Gallery Exhibitions
December 14th – January 21st
From Inkweed to Haunted Ink: The Beat Greeting Card
John McWhinnie @ GHB is pleased to present From Inkweed to Haunted Ink: The Beat Greeting Card, a first look into the archive of Inkweed Studios’ co-founders: Beat poet, Kabbalistic scholar, and Lower East Side legend, Lionel Ziprin, and his wife and principal collaborator, Joanne Ziprin.
In 1950, Joanne Eashe—a dancer, illustrator, and model—married poet and Kabbalah scholar Lionel Ziprin. Their union was a pivotal moment in the underground history of the Lower East Side, a neighborhood aptly described by poet Janine Pommy Vega as “the meeting place of Old World mysticism and New World craziness.” Lionel Ziprin, born and raised in the LES, would become one of its most hallowed cultural figures. However, it was his wife Joanne who, in the early 1950s, claimed the couple’s stake in the booming post-War economy, infiltrating that last bastion of good, old fashioned, American incorruptibility: the holiday greeting card.
Founded in 1951, Inkweed Studios occupied a loft at 128 Lexington Avenue. The couple set out to create handcrafted, personalized “studio” cards, drawing on Joanne’s illustrative talents and Lionel’s hermetic, proto-Beat wit. Their cards aimed to rival those mass produced by the Hallmark Company, which had a virtual monopoly on the business at the time. In a letter from 1953 addressed to potential investors, Joanne and Lionel state that Inkweed has “worked hard to design, perfect and market an idea in greeting cards that we believe in. . . having to do with imagination, bits of black magic and shoe strings, which all too few people accept in lieu of cold, hard, cash.”
Inkweed offered itself as a launching pad for a handful of equally ambitious and talented artists, several of whom found their first paying commercial jobs with the company. These include polymath artists Harry Smith and Jordan Belson, painter and filmmaker Bruce Conner, and illustrators Barbara Remington and William Mohr. Smith’s instantly recognizable geometric designs were used for a series of hand screened Christmas cards, which echoed the artist’s famed series of drawings and collotypes inspired by Kabbalistic themes. Their most prodigious collaborator, however, was Conner, who met the Ziprins on a visit to New York in 1951. While studying art at Wichita University and the University of Nebraska, Conner regularly sent The Ziprins card concepts, alongside completed linoleum cuts and meticulous printing instructions. Conner’s work for the Ziprins—inspired by the two-dimensional, alien forms of painter Paul Klee and the absurdum ad infinitum ethos of Dada and Beat—infused Inkweed with a heavy dose of subversive wit and black humor. Conner’s vision inspired the Ziprins to take greater risk in their own designs, expanding the parameters of what the company could and would soon become.
Within a year Inkweed offered a full line of three-dimensional, screen-print cards (sold together, for $.50, with Inkweed 3D glasses) and intricate, hand-colored, three-panel foldouts. A national distribution deal helped Inkweed get their cards into department stores (including B. Altman & Co.), gift shops, and college bookstores. By 1954, however, the company’s high production costs and ramshackle accounting would bring it to the brink of bankruptcy. The Ziprins were forced to sell their share in Inkweed to stationer Fred Mann and Co. Mann managed the affairs of Inkweed for a few more years, cheaply rehashing several of its designs and concepts, much to the chagrin of its artists.
During this period of transition, the Ziprins conceived of another commercial venture. In early 1955, from the ashes of Inkweed Studios, The Haunted Inkbottle was born. Continuing to produce personalized, high-quality greeting cards, the Ziprins sought to expand their reach by manufacturing finely printed books and ephemera. Working out of a new studio at 6 East 17th Street, the couple again recruited the talents of Conner, Remington, and Mohr. Remington would go on to design several notable book covers for Ballantine, and Mohr’s comically menacing, Edward Gorey inspired figures became a fixture of The Haunted Inkbottle aesthetic. To a far greater degree than its predecessor, Inkbottle maintained itself as a self-sustaining entity. For nearly five years it enjoyed a steady stream of business and returning clientele. The Haunted Inkbottle, however, never quite reached its goal of expanding into new media—though, as the company archive reveals, this was not due to any lack of will. Literally hundreds of Inkbottle drawings, ink blocks, and sketches exist for unpublished books and other waylaid projects, such as silk screen reproductions of Piet Mondrian paintings and an elaborately designed set of tarot cards.
Spanning the years 1951 – 1959, From Inkweed to Haunted Ink provides a unique window into one of the most curious and wonderfully cracked attempts at merging Beat sensibility with American consumerism. Additionally, the exhibition brings into relief the significant contributions of Joanne Ziprin—a rare and pioneering female artist and entrepreneur, who in an era dominated by strong, male, personalities, made an indelible, largely unprecedented mark on the fabled history of the Lower East Side in the 1950s and 60s.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
November 1st – December 9th
Influential Friends by Peter Hujar
John McWhinnie and Glenn Horowitz are pleased to present a new exhibition, Influential Friends by Peter Hujar. The exhibition opens on November 1st and runs through December 9th. A reception will be held on Tuesday, November 1st from 6:00 – 8:00 P.M.
Influential Friends is an exhibition of photographs and archival material from Peter Hujar’s friendships with Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz – two artists who, along with Hujar himself, played a significant role shaping American art between 1960 and 1990, particularly the cultural downtown scene in New York during the 1970s and 80s. Hujar vividly documented this urban milieu through a range of subjects – studio portraits, nudes, landscapes, the city street, modern ruins and animals – capturing in the process a New York that has been all but lost to us today.
Thek was a friend from Hujar’s youth. They met in their late teens, and the story of their relationship is the history of how both came to maturity as men and as artists. In 1967, when both Thek and Hujar were emerging artists, Hujar did a color series of Thek at work on his groundbreaking sculptural environment, “The Tomb” – popularly known as “The Dead Hippie” – which will be on display.
Wojnarowicz was the great relationship in the final phase of Hujar’s life; they met when he was 26 and Hujar 46 years old. Wojnarowicz’s yearning for mentoring and support was found in the middle-aged Hujar who, although near the apex of his achievement, was depressed and at a personal and artistic impasse. The brilliantly talented Wojnarowicz became an inspiration, friend and lover to Hujar, developing a phenomenal creative surge for both men. Wojnarowicz’s career as a painter materialized under Hujar’s guidance, and many of his best-known early paintings (including “Peter Hujar Dreaming”) were painted on the floor of Hujar’s studio. Meanwhile, many of the greatest images of Hujar’s last phase were done with and for his young protégé.
When Hujar developed AIDS in 1987, Wojnarowicz (who would die of the same disease in 1991) was at Hujar’s side during the worst of the epidemic, as the photographer, by then 52, developed his series on urban desolation, also on display. Influential Friends documents the key relationships, personal and artistic, between these artists, as they influenced each other’s work and life and all faced the same mortal end, together.
Hujar’s sensibility, eye for detail and feel for light and texture facilitated his ability to find before him mystery where none is apparent, beauty in the everyday, and grace in decomposition. All of his work is instilled with a deep aura of mortality and a visible awareness of life and death as forever entangled.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
October 15th – October 29th
Richard Prince: The Author
John McWhinnie and Glenn Horowitz are pleased to present a new exhibition of works by Richard Prince. The exhibition opens on October 15th and runs through October 29th. A reception for the artist on the publication of Richard Prince: Collected Writings will be held on Thursday, October 27th from 6:00 – 8:00 P.M.
Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone. In the mid-1970s, Prince developed a radical art-making practice based on mining images from mass media, advertising and entertainment that has redefined the concepts of authorship and ownership. Applying his understanding of the complex transactions of representation to the making of art, he has evolved a unique signature that is filled with the echoes of other signatures, but is uniquely his own.
The exhibition, Richard Prince: The Author, focuses on the artist’s early text-based work and its development in various incarnations and combinations, including work from the late 1980s and new pieces from 2011. The show includes his “TV Listings” series from 1989-1993, a body of work exhibited here for the first time. Prince bought pre-stretched canvas at a store to create these silkscreen paintings, which are a marriage between his joke paintings and the listings he would pick from TV guides, primarily the 4:00pm or 6:00pm programs.
Also on display are less known early text-based works from 1976-77 such as Bomb Dream Enameled from 1976, whose title plays on Duchamp’s “Apollinaire Enameled.” The book consists of pithy sentences describing the whereabouts of members of the Parisian avant-garde during WWI, such as “Braque is a second lieutenant,” which Prince first typed and then hand wrote again above. Another early work is Untitled (Statement for Press Release) from 1976, a typewritten text written by Prince for one of his first solo shows in New York City, a show where he crossed the threshold from an artist working in the tradition of conceptual art to a new tradition, which he, along with other artists of his generation of picture takers, borrowers, mimickers and stealers would help invent.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
14 September - 8 October 2011
DASH by David Matterhorn
This exhibition comprises works of the last four years, during which the artist visited cemeteries from Paris to Portland seeking out the most compelling dashes. After photographing Jackson Pollock’s dash, he discovered how that image and those of other notable figures serve as a potent reminder of both the fleeting nature of life and our own personal power.
Expanding upon this notion, he embarked to create a series that focused not only on the dashes of artists, musicians, and luminaries, but also those of unknown individuals, creating a dramatic and revealing juxtaposition. However, Matterhorn’s work captures much more than how we symbolize the time we spend on this planet between our birth and death dates. It also captures the “life” of the very dash itself, rendering it in vivid detail amidst its own form of organic change: dashes are encrusted with oxidizing elements, encroached upon by moss of varying hues of brilliant chroma, and attacked by the inescapable elements of wind, rain, ice and frost. The “Unknowns,” having suffered the ravages of time and neglect, leave a haunting visual impact. Among the dashes featured in the exhibition are those of Harry Houdini, Lee Krasner, Marilyn Monroe, and Oscar Wilde.
DASH addresses the universal themes of time, life and death by capturing a selection of visually stimulating tiny dashes on a series of tombstones in macro-focus. Through these images Matterhorn has aimed to capture, in its most reduced form, the complexity of human existence and the immutable laws that govern life and nature. In documenting these dashes Matterhorn leaves the viewer to construct their own narrative of each person’s life, to fill in the blanks and to inevitably ponder their own time on this earth.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
May 19th to August 16th
David Levinthal: Black Again
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce our next exhibition, David Levinthal: Black Again. The show opens with a reception on May 19th, from 6-8pm, and runs through August 16, 2011. The exhibition is drawn from David Levinthal’s project Blackface, dating from 1995-1998, featuring blackface Polaroids and the original memorabilia, drawn from the artist’s personal collection, that are the Polaroid’s subject matter.
Levinthal’s collecting of black memorabilia evolved into Blackface, a stimulating and controversial body of work. The title, according to Levinthal, “makes reference to the many facades, poise and physicality of these figures.” The title is also taken from the name of a journal of a black film-making company and is a term referring to both blacks and whites. Traditionally associated with minstrelsy, these images were used to perpetuate negative stereotypes. Levinthal’s work was originally intended to be exhibited at Philadelphia’s ICA in 1997. However, the show was cancelled when it became a cause célèbre as a result of its controversial subject-matter. Subsequently, images from the series were exhibited at the International Center of Photography and at Janet Borden, Inc. in New York. This is the first time that the artist has exhibited this body of work with the original figurines and advertising that inspired the portraits.
Levinthal’s initial inspiration for Blackface was D.W.Griffith’s 1915 film “Birth of a Nation,” a groundbreaking film of its time and a watershed moment in the cultural wars. It’s extreme and racist depictions of African Americans fueled a debate over the efficacy and motivation of using racially charged images that continues to reverberate in our culture today. Levinthal’s Blackface was originally intended to be a series based on “Birth of a Nation,” but the focus of the work shifted to the inscription of racially charged identities - what these collectibles convey, how they function within society, and how they continue to polarize social attitudes – within material objects produced and packaged as consumer goods.
This exhibit places these historical and cultural mementos alongside Levinthal’s photographs in an attempt to provide the viewer a new experience of both: the viewer can experience the transformation of the real object, which at first seems familiar and tangible, into a strangely captivating and ambiguous portrait, suspending history in an image.
Levinthal works using a 20 x 24inch Polaroid Polacolor ER Land Film which results in a large format Polaroid. The objects are set against a black background, isolated and devoid of narrative. Investigating the images closely, the textures and surfaces of cracked paint, shiny plastic and rusty metal come into relief, creating a three-dimensional tactile surface expressing a melancholic humanism. The artist did little editing with these images, recording the object in its pure form. The majority of works exhibited are portraits of objects – sometimes human like and often exaggerated – both alluring and grotesque. Levinthal’s Blackface portraits unfold a repressed history associated with the black stereotype. The compositions are focused, the gloss seductive, and the light hitting their surfaces exquisitely mannered. The work is in constant tension between its controversial subject matter and its sensuality.
David Levinthal: Black Again re-examines a highly-confrontational and thought-provoking body of work. It also adds a new layer of meaning to the work by exhibiting it with the originals that inspired the artwork for the first time. Levinthal’s Blackface excavates a pocket of American history along with the cultural richness of these artifacts and their physicality, letting the viewer experience the transformation of the object as documented by the medium of photography.
David Levinthal was born in San Francisco, CA in 1949. His major projects include Hitler Moves East (1977), Modern Romance (1986), The Wild West (1989), American Beauties (1990), Desire(1991), Mein Kampf (1994), Blackface (1996), Barbie Millicent Roberts (1999), XXX (1999),Netsuke (2002), and Baseball (2003). He has been the recipient of numerous important arts prizes and fellowships; his work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been collected by numerous institutions. He lives and works in New York City.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
April 7th to May 7th, 2011
Dream Sequence 3:52:29 am–3:56:12 am by Michael Counts
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is very pleased to announce our forthcoming exhibition, Dream Sequence 3:52:29 am–3:56:12 am by Michael Counts. The show will open with a reception on April 7th and run through May 7th, 2011, consisting of five out of ten sculptures made to accompany the Monodramas production he is directing at the New York City Opera. Monodramas is a series of three one-act operas by John Zorn, Arnold Schoenberg, and Morton Feldman and also features the work of choreographer Ken Roht, motionographer Ada Whitney, and video artist Jennifer Steinkamp. Acclaimed composer John Zorn’s monodrama, La Machine de l’être, inspired by the drawings of Antonin Artaud, is part of the extended sculptural sequence by Michael Counts.
Michael Counts has spent his career as an artist in exploration of a total, unified work of art. His multi-media artworks trace the boundaries of sculpture, theatre, music and live performance. He brings boundless curiosity and artistic vision to Monodramas, his directorial debut with the New York City Opera, in a program meant to challenge the traditional experience of opera and take it beyond its physical boundaries within the opera house. To that end, he has created a production uniting the opera house with its surrounding architecture, taking key leitmotifs from each dramatic production and artistically expressing them within ten sculptures which he has situated in the Opera house’s lobby, mezzanine, and across town at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, an art gallery and rare book shop, where five of the sculptures will be exhibited. The architecture of the opera house, in a way, is a reflection of the sculptures and ultimately of the mind. The sculptures are contained miniature worlds with details that draw the viewer in, allowing for an intimate experience. Counts’s cube sculptures are made of highly polished and reflective surfaces, containing dioramic scenes within, recalling a line from Gaston Bachelard’s book, The Poetics of Space, in which he claims, the “miniature is one of the refuges of greatness.“Together these sculptures and the actual operatic production constitute Counts directorial vision for Monodramas, a vision that takes the traditional role of director beyond the staged production and out into the world, fusing it with his artistic identity as a sculptor and visual artist.
In each Monodrama, a female protagonist recalls her harrowing journey through a suggested, but unexplained spiritual crisis. For each inner drama, Counts suggests the protagonist’s thoughts and emotional states with the unifying motif of a cube. Although the motif is present in each production, its suggestive role is not entirely revealed, but rather, like the inner thoughts of each character, merely reflected through the surface play of their voice, gesture and emotion. The cubes ultimately contain the character’s inner thoughts, their struggles for meaning, and emotional states. This evocation of inner life, the struggle to articulate meaning and convey the experience of crisis, is ultimately contained within the cubes but not something that the spectator has direct access to in the staged production, cultivating an element of mystery and surprise.
Together these ten sculptures offer a deeper three dimensional experience of the staged operatic productions. Within each cube Counts constructs a mise-en-scene connected to the three productions, offering a glimpse into the psyche of the three sopranos of the Monodramas. But like the staged productions, non-narrative renderings of an emotional journey through crisis, Counts’ sculpture will suggest, not solve, those crises, bringing the viewer towards a new level of appreciation of the production without didactically explaining it. Beyond that, the opera’s spectators will embark on a physical journey, one that challenges them to take their experience of opera beyond its conventional boundaries, outside the staged production, into the opera house’s building and beyond, to a gallery located on the upper east side. Through that journey they’ll encounter a sculptural, three dimensional interpretation of the meaning of each production. It’s all in keeping with Counts’ belief, following Antonin Artaud, that theatre rediscovers itself at the point where the mind requires a new language to express its manifestations. These ten sculptures embody the mind and feelings of the protagonists of Monodramas. Beyond that, they are Counts’ expressions of his desire to take opera into realms beyond the actual production and expand it into a three dimensional space where performance and sculpture meet and become one.
Read The New York Times Review.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
December 10 2010-February 5, 2011
Holton Rower: Scraps
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is very pleased to announce a forthcoming show, Holton Rower: Scraps. The show will open December 10th with a reception for the artist from 6 to 8 pm and will run through January 22, 2011. In conjunction with the exhibition, a catalogue will be published in an edition of 300 copies.
Rower’s latest body of work – hybrid painting/reliefs that are created by stacking and gluing plywood scraps into tower like forms and pouring acrylic paints over them– are steeped in art history. The grammar of their language forms a veritable artistic Esperanto. Plywood scraps taken from the studio floor speak both to minimalist sculpture and painting as well as to art povera: The process of building the surface up with glue recalls post minimalist use of organic materials but it also speaks to a tradition of unorthodox support for painting, one that follows the trajectory of Duchamp’s large glass and joins Rauschenberg’s combines, Polke’s t-shirts and tablecloths to Dieter Roth’s dirt paintings. And Rower’s method of creating these beings by dripping and pouring multicolored acrylic paint is also ripe with allusion. There have been notorious pourers and drippers, beginning most famously with Jackson Pollock but including Linda Benglis and Roxy Paine, who have exploited both the viscous potential of their medium, acrylic and latex, as well as gravity and gesture. Rower’s work follows in this path. But unlike their efforts, he takes a detour into a world of optical ravishment and trickery.
“Holton’s new work is many-hued, differing from his many-folded green-back Annuit Coeptis (Novus Ordo Seclorum) chains and fitted pipes and series of brass Chinese locks. He has mined ply-wood and freed rainbow riots of color to dazzle us and to pose the question of the legitimacy of Mister Master Mondrian’s primary babies. Boogie-Woogie penmen, indeed!”
-Sean Sweeney
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
November 4th-7th, 2010 Opening Thursday, Nov. 4th from 6 to 9pm
New York Art Book Fair 2010
John McWhinnie @ GHB is pleased to announce our participation in this year’s New York Art Book Fair at MoMA’s PS1. Printed Matter, Inc. and The NY Art Book Fair will take over all three floors of PS1to present 275 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, museums, galleries, and artists from twenty-four countries, exhibiting the very best of contemporary art publishing. All weekend long, The NY Art Book Fair will host performances, artist talks, and screenings organized by publishers from across the world.
FAIR LOCATION AND HOURS
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave. at the intersection of 46th Ave., Long Island City, NY
Free and open to the public:
Preview: November 4, 6-9 p.m.
Friday & Saturday, November 5 & 6, 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.
Sunday, November 7, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Visit www.nyartbookfair.com for a complete list of exhibitors and programs.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
October 13th-November 9th
James Frey: Il Divino Bambino
John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce a new exhibition by James Frey, Il Divino Bambino. Il Divino Bambino is an exhibition of text based artwork taken from James Frey’s latest mansucript of the same name. Frey’s tale is a contemporary riff on Dante’s Divine Comedy and it offers up a story of his raucous trip through Heaven, Hell and Purgatory with a modern Virgil as a guide. For the exhibition, Frey has transformed his manuscript into a series of artworks: They are equal parts literary manuscript and visual artwork, things to be hung on a wall and read. With Il Divino Bambino, Frey once again gives us a glimpse of his own version of literary and artistic medicine, mixed and mashed-up in the subterranean basement of his wild imagination, a place where truth is stranger than fiction and fiction is a paler version of the truth. If you have ever wanted to see Frey in hell, wander through purgatorial malaise, or bask in the allurements of heaven, you need not go any further than Il Divino Bambino. An opening reception for the author will be held on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010, from 6 to 8 p.m. More details to follow.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
Nov. 4 - 7th, 2010 Opening Thursday, Nov. 4th from 6 to 9pm
Editions/Artists' Book Fair
John McWhinnie@Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is participating in the Editions|Artists’ Book Fair - the premier showcase for contemporary publishers and dealers, presenting the latest and greatest in prints, multiples and artists’ books. The Editions|Artists’ Book Fair is well known for its vibrant energy and innovation, thanks to over sixty exhibitors, presenting hundreds of artists representing New York, Johannesburg, Amsterdam, London, Paris and points in between.
Fair admission is free:
Nov. 4 - 7th, 2010
11am to 7pm (Friday & Saturday)
11am to 4pm (Sunday)
Opening Night Party:
Thursday, Nov. 4th from 6 to 9pm
Tickets are $20.00 and may be purchased at the door
Former Dia/Former X Initiative
548 West 22nd Street
Between 10th & 11th Avenues
For More Information, please visit http://eabfair.com
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
Exhibition at our East Hampton space at 87 Newtown Lane, August 14th to September 26th, 2010; Opening Reception Saturday, August 14th from 6-8pm
Peter Saville: Accessories to an Artwork
Featuring: Tauba Auerbach, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Will Cotton, Sarah Crowner, Brendan Fowler, Kim Gordon, Matthew Higgs, Richard Kern, Sean Landers, Adam McEwen, Ryan McGinley, Ryan McGinness, Josephine Meckseper, Dave Muller, Richard Prince, Nick Relph, Josh Shaddock, Lawrence Weiner, Dirk Westphal.
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce Accessories To An Artwork, an exhibition by Peter Saville. Saville has designed a minimal white plinth, an artwork in the form of a pedestal of the sort that would conventionally be used to display an object in a museum setting, and has fabricated these plinths out of white museum board in an edition of 200. Approximately 20-25 of these will be distributed throughout the gallery space and a group of other artists, whose names appear above, have each been invited to place an object or artwork of their choice on one of the plinths.
Saville’s plinth provides a framework for a collaborative exhibition. It is an artwork which transfers the power of curatorial decision-making to others, namely the individual artists in the exhibition, but also to the individual collector who purchases a plinth from the edition. Saville once observed that, ‘it all looks like art to me now.’ This artwork recognizes that cultural authority is an increasingly do-it-yourself enterprise; the plinth is an accessory for the individual who has chosen to “curate” the world for him- or herself. By placing something atop the plinth one makes a statement as to what is worth looking at.
When Saville exhibited his work at the Migros Museum in Zurich in 2005 he designated the last room as “work in progress” and included objects that had little contemporary artistic currency, but that somehow still seemed pertinent as materials of an idea. Not wanting to present these objects as artworks, Saville laid all of them out on tables, with one exception, a plastic bird, which placed on a plinth. Noting the transformative energy of the plinth, Saville created this artwork so that others might share his experience.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
July 10th - August 8th, 2010
Steven Klein: Stag Film
On view at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY.
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is very pleased to announce a forthcoming show at our East Hampton location, Steven Klein: Stag Film. The show will open July 10th with a reception for the artist from 6 to 8 pm at 87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, and run through August 8th 2010.
In the most literal sense the title Stag Film is what it says: a stag shot on film. Period.
There is nothing implied or symbolic. The work is a documentation of a sexual act, one that is artificial (because it involves a dummy horse, a construct) and natural since it incorporates the actual emission of the horse’s sperm.
Yet implications and layers of meaning can be derived in viewing the project. Is it representational of the relationships between male and female in that a woman can use the artificial allure of cosmetics and synthetic fragrances to trap a man in to marriage and fatherhood? Or is it the nature of consumerism and commerce; how advertising through the medium of the Artificial Image lures people into spending their life-force into the empty promises of products and mechanisms to be bought and discarded?
Or is it that Stag Film is simply about motion and emulsion and how light at 250th of a second captures and renders life static?
Your choice.
In tandem with this exhibition JMc & GHB editions will introduce a new publication drawn from the show, Stag Film. Planned as a large quarto-size paper-covered volume, the book will be published in an edition of 2000.
Originally a painting graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Steven Klein moved swiftly into the photographic realm and was involved in shooting several high profile fashion campaigns. His mediums include magazine work, exhibitions, film, and most recently the video for Lady Gaga’s single “Alejandro”. His work has been exhibited at several gallery spaces, including Deitch Projects, and Gagosian Gallery. He currently lives and works in New York City.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
May 29th to June 27th, 2010
Peter Dayton: The Beginning of an Era
On view at 36 Newtown Lane, East Hampton: “Yea it’s 1977 again everybodys on the dole no future….THATS WHY WE ARE SO HAPPY !” Please join us for our inaugural seasonal show in East Hampton, featuring new works by punk rocker turned artist Peter Dayton. As the former frontman for the 1970s rock outfit La Peste, Dayton had a front row seat from which to observe the collision of political frustrations, cultural nihilism, and lip curling sneer that fueled the emergence of the punk ideology. This new series reworks album covers by musical icons Pink Floyd, Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin, The Buzzcocks, and Jimi Hendrix among others, with lush layers of Xerox collage, acrylic and resin that invoke both the swirling psychedelic rock posters of the late 1960s and ‘70s and the DIY anything goes aesthetic of the following decade.
http://peterdayton.com/showone/
Jimi Hendrix photo courtesy of John Musnicki
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
May 12th - June 12th, 2010
Oedipal Indescretions, Edible Obsessions: Early Work of Toshio Saeki
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is very happy to announce our upcoming exhibition – Oedipal Indescretions, Edible Obsessions: Early Work of Toshio Saeki. Featuring original drawings made for print by the “godfather of Japanese erotica”, this exhibition showcases works by Saeki dating from the late 70s. The show will open Wednesday May 12th with a reception from 6 to 8pm, and run through June 12th.
Cannibalism, rape, and torture; perverse is merely a starting point for these vivid, fantastical tableaux of deviant sexual theater, laced with mutilation, horror, and dread. A singular artist in many senses, Saeki did not ever color his own works, but saw himself as part of the traditional partnership deployed by the Ukioy-e woodcut masters, which reserved separate roles for the artist (Eshi) and the printer (Surishi). The works on display are presented in the original working form, as black and white line drawings overlaid with vellum sheets marked with Saeki’s color plans for the visualized finished printed image. Saeki refers to his method of practice as Chinto printing.
Born in 1945 Toshio Saeki grew up in the radically transforming culture of post-war Japan. Japanese social mores shifted dramatically in the immediate aftermath of WWII and there was a great liberalization in attitudes relating to sexual behavior. Publishers began freely printing material with sexual content and previously suppressed literature and graphics devoted to themes of deviant sexuality which had flourished for a short while in the 20s and 30s – Ero Guro Nansensu (roughly “erotic, grotesque, nonsense”) – re-emerged and found a willing audience. This popular “pulp” explosion echoed that experienced in the post war United States, but license was broader in Japan and, harkening back to the earlier Ero Guro era, and indeed the earlier tradition of Shunga (popular printed erotic imagery), a sub genre, hentai seiyoku, emerged with a particular focus on fetishistic and extreme scenarios. Bondage, sado-masochism, love suicides, and ritual disembowelment (seppuku) were themes of great interest in these publications. In 1970 the topic of seppuku projected hugely onto the nation’s consciousness with the ritual self disembowelment of the internationally celebrated author Yukio Mishima following a failed royalist coup. It was against this background that Saeki evolved his graphic erotic universe.
The work is strongly characterized as Japanese in its depiction of typical interiors, clothing, and types. Saeki rarely tries to suggest a trans-national scenario or environment. He hones close to the physical world he knows and this lends the images – so surreally shocking in other ways – an added strength of impact. But the real language of these scenes derives from the unconscious and the world of dreams. The artist recalls his wish to illustrate his own scary dreams as a young man as part of the evolution of his work. As essentially Japanese as the scenes and characters may be, the graphic potency of what is shown and the themes addressed speaks directly to the viewer’s unconscious, those awarenesses typically kept out of sight from the censorious ego. The body as a site of pain, mortification, shame and betrayal, and as the victim and source of an uncontrollable sexual desire, is primary. The body dissolves or is split open to admit or release irresistible urges. Demons and bogies approach or assault from all sides and vulnerability and purity only prompt us to pity in the face of a predatory, perverse and pitiless fantasy world.
It is due in no small part to the artist’s ability to push further into the realms of the taboo, to transgress further than fellow practitioners of the illustrative extremism so characteristic of contemporary comics and manga, that this work stands in a class of its own. “I’m just mischievous and like to surprise people… The more I produce the work, the more I want to top myself each time, to shock people even more.” In the past, in Japan, his books have received local government cautions from decency monitors. It would be difficult to conceive of U.S. censors taking such a lenient attitude, even by today’s standards. An explicit connection between horror and sexuality has become more mainstream in the last few decades, particularly with relation to popular cinema. The Japanese series of Ju-on horror films that began in the 90s pay indirect homage to the artist, featuring the somewhat malign child spirit Toshio Saeki, a witness of his mother’s murder at the hands of his father over sexual jealousy. Children and adolescents are a frequent presence in the artist’s work. The, to date, cultish following of Saeki’s oeuvre is about to readily expand significantly as public tastes catch up with his aesthetic. Apart from several shows of works in France (at the very first of which in 1970 all the pieces were stolen), the work has not been widely exhibited on an international platform. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view primary materials by the artist, with his printing notations and formulae, that are part of the process involved in creating a Toshio Saeki finished piece.
Since their first publication in 1970, Toshio Saeki’s erotic drawings have found a small but devoted audience in his native Japan. He has worked since then on commission and privately, delving deeper into a personal world of obsessive erotic illustration. Several publications of collected works emerged in the 70s in Japan, and then again later in the 90s including Saeki Toshio Gashu, Akai-Hako (Red Box), Chimushi I, and Chimushi II, and Yume Manji (Dream Swastika). His first U.S. publication, Onikage, is planned for release later this year by Last Gasp in San Francisco. His work has been shown frequently in solo shows in Japan and in France, and has been featured in shows at the Gray Box Gallery in San Jose, “Contemporary Japanese Erotica” in Los Angeles, and at “Art & Lust” in Miami. He presently lives and works in the small town of Ichihara, Chiba, Japan.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
April 8th - May 8th, 2010.
Kim Gordon: The Noise Paintings
Featuring a series of works on canvas and on paper the show presents Kim Gordon’s recent explorations using paint, lyrics, and personal catch phrases to create a collision of the verbal and the visual, and the discovery of something quite other.
One of the original band members of musical group Sonic Youth, it is as a front line guitarist and vocalist that Kim Gordon is more widely celebrated in cultural circles. The band formed in 1981 and quickly established itself as the source of an energetic, raw new sound deploying alternative tuning and creative methods of noise production. Emerging from the 1970s No Wave scene of New York City, they were highly influential in evolving an alternative musical ethos for rock musicians of the period and those following. Gordon and the other band members were originally art students and from an early stage there was a natural overlap between the worlds of art and music. The group’s sound and performance style pushed at the boundaries of conventional rock music presentation, rigging guitars with DIY-style add-ons in order to achieve particular effects, and playing them in unorthodox ways. This essentially pragmatic engagement with the limits of an instrument’s capacity is echoed in Gordon’s plastic artworks. There is a focus on the material in hand – liquid pigment and paper – and an engagement with the very extremes of the materials’ interactions. Facial features and likenesses are all but eclipsed by the freely handled paint and color, teetering on the brink of self-effacement. In a similar manner Gordon subjects her very themes to the perils of disintegration. Loosely painted words have dripping edges and bleeding contours that threaten to disrupt or annihilate the sense within. There is the feel of un-stylized urban graffiti, of the anonymous, spontaneous scrawls encountered in the profane world. The gesture, the moment of creation, with all its attendant expressiveness is paramount. And yet, as lyrics, and personal catch phrases, Gordon has produced these words before, on paper and on canvas. They are like personal mantras, surfacing repeatedly at moments of creative charge and expression. Based on the names of noise bands, there is a sense of homage, as well as obsession. From the provocative (16 Bitch Pile Up) to the banal (Wet Hair) by way of the more obscure (Sudden Oak), in The Noise Paintings the words find a new unique form each time the artist commits them to a surface. The process recalls the experience of the performer who draws from a repertoire again and again, but each time the delivery is essentially, uniquely distinctive.
A graduate of Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Kim Gordon was contributing articles for Art Forum at the beginning of the 80s and worked in several NYC galleries. In 1982 she curated a show at White Columns Gallery which featured work by Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler, among others. As well as music and art production, she has been involved in film making - direction and acting – and in fashion design and publishing. Her artwork has been shown throughout the US as well as in Europe and Japan. Some recent shows have included Portaits #17-37, Iguapop Gallery, Barcelona 2007; Come Across, at KS Art, New York 2008; Rock Paper Scissor at Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica 2009. She currently lives and works in Northampton, MA.
In partnership with Ecstatic Peace Library, JMc & GHB Editions will introduce a special edition of a new artist’s unbound, signed and numbered portfolio, Kim Gordon, The Noise Paintings. Drawn from a full edition of just 200, the special edition will comprise 26 lettered copies enclosed in a custom cloth box with an original painting and recording laid in.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
March 4th - April 3rd, 2010
Ruth Ford, Model and Muse: A Life in Photographs
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is very pleased to announce our latest exhibition – Ruth Ford, Muse and Model: A Life in Photographs. The show will comprise of photographs and art works from Ruth Ford’s personal collection documenting a life and career that spanned five decades in the worlds of modeling, acting and literary endeavor. The exhibition will run from March 4th through April 3rd 2010.
Model, actress, muse and hostess, Ruth Ford’s gregarious appetite for life saw her pose for some of the most important photographers of her era, act in plays written by the leading playwrights of her generation, inspire the attachment of avant-garde figures of the day, and establish a salon in her own home that was the talk of the town. She numbered among her friends Cecil Beaton, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Andy Warhol. Among her romantic conquests were Edward James, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, and Zachary Scott. During one of her parties in the Dakota building, Stephen Sondheim was famously introduced to librettist Arthur Laurents, which led to their collaboration with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story. Other introductions she is credited with are introducing her brother, the poet Charles Henri Ford to Andy Warhol (who in turn introduced Warhol to Gerard Malanga), and the spouses-to-be, Berry Berenson to Anthony Perkins. Ruth is also credited by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight with bringing them together to develop the celebrated stories of Eloise, the little girl who lived at the Ritz.
Born in Brookhaven, Mississipi, Ruth’s family were hoteliers, and she and her younger brother Charles grew up travelling from state to state as required by the business. In the mid 30s she followed her brother to New York and was introduced to the rarified artistic community he had found for himself. An attractive, self-advertising, and creative duo, they were a social hit. The painter Pavel Tchelitchew was stricken and began a life-long relationship with Charles, and helped promote Ruth as a photographic model. Ruth worked with photographers Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Carl Van Vechten, and George Platt Lynes. In 1935, while working in Paris, she met the Surrealist patron Edward James who fell heavily for her. She declined James’s offers of marriage and returned to New York where she sought work as an actress, and was eventually hired by the young Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre. She acted in two of Mercury’s productions – The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and Swingin’ the Dream – as well as appearing in the director’s lost play/film production, Too Much Johnson. When she moved to Hollywood to work in motion pictures much of her good luck with connections deserted her and the ensuing years saw her starring in a string of forgettable films, prompting Tennessee Williams to describe her as “the Bernhardt of Grade B pictures”. She returned to New York in 1946 where she focused on stage work appearing in Shakespeare and Strindberg plays, and worked with Edward Albee, John Huston, and Paul Bowles. William Faulkner’s play adaptation Requeim for a Nun was written with her in mind and she took the central role alongside Zachary Scott, her second husband, in 1957, touring through London, Paris, and Berlin. Later stage roles were in the 1964 revival of Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, with Tallulah Bankhead, Dinner at Eight, The Grass Harp, and Harold and Maude.
But it was Ruth’s prominence as a hostess, and the salon she created in her Dakota building apartment on the Upper West Side for which she is best remembered and revered. Friends of every stripe and order were welcomed and she delighted in drawing together unfamiliar figures and networks. A party she hosted for author Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) in 1958 was cited as one of the greatest ever given in the storied building’s history. She drew upon her connections in the literary, visual and performing arts to gather the most intriguing of mixtures. Her web reached wide enough to draw in reclusive figures such as Joseph Cornell, who was an admirer and fond correspondent. She enjoyed creative correspondences also with fringe figures such as Stephen Tennant, the effetely fabulous “Bright Young Thing” from Britain’s 1920s, and with the enigmatic Ray Johnson, who founded the New York Correspondence School for mail art.
Dismissing her acting and modeling work as secondary she once said, “My life has been too exciting, too wonderful to let anything else, and that includes acting, come first.” Including the photographs of George Platt Lynes, Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Carl Van Vechten, Louise Dahl Wolfe and Norman Parkinson, with contributions by Joseph Cornell, Ray Johnson, Joe Brainard, Stephen Tennant and Robert Mapplethorpe, this exhibition offers just a taste of that exciting, wonderful life.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
Dec. 10th, 2009 - Jan. 23rd, 2010 CURRENT Extended through Feb. 27th.
Mats Gustafson: Swan
John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce a new show of works by Mats Gustafson. The show, entitled Swan, will feature recent pastel drawings focusing on the image of swans gliding across water surfaces, alongside haunting landscape studies. Working with Maharam Digital Projects the artist has developed related designs for a stunning new wall installation which, courtesy of Maharam, will be on display for the duration of the show. A book publication, Mats Gustafson, Swan, by JMc & GHB Editions is planned for release in conjunction with the exhibition.
Following a singular, celebrated career in fashion illustration, where he has been called the heir to René Grau, the artist Mats Gustafson turned his attention toward less artificial subject matter, to Nature itself. Beginning in the mid-nineties Gustafson began to make watercolor studies and drawings of natural scenes – trees, rocks, landscape. Having honed his illustration craft to an almost extreme minimalism – emphasizing line and form over decoration and details – we find the same editorial eye at work in the rendition of natural subjects. Images are pared down to essentials of shape and color, with a bold yet subtle use of line providing the necessary surface drama. A series of slender tree trunks can be rendered almost like drips of color wash trickling down the page. The simplicity and apparent effortlessness of these images belie a shrewdness of glance and a steely control of his chosen medium. The final effect is one in which the viewer encounters something superbly refined and minimal, an almost spiritual apprehension of the subject, elevated out of time and space and resonant of a singular moment of vision.
In this series of pastel drawings, the artist foscusses on the motif of the swan. With its stark white plumage this creature is perhaps a natural subject for a minimalist eye like Gustafson’s. Graceful, long-necked birds glide over satin surfaces that retain the color only of reflection. In some pieces the dialogue is merely between darkness and light. But in his use of pastel, as distinct from watercolor, Gustafson has discovered a new softness of edge. His swan subjects have almost roughly described contours in these pieces, as if the hand that was tracing them were naïve, or uncertain. Or it may be that the softer edge describes more aptly the bird’s condition - partially submerged in another medium. And then again it is the nature of water to catch and reflect that with which it has contact, and this “roughness” of treatment is, more properly, another of the artist’s perceptive refinements. In some instances overlapping figures of birds can be read as merging together against the darker background, again suggesting a porousness of edge. The contrasting monochrome hues of the birds and their surroundings discover a wide range of formal and linear dramas carefully orchestrated and preserved within the signature sense of quiet that attends Gustafson’s best works. There is almost a palpable hush when we spend time before these pieces.
This sense of silence is echoed in the misty landscapes presented in the show. The artist has almost dissolved form in a series of impressions of land heads reaching down to water. A sense of form through formlessness pervades, almost a quivering between abstraction and figuration, between body and spirit. This step towards the abstract is heightened when we encounter Gustafson’s “water” studies which emerged during this project. Here we are faced with pure, monochrome abstracts, which in point of context we read as representations of water. The mind shows us one thing, the eye another. At once inviting and ominous they represent new portals into perception and the quest for reality, bound or limitless.
Mats Gustafson was born in Sweden in 1951, but as befitting an international talent, has spent much time living abroad, chiefly in New York and Paris. He began his career as a fashion illustrator at the end of the 70s and throughout the 80s his distinctive minimalist style was much in demand by the likes of Vogue, Interview, Marie Claire, The New York Times, and The New Yorker , amongst others. His work was also used for advertising campaigns by fashion houses such as Chanel, Romeo Gigli, Geoffrey Beene, Comme des Garcons, and Yohji Yamamoto. His use of watercolor was highly innovative in the world of commercial graphics and his approach seemed to blur the line between the notion of the commercially graphic and the purely artistic. As a result his work has been exhibited widely in Europe and the U.S. Several publications have been released, including Drawn by the Sea (with Ted Muehling, 2000), Mats Gustafson 1989 - 2001 (2001), Rocks (2003), and Pictures (2006). In 2006 John McWhinnie @ GHB exhibited his widely acclaimed show, Deer. A publication of the same name, based on this exhibition, was produced by JMc & GHB Editions. The artist presently lives and works in New York City and Sag Harbor, NY.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
November 4th to December 5th, 2009.
David Levinthal, Bad Barbie: Vintage Photographs
John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is very pleased to announce their new exhibition, David Levinthal, Bad Barbie: Vintage Photographs. The show will open with a reception for the artist on Wednesday, November 4th from 6 to 8pm and will run through December 5th.
This sequence of photographs, all made in black and white, dates from 1972 and represents Levinthal’s first explorations with the use of toys in making his art. He deploys the commercially ubiquitous dolls, Barbie, her “boyfriend” Ken, and G.I. Joe in a series of poses and tableaux of sexual liaison and activity. The young artist was responding to a contemporary atmosphere of new sexual license enjoyed by youthful America following the liberal-leaning social upheavals of the 1960s. Barbie, already a popular icon, had morphed into the preternaturally blonde, tanned, buxom California beach model so desirous of the era. Levinthal shoots her in scenes of sexual libertinism, solo and with partners, reveling in her freedom and sexuality. She gives pleasure and is pleasured in return. Levinthal’s Barbie, exuding the progressiveness of the times, blithely crosses the racial divide in her carefree eroticism, hooking up with a black G.I.Joe action figure for several carnal encounters. Joe sports a modest Afro, a look of military alertness, and a necklace chain advertising he is hip to the flow. Though these small clothing details are carefully arranged by the photographer, Levinthal has not yet surrounded his subjects in the more elaborately dressed environments that serve to create an atmosphere and key an emotion in his works. There is an absence of scene dressing, just notes of suggestion: a towel on the ground invokes a beach; Barbie’s car passing Joe conjures a roadside; a bath and a vanity unit create a bathroom. This Barbie, high on the moment, eschews the boudoir, or a bed, for her sexual trysts and acts on impulse to fulfill her desires.
Though Levinthal subsequently worked on a project involving the Barbie doll, Barbie Millicent Roberts (1999), these early experiments of his have never before been exhibited. He used a Rollie SL66 camera and black and white film for his early projects. Black and white was the favored medium of serious “art photographers” of the era and Levinthal, by training it on toys - products deemed beneath the dignity of serious cultural exploration – was drawing attention to a form of social myopia he has since explored with profound results. We see him working out details regarding suggestion, lighting, narrative, and atmosphere, all notes he deploys with great sensitivity and confidence in later projects. The most immediate project to emerge from these early investigations was his celebrated Hitler Moves East publication with Garry Trudeau.
The comparable rawness of these images offers another appeal. They not only present a sense of work in progress, but also recall something of the artlessness associated with sexploitation and pornographic imagery- two industries that were expanding hugely at the time these photographs were made. Barbie herself has been put to work in all manner of culturally transgressive uses since that time; this is hardly her only x-rated feature. Though Barbie, and more notably Joe, have always fallen a little short when it comes to anatomical correctness, little girls and little boys - and viewers everywhere - are only too ready imaginatively to fill in the missing parts. And that, in many ways, has been what Levinthal’s work has always been about.
In conjunction with the show, JMc&GHB Editions is publishing a new book featuring David Levinthal’s Bad Barbie series. Bad Barbie, a 62 page paperback with 37 photographic reproductions will feature an introduction by Richard Prince and a narrative by John McWhinnie.
David Levinthal was born in San Francisco, CA in 1949. His major projects include Hitler Moves East (1977), Modern Romance (1986), The Wild West (1989), American Beauties (1990), Desire (1991), Mein Kampf (1994), Blackface (1996), Barbie Millicent Roberts (1999), XXX (1999), Netsuke (2002), and Baseball (2003). He has been the recipient of numerous important arts prizes and fellowships, his work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been collected by numerous institutions. He lives and works in New York City.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
Sept. 15th - Oct. 10th, 2009
Josephine Meckseper.
John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to present an installation by Josephine Meckseper. In her photography, videos, and object-based installations Meckseper engages with the manipulation and attendant imbalance of power created through the promotion of such culturally sanctioned vices as greed, excess, and corruption. Recurrent images of political activism—whether photographs of demonstrations or newspaper cuttings—are set against sparkling consumer goods and advertising motifs. Rather than aestheticizing, and thus glorifying, the seductive power of these themes, Meckseper instead “challenges ingrained perspectives” with a conceptual approach that seeks out ways of articulating and interacting with the world, while purposefully degrading and devaluing the visual idiom associated with contemporary consumer culture. Recently, Meckseper has pursued the capitalist-critique method, with subject areas agitating around the war in Iraq and the oil industry, with their inherent economic and socio-political implications, in particular those concerning the automobile industry.
The installation series coincides with the publication of Meckseper’s new monograph from JRP/Ringier. This title focuses on a new series of object arrangements which recalls the window displays of department stores and expensive boutiques, using such disparate items as silver mannequins, raccoon tails, photographs of muscle cars, and toilet brushes. These objects are all exchangeable signifiers of consumerism, and Meckseper infuses these elements with “a sense of de-fascination” and instability by favoring a “non-affirmative” mode of representation. The artist will be signing copies at a reception hosted in her honor Thursday, Sept. 24th from 6 to 8 p.m. in the gallery.
Josephine Meckseper was born in 1964 in Lilienthal, Germany, and received her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1992 from the California Institute of Arts in Valencia. She has lived in the United States for nearly twenty years, currently living and working in New York City. Her work has been included in such prominent exhibitions as New Photography 2008 at the Museum of Modern Art; Prospect 1 New Orleans; That Was Then . . . This Is Now at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City; the international touring exhibition USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Gallery; the 2006 Whitney Biennial Day for Night; and a significant retrospective at the Stuttgart Art Museum (Kunstmuseum Stuttgart) in Stuttgart, Germany. Meckseper will premier her first major solo exhibition in a Texas museum at Blaffer Gallery in Houston in September 2009.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
July 16th to August 15th, 2009 Extended through August 22nd.
Neke Carson: Portraits from the Closet
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is very pleased to announce their new exhibition, Portraits from the Closet, by Neke Carson. The show will open with a reception for the artist on Thursday, July 16th between 6 and 8 pm, and will run through August 15th, 2009.
For some time now the artist Neke Carson has been dropping by on friends and leaving his camera on the floor of their clothes closets where it takes a timed photograph once the door has been shut. The resulting images present a perplexing angle of view and a picture that is not immediately readable. The viewer is reminded of something resembling submarine plant life, geological mineral strata, gaseous astronomical phenomena. Looming from the closeted darkness these swirling eruptions of color and shape, so surprising in form, seem in turn surprised in some clandestine nocturnal exchange. Dumb, stationary, what is normally hidden from thought or view is captured in the camera’s flash and the noisome imagery belies the pedestrian notion and tranquility of a simple closet interior.
It is perhaps a little more than of passing interest that Carson’s friends include celebrity names such as Debbie Harry, John Waters, Todd Oldham, Brigid Berlin and other “soon to be famous” personae of the caliber that invites a prurient curiosity. What would such people keep in their closets? The voyeur appetites are whetted. Carson’s art project answers the question with a dramatically creative, “Behold!”
As well as recording the contents of the subject’s closet, these images present peculiar instances of visual accord or conflict. Carson does not compose the closet contents in any way so the final image can be considered entirely accidental. Yet all sorts of drama energizes these mute spaces, from the silken, seductive come-on’s of Tracy Quan #1, through the vertiginous spectacle of Brigid Berlin #2, to the unsettling menace of John Waters # 2. And so Carson’s use of the term “portrait” seems not inappropriate. The randomness of the process is not without meaning to Carson. “I think of my camera as a mini Hubble telescope,” he has said. “The Hubble is pointed into different regions of the vastness of space, pictures are taken, and data is interpreted.” Alpha Centauri, or the stellar closet, the mystery of time and space holds sway, or as the Magi of yore were fond of declaring, “as above so below.”
Fresh from the Rhode Island School of Design, Neke Carson emerged into the art world with something of a bang when his sculpture, Moon Man Fountain, was shown by Andy Warhol at his Factory space in 1969. The piece, a large water-filled Plexiglas sculpture into which two people could sit as “statues”, was subsequently exhibited by Howard Wise and at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, and was reviewed in Time magazine. In subsequent acts of creativity Carson could be seen cycling his Atomic Bicycle, “for people who like to ride around in an obsolete concept of the universe”; distributing his six-week art course, “Art Therapy for Conceptual Artists”; and, most notoriously, making a portrait of sitter Andy Warhol using a paintbrush in an unorthodox manner, an item from his “Rectal Realism” period. Fast-forward through a variety of other Carson periods as performance artist, kinetic sculptor, fashion photographer and critic, night club owner, apprentice jockey, New Wave modeling agent, and lounge pianist, and we find the dilettantish Dadaist poised to present his latest project, Portraits from the Closet.
The former Laureate Billy Collins has observed, “Whether you take this peculiar point of view as that of a voyeur or a child hiding (or locked) in a closet, Neke Carson’s snoopy camera certainly fulfills the old imperative that art shows us the ordinary from a new angle. These photographs put us in a place we want to be and do not want to be at the same time, and thus amount to a chillingly ambivalent invasion of privacy.”
Neke Carson was born in 1946 in Dallas, TX. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1968 and moved to New York in 1969. He was active as a sculptor and performance artist throughout the early ‘70s and was the Director of Performances at the Robert Friedus Gallery for 1978. He has worked as an Art Director at Camera 35 and founded the modeling agency LaRocka in 1979, opening a nightclub/performance venue with the same name in 1980. In 1983 he began writing for the Village Voice contributing his own photographs for a series on fashion criticism. As a writer he has contributed to Mirabella, and Night Magazine, and as a photographer contributes to the Styles of the Times section of the New York Times. He is a director of performances at the Gershwin Hotel, NYC and is currently a regular pianist at several Manhattan hotel lounge destinations. In 2008 the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh hosted an exhibition of his selected works. He presently lives in New York City.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
June 27th to August 2nd, '09 at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton NY.
Bill Jacobson: figure, water, land. 1989 - 2009
John McWhinnie & GHB is very pleased to announce their forthcoming exhibition, Bill Jacobson: figure, water, land. 1989 – 2009. A reception for the photographer will be held Saturday July 27th from to 6 to 8 pm. The show will run until August 2nd.
This selection of photographs dating from the end of the 1980s to the present reflects Jacobson’s enduring attachment to the theme of temporality in human experience. Using a diffusing lens to obscure the specificity of his subjects, the photographer addresses an emotional, even spiritual experience of vision, gracefully disposing of the objective documentary power photography embodies in favor of a universal subjectivity of experience. Jacobson’s soft-focus images present a moment in time but vividly allude to the transitory quality of the moment, invoking an experience that heightens one’s sense of the temporal while embracing the possibility of its transcendence. A stillness and contemplativeness prevails. As subjects ranging from the figure to landscapes, painting to waterscapes melt before his lens, Jacobson presents sensual moments of great delicacy and introspection.
Concurrent with this show our related business, John McWhinnie & Glenn Horowitz Bookseller at 36 Newtown Lane, East Hampton will present Bill Jacobson, Diana Pictures. This exhibition will feature a selection of the photographer’s early work from the mid ‘70s. Using the popular Diana camera of the period, Jacobson captures a series of moody black-and-white images of diverse subjects draped in a rich tonality of shadow.
Born in Norwich, CT Bill Jacobson earned a BFA in Art and American Studies at Brown University (1977) and an MFA in photography from San Francisco Art Institute (1981). His work has been widely exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Current collectors of his work include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In 1997 Twin Palms Publisher’s issued a book on his work, bill jacobson, 1989 – 1997; and in 2006 Hatje Cantz Verlag issued Bill Jacobson: Photographs. He presently lives and works in New York City.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
May 14th - June 20th, 2009
Duncan Hannah, World of Women: Paintings & Works on Paper
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Booksellers is very pleased to announce their new exhibition – Duncan Hannah, World of Women: Paintings and Works on Paper. The show will open with a reception for the artist on Thursday, May 14th from 6 and 8 p.m., and run through June 20th.
Woman as subject and muse is an age old theme in the archives of art’s history and it is no revelation that the artist here frequently crosses the threshold into a world of the personal and the imaginary. Such a supposition might be entertained in double with the work of Duncan Hannah who has consistently insisted upon a personal imaginary world in his art. Characteristically his work is infused with the spirit of a by-gone era, or more properly, with an imaginary by-gone era. Through mutual exposure to photography, film and printed media of the not-too-distant past we are invited to feel ourselves familiar with this world. As plainly as they are rendered here, the women in these paintings and drawings, all produced over the last 7 years, partake of this feeling of the imagined world. Hannah has no problem tagging his subjects with their real-life source names - a bevy of beauties from the fashion and film worlds of the past century; Joan Barry, Laura Antonelli, Stephanie Audran, Catherine Spaak all get some play here alongside, of course, Hannah’s major pash, Nova Pilbeam, the British teen actress of the ‘30s. Not all of his women are dubbed with real source names, but it is not without significance that those who are hail from the past, and from the perfected world of the camera lens. This information renders them more remote, and remote they singularly are. There is a particular type of alchemy Hannah is capable of in establishing a careful distance between his subjects and the viewer. The smoothness of treatment, the inexpressive scenes and features, the whisper of a faded era are all elements he deploys in situating the viewer. The distance created is precise in its invitation to the viewer to blink and walk away, or to stop and take note. If you do stop and note, the spell will take hold. As with the blankness of Edward Hopper’s world, the coolness of De Chirico’s, the plainness of early Picabia’s, the impact of these works is in the space they open up for feeling to inhabit. At the same time the work subtly repels emotion, insisting on the banality of its simplicity. There is no visual nuance here. Many of the drawings could have been made from magazine centerfolds, cinema lobby cards or marginal snap shots. It is in the tightrope act they walk between the worlds of cliché and moment that Hannah’s works acquire their power.
Alongside drawings and paintings Hannah is exhibiting a range of earlier collage works dating from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Here he gives way to more overt formal considerations and experiments with abstraction. Whole post cards, ticket stubs, advertising clippings, packagings and photographs are arranged on the page beside torn and scissor cut elements elaborating color, graphic and compositional themes. The disparate elements are highly evocative of the artist’s imaginary world; letter fonts, color choices and written content allude to a past time, events gone by, memories of a shared visual environment now fleetingly out of touch. Traces of biographical information are woven into the pieces, bringing the artist’s real life existence into alignment with idealized acts of creativity. The real and the imaginary are married together with art.
Born in Minneapolis in 1952 Duncan Hannah studied art in New York at Bard College and the Parsons School of Design. Since the early ‘80s his work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and in the U.K. His works are part of the permanent collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, amongst others. He currently lives and works in New York City.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
April 2nd - May 2nd 2009
What I've Been Hoarding; An Accumulation of Rock and Literary Decadence: 1965 - 85
John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Booksellers is very pleased to announce their new exhibition, “What I’ve Been Hoarding; An Accumulation of Rock and Literary Decadence; 1965 – 85”. The show will run from April 2nd to May 2nd, 2009.
Spanning three decades the show presents an unruly collection of posters, drawings, photographs, flyers, magazines, and other printed ephemera as an insight into visual innovation amongst the cultural fringe during the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Though the term fringe could be widely applied to the items displayed here, the look each fostered left a powerful legacy of influence on evolving mainstream design aesthetics in the U.S. The “edge”, self-defined and what passed for it in years gone by, is brought into perspective with this eclectic and appropriately undisciplined collection.
An FBI Wanted poster for Angela Davis in the 60’s; a sprawling photostat announcement for Killing Joke from the 80’s; a hand-painted design for a Lounge Lizards performance night; a rake of black and white girly-mag prints of the 60’s; these are the cultural gems and detritus left by musicians, agitators, provocateurs, and posers – or history-makers if you will. A convergence of the profane and the sacred is here available for all to see, amongst which the spector of History smiles through, coyly withholding the punchline on all enterprises.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
January 10th - February 21st, 2009. Extended through February 28th.
Stephen Sprouse: Drawings 1970s - 1980s
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to present Stephen Sprouse:Drawings 1970s-1980s, an exhibition featuring 100 pieces of the artist’s original fashion drawings and inspirational related ephemera. The exhibit will open Saturday, January 10th, 2009 with a reception from 6-8pm and run through February 21st.
Drawn from an archive of more than 1500 separate pieces, including 600 original drawings, the featured work on show spans the decades of the 70’s and 80’s - the earliest works dated circa 1974/75, leading up to the late 80’s as seen in numerous pieces physically annotated in Sprouse’s hand as ‘88. Presented is a wide array of working drawings and notes executed in marker, pen, pencil and Xerox - black-and-white and color - some hand colored in gouache and watercolor. Sample fabric books and strategic worksheets in which Sprouse collaged his signature color palettes will be on view.
Alongside sketches made during his years working with Halston are later more explosive, individually styled creations. The exhibit, much like a time capsule, captures the technical process of Sprouse’s design work and the emergent visual style that became his hallmark born and developed out of a most decadent and colorful era. His strong, vigorous line is consistent throughout, whether serving to describe the poised, elegant presence of Halston models or the energized, expressive figures of Sprouse’s own design. The progression/transition is obvious. An impressive economy of line and an innate understanding of the body and fabric are clearly evident. As colorful as his clothing was - he brought day-glo to the runway - it is intriguing to note how many of his ideas are discovered in simple black-and-white linear schema. Visual tropes he employed - graffiti, tv/video scanlines, urban street motifs like spikes, bullets, chain-link – emerge as cunningly deployed pattern and speak of the artist’s creative wit. His tendency to include words and song lyrics on sketches gives insight into Sprouse’s creative process where art, fashion and music were intimately connected. Among numerous examples in this exhibit: Blondie lyrics “Shayla Worked In A Factory” floating in the space above a sketch for a dress design, and “L.A.-LA-LA-LLLANDINGG” from Patti Smith’s song Distant Fingers hovering above a finished drawing of a man wearing shades and a Sprouse jacket design. Some of the pieces indicate they were expressly designed with a particular musician in mind. He writes “Debbie” or “Anthony Look” (as in Anthony Keidis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) atop the page. Others simply resound of the rock world with figures rendered in fierce microphoned stance. Sprouse’s use of the Xerox machine to experiment with various colors and open playful opportunities recalls Warhol and his focus on multiples. The graphic immediacy of energetic, loose-handed lettering invokes the raw, Punk aesthetic so prevalent in the upstart Xeroxed ‘zines and music bills of the period, most famously exemplified by Raymond Pettibon.
Hailed as a prodigy, Stephen worked with Bill Blass at the tender age of 14. Restless and 18, after 3 short months of college at the Rhode Island School of Design, in search of big city stimulation, he made a serious commitment to New York City. He was offered a job with Halston, then the pre-eminent US fashion designer. He lost no time in taking up with Warhol and the Factory denizens. Andy Warhol’s everything is equally important Pop aesthetic resonated with Sprouse. While he was dressing celebrities in Halston high-end clothes, his penchant was for the Punk and New Wave aesthetic emerging amongst young artists and musicians of the time. Many of the drawings in this exhibit reflect the Disco/Punk movements as the two musical genres thrived simultaneously; Studio 54 vs Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s. Finally quitting Halston in his early 20s Sprouse moved downtown and worked as a band photographer for a while. Here he met with Deborah Harry and the members of the ground breaking group Blondie. She became an important muse. The two worked together on clothes for performances and as Blondie’s star rose, alongside the advent of the visual marketing of music, Sprouse’s personal designs reached a wider audience. This was the springboard he required to initiate his own label. At the “mature” age of 30 he emerged with a bang on the international fashion stage in his first solo show of 1983. This and his show in 1984 established his electrifying style and startling vision at the forefront of a new fashion momentum. A true artist, with little time for the business aspect of the trade, Sprouse subsequently set up a variety of fashion design and retail ventures. Despite the fact nearly all met with gasps of admiration and approval, he somehow failed to establish a lasting commercial success. In every sense a visionary innovator of the time he went on to a heady career of critical adulation and commercial inconsistency.
The uptown/downtown theme was to play a great part in Sprouse’s story as he socialized in both milieus and sought to connect the two in his clothes and in his store locations, be it Fifth Avenue or Wooster Street. The cocktail had mixed results in terms of commercial success. His “downtown”, “street” influenced designs were executed in the highest quality material making them all but unaffordable to those who sympathized most closely. His insistence on artisan quality and on hand-working pieces could not work for large-scale commercial production. As widely admired as his designs were, his career as a designer and marketer started and stalled throughout the 80s and 90s. Following a series of wildly successful collaborative projects with larger fashion houses, all too early, in 2004, Stephen Sprouse passed away due to complications from lung cancer.
Visionary; design innovator; style iconoclast, his unique impact on the “eye” of the fashion and music world has left an everlasting, burning message. In the intimate immediacy of his sketches and drawings this exhibit gives the viewer a rare opportunity to draw closer to the very heart of Stephen Sprouse, the artist.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
Dec. 3rd 2008 to Jan. 2nd 2009
American Dreamers: Gatsby, Godfather and Gonzo.
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is very pleased to announce their new exhibition American Dreamers: Gatsby, Godfather and Gonzo. Tracing the themes of ambition, quest, and overreach in three great literary works of the twentieth century the show comprises an exhibition of archival materials relating to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Godfather by Mario Puzo, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. Manuscripts, letters, artwork, objects and ephemera will be on display with highlights including the original corrected manuscript for The Godfather together with all of the screenplays, heavily revised, for the movie trilogy; letters between Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, and Marlon Brando; Hunter S. Thompson’s original manuscripts of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; and the original preparatory sketches and artwork by Francis Cugat for the dust-jacket of The Great Gatsby, arguably the most famous dust-jacket of the twentieth century. American Dreamers unites three key literary figures of an era – Jay Gatsby, Don Corleone, and Raoul Duke - whose mad pursuit of America’s gilded promise leads to tragic and ruinous consequences.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
Oct.18th to Nov. 29th, 2008 at 36 Newtown Lane, East Hampton NY. Extended through Jan. 2nd 2009
Mike Solomon. Meteorological Watercolors
John McWhinnie & GHB are very pleased to present an exhibition of works by Mike Solomon, Meteorological Watercolors. The show will run from Oct. 18th to Nov. 29th at 36 Newtown Lane, East Hampton. Hours of opening are Fri. & Sat. 10 am to 5 pm, and Sun. 11 am to 4 pm. The gallery is closed Mon. - Thurs. To phone please call 631-324 5561.
Mike Solomon’s Meteorological Watercolors hold the viewer suspended in a curious time warp where an instant is preserved in paper and pigment, yet an extended span of watchfulness has been presented. The ever-moving sea has washed forward before the moment of depiction, and fallen backwards in the moment afterward, and this unalterable continuity is alive and manifest in these careful, vivid studies. Each work presents an experience of nature induced transcendence. Invoking the patience of the swell awaiting surfer and the light-sensitivity of the watercolorist, Solomon’s paintings resonate with clarity of vision and an ecstasy of feeling. One can smell the air in these pictures and taste the salt on one’s lips, yet the moment – changeful as the light - is passing even as the eye drinks in the scene glowing before it.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
Oct. 21st - Nov. 22nd 2008
Brigid Berlin; Needlepoint
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is delighted to announce their new exhibition, Brigid Berlin, Needlepoint. Featuring a selection of Berlin’s needlepoint work of the last ten years the show will open Oct. 21st with a reception for the artist between 6 pm and 8 pm, and run through Nov. 22nd.
It is not uncharacteristic that Berlin in later years has turned to the traditionally ladylike craft of needlepoint to create work that continues to challenge the social status quo, defy convention, and pose questions about taste and society. An avid consumer of tabloid newspapers, the “popular press” as it’s referred to in Britain, she translates front page headline broadsheets into genteel features of interior décor. Her subjects are typically crude, salacious paper-selling press announcements in origin designed to appall, shock, and titillate viewers. The meticulously executed needlepoint pieces transform the daily ghastliness of news occurrences and media spin into demure domestic objects of quaint design and questionable comfort. News products designed for a momentary frisson of engagement are rendered into soft edged but durable monuments that outlive the typical transitory lifespan expected of such unpalatable printed exclamations. Only, perhaps, by virtue of their fleeting existence – bought one day and consigned to the garbage the next - do we routinely tolerate the raging excesses of the contemporary newspaper industry. Plush and tactile as the finished works might be they defy any but the hardiest to cozy up to them. Sweetheart cushions they are not.
As carefully executed as they are the pieces invoke the traditional feminine practice of needlework when young girls were taught sewing skills and writing together, producing bland yet cheerful decorative samplers of prayers and pieties. Along with Annette Messager, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Saja, and Mark Newport, Berlin is not alone in her selection of a gendered craft like needlework to explore issues of cultural identity and engagement. Needlepoint, the province of women’s work for centuries, has traditionally been excluded from the canon of the fine arts, possibly by virtue of the fact of its gender specificity. In laying claim to this work as art Berlin holds fast to the principles of works produced in the sixties and later that refer directly to her gender – topless performance work, mono prints made using her breasts, and penis autograph books. Even still, these completed needlepoint “cushions” occupy an uneasy, undetermined space; is it art to be hung on the wall, or to be displayed on the couch? Is it a type of painting, or a form of soft sculpture? Alas such questions cannot all be so neatly sewn up into tightly stitched answers.
Brigid Berlin is the daughter of Richard Berlin, who directed the Hearst media empire for 52 years. Though raised in elite social circles, Berlin became a self-described “troublemaker” and spent most of her life reacting against, and sending up, the social conventions of her youth. She met Andy Warhol in 1964 and was soon drawn into the downtown social set centered at the Factory. Berlin became a member of Warhol’s inner circle and a personal confidante. She appeared in several Warhol films, including Chelsea Girls (1966), Imitation of Christ (1967) and The Nude Restaurant (1967), under the name Brigid Polk. Her skill at administering “pokes” (amphetamine injections) to herself and other hangers-on about the Factory earned her this name. She acquired the taste for speed at age eleven when her mother had the family doctor prescribe Dexedrine and amphetamine so that she would lose weight. Berlin continued to use speed through most of the ‘60s, until laws about what could be prescribed changed and her habits changed as well.
Like Warhol, Berlin obsessively used the new technologies of the day to document her own life. She carried a tape recorder with her everywhere and made tapes of conversations and performances. She documented the artistic milieu with her Polaroid camera and these shots offer a rare glimpse into life at Warhol’s Factory. Unlike Warhol, who used the least complicated camera equipment available, Berlin always employed the latest and most innovative technology. She made portraits and still-lifes in double-exposure, a feat not previously achieved with a Polaroid camera. These photographs were the subject of a large exhibition at Heiner Friedrich’s gallery in 1971 and later at the Gotham Book Mart. An extensive exhibition of her works of the last 40 years - photoworks, prints, notebooks, needlepoint - was shown at John McWhinnie in 2006. She presently lives and works in New York City.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
September 16th to October 12th 2008
Picture Perfect; Images and Shapes in Seventies & Eighties Vinyl
“Vinyl is dead.”
“Vinyl is back.”
The music media and industry goes back and forth on the issue of whether vinyl production is tenable in today’s technologically advanced audio culture, and on whether it may even be preferable to more recent forms of music recording and dissemination – cds and MP3s. Many vocal defenders of vinyl cite it as the superior format imparting both a “warmer” sound and a more intimate experience of music listening. Certainly it is a more involved procedure requiring use of a turntable and a careful handling of the medium. The scale of vinyl records is typically larger and many lament along with its “passing” the demise of the singular genre of packaging design specific to vinyl LPs, a classic template which engaged so many talented designers and artists for decades. It must be acknowledged that the visual impact of the much smaller (soon to be defunct?) CD package design falls well short of those bolder canvasses.
The evolution of the colored vinyl record, and later the illustrated and shaped vinyl disc, served as an extension of this visual aspect of music packaging and marketing of the era. From colors to images nothing was too wild to be pressed into the service of music promotion. It is unlikely that we will see again in vinyl form the riotous profusion of ideas, brilliant and banal, inspired and indigestible, that emerged at the peak of vinyl’s sway, the nineteen seventies and eighties. Many of these display pieces are proof in measure that there is indeed no such thing as a crime of pop excess.
The sad truth about vinyl as a medium is that it is fragile, almost ephemeral, prone to degradation and breakage. As we move further and further from that period vinyl appears more and more collectable, imbued with preciosity and nostalgia. The limited edition pressings of color, illustrated and shaped records – once popularly derided as crass and redundant forms of the medium – naturally ascend in this milieu, taking on a special sense of this character of a by-gone-era. No doubt traces of this specialness adhere to some arguments in favor of vinyl over new media. Post-vinyl generation music enthusiasts experience the format as exotic in contrast to the sea of cd and digital audio units that currently prevails. Collection and preservation of vinyl becomes a specialization of sorts. The listening to vinyl takes on an almost ritualistic character, requiring the careful handling of the record, the observable mechanical functions that initiate the auditory experience, and the requirement of stationary proximity to the record player; all quite unusual in today’s carefree, mobile listening environment. All of which is to say, once again, that nothing stays the same and that, as the expression goes, there are revolutions per minute.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
July 17th - August 14th, 2008
Walter Steding. King of the Poppies; Paintings and Drawings
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is very pleased to announce their new exhibition, Walter Steding. King of the Poppies; Paintings and Drawings. The show will open with a reception for the artist on Thursday, July 17th from 6 to 8 pm, and will run through August 14th.
There is an undeniable Pop sensibility at work in Stedings’ compositions. His still life works have the hallmarks of kitsch about them, as does his election of devils, imps, dogs and children as subjects. Yet the motivation to present something pure, something essential, undercuts the usual tiresome irony one associates with Pop and kitsch imagery. In a Post Modern context kitsch typically presents the well-known, sentimentalized subject in a straightforward manner allowing one to by-pass the actual image and reference cultural conventions and attitudes surrounding it. While insisting on its simplicity contemporary kitsch actually points to larger, more complex themes in culture and aesthetics. Steding uses this extra dimension to address something metaphysical in his subjects.
Early in his career during the legendary days of pre-eighties New York, Steding had the distinction of attracting the attention of Andy Warhol who, appreciative of his abilities, subsequently employed him as a painting assistant. Warhol took an interest in Steding’s other creative outlet, as musician, and eventually took on the role of managing his musical career, a project Warhol had not engaged with since working with the Velvet Underground in their seminal years. Steding’s musical performances at that time were as a regular opening act at CBGBs for other emerging bands of the era including Blondie, the Ramones, and Suicide. With his band, Walter Steding and the Dragon People, he is featured in the cult slice of time film Downtown 81, which includes performances by Jean Michel Basquiat, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Arto Lindsay, Ronnie Cutrone, Cookie Mueller, Victor Bockris and a host of other art and musical scenesters of the day. Steding plays the violin, a classical instrument, teasing from it traditional sounds with an unusual feel.
This sense of the traditional with a twist is also most apparent in his painted work. Steding’s subject is portraiture and still life, two currently unfashionable themes in today’s art world. His representative style and classical technique are imbued however with a very particular character and sensibility. While taking pains to depict his subjects realistically, he is concerned primarily with presenting the unseen world, or the world of “non-being”. Perhaps this is why many of his portrait subjects are transformed into more abstract versions of themselves which appear, also, to acquire some of the artist’s own physiognomy. The instance of portraiture is fused into these images and faces. Features exhibit an intensity of focus that somehow lifts away from the subject, hovering before the sitter like a projected mask, just a part of the person’s aura of identity. Something essential and ineffable is invoked. This is confusing when we are presented with somewhat simplified facial compositions and this is why the works cannot accurately be called caricatures. None of his subjects occupy real space. They appear in a purely pictorial space, looming from a flat, neutral background, happy to exist in an unreal picture convention even as they fix you with a cool look that dares you to deny their presence. Even his dog subjects are not completely demure as, becalmed, eyes forward, they draw in the viewer’s gaze.
While there is a sense that even the most sober of sitters in Steding’s work is sporting phantom horns, it is impossible to overlook the many paintings of actual horned personages, demons and sprites who populate his canvasses. Whereas the unseen is powerfully evoked in his depictions of real people - personalities of the arts, business and domestic realms – in these other works the fantasy realm, the “non-being” is given a realistic form and projected at the viewer as directly as any celebrated artist, writer or cherished family pet.
Walter Steding was born in Harmony, Pennsylvania. As a violinist he first worked with The Electric Symphony and developed his own electronic instruments including a synthesizer triggered by biofeedback devices. He performed as a soloist at art galleries and eventually at New York clubs such as CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City. He has worked as a recording artist and performer with among others Blondie, Jim Carroll, David Byrne, Chic, Robert Fripp and Panther Burns. On television he was orchestra leader on “Glenn O’Brien’s T.V. Party”. He has written, directed, scored and acted in films and plays including Not Quite Love, Time Capsules, Polyester, Union City, and Downtown 81. He lives and works in New York City.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
June 10th - July 3rd 2008.
Purple Anthology; Art Prose Fashion Music Architecture Sex
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz is very pleased to announce the publication of Rizzoli’s Purple Anthology, a book celebrating the 15th anniversary of Purple Magazine. A reception will be held June 10th from 6pm - 8 pm to launch the new title. Photographic works and page spreads from the magazine will be on show from June 10th through July 3rd.
A repository for all matters visually cultural Purple has become the magazine industry’s reference bible for inspiration, guidance, and emulation. Co-founded in 1992 by Olivier Zahm and Elein Fleiss Purple set out to cut a fresh path in the already visual-and-idea saturated fields of art and fashion periodical production. Disdaining to divide the two worlds, art and fashion, Purple set its sights on marrying them together using a radical editorial approach. Celebrated fine artists were commissioned to shoot fashion editorial spreads, a decision which gave rise to a whole new feel in fashion spreads- something individualistic, a raw improvisational aesthetic that parted company from the editorial boardroom consensus take. The aesthetic carried forward into styling the look of the publication, in its graphics, attitude and sensibility. The result revolutionized the look of fashion magazines and the effect is still with us today.
Over the years Purple worked closely with individual artist contributors building stable connections with such culturally celebrated figures of today as Terry Richardson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller, Jack Pierson, Richard Kern and Inez van Lamsveerde. Artists who have contributed to Purple’s pages include Richard Prince, Christopher Wool, John Currin, and Vanessa Beecroft. Ever in quest of the fresh and innovative the magazine could not deny a certain attachment to various media figures it regularly featured, muses in the form of Kim Gordon, Chloe Sevigny, Kate Moss, Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Gainsburg and Vincent Gallo, all of whom make an appearance in the pages of the Anthology. Texts contributed for the book are from, amongst others, Glenn O’Brien, Dave Hickey, Gary Indiana, Bruce Benderson, Bob Nickas and Jeff Rian. Captured together in one volume, reviewing fifteen years in cutting edge fashion, photography, art and graphic design, Purple Anthology represents a serious engagement with documenting the visually groundbreaking and aesthetically innovative in contemporary culture at the end of the millennium.
In recognition of Purple’s contribution John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Booksellers will produce a special limited edition photographic portfolio of works by five of Purple’s contributors – Juergen Teller, Richard Kern, Jack Pierson, Terry Richardson, and Richard Prince. The deluxe portfolio, featuring a work by each artist, will comprise 5 signed and numbered 16” x 20” color prints. The photographs will be gathered in a deluxe portfolio case. This singular production will be an edition of 10 and will be available for $25,000.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
May 24th 2008 - June 25th 2008.
David Levinthal, A Wild Romance: Selected Works from the Eighties.
Into the production of a toy there goes a great many presumptions. Shorn of any worrying content, anything that might be too serious, troublesome or adult, toys are a repository of unexamined cultural information. After his first experiment using military models and toy soldiers in the photographic project Hitler Moves East, David Levinthal found himself increasingly drawn to the use of toys in his art. Precisely because of their apparent blandness, toys offered a perfect starting point for an exploration of the standard narratives and mythologies embedded within popular imagery. A Wild Romance is an exhibition of vintage photographs from two groundbreaking series that Levinthal made in the 1980s: Modern Romance (1983–1985); and The Wild West (1986-88).
In Modern Romance, Levinthal trains his lens on figurines and environments of leisure. Curvaceous young women, some escorted by men, others set amidst comfortable domestic surroundings, are pictured using Levinthal’s characteristic device of a shortened depth of field so that all takes on a blurred and dreamy softness. Settings, clothing and hairstyles hint at the 1950s, an age of American prosperity and burgeoning self confidence, as well as suburbanization, straightened social roles and inequality. Colors are mostly soft and bright – ice cream and sherbet hues – bleached by an excess of light. Levinthal used Ektacolor retouching dyes to achieve the subtle colorization in these works and the delicate tints are both expressive and atmospheric, with tones of ivory, sepia and faded silver contributing to a sense of cloying nostalgia. Comfortable as these images seem, nearly all of them contain an undercurrent of psychological tension. As in the paintings of Edward Hopper, there is not only tranquility, but also dread, in the preternatural stillness.
The Wild West is a series of photographic images rendered via the Scanamural process. Scanamural, an analogue process anticipating the digital printing revolution which has since revolutionized the scale and quality of photographic art, used a photo-transparency and acrylic paint to transfer an image onto a large-scale canvas. With a palette of ominous blacks and incendiary reds these images depict scenes of action and conflict peopled by cowboys and indians, distressed ladies, townsfolk, and other stock western types. Levinthal evokes the epic scale and Technicolor look of the classic Hollywood westerns even as his miniaturized rendition of the usual frontier myths called into question the simplistic good and evil narratives and the notions of freedom and valor by which the old films operated. Coming as it did in the last years of Reagan’s cowboy-inflected presidency, this was a subtly subversive series of images. Their importance and their relevance have only grown since then.
David Levinthal was born in San Francisco, CA in 1949. His major projects include Hitler Moves East (1977), Modern Romance (1986), The Wild West (1989), American Beauties (1990), Desire (1991), Mein Kampf (1994), Blackface (1996), Barbie Millicent Roberts (1999), XXX (1999), Netsuke (2002), and Baseball (2003). He has been the recipient of numerous important arts prizes and fellowships, his work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been collected by numerous institutions. He lives and works in New York City.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
May 1st 2008 to June 4th 2008
Psychopts; Richard Hell, Christopher Wool
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is very pleased to announce their new exhibition, Psychopts, a collaboration between Richard Hell and Christopher Wool.
The exhibition will open with an artist’s reception on May 1st from 6 to 8pm, and run through June 4th.
The project emerged out of a friendship Hell and Wool share and focuses on their mutual interest in experiences associated with reading. Hell, a writer and avid reader, has for some time been assembling two-word groupings drawn from personal reading experience. Using a selection of these pairs he and Wool worked together making visual combinations of the word couples. They settled on 57 separate designs from which they developed six unique drawings in various media on paper, and nine silkscreen prints which will be published in a portfolio.
Christopher Wool’s paintings have long shown a fascination with words, exploring the tension of presenting them as visual forms rather than as linguistic signs with specific meanings. For the viewer a struggle ensues. Do you look at the painting or do you read it? And if you can do both, which is more important?
Richard Hell’s word couples show a similarity of visual appearance, yet conceptually are far removed in terms of meaning. The contrast between form and content is brought into dramatic relief. Hell’s discovery regarding these words - that as well as being an example of similar looking signs, one part is culturally, and indeed personally loaded, while the other is inoffensive to the point of self-eclipse - echoes Wool’s interest in the word image. This rift between sign and sense presents a rosy invitation for another of Wool’s ruminative investigations into the construction of a word image.
In some instances the partnership’s rendering of the word combinations presents a sort of rebus. An image that seems to invite reading scrutiny, an un-entangling of merged words, simultaneously playfully resists a mere reading and prompts a purely visual experience of the word. Almost irresistibly the completed image is evocative of the printed page and the conventions of graphic page lay-out and signage. Yet the final impression subverts these expectations, alerting us to the fact that we are viewing something other than a merely readable object.
The word associations suggest a process of subliminal connection. The reader, in a moment of peripheral observation, may have unconsciously summoned the word “incest” where the word on the page read “nicest”. It is a common enough reading experience and points to the relentless realm of the unconscious and its bid for acknowledgement at the expense of the conscious and ever-censorious ego. In a similar way, the artists’ prompts to view readable signs as merely formal, visual phenomena ask that we relax the ego drive and its penchant for rational interpretation so that we might experience more directly the impact of their compositions. While deploying the tools of the ordered, rational world, the artists are calling on the irrational, less ego driven senses to engage with these works.
The notion of chance or error is invoked and plays an important role in the works, whether by the visual accident in reading that summons the rogue association between essentially unrelated words, or by the suggestion of a printing or transcription error that runs two words over each other. The resultant impact of these different perceptions is significant. In the first instance we are called to look, to investigate more thoroughly, while in the second the instinct is to drop our attention, to look away. In both instances Hell and Wool would rather we paid attention, information being as bright, evasive and hard to hold as beading quicksilver.
In conjunction with the show, JMc & GHB Editions has published an artist book, Psychopts, featuring the original 57 collaborative images from the project. A trade edition of 1500 copies with paper covers will be available for $45.00, a hardbound edition of 50 signed by the artists will be available for $400, and 26 lettered copies, signed and slipcased with an original word collaboration piece, will be available at $2000.00.
Richard Hell is a musician and writer residing in New York. He was a seminal figure during the emergence of punk in the 1970s, leading up to the release of the influential album Blank Generation (1977) by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. He retired from music in 1984 to devote himself to writing. He is the author of two novels, Go Now, and Godlike, as well as a number of other books.
Christopher Wool is an artist living and working in New York City who makes paintings and prints using diverse media. He has published a variety of artist books featuring works with paint, print, Xerox and photography. His work has been widely shown nationally and internationally and is part of permanent collections at the MoMA, New York, the Tate Modern, London, Kunsthalle Basel, and Centre Pompidou, Paris, amongst others.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
March 18 2008 to April 26 2008.
David Levinthal: Hitler Moves East. Vintage Photographs.
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is very pleased to announce their latest exhibition, David Levinthal: Hitler Moves East. Vintage Photographs. The show will open March 18th with a reception for the artist from 6pm to 8pm, and run through April 26th. The exhibition, drawn from Levinthal’s project of 1977, a joint production with Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame, will feature new installation work, vintage photographs, and the original publisher’s book macquette. In the form of installation pieces, photographs, and a publication, Hitler Moves East was initially produced as a college project while the duo were in art school at Yale. For Levinthal, then 28 years old, the work heralded the beginning of a distinctive formal and stylistic approach to photography.
Using toy soldiers, constructed dioramas, and HO models of railroads, bridges and buildings, the pair endeavored to recreate a documentary style account of Hitler’s 6th army’s irresistible push into the USSR over the course of 1941-42, and their eventual rout and surrender to Soviet forces in the winter of 1943. In the publication that emerged, Hitler Moves East; A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-43, photographs, illustrations, and text excerpts are carefully arranged in a sequence that describes the unfolding campaign, from initial triumphant beginnings to war-weary final defeat. The photographs, with sepia tones and grainy resolution, ape the prevailing style of the era’s reportage photography, invoking the celebrated battle field images of Robert Capa, amongst others. Against skillfully crafted backdrops Levinthal’s photographs deploy a constricted depth of field and a narrowed focus rendering his images all the more illusionary in their ability to suggest a war torn realism. Within the context of this project these depictions discover a new dimension for photography, one where the camera’s capacity to both accurately record and seductively suggest is pointedly married to our appetite for constructing documentary and composing narrative; in short, for formulating history.
These artfully composed tableaux – artificial in every sense – through the medium of photography, are transformed into something with a very real impact, something flushed with feeling and coursing with a sense of verité. Levinthal has said of his work that “there’s less in my photographs than meets the eye” and it is this canny understanding of the viewer’s basic inability to sift the visual fact from its personal resonance that has emerged as a central theme in his work, informing almost three decades of projects which have regularly generated a storm of controversy.
When Levinthal and Trudeau’s slyly crafted publication first emerged in 1977 the authors were astonished at how quickly people believed the images were actual war photographs. Bookstores routinely placed the book in the history and not photography sections. This sort of myopic response is certainly a valid reaction to the artistry in Levinthal’s photographs, but it is not intrinsically the sort of scrutiny his work courts. He wants the viewer to peer into the photograph and perceive the artificiality at work there, but in so doing to catch something of the truth which is leaking from these creations; vision is not a unilateral process, but a dialogue between viewer and viewed. Truth and artifice are not diametrically opposed, but complexly related and interwoven.
A new publication, Hitler Moves East; Artist’s Cut, has been published by JMc & GHB editions to accompany the show. The forty-four page, paper bound book features reproductions of original photographs produced for the project of 1977, as well as illustrations from research source materials used. Featuring works not included in the original publication, Artist’s Cut represents an artistic reworking by the photographer of the seminal themes which made the original a cultural touchstone. A deluxe edition of this publication will also be made available and will include an original piece of artwork.
David Levinthal was born in San Francisco, CA in 1949. He is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1995), a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship (1990-91), Polaroid Corporation Artist Support Grants (1987-89), and the Prix du Livre de Photographie, Le Prix du Livre-Images, les Rencontres, Arles, France (1997). His major projects include Hitler Moves East (1977), Modern Romance (1986), The Wild West (1989), American Beauties (1990), Desire (1991), Mein Kampf (1994), Blackface (1996), Barbie Millicent Roberts (1999), XXX (1999), Netsuke (2002), and Baseball (2003). His work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, in group and solo shows, and has been collected by numerous institutions. He lives and works in New York City.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
November 29, 2007 to January 4, 2008. Extended through February 2, 2008.
Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81 - Vintage Prints and Printing Notes
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is proud to announce their forthcoming exhibition, Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81 – Vintage Prints and Printing Notes. Taken from her celebrated book of 1979, Ward 81, this show presents a selection of 10 vintage prints, plus a large selection of never published or exhibited work presented on original printer’s index cards with handwritten printing instructions.
First published to wide acclaim by Fireside in 1979, Mark’s Ward 81 announced the arrival of a brave new photographic talent and heralded the beginning of a luminous career in documentary photography. The book sent shockwaves through US societal attitudes toward the mentally ill, their care and rehabilitation, and served to broaden the very definition of documentary as it applied to the photographic process. Emerging against a backdrop of the newly empowered feminist movement, emboldened by the posthumous success of Diane Arbus’ work, the widely viewed Milos Forman film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and a political awareness of the treatment of women at the hands of a predominantly male psychiatric establishment, the book is truly a social cultural benchmark of its time. Today it still stands as a singular testament of the fragility of the individual in the face of state institutional authority.
In many ways this, her first sustained personally elected project, set the standard for the work that was to follow in a career spanning four decades. With regard to approach, subject matter, and engagement Ward 81 presents all of the photographer’s guiding aesthetic principles, signaling a rare early artistic maturity in someone who had been working professionally for barely a decade at the time.
Ward 81 is a record of the day to day life of a group of female patients in the secured wing of an Oregon mental hospital. Along with the writer Karen Folger Jacobs, Mark spent 36 days living in the facility, sharing the routines of the inmates, growing close to them, and photographing them. It was a project she had pushed for over the course of several years after an experience she had had in 1971 shooting still footage for Milos Forman’s evolving film project One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. She had talked her way into that role, offering her services for just equipment expenses without pay as the film had no budget for a still photographer. During the undertaking she learned of the locked ward, number 81, where female patients considered dangerous to themselves and to others, were kept in isolated though not solitary confinement. It was, however, not until February 1976 that she was permitted access to the ward. This tenacious persistence in tracking projects was to become characteristic of her approach to shooting personal work. As was the degree of complete immersion in the environment of her subjects, requiring in this instance extended periods of time getting to know the women and their world, and finding the photographs she wanted only after a special relationship of trust and interaction had been established. She has said that her quest is to capture “something that I feel is at the core of people”. As such, beginning from this emotionally attuned starting point, her work broadened the definition of so-called documentary photography which traditionally required an impersonal approach. While stressing the personal in her work Mark is always reaching for the universal spirit in the particular instant. It is this insistence on the universal which preserves the work from teetering over into the realm of sentiment. Though the images in Ward 81 are riven with powerful feelings, many tinged with tragedy, nothing becomes just an example of mawkish emotionality – be it sorrow, anger, or joy.
Coming off a regular money-earning beat photographing actors during film shoots Mark was wise to the moment of feigned feeling, in her subjects and in herself. For her the choice of the mentally ill was motivated by the sense that they embodied uncensored feeling – “the feelings were so much more exaggerated”. But it is a rare eye that can record such instances of unfettered emotion without being swept away in the current.
Her election to use black and white film was also prompted by this desire for the pure image. She has said that color photography holds the additional challenge of introducing sensationally heightened and unconsciously decorative elements in the construction and interpretation of the image. Opting for a honed black and white medium she concentrated the instant and the feeling into monochrome pictures. Given the discipline of this format the result is all the more remarkable in its range of feeling and revelation.
In contrast to the people she had previously been paid to photograph, these subjects were not celebrities, but as she later dubbed them “the unfamous”, people on the fringes of society and, in this case, those purposely consigned to and held without choice on the margins. But Mark does not come here to merely sympathize with the individuals, to angrily accuse society of victimization, or mourn the remoteness of their lives. She pushes past such easily aroused senses of social injustice and pity to present instances of camaraderie, joy, humor, and creativity. These women, surrounded by ashtrays, lounging listlessly before a television or passing down corridors in restraints, their limbs scarred with evidence of self-mutilation, are obviously not in a good place, but they are presented as three-dimensional people. Mark captures moments of enthusiasm and engagement, rebelliousness and reflection. The urge to fully humanize her sitters is primary, not merely present them as quickly grasped ciphers for simple pathos.
While aesthetically she insists that every photograph should be able to stand on its own merit – she is a demanding technical photographer – Mark’s preference to immerse herself for long periods at a time in the project she elects speaks to the notion that she desires her audience to spend time inside her work. For any photographer editing down a group of images into just a select few for publication can be excruciating, especially given the degree of emotional investment the work represents. In this exhibition viewers are given a unique opportunity to go further with Mark’s Ward 81, to delve deeper into her process of insightful recording and revelation. More than fifty additional images not included in the original publication will be on show, offering an extended look into the world of the ward’s residents, and a closer contact with the shutter genius of the photographer.
Mary Ellen Mark is the recipient of numerous national and international awards for photography including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, Photographer of the Year Award from the Friends of Photography, the Creative Arts Award Citation for Photography from Brandeis University, and the George W. Polk Award for Photojournalism. She has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants. Her work has been published widely in the U.S. and abroad, featuring in publications such as Life, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Books published of her work include Passport, Ward 81, Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay, Photographs of Mother Teresa’s Missions of Charity in Calcutta, and Streetwise.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
September 14 to October 13 2007. Extended until Nov. 17th.
Claude Pelieu/Mary Beach 2001
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is proud to present the works of artists Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach.
The place of collage in the aesthetic of the Beats is crucial, pointing to the attunement of these creatives with an emerging sensibility and style inherent in the culture of that era. The increasing omnipresence of television and magazine style presentation, with the move towards the instant phenomena, the hybridization of “high” and “low” or “pop” culture, the 15 minutes of fame, the remote control, the sound “bite”, is all well understood in collage. In such terrain Pelieu and Beach mined their material. Though there is a basic similarity in the raw components of their work – sources and styles – each takes a very different approach. Pelieu’s work is characterized by intricacy of color combining, care in cutting and almost a blending of elements, while Beach’s work displays a much more direct, almost confrontational sense, aping the conventions of the magazine style while mocking it. Pelieu cuts into his imagery to subdue and quiet the shrillness of the magazine ethos, while Beach works to actually amplify the clamor of contemporary media address.
Displaying a pointed critique of gender ideals and representations, Beach’s works seek to unmask the identity of both advertiser and consumer. Masks are ever present in the works of 2001, either literally, implicitly in the focus on cosmetic idealizations, or in the frequency with which she obliterates parts or all of the face. A personal symbology seems to emerge in the reoccurring motifs she deploys – snakes, apples, Eden, felines, children. Questions are posed about female identity utilizing imagery that purports to answer questions on the subject. There is a sardonic humor at play, exuberantly mocking the ideals of commercial advertising imagery while pushing for serious re-evaluations.
Pelieu’s work by contrast exhibits a more considered complexity of composition. Components are cut and arranged with greater concern for density of image and harmony of form and color. Here are the notes of cubism, futurism and deconstructivism French critics have referred to, works alive with particularity of feature yet artfully finished as integrated wholes. Image and outline, form and content are skillfully separated from one another then expertly recombined into new forms with subtler, more complex content. Splintered images unfold across the page in compositions that breathe time and motion into the work; at times the result is almost cinematic.
In this collection by Pelieu from 2001 the joyful, sinuous outlines of figure groupings in works preceding September 11 are a stark contrast to the work following. Though he was not in New York city at the time Claude began to title works “NY September 2001” in the wake of the calamitous attack on the World Trade Center. The cut segments straighten out dramatically into hard-edged geometrical wedges. Edges are pointed, sharpened, severe. The first piece entitled “NY September 11 2001” is just a jagged pile of gray textured shapes, collapsed into a rubble upon itself. The human element, parts of a face, is reduced to a minimum and a bleakness prevails. Following works introduce color, but the pallet is somber and restricted, evolving in some compositions to show a marked fondness for grey, black, and blood-red hues. The two other compositions entitled “NY September 11 2001” open up from the despondency of the first, deploying color and rhythmical elements but each depict subtly disturbing features. One shows two parts of a smiling woman’s face separated by an image of an exploding building, the other shows partial snippets of a masked man using a cell phone and the bitter inclusion of the logo of a popular cigarette, “Lucky Strike”. But in later pieces we see Pelieu’s engagement evolve. The work entitled “NY September 13 2001” manipulates fragmented pieces of facial close-ups which though displaying a fractured visage presents a haunting, tender meditation on human fragility. “NY September 15 2001” again strikes a more hopeful note with its soft, Spring-like greens, its up-beat rhythmic pace, and the toy bird poised on a figure’s hand in what must be read as the final segment of the composition. In this NY September 2001 sequence we have what amounts to a diary of one artist’s response to the momentous devastation of the time.
The artists first met in Paris in 1962. Claude was 28 and Mary 15 years his senior. Mary gave Claude a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Reality Sandwiches and a correspondence with the poet ensued. Shortly thereafter, with encouragement from Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, they moved and settled in San Francisco working at City Lights publishers and turning their hands to writing, editing, translating, publishing and book illustration. Mary is credited with discovering the work of poet Bob Kaufman whose work, along with work by William Burroughs, she eventually published under her own imprint, Beach Books (Mary was a relative of Sylvia Beach, the enterprising book dealer who first published Joyce’s Ulysses.) Claude at this time was also involved with writing, producing poetry volumes of his own which deployed the cut-up and re-arranged text practice made famous by Burroughs. They eventually forged close friendship and work bonds with Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, Charles Plymell and Brion Gysin. In 1965 they moved to New York city and by 1969, while living in the Chelsea Hotel, they could count among friends and colleagues Ed Sanders, Harry Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Patti Smith. Frequent travelers, they spent time in France and Britain and in 1975 they married and settled in upstate New York where they lived, working ceaselessly, until their deaths in 2002 (Claude) and 2006 (Mary).
Claude Pelieu has exhibited his work internationally in the U.S., Brazil and Europe, both in solo shows and joint exhibitions with others, including Mary Beach. Venues have included Galerie du Haut Pavé, Paris; Biennale de Sao Paolo; Galerie Mandragore, Rouen; Suzan Cooper Gallery, New York; and Enderlin Gallery, Roxbury, NY.
Mary Beach has shown work in Europe, Africa, and the U.S., including Salon des Indépendents, Paris; Galerie Farnèse, Algeria; Galerie Landwerlin, Strasbourg; Gotham Book Mart, New York; The Rainbow Gallery, Cherry Valley, NY.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
July 20th to August 16th
Summer Show
Showcasing a diverse range of artists this exhibition spans works from the tail end of the sixties through to those produced just this year, and encompasses painting, drawing, photography, print, collage, digital art and sculpture. Contrasts in scale range from an enlarged Harry Kipper digitally-altered portrait to the sculptural pieces of Michael Counts and his interests in the notion of the micro epic. The artist’s involvement with the book is a recurrent theme and is touched on by commentators ranging from Brigid Berlin to Matthew Barney, by way of Richard Prince and Mats Gustafson. It’s an odd crowd and the sublime rubs up against the ridiculous. The meditative serenity of Gustafson’s becalmed nature studies is answered by the apparently barbarous, yet teasingly sophisticated imagery of Richard Prince. The ever-provocative Terry Richardson, represented here by his youthful snapshots of partying punk peers in seventies L.A., faces off against the poetic, poised nude oil studies of painter Nick Weber. Ryan McGinnesses wall-flowering silkscreens present one fascination with the printing process, while Brigid Berlin’s very visceral experiments show quite another. There’s something, as they say, for everyone; or Mats Gustafson, perhaps, would call it a smorgasbord. Tasty.
Featured artists include Richard Prince, Ryan McGinness, Matthew Barney, Terry Richardson, Mats Gustafson, Brigid Berlin, Nick Weber, Michael Counts, and Harry Kipper.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
August 4th to September 10, 2007
Printed Matters. New Work by Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce their latest exhibition of new works by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Printed Matters, curated by Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner.
Taken from the contents of diCorcia’s 2003 book project, A Storybook Life, the works in this show were not made by any overt action on the part of the photographer, but came about accidentally as part of the printing process for the book. These images are the result of a proofing procedure typical in book publishing where a finite number of paper sheets are run through the press to ascertain sharpness of image, color absorption, and registration accuracy. The sheets are run through once on one side, flipped, run through again, and often re-flipped and run again producing a visual effect like a double exposure, an over-printing. Normally these pages are discarded once the printers are satisfied with the results, but diCorcia found himself captivated by the resultant imagery and held on to the proof sheets. Since then his interest in the special qualities of juxtaposed images which actually contact each other has developed. The layering effect, creating the proximity of ordinarily unrelated subjects, opens up greater worlds of narrative intrigue and complicates the field of meaning, two themes at the core of the photographer’s practice.
From more than 100 impressions diCorcia has selected 20 for this show, presenting them as “found” artist’s works. In doing so, as well as broadening the confines of his traditional discipline, he elaborates on his own familiar concerns of subject and interpretation, of control and accident as they feature in the photographic process. In one image a scene inside a funeral parlor is overlaid with a photograph of a man standing in a low room who reaches up to touch the ceiling. Both in their own right are apparently commonplace enough images, but in combination they conjure an extra dimensional realm of narrative and interpretation. For diCorcia the contact of these two disparate images owns a peculiarly personal resonance as the overlapping figures portray his brother and his late father. An eerie “spiritual” flavor pervades. This overlay of figures from different photographs recalls a process popularly exploited at the beginning of the last century when portraits were devised that appeared to show spectral contacts between the sitter and deceased loved ones. This transcendental feel to diCorcia’s images is not without an ironic undertow given that these works exist merely by virtue of the fact of mechanical accident.
The “Storybook Life” element of these images is enhanced as we confront everyday scenes, already distinctly charged with diCorcia’s signature theatricality, now overlaid with a secondary scene. The mind and eye helplessly initiate a narrative connection, a story on top of a story, even while teasing apart the distinct details of one image from another. The picture spaces merge and new meaning is born in a world where objective rules struggle to prevail; interior becomes exterior, past invades present, and the cool impersonal scene crackles with a personalized sense of the moment. In these arresting impressions diCorcia has phrased the question neatly once again; are we looking at layers of imagery or just looking through the veils of our own experience?
Over the last thirty years diCorcia’s work has famously addressed the seemingly contradictory aspects of straight-faced documentation and personalized representation as they apply inherently to the acts of making and viewing a photograph. He has been widely acknowledged as one of the most influential photographers of his generation. The recipient of numerous honors and awards, his work has been shown at one person shows nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; the Centre National de la Photographie, Paris; and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover.
“The conscious and subconscious decisions made in editing the photographs is the real work of A Storybook Life,” diCorcia has said, but he might as easily have said it about his photographic process and its subject. More simply yet, the title of his book spells it out.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
June 30 to July 31, 2007
Will Cotton Drawings
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works on paper by Will Cotton. These images, all produced this year, add to an expanding body of work detailing Cotton’s primary aesthetic obsession - the representation of pleasure. In the past Cotton produced lavish, mouth-watering images of candy fantasy lands- forests and caverns composed of chocolate, lollipops and ice cream – but has more recently begun to populate these utopian confectionary landscapes with gorgeous, eroticized female figures, as realistically represented as the impossible environments they seem so at home in. These lithe-limbed beauties appear almost as one with their delectable surroundings, as inviting and reassuring as the candy worlds they inhabit, as innocent, melting and available as taffy. Their untroubled countenances defy the viewer to find anything here that is less than simple, less than sweet. And perhaps because of this candid simplicity, the viewer is thrown back upon themselves and the question looms large - how free and uninhibited are our own desires?
The drawings in oil and varnish display a graceful, fluid style, an exuberant gestural freedom that belies the carefully honed craftsmanship of a hand and eye that, while deft, is never less than exacting in its requirements. Studies made from some of Cotton’s earlier works – Candy Forest (Study) from a painting of 2005 entitled Candy Stick Forest – denote an artist who is serious about understanding issues of draftsmanship and composition. Only with concentration and effort can the illusion of such easy spontaneity be brought about. The earthy monochrome pallet he uses in the drawings travels some way toward expressing a new gravity, a groundedness perhaps, which is absent in Cotton’s brightly hued, hyper-idealized painted works. Because of this color choice there is a haunting quality to some of these scenes which is less apparent in the paintings. Something of the Baroque spirit inhabits these pieces, recalling works by Fragonard and other 18th century painters, artists similarly given over to the celebration of life’s pleasures and appetites. And yet in our guilty age, the weight of history bearing down on us, these vistas onto carefree worlds of satiety and indulgence are never without a murmur of anxiety. Eden remains to mock the price we paid for our self-consciousness and the specter of this knowledge hangs over each of these compositions. Bitingly we recall the consequences of what it would be like to gorge ourselves on this sugar-coated wonderland, to fall for one of these spectral girls. Pleasure is fleeting, and all the sweeter for its transience.
Will Cotton was born in Melrose, Massachusetts. His work has been displayed in numerous group and one-person shows throughout the U.S. and Europe. Presently he lives and works in New York City.
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
April 12 to May 12, 2007
c/o The Velvet Underground New York, NY
John McWhinnie / Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition commemorating the 40th anniversary of the release of The Velvet Underground and Nico. The album, perhaps the most famous debut by any band in the history of rock and roll, continues to resonate today with collectors, indie-rockers, aficionados, critics and the culture at large. Its enormous presence, however, has yet to be fully examined in an exhibition. This show attempts to correct that oversight, offering the most comprehensive collection of Velvet Underground memorabilia and artifacts to be seen in New York City. The exhibition tells the story of the album and the Velvet Underground through the historical artifacts of the period. Drawn from public and private collections, it includes rare printed work - posters, books, silk-screens, ads, reviews, and ephemera - as well as albums and photographs.
The exhibit reveals the many styles of cultural promotion and engagement that served the Velvets, from their first gigs in New Jersey as a fledgling band to their celebrated collaboration with Andy Warhol. It charts the evolution from garage band to proto-punk, a movement that began with the release of their seminal first album. Rare posters in the show, including a signed poster from the 1966 performance in Provincetown, show how much Warhol influenced their early look. Later graphics show the band grappling with their identity, fusing a detached east coast cool with a slight nod to the psychedelia of the period. The show also reveals how their identities wandered over the latter part of the decade. Broadsides and announcements by other graphic designers, trippy to the point of high hippie, reveal how little control over their image they ultimately had. The look, a fascinating hybrid of art, design and musical cool, will be on display at the gallery.
Never before published or publicly shown photographs of the band by Adam Ritchie, Paul Morrisey and Doug Yule will be exhibited. The accompanying catalogue, C/O The Velvet Underground New York N.Y., features texts by Richard Prince, William Gibson, Jack Womack, Jonathan Richman, Jon Savage, John McWhinnie and Johan Kugelberg. There will be both a limited and deluxe version of the catalogue, each containing original photographs and silkscreen posters.
Highlights of the exhibition:
Warhol’s designs for Up-Tight, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable
The original artwork for the 1966 Boston Tea Party show
The famous 1966 acetate demo of The Velvet Underground and Nico - an album The London Observer has cited as number one in a list of “50 Albums that Changed Music”
Original Lyrics by Lou Reed from 1965
Original Warhol screen test film stills and photobooth pictures of band members
Bookstore Gallery Featuring Rare Books,
Artist Books, Art Work & Exhibitions
Gallery Exhibitions
February 21 to March 24, 2007
Peter Dayton Black Boards, White Chicks
Black Boards, White Chicks consists of two series of works poised in an uneasy standoff. The black boards are from Dayton’s surfboard series, rectangular wood panels decorated with vertical stripes of color, meticulously crafted, lacquered and raised to a high gloss sheen. The surfboards draw equally upon the high-art tradition of post-painterly abstraction once championed by the cultural eminence Clement Greenburg, as they do upon the artisanal ethos of a much lower end of the culture, that of the surf bum painstakingly shaping a board in his workshop. This particular group, all compositions in shades of black, is a wave rider’s riff on Frank Stella’s black paintings. The white chicks are a new series of work in which Dayton takes images of performances by such feminist art pioneers as Hannah Wilke and Linda Benglis and combines them with back-of-the-magazine graphics from 900 number sex hotline ads. Schoolgirl stickers with sassy slogans are placed provocatively across these feminist icons’ bodies, declaring them “hotties” in loopy fonts and sparkles of color.
Peter Dayton’s work has always been deceptively decorator friendly. A blurb on the listings page for one previous show described his work as half Andy Warhol, half Martha Stewart. To describe it as friendly, to decorators or to anyone else, is to focus only on the works seduction and miss its subversion entirely. His intensely luscious surfaces mimic the enticements of luxury goods. The work does not just strive to be merely beautiful, but irresistible. When paired with this subject matter it demonstrates the way our culture regularly applies a marketing sheen to the most antiestablishment figures or outré subcultures, transforming them into readily saleable commodities or attitudes. This work is like a Halloween bag overflowing with candy; it is an overdose of sugar expressly designed to give the viewer a stomachache.
Peter Dayton was born in 1955 in New York City. His work has been the subject of numerous solo shows and group exhibitions.
