george condo paintings

This survey of three decades of work by George Condo includes about 50 portraits, most of fictional subjects. More Photos »

The American artist George Condo made a splash in New York in the early 1980s with a line of surrealist-style figure paintings. It was tasty, erudite stuff, freaky but classy, a Mixmaster version of old master, with a big glop of Pop tossed in. Then he went to Europe, found an avid audience and stayed for a decade, mostly in Paris. To the New York art world, myopic and memoryless, he might have moved to Mars.

In 1995 he resettled in Manhattan, and has been there since, producing at high volume and exhibiting prominently without generating the kind of main-stage mojo that has made a younger artist like John Currin — who is hugely indebted to Mr. Condo’s example — a star.

But now, finally, and with minimum fanfare, he’s having his first institutional career survey here. It’s titled “George Condo: Mental States.” It’s at the New Museum. And it’s sensational.

It demonstrates, among other things, what anyone who has tracked his career already knows. He’s the missing link, or one of them (Carroll Dunham is another), between an older tradition of fiercely loony American figure painting —Willem de Kooning’s grinning women, Philip Guston’s ground-meat guys, Jim Nutt’s cubist cuties, anything by Peter Saul — and the recent and updated resurgence of that tradition in the work of Mr. Currin, Glenn Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Dana Schutz and others.

Not that Mr. Condo — born in 1957 in New Hampshire — requires historical positioning to justify a survey. One glance at the installation of about 50 of his mainly fictional portraits on the New Museum’s fourth floor tells you otherwise. Some of the paintings are stronger and stranger than others. But covering a long wall up to the ceiling, with no two images alike, they add up to a tour de force of stylistic multitasking and figurative variety.

Your first instinct is to spot sources for those styles and figures: Picasso, Arcimboldo, Cookie Monster, Goya, Looney Tunes. But you only go so far with this because Mr. Condo isn’t much into wholesale appropriation. He’s interested in invention. Everything is pretty much straight from his brain.

The earliest picture in the show, “The Madonna,” dates from 1982 and gives a basic sense of how Mr. Condo works. He painted his subject, a Renaissance staple, straightforwardly, then did something funny to it. He scraped some paint away so that the face became blurred and slightly separated from the head, like a slipping mask. This subtle effect turned a historically and ideologically loaded subject into contemporary caprice, though without taking the history and ideas away. They’re here, but detached, like the Madonna’s face.

Even after being messed around with, she looks fairly normal, which cannot be said of most of the figures surrounding her. These include other quasi-religious images — Mr. Condo grew up as a Roman Catholic — including a Mary Magdalene with bared breasts and sticking-out rodent ears. Taken as an icon it’s deeply bizarre, yet it doesn’t feel entirely irreverent, which makes it even odder.

Various gods of art history get their due and take their licks. The 1994 “Memories ofRembrandt” borrows the tawny palette of that Dutch artist’s late self-portraits but reduces his facial features to a juicy stew of eyeballs and chunks of flesh. Throughout the show pieces of Picasso are everywhere, puzzled together, piled up like kindling, broken up, gnawed on, inserted wherever there’s room. Mr. Condo clearly can’t get enough of him.

News photographs of public personalities have served as models for portraits, and occasionally he leaves these people looking more or less like themselves, as he did a few years back in a series of 15 portraits of Elizabeth II of Britain. One of these images at the New Museum, “The Insane Queen,” is, in its zany way, almost respectful of her. Others — the queen with a detachable chin, a clown smile, a carrot stuck through her head — are not, and landed Mr. Condo in hot water when he brought them to the Tate Modern.

A few paintings, and several gilded bronze heads in the show, are named for characters — “The Barber,” “The Butler,” “The Alcoholic” — in Mr. Condo’s private mythology of cultural types. And then there are portraits that are just mysterious hallucinations, floating free and unrooted.

In “Red Antipodular Portrait” a bug-eyed creature stares out apprehensively from behind cascades of scarlet fur. A kind of Bichon Maltese-Yosemite Sam hybrid, it exists in a one-species universe, unconnected to art or life or history. Yet it gives the impression of having feelings, so it evokes a complicated response: amusement with a tug of empathy. Isn’t empathy going too far? Isn’t this picture just a cartoon? Within the world of Mr. Condo’s portraits, nothing is “just” anything.

Let me remind my fellow Americans that Nazi Germany’s Stasi was NOT in fact called “The Department of Homeland Security”. It was called “The Ministry of State Security”, so let’s please not confuse them.Also note that America is “The Land of The Free”, while Nazi Germany was “The Fatherland”. Hitler was killing Jews, and Muslim terrorist scum are not Jews, so America is clearly different.Let no-one even think we are living in a fascist state of any sort. This is obviously a Democracy — that’s why we have congress to always look out for our interests!Besides, the Germans invaded Poland. Who would the US bother to invade? Mexico? Canada? Iraq is way too far from home to count! Did Hitler have nukes? No! Did Hitler censor the internet? No! Therefore, there is simply no comparison!So, everything is fine. There’s nothing to worry about. Just trust in God, O Land of The Free and Home of The Brave! We’re going to be just fine.-Mike Godwin. Posted from iPhone while defecting to Europe.

via U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More | TorrentFreak.

Brain Power Natural History Museum

A once-living example of the most complicated object in the universe is mounted in a case at the beginning of the ambitious exhibition “Brain: The Inside Story,” which opens on Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History. And a sorry-looking object it is, if we put aside the symbolism and portentousness that have grown around it, and the research that barely has begun to dissect its innermost workings.Multimedia Slide Show‘Brain:The Inside Story’BlogArtsBeatThe latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.More Arts NewsApproach it without preconceptions and its compressed tubular windings make it seem like a small intestine coiled for easy transport. And this particular organ on display — which undoubtedly once contemplated the world with much curiosity as its observers now do — looks particularly inconsequential and stolid; it was preserved using “plastination silicone technique.”But it is helpful, at times, to see the three-pound human brain as a somewhat bizarre and alien thing. We must use it in order to study it, but it offers very little help. You can’t really peer into it, but it determines how we peer into anything else. For the most part, we can’t even see it or feel it do anything at all. The brain is most visible when it is most strange, for that is when its powers and limitations stand out from the background hum of ordinary experience.There are times, in this exhibition, when that happens, when we must stop and think about the organ that makes us stop and think. There are also, unfortunately, a few too many times when our own brains are put into passive, textbook-reading mode. But the high points stand out. Look at a seemingly random display of colored spools of thread in the first gallery, for example, an art installation by Devorah Sperber. Gaze at that array through a spherical lens and we see that the spools actually create a pixilated and inverted image of the Mona Lisa: a neat demonstration that it isn’t just sensation that the brain processes; sensations are also given shape. In this case, we learn, the “fusiform face area” of the brain, which is utilized for facial recognition, is being put to work.

“Brain: The Inside Story” opens on Saturday and runs through Aug. 14 at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street; (212) 769-5100, amnh.org.

via ‘Brain’ Exhibit at American Museum of Natural History – Review – NYTimes.com.

graffiti

It is one of the largest shows of such pieces ever mounted in one place, and many of the contributors are significant figures in both the street-art world and the commercial trade that now revolves around it. Its debut might have been expected to draw critics, art dealers and auction-house representatives, not to mention hordes of young fans. But none of them were invited.

In the weeks since, almost no one has seen the show. The gallery, whose existence has been a closely guarded secret, closed on the same night it opened.

Known to its creators and participating artists as the Underbelly Project, the space, where all the show’s artworks remain, defies every norm of the gallery scene. Collectors can’t buy the art. The public can’t see it. And the only people with a chance of stumbling across it are the urban explorers who prowl the city’s hidden infrastructure or employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

That’s because the exhibition has been mounted, illegally, in a long-abandoned subway station. The dank, cavernous hall feels a lot farther than it actually is from the bright white rooms of Chelsea’s gallery district. Which is more or less the point: This is an art exhibition that goes to extremes to avoid being part of the art world, and even the world in general.

The show’s curators, street artists themselves, unveiled the project for a single night, leading this reporter on a two-and-a-half hour tour. Determined to protect their secrecy, they offered the tour on condition that no details that might help identify the site be published, not even a description of the equipment they used to get in and out. And since they were (and remain) seriously concerned about the threat of prosecution, they agreed only to the use of street-artist pseudonyms.

Workhorse, in his late 30s, is a well-known street artist with gallery representation; PAC, younger by a decade, is less established but familiar (under a different name) to followers of urban-art blogs. The two came up with the idea for the Underbelly Project in 2008, a few years after PAC first saw the old station, led to it from a functioning one by an urban explorer acquaintance.

Abandoned stations like this — and there are a fair number of them in the city — are irresistible to those who search out hidden spaces in the city, despite or perhaps because of the fact that being there is illegal and potentially dangerous. PAC too found himself compelled after that first visit, and he began going back sporadically.

Seduced by the Abandoned

The place was pitch black, but standing with a powerful flashlight on a platform, PAC said, he had been able to make out a landscape of several more platforms, each lined with rows of columns, alternating with sunken track beds. The station, about the size of a football field, had clearly never been completed: no track had been laid in those beds, no escalators or staircases met the gaping holes in the platforms, and there was no electricity.

“I would hang out here for hours,” PAC said, enjoying “the solitude of being underground” and the architecture.

Then he met Workhorse, whose art often focuses on abandoned spaces.

“I told him I knew about a space that was pretty cool,” PAC said, and “brought him down here, and that night the idea for the project hatched.”

The difficult process of getting to the Underbelly space — which involves waiting at an active station’s platform until it’s empty, slipping from it into the damp and very dirty no man’s land beyond, and traversing that to get to the old station’s entrance — suggested to PAC and Workhorse how challenging the project would be. And the legal risks were obvious. Charles F. Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit, described such incursions as “trespassing, punishable by law,” and said “anyone caught defacing M.T.A. property is subject to arrest and fine.” Beyond that, Workhorse and PAC worried that given anxiety about terrorism in the subway, a large-scale, long-term project like theirs might even lead to more serious charges.

via ‘Underbelly Project’ Hidden Art Show in Abandoned Subway Station – NYTimes.com.

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The Real Work of Art

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Unlock Your iphone 3GS 4.0 Firmware

I don’t usually put up tech posts but this one really seemed to warrant my attention.

Firstly let me say that I will never go ahead and just do an “upgrade” on my iphone without researching it completely first. I , like so many other people , went ahead and did the upgrade which then screwed my iphone up an it also wiped off some software that I had on there, that I had purchased.

I am an Mac user and I love a lot of what Apple does, but what I don’t like about them is their “Big Brother” attitude about what I can and cannot use out in the digital world. I BOUGHT the phone from them, I am not renting or leasing it from them , if I drop it in the sewer , it’s gone , my problem … so who is Apple to come through and wipe off software I purchased off my phone and try to prevent me from using it again?

The only thing I really wanted to use was an application that allowed me to connect to the internet with my computer using the data connection from my iphone. I do this about once a week  and in order for me to do this AT&T wants another $40 a month – ( I already pay them $125 a month) and I lose my data plan where it makes it much easier to go over in data minutes – and if I do that, then I have to pay more.

Do not be fooled anything that comes from SWGREG seems to be a scam. I have tried 3 time to get my iphone “jailbroken” and all three of these entities are SCAMS …

www.unlockiphoneus.com and they brag on their site about their customer service which I have yet to hear back from .

www.unlocktheiphone.com still nothing , they went to a lot of trouble to make a really glitzy site that looks legit , but it’s a scam.

www.easy-iphone-unlocking.com at tleast these people responded to an email I sent them , but that was before I gave them money , now nothing. What they do, is tell you about things that you can find on the internet for free , . For $34.95 they will tell you there is still no jailbreak available for the iPhone 3gs running 4.0 firmware.

So far I have tried…

pawnage tool
redsn0w
blackrain
and a few other to no avail.

I can’t tell you how much time, including today , I have wasted on this stupid project so I can use the internet 4 times a month using my iphone, but if you find anything out please let me know. You can leave a comment here of you like or email me at euxart@aol.com

I hope that This post can save somebody some of the aggravation I have been through with this.