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Q&A: Nicky Silver, Inheritor to Neil Simon and Edward Albee, Reaches Broadway at Last With “The Lyons”

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Q&A: Nicky Silver, Inheritor to Neil Simon and Edward Albee, Reaches Broadway at Last With “The Lyons”
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Last Monday, at the jubilant opening night party for Nicky Silver’s “The Lyons,” the playwright hid behind a pillar at Sardi’s Restaurant as a publicist read the New York Times’s rave review of the show to the crowd. Fingering an unlit cigarette, he listened as the encomiums poured forth — for the actors, including Linda Lavin, Dick Latessa, Kate Jennings Grant and Michael Esper, and director Mark Brokaw — but mostly for the one-time enfant terrible of experimental theater who, at 51, had finally made his Broadway debut. During the reading, Silver darted from his hiding place to fire off barbs (“Your childhood elocution lessons obviously did not pay off!”) not unlike those in his  acidic plays.

Since the early ‘90s,  this modern American absurdist has launched depth charges of subversive laughter in such dark comedies as “Fat Men in Skirts,” about incest, rape and cannibalism, and “Pterodactyls,” a domestic comedy about AIDS and alienation. “The Lyons” is no less toxic or brutally funny, though arguably more polished and moving. The play opens in a hospital room where long-stewing grudges are exchanged within a pathological family: an epithet-spewing father who is on his deathbed and hates his kids (Latessa); a mother from hell (Lavin) who can’t help laying waste to people’s self-esteem; a divorced daughter (Grant) whose A.A. mantras are as shaky as her hands; and a son (Esper), a gay short-story writer whose neck still bears the marks of mom’s apron strings. 

Raised in a middle-class Jewish family,  the Philadelphia-born Silver claims that his own childhood was not the “Hindenberg” experienced by his characters. But he recalls a story from Alice Miller’s “The Drama of the Gifted Child,” in which two young girls suffer the loss of ice cream from their respective cones. “One doesn’t care and the other is traumatized,” says the playwright. “I’m the little girl whose ice cream cone made her scarred for life.” Silver spoke with ARTINFO about other ways in which his life and career  has been both a trauma and a privilege. 

How did you feel when the Times hailed you as progeny of Neil Simon and Edward Albee?
In a word, embarrassed. These are iconic playwrights. But without making any claims to equality, my aesthetic makes it clear that it’s not an altogether inappropriate arena. Clearly I like a joke, but there’s also a strain in me that is very dark, forbidding, and disturbing. There’s a lot of Borscht Belt in me and a lot of psychological misery. Was that self-deprecating enough? 

Early in your career, a critic once famously wrote, “Silver never met a pain he couldn’t laugh at.” True?
I think I can find something funny in the worst of it. I’ve been in a room with parents of dying children and while I hope I have a sensitivity developed enough so that I don’t sit there making jokes in the depths of despair, I also know when a joke is called for and when it will help.

Do you believe that marriage is as vicious as it’s presented in “The Lyons”?
I don’t feel that way about marriage as a rule. I do think theater has to come from conflict and conflict comes from misery. It’s not part of my worldview that family is doomed and that marriage is doomed — wait, maybe I shouldn’t say that. It’s certainly not part of my worldview that marriage is doomed. It just makes more interesting theater.

Then you think family is doomed?
Hmm. I don’t think — last night people kept asking me, what do I want people to take away from the play? And I was flummoxed, so I kept saying, “My phone number, which is scrawled on the wall of the mezzanine bathroom.” But I think the play is saying when family fails, then you take your connection to other human beings where you can find it and don’t question it, whether it’s a surly nurse, a man dying of lymphoma, or a gigolo. I don’t think all families fail, but it’s hard and we have to be open to finding peace wherever we can.

When connection is elusive,  as it is for Curtis, the son, does fantasy then become a substitute? 
Hold on, my imaginary boyfriend just asked me something. [Pretends to talk to someone.] I’m back! I’m reluctant to talk about this because the actor who is playing him might read this. But what I will say is there is a certain point when internalized self-loathing becomes so burdensome that I suspect that his character believes the only connection that he is worthy of is one that’s illusionary.  “Illusionary”? Is that a word? Did I just make that up? Illusory? Illusionary? Whatever. I don’t think it’s about control with Curtis. It’s finding some way to overcome the grandiosity of his own self-loathing.

The parents appear to likewise be deluded about each other.
Rita says to him, “All you ever did was love someone who you thought I was.” We often create people out of whole cloth or sometimes from the raw materials of real people, but created in such a way that isn’t who they actually are. That’s a theme that runs through a lot of my work. In “The Food Chain,” there’s a line: “I’ve spent my whole life looking for someone who will love me for who I am on the inside so that I can love them for the way they look.” We’re all looking for someone who can embrace our authentic self more than we can embrace our authentic self, to the point that we won’t show our authentic self even while we’re looking for someone to embrace it.  Could you follow that?

How exaggerated are these characters?
I think they’re condensed, not exaggerated.

You don’t feel you need to shock the audience, to wake them up?
Early in my career I tried to shock them with subject matter, but now I think it’s more a matter of stylistic shifts to keep them on their toes.  For instance, in “Fat Men in Skirts,” the first act was non-linear, the second act was a farce, and the third act was a courtroom drama. In [“The Lyons”], there are subtle shifts in the first act and then big ones in the second. I know that makes some people uncomfortable and they reject it. But I like it.

As trapped as these characters are in their rampant narcissism and loneliness, do you feel hopeful they can escape it?
I absolutely feel there is hope for all of them. The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is not the presence of tears versus jokes. In my mind, in a comedy the characters get what they need; in a tragedy they are denied what they need. The tone is almost immaterial because you can have a very funny tragedy and a very sad comedy. At the beginning of my career, I got rejection letter after rejection letter saying, “There’s no one to like in your plays, no one to root for.” And I loved and rooted for all of them. Whether or not they seem nice in the conventional sense, they’re fighting very hard for some crumb of gratification, of happiness, of affirmation that seems really elusive. And that for me is as admirable a quality that one can have. It’s a fearful thing to do and shows a lot of courage. Oh, God, I sound so pompous.

You’re a scrapper yourself, hanging in through the years of rejection and mixed critical reviews.
You can’t control your career, but you can control your work and I’ve been lucky to have had this long relationship with the Vineyard [Theatre], which has developed my plays off-Broadway over the years. Broadway was never a goal. When I arrived here in the mid-‘70s, I had the superiority of someone who had accomplished nothing. I thought of Broadway as very bourgeois and lowbrow except for Stephen Sondheim and Joe Papp and the Public Theater. It was just a snotty outlook. Since then, the effort to make plays feels like it’s been unending battle. It was not unpleasant, but never easy. It’s been an uphill battle. Now, I sound whiny. I’ve gone from pompous to whiny.

But you’ve fought …
Tooth and fucking nail!

Read more theater coverage in Play by Play


Slideshow: Student protests at Cooper Union

Lars von Trier’s Pornographic “Nymphomania”: How Far Will Charlotte Gainsbourg Go?

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Lars von Trier’s Pornographic “Nymphomania”: How Far Will Charlotte Gainsbourg Go?
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Lars von Trier isn’t alone among arthouse or indie directors who have depicted actual sex in films. Von Trier showed it in “The Idiots” (1998), Bruno Dumont in “La Vie de Jésus” (1997), Catherine Breillat in “Romance” (1999), and Michael Winterbottom in “9 Songs” (2004), while Vincent Gallo was the recipient of unsimulated oral sex from Chloë Sevigny in “The Brown Bunny” (2003). Marco Bellochio had paved the way for showing that particular act in 1986’s “Devil in the Flesh” (1986). Fellatio also featured in Patrice Chereau’s “Intimacy” (2001) and Carlos Reygadas’s “Battle in Heaven” (2005).

Von Trier will be the first reputable filmmaker, however, to make a hardcore pornographic film under the aegis of art. He will shoot graphic sex scenes for his next movie “Nymphomania,” which, as expected, is to be made in both hardcore and softcore versions. Filming begins in the German state of North-Rhine Wesphalia this summer, according to Hollywood Reporter.

Charlotte Gainsbourg, who played a woman who commits genital self-mutilation in von Trier’s “Antichrist” and the passive-aggressive Claire in his “Melancholia,” has been cast as the lead in “Nymphomania.” She will play “Joe,” who describes her sexual history from infancy to middle-age to an older bachelor, Seligman, to be played by Stellan Skarsgård.

It has not been revealed whether Gainsbourg will participate in the real sex scenes or whether body doubles will be used, as in “The Idiots.”

The indication that von Trier wants to tackle child sexuality in the film isn’t likely to dampen his reputation as an agent provocateur. Awarded “persona non grata” status at last year’s Cannes festival for his “All right, I’m a Nazi” faux pas, the Danish director could be courting membership of the pariah club.

The softcore version of the film is necessitated by the need for a mass audience. “If Lars wants to make explicit sex scenes in the film, he also has to make a version that can be shown on TV in Europe,” his producer Peter Aalback told The Guardian. “He has accepted that.”

In an interview with Modern Painters published last October, von Trier admitted he was enjoying doing the research for “Nymphomania.” “I have been meeting some old girlfriends and some women I knew in my youth who were really screwing around,” he said. “I’m having such a ball listening to all these stories. If the film has any of the enjoyment of the research, then it will be really joyful, even though it will contain tragic elements.”

In Five: Brian Williams Loves His Daughter’s Sex Scene, David Simon Blogs, and More Performing Arts News

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In Five: Brian Williams Loves His Daughter’s Sex Scene, David Simon Blogs, and More Performing Arts News
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1. Brian Williams experienced “unmitigated joy” watching his daughter Allison’s bad-sex scene on “Girls.” [Vulture]

2. Rooney Mara may play the Siri-like siren of an electronic voice in planned Spike Jonez movie. [Variety via Hitfix]

3. David Simon is blogging. [Galleycat]

4. Mariah Carey recorded with Rick Ross in Miami this week. [Rap-Up]
Related: Mariah Carey Turns a Young 42

5. Watch a funny promotional video, featuring Bob Odenkirk, for Tenacious D’s new album. [RS]

Previously: President Obama, Nas, Seth Rogen, James Gray, and “Game of Thrones”

The Berlin Biennale Pushes Radical Chic to Its Limit, Playing Host to Occupiers and Terrorist Leaders

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The Berlin Biennale Pushes Radical Chic to Its Limit, Playing Host to Occupiers and Terrorist Leaders
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BERLIN — On paper, the 7th Berlin Biennale looks great. It’s young. It challenges exhibition conventions. It’s organic in its growth. It’s even free! Speaking to the press on Wednesday, curator Joanna Warsza stressed, “The starting question was 'What can art do for you?'” She and Artur Zmijewski, a formidable and talented artist in his own right, wanted art that would not only engage with the viewer, but actually, actively, help them in real, material ways. Differentiating this incarnation from past biennales, Warsza continued, “While [MaurizioCattelan [who co-curated the 2005 Biennale] conducted over 800 studio visits in Berlin, our studio visits were happening by following the news.”

It’s a noble approach. However, walking the line between antagonistic, subversive, and intellectualized spectacle, leads one often tipping irrevocably towards the latter. And, with the Biennale's KW Institute for Contemporary Art headquarters opening it’s cavernous main floor to Occupiers of international origins, it all too quickly did. Fully equipped with an online radio station, a “99% Sleeping Room,” poster-making stations, and a pop-up university, it’s an occupier’s dream. Yet the dreadlocked, flannel-clad participants in front of their stands look more like what one might construct as a time-capsule of our particular moment 30 years from now than a current, organically produced happening.

Admittedly, the occupiers are only one portion of the biennale, and their projects are set to grow immensely over then next months — they have a calendar where anyone can plan some action. But the theme continues across many of the projects on KW’s other floors. At the “New World Summit,” Jonas Staal, Younes Bouadi, Robert Kluijver, Paul Kuipers, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, and Sjoerd Oudman plan to create a international summit for members of various organizations placed on international terror lists, from Al-Shebab to the World Tamil Movement. Bouadi said, “We were in touch with the Dutch secret service before starting the project,” which involved infiltrating terror cells to get in contact with leaders and persecuted members. It’s undeniably an interesting project, but in the context of the biennale, again, it just feels strange. Even more so because he said, “We could only do it because it’s in an artistic context.” Statements like this make the exhibition seem ever less about art that changes the world, and ever more about political action or discourse functioning under a thin veil of aesthetics.

Several projects — coincidentally those that do engage in a more dialectical understanding of the relationship between art’s necessary autonomy and its political implications — are moving, and affectively motivate one to act. A darkened room on the exhibition’s third floor shows scenes from political protests and struggles around the world. While the clip of topless female protestors fighting off security personnel was distracting, the screens displayed more jarring imagery as well, the indelible video of water canons blasting a single man crossing the street at the top of that list. “Berlin/Birkenau,” a venture by Łukasz Surowiec that involves him transporting saplings from the forests outside Auschwitz to Berlin, takes over KW’s attic, where the seedlings are being grown under florescent lights. The olfactory presence is overwhelming, as is the blackened space's somber environment, lending itself to real, meaningful reflection.

But, perhaps one should hold off maligning the exhibition to the extent that the popular press has in the day or so since it got its first glimpse of the show. What if we assume Zmijewski is not so naïve as to believe that putting occupiers, terrorist flags, and topless protest videos into a state-funded institution could be taken as anything less than spectacle. That seems all too genuine for a master of exploitative realism. Maybe this show is just an example of truly making the viewer part of the art: Our reactions become part of the event in order to show that the spectacle of subversion is, well, bullshit. By both exploiting the state to allow the beginnings and continuations of subversive behavior within KW and by tricking us all into his carnivalesque political theater, Zmijewski is may indeed just be pushing us to see the ridiculousness of talking about politics rather than being political actors. Or, maybe not.

London’s Olympic Park Takes on an Ambitious Plan for Zero-Carbon Sustainability After the 2012 Games

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London’s Olympic Park Takes on an Ambitious Plan for Zero-Carbon Sustainability After the 2012 Games
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With the frenzied build-out of every Olympic host city comes the inevitable question of what will happen after the city is emptied of athletes and fans. London has been far from apathetic on the matter. Not only will the co-creators of the High Line, James Corner Field Operations, be building a hedge maze and planting cotton-candy-pink cherry blossoms in the south hub of the park, but the Olympic Park Legacy Company has long stressed an initiative to add much-needed family housing to the Olympic estate. Yesterday, news broke that all of the 8,000 homes built on the park will be constructed to zero-carbon standards.

A newly released pamphlet from the London Legacy Development Corporation has outlined a vision of sustainable parklands, residential homes, and even new jobs to shape the future Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park into "an environment that drives behavioral change," as Andrew Altman, chief executive of the LLDC explained in London24. "Your Sustainability Guide to the Queen Elizabeth Park 2030" boasts a future of low-energy homes, bio-diverse habitats, cycling routes, and fewer trips to the landfill.

The move to zero-carbon standards sets a new benchmark for the kind of urban reprogramming precipitated not only by the Olympic games but also by increasingly steroidal development elsewhere in the world. We're interested in seeing how housing issues will be resolved with London's new plans. Though the push towards a greener Olympic Park is indisputably admirable, it is often too easy to let strides in sustainability detract from other pressing social issues. The challenge of developing an entirely new city district requires foresight of mythical proportions, a Robert Moses-like ability to anticipate the needs of a neighborhood that only exists, as of yet, in numbers, words, and renderings. But this also means that now is the time for London to dream big for the future of its Olympic Park. And in many ways, it has.

 

Slideshow: Images from Gilbert & George's show at Lehmann Maupin

Slideshow: Zaha Hadid's "Dune Formations" collection


Zaha Hadid's "Liquid Glacial": The Ice Table Cometh

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Zaha Hadid's "Liquid Glacial": The Ice Table Cometh
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Architect Zaha Hadid, the mastermind behind the surreal Guangzhou Opera House and troubled MAXXI Museum, has made it her practice's signature to create curvilinear forms frozen in motion, as if they had been thrown at a very high speed and suspended midair. Her latest venture into frozen industrial design, Liquid Glacial, possesses a much more subtle, zen-like M.O. The clear acrylic table is a mercurial piece that appears to be transitioning between states of matter, seemingly from ice to water. Like the surface of a frozen lake, the glassy tabletop is still, while the quiet rippling pattern flows into the legs below.  

The table made its debut at the opening of the new David Gill showroom London's Mayfair neighborhood, where Hadid's fluid Dune collection will also be on view. 

 

Disney Turns to Louboutin to Update Cinderella's Glass Slipper

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Disney Turns to Louboutin to Update Cinderella's Glass Slipper
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When Disney re-releases “Cinderella” this summer on DVD, the heroine may have to fit into a slipper with a heel that’s a lot more treacherous than what she wore in 1950. The studio has tapped Christian Louboutin to put a new spin on pop culture’s most notorious piece of glass footwear, timed to be unveiled alongside a crisp Blu-ray version of the animated classic.

“I have been so lucky to have crossed paths with Cinderella, an icon who is so emblematic to the shoe world as well as the dream world,” Louboutin told WWD.

Just how the designer will alter the dimensions of the shoe remains to be seen. It is, after all, an iconic piece, and its ability to fit a girl’s foot is the main element of the fairy tale’s plot. Could Cinderella glide about in 5-inch Very Privés? And when she walks into the ball, will those behind her see clear soles, or will Louboutin paint the glass red?

Louboutin has dabbled in film collaborations before, but the projects have tended to be more outré then your average Disney princess flick. The designer credited surrealist filmmakers with inspiring his shoes, and some do look like Buñuel films you can (barely) walk in. He also collaborated with David Lynch on a project called “Fetish,” which showed at the Galerie du Passage, in Paris. In it, women strutted around in 20-inch stems. “As is his habit,” Louboutin said, “David Lynch made it into a décor populated with shadows.”

Not exactly happily ever after. But despite the dark streaks that have popped up in his designs, there’s no doubt that Louboutin can embrace that Disney magic and design a slipper appropriate for the occasion. And if there’s a red sole, too, the girl at the ball may not need until midnight to attract the attention of her prince charming.

Hoberman: The All-Too Affable Ballad of “Bernie”

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Hoberman: The All-Too Affable Ballad of “Bernie”
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One of the most amiable and least predictable of American directors, Austin-based indie Richard Linklater follows his deft period reconstruction “Me and Orson Welles” and animated Philip K. Dick yarn “A Scanner Darkly” with an exercise in regional humor. “Bernie” is a true-life Texas tall-tale about a murderous funeral director and the little town of Carthage that loved him.

The Ballad of Bernie Tiede is also a vehicle for Jack Black (who gave Linklater his career performance nine years ago in “School of Rock”). Introduced dressing and grooming a corpse for an audience of would-be morticians, Bernie is the town goody-goody — he literally puts the best face on death while taking it as his mission to comfort the newly bereaved. Elderly women are his specialty, but he nearly meets his match in the person of Carthage’s richest, meanest widow, and owner of the local bank, Marjorie Nugent.

Played by a poker-faced Shirley MacClaine (who doesn’t bother to feign an East Texas accent), Marjorie instantly rejects Bernie, but ultimately succumbs to his placid persistence. After winning her confidence (and power of attorney), escorting her on vacation trips to European spas and Broadway shows, enduring numerous temper tantrums, and performing all manner of humiliating chores, Bernie finally loses it. It’s practically a country-western ballad. The setting is not quite Bonnie and Clyde country (their Carthage was in Missouri) but close enough. He shoots her four times in the back then conceals her corpse in a freezer for nine months, using her money to the benefit of the town while pretending she’s in a hospital out of state.

Black’s Bernie is a study in bland ambiguity: Christian or con man, straight or gay, gigolo or caretaker, unbelievably sincere or brilliantly duplicitous, hymn-singing hypocrite or scheming Samaritan, Robin Hood or Jack the Ripper? To add to the confusion, Black gets to sing, dance (his “Seventy Six Trombones” is a virtual audition tape) and blubber like a baby. Linklater is less interested in his hero’s psychology than that of the town. Just about everyone hated Marjorie and loved Bernie. His trial has to be moved to a hamlet two counties away because the showboat district attorney Danny Buck Davidson (ripely played by Texas native Matthew McConaughey) knows that despite Bernie’s tearful confession, he’ll never get a conviction — especially since, at least in the movie, one of his most damning lines of questioning concerns the alleged killer’s knowledge of the appropriate wine to serve with fish.

Repetitive but not tiresome, Bernie is shot as a mock documentary — with the action annotated or described by a chorus of gossipy townspeople, many of them played by Bernie’s actual neighbors. This colorful discourse makes for the movie’s richest element. “That old heifer turned down loans just for a hobby,” says one of Marjorie. “They had more tattoos than teeth,” is how another characterizes the jury that heard Bernie’s case. The material brings Linklater near the realm of the Coen brothers; the methodology, as well as the material, takes him even closer to the world of documentarian Errol Morris. Herein lies a paradox. The bilious Coens would typically have treated the Passion of Bernie as a subject for grotesque farce; the habitually facetious Morris could have brought a ruthless defamiliarization to bear on the setting. Linklater’s attitude is none at all. Familiarity breeds no contempt, and consequently, “Bernie” lacks the edge of malice one might reasonably expect from so nasty a tale.

Read more J. Hoberman in Movie Journal

Slideshow: Alistair Carr's designs for Pringle of Scotland

Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones Languish in Trailer for No-Sex Comedy “Hope Springs”

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Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones Languish in Trailer for No-Sex Comedy “Hope Springs”
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It’s easy to see why Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep signed on to “Hope Springs,” even if doesn’t fall into their usual two buckets, as astutely defined by Indiewire — “challenging fare” and “cash-ins.” This is an adult movie, about the kind of clouds that skid across your sunset years; clouds that aren’t always so distant on the horizon, even. It’s a story about marriage as it enters its seemingly inevitable non-sex-having phase. This is both difficult, unhappy territory for a movie, and ocassion for all manner of flick-friendly blue humor. Here, for instance, we see Streep absentmindedly biting into a banana as she ponders a book’s instructions to practice her oral technique on the fruit.

Looking past the clouds, then, the film’s forecast calls for noble life musings with a chance of ribald humor. Wonderful. Except there are some glaring problems. The intelligence-insulting pun implied in the title, for one. Just think of what a porn producer could do with such a labored bit of hand-holding. (“Hope Springs Internal”?) And then there’s Steve Carrell as the sex therapist; can we finally agree that this man’s career has, finally, managed only to reveal him as stiff and awkward, not some master interpreter of the stiff and awkward?

Finally, and most damningly: What is it about this trailer’s insistence that this older couple never learned how to have sex in the first place? They had children, which admittedly doesn’t prove much in real life but in the cinemaverse suggests that they had, if nothing else, a fairly average relationship. Which would mean something more than the odd impregnation. And we’re pretty sure that the filmmakers did not set out to make a movie about a couple that never understood the act. The film’s clearly intended to reach those people concerned about the “spark” going out. And if it can’t appeal to their understanding of sex’s fundamental rewards, then it might as well not bother talking to them about sex at all.

 

New Museum Curator Lauren Cornell and Artist Ryan Trecartin to Curate 2015 Generational Triennial

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New Museum Curator Lauren Cornell and Artist Ryan Trecartin to Curate 2015 Generational Triennial
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Following Eungie Joo’s highly regarded exhibition “The Ungovernables,” which just closed at the New Museum, adjunct curator Lauren Cornell and the frenetic, surreal video artist Ryan Trecartin will curate the museum’s 2015 Generational Triennial, according to a New Museum press release.

Currently the director of new media nonprofit and New Museum resident Rhizome.org, Cornell has previously organized incisive exhibitions and projects for the institution, including 2010's “Free,” which examined how the Internet has changed our information landscape. She also led the development of the annual Seven on Seven conference series, which pairs technological innovators with visual artists for collaborative projects, as well as organized performances, lectures, and other events at the museum through the monthly "New Silent" series. 

Considering Cornell’s background and the choice of Trecartin as a curatorial partner, it’s likely that the 2015 triennial will take on a new media bent. “Cornell and Trecartin came into their own in this millennium and are deeply in touch with how the world is changing and how artists of their generation are responding,” New Museum director Lisa Philips said in the press release. The 2015 triennial will be Trecartin’s first curatorial effort.

With the announcement comes a career change for Cornell. After seven years at Rhizome, she will step down as its director and continue to develop digital projects for the New Museum and organize public programming, as well as serve as a new core faculty member at Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, where she has previously taught classes. The search for a new Rhizome director is underway, and Cornell will remain until a replacement is found. 

"We’re Living in a Better World Than It’s Ever Been": Gilbert & George on Their Lurid "London Pictures"

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"We’re Living in a Better World Than It’s Ever Been": Gilbert & George on Their Lurid "London Pictures"

From singing in matching tweed suits to pictures of their own bodily fluids, the living sculptures known as Gilbert & George continue to leave behind unforgettable remnants of their life as art. The two have engaged in a highly committed practice since 1967, making no distinction between their day-to-day activities and art making. However, as Gilbert aptly pointed during our conversation, actually living their day-to-day lives in an art gallery would be impossible — and so began the birth of their ongoing “Pictures” projects. The most recent series, the “London Pictures,” are monstrous, both in subject matter and size, bombarding the viewer with violence wrenched from the promotional posters of London’s streets.

While the show is not traveling, the complete work from the series is being divvied up and shown in shows at White Cube (London & Hong Kong), both Lehmann Maupin Gallery locations (New York), Sonnabend Gallery (New York), Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (Paris and Salzburg), Galleria Alfonso Artiaco (Naples), Baronian Francey (Brussels), and the Bernier/Eliades Gallery (Athens) through November. They had all three New York openings last night. It seems fitting that they embark on a full-scale media campaign to promote this show about media hype.

The two maintained their usual demeanor of English gentleman — even so kind as to explain the nuances of the phrase “sex beast” — during ARTINFO’s recent interview with them. Here is what the famous duo had to say about London posters, life in a better world, and continuing to be Gilbert & George.

What do your “London Pictures” say about contemporary London? What did you learn by bringing together and tracking all these headlines?

George: Oh, so much — so many different things. First of all they’re not headlines, they’re actually posters from outside of the newsstands. We think they show the modern Western world: London, Paris, New York, or you could say North America, Europe, and Australia. It doesn’t really reflect Latin America, China, and Russia. We think that the works are not only there to show the modern life, but also to change it. Maybe the people that see the pictures will be a little bit different.

Gilbert: We are showing London in an amazing way. Everybody’s showing something, no? But we were able to show something, a townscape that is true. It’s not invented. Not one word is invented by us.

George: It’s not exaggerated.

You developed an elaborate system for categorizing and presenting these headlines. What’s the point of arranging the subject matter this way?

Gilbert: I mean we had to find a way to make a system. First we had to get all these posters together. It took us six years, roughly three a day. So then it was around Christmas time that we decided to divide them up into subjects.

George: Without thinking, we just piled up all the ones that had murder, all the ones that had horror, children, woman, man, and child.

Gilbert: They decided the size of the picture.

George: So the biggest subjects were murder, sex, and religion. Nothing to do with us, that is what the piles do. Those are probably the three biggest subjects.

Gilbert: For “Shooting” we only had three, so we were able to make a piece.

George: We always leave one empty for the title. For “Sex Beast” there were five, so we could do a six-part one. So in a way, it was partly automatic. The posters are black and white, that’s not because of us. Red is very good for highlighting, like a traffic signal. And the only other thing that ran through all of the posters was the human presence. So we added flesh.

Did you curate the posters, or take any out?

George: As near as possible, without interference. Only if we got four with the word shootings — we only need three for a four-part work. Four is not enough for the next size picture, so we would find which one of those three has another word that can transfer to a different picture. Sometimes, that was quite complicated. But we used every single poster. In the end we had accrued too many that we couldn’t use and so we did one called…

Gilbert & George (in unison): “Family Straight,” and “London Crime,” and they’re a mixture.

Gilbert: We had two special ones.

George: Exceptions, because we think whenever you have a rule, you need an exception to show that up.

These headlines are very dark, in terms of subject matter. Did you specifically pick out negative headlines, or is this just a picture of London tabloid culture?

George: No, that’s how it is. But they’re not tabloids strangely. The Sun, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Star are the famous tabloids. They’re the lower class, violent, sexually aggressive newspapers. They don’t do posters. These are posters from the historic London evening newspapers, the Evening Standard, very famous, one of the first London city evening newspapers, and from two local papers, again very respectable, the North London newspaper and the Hackney Gazette. So strange that they’re not, but if the tabloids did do posters they would be more sensationalized. These are very plain spoken.

Gilbert: After all, it is the tragedy of life.

George: We’re just lucky it hasn’t happened to us.

Gilbert: Most of life is complicated, not easy, and happening with tragedy — trying to sort it out.

George: The most chilling and best book of Charles Dickens is the least read one, but its called “Hard Times” — extraordinary.

Are these hard times?

Gilbert: No!

George: No! We think we’re living in a better world than it’s ever been. We think we’re all so privileged. And we like to remind ourselves, and our younger friends how privileged they are.

I was really struck by the scale of the “Pictures.” What does monumentalizing them in this way bring to the concept of the work?

Gilbert: These are not the biggest ones. There are much bigger in London! For us we want the picture to look down, to speak, and to look into the human person. Normally we go to a museum to look into a picture, and here the picture looks at you.

While walking through the gallery, the sensation I felt most strongly was that of being overwhelmed by the pieces. 

Gilbert: Overwhelming them. That’s how it works, we always want to do that.

George: It’s subversion in a way

Gilbert: We always want to do a very big picture because we always feel if we are not able to get that viewer in the first second we are losing them.

You’re on kind of a world tour, presenting the “London Pictures” in Hong Kong, now New York, and Paris. Since they are specifically about London, do people respond to them differently in different places?

Gilbert: It’s nerve-wracking in some way. Not every collector would want a piece called “Shout Out” on the wall, and so they have to identify in some way, they have to be proud or they have to be confronting the viewer themselves with pictures like that.

George: Some people like to be challenged. That’s why you go and buy maybe a different book to read. We don’t always want what’s the nicest thing in the world, all the time. Young people love to be challenged. We had posters in London printed, which we sold in the gallery for 10 or 20 pounds — they all love to buy a poster to annoy their parents, right? And the most distinctive one, people would say, was the picture of Islam, and that’s the one they all bought. People stopped and said “I got Islam!”

Gilbert: We sold so many posters in London that it shocked us totally. Because we made, well, we always did posters but not in New York because we felt we couldn’t sell them. There was no tradition. But in London there was a kind of tradition, so we did seven different ones, and in four weeks we nearly sold four or five thousand. It’s amazing!

Why wouldn’t you do the posters here in NY?

George: Well there’s no tradition, but maybe we should try it next time.

Gilbert: England has become this place now where ordinary people go to shows. It didn’t used to be like that. Now all the galleries, we had nearly, I think in two week, 15,000 people come to a private gallery. And that’s massive.

George: It’s huge.

Gilbert: And that’s new in England. It was never like that. It’s all new the idea that ordinary people would go to shows. It used to be very limited. New York in some ways, in the '80s, they had a lot of people through the galleries. But now we feel, I don’t know — I don’t know how many people they have here.

How has your continued existence as living sculptures (the day-to-day actions) contributed to the creation of a graphic series like this?

George: These pictures probably more than any others we made, we lived. We had to go and steal that poster. Put it in our pocket, even if it was raining, even if it was snowing. We still had to rescue these posters everyday. And seeing the studio filled with piles of nightmarish subjects, and then making the work, all of the posters came all the way through us. We were thinking about these people, grownups, kids, pensioners, people who are mauled by dogs — it came through us in an extraordinary way.

Gilbert: But you know, the Living Sculpture, that’s very interesting, because when we discovered the whole idea that we were the actual artwork that has feeling, meaning, understanding, happiness, unhappiness, even now, we always say we are leaving something behind, on the wall. We cannot just be in the gallery non-stop. It’s our vision of the world, our love letters. So in the beginning we started to leave these big drawings behind. These big artworks based on subjects like young people, or drunkenness, or shit, it's like a kind of preacher talking about what he feels like being alive. That’s what we feel it means to be a living sculpture: Talking about what you feel like being alive.

Gilbert: And even here you have our spirit, the sense of where we live — it’s on every picture. The ghost of us behind the text.

George: Not every artist wants to do a picture of a sex beast, but we want to.

Gilbert: It is like writing a novel in some ways. You are the protagonist talking to you.

What are you working on next?

George: It’s a big secret. We know and we don’t know.

Gilbert: At the moment we are just trying to sell this show to the public.

George: Even when we’re not, we’re not ever not creating. It’s always there.

Gilbert: It’s the total idea. Invitations, installations, postcards, they’re all done by us. It’s not done by a group, we don’t have of assistants. We have one boy — one person helping us.

Did they ever collect any posters for you?

Gilbert: No, that would be art! All that has to do with art we are doing.

George: There was one exception. A person sent us a poster.

Was it meant as a suggestion for a piece?

George: It was strange, they just sent it. And we thought well we said we would never use one that somebody else chose, so we thought if that’s the rule we should have an exception. So we did put that one in as well.

Do you remember what it said, and which piece it ended up in?

George: Yes, it’s extraordinary. It was “Gun Found in Man’s Bum.”

To see a selection from the "London Pictures" click the slide show

 

Slideshow: Bill Cunningham's Hats

Slideshow: See buildings that never were, from "unMade in China"

Slideshow: Dior & Interview Magazine Celebrate The Dior Homme Soho Pop-Up Store

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda: "unMade in China" Examines the Cutting-Edge Architecture That Never Was

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Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda: "unMade in China" Examines the Cutting-Edge Architecture That Never Was
English

WHAT: "unMade in China: Undone Architecture in P.R.C."

WHEN: Through June 20, Monday-Saturday 10am- 5pm

WHERE: ide@s Gallery, 25 Jianguo Middle Road, Shanghai, China 200025

WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: With the explosion of architectural development China has experienced in recent decades — Rem Koolhaas's CCTV Tower, Herzog & de Meuron's National Stadium in Beijing, and Norman Foster's Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport, for example — it's interesting to hear of an exhibition about buildings that aren't there. That's the focus of "Unmade in China," a show of the most awe-inspiring structures of the last ten years that never were, the proposed designs that misfired, or simply never took off.

Through sketches, models, and renderings, viewers glimpse the unrealized Long Tan Park, a Liuzhou project started in 2004 by architects MVRDV (the architects behind the unfortunate Cloud-9/11 controversy in Seoul), then abandoned in 2006. The Dutch practice proposed a "vertical village" embedded into a limestone mine of the Karst mountain range, made in part from the actual surrounding rocks, with each box-like concrete housing unit a little pixel in the picturesque landscape. In a two-birds-with-one-stone swoop of sustainability, the project would have both provided housing for the region's rapidly growing middle class and stopped the erosion of the steeply cut mountainside.

There's also amphibianArc's Shenguotou Plaza Renovation, started and stopped in 2010. It was intended to turn an outdated, poorly planned shopping facility into a glowing space for public art, with better pedestrian traffic, and refurbished building façades — as well as a Sam's Club outfitted with an artificial 65-foot-tall tree, the tensile membrane and curvilinear steel branches of which would provide shoppers with both shade and a little panache. Also on view: the woven swaths of metal that make up UNStudio's Dalian Football Stadium, and the electrifying glow of Spark's Shanghai Kiss towers, neither of which we'll ever get to experience in real life.

Taking a tour down roads never traveled, "Unmade" examines what could have been, but what's missing from the exhibition is the answer to the obvious question: Why? While myriad obstacles stand in the way of a building's development, this is the type of show that could give creators an impetus to pick back up where they left off. While the works remain unmade, they're hardly unrealistic.

Hats Off to Bill Cunningham: The Lovable Photographer's Millinery Creations Snapped Up for $20,000 at Auction

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Hats Off to Bill Cunningham: The Lovable Photographer's Millinery Creations Snapped Up for $20,000 at Auction
English

If you’ve seen “Bill Cunningham New York,” and let’s assume you have, you know that before the legendary New York Times fashion photographer was hunting down looks on the street and the runway, he was laboring over his first love, millinery.

Bill Cunningham’s hats weren’t exactly career making, though. He had to go by the name William J, to protect his conservative family. And these weren’t your average hat designs, either. They often took the form of birds, plants, flower bouquets, and other unusual objects.

“I don’t think we sold many,” he told the New York Times last year. “Everything I did was a little too exotic — you know, for normal people.”

However, there’s at least one person who’s quite taken with the hats. Yesterday, a single buyer scooped up all 23 William J pieces on auction at 1stdibs.com to the tune of $20,000. The whole event was over in 10 minutes, breaking the record for quickest sale on the site.

The identity of the buyer hasn’t been revealed, but WWD claims that she’s an “arts patron and friend of the cycling street-style photographer.” What we do know is that this buyer is looking out for all of us: the entire collection will be donated to a museum in Cunningham’s name. Which museum that might be has not yet been made public, but there’s a good chance it will be in New York, where Cunningham has lived and worked his whole life.

How did the long-lost artifacts of Cunningham’s past life resurface? Alison Shacter, a friend of the photographer’s, acquired them from her aunt, Milly, who had 23 Cunningham hats from the 1940s and ’50s among her hoarded belongings. When Shacter found them, she passed them along to Katy Kane, a vintage dealer based out of New Hope, Pennsylvania, who then arranged for the pieces to hit the online auction block.  

The sale capped what has to be an exceptional week for Cunningham. On Monday he was awarded the Carnegie Hall Medal of Excellence, and accepted it during a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria. Although he was guest of honor, Cunningham still toted around his camera, taking it out whenever a pretty dress caught his eye.

Let’s hope the hats find a home soon, so everyone can become acquainted with Bill Cunningham, the milliner.

Click on the slide show to see images of Bill Cunningham’s hats. 

by Nate Freeman,Fashion,Fashion
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