550 South Flower Street
Los Angeles, CA 90017
Friday, February 12 7PM
in conjunction with the LA Art Book Fair
Program:
Jean Paul Goude, A One Man Show, VHS, 45min., 1982
Dirty Looks returns to the LA Art Book Fair to screen A One Man Show, Grace Jones’s remarkable concert video, introduced by Uri McMillan. In 1982, Jones collaborated with photographer Jean-Paul Goude, translating their iconic and trailblazing album artwork for the new, home video format. A thrilling showcase for the former disco diva-cum-New Wave chanteuse, the tape combines rock ribaldry with avant-garde theater, tearing asunder racial and gender stereotypes.
Jones writes of the tape in her memoirs, “It was like the invention of a new genre, related to the musical, to opera, to circus, to cinema, to documentary, to the art gallery… It was about rejecting normal, often quite sentimental and conventionally crowd-pleasing ways of projecting myself as a black singer and female entertainer, because those ways had turned into clichés, which kept me pent up in a cage. I wanted to jolt the adult world that is traditionally left bland by white men, to shatter certain kinds of smugness through performance and theater.”
Jean-Paul Goude lives and works in Paris, France. Working as a photographer, graphic designer, illustrator, and advertising film director since the 1960s, Goude has had a rich and storied career. Best known for his professional and romantic relationship with famous model Grace Jones, his muse of the 70s-80s, Goude has been one of the greatest contemporary imaginations and seminal taste makers for over four decades. He had his international gallery debut of his photographs at the gallery in 2007 at the time of the release of his monograph, So Far So Goude and is recently notorious for “breaking the internet” when his photo shoot with Kim Kardashian graced the cover of Paper Magazine.