From my regular column in AnOther magazine.

This week in New York City is a busy one for Irina Lazareanu. Her birthday was on Tuesday, and today she hosts a star-studded benefit – something she pretty much threw together on the fly. It’s a release event for Corduroy magazine and a benefit for Kiva.org, a charity that provides micro-loans around the world to help alleviate poverty. Although the logistics were handled by event organisers, you can credit Irina for the main attractions. Can you imagine Pete Doherty and Sean Lennon jamming together on the same stage? Well, Irina can – and she can also call them both up and tell them to start rehearsing. They did so by emailing practice sessions back and forth across the Atlantic. However, getting Pete himself across the ocean proved more challenging. “I think the hardest thing was getting Pete’s visa,” Irina says. “When they asked if he’d ever had any infractions, we had to answer, ‘um, well, yeah, like 27.’” Apparently, it’s harder for Pete Doherty to get into this country than most would-be terrorists, even though he’s only ever veered toward self-destruction, not mass-destruction. But that’s a whole other matter best left to the tabloids. Besides, Irina succeeded at getting him in. So it’s all set for Thursday, the hottest ticket in town.

On a pleasant afternoon last, January Damir Doma, the young fashion designer who works in Paris, sat at a long table in his boutique-cum-showroom located in a tiny alley of Le Marais, Paris’s fashion district. He looked content. His men’s show that took place the night before was well received and the nail-biting, repeated-click anxiety that every designer goes through after the show, has passed.
    The showroom was swarming with buyers from all over the world, and Doma’s assistants, all young and lanky, were busy filling out orders, chatting in half-a-dozen languages — I discerned French, English, Italian, and Russian. The courtyard served as a smoke-break gathering place and sandwiches were laid out for the hungry.
    Doma is a hot new name among the young fashion cognoscenti and his ethereal, monochromatic menswear has already been copied high and low. Last fall, as I was chatting with Susie Bubble, the famous English fashion blogger, one of her entourage broke in asking if my coat was by Doma (it wasn’t).
    Doma’s show, held at a parking garage, was a mob scene with hangers-on of all stripes trying to get inside to see what the designer cooked up this time.

Just as governments begin to implement policies and practices to slow global climate change, some designers are jumping ship. They fear that our environment is damaged beyond repair and are thinking up ways for us to survive the impending apocalypse. A new show at the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster, gives credence to their ideas.
     These artists attack the problem at various scales. Some are creating specialized articles of clothing to protect the human body from increasingly damaging atmospheric conditions. Lucy Orta crafted a tent-like, nylon garment that gives protection from the light, heat, cold, and water. Equipped with its own whistle, lantern, and compass, it’s like a highly-evolved all-weather coat. Performance artist Lawrence Mastaf designed a clear vacuum-sealed plastic trap for himself, in which he lies suspended with only slender tubes to breathe through. It’s a spectacle that’s both eery and peaceful. He’s preserved like a biological specimen, and floating dreamily like an embryo.

Raymond Pettibon, the guru of grungy great works on paper, has a new series at Gladstone in Brussels through July 10. For someone whose output has sustained itself for decades within a fairly narrow range, it’s such a thrill to see the interest and variety in the work continue to increase. The fifteen or so dirty doggies in this show feature some staple symbols (Jesus, fighter planes, cloudy oceans, and text text text) but overall seem to be — as is typical of Pettibon at his best — chick-driven and philosophical.
     Meditations on sexual anxiety morph into poetic perambulations on semantic meaning and symbolic anxiety. How meaning is made in the brain and the relationship between words and images seem to form the basis of these explorations in ink, pen, and gouache. Slippery signifiers, another Pettibon staple, reproduce on the page as his pop culture-crammed psyche plays itself out. A small and self-referential sounding piece professes that he only wants “slow, calm drawing and daydreaming over a thing till it arranges itself”.
     An increased use of collage in this group makes things kind of hectic, the anxiety building with the thickness of the layered imagery. The raggedy torn edges of the paper, and his signature fraying brushtrokes that split as the brush empties itself of ink, keep them rough and ready, in the present, and never quite finished off. Distinctly un-dainty, his pieces seem to growl at you and like the grumpy cloud in one work, serve “to make the swell grow”.

A Man Sat Alone In His Room is the result of the collaboration between Joscha Bruckert and Andreas Till, photography students in Dortmund, Germany. The two are self-proclaimed “lonely workers”, which helps explain the subject matter of their project. The self-published book of luminous portraits, collages, and found images, is “about the night and everything that comes along with it”, writes Bruckert via email. “Starting with…the night sky and the phenomenon of darkness itself”, the end result is “a very heterogeneous collection of photographic fragments that add up to what the night means to us”.
     Till writes, “For me, the book is like a thought bubble in which many thoughts, ideas and desires circle around each other like the planets of our universe. They influence each other, but as they differ so much in respect of volume, texture, and maybe size, they will stay in their own orbit.” The subject matter on these pages ranges wide, but the colors and forms reverberate off of each other in their exploration of nighttime, and together evoke what it feels to be awake as the dark lonely hours stretch into morning.
     Joscha Bruckert is the editor of Romka, a photography magazine that features the personal photos of professional, student, and amateur photographers from all over the world. Till is working on several other projects and plans to enroll in an MFA program at Ohio University in the fall. A Man Sat Alone In His Room is available in its first edition of fifty copies, numbered and signed. All copies include four free posters, and can be ordered online here.

Angela McCluskey’s mother promised her that one day she would look like a Christmas tree. And she does. Depending on when you catch her and what your mood is, McCluskey could be a haphazardly-but-enthusiastically-decorated-by-the-kids tree. Or she could be a candle-lit, comfort-bringing, anticipation-ridden, pine-scented tree. Most of the time, McCluskey is both.
     It is this combination that attracts young and old, famous and infamous, rich and poor to McCluskey’s side. At her 17th anniversary party with husband Paul Cantelon, McCluskey’s home is bursting. The cross-section of guests represent the Los Angeles melting pot, which one rarely sees gathered in the same place. Star-studded, but not glittering, McCluskey has a way of humanizing everyone that comes into contact with her. There is no distinction between McCluskey’s goddaughter, Riley Keough — Elvis’ granddaughter — or Alison Owen, the mother of McCluskey’s other goddaughter, Lily Allen.
     McCluskey brings the notable and the obscure together, breaking down the reserve of the former and bringing up the assurance of the latter. Within her inner circle, which McCluskey calls the “Ring Of Fire”, there is a core of seven girls who serve as each other’s security blankets.

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When he was just starting out four years ago, Steve Lazarides was the man behind the man. Considering many of his artists work under the cloak of secrecy, you’d think that would’ve left him in relative obscurity. But with a stable of names such as French street art godfather Invader, Radiohead’s long time artist Stanley Donwood, Banksy, and Brooklyn wheatpaste kings Faile, he has become the focus of increased attention across the art world. Next week, his upstart UK gallery, Lazarides, will begin the second phase of its five-month LA stint with the awesomely named Eurotrash — a group show including breakout JR, Antony Micallef, Conor Harrington, and Vhils. Lazarides’ eye for talent and new forms of renegade, sometimes vandal art feels like a renaissance of Tony Shafrazi’s legendary ’80s New York gallery, which launched the careers of Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Futura 2000. Here in LA, he fits in with the city’s most ambitious impresarios with this pop-up spectacle. An 8,000 square-foot space in the heart of posh Beverly Hills, it feels like both an attack on the upper crust and perhaps a provocative statement of art nouveau riche. The visit opened back in April with a daunting solo show from misfit David Choe, which could’ve been four separate shows (oil painting, drawings, huge inflatable “sculptures”, and XXX graffiti) and continues through September.   Like the legendary Banksy show Lazarides staged four years ago, it’s an event that will still have people talking once it’s gone. 

Eurotrash opens June 8 at LAzarides, 320 N Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, 90210

Steel freight containers have become favorite toys for ecocentric architects looking to repurpose existing materials. The crates themselves, which are eight-feet wide, eight or nine-feet high, and twenty or 40-feet long, are ideally proportioned building blocks. Their CORE-TEN steel frames and cladding make them incredibly strong, and resistant to corrosion and puncture. The units are manufactured with integral corner connectors so that they can be stacked vertically, strung horizontally, and stabilized diagonally with simple hardware. And both new and used containers are readily available.  Because of the recent slow-down in international commerce, thousands of containers are lying unused at ports throughout the world.
     Container Atlas: A Practical Guide to Container Architecture showcases some incredible buildings that have been assembled from these containers. The projects cover all styles, scales, and sensibilities, illustrating the broad range of effects that can be achieved.
     Most designs leverage the rugged, industrial aesthetic of the containers, highlighting their corrugated cladding and leaving the scarred surfaces of used containers intact. A group of artists in Vancouver converted two used containers into an event space, where passers-by can stop to check out videos, artwork, or a live DJ. The graffiti-enhanced containers give the venue a gritty authenticity. 

Louise Bourgeois was a remarkably prolific and giving artist, who over a lifetime of working created a language — beautiful, organic, sometimes terrifying, sensual, and abstract — that taught you what listening was really about. She was self-sacrificing in her work, which often necessitated an exploration of guilt and shame and littleness, as well as that inherently fraught and awkward business of human interaction. But she went down into the shadows only to climb back up, bearing something to give, every time, and most present in her work is a strong, clear drive for rapport, what she called the “toi et moi”, our need to understand and connect with each other, without which we would be very lost. Her work communicated the universal, but in that strange, particularizing way it was also instantly recognizable as hers. As Bourgeois herself said in 1994, “All our subjects are the same: anything I say would apply to any of us. So, it’s not a mystery. The mystery resides in what you do with it.”

In an era in which advertising presents itself to us in almost every form of media possible, it seems billboards have to contain something special in order to make us look up. Enter the Ritual Project, an exploration of the dwindling hand-painted billboard trade, and Up There, a short documentary that explores the painstaking execution of a hand-painted 20×50-foot billboard in New York City.
     Up There is a testament to the dying art of hand-painted advertisements. “We’re in the vast minority”, says one painter, “Just about everything is done on vinyl, which is printed”. The painters are not interested in instant gratification — evidenced by their completion of a requisite two-year apprenticeship before even being allowed to put paintbrush to brick. The work is both artistically challenging and physically grueling; industry veterans show off warped knuckles resulting from decades of braving the elements. “It takes so much work that it’s kind of ridiculous”, one painter admits. But compared to the pixelated gloss of the more popular vinyl ads, the rich colors that emerge from their own painstaking process make the result well worth the effort. As one artist notes, “It’s the same way Michelangelo did the Sistine Chapel”.

Watch the full documentary after the jump.