Chances are you’ve never heard of Brion Gysin, an artist who for forty years literally did it all. Not only did Gysin paint, write, perform, and compose poems, he did it all simultaneously, experimenting and redefining as he went. Nowadays, this kind of multi-faceted, genre-crossing talent is rare. But the rebellious British artist, born in 1916, was seemingly born to invent — fusing the un-fusible in art, culture, and language.
     New York’s New Museum is finally paying Gysin the respect he deserves with a new show, Brion Gysin: Dream Machine. Though Gysin was a shaping force of collage, sound works and uncategorized collaborations up until his death in 1986, Dream Machine is the first stateside retrospective of his work. Curated by Laura Hoptman, the exhibition is well wrought and includes more than 300 drawings, books, photo-collages, paintings, films, slide projections, and sound works. A daylong poetry marathon will be held on September 25 with John Giorno, Anne Waldman, and Monica de la Torre among others. Most thrilling, however, is the show’s eponymous centerpiece, an original, working Dreamachine, also known as the trippy, flickering light sculpture that stimulates trance-like visions when your eyes are closed. Conceived with the help of mathematician/computer whiz Ian Sommerville, the machine projects light at a frequency corresponding to alpha waves in the human brain during wakeful relaxation. This piece is exceedingly notable because it represents the culmination of everything Gysin believed in and worked for: to free images from their representation and by extension, alter the way people see and think.
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American writer Harvey Pekar died July 12 in his Ohio home. He was 70. Pekar is best known for his autobiographical comic series, “American Splendor”, which narrates the everyday life of Pekar and his fellow Cleveland residents. Pekar won the American Book Award in 1987 for his first series of American Splendor. In 2003, the film adaption won the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic films at the Sundance Film Festival. Over the years, several well-respected illustrators collaborated with Pekar on the comic series. The most notable, R. Crumb, was a personal friend who met Pekar while working at American Greetings in Cleveland during the 1960s. He encouraged Pekar to explore comics as a medium for his writing.
     Unlike comics chronicling tales of superheroes, villains and their fantastical battles, Pekar detailed the stories of a different kind of hero: the everyday, working class man who battles depression, loneliness and anxiety while attempting to preserve soul, pride and authenticity. Both ordinary and extraordinary, Pekar will be remembered for his humor, honesty and gift to narrate what he described best as “a series of day-after-day activities that have more influence on a person than any spectacular or traumatic event. It’s the 99 percent of life that nobody ever writes about.”

In a week in which the media focuses on the departure of an athlete from Northeast Ohio, it is the man who R.Crumb called “the soul of Cleveland” who will truly be remembered and missed.

On June 26, New Yorkers, art followers, and lovers of the purely weird finally got their answer to the question: What Happens After Deitch? Come what may, intentional gaps and accidents aplenty, the show goes on — at the Hole gallery on 104 Greene Street in SoHo. Run by Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman, both former directors of the newly defunct Deitch Projects, the Hole has valiantly stepped in to fill the fissures left behind by their iconic predecessor with experimental art shows, events, a book store and all-around mayhem. First up is the aptly named Not Quite Open for Business, a conceptual group show of unfinished work by twenty-plus artists including the likes of Barry McGee, Aurel Schmidt, Rosson Crow, Jules de Balincourt, and Terence Koh. Each artist almost gave it their all for the gallery installation, fearlessly designed by Taylor McKimens. Nearly-there poems, long-neglected art, broken symphonies and other half-realized ideas; how come no one thought of this sooner? PLANET spoke to Kathy Grayson about how it all (sort of) came together.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the show? The inspiration seems clear enough, but what pushed you to think of it as a viable idea?
The idea of showing unfinished work popped into my head first. But the fact that I knew Taylor McKimens could tackle a really blockbuster installation design sealed it. Just showing unfinished work wasn’t enough, the space had to be designed by an artist and the only person who could have done it was Taylor.
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Romina Shama is a film director and fashion photographer based in Europe. Her work boasts a distinctly soft, cinematic style as a result of her sole reliance on natural light and an analog camera. Formerly co-creative director of the now-defunct Icon Magazine, Shama has devoted herself since the magazine’s closing in 2005 exclusively to her art. Her current show is on display at Visionairs Gallery Paris through July 9.
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Forget space travel, time capsules. Past, present, and future are but alter egos video artist Mariko Mori (森万里子, b. 1967 in Tokyo, Japan) embodies in the glow of a moon-age daydream. Now showing through August 1, Kumano (1997-98) celebrates the Asia Society’s recent acquisition of a pivotal work in the artist’s oeuvre. Affirming her knack for re-invention and media overlay, Kumano witnesses Mori’s quirky jumble of the temporal continuum in fairy, shaman, and angel incarnations. As the exhibition flows from traditional layout to meditative chamber and theater, Mori’s own spiritual journey (no whimsical diversion but a twelve-hour trek) to the revered 8th century pilgrimage site is illuminated. An ancient stone statue, 18th-century golden Tibetan icon and Japanese silk scroll are among the treasures she cycles through with shimmering, looping vocals, as if to reference the non-linear arc of Shintoism and mutability of adopted religions. Once having described her aim to “connect [ancient things] with contemporary life through the technology we have now”, Mori implements aural layering and digital imaging to splice epochs of Asian belief systems.
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Last Friday saw the fiftieth, and final, of Ryan McGinness’ 50 parties project. Conceived of one year ago by the New York-based artist, the project involved fifty consecutive parties, one thrown each week, in McGinness’ studio. Since New York’s rave culture of the 1990s died and turned corporate, it may be safe to say that we’re all sick of crowds, bouncers, and sponsorship. With a “No strangers. No sponsors.” tagline, these parties revived the concept of the artist’s studio as salon and incubator for discourse and intimacy among the creative community. NYC photographer Nathan Perkel was not only lucky enough to come by a standing invitation, but he received permission from McGinness to take aside party goers to photograph them in his studio. With the context of the events removed, viewers are left to imagine height of the celebrations these fantastic dressers were attending. Following the end of the project, Perkel answered our questions about his favorite themes, the parties’ impact on New York party culture, and what it was like to attend the events as both participant and detached voyeur.
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In the novels of Edith Wharton, a bygone era of New York is immortalized, one in which New York’s burgeoning urban space exists alongside sprawling wilderness. The cartography of the Manhattan isle has long since been charted — but in parts of the Middle East, newly-constructed skyscrapers stand against a seldom-interrupted backdrop of desert sand.
     Rotterdam-based artist Bas Princen was introduced to this curiously disparate landscape as a research project for the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. However, his photographs of rapidly-developing urban centers in areas like Dubai, Beirut, Amman, Cairo, and Istanbul reveal differences that extend far beyond architecture.
     While most of his images are absent of people, when he does juxtapose human figures with the structures-in-progress, their physical proximity belies the two entities’ social distance from one another. Clad in blue workman’s uniforms and clustered near piles of rubble, groups of laborers gather in front of a massive slick black cube of a building. It is clear that these workmen occupy a very different world than the one that they are working to create for others.
     The cities portrayed in Bas Princen’s images have the feeling of a work in progress. Yet while the landscapes he has captured are certainly progressing toward urbanization, the somewhat desolate atmosphere of his pictures impose a looming question mark over this new generation of flourishing cities.
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The veritable hodgepodge of influences that define Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander’s work is reflected in her own heritage and training. Born in Belo Horizonte of mixed ancestry, Neuenschwander has darted back and forth between her home country and the European continent for much of her career. Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other, now on display at the New Museum, presents the last decade of the artist’s multi-genre work.
     Dabbling in film, painting, and sculpture, Neuenschwander relies on a fluid relationship between herself and the audience. The hundreds of colorful ribbons that make up I Wish Your Wish are printed with wishes submitted by past visitors. Viewers are encouraged to take one of the ribbons and tie it to their wrist, and replace the empty spot with a written wish of their own. The inspiration for the project stems from a tradition practiced by members of the church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
A Day Like Any Other is curated by Richard Flood at the New Museum. On Thursday evening, Flood will discuss the exhibit with the artist herself, touching on Neuenschwander’s contributions to Brazilian Conceptualism and the ways in which her rich background has allowed her to surpass her predecessors, creating work that at once references the past yet is still uniquely her own.
     Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other will be on view through September 19, 2010 at the New Museum. Rivane Neuenschwander and Richard Flood in Conversation takes place on June 24 at 7 p.m.
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Jan Smith has worked as a businessman and entrepreneur for much of his life. After selling his company five years ago, he committed himself to what he had long considered just a hobby: photography. His recent project captures the shells of abandoned ships in the world’s largest “ship cemetery”, in Nouadhibou, Mauritania. Smith spoke to PLANET about his body of work and the rugged journey that led him to Nouadhibou.

How would you characterize your work?
I’m really drawn to things that are overlooked, what most people don’t seem to pay attention to. If you pay attention to what I’m taking a picture of, you’ll see the story behind it. But I don’t really want to tell you that story up front.

Can you explain the story behind the approximately 500 abandoned ships?
In the 1980s, the fishing industry was nationalized. And rather than turning in some of the ships to the government, some of the smaller companies simply left them languishing there. When the government took over the boats they realized they didn’t really have the expertise to maintain them. And so when eventually they’d break down, or they’d need an overhaul, and they ended up being abandoned in the bay as well. That made it into an ideal place to then cover up abandoning other ships [for] insurance fraud. Rather than recycling the boat or bringing it all the way back to the waters of Europe or China, it was easier to write them off as sunk or unusable and claim the insurance.
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Mike Stilkey’s home is full of books. And though he most certainly collects them, it’s not a habit that stems from reading frenzies. The thousands upon thousands of hardcover books he obtains from libraries, garage sales, and publisher’s back stocks are used to paint on. But hold on, it’s not as simple as it sounds. Before he even thinks of dipping his brush in paint, Stilkey arranges the books (spines out) into tall, free-standing stacks, which he then uses as the most moveable canvas in the world.
     Hot off the success of a seminal installation at the Corey Helford show in the U.K., Art from the New World, his new show, Reminiscent is a series of book sculptures for the inaugural exhibition at the new Hurley’s )( Space Gallery in Costa Mesa, California. For the show, Stilkey created two 10 x 12-foot murals, one painted with the image of a wan man playing the piano, the other a portrait of a woman. Each mural took roughly 5,000 recycled books to construct.
     True bibliophiles may cringe at the notion of wasting a good read for artistic purposes, but Stilkey’s reverence for the written word is evident. By meticulously collecting, stacking, and eventually painting down the spines of these lost books Stilkey is saving them from the dubious fate of a sealed cardboard box or library dumpster.
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