Golfers are invited to get a ‘Heil’ in one when a controversial crazy golf exhibition opens in Derby, England later this month.

Doug Fishbone and Friends: Adventureland Golf presents artworks by the likes of Jake and Dinos Chapman, David Shrigley, Brian Griffiths, Jonathan Allen, Zatorski + Zatorski, and Doug Fishbone displayed over a golf course.

The course begins with Jonathan Allen’s boarded up library before heading over to Brian Griffiths’ desert island. Elsewhere David Shrigley offers advice and guidance on the participant’s way round the course such as “Respect Your Opponent”. In the context of holiday fun Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Doug Fishbone have created replicas of two dictators for the course which concludes with Zatorski + Zatorski’s black mausoleum-like slabs. After this hole the ball is irretrievable. The game is over!

The most controversial exhibits are a statue of Saddam Hussein by Fishbone, and a statue of Adolf Hitler, designed by the Chapman brothers.
 

 
When a player hits a ball through the Hitler hole, the fiberglass Führer raises his arm in a Nazi salute and says “Nein, nein, nein.”

London-based, American-artist Doug Fishbone claimed the intention was not to ridicule or minimize the suffering caused by these dictators.

However, when the exhibition first opened last year in the popular seaside resort of Blackpool, Michael Samuels, of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, described the Hitler statue as having “absolutely no artistic value whatsoever.”

The exhibition has inspired considerable debate on local newspaper the Derby Telegraph‘s website.

“Bagheera” criticised the exhibition and said: “As someone who lost family members in both conflicts, I consider this grossly offensive. If this is art then, quite frankly, we would be better off without it.”

Manasas called the exhibition a “total waste of public money”, said it was “insulting to the people who died under both monsters” and called for it to be cancelled.

Fellow reader Ianrad51 said: “I think the crazy golf course with Hitler and Saddam on it is sick.”

Other readers praised Quad for bringing the exhibition – called Doug Fishbone and Friends: Adventureland Golf – to Derby.

Ben-Spiller wrote: “Ridiculing tyranny through interactive art that provokes debate about the legacy of mass-murdering bigots can only be a good thing.

“Would Hitler and Hussein have wanted their legacy to include being figures of fun on a crazy-golf course for people from all cultures to enjoy together? Most probably not. This is a good reason to do just that.

“Let’s knock Hitler and Hussein off their self-made pedestals and have fun doing so but let’s also think about the terrible impact of their cruel regimes.”

Doug Fishbone and Friends: Adventureland Golf opens at the Quod in Derby on August 31st, details here.
 

 
H/T Derby Telegraph
 
A tour of the golf course plus an interview with Doug Fishbone, after the jump…

 
The author of Scarlett Takes Manhattan and the web comics “Backstage” and “Puppet Makers” might fairly be counted as an unlikely source for a significant information on the current status of the Global War on Terror, but Molly Crabapple is one of the few human beings on earth the U.S. government has granted permission to sketch drawings of the pre-trial hearings of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators as well as the conditions at Guantánamo Bay itself. Crabapple recently returned from a trip to Guantánamo and reported her findings (and drawings) in a VICE article entitled “It Don’t Gitmo Better Than This: Inside the Dark Heart of Guantánamo Bay.”
 
In an interview, Talking Points Memo’s Catherine Thompson asked Crabapple what single thing she would want the world to know about Guantánamo:
 

CRABAPPLE: I want them to know that a lot of the people there probably aren’t guilty. I think that’s the most important takeaway from it, that a lot of the people there were people who were sold for bounties that we have no proof that they did anything, and that they’re just stuck there because of politics.

 

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
Armed with his Leica M4, photographer Bob Mazzer spent two decades documenting London’s commuters, tourists, and workers, as they traveled through the city’s famous Underground system.

Mazzer shot most of these photographs as he traveled to-and-from work. An exhibition of his Mazzer’s incredibly evocative images was first shown at a Greater London Council exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall in the 1980s. View more here.
 

 

 

 
Via the Daily Telegraph
 
More photos from the Underground, after the jump…
 

 
This video dates back to 1993. Martin Arnold, born in 1959, is from Vienna, Austria, and has spent a good deal of time teaching film at American universities, including SUNY Binghamton, Bard College, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The YouTube title indicates that this is merely an “extract”—this clip is a little less than 6 minutes long, but the whole thing is only 12 minutes long, and it continues roughly in the same manner as the part that is extant. The first 6 minutes are all you need to explore its choppy, frenetic brilliance.

As Wikipedia says, “Passage à l’acte (1993) uses several seconds of the film To Kill a Mockingbird to create a bizarre story of aggression and tension within a traditional American family.”

My favorite bit is the “duet” between Scout and her brother Jem around 4:10.
 

 
Well, I’m assuming this is a guy. And I’m also going to assume this tattoo is either the result of a bet he LOST or else just a really creative way to disguise male pattern baldness…

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Worst rock tattoo of all time

Batshit ‘Brenda’ tattoo

Amputee Dolphin Tattoo

Invasion of the Flesh Etchers: Vintage TV report of Minnesota tattoo convention, 1978

Tattoos from Hell: The only solution is amputation

Man Gets Prince William and Kate Middleton Tattooed on His Teeth

Via Geekologie

 
Artist Samuel J. Butcher is about as American as an artist can possibly be, like, say Ansel Adams, Norman Rockwell or even Andy Warhol. He draws, paints in oil, water-color, acrylic and sculpts in mixed-media.

Butcher is primarily known as the artistic creator of the Precious Moments brand. His easily identifiable big-eyed characters, originally modeled after one of his toddler sons, and his American-Christian themes make his kitschy work instantly recognizable. Chances are your grandmother has at least one Precious Moments statuette. Precious Moments is the second most lucrative brand in the figurine marketplace.

A deeply religious man, Butcher purchased a parcel of land in the Ozark Mountains near Carthage Missouri and set about building the Precious Moments Chapel, which he worked on, really, really obsessively for years before it opened in 1989.

In the Precious Moments Chapel, Butcher used his characters to bring Bible stories to life in dozens of murals—9,000 square feet of them all hand-painted by the artist—including the Creation myth and the resurrection of Jesus.

There is also mural called “Hallelujah Square” that memorializes the lives of real children who died young and depicts them being reunited with their parents in Heaven. Naturally the ceiling of the Precious Moments Chapel has been called “America’s Sistine Chapel” by the aesthetically undiscerning, but that still doesn’t mean that it’s not sort of weirdly cool anyway.

Would it surprise you to know that the country’s largest Precious Moments gift shop is adjacent to the Chapel? No?
 

 

 

 

 
Below, some smart-asses from an indie band called Fishboy stop by this unusual roadside attraction and crack wise over the Precious Moments Chapel:
 

 
A more sincere look around the Precious Moments Chapel:
 

 
Here’s a guy who paints his right hand to look like a woman’s and then proceeds to takes selfies in public as if he’s with an actual girlfriend in the photos.

I like how no one seems to pay him any mind. I’m just going to assume he does this all the time and they’re all like, “That damned ‘Fake Girlfriend Hand Guy’ is at it… again.”
 

 

 

 

 
A delightful short interview with renowned portrait artist Don Bachardy, in which he tells interviewer Bradford J Salamon about drawing Salvador Dali, and his friends, painters Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.

Bachardy was the life partner of writer Christopher Isherwood. They met on Valentine’s Day of 1953, when he was but 18 and Isherwood was 30 years his senior. They were one of the first openly gay couples in Los Angeles and together until Isherwood died in 1986 of prostate cancer. A film about their lives together, Chris & Don: A Love Story, was released in 2008.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Notes towards a portrait of Francis Bacon

 
It’s certainly no slight to the late director Curtis Harrington to describe The Wormwood Star, his visually arresting 1955 portrait of occult artist/beatnik weirdo Marjorie Cameron as being “Anger-esque” considering that he’d served as the cinematographer for Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment and that it stars Cameron, one of Anger’s most well-known cinematic avatars (Cameron famously played “The Scarlet Woman” in Inauguration of The Pleasure Dome and Harrington himself portrayed “Cesare the Somnambulist” in that film. Additionally, Paul Mathison, who played “Pan” in Anger’s druggy occult vision was the art director of The Wormwood Star).

Until The Wormwood Star came out on DVD and Blu-ray recently via Drag City/Flicker Alley as part of The Curtis Harrington Short Film Collection, it was very, very scarce and very difficult to see. You either had to be a friend of Curtis Harrington, probably, or have had a mutual friend with the late director (that’s how I saw it) or maybe see it in a museum. Now it’s on YouTube, of course.

So we’ve established that’s it’s, er, Angery, meaning that there’s more than a fair share of visual flair, drama and a hefty dollop of authentic occult creepiness. Cameron, for those who don’t know, was the wife of rocket scientist/wannabe Antichrist Jack Parsons and a participant in the infamous “Babalon Working” magical rite that also involved future Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. She was a dedicated follower of Aleister Crowley and his occult philosophy of Thelema (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”).

Curtis Harrington told Cameron biographer Spencer Kansa in his book, Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron:

Before I made the film I’d heard from Renate [referring here to painter Renate Druks] that Cameron had spent some time in the desert trying, through magical means, to conceive a child by the spirit of Jack Parsons without success.  Cameron never spoke of Jack directly, but I do remember feeling sometimes when I talked to her, of her going off into a realm that I didn’t understand at all. It was sort of an apocalyptic thing and it’s there in her poetry.

What you should know as you watch this is that the vast majority of Marjorie Cameron’s paintings were destroyed by her—burned—in an act of ritualized suicide. There are very few pieces by Cameron that have survived—a few paintings and some sketches—and The Wormwood Star is the only record of most of them (outside of the astral plane, natch. What does survive of her estate is represented by longtime New York gallerist Nicole Klagsbrun). Cameron has long been a figure of fascination for many people and I think I can say with confidence that this film meets or even far exceeds any expectations you might have for it.

As with Anger’s films, I deeply appreciate the careful aesthetic balance between beauty and evil and, as such, it’s an extraordinary document of both Marjorie Cameron Parsons’ very essence as a human being and of her creative output. As cinema, it’s a mini-masterpiece that can stand alongside any of Anger’s films, Ira Cohen’s magnificently freaky Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda, Jack Smith’s Normal Love or Yayoi Kusama’s Self-Obliteration.

Below, the seldom-seen short film, The Wormwood Star. If it looks this good on YouTube, it must look really amazing on Blu-ray. Order The Curtis Harrington Short Film Collection on Amazon (I just did).
 

 
Curtis Harrington and Cameron would work together again on 1961’s Night Tide, one of Dennis Hopper’s first starring roles. Her role as the “Water Witch” was brief, but oh so memorable…
 

 
Thank you Spencer Kansa, author of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron

 
Self-taught makeup artist Carly Paige transforms herself into a damned impressive Walter White from Breaking Bad. To give you an idea of just how talented the 26-year-old Paige is, here’s a photo of what she looks like sans the Heisenberg makeup.

PS - No spoilers from last night’s episode of Breaking Bad in the comments, please. I haven’t watched it yet!