Interview

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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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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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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With "The Americans" Robert Frank solidified his position among photography legends, as evidenced by the success the Met's current exhibition of those 83 poignant, era-defining snapshots. Though decidedly less exposed, the Swiss-born artist's film ventures were just as evocative, and caught their subjects off-guard in a way that idolizes and destroys them at the same time. In fact, viewers of Cocksucker Blues might not realize Frank was the man who shot the seminal Rolling Stones documentary, which was banned by the band for pulling the curtain back on their drug use and hard partying lifestyle. Frank also is near the source of the meta genre that Charlie Kaufman has come to embrace, with his first feature length film Me and My Brother. Co-written by playwright Sam Shepard and debuted at the 1968 Venice Film Festival to raves, the film revisits two of the Beat subjects from Frank's 28-minute short, Pull My Daisy, on a cross-country campus book tour with Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, and Orlovsky's catatonic brother, Julius, whom they signed out of a New York psychiatric ward in the mid-sixties. Read the full story on Art in America. (PHOTO: ROBERT FRANK'S ME AND MY BROTHER)

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