Sense8_series

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• Sense8 tells the story of eight strangers played by an impressive cast of international actors and actresses: Will (Smith), Riley (Middleton), Capheus (Ameen), Sun (Bae), Lito (Silvestre), Kala (Desai), Wolfgang (Riemelt), and Nomi (Clayton). Each individual is from a different culture and part of the world. In the aftermath of a tragic death which they all experience through what they perceive as dreams or visions, they suddenly find themselves growing mentally and emotionally connected. While trying to figure how and why this connection happened and what it means, a mysterious man named Jonas tries to help the eight. Meanwhile, another stranger called Whispers attempts to hunt them down, using the same sensate power to gain full access to a sensate's mind (thoughts/sight) after looking into their eyes. Each episode reflects the views of the characters interacting with each other while delving deeper into their backgrounds and what sets them apart and brings them together with the others.

  
  

  This group of strangers are suddenly linked mentally, and must find a way to survive being hunted by those who see them as a threat to the world's order. They all experience a rebirth which inexplicably links them intellectually, emotionally and sensually. We are taken along their journey to discover exactly what they are going through, witnessing their interactions from face-to-face conversations from opposite sides of the world without the use of any devices, simply using each other's skills and abilities, learning about each other, all the while being pursued by a secretive group that wish to lobotomize them in order to prevent an evolutionary path they do not wish to become humanity's future. Written and directed by the Wachowski sisters, this is an un unmissable science-fiction drama series! A total visual treat. I recommend watching it with English subtitles on.
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Volcano by JUNGLE: The Music and The Dancing of Our Time

Volcano is a hypnotic dance film by London-based company Jungle, now on YouTube. Not only is Shay Latukolan’s choreography mesmerizing, but also the dancing, the styling, the lighting, the camera work, the cinematography are pure joy. People are comparing some of their dance movements to Bob Fosse. Although the group’s striking series of 14 one-shot music videos has gone viral on social media, you may call Jungle a band, or a music collective — just don’t call them famous, as they are not interested in notions of celebrity. Sill, Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland’s electrifying electronic mix of funk, hip-hop and jazzy/techno beat will get you hooked. Sit back and watch the 49-min. film on your computer or on your TV screen. You are bound to flip out. It's simply a masterpiece of modern dance. Brilliant beyond words. Enjoy it! 

Breaking Bad, a masterpiece now, and a masterpiece a hundred years from now

Everything stands out, from the subtle details, to the unmatched writing and the perfect cast, to the very beautifully shot scenes. Breaking Bad, created by Vince Gillian, may very well be the best TV series out there. The story, even with some creative liberties, is well grounded, believable and feels very real. The show, unlike others, ages like fine wine. The more you watch and the longer you sink in, the better it gets. I can think of few series which grow stronger and better every season. It's not only worth sinking your teeth into, it's worth eating. Breaking Bad is a timeless piece and it will stand even long into the future, and will forever be one of the best TV shows to ever come out.

Definitely one of the greatest series ever. It just gets better as it goes along. The journeys of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman are something I will never forget. These are some of the best written characters to ever come from a pen hitting a paper. My praises for the acting and cinematography are unending. Some of the shots are intricate works of art, and in general the performances are just excellent. This makes all but the best movies look like utter dribble, and in terms of tone, every intense moment is executed with excellence, and always has the impact it's going for.

The plot of the series in the early seasons lacks a certain level of complexity, and the start is a bit slow paced, but nevertheless, this is an absolute must-watch, preferably one episode a day. If you have mixed feelings about Season 1, trust me, it's only uphill from there. If you want a series to call perfect; I think this might be it.

"Somebody To Love" / George Michael + Queen at Wembley Stadium 1992

Oh, those analogical times when singer and audiences would interact clapping hands together! No mobiles glued to their hands like synthetic prosthesis. What an emotional, unforgettable moment George Michael left for posterity with this electrifying rendition of "Somebody To Love". How well I remember showing my B2 students this video over the years! A musical jewel from the 90s, for sure.

BITTE LACHEN / PLEASE CRY

Barbara Kruger

Bitte Lachen / Please Cry

29.04.2022 to 28.08.2022 
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

The Neue Nationalgalerie presents Barbara Kruger's first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin. The American conceptual artist has developed a site-specific text installation for the Neue Nationalgalerie’s upper-level exhibition hall, making use of the entire space. The work seeks to engage visitors in public discussion about political and social topics.

In an expansive text installation, Barbara Kruger combines her own texts with quotes by three authors ‒ George Orwell, James Baldwin and Walter Benjamin ‒ whose writings each address major political issues: the violence of totalitarian states, the mechanisms behind societal discrimination and the dangers of biased historiography.

Through the stark graphic impact of her texts, reduced to just three colours (black, white and red), Kruger succeeds in introducing her own artistic language into Mies van der Rohe’s massive building. Aside from the topicality of the texts and their subject matter, the invitation extended to Barbara Kruger to develop this work also pays homage to her outstanding artistic contributions, whose feminist and political approaches have strongly influenced the art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

State and Totalitarianism

At the centre is a sentence borrowed from Orwell’s book 1984: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face ‒ forever."

This nightmarish vision of a totalitarian state originated from Orwell, directly following the Second World War. The statement was intended as a reckoning and reflection on the National Socialist dictatorship in Germany. In his novel 1984, Orwell issued a universal and timeless warning to society to question and criticise any form of state violence and control. By citing this well-known quote, Barbara Kruger also recalls the universal dangers that can arise at any time from repressive structures and nations. Given the current war in Europe, this warning about violence brought about by a totalitarian state seems all the more prescient.

Consumerism and Affirmation

The literary quotes are accompanied by short texts written by the artist that have been adopted from social media news. They address visitors directly and refer to the discrepancies between self-perception and self-alienation, for instance, “Please cry” or “Is that all there is?”. In contrast to Mies van der Rohe’s classical and austere architecture, Kruger employs her own distinctive aesthetic while fundamentally questioning the consumer-oriented, uncritical ways of life that characterise many of today’s societies.

The Artist Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) has been known since the 1970s for her large-scale graphic works featuring sharply worded statements or short texts, which she uses to examine and interrogate common social stereotypes from a feminist and consumerism-critical perspective. She addresses how images and ideas are circulated and perceived today.

PUTIN MY PUTAIN

American artist Ryan Mendoza playing cunningly with words and sounds in his wall-to-wall, pro-Ukraine piece "PUTIN MY PUTAIN", on display at Naples' Spazio NEA. 

https://segnonline.it/ryan-mendoza/

Minimal Desktop Wallpapers

MinimalWall is a beautiful new website which features truly minimal desktop wallpapers with Basic Colors, Mindful Words and Minimal Graphics, for your simplified, motivative computer experience. Here are some samples:

Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Chicago

Cloud Gate on the AT&T Plaza in Chicago´s Millennium Park

Cloud Gate is British artist Anish Kapoor's first public outdoor work installed in the United States. The 110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city's famous skyline and the clouds above. A 12-foot-high arch provides a "gate" to the concave chamber beneath the sculpture, inviting visitors to touch its mirror-like surface and see their image reflected back from a variety of perspectives.

Inspired by liquid mercury, the sculpture is among the largest of its kind in the world, measuring 66-feet long by 33-feet high. Cloud Gate sits upon the AT&T Plaza, which was made possible by a gift from AT&T.

What I wanted to do in Millennium Park is make something that would engage the Chicago skyline…so that one will see the clouds kind of floating in, with those very tall buildings reflected in the work. And then, since it is in the form of a gate, the participant, the viewer, will be able to enter into this very deep chamber that does, in a way, the same thing to one's reflection as the exterior of the piece is doing to the reflection of the city around.-Anish Kapoor

Grace Jones: Slave to the Rhythm

It’s both curious and revealing that the false rumour still persists that Grace Jones is actually a transsexual man. A quick online search is enough to discover that Jones is a mother and was born a woman, although others would say she was born a goddess. A capricious nature gave her a personality and a body that broke all the moulds and assumptions of her time. Turning sexual and racial conventions on their head, she became one of the most important icons of the 1980s. Model, actress, singer, a holy trinity of fame. Jones was successful in all three roles, but always in her own very individual way. She was foremost a model, heading to Paris in search of a market where her features would be found even more exotic. There, she shared an apartment with Jessica Lange, and soon fell in with illustrator Antonio López, who helped her to obtain her first covers for Vogue and Elle. Having made a name for herself, she returned to New York, the city she had first made her home, after abandoning her strictly religious Jamaican family and her studies. In Manhattan she rapidly became the epicentre of a new scene - disco music - which turned her into its latest diva. Helped by Andy Warhol, and with Tom Moulton and Richard Bernstein responsible for the music and artwork on her first singles, it didn’t take Jones long for her to become one of the most desired women on the New York gay scene. She was Madonna before Madonna. Her visits and performances in Studio 54 and other nightclubs were notorious, and her intention was anything but to go unnoticed. She would turn up semi-naked, on skates, riding a motorbike and surrounded by men in bathing costumes. Anything that took her fancy. Although the golden age of disco music had an expiry date, she foresaw its climax and recycled herself to become a pop artist, and one with an incredibly captivating aesthetic image. ‘Warm Leatherette’ (1980) and ‘Nightclubbing’ (1981) (the man responsible for her iconic album covers was the artist Jean-Paul Goude, the father of her son Paulo) were clear evidence that she was more than a simple Nubian mannequin, transforming her into one of the essential figures of a post-disco transition. She was never short on personality, either as a model, singer, or in her new guise as actress. Arnold Schwarzenegger even complained about her being too tough in the scenes they shared in the 1984 film Conan the Destroyer. And although it was more than toughness that earned her a Saturn Award and a Grammy nomination, there are a number of anecdotes about her indomitable character: on one occasion she slapped a presenter live on British television for turning his back on her, and on another she was removed from a performance in Disneyland for showing a breast. You can’t help wondering what Disney was expecting from a woman that fought tooth and nail to outshine the domineering personalities of the 1980s, driven by her insatiable hunger for fame and her overpowering personality; an ebony goddess who seemed capable of crushing any man with her vanity, a living sculpture, made of body and of art.

Cappuccino Grand Papier, volume 7

"Untitled"

‘Untitled’ (2018), oil painting on canvas by Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie / Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

 

MADBOOTS DANCE (excerpts)

MASC (2017) from MADBOOTS DANCE on Vimeo.

Anthony Hernandez, photographer

The work of photographer Anthony Hernandez (born 1947) is at once highly personal and deeply resonant. His retrospective at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid spans his more than 45-year career, revealing an unusually varied body of of photographs united by their arresting formal beauty and subtle engagement with contemporary social issues. The Mapfre galleries chart his continual reconceptualization of his approach, tracing his deft movement from black and white to color, 35 mm to large-format cameras, ans from the human figure to landscapes to abstracted detail.

Hernandez began making pictures on the streets of his native Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Essentially self-taught, he had taken dark room classes at East Los Angeles College, but was largely unaware of the history of the medium and its formal traditions. Rather than perpetuating Hollywood's idealized image of the city, he chose instead to photograph the LA inhabited by the working class, the poor and the homeless, developing a unique style of photography attuned to the desolate beauty and sprawling expanses of his hometown. From the start, he has found visual poetry in what could be dismissed as inner city blight and has seen aesthetic potential in the abandoned and discarded. While Hernandez has also photographed in other locations in the US and Europe, Los Angeles has remained his primary subject.

Despite the many shifts in his practice over the years, Hernandez still considers himself a street photographer. Endlessly curious, he relishes the process of discovery and sees his medium as a means of understanding the world around him. He remains true to his conviction that great photography is the result of more than just a keen eye. As Hernandez once noted, "Being aware is more important than the evidence of the awareness on a piece of paper. Being sensitive to what passes in front of you is more important than what passes into the camera." Erin O'Toole, Curator

Anthony Hernandez is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, Bárbara de Braganza 12, 28004 Madrid. 
From January 31 to May 12, 2019.

MADBOOTS DANCE: Dancing to Male Identity

MADBOOTS DANCE is a NYC-based company founded and led by two dancer-choreographers, Jonathan Campbell and Austin Diaz, who are also life partners. Having met in 2010 as both were starting their professional careers as dancers, Campbell and Diaz soon began to collaborate in the choreography of their own duets. In time, they began to create pieces for a small ensemble of male dancers, producing such works as Sad Boys, All Fours, and Masc. Their work frequently addresses gay themes and features male-to-male contact and intimacy. Excerpts of their pieces can be seen in high definition on their website www.madbootsdance.com or on Vimeo.

Austin Diaz and Jonathan Campbell of Madboots. Photo: Nir Arielli

The Gay & Lesbian Review met Diaz and Campbell at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Mass., in 2015 , where they performed Beau and Sad Boys in the Doris Duke Theatre. 

The Gay & Lesbian Review: Let me start with some background questions about where you grew up and how you got into dancing. How long have you’ve been dancing? And how did you come to found Madboots?

Jonathan Campbell: I grew up in Dallas. I started dancing when I was eight or nine. I kind of started out doing tap, because I was fascinated by the tap shoes. But when I got older, I realized I hated tap and started doing jazz. I went to a performing arts high school, and I was introduced to ballet and modern, and I realized that’s what I wanted to do. And then I got accepted to the Juilliard School. I graduated from there in 2010. And then I met Austin.

Austin Diaz: I grew up in New Jersey. I went to a small, local studio, and trained on my own. I started when I was about ten, and trained in jazz, tap, all that. It wasn’t until college that I really got to take modern and more ballet. I went to NYU, and I graduated in 2011. Which is actually when we met. We met at NYU.

JC: I had just finished school and started working for a choreographer in New York named Sidra Bell. She was commissioned by NYU to make a piece on the Second Avenue Dance Company. I was her assistant and Austin was in the piece. She actually hired Austin while he was still in school to join her company, so Austin and I ended up dancing together while he was still in school. We spent a lot of time together because she created a duet for us. It just kind of felt like there was a lot of chemistry artistically and dance-wise between us.

AD: It was at NYU that I rented space, and we were like, let’s fool around for a couple of hours and see if we can make something together, and we did. We made a duet, and that was sort of the birth of Madboots, in that moment. It was something that we wanted to continue doing. It took a little time to say, okay, we’re starting a dance company, but we did it pretty quickly, without understanding, really, what we were getting into and what it meant to have a dance company. So, the momentum picked up faster than we expected. But I’m glad that we did it.

G&LR: So, initially Madboots was just the two of you. At what point did you start to bring in other dancers?

AD: It was just the two of us for about a year, year-and-a-half. We were making duets at little festivals and anywhere we could perform. We’ve done some pretty embarrassing shows. We ended up performing in bars, and we did a show where no one showed up. We’ve had our share of lows when it comes to performing, but of course we’re happy to have had those experiences.

G&LR: Getting to perform at Jacob’s Pillow in 2015—how big a deal was that for you?

AD: It was a huge moment for us. We had been asked to do the Inside Out festival at Jacob’s Pillow in 2012, and that in itself was a really cool moment for us. Then we made the connection with Ella [Baff, the artistic director], and she kept in touch and offered us two residencies. Finally, the performance opportunity came in 2015, at the Doris Duke Theatre.

G&LR: That was Ella’s last year, wasn't it?

AD: It was actually her very last show. We closed the festival along with the Martha Graham Dance Company. Ella did her [farewell] speech and came over and did her last show, her last “Let’s dance!” So that was an epic moment for us.

G&LR: Do you think of Madboots as basically the two of you? Do you bring in dancers as needed, or do you have a company of dancers who stay with you?

JC: Right now we’ve moved towards a project-based model. We hire for each project that we do. The piece we’re working on now is for five dancers, but it’s always kind of shifting. The difficult thing about having an all-male company is that hiring dancers at a certain level and caliber—it’s hard to keep them, especially on a project freelance basis, because these guys can get work very quickly and easily. So, often they get these gigs that are high-paying or touring, and we can’t blame them for taking these opportunities. So it’s fluid; people come in and out; and we’ve gotten used to that. But it’s still somehow a company, even if it’s just the two of us.

From Sad Boys. Christoper Duggan Photography

G&LR: I’ve just been binge-watching the footage on your website. You guys have done some incredible work. I want to address your use of gay themes in your work. A lot of modern dancers or dancers in general are gay, but most companies don’t specifically deal with gay issues of isolation and homophobia, but you guys do so. Can you talk a little about this?

JC: It’s interesting, we started making work not necessarily with the goal of being driven from a gay male perspective or anything like that. We just wanted to make work together. It’s kind of because it’s who we are, so it’s inherent in the work that we’re making. It wasn’t until fairly recently that someone asked us, are you a gay company? We kind of looked at each other and said, “Yeah, we are.” We’re making gay works and we’re a gay company, and we should just embrace it.

AD: In concert dance, there has been some degree of homophobia. We’ve had trouble with a couple of venues presenting our work because of the gay content. The theaters will connect to the physicality, and they really enjoy the dancing, but when it comes to the gay content, they’re not so thrilled by it. It’s tricky, but the work is the work, and people will present it who are interested in showing that kind of intimacy onstage, which a lot of people shy away from.

G&LR: In your multimedia piece called Sad Boys, you flash words like “gay” and “faggot” on the floor during the performance. Would you call this a “political” statement?

JC: And “beast.” And “I feel pretty, witty, and gay.” I think people do read it as “political,” and I guess it kind of is. But these are just comments on our experiences and the things that people go through on a daily basis. These experiences are real, but it’s perceived as political or aggressive in that way.

AD: For us, it’s just our lives.

JC: You get called “faggot” on the street; we don’t step away from those things. We try to push them forward. It does make people uncomfortable, but I think it’s okay to do that. It’s kind of necessary.

AD: We think the visibility is important, to continue to try and bring up these topics and bring them into conversation and just create more dialogue.

G&LR: Another thing I wanted to ask about was your use of spoken narrative as background, such as a passage from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. In Beau, a piece you did at Jacob’s Pillow, the lines are from the “holy” section as read by Ginsberg himself, whose voice is slowed down and deepened for the piece.

AD: We read Howl and other of his works, and it was so impactful; it affected us so deeply. I think there’s something about Ginsberg and his sense of rebellion that we really connected with. His writing has ended up in a few of our creations. I mean, there’s a lot of humanity in it, there’s a lot of vulnerability in it, and a lot of truth and bluntness in it.

G&LR: I also liked your use of a passage by David Wojnarowicz in your piece called All Fours. I guess it’s probably about AIDS and dying, but it’s also a commentary on the madness of modern civilization. What do you think?

AD: With David’s text, it was probably last fall that we found a couple of books about him, and we found these pieces of text that were so heartbreaking. It was when he was dying of AIDS that he was writing. It’s about his isolation, his feeling of voicelessness, of not being heard. He says, “I’m screaming, but it comes out like pieces of clear ice.” It’s full of heartbreaking images of trying to connect or trying to be seen, but you’re not. Which I think was a huge issue during the AIDS crisis: that these people were dying, and it was being swept aside. Even today, it’s still just as impactful and relevant—how many people feel voiceless and helpless.

G&LR: The way that you worked the words and the dance together is very intense. It’s an amazing vision. All Fours also features full nudity if I remember correctly. Was that aspect controversial, and does it present problems in terms of performance?

AD: For sure, for men in dance. It’s a little bit more accepted for women to be fully nude. But for men it does create more problems. We were performing another work—Sad Boys, which we’ve sort of edited since we premiered at the Pillow. Ella was totally fine with the nudity, but it has gone through a bit of an evolution after one presenter had a problem with it. Had it been a woman, the theater would have been okay with it. The fact that it was male genitalia was a problem. We were kind of stunned by that, and it was kind of infuriating. Basically, we just turned the lights very low. We made a compromise, which is sadly what artists sometimes have to do. However, I think nudity is becoming more prevalent in our work. It just is a vulnerable state of being—the exposure. Even going in toAll Fours—it wasn’t like we were thrilled about doing it nude, but we knew it needed to be done that way. Experiencing it alone onstage in real time—it changes you.

G&LR: Let me ask you about your influences, and where you would place your work in the context of modern dance.

JC: We’ve been asked this before, but I don’t know that there’s a good label for it, because it feels like our work is constantly shifting. The movement language, the æsthetic, even the way we set up the stage—we feel like we’ve kind of gotten to a certain place where we are already moving forward to change it.

G&LR: I’m fascinated by the creative process, especially with dance, because it seems to evolve in a more spontaneous way than, say, writing. You talked at the beginning about how you work together, how you start playing around with some ideas, and it seems like the work starts to take on a life of its own. Is that a reasonable description of how it works?

JC: It can. It has been different for each project. Sometimes we come in knowing exactly what we’re trying to do. We know how the piece starts and how it ends, and we’ll fill in the middle. Or we come in with just a title, and the piece kind of grows out of that.

AD: For our next creation, we have a thirty-minute piece of music that we want to use. This is something that we’ve never done before.

JC: We’re starting with the music, without knowing anything else. So, I think the starting point is different with each project. There have been processes where we started with just a phrase, and we come in and start making moves. We don’t know where it will go or what we’re going to do with it, because it kind of snowballs and things start to fall in place.

AD: And we kind of let our lives come in, and there are so many things that will happen just randomly, like a song will come up in a movie, or—

JC: Or even the people, when we’re working with other people and they say or do something, and it kind of triggers something and it gets absorbed into the work. So, speaking of influences, they can be music, texts, poetry, fashion. We look at the fashion blogs on-line and the way things are designed. So, it’s really sort of this big amalgamation of all of these elements.

THE GAY & LESBIAN REVEW, July-August 2017, pages 24-26

Museum of the Moon

Luke Jerram's multidisciplinary arts practice involves the creation of sculptures, installations and live artworks. Living in the UK but working internationally, Jerram creates art projects which excite and inspire people around the world.

Museum of the Moon is a new touring artwork by Luke Jerram that will be presented in a number of arts and cultural festivals over the coming years. The installation is a fusion of lunar imagery, moonlight and surround sound composition.

Measuring seven metres in diameter, the moon features incredibly detailed NASA imagery of the lunar surface. As the artwork travels from place to place, it will gather new musical compositions and collect the local moon mythologies and stories, as well as highlighting the latest moon science.

Humans of New York

Humans of New York (HONY) is a photoblog and a bestselling book featuring street portraits and interviews collected in New York City. Started in November 2010 by photographer Brandon Stanton, over 6,000 portraits have been gathered thus far. Humans of New York has developed a large following through social media, and has over 13.7 million followers on Facebook and over 3.3 million followers on Instagram as of July 2015.

Stanton, who grew up outside of Atlanta and attended the University of Georgia, came to New York after a three-year stint as a bond trader in Chicago. Having started his career as a bond trader in the year 2008, Brandon Stanton decided to pursue his passion of photography professionally after he lost his job in 2010. He started to take candid portraits on streets which became a hit on his Facebook page. Stanton is most known for his photoblog Humans of New York, started in 2010. This is the human behind Humans of New York:

Bansky in Rome: War, Capitalism & Liberty

Rome's Palazzo Cipolla hosts Guerra, Capitalismo & Libertà, the largest exhibition ever dedicated to the elusive British street artist Banksy, whose identity remains unknown.

On loan from private collections around the world, the 150 works on display feature the most celebrated motifs by the artist and political activist from Bristol, including his famous rat series. As the title suggests, the exhibition focuses on themes central to Banksy’s work: war, capitalism and liberty.

Over the years Banksy has gained notoriety and acclaim in equal measure for his stencil graffiti paintings which provide a subversive and satirical commentary on modern-day society. From 24 May-4 September 2016

David Bowie: In Memoriam

David Bowie, legendary rock star, dies of cancer. 

Ibiza Timelapse

By José Antonio Hervás

Luciano Rosso_lip-dubbing

Argentinian artist and dancer Luciano Rosso offers his awesome, lip-dubbing rendition of Freddie Mercury's timeless classic "Somebody to Love". Unmissable!

Undress Me_video