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Michael Slenske
Florent Morellet Charts 'Lichenstein'
11/05/2009 05:25 PM
As evidenced by Katharine Harmon's new book The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (Princeton Architectural Press) map-related artwork is hot right now. But of the 150 artists in her new tome–including Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, Olafur Eliasson, Maira Kalman, William Kentridge, and Vik Muniz–one is particularly intriguing: Florent Morellet. As you might know, the famed Meatpacking District restaurateur was born into an artistic family–his father, abstract minimalist painter Francois Morellet, has many pieces in MoMA's permanent collection and is currently installing seven new permanent window installations at the Louvre in January. (IMAGE: FLORENT MORELLET; EMPTY LICHEN)
"I'm so obsessed with maps," says Morellet, who's been making maps since he was 10 years old. "My work is insane, it's completely conceptual–and realistic." To wit: In a 1997 show in Paris years back, he imagined the City of Light from five different vantage points–think Cairo superimposed over the Seine–and five different climates, complete with tongue-in-cheek almanacs detailing the imagined political, economic, and educational landscapes. For this book's accompanying art show, opening tonight at New York's Christopher Henry Gallery, Florent put Harmon in touch with Soho gallerist Christopher Henry to cull maps from a dozen artists including Morellet, who has created 11 new pieces, including a series in tribute to his late patron and friend Roy Lichtenstein. Though Florent doesn't have any new designs on another restaurant at the moment, he may be forging a new path into the hospitality game soon.
MICHAEL SLENSKE: Hello, how are you?
FLORENT MORELLET: Great, how are you?
SLENSKE: Great. So how's it been preparing for this show?
MORELLET: I did a dozen pieces. Most of them I did recently in the past couple of months. I mean I was working to the wire. I've been working every day and every night for the past week. In the book what Kaite chose are three pieces I did with lichen, you know the moss. I did a picture together with a graphic designer I've been working with for 20 years named Douglas Riccardi. He helped me work on the pictures digitally to isolate the light away from it's background and turn it into a nice image. I was seeing maps everywhere and lichen really looks like the map of an island, especially a volcanic island.
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10/29/2009 05:30 PM
Whether you take the bowldlerized oral history of Andy Warhol as gospel or not, there's little doubt that he was one of the more visionary artists of the 20th century. (Take this very magazine as your example). But that vision rarely began with Warhol, according to Tony Scherman and David Dalton's exhaustively researched, seductively written new history Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (HarperCollins).
Chief among those usurped visions is the revelation that Warhol paid uptown gallerist-turned-novelist Muriel Latow for the idea to paint Campbell's soup cans. Ironically, he cut her a check for $100, the same amount each of the 32 paintings were originally priced at in his inaugural 1962 show at L.A.'s Ferus Gallery, before Irving Blum decided to keep them all (later selling the lot to MoMA for $15 million).
"The Muriel Latow thing was stunning to hear that it actually happened," says Dalton of the event, which occured around the time Warhol would've seen (and freaked out about) Lichtenstein's Girl With A Ball at the Castelli Gallery. "But, if you think about it, if you were writing a movie about a character like Andy, that would be just the perfect thing. I guess we should've reproduced the check. It's in the Warhol Museum," he says. "But if you had given that idea to someone else in that group of artists nobody would've done it in the way that he did it. Part of why he was so successful is that he was so American."
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10/26/2009 11:40 AM
There was no shortage of fireworks at last Friday's CMJ showcase put on by The Hours and High Rise PR at Norwood. Woody Harrelson and Gerard Butler stopped by, a fight broke out toward the end, and the Aussies were out in full force, including Sydney's currently unsigned Sherlock's Daughter, in town for the month to record an album in New York, and a DJ set by the Midnight Juggernauts. Though soft, one of the most intriguing performances of the night came from opening act Via Tania. Before she went on, singer-songwriter Tania Bowers actually prevented the building from flooding. "I found this bathroom on the third floor that was quiet, and I was doing my warmups when all this water started rushing out of the wall because the pipe broke," she says. "When I came out everyone thought I was some MacGyver or something, but all I did was turn off the main [pipe]."
Born in Sydney, the 34 year-old chanteuse, grew up playing music and went on to form the garage pop act SPDFGH with her older sister Kim as a teenager, opening for bands like The Breeders and Bikini Kill when they came to town. Always writing songs for herself, she broke off from her sister at the age of 21, moved to Chicago's Ukrainian Village and started composing her own songs. With a big whispery voice and a quirky guitar-drums-and-synthesizer sound that draws on jazz, punk, and hip-hop, her just-released album, Moon Sweet Moon, could easily become the soundtrack to your next breakup, or the next Zack Braff film, or both. We chatted for a bit about the album before her Saturday night showcase at Joe's Pub.
SLENSKE: Where would say your sound comes from: Australia or Chicago?
BOWERS: It's weird. I don't know, not Chicago. I don't think there's particularly anything that makes me want to make music that's right around me.
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10/22/2009 04:54 PM
On the eve of their initial exhibition last year at New York's Salon 94 Freemans, I stopped by Marilyn Minter's Soho studio for a peek at her Mouth series. Not unlike Hans Namuth's photographs of Jackson Pollock, Minter had captured subjects marking glass—in the latter case, models regurgitating unreal foodstuffs. Minter's probing, sometimes repulsing investigations into consumer culture, and the work's slick pop sensibility have opened her work to a variety of commercial clients—not just luxury brands like Tom Ford, but cosmetics giant MAC and Supreme skateboards.
In preparation for her show at Regen Projects, we ask Minter what she learned from Madonna. For the full interview click on to Art in America.
Marilyn Minter, Saturday through Decebmer 5 at Regen Projects and Regen Projects II, 633 N. Almont Drive and 9016 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles. Left: Pamela Anderson, Tanline, 2007–2009. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.
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10/20/2009 12:25 PM
David Corio, Salt-n-Pepa at Radio City Music Hall, New York City, May 27, 1992
"Part of the story of the image of rock is censorship, and driving people crazy," explains Gail Buckland, the photo historian behind the forthcoming book Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955-Present (Knopf). Another part of the story, according to Buckland, is quite literally about answering the question: Who shot rock & roll? She sets out for answers with an exhaustive tome and multi-sensory exhibition of the same name, which she's curated for the Brooklyn Museum.
If the stories here can be called answers, there's Philip Townsend's tales about his photographs of the Rolling Stones in a literal gutter (they were trying perhaps a little too hard to change their nice-guy reputations); of how David Bowie learned to strike his pose in front of the editor of Sixteen magazine (awkwardly); and the strange censoring of a toilet on the cover of The Mamas and the Papas' "If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears."
The six-section exhibition is equally ambitious, with audio histories provided by many of the photographers, a special room meant to replicate Henry Diltz's famed slideshow parties (where he'd gather all his famous friends and show reels of shots he'd snapped of them), and a special percussion accompaniment inspired by Debbie Harry. "We went out to dinner and she's just hitting the table, getting a beat going and she says, 'When I walk around an exhibition I just want to hear some good percussion,'" recalls Buckland. "So we have that. And Blondie is playing the opening." Not a bad way to kickoff a rock show.
MICHAEL SLENSKE: You've written a number of photo books like Fox Talbot and The Invention of Photography, The Magic Image, and did the photo research for Harold Evans' history The American Century. But where did this one start?
GAIL BUCKLAND: It was my friend Jonathan Mauder's idea—not mine, because I'm certainly no expert in rock 'n roll. He always loved Rolling Stone's book of photographs, to which there hasn't been an update. I've been around long enough to remember when fashion was a stepchild and museums wouldn't show fashion photographs because it was too commercial. Gradually, different genres are brought into the pantheon. So many of the images that shape our consciousness come from our teen years and young adulthood and we often don't even know who took them.
SLENSKE: Were there any such definitive images for you?
BUCKLAND: I remember thinking immediately of Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and seeing Dylan and Suze Rotolo walking down that snowy street somewhere in New York. I wanted to get out of my teenage bedroom and go wherever they were going, and it turns out the man that took the photograph lives on the Upper West Side. He's my neighbor. Henry Diltz, whose photograph of Tina Turner is on the cover, spent his life taking pictures of his friends—Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Eagles, Joni Mitchell. He said his whole career nobody spoke to him like I spoke to him because I came and I said, "I'd like to see you, what you've done." He said, "What, Joni? What do you want to see?" I said, "No, I want to see you."
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