The Hett Art Gallery and Museum in Chesterfield, Indiana was built to house artifacts from the spiritualist movement, most notably artwork done by spiritualist mediums when in contact with the spirit world, referred to in their installation as “Psychic Art and Inspirational Painting.” There are portraits painted by, among others, the psychic Bangs sisters who painted portraits of spirits with whom they communicated, who were later identified as actual people who had passed on, and a rather touching landscape of the spirit world.
Mediums still live and teach classes at Camp Chesterfield, among the oldest spiritualist communities in the U.S. (founded in 1886).
Above, a tour of the West Room at The Hett Art Gallery and Museum, which houses artifacts from the early history of the camp and the long line of well-known professional mediums who lived there.
Bryan Ray Turcotte, author the classic chronicle of punk rock handbills and posters, Fucked Up + Photocopied, has one of the largest private collections of punk rock-related ephemera in the world—he’s a one-man Smithsonian Institute of the counterculture, truly a maven’s maven.
When I got advance notice that one of the world’s most prominent archivists and historians on the matter of punk rock’s graphic design had made (with Bo Bushnell) a film about Black Flag and Raymond Pettibon , I was expecting something pretty great and… it’s excellent!
It went live this morning. I got the link a little while ago and promptly sat down and watched the whole thing:
On the first episode of “The Art of Punk” we dissect the art of the legendary Black Flag. From the iconic four bars symbols, to the many coveted and collected gig flyers, singles, and band t-shirts, all depicting the distinctive Indian ink drawn image and text by artist Raymond Pettibon. We start off in Los Angeles talking to two founding members, singer Keith Morris and bass player Chuck Dukowski, about what the scene was like in 1976 - setting the stage for the band’s formation, as well as the bands name, and the creation of the iconic four bars symbol. Raymond Pettibon talks with us from his New York art studio. Back in LA we meet with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, about how the art, the music, and that early LA scene impacted his own life and career. To wrap it all up we sit and talk at length, with Henry Rollins, at MOCA Grand Ave in Los Angeles, about all of the above and more.
What’s so compelling about this piece is how filmmakers Turcotte and Bushnell tell you a story that you haven’t already heard a gazillion times before by focusing in on the graphics and how important an iconic logo was back then for outsider kids to rally around, wear on their chests or have etched into their flesh.
In the film, Flea makes, I thought, an especially valuable contribution, because he was young enough then (like Rollins himself was, of course) to have been in the audience and he speaks to how seeing a group like Black Flag could change your direction in life. From what I have heard from a number of people, Flea’s supposed to have an absolutely first rate modern art collection. He’s really inspired when he speaks here.
A production of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. New MOCAtv episodes exploring the visual identities of Dead Kennedys and Crass will debut soon at the MOCAtv YouTube channel
Like watercolors of cartoon roadkill, these (rather fab) paintings of “Failed Taxidermy” are by Magnus Kallas, designer, artist and man behind the NSFW “guide to gutter culture,” Flash Glam Trash.
I am quite taken by these wonderfully affecting paintings, which are like finding those long, lost toys (once held precious) discarded in an attic…or, perhaps in this case, a cold, dank cellar.
Still, I’d rather have my favorite pet remembered in a painting like this, rather than having the dear heart stuffed.
Originally published in 1975 by lesbian activist and artist Tee A. Corinne, the Cunt Coloring Book was originally intended as a sex education resource. Of course, the parade of vulvas doesn’t always inform so much as affect the viewer, especially as the depictions become increasingly stylized throughout the book.
Regardless, the project is a classic example of feminist/queer art, representative of the more experimental “second-wave” of sapphic activism. Corinne set out to create something interactive for both children and adults:
’In 1973 I set out to do drawings of women’s genitals for use in sex education groups. I wanted the drawings to be lovely and informative, to give pleasure and affirmation. I organized the drawings into a coloring book because a major way we learn to understand the world, as children, is by coloring. As adults many of us still need to learn about our external sexual anatomy.
But what about the “C-word” title? Wasn’t that an impediment to sales, or were the 70s really that much more open of an era? Corinne explained:
The Cunt Coloring Book, published in 1975, was immediately and wildly popular, although many people complained about the “awful” title. Three printings later, in 1981, the title was changed to Labiaflowers and the book virtually died. So much for euphemisms.
Okay, starting out pretty anatomical here—no big surpise.
And now we’re into more of a comic book-style abstractions—a bit grotesque, in my opinion. This isn’t the first time you’ll see a hand in the picture
And of course, someone has made a YouTube video of their own Cunt Coloring Book! Because what’s the use of vagina art if you can’t share it?
As the Taksim Square demonstrations escalated into police riots, Turkish television ignored the major event and instead broadcast a documentary on penguins. The penguin became a symbol of the gutlessness of Turkish media.
Turkish-American artist Mirgun Akyavas has been photographing street art and graffiti, from Calcutta to Cleveland, for the past three decades. Last month she went home to Istanbul to participate in a retrospective of her father Erol’s art at the Istanbul Modern museum. When the Taksim Square demonstrations and police riots erupted, Akyavas was there. In these photos, she shows us some of the residue of resistance.
Civil unrest often finds its expression on the walls of the city, particularly when the media is as suppressed as that of Turkey’s. Graffiti and street art become the headlines, not found on newsprint but on cement and brick. A can of Krylon and a stencil become the medium of the people, often coarse, frequently funny and generally angry.
Akyavas took these photos exclusively for Dangerous Minds. She’s become our resident photo-journalist. She’s also my wife.
Police wagon.
“The people’s gas.”
“Erdogan The Joker.”
“Love is an organized group.”
The calm between the storms.
“Tayyip get lost.”
“Let the people eat pepper gas.” Tayyip Antoinette.
“Instead of having 3 children, plant 3 trees.”
“Sex, drugs and revolution.”
“We are proud of our revolutionary lawyers.” Honoring the lawyers that have been representing arrested protesters for free.
All photographs by Mirgun Akyavas. Feel free to share them but please credit the photographer and Dangerous Minds.
It’s an hallucinatory, almost trance-inducing experience, said underground film-maker, photographer and poet, Ira Cohen about his film The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968).
It’s like going on an ecstatic journey to another planet, full of magical beings, animals and plants.
It’s certainly all that and more, and also has a soundtrack by The Velvet Underground’s original drummer Angus MacLise.
Cohen filmed this phantasmagorical short at his apartment in New York’s Lower East Side. Cohen called his home “The Mylar Chamber,” as its walls were covered with Mylar, and he used its distorted and reflective quality to photograph various artists, writers and musicians. It was also a key component to The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, where its wonderful ripple effect is like one long trip. But to Ira Cohen back in the 1960s, it was “just reality.”
I have always thought William Burroughs was a terribly superstitious man. His life was tinged by the strange, the paranormal and the occult. Whether this was his interest in the number “23”; or his hours spent gazing into mirrors in search of visions; or his belief that he could negate curses by repeating his own (“Go back, go back…” etc); or that he could, somehow, divine the future from Brion Gysin’s “Cut-Up” techniques.
Of course, he couldn’t. But he was always smart enough to suggest he could (for what it’s worth), while at the same time creating distance through the wry aside, the knowing wink, to escape any suggestion he was deluded.
Put it this way, if some acquaintance buttonholed you at a party, with a relentless, monotone whine of how they closed down a Scientology office by repeatedly playing recorded tapes outside the premises, you would make your excuses and head for the canapes.
Burroughs claims as much here, in his explanation of Brion Gysin’s “Cut-Up Method.”
When you experiment with Cut-Ups over a period of time you find that some of the Cut-Ups in re-arranged texts seemed to refer to future events. I cut-up an article written by John-Paul Getty and got, “It’s a bad thing to sue your own father.” This was a re-arrangement and wasn’t in the original text, and a year later, one of his sons did sue him.
Then comes the knowing aside…
Purely extraneous information, it meant nothing to me. Nothing to gain on either side.
Before he goes on to confirm his acceptance of some mysterious powers of divination.
We had no explanation for this at the time, it just suggesting that when you cut into the Present the Future leaks out. Well, we certainly accepted it, and continued our experiments.
Although British art critic Brian Sewell’s Dirty Dali: A Private View isn’t quite as salacious as the title makes it sound (and doesn’t include a fraction of the dirt that was in Ian Gibson’s fascinating 1997 biography, (The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí) it’s still pretty darned interesting.
In fact, though less “warts and all” than Gibson’s book, Sewell’s 2007 documentary about the painter does have something Gibson’s account did not, and that is a personal sexual… experience (“encounter” would probably be too strong a word) with the voyeuristic Great Masturbator himself!
Sewell describes in the film how as a young man he came to stay in Port Lligat for four summers between 1968 and 1971 and was introduced into the Dali’s social circle at a time that the genius was thought to have seen his best days—and best work—now long behind him.
After a dinner, Dali convinced Sewell to recline on a sculpture of Christ and masturbate while he took photos and beat his own (apparently very tiny) meat. This sort of thing went on, obviously, with Gala’s disinterested blessing as she was into her very own swinging scene and was allegedly a complete nymphomaniac into a ripe old age.
Although ultimately quite sympathetic to Dali, Sewell’s film depicts how unconstrained Dali was by conventional morality and yet how his own deep psychological (not to mention Catholic) shame at what he got up to, fed into his work in a perverse sort of guilty, self-loathing Freudian feedback loop.
Let me state this clearly, London-based DM readers: Next Tuesday, you will have the rare opportunity to meet one of the most fascinating people alive on the planet today. I truly believe that you will be stunned, I repeat, stunned, by what you’ll see there that evening. Paul Laffoley’s a Sci-Fi Leonardo da Vinci, a Bodhisattva reborn as a mild-mannered Harvard-trained architect/artist/inventor.
In short, the man is a dazzling genius and I’m reasonably sure that you, London-based reader, yes, I am talking to YOU, here, don’t have anything better to do that evening. In fact, I know that you don’t.
An opportunity to hear artist Paul Laffoley, whose practice has been defined as ‘the conversion of mysticism into mechanics’.
Paul Laffoley works with texts and images to create new ways of thinking about time and space, dream and mysticism, magic and consciousness. He has also designed a time machine and a prayer gun.
His appearance, to celebrate the opening of The Alternative Guide to the Universe, is a unique chance to hear someone The New York Times recently hailed as ‘one of the most unusual creative minds of our time’.
You hear that? It’s not just me, it’s The New York Times, too… Miss this at your own later regret, truly. The lecture begins at 6:30.
) it’s still pretty darned interesting.
