“Spot Painted Art Wars Stormtrooper Helmet” by Damien Hirst and “Haitian Witch Doctor” by David Bailey

We’ve all seen our major cities, and probably even some rural areas, dotted with ceramic cows and horses and human hands and the like, all painted in crazy colors—a trend that has about run its course, if you ask me—but here’s a variation even I can get behind. Ben Moore, founder of the UK public art enterprise art below, in collaboration with the original designer of the iconic stormtrooper helmet from Star Wars, Andrew Sinsworth, have asked several of the world’s most renowned contemporary artists to take a stab at putting their personal imprint on the helmet. The project is called, aptly, “Art Wars,” and the helmets were on display at the Saatchi Gallery in London last week and will be showcased “for 4 weeks across billboard space on an entire platform of Regent’s Park Underground station to coincide with Frieze (17-20th October).”

Thankfully, the artists ran with the idea, and a lot of the designs show considerable cheek and whimsy. Among the artists is Mr. Brainwash, who came to public prominence as a result of Banksy’s 2010 movie Exit Through the Gift Shop; his entry appropriates Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup canvases and adds an aerosol spray top.
 

 
My favorite might be Jason Brooks’ homage to the legendary Formula 1 race driver Ayrton Senna (if you haven’t seen the documentary Senna, you really must):
 

 
Check out the entire range of helmets at the “Art Wars” website.
 

 
via designboom

 
The 1% be twerkin’ it up in style to “Butthoven’s 5th Symphony.”

In actuality, this is burlesque performer Michelle L’amour who has amazing capabilities with her buttcheeks. I mean, amazing!

 
MOCAtv is the Museum Of Contemporary Art’s YouTube channel. MOCAtv has been showcasing some well-produced and very hip programs about art and music. One that is of particular interest to me is a series of short pieces on experimental filmmaker and artist Bruce Conner and his collaborations with Devo, Brian & David Byrne and Toni Basil. Conner began creating film collages composed of found footage, newsreels, animation and distressed celluloid back in the early 1960s and his style has been an undeniable influence on the MTV generation of video directors. His 1961 short film Cosmic Ray features Ray Charles singing “What I’d Say” set to a darkly psychedelic montage of go-go dancers, nuclear age imagery, cartoons and war footage that still carries some of the shock value that must have nailed viewers to the floor back in the early Sixties. Punk before punk.

In the mid-Seventies when punk erupted like the mushroom clouds in Cosmic Ray, Conner found a kindred artistic spirit in the subversive, often surreal, high-energy and over-the-top groups that were upending rock and roll in much the same that he himself had done with the visual arts more than a decade earlier. Conner’s creative juices were primed by punk and he spent many nights in the late Seventies hanging out with and photographing musicians at San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens.
 

 
One of the bands that really connected with Conner’s dada sensibilities was Devo. In this episode of MOCAtv, Devo vocalist, bass guitar/synthesizer player Jerry Casale talks about his encounters with Conner and the film that Bruce made for Devo’s “Mongoloid.”
 

 
In 1966 Conner made a film featuring Toni Basil dancing to a Northern Soulish single she had just released called “Breakaway.” It’s an amazing work on many levels—Basil’s dancing is exquisite, her nakedness is taboo-shattering: no female pop singer in the Sixties was so fearless and open—and there’s Conner’s gorgeous black and white photography and trippy editing. The film for “Breakaway” was, and still is, a fucking stunner. Conner’s buddy Dennis Hopper held the lights for the Breakaway shoot and ended up casting Basil in Easy Rider. I wonder if Kate Bush ever saw Breakaway. Basil and Bush are on similar wavelengths and after seeing Conner’s film I’ve become a Basil devotee. This ain’t no “Mickey.”

Toni Basil recounts her experiences with Conner in this episode of MOCAtv.

These presentations of MOCAtv were produced by Matthew Shattuck and directed by Chris Green.
 

 
The photos featured here of Devo in performance and Toni Basil in front of Mabuhay Gardens are both from 1978 and were taken by Conner. This is their Internet debut and they were provided to Dangerous Minds exclusively by the Conner Family Trust. We’re thrilled to be able to share them with you.
 
Watch the uncut (NSFW) version of ‘Breakaway’ after the jump…

The one in the middle… he designs wallpaper now
 
And it’s pretty clever and cool! Available in blue or red, the print is done the style of a French Country Toile, but depicts the imagery of Brooklyn. There’s Biggie Smalls, Coney Island’s famous Cyclone Roller Coaster, pigeons, and even a Hasidic Jew!

I’m sure a few curmudgeons will scoff, but come on; Mike D is actually Mike Diamond, a 47-year-old father of two. He’s been married to the same woman for 20 years—a music video director who wrote a vegetarian cookbook. He was born to an upper middle class Jewish family and he went to Vassar. How has he not already designed a wallpaper?

The idea was his, but it was executed by Vincent J. Ficarra and Adela Qersaqi of Revolver New York. Flavor Paper produced the design as wallpaper. The product is eco-friendly, and available for as low as $7 per square foot. That seems pretty affordable for an accent wall, right? (I have no idea, my walls are all crumbling drywall and exposed brick.)
 

 

Here it is in Mike D’s very own hallway!
 
Via Brokelyn

 
Rainbow Brown just might be my new favorite author. I can think of dozens of folks who could benefit greatly from this fine literature. Lemme say that again, dozens.

LiarTownUSA is my daily go-to website for a laff. Just like Internet K-Hole (NSFW-ish), it’s highly addictive.
 

 

 
More after the jump, plus a special little-known volume by Ann Coulter…
 

 
I’ve always had a mild fascination with the art of plastic surgery. I’ve never had any cosmetic plastic surgery myself, but I’ve got nothing against someone who has if it makes that person feel better about themselves. Extreme plastic surgery—Jocelyn Wildenstein-level surgical augmentation—is a whole other story, but then again, if that’s what makes her happy, who I am to say… anything?

But what I really find interesting about these “vintage” 1930s nose jobs is how well they’re done. Apparently back then, plastic surgeons were simply better. Instead of carving out the perfect little “one size fits all” Hollywood-approved button nose for everyone, the surgeons gave their patients noses that fit their faces.

 

 
Via Retronaut

 
Here we have a fascinating artifact from an unquestionably fascinating artist, Kim Gordon. It’s an 11-minute video called “Making the Nature Scene” that pretty much perfectly blends music, video, and text to create a kind of high-minded no-wave manifesto dedicated to the pressing subject of, well, using video in nightclubs.

Consisting of little more than a handful of slow pans across the fabled Danceteria, the entropic tinkling of experimental and pop music, and some hastily penned video text, “Making the Nature Scene” honestly looks like it was thrown together in little more than a weekend. The quasi-Ballardian text, which is also highly Warhol-influenced (and indeed, mentions Warhol twice), frequently confuses “its” and “it’s” and generally does great violence to apostrophes, something that will surely drive Richard up the wall.

In a more serious vein, the sheer chilliness of it all is a sobering reminder of how “cool” things were in the early 1980s. All that concentrated energy and thought to defend the validity of using video…. we have it better now. Art and creativity are no longer so sequestered; it’s hard to imagine that a young person today with any kind of resources wouldn’t be able to find or justify this or that injection of anarchic expression in whatsoever context he or she desired, whether it be a cheerleading session, a haystack, a magnet board, a collection of 1940s postcards, or an expanse in a Home Depot. You’ll find it all on Vine, right?

We leave you with a brief reminiscence from Kim Gordon about Danceteria and then, the video itself:
 

Mike Gira, from the Swans was someone I knew from art school and we used to hang out with him. I remember hanging out with him at this club Danceteria and Madonna was around. She was sort of sitting on his lap kissing him but then looking around the room for her next move Or whatever… But when her first record came out we thought it was cool because it was such minimal dance music and it was sort of lo fi.

 
Whether you are a professional designer, illustrator, a Nabokov nut—or even none of the above—there is much to like about Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl, a fascinating new book edited by John Bertram and Yuri Leving. At the center of their project is the problem Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious 1955 novel of sexual obsession, pedophilia and quasi-incest has posed for over half a century of book jacket designers.

First consider the creative brief as laid out by Nabokov himself, a man who liked to be in firm control of how his work, and his own public image, were represented:

“I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.”

You hear that? Let me turn it up a little bit louder for you:

“Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.”

The image most closely associated with the novel today, of course, is the misleadingly “sexy” image of Sue Lyon, who played “Lolita” in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, wearing the heart-shaped sunglasses and lasciviously licking a lollipop. This is not even a still from the film, it was a publicity photograph taken by Burt Stern. [In Kubrick’s film, Lyon, who was fourteen when it was shot, is meant to be sixteen to soften the situation for movie audiences (and censorship boards). I found it fascinating to learn that Nabokov would later remark that Catherine Demongeot, who played the title character in Louis Malle’s 1960 film Zazie dans le métro, was in fact closer to his own image of young Delores Haze!]

How do you solve a creative conundrum like Lolita? Not only is the subject matter uniquely problematic, you have its author, a towering genius of 20th century literature, telling you emphatically: “NO GIRLS.”

The genesis of the book began in 2009 when Bertram discovered Dieter Zimmer’s Covering Lolita, an online collection of nearly 200 Lolita covers from around the world and decided to sponsor a book cover competition for a new cover for Lolita. There were 155 entries from 34 countries. After the contest, Bertram was approached by Yuri Leving, the editor of the Nabokov Online Journal about writing an essay on the results. When his paper was published there, Bertram sensed there was more to say on the subject and the result is Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl, which he co-edited with Leving.

Several of the entries are seen in the book. You can see them online, too, at Bertram’s Venus febriculosa website, where he has also held a contest for “cover versions” of Brian Eno’s decidedly minimalist Music for Films album art.

Today in Los Angeles at Skylight Books in Los Feliz at 5pm, Bertram will lead a discussion regarding the art and design of Nabokov’s novel over the decades. On the panel will be Johanna Drucker, Leland De La Durantaye and Mary Gaitskill.

First prize winner by Lyuba Haleva

Design by Rachel Berger (I especially liked this one. Subtle, but powerful)

Design by Derek McCalla

Design by Aleksander Bak

Design by Barbara Bloom

 
Now this is interesting. In a recent DM post, our Martin Schneider, wanting to give credit where credit is due, wrote “Attention ‘Slow Ass Jolene’ Dolly Parton uploader: Plunderphonics did that same thing 25 years ago!” His intentions were noble, but apparently Dolly’s pitch was first fucked with 32 years ago. Plunderphonics—that would be composer John Oswald—made his first “slo ass Jolene” way back in 1981. What’s even better?

It’s a dual-speed Dolly duet!

Here’s the description from the newly minted Plunderphonics YouTube channel:

As Dolly says in the intro, “well, I’m just the fellow that’ll talk to you.”

This is the 2-speed version of “Jolene” that John Oswald first played on the radio show Sounds Wrong which was broadcast in Vancouver in 1981 as a summer fill-in for the excellent HP Dinner Hour. The same piece also ended up on “Mystery Tape k7.”

An essay by Oswald entitled “Revolutions and Mister Dolly Parton— a vortex of androgyny” appeared in the 2nd issue of the (also) excellent British music magazine Collusion in 1982, in which he writes:

“[S]everal people have told me that they play copies Dolly Parton’s single ‘Jolene’ at 331∕3 rpm at which speed she becomes a slightly slurring but beautiful tenor. The effect is a vortex of androgyny when one flips from one turntable speed to the other with each verse: the accelerations follow the swoops of the solo violin and Dolly proceeds to sing himself into a ménage a trois.”

The source for Oswald’s decidedly polyamorous take on “Jolene” was apparently this clip from a 1973 episode of The Porter Wagoner Show and now thanks to the wonder of Final Cut Pro, I suppose, they’ve been able to sync the video and audio together again.
 

 
Thank you, R.Brain!

 
I hereby confess: I’m a recovering art school grad. I’ve spent more hours and tuition than I’d care to recount in life drawing and portrait classes, trying to hone my ability to render a figure or a likeness. More recently, I’ve even hopped the Dr. Sketchy and Drink & Draw trains, and yet, to this day, I still can’t draw hands for shit. Before, and even many times since the advent of reference models online, I’ve used the classic wooden articulated figures that artists have used since approximately the invention of pencils. If a picture isn’t forming in your mind, Dada/Surrealism leading light Man Ray featured them in a series of photos in the 1940s.
 

Real mature, there, Manny.

But as you can see, they have plenty of limitations. You can get the basics of a pose from them, but come on, nobody looks like that. Nobody has a honeydew melon for a shoulder or a Magneto helmet for a head. But necessity being the mother of invention, someone has at long last addressed this glaring deficiency in this most basic artist’s tool. Via RocketNews24, meet S.F.B.T.-3 (Special Full-action Body Type v.3).
 

 

 

 

Ten years in the making, this girl has 80 moveable parts in her body, allowing for an unprecedented number of poses and anatomical designs. We take a look at the doll’s amazing details and see how it performs in some popular anime poses for the illustrator’s eye.

Manufactured in Japan by Dolk Station (the site’s in Japanese, sorry), it has articulated eyeballs and toes, for God’s sake.  Hans Bellmer may be bonering in his grave. There’s a write-up at CrabFu Artworks, and it’s a very favorable review. Understandably so. The attention to realism in the musculature is astonishing. The big downsides are that the slender female that looks like a much friendlier and somewhat more human version of the creature from Splice is the only body type available, and it’s priced at an ouch-worthy $300, and that’s before international shipping. But still, its mere existence is a start - there may be hope for my hand-eye coordination, yet.