DRAWING RESTRAINT by Matthew Barney

At Serpentine Gallery
20 September – 11 November 2007

Matthew Barney - DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 2005Production still Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York© 2005 Matthew BarneyPhotograph: Chris Winget

Matthew Barney (born 1967, San Francisco) is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. His practice encompasses a diverse array of media including drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, film and installation, which are presented in exhibitions that are conceived by the artist as a gesamtkunstwerk or total work.


Barney’s exhibition at the Serpentine presents works from his Drawing Restraint series, which he began in 1987 while still in art school. Inspired by the idea of resistance training, he applied restraints to his body while drawing, exhibiting the resulting drawings, props and video documentation of the performances in the spaces where the actions had taken place. The Drawing Restraint series investigates the relationship between resistance and creativity and artistic and athletic bodies working at the threshold of physical limitations.


More recent works in the series continue to explore ways in which the body can be transformed, incorporating scripted narratives and diverse references ranging from Greek mythology to Japanese tea ceremonies. The exhibition at the Serpentine explores, in some depth, the sculptural cycle related to Barney’s recent feature film DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, 2006, which is being screened at the Gate Picturehouse cinema during the course of the exhibition. The Serpentine has worked closely with the artist to realise this ambitious presentation of work featuring sculpture, drawings, film, photography and video. Barney has also made a new work, Drawing Restraint 16, for the Serpentine; drawings and other residue of this performance fill the Gallery’s large central space.


The Serpentine Gallery exhibition will be accompanied by Drawing Restraint Volume V. The publication will include new texts on Barney’s Drawing Restraint series by New York-based writer and curator Neville Wakefield, Serpentine Gallery Chief Curator Kitty Scott and a short story by the award-winning Icelandic poet and lyricist Sjón. The book will also include previously unpublished images of Barney’s recent artworks.


Barney was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize in 1996 and has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in the USA and internationally. The complete Cremaster cycle was the subject of a major exhibition organised by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2002 that travelled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris.
More recently, the Drawing Restraint series has been presented in different incarnations at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, both in 2005; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2006.


To learn more : http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2007/04/matthew_barney20_september11_n.html

Bill Viola is so enigmatic...and fascinates me so much...

'The two main examples of multiple screens', Bill Viola explained earlier this year in an interview witht the Los Angeles Times, 'are in a video making and in late Medieval-Renaissance altarpieces'. This month, to coincide with the Biennale, Viola combines these two examples in an ambitious installation to be shown inside the church of San Gallo in Venice.


Ocean Without a Shore (2007) is a triptych composed of plasma screens postioned around the three existing stone altars of the fifteenth-century church, once a private chapel for one of the watery city's elite families. Viola (no stranger to mysticism) has said of the piece that 'it is about the presence of the dead in our lives'. The three stone altars in San Gallo become transparent surfaces for the manifestation of images of the dead attempting to re-enter our world'.


Viola's work is underscored by a spiritualism that has, in the past, riled a number of critics. But while the triptych is rich in religious iconography - there is something undeniably baptismal about the water dousing his ethereal figures - it is really a showcase for what Viola does best: visualise liminality with a poetry that is hard to resist. Slowed-down footage captures the borderline status of his subjects, whose bodies are poised at a threshold of being and non-being. As in previous works, gushing water is used to delineate flux; the artist's interest in water as a medium through which one passes from one world to the next is founded in a childhood experience in which he nearly drowned.
Ocean Without a Shore isn't the artist's only work to be displayed in a place of worship; next year Viola unveil a specially commissioned work for St Paul's Cathedral in London. And despite his occasionally straying into non denominational self-help aphorising, not many artists can count the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama as admirers.

Ocean Without a Shore can be seen from 10 June to 24 November, Chiesa San Gallo, Venice.

From ArtReview June 2007

The band that I worship TOOL should get in touch with Bill Viola...


More info on:
http://www.billviola.com/


http://www.oceanwithoutashore.com/

Trienale de Arquitectura de Lisboa

Chegou ao fim a Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa.

Ao longo de dois meses intensos a Trienal de Arquitectura juntou largas dezenas de colaboradores, conferencistas nacionais e internacionais, entidades públicas e privadas, universidades portuguesas e estrangeiras, arquitectos, urbanistas, artistas, músicos, historiadores e especialistas de áreas profissionais muito diversas. Esta primeira edição lançou as bases para a constituição de um “Festival” de arquitectura capaz de motivar o interesse e a participação, tanto da comunidade local como do público internacional. Portugal contribui desta forma para a reflexão, o debate, prospecção e divulgação da arquitectura nas suas múltiplas formas de expressão, das contingências regionais à complexa realidade global.

Falar de Vazios Urbanos, tema central do evento, foi também pretexto para falar da cidade contemporânea e, paralelamente, da situação específica de Lisboa no contexto internacional. Os vazios, espaços de falha funcional e humana, são lugares reveladores dos imprevistos da cidade – uma outra cidade não planeada que agora descobrimos presente em todas as metrópoles europeias. O crescimento rápido ditou a falência dos modelos modernos de urbanismo, pois que não existe já um paradigma único capaz de anular os seus crescentes graus de incerteza. Questionar, reflectir sobre este novo território da urbanidade é algo para que também a arquitectura é assim chamada a participar.

Reflectiram-se, nesta edição, sobre os muitos modos como a mudança actual é, inicialmente, uma mudança de sociedade e só depois de cidade. O aumento da velocidade diminuiu o tempo mas aumentou as distâncias. A expansão tornou-se possível e com ela surgiram novas centralidades – “nós” que com o tempo se tornaram outros pólos de crescimento autónomo e multi-funcionalidade interna. Estas transformações têm motivado uma reflexão crítica em todo o mundo, pois que se exigem hoje soluções de governabilidade territorial que sejam capazes de antecipar a incerteza presente no fenómeno urbano. Também à arquitectura cumpre contribuir activamente para uma paisagem urbana melhor e mais humana, respeitando os seus vários conteúdos – entre os quais a dimensão ecológica que esta implica – e dando sentido aos seus vazios. O desafio é imenso e a todos diz respeito.

A Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa regressa em 2010.

More info on:
http://trienaldelisboa.sapo.pt/

New campaign for Louis Vuitton...hard to understand the marketing strategy

Following J-Lo, Scarlett Johansson, and friend Pharell Williams, Catherine Deneuve was photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the new LV campaign. Deneuve, 63 posed at Gare de l'Est in Paris sitting on 2 Vuitton trunks with Manahattan handbags dangling from her arm.

"Our priority over recent years has been to establish Louis Vuitton among the world's leading fashion houses" said Yves Carcelle. "Under the direction of Marc Jacobs, this goal has been brilliantly achieved. But the purpose of this campaign is to restate our 150-year heritage as pioneert of the art of travel. We are very proud of this new campaign, and delighted to be associated with such exceptionnal yet very different personalities." Among those personalities, Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi, as well as Michael Gorbatchev.

To learn more: www.louisvuitton.com

FETISH = David Lynch/Christian Louboutin

I found FETISH aesthetic very interesting and many of my references (Marilyn Manson, Vivienne Westwood, NIN, Floria Sigismondi, Dita Von Teese...) have one day or another used it and interpreted their own way.

Therefore I am very happy to be posting about a fascinating collaboration between David Lynch and Christian Louboutin. The exhibition, simply entitled FETISH features David Lynch's pictures of Christian Louboutin's shoes, and will start from the 20th of September to the 20th of October 2007.

The show takes place at the Galerie du Passage whose director is Pierre Passebon in Paris. Paris, city of Toulouse-Lautrec, the city of hedonism and pleasure, the city of fashion and couture was the perfect setting for that exhibition.

David Lynch's universe seems to win over the one of David Louboutin, it looks obvious...or not...

Christian Louboutin says:
“David Lynch had asked me to draw shoes for his exhibition at the Cartier Foundation. He painted some of the shoes to show them in a cage. I wanted to ask him to photograph some of the shoes that I had designed in this for this particular project. David Lynch is one of the biggest movie maker alive. As his movies are extremely coded, I also wanted fetishist shoes. Those shoes would indeed follow those codes.
Many only see shoe as a functionnal accessory to be able walk. However, some are made to run, others to swim… Some are made for sex. If there is an element of fetishism in a wardrobe, it is the female shoe, even without stilettos. It has appearance of an indian totem.
It is an object of worship that lead to rituals. I had been thinking about shoe-sculptures, not made to be worn but to reveal what is the most beautiful: the curves of the feet. David Lynch gave me his agreement. He saw a sofa, roses, a lamp and a girl. He saw what I did not see. The image was already in his mind. The photographs were taken within two days in Paris.

To my surprise, David Lynch worked like a choreographer. He had the enthusiasm of a student from Art school, and the religious power of Pollock or Picasso. His images are endowed with a pictorial dimension: they remind me of Bellmer and Bacon, but also Boldini, in the way flesh is portrayed.
David had a requirement: “No bones”. The models are called Nouka and Baby, and dance for the Crazy Horse. As a fetishist of operetta, I chose them for their grace and their beauty, but also for their curves. Their very white skins, their very dark eyes and their brilliant mouths were added into the aesthetic of Lynch, which has sometimes fetishist accents: the lacerated body of Isabella Rosselini in Blue Velvet, or this atmosphere of anguish where blood is never shed. Or these curtains with symmetrical folds. David Lynch made as usual a populated landscape of shadows”.

FETISH : 20/09/2007 to 20/10/2007
Photographie
Pierre Passebon presents DAVID LYNCH (Photographies, 2007)/ CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN (Souliers, 2007)

www.galeriedupassage.com

Exhibition “MOSCOUPOLIS” at the LOUIS VUITTON GALLERY

Exhibition “MOSCOUPOLIS” at the LOUIS VUITTON GALLERY
21 September -31 December

up, Wall paintings by Valery Chtak,

down, objects from d'Alexandre Brodsky, © Louis Vuitton images

The city of Moscow will be honored at the Louis Vuitton gallery, from 21 September to 31 December.

Eleven Russian artists - Alexander Brodsky, Kirill Chelushkin, Valery Chtak, Olga Chernysheva, Alexeï Kallima, Valery Koshlyakov, Oleg Kulik, Pavel Pepperstein, Ksenia Peretrukhina, Stanislav Shuripa, Iced Architects - will present their works. Exploring the topic that is mutation, those emerging artists have been studying the changing of their capital.

From the 1st of September seven of them will invest the place and use it as a workshop where future artworks might be exhibited. Moscow the new city to be ? That is what some of those artists tried to show through various means : sculptures, glass artworks, photographies, all those materials to vary the pleasures.

An exhibition not to miss and that I had to talk about since I am half Russian...

Espace Louis Vuitton :
60, rue de Bassano / 101, avenue des Champs Elysées
75 008 Paris

More info on : http://www.louisvuitton.com/

Exclusive interview with Rachel Garrard.

This week I wanted to share the work of an interesting artist : Rachel Garrard.
Originally from Devon, she graduated from Central Saint Martins, where she studied women's wear.
Art and photography have always been of her interest. Over the last couple of years she has been working for Narciso Rodrigues, Alexander Mc Queen and Haider Ackermann, and has been commisioned to do various sculptures and paintings. In the future ? She hopes to produce a collection under her own label and showcase her installations.

How would you describe yourself and how would you describe your art ?
Anything I say about myself would also be relevant to my art. I consider them to be the same entity. My artwork is the direct physical representation of everything I think and feel. It is a diary of myself, and my journey as a creative being. A lot of my work is almost done subconsciously and I constantly understand new things about myself from looking at my work. I would describe myself as a questioner. I am hugely influenced and affected by everything that surrounds me, and I have to find a way of understanding it.

Do you feel that you belong more to the fashion universe or to the contemporary art world ? I would like to think that I do not have to be confined to either. As a creative person it is necessary to explore all outlets, and this may not fit into a single category. At the moment I am designing clothes, but the way I think and the way I work are as an artist.

Do you believe that frontiers exist between fashion and art ?
A lot of people like to say that boundaries between fashion and art no longer exist, but I would have to disagree. Fashion and Art have very different roles in society, and therefore are seen in a completely different light. Of course there are exceptions and some people do manage to combine both elements, but not without facing huge challenges.

What is the role of an artist in today’s world ?
To offer new ideas and explanations of the world around us.

What other artists, designers, fashion designer do you feel close to and why ?
Alberto Giacometti has been a hero of mine for a long time. There is a truth to his work that is very rare. The artists who I admire are those whose vision is so clear and profound that it has a lasting effect on your life. Whose entire lives are dominated by a constant questionning and drive to find a true understanding. Other artists I feel very close to are Naum Gabo, Mark Rothko. I would also like to include Friedrich Nietzsche and Trent Reznor.

Would you consider to do something else if you were not an artist ?
If I was not an artist I would need to have another outlet. I would probably consider going into music, writing, film or contemporary dance. I think being creative means that you have the ability to adapt your ideas into whichever medium is available.

Do you consider that “art is alive” ?
Definitely! Art is constantly growing and changing, being given new dimensions and interpretations by everyone that sees it. As long as art continues to affect people it will always be alive.

More info on: http://www.rachelgarrard.com/