Patti Smith seems to be everywhere these days. She’s got a new book Just Kids, an upcoming tour, and just opened an exhibition of drawings, photographs and personal things: Patti Smith and Steven Sebring: Objects of Life.

There were some great faces in Chelsea’s Robert Smith Gallery during the opening night: Michael Stipe turned up to congratulate Patti, Ryan McGinley and Terry Richardson were there, even my beloved film archivist Jonas Mekas came out, and it was nice to notice the abundance of older art lovers, not only the typical gallery opening show-offs.

There was a reason why all these great people came. In the exhibition, the persona that is Patti Smith gets featured in four ways: you can find her drawings and writings; still-lifes of her iconic belongings done by Steven Sebring, a photographer, who spent a decade filming Patti and put it into a documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life; another room is highlighting Patti Smith as a performer with grand images of stage acts and singing; and the middle of a gallery is dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe, as seen through Patti Smith’s camera lens.

The exhibition is powerful and insightful. The pictures of Patti Smith’s belongings talk about the icon that she is: her beat boots, her guitar, a necklace, childhood dress, luggage covered in old concert stickers, a Polaroid camera, a tambourine made by Robert Mapplethorpe. The objects in towering pictures appear illuminated, translucent. Real objects lay right there on pedestals: there’s a knight’s helmet, few pictures, a typewriter, and a Jeanne d’Arc book, which seems so fitting here.

Steven Sebring documents Patti on stage as well: pictures of her performing are powerful, and the image of Patti’s face with a bandana covering her eyes is breathtaking. However, here she is as a public persona, a performer. Her drawings – raw, outlined scribblings with text, sticky tape, lines drawn on dark albumen silver prints, attached pictures, screen prints of buildings – feel like free hand sketches, private and instinctive. The drawings are recent works, some of them created in collaboration with Steven Sebring, meanwhile Patti’s pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe remember the late ’60s and ’70s and her relationship with him. This part of exhibition introduces Patti’s new book, Just Kids.

The exhibition sums up everything that makes Patti so iconic: it’s not only her music, but her free spirit, non-conformism, style, and her relationships.

Another day, another Ari Marcopoulos book. The epic photographer of emotive portraiture, who has been around for a number of years, has put together a new book – or has he?

More a catalogue than an actual book, it is compiled to coincide with the exhibition Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arm’s Reach, at the Berkeley Art Museum. Once again Ari has teamed with a clever designer and an interesting European publishing company (JRP/Ringier, that’s why they look good?) to produce a beautiful object.

The book feels like a retrospective and the images are ones we have seen before, published numerous times in other Marcopoulos books or zines. The question to be asked: did we need another book by Ari this year?

Regardless it is a very interesting to go through his early work including his portraits of Basquiat and Warhol, his New York Hip Hop work, his Beastie Boys era, 90s skaters down at the Brooklyn Banks, him being on the slopes with his snowboarder series all the way through to his intimate family pictures capturing his own sons growing up, and lastly to more recent snapshots from his Astronauts zine – all in one digestible pressing. It’s a great book for fans of Marcopoulos but don’t look for new material; just for another well-made carrier for his history.

Maybe this is Ari’s point: each time he publishes a book he represents a new way to look at the same bodies of work, making the volume an artifact in itself. It’s like the pair of your favorite sneakers that just came out in the new color edition.

Beautifully printed with the photographs on glossy pages and with the text on pink matte paper in the back of the book, the print fits well in New York’s Dashwood Books, where it was up for signing. Here you can find other Ari books including two they published themselves: The Chance Is Higher and Astronauts, among other beautiful photography books, including rare editions and handmade zines, etc. Well worth a stop on a day in the city.

Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arm’s Reach is at Berkeley Art Museum until February 7th, 2010.

If you haven’t seen the Paradis exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, maybe you should. Not because it’s good, but because it’s Juergen Teller. Who could clarify which fashion shoots make it into magazines and which into gallery spaces? Juergen Teller’s Paradis, a story of two naked women of different ages in the Louvre, does the latter. A fashion story becomes an art exhibition. Why?

Of course, Juergen does it right. It’s all his angles, colors, crops. We find two recognizable women – Rachel Zimmerman and Charlotte Rampling – dressed down to nothing and placed in the empty Louvre, next to Roman statues and Classical paintings. I appreciated the raw feeling of it: women’s bodies do feel more statuesque in the context of the museum, as if the bodies themselves should be put behind glass and on pedestals. The women become showpieces, blending into the quiet world of description cards and checkered floors.  

On the other hand, the live real flesh, put between the naked marble history heroes, heightens the juxtaposition between the past and the vibrant present. A human body in between the relics of art, the jewels from the past – is it a visitor, an alien, nobody, dust? Greek body perfection meets the flesh of today. Hundreds of years of admiration meets the It of the moment.

The nakedness becomes all too obvious in the empty museum space, especially knowing that Juergen Teller was commissioned for a “fashion shoot” here for French men’s magazine Paradis. Fashion without clothes in a museum environment? I like this shift. I also like the picture of Rachel Zimmerman’s torso, all flat from the flashlight, standing in front of the statues. Juergen Teller photographs some of the museum’s pieces by themselves, like the sculpture of a man holding a cut-open cow and the painting of a coronation. These pictures blend together with the images of the women, creating a complete package of an extraordinary visit to the Louvre.

Paradis is at Lehmann Maupin (540 W. 26th st) until October 17th. Images from Lehmann Maupin’s website.

The fall is here, you can tell that from the amount of people who gathered around Deitch galleries in Soho Thursday night for the opening of Kehinde Wiley‘s new exhibition, Black Light.

First impressions of Wiley’s works vary wildly. Wiley has been enormously successful since graduating with his Masters from Yale in 2001, and yet his work has its critics. Here exhibiting photography for the first time, Wiley combines photography (black male portraits in somewhat religious poses) with tapestry painted backgrounds. It is reminiscent of paintings of the saints in Latin American countries, or the murals around Bushwick and Bed-Stuy for fallen young men. Wiley’s subjects stare into the camera from slightly above through a light haze, as canonized saints or forgiving heroes. The photographs are carefully styled, with models wearing hip-hop classified caps, tees and accessories, some wearing Etch-a-Sketches on their belts. One hat reads, “Beware of the young doctor and the old barber.” The lips are shining with lip-gloss, the light illuminates the subjects, while the highlights on their faces match the color of the backgrounds.

My friend called Wiley’s work “over-styled Urban Outfitters,” the other noted that the “photoshoping” was done rather amateurishly. And, even when I enjoy the idea of “canonizing” black young men “from the hood,” isn’t it a bit cheesey? Once one understands the general idea the work becomes repetitive and none of the numerous photographs really stood out, even though I liked the flowery, 70s print background patterns. In the past Wiley has made similar works, massive paintings with the same general aesthetic, and more than anything I liked the realistic canvas of a model enmeshed in a background pattern. It seemed to require considerably more skill and was more visually appealing.

Kehinde Wiley’s Black Light is at the Deitch Gallery at 76 Grand St. until September 26th.

You’ve probably been to Deitch Projects Gallery in Soho before, but you might not recognize the place this time. Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe combined their creative powers to create Black Acid Co-Op – a meth den, Chinese herbal shop and a Native American conservation site in the gallery space.

Actually, there is more. The whole gallery has been transformed into a labyrinth of different bizarre rooms filled with wigged heads, burnt furniture, trash, pictures, jars, books, etc. Different rooms, connected by axed holes in the walls, speak differently to their visitors.  

The drug-lab-gone-wrong part of the house creates a terribly realistic and scary feeling of tragedy, making one grow quiet. Empty flu medicine tubes, a toilet – with a crap still in it, glass pipes and homemade drug-boiling machines covered in dust and ash reveal a life regular gallery goers do not usually see. Next there is an empty room with the wallpaper all scratched to pieces. This room smells old. Through another hole, there’s a clean and almost luxurious red-carpeted picture gallery, and through another hole there is a book library. All the book covers are ripped off and replaced with handwritten titles.

Besides emotional impact, every room seems very labor intensive. A whole miniature city was built within the space. The Black Acid Co-Op fits so many different eras and socio-economic climates. Upstairs there is a museum-like wood covered room where the glass jars are filled with yucky liquids and telephone books. There is a taxidermied wolf with his cub and cozy furs for those who would like to take a seat. It feels nice in here. Walk two flights down, and you are in erotic-exotic Chinese herb shop, with its cold white halogen lights and signs, TV screens and posters.

With all this intense mess, Freeman and Lowe’s Black Acid Co-Op definitely evokes the feelings of awe and chock; it layers historical values, insanity, understandings of art, the high and the low. The artists medley together the most juxtaposed architectural and urban solutions under one roof.

Image, by Greg Kessler, taken from the show’s website.

Every time I get to go to Printed Matter, I feel like I’m in a different world: the world of fanzines, self publishing and DIY culture where casual to crazy ideas are born through paper pages. At the ”Destroy All The Monsters” exhibition, it felt like all the zine-making, weird picture taking and music playing punks united over a bottle or two and splashed the walls of the shop full of DIY art. 

As the name suggests, there were some Godzilla posters and an amazing banner of a bull mutant with a snake’s mouth. But aside from all the monster-related pieces, on the walls you could meet Nancy Spungen-esque ladies with knife wounds, stereotypical 70′s photoshoots, band memorabilia, flyers, collages, movie posters, old cut outs of Iggy Pop, Andy Warhol posters, a see-through LP and whole load of fanzines.

Turns out, “Destroy All Monsters” was a band in the 70s created by a foursome of artists in Michigan. They never recorded a full-length album, but were joined by the Stooges and MC5 at certain periods of the band’s lifetime, and Thurston Moore put together a compilation of the group’s music in the 90′s. “Destroy All Monsters” also released some video work, as one of the band’s members was a filmmaker, and always made fanzines. If famous names and punk history doesn’t excite, it is still worth going for a look around the exhibition — the chaotic, colorful walls scream of revolt and underground.

It inspires you to go through your own scrap books, make records with friends and publish your own magazine. Complete anti-pretentiousness: you like, you make. It’s also a great chance to pick DAM artists’ minds and to see where their inspiration to play on vacuum cleaner came from.

What do music fans think about? Poppy de Villeneuve explores what lurks behind those blank stares, that dreaminess in the audience’s eyes as they watch a musician perform.

First of all, what a weird gallery space the Soho Grand is. If you missed the opening reception, get ready to look at the photographs across dinner tables. In any case, you can still study the ecstasy, loneliness and awe in the eyes of music fans photographed by Poppy de Villeneuve at Coachella and other concerts and festivals.

Poppy takes a different approach to the idea once explored by Ryan McGinley in his Morrissey concert photos: Instead of the capturing the unity and palpable dedication of a crowd, here we have only the individual celebration — alternately blissful or lonely — of music. Even in a sea of people, or in a tightly tangled couple, everyone seems to be experiencing the music alone.

At the New York Photo Festival in Dumbo, portraits of nature at the (super)natural exhibition stood out in a sea of fashionable faces and provocative angles. Curated by the collective LUCI, (super)natural takes you to the quiet world of earthly environments largely devoid of a human presence. And that might be the best thing about the show: It projects calm and peace from its mountain views, flocks of birds, waves in the ocean–demonstrating that no nasty gestures or crazy costumes are necessary.

My favorites were Theresa Ganz’s cut-out tree branches knitted together into an interpretation of a photograph, and Justin Hollar’s ocean at night. It seems like you could spend hours just gazing at images of rocks, water in an old jacuzzi or a crack in the landscape of John Clang. In the middle of flashy NYPH works, this was a welcome oasis.

Images: Willy Soma (top), Christopher LaMarca (bottom).

The death of Polaroid made a lot of fashion editors, photographers and instant picture lovers (author included) miserable. 12 Instances, a group exhibition of Polaroid works at Heist Gallery, glances with nostalgia at the farewell world of instant snaps.

Curated by artist Molly Surno, 12 Instances comprises random self-portraits, night visions, interpretations of other people’s artwork, vacation memories and studies of light and darkness. Twelve artists invite viewers into Polaroid’s dreamy and intimate world, each with their own story to tell, but united by Polaroid’s typical blueish-yellowish palette, vignetting and blurriness. My favorites were the acidy Mary Popins by Grant Worth and sleepy cityscapes at night by Jem Cohen.

This December, a sequel to the show will require each artist to shoot with a Fuji-roid–Fuji’s take on the good old instant camera. The camera itself is huge; you have to use batteries to turn it on and the picture format has changed into a longer, thinner version, but it still takes dreamy pictures (I thought new ones looked sharper). The participants now have to come up with new material using the instant camera.

Photos by Molly Surno and Olivia Wyatt.

If there’s an opening at Williamsburg’s Cinders gallery, be prepared for some cute stuff. The works collected here usually have a crafty, airy feel about them, and the latest exhibition–comprised of collages, drawings and paintings by Alex Barry, Richard Colman and Josh Slater–is no exception.

The three artists are pals whose work is inspired by zombies, cosmos, science fiction and secret societies. Though each varies in style, all are linked by humorous story lines, DIY aesthetics and bursting colors. And it’s not only color that bursts from the works: Richard Colman likes bursting rainbows, Josh Slater collages planets bursting out of third eyes, and in Alex Barry drawings, it’s penises or ants that usually burst out of cat-headed, sock-only wearing creatures. The three artists’ creations work together in the gallery space to a create weird, sarcastic and mysterious world.

Richard Colman’s massive mural with elongated hands, naked people and weird mechanisms (this whole pile of weirdness reminds me, for some reason, of La Pedrera in Barcelona, the building on roof of which the scenes from “The Passenger” were filmed) takes up half of the gallery space. The wall across from it fits paintings and napkin-size drawings, together with Josh’s, Alex’s and Richard’s joint drawing of their perception of third eyes.

“Ugly People Mating” are humorous and rough cartoonish stories by Alex Barry. His little, funny creatures remind me of Fanny Bostrom’s naughty figurines. The drawings are tempered by Josh Slater’s collages featuring pyramids and Martian landscapes. They suggest alien visitations, the visions of the worlds faraway and variations on ancient civilizations and Masons’ symbols.