More Riley

Bridget Riley discusses the 60s.

Summer

Bridget takes Paris

One of my favorite artists Bridget Riley - had yet another massive career retrospective open this month, this time in Paris at the Musee d'Art Modern de la Ville de Paris - it runs until Sept 28th.































"For me Nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces - an event rather than an appearance - these forces can only be tackled by treating color and form as ultimate identities, freeing them from all descriptive or functional roles." Bridget Riley.

Listen to Bridget discuss 5 subjects.

Her current studios in the East and West of London.

Let the Water Fall

"The Waterfalls appear in the midst of the dense social, environmental, and political tissue that makes up the heart of New York City. They will give people the possibility to reconsider their relationships to the spectacular surroundings, and I hope to evoke experiences that are both individual and enhance a sense of collectivity." Olafur Eliasson

Eliasson's New York City Waterfalls open today at 7am. The four man-made electrically-powered waterfalls are each 90 - 120 feet tall. Here's where you can find them



Pier 35, just north of the Manhattan Bridge
at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge
between Piers 4 and 5 near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade
on the north shore of Governors Island



They will operate from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM, and will be lit after sunset. They will be on display through October.


Interesting interview with Eliasson about the project



Official Site includes artists statement

Marc on Murakami

it was such a whim. My mind absorbs things in a funny way. I’m on planes quite a bit and I always take stacks and stacks of magazines and I go through them and tear pages out and fold them up, and they get stuck at the bottom of my backpack or whatever. I’d seen an article about Takashi. I just remember the graphic. It was the DOB character, a funny Mickey Mouse–type thing. I didn’t really read the article; I was just drawn to the graphic. A couple months later there was another magazine and a different graphic, but again I tore it out—and I wasn’t aware that it was the same artist. Then I received a Christie’s catalogue and on the back cover there was a statue of Hiropon—that’s the female figure that’s squirting milk out of her breasts in an arc. I looked at the statue and then I remember going online and reading the essay that accompanied it. It talked about Takashi’s references to Warhol and the Factory, and how Takashi credited the artists he worked with. I lived not far from the Cartier Foundation, so I walked by there one weekend, and there was an enormous show of his work. I went on a Saturday and then on Monday I came to the office and I just thought, I wonder if that guy would ever be interested in collaborating on something for Vuitton? So we sent him an e-mail, and he was really interested. But my e-mail was so vague: "I would love to know if you’d be interested in coming and having a meeting . . .”



A few days later, he arrived with a team of Japanese assistants and the other artists he works with. They came into my office—my dog was there, the other designers I work with were there, there was stuff all over the walls. He just started taking pictures and making videotapes, and then we started talking. Neither one of us was very specific about what we wanted out of this thing, but we decided that we would do something together.



And, again, I think it drove people in legal a little crazy. They always like to know, "What are we actually commissioning? How do we know what to pay him for if we don’t know what you’re asking him?” And then I say, "Well, it’s gonna be a little bit organic and you’re just gonna have to follow me on it.” Again, we discussed reinterpreting, reinventing, and creating a new monogram. We talked about changing the icons of the symbols within the monogram into other images. We talked about so many different things. And Takashi and I just sort of decided that throughout the summer he would send me things that he had in mind, and I would just make notes on them, or draw on them, or comment on them, and send them back. And so, via the Internet, we ended up with all this work.



We started making bags out of the artwork that he sent. Things would come through as jpegs, and I’d just comment and do funny little drawings and write notes in the margins and stuff and send them back, and we’d go back and forth. And then we had the fashion show where we showed all the stuff, and everybody loved it. It was crazy. We opened the show with all these girls carrying these things, and we did the makeup to look like one of his statues, a manga, sort-of-anime figure. And then I had asked him to create the entrance to the show space. We were showing at the Glass Greenhouse, the same place we showed the Sprouse collection. So I asked Takashi to design something that would make for a very important entrance into the space. He did these inflatable sculptures in this multicolored monogram.



Takashi was so pleased with what we had done that he then had a show at Marianne Boesky Gallery where he showed his paintings, which were inspired by the work that we had done together. He had an actual art show of work that he had done after seeing the fashion show.


Marc Jacobs describing bringing Japanese artist Takashi Murakami to Louis Vuitton (from Interview Magazine). Images from Takashi Murakami exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery April-May 2003.



New York Magazine: Do you get self-conscious seeing yourself in magazine spreads?
Marc Jacobs: Yeah, but I love the attention


And to close here's a great article on Marc Jacobs from a recent issue of GQ - Marc Jacobs Doesn't Give a F---

Faezeh

Bumped into my favorite NYC artist Shirin Neshat on the street in Soho on Saturday - or should I say I did that most un-New York thing and stopped her as she walking past !! Shirin Neshat's video "Faezeh," which I saw at the Gladstone gallery early in the year is still my favorite moving image of the year so far. The video is one of five large-scale video installations which were completed between 2004 and 2008. They all take their inspiration from the Shahrnush Parsipur’s Iranian novel "Women Without Men" which Neshat describes by saying - “Magic realism is a common style for artists in exile like Parsipur. People who have been forced from their homes tend to reach out for a universal vocabulary that transcends time and place. After all, how long can an exile depend on their memory? What if they don’t feel connected to the place where they live now? They might not foster an obsession for their new home. But art is an obsession—art has to be an urge, not something you calculate.”


Production still from Faezeh, 2008.

How did you come across Shahrnush Parsipur’s book Women Without Men?
Neshat: Women Without Men is a very well-known book in Iran. It was published in 1989 in Tehran, and subsequently banned along with all of Parsipur’s other work. Parsipur spent more than five years after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 in prison because of her writing, and she was imprisoned again for Women Without Men because she mentions virginity in the book. Most educated Iranians know about Women Without Men.

I had read Women Without Men some years ago, but had forgotten about it. When I was trying to find a project to bring to the Writers’ Workshop Lab at the Sundance Institute, Robert Redford’s organization for independent film, a friend of mine urged me to reread Women Without Men. When I reread it, I knew I wanted to work with it at Sundance as a film project.

What was it about the book that inspired you?
Neshat: Women Without Men is written in a tradition of magical realism where anything can happen. It is a wonderful, little book. The book tells the stories of five different women who are suffering from their life situations. The author Shahrnush Parsipur uses metaphorical and subversive language to explore the social and religious pressures that oppress these women who come from different classes in society in Tehran. Trying to escape society, the women eventually find themselves together in the garden of Karaj, a symbolic of Garden of Eden. There are lots of strong images in the book, like the image of Mahdokht obsessively knitting, which I felt would be interesting to work with visually.

Also, I was looking for material that would lend itself well to film. For me, film is about characters and narrative, and I was interested in the female characters and liked the loose narrative structure in Women Without Men. I had never tried to develop characters with personalities or psychologies before, so I needed characters that I could relate to. In my earlier work, people function more as symbols, or even sculptures. With respect to the narrative structure of Women Without Men, I found out after I had started working with the book that the chapters of the book had originally been written as separate stories and then later tied together in a final chapter where the characters meet each other in the garden. I guess this loose structure instinctively appealed to me.

I also really like the political aspect of the book. Women Without Men is set in 1953, an important year in the history of Iran. In 1953, a democratic government headed by Mohammed Mossadegh was brought down by a coup led by American and British forces. The coup reinstalled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as the absolute monarch. In the last chapter of Women Without Men, the women find themselves in the garden of Karaj trying to form a new society, a sort of alternative feminist utopia—again, a symbolic Garden of Eden. I have never worked on anything that was specifically political before, and I saw this as an opportunity to look into the political history of Iran. Not so much in the Women Without Men video installations, as in a feature length film which I expect to finish in about two months.

Let’s talk about the other part of your Women Without Men project, your full-length feature film. How will the feature-film of Women Without Men differ from the video installations?
Neshat: The video installations are inspired by the book Women Without Men, but do not follow the book closely. The film is also very different from the book. I have written a political narrative that develops throughout the film that is not in the book. In the book, the only chapter that is political is the last chapter. I have used the entire last chapter of the book in the film, exactly as it is in the book.

The film is a full-length feature film with a narrative and characters that develop over time. The characters also develop in the video progression, but these developments are more hidden. In the film, the character of Zarin, the young, anorexic prostitute, becomes an almost central character. Ironically, she becomes a redemptive savior figure; she has the hardest life, but also the biggest capacity to give. Also, the gardener becomes an important character in the film, as keeper of the garden of Karaj, a symbolic Garden of Eden.

But I shouldn’t give too much of the film away. You’ll have to wait and see it.



Neshat said to me that she hopes her first full length film " Women Without Men" will first be shown next January at Sundance. Something to look forward to in 2009 for sure.

Spacemen

Detroit artist Abdul Quadim Haqq designed this for Carl Craig's Planet E label and their first ever CD way back in the early 90s. Still magic. Haqq is featured in this month's issue of The Wire alongside Phillip Sherburne's Invisible Jukebox with Carl himself. Phil said today the whole transcript will be online soon. Bookmark it.

Klarwein Landing

Classics 1: Deceit

best album cover of 2008 so far ?

my vote goes to John Zorn's "The Dreamers"

Deforming and Reforming Reality

"I do believe that today... one could say that modern man, wants a sensation really without the boredom of its conveyance. Or the cut down of conveyance as far as possible so you just give over the sensation."



"I try to make concentrations of images."



what do you think when people say your paintings are ugly?
"I'm very pleased that those people don't like them. I am much more pleased when they really hate them than when they like them. It means that there might be something there."



"art is artifact"

Quotes from the incredible UK TV documentary The South Bank Show Francis Bacon Special (9th June 1985)

Pasta with Derek

Just saw the absolutely fantastic documentary / biographical film on the life of cult film-maker Derek Jarman - Derek made by Derek Jarman’s friend and collaborator Tilda Swinton and film maker video artist Isaac Julien. In England thankfully there is a major reappraisal of Derek's work afoot with a major retrospective at the Serpentine . I'm really sad I won't get a chance to visit this.

Thankfully, I was lucky enough to meet and interview legendary film maker Derek Jarman some years ago (before Blue / after Caravaggio). The interview took place on one of my then favorite streets in London, Old Compton St, where we had pasta for lunch after which we retired to Derek's apartment just across the road above Charing Cross Rd. His place was, unsurprisingly, as striking as the man himself - black paintings embedded with mirrors, a wooden throne, all kinds of wonderful books. I remember we talked about 15th Century English mystic John Dee, his fantastic sets for the ballet "In The Mouth of The Night," his work with the equally legendary Ken Russell and his now very famous, but then still new garden.



I'm not gay, and have no interest in homosexuality, but Derek's work even in it's most homosexual of moments transcends the narrow framework of being classified as strictly "gay." Much has been made of his sexual orientation since his passing of AIDS related illness and many have championed him as a "gay" artist and whilst I do not want to deny the essence of the man the fact is he was much much more - Derek was a fascinating mixture of characters and was obsessed with a wide array of themes.

I think it is fairer to call him an artist interested and exploring "outsider" territory and as such he's much more accessible and meaningful to a broader range of people. Derek's work reflected the depth of his thinking and it's very English in many ways. On one hand he handles the classics - Caravaggio's biography, Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, Britten's War Requiem, Wittgenstein's biography and Shakespeare's The Tempest. On the other hand he's very much a part of Punk - Jubilee and Post-Punk - videos for Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and The Smiths and the dissection of Thatcher's UK that is The Last of England. Then of course he's purely poetic - The Angelic Conversation, In The Shadow of The Sun and many other super 8 films.

Fact is simply put Derek Jarman was one of the most innovative, original and down right unique film-makers England, or any other country for that matter, has seen. If you haven't seen his work I suggest you track down Caravaggio as a good starting point - it's one of his more formal works but outstanding. After find the two volumes of Super 8 films - much more experimental but a fantastic view at the real "inside' of his work. Then I'd try something like "The Last of England."



Derek and his films were very important to me, alongside Mike Leigh's "Naked" I felt something like "The Last of England" truly reflected the world I was living in and Caravaggio was one of the reasons I went to acting school. I always wanted to be in one of his films. Here's what his cohort film-maker Cerith Wyn Evans (who was Jarman's assistant in the early 80s on films like "The Last of England") said about him recently - "It would be wonderful to have Derek still with us but I wonder what he would have made of the YBAs or BritArt. I think you can see aspects of Derek’s work in the Britishness of it but, at the same time, I’m sure he would have been critical of all the marketing. Because, after all, he was very much part of the pop art generation and he distanced himself from that. It would have been very interesting to see what his counter arguments would have been. Certainly, I imagine Charles Saatchi would have been a real demon for Derek. But also I think there would have been aspects that he could and would have exploited to the full."

And here is British Punk scholar and Derek's friend Jon Savage - "He was a fantastic catalyst. I remember at the funeral saying to a couple of people, ‘This will be the last time these diverse people will be in the same room.’ You used to go up to Derek’s tiny flat and there would be some German punk kid who’d come to talk to him, together with Norman Rosenthal from the Royal Academy, John Maybury and Derek’s latest rent boy discovery. Not that Derek was having sex with them necessarily, but he liked those marginal lads. Derek was always unbiddable, that’s what I liked about him: ‘I’m going to do what the hell I want. I’m going to do the opposite to everybody else, and sod you. He was a great battler.

There were very many sides to him. And I really like Derek’s Super-8 films. I loved ‘In the Shadow of the Sun’. I thought that was fantastic. It just all worked. Derek was very lyrical about the countryside. I spent a lot of time with him in 1983/1984, just driving around London. He took me all around the Docklands. It was that pyscho-geographical thing of finding forgotten bits of the city; this fantastic landscape that I hadn’t realised existed. I like the idea that filmmaking is an extension of everyday life. For Derek, it wasn’t something that was blocked off by production schedules. And I do see some of Derek’s films as a visual diary, really. In that way he was very inspiring."

Kusama and her wonderful dot obsession

Last week I posted a classic 60s films from one of my favorite artists Yayoi Kusama now here is a couple of shots of her new art show (sadly not in New York) but in London at Victoria Miro gallery (the same people that rep Chris Ofili) -



Dots Obsession - Infinity Mirrored Room, 2008

Self Obliteration

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h0hExzfS5Q


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOd99fqGjto


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGHr-KS5gz4

Fireworks

Brand new 20 page book of haiku-like drawings from graphic designer / film-maker Mike Mills - about which he says "Some things that may or may not relate to these drawings: A professional suggested I take anti-depressants. I declined. About the same time I started drawing fireworks. I didn’t know what they meant or why I was drawing them. I was confused and embarrassed by this lack of meaning, but they kept coming. I could draw them no matter how I felt. I read that fireworks were first used in China in the 12th century to scare away negative spirits. I envied a world that not only recognized spirits, but scared the negative ones away with small man made explosions. About the same time, I read in a magazine that antidepressants have a hard time performing better than the placebo pills they are tested against. Scientist cannot explain it, but almost as many people who take the fake pills say they feel relief from their depression. The blood flow in their brains actually changes in the same positive way that it does for the people who take the real pills. I felt a connection between the Chinese fireworks and the placebo effect, and some relief in all the things we don’t understand. At some point the fireworks grew more and more abstract, and messy, and complicated, and I became if not content then at least willing to make things that didn’t have any apparent meaning." The book is available from
Nieves Books

Here is a quicktime clip from Mike's similarly themed documentary "Does Your Soul Have a Cold" that follows the lives of five depressed Japanese individuals and the marketing of anti-depressant drugs to them.