Valerie Adinolfi (left) Ron Travelletti (right) at Bean There Cafe November

 

adinolfi-travelletti

Valerie Adinolfi, Collage Artist

Ron Travelletti, Assemblage Artist

‘another time same place’

Bean There Café

201 Steiner

San Francisco, CA 94117

November 1^st - 30th

 

 

The 7th Annual Altered Barbie Show

august 1-august 17

ART 94124

39008 3RD ST. at Fairfax

SF  CA

Artist's Reception August 8th 5-8PM

S.W.A.B.

Ron Travelletti

I first became attracted to the wonderful world of Barbie as a young  queer growing up in Southern California (home of Mattel) I remember when we would drive by Mattel  I would fantasize about having five minutes in the huge,  non descript building with an empty cart. Millions of Barbie’s rolling out with accessories galore would have been my one and only target. With the precision and stealth of a  Green Beret I would shovel Barbie’s fresh off the assembly line into my basket and high tail it to the my Dad’s Edsel Wagon  idling outside.  I loved the world of miniature. It was a world within a world. My parents became overly concerned when at the tender age of eight I would scold my sisters for making such poor choices in accessorizing their Barbie’s. “Those shoes are all wrong with that outfit” I would squeal.  I loved all the options one had with Barbie. She could be anyone, anytime, anywhere. (As long as the situation could accommodate an empty headed, sharp breasted Fashionista.)  GI Joe just had guns, fatigues and boots, sexy but BORING…..  There are so many possibilities with Barbie and her crew. Doctors, Whores, Postal Workers (automatic weapons sold separately). Barbie and her posse could wear many hats (Check EBay- Barbie-Clothing-Accessories-Hats). She also came with lots of fun items to employ in dioramas. Barbie’s Barbeque, Barbie’s Hair Salon, Barbie’s Corvette, Barbie’s Massage Parlor, Barbie’s Crack House.

I decided to put Barbie and Ken in a situation where they could be of maximum effect. Wandering around fighting communicable diseases in their SWAB (Not SWAT) Mobile. One poke with Ken’s handy Anti Viral injector Gun and you’re on your way to happy days and a long life. Barbie has  the Bazooka loaded with Retro Viral Horse Pills that will buy you time you time to pay off all of those pesky bills you piled up thinking you were going to die.

What a Duo.

What a Team.

You Go Ken.

You Go Miss Barbie 

My Posters

Over the last two years I have become more and more interested in the opera. It seems to offer everything for people who love the arts. It is very visual, sets, costumes,patrons. The music is usually beautiful, there is drama, excitement, tragedy, ecstasy. What is not to like. Over the last year I am becoming more and more interested in creating representational art rather the abstract and assemblage (although I will always be passionate about the two).Part of my quest has been to take numerous drawing classes and keep a daily sketchbook. To keep my sketchbook interesting I draw things that excite me and are part of my cultural tastes. After stumbling upon an old opera poster at a thrift shop I have discovered how much I enjoy creating them. Especially right after seeing an opera when it is fresh in my mind. Drawing has opened many doors in my creative and spiritual life and I look forward to recording more of the wonderful. Here are some classic opera posters from the past I found on the net. And three of my own.

Frida Kahlo at MOMA June 14- September 28

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In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Frida Kahlo’s birth, this exhibition—organized by SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center with renowned Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera—brings together approximately 50 paintings spanning the artist’s career, from 1926 to 1954. Focusing on Kahlo’s hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits, the presentation will elucidate the progression of her practice, reflecting both her private obsessions and political concerns. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum will present a small selection of photographs from the Vicente Wolf Photography Collection, including portraits of Kahlo by preeminent photographers of the period, as well as personal snapshots of the artist with family and friends from the artist’s own photo albums—some of which have never before been published or exhibited.

Diego's Pan Am Mural at City College in San Francisco

Diego Rivera on Pan American Unity...

My mural which I am painting now--it is about the marriage of the artistic expression of the North and of the South on this continent, that is all. I believe in order to make an American art, a real American art, this will be necessary, this blending of the art of the Indian, the Mexican, the Eskimo, with the kind of urge which makes the machine, the invention in the material side of life, which is also an artistic urge, the same urge primarily but in a different form of expression.

In the center of my mural there is a large figure--on one side it has the neck of Quetzalcoatl elements from the Mexican Goddess of Earth and the God of Water. On the other side the figure is made of machinery, the machine which makes fenders and parts for airplanes. On one side of this figure there is the northern culture, on the other the southern art, the art of the emotions. People are working on this figure, artists of the North and South, Mexican and North American. I have also Fulton and Morse, artists who, as well as being painters, invented the tools for the industrial revolution, the telegraph and the steamboat, the means of transporting ideas and materials. From the South comes the plumed serpent, from the North the conveyor belt. So that is my idea which I am trying to express in this mural.

In both of the Americas I see a great many people who paint as nearly as possible like Picasso, like Matisse, like Cezanne -- not like themselves, like some European they admire. Picasso--he paints from his emotions, his own emotions only. If he thinks he copies some other style, the Greek perhaps, it is not Greek art that comes out, but something else, because of what Picasso puts into it himself. So then he assimilates what he has copied, and soon his expression is all Picasso.

Here in the Fine Arts Building there is a man carving wood. This man was an engineer, an educated and sophisticated man. He lived with the Indians and then he became an artist, and his art for awhile was like Indian art--only not the same, but a great deal of Indian feeling had passed into him and it came out in his art. Now, what he carves is not Indian any more, but his own expression--and his own expression now has in it what he has felt, what he has learned from the Indians. That is right, that is the way art should be. First the assimilation and then the expression. Only why do the artists of this continent think that they should always assimilate the art of Europe? They should go to the other Americans for their enrichment, because if they copy Europe it will always be something they cannot feel because after all they are not Europeans.

I do not think that the capacity for artistic expression has anything to do with race or heredity. Opportunity, merely. In this civilization we are more crowded, more hurried, and we are made to do from childhood many things we do not want to do, so that what is creative is killed, at least it is forcibly turned into other channels than the artistic because of the pressure against true artistic expression. So people of this civilization express their emotions in other ways than in art, and it is a very poor place for the artist to function. In the South or far North where there is not always the system saying do this, do that, there it is easy for them to make art because they do not know that they are artists and that art is something apart from life, and that to make it one must be either a genius or crazy. They make it because they love the animals, they hunt them for food, they kill them, their emotions are bound up in the animals --and so they put this emotion into these little carvings. They have not had their emotions squeezed out of them and so they can function as artists.

Source: Dorothy Puccinelli's interview with Diego Rivera, San Francisco 1940)

Rivera

On December 8, 1886, Diego Rivera was born in Guanajuato Mexico. At the age of two, before Diego was even able to read, his father set up a studio for him. The family lived in Guanajuato until 1892, when they moved to Mexico City. At the young age of 10, Diego decided he wanted to become an artist. So he began taking evening classes at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City. He enrolled in military college at the request of his father. But Diego did not like the strict regimen and after two weeks, in 1898, he attended San Carlos as a full-time student.

JOSEPH CORNELL AT MOMA SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER

Joseph Cornell
"V.L. de Mille Clro Merode cours elemantaire d'histoire nuturelle"
Construction
1941

Ron Travelletti
"Paris Passeport"
Assemblage
2007

Joseph Cornell
"XXIII Habitat group for a Shooting Gallery"
1940

Joseph Cornells work will be on display ay MOMA SF Saturday, October 06, 2007 - Sunday, January 06, 2008 . He has influenced my work enormously. Just finished reading a real page turner about his life called "Utopia Parkway" by Deborah Soloman. He had no formal training in art and his most characteristic works are his highly distinctive `boxes'. These are simple boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged surprising collections of photographs or Victorian bric-à-brac in a way that has been said to combine the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Like Kurt Schwitters he could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects, relying on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition and on the evocation of nostalgia for his appeal (he befriended several members of the Surrealist movement who settled in the USA during the Second World War). Cornell also painted and made Surrealist films.

Asian Art Museum San Francisco

Tezuka:
The Marvel
of Manga
June 2–
September 9, 2007
Exclusive U.S. venue
Osher Gallery


150,000 pages of manga. 70 anime TV & feature-length productions. Two explosive elements of Japanese pop culture. One visionary: Tezuka Osamu.

Regarded in Japan as “The God of Comics,” Tezuka Osamu is an icon in the world of manga (Japanese comics) and revered as an artistic master. This major exhibition—the first of its kind outside of Japan—features more than 200 original drawings, paintings, and more. See the art that started an international phenomenon and discover why manga is more than just your Sunday funny pages.

Astro Boy and Ron

Colon enjoys lunch in one of Tates Cafes flanked by G & G works.

In February 2007, the first major retrospective in the UK for more than twenty-five years of the art of Gilbert & George will open at Tate Modern.

The exhibition will occupy both the east and west wings on Level 4 at the gallery and part of the concourse, making it the largest exhibition ever to be mounted of their art. Comprising more than 200 pictures made since 1971, the exhibition, designed by the artists, will trace their stylistic and emotional development to the present day.

Rarely seen charcoal on paper sculptures, including The Nature of Our Looking 1970, and pieces such as Dusty Corners 1975 and Cherry Blossom 1976, will feature alongside pictures from subsequent decades, including large-scale pictures such as Life Without End 1982 and Named 2001, which is over 15 metres long. All of the 45 groups of pictures will be represented, including major quadripartite pictures such as Death Hope Life Fear 1984, Shitty Naked Human World 1994, and Nineteen Ninety Nine 1999. The exhibition will also include postcard pieces, films, books and documentation of the so-called ‘living sculptures’, works which feature the artists themselves. Gilbert & George will also make new work especially for the exhibition.

Gilbert & George (born 1943 and 1942 respectively) began working together as students at St.Martin’s School of Art in 1967. Since the early 1970s they have created pictures in series or groups of black and white, then coloured, pictures. They began to introduce bold colours in the early 1980s and subsequent groups usually include one or more pictures realised on a monumental scale. Each shares common motifs and conceptual and formal elements. Among the themes that recur are religion, sexuality, race and identity, what it is to live in a metropolis and the tensions and desires that can arise from the proximity of disparate cultural traditions and values.

Gilbert & George are renowned for their revolutionary expansion of the concept of sculpture which they shifted from an object-based practice to one that incorporates the entirety of lived experience, including presenting themselves as ‘living sculptures’. They have since worked in a range of media conventionally regarded as non-sculptural or even non-artistic. Their maxim 'Art For All' is firmly rooted in the urban and social fabric of London’s East End where they have lived and worked for forty years and remains a dominant inspiration in their art.

The exhibition is being curated by Jan Debbaut, formerly Director of Tate Collections, assisted by Ben Borthwick, Assistant Curator, Tate. It will travel to Haus der Kunst Munich (June to September 2007), Castello dei Rivoli, Turin (October to January 2008), De Young Museum, San Francisco (February to May 2008), MilwaukeeArt Museum (June to September 2008) and Brooklyn Museum of Art (October to January 2009). It will be accompanied by a comprehensive, illustrated, double-volume featuring 1479 plates with an in-depth analysis of their oeuvre by Rudi Fuchs. There will also be a 200 page exhibition catalogue which will feature essays by curator Jan Debbaut, novelist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell and art historian Marco Livingstone and this will reproduce all the works in the exhibition.

Gilbert and George at Tate Modern in London

Early life

Gilbert was born in St. Martin in Thurn/Dolomites in South Tyrol/Italy, and studied art at the Wolkenstein School of Art and Hallein School of Art, Austria and the Akademie der Kunst, Munich, before moving to England. George was born in Plymouth in the United Kingdom, and first studied art at the Dartington Hall College of Art and the Oxford School of Art, then part of the Oxford College of Technology, which eventually became Oxford Brookes University.

The two first met on 25th September 1967 while studying sculpture at St Martins School of Art, now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, one of six colleges in the University of the Arts, London. The two claim they came together because George was the only person who could understand Gilbert's rather poor spoken English. In a 2002 interview with The Daily Telegraph they said of their meeting: "it was love at first sight." (Telegraph, 2002.05.28). It is widely assumed that Gilbert & George are lovers, although they always dismiss questions about their sex lives.

[edit] Performance artists

They were initially known as performance artists. While still students they made The Singing Sculpture (1970), for which they covered themselves in gold metallic paint, stood on a table, and mimed to a recording of Flanagan and Allen's song "Underneath the Arches", sometimes for hours at a time.

A number of works from the early 1970s consisted of the two of them getting drunk, usually on gin. Smashed (1973) was a set of photographs documenting a drunken evening, while Gordon's Makes Us Drunk is a film of the pair drinking Gordon's gin and listening to Elgar and Grieg, occasionally saying "Gordon's makes us very drunk" or a slight variant thereof. This work, in common with many others by Gilbert and George, is executed in a completely deadpan way.

The matching business suits which they wore for these performances became a sort of uniform for them, and they rarely appear in public unless wearing them. It is also virtually unheard of for one of the pair to be seen without the other. They refuse to disassociate their performances from their everyday lives, insisting that everything they do is art. The pair regard themselves as "living sculptures", the idea of which came to them from a visit to Knock Shrine, Co. Mayo Ireland where it is believed that an apparition of the Blessed Virgin, saints and angels occurred in 1879. Gilbert and George have recently accepted a commission for a piece of installation art which is to be located at the apparition site.

[edit] Photo-montages

The pair are perhaps best known for their large scale photo-montages, such as Cosmological Pictures (1993), frequently tinted in extremely bright colours, backlit, and overlaid with black grids so as to resemble stained glass windows. Gilbert & George themselves often feature in these works, along with flowers and youths, their friends, and echoes of Christian symbolism. The early works in this style were in black and white, with red and yellow touches in later series. Later these works moved to use a range of bold colours. Their 2005 work, Sonofagod, has returned to a more sombre and darker palette.

Some series of their pictures have attracted media attention through including potentially shocking imagery, including nudity, depictions of sexual acts, and bodily fluids, such as faeces, urine and semen. The titling of their series, such as "Naked Shit Pictures" (1995), has also contributed to media attention. In 1986 Gilbert and George attracted criticism from left-wing commentators for a series of works seemingly glamorizing 'rough types' of London's East End such as skinheads, while a picture of an asian man bore the derogatory title "Paki".

For many years they have been residents of Fournier Street, Spitalfields, East London. In 2000 they moved galleries to be represented by White Cube.

[edit] Awards

They won the Turner Prize in 1986, and represented the UK at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

[edit] Trivia

* Martin Clunes, while a struggling young actor in the early 1980s, was a photo model for Gilbert and George. He can be recognised in their 1983 work 'World'.

* The pair assumed ownership of a working men's cafe in Spitalfields near their house in the 1990s. For a time they were often to be found in the cafe and even serving behind the counter.

* They have their own dance called the 'bend-it'.

* George was briefly married to a young art student in 1967, until about 1972. They separated but never divorced, because the marriage had produced two children.

* The pair own one of the most powerful graphics workstation computers in the UK, needed to manipulate the huge file-sizes that producing their work requires.

* The pair inspired two characters, Man Green and Man Yellow, Chief Constables of the Science Gestapo, in Grant Morrison's comicbook series The Filth. The two characters appear in pastiches of Gilbert and George's artwork, with the separate sections of the photo montages acting as individual comic book panels.

* They have dinner in the same Kurdish restaurant in Dalston at the same time every night. George walks there while Gilbert sometimes takes a cab. [1]

* The music video for "This Is How It Feels" by Inspiral Carpets is visually styled on Gilbert and George imagery.

* The look Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart adopted in the early career of Eurythmics (both dressed in men's suits and ties) was said to be inspired by Gilbert and George.

* Billy Bragg, socialist English pop singer, refers to Gilbert and George in the chorus of "Take Down the Union Jack" on the 2002 album English, Half English.

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