[Editor's note: We're reposting this feature from last year due to popular demand and the fact that we're wondering if most of you got to see it the first time around. Enjoy!]
On a recent holiday shopping trip uptown, in order to escape the hordes cascading down 5th Avenue, I ducked into one of New York’s contemporary art museums. While sauntering through the maze of galleries I came upon a certain photograph that gave me pause. I studied the slap-dash camera angle and the basic lighting, and thought to myself: “Really? This is what it takes? I can do that!”
And then it hit me like a bolt of lightning: Not only can I do that, I will do that, and then I will pawn off the results on all of my unsuspecting relatives. Why give a Richard Avedon poster, when I can make an original Adda Birnir knock-off? Thus I enlisted the help of my trusty co-conspirator Tom Starkweather and together we picked five masters of photography (Cindy Sherman, Steve McCurry, Philip Lorca Dicorcia, Richard Avedon, and Ryan McGinley) whose work we felt was just begging to be re-created.
Detailed instructions and the results, after the jump.
Photographer Richard Mosse has recently returned from a month-long trip to Iraq to photograph what remains of Saddam Hussein’s dozens of palaces, now used by American soldiers as make-shift combat headquarters. This month, the American army is set to handover the last of the palaces back to the Iraqi army. Mosse, who has previously photographed war-torn areas of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, sat down with us to discuss his latest project and the deeply disturbing, though darkly humorous, aspects of the ongoing war in Iraq.
Despite the snarkification of our culture thanks to the likes of Gawker, Perez Hilton, and Simon Cowell, its hard to improve upon Barbara Kruger’s biting feminist witticism. So why try?
This summer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art invited Brooklyn based artist Roxy Paine to design a site specific installation in The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. In keeping with the garden’s aboreal surroundings, Paine has installed a variation on his classic stainless steel defoliated trees. For the rooftop installation Paine has situated each tree that comprises the small copse sideways, as if blown over by a strong gust of wind. Fittingly, Paine has titled the piece Maelstrom. (The Met’s rooftop bar is also serving a cocktail of the same name.)
Stephanie Chernikowski, Sonic Youth, 1983, Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art
For this fine Wednesday’s pictorial pick we decided to pay homage to the king and queen of rock’n'roll couples (and our Soho neighbors) Kim and Thurston. This picture, taken by Stephanie Chernikowski in 1983, is on view in the Looking at Music: Side 2 exhibition opening today at MoMA.
The preponderance of landscape photography exhibitions invading our nations’ museums got us thinking about the vast tradition of American landscape photography. By and large, landscape photographers — working in tandem with a team of painters and writers — have accounted for our popular understanding of what America looks like. Back in the 19th century, Timothy O’Sullivan introduced Americans to the sweeping vistas of the Southwest with his survey images, in the ’30s WPA photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange documented the trials and travails of blighted farmers in the great plains, and in the ’70s William Eggleston threw his hat in the mix with his whiskey soaked images of the South.
For all of the iconic images of the United States and their seemingly quaint regionalism, how easy is it to tell where a photograph was taken? Take our quiz to find out.
In Christy Bush’s new series, Jackson, currently on view at Bespoke Gallery in New York, the artist continues her chronicle of American adolescence. In Bush’s earlier series, Soundtrack to Nothing, exhibited at Bespoke in 2006, she documented the lives of an expansive community of alternative music listening, concert going, youth. For Jackson Bush focused on one subject, a beautifully adrogynous teenage boy living in Georgia. Shot over the course of a few years, though not shown in chronological order, the images come together to create a breathtaking portrait of what teenage life looks like and how we adults like to imagine it.
Artists Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray are hard at work discovering creative, city friendly, and most importantly, artistic ways for you to practice your environmentalism. Their latest project, called Window Farms, and is an ongoing experiment in designing functional and beautiful ways to grow food in your apartment/house/loft window using only materials available in your recycling bin and the local hardware store. The current prototype (as seen in the image above) is a “suspended, hydroponic, modular, low-energy” model, which promises to grow you a “high-yield edible food gardens built using low-impact or recycled local materials.” That’s right, Britta and Rebecca have designed a way for you to get a high-yield edible food garden and a zany, mad-scientist apartment decorating theme in one fell swoop. Read More »
Marc Hundley, Image courtesy Bellwether Gallery, New York
New York based Canadian artist Marc Hundley makes delicately hand stenciled posters, flyers, and t-shirts. He began making the simple pieces as gifts for friends, but they soon gained a cult-like following in the downtown arts community and were picked up by galleries such as the Lower East Side’s former Rivington Arms and Los Angeles’ Cherry and Martin gallery. The works, wrought in ink, acrylic, or enamel on paper or cloth, play on romantic and nostalgic ideas of love, music, and literature. Hundley pulls particularly evocative lines from Rainer Maria Rilke, Joni Mitchell, and Morrissey and weaves them into his own lumbering reality, often marking the pieces with the date and location of their creation. Read More »
Heading into the archive for some lunchtime love, ahem, lunchtime stark naked love, today. American/Korean duo Marc Voge and Young-hae Chang’s simple flash animations are still some of the most delightful and delicious, not to mention butter basted, fun to be had on the Internet.
Check out their jazzy romp in the sun (and make sure to have your speakers on): The Struggle Continues.
