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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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

1979

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Now playing: David Bowie - Fashion

Worlds end

Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010)

Lost and found

Recently reissued, La Lampe Gras makes its Australian debut at this month's designEx.

Originally created in 1921 by French engineer Bernard-Albin Gras. Production ceased at the outbreak of World War II.



Found via World Interior Design Network's blog.


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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)

Random bits of fabulous

Taken from the November issue of The World of Interiors.



The courtyard of Cranbrook's Saarinen House photographed by Richard Powers.




A covered patio in Tangier photographed by Roland Beaufre.



Recently, I read somewhere (and it wasn't over the rainbow) that there are people who actually believe that designers create a WOI look just to be published in those hallowed pages.

Mind boggling.



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Tryon, North Carolina

If known for nothing else, it should be known for being the birthplace of one Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003). Who was better known as Nina Simone.









Screen shots from the documentary Nina Simone: The Legend; the last being of the house she grew up in.




Nina Simone performing Four Women at the Antibes Jazz Festival, 1965.

The clouds are so low

Jean Dupas (1882-1964)
The History of Navigation Mural, 1934
Made for the SS Normandie
Verre eglomise panels manufactured by Charles Champigneulle






The Metropolitan Museum of Art










Jean Dupas (1882-1964) and Jean Dunand (1877-1942)
Chariot of Aurora, 1935
Gold leaf and lacquer on plaster




Carnegie Museum



Jean Théodore Dupas (1882-1964)




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Now playing: Rod McKuen - Jean
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The real House of Beauty & Culture

Originally the collaboration between shoe designer John Moore, fashion designer Christopher Nemeth and jewellery designer Judy Blame. Like gods, they fashioned their world, both collectively and respectively, in their own image.




A House of Beauty & Culture cropped white denim jacket, 1980s, the back inset with knitted panel Casa Vaselina together with a bracelet made from slivers of antler, by Judy Blame, with a pair of high-waisted black Demob trousers.



John Moore, London 1981






Legendary stylist and designer Judy Blame.




Detail of the sculpted style of Christopher Nemeth, who has long since decamped for life in Tokyo.


There is a lot of peer pressure today, that didn't exist before. There weren't any reality tv fashion shows back in 1981, to tell you what was cool. Popular opinion/taste is tyrannical. There is so much pressure to be cool today. Ultimately it is a marketing conspiracy . They are selling cool. It sells. And, there isn't anything necessarily wrong with it. Just acknowledge what it is though, and acknowledge there is a difference. What is today mostly isn't art though, it is fashion. There's a difference between what John Moore and people of his generation were doing back then, that really doesn't exist anymore. - from John More Defined a Generation by Joel Nikolaou



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The name is Baas

Maarten Bass

Clay Furniture

Introduced at Salone del Mobile, Milan, 2006.

Made of a synthetic Clay on a metal skeleton. Each piece is modelled by hand. As no moulds are used in the production, each piece is unique. Available in eight standard colours: black, white, brown, red, yellow, blue, orange and green.


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Mother necessity

Judd Foundation


I rented a small house on the edge of the town. The house was quartered into eleven by eleven foot rooms. There was no furniture and none to be bought, either old, since the town had not shrunk or changed much since its beginning in 1886, or new, since the few stores sold only fake antiques or tubular kitchen furniture with plastic surfaces printed with inane geometric patterns of flowers...I designed a bed... so that the lumberyard could cut the few different lengths to size and I could nail them together in place. I liked the bed a great deal, and in fact the whole house, for which I made other furniture. - Donald Judd (1928-1994)



Corner chair



Bookshelf



Single bed



Desk



Chair


I’m very touchy about it being considered art. To me the chairs and benches are perfectly comfortable, not hard and uncomfortable as people sometimes seem to think they are. I have nineteenth-century wooden chairs from Sweden and I’ve sat on them for years. I think the thing to do is to either sit up or lie down or stand up: I’m not sympathetic to in-between positions. - Donald Judd




In Donald Judd's last interview he discusses his unique aesthetic, his dislike of contemporary architecture, and his passionate quest for the perfect exhibition setting for his large works of art.




Donald Judd furniture is available from Artware Editions and London's Louisa Guinness Gallery; with each supplying different pieces from his catalogue of designs.

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The opposite of hate

Love.















The house of Chrisian Astuguevieille as it appeared in Maison Francaise. Highly individual and impossible to mindlessly imitate.


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Lyric of the modern

Easy Chair, c. 1935
Made by Fritz Henningsen. Leather and stained oak



Chair, c. 1935
Made by Fritz Henningsen. Leather and mahogany



Sofa, c. 1930
Made by Fritz Henningsen. Leather and mahogany

Fritz Henningsen
1902-1971

While quite possibly the least famous of the internationally recognised Scandinavian designers, Fritz Henningsen may very well be the most coveted.


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A surrealist by default

Leonor Fini (1908-1996)

Leonor was like no other woman, like no other human, or other species for that matter. Hers was a natural allure and distinguished bearing. Then too, she was intelligent in ways that only she could be - Arlette Souhami, Galerie Minsky




Douceur, 1960
Watercolour on paper



L'Infante, 1978
India ink, lavis and gouache




Hélène, 1985-86
Watercolour, India ink, and lavis on paper




From Portrait of an Artist: Leonor Fini by Chris Vermorcken, 1987



A woman should live with two men; one more a lover and the other more a friend - Leonor Fini



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Let's be frank

Three lamp designs by Jean-Michel Frank.


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