Artwork by Boo Saville

Artist Boo Saville isn’t scared of things that go bump in the night. In fact, you could presume an avid fascination beyond moribund. She lingers over the physical embodiment of death, deliberating upon the remaining relic once breath, soul, imagination and bowels have stirred their last. Despite a righteous artistic background — a successful artist for an older sister and years spent diligently absorbing advice from tutors at London’s Slade School of Fine Art — what Saville remains best at is copying. “At art school you are told copying is cheating.” But she insists that it’s neither death nor copying from photographs that she’s fascinated by. “It is the iconography of death,” she says, “the dual quality of violence and redemption a corpse presents. Photographs have already begun that process of distortion, of creating an icon, a lie.” (more…)

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Revered for her moving and surprisingly beautiful take on the scatological, AUREL SCHMIDT is one of today’s hottest young artists. Born in Kamloops, Canada, Aurel lives and works between Vancouver and New York City. Her passion for upsetting conventional ideas of art has evolved significantly beyond her attempts in high school to offend her art teacher. Now she’s armed with a self-taught intensive art history education and enviable hyper-realistic drawing abilities. Dutch still-life/landscapes and “all of the garbage, rats, and decayed stuff” on the streets of NYC inspire Aurel’s painstakingly detailed psychedelic compositions. For Issue 19’s Earth By, Aurel submitted an earlier work, titled The End. We first featured her in PLANET° in spring 2007.

“Astonish Me!” commanded Sergei Diaghilev, arbiter of taste and founder of the Ballet Russes in Paris in the early 20th Century, to his gathering of composers, dancers, writers, and artists — which included such luminaries as Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Apollinaire, and Picasso among many others. It became the defining dictum for art in the 20th Century, infusing Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism and onward with a simple, clear directive to make art that stunned. For me, it’s the benchmark I always hold in mind when viewing new work. Does it stop me in my tracks and seize me – emotionally? aesthetically? Does it reach out and shake me from my bland existence? Unfortunately, in today’s oversaturated art market, where crude, rudimentary craft-making seems to rule the day, the answer more often than not is “No”. But not even a resounding no; I’ve become so resigned to bad art at this point it’s more like a wimper of a no as I leave the gallery or museum uninspired, and often despondent (this year’s Whitney Biennial). Wangechi Mutu, on the other hand… she is a resounding “Yes!” A breathtaking, entirely unexpected fusion of Klee, Klimt, and Schiele, Mutu’s art is polemical, lyrical, and disturbing at once. PLANET° first wrote about Mutu in 2004 in a long profile and was one of the earliest magazines to notice and champion her work.
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In 1980s-New York, players like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Mapplethorpe revolutionized the art scene. Today something similar is happening in India, where a new generation of artists is creating work that challenges cultural taboos on feminism, homosexuality, and class mobility. Rooted in Indian culture, using references that run from the Bhagavad Gita to Bollywood, these “New Wave” Indian artists are producing art that’s bold, bright, and refreshingly in-your-face.
     The fourteen artists profiled in New Delhi, New Wave (Damiani) have been carefully picked to represent the new generation. Some of them are friends, two are married to each other, but each body of work is completely separate and original. A lot of the work deals with sexuality, from the condom-embossed articles of clothing made by twentysomething designer/artists Thukral & Tagra to Tejal Shah’s gender-bending photographs of transvestites as female sex goddesses and divas. Video artist Sonia Khurana uses her large, voluptuous body to counter India’s dependence on Western ideals of beauty, while Kriti Arora’s huge photographs of humble road-builders make us confront a social underclass that’s usually hidden.
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Artwork Courtesy of the Artist & the James Cohan Gallery

“It’s a tradition to escape by going West,” says Alison Elizabeth Taylor, referring to the wide-open spaces that beckon America’s freedom seekers. Since Taylor went the opposite direction, from Los Angeles to New York City, to attend Columbia University’s MFA program in 2003, her artwork has been intensely preoccupied with the West she left behind. “I grew up hating the desert,” she says about her years in Las Vegas. “I thought it was so oppressive. I felt like it made everything in the real world so much farther away from me, but I don’t feel that way now.”
     Taylor’s work tells stories about individuals who have struck a bargain with the desert — freedom for isolation, she calls it — and gladly agree to its terms. In her latest series, she pays homage to this American brand of misfit, using a technique called marquetry, or wood inlay, that employs different grains of wood sanded down to a regal sheen. Against an arid, barren backdrop of varying shades of brown, the inevitable collision between Utopia and reality plays out. In Taylor’s art, big-box stores and subdivisions multiply exponentially, and dirt roads turn into four-lane highways — all signs of society’s unrelenting encroachment. As she does in all of her work, Taylor peels back the clean, shiny surface of the American Dream to give us a glimpse of the alienation, boredom, and violence that exist just underneath. Whether her subject matter involves a drunken confrontation, an accidental drowning, or a man on the run, she offers us just a hint of the narrative and lets our imaginations do the rest.
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The songs of the spheres in the palm of your hand

“Is celebrational a word?” asks Matthew Stone. Not officially, but it’s a good fit for the maverick ringleader of !WOWOW!, south London’s notorious art-squat collective. The self-supporting community of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians stage word-of-mouth gatherings that deliver equal amounts of creativity and decadence. Their complex “happenings” exude the aura of secret initiation rituals, and can involve anything from single individuals to thousands of people. “We stand/lie here united in infinite possibility,” Stone explained in an invitation to a one-off “pirate” view in a dilapidated Peckham warehouse last year. The 25-year-old self-styled “art shaman” puts his co-conspirators at the center of his own epically disheveled photographs. (more…)

Yayoi Kusama

Plagued with hallucinations and an unnatural obsession with tiny circles since childhood, avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama started painting dot motifs at the age of 10. Instead of seeing her fixation as a setback, she embraced it, painting trees, furniture, and sometimes even the people around her in brightly colored polka dots. Then, in 1957, she moved to New York City, where she joined scores of other creative types in spearheading crazy art events in Brooklyn, anti-war demonstrations, and body painting festivals in studios across town. She shared exhibits with the likes of Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenberg, and represented Japan at the Venice Bienniale several times throughout the 1990s. Since 2000, she’s had solo exhibitions in France, Denmark, Korea, Hong Kong, and her native Japan, where she has received numerous awards. (more…)

YOSHITAKA AZUMA created the Earth By for Issue 18 of PLANETº, which is our ongoing series of personal interpretations of Earth by some of today’s top international artists. Azuma, a Kyoto-based artist who has been generating international buzz since his debut in New York in late 2005, and then again in 2006 at a group show at Dietch Projects, is best known for his layered silhouettes of young girls whose insides are made up of a kaleidoscope of associative imagery – including snakes and forests and animals and car crashes – that provokes a profound sensory and psychological experience in the viewer. We are honored to feature his mysterious, symbolic vision.

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