Never Lost His Punk Spirit

Jean-Charles de Castelbajac is best-known for his confrontational approach to fashion. His outfits have graced everybody from Andy Warhol to Lady Gaga, and over the years he has often been the designer of choice for the most creative, and by proxy the most rebellious.

What you may not know is that he is also an accomplished painter and live artist, with a furiously productive output. He tours with the French group Mr No, painting live and performing onstage. And you can always tell where he's been in Paris, and indeed the world, by the faded chalk drawings of angels and friends that he leaves on building walls — like friendly graffiti.

De Castelbajac's latest exhibition, The Phantoms of Eden, opened this month in the luxury resort of Eden Rock in Saint Barths. We caught up with him at his French home to speak about the show and much more.

How did the collaboration with Eden Rock come about?

I always wanted to go to Saint Barths. It’s a place where the past encounters the modern and the Caribbean. This meeting, and in fact the collaboration with Eden Rock, came about through my Parisian gallery, Nuke. For me the idea of evoking ghosts in Eden was a perfect situation. The exhibition is beautiful. Can you tell us a little about the act of making it?

The process of this exhibition has been quite long. I started to paint four months ago in small format. The link between it all was the evocation of ghosts: the ghosts of my innocence, the ghosts of my childhood, and the ghosts of the friends I’ve lost. All of this brought me to a land I’ve never known, closer to the invisible. When I arrived in Saint Barths, I started to paint a big fresco, in conjunction with my paintings. It’s all about accident, and the evocation of lost innocence.

Ever since I’ve known you, I’ve seen you draw on walls with chalk. Can you remember the moment this materialized?

The first time I remember drawing with a chalk on a wall was in Casablanca when I was six years old. So, a very little boy! After that, I was totally fascinated by the work of Keith Haring in the subways of New York. Around 1992 or '93, I started to draw angels on the walls of Paris. Now, I always have a chalk in my pocket! It’s a form of prayer I suppose, a poetic gesture, and I love the idea of ephemera.

These large-scale immediate drawings are ‘phantoms’ and yet they hold all of the parts in place. Do you feel they are an important part of your working process?

The wall drawings are very particular for me because they are always unprepared. They are totally inspirational. So, when I start them, I paint with music on [electro music, generally] and I don’t know where the painting is going to take me. I cannot stop before I finish. It’s like a form of trance. I am in sync with the painting and every face appearing, every animal, has a kind of shamanic link to me. It is as if phantoms are appearing, yes. The first part of the process is to build the primary colors in shapes, like circles, arcs, or crosses, that I consider as ‘heraldic’ figures. Then I paint in black over it, and everything becomes almost religious.

Does your approach differ between your art and your fashion?

The very big difference between my art and my fashion is not the inspiration. It’s to do with the process. Fashion is an industrial process, and it takes up to six months to prepare a collection. The fundamental difference is, to me, that fashion is there to answer questions. It is something to protect, to make people beautiful, and it is functional. Art has no particular function, just the fantastic function of creating mystery, or creating hope, or asking questions. 

Today it seems pop culture has mixed with the classical arts and its preoccupation with sex, life, and death. Do you feel there are no boundaries anymore between the high and the low?
I have never seen any boundaries between low and high art. I was educated by popular culture, by advertising, calligraphy, coats of arms, flags, and toys. My first memories of being fascinated by color were the ideas that the fire truck was red, and that safety belts on the plane were yellow. All of these things have remained strong in my subconscious. In high culture, like in Paulo Coelho, or Francis Bacon, the techniques and the crystallization of actions — for instance, the way in which Bacon painted Pope Innocent X — fascinates me. I have a strange memory that appropriates and kidnaps things, and makes them mine. After that, it becomes all about technique. I am fascinated by the technique and the act of painting. Sometimes I look at my work and I think, "Who has inspired me? Is it Fernand Léger, Miró, Kandinsky, or is it Keith Haring or Lichtenstein?!" But certainly, my biggest inspiration is the strength of image. These images can come from popular culture or high art. I think this is because I come from the generation of the logo: a cigarette packet, the Lucky Strike packet, the Players packet, the Esso logo by Raymond Loewy. 

I remember you telling me once that rappers in the 90s wore your cartoon sweaters like coats of arms. This re-appropriation has always been present in your fashion. How does the cartoon relate to your art practice?

Roy Lichtenstein used to say that the cartoon was the most important symbol of the new age. For me, the cartoon is like a ghost. it is an icon that's totally empty but can be filled with the feelings you give it. So, the cartoon is a big link between my fashion and my art. I see it like a contemporary feeling of a medieval time. So I was very pleased when people like LL Cool J interpreted my cartoons, like they would interpret a coat of arms for the King Of England! It’s a strong appropriation that the rap scene has taken from my work, and I sell many of the paintings to the artists of the rap scene.

There’s been a lot of fashion talk recently about punk. I said to a friend over Fashion Week that, to me, you were one of the most ‘punk’ creators. Do you feel an affinity with punk?
There is a song from the English pop band Wave Machines that asks, "Where is my punk spirit?" And honestly, I have never lost it. The idea of punk was so strong for me when I met Malcolm McLaren in the 70s, the idea of daring and never minding what the critics think. It’s a defiant attitude that for me is essential. My position, and my creations are always transversal, using and mixing territories, no matter the opinions of others. That’s my punk attitude.

I saw images of a dress you painted live in the Villa Polaroid space. You told me once about the furor you caused when you made your first ‘painted’ dresses. Could you recall this story for us?

In the 80s I created a symbolic dress that I called Robe Tableau, or canvas dress. Every artist I approached — Miquel Barceló, Gérard Garouste, Annette Messager — was asked to interpret this dress. At the time it was a big scandal because fashion and art were not linked in this way at all. We had a big fashion-art show in the FIAC and people were strangely surprised. But, I never painted personally on this dress. So, in Saint Barths, after a seven-hour live fresco painting, Ai Canno arrived with a white dress and I started to paint an angel on her, signaling the end of the cycle, painting myself on the dress. At one point I took her hair and used it to wipe across the paint, and to make drip forms on the angel, and this act was so strong and unfamiliar. That’s what I prefer: to perform. I love also to paint all alone in my atelier, but I love live art. It is the most rock ’n’ roll thing in my life.

• Posted Aug 13, 2013
  
  
  by Anthony Stephinson
• 
  

MICHAEL O'NEILL ON YOGA: THE ARCHITECTURE OF PEACE

It’s taken yoga several thousand years to journey from a handful of monasteries dotting the Himalayas to the myriad studios of London, Lower Manhattan, and beyond. Whether bathing with holy men in the Ganges or joining the chorus of a thousand voices chanting “om,” photographer Michael O’Neill decided to devote himself to experiencing and recording the world of yoga at this critical juncture in its history.

From November 7 – January 2016, TASCHEN Gallery will exhibit MICHAEL O’NEILL. ON YOGA: THE ARCHITECTURE OF PEACE, the first major photographic exhibition on the subjects of yoga and meditation and O’Neill’s first show in Los Angeles. Opening on November 7 to a crowd of over 500 people, including art enthusiasts, passionate yogis, and O’Neill’s friends, collaborators, and subjects, the exhibition features 80 photographs alongside a selection of artifacts documenting O’Neill’s journey and the history and of yoga through the ages. The photographs celebrate both the rich lineage and the international reach, locating beauty and learning with young boys practicing the little known discipline of Mallakhamba at the wrestling grounds of Kochi as much as with some of the most influential yogis our time such as B. K. S. Iyengar, Shri K. Pattabhi Jois, and Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa and meditation masters His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and S. N. Goenka. Says O’Neill: “All I wanted to do was to pay homage to yoga’s classical lineage and understand this unique moment before it slips away.” The result is a powerful photographic tribute to an age-old discipline turned modern, global, and mindful community of 250 million practitioners.

All of the prints in this exhibition are archival pigment prints made by Adamson Editions, one of the world’s foremost digital ateliers, founded in 1979. David Adamson and his team have collaborated with some of the most interesting and influential artists working today, including Chuck Close, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo, and Kiki Smith.

Michael O’Neill (b. 1946) has photographed the cultural icons of his time, from Andy Warhol to the Dalai Lama over nearly 50 years for publications including the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. For the last decade he has immersed himself in the culture of yoga, turning his lens on the origins and essence of this ancient and timeless spiritual practice.

Astronauts-Series

Inspiring us right now: Spanish photographer Cristina De Middel's The Astronauts series, to go on view at Foam museum in Amsterdam. Not just a clever word mash-up, astronauts were a real thing — sort of. With grand delusions of jumping into the 1960s space race between the US and the Soviet Union, the little African nation of Zambia began a program — that never got off the ground — to explore the realm of the stars, starting with colorful spacesuits and fish bowls for helmets. Or at least that's how De Middel re-imagines it in square Polaroid form, based on vintage photographs. - (c) hint

Ghosts in the Machine Gun

These startling images were taken by the Johannesburg-born filmmaker and artist Ralph Ziman, who looked to the South African city's violent past and present for his exhibition, Ghosts, at C.A.V.E. Gallery in Los Angeles. These ghosts, says Ziman, who nows lives in L.A., are "the unseen traffickers and the nameless faceless people" killed in the many wars and genocides made possible by the continent's endless import of arms. "This is a trade that not only fuels, but also sustains conflict across the continent. Arms that are paid for and imported into Africa are used by individuals not just for defense but often by corrupt, autocratic governments to oppress their own people."
For the project, Ziman commissioned six Zimbabwean craftsmen to produce a series of replica AK-47s, bullets, and clothing using traditional African beading and knitting techniques. He then took the guns and their creators to a derelict district of Johannesburg to photograph the results. With their rainbow-colored guns and outfits, the men appear both strong and weak, ominous and feeble. They are made to seem willing participants in, yet indifferent to, the glorification of gun violence that occurs across the African continent — and, as we know all too well, in places closer to home.
Ghosts — including the photos, ersatz guns and bullets — will go on view at C.A.V.E. Gallery, 1108 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice, Los Angeles, February 8 - March 2, 2014. All proceeds will go to Human Rights Watch against arms trafficking.

Matthias Vriens Is Bringing Sex Back With a New Magazine

With his subversive, sex-stoked imagery for DUTCH in the 1990s, creative director Matthias Vriens (now Vriens-McGrath) knew no bounds. Each issue of the fashion and art magazine came packed with homo- and hetero-erotic imagery alike, merging the latest designer wares with suggestive, titillating story concepts. After becoming editor-in-chief, he published the notorious naked issue, in which not a stitch of clothing could be found among the 83 pages of fashion editorial — shot by Mikael Jansson — aside from designer credits. Following DUTCH, Vriens-McGrath packed up his provocations and headed to Giorgio Armani (to be global creative director), then Gucci Group (senior art director), while continuing to shoot skin-flashing stories for the likes of i-D, The Face, Numéro, and the New York Times' T magazine. Now, a marriage and a move to Hollywood later, he's back in the game with another eye-popping publication, TVTOR. The first issue of the self-financed, visually-led biannual bursts with nearly 400 pages, nearly all of it peek-a-boo photos taken by Vriens-McGrath himself or one of a randy roster of up-and-comers. Here, following a launch party in Milan, Matthias Vriens-McGrath talks fashion versus art, his Tumblr addiction, and the pursuit of "tits, dick, pussy, and ass"... Lee Carter: What does the Latin title refer to? To me it conjures up sexy Caesars in togas. Matthias Vriens-McGrath: You’re not far off. Personally TVTOR symbolizes a desire for photography and all things visual and delicious. That could be contemporary art, fashion, sex. Or possibly all of them combined. The two covers of the first issue, the romanticism issue, show a man and a woman lying prostrate on the floor with their head in an oven, apparently dead and wearing designer shoes. At first I thought: footwear story! Rather, it appears to be a more complex reflection of your current mood. It's all in the eyes of the beholder. If it ends for you as a shoe story, then I am content with that. However, the theme of romanticism for me is more Hansel and Gretel, Romeo and Juliet, in a manner not shy of Pina Bausch. I grew up in the theater and like to provoke thought by means of suggestive visuals. Neo-romanticism has occurred in history at times disastrous and too turbulent to grasp intellectually and emotionally. I think we can all agree on it being a rather horrific moment in time currently. Personally the return to nature, aka romanticism, is something dear to my heart. Whereas most people believe I am surrounded by bulging cocks non-stop, the truth is I’d rather be in the garden. What makes it a horrific moment in time? I am referring to total global insecurity. Most economical structures have collapsed, while others are holding on by a silk thread, watching a minority spend it all. Other fun things that come to mind are assholes like Putin fucking up his country and telling people what to do, including gays, and denying them a future altogether. I can elaborate a hell of a lot more, but I think you catch my drift. Your work at DUTCH revolutionized alt-publishing, bringing to the fore a brazen, artistic approach to sexuality. What will you carry over from those risqué days? Does sex sell now the same way as it did then? It does for me. However, this is a complicated stretch. Hypocrisy runs through most commercial and subsequently editorial structures. Fear of flesh and fantasy are of course a prominent source. Double standards rule the fashion world, but it's entirely different in the art world. Appropriation between the two does not seem valid. We can look at pornography within the confines of, let’s say, a Larry Gagosian structure, and art foundations sponsored by fashion structures will include this work in their permanent collections, while a little tits and ass in a magazine might kill off the ad pages from those very same fashion houses. It has not stopped me from showing plenty of tits, dick, pussy, and ass in the first issue of TVTOR. Which fashion houses have been hypocritical about T&A? Now that would be juicy indeed! But you have to understand if I were to be specific about this, my chances of making any money at all would be shot, wouldn't it? So one could arguably say I am just as hypocritical as the ones I point my finger at. Rather, I think that after 25 years in this industry and having worked on all different fronts of it, I understand how it functions. I might not agree personally, but mentioning people or companies would not be smart or respectful. In the end we are all just trying to make a buck, one way or another. One of the things that made DUTCH so exciting and provocative was the idea that your own sex life was just as exotic and copious. In fact you didn’t shy away from that notion. I remember a series you drew on hotel stationery of post-coital male nudes in your room. Besides being happily married now, has anything changed? Ha! My sex life before marriage seems somewhat of a myth. The sex scenes you refer to were more in my head than in the flesh. The reality of it all was a lot more like a pot of tea in bed and making art by myself. Marriage has definitely spiced up my sex life. With your return to print, do you foresee a renewed, post-Internet interest in the tactile page? I have always been a fan of print, at the risk of telling my age. Perhaps this is a desire for collecting. I have indeed taken a long break from it all, but right now I’m more excited than ever to self-publish TVTOR. Magazines will always be around, otherwise they would have vanished already. Niche magazines are needed to inspire and set the tone, where others cannot due to some of the abovementioned. It remains to be seen where this leads. What has been the most challenging moment for you in the making of TVTOR? To see my bank account shrink. And the most triumphant? When I held the first issue in my hands, I felt a sheer sense of pride and triumph indeed. Before that, to a degree, I lost touch with reality, I love to work and I can sit behind a computer literally for 24 hours. I am addicted to Tumblr, I love Tumblr. I think it’s the best thing ever. A world of millions of brilliant editors gathered in one collective space — orgasmic! Our website will reflect this. Blog entries by a group of TVTOR illuminati will delight, I promise you. That’s funny. I think a lot of people are addicted to Tumblr, Twitter, and whatnot. Grindr, too. But I think in your case it’s more for inspiration. Absolutely. I am mesmerized by the amount of research that pops up on the screen in a flash. Twitter doesn't do it for me, but I have yet to start this engine for TVTOR. Who knows, when it catches on, it might be delicious. Ideally, what's the future you see for TVTOR? If I can continue making this magazine twice a year, keep the quality of paper, and work with people I admire and like, without bankrupting myself, then I will be a happy boy.

Book>Apocalypse

Newly uncovered illuminations from the Renaissance depicting miraculous phenomena

The Book of Miracles that first surfaced a few years ago and recently made its way into an American private collection is one of the most spectacular new discoveries in the field of Renaissance art. The nearly complete surviving illustrated manuscript, which was created in the Swabian Imperial Free City of Augsburg around 1550, is composed of 169 pages with large-format illustrations in gouache and watercolor depicting wondrous and often eerie celestial phenomena, constellations, conflagrations, and floods as well as other catastrophes and occurrences. It deals with events ranging from the creation of the world and incidents drawn from the Old Testament, ancient tradition, and medieval chronicles to those that took place in the immediate present of the book’s author and, with the illustrations of the visionary Book of Revelation, even includes the future end of the world.

The surprisingly modern-looking, sometimes hallucinatory illustrations and the cursory descriptions of the Book of Miracles strikingly convey a unique view of the concerns and anxieties of the 16th century, of apocalyptic thinking and eschatological expectation. The present facsimile volume reproduces the Book of Miracles in its entirety for the first time and thus makes one of the most important works of the German Renaissance finally available to art lovers and scholars. The introduction puts the codex in its cultural and historical context, and an extensive description of the manuscript and its miniatures, as well as a complete transcript of the text, accompany the facsimile in an appendix.

The authors:
Till-Holger Borchert studied art history, musicology and German Literature at the universities of Bonn and Bloomington (IN). An acknowledged expert in Early Netherlandish paintings, he has been chief curator at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges since 2002. He has also curated numerous exhibitions in the sphere of art and cultural history, including in Brussels, Maastricht, Rotterdam, Madrid and New York. Borchert teaches art history at the universities of Aachen and Memphis (TN) and heads the Flemish Research Centre for the Arts in the Burgundian Netherlands.

Joshua P. Waterman studied art history at Oregon State University and received a Ph.D. from Princeton University for his dissertation on interrelations of literature and visual art of the Silesian Baroque. The proven expert on German art of the late medieval and early modern periods worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Currently he is a research associate at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. He has collaborated on exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Cologne and Bruges.

Chinese Artist Liu Bolin on Invisibility, Materialism, and Orwellian Themes

Chinese artist Liu Bolin makes enthralling hybrid art, deploying slick subliminal signals and inventive arrangements replete with smart commentary on contemporary China. His walloping canvases and photos are often peopled by youthful ruffians, pretty pedestrians, or the artist himself — all of whom take on a cunning, clandestine, camouflaged complexion. Liu’s images depict the disenfranchised, displaced, and invisible strivers ('the ant tribe,' as they're known in China), who struggle in a society laden with systemic risks, paradoxes, ideological schisms, and false dawns. His cool compositions display complex painterliness, vibrant viscosities, and optical oomph.

Amid a yawning spiritual-ideological vacuum, Bolin's art is powerful commentary on the Middle Kingdom’s frenetic social fabric. In the end, his works are multi-layered studies of the ways we take in imagery and express identity. Over the years he has captured major motifs in China’s turbulent socio-economic transition, among them industrialization, expropriation, nefarious apparatchiks, the nouveau riche. With series like Hiding in the City, The Invisible Man, and his latest eye-popping exhibit at Klein Sun Gallery in New York, A Colorful World, Liu Bolin creeps into ontological crevices, decoding and recoding art and life.