American Apparel, everyone’s favorite (union-busting, sexual harassing, but still technically sweatshop-free) producer of $20 plain t-shirts has created their most scandalous garment since those ugly-ass pleated mom-pants. At $32, the shirt depicts a close up of some “self-pleasing” artwork by artist, Petra Collins, who has quite the gynocentric resume:

The Ardorous is an all-female online art platform curated by Petra Collins, a Toronto-born artist. Petra began her infatuation with photography at age 15 and became an American Apparel retail employee around the same time. She creates portraits exploring female sexuality and teen girl culture. Now 20, Petra has worked with Vice, Vogue Italia, Purple, Rookie, and is a contributing photographer for American Apparel.

I’m no prude, and I love me some uncomfortable vagina art, but I’m left with many questions. I mean, since Annie Sprinkle’s Public Cervix Announcement and The C*nt Coloring Book, are explicit portrayals of vulva really that transgressive anymore? I suppose the menstruation doesn’t play to the ole’ patriarchal norms, and it’s nice to see pubes, I suppose. But aside from being graphic and trendy, is this really much of a departure from the perpetual vulva parade of pop culture?

When is a vagina interesting, and when is it just shock value? And when the mere image ceases to be shocking, does it have much cultural significance?

Most importantly, how can you masturbate with that manicure?

 
Brian Butler’s collaboration with actress Paz de la Huerta, “Babalon Working” premiered last month at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) here in Los Angeles. It was shot on location in Prague at the site where sixteenth-century alchemist Edward Kelly worked the Enochian system of magick. Blondie’s Chris Stein provided the no-wave synthesizer soundtrack.

“It’s between a dream and being awake. It’s a state just between those two. And if you can stay there, then you can channel something otherworldly, nonhuman,” says Butler of his hypnagogic cinematic practices.
 

Brian Butler’s “Babalon Working” on MOCAtv
 

 
After the short film was screened, there was a ritualistic performance art piece. Paz de la Huerta sat in a chair that was itself a work of art, facing the audience, making direct eye contact and sort of writhing and undulating around slowly, touching herself in a kind of sexy yet insane way that would be difficult to describe in any more detail than that. Extremely powerful strobe lights flashed around her.

Ashtar Command’s Chris Holmes did his Eno-thing on a laptop while Brian made stomach-churning low frequency oscillations on an analog synth. Then it was over.

Oddisee Films, in conjunction with David Lynch Foundation Television, have produced a portrait of Butler where he describes his meditational working methods. Eagle-eyed occultniks will note his interesting selection of book props: Znuz is Znees, Memoirs of a Magician by obscure Crowley acolyte C.F. Russell.

I appreciated that. For me, it’s all about the details.

 
You have to see only a single one of Guillermo del Toro’s lush, vivid movies to realize that the Mexican director, most recently of the Godzilla-style throwback Pacific Rim, is some kind of creative Tasmanian devil—another Tim Burton. It’s no surprise to learn that del Toro is a first-rate draftsman and has been obsessively marking up art notebooks for years. Fans have been wanting to a look at those notebooks for years, and finally, the day is nigh: Timed perfectly for Halloween gift season (is that even a thing?), Harper Design on October 29 is releasing a gorgeous edition of Guillermo del Toro Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions. It may not be quite as spectacularly weird as Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, it’s pretty damn weird and spectacular in its own right.
 

 

 
You can pre-order the book from Amazon for $36 (down from $60). If that seems pricy to you, then you probably aren’t super interested in the “Limited Edition,” which comes “encased in a cabinet with partitions and a secret compartment that holds the book”—that baby will run you $633.82. Marc Zicree is credited as a coauthor, and —as befits the A-lister del Toro has become—a foreword by James Cameron and an afterword by Tom Cruise.
 

 
Here’s a charming video trailer for the book, with plenty of mouth-watering closeups of various oddities in what I presume is del Toro’s own home:

 
In related news, Guillermo del Toro’s reference-tastic opening to the Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” was released yesterday, and it’s fantastic. It’s meticulously detailed (like the Cabinet of Curiosities) and jammed with classic horror movie references. I spotted The Birds, The Phantom of the Paradise, The Shining, and del Toro’s own Pan’s Labyrinth are gimmes; I leave the rest for you to spot.
 

 
via Collider

 
Artist Alex Chinneck has transformed a derelict house in Margate, England, to make it appear as if the frontage is slowly sliding down into the street.

The mid-19th-century town house was bought under compulsory purchase by Thanet District Council, who allowed artist Chinneck to create a public artwork.

Ten different companies donated materials to create the sloping facade at Godwin Road, Margate, which Chinneck has called “From the knees of my nose to the belly of my toes.”

London-based Chinneck said the idea was “self-initiated”:

“Initially I wanted to do it in London and I wrote to various people to try to get it off the ground. I was offered a huge number of properties, including a multi-storey car park, but I then decided I wanted to do it in Margate because I was excited by the arrival of the Turner Contemporary art gallery.

“I was aware of this idea that people have a choice whether or not they go through the doors of an art gallery, and often they don’t because they feel intimidated, so I think public art is important.

“I wanted to create something that captured humour, illusion and would be accessible to people from all types of different backgrounds. The response has been very positive.”

The building will be on display for a year, before it will be brought back into residential use. See more of artist Alex Chinneck’s work here.
 

 

 
H/T Rebecca Thompson!
 

 
Augustin Lesage (1876-1954) was a French coal miner who became a self-taught spiritualist artist. He was possibly also schizophrenic.

He began painting in 1912 at age thirty-five a year after hearing a voice while working in a coal mine in northern France. The disembodied voice told him “Un jour, tu seras peintre” (“One day, you will be a painter.”)

Already a spiritualist, while Lesage was experimenting with communicating with spirits during seances and through automatic writing, spirits reassured him that the voice he heard had been real. The voice returned and soon instructed him not only to become an artist but what specific art supplies to buy, where to find them, and what to paint. He believed that his works were dictated by spirits, specifically Leonardo da Vinci, Marius of Tyana, Apollonius of Tyana, or Marie, his little sister who died at the age of three.

 
A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World,1923

 
A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World, 1925

Lesage wrote:

Before I start to paint I never have any idea as to what I want to portray. I never have an overview of the entire work at any point of the execution. My guides tell me : ‘Do not try to understand what you’re doing.’ I surrender to their impulse.

After World War I he found a patron in Jean Meyer, the director of the Spiritualist journal La Revue Spirite and was able to quit working in the coal mine. He spent all of his time painting until his eyesight failed shortly before his death.

Many of his works, as well as others from the “Art Brut” (rough art) movement, are at the Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art in Villeneuve d’Ascq, France.

 
Untitled, oil on canvas

Christian Delacampagne wrote (translated by blogger Emily Ann Pothast):

The first large painting of Augustin Lesage is one of the most daring in modern art. Although not, strictly speaking, non-figurative (figures both architectural and anthropomorphic abound), it explores almost all possibilities of abstraction — lyrical as well as geometric — at a time when the latter, among professional artists, was still in its infancy. They are no less ornamental and decorative than the works of Kandinsky, Lesage’s spiritual contemporary. Indeed, is the distance so great between the the Theosophy dear to the Russian artist and the Spiritualism embraced by the French? The former hearkens to Rudolf Steiner, the latter to Léon Denis.

Augustin Lesage, un messager de Dieu pas comme les autres (Augustin Lesage, a messenger of God like no other):

Via But does it float

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
A trippy tech take on Lesage
Another trippy tech take on Lesage

 
Episode 37 in the Monkees’ TV canon, “Art for Monkees’ Sake,” is a pretty routine episode as Monkees episodes go. The premise is that Peter gets interested in art, paints his version of Frans Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier at the local museum, which then gets switched for the real thing, it gets stolen, hijinks ensue. It doesn’t really matter. It’s a Monkees episode, with two wonderful songs (“Randy Scouse Git” and “Daydream Believer”) and as many dumb sight gags as they could cram in there.

Because it’s set in a museum, the writers took full advantage of the opportunity to make “modern art” the target of as many silly jokes as possible. There’s a brief scene where Mickey wanders into an artist’s studio and the artist says most of the things you’d expect a pretentious “actionist” painter to say in an absurdist sitcom. There’s a gag where three of the Monkees are surprised in the darkened museum by a security guard, but they just freeze in odd poses, and the guard doesn’t “see” them, thinking they’re just some dumb art installation. Get it? Modern art! Hah!

Right in the middle of the episode, Mike’s off looking for Peter and wanders into a chamber music concert. And then something remarkable happens.

The room is populated by snooty-snoots wearing tuxedos and fine gowns. Through a door enters Liberace, who wordlessly opens a large case, extracts a golden sledgehammer, and proceeds to lay waste to a blameless piano while Mike mugs and cringes. Then Liberace, clearly having enjoyed himself, is wordlessly congratulated by the snooty-snoots as the scene fades out.

But wait! Destroying a piano with a sledgehammer? That’s a Fluxus move, innit? Pretty sure…..
 

George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Wolf Vostell, Benjamin Patterson, Emmett Williams performing Phillip Corner’s Piano Activities at Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik, Wiesbaden, 1962

By the autumn of 1967, when “Art for Monkees’ Sake” first aired, destroying musical instruments was a well-known Fluxus trope. As Hannah Higgins reports in her book Fluxus Experience, in Nam June Paik’s 1961 work One for Violin, “The performer raises a violin overhead at a nearly imperceptible rate until it is released full-force downward, smashing it to pieces.” Furthermore, Higgins continues,

In Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, performed in 1962 at the first Fluxus-titled festival in Wiesbaden, Germany, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, Alison Knowles, and Emmett Williams engaged in the apparent destruction of an old, unplayable piano belonging to the Kunstverein. They did destroy the instrument, but not haphazardly. … [the performance included] the careful rubbing of a brick over the strings, patient waiting for the right moment to use a hammer.”

As Richard Meltzer writes in The Aesthetics of Rock, “One of the farthest-reaching dissonant-worlds-of-quality moves that the Monkees (or their producers) have carried out has been their TV scene with Liberace destroying a piano with a sledge hammer before an appreciative chamber music audience.”

I have to agree. I don’t know if Liberace gave a hoot about Fluxus or not—probably he didn’t—but I have to applaud the discipline and sheer insouciant gumption it took to do that scene and that scene only and not demand even a line of dialogue for his trouble.
 

 
The complete episode, after the jump…

 
The well-known Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei has just released three gorgeous skateboard decks in association with the Dutch skateboard company The Sk8room. Each of the models is a limited edition of 150, is hand-numbered and signed, and costs 300 Euros (about $400). Proceeds from the sale of the decks will go to Skateistan, a nonprofit NGO that promotes skateboarding and educational activities.

The slogans directly reference Weiwei’s ongoing struggles against the Chinese government, which has repeatedly harassed the whimsical and outspoken artist and even arrested him for “economic crimes” in 2001. The three slogans are: “There Are No Outdoor Sports as Graceful as Throwing Stones at a Dictatorship in the World,” “Maybe Being Powerful Means to Be Fragile,” “The World Is Not Changing If You Don’t Shoulder the Burden of Responsibility.”

Weiwei paid homage to his own artworks for the decks. One of them uses an image from his installation Sunflower Seeds, which was shown at London’s Tate Modern in 2010, and another borrows from his work He Xie, which featured a group of ceramic crabs and was displayed at Washington D.C.‘s Hirshhorn Museum.
 
After the jump, some close-up views of the three Ai Weiwei decks….

 
Marc Campbell’s post yesterday on the Jodorowsky’s Dune documentary—he was even more effusive in his praise of the film on the phone—reminded me of something that I wanted to post here:

Before their collaboration on the classic 1973 animated sci-fi feature, Fantastic Planet, René Laloux and Roland Topor made “Les Escargots,” (“The Snails”) an exquisite stop-frame animated short in 1965. (If the Jodorowsky link isn’t clear, in the early 1960s, Fernando Arrabal, Roland Topor and Jodorowsky mounted entrail-covered Hermann Nitsch-like theatrical performance art happenings as “the Panic Movement” in Paris.)

Here’s how IMDB describes this little-known mini-masterpiece:

A gardener tries his best to make his salad plants grow. It is only when he cries that his tears finally water the field and the salads grow huge. The incredible size attracts a multitude of snails that quickly become giant too, causing disasters and panic in the nearby city.

I think that about says it all… The film’s message is a bit ambiguous, as you’ll see. “Les Escargots” won Special Jury Prize at the Cracow Film Festival.

Fun facts: Roland Topor wrote the novel of the same title that Roman Polanski’s creepy as fuck psychological thriller, The Tenant was based on and he played the role of “Renfield” in Werner Herzog’s movie Nosferatu the Vampyre.
 

 
The year before “Les Escargots,” René Laloux and Roland Topor collaborated on “Les Temps Morts” (“Dead Times”) an anti-war meditation on what it means to be human.
 

 
For whatever reason French music producer Drixxxe’s 70s Sexploitation mixtape (I blogged about it last week) was removed from SoundCloud!? Here’s a new one, with even more amazing soundtrack songs from erotic flicks such as Comme un pot de fraises, Tongue, L’Initiation, The Devil in Miss Jones, Comme un pot de fraises, Teenage Twins and many more.

I suggest if you’re digging the tunes, to download it ASAP. As this one might get removed too!

 
Via Nerdcore

 
The rich are different from you and me. First off they have lots and lots of money, mansions, boats, castles, summer homes in the Caribbean, nice cars and STUFF. They get to own politicians—entire countries even—and stack the deck in their favor so that capitalism works just for them!
 

 
Their parties are certainly better catered than ours are…
 

 
...and the wealthy get their fancy dress costumes from couture houses in Paris, not Target.
 

 
These shots were taken at Marie-Hélène de Rothschild’s famous Surrealist Ball held at Château Ferrières on December 12 1972.

Another cool thing about rich people is that they know all the right people, like Audrey Hepburn…
 

 
... and Salvador Dali…
 

 
... supermodel Marisa Berenson…
 

 
...and famed perfumer Hélène Rochas
 

 
Obviously we know where hostess-with-the-mostess Marie-Hélène got her money from. The Château was already in the family and owned by her husband, Guy de Rothschild. Convenient, that!
 

 
The requirements for the fancy dress party were “Black tie, long dresses & Surrealists heads” and the invitation had to be held up to a mirror—it was printed backwards—to be read. Guests walked through a forest of black ribbons, meant to be cobwebs, and a maze before entering the ballroom.
 

 
Marie-Hélène, with husband Guy de Rothschild, seen here wearing a mask crying tears of diamonds. But of course!
 

 
What would David Icke make of these lizard people???

Via So Bad, So Good/HT Rupert Russell