S.C.U.M

The first single on Mute called 'Amber Hands' is released in May followed by their debut album in the summer

S.C.U.M stands for Society for Cutting Up Men, originates from the manifesto published by Valerie Solanas in 1968, she was an American radical feminist writer, best known for her attempted murder of Andy Warhol. She wrote the SCUM Manifesto which encouraged male gendercide and the creation of an all-female society

via DazedDigital

Angelika Arendt

German Artist Angelika Arendt was born in Böblingen in 1975, who studied textile design at Reutlingen University

 currently lives and works in Karlsruhe and Berlin 

famous for using polymer, Polyurethane (Plastic) in Sculptures

o.T., 2010
Modelliermasse

150 Jahre, 2005
PU-Schaum, Acrylfarbe

Angelika Arendt, epigonal, 2007 

Vertigo Headspin, 2011

Constantin, 2007 Stahl, PU-Schaum

Kunstverein Ettlingen, 2008

Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen was born in New York City, New York, USA in 1950. He is a South African photographer working exclusively in black and white film processes. Ballen's work is infused with a documentary-like style, however, also portrays the balance between realism and theatrics, living and inanimate, humans and animals. Ballen's use of carefully arranged objects allows the viewer to place the human existence within the environment without the presence of a human subject. He is a master of human psychology and portrays the depths of the mind through collaboration and directing, documenting and sculpting environments. The most recent series becomes increasingly tableau, including elements of sculpture, and increasing theatrical ambiguity. 

"I have been shooting black and white film for nearly fifty years now. I believe I am part of the last generation that will grow up with this media. Black and White is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.

My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.

If an artist is one who spends his life trying to define his being, I guess I would have to call myself an artist." 


- Roger Ballen

10th of The Cheaper Show

The Cheaper Show No. 10 - Artist Announcement from The Cheaper Show

200 artists, 400 pieces, $200 each

The Cheaper Show is a massive one-night art event where all works sell for a uniform, affordable price. 
The organizer removes barriers between talented emerging artists, established artists, buyers, curators, gallery directors and collectors, creating new channels for engaged interaction. The shows format is unparalleled anywhere in Canada. It showcases hundreds of multi-disciplined artists, with a mandate of featuring 75% local artists, based solely on their artistic merit. 


This meaningful event promotes local artists, not to mention helping artist to *sell* their works in public, but actually share aesthetic values and interests among many art lovers.

“Nobody ever listened to me and I used to think that was their problem. Eventually I got to realize maybe it was the fact I was boring and paranoid that was the problem. 


But you find that people who know you rarely listen to a word you say, even though they will happily take as gospel the word of a man they’ve never met if it’s on a record or in a book.


If you want to say something and have people listen then you have to wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to lie. 


Being yourself is overrated anyway. It doesn’t help. People say ‘I’m just being myself’ as if that’s some kind of fucking achievement. That’s not an achievement, that’s not honesty, it's lack of imagination and cowardice.” 

The turin horse

This is the film i saw last week and i would like to introduce it  to you.

The Turin Horse is a 2011 Hungarian film directed by Béla Tarr, starring János Derzsi, Erika Bók and Mihály Kormos. It was co-written by Tarr and his frequent collaborator László Krasznahorkai. It recalls the whipping of a horse in the Italian city Turin which is rumoured to have caused the mental breakdown of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The film is in black and white and focuses on the repetitive daily lives of the horse and its owner.

The story is started with........

"In Turin on 3rd January, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Albert. Not far from him, the driver of a hansom cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words, and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters. We do not know what happened to the horse.”

These are Béla Tarr’s introductory words at the beginning of his film, which picks up the narrative immediately after these events, and is a meticulous description of the life of the driver of the hansom cab, his daughter and the horse.

And the theme is........

Director Béla Tarr says that the film is about the "heaviness of human existence". The focus is not on mortality, but rather the daily life: "We just wanted to see how difficult and terrible it is when every day you have to go to the well and bring the water, in summer, in winter... All the time. The daily repetition of the same routine makes it possible to show that something is wrong with their world. It's very simple and pure."Tarr has also described The Turin Horse as the last step in a development throughout his career: "In my first film I started from my social sensibility and I just wanted to change the world. Then I had to understand that problems are more complicated. Now I can just say it’s quite heavy and I don’t know what is coming, but I can see something that is very close – the end."

According to Tarr, the book the daughter receives is an "anti-Bible". The text was an original work by the film's writer, László Krasznahorkai, and contains references to Nietzsche. Tarr described the visitor in the film as "a sort of Nietzschean shadow". As Tarr elaborated, the man differs from Nietzsche in that he is not claiming that God is dead, but rather puts blame on both humans and God: "The key point is that the humanity, all of us, including me, are responsible for destruction of the world. But there is also a force above human at work – the gale blowing throughout the film – that is also destroying the world. So both humanity and a higher force are destroying the world."The production notes for the film label it as "remodernist cinema".

Louise Bourgeois

(25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010),was a renowned French-American artist and sculptor, best known for her contributions to both modern and contemporary art, and for her spider structures, titled Maman, which resulted in her being nicknamed the Spiderwoman. She is recognized today as the founder of confessional art.

In the late 1940s, after moving to New York City with her American husband, Robert Goldwater, she turned to sculpture. Though her works are abstract, they are suggestive of the human figure and express themes of betrayal, anxiety, and loneliness. Her work was wholly autobiographical, inspired by her childhood trauma of discovering that her English governess was also her father’s mistress.

Fabric Works

 “I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. Sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole”.

Nothing to remember

“I’ve worked my whole life to hold onto my memories. I don’t want them to slip away. This is what the work is about, trying to hold onto my memories.”

Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin: Do Not Abandon Me

London's Hauser & Wirth gallery celebrates a rare collaboration between artists Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin.

For an artist who spent her career reluctant to work with others, it would seem unlikely that Louise Bourgeois would spend her last few years working on a series of collaborative works. But once you see these sixteen intimate paintings produced by Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, you soon understand why.

Throughout both of their careers, Emin and Bourgeois have explored similar themes of sexuality, abandonment, maternalism and identity. They are undoubtedly suited for one another, through style, childhood experience and intent.  

The collaboration began two years ago with Bourgeois’ delicate dyed paintings of male and female torsos. They were then passed on to Emin - who claimed she was “too scared touch them” - eventually layering them with her scratchy black text and fragile ink drawings. In the short period they worked together Bourgeois had a vast influence on Emin, and in many ways this exhibition is a homage to one of the last projects she completed before her death in May last year.

i-D Online spoke to the gallery’s director, Neil Wenman, about the relationship and charm of Bourgeois and Emin as a collaborative duo.

Why did you decide to exhibit these collaborative works? ‘Do Not Abandon Me’ forms the final part of a trilogy of exhibitions which began with ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works’, our inaugural exhibition at Savile Row, followed by ‘Alex Van Gelder – Louise Bourgeois. Armed Forces’ at our Zürich gallery. This collaborative project is both compelling and poignant in light of the fact that it became one of the last bodies of work produced by Louise.

How do you feel Louise’s larger works compare with these smaller and intimate works on paper? Louise’s larger sculptures are incredibly commanding. At first glance they are terrifying and imposing, but at the same time, they show fear, dependency and nurturing. Her smaller works, such as these gouaches, express more intimate subtexts, often her most personal, interior thoughts. The emotive qualities are captured by the swelling of the paint on the paper and the drawn line.

Louise Bourgeois rarely collaborated with other artists, why do you think she decided to work with Emin so late in her career? During their first encounter, Louise asked why hadn’t she visited before! The two artists had so much in common with their work exploring similar themes. From that point on their meetings became a regular occurrence and they formed a close friendship.

How did she feel about Emin’s work? Both Louise and Tracey expressed a mutual admiration and appreciation of each other’s work and I think Louise felt a definite affinity to Tracey (and vice versa). Laying in bed in her New York home, Louise saw the finished works and, as Tracey recalls, she was very excited about seeing the project completed.

With these works, you can see the clear connection between both Bourgeois’ and Emin’s approach to female identity and sexuality. Yes of course, I think Louise’s work has been a strong influence on artists spanning three generations. Tracey acknowledges that Louise led the way for many female artists, including herself.

How did the title ‘Do Not Abandon Me’ come about? The title is taken from an early Bourgeois fabric sculpture of the same name. The piece depicts a woman immediately after childbirth, her newborn baby still connected by the umbilical cord. It explicitly addresses many of the same topics we see in the exhibition.

Published by i-D

House of Wolves

House of Wolves is the solo project of singer/songwriter Rey Villalobos, the name originated from the translation of Villa-lobos from Spanish to English.

The debut album Fold In The Wind presents a soothing and poetic collection in acoustic form. Emotional and intricate, the sounds blended with Villalobos's haunting melodies, often associated with Elliot Smith, Sufjan Stevens, and Beach House.

Rey Villalobos is a Los Angeles native, his family originates from two different sides of the globe - Cananea Sonora México and Francavilla al Mare on the Italian Adriatic Coast. Rey grew up a classically trained pianist, citing Chopin as his first and main musical influence.

Villalobos has been touring the U.S. and Europe and playing shows with: Sharon Van Etten, Villagers, White Rabbits, The Middle East, Damien Jurado, Little Joy, Seabear and Fanfarlo.

Fold in the Wind is set to release in late Spring 2011.

Luigi Ghirri

(5 January 1943 – 1992) was an Italian photographer. Born in Scandiano, Ghirri began taking photographs in 1970, mostly working in a milieu of conceptual artists. From 1983 he focussed primarily on photographing architecture and the Italian landscape. 

Luigi Ghirri was an extraordinary photographer, as well as a writer and curator whose career was so rich and varied that it seems like a lesson in the contemporary history of the medium. Although well-known in his native Italy, Ghirri does not yet have the international audience his work merits--perhaps because he died so young. "It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It"--the first book published on Ghirri in the U.S.--will establish him as the seminal artist he was. Uncannily prescient, Ghirri shared the sensibility of what became known in the U.S. as the New Color and the New Topographics movements before they had even been named. Like his counterparts in Italian cinema, Ghirri believed that the local and the universal were inseparable, and that life's polarities--love and hate, present and past--were equally compelling. Not surprisingly, his interests encompassed all the arts: he worked in Giorgio Morandi's studio and with architect Aldo Rossi, while influencing a generation of photographers, including Olivo Barbieri and Martin Parr. 

" The meaning that i am trying to render through my work is a verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able finally to distinguish the precise identity of man, things, life, from the image of man, things and life." -1978 Luigi Ghirri

Hans bellmer

(March 13, 1902 - February 23, 1975) was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer.To show his repudiation of Fascism and the aesthetic it propagated, Hans Bellmer began to construct girlish three-dimensional dolls, which he photographed in erotic poses.Some of these works were published by Bellmer at his own expense in 1934, others appeared in the Surrealist journal "Le Minotaure", ensuring Bellmer important ranking among Paris Surrealists.

"One of the most important characteristics of psychic life," the psychiatrist asserted, "is the tendency to multiply images and to vary them with every multiplication."

The curvaceous form is hardly that of child, but neither the face nor the large hair bow seem to belong to a mature woman. An arm, leg, and breast are missing from the figure; still-life objects serve as their surrogates: a baguette substitutes for the arm, the table leg wears the matching boot, a milk pitcher doubles as a breast. Bellmer depicted the body as an amalgamation of the organic and inorganic, transgressing its normative limits to incorporate aspects of its environment. He fantasized the body as a series of shifting, interchangeable erogenous zones, subject to the forces of psychic repression in what he termed "the physical unconscious."

"With a second (reversed) pelvis substituting for its chest, the doll is given buttocks for breasts, and these seem incongruously large, considering the undeveloped pudenda and the juvenile hair-bow. The doll's left leg is bound at the knee, while the right thigh ends abruptly in midair, exposing a hollow core. All is passive, inert: one hand lies limply against the banister, and a blank, unseeing eye suggests a loss of consciousness. 

Who, one wonders, is responsible for the naked and abject condition of the doll?"

Bellmer felt he must understand why certain parts of the body were absent from his imaginary girl's awareness. Using terms from psychoanalysis such as "condensation" and "displacement" to develop his theory, he proposed that, in the body's sense of itself, various parts can stand for or symbolize others. He reasoned that, because amputees retain awareness of their missing limbs, the images of the absent parts may be taken over by other areas of the body.

Hans Bellmer said "If the origin of my work is scandalous, it is because, for me, the world is scandal."