Björk’s new album Biophilia arrives September 27th on Nonesuch/One Little Indian. The video drops from director Michel Gondry, whose last music video was for The Living Sisters song How Are You Doing?
Also an app for the album, has just been made available for free on iTunes, which will eventually enclose the rest of the apps, one for each song. The intro to the app is narrated by David Attenborough explaining it’s concept!!!
A new-fangled internet phenomenon was born this week and with it, a new phrase coined. The practice of ‘owling’ – a sequel to the ‘planking’ craze of 2010 – involves crouching like an owl in strange places and sharing a picture of your roost with friends. Notable spots for ‘owlers’ appear to be staircases, fridges, office tables and kitchen work surfaces but there is a whole world out there crying out to be perched upon. So step out of those four walls and settle a-top this beautiful jagged shard of rock jutting out of Cathedral Cove, New Zealand.
Cathedral Cove in New Zealand’s North Island is an area of dramatic cliff tops, sharp rock formations and outcrops carved by the crashing waves. Any serious ‘owler’ would be proud to call this home. The famous marine reserve, donated to the country by a rather generous Vaughan Harsant in 1971, has some spectacular scenery including a sea cave and the honeycomb cliff face of the bay.
Off-shore islands such as this provide protection for the beautiful bleached out beaches of Stingray Bay and Hot Water Beach. That’s right –believe it or not – the aforementioned sea creature is regularly seen lurking in Stingray Bay and Hot Water Beach is infact wonderfully warm.
But, for the very best view of Cathedral Cove, perch at one of the look-out points dotted along the cliff tops and enjoy the sweeping views of this splintered coastline.
For more information about Cathedral Cove, New Zealand and to book, visit www.blacktomato.co.uk or call on 020 7426 9888.
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Cognac label Hennessy unveils an exclusive V.S bottle designed by NY artist KAWS. The cognac bottle is adorned with signature KAWS imagery including chomper teeth, “X X” eyes and colorful graphics that mix geometry and cartoon, right down to the SpongeBob eyeball.
www.kawsone.com
www.hennessy.com
The exhibition Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities, which features 27 other artists, illuminates the renaissance of interest among artists worldwide in constructing small-scale, hand built depictions of artificial environments and alternative realities, either as sculpture or as subjects for photography and video. These are worlds of “magic realism” conceived and realized through intense engagement with materials, attention to detail, and concern for meaningful content.
Opposite – Mat Collishaw, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 2009
Exhibition runs through to September 18th, 2011
The Museum of Arts and Design
2 Columbus Circle
New York
NY
10019
For the past year, Jake and Dinos have been working in separate studios to produce a series of works in isolation from each other. Only in the staging of this show will each become aware of what the other has done. Unlike Gilbert & George, for whom Jake and Dinos worked at times as studio assistants, their practice is not one of ‘singular duality’. They have always discussed, debated, argued and on occasion fought over creative and cultural ideas, but in this exhibition they will scrutinise and confront the whole idea of creative collaboration.
Jake and Dinos Chapman began their artistic collaboration after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London in 1990 when they created We are Artists. Since this self-defining anti-aesthetic manifesto was first stencilled onto a mud-splattered wall at the ICA, London in 1992 they have developed their own shared discourse as ‘sore-eyed scopophiliac oxymorons’ with, as they put it at the time, ‘a benevolent contingency of conceits’.
Over the last twenty years their practice has seen them make iconoclastic sculpture, paintings, prints and installations that examine, with searing wit and energy, contemporary politics, religion and morality. In the essay accompanying their survey show at Tate Liverpool in 2006, Christoph Grunenberg described the work as existing between that which repulses and that which attracts the viewer. Furthermore, he said that what becomes really disturbing is “the underlying psychological meanings – the attacks on the whole body, the blurring of gender lines, the revulsions of the abject, the insinuations of sadism and moral offences. While their sculptures, paintings and prints function perfectly on a visceral level without theoretical superstructure, particular figures, motifs and images can always be traced to specific textual and visual references.”
Exhibition runs through to September 17th, 2011
White Cube
48 Hoxton Square
London
N1 6PB
His work has been described, in the writings about him, as being in a dialogue with the now extinguished utopian ideals, or grand value systems, of early modernism, and the writers who have stated this are, of course, all correct in their description. It’s been noted that Peri’s grandfather was an early Constructivist and in a sense Constructivism is Peri’s inheritance fortune – the art historical equivalent of a decayed noble estate, amongst whose treasures Peri, the young heir, may wander, enjoying whatever uses or strange squanders that the rights of ownership allow him.
There is a vast, potent, teeming art historical energy about early modernism; it fascinates artists, and enthralls critics and art institutions. Modernism’s original formations suggested political utopianism, geometric spirituality, avant gardism and artistic heroism, cosmological searching, the coded systems of spiritualist and occultist empowerment, abstract and formalist absolutism, and ideals of social and scientific progressiveness. Peri’s appropriations of these (mostly ruined) modernist ideals could be just a cerebral, art historical exercise, or else an opportunity for playfully ironic, retro gags. But his geometrical modernist forms are better than either; propelled forth from a mostly poetic logic (as indicated in the painting titles), he creates the visual equivalences of intense, authoritative, summary moods. Peri’s is a cosmology of various sacred geometries – there are many sacred geometries around to choose from – which he allows to glisten in the brightness of a silvery honouring, before revealing something profane; a foul night time of the dissolute, created from the distressed grunge of painted and overpainted effacement.
Opposite – I Live in a Paradise of Hellish Blue Balls, 2011
Exhibition runs through to July 30th, 2011
Almine Rech Gallery
19 Rue Saintonge
F75003
Paris
