Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Untold Stories

Andy Warhol Reading Group Lecture Series

mondaymay5

7pm: MY (untold) stories, a lecture with Mark Sink

Photobucket

Local photographer, Mark Sink experienced The Factory in its active years. Come hear Sink share his experiences with Andy and the other characters who roamed the famous studio in midtown Manhattan. This event is free and open to the public.

Mark Sink, an artist, photographer and private art consultant, represents and curates local and international cutting-edge fine art photography. Mark hosts photography workshops with The Denver Darkroom and Working with Artists. Studio photography services include, portraits, documentation of artwork, as well as product, architectural and fashion photography.

The Dikeou Collection is located in the Colorado Building, 1615 California St, at 16th St, Suite 515, Denver, CO 80202. The Dikeou Collection is free and open to the public Wednesday-Friday, 11-5pm. To contact the Dikeou Collection call 303-623-3001 or write to info@dikeoucollection.org

For more info about The Andy Warhol Reading Group and future events, contact Rachel Cole, rachel@dikeoucollection.org

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and more dispatches from zingmagazine's anonymous intern

WORLD PINHOLE DAY







Thank you Damaris and Joseph for making the day.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Siren Song

'American Eve: The Birth of the It Girl and the Crime of the Century'

By Paula Uruburu
April 24, 2008 11:55 p.m.

Chapter 1: Siren Song

Evelyn Nesbit, image of an age, its sins, its soullessness . . .

Most don't know that her given name was apparently Florence Mary. She was not-so-plain Flo to her family and "Flossie the Fuss" to the chorus. She was "Kittens" to Stanford White, "Evie" to John Barrymore, and "Boofuls" to Harry Thaw. She was "Mrs. Thaw the younger" in London, "Le Bébé" in France, and "Mrs. Harry" when in Pittsburgh. Schoolgirl. Florodora girl. Gibson girl. "Angel-child." "Snake-charmer." Vixen. Victim. The ur-Lolita. The very first "It" girl before anyone know what "It" was. She could be what anyone wanted her to be. And inevitably was, even if it wasn't what she wanted. To anyone familiar with E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime, the name Evelyn Nesbit may evoke the mauve-tinted crucible of the sentimentally inclined and cynically named Gilded Age To others it may signify passion and perversion, murder and scandal, "love, hate, villainy, perfidy, and outraged innocence." The extinction of an era. And a red velvet swing.

[americaneve cover]
Riverhead Books/ Penguin Group

Herself a product of the Victorian past but with an approach to life that was unconsciously and uncannily modern, Evelyn Nesbit unwittingly embodied the country's paradoxes and ambiguities at its trembling turn into the twentieth century. At times she seemed the very picture of nineteenth-century sentimentality and girlish purity, yet her naturally bewitching Mona Lisa smile promised something dangerously new and enticing. A self-inventory of her visible assets tells the story: the curled pink ribbon of a mouth (painted red only for the stage) contrasted with "slightly olive-hued" skin; huge, dark, sultry eyes set in an angelic face, all framed by a "profusion of burnished copper curls." It was an image that spoke of both the vitality and freshness of an antediluvian world and the brave new world of the Century of Progress. As with Eve before the Fall, Evelyn's natural charms and air of innocence created an overwhelming and immediate impression of incorruptibility in certain poses. Yet the deceptive maturity of her heavy-lidded gaze and ever so slightly openmouthed expression of apparent self-satisfaction in photo after photo suggested an Eve who had already tasted forbidden fruit.

In those first few years of what would prove to be a thrilling and ingenious decade of crusaders and con men, cakewalks and coon songs, contradictions and coincidences, class wars and conspicuous consumption, Evelyn Nesbit became its most precious commodity, even though, as the newspapers reported, she had come to New York with "nothing but her looks." But her face was her fortune (as her parasitic mother well knew), and Evelyn's mercurial rise to fame and equally precipitous plunge into notoriety only five years later reflected the era's accelerated, intoxicating, and uniquely schizophrenic mood.

[evelyn portrait]
Riverhead Books/ Penguin Group
Postcard pose of sixteen-year-old Evelyn for Sarony, 1901.

All the feminine myth and mystique of the ancient world seemed to coalesce with contemporary American freshness in Evelyn and form a "beguiling new creature." She was Freud's "eternal question," embodying both "contemporary social types like 'the charmer' and 'The New Woman,' " as well as more universal abstractions such as "virtue, progress, etc., raised to nearly mythological proportions." Like the nation itself, she was poised fearlessly on the brink of uncharted discoveries but apprehensive about abandoning the illusion of security or sentiments of the past.

To the reporters who followed her every move and unprecedented rise as a celebrity before there was any discernible evidence of a singular talent to justify such attention (we of course no longer harbor any delusions with regard to the modern cult of personality), she was a startling silky contradiction, "a vision who assailed one's senses like a perfume at once delicate and heavy, overpowering and yet faint." As the American Eve, her delectable budding underage appeal proved irresistible to the renegade creator who wanted to cultivate her as the rarest fl ower in his Garden of too-earthly delights. Yet no matter how different she may have looked from one image or photograph to the next, the public felt they knew her. Women wanted to be her; men wanted to own her. She became a maddening object of desire, and tragically, a victim of her own beguiling beauty during the "gaudy spree," which she would help bring to a stunningly shameful end.

At first the publicity that swirled and hummed around Evelyn would have you believe that hers was a fairy- tale existence. She was seen as a modern-day Cinderella who came from a city of literal burning ash and coal to become the "glittering girl model of Gotham." She then made the precarious but inevitable leap from studio to stage. From there it was but a cakewalk to a life of luxury as the "mistress of millions" once she became Mrs. Harry K. Thaw, of Pittsburgh. Or so the newspapers said. And all before she was twenty-one.

An unwitting sexual anarchist draped in a crimson silk kimono and laid out seductively on a pure white polar bear rug, she could incite the wrath of reformers and excite the imagination of the public merely by sleeping. Once the "Madison Square Tragedy" tore its way into the headlines, the "little butterfly" generated more newspaper sales and publicity than Hearst himself could ever have manufactured. Through two trials riddled with theatrical tribulation and shocking revelations, she was the "pale flower" whose petals took on a "bruised pallor," with sympathetic observers wishing she had "grown wholesomely in a wholesome garden." Others, like the sculptor Saint-Gaudens, were less charitable, commenting just before he died, in 1907, that "she had the face of an angel and the heart of a snake."

Throughout her humiliating and protracted ordeal on the witness stand, Evelyn's ubiquitous and mesmerizing image—and what it represented to a nation of novice interpreters—captivated even the most cynical New York journalists. Irvin S. Cobb, a well-known syndicated columnist and social critic, described her as "the most exquisitely lovely human being I ever looked at—[she had] the slim quick grace of a fawn, a head that sat on her flawless throat as a lily on its stem, eyes that were the color of blue-brown pansies and the size of half dollars; a mouth made of rumpled rose petals." Yet even as her startling testimony helped push an unsuspecting and unprepared America into the modern age, while canny entrepreneurs sold hastily manufactured little red velvet swings on the street outside the courthouse, as quickly as Evelyn's star rose, it fell victim to the very culture that created and consumed her.

Reprinted from American Eve by Paula Uruburu by arrangement with Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., Copyright 2008 by Paula Uruburu.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Want to go to China ?

From my great artist friend Susanne Junker:

Dear friends,

I proudly announce the opening of stageBACK gallery, a space from an artist for artists in Shanghai, China.
We had our # 0 opening last saturday and it was a big success, thanks to all of you who came by.

The idea to open an art space blossomed in the fall of 2007 with the wish to be a part of Shanghais fast growing urban culture.
Especially in our days, cultural and intellectual exchange between the West and the East are of great importance.
This is what this space stands for: FREEDOM - ART - PARTY.

stageBACK is now located on 696 Weihai Lu, a already "famous" old opium den and artist occupied warehouse in the center of Shanghai.
A few years ago, artist moved into this building and it reached it's first "fame" with the premier open artist workshop event in 2007. It also resisted
the demolition last summer and all tenants signed a new lease for the next two years. Since then, individual spaces are getting fixed up,
little galleries pop up here and there, people invest in the space to improve for themselves and visitors.
About 40 artist studios and galleries are now located on 696.

Special thanks to:

Susan Shen for her help and patience. She helped me to discover most abandoned spaces in downtown Shanghai - what an experience!
Silvia Xu, who showed me 696 Weihai Lu, and made me be at the right place at the right time.
Chris Gill, who was so cool to translate all my extra renovation wishes to the constructer, Mr Jin, who thinks I am crazy.

Our # 0 show will be still up this weekend, thursday to sunday april 24 - april 27, 14h - 18h or by appointment. Please drop by.
I am curious about your responds and open to all ideas and art works and projects that will improve stageBACK now and in the future.

For more info and photos please check:

http://www.stageback-shanghai.com

http://www.smartshanghai.com/blog/967/Back_from_the_Brink.html

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=613998020

http://www.youtube.com/user/stagebackshanghai

best wishes to all of you

Susanne

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Photo Spring

Westword

"Denver's Month of Photography ended weeks ago, but many of the exhibits are still up and running. So maybe the highly successful March event should have been called the "Season of Photography," or even "Photo Spring." Regardless of what it should have been called, it was an incredible chance for gallery-goers to see an amazing range of photo-based creations by some of the most interesting artists in the world. For this reason, the community owes a debt of gratitude to Mark Sink, who thought it up, and Rachel Hawthorn and Sabin Aell, who helped organize it. And last, but hardly least, credit must go to the gallery directors and curators who elected to be a part of it by mounting photo shows."

http://www.westword.com/2008-04-17/culture/freeze-frames/

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Chelsea Hotel Show





April 1, 2008

Dear Stanley and the Chelsea Hotel,

I first lived there in the early nineteen eighties. Staying for several months at a time. I carried a camera around my neck night and day. It was Stanley always at the desk who started calling me Stieglitz. I really loved that for he did not know my great grandfather was the founder of the NY Camera Club in the 1890s. His studio was just a couple blocks away.

I have thousands of images of the residents at that time.. many of the lobby hang outs there. I was friends with Richard Bernstein who did all the Interview magazine covers..his place was so so cluttered with stuff we worked on several projects together. I photographed Viva’s daughter for her acting. I am friends with the current resident Rene Ricard, he was always so mean to me in the early days. But I believe he always really liked me. He returns my calls and is very pleasant these days. I think he was the most important art critic of the 1980s.

I have to many stories and so many blur together but I will try a couple draft notes.

A wild girl friend at the time, Patrice Hartman locked herself in the bathroom and broke a glass and attempted to commit suicide. I kicked the door open and pulled her out. She ran out and into the lobby and out onto the street with nothing but her underwear. I later found out that was the room Sid murdered Nancy.

My stepfather Ed White was best friends with Jack Kerouac. He was Tim Gray in On The Road. I guess they spent a lot of time there together in the 1950s. And Jack wrote On The Road there. I spent some time with Allen Ginsberg there, I can’t remember whose place it was, and we made a lot of pictures together. That was his thing at the end of his life.

I photographed the artwork of wonderful Nicola L there and the work of John Wells. I spent a lot of time with the painter Robert Hawkins while staying there. I am going to write Robert ask him to remind me who we partied with there. Was it Teri Toye and Patrick Fox? I think it was. And who was the long hair and bearded hippy that spent a lot of time in the egg chair in the lobby? He had giant holes in his earlobes that he would put a rolled up NY Daily newspaper in. So many names have escaped me.

I was lucky to be friends and spend time with Andy Warhol. He never wanted to talk about the Chelsea for some reason. He would always say why are you staying there? its so dirty.
I shot lots of fashion shoots there. Never had to get permission.

Well thank you Chelsea Hotel for great memories thank you dear Stanley and thank you Linda for doing this. You have motivated me now have to start a dig into my contact sheets. I want to find my images of Stanley the man who called me Stieglitz.

Best
Mark Sink

Tuesday, April 1, 2008