Bara is awesome. It’s a type of Japanese erotic manga for gay men, but unlike the much more well-known genre Yaoi, no one has published Bara comics in English. Die hard fans of Bara in North America must order the books overseas or hunt down scans on the Internet.
When my friend Blake Besharian invited me to make a series of prints on his letterpress, I decided to pay Bara homage. I collaged my favorite panels from Seizo Yebisubashi’s manga “My Hometown Hospitality” into new visual narratives, emphasizing the transitions, exteriors, and moments of stillness that establish the subtle mood and tone in Yebusibashi’s artwork.
“Bara by Letterpress” is a limited edition series of six prints. If you’d like a set, here’s your chance! Post this video on your blog/Tumblr/Twitter and then leave a comment below with a link to your site. Next week, I’ll randomly select one commenter to receive a set of all six prints!
Here are some links to help you investigate Bara on your own:
Bara Resources: Bara – Wikipedia page. G-Men – G-Men is the foremost magazine that publishes Bara comics. Site mostly in Japanese. Japanese Gay Art – An Australian fine art blog devoted to the genre. G-Project – A Japanese store that allows international orders of Bara manga. Seizo Yebisubashi – All-Japanese website for the Bara artist. Gengoroh Tagame – Mixed Japanese and English site for the legendary Tagame.
Look, I’m going to try and display some restraint here. If I’m not careful, I could easily scare you away with the ocean of magniloquent praise swelling inside me. So let me be delicate in my wording– calm, cool and collected to help you understand the unparalleled beauty of Matthew Thurber‘s 1-800-Mice.
It’s an epic mystery about the moment in our future-history when human-tree marriage is on the cusp of social acceptance. An intersex mouse named Peace Punk roams the world seeking the entrance to Valhala, evading a trio of angry assassins through an underworld of never-ending hardcore festivals and viral video production palaces. A tightly wound mouse detective goes undercover amongst a pack of nihlistic terrorists, confronting his own criminality in the process. And a cog in the machine at 1-800-Mice (the world’s fastest courier service) learns the grisly truth behind a mysterious drug made of dead trees.
If that sounds like a lot, it is! There’s a whole Universe behind this story, and it feels like something dreamed by Henry Darger and Alajandro Jodorowsky after a night of getting stoned, prank-calling Marilyn Manson, and watching Monty Python. But don’t worry about keeping up with all the details: readers of 1-800-Mice will learn to truly appreciate a sudden nosedive into the surreal. Each panel says a lot, even when the narrative speaks in tongues.
Thurber’s particular poetry is a web of jokey stand-up observations, noirish voice-over, drifting existential questions, imaginary buzzwords, playful puns and casual dick jokes. He constructs a foreign language with familiar associations and unexpectedly deep capacity for humanity (even in interspecies characters). You’ll be reading a goofy exchange between a death cultist dentist and his vampiric assistant, and suddenly you’ll tap into a quiet sense of melancholy embedded within the panel. It’s an interplay that grants Thurber’s gonzo fantasy a surprising scope of emotional depth. Plus, heads explode, reality collapses, and you have a new message on MindBook.
1-800-Mice is published by the awesome PictureBox press, and it looks beautiful. The hardcover feeels really special, and it has pretty colors on it. Plus, there’s an endorsement from Matt Groening on the cover! Check it out at one of Thurber’s upcoming readings!
Watching L’amour fou, the documentary about the art auction conducted by Pierre Bergé after the death of his partner of 50 years, Yves Saint Laurent, is a little less inspiring than watching Herb & Dorothy, the 2009 documentary that’s also about art collecting (and then unloading late in life). But I’ll get to the reasons why in a minute, because first I want to praise this movie for what it gets excellently right:
1. You get to see a tiny amount of very intimate, loving footage related to the relationship between YSL and Bergé. Bergé’s eulogy for his deceased husband is as moving a moment as you’ll see in theaters this year. And, earlier, some vintage one-on-one conversation footage where YSL playfully tells his man that he enjoys male “body hair” and that he wants to live in “a large bed, a full one,” should clear up any clueless viewer’s ideas about them being strictly business associates. Bergé was YSL’s daddy bear.
Left: Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. Right: one of YSL’s Mondrian-inspired dresses.
2. Bergé is not the kind of guy to waste time mourning the past. His clear-eyed approach to the dismantling of the couple’s astonishingly large art, furniture and rare object collection is a study in not being attached to things when it’s time for them to exit your life. Besides, he had plenty of time to mourn while YSL was alive and trying to simultaneously drown himself in booze and snort up all the cocaine on the planet. During that time Bergé stood by and took care of his clinically depressed, sickened, addict partner and kept all the paperwork in order so that YSL could design clothes and then hermit himself in a private room, put on a caftan and inhale a small pyramid of blow.
3. You get to see a healthy amount of Loulou de La Falaise and Betty Catroux, YSL’s muses. One light and warm (de la Falaise), one dark and swaddled in black leather (Catroux), they are cool injections of French womanhood into YSL’s insular gayness. Catroux, especially, is like something a writer would invent, never without her sunglasses, even at night.
Loulou de La Falaise and Betty Catroux
4. Their lives were an orgy of luxury and shopping. They bought houses, art and more houses and more art. “One fine day a Mondrian came into our lives,” says Bergé, like it flew into their window and decided it was happiest living next to that Picasso over the fireplace. And then, when it was done, Bergé sent it to the auction house, a place he describes as “the undertakers of art.”
5. Thrill to the head-scratching vagaries of the art auction secondary market where an Ensor fetches more than a Degas.
6. This sort of thing:
And if, in the end, it’s all a little less inspiring than Herb & Dorothy, it’s because of that wealth. Extreme capitalism, even when it’s predicated on the work of a design visionary like Yves Saint Laurent and subsequently used in the service of building an awesome art collection, is sort of automatically less interesting than going on a journey with two extremely ordinary, working class collectors like Herb and Dorothy Vogel, whose lives revolved around living on her librarian’s salary and amassing crazy amounts of conceptual and minimalist pieces (when no one else wanted them) on his postal worker’s income. It’s easy to see a Brâncusi and say, “I’ll take it,” when you’re swimming in cash, or getting a Warhol piece for free because you hang out with him and he decides to photograph you. It’s way more dangerous to risk your retirement savings on work you love just because you love it, become Christo’s cat-sitter and then later donate all of it to various museums without asking for anything in return.
But again, this isn’t meant to harsh on these guys. YSL backed up his decadence with a legacy of his own amazing art worn by fancy ladies the world over. The planet needs people like him, people who live their lives exactly as they please. And if that life involves getting high with Mick Jagger and flying around France in your own private helicopter and asking Betty Catroux what she wants for dinner and she says, “Cigarettes,” then that’s cool, too.
It’s a jungle is the name of the the installation dominating Henry Taylor‘s show at Blum & Poe. It is a jungle, but it’s also a graveyard and a playground, a densely layered labyrinth of refuse and memories cobbled together in the most pleasing manner. Bleak black bottles of bleach, mops and spears envelop artifacts from cherished memories of African-American culture. The spectre of racism looms near, establishing a mood as melancholy as it is magnetic– but Taylor refrains from placing obvious value judgements on his juxtapositions and references, instead opting to create an emotional data set from which viewers may extract what they choose.
Huge, gorgeous paintings fill the rest of the gallery with family and friends, heroes and archetypes rendered in vivid colors and passionate brush strokes. Taylor hails from downtown L.A. and he seems to takes pleasure in capturing the beating heart of his community. For instance, from an interview with Artinfo:
The stunned-looking woman seated in a chair in a 2010 canvas, for example, is a crack addict Taylor met on the street and paid to pose late one night. Asked whether he worries about letting strangers into his loft, which also functions as his studio, Taylor, 52, shrugs. “I wanted to work. You gotta get what you gotta get. So far so good. One girl stole my CD player.”
A feeling of intense intimacy creeps up on you in the midst of Taylor’s work. Little by little, he pulls you into his world and you’ll find yourself reluctant to leave. Check out some photos I took at the gallery after the jump, and head on over to Culver City to see it in person before the show closes this Saturday!
[ Ed. note: Dave White is a hoarder of radness. His house is brimming with awesome art objects carefully collected over the years, so I asked him to write a series of posts chronicling his connoisseurship. It all began with the purchase of one record... - Graham ]
An excerpt from the notes of a boxed, 12” piece of vinyl by Christian Marclay, one I bought in 1990:
From June 4th through July 16th 1989 the floor of one of the Shedhalle Galleries, Zurich, was covered with 3500 copies of a record titled Footsteps. During the six weeks of the installation, people were invited to walk on the records—willingly or not, they had to step on them to reach the adjacent galleries where other sculptures were exhibited. The one-sided recording, containing the sounds of footsteps, was recorded in December 1988 in the deserted hallways of the Clocktower (N.Y.) and in the studios of Harmonic Ranch (N.Y.), where Keiko Uenishi’s tap dancing was mixed in. During the gallery installation the work could be looked at, stepped on and walked through, but the recording was never heard…
At the end of the exhibition, the records, which were attached to the floor with double-sided tape, were removed.
One thousand of these records have been made available, apart from a special edition of one hundred copies signed and numbered. Dedicated to the memory of Fred Astaire.
I was already a fan of Christian Marclay, even though I was about as land-locked from both the art world and the weird music world as a person could get. I had some compilations he was on and I’d bought his 10” EP called More Encores where he mangled up the music of people like Maria Callas and Jimi Hendrix. I was a college student in Lubbock, Texas, and since the internet wasn’t around to make every single thing ever created accessible within seconds, it meant I had to dig and hunt to find the stuff I wanted to see and hear. And I had hunted down and loved his turntable re-interpretations of pre-existing sound. I don’t want this explanation to come off like “In my day I had to walk to school uphill in the snow” because it wasn’t like that. It was exciting. You learned secret stuff and shared it with the friends who also wanted in on that secret.
Anyway, my boss at the indie record shop I worked in said, “I can get this for you at my cost but it’s still going to be as much as you make in two weeks of work.” Now, I also made money by washing dishes in a women’s dorm cafeteria and feeding breakfast to a friend with really profound cerebral palsy. I always juggled two or three jobs to keep myself afloat while going to college part-time. But in spite of multiple employments this absolutely necessary indulgence was out of my reach.
Because I wasn’t reliant on my parents to live, I didn’t feel guilty about lying to my mother for some emergency art cash. I said I needed to buy groceries. That I was strapped. She wrote me a check. I remember it being somewhere in the neighborhood of $100. Maybe $150. It’s been a while and I didn’t keep good financial records back then. But it might as well have been $10,000. That’s how little wiggle room there was in my personal budget in those days. (And yes, I paid her back eventually. And not just in hugs.)
I took it out of the box, played it once, then put the accompanying poster on my bedroom wall—it’s a shot of the installation featuring all the records, including whichever one of them became mine—and placed the record on the floor. For 21 years now it has remained on the floor inside whatever front door I’ve rented. It’s been walked on by countless visitors, including one actual famous person, the label is sun-faded and the recording itself has been footstepped right off, wiped out of playability. And in the meantime Christian Marclay has become a big art world star. That makes me pretty happy. I like to think that every time a new person asked me why I had a record on my floor, my explanation turned them into a fan and I helped his reputation that way. I realize how delusional that is. It’s sort of like thinking that the shoes you don’t wear very often are sad about it.
With 1100 of these things floating around, Footsteps barely straddles the line between functional recorded object and what most people would call a proper piece of art. But to me it was my gateway drug art purchase because it inspired and satisfied a gnawing cake-hunger in my belly. That’s the itch most people who collect stuff all feel inside, the one that tells you that life is going to be so much better after you get that thing in your hands. And when it really does make life better that’s when you know you made the right decision. And I totally did. I’m going to go stomp on that record right now.
Annie Lapin‘s paintings represent a healthy mix of cerebral contemplation and audacious instinct. Framed by centuries of art history, Lapin’s work culls from the conventions of landscape painting and then obscures those familiar elements with unsettling layers of abstraction. I teamed up with Boston-based magazine New American Paintings to interview this renowned painter in her downtown L.A. studio, and take a look at her unique process.
Clockwise from top:States of Matter, Natalie Portman in one of Rodarte’s Black Swan costumes, and Dave White at MOCA (photo by Chris Gardner).
I think about the La Brea Tar Pits a lot. It’s my favorite place in Los Angeles.
One of the things I like about the main tar pit is that it’s a neighbor to the LA County Museum of Art. Separating them is a permanent outdoor installation of huge concrete Donald Judd cubes. I like the way the cubes are enormously heavy, solid, orderly and immobile, but 20 feet away is a bubbling pit of tar that seems alive and chaotic and—if the movie Volcano is to be believed—possibly even going to kill us all some day and swallow those cubes whole.
Donald Judd:Untitled (for Leo Castelli), 1977
That block of land at Wilshire and Fairfax is also slugging itself around my brain while I’m inside MOCA at the Pacific Design Center at the Rodarte: States of Matter show. Because when you walk inside, the lower level is engaged in a similar kind of boxing match between the witchy, mentally ill Black Swan ballerina costumes that Kate and Laura Mulleavy created for Natalie Portman’s freakout, and several other black dresses that have been assembled from dyed cheesecloth and gauze, black feathers, metal lace and black vinyl embossed in a way that resembles a gnarled, lumpy, horror-creature dream. Hedora from Godzilla vs The Smog Monster appears to have been skinned alive after emerging from the oozing, bubbling Tar Pits and then turned into a shoulder cap for a dress. While you stare at it wondering how and why, you realize that if you took a very close-up photograph of all the elements going on at once, it would seem like a scorched, doom-landscape. Not a dress, but something that could swallow a giant Donald Judd cube. And that is fantastic.
Photo: Autumn de Wilde
Climb the stairs for more dresses and more Black Swan gear. Now the entire space on MOCA’s second floor is a strobe light show of flurorescent black and red competing for attention and, at times, simultaneously submerging the area in darkness. None of the clothes are black but the narrative is still a scary bedtime story.
At the top of the stairs is a group of white dresses suspended on wires that, in the black light, turn to into floating Haunted Mansion ghosts but, at, odd intervals, in brightest light, have the feel of a pearl-draped grandma who decided to add bedspread fringe to her sleeves just to remind you that she’s about to turn a hundred and she’s not done having it her way quite yet. Gnarled, nubbly wool pops up all over the place, and one of the dresses features a bodice that looks like a shearling breastplate. Everything here is white or near-white and, depending on when you look at it, in darkness or in light, it can feel both romantic and full of strange dread.
If you move over there are white incarnations of the black ballet costumes from below and, then, in the back corner, the film’s “Oops I just stabbed myself in the stomach because I’m crazy” costume, its hand-made open red wound popping out like a really gross flower, front and center.
The shock of that garment tempers the Dario Argento-ish smeared, streaked red dresses from a 2008 collection hovering nearby. They haven’t been splattered, though. They’ve been soaked and left to precision drip. Again, order co-existing with chaos. These are my favorite pieces in the show, because they remind me of a fake blood-stained white porcelain teapot by the Spanish artist Antonio Murado that a friend gave me, the perfect dresses to wear to a crime scene tea party or teen slasher prom night. They’re the last thing you witness. They’re the horror movie’s “Final Girl.” They’re everything beautiful and terrifying, all at once.
On a recent trip to Chinatown, some invisible force drew me into the POVevolving gallery, where I was confronted by an 18′-long foam skeleton. The piece, Dead Man, dominates the space, floating just a few inches above the floor. It reminds me of those wooden mannequins that pervade art classes across the globe, except huge and suspended in an indefinitely cadaverous pose. Dead Man is the centerpiece of New York artist Clark Goolsby‘s show STRANGE/LOVE, comprised of paintings and sculptures rendered in pleasing shapes and a fluorescent color palette that I’ll never not adore. Pictures after the jump.
There’s so much rad art scattered throughout the world, it can all feel little overwhelming. Luckily, in the 21st Century, we have a plethora of mediums through which to disseminate all that radness: the Internet, magazines, coffee table book anthologies– and perhaps the most quaintly archaic of the bunch– art fairs! Fairs provide you with something that none of the above can: a visceral sense of the endlessness of culture. Direct contact with the people who get paid to have good taste. A labyrinth of beautiful objects that you can examine with an awe-inspired scrutiny that even the best computer monitor cannot allow.
