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


Now playing: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - More News From Nowhere

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

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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Now playing: Peter Murphy - Indigo Eyes
via FoxyTunes

Something for the weekend

Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto comes tearing out of the gate like a pink poodle on speed. Rattling through chapters from Patrick McCabe's novel - all 36 of them, individually captioned - it relates the picaresque adventures of a young Irish transvestite called Kitten (Cillian Murphy), taking us from his rural Irish childhood, dumped on the doorstep of the parish priest (Liam Neeson), to his quest for his mother (Eva Birthistle) between bombings and cabaret shows in glam 1970s London. - Tim Robey





I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about. - Oscar Wilde


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Now playing: Dusty Springfield - The Windmills of Your Mind
via FoxyTunes

Le Nouvel An Chinois

Mussels in Black Bean Sauce

Chinese Broccoli with Oyster Sauce


Both served with steamed rice. Everything else, from the duck (which symbolises fidelity) to the Char siu, is ordered from a restaurant.



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Now playing: Queen Latifah - Come Into My House
via FoxyTunes

Manfred, lord of the castle

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well. So said Horace Walpole, the 18th century English art historian, author, politician and, not least of all, arbiter of taste. Today he is most remembered for his Gothic revival villa, Strawberry Hill.


Strawberry Hill




The Long Gallery




Strawberry Hill
By Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi




Walpole also said, Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.


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Now playing: Barenaked Ladies - What a Good Boy
via FoxyTunes

One congratulates the groom...

and wishes the bride good luck. The bride in this instance is Emily Evans Eerdmans. And my gift to the couple would be a pair of Black-necked Swans.



Saint-Saens - Le Cygne

Sounds like...

Splendour and Squalor: The Decline and Fall of Three Aristocratic Dynasties


From stunning stately homes to the prisons of wartime Britain; from the House of Lords to Edwardian asylums; from the Ritz and the Dorchester to East End pubs, "Splendour and Squalor" tells the stories of four of Britain's most illustrious aristocratic dynasties and of the black sheep who brought them down. They kept monkeys in West End hotels, and rent-boys in Deauville and Kensington. They spiced up life in pre-war Britain by patronizing illegal gaming clubs and staging elaborate five-in-a-bed sex in stately homes. They used firearms with convincing disregard for their own and others' safety and drove their Rollses and Bentleys with apparently suicidal intent. They acquired yachts and helicopters as they shipped the family silver to California and disposed of Old Masters at auction. They married frequently and unsatisfactorily, humiliating their wives and always withholding from them dynastic secrets of schizophrenia and insanity. Lacking the energy and appetite to do so, they rarely developed their talents. Carpeting their lives with deceit, they sought consolation in ferocious expenditure, funding narcotic and alcohol-fueled blow-outs. They ignored the advice of sane relations, shrugged off trustees, and experimented with burglary, shop-lifting, vagrancy and fraud. Their primary, possibly sole, accomplishment was to drag down their families with them. They were the black sheep of aristocracy and this is their story.

my kind of people.



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Now playing: Shirley Bassey - Get the Party Started
via FoxyTunes

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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Now playing: Bronski Beat - Heat Wave
via FoxyTunes

Love will come

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


Pre-order available here and here.

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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Now playing: Depeche Mode - World in my Eyes
via FoxyTunes

Looking forward to...

seeing,





Precious



and reading,



Mia Mask's Divas on Screen - Black Women in American Film


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Now playing: Mary J. Blige - No more drama
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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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Now playing: Aretha Franklin - Amazing Grace
via FoxyTunes

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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Now playing: Toni Childs - Blind
via FoxyTunes

Larger than life

The maquette for the eventual bronze statue to honour the legend that was Nina Simone. It only seems fitting that it be, like the lady herself, larger than life. The Eunice Waymon-Nina Simone Memorial Project has commissioned the Philadelphia based sculptor Zenos Frudakis to execute the work.


Participation in The Eunice Waymon—Nina Simone Memorial Project supports the recognition of an international musical legend and an icon of human potential realized.


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Now playing: Nina Simone - Little Girl Blue
via FoxyTunes

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.

Ferrymen

A 19th-century depiction of Charon ferrying newly departed souls across the River Styx.

Something for the weekend

Mission: Impossible

Seasons one through three. Why? Those were the seasons that Barbara Bain appeared as top model and actress Cinnamon Carter. So flawlessly chic in that knowing way.














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Now playing: Richard Kiley - Little Bird, Little Bird
via FoxyTunes

Clam diggers

Linguine with clams in a cream sauce, served with sauteed samphire.
Arrange linguine in the centre of the plate, place open clams around the outside interspersing with the samphire.




Zoffany's Samphire

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Now playing: Tony Bennett - The Shadow of Your Smile
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Through the keyhole

Who lives in a house like this?

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Now playing: Chaka Demus & Pliers - Tease Me
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