Prada Marfa

Elmgreen and Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2005

Prada Marfa is a permanently installed sculpture by artists Elmgreen and Dragset, situated 2,3 km northwest of Valentine, Texas, just off U.S. Route 90, and about 60 km northwest of the city of Marfa. The installation was inaugurated on October 1, 2005. The artists called the work a pop architectural land art project. The sculpture, realized with the assistance of American architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, cost US$80,000 and was intended to never be repaired, so it might slowly degrade back into the natural landscape.

Designed to resemble a Prada store, the building is made of adobe bricks, plaster, paint, glass pane, aluminum frame, MDF, and carpet. The installation’s door is nonfunctional. On the front of the structure there are two large windows displaying actual Prada wares, shoes and handbags, picked out and provided by Miuccia Prada herself from the fall/winter 2005 collection. Prada allowed Elmgreen and Dragset to use the Prada trademark for this work. Prada had already collaborated with Elmgreen and Dragset in 2001 when the artists attached signage to the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City with the false message “Opening soon – PRADA”.

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AIDS research: Cured of HIV?

8 March 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Culture Main Science No Comments

From the printed edition of The Economist, March 19, 2013

In journalism, cynics suggest, three data points are enough for a trend. As of March 4th, AIDS researchers hope two might be sufficient. On that day Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University announced to the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, in Atlanta, Georgia, that a patient under her care had been cured of HIV infection. The announcement was hedged with caveats (“functionally cured” was the exact term used). But the bottom line was clear. Dr Persaud thinks her patient, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, has joined Timothy Brown, a man known to many as the “Berlin patient”, as a human who was once infected with HIV and now no longer is.

The girl was born infected because her mother was infected but was not under treatment at the time (which would normally prevent mother-to-child transmission). She was given standard anti-retroviral drugs almost immediately and for 18 months afterwards. Doctors then lost track of her for five months and when she returned to their attention, they found the virus had vanished. Half a year later, despite the fact that she is no longer taking anti-AIDS medicine, there is no sign of HIV having returned.

This is a result of great potential significance. Mr Brown’s cure was effected because his bone marrow (and thus the pertinent part of his immune system, which HIV infects) was destroyed and replaced during a course of treatment for leukaemia. That is hardly a viable approach for most people. But if HIV infection can be cured with drugs, as Dr Persaud’s observations suggest, a whole new line of investigation opens up.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21573087-american-child-seems-have-been-cured-hiv

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Jeff Wall

19 December 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Main Photography No Comments

Jeff Wall, Boxing and Boy Falls From Tree, 2010

Over the course of Jeff Wall’s career, his versatile and disciplined approach to the possibilities of the medium of photography to ‘paint modern life’ has resulted in a body of work notable in its attention to composition, scale, color and construction and for its hybrid integration of the documentary and the cinematographic, the ‘street’ and the monumental, two directions he has pursued simultaneously, while being partial to neither.

‘The Crooked Path’ , an exhibition that surveys Jeff Wall’s work from the seventies to today in conjunction with the work of fifty-nine other artists, has just opened at the CGAC, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and will be on view until February 28, 2012. The exhibition was organized by the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and opened there in spring of this year.

Jeff Wall’s work has been seen in a number of large solo exhibitions over the past few years. These include ‘Transit’ at the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen, in Dresden in 2010, and ‘Jeff Wall: Exposure’, a special commissioned exhibition of new black & white works in conjunction with earlier works, at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin in 2007. That same year an important retrospective featuring a selection of over 40 works, was shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and travelled to The Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2005, ‘Jeff Wall, Photographs 1978-2004’ was seen at the Schaulager, Munchenstein, Basel, for which a catalogue raisonné was published. A related, revised exhibition was shown at Tate Modern, London, for which a complementary catalogue was also published.

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Christopher Kane Fall 2016, Ready To Wear, London

30 July 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Fashion No Comments

Christopher Kane, Ready To Wear, Fall 2016, London

“Our mum used to embarrass us when she picked us up from school wearing one of those plastic rain hats,” said Tammy Kane, Christopher Kane’s sister. The very private world of the Kanes and their memories of growing up outside Glasgow in the ’90s will always inform Christopher Kane’s work. The Kanes suffered the loss of their mother a year ago, so the salute to Christine Kane was there at the beginning of the show, transformed into tied-under-the-chin plastic rain hats—the work of Stephen Jones. But searching for a linear trail of clues to make sense of how Kane processes ideas into clothes is never all that helpful. Briefing a crowd of journalists after the show, the designer spoke about reclusive hoarders, an outsider point of view, somebody living behind her own psychological bars. “She doesn’t know how to get out. She’s stuck.” Kane finds beauty in that manic predicament. “Things are so normal these days,” he shrugged. “So why not think out of the box?”

Really, the thing to watch a Kane show for are the creative fusion points where he produces something we’ve never quite seen before, trophies of fashion that you know on sight you’d urgently like to make your own. To this pair of eyes, that electricity hit halfway through this collection. The section of asymmetrical black tailoring, jackets, and scarves fringed with ostrich feathers in red, green, and faded pink had an off-hand elegance that would cause a mayhem of envy walking into any room. There would be no regrets spending the money on one of these: They had the quality of long-term classics a woman could—yes—hoard in her wardrobe to bring out again and again.

What else? Nearly ten years on from his neon body-con debut collection, which consisted of one tight (in both senses) statement, Kane is backed by Kering and has many commercial categories on the go and to show. The tubular Swarovski sparkle-mesh “bolster” necklaces the Kane siblings made for that original 2006 show continued as lanyards dangling sunglasses, or were whipped into whorls as big glamorous brooches around faceted stones. Crystal-dangling alphabet charms were pinned along necklines and scattered across skirts. A part of the show that involved haberdashery ribbons and scraps of fabric samples was also available in the form of one of Christopher Kane’s zip-top envelope clutches. All these came under the heading of little accessible things young girls can afford to show off with. A new gothic-type “K” logo on a beige sweater also seemed aimed at keeping a young audience engaged, which Kane needs to do to keep his brand hot.

Treading that line between reasonably affordable novelty and luxury is a really tough balancing act now—and obviously, that doesn’t just apply to Christopher Kane. On the elevated side, he can do a gray mink coat now, and the complex party dresses he’s made a name with are just as weirdly sexy—like the ones made from alternating stripes of tan pleather and sheer black lace that started the show. But the pressure to encompass it all, all the time, is a strain for every designer when the whole fashion environment is in upheaval. The underlying narrative of a woman in a disturbed mental state that came through Kane’s show today is easy enough to link with so many of this season’s other creative excursions into surrealism. It’s a mad world out there.

Source: Style.com.
Text: Sarah Mower, Style.com.
All images belongs to the respective artist and management.

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Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

24 June 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Exhibitions Main No Comments

Installation view: Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, geometrics, 2013

Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, June 18 – September 22, 2013
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The first major museum exhibition of Ken Price’s work in New York, will trace the development of his ceramic sculptures with approximately sixty-five examples from 1959 to 2012. The selection range from the luminously glazed ovoid forms of Price’s early work to the suggestive, molten-like slumps he has made since the 1990s. In addition to the sculpture, the exhibition will feature eleven late works on paper by the artist. Price’s close friend, the architect Frank O. Gehry, designed the exhibition.

Price was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Price’s earliest aspirations were to be an artist, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be an artist. Even when I was a kid I would make drawings and little books, and cartoons..,” he states. Price enrolled in his first art ceramics course at Santa Monica City College in 1954, where he quickly embraced a formal craft tradition as espoused by Marguerite Wildenhain. He subsequently studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, before receiving his BFA degree from the University of Southern California in 1956.

In the 1950s Price lived along the Pacific coastline, where his interest in surfing and Mexican pottery developed. During surfing trips in Southern California, Price and his friends, “always made a point of hitting the curio stores in [Tijuana], because they had great pottery. …just looking was a great education in earthenware pottery.” Price’s ceramic work at USC could be characterized as functional vessels derived from a folk pottery tradition.

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Arab Contemporary Art: Artist Collective GCC

22 December 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Culture Main No Comments

GCC, Exhibition View, Royal Mirage, 2014, Chartered Cruise, Rolls Royce Silver Phantom, sound, ephemeral/performance, 2013, and Royal Mirage III, 2014

The artist collective GCC has been making arab contemporary art that is both inspired by and addresses the contemporary culture of the Arab Gulf region. Consisting of a “delegation” of nine artists, the GCC makes reference to the English abbreviation of the Gulf Cooperation Council, an economic and political consortium of Arabian Gulf nations. Founded in the VIP lounge of Art Dubai in 2013, the GCC makes use of ministerial language and celebratory rituals associated with the Gulf. The collective consists of Nanu Al-Hamad, Khalid al Gharaballi, Abdullah Al-Mutairi, Fatima Al Qadiri, Monira Al Qadiri, Aziz Al Qatami, Barrak Alzaid, Amal Khalaf.

For their inaugural series of exhibitions, the collective focused on the notion of achievement, focusing on the rituals that mark accomplishment as well as the physical objects that embody them. They have created a series of Congratulants based on trophies exchanged in the Gulf as well as videos examining ribbon-cutting ceremonies and installations that reference the spectacular cities that have been recently constructed in the region. The GCC’s visual language is not one of irony or hyperbole, but rather a way of framing culture that reveals the ambiguity and nuance of how people live today.By utilizing new mediums like HD and 4K video, in addition to appropriating traditional forms like news radio and miniature model building, the GCC span a range of artistic practices. They are rooted in the legacy of identity politics while engaging with new ways of relating images and objects. With members trained in architecture, design, music, and of course art, the collective embraces an interdisciplinary way of working that produces arab contemporary art that are both coherent and concise in their concept and execution. They make use of visuals that are largely known to the late-capitalist consumer—advertising and brand management that is employed by global business and nations alike.

Upon entering Achievements in Swiss Summit, London’s first GCC exhibition at Project Native Informant, it becomes immediately apparent that the luxurious setting is apt – the Rolls Royce hovering by the entrance on the opening night is not a mode of transportation for an ostentatious Frieze-goer but a prop that plays an integral part of the show’s concept. Achievements in Swiss Summit acts as a formal celebration of the artistic union of the GCC collective, an auspicious event that reinforces its first meeting in Morschach, Switzerland and announces through speakers in controlled, mellow tones its intentions as a High Level Strategic Dialogue.

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