AMOS GITAI - RACES - FEBRUARY 5th - APRIL 10th 2011 - PALAIS DE TOKYO - 2011

Avec une oeuvre inaugurée voici près de trente ans, Amos Gitai est salué dans le monde entier comme l’un des grands cinéastes de notre temps.
Traversés par la question de l’identité et de l’exil, de la mémoire et de l’Histoire, ses films engagent une réflexion sur le passé et le présent, sur la nécessité de la transmission et sur le rôle de l’art. Aujourd’hui, le cinéaste poursuit ce questionnement en proposant, pour le Palais de Tokyo, une vaste installation conçue comme une expérience émotionnelle et intime au sein d’une histoire collective. Investissant le sous-sol, il crée une promenade visuelle et sonore d’une densité exceptionnelle dans des images extraites de ses films.
















http://www.palaisdetokyo.com

PHILIPPE COGNEE - VERSAILLES - DILECTA - 2011

Philippe Cognée a été choisi en 2009 pour réaliser une oeuvre, Écho, pour les locaux rénovés du Grand Commun du château de Versailles : une quarantaine de tableaux circulaires - des ”tondo” - comme des constellations d’images captées par le coup d’oeil du peintre dans l’univers si chargé (d’histoire, d’oeuvres, d’imaginaire...) de Versailles. Ces tableaux aux formats très variés, conçus à partir d’un travail vidéo dont le livre présente plusieurs ”captures”, font office de ”fenêtres”, de ”longue-vue” écrit Alain Bonfand, par où saisir une réalité mouvante, vive, à la fois légère et tragique.
Cet ouvrage d’un grand format s’ouvre sur un entretien de Philippe Cognée avec Marie-Laure Bernadac, et contient un essai d’Alain Bonfand, historien d’art, docteur en philosophie et professeur aux Beaux-Arts de Paris.

















Sofia Coppola - Marie-Antoinette 2005

R.I.P ELIZABETH TAYLOR - 1932 . 2011 - LOS ANGELES

Elizabeth Taylor was a stunning beauty whose name was synonymous with Hollywood glamour. Ms. Taylor died on March 23, 2011, in Los Angeles of congestive heart failure. She was 79.

it seems hard to believe that she isn't on the earth anymore - hers was such as strong presence. what a life and body of work she leaves behind. she starred in some of my all time favorite films: butterfield 8, suddenly last summer, a place in the sun, who's afraid of virginia woolf, reflections in a golden eye.....as well as the all time classics: giant, cleopatra, cat on a hot tin roof. what a loss. i think she was so well loved because she loved so well - she was so far ahead of her time in terms of human rights.

Interview with Simon Procter for "Invisible Paris"

Tuesday, 22 March 2011

Simon Procter: a spy in the house of fashion

Paris-based Simon Procter is one of the world’s most renowned fashion photographers, but his glamourous lifestyle today is a long way from his working-class roots in a small industrial village in the North of England. I talked to him about his unusual journey, and about how he is trying to transcend the fashion genre to create truly great works of art.

“A long time ago I wrote a poem called Lockwing, which was about the swift. It's a bird that can lock its wing and sleep while still flying, and I wondered what it would mean to be a creature that had no nationality and no need for contact with the earth”. Dividing his time between New York and Paris, as well as on location shoots across the globe, Simon Procter is seemingly in the perfect position to answer this question.

As yet though, it is an enigma that he has not solved. The name Lockwing has also been given to his studio space in Paris, as well as to a mysterious ongoing project. "We are not sure what the Lockwing Project is yet" announces the website he has set up in this name, and when I ask him directly he is no more forthcoming; “I’m afraid you will have to wait and see where that one goes” he explains, “it’s a bit confidential at the moment”.

Will it be his life-defining project? Procter's artistic progression has been a curious mixture of intense self-belief with splashes of serendipity, but when speaking to him it is clear that he is constantly questioning his work and attempting to move back the boundaries of his discipline(s).
His creations - often based around monumental and dramatic compositions - have been described as “a unique synthesis of classical painting and fashion photography”, but this is a label he refutes. He is happy to keep the ‘unique’ tag, pointing out that he is always “trying to do something that no one else is doing”, but seems annoyed to have his work thought of as some kind of fusion. “My work is not a pastiche or a reference to the great classical art works. I am truly trying to produce things of that level” he explains.
His ambitions, and the creations that have stemmed from this, have also provoked a minor storm in the worlds of art and fashion. In 2008, British newspaper The Independent discussed Procter’s monumental ‘Galliano Royal’ creation for Harper’s Bazaar and its later starring role at the prestigious Art Basel Miami art fair, and asked ‘it may be fashion, but is it art?’ Describing his work as ultra-flamboyant theatricality the article also asked ‘does a Galliano shoot really belong in a gallery?’

For Procter, though, the more relevant question was the one posed at the end of the article; "it may be art, but is it photography?". As Procter has himself admitted, "most of the time I don't consider myself to be a photographer". He is working on projects that involve both painting and photography, and is a thoroughly modern artist, tacking along the digital line that today blurs traditionally distinct artistic boundaries.
The reason behind his approach may come from his background. Procter is classically trained. He studied fine arts, and for many years concentrated purely on painting and sculpture, considering photography to be a discipline for the rich. His drift towards photography was part accident and part design, but he believes that his wider training has given him a certain edge. “There was a whole genre of painting that was not really relevant to me when I studied Fine Art. But once I started taking photos something - a whole tombe of composition and pictorial structure that I was trained to understand and analyse - clicked. This was a massive advantage” he explains.

His vision may have developed early, but just how did he land in Paris and the fashion world? Following his art school studies, Procter explains that he did many things, and lived most of his adult life without very much money, which although "a bit exhausting and scary at times" was also a way of life that he "always believed to be for the sake of something".
After drifting to Paris, his break came following a chance meeting with “a wonderful guy called James Kaliardos (one of the founders of V magazine) who really supported me without asking for anything in return”. At the same time he stumbled into the fashion world, which he describes as "a very strange land, much stranger than people realise", but also one which changed his life.

The world of fashion gave him freedoms that he had never had before. "I had rather naive but very strong ideas about what an image should be, and by sheer chance I was put in a situation where this had great value. One day I was worrying about having enough money to buy batteries for my 10 dollar flash on my first V magazine shoot and five weeks later I was shooting the Nike global advertising campaign. The speed is the most fascinating and exhausting thing about fashion".
Simon Procter may be one of the key movers in this industry today, but he remains something of a non-conformist. When I ask about his influences, he mentions 19th century French artist Gustave Doré, whose work he describes as "very immediate, very graphic", but he also lists a far more surprising influence. "On a personal level the class stuggle in britain is a darkness that touches in an oblique way" he explains. "I think there is a whole generation in the north of my country that has been neglected and utterly forgotten. My brothers do not have the same life as me".
When I ask if this is not a little incongruous in the elitist world of the fashion industry, Procter hesitates. "I think its mainly an outlook on the world, seeing both the bottom and the top. The consumption of luxury brands may be elitist but the creative forces and ideas can come from anywhere" he explains.

Some of his recent photoshoots back up this theory. A Chanel project was snapped in the workshops of the artisans who live and work alongside Procter, but above all, it is his series 'Death of a Painter' for Christian Dior Haute Couture that gives an insight into this world-view. The shoot is the recreation of the 'life, art and death' of Procter's aged painter-neighbour, a lady called Rolande who had befriended his young daughter. It is a difficult subject matter, and one that could be deemed in bad taste in the wrong hands, but with the elegance and craft of Procter's photography it stands as a haunting eulogy.
Simon Procter's vision and motivations are undoubtedly complex, as are his often hyperreal airbrushed photographic compositions. Perhaps as an antidote to this existence, he also runs a blog called ‘Under Lutetia’ which focusses mostly on Paris and features much more intimate and personal photography shot entirely on his iPhone. When I ask him about it, he seems almost surprised. "I didn't think anybody else looked at it" he says. However, it is perhaps here where the real Simon Procter can be found. "It's more a kind of diary for myself" he explains. "Its not very glamorous. I think it's about what it is to be human". It's a subject that Simon Procter seems to know a lot about.

Simon Procter’s Paris"I love Paris, I truly love Paris. I have grown up in Paris, but always with - and as - a bunch of outsiders, who dont know much about St Germain and the Latin Quarter. I lived in Belleville a long time - a kind of china town in the east of the city - and it’s a wonderful place. There's duck drying on the balconies, and you can see live eels for sale in the street. Everywhere is energy and industry, but no one has a free ride here.

My recommendations for visitors are always the same. Everyone once in their life should go to the menagerie in Jardin des Plantes and see the snow leopard. After that a bowl of soupe satay sans boulettes in the vietnamese Tin Tin restaurant just next to the Belleville crossroads".

MOVIE GREEN - SOPHIA TAKAL - 2011

Sophia Takal, the first-time director of Green, gets to the same dark place, deploying the flamethrower glare of actor Kate Lyn Sheil to ignite her rustic psychodrama. It concerns hip Brooklyn couple Sebastian (Lawrence Levine) and Genevieve (Sheil), whose relationship goes through a loop when they retreat to a country house where he intends to write about an adventure in sustainable living. Their solitude is soon gate-crashed by Robin (Takal), a compulsively chatty neighbor whose twangy intrusiveness gradually charms Genevieve and then Sebastian, even though her lack of urban sophistication and casual regard to boundaries make her, at first, a source of condescending amusement. Pretty quickly, though, you surmise that this isn’t some micro budget riff on Green Acres.

DIARY LYLYBYE - AGAINST NATURE - 2011

The Piano - Jane Campion 1993







W March 2011 - Against Nature -Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott




John William Waterhouse Ophelia, 1889

TIM WALKER - THE LOST EXPLORER - STORY BY PATRICK McGRATH - TENEUES - 2011

The story the adventurer then whispers to Evelyn comes not from McGrath's book but from Walker's memory. 'Ages ago someone told me how, in Victorian times, there were canary clouds over the Atlantic,' he says, referring to the days when a taste for exotic birds meant that clippers sailed back from Africa loaded with cages. Halfway home, they would release the birds, which would soar over the sea, until, too tiny to reach land, they would drop back down to the ship and a life of captivity.

This magical volume is a companion piece to the short film of the same name, which is due to be shown at film festivals worldwide. Long awaited, this is Tim Walker’s first cinematic endeavor. To this fantastical work, Walker brings all the whimsy and elaborate scene-making so integral to his renowned fashion photography.

This volume contains the original short story by Patrick McGrath as well as a facsimile of the annotated shooting script. Embark on a memorable journey with young Evelyn as she finds a lost explorer in her garden— and begins a haunting tale of dark adventure.