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.

A two-day gathering of younger indie bands, the Propaganda Music festival in Stockholm was spiced up with an appearance by veterans Belle and Sebastian. Attended by a generally mixed audience, it was easy to spot this summer’s style tweak to the anxious hipster uniform: slightly rolled-up skinny jeans (last year, it was the rolled-up khaki) hovering over white converse. A glimpse of fall’s newest addition was represented by a rolled-up fisherman’s hat.

The presence of 80′s-90′s nostalgia–including an ironic synchronized swimming performance–was hard to shake off, but it was the artists who had moved on that came out on top. The most pleasant surprise was the French duo turned trio Jamaica, who could be described as the missing link (if there ever was one) between Phoenix and Daft Punk. With an energetic and spontaneous performance, they delivered stacks of rock clichés that somehow came out feeling very fresh. Texas-born, Brooklyn-based Neon Indian also impressed with their electronic, danceable and psychedelic set. Referred to as Sweden’s most pleasant indie-band, the great-sounding Shout Out Louds lived up to every expectation, thanks in part to lead singer Adam Olenius’ captivating voice. And it’s hard not to like a band like Magic Numbers. A folksier, more huggable version of Kings of Leon, the quartet constantly adds well-written songs to their repertoire.

But it was the Swedish queen of electro-pop, Robyn, that got the large crowd dancing, as she transformed the first night of the festival into a nightclub. Energetic as an aerobics instructor, she worked through her hits, and delivered this summer’s unstoppable “Dancing On My Own” as the evening’s highlight.

http://www.myspace.com/ithinkilikejamaica
http://www.myspace.com/neonindian

Like a forgotten phrase lurking just on the tip of the tongue, artist Kate Steciw’s complex photographic images subtly elude both the mind and eye. A professional retoucher, Steciw employs all the tools of commercial image manipulation to transform her art images into something supernatural, upsetting the normal order of photographic experience. Her work foregrounds the powerful (and normally whisper quiet) techniques used to smooth and polish images in print, in sidebar ads and on television, underscoring their pervasiveness and sleek efficacy. The images collected in her first book, The Strangeness of This Idea, offer a glimpse of the artist’s project. Seen through Steciw’s lens (and monitor), subject matter that in another context would be easy to file away as pastoral or nostalgic instead calls into question the way we process the constant stream of images that batter us each day.

KG: What was the genesis of the book?

KS: I was spending time at my parent’s house in Bethlehem [Pennsylvania], and I was shooting a lot of what might be considered mundane images around my parent’s garden and back yard, and around my hometown. Being a retoucher, the language of manipulation has informed much of what I do, and I was taking those straight images into Photoshop and using it to produce altered images.

KG: In your work, there seems to be on the one hand a very transparent reverence for nature, and on the other hand a persistent interest in artifice.

KS: I’m very interested in creating a sense of pause or anxiety in the viewing process. We’re so constantly inundated with images, and I’m interested in creating an image that’s difficult to look at or difficult to get a grasp on conceptually. Virtually every image we see has been manipulated or altered; we’re not accustomed to seeing images that aren’t, in fact, heavily manipulated.

KG: Is your work in the same tradition as someone of an earlier generation like Jeff Wall? He also foregrounds manipulation, but in a way that asks the viewer to accept the illusion as reality.

KS: I do see myself in that continuum, as someone who’s interested in exploring artifice. Because so many of the images we’re confronted with are so abstract and artificial in a basic way.

KG: And meant to be consumed in an instant.

KS: That seems to be the way we’re headed, for better or worse. The printing press changed the nature and speed of image consumption; photography did, film did, and the internet did, and I think it’s the job of art to work hand in hand with philosophy in opening up new ways of thinking about the world around us. And particularly of illustrating new visual ways of thinking about things and operating. There’s this tendency among photographers to think that slowing the process down or fetishizing the process will make a photograph more valuable or permanent. But that’s not the truth of photography, especially today. A photo shoot happens in a day, it’s retouched three days later, it appears in a magazine weeks later or online in a matter of hours. It’s consumed very quickly and it’s forgotten about. So in some ways, to be nervous about that aspect of the medium and other media is counterproductive, at least to me.

The Strangeness of This Idea is published by Hassla and available now.

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

There are artists that live out their lives on stage, without any filter between themselves and the audience, and ones that are simply pretending to. This year’s lineup of Way out West, an exceptionally well-organized outdoor festival held in the beautiful city of Gothenburg, was a celebration of that first type. Located in Slottskogen city park and continuing throughout the night with additional performances and DJ sets at local clubs, churches and boats, Way Out West is unlike a lot of other festivals in that it takes less than five minutes for audiences to travel from stage to stage. With the weather close to perfect and no serious festival mud in sight, you actually spent most of your time listening to music and hanging out with your friends.

But it was the honesty and self revelation from some of my favorite female artists that brought out the big emotions and sometimes tears from both performers and audience. Anna Ternheim, M.I.A., Anna von Hausswolff and Lykke Li all play by their own rules. They dig deep, and in sometimes uncomfortably dark places, which is why they all seem so much more relevant than most of their male colleagues. Young von Hausswolff dedicated songs to her grandmother as well as her lover and pointed out that performing here was a dream come true. Lykke Li (next to M.I.A.) was the only artist who seemed to put any thought into the visual aspect of her performance, allowing for a highly emotional experience and not just a set of songs.

“A girder is nothing to be ashamed of,” Mies van der Rohe once famously quipped in defense of his trademark aesthetic, which championed a lithe vocabulary of architectural skin and bones. “The old way was to look at architecture as a display of forms. We concentrate on the simple, basic structure, and we believe the structural way gives more freedom and variety.”

Support Structures, Celine Condorelli’s ambitious book on all those things in contemporary culture that prop up and stand behind, operates in an unabashedly Miesian mode. The product of a six year joint project between Condorelli and Gavin Wade, the book is positioned as a curated bibliography, compiled in response to what Condorelli perceived as “an almost complete absence of literature or theory on what constitutes ‘support’” in architecture and the arts. Judging by the breadth of material included in Support Structures, it turns out that sources of support are almost as plentiful and varied as the ways to define, describe and debate them. The book is organized as “a manual for engagement in and with its subject” replete with an explanatory preface (one of six!), titled Directions for Use. What theoretician worth her salt could resist?

The body of Support Structures consists of a series of brief chapters (“instances of support at work”) that range from interviews and photo essays to architectural drawings, typographical studies, archival press clippings, pamphlets, and of course the odd manifesto or two. Thematically, it forms an interesting and diverse archive, and even if it’s hardly a ripping good yarn, almost all of the material is subtle, considered and thought-provoking. Too bad, then, that in keeping with so much contemporary art criticism, many of the contributing writers default to the kind of icy academic prose that’s likely to alienate all but a small group of post-doctoral-type readers. At least it’s beautiful to look at. Elegantly designed, painstakingly laid out and lavishly printed, as a physical object it seduces completely.

“Support Structures” is published by Sternberg Press and is available now.

Model: Olivia Gordon at Ford NY
Top by Burglar.Co.,Ltd. Skirt by Rodebjer.
Photography by Martin Lidell
Styling by Zara Zachrisson
Makeup by Fredrik Stambro using Shu Uemura at L’Atelier NYC.
Hair by Fernando Torrent at L’Atelier NYC.
Casting by Natalie Joos.
Photographer’s assistant: Melanie Gessner.
Special thanks to Fast Ashleys and Julie Kauss at The Production.

Model: Ylonka Verheul at New York Models wears Tank Top by Calvin Clein.
Earrings by Genevieve Jones.
Photography by Martin Lidell
Styling by Zara Zachrisson
Makeup by Fredrik Stambro using Shu Uemura at L’Atelier NYC.
Hair by Fernando Torrent at L’Atelier NYC.
Casting by Natalie Joos.
Photographer’s assistant: Melanie Gessner.
Special thanks to Fast Ashleys and Julie Kauss at The Production.