Theomenmag Issue 09.Pdf

09 Omen Magazine is a showcase for multi-medium International creativity. It is a visual online magazine that is a homage to Art and Fashion that may not be necessarily mainstream. It will be a hybrid of talent from up and coming to famous.The focus is on the image, not the buzz. Omen wants to explore and expose to the cyber world, all the amazing work that is off the commercial radar.

www.theomenmag.com

Cover Photo : Thomas Woodruff

© 2010-2012 theOMENmag. All Rights Reserved. 09 Mário Correia - Graphic editor Marcus Leatherdale - Art Director / Art Editor Pedro Matos - Photo editor Jorge Serio - Fashion editor + Art Correspondents: Paul Bridgewater – NYC Amabel Barraclough – London Martin Belk – Paris / Glasgow Dan Bazuin – Toronto Patric Lehman – Toronto Jennifer Leskiw –Antwerp Anne McDonald – Prague Muga Miyahara –Tokyo Elizabeth Rogers – New Delhi Hector Ramsay - Florence Andrea Splisgar – Berlin Jorge Soccaras – Barcelona / NYC Arturo Toulanov - NYC Sheba Legend – NYC Jose Maria Bustos - Singapore + Fashion Correspondents: Michael Schmidt – Los Angeles Rebecca Weinberg – NYC Zuleika Ponsen - Paris + Literary Correspondent: Christina Oxenberg Mark Sink- Denver www.gallerysink.com

Born in 1958, Sink’s photographic destiny was partly shaped by his family history. From a long family line of artists, Sink’s great-great-uncle was Samuel Finley Breese Morse, who is known as America’s “Father of Photography” and introduced the daguerreotype to this country in the 1850s. Sink’s great-grandfather was James L. Breese, a famous photographer who made waves in turn of the century New York. His mother is Denver painter Ann White and Sink’s father is a well known Denver architect.

Sink says when he received his first Diana camera as a child, his future was clear. After art school, the 1980s found Sink in the heady boom days of the New York art scene, experimenting with plastic toy cameras, working professionally as both a commercial and fine art photographer, and hanging out in Andy Warhol’s famous Factory scene. In the early 1990s, Sink returned to his hometown of Denver, where he worked with early digital cameras and created a series of still life photographs inspired by Old Master Dutch paintings.

The latter half of the decade brought Sink into museum administration, as he was co-founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and formed his own community based art center, Gallery Sink. Inspired by the pictorialist traditions of his great grandfather, Sink made traditional landscapes and cyanotypes, as well as camera-less photograms. Photograms are made by laying objects directly on photographic paper and exposing it to sunlight.

With the closing of Gallery Sink, the artist returned to making photography full time in the new century. Sink embarked on a new series with his partner, Kristen Hatgi, using a 150 year old lens to create dreamy collodion wet plates with the technology of the 1860s. All of these chapters will be on view in the Gallery with techniques ranging from photo silkscreen, Polaroid’s, cyanotypes, silver prints, gravure, collodion wet plate and digital.

Mark Sink Photographs with diverse techniques, eras and experiments come together under Sink’s unifying vision of beauty. “I am a gushy romantic,” Sink says. “The theme of this survey is to show my obsession and passion for capturing beauty.”

Sink’s work is in numerous museum collections as well as gallery solo and group shows in the US, South America and Europe. He is currently represented by G. Ray Hawkins in California, Robin Rice in New York, and Rule Gallery in Denver.

THOMAS WOODRUFF NYC

THOMAS WOODRUFF

Thomas Woodruff is a painter who always works in series. His visionary works have dealt with issues of health and wellness, emotional loss, and personal discovery. His themes often have esoteric underpinnings, archetypal formats, and hybrid visual vocabularies from history. He likens his work to “structures of contemplation.” Woodruff’s latest opus, The Four Temperament Variations, are not only an exploration of the archaic medical theory of the humors but are also a riff on the figurative painting genres of still life, portrait, landscape, and wildlife. Using his manically excessive pictorial mash-up of visual motifs, this series is a celebration of the emotive value of color, the storytelling potential of character and costume, and a contemporary revision of the enigmatic and arcane mysteries of our collective past. His tableaus have a slippery resonance and are mysterious yet plausible. By creating richly ornamented works, Woodruff rejects the modernist penchant for the withholding of pleasure and believes that lack of ornament is akin to a lack of adjectives in literature or a lack of seasoning in cooking. Yet, their “over the top” design serves the images; their intention is to transport and bring the viewer into a heightened sense of looking and reading the carefully constructed iconography. The artist is well aware that his paintings are more complex than most created today, and are not for the timid. His artistic heroes are on the fringe of art history and are often not included in the traditional surveys of world art. He has said he would “rather own an Ensor over a Picasso, a Pierro di Cosimo over a Botticelli, a Ferdinand Knopff over an Edward Manet, and a Gustave Moreau much more than a Paul Cezanne.” His belief in the idiosyncratic personal vision as the highest form of art making is apparent in his approach to making pictures. Woodruff’s process is simple: it is all made by hand; paint on linen, with no assistance. The Four Temperament Variations took three years to complete. Over the years, Thomas Woodruff has worked as an artist, illustrator, educator, and curator. He has designed works for theatre, dance, opera, and television, and has worked as a tattooist. He has been a chair at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for the past 12 years, and continues to inspire young artists with his paintings informed by his love of art history, story-telling, popular culture, and all things imagistic. His other series are: The Turning Heads (2008); Freak Parade (2000-2006); All Systems Go (1996- 1999); Apple Canon (1995-1997); and The Secret Charts (1995). Mr. Woodruff has had over thirty exhibitions in his thirty- year career and shows with P.P.O.W Gallery. His work is in public and museum collections all over the world.

www.thomaswoodruff.com

MUNSIF MOLU DUBAI

TAJ MAHAL

Robert Russell

The first image I saw of a Robert Russell painting was on an iPhone, and it says quite a bit that even at such a reduced scale it proved immediately captivating. It was a portrait of the actress Jill Clayburgh elegantly dressed in black, standing demurely, almost awkwardly, against a slate gray background. The painting is just this side of monochromatic, the subject’s skin and hair rendered in the same muted pinks, her moist eyes tinged slightly blue. The unassuming repose of her face upon zooming in discloses something more. She looks as if she could be on the verge of tears, yet the restraint of her mouth says she will maintain for as long as necessary - the kind of expressive complexity that made Jill Clayburgh so startling on film. Inevitably, there dawns the existential reality that this is a woman facing her mortality. In the past, this theme might have utilized the depiction of a skull or some symbol of earthly vanity, the closest thing to that here being perhaps the diamond necklace she wears. In Russell’s painting, no accessory is required other than the viewer, whom Miss Clayburgh gazes at unflinchingly, and who in turn mirrors back her own mortality. That the portrait manages to convey all this is a tribute to both the actress and the artist, and Russell effects it with a fluid ease of brushwork – just enough paint and attention to light not to obscure the depth of his subject.

Robert Russell painted Jill Clayburgh from a photograph he took of her two years before her death from the leukemia she had lived with for twenty. No doubt the knowledge of this makes the portrait especially poignant. Nonetheless, a heightened and complex self-awareness permeates much of Russell’s work, however deceptively simple the surface gesture, whatever the subject. Whether a close-up of a crying child, or a drove of tightly penned pigs, the fundament is always a deft use of paint and light. His rendering of flesh and human features invites comparison to Lucien Freud’s brushwork, if perhaps less frenetic, and it would seem predictable enough if Russell were to dedicate himself entirely to the human figure. But the point at which comparisons begin is precisely the point where Russell takes charge of them, steering them in an entirely new direction. In a rather startling thematic progression, he introduces a new level of complexity and wryness by turning his and the viewer’s gaze onto the subject of art itself.

In Russell’s portrait of yet another famous actress, we are confronted with a tour de force of a different color. If we do not immediately recognize Scarlett Johansson, it is likely because her own identity is subsumed by her portrayal of Johannes Vermeer’s iconic “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (c. 1665) in Peter Webber’s eponymous film (2003). Having traded his muted palette for the richer hues of a Vermeer (in Technicolor), Russell deflects the viewer’s gaze back and forth via a mirrored hall of impersonations. The portrait’s subject is destabilized, its source and endpoint ironic ellipses. In its place, the viewer’s own contemplation of fame, perception and preconception - how they reciprocally inform and alter one another. Russell subverts any pure, fixed notion of copy and original, icon and con, classical and popular, engaging us in a discourse that segues seamlessly between them all. That Webber’s film is itself an adaptation of a historical novel by Tracy Chevalier fictionalizing the circumstances leading to the creation of the famed painting, adds yet another reflective veneer to the multilayered pseudo- Vermeer.

Wait, Russell is not done yet. He makes yet another startling leap from subject- as-art to art-as-subject, this time focusing his artistry on a select canon of monographs. Iconic names loom from the beautifully painted covers of this larger- than-life series of art books - Courbet, Warhol, Leonardo, Sargent - to name a few. One title, “Pure Beauty,” being the catalogue of artist John Baldessari’s LACMA/Tate Modern retrospective, seems to almost hover dislodged above its exquisitely plain white cover. Where Scarlett Johansson displaced Vermeer’s original model, Russell himself now displaces Baldesarri with a simulacrum, wryly echoing the latter artist’s emblematic quote, “everything has been purged from this painting but art...” Meanwhile, a painting of a Lucien Freud monograph alludes to Russell’s own painterly influences like a serpent biting its tail. Concept has been meticulously melded to form, form masterfully shaped into content, content symbiotically married to concept.

Perhaps it says most about Russell’s work that it provokes so much to say. And much to ask. Leaving his credentials to his website – suffice to say that he lives and works in Los Angeles – I’ll start with the Jill Clayburgh portrait. How did that come about?

Robert Russell: My friend Craig Wright had created the TV show Dirty, Sexy, Money and had included me as a character using my actual name. I was a painter who had been commissioned to make a portrait of the family matriarch, played by Jill Clayburgh. There is a great deal of role-playing in my practice, so it was a perfect opportunity to really indulge in the bourgeois tradition of decadent portraiture of the stinking rich! The show provided me with adequate cover to make something I had considered to be so indulgent and beautiful.

JS: You playing yourself certainly seems fitting in light of your work - the Scarlett Johansson Vermeer comes to mind. Did that painting occur to you as a whole idea with all its implicit complexity?

RR: The seeds of that Vermeer/Johansson piece had been planted quite a bit earlier in a series of floral still life pictures that I had been making. I found myself looting art history books for images to make. I had emptied so much out of my work that it seemed there were no more images available to me. I wanted to make paintings that looked like Artworks (capital “A”) so I had to refer to what the canon had decided were the great artworks of the past. I wanted to try on a Vermeer but could not content myself with a direct master copy along with all the meanings that that would conjure up. The film and Scarlett again gave me the proper cover, so to speak, to enter the piece and avoid the problem of the master copy.

JS: What about your paintings of crying children? Was your main concern here an emotional one, or something more ironic?

RR: I have always been interested in the kind of paintings that are considered sentimental, or pejoratively referred to as kitsch. So many so-called “Sunday Painters” have painted an image of a crying child that it’s hard to know if the image can generate meaning beyond the trope. The crying series looks at that question.

JS: You’re an artist who could understandably content himself with portraiture; why then push the parameters of your subject matter?

RR: Portraits do hold a lot of interest for me, but of course so do a lot of other things. I’m liberated in my practice knowing that there is no obligation to remain the same painter or pursue the same subjects for any length of time.

JS: Were the art-book paintings primarily a conceptual leap for you, or a visual one, and which book was first?

RR: I don’t think that the book pieces were much of a leap, really, given what we are discussing here and the oblique way in which I have tried to deal with the problem of Painting’s History. The book pieces are straight, still lives that quite plainly deal with the “Master” copy indirectly and even casually in this context. They were always intended as a series (perhaps ongoing) with the Sargent as the first. Sargent is one of these frustrating figures in Art History whose influence creates so much anxiety. The work appears to be so breathtakingly effortless. Henry James sat for a portrait with Sargent and described those bravado flourishes, for which Sargent is so well know, as having been applied in the very final stages of the painting - those final strokes are so indulgent and sweet - I read cake decoration in this depiction. I needed to try and shed this influence and almost stifle it. Turning the Sargent into a book cover, tipped and distorted in perspective, seemed like the right strategy.

JS: The art book series are quite large paintings, which makes them especially impressive when viewed hanging together. Was the effect of scale a major consideration?

RR: Absolutely. The book pieces needed to be slightly beyond the easel scale.

JS: Do you thoroughly enjoy the painting process, or is it equally laborious and frustrating?

RR: I love to make paintings despite the frustration and labor.

JS: When did you first think, “I want to be a painter?”

RR: I honestly cannot remember a time when I wasn’t drawing - there was nothing else that I was going to do.

JS: Who are some of the artists that inspired you? Might the monographs you’ve painted serve also as homage to them?

RR: Yes actually. The artists that I have painted represent the main influences on my practice. They are both homage and a bit of vandalism.

JS: I see your work as progressing via “leaps” in subject matter. Do you know what your next leap might be?

RR: The last 2 years or so, I have been making paintings of men I find on the internet that have the same full name as me. Francois Ghebaly, the director of the gallery representing me, and I agree that my next exhibition will likely be a collection of portraits of men named Robert Russell.

Interview and text by Jorge Socarras

THIERRY VAN BIESEN April 13, 1965

Of Lebanese and Belgian o r i g i n , THIERRY VAN BIESEN was born in Beirut in 1965. When he was 10 years old, the Lebanese civil war broke out and c h a n g e h i s l i f e dramatically. In order to survive the horrors all around him, he sup- pressed the violence and developed a way of seeing that was unusually optimis- tic and uplifting. Little did he know that this selective filter would consciously be applied to his work years later. At the age of 16, Thierry’s father sent him to Belgium in order to distance him from the war. A few years later, he landed at Polytechnic Institute where he was destined for a career in mathematics and engineering. It’s here that he first began to take pho- tographs. The lab owner who processed his first roll of images was so impressed by his natural aptitude for composition and color that he encouraged him to nur- ture his innate talent. In 1989, Thierry moved to New York to assist prestigious photographers Ralph Gibson , Sarah Moon, Duane Michals, Art Kane and Arthur Elgort. They gave him insight into their mastery and inspired him to think about his own visual style. Thierry then returned to Beirut where he opened his first commercial photo-studio with friend and worldrenowned photojournalist Pat- rick Baz. The studio reinforced his technical skills and gave him the opportunity to shoot a wide range of subjects for advertising clients including KODAK, SEIKO, PLAYTEX, MARLBORO, TANG, PROCT E R & GAMBLE and numerous local Lebanese businesses. In 1997, he moved to London to “play with the big boys.” It’s here that there alm of fashion photography offered him the opportunity to start cul- tivating his personal style and experimenting with a visual language infused with his signature buoyancy. Thierry’s vision was instantly recognized, and he soon collaborated with major fashion magazines such as TANK, MINED, ELLE Ja- pan, DON’T TELL IT, MADAME FIGARO, JALOUSE, DEALER DELUXE, IT, AD!DICT!, MARIE- CLAIRE, ZINK! And OMEN. The ecognition that his fashion photography brought him attracted worldwide advertising clients including SONY, AMAZON. COM, FIAT cars, SOCIETE GENERALE, GUINNESS, CASTELBAJAC PERFUME, ISSEY MIYAKE, KATE SPADE, MACY’s, OLD NAVY, NEIMAN MARCUS, SHINSEGAE depart- ment stores in South Korea and CLUB MEDITERRANEE. In 2000, his work was ex- hibited alongside Guy Bourdin, Patrick Demarchelier, Steven Klein, Nick Knight, Peter Lindbergh, Herb Ritts, Paolo Roversi and 50 others as part of the group exhibition “Archeology Of Elegance” at The Hamburg Museum Of Modern Art. Dealing with the correlation between art and fashion, the exhibition included the most uccinct and influential photographers of the 80s and 90s. Convinced that those who change the world for the better are the dreamers, not the cynics, Thierry continues to create imagery that vibrates with joy, movement and poetry. Collaborating again with Patrick Baz, he’s revisiting his past with an exhibition for the 2013 Festival of War Photography in Bayeux, France. By modifying Pat- rick’s hyper real images of war, Thierry will finally be able to share his revisionist version of the Lebanese civil war, one filled with nonchalance and oblivion. THIERRY VAN BIESEN

Styling by Rebecca Weinberg

www.joedallesandro.com

Pretty boys can inspire, but they can also assumed he was a casualty of the Warhol be replaced. You have to possess more scene. In fact, he made just eight films for than good looks to attain the longevity of Warhol and Paul Morrissey, then moved a Joe Dallesandro. His flesh in advertise- to Europe for ten years in the seventies ments for Andy Warhol’s Flesh (1968)— and worked for the likes of Gainsbourg, which carried the tag line “Can A Boy Be Malle, Borowczyk, Rivette, and Breillat. A Too Attractive?”—might have been the return to America in the eighties was met lure, but it was the boy himself who cap- with mixed results professionally, and tivated us, a sometimes sweet, even shy, with personal turmoil to overcome, but often temperamental young man forcing he’s alive and well in the 21st century and himself to hustle through another day’s thankful in retrospect for the career he life in the big city. never sought. If there was a hitch, it was in having He was the recipient of a special the character he played commingled in Teddy Award at the 2009 Berlin Interna- the viewer’s mind with his off-screen self. tional Film Festival in recognition of his The intrinsic identification was key to the work in cinema. For a generation of gay remarkable following the film developed men he was a vital sex symbol, perhaps and the equally remarkable emotional re- even an affirming, liberating one. For sponse it engendered. With its low budget many women he was a turn-the-tables, and improvisational nature, its array of about-face, and fair play object of de- curious personalities parading before the sire. Straight or gay, male or female, you camera often calling each other by their couldn’t gaze at Joe in the late 1960s or actual first names, as well as with the War- 1970s and not confront your perspective hol brand and the growing mythology of on sexuality and desirability. his Factory, the film’s line between what The following is an excerpt from the was acting and what was real had been new book Joe Dallesandro: Warhol Su- blurred to the point of obliteration. Audi- perstar, Underground Film Icon, Actor, by ences could hardly be blamed for thinking Michael Ferguson, out now and available that the Little Joe they saw up there on through Amazon.com. screen was the Little Joe they might meet on the corner. One legendary day in 1967, 18- As the first overtly eroticized and year old Joe and a buddy went to visit a fully nude male film star, Joe Dallesandro friend at a Greenwich Village residential was a culturally provocative figure during complex and happened upon an apart- the American sexual revolution. ment where some peculiar people were He has made some forty films over making a movie. Artist Andy Warhol and the years, regularly surprising those who filmmaker Paul Morrissey were shooting a flick and a good-looking stray like Joe “My introduction to the gay world was simply too much to resist. He agreed did two things,” he says. “One, saved me to participate for the afternoon and un- from life in prison for murder, which is derground film history registered a new probably where I would have wound up. personality, though he hadn’t an inkling How? Because the gay world showed me that what he was doing would amount to that you didn’t have to beat up every man anything. you saw or hurt people to make a point. It Joe Dallesandro became the cen- gave me a whole other attitude, a calmer terpiece of all advertising for The Loves attitude. Two, it taught me never to be of Ondine (1967), a rambling splutter of homophobic, even before there was such film stock meant as part of a planned 24- a term. I think it was because I grew up hour experimental film entitled ****. With in a period, especially later on, when the slightly less than a reel’s screen time, this people I looked up to were people like tough little kid from the neighborhood David Bowie. All of those characters were was about to begin life as an underground my heroes. You know, people would adore film sensation, and all he had to do—liter- Mick Jagger, both male and female, for a ally—was show up for it. look or an attitude, and that’s what I liked His father could hardly believe it. about the period I grew up in, that a man Joe, quite frankly, didn’t think much of the could say he liked both, that he appreci- whole experience, particularly since the ated both the look of a man and the look circumstances were so strange that any of a woman without being stereotyped.” concept of this thing actually playing in a For a young man with Joe’s intense real movie theatre was beyond him. good looks, familiarity bred understand- But it did play. ing, compassion, and even a sense of Audiences were lured to the cinema brotherhood. “At sixteen, I had this gay by ads featuring Joe in his underwear. friend that I lived with. He must have While those who went to see the film cut been in his early forties and he owned a across all persuasions, it was clear that his club down on Columbus and 76th or 78th being offered as beefcake held particular Street. It was an after hours club that I appeal for gay men, an extension of an ran for him. It catered basically to the attraction he was already well aware of bartenders of the gay bars and so they all commanding. came to our club at the end of their shift. His sensibility about homosexuality We were open from 2 a.m. to 6 in the quickly evolved into a uniquely mature morning. I did that for about six months understanding for a teenager in those before I ever met the Andy Warhol peo- times, but undoubtedly also from a per- ple.” sonal need for acceptance. That is, before he was introduced to a world rife with flamboyant homosexu- So what was his reaction the first als, drag queens, drug addicts, actors, time he heard the song? musicians, and the habitually misplaced. “I thought it was right on, because In social circles, as he would become when you take all the stories in “Walk on more and more well known via the Warhol the Wild Side,” they’re about people dis- and Morrissey films, every Tom, Dick and covering who they are. Everybody is mak- Harry enjoyed naming him as a former ing a discovery. For me, it wasn’t about lover. He’s met a lot of people for the first money. Everybody just came away with, time who claimed to have had a roll with ‘Oh, Joe’s a hustler.’ They didn’t get the him in his heyday. whole point of the lyric. It was about what The reputation certainly wasn’t dis- I wanted. New York was the place I came couraged by Lou Reed’s inclusion of a Lit- to get what I needed. Well, in a manner tle Joe who everybody had to pay and pay of speaking, Paul [Morrissey] was paying. in “Walk on the Wild Side,” the single that I came back to New York City. Didn’t I be- broke into the Top 40 in March of 1973 come a part of that whole Warhol group and stayed there for two months. With its and didn’t they want to keep me there? drug, transvestite, and sexual references Weren’t they then paying me by giving buried in the melodic drone, it managed me a profession? So the hustle never to become a hit even while being banned stopped.” in parts of the US and UK, where some Joe would eventually do eight films stations censored it to little more than the under the Warhol banner, though all but “doo-do-doos.” the first two are completely Paul Mor- Joe is quick to make it clear that he rissey’s, an attribution mix-up that has hadn’t met Reed at the time and that the confounded and embittered the director singer was basing his song’s “Little Joe” whose work was, and still is, routinely reference on the hustler image from the credited to Andy. Morrissey films he had made, particularly Warhol’s “Superstars,” as they came Flesh. Without the proper context, the to be known, were peopled by an array of lyric about never giving it away sounds colorful personalities, but the pansexual critical, even biting. But Joe hears it differ- (read homosexual) and drug-influenced ently. members became scapegoat represen- “I always said it wasn’t about a hus- tations of a perceived decadence in the tle,” Joe tells me. “It was about how you larger culture. Andy Warhol was bestow- got people who wanted to be a part of ing delusions of grandeur. His Superstars your life. The pay was that they became a were a camp celebration of America’s part of your life, even for a short time. The surrogate royalty, its Cult of Celebrity— lyrics have been misinterpreted.” which was infinitesimal compared to the grotesque worship we see today. star, Joe Dallesandro, would now be the “Andy’s idea of making anybody a Factory’s leading man. star would have been okay if the people Flesh (1968), the first in what was hadn’t completely lost their minds and to become a famed trilogy of cult classics taken it to a place where they wanted to starring Joe, not only beat Midnight Cow- do harm to him,” says Joe. “A woman like boy to the movie screens, thus becoming Valerie Solanas comes along and wants to the first explicit cinematic look at the life shoot Andy, but who’s never made any- of a male prostitute, but it also launched thing with Andy. She’s basically a person a Long Island kid from the ‘hood on an who, in her delusion, thought Andy was international career of singular fame and stealing something of hers. But he wasn’t. adoration. Flesh, Trash (1970), and Heat Yet she wants to physically hurt him be- (1972) took Joe on a voyage in his early cause she thinks so.” twenties to see all of Europe, to be fêted A new security measure was to be in Germany, Italy, France, and the United installed at the Factory the very day So- Kingdom, as well as in the United States lanas unloaded her wrath on Warhol, at where the increasing exposure suggested least the way Joe tells it. Paul Morrissey the potential of other profitable ventures, had just hired Dallesandro. perhaps even a little Hollywood enthusi- “When I went to work there,” says asm. Joe, “I showed up thinking I was going to But was Hollywood of the early be the bodyguard. I could be a little hot- 1970s ready to seriously consider a tempered and I could do damage, because male sex symbol of underground films, I’m dangerous for just a little guy. I prided let alone a male sex symbol who wasn’t myself not on my acting ability, because wearing any clothes? I didn’t know anything about that, but on the way I was able to fight. And on my first day they were taking Andy out on a stretcher and I went up to Paul and said, ‘Well, I guess I don’t have a job.’” During crime scene work on the premises, investigating police officers reportedly lingered over a stash of nude photos from Joe’s physique magazine ses- sions that Warhol now had on file. With Andy recuperating in the hos- pital, Paul Morrissey took the reins for the next feature-length film. His emblematic

“ It was late July. The summer mangoes had dropped from the trees and were lying rotting on the ground, ripped open by feasting bugs and birds. Their intoxicating sweet smell mixed with the heaviness of the night blooming jasmine. This languid perfume created a thick, rarefied atmosphere that at times made breathing dif- ficult. In Miami, nature is often a mix of colorful abundance and dark decay. This evening, I was walking home from a friend’s birthday party. We had lis- tened to the new Rolling Stones’s album, “Aftermath” then turned off the lights and pretended to make out with the nearest girl. Some party. But then again, this was 1966 and I was only fourteen. As I approached my father’s house, I realized that I had forgotten my keys. The porch lights were on, my father’s car was parked out front but the house was completely dark. He must have gone to bed early. Not wanting to startle him, I knocked somewhat timidly. A tornado of mosqui- toes brought on by the summer rains swarmed around my head. I knocked again, this time louder. “Pop, it’s me, open up.” No response. As I stood there, the front door remained closed. Then, ever so slowly, like in some black and white horror movie, the door began to creak open. From the shad- ows emerged a tall man with grayish skin. I had never seen this guy before; he had the stature and demeanor of Lurch. Without any introduction, he looked at me with a cool stare and said in a flat robot-like voice, “We are currently in communication with the master souls of the eleventh plane. Your father is deep in trance and cannot be disturbed.” Lurch began to back away and close the door. He then paused and asked, “Why did you even bother to knock? After all, you are your father’s son. Haven’t you learned to walk through walls yet?” click for music http://ravensandchimes.bandcamp.com/track/division-street hardoszust.com cover credit; Stephen lack COLETTE – NYC

“At the core of Colette’s work is a nomadic principle, an openess to any media, materials, or cultural network as a means of circulating images or ideas; neither performance nor painting is valued above the other... Colette’s art is bound up with the idea of uninterrupted performance , so that her physical presence itself becomes a kind of signature, a trademark. Colette undertook the step of establishing a business corporation for the distribution of her Beautiful dreamer “ products. Projects carried our around 1978 included the marketing of clothes, a perfume, furniture, candy , pinball machine, dolls,and record albums as part of her “Reverse Pop series. Often her representation of these items involved the framing devise of a store window.”

Johnathan Crary 1983 Arts magazine

not responded. And now the Lady takes a vow of Colette Lumiere On Lady media silence. Gaga’s Vow of Silence You are not the first to see parallels and near- & Bullying in the Art direct lifts from Lady Gaga of other’s work, like Madonna, who referred to ‘Born This Way’ as a Community “reductive” version of ‘Express Yourself’. How would you describe Lady Gaga’s translation by Jessica Lapidostitle your work?

Lady Gaga has never met her true Mother Mon- Lady Gaga’s translation of my work, “Gaga’s Bou- ster. She has influenced such sensations as Ma- doir “ goes much further than a parallel or even donna, Daphne Guiness, Norma Kamali, Gaga, a direct lift . The installation implies that the pop the list goes on. The artist’s name, at present, is star lives as a work of art in [that] work of art. Colette Lumiere. Though she has existed under That very concept, and my unique visual manifes- various personas in the past, including Justine tation of it, has been documented in multiple art and the Victorian Punks, a Studio 54-perform- history books, magazines, and various films etc. ing recording artist (which was actually an ex- since the seventies. Most who are familiar with periment she labeled “Reverse Pop”). A radical my work and have seen pictures or witnessed the feminist performance artist since the early 70’s, window described it as an infringement of my Colette was the first artist to become the art, trademark. I call it “a visual rape”. truly live it and be the spectacle. “Until the sev- enties, artists only painted the landscape... Co- They say copying is the greatest form of flattery. lette instead of painting the landscape created What are your thoughts on this statement? the landscape and became part of it,” explains critic and former MoMa Chief Curator Peter Selz. If copying is the greatest form of flattery, I cer- Her main opus of work was her home, which she t a i n l y h a v e b e e n fl a t t e r e d e n o u g h t o l a s t m y would recreate in galleries and public spaces like lifetimes. Last year, when Daphne Guiness per- store windows. As the centerpiece of the installa- formed dressing up in Barneys’ windows, many tion, she would lay in repose, recalling the nudes also bought it up to my attention. I had never painted by male artists since the dawn of time. It heard of the heiress, and took it as a compliment! was a reclamation of feminine power and an hon- Now that I know her to be a woman of style and est statement of how Colette lives. great taste, I am even more flattered.

Recently, a line of interpretation has been However, Gaga’s and Barneys creative team, crossed with “Gaga’s Boudoir”, the Barneys besides hiring me, should have at least made a Christmas window. It ruffled the rouched satin reference to my work in the press releases to the of the art world, those who know Colette’s work. media. The general public is not aware of con- We must ask, where does the line of inspiration temporary art, and especially its women pio- stop, and plagiarism begin? For Colette Lumiere, neers. Barneys and the Pop star are, and this is it started here. And though her handwritten note where the crime begins. from Colette has been delivered to Gaga, and a short film on the matter has gone viral, she has How did seeing her Barney’s window for the first time make you feel? ing art installations. How does it make you feel that you opened doors for other female artists to I had heard about the window when it was first live that way? unveiled. Friends and colleagues were outraged! Being accustomed to inspiring others with my I believe important artists should make an impact work, I initially ignored it. I thought the window and be an inspiration for others. When Gaga first display was at Macy’s. On Thanksgiving, I first appeared in the scene many commented how accidentally laid my eyes on “Gaga’s Boudoir” she reminded them of me. I thought of her as from across the street of Barneys’. I thought I hal- another one of my descendants Yes, I am very lucinated. I was on my way to a dinner at Vivian proud that my work has opened the doors for Horan, a gallerist I exhibited with, and when I other female artists of all sorts. arrived, it was already the topic of conversation. For the next few weeks, the phone calls, emails There is an intrinsic difference between art and & Facebook messages making me aware of the pop: “Pop culture takes the whipped cream and art theft continued. Barney’s windows were well not the cake,” Colette explains. With money and publicized, some who noticed the reproduction a machine of a team, the best parts of the ideas assumed, I was involved and congratulated me. are taken from artists who pour their life and soul into their work, and make them more polished. How did you address Lady Gaga upon this dis- Though Gaga is fighting bullying with the Born covery? This Way Foundation, we’re left wondering what she is doing about the unfair treatment of others I did respectfully address the pop star before within the art community. the dismantling of the window. In a personal handwritten letter, I identified myself and made Colette’s breadth of work is vast. Illuminate your- her aware that perhaps she not been aware of it, self with the work of one of our greatest creative but someone in her creative team had crossed foremothers. the line. Having heard that Gaga was involved www.CollectColette.com with the “Born This Way Foundation” which em- A documentary on the artist “A Pirate In Venice” powered the brave in the arts, I had faith that I soon to be released. would hear back from her . So far no response from Gaga or any sign of acknowledgment. The art community, however, has spoken out on my behalf in conversations on Facebook etc. I was also comforted when a notable art writer intro- duced himself to me at an art party, and said “the people that really matter know”. He added “his- torical precedence is something one can never change”. Strangely enough, even her silence has become an active part of the discussion.

I see a few parallels between you and Lady Gaga - that you both killed your identity in order to create a new (musical) one, and both live as liv- Looking for Lady Gaga Looking for Originality in Art click for video http://vimeo.com/34473694

ZABO CHABILAND BERLIN X-RAY

PERSONA - or the removable mask (on “Zabo Chabiland’s “X-Ray” and “Black Project” pieces) Persona : • Is a social role or a character played by an actor. Derived from ancient Latin, Persona orig- inally referred to a theatrical mask. Today it does not usually refer to a literal mask but to the “social masks” all humans supposedly wear. • In the study of communication : Persona is a term given to describe the versions of self that all individuals possess. Behaviours are selected according to the desired impression an individual wishes to create when in- teracting with other people. • In marketing : Some marketing experts recommend that one creates a Persona that represents a group of customers so that the company can focus its efforts. • In psychol- ogy : The Persona, for Carl Gustav Jung, was the mask or appearance, the social face the individual presented to the world - a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.. (source : wikipedia.)

Think of that long history of Vanitas paintings... An attempt to catch, encapsulate, by representing the whole world in its essence : a table, manmade items and tools, books, instruments, next to natu- ral goods, food, fruits, flowers, sometimes in decomposition, some paper, mostly unwritten, some ink, a feather, and the presence of human being, cristallized by its passing, his remains : a skull - what else. A presence-absence, the perishable. Immortalising the ephemeral : Cheating death. (...Quite a humble statement and harsh critic on human condition ultimately for those works to be named Vanitas...) When painting and such was the only way to represent the world, this was an easyer, understand- able, place to live in : a place where men could figure out the mechanics of things they were sur- rounded by. A place where the constant underlying war between objectifying and subjectifying - the definition of reality - wasn’t that much of a topic. yet. The more means we have to observe, decipher and analyze the world, the less we have an answer. and the more we have questions. Standing in front of Zabo Chabiland’s pieces, I watch and think hard... No, actually, I don’t. I screw my eyes in an attempt to get the contours, grasp the main lines ; not of what is before my eyes, but the mental imprint those images are what other choice do we have but looking at the making on my brain. world and Reading between the lines. Trying to feel hard. ourselves through a veil, if we genuinly want to They happen to be rapidly talking to me, sooner have the possibly most truthful view upon it and than expected, it appears that those aren’t the us... objective statements they formally, at first sight, ...Slowly heading towards the “X-Ray” pieces... dress up in and pretend to be. This time, moving away from the perspective of Nice try, I think and inwardly chuckle at that ob- close ups framing the faces of the “Black Project” servation ; that trick she is playing... portraits ; No, they aren’t statements at all. They are ques- the subjects are being shown entirely : naked tions. bodies, frontally facing the viewer, like gazing Unformulated questions though, just as a raw statues. and yet unformed material, such as clay, would This time, moving away from the opacity and say : density of the matt black, towards a bluish milky Look, i’m infinite possibility ; what will you do transparency, with me ? fixed on a translucid support, soberly lit by a The black portraits deny me a look, an insight natural light off a light-box. into what we call the windows of the soul. Sheets of radiographic films. The words “death mask” and some images of Naked, plain flesh, instead of the expected to- them, tucked up in the back of my mind, are pography of bones. Of broken bones. flashing by... ; followed - like a blow and an excla- Here again the skin is being objectified if not mation mark - by bits and pieces the word Per- anonymized by its preparation : like in some life sona beholds, falling, like swirling leaves, upon stage ritual - those ones, we degenerated civi- the death masks... lized people can only talk about from a concep- All eyes are closed. like looking inward.. This is, tualized, anthropological, they are demanding from me to look beyond, to exotic distance - the bodies and faces have been focus harder on my mental horizon, delineate completely scrubbed “in”, covered in soot. and perform a movement of having to go deeper, - a Make-Up, the making up of a mask. whilst distancing myself in the same breath : get Dressed up in nudity. the “big picture”... Another layer, another veil, another presence- - Mise en abyme as much as paradox, because absence. one has to get real close to the pieces in order to Is there something broken to be checked out decipher an image at all - at first sight, from afar, here ? A fracture ? No. I m being shown a whole it’s all black. entity, Opacity, permeability. sealed by the skin, unbroken, unfragmented, The closer i get, the more i see, but the less I frontal, bare and offered to my eyes, yet barely know. Here we are. Here we go. again. showing, another person(a?) denying me a view A double function : because as much as it hides, into its eyes again - like it would become ob- the veil reveals. scene to show more than this : there is enough Transcendance. of being abandoned to oneself and to the other No, imminent immanence. (another blow with here. exclamation mark) Letting go. I softly smirk... cuz yes, I’m thinking to myself, Because if an access is being denied to us in the apparatus of the view of the subject, if the in- cultural affiliation, opinions, fears, joys, worries teraction, the answer we keep on looking for in and bills to pay, not their Persona, but the inner someone else’s eyes is nonexistent here, it nev- “I”, their inner eye, their alter ego - ultimately : ertheless puts those subjects at the most vulner- their double. I have to stand corrected...: those able level possible. pieces are not asking questions ; they are cristal- Like a pile of clay, they silently ask : what will you lizing a state, aspiring to it, by embodying that do with me.. - or to me. pure animal-like way of being, feeling like exis- And the answer arises as the question does : tence itself - and they are an invitation there nothing i want to do. I feel it in my bones, to strive for that state. there’s nothing else to do, but to let myself drift And at the instar of the difficulty it takes to reach into that very same state of receptivity they are that level of dispossession, those pieces aren’t in. I feel now like I’m sneak-peeking at someone giving themselves away that easily ; and their sleeping ; although knowing I’ve been invited to formality, anonymized appearance shuffles the do so. If everything is given, there’s nothing more issue for more than one viewer. to take. Non plus ultra intimicy. Camouflage is nature’s craftiest trick - and Zabo I can suddenly hear my regular breath, sense my Chabiland delicately hides her invitation. verticality, as I’m standing there, motionless, in And as I walk out of the room, throwing one last front of those images, as their very reflection, glance, reviewing those pieces again, retracing feeling the space, the volume of the room en- my steps, in order to imprint them as much as folding me. possible onto my retina and my memories, I real- Unfolding thoughts ; more than if I’d have a por- ize, oh no, this is not about cheating death. nor trait of an individual, eyes all open, animated by about facing it. it’s about getting acquainted to it. an emotion, It’s not about immortality. on the contrary : about a thought, with its expressions and looks, their endless renewal, resumption. “lack” of individuality makes me wonder and ...Just like we’re starting to die ever since our very realize : first breath ; with every little breath we take day this actually is a person, with a life, a history ; in day out, that sustains the dying machine we and as my mind tries to “put scaffolding up”, are ; or just like we die a single bit every night, by devise what those histories could be, the attempt letting ourselves fall into a deep saving sleep. as much as the will to do so weaken, because I ...And I’m left with that soothing thought, that if know it is a story I could only be trying to figure there is a role, a social role to bear, that the pos- out, one that will ultimately remain unrevealed sibility of reaching out, of becoming over and to me. Chabiland makes very few statements, but over again a dark horse, an immaculate blank she makes a bold one by telling us this isn’t the page, in order to rename and redefine ourselves, point anyway, wiping away “la petite histoire”, always exists. getting beyond the anecdotal, reaching out for Zabo Chabiland gives us a hint, a blueprint for more, for that “bigger than that matter - an ode to inhabiting the cracks, life” thing. the void of our self - becoming, remaining, a pa- As I’m starting to pinpoint what this is all about, limpsest. I’m beginning to envy the state those people are in. They seem to be floating, in a meditative state, Elisa Coissard in touch with themselves ; but not the “I” with a name, tastes,

Piano Coude EN C Majeur click for video http://youtu.be/Ymhl_p7jwB0 Artists Mark Sink - www.gallerysink.com Thomas Woodruff - www.thomaswoodruff.com Munsif Molu - www.munsifmolu.com Robert Russell - www.robertrussell.net Thierry Van Biesen - www.thierryvanbiesen.com Colette - www.collectcolette.com Zabo Chabiland - www.zabo-chabiland.com