though the members of Philadelphia’s Modern Baseball are barely old enough to drink in the venues they’re packing out, they squeezed out a few lifetimes worth of introspection with their third LP Holy Ghost. Fresh off a dizzying rise in popularity from building a fervent fanbase with an earnest pop-punk and emo blend combined with a DIY ethos, the band’s members saw some growing pains: addiction, mental illness, anxiety, self-harm. On Holy Ghost this boils up to an assured and powerful closer in “Just Another Face,” a song that turns self-pity into triumph with a chorus where you can truly envision a throng of sweaty bodies screaming to the point of exhaustion at the stage. Though Brendan Lukens—one of the band’s two singers who split duties on Holy Ghost —opens by saying he’s a “waste of time and space,” he turns quickly to confront his demons more directly (If it’s all the same / It’s time to confront this face to face / I’ll be with you the whole way). It’s undeniably raw and personal, but also beautifully universal in its message of the many paths on the road to recovery. Eric Clapton (featuring Phil Collins) / “Layla” / Live Aid 1985 (1985) Not really feeling the new Eric Clapton album that came out today, one which may be his last? That’s okay. Here’s a #FlashbackFriday for ya. 2016-05-20 13:29 realart.com
60 Cigarettes & Cake Celebrate the Ballets De Monte Carlo’s 30th Screencap via In honor of the 30th anniversary of the Ballets de Monte Carlo , famed Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián posted Oskar online, a new video that celebrates the innovation of this world-renowned dance company. It is part of an ongoing celebration that includes commemorative performances of some of the company’s iconic works at home and internationally, such as Cinderella , performed at the New York City Center last February. Kylián is considered to be one of the most prominent and influential choreographers alive today. His work marries classical ballet technique with a modern attitude. Oskar is one of Kylián’s “pièces d’occasion” performed exclusively by Bernice Coppieters and Jean-Christophe Maillot , ex-prima ballerina and current director of the company, respectively. Ballets de Monte Carlo is known for being at the forefront of contemporary choreography that is firmly based in the classical tradition. In its 30 years, it has birthed ballets that have become repertoire standards at many other companies around the world (such as Maillot’s Romeo and Juliet ). Kylián‘s choreography in the video is witty and sophisticated, as is typical of his work. Classical moves with modern sensibilities are filmed sometimes as though in fast-forward or slow motion, or repeated over again like a GIF. Not only are the steps sharp and perfectly crisp, but the dancers’ facial expressions tell a universal story of human playfulness. They flirt, smear cake on their faces, and experiment with physical comedy while a puppy (the famed Oskar himself) follows them around the stage. The video is Kylián on top form: choreography that engages and entertains, simultaneously relatable, funny, and impressive. Click here to learn more about the Ballets De Monte Carlo. Related: Life-Sized Photographs Expose the Brutality of Ballet Bodies Ballet Legend Baryshnikov Dances a Descent into Madness [Exclusive] 'Bolshoi Babylon': A Look Inside Russia's Greatest Ballet 2016-05-20 13:25 Anya Tchoupakov
61 61 Five Minutes With Kobe Bryant: Starting a Media Company, Editing Life, Getting Style Tips From His Daughters More Articles By Now that he’s retired from the NBA, Kobe Bryant is making the big jump from an athlete with five championship rings and a pair of Olympic gold medals to a businessman who cold- calls potential partners. While he continues flexing his influence in the sports world with a Nike endorsement, he’s building a media company called Kobe Inc. to create books, TV shows and films that will inspire kids. Certainly, he has two trusted advisers: his 10- and 13-year-old daughters. Before his dinner with Hublot on Wednesday to celebrate the launch of a limited-edition watch named after his HeroVillain philosophy , which embraces both the positive and the negative in life, he talked to WWD about having an editor’s eye and finding “casual tailored” looks for his new career. 2016-05-20 13:00 Khanh T
62 The Six Stages of Drunk | GIF Six-Pack Ethan Barnowsky From source to sadness, today we follow the drunk-getting process in a series of beautiful GIFs that will be looping long after we're passed out in puke (maybe even our own). We're kicking things off with a beer gremlin animated by Ethan Barnowsky, then segueing smoothly into a jello shot factory, commemorating the moment you gaze upon your first drink of the night, the pouring of that sweet first drink into the mouth, and the growing love affair with your beverage until you become just like the wasted squirrel below. Finally, Kyttenjanae holds it down with a Vine that perfectly captures that moment when you realize you're too drunk, set to Duwap Kaine's "Pouring Codeine. " Happy Friday. Jelly London Karan Singh Ethan Barnowsky Sick As Me su0malainen Now you've already lived your liver-killing Friday night through GIFs, why don't you just go home and have some milk and cookies? Or check out more GIFs on GIPHY . Related: Crack Open an Ice Cold Six Pack of Beer GIFs Holy Ghost! Remix Spike Jonze Directed "Drunk Girls" The Photographer Capturing People on Drugs | High Art 2016-05-20 13:00 Beckett Mufson
63 Duchess of Cambridge Heads to Portsmouth She visited the Land Rover Bar Base headquarters and met with Ainslie, an Olympic gold-medalist sailor, members from the America’s Cup team and children from the Portsmouth Sailing project. A patron of the 1851 Trust and a keen sailor herself, the duchess took a tour of the base’s new Tech Deck education center and inaugurated the education facility. She also launched a sailing initiative with the Andrew Simpson Sailing Foundation, a charity that runs programs for kids and young adults to promote the sport. The duchess wore an Alexander McQueen navy pencil skirt and cream blouse. She had previously worn the outfit in 2011, when she visited Birmingham, and then in 2014 for a visit to Bletchley Park. Earlier this week, the duchess attended the launch of Heads Together, a mental-health campaign and gala concert, part of the celebrations marking the Queen’s 90th birthday. RELATED STORY: The Duchess of Cambridge Dons Boxing Gloves >> 2016-05-20 12:56 Lorelei Marfil
64 flying architecture presents HiLoft, a fully transportable high-quality room flying architecture presents HiLoft, a fully transportable high-quality room (above) the ‘HiLoft’ offers lots of different possibilites of usage image © robert sakowski compared to other container designs, the ‘HiLoft’ offers an entirely new independent room that is easy to adapt to any use or any season. the project takes part of a modern urban architecture concept which is based on an ordinary shipping container. it is a compact high quality room, fully independent from any specific location allowing for a lot of interesting possibilities of usage. in times of growing cities, it can also give a running-out-of-space area an efficient solution. with a focus on sustainability, the ‘HiLoft’ is made from a selection of environmentally friendly materials and designed for a long lifetime. it is operating with the original doors image © robert sakowski although the ‘HiLoft’ has a rather small floor area, it provides a very high comfort level. this is generated by accurately designed details, well conceived materials and innovative equipment. for general well-being, all the walls and ceilings are made of natural real wood, achieving a serene atmosphere. the full-surface floor radiates a pleasant heat from below, without air turbulence, dust or dry heating art. a decentralized ventilation with heat recovery supplies the premises with fresh air without loosing energy, and an air condition system has been integrated into the interior design. you can open the whole entrance side image © robert sakowski the interior is characterized by its natural wood coverings image © robert sakowski designboom has received this project from our ‘DIY submissions‘ feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here. 2016-05-20 12:42 www.designboom
65 Damian Hackett on the Expanding Aboriginal Art Market Deutscher and Hackett is a leading auction house in Australia, with offices in both Sydney and Melbourne. Helmed by two founders who come from a background of gallery work and private dealing, this auction house brings a fresh approach to the secondary art market. Not the least of which are their stunning Aboriginal art auctions, the next of which, Important Aboriginal Works of Art , will be held this May 25 in Melbourne and features a variety of 20th- and 21st-century pieces offering a vibrant selection of innovative abstraction. Here, we ask Sydney-based Executive Director Damien Hackett about their upcoming sale, what makes contemporary Aboriginal art unique, and how collectors can approach this booming market. You have regular Aboriginal art auctions and are among very few houses worldwide who specialize in this market. Would you consider this market as niche or expanding? We are very proud of our stand-alone Important Aboriginal Art auctions, which we've now presented continually for nearly a decade. Deutscher and Hackett is the only auction house in Australia to do so. It took us a year before we were able to secure the head of our department, Crispin Gutteridge, who is the possibly the most experienced and respected Aboriginal Art auction specialist in the world. We are very strict about the quality of the works we handle, as well as their original source. The Aboriginal art of Australia is incredibly rich, visually exciting, and intellectually stimulating, with the discussions surrounding it delving into spirituality, aesthetics, and politics. After the Global Financial Crisis—when a number of market-damaging decisions by the former government combined with a skyrocketing Australian dollar—the market for Aboriginal art, both domestically and internationally, did hit a few big potholes. Now, however, the market has readjusted and, I think, as a result of some extremely good-quality collections are coming to market, such as the Laverty collection. There has been a renewed interest and enthusiasm for Aboriginal art, which is very positive. Also, the fact that the Australian dollar is back to a sensible level, interest in our indigenous art from international collectors is also now returning, but there is a ways to go before the prices achieve their pre-2008 levels on the whole. What is your advice for buyers who want to start collecting this type of work? To enter into the Aboriginal market is somewhat the same as the non- Aboriginal market: look and learn. As always, don't hold back when asking questions of the auction house or dealer. Even though contemporary Aboriginal art is ‘young,' provenance is of great importance. But while there are some very good collections of Australian Aboriginal art overseas, some museum collections do still only hold a small representation of mainly historical artefacts. While these are important objects and they provide pathways into the language and symbolism, contemporary Aboriginal culture has not only endured the last 200-odd years of post- colonisation, but is one of the most fertile and evolving cultures on earth. What has happened since the early 1970s is remarkable. The use of contemporary materials has provided us with a unique opportunity to experience the regional visual languages of Australia and the ancient stories of universal connectivity, of family, of home, of survival and of celebration. But, ironically, international collectors have an advantage in that Australians, in general, are far less accepting of abstraction! When artists like Emily Kame Kngwarreye , Rover Joolama Thomas , Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford , Ronnie Tjampitjinpa , and the contemporary painter Daniel Walbidi —most of whom had never seen an international art textbook—can produce the most remarkable contemporary abstraction that has ancient foundations, we have a truly timeless and enduring art. However, some of the biggest and most important private collections of Australian aboriginal art are not owned by Australians. Do you see a growth potential for Aboriginal art? The Australian Aboriginal market is poised for growth. Last year, the annual auction turnover was still less than half of what it was at its peak of 26 million AUD in 2007. We have experienced new interest from Asian collectors, where in the past non-Australian collectors of Aboriginal work have predominately been from the United States and Western Europe. It will be interesting to look back at 2015–2016 in five years' time… I think people will be amazed at the value. 2016-05-20 12:01 artnet Galleries
66 paolo pettigiani sees new york city's central park in pink and blue paolo pettigiani sees new york city's central park in pink and blue paolo pettigiani sees new york city’s central park in pink and blue all images courtesy paolo pettigiani in the otherwise cool grey landscape of new york’s largely architectural atmosphere, paolo pettigiani sees the city saturated in a sea of vibrant color. from within manhattan’s unmatched natural haven of central park, the italian photographer points his lens towards the urban sprawl, documenting the setting and sights with an infrared camera. ‘the purpose is to highlight the majesty and the contrast of nature included in the famous big apple’s skyscrapers,’ pettigiani says. for the project ‘infrared NYC’, pettigiani continues his exploration of infrared landscapes, previously shot in the small town of avigliana in torino. the series invites viewers into a world unseen, as eyes cannot fully see infrared light. using a camera filter, bright whites visualize instead as turquoise, whereas darker tones in the frame materialize as cotton-candy pink. the metropolis is transformed from grassy expanses and towering buildings to a surreal urban vision, almost unreal in its colorful quality. the photos have been shot from within manhattan’s natural haven of central park paolo pettigiani points his lens towards the urban sprawl the photographer documents the setting and sights with an infrared camera the surreal urban vision is almost unreal in its colorful quality 2016-05-20 12:00 Nina Azzarello
67 Renaissance Society Receives $1.5 M. Through Three Large Gifts, Largest in Museum’s History The Renaissance Society. COURTESY THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY Solveig Øvstebø, the executive director and chief curator of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, announced today that the Renaissance Society has received three major gifts, from the Edlis Neeson Foundation, the Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation, and the Zell Family Foundation. The gifts will go toward the museum’s Next Century Fund, a $5 million campaign focused on commissioning contemporary art. These awards, each of which is $500,000, are the largest single donations in the museum’s history, and together total $1.5 million. The Renaissance Society, founded in 1915 by a group of University of Chicago faculty members, has presented the work of revered contemporary artists for the past century. Currently, with the Next Century fund, the organization is looking to maintain this legacy through more actively engaging with the contemporary artists they work with. In a statement, Øvstebø said, “Over its history the Renaissance Society has stayed resolutely small and focused, which gives us an incredible freedom and flexibility. My vision of the Ren as an engine for new artistic production allows us to concentrate on the present moment and to engage with artists who are addressing urgent and timely issues. These amazing gifts give us the resources to push the boundaries of art in new and unexpected directions.” 2016-05-20 11:48 Ella Coon
68 A Walk Through the Feuerle Collection in Berlin Related Artists John Cage Nobuyoshi Araki Anish Kapoor Cristina Iglesias A stiff, cold breeze greets you upon entering the Feuerle Collection , a new private museum in Berlin dedicated to the accumulated holdings of collector Désiré Feuerle. The austere, cast-concrete building, which served as a telecommunications bunker during World War II, offers little information about what one finds inside the fortress-like institution. The darkened lobby is equally disorienting. On the eve of its recent opening, VIP guests huddled in the bleak entryway, waiting for instructions like a group of anxious school children. The walls, still etched with graffiti, gave no indication that British architect John Pawson had renovated the historic space from top to bottom, but they certainly added to the Brutalist ambience. Once enough visitors had accumulated in the small corridor, a docent ushered the herd downstairs, where a pitch black room awaited. As the door closed, a minimalist sound piece by John Cage began playing overhead — a “gift” from the collector. The two-minute composition operated as a sort of musical prelude to the stark journey that each visitor was about to embark on. Completely dark save for spotlights on individual pieces, the subterranean hall felt like a kind of tomb for art. Spaced out generously, each work sat on its own pedestal creating a feeling of totalized preciousness. Stone, bronze, and wood Khmer sculptures from the 7th to 13th centuries came to life as their carefully carved figures were amplified by the imposing shadows they cast across the bare floor. Looking up at the lights, one could make out small stalagmites dripping down — a reminder of the space’s underground location. Weight bearing columns are the only things that intersect the large space, but their presence helps create a geometric framework for the viewing experience. A glimpse through the pillars juxtaposed small black-and-white Nobuyoshi Araki photographs with Qing Dynasty-era garden furniture. These were pause-worthy vignettes that the room’s layout encouraged. Placed in the center, the most valuable piece on the floor was a non- description stone mat from the Han Dynasty (circa 200 BC), which serves as a humbling counterpoint to blue chip contemporary works by Anish Kapoor and Zeng Fanzhi. With no labels or descriptions to be found, one had to ask the docent if they wanted to learn the origin of a work. This purposeful blankness allowed for a sense of discovery as well as a collapse of time. Upstairs on the second floor, more treasures awaited. A metal fountain by Cristina Iglesias welcomed people into the space, but it was the lacquer Imperial Chinese furniture that demanded immediate attention. Displayed on ankle-height plinths, these functionalist pieces looked just as sculptural as anything else on show. Araki’s erotic images of submissive Asian schoolgirls added to the palpable sense of fetishism that characterized the room. After adjusting to the extremist conditions, the entryway that at first seemed somber now felt relatively inviting, especially when packed with a new batch of guests eager to see the sights. Walking back out into the spring sunshine, one couldn’t help but feel the lingering effects of the collection — a fantasy of ghosts. 2016-05-20 11:28 Kat Herriman
69 NADA Announces Inaugural International Exhibitor Prize COURTESY NADA The New Art Dealers Alliance said today that it is now accepting applications for its first-ever International Exhibitor Prize. The winner will be provided with a sponsored booth at NADA Miami Beach 2016 in December in which to exhibit work. The deadline to apply is Monday, July 11. A press release notes that eligible candidates will be represented by commercial galleries operating outside of the United States, and they cannot have shown work at NADA Miami Beach in the past. The prize has been funded in part by ticket sales from NADA New York 2016, which took place earlier this month. 2016-05-20 11:26 Hannah Ghorashi
70 MAD reveals plans for UNIC, a residential building in paris MAD reveals plans for UNIC, a sinuous residential building in paris all images courtesy of MAD architects MAD architects has unveiled its first residential project to be constructed in europe. located in clichy-batignolles — a newly developed neighborhood in paris’ 17th arrondissement — the planned building will be situated next to martin luther king park, and a courthouse designed by renzo piano, which is currently under construction. named ‘UNIC’, the 13-storey scheme will be developed in collaboration with local french firm biecher architectes. the building will be situated next to a 10-hectare park oriented to face the adjacent 10-hectare green space, the building’s form is accentuated by sinuous floor plates, with each asymmetrical level tapering as the building ascends. MAD attempts to blur the boundary between architecture and nature through stepped terraces, which extend the green space from the park into the building. this also provides room for residents to directly interact with nature. comprising 13 floors, the building’s upper levels offer sweeping views of the city, including the eiffel tower. a double core structure clad with a raw concrete façade emerges from a podium that adjoins an adjacent public housing project. direct connection is also provided to the metro transit network, as well as other community resources such as a kindergarten, and various retail outlets and restaurants. after being selected to complete the project, MAD participated in a series of workshops to explore topics from urban plans to sustainable community development, resource sharing, energy management, and population demographics. ‘we worked closely with the local government, city planners and local architects in a series of workshops to ensure UNIC is a creative and iconic residential project united with the community,’ explains MAD’s founder and principal partner ma yansong. terraces extend the green space from the park into the vertical area of the building 2016-05-20 10:59 Philip Stevens
71 Malaysian Investor Jho Low Sells Off Basquiat- Malaysian businessman and former world-renowned art collector Jho Low is getting rid of a number of artworks, including major Jean- Michel Basquiat and Claude Monet paintings, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation is "actively examining his financial dealings in the US and abroad," according to a lengthy report in the Wall Street Journal. Up until last week, Diamond Dust Heads (1982), a painting of two drug addicts, held the record for the most expensive Basquiat work ever sold at auction. Low was the eventual buyer who helped propel the price to $48.8 million at Christie's in May 2013, where it jumped past the $25–35 million estimate. But, in a sign of how dire his financial situation has become, according to the report, Low sold Dust Heads last month to Connecticut hedge fund manager Daniel Sundheim, in a private deal brokered by Sotheby's, for $35 million, a steep 28 percent drop from what Low paid just over three years ago. This move comes at a time when the Basquiat market is hotter than ever. Just last week, the artist's Untitled (1982) canvas set a new record of $57.3 million at Christie's "Bound to Fail" sale, which also set new auction records for Maurizio Cattelan, Paola Pivi, Neil Jenney, Rebecca Horn, and Daniel Buren, among others. Sotheby's declined to comment; although the auction house did not confirm it, artworks consigned by Low to the major London sales on February 3 and 10 were sold at a steep loss. They were reportedly pledged as collateral for a loan of about $100 million from Sotheby's Financial Services, according to Bloomberg. The three works roughly fetched $53 million, based on artnet's conversions. These included Picasso's Tete de Femme (1935), which was estimated at $23–28.8 million and sold for $27 million. Provenance records show it had been previously sold in November 2013 at Sotheby's New York for just under $40 million, according to the artnet Price Database. (Prices have been converted to USD from British pounds.) Meanwhile, Low was also reported to be the consignor of Claude Monet's Le Palais Ducal vu de Saint-Georges Majeur (1908), for $16.6 million, which missed the low estimate of $17.2 million, even including the hefty premiums. (The original transaction price is not public, since it was acquired in 1998 from a Swiss private collection.) The third work Low consigned to the contemporary London sale (February 10) was another Basquiat, this one a 1982 oilstick drawing Untitled (Head of Madman) , which sold for $8.9 million. When it was previously sold at auction in November 2013, it fetched $12 million on an estimate of $7–9 million, the artnet Price Database shows. Christie's provided artnet News with the following statement: The FBI had not responded to artnet News' request for comment as of publication time. Related: Here Are Jean-Michel Basquiat's Most Expensive Works at Auction According to the WSJ report, investigators believe that at least some of the money Low used to buy his art—his collection had at one point been estimated at upwards of $300 million—came from a Malaysian fund he set up seven years ago, known as 1Malaysia Development Bhd or 1MDB. The fund was set up in conjunction with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak. There are reportedly at least six investigations ongoing around the world into transactions that are related to 1MDB. In the past five months, Low has reportedly sold at least $205 million worth of art, including the Basquiat, the Picasso and the Monet. Low reportedly has also been unloading real estate, having agreed to sell his stake in the Park Lane Hotel, which overlooks Central Park, for an undisclosed price. Investigators are tracking more than $6 billion believed to have been funneled out of 1MDB in a six-year period between 2009 and 2016. In 2009, at least $500 million that originated with 1MDB was placed in a bank account controlled by Low. The money was later transferred to other accounts, as well as to members of Low's family, the report states, citing people familiar with the matter. Follow artnet News on Facebook . 2016-05-20 10:51 Eileen Kinsella
72 Markus Klinko's Unseen Photos of David Bowie In 2001, Markus Klinko was invited to photograph David Bowie. Now, in the wake of the beloved singer and artist's unexpected passing , the unpublished images are finally coming to light, and are currently on view in" Bowie Unseen " at LA's Mr MusicHead Gallery. Related: Take a Peek at David Bowie's Idiosyncratic Art Collection The photographer shot the album cover for Bowie's 2002 record, Heathen , an eerie black and white image of the singer as a blind man. The current exhibition includes that photo, as well as over 20 never-before-seen outtakes from that day. "It was a 9 to 5 shoot," Klinko recalled in an interview with ABC. "We got so much done and, you know, I will never forget this session. " Once we did the cover for Heathen—which took several hours and which he had very precisely mapped out in his head what he wanted—he then turned very playful and allowed me to have fun," he added. Related: Mick Rock's Rare Photos of David Bowie Unveiled in New LA Show On the strength of that work, Klinko was asked to create the cover image for GQ 's "Man of the Year" issue honoring Bowie. The resulting image shows the rock star fearlessly posing with a pack of wild wolves. Due to Bowie's busy schedule and lack of availability for another shoot, Klinko was forced to use a body double with the wolves, carefully adding in the singer's face from the photos taken for Heathen during post-production. "Our male model proved himself quite brave, as he worked it with the energetic and sometimes aggressive wolves," Klinko recalled in GQ earlier this year. "While his face looked nothing like Bowie, he was able to channel him through his body language. " A portion of the proceeds from all works sold during Klinko's exhibition will go to Gabrielle's Angel Foundation for Cancer Research, in honor of the singer, who died from liver cancer. See more of Klinko's photos of Bowie below. Markus Klinko's " Bowie Unseen " is on view at Mr MusicHead Gallery , 7420 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, May 19–June 15, 2016. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-05-20 10:37 Sarah Cascone
73 2016 Cannes Film Festival: amfAR Gala Draws Star-Studded Crowd Kevin Spacey, Helen Mirren, Leonardo DiCaprio, Elle Fanning, Joel Edgerton, Orlando Bloom, Uma Thurman, Chris Tucker and Adrien Brody were among the presenters at the event, held at the Hotel du Cap- Eden-Roc. Katy Perry, Sister Sledge and Village People provided the entertainment, while 2016 Cannes Film Festival jury members Kirsten Dunst, Vanessa Paradis, and Mads Mikkelsen and amfAR chairman Kenneth Cole sat in the crowd, along with a bevy of millionaires and models. Fanning arrived with director Nicolas Winding Refn just as reports were filtering in from the press screening of his movie “The Neon Demon,” in which the 18-year-old has the lead role. The horror film, set in the fashion industry, sharply divided critics at Cannes 2016 with its scenes of flesh- eating and lesbian necrophilia. “It’s a movie about this fashion world and kind of beauty obsession,” said Fanning, wearing a diaphanous Valentino gown. “It’s a movie for girls — I mean it’s all women, you know — and it’s very exciting, and I just love it so much. It’s so different. I think it’s very wacky and will start lots of discussions.” Edgerton was basking in the rapturous reception for “Loving,” one of 21 films competing for the coveted Palme d’Or award. Based on the true story of the couple that paved the way for interracial marriage in the United States in the Sixties, the movie directed by Jeff Nichols is already garnering Oscars buzz. “I knew Jeff had made a special film, but I just hoped that the audience would feel that way too and it was the way it was — it was beautiful,” said Edgerton, noting that his character is a man of few words. “It’s weird — I’ve come out of a couple of films where I talk maybe too much, so it’s nice to talk very little and, you know, a film is about expression and about capturing thoughts, and so as long as that’s there, words don’t mean as much, sometimes,” the Australian actor mused. Dunst was relishing the role of juror. “I love the people that I’ve been able to meet. I feel like I have relationships that I’ll have for the rest of my life — it’s been really wonderful,” she enthused. She and Paradis share a fondness for smoking. The French actress hid her roll-up cigarette behind her back to pose for photographs, but quickly thought better of it, as she laughingly mimed her vaporous Chanel gown going up in a puff of smoke. The luxury brand also dressed Juliette Binoche, who has joined forces with talents including Robin Wright and Freida Pinto to launch We Do It Together, a nonprofit production company dedicated to financing and producing female-driven films. “I get the feeling that consciences are changing and that there is really a yearning for women to be more involved in the creative process and be recognized,” the French actress said. Inside the venue, business took a backseat to entertainment, as Spacey — replacing Sharon Stone as emcee — launched into spot-on impersonations of the likes of Johnny Carson and Bill Clinton. With a series of zingy one- liners, he roasted everyone from Donald Trump to producer Harvey Weinstein. “I don’t think Donald Trump would like it here at the Cannes Film Festival. Foreign films contain the two things Donald Trump hates the most — foreigners and reading,” Spacey said in Carson mode. “No, I’m kidding. Donald Trump would probably love it here on the Riviera, because there’s so many casinos to bankrupt.” Among the auction lots was a day with the “House of Cards” star in Washington D. C., which sold for 500,000 euros, or $560,000 at current exchange. Guests also bid on a week’s stay at DiCaprio’s home in Palm Springs. “Now that’s very rare — that’s something only a few hundred Victoria’s Secret models have been able to do,” Spacey joked. “And apparently Orlando Bloom is going to be bidding on that one. No, no, no, it’s fine, it’s fine. He and Katy have an understanding — they don’t mind what goes on near the desert.” That jibe was a reference to tabloid reports that the British actor cheated on his girlfriend with Selena Gomez in Las Vegas. Bloom and Perry have been packing on the PDA since arriving in Cannes. Bidding went stratospheric on several lots, including the collection of 32 designer outfits modeled by the likes of Karlie Kloss, Jourdan Dunn, Alessandra Ambrosio and Doutzen Kroes, which sold for 1.4 million euros, or $1.57 million. Brody, currently on screens in “Manhattan Night,” said he has put his acting career on hold to focus on painting. Going by the artist name Brody, he donated a painting titled “Jumbo Dropfish.” “The painting tonight is a fish that represents the brightness of fish that live at the darkest depths of this Earth,” the Oscar winner explained. “If you can relate to this and the beauty of the human spirit that must shine bright during the dark times that we are living through today, please bid on this fish.” It went for 450,000 euros, or $505,000, beating lots by leading artists including Martin Kippenberger, Richard Orlinski and John Armleder. The event raised more than $25 million in total. 2016-05-20 10:13 Joelle Diderich
74 penda: magic breeze landscape design in india chris precht of penda has shared his latest project ‘magic breeze’ – a landscape that derives from the distinctive forms and historical architecture of indian stairwells and water mazes. approached by the real estate company pooja crafted homes, the brief called for a communal garden for a residential development based in hyderabad in india. the result sees a obvious reference to indian stairwells which have led to the steps for the landscape. this, coupled with the steps used as planters and filled with flowers, herbs and grasses. furthermore, there is a nod to water-mazes illustrated by the shifting steps. the 8,000 sqm landscape is organized to accommodate three different speeds of movement; a wider and straight path for runners, fast walkers and an emergency lane. the private and more narrow path is for a leisurely speed, while lastly, the third trail takes people and their pets onto the steps to the private gardens. construction of the ‘magic breeze landscape’ will begin construction in summer 2016. the landscape is organized for three different speeds of walking penda took indian stairwells as a source of inspiration and created steps for the landscape in between the steps, herbs, flowers and plants will be grown based on indian water-mazes, the steps get shifted to create different types of atmosphere the landscape will serve the residents of 145 apartments and will start construction by summer 2016 concept diagram of the three routes 2016-05-20 10:10 Natasha Kwok
75 Chapter One: Colin de Land & Pat Hearn Colin de Land is the reason I decided to open a gallery. I was never a friend of his. I didn’t know him well, but when I moved to New York I had this dream of working for him. I managed to get a job interview with him that was quick and a bit pointless. I did not really speak any English, and he did not really have any money to pay me. But those three minutes were crucial to my personal growth. I remember him being scruffy yet elegant. I remember this melancholy in his eyes — the eyes of someone who loved art more than money. Everyone conspired to steal his artists (and eventually they did). But above all, besides his great gallery, I was fascinated by his love affair with Pat Hearn. I fantasized a lot about their bond, a relationship based on a love for each other and for art. Linda Yablonksy, in a beautiful article about their time together, recalled their early days, when they filled each other’s galleries with flowers. Pat was beautiful and always elegant, avoiding the clichés of the normcore pseudo-intellectual dealer or the priest in black Japanese designer clothes. Pat was the first to leave this world — sadly, way too early. Struck by cancer, struggling with medical bills, she died, followed by Colin only a year later. article I still dream about their story. Regardless of their tragic end, I always looked for that kind of romantic bohemian love. Thus the corny title of this column. How do love relationships work in the art world? Most people would say that it’s the same as any other field. But I wonder about the emotional intensity of the art community. Making art, selling it, or writing about it requires a lot of emotional strength as well a totally open heart. Artists are always pursuing their obsessions and their deepest feelings. Dealers (usually failed artists themselves) project their own obsessions onto their artists, nurturing strong feelings of exclusivity. The art world can be a big, messy, emotional place. And we should not forget about the social aspect of the business: the openings, the parties, the drinks, the fairs, the travel, which all accelerate the process of meeting new people and forming relationships. Over these past few years of ultra professionalism in the art market, such feelings have sometimes been replaced by competition, paranoia and cynicism. The large amount of money at stake certainly does not help engender healthy relationships. Things can easily get out of control. Anyone is capable of being aggressive, greedy, vengeful. But things are not that bad. We should remember that many success stories in the art world are borne out of loving relationships. Think of Ugo Rondinone and John Giorno, whose love culminated in their beautiful show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (the city of love). Consider Anina Nosei and John Weber. Or take Mary Boone and Michael Werner, a long, successful relationship. Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend wrote entire chapters of art history while they were together. Palais de Tokyo I tried to count all the art-world relationships I could think of. I couldn’t finish the list, which in a way is good news. Some of the relationships are over, but what they created was often rather magical and eternal. Many of them survived recessions, long distances, business breakups. When a relationship works, a mutual passion for art can be a bond that kindles greatness. Still, I keep asking myself the same questions: Do relationships form more easily in the art world because feelings are stronger? Are those relationships more intense or more superficial? Is the art world a place of romanticism or cynicism? Left with these questions, I think about Colin and Pat. A few years after my first and only meeting with Colin de Land, I moved back to Europe. Thanks to the help of Alexander Schroeder, I had the chance to borrow Colin’s personal collection of books. Before he passed away, he organized a selection of his books that were supposed to represent his life and interests. Everything was there, including the shelves. It was clear that I had to live with it for a while. I had to convince my partner at the time (now my business partner) to let me repurpose our dining room as a library. For one month, Parisians could visit the Colin de Land library by appointment. Some purists were disappointed, as the collection included fewer art books than they expected. Cookbooks were shelved next to the biography of a twenty-one-year-old Claudia Schiffer. There were also quite a few tourist guides and underground music fanzines from the East Village. Some of the books were presents from artists, and flipping through them you could find inscriptions from people like Isa Genzken and Cosima von Bonin. A few art critics were quite disappointed by this random selection of books. Meanwhile I was pleased to learn that my favorite art dealer had been all about food, supermodels and music. It didn’t take me long to realize that this collection of books, this celebration of one man’s voracious love of life, was an artwork in itself. Colin’s and Pat’s galleries were on the same street. Most of their openings happened at the same time, odd gatherings of rich people from the Upper East Side and the downtown underground community. Under the umbrella of their love, everything around them seemed a little more profound. After they were gone, everything felt that much more superficial. by Daniele Balice 2016-05-20 10:10 Kari Rittenbach
76 aston martin vanquish zagato concept aston martin returns to concorso d’eleganza with zagato for bespoke vanquish concept all images courtesy of aston martin at the 2016 concorso d’eleganza villa d’este held at lake como in italy, aston martin unveils their latest creation with italian design-house zagato called the ‘vanquish zagato’ concept. it is the fith car to emerge from a collaboration that stretches back over five decades. highlights include a ‘DB4 GT zagato’ as well as an one- off ‘virage shooting brake’. ‘we pride ourselves on our strong partnership and the creation of the vanquish zagato concept was a true shared experience,’ explains zagato’s CEO, andrea zagato. ‘it represents the essence of an important design relationship that dates back over fifty years.’ the ‘vanquish zagato’ concept was designed in close collaboration between the aston martin design branch, led by marek reichman, and andrea zagato and his dedicated team in milan. the concept features proportions that emphasize a dynamic, forward-looking stance: new bodywork that is entirely shaped from carbon fibre, with the split lines on the body reduced by the use of large one-piece panels. new round tail light reflectors that evoke the classic rear view of a zagato design, incorporating the same ‘bladed’ LED technology as the aston martin ‘vulcan’. designed in close collaboration between the aston martin design team led by marek reichman and andrea zagato ‘over the years, we have developed and refined our own design language and we have always gone that little bit further with our special series cars like CC-100, one-77 and aston martin vulcan,’ says aston martin executive vice president and chief creative officer, marek reichman. ‘the vanquish zagato concept shows how our two companies can come together and push the definition of aston martin design.’ referencing elements of the brand’s present design language, ‘vanquish zagato’ concept features ‘one-77’ inspired wing mirrors and a sculptural rear end similar to ‘DB11’s’ aerodynamic profile, complete with retractable spoiler and rear hatch for access to the luggage compartment. a quad- exhaust nestles in the carbon fibre sills that run around the lower body, creating a pronounced line from front to rear. inside, the concept is filled with herringbone carbon fibre paired with shadow and anodized bronze and aniline leather to give the door panels, vents and rotary dials a rich material quality. be sure to check more of designboom’s coverage of the 2016 concorso d’eleganza here. a sharp crease on the rear wheel arch transforms into the rear flanks 2016-05-20 10:00 Piotr Boruslawski
77 ‘I Don’t Want to Be Part of a Conglomerate’: Julian Schnabel Discusses Leaving Gagosian for Pace at Bruce High Quality Benefit The scene at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University benefit, held at Palazzo Chupi. COURTESY MAX LAKNER/BFA Earlier this year, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, the free art school run by members of the semi-anonymous collective, moved its operations completely out of Manhattan , settling in Industry City after three years at a second-floor space on Avenue A. But despite the new Brooklyn environs, the Bruce crew held its annual benefit at its usual West Village spot: the home of Julian Schnabel, otherwise known as Palazzo Chupi. Schnabel’s son Vito is a longtime compatriot of the BHQF, and seeing as he also lives in the infamous pink mansion (a few floors below his dad) the downstairs garage makes for a pretty perfect spot to throw a party to raise money for the gratis university. After a live auction of work by Rita Ackerman, Henry Taylor, and the Bruces themselves, Schnabel was seen futzing around the space in his usual cocktail attire, which is his pajamas. Perhaps it was the right time to chat with him about his recent decision to join Pace Gallery, ending his relationship with Gagosian Gallery (however tenuous that relationship was—a Gagosian representative told the New York Times that they never “formally represented” Schnabel). It recalled a similar situation in 1984, when the artist rather abruptly decided to leave Mary Boone for Pace, causing some consternation among the people with chips in the game. Leo Castelli called up Schnabel, yelled , “I have nothing but contempt for you,” and slammed down the phone. So, why make a move back to Pace this time?“Why would I want to do that? Because I know them,” Schnabel said. “And life’s too short. Too short to waste. I just think that, if it’s not fun, don’t do it. I wasn’t having much fun.”He was stopped for a second by his daughter Stella, who was beckoning him elsewhere in his garage. Before he left, he said he wanted to elaborate on how much he likes Pace founder Arne Glimcher.“I’ve known Arne for a long time, I wanted to have a dealer that was a friend of mine. I don’t want to be part of a conglomerate. It doesn’t have to be like that! I wasn’t feeling it, you know?”Fair enough. 2016-05-20 10:00 Nate Freeman
78 With ‘The Nice Guys,’ ‘Lethal Weapon’ Writer Shane Black is Back: Do We Really Want Him? “The Nice Guys,” written and directed by Shane Black, has been touted as the “ superhero antidote we all need .” A Los Angeles detective movie set in the 1970s, it stars Ryan Gosling as a perpetually drunk private detective who slums it on low-rent cases and Russell Crowe as a freelance tough-guy who beats people up for a price. The odd-couple find themselves in the middle of a La-La Land noir involving a missing girl, a dead porn star, and the shadowy forces who are killing everybody involved. But is this really what we need? The film marks the bright-lights return of Black, who, with the screenplay for “Lethal Weapon,” sold on spec in 1986 for a then-remarkable $250,000, introduced a template for the kind of action movie that would rule the blockbuster market through the mid 1990s: excessive male dominated shot-’em-ups injected with adrenaline and frat- house humor. “Lethal Weapon” was a major hit, grossing more than $65 million domestically. Black was only 24 years old, and he acted like it: he spent his off hours in a clubhouse called the Pad O’ Guys in West Hollywood, and was anointed into an informal group of screenwriters who were cashing in on Hollywood’s frantic purchasing spree. (New York Magazine profiled Black and other high-priced screenwriters in 1990, in a piece titled “ Million Dollar Babies .”) Black kept churning out scripts, and Hollywood kept giving him more money. “The Last Boy Scout” sold for a reported $1.75 million, rumored to be the highest amount for an original script up to that point — topped by Joe Eszterhas two months later when he sold the script for “Basic Instinct,” for $3 million. Black would flame out with his biggest spec-script sale, “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” which sold for $4 million in 1994. The movie tanked at the box-office, produced a scathing attack on his work in the pages of Variety, and sent the screenwriter into hiding for almost a decade. He returned in 2005 with “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” starring Robert Downey Jr. In the interim, the kind of movie Black helped popularize had gone from hot property to problem — in the aforementioned Variety screed, editorial director Peter Bart, reportedly echoing many in the movie industry , chastised Black personally for the excessive violence in his films — and back around the circle again. What replaced the dumb-fun action movie during his absence was an even dumber and higher-priced blockbuster, and nostalgia kicked in. “Kiss Kiss” was well received, but it wasn’t a success financially. (It attracted a bigger cult following on home video.) Black remained in the shadows for the next few years, until his friend Downey brought him into the superhero fold in 2013, asking him to write and direct the third iteration of the “Iron Man” franchise. A guaranteed success, it allowed Black the freedom to make the kind of movies he wanted to make all along. This might sound like a comeback story, and in some clear ways it is. Black’s work, even the most maligned, has attracted cult audiences in a way other box-office failures of the period have not. The once hotshot screenwriter stuck to his guns, and now his movies are back in favor. But to call “The Nice Guys” an antidote is missing the obvious: Black might have been off the grid, but his work never disappeared. Instead, it was absorbed into the mainstream. Before Downey helped him get hired on “Iron Man,” the modern superhero movie already bore traces of the Shane Black-style, just glitzier and with a more contemporary moral compass. Superheroes aren’t as reckless as the protagonists in a typical Shane Black film, but they wield the same kind of humor and reach for the same kind of relatability. Which makes “The Nice Guys” feel less like a refreshing counter to what’s popular and more like a scaled-down version of the same thing. Sure, it’s funny to a point, especially Gosling, who is hamming it up, and there are fantastic set pieces and wildly choreographed shoot-outs that are loud and intense. I’m not immune to the pleasures this film offers. But what made Black interesting, and what made him popular, was how he took something that already existed — the action film, the buddy comedy, whatever you want to call it — and perfected it. He made something the best that it could be. “The Nice Guys” feels like a step backwards, an artist running on empty. This is a good version of a Shane Black film. But what we really need is the Shane Black film that we can’t predict, the one that bursts on the scene like an exploding car. 2016-05-20 09:53 Craig Hubert
79 The Diary of Mark Flood, Part Two: Home Alone Install shot at CAMH. PHOTO BY THOMAS DUBROCK Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a multipart series about Mark Flood’s experience organizing his first museum survey. You can read the first part here. The diary is slightly backdated because, as mentioned, he was busy organizing his first museum survey. “Mark Flood: Gratest Hits” opened April 29 at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and will run until August 7. Sunday, April 17 1. I’ve thought about hiring a fake crowd for my CAMH opening. l hear they get hired for political rallies, to make political candidates look more popular than they really are. Maybe they should protest something. I’ve made protest signs before, and I like doing it. It’s easier to have a reason to make a protest sign than it is to have a reason to make a painting. I made protest signs to ridicule the KKK, and the media, back in the ’80s, when the Klan used to march in Houston. And I made them to ridicule the candidates, and the media, in 1996, when the Republican National Convention was held in Houston. I remember in 1996 the protest leader frowned at my protest sign, DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT, CREATE NEW JOBS. I swear he complained: I don’t like this, it makes people think. For CAMH, I have no clear vision of what the protest signs might say. One idea I had was that they should copy some of the negative comments people made online about my Supreme skateboard decks. My decks were text paintings that said MOM DIED or DAD DIED. They got a lot of hate, really great, stupid teenage hate. Some cleverly commented that Mark Flood should die. MARK FLOOD SHOULD DIE. That might make a good protest sign outside my exhibition. But I’m already trying out so many things at CAMH, I’m not sure this is the time. Also, one of my assistants thinks some other artist has already done it. Ugh. 2. I went over to my Wakefield studio. Two of my assistants, Barry and Edgar, are finishing up 5,000 LIKE paintings there. “5000 Likes.” COURTESY MARK FLOOD The LIKE paintings are handmade. They spray black spray paint through stencils onto 12 x 16 white cotton canvases. By this time, the much-used stencils are encrusted by dark growths of accumulated paint. This all got started when I made a painting about Facebook’s tie to the CIA. I made the first eight LIKE paintings to go with it, and leaned them on the floor under the CIA painting. At that opening, people picked up the LIKEs, and moved them. Daily Facebook activity had erased their reservations about touching art! I thought that was something special. I tried it again in Miami, during the Basel frenzy, leaving hundreds of LIKEs stacked at various fairs. And again, the LIKEs walked and I got dozens of pics of them in new locations. So at CAMH we’re going to have 5,000 LIKE paintings, and I assume the public will just pick them up, and put them wherever. Some people will try to steal them. I told the guards to say No to the LIKE thieves, but not to actually shoot them. 3. I give a LIKE painting to each person who visits my studio, and I always name the LIKE painting after them, Mona’s LIKE or Truman’s LIKE . People may interpret this to mean I like them. But the work is actually about how much I’m disgusted by Facebook, and its creepy corporate colonization of all human reality. When a LIKE painting comes up at auction, I’ll know who’s selling it… 4. I dug through boxes of old paperwork from the ANR warehouse. I need to make a selection of ’80s and ’90s memorabilia, to install on CAMH’s walls. Visitors, if they wish, will be able to go down the rabbit-hole of my complicated past by browsing my memorabilia. Flyers, receipts, photographs, reviews… I get lost in the rabbit-hole myself. Even an old utility bill can make me start staring into space. Get it together, Flood! Just make sure nothing is too embarrassing to yourself, or anybody else, and throw it in the box! My favorites are the pages of my old press kits, where I’ve crossed out my old name and written my new name in the margin. I like to say I’ve had seven names but the truth is, I’ve lost count of how many names I’ve had. Digging in these boxes, I’ve several times come up with puzzling clippings of articles by strangers. Then I slowly realize….that’s me…I wrote this! 5. Surrogates in the cage. PHOTO BY PATRICK BRESNAN My personal assistant’s assistant called about the cage that I want for my opening, where I could put the two surrogates I’ve hired to pose as me and my brother. The assistant said that they looked for a cage for me to use, like a go-go dancer or some BDSM dungeon, but they couldn’t find one in Houston. They had to go to L. A. or New York. They weren’t sure they could get here in time. I told them to look for animal cages… maybe shark cages? Monday, April 18 1. I tried to ignore the heavy rain, since this is the week we’re moving all the work to CAMH, and we had lots of prep work to do. The assistants have to go to ANR storage, to stage paintings for ANR to move. Then we have to wrap art at Party Tyme studio for Crateworks to move. But it turned out we were in the middle of a huge flood, no relation, and the roads are impassable. 2. My PA has found the celebrity shark cage I want for the opening. It’s actually something called Lucky Dog Modular Welded Wire Kennel Kit, but it’s perfect for my purposes. If only we can get it here on time, and I bet we can! I’ve written the surrogates to make sure they’re willing, and I haven’t heard back, but I’m getting the cage anyway, because I’m sure I can talk them into it. At the least, they only have to get in the cage for 20 or 30 minutes… The rest of the time, customers can get in the cage, and take selfies… I’ve seen it all on my visits to Alcatraz, where tourists pose in the prison cells…It’ll be a nice photo-op for this camera-crazed world. Tuesday, April 19, 2016 1. Because of the flood, everything’s pushed back a day. No big deal. I drove four assistants out to the north side airport area to ANR, where I store tons of my art. The north side is where the flooding was worst. My buddies at ANR showed me photos of giant rivers that used to be creeks, and told me about their friends who lost everything. 2. “The Warrior.” COURTESY MARK FLOOD We had to pull great big paintings from the ANR stacks. One of the things “Gratest Hits” means to me is great big paintings. They’re the only thing that looks good in the great big CAMH space. One of these paintings is The Warrior, made with lace and acrylic. It’s 14- feet-tall. It took six of us to pull it off its shelf and lay it on its side, so it can get in the truck. I remembered how, ten years ago, I painted it from a scaffold in one day. It doesn’t matter how big they are, or how small, a lace painting takes one day to paint. You can prep for weeks but when you paint it, the process takes one day. You have to follow a recipe, like you’re baking a cake. 3. The next challenge at ANR storage was finding the EAT HUMAN FLESH folder. We found it. I’ve told the EAT HUMAN FLESH story so many times that I’m sick of it, but in brief: I made a painting, on paper, with that caption, plus a picture of a teen Idol. It was the late ’80s, when I was using slogans like MASTURBATE OFTEN, DRINK BLOOD, KILL YOUR PARENTS, etc. The paintings were pseudo- advertisements, that captured the advertising form without being comfortable or familiar. I gave it to a bass player, who was living with a nest of punk rock drug dealers. As you may or may not know, drug dealers often have advanced taste in art. They hung EAT HUMAN FLESH over their sofa, looking out from their picture window, onto the mean streets of their dicey hood. “Eat Human Flesh.” COURTESY MARK FLOOD The police were monitoring their activities. And it so happened that members of a very advanced branch of Santeria had recently cooked and eaten a spring breaker college student, in Matamoros, just down the road… So the clever cops put two and two together and got five, and they busted the place, bringing in all the local news crews. Soon EAT HUMAN FLESH was famous, and I was doing interviews as the Satanic Artist on the nightly news. No charges were filed. The police took the painting and I never saw it again, but I made ten copies for a show, to try to cash in on the publicity. Thousands came, but no one bought. Welcome to Houston! Wednesday, April 20 1. The CAMH guys had strips of cardboard on the floor, that mapped out where the wall of giant paintings was going to go. This made it very easy to see what we were doing. So my biggest worry, that the wall wouldn’t fit, went away. ANR and Crateworks had already delivered most of the art by the time I got to the CAMH. We spent the day unwrapping paintings and leaning them around the room. 2. Here’s some of the art, with bland professional commentary… “Deutsche Bank 37.” PHOTO BY PATRICK BRESNAN Deutsche Bank 37 A few years ago, I got inspired by seeing the Deutsche Bank logo, tattooed here and there on the white flesh of the tent-womb of Frieze New York. When I strapped that involuntary subject onto my lab table, and started experimenting, the results were fabulous. My process, which is low-tech and stupid, but patiently developed, mutates corporate logos in a thousand directions, ranging from insect exoskeleton to alternate universe modernism. You could argue that I am being all too cooperative with corporate fascism, or that I am subtly subverting it. By the time such conversations are possible, I feel my work is done. “Inscribed [Anderson Cooper].” PHOTO BY PATRICK BRESNAN Inscribed [Anderson Cooper] I understand why viewers assume I hate the celebrities whose faces I mutilate, but it’s not really about hate. Its about how one finds one’s own feelings reflected, in certain photos of celebrities, and how with a little stretch here, and a tuck there, self-expression blossoms forth. Celebrity faces are how every person in this culture experiences their emotions. So I allow myself, and everybody else, to soak our tense realities away, in the warm hot-springs of Anderson’s sad eyes. In this particular photo, there was a vertical tension line in his forehead, exactly the kind of wrinkle that Botox is designed to remove from the foreheads of celebrities. I decided to develop that tension line until it was a nasty Otto Dix WWI scar. The scar leads to an abscess, where modern viewers can locate the anxiety we experience in the trenches of today… “Pink Glow.” PHOTO BY PATRICK BRESNAN Pink Glow I haven’t had much hate about my digital Rothko Derivatives from the art world, at least not that I’ve heard. But the voices in my head won’t shut up about how wrong it is to make them, and what a bad person, and a rotten artist I am. So I sneak around in my Mac after midnight when I’m too tired to care what the voices say, and develop these works. I’m obsessed. The Rothko formats and the Rothko projects are too interesting to pass by. Isn’t it strange that staring at certain shapes and color combinations can make you have intense feelings? I hop over the cemetery fence, because I need to play on that playground. 2. The first thing that actually got installed at CAMH was my mural, Drone War. It was challenging to install, because not all of the seven 14-foot-tall canvases were perfectly square. The preparators said that some of them were shaped more like strips of bacon. We also started work on The Edge of Fame , a.k.a. the Lindsay Lohan wall. I have 6,500 clippings of Lohan covering every phase of her career, which I bought from an obsessed fan. “The Edge of Fame.” PHOTO BY THOMAS DUBROCK Published photographs are the basic unit of fame. I think displaying quantities of a star’s published photographs is a way to look at fame, and think about it. We have to pin up enough to go 30 feet long, 6 feet high. The walls of CAMH have so many coats of white paint that the assistants can’t get the pushpins in. I told them to tape pennies to their thumbs, and think about the pioneers. But they decided to use rubber hammers. When I showed The Edge of Fame in NYC it was wildly popular. Everyone stood around talking about Lindsay. I wish they had been talking about me, but I’ll take what I can get. Thursday, April 21 1. We started assembling pieces of the wall. We joined together pairs of paintings, at right angles, with big brackets. We also studied the vertical diptychs. They need to be fastened together very securely. I’m worried an upper panel might fall down and kill a customer. 2. Hours later, the wall started to take shape. It looks like it may be cool. You walk into CAMH and face this big facade of art, then you go backstage through a passageway. You end up in this backstage art zone, with a lot of sofas and memorabilia, and probably some dim light. As I mentioned, my operating theory is that nobody wants to be in the audience anymore. Everybody wants to be backstage, licking glitter off Miley’s tits, or rubbing Nick Jonas’s cock through his greasy leather pants. Mysterious, glamorous, exclusive art world backstage! That’s what everybody wants, so I’m giving it to them. 3. The backs of paintings. PHOTO BY THOMAS DUBROCK I hadn’t thought about what it would be like to have the backs of all the paintings exposed. They’re a lot more interesting than one might expect. There are signatures and labels and paint bleed-through and dirt, plus the brackets joining them and anchoring them to the floor. The oddly connected paintings jutting up in the space remind me of Serra’s looming slabs of steel. 4. The CAMH preparators kept assembling the wall all day. My guys work on the Lindsay Lohan wall, and move paintings around. I’m taking lots of pictures and lots of glitch panoramas with my iPhone. I’m trying to improve my entourage’s Instagram account, which is called mikeloodsarmyofthedamned. I also need a lot of pictures for the catalogue. The catalogue comes out later, in July, so it can have pics of the install. I like shots of paintings with people in the shot, working, sleeping, dancing, whatever. I like shots of people unwrapping the painting, carrying it, installing it. I’m so bored with straight shots of paintings on white walls. I hate it when they trim a photo of a painting, right up to the painting’s edge, and throw the last scrap of context away. It seems art professionals, in their never ending quest to turn art into something that makes sense, want to pretend that they’re scientists, and that they’re studying something. So they need a lot of white space, and no contamination from reality. They need to study this art thing, to really pin it down, like a butterfly on a nice white board, or a swab of blood on a nice sterile slide, or a naked political prisoner in a nice clean cage. Art professionals need to remove all the dirt, all the context, all the people, and all the fun from the art. They need to starve it for money, and torture it with stupid reviews, and inject a bunch of pureed Marxist theories up its ass. Then they may finally get some valuable intel out of that art, right before it shudders and dies. 5. I kept looking for the boundaries at the CAMH and I never found any. I had suggested that we do a photo session where we get a bunch of erotic performers and fog machines, and CAMH’s director, Bill Arning, said, Sure. Thats when I knew I’d met my match. The fog machine was sitting there. My CAMH liaison, Patricia, casually mentioned to me that she had gotten a bunch of names and contact information, regarding erotic performers. Bill said he had some too. No boundaries…It’s like my parents are gone for the summer, and I’m throwing a scary party in their house! MF 2016-05-20 09:45 Mark Flood
80 80 ‘The Word Gallery Is No Longer Elastic Enough’: Gavin Brown on His New York Reopening The new address. COURTESY GAVIN BROWN’S ENTERPRISE Like many of New York’s noteworthy gallerists— think Leo Castelli, or Larry Gagosian—Gavin Brown is a transplant to the city. Brown, who has shown such artists as Piotr Uklański, Urs Fischer, Elizabeth Peyton, and Peter Doig, moved to New York from the U. K. in the late 1980s, and ran a gallery, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (and a bar, Passerby, next door), on West 15th Street for six years before relocating it to the West Village, on Leroy Street, in 2003. In 2010, when Brown’s landlord, Pat LaFrieda Wholesale Meats, moved to new headquarters in New Jersey, Brown expanded into the building next door, doubling his exhibition space and making his gallery a full city block in length. In 2013 he opened a space in Downtown Los Angeles, 356 Mission, in partnership with one of his artists, the painter Laura Owens. In 2014 he opened a modestly sized branch on the Lower East Side, and last year he began doing exhibitions in Rome, in the deconsecrated 8th-century church Sant’Andrea de Scaphis. Two years ago, word got out that Brown’s West Village HQ would go to a developer, and he’d be forced to move. For his final exhibition in the space, last June, Brown re-created Greek Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis’s famous 1969 installation of live horses, Untitled (12 Horses) , alongside a barbecue pit from a longtime Brown artist, Rirkrit Tiravanija, who also removed the gallery’s windows and doors so that one could visit at any time. For four days, the gallery was open 24 hours; at night, there were screenings of Sturtevant’s Warhol Empire State (1972). After visiting the exhibition, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz wrote , “Brown is part of a great generation of dealers who opened galleries in the 1990s, people whose purpose was to somehow to make money while making worlds possible where they, and the kind of art that they thought helped people, slide into … other destinations.” On Artforum.com, Linda Yablonsky called Brown “perhaps the most imaginative artist-dealer in town,” and noted that his gallery “has given us a number of memorable shows, wonderful art, and dinners on that rooftop that no other gallery could match.”Not long after the West Village space’s swan song came the news that Gavin Brown’s Enterprise would move to Harlem, where Brown has lived for the past five years. The new space would be a former brewery at 439 West 127th Street, a 19th-century building that, Brown told the the New York Times , reminded him of “an urban secular cathedral.” It would have three floors of exhibition space, and would open in September with an exhibition of British artist Ed Atkins. As often happens with complex renovation projects, Brown’s took longer than expected. In the meantime, several other galleries announced their openings in Harlem, including Elizabeth Dee, Broadway 1602, and Eli Ping Frances Perkins. Tomorrow, Brown, whose space is the largest of them, opens the doors to his gallery at last, with the Atkins show. He is opening with the renovations not yet complete. On the eve of his New York reopening, I emailed with Brown about his first encounter with the space, which had been empty for around 50 years; the challenges that the building presented; what Atkins is showing and how the installation of this work will respond to the space’s particular qualities; whether he thinks the New York art landscape is becoming more like London, with clusters of galleries throughout the city instead of centralized in one neighborhood; what he makes of the art world’s recent focus on Harlem; and how Gavin Brown’s Enterprise might be different in its new location. During the time in which Brown has been planning his move and starting renovations, there has been a lot of talk about what galleries are for, and what defines the relationship between a dealer and an artist. A Hollywood agent started representing artists. A book was published that described most galleries as inefficient businesses. I asked Brown about his thinking about what the role of the art gallery is today—and in particular what his own gallery is for. The following is an edited transcript of his remarks:About two or three years ago I was given a tour by the landlord of the ‘complex’ of buildings. And he took me into this tower. It was very impressive. It was like [nothing] I had seen before. The kind of space that doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. An imaginary space. When I saw it I was still in the mindset that I would be moving to a space downtown. I was stuck in an assumption that my life with a gallery would continue somewhere downtown. So while I was stunned by the space I didn’t make the imaginative leap to see myself there. It was ‘merely’ one of the most soulful and spectacular spaces I had ever seen. … It is sometimes hard to see outside of the tram lines of life one is habituated to. But it soon became clear that there was nothing that wasn’t either already being developed or was stupid money. And in turning my head back uptown I came to realize that downtown—to use a generalized term—was filled with zombies. If the downtown of the collective imagination had been created by the artist, then in some ways downtown is now the artist’s corpse, being fed on by a population that has only the vaguest unconscious memory of that origin story. Uptown represented space to think and imagine. A margin, which I now appreciate as a vital quality. Margin of what? A center of gravitational insanity? Insane gravity? Suddenly this space revealed itself to me as an answer. After 50 years of being empty—it had been waiting for me. And I’ve never looked back.[Ed Atkins will show] three works. Hisser , Ribbons , and Safe Conduct —in that order from ground floor to second floor to third (top) floor. The progression of the works goes hand in hand with the ascension up through the space. New York is its own animal, unlike any other. Chelsea, the Upper East Side, and the Lower East Side will probably be the predominant ‘art neighborhoods’ for some time. Manhattan really isn’t that big so it is still relatively manageable if there are some galleries at more of a distance. But I do hope there is more of a cracking of these conglomerations. Perhaps art might change and become more complex and meaningful outside of the echo chamber of these groupings. This focus that is on Harlem feels a little strange to me. The subject is entirely based on real estate. It doesn’t touch on life or art. To talk about Harlem as a new, undiscovered art destination ignores the fact that, unlike SoHo in the ’60s or Chelsea in the early ’90s, this neighborhood has been a home, a community to generations. It also ignores that it has been a cultural epicenter for almost a century. But in New York a ‘new’ must always be found. One component that does represent both continuity and change [at my gallery] is the kitchen which will be in the so-called exhibition space rather than hidden in separate area. I hope there will be a continuity with who we were. I’m proud of what I was part of downtown and I want to keep it going. Doing amazing things with amazing artists in this incredible place. I also want to be as open to change and evolution as I possibly can be. It feels like a break from the past. But I cannot possibly describe what those changes might be. Which feels like a free and exciting framework to act from. It has been a strange year. I’ve been at home mostly and so have observed from a distance the continued expansion of this industry. And I didn’t really feel part of it. Obviously. The word ‘gallery’ is no longer elastic enough to describe all the versions and species that we currently regard as galleries. There are vastly different models, vastly different scales of economy, different ideologies which all produce different ideas of what art even is. What art is for. What galleries are for. But my instinct is that the entire endeavor—across the board—and however it manifests itself is more vital and needed than ever. But perhaps needed only for and by the people involved in each individual situation. Is it my imagination or aren’t there hundreds and hundreds of smaller young galleries opening all over the world? It feels to me that if you are a thinking person in your 20s or 30s staring across the 21st century and all the goodies it has in store for us, it is an instinctual necessary reaction to gather with others of your group, your village, your friends, and try to work out what it all means. And you can’t seem to do that anymore in music, politics. Galleries are perhaps finally fulfilling their potential. They are open spaces that just need to be filled. Unlike anything else in our society. I’m not talking about the large galleries that are trying to meet the future with scale and muscle and volume, even though they are doing some important things. I am talking about galleries who must know that there is no money in this in the long run, this is not a career choice, but a way to begin culture, in one’s time. To me, it feels like art is about to be unleashed—because we need it to be. And galleries, whatever their form, are necessary for that. I sound stupidly naive now. But I sense this in my peripheral vision. Or maybe I’m just hoping for it. 2016-05-20 09:30 Sarah Douglas
81 santa teresa house by PF architecture studio reflects porto's rejuvenated city center the nineteenth century ‘santa teresa’ building is located in the heart of downtown porto – portugal. the city center has recently taken a radical change both socially, culturally and economically which has consequently attracted an influx of tourism. the converted apartment house is named after the street in which it is situated and reflects the rejuvenated spirit that the urban area is currently undertaking. PF architecture studio was invited to refurbish the interior of the residence with a series of rooms that would be available for temporary lease. the third floor of the building the aim was to re-interpret the space by allowing extra room for smaller apartments. this was achieved through the use of different typologies including the conversion of the attic and the installation of a mezzanine platform. the result concluded in nine purged suites that conformed to the existing structure whilst embracing the newly installed features. each room contains a minimal appearance that responds to the natural light exterior to the building. the harmonious shift between old and new, embraces the current direction that porto is following, providing inhabitants with a reflection the city’s cultural past and regenerated urban scene. the harmonious shift between old and new embraces the current direction that porto is following the conversion worked around the original structure of the building each rooms responds to the natural light exterior the the building ‘santa teresa’ seen from the outside designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here. 2016-05-20 08:45 Pf Arch
82 The Top Seven Booths at Art16 There was something slightly different about Art16 this year. It wasn't just that the fair's organizers had moved the entrance round the corner, it was deeper than that—there was a greater confidence in the relatively young art fair and a buzz in the air. Early sales include South Kensington locals The Dot Project, who reportedly sold 40 percent of their stand dedicated to Brooklyn based artist Zane Lewis, with works changing hands for around £8,000 ($11,654) each. Alighting in London from further afield, Hungarian Gallery Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts has sold François Fiedler's Lantern of the Night (1965) for £50,000 ($72,877) and Suh Jeong-Min's work Lines of Travel (2016) for £35,000 ($51,004) Not only was Absolutely Fabulous ' Jennifer Saunders browsing the stands, but prices and sales were being discussed throughout the day, accelerating into the evening. Whether they translate into more deals being struck is yet to be seen but in the meantime, here are our seven favorite booths at Art16. 1. Pearl Lam Galleries Pearl Lam, a regular at the fair, showed one of the best stands again this year with a selection of work from Su Xiaobai, Su Dong Ping, and Zhou Yang Ming as well as José Patrício and Dale Frank. All of the work on view showed an inventiveness in terms of surface and use of material with many of the works straddling the boundary between painting and sculpture. The deliciousness of the thick textural layers of paint in the works by Su Xiaobai were particularly striking. As with last year, the booth was abuzz with excitement from the moment the fair opened its door. 2. Other Criteria Talk of Damien Hirst 's Jeff Koons show, which opened at Hirst's Newport Street Gallery yesterday, dominated a lot of the chatter while his gallery, Other Criteria , staged an impressive stand to boot. The selection of witty Harland Miller prints were attracting a lot of attention and the beautiful Rachel Howard wood-cuts were both appealing and reasonably priced, so that around both these selections of work there was much congestion among potential shoppers. There was also a healthy selection of Hirsts up for grabs, on butterfly- adorned Hirst wallpaper nonetheless, with two Polly Morgan taxidermy python works giving a good "ooh" factor to the entire presentation. 3. Tanya Ling Studio Fashion illustrator and artist Tanya Ling was painting live at her stand which was showing both her delicate, abstract line paintings and fashion illustrations going back many seasons. Ling is known primarily in the fashion world as her illustrations have appeared in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, at Selfridges, and promoting fashion house Louis Vuitton. She gained renown as an illustrator after Gavin Turk staged an exhibition of her drawings in 1996 and had previously worked as a designer for Christian Lacroix. Ling is also speaking on Saturday about being a cross-disciplinary artist working in both fashion and fine art. 4. Ruya Foundation This year's non-profit section at the fair was also strong. The Ruya Foundation, who gained attention last year for their project in Iraq with Francis Alÿs , were showing paintings, textile works, photography, and works on paper by Dilan Abdin, Qasim Hamz, Jamal Penjweny, and Ahmad Abdul Razzaq, all of whom are living and working in Iraq. The Ruya Foundation is a non-governmental organization that works with enriching culture within Iraq and building connections with the cultural community in Iraq and the rest of the world. 5. October Gallery The October Gallery also repeated their strong showing of last year with a great international stand reflecting their 35 years dealing in international art, featuring sculpture and works on paper by Ghanian El Anatsui, plus Palestinian Laila Shawa, Kenji Yoshida of Japan, and late British artist Gerald Wilde. The gallery seems to be building on their reputation for showing contemporary art from the African Diaspora and branching into artists from the Middle East. 6. Gilden's Art Gallery Art16 has a reputation for showing work which is mainly contemporary, so Gilden's stand was a real unexpected treat with a selection of more affordable artworks by big name artists including early works by Gerhard Richter and post-war and Modern works on paper by Francis Bacon , Picasso, and Joan Miro. There were also some charming works on paper by Yayoi Kusama which are certainly worth a browse. 7. House of Fairy Tales Gavin Turk's House of Fairy Tales was literally busting with people making inquiries regarding a selection that included Peter Blake , Ian Dawson, Adam Dant, and Turk himself. All proceeds from the stand will go towards the development of their inspiration in schools project. House of Fairy Tales started off targeting young people with their events at festivals and museums around the UK, but from the amount of interest at their booth at the fair their appeal has grown and extends way beyond its origins. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-05-20 07:41 Amah-Rose
83 Artists Occupy Cultural Buildings in Brazil Brazil's cultural elite are protesting the country's move to subsume its Culture Ministry into the Education Ministry. Activists around the country objected to the new rule by occupying ministry buildings in 11 regional capitals. Buildings in Brasilia, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Belo Horizonte, as well as seven other state capitals, were packed with hundreds of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and members of major cultural organizations, AFP reports . Chants of "Out Temer! " filled the iconic Gustao Capanema Palace in Rio. At the Teatro Oficina in São Paulo, a building known for its role in the resistance movement during the years of Brazil's military junta, dissenters adapted the popular song "Baile de Favela," to sound their protest. The government decision to cut the ministries from 32 to 23 came at the behest of interim president Michel Temer in a bid to "streamline a bloated government," according to AFP. Formerly vice president, Temer became acting president last week, following president Dilma Rousseff's suspension for an impeachment trial. On May 12, Rousseff was suspended on charges of manipulating government accounts, bringing an end to 13 years of the leftist Worker's Party in power. She faces a Senate trial that could take up to six months. Should it result in a two-thirds majority vote against her, it will conclude with her removal from power. Despite Rousseff's low approval ratings, Brazil's artistic community chiefly opposes her impeachment. However, Temer, who stands to replace Rousseff permanently should she get the ax, has even worse approval ratings. The market-oriented centrist from the PMDB Party has come under fire for his conservative leanings and suspected involvement in the Petrobras oil scandal. On Wednesday, Temer named Marcelo Calero as the new culture secretary. Calero's appointment is fraught with controversy since Temer had promised to appoint a female culture secretary in a measure to balance his all-male cabinet. Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho spoke out against the new government at the Cannes film festival, where his movie “Aquarius" is competing for the Palme D'Or. According to AFP , Filho claims the move has caused a “dramatic divide" in the country and objects to the government's “extinguishing" of the culture ministry as well as its gender bias. Government support of the arts has never been strong in Brazil, so this latest move has been a blow to the artistic community. Artists across the country are endeavoring to sound their protest—from a series of films objecting Rousseff's impeachment to swathes of activist art such as that currently featured in the exhibition of pro-democracy posters at the Centro Cultural in São Paulo. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-05-20 07:31 Naomi Rea
84 nura headphones by studio office for product nura headphones self-tune for more individual hearing experience all images courtesy of office for product design humans all hear differently, but standard headphones deliver the same audio output regardless of someones individual hearing profile or sensitivity. nura headphones by nicol boyd and tomas rosén of hong kong based studio office for product design takes a more personal approach to music. using built-in microphones, they measure the actual audio response from ears at different frequencies in a process similar to an advanced clinical hearing test. the music signal is then calibrated through a proprietary algorithm and tuned to your unique hearing signature. once the initial 30-second calibration sequence is completed, the headphones will automatically recognize who is listening every time. by further combining an innovative over-ear and in-ear design, ‘nura’ headphones can deliver immersive studio quality sound across the entire audible spectrum. mid and high frequency tones are emitted through a spring mounted earbud directly into an ear canal, whereas low tones resonate from a separate 40 mm bass driver. the result of this acoustic separation is crystal clear mid and high notes that aren’t muddled by the powerful bass. in addition, the double barrier isolation achieved from the earbuds and over-ear cushions block out virtually all ambient noise, as well as being completely silent around people. nura headphones are executed in dark grey anodised aluminium with a signature coloured cable the split electronic architecture and speaker drivers are housed in two sturdy yet lightweight aluminium headphone enclosures with compliant cushions that are designed for comfortable long-term use. the headphones are connected by a slender flexible headband with an integrated cable channel and padding. the configuration allows for full size and fit adjustability, and is executed in a dark anodised finish with a signature coloured cable. the headphones connect to apple’s device through a detachable ‘lightning’ or USB cable, and the initial calibration sequence and further custom settings are controlled through a smartphone app. nura connects to a smartphone through a lightning or USB cable the project was carried out in close collaboration with nura, a melbourne based audio start-up, and the HAX hardware accelerator in san francisco and shenzhen. besides the design, office for product design also created the logo and visual identity. nura headphones are available for pre-ordering through kickstarter. nura headphones are built from sturdy yet lightweight aluminium the spring mounted earbud automaticall adapt to your ear’s anatomy for a perfect fit designboom has received this project from our ‘DIY submissions‘ feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here. 2016-05-20 06:15 Tomas Ros
Total 84 articles. Created at 2016-05-21 06:01