Pop artist Ron English has come up with some witty new products in anticipation of the eventual legalization of pot.
See more at Ron’s site Popaganda. “English coined the term Popaganda to describe his signature mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones.”
Via CB
Most of these flyers were designed by Buddy Esquire and Phase 2. Drawn by hand and using Letraset, Xerox, Exacto knives, graph paper, stencils etc. these are artifacts of the days before Microsoft Word and Adobe photoshop, real cut and paste. Old skool.
You can check out more of these groovy nuggets of hip hop history at Toledo Hip Hop
More flyers after the jump..
Tea With Duggie Fields is a beautiful and fascinating short film by Federico Fianchini, in which the Genius of Earls Court talks about his life, his art and his influences.
Fields has painted from the age of 11, when his earliest work, an abstract painting, was entered into a local exhibition amid incredulity that a child could paint so brilliantly. With an interest in structure and design, Fields briefly studied architecture, before he attended the Chelsea School of Art, between 1964 and 1968.
In the late sixties, as he established himself as an artist of note, Fields shared a flat with Pink Floyd’s crazy diamond, Syd Barrett. During the 1970s, he developed his brilliant day-glo style that inspired Marc Bolan, Stanley Kubrick, Derek Jarman and David Bowie, who was snapped with William Burroughs wearing Fields’ portrait of Malcolm McDowall.
Fields’ paintings have been variously described as Pop Art, Post Modernist and Minimalist, but in essence, Fields is very much his own art movement, one he termed MAXIMALism - “Minimalism with a plus plus plus.”
Iconic, unique and startlingly original, his work ranges from portraits of Michael Jackson, The Rolling Stones, Marilyn Monroe, Zandra Rhodes, the artist Andrew Logan, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, to potent images of sexual intercourse, landscapes and his own distinct interpretations of his favored artistic influences (Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian).
Today, the Genius of Earl’s Court continues with his brilliance as painter, digital artist, musician, writer and photographer.
Bonus clips including Duggie Fields on Syd Barrett plus ‘I Wonder Why’ after the jump…
Peter Blegvad is an all around swell songwriter/ poet/visual artist that I’ve long admired. Here are some great cartoons of his that are posted at the Radio Free Song Club which also hosts some songs by Blegvad as well.
More after the jump…
Breyer P-Orridge in 2006 by Laure Leber.
A further statement, rather ambiguous, from Genesis Breyer P-Orridge regarding the recent Throbbing Gristle rift. According to Gen, s/he didn’t quit the group:
Dear Friends,
We have seen and heard various inaccurate, erroneous, even sometimes libelous speculations about why we felt compelled to drop out of the current Throbbing Gristle tour. As a result we intend to address these matters in full as soon as possible. We hope that what we state now, and later, will be clear, will not fan the flames of destructive gossip, will not seem negative and will reduce an somewhat dramatic situation into a simpler story. We want to make it clear right now that we did not, and have no wish to quit TG. Obviously there is more involved than just that simple statement. Personally, at this point of my life, my position is that the inner workings and dynamics of any band, but especially of TG, are as intimate, unique and most of all complex as they are within any family. Unfortunately, even at the level TG occupy in popular culture, band business becomes potentially everyone’s business. We all know the internet has amplified the speed of distribution of “information” almost as fast as it has accelerated the decline of accuracy worldwide. We have no interest in pointing fingers (or is it claws?) at various people or sites and accusing them of letting the cat out of the bag. Bickering is never attractive, not one on one nor within the realms of an ever expanding media fueled by smart phone technologies and laptops. As soon as we have composed a written version of what series of events we believe led to my feeling unable to remain part of THIS short tour by the re-grouped TG that feels acceptable we will post it here.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
Below, a video demonstrating an amazing new multiple from Breyer P-Orridge, the “Pandrogyne Cube.” The limited edition shifting photo sculpture, 4 x 4 inches, edition of 300 costs $123 + shipping and handling. Purchase at Invisible Exports in NYC.
A very happy birthday to artist, musician, model and feminist icon, Cosey Fanni Tutti, who was born Christine Newby on this day in 1951. You can visit her website to read about current museum exhibits, live performances and to see online archival materials from her four decade career with COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, Chris & Cosey and now Carter Tutti.
Read an excerpt about the infamous “Prostitution” exhibit at London’s ICA in 1976 from John A. Walker’s book, Art and Outrage: Cosey Fanni Tutti & Genesis P-Orridge in 1976:Media frenzy, Prostitution-style (Art Design Cafe)
From her “Time to Tell” box set, an interview with Cosey about her time in the sex trade.
Below, Cosey demonstrates the Tutti Box:
Described by Milos Forman as “Disney + Bunuel,” stop-motion animator Jan Švankmajer is one of the few artists to truly translate the spirit of early-20th century surrealism for the present. Folks like Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam cite Švankmajer’s late-‘80s and early-‘90s feature films like Alice and Faust as classics in the art form.
But most of all, Burton and Gilliam point to Švankmajer’s early short films from the ‘60s through the early ‘80s. One of these, the 10-minute Kostnice from 1970—known as Ossuary—isn’t stop-motion at all. Instead, it’s a beautifully stylized study of the decoratively laid-out bones of 70,000 people in the Cemetery Church in suburban Sedlec in the Czech Republic.
Shot during the dire couple of years after the Prague Spring liberation of 1968 collapsed under an invasion by Warsaw Pact troops, Svankmajer made Ossuary a grim reminder of human fallibility.
As Jan Uhde wrote in his piece on the film for KinoEye:
Film-makers, particularly those of the “Czech New Wave,” were among the most severely persecuted. The fact that a non-conformist like Švankmajer was allowed to shoot in this atmosphere at all was in part due to the fact that he was working in the relatively obscure and inexpensive domain of short film production; this may have saved him from the crackdown that struck his more exposed colleagues in the feature film studios during the 1970s.
Moreover, Švankmajer’s remarkable tenacity and creative thinking enabled him to sometimes outwit the regime’s ideological watchdogs[…] The film was commissioned as a “cultural documentary,” a form popular with the authorities and considered relatively safe politically. But the subject Švankmajer chose must have been a surprise for the apparatchiks: on the one hand, the Sedlec Ossuary was a first-rate historical site which, at first glance, suited the official didactic demand. On the other hand, there was the uncomfortable subject of decay and death as well as religion, reflecting a subtle yet defiant opposition to the loud secular optimism of the communist officialdom.
Get: Jan Švankmajer - The Ossuary and Other Tales [DVD]
Christmas is coming and I want one of these
Clock made from a recycled Sanyo turntable. Handmade in the USA. The record is replaceable. This one is sold, but there may be more coming. Check it out here.
Via Lost At E Minor
Cynthia Plaster Caster (Cynthia Albritton) is running for Mayor of Chicago. Cynthia was the founder in 1968 of The Plaster Casters of Chicago who were notorious for making plaster casts of rock stars’ cocks. Her crowning achievement was immortalizing Jimi Hendrix’s pecker in plaster. Cynthia who is now in her fifties has turned her attention away from the low end of rock stars’ anatomies to the lower depths of politics. She knows a lot about dicks so she should fit right in. Visit her website here.
I am not a politician. I am an everyday citizen that is sick and tired of seeing the problems of our city escalate and I believe we ALL need to participate in helping to make our city the best it can be. Please join me by being a part of this election process. Tell your friends and family to actively engage in being informed about what is REALLY happening in City Hall RIGHT UNDER OUR NOSES! I will do my best to let you know what I learn along the way AND if you know something that we should all know, join me on Facebook and Twitter and tell everyone.
Neil Hamburger endorses Cynthia for Mayor.
Trailer for the documentary Plaster Caster.
Dangerous Minds pal, the great painter, Joe Coleman, has a rare New York art show currently hanging at the prestigious Dickinson New York gallery on the Upper East Side. Only a fool or a philistine in the NYC-area would pass up the chance to see Joe’s work in person, including the new 7-feet tall self-portrait—which took three years to paint—described in the below article from the Wall Street Journal (Trust me, during the last big NYC Coleman exhibit in 2006, on the final day of the show, I hobbled on a train from NJ with crutches and then painfully grimaced as I took ever single step to the gallery and back home. Was it worth it? YOU BET IT WAS WORTH IT!):
The images, which occupy dozens of amorphous panels, veer from the sweetly sentimental—the cartoon bunnies and kittens that fill his wife Whitney Ward’s bedtime thoughts—to nightmarish visions grotesque enough to evoke both 1950s EC Comics and 15th-century Hieronymous Bosch. It’s a phantasmagorical kaleidoscope that grows hypnotic with its minute detail.
“You almost feel like you’re being sucked into it,” Mr. Coleman said. The work, “A Doorway to Joe,” is the centerpiece of “Joe Coleman: Auto-Portrait,” an exhibit opening Thursday at Dickinson New York gallery on the Upper East Side. “You spend too much time, you get what [Italian filmmaker] Dario Argento depicted in ‘The Stendhal Syndrome.’ You ever see that one? It’s this idea that staring at the paintings would make certain people feel like they become part of the painting.”
Mr. Coleman can appreciate that scenario. He’s lived the painting. Once notorious for his literally explosive performance-art spectacles, which occasionally made the New York City police logs in the 1970s and ‘80s, he has increasingly been lauded for his paintings. In 2007, he was feted at one-man shows in Paris and Berlin, cutting a figure Ms. Ward, an actress and photographer, described as “Part Tammany Hall, part Wild West—he’s a handsome and omniscient walking ghost of old America.”
Not long after the exhibit at Berlin’s KW Institute, Mr. Coleman had a chat with his patron, the collector Mickey Cartin, who agreed to buy “Doorway” in advance, mindful that it would take three years to complete. Mr. Coleman finished roughly one square inch of space each day, using a jeweler’s lens to magnify and discover “the spaces between the spaces I’d already painted.” It was a laborious task, one that often entailed brushes with as few as two horse hairs. “It puts the pain back in painting,” he said. “I use my pinkie to balance the whole rest of my wrist. And you have to hold your breath as well while you’re doing it.”
The concept of suffering is indivisible from Mr. Coleman’s desire to make art. His first pieces were drawings made during services at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in his native Norwalk, Conn. “My mom gave me a pad and crayons and a pencil,” he recalled, “and around the church are these scenes of Christ being crowned with thorns and crucified. I just started drawing them. The only crayon I used was the red crayon with the blood. The subject matter has not really changed that much,” he said. “I’m still struggling with these ideas of good and evil, and this idea that there’s something holy in violence. That’s the essence I was spoonfed from childhood.”
Mr. Cartin, in whose loft the work usually hangs—in the company of contemporary and 15th- and 16th-century art—first met Mr. Coleman 20 years ago, when the artist was driving a cab. “I simply believed in him, not only as a totally lovable and eccentric character, but as a very committed artist,” Mr. Cartin said. “He asks so much of himself, and it shows in the way his work has evolved. He is a painter-storyteller, and the stories are not easy. He loves his work, but each painting is a significant internal struggle for him. He keeps no secrets.”
That’s true in conversation, as well. Mr. Coleman, who projects a personal warmth that balances his psychic intensity, recounted the story behind one of the panels, an image of a “Jap Hand,” chopped off a Japanese soldier by an American serviceman in World War II. As a boy, Mr. Coleman became an expert at breaking into a locked cabinet in his father’s den. On one such occasion, while his father was out drinking at a bar, he found more than he bargained for lurking in a stash of pornography and military mementos. “It was this picture of a GI holding the head of a Japanese soldier, kind of proudly, and when I looked at it more closely I saw that it was my father.”
Some things, once seen, can never be unseen. And that’s exactly what Mr. Coleman wants to show. “It’s like an archeological dig,” he said, “but internally.”
The Walking Ghost of Old America: Cartoon Kittens, Serial Killers, Lovers and Literary Lions: Joe Coleman Paints a Journey Through His Labyrinthine Mind (WSJ)
Joe Coleman’s incredible portrait of Harry Houdini is on display at the Jewish Museum’s exhibit, Houdini: Art and Magic until March 27th, 2011.
Thank you, Whitney Ward!
