When I was nineteen, I assisted stylist Karl Plewka and was terrible at it. I didn’t know any better, and thought photo shoots were group opportunities for everyone to make their own pictures, so I shot everyone with my Polaroid camera and got into trouble. Afterward, Karl, who worked often with Corinne Day, looked at my pictures and said, “Well, these are nice: you shoot like Corinne.” Being compared, however offhandedly, to one of my heroes gave me so much confidence. It made me feel that my creativity had a purpose and wasn’t just the side effect of being a strange and insecure person. Day was someone who challenged not just the glossy flawlessness of ‘80s fashion photography, but also the idea that a fashion photograph is better when crafted by a male photographer. Resolutely in touch with the times she lived in–and what it meant to be a woman in front of a camera and behind one–Day had a point of view worth caring about, and she made people care about it, and her, and what her images said about the time they were made in. It takes courage to do that: when you are what you create artistically, continually showing it to the world is like letting everyone, friend or foe, have a little piece of you. Having your work published or exhibited is often more painful and embarrassing than it is glamorous, and it never feels quite like the compliment people imagine it to be. So it’s hard and really sad when the people who changed the way you look at things and who inspired your own creative life die young. I can’t imagine photography without the shift in perspective Day brought to it.

I once sat in on an art history class taught by multicultural theorist Thomas McEvilley, wherein he lectured on yoga. He explained that what we as Westerners knew of the practice was really a very simplified overview of the true nature of yoga. McEvilley explained that historically, yoga involved extremely complex beliefs and rituals, and he gave an example involving, to paraphrase, a man and woman mixing various bodily fluids together on the ground and then licking the mix off each others’ open palms. And I’ve yet to witness any of NYC’s yoga diehards attempting that pose. Learning this made me newly intrigued by yoga, and also with artistic forms that possess an Eastern religion-based history.

Currently, Rubin Museum in New York has on view Tradition Transformed: Tibetan Artists Respond, the first-ever exhibition of contemporary Tibetan art in New York. Many of the nine artists included were either personally affected by the Tibetan diaspora, or are the children of parents who were forced to leave Tibet following the 1959 uprising. Their works highlight the tension between traditional Tibetan practices and newer, Western inspirations (many of the pieces shown seem heavily influenced by Andy Warhol).  One artist, Kesang Lamdark, who grew up in Switzerland and received his MFA from Columbia University, plays with this Warhol influence in a humorous way that highlights the ubiquity of Warhol’s favorite muse: the can. In many of his pieces in the show, he has taken tantric imagery and repositioned it, via tiny pointillist pinholes, onto the bottoms of soda cans. Look through the cans, and a small, complicated and enchanting image appears.

Much of the contemporary Tibetan art shown seems linked to a strong-held devotion to Tibetan Buddhism and traditional Tibetan art-making practices, yet most also seems to be entranced by Western aesthetics. The dissolution of traditional Tibetan culture, via the diaspora, can be seen as the main inspiration for the forward momemtum of contemporary Tibetan art–“Without the Tibetan diaspora I would be in Tibet herding yaks or being a monk,” says Lamdark. But is hard for a Western art writer to position a forced cultural reconfiguration as entirely positive. There is something captivating about a singular belief system, unadulterated by Western tendencies toward skepticism. “In old Tibet, art had no individuality,” says Lamdark, to counterpoint this, yet in the contemporary West, we seem to have such a hard time truly believing in anything: love, friendships, ourselves. Entirely different from a culture of traditional Tibetan Buddhism, which holds a belief system indivisible from personal identity, our beliefs lean more and more toward rote social expectations. Probably because it’s just too hard to believe in a world that doesn’t really believe in itself.

Tradition Transformed will be on view until October 18
Rubin Museum
150 West 17th Street, NYC

Attending summer dance festivals held in idyllic settings often feels like crashing another generation’s party. Happily, for younger people interested in dance and performance, there is a festival newcomer, Mount Tremper Arts, with a much fresher and far more experimental program than many of its older festival relations. Located in the Catskills and founded three years ago by choreographer Aynsley Vandenbroucke and photographer Mathew Pokoik, the festival composes a fairly ideal weekend trip for New Yorkers to watch a well-curated program of new dance and performance. A determined intimacy makes MTA seem in some ways more like a creative camp than a stuffy performance venue: Vandenbroucke and Pokoik prepare a beautiful dinner every Friday evening, and almost always host an after-performance campfire where everyone gets together to drink and talk amid the chatter of frogs and crickets (of whom, one attendee noted: “This isn’t the city. You can’t call 311 on crickets.”). Last weekend featured a Friday evening performance of a work-in-progress by Katie Workum Dance Theater. On Saturday, choreographer Karinne Keithley showcased a dance, film and text-based piece titled Montgomery Park, or Opulance, which reminded me a little of the visual artist Trisha Donnelly in its pile-up of unresolved evocations. Dancer Katy Pyle performed in both pieces, and was riveting each time. The festival opened this year with a performance by the extremely talented Rashaun Mitchell, and will continue into mid-August with performances by Foofwa d’Imobilité, and Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly. The well-designed post-and-beam performance space also hosts a group show of photography curated by Matthew Porter and featuring the work Hannah Whitaker, who is profiled in the current issue of The Last Magazine. Great taste in photography extends to Vandenbroucke and Poikok’s own collection, which includes a small print of Daido Moriyama’s Stray Dog hung in the kitchen, seemingly lurking for table scraps. And, if you hike to the summit of Mount Tremper you’ll find a view to rival Daido’s: climb its vertiginous fire tower and you will see your future, I promise you.

Photography by Mathew Pokoik

http://mounttremperarts.org

You probably have interesting plans this summer. But frankly, unlike artist Ted Southern, they probably do not include constructing a functional spacesuit. Southern (an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam in New York) is currently partnering with Moscow-based spacesuit engineer Nikolay Moiseev on a project called Full Frontal Design, and the team is designing spacesuits together. Tonight at Eyebeam, the pair will unveil their newest spacesuit, the “Frontier Prime.” The event will include arm and leg burst tests, limb torque demonstrations, and an interactive vacuum chamber glove box. Here, we speak to Southern about his latest endeavor.

Tonight, my two best friends art and literature unite New York-style at the opening of Lush Life, an exhibition curated by Franklin Evans and Omar Lopez-Chahoud taking place at nine separate gallery locations on the Lower East Side. Featuring some of our favorite younger galleries, as well as artist Scott Hug (featured in The Last Magazine #4), the sprawling assemblage reinterpret’s Richard Price’s 2008 murder mystery novel Lush Life; each gallery’s exhibition focuses on a different chapter of his novel. Applying a unique conceptual conceit to traditional group show curation, the show’s curators chose nine artists, who each in turn chose an additional artist to build up the exhibition. While my favorite literary homage to New York City is probably Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That, wherein the author departs after getting her fill of heartless New York (but you did come back to us, didn’t you Joanie?), Lush Life represents New York at its more obviously steamy, seedy and degenerate–quite perfect for the weather we’re having.

Attending one of Jennifer Rubell’s infamous food performances allows one to become, for the moment, re-acquainted with the conceptual imperatives of bounty and harvest. A recent Rubell “food journey,” at the Brooklyn Museum, featured 700 paint tubes filled with edible dips and a large indoor garden with pull-from-the-ground-and-eat carrots. If Jennifer’s copious piles of food were to magically turn into mountains of art books, you might conjure what it’s like inside the Rubell Family Collection Library. Founded by Jennifer’s parents, noted collectors Don and Mera Rubell, the Rubell Family Collection Museum in Miami is housed inside a former Drug Enforcement Agency facility, and the library found within is certainly a mind-altering experience. On a recent visit to Miami to work on a project with the painter JJ PEET, we were invited to do research at the library (the Rubells generously offer it for use to artists, writers and scholars on a by-appointment basis) Presided over by the museum’s gracious Director, Juan Roselione-Valadez, the library is, to quote Juan, “Like nothing you’ll find in New York.” And, you know what jaded New York? He’s correct. The library’s alpine-high walls are stacked floor-to-ceiling with over 40,000 volumes mostly dating from 1970 to the present artists’ monographs, catalogs, works of criticism and theory, full sets of art journals and magazines–many of which, according to Juan, the Rubells brought back personally from their travels. It is extraordinary. The section of Fs alone require a cherrypicker to reach—and are all the more magnificent for the climb.

Most of us want to pretend that bad things never happened to us, that we have never been ashamed or mistreated—and, more importantly, that we’ve never done so to others. French artist Louise Bourgeois transformed all the bruising lies we tell ourselves into forms with a telltale heart that beat out for pernicious, principled truth. And she was really funny, with her huge, menacing arachnid forms and snickering phallic anecdotes. Her passing allows us to remember the function of art: sometimes understanding objects is the closest we will ever get toward understanding ourselves.

Whilst drinking an iced coffee from a plastic cup I’ll toss devil-may-care into the trash today, I became absolutely sickened by watching the live feed of the BP oil spill gushing into the sea. Am I a hypocrite? Of course I am. I’m human. As a species, we have a frightening blind spot toward the ways in which we each personally contribute to the eventual failing of this planet to sustain itself. We can “think green” as a cool trend, or even as a silly, meaningless trend, but until we can actually accept some individual accountability for our own undisclosed crimes of ecological carelessness, this world will continue to overheat, rot and eventually peter out. Ergo, using environmentally sound things like the new 98 pen from DBA, which is constructed of 98% biodegradable, compostable potato-based plastic (as opposed to traditional pens, which are made with non-biodegradable petroleum-based plastics) is something one should think about practically (i.e. go buy a bunch), versus idealistically (i.e. think they’re cool but remain devoted to your felt-tip). The pen, which is also made with a non-toxic ink, is being celebrated right now with a silent auction, featuring ink-on-paper prose and illustrations by talents including Cynthia Rowley, Susan Kirschbaum (who has produced for the auction a very un-PC take on chick lit, titled “Chic Shit”), and my favorite: artist Adam Dugas’ charming illustrations of the last 27 films he watched. Proceeds from the auction go to benefit Riverkeeper, an organization that is working to clean up NYC’s waterways. And while auctions eventually end, the idea of continually using a earth-friendly disposable pen probably benefits, equally, the planet and one’s conflicted state of mind.

Find the DBA 98 auction here: http://www.dba-co.com/riverkeeper

Artwork by GK Reid