WAFA is a global artist collective dedicated to the support and development of emerging artists. We are a global network of working artists with members in Vancouver, Portland, Seattle, North Carolina, St. Paul, Sydney, Brighton, and Norwich.
All work documented on this website was created by two or more artists working together. We have found that collectively we are stronger than individually.
‘Hhmmm, if I sit here long enough stroking my chin and staring at this book cover, then someone might photograph me and people will forget I made ‘Your Highness’ and remember how arty I am.’
The first time I realised that modern day renaissance man James Franco was more than just the guy who played Peter Parker’s bfbnfbhkhf* in Spiderman was a couple of years ago in Paris. I was in one of the Latin Quarter’s tourist trap restaurants with a friend when the camp, middle-aged frenchman dining alone on the table next to us asked what films we’d seen recently. The conversation went something like this:
My friend: Um, I saw Pineapple Express.
Strange Man: Oh, who plays in this Pineapple Express?
My friend: An actor called James Franco is in it.
Strange Man: Oh! James Franco! Yes I know James Franco. What other films have you seen?
Me: Well, I did watch Harry Potter the other day.
Strange Man: Is James Franco in this one?
Me: Uh, no. He isn’t.
Strange Man: Ah, I see. Have you seen any other films with James Franco in?
Me: Um, Spiderman.
Strange Man: And did you like James Franco in this one?
Me: Yeah, I s’pose.
Strange Man: So what other films have you seen with James Franco in?
And so on and so on it went. I detected that the man had a soft spot for James Franco. Since then the Franc’s numerous artistic and academic ventures (books, artshows, albums, creative writing masters to name a few) have seen his value rise dramatically. I feel absolutely certain in my statistical estimations when I say that in the last year 50% of all cultural magazine and sunday supplement article headlines have been a variation on the sentence ‘James Franco does a lot of different things’. Ever ready to go to extreme lengths to get the latest lowbrow culture lowdown, I concocted an elaborate plan to break into his house undetected and see if I could get a heads up on any of his future projects. The plan is too elaborate to go into here so I won’t bore you with the details, instead I shall just provide my findings.
*bfbnfbhkhf = best friend but not forever because he kills his father
Iris Van Herpen, a young designer originally from the Netherlands, recently showed her eagerly anticipated SS11 Haute Couture Collection in Paris. This particular collection was presented as a collaboration with the much celebrated milliner Stephen Jones and embodied everything both artists stand for – innovation and eccentricity. Every piece projected creative individuality but a high level of consistency still ran throughout.
The garments were both intricate and delicate in their designs but still remained structurally rigid as they worked their way along the catwalk. The collection, named ‘Escapism’, ironically lacked a certain level of flexibility, displayed by the models inability to navigate smoothly down the runway at a regular walking pace (probably something to do with the remarkable 6inch ‘broken glass slippers’ being worn).
However, this staggered progression, aided by the intense beating music, only added to the overall drama and certainly ensured the amount of attention it deserved. Here are our photos from the show.
Just over one week ago Halfslant closed the Commercial Center Sans Commerce at CHIC Art Fair, after being open for five wonderful, busy days. The opening and closing parties were huge successes, and Halfslant feels so honored to have collaborated with the CHIC directors, Cécile Greismar and Sandrine Bonsignon, their wonderful staff, and the fifteen CHIC artists and their enthusiastic Galleries to welcome Paris to the Cité de la Mode et du Design for the first time.
For those of you who could not visit the Commercial Center for yourselves, we’ve put together this blog of photos and descriptions to show you some of the more interactive aspects of the show.
The website, www.sanscommerce.com, created by beholdthedestroyer! showcases the floorplan and custom signage of the commercial center, as well as lists the artworks contained in each boutique.
Opening and closing night the public was greeted by a red carpet leading to the Galerie E.G.P’s beautifully designed box containing artist Igor Josifov. This performance invited attendees to walk over Mr. Josifov- separated from them by a thick sheet of plexi-glass.
Some people jumped off horrified, others flirtatiously kneeled down to give him a big kiss, while children stomped up and down in furious disbelief. Stepping over Mr. Josifov’s face may have been extremely uncomfortable, yet this somewhat morbid performance also managed to be playful and fun.
Perhaps one of the most dynamic aspects of the Commercial Center was the “Dream Object Boutique” featuring paintings that were composed by Patrick Lebret’s (Galerie Ma Collection) daughter and then meticulously copied and enlarged by the artist. The Princesses, they matched perfectly with the Boutiques main product: dreams. Visitors were greeted by a single representative of the troupe of actors at a stark white counter, but then were surprised to find five more popping out offering to recreate childhood dreams and current desires. We watched children ride elephants on a safari, a grown man fulfill his dream of being a baseball star, as well as a certain curator who once dreamt of being a veterninarian magically heal a sick dog. All you needed in this boutique was a bit of imagination to play along.
We also caught many people interacting with Ana-Lee Karkar’s “Video Club 2010+”. The poetic DVD cases described films that could be watched by snapping a photo of the enclosed bar-code with your smartphone, which could then be used to instantaneously accessed the video via the internet. Even for the non-tech-savvy the titles themselves were evocative and thoughtful.
On quieter days, the Music provided by the M. Chinworth ensemble would echo through the space unhindered by the masses or the sounds from the river or the street. A jazzy slow version of the Pixies “Where is my mind?”, Beethoven’s 5th sung acapella in a doo-wop style, or a sound-art noise mashup of modern pop hits and screeching sounds were all part of the one hour loop which provided sound during the entirety of the Commercial Center show.
Over at the “Make Your Own Furniture” Boutique , design troupe Breaded Escalope (Outdoorz Gallery) from Vienna led workshops where they created their “Original Product” stools with the visitor participation.
The recent Steve Carell and Paul Rudd comedy Dinner For Schmucks was, like many Hollywood films, a remake. This time of popular French play-turned-film Dîner de Cons. Although the European original is funnier and overall better than the American version, the initial idea of the remake could possibly be excused, no matter how bad the final cut actually is, as it has been over ten years since the original was released and the new film introduces new characters. So, in this respect the remake is targeting a different audience to the original and is not trying to just copy the film, rather take the central concept and create new ideas around that.
However, there is absolutely no excuse for a foreign-language film that was first shown in cinemas only two years ago, to worldwide critical acclaim, to be remade into a film that looks to emulate the original in nearly every way except that the language is now English. It therefore follows that there is no excuse for the US remake of Swedish vampire flick Let The Right One In; the story of 12 year-old Oskar who shares a small flat with his mother living in a relatively poor area of Stockholm in the mid-80’s, and the friendship he develops with seemingly 12 year-old vampire girl Eli, who moves in next door with her mysterious elderly male carer. Based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (who also wrote the screenplay) and directed by Tomas Alfredson, it is more a study of the loneliness and longing of children on the verge of adolescence than it is about vampires. Though it does also do that very well. The Anglophone rights were quickly snapped up once it started screening at festivals and those quick-thinking American film execs cunningly re-named it Let Me In, the other translation of the novel’s title. Presumably to support the claim made by the remake’s director, Matt Reeves, that he has made a new version of the book rather than just ripping off one of the most innovative horror films of recent times.
Reeves said at the film’s panel discussion at this year’s Comic-Con that he thinks the original is “a masterpiece”. This begs the question: why the hell are you remaking it then? If a work of art is already exceptional, then where is the need for a new version? Especially when it’s still so fresh in the memory. Evidently, in a case like this there is a clear financial gain to be made. As with all Hollywood films, they’re made first and foremost as a business venture, and in business the safest way to make a profit is to give the customer what you know they want. This is why there are so many sequels, remakes and adaptations. It’s much easier for a studio to keep rehashing old stories that they know are already successful than to risk original and untried ideas.
More than that however, remakes like Let Me In smack of Tinsel Town’s desperation to be seen as the world’s leading cinema industry, artistically as well as commercially. Not artistically in the sense of a film that borders on being an art installation like Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait for example. More that, if a foreign-language film has an interesting, commercially profitable idea at it’s heart, yet artfully crafted in a very non-Hollywood style, then the major studios will want to plunder that idea, market it as the USP of their version and then flesh it out with classic Hollywood devices. Take for example, the remake of Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire. Here, the studio has picked-up a beautifully made, ethereal tale about an angel watching over Berlin who desires to feel the full range of human emotions, to see life in colour, and transported it to LA, duly called it City Of Angels, cast Meg Ryan and upped the rom-com factor. It’s the type of commercial dilution of art that Hollywood has always been swimming in.
You can see the attractiveness of Let The Right One In then. As an artistic comment on childhood, it is stunning, emotive and intelligent, and as a vampire story, also has great mass-market potential. Moreover, as Hollywood sees itself as being a leader in vampire movies they would view it as their right to have their piece of this new form of blood-sucking pie and show that they too are capable of making such great cinema. Even if ‘making great cinema’ equates to ‘copying great cinema’, which, in essence, negates the ‘great’ bit. As what is ‘great’ about a like-for-like copy? If a painting by one artist copies an original painting by a different artist then it is labelled a ‘fake’ and discarded as being artistically redundant. If we applied the same rules in the world of cinema then we could call Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho a ‘fake’. (What would we call Michael Haneke’s English language shot-for shot remake of his own, originally German, Funny Games though? ‘Completely unnecessary’ perhaps?)
Reeves seems acutely aware that if the film is to have any sort of critical merit of its own then it cannot merely be a copy. And he forcibly wants to demonstrate that Let Me In isn’t one right from the get-go by reshuffling the narrative structure of events. It’s a desperate appeal to the audience of the original for their approval. ‘Hey, look, I haven’t just ripped it off! I changed it around a bit. I’m not a copy-cat after all! I’ve got my own ideas!’ It is also ultimately an insubstantial appeal because playing with the scene sequences doesn’t differentiate it from Let The Right One In that much when all the costumes, characters and locations in those scenes have been specifically chosen to resemble the original as closely as possible. Plus, it has then been shot in a way that tries to replicate the atmosphere that fills the original.
However, although the filmmakers want to recreate the Swedish film as closely as they can get away with, they don’t appear overly fond of the subtlety that made LTROI so interesting. So, they’ve crudely crowbarred in some Hollywood horror clichés to spell-out what’s going on to the audience. For example, the soundtrack is instantly recognisable as being for a horror film, whereas the original goes without one completely. The murderer wears a bag over his head to give him the look of a classic slasher serial killer. And, typically American, an unnecessary religious subtext is also added via the character of the mother. These are used to tell the audience that they should be scared, that they are watching a horror film. Let The Right One In didn’t do that because it couldn’t easily be classed as a horror film. It was far more than that, and that’s where Let Me In falls short.
In terms of the acting, Kodi Smit Mcphee deserves applause for his portrayal of Owen, the new version of Oskar. It’s not his fault that the film he’s in doesn’t deserve to exist. In contrast, Chloe Moretz who plays Aby, the American Eli, is too annoying to be able to portray the nuances of the character in the way that Lina Leandersson did in the original. Moretz was the worst thing in (500) Days of Summer and Kick-Ass. Her on-screen presence is incredibly grating in all her films. Just because she drops the c-bomb in the comic book movie doesn’t make her anymore edgy, or any less precocious than your normal Hollywood brat.
It must be said though, to be fair to Reeves, taken on it’s own, it is a very well directed film. He has tried a few different tricks, some which work: playing with the narrative structure; never showing the mother’s face, always keeping her on the edge of the frame to depict her as never being fully involved in her son’s life. And some that don’t: the highly unoriginal introduction of a lone cop investigating the case. Yet it is damned, for overall it essentially just aspires to be Alfredson’s film for an English-speaking audience who can’t be bothered with subtitles. There is absolutely no need for this film. Furthermore, Reeves’ shaky assertion that he’s making a different version of the novel, rather than remaking the film is violently tested as soon as the credits declare that it’s ‘based on the novel and the screenplay’ (Italics my own). This was blatantly never true anyway because the studio only bought the rights after watching Let The Right One In and it is highly doubtful they had even heard of the book before that. More importantly though, their denial that they have remade the movie demonstrates that filmmakers know that there is an intrinsic wrongness in remaking a film that they don’t think exists when filming a book. So why is that?
Well, the major, obvious difference between remaking a film, and filming a novel is that in the former case the same medium is being used and therefore falls under the same rules and can be judged in the same way. Whereas, in the latter case the original piece (the novel) is being transferred to a new medium and therefore falls under a different set of rules, so the adaptation (the film) cannot be judged in the same way as the original book. A film of a book must be a viewed as a stand-alone piece and be judged separately from any connections to the book. It must be judged only as piece of cinema. Film works in a vastly different, more narrow space than the novel and so any filmmakers adapting a novel should be free to take what they deem to be the essential elements of the story and then use the language of cinema to reform them. So it is always highly unfair when angry readers decry filmmakers for removing some of their favourite subplots of a book from the film version, or for not recreating locations exactly as they were in the reader’s head.
On the other hand, when remaking a film, a director is using the same language as the original and is therefore already tied more closely to the source material than they would be if they were filming a novel. Therefore they will have to change more essential elements if they want to make a legitimately worthwhile remake. Let Me In doesn’t do this. It’s gone out of it’s way to make locations and costumes that look the same, use the same dialogue, same scenes as Let The Right One In, with a few minor differences to warn off critics saying it’s an outright rip-off. Indeed it may be an official rip-off, but a rip-off it still is. Though Lindqvist may be happy that his pockets are getting deeper, Alfredson must be a bit pissed off that his great work has now been overshadowed in the wider public consciousness by a film that is essentially a ‘wanna-be’.
Remakes such as Let Me In typify not only Hollywood’s unimaginative thinking but also the sheer arrogance of the ‘whatever you can do, I can do better’ variety, even though they’re just copying someone else’s work. They want to envelop global cinema so as to be the reigning film industry empire and take foreign films of their liking for their own. They procure any good idea for themselves, Americanise it and dumb it down. It is their inherent American belief that because they have the money to do this, then they have the right. They don’t. Just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should and Hollywood should learn when to leave a good thing alone. They never will of course if there’s money to be made.
However, sometimes, just sometimes the remake can work if it is sufficiently different enough, and confident enough to have it’s own identity, such as The Magnificent Seven, Hollywood’s take on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samouraï. That film legitimises itself as a remake by ensconcing itself in a very Hollywood genre, the western, exchanging samouraïs for cowboys. Let Me In attempts partly to achieve this contextual transfer, but it feels very half-hearted; a few token clips of Regan speaking on TV are shown in the background of scenes. The overriding sentiment when watching the film is that by setting it at the same time, in a very snowy, not well-off corner of New Mexico, Reeves has gone out of his way to place it in as similar context to the Swedish version as possible. It’s just in America because then everyone can be speaking English.
So, when you hear that David Fincher is shooting his versions of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy in Sweden, alarm bells start ringing. Sure, the books are so globally successful that Hollywood would have made their versions of the films whether the Swedes had beaten them to it or not. Yet by making them so soon after the Swedish versions and especially by shooting them in Sweden, not relocating to America, they are acting as if the Swedish films didn’t exist. Are they going to go to the same locations as the Swedish films? Is everyone in the films meant to be Swedish but just speaking English? Are they implying that Hollywood can do Swedish better than the Swedish? In which case, it’s the worst type of movie arrogance and imperialism: Hollywood’s desire for world film hegemony, the need to envelope all cinema as American in order to control it as much as possible and therefore reap as much profit from it.
Finally however, it is down to the Anglophone cinema going public to not be so lazy and think that it’s hard work to watch a film with subtitles, because that’s a load of bollocks. Watch fantastic foreign language films, rather than the sanitised American versions. There were a lot of people around the world who did go and watch Let The Right One In but if there were more, then Hollywood wouldn’t bother remaking it. They know they can capitalise on it by remaking it as close as possible to the original without coming under fire for just copying it, and doing it in English. This lack of subtitles in English speaking countries will no doubt reap more financial rewards for Let Me In than the original did, and it’s a very sorry state of affairs.
When standing before the selected photos of the World Press Photo exhibit, on view at the Azzedine Alaia space in the Marais, it is impossible to divorce yourself from the graphic nature of the internationally-snapped selection of photos. Impossible in a way that, perhaps, you can with press photos that glut our daily lives in crumpled morning newspapers and distracted viewings of the evening news.
The foreign reporting that trickles into our lives often seems unfathomable for a cosmopolitan Western dweller to conceive of. War, savagery in the streets, fear of your neighbor, abject hunger—this exhibit brings the faraway chaos up close and personal, bringing other people’s daily realities into focus in a way that becomes heart-lurchingly tangible. We’re not talking “empathy.” This is about humanism rooted far more deeply than that: getting eye to eye with forceful realities that throw off the quotidian sense of what can and does exist. It will, in a word, stun. Stun in both senses– bewitch, and, moreover, shock.
The World Press Photography Contest has been ever-increasing in breadth since its inception, in 1955, in the Netherlands. It is a non-profit organization, holding the largest annual press photography contest in the world. The winning photographs are assembled into a traveling exhibit that tours 45 countries. The first photo to ever win the contest was by a Danish photographer, Mogens von Haven, who snapped a photo of a man dramatically—almost slap-stick in form— flipping off of his motorcycle.
This year, over 100,000 submissions were entered into the contest. Each year a specialized panel evaluates and narrows down the winners from the pool of candidates. The vastness of the photographed experiences is broken down into ten loose categories within which there are first, second and third prizes and some honorable mentions, for series and single shots respectively. Below are but a few of the photos, mesmerizing both with visual artistry and arresting subject matter:
To be frank, I care very little about most sports. I hate team spirit, lycra, running, and whooping. I was not expecting to be wooed by the sports category. But Golding’s portrait of Jack Mathieson, a 91-year-old swimmer, made my heart melt. The man is close to a century old and he’d just swum 800 meters! Incredible. Even more incredible is how Golding somehow captured something about this senior that made him look like a… boy. For all his wrinkles, Mathieson is standing there with his wet hair plastered to his head, his goofy ears sticking out, his freckles dancing all over his body, and triumph in his bleary water-logged eyes.
The giraffe is such a vertical animal: its gangly grace is all about its elongated neck and lean legs. The sight of this horizontally-splayed giraffe is horrible. There is something almost ridiculous about it – it looks like it passed out drunk, or like it’s some kind of road kill. No: it is dying of thirst, neck curled powerlessly into the dirt of a dry African riverbed which had not seen rain in three years.
Photographer: Kees Van de Veen (Category: Arts and Entertainment).
This photo manages to be meta in an amazingly non-pretentious way. It’s a photograph of a woman (photographer Janna Bathoorn) snapping a picture of a seated man, behind which another man props up a pastoral tableau directly behind his head, as a trompe l’oeil background. The actual background is a gray clouded sky with an eerily menacing feel, wildflower strewn fields clear to the horizon, and a short clothesline of droopy laundry. The painted picture held behind the sitter is of a lush green field in which sheep roam and the sky is a lush blue.
There’s something wonderfully bittersweet about this juxtaposition of reality and fantasy – envisioning and projecting the circumstances you dream about to overshadow dreary reality, while equally representing disappointment about what is in front of you, having to resort to illusion when what you wish were real is not.
There is something almost painterly about this photo, maybe because of the mother-and-child trope and the prettily diffused light. In crime-ridden Detroit, this single mother is seen standing in her front yard, a lone figure looking across a fence that segregates her from the neighboring houses beyond it. A lurid red light emanates from her own doorway, and the grayish tinge of bricks and pallid sky creates an uninviting background to her life. Though the mother is vulnerable and alone in the sad landscape, her pale naked young son — with his cute tiny butt sagging over her forearm — is her family, and that they have each other provides a bit of hope.
This photo is so, so horrifying I don’t really know what to say. When I first laid eyes on it, I wanted to make it unreal, I told myself “it looks like a broken, battered doll”. But it is not. She’s not a doll – it’s a little girl. A person, with her mouth ajar, and blood on her cheeks, and a halo of dirt around her head, which will never grow to be any bigger than the sharply edged rocks scattered nearby.
This photo is perturbing not only because it is upsetting to witness the obvious aggression but also because it is so beautiful even as it is depicting an act of harassment that should squarely be considered ugly. The arc of the wine, unfurled mid-air is like a liquid crimson serpent, almost like some kind of party gag flung joke-ishly. The expression of the young boy slinging the contents of his drink from the flimsy plastic cup at this woman is completely unashamed, almost casual. Her face is completely hidden; only the swivel of her hips away from the boy shows her reaction.
It begs the question of what went on between them – if she provoked him in any way, if he’s so ravaged by anger and prejudice that his act is apropos of nothing. There is no small irony in the overlap of Arabic and Hebrew words — scribbled on that sea green panel above their heads — and the inability of rival cultures to communicate below.
On most days with sweet blue skies, one often thinks to oneself, nothing bad could happen. But the blue sky as the backdrop to this savagery reveals a wretched, Nietzschian depiction of an apathetic universe. The baby blue sky seemingly fit for a picnic, instead hangs over horrific, rampant savagery of fourteen grown men pelting a fellow human creature to death. They’re punishing this man for having committed adultery.The right arm of the man in the right quadrant of the picture is fully extended, to maximize the momentum of his throw.
I’ve remained haunted by the man with the raised right arm, poised to chuck the malevolent meringue of a rock, ever since I saw this. He is the emblem of the most base unquenchable violence, ready to strike unmercifully, fueled by the zeal of his fundamentalist moral righteousness.
Winner of World Press Photo Contest, Photographer: Pietro Masturzo.
This was a controversial choice, which the selection panel readily admits, for the prestigious win. Masturzo’s photos are blurry, shadowy, their context as vague as the lighting. If you didn’t read the accompanying text, you might not see much value to them aesthetically.
Masturzo’s photos capture protesters in the night in Iran, anonymously yelling dissent from the rooftops after the unjust election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This illicit, subversive behavior is enacted in the most punishing of circumstances, which in itself is a testament to the tirelessness of the human spirit: the belief that what is deserved will come forth, and that what is unearned needs to be called out, and that repression does not eviscerate dignity from people’s souls.
The spotlight on these subjects makes the viewer absorb the sorrows and hardships and triumphs of other corners of the world. You see what the photographer saw, a glimpse into unmentionable anguish or extraordinary circumstances; you are witness by transfer. The burdens and courage you see become the burdens and courage in your own existence. It is important to value this kind of reporting, this kind of information, and to be privy to the world at large, which we are so quick to forget amidst the minutia of our lives.
Les Flâneurs met up with the founders of the Chez Jack art collective based on a chimerical, unconventional world that is Jack’s. Chez Jack’s compelling installations and photography will be exhibited this month at the Centre Culturel Auguste Dobel.
Vernissage and Happening this Friday, June 4th make for an awesome event.
Les Flâneurs: First of all, who is Jack?
Anthony: To be honest, I don’t really know. I just know that he doesn’t have the life of an ice-skater and that he doesn’t work at Météo France…
Jonathan: Jack is no one in particular. It startedoff as the name of a place we used to live in 3 years ago. Instead of saying “tonight there’s a party at Anthony’s, Jonathan’s, and Phillipe’s Place,” we would just say “Party Chez Jack tonight”. Then we moved to another apartment with different people but we still called the new place “Chez Jack”. Chez Jack wasn’t associated with just one place anymore, or identified by specific people. Chez Jack became an “état d’esprit…” / a state of mind.
LF: When Chez Jack speaks of having certain “sensibilités’”? What does that mean? What is Chez Jack sensitive towards?
Anthony: You could say that Chez Jack is sensitive towards a lot of things: the absurd, the mysterious, estafettes*, romance, Alain Turban…What counts is that this sensitivity ties us together. It’s like a language that we have in common that allows us to share, create, and move forward.
Jonathan: We each have our own mindsets, but we have the common desire to live together in a poetic world – in a world that’s a bit more mysterious, more incoherent, more colorful. Chez Jack tends to transform the commonplace into a work of art.
LF: Who can take part of Chez Jack?
Jonathan: Anyone. Chez Jack is based on chance encounters. The key is to have an open mind.
Anthony: We know that specific characteristics make certain people get along and others not. These characteristics are probably subconscious or in any case difficult to pinpoint. We don’t deny their existence but we don’t really want to think much on them either. When really asking ourselves this question, we use a system we’ve developed, which involvesmeasuring one’s skull and height. According to our calculations, Benjamin, our black toy baby is much more capable of being part of Chez Jack than a Batman figurine…
LF: On your site it says that Chez Jack’s network is made of permanent ties. What are the factors that make these ties?
Jonathan: We mean that, even if you just stayed in our apartment for 3 days, and we had a good time together, you’re a part of Chez Jack…even if you live 8000 km away. People traveling from all over the world have taken part in Chez Jack. We don’t hear from them so often anymore for the most part.
Anthony: Certain people seem to live in a permanent Chez Jack, when others return, leave, pass through, fly over, disembark…
Aude: Who says that?
LF: Chez Jack has a certain 60s / new wave / nostalgic / retro feel. Where do you think that comes from?
Jonathan: I think it’s justa general trend. It’s in ‘l’air du temps’. We didn’t particularly think of this aspect, but the retro feel has been everywhere for a while now. Like a lot of people, outdated things fascinate us. Eventually, we all end up being overtaken; maybe this fascination is a way to anticipate [what's coming next], to reassure ourselves.
Anthony: It might come from the fact that we’re constantly looking for ways of living that aren’t merely imposed upon us and that correspond to us [as individuals]. So we go back and look for images from past eras that appeal to us and have been on our minds – eras in which people lived differently.
LF: Hats seem to be an important type of Chez Jack object. What do they mean? Are they signs of some kind of ranking or positioning between Chez Jack members?
Jonathan: Hats are a way to change your mood. If you’re feeling blasé and angry, just put on your “I love jesus” cap and you’ll look way better.
Anthony: At Chez Jack, wearing a hat can be a way to let go of everyday life. It’s like a mask or a costume, an object that helps each person decide who he or she really wants to be at that precise moment.
Aude: The fear that our ideas will escape.
LF: What is the difference between a regular object and a Chez Jack object?
Jonathan: Chez Jack objects are just everyday life objects that have a special meaning to us because of the different experiences we’ve had with them. We share a collective memory around these objects, because at one point or another, these objects werepart of a story linked to our imagination – a place we go from time to time.
Anthony: They’re loaded with shared recollections, which make them of inestimable worth. They speak to us, remind us of things, and inspire us…
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Come discover the universe of Chez Jack, at its moment of exposure.
Special opening and installation Friday June 4th, 2010, from 6-10pm.
Chez Jack at Centre Culturel Auguste Dobel
9 rue Philidor
75020 Paris
Métro: Maraîchers
The Art Of Conversation: London—Berlin showcases specially created original work from a selected group of 20 young and established designers and design studios and exhibits the results in both London at Idea Generation Gallery and Berlin at Program Gallery.
From January to March 2010 the participants, 10 London based design studios and 10 Berlin based design studios, played a visual game of Chinese Whispers. Each participant was presented with a work/idea from the previous participant in the chain via a Skype chat, they then had 3 days to interpret it and forward their results to the next participant.
These responses could take any form; from sculpture to performance, photograph to text.
An entertaining and cheeky music video for “70 Million”, hit song by Franco-American band, Hold Your Horses! offers a wink at art history as band members playfully reconstruct famous paintings in an off the wall lyrical interpretation all their own.
Launching their 4th edition of this drawing fair, with sixty-six mostly French/Parisian galleries and a small selection of other galleries from Europe, the United States and South Korea, the Salon du Dessin Contemporain proves again that it is an outstanding showcase for presenting the oeuvre of works on paper.
Located in the spacious Carrousel du Louvre in central Paris, the fair had a lively ambiance from the moment the doors opened, with collectors quickly making the rounds to search for Contemporary gems in this environment focused on one specific medium.
Navigating through the aisles, there were some quite strong works to be admired. Among the more interesting were works by Frédéric Coché to be found at Galerie La Ferronnerie, Paris 11e. These delicate, well-executed drawings depict «the brief moments that can/will change a life forever», as was described by the artist himself, who was in attendance. Two larger works, of roughly 24 x 30 inches, that portrayed destroyed or in the act of being destroyed Classicist works (Rembrandts – see below) were being offered for a quite reasonable 3500€. Smaller works (approx. 8 ½ x 11 inches) depicting singular scenes of an execution, a mass grave and….. of lottery balls!, were offered for 700€.
Also from Paris, Galerie ALFA, Paris 6e, was showing a series of drawings titled A History of Filmmaking by the young artist Mathieu Dufois. Interesting in their handling of graphite, in their installation as well as conceptually, the series is the artist’s conception of an imaginary scene that was never included in Hitchcock’s «North by Northwest». The drawings are the result of a well-documented conversation between Hitchcock and François Truffaut, in which Hitchcock described Carey Grant meeting with an executive at an automobile factory, the scene developing and resulting in the discovery of a body at the end of the sequence. Having never been shot by the famous director, Mr. Dufois has been able to capture the drama wonderfully in 2 dimensions. This compendium which takes the form of a wall-hung storyboard was on hold almost immediately after the fair opening, for 22,000€.
Mathieu Dufois A History of Filmmaking, 2010, graphite on paper, series of 34 drawings in different formats.
From further afield, Galerie Zink, Munich displayed a small selection of works by the Japanese artist Fumie Sasabuchi, who currently resides in Germany. The works consist of single or two-page editorial spreads from fashion magazines, which are then skillfully manipulated with solvent and then drawn upon, the models’ skin becoming transparent, exposing musculature and bones, the environments becoming odd, museological spaces displaying unusual minimalist forms. These reinterpretations of high-fashion scenes into one of disintegrating flesh readily creates an intersting commentary on death/vanitas in a contemporary context. Works were priced at a sensible 1800€ for single sheets, 3600€ for 2 page spreads.
Fumie Sasabuchi, Untitled, 2009, ball pen, fashion magazine, 27,5 x 20,7 cm
Last, but certainly not least is Perugi ArteContemporanea from Padova, Italy. Showing a collaboration for former Canadian art collective Royal Art Lodge members Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama and Neil Farber, the gallery presented a fantastic installation of dozens of small paintings, installed like a horizon line in their corner booth. Prices ranged from 200€ to 600€ for 2 inch to 6 inch square works. These small, witty, often incredibly humorous works were eyecatching enough to keep visitors on the stand examining the works for longer than one would expect in the context of a fair. Their small scale, bright colors and hilarious scenes definitely set these works apart from the rest of the fair.
Overall, the 4th edition of this brilliant fair was again a great pleasure to visit. Often consigned to the backrooms of galleries, serious collectors know the value, often easily affordable, of drawings and other works on paper and the Salon du Dessin is a superb and energetic event to make new discoveries.
