Cindy Sherman: Retrospective

Cindy Sherman: “Untitled #465”, 2008, C-Print, 161,9 x 145,4 cm

Cindy Sherman, Retrospective, February 26-June 11, 2012
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history.

Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting.

To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/cindysherman/

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From the Archive

Saâdane Afif

2 April 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Saâdane Afif, Blue Time vs. Suspense, 2007

Saâdane Afif plays with notions of displacement, collusion and contrast. He uses objects, scale models and installations, sounds and writing to mirror in the work of art itself the dialogue arising between the artist and the viewer. This dialogue makes allusions to psychological, historical, social and cultural elements.

Thanks to this extended formal vocabulary, borrowed as easily from the history of art as from the world of the media and music, Afif creates installations made up of unexpected encounters between objects and disciplines. Power Chords, produced for the Lyon Biennial in 2004, and for which he won the International Prize for Contemporary Art from the Fondation Prince Pierre in Monaco, is a sound installation for eleven electric guitars controlled by informatics. Each guitar emits its own note at random, in order to compose “key” harmonies from Rock history that are the musical transcription of mathematical harmonies played by artist André Cadéré with the drumsticks.

Blue Time vs. Suspense is especially produced for the Xavier Hufkens Gallery. It makes a synthesis between two older projects: Blue Time and Suspense. Blue Time vs. Suspense comprises three guitars/black clocks hung like suspension points, attached to three amplifiers via audio cables. The sound produced is similar to that of three out-of-tempo metronomes.

“To produce a musical instrument related to time, is to recall that the mastering of the latter lies at the heart of an artist’s preoccupations”.

The lyrics of the two songs about the older pieces, from which this new work originates, are stuck on the walls in adhesive letters. They accompany a text created for the occasion referring to the new work. Playing alone, the musician Vale Poher performs these texts, accompanying the songs on electric guitar. This is broadcast via headphones placed on a stand upon which the visitor can sit.
The style of music and the instrument perfectly match the project.

A screen-printed poster features the titles of the album and by extension, the titles of the works. It is a kind of exhibition ‘credits’.

A CD, also produced for the occasion, is a recording of the exhibition in words and music.

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Advertising: Lanvin

2 January 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Fashion Main No Comments

Lanvin, Fall Winter 2011-2012 Ad Campaign

Primped and adorned in Lanvin dresses, two gorgeous ladies are ready for a night on the town. Just as we believe they’re about to step out for the evening, they stand in position, fixate their eyes on their screen and on cue, start to groove to the music and sway their hips in sync.

Moving to the rhythm of the beat, the girls swing their arms in the air creating a visual show, as the audience catches glimpses of the chic evening clutch in one hand and a bejeweled cuff in the other, with wind in their hair. Suddenly, the scene switches up a bit and in comes their two male companions. At this moment, the party has begun. The rhythm of the night and the synchronized steps do not delay the revealing guest surprise.

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Exhibition: Anri Sala

13 November 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Exhibitions Main No Comments

Doldrum, 2008, Installation view

Anri Sala, 1 October – 20 November 2011
The Serpentine Gallery

Anri Sala (born 1974, Tirana) is a leading contemporary artist whose early videos and films mined his personal experience to reflect on the social and political change taking place in his native Albania.
Sala has attached a growing importance to sound, creating remarkable works in which he recasts sound’s relationship to the image. Linked to this development is Sala’s long-standing interest in performance, and particularly musical performance.
A central premise of this exhibition is that most of the works presented at the Serpentine either use a live performance as their starting point or could lead to a performance in the future.

The exhibition is conceived as a cycle, or loop, structured around pairs of works that echo each other

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Tom Burr, Sentence

11 February 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Artists Main No Comments

Tom Barr, Sentence, 2009

Tom Burr, Sentence, 10 September – 24 Oktober 2009
Bortolami, New York

There was no single work in Tom Burr’s recent exhibition “sentence” that was truly emblematic of the whole, but one pair at least came close. The two sculptures his personal effects (White) and (Natural) (both 2009) demonstrate a bold juxtaposition of randomness and precision and a fascination with the aura of ephemeral objects that united all the pieces here. Enclosing two pairs of worn-out sneakers in Plexiglas cases, one per shoe, and placing them atop wooden pedestals of differing heights colored according to the works’ subtitles, the New York- and Norfolk, Connecticut-based artist seems to have framed his exhibition as a meditation on entropy and loss, a series of forward steps that cohere only with a backward glance.

Tom Burr entered the picture then, back in the early 1990s when he started showing at Colin DeLand’s American Fine Arts in SoHo. AFA had already presented the fences and aluminum panels of Cady Noland and the domestic-object based installations of Jessica Stockholder; across the street and around the corner, Felix Gonzalez-Torres put out strings of light and Jack Pierson hung tinsel. Within this context, Burr was an important new voice in the dialogue of institutional critique, exploring the politics of minimalism and politics at large that were at the forefront of artistic and social concerns—notably identity, society and the body, often dealing with issues of sexuality, war and the structures of public and private spheres.

One distinction of Burr’s work that persists is his consideration of the ephemeral. This interest extends beyond time to all sensory experiences, which must be transitory by nature. He describes individual sculptures as ‘moments’ and thinks of their varied qualities in terms of musical notes, temperatures, and moods—qualities that cannot be trapped into the permanency of an object, but may be somehow suggested.

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Artist: Josh Smith

23 June 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Artists Main No Comments

Josh Smith, Untitled, 2008 and Untitled, 2010. Mixed media on canvas, acrylic glass

Through paintings, collages, books, and ceramics, Josh Smith challenges the ideas of the artist. In forcing the painted image to be somewhat arbitrary, he has managed to take the act of painting beyond aesthetics.

Smith’s early training in printmaking is often the spur which drives his art making. Many of his paintings start with the artist’s name or a fish or leaf motif as a point of departure, but they typically eschew formal representation in favor of an exploration of abstraction. Other works, such as his palette paintings, are purely abstract and explore the notion of composition created by chance.
In his mixed media collages on plywood, subway maps, take-out menus, newspapers and street posters are combined with reproductions of Smith’s existing works as well as silk-screened text and original painting. Smith intersperses the manufactured with the handmade and elevates found materials by virtue of inclusion. He makes art so he can look at it.

Born in 1976, Josh Smith is from Knoxville, Tennessee. He has had numerous solo exhibitions. He lives and works in New York.

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