My first brush with the sculptures of Richard Nonas was actually a missed opportunity. James Fuentes mounted a solo exhibition of new and old work in the spring of 2013 but unfortunately by the time I became aware of it all I got to see was images after the fact on the web.
Some time ago in Paris at a men’s show of the cult Japanese label Julius I found myself sitting next to the singer Usher. As I was chatting with his companion, Grace, I could not help but wonder what Usher was doing in a dark, cavernous space, looking at the goth aesthetic of black leathers and drapey wools that Tatsuro Horikawa, Julius’s designer, sent down the runway. And, I also wondered, where are the rockers?
In the age of Instagram, where minutiae of life is incessantly documented, Josef Sudek’s new book, Labyrinths (Torst, $60), seems oddly prescient. Here is the minutiae documented so artfully that the subject matter is seen at a remove. Meaning, you are first mesmerized by the masterful sepia of the photos before you realize that you are essentially looking at little piles of trash, scraps of paper, leftover food, unspooled string, and so on.
“Fuck You Heros” – now there is a title for a book. A title for a photo book, to be precise, by Glen E. Friedman, a photographer who first got into a cop’s face to protest his arrest as unconstitutional at the age of 12, had his first photo published in SkateBoarder magazine at the age of 14, immortalized the skating scene around Dogtown in Los Angeles, discovered and produced the punk band Suicidal Tendencies, and photographed the Los Angeles hardcore and punk scene and the New York hip-hop scene, among other subjects, with equal zest. A title of a book that Friedman, in a meta-fuck-you gesture to the world, produced and printed himself because no major publisher would touch it in the 90s.
If in Paris you would be well served to stop by the new outpost of Taka Ishii Gallery Photo where a solo exhibition of vintage prints by Keiichi Tahara recently opened. Tahara, now in his 60s, learned photography from his grandfather in his early teens and has pursued an exploration of light as material – in photographs, installations and light sculptures – tenaciously since. The show at Taka Ishii Gallery presents works from two photographic series, Fenêtre (1973-1984) and Éclats (1979-1983), both of which Tahara completed early in his career shortly after moving to Paris.
Yesterday we co-hosted the New York launch of a special collaboration between the Dutch designer Iris van Herpen and Dom Perignon, for whom van Herpen designed a bottle. The theme for this collaboration is METAMORPHOSIS, as a Dom Perignon agent told us, and van Herpen, whose work has a distinct otherworldly bent, seemed like a perfect candidate.
This season the Russian-born designer Alexandre Plokhov is releasing a limited edition t-shirt with the band Cold Cave as part of his Fall/Winter 2014 collection. We like the idea of a band t-shirt without it being a band t-shirt, something abstract and elegant. Both creators, Wesley Eisold of Cold Cave and Alexandre Plokhov, admired each other’s work before they met, and this collaboration almost seems like it was meant to be.
It is a happy thing that in the Morgan Library & Museum, in the heart of Manhattan, you can have the place – and the art — so to yourself as to actually hear your footfalls on the gallery floors. For a small museum begun as the personal library of financier Pierpont Morgan and principally dedicated to drawings, manuscripts and books, the Morgan punches well above its weight class and in that respect it deserves to be thronged but lucky for us it isn’t.
After spending the year 1959 taking pictures of a Brooklyn youth gang has taken an emotional toll, the American photographer Bruce Davidson was looking for a change of scenery. He got this, literally, when Magnum, his photo agency, sent him to Great Britain to photograph the country’s everyday life. The photographer spent several months roaming the streets of London and the English and Scottish countryside. The photos were originally published in Queen magazine. They first appeared in book form, titled England/Scotland 1960, in 2005. Now, Steidl Verlag printed its second edition, in an expanded, larger format.
Despite the ongoing political and social difficulties in Russia, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is hosting the tenth iteration of Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, which runs from June 28 through October 3, 2014.
Parallel to the main program, the city is dotted with carefully selected gallery exhibitions that aim to further broaden the public view of current artistic activity in St. Petersburg, a city long considered to be the cultural capital of Russia.