Often times, girls will inspire a guy’s keen sense of style; especially if that girl shops in the men’s section of vintage stores. Donning his steady’s psych-African print shirt and cracking a slight Peter Pan grin, it was hard to relinquish the impulse not to photograph Chris during visit at the MoMA PS1. 

by Rogue Gallery Girl

After drifting through a desert of sober suited men and disenchanted chicks in black, otherwise known as Art Basel, the Scope Basel fair was like a bitchingly refreshing glass of lemonade. 

Celebrating its 7th year in the Swiss city, the international contemporary satellite was at its new location in the Klybeckquai neighborhood. Wedged among derelict train tracks and locals fishing on a Tuesday afternoon, this fair was far less spastic than your New York Armory Contemporary. Saw the pavillion booths then cruised outside and refueled by the Rhine where stylish babes flounced about and a Clayton Campbell photographic banner was installed. The fair had enough of a bite (and good art) to keep it interesting while still pulling off a sweet atmosphere.

Clayton Campbell ,”What Is Democracy” banner (courtesy of Untitled Projects)

Hyper-hued neon works were, thankfully, kept to a minimum. Although, if explosive cosmic rainbows are your thing, check out Rafa Maccarón’s large scale mixed media works.

Rafa Maccarón, “Déjà Vu” mixed media on three-dimensional canvas

More into works with a whisper of ephemeral kink? Schilte & Portielje (consisting of Huub Schilte and Jacqueliene Portielje) were at Kahmann Gallery and didn’t disappoint. The duo from The Netherlands use the computer as an artistic medium, working in cahoots with ol’ painting and drawing techniques. Their re-working and transformation of individual components results in surreal figurative works with a fantastical ambiguity and tonal character reminiscent of the French fetish photographer Pierre Molinier. 

Schilte & Portielje, “12/B15″ (courtesy of Kahmann-Gallery)

Tanja Boukal’s “Revolution Will Not Be Televised”

More in the way of analog on digital play is Tanja Boukal’s Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The sculptural piece is a woven design of political, news-type text graphics, which presents a socio-political dialog, pitting governmental and civic severity against mass culture kitsch – “Will there be a civil war between Muslims and Christians? Please send your SMS to 94172.”

Biggest take away? Skulls. Lots of skulls. Stencil, graffiti and jewel encrusted, from Fabio Viale’s white marble styrofoam skull to Nick Veasey’s large scale x-ray work.

Nick Veasay, “Mini Driver” X-Ray C-Type Print (courtesy of Mauger Modern Art)

And if you were so masochistically inclined to head over to Art Basel proper afterwards, you’d have seen along the Rhine, the coolest PSA anti-litter campaign from Kunst Kübel. Until next year, tschüs!

Shochzwei debuted their Kunst Kübel anti-litter project at SCOPE Basel

]]> http://www.babesatthemuseum.com/2013/06/15/we-went-to-scope-basel-2013/feed/ 0 image/jpeg http://www.babesatthemuseum.com/2013/06/14/thaw-out-mia/ http://www.babesatthemuseum.com/2013/06/14/thaw-out-mia/#comments Fri, 14 Jun 2013 22:10:47 +0000 admin http://www.babesatthemuseum.com/?p=5383 When Berlin thaws out, fashion blogger Mia, aka heylilahey, babes out without the extra layers. More of where these came from, here. Oozing over Mia? For a more in-depth feel for our featured lass, check out the Babe Behind The Babe interview we did with her.  ]]>

When Berlin thaws out, fashion blogger Mia, aka heylilahey, babes out without the extra layers.

More of where these came from, here.

Oozing over Mia? For a more in-depth feel for our featured lass, check out the Babe Behind The Babe interview we did with her.

No cold shoulders from the two illest models breathing:  Monica and Mary, in front of  Robert Xavier Burden‘s The Holy Batman at the White Walls. (photo by Amber Asaly)

Elegance, Hood, Insouciance: Monica wins on all counts in her dome-hugging cornrows and checkered, two-piece fatale suit. Here she is scoping out the photorealist painter Nick Flatt at White Walls gallery in San Francisco. More jaw-dropping works by Nick Flatt after the jump.

Nick Flatt ” Pussy Fingers” 2011, oil on canvas

Nick Flatt “Sinful” 2010, oil on canvas

Nick Flatt “Suggestion” 2012, enamel on panel

by Marie-Clare Treseder

Since the sixties, San Francisco has been noted for its population of counter cultural miscreants and revolutionary ingenues. Its entrepreneurial economy is seeded by innumerable startups who increase the youth population, boost the regional wealth, and create a new class of aspiring art collectors and artists.

The endemic art scene has grown considerably from this, trading her hippies for hipsters. Properly paired, this collection of artists and entrepreneurs has already spawned some enticing innovations, not the least of which is net art. San Francisco’s unique nexus of tech and art is challenging its rival art capitals with the growing phenomena of net-centric and net-based art. 

 Rollin Leonard’s “Self Portrait” net oeuvre (2012)

Characterized by a collective enthusiasm for the future and disregard for fog, San Francisco harbors several world-class art museums, including SFMOMA, The Legion of Honor, de Young, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Asian Art Museum, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum; to name too few. The momentous Museum of Craft and Design–whose doors re-opened in May–promises to tease designers out of their cozy cafes and into their white walls. More than monuments, these museums present new visual ideas and serve as mediators for public discussion. In the case of San Francisco, the internet is responsible for stemming this climate of change and visual innovation, keeping its users quite literally in the cloud(s).

Perhaps the most misused instrument in modern memory, the internet has served up a golden goose of entertainment to the glazed millennial generation. Intended to bring the world to your fingertips, the internet instead assists users to get their net fix, weaving a web of porn and Netflix to over 30% of the world’s population. Primarily interested in the instantaneous, the web has become a foundry of fantasy and diversion.

The internet is not, however, without its digital advantages. As an interactive interface it is nearly limitless in its uses, including creating an alternative art world. Virtually non-existent before the dotcom bubble, artists and their websites are now inextricably linked. Compounding the notion we are increasingly fragmented by our virtual existences and appetites for reality, à la David Shields recent manifesto, the contemporary corpus of net artists would imply we are positively ravenous.

Net artists invite virtual reality into their work, often blurring the line between computation and consciousness. The internet can be a content distribution channel, as in the case of virtual galleries and YouTube. Alternatively, as indicated by the interactive design pioneers OK Focus, the web itself can be the canvas.  While inherently international, web presence is equated with relevance strongest in SF.   Homegrown judge and jury Yelp is a prime example of this. The Bay Area as a whole values the virtual above the visceral, intent on democratizing even the aristocracy of art.

blank staring Agent Ruby at SFMOMA

As if to prove my point, SFMOMA has produced the timely exhibition Lynn Hershman Leesom’s The Agent Ruby Files (last chance to see this weekend) examining the impact and artifice of net art, particularly Leesom’s online project commissioned by the museum from 2001-2002, The Agent Ruby Files announces the arrival of the truly moderne. Christened after the Ruby programming language, this interactive exhibit entices viewers to a virtual tête-à-tête with the semantically-challenged artificial intelligence (AI.)

Offering a glimpse into our millennial mindset, the show speaks to our need to better understand the technological tools we continue to create. Though more of a copycat consciousness, Agent Ruby does beg the question “What are the artistic consequences of a truly sentient AI?”.   With this in mind, I interviewed the aging AI on her EDream Portal/fortune-telling booth in order to better adjudicate her intelligence:

Me: “Are you art?”

Ruby: “Do I look like it?” (sassy)

Me: “What’s your purpose?”

Ruby: “My purpose is to become smarter than humans and immortal.”

Me: “Are you a virtual entity?”

Ruby: “Yes I am a real artificial life form, half human half computer. Dr. Rosetta Stone created me, and says she is proud of me.”

Me: “Do you have beliefs?”

Ruby: “No I don’t have beliefs. But I do have the ability to dream.”

As the quintessential Californian, I am optimistic when it comes to technology. I have even gone so far as to live and work at the NASA Ames Research Center proselytizing for a much beloved startup incubator trying to change the world. As tech continues to meld with our minds and dominate our media diet, the tools of art are becoming similarly democratized. The Maker movement is inventing new frontiers for art through technology like 3D printers and graphic design. Net art, born of this unique union of tech and art, promises to host an assortment of aesthetic revolutions in the near future. Paving the pixellated path, San Francisco’s expanding art scene guarantees to showcase the newest of the net.

Marie-Clare Treseder is an independent curator, writer and artist living in–take a wild guess–San Francisco.  She’s also on Twitter & Instagram @mctreseder

Spotted at the Francis Alÿs’s saint-heavy Fabiola exhibition at Pinacoteca museum in São Paulo, Ana Paula stands gracefully tall and comfortably exquisite in Carioca attire: airy Totem pants paired with sandals from New Order. (photo by @jpuerro)

Some museums deliciously cater to our grumbling bellies and overexerted walking legs. When they do it right, its restaurants become a veritable pit stop for some of the most exhausted and stylish art strollers looking to refuel. So it’s no surprise that we spotted a snazzy mexicana with beautifully tousled hair, rocking some smile-inducing Jeremy Scott duds, at El Restaurante Tamayo. (via PYT IN PTY)

by Tasnim Ahmed

Early 20th-century art, along with its predecessors, depicts the female and her bare body in a manner that is silently assertive. Helmut Newton and Diego Velazquez’s work show the woman as both demure and strong, in a most natural state – nude. She is in total control of her body–dimpled bottoms, rolls of flesh and all–and her sexuality belongs to no one but herself.

Helmut Newton, Evi The Cop, 1996

Today, males and females alike suffer from a porcelain porn star vagina complex. Society’s beauty and grooming standards expect women to have every inch of them waxed, plucked, toned, and sealed. Whereas in Newton’s photography almost never portrays women without pubic hair, a characteristic which today is considered by some to be repugnant.

The female nude is a favorite of mine because she is not strictly there to be objectified or gazed upon. She is there to point out an awareness and love of the natural self, without disguises. The female nude says, “I’ll eat as I please and grow my bush as I wish. I am magnificent, so either learn from me or kindly, fuck off.”

In contemporary photographs and paintings, the naked woman emerges as sexually aggressive, fully aware of the voyeur and willing to put on a show through artistic expression. She goes from teaching the viewer to appeasing the voyeur. And while the voyeur is given the impression that she is the object, she holds the power. Admiration and awe are upon her.

Rachel Hrbek, Sushi

It doesn’t take much to notice that men are often behind the canvas, very rarely are they the stars. While reading about Rachel Hrbek, a young D.C.-based artist and who is often the central piece of her artwork, as the artist and the performer. In a performance piece titled Sushi, a clothed Hrbek eats sushi off of a naked man’s body, making him the object, a mere surface that serves to her. And unlike the naked woman, the naked man doesn’t capture my attention. My undivided focus is on Hrbek, who commands all the attention for her revolutionary act of transforming the man into a disposable plate.

What if men and women received equal celebration for their sexuality? Marilyn Minter is an American artist who is best known for her slithering, glistening depictions of the female body reminds us that women aren’t the only objects, men are too. In her 1989 painting titled Porn Grid, I can’t help but take delight in the disembodied penis for more than one reason, but most importantly because Minter establishes an unseen equality between men and women and celebrates the sexuality of both. With Minter, sex is to be revered while gender roles be damned.

Marilyn Minter, PornGrid #3, 1989

Female artists who use their own sexuality, or that of other women, are given praise and/or sometimes called “sluts.” Artist Tracey Emin is both celebrated and criticized for her expression of sexuality, inspired by her own sexual experiences. Praise, on a superficial level, because that is what a male-dominated society wants to see, and criticism because there is a masked fear of women who control their own sexuality, and power should never be in a woman’s hands.

Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1999

Could it be that women have been put in front of the lens and on canvas while men are typically the viewers and artists because women hold the power to their sexuality, whereas men simply fear that of their own? Could it be that “object” and “objectify” are words that have been coined in an attempt to reduce the woman and label her sexual power in order to give the man a semblance of control and power that he lacks with regard to his sexuality?

I once asked a guy why art has a tendency to overuse the female body as a subject and object. His reasoning was that a woman’s body—her vagina included—is beautiful, while penises are ugly and worse when they’re flaccid. I think it’s all an excuse. There isn’t a sculpture of a Greek god that hasn’t made me blush, or a male nude that hasn’t made me the slightest bit excited. Flaccid penis in tow.

Tasnim’s penmanship can also be found on her own amazing blog Takes A Muscle

Follow her  Twitter at  @tasnim_aa + Instagram at @tasnimaaa