This is Jasper Joffe. He's very high here. High on hubris. High on being Jasper Joffe. As if the Britart "me, me, me" generation hadn't gone far enough – as if Tracey Emin sketching herself masturbating (how did she hold the pencil steady?) wasn't onanistic enough to put you off your copy of Art Now – Jasper Joffe has recently also concluded that l'art c'est moi.
The man who painted Himmler in lush pastels is spending the rest of this week flogging all his possessions at the Shoreditch gallery. Childhood photos, big fuck-off TVs, love letters, toothbrushes, racist dolls – they've all have been divided into 33 lots, priced at £3333.33 apiece. Nice work, Jasper.
He is doing this, he says, for two reasons.
Reason one: he's 33. Jesus had been there, done that, and got crucified by that point. It's a pretty high peg to measure up to, he says. (Didn't tell him about Alexander the Great conquering the known world by 24.) Reason two: his girlfriend recently split up with him. So there's a certain amount of self-flagellation going on here.
It seems all the artworks I like have a few things in common: death, decay, and the never-ending enigma of transience. I know, I’m deep like that. But think about it--the Acropolis, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and a couple other masterpieces of humanity have all been blessed with this final touch of rot that made them so very special. Same thing goes for work by Rene Schäffers, the artist from Halle who lets his pictures “go bad.”
Painter Daniel Lezama is a sort of rebel in the Mexican art world. There’s those who hate him, those who idolize him, and asshole curators who refuse to say hi, but everyone knows him and has an opinion. Daniel plays with Mexican history in an absolutely free way, paying no mind to who's supposed to be respected, which may not be a big deal here but apparently Mexicans are easily offended when someone doesn't venerate historical figures like Benito Juarez and friends.
I’m bored with graffiti. Actually that’s not entirely true - what I'm really bored with is the constant inane debate over art vs. vandalism that comes with graffiti. Let’s settle it here and now, and never be so boring as to speak of it again; graffiti is art as long as it’s not done on my roller door. Ok? ok!
I have a fearful reaction when I hear the phrases "performance art" and "experimental theater." I've spent many a conversation about my school days trying to gloss over my theater background--I don't want to be outed. Not that I even earned that despicable title of Theater Person while in high school; I spent more time backstage listening to Tool with the techies than preening for my breakthrough appearance as a maid in A Tale of Two Cities. My brief career did, unfortunately, extend beyond school property. I starred as Alice in a community theater production of Through the Looking Glass. I remember pissing off my director when I buzzed off most of my hair immediately after getting cast. But it was one of those experimental productions, so we worked it in--I got to be a post-modern angsty Alice...and I shudder when I remember how in the opening scene they made me talk to a Tamagotchi instead of a kitty. Ah, late-90s technophilia.
When we talked to Dutch artist Tinkebell a couple years ago about her “Save the Males” campaign, a project that involved throwing baby chicks through a woodchipper at a flea market, that piece garnered a lot of angry comments by anonymous blog commenters. So imagine the shitstorm of hate mail she received when she made a handbag out of her cat and posted a how-to manual about it online. After that flood of hate mail, she teamed with Coralie Vogelaar and looked up as much personal information about those people they could possibly find. Together they made a book out of it. A lot of people who thought they sent anonymous hate mails lost their anonymity that day…
Lars Krantz is one of those geeks you bullied all the way through high school for playing Dungeons and Dragons and listening to heavy metal. Now he’s turned out to be one of Sweden’s most promising comic artists. Since Charles Burns is near and dear to his heart, he makes really scary pictures with one foot safely planted in reality and the other one in the grave. If you live in Scandinavia, you should pick up his debut comic album Dödvatten (Death Water) before the hype hits-–otherwise you’ll be left without, standing alone like you just dropped your ice cream cone on the sidewalk. Here are some illustrations he did for us of Josef Fritzl, a series called Prisoner of Decay.
Fine arts oil painter Hannaleena Heiska is part of that new wave of Odd Nerdrum-type painters, who are both skilled and good, as opposed to skilled and boring. Intricacy is traditionally something that dudes try to lay claim to, but contrary to a lot of the young painters graduating from snazzy London schools that're all about Vermeer and perfect light, Hannaleena seems to have stepped right out of a teenage girl’s fantasy. If you were wondering where to go next with this whole unicorns and wolves motif thing, here's your answer. We asked her to pick some of her current favourites, and tell us a little bit about the things her pretty, naïve, slightly disturbing images might mean to someone who’s actually been to art school.
Rene Ricard is one of the art world's sharpest critics and brightest luminaries. Once a fixture in Warhol's Factory days, he's been largely responsible for ushering people like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, and Francesco Clemente to success and universal acclaim. Rene is also a distinguished artist himself. His poetry and paintings (which, these days, are usually one and the same) have been quietly lauded by the more tasteful among us as an example of how to properly combine words and imagery. You'll find an interview with him, plus a bunch of photos of him by his friend Mirabelle Marden, in our next issue real soon. Tonight from 6 to 8 Rene will peek his head out of his permanent room at the Chelsea Hotel to exhibit a new assemblage of work at Half/Gallery. He's calling it "The Torturer's Apprentice" and we bet you $1,000 in counterfeit bills that his work will exude such a high level of quality it will make you feel dignified just for being there.
We ran a story about our visit to Wadeye, the remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory, last year that was accompanied by amazing photos by John West. We'll be showing you the documentary we made during the trip on VBS.tv in good time, but in the meantime, you can see more of John's Wadeye photos at an exhibition which opens tonight at the Convent Gallery in Melbourne.
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