The very exciting Guggenheim Museum/YouTube collaborative competition – YouTube Play – is on the hunt for the world’s most creative videos. As we reported last month, YouTube Play was conceived to discover and showcase the most exceptional talent working in the ever-expanding realm of online video. Open to the global online community, the competition is accepting submissions now through July 31st.
“We will be looking for work that will test, elevate, and experiment with video as it is manifest online. We are less interested in what’s ‘now’ than in what’s next.” YouTube Play is open to students and amateur video makers, artists, and creative professionals. Submissions may include animation, motion graphics, narrative, nonnarrative, documentary, and music videos. The jury will review a short list of up to two hundred video works that have been prescreened by the Guggenheim from the pool of videos submitted by the international YouTube community and uploaded to youtube.com/play. From the short list, the jury will select up to twenty that they deem the most creative and inspiring, regardless of genre, technique, or budget. The short-listed videos will be on the YouTube Play channel (youtube.com/play) beginning in September 2010.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and YouTube have announced the launch of YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video. A collaboration with HP, YouTube Play was conceived to discover and showcase the most exceptional talent working in the ever-expanding realm of online video. Open to the global online community, the competition is accepting submissions now through July 31st.
A jury of experts from the worlds of art, design, film, and entertainment will select up to 20 videos submitted from around the world to be presented at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21, 2010, with simultaneous presentations at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice. The works will also be available to a worldwide audience on the special YouTube Play channel at youtube.com/play.
YouTube Play is just the latest in YouTube’s run of innovative events. In 2009, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra gave everyone with access to the Internet a chance to play in Carnegie Hall, and in 2007, the CNN/YouTube debates gave everyone a chance to ask a question of U.S. presidential candidates. With YouTube Play, YouTube expands upon the traditional curatorial process in a way that gives every video creator a shot at international artistic recognition.
Upload Creative Video
The goal of this project is to discover and celebrate work that expands the notion of what video can be. Submissions may include any form of creative video, including art, animation, motion graphics, narrative and non-narrative work, or entirely new art forms. YouTube Play hopes to attract innovative, original, and surprising videos from around the world, regardless of genre, technique, background, or budget. Participants can be art students or amateur video makers as well as creative professionals. To help video creators generate the best possible submissions, the YouTube Play channel will post HP Make tutorials, featuring editing, sound, and other video-making techniques.
How to Participate
Participants are invited to submit new or existing videos created within the last two years to a YouTube Play channel at youtube.com/play. The maximum running time for a video is ten minutes. Each participant will be asked to provide a written statement regarding his or her work. Only one video per participant will be considered. The deadline for submission is July 31, 2010, 12:00 p.m., Pacific Time, 3:00 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.
Selection Process
The Guggenheim will identify up to 200 videos which will be viewable on the YouTube Play channel at youtube.com/play. From the 200, up to 20 videos will be selected by a jury of experts, comprised of distinguished artists, filmmakers, designers, and musicians, to be presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York during a special event on October 21, 2010.
Check out the video below for more details, and/or visit YouTube.com/Play.
Architecture and design duo Ludovica and Roberto Palomba‘s new floor-style GREGG lamp for Foscarini is the latest addition to the very popular series of organically-inspired lighting. Complementing the existing table, wall, ceiling and suspension versions, the GREGG floor lamp is made of an incandescent mass of blown glass transformed into an elegant, asymmetric bubble, closer to something we might find in nature than a machine-shaped geometric form. The elegant movement of the stem links the base to the blown glass diffuser, and the egg-like shape morphs depending on the observer’s point of view.
Check out the images and video below to learn more about Ludovica and Roberto Palomba’s inspiration behind the GREGG series.
Iranian born photographer, videographer and filmmaker Shirin Neshat first rose to the international stage in the mid-90s with a photo series called Women of Allah, an intense body of work exploring women and martyrdom in Islamic culture. Since then, her work has progressed from photographs to video installations and short films, covering difficult topics like Eastern and Western boundaries, men and women, the sacred and the profane, exile and belonging.
A new book out this month entitled, simply, Shirin Neshat, explores the evolution of Neshat’s potent imagery (see below!). Featuring a foreword by world renowned artist Marina Abramovic and an essay by art critic Arthur Danto, this stunning collection covers everything from Women of Allah, focusing the lens on militant Muslim women, to her first feature film, Women Without Men, based on a novella by Shahrnush Parsipur, which was banned from the author’s native Iran. The film follows the lives of four women during the summer of 1953, when an American-led coup d’etat brought down Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister and reinstalled the Shah to power. Notably, Women Without Men makes its U.S. debut this year, and has already earned the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival and been selected as part of 2010′s New Directors/New Films program of MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Neshat’s work is boldly beautiful, incredibly powerful, and at times even stark: women cloaked in black veils with excerpts of Farsi poetry inscribed across the surface; videos of clans of men and women in barren landscapes chanting, sacred burial rituals, groups of men and women listening to rousing moralistic sermons in a public hall, and more recently, magical realist works in which women fly or plant themselves in gardens to ensure their fertility.
Shirin Neshat is available now through Amazon or Rizzoli.
Shirin Neshat
essay by Arthur Danto
foreword by Marina Abramovic
Published by Rizzoli
Hardcover, $75.00
*above: Shirin Neshat, Women of Allah Series, 1994. B&W RC print (photo taken by Cynthia Preston), 31 x 46 1/2 inches (79 x 118 cm). Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.
*above: Shirin Neshat, Allegiance with Wakefulness, 1994. B&W RC print & ink (photo taken by Cynthia Preston), 46 3/4 x 37 1/8 inches (118.7 x 94.3 cm). Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.
*above: Shirin Neshat, Stories of Martyrdom, 1994. B&W RC print and ink (photo taken by Cynthia Preston). 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm). Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.
*above: Shirin Neshat, Production Still. Rapture, 1999. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York
*above: Shirin Neshat, Rapture Series, 1999. Gelatin silver print. 44 x 69 inches (111.8 x 175.3 cm). Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York
*above: Shirin Neshat, Passage Series, 2001. Cibachrome print. 51-1/8 x 63 inches framed. 130 x 160 cm framed. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York
*above: Shirin Neshat, Passage Series, 2001. Cibachrome print. 51-1/8 x 63 inches framed. 130 x 160 cm framed. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York
*above: Shirin Neshat, Passage Series, 2001. Cibachrome print. 42 x 63 1/8 inches (106.7 x 160.3 cm) framed. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York
*All images courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York
“Architecture affects everybody…” Julius Shulman once said. And he’s right – it’s all around us, and far too often taken for granted. Sadly, Shulman passed away earlier this year. Now, director Erik Bricker‘s new documentary, “Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman,” celebrates Shulman’s life and work as the world’s greatest architectural photographer.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art welcomes visionary Dutch designer Marcel Wanders in a self-designed, self-curated exhibition called “Marcel Wanders: Daydreams.” This dreamlike, multimedia installation of objects was personally selected by Wanders to represent pivotal points in his 20+ year career. Video images, lighting, and sound illuminate his creative development over the years.
New films—detailing Wanders’s design process and philosophy in projects ranging from manufactured products, hotel interiors, and design art—also make their public debut at the retrospective. The films’ soundscapes provide Wanders’s personal views on design.
“Marcel Wanders: Daydreams”
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Curated by Kathryn Hiesinger
November 22, 2009- June 13, 2010
A few days ago, I posted about the upcoming Tim Burton retrospective at MoMA. In other Tim Burton news, take a look at the new trailer for “Alice in Wonderland,” scheduled for release spring 2010. From Walt Disney, Burton teams up with some of his favorite players, including Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen. A new face – 19-year-old Mia Wasikowska – plays Alice. Looking forward to seeing a classic retold with Burton’s twists and turns.
Let me be honest here: Sally Mann is my favorite photographer. I lived in Lexington, VA (Mann’s hometown) for about a year when I was 14, and that was it. That’s when I fell in love with photography – mostly due to Sally Mann’s work.
So, that said, when I heard Sally Mann was debuting a new series of work at the Gagosian Gallery in September, I was incredibly excited. With “Proud Flesh,” photographer Sally Mann turns her camera away from her earlier subjects – childhood, adolescence, life and death, landscape, history – and considers the relationship between husband and wife, turning the tables on the traditionally male artist-dominated lover studies, with a series dedicated to her husband of almost 40 years, Larry Mann.
Mrs. Mann describes their relationship as “love at first sight.” Of note, Mr. Mann – a once strikingly powerful man, who, as told in one story, was capable of independently lifting a heavy stone three men together could not – was diagnosed in 1994 with muscular dystrophy, an incurable disease that has weakened his muscle tissue.
There has always been a palpable honesty to Mann’s work – sometimes haunting, often beautiful, sometimes intimidating, other times heartbreaking. Take, for example, the photographs she took of her children years ago for 1990′s “Immediate Family” (some of the most powerful portraits I’ve ever seen – see images below). These provoked controversy for their unflinching look at childhood in its entirety – curious, passionate, proud, peaceful, and, yes, sexual beings. Mrs. Mann does not shy away from the truth – she openly embraces it. And “Proud Flesh” is no exception.
As she describes it in a recent essay, “Rhetorically circumnavigate it any way you will, but exploitation lies at the root of every interaction between photographer and subject, even forty years into it. Larry and I both understand how ethically complex and potent the act of making photographs is, how freighted with issues of honesty, responsibility, power, and complicity, and how so many good images come at the expense of the sitter, in one way or another. These new images, we both knew, would come at his.”
“It is a testament to Larry’s tremendous dignity and strength that he allowed me to take the pictures that I did. The gods might reasonably have slapped this particular lantern out of my raised hand, for before me lay a man as naked and vulnerable as any wretch strung across the mythical, vulture-topped rock. At our ages, we are past the prime of life, given to sinew and sag, and Larry bears, with his trademark god-like nobility, the further affliction of a late-onset muscular dystrophy. That he was so willing is both heartbreaking and terrifying at once.”
WIth “Proud Flesh,” some of the ideas and emotions Mann’s focused on in past work converge: sexuality, strength and weakness, vulnerability and, so importantly, trust. Larry Mann is her husband and lover, yes, which provides a rich, new dimension; he’s also a man weakened by illness. This element cannot be ignored, and presents a different level of intimacy in Mann’s work.
Sally Mann writes,”Most of the pictures I take are of the things I love, the things that fascinate and compel me, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to look at or take … I look, all the time, at the people and places I care about, and I look with both ardor and frank, aesthetic, cold appraisal. And I look with the passions of both eye and heart, but in that ardent heart, there must also be a splinter of ice.”
“And so it was with fire and ice, the studio woodstove too far away from the light to do him any good on a cold winter afternoon, that Larry and I began this work of exploring what it means to grow older, to let the sunshine fall voluptuously on a still-beautiful form, and to spend quiet afternoons together again. No phone, no kids, two fingers of bourbon, the smell of the ether, the two of us—still in love, still at work.”
“Proud Flesh” opens September 15th at Gagosian’s 980 Madison gallery. Aperture is releasing a book of the same title in coordination.
All images courtesy of Gagosian.
For more info, visit Gagosian.com
For several images from Mann’s “Immediate Family” series, check out:
Plus, see a clip from “What Remains,” the 2006 documentary focused on Mann’s series of the same title:
And for an interesting interview with Sally Mann on Charlie Rose:
Tim Burton. (American, b. 1958); Untitled (The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories); 1982–1984; Pen and ink, marker, and colored pencil on paper, 10 x 9\
Tim Burton; (American, b. 1958); Blue Girl with Wine. c. 1997; Oil on canvas, 28 x 22\
Throughout his career, Tim Burton has always pushed the cinematic envelope. This November, the Museum of Modern Art presents a major retrospective of his work. Tim Burton considers his evolution as both a director and concept artist for live-action and animated films, and as an artist, illustrator, photographer and writer. The show will trace Burton’s creative history, from his earliest childhood drawings through his mature work in film.
The exhibition will bring together over 700 examples of rarely or never-before-seen drawings, paintings, photographs, storyboards, moving-image works, puppets, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera, and include an extensive film series spanning Burton’s 27-year career. Artworks and objects will be drawn primarily from the artist’s personal archive, as well as studio archives and the private collections of Burton’s collaborators. His student films and early, nonprofessional films will also be on display. International and domestic posters from Burton’s films will be on display in the theater lobby galleries.
In conjunction with Tim Burton, MoMA presents The Lurid Beauty of Monsters, a series of films that influenced, inspired, and intrigued Burton. Taking as its starting point a screening of
horror movies that Burton organized in Burbank in 1977, the series includes such films as Jason
and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963), Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman, 1961), Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922), and Earthquake (Mark Robson, 1974), and will be screened from December 2, 2009 to April 26, 2010.
The show runs through April 2010.
Images courtesy of MoMA. For more info, visit www.moma.org
“Hate advertising? Make better ads.” So says Doug Pray, director of Art & Copy, a documentary study of art, commerce and human emotion. Pray’s newest film focuses on advertising’s best, featuring a series of interviews with the industry’s leaders: George Lois, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, Lee Clow, Hal Riney (who sadly passed away last year), Rich Silverstein, Jeff Goodby and other trailblazers, who bring honor to a profession all too often clouded by mediocrity.
In the spirit of other recent, great art/design documentaries – such as Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica and Objectified – and for a world so happy to embrace this under-represented industry – Madmen anyone? – Art & Copy considers the creative minds and passion of those who, generally without our awareness, sculpt so much of our world.
Art & Copy premiers tomorrow at the IFC Center in NY. For more information – and the trailer – visit artandcopyfilm.com
