The world at my feet

Nobuyoshi Araki is one of the best living photographers. He has published over 350 books and is considered one of the most productive artists around the world. Many of his photos are erotic. He is best known for his pictures of bondage, with young women tied and often suspended and entangled in rope.

Now, a young French artist, Benjamin Deroche, has made a series of photos in honour of the master: Tribute to Araki. He has tried to reproduce with a dead chicken the pictures of bondage, with odd, but also disturbing, effects. In a interview given to Liberation’s blog Zoum Zoum, Deroche says Araki is one of his favourite photographers. Goodness knows what Araki thinks about it.

One of the main works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the MoMA of New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made of embryonic stem cells extracted from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work, that was nourished with nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and occluded its incubation system five weeks after the show opened. So, the poor, little jacket has been killed. It was one of the works created as part of their Tissue Culture & Art Project, promoted by the University of Western Australia in Perth, that unites art and scientific research.

This story reminds me of a scientist who considered himself all-powerful and created a modern Prometheus: both of them met a sticky end.

Photo by wallyg

In parallel with his official site, the French fashion designer (Dior Homme) Hedi Slimane has a photo diary: Hedi Slimane Diary. The stylist is a rock fan, with many connections to British indie scene and these photos incarnate perfectly his rock temperament. The site collects more than 800 untitled and exclusively black-and-white works. It features photos of Slimane’s books about contemporary rock like the famous Stage, reportages on the New York musical scene and portraits of scandalous stars like Pete Doherty, Kate Moss, Amy Winehouse and Courtney Love. In short, it’s the cool, good, old triad: sex, drugs and rock and roll.

For celebrating the fortieth anniversary of May ‘68, the English fashion designer Paul Smith launches a book regrouping forty reproductions of the most representative posters of that mythic event. It’s a limited edition of 68 copies, which are not really cheap, indeed every copy costs £1392. The book comes out in parallel with the first UK exhibition of posters produced by students and workers in Paris during the risings of May 1968. You can see these iconographies at The Hayaward Project Space in London throughout the current and unmythic May.

You can also buy some “revolutionary” May ‘68 gadget in Paul Smith boutiques, like candles, key cases, pocket notebooks, et cetera. According to me, this is the negation of the spirit of a season that, for better or worse, changed the world. But this is the spirit of ours times, where often the rebels eat caviar and drink champagne.

The German artist Gregor Schneider is seeking volunteers for his last performance-art piece, a work in which terminal patients will die as part of the exhibition. A private clinic in Düsseldorf has agreed to help him find volunteers for the project.

At the Wellcome Collection in London there is an exhibition of photos of ordinary people pictured before and after death by the German photographers Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta.

25 million people have seen Ghunter von Hagen’s Body World’s exhibition, in which real cadavers are conserved in various states of dissection.

Man, you must die, and art reminds you about it. Maybe von Hagen’s cadavers are interesting, maybe Schels and Lakotta’s portraits are touching, but I think Schneider is overstepping the line. Perhaps I’m wrong, I often don’t understand contemporary art. I’m only sure of one thing: Germans should enjoy life a little more.

Photo by Cayusa

If Ernesto Che Guevara was still alive, he would be an old man of eighty years, but he died young (in 1967) and has become immortal. He is even sanctified by some Bolivian campesinos as Saint Ernesto. Actually, he had the perfect physique du rôle of a martyr. In the famous Alberto Korda portrait, he has the proud expression of a modern Saint George fighting against the Dragon of Capitalism and Oppression. The photo of his corpse calls to mind a Renaissance deposition of Christ.

Now, the Argentine sculptor Andrés Zerneri is making a tangible statue of Guevara. The peculiarity of this work is that it is made of bronze objects sent by Che fans from the world over. It will be unveiled in Rosario, his birthplace, on the next June 14 th. I think it’s a very good idea. This statue is a collective work which has a symbolic and almost religious mean: the faithful offer their “possessions” to build the monument of their hero/divinity. Ok, maybe I’m overdoing it. Certainly, if an afterlife exists, there is a furious Guevara who is waiting for those who make big money with his face.

Photo by Fortimbras

We Tell Stories is a very interesting project. The publishing house Penguin has recruited some of the UK’s best young writers to create six short stories inspired by literary classics, but featuring web tools, blogs and games. The digital part has been entrusted to the alternate reality games company SixtoStart, with an excellent result.

The first story is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, inspired by John Buchan’s thriller The 39 Steps. It utilizes Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the protagonist, a young Londoner, who witnesses a murder and is obliged to smuggle a mysterious substance onto a plane. The second work is Toby Litt’s Slice, based on M R James’ ghost story The Haunted Dolls’ House. Lisa (Slice for her friends), has moved from US to London with her parents. They live in a old house where strange and creepy things happen. Is it an haunted house? You can follow the story on Slice’s and her parents’ blogs or on Twitter. You can also interact with the characters.

The other authors involved in the project are Kevin Brooks, Nicci French, Matt Mason and Mohsin Hamid. In the next weeks they will submit their works. They will respectively take inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Charles Dickens’ Hard Times and the anonymous Tales from the 1001 Nights. For sure, there will be other good stuff on We Tell Stories.

John Holmes, the most famous male porn star of all time, died on 13 March 1988. The Spanish daily El Pais dedicated a commemorative article to the death of this pop icon. Why is John Holmes a pop icon? For a start, I take myself as an example: I have never seen a porn film, but I know John Holmes. He’s a pop icon because has inspired books, songs (like John Holmes by the Italian band Elio e le Storie Tese) and movies like Boogie Nights and Wonderland. At last, a pop icon usually doesn’t have a long and quiet life. He died of Aids at age 44 and had a fairly full life : drug, alcohol, prison and naturally much, much sex.

The El Pais article tells a few little known anecdotes. He was noticed by a photographer standing next to him at a restroom urinal (porn has its talent-scouts as well..) and in his career appeared in gay films too. He was a gigolo, a stripper, a stool pigeon. For his cocaine addiction, that forced him to snort a line every 15 minutes, he started to keep the underworld and was involved in the Wonderland murders. The rest is story, or rather,  is myth. Little wonder that our times have as a myth a man famous only for his penis. After all, the Greeks already venerated a certain Priapus.

Boris Godunov is crowned Tsar, but the remorse for Prince Dimitri’s murder plagues him. Lost in bad omens, he doesn’t notice the spectres in ski-mask that come brandishing menacing weapons. In a few minutes, they fill the place with explosive and..

Welcome to the new show of La Fura dels Baus, one of the world’s most important performance companies. On 6 March, the Catalan theatrical group previewed “Boris Godunov”, a piece based on Alexandr Pushkin’s play. Pushkin’s plot fuses with reality, taking inspiration from the terrorist attack happened in the Moscow’s Dubrovka Theatre in October 2002. The Chechen terrorists took the audience hostage threatening to blast the building and exacting the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya. After three days of negotiations, Putin chose the hard-line: the special forces raid ended with the death of 129 hostages and 33 terrorists. Now, La Fura dels Baus retrieves that terrible event in this sort of docu-drama, where the audience is involved in a whirl of sensations, including  fear too. The company chose a little theatre in the small town of Molina De Segura, giving an even more claustrophobic touch to the show. Spectators and critics were very fascinated by this tragic parable about the quandary between means and purposes.

The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has become famous to the general public with The Weather Project at London’s Tate Modern. In 2003, he lit up the Turbine Hall with an artificial sun that “warmed” 2 million visitors. Now he changes element: he will set up four mammoth, free-standing waterfalls around New York harbour, including one under Brooklyn Bridge. The project, sponsored by the U.S. non-profit organisation Public Art Found, will give an illusion of coolness to the hot Big Apple from mid-July to mid- October. But this is not the first time the artist has probed the power of water. In 2005 he installed a waterfall at the Dundee University. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates in Central Park drew more than 4 million visitors in 2005, Eliasson’s waterfalls are the artistic dare of 2008.