Latest news with #avantgarde
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mary Halvorson: About Ghosts review – restless beauty from jazz's shape-shifting guitarist
However edgy and angular Mary Halvorson's music gets, powerful melodies and inviting harmonies always drift below even the stormiest surface, giving the much-lauded New York composer and guitarist an appeal way beyond the avant garde. About Ghosts features an expanded version of her Amaryllis ensemble, which made one of 2024's standout jazz albums, Cloudward. The lineup retains Adam O'Farrill (trumpet), Jacob Garchik (trombone), Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass) and Tomas Fujiwara (drums), augmented by Blue Note Records' fiery, gospelly alto-sax star Immanuel Wilkins and the rugged, Wayne Shorter-like tenorist Brian Settles. These two players give this release a crucially different feel, lending richer tonalities and expressive range to Halvorson's signature brass fanfares, boppish-to-abstract improv, restlessly interweaving melodies and vigilant drumming. Opener Full of Neon begins the set with a textbook piece of Halvorson ensemble variety: elliptically march-like percussion, squirming improv intro, fluent solos and luxurious ensemble passages with woodpecker-like horn chatter. Carved From starts to canter and chime after a soft, unaccompanied arrival in rich horn chords, and features driving improv from Halvorson and Wilkins, mixing crisply defined guitar figures and skidding elisions with flat-out, whooping alto-sax firestorms. The excitement of Halvorson's music is not cinematic or illustrative, but in the kaleidoscopic fascination of its internal symmetries and conflict. Melody parts play rhythm patterns, then the melodies bend while the rhythms push on. Her harmonies sometimes echo jazz big bands, at others contemporary classical. The initially tender title track becomes a captivating journey of improv and constantly morphing thematic shapes, while Eventidal is a graceful guitar and vibes ballad, and the fast Absinthian and Amaranthine suggest hyper-compressed bebop lines. Recently discussing the quirkily wonderful English singer and songwriter Robert Wyatt in Jazzwise magazine, Halvorson said she loved his ability to blend 'the weird with the beautiful'. She wouldn't dream of it, but she could have been saying much the same of herself. This year sees the 50th anniversary of Keith Jarrett's legendary Köln Concert, and New Vienna (ECM), a 2016 gig from the now 80-year-old's final solo tour, is a familiar but bewitching hour of hurtling free squalls, chugging-hook rockers and tender romances. Young French flautist and composer Naïssam Jalal follows up 2023's acclaimed Healing Rituals with the very different Souffles (Les Couleurs du Son), a set of eight diverse duos with eminent wind-players. Her flute glides animatedly around Louis Sclavis's solemnly evocative bass clarinet, rises in clamorous harmonies with Émile Parisien's soprano sax while she eloquently chants instrumentally and vocally as Archie Shepp plays gruffly bluesy tenor sax. And on Amoeba's Dance (Trouble in the East), prize-winning Berlin saxophonist and composer Silke Eberhard's enlarged Potsa Lotsa group makes vividly creative use of their leader's intricately structured but constantly provocative pieces.
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dogme 25 announced at Cannes, as directors launch ‘cultural uprising'
A group of Danish and Swedish film-makers have relaunched the notorious avant garde Dogme 95 movement with a manifesto updated for the internet age, vowing to make five films between them in a year, from handwritten scripts and without using the internet or any emails in the creative process. 'In a world where film is based on algorithms and artificial visual expressions are gaining traction, it's our mission to stand up for the flawed, distinct and human imprint,' said the five film-makers in a statement read at the Cannes film festival on Saturday. Described in its manifesto as 'a rescue mission and a cultural uprising', Dogma 25 was founded in Copenhagen by 47-year-old Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy, whose 2019 erotic drama Queen of Hearts was that year's Danish submission to the Oscars, and who has directed two episodes of British TV drama The Crown. 'After Covid, all prices have gone up and we get less film for the same amount of money,' El-Toukhy said. 'That's a huge problem for the arthouse film, because the risk-taking is gone. All mainstream stands on the shoulders of arthouse, and if the arthouse dies completely, there will be no originality left in the mainstream.' El-Toukhy is joined in Dogme 25 by film-makers Milad Alami, Annika Berg and Isabella Eklöf, and visual artist Jesper Just, 50, though the movement is open to allowing further members. Their manifesto has been endorsed by the two best-known directors to emerge from the original Dogme movement, Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier, and established in collaboration with Zentropa, the film production company set up by Von Trier. The low-budget ethos of Dogme 95 films such as Vinterberg's Festen and Von Trier's The Idiots went on to have a profound influence on contemporary cinema in Europe and beyond. Some 212 Danish and international films have been granted a Dogme certificate since its manifesto was launched in Paris in March 1995 – though many films associated with the movement, such as Von Trier's Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, didn't qualify because they failed to meet its strict 'vows of chastity'. Dogma 25 only retains one of the original manifesto's self-imposed rules: that any film that is part of the movement must be 'shot where the narrative takes place'. The new movement's 10 rules commit its followers to working from a script that 'must be original and handwritten by the director', to only accept funding 'with no content-altering conditions attached', and to have 'no more than 10 people behind the camera'. At least half of any Dogma 25 film must be without dialogue, 'because we believe in visual storytelling and faith in the audience'. The use of makeup or any manipulation of faces and bodies is not allowed, and props used on set must be either 'rented, borrowed, found or used'. Most challenging of all, Dogma 25 films must be made 'in no more than a year', and the use of the internet 'is off limits in all creative processes'. At the launch event in Cannes, Just clarified that this rule meant they would only be allowed to use email for administrative purposes during the one-year film-making phase. 'We've become so dependent on the internet that you think, 'Wow, all my inspiration I draw from the internet,'' said Berg. 'The point is to liberate ourselves from it because we are very vulnerable when we constantly are attached to big firms that can target us with algorithms.' Swedish filmmaker Eklöf, whose film Holiday won best Danish film at the country's annual Bodil awards in 2018, said she had already decided on the plot of her first Dogma 25 feature. 'I was in a sadomasochistic relationship and I've never seen a film about that from a sort of naturalistic point of view,' she said. 'I would really like to make a romantic, down to earth film about that.'
The National
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Abu Dhabi presents thought-provoking showcase of contemporary South Korean art
The mid-20th century was a time of seismic change in Korea. After its liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, the peninsula was divided into North and South, setting the stage for the Korean War, a devastating conflict that took place between 1950 and 1953, ending not in peace, but ceasefire. South Korea came out in shambles, soon entering a period of military dictatorship, industrialisation and strict censorship. It was in this politically charged, socially repressive environment that a generation of avant-garde artists emerged. Their work rejected traditional aesthetics and state-sanctioned art, embracing experimentation, performance and provocation. The exhibition at Manarat Al Saadiyat, titled Layered Medium: We are in Open Circuits, kicks off from this period, showcasing the beginnings of the avant-garde contemporary art movement in South Korea and charts its development to the present. It is the first major showcase of Korean contemporary art in the Gulf region and comes as the inaugural project of a three-year collaboration between the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation (Admaf) and the Seoul Museum of Art (Sema). It has been co-curated by Maya El Khalil and Kyung-hwan Yeo. 'We thought about how we could genuinely work together, rather than simply transfer,' El Khalil says. 'This is not an exhibition that is travelling. That's not the idea at all. It was inspired by an exhibition that Kyung-hwan curated at Sema, but we worked together to completely reconfigure the exhibition [for the local context].' Layered Medium brings together works by more than two dozen South Korean artists, from pioneers including Nam June Paik and Park Hyunki to renowned contemporary figures such as Lee Bul, Haegue Yang and Moka Lee. While the exhibition doesn't claim to be a comprehensive survey of contemporary South Korean art, it still presents a healthy breadth of works that show the diversity of practices that have shaped the country's avant-garde scene. 'We wanted to capture the flow and the main core of Korean contemporary art for the audience in Abu Dhabi,' Kyung-hwan says. Aware that Layered Medium is, for many in the UAE capital, a first encounter with the country's contemporary art scene, the curators set the stage with a historical overview spanning from the mid-20th century to today. This introduction underscores a central premise: contemporary South Korean art has developed in tandem with both political transformation and technological innovation. Paik's Self-Portrait Dharma Wheel opens Layered Medium and stands out as a major work from the artist's later career. It features five CRT screens arranged on wheels within a sculptural installation. The dizzying set of images that touch upon Buddhist motifs reflects on themes of spirituality and transformation. The 1998 work was created after Paik suffered a stroke, and has an added undertone. It was important to begin with Paik's work, Kyung-hwan says, because of the artist's towering legacy on the avant-garde contemporary art scene. His influence was not limited to the borders of South Korea, as Paik is widely considered to be a forerunner of the video art movement as a whole. On the other side of the exhibition wall is a work by another pioneering video artist. Park's 1979 Video Inclining Water is a key example of how he reflected on technology with natural elements and physical interventions. The work was performed initially at the 15th Bienal de Sao Paulo before being exhibited in South Korea as a series of colour photographs, which are being displayed in Layered Medium. The performance features Park tilting a CRT television, giving the impression that the water on the screen was shifting. Along with Kim Kulim's seminal 1969 work Space Structure 69 – which features vinyl tubes filled with water and oil and lit by coloured fluorescent lights – as well as Paik's 1996 work Moon is the Oldest TV, which presents magnets within a set CRT televisions to create lunar phases, the exhibition showcases early examples of how South Korean artists explored how technology tested the nature of human perception. The assembly of opening works also makes clear from the beginning that the curators were not interested in simply presenting the 48 works in the exhibition chronologically. Rather, they coaxed out thematic threads between, elegantly segmenting the exhibition across three layers: body as a medium, society as a medium and space as a medium. 'The medium has two main meanings here,' El Khalil says. 'It's how we experience and relate to the world. Artists also tackle fundamental questions of media with the works, showing how media does not only refer to its technical meaning, but also thematic lenses through which to look at society, policies and history.' While the opening segment considers perception as one aspect of the body, other artists examine a broader range of physical and bodily experiences. A 2007 acrylic work from Lee Kun-Young's The Method of Drawing explores traces of bodily movements. Hyejoo Jun draws comparisons between our studies of nature and our pursuit of survival in The Birth of a New Flower (2023-2024). Hong Seung-Hye reflects on death and mourning through digital avatars in Ghost (2016), whereas Min Oh highlights the human voice as a musical instrument that can prompt transformation in Etude for Etude (2018). Another highlight is a 2006 work by Lee Bul. Untitled (Crystal Figure) presents an outline of a woman's head and body manifested by transparent beads. An overhead light casts mesmerising, glittering patterns on the floor below. The work takes cues from the illustrations of 16th-century Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius and is less interested in a clinical rendering of the female form than a spiritual and even spectral one, drawing a statement to the systemic overlooking of women's contribution and influence in history. Society as a medium is the second layer that the exhibition examines. The section opens vividly with a pair of cotton-embroidered works by Young in Hong. Still Life Parade (2015) is based on a children's parade from 1970. Her use of embroidery as opposed to a photographic medium is an attempt, as the exhibition explains, 'to fossilise history' and prompt new ways of thinking about memory and material beyond direct experience. Under the Sky of Happiness (2013), meanwhile, takes inspiration from the 1974 film Under the Sky of Sakhalin, examining its premise about Korean labourers strander after Second World War from a feminist point of view, replacing the male protagonists with pioneering Korean women such as the poet, journalist and painter Na Hye-sok. Three video pieces by Sojung Jun, meanwhile, reflect on Korea's divided present while also presenting music as a mode of dialogue and reconciliation. Hayoun Kwon, on the other hand, presents 1920s colonial-era Seoul through VR. Finally, the exhibition presents the concept of space as a medium in itself. Three works bare the section's theme. Minouk Lim's video performance S. O. S-Adoptive Dissensus (2009), featuring staged scenes across Seoul's urban landscape, juxtaposed with Haegue Yang's Yes-I-Know-Screen (2007), a set of ten traditional South Korean doors fashioned as folding screens, and two works from Ram Han's vibrant digital painting series Room (2018) that shows hotel spaces in a bold and dreamlike palette of colours. The trio of works smartly underscores demarcations between the public and the private spheres, and how built environments are shaped by social relations as well as economic and political factors. This section also has the most innovative application of technology within art. In Forest of Subtle Truth 2 (2018), Byungjun Kwon employs a Local Position System (LPS) that plays recordings through headphones depending on where the viewer is within a space. The sounds are of various songs sung by Yemeni refugees, who escaped the war to seek shelter in South Korea. Kwon also presents another technologically interesting work at the tail end of the exhibition. Dancing Ladders features foldable ladders – symbols of ascent – that have been affixed to robotic technology and tracks. However, by using 3D printing technology to make the works, as well as open-source software, to make a statement about the democratisation and accessibility of art and technology. Overall, Layered Medium offers a thought-provoking entry point into the avant-garde landscape of contemporary art from South Korea. It exhibits a breadth of approach and subject, as well as a ceaseless desire for innovation and material reflection. The exhibition also implicitly underscores a thoughtful way of curating cross-cultural exhibitions – to show how research and mindfulness is essential in making the most of these exchanges. 'I wanted to show our collection, this avant-garde contemporaneity but in a global context,' Kyung-hwan, who is a curator at Sema, says. 'We struggled with the notion that, how can we escape typical notions of cultural exchange. We had to approach it differently with research trips, artist residencies and collection researches. This is, after all, a three-year-long project, a long-term institutional collaboration.' Layered Medium: We are in Open Circuits runs until June 30 at Manarat Al Saadiyat
The Guardian
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I invited a dozen ex-boyfriends to dinner and taped it': the amazing avant-garde recordings of Linda Rosenkrantz
There is a series by Peter Hujar in which the photographer shot groups of friends, collaborators, lovers and other members of the New York avant garde, from the 1960s to 80s. In one image – including the artists Paul Thek and Eva Hesse – the writer Linda Rosenkrantz stands near the centre. 'That was mostly people that I had gotten together, some who became very well-known,' Rosenkrantz tells me by phone from California. 'Five or six of us would go ice-skating or dancing on Friday nights.' Rosenkrantz grew up in the Bronx in the 1930s. After university she moved to Manhattan to work in the publicity and editorial department of the Parke-Bernet auction house, becoming enmeshed in the city's art scene. 'I met Hujar in 1956. We hit it off immediately,' she says. Hujar and Rosenkrantz remained close until his death from Aids-related complications in 1987. In the 70s, when Rosenkrantz was an established writer, she asked various artists to note everything that happened to them on a specific day, and then read it out for her to record. The first two were Hujar and the painter Chuck Close . The latter's day – 18 December 1974 – featured a job photographing Allen Ginsberg for the New York Times. The project eventually ran out of steam and Rosenkrantz didn't give it much thought until decades later, when Hujar's archive went to the Morgan Library in New York and she donated the material. Eventually the publisher Magic Hour Press discovered it and in 2021 released their discussion as the book, Peter Hujar's Day. Now it's been adapted into a film by Passages director Ira Sachs, with Ben Whishaw as Hujar and Rebecca Hall playing Rosenkrantz. 'When Ira Sachs signed up for the film, he got in touch and I instinctively felt that he was the right person to do it, because I had liked his other films,' says Rosenkrantz. 'It's been a great experience for me, and it was so serendipitous.' The film, which premiered to good reviews at Sundance, is due for release later this year. It plays into a recent surge of interest in Hujar, with an acclaimed show at Raven Row in London, after an exhibition at the Venice Biennale last year. While Hujar has been celebrated in the decades since his death, Rosenkrantz remains lesser known. Aged 90, she is living in Santa Monica in California. Her husband of 50 years, the Guernsey-born writer and artist Christopher Finch, died three years ago. When I contact Rosenkrantz about an interview, she cautions that she's not very articulate, which is ironic given how heavily speech features in her work. She is best known for the cult book Talk from 1968, a dialogue-only 'reality' novel, in which she spent months taping her conversations with friends. She then transcribed hours of tape into 1,500 pages of text, eventually whittling it to a story of three friends in their late 20s, spending a summer by a Long Island beach. It was a raw, funny book presenting people from the Warholian art crowd talking about sex, drugs, psychoanalysis and much else. (Sample chapter title: Emily, Marsha and Vincent Discuss Orgies). The book captured the modern moment in a novel way. 'That kind of thing was in the zeitgeist. Artists were painting from photographs,' she says. 'It just struck me as I was getting ready to go to East Hampton that I should take a tape recorder and I always had it in mind as a book.' It caused a minor stir. New York magazine ran two reviews, alongside a photo of Rosenkrantz on the beach in a bikini, tape recorder by her side. Not all responses were kind. 'It was mocked for all the talk of sex, drugs and therapy. There was a minister or some church person in Britain who thought it should be banned,' she recalls. It had its admirers too; Harold Pinter sent a note of praise, George Romero's production company wanted the film rights and Leonard Cohen was a fan. 'He said that he had read it out loud walking on the beach,' she says, 'and that he had tried to do something similar and decided that it couldn't be done and that I had done it.' Through the 60s and 70s, she was an art world insider, encountering the likes of Susan Sontag and David Hockney, going to Andy Warhol's parties at the Factory. While working at Parke-Bernet, then acquired by Sotheby's, she set up and edited their art magazine. She met her husband while running the magazine. He was a friend of Chuck Close and later she was the subject of one of the painter's large-scale portraits, not that sitting for him was particularly dramatic: 'He took a polaroid. It was very quick and not a lot of talking or direction.' After Talk was published, she tried more tape experiments, including the day-in-a-life recordings, while another idea, Ex, had gallows humour: 'I invited, one by one, about a dozen ex-boyfriends to dinner and taped the whole evening, and they're pretty funny.' Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Rosenkrantz and Finch were inseparable. They co-wrote a novel called Soho, a multi-generational saga set in the Manhattan neighbourhood, and Gone Hollywood, a social history of cinema's golden age. 'We worked very well together,' she says, though Soho – written under the pseudonym CL Byrd – 'did not make an impact.' In 1990, the couple and their daughter Chloe left New York for LA, shortly after Rosenkrantz started a new track. A friend, Pamela Redmond Satran was an editor at Glamor magazine: 'I pitched the idea of doing an article about baby names. And she said, 'You know, I think this could be a book'.' Before this, there were just books with lists of names; Rosenkrantz and Satran added more analysis with social context and trends. 'The first one, which was called Beyond Jennifer and Jason, sold very, very well,' she says. This was followed by nine more books. They set up a website, to collect everything. 'It influenced the culture in a major way.' Whether anticipating the babynaming industry, or developing new approaches to storytelling, Rosenkrantz always had a knack for the new. 'My father used to say that I was ahead of my time when I was quite young,' she says. She has also 'always been attracted to unusual forms', which led her to publish a memoir in the style of a listicle, before they were BuzzFed to death. My Life As a List: 207 Things About My (Bronx) Childhood was published in 1999. But by the 00s, her most significant work – Talk - was no longer in wide circulation. One reason for its muddled reception was that her publishers presented it as a straightforward novel, rather than a recorded rendering of reality. But in 2015, when New York Review Books revived Talk in their Classics strand, she says, 'It was a complete reversal. It got great reviews and was seen for what it was. I kind of insisted that it had to be what it was meant to be, which was a taped book. I felt very redeemed.' The book was praised as a blast of 60s counterculture and for its prescient view of neurotic city dwellers. Critic Becca Rothfield wrote that it 'reminds us that wry self-awareness and anxious fragility are hardly a millennial invention'. It was seen as presaging the autofiction boom of the 2010s and likened to the TV shows Girls and Broad City. Then in 2018, Lena Dunham's website Lenny Letter revived parts of the Ex project: publishing transcripts of Rosenkrantz's boyfriend dinners, rendered in comic strip form. Today Rosenkrantz wants to do more with Ex, and revisit diaries she kept years ago. When Peter Hujar's Day was published, she was said to be working on a book called Namedrops Keep Falling on My Head, about the people she's met through the years. She says now that it's not enough for a book but perhaps it will appear in another form. It takes in everyone from Janet Malcolm, David Hockney and Fred Astaire, to the beat poet Gregory Corso with whom she had a relationship. Meanwhile, she hopes the new film prompts interest in a screen version of Talk. 'It has real scenes as opposed to the Peter Hujar [book].' How does she feel about Rebecca Hall's representation of her in Peter Hujar's Day? 'I'm very happy with it,' she says. 'Most of it is Peter talking, but she doesn't get to say very much, or I didn't say very much. But she sort of captured the way I would have responded.' This hints at a self-effacing matter-of-factness to Rosencrantz. She doesn't give off a sense of thwarted ambition or great regrets – just a life lived well. In the original Peter Hujar transcript, there's a moment where Rosenkrantz explains her motive for the project: 'To find out how people fill up their days, because I myself feel like I don't do anything much all day.' The fact that at 90 she's still developing work seems to prove otherwise.
Vogue
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Alfredo Martínez Mexico Fall 2025 Collection
Alfredo Martínez continues to draw from the allure of powerful, sensual women for his collections. Last season's inspiration was Carmen Mondragón—also known as Nahui Olin, the painter and poet synonymous with Mexican avant-garde femininity. This season he turned to another icon, the actress and singer Sasha Montenegro, a Mexican screen siren of Italian descent known for her glamorous mystique. The opening look set a dramatic tone; the sleek black dress paired and voluminous faux fur coat evoked a collective 'wow' from the audience. It was a clear signal that Martínez continues to deliver for women who want to command attention. 'It's synthetic fur,' he clarified backstage, nodding to the Mob Wife aesthetic trend. The designer's staples—tailored suits, black dresses, and power silhouettes—were elevated through strategic details: oversized gold buttons, plush stoles that emphasized the shoulders, and controlled draping that sculpted the body. The silhouette was classic Martínez: sharp shoulders, cinched waists, and curve-skimming skirts. Decades later, it still works—and he knows it. There's a kind of clothing that functions as armor, and this was it. While sensuality remained front and center—at times overtly so—there was also a sense of mystery, a deliberate withholding. That effect was amplified by the oversized sunglasses that completed nearly every look, Martínez's new venture into accessories. While past seasons leaned heavily into bold colors and metallics, this collection pivoted toward a more grounded palette. Earth tones were the focus, offset by crisp black and white, a timeless combination. Martinez's strength lies in tailoring, and the collection's strongest moments were precisely those where structure met seduction. Perfectly balanced proportions ensured that suiting felt both commanding and undeniably feminine.
