Both his objects and images are often created from the residue of monetary exchanges and the consumed goods that the artist collects on a daily basis. Kuri is a material archivist who extracts visual and linguistic value from the tracking systems, retail supplies, and trivial marketing mechanisms that constitute our daily lives.

Untitled (superama II), 2003

Untitled (il est temps), 2006

SYNOPSIS: With Masculin féminin, ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” through a gang of restless youths engaged in hopeless love affairs with music, revolution, and each other. French new wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud stars as Paul, an idealistic would-be intellectual struggling to forge a relationship with the adorable pop star Madeleine. Through their tempestuous affair, Godard fashions a candid and wildly funny free-form examination of youth culture in throbbing 1960s Paris, mixing satire and tragedy as only Godard can.

In 1978, twelve years after complet-ing the film, Godard still thought about the project in terms that emphasized, above all else, its documentary aspect. He recalled the fact that the majority of the dialogues in it are constructed, almost surreally, as interviews, question-and-answer sessions delivered in machine-gun shot-countershot volleys. “There were no written dialogues; they were real interviews with the actors. I did the interviewing myself . . . and later mixed up these interviews in the editing . . . so that people would think the characters are talking to each other.”

Godard was here pioneering experiments on the uncertain border between documentary and fiction, of a kind that Abbas Kiarostami would take further a quarter of a century later.

Taking Masculin féminin as primarily a chronicle of the sixties, however, obscures the film’s achievement, both as a work of art and as a personal testament. Aesthetically, Masculin féminin can easily seem like one of Godard’s more casual efforts: a collec-tion of fragments, notes, improvisations. Godard tries out all the available tech-niques (long takes versus extensive editing, static camera versus moving camera) as he experiments with different ways of rendering the verbal exchanges between his characters––demonstrating that truth can never be simply filmed in a singular, transparent way, while trying, all the same, to reach and express that truth through a mosaic or collage structure.

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Women Art Revolution annotates the evolution of the Feminist Art Movement in the United States from the personal perspective of feminist artist and film director Lynn Hershman Leeson. Through interviews, art, and rarely seen archival films and images, Women Art Revolution combines documentary and memoir to boldly illustrate how this Movement, driven by personal and political imperatives of social justice and civil rights, radically transformed the art and culture of our times.

Official Trailer:

Selected Featured Artists:

• Janine Antoni
• Judy Chicago
• Guerrilla Girls
• Martha Rosler
• Adrian Piper
• Ana Mendieta
• Marina Abramovic
• Barbara Kruger
• Carolee Schneemann

One of the documentary’s best interviews features Marcia Tucker, (Founder and Former Director, New Museum of Contemporary  and Former Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Whitney Museum). In the interview she explains the difficult and discriminatory hiring process for women at the museums in the 60′s.

Lynn Hershman Leeson
TV Legs
1990

Lynn Hershman Leeson
Seduction
1988

The film is an adaptation of the ancient Arabic anthology The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, better known as The Arabian Nights. It is the last of Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life”, which began with The Decameron and continued with The Canterbury Tales. The locations – Yemen, Ethiopia, Iran and Nepal – form a rich, exotic backdrop to these tales of slaves and kings, potions, betrayals, demons and, most of all love and lovemaking in all its myriad forms. Engrossing, mysterious, profound and liberating, Arabian Nights is an exquisitely dreamlike, sensuous and adult interpretation of the original folk tales.

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“Teorema” is the story of an upper middle-class Milanese family that is suddenly visited by a beautiful young man (Terence Stamp) who systematically proceeds to make love to everyone in the family — father (Massimo Girotti), mother (Silvana Mangano), daughter (Anna Wiazemsky), son (Andres José Cruz Soublette) and even the maid (Laura Betti), in roughly the reverse of that order.

Having provided each member of the household with an apparently transcendental experience, the young man departs, leaving each to collapse in his own way. Because they are materialistic, rich bourgeoisie, their collapses are elegant and terrifying. The daughter withdraws into a catatonic state; the son withdraws into his painting, determined to set up his own rules of esthetics that are so mysterious he cannot be judged; the mother and father seek to repeat their experiences with counterfeits of the young man. However, the maid, the good, decent, believing peasant woman, becomes sanctified.

The film is almost completely visual, the actors don’t act, but simply exist to be photographed. The movie itself is the message, a series of cool, beautiful, often enigmatic scenes that flow one into another with the rhythm of blank verse.

“Teorema” is a highly personal, open-ended movie, and it was condemned by the Vatican even thought Pasolini stated that the young man is not meant to represent Jesus in a Second Coming. Rather, he said, the young man is god, any god, but the fact remains that he is God in a Roman Catholic land.

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“You will now listen to my voice . . . On the count of ten you will be in Europa . . .” So begins Max von Sydow’s opening narration to Lars von Trier’s hypnotic Europa (known in the U.S. as Zentropa), a fever dream in which American pacifist Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr) stumbles into a job as a sleeping-car conductor for the Zentropa railways in a Kafkaesque 1945 postwar Frankfurt. With its gorgeous black-and-white and color imagery and meticulously recreated (if then nightmarishly deconstructed) costumes and sets, Europa is one of the great Danish filmmaker’s weirdest and most wonderful works, a runaway-train ride to an oddly futuristic past.

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State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 offers the first in-depth survey of Conceptual art and related avant-garde activities in both Northern and Southern California during a pivotal period in contemporary art.

The exhibition showcases more than 150 works of art—installations, photographs, videos and films, artists’ books, and extensive performance documentation—that demonstrate the critical role of California artists in the development of Conceptual art and other new genres.

State of Mind features works by sixty artists and collectives, some of who are now internationally known—Ant Farm, John Baldesarri, Chris Burden, Lynn Hershman, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Ed Ruscha—and others who are less recognized but merit renewed attention. Organized thematically, the exhibition brings together artists whose works are not usually seen together to underscore their related interests and to provide a fresh perspective on the development of Conceptual art in California.

Chris Burden

Chris Burden
Trans-fixed, 1974

Chris Burden
Shoot, 1971

Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman
Revolving Upside Down, 1968

Bruce Nauman
Lip Sync, 1969

Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler
Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975

Martha Rosler
Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, 1977

François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 brings Ray Bradbury’s big-brother world into crisp focus, employing a thought-provoking production design full of muted technicolor and almost entirely devoid of written language — even the opening credits are spoken. The quashing of intellectualism in the interest of lulling the masses into contented enslavement makes wonderfully portentous subject matter for Truffaut’s confident first strides into English filmmaking.

The coiled fire-breathing dragon that serves as the fire department’s icon comments both on the routine dominance of the ruling regime and its blindness toward its own oppressiveness; no self-aware, PR-conscious thought police would represent itself through such monstrous imagery

The title, incidentally, means the heat at which paper ignites.

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Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art. Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.

Bringing together more than 170 photographs, this retrospective survey traces the artist’s career from the mid 1970s to the present. Highlighted in the exhibition are in-depth presentations of her key series, including the groundbreaking series “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–80), the black-and-white pictures that feature the artist in stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, and European art-house films; her ornate history portraits (1989–90), in which the artist poses as aristocrats, clergymen, and milkmaids in the manner of old master paintings; and her larger-than-life society portraits (2008) that address the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status. The exhibition will explore dominant themes throughout Sherman’s career, including artifice and fiction; cinema and performance; horror and the grotesque; myth, carnival, and fairy tale; and gender and class identity.

To learn more about the show please visit the Cindy Sherman’s  Multimedia Channel at MOMA

1970′s Untitled Film Stills

Untitled Film Still #3
1977

Untitled Film Still #48
1979

1980′s  Untitled Stills

Untitled #66
1980

Untitled #93
1981

1990′s Untitled Stills

Untitled #224
1990

Untitled #193
1989

2000′s Untitled Stills

Untitled #475
2008

Untitled #463
2007

Untitled Mural
2010

Curator Pablo Ortiz Monasterio has classified the 240 photographs on view into six thematic sections divided into “Rooms”—The Origins, The Blue House, The Broken Body, Loves, Photography and Diego’s Eye. This collection reveals details of her life, not only through who was behind the camera, in front of the lens or the anonymous nature of some of the work but also through the annotated writing found on the back of many of the photographs. The original exhibition was on view at the Blue House, or Casa Azul, which was Frida Kahlo and Diego Riveras’ home and is now the Frida Kahlo Museum.

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