OLD NEWS

BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1503, GIROLAMO FRANCESCO MARIA MAZZOLA,
better known as Parmigianino.
Here, his marvelous self-portrait in a convex mirror, 1524.
<https://tinyurl.com/48ab46ah>
Young man in a frame, curious,
also painted in 1524 by Parmigianino.
<https://tinyurl.com/4wrfswwa>
Plotting to destroy
any argument you may offer
with extreme intellectual intensity:
man with a book,
painted in 1530 by Parmigianino.
<https://tinyurl.com/vd2cjfuh>
Pensive man with a book,
back in 1526.
<https://tinyurl.com/yubw3vpa>
What's a few extra vertebrae
(or finger joints)
in the cause of Beauty?
Parmigianino's so-called
Madonna of the Long Neck, late 1530s.
<https://tinyurl.com/bde5x949>
The adoring throng,
almost as perfectly beautiful
as the object of their devotion.
Also here,
a fab detail of the famous fingers!.
<https://tinyurl.com/3ea8r33w>
Mannerist passion and drama,
and a strangely small head on the horse
in Parmigianino's Conversion of Saint Paul, 1527
<https://tinyurl.com/yc5n3khc>
My beautiful Antea,
what is that animal that is eating your glove?
Fashions of the 1530s as painted by Parmigianino,
<https://tinyurl.com/szyrpxpv>
The beauty of Parmigianino's Antea,
up close & looking back at you.
<https://tinyurl.com/22puk3sh>
Haughty (& hairy)
Pier Maria Rossi di San Secondo,
with a remarkably lively codpiece.
<https://tinyurl.com/5n96ns7a>
Portrait of a collector, 1523.
Why does he look so irritated?
Has lovely art and now
a lovely portrait, painted by Parmigianino.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdftrama>
Saint Barbara, 1522.
Gorgeous work by the teen-aged (!) Parmigianino,
<https://tinyurl.com/yc23d6jr>
Woman (possibly Camilla Gonzaga)
with her three sons,
painted by Parmigianino.
<https://tinyurl.com/3ntduxa4>
Mary, Baby J, John the Baptist,
and some other random attractive young lady
(the au pair, perhaps?),
painted in the 1540s by Parmigianino.
<https://tinyurl.com/yuf664da>
Possessed of an A+ curly beard
and formidable arms & armor,
and looking very wide awake:
Gian Galeazzo Sanvitale,
Count of Fontanellato, in 1524.
<https://tinyurl.com/mw6xmm2x>
A little prophet
(with spare foot!)
by base of Parmigianino's
oddly compressed colonnade.
He's become transparent over time,
which adds to his strangeness.
<https://tinyurl.com/mwkxrjfz>
Just a boy,
portrayed by Parmigianino.
No codpiece.
Yet.
<https://tinyurl.com/54zew7st>
Madonna of the Rose,
w/ rather too knowing child,
and the world, 1530.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc2b8dvd>
Another gentleman
w/ very impressive beard & furs,
possibly Condottiere Malatesta Baglione.
<https://tinyurl.com/ytf5nskh>
What a portrait! Painted 1527,
could have been yesterday
(except for the hat),
<https://tinyurl.com/yevvm22j>
Man in a black beret,
w/ improbably long aristocratic fingers
& a fine beard, 1530.
<https://tinyurl.com/r6z3ww95>
Flaying of Marsyas:
elegant rendition of a gruesome subject
by Parmigianino in 1526.
<https://tinyurl.com/y5bss2dr>
Flirting with you:
Cupid sharpening his bow (1533)
<https://tinyurl.com/nsermwy5>
And my (improved) copy after his work,
from almost a century later.
<https://tinyurl.com/3a78nref>
Flirting with you.
And you know you want to touch her feather fan!
Woman in fashionable turban, 1530
<https://tinyurl.com/b7ed8u27> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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DO YOU WANT TO SAY I’M DATED?’ ARTIST ANNE IMHOF
<https://tinyurl.com/rtmjp5t8>
‘I don’t know what you want to know,” says Anne Imhof, three-quarters of the way into our interview. Her cautious smile, between curtains of jet black hair, changes into a sceptical pout. I have just quoted a headline at Imhof, one of Germany’s most important contemporary artists, that described her 2025 New York show as “a bad Balenciaga ad”.
Just a few years ago, Imhof was the hottest ticket on the international art circuit: a Golden Lion winner at the 2017 Venice Biennale, whose transformation of the German pavilion into a sinister, S&M-flavoured “catwalk show from hell” had masses scrambling to join the queue. Imhof was a cultural polymath whose shows combined etchings, paintings, dance, live music and film; a muse to fashion designers whose sporty goth aesthetic – Adidas tracksuit bottoms, chunky trainers, black leather – beseiged the clubs of Berlin and beyond.
But her last sprawling mega-show, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, was met with mixed reviews in US broadsheets and proper drubbings in hipster online journals such as Hyperallergic and Spike. Suddenly the next generation seemed all too eager to cancel her membership of the cool club. Still, I had expected she would rise to me bringing it up. Instead, the shutters come down. The arms she enthusiastically waved across the screen minutes earlier are now locked across her chest. My questions become longer, her answers shorter. “Do you want to say I’m dated as an artist?” she asks when I say that the music she has just released for her debut album <https://www.modernmatters.net/music/promotion/pan150-anne-imhof/> reminds me of 1990s grunge. “Actually, this is getting quite exhausting,” she says and soon after ends our call (though she later agrees to continue the interview via email).
<https://tinyurl.com/2e2v9aew>
What most likely caused the annoyance wasn’t the criticism as such, more the fact that it wasn’t direct enough. Because open conflict is something Imhof, now 48, always seemed to thrive on. Educated at private schools in Germany and Britain, she was suspended from a boarding school in Bath on the grounds – in her telling – that she had an “evil eye” and was bewitching other girls. While studying art in Offenbach and Frankfurt, she moonlit as a bouncer at the Robert Johnson nightclub. The first entry in her catalogue raisonné <https://tinyurl.com/544aa6se> is a performance she put on at a red-light bar, where two boxers had to fight each other until a band in the other corner played their last note.
Later, in her 30s, Imhof was commissioned to fill the German pavilion at Venice, a building re-designed by the Nazis in 1938. “I decided to make things visible that are obviously problematic in my country,” she explained at the start of our interview. “I built a fence around the house that the Nazis built, and I let dogs piss on the staircase leading up to it.”
Called Faust, the work did not just showcase Imhof’s taste for conflict, but also her gift for conjuring up images that obliquely capture the spirit of our age. Once visitors got past the menacing dobermans patrolling outside, they found themselves walking across a raised glass floor that spanned the building and unsettled its occupants. The feeling was exacerbated by a crew of dead-eyed performers in black sportswear, who roamed among and below the crowd, playing thrash metal or sulkily hovering over their phones.
All the cultural preoccupations of the 2010s were there: the militarisation of physical borders on land, the melting away of barriers in the digital sphere, tech surveillance and Apple Store aesthetics. Imhof says she was living in Frankfurt at the time, home to the European Central Bank, which played a key role in the decades of sovereign debt crises. “Their buildings are mostly made of glass,” says Imhhof. “That transparency is supposed to unite the inside and the outside. But glass creates separation as much as it does visibility.”
Faust was also one of the first major art shows that seemed to be specially designed for . “It was the height of social media becoming a new way of communicating,” says Imhof. “In front of my eyes, Faust turned from something I created into something the audience created. They were coming up with their own edits, their own iconography.”
The trouble with art that captures the zeitgeist, of course, is that the zeitgeist moves on, relentlessly. Entitled Doom: House of Hope and performed underneath a giant ticking doomsday clock, Imhof’s three-hour New York show swapped out some cultural signifiers – out went the Germanic guard dogs, in came high-school jocks, cheerleaders and grunge kids. But it featured many of the same performers as the Venice show and reprised a feeling of existential exhaustion: “We’re fucked, we’re doomed, we’re dead / I think I made you up inside my head.” That was one of the choruses chanted by Imhof’s roving cast. Critic called it “excessively pessimistic about the future” and “comically apolitical”.
<https://tinyurl.com/mtmaxnyj>
Her dalliances with the world of fashion, too, have invited a backlash, which might explain her bristling at the “Balenciaga ad” dig. After years of serving as a semi-official muse for Balenciaga’s former creative director Demna, she designed a moody show for Burberry during lockdown in 2020. Last year, she put on a “battle of the bands” performance sponsored by Nike, including a special-edition football top with “Imhof” written on the back.
This winter, she and her new partner, US ballet dancer Devon Teuscher, were photographed in a hotel bed dressed in Valentino, for the Italian fashion brand’s new campaign. German newspaper Welt said her career was starting to resemble a cautionary tale of what happens to artists who get into bed with the fashion industry: “One front-row appearance is one too many.”
How has Imhof bounced back from this? Does she now feel pressure to be more politically explicit? “I think I have a responsibility towards my work,” she says, “but also towards the people I work with, not to make political statements just to make pieces more desirable. It’s not that I think art isn’t political – on the contrary. It’s about creating a space you share, in which you show moments of love and care, as extremely skilled people give everything. My goal is not to politicise my art, or to justify it in that context, to monetise or profit on that. Revolutions don’t happen inside a museum space.”
The title of Imhof’s latest exhibition, Fun ist ein Stahlbad, or Fun is a Steel Bath, could be read as her answering her critics on the politics point. Showing at the Serralves Foundation in Porto, it cites the philosopher Theodor Adorno, for whom naive hope has no place in modern art: at best, artists can create works that expose how deeply damaged our world has become.
While previous Imhof shows were emphatically immersive, this one is filled with sculptures designed to be uninviting: in the courtyard, Imhof has built an empty swimming pool out of black metal, the literal steel bath of the title. Elsewhere, there is a grid of crowd-control barriers. “The viewer confronts a sculpture that already embodies control rather than being guided through it,” she says. “The body becomes a site of thought, movement a form of intelligence – that is inherently political.”
In another corner, a four-channel film overlays footage of the New York show with a passage from Australian science-fiction writer Greg Egan’s novel Diaspora, about a dystopian, proto-fascist future in which software births genderless beings without parents. Pessimism, she seems to be saying, can be political too.
“A lot of things have changed since I made Faust in 2017, when maybe we were at the height of social media,” she says. “Perhaps now it is not about the presence of bodies, or about being seen. It’s more about sheltering a certain artistic autonomy and having to mimic something to be not taken in by it.”
<https://tinyurl.com/3bdv9ynr>
Does it all add up? Adorno was a firm believer that artistic autonomy could only be sheltered in high-modernist art, and that all entertainment was essentially a form of cultural coercion. But Imhof makes art that wants to be autonomous and popular, pulling in anything from painting to graffiti, from rock to rap, from modern dance to classical ballet. This debut album WYWG (short for “Wish You Were Gay”) contains songs she mostly wrote in the early noughties, bearing the influence of hard-to-digest acts like Genesis P-Orridge and Black Flag. Yet some songs, Brand New Gods for instance, also bring to mind the Velvet Underground: austere but surprisingly catchy. “I think there is a need or a desire of mine to make my work accessible,” she says. “I don’t think the future of art lies in making it into some elite bubble.”
Artists who design football shirts may be breaking out of the art world bubble, but if they make that shirt for Nike, are they still “mimicking something in order not to be taken in by it”? Or are they just making lifestyle consumer products, pure and simple?
“When I talk about mimicry, I mean a strategy for staying alert within powerful systems, including social structures, as a means of survival,” she says. “Fashion and art are not separate moral systems. They both involve labour, production, and circulation that aren’t fully transparent. For me, the question is more about agency: who makes decisions, who is involved, and whether the work can maintain its critical position while moving through these systems.”
Adorno might be the patron saint of her Porto show, but would he have approved of her work for Nike? “My interest is not in claiming moral purity, but in remaining aware of the conditions of production – who is involved, how labour is treated, and what choices I make as an artist. Collaborating with fashion or popular culture doesn’t surrender autonomy.” _Philip Oltermann _GuardianUK

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SEASON 5, EPISODE 17: INTERVIEW WITH DAMIEN HIRST
<https://tinyurl.com/ywkmh7me> _Waldy&Bendy

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RAGNAR KJARTANSSON KEEPS REPEATING HIMSELF
<https://tinyurl.com/3w5amd42>
Ragnar Kjartansson has done it again, which shouldn’t be a surprise for an artist whose stock in trade is repetition. The celebrated Icelandic performer’s latest video, Sunday Without Love, reprises his signature musical formula – spare lyrics and harmonies, repeated over and over, to tragicomic effect. Inspired by a souvenir postcard from his daughter’s baptism that the artist keeps on his refrigerator, the nineteen-minute video is set in an idyllic mountain valley. It depicts ten variously aged white people wearing folk costumes of indeterminate European provenance: bonnets, aprons and pink petticoats; top hats, cravats and blue blouses. Half the people play acoustic instruments while the rest loiter on the grass. Kjartansson, the song’s lead vocalist and guitarist, croons an English translation of the short comedic German song ‘Ohne Liebe Leben Lernen’ (1996). Little else transpires.
Yet, like much of Kjartansson’s work, Sunday Without Love does a lot with that little. Inside the gallery, visitors sink into its mood. “You must learn to live,” the song begins, “live without love. / Love is not good for you.” It continues: “Stop all this longing, / looking at stars. / Stay on the ground. / Hear what I say.” That’s the entire song; its un-Romantic message is in tension not only with the video’s distinctly Romantic setting but also the singer’s wistfulness. Despite the pragmatic-minded lyrics Kjartansson sings over and over, his voice conveys a deep sense of longing. It’s as if he were a brooding adolescent, locked in his bedroom, playing the same sad song on repeat. Yet what’s fascinating about the artwork, what takes it beyond mere self-pity, is how it pushes its languid wistfulness to farcical extremes: the setting’s incongruousness, the actors’ folksy cosplay, the lyrics’ insensate repetition. Living without love, the video suggests, doesn’t come at the cost of levity.
Sunday Without Love’s title alludes vaguely to the Christian day of worship. The video’s lush setting appears life-affirming, yet the performers’ anachronistic costumes suggest that the pastoral ideal remains stuck in a mythic past. The costumes’ non-specificity – at the exhibition opening, Kjartansson jokingly described his use of them as “total cultural appropriation… I have no idea what they stand for” – allows them to represent a generalised idea of historical European folk religiosity. While many present-day Europeans, stoked by reactionary politicians and commentators, lament what they perceive to be cultural decline, Sunday Without Love suggests the impossibility of returning to the past, and the ridiculousness of imagining you could, particularly if one reads the repetition of its tragicomic lyrics as a metaphor for cultural stagnation.
<https://tinyurl.com/pthdbjj8>
Kjartansson has played with the ambiguities of European nostalgia before. For example, his photograph restaging an image taken at the first Russian McDonald’s franchise, Three Sisters (remake of Jay Ranelli’s Lost Photo c. 1990) (2021), contains layers of enigmatic cultural allusion. Kjartansson’s version is based on US theatre director Jay Ranelli’s lost 1990 original, which the latter claims captured three servers with the same names as the lead characters in Anton Chekhov’s play, Three Sisters (1901). The image’s smiling characters and sterile fast-food setting are inversions of Sunday Without Love’s dowdy characters and glorious natural environs, but the dissonance produced by their contrast has a similar effect, making it hard to pin down the artwork’s meaning. Is Three Sisters a heartfelt glance back at the transition to post-Soviet Russia and its increasing openness to Western culture? Is it a commentary on how far Russian culture has fallen, from theatrical masterpieces to the bathos of fast food? Is it an implicit rebuke of Putin-era Russia’s pariah status since its annexation of Crimea? A meta-commentary on the dizzying levels of cultural reference embedded in a photograph that no longer even exists? The artwork’s ambiguities allow it to be all of those things at once: sincere and ironic, impressed and critical, nostalgic and unsentimental.
In Sunday Without Love, the use of a postcard with personal associations as the source text provides a way for Kjartansson to negotiate a similar set of ambiguous feelings. While Sunday Without Love isn’t explicitly about Kjartansson’s daughter in the way that performances such as Me and My Mother (2000-ongoing), or Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage (2011/14), are about his parents, the artwork can’t help but feel like a knowingly melodramatic lament for the world she was born into – and a past she can never experience. The video has affinities with postcards in that both embrace their own kitschy, stylised nostalgia, which allows irony to coexist with sincerity. Sunday Without Love’s aestheticised blend of ironic performance and sincere expression constitutes Kjartansson’s answer to the bind the song lyrics articulate. Even if living without love might fortify the spirit, why would you want to stop “looking at stars”, dreaming of something better?
<https://tinyurl.com/vprt5jce>
<https://tinyurl.com/y46rhyj4>
It’s as though, on an intellectual level, Kjartansson knows better than to indulge in nostalgia, yet nonetheless recognises its emotional pull for both himself and others. When Clement Greenberg set avant-garde art against commercialised kitsch in his classic essay, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939), the forces of reaction were at Western Europe’s door and kitsch for him wasn’t merely a matter of bad taste but an instrument of totalitarian demagoguery in Germany, Italy and Russia. Today, the sense of discrete nation-state enemies may be more diffuse, but the perception of a decline in taste, as well as a loss of cultural mooring posts, is even more acute, with the Internet ushering in decades of what the critic Dean Kissick aptly calls ‘Vulgar Images’. Whereas Greenberg believed that only avant-garde art could resist the ‘ersatz culture’ of kitsch, here and elsewhere Kjartansson deflates his own kitschy impulses through an exaggerated embrace of them.
That, too, is something the artist has done many times before, yet both he and his audiences can’t seem to get enough of it. At Sunday Without Love and other installations of his I’ve seen, clumps of visitors linger in front of the glowing screen as though it were a campfire flickering in the dark. In such moments, the audience forms a temporary community in the secular gallery space, the kind of unhurried, reverent gathering that some lament has disappeared with the advent of the smartphone and the decline in attendance at religious services. Longing is like that: you see the thing you wish you had and dwell on it – maybe a bit more than you should. Kjartansson’s irresistible repetitions show us how ridiculously easy it is to get stuck in that feeling but also how sometimes the only way out is through. _Louis Bury_ArtReview

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RICHARD ESTES PARKED CARS 1969
<https://tinyurl.com/44sx34mn>
Wayne Thibaud - Heavy Traffic
<https://tinyurl.com/2ec4dbvz>
Phillip Geiger
https://tinyurl.com/bdz8ce79
Ralph Goings, Paul's Corner Cushion, 1970
<https://tinyurl.com/ykc8btbz>
Robert Bechtle, Alameda Gran Torino, 1974
<https://tinyurl.com/533y36fk>
Richard Estes, Apollo, 1968
<https://tinyurl.com/yrp6jvt2>
Fairfield Porter
<https://tinyurl.com/47xvm789>
Vladimir Shinkarev, Night on Msta, 2013
<https://tinyurl.com/32k9tsa7>
Jane Freilicher, The car, 1963
https://tinyurl.com/348v2r3w
Alex Katz
<https://tinyurl.com/4tnza8bw>
Alex Colville, Main Street, 1979
<https://tinyurl.com/nrh5xx26> _RabihAlameddine