The Andy Warhol Museum has recruited a group of five musicians, including Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, Eleanor Friedberger, Television’s Tom Verlaine, Suicide’s Martin Rev and Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500, to score a selection of never-before seen Warhol films.  The performances will launch on Oct. 24 at the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, before opening in New York at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House from Nov. 6-8. (more…)

Bill Viola, Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall) (2005) all images courtesy Grand Palais

On view at the Grand Palais in Paris is a group of works by celebrated American video artist Bill Viola, ranging in date from 1977 to the present day, making it  the largest retrospective the artist has ever shown during his long and productive career.

(more…)

Takashi Murakami’s debut film Jellyfish Eyes is set to premiere in the United States next week, bringing some of the artist’s signature characters to the silver screen.  The film, which centers around a series of magical creatures that only children can see, will show in select cities May 1st through the 5th. (more…)

Carter, Beside Myself (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Lisa Cooley’s Lower East Side exhibition space is a body of new work by Carter, including paintings, drawings, photography, sculpture and film from the artist’s wide-ranging and impressive output.  Continuing his exploration of varying identities and their interconnected relationships to the art object, the show continues Carter’s ongoing interest with presence throughout.

Carter, Fully Present (2013-2014), via Lisa Cooley (more…)

Actor Antonio Banderas has been chosen to portray Pablo Picasso in an upcoming film by Carlos Saura.  Banderas will act alongside Gwyneth Paltrow, who will play the artist’s longtime muse, Dora Maar.  “I turned down the chance at one point of playing Mr. Pablo, but the time has come in my life where I understand him better,” says Banderas. “I am nearly at the age he was when those events happened, in 1937, when he was 55 or 56, and I’m getting close.” (more…)

A new documentary on Ai Weiwei, The Fake Case, is preparing for release, profiling the artist’s release from his 81-day detention under the Chinese state, the artist’s response after his imprisonment, and his preparation for S.A.C.R.E.D., a series of works that documented his time while he was held without bail for tax evasion, a charge one person in his film notes doesn’t even exist in China.  “Nobody in China would believe it, because nobody pays taxes in China anyways, so there’s no such thing,” they say. (more…)

Matthew Barney is in the Spring issue of BOMB Magazine, speaking with Director Gaspar Noé about the pair’s shared love of Kubrick, comparisons between past work and their latest projects, and their interests in realism versus spontaneity.   “The aspect of filmmaking that I’m most interested in has to do with creating a live condition,” Barney says, “where something is actually happening in real time, and then filming in response to that… It’s not a very economical way of making a film—to set those situations up and shoot them in real time and then edit it all down.” (more…)

Giacomo Balla, Mercury Passing Before the Sun (1914), via Art Observed

From the opening lines of the The Futurist Manifesto, on view near the ground floor of the Guggenheim’s current historical survey of the early 20th century Italian avant-garde, one can detect a certain mechanistic determinism, a powerful, single-minded focus on the power of industry, science and machines.  F.T. Marinetti’s famous lines summon the roar of the engine, and the hum of electricity in equal measure, damning an Italy obsessed with its own past, and embracing a new future as a world power.

Umberto Boccioni, Elasticity (Elasticità), (1912), Courtesy Guggenheim Museum (more…)

Matthew Barney, River of Fundament (still) (2014), Courtesy BAM credit: Hugo Glendinning

Matthew Barney’s newest film, River of Fundament, is a spectacle, to say the least.  Clocking in at just under 6-hours, the film is in turns a surreal voyage through the Egyptian afterlife, the American automotive industry, and the respective encounters of Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler’s with their various subjects, all turned inwards on the film’s own internal logic and unleashed in jarring blasts of viscera, atonal operatics and monumental, ritualistic performance happenings taking part in Detroit, Los Angeles and New York.

Matthew Barney, River of Fundament (still) (2014), Courtesy BAM credit: Hugo Glendinning (more…)

Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue (2013), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue seeks an experience akin to the slow trawls of internet message boards, Wikipedia pages, and Google searches that mark the contemporary search for information, a compartmentalized seeking after discrete bits of data.  Running from image to image, many culled from the archives of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Henrot’s project offers a condensed experience of information overload, cramming the story of the earth’s creation into 13 minutes.

Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue (2013), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed (more…)

Artist Mickalene Thomas premiered a film eulogizing her late mother on HBO last night, titled Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman.  Capitalizing on the film’s release, Thomas has also published an essay and a number of new paintings and photographs of her mother on Creative Time Reports. “As an artist I have always been astonished not only by my mother’s strength and tenacity but also by her sustained elegance and charisma in spite of harsh obstacles,” she writes. (more…)

Alex Katz / Dara Friedman (Installation View), all images courtesy Gavin Brown’s enterprise

On view at Gavin Brown’s enterprise from January 11th through February 22nd is an exhibition of cutout works from American Pop artist Alex Katz, paired with a new Super 8 and High Definition film by Dara Friedman entitled PLAY, (Part 1&2).

(more…)

The New York Times Magazine publishes an interview with Matthew Barney, leading up to the premiere of the artist’s River of Fundament at BAM this week, discussing the artist’s inspiration, and his time with writer Norman Mailer, on whose death much of the film is based.  “When Mailer said to me that I should really read “Ancient Evenings,” I thought, Wow, this is so much like the beginning of “Cremaster 3.” I’ve already done this.” (more…)

Stan Douglas, Luanda-Kinshasa (Installation view), all images courtesy David Zwirmer

Currently on view at David Zwirmer’s 533 West 19th Street location is the debut of a new film by Stan Douglas entitled Luanda-Kinhshasa, featuring a reconstruction of the famed Columbia 30th Street studio, where some of the most iconic recordings of the twentieth century were originally produced. The film will be on view at the gallery through February 22, 2014.

(more…)

With artist Doug Aitken’s The Source series of creative dialogues has opened at Sundance Film Festival, he sat down with New York Times Magazine to discuss the work, his recent Station to Station project, and his ideas of creative immediacy.  “I see it as trying to reduce and reduce and reduce,” he says. “Bringing things back to a candid and immediate conversation between two people. Having something that has very little filtration, that is not reprocessed by a critic and is not repurposed through the filter of cultural history.” (more…)

Matthew Barney’s latest filmic project, the nearly 6-hour long epic River of Fundament is set to premiere next month at Brooklyn Academy of Music.  Created in collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler,  the work takes its inspiration from Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, paralleling Mailer’s tale of Egyptian mythology with the rise and fall of the American auto industry.   (more…)

Filmmaker and Video Artist Steve McQueen is profiled in The Guardian this week, talking about his inspirations, his childhood dyslexia, and his personal reflections on the history of slavery.  “All I remember feeling was a real sense of shame and embarrassment about it,” he says. “We can deal with the second world war and the Holocaust and so forth and what not, but this side of history, maybe because it was so hideous, people just do not want to see. People do not want to engage.” (more…)

The New York Times profiles the upcoming release of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, and the recent panel discussion the filmmaker and artist gave with writer Nelson George and fellow artist Kara Walker, discussing the influences for the film, and its place as a historical perspective on slavery.  “There’s a uniquely American exuberance for violence or an exuberance for getting ahead in the world and making a name for themselves. I’m talking about the sort of plantation class that fought for the entrenchment of the slave system,” Walker notes.  “That’s not something that can be overlooked when you think about the mythology of what it means to be an American, that one can become a self-made man if one is white and male and able.” (more…)

Tacita Dean, c/o Jolyon, 2012-2013 (detail), courtesy Frith Street Gallery

The current exhibition on view at Frith Street Gallery in London features Tacita Dean’s 2012-2013 projects, JG  (a 26.5 minute film shot on 35mm anamorphic film) and c/o Jolyon, a series of 100 original postcards of pre-war Kassel in Germany, overpainted with contemporary scenes from the same place.

(more…)

The New York Times profiles artist Omer Fast during the final stages of the artist’s newest video project, set to premiere in two weeks at Frieze Art Fair in London.  Examining the impact of pornography on the psyche, Fast’s work will be included in the Arratia, Beer booth.  “I can show it as nasty as it gets, or I can pull back,” Fast says. “It would be totally hypocritical to clean it up.” (more…)

Chris Burden, Shoot, (1971), Performance at F Space, Santa Ana, California November 19, 1971

The New Museum’s Extreme Measures, a career retrospective of the work of Chris Burden, begins modestly: an orange flatbed truck sits in the museum’s ground floor exhibition space, holding a 1 ton block of steel on its mounted crane.  Silent and imposing , the work hints at Burden’s preoccupation with scale and weight, his focus on material scale and industrial affect.

Chris Burden, Ghost Ship (2005), Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery (more…)

American actor Willem Dafoe has been named to the role of Andy Warhol in the French film Saint Laurent, a biopic about the famous French designer.  The film is already in production for a May 14^th, 2014 release. (more…)

John Baldessari, Man Fixing Curlers in Woman’s Hair (2013), all images by Sophie Kitching for Art Observed unless otherwise noted

On view at Sprüth Magers Berlin is a solo exhibition of new works by L.A.-based John Baldessari: large-format storyboard canvases he created in 2013.

The opening for John Baldessari’s Storyboard (in 4 Parts)
(more…)

Filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen has taken top awards at the Toronto International Film Festival for his newest work, 12 Years a Slave.  Announced this week as the People’s Choice Award-winner, his film documents the life of Solomon Northrup, a black American kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841. (more…)