'Underdressed and oversexed'. It's the beautiful in the obscene, and the obscene in the beautiful. NUDE PAPER, the Hamburg-based independent magazine of new standing, reignites the freedom beyond clothes and their politics. 'An orchid paper full of genitalia', Uwe Jens Bermeitinger, Art Director for NUDE PAPER, told me. A conversation in a sauna one day between Uwe Jens Bermeitinger and Hannes Deter (publisher), and NUDE PAPER was born. The first issue was launched in 2009, unknowingly to most. Young men, girls, older men, and transgenders - the only elitism that reigns through NUDE PAPER is the worship of nudity. It all lies somewhere between art, fashion, erotica and a certain philosophy - nudity as physical liberation, a sexual lure, a spiritual exercise. Those naked bodies on the hued paper usher in the unapologetic chic and poetics of beauty au naturel. It reads like sexuality's grammar: our fetish, our perversities, our inner exhibitionist, our unrestricted selves..."LIBERTE. EGALITE. NUDITE!"
NUDE PAPER Issue N°III can be ordered at BOYS BOYS BOYS with a limited 1000 handnumbered copies worldwide, featuring stories with and by Francois Sagat, Nettie Harris, Daniel Josefsohn, to name a few.
Photo Uwe Jens Bermeitinger and text Sophie Pinchetti
Presented at the US Pavilion, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla showcased five powerful installations which exacerbated the dark and chaotic spirit of this 54th Venice Biennale. Gloria, with performances of American gymnasts was held inside whilst Track and Field saw U.S Olympic athlete Gary Morgan on a treadmill on top of a tank running in 30 minute stretches. A replica of the symbolic statue of Freedom stood alongside Algorithm, a pipe rigged together with a working ATM, where the organ only plays music during a transaction. "You can see the relationship between militarism, obviously," says Guillermo Calzadilla, "and you can think about the war. But also you can think about sculpture; you can think about gravity, weight, assemblage, performance, sound. So it has all these sort of multiple registers that make it exceed one single, useful, practical, functional end."
The culture wars are back. In light of the recent surge of censorship in the art world, People for the American Way will be hosting a special symposium next week entitled Looking Forward and Fighting Back: Free Expression in a New Age of Culture Wars. Following the Smithsonian’s decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s video from the Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, free expression was overrided by the financial power of the Republican congress over the Smithsonian’s funding. Fire In My Belly was far from the first time that Wojnarowicz featured Christ as a representation of suffering and stigmatization. Whilst the commissioner of the National Portrait Gallery resigned, AA Bronson retracted his work from the exhibit. AA Bronson will be speaking amongst a panel which will include Michael Keegan, Norman Lear and culture-war veteran Dennis Barrie, former director of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, who successfully fought criminal obscenity charges in 1990 for the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe works.
How can we fight against the politics of a culture war in the 21st century? As the Right-wing activists threaten the art world with a new form of cultural stewarding in the digital age, the question of how we can move forward - as artists, activists and culture warriors - is one of crucial value to defend the most basic right to freedom in art.
Looking Forward and Fighting Back: Free Expression in a new age of culture wars will be held Tuesday 12 April at 7.30pm at the New Museum, Theater, 235 Bowery, New York. Photo courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York. Text Sophie Pinchetti
The filmmaker, actor and peace activist Juliano Mer-Khamisson was shot dead in his car outside of the Freedom Theater which he founded in the West Bank city of Jenin. The masked assailant of the brutal murder that occurred on Monday has not yet been identified, though several arrests have been made. Juliano Mer-Khamisson was the star to Julian Schnabel’s film Miral depicting life in the midst of the ever-escalating and volatile conflict between Israel and Palestine. Mer-Khamisson was son to Arna Mer, a Jewish Israeli activist for Palestinian causes and Saliba Khamis, a Nazareth-born Christian, one of the leaders of the Israeli Communist Party in the 1950s. In addition to his film work, Mer-Khamisson created an extraordinary project which was the Freedom Theater, a drama venue in the heart of the occupied West Bank with a mission to improve education and promote cultural resistance in occupied Palestine. He was a vocal and strident proponent of Palestinian rights and active critic of Israel, once declaring during a press conference in his theater in 2009, ‘If there isn’t history, culture and art behind one’s rifle, that rifle kills rather than liberates’. Text Sophie Pinchetti
He sleeps where he falls by Purple contributor Jane Kurland is the result of life on the road, a nine month trip trailing life with nomadic subcultures of America. Spending most of her year away with her van with her six year old son, Kurland traces realist pictorial landscapes where man returns to the earth reconnecting to its tempo. It is the bohemian American frontier, one where Kurland seeks out the mythical identity of the American hobo – simultaneously marginalised and revered. They are the Dean Moriartys’ from Jack Kerouac’sOn the Road of today, exiting society to affirm their right to freedom. The utopian expressions of Kurland’s earlier work are questioned with the melancholy of these drifting communities. And one must ask, did they achieve it - the freedom? Perhaps not, Kurland thought. Or perhaps they do, but in moments. These would be fleeting intervals of freedom – and just one of the many expressions of soul in Kurland’s lone wanderers.
He Sleeps Where He Falls by Justine Kurland is on view until 4 May at Frank Elbaz Gallery, 7 Rue Saint Claude, Paris.
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