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Naked Vegas: Kelly Garni’s Images of the Showgirls, Strippers & Sex Workers of Las Vegas


A photograph by Kelly Garni that graces the cover of his new book, ‘Naked Vegas: The Highs and Lows of A Photographers Journey’ (2022).
 

Kelly Garni has led a pretty storied life, his entire life. As a young teen, he became best friends with another teen, as kids do. Except Garni’s friend happened to be Randy Rhoads—a then budding guitar prodigy who would define the ultimate heavy metal sound with his instrument. Garni, who played bass, and Rhoads would go on to form Quiet Riot in the mid-70s along with vocalist Kevin Dubrow and drummer Drew Forsyth. The music put out by this original configuration of Quiet Riot is foundational, not just to heavy metal, but to glam and punk not just musically, but also in the way they dressed. Bow ties, polka dots, spandex and leather, with lots of the outfits coming from the ladies department. Their appearance created a stir at Garni and Rhoads’ high school, so much so they would routinely leave school quickly to avoid getting beat up by students who just didn’t get it. This changed once Quiet Riot started getting the attention they had worked so hard for and deserved. They were so popular, they were invited to play their high school prom even though Garni and Rhoads were barely attending classes anymore. Their classmates were no longer lining up to give them a beatdown, they were cheering for them in a swanky ballroom in Burbank. They would open for Van Halen who was coming up at the same time in Southern California. Garni’s time in Quiet Riot came to an abrupt end after an incident involving a gun and a drunken threat to kill Kevin Dubrow.
 

An early photo of Quiet Riot (Kelly Garni is on the left) and a ticket stub from their gig with rivals Van Halen, April 23rd, 1977. Photo by Rob Sobol. Source.
 
In a transitional move not unlike David Lee Roth’s in the same decade, Garni became an EMT in Los Angeles in the early 90s. As detailed in his wonderfully conversational new book Naked Vegas: The Highs and Lows of a Photographer’s Journey, he recalls the day his ambulance driver brought a 35mm camera along with her. Garni had never really used a camera and after getting some tips from his driver, he was hooked. At least until the demands of his job saving lives in LA became too time consuming, and his infatuation with photography waned. Thankfully that wouldn’t last and in the early 90s after going through what Garni describes as a very “painful divorce” he would rediscover his love of the lens. He spent time studying in the library and would chat up employees at camera stores. He built his own darkroom. Garni has never had a lack of self-confidence, and this of course worked to his advantage as he was embarking on what would become decades of photographing beautiful women merely by approaching them offering to take their photo and give it to them for free in order to hone his craft. So enthralled with the idea of photography becoming a legitimate career move, he quickly went into a bit of debt building a photography studio in his home in Las Vegas. Then Garni got the call that started it all from a modeling agency in Las Vegas that had seen some of his images. In a stroke of luck (or more likely Garni’s eye for a pretty girl), several of the girls he had recently photographed were actually working models. He would spend the next two decades taking photos of Vegas showgirls, strippers, models and sex workers, mostly in the setting of the Nevada desert. Here’s Garni on what he calls his favorite part of his life thus far:

“The next 20 years of my life (beginning in 1993) were by far my favorite. It was everything I loved. I made good money, was constantly around beautiful women, it was a non-stop party, and I was only in my early 40s. All that works for me. I had timing on my side when I started this. Timing and luck, the single greatest pairing in the history of the world for anything good that can happen to you.”

 

Garni getting artistic in the desert. All photos courtesy of Kelly Garni.
 
Garni’s assertion about this being the favorite part of his life makes sense, especially given the fact that he was living in Las Vegas during the 90s when “mega-resorts” were being built as quickly as possible. In ten years time Vegas would build massive themed “family style” resorts such as Bellagio, MGM Grand, the Luxor, Treasure Island, Mandalay Bay, the Venetian, Paris and Excalibur. Along with this, the resorts featured enormous convention facilities to help accommodate the 900 or so conventions held in the city each year. At the time, modeling agencies were making a ton of money by deploying “booth babes” to hand out company-specific merch to attendees in an effort to lure them into the all-important sales pitch from the staff inside. Garni would end up creating something called a “Zed Card” for loads of booth babes, which naturally got his images more lip-service within the Las Vegas photography industry. Though he also did other kinds of photography, demand for his nude photography soon took up 50% of his overall business. Interestingly, in his book, Garni makes it very clear that while he loves photographing women (as one should), he does not derive any kind of “enjoyment” in full-frontal nude photography as he feels it is “demeaning” to women. However, prides himself in not turning any client down, regardless of the nature of the request. Garni is a lot of things, has seen a lot of things, and has done a lot of things. Sometimes bad things (remember his desire to kill Kevin Dubrow?). But that does not make him a bad guy, and his catalog of photos in Naked Vegas convey a deep sense of admiration and respect for his subjects, even if they are buck naked. Now you might be wondering, did anything the level of “what happened in Vegas, stays in Vegas” happen to Garni during one or more of his shoots? You better believe it. And just like the debaucherous stories intertwined within the world of rock and roll, Kelly has a few shady stories about some of his clients which also reinforce his work ethic—never turn a client down. Here’s a doozy:

“Some people made this business down right creepy. This middle-aged couple came to me for pictures of a worship service at their church. They were both pastors. I guess they did alright, they had about a hundred people there donating right and left. They first asked me to do family pictures, and later, some senior pictures of their two sons. Finally, they asked about the wife doing some nudes. I thought the request was a little strange, I mean, these two were preachers. But I suppose there’s nothing wrong with a married pair of people of the fi=aith wanting some spicy pictures. Except they wanted shots that were VERY spicy. The creepy part was that during the entire shoot, the husband stood behind me. Watching. Breathing heavily. It made my skin crawl. The guy was really getting off on this. My mantra is to turn down no work no matter the nature, they became good customers in that they did these shoots several times with the husband getting more excited each time, which was always uncomfortable for me. I heard they got divorced. I don’t miss them though—they were icky to work with.”

 

A few call girl cards featurning Garni’s photographs.
 
In addition to the women who worked in Vegas, Garni also did quite a lot of photography for aspiring Playboy models. And many of the images in his 153 page book are of women projecting that image. His photographs were also widely used by Vegas call girls for their business cards. If you visited Vegas during the 90s, you will remember being bombarded by people, sometimes kids, aggressively handing out fliers and cards on the strip. Most of these handouts ended up on the sidewalks of the strip itself (something I can attest to as well), creating a sidewalk plastered in photos of half-naked women with red dots on their nippples (or not). As Garni never turned any work down, he would joke that when people asked him where they could see his photographs, he said just go to the strip and “look down.” Garni spent quite a while photographing Vegas sex workers and to say he’s seen it all is an understatement. He formed friendships with many of the women he photographed and would always ask them this question; ” What’s the weirdest thing you ever had to do for a client?” As you might imagine, Garni has an arsenal of sordid tales, including one wild one about a customer the girls called “The Balloon Guy.”

“Given the number of girls who have told me about ‘the balloon guy,’ he must have spent quite a bit of time doing ‘his thing’ around Vegas. And he must also be very rich, and very old. Balloon guy would book a large suite in a major hotel. Then he would make some calls. He’d order close to a thousand balloons, small, medium and large, but not filled with helium as he wanted balloons laid on the floor. He had ‘balloon people’ spread the balloons all over the suite, covering every inch of the floor, carpet, or tile. The bathtub would be filled with water and then covered in balloons. Then the girls would arrive, strip naked and remove all their jewelry. Balloon guy was naked too, Viagra-fueled and ready to go. It was showtime. The girls were then told to sit hard on the balloons and pop them using only their bare bottoms. Hence no jewelry. Apparently, that’s cheating. Pop! Pop! Pop! He would follow them around whacking off, and then, only when the last balloon left this Earth, did he himself pop so to speak. The girls said this all took about an hour.”

The Balloon Guy sounds like he belongs somewhere in Quentin Tarantino’s character lexicon, as do some of the other stories in Naked Vegas. In it, Garni takes us along with him on his journey through Las Vegas with his eyes and lens pointed squarely on the women of Las Vegas—models, sex workers, strippers, and exotic performers, you name it. Through his photos and experience, he illuminates the some of the underbelly Vegas is known for, by navigating it himself for the first time as a self-taught photographer. Naked Vegas: The Highs and Lows of a Photographer’s Journey, is available now via Garni’s soon-to-be-redesigned website or here. Like the other images in in this post, most are NSFW. But you didn’t like that job anyway.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
With many thanks to Kelly Garni and Marcy Johnson.

 

Posted by Cherrybomb
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10.24.2022
02:52 pm
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Lydia Lunch sells out*
04.29.2021
09:46 am
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Photo by Jasmine Hirst
 
*As if.

As reported at Pitchfork and elsewhere, Lydia Lunch is selling the rights to her life’s work. According to a March 25 press release, this would transfer “all intellectual rights and copyright ownership” of “all of her written articles, compositions, the majority of her Master Recordings, books, artworks, photography and more.” This would include 61 published works, nearly 400 compositions, and Lydia’s “ownership interest” in 326 master recordings. The ultimate buyer—obviously a person of wealth and refined taste who would respect the cultural and historical significance of such a body of work—will be able to exploit the material as they see fit.

Valuing transgressive art might have been a difficult thing in the past, but with a few decades of distance, what was once underground and perhaps violated cultural norms—like Fingered for instance—becomes history. (And in this case, it also gets uploaded to PornHub.) And that’s not to say that it’s “safer”—we’re talking about Lydia Lunch, for chrissakes—but that it can be more readily turned into a more mainstream commodity than in the past. 

It will be interesting to see what happens here. I asked Lydia a few questions over email, her answers below, but I think it’s worth mentioning that in the past two years, I personally have purchased seven Lydia Lunch authored, or related items—vintage vinyl pressings of Queen of Siam and 13.13, a newer vinyl version of 13.13, and three books, one by Lydia, the recent “oral history” Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over by Nick Soulsby (which I contributed to) and a book of her interviews with RE/Search’s V. Vale that I just bought. I realize that my spending habits aren’t the same as most people’s, but I’m a good example of someone who has spent, you know, more than $100 on Lydia-related products in the past 24 months.

What made you decide to do this?

Lydia Lunch: I have managed to own everything I’ve done, was able to release as much material as I have in various formats over the years, produce other artists, curate spoken word shows for decades, host workshops for writers, collaborate with so many incredibly creative artists, tour extensively…it would be a great relief if someone would step in and conceive possibilities that can allow me to carry on.

It would be extremely helpful to have support for my podcast The Lydian Spin with Tim Dahl, which has over 90 episodes online available for free.  I consider it an audio museum where we promote other artists, musicians, filmmakers, etc.  It is a mandatory platform not only to give voice to other artists to express their vision, but a vehicle for myself and Tim to try to make sense of the almost unfathomable mess this country is trying to lift itself out of after four years of complete absurdity.

I’m working on a documentary with Jasmine Hirst - Artists-Depression/Anxiety & Rage. We’ve interviewed over 35 artists and a few therapists and will have it finished by fall. An important subject especially now.
 

 
I have an LP finished with Tim Dahl’s psycho-ambient trio GRID, and a slinky jazz-noir LP with the amazing chanteuse and songwriter Sylvia Black. I’m working on a play. RETROVIRUS is waiting for shows to open up. All of this, as usual, self produced amd self financed…even I can only do so much without some financial support especially now for fuck’s sake. HA! Or should I wait for Spotify to cough up half a cent for every song they play?

How do you put a dollar value on your life’s work?

I can’t. But I’m open to proposals. Also after 43 years it begins to feel like a humongous invisible beast of sound and vision hanging over my head, or to quote Lawrence Ferlinghetti a “Coney Island of the Mind”. It would be great if someone stepped in who wanted to run The Cyclone.
 

“My Amerikkka” by Lydia Lunch
 
How would a potential purchaser do the same?

They would have 100 years to figure it out! There must be someone creative enough to find methods that I don’t have the time or energy to pursue, since I continue to create in multiple formats and have no intention of slowing down.
 

“Collateral Damage” by Lydia Lunch
 
What’s the process you envision?

Getting the word out that this material is available, targeting forward-thinking people who understand not only the future possibilities, but have an understanding of history as well. I was lucky to work with Nicholas Martin who recently acquired my archives for the Fales Library at New York University and is establishing a digital museum. But I still own the copyright on over 380 musical compositions, and partial ownership in most of the master recordings, 61 published works, my artwork and photography, etc. It’s all just really too much for me to manage as I continue to create. Selling this to the right party would also allow me to independently continue to produce and collaborate with other artists which is extremely important to me.
 

“Casualty” by Lydia Lunch
 
How does a serious possible buyer contact you?

Through my manager Tom Garretson at tgarretson@lydia-lunch.net

The trailer for Beth B’s documentary ‘Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over.’

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.29.2021
09:46 am
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Jeanne Mammen: The fierce artwork of a woman dubbed a ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis
08.12.2020
01:40 pm
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“Woman with absinthe glass, Moulin Rouge” by Jeanne Mammen (early 1900s).
 

“I have always wanted to be just a pair of eyes, walking through the world unseen, only to see others.”

—a quote from artist Jeanne Mammen from the only interview she would ever do during her career, with art historian Hans Kinkel, 1975.

Described as “artistically gifted” at a very early age, Jeanne Mammen’s family would move from her birthplace of Berlin to Paris when she was five. She immersed herself in French literature—especially that of the great Romantic novelist Victor Hugo and the poet Charles Baudelaire. In 1907, at the age of seventeen, Mammen and her sister Adeline attended Académie Julian. The Académie Julian was an artistic refuge, especially for women who were allowed to enroll and where they had access to nude male models as subject matter. This is important as other art-centric schools had been slow to admit women into their institutions. If they did, women were not allowed to participate in painting or life study classes with their male counterparts.

Jeanne and Adeline would move on to Brussels to continue their studies. Then to Rome, where they attended both the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma and the Scuola Libera del Nudo dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma (aka “The Scuola Libera del Nudo,” or “free school of the nude,” for the teaching of life-drawing). The sisters would return to Paris in 1912 only to be forced to flee the city with their family. Unfortunately, their successful merchant father, Gustav Oskar Mammen, was labeled a “foreign enemy” and all of the family’s possessions, including their home, were confiscated. By 1916, the Mammen family was impecunious and living in Berlin doing any kind of work they could collectively find to keep financially afloat. After some time, Jeanne and her sister were able to afford to rent a studio apartment. The small apartment would eventually become a place Jeanne seldom left and where she would bring her observations of Berlin to life. Her work was widely published in magazines, as well as her writing. She was finally, once again, financially secure. But as 1933 and WWII loomed, Mammen would once again find herself out of work, but that didn’t mean she stopped working. Here is another quote attributed to Mammen’s lone interview on how she managed to keep creating despite the Nazis’ best efforts to stop her and other artists whom they categorized as “degenerates”:

“With the advent of the Hitler era, a ban on, or ‘Gleichschaltung’ of, all the magazines I was working for. The end of my ‘realistic’ period. Transition to an aggressive painting style, of fragmenting the object (in contrast to the official art world). World War II: no oil paints, no canvas—all pictures from this period are painted with gouache on cardboard. Ration cards, unemployment registration, hard labor, bombing, forced training as a fireman.”

Influenced by artists such as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas, Mammen seemed to embrace Figuratism as early as 1908, painting in this style for approximately six years before her work became more aligned with Symbolism. A wildly prolific artist who worked in various mediums, including watercolor, Mammen’s muses included members of Berlin’s queer community, a plethora of women, and vivid interjections of religious imagery and symbolism. Following the conclusion of WWII, Mammen would allegedly tell her longtime friend, Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist Max Delbrück, that “the ruins of Jeanne can be found in the ruins of Berlin.” After seven decades of creating artwork that still refuses to be defined by a singular artistic description, Mammen would pass away in Berlin at the age of 86. Mammen’s long career and artwork have been the subject of a couple of books including Jeanne Mammen: Paris – Bruxelles – Berlin (2017), Jeanne Mammen The Observer: Retrospective, 1910–1975 (2018). Her work is also featured in Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic: From Otto Dix to Jeanne Mammen (2018).

Images spanning Mammen’s impressive career follow.
 

 

“She Represents” (1928).
 

“Two Women Dancing” (1928).
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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08.12.2020
01:40 pm
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‘Beware! Beware! We are not to be trifled with’: The work of pioneering genderqueer artist Gluck
08.28.2019
08:50 am
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Gluck, circa 1924.
 
Hannah Gluckstein preferred to be called Peter or Hig but liked “Gluck, no prefix, suffix or quotes” best. Gluck. A functional name. Gender neutral long before such a term existed. A trademark, a product, a producer of art.

Gluck was born into a very wealthy Jewish family on August 13th, 1895 in London. The first born, a daughter who was expected to grow happy and demure and marry a most suitable husband—someone who would make the family proud and strengthen the business. But that wasn’t Gluck. Early photographs show a long-haired girl staring fixedly at the camera with defiance and dreams of another life.

This life came with a growing interest in painting and drawing and a desire to be an artist. The family were not impressed. The Glucksteins were half of the business empire Salmon & Gluckstein, owners of (what was claimed to be) the world’s largest tobacco company, a selection of hotels (the Cumberland, the Trocadero), and the famous Lyon’s Corner House tearooms, which were a staple of British social life from the 1920s-50s—see Graham Greene’s novels for details. Art was a poor choice for business and a not a suitable career for a woman. Yet, Gluck’s parents indulged their daughter thinking this trifling passion for art was mere whimsy, a passing phase.

Between 1913-1916, Gluck attended the St. John’s Wood School of Art in London. The parents hoped this experience would cause Gluck to give up on this teenage fancy. Instead it proved to be three years that changed Gluck’s life and confirmed a startling talent and some deeply held ambitions. At the college, Gluck met another artist Miss E. M. Craig, a mysterious figure who was simply known as Craig. Together they eloped to Lamorna, Cornwall to an artists’ colony.  Gluck’s parents were shocked. This was not the kind of thing a good Jewish girl was supposed to do. They blamed Craig as a “pernicious influence.”

Yet still, when their wayward daughter reached the age of 21, Gluck’s father supplied a trust fund which ably supported the move to Cornwall, where Gluck bought a studio. The money also enabled Gluck to be the person little Hannah Gluckstein had once dreamed of becoming. Hair razor cut like a boy’s, a suit handmade by one of London’s finest tailors, and the adopting of the name “Gluck.”

Gluck was particular about this new name. People who used any other name, any former name, were cut off. Once, an art society sent a letter to “Miss Gluck”—Gluck resigned from the society immediately. It led many to describe Gluck as “a difficult woman.” Now Gluck was free to begin a new life.

In the 1920s, Gluck held a first “one man exhibition” of diverse artworks. It brought celebrity and commissions to paint portraits of the elite members of the establishment—lawyers, judges, and so forth. The solo exhibition was visited by members of royalty and politics, and brought contacts with some of society’s most influential enablers. The interior designer, Syrie Maugham, wife of writer Somerset Maugham, used Gluck’s paintings to enhance her creations which brought further fame and more commissions.

When Gluck’s father died in 1930, it was the younger brother who inherited the estate as the eldest male heir. This (understandably) proved to be an irksome bone of contention which meant Gluck had to ask, or go cap in hand, for any further monies. Yet, if Gluck had wanted to be truly independent then it would have made far more sense to cut all ties with the family and establish a career by hard work and perseverance. But the family’s wealth allowed Gluck to live a life of luxury, to live the life of an artist, or as Picasso once almost poetically put it—to be rich enough to live poor.

Money was important but a more important factor in Gluck’s development as an artist were the women who became lovers. One was Sybil Cookson, the journalist and writer who inspired Gluck’s paintings of horse races and boxing matches. The couple lived together at Bolton House in West Hampstead, bought by Gluck’s father and maintained by a staff of servants—a cook, a maid, and a housekeeper. The relationship between the two women lasted until Cookson caught Gluck frolicking with a dancer called Annette Mills, who was the actor John Mills older sister and was later famous as the presenter of the classic BBC children’s show Muffin the Mule (which perhaps brings a whole new meaning to the term “Muffin the Mule.”) This fling lasted until Gluck formed a new relationship with the florist and flower arranger Constance Spry who inspired Gluck’s sequence of exquisite floral paintings. This revelation of the secret relationship between Gluck and the married Spry only became public after Diana Souhami published her excellent biography on the artist in 1988—a book and a writer whose work I thoroughly recommend to all.

But the woman who brought Gluck to the height of artistic expression as a genderqueer icon was Nesta Obermer, an American who was married to an older, exceedingly rich Mr. Moneybags. Gluck fell deeply, passionately in love with Obermer and wanted to live with her “for eternity.” Gluck took the title husband and called Obermer wife. Gluck was so convinced this was the beginning of a bright and beautiful future together that old photographs, letters, and even paintings were burned as a symbol of this new beginning. Their marriage was confirmed in the painting “Medallion” or “YouWe” in 1936. A powerful portrait of an out lesbian couple or as Gluck described it in a letter to Nesta:

Now it is out and to the rest of the Universe I call Beware! Beware! We are not to be trifled with.

The two women in profile. Gluck the darker more pessimistic looking. The blonde-highlighted Obermer head up, eyes glinting to a better, brighter future.

And there was the rub.

If Gluck and Obermer married what sort of future would it be? How would they live? Obermer was not entirely smitten to cede the comfort and wealth of her rich aged beau, no matter how little she thought of him. She could never give up the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. The relationship lasted six years. When Obermer left, Gluck was devastated—as can be seen in the powerful “Self-Portrait” from 1942, which depicts Gluck looking almost as if recently bereaved and bravely attempting to carry on alone.

Alas, Gluck did not carry on. The work faltered, and years were spent in correspondence with paint companies attempting to find better quality paints for artists. Worthwhile, yes, but not a subject to consume a talent as rare and as brilliant as Gluck’s.

After the Second World War, Gluck fell out of favor as an artist. A new world of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art dominated. In 1973, over thirty years since the last solo exhibition, Gluck held a final exhibition at the Fine Art Gallery. It was a last hurrah for this pioneering and distinctly unique talent. One of Gluck’s last paintings “Credo (Rage Rage Against the Dying of the Light)” (1970-73) captured the artist countering the inevitable decline:

I am living daily with death and decay, and it is beautiful and calming. All order is lost; mechanics have gone overboard—A phantasmagoric irrelevance links shapes and matter. A new world evolves with increasingly energy and freedom soon to be invisibly reborn within our airy envelope.

Gluck died at the age of 82 on January 10th, 1978.
 
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‘Portrait of Miss E.M. Craig’ (1920).
 
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‘Gluck. Before the races, St Buryan, Cornwall’ (1924).
 
More iconic paintings by Gluck, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.28.2019
08:50 am
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The remarkable story of the pioneering Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola

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‘Self-Portrait’ (1556).
 
You don’t have to be no punk rock star or drug addled cult writer to earn the tag of a dangerous mind. A Renaissance artist who painted court portraits can equally fit the bill. The artist was Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532-1625), a brilliant and pioneering female painter who worked at a time when women were considered only suitable as the subject matter for a canvas rather than the one applying the paint. When Sofonisba started her career there were no women artists in Italy, or rather no recognized women artists. Art was not a career suitable for a woman—no matter how talented.

Sofonisba was exceptionally talented. The drawings and paintings she produced as a child drew considerable interest but little help in establishing her career as an artist. Yet at fourteen, she somehow convinced her father to allow her to train under the tutelage of portraitist Bernardino Campi. However, she could not be apprenticed to Campi, like any other young male artist, as this was considered morally dangerous for a woman, and even sinful. Therefore, Sofonisba’s father arranged for his teenage daughter to stay at Campi’s studio as a paying guest. This enabled her to watch, learn, paint, and develop her talents.

In her hometown of Cremona, Sofonisba was hailed as “among the exceptional painters of out times.” Though her subject matter was very much limited as women were banned from hiring models to pose less they be corrupted. This was a minor irritant for Sofonisba who focussed on painting her father, mother, and siblings.

After Campi left Cremona, Sofonisba’s father began promoting his daughter’s work by giving away as much of his daughter’s work as possible in the (unlikely) hope of finding a rich patron. One sketch was sent to Michelangelo, who was so impressed by the drawing asked for another. This was duly sent and a correspondence began between Michelangelo, who was then in his eighties, and the young Sofonisba. In 1554, she traveled to Rome to meet and work with the great artist. This association attracted the interest of the Spanish court and led to Sofonisba being offered the position as lady-in-waiting and court artist to Elisabeth of Valois the third wife of the Spanish king Philip II.

Elisabeth was just fourteen when she married Philip II in 1559. Sofonisba proved a deeply loyal and trustworthy consort for the young queen. When Elisabeth died at the age of twenty-two, Sofonisba remained at the palace in Madrid and helped raise the royal children. Throughout all of this time, she painted portraits of Philip, Elisabeth, their family, and members of the court. She also met and married a Spanish grandee, who died in what some describe as “mysterious circumstances”—he drowned in a shipwreck in 1578.

This could have been the end of Sofonisba’s career, who was now in her forties and no longer the court artist (having been replaced by Peter Paul Rubens) or even a lady-in-waiting. She decided to return to Cremona to continue her life as an artist. But things took a surprising turn, as on the voyage home Sofonisba met and fell in love with the ship’s captain, a much younger man called Orazio Lomellino. It was a passionate affair and the two were married in 1580. They set up house in Genoa but then moved to Palermo. It was here, towards the end of her life in 1624, that another young artist, Anthony Van Dyck, came to pay her homage. Though Sofonisba was 96 years of age and almost blind, Van Dyck said that she told him what she had learned from Michelangelo and gave him the best advice on painting and portraiture which he used in his own career as court painter to the English king Charles I.

Sofonisba had a remarkable life, one that almost reads like the plot to a novel, but she also faced considerable obstacles in achieving success. Many of her paintings were wrongly credited to male artists as there were those who could not or rather would not accept a woman could paint as good as or even better than men. Her work prefigured Caravaggio and she produced a considerable number of self-portraits (mainly from a lack of subject matter) long before artists like Rembrandt. 
 
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‘Three Children with Dog’ (c. 1570).
 
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‘The Chess Game’ (1555).
 
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‘Family Portrait, Minerva, Amilcare and Asdrubale Anguissola’ (c. 1559).
 
More of Sofonisba Anguissola’s work, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.27.2019
09:26 am
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Watch some ball-kicking self-defense with seventies pop princess Lynsey de Paul
01.16.2019
08:12 am
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Down these mean streets a pop star must occasionally go. Though they may not be mean themselves, they are sometimes trained in martial arts like Elvis Presley who was a black belt able to disarm a whole plateful of cheeseburgers at fifteen paces. Or, Stevie Nicks who could fuck you up with her four-inch platform heels. Or, the late seventies pop princess Lynsey de Paul who was so adept at kicking butt in self-defense she made her very own video to let others in on her secret ninja skills.

Lynsey de Paul may not be as well-known today as Presley or Nicks but at the peak of her career in the 1970s, she was a chart-topping star on both sides of the Atlantic. The first woman to win an Ivor Novello Award for her song “Won’t Somebody Dance With Me” in 1974 (she won a second the following year with “No, Honestly”—the theme tune to a hit TV series), de Paul scored a string of hits before her career imploded after a fall-out with her manager Don Arden—aka Sharon Osbourne’s dad. Osbourne described de Paul as “a miserable old cow” and allegedly, during one acrimonious tour, urinated in a suitcase full of the singer’s clothes.

Lynsey de Paul was born Lynsey Monckton Rubin on June 11th, 1948, in north London. Her father was a bad-tempered old git, a property-developer who regularly beat de Paul and her brother. He also spent a lot of time demeaning and undermining his daughter who he claimed would never amount to anything. At the age of eleven, de Paul vowed to get her ass out of the family home ASAP and make enough dough to live an independent life far away from her old man. It was another ten years before de Paul managed to get out, but once gone she never looked back.

My motivation was negative because I was trying to get away from something. I turned it into something positive, so that I wasn’t walking away from home but towards something better.

De Paul studied at art college and had a brief career as a graphic designer before turning her talents towards songwriting in the late 1960s. She wrote a batch of singles for Oliver! star Jack Wild before writing a song called “Sugar Me” for Peter Noone. It was only when her then boyfriend Dudley Moore suggested she should record this single herself instead of Noone that a star was born. “Sugar Me” was de Paul’s first major hit in both the UK and the US. It was the kind of song that once you started singing the opening line, it was difficult not to follow on to the next.

One for you and one for me
But one and one and one,
Pardon me, comes to three.

A simple rhythm, a clever hook and then:

Honey sweet and all the while,
Hid behind the smile was saccharine
I’m a go-between.

I must have sung those lines more times than a few headshrinkers would think healthy. The first time I heard them, I was caught, filleted, and served up ready to eat. Not just for the beauty of the singer but the cleverness of the song. Those old enough to remember “Sugar Me” will know what I mean.
 

 
Watch Lynsey de Paul’s self-defense video ‘Taking Control,’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.16.2019
08:12 am
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The Mama & the Dadas: The pioneering feminist artwork of Hannah Höch
11.13.2018
12:24 pm
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‘Untitled’ (1930).
 
Hannah Höch was the only female artist included in the Dada movement that flourished after the First World War. Art was then still considered mainly a man’s game—and women weren’t allowed to share the toys. Dada, however, was supposedly a radical avant garde movement that despised bourgeois conventions and the politics that had led to the carnage of the war. Though the central members of Dada’s Berlin group claimed they supported women’s rights, their words were little more than worthy platitudes as Höch was barely tolerated by some Dadaists (George Grosz and John Heartfield) who were adverse to including her work in the collective’s first exhibition in 1920. Because she was a woman, these also men expected Höch to supply the “beer and sandwiches” while they were busy discussing art and changing the world. This patriarchal sexism was all part of Höch’s long struggle to succeed as an artist.

Hannah Höch was born Anna Therese Johanne Höch into a middle-class family in Gotha, on November 1, 1889. When she first showed an early interest into art as a child, her father told her women were not meant to be artists, but were intended to be mothers and care-givers—“a girl should get married and forget about studying art.” As the eldest of five children, Höch’s role was to look after her younger siblings. When she was fifteen, she was removed from school in order to do this. Her plans for a career as an artist were put on hold until 1912 when she enrolled at the School of Applied Arts in Berlin to study glass and ceramic design. Her studies were interrupted by the First World War. Höch briefly joined the Red Cross but soon returned to Berlin where she studied graphic art at the School of the Royal Museum of Applied Arts. It was here she met the Dadaists Raoul Hausmann, with whom she had a relationship, and Kurt Schwitters, who is said to have added an “H” to her name so it became a palindrome. It was during this time that Höch began making collages. She was inspired after seeing postcards sent by German soldiers to their loved ones in which they had pasted clipped photographs of their faces over the card’s main image of cavaliers or peasants. While developing her ideas with her fellow Dadaists, Höch worked for a variety of magazines writing articles on handicraft and embroidery. This was more than just maintaining her own independence, her lover Hausmann thought Höch should work so she could support him. She described her life with Hausmann in her short story “The Painter” in which a male artist is filled with bitter resentment when his wife asks him “at least four times in four years” to wash dishes.

In 1920, Höch’s work was included in the First International Fair in Berlin. However, Grosz and Heartfield objected to her inclusion as she was a woman. It was only after Hausmann threatened to withdraw his own work if Höch was not included that Grosz and Heartfield relented. Höch disliked the loud, boisterous exhibitionism of her fellow Dadaists. She thought them childish and embarrassing. While their work was primarily intended to shock and cause outrage in response to the war, Höch was more interested in gender, sexism, identity, ethnicity, and society’s poisonous inequalities. She said she used photographs as a painter uses color or a poet words. In 1922, she split from Hausmann and began to move away from the Dada group. She started a lesbian relationship with the poet and writer Til Brugman, which lasted for ten years before she met and married the successful businessman Kurt Matthies in 1938.

With the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, Höch was listed as a “degenerate artist” and a “cultural bolshevik” whose work was work was deemed to have no moral value. She spent the Second World War hidden in plain sight living an almost anonymous life in a small cottage with its overgrown garden where she continued to produce art. In 1944, she divorced from Matthies.

After the war, Höch’s work moved towards abstraction with an interest in nature and the environment. Though her work from this time until her death is less well-known, Höch was still highly prolific and never lost her desire “to show the world today as an ant sees it and tomorrow as the moon sees it.” Höch died in May 31, 1978, at the age of 88.

Höch’s work ranged from the political to the satirical. She considered the artist’s role as questioning accepted values and pushing for a fairer more equal society. Works life “Beautiful Girl” and “Made for a Party” questioned ideas about beauty, identity, and feminism, while “Heads of State” poked fun at male pomposity and the collages “From an Ethnographic Museum” examined ethnicity and racism.
 
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‘Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany’ (1919).
 
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‘The Beautiful Girl’ (1919).
 
More of Hannah Höch’s work, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.13.2018
12:24 pm
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Witchy women and leggy ladies: Halloween in Hollywood
10.29.2018
09:45 am
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Audrey Totter

While most folks around Halloween want to revel in horror films and gore, I find myself acknowledging the fact that, well, I kinda like those films all year long and take this period of time to look at how the holiday was done in years gone by. But I will admit, like many of the other people that you will find on the Internetz right now who are playing their “30 Horror Films in 30 Days” or what have you, my interests are also centered in the cinema world. They are just, like me, a little…uh…different.

As a classic film fan, I have an extreme love for the PR materials that US film studios produced year-round from the 1940s-60s.  Specifically, I have a very deep engagement for the very quirky photographic materials that were distributed around the holidays. Photo shoots centered on Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fourth of July and (duh) Halloween are totally my bag, baby.  Because really…turkeys HAD to be hard to wrangle, right??

These PR photos are primarily made-up of working Hollywood actresses and (on occasion) pin-up models. Commissioned by studios like Paramount, MGM, Columbia and so on, these professional pictures were distributed to magazines and newspapers for publication, designed and intended to promote each studio’s “stable of starlets” and to increase public support/fan culture. Some of the more fun pix are of well-known ladies whose media work dealt with supernatural or fantastic subjects. The amount of Halloween-themed photos taken with the actresses of Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie, the cast from The Munsters, and especially the photos done by The Wizard of Oz cast members over the years are endless and delightful! I could have filled this piece just with those pictures.

So these are all gynocentric photos, and they’re pretty sexy and fun. Mainly predicated on classic pin-up girl designs, many feature women who have been working together in the film industry for years and seem to be having a good time dressing up. If there happen to be any men or male-stand-in-figures, their “characters” in the photo narrative were actually a little bit rapey (if you are familiar with pin-up girl narratives, then, like, no big shocker right?). These photos are specifically not included in this article because…well, why the fuck would I do that?

Fact: Hollywood was (and is) misogynistic. Male creepiness is certainly not a modern invention within film culture. But I can certainly curate what is seen and appreciated. I think we are responsible for doing a better job of that at this point. For those who are curious (and let’s face it, I know y’all are) I chose not to include photos that depicted things such as a sleeping woman being leered at rapily by a “scarecrow” figure who was a famous actor in costume who I happen to like very much! Another photo showed the “male-stand-in-figure” I referred to earlier—a pumpkin with painted on eyes—it was posed as looking up the starlet’s skirt as she looked down, suitably irritated. I don’t think these pictures or what they say about the way that women/women-identifying people should be treated need extra viewing.

So let’s go to what I DO love about the Halloween work in particular. The photos range from the early days of silent film, with women like Clara Bow and Joan Crawford to rock ‘n’ roll era Sandra Dee and beyond. Their biggest flaw in my eyes is that there are no women of color even though women like Fredi Washington, Carmen Miranda, Anna May Wong and more were working actresses at the time. But let’s face it: we’re STILL working on the fact that Hollywood is racist AF.

Somehow, I manage to spend time with these photos every year. It’s therapeutic to just click through them, babbling to my cats about how cool the outfits are, how sassy Paulette Goddard and Gloria DeHaven look instead of cursing modern Halloween fuckery with its tired racist costumes and the sexification of The Handmaid’s Tale uniforms or whatever. I revel in these photos as a viable alternative or reprieve from what the system is currently providing en masse for a holiday I kinda dig. I wanna be one of these badass Halloween heroines, dammit!

As posed as they are, as cardboard as the sets appear, they are valuable as they also allow me to center my focus on and engage in representations of women and women’s sexuality. These pictures enrich my Halloween far more than the toxic masculinity that begins as a hum and ends up as a roar by the end of October via the film nerd internetz. So many dudes I hear arguing about which Halloween or Friday the 13th movie is the best or what their top ten films from x filmmaker are, etc. What’s the point? In my lifetime, women have been part of those discussions, joined those discussions but we have never been the center of those discussions. And that bugs the fuck out of me. I wish those dudes would be better.

I choose to go back in history and look at pictures of starlets dressed as witchy women and leggy ladies grinning at jack-o’-lanterns. None of this is to say that I won’t turn on Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974), The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) or maybe have a Nightmare on Elm Street marathon later…but I probably would’ve done that anyway! Please enjoy these pictures and the wonderful women who are scaring their way into your hearts through your eyes.


Vera-Ellen
 

Paulette Goddard
 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ariel Schudson
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10.29.2018
09:45 am
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‘Messin’ With the Boys’: The brief (& very blonde) musical career of Cherie Currie & her twin Marie


Cherie Currie and her twin sister (born two minutes before Cherie) Marie.
 
Shortly after The Runaways combusted two-or-so short years into their existence, vocalist Cherie Currie put out her first solo record, 1978’s Beauty’s Only Skin Deep. The album included a duet with Currie’s twin sister Marie, “Love at First Sight.” The record, supposedly produced in part by Kim Fowley (Currie has said Fowley had no involvement in the album’s production), tanked. However, the misstep didn’t stop Currie and her twin from teaming up and putting out two more albums together, Messin’ With the Boys (1980) and Young and Wild (1998). During the early 80s the Currie twins were all over the place appearing on The Mike Douglas Show (season nineteen, episode 174) and also landing featured appearances in the 1984 film The Rosebud Beach Hotel with Christopher Lee (!), and Tom Hanks’ one-time bosom buddy, Peter Scolari.

Thanks to some of the history of The Runaways’ finally being laid out in the 2010 film The Runaways (based on Cherie Currie’s 2010 book, Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway) more fans have been exposed to the band and their impact on the male-dominated world of rock and roll. According to Cherie, when the demise of The Runaways was drawing near, Fowley started spreading rumors in Japan—where The Runaways were superstars—that Currie didn’t have a twin. Then, to help stir the PR pot, he released more statements saying Currie did have a twin and the pair would soon be back to play a few live gigs in Japan. People went nuts of course and by the time Beauty’s Only Skin Deep was out, the blonde sisters were playing to crowds filled with fanatical fans. Cherie would beat out actress Kristy McNichol for the role of Annie in the 1980 film Foxes
 

Wonder twin powers, ACTIVATE! Cherie (left) and Marie (right).
 
These days, Cherie Currie keeps busy as a chainsaw artist in California running her own gallery in Chatsworth. After meeting during the recording of Messin’ with the Boys, Marie would marry Toto guitarist and vocalist Steve Lukather. Interesting side note; Cherie was once married to actor Robert Hays (Airplane‘s Ted Striker—NEVER FORGET!), and their only child Jake occasionally plays with Currie while she tours.

So if you didn’t already think Cherie Currie and her twin Marie were about as cool as they come, now you should. I’ve posted some nostalgic images of Cherie and Marie, as well great footage of the girls performing some tunes from Messin’ with the Boys and their appearance in The Rosebud Beach Hotel rocking out to “Steel,” one of the songs written by Cherie and Marie for the film’s score.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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09.18.2018
08:09 am
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The career of Penny Slinger, intrepid surrealist artist of the 1970s, is ripe for rediscovery
08.27.2018
08:48 am
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Penny in frame from 16mm film Lilford Hall, 1969, by Penny Slinger and Peter Whitehead
 
My reaction upon recently being exposed to the work of Penny Slinger, a bold and penetrating surrealist multimedia artist from the U.K. who produced her most striking work in the late 1960s and 1970s, was to suppose that there must have been a mistake of some sort. Slinger’s work, which spans photography, collage, and sculpture, uses techniques of surrealism to address highly pertinent topics of sexuality, gender, and identity in ways that make quite a few people uncomfortable—which is all to her credit, of course. What I could not comprehend, given the stunning clarity, precision, and power of her work, was her relative lack of recognition, a matter that a new documentary by director Richard Kovitch seeks to remedy.

The movie, called Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows, places the pressing question of the artist’s rediscovery—as well as a major theme of her work—squarely in its title. Born Penelope Slinger in 1947 London to a middle-class family, Slinger attended art school in the mid- to late 1960s, where she was exposed to the work of surrealist Max Ernst, whose art seemed to address many of the questions that Slinger felt most needed addressing. (Later she got to know Ernst.) In 1969, while still a student, she produced a book of ambitious and bracing photocollages, falling into the rubric “feminist surrealism,” under the title 50%—The Visible Woman. In 1971 Slinger became involved with a feminist art collective called Holocaust, which produced a theatrical work in London and at the Edinburgh Festival titled A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets, and Witches—one of Slinger’s primary characters in that production was called simply “The Shadow Man.” This evolved into Jane Arden’s groundbreaking movie, in which Slinger played a major part, entitled The Other Side of the Underneath, which to today’s eyes might come off as something like a feminist Zardoz without being either self-evidently funny or a failure. That movie was marred by a dreadful incident in which the husband of the cellist and composer involved with the movie immolated himself in an obscure attempt at protesting of the movie. Out of the residue of that experience Slinger produced the splendidly focused book of photographic collages based in an abandoned mansion in Northamptonshire, titled An Exorcism. If Slinger had produced nothing but An Exorcism, her career would be well worth celebrating. But there is much, much more.
 

Poster for Penny Slinger, Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows (2016), featuring Bird in the Hand, 19.25” x 13.25”, collage from An Exorcism (1977), courtesy Riflemaker Gallery, London. Copyright Penny Slinger.
             
In 1977, Slinger, following her muse, largely abandoned the world of bracing high art in favor of authorial explorations into Jungian sexual archetypes and the introduction of Tantra into the modern world; works include Sexual Secrets: The Alchemy of Ecstasy, Erotic Sentiment in the Paintings of India and Nepal, and The Pillow Book.

One would have thought that a female artist with work as profoundly arresting as Slinger’s would have become a household name, but in many ways the chameleonic and elusive nature of her work resulted, perversely, in lack of recognition. It could be argued that her work fits in much better with our notions of art today than they did back then, in other words that we’ve caught up to her, rather than the other way around.

As I stated earlier, a new movie about Slinger is on the horizon that has the potential to transform the artist’s currency among the art aficionados (and regular art fans) of our own day. Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows is still currently playing on the festival circuit in the US and Europe and screened earlier this year at the Tate St. Ives. The movie takes as its subject Slinger’s life and career from her birth up to the late 1970s, after which her visibility as a cutting-edge, provocative artist regrettably diminished. Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows investigates in detail the themes of Slinger’s work as well as the salient biographical details of her life, which (I assure you) readers of Dangerous Minds are well-nigh guaranteed to find of great interest. We get to see a great deal of Slinger’s work, which (as already stated) has a knack for holding viewers’ attention. Slinger herself is on hand for interviews in which she clarifies how things looked from her perspective, as are several of her key collaborators as well as a handful of commentators from the art world or academia to supply valuable context.

Kovitch has told me that he is hopeful that a DVD/VOD distribution deal will solidify in the near future. Speaking personally, I cannot wait for this movie to find a broader viewership because it does such an outstanding job of placing Slinger’s career in context and teasing out the manifold ways in which her work speaks to us in the second decade of the 21st century. For anyone tracking the intersection of surrealism and gender, it’s an essential work.   
 
An interview with Penny Slinger, after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.27.2018
08:48 am
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