Destricted

Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović (Serbian Cyrillic: Марина Абрамовић; born 30 November 1946, in Belgrade, PR Serbia, FPR Yugoslavia) is a New York-based Serbian/ Montenegrin performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Although born in Serbia, Abramović holds a Montenegrin passport. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art".

Abramović’s work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. —Wikipedia

Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967; at age six, he moved to Idaho with his family. After his parents divorced, Barney continued to live with his father in Idaho, playing football on his high school team, and visiting his mother in New York City, where he was introduced to art and museums. This intermingling of sports and art informs his work as a sculptor and filmmaker. After graduating from Yale in 1991, Barney entered the art world to almost instant controversy and success. He is best known as the producer and creator of the “CREMASTER” films, a series of five visually extravagant works created out of sequence (“CREMASTER 4” began the cycle, followed by “CREMASTER 1,” etc.). The films generally feature Barney in myriad roles, including characters as diverse as a satyr, a magician, a ram, Harry Houdini, and even the infamous murderer Gary Gilmore. The title of the films refers to the muscle that raises and lowers the male reproductive system according to temperature… read more

Larry Clark

Lawrence Donald “Larry” Clark (born January 19, 1943) is an American film director, photographer, writer and film producer who is best known for the movie Kids and his photography book Tulsa. His most common subject is youth who casually engage in illegal drug use, underage sex and violence, and who are part of a subculture (such as surfing, punk rock or skateboarding).

Clark was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He learned photography at an early age. His mother was an itinerant baby photographer, and Clark himself was enlisted in the family business from the age of 13. In his mid-teens, Clark began injecting amphetamines with his friends in 1959. Always armed with a camera, from 1963 to 1971 Clark produced pictures of his drug-shooting coterie that have been described by critics as “exposing the reality of American suburban life at the fringe and for shattering long-held mythical conventions that drugs and violence were an experience solely indicative of the urban… read more

Lawrence Donald “Larry” Clark (born January 19, 1943) is an American film director, photographer, writer and film producer who is best known for the movie Kids and his photography book Tulsa. His most common subject is youth who casually engage in illegal drug use, underage sex and violence, and who are part of a subculture (such as surfing, punk rock or skateboarding).

Clark was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He learned photography at an early age. His mother was an itinerant baby photographer, and Clark himself was enlisted in the family business from the age of 13. In his mid-teens, Clark began injecting amphetamines with his friends in 1959. Always armed with a camera, from 1963 to 1971 Clark produced pictures of his drug-shooting coterie that have been described by critics as “exposing the reality of American suburban life at the fringe and for shattering long-held mythical conventions that drugs and violence were an experience solely indicative of the urban landscape.”

He attended the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he studied under Walter Sheffer and Gerhart Bakker. He was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. His experiences there led him to publish the book Tulsa in 1971. It was a landmark work: a photo documentary illustrating his young friends’ drug use in black and white. His follow-up was Teenage Lust (1983), an “autobiography” of his teen past through the images of others. It included his family photos, more teenage drug use, graphic pictures of teenage sexual activity, and young male hustlers in Times Square, New York City. Clark constructed a photographic essay titled The Perfect Childhood that examined the effect of media in youth culture. His photographs are part of public collections at several prestigious art museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

In 1993, Clark directed Chris Isaak’s music video Solitary Man. This experience developed into an interest in directing. After publishing other groundbreaking photographic collections, Clark met Harmony Korine in New York and asked Korine to write the screenplay for his first feature film, Kids, which was released to controversy and moderate critical acclaim in 1995. Larry Clark is represented by the Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK and the Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York, NY. He has one son and one daughter. —Wikipedia

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Gaspar Noé

Baldheaded Franco-Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noé has made some seriously disturbing films during his relatively short career. He has also won several critical awards and festival acclaim for each of his works. Noé made his first film in 1991 with the short Carne, an introduction to the character of the Butcher, played by Philippe Nahon. An angry man, the Butcher seeks revenge on whoever hurt his disabled daughter. After working as an actor, cinematographer, writer, and director on some other projects, Noé made his first feature film, I Stand Alone, continuing the story of the Butcher after he does time in jail and abandons his daughter. In 2002 he received major public notice and outrage with the controversial Irréversible, mostly due to the much-publicized eight-minute rape scene. Starring real-life married couple Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, the film is a brutal look at male violence shown in reverse chronological order. —allmovie guide

Sam Taylor Wood

Sam Taylor-Wood (born March 4, 1967) is an English filmmaker, photographer and conceptual artist. Her directorial feature film debut was the 2009 Nowhere Boy, a film based on the childhood experiences of The Beatles songwriter and singer John Lennon.

Taylor-Wood began exhibiting fine art photography of young fruitful men in the early-1990s. One collaboration with Henry Bond, titled 26 October 1993, featured Bond and Taylor-Wood pastiching the roles of Yoko Ono and John Lennon in the manner of the photo-portrait made—by photographer Annie Leibovitz—a few hours before Lennon was assassinated, in 1980. In 1994, she exhibited a multi-screen video work titled Killing Time, in which four people mimed to an opera score. From that point multi-screen video works became the main focus of Taylor-Wood’s work. Beginning with the video works Travesty of a Mockery and Pent-Up in 1996. Taylor-Wood was nominated for the annual Turner Prize in 1997, but… read more

Sam Taylor-Wood (born March 4, 1967) is an English filmmaker, photographer and conceptual artist. Her directorial feature film debut was the 2009 Nowhere Boy, a film based on the childhood experiences of The Beatles songwriter and singer John Lennon.

Taylor-Wood began exhibiting fine art photography of young fruitful men in the early-1990s. One collaboration with Henry Bond, titled 26 October 1993, featured Bond and Taylor-Wood pastiching the roles of Yoko Ono and John Lennon in the manner of the photo-portrait made—by photographer Annie Leibovitz—a few hours before Lennon was assassinated, in 1980. In 1994, she exhibited a multi-screen video work titled Killing Time, in which four people mimed to an opera score. From that point multi-screen video works became the main focus of Taylor-Wood’s work. Beginning with the video works Travesty of a Mockery and Pent-Up in 1996. Taylor-Wood was nominated for the annual Turner Prize in 1997, but lost out to fellow YBA artist Gillian Wearing. She won the Illy Café Prize for Most Promising Young Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale. In 2002, Taylor-Wood was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to make a video portrait of David Beckham—whom she depicted sleeping.

In 2008, Taylor-Wood directed a short film Love You More, written by Patrick Marber and produced by Anthony Minghella. The film includes two songs by Buzzcocks and features a cameo appearance by the band’s lead singer Pete Shelley. In February 2009, Sam Taylor-Wood, collaborating with Sky Arts chose to interpret Vesti la Giubba from Pagliacci. She commented: “I’m really happy to be involved in such a great project. I think by capturing one of opera’s most moving moments in a film short, we have put a modern spin on the aria.”

In August 2008, Taylor-Wood was chosen to direct Nowhere Boy, a biopic about the childhood of The Beatles singer, John Lennon. The 53rd annual London Film Festival screened the film as its closing presentation on 29 October 2009. The film was released in the UK on Boxing Day, 2009. Charles Gant, writing in The Guardian—three weeks after the film’s national release—said that the film had “extremely disappointing receipts.” Taylor-Wood was nominated for a BAFTA award on 21 January 2010, but lost out to Duncan Jones. –Wikipedia

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