Interview

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Fred Tomaselli first earned street cred in the 1970s, for his involvement in the underground Los Angeles punk and new wave music scene, when his drawings were published in Slash (fanzine), an LA punk rock magazine. In the 1980s, he emerged as an installation and performance artist with Paul McCarthy and other California artists. Living on the Pacific Coast, surfboards were Tomaselli's natural vehicles for escape, and resin was a familiar medium in his artwork. His very West-Coast interest in drug culture informed the artist's interest in creating "sublime experiences" in reaction to the "theme parks and dislocated realities" he experienced growing up in Southern California.

Tomaselli moved East in 1986, settling into a studio in then-dodgy Williamsburg, where he turned to painting as a window to another reality. Over the years Tomaselli has carefully assembled an archive—an herbarium of sorts—of weeds, plants, pills, speed, insects, flowers, birds, and anatomical illustrations, carefully cut from books and digital scans. He makes baroque paintings that draw upon a range of art historical sources and decorative traditions, like quilts and mosaics. Combining unusual materials and paint under layers of clear epoxy resin, Tomaselli's paintings explode in mesmerizing patterns that appear to grow organically across his compositions in a multilayered coexistence of the real, the photographic, and the painterly.

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The motto of cosmetic giant M.A.C is "Art is M.A.C's DNA"—although of course it's designed to cover up imperfections in your own genetics. Last week, M.A.C outdid itself, launching three collaborations for their Fall 2009 pallette, featuring painter of many things glossy Marilyn Minter, illustrator Maira Kalman, and Richard Phillips. The latter is a particularly bold choice: not that Phillips couldn't be accused of touching up his hyper-real portraits of young women—far from it, he likes his subjects to look perfect. But for a multi-national corporation, M.A.C has given unprecedented creative freedom to an artist who sources his subjects from pornography, and incorporates into them images of the government and the business world as symbols of power and control. Says M.A.C. creative director James Gager, "We thought it'd be interesting to see what three artists in their own field would do if we gave them our Fall color collection... I didn't get involved in art directing; I wanted the project to be pure. At M.A.C, we do a lot of things that no other company would dare."

Last week M.A.C hosted three separate parties for the artists, in one night. The last, "Make-Up Art Cosmetics Fall '09 As Seen By Richard Phillips" entailed a cocktail party held at the artist's Chelsea studio. Phillips gave some of his paintings a M*A*C make-over, some photo-retouched with dirty pale pink matte cheek blush and Young Thing lipglass. Xeno and Oaklander, the minimal wave/synth duo of artist Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride flipped on a (poor clarifying) smoke-machine and played analog synthesizers and percussion instruments. When I stepped out for air the paparazzi were snapping feverishly at nightclub owner Amy Sacco and Phillips' Yale alum the painter John Currin with his wife the artist and sometime fashion model Rachel Feinstein. Art, buisiness, celebrity, and fashion, at it again.

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Can you beleieve that Dan Graham, one of contemporary arts most innovative and influential figures, is in no American museum collections? Graham got some much-deserved recognition last night at The Whitney when they unveiled Dan Graham: BEYOND, curated by Chrissie Isles and Bennett Simpson. A retrospective of Graham's groundbreaking work in film, video, photography, installation, performance, sculpture and musical collaborations dating from the mid–60's to present fills the entire fourth floor. Guests weaved in and out of architectural-scale glass pavilions that filled the main gallery, turning it into a playground for paranoid adults. Quite a few of the ladies were in and out of Girl's Make-up Room, 1998-2000, a curved, semi-circular stainless steel mesh and two-way mirror glass pavilion complete with a mirror wand and a vanity table with a selection of red lipsticks to try on. On the flipside of the space, people crammed in to view Graham's seminal Body Press, 1970–1972, a dizzying 16mm film in which Graham obliterates the idea of the supposed objectivity of the camera by handing the device to actors, who performed simple movements like circling one another. By closing time no one knew if they were coming or going.


See more by Mary Barone at her web site, Out With Mary.

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