This Saturday night in Los Angles, there’s going to be a special art show hosted by Neil Gaiman and actress Fairuza Balk and produced by Dangerous Minds pal Lenora Claire:
“Illuminate Parkinsons” is a benefit for Becky Hurd’s Illuminate charity fighting young onset Parkinson’s disease
The aim of Illuminate is to raise awareness of Young Onset Parkinsons while raising funds to support Parkinsons charities. The Illuminate Parkinsons International Photography Exhibition has been created by Becky’s best friend and celebrity photographer, Allan Amato. This amazing photographic journey into the world of Parkinsons spans two years beginning in September 17th at Pop tART Gallery. Subjects in the exhibit include Terry Gilliam, Neil Gaiman, Kevin Smith and an assortment of other fascinating people all of whom lent their support to the project.
The initial aim of the Illuminate Parkinsons campaign was to raise £100,000 for Parkinsons charities. So far the campaign has generated over £51,000 since it began with the first Illuminate Ball in Birmingham in April 2010. Since the first ball Illuminate Parkinsons has gone from strength to strength with many new fundraising projects.
Illuminate Parkinsons by Allan Amato
Saturday, September 17th, 8-11pm Pop tART Gallery, 3023 W. 6th St., Los Angeles
Last year Patti Smith paid tribute to “filmmaker, musicologist, ethnographer, bohemian, and occultist, Harry Smith” at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
In this simple and sweet video, Patti reads from her memoir, tells stories and sings a Hank Williams tune as well as her own.
The audio makes it sound at times like Patti has a slight speech impediment. It’s kind of endearing.
Like many traditional collage artist, the Glasgow-based Lola Dupré makes all her work out of just paper, scissors and glue. But unlike most artists Lola goes further than relying on a simple juxtaposition of imagery to make a point. Instead she uses multiple copies of source material, employing thousands of cuts and manipulating tiny shards of paper to create a strange, amorphous, almost fractal vision. Her work is like looking at a dissolving reality reflected in a spoon.
In a recent interview on the Empty Kingdom blog, Lola says this of her modus operandi:
t came about through experiments with paper as a sculptural medium, through a chance arrangement in 3D forms I began to think about applying it in 2D. I guess the work could say a few different things about me; I think I am meticulous and multi-dimensional as a person, perhaps that comes across in my work, I’m not sure. In my opinion, I create, and it is up to the viewer to decipher things and find meaning.
You can read the rest of that interview here, and see all of Lola’s work at her website www.loladupre.com - in the meantime, click read on (below) to see more of her exceptional work.
DM favorite John Waters is having a new exhibition of his photographs and sculptures called Rear Projection at the Arthur Roger Gallery, 432 Julia Street, New Orleans, LA, from October 1st – 29th.
Mr. Waters will be present at the opening reception hosted by the gallery on Saturday, October 1st from 6 to 9 pm, and will lead a walk-through of his exhibition on Saturday, October 1st at 1 pm. Now how cool is that?
Rear Projection is a movie term for the process whereby a foreground action is combined with a background scene filmed earlier to give the impression the actors are on location when they are, in fact, working inside a studio. In John Waters’ latest work, this artificial and outdated visual effect is embraced and taken to extremes.
Using an insider’s bag of tricks and trade lingo, John Waters celebrates the excess of the movie industry. Word and image play permeate Waters’ work, and the movie industry and its various sleights of hand are a common target. Always ambitious and playful, some of the works are condensed narratives or “little movies” as Waters calls them. Waters wickedly juxtaposes images from films and television that he captured by photographing his television set as they play. His approach originated with a desire to retrieve stills from his own movies and developed into an appreciation for the overlooked and misrecalled.
Waters has said, “I’m concerned that people don’t remember movies; they remember stills that they’ve seen over and over in books so I try to photograph things in movies that you are never supposed to see. Really, it’s about writing and editing. I think up each of these pieces and then I have to go find the images that make a new narrative which many times is the opposite of or has nothing to do with what the director really began with.”
Born in London in 1922, Hamilton was determined to become an artist an early age, he quit school at 15, and studied art at night before entering the Royal Academy at 16. His studies were cut short by the outbreak of the Second World War, during which he worked as a draughtsman with engineers and scientists at EMI. After the war returned to the Royal Academy, but was expelled for “not profiting from the instruction”. He then attended the Slade College of Art for 2 years, from which he started working at the ICA, where he produced posters, leaflets and exhibit work.
In 1951, Hamilton curated his first exhibition, Growth and Form. This was followed in 1955 with the seminal Man, Machine and Motion, which examined human interaction with machine and environment, and how “the need to cope with technology provokes great art.”
It was at this time Hamilton met with Eduardo Paolozzi, who was already working on the collages which are now best associated with Pop Art. Hamilton joined Paolozzi in the loose grouping of artists known as the Independent Group, who gathered around the ICA.
In 1956, the Independent Group mounted This Is Tomorrow, an exhibition that is now seen as one of the most influential of the past sixty years - its resonance is still with us today. This was the show that announced Pop Art to the world - long before Warhol, who was then window dressing. As described by the Daily Telegraph:
This Is Tomorrow, a quasi-anthropological, partly ironic exhibition embracing the imagery of the embryonic mass media. In Hamilton’s words, the idea was to examine “our new visual environment — cinema, the jukebox, Marilyn Monroe, and comics — all these games with sound, optical illusion and imagery”.
His own small, dense, prophetic work Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? not only introduced the word “pop” into art (emblazoned on the muscleman’s phallic lollipop) but also anticipated many of the key images of the genre: the television; the Warner Bros billboard; the comic poster (Lichtenstein); the packaged ham (Rosenquist); the Motel bed (Oldenburg); and the Ford logo — Hamilton’s obsession with car design and engineering culminated in Hommage à Chrysler (1957). This was Pop Art, but not populist art. Hamilton called it “a new landscape of secondary, filtered material” – sophisticated art to be devoured by a mass audience.
The exhibition’s success gained him a teaching post at the Royal College of Art, where he influenced David Hockney and Peter Blake. He produced works such as Hers Is A Lush Situation (1958), in which automotive and female design are commingled; Pin-up (1961), with its mixed idioms, classical, modern, vulgar; and the sketchy, painterly collage-like rapture of $he (1962) – it was, he suggested, “a sieved reflection of the adman’s paraphrase of the consumer’s dream”.
In 1962, Hamilton’s wife, Terry, was tragically killed in a automobile accident. Hamilton quit Britain for the USA, where he became close friends with Marcel Duchamp. The friendship led to Hamilton curating a retrospective of Duchamp’s work at the Tate Gallery, London.
The association with Pop Art, led Hamilton to be hailed the “Father of Pop Art” a title he loathed. The association continued in the mid-sixties after he returned to England, and produced two of his most famous works Swingeing London 67, a portrait of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser under arrest, which became one of the defining images of the 1960s. The following year Hamilton designed the cover for the Beatles White Album, which became his best known work.
The sixties also saw Hamilton influence another, younger generation of artists and musicians, most famously one of his pupils, Bryan Ferry and his band Roxy Music.
In the the 1970s, Hamilton had retrospectives at the Tate (1970) and the Guggenheim in New York (1973), both exhibitions subsequently toured Europe.
I saw one retrospective of his work during this decade at the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, which mixed his famous line drawings for James Joyce’s Ulysses, with his Pop Art, and silk screens. It was highly impressive, but more because of the intelligence on display, rather than any shared emotion inspired by the work. This may explain why Hamilton never really made the cross-over from critical acclaim to populist success.
The seventies saw Hamilton produce some of his most political work:
Hamilton had always been politically engaged, vociferously supporting the CND. In the 1980s he began a “Northern Ireland” trilogy: The Citizen (1981-83) depicted a “dirty protest” prisoner in the Maze; The Subject (1988-89), a self-righteous Orangeman; and The State (1993), a British soldier on patrol. Inevitably such politicised subject matter attracted criticism, though many considered the works merely naive oversimplifications.
Despite his advancing years, Hamilton continued to reinvent himself. In the 1980s he began working with computers: “I initially ventured into working with computers because I didn’t want to get left behind. I was approaching old age and aware of it, and I thought ‘I’m going to keep up with this’ and found out that I was ahead of everybody.” He designed two computers, the OHIO and the Diab DS-101, and increasingly used digital devices to manipulate images and create a dialogue between technique, technology and aesthetics.
The attraction of computers, he claimed, was that “you have the possibility of perfection. I’m after beauty — of composition, colour and tone.” It did not seem ironic that a man in his eighth decade was exploring technology with greater vivacity than almost any other artist: throughout his long career, Hamilton’s work anticipated almost every interpretative cultural theory, from Marshall McLuhan to the “Young British Artists”, and provided the most thorough engagement with mass media and technology this side of the Atlantic. Damien Hirst referred to Hamilton as “the greatest”.
Hamilton was appointed Companion of Honour in 2000; in 2006 he received the Max Beckmann Prize for Painting. A major retrospective of his work is due to travel to tour America and Europe from 2013.
Richard Hamilton married Terry O’Reilly in 1947; they had a son and a daughter. Rita Donagh, whom he married in 1991, survives him with the son of his first marriage.
Bonus clip, Richard Hamilton on Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, after the jump…
Arturo Vega painting a banner with The Ramones’ logo, one of the most enduring brands in rock and roll history.
When I first came on board here at DM, I posted a couple of clips of The Ramones rehearsing in 1975 in the loft of their artistic director Arturo Vega. The links to the clips are no longer current, so I thought I’d offer an update with some extended footage and a bit more history regarding Vega and The Ramones relationship.
As the ‘creative director’ for the Ramones, Arturo Vega played a key role in developing the visual style that was integral to the band’s image. His most well known creation is the Ramones’ eagle logo that he based on the great seal of the United States. He replaced ‘e pluribus unum‘ with ‘Hey Ho let’s Go‘ and swapped the arrows in the eagle’s talons for a baseball bat. The logo went on T-shirts, which during the early years of the band frequently rivaled the record sales. Arturo also housed Joey and Dee Dee for many years. His loft was the Ramones headquarters, rehearsal space and crash pad.”
24 year old Vega arrived in NYC from Mexico in 1971 to perform in musical theater. He eventually ended up in the East Village where he transformed an old plastic flower factory into the loft that became the mid-70s punk version of Warhol’s Factory..
In 1975, both DeeDee and Joey lived with me at “The Loft”, which is around the corner from CBGB, so every night after CB’s closed the party would move on to my place, which is on a second floor. Most people didn’t bother ringing the bell they would climb the metal gates from the store at the street level and come through the windows, which is what three guys that came together did to nobody’s surprise. In those days New York City was on a loosing battle against crime, the city was at one of it’s lowest points ever neighborhoods like the East Village were heroin supermarkets, the Bowery was “free for all” territory, we liked it. Any way these three guys came back to the loft a few times after that, and one day one of them confessed to me that the first time they came in they intended to rob everybody, but found the party so cool they decided to join us instead. SEE! PUNK ROCK DOESN’T PROMOTE CRIME, IT STOPS IT!’ – Arturo Vega
This footage is raw, which is exactly as it should be.
Tonight at Cinefamily in Hollywood, I’ll be doing the second presentation in their “Show and Tell” series:
“A new Cinefamily series that invites artists, filmmakers, musicians and other cultural heroes to divulge their deepest, darkest media obsessions by opening their closets, digging through their attic and plundering their garages to curate an evening of whatever they want to share! From thrift store finds to late-night Tivo, from foreign film bootlegs to home movies, from the popular to the perverse –- all media will be presented live by the honored guests, as they take us on a personal tour of the audio, video and other ephemera that has inspired them, delighted them, or just plain freaked them out.
For September’s session, we’re thrilled to present a friend who is not only a true warrior collector of amazing one-of-a-kind artifacts, but also a fantastic chronicler of hidden underground culture: Richard Metzger, creator of Dangerous Minds and co-creator of Disinformation!
Simply put, Richard’s one of the world’s foremost experts on all things counterculture, conspiratorial and just plain crazy. From a childhood in West Virginia spent obsessively digging through libraries (“There wasn’t a whole lot to do except to tip cows and to read”), to a grown-up era of showcasing the work of folks he respects and admires on TV (Disinformation), in blogland (DangerousMinds.net) and in print (“Everything You Know Is Wrong”), Richard’s amassed a personal archive that overflows with impossibly cool items. This evening will be a closet-rummaging bonanza, as Richard shows you everything from his incredible archival print materials to priceless time capsule footage of the groundbreaking ‘80s NYC club scene (of which he was a part!) Plus, join us for excerpts of Richard’s music video work, highlights from the Disinformation TV show, and so much more!”
I’m going to be screening footage from my own collection and from the archive of the late NYC-based video artist Nelson Sullivan, who videotaped hundreds of hours of the East Village art scene and night life of the 1980s. A clip of Andy Warhol signing books at Fiorucci in 1987 with a wild cast of characters surrounding him, video of of the real life “outlaw party” thrown by “club kid murderer” Michael Alig in the Times Square McDonald’s as depicted in Party Monster, Bongwater, John Sex, and some other surprises and rarities.
It’s a double feature, first the “Show and Tell,” then a screening of a 2-hour interview with Robert Anton Wilson conducted by me and Genesis P-Orridge in 1997 for my old “Infinity Factory” talkshow. Ironically, what was once seen as the size of a postage stamp in a 56k modem world will be screened as if it’s Ben Hur…
Aren’t these something? Hand-painted movie posters from Ghana, for such Hollywood movies as Alien, Cujo, Evil Dead 2, Mission Impossible, The Spy Who Loved Me and Terminator.
For party games, remove title and guess the film solely by its art work. Or suggest even better titles - post yours below.
A new series of drawings and paintings by Bob Dylan that form a visual diary of his travels in Asia last spring will be on display at the Gagosian Gallery in New York beginning September 20. The gallery says that this will the first time ever that Dylan’s art will be exhibited in NYC:
The gallery said in a news release that Mr. Dylan’s works would offer “firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape” with evocative titles like “Mae Ling,” “Cockfight,” “The Bridge” and “Hunan Province.” The release added: “Conversely, there are more cryptic paintings often of personalities and situations, such as ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Opium,’ or ‘LeBelle Cascade,’ which looks like a riff on Manet’s ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’ but which is, in fact, a scenographic tourist photo-opportunity in a Tokyo amusement arcade.” Mr. Dylan’s paintings have previously been shown in Chemnitz, Germany (where the exhibition “The Drawn Blank Series” opened in 2007), the Statens Museum in Copenhagen (where his “Brazil Series” was shown in 2008) and any rec room where the cover of his “Self Portrait” album has been prominently displayed.
Attention poetry fans: Over at the LA Times “Jacket Copy” blog, Carolyn Kellogg posts about an event this weekend at the Getty Museum here in Los Angeles that will see Marilyn Manson reading the work of the great English poet, artist and mystic, William Blake:
The goth rocker adds star power to an event that’s focused on poetry, which tends to be a little quieter than your basic stadium rock show. Six poets will be reading original works inspired by the current Getty exhibit “Luminous Paper: British Watercolors and Drawings.”
Poets on the bill include Patricia Smith, a 2008 National Book Award finalist; Whiting Award recipient Ilya Kaminsky; Jeffrey McDaniel, who has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; poetry slam champ Rachel McKibbens; and poets and educators Brendan Constantine and Suzanne Lummis.
The readings will be accompanied by live music from Timmy Straw, who combines classical string training with electronics, and Roberto Miranda, an improvisational bassist.
The event, called “Dark Blushing,” is organized by the Write Now Poetry Society, a nonprofit founded by actress and poet Amber Tamblyn and poet Mindy Nettifee.
“Dark Blushing,” 7:30 p.m., free; parking at the Getty is free after 5 p.m. Reservations are already full, but the Getty will give out standby tickets starting at 6 p.m.
