Oliver Maxwell Kupper ‘Self Portrait in Manhattan” © 2011

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Nick Veasy “The Finger”

In a “world obsessed with image,” UK based artist Nick Veasy is on a peregrination to find the beauty so rumored to be only “skin deep.” In a mysterious, fortified radiation safe structure called “the black box” is where Veasy creates most of his X-Ray images. The above fuck you image entitled “The Finger” and other works by Veasy will be on display at the the 11th Annual Los Angeles Art Show that runs from Jan. 19th to the 23rd. www.nickveasy.com

The Vicissitude Of Water (Tennis Court No. 2) Minneapolis, USA Photo Dustin Lynn

The Vicissitude Of Water (Goal Post) Minneapolis, USA Photo Dustin Lynn

New photographs by artist, filmmaker, traveler Dustin Lynn.  To elucidate the hidden meaning behind these haunting, frigid images, in Dustin Lynn’s own words: “[The] highest level of ascension in water is when it becomes snow – then it can take other forms like the branches of a tree, an alfa romeo, or a playing field.” Isolated and glamorous with overwhelming quietude, these images are still-frames of a morbid, parallel nirvana in Middle America.

“747″ January 5, 1973 Los Angeles, California, at about 8am at a beach near the Los Angeles International Airport, I fired several shots with a pistol at a Boeing 747.

In 1971, during one of his most famous pieces, Chris Burden had his assistant shoot him in the arm from a distance of 5 meters with a riffle. “At 7:45 P.M. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” His life is seemingly an extreme case of Dadaist impulses and an insatiable thirst for danger; as well as the warm hard-on milking of the brain for adrenaline. Burden currently lives and works in Los Angeles.  You can find a book, an overview, of his works, here.

53 Art Museum, a new avant-garde contemporary art institution located in Guangzhou China will present an exhibition of three cutting-edge artists, Feng Feng, Qin Jin and Liu Qingyuan. Curated and sponsored by the prominent Asian Art Magazines Art Gallery Magazine / Gallery Sights. On view at the 2011 LA Art Show – Jan 19-23.

‘Adarsha Benjamin in New York City’ Photography by Oliver Maxwell Kupper © 2011

Fragmented Narratives, Todd Hido’s second solo show with the [Bruce Silverstein Gallery]. Renowned as a master of sequencing in book format, Hido juxtaposes images from his influential monographs House Hunting, A Road Divided, Outskirts, and Between the Two with portraits and new images never before exhibited. Hido successfully extends his narrative from a linear book format to an almost cinematic storyline forged by his grouping and pairing of images unrelated in time or place, his female subjects acting as the characters in his photographic sequences. Hido’s eerily lit nocturnal images of suburban houses allude to the often discomforting, lonely American scenes by the painter Edward Hopper as well as mirror the director David Lynch’s interest and attention to the seedy underside of suburban American culture. www.brucesilversteingallery.com

Adolf Ziegler ‘The Four Elements: Fire, Water and Earth, Air’ before 1937

The above painting is one of the works on display at the Guggenheim NY that explores artworks from France, Italy, and Germany between World War I and II. Today is the last day of the exhibit.  Adolf Ziegler’s The Four Elements was hung in Adolf Hitler’s apartment in Munich. To Hitler the painting exemplified his ideal of what art should be: “realist, idealizing, and classical.” Hitler despised modernism. The artist Ziegler was hired by Hitler to head the The Reich’s “Chamber of Visual Arts.” Its chief responsibility was to absquatulate all modernist artworks from German museums.  Ziegler, who who was already a member of the Nazi party, met Hitler in the early 1920s.  Ziegler became Hitler’s “artistic advisor” in 1925. Hitler commissioned Ziegler to paint a portrait of his niece, Geli Raubal, who committed suicide with a single gunshot wound to her lung, after an apparent fight with her uncle, in  the same Munich apartment; she was 25. Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 is a fascinating look at an artistic movement in Europe that reverted, with almost wishful thinking, to more idealized forms after one the most brutal, violent wars in human history.  Click here for more info.

Last night I drove a car
not knowing how to drive
not owning a car
I drove and knocked down
people I loved
…went 120 through one town.
I stopped at Hedgeville
and slept in the back seat
…excited about my new life.
–Gregory Corso