Last minute Diane Arbus

Empty movie theater 

 Clouds on screen at a drive-in movie

42nd street movie theater audience

 Self-portrait pregnant

This self-portrait was taken with her first camera her husband bought her this one for her birthday. It symbolizes the start of their professional collaboration.

Self-portrait with daughter Doom

 Family in Brooklyn, Nyc

 Dominatrix with her client

 Groom kissing his bride

 Flower girl at a wedding

 Girl in a watch cap

Her pictures of children reveal a poignant truth as if they knew something adults have lost, without wearing any social masks, facing life with innocent madness.

 Santa Claus bishop

 Seated man in bra

This picture and the one below remind be of religious icons.

Superstar at home.

 Blind couple in their bedroom

 Teenage couple on Hudson street

Probably the picture in front of which I stayed the longest. How old could they be ? They look so powerful and confident together. It's disturbing.

 Mrs Dagmar Patino at the grand opera

The 1938 debutante in her room

 Nudist lady with swan sunglasses (love this pair !)

For the exhibition closing I tryed hard to look like the old actresses Diane used to shoot with their duchesses furs but I maybe have mixed up with Peggy >here<

From october 18th, a blockbuster exhibition is on every mouth in Paris, the retrospective of the american photographer Diane Arbus at the Jeu de Paume. Yesterday was the last day and I was the last person of the thousands of visitors coming there since 5 months to exit it pushed away by the bouncers.

Approximately 200 photographs drawn from museum and private collections offered a sight on her most famous pictures but also on her unpublished works.

Arbus is famous for her clichés of the banged up America, its monster reality,and the mysteries of its banalities. Freaks, transexuals, child with grenada, these are all part of our collective memory and its impossible not to enjoy seeing them again but it was also the occasion to get acquainted with rare and previously unreleased works.

I was surprised to discover the spectrum of her work ( even if the layout of the exhibition was too smooth and polished, pics almost equal in both their presentation and put in very chic white frames !).
The series on circus reminded me a lot of Stanley Kubrick photographs Personalities of the circus I've seen at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Art, here are some examples.

 And the cinema series is the one I loved most because I think it is a metaphor of how she looks at life, dramatic and detached, through her camera lenses, watching passive audiences hypnotized by alienating characters.

The last two rooms were dedicated to her life, from her birth to her suicide with big quotes (she studied literrature and it appears obvious) I let you some with of them.

I see the divinity in ordinary things.

The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.

One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

See also one of her photograph the albinos sisters at the Fiac >here<

Kelley's last journey to Kandor

Today the contemporary art world lost one of his most influential talent : Mike Kelley. An occasion to remember one of his masterpieces "Kandors". 

For you, non-Superman fans, Kandor is a Kryptonian city that has been shrunk and placed in a bell jar.

Kelley created replicas of Kandor using colorful handblown glass bottles and bell jars. I had the chance to see  some of them at the Punta Della Dogana when I lived in Venice and it concentrates all the imaginary ingredients I love in artworks. 

A bizarre and beautiful mix of science fiction, mudane, retro-futuristic, industrial and intimate. Some sources said that the cause of death was suicide but I prefer thinking he found his way to the birthplace of Superman, Kandor.

Marina Abramovic: An Artist's Life Manifesto

I found this today and now I want a human cake for my birthday.

This video was made during Abramovic's happening at the MOCA in Los Angeles :

An artist should avoid falling in love with another artist

Winter Vulkan Wolke

Another photoshoot with my siamese sister along the red rocks of the volcanic massif of Esterel.

The legend says that a fairy named Estérelle gave its name. Women came to consult for fertility. The true origin of the massif, less romanticized, comes from the adjective derived from sterile, which corresponded to the acidic and less fertile land that is the Esterel. The story of the Esterel is very old, its runs on 300 millions years. First attached to Africa, this piece of land separated itself during the formation of the Mediterrean sea. In the Tertiary, a section of the Esterel drifted and formed Corsica. Rugged landscapes and steep creeks plunging into the sea reflect the turbulent geological history.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama at the Tate

Seascape (My #1 !)

Dead Body (Part 1 of the triptych)

 Betty (Richter's daughter)

Overpainted family photographs

 Richter's father and dog

 Wolke (triptych)

Moonscape

Lion with tourist

What to do when you are an artist presenting at the Venice Biennale and you fall in love with the Annunciation painted by Titian at the Scuola di San Ranco. Just produce a copy and hang it on your walls.

The Annunciation after Titian

Between Xmas and NYE I went to the UK and did two major exhibitions: Vermeer's Women : Secrets and Silence at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and Gerhard Richter: Panorama at the Tate Modern in London. I will write later on Vermeer as I am too excited to tell you about Richter. I was waiting this exhibition for so long and thought I would wait for it to come to the Centre Georges Pompidou in june as it is supposed to be but had the chance to see a preview. Lucky lucky me.

Althought I know more about his contemporary and friend Sigmar Polke (I studied a lot while in Venice at the François Pinaud foundation >here<) I always had a strong interest in this 80 years old german painter. 

When I entered the exhibition I had the same impression when I went to Basquiat at the Musée d'Art Moderne >here<, his work is immense ! 14 rooms altogether. Diverse range of techniques are presented: paintings based on photographs, gestural abstractions, portraits (mostly of his daugther and family members) and landscapes. As Christian Boltanski ( see his work for the french pavillon at the Venice Biennale >here<)  his paintings reflect historical horrors of the nazism without heavily suggest them. 

What I perceived from this mass of artworks was that Richter is not a painter at all. I remember what my art teacher Fluxus movement member Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux used to tell me "The Medium is the Medium, I am painting with pieces of torn photographs, I am drawing with scissors, detach yoursel from the medium to better understand it". Richter is a photograph who has traded his films against brushes. The result is an epic beauty of photographic quality (called photorealism but I hate this word) paintings deepen into a tangible blur made with horizontal gestures.

To me, the most interesting part of the work are the landscapes, his daughter portraits and the paintings made of newspapers photographs (even if it is Polke's iconic range of work). I've been a bit disappointed by his abstractions entitled each time 'Abstraction n°1,2...' Althought I was less sensible to it, I can understand how these colorful explosions constitute an essential part of his artistic evolution. This judgement may appear too hasty and newt time I will face Richter's abstraction I will try to look at it with virgin eyes. 

Tate Modern 6 October 2011 - 8 January 2012

Ghost wandering the rooftops of London

This photographs were taken in London mid-october before going to a warehouse party with my mysterious muse Olivia. She looks like a spirit that wanders from balcony to balcony.

MINIMAL ART AT THE MCA

Minimalism exhibition at the MCA of Chicago. Masterpieces were presented along new artworks of contemporary artists said to be the heirs of the movement. Consistent.

Tony Conrad - Yellow Movie

Conrad's Yellow Movie appears at first to be a classic work of Minimalism in its reduced palette and simple geometric composition until one lears the artist's intentions. For Conrad, the nearly white color painted within the black fram is an active surface, yellowing slowly as it observes and absorbs changes of light over time on its seemingly blank screen. The opening up of art to life and the inevitability of decay were preoccupations for artists during this time and have remained powerfully fresh ideas to this day.

Donald Judd - Horizontal Purple

Gordon Matta-Clark - Untitled

Whereas many of the artists represented in the exhibtion call attention to the limits and borders of the art objects themselves,  Matta-Clark highlights the limitations and characteristics of his tools, cutting overlapping arcs into paper with the use of a compass. The artist was well known for cutting into much larger structures, such as buildings, using geometric shapes to guide him.

Frank Stella - Type

Fred Sandback - Helium, from Eight-Part Sculpture for the Dwan Gallery (Conceptual Construction)

(My favourite one) Sandback proposes a sculptural intervention that cannot be seen. If helium was to be released into a room, the density or composition of the atmosphere of that room would have change as it would change if a larger stone sculpture were placed in the middle of the room but because this change would be imperceptible to unaided human perception, it would probably go unnoticed. Proposals for experiments such as this remind us of the immense amount of information available for us to process at every waking moment, most of which completely passes us by.

Carl André - Zinc Lead Plain

Gordon Matta-Clark - Circus of the Caribbean Orange

Scott Reeder