Two cool clips from Dutch television’s Top Pop of a lip-syncing Iggy Pop in 1978 and a low-key interview. Although it is just pantomime, it’s pretty badass pantomime. For whatever reason he’s doing the seldom heard “I Got A Right” from the James Williamson-era, plus “Some Weird Sin” from Lust for Life.
After the jump: A 1978 TV performance of “Some Weird Sin.”
Lucian Freud, one of Britain’s most distinguished and acclaimed artists, has died at the age of 88. Described as a “great realist painter,” Freud first came to prominence when he was just twenty-one, with his first highly successful one-man-show in 1944.
Freud’s early work was illustrative - doe-eyed portraits of his wife Caroline Blackwood, or his friend, Francis Bacon, which are reminiscent of the work of Stanley Spencer, and seem almost polite representations compared to his later giant nudes. Freud was greatly impressed by Bacon, and the older artist influenced Freud’s development as a painter. Freud and Bacon exhibited alongside Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, a loose grouping of London artists, whose work established the foundations for figurative painting for decades to come.
The critic David Sylvester named Bacon as the head, while Freud
“produced easily the best portraits painted in this country during the last decade.”
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Freud’s technique changed as he began to use impasto to create intense, almost physical assaults on his sitters. Freud said of his portraits:
“I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.”
The New York Times writes:
Mr. Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud and a brother of the British television personality Clement Freud, was already an important figure in the small London art world when, in the immediate postwar years, he embarked on a series of portraits that established him as a potent new voice in figurative art.
In paintings like “Girl With Roses” (1947-48) and “Girl With a White Dog” (1951-52), he put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter’s social facade. Ordinary people — many of them his friends and intimates — stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist’s ruthless inspection.
From the late 1950s, when he began using a stiffer brush and moving paint in great swaths around the canvas, Mr. Freud’s nudes took on a new fleshiness and mass. His subjects, pushed to the limit in exhausting extended sessions, day after day, dropped their defenses and opened up. The faces showed fatigue, distress, torpor.
The flesh was mottled, lumpy and, in the case of his 1990s portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the phenomenally obese civil servant Sue Tilley, shockingly abundant.
The relationship between sitter and painter, in his work, overturned traditional portraiture. It was “nearer to the classic relationship of the 20th century: that between interrogator and interrogated,” the art critic John Russell wrote in “Private View,” his survey of the London art scene in the 1960s.
William Feaver, a British critic who organized a Freud retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002, said: “Freud has generated a life’s worth of genuinely new painting that sits obstinately across the path of those lesser painters who get by on less. He always pressed to extremes, carrying on further than one would think necessary and rarely letting anything go before it became disconcerting.”
Amongst Freud’s great late paintings were his enormous portraits of the performance artist, Leigh Bowery. Theirs was a special relationship, as Freud’s portraits of Bowery revealed the shy humanity hidden behind the make-up and costumes of a performer who invested all in concealing himself.
As Bowery discovered, sitting for Freud was a challenge, as the sitter allowed Freud “maximum observation”, as the BBC reports:
Lucian Freud’s portraits were not concerned with flattery or modesty - disturbing was one adjective applied to them - and some were said to have compelling nastiness.
His early work was the product of “maximum observation”, Freud said
Though sometimes startling, his portraits could also be beautiful and intimate. Freud had been an admirer of the artist Francis Bacon and painted a striking portrait of him.Freud, who lived and worked in London, said his work was purely autobiographical - he painted “the people that interest me and that I care about and think about in rooms I live in and know”.
A close relationship with sitters was important to him. He painted several affectionate portraits of his mother and his daughters Bella and Esther were also models.
Sittings could last for a year and sitters were often profoundly affected by the process. One of them once said: “You are the centre of his world while he paints you. But then he moves on to someone else.”
Freud seldom accepted commissions. His work is in a number of galleries in Britain and overseas, but much of it is privately owned.
He was one of few artists to have had two retrospective exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery in London.
The following short documentary looks at Lucian Freud’s portraits through the people who have posed for him, from David Hockney to Duke of Devonshire.
Rest of documentary plus Lucian freud speaks, after the jump…
As someone who has seen a hell of a lot of documentaries on Frank Zappa, I’d have to say that this 1971 Dutch TV doc is probably the very best. Featuring Frank composing, puttering around the house with Gail and babies Moon and Dweezil, plus interviews with various members of the GTOs. We also see Frank and Gail go out for burritos in Los Angeles, Miss Lucy tells an anecdote about pissing on Jeff Beck’s chest and Zappa airs his views on “the revolution” (“It’s a matter of infiltration.”) and why he doesn’t want to be the President, but has thought about it. There is a less savory section where Zappa discusses giving VD to his wife in a very matter of fact way….
With some shit-hot concert footage from the Flo & Eddie incarnation of the Mothers, shot at the Fillmore West, Nov 6 1970. This VPRO documentary was directed by Roelof Kiers.
Jason Mecier is truly a mixed media artist composing portraits using everything from food and yarn to pills and assorted junk. Here are a few of his pieces that turned my head.
Mary Hartman made from beans. Andy Warhol: bananas, film, soup cans. Tura Satana; rice. Michaels Jackson: pills. Patti Smith: yarn. Barbi Benton: rolls of film, cosmetics…
You really must visit Jason’s website to see all of his work in close-up. In many of the portraits, the materials used tell the tale - form truly being an extension of content.
More after the jump…
LA Curbed put together this wonderful video of famed modern architect John Launter’s sexy architectural designs as in Hollywood for his 100th birthday.
According to the comments on YouTube, these guys are getting off easy. Commenters who are in the military i.e. Marines, are saying that after removing the gas mask and answering a longer list questions, they then would have to run five miles. I don’t know if this is true, or just a pissing contest between members of different branches of the armed forces.
(via IHC)
Raggamuffin legend Daddy Freddy breaks his own record for rapping the most syllables in one minute on BBC TV’s Record Breakers in 1989.
Eventually Freddy broke the record four times taking it from 346 to 598 syllables a minute. First and second time in UK (in Covent Garden and at BBCs Record Breakers on BBC Record Breakers show where he appeared with the great Roy Castle) and two times in America (New York Empire State Building and in Washington).”
Freddy’s record has been broken over the years, most recently by Spanish rapper El Chojin, but Daddy still ranks number one in the world of raggamuffin.
A short and sweet documentary on Daddy Freddy:
Who is this? And what exactly is going on here? Does anyone know the provenance of this “nightmare fuel”?
Update: The photograph is by Roger Ballen. It appears the photo was taken in South Africa some time in the 1970s. Thanks, Patrick!
(via Retrogasm)
According to the Porsche website, the hookah “made out of TecFlex material,” will be available at the end of July. I wonder how much this sucker is going to cost?
The extraordinary Porsche Design Shisha combines high-quality materials such as aluminium, stainless steel and glass with the timeless and unique design approach of the luxury brand. Puristic and stylish at the same time. The Porsche Design Shisha is made in Germany and stands at a height of 55 centimetres. It only shows a discreet branding on the aluminium top of the Shisha and comes with a long flexible tube made out of TecFlex material, which is also used for the classic Porsche Design TecFlex writing tools.
(via Core 77)
Spectrum flyer, 1988, designed by Dave Little.
Acid house - the sound of a Roland TB 303 getting turned up too far that can send the most loved up dancer wild with convulsions of ecstasy . A unique sound accidentally discovered by DJ Pierre and friends in Chicago 25 years ago and that can still wreck dancefloors to this very day. A type of music which for a period of time in the late 80s infested the upper reaches of the UK’s charts and spawned a youth culture all of its own. Let me hear you say ACIEEED!
I was way too young to have any first hand experience of clubbing during the acid house years, but the music and imagery still had a huge effect on my childhood brain . Who couldn’t resist the acid-washed day-glo colours, the oversized clothes, the nods back to hippie culture and the first summer of love, and chart topping tracks from the likes of D-Mob, S’Express, M/A/R/R/S, Yazz, Farley Jackmaster Funk, 808 State, Bomb The Bass and Stakker Humanoid? When I had a chance to buy my own clothes it would be Joe Bloggs, and I had quite the collection of smiley face badges for a kid not yet a teenager. My own pet theory is that disco never had the impact in the UK that it had in the States, but house music and raving had the same effect of democratising the dancefloor ten years later. A large piece of the puzzle was of course the arrival of a new drug called “ecstasy” (actually only made illegal in the UK in 1985), which when combined with the powerful filter sweeps of a TB303 can give the user incredible head rushes. It was this new drug and its implications that seemed to worry the authorities the most.
This great documentary from the BBC’s World in Action strand is like a full blown acid house flashback. Broadcast in 1988 at height of acid house fever, it follows the typical weekend rituals of a group of very young fans, tracks the working life of an illegal party promoter, speaks to some of the producers of the music and charts the the then-growing moral panic which surrounded the scene and its copious drug taking. Raving, and acid house, had a huge (if subtle) effect on British culture, bringing people together in new, democratised contexts free of class and social boundaries, opening people’s ears up to a new world of music and opening their minds to new ideas.
A Trip Round Acid House makes for very interesting viewing at a time when Murdoch Inc and News International stand accused of distorting facts to suit their own means. The program gives a fairly detailed description of how The Sun newspaper did an about face on acid house, going from being supporters of this new youth culture (even selling their own acid house branded t-shirts to decrying it as an outrage that needed to be banned (and as such sold more papers). Some of the other footage here is priceless too, and has popped up on the internet in other forms, such as the classic reaction of two old cockney dears to the description of a typical “rave”. Blimey!
Parts 2 & 3 after the jump…