RIP Gil Scott-Heron

RIP Isabella Blow 19.11.58 - 07.05.07

Isabella Blow died four years ago today, of complications following a suicide attempt. It's weird because I was raving about her and how important she was for fashion and art in England and world-wide, telling a friend excitedly about how amazing she was, what a genius. I was wondering if her pivotal role in McQueen's career had been noted in the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty show that opened at the Met a few days ago. My friend had not heard of her, which is what worries me. Of course, the fashion people and I think people interested in contemporary art in England know who she was. Also, McQueen's own suicide brought renewed attention to their personal and creative relationship and the tragic parallels found in their deaths. Thankfully there are 3 recent books about her life and work (see link below for more info).

I remember reading her widow Detmar Blow's moving and riveting biography and wincing at passages describing Isabella Blow's insecurities about her appearance, how she created an elaborate persona through fashion, and how she described her use of it and lipstick - her signature cosmetic - to disguise what she viewed as her flaws. I identified with this theatrical strategy but I can never aspire to her aesthetic originality!!!!

Worn Through blog features reviews of a series of books about her life and work, as well as other helpful information, here:

http://www.wornthrough.com/2010/12/15/blow-vs-blow-isabella-blow-biographies/

Gossipy feature on her contributions to fashion and her tragic life here:

http://nymag.com/news/features/34732/

FREE AI WEIWEI

RIP Elizabeth Taylor

11-M 2004

I am thinking about the victims, families and survivors of the brutal terrorist attacks in Madrid on March 11, 2004.

http://www.elmundo.es/documentos/2004/03/espana/atentados11m/

Estrella Morente sings for her father at his wake, Granada, Spain

Estrella Morente is my favorite singer and I have seen her in concert twice. Here she is today singing to her father who died this week. Incredibly tragic but also extraordinarily beautiful.

Enrique Morente

Here is his last performance, in honor of Picasso (video EL PAIS):

A Sad Day for Art Lovers

I have a running list of museums I'd like to visit. The Liberace Museum, in a mall in Vegas, is high on that list. Today I woke up to the tragic news that the museum is closing 10/17. Why they did not give more advance notice is unclear. But now I am scrambling to figure out if I can go for a weekend. Not kidding. My fantasy had been to do an American Road trip, drive to Graceland and the LIberace museum.....and stop to see other campy American monuments along the way. I had also planned to celebrate a landmark birthday (yes, I am not yet 21) party in Vegas expressly to see the museum, but instead we went to LA. No time to waste on regrets, Travelocity, here I come.

The full sad story is here:

http://www.lvrj.com/news/liberace-museum-to-close-after-31-years-102646619.html

The fabulous Liberace:

Doug Fieger of the Knack RIP

The game can change at any time

Alexander McQueen It's Only a Game collection 2005

The Beautiful Amazing Immortal Isabella Blow

Alexander McQueen, dead at 40.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250249/Alexander-McQueen-commits-suicide.html

Alexander McQueen with his Muse (and my Idol), the late great Isabella Blow.

13 Years

Alice Yang, Curator And Historian, 35

The New York Times, Published: February 11, 1997

Alice Huei-Zu Yang, an art historian and curator, died early Saturday morning after a hit-and-run accident at Canal and Varick Streets in Manhattan. She was 35 and lived in TriBeCa.

Ms. Yang's husband, Gerald Szeto, an architect with the firm of Calvin Tsai, was injured in the accident and was in stable condition yesterday at St. Vincent's Hospital.

Ms. Yang was born in 1961 in Taipei and came to the United States when she was 15. She studied art history at Yale University, graduating cum laude in 1984. After completing internships in several Manhattan museums, Ms. Yang worked for five years as an assistant curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo, organizing several exhibitions, including a survey of the work of Alfredo Jaar in 1992 and a group show titled ''The Final Frontier'' in 1993. That year, she left the museum to work as a critic and independent curator while earning her master's degree at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.

Ms. Yang had recently passed her oral examinations for a Ph.D. at the institute and last week began working as the Robert Lehman curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, L.I. She was also organizing an exhibition of drawings by emerging Taiwanese artists at the Drawing Center in SoHo.

In addition to her husband, Ms. Yang is survived by her parents, Mr. and Mrs. William Yang, of Taipei, and two brothers, James, of Hong Kong, and Andrew, also of Taipei.

If you want to know more: buy her book, Why Asia?

description from barnes & noble site -

Why Asia?: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art is a ground-breaking investigation into two overlapping and rapidly emerging areas in contemporary art. Extricating them from their current confusion under a generic "Asian" label, Yang reveals the specificity of each. The book consists of lucid discussions on individual artists, exhibitions and theoretical issues. With over sixty illustrations it serves to introduce the current landscape of Asian and Asian American Art, with essays on art in China, Taiwan and North America, as well as individual essays on leading artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Xu Bing and Michael Joo. Above all, Yang explores the challenges that contemporary Asian and Asian American art poses to artists, critics, curators and viewers alike. In particular, she reflects on the complexities of exhibition practice, the role of identity politics in arts, the unspoken assumptions of Western critics faced with Asian art, and the difficulties faced by artists working between cultures. This is a major critical contribution in an area where criticism conspicuously lags behind artistic practice.

3 years.

PASSINGS: JONATHAN NAPACK
January 14, 2007 @ 9:05 am — — / home / writing
Originally published in Art AsiaPacific 52, 2007, with Hou Hanru.

Jonathan Napack titled the essay that began his involvement with the contemporary art scene in Asia, written for the catalogue of the traveling exhibition Cities on the Move just around the time of his move to Hong Kong in 1997, “Death and Destruction in Bangkok.” In it he wrote of how “Bangkok stretches the line between life and death thinner than any modern city,” and how “this openness to death, its all-pervasiveness, marks Bangkok apart and makes it a kind of theater for the tensions of the day.”

These words have been on our minds in recent weeks, since the sudden and tragic news of Jonathan’s death in Hong Kong from a severe lung infection on January 20 curtailed the travel plans some of us were making to attend his 40th birthday party on February 13. The bash, ironically, was to be held in Bangkok, where Jonathan also made his final trip in the days surrounding New Year’s 2007.

Cities on the Move, more than any of the sweeping China surveys in Euro-American capitals or the Venice Biennales of the 1990s, brought artists from the Asian fringes into the mainstream, with full rights and privileges. In the art world, it marked the end of one modality of relating to the East as foreign and peripheral, and the onset of another, post-Orientalist moment. Jonathan, first as a pedigreed writer and critic who quite consciously left a successful Manhattan career with publications like Spy and the New York Observer to become a freelancer in Hong Kong, and later as “Advisor Asia” to Art Basel, was both a product and an agent of this same historical process. It is a process that would have happened, and will continue to happen, in his absence. And yet his interest, his contribution, his passion will stand as visionary rather than derivative, phenomenal rather than epiphenomenal. Jonathan’s work was about the making of these waves, not the riding of them.

One of Jonathan’s most beloved lines was not his, but Woody Allen’s. He believed ardently that “ninety-five percent of life is showing up,” and spent countless hours on Cathay Pacific jetliners to prove it. He reveled in calculations like how many hours one would need for a proper overnight at the best Ryokan in Niigata prefecture, or at what time one might clear customs and emerge onto the streets of Taipei if one caught the 5:00 flight from Chep Lap Kok. His conversational repertoire jumped flawlessly from Korean party politics to Viennese Modernism, from state formation on the Arabian Peninsula to the intricacies of Malaysian ethnic groups. He was a connoisseur of prosecco and huangjiu, schnitzel and sushi. He could converse with cab drivers in at least ten languages. Jonathan’s cosmopolitanism was effortless, his bright blue Samsonite carry-on always elegantly rolling a step behind him. His Chinese name, Jiangluosan, was a gloss on an entire life that he created for himself: It translates literally as “parachute.”

Jonathan’s wry spirit gelled perfectly with the exigencies of the cities and the region he came to call home. Anyone who saw him last summer surely heard his impression of the infamous Hong Kong “bus uncle,” a harried commuter whose tirade toward a fellow passenger was captured on a cell phone and circulated online. Among the last e-mails we would receive from him was a forwarded article from a Hong Kong newspaper detailing the prosecution of a scam whereby a local insurance agent enlisted three mainland Chinese nationals to voluntarily undergo surgical blinding in order to defraud an insurance company, stealing money by sacrificing their eyes. Jonathan’s subject line read simply, “saddest are the 2 losers who didn’t even get the payout.”

And yet Jonathan was more bon vivant than cynic, more expert than pundit, more internationalist than expatriate. He was a strategist and a conversationalist, a humorist and an information-monger. He was a brilliant writer whose biggest problem was that he was often too ensconced in the intrigues and pleasures and confusions of modern, globalized, urban life to sit down at the computer.

He has parachuted out of our lives at the same speed with which he would habitually leave his apartment in Central, hop on the Airport Express, and fly off to Bangkok or wherever else. But this time, he is not coming back.

R.I.P. Teddy Pendrergrass

the joy of infatuation



and the pain of losing in the game of love......

Helio Oiticica

Hélio Oiticica, B15 Glass Bólide 04 Earth, Terra 1964, Glass; pigment; oil with polyvinyl acetate emulsion on nylon mesh, 420 x 280 mm 930 mm, César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro

Just a few days ago a fire destroyed most of the work created by Helio Oiticica, which was owned by his family.

According to the latest reports, the percentage might be as high as 90% and lost were the Parangoles (see video above) and the Bolides series.

Article from ARTINFO:
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/32990/fire-destroys-brazilian-artist-helio-oiticicas-works/

Fire Destroys Brazilian Artist Helio Oiticica’s Works
Published: October 19, 2009

RIO de JANEIRO— On October 16, a fire destroyed 90 percent of the estate of Brazilian neoconcretist Helio Oiticica (1937–1980), housed at the artist’s brother César Oiticica's residence in Brazil. The fire consumed an estimated $200 million worth of artwork in the form of 2,000 individual pieces. The artist's works were originally moved to Cesar’s house as a result of disagreements over money and the adequacy of the storage facilities at the Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica.

The cause of the fire has not yet been determined. Cesar’s house was equipped with humidity and temperature controls for the works, as well as working fire alarms and other safety systems. The fire took around three hours to be brought under control. The Brazilian tourism minister has called for an investigation into the causes of the fire and to see whether any works can be recovered.

The works lost in the fire were uninsured, reportedly due to financial issues, and included the artist’s archive of materials, which included drawings, notes, documentaries, and books. Key pieces such as Bólides, Parangolés, and works from the Oiticica’s 2007 exhibitions at the Tate and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston were destroyed. The fire also claimed pictures and film negatives by Brazilian photographer José Oiticica, Helio and César’s father.

Cesar spoke about the fire, saying, “It was the greatest tragedy that could happen to the Brazilian culture. Without doubt, the only victim of this tragedy was the Brazilian culture.”

Read more at Globo and greg.org.

________________

Source; Tate Modern "The Body of Color" exhibition website


Bólides (1963–69)

Oiticica began to work on the first 'Bólides' (Fireballs) in 1963, after completing the 'Invenções' (Inventions) series, through which he had discovered the means of infusing colour with depth and luminosity. All of the 64 works in the Bólides series include some means of allowing light to penetrate into their interior, generating the effect of a luminous centre or nucleus, and making them containers of light.

The first Bólides Oiticica created – called 'Bólides caixas' (Box Bolides) – are highly elaborate yet simple constructions made from coarse painted plywood. Like small architectural environments, they appear to be 'inflamed' by light and charged with energy, an important evolution in Oiticica's idea of 'totalidade-côr' (total colour). They were designed to be handled, with moveable panels revealing new chromatic planes, though for conservation reasons they can no longer be touched. The compartments and openings – some visible, some hidden – hold loose pigments, mirrors, and other materials; Oiticica referred to the group as 'structures for inspection'.

With the introduction of Glass Bólides into the series, Oiticica began to include everyday materials such as glass vessels, plastic, earth, painted cloth, shells and foam, expanding the range of sensory experience offered through interaction with the artwork. The range of colours was extended to include pinks and blues, and ready-made objects also began to find their way into the work, further encouraging the viewer's emotional and intellectual participation.

Mercedes Sosa -"Solo le pido a Dios"

Christian Poveda

Yesterday I was shocked and saddened to read about the murder of photojournalist and documentary film maker Christian Poveda. While in Chiapas for a conference last March, he presented his documentary about gangs in El Salvador "Mi Vida Loca" as part of a festival. I met him and we spoke briefly after the Q & A. I was quite struck by his idealism and good intentions. I also had questions about his immersion in their lives, which meant that he shot them committing crimes, and simultaneously, the access that the police also gave him. The documentary was shot and edited in a very reality TV style and it made you feel like a witness which I found deeply disturbing, since we saw crimes committed. The way he presented himself was simultaneously: a journalist and an anthropologist participant-observer, a person that got involved with the subjects' lives beyond the reportage.

The ways in which he presented what he witnessed made human beings out of marginalized criminals and called into question the policing organized by the Salvadorean government. During the Q & A he contextualized the background to these horrific events, the violence that emerged out of the civil war and moved with refugees from LA to El Salvador. He wanted to understand why a generation was led to such violence. He wanted to try to find solutions to reintegrate this lost generation back into society. I was moved by his comments that indicated his personal involvement in the gang members' lives. He kept in touch with them and tried to help them, particularly the women and children, although I was not sure of the specifics. He did say that he was speaking to the current President of El Salvador about possible ways in which the youth could be reinserted into society.

If one of his goals was to make people outside of El Salvador aware of the complexities of this situation and its political origins, he succeeded with me. But to what extent does any documentary really change things? I was talking with friends about this last night, and it made me so heartbroken to realize that now that he was murdered, what has in fact happened is that on the one hand the film has been discussed in the thousands of articles published about his death worldwide; but on the other, the focus is on him. The latest government accounts blame 4 mara members and 1 policeman. If he wanted to persuade people that the gang members could be rehabilitated, clearly now events may persuade most that this is not possible.

What I did not know is that his parents were Spanish Republican exiles that fled to France, where he was born, and that this family history motivated him to fight for human rights. (see below)

SOURCE: REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS

http://www.rsf.org/spip.php?page=article&id_article=34382

Sept. 3 Death of a Journalist Who Combined Professionalism with Strong Humanist Convictions

Journalists in Spain, France, Latin America and elsewhere are mourning the death of a colleague who paid for his dedication with his life. Franco-Spanish documentary filmmaker Christian Poveda was shot dead early yesterday in El Salvador, where he had for some time been covering the extremely violent gangs known in Central America as “maras,” which have killed other journalists in the past. His film on the maras, “La Vida Loca,” (Trailer:http://www.lafemme-endormie.com/vidaloca/) is to be premiered in France on 30 September.

Fellow journalist Alain Mingam, a member of the Reporters Without Borders board, said this about his close friend today:

“Christian was the son of Spanish Republicans who sought refuge in France. It was from his origins that he derived the strong humanist convictions to which he always remained faithful. He was a reporter in Chile, under the Pinochet dictatorship, in Nicaragua and El Salvador. He was very committed and involved in his subjects without taking sides. His humanistic convictions went hand in hand with a great deal of professional rigour.

“He had an original approach and an incredible ability to penetrate the worlds he was filming, whether AIDS or anti-fascism in France or the Salvadorean maras. For him, the way a film was edited was more important that any comments you made. This was how he restored humanity to people like the ‘mareros’ regardless of how monstrous their actions were. Christian’s personal involvement in his subject even resulted in his being approached by gangs who saw him as a possible mediator.”

Poveda’s name must nonetheless now be added to the long list of victims of violence between the two main mara groups, “Mara 18” and “Mara Salvatrucha,” which is estimated to have cost 3,700 lives last year.

Aged 54, Poveda was found dead near his car on the road from Apopa to Tonacatepeque, in Rosario, a rural area just to the north of the capital, San Salvador. He had been shot in the head. Police said he was on his way from filming in La Campanera, just to the east of the capital.

A life of danger

Christian Gregorio Poveda Ruiz was born in France on 12 January 1955. He established his reputation as a photo-journalist with a report about the Polisario Front’s war in Western Sahara. Many more reports followed, as well as documentaries that were screened in festivals and broadcast by TV stations.

He began going to El Salvador for the first time in the 1980s to cover the 1980-92 civil war, as a photographer for Time magazine as a correspondent for French news media and international news agencies. He returned to El Salvador in the 1990s, this time covering the armed gang phenomenon. He also covered wars in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.

La Vida Loca

Poveda spent 16 months with the gangs in the east San Salvador of La Campanera in order to make La Vida Loca, which was broadcast for the first time in 2008 and focuses on “Mara 18.” Its images are crude and disturbing – gang members gunned down in the street, the corpses of teenagers, relatives weeping over coffins, young women with their faces covered with tattoos.

According to the local media, Poveda witnessed seven murders in the course of making the film. Three of the seven victims were people who figure prominently in the documentary. Other Mara 18 members who appear in the film were arrested while it was being made.

La Vida Loca also takes a critical look at the strong-arm methods used by the police against the young gang members. While recognising that they sow terror, it portrays gang-members as victims of broken homes who nonetheless fascinate. It also tries to show how young Salvadoreans are pushed into crime by social and economic conditions which, in his view, are too often ignored.

“We must try to understand why a child of 12 or 13 joins a gang and gives his life for it,” Poveda said in an interview for the Salvadorean online daily El Faro. Already broadcast in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Germany and Hungary, La Vida Loca has never been screened in El Salvador.

(Photo of Christian Poveda: AFP)

Estrella de Diego on Michael Jackson

This is an article about the mediatic experience of the death of Michael Jackson by Estrella de Diego, the smartest person I know. I enjoyed it so much that I insert it in its entirety here.

EL PAIS
BABELIA

CRÍTICA: LLAMADA EN ESPERA
Thriller
Estrella de Diego

Llevo semanas literalmente pegada al ordenador, presa de unas noticias que, inscritas en la pantalla, llegan frescas, como surgidas de las fauces mismas del acontecimiento. Me he acostumbrado de tal manera a la información continua e inmediata que en las noches de insomnio me levanto a mirar si ha pasado algo nuevo. Lo miro desde el ordenador de casa, en una pantalla prestada, a oscuras en el cine con mi iPhone. Es ese flujo lo que engancha; es el carácter abierto, inacabado de las informaciones lo que conmueve nuestra imaginación contemporánea; saber que siempre va a pasar algo más que va a llegar en secuencias, paso a paso, como los suspiros. Es el hueco descubierto por los psicoanalistas que ha encontrado en Internet un sitio donde abismar los vértigos.

Así que me engancho voraz a las noticias que van llegando desde Neverland. Tampoco significa nada concreto: antes fueron Berlusconi e Italia. Como amantes de repertorio, las obsesiones se van sucediendo sistemáticas frente a la pantalla, unidas por lazos sutilísimos que, en las noches de insomnio, se configuran claros y contundentes. En el fondo, me digo, el ataúd vacío de Michel Jackson se parece en lo rocambolesco al vaudeville italiano. Se parecen Jackson y Berlusconi en sus caras falsas, su pelo prestado, la pasión por los menores —o eso dicen sus respectivas esposas—. O se parecen, al menos, en Internet que lo iguala todo, sin jerarquías, sin controles, sin tino. Mezcla intrépida de aluvión infinito que tragamos sin tiempo para saborearlo.

Pese a la brevedad de las sensaciones —o por esa misma brevedad— llevo días siguiendo la noticia de la muerte del gran mito del Pop —aunque no el mejor, porque el título habría debido corresponder a Prince si Jackson no hubiera salido de escena tan ostentoso—. Corro tras la noticia que se instala en mi pantalla mientras me he ido a por agua a la cocina. Hasta entro en un concurso absurdo, yo, que me las doy de seria. Me decepciono cuando no me toca la entrada al funeral-concierto —costaba incluso más que la reventa de Tomás en la Monumental—. Mejor, pienso, resuelta a retomar mi vida. Luego te toca y menuda pereza llegar hasta allí, toda apretada, con la compañía de bajo coste de turno. Una señora, con lágrimas en los ojos, declaraba su perplejidad ante las cámaras: “A mí nunca me ha tocado nada y ahora me toca esto…”. Es esa perplejidad tan contemporánea la que nos emociona, la incapacidad misma de entender qué hacemos allí, de qué modo tan radical ha cambiado la Red nuestras vidas.

Lo voy rumiando mientras me asomo a YouTube —Nuestra Señora de YouTube—. Vuelvo a ver Thriller —no me canso nunca de verlo—, uno de los mejores videoclips de los ochenta. Es más: una de las obras maestras de la década. Nada de buscar la esencia de aquella época en esta o la otra corriente artística —ni apropiacionismo, ni neopop, ni neoconceptual—. Hasta la llegada de MTV —el canal sólo de videoclips en sesión continua, a su modo fragmentario y abierto como la pantalla del ordenador— los destellos de relato, rápidos y eficaces, musicales con un final también casi siempre feliz, irrumpían en la pantalla casera. Se colaban entre los anuncios y los esperábamos con ansiedad antigua, regusto a “peticiones del oyente” en la radio: un momento de distracción y la canción se había desvanecido fugaz. Ahora, por fin, se han saciado las ansiedades: en la Red podemos regresar a cada fragmento de realidad con la frecuencia que decidamos. La esencia fragmentaria del medio lo permite y ahí radica la paradoja: recuperar a la carta cada cosa del mundo con la velocidad malsana de la noticia.

SOURCE: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/arte/Thriller/elpepuculbab/20090718elpbabart_4/Tes