“With Lenin’s name”

The Soviet Union was far ahead of the U.S. in the “space race” of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. By 1965 the U.S.S.R. could take credit for the first satellite, Sputnik-1 (1957), first animal in space (1957), first human in space and Earth orbit (1961), first woman in space and Earth orbit (1963), first spacewalk (1965), first Moon impact (1959), and first image of the far side of the Moon (1959).

As a result Soviet space program propaganda posters from this era were colorful and inspiring. The Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had Wernher von Braun helping NASA but no artists creating bold, bragging promotional posters like these. Even into the 1970s, all I remember from grade school is a faded poster of moon rocks and the usual “big blue marble” image of the Earth from the Moon.

“Glory to the Soviet people, the pioneers of space!”
 

“We were born to make the fairy tale come true!”
 

 
“Glory to the conquerors of the universe!”
 

Above, “Flight to the Moon,” a Soviet propaganda cartoon from 1953

Via io9, where you can see a lot more of these vintage Soviet space program posters

 
You grew up watching Donald Duck cartoons, maybe. But do you know the name Carl Barks? A great many cartoonists know and revere him today, but it took many years for his talents to become properly celebrated—for years he was called just “the Duck Man” or, even more tellingly, “the Good Duck Artist.” 

How great a cartoonist was Carl Barks? The Eisner Awards are the “Oscars” of cartooning, and they include the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame. When they kickstarted that category, they chose three cartoonists, of all the cartoonists of the world, to define greatness in cartooning. One of the cartoonists they chose was (duh) Will Eisner. One of them was Jack Kirby. And one of them was Carl Barks.

That’s how great of a cartoonist Carl Barks was.

Barks was the artist who did the most with Donald Duck, but he actually created Uncle Scrooge McDuck. Donald and Scrooge and Huey, Dewey, and Louie are a bigger deal in Europe than in the United States. When Barks died American newspapers barely took any notice, but in Europe they understood that a master had passed.
 

 
Praise of Barks’ work isn’t hard to come by, but here are a couple of quotes, chosen almost at random.

Just a couple months ago, Mark Squirek wrote in the New York Journal of Books:

Mr. Barks distills pure comedy down to its simplest form. ... Carl Barks was a true artist who could show us our own world while at the same time making us laugh uncontrollably at the image of a duck walking into a castle or calmly sitting on top of a horse ten times his size.

Try not smiling at Carl Barks’ work. It’s impossible.

Here’s another one. This time it’s Rich Clabaugh in The Christian Science Monitor:

Barks, the artist, is a master cartoonist, drawing lively, expressive characters with a graceful sense of movement. His beautiful, detailed backgrounds plant the ducks in a fully realized world that adds weight to his storytelling. ... But besides the entertaining plots, Barks’ appeal is in his characters. He gives his ducks many human frailties and while they usually try to do the right thing, they make mistakes, get angry, frustrated, and even fail.

 
In 1994 Danish TV conducted a substantial interview with Barks. The interviewer compares Barks to Shakespeare—really.
 

 
Linked below is a 2006 work by Brooklyn artist Catherine Ross called Trilling.

From her website:
 

Trilling scrolls right to left across the screen, recombining footage from the early 80s television program “Three’s Company” into a sequence of traveling gestural loops. Trilling is about physical humor. It emerged out of a curiosity about my childhood obsession with the well-known sitcom “Three’s Company”. The show was written for adults, but through the actor’s performances it conveyed a humor that enabled anyone (including children) to laugh out loud. The physical comedy became the vehicle for the narrative, expressing the humor of the show in a way that words could not. Unlike verbal comedy, which needs time to register and be translated before we recognize its wit, physical humor is immediate; awkward bodily movement can trigger an uncontrollable hysterical response.

By excerpting and reformatting physical gestures from the actors in the show, I constructed a new narrative in collaboration with Trumpeter Taylor Haskins. Haskins composed the music spontaneously, creating a unique improvised response to each clip that fold together into a unified whole.

 
I haven’t seen it yet, but I hear there’s a supercut of Kramer’s feet skidding into Jerry’s apartment set to a lonesome oboe that is mind-blowing.
 

 
Via David Byrne’s blog

 
Like Dario Fo before him, film-maker Peter Greenaway was inspired by a series of news stories involving political prisoners being “accidentally” thrown out of windows during police interrogations.

While Fo wrote Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Greenaway made Windows—a wry, pastoral and “slightly political” film, which, while making reference to Flemish painting, distilled fictionalized details of the deaths by defenestration of political prisoners.

Greenaway later said of Windows

“I had been appalled and fascinated by the statistics coming out of South Africa—political prisoners pushed out of windows, with fatuous excuses like they slipped on a bar of soap, they thought it was the door, etc. I built that into a fiction, trying to find all the possible reasons why anybody might fall out of a window, and compressed it into three-and-a-half-minutes and set these appalling facts up against a very idyllic landscape in order to create irony and paradox.

I think it sums up everything I’ve done afterwards: it’s about statistics, it’s very eclectic, it has a very lyrical use of landscape, it’s about death - four characteristics that have stayed with me ever since.”

The result has been described elsewhere as a “macabre and slightly political…darkly funny early short,” but I’ll let you be the judge of that.
 

 
It was Gloria the cat that first brought Gemma Kirby Davies the “gift” that started her photographing dead animals.

“It started about 18 months ago when Gloria (the cat) brought me a gift,” Gemma tells Dangerous MInds. “A perfectly intact, but totally lifeless mouse–which as it fell from her mouth to the floor, seemed to sink into the earth with a complete sense of purpose and ultimate timeliness. It was his time to go, and the earth swallowed him back up. It made me feel a huge sense of peace toward death.

“Gloria rarely eats her prey, and so the mouse’s corpse was given back to nature. In one of my favourite books, Jim Crace’s Being Dead, there are beautiful descriptions of nature reclaiming nature and how through the death and decomposition of living things, nature is renewed and the dead (once living matter), prevail in the earth, the soil and the plants.”

Gloria’s gift inspired Gemma to begin photographing dead animals, when and wherever she discovered their bodies, and curating these beautiful and moving pictures on her website Peace at Last. It should be made clear that Gemma has nothing to do with the demise of any of the animals photographed, and her work aims to preserve something of each creature’s final beauty. The site is introduced by the poem “Death Be Not Proud” by John Donne:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost over throw
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure - then, from thee much more must flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones and soul’s delivery.
Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more. Death thou shalt die.

Gemma Kirby Davies: We, like all animals will one day die. It’s something I find sad, but reassuringly certain. I hope my photographs evoke a sense of how I perceive death; wholly still, eternally quiet and completely calm.

I see death as stillness and as sleep. Not all of my images are cute and fluffy; some animals may have come to a brutal end and their visceral wounds reflect that. But death for me is always an end to chaos: an end to suffering, peace at last.

Dangerous Minds: What attracted you to this subject matter?

Gemma Kirby Davies: Growing up I was always interested in dark themes in art; Francis Bacon’s paintings and macabre literature. I love Taxidermy, and have been extremely inspired by this art trend, especially the exquisite work of modern artists like Polly Morgan and Nancy Foutts.

Yes, there is a deeper meaning behind what I am doing, but I think the colours and composition of my pictures work on a superficial level too – dead animals can be visually stunning… and much easier to photograph when still.

DM: What has the response to your work been?

Gemma Kirby Davies: It’s not for everyone. My aunt’s response to the invite to my recent exhibition was, “Of course I’ll come and support you dear—as long as you don’t expect me to ever put any of it up on my walls!” and on applying for a stall at Spitalfields Art Market, I was advised that my work wasn’t family friendly and cautioned that my photographs could be “interpreted as disturbing”… I didn’t have the heart tell them that that was sort of the point!

I think art should always incite feeling, and if we all got excited about the same things then life would be rather boring. Reactions like that - especially from an art market in London’s seemingly edgy East End - prove that there is a real stigma around portraying death in art. If I have hit a nerve with this subject matter then I am glad of positive and negative responses as it opens up a debate.

Gemma is now developing a Peace At Last book, which will include pictures sent to her by other artists. If you are genuinely interested in submitting a picture, “your personal interpretations of this theme (photos of ‘peaceful’ dead animals),” then please send your images to peaceatlastphotography@yahoo.co.uk Alas, Gemma can’t offer a fee, but if published in the book each artist will be credited and “of course get free champagne at the book launch!”

Discover more of Gemma Kirby Davies’ incredible photographs at her site Peace at Last.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Oh what a time it must have been on Manhattan’s Bond Street in the mid-1970s. Bond Street connects Broadway and the Bowery exactly where CBGB’s used to be, and a lot of cool folks used to live there when it was still considered a pretty sketchy part of town—before NYU moved in. Today Bond Street is mostly known for very expensive co-ops.

David Byrne used to live at 52 Bond Street back in the day, just a few steps away from CBGB’s. He crashed with an old RISD buddy of his, an artist named Jamie Dalglish. Dalglish was and is a painter but at that time he was obsessed with video. In 1975 he had the idea of a video art project that would consist entirely of interviews. The idea was that Dalglish would compile hours and hours of footage of his artist friends talking with Byrne—but Byrne would be offscreen the entire time. The name of the project was “Talking Heads.”

As David Bowman relates in his book on Talking Heads (meaning the band, not the video project):
 

But back in 1974, Dalglish spent most of his energy on ideas about video as a replacement for language. At year’s end, Dalglish would undertake a massive seven-and-a-half-hour video consisting of more talking than images. It would be composed of fifteen static shots of fifteen different people sitting in a chair listening to David Byrne.

David was talking—jabbering actually—performing a stream-of-consciousness dialogue off-camera. Tina said, “The tape was David spouting off what other people thought. Memorizing anecdotes and advertisements from TV. Things that he’d heard other people say.”

—snip—

This video disappeared years ago and has become the Holy Grail of Talking Heads research. Dalglish is convinced that Talking Heads manager Gary Kurfirst has it. Kurfirst says he doesn’t know what Dalglish is talking about.

I’m not a private detective or anything, but to me it sure sounds like those tapes are lost for good, fellas.

As Byrne blandly tells it in his 2012 book How Music Works, “In the mid-seventies I was offered room and board in New York by a painter, Jamie Dalglish, who let me sleep on his loft floor in return for help renovating the place. This was on Bond Street, almost right across from CBGB, where Patti Smith would read occasionally while Lenny Kaye accompanied her on guitar.” And that’s the last we ever hear about Dalglish—and no word at all about Dalglish’s “Talking Heads” video project.

Here’s a little more about Bond Street, taken from a 2007 article in the New York Observer—the whole thing is worth a read:

My other neighbors included a struggling and somewhat unstable artist, an ex of David Byrne’s, and a lesbian novelist who would later publish to considerable acclaim but who then worked at a rickety table I could see out my window, where she’d gently masturbate with one hand and hunt-and-peck type with the other. Our doormen were typically prone and pungent skid-row types. There were several Bowery hotels, a.k.a. flophouses, nearby, but no Bowery Hotel, and certainly no trendy restaurants.

The only semblance of uptown chic arrived with visitors slumming at CBGB. Which may be why, after Talking Heads shows, David Byrne would escape to visit my downstairs neighbor, a fellow Rhode Island School of Design grad, [this is almost certainly Dalglish—Ed.] while Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, who shared a cold-water loft on Chrystie Street, would come to my place for hot showers and quick pick-me-ups.

The full “Talking Heads” videos appear to be lost, but you can see four short snippets to get a taste of the whole thing. Here Byrne and artist Jeff Koons discuss authenticity in music, working in a key reference to The Bob Newhart Show:

David Byrne / Jeff Koons:

 
After the jump, Byrne talks with Jeff Turtletaub, Chris Frantz, and Vito Acconci…

 
Depending on the subject, and my (lack of) interest in it, I spent whole timetables of my schooldays illustrating classroom textbooks with ink-stained superheroes wrestling parallelograms, isosceles triangles, and the redundant gerund. I considered myself as a fraternal pen-pal to Nigel Molesworth of the Lower Third, filling in the gaps of my education the teachers seemed determined to leave out.

Some of these doodles are wonderful, others less so. But where I’ve always thought of the abandoned doodle as something to be drawn and then left for another generation to discover, erase, amend, and (hopefully) enjoy, today’s doodles are preserved by smart ‘phone and shared on-line. Personally, I prefer the anonymity, transience, and even the surprise of finding smudged, thumbnail sketches carefully hidden in the pages of old textbooks.
 

 

 
More textbook drawings, after the jump…
 
Via hamusoku
 

 
There are few more interesting and innovative thinkers in the history of music than Harry Partch.

He serves as a kind of template for a restless, unorthodox, and distinctly American kind of genius: He invented a 43-tone musical system that many found (and still find) eccentric—but it worked. He was a hobo for a time, wrote popular songs under the pseudonym “Paul Pirate,” and set up a studio in a disused chick hatchery.

If nothing else, Harry Partch was a guy who got into the habit of thinking for himself. As The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross put it, “Of all the triumphantly weird characters who have roamed the frontiers of American art, none ever went quite as far out as the composer Harry Partch.”

Partch invented a boatload of instruments to suit his unique musical system, with whimsical and awe-inspiring names like the Quadrangularis Reversum, the Zymo-Xyl, and the Chromelodeon. Among the well-known musicians Partch influenced are Danny Elfman, Glenn Branca, and most particularly Tom Waits. Beck, himself the grandson of freethinker and Fluxus member Al Hansen, wrote a 10-minute song called “Harry Partch” in 2009—Beck claims that it is consistent with Partch’s 43-note scale. Partch virtually invented the category of microtonal music, an area in which a cousin of mine happens to be a leading expert.

Partch was intensely interested in King Oedipus, William Butler Yeats’ adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In 1934 Partch met with Yeats in England and told him of his ideas for adapting it, and Yeats was quite enthusiastic about it. It took Partch 18 years after that meeting to realize his conception for King Oedipus. Around 1951 Arch Lauterer, a professor of speech and drama at Mills College, a women’s school in Oakland, wanted to mount an adaptation of the work, and worked with Partch to make it happen. Lauterer proposed putting the instruments on the stage, an idea with which Partch agreed with alacrity.

The following video is a report on that production of King Oedipus, which was performed on March 14-16, 1952. You don’t have to be too expert a listener to hear a precursor to Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits in the tonalities.
 

 
Via Open Culture

 
In April of this year, YouTube user yadniel padron aguilera, presumably a Cuban citizen, posted three videos. All three videos are just raw footage taken by a single person, straight footage recorded without any cuts. There isn’t really any information about these videos—hardly any text was uploaded with them—but they add up, potentially, to a very interesting story.

At the very least we’re desperate to know more.

The first video, “Beyoncé and Jay-Z in Cuba,” uploaded on April 6, is 22 minutes long. It’s a fairly aimless attempt to capture some footage of the two married megastars as they make their way from a building to an automobile or vice versa. A few times in the video one can in fact see Jay-Z and Beyoncé walk from a building to a van or the like, surrounded by just teeming hordes of people. Mainly what the video is is a documentation of the thousands of devoted fans swarming the area in the hopes of catching a glimpse of Jay-Z and Beyoncé. In a funny way it’s an unintentional commentary on the nature of fame.

“Beyoncé and Jay-Z in Cuba”:

 
The second two videos are dated April 10, and apparently document the same event—a very remarkable event indeed! The two videos bear the same title, “Beyoncé vs Hermann Nitsch,” and the one we’re going to call “BvHN1” lasts 8:05 and the one we’re going to call “BvHN2” lasts 5:30.

If you’re not familiar with the work of the notorious Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch, suffice it to say that his Das Orgien-Mysterien-Theater arguably took Antonin Artaud’s concept of “the theater of cruelty” to its most extreme expression. (Everything about Nitsch’s work is extremely NSFW!! You have been warned! Your co-workers will think you are nuts if you are caught watching! It is recommended that the squeamish under no circumstances check out a Google Images search for “Hermann Nitsch.” Seriously. It’s very disturbing stuff.)

Both videos record a big chunk of what is unmistakably a Nitsch-style “action,” complete with naked people, dismembered animals, people wearing white clothes stained with what could very well be blood, unearthly music, people being crucified in some way, rampant abuse of fruits and vegetables, and a generally orgiastic atmosphere. When I say “Nitsch-style,” I am 99% certain that this is actually an event staged by Nitsch, but I’m not 100% certain. He was in Havana in the spring of 2012, but Beyoncé and Jay-Z were there in 2013.

Back to those Cuban videos: Despite the title, in neither video is there any overt physical appearance by Beyoncé (and at no point is any of her music played). Nevertheless, her name is mentioned in the titles of both videos.

Why is her name there? Why did yadniel padron aguilera decide to pair Beyoncé and Nitsch in this way? For more YouTube hits?

“BvHN1”:

 
“BvHN1” features pretty much straight footage of the bloody “happening” and little else. Stirring atonal modern music can be heard throughout, with occasional loud whistles that appear to dictate new events in the revelry. Mostly a group of perhaps 30 people spend most of the video frolicking among a bunch of fruits and vegetables and possibly some fluids that are more vital to life.

“BvHN2”:

 
“BvHN2” is clearly footage of more or less the same event, but in this one there are a bunch of tables everywhere, and it seems like it may be a preparatory stage for the other video, an earlier stage. It’s hard to tell.

But there’s something very striking about “BvHN2” as opposed to “BvHN1”—namely, there is a pretty tight clot of what must be a couple thousand people milling around not far from the tables. Furthermore, after about a minute it becomes apparent that LOTS of the people there are DOCUMENTING the ever-loving SHIT out of this event, quite possibly a human being at the center of the clot of people—in other words, perhaps they’re not documenting the “happening” as such, but an extremely famous onlooker or two? A whole bunch of people are holding cameras way over their heads to get pics of something, and there are even a couple of boom mics visible. Would a Nitsch “action” attract such attention? This seems dubious, but it’s still possible. Anything is possible… like I never, ever thought I’d be speculating about an apparent connection between Beyoncé and Hermann Nitsch!

“BvHN2” seems to bear some relationship to the massive throngs of people running around trying to get close to Jay-Z and Beyoncé in that first video. What else would draw so many people to what (in truth) most people would regard as a disgusting display of artistic excess?

I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me that one of these things could very well be true:

Beyoncé Knowles, possibly with or possibly without her husband Jay-Z, attended a Hermann Nitsch-style action while they were in Cuba last April (or, in fact, this was an event staged by Nitsch himself as it appears).

Maybe a huge number of Cubans staged a bloody, entrails-enhanced Hermann Nitsch-style action as a kind of companion to or comment on Jay-Z and Beyoncé‘s visit to Cuba???

Both of these possibilities are incredibly amusing. There’s also the more mundane possibility that the uploader simply thought that adding her name to his footage of a Nitsch action would bring in more YouTube views. We just don’t know.

We need more information about this event. We certainly wish that Mr. yadniel padron aguilera were a little more forthcoming about the footage he uploaded. We’re counting ourselves utterly bumfuzzled.

If you know anything about this, please contact us!

A Collapse of World Lines

People of El Lay, if you happen to find yourself along Culver City’s “art walk” tonight, make sure to put Gail Potocki‘s “Fragmented Alice” show at Century Guild gallery on your list of “must see” exhibits.

“Fragmented Alice” is 21st century “Old Master” Potocki’s first public show in three years. The work utilizes the archetypes of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland mythology to explore the ways in which we experience the passing of time. 

“I have a large turn-of-the-century cabinet in my home devoted to Alice in Wonderland,” Potocki explains. “From the time I was a little girl, the story fascinated me, and as I got older I bought every Alice-related oddity I could find.  I have antique card games, old metal toys… I even found LSD paper from the 1960s with an Alice theme!”

The results of Potocki’s explorations are on display from August 17- September 21 at at the Century Guild gallery at 6150 Washington Blvd. Culver City, CA. The opening is tonight at 7pm and exhibition hours are Thursday through Sunday, noon-8pm.
 

I Wonder if I’ve Been Changed in the Night
 

It Doesn’t Matter Which Way You Go…