I've known Laetitia Benat since 1996, when she worked as an intern at Purple magazine, where I'm a regular. She was still a student at the Ecole des Beaux Art in Lyon, mostly working with photography and video. One day she showed a close-up photograph of a girl wearing a white plastic bag as a top, which had the words "Thank you" in red across the chest. That simple image became the cover of the summer issue, 11, 1996, and Laetitia became a regular at Purple and began showing in Purple's occasional exhibitions, among others, and expanding her output to drawings, collages and ceramics. The photographs, collages and ceramics in her exhibition and rose again, combine religious symbolism, scientific artifacts, and the worldly New Age as if seen through a spiritualist's prism. A photograph of an evangelical symbol is placed with the still shot of a ceramic cruet; the picture of a monk's vestment is positioned next to that of an Asiatic votive still life; a photograph of one of her handmade ceramic figurine lurches forward in aggressive pantomime alongside a photograph of quietly falling snow over a rooftop, The single image of a pale, nude girl reveals her bobbing on her enfolded arms in serene security at the verge of a stream. These are beautifully shot photographs - beautiful in the sense that they are balanced, nicely proportioned, and carefully ordered. The collages are taken from computer downloads and include color wheels, scientific curios, a nude figure, and hippie-era musicians. The ceramics are somewhat like her pen and pencil drawings, only in 3D. Some are abstract, some have fingerlike tendrils, some have masks, and some are of animals. In all, her images and objects, interiors and environments, and colors and textures, bring to mind terms like simple, significant, and respectful. Laetitia has easy empathy for people and things. She doesn't aim to be hip or controversial. If anything her words are the polar opposite of stridently political art or noisy, sexy, speedy, and cheap, commercial pop art - from the Sixties up to now - simply by not being either political or pop. Her images derive instead from the quiet, inside-outside world of her careful choosing, and are imbued with her almost-Japanese esthetic of reticent gift giving. The gift-giving aspect is especially evident, I think, in her subjects and materials, and in her close-in style of drawing, modeling and photographing - and because Laetitia treats her subjects, objects, and chosen media so intimately. Which, I think, is one of the things that makes her work contemporary or so pertinent now. Text Jeff Rian and Photo Sophie Pinchetti
New York Portraits by Ari Marcopoulos and styled by Heathermary Jackson, by Max Farago and styled by Mel Ottenberg, by Marcelo Krasilic and styled by Masha Orlov, Mario Sorrenti and styled by Jane How, by Terry Richardson and styled by Masha Orlov
Los Angeles Portraits by Hanna Liden and styled by Heidi Bivens
Paris Portraits by Olivier Zahm and styled by Yasmine Eslami
Tokyo Portraits by Chikashi Suzuki and styled by Michiko Kitamura
The Anchorage, a film by Anders Edström and C.W. Winter
I was knocked out the other night watching Anders Edström and C.W. Winter’s first feature-length film, The Anchorage, at Le Fémis in Paris. Last year the film won the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Film festival and the Los Angeles Film Critics Independent/Experimental Film/Video Award. The starkly simple story is an incredible visual and sonic cinema experience. Shot during three weeks in October on small a Baltic island in Sweden, an older woman, who lives alone in a sequestered house, is made anxious by the sudden appearance of a hunter she’s never seen before. With a brief voice-over and minimum dialogue, the 87-minute film reifies three days of her life in a concentration of long pans and quick cuts, each rich with ambient sound and stimulating visual textures. The result is the purest of cinema experiences. Edström, a master at incarnating light, was a long-time Purple photographer, since 1992. In this film he further proves his special genius. Los Angles-based C.W. Winter wrote the short script and was the film’s formal mastermind. Their collaboration is refreshing and unique, as is their film. A new project is now in the planning stages. Text by Jeff Rian
Personally speaking, I don’t really want much of anything. I know that sounds pretentious, but I never really wanted much. When I was a kid my father would bring home presents from his business trips, and I usually gave mine to friends who seemed to want them more than I did. For years I collected books. I sold many of them, mostly to pay off hopeless romantic over-indulgences, but I still have a lot of books, because I read a lot and consider books to be the closest thing to any kind of representation of myself. Before I moved to Paris I gave away my old Chrysler, my television, my stereo, many books and records, all my furniture, including bookshelves and Japanese Rattan chairs and tables from the 1940s, all my kitchen paraphernalia, and other things too numerous to remember. I don’t miss any of it. The problem with not wanting anything is that people don’t really let you get away with it. Wanting things is the ultimate human ambition, and it really starts to get serious with sex.
To have sex, even a quickie with someone from a new encounter, brings you into an exchange with that person’s stuff, their psychological baggage as well as their possessions. When sex evolves into a relationship you are drawn into joint projects and acquisitions. Projects can be anything, in any order, on any basis, from sharing a taste in music, to renting apartments, to accommodating habits, to making babies. Acquisitions involve every domestic appurtenance, without exception. Relationships also bring up the issue of ambition and, therefore, the philosophical problem of Being versus Becoming — of who you are in the Know Thyself sense versus the what you or your relationship partner might want you to Become sense, be that mechanic, doctor, house husband, or success story. Partners usually want their mates to increase something, generally materially related, but not something necessarily related to every aspect of their relationship, such as agreeing on the number of sex partners permissible outside the relationship.
I’ve been accused, mostly behind my back, of lacking ambition. But that’s not exactly the case. The problem is, you can’t always do things that work out in exact, or even increasing, exchange ratios with who you are, your personal circumstances, or what you want to become. Sometimes the things you do, like teaching or being a musician, say, aren’t so rewarding financially. Which reminds me of the joke: What do you call a musician who just lost his girlfriend? Homeless. (The problem with that joke is that it becomes a philosophical problem for musicians.) […]
An extract from the new book Purple Years (Onestar Press) by Jeff Rian, art critic and longtime collaborator to Purple. The book is a collection of his most brillant texts, many from Purple, Purple Journal and Purple Fashion between 1998 and 2004.
GALLERY
