Have no fear, Crimea! Jared Leto and his shitty band have arrived to Kiev for a concert. There he is — the actor who shouted out “the dreamers” in “the” Ukraine during his Oscar acceptance speech (which was censored by the Russian state-controlled television) – visiting what is left of the protest camps of Maidan and looking very concerned.

Here he is the actor bravely waving a Ukrainian flag. (He likes flags.)

Here is another photo of Jared Leto in Maidan, in brave proximity to a Russian flag.

Here is Jared Leto bravely leading the Kiev audience in a “Glory to Ukraine” chant and talking about how “other bands have cancelled their shows but there was no fucking way… no fucking way…” and the crowd erupts in cheers, as the country heads closer and closer to war.

Jared Leto: Always up on politics.

(Images: @Nepareizais, @HromadskeTV, @pablomediavilla)

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Fashion photographer Bill Cunningham shot the above image on the subway in the late ’60s/early ’70s, as part of an eight-year project on view at the New York Historical Society on March 14th. Shooting fellow photographer Editta Sherman in various authentic vintage ensembles scoured from vintage shops and auction houses, Cunningham his 1,800 historic locations in the city. Time and space is not coming apart at the seams. “Facades,” Bill Cunningham, Mar 14 – Jun 15,  New York Historical Society, Manhattan (Images: NY History.org, The Cut)

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New Orleans-born, New York-based artist Rashaad Newsome‘s practice is varied, ranging from video, sound and installation to a shade-inspired performance series that gets more polished every year. This is the latest incarnation of his vogue series. FIVE (The Drawing Center), as profiled by ARTnews, features several dancers whose dyed hair, nails, eyebrows and color contact lenses represent the five components of competitive vogue performance — “blue is hands performance, red is catwalk, pink is floor performance, yellow is spin dips, and green is duck walking.”

Using an adapted Xbox Kinect depth censor, Newsome then live-recorded the dancers’ isolated movements, combining them into digital collage and a 3D rendering tracking the choreography along their blue, red, pink, yellow and green paths. The path rendering will serve as a skeletal structure for Newsome’s upcoming sculpture. This adaptation “turn[s] what the dancers are doing into physical objects,” Newsome explained.

For more on the art form of vogueing and New York’s current ball culture scene, check out ANIMAL’s mini-documentary “Vogue Knights” by Citizen. P.S. We’d love to hook up Newsome and the crew with the makers of the RGBDToolkit!

The post Live Digital Painting With Vogueing and Xbox Kinect appeared first on ANIMAL.

“The old sent us to die and we hated them.” The new documentary Matt Wolf examines a most transient of identities. Teenager is comprised of archival footage of adolescent groups through the decades — flappers, punks, etc. — and anonymous narrations of once-teenagers. “We didn’t always exist.”  How did the youth (aged roughly 16-24) became labeled and recognized within a society that forces children behind factory machines and into the trenches of foreign countries? How did they avenge this oppression? What’s their fucking problem? Teenage opens March 14th on a limited release. Twitch has a positive review.

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From the artist/writer who founded the “New Aesthetic,” James Bridle’s project #Rorschcam taps into the CCTV cameras mounted all around the city.

You can now watch the Department of Transportation’s live feeds, from the construction on 9th Avenue and 49th Street to the midday traffic droll of Columbus Circle at Central Park, from as close to a block from our office to as far the Rockaways Blvd at Division – all in four mesmerizing mirrored pattern view.

The project is part of Bridle’s series that also includes kaleidoscopic views of Google maps  and Google Street View, developed during his residency Eyebeam.

The post New York’s CCTV Live Feeds Make Kaleidoscopic Video Art appeared first on ANIMAL.

If you’re confused about the health code status of those shiny roasted duck carcasses hanging in the windows of your favorite Chinatown joints in Manhattan, so is the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, according to a recent report in Open City.

Ten years ago, the DOH deemed the ducks in violation because the meat was not being kept at the adequate temperature of 140 degrees (which would dry out the meat). But then, the DOH changed its mind. Food and science writer Dave Arnold explained:

The fact of the matter is that they cook the crap out of it, the skin is dry, they baste it when it’s up on the thing so there’s very little water activity, and the stuff underneath has been killed pretty good.

And so, the shops could have choices other than being slapped over and over with hefty fines. They could get some display-only ducks or follow a very hard, NASA-enthused HACCP (hazard analysis and critical control point) protocol. While organizations like the Chinatown Business Improvement District (BID) are working to improve the local restaurants’ relationship with the DOH, however, “ethnic” restaurants around the city still earn lower grades. A greater conversation about food safety and the possibilities of relatively safe cuisine sacrificed to bureaucratic othering seems necessary.

Side note: The famous Per Se (that serves tastings of posh’ed up American food at $310 per person) has been recently slaughtered by the DOH with a C rating and 42 violations. (Image: @phy5ics)

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“The art world is still a boys’ club,” artist Mollie McKinley told ANIMAL. Before a nude performer bent herself over Z Behl’s giant-horned sculpture and the crowd flooded in, we crashed the instal of this year’s massive Brucennial group show in the Meatpacking Disctrict. Soon, the lines would stretch around the block in the freezing cold and the GoPro we taped to the ceiling would only catch the first hour of the four-hour opening reception, missing the packed tipsy mob it would become. Just like every Brucennial. But a little different. (See video interview above).

The biannual exhibition is organized by the Bruce High Quality Foundation (a much-lauded, subversive, celebrity-circle-infiltrating artist collective) and is historically inclusive (anyone can come hang up their work at set hours). The interchangeable “Bruces,” despite being anonymous (except for their celebrity dealer Vito Schnabel), appear to consist of only men. With the group shifting focus entirely to the free Bruce High Quality Foundation University, this is The Last Brucennial and all of the 600 participating artists are women.

“I understand some feminist complaints that maybe having it all women further marginalizes the female artist,” McKinley considered, ultimately siding with the impetus of the show.

Parsing through shows of such overwhelming proportions is a bit stressing, but despite the stress of inching around without knocking over Daniele Frazier’s Cover The Earth or grazing butt, there was some really enjoyable pieces among the horde. Inside the hair-draped solid transparent pink, the compact monitor part of Lena Imamura’s sculpture whirled and whined. It was glitchy, chaotic and upsetting, but also sleek and stroke-able, an aggressively tangible piece for something so heavily referencing ephemeral technology.

Then there were boobs. And boobs. And more boobs.

There were also tons of vaginas, vulvas, clitoral piercings, paintings of blowjobs and other genitalia of all sorts — even a famous one by Marilyn Minter — which is all fine, because thankfully, I only noticed one piece of the other kind of gendered art — the white-washed-cardboard-egg-crate insufferably-blunt-”symbolism” kind.

This one’s the best of the boobs — Faith Holland’s boobs.gif, a gif collage of asynchronously bouncing sets of boobs from the internet. Boobs.

Anya Liftig — the performance artist I too-hastily ranted at back in 2010 for crashing Marina Abramović’s MoMA staring thing – exhibited video of her great performance The Human Factor. It showed the artist cradling, groping, gutting and finally drinking the ground-up guts of a 14-pound salmon to David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.”

There were also a lot of paintings, as there is, sadly, always a lot of paintings everywhere, but kudos to this minimalist scrappy Kunst (“art”) by Phoebe Morris. Earlier this week at the Armory, someone big had another lofty steel/light “Gesamtkunstwerk” (“total work of art”/”ideal work of art”/”universal artwork”/”synthesis of the arts”/”comprehensive artwork”/”all-embracing art form”/”total artwork”). This one speaks better. Maybe I’m wrong about my blanket aversion to consumer culture-referencing art…

Amelia Bauer’s print is part of a series featuring Pagan spells ingredients. This one is For a Woman to Attract a Man She Desires with apple blossoms, geranium, jasmine, rose, rosemary, vanilla pods and vervain. It’s the subtlest of her Book of Shadows set — which has better with more garishly neon backlighting in clashing disco colors. Hey. Woo. Occult tableaux.

This is Antonia Marsh’s prominently plopped piece. Duchamp, something something. Something, toilet.

The show is open through April 4th. (Photos: Marina Galperina and Rhett Jones/ANIMALNewYork; Video: Marina Galperina and Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork)

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Slavoj, Midtown. (Photo: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork)

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A hand-painted mural by the iconic Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha (Hollywood Is a Verb, Another Hollywood Bubble Popped) is coming to the side of a building next to the High Line at West 22nd Street and Tenth Avenue, on May 6th, for a year.

Above is the Gagosian’s official rendering of what it might look like overlooking Chelsea’s elevated-train-tracks-turned-public-park — a frothy pink reiteration of his Honey, I Twisted Through More Damn Traffic Today pastel, Ruscha’s first public commission in New York.

That’s nice, but too California. Here are some better very subjective suggestions.

“It has an intimate quality and is a piece you can experience by just walking by it,” director of High Line Art Cecilia Alemani told the New York Times about the future Honey, I Twisted Through More Damn Traffic Today mural. It will be lit at night.

The High Line’s previous text-based public artworks included a neurotic, ambiguous Allen Rupppersberg and a great, glum David Shrigley on their West 18th Street billboard.

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ANIMAL’s feature Artist’s Notebook asks artists to show us their original “idea sketch” next to a finished piece. This week, Kate Wilson, talks about the Swiss and celestial inspirations of her Geometric Mechanics series for WAG – ”a mini 3-dimensional, single room gallery that fits into people’s pocket.”

In 2012, I began working on a series of drawings inspired by geometry titled Geometric Mechanics. In 2013, Chiara Passa commissioned a GIF version for the Widget Art Gallery.

My previous animations consisted of three short films produced using Dragronframe stop motion software. Thanks to Chiara’s invitation, the GIF world beckons.

When I made my geometric drawings and animations digital, it opened up a whole other plane of options.

My inspirations include architectural plans, images of space debris…

celestial forms…

chemistry diagrams…

……and the graphic design of Erik Nitsche…

…the Swiss born designer considered by many to be one of the pioneers of modern design.

Geometric Mechanics, created for the WAG, is a small-contained architecture where the invisible elements that hold everything together collide, merge, disappear and reappear.

KATE WILSON, GEOMETRIC MECHANICS (2013)

In May, Kate Wilson is participating in the Ontario College of Art & Design University Digital Painting Atelier in Toronto.

Previous Artist’s Notebook selects:

Artist’s Notebook: Eva Papamargariti
Artist’s Notebook: Jonas Lund
Artist’s Notebook: Brenna Murphy
Artist’s Notebook: Gordon Holden
Artist’s Notebook: Rafaël Rozendaal
Artist’s Notebook: Andrew Ohanesian
Artist’s Notebook: Jesse Darling
Artist’s Notebook: Tristan Perich
Artist’s Notebook: A. Bill Miller
Artist’s Notebook: Addie Wagenknecht
Artist’s Notebook: Lorna Mills
Artist’s Notebook: Rollin Leonard
Artist’s Notebook: Don Hertzfeldt

The post Artist’s Notebook:
Kate Wilson appeared first on ANIMAL.

“Dublin is covered in vomit. I am hiding inside,” Irish artist Saoirse Wall tells us, pointing to this nifty EarthCam live stream as proof.

So if you thought New York is getting into St. Patrick’s Day spirit rather early, it’s 8:30pm in Dublin and that’s what its famed tourist-beloved Temple Bar and the surrounding “cultural quarter” looks like.

This is what it looked like four hours ago.

And what does Lá Fhéile Pádraig mean to Saoirse? “Not much, really… Shamrock shakes? Most of my friends want to do something fun on Paddy’s Day, but usually planning is involved in figuring out something that avoids having to go into town.”

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SNOEMAN, SHAUN, AKS and ACNE leave their marks at the New Museum’s Pawel Althamer exhibit, legally. (Image: @thesnoeman)

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Saoirse and Seán, Midtown. (Photo: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork)

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“I created Mt. Gox as an actual landscape,” artist-render LaTurbo Avedon tells ANIMAL. “People can submit media to place it at or on the shrine.”

Avedon is an artist-render who exists only in on social media, Second Life and other interactive digital platforms that she chooses to inhabit. This is her first show at the online project space Webspace.Gallery.

By now, we’re used to communicating with LaTurbo without any need to tether her identity to someone’s specific bundle of physical flesh, offline somewhere. We’ve discussed her digital sculpting process, watched her dance around, attended the physical opening of her art show in Brooklyn (the artist was present via monitor) and hell… ok… drunk-messaged on Facebook for a few hours. This is an accessible if not common suspension of belief; LaTurbo doesn’t have to “exist” to exist.

Of course, the unfortunate customers of bitcoin’s oldest exchange feel differently about their money’s “existence.” The Tokyo-based crypto-currency exchange crashed suddenly last month, declared bankruptcy after loosing $520 million worth of bitcoin to security flaws, malware and hackers.

Mt. Gox also knowingly traded in nonexistent currency. Today, the previously shut down site had re-appeared, allowing users to log-in and check out the balances of their digital wallets, along with this less-than-comforting disclaimer:

Please be aware that confirming the balance on this site does not constitute a filing of rehabilitation claims under the civil rehabilitation procedure and note that the balance amounts shown on this site should also not be considered an acknowledgment by Mt. Gox of the amount of any rehabilitation claims of users.

It seems that Mt. Gox is still dead. And so, “Avedon has erected an equally virtual monument to Mt. Gox,” the gallery announces.

For the duration of the exhibition, visitors to webspace.gallery are encouraged to anonymously submit images and 3D objects to be left at the monument on their behalf. Every second day, new renders of the monument will be uploaded, showing the various acts of vigil, or vandalism requested by visitors. A video of the monument will be uploaded on April 14 to document the end-result of this month-long process.

“All the things people send will accumulate,” LaTurbo explains. Since launching the project over the weekend, visitors have already stopped to drop off artwork and other digital tokens.

“It looks like some sort of Vierkant-esque gradient panel and a Turner painting,” LaTurbo observes in her latest render.

You too can ”leave something at Mt. Gox” – an image (“a high-resolution image to be placed on or near the monument as print”), an object (“.obj files are accepted and will be placed on or near the monument as a physical object”) or a sticker (“.png files will be used for surface markings on or near the monument”).

You can also leave a carving (“single-colour handwritten notes will be carved into the monument’s surface”). This could technically function as graffiti. Now, who wants tag Mt. Gox’s tombstone?

(Images: LaTurbo Avedon)

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Here’s a great supercut that slices shots from Wes Anderson’s filmography straight down in half –right along the nose-line of all The Royal Tenenbaums, through every line of that stop-motion furry thing and… wait till you see The Grand Budapest Hotel. It explains a lot. Wes’s compulsion for perfection, balance and order? You have no idea. Nice job, Kogonada. Wonderful Malick fire and water supercut, too.

While we’re learning, here’s one of Stanley Kubrick’s one-point perspective, Spike Lee’s dolly shots, oh look here’s another Wes Anderson supercut… from above.

Now Nicolas Cage me!!! Now shhh, Nicolas Cage. Mmm, oh yeah.

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We don’t have much to go in trying to interpret what the hell is going on in these photos of Skull x Skull that Tod Seelie shot for us. Apparently, the event takes place every Sunday of SXSW, starts in the afternoon and goes until the cops shut it down, every time. Geographically, it’s within the city limits of Austin, but barely.

There is a wheel. You spin it. Maybe you’ll get lucky and get the relatively harmless-sounding options like “Candy Dance,” “Dogshit Warpaint,” or “Tattoo.” Some of the tamer options on the wheel are misleading though, like “Blow Bubbles.” Bubbles is the tiny dog. Last year, Tod got “Get Zapped” and got tased in the face.

You just never know. What’s the sparkly option? “Ah, sparkly one means you chug an original Four Loko,” Tod explains.

There was metal.

Around two hundred showed this time to see Doom Siren, Fuck Work, Waarface, Woman Thrower, Steel Bearing Hand and the stage exploding with a purple cloud. See you next year. (Photos: Tod Seelie/ANIMALNewYork)

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Here’s a fresh artwork by David Renault over at F.A.T. It involves breaking into a lot of abandoned construction equipment in Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande of north-western France with a horn, some air tubes and something sharp enough to punch through industrial strength tire.

Presenting, Dernier Souffle (The Last Breath). Honk your dead heart out, you annoying fucking thing.

Renault’s past “Previously In The City” series also includes this Dancing Trash Bag in Rome.

The post How to Turn a Dead Car Into the World’s Most Irritating Sound Art appeared first on ANIMAL.

Cloaque — a collaborative, Exquisite corpse-style digital art project from Carlos Sáez and Claudia Maté – just celebrated its 2nd anniversary.

“314,377 pixels are a lot, 464 posts are a lot, 67 artists are a lot — but two years mean nothing, specially when talking about a never ending project,” Cloaque’s Sáez and Maté tell ANIMAL. Artists in Cloaque created original vertical artworks as connected panels (posted as sequential Tumblr posts), with each contributor’s piece seamlessly flowing into the next.

Over the two years, Cloaque has seen some necessary modifications. “Maybe the most significant one is in our navigation,” Cloaque says. “We replaced the infinite scroll for page division.” Previously, your browser would die after ten artists’ work had loaded. There was just too many hyper-detailed landscapes and cascading gif collages.

“We are happy to announce that CLOAQUE IS NOW BROWSER-FRIENDLY! Every computer will now be able to tour the whole column without perishing in the attempt.” There’s also a map for international navigation.

“We are very happy to see how it grows (in all aspects) and how it can develop in multiple formats,” Cloaque says. “Our first anniversary project cloaque.mov, the exquisite corpse in audiovisual format has now become a parallel project.”

Last year, Cloaque was manifested into flesh-space via Art F City’s project at UNTITLED as a physical scroll with the work of 40 artists who participated in Cloaque between January 2012 to June 2013, printed on 265 feet of Tyvek.

“We were very happy with Cloaque’s first real life contact during the Miami Art Week, so we decided to repeat the experience for our 2nd anniversary party,” Cloaque says.

“The event took place at Pelonio’s studio, an amazing tunnel in the underground at heart of Madrid. Very appropriate for what happened inside it, in our opinion. We presented the gif group show I FIVE YOU and invited MHSR to perform as part of their European Tour 2014, who turned the place into some kind of End-of-the-World simulator. Just amazing.”

I FIVE YOU is yet another way for Cloaque to promote artists — “the same way we do in the website. We asked a few people from the Cloaque family to redesign our logo in gif format. The show was presented IRL as part of our anniversary event. The gifs appear randomly on the top of our website.”

You’re also seeing a few of them on this page.

Cloaque was conceived as “a digital landfill.” Now that it’s two, it’s a valuable, ongoing collection of work and a dynamic platform for digital collaboration. Not bad for a website named after a bird’s asshole-combination-vagina.

(Lead Image: Kim Laughton; GIFs: Nicolas Sassoon, Anthony Antonellis, Lorna Mills, Rollin Leonard, Claudia Mate)

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on Tumblr Turns Two appeared first on ANIMAL.

Blanche, SoHo. (Photo: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork)

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What just happened?

Well, artist Richard Prince appropriated the photographs of Jamaican Rastafarians by Patrick Cariou to make million-dollar-selling “Canal Zone” series of works; it’s been a legal, copyright infringement vs. fair use mess for five years. In 2011, the federal court ruled against Prince. In 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled (mostly) for Prince.  Now, Prince and Cariou have “reached a settlement” but what does that EVEN MEAN ANYMORE? We asked Greg Allen, who has been entrenched in all this.

Gerg Allen has published tomes of detailed appendixes chronicling the case of explanations, illustrations and actual court documents. (And once made a very convincing case that Richard Prince made “Bob Dylan’s” art, LULZ).

“We don’t know why Cariou dropped his claim now, or if any deal was cut, but from the court records, it sure doesn’t seem like it,” Greg Allen explains to ANIMAL. “So the apparent lack of a payday and the court’s previous ruling for Prince, might take the edge off the copyright infringement threat for a while.”

Yey for appropriation. What about those five works that — unlike the 25 already judged fair use for having “an entirely different aesthetic” than Cariou’s — were sent back for determination, forcing judges to critique art and lawyers to study appropriation art history? While those works’ status and terms of settlement are not disclosed, it is said that the court does not intend to destroy them, as previously suggested.

“Personally, as a spectator, I’m little bummed that we won’t get to see the dadaist theater of a lawyers, experts, and a judge calculating the infringiness of these last five Prince paintings, which were supposedly so different from the 25 others that they were declared fair use,” Allen notes. ”But now that Prince gets his paintings back, who knows, maybe he’ll go for the big finish by lighting them all on fire.” Again.

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