Long overdue

Michael Clark by Michael Bracewell and Suzanne Cotter

Violette Editions 7th June, 2010


Notorious for his continually subversive takes on classical dance, Michael Clark is without doubt one of the most important dancers and choreographers of our time. He has created some of contemporary dances finest productions, often using leftfield rock music (most famously in his fantastic collaboration with The Fall, I Am Kurious, Oranj). Situated at the heart of the British post-punk art scene, Clark is much admired for his judicious choice of collaborators, such as designers Bodymap and Hussein Chalayan, artists Cerith Wyn Evans, Leigh Bowery, Charles Atlas and Sarah Lucas, film director Peter Greenaway (Clark played Caliban in Prosperos Books) and bands The Fall, Laibach and Wire. This monograph, the first on this major artist, celebrates the whole of Michael Clark's career to date, from the late 1970s to the present. Rich in visual and archival material, it contains new essays on Clark's work, reprints of key texts and journalism, photography by Nick Knight, David LaChappelle and others, plus interviews with many of Clark's collaborators from the worlds of dance, art, fashion and music. A protege of Richard Alston and Karol Armitage, Michael Clark set up his own dance company in 1984, at the age of 22. He immediately won the admiration of Rudolf Nureyev, who commissioned ballets from Clark for the repertoire at the Paris Opera. Clark has also been the subject of numerous films and documentaries, including the fictional biography Hail the New Puritans by Charles Atlas and The Late Michael Clark, directed by Sophie Fiennes. Michael Clark's new ballet opens in June at the Biennale in Venice, and travels to Edinburgh, Stockholm, Paris and, in late October, to the Barbican in London.










Michael Clark in collaboration with Leigh Bowery


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Something for the weekend

Bouquet de mimosas




Works by the French naïve painter Séraphine Louis (1864-1942), known as Séraphine de Senlis, set to Brian Eno and Harold Budd's Lost in the Humming Air.




Fleurs





Séraphine (2008)

Once lost, now found

Pink Flowers, Water Colors, (Jay Garvin) by James Bidgood


Necessity was the mother of invention for Bidgood, who created elaborate photographic tableaux in his small midtown Manhattan studio apartment. His first erotic series was an underwater epic called Water Colors, made in the early 1960s, in which he used a dancer from Club 82 named Jay Garvin as his subject. The underwater atmosphere is completely fabricated; the bottom of the ocean was created with silver lame spread across the floor of Bidgood's apartment; he made the arch of a cave out of waxed paper, and fashioned red lame into the shape of a lobster. He coated Garvin with mineral oil and pasted glitter and sequins to his skin so the silver fabric under photographic lights would reflect on his body like water. For weeks at a time, Bigood would eat and sleep within the sets he constructed in his apartment. - Off to Camp: The Photographs of James Bidgood, Aperture





James Bidgood by Bruce Benderson


James Bidgood is represented by CLAMPART


Now playing: Etta James - At Last

Muse

She enjoyed the attentions of painter Gustav Klimt, composer Alexander Zemlinsky and painter Oskar Kokoschka. But she married composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius and writer Franz Werfel. Some she inspired and some she tortured. She being, Alma Maria Mahler-Werfel (née Schindler), the most beautiful girl in Vienna.





Danae by Gustav Klimt.





Double portrait (Kokoschka and Alma Mahler), 1912-13
Museum Folkwang, Essen




Alma Mahler, 1912
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo




Bride of the Wind, Kokoschka's self-portrait expressing his unrequited love




Two Nudes (Lovers), 1913
Self-portrait of Kokoschka with Alma Mahler


Kokoschka and Alma Mahler: Testimony to a Passionate Relationship




The polydrama Alma by writer Joshua Sobol and director Paulus Manker.



My Life, My Loves: Memoirs of Alma Mahler, out of print

Diaries 1898-1902 by Alma Mahler-Werfel

Worlds end

Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010)

Return of the Ankh

Ancient Egyptian symbol of eternal life




Erykah Badu performing Window Seat, from her new album New Amerykah Part II: Return Of The Ankh, on The Wendy Williams Show and on Jimmy Fallon with a fuller rendition.




\
Famous ankh wearer Jacqueline Susann

Something for the weekend

Chumlum, 1963-64 by Ron Rice
© Light Cone


Invocations and Evocations: Queer and Surreal

Friday 26 March – Monday 29 March 2010

Featuring the first public screening of Derek Jarman’s long lost and recently rediscovered first film, Electric Fairy (1971), this special series at Tate Modern will provide a form of invocation where the tangled threads of surrealism and queer experimental cinema, exemplified by Jarman, Kenneth Anger, Joseph Cornell, George Kuchar, Marie Menken and many others, will be reflected from the projector’s blinding beam.
Surrealism began as a brotherhood experimenting with trance states, games of chance and research into the world of the marvellous. One of their games was the act of invocation – calling forth forgotten or buried figures: famous or notorious. Although the surrealists’ social politics initially included a virulent strain of homophobia, the thread woven by André Breton and his peers can be followed into the labyrinth of queer practice throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
Curated by James Boaden, Stuart Comer, Ed Halter, Jonathan Katz and Juan A. Suárez.


Two of the films included in the programme available on DVD:






Avery Danziger's Edward James: Builder of Dreams (1995)










James Bidgood's (a fact not widely known until the mid-90s) cult classic Pink Narcissus (1971)


Marvellous.


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Opening a new window everyday

One such window is the newly created Corbu's Cave, also known as The Painted Wall: From Cave Painting to Le Corbusier and Beyond, by the very talented Mr. Scott Waterman.


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Aide-memoire

La mémoire du rhinocéros, 1980 by François-Xavier Lalanne



Life is all memory. - Flora Sissy Goforth


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Little girl blue

Princess Noire
The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone
By Nadine Cohodas


From Books of The New York Times
Under a Strange, Soulful Spell by Dwight Garner

Flora

By South African artist Maggie Oliver.


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Le japonais

Self portrait, Paul Jacoulet


Paul Jacoulet (1896-1960) the French born artist best known for his Japanese woodblock portraits. Following in the tradition of ukiyo-e printmaking, Jacoulet was able to reproduce, and transform, his delicate line drawings and watercolours.




Trois Coreen, Seoul, Coree



Le Bonze Errant, Coree




La Mariee, Seoul, Coree



Le Marie, Seoul, Coree




Le Tabouret de Porcelaine, Mandochoukuo



Les Paradisiers, Mendo, Celebes





Ryuichi Sakamoto - Forbidden Colours

Something for the weekend

Die Mommie Die! (2003)

Written by and starring Charles Busch as Angela Arden. Angela is an unhappily married cabaret singer trying to make a comeback. And she is not going to let anyone stand in her way.

Angela Arden: I hate this house! I hate these walls... I hate that sofa! The only part of this dump that doesn't make me puke is that door - because that's the way I'm gettin' out!





You've slipped into my life as easily as vermouth into a glass of gin... quickly and just a bit too smooth.


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American master

Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield


The work of Charles Burchfield is most decidedly founded, not on art, but on life, and the life that he knows and loves best. - Edward Hopper



An April Mood
1946-1955



Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring)
1950



Sun and Rocks
1918-50



The Insect Chorus
1917



Two Ravines
1934-1943




Curator Robert Gober discusses Hammer exhibition Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield
Run Time: 9 min. 44 sec.



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Treasure

Covent Garden, 1983


Miss Shirley Verrett

Last of the French New Wave

Le Rayon vert, the 1986 film by Éric Rohmer


Ah, for the days - that set our hearts ablaze


Éric Rohmer (1920-2010)

Love will come

Sade's new album Soldier of Love due for release Febuary 8, 2010.


Pre-order available here and here.

Provenance

Copper vessels once the property of the late Ingmar Bergman, whose estate was auctioned by Bukowskis in September.




Ingmar Bergman photographed by Irving Penn, 1964



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The curious made extraordinary

All Visual Arts presents The Age of the Marvellous

Inspired by the Wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities, popular in the late Renaissance through the Baroque period (ca. 1550–ca. 1700). An era characterized by a revival of learning, the sum of all of man’s knowledge could be represented in rooms filled with natural wonders, artificial exotica and relics or art works concerned with the supernatural.

The Wunderkammer‘s particular ability to evoke the marvellous, to incite the emotions of awe, wonder, surprise and astonishment leading to curiosity and then learning was based on its ability to draw parallels and unify seemingly unrelated fields of human knowledge like Science and Art. The brilliant evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson considered the unification of knowledge – or what he labeled ‘Consilience’ in his eponymous book published in 1998 - nothing short of imperative for the survival of the human species.



Adam Fuss’s photograms
Alastair Mackie's Metamorphoses




Polly Morgan's At the Beginning, inspired by a Victorian proposal for a flying machine.




Kate MccGwire's sculptural works made from crow and jackdaw feathers.



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Fash. Ed. Supreme.

That was how Joanna Lumley's fashion editor character, Patsy Stone, in Absolutely Fabulous described her idol Grace Coddington.


Vogue's Grace Coddington
More from Style.com





With the release of The September Issue Coddington finds a new audience and confirms what those of a certain age already knew - she is genius.





Her 2002 opus Grace: Thirty Years of Fashion at Vogue



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