In What We Trust

A current exhibition at the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw aims to show America's religious diversity. Instead, it reveals the homoeroticism in Christian imagery trough the eyes of contemporary artists. 

Read my review in the Columbia Journal here.

Generic Art Solutions, Pieta, 2008

Scene from The Septemberists (2006) by Anthony Goicolea - in full here

David LaChapelle, Jesus is My Homeboy, 2003

And a propos, Małgorzata Szumowska's topical film which won Best Queer Feature at the Berlin Film Festival this year. 

W Imię (In the Name of), 2013 - Trailer

Fit For A King

"Mummy, is that gold inside the tree?"

The little boy runs up to Spazio di Luce, an 8-metre horizontal scultpure by Giuseppe Penone standing just in front of the Chateau de Versailles.

French mother huffs. "Mais non. Think about it - they wouldn't do such a thing!" 

Well, they did. Except that the tree is not a tree, but a mould made from bronze, cut up and reassembled by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone. 

“What interests me is when the work of man starts to become nature”, admits Penone in an interview.  The twelve installations on the grounds of the Chateau are in fact trompe-oeils that straddle the line between art and nature. But they are also subversively playful, almost supernatural. Stones resting on branches like cotton balls? A flying tree? 

“I think that the tree is a perfect sculpture”, says the artist. 

In my mind - as night descends and the tourists leave - the ghost of Versailles walk the grounds and agree. 

A Night in Palermo

It is loud & messy & warm, and there is no difference between inside and outside.

In the narrow streets you peer through curtains and see families, half-naked, watching TV or cutting onions. Old ladies sit outside on plastic chairs, chatting, a fairy-lit Madonna glittering above their heads.

Almost everything is in ruins. You think a house is ready for death with doors barely held-up by beams when a couple emerges from its depths, enlaced.
You will fantasize about living in that palazzo only to approach and see it hollow like an eaten tooth.

It smells of garbage boiled by heat. But there there is more, for finer noses: cooking, jasmine bushes, the smell of heated bricks. At night it's balmy. The temperature is that of your skin. There is no difference between inside and outisde.

photography by Letizia Battaglia

Getting Over It

Like an appendix to the previous post, my estival hangover has been fading.
Too bad then, that I discovered German photographer Herbert List. Like legendary Wilhelm von Gloeden before him, List was fascinated by Italy and Greece, and their local resources of male beauty. But as a member of the photo agency Magnum he also worked with actors, artists and all important fashion magazines of the day.
Can you see how he influenced Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber?

The only photo by List I could find that contained the cold is this. And somehow, it made me look forward to it.

For Now

Yes, summer is over
You no longer strip to merge with the air.

You no longer
Search the shade
Fan your face
Vandalize with pee or paint.

Soon your thighs will jitter in bed
Sweat reserved for rarer efforts.
For now.

Le Corbusier

Revamping and De-gaying

For those who'd been starting to give up on Woody Allen, Blue Jasmine will come as a surprise. Because Allen's latest - and fourthy-third - feature is without doubt the director's best since at least Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008).

Blue Jasmine (2013) Trailer

That is, first of all, thanks to Cate Blanchett. In this revamped version of Tennessee Williams' Streetcar Named Desire, she excells as Blanche a.k.a. Jasmine, a fallen Park Avenue wife who needs to move in with her sister, Ginger. Like in Botho Strauss' play Gross und Klein, Blanchett does a brilliantly subtle psychotic. 

Cate Blanchett as the delusional Jasmine...

...and as deranged Lotte in Big and Small

But if this film avoids being another tedious digression on European life, it's because Allen is back in the US for the first time in a long time. And adapting an existing tale to contemporary American life works: The clash of classes is as relevant in 21st century post-crisis America as when the Streetcar rattled through New Orleans in 1947. 

Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

The only regret is the utter de-gaying of Williams’ story. Allen turns Blanche’s ex-boyfriend, who killed himself because he was gay, into a husband who killed himself because he was convicted for financial fraud. Even worse, the sexual power of Stanley Kowalski, played by Marlon Brando in the stage and film adaptations, finds no substitute in the somewhat failed (and very badly-dressed) masculinity of Chili, Ginger's boyfriend. Fortunately and unfortunately, this says more about how things have changed since Tennessee Williams than it does about Woody Allen's new film. 

Summer Snaps

1 - Levanzo, an island off Sicily
2 - Naomi Campbell for Harper's Bazaar, 1994
3 - Polish feminist art: Katarzyna Kozyra, Men's Bathhouse 
4 - Małgosia Bela by Glen Luchford for Self Service F/W 2011
5 - Flo Wales Bonner