Matthew Barney: DJED

Matthew Barney, the ever-controversial art-world darling perhaps best known for his Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), a collection of highly provocative performance-art films made over a period of eight years, presents his new solo exhibition,“DJED," at New York's Gladstone Gallery. In the exhibition, Barney reworks ancient tropes with a modern hand. The eponymous sculpture on the first floor of the gallery is a sprawling floor installation, much like a hardened black lake, crafted from poured molten cast iron and graphite and containing the actual remains of a 1967 Chrysler Imperial that Barney salvaged from a lake in his Detroit performance piece "KHU.” Secret Name, which resides upstairs in the gallery, includes a slab of rusted copper, a thick winding rope, and a seemingly calcified fragment of what appears to be a door that has been underwater for years, recalling in an eerie and nostalgic manner the remains of a shipwreck. Canopic Chest, a large-scale installation piece of weathered cast bronze that also contains actual automobile parts, mingles the visual elements of a car wreck and an industrial worksite. These relics of accidents, as they appear, are presented individually within a stark, sweeping white room—the silent, still and vaguely apocalyptic counterparts to Barney’s intensely visceral KHU. DJED is named after an ancient Egyptian symbol associated with the god Osiris, whose body was cut into pieces before it was retrieved and reassembled. If KHU parallels the cutting-up of Osiris’ body, DJED is the retrieving and reassembling of those parts—a ghostly panoply of mayhem and destruction. The pieces are primitive yet utterly modern, making the ancient Egyptian themes of the afterlife and mummification relevant within the landscape of an industrial wasteland. Below, a few pictures from the exhibition:

Canopic Chest

Secret Name

DJED is on view until October 22nd at Gladstone Gallery, 520 W. 21st St, New York.

The Poetry of Mistakes: Miroslav Tichý

"If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world."

--Miroslav Tichý

From the early 1960s through 1985, the eccentric, reclusive Miroslav Tichý took hundreds of surreptitious photographs of the women of Kyjov, his hometown in the Czech Republic. His unconventional method involved the use of homemade cameras with crude telephoto lenses constructed from cardboard tubes, tin cans, toothpaste, sandpaper and other found materials. Though his soft-focus, black-and-white images were generally taken through fences or peepholes and are blurred, scratched, under- or over-exposed, stained, spotted and skewed, they exude a profoundly voyeuristic yet tender eroticism.

His images of women bathing, waiting for the bus, arranging their hair and performing other trivial activities, unaware of the photographer, are intensely personal, somehow imbued with an acute sense of rarity and exceptionality. Art critic Allan Doyle writes that Tichý's photographs “evidence a paradoxical coupling of intention and accident.”

Tichý, who was trained as a classical painter but left the academy after the Communist takeover forced artists to focus on socialist subjects, was known as somewhat of a pariah who wandered around Kyjov in ragged, disheveled suits with unkempt long hair and a beard. He disregarded societal standards and painted, drew and photographed purely for his own personal satisfaction. Tichý remained relatively unknown to the art world until 2004, when his first exhibition was held. He printed each negative only once, and his works were untitled, unnumbered and undated. He died in April 2011 in Kyjov, Czech Republic.

"A mistake. That's what makes the poetry."

Tichý with one of his homemade cameras

Miroslav Tichý: Sun Screen, a solo photography exhibition, was on view until September 10, 2011 at Horton Gallery; 504 West 22nd St., New York.

http://www.tichyocean.com/

A Taste of Open Space & Stars

Just a taste from the shoot I did of the amazing French dream-pop band Open Space & Stars this past May at MAD Agency (a French artists' collective founded by Paul Armand-Delille, Hugues Armand-Delille and Anatole Maggiar) headquarters just outside of Paris... stay tuned for the full article and interview, which will appear in Autre Quarterly, the print version of Pas Un Autre, later this month!

OSS' debut album, Pop Prophecy, came out in December and is available on iTunes. Take a listen here.

Paul Armand-Delille and Nina Lili J of Open Space & Stars on the rooftop of La SIRA in Asnières

Anatole Maggiar, president and co-founder of MAD Agency

skateboarding is the best way to get around at La SIRA...

look out for Nina's solo album, currently in the works

Nina and Anatole

Paul and Nina

MAD Agency

La SIRA- inspired artwork

Paul and Nina

Open Space & Stars

For a taste of the beginning stages of Nina's solo project, check out her original video and cover of 10cc's "I'm Not In Love":

...and one of the most unique takes on Timbaland/OneRepublic's "Apologize" I've ever seen:

Can't wait to see what each and every one of these fantastic, creative spirits have planned for the future!

All images shot by Annabel Graham on location in Asnières-sur-Seine, France.

Paris' Cindy Sherman: Claude Cahun at the Jeu de Paume

Claude Cahun, Que me veux-tu?, 1928

It looks like we've found Cindy Sherman's long-lost French twin in Claude Cahun, gender-bending Surrealist photographer (and poet, and actress) obsessed with the art of theatrical deception. Born in 1894 in Nantes, Lucy Schwob began taking the self-portraits that would become her claim to fame during her teenage years, coming up with the androgynous pseudonym and persona of "Claude Cahun" soon after. In the early 1920s, Cahun settled in Paris with her stepsister and life partner, the artist Suzanne Malherbe (who in turn adopted the pseudonym "Marcel Moore"), and the two began to hold artists' salons at their home, which would be frequented by the likes of André Breton, Sylvia Beach and Henri Michaux. During World War II, Cahun and Malherbe took their radical political activism to the streets, producing and distributing anti-German flyers and participating diligently in the French resistance. They were arrested by the Gestapo, and though they were spared, their home was pillaged and a great amount of their artwork destroyed. Cahun's oeuvre was not rediscovered until the 1980's, which explains why her work has been relatively unknown until recently.

Cahun (L) and Malherbe

Cahun's prolific, often absurd and outlandish body of work ranges from the playfully poetic to the staunchly political.

In her carefully-designed self-portraits, she challenges socially accepted notions of feminine identity, exploring and documenting a chameleonic range of personas (thus the obvious Cindy Sherman comparison!). She oscillates from a strangely-convincing Buddha to a marionette to a doll to a male aviator; she appears in elaborate costumes and carefully-applied stage makeup, or utterly bare-faced with a shaved head and eyebrows, calling into question the often-ambiguous nature of gender and sexuality.

A few weeks ago, I visited the extensive Claude Cahun retrospective held at the Jeu de Paume, one of my favorite galleries in Paris, just on the edge of the Tuileries. The exhibit showcases hundreds of Cahun's works, capturing the essence of her eccentric, bold foray into the early realm of self-representation and the photographic image.

Some of Cahun's legendary self-portraits, all featured in the exhibit, below:

Autoportrait, 1927

Autoportrait, 1927

Autoportrait, 1929

Untitled, 1939

Autoportrait, 1947

(P.S. Apologies for the posting-hiatus!)

Claude Cahun: Exposition is on display until September 25, 2011 at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, 1 Place de la Concorde, 75008 Paris.

Pioneer of Light and Space: James Turrell

^“My work is about space and the light that inhabits it. It is about how you confront that space and plumb it with vision. It is about your seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking into fire.”

In his often ethereal, atmospheric works, James Turrell explores the malleability of light and its infinite spectrum of effects as well as his own ability to accentuate and control the ever-elusive element. Carving a vast crater into the middle of the Arizona desert, trapping colored fluorescence into a prism, creating an entire exhibition space out of light that the viewer can physically interact with—Turrell toys with our perceptions of space, depth and light, challenging our habits of looking at and interacting with art.

Space that Sees, 2009, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Alta, 1968

The Light Inside, 1999, MFA Houston

The Light Inside (second view)

Bridget's Bardo, 2009, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany

Spread, 2003, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle

The artist had an unlikely beginning—born into a Quaker family of doctors and engineers in Pasadena, California in 1943, Turrell studied mathematics, astronomy, geology and psychology—all principles that would later emerge in his artwork. He began to gain widespread notoriety for his art in the mid-1960’s, when he became associated with a group of Los Angeles artists (including Bruce Nauman and Robert Irwin) who pioneered what is now known as the Light and Space Movement. Turrell currently resides in Flagstaff, Arizona—at least until the completion of his most ambitious project to date (slated for 2012), Roden Crater, a dormant volcano that has been in the process of artistic transformation into a celestial observatory under Turrell’s hands for the past 32 years.

Interior view of Roden Crater, 1977-present, Flagstaff, Arizona

Exterior view of Roden Crater

John Coplans writes that Turrell’s work possesses “considerable iconic power… the compelling sensuousness of the light and its inexhaustible brilliance are almost hypnotic…[the unconcealed light source] does not rationalize the total effect but adds to its vividness and mysteriousness.”

Turrell himself articulates,

“I feel my work is made for one being, one individual. You could say that's me, but that's not really true. It's for an idealized viewer. Sometimes I'm kind of cranky coming to see something. I saw the Mona Lisa when it was in L.A., saw it for 13 seconds and had to move on. But, you know, there's this slow-food movement right now. Maybe we could also have a slow-art movement, and take an hour.”

Indeed, his artwork demands direct confrontation, creating an inescapable psychological and physical dialogue with its viewers. Turrell has created a form of art that is impossible to glance at for a mere 13 seconds—the viewer is forced to walk through his pieces, to confront his or her own perceptions of and reactions to the space and to experience the transcendent, ever-changing elements (both natural and manipulated) that affect it.

A snazzy photo of the artist in his younger years

Turrell is currently represented by Pace Gallery in New York. A selection of his works are currently on display at the 54^th Venice Biennale, which will run through June 2011, within the ILUMMInazioni pavilion curated by critic and art historian Bice Curger.

The Poetics of Reverie: Uta Barth

“We all expect photographs to be a picture of something. We assume that the photographer observed a place, a person, an event in the world, and wants to record it, point at it…The problem with my work is that these images are really not of anything in that sense, they register only that which is incidental and peripheral to the implied it.”

–Uta Barth

Like memories blurred around the edges, German-American photographer Uta Barth’s haunting, ethereal images capture not only fleeting moments themselves but the sensations surrounding those moments. Barth’s oeuvre evokes nostalgia, longing, emptiness, reverie, stillness and quiet, fabricating an almost cinematic ambiance. As viewers, we are psychologically seized up and pulled into her soft-focus dream world; made to feel the warmth of late-afternoon sunlight on our cheek, to witness the slowly circling dust motes in front of a window, studying a blade of grass until it blurs in front of our eyes.

Taking an aesthetic approach opposite to that of the famed Düsseldorf school of photography, which stresses sharply objective, archival documentation of subjects, Barth captures empty, subject-free fragments of scenes, often out-of-focus, off-center or cropped—in an ephemeral study of light, negative space and time.

After ten years of photographing exclusively inside of her own home, Barth began to bring her camera with her on walking trips, “…to walk without destination and to see only to see.” These exploratory photographic promenades spun themselves into her most recent collection of prints, which were on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles last summer.

A few of my favorites below:

Born in 1958 in Berlin, Barth lives and works in Los Angeles. For more information, visit Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.