Recently in Art Category

"My dream has always been the same since I was a kid, to somehow show people life through different colored lenses," writes Nikki Sixx in the introduction to his new book, a collection of very personal words and images called This Is Gonna Hurt. "Now more than ever I feel it's important to see that way. We need to be aware that the warped perspectives of television, Internet, and magazines are sometimes poisonous," he continues. "I cannot walk down the street without feeling I am being subjected to some constant sales pitch on what we should look like, smell like, dress like, or even worse, what we should be like."

A devout nonconformist, Sixx wears many hats in his life. SuicideGirls last caught up with Mötley Crüe's co-founder and bass player shortly before the release of his bestselling book, The Heroin Diaries, a collection of journal entries that chronicled his self-destructive - but ultimately self-saving - journey to the other side of drugs. To accompany its release, Sixx put together a side project called Sixx:A.M. - a band which went on to have a life of its own. The musician, songwriter and author also has his own clothing line, and hosts two radio shows, Sixx Sense (which airs Monday to Friday) and The Side Show Countdown (which is broadcast on weekends).

But it's Sixx's work as a photographer that made a further conversation with the multi-talented man mandatory. His photography, as seen in this first bound collection, is shockingly beautiful. However, the beauty within the images is of a kind that complies with nothing except Sixx's own very individual aesthetic. Reflecting the contradictions in life that have troubled him in the past, his often preconceived portraits are both ethereal and hyperreal at the same time.

Sixx spoke with SG by phone from the Funny Farm, his photography studio and creative sanctuary...

Read our exclusive interview with Nikki Sixx on SuicideGirls.com.

"It's an absolutely fucking crazy story."
- Jaimie D'Cruz

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a film that defies explanation, and one's ability to suspend disbelief. Indeed the plot would be utterly ridiculous, if it weren't for the fact that it's true.

It started out life as a simple documentary about street art as seen through the lens of Thierry Guetta, a French national living in Los Angeles. Thanks to a family connection, and his infectious and perpetuity ebullient personality, Guetta gained unparalleled access to the major players in the scene, who are a notoriously secretive and hard to track down bunch by necessity due to the predominantly illicit nature of their work. Guetta's extreme enthusiasm for the form, and his zealous pursuit of its practitioners, ultimately led him to the scene's holy grail, Banksy, an elusive British street art superstar.

After Guetta proved his worth as a location scout in LA, Banksy - whose real identity is shrouded in mystery - inexplicably agreed to participate in his documentary film project (or more accurately didn't object when he started rolling tape). Guetta proceeded to shoot hundreds of hours of footage, over a period that spanned several years. With no sign of the finished product in sight however, Banksy eventually suggested Guetta work on a first cut. It was only at this point that a major stumbling block became apparent - the fact that Guetta actually had no clue how to make a film,

"I didn't know if I believed he was a filmmaker or a mental patient with a camera," said Banksy of Life Remote Control, the manic film Guetta subsequently produced. In an attempt to salvage the situation, Banksy decided to take control of the project - and of Guetta's vast library of unlogged videotape. Banksy in turn, encouraged the cameraman turned friend to make some art of his own, as he exchanged roles and became the filmmaker.

It was at this point that events took an unlikely and unanticipated course. Banksy recruited producer Jaimie D'Cruz, who then brought editor Chris King onboard. Together they began the process of assessing Guetta's raw material to see if it was even possible to assemble it into some kind of meaningful narrative. As they viewed it they began to realize that the effusive Frenchman was ultimately the star of his own footage. Guetta meanwhile had taken Banksy's edict a little more seriously than had been intended, and started work on an art show of epic proportions.

A crew was dispatched to LA to film Guetta as he mounted his assault on the art world under the moniker Mr. Brainwash. Having rented the extremely spacious old CBS building, Columbia Square, on Sunset Blvd., Guetta set about filling it ahead of his June 18, 2008 debut. As with his filmmaking endeavor, Guetta didn't let his lack of prior personal experience hold him back from jumping in with two feet (neither did a broken leg).

Much to the surprise of everyone - including Banksy - the event proved to be an undeniable success. Thousands flocked to the opening night (which featured Shepard Fairey on the decks), and by the end of the first week Guetta had sold close to $1 million worth of his Mr. Brainwash "art."

Guetta was a bona fide overnight sensation, but was he a bona fide artist? As Mr. Brainwash's career took flight, Banksy, D'Cruz and King shifted the focus of the street art documentary, turning the lens on its original documentarian. Though the resulting film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, can't possibly provide a definitive conclusion regarding Guetta's authenticity as an artist, it poses the underlying question, and many more with it, in an incredibly smart and entertaining way. However, following initial screenings at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals, and the documentary's cinematic release in April of this year, this ambiguity and the unlikely events chronicled have led some to accuse the filmmakers of staging an elaborate hoax.

Banksy's reputation as a prankster has also confounded the situation, but, with his blessing, filmmakers D'Cruz and King are keen to set the record straight. While in town for the International Documentary Awards, SuicideGirls caught up with the duo at a brunch spot on Robertson Blvd. Though Exit Through the Gift Shop was passed over (in favor of Waste Land) at that particular ceremony, the film has won a prestigious Grierson Award, and is nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and shortlisted for Oscar nomination.

Read my exclusive interview with Jaimie D'Cruz and Chris King on SuicideGirls.com/.

"She's a bit of a skank."
- Rufus Dayglo

It's been a couple of years since Tank Girl made her dramatic comeback. Since then she's been kicking a lot of physical and metaphorical butt. After a hiatus of over a decade, the punk rock comic character is making up for lost time, with a slew of new adventures in book and comic form.

Created by anarchist wordsmith Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, Tankie (as she is affectionately known to those in the know) first made her debut in the pages of UK comic magazine Deadline in 1988. Her "fuck you" attitude instantly resonated with Britain's disenfranchised, Thatcher-abused youth, and it wasn't long before Hollywood came calling. However MGM's 1995 film, which captured the look but not the spirit of the comic strip, pretty much stopped Tank Girl in her tracks.

Having run out of steam, Tank Girl languished in the desert. Her fans moved on, as did Hewlett, who founded the virtual band Gorillaz with Blur's Damon Albarn. With Hewlett entrenched in the music biz, when Martin decided to brush the dust off Tank Girl and recall her into action, another pen pal was needed.

Stepping into the Doc Martin's of Hewlett was a daunting task, but London-based pencil master Rufus Dayglo has proved himself worthy. His authentic yet fresh vision of Tank Girl has won over old and new fans alike. With a veritable avalanche of new material hitting stores, I tracked Dayglo down by phone at his peanut factory-turned-art studio to talk out about the inspirations behind his Tank Girl.

Read my exclusive interview with Tank Girl artist Rufus Dayglo on SuicideGirls.com.

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Tank Girl, Genesis, and The Cool-Crap-Continuum

SuicideGirls' Interview - Alan Martin: Tank Girl Resurrected

I Am Love is a cinematic tour de force that explores the revolutionary power of love. The film is the result of a long-term collaboration between British actress Tilda Swinton (Orlando, Michael Clayton, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Italian writer and director Luca Guadagnino, who first worked with Swinton when she took the lead role in his 1999 feature-length debut, The Protagonists.

At the center of I Am Love, is Emma Recchi, played by Swinton. She's a trophy wife acquired by her Russian art-loving husband on a foray into the former socialist republic. By marriage, Emma is part of an Italian industrial dynasty that is born of fascism but embracing capitalism. But having served her primary purpose, giving birth to and raising those that will carry on the Recchi lineage, Emma is searching for a place in life beyond that at the end of a well-laid dinner table. At a point where she's at a crossroads in her own life, Antonio Biscaglia, an associate of her son's, crosses her path. As a chef, he's below stairs and below her status, but he proves to be irresistible to her, and their passion ignites a chain of events that rocks the stability of the Recchi patriarchy.

Though I Am Love is a work of fiction, there are distinct parallels to Swinton's own life. "You're always playing yourself," the actress told The Observer newspaper back in 2005 while promoting the film Thumbsucker. "It's all autobiography, whatever you're doing. It's using them as a kind of prism through which to throw something real about yourself."

With luminous pale skin, Celtic coloring and disconcertingly vivid green eyes, Tilda is clearly not born of Italian capitalist / nouveau aristocratic stock. However she comes from one of the oldest feudal baronial families in the United Kingdom, and can trace her bloodline back to the ninth century, so understands what it is to be a woman in a grand family. The mother of twins by Scottish writer John Byrne, who is twenty years her senior, since 2004 Swinton has been in a much-speculated about relationship with German-born painter Sandro Kopp, who is her junior by 18 years. Though this love triangle has echoes of that in her latest film, ultimately the outcomes are very different. The choice Byrne made to give Swinton his blessing in order to preserve their love and family life for the sake of themselves and their children is as progressive as her partner's alternate choice in the film is archaic.

I sat down with Swinton at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons to talk about her philosophies on filmmaking and love.

Read my interview with Tilda Swinton on SuicideGirls.com.

My SG buddy Heathervescent helped instigate the feathered anarchy that was the International Pillow Fight Day celebrations in DTLA.

For more images of the fluffy fun hit my International Pillow Fight Day photo album.

SuicideGirls premiered their groundbreaking reality horror movie last night at the Downtown Independent, in DTLA. Those who came out to witness the sexy fun/terror of Suicide Girls Must Die included members of the cast and crew, alongside We Live In Public director Ondi Timoner and Jeremy "Wizard of Gore" Kasten.

Suicide Girls Must Die is unabashedly documentary in its lowest (and funnest) form. When SuicideGirls co-founder Missy and photographer / filmmaker Sawa invited 12 of their favorite Suicide Girls to a remote cabin in Maine to shoot a calendar video, none of the girls had any idea they were going to be a part of SuicideGirl's first feature length horror movie.

When models Bailey Suicide and Evan Suicide go missing, the idyllic working vacation quickly degenerates into a chaotic nightmare for the calendar girls. As more girls vanish, those who remain wonder who'll be the next to disappear - and if their calendar shots will come out OK.

Suicide Girls Must Die is the ultimate feel-good horror movie. After this, all other horror movies will seem way too overdressed!

SuicideGirls Top 10 Life lessons from Suicide Girls Must Die

1. Best misunderestimation:
"Nothing can go wrong."

2. Most debatable statement:
"Humans are a bit more important than a calendar."

3. Best health advice:
"An apple [bong] a day keeps the doctor away."

4. Best model advice:
"Make the blow job face - you know what I'm talking about."

5. Best fashion/face furniture advice on what not to wear when you accidentally find yourself in the middle of a real-life horror movie:
"It's always the cute girl with glasses that gets axe-murdered."

6. Most positive job performance assessment under adverse circumstances:
"All I have to do is make sure the models are happy. They're all happy, they're just lost."

7. Best offer you've had all day:
"Let's have some champagne, get drunk, and I'll make out with you in the Jacuzzi later."

8. Ultimate self-preservation evaluation:
"I'm not missing. I don't give a shit."

9. Best rallying advice after 80% of your friends have gone missing:
"Do you wanna sit and mope all night?"

10. Famous last words:
"I'm not going to fucking die."

No Suicide Girls were harmed in the making of this movie.

Check out the HD trailer at SuicideGirls.com/MustDie/.

Was Manifesting Equality on Saturday night.

Hope it works!

Can't believe anyone can be pro-Prop H8te in 2010.

That kind of philosophy is so last century, never mind last decade.

It's about time primitive minds evolved.

Thanks to Jon Stern for the images.

I caught up with artist Camille Rose Garcia at the opening of Down The Rabbit Hole, an exhibition of the original art from her latest project, a reimagining of the illustrations that accompany the text of Lewis Carroll's classic children's book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Though the March Hare, the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse were unable to attend the party at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles on Saturday night in person, Hollywood funnyman Robin Williams did make a somewhat unexpected appearance.

Earlier, I'd spoken with Garcia for an in-depth interview which can be found at SuicideGirls.com. After talking about the visual vocabulary and inspirations behind her Alice illustrations, our conversation turned to a core SuicideGirls topic: body art.

Here is a previously unpublished outtake from this interview in which Garcia talks about her own tattoos and her art as it appears on other people's body parts.

At a time when, however deliberately or consciously, we live our lives in public online, access to our privacy is the new currency of value. Just because you can keep track of your friends via Facebook, post and tag photos on MySpace, and spew out your every waking thought on Twitter - all easily and for free - it's easy to assume it's a good thing. Josh Harris is a man who made a similar assumption.

Described as "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of," Harris carved a high profile career out of being an instinctive World Wide Web visionary. Before the web was very worldly or wide, he founded Jupiter Research, a company which sold technology trend and impact information to corporations that barely understood what a website was. Harris then rolled the dot.com fortune he made there into Pseudo.com, a New York based Internet TV station that went live when most of America was still on dial up.

Serving as both business manager and creative director at Pseudo, which webcast multiple channels of original content, Harris reinvented himself in the frame of a digital performance artist during his tenure at the too-far-ahead of its time company. As the millennium loomed, Harris was forced out of Pseudo, and he subsequently invested a large amount of his considerable fortune ($80 million at its peak) in a series of two very controversial digital media social experiments.

The first was called Quiet, though it was anything but. For the project which was intended to mark the turn of the millennium, Harris built an ambitious - and expensive - fully wired environment, which housed 100 guests / experiment subjects 24/7 for a period of 30 days. The claustrophobic underground bunker featured pod bunks for sleeping, communal toilet and bathing facilities, a dining area, and a poorly insulated gun range where residents could blow off steam. There was also an onsite interrogation room.

Potential residents had to sell their pixilated souls in order to gain entry to Quiet. There was an intense intake program that involved an intrusive questionnaire, those that passed this initial test had to agree to subject themselves to random interrogations, among other dehumanizing things. All activity in the bunker was caught on camera and microphone, and relayed for the entertainment of Quiet's residents to their in-Pod TVs. Privacy was non-existent, and individuals were reduced to being "channels" for the entertainment of others - suffice to say the sate-or-the art society Harris had created was far from utopian.

For his next experiment / performance art piece Josh took things a step further, and took on the roles of both puppet and puppet master. He installed 30 motion-controlled surveillance cameras and 66 high sensitivity microphones in a New York loft, and moved in with his new girlfriend, Tanya Corrin (who had previously worked with Harris as a presenter at Pseudo). The pair were the first couple to broadcast their everyday home lives live on the Internet, and viewers could post their comments in real time via the project's associated chat rooms. The stunt garnered much mainstream attention, and fed Harris' growing need for 15 minutes of fame - per day. But as life in public unfolded, and not in the way either of them had planned, Harris and Corrin realized a little too late that perhaps the most valuable thing online might be privacy. It's a lesson we all may want to take note of.

To this end, renowned film director Ondi Timoner set about assembling and editing footage she'd shot of Harris over a 10-year period. The resulting film, We Live In Public, which Timoner describes as "a cautionary tale," is both thought provoking and shocking, having a profound effect on all who open themselves up to it. The documentary won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2009, making Timoner, whose previous film Dig! was also a winner at the festival (in 2004), the only director ever to be given the honor twice.

I caught up with Timoner ahead of We Live In Public's March 1st DVD and VOD release.

Read my interview with Ondi Timoner at SuicideGirls.com to get an exclusive retrospective tour of the Quiet bunker, and an insight into the mind of its maniacal master.

Growing up in the shadow of Disneyland, artist and illustrator Camille Rose Garcia spent a lot of time contemplating the reality of fantasy and the fantasies that make reality palatable.

Just as the white paint flaked and the wood decayed in the once-perfect picket-fenced suburbs that surround Disney's Orange County Fantasyland, on canvas and in print, Garcia's brightly colored fairytale tableaus are juxtaposed with darker elements, as real world forces impinge on her perfect dream worlds.

Much of Garcia's work explores the lie of the American Dream, the loss of it, and how the masses are self-medicating to deal with the aftermath. Though these themes are adult in nature, the on-the-surface beauty of Garcia's art appeals to a younger audience on a more basic level. So when Harper Collins decided to revisit Alice's Adventures in Wonderland amid renewed interest in Lewis Carroll's curious tale (which was first published in 1865), Garcia was a natural choice to re-imagine the visual element of the book.

I spoke with Garcia to find out what she saw when she followed Alice and a certain well-dressed (and very late) White Rabbit down Carroll's most unusual rabbit-hole.

Read my exclusive interview with Camille Rose Garcia at SuicideGirls.com.