On Valentine’s Day, the artist Vanessa Beecroft sent an e-mail telling me to go to an address on Wooster Street in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, where she would be, as the e-mail stated, “w Kanye.”

“Haven’t had a minute since k came to NY, I’m a bit destroyed but please text later,” the e-mail said.

I arrived at the stated address that evening to see Kanye West leaving the building with his daughter, North West, perched on his shoulder, and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, at his side. West was greeted by a phalanx of paparazzi, whom he posed for, and then piled into a black SUV, off to a Valentine’s Day dinner with his family.

Beecroft stayed at West’s secret fashion lab on Wooster Street to work on projects for him, as there was a lot to do. The previous Thursday, Beecroft—who vanished from the gallery circuit a decade ago when she cut ties with her dealers, who included Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian—had staged a performance to accompany the launch of West’s newest fashion line, Yeezy Season 3, and album, The Life of Pablo. The event was held at a sold-out Madison Square Garden, screened live in 700 theaters in 23 countries, and streamed on Tidal to more than 20 million viewers. Beecroft’s performance had more real-time viewers than any work of performance art in history.

“While I work in museums where people can walk in and out and there isn’t really a spectacle, the configuration of this was more spectacular—people had to sit down, there was all the music,” she said of the performance, once I was cleared to enter the all-white compound where members of West’s entourage were listening to his new album on repeat while eating Starburst candies and drinking Patron tequila. To escape the deafening beats, we moved to the freezing basement of the SoHo space, where models wearing skimpy looks from West’s new collection fumbled through racks of apparel looking for their street clothes.

“But I was really grateful that Kanye allowed me to do whatever I wanted,” she went on.

Vanessa Beecroft.

COURTESY THE ARTIST
Over the course of nearly a dozen collaborations in the past eight years, the unlikely duo of Beecroft and West has seen their visions come together in a fluid way. And even if this is not the rarefied context of biennales and retrospectives (a context Beecroft once existed comfortably within, and then spurned), it’s pretty clear that working on this level has improved her practice. What she was missing earlier seems to be, improbably, someone like Kanye West.

“The relationship gradually grew to what it is today, when Kanye told me, ‘Do whatever you want,’ ” she said. “I said, ‘Do you want to show your collection?’ And he said, ‘I don’t care, just do whatever you want.’ ”

Beecroft was born in Italy, and started to gain a reputation as an artist shortly after moving to the United States. She staged her performances at Andrea Rosen Gallery, MoMA PS1, and Deitch Projects. Jeffrey Deitch offered her the very first show at that space, which happens to be a block away from Kanye HQ, on Wooster Street. Her work often focused on skinny, nude or near-nude women standing around, bored-looking, for hours. One performance, 2004’s VB54, was set to be unveiled at the former TWA terminal at JFK airport, and featured African American woman standing naked, all shackled in chains. JetBlue, a sponsor of the show, pulled the plug before its debut, and plans to show the work at the Port Authority were botched as well.

“After my career started to fade slowly, being less on a hype, and I moved to Los Angeles, Kanye looked for me,” Beecroft said. “I didn’t know who he was because I don’t know anything about pop culture. I don’t listen to music. And when he approached me I decided to work with him because he was my alter ego: An African American male, and I was a white woman. So I said, it’s perfect, I’m going to take advantage of this channel to do something I could never do before.”

Their first collaboration was at a loft in Los Angeles in 2008, during the unveiling of Kanye West’s then-shocking auto-tuned album 808s & Heartbreak. It was West’s first foray into the realm of performance art, and the crowd at the event wasn’t sure how to respond.

“I’m sure it’s beautiful art, and many people can appreciate it on a much deeper level than I can,” the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel told a reporter from Rolling Stone. “But I look out there and see a lot of good-looking naked girls and it makes me happy.”

West continued to work with Beecroft, calling on her to act as the art director for his short filmRunaway, which accompanied the release of his 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. They then collaborated on Affordable Care, a performance at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2013, and that year, she designed the sets for West’s Yeezus Tour. She was entrusted with the set for West’s blowout wedding to Kim Kardashian, an affair in Milan that supposedly cost $12 million.

Installation view of VB46 at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, California, in 2001.

COURTESY GAGOSIAN GALLERY
The latest arc of their collaboration focuses on the musician’s fashion line that he makes for Adidas. The first show, unveiled in February 2015 during New York Fashion Week, was centered around a Beecroft performance; she is now inextricably linked with the brand, and available to work on it at the drop of a hat. For instance: The day after her performance last week, she left for Los Angeles, where she lives with her children. Upon landing, Kanye called her, and she got on a flight back to New York.

“He was depressed,” Beecroft said, “and I give him this little spark.”

The work with West has become Beecroft’s only output—her last solo show under her own name was in Naples, Italy, in 2010.

“It’s like, my work, by invading another world, is continuing to impose, and I like that: the power of the work, and the power of influencing lots of people, not necessarily the art elite,” she said. “I abandoned my dealers—all of them. I don’t like to do shows at galleries. I’m actually not very proud of myself, how I behaved with Gagosian, Deitch, all these other European dealers, but I felt like, I’m not going to do another show with this stupid guy.”

Instead, she’s become tethered to the most fascinating and volatile pop-culture figure in the country.

“I do it all for Kanye,” she said. “My public facade could just go through him now, I don’t care.”

West’s most recent fashion show also acted as the world premiere of West’s new album, The Life of Pablo. It’s a blast-level dad-rock gospel record, intent on offending solely for the sake of offending, a bonkers collection of songs oscillating between brilliant and confounding and sprung forth from one unmistakable mind. The album’s namesake could be Picasso, or Escobar, or St. Paul the Apostle.

Its unveiling at Madison Square Garden—an auspicious choice of pavilion, as it was at the Garden where West famously interrupted Taylor Swift mid-speech at the MTV Video Music Awards—was also a triumph. I was there, along with most of the people I follow on Instagram.

Vanessa Beecroft’s performance at the launch of Yeezy Season 3.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KANYE WEST
Getting there was no easy feat. The ticket distribution system unfolded like a Samuel Beckett play where Karl Lagerfeld served as the costume designer. To receive a ticket, menswear bloggers stood in a conference room at a nondescript Midtown hotel, waiting endlessly for their names to be called by an unseen handler. No one spoke to anyone else, but everyone watched as Kanye’s people handed out tickets to one person every excruciating 10 minutes.

The next day, Kanye West walked into Madison Square Garden, plugged his laptop into the arena’s sound system, and played the first song onThe Life of Pablo, which is called “Ultralight Beam.” There was a desert-colored tarp draped over an installation placed on the basketball court, and at the hundred-voice apex of that first song, the tarp was whipped away to reveal a hundred-strong gang of models wearing the desert-colored looks in Yeezy Season 3, all standing despondent and motionless and defiant. It was a euphoric moment, fully Beecroft’s performance, one in line with her entire practice, now fully realized. Their looks, as has been reported by the many outlets that covered the event, were inspired by images a Rwandan refugee camp.

“I wanted to show to America a picture of poverty, of the poor America,” Beecroft said. “My intention was to show the third world that is here.”

And with that in mind, about a hundred frail models stood perfectly still for a few hours while millions of people watched. A picture of a lengthy list of instructions, presumably by West, though he hasn’t commented on that, went viral, and included outlandish and contradictory rules spelled out in what can only be described as Kanye parlance, in all-caps: “DO NOT BE CASUAL,” “DO NOT ACT COOL,” “BEHAVE AS IF NO ONE WAS IN THE ROOM,” “DO NOT EVER LOOK AT THE JUMBOTRON.”

“Endurance is very important to me,” Beecroft said. “How long can you hold onto that position without entertaining anyone, and just being there? And start to acquire human qualities, and a look that is no longer glamorous, but introspective?” West, she said, allowed her to have “no action” in her direction of the models. “We told them don’t move, even if the music is playing.”

At the end of our conversation, Beecroft told me I should come by the next day to meet West. This, somewhat expectedly, did not pan out. “He’s shy, sorry,” Beecroft said in a text message. (West has yet to give an interview to any publication regarding The Life of Pablo—a media blackout strange even for him.)

Beecroft did reveal, however, that West plans on shooting his next video in Mexico, at one of the ancient Aztec pyramids in the Yucatan. She did the location scouting herself.

She also mentioned a fellow Italian artist, the director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who traveled to Africa in 1970 with the intention of making a film about the African Oresteia. He believed, Beecroft said, that “the new king of Africa will be the African American musician. And I thought, maybe this is something that will happen someday.”

source: www.artnews.com

نوشته THE MOST-VIEWED WORK OF PERFORMANCE ART IN HISTORY اولین بار در Honargardi. پدیدار شد.

BLANK ON BLANK: DAVID BOWIE ON STARDUST

Our website might just be a celebration of everything is David Bowie as we mourn his passing this week. “I never really felt like a rock singer or a rock star. I always felt a little bit out of my element,” he said in this episode of the wonderful PBS series Blank on Blank.

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Aesthetica has been following Julia Vogl’s work since she won the Aesthetica Creative Works Competition in 2011. Following her success in the competition, we spoke to the artist about her work and the idea of social practices in art. Click this link to read the full interview.

The Catlin Art Prize 2012, Londonewcastle Project Space, 03/05/2012 – 25/05/2012, 28 Redchurch Street, Shoreditch, London, E2 7DP. www.londonewcastle.com

Credit: Julia Vogl Let’s Hang Out (2012)
Photography: Peter Hope

Could you be the next Julia Vogl?

The Aesthetica Art Prize is a celebration of excellence in art from across the world. Previous finalists include Marcus Jansen, a leading modern expressionist who joins a legacy of artists featuring in Absolut Vodka’s artistic campaigns and Bernat Millet, also shortlisted for National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. To find out more about how to enter see:www.aestheticamagazine.com/artprize

نوشته Julia Vogl wins the Catlin Art Prize 2012 اولین بار در Honargardi. پدیدار شد.

A: What is the context of your upcoming solo show in New York?
AR: This exhibition shows my video artwork, entitled What are you Fishing for? shown together with a couple of stills from the film. It’s a metaphorical story about diving deep into your soul; about the story of a fisherman and the sea; and about life and death, renaissance and rebirth.

A: This is your first solo exhibition in New York. How did you achieve this?
AR: Since last year, I have been travelling between Paris and New York meeting lots of people including the two gallerists Elliott Levenglick and Catinca Tabacaru. This led to me being signed with the Catinca Tabacaru Gallery in New York, and I am really happy to be part of the group of represented artists.

A: Has being longlisted in the Aesthetica Art Prize helped you move forwards with your work?
AR: Yes, definitely. Being longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize was one of two main supports for me this year; the second being selected for exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

A: Where would you like to see your work exhibited next?
AR: I would love to showcase video installations in a museum space. I love to create immersive experiences, where time stands still. There are so many great museums to list around the world; we will see what the future brings.

A: What new projects are you working on?
AR: I have been working for over a year on my new video piece, A Love Story.  I am now in the final stages of finishing the music with a French composer called Alexandre Bazin. It’s fantastic to see the film finally coming to life to be shared with the public. I hope they will like it.

To see more of Annina Roescheisen’s work visit www.anninaroescheisen.com

The Aesthetica Art Prize is now open for entries. To register, visit www.aestheticamagazine.com/art-prize/enter

Follow us on Twitter @AestheticaMag for the latest news in contemporary art and culture.

Credits
1. Annina Roescheisen, What are you Fishing for?  (2014). Courtesy of the artist.

نوشته Interview with Multimedia Artist, Annina Roescheisen اولین بار در Honargardi. پدیدار شد.

Presale tickets are strongly encouraged – limited tickets will be available at the door only as capacity allows. Bay Area blues group Quinn DeVeaux have also been added to the musical lineup, setting the stage for Rebirth. We are also excited to announce that Mike Shine will be doing live mural painting on Berwick Place during the event. The facade is being prepared as we speak

نوشته REBIRTH BRASS BAND IN SAN FRANCISCO اولین بار در Honargardi. پدیدار شد.

San Francisc’s Portal will open as a gateway to Tehran, Iran on Friday, September 18th at 7:30pm in Hayes Valley. For more information, visit sharedstudios.com

نوشته PORTALS PROJECT OPENS GATEWAY FROM SF TO TEHRAN اولین بار در Honargardi. پدیدار شد.

نوشته Interview with Jane Hanson about One Day One Choir اولین بار در Honargardi. پدیدار شد.

Pasolini in his “Notes Towards an African Orestes” links the Furies or Erinyes with enormous trees, shaken by the wind in the African forest. “But the Furies are unrepresentable under a human aspect and so I would represent them under a non human aspect. These trees, for instances, lost in the silence of the forest, monstrous, in some way, and terrible. What makes Africa terrible is its solitude, the monstrous forms that nature can take. The deep and scary silences. Irrationality is animal. The Furies are the goddesses of the animal moment of man.” *
Starting from this metaphor, Andreco drew the symbols and the whole iconography of “L’Erba cativa” parade, which was fully set up during the Go Deep workshop coordinated at the end of June at the Astoria ex-cinema in Rimini with Motus . Go Deep was an intense participative process articulated around ten days of collective work; thirty-five young people involved in various artistic fields, most of whom living in the local or nearby territory, took part in it. An unforgettable experience that has led to the birth of a new collective of artists, “Godeepers”, who will continue to work independently in the region, also in anticipation of the reopening of the Rimini ex-cinema, that has been closed for 10 years.

The parade started at Parco dei Cappuccini, with the shaking of leafy tree branches and bushes (spontaneous hawthorne and poplars), and finished, after going through the whole city center, at the Sphaeristerium of the city of Santarcangelo. The parade creates an imaginary bond between the natural space (the green space of Parco dei Capuccini) and the city center (the paved Piazza Ganganelli). The whole walk was accompanied by an experimental noise soundtrack, in alternation to fragments of texts and recordings of sounds of nature, composed by the musicians of the collective and played by 4 portable self-constructed PA systems. There were several stops, with lightning-like performances; among them, the “capture of the Campanone”, on which were flying two banners showing black bush branches and a leaf crossed by a knife as “new natural weapons”. The mysterious procession reached Piazza Ganganelli to create a powerful collective image connected to the “Illegal Hawthorne” installation: a tripod suspending in the air a green cloud made with hawthorne. This indigenous plant has recently been prohibited from being planted in the ground as it is a carrier of a virus called “Fire blow” that damages fruit trees (pear, apple, peach trees). For the installation at the festival, the company had to obtain a special 10-day permission. This way, the parade symbolically linked this illegal and banned plant with its sisters that, paradoxically, grow spontaneously not too far in the Cappuccini forest. At the arrival at the Sphaeristerium, the final act of performer Ondina Quadri was to burn a wind flag painted by Andreco, representing a cloud. The burning cloud, among the growing sounds, accompanied the last words of the parade: a citation from the Oresteia translated into Italian by Pasolini.

“How to explain that we have broken the chain that makes the Past a source of certainty, the certainty of which we are full and insatiable.

The certainty that, from the bottom of centuries, gives the reason to exist in every instant act of the city; the certainty that saves us from scandal… A certainty that feeds on cowardice, mediocrity and brutality.

But what is the point of a certainty founded on terror?”**

نوشته AN UPDATE WITH GYER اولین بار در Honargardi. پدیدار شد.