The Puppet Masters' Demons

Erik Sanko first became enamored of marionettes at the age of five. "When I was a little boy my mom would take us to a theater in the West Village that was run by a guy named Bil Baird who did the marionette sequence in The Sound of Music," says Sanko, who subsequently made his own puppets. For nearly three decades this childhood passion laid dormant. Sanko turned himself into a self-described "go-to guy for avant-garde bass playing," working with Yoko Ono, John Cale, and his own Grammy-nominated band Skeleton Key. "Then for some reason in my early 30s I started making puppets again for no particular reason, other than they scratched some itch I couldn't reach in any other way, and I took them on tour," he says. "That's how it began."
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Zhang Huan's Buddha Means Business

"For the past 100 years everyone in China was laying down and sleeping," says artist Zhang Huan of the economic circumstances in his country and its more-than-half-century-old communist regime. "Now they're awake." Of course, when you wake a sleeping giant, there will be unexpected consequences, like the growing influence of a rising middle class that values personal wealth creation over its own heritage and traditions. This cultural shift has become the primary concern of the artist's recent work, including his new exhibition "Neither Coming Nor Going," which opens tonight at Pace Wildenstein's 22nd Street location.
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Studio Visit: On Tour With Marilyn Minter

On the eve of their initial exhibition last year at New York's Salon 94 Freemans, I stopped by Marilyn Minter's Soho studio for a peek at her Mouth series. Not unlike Hans Namuth's photographs of Jackson Pollock, Minter had captured subjects marking glass—in the latter case, models regurgitating unreal foodstuffs. Minter's probing, sometimes repulsing investigations into consumer culture, and the work's slick pop sensibility have opened her work to a variety of commercial clients—not just luxury brands like Tom Ford, but cosmetics giant MAC and Supreme skateboards.
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A Film Inside a Film: Robert Frank

With "The Americans" Robert Frank solidified his position among photography legends, as evidenced by the success the Met's current exhibition of those 83 poignant, era-defining snapshots. Though decidedly less exposed, the Swiss-born artist's film ventures were just as evocative, and caught their subjects off-guard in a way that idolizes and destroys them at the same time. In fact, viewers of Cocksucker Blues might not realize Frank was the man who shot the seminal Rolling Stones documentary, which was banned by the band for pulling the curtain back on their drug use and hard partying lifestyle. Frank also is near the source of the meta genre that Charlie Kaufman has come to embrace, with his first feature length film Me and My Brother. Co-written by playwright Sam Shepard and debuted at the 1968 Venice Film Festival to raves, the film revisits two of the Beat subjects from Frank's 28-minute short, Pull My Daisy, on a cross-country campus book tour with Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, and Orlovsky's catatonic brother, Julius, whom they signed out of a New York psychiatric ward in the mid-sixties. [Photo: Robert Frank's Me and My Brother]  Read More