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WHAT does Pablo Picasso think he’s doing in this 1955 photograph?
11.29.2012
04:48 pm
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An interesting image of French photographer André Villers and a topless Pablo Picasso—he would have been around 74 years old here—wearing what looks like a knitted children’s hat.

Posted by Tara McGinley
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11.29.2012
04:48 pm
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Cabinet of Curiosities: Steven Arnold, greatest American artist you’ve probably never heard of?
11.28.2012
06:06 pm
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My angels
Please don’t take me for granted – I’m a rare
Freak of nature and now is the time to appreciate
What I am saying to the Earth
Love, Steven Arnold
September 10, 1990

I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m someone who lives for outsider art and culture, and like the other contributors to Dangerous Minds, it’s fun for me, as that kind of extreme “infomaniac,” to be able to marquee for our readers in some way the various weird things that I know about, stumble across acidentally or that gets submitted to us. A big part of the enjoyment also comes from seeing what everyone else comes up with—I get it at just about the same time that you do—and the most fun of all is when I get to discover something that’s totally unknown to me that perhaps I should have known about, but didn’t.

I’m usually pretty hard to stump, but it’s the best thing ever, as far as I’m concerned, when that does happen. Like with the work of Steven Arnold. Prior to March of this year, I’d never heard of him. For a straight guy, I actually happen to know quite a bit about 20th century queer underground art films (Warhol, Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses, John Waters, Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, Thundercrack, Andy Milligan, Black Lizard Jack Smith’s Beautiful Creatures and Normal Love, the Kuchar Brothers, Pink Narcissus, etc.—it’s not all that long of a list). But Steven Arnold? Nope, doesn’t ring a bell.

Steven Arnold, who died in 1994, is one of the greatest—albeit, admittedly rather unfairly obscure—avant garde photographic geniuses America has ever produced. First I stumbled across his 1971 cult movie Luminous Procuress—a jaw-dropping surrealist film praised by both Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol—on Vimeo (I was researching something on The Cockettes) and then I was positively stunned by what I saw on display at the exhaustive website about his work, The Steven Arnold Archive, maintained by Stephanie Farago (a wonderful artist in her own right).
 

 
Here’s a slightly abridged version of Arnold’s bio from the site:

Steven Arnold (1943–1994) was a California-based multi-media artist, spiritualist, gender bender, and protegee of Salvador Dali. His work consisted of drawings, paintings, rock and film posters, makeup design, costume design, set design, photography and film.

Steven also played an instrumental role in giving The Cockettes, the famed psychedelic San Francisco drag troupe, their first chance to perform on stage in exchange for free tickets to his “Nocturnal Dream Show” – which was among the first-ever Midnight Movie showcases. This launched The Cockettes into underground fame.

Early in his career, Steven also nurtured a prolific creative relationship with pioneer of the wearable art movement Kaisik Wong which lasted until Kaisik’s death in 1989. Their work together included the production and design of a play titled Dragonfly, and several tableaux vivant photography collaborations. Throughout his life, Steven’s eccentric modes of expression led him to the upper-crust of both coasts, including encounters, in some cases lifelong friendships, with the likes of Vogue’s Diana Vreeland, actress Ellen Burstyn, psychedelic explorer Timothy Leary, Jay Leno, The Cars, George Harrison, Blondie‘s Debbie Harry, Divine, and Warhol Superstar Holly Woodlawn.

Among Steven’s most notable early works is a rarely-seen film gem titled Luminous Procuress, starring Pandora and featuring The Cockettes, which was lauded by Salvador Dali, and Andy Warhol, among others. In fact, Dali was so impressed with the film, that he invited Steven, Pandora (Steven’s muse, and the film’s star), Kaisik Wong, and their entourage to help him open his Dali Theater-Museum in Figueres, Spain. Luminous Procuress was edited and scored by electronic music forefather Warner Jepson. The film continues to be screened worldwide, including showings at the Tate Modern, London, and CPH:DOX, Denmark. Steven’s films have been recently featured Museum of the Moving Image, the Tate Modern, London, and the List Visual Art Center Film Night at MIT.

Although his early film work garnered him much attention, Steven was best known for his exquisite, surreal, black & white tableau vivant photography produced from the old pretzel factory he called Zanzibar Studios in Los Angeles. His photography has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; among others. Steven Arnold’s works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Cinematheque Francaise, Paris, France; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA); the Oakland Museum of California; and the Cincinnati Art Museum. His works are in the private collections of: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ellen Burstyn, Cher, Salvador Dali, Goldie Hawn, Yves St. Laurent, Diana Vreeland, and many others. Steven published three books of photography during his lifetime: Reliquaries, with a foreword by Ellen Burstyn, Epiphanies, with afterword by James Leo Herlihy, and Angels of Night. Steven Arnold Stemmle Edition, a photographic retrospective, was published posthumously.

 

 
Steven Arnold’s work exists at a delicate intersection of Luis Buñuel, Ken Anger,The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 50’s Hollywood glamour photography, Pink Narcissus, Joel-Peter Witkin and Jack Smith. I’ve never seen anything else even remotely like it, although I can also see an influence Arnold’s work might have had on Rocky Schenk’s wonderfully artsy portraits and the highly-styled portraiture landscapes of Josef Astor.
 

 
Steven Arnold, in his own words:

“I interview myself all day long – Doesn’t everyone? Rant and rave about bliss, the creative process angels listening to higher message-appreciation of one’s gifts. The best way to elevate consciousness is to do the work with love. Love is sharing the message.”

 

 

“Art is revolution or it’s nothing.”

 

 
For more information on the life and work of Steven Arnold, visit The Steven Arnold Archive. I recommend downloading the PDF file of the proposed coffee table book on Arnold which you can find here.
 

 
A new exhibit, Steven Arnold: Cabinet of Curiosities, a retrospective of this groundbreaking yet under-recognized queer artist will be on display through January 12, 2013 at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, 626 North Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood. The exhibition celebrates Arnold’s radical imagination, presenting many of his tableaux vivant photographs alongside never before exhibited drawings, sketchbooks, paintings and original poster art. In conjunction with the exhibition, ONE will screen Arnold’s four films, including Luminous Procuress on the exhibit’s closing day, Saturday, January 12, 2013

Below, Luminous Procuress (you can purchase all of Arnold’s films on DVD and support The Steven Arnold Archive):
 

 
Arnold’s 1967 short, The Liberation of Mannique Mechanique:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.28.2012
06:06 pm
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Gorgeous long exposure nude photography (SFW)
11.28.2012
06:58 am
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nude
 
Japanese artist Shinichi Maruyama takes amazing photographs dealing with themes of the impermanence of motion. His stylized “nudes” are dancers captured with long exposure photography. The images are startlingly de-eroticized and genderless moments of beauty in human movement.
 
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Below, a video of Maruyama’s “water sculptures.”
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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11.28.2012
06:58 am
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Glenn Beck makes his own ‘Piss Christ’ with Obama Bobblehead
11.27.2012
09:42 pm
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In which the loony former television personality decides to do something “controversial,” as reported on his own website, The Blaze:

The idea, for Beck however, is not to be untoward, but through irony, to highlight the hypocrisy of those who would shout in defiance at defacing the image of a sitting U.S. president, but not that of an image so sacred to Christianity — the world’s largest religion.

Beck’s piece is titled “Obama in Pee-Pee” and he says it’s for sale at $25,000. Beck admitted that it was not his own celebrity whiz in the container, but just some beer.

The clip is painful to watch, although I will admit to LOLing when Beck referred to his “home-brewed ‘Country Time.’”
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.27.2012
09:42 pm
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‘The Bones Go Last’: A film on occult artist Austin Osman Spare
11.26.2012
07:36 pm
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austin_osman_spare_1955
 
Artist and Occultist, Austin Osman Spare playing the clarinet.

AOS, ‘55

Improvising an original theme

AOS

“Libertine to the Gods”

This photograph led me to The Bones Go Last, a film documentary on AOS.

This is a film about Austin Osman Spare, perhaps the greatest artist ever to be ignored / overlooked / considered too weird by mainstream art history.  Spare’s work embraced religion, the occult, sex, magic, atavisms, ghosts and cockneys in ways never fully understood, or adequately appreciated. 

It doesn’t have a title, yet. 

What it does have, and is gaining more of (perhaps as you read this) is footage of Spare’s extraordinary artistic works along with the South East London urban sprawl that he made his home, plus interviews with foremost authorities / experts / fanatics.

Discovering Spare is one of the most rewarding art appreciation experiences there is.  When completed this film will stand as a pretty good first step on that journey.

More information here.
 

 
Part 2 of ‘The Bones Go Last’, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.26.2012
07:36 pm
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Mr. Pötatöhead Lemmy Kilmister
11.26.2012
12:24 pm
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Last week I blogged about the Dee Dee Ramone Mr. Potato Head. This week it’s a Mr. Pötatöhead Lemmy Kilmister by self-proclaimed “Potato Head Master” and artist, Jason D. Johnson.


 

 
With thanks to Cherrybombed

Posted by Tara McGinley
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11.26.2012
12:24 pm
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Momus: Performative Lecture from 2012
11.22.2012
12:26 pm
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momus_portrait
 
Artist and DM pal, the fabulous Norn Cutson forwarded this fascinating performative lecture given by pop oddity, musician (The Poison Boyfriend, Tender Pervert), author The Book of Jokes and The Book of Scotlands, philosopher, post modernist and artist Momus.

This is a fascinating and entertaining lecture with a Q + A session, which Momus presnted at Nottingham Trent University, October 18th, 2012. Now based in Osaka, Japan, Momus is available for public speaking engagements - email: momasu@gmail.com - and will be next available in Europe during March 2013.

For more information check his website.
 

 
With thanks to Norn Cutson!
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.22.2012
12:26 pm
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‘The Street of Crocodiles’: Bruno Schulz was murdered 70 years ago this week
11.21.2012
07:52 pm
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That he was a genius was undeniable. Even from the little of his work that has survived it can be seen that artist and writer, Bruno Schulz was a genius. He was born in the small town of Drohobycz in 1892, which was then part of Galicia, a province of Austro-Hungary. Schulz lived a quiet, seemingy ordinary life - he taught art classes during the day, and by night dedicated himself to his writing and art.

His first exhibition was held in Warsaw in 1922. By the end of the decade he was writing the stories which would bring him fame, and would lead to the publication of his book The Street of Crocodiles in 1933. By 1938, Schulz was well on his way to becoming an internationally respected author.

This all changed with the Second World War, when Germany invaded Drohobycz in 1941. Recognizing that his life was in severe danger, Schulz began to send as much of his writing and art to his gentile friends across Europe. This included a hand-written copy his unpublished magnum opus The Messiah (allegedly sent to Thomas Mann), the manuscript for which has never been found.

Being Jewish, Schulz was placed under arrest, and was to be sentenced to a work camp or executed. Because of his artistic talents, Schulz was favored by the brutal Gestapo officer, Felix Landau, who was in charge of the extermination of Galician Jews. Landau admired Schulz’s talents, and as he was also in charge of the Jewish labor programs, had Schulz decorate his apartment, painting murals on his son’s nursery room. This position allowed Schultz certain privileges and some protection. It also gave him time to think and plan his escape.

On November 19th 1942, Schulz was walking through the Aryan District to his home in the Jewish ghetto. He walked past the labor exchange at 44 Mickiewicz Street, where the previous year Landau had rounded up 350 Jews and executed them in cold blood. As Schulz reached the corner of Czacki street, leading to the entrance of the ghetto, he was stopped by Gestapo officer, Karl Günther. Günther smiled, placed his Luger against Schulz’s temple, and shot him twice in the head, killing himself instantly.

Günther later told Landau he did it as an act of retaliation, ‘You killed my Jew - I killed yours.’

Today, all we have left of Schulz’ work are his drawings, letters, a handful of short stories, and the novels (or connected stories) The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Schulz’s work is beautiful, poetic, dream-like and mythic, and has been described as producing ‘the metaphysical feeling of the strangeness of existence.’ In 1986, the Brothers Quay made their classic stop-motion animation interpretation of The Street of Crocodiles, which compliments Schulz’s tales, rather than gives a literal interpretation.
 

 
Bonus documentary on Bruno Schulz, aftter the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.21.2012
07:52 pm
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Beautiful Fevered Dreams: The Art of Sig Waller
11.20.2012
06:48 pm
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When the artist Sig Waller was a child, she experienced intense fever hallucinations. It possibly explains something about her paintings, which are beautiful, brightly colored, fluid, dreamlike, visions of reality. I find her work addictive, and am drawn back, time and again to certain paintings - paintings which seem as if she has made real some fragment of my dreams.

Waller’s first major exhibition was in 1996, and since then she has exhibited her paintings across the world. Her work is fabulous, intense, politicized yet often darkly amusing. There is a great intelligence at work here, which can be seen in such varied series as: Dreamlands (1999-2001) a series of channel-hopping images taken form television; Hotel Romantica (2002), sensuous paintings based on a pack of nude playing cards, which was stowed away on the Apollo 12 spacecraft during its November 1969 voyage to the moon; All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (2011) a series of paintings examining different forms of protest; which ties in with Burning Desire (2102) a series of paintings based on mobile ‘phone photographs of the Tottenham riots in 2011.

Sig (originally “S.I.G.” or “Spectrum is Green” from Captain Scarlett and the Mysterions) Waller divides her time between Brighton and Berlin, and is about to start an artist’s residency in Italy. I contacted Sig to find out more about her life, her inspiration and her childhood.

Sig Waller: ‘I grew up mainly on the Gower Peninsula near Swansea, Wales. My parents were foreign intellectuals - my father an American historian who dressed like a tramp and my mother an obsessively Francophile, German psychologist. Our house had no TV or telephone; pop music was banned, as were cinema visits. The only contact my sister and I had with popular culture was via comic books and story cassettes sent from Germany. We spent a lot of time at our grandparent’s house in the Saarland and I grew up bi-lingual with my mother’s French-influenced regional dialect as my first language.

‘My mother was horrified by life in South Wales and tried to create her own “Little Germany” within the walls of our house. This resulted in me reading Gothic tales in old German script dressed in Bavarian costume while my classmates wore t-shirts and watched Top of the Pops.

‘When I was 8 there was a period when I experienced some quite intense fever hallucinations. At the same time, I had Hauff’s dark tales swirling around in my head and this came to form the root of my fascination with the macabre and the grotesque. Stories such as “The Tale of the Hacked-off Hand” or “The Tale of the Ghost Ship” are still with me today.

‘One of my most formative childhood experiences was that of alienation. If a kid is different, the other kids will point and I got used to being pointed at. Later things changed and my parents got hip, dragging us to experimental theater performances and art movies. I remember the day I told them I wanted a record and their dumbfounded reaction. Prior to this, I’d been secretly listening to music on a small transistor radio in bed. Surprisingly, my mother entered into the spirit of things and started buying Brian Eno records and taking us to the ICA. At around this time I began to dye my hair and decided that it was okay to be different.

‘When I was little I wanted to be a clown or an artist. I loved Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy and was fascinated by the idea of the circus but as I was also quiet and shy I must have decided that art was the better option. I spent hours studying reproductions of paintings and imagining my future life as an artist. I didn’t think I was very good at drawing but held onto my fantasy and at around age 13 something strange happened and suddenly I could draw. I then spent most of my adolescence listening to obscure music, drawing and nurturing my teenage melancholia.

‘My first truly artistic (and coincidentally also comic) act took place in the baby cot, where I – left unattended – picked up one of my baby-poos and using it as a colouring stick, expressively daubed at the bars of my confinement. This event has been recounted to me on many occasions, usually in the presence of a new boyfriend, so it must be true.

Paul Gallagher: Tell me about Art College?

Sig Waller: ‘I was barely 18 when I moved to London to study Art and Art History at Goldsmiths. Back then the art college was at the Millard building in Camberwell and that place had an incredible atmosphere. I remember one afternoon, a guy came into the bar with a pistol and yelled, ‘Everybody get their hands up,’ and everyone just ignored him, it was that kind of place. People were generally too busy polishing their egos to notice the guy with the gun.

‘I started going to warehouse and squat parties and halfway through my first year at college I began living in squats. I continued with this life for the next 7 years and this gave rise to my interest in protest and rebellion.

‘While at college I began to paint with oils and use elements of my clothing in my work. I would walk around with slogans pinned to my back and these would eventually make their way into my paintings. One of my jackets became part of a painting too – I wore some very strange outfits; I guess it was a kind of performance I was engaged in, though it was more organic than contrived.

‘After college, I stopped painting and started making hats and other fluffy rubbish and selling these through markets and designer shops. I also did a Photo / Video foundation course, worked on music videos and animation and wrote a few film scripts.’

Paul Gallagher: From college, you moved to berlin, why and what happened?

Sig Waller: ‘I’d been fascinated by Berlin for years, its new wave and industrial music scene excited me and so many things seemed to be happening there. I first went to Berlin in 1989, just after The Wall came down and was there over the New Year, which was an incredibly intense experience. In 1995 my friend Volker Sieben invited me to live in his run down studio complex in Brunnenstrasse in Berlin-Mitte, so I packed my bags and drove there with a car full of fake fur, which I was going to turn into stuff to sell.

‘In 1996, I moved into a place on Reinhardstrasse, which was a stone’s throw away from the Reichstag. A new project space called C4 opened round the corner and in early 1998 I curated Blut & Blumen (Blood and Flowers) there. This marked a turning point for me as I began to revisit my childhood dream of being an artist. Some months later, I had a solo show at the Tacheles and painted my first oil paintings in 10 years.

‘In late 1998 I moved back to Brunnenstrasse, which is where I painted my extensive Dreamlands TV-zapping series which I showed as part of the Z2000 Festival in Berlin and also in New York in 2001. The flat on Brunnenstrasse was documented in a book called Berlin Interiors: East meets West.’

Paul Gallagher: What inspires you?

Sig Waller: ‘Dark things inspire me. And things that make me laugh. I find the combination of dark and funny particularly inspirational but I am also interested in art history and cultural theory; junk and found materials; chance encounters; future studies and science fiction; fairy tales, horror and the paranormal; expressionist cinema, cult movies and television; and obviously books and the internet are an endless source of inspiration, as are conversations with artists and friends…

‘Some of my work may appear to be quite militant, this is because I find a lot of political issues quite infuriating, so in a way my work is also a form of personal anger management and these more radical pieces are an expression of some of that rage.

‘Right now I’m feeling inspired by needle-crafting grandmothers everywhere, by all the people who spend hours making stuff in their living rooms, by my son’s infallible sense of humor, by the encouragement of others and by the many great and wonderful artists I’ve stumbled across over the years whose time has yet to come.

‘I’m also still a fan of Kippenberger, his work resonates to this day and a lot of the art I’ve seen in the past 20 years is simply imitation Kippenberger.

Out of the exhibitions I’ve visited recently, I found the Deller show at the Hayward the most engaging. Art can be political, but on some level it should also be enjoyable.
 
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More from Sig Waller’s life and art, after the jump…
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

S.I.G. Waller: ‘Our capacity for cruelty and suffering is timeless, as is our ability to look away’


 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.20.2012
06:48 pm
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Vincent Price instructs Sears Roebuck employees on the sale of fine art
11.20.2012
09:19 am
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Vincent Price
 
The first surprising part of this video is that Sears actually sold art; apparently the department store chain had been selling oil paintings since the the early part of the 20th century. I suspect that as the mass availability of affordable art reproductions became available to the middle class, Sears decided to rebrand purchasing original art for the home, with the help of that consummate sophisticated gentleman, Vincent Price.

Price was not only a household name, but an avid art collector and gallerist (think of him as the Dennis Hopper of the 1950s). The Vincent Price Art Museum in East Los Angeles houses the actor’s vast collection in a 40,000-sq. ft. Arquitectonica building that opened on what would have been the actor’s 100 birthday, May 27, 2011. From the Sears archives:

Price was given complete authority to acquire any works he considered worthy of selection. He searched throughout the world for fine art to offer through Sears. He bought whole collections and even commissioned artists, including Salvador Dali, to do works specifically for this program.

At first, the idea of a large merchandising organization, such as Sears, maintaining a serious, top-quality art collection met with skepticism. But the public - and the artists themselves - soon learned that Sears would not compromise with good taste or artistic quality.

On October 6, 1962, the first exhibit and sale of “The Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art” took place in a Sears store in Denver, Colo. Original works of the great masters - Rembrandt, Chagall, Picasso, Whistler and more - as well as those of the best contemporary artists at the time were offered for sale in this first exhibit and throughout the program’s existence.

 

Posted by Amber Frost
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11.20.2012
09:19 am
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