True, Michael Stipe is no longer in REM, but he’s still artistically active—most publicly on his stimulating Tumblr page. It’s called “Confessions of a Michael Stipe” or, in Tumblr-speak, confessionsofamichaelstipe. If Tumblr’s archive module is to be believed, he’s been running it since January 2011, and he posts incredibly frequently—I would estimate well over 100 posts a month. Many of the pics he posts focus on high art or experimental art, but there’s plenty of music and movie imagery as well.

It’s decidedly NSFW—there are plenty of pictures of the beautiful male figure in all its glory—but it’s simply a very high-quality Tumblr. Prominently featured right now are original one-sheets of Fellini Satyricon and Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (both from Stipe’s collection), Valentin Serov’s painting Portrait of the Italian Singer Angelo Masini, a Marianne Faithfull album cover, a photo of Brigitte Bardot, and a painting by Winston Chmielinski.

In the archives you can see patterns. In July 2012 he was posting about George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, in December 2012 he was all into Kate Moss. On August 5 he posted an amusing sequence consisting of several b/w images with the blue label “I DID THIS FIRST MICHAEL STIPE” superimposed over them.

In among the high-quality artsy-fartsy pics you’ll glean new bits of information about Stipe you may not have known before. For instance, you’ll see pics of

the first three records that i purchased, and with my own money (to boot)

deep purple “hush”  (na na na nahh na na nah, na na na na na nahh)

glen campbell ”galveston”  (hand written name, taken w/me to summer camp)

van morrison “brown-eyed girl”  (also my first 4”flexi/hip-pocket record)

In this video with Tumblr Storyboard, Stipe discusses the “confessional” side of his Tumblr as well as the sculptures he’s been working on for the last several years.

 
via Fluxtumblr

 
Kim Gordon has reportedly begun writing her autobiography—just one of two books she will be publishing soon, the second will focus on her writing for art magazines in the 80s. She’s also slated to appear in the third season of HBO’s Girls. Via NME:

Set to be titled Girl In A Band and published by HarperCollins, it will “chronicle her choice to leave Los Angeles in the early ’80s for the post-punk scene in New York City, where she formed Sonic Youth”. Gordon was a member of the iconic group from their foundation in 1981 until 2011, when the band went on hiatus after her separation from bandmate and husband Thurston Moore. She has since formed a new band, Body/Head, with Vampire Belt member Bill Nace.

Another book due to be released by Sternberg Press will collate essays the musician wrote for art and culture magazines in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Gordon is also exhibiting a retrospective of her own visual art at New York gallery White Columns. The exhibition features her work from 1980 right through to 2013 and, according to the gallery’s own website, “a new limited-edition vinyl solo recording by Kim Gordon will accompany the exhibition, and a publication anthologizing Gordon’s activities as an artist will follow in the fall.”

The world of book publishing isn’t entirely new for Ms. Gordon. In the mid Oughts she released Chronicles, Vol.1 and Vol. 2, and another artist’s book, Performing/Guzzling, followed in 2010.

Body/Head’s Coming Apart album is released today

Below, Body/Head (Kim Gordon and Bill Nace) at Kunstencentrum, Belgium on February 24th 2012.
 

 
The good Reverend Gordon marries Rufus and Lily on Gossip Girl:
 

 
If you’re unfamiliar with the vulgar, technicolor fever dream above, you’re clearly not schooled in the art of Lisa Frank, which was forged in the fires of hell and emblazoned upon the notebooks, folders, backpacks, and all manner of school supplies belonging to female children in the 1990s. I certainly fell prey to the rainbow pusher, myself. (Support groups help me to deal with the trauma.) To say that it was a craze makes it sound more conscious than it actually was—we were feral little teddy bear/unicorn/dolphin junkies, and we had to have Lisa Frank products.

If you’re wondering what it was about this stuff that invoked such a frenzy from so many little girls, you have to realize what a perfect storm of girly interests it was. Many children just have a genuine attraction to the hyper-feminine aesthetic, and whatever black magic or super science Frank used has produced some of the purest, uncut concentrations of girliness known to girlkind.
 

I cannot overstate the importance of unicorns to the Frank school of art.
 
Of course, some of us actually weren’t particularly partial to baby animals, hearts, and rainbows, but as boys boasted adult-sanctioned separate social worlds (often around sports), many girls craved a feminine culture of our own. There’s also the appeal of a famous woman creating a ubiquitous brand- Lisa Frank was the first female artist a lot of kids could name. And of course, some of us probably just enjoyed the surreal insanity of it all, and probably grew up to do lots of hallucinogens.
 

I had this exact notebook. I would have cut a mother to assure all covetous peers that this notebook was rightfully mine.
 
The weirdest thing about Frank though, is her aversion to the spotlight. When some one’s artistic legacy is so conspicuous, there’s something a little eery about a life of secrecy. Refusing to be shot in anything but silhouette, Lisa Frank haunts this video in her very first public interview, her terrifying cast of characters in tow. The whole thing is giving me flashbacks to a childhood not unlike a bad trip at a rave. A warning to those with sensory sensitivity: you may want to have a dark room ready if it becomes too intense.
 

 
Francis Bacon described Jackson Pollock as the “lacemaker,” as he thought Pollock’s Action Paintings looked like the intricacies of fine lacework. The description was flippant, but in it was also the recognition of Pollock’s talent in creating such fluid and spontaneous artwork.

In 1963, Salvador Dali tried his hand at Action Painting, or as he termed it “Dynamic Painting,” on the panel show I’ve Got A Secret. Unlike Pollock, who used oil, enamel and aluminum paint, Dali opted for shaving foam (yes, shaving foam) to create his mini-masterpiece. As one would imagine, the resultant (comic) mess bears little resemblance to the quality of the lacemaker’s work—though I doubt that was ever the intention.
 

 
A longer version with Dali judging the panelists’ paintings, after the jump…

 
A satirical painting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev dressed in frilly ladies’ lingerie, Travesty, was confiscated by officials from the Museum of Power art gallery in St. Petersburg a week before the G20 summit started. Putin is shown combing Medvedev’s hair.

Other paintings of authority figures in the “Rulers” exhibit that “violated existing legislation” and were confiscated included depictions of two evil politicians, Vitaly Milonov (deputy mayor of St. Petersburg) and Yelena Mizulina, the ones responsible for recent vicious anti-gay legislation, with a rainbow flag, and conservative, homophobic Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, who was painted with skull tattoos and busts of Stalin and Lenin. The government won’t say which existing laws were violated, but they could always point to the one prohibiting insulting state authorities or the new one banning alleged homosexual propaganda aimed at minors. It would be hard to argue that seeing the equivalent of a political cartoon in a newspaper is going to give young people “The Gay.”

Milonov, who may be the last male on the planet who has never seen actual pornography, had already complained about the paintings being displayed and described them as being “of a distinctly pornographic character.”

According to gallery owner, Alexander Donskoy, the paintings were seized with no formal warrant for their removal, the director was detained by police but not charged, and the museum was closed for a few days. Donskoy has been a thorn in the side of the Russian government since announcing his intention to enter politics in 2006. He also owns the G-Spot, a gallery of erotica, where a painting of a nude Putin and Barack Obama (with multiple massive dayglo penises) by artist Vera Donskaya-Khilko was seized by police yesterday. The G-Spot was shut down.

The artist who painted the Putin-Milonov Travesty piece, Konstantin Altunin, has fled to France and is planning to seek asylum. Maybe he and Femen’s Inna Shevchenko, the two members of Pussy Riot who fled Russia in 2012, and the upcoming diaspora of Russian artists can all be housemates.

Oh, and he wants his painting back. In an open letter to G20 leaders, Altunin wrote, “I ask [you] to mention the topic of censorship in [a] personal conversation with Putin and ask him to return my paintings seized from the Museum of Authority.”

So, hey, just in case G20 leaders or their staff members are actually reading Dangerous Minds during boring meetings, instead of playing poker on their phones (hi guys!), here are two other paintings they’re not supposed to see:

 

 
Reuters report on confiscated paintings, below:

 
The short-lived UFO Club was a small, pioneering psychedelic club in London that operated from December 1966 to October 1967. It was born as a result of the underground newspaper The International Times’ fabulously successful launch party at the Roundhouse on October 14, 1966, where the early Pink Floyd and Soft Machine performed. IT‘s visionary owners Joe Boyd and John “Hoppy” Hopkins opened the UFO Club in a basement at 31 Tottenham Court Road under Gala Berkeley Cinema on December 23, 1966. The club was open every week “10:30 until dawn.” A one-year membership was 15 shillings but “Overseas visitors need not be members” (according to a UFO Club ad for a Procol Harum show). Mick Farren was a doorman.

The roster of artists who played there is mind-blowing: Barrett-era Pink Floyd (the house band), The Move, The Pretty Things, Graham Bond, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Soft Machine, Denny Laine, Fairport Convention, and Jimi Hendrix, Eric Burdon and The New Animals, Dantalion’s Chariot (with Zoot Money and future Police guitarist Andy Summers), The Bonzo Dog Band, The Smoke, Third Ear Band, Jeff Beck, Ten Years After, and (Giant) Sun Trolley.

Movies were shown (Buñuel, Dali, W.C. Fields, Marilyn Monroe, Kenneth Anger), first-generation light shows and film projections (by Mark Boyle and Joan Hills), and vegetarian macrobiotic food was served. LSD was easy to find.

 

 

 

 

 
Andy Summers wrote in his autobiography One Train Later:

In the Roundhouse, the UFO, and the Middle Earth Club in London everyone seems to get it, and it’s as if we are all in on the same joke. Our music expresses the release, the dropping of old conventions, the newly found freedom – and to play old-style R&B in these places would be distinctly uncool.

UFO Club owners Joe Boyd and Hopkins were inspired by American music venues’ colorful commissioned concert posters and decided to follow suit. They chose pop artists Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, a.k.a. Hapshash & the Coloured Coat, to design promotional posters for the UFO Club. English had already worked on the first few issues of IT.

The two men met in 1966 when both were involved in creating exterior murals for trendy London clothing shops, English at Hung On You, and Waymouth at his own boutique Granny Takes A Trip, on Kings Road. Granny Takes A Trip, opened by Waymouth and artists John Pearse and Sheila Cohen, was the hippest clothing store, selling antique clothes and original psychedelic designs to hippies, young aristocrats, and rock stars and their consorts (Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Ronnie Wood, Rod Stewart, Andy Summers, The GTO’s Miss Pamela, Marianne Faithfull, and Anita Pallenberg). In 1967 English and Waymouth formed their graphic design partnership, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (earlier discarded names were Cosmic Colors and Jacob and the Coloured Coat).

Hapshash’s intricate, detailed, sometimes illegible posters were printed by IT offshoot Osiris Visions in the Indica Gallery (owned by Marianne Faithfull’s husband John Dunbar, Peter Asher, and IT editor Barry Miles and heavily invested in by Paul McCartney), located in the basement of the Indica Bookshop. The Creative Review said in 2011 before a Hapshash retrospective at London’s Idea Generation Gallery: “Many of the posters were designed to be largely illegible to those not prepared to stand and read them – thus the artists could get away with including explicit elements, subversive codes and messages.”

The Houston Freeburg Collection website quoted Nigel Waymouth’s description of his collaboration with Michael English:

Michael’s talent lies in his ability to balance an unrivaled attention to detail whilst creating the most fluid designs. I brought to the work a strong imagination bursting with romantic ideas and a facility for figurative drawing. We also had a very strong sense of colour, which was important , given the cost limitations and the strictures of the silk screen process. At a time when the prevailing fashion was for an indiscriminate use of rainbows and any clashing colour combination, we strived for maximum colour effect without sacrificing balance or harmony. To this end we introduced numerous innovations that have since become common practice. Expensive gold and silver inks had not been used much on street posters before we made it a regular feature of our designs. We also pioneered the technique of gradating from one colour to another on a single separation. The effects were startling, bringing an explosive vitality to the fly posters on the London streets. Nothing like it had been seen before or since. Looking at a whole block of some twenty or thirty of a single Hapshash poster was a powerful visual shock. It was not long before people began tearing some of them down in order to decorate their own walls. It was eye candy to match any psychedelic experience. In hindsight we now realize that what we had done was to bridge a gap between Pop Art and tagged graffiti. The posters often contained subversive elements, including sexually explicit graphics, mystical symbols and dissenting messages. We regarded each poster, whatever it was promoting, not only as an aesthetically pleasing design but also as a proactive concept. We got away with it because the posters were so charming to look at and the contents, including the words, required closer attention than people could give them at first glance. Our immediate audience was the younger generation, sympathetic to the spirit of the times but we also wanted to brighten the lives of people going about there everyday business on the gray streets of London.

For eighteen months Hapshash also did similar artwork for album covers (The Incredible String Band), the sleeve for The Who’s single “I Can See For Miles,” the film Luv Me, promotional posters for Tomorrow, Soft Machine, Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Who, Traffic, Granny Takes a Trip, the 1968 International Pop Festival in Rome, the Middle Earth Club, the Savile Theatre, and the the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream “free speech benefit” fundraiser at Alexandra Palace on April 29, 1967 to help IT with legal fees. The posters’ screen-prints were often given away to members of the audience at the end of a night (well, very early morning). An illicit cottage industry has grown up around bootlegging these posters and inventing unlikely stories about their origins. There is a good checklist of how to spot fakes here.

 

 
More posters + Soft Machine at the UFO Club, June 2, 1967 after the jump…
 

Wonder Woman LP Painting
 
Artist Robert Jimenez reworked iconic vintage LPs with with Marvel and DC comic book characters. I’m dying over The Divine Miss M cover!

Sadly, each one was selling for around $40 and they’re all sold! Maybe he’ll make more?
 

Batgirl LP Painting
 

Dr. Strange LP Painting
 

LOBO LP Painting
 

Batman Catwoman LP Painting
 
Via Laughing Squid

 
Handmade Facehugger Alien wall clock by designer and artist Chris Edwards aka “Eddie Escher.”

It’s currently on display at the Rapture Gallery in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, but can be purchased too on Etsy for a mere $312.30 + shipping. I think it really looks good against that wallpaper. WANT!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Life-size ‘Alien’ LEGO facehugger

Suck on that: ‘Alien’ facehugger bong

Via Laughing Squid

 
John Cage, the musician, musical theorist, artist, composer, philosopher, avid mycologist, writer and one of the leading lights of the 20th century avant garde was born on September 5, 1912. Cage’s iconoclastic approach to music—and everything else he did—is neatly summed up in this short comment:

After I had been studying with him for two years, [Austrian composer Arnold] Schoenberg said, “In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.” I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, “In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.”

Superb! I hate to admit it, but I’d rather read John Cage than actually listen to his music. Like most people, the only song of his that I can sing in the shower is “4′33″ although I have a shelf full of his books, books about him and anthologies of his interviews.

I do have a slightly funny John Cage anecdote: Sometime in the mid-1980s, Cage, along with Winona Ryder and several other cultural notables, was photographed for an ad campaign for The GAP. These black and white ads were in magazines and on bus shelters in major cities. New York was just plastered with them at the time (Sadly I can’t find Cage’s ad on Google Images).

Part of the pay, apparently, was a rather large GAP gift certificate and on a day that I happened to be in a GAP store on Seventh Ave and 23rd Street—and had literally just passed his ad on the way into the store—John Cage decided that he was going to spend his. I heard him explaining this to the employees—that he had $1000 to spend—and could they please assist him spending it? They at least seemed to recognize Cage from his GAP ad, if not his actual achievements and the staff was happy to help out the cool old guy in the ad.

Cage didn’t stay long because he seemed to know exactly what he wanted. I recall that he walked out with a winter corduroy coat, a big stack of black “pocket tee” shirts, some denim shirts and some blue jeans. His style of shopping was extremely utilitarian. He left nothing to chance…

Below, the fascinating ‘American Masters’ documentary on John Cage, ‘I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It’:
 

 
Below, a seldom-seen cable access program with Cage with his friend, writer Richard Kostelanetz. The pair discuss James Joyce and more:
 

 
While Disney and Looney Tunes probably have him beat on sheer numbers, Bart Simpson has to have been bootlegged more elaborately and creatively than any other animated character in history. There’s even a Facebook group called “Bootleg Bart,” that curates knock-off Simpsons merchandise and art. “Safer Sex Bart” was my favorite, until I stumbled across these janky little posters from a Chinese nightclub.

The imitation of Groening’s art is just a superficial design element. It doesn’t seem to matter to the illustrator that the posters are obvious bootlegs, because a legitimate association with The Simpsons as a brand obviously isn’t really the point. Still, I can’t help but enjoy the irony of America’s favorite dysfunctional family used to foster public decency in a Chinese bar. (No fighting? Really?)
 

 

 

 
Via Buried Above Ground