My BOMB magazine interview with Bob Colacello: From the White House to Studio 54

June 21, 2019 Jane Harris

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/documenting-the-times-bob-colacello-interviewed/

“In November of 1969, still recovering from the near-fatal gunshot wounds inflicted by Valerie Solanas, Andy Warhol launched Interview magazine. Its initial mission as “A Monthly Film Journal,” however short-lived, would prove fortuitous for Bob Colacello, a young, Columbia University student who’d started writing for the Village Voice. Colacello’s ardent review of the Warhol-produced, Paul Morrissey-directed film, Trash (1970), caught the Pop Master’s attention, and within six months Colacello became Interview’s managing editor. From 1971–83, he was Warhol’s righthand man, helping steer the magazine through the hedonistic Me Decade when cocaine, disco, and flashy fashion reigned. By 1976, he’d begun “OUT,” a mock society column that coupled in-the-moment recaps with photos taken mostly on the sly.

The denizens of this glittery, jet-set world—some still famous, some now has-beens—rub elbows once again in Pictures From Another Time: Photographs by Bob Colacello, 1976–82 at Vito Schnabel Projects. It assembles over 150 black-and-white photos, many never shown before, the majority of which are arranged in a dense grid of small-scale prints. Shot in, and at, chateaus, hotels, limos, movie premieres, dance clubs, restaurants, weddings, and presidential inaugurations, both the scenery and the inhabitants depicted—New York socialites, Hollywood actors, politicos, rock stars, supermodels, and artists—evoke the era’s legendary party scene.” - From the intro.

My Art in America review on the group exhibition, “Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modification Paintings”

June 5, 2019 Jane Harris

https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/strategic-vandalism-the-legacy-of-asger-jorns-modification-paintings/

Asger Jorn: Ainsi s’Ensor (Out of this World – after Ensor), 1962 — Asger Jorn: *Ainsi s’Ensor (Out of this World – after Ensor)*, 1962

EXCERPT: “To détourn something is to give it a new context in order to reroute and subvert its meaning. Jorn created his own version of the tactic in his “Modification” series, which comprises paintings he purchased at flea markets and altered with his own irreverent touches. In the most compelling example in the show, Ainsi on s’Ensor (Out of This World—After Ensor), 1962, he transformed a somber painting of suicide into an especially grotesque scene, adding a garish mask (an allusion to the work of Symbolist painter James Ensor) to the image of a man who had hanged himself in a dining room.

The Situationists, who sought to oppose what they saw as an increasingly banal, commodified postwar culture, were greatly influenced by Dada. Perhaps that’s why, despite the exhibition’s premise, the curators included not only works by twenty-four artists that were made after Jorn’s “Modifications” but also three earlier pieces by Dada heavyweights: Marcel Duchamp’s infamous L.H.O.O.Q. (1919/1964), a Mona Lisa postcard disfigured with a mustache and goatee; Francis Picabia’s Bière Sarrator (ca. 1925), a beer advertisement he signed as his own; and Max Ernst’s Untitled—Le feu (1934), a collage on an engraving depicting medieval torture.”

My essay, Mourning as Insurrection, in the newly published monograph, NEGROGOTHIC: M. LAMAR

March 31, 2019 Jane Harris

Excerpt: “With its piercing crescendos and guttural trills, M. Lamar’s haunting countertenor recalls the vocal stylings of Diamanda Galas, Nina Simone, and Sylvester, though his references are much broader. Combining the heavy, dissonant tempos of doom metal, the mournful, apocalyptic melodies of Negro Spirituals, and the melodrama of opera, his compositions seek to expose and expunge the psychosexual legacy of slavery in the black male psyche. Emotionally raw and intellectually vigorous, they are powerful, inimitable proclamations of pain and wonder – exorcisms of longing rooted in a deep consciousness of history. The first time I heard Lamar perform, I felt as if I’d unwittingly attended a funeral-cum-seance. The sexual subjectivity of the black man was simultaneously mourned and resurrected as if it were rising from the death-clutches of white supremacy – a ghost throwing off its chains.”

Visiting Critic at Parsons School of Design

January 2, 2019 Jane Harris

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I’ll be a visiting MFA critic in the Parsons program this January!

http://amt.parsons.edu/finearts/visitingcritics/jane-ursula-harris/

My feature on Sarah Lucas for Art in America

December 5, 2018 Jane Harris

An excerpt: “Over a third of the works in Sarah Lucas’s first stateside retrospective are from her early years as part of the Young British Artists (YBA) group, beginning with the sculpture Au Naturel (1994), from which the exhibition takes its title. The now infamous tableau made from found objects and perishable food was an early enactment of the kind of abject shorthand for body parts that has since defined her aesthetic. The work features a yellow-stained mattress sitting on the floor, slumped against the wall. Two melons positioned above a metal bucket and an upright cucumber stuck between a pair of oranges are set on top, completing the visual pun.

Yet perhaps because of the dubiousness of the YBA legacy thirty years on, the exhibition’s wall texts and catalogue essays downplay the association in favor of more gender-based readings that also sidestep the role of class intrinsic to much YBA work. A group of brash DIY-styled artists who came of age in a post-Thatcher world marred by economic recession, rancorous class divisions, and tabloid sensationalism, the YBAs were defined by their shared use of found objects, shock tactics, and mass media. Their interest in the base realities of sex, death, and materialism channeled a working-class cynicism toward high art that artists like Lucas expressed through crude humor and accessible metaphors.”