Danish fashion designer Henrik Vibskov‘s amazingly beautiful and eclectic spring/summer 2013 collection “The Transparent Tongue” was presented both at the Paris fashion week at the end of June and at the Copenhagen fashion week earlier this month. Both times the runway was decorated with a huge pink blow-up “tongue”, that unfolded an inner life during the show and that also echoed in the outfits. With the show Vibskov also follows two ongoing trends amongst street-wear oriented avantgardist fashion designers: He not only worked mainly with models of color, but also whoed both menswear and womenswear in one show, which in the fashion world of 2012 still is a big deal.
Here are some of my favorite looks from the runway show in Copenhagen, more can be found on the Life is not a Rehearsal blog (focus on the guys) and on the German fashion blog LesMads (focus on the girls). All pictures are (c) Copenhagen Fashion Week. The photos are followed by two videos of the runway show, the first one was shot in Copenhagen, the second one in Paris.
The connections between two lovers are finite, and the feelings that swell up and over them bind the two people together in an obsession. But they eventually recede, leaving behind nothing but the outline of a bell curve. In Keep The Lights OnIra Sachs (The Delta, Forth Shades of Blue) has brilliantly documented the arc of his own troubled nine-year relationship with literary agent and author Bill Clegg. Bathing his characters in an embracing, radiant glow, Sachs moves through the stages of his relationship, shining an unflinching spotlight on his past and the corrosion wrought by gay shame and addiction, showing how the closet can damage our relationships and our lives. Cerebral, reflective and emotionally raw, Keep The Lights On is a testament that intelligently crafted gay-centric films are still being made in America today.
The film opens on paintings of nude men propelled across the screen, visually evoking the infinite appetite of desire, its forward drive pushing gay men towards new sexual encounters and friendships and new men to fall in love with, incessantly. Standing in for Sachs is Erick (Thure Lindhardt), a documentary filmmaker, who we meet circa 1996 in a sparse New York apartment working the sex phone lines. He stokes himself as he sells himself through the handset—“uncut, 6.5, top.” Clicking through possible matches, Erick is clearly sexually frustrated. So he is relieved to make a connection with Paul (Zachery Booth); there is obvious chemistry between the two men on screen, despite the fact that Paul is still closeted with a girlfriend.
Aug 24 Berlin – Import/Export #3, Prince Charles
Aug 25 Zurich – House of Mixed Emotion, Longstreet Bar
Sept 1 Malmo – CEO Gallery (Mykki only)
Sept 5 Berlin – CTM festival
Sept 6 Lisbon – ZDB
Sept 7 London – Lucky PDF
Sept 6 Berlin – Cream Cake, Südblock
The “Good Blogs” section exists since I’ve started this blog, but instead of keeping on with just reviewing other people’s websites, I’ve decided that it would be more productive to turn the whole thing into an actual exchange with my favorite bloggers. So from now on the “Good Blogs” postings will contain short interviews with the people who run the recommended sites, starting with a talk with Baltimore based blogger Abdu Ali Eaton, the guy behind the pretty awesome culture blog Eat On This. The blog exists since February 2010 and has a focus on music, fashion and art, with a heavy bent on queer artists and artist from Baltimore. Here’s what Abdu wrote me about his work.
What was your main inspiration/motivation to start your own blog? Did you have any experience with writing before it?
I first started writing for local media outlets in Baltimore, but it wasn’t progressive enough and dependable for me to continue writing for other folks in Baltimore. I was getting frustrated so I started my own shit. I always wanted to give passionate unconventional unknown artist a platform to show their works and let people hear about these great artist that aren’t mainstream, so I did Eat On This for that. Plus to fufill my want to just be able to write too. So it was like a good exchange in a way. “Eat On This” came from my lastname Eaton and it sends a good message too.
How and where do you find the subjects for your postings?
I just use what’s around me. I get great things from my immediate circle of friends because a lot of them are into the arts, also from certain blogs, and a couple of universal media outlets. Sometimes it’s even from browsing social networking sites like Tumblr especially, or soundcloud where artists promote their own works.
Did you ever delete a post right after you finished writing it or even after posting it? And of yes, what was it about?
No, I’ve edited a lot of old posts, just because I thought the writing could be better. And I just deleted some post that I thought were too mainstream and trendy.
Where do you want to take the blog, do you have certain aims you want to achieve with it?
With me being a performer now*, I want to make more about my journey as a music artist, but also invite other artists to be interviewed on my blog. It’s strictly going to be interviews. Nothing else. I want to keep it like a diary, no magazine, I like the intimacy a blog provides to it’s readers and the non-exclusiveness.
Over the past few years Brooklyn based photographer, publisher and writer Amos Mac (picture by Elisa Shea) has been doing an amazing job in documenting and pushing forward queer and trans* culture in the US and worldwide. I’ve already posted about Amos’ work as the founder and editor of the wonderful trans guys magazine Original Plumbing and his new Translady Fanzine, this time I want to focus on his colorful and powerful portraits of queer, trans* and gender non-conforming artists, performers and musicians, such as OPM co-founder Rocco Katrastrophe, Cody Critcheloe aka Ssion, the House of Ladosha Crew, Hunx or Black Cracker.
The pictures shown here are only a collection of personal favorites taken from the photographer’s website and his tumblr, where you find many more facets of his work. The one on top of the gallery, a portrait of Cunty Crawford Ladosha, was just recently shown at the exhibition Testimony: A Living Exhibition Of Queer Youthat the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York. Amos’ latest project is a video campaign entitled “Talk About It”, which seeks to adress adult suicide in the queer community and strengthen the trans community from within.
+++ San Francisco based duo Matmos are releasing their new “The Ganzfeld EP” in October, you can already pre-order it on CD, LP and in different limited edition packages via Thrill Jockey. The opening track “Very Large Green Triangles (Edit)” is already online and can be downloaded for free:
+++ Red Hot Organisation, the non-profit company who produced the Dark Was The Night compilation and more than 15 other albums aiming to raise awareness and money to fight AIDS/HIV, has a new project: On Kickstarter they are raising funding for a new Arthur Russell tribute compilation entitled This is how we walk on the moon. Featured artists will be a whole bunch of nice pop acts such Twin Shadow, Washed Out, José González, Robyn, Hot Chip, Nico Muhly + Owen Pallett, Cut Copy and many others. You can donate here.
+++ Berlin based artist Nikolaj Tange Lange (see picture on top) has just released a new album with his synth-punk project Nuclear Family. “Crime” is now available via Bandcamp (limited picture LP/digital). You can stream the record here right here and/or check out Tange Lange’s YouTube page to see the first three videos that were made as additional material.
+++ Kids On TV have a new video to their song “Poison”, a collaboration with Isabelle Noel / SIQUEMU. The strack was originally featured on the bands Shape-Shifting Mutants EP and will be part of the new album Pantheon, which is due September 4. The video was directed by Roxanne Luchark.
June in San Francisco ushered in an exhibition for the underground filmmaker and visual artist Mike Kuchar. “Mike’s Men: Sex, Guys, and Videotape!” was held at Magnet, a city-funded STD clinic in the heart of the Castro, that supposed gay mecca. In fact, the event proved to be one of the most successful attempts at bringing together queer men during Pride month. Superbly curated by Eric Smith, Mark Garrett and Margaret Tedesco, “Mike’s Men” was a collection of illustrations and four video shorts. The exhibition served both as a tribute to his lifelong career in avant-garde art, and an acknowledgement of Mike’s recent loss.
Just last September, George Kuchar, Mike’s twin brother and the co-director on many of his films, passed away from prostate cancer (our contributor Jon Davis posted an essay on Kuchar here shortly after). George and Mike were central figures in the 1960s underground film scene, screening their work alongside Andy Warhol, Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger. The subjects of Jennifer M. Kroot’s 2009 documentary It Came From Kuchar, both brothers were legends in the world of experimental film. But even within that innovative, anarchic world, the Kuchars upended the category with their brazenness, camp and DIY style. The Kuchar brothers had wide-ranging impact, influencing David Lynch, Rodger Vadim and San Francisco resident John Waters, who was in attendance for the opening. Waters credits Kuchar’s 1965 film Sins of the Fleshapoids as a major influence on his career. “It’s really what an underground film was,” said Waters, writing in the introduction to the brothers’ 1997 shared memoir Reflections From A Cinematic Cesspool.
BCALLA is a pretty awesome, pretty experimental post-gender fashion label run by Brad Callahan, a graduate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. About a year ago we’ve already posted about his BCALLA LQQKS project, which ran until earlier this year. With the monthly series Callahan and his beautiful models (most of them queer artists and performers such as Colin Self, Jake Dibeler or Juliana Huxtable Ladosha) presented different looks available for limited purchase for a limited time. Here are some more of the LQQKS that were created after our last posting:
The Walter Collection recently presented the first New York solo show by Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955 – 1989), one of the most important artists of British queer culture of the 1980s. The show opened in March an closed on July 28, displaying works from Rotimi’s series “Nothing to Lose” from 1989, as well as from “Ecstatic Antibodies”, for which he collaborated with his boyfriend Alex Hirst and which was shown in a group exhibition dealing with HIV/AIDS in 1990. In the large-scale color and black-and-white portraits Rotomi explores sexuality, race and religion and recontextualizes his cultural and religious background as the child of a traditional Yoruba upbringing (his Nigerian family had to flee to the U.K. in 1960 after a military coup).
For everyone who wasn’t able to see the exhibition here’s a little collection of pictures that were shown in it. More of the featured photographs can be found below this article about the show on Huffington Post, for more background information about the exhibition check out this press release (pdf) published by The Walter Collection as well as this article on Africa is a Country. To get a bigger overview on the artist’s work please check out the website of the Association of Black Photographers/Autograph ABP, which Rotimi co-founded in 1988.
Copyright: Rotimi Fani-Kayode / Courtesy of The Walther Collection and Autograph ABP, London.
Fashion has always been a genre New York based artist K8 Hardy both likes to passionately criticize for its commercialism and elitism, while and at the same time tries to reinvent and develop using her own DIY approach to manipulate it as a way of expressing individualism. After publishing four issues of a zine entitled FashionFashion between 2004 and 2008 and and creating her own fashion collection (“J’APPROVE“) in collaboration with JF and Son in 2010, Hardy just recently presented another artistic attempt to subvert the fashion business: On May 20 she staged a runway show as a contribution to the Whitney Biennial, which both deconstructed the rules of the catwalk, while at the same time opened up the ritual to new forms by using cheap material like clothes from thrift stores and letting the models walk in slow motion sideways, backwards, and in their own freestyle. The set of the show was designed by Oscar Tuazon, another Biennial artist. “I wanted to do a fashion show so that we can look at fashion in a different context outside of commercialism and outside of the marketing that’s usually associated with a fashion show,” Hardy said in an interview with (sic!) ELLE. “I wanted to make a statement with the looks of a more democratic expression outside of luxury.” Here’s a collection of pictures + an embeddable slideshow and a blurry video of the show, found on Amos Mac’s tumblr, New York Magazine online (by Bek Andersen), Art in America (slightshow) and on the artist’s YouTube page (video).
Artist Felipe Bracelis has many talents, whether he designs digital origami out of porn pictures, models for kinky fanzines or curates exhibitions under his YESSR label in his hometown Santiago de Chile and in other places. Just recently he exported his curator skills to Canada, where he hosted YESSR4 “Flesh Garden” in collaboration with La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa. He’s currently working on pieces for a new solo show at the Acuadrado Gallery in Santiago, which will open in November 2012. For Catch Fire, Felipe has written a little introduction to his YESSR photo magazine, of which he has already published four issues and is dedicated to the motive of nude male amateur models in nature. Alongside with the text, you’ll also have the chance to take a look at some pictures of the fifth issue, which will be released in August.
