With a keen eye for color and composition, California collage artist Eugenia Loli crafts marvelously bizarre juxtapositions resulting in vibrant, beautiful, and weird images. I cannot recommend checking out Loli’s Tumblr archive  enough. There’s so much eye candy in the galleries that you’re sure to find yourself getting lost there for quite a while. And if you’re not satisfied with digital gawking, you can buy a variety of tangible items including prints, shower curtains and even bedspreads from Loli’s online store.

From Loli’s “About the Artist” page on Tumblr:

Q: Do you have an artist’s statement?

A: “Eugenia Loli originated in the technology sector, but she left that impersonal world behind in order to build new, exciting worlds via her art. Her collages, with the help of the title, often include a teasing, visual narrative, as if they’re still frames of a surreal movie. The viewers are invited to make up the movie’s plot in their mind.”

Q: How do you make your collages?

A: I start by finding a “base” image, and then I sort of build around it. Sometimes I have a concrete idea of what I want to do, and sometimes I leave the images to fit together by themselves. Sometimes, after a lot of juxtaposing, the “base” image might not even be part of the final collage. Most of the time, I try to “say” something important via my art, but other times it’s just about doodling.

Q: What are your influences?

A: I got into collage because I loved Julien Pacaud’s illustrations, but it was Kieron “Cur3es” Cropper who became my main influence. The guy’s a genius. Bryan “Glass Planet” Olson and David Delruelle are also influences of mine. From the older artists, I’d have to say, Magritte. However, I collage on many different styles: from “pop” to dada, and from modern illustrations to traditional surrealism. I don’t believe that artists should “find their style”. That’s artistic death. If I have a style, it’s probably some “meta” aspect of it (e.g. the sarcasm that I usually employ in my collages), rather than something visual.

The images below are my attempt at an adequate overview of Loli’s work. There are literally hundreds more where these came from, some in the form of animated GIFs and often downloadable in full resolution. The titles are the artist’s. The last image is animated and really great!
 

“Maker”
 

“The Jump”
 

“Triumph of the Spectacle”
 
More after the jump…

Brian Eno lecturing at MoMA on Duchamp’s “Fountain,” October 23, 1990
 
This stimulating interview with Brian Eno was conducted in 1993 by Israeli industrial designer and architect Ron Arad for the TV show Rencontre/Begegnung on the bilingual Euro TV arts channel Arte.

In the interview Eno confesses that “Roxy Music was an aberration in my life” and also intriguingly asserts that he has never owned a copy of the Velvet Underground’s third album because he does not want to spoil it by overplaying it. But the most startling portion of the interview comes towards the end, when he describes an illicit art adventure he experienced three years earlier, in 1990, when he decided to pee in Marcel Duchamp’s famous “ready-made” from 1917, a urinal with the title “Fountain” bestowed upon it.

Eno explains the importance of “Fountain” quite well when he says that it represented “a new idea in art,” that “the artist was not necessarily somebody who made something but somebody who recognized something, somebody who created an art experience by naming it as such.” Then Eno eases into his narrative: “This readymade was on show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I was due to give a lecture there called ‘High Art/Low Art.’ … There it was, sitting in the museum.” After mentioning that he had already seen “Fountain” at the Sao Paulo Biennale in the 1980s as well as in London in the 1970s, he gets to the meat of his protest:
 

And I thought, how ridiculous that this particular … pisspot gets carried around the world at—it costs about thirty or forty thousand dollars to insure it every time it travels. I thought, How absolutely stupid, the whole message of this work is, “You can take any object and put it in a gallery.” It doesn’t have to be that one, that’s losing the point completely. And this seemed to me an example of the art world once again covering itself by drawing a fence around that thing, saying, “This isn’t just any ordinary piss pot, this is THE one, the special one, the one that is worth all this money.”

So I thought, somebody should piss in that thing, to sort of bring it back to where it belonged. So I decided it had to be me.

 
In the video he then goes on to describe in great detail exactly how he managed to pee on the urinal. The date of this series of events was October 23, 1990. Eno wrote about this episode in his 1996 book A Year With Swollen Appendices. Here’s his account from that book (the story in the video is very similar):
 

…each time it was shown it was more heavily defended. At MoMA it was being shown behind glass, in a large display case. There was, however, a narrow slit between the two front sheets of glass. It was about three-sixteenths of an inch wide.

I went to the plumber’s on the corner [New Yorkers might wonder what “plumber” has a retail presence on the intersection of 53rd and 5th Avenue?] and obtained a couple of feet of clear plastic tubing of that thickness, along with a similar length of galvanized wire. Back in my hotel room, I inserted the wire down to the tubing to stiffen it. Then I urinated into the sink and, using the tube as a pipette, managed to fill it with urine. I then inserted the whole apparatus down my trouser-leg and returned to the museum, keeping my thumb over the top end so as to ensure that the urine stayed in the tube.

At the museum, I positioned myself before the display case, concentrating intensely on its contents. There was a guard standing behind me and about 12 feet away. I opened my fly and slipped out the tube, feeding it carefully through the slot in the glass. It was a perfect fit, and slid in quite easily until its end was positioned above the famous john. I released my thumb, and a small but distinct trickle of my urine splashed on to the work of art.

That evening I used this incident, illustrated with several diagrams showing from all angles exactly how it had been achieved, as the basis of my talk. Since “decommodification” wwas one of the buzzwords of the day, I described my action as “re-commode-ification.”

 
To my ear, this story has the strong whiff of bullshit about it, but as far as I know it has not been debunked—presumably, the guards or an art expert would have been able to verify at the time whether such a thing had happened. I would very much like to see those “diagrams” showing how he did it.

Paul Ingram implies that Eno was working as part of a group of similarly minded activists, which if true Eno’s two accounts certainly obscures: “In the last decade of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain [1917] was the subject of a series of interventions by artists who each attempted, more or less successfully, to urinate in it: Brian Eno at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1990; Kendell Geers at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1993; Pierre Pinocelli at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes in 1993; Björn Kjelltoft at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1999; and Cai Yuan and Jian Jun Xi at the Tate Modern in London in 2000.”
 

 
I’m always impressed by the human ability and impulse to create art, even under the most dire of conditions, and it’s difficult to imagine a artistically repressive environment than the U.S. prison system. I’m actually kind of baffled I’d never heard of paños, the Chicano handkerchief prison art curated here by Reno Leplat-Torti, a Marseilles artists who began collecting them from the Internet just a few years ago. The diversity in style and iconography is fascinating; from ethnic (bullfights and Aztec imagery) to heavy metal demons to pin-up pulp—-even hankies clearly produced for children, the work is incredibly intimate and complex. A brief history from Leplat-Torti’s site:

The art of paño, diminutive of pañuelo ( «handkerchief» in Spanish), marginal folk art, appeared during the 40’s in the prisons of Texas, California and New Mexico. Some fans believe that their origins in the French prison system set up in Mexico after the revolution of 1910. The detainees, usually from Hispanic origin, most of them illiterate, invent their own system of communication with the outside.

On simple regulatory handkerchiefs assigned by the prison administration, they draw in pen with the recovered ink, wax or coffee. Thereafter, in the states of south-western United States this practice becomes a kind of prison traditional art and spreads to the rest of the country.

The Reno-Leplat Torti Collection now boasts over 200 paños, and a genre previously rarely seen by anyone but Chicano prisoners and their families has now been featured in galleries in Milan, Copenhagen and Paris. Torti is currently working on a documentary on the subject.
 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
The Chuck Taylor All-Star is an iconic American shoe that comes pre-loaded with rebel cache, so it’s kind of astonishing that Andy Warhol never made a series of drawings or screen prints celebrating it—at least none I’ve been able to find, and the man drew PLENTY of shoes. But though Warhol is no longer with us, the Warhol Foundation and Converse have teamed up to do the inverse, and now you can get Chucks emblazoned with iconic Warhol works for $70-$90 a pair. (Indulge me in an alter-kaker moment—these used to be such an attractive sartorial option not just because they look perfectly timeless, but because they were cheap as dirt. Nike took over the Converse company in 2003, and suddenly the simple canvas wonders cost as much as any sneaker. Also: sweatshops!) My favorite pair, the Black Bean Soup high top, is a bit cheaper on Amazon, so I’m fairly tempted, as my current pair of Chucks is starting to fall apart. Though they may still have a decent year left in them—like blue jeans and concert tees, I’ve always felt like Chucks looked all the cooler once they got to be a bit thrashed.
 

 

 

 

 

 
via Tasting Table

 
What is an artwork that no one can see? That’s the question French conceptual artist Pierre Bismuth asked himself ten years ago after finding out about an obscure artwork by Ed Ruscha—a fake rock placed somewhere in the Mojave desert at the end of the seventies and apparently left there. Ruscha was filmed making and depositing the piece, named “Rocky II” (after the Sylvester Stallone movie) for a 1980 BBC documentary—the only definitive proof that it ever even existed. Bismuth was so captivated by this idea that he determined to find Rocky II, and make a documentary about his search—Bismuth describes it as a “fake fiction.”

Via The Guardian:

The closer he got to Ruscha, the more he was “met with a weird silence.” Eventually, he realised he would have to confront the artist himself. So, posing as a journalist with a camera crew in tow, he attended the press conference for the Ruscha retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2009. There he “aggressively” posed the question: “Where is Rocky number two?” Footage of Ruscha’s reaction, clearly caught off guard but amused, opens Bismuth’s film. While acknowledging the artwork’s existence, he declined to reveal its location, wishing Bismuth “good luck” in his search.

 

 
Being the man who devised the original storyline for the Michel Gondry film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay—Bismuth didn’t go about making his film in the most straight-forward way, applying the same Möbius strip logic in his search. Bismuth hired an ex-LAPD homicide detective, turned P.I., named Michael Scott to hunt for the piece and two Hollywood screenwriters – D.V. DeVincentis (writer of cult movie Grosse Point Blank and Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity) and Anthony Peckham (Clint Eastwood’s Invictus and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes) – to write a short film about the rock. The idea being, Bismuth says, that both are essentially engaged in the same process:

“The private investigator, in order to find the truth, will develop some crazy theories that turn out to be, in the end, totally fictional. And the screenwriter, in order to create fiction, has to start from real fact. I thought it was interesting the way they go in opposite directions and probably cross in the middle.”

Although 90% complete, the project has launched a crowdfunding site to fund the filming of the short scripted by DeVincentis and Peckham that takes the form of an interactive treasure hunt for Rocky II.
 

 
A story at TeamRock alerted me to artist Vladislav Shabalin’s latest work, a collaboration with Peter Hammill’s mighty prog band Van der Graaf Generator. The Earlybird Project, now on display in Thailand’s Bantak Petrified Forest Park, combines a 220-million-year-old fossilized tree trunk (a specimen of Araucarioxylon arizonicum, the state fossil of Arizona) with birdhouses that play Van der Graaf’s song “Earlybird.”

Previously, Shabalin collaborated with Diamanda Galás on a 2011 sound installation called Aquarium. A dissident artist in the former Soviet Union, Shabalin’s work got him diagnosed schizophrenic and committed to a Soviet psychiatric hospital. He writes that he bought his freedom from the hospital and its regimen of electroshock therapy by bribing his doctor with his collection of forbidden Led Zeppelin LPs, procured at great expense on the black market. In 1988, after his “rehabilitation,” Shabalin founded a space called Avantgarde, which his bio says was “the first exhibition center in the USSR devoted to unofficial art.”

Shabalin has posted the following description of the Earlybird Project installation at his website: 

The EARLYBIRD PROJECT: a work in progress

For a long time I’ve worked as a restorer of fossils, which gives me the opportunity to use some fossils for my art. Several works of mine relate to environmental issues, pollution, exploitation of the land, climate changes, forced migration.

Some time ago, I restored a fossil tree trunk from Arizona dating back to the Triassic (220 million years ago approx.). It is 7 meters long and weighs 2,200 kilos. The petrified wood is a spectacle of colours.

The idea of a sound installation came to my mind when I remembered “Earlybird”, from Van Der Graaf Generator’s album Alt. On the inner cover of the cd there is a note on this particular track: “The earlybird you hear here is of course, not from rural Cornwall but the heart of Camden, the morning idyll shortly to be shattered not by frolicking swallows, but by groaning refuse trucks and the curses of itinerant blackheads.” I had met Peter Hammill before, so I decided to contact him and, through him, the other members of the band, Guy Evans and Hugh Banton. The three of them have willingly accepted to collaborate on the Earlybird Project.

The main element of the installation is the fossil tree, to which I have attached 3 birdhouses that I made using exclusively stone with traces of fossils. Small loudspeakers have been placed inside each of them to replay “Earlybird”.

The installation is a huge still life representing a natural world that no longer exists. Everything in it is “artificial”: the trunk is no longer wood but stone, the birdhouses are petrified, too, and could never be used as real birdhouses, and the birdsong is a recorded music track. The trunk is also a fetish to which we give a great economic value. We devote much labour and care to its restoration, in sharp contrast to the careless relationship that we have with the trees (flora) and the birds (fauna) that live here and now.

Some videos will be also included. I’m currently checking with the film archive La Cineteca del Friuli the possibility of using 3 particularly significant excerpts from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Offret (The Sacrifice). Also, I have made 6 more birdhouses, some of which have already been shipped in different parts of the world. The plan is to complete the installation with 6 videos: 3 shot in big cities and 3 shot in important parks – in Asia, Europe and America – with remains of fossil trees in the open air.

A note about the recurrence of the number 3: I have chosen the “perfect number” (which is also the number of the members of the VdGG) for the high symbolic value it has in almost all civilizations, eras and religions: the cosmic totality of the Chinese (Heaven, Earth, Man), the divine triads in Christianity and Hinduism, and so on. Environmental destruction goes hand in hand with the contempt of our ancestors’ history and legacy.

The Earlybird Project should be first exhibited in Venice, a city built on stilts – houses “attached” to tree trunks – and which has a particularly delicate environmental balance.

 
The short video clip below, from Shabalin’s website, shows the artist arranging the fossilized trunk and the singing birdhouses.
 

 
Less than a year after the premiere of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on BBC, Terry Gilliam’s credit sequence for Gordon Hessler’s Cry of the Banshee was also presented to the world. For those of us who are more likely to think of a fleshy foot or perhaps “Conrad Poohs and His Dancing Teeth” as typical of Gilliam’s well-known cutout technique might be surprised to see it used to such different effect.

Cry of the Banshee was the second of three movies Hessler would make with Vincent Price in a span of two years; the others were The Oblong Box and Scream and Scream Again.

Among other things this represents Gilliam’s first-ever credit on a feature film, at least I could find nothing earlier on IMDb.
 

 
This incredible comic book program, designed by Hipgnosis for Pink Floyd’s 1975 tour supporting The Dark Side of the Moon, is full of wonders. It has an appealing lack of polish that puts it somewhere halfway between “professional promotional item” and “schoolboy’s notebook scribbling.” The bubble letters on page 2, where the credits are, are particularly striking. The “programme” is credited to Hipgnosis, Nick Mason, Gerald Scarfe, Paul Stubbs, Joe Petagno, Colin Elgie, Richard Evans, and Dave Gale. Scarfe, of course, would create the imagery for Floyd’s 1980 album The Wall.

The comic book features a short comic about “Rog Waters,” who is identified as the “ace scorer” of the football squad called the “Grantchester Rovers,” contending with a nefarious waiter who has “doped” him, but he fights back and leads his team to (apparently) ... a rousing tie. There’s also a comic about “Captain Mason,” of the Royal Navy in World War II. There’s plenty more, but I’ll leave you to find out the rest on your own.

Most interesting is the mention of a “film” directed by Peter Medak, who at the time had The Ruling Class and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg among his directorial credits, and since then also helmed Romeo is Bleeding, The Krays, and Zorro, The Gay Blade. In Echoes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd Glenn Povey describes the film as “an interpretation of Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon,” which sounds pretty tasty to me—what happened to that movie?

This is quite the collector’s item—on eBay it’s currently available for $149.99.

(click on any image to see a larger image)
 

 

 

 

 

 
The rest of the comic book is after the jump…..

 
My own exposure to Mexican pop art came from a friend—a self-identified East LA chola who had retired her dickies to teach Latin American studies, but kept the Jean Harlow eyebrows as a nod to home. There were tropes recognizable in American pulp of course—busty babes of the coquette and vamp variety, plus harrowing danger—but where American pulp art pulled from the aesthetics of film noir, its Mexican counterpart the has a distinctly sci-fi comic feel to it. Not only is there way more supernatural subject matter, but the colors are brighter, the brush strokes are meatier and the scenes are absolutely insane. There’s this hilarious sensationalism to it all that I just love.

The book Mexican Pulp Art is a fantastic resource, but now New Yorkers have the opportunity to actually see some of these tempera masterpieces up close, at “Pulp Drunk: Mexican Pulp Art,” at the Ricco/Maresca gallery in Chelsea. Think robots, little green men and werewolves—but with hot babes and confusing, outrageous irreverence.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Yoko Honda was a teenager in the 1980s, a fact that is evident everywhere in her work. Her images unstintingly evoke Los Angeles and Miami of the coked-up Miami Vice years when Michael Jackson and Madonna dominated the pop landscape, when Corey Hart wore his sunglasses at night and Frankie Goes to Hollywood urged listeners to “Relax.” Patrick Nagel‘s sleek women adorned the cover of Duran Duran’s Rio as well as the living rooms of many a day trader.

As Rachel Shearer writes,
 

This particular series of 80s inspired images are testament to her artistic knowledge and interpretive skills. Having grown up as a teen in this era, she was immersed in the art, movies, commercials and TV series that formed the distinctly recognizable flavor, color and style. Listening to the musical strains of a range of classics, the 80s moods return to mind and allow her to transfer these images from memory to print.

A painter at heart, Honda also uses Photoshop to amplify her prints with a strong, modern punch that simultaneously exaggerates the old-school vibes and catapults the designs into the 21st Century. Hoping to inspire feelings of nostalgia and love in her audience, Honda pulls on the heart strings of those who long for the lost era with gentle nods to pop cult trends of motels, Michael Jackson (circa “Thriller”) and playful tacky shades of Boogie Nights that make us yearn for a disco pool-party where it was completely acceptable to wear feather boas, sequins and heels.

 
Her work reminds me an unholy combination of David Hockney and Wayne Thiebaud with a soupçon of the interiors of Bojack Horseman, perhaps.

Her book Summertime Love will be available in June, but you can preorder it now.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…