Marko Mäetamm is a multimedia artist, who works within the mediums of video, photography, drawing, painting and the Internet. Over the past 2 decades, Marko has established himself as an original and provocative artist, and his work has been exhibited across Europe.

Born in South Estonia, Mäetamm ‘grew up without any artistic influences,’ and did not consider becoming an artist until he was 18.

‘The first time I thought doing something creative was through this friend, who was a great fan of Prog Rock and Heavy Metal,’ Marko explains. ‘And the first time I felt I really wanted to do something visual or artistic was when I was looking at the these Heavy Metal and Prog Rock album sleeves at his place.

‘This was at the beginning of the 1980s, when Estonia was part of Soviet Union and you couldn’t legally buy any Western music in stores. It was all smuggled in somehow, so you had to know people who knew people who knew other people to get access to original albums of any kind of Western music. It was more common to share tape-recorded copies of the albums rather than to have the original vinyl.

‘So, my first “serious drawings” were copies of all of these album covers and bands.’

Marko jokes that these were ‘terribly bad drawings,’ but it was still enough to inspire his interest, and after 2 compulsory years in the Soviet Army, he studied study printmaking at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn.

‘It was still the end of Soviet regime, so we didn’t get much information of what was happening in the world of contemporary art. My first influences were all these great modern artists we had to study—Rousseau, Matisse, Chagall, Picasso and so on. That was until I discovered Pop Art, at the end of my studies, and got really into it.

‘This was all happening around the same time the new wave of Young British Artists jumped on the stage, but then nobody was talking about it in Estonia. So it shows you how huge a gap there was between the art here in Estonia, and international art. It took the whole 90-s to cover this gap.’

Dangerous Minds: How would you describe yourself as an artist and how would you describe your art?

Marko Mäetamm: ‘It is always difficult to describe yourself. It is kind of a tricky thing. We never see ourselves the way like the other people do, even when we look in the mirror we actually see our image in a mirror – the eye that we think is our right eye is actually our left eye for other people and so on. And our voice we hear coming from inside us is totally different from the voice other people hear us talking with.

‘But to try to say something - I think I am quite obsessed by my work and I probably need it to keep myself in balance. I say, “I think” because I do think that it might be like that, I don’t really know. And I think that I may not function as good if I didn’t have that channel – art, to communicate with the world. I have come to recognize this by thinking of my own projects during my career. And how my ideas change. People have asked me if I have a therapeutic relationship with my work, and I have always answered that it is absolutely possible. But I really don’t know and I don’t even know if I would need to know it. I don’t know if that would make my work better.’
 

 
More art and answers from Marko, after the jump…
 

 
Cleveland resident Stephen Munhollon explains why he got a portrait of Charles Ramsey tattooed on the back of his calf (right next to his Chuck Norris tat, natch):

You could ask the question, did I want to get Charles Ramsey tattooed on my leg, and the obvious answer is no. The real question is, was I willing to get Charles Ramsey tattooed on my leg, and the answer was yes…In society, a lot of times people choose not to get involved in situations. I think what’s really grabbed people in regards to Mr. Ramsey, is he’s an average, everyday guy. He’s an ordinary person, he was put in an extraordinary situation that he could have walked away from. But he chose to do something.

Apparently this all started when tattoo aritist Rodney Rose offered a free ink job—but it had to be of Ramsey—to anyone who was up for it. Munhollon took him up on his offer.
 
Via Uproxx

 
When I was a teenager growing up in Brooklyn in the early 1980s, on Saturday nights, a pirate radio station would sometimes elbow its way to the fore, past the college stations in the lower FM band. One piece I very clearly recall being introduced to on one of these illegal broadcasts was “Music on a Long Thin Wire,” by Alvin Lucier.

Lucier’s curious acoustical installation was originally set up in a shopping mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1979 and broadcast for five uninterrupted days and nights on PBS station KUNM. The “score” consisted simply of a very long piano wire (in some installations as long as 80 feet) clamped by magnets at both ends to tables and driven by a sine wave oscillator. Variations in ambient temperatures, room vibrations, humidity and (who knows what) quantum ephemera would cause the wire’s sound to slowly drift and change over time. Aside from setting up the wire and switching it on, there were no performers per se, so experiencing the piece “live” was difficult by definition.

As Lucier started “composing” (if you want to call it that) such work in the mid 1960s, you could probably include him in that subgroup of the early John Cage-influenced minimalists who, like Steven Reich (with his mind-blowing phase-shifting tape manipulation “Come Out”), were rejecting European traditions about how music should be made, and through what means. Unlike Reich or Glass, however, Lucier never made a transition back into more conventional performance-based music, but indeed kept going deeper and deeper into more formidable and abstract sonic territories. That’s why it’s hard to find any Alvin Lucier “fans,” as only someone with access to a private jet could ever have seen more than a handful of his distinctive installation compositions.

Lucier described the piece as “an interest in the poetry of what we used to think of as science.”:

“I always thought that the world was divided into two kinds of people, poets and practical people, and that while the practical people ran the world, poets had visions about it…. Now I realize that there is no difference between science and art.”

You have to admit that if you ran across something like this you’d stand there with mouth agape, simply amazed that someone decided to put something like this together (Kinda similar to encountering a Richard Serra sculpture in real life). YouTube was obviously invented for the express purpose of allowing you to get a sense of “Music on a Long Thin Wire” as it looks and sounds in real life. “Like” it or not, it’s undeniably ambitious and impressive.
 

 
‘A writer moves about, observing, seeing as much as he can, trying to guess how man will play the game,’ Ray Bradbury said in Story of a Writer, a documentary on his life and work from 1963.

‘Constantly measuring the way life is, against the way he feels it ought to be. He is a magnet passing through a factual world, taking from it what he needs.’

Bradbury was always generous with his advice and encouragement, always willing to explain his method of writing to those who wanted to know. Writing was like a love affair.

“You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

Bradbury worked his apprenticeship as a writer in libraries, which he later described as places where:

...anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

In the “The Importance of Being Startled,” the afterword to his final novel, Farewell Summer, Bradbury described the process by which he wrote:

The way I write my novels can best be described as imagining that I’m going into the kitchen to fry a couple of eggs and then find myself cooking up a banquet. Starting with very simple things, they then word-associate themselves with further things until I’m up and running and eager to find out the next surprise, the next hour, the next day or the next week.

Surprise is everything with me. When I go to bed at night I give myself instructions to startle myself when I wake in the morning.

As Bradbury explained in Story of a Writer, allowing the ‘subconscious time to think’ was essential.

‘The time we have alone; the time we have in walking; the time we have in riding a bicycle; are the most important times for a writer. Escaping from a typewriter is part of the creative process. You have to give your subconscious time to think. Real thinking always occurs on the subconscious level.

‘I never consciously set out to write a certain story. The idea must originate somewhere deep within me and push itself out in its own time. Usually, it begins with associations. Electricity. The sea. Life started in the sea. Could the miracle occur again? Could life take hold in another environment? An electro-mechanical environment?’

This was the kind of thinking that made Bradbury’s book so irresistible. Anything was possible with Bradbury. He had a joyous, child-like enthusiasm for life that infused his books, with a brilliance and pleasure, that makes them so very, very special.

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.
 

Siouxsie Sioux (Feb 1979) This is certainly a young woman who knew exactly who she was, wouldn’t you say?

Nevermind those sterile museum retrospectives, First Third Books has just published Punk+, a gorgeous new coffee table monograph featuring Sheila Rock’s documentation of the formative London punk scene. Although many of the faces are familiar, the emphasis on punk as a youth culture, as a tribe, makes this a welcome departure from many other books of punk era photography. These shots are from when the participants were still really young and Rock’s intimate images haven’t lost any of their power from being overused (85 to 90% of the photographs are unseen according to her estimate).

I get sent books like this, well, frequently, and Punk+ is far and away one of the best. Speaking as a former publisher myself, this is a high quality piece to be really proud of.

With a brief introduction by Nick Logan and commentary from some of the participants, Punk+ wisely lets Sheila Rock’s portraits do the talking. I especially loved the pics of a young John Lydon in what appears to be his own flat.
 

Jordan outside of Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westwood’s SEX boutique
 

Girl (Leather Jacket)
 

Subey (June 1977)
 

The Subway Sect, Chalk Farm (Dec 1976)

Rob Symmons: “They’re the only public photographs of us that exist from that time because we wouldn’t have any photographs taken. When you (Sheila Rock) rang the door bell, (that little black door at the side Rehearsal Rehearsals) you asked for The Clash and were disappointed they were not there, didn’t believe us and came in to see. To save a wasted trip, you reluctantly photographed us. After we told Bernie [Rhodes] you had come to the studio one evening and taken our pictures, he was cross. I remember his exact words: “When the cat’s away. the mice will play”

 

Generation X (1977)
 

The Buzzcocks (Nov 1977)

Paul Simonon: “We did a couple of shows with The Buzzcocks and we used to go on stage with Jackson Pollack Shirts. One time they did a show with us and came on with Mondrian shorts. It was great!”

 

The Damned (Nov 1976)
 

Paul Weller of The Jam (1979)
 
Sheila Rock’s Punk+ is available as a signed limited edition and standard edition directly through First Third Books.

 
Norwegian artist and film-maker Prins Preben has released I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins, which is the first of a series of one minute films, partly inspired by a recurring dream.

‘I often dream of houses,’ Preben told Dangerous Minds, ‘So destroying one when awake is liberating I guess. I wear the chaos star and the ski-mask as a symbol of inner chaos and like going to war against myself.’

The film is a personal expression of the inner frustrations that lead to external violence. Preben also has plans for a project on Shakespeare’s MacBeth, for which he has been collecting strange facts about the play including:

In a 1672 production in Amsterdam, the actor playing Macbeth substituted a real dagger for the blunted stage dagger and killed the actor playing Duncan, in full view of the audience.

In a 1942 staging, with John Gielgud as Macbeth, three actors (two witches and Duncan) died and the set designer committed suicide.

In a Thursday-night performance in 1947 actor Harold Norman was stabbed during the final sword fight in Act 5 and died of his wounds. On Thursday’s his ghost is now said to haunt the Coliseum Theatre in Oldham, where the fatal scene was played.

Follow Prins Preben on Facebook.
 

 
The Metropolitan Museum Of Art’s “PUNK: Chaos to Couture” exhibition includes a re-creation of the legendary bathroom at CBGB’s, the Mecca of merde. But, as we see in the above photo of the museum’s replication of the tortured toilet, duplicating mayhem is impossible. Like most forms of wildlife, if you remove it from its habitat you kill it.

As someone who waded into that hellhole with the regularity of a bottom-feeding crustacean with a bad beer habit, this feeble installation doesn’t come close to evoking the dank horror of the place. The shithole at CBGB’s was punk rock’s Petri dish, spawning a virus that would radiate outward and forward into the future changing pop culture forever. Rock ‘n’ roll’s DNA was re-tooled in this stool garden.  Oh, how I miss it.

For the sake of historical accuracy, the bathroom’s floor should be soaking wet, the toilets overflowing with shit and piss and shards of broken beer bottles everywhere.

This was one of the few bathrooms in Manhattan where it was impossible to snort a line of coke discreetly and every bowel movement was performance art. The toilet truly lived up to the appellation of “throne.” You had to ascend a small staircase to reach it. You defecated from on high while below drunken rockers staggered around the urinals trying to hit their mark in an appallingly comical version of Sin City’s dancing fountains. This was Las Vegas for cockroaches.

Here’s a photo of the real deal. Lean into the monitor and smell the stomach-churning aroma of punk rock.
 

 
Via The Gothamist.

 
Nineteen-year-old photographer and photoshopper extraordinaire Flóra Borsi‘s newest series The real life models has a message I can get behind:  “The essence of my photos is to visualize the physically impossible in a form of photo manipulation.” The Budapest-based Borsi asks the question, “What if these abstract models were real people?” 

What I find compelling about Borsi series (I’m projecting here, btw) is how it calls out the unattainable, photoshopped images women are subjected to daily of other women on magazine stands, billboards and advertisements. The beautifully photoshopped skin or the perfect photoshoped body, that they, the models, don’t even possess themselves.

Flóra Borsi Photography on Facebook.

 
More after the jump…
 

 
Few DJs can rock the decks like The Gaslamp Killer. I’ve never bought into the cult of the DJ, but he’s truly incredible at what he does. His own music is fascinating, compelling and intense, as heard on his first full-length solo release, Breakthrough, put out via Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label.

This new video for “In The Dark” is one of the most complete and satisfyingly original visions for electronic dance music that I’ve seen in some time, with Gurdjieffian dervish dancers, ominous worship and stunning cinematography perfectly complimenting the horror movie soundtrack elements of the track. Directed by Hyperballad, the piece was shot in Prague, including scenes inside a 12th century crypt. Everyone involved here knocked the ball right out of the park with this one. This is a work of art.
 

 
The (also quite stunning) Hyperballad-directed ad for “Breakthrough”:
 

 
On the Passage of a few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1956-1972 is an interesting short film by Branka Bogdanov primarily documenting the work of ultra-leftist French philosopher Guy Debord, author of the influential post Marxist study of 20th capitalism Society of the Spectacle. The film explores Debord’s influence on the Paris riots of May 1968 and the nihilistic aesthetics of the punk rock era.

Interviewees include Greil Marcus, Malcolm McLaren and Sex Pistols graphic designer Jamie Reid.