Barry McGee retrospective at Berkeley Art Museum
One week from today the Berkeley Art Museum will open the first exhibition surveying the art of Barry McGee. “Throughout his career,†writes Alex Baker in the exhibition catalog, “Barry McGee has continued to surprise and contradict expectations.†Including rarely seen early etchings, letterpress printing trays and liquor bottles painted with his trademark cast of […]
The Italian Surf Academy
Growing up in Italy, guitarist Marco Cappelli had little exposure to surf music, but what he heard he liked. As the Wall Street Journal notes in a profile of Cappelli, he learned mostly from the scores to spaghetti western films. “It was not very systematic, my approach,” said Mr. Cappelli, who is 47, last week by phone […]
Saltwater Buddha
Mention that you’ve visited a surf mecca in Costa Rica, and a surprising number of people in your life reveal their own connections to the ocean. Yesterday someone I know mentioned that the best book he has read this summer is Jaimal Yogis’ Saltwater Buddha, which was published a few years ago. Here’s a review […]
Surfland Revisited
Last chance to see these beautiful portraits by Joni Sternbach at Rick Wester Fine Art in NYC. Exhibit closes tomorrow, August 10.
Bruce Chatwin’s “The Songlines”
I have lately spent much time thinking about travel writing as a genre, and was therefore pleased to discover the New York Review of Books has published a portion of Rory Stewart’s introduction to a new edition Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines. I’ll allow him to explain the significance of Chatwin’s book: The publication of Bruce Chatwin’s The […]
Franz West, 1947-2012
The Austrian artist Franz West passed away on July 25. Peter Schjeldahl‘s obit in the New Yorker is a poignant and spot on read: The death in Vienna on Thursday of the sneaky-great Austrian artist Franz West—at the age of sixty-five, after a long illness—saddens me to a degree that I’m afraid needs explaining. The circle of West’s fans […]
Party People
Join Origin Magazine and Eyebeam on July 26th at 7PM for a discussion hosted by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) dedicated to exploring hidden architectures and their capacity to influence the evolution of cities and the well-being of their inhabitants. Panelists Daniel Barasch, Kenji Williams and Christopher Kieran will discuss strategies for utilizing these […]
Cave Cleaning in Greece
Artist Pam Longobardi is in Greece cleaning sea caves filled with plastic and debris. For Drifters Project/Kefalonia Phase II, she plans to clean the cave with a team of swimmers, remove all the material and transport it to the Ionion Center of Art and Culture to document, analyze and create a single large-scale art installation […]
Sgrafo vs. Fat Lava
A taste from a not-to-be-missed show of ceramics and porcelains made in West Germany, ca. 1960-1980. Curated by Nicolas Trembley at Alex Zachary Peter Currie in NYC. Closes Saturday! The installation views.
William Wegman, For A Moment He Forgot Where He Was And Jumped Into The Ocean, 1971
William Wegman’s solo exhibition “Hello Nature” runs from July 13 to October 21 the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine. (Though this photograph isn’t in the show it’s one of my favorite works by him.) The exhibition features some thirty years of work inspired by Maine, where the artist spends his summers. Read a recent interview […]
“Jack Goldstein X 10,000”
Until September 9 at OCMA: This exhibition is the first American retrospective of Jack Goldstein (1945–2003), a central figure in Postmodernist discourse of the 1970s and 1980s. Goldstein’s oeuvre developed over the years in an unusual breadth of media, from sculpture, performance, and film, to photography, records of sound effects, paintings, and aphorisms. The exhibition […]
Rineke Dijkstra
A nice retrospective of this Dutch artist’s portraits at the Guggenheim in NYC until October 8.
Human Nature
If you’ve always wanted to check out Jason deCaires Taylor‘s mesmerizing underwater sculptures but haven’t made it to The Museum of Underwater Modern Art in Mexico, you’re in luck. Starting tomorrow, you can see his work at the Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York from June 30 until July 28, 2012. The show includes a new […]
Tacita Dean, Fatigues
Currently on view at Documenta 13 (image via Contemporary Art Daily). Ex-Finance Building, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany. June 6 – August 16, 2012 Tacita Dean has brought the mountains of Afghanistan to Kassel, filling a former banking hall with enormous, beautiful blackboard drawings. Some are near-empty, just turbid blackness; others are filled with moiling rapids and […]
Ron Church, California to Hawaii
First published in 2007 and now a rare collector’s item, photographer Ron Church’s California to Hawaii, 1960-1965Â documents “the last moments of a small and innocent brand of west coast surf culture before it became swallowed up by today’s wave jockeying, plastic surfboards, and manufactured surf wear.” The book was co-published by T. Adler Books and […]
Thomas Campbell, Slide Your Brains Out
Later this summer, Um Yeah Press will release Thomas Campbell’s Slide Your Brains Out: Surfing in General, 1997-2012. Here’s a description: Growing up in southern California, artist, photographer and filmmaker Thomas Campbell was raised on the DIY aesthetic of the early 1980s skateboarding culture. Photography tips came from like-minded fellow photographers employed in the skateboarding […]
Constantin Brancusi, The Golden Bird
In other images Brancusi underscores his attachment to his works as almost living spirits, multiplying and animating their forms with shadows or double exposures, or arranging them in suggestive tableaus. In an especially tender image his sculpture “Little French Girl†seems to sidle up to a cuplike sculpture resting on an “Endless Column†fragment as […]
James Katsipis
Weekends are way more fun now that summer’s here! Images by Montuak photographer, James Katsipis.
“Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974”
Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974Â is the first large-scale, historical-thematic exhibition to deal broadly with Land art, capturing the simultaneous impulse emergent in the 1960s to use the earth as an artistic medium and to locate works in remote sites far from familiar art contexts. Organized by MOCA Senior Curator Philipp Kaiser and […]
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Excellent Trailer for The Master
The Master is an upcoming drama film written, directed, and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. It was given the green-light in May 2011, and began filming in June. The film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, and Laura Dern. The plot involves a religion called “The Cause” which has been compared to Scientology. The Master is scheduled for release on October 12, 2012.[4] Read […]
Cindy Sherman at the MoMA
If you planned to go but haven’t made it yet, get a move on. The MoMA‘s Cindy Sherman retrospective will be gone in a week, on June 11th.
Vera Lutter, Chephren and Cheops Pyramids, Giza: April 12, 2010
It is fascinating to me that these enormous buildings have been left alone and are in a natural state of deterioration within the magical landscape of the desert. —Vera Lutter
Tree to Sea
Here’s a short movie by Barry Mottershead—one of the foremost chargers of the Ireland big wave scene—showing the handcrafting of an Alaia board from Paulownia wood. You’ll usually find Barry crashing around on huge Irish waves, so here’s some more mellow radness. Music by Siskiyou – Twigs and Stones.—from Drift Surfing
