But to find out the real meaning behind the hit show you’ll need to read Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America by Natasha Vargas-Cooper, the woman behind the highly popular blog The Footnotes of Mad Men.

In the book, Vargas-Cooper turns her eye to everything from Lucky Strike to Madienform, gray flannel suits to Burt Cooper’s Japonism, Grace Kelly to John Cheever — and examines iconic morsels from the show and the error. Very Short List agrees, Mad Men Unbuttoned is like a little time machine that takes us, as Mr. Draper so elegantly put it, ‘to a place where we ache to go again.’”

Still need more Mad Men in your life and on your computer screen? You can download two Mad Men wallpaper designs for your computer: What’s in Don Draper’s Desk and What’s in Joan Holloway’s Purse.

Buy the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders or Books-a-Million.

The John Jasperse Company has the New York debut of the brilliant new work, Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies, June 16-19 at the Joyce.  If you’re in or around NYC you definitely don’t want to miss this one.

Via Joyce.org:

“When Jasperse makes a new work, it should be seen: end of story,” says Claudia La Rocca of The New York Times. You can see Jasperse’s latest work when the company returns to The Joyce for the first time since 2000 with the New York premiere of Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies. The evening-length piece explores the often fluid boundaries between fantasy and reality, and features a commissioned score by composer Hahn Rowe and live musicians from the critically acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble.

Buy tickets here.

(Photos via Joyce.org and JohnJasperse.org)

At long last, a tutorial on the space shuttle toilet (via VSL). Remember: “Alignment is important.”

Completely unrelated, our friends at Partners & Spade were instrumental in founding the new NoHo Design District in Downtown New York. As part of the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, the district is throwing a neighborhood kick-off party this Saturday from 7-10 pm. With retailers like The Smile, Billy Reid, Oak and the aforementioned Partners & Spade, NoHo is one of our favorite places to shop.

Here’s how to get there.

That’s because style icon Sarah Jessica Parker recorded the audio guide to The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Musem of Art’s new Spring exhibition, on view from May 5th to August 15th, reports WWD. Curator Andrew Bolton explains the choice: “Because of Sex and the City, she is so much associated with New York and with America, and with using fashion as a way to shape identity.” 

The exhibit “will explore developing perceptions of the modern American woman from the 1890s to the 1940s, and how they have affected the way American women are seen today,” says the Met website.

I can’t wait to see (and listen to) this exhibit! And I’m even more excited to see Sex and the City 2 in theaters on May 27th, and read The Carrie Diaries, on-sale tomorrow from Harper Teen!

Ryan McGinley: Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere at Team Gallery through April 17

Catherine Opie: Girlfriends at Barbara Gladstone Gallery through April 24

Time was when photography was a kind of bastard stepchild to an art world that disallowed this craft the exaltation that attended the canon of painting, drawing and sculpture. If the video, installation and performance arts have been given a wider berth of acceptance in the last 20 years, this might be owed to the folly of decades-long deliberation over the mechanical art of photography having a place in exhibition. It does. And no more so than right now for two practitioners of this art who have respective solo shows: Ryan McGinley at Team Gallery and Catherine Opie at Gladstone Gallery. Each possesses an adroit precision for unveiling the secret lives of the worlds they inhabit.

Ryan McGinley has for sometime now been a darling of the art world, having earned his accolades (and the envy of countless of other artists), from the very start of his career; perhaps beginning with his much-resented one-man show at the Whitney, which featured his then-métier: the Polaroid portrait—and scads of them, depicting his friends in various states of undress or just plain nude and the debauchery of their parties. Not exactly new since Warhol, to be sure—but is anything new since Warhol? What’s perhaps new for McGinley, at least this time around, is his location shift: from the grungy apartments and cross-country American landscapes of past work to the somewhat grown-up confines of his New York studio. In this splendid exhibition called Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, he has captured a series of black and white portraits (yes, nudes), in which the subjects—young men and women, all androgynously smooth—are laid bare more earnestly than their nakedness alone could ever reveal: their interior lives an exchange of currency for the pleasure of our viewing. Subjectively not unlike Larry Clark, to whom he’s been likened, McGinley’s strength in elegantly apprehending the budding sexuality of what appear to be pubescent teens is done so without apology. This isn’t kiddie porn, after all: the models are all at least 18, even if they don’t seem so. And that ambiguity only reinforces our quarrel with this taunting sense of arousal, as these young people languorously testify to the awareness of desire that lurks within us all from the moment we reach maturation.

Of these 74 gelatin silver prints, all framed identically, some are exuberant; while others remain expressionless, perhaps even blasé, about the notion of their suspended objectification. Others suggest a kind of post-coital bliss in which afterglow is an emotional occupation: contemplative, perhaps, and even, at turns, somewhat melancholy. In addition to these black and white photographs, the exhibition also includes three large-scale images in color gels blown large and shot at longer exposures without natural light, including previews of his new “Night Sky” series, in which his naked subjects are seen almost as apparitions against the vast expanse of twilight time; and one of his cave-series photographs from a previous show, called Moonmilk, last fall in London. Fittingly, the catalogue for this current exhibition at Team contains a conversation between McGinley and his friend, Catherine Opie, who occupies a similar plinth for arresting portraiture, and whose never-before-seen photographs at Gladstone Gallery comprise Girlfriends with equal transgression.

For Opie, the show collects itself around an unabashedly forthright and provocative subject matter she knows well: the butch dyke. Verily, Opie has explored the trope of LGBT imagery in the past, photographing various friends and lovers; some others of whom appear here as large color portraits in a startling confrontation with the viewer. This most intriguing examination of the masculine woman as a subject of desire includes such celebrities as musician k.d. lang, poet Eileen Myles and The L Word actresses Daniela Sea (“Moira”/”Max”) and Katherine Moennig (“Shane”), among others not so famous, who emerge as unvarnished, aggressive, radical representations of butch women—or womyn?

“Pretty” is in the eye of any beholder, of course; and here only a conceptual adjective in this survey of heroic integrity, where challenging gender norms has long enabled the bull dyke her appropriation of representational male pageantry. She’s the cock of the walk in Opie’s eyes, you bet, flouting the chokehold of beauty so well beyond the obvious signifiers of a feminine vocabulary that she breathes a whole other air. If we at first wince at what mistakenly appears as the hostile countenance on the faces of these subjects—some of whom wear their more evident battle scars: deliberate body mutations, whether tattooed and/or pierced, along with a proud display of natural facial/body hair and the process of aging without demulcent remedy—we also respect the courageous allowance these corporeal histories reveal. It’s one thing to embrace the theoretical disavowal of a restrictive gender binary, but it takes real balls to make manifest the articulation of one’s truth. It is this ineffable conjunction of identity that Opie so masterfully and so gracefully captures in her photographs.

Image credits in order of appearance:

Ryan McGinley images courtesy of Team Gallery and the artist

Marcel
2009
gelatin silver print
18 x 13.5 inches
edition of three

Night Sky (Green)
2010
c-print
72 x 110 inches
edition of three

Catherine Opie images courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York
Copyright Catherine Opie

Kate, 2007
Chromogenic print
30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm)

Julie (play piercing), 1994
Ink jet print
9 1/2 x 10 inches (24.1 x 25.4 cm)

Learn more about the book here.

Like it does for most art forms, the internet offers a lot of opportunities to change the way we think of comics and graphic novels. Creators without the backing of major publishers are able to push their creations directly to the web at a fraction of the cost associated with print versions.

A new web comic from Dan Goldman called Red Light Properties offers a twist on the genre. Navigation is always a bit of a challenge for online comics–the flow of reading a panel-driven narrative can be a bit tricky digitally. But Goldman’s method–to reveal one panel at a time–gives a new feel to the process. He’s a trained filmmaker, so it’s natural that his comic should achieve a filmic feel. Here you take in the action frame-by-frame, and there’s no opportunity for your eyes to wander and spoil the action later down the page.

The full comic–which melds Ghost Busters with the mortgage meltdown and gives it all a sort of Leisure Suit Larry veneer–is available serially each Tuesday on Tor’s website. To get a better look at the process behind the product, check out this really nice Babelgum video.

Update: Please plan to catch Federico Solmi this week at VOLTA NY, the cutting-edge satellite art fair, featuring only 92 artists by invitation, which is being held in tandem during the Armory Show, at 7 West 34th Street, 11th floor. www.voltashow.com

Without further ado, we welcome our newest Your It List columnist, Theodore Bouloukos.

As an actor whose performance origins reside in video art, I’m often at pains to define this genre for even the most reasonably sophisticated friends. Video art, as a medium distinct from, say, early artistic cinematic experiments in 35-mm film (such as Buñuel’s 16-minute silent surrealist short, Un Chien Andalou), is thought to owe its latter-day roots to Fluxus artist Nam June Paik and the portable video-audio experimental pieces that he created on his Sony Portapak in the mid 1960s. Contemporaneously, Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, employing both film and video, manipulated both medium and content in their work to either imitate and extricate the conventions of its motion picture and television brethren; in so doing, their collaborations have long influenced the visual vocabulary of what we see in a gallery and what we see on TV. The introduction of digital video in the 1990s enabled many artists to expand their artistic practices, engulfing such previously discrete media as design, sculpture, installation and electronic arts. In so doing, video art itself became more variegated, amplifying its boundaries while rigorously challenging the viewer’s expectations of video as an enterprise of either narrative or entertainment. The preponderant use of home video these days for the sake of the Internet alone has only added to this heterogeneity of hybrid practice, wherein everyone can be the director and the distributor of his own movie.

If the fluid relationship between art and cinema (viz. Cocteau) sees its tradition extended in Matthew Barney’s five feature-film Cremaster series (in which the interstitial plot lines serve as metaphors for the descension of the suspensory muscle of the testis); or in The Rape of the Sabine Women, Eve Sussman’s gorgeous epic, in which the myth of Romulus’s founding of Rome, depicted famously in in Jacques-Louis David’s 1799 painting, is re-envisioned as a 1960s allegorical musical with a cast of hundreds, shot on location in Berlin and on the isle of Hydra, Greece, then so, too, might animation, itself the womb of the video game, find companionable conflation in the work of Federico Solmi (1973), whose second solo exhibition at LMAK projects, entitled “From Uterus to Grave with no Happy Ending,” can be seen at the gallery through February 14. In it, he has combined traditional, hand-drawn animation with digital models, utilizing computer gaming engines to create a real-time 3D framework, thanks to his long-time collaborator, 3D artist Russell Lowe, a New Zealander who is also a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales, in Australia.

If the title of his show is provocative, so too has Solmi gained currency as something of an enfant terrible; although not in the masturbatory way of, say, Sebastian Horsley, the British dandy-memoirist-artist of self-crucifixion fame, denied entry to the States for previous controlled-substance violations a couple of years ago, forfeiting his only New York book-signing appearance in the bargain. No, no, for Signor Solmi, the offense was creatively crucifying–depending on one’s stridency of commitment to religious dogma–and more in the vein of a good old-fashioned duel with the Roman Catholic Church. Solmi’s an Italian, after all, and his native land is one in which it’s A-okay to elect a porn star to Parliament just as long as you don’t fuck with the Pope. Brought to trial for “obscenity, blasphemy and offense to religion,” after his work, The Evil Empire (2007)–seen at his first solo show at LMAK Projects in 2008, coincidental with the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to New York–appeared at the Arte Fiera Bologna art fair a year later. While Solmi was being absolved of the “religious offense” charge, the work in question was sold for $7,000 at the fair, but remained in custody. Since that time, these censorship charges have all been dismissed, and Solmi, a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient for Video Art, has moved to New York; and he has since been invited to exhibit his work at the upcoming Santa Fe Biennale in New Mexico. Through his media of video, drawings, mechanical sculptures and paintings, Solmi has infused the imagery he plucks from pop culture with art-historical references to realize his irreverently rambunctious manifestations as depictions of gorgeous phantasm. His is a place where extravagance and irony are the collaborative devices in showing us why moral decay might be our only legacy.

The Evil Empire, which returns to the current show, is perfectly expressive of Solmi’s intricately lurid wit, wherein a porn-addled Pope Urban LXIX of “Vatic-Anal City”–His Holiness shod in Prada as befitting any hedonistic consumer–is throttled by the various trials and tribulations of being mortal, and pace, randy; and for it, must be sent on a journey to hell. To atone, endlessly, of course: a recrimination as repetitive as the soundtrack, the maniacal melody of Michael Oldfield’s eerie “Tubular Bells,” better known as the “Theme from The Exorcist.” Comically set in 2046, just being carnal is still all it takes to send you to the Inferno; and so especially heretical are pervert popes who allow their libido a bit of voyeuristic wanderlust amid the frescoes of St. Peter’s Basilica. But just as Goya and other Enlightenment reformers were often accused of being anti-clerical for their opprobrium of the vices of the clergy, so too does Solmi offer up a mordant critique of the Vatican’s excesses: wherein papal infallibility is a handmaiden to their corruptive control, and the abuses therefrom that serve as both an attitudinal nemesis and a consistent thematic strain. Genuflection here is reserved for the pope’s swollen cock, a sceptor, of sorts, and the culprit of his eternal damnation. If his degringolade is this loop of continual misery that recalls Dante’s second circle of hell, it also reminds me of that horrific enchantment from Neil Gaiman, called “Other People.”

The centerpiece of the show, Douche Bag City (2009) is a video installation of nine single-channel, hand-drawn animated films (and available in an edition of eight), hung as a montage of ornately framed screens, as if to reinforce this Baroque alter of gaming excess. A satire about the current world economic crisis, Douche Bag City proffers a delicious fantasy: a place where Wall Street grifters are imprisoned with no hope for justice or escape; where mercy and salvation are delivered as punishment and torture like three-square meals. This frenzied spectacle with its bombastic strains (composed by Solmi’s wife, Jennifer) booming in their triumphant lullaby for the extermination of greed, stars the Madoff-esque, Dick Richman, a punny and now-puny little soul who has been banished and made to pay for his atrocities through a constant battle of challenges, or missions, with the barbaric demons who are just as avaricious in their thirst for annihilating the likes of these bloodless financiers, and will defeat him every time. Yes, in Solmi’s world, there is a God.

Douche Bag City, (Zombie Attack) 2010 from bart keijsers koning on Vimeo.

Please plan to catch Federico Solmi this week at VOLTA NY, the cutting-edge satellite art fair, featuring only 92 artists by invitation, which is being held in tandem during the Armory Show, at 7 West 34th Street, 11th floor. www.voltashow.com

Theodore Bouloukos is a New York-based actor and writer, whose performance work is divided equally between independent narrative cinema and myriad projects in video, painting and photography, live-performance and tableaux vivants, which have been exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries around the world, including recent shows at the Venice Biennale and Art Basel Miami. Theo’s films include the Sundance hit, Moonshine and Bulldog in the Whitehouse; and he recently completed two other features in which he stars, Public Hearing and The Evangelist. His credits and additional information can be found on IMDB and Myspace. He can be reached here.

Video courtesy of LMAK projects:

The Douche Bag City Installation, 2009
Color and sound
1.30 min
Edition of 5 (each)
(8 LCD, 8 inches, 8 frame)

Word on the street is that there’s a new Alice in Wonderland movie on the horizon. We’re excited for that, but we’re even more excited for this incredible new book: Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, illustrated by the wonderful Camille Rose Garcia. In her visual interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s unabridged masterpiece,  Garcia brings this classic tale to life with the unique style for which she is famous.

Watch Camille explain her creative process:

Browse inside the book:

Then buy your very own copy.

Music always inspires me while I work, for this project I wanted the art to reference psychedelic colors, and also have a bit of darkness. While reading the story again, I realized it is a pretty dark story, everyone is mean to Alice, she gets drugged by a crazy caterpillar, and the queen threatens her with a beheading! So my musical selections are a nice mix of psychedelic, punk rock, and dark, brooding music. And a couple of folk songs thrown in since my studio is in the middle of the woods!

Camille Rose Garcia shares the music that inspired the book:

Click here for some downloadable wallpapers.  Curiouser and curiouser…