In the running for best potato ever!!
Gerald Holtom's peace sign circa '58 (N.D.)
Une Femme Coquette may not sound like anything special—a 9-minute no-budget short film, shot on a borrowed 16mm camera by a 24-year-old amateur with no formal film school training. But the short, which was the subject of our article “Neither lost nor found: On the trail of an elusive icon’s rarest film” back in 2014, has for decades been a sought-after item for art-house buffs and rare movie fiends. Filmed in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1955, it was the first attempt at a narrative film by the iconic French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard—a pivotal figure in the evolution of movie style, who would make his feature debut just five years later, with the hugely influential and perennially cool Breathless.
Looking for something to take my mind off of the news I stumbled upon Detectorists, so far so good but I'm only one episode in. NYT: DETECTORISTS Britain (Acorn) - Mackenzie Crook’s melancholy comedy about the minor triumphs of a pair of friends who share a passion for metal detecting is the most delicate of shows — it feels as if it might float away while you’re watching it. In its second season, Mr. Crook and especially Toby Jones continued their marvelous work as small-timers who, most of the time, mask their frustration and rage in hilariously ineffectual diffidence. NETFLIX.
Triple treat: Eclipse, comet, full moon all coming Friday night
cafe clock Fez
From the outset, he was blatantly fraudulent. Reeking of unabashed insincerity, he cannibalised every -ism he encountered, chewed it up and joyfully spit it back into the faces of the establishment. David Bowie used to say that he wasn’t really a rock star, but an actor playing a rock star. The same could be said for Picabia: he played the role of an artist, producing an oeuvre of spectacular fakeness—fake Cubism, fake Surrealism, fake Social Realism, fake Romanticism, and finally, in his last works, fake Dadaism. For a half century, Picabia brilliantly trolled the art world. Everything he did was purposefully “wrong.”
best country ham sandwich in Virginia contest.
global arms trade doc trailer
The true story of Friends, Family, and 100 million hits of acid.
A Documentary feature on the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group of friends out of Southern California that became the largest distributors of LSD and Hash in the world.
Krazy Kat has been described as a parable of love, a metaphor for democracy, a “surrealistic” poem, unfolding over years and years. It is all of these, but so much more: it is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip. Like the America it portrays, Herriman’s identity has been poised for a revision for many decades now. Michael Tisserand’s new biography Krazy does just that, clearing the shifting sands and shadows of Herriman’s ancestry, the discovery in the early 1970s of a birth certificate which described Herriman as “colored” sending up a flag among comics researchers and aficionados. Tisserand confirms what for years was hiding in plain sight in the tangled brush of Coconino County, Arizona, where Krazy Kat is supposedly set: Herriman, of mixed African-American ancestry, spent his entire adult life passing as white. He had been born in the African-American neighborhood of racially mixed, culturally polyglot 1880s New Orleans, but within a decade Herriman’s parents moved George and his three siblings to the small but growing town of Los Angeles to escape the increasing bigotry and racial animosity of postbellum Louisiana. The Herrimans melted into California life, and it was there that George, with brief professional spates in New York, would remain for the rest of his life.
the aussie open turns back the clock to 2007 with dream matchups serena vs venus tonight and federer vs nadal tomorrow. unfortunately they are both (i think) set to start at 330 am on the east coast. sure to replay on espn2 the following morning. all four are 30 years old with venus, serena and federer post-35. to be eligible for the seniors tour in tennis one must be 35.
I saw La La Land over the holidays, and was kind of underwhelmed. An interesting effort, but didn’t really captivate me. The songs are clever and carry the story along, but aren’t memorable, and are more in a Sondheimesque musical-theater style than pop songs. And in comparison to musicals of yore the supporting characters don’t amount to much; John Legend is no Edward Everett Horton.
I do like musicals, especially for the psychedelic quality they often display, but in thinking about them I realized I was forgetting one of my favorite movies, until I noticed it was finally turning up on TCM: Robert Altman’s Nashville (Sat/Sun at midnight; DVR set.) It’s more like a back stage musical, with the songs occurring as performances instead of intruding into real life scenarios, but you would have to call it a musical of sorts. When it came out in 1975 I thought it was the best thing ever; I sat through it twice in a row. Funny, tragic, political, musical (with the actors writing their own songs.) I haven’t seen it in many years, and have had mixed reactions to some 70’s films I've watched again more recently, so interested to see how it holds up.
rip, mtm.
2732: Steve DiBenedetto
Novelty Mapping Picnic
Sifter
2010-2016
Oil on Linen
28.5 x 21.5 inches
72.39 x 54.61 centimeters
Cherry and Martin is proud to present a solo exhibition of new, densely layered oil-on-canvas paintings by Steve DiBenedetto.
Steve DiBenedetto’s intensely worked canvases explore painting in the Post Modern world. His process, a sometimes-combative approach that can last many years, has a ferocity to it. DiBenedetto’s paintings drip with energy and the liquid materiality of oil and pigment. They ram together pattern, line, color and imagery with seemingly both abandon and calculated intent.
DiBenedetto speaks of his work as a very compressed expressionism: a meticulous, yet agitated kind of painting. In his work, boundaries become uncertain. Multiple layers of paint create hallucinogenic scenes held together by webs and tendrils. DiBenedetto’s encrusted surfaces display a fascination with assertive color; they organically merge surface and structure into a sometimes plaintive, sometimes exuberant whole.
Critics have described DiBenedetto’s works as depicting invented, science fiction-infused environments, which grapple with the overwhelming abundance of information now present in our lives. Other critics, like New York Times-writer Martha Schwendener, have described DiBenedetto’s work as truly “phenomenal,” placing it in a context with that of artists like Philip Guston. Schwendener adds that as artworks, “The paintings’ layered and distressed surfaces lends them an aura of history and authority, like archaeological objects.”
DiBenedetto’s recent solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT) interspersed texts by writers like J. G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon and William Blake alongside his paintings. One area held a collection of ephemera — works on paper, photographs, books, album covers and other materials — culled from the artist’s studio. As an artist who has revitalized the landscape of contemporary painting, DiBenedetto’s work was included in the major exhibition, “Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing,” (2005, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY). The show was curated by Elisabeth Sussman, and placed DiBenedetto’s work alongside friends and peers like Franz Ackermann, Carroll Dunham, Julie Mehretu, Matthew Ritchie, Alexander Ross, and Terry Winters.
Steve DIBENEDETTO’s most recent solo exhibition, “Evidence of Everything,” was at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT) from November 2015 through April 2016. DiBenedetto’s work has been included in such solo and group museum exhibitions as “Remote Viewing” Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); “Curious Crystals of Unusual Purity” PS1 Contemporary Art Center (Long Island City, NY); “Le Consortium Collection” Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France); “Slow Art” PS1 Contemporary Art Center (Long Island City, NY); “Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions” Morgan Library & Museum (New York, NY); “Portrait de l’artiste en motocycliste,” MAGASIN-Centre National d’art Contemporain de Grenoble (Grenoble, France); “Einfach Kunst, Sammlung Rolf Ricke” Neuen Museum (Nurnberg, Germany); “Sieben New Yorker Maler” Kunstverein Museum Schloss Morsbroich (Leverkusen, Germany); “Nachtschattengewaschse-The Nightshade Family” Museum Fridericianum (Kassel, Germany); “Inaugural Exhibition” Museum of Contemporary Art (Geneva, Switzerland). DiBenedetto’s work is included in such public collections as Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA); Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY). DiBenedetto lives and works in New York.
Cherry and Martin’s 2732 space is open Tuesday - Saturday 11am-5pm and by appointment. For images or more information please contact the gallery at 310-559-0100, or email info@cherryandmartin.com.
in case of emergency, bomb new zealand.
