Gossip Central

Richard Prince Covers Jackson Pollock at Guild Hall

To imagine Richard Prince doing drip paintings in honor of Jackson Pollock is too linear a concept for what Prince does in Guild Hall's new exhibition, Richard Prince: Covering Pollock. The iconic abstract expressionist is pure subject for Prince's collages, repetitions in the manner of Warhol, Rauchenberg-like juxtapositions. He's evoking a whole lot more than just Pollock in this homage. 

Hamptons Journal: Robert Wilson's Very Merry Un-Birthday

The parties are planned for the fall, at least 4 of them in Milan, Berlin, New York, and Paris, for the internationally famous artist Robert Wilson's 70th birthday. But on Saturday night, he presided over the 18th annual summer benefit for the Byrd Hoffman Watermill Center. Celebrating collaboration in the arts, the extravaganza featured an array of wildly clad actors in outlandish poses and postures, in haute melodrama befitting the theme: Voluptuous Panic; taken together throughout the Center's ample 8 acres, 20 site-specific installations and performances created by young international artists, the Center became a carnival of splendor and silver body paint. You never knew what might come peeking through the trees, or underfoot, as in two heads poking up through the straw ground cover. For all his avant-garde vision, Wilson stays close to the classics: One upcoming premiere, a production of The Odyssey for October, 2012, in Athens.

Beauty and the Beast: Shen Yun at Lincoln Center /PEN on China / Horrible Bosses at Vault

Spirits soar over snow capped mountains, a sword wielding hero, Wu Song, slays a man-eating tiger, a dance corps in Barbie pink clusters like plum blossoms, another twirls handkerchiefs, nymphs frolic in the waves. Heaven opens its gates. In spectacular color and gorgeous costumes, Shen Yun, a New York based arts group enacts the rich cultural heritage of China at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. 

L'Amour Fou: The Fashion of Yves St. Laurent and Alexander McQueen

In a new documentary L'Amour Fou about the iconic Yves St. Laurent, it is hard to tell just what is the object of that besotted state: his work, his substantial art collection, his posh homes in Paris, Marrakech and Normandy, opulently decorated with antiques and woven fabrics. From the perspective of Pierre Berge, St. Laurent's lifelong companion, the film is perhaps an expression of the businessman's own mad devotion to the bespectacled designer who defined fashion in the mid century. In his view, YSL was an aloof workaholic, obsessed with sex and drugs, ambivalent to fame, and mainly depressed. Berge's own place in YSL's life comes off as more business than pleasure. This is not the ebullient Valentino and Giancarlo Giametti. 

Words and Pictures: at Tibor de Nagy and Condo's Subversive Art at The New Museum

On a random Friday afternoon between snowstorms, visitors to Tibor de Nagy's midtown gallery for the “Painters & Poets” exhibit marveled at the small press editions in vitrines (with work by Joe Brainard, Kenward Elmslie, Charles Henri Ford, and Allen Ginsberg) and whimsical black & white films by Rudy Burkhardt starring his artworld buddies: Larry Rivers, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Alex Katz, etc. Playwright Jon Robin Baitz, poet Honore Moore, actor Bob Dishy, and painter Duncan Hannah milled about. Jane Freilicher came by too. Her painting, “The Painting Table” (1954) is perhaps the centerpiece of the show along with Rivers' and O'Hara's “Portrait and Poem Painting” (1961) the art that graces the handsome catalogue. The exhibit includes work by Fairfield Porter, Joan Mitchell, a religious triptych by Red Grooms and poet Anne Waldman. Not an opening or special viewing, the afternoon had the exhilarating spark of a Happening. 

The collaboration of artists and poets is of course not new, but the show celebrates a unique New York moment when publications were small, and the cross fertilization of artistic energy gave rise to The New York School of Poetry, the beat and other literary movements. Commerce, though not ignored, was not at the forefront of art. But that of course was pre-Warhol.

Artist George Condo has some literary cred: he collaborated with Burroughs and Ginsberg, and coming from Lowell, Massachusetts, the working class milieu that spawned Jack Kerouac, he wrote a spirited intro for Kerouac's “Book of Sketches.” 

George Condo, the artist as Warholian “superstar,” is affirmed at the New Museum's survey of his career, “Mental States,” where Condo posing with Kanye West and Marc Jacobs at the shows' opening, signifying a synergy of arts and marketplace. Just look at those portraits in the show's main gallery on the 4th floor, hung in important frames, the Guston/ Crumb/ Picasso/ Looney Tune inspired, pod heads juxtaposed with abstract riffs on Old Masters oils. Artist Judy Hudson observed, “Here we are at Disney World again.” The whole enterprise is a subversive riff on art history, including the gnarly bronze busts titled “Dionysus,” “The Old Sea Hag,” “Perseus,” “Tristessa,” etc. 

Down what feels like a secret staircase to the 3rd floor where smaller spaces house works of various themes, LeeLee Sobieski and others crammed into the largest gallery focused on abstract work. You can say, Condo mines the collaborative; his imagination is keyed in with music, and with celebrity. 
Especially the notorious. One room themed, “Manic Society” features finely wrought paintings of a toothy screaming priest, of sex on a striped couch; the figures form a two-headed beast both bizarre and frightening. This unforgettable picture is called “The Return of Client No. 9.” 

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

Remembering Paul Bowles

The American writer and composer Paul Bowles-born in Queens, New York-- would be 100 years old tomorrow. In our age of instant fame, it is useful to think about an artist who was famous for not being in the limelight. In his time, the cult of personality was taking hold, and would worsen in the days of Warhol, auguring the era of the “superstar.” (Although after seeing the current show of his screen work at MoMA, Warhol managed to make a formidable art of “stardom,” as both celebration of the self and ironic take on it.) Old-fashioned, gentlemanly, and romantically pure, Paul Bowles shunned post-war American culture.

In the 1950's with the advent of television a new invention, the talk show, provided extraordinary access to the widest audience then imaginable. Bowles retreated to Tangier, Morocco-first visited in 1931 at the suggestion of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas-- where he lived modestly in an apartment that had the look of a spare place in Greenwich Village. In fact, when Bowles was famous as a composer of incidental music for the plays of Tennessee Williams and Lillian Hellman on Broadway, and wrote music reviews for the Herald Tribune under the editorship of fellow composer Virgil Thomson, he and his wife, the writer Jane Bowles, lived for a time on 10th Street, between 5th and 6th. He also shared a house in Brooklyn Heights with W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee. The Chelsea Hotel was also home, for a while.“The writer doesn't exist,” Bowles, handsome as a matinee idol, famously exclaimed. What mattered is the work. His autobiography, Without Stopping (1972), was famously dubbed “Without Telling” by fellow novelist William Burroughs. A who's who of the 20th century, the book features anecdotes of friendship and collaboration with Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, and Salvador Dali.    

Even after this illustrious and glamorous early career as composer, Bowles became famous as a writer, perhaps following the example of his wife's most celebrated work, a novella published in 1943 called Two Serious Ladies (now available in a handsome edition, see www.sortof.com). His first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949) became a film in 1989, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich. Three other novels would follow: Let it Come Down (1952), The Spider's House (1955), and Up Above the World (1966). A collection of his travel writings has been reissued, Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993, (see www.sortof.com). A master of the short story, his Collected Stories 1939-1974 (Black Sparrow) remains a favorite. Readers fascinated by a westerner's take on life in a Muslim culture will do well to read such stories as “A Distant Episode,” “Pages from Cold Point,” “The Time of Friendship,” and the fable, “The Hyena.” The story, “You Are Not I” was made into a film by Sara Driver in the early 1980's. Thought lost, a print was found in Bowles's apartment and then taken to his driver's house and stored. Recently discovered and restored, the film of “You Are Not I” is a brilliant evocation of this writer's unique sensibility. In addition, Bowles' literary career includes translations of the Moroccan writers and storytellers, Larbi Layachi, Mohamed Choukri, Mohammed Mrabet, and Ahmed Yacoubi. For updates on all things Bowles including centennial celebrations, see www.paulbowles.org.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

Brion Gysin's Flickering Light at the New Museum

After the Guggenheim's 2009 show, The Third Mind, named for a concept of collaboration by famed novelist William S. Burroughs and lesser known painter, writer, restaurateur, raconteur Brion Gysin, inevitably a curiosity would grow around this exceptional artist of many trades. The New Museum does great service to Gysin's work in a new show called Dreamachine, so dubbed for a device he co-created to stimulate hallucinatory states of consciousness. Makeup magnate Helena Rubinstein was said to have had one. And Keith Haring brought Gysin to New York for a show at the Tower Gallery in the 1980's in exchange for one. And now, you too can sit on a cushion and feel the flicker of light over your closed lids. But who was Brion Gysin and why haven't we seen more of him?

As Nabokov wrote of his Lolita protagonist Humbert Humbert, Gysin was a salad of racial genes: a mix of British, Swiss, and Canadian. He lived mainly in Paris, and in Tangier, loci of much literary and artistic experimentation. Many have considered him merely a catalyst of art in others: for example, it was Gysin who invented the cut-ups, a collage technique utilized to random perfection by Burroughs in a series of novels. While the New Museum exhibits this part of his career, this show of 300 works also features calligraphic paintings, drawings, films, notebooks--sufficient evidence for a rethinking of Gysin as an artist on his own.

In the excellent catalogue that accompanies this exhibit, friends and colleagues offer fascinating glimpses into his art. Poet John Giorno provides insights into Gysin as a sound poet, painter George Condo writes of Gysin's photorealist imagery, describing him as “a man of internal music for which no score could be transcribed.” Throbbing Gristles' Genesis Breyer P. Orridge explains the uses of cut-ups for his own work and the inspired Gysin notion, “Poets don't own words,” opening the door for alternate modes of creativity. James Grauerholz, executor of both Burroughs' and Gysin's literary estate, writes movingly of the personal ties between Burroughs and Gysin particularly after 1974 until each one died, Gysin in 1986 and Burroughs in 1997. Contextualizing William Burroughs as a painter, he claims, begins with Brion Gysin.

In a taped interview, Burroughs laments that the mold is gone for people of a certain caliber-including Becket, Genet, Bowles, and Gysin. The tribute from so close a friend and collaborator goes far in illustrating the remembrance of those who knew him best. You won't, however, get Gysin's drama queen persona at the New Museum. Curator Laura Hoptman spoke about such limitations at a press opening.  None of Gysin's Jma el Fna market place paintings -works that were on view in Burroughs's Bunker as well as leaning against the floor in Paul Bowles's Tangier flat-are represented. Morocco career is evident in other calligraphic works. More than other expatriates living there in the pivotal mid-century, he “went native” in adopting habits and perceptions.

In a case of synergy, uptown at MoMA, at the new Matisse exhibition at MoMA, “Radical Invention 1913-1917,” such famous paintings as “Zorah in Yellow” show the imprint of Tangier, the place Bowles called “a dream scape.” Christopher Nolan's new movie starring Leonardo diCaprio, Inception, a film that plays with states of consciousness, uses the Tangier medina as the perfect maze for working out the Burroughs/Gysin conception of ideas as viruses.

Brion Gysin extolled a humbling worldview: we are Here to Go; nevertheless at the New Museum, it is simply amazing to see the rich legacy he left behind.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Andy Warhol's Last Decade at the Brooklyn Museum and Remembered at the New York Public Library: Please Sign My Banana

Andy Warhol more than exceeded his famous dictum about fame. Now an excellent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum focuses on his last decade, meaning, work of this art-world genius in late mid-career. The bewigged Warhol predicted he would not survive the hospital when he went in for a routine operation, and he was right. By a fluke, (neglect, or malpractice) he died in 1987 at age 58. As you make it through the 5th floor galleries past “Last Supper,” a 10 x 32 foot canvas with renderings of Leonardo's masterpiece and motorcycles suggesting religious-cum-erotic themes, or “The Origins of Cotton,” one of several collaborations with Clemente and Basquiat, you are reminded of his versatility beyond the much lauded Pop period, dazzled by the sheer brilliance of his vision. At the time, he seemed the enemy of abstract expressionism, and in his last decade, a practitioner of it, in his way.

The exhibition catalogue features a fine essay by the show's organizer, Joseph D. Ketner, explaining how peeing on a canvas treated with metallic paint turned into a method of abstraction utilized in the series “Oxidation Painting.” A wise inclusion is Julian Schnabel's 1989 take on the Shadow paintings so monumentally displayed at Dia: Beacon with only a few on display in Brooklyn: “These paintings hover as the shadow of life's edge. . . . whereas the subject of many of Andy's paintings is a record of events in life, these are a record of the act of painting.” Also included in the catalogue, in an essay by Bruno Bischofberger, “Collaborations: Reflections on My Experiences with Basquiat, Clemente, and Warhol,” is a Basquiat portrait of Andy Warhol as a banana, brown spots included.

On Wednesday night a few who knew him gathered at the New York Public Library for a panel moderated by Factory historian Steven Watson: John Wilcock, Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead, Gretchen Berg, and surprise guest Bibbe Hansen. Joseph “Little Joey” Freeman spoke up from the audience. The occasion was the re-publication of The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol by John Wilcock. Known for the documentary, Guest of Cindy Sherman, the editor of the reissue, Christopher Trela said he was inspired to publish it after picking up an original copy of this interview collection with photos by Shunk-Kender. The book's title comes from Paul Morrissey, and becomes a sly comment on its contents: interviews with Factory regulars and other Warhol associates: Charles Henri Ford, Naomi Levine, Marisol, Henry Geldzahler, Sam Green, Ultra Violet, Lou Reed and Nico, among them, by Village Voice founding editor and Interview Magazine founding co-publisher John Wilcock. 

Much was said of Warhol as a catalyst for the art in others, his intense work ethic, but no one knew for sure what Warhol was like in bed. The sexiest image: Warhol in come stained jockeys greeting Little Joey, asking, does he need anything when he showed up at his townhouse. In true Warhol spirit, Trela created a marketing device offering a banana shaped bookmark to lure book buyers who would also have the panel members sign. When the books sold out, fans queued up, uttering the line of the night: “Please sign my banana.”

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ve

Christian Boltanski's No Man's Land at the Armory

Is that my pink frilly frock dangling above a mountain of tired clothes by the paw of a crane? Look at it drop to join the tons of garments below, not quite far enough away to avoid the next random fistful. Maybe that's not my old party dress, but it could be. I am drawn to its fate, anyway, to the fact that eventually it will be out of reach, buried by the next drop. Obsessed with questions of identity, memory, and loss, Christian Boltanski created this huge installation now displayed in the 55,000 square foot drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory, having originated at the Grand Palais in Paris, inspired by one of those contraptions in an amusement park, where you try your best to pick up a teddy bear with a metal arm. Of course you never can, said Boltanski playfully the other day, looking a lot like Hitchcock. But this exhibition is dead serious: coats and outer clothing are meticulously arranged on the ground, in sections, with disturbing harsh lights thrown on them like a police lineup, an interrogation of the inanimate. And the noise, heartbeats, throbbing, in cacophony. I say, when I see a mass of anything I think of Auschwitz, of human hair, shoes, suitcases, and the iconic pile of bones.

He replies, “All my art is after the Holocaust. Yes it is about that and much more.” A woman offers, she sees the detritus after a plane crash. Walking around the space, you are pulled into history's large questions about man's place, the human condition, the value of life, and the power of pondering all that. But the making of art is far more practical. The tons of clothes were acquired from a place in New Jersey, solving a problem closer to what to do with the enormous excess of clothing now that it can all be purchased so cheaply.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

At the Brooklyn and Metropolitan Museums/ IFP Gala

When last I ran into her, Diane von Furstenberg was photographing an antique shoe with curlicue heel-I imagine for inspiration-- at the Brooklyn Museum's excellent new “American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection.” Sibling to the Metropolitan's “American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity,” viewed this week, the show features masterworks from the Brooklyn Museum costume collection: fashion as fine art in the work of Charles James, Charles Frederick Worth, Madeleine Vionnet, Steven Arpad, and many others. 

The shoe collection is one of the most unusual, with Ferragamos, Delmans and Valentinos. And a display at the Met features a rack of extraordinary lacy footwear. But as anyone-even the likes of Anna Wintour who wore a Proenza Schouler day dress to the press conference, posing for the discerning lens of Bill Cunningham-- will tell you, women do not live by shoes alone.

Wednesday night in the DVF Design Studio in the meatpacking district, Diane von Furstenberg hosted the annual Independent Filmmaker Project gala in honor of daughter Tatiana von Furstenberg and Fransesca Gregorini's movie “Tanner Hall” to open this fall. Sipping champagne and red bull cocktails, New York's downtown film community and well wishers including Blythe Danner, Mamie Gummer, Uma Thurman, Ed Burns, Mira Nair, Alexander Olch, Jean Doumanian, Christine Vachon, Cynthia Rowley, to name a mere few, watched clips of the film. Patricia Clarkson and Amber Tamblyn wore hot pink look alike sheaths and first mocked shock and dismay and then a forgiving embrace. Anthony Bregman came from the Westchester shoot of his new movie “Oranges” starring the winning “Please Give” actors Oliver Platt and Catherine Keener. 

Dressed in hippie chic, DVF huddled in deep talk on a banquette with talented young photographer Francesco Carrozzini whose giant portraits of Keith Richards and Scarlett Johansson with Liev Schreiber hung over the elegant dinner.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura