New York City street legend PMD inaugurates Youth Group Gallery for the debut exhibition of the newly expanded Bushwick space. The opening is Friday, February 4 at 407 Johnson Ave., Brooklyn.

The South African artist’s neo-primitive, psychedelic pen and ink and acrylic on canvas from his “Sausagehead” series will be on view from 8pm until late opening night. Post opening, viewing will be by appointment only.

Is PMD’s radical marketing strategy and ongoing social critique a harbinger of a post bluechip world? Only time will tell.

Casiorossi has a new album out, which you can hear on Myspace. Click “Read More” for the new video.

Friday evening artist Sean Leonard makes his debut in a solo show at Brooklyn’s up-and-coming Youth Group Gallery. The show consists of a series of appropriated (‘found’) photographs that have been superficially embellished and thereby recontextualized, immediately undermining any sort of basic, subtextual form.  The works have been neither blown up nor titled (and are, more or less, without explanation), giving them a sort of nascent, incidental quality, implicating the viewer alongside the artist in a perverse sort of see-ing (a sort of voyeurism, as it were) that calls into question not only the notion of private or personal photography, but the gallery space itself.

The show opens Friday at 8:30 PM at 19 Hope St – Basement, and the works will remain up until March 14th.

If anyone was wondering what Moritz von Oswald, Thomas Fehlmann, and FM Einheit were doing in the early eighties, it sounded (and looked) something like this.  Click ahead for another track.

“Until now, every magazine was a bunch of pages stapled together. It arrived in your mailbox folded, mutilated spindled — usually with more ads than editorial. Last year, a group of us enjoying the sun, skiing and unique cultural climate of Aspen Colorado, asked ourselves, ‘Why?’

Why, for example, couldn’t a magazine come in a box? Why shouldn’t an article exploring jazz be accompanied by an LP record illustrating in sound our words in print? Why couldn’t each article be a separate booklet, in the shape, color and paper most appropriate to the subject?

We kept asking why for months. Aspen magazine is the answer.” – August 1966 advertisement for Aspen

Since I first stumbled upon some excerpts from Aspen my freshman year in college, I have been enthusiastically telling anyone who will listen that the magazine stands, perhaps alongside Wyndham Lewis’ and Ezra Pound’s Vorticist journal BLAST from the 1910s, as easily the best (and, for that matter, although here the hyperbole is somewhat less warranted, most influential) publication of the 20th century.  Regardless of its short run and truncated distribution – it only spanned ten ‘issues’ over six years – its influence on contemporary media radiates through to even the most somnambulant of readers, as magazines such as Visionaire (and, perhaps, even our own Dossier) have picked up on Aspen‘s discursive folding-over of various, often incongruent, forms of media; and, crucially, they have appropriated its sort of lofty self-awareness of, among other things, the very implications of publishing: of calling this disseminated assemblage of various works a ‘magazine.’

But you really don’t need me to convince you of anything. The list of  contributors that founding editor Phyllis Johnson brought together for Aspen‘s short run is truly astounding, and should, in a sort of silent, coercive demonstration, do all of the convincing itself.  Among them: Andy Warhol, John Cale, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, Marcel Duchamp, Philip Glass, Richard Serra, Jasper Johns, Ken Jacobs, J.G. Ballard, John Cage, Carolee Schneemann, Morton Feldman, Timothy Leary, Gerard Malanga, Alain Robbe-Grillet Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Richter, John Lennon, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, La Monte Young.

Like its contemporary cousin Visionaire, Aspen has had the good fortune of being regarded as a ‘collector’s item’; and, unfortunately, for most that means that getting a copy of a fully-intact issue is something of a monetary issue.  Thankfully, UbuWeb has been kind enough to post every issue, in its entirety, on its site, in a very clean, navigable layout.  Click on the image above (of the cover of the third issue, designed by Andy Warhol) to navigate to that page.

Frequent collaborators Spike Jonze and Kanye West released a new short film today entitled We Were Once a Fairytale, and it’s easily their most accomplished work together to date.  While the film is far from apologetic, it nevertheless finds Kanye taking on his recent public image to the point of brutal self-satire.  Culling from references as incongruent as Ridley Scott, Beethoven, and Bret Easton Ellis, Jonze and West have somehow constructed a film that is, at once, typical Kanye West fodder (there is no doubt his fans will be pleased) and yet at the same time an inspired black comedy: that is, it’s a sort of disorientating and oddly mesmerizing perversion of the latter’s public image, painting him as a superficial, rich, uninspired, socially incompetent dilettante who has gone so far ‘off,’ for so long, so as to have lost all sense of self (that BEE reference make sense yet?).

Personally, I love this idea – to build a character not on the foundations of Mr. West himself, but rather on those very traits used so recently to describe him in the mass media – not only because it affords the opportunity for self-mockery, but also, and more importantly, because it makes for a far more interesting character (one that would not be out of place in one of Jonze’s films).  And I think this is precisely what has made Kanye West such an interesting contemporary public figure: in an era where even the most hardcore of punks thank you ‘kindly’ for attending their shows (and the most hardcore of rappers hang out with Bette Midler) it’s oddly reassuring to see someone publicly refuse to accede to a system where the artist is delimited to the realm of the everyday consumer. Kanye is shamelessly self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing, as real a ‘Rock Star’ as one can be in a time when even Paul McCartney plays ‘Rock Band’; a time that has forgotten the allure of the immortal, lofty musician (better yet: the allure of affectation); a time where the only thing we believe to be the ‘real deal’ is when some dude dies of a heroin overdose.  That is, Kanye himself, much like his caricature in Jonze’s film, is a true character in the most literary (or is it cinematic?) sense of the word: a fabrication that allows us to become willingly subjugated for, at the least, some sort of decent entertainment.

This is precisely why, regardless of the parodying, and even if one were to call Jonze’s film somewhat self-loathing, Kanye remains dressed at his self-same sharpest (that knife does little to damper his look).  Apparently self-satire can still be framed to make oneself look eminently ‘cool’…

Terence Koh presents ADANSONIAS, A Tragic Opera In 8 Acts

ACT 1
6th October 2009
8 PM

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
7 Rue Debelleyme, 75003. Paris.

In light of this past season’s collaboration with Gerard Malanga, Adam Kimmel’s decision to hire Jim Krantz, who used to shoot for Marlboro (as in the cigarette), is hardly surprising.  Kimmel sent Krantz down to the same Utah ranch he had used to photograph the Marlboro Man ads to shoot artist (and Kimmel regular) Dan Colen along with some local ranch-hands, in what will doubtless be seen, all intentions aside, as a nod to Richard Prince (whose Cowboys series was itself, at least superficially, composed of Marlboro ads without — that is, ‘cropped-off’ — the Marlboro name).  The final product is a highly-stylized affair, to be sure, and in stark contrast to the typically raw and Beat-y and nearly personal look-books shot by Kimmel’s brother Alexei Hay; but I have to admit, with the above as evidence, that it works — quite well actually — and it’s a sure sign as any that Adam Kimmel will continue to be a designer whose collections (and respective lookbooks) are to be anxiously looked-forward to in the seasons that follow.

Jim Krantz’s photographs will be on display at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris (108 rue Vieille du Temple) alongside a video display by Meredith Danluck.

As a part of X-Initiative’s No Soul For Sale opening on the 23rd of June, Rhizome will present an exhibition entitled The World is Flat, a series taking the ‘flatness’ of culture characteristic of a web-centered information economy as its orientation.  Artists and collectives including B’L'ing, Anna Lundh, Oliver Laric, Lizzie Fitch, Alexandre Singh and David Horvitz approach this centerpoint discursively, offering everything from found-footage and sculptures to zines and Mariah Carey remixes — and, perhaps mostly excitingly, teaching, as Anna Lundh, on June 27th from 2-3 PM, walks visitors through a short history of hexaflexagons as well as offers a walk-through of their construction.

The exhibition will be on display from June 24 until June 28, and is free to the public.