Against a dark, monochromatic background, a figure appears. Wearing a distinctly red robe and not much else, their gaze is penetrative, their hand on their chest evokes an equally surprising look back at the viewer in return. The red halo around the person, as if a reflection from the clothes, adds mystery to the work, yet it gives nothing away. But while all these representational elements certainly inform the painting and add to the public’s possible interpretation of it, what struck me is the exquisite brushwork. The character’s face, the single stroke that comes to define their lip and thus the whole facial expression, the poignant white around the pupils. The way all these movements come together in perfect harmony to create poetry that is this painting.

Fly In League With The Night

It’s hard to believe none of the people in some 80 paintings in this exhibition are real. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (born 1977 in London) combines drawings, found images and imagination to give life to ambiguous characters based on these visual notes. Stemming from the artist’s scrapbook, they appear in everyday scenes, in intimate and timeless moments, becoming somebody and nobody at the same time. It is precisely because these people could be any people that we can relate to them so deeply. This is also why this artist is finally in the spotlight she deserves, amid the rise of figurative painting on the international art scene.

Indeed, that very first portrait I saw in this show is a great example of Yiadom-Boakye’s practice as a whole, which we can describe it as a threefold one.

There is the figure depicted, based on a color, a movement, or a gesture. These characters are usually depicted resting, observing, or dancing, in an intimate conversation. Sometimes there is nothing or very little accompanying them on canvas (or linen). The backdrop is usually dark, almost the same hue as the characters’ skin. Sometimes there is an animal, or an endless landscape – all designed to ignite our imagination and have us write out their stories ourselves.

I mention “writing” here on purpose, because aside from being visual narratives, Yiadom-Boakye’s artworks are also poetry, prose. According to the artist, fiction and narration are both profoundly present. “I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about,” she says. The exhibition title itself, “Fly In League With The Night,” is taken from a poem by the artist, written especially for this presentation. The titles of the paintings can be seen as extensions of the prose, she says, as additional brushstrokes on the picture plane. And so, we have painting titles such as “Repurposed for Songs,” or “No Such Luxury,” or “A Passion Like No Other,” again providing very little actual context to the work and asking us to do it instead.

Finally, there is the act of painting itself. Yiadom-Boakye explores the potential of color, composition, light and tone, improvising in a conversation between paint, brush, and canvas. The paintings are generally dark in color palette, with palpable, thick strokes that examine the way the human eye perceives color. Because of that, and the way the artworks were lit inside Moderna Museet, I explored different points of view of each work, each angle giving me something I hadn’t seen before. Additionally, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye never uses a ready-made black, but instead mixes blues and browns to capture all the nuances and hues – something which can be seen in many of the paintings on display, if you pay enough attention.

Almost always, as well, there is a single or couple of elements that stand out in the paintings. Sometimes it’s a brightly painted piece of clothing, other times it’s the whiteness of a cigarette, or the subject’s teeth, or the redness of a parrot.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Moderna Museet Stockholm

A contemporary artist, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye obtained her MA degree at the Royal Academy Schools in 2003. In 2010, the late curator Okwui Enwezor gave her an exhibition at Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2013, she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. The exhibition “Fly In League With The Night,” which was previously shown at Tate Modern in London (December 2020-May 2021), is the most extensive survey of the artist’s career to date.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Wikipedia page states that “her work has contributed to the renaissance in painting the Black figure.” While “painting the Black figure” certainly isn’t a new phenomenon, I would argue that it is one pushed by the mechanisms behind today’s contemporary art market. The white Western contemporary art canon has been showing an interest in Black figurative painters that center Black people in their work. It is a phenomenon that perhaps did start before the Black Lives Matter movement’s 2020 protests, but was definitely pushed by it into the mainstream.

As usual, the two sides of the mainstream coin will show again here: the Black painters will finally benefit from it by getting the spot within it that they deserve, but are also in risk of being forever referred to as “painters of Black figuration” instead of just “painters of figuration.”

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is not new to this business. In my opinion, her work is in no need of contributing to anything. Perhaps the artist’s own quote is best explains this view:

“Blackness has never been other to me. Therefore, I’ve never felt the need to explain its presence in the work anymore than I’ve felt the need to explain my presence in the world, however often I’m asked. I’ve never liked being told who I am, how I should speak, what to think and how to think it. I’ve never needed telling.”

“Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Fly In League With The Night” is on view at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden until September 19, 2021.

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Airbnb is a privately held global company headquartered in San Francisco that operates an online market place and hospitality service which is accessible via its website and mobile apps. It started off in 2008 and has since date hosted guests and helped to make sharing a space easy, enjoyable and safe.

The Louvre Museum is the world’s largest art museum and a historic monument in Paris, France. It is home to hundreds of thousands of pieces of art. The Louvre pyramid is one of the most iconic landmarks in Paris which also serves as the main entrance to the Louvre Museum. It is a large glass and metal pyramid that was designed by Chinese American architect I.M Pei and is surrounded by three smaller pyramids in the main courtyard of the Louvre palace in Paris.

Airbnb and Louvre Museum have come together to offer an amazing once-in-a-lifetime experience to two lucky winners. The special offer is part of the Louvre’s celebrations of the 30^th birthday of the pyramid entrance of the Louvre Museum. Contrary to the norm where we get to spend only a few hours in a museum during the day, this time round you might get to experience the world’s largest museum at night. The special night will include an exquisite dinner and drinks alongside the company of the “Mona Lisa Painting” and “Venus De Milo” on the night of April 30^th without any other visitors pushing past to get a better photo with the painting.

After wining and dining, the two will get to relax in Napoleon ILL’s rococo salon before the guests retire to their sleeping quarters in a frosted glass miniature pyramid. They will however not have the freedom to move around in the museum but they will get a personal tour by an art historian.

The museum has continued to attract a wider audience especially in the last year where it broke its record of attendance by welcoming 10 million visitors. The record number was helped by some blockbuster shows including the music video “Apes**t” by Beyoncé and Jay Z that was filmed in the museum.

For a chance to spend a night with Mona Lisa, all you need to do is fill out Airbnb’s form which asks why you think you are Mona Lisa’s perfect guest and  whether you are able to travel between April 28^th and May 2^nd. The deadline to apply for the exclusive night in the Louvre museum ends on April 12 at 6pm Eastern Standard Time.

This is an amazing chance to experience the world’s largest museum when the doors shut and the lights go out under the skies of Paris.

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Italy has stood ground on its firm decision of declining to lend the artworks one of its greatest natives, to France. What is termed as this year’s “greatest cultural event” at the Louvre Museum in Paris, is expected to mark the 500^th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci. However, an agreement between Italy and France, to have Leonardo’s works lent on loan to the Museum has been scrapped off by Italy’s government. According to Italy’s undersecretary in the ministry of culture Lucia Borgonzoni, two years ago the former minister of culture Dario Franceschini signed an agreement, to lend several paintings as well as drawings to France for the Louvre Museum exhibition in honour of Leonardo.

Borgonzoni asserts that the signed deal of having the works at the exhibition puts Italy on the margins of a great cultural event, terming that the artist is by far remembered as one of their own, “Leonardo is Italian; he only died in France”. The artistic master worldly known for his painting “The Monalisa” was born in Anchiano, Italy in 1452 and passed away in France in the year 1519. Borgonzoni is now requesting to have the whole deal revised on the basis of having the nation’s interest put on notice as a major concern, “Where museums’ autonomy is concerned, the nation’s interest cannot come second, the French cannot have everything.”

The director of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence Eike Schmidt, said that the three paintings in their possession: The Annunciation, The Adoration of the Magi, and The Baptism of Christ would not be lent to the Louvre Museum as they as too fragile to be moved. However at the moment questions on why the condition of the paintings was not discussed ahead of this year (when the exhibition is set to take place) are being raised.

With another concern emerging, who would have thought it would turn out to be a tit for tat fair game? Schmidt was quoted citing the Museum’s policy to never lend “The Mona Lisa”, “I am sure my French colleagues at Louvre will support me when I apply the same rules to our Leonardo paintings that they apply to the Mona Lisa,”

Both Italy and France are preparing exhibitions this year marking the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo, with Italy still seeking ways to access the Mona Lisa. The Louvre has repeatedly brushed requests to allow the Mona Lisa to be shown in Italy, with claims that is owned by the France since the French Royal Family acquired it right after the artist’s death.  

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Each year at this time I make the trip to my childhood home and stare at a refrigerator full of holiday cards from distant relatives and old family friends. Many of these cards include an annual photo, each year the same people in the same configuration, in front of the same fireplace, or a new vacation location. In the spirit of the season, here are fifteen artworld family photos.

Merry Christmas from the Impressionists

1. Above is the painting A Studio in the Batignolles by Henri Fantin-Latour. This image depicts a bunch of the French Impressionists, including Manet, Renoir, Monet, and the critic Emile Zola. An oil painting of an artist’s friends and colleagues that probably took weeks to complete really makes you appreciate the immediacy of Instagram.

Let It Snow, the Futurists

2. This is a Futurist banquet in Tunis with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of the Futurist Manifesto, front and center. (image via)

Winter Greetings, The Ashcan School

3. Here we have the Ashcan School artists at the painter John French Sloan’s Philadelphia Studio in 1898. The original “Philadelphia Five,” included the great American artists George Bellows and Edward Hopper, among others. (image via)

Spreading Holiday Cheer, the Stieglitz’s

4. Meanwhile, over in New York is the Steiglitz Circle. This is an early photo, so Alfred is in there, but not Georgia O’Keeffe or Arthur Dove.  (image via)

Peace, Love & Joy from Weimar

5. This is a photograph from the Meeting of the Contstructivists and Dadaists in Weimar, 1922. Pictured here are some of the movements’ heavy hitters like Theo van Doesburg in the middle with his makeshift hat, El Lissitsky, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and Hans Richter. (image via)

Happy Holidays from The Bauhaus

6. Here are members of the Bauhaus on the roof of their building, 1926.From left: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl, Oskar Schlemmer.(image via)

Seasons Greetings from The Surrealists

7. And here are the Surrealists – among them, Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, Salvador Dalí, Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, and Man Ray.

Feliz Navidad!

8. While Frida and Diego have a variety of options to choose from for their annual holiday greeting card, we need at least three people to fit in our group theme. Here they are with architect Albert Khan. (image via)

Celebrate The Season with The Irascibles!

9. Can you imagine what their Christmas party would have been like? Everyone drunk, night ending with fist fights and arguing over representation. From left, rear: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottleib, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne;(next row) Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst (w. bow tie), Jackson Pollock (in striped jacket), James Brooks, Clyfford Still (leaning on knee), Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin; (in foreground) Theodoros Stamos (on bench), Barnett Newman (on stool), Mark Rothko (with glasses). (image via)

Merry Fuckin’ X-Mas from The Factory

10. This Richard Avedon portrait of the Warhol Factory, “Andy Warhol and members of The Factory, New York, October 30, 1969”, would actually be a really amazing thing to see on your mom’s ‘fridge. In addition to some beautiful feathered 1970’s hair and a whole lotta D, this photo features the fabulous Warhol Superstars Viva, Candy Darling, and Brigid Berlin. (image via)

Happy New Year from the Castelli Family

11. This is an invitation to the birthday party of legendary galleriest Leo Castelli by Hans Namuth in 1985 with Castelli and  his artists: Ellsworth Kelly, Dan Flavin, Joseph Kosuth, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, Nassos Daphnis, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Salvatore Scarpitta, Richard Artschwager, Mia Westerlund Roosen, Cletus Johnson, Keith Sonnier, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Edward Ruscha, James Rosenquist, and Robert Barry.(image via)

Christmas Greetings from Mr. Chow’s

12. Here is another group shot that includes man-about-town Andy Warhol. The staged group photo seemed to be a popular format in the late 80s. (image via)

Fort Greene Felicitations

13. This image which features artists from music and film as well as art such as Lorna Simpson and Spike Lee. You can see these people featured in the documentary Brooklyn Boheme, which is available on Netflix. (image via)

Holiday Greetings from Christie’s

14. While flipping through a recent Art in America print issue, I clocked this double page spread which is not a cover photo for a feature on the auction house, but an advertisement. An advertisement for what, exactly? Well I’m not quite sure other than that these Christie’s staff are serious, they have names, and they sure seem to like hanging around on installation equipment. It mostly bums me out, thinking about the art handlers who had to unpack, move, place, and then re-crate those big Basquiat and Mark Grotjahn paintings in the background for this casual photoshoot. (image – author scan from Art In America November 2013)

Warm Winter Wishes from Work of Art!

15. And finally, everyone’s favorite bunch of reality artists – the cast of Work of Art Season 1. Just kidding! (image via)

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New York City – Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Mike Kelley’s body of work is raw, unsettling, and complex. Unfortunately, the retrospective currently on view at MoMA/PS1 is none of those things. Perhaps this exhibition would have been well situated at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center about 10 years ago, when the facilities were a little less polished and the galleries weren’t packed with the brunch & stroller crowd (despite, or maybe because of, the adult content warning that greets visitors at the entrance). This highly anticipated exhibition has received top marks from all of the critics, which is not to say that it is a bad show – just not the one that I wanted to see.

(image via)

The ground floor galleries are largely dedicated to a collection of works dealing with Kandor, the capital city of Superman’s home planet Krypton. A storyline in the comic involves the villain Brainiac capturing the city, shrinking it, and containing it in a bell jar. Kelley’s work attempts to arrive at a definitive depiction through sculptures, animations, and videos. These works are visually dramatic but conceptually obscure. The video Superman Recites Selections from ‘The Bell Jar’ and Other Works by Sylvia Plath offers a bright reprieve. It features a hunk in a dimestore costume against a black backdrop doing just as the title indicates. This weird conflation of American literary cultures is more immediately felt than the obscurity of the sculptures. It takes some time to uncover, but there is a connection to Kelley’s work on The Uncanny through repetition of images, subject matter from the collective unconscious, and anxiety embodied in the disaster and confinement of the shrunken city. The artist’s deep delve into the subject is fascinating, but if you didn’t make it past that first group of galleries, you would have thought Mike Kelley was some kind of pop-architect.

Similarly to the focus on Kandor, the main gallery on the third floor is dedicated exclusively to the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series. This room features numerous loud and confusing multi-media installations. Found images that might be photographs from yearbooks or community newsletters are re-enacted or are the starting point for videos and sculptures. Meant to exorcise repressed childhood trauma, the resultant works are equal parts humorous and horrifying.

There are so many different moments and fixations in the artist’s career – collaborations with contemporaries like Paul McCarthy and Tony Oursler, performances, the astronaut John Glenn, Detroit, stuffed animals – that it is impossible to summarize everything in one blog post. However it would be remiss of me not to mention one piece that exists in the collective unconscious of a certain generation, which is the group of photographs that became the cover of Sonic Youth’s album Dirty.

 (image via)

The piece is a grid of photographic portraits of stuffed animals and at the center, the artist just as lonely, frayed, and pitifully adorable as the other little discarded weirdos. I usually shirk away from imposing too much on an artist’s interior life, but just as we anthropomorphize the creatures in the photos, the artist’s face is a blank canvas on which to project our own readings.

Disappointingly, there is no fulcrum to the show, no hard earned climax, and not a clear understanding of this artist. With the artist’s suicide in 2012, what might have been a mid-career retrospective suddenly became a definitive exhibition of Kelley’s gesamtkunstwerk. A subway ad touts the show as “the first comprehensive retrospective”, which I’m not sure is a fact that warrants positive marketing. Maybe the curators could have used a little more time to wrap their heads around Kelley’s career. The work itself is muscular and bears the evidence of the artist as an incredible influence on other generations. This exhibition, however, might be a rare instance where the artist serves the institution with credibility, rather than the other way around.

Go see it though. Kelley deserves your attention and there is so much to see and think about in his work. Kelley is the kind of artist whose work marinates and reveals itself over time, and warrants repeat viewings. The ultimate tribute to Kelley would be to restage the retrospective in its entirety in ten years time, the way he did with his 1992 ICA London exhibition The Uncanny at Tate Liverpool in 2004. By 2023 we may have had time enough to begin our comprehension.

On view until February 2, 2014 at MoMA/P.S.1

Written by Rose Edward

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Written by Laura West

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Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey – October 11, 2013–March 9, 2014 – At the Brooklyn Museum

Wangechi Mutu‘s new show, A Fantastic Journey, is currently up, and it is beyond a feast for the eyes. One could search her name, and find a plethora of digital photographs of her collages, but to say you’ve really seen Mutu’s work, you need to see it in person. The saturation and dissipation of paint, with all the intricate combinations of pasted photographs, is hard to completely see on a computer screen.

For those who are not familiar with her collage work, she renders the black female form with application of intensely innovative surface quality techniques, all along challenging those who use the term “exotic” to categorize a black woman. Perhaps the title, “A Fantastic Journey” comes from the visual voyage the viewer takes as they stumble across the hidden creatures, and varied patterns lying within a figure that has so many colors, that it brings a new meaning to the word, “colored woman.”

She demonstrates a mastery of balance between ambience and rich, detailed content. The hidden treasures found within her work range from decontextualized elements of animal heads and limbs cut out from magazines, combined with violent red splatter reminiscent of blood massacres, to pornographic images, and machinery parts, all of which compose most often in her works, a slender female warrior.

Viewing these images from a fine artist perspective, she nails all they needs to make visually pleasing and evocative imagery within her collages. Nothing less than extraordinary intuitive placement, each pattern synergistically flows from one to the next. If an art student is running short of what mark to make next, it is urgent to see this show, because Mutu knows how to experiment with color and juxtaposition.

When and if you see Wangechi Mutu’s show at the Brooklyn Museum, on the fourth floor, I strongly suggest you actually appreciate it, and pause at each collage, considering the painstaking details, the sophisticated color choices, and those suggestions of gender, war, race, colonialism, global consumption, and science-fiction. Don’t breeze past them, because you will regret not being attentive to the wide range of visual language she has developed at and since her education at Cooper Union and Yale. Each of her collages has its own unique hook to allure the viewer into its clusters of warm polka dots, and black mold ornamentations curving to the contours of the figure, or the figure’s bulbous lips and wide nose.

Her collages were her strongest work. Mutu is known for her collages, but this show was also an opportunity for her to demonstrate her strength in video installation, and sculpture. Her video work touches upon how “wild” and “untamed” her black female characters are, as one of her videos displays the artist, herself, eating cake without utensils in a fancy white dress, in some outdoors environment. Her other video, which immerses you within its cinema-like presence, displays a woman with a giant attachment of mechanized, industrial forms, oozing, smoking, eating bats. Her video work recalls the attention to detail and conglomeration of content that her collage work does, but it also moves on-screen.

She also installed trees made of multi-colored carpet throughout the exhibition space, and in another room (photo not included), she hung black plastic bags in tied hemp string from the ceiling. Her sculptures omitted the knowledge of color, tonality, and heavy-subject-matter-infused photographs. Her sculptures are simple, exploring the wrinkles the materials make. Her sculptures didn’t exploit the colors that people often associate with exotic fruits and flowers, but rather stuck with browns, grays, and earthy hues.

Wangechi demonstrates her vast imagination, and attention to detail so vividly in her fiery, colorful collages, I was hoping to literally walk into one of her worlds, being able to touch the different textured forms, smell the body odor of one of her figures, or hell, even eat some exotic fruit off the branches of her installed trees. Her installations are shadowed by her collage work. Mutu seems to work liberally, without restraint in her collages, and she challenged herself with her sculptures. My hopes were not let down by seeing this show, but I wonder if in the future, her installation and immersive sculptural work will truly compete with the seductive nature of her collages and 2 dimensional work. She is certainly in her element on flat surfaces, but it seems apparent that she could further push her installation work.

I have no doubt that this artist will continue to grow, and share her incredible gift with the world, especially through her 2-d work, but I’m still waiting for her sculptural work to grab me like her collages do.

Written and photographed by Andrew Kaminski

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Manchester, England – Monday, June 24, 2013

In a bizarre, as-of-yet *unexplained ancient art phenomena, a statue dedicated to Osiris, the god of death, in an enclosed museum display case in Manchester, England is spinning like a top…a very, very, slow top.  *(well, not conclusively)

“[Physicist Brian Cox] thinks it’s ‘differential friction,'” Price told The Daily Mail, referring to the process by which two surfaces — in this case the statue’s stone and the glass shelf, “cause a subtle vibration which is making the statuette turn.” Cox believes foot traffic or vibrations from the street outside are causing the mysterious movement, but Price refutes that theory. “It has been on those surfaces since we have had it and it has never moved before,” he said.

I’ve always thought a Pharoah’s curse involved something outside of the five elements of hip-hop.  If this is all the ancient Egyptians were afraid of, yo that’s kinda funny – Ra’s got fat base lines like Russell Simmons steals money.

My best guess is that another one of the statues Stepped-up, and Osiris had to pull out some killer, thriller moves.

My advice for any statue who doesn’t want to get smoked by Osiris…

Try throwing in a windmill, it’s always impressive.

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

[via Gawker via DailyMail]

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Thursday, April 11th

11:30 am   MoMA TALKS : Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 – by Elisabeth Bardt Pellerin – MoMA
1:30 pm     MoMA TALKS : Highlights from the Collection:1885-1945 – by Elisabeth Bardt Pellerin – MoMA
6:00 pm    Desaturated Rainbow: Opening Reception – Field Projects – W.26th St., NYC
6:00 pm    Stanley Whitney | Other Colors I Forget: Opening Reception – Team Gallery – 83 Grand St.
6:00 pm    Echo of Echo Pt.1 | Joo Yeon Park: Opening Reception – Doosan Gallery – W.25th St.
6:00 pm    Bryan Graf | Broken Lattice: Opening Reception – Yancey Richardson Gallery – W. 20th St.
6:00 pm    Tallur L.N. | New Yorked: Opening Reception- Jack Shainman Gallery – W.20th St.
6:00 pm    Charles Fréger Wilder Mann: Opening Reception – Yossi Milo Gallery -245 10th Ave.
6:00 pm    John Klukas | Shape Shifter: Opening Reception – 511 Gallery – 252 11th Avenue, NYC
6:00 pm    Joshua Lutz | Hesitating Beauty and Amsterdam: Opening Reception – ClampArt Gallery – W55th St.
6:00 pm    3 & 6 | Anoka Faruqee, On Kawara, cont..: Opening Reception – Leo Koenig – W.23rd St. NYC
6:30 pm    Where are the Utopian Visionaries? Architecture of Social Exchange: Panel – Cooper Union
7:00 pm    Animal Farm : The Musial – by The Bruce High Quality Foundation – East Village
7:00 pm    Brain Cave Festival – Europa – Greenpoint, Brooklyn
7:00 pm    EXHIBITION: Manet | Great Art On Screen- NYU Skirball Center – West Village, NYC
8:00 pm    RAW:natural born artists NYC Presents MARVEL – 52 Walker St., NYC

Friday, April 12th

6:00 pm    Wessel Castle Alli Miller + Trey Burns : Opening Reception – et al projects – 56 Bogart, Bushwick, Bklyn
6:00 pm    Ben Durham | Portraits, Maps, Texts: Opening Reception: Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery – W.24th St.,NYC
6:00 pm    Seeing Double | Ellen Stagg & Hiroshi Kumagai – Mighty Tanaka – Dumbo, Bklyn
6:00 pm    Assonanze/Dissonanze: Opening Reception: Italian Cultural Institute – 686 Park Ave.,NYC
7:00 pm    Buff Monster & L’Amour Supreme : Number Of The Beast- Cotton Candy Machine, Williamsburg, Bklyn
7:00 pm    Definitions 03: Brainstorming for Ideas City 2013 theme: Untapped Capital – 97 Kenmare, NYC
7:00 pm    Uncharted Waters: REVERSE 2013: Opening Reception: – Reverse – Brooklyn, NY
7:00 pm    Static: Elana Adler and Hannah Lamar Simmons: Calico – Brooklyn, NY
7:00 pm    18 drawings and 1 painting: Paul Pagk: Opening Reception – Studio 10 – Bushwick, Bklyn

Saturday, April 13th

12:00 pm   Greenpointers Spring Market – From The Source – Greenpoint, Brooklyn
3:00 pm   Rainbow Book Fair – Holiday Inn –Midtown, NYC
4:00 pm   Lili Reynauld-Dewar | I Am Intact And I Don’t Care: Opening Reception – Clearing – Brooklyn
4:00 pm   Families/Cities Shift: Opening Reception- Susan Teller Gallery – 568 Broadway, NYC
6:00 pm   Rutgers MFA Show – White Box – Lower East Side
6:00 pm   useful pictures: Opening Reception -Michael Matthews – Harlem
6:00 pm   Janine Polak “Shoulder Touch” – Sardine– Bushwick, Bklyn
6:00 pm   De-rezzed: Henry Chung and Jennifer Grimyser : Opening Reception – Harbor – Ridgewood, Qns
6:30 pm    Gravity Light: New Paintings by Mike Olin: Opening Reception – Parallel Art Space – Ridgewood, Qns
7:00 pm    Gridworks : Bill Miller:  Opening Reception – Transfer Gallery – Bushwick, Bklyn
7:00 pm    Cold War Kids : Live Performance- @ Webster Hall, Nyc, NY
7:30 pm    Vintage NYC Magazine Launch Party – West 40th St.
8:00 pm    n+1 Magazine Issue 16 Launch Party– Bushwick, Bklyn

Sunday, April 14th

11:00 am – 4:30 pm    FIRST EVER: Ridgewood Market – Gottscheer Hall – Ridgewood, Qns
3:00 pm    Marking Spaces: Opening Reception – Queens Museum of Art

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New York, NY – Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Some of our favorite characters in film may hold down day jobs.  They may be students, professors, doctors, or lawyers by trade, but secretly they are artists.  Whether they say so on screen or not, it resonates with us.  I can spot a fellow artist in a crowd, as well as in film.  Watch as Artiholics salutes some of your favorite film characters for the secret artists they really are, but would most likely never claim to be.

Ferris Bueller is an artist.  A multidisciplinary artist in fact.

He made it not only cool for teenagers to like sports, dating cheerleaders, and driving flashy cars;  but also to make art, act, sing, play musical instruments, and understand computers.  On top of all that, he made it OK for teenagers to appreciate fine art, design, fashion, and architecture.

For a generation recently becoming addicted to a new medium (Mtv, Music Videos) , he helped form a bridge between the perceived elitist fine art Museum world, and the dawning digital computer aided drawing age.

A high school senior in a upper-middle class Chicago suburb, Ferris Bueller is the prototypical epitome of cool. As the Dean’s secretary Grace pointed out, he’s very popular.  “The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, dickheads — They all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.”

Having already taken 8 sick days (day’s off) this semester, his 9th (and most likely final) day of skipping school is just beginning so he wants to make the best of it.  He’s on the verge of having to repeat the grade if he were to get caught, but as he says “How could I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?”, after all “life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you can miss it.”

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So what would the coolest kid in school do on his final High School skip day before he is off to enter the real world?   You might not have really thought about it, but a lot of his day was spent pursuing artistic ventures.

Viewing and experiencing art, architecture, design, performance art, audio visual art, building art installations, hair sculpting, creating digital art, designing interactive audio art pieces, wearing various fashions (more than 15 looks in one day), performing a live on-the-fly foley art mixing, improvisationally impersonating various people, filming a “how to” YOUtube video in a pre-YOUtube world, and headlining two vocal cover songs in a large scale concert – twenty three years before Glee.

Not your typical teenager’s fantasy day off.

Let’s break this down A Day In The Life of the Artist & Art World Maven otherwise known as Ferris Bueller, shot by shot.

ART COLLECTOR / ART APPRECIATOR.

After his parents are convinced he’s sick Ferris sits up. “They bought it!” On the wall behind the head of his bed are some posters of slightly obscure master artworks. Interesting choices and totally above and beyond what most high school art classes ever touch upon.

Fashion #1: Blue and brown blanket.

The top black and white image is  photo of the sculpture “The Kiss” by Rodin.

The lower piece is a self portrait of French Impressionist painter Frédéric Bazille.

MASTER THESPIAN.

The film starts with Ferris Bueller tricking his parent’s into believing he’s sick with a feat of acting and slight of hand stage craft.  “Incredible, one of the worst performances of my career and they never doubted it for a second.” he says post performance, addressing the camera directly.   In this shot you also notice behind him hang a pair of boxing gloves, and what looks to be a (foreshadowing) catcher’s mask on the top of the door to his closet.  The American flag is also hung on the wall the opposite way of how it’s supposed to hang for some reason (the union is supposed to be on the left).

Fashion #2: Red & gray striped robe, white t-shirt.

SELF DOCUMENTARIAN / GUITARIST / PHOTOGRAPHER.

As he sets up the audio for the music he wants to listen to we notice the monitor on the left is a closed-circuit camera feed shooting the chair in his room (with the horse head painted on it).  The sound system and recording / film editing equipment he’s working with is state-of-the art for the time.

In the next shots Ferris takes a seat in front of the camera, documenting his step-by-step explanation of how to convince your parent’s you are sick, all the while he is creating a slipknot, and building what we will later see is part of an elaborate Rube Goldberg esque interactive piece of installation art.  He loops the end of the string around a basketball trophy (thus indicating he is also good at sports, basketball, jumping, aiming a ball, etc.).

Behind him on the left is an electric guitar on a stand, and on the right is an empty tripod, indicating that he not only also plays guitar but also is a photographer.  The window curtains also seem to be made out of a parachute which has been cut in half, probably implying that he has parachuted before and is not afraid of heights.

SLIGHT OF HAND ARTIST / ILLUSIONIST.

“The key to faking out the parents is the Clammy Hands, it’s a good non-specific symptom, I’m a big believer in it…You fake a stomach cramp, and when you’re bent over moaning and whaling, you lick your palms.  It’s a little childish and stupid, but then again, so is High School.” Ferris Bueller, in a step-by-step breaking down of description of how to create the illusion of clammy hands.

HAIR SCULPTOR, CROONER, & SPOKEN WORD BEAT POET.

Ferris takes a shower while styling his hair into a British punk-esque faux hawk while doing a bit of foreshadow-singing Danka Shoen into the shower handle, in between talking about the European Fascism test he would be missing by skipping school.

Fashion #3: Naked with faux hawk.

“It’s not that I condone fascism or any ‘ism’ for that matter. Ism’s, in my opinion, are not good. A person should not believe in an ‘ism,’ he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: ‘I don’t believe in Beatles. I just believe in me.’ A good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus. I’d still have to bum rides off of people.”

Fashion #4: Red towel, white turban.

COMPUTER PROGRAMMER / HACKER

Ferris chills by the pool, before going back inside to hack into the high school’s computer, because every 17-year-old could do that in 1986.

Fashion #5: Sunglasses in hair, shirtless with Jams Shorts, and leather strapped sandals, no socks.

Dean of students Ed Rooney talks to Ferris’ mom about his bad attendance record, and the possibility of holding him back another year.  Ferris slips inside, changing his attendance record in real time from 9 to 2 missed days, while changing his clothes.

Notice that the school computers are green screen, while Ferris has an IBM 5150 with a Intel 8088 processor and a color monitor.   When coding it’s amber type on black screen.

The hacking is a feat that isn’t really dwelled upon, but in reality, if the option was having a high school diploma in 1986, or flunking out (or dropping out) with the programming ability as a 17-year-old to be able to navigate complex code enough to hack computers and alter databases over the primitive internet of 1986, you would pretty much be guaranteed a job at any software engineering firm in the country.  Might as well take a few more days off.

“I asked for a car, I got a computer.  How’s that for being born under a bad sign.”

Fashion #6: Blue collared shirt, white t-shirt.

PERFORMANCE ARTIST / FOLEY ARTIST / AUDIO ENGINEER

He then takes a floppy disk with the sounds of coughing and vomiting, loads that into his digital piano keyboard, connects that into his sound system converting it from playing music into a digital soundboard, and while talking to some freshman on a school payphone he plays the vomit and cough sounds by pressing various corresponding keys to simulate his sickness.

Fashion #7: Green Hawaiian shirt, black & green striped pants, green Converse “Chucks”, white tube socks.

CLASSICALLY TRAINED PIANIST

After performing his sick sound effects to trick his fellow classmates, he plays a bit of Johann Strauss II – The Blue Danube Waltz in programmed coughs and wretches.

DIGITAL PAINTER / DIGITAL ILLUSTRATOR

At this point Ferris is on the phone with Cameron again, trying to convince him that Cameron needs to man-up, get in his piece-of-shit car, and pick him up.  He also reiterates hat it’s his 9th sick day, and if he gets caught, he won’t graduate.  This is an important plot point, or they wouldn’t keep bringing it up, although Rooney pretty much bumbles his way through the film never coming near to Ferris, Sloane or Cameron, it makes for a funny & slapstick subplot.

Fashion #8: White T-shirt, blue jeans, white belt, green socks, black and red sneakers.

He says all of this while left-handedly using a mouse and a primitive 11 swatch paint program to recreate a perfect flipped version of a Amedeo Modialiani’s Reclining Nude.

Creating art with the left hand is a sure sign of a right brain thinking artist.

This has to be one of the first examples of a digital illustrator shown creating art in film history, and the fact that he’s recreating a famous old master painting in pixel form is doubly cool.

Kids watching will most likely just see that he’s haphazardly computer doodling a naked woman, thus validating that it is a stupid gizmo his parent’s got him which is only good for drawing porn and hacking, and instead should have gotten him the car he actually wanted.

But the fact that he’s actually recreating a flipped version of a masterpiece left handed with a mouse is an artistic feat.

JAZZ ENTHUSIAST / FASHION ICON

Although Ferris knows full well he can’t play the clarinet, he knows he can pull off the jazz musician look, he dresses up like this just to fuck around and imagine himself a jazz player.

Fashion #9: Gray hat, blue undershirt.

CLASSIC CAR ENTHUSIAST / FASHION ICON

After putting on a nice suit and tie, Ferris and Cameron head over to Cameron’s dad’s private garage to “borrow” his vintage Ferrari.

Fashion #10: Gray Suit.

PERFORMANCE ARTIST / IMPROV ACTOR / IMPERSONATOR

After putting on a nice suit and tie, Cameron and Ferris take Cameron’s dad’s Ferrari to the school.  Ferris throws a trench coat and fisherman’s hat over the suit to impersonate Ferris’ girlfriend Sloane’s father.  They boost Sloane from school without much effort, and what is perceived to Mr. Rooney as a quasi-incestuous kiss.

Fashion #11: Gray Suit, beige trench coat, fisherman’s hat, sunglasses.

I always thought Ferris resembled Inspector Gadget in this trench.  So did the eventual production team who made the film version of Inspector Gadget years later.

HIGH FASHION ICON:

The three head to the city proper now wearing driving caps, berets and sun glasses.   Ferris has also changed from his suit (which he apparently only put on to initially sit in the Ferrari).  The others must have just sat around while he changed outfits because they are still in their same wardrobe.

Fashion #12: Black, gray, & white leather jacket, leopard print vest, white t-shirt, jeans, sunglasses, beret, black socks, white sneakers.

ARCHITECTURAL TOUR GUIDE

After warily parking the car in a garage they head for the Sears tower, to marvel at the city’s architecture.

Fashion #13: Black, gray, & white leather jacket, leopard print vest, white t-shirt, jeans, black socks, white sneakers

Sloane: “The city looks so peaceful from up here.”

Ferris: “Anything’s peaceful from 1,353 feet.”

SCULPTURAL INSTALLATION ARTIST

CONTEMPORAY CONSTRUCTIONALIST

MIXED-MEDIA INTERACTIVE AUDIO VISUAL ARTIST

Meanwhile, back at home Ferris’ mom stops in to check on him only to be tricked by the Rube Goldberg inspired art installation which mimics Ferris asleep in bed, down to the slight movement and synthetic snoring.  We saw the beginnings of him constructing this contraption when while he was giving the instructions on how to fake-out your parents in to believing you are sick.

To the right of the door is a Renaissance era painting of what looks to be King Henry VIII.  On the far left is a black and white photo of the sculpture “Kiss” by Rodin.    We see by the Cabaret Voltaire poster, as well as the Union Jack on the door, letting us know that Ferris is into other British bands besides The Beatles and The Who.

SOCIOLOGIST / FAN OF PANTOMIME

The next  part of their adventure takes them to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.  Not to interact or learn anything,  just to observe adults in their working world, from behind glass.  Like monkeys in a zoo.  They watch life as though it was a play, or performance art.  Cameron mimics and parodies the various buying and selling gestures of the day traders.  So far this would be like a New Yorker going to the top of the Empire State Building, and then directly to the New York Stock Exchange.  Two very touristy things to do, but hey, he is the coolest kid in school, so he knows best.

The three then venture to a gourmet French Restaurant for a high class dining experience where they con their way through a series of group misdirection and improv exercises, into seats where they enjoy some pancreas at Chez Luis for a near miss with Ferris’ dad.

Meanwhile Mr. Rooney heads to the local Pizza joint where he assumes he will run into Ferris playing video games only to get a spitball of soda from a female model who looks like Ferris from behind in one of his 10 outfits so far in this film, amazingly it happens to be the exact same outfit that appeared on camera most recently.  A smart guess for a place for Ferris to be while playing hookie, but huge coincidence on the outfit similarities. 

Ferris on the other hand is at a Cubs home game, and catches a foul ball.  He catches it bare handed with his right hand, which makes sense for a lefty, as lefties wear their mitt on their right hand.

But strangely when we close in on them Ferris thinks he may have broke his left thumb.  Makes no sense.

Fashion #14: Leopard print vest, white t-shirt,jeans, black socks, white sneakers.

INTERACTIVE AUDIO TECH:

Ed Rooney determined to prove Ferris isn’t sick visits Ferris’ home.  Ferris has rigged (in a masterful feat of audio engineering) the doorbell to trigger a tape recorder to play a prerecorded message, designed to create the illusion that he’s too sick to answer the door.

ART MUSEUM DOCENT:

While Rooney tries and fails to gain entry to the Bueller estate, the trio visit the Art Institute of Chicago, and a beautiful art montage unlike any other in the history of cinema plays out.  Here is the scene with voice over by the film’s writer / director the late & great John Hughes.

We see in this scene that Ferris and friends almost revert to childhood with the wonder they experience. . . by seeing some of the greatest masterpieces of the world in living color.

This inspired a “mimic the statue” moment from me and the other groomsmen at a wedding this summer.

This scene also features 4 second tripod steady holds on paintings, which in movie time is insane.  Featuring the pieces below.

• Nighthawks by Edward Hopper
• Paris Street; Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte
• Improvisation 30 (Cannons) by Wassily Kandinsky
• Painting With Green Center by Kandinsky
• Nude Under Pine Tree by Pablo Picasso
• L’Homme qui marche I by Alberto Giacometti
• The Old Guitarist by Picasso
• The Child’s Bath by Mary Cassatt
• Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz by Amedeo Modigliani
• Day of the God (Mahana No Atua) by Paul Gauguin
• Greyed Rainbow by Jackson Pollock
• Tanktotem No. 1 by David Smith
• Bathers by a River by Henri Matisse
• Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
• Portrait of Balzac by Auguste Rodin
• The Red Armchair by Picasso
• Portrait of Sylvette David by Picasso
• Seated Woman by Picasso
• Maquette for UNESCO Reclining Figure by Henry Moore
• America Windows by Marc Chagall

In speaking of the end shot in this sequence John Hughes talks about Cameron being transfixed on George Seurat’s pointillist painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” which was the centerpiece for the Sondheim play Sunday In The Park With George.

“I always thought this painting was sort of like making a movie, the pointillist style… You don’t have any idea what you’ve made until you step back from it. … The more he looks at it, there’s nothing there. He fears that the more you look at him, the less you see.” John Hughes

Marc Chagall’s  “America Window, 1977”.

Which I would imagine has since become an iconic make-out spot ever since the famous Ferris and Sloane backlit silhouetted kiss.

MUSICAL PERFORMANCE ARTIST:

Ferris crashes the Von Steuben Day Parade and lip-synch croons his heart out to Danka Shoen and the Beatles version of Twist & Shout.

He did it not a moment too soon, because his brother and sister were about to disappear from that photo.

Fashion #15 Leopard print vest, white t-shirt,jeans, hair gelled up, black socks, white sneakers.

After being escorted away from the float Cameron and Sloane wander and talk about their futures.  They walk right under “Flamingo,” a 53-foot tall red steel sculpture by Alexander Calder.

After the parade they get the car out of the garage.

Cameron soon realizes that there are almost 175 extra miles on the odometer.  Shocked he goes into a near catatonic state.  Sloane and Ferris try to get him to respond.  They encourage him to join them in the hot tub, but he just tumbles lifelessly into the deep end of the pool.  Afraid that Cameron has given up on life Ferris dives in after him.

Ferris pulls Cameron to the surface only to find out that Cameron is alive and well, and laughing at him.  It seems Cameron has been baptized by the experiences of the day, and the dunk in the pool pushed him into his next stage of realization, that there are things in life worth living for.  Angry that Cameron made him look like an idiot, Ferris pushes Cameron and Sloane into the pool.

Fashion #16 Snow Leopard print shorts.

They take the car back to Cameron’s dad’s garage.  For the first time Cameron and Sloane are wearing different clothes while Ferris has remained in the same outfit.  After realizing that putting the Ferrari on a jack and running it at high speeds in reverse isn’t rolling the odometer back, Cameron in pure frustration kicks the front of the car in.

What comes next, well. . .

if you haven’t seen it, you have to watch it for yourself.

And remember, if you are a student at Ferris’ school…

Submission deadline for the Art Magazine is May 1st!

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

THIS ARTICLE WAS INSPIRED BY: I was at the gym yesterday and in the Retro Theatre they were playing the classic John Hughes1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  One of the few 80s movies I have probably seen over 10 times, so I ended up prolonging my cardio punching regime to an hour and a half, rather than the usual 38 minutes, in order to see the entire film. I realized a few things upon the dozenth viewing that I might not have otherwise caught- this forced me to really break it down. 

The post Secret Artist: Ferris Bueller – From Ferris Bueller’s Day Off appeared first on Artiholics.