Bitforms Gallery New York presents Michael Najjar Bionic Angel - New Photography, on view through November 25, 2006. The work series bionic angel takes as its starting point the future transformation and technological control of human evolution. Rapid development in the field of so-called "g-r-i-n technologies" (genetics, robotics, information and nano-technologies) are changing our bodies, minds, memories, and identities, but also impact on our progeny.

These technologies all converge with the aim of enhancing human performance. prenatal genetic determination enables children to be built to plan. Clone bodies become depositories for ersatz organs whilst manipulation of atomic structure creates new bodies which far outstrip the old ones in terms of robustness, elasticity and durability. The new bodies are adapted to the needs of the high-speed data highway. these developments based on genetic algorithms and neuronal networks mean that biological evolution can now be controlled; they open up the way to a new and superior form of existence for the human being.

Such acts of transgression were already implicit in the idealised body images of greek mythology which the italian renaissance adopted as the perfect _expression of radical transformation in terms of the understanding of body, mind and science - secular man became a utopian promise.

Referring to such idealised body worlds from antiquity and the renaissance, the work series bionic angel takes up themes of metamorphosis from classical greek mythology as treated by the roman poet ovid. Scenarios of creatures in the throes of transformation articulate the inevitability of genetic self-creation in the future of human history. The moment of metamorphosis itself serves as the key metaphor for the technology-driven transformation of the human body in its future post human and possibly immortal existence.

Ira Schneider Mysteries in Reality Hannah Höch Prize 2006 Opening: 3 November 2006, 7 pm
4 November – 17 December 2006
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein http://www.nbk.org

Ira Schneider “A Weekend at the Beach (with Jean-Luc Godard)”, 1978/84, videostills

Ira Schneider was born in 1939 in Manhattan into a family who, in 1947, were the first on their street to own a television. The 8-year-old’s fate is sealed, and several decades and 250,000 hours of television viewing later he stops counting. Obsessed with media technology and imagery, Ira Schneider becomes a “televisor”, filmmaker, visionary video artist and proponent, co-founder and publisher of the journal Radical Software – the most important voice of the US video community in the 1970s – and co-author of the first standard work on the then new media: Video Art. An Anthology.

For these achievements the video pioneer Ira Schneider, who has been living in Berlin since the 1990s, will be honoured with the Hannah Höch Prize of the Berlin Ministry of Science, Research and Culture and an exhibition in the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (NBK – New Berlin Art Association). The exhibition will also contain a concentrated insight into Schneider’s photographic work, and thus enable a comprehensive view of his life’s work.

Accompanying Programme

15 November 2006, 7 pm
in the series “Treffpunkt NBK”:
“In and out of Context”. Excerpts from recent video works by Ira Schneider, winner of the Hannah Höch Prize for 2006.

via e-flux

Tuesday 31st October

Art Central: Tapies exhibition, 6-8pm, Adam Gallery, 24 Cork St Art East: 1) Opening at INIVA, 6 Standard Place, EC2 - 6.30-8pm 2) Poetry live 6.30pm at Parasol Unit, 12 Wharf Road, N1.

Art Scares: £10 for event with www.thelastturesdaysociety.org at 43 South Molton St (lotsa free gin) - or see BIB at the Vibe Bar, Debretts Halloween Party, 8pm (lotsa live music)

Wednesday 1st November

Art East: 1) John Stezager, The Approach, 47 Approach Road, E2 - 6-9pm

2) Contemporary Projects, 20 Rivington St, pv 6.30-8.30pm

Thursday 2nd November

Art East: 1) 'You Can't Come Closer', Polish Video & Live Art, Cell Projects, 258 Cambridge Heath Road, E2, 6.30-9.30pm 2) PV Standpoint Gallery, 45 Coronet Street, N1, 6-9pm Art South: Richard Crow, talk & live performance at the South London Gallery, Peckham High St, SE15 - free but book via, www.southlondongallery.org

Friday 3rd November

Art East: 1) MOT International, 5th Floor Regents Studio, 8 Andrews Road, E8, 6.30-9pm

2) 'Number 42' group show at Three Colts Gallery, Three Colts Lane, E2, 6.30-9.30pm

Sunday 5th November

Art Explosions East: Live performance and spectacular fireworks, 7.30-9pm in Victoria Park, Hackney, E9 (event starts from 4pm)

XFSGBX

The Freeloaders Society of Great Britain

According to research…

…Two Russian artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid … hired a professional polling organization to conduct a broad survey of art preferences of people living in ten countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas (Wypijewski 1997). Blue turned out to be the favourite colour worldwide, with green in second place. Respondents expressed a liking for realistic representative paintings. Preferred elements included water, trees and other plants, human beings (with a preference for women and children, and also for historical figures, such as Jomo Kenyatta or Sun Yat-sen), and animals, especially large mammals, both wild and domestic. Using the statistical preferences as a guide, Komar and Melamid then produced a favourite painting for each country. Their intent was clearly ironic, as the painting humorously mixed completely incompatible elements "America's Most Wanted," as it was titled, presented a Hudson River School scene, with George Washington standing beside a lake in which a large hippo is bellowing. But there was also a serious side to the project; for the paintings, though created from the choices of different cultures, tended to share a remarkably similar set of preferences — they looked like ordinary European landscape calendar art, both photographic and painted. In an attempt to explain this odd cross-cultural uniformity — which had East Africans choosing the lush calendar scenes over landscapes they might be familiar with in their own daily lives — Arthur Danto claimed that the Komar-Melamid paintings demonstrate the power of the international calendar industry to influence taste away from indigenous values and towards European conventions. While he admits that the Kenyans preferred scenes that looked more like upper New York State than like Kenya, the polling work also indicated that most Kenyans had calendars in their homes (Danto, in Wypijewski 1997). What this does not acknowledge is the question of why worldwide calendars have the same landscape themes—the very themes that evolutionary psychology would predict. The real question is "Why are calendars so uniform in their content worldwide?" a uniformity that includes other, non-landscape, objects of attention, such as babies, pretty girls, children, and animals. It is the calendar industry that has, by meeting market demands, discovered a Pleistocene taste in outdoor scenes.

via City Comforts

Pictures of the world's most and least wanted paintings here . 

“Mary Calling up a Storm”, 1996 Oil on canvas Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

KAREN KILIMNIK 27 OCTOBER 2006 – 7 JANUARY 2007 MUSEE D’ART MODERNE  DE LA VILLE DE PARIS / ARC

Karen Kilimnik first drew attention in the 1990s with the distinctive "installation" approach she still uses today. Her oeuvre is patiently built out of strangely poetic orchestrations born of a zanily imagination.

A resident of Philadelphia, this American artist gradually gained recognition with the singular vision punctuated by countless references mixing academic art and popular culture, historical and current events, reality and fiction.

While she seems to have halted the big “scatter art” installations that made her famous at the end of the 1990s, she continues to make use of freewheeling scenarios in the form of unexpected collages showing no deference to historical exactitude. Drawing markedly on tales, legends, opera, ballet, fashion magazines and TV series, her installations use the small format paintings known as modelli for the staging of a world of illusion. With a sound mastery of layout of works combining classical rigour and the creation of a setting, the artist offers a reinterpretation of "Old World" culture.

After having found her way into historically charged venues in Basel and Venice in 2005, Karen Kilimnik is presenting here four installations – two of them new – in association with some fifty paintings.

With its mix of artificial snow, candles, garlands of leaves and monochrome paintings of the sky, the installation Good, 1995 seemingly disorganised but in fact skilfully structured, belongs to the “scatter art” method she initiated in New York in the early 1990s.

Antechambers, 2005 is a group of three coloured walls using arrangements of various pieces of ornamentation to create a kind of 18th-century "folly" that disconcerts in the context of a contemporary space. Paintings of antechambers and other reading rooms are standing outside the walls, as if propelled out of the “set”.

The globbed furnitureM, 2006 recreates the absurd and artificial ads of interior design magazines in three dimensions, with all sort of objects.

The new installation The Grotto, 2006 suggests the architecturally constructed gardens of Renaissance Italian villas, with the foliage and the lion and tiger masks on their elaborate bases conjuring up the atmosphere of a paganism. For the artist this scenery recalls both Halloween costumes and a Danish ballet Napoli (by Bournonville).

The various installations are orchestrated by fifty or so pictures of very different kinds – oils, gouaches, watercolours and sketches – that reference the painting of masters like Ruysdael, Stubbs and Raeburn.

The portraits are often of actors, models or dancers embodying historical or literary figures: for instance Paris Hilton as Marie Antoinette, Leonardo di Caprio as Prince Desire and Nureyev as the Snow Prince. Sometimes, however, they take the form of more or less realistic self-portraits spelling out a coded identity for the artist.

The landscapes contain a multiplicity of references to English painting; to French preromanticism – Hubert Robert-style ruins, Horace Vernet-style storms; and to theatre and ballet sets – weirdly fantastic castles, prancing horses, etc.

The world of Karen Kilimnik is full of paradoxes: she draws on inventiveness and appropriation, on the present and the past, on the anonymous and the famous. Deliberately turning her back on a certain kind of avant-garde, she succeeds in inventing a new kind of installation.

Her genius for mise en scène is not easy to pin down, never stopping at the context she has chosen and avoiding all certain interpretation. Subverting the genres she uses, she recreates an "imaginary reality" always propped up by sham. Parodying painting's commonplaces, she only plays at the disappearance or the multiplication of the author. Armed with humour and wit, Karen Kilimnik depicts a world of appearances in quest of an ambiguous, subversive beauty.

Annie Leibovitz (American, b. 1949), Nicole Kidman, 2003, Photograph © Annie Leibovitz from "A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005" Courtesy of Vogue.

Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005, an exhibition of more than 200 photographs, debuts at the Brooklyn Museum, where it will be on view through January 21, 2007, prior to an international tour. Among the other venues to which it will travel are the San Diego Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, the De Young Museum, Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, and London’s National Portrait Gallery, with additional venues to be announced.

Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005 has been organized by the Brooklyn Museum and is sponsored by American Express. Additional support has been provided by Richard Meier’s “On Prospect Park,” an SDS Procida Distinctive Property.

The material in the exhibition, and in the accompanying book of the same title, which will be published by Random House, encompasses work Leibovitz made on assignment as a professional photographer as well as personal photographs of her family and close friends. “I don’t have two lives,” Leibovitz says. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” The material documents the birth of her three daughters and many events involving her large and robust family, including the death of her father.

Portraits of public figures include the pregnant Demi Moore, Nelson Mandela in Soweto, Jack Nicholson on Mulholland Drive, George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet at the White House, William Burroughs in Kansas, and Agnes Martin in Taos. The assignment work also includes searing reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s and a series of landscapes taken in the American West and in the Jordanian desert.

The exhibition will be installed in three sections. An introductory gallery will include exuberant photographs of subjects free from gravity, among them dancers, divers, and an airborne stealth bomber. The main gallery will include a chronological presentation of the fifteen years covered by the exhibition, in which personal photographs mingle with commissioned works. The final gallery includes eight large-scale landscapes.

One of the most celebrated photographers of our time, Annie Leibovitz has been making witty, powerful images documenting American popular culture since the early 1970s, when her work began appearing in Rolling Stone.

She became the magazine’s chief photographer in 1973, and ten years later began working for Vanity Fair, and then Vogue, creating a legendary body of work. In addition to her magazine work, Leibovitz has created influential advertising campaigns for American Express, Gap, Givenchy, The Sopranos, and the Milk Board. A retrospective of her work from the years 1970 to 1990 was presented at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and at the International Center of Photography in New York.