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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Exhibition: Chris Moore, Catwalking

31 January 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Exhibitions Main No Comments

Chris Moore, Catwalking 2 December-10 February 2012
Kings Place Gallery

Born in Newcastle, Chris Moore moved with the rest of his family to London when he was four years old. He entered the world of fashion at the age of 18 and became a Vogue photographer’s assistant, working with luminaries such as Henry Clarke, Norman Parkinson and Cecil Beaton. His early career was spent documenting the intimidatingly exclusive Paris couture shows in the late 60s and continued with the advent of the Ready to Wear Collections in Milan, London and later New York in the 80s. By the mid 90s, with the expansion of the circuit to include menswear in Paris and Milan, photographing the catwalks became a full-time occupation.

Moore moved on, was represented briefly by the Camera Press Agency, but became a freelance photographer and has worked independently ever since. As a person he is extremely grounded and in appearance is unobtrusive, almost invisible. This ability to ply his craft unobserved might indeed, be part of the secret of his becoming ‘King of the Catwalk’, as he has been dubbed by the fashion industry. During his phenomenal career he has captured images of every conceivable catwalk event from the Paris
Couture houses of the sixties with Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin and Courrèges to the extravagant, theatrical spectacles staged by Hussein Chalayan and Alexander McQueen.

In 2000, Moore launched www.catwalking.com the successful online photographic library which is used by all major fashion and broadsheet titles internationally during the fashion week circuits. His photographs appear regularly in every major newspaper and magazine including The Guardian, Observer, The Times, and Independent as well as Vogue and Harpers Bazaar and the International Herald Tribune.
This exhibition celebrates Moore’s remarkable career with a collection of his iconic images.

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Wojciech Kosma, “In the beginning was the word,” Rehearsal II

3 April 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Wojciech Kosma, In the beginning was the word, Rehearsal II, 2011 and The—family Part 1: Pieta, 2013

It’s not often that we get to spy on each other’s private relationships. Reading a Facebook wall is no substitute for watching a couple alone in bed. Is it even possible for intimacy to be glimpsed from the outside – or does it become something else just by virtue of being watched? If we could witness the inner workings of others’ relationships, how would it change the way we think about our own? Over the past two years, the artist Wojciech Kosma has established a framework for performance art that maximizes the act of self-exposure, asking whether it is precisely through the act of public performance that the most ‘authentic’ relationships can develop.

Kosma is a Polish artist based in Berlin. His artistic history is varied – he has a background in computer science and music composition – but since around 2011, he’s become devoted to an increasingly unified pursuit, dubbed The—family, in which he creates performances using live actors. To the naked eye, each performance looks like a pair of close friends or lovers have landed in a room without instructions and been left to their own devices. Kosma’s influence is remote, his role distilled to the creator of conditions within which action can develop – a kind of John Cassavetes without a camera.

The most recent iteration of The—family series of performances, Pieta, occurred in January 2013 at LEAP overlooking Alexanderplatz in Berlin. For two consecutive nights, viewers were given a window into the relationship between Brian Doose, a 24-year-old American and Ingrid Sattes, a 51-year-old German. Sattes and Doose circled each other on a mat in the middle of the room: joking, fighting, fondling, singing, arguing and kissing.

Seemingly without self-censorship, Sattes gave a tearful account of a recent meeting with her ex-Nazi father, confessed age anxiety and body issues and sought reassurance and comfort from her partner – who at varying moments either gave or withheld affection. As power dynamics emerge between various actors in Kosma’s pieces, they become archetypes for relationship typologies we’ve all experienced in some form or another. Perhaps one falls into preconditioned patterns when on stage. Or perhaps we are all performing received notions of intimacy even when alone together.

Kosma orchestrates The—family relationships within a prescribed space. The people he selects rehearse regularly and rigorously in a defined area where he is always present but which is generally open to visitors. During this process the performers’ relationships begin to leak out into non-performance time; they meet the rest of the group and go out together – re-situating their relationships into the ‘regular’ arena of social performance. The difference is that those of us who have seen them perform have seen them at their most vulnerable moments – we know them, obliquely, in the way we are only used to knowing a best friend or a lover.

Far beyond the range of ‘performance as performance’, Kosma’s work elucidates the permeable membranes of artistic production and social space. Over time he is establishing a form of community between both realms. The—family is not a direct product of the art world but an outlet from its sphere within the scope of its influence.

http://frieze-magazin.de/archiv/kritik/wojciech-kosma/?lang=en

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Dance: Xavier Le Roy, Nudity Has Been Around From Prehistoric Times

7 December 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Culture No Comments

Xavier Le Roy and Eszter Salamon, Gisxelle, 2001

For Le Roy, nakedness is not a shock tactic but a quest for the sculptural and the sublime. “Nudity has been around from prehistoric times,” says John Kaldor. From 35,000-year-old figurines of Venus to the pursuit of male bodily perfection in Greek and Roman marble statues, Temporary Title is following a long artistic tradition. “Everybody is the same but is different,” says Le Roy, “The skin is great at showing that.”

For two decades, Le Roy has been tearing contemporary dance away from its conventional home in the theatre and placing it firmly into the art museum (appearing everywhere from London’s Tate Modern to the Museum of Modern Art in New York). His work is an “exhibition”, a moving landscape if you will, a space where visitors can stroll in and out as they see fit, spending 10 minutes or six hours consuming the art.

Xavier Le Roy holds a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier, France, and has worked as a dancer and choreographer since 1991. He has performed with diverse companies and choreographers and produces his work since 1994.

His most famous composition to date, Self Unfinished (1988), sees Le Roy use an elasticated black jumper and trousers to divulge, and then cover up, parts of his body, before peeling off his clothes altogether. In the process he becomes barely human. He is a robot, a raw plucked chicken carcass, a series of shapes and curves, his anatomy a ball of clay to mould.

When he performs Self Unfinished around the world, he is still struck by the “density of concentration” between himself and viewers, so thick it’s “like you can almost touch it”, he murmurs, rubbing his fingers together. Le Roy’s art is in his audience’s hands too (hence the open rehearsals and feedback sessions). He recalls one onlooker who was asked a question in a practice run of Temporary Title. Faced with the nakedness, he answered honestly, later telling the artist he could no longer “dress up” his answer.

But if being nude is being vulnerable, so, ironically, is putting back on clothes. Temporary Title’s performers work in shifts, dressing and undressing in front of the watchful eyes of the crowd. In the process they become “coloured in”, observes Christopher Quyen. Clothes act as identity: a conscious, carefully chosen image.

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Books: Housmans Bookshop

29 February 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Books Culture Main No Comments

Housmans is London’s premier radical bookshop
Housmans, Peace House, 5 Caledonian Road, Kings Cross, London N1 9DX

A not-for-profit bookshop, specialising in books, zines, and periodicals of radical interest and progressive politics who stock the largest range of radical newsletters, newspapers and art magazines of any shop in Britain.
In the basment, a vast, diverse, and ever-changing selection of second-hand books.

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ICA: The suiciders, Travis Jeppesen

24 October 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Books Culture Main No Comments

The suiciders, Travis Jeppesen, 2013

In an endurance-based explosion of the typical ‘literary reading’, Jeppesen will perform the entire text of his new novel The Suiciders in a single marathon reading for the London launch.

In Travis Jeppesen’s new novel, a group of friends occupies an indeterminate house in an unidentified American suburb and replays a continuous loop of eternal exile and youth. Permanently in their late teens, the seven young men are fluid and mutable ciphers, although endowed with highly reflexive, and wholly generic, internal lives.

“Once you learn how to love, you will also learn how to mutilate it . . . I want to feel so free you can’t even imagine . . . Let’s get out there and eat some popsicles. There is work to be done'”. Eventually, the group decides to remove themselves from the safe confines of the house and to embark upon a road trip to the end of the world with their companion, the Whore, and their pet parrot, Jesus H. Christ. The Suiciders is their legacy.

Chronicling the last days of a religious cult in rural America, Jeppesen’s debut novel Victimswas praised by the Village Voice for its “artfully fractured vision of memory and escape”, and by Punk Planet for its masterful balance of “the laconic speech of teenagers with philosophical density”. In The Suiciders, Jeppesen ventures beyond any notion of fixed identity. The result is a dazzling, perversely accurate portrait of American life in the new century, conveyed as a post-punk nouveau roman.

Saturday 26 October 2013
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

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