Archive for the 'Sebastian Puig' Category

On the town in S.F.: It’s all about Artsy Fartsy Urinals.

Published by Sebastian Puig on December 17, 2009 in San Francisco, Sculpture, Sebastian Puig, Sublime ridiculosity and Travel.


Piss on this: Clark Sorensen’s over-the-top urinals. (Photos by Sebastian Puig.)

On a recent visit to San Francisco’s once nitty gritty Mission district, we paid a visit to the studio of Clark Sorensen, a ceramicist known for his outrageous glazed and high-fired floral urinals. Interestingly, Sorensen was raised as a Mormon in Utah (and once proselytized for the Latter Day Saints in France) but found himself as a pinko leftist queer in San Francisco where he came to his senses, and he has recently let his politics creep into his work. In addition to producing some highly unusual urinals (ever tinkle on a cala lilly?), he also has a series titled Down the Drain: The Legacy of George W. Bush — a fitting urinary tribute to those eight lousy years. There’s no telling what his next series will be devoted to, but may we kindly suggest the addition of hysteria-monger and kooky gold shiller Glenn Beck.


Take that, Dubya!

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Hydra Workshop: Where art parties and errant donkeys collide.

Published by Sebastian Puig on July 31, 2009 in Galleries, Greece, Sebastian Puig, Silkscreen and Social Diary.


While the dead sleep, the crowd parties hearty outside. (Photos by Sebastian Puig.)

It must be summer, because the artsy jet-set and their Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses have materialized in abundance on the Greek Isle of Hydra, like the wild capers that grow from the cracks all over the island’s stone stairways. This past week’s super-event was the summer show at the Hydra Workshop, a waterfront art space that puts together an annual exhibit inspired by the collection of London-based art patron Pauline Karpidas, who flew in le tout New York (and demi-Dallas) for this year’s event. Co-curated by mega-gallerist Sadie Coles, the young artist featured this year was “bad boy” New York artiste Nate Lowman, who was in attendance with non other than petite amie Mary-Kate Olsen. (Coles’ hubby, fashion photographer Juergen Teller was also there — with nary a Marc Jacobs model in sight.)

The art this year was all about being self-referential: silk-screened portraits à-la-Warhol featured all the friends-of-Lowman crowding the Hydra waterfront (and saving everyone the trouble of having to look in the mirror). Many of the images were based on photographs snapped by John Shand-kydd (cousin-by-marriage to Diana Spencer), who, to keep things really meta, was also there, snapping away at the proceedings.

For more on this little fiesta, check out Rachel Chandler’s (self-referential) report at The Moment.

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Sebastian Puig: It’s summer in Paris, and the living ain’t easy.

Published by Sebastian Puig on July 6, 2009 in Painting, Paris and Sebastian Puig.


Way better than Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth: the summertime crowds at the Louvre. (Photos by Sebastian Puig.)

Once upon a time, in our youth, we were asked to write for a companion guide to a famous novel by Dan Brown. We visited many locations in the book and wrote with some authority (being versed in art conservation matters) about the restoration of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan. But we wrote from a distance about the Caravaggio holdings at the Louvre.

Our challenge was to figure out which painting in the Grand Gallerie could have been yanked off the wall during a key murder scene. We went for the fabulous Death of the Virgin (and luckily, so did the movie-makers, who turned the novel into a Tom Hanks romp, complete with straightened hair). But having just been to Paris to visit said gallery in person, we think that we may have made a mistake…

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From Paris: Sebastian Puig checks out Kandinsky and Calder at the Pompidou.

Published by Sebastian Puig on June 29, 2009 in Art, Museums, Paris and Sebastian Puig.


Now what the heck does it say up there? (Surreptitious photos by Sebastian Puig all taken with special Get Smart® shoe phone.)

Q: What’s better than SUPERTITLES at the opera?
A: REALLY BIG WALL TEXT REALLY HIGH UP at an art museum!

We loved seeing the exhaustive (and exhausting) Kandinsky retrospective at the Beaubourg, a.k.a. Centre Georges Pompidou: the bold splotches of color, the whimsical shapes, all that kinetic motion from the peripatetic 20th-century master whose career took him from the Blue Rider through the Bauhaus. The only thing that left us puzzled was the wall text, which was writ LARGE and placed WAAAY up the wall. I suppose it’s so that even if visitors are stacked five-deep and can’t see the art, they can at least read the name of the painting over the tousled heads of fellow art-gawkers. Maybe some U.S. museums will catch on to this user-friendly trick. The Guggenheim will get its opportunity in September, when the show travels to New York.

Calder at the Pompidou is up through July 20; Kandinsky, through Aug. 10.

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Hydra Dispatch: Sebastian Puig reports on Matthew Barney’s latest.

Published by Sebastian Puig on June 22, 2009 in Conceptual, Events, Greece, Installation, Performance art and Sebastian Puig.


I’ll have the shark. Well done. (Photos by Sebastian Puig and U.B. Morgan.)

Take one dead shark. Add a submerged coffin. Throw in a Jeff Koons-designed yacht. What do you have? A Matthew Barney extravaganza on the Greek Isle of Hydra, a renowned, car-free artsy fartsy hideout where everyone who is anyone goes everywhere by foot or burro. Hosted by collector/industrialist/Koons yacht owner Dakis Joannou, the performance/party/shark roast combined various events into one hyperreal Mediterranean spectacle.

The first installation was in a former slaughterhouse on Hydra’s Mandraki Bay, where Barney and painter-of-the-minute Elizabeth Peyton collaborated on a little event called Blood of Two, sponsored by the Athens-based Deste Foundation Center for Contemporary Art. Sadly, it did not involve fileting Björk. But it did involve getting up at dawn to watch a bunch of local workers dredge up a glass coffin from the Aegean that contained a Peyton-painted portrait of Barney. (So meta!) After the ceremonial lifting, said coffin/vitrine — very Jules Verne — was carried along a rocky path to the slaughterhouse, where the artsy jet set could admire its contents. Naturally, the Barney/Peyton team filmed the whole parade, which mimics a local Easter event in which an icon is carried into the sea and out again. (So culturally relevant!)

Accompanying the procession? One shark, dead, to be sacrificed to the ravenous culture vultures at an evening reception. This consisted of about 500 attendees sitting at the longest table we’ve ever seen (seriously, you couldn’t see the ends from the middle) all of whom diligently gnawed on the charred member of the phylum Chordata in the name of art. Naturally, it tasted like chicken. OK, not really. We didn’t eat the shark. There wasn’t enough to go around. But I’m sure it was delicious. Especially with a little tsatsiki on the side.

To read more on Matthew Barney’s shark party, check out The Moment, ArtForum and Art Observed.

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