Jeremy Blake

Video Still from Glitterbest, Jeremy Blake
Copyright Jeremy Blake

I am glad that the Jeremy Blake Memorial Show @ Kinz, Tillou & Feigen will be extended for two additional weeks. That gives me enough time to catch it next Saturday. I am excited to see all of Jeremy Blake's major video works together in one show. Also, it will be great to catch a glimpse of the unfinished Glitterbest, sadly the last work of the Artist who committed suicide last summer. The NY Times has an interesting feature about David Sigal(a friend of curator Jonathan P. Binstock) preparing the unfinished piece for the show. Of the intended 11 minutes only five minutes could be found on Blake's computer. To fill the remaining 7 minutes of voice overs on the timeline they had to track down missing image files and add them to the video file, at the same time trying to maintain the integrity of the work....

After Death, Unfinished Artwork Gets a Life , By Dan Levin.....here

Music to the Eye
Jeremy Blake's 'Moving Paintings' Are a Brilliant Coda to a Life That Ended on a Sad Note
By Chris Richards......here

Cus (Part3)

Copyright Matias Aguilar

here for more pictures of my Cus Series...

1001(Part 7)

copyright Matias Aguilar

...for more pictures of my 1001 series...here

Jon Kessler

copyright Jon Kessler

I still fondly remember an exhibit I watched sometime in the 90's at Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, Germany, entitled Jon Kessler's Asia . Being from New York, Kessler would go to Chinatown and buy all sort of objects, figurines, etc. used as decor for Chinese restaurants and then playfully remix these found objects in his studio, making mechanical kinetic sculptures out of them. I recently looked up John Kessler at Google and came across his site here. Fortunately, there are little videos of the work that can be found on his site as well....

There is an article @ Frieze about this body of work here

Recently Kessler has been channeling his focus as the Drawing Center puts it on..."the mass media's infatuation with disaster, war, sex, and celebrity. In his new series of drawings, Kessler creates portraits by taking found representations culled from the worlds of fashion, celebrity culture, and contemporary politics and reconfiguring them to reflect on the spectacle of American power and the instant access to images of objectification and violence. Based on the idea of “the portrait as a metaphor for captivity,” Kessler's new body of work confronts the convergence of advertising, propaganda, surveillance, and technology that threatens to undermine democratic politics. "
...review of Drawing Center here
...Web Gallery courtesy of Drawing Center here

Matias Aguilar - Cus (Part 2) - 2007

Copyright Matias Aguilar

here for more pictures of my Cus Series

Katsumi Watanabe

Last year around this time I watched the Katsumi Watanabe show at Andrew Roth Gallery, entitled The Gangs of Shinjuku. Watanabe's pictures from the 60's and 70's are portraits of more or less shady characters of Kabukicho, a red light district in Tokyo. As the photographer gets commissioned to take the pictures (for a relatively low amount of money), red light hustlers and entertainers are calling the shots of how the picture is supposed to look like. Normally, it is quite unusual for photographers to allow the power shift to the model. But this commercial give and take scenario enables Watanabe to take many portraits of really interesting characters of a particular area in time.

Copyright Katsumi Watanabe

There are not many pictures displayed on the web. But there is a book available actually published by the gallery.

The Low Life and High Life, Hand in Hand by Guy Trebay here

Anna and Bernhard Blume

copyright Anna and Bernhard Blume

Anna and Bernhard Blume's staged photographs are something else....Although they have had major shows in Germany and here in America, I have not really heard anything from them for a long time. I remember seeing their Kitchen Frenzy series in the nineties at Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover. Find the best MySpace page ever featuring a lot of their work here

Joe Strummer

Copyright Bob Gruen

The importance of style and fashion could be easily overlooked if you automatically relate fashion to hedonism and vanity. To me the first generation of Punk in New York and London proved that fast paced, pure Rockn’ Roll in conjunction with provocative style was a not only a blast. It actually changed the course of music.
But you would have to be as brilliant as the Clash to get away with telling people that by plainly being a rock star you could make bigger changes happen in the world. God bless him for that...

There is a Joe Strummer documentary The Future Is Unwritten by Julian Temple that I was not completely happy about. I did enjoy the film as a fan. The filmmaker had everything at hand, amazing footage, sufficient knowledge of the singer, interesting participants, etc. But sadly and annoyingly, too many of the interviews of Strummers friends, acquaintances and family members are conducted around campfires. We all know now that campfires meant a lot to the late singer and that you can draw a lot from reasoning sitting around campfires. Probably such primordial gatherings could also strengthen, even deepen comradeships. But honestly, I do not want to remember the singer from the Clash as the Punkrocker who also was a hippie at heart. That just does not seem right to me. I would have preferred a more sober focus on his work.

I loved this article from the NY Times by CHRIS SALEWICZ here

Joseph Szabo

Tom on his car, 1977, Joseph Szabo, 16x20

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Nice! ...more Joseph Szabo pictures here

Henry Wessel

copyright Henry Wessel

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The Henry Wessel exhibition at Charles Cowles Gallery was my favorite show of the year. The b+w prints I saw there were so unbelievably luminous that I actually felt quite let down by the postcard invites from the gallery that I took home...and I was really thankful for them in the first place...For more Henry Wessel pictures go here

Rink Series Part 4

...new pictures from my Rink series ..... here

Filming the "Lucy" Show by Karl Freund 1953

from Art Photography, December1953, Vol.4, No.6-45

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here

Bert Stern

copyright Bert Stern


copyright Bert Stern
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I totally love the collages of Bert Stern....
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here for Bert Stern portfolio

Sibylle Bergemann, Arno Fischer

Sibylle Bergemann, Lustgarten in Berlin, 1982

...30 years of Fashion Photography in the GDR here (article in German)

From The Times: Now the Party’s over... Images from communist East Germany subvert the myth of the workers’ paradise, by Joanna Pitman here

Koji Wakamatsu

Film Still Go, Go, Second Time Virgin(1969)
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Koji Wakamatsu has a reputation as a controversial filmmaker. Due to the graphic violence, sexuality, and radical themes, his movies are anything but easy entertainment. His work puts people in shock. I watched Go, Go, Second Time Virgin(1969). It is an outstanding film. There is an online petition here that can be signed to support Koji Wakamatsu struggle with the French censor board to facilitate the release of The Embryo Hunts in Secret(1966). I have not watched this movie. I do not believe it is available on DVD.
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Koji Wakamatsu promoting his new film here
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Go, Go, Second Time Virgin @ YouTube here

The Isle Of Man (Part 7) Series

Copyright Matias Aguilar
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...new pictures from my Isle Of Man Series right here