Monthly Archive for June, 2009

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The Digest. 06.22.09.

By c-monster on June 22, 2009 in C-Monster, Painting, Peru and The Digest. 5 Comments

Sin Título (Untitled), 1971 an oil-on-canvas work by the Arequipa-born Bill Caro at the Lima Art Museum (MALI) exhibit at the Fundación Wiese gallery in downtown Lima. (Photo by C-M.)

***Support Fictional Hardcore Heavy Metal Bands!! Make a donation to my buddy Abe Lincoln Jr.’s latest art prank/project: Fugue State Records.***

“The cool new brand that enables you to make real contemporary pieces of art from the comfort of your own home.” Sublime. (Rebel:Art.)
MoMA’s fourth and fifth floors are vagina-deficient. The Saltz-Master is on the case.
Plus: the Saltz-Master on the Venice Biennale: “Impersonal, administratively adept, highly professionalized, formally generic, mildly gregarious, aesthetically familiar, totally knowing, cookie-cutter.”
¡Art Industry Smackdown, Motherfucker Edition! Geoff Dyer versus Peter Schjeldahl over Schjeldahl’s comments about Dyer’s book. I have no way of knowing if that’s really a Schjeldahl comment at the bottom of the post, but who cares. It’s juicy! (Anaba.)
Oh, do they want those Elgin Marbles back. Photo Essay: The new Acropolis Museum. More on the museum here. (A.J.)
Here’s hoping this British TV program arrives Stateside: Today’s Nude.
Michelangelo’s supposed first painting. So totally demonic.
In the O.C.: High drama over some plein-air paintings sold all-too-secretly by OCMA.
The Art Industrial Average is Low: NYC’s art galleries brace for a very quiet summer; Chicago Art Institute lays off 3% of its staff; Gugg lays off 25. Plus: Collectors score deals at Basel. (A.J., A.O., AFC.)
Geek Out! The St. Louis Art Museum to convert one of its galleries into a public paintings conservation lab. So rad.
My Papa’s Waltz: In honor of Father’s Day (belatedly), Another Bouncing Ball mashes up a poem by Theodore Roethke with images by Charles LeDray. The result: pure awesomeness.
Antony Gormley’s terracotta army. Whoa. More here. (A.O.)
Robert Indiana’s giant EAT sign to be lit up in Maine after 44 year hiatus.
Michael Kamber on how to be a conflict photographer. An incredible story accompanied by an even more incredible photo essay.
Oh the possibilities: Tin Eye, a search engine (still in early beta stages) that lets you find images using other images.
A Daily Dose of Architecture takes a tour of NYC High Line. And took lots of pictures!
What would Sarah Palin think? A competition for the design of a road connecting Russia to Alaska via the Bering Strait…sponsored by Sun Myung Moon. With relentlessly cheesy propaganda video — touting it as a road to world peace — to boot!
Wanted: Buyer for leaky fixer-upper. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House is for sale in L.A.
The New York Times Magazine on building a better prison. (architecture.mnp.)
Your moment of Louis Vuitton, Mexicali style.

Tags: bill caro, lima, mali.

Please stand by…

By c-monster on June 21, 2009 in Announcements and C-Monster. Closed

Photo by Roadsidepictures.

…we will soon return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Final Peru Dispatch: My Lima food orgy.

By c-monster on June 19, 2009 in C-Monster, Food, Peru and Travel. 15 Comments

Classic ceviche, made with flounder, red onions and hot peppers and served with sweet potato and Andean corn at El Veredico de Fidel, in La Victoria. (Photos by C-M.)

Now it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty: The food. Lima, hands down, serves up the best food in the Americas. I’m not even gonna debate it. I’ve been to Mexico and eaten the seven moles of Oaxaca and sucked down tacos as if the world were about to end. I’ve worked my way through menus at all kinds of places, both high-falutin’ and not, in spots such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami. But, Peru, at every level — from the corner lunch joint to the A-List world-class eatery — offers such a mind-melting variety of spectacular dishes, that you could literally spend a month in the country and still not begin to cover everything there is to eat. Not convinced? Well, I’ve prepared a little photo essay…

Special thanks to my buddy Howard for flying to Lima to consume many of these dishes with me. And to Arturo Rojas for leading me to some of these spots in the first place. You guys rock. Hard.

Click on images to supersize. C-Monster.net is not responsible for any damages incurred to your keyboard as a result of involuntary drooling. Vegetarians: You might want to stop reading here.

Continue reading ‘Final Peru Dispatch: My Lima food orgy.’

Tags: anticucho, astrid y gaston, bembos, causa, ceviche, coca sour, el chinito, el veridico de fidel, food porn, gaston acurio, la mar cebicheria, lima, peruvian food, pescados capitales, tanta.

Peru Dispatch: Lima the surreal.

By c-monster on June 19, 2009 in C-Monster, Peru and Travel. 3 Comments

La ciudad y los perros: A mutt snoozes in front of an assault tank guarding the Presidential palace in downtown. (Photos by C-M.)

For most of my life, I’ve been making regular sojourns to Lima to visit my father’s family, a collection of hyper-nostalgic oddballs and eccentrics that have always led me to believe that Gabriel García Márquez doesn’t write fiction. But on this occasion, on assignment for a travel guide, I really had an opportunity to explore the city. And explore it, I did — from ceviche dives in La Victoria to the skulls of saints at the Santo Domingo Church in downtown to the high-end lounges of Barranco, where Lima’s beautiful people arrive to sip coca leaf sours and show off their money.

Lima is no thing of beauty. It clings precariously to a set of dusty, desert cliffs and is bathed in a perpetual fog six months out of the year. Much of its architecture is unremarkable, an assortment of concrete bunkers that appear to have been imported from 1960s East Germany. It is grimy. It is noisy. It is relentless in its sensory stimulation — from the food, which comes in a rainbow palette of nuclear colors, to the infinite supply of smog-belching buses, each of which is armed with a guy that hangs out the window and hollers the route: Arequipa, República, Abancaaaayyy.

But peel away the top layers and underneath you will find a city that is a novel waiting to be written. (And it has, by everyone from Sebastián Salazar Bondy to Mario Vargas Llosa to Daniel Alarcón.) It is in Lima that 2,000 year-old adobe pyramids sit silently in residential neighborhoods. It is in Lima that Andean cuy is doused in soy sauce and served Peking-style. And it is in Lima that well-to-do tennis moms and Ayacucho grandmothers in big skirts and braids all come together. It is a city imbued with a legacy of plunder and violence, but which has inherited all the pomp of a former viceregal capital. It is both ridiculous and sublime; one of the most preposterous settlements on earth. So, in homage to Salazar Bondy, C-Mon presents: Lima, the Surreal.

Click on images to supersize. Continue reading ‘Peru Dispatch: Lima the surreal.’

Tags: lima, surreal.

Lima, Day 26: Narchitecture, deconstructed.

By c-monster on June 16, 2009 in Architecture, C-Monster, Narchitecture and Peru. Closed

Mirrored windows, neo-classical mini-facade embedded onto larger sort-of neo-classical facade, chopped-up classical columns, Roman-style statues of naked people…and a Peruvian buffet! All for only S/35 (almost US$12). By jove, I think we have narchitecture! (Photo by C-M.)

Tags: lima, Narchitecture.

Photos: Dominican artists Quintapata at the Centro Cultural de España in Lima.

By c-monster on June 14, 2009 in Art, C-Monster, Drawing, Installation, Mixed Media, Peru and Sculpture. 5 Comments

Boobies!!! A whole wall of them. The piece is titled Muro, 2009 by Raquel Paiewonsky. (Photos by C-M.)

While my mission on this trip to Lima has been to eat and to eat again, I have managed to sneak in a few visits to art galleries between degustaciones. The best show thus far has been an exhibit of contemporary Dominican art that I happened to catch at the Centro Cultural de España on the Plaza Washington, near downtown. The show, Mover la roca (Move the Rock), features new works by the D.R. arts collective Quintapata, whose members are Tony Capellán, Pascal Meccariello, Raquel Paiewonsky, Jorge Pineda and Belkis Ramírez. Overall, a highly interesting show. And way better than the couch art I’ve been admiring at many of the city’s commercial art galleries.

Click on images to supersize.

Continue reading ‘Photos: Dominican artists Quintapata at the Centro Cultural de España in Lima.’

Tags: belkis ramirez, ccelima, centro cultural de espana, jorge pineda, lima, pascal meccariello, quintapata, raquel paiewonsky, tony capella.

The Good, the Bad, the Rude & the Toxic: San Suzie presents the 1st Annual C-Monster.net Venice Biennial Awards.

By SanSuzie on June 12, 2009 in Art, Italy, San Suzie and Venice Biennale. 7 Comments

Obey Biennale: Taste the hype. (Photos by San Suzie.)

We are just back from the City of the Doges where this summer’s artapalooza kicked off with the 53rd Prosecco-soaked edition of La Biennale di Venezia. The show, which bore the very important title Making Worlds consisted of 38 exhibit spaces in the Arsenale and Giardini, plus a whopping 45 collateral event sites scattered throughout the city’s labyrinthine streets. This was in addition to numerous must-see museums, including the fabulous Pinault Collection at Palazzo Grassi and its new contemporary art venue at Punta della Dogana.

We spent at least a third of the preview days simply trying to get from one place to another, searching the maze of alleys and canals for obscure out-of-the-way locales like the Palazzo Rota Ivancich, the official venue of the Mexican Pavillion. But, all in all, we we were nicely surprised by the offerings: free food, art swag, yacht-and-people-watching, and, oh yeah, the city itself, which was once the wealthiest in all of Europe — and is therefore filled with masterpieces by 16th century heavyweights such as Titian, Veronese, Bellini and Palladio.

Of course, no artapalooza comes without annoyances, ironies, ridiculosity and even a few moments of sheer, breathtaking joy. Therefore, we present you with the First Annual C-Mon awards to celebrate the mother-of-all biennales, highlighting the good, the bad, the ugly, the incomprehensible and the just plain too damn much.

The envelope please…

Continue reading ‘The Good, the Bad, the Rude & the Toxic: San Suzie presents the 1st Annual C-Monster.net Venice Biennial Awards.’

Tags: Venice Biennale.

Lima, Day 20: Peruvian dogs, three ways.

By c-monster on June 11, 2009 in C-Monster, Peru and Sublime ridiculosity. 2 Comments

Peruvian dogs, a.k.a. perros calatos (“naked dogs”), Chancay edition. At the Museo Andrés del Castillo. (Photos by C-M.)

Moche version, at the Museo de la Nación.

The real deal, rocking a sweatshirt, near the ruins at Pachacamac. Sublime.

Tags: chancay, moche, perros calatos, perros peruanos, peruvian dogs.

Lima, Day 19: Crumbling Modernism.

By c-monster on June 9, 2009 in Architecture, C-Monster and Peru. 5 Comments

The Cine Tauro: Musta been something in its day. (Photos by C-M.)

Lima is not kind to its buildings. The city spends half the year moistened by a persistent fog known as garúa, under skies that look like styrofoam. There’s dust: a pervasive influx from from the surrounding desert, mixed with the soot produced by an endless parade of smog-belching buses. And there are regular earthquakes, end-of-the-world affairs that regularly clear patches of the grid.

Even so, the city retains some striking Modernist buildings. Even if, sometimes, they are little more than a shell. Above is the Cine Tauro, designed by Walter Weberhofer in 1960, residing on a grimy corner on the west side of downtown. This was where stylish limeños once came to see the latest releases, before heading off to El Chinito for over-stuffed sandwiches. The country’s economic crisis in the 1980s (aided and abetted by the internal conflict) sent the locals running for the suburbs. Now the Cine Tauro is a decaying porn palace, a spot where solo men pop in for a skin flick and a hand job. (Though, two years ago, artist Sandra Nakamura did use a piece of the sign as part of a temporary gallery installation.)

As the city works on restoring its downtown, it’d be nice if they didn’t forget about structures like this. Neo-colonial is nice. And it’s great to see the areas around the main plazas looking spiffy. But how rad would it be to catch a flick in this building? Preferably without getting stuck to the seat.

Click on images to supersize.

Continue reading ‘Lima, Day 19: Crumbling Modernism.’

Tags: cine tauro, lima, modernism.

Remembering Peru’s Internal Conflict: Yuyanapaq, at the Museo Nacional in Lima.

By c-monster on June 8, 2009 in C-Monster, Museums, Peru and Photography. 6 Comments

Celestino Ccente, a campesino from the region of Ayacucho, after being treated for machete wounds received during an attack by Sendero Luminoso, 1983. (Photo by Oscar Medrano.)

There are exhibits that hit you in the gut like a sucker punch. Yuyanapaq: Para Recordar, at the Museo de la Nación in Lima, is one of them. Located on the 6th floor of the museum, a Soviet-style concrete bunker that lords over Avenida Javier Prado Este in San Borja, the show was put together by the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission. It explores the 20 years of violence, beginning in 1980, suffered primarily by poor campesinos throughout the country during what is euphemistically described as Peru’s “internal conflict.”

It’s difficult to sum up in a few sentences what exactly happened during that period. Like so much of Peruvian history, it is a fantasmagoria of violence and obfuscation. The conflict was a protracted struggle between two leftist insurgency groups — Sendero Luminoso and the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA) — against the Peruvian government, which had little idea how to manage a guerilla war. Caught in the middle were tens of thousands of poor campesinos, who suffered massacres, torture and disappearances at the hands of the heavy-handed national police, in addition to the regular bouts of terror inflicted by the insurgency groups. (Sendero Luminoso in its later days was particularly renowned for its bloody tactics, especially against union leaders and other activists.) An exact death toll will never be known. Some estimates are as high as 70,000.

The exhibit, which consists primarily of black and white photography from throughout the era, was first staged by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission beginning in 2003 and has been housed at the Museo de la Nación since last year. It is absolutely breathtakingly riveting. If you’re anywhere near Lima, this is an absolute must-see.

Museo de la Nación, Javier Prado Este 2466 in San Borja. Tuesday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.

Click on images to view large.
Continue reading ‘Remembering Peru’s Internal Conflict: Yuyanapaq, at the Museo Nacional in Lima.’

Tags: lima, museo de la nacion, para recordar, yuyanapaq.