Geoffrey Mann of Studio*Mrmann is an artist and designer who disintegrates the dividing line between art, craft, and design. His creations challenge our notions of the genres as he works to enlarge the gray area between them. Originally from and currently based in Edinburgh, UK, Mann received a postgraduate degree in Ceramics and Glass from the Royal College of Art, London after completing an undergraduate degree in 3D Design at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen. The integration of crafts, design, and multimedia demonstrated by Mann’s path as a student is also clear in his latest work, Cross-fire — a unique project that seamlessly integrates a gorgeous work of animation with an unusual series of dishware and utensils.
     Cross-fire animates a sound clip from American Beauty, the Oscar-winning film directed by Sam Mendes, in which the main character argues with his wife and daughter over the dinner table. In the clip, the voices of each character undulate through the plates, glasses, and utensils. As the emotions reach a crescendo, the waves of sound crash through the normally inanimate objects and deform “their once static existence into objects of unseen familiarity”, according to Mann’s description. Click through for the video.

From embattled warriors to writhing sea creatures, ukiyo-e aficionados and comic book collectors will find their niche in the fearsome and fantastic, now on display at the Japan Society through June 13. Showcasing exquisitely detailed woodblock prints by the godfather of modern video games and anime, Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Japanese Prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), from the Arthur R. Miller Collection,” is a not-to-be-missed exhibition organized by Timothy Clark, head of the Japanese section of the British Museum. An action-packed show grouped in warrior, landscape, kabuki, beautiful women, and kyoga (literally “crazy pictures”) categories, the 130-print pictorama includes gems from the collection of NYU legal scholar Arthur R. Miller, rough sketches unearthed from the Victoria and Albert Museum and even onsite drawing by the mangaka-in-residence Hiroki Otsuka. Moved by the master printmaker, Otsuka will create a full-length comic strip as an interactive “meta-narrative” for exhibition goers.
     Having created roughly 10,000 prints, Kuniyoshi can be viewed a powerful Pop Art progenitor who worked to satisfy the insatiable appetite of Edo period manga fan equivalents (at a rate of two soba platefuls per print, scholars estimate). But apart from his staggering output, the artist is celebrated for his spirited defiance and slew of creative tangents despite his censorial 1840s Tokugawa shogunate.

“It is a very exciting time for Middle Eastern artists: there is a real spirit of innovation and creativity in the air,” the famed architect Zaha Hadid, who is based in London but hails from Iraq, writes in the foreword to the newly released The Art of the Middle East.
Here’s a personal note just to put things in better perspective: When I began reporting on Middle Eastern arts and culture, some fifteen years ago, there were but a handful of notable players worth writing about — or so it seemed at the time. Now, as this book makes all too clear, not only are there enough artists to fill a hefty, 300-page coffee-table book but the number has swelled to the extent that such a compendium can’t make enough room for all of them. As thoroughly exclusive as The Art of the Middle East tries to be, several people — most notably the Hugo Boss Prize winning Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, who had her own retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim last Spring — have been left out. The author, Saeb Eigner, a British-Lebanese financier and self-assigned Arab arts champion (his credentials include acting as the senior adviser for the British Museum’s exhibition Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East) apologizes for the omissions in the Afterword.
     He’s forgiven. Especially since this book is so beautifully and impressively rendered.

Underwater sculpture is an environmental art form invented by British diver and sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor, who is now hard at work creating more than 400 life-size sculptures that will form the world’s largest underwater sculpture museum. Located off of Cancun — Mexico’s largest tourist destination — the waters where the sculptures are located are visited by over 750,000 people each year.
     Taylor’s sculptures are made of environmentally safe materials that encourage reef regrowth, and located on the ocean floor in areas that won’t harm existing ecosystems, thus allowing the much-damaged coral to regrow and create whole new ecosystems to support fish, crustaceans, and other invertebrates. The eery underwater presence of the life-size human sculptures involved in various activities (reading the paper; lounging in underwater gardens; maintaining an archive of messages in bottles) serves to distract the tourists, whose dives have thus far only worked to harm the Caribbean reefs, in order to prevent them from doing further damage.

From my regular column in AnOther magazine.

The day of my visit with Shirin Neshat, the internationally renowned Iranian artist, just so happens to be her birthday. I didn’t know this; she tells me upon my arrival at the Soho loft she shares with her partner (in life and art), Shoja Azari. Although Shirin and I have met a few times before and share friends in common, I feel bad about intruding on her special day for something as mundane as journalism. However, I soon realise she’s not much in the mood for celebrating it anyway. In fact, she seems even to be wishing it away. I don’t understand why people are making such a fuss, she says. I don’t really have time to think about my birthday this year anyway. We’re leaving for Toronto tomorrow and there’s still so much to do.
The “so much” Shirin is referring to has to do with pre-release events and official openings of her first feature film, Women Without Men, in various countries. There are emails and phone calls to answer, travel plans to arrange, screenings and parties to attend, and, of course, a deluge of interviews on the horizon. I’m so glad it’s you today, Shirin says, I can just be myself.
     She takes visible enjoyment in telling me the story, over Iranian tea and a bowl of green raisins and walnuts. It’s the one thing that seems to excite her out of her birthday humbug and the apparent sense of anxiousness that must accompany such breakthrough periods in one’s life.

Bansky, the famed British street artist whose identity is a closely guarded secret, is a known trickster and provocateur. He gained early attention for hanging his pieces in major museums on the sly, placing them next to the work of masters, and later caused controversy by featuring a live, painted elephant in one of his shows. His newest piece, a documentary called Exit Through the Gift Shop, is another head scratcher, following street art’s evolution from graffitti’s progeny to fine art’s younger brother in a movie that questions not just street art, but art itself.
     The film purports to document the life of Thierry Guetta, a French expat who through his obsession with filming everything stumbles upon the burgeoning street art scene. He is introduced to it by a cousin known as Space Invader, and in the course of his adventures meets the scene’s biggest players, including Shepard Fairey of “Obey” fame, and, eventually, Bansky. Guetta, our guide, is the comic relief — a naif asking innocent and frankly stupid questions of the street art superheroes with whom he becomes friends — filming, lending a hand, and occasionally spilling buckets of paint.
     The film takes a critical turn when Guetta drops the video camera and picks up a brush. He does so at the urging of Bansky, who makes the suggestion when he sees the disastrous documentary Guetta has produced from his near decade of street art footage.

Let’s face it. For every movement, there’s a counter-movement — even in the graffiti world. It appears that the ubiquitous spirit of graffiti in urban areas has finally spawned a new generation of taggers, with one major difference, however: these new deviants prefer to wield cleaning materials rather than cans of spray paint.
     In past decade, Reverse Graffiti (an art form that removes dirt, dust, and decay rather than adding paint) has experienced something of a mass migration across the world. Crafty examples can be found on everything from filthy car windows to highway tunnels and exit ramps. Huge projects along with small outbursts have exacted equal exposure in places like San Francisco, São Paulo, the UK, Israel, Germany, and Amsterdam. Though the majority of clean graffiti artists cite environmental concerns and/or political issues as their muse, even big-shot companies like Microsoft and Smirnoff have gotten in on the action, sensing a hip new method of advertisement.
     The movement, which traces back to British artist Paul “Moose” Curtis, the self-titled “Professor of Dirt”, is currently enticing new disciples in South Africa. Martin Pace, a student living in Durban, modified Moose’s technique in his own neighborhood for a final school project. Using a metal scrubbing brush instead of a high-pressure water hose, Pace etched a fifty-five-foot timeline of Westville’s architecture into a freeway wall. Since then, Pace has recruited a few of his buddies, formed a group called Dutch Ink, and continues to hit the streets, leaving beautiful organic murals behind.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the famous French photographer, had an incredibly prolific career as a photojournalist and portraitist. He traveled the globe for fifty years, from Mexico to Indonesia, obsessively freeze-framing the world, turning the ephemeral into the permanent. The new Cartier-Bresson retrospective at the MoMA, opening on April 11, is the first since the photographer’s death in 2004. It aims to put together a comprehensive summary of his illustrious career.
    The exhibit contains three hundred photographs dating from 1929 to 1989, one fifth of them previously unpublished. Divided into twelve chapters, it highlights Cartier-Bresson’s biggest accomplishments, most notably as the pioneer of the photo-essay genre. Among these are his trips to Communist China and the USSR, places that were not the most welcoming to Western photographers.
    It is not the photojournalism, however, that is the most moving part of the show. The middle of the exhibit is devoted to a selection of exquisite portraits that captures the essence of its subjects. There is a beautiful picture of Henri Matisse, the famous painter, serenely contemplating his pigeons. The well-known image of Albert Camus, the cigarette in his mouth and the collar of his coat upturned, the very picture of un homme is juxtaposed against the photo of Jean Paul-Sartre, his great existentialist friend and enemy.
    Cariter-Bresson once said that his aim was to engage the world. Of course, we’ve long known that he succeeded, and the MoMA exhibition is a testament to that, in case we had forgotten.

Last Thursday saw the riotous opening party — complete with psychedelic light show — of Thirty Days NY, an event series in a pop-up space in Tribeca. Curated by David Jacob Kramer and Sammy Harkham (LA natives might recognize them as the minds behind the Family Bookstore, a curated collection of published works of art, text, design, and performance), the project mashes together incredible artists, writers, and thinkers from all walks of life — and offers all events for free and open to the public. This past weekend, performances by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore and even Fred Armisen of SNL fame gave us an enticing taste of the caliber of talent slated to appear in the weeks to come.
     Highlights of the program include A.M. Homes reading Sean Wilsey; Art Spiegelman in discussion with experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs; a presentation by Aaron Rose of never-before-seen VHS short film footage by the artists he represented in the heyday of his legendary New York gallery; psychedelic light shows by Joshua White — who invented the shows in the sixties and performed at New York’s infamous Fillmore East with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and The Doors — together with Gary Panter, who built the sets for Pee-wee’s Playhouse in the ’80s.

Break out the old Singer, fiber art is back. Sewing meets its urban counterpart in San Francisco-based artist Steve MacDonald, whose fervid creativity is made manifest in the unlikely medium of stitching and needlework. Even on a good day, embroidery and pop culture make strange bedfellows, but in the deft hands of MacDonald (aka Ramblin Worker) it just works. Combining typography, painting, and sewing with a bold and graphic aesthetic, each illustrative piece is like an eccentric home-ec project gone wonderfully awry. MacDonald cites folk art, fantasy, mythology, urban settings and Japanese nature scenes as just a few of his influences, making his own landscapes something of a limitless fantasy world. Obsessive attention to detail (did you notice all the different trajectories of stars in the sky?), tongue-in-cheek humor, and the strange recurrence of roaring tigers render the handmade intricacies all the more refreshing. More than ever in an increasingly digital age, where some fear nostalgic methods could be going the way of the dinosaur, or in MacDonald’s case, the way of the dragon.

The Last Dragon opens at the Fuse Gallery in New York on April 24 and runs through May 15.