Little-known are the two music videos directed by Oscar-winning Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger for Debbie Harry’s 1981 solo album KooKoo (for which Giger also did the now iconic cover art).

“Now I Know You Know” was written by Harry and Chris Stein and produced by Chic’s resident geniuses, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. At the time of KooKoo‘s recording, sick of being “Blondie” and taking a year off from the band, Harry had dyed her signature two-tone bleached-blonde hair brunette and was pictured on the album cover with four spikes going through her head and neck (something inspired by Giger’s visit to his acupuncturist).

The video was shot in H.R. Giger’s studio in Switzerland, in it Harry cavorts around in a sexy black wig, with make-up and a body-hugging catsuit painted by Giger.

Another video was shot by Giger—and he’s in it, too, judging from the hairstyle of the masked male “magician” character—for KooKoo‘s first single, “Backfired,” but it’s pretty weak, actually.
 

 

 
I don’t think of Damien Hirst as an artist, I tend to think of him as a successful commodity broker. One who has made money out of selling ideas.

The question of whether Hirst is an artist or not, is irrelevant. The question should be is he any good at what he does? Yes, Hirst is very good at what he does. One can see this from the amount of money he has made. In 2010, Hirst’s estimated net worth was over $300m.

Hirst’s financial success is the only way we can judge Damien Hirst the artist in terms of his career. He has rarely produced anything of much originality, for example his “Spin” paintings lifted directly from ideas contained in the 60’s children’s toy Spiro-Matic, while his sculpture Hymn breached copyright of Humbrol’s Young Scientist Anatomy Set, and led to an out-of-court settlement.

While one of his most recent works, For the Love of God, raised similar controversies. The work also suggested Hirst believes longevity in art can only be achieved by making something that is financially valuable - in this case a skull encrusted with $40m’s worth of diamonds, which was sold for $50m. Diamonds, it seems, are forever.

The following documentary, Damien Hirst: Thoughts, Work, Life is:

...an intimate and revealing portrait, Damien Hirst talks openly and honestly about his life. From his early years growing up in Leeds and his move to London in the early 80s, to his time spent at Goldsmiths College where he curated the now infamous Freeze show that brought the Young British Artists together. And, of course, his meteoric rise to fame in the 90s. The film includes never-before-seen footage, largely collated from the artist’s own archives, and shows a private side of the artist rarely seen by the public.

In interview Hirst generally comes across as a likable, chummy bloke, who seems rather ordinary. What makes him different is that Damien Hirst has had the self-belief and ambition to put his ideas into reality. And this has made him very successful.
 

 
Berlin Super 80 is a compilation of 18 short movies shot in Super 8 by West German experimental film makers during the late 1970s/early 80s. Featuring music by Malaria, Reflections, Einstürzende Neubauten, Frieder Butzmann and Die Tödliche Doris. It’s a hit or miss affair with films that range from the brilliant to the banal. Well worth watching for the flashes of genius.

01. Brand & Maschmann: E Dopo? (1981)
02. Christoph Doering: 3302- Taxi Film (1979)
03. Markgraf & Wolkenstein: Hüpfen 82 (1982)
04. Yana Yo: Sax (1983)
05. Maye & Rendschmid: Ohne Liebe gibt es keinen Tod (1980)
06. Stiletto Studio,s: Formel Super VIII (1983)
07. Walter Gramming: Hammer und Sichel (1978)
08. Georg Marioth: Morgengesänge (1984)
09. Hormel/Bühler: Geld (Malaria Clip) (1982)
10. Notorische Reflexe: Fragment Video (1983)
11. Jörg Buttgereit: Mein Papi (1981)
12. Die Tödliche Doris: Berliner Küchenmusik (1982)
13. Butzmann & Kiesel: Spanish Fly (1979)
14. Manfred Jelinski: So war das SO 36 (1984)
15. Klaus Beyer: Die Glatze (1983)
16. Markgraf & Wolkenstein: Craex Apart (1983)
17. Andrea Hillen: Gelbfieber 1982)
18. Ika Schier: Wedding Night (1982)

A DVD of these films is available with a music CD of Berlin bands as part of a box set, available here.
 

 
Dangerous Minds pal, Los Angeles-based architect John Bertram, is sponsoring a new design contest at his Nabokov-obsessed blog, Venus febriculosa. This time, however, the contest is to create alternate art for Brian Eno’s decidedly minimalist (in every respect) Music For Films:

Brian Eno’s album covers have always tended toward the interesting, (one or two I find exceptional, notably Music for Airports), and he was fortunate to count work by the brilliant artists Tom Phillips and Russell Mills among them. On some level, however, the covers have always seemed more intent on establishing Eno’s artistic, intellectual, and theoretical bona fides (and, especially with the earlier albums, his overall weirdness) than anything else. The cover for Music for Films, however, is radically different.  Not so much designed as intentionally left blank, the chocolate brown Helvetica text is pushed to the extreme upper edges of the texture-less and indescribably beige cover (the same text layout was used to good effect for the Cluster collaborations After the Heat and Begegnungen). This apotheosis of neutrality avoided the plain brown wrapper look in favor of what in retrospect seems closer to the generic packaging popular in grocery stores in the late ‘70s (or perhaps a reference color from Interiors, Woody Allen’s beige-est Bergman-esque film, also from 1978). Importantly, the cover is not ‘conceptual’ in the way that Richard Hamilton’s design for The Beatles’ White Album is, nor has it the cool rigor and studied minimalism of any number of ECM or Factory Records covers that – brilliant as they are (and they are brilliant) – somehow appear positively baroque in comparison. Rather, music and cover co-exist nicely as a unit, the latter providing no commentary on the former (or anything else for that matter), simply existing as a visual analogue to the wordless music. It’s a nice conceit.

The contest will be judged by Geeta Dayal, staff writer at Wired.com and author of Another Green World; famed graphic designer and typeface maven, Frith Kerr; Medicine man and former DM blogger Brad Laner, who contributed to Brian Eno’s Another Day on Earth album; Russell Mills, artist; illustrator and Eno collaborator on More Dark Than Shark and cultural critic Rick Poynor, who also collaborated with Mills and Eno on More Dark than Shark.

There are a lot of DM readers who are both graphic designers and Eno fans, so get your engines started. Deadline for entry is September 1, 2012 and the winner will receive $500 (and some additional Eno-related prizes that have yet to be announced.)

Go to Venus febriculosa.for more information.
 

 
Fierce combat garden gnomes to ward off those pesky summertime critters for sale at Shawn Thorsson’s Etsy shop. There are some unpainted gnomes there, too.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Holy cow is all I have to say!

Via Goldmine: The Collectors Record And Compact Disc Marketplace

 
“It’s one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready now clone, cat, clone, but don’t you step on my Elvis Mouse… Oh you can do anything but stay offa my Elvis Mouse… “

Koby Barhad explains in the artist statement from his “All That I Am” installation at Design Interactions 2012 graduate show:

From a speck of hair to a mouse model.

A combination of three online services can make this project possible.
Hair samples of Elvis Presley, bought on eBay were sent to a gene sequencing lab to identify different behavioural traits (varied from sociability, athletic performance to obesity and addiction). Using this information, transgenic mice clones with parallel traits were produced. The genetically cloned models of Elvis (in this case) are tested in a collection of various contemporary scientific mouse model environments, simulating some of the significant biographical circumstances of his life.

Is it possible to quantify our life through a series of conditions and events? What are the aspects of life that are responsible in making us ourselves?
Does buying a pre-owned item gives one the legal right to another individual’s genetic data?
Can mouse models of ourselves help us prepare for possible futures or will it impose them on us?
Will we make different choices Re-living the same life?
Can a mouse be Elvis? What makes you believe it can be?

Further explication via We Make Money, Not Art:

In parallel to the works performed by these laboratories, Koby has been studying the scientific mouse model environments that have been used on lab mice over the past 100 years. The cages have been designed to study and manipulate psychological aspects of mice.

Koby then made his own cages. But his were intended to reconstruct some of the most influential moments in the life of Elvis. Each of these cages offers a specific environment that is designed to influence the psychology of the mouse and make it closer to Elvis’.

Some of the main themes that the designer identified as being influential in making Elvis are: his close relationship with his mother (and so the mouse is given a mouse companion), being the victim of bullying when he was a child (in this cage, the mouse is submitted to external stimuli that frightens it), the discovery of his talents, becoming a star (features a distorted mirror that makes the mouse appear bigger), the Graceland period (in every place the mouse pokes nose, it gets a positive reaction in the shape of food or toys and keeps filling the cage to the point making it anxious), the army, the death of mum, the divorce from Priscilla are events that are represented by a cage that functions as an isolation chamber. The last cage embodies the last three years of the life of Elvis, when he worked himself to death, that period is represented by a little treadmill at the top of the cages. The mouse would run, run, run and eventually fall down.

It’s unclear if the Elvis Mouse is only being fed fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches washed down with phenobarbital, when it groggily rings for its cook in the middle of the night.

Also unclear is whether or not there is a mouse equivalent to “Dr. Nick” Elvis’s legendary doctor feelgood, who prescribed the King over 10,000 doses of amphetamines, barbiturates, narcotics, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, laxatives and hormones in the final year of his life alone.
 

 
Via Nerdcore

 
Recent Cal Arts graduate Clair Monaghan made this grotesque, but let’s be honest here, kinda awesome miniature butcher shop. There’s not too much information about Clair online, except for that she loves “making little things.”

Visit Clair Monaghan’s blog ARTa to see more of her work.
 

 

 

 
Musician and poet Luke Rathborne spent an afternoon in March of this year with Blixa Bargeld discussing, among other things, Bargeld’s art show “Einschüsse” at the Galerie Hunchentoot in Berlin-Mitte, Germany. Lukas, a friend and follower of Dangerous Minds, was kind enough to provide us with this exclusive video interview with Bargeld.

Blixa is a word that is a hum in Berlin.

When I met up with Blixa he had a wisp in his hair.

I had been up the whole night.

A friend in Tokyo said Blixa was doing an art show here called, “Einschüsse”, meaning bullet holes, shots.. (or an ember that, “encases fossilized remains,” Blixa said.)

When I met Blixa it was at an old bar across the street.

I had flown from Paris to play at an abandoned subway station in Kreuzberg, staying with a girl in the top floor of a burnt out apartment building in East Berlin. The punks slept in the alcove of the stairs.

You can’t get rid of the punks in Berlin, everyone has tried.

In France, a punk with a dog is called, “punk-a-chien”. To be a, “punk-a-chien” is worse than just being a punk or just being a dog.

We set up in the hotel room and I felt like more like a dog than a punk. Then Blixa started to speak.” L. Rathborne

This is quite lovely, relaxed and free-flowing. Rathborne is clearly enthralled by his mentor and gives Bargeld plenty of room to expound on his art, music, influence and the nature of being Blixa.
 

 
As a film, Anger Me is almost the antithesis of a Kenneth Anger film . It’s about as artful as an industrial training movie. But it does feature one of the great visionaries of cinema speaking to a camera for 70 minutes and for fans and admirers of Kenneth Anger, that is something to be grateful for. This is a talking head well-worth listening to.

Director Elio Gelmini clearly believes that Anger can carry the film on his own and given Anger’s fascinating history and storytelling gifts the film succeeds despite its threadbare production. The film would have greatly benefited from a more expansive approach. As Anger discusses his work, scenes from his films have been added to a blue screen background and the effect diminishes the evocative mystery of Anger’s imagery. You yearn to enter the mystical caverns of Anger’s world, but instead are left with a kind of retro MTV effect. Ironic, considering Anger hugely influenced the world of music videos, pointing a direction away from glossiness into something more magical and dreamlike. But putting aside my criticism of the film’s technique, I applaud Gelmini for shining a light on one of the most remarkable human beings to have had an impact on my life.

So here have it, Anger Me. For those unfamiliar with Kenneth Anger, this is a solid introduction. Watch it and then seek out his work on DVD. It’s mindblowing stuff.