Park Ave. Armory

Massive Attack V Adam Curtis

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I’m at that age where concerts don’t impress me much, having seen everyone I have wanted to see a few times over. But when by chance I saw a Facebook post about Massive Attack, whom I have never seen play, I bought a ticket right away. I did not realize that it’s not a straightforward concert. What I witnessed was something infinitely better. Massive Attack has teamed up with the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis to create a performance that will undoubtedly be etched in the minds of those who witnessed it for years to come. It was a combination of film and music, not exactly a documentary and not exactly a concert, but flawlessly executed fusion of image and sound.

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Holy Bible

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“…and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.” Genesis {7:4}

History of human conflict is a history of religious conflict. Pick up any history textbook and you will be benumbed by death and atrocities that humans have inflicted (and continue to inflict) on each other in the name of religion.

Holy Bible, by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (MACK, $80) literally fuses the histories of violence and religion together. The tome itself is a direct copy of the King James bible. Its text, however, is carefully overlayed with images from The Archive of Modern Conflict, an entity that collects photos whose subject is self-explanatory and that purposefully shrouds itself in mystery.

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SUB ROSA

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The Bleeker Street Arts Club is a relatively new gallery tucked on the upper floors of a landmarked art deco West Village building.  The space is well-appointed and well-lit and showing, for a few days longer, a group show titled Sub Rosa that includes collaborative and solo photographs by Los Angeles based Nicholas Alan Cope and Dustin Edward Arnold. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Cope/Arnold on their long running collaborative projects and a chance to catch up with Cope at the opening for this show.  The full profile will appear in volume five of our print magazine.

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Mario Sorrenti: Draw Blood For Proof

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The minutia of life can be a waste of time or the most fascinating thing about it. The writer Saul Bellow once said that he finds a good footnote more interesting than the text itself. And if you know whom to follow on Instagram you can spare yourself from selfies and food pictures and behold some captivating ephemera instead. One cannot always be grandiose – it’s tiring.

The new Steidldangin book on the photographer Mario Sorrenti is just the kind of thing if you are in the minutia camp. He’s done enough grandiosity – Calvin Klein campaigns, photos in every imaginable fashion magazine, and so on. But this volume is dedicated to something entirely different – a series of scraps of Sorrenti’s life rendered in visual form.

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A Few Words With: Gerhard Steidl

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One quiet morning in New York I met with the legendary German publisher Gerhard Steidl in the lobby of the Mercer Hotel in SoHo. Steidl is the last of the Mohicans in the world of print – a fiercely independent publisher who has maintained complete control and ownership of his house for over forty years. His art and photo books with the likes of Robert Frank and Bruce Davidson are revered as the best in the business. He also publishes literature in German, including books by the Nobel prize winners Günter Grass and Halldór Laxness.

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Francis Cape – We Sit Together: Utopian Benches from the Shakers to the Separatists of Zoar

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The sculptor Francis Cape begins the introduction to his book We Sit Together thus, “Twenty Benches are gathered in the middle of a room. Each is built from poplar and finished in the same rubbed linseed oil. No two are the same. This is the sculpture Utopian Benches. I made the sculpture as a way of thinking – and talking – about communalism as both a historic and a contemporary alternative to [capitalist-driven] individualism.”

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Boris Bidjan Saberi Book – II

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When Saberi approached me to write an essay for his monograph last year, I felt not only honored but also enthusiastic.

There is nothing like writing that gives me an opportunity to systematize and define what I think about someone’s work. This is no mean task since often what we like about creative work is ineffable.

The book is now out on the roster of the Italian publisher Atlante and is edited by Fabriano Fabbri, professor of art history at University of Bologna who has lately been delving into fashion design.

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Takuma Nakahira: Circulation: Date, Place, Events

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The 80 or so medium-sized, B&W photographs up at Yossi Milo Gallery by Provoke founder Takuma Nakahira in his first solo US show may initially read as street photography but what “Circulation: Date, Place, Events” really amounts to is an exercise in intellectual honesty, and a brutal one at that.

The prints on view were selected from negatives created by Nakahira during the Seventh Paris Biennale held in the autumn of 1971. When Nakahira was invited to participate he was in an intellectual rut after the publication of his classic photo book “For a Language to Come” (a rut documented with Daido Moriyama in his 1972 classic, “Farewell Photography”). As he describes it in “Photography, a Single Day’s Actuality,” one of his essays reprinted in the book “Circulation: Date, Place, Events”