THE Q&A: RETNA, ARTIST
At first glance, the work of the artist Retna looks like an undiscovered ancient script: a series of hypnotic symbols—complex, beautiful and captivating. But Retna has created an original alphabet, fusing together influences from ancient Incan and Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic, Hebrew, Asian calligraphy, and graffiti. Each piece carries meaning, conveying an event or dialogue that the artist experienced.
As a youth of African-American, El Salvadorian and Cherokee descent growing up in Los Angeles, Retna (real name Marquis Lewis) was mesmerized by the gang graffiti that surrounded him. He began practicing the art form, and adopted the name Retna from a Wu-Tang Clan song. In the mid-nineties he began making murals on walls, trains and freeway overpasses throughout the city.
Retna has transformed from a street artist to a break-out star in the contemporary art world. He has garnered attention from Usher, an R&B artist, who commissioned the artist to create a portrait of Marvin Gaye, and MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, who wrote in the September 2010 issue of Juxtapoz “one of the most exciting exhibitions...this year, anywhere, was Retna’s exhibition at New Image Art.” This spring, MOCA will feature Retna's work in the “Art in the Streets” exhibit. read more »
WE'RE ALL STREET ARTISTS NOW
In London, you can take classes on how to make graffiti. On weekends, street artist Andy Seize gives graffiti lessons to children and adults who pay between £35 and £150 per session. Since he works in pre-approved spaces, Seize doesn't have to worry about London's active graffiti clean-up crews.
"[Graffiti] will always have people who prefer to paint trains, tubes, buses and motorway's illegally," says Seize, a self-taught graffiti artist who got his start when he was 15. "You can call it vandalism, but some people regard it as leaving their tag or image for all to see. Graffiti is freedom." Seize did not seem to find anything counterintuitive in teaching paying customers how to grasp this expressive, rule-flouting freedom for themselves.
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, an inconspicuous pop-up shop filled with street art was open for business on Berwick Street in London's Soho. Original Banksy pieces were on display alongside works by Dran, Ian Stevenson, Mark Sinckler, Paul Insect and Doodle Earth. Pictures on Walls (POW), the East London collective that runs the annual pop-up shop, called it "Marks & Stencils" (a riff on the British chain Marks & Spencer). read more »
THE FEED: FEB 17TH
What we're reading:
At £3.50 a seed
(New York Times): Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s works “Sunflower Seeds’’ sold at Sotheby’s in London Tuesday evening for £349,250
Angry Birds vs Halo
(Wired): Mobile games endanger the console gaming industry
Man Asian prize will reward published work
(Wall Street Journal): “As we sat down and thought about it, we came to realize that, in fact, the Man Booker format of dealing with published novels is a lot better”
Today's quote:
“If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. ”
~ Martin Amis, "Martin Amis claims only a 'serious brain injury' could make him write children's literature" (Telegraph)
A DIFFERENT KIND OF DIVA IN COVENT GARDEN
The news that Mark-Anthony Turnage is to unveil an opera based on the mysterious life and death of the American actress and sex-symbol Anna Nicole Smith comes as a typical surprise. Turnage is a slow-burning composer, and never predictable. His first opera, “Greek” (1988), set the raw violence and black comedy of a Steven Berkoff play excoriating Mrs Thatcher’s Britain to music which was both caustic and beguiling. His second turned Sean O’Casey’s first-world-war tragedy “The Silver Tassie” into that rare thing, a contemporary opera with the durability of a classic.
Reared in Essex on a mixed diet of Bach, Mozart and black American fusion, Turnage claims that he started composing “by distorting other people’s music out of boredom”, and he has stayed faithful to his roots, with a love of jazz—most often Miles Davis—infusing almost everything he writes for the concert hall. The death from drugs of his younger brother inspired “Blood on the Floor”, a tender elegy for guitar, strings and muted trumpets, and Francis Bacon’s paintings were the explosive trigger for the densely allusive “Three Screaming Popes”. Turnage’s music can be relied on to be brightly coloured, intricate and contain a wealth of suggestion. With Richard Thomas—co-creator of “Jerry Springer: The Opera”—as its librettist, and the Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek in the title role, this new opera may well push out the frontiers of the art form.
"Anna Nicole" Royal Opera House, London WC2, from February 17th
~ MICHAEL CHURCH read more »
SIDI TOURE'S "SAHEL FOLK"
Say we're old friends. I ask you over for tea and you bring a guitar. It's a sunny morning, so we sip and strum outside, on the fire escape. Now imagine I am a celebrated singer from Mali, with a voice as exacting as a raconteur's. You too are a virtuoso, practiced in both the local Songhaï tradition and American blues. And the city beyond the fire escape? That's a vast field by the Niger River, outside the ancient town of Gao.
This is the backstory to Sidi Touré's new album, "Sahel Folk". The unofficial ambassadorship of Malian music was thrust upon Mr Touré after the death of Ali Farka Touré in 2006 (the two men were not related). But recognition first came to him when, at 25, he won the vocalist's top prize at the 1984 Mali National Biennale, a government-produced cultural fair (now defunct, along with the single-party political system that administered it). Another ten years passed before Mr Touré recorded "Hoga", his first solo album. "Sahel Folk" is the long-awaited follow-up to that debut. read more »
THE FEED: FEB 15TH
What we're reading:
How to name a movie
(Salon): You "would lose a lot of viewers if they looked through the paper and saw a movie called "F*ck Buddies.'"
Revenge of the dragon tattoo
(Slate): Eva Gabrielsson, Stieg Larsson's long-time partner, positions herself as the Millennium saga's guardian
More human than human?
(Atlantic): On the Turing Test, "an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people."
Today's quote:
“We all come to the theater with baggage. The baggage of our daily lives, the baggage of our problems, the baggage of our tragedies, the baggage of being tired. It doesn’t matter what age you are. But if our hearts get opened and released—well, that’s what theater can do, and does sometimes, and everyone is thankful when that happens.”
~ Vanessa Redgrave, "Driving Ms. Redgrave Through a Reluctant Conversation" (New York Times)
BRINGING HOME THE BACON
Christie's and Sotheby’s sold just under £248m ($399.3m) worth of Impressionist and Modern art in three days of auctions in London earlier this week. The total is one of the highest ever achieved for the February Impressionist sales in London, and seemed to prove that the recession that hit the art market in 2009 is well and truly over.
Both auction houses have been reporting an increase in turnover as confidence has returned and business expanded. Christie’s new chief executive, Stephen Murphy, also reports a sizeable rise in the number of new clients registering to bid in its sales in 2010; the year saw a 13% increase in new clients from continental Europe over 2009; a 24% increase in Britain; and a 32% rise in America. Despite this bullishness, the mood in the salerooms ranged from sluggish to euphoric during Impressionist week in London, indicating that sentiment in the art market is more complex than the figures might reveal.
Certainly, there is plenty of money being spent on art, but buyers are extremely picky. Trying to sell anything other than top-quality works that are new to the market and have an excellent provenance is still an uphill struggle. The week began on February 8th with Sotheby’s prestigious evening sale, when the auction house offers up its rarest and most expensive works. read more »
PICASSO'S GUITARS
Visitors to Picasso’s new studio on rue Schoelcher in 1913 were greeted with quite a sight. “The whole studio seemed to be bristling with Picassos. All the bits of wood and frame had become like his pictures,” wrote Vanessa Bell in a letter to Duncan Grant, a fellow member of the Bloomsbury group. In the jumble of works on view, it was hard to tell what was art and what was soon to be art. Collage clippings were scattered on the desk and paintings were stacked against the walls. The room also held a still-life construction: a cardboard guitar, placed upon semi-circular cardboard tabletop, with some faux bois (fake wood) wallpaper behind.
This guitar, along with another one made of sheet metal in 1914 (which Picasso himself gave to the museum in the 1970s), are the inspiration for "Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914", a new show at New York's Museum of Modern Art (it opens on February 13th). In 2005 the aforementioned cardboard tabletop that belongs with the cardboard guitar was rediscovered in the MoMA basement, this exhibition marks the first time they are shown together, and also includes a variety of collages, ‘constructions’, drawings, photographs and paintings that follow similar themes. read more »
THE BLACK DOG
The black dog. Just where did Winston Churchill get his famous metaphor for depression? From Arthur Conan Doyle and his diabolical Baskerville hound? Or perhaps from Samuel Johnson, who in 1783 wrote, "when I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking."
What about "Beowulf"?
Whatever its origins, Churchill's black dog quickly went from being a private quip to a cliché: stranded, toothless and damp. Rebecca Hunt, an artist and writer based in London, explores the comic possibilities of the metaphor's lost snarl in her debut novel, "Mr Chartwell". The book introduces us to Black Pat, "a mammoth muscular dog about six foot seven high" who happens to be the physical embodiment of depression. Oh, and he talks. When we meet Pat, he is lurking at Churchill's bedside, as we might expect. "Bugger off," Churchill barks back, with a weariness that tells us this is an act they've played for years.
But Pat thinks he has more to offer than quiet foreboding. He wishes to make ths plain to a recently widowed librarian named Esther. As charming as Pat turns out to be (drollery is his chief tactic), neither Churchill nor Esther are moved by his overtures. This odd triangle of characters—awkward, sympathetic and strange—is the crux of the novel's humour. read more »
THE FEED: FEB 11TH
What we're reading:
On cannibalism and evil
(Slate): "Bloodlands", Timothy Snyder's new book about the Stalinist famine in the Ukraine
The solution is upwards
(Atlantic): Edward Glaeser on how skyscrapers can save cities
"The lost art of editing"
(Guardian): Are books edited properly these days?
Today's quote:
"Who are they, and who are we?/ They are the authority, the sultans./ They are the rich, and the government is on their side./ We are the poor, the governed./ Think about it, use your head./ See which one of us rules the other."
~ Ahmed Fouad Negm, Egyptian poet and songwriter, "Egypt: The Cultural Revolution" (New York Times)
Comment of the moment
quote Given a chance, any chance of a decent respectable life, these people will slowly steer away from conformism towards a more open society. The painting message is poignant: even valentine,s heart is bleeding !!!