TATE MODERN REMOVES NAKED BROOKE SHIELDS PHOTOGRAPH

A detail from the original photograph of Brooke Shields by Gary Gross, which Richard Prince used in his artwork displayed at the Tate. Photograph: Gary Gross

A display due to go on show to the public at Tate Modern tomorrow has been withdrawn after a warning from Scotland Yard that the naked image of actor Brooke Shields aged 10 and heavily made up could break obscenity laws. The work, by American artist Richard Prince and entitled Spiritual America, was due to be part of the London gallery's new Pop Life exhibition . It has been removed from display after a visit to Tate Modern by officers from the obscene publications unit of the Metropolitan police.
The exhibition had been open to members of the Tate today before opening to the public tomorrow. A Tate spokeswoman confirmed that the display had been "temporarily closed down" and the catalogue for the exhibition withdrawn from sale. The work had been accompanied by a warning, and the Tate had sought legal advice before displaying it.
A Scotland Yard source said the actions of its officers were "common sense" and were taken to pre-empt any breach of the law. The source said the image of Shields was of potential concern because it was of a 10-year-old, and could be viewed as sexually provocative. The work has been shown recently in New York, without attracting major controversy, where it gave the title to the 2007 retrospective of Prince's work at the Guggenheim Museum. Spiritual America is a photograph of a photograph. The original – authorised by Shields's mother for $450 – had been taken by a commercial photographer, Gary Gross, for the Playboy publication Sugar 'n' Spice in 1976. Shields later attempted, unsuccessfully, to suppress the picture. Prince used the image as the source material for his own 1983 piece; he placed it in a gilt frame and displayed it, without labelling or explanation, in a shopfront in a then rundown street in Lower East Side, New York. The title comes from a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz from 1923 of a gelded horse. Prince has described the image as resembling "a body with two different sexes, maybe more, and a head that looks like it's got a different birthday."
In an essay in the exhibition catalogue Jack Bankowsky, co-curator of the exhibition, describes the image as of "a bath-damp and decidedly underage Brooke Shields … When Prince invites us to ogle Brooke Shields in her prepubescent nakedness, his impulse has less to do with his desire to savour the lubricious titillations that it was shot to spark in its original context … than with a profound fascination for the child star's story."

The Guardian

POP LIFE: ART IN A MATERIAL WORLD

Jeff Koons
Bourgeois Bust - Jeff and Ilona 1991
Tate © Jeff Koons

TATE MODERN
LONDON
1 October 2009 – 17 January 2010

Pop Life: Art in a Material World proposes a re-reading of one of the major legacies of Pop Art. The exhibition takes Andy Warhol’s notorious provocation that ‘good business is the best art’ as a starting point in reconsidering the legacy of Pop Art and the influence of the movement’s chief protagonist. Pop Life: Art in a Material World looks ahead to the various ways that artists since the 1980s have engaged with mass media and cultivated artistic personas creating their own signature 'brands'. Among the artists represented are Tracey Emin, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince. The exhibition argues that Warhol’s most radical lesson is reflected in the work of artists of subsequent generations who, rather than simply representing or commenting upon our mass media culture, have infiltrated the publicity machine and the marketplace as a deliberate strategy. Harnessing the power of the celebrity system and expanding their reach beyond the art world and into the wider world of commerce, these artists exploit channels that engage audiences both inside and outside the gallery. The conflation of culture and commerce is typically seen as a betrayal of the values associated with modern art; this exhibition contends that, for many artists working after Warhol, to cross this line is to engage with modern life on its own terms. The show begins with a focused look at Warhol’s late work, examining his related initiatives as a television personality, paparazzo, and publishing impresario. Pop Life: Art in a Material World includes reconstructions of both Keith Haring’s Pop Shop and Jeff Koons's seldom reunited Made in Heaven. Haring opened the Pop Shop in 1986 on New York's Lafayette St. to merchandise his branded artistic signature as editioned objects such as t-shirts, toys and magnets aimed at as wide an audience as possible. Jeff Koons’s Made in Heaven, which debuted at the Venice Bienniale in 1990, immortalized his marital union with the Italian porn star and politician known as La Cicciolina. A specially-commissioned new installation by the celebrated Japanese artist Takashi Murakami debuts in the exhibition's final gallery. A gallery dedicated to the so-called ‘Young British Artists’ focuses on their early performative exploits.
TATE MODERN states: Please be aware that some works in this exhibition are of a challenging and sexual nature. Admission to three of the rooms is restricted to over-18s.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog.

DON'T MISS! THE NY ART BOOK FAIR

Printed Matter, the world’s largest nonprofit organization dedicated to publications made by artists, presents the fourth annual NY Art Book Fair, October 2-4 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, Queens. The NY Art Book Fair will take over all three floors of P.S.1 to present 205 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, museums, galleries, and artists from twenty-one countries, showing the very best in contemporary art publishing. The Fair opens from 6-8pm on Thursday, October 1, and runs from October 2 through 4th at P.S.1. Admission to the Fair is FREE. Richard Prince: Calling All Readers, is the featured exhibition, a special, three-day survey of the influential artist's books and posters from the 1970s onward. Zine-makers, artists, collectives, and young publishers bombard two full galleries with all things DIY—from rare zines to hand-packaged DVDs—in the Friendly Fire and Flaming Creatures sections of the Fair. Peres Projects and Daddy the Magazine present a solo exhibition by Bruce La Bruce in a blacked-out gallery. Dexter Sinister, EAI (Electronic Arts Intermix), Gallery 360º from Tokyo, and the entire student body of Dutch super-school Werkplaats Typografie take over P.S.1's project rooms for the duration of the Fair. On the third floor, the Contemporary Artists' Books Conference features a keynote session by artists Maria Eichhorn, Hans Haacke, and lengendary curator/author Seth Siegelaub in conversation with MoMA curator Christophe Cherix. The Fair previews on the evening of Thursday, October 1, followed by a Benefit at Deitch Studios in Long Island City, with musical guests I.U.D. and Silk Flowers. Tickets include limited artist editions by Elmgreen & Dragset, Jutta Koether, Tom Sachs, and Mungo Thomson. Buy tickets online now at http://www.nyartbookfair.com.

WARHOL WOOL NEWMAN. PAINTING REAL

Christopher Wool, Untitled (P186), 1993
© Christopher Wool

Kunsthaus Graz
Graz, Austria
September 26, 2009- January 10, 2010
Curator: Peter Pakesch

A legend even in his lifetime, Andy Warhol was known as a celebrity and public figure. Often described as a sphinx, he was adept at concealing his real artistic importance behind media packaging. Warhol took a cool look at painting as a medium, querying in the 1960s the existence and function of pictures in a completely new way. Later developments in the world of electronic images fully confirmed the relevance of his approach. A revolutionary leap into a new world of interpreting the meaning of art had already taken place in the 1950s with the work of Barnett Newman. A painter with a social and political agenda, Newman developed a fundamental, abstract formal idiom that completely redefined physical, mental and spiritual space with a new, radical take on aesthetics and the uncompromising implementation of it. Painting Real fathoms the explosive force of the works by Newman and Warhol from the perspective of one America’s most significant contemporary painters: Christopher Wool. For him, today’s art and approach to pictures would be inconceivable without the input of Warhol and Newman in the previous generation. Wool’s Word Paintings constitute a further step in the development of painting as a key medium of our visual reality. For someone like him, art and involvement with pictures has become inconceivable without Warhol. With a radicalism comparable with that of Warhol and Newman, Wool combines immediacy, indifference and commitment – a mix of concepts that is far from common, indeed contradictory, but therewith all the more explosive!

A catalog accompanies the exhibition.

CHRISTIAN HOLSTAD. I CONFESS

Christian Holstad, The Gift, 2009, graphite and gold leaf on newsprint.
© Christian Holstad

CHRISTIAN HOLSTAD. I CONFESS
September 20, 2009-January 10, 2010

Organized and co-produced by the Galleria Civica di Modena and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, curated by Milovan Farronato.

The first solo exhibition in Italy of the eclectic and versatile American artist presents installations, sculptures and unpublished drawings, offering the visitor the possibility of a personal - and at times harsh - journey to investigate the contradictions of contemporary American society. Ironic or desecrating manipulator of styles, Christian Holstad uses a range of expressive media with great nonchalance – sculpture, installation, drawing, collage, assemblage, video and performance – for his visionary incursions into spaces and situations adopted for the revisiting (or rehabilitation ) of the most diverse kinds of imagery. An inward looking itinerary organized along 12 stations the art of Holstad combines authenticity and autobiography.
Christian Holstad was born in Anaheim, California, in 1972; he grew up in Minnesota and graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute. He has lived in New York since ‘94. His works are held in the most important American museum collections, including the MOMA in New York, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Museum of Modern Art of Los Angeles, of North Miami, of Chicago, as well as the Hammer Museum and the County Museum of Art in Los Angeles. He work has been exhibited in important international art events such as the Whitney Biennial (2004), that of Moscow (2007), Lyon (2007) as well as the Triennial of Yokohama (2008). The Kunstverein in Hamburg, the X-Initiative in New York, the Kunsthalle in Zurich, the MOCA in Miami, and the P.S.1 in New York.

ARI MARCOPOULOS: WITHIN ARM'S REACH

Ari Marcopoulos: Cairo, Sonoma, 2006; Xerox print; 53 x 36 in.; courtesy of the artist; Ratio 3, San Francisco; and The Project, New York.

Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arm’s Reach
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
September 23, 2009 - February 7, 2010

Ari Marcopoulos’s photographs convey a remarkable feeling of intimacy. He draws the viewer into relationships with his subjects that could only have been achieved through a powerful experience of empathy and engagement. Self-taught as a photographer, Marcopoulos makes photographs that are often imbued with a subtle formalism, a classical austerity—informed by the artist’s broad knowledge of art history—combined with an intuitive approach and an ability to adapt to the moment. Born in Amsterdam in 1957, Marcopoulos came to New York in 1979 and quickly became part of the downtown art scene. He got a job printing black-and-white photographs for Andy Warhol, and two years later, tired of spending so much time in the darkroom, he found a position as a studio assistant with the photographer Irving Penn. Marcopoulos credits Warhol with teaching him that anything is worth photographing, and Penn for showing him the virtues of control, technical skill, and a simple approach. His own artistic practice began on the streets of New York City, echoing a long tradition of work made in this arena by photographers such as Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand. His approach was unusually engaged: Marcopoulos has an uncanny ability to become part of the community he is photographing. Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arm’s Reach is the photographer’s first mid-career survey in the United States and his first one-person exhibition at a West Coast museum. The exhibition brings together more than a hundred photographs spanning the artist’s career including early New York work portraying street life and the downtown art and music scene; images of skateboarders and professional snowboarders around the world from the 1990s into the twenty-first century; landscapes; and portraits of the artist’s family at home in Northern California.

Stephanie Cannizzo
Curatorial Associate

FACTUALITY #7

"BETWEEN STIMULUS AND RESPONSE, THERE IS A SPACE. IN THAT SPACE IS OUR POWER TO CHOOSE OUR RESPONSE. IN OUR RESPONSE LIES OUR GROWTH AND OUR FREEDOM."
VIKTOR FRANKL