“How Else Am I Gonna Learn?” by Barnaby Barford, 2011. 
 

“Ceramic is a fascinating material, it is steeped in such a rich history, and we have a unique relationship with it as a tactile material. We eat and drink from it every day, we decorate our houses with it, but we do not expect to be challenged by it, which is precisely what makes it fun to play with.”

—British artist Barnaby Barford on his preferred medium, ceramics.

Once he stepped into the creative realm, it didn’t take long for Barnaby Barford to discover an artistic medium which would allow him to create virtually “any form he wanted.” The material was ceramics and Barford would spend several years at various art schools and institutes including The Higher Institute for Artistic Industries in Faenza, Italy which specializes in the exploration and manipulation of ceramics. Barford has created a wide range of works such as an eight-foot polar bear made from 7,500 different pieces of porcelain (and other materials), and his legendary twenty-foot high “Tower of Babel.”

For this post, we will be diving deep into Barford’s world of wildly debaucherous and irreverent ceramic figures, which he has been creating for well over a decade. Many of Barford’s ceramic figures are presented as purveyors of perversion and violence. They are voyeuristic, and Barford’s little ceramic trouble-makers are meant to convey the artist’s observations of his fellow humans and what makes us all tick, or, perhaps, how we might behave when we get ticked off or turned on. Here’s Barford from an interview in 2016 talking about what sparks his creative process:

“Inspiration comes from everywhere—looking, seeing, listening, living. The human condition is the thread of inquiry connecting all my work, which means current affairs often influence me. How do we live now? What is happening now? Our hopes, dreams, aspirations, and, of course, our failures, fears, and frailties. Then finding parallels within history and questioning if we have always been like this? Will we always be like this?”

Barford’s creations have been displayed in galleries and museums all around the world, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why once you become acquainted with his diverse body of work. Of course, since I follow the lead of my deviant heart, I choose to feature Barford’s subversive ceramic figures, as I’m sure you are going to wish you could have one of your very own. If owning one of Barford’s original pieces is now a goal in your life, many pieces from his “Tower of Babel” (an interpretation of London’s many heterogeneous shops) can be purchased here for anywhere from $230 to $7,900. Some of the images that follow are NSFW.
 

“Mary had a little lamb” 2007.
 

“Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Scorned.”
 
More after the jump…

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…

 
For a couple of years now, a Twitter account dedicated to unappetizing stills from cookbooks dating from my childhood has ranked as one of my favorites—I refer of course to 70s Dinner Party.

This may have been inevitable but that account has recently been one-upped by a new arrival, the hilarious and eternally puzzling account 70s Adult Titles.

According to the account’s mission statement, the images, which consist entirely of screenshots from the covers of decades-old porn magazines, are
 

the mostly safe-for-work and sometimes surreal titles of stories and photosets in hardcore porn magazines of the 1970s & 80s.

 
Well….. SFW, maybe in a technical sense; still, a large image trumpeting “Boulevard St. Fuck” might not necessarily be appropriate cubicle décor in every setting.

I reached out to the “70s Adult Titles” guy, who declined to offer his real name but goes by the porny sobriquet “Dick Hardman.” Saying that he was currently based “somewhere in Europe,” he divulged that approximately the same is true of these magazine covers, which come from publications featuring interior text in “English, French and German.” 

Hardman wittily touts his account as fodder for lovers of typography; it’s certainly true that there’s much to like about the use of fonts here. After I noted that the “Barking Up the Wrong Twat” image must have come from the same imprint as “Reluctant Hamster,” Hardman revealed that “it looks like the same typefaces were used in rotation over several publications (which were probably all owned by the same publisher).”

The insouciance of these bizarre snippets of text are a sign of a more innocent time when widespread porn was first gaining a foothold in Western culture. “Anything was possible back then,” says Hardman. “Sexual liberation quickly took a depraved nosedive.”

Enjoy these ridiculous images and subscribe to 70s Adult Titles on Twitter for more of the same.
 

 
More delightful images after the jump…...
 

A cover painted by artist Robert Bonfils for a Greenleaf Classics Candid Reader, 1969.
 
For about a decade starting in the early 1960s, up until the time he retired from painting art used for pulp paperbacks and digests, Robert Bonfils (not to be confused with French artist Robert Bonfils), was employed by Greenleaf Publishing. Run by William Hamling, Greenleaf published many things including a vast number of adult-oriented books using art provided almost exclusively by Bonfils until the early 70s, paired with stories written by the wildly prolific, larger-than-life Harlan Ellison, who we just lost late last month, and Kurt Vonnegut.

During Greenleaf’s peak-adult pulp years, Hamling was known to keep his lawyer Stanley Fleishman on the payroll, as his adult books were a constant target of the morality police. While Nixon was occupying the White House in the early 1970s, he came hard for Hamling as did FBI head J. Edgar Hoover. For years Hamling fought lawsuit after lawsuit filed against Greenleaf by the Federal Government and won. Unfortunately an obscenity charge filed by the feds in 1974 did stick and Hamlin and his editor Earl Kemp were both convicted and spent time in federal prison.

Now, here’s the thing. I’m not here to tell you what is or is not obscene. This decision is up to you and you alone—and for sure it should not be up to the fucking government to decide. Of course history often tells a much different version of this battered old story concerning the First Amendment as it relates to freedom of speech and expression. At any rate, Greenleaf was forced to shut down, and the total cost of the books pulled from the shelves following the case equaled nearly a million dollars in sales as Greenleaf was and had been the top distributor of adult sex novellas since the mid-1950s.

Now let’s get to another reason Greenleaf’s books were so controversial—the graphic and shall we say sexually adventurous covers painted by Robert Bonfils. Bonfils was responsible for the vast majority of Greenleaf’s adult lit covers, producing as many as 50 a month starting sometime in the early 1960s. Even when he wasn’t painting strange sleaze for Greenleaf, his style was mimicked by other artists employed or freelancing for the publisher as “readers” responded so strongly to Bonfils’ nearly X-rated paintings for titles such as Dr. Dildo’s Delightful Machine, and God’s Little Orgy.

Which brings me to another point about many of Greenleaf’s adult books—THE TITLES. They are as hysterical as the deviant topics they mean to inform you about—case in point being 1971’s masterpiece of sleaze about swingers, Spicy Meatball Swap. As I mentioned, Bonfils retired from the pulp paperback game in the early part of the 1970s, but would remain a vibrant member of the San Diego Fine Art community where he still resides to this day. For the purpose of this post, I’ve included examples of Bonfils’ super-charged artwork for many of Greenleaf’s amusingly titled books below—all of it is NSFW. YAY!
 

1965.
 

1965.
 

1968.
 
More after the jump…

A surreal shot of Jayne Mansfield floating in her pool surrounded by her novelty hot water bottles designed by Don Poynter.
 

“I stayed in California sculpting her for the mold for a week. I could have done it in two days but thought — why rush it?”

—the creator of whiskey-flavored toothpaste and other weird delights, inventor and designer Don Poynter musing about his collaboration with Jayne Mansfield

A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Don Poynter showed an aptitude not just for creating things, but also possessing a good head for business as a young child. When he was eleven, Poynter began making and selling remote-controlled tanks with working cannons. While a student at the University of Cincinnati, Poynter formed Poynter Creations (later changing the name to Poynter International) and the company would begin its weird journey making bizarro novelties of all kinds for decades, the first being the wildly successful partnership of booze and good oral hygiene, Whiskey-Flavored toothpaste in 1954. In the early 60s he created the boozehound icon “melting wax” that appears to drip from the top of Maker’s Mark whiskey bottles. In 1967 he put out “Uncle Fester’s Mystery Light Bulb” (an homage to actor Jackie Coogan’s portrayal of lightbulb-loving Fester Addams in The Addams Family television show) and sold a staggering fourteen million of them. He was a champion baton twirler at UC, and this particular talent got him a gig touring with the Harlem Globetrotters. As cool as Poynter’s many life achievements are, there are few things cooler than the nearly two-foot-tall hot water bottle he sculpted in the image of blonde temptress—and good pal of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey—Jayne Mansfield.

Poynter had a knack for taking the public’s temperature as it pertained to embracing novelty items. In other words, Poynter knew you wanted a talking toilet seat before you did. When the idea came to him to make a hot water bottle in the image of Jayne Mansfield in a black bikini, he was fully confident such a product would sell like crazy. He spent weeks sculpting the water bottle while negotiating with Mansfield’s Hollywood honchos, who weren’t at all keen on the idea of their star becoming one of Poynter’s novelties. It seems Jayne was fond of the idea from the start and she asked Poynter to come to Hollywood so they could work on their joint venture.

In 1957 Poynter flew to Hollywood where he would remain for a week sculpting the actual Jayne in his studio on a daily basis. Poynter had to throw away his original sculpture of Jayne and start from scratch after realizing the 5’5 actress was not as tall as he had imagined. He also had the pleasure of shopping for a cheeky nightie for Mansfield to wear in a pin-up-style promotional ad for the bottle. Jayne didn’t own any herself as she slept in the nude.

Poynter paid Mansfield five grand for her time, and before the actress’ untimely death in 1967 his company sold 400,000 water bottles for ten bucks a pop. As of this writing, as far as I can ascertain, Poynter is still hanging out in Cincinnati “acting much younger” than his age of 94. Photos of Jayne and Poynter posing with her water bottle, and the gloriously bodacious bottle itself follow.
 

Another shot of Mansfield in her pool with her water bottles.
 

The illustrated ad for the Jayne Mansfield Hot Water Bottle. One should presume Mansfield is wearing the nightie purchased by Poyner for the promotional ad.
 

A very pleased looking Poynter pictured with Mansfield and her hot water bottle.
 
Continues after the jump…

Members of the dance troupe/cabaret L.A. Knockers getting ready to take the stage at the Playboy Club in Los Angeles in the late 1970s.
 
I’ve learned many things here writing for Dangerous Minds—one that there is always more to a picture than meets the eye. Which is why I took it upon myself to find out more about mid-70s all-girl dance troupe/cabaret act, L.A. Knockers. Their act was a fan favorite in the Los Angeles club scene where you could find the girls performing at The Starwood, The Troubadour, The Comedy Store, The Matrix Theater, and the Playboy Club. The shows curated exclusively for the Playboy Club included a strange sounding sexed-up comedic version of a 1978 medley by The Village People, “The Women” featuring members of the Knockers dressed as John Travolta (in Saturday Night Fever mode), Dracula, Superman, King Kong and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. And that was just for starters.

The members of L.A. Knockers would grow through the dozen or so years they were together and they performed all over the country to packed houses, but most often in Las Vegas and Reno. Knockers’ principal choreographer Jennifer Stace would bring the dance-magic to the group as did choreographer, Marilyn Corwin. Corwin worked her disco moves with The Village People, for the movie, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984) and with Frank Zappa during some of his live performances. The Knockers caught the eye of Zappa, who, according to an article published in 1981 in Italian magazine L’Espresso, wanted to take the Knockers on tour with him, a claim that perhaps at first sounded like it had no legs, but it much like the Knockers, actually did. On New Year’s Eve in 1976, Zappa played a show at the Forum in Los Angeles which included members of the L.A. Knockers dressed like babies in diapers and white afro wigs. Hey, even Frank Zappa thought they were cool as fuck, which, without question, they were.

Any story worth reading must include a twist, and this is where the part about the Hillside Stranglers, the horrific serial killers and cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, comes in. Twenty-one-year-old Lissa Kastin, an original member of L.A. Knockers would become Bianchi and Buono’s third victim. In 1985’s The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O’Brien, the author notes that Kastin was not “an attractive enough victim” for the degenerate cousins who were put off by her “health nut looks” and “unshaved legs.” In some true crime circles, Kastin would be referred to as “the ugly girl” among the Hillside Stranglers’ female body count thanks to a photo used by the newspapers—an image that looked almost nothing like the young, rising star.

Below are some incredible photos taken by Elisa Leonelli which lovingly chronicle the L.A. Knockers’ decade-plus career in showbiz as well as a compilation video of the troupe performing live which you simply must see. Some of the images which follow are slightly NSFW.
 

Original members of L.A. Knockers, Jennifer Stace (left), Lissa Kastin (RIP, center) and Yana Nirvana (right).
 

1978.
 
More after the jump…

Artist Terry Minella’s sculpture of Brigitte Bardot (pictured on the left) and a photo of the real Bardot in a very similar bikini. I’m as confused as you are.
 
I know very little about the artist responsible for the sculpture featured in this post of one of the most famous blondes in history, Brigitte Bardot, but here’s what I do know. Terry Minella is a self-educated artist living and working in France specializing in photography and sculpture. Minella also notes he has a deep affection for cinema—especially vintage decades such as the 1950s, which Bardot ruled along with blonde peers Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Grace Kelly. In photos at least, Minella’s Bardot is nearly impossible to differentiate from the real actress/model/and singer during her heyday.

From what I can ascertain, Minella created various life-sized busts of Bardot then matched them up with a mannequin’s body. Minella also uses highly-specialized fake eyes created by Tech-Optics Eyes made of resin, glass, acrylics, and polymers giving them an ultra-realistic look. Minella’s faux Bardot is spot-on perfection, much like the actress herself. You can see more of Minella’s sculpture/mannequin mashups over on his Flickr page. I’ve posted photos of Minella’s Bardot sculpture below—some are slightly NSFW.
 

Another side-by-side shot of Bardot and the faux-Bardot in the same outfit.
 

 
More after the jump…

Est-ce que celà vous regarde? // Does this concern you?
 
Here’s a ribald glimpse of the swinging Sixties from the land of yé-yé, la France! The title of this card game is La Grivoise, which translates as “The bawdy wench” or something like that. The women initiate the action by taking a red card and reading aloud the question to the men, who answer with the blue cards. I think. The notion of mixing and matching answers has some vague resemblance to Cards Against Humanity but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.
 

 
On the package, pictured above, the text reads, “Un jeu marrant! pour rire et s’amuser,” which means, “A funny game! To laugh and have a good time.” My French is OK, but I must confess I didn’t understand everything. I used Google Translate where I wasn’t sure, so don’t blame me if the English renditions of the phrases suck. The pictures and the general vibe are really all you’re gonna need, though.

You can actually buy an English “deadstock” version of this game on Etsy that appears to be identical. It costs only $8.99, which is kind of a steal if you’re in need of a sexy card game ASAP.
 

 
There are more cards, and you can see the entire set in the Flickr photostream of “patricia m,” who for years ran the indispensable Agence Eureka blog.
 

Un homme ferait-il votre affaire? // Would a man do your thing?
 
More after the jump…...

An ad and order form for the Racy Stripper doll, 1998.
 
Though it seems like a toy better suited for the 1980s, you know when strippers were as synonymous with heavy metal as a sweet Gibson Flying V, the Racy Stripper doll became a thing in 1998 thanks to a company called Racy Enterprises (or R.C. Inc.)

Billed as Racy Stripper (or Racy: The Naughty Doll), Racy had similar unrealistic proportions as Barbie, and, as I understand it, a carved out hoohah and pink nipples, something her kiddie-toy counterpart was without. As you might expect the 11.5-inch doll came with a few useful accessories, such as thigh-high stockings with a back seam, long black satin gloves, a stripper pole with a heart-shaped platform, a package of mini-100-dollar bills (because I guess this is one classy joint Racy works at), and a cassette labeled “Racy Strip Party” which I presume contains a rendition of Def Leppard’s 1987 stripper anthem, “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” Racy Enterprises produced two different stripper dolls—one with long platinum blonde hair and the other with long brunette hair which can be pretty easily procured out there on various Internet auction sites such as eBay for less than 20 bucks, depending on its condition.

I’ve posted images of the Racy doll below which are NSFW-ish.
 

 

The platinum blonde and brunette version of the Racy Stripper doll.
 

 
Continues after the jump…

 
John Harvey Kellogg invented Corn Flakes as a means to stop masturbation. Kellogg believed a bowl of crispy morning goodness would stop youngsters from the evils of self-pollution, disease, and possible madness. Kellogg was a doctor, nutritionist, inventor, health freak, activist, and shrewd businessman. He wrote the treatise Plain Facts for Old and Young: Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life in which he cataloged a startling array of side-effects caused by the “doubly abominable” “crime” of onanism. His list included poor posture, stiffness of the joints, infirmity, bashfulness, and even an unhealthy predilection for spicy foods.

Kellogg believed diet played an enormous part in why so many youngsters wasted their lives in self-abuse. He, therefore, insisted on a diet of bland food, a cleansing of the bowels through regular use of enemas, and a daily bowl of his tasty Corn Flakes.

Masturbation was considered a very serious threat to the good health and clean-living of every young man and woman up as far up as the 1950s and even the 1960s. Some may recall Monty Python’s spoof advert in their Brand New Bok which displayed a naked Graham Chapman under the headline “Masturbation The Difficult One”:

Some people find it difficult to talk about. Others find it difficult to do.

The mock ad went on to explain how masturbation:

...does not make you blind
It does not make your hair fall out
It does not make you vote Conservative
It does not stunt your growth

 

Mr. Chapman and that difficult one.
 
The writer, lawyer, and “champagne socialist” John Mortimer, probably best known for his fictional character Rumpole of the Bailey, recounted in his autobiography Clinging to the Wreckage a tale of one of his classmates, a boy called Tainton, caught masturbating by the school chaplain, the suitably-named Mr. Percy.

Mr. Percy was deeply shocked to discover Tainton playing with himself and admonished him by saying:

“Really my boy, you should save that up till you are married.”
“Oh, I’m doing that, sir,” Tainton answered with his rare smile, “I’ve already got several jam jars full.”

In a bid to stop such heinous behavior, various contraptions were invented to stop self-pollution. For young women, there was the chastity belt, and for men, well, a variety of painful devices including this one which was intended to lock the penis and testicles into a metal retainer to avoid any self-abuse.

This male chastity belt, or “surgical appliance,” was in use from the 1830s until the 1930s. The device may look like a novel fashion accessory or a variation on one of those “cock locks” favored by those into fetishism, cross-dressing, and a little S&M, but it was originally intended to put a stop to young men spilling their seed on stony ground, or rather in their hands or handkerchieves.
 

A male antimasturbation apparatus ca 1871-1930. According to the Science Museum:

This metal device is one of a number of similar devices which were invented in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries to prevent masturbation. A leather strap which would have kept it in place is now missing. Until the early 1900s, many people regarded masturbation as harmful to a person’s health, and it was blamed for a variety of ailments, including insanity.

 

 
More male anti-masturbation devices, after the jump…