ELASTE: Last Exit, First Return
From DIY zines to AI manifestos—culture never dies, it mutates.ELASTE was born in club nights and backroom conversations—shaped by pop culture, politics, and the restless afterglow of 1970s New York, filtered through Hannover and Munich.
It grew out of what we called the Szene: DJs, bouncers, designers, photographers, publishers—people orbiting the same dance floors, arguing about art at dawn.
Four decades later, it surfaces again with the same refusal to conform.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a remix. A last exit that became a first return.
ELASTE 1980–1986 — The Book
Apparently, the ’80s weren’t done with us.
Thomas Elsner and Michael Reinboth have unearthed ELASTE — our restless, neon, and nicotine-stained child — and turned it into a 560-page time capsule. Published by DCV, Elaste 1980–1986 brings back the magazine’s beautiful confusion: Warhol, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, DAF, and the naïve belief that pop could still save the world.
Now reissued as a best-of anthology, Elaste. 1980–1986 collects original photographs, interviews, and essays from the magazine’s sixteen issues — featuring icons like Andy Warhol, Boy George, and Keith Haring — alongside new reflections by its founders and contributors. It’s a document of an era when print was bold, culture was experimental, and style had an opinion.
Available from DCV Books: Hardcover edition, 560 pages, bilingual version, set to be released on November 19.
Sniffin’ Glue
DINNER WITH ANDY
The King of Pop Art, our biggest inspiration, and the most enormous influence in contemporary art were coming to visit the Hinterland.
IN FLAMMEN
DOCUMENTA BOUND – KASSELER KREUZ
Always be Sceptical About Simplicity
Ping Pong mit den Rolling Stones (Deutsch)
Hero For One Day
P.L.O.
VISIONS OF CHINA
Looking for the Thin White Duke
Joi Trouvé
SOUNDS AND VISION
THE GERMAN DAYS
LC/SHT
CLUBBED
Rick Banks compiles a visual history of UK club culture Manchester-based designer Rick Banks has compiled three decade’s worth of nightclub graphics into a new book. In a Dezeen exclusive, he picks out five of the most important examples and explains why they…
“Draw the Raised Bridge”
Redescovered artwork by Banksy. Hull, England.
Tree of Life
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is proud to present Tree of Life, an exhibition of never-before-seen archival works by Genesis P-Orridge: a suite of 30 recently discovered magic marker drawings from 1974-1975. This is the fourth show of Genesis’s work at the gallery, and the first…
Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han
You tweet therefore you are; like and you too shall be liked; confess every last boring detail and you too shall be saved. – During a commercial break in the 1984 Super Bowl, Apple broadcast an ad directed by Ridley Scott. Glum, grey workers sat in a vast grey hall…
Ten memorable moments from the history of cult magazine The Face
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF NICK LOGAN/THE FACE ARCHIVE. You’ve likely seen the images of Kate Moss, bounding across the sand in the buff in one, her face scrunched up and beaming out from underneath a headdress in another. Shot by photographer Corinne Day, Moss was then…
Gay Party Music and Social Media Induced Narcissism
Casey Spooner and Michael Stipe penetrate queerdom. When Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner formed the electroclash duo Fischerspooner in 1998, they set out to open minds and expose the masses to worlds of art and performance through synth-heavy dance music. They…
Interview with James Turrell
Next month, an extension to our gallery, called Pharos, will open, housing four new works by James Turrell, as well as works by Jean Tinguely, Charles Ross, Richard Wilson and Randy Polumbo. Read more about Pharos here. Elizabeth Pearce: Do the four pieces of yours in…
Is Fashion Modern?
A FULL LIST OF THE 111 ITEMS in the MoMA exhibition. • 501 Jeans (Levi’s). 1947 example from the company archive • A-POC Queen Textile (Issey Miyake). Example from MoMA’s collection • Adidas Superstars. 1983 pair from the company archive • Air Force 1s (Nike). Three…
F O R E V E R
Sprüth Magers presents FOREVER, a new site-specific work by Barbara Kruger. For this installation, which occupies all four walls and the floor of the Berlin gallery’s main exhibition space, the artist has created one of her immersive room-wraps and several new vinyl…
Great Modern Things
Neon is one of what Andy Warhol called “the great modern things” – a kind of lovely thing that can only exist in the modern world. Neon is up in lights, again. The gaseous element whose glamorous glow has been appropriated by one artist after another since the 1960s…
DUST REMAINS
Mortality according to ELASTE x Thomas Elsner.
WOOD SWIMMER
“The Woodswimmer,” is a stop-motion music video shot by Brett Foxwell. “Fascinated with the shapes and textures found in both newly-cut and long-dead pieces of wood, I envisioned a world composed entirely of these forms.” “As I began to…
The Green Box Shop Saves Us All
Musician Frank Ocean headlined New York City’s Panorama Festival at Randall’s Island Park this weekend wearing a T-shirt with a simple message: “WHY BE RACIST, SEXIST, HOMOPHOBIC, OR TRANSPHOBIC WHEN YOU COULD JUST BE QUIET?” In today’s political maelstrom, and the…
TRUMP TV
We’re Approaching a Major Turning Point in Trump-Era Pop Culture. Critics and audiences alike can be suspicious of art that looks like it wants to have an effect. We like to be unsettled but we also want our politics to be confirmed; some of us disdain “preaching to…
ZEIT GEIST
German ZEIT Magagzin about ELASTE. Now on display the original ELASTE in the “Geniale Dilletanten” exhibition in Dresden’s Albertinum Museum. Einige Leser haben mir nach dem Newsletter vom Montag gemailt, weil sie wissen wollen, wie das…
INTERVIEW WITH PSYCHIC TV AND “GODSTAR”
SACRED BONES RECORDS presents PSYCHIC TV official music video for ‘Godstar’ directed by AKIKO HADA in 1985. The video also features an interview with GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE commenting on their ‘Godstar’ single and the band’s new pop-oriented musical…
KEEP IT ALIVE
Keep IT Alive is an exhibition of Alan Vega’s final work, a suite of haunting large-scale paintings he had completed just before his death in July, 2016. Born in Brooklyn in 1938, Vega is known first as one-half of the groundbreaking electro-punk duo Suicide, which…
Anish Kapoor Explores “Urgent Times”
Anish Kapoor has continued to explore the power of pigment by transforming a room into a bright red landscape based on the unseen borders that separate the modern world. The installation, titled Destierro, is on show at the Parque de la Memoria in Argentina – marking…
OBEY, SYDNEY
Shepard Fairey unveils largest work to date in Sydney. The artwork is a 50m-high and 30m-wide woman with flowers behind her ears, holding a giant waratah – the floral emblem of New South Wales – and the word “OBEY”. It will take around 400 cans of spray paint to…
OFF – WHITE
In this time of political protest, terrorism, warfare, and the mass displacement of people, what good can mere fashion do? Virgil Abloh, for one, decided that he was going to say something big with his Off-White menswear show in Florence. “It’s my Trojan horse model,”…
MORTALITY
according to Leonard Cohen and David Bowie.
Ghosts
Jason Shulman captures the entire duration of a movie in a single image with his series Photographs of Films. Pointing his camera at a screen and making an ultra-long exposure of the film as it plays through, each scene from a movie is overlaid on top on another until…
TRICKSTER
New York painter Kehinde Wiley’s latest exhibition features portraits of fellow artists, among them Derrick Adams, Sanford Biggers, Rashid Johnson, Wangechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems. Wiley examines the ways in which artists, and people of color,…
No I.D.. No Identity.
In the cover story for i-D’s Creativity Issue, Tim Walker captures the energy of bright young things Adwoa, Slick, King, Leo and Elliott, against the distinct backdrop of East London.
Talking God, Sex, Money and Bodybuilding
The Milan-based duo shares their take on contemporary obsessions.– Laura, you’re the first partner in a design office I’ve come across who is also a professional opera singer. Laura Baldassari: In addition to being an opera singer, I’m a painter. Design was not on my…
A DOCUMENT
Turns Five – “In a political climate that aims to tear us apart, we are reminded of the common capacity to marvel at the power of beauty and creativity. This issue marks a milestone—our five-year anniversary—and ten editions in, we continue to explore questions;…
Memorized
You get the idea, meeting Helmut Lang as I did on a recent afternoon at the Sperone Westwater gallery on Bowery amid his peculiarly assertive, fossil-like memory-foam sculptures, shellacked wall objects (some of which look almost edible, but of course are not), and…
Glenn O’Brien, the Last Great New Yorker, Will Continue Schooling Kids in the Afterlife
Glenn O’Brien was a one-man crash course in classic alternative culture. In some ways, he was the last bastion of the “old New York” so many people lament about missing — Warhol’s warehouse, the days when SoHo was covered in SAMO tags, and struggling creatives could…
SOMEDAY WE CAN:
Using her simple trademark linework—black ink on white surfaces — Shantell Martin transforms everything from walls to found objects, ceramics, toys, sneakers, and even the faces and bodies of participants and passersby into a signature visual narrative. This is the…
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Ai Weiwei will build more than 100 fences and installations around New York City this fall for “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” one of his most large-scale public art projects to date. Mr. Ai, who lived in New York during the 1980s, said this work is a reaction to…
Electronic Renaissance
From 10 March to 23 July 2017 the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi will be introducing the Florentine public to Bill Viola. Thus the exhibition is a celebration of Bill Viola’s special relationship with Florence, where his career in video art began when he was technical…
SOFTlab (American), Spectralline, 2016. Dichroic acrylic, aluminum, LEDs.
Inspired by the ordered asymmetry of crystals, New York design studio SOFTLab has created an immersive installation that looks different from every angle. By cladding the complex aluminum structure with 3M dichroic acrylic, the piece changes color and reflectivity as…
Chinese Photographer 航 任 Ren Hang Dies (1987-2017)
Ai Weiwei Reflects on the Sadness of Ren Hang’s Photographs. The sudden death of photographer and poet Ren Hang on Feb. 24 shook the art world to its core. His photographs were a radiant celebration of sensuality and the naked beauty of life that he continued to…
KINGS & QUEENS KOLLECTION
By Karen Bystedt Please Do Not Enter is thrilled to open its first Pop-Up Gallery at the historic Pacmutual Building: 523 W 6th Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90013. Starting on March 1st, our Pop-Up Gallery will feature DTLA based Artist Karen Bystedt with her solo-show:…
The Future According to Coco
Coco Capitán Sounds Off on Her Gucci Collab for Fall 2017.In the mix of biological prints and crystal sequin body suits were some simply printed tops and parasols on the Gucci runway today. Those poignant pieces, scrawled with phrases like Common sense is not so…
Nothing Comes Between Me and My Calvins
“This is Not America”, Calvins in front of artwork of Sterling Ruby.
Ma’ Ma’ Raschplatz Da
»Just what is it that makes today’s home so different, so appealing?«
(Richard Hamilton, 1956)
Wenn der Postmann zweimal klingelt, liegt meist ein kleines Kärtchen in meinem Flur. So auch diesmal »Basement« Hannover Raschplatz. Eröffnung Freitag 12.6.81 22h. Knapp am dreizehnten vorbei, dachte ich und lenkte meinen Wagen einige Tage später durch die trostlose Gegend hinter dem Bahnhof. Beinahe am Ziel angelangt ging ́s dann auch noch in den Keller. Gleißende Leuchtstoffröhren, Pirelli Gummi auf dem Boden, die Decke unverkleidet, hier und da ein bißchen Chrom. Der erste Blick signalisiert, hier wollte jemand der Café– und Diskothekenszene mit ihren pastellfarbigen, schimmernden Barocktempeln eine Ohrfeige verpassen.“
