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Born With Three Mouths
12.27.2010
03:57 pm
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Photographer and film maker Alva Bernadine mixes the erotic with the grotesque in “Born With Three Mouths,” part of an ongoing film project.

To view Bernadine’s other works visit his website here.
 

 
Previously on DM: Alva Bernadine and Spanking As Art.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.27.2010
03:57 pm
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A skate park on a skateboard in a skate park
12.27.2010
02:32 pm
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“Let’s go Surfing Instead” by Nansei over at deviantART.

(via Dude Craft)

 

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.27.2010
02:32 pm
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The Shroud of William Lee: Alison Van Pelt’s portraits of William Burroughs
12.27.2010
12:45 am
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Alison Van Pelt’s oil on canvas portraits look like giant faded and scratched Polaroids. Or in the case of her paintings of William Burroughs, the Shroud Of Turin.

See more of Pelt’s “blurry photorealism” here.
 
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Cover of Catalog for Burroughs Retrospective, LACMA, 1996.
 
Via

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.27.2010
12:45 am
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The Clash meet Futura 2000 and a riot they didn’t own
12.25.2010
04:12 am
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The Clash, Futura 2000, Fab 5 Freddy and Dondi White recording The Escapades at Electric Lady Studio. Photo by Bob Gruen.

New York City graffiti legend Futura 2000 is one of the immortals, a spray can slinging Jesse James. Starting out in the 70s thru the 80s and beyond, Futura’s subway and wall murals are distinctive for their tight clean lines and wild but precise abstract lettering. They jumped out with a stunning clarity. He and Dondi White were the kings of Krylon.

When The Clash arrived in New York in 1981 to do their series of gigs at Bonds, they embraced the hip hop scene much in the same way they had absorbed reggae into their music. Joe, Mick, Paul and Topper hooked up with some of the major forces in rap and graffiti, including Futura. At the time Mr. 2000 knew nothing about The Clash but accepted their invitation to join them on stage and paint graffiti backdrops as the band played. He eventually joined them on tour.

During their 2 1/2 week residency at Bonds, The Clash took some time off to go into Electric Lady Studio with Futura, Fab Five Freddy and Dondi. As The Clash layed down rhythm tracks for “The Escapades of Futura 2000,” Fab, Dondi and Strummer sang background while Futura did his best to compress the history of graffiti into a 6 minute rap. His rapping skills leave alot to be desired; off the rhythm and with lyrics that are rudimentary at best. However, his mission statement and celebration of street art makes up in solidarity what it lacks in dexterity. “Escapades Of Futura 2000”  may not endure as a rap classic, but it was one vital element in the hybridization of punk and Black street culture. White/Black, we were all living in the ghetto, whether it be a council flat, the Lower East Side or the South Bronx. We were united by poverty, anger, music and art and looking for a riot of our own.

The coming together of the uptown rap scene with the downtown punks was the beginning of a melding of musical movements that had previously just observed each other from a distance. Uptown and downtown innovators started collaborating in New York and on an international scale. Bands like The Beastie Boys, Gang Of Four, Rip Rig Panic, The Slits, Bush Tetras, Liquid Liquid and PIL fell under the influence of dub, reggae, funk and disco. Even college kids like Talking Heads got into the action. Suddenly The Clash were being played in the discos and white hipsters were dancing to Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa at the Mudd Club.

The quintessential and most seamless marriage of punk to reggae and funk to hardcore was by a former jazz band from Washington D.C.: Bad Brains. The Damned had turned The Clash onto the Brains and were invited by the band to be an opening act at Bonds. The Clash/Bad Brains double bill was one of those seminal moments when the music really came together, in theory and action, and for those in the audience who were open to it (sadly, not many were) there was the realization that punk was more than a fashion statement or hip stance. It was part of a struggle that reached way beyond white suburbia or the enclaves of pale-skinned rock and rollers in Alphabet City. The White Riot was Black as well. And the beat was everything, the common ground, the heart. And it belonged to everyone. A riot of your own might give you a momentary sense of empowerment, but it won’t win the big battles.  When punk met rap, the seeds of a cultural revolution began. We just didn’t follow through. As the 80s and 90s rolled around, music became commodified once again along racial lines, urban or classic, hip hop or punk, rap or hardcore. And New York City has never been as musically segregated as it is today.

Here’s a video mashup of “Escapades Of Futura 2000” with excerpts from Manfred Kirchheimer’s Stations Of The Elevated. The Clash are rocking it as Futura invokes the gods of Rustoleum in his mission to change the world.
 

 
Futura 2000 art after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.25.2010
04:12 am
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Bad Santa: Rare art by Warhol and Lichtenstein stolen from Greenwich Village Apartment
12.25.2010
02:30 am
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Christmas Eve bummer. It wasn’t Bad Santa that came down the chimney. It was art thieves burrowing through the walls of a Greenwich Village apartment. Prints by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were among the valuable pieces stolen.

The New York Times reports:

On Thursday night, the NYPD was in Greenwich Village investigating a major art heist. They said works by Andy Warhol and other famous names, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, were stolen from an apartment near 9th Avenue, reports CBS 2’s Dave Carlin.

Police said creepy is the right way to describe the art thieves who ransacked a home in a swanky section of the West Village. Investigators said while the owners were out of town during the final week of November, the burglars carved their way into an apartment from an adjacent hallway. They eventually came upon an art collection worth close to $1 million. Once the opening in the wall was large enough for crooks to gain entry, the crafty criminals looted luxury items.

Clearly rare prints of several important works of art by modern masters including Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were what they were looking for. “Those kinds of thieves are going to go for that kind of merchandise,” West Village resident Mitch Ely said. “The people who are going to go for this are going to have a clientele that is going to buy it.”

Police said the burglars must have known they’d be on film because they also stole a video recorder attached to surveillance cameras.”

Via NYT

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.25.2010
02:30 am
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Dingushead: Dr. Steve Brule meets Eraserhead
12.24.2010
06:22 pm
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“Dingushead” by Dylan Mitchell-Funk.

I’ve been reading boingboing for a while now (...) I’ve just put the finishing touches onto a poster I’ll be printing out as a gift tomorrow - Steve Brule and Eraserhead… I’m really pleased with how it turned out and thought I’d share it. Merry Chrimbus!

(via Boing Boing)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.24.2010
06:22 pm
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Underground filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s ‘Lemon’ (1969)
12.24.2010
03:48 pm
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America’s abstract expressionist on celluloid, Hollis Frampton’s early still life, Lemon. What would you do with a light, a lemon and a camera? (On second thought, after seeing how you lot are doing with the band naming contest, please don’t answer that).
 

 
More Hollis Frampton on UbuWeb

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.24.2010
03:48 pm
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Limited edition Kembra Pfahler poster
12.24.2010
01:35 pm
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Still looking for that “difficult to buy for” friend’s Xmas gift? What about this badass poster from artist Kembra Pfahler? It comes in an edition of just 50 from The Hole. The poster is 24” by 36” with each one being numbered. Buy here.

These are both part of a Levis-sponsored traveling art exhibit at The Hole. The show is an homage to POSTERMAT, one of the shops that made 8th Street in NYC so great in the 80s, also featuring notables like Bruce LaBruce, Yamataka Eye, Gavin McInnes, Jack Pierson, Maripol, Clayton Patterson, ARE Weapons,  Robert Lazzarini, Shepard Fairey, Cheryl Dunn, and Yoko Ono. Kembra also appears in Bijoux Altimirano’s poster. All posters limited to editions of 50 and numbered.

I thought Robert Lazzarini’s clever homage to the famous Farrah Fawcett poster (I had one on my childhood wall right next to one of Cherie Currie, I can assure you) was especially good, but a lot of them are awesome.
 
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Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.24.2010
01:35 pm
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Jelly Wobbler: The sex life of machines.
12.23.2010
04:23 am
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British artist Nic Ramage describes the Jelly Wobbler as being non-utilitarian, fragile, struggling to do its job and always on the verge of giving up. All of which sounds like bad sex to me.

In this video, the oddly erotic Wobbler starts slowly, hesitantly, but eventually finds a groove as its little mechanical pelvis starts thrusting and trembling with increased frenzy toward a gelatinous petite mort.
 

 
Via AM

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.23.2010
04:23 am
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Jeff Koons is pissed off and he wants your balloon dogs
12.22.2010
11:11 pm
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Koons and one really big expensive balloon dog.

The owners of San Francisco’s Park Life gallery and retail store have been threatened with a lawsuit by multi-millionaire artist Jeff Koons. Jamie Alexander and Derek Song were selling a small plastic balloon dog sculpture that kind of looks like Koons’s balloon dog sculptures which kind of look like the balloon dogs clowns have been twisting and tying at children’s birthday parties since the 1920’s - 30 years before Koons was born.

Alexander and Song posted the following message on their website:

Park Life just received a very formal Cease and Desist Letter from Jeff Koons’ Lawyers calling for an “Immediate Cessation” of selling our Balloon Dog sculptures.
Wait, I’m confused, isnt his ENTIRE FUCKING CAREER based on co-opting other peoples work/objects????
So going forward, just so you know; Jeff Koons owns all likenesses of balloon dogs.”

Ironically, Koons has been sued repeatedly for copyright infringement for his use of…

[...] pre-existing images, the original works of others, in his work. In Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a judgment against him for his use of a photograph of puppies as the basis for a sculpture, String of Puppies.”

A Koons balloon dog (of the smaller variety) will set you back several thousand dollars. The Park Life balloon dog was 34 bucks.
 
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Park Life balloon dog
 
Via TB

 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.22.2010
11:11 pm
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