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When William S. Burroughs met Francis Bacon: Uncut
09.18.2019
08:44 am
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When William Burroughs met Francis Bacon a lot of tea was drunk, cigarettes smoked, a few secrets shared but very little was revealed about the two men. At times, this “historic meeting” of two great minds in 1982 is like the old class reunion where two former pupils meet up only to find they have very little in common other than they once shared the same classroom together.

The two men first met in Tangiers in the 1950s when Burroughs was technically on the run for murdering his wife after a “shooting accident” during a drunken game of William Tell. Bacon was then in a brutal and near fatal relationship with a violent sadist called Peter Lacey who used to beat him with a leather studded belt. Bacon once remarked in a documentary that he had lost all of his teeth to his lovers—Lacey was the boyfriend who knocked most of them out.

It was Allen Ginsberg who first introduced Bacon to Burroughs as he thought Bacon painted the way Burroughs wrote. Ginsberg had also wanted Bacon to paint his portrait in the act of having sex with his partner Peter Orlovsky. Bacon wondered if Ginsberg would be able “to keep it up” for the duration of the sitting. In the 1960s, Ginsberg again asked Bacon to paint his portrait. Bacon demurred claiming he had an aversion to long hair and beards and preferred painting short-haired, clean-shaven men because he could see the skull underneath the skin.

Burroughs thought he and Bacon were “at opposite ends of the spectrum.”

“[Bacon] likes middle-aged truck drivers and I like young boys. He sneers at immortality and I think it’s the one thing of importance. Of course we’re associated because of our morbid subject matter.”

This meeting between the two men was filmed by Mike Southon at Bacon’s studio/home 7 Reece Mews for a documentary on Burroughs directed by Howard Brookner. Burroughs appeared slightly standoffish, self conscious, and occasionally looks bored though he almost warms up when he riffed on some of his favorite subject matter—Jajouka, Mayans, and immortality. He also looked far older than Bacon, but was in fact five years younger. Bacon is waspish, bitchy, gleeful like a naughty schoolboy, and delivers the best lines (Jackson Pollock is “a lacemaker,” Mary McCarthy is “a bitch”).

According to Burroughs, when the pair first met in Tangiers they had several conversations about art though Bacon feigned not remembering the details. Burroughs reminded him that he had dismissed the then popular trend in art Abstract Expressionism as “mere decoration.”

Bacon recalled their mutual friendship with Jane and Paul Bowles, going on to discuss Jane Bowles’ mental decline and the tragedy of her last years being tended to by nuns, a situation which Bacon thought ghastly. Ironically, Bacon died just over a decade later being tended to by nuns after becoming ill in Spain (an asthma attack).

Burroughs seemed a little ill-at-ease having a camera crew film his every word. The pot-bellied Bacon seemed more relaxed (he’s on home turf) and even made the occasional dig at Burroughs. When discussing painters Bacon asks “Do you mean Monet or Manet?” like Lady Bracknell.

This is the unedited footage of something that (understandably) ended up being but a few minutes in Brookner’s finished documentary. I suppose one would have (perhaps) expected something far more scintillating and IQ-raising when two great artists meet but Burroughs and Bacon skate around subjects and stick to those things that obsesses them without revealing too much—even if they can’t always remember people’s last names or who or what it is they’re exactly talking about.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.18.2019
08:44 am
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Kenneth Anger & Brian Butler’s Autumnal Equinox Ritual: A magickal working in light and sound
09.16.2019
04:35 pm
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Not to put too fine a point on it, but who knows, this weekend in Los Angeles might be your last chance ever to bask in the Luciferian legend that is filmmaker Kenneth Anger. He is, after all, 92 years old at this point. He might have another good decade in him, but you never know, so why take that chance? (The same could be said, of course, about his old chums the Rolling Stones who are about 15 years younger.)

This Saturday, September 21, Spaceland and Lethal Amounts present Anger and Brian Butler in a rare appearance as Technicolor Skull:

On the occasion of the Autumnal Equinox, Kenneth Anger and Los Angeles-based artist Brian Butler will perform at the historic Regent Theater in Downtown Los Angeles. A selection of Anger’s iconic films including Invocation of My Demon Brother, Lucifer Rising, and Scorpio Rising will be presented along with a conversation on the occult forces which drive these two visionary artists. The presentation will climax with the shattering ritualistic spectacle of magick, sound and light; Kenneth Anger & Brian Butler’s Technicolor Skull.

According to VICE: “Anger and Butler’s act employs guitars, a theremin, and a 60,000 watt sound system—the type of stuff normally associated with such trivialities as mere music—in combination with visuals and stagecraft, to plunge audiences into a kind of ecstatic nightmare. If you’ve ever seen Anger’s Lucifer Rising, you’re at least partially ready for this magick ritual of light and sound.”

I saw the Technicolor Skull performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles a few years back, during Anger’s big show there. It’s quite extraordinary: with Anger’s films projected behind them, Butler plays a Flying V guitar with a E-bow making a diabolical noise while Anger plays the theremin as if he is fisting it with manic glee (lest you think I am exaggerating for comic effect, first off, we are talking about Kenneth Anger here and second, he pointedly rolled up his sleeve before sticking his fist through the theremin’s… hole.)

Saturday, September 21 · Doors 8:00 PM / Show 9:00 PM at The Regent Theater. Buy tickets HERE
 

 

Above, Floria Sigismondi’s “72 hours in André Balazs’ Chateau Marmont with Kenneth Anger.”

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.16.2019
04:35 pm
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All Life Here: The raw, disturbing and often political artwork of Jan Pötter
09.10.2019
06:45 pm
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‘Doppelte Portion.’
 
At his graduation exhibition, German artist Jan Pötter was asked by one of his fellow students if this was the kind of work he produced? His contemporaries seemed surprised by Pötter’s striking, naive, colorful, kind of Jean Dubuffet almost meets Jean-Michel Basquiat artworks. Pötter took this as a compliment because “at a certain level” he wants his work “to surprise and unsettle people.”

His mixed media paintings are powerful, raw, original, and challenging. The viewer is left to question what they are looking at and see the painting’s meaning within a larger cultural, personal, and political context.

Pötter says he makes “unexpected pieces” that “deliberately break with my own and with the audience’s expectations” which is what all great art is supposed to do.

Born in Nordhorn in 1988, Pötter graduated in Fine Art, Painting and Drawing from AKI Enschede, Holland in 2012. He was nominated for a YoungBlood and an ArtOlive Young Talent awards the same year and thereafter exhibited his work in group and solo shows across Holland and Germany. Now based in Berlin, Pötter takes his inspiration from the image saturated multimedia world of news, television, music, film, and his own personal experience.

Though not all of his work is political, some of his most iconic paintings like “Crusie” was inspired by a friend remarking they were taking a cruise ship holiday oblivious to the struggles of refugees families many of whom have drowned at sea trying to reach the safety and security of mainland Europe. Others, like “Great White” suggest the troubling and aggressive predatory behavior of white nations in history. While “Worms and Bird” suggests not so much that the early bird catches the worm but rather all good intentions inevitably come to nought—or food for the worms. Follow Pötter on Instagram.
 
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‘The Birth of Joy.’
 
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‘Der Schrei des Tauchers’ (‘The Scream of the Divers’)
 
See more of Jan Pötter’s powerful and original work, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.10.2019
06:45 pm
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‘Beware! Beware! We are not to be trifled with’: The work of pioneering genderqueer artist Gluck
08.28.2019
08:50 am
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Gluck, circa 1924.
 
Hannah Gluckstein preferred to be called Peter or Hig but liked “Gluck, no prefix, suffix or quotes” best. Gluck. A functional name. Gender neutral long before such a term existed. A trademark, a product, a producer of art.

Gluck was born into a very wealthy Jewish family on August 13th, 1895 in London. The first born, a daughter who was expected to grow happy and demure and marry a most suitable husband—someone who would make the family proud and strengthen the business. But that wasn’t Gluck. Early photographs show a long-haired girl staring fixedly at the camera with defiance and dreams of another life.

This life came with a growing interest in painting and drawing and a desire to be an artist. The family were not impressed. The Glucksteins were half of the business empire Salmon & Gluckstein, owners of (what was claimed to be) the world’s largest tobacco company, a selection of hotels (the Cumberland, the Trocadero), and the famous Lyon’s Corner House tearooms, which were a staple of British social life from the 1920s-50s—see Graham Greene’s novels for details. Art was a poor choice for business and a not a suitable career for a woman. Yet, Gluck’s parents indulged their daughter thinking this trifling passion for art was mere whimsy, a passing phase.

Between 1913-1916, Gluck attended the St. John’s Wood School of Art in London. The parents hoped this experience would cause Gluck to give up on this teenage fancy. Instead it proved to be three years that changed Gluck’s life and confirmed a startling talent and some deeply held ambitions. At the college, Gluck met another artist Miss E. M. Craig, a mysterious figure who was simply known as Craig. Together they eloped to Lamorna, Cornwall to an artists’ colony.  Gluck’s parents were shocked. This was not the kind of thing a good Jewish girl was supposed to do. They blamed Craig as a “pernicious influence.”

Yet still, when their wayward daughter reached the age of 21, Gluck’s father supplied a trust fund which ably supported the move to Cornwall, where Gluck bought a studio. The money also enabled Gluck to be the person little Hannah Gluckstein had once dreamed of becoming. Hair razor cut like a boy’s, a suit handmade by one of London’s finest tailors, and the adopting of the name “Gluck.”

Gluck was particular about this new name. People who used any other name, any former name, were cut off. Once, an art society sent a letter to “Miss Gluck”—Gluck resigned from the society immediately. It led many to describe Gluck as “a difficult woman.” Now Gluck was free to begin a new life.

In the 1920s, Gluck held a first “one man exhibition” of diverse artworks. It brought celebrity and commissions to paint portraits of the elite members of the establishment—lawyers, judges, and so forth. The solo exhibition was visited by members of royalty and politics, and brought contacts with some of society’s most influential enablers. The interior designer, Syrie Maugham, wife of writer Somerset Maugham, used Gluck’s paintings to enhance her creations which brought further fame and more commissions.

When Gluck’s father died in 1930, it was the younger brother who inherited the estate as the eldest male heir. This (understandably) proved to be an irksome bone of contention which meant Gluck had to ask, or go cap in hand, for any further monies. Yet, if Gluck had wanted to be truly independent then it would have made far more sense to cut all ties with the family and establish a career by hard work and perseverance. But the family’s wealth allowed Gluck to live a life of luxury, to live the life of an artist, or as Picasso once almost poetically put it—to be rich enough to live poor.

Money was important but a more important factor in Gluck’s development as an artist were the women who became lovers. One was Sybil Cookson, the journalist and writer who inspired Gluck’s paintings of horse races and boxing matches. The couple lived together at Bolton House in West Hampstead, bought by Gluck’s father and maintained by a staff of servants—a cook, a maid, and a housekeeper. The relationship between the two women lasted until Cookson caught Gluck frolicking with a dancer called Annette Mills, who was the actor John Mills older sister and was later famous as the presenter of the classic BBC children’s show Muffin the Mule (which perhaps brings a whole new meaning to the term “Muffin the Mule.”) This fling lasted until Gluck formed a new relationship with the florist and flower arranger Constance Spry who inspired Gluck’s sequence of exquisite floral paintings. This revelation of the secret relationship between Gluck and the married Spry only became public after Diana Souhami published her excellent biography on the artist in 1988—a book and a writer whose work I thoroughly recommend to all.

But the woman who brought Gluck to the height of artistic expression as a genderqueer icon was Nesta Obermer, an American who was married to an older, exceedingly rich Mr. Moneybags. Gluck fell deeply, passionately in love with Obermer and wanted to live with her “for eternity.” Gluck took the title husband and called Obermer wife. Gluck was so convinced this was the beginning of a bright and beautiful future together that old photographs, letters, and even paintings were burned as a symbol of this new beginning. Their marriage was confirmed in the painting “Medallion” or “YouWe” in 1936. A powerful portrait of an out lesbian couple or as Gluck described it in a letter to Nesta:

Now it is out and to the rest of the Universe I call Beware! Beware! We are not to be trifled with.

The two women in profile. Gluck the darker more pessimistic looking. The blonde-highlighted Obermer head up, eyes glinting to a better, brighter future.

And there was the rub.

If Gluck and Obermer married what sort of future would it be? How would they live? Obermer was not entirely smitten to cede the comfort and wealth of her rich aged beau, no matter how little she thought of him. She could never give up the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. The relationship lasted six years. When Obermer left, Gluck was devastated—as can be seen in the powerful “Self-Portrait” from 1942, which depicts Gluck looking almost as if recently bereaved and bravely attempting to carry on alone.

Alas, Gluck did not carry on. The work faltered, and years were spent in correspondence with paint companies attempting to find better quality paints for artists. Worthwhile, yes, but not a subject to consume a talent as rare and as brilliant as Gluck’s.

After the Second World War, Gluck fell out of favor as an artist. A new world of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art dominated. In 1973, over thirty years since the last solo exhibition, Gluck held a final exhibition at the Fine Art Gallery. It was a last hurrah for this pioneering and distinctly unique talent. One of Gluck’s last paintings “Credo (Rage Rage Against the Dying of the Light)” (1970-73) captured the artist countering the inevitable decline:

I am living daily with death and decay, and it is beautiful and calming. All order is lost; mechanics have gone overboard—A phantasmagoric irrelevance links shapes and matter. A new world evolves with increasingly energy and freedom soon to be invisibly reborn within our airy envelope.

Gluck died at the age of 82 on January 10th, 1978.
 
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‘Portrait of Miss E.M. Craig’ (1920).
 
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‘Gluck. Before the races, St Buryan, Cornwall’ (1924).
 
More iconic paintings by Gluck, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.28.2019
08:50 am
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The grotesque and the beautiful: Meet Valeska Gert, the woman who pioneered performance art
07.18.2019
08:38 am
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One evening at a local fleapit in Germany, sometime in the 1920s, a young woman stood on stage while the projectionist changed reels between movies and performed her latest dance called Pause. The woman was Valeska Gert who was well-known for her wild, unpredictable, highly controversial, beautiful yet often grotesque performances. The audience waited expectantly, a few coughs, a few giggles, but Gert did not move. She stood motionless in a slightly contrived awkward position and stared off into the distance. The audience grew restless. What the fuck was going on? The lights dimmed, the performance ended, and the movie came on. This wasn’t just dance, this was anti-dance. This was performance art. And nobody knew what to make of it.

Nijinsky had tried something similar a few years earlier, when he sat on the stage to a small audience and said something like: “And now I dance for you the meaning of the War.” He ended up in the booby-hatch. Gert thankfully didn’t. She just antagonized the bourgeoisie and inspired a whole new way of performance.

Valeska Gert was born Gertrud Valesca Samosch in Berlin, on January 11th, 1892. Her father was a highly successful businessman and a respected member of the Jewish community. According to her autobiographies (she wrote four of them), Gert was rebellious from the get-go. She showed little interest in school preferring to express herself through art and dance. At the age of nine, Gert was signed-up for ballet school where she exhibited considerable proficiency but a wilful subversiveness. She hated bourgeois conventions and considered traditional dance limiting and oppressive. But she was smart enough and talented enough to learn the moves and impress her teachers.

On the recommendation of one teacher, Gert was given an introduction to the renowned and highly respected dancer and choreographer Rita Sacchetto. Good ole Sacchetto thought she had a future prima ballerina on her hands and gave Gert the opportunity to perform her own dance in one of her shows. Instead of something traditional, Gert burst on stage “like a bomb” in an outrageous orange silk costume. Then rather than perform the dance as rehearsed and as expected Gert proceeded to jump, swing, stomp, grimace, and dance like “a spark in a powder keg.” Sacchetto was not pleased but the audience went wild. This became Gert’s first major performance Tanz in Orange (Dance in Orange) in 1916.

As the First World War had a dramatic and negative effect on her father’s business, Gert, buoyed by her success with Tanz in Orange, sought out her own career as a dancer, performer, and actor. She worked with various theater groups and cabarets, winning garlands for her performances in Oskar Kokoschka’s Hiob (1918), Ernst Toller’s Transformation (1919), and a revival of Frank Wedekind’s Franziska (1920).

But Gert became more interested in merging acting with dance and performance with politics. She created a series of lowlife characters who she brought to life through exaggerated performance. Or as Gert put it:

I danced all of the people that the upright citizen despised: whores, pimps, depraved souls—the ones who slipped through the cracks.

Long before Madonna caused outrage by flicking-off on stage, Gert was simulating masturbation, coition, and orgasm. It brought her a visit for the cops on grounds of obscenity. Her most notorious performance was the prostitute Canaille. As the academic Alexandra Kolb wrote in her thesis ‘There was never anythin’ like this!!!’ Valeska Gert’s Performances in the Context of Weimar Culture:

Gert’s portrayal of this figure is significant at a time when German state regulation of prostitution, which involved the supervision of sex-workers by the Sittenpolizei (moral police) and severe limitations on their freedom, became increasingly attacked as incompatible with the new democratic system and moves towards greater legal and civil rights for women. The regulation policy was in fact abolished in 1927.

Gert’s unvarnished and ruthless depiction of the prostitute renounced any idealisation. Everyday life—and misery—were reinstated over and above the aestheticised life previously represented in much dance, in particular classical ballet with its fairy-tale plots and noble, dignified representation of humanity.

~ Snip! ~

...Gert did not simply interpret this role as a critique of capitalist society and its treatment of woman as a will-less and submissive commodity. Rather, she strove to depict the female experience in a somewhat autonomous light, with the prostitute enjoying considerable control over her sexuality.

Forget The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, this was a nice Jewish girl ripping-up the text book and changing society. Gert was making a one-woman stand for “those marginalised or excluded from bourgeois society.”

Nothing was taboo for Gert. Her performances covered a wide range of subjects, themes, and characters—from sport to news, sex to death, and to the invidious nature of capitalist society. When Gert asked Bertolt Brecht what he meant by “epic theater,” the playwright replied. “It’s what you do.”

Her reputation grew in the 1920s. She appeared in cabaret, in movies, and in theater productions. Gert would have been a superstar had not the rise of the anti-semitic Nazis brought her career to a premature hiatus. She quit Germany, moved to England, and got married. She then moved to New York, ran a cabaret where both Julian Beck and Jackson Pollock worked for her, and became friends with Tennessee Williams.

After the Second World War, Gert returned to Europe. She tried her hand at cabaret again and found herself cast in movies by Fellini, Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders. But it really wasn’t until the 1970s and the explosion of punk that Gert was fully rediscovered and embraced by a younger generation. Gert was hailed as a progenitor of punk, the woman who “laid the foundations and paved the way for the punk movement.”

Gert died sometime in March 1978. The official date is March 18th. But Gert’s body had lain undiscovered for a few days—something she predicted in her 1968 autobiography Ich bin eine Hexe (I am a Witch):

Only the kitty will be with me. When I’m dead, I can’t feed him anymore. He’s hungry. In desperation he nibbles at me. I stink. Kitty’s a gourmet, he doesn’t like me anymore. He meows loudly with hunger until the neighbours notice and break down the door.

 
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More pix of Gert and a video, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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07.18.2019
08:38 am
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The lurid world of cult movie posters
07.12.2019
04:46 pm
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Italian movie poster for ‘Profondo rosso’ for sale at Westgate Gallery
 
Every year around this time, Westgate Gallery‘s poster concierge extraordinaire Christian McLaughlin drastically cuts prices for his annual Cruel Summer 50% Off Sale. Why that’s almost half off, even…

Anyway, my pal McLaughlin, a novelist and TV/movie writer and producer based in Los Angeles, is the maven of mavens when it comes to this sort of thing. You couldn’t even begin to stock a store like his if you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for in the first place, and if you want a quick (not to mention rather visceral) idea of his level of deep expertise—and what a great eye he’s got—then take a gander at his world-beating selection of Italian giallo posters. Christian is what I call a “sophisticate.”

He’s got a carefully curated cult poster collection on offer that is second to none. His home is a shrine to lurid giallo, 70s XXX and any and every midnight movie classic you can shake a stick at. But why would you want to shake a stick at a bunch of movie posters to begin with? That would be silly!

The Westgate Gallery’s Cruel Summer 50% off sale sees every item in stock at—you guessed it—50% off the (already reasonable) normal price. All you have to do is enter the discount code “CRUEL2019” at checkout and your tab will be magically cut in half.
 

The Pit’ aka ‘Teddy’ (Canada, 1981)
 

‘Andy Warhol’s Dracula’ poster for sale at Westgate Gallery
 

Rare Japanese ‘Sisters’ poster for sale at Westgate Gallery
 

‘Pets’ poster for sale 50% off at Westgate Gallery
 

Jess Franco’s ‘Lorna the Exorcist’ (France, 1976)
 
Many, many more after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.12.2019
04:46 pm
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Searching for the Perfect Beat: American Rave Fliers from the 90s
06.10.2019
10:59 am
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Many consider the first rave happenings to have taken place during Ken Kesey’s notorious “Kool Aid” Acid Tests held in California during the winter of 1966. Another core influence would be England’s “Second Summer of Love” and the explosion of acid house in the late-eighties. Or maybe it really was Deadmau5 that started it all…
 
Early raves were punk rock. Outcast to the fringes of society, nights tended to be transcendental and unpredictable. There were no meme totem poles, weed leaf pasties, or Kandi. Corporate interests had not yet tapped this corner of the underground.
 

 
The primary way to reach people was through vibrant (yet discreet) rave fliers. You’ve probably heard folklore of xeroxed maps and phone numbers that played back the address of a warehouse or generator in the middle of nowhere. It was viral guerilla marketing prior to the smartphone era. Fuck your Facebook boosts and admat.
 
I am so lucky to have stumbled across the book - Searching for the Perfect Beat: Flyer Designs of the American Rave Scene - at my local library. It depicts a decade’s worth of rave fliers from across the United States, so you can get a sense of just how psychedelic things truly were. Peace Love Unity Respect.
 
Lose yourself (and find yourself) at the virtual flier rave, below:
 

 

 

 
More rave flyers after the jump…

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Posted by Bennett Kogon
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06.10.2019
10:59 am
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That time Marty Feldman almost had his portrait painted by Francis Bacon
06.05.2019
06:46 am
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When Marty Feldman met Francis Bacon drink was involved.

Before he became internationally famous for his performance as Igor in Young Frankenstein, Marty Feldman was a very successful and hugely influential comedy scriptwriter with his long-time writing partner Barry Took.

One night in London, sometime during the almost swinging sixties, Feldman and Took had been working late finishing off another episode of their hit radio show Round the Horne. It had been a good day, a productive day, and now Feldman was on his way home to see his wife, Lauretta. As he walked through the city he heard jazz coming from an art gallery. The band were playing “Night in Tunisia.” It piqued his interest. Feldman had started off as a jazz musician when he was fifteen playing trumpet with his own band and occasionally filling in with other combos. He wandered towards the gallery. A small crowd stood around clinking glasses. Ah, jazz, art, and free booze.

Feldman snaffled a couple of cocktails and had a look at the paintings. Not bad. Interesting. Certainly different but not really to his taste. Against one bare white wall there stood a man who looked like he was losing his battle to keep himself or the building up. He had the look of an aged choirboy gone to seed. A round turnip head, with dyed hair slicked back, and just a hint of rouge on his cheeks. He wore a leather jacket, a white shirt (top button undone) and blue paint splattered denims. Feldman thought he looked familiar but wasn’t quite sure where from?

What was said, we can only imagine, but it apparently began with the man against the wall commenting on Feldman’s distinctive face.

“I could use that face,” he might have said
“Well, I’m using it myself at the moment,” Feldman replied in our imaginary dialog.
“Your eyes,” returned the first.
“Yes, they’re my eyes.”
“You don’t understand, I. Have. To. Paint. You,” almost like Edith Evans’ “handbag” in The Importance of Being Earnest.

The man against the wall leaned towards Feldman as if attempting to capture something invisible between them.

“I,” he continued, “must paint you. You look the sort of man I could do something with.”

Feldman thought what sort of things this man might want to do with him then decided this strange character was trying to pick him up.

“Here, take my number,” the man said. He wrote something down on a scrap of paper. Feldman took the paper and watched the man who was no longer holding up the wall stagger off into the night.

The next morning, over breakfast, Feldman told his wife Lauretta about the man at the gallery who had tried to pick him up. “He wanted to paint my portrait, ” he added.

“Who was it?” Lauretta asked.

“Dunno. He wrote his name down.”

Feldman retrieved the slip of paper and said, “Francis. That’s all it says.”

Lauretta asked Feldman to describe this painter. He did. Lauretta then suggested her husband had met Francis Bacon.
 
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Francis Bacon in his studio.
 
Moving forward a few months: Feldman spent the day writing with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in a local pub. It was a long day’s writing and drinking into the night. Eventually, the threesome were “poured out of the place hammered” trying to remember who they were and where they lived. Somehow they got lost and ended up (surprise, surprise) at another art gallery party.

Once again, Feldman tucked into the cocktails, this time joined by the equally drunk Cook and Moore. And once again, there was that man Francis holding up a wall. As Feldman recounted the incident in his autobiography eYE Marty:

I spotted my old pal Francis standing at a distance and pointed him out to Peter, who knew my story because I had become obsessed with what-ifs. Bacon’s work was fetching high prices and it would have been fun if he’d painted a portrait of me and I hadn’t told Lauretta, just inviting her to a gallery and pretended it was no big deal.

Cook told Moore about Bacon’s offer to paint Feldman’s portrait.

Without hesitation, Dudley went up to Bacon and told him that Marty was now ready to be painted.

Unfortunately, the temperamental Bacon told Moore that he had “never seen or talked to [Feldman] in his life.”

Though Bacon may not have known Feldman, he was bound to be at least acquainted with Cook and Moore, as he had often visited Cook’s Establishment Club, and had been at parties also attended by Pete ‘n’ Dud. Perhaps, as Feldman suggested, Bacon saw the state the trio were in and thought they were just “a bunch of drunken wankers.”
 
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Pete ‘n’ Dud.
 
More shenanigans from Feldman, Bacon, and co, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.05.2019
06:46 am
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It’s Murder on the Dancefloor: Incredible Expressionist dance costumes from the 1920s
05.30.2019
06:34 am
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Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt were a wife and husband partnership briefly famous in Germany during the early 1920s for their wild, expressionist dance performances consisting of “creeping, stamping, squatting, crouching, kneeling, arching, striding, lunging, leaping in mostly diagonal-spiraling patterns” across the stage. Shulz believed “art should be…an expression of struggle” and used dance to express “the violent struggle of a female body to achieve central, dominant control of the performance space and its emptiness.”

In his book, Empire of Ecstasy—Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935, author Karl Toepfer notes that “Husband-wife dance pairs are quite rare on the stage; in the case of Schulz and Holdt the concept of marriage entailed a peculiarly deep implication in that it also referred to a haunting marriage of dance and costume.”

The couple created dances and costumes together and at the same time, so that bodily movement and the masking of the body arose from the same impulse. Schulz was a highly gifted artist whose drawings and sketches invariably startle the viewer with their hard primitivism and demonic abstraction, but Holdt assumed much responsibility for the design of the costumes and masks; for most of the costumes deposited in Hamburg, it is not possible to assign definite authorship to Schulz. The mask portions consisted mostly of fantastically reptilian, insectoid, or robotic heads, whereas the rest of the costumes comprised eccentric patchworks of design, color, and material to convey the impression of bodies assembled out of contradictory structures.

According to Toepfer, these costumes “disclose a quality of cartoonish, demonic grotesquerie rather than frightening ferocity.” The couple gave these designs descriptive names like Toboggan, Springvieh, and Technik, which they also used as titles for their performances. Their designs sought something pagan, pre-Christian, that tapped into the “redemptive organic forms of nature and the animal world.”

Little is known about Holdt. What is known about Schulz could be written on a postcard. Born in Lübben in 1896, Schulz studied dance and performance in Berlin in 1913. She became associated with the Expressionists who rebeled against the rigid, traditional forms of art in favor of a more subjective perspective. In dance, this meant abandoning the austere, mechanical, and precise choreography of ballet for more expressive, fluid, and personal interpretations. Schulz moved to Hamburg, where she married Holdt in April 1920. The couple had a tempestuous relationship. Schulz has been described as possessive and jealous, while Holdt was considered “untrustworthy” which I take to mean he played around a lot. The difficulties and emotional insecurities in their relationship fed into their work. According to Toepfer:

The Schulz-Holdt dance aesthetic does seem to embed a powerful masochism, not only in the marriage between dancers but in the equally passionate marriage of mask and movement. But the dances of this strange couple were also a kind of bizarre, expressionist demonization of marriage itself, the most grotesquely touching critique of pairing to appear in the whole empire of German dance culture.

The couple moved away from Expressionism and sought inspiration from the supposed purity of pre-Judeo-Christian, Aryan-Nordic culture—which kinda almost sounds vaguely National Socialist. They lived an austere existence in direst poverty. Their home was basically one room with little in the way of amenities or even a bed—they slept on straw. They wanted to live without money and desired a society where everyone was given an equal share on the basis of their needs. Between 1920-24, the couple performed their dance routines to the bewildered and often antagonistic audiences of Hamburg. Though some critics appreciated the pair’s talent and startling originality, this praise was never enough to pay the rent.

In 1923, Schulz gave birth to a son. In 1924, the couple were photographed in their costumes by Minya Diez-Dührkoop. That same year, on June 19th, four days before her birthday, Schulz, no longer able to withstand Holdt’s (suspected) adultery, shot her husband in a jealous rage several times at point blank range before turning the gun on herself. The couple were discovered dead lying on their bed of straw with their infant son between them.

Schulz and Holdt would have been long forgotten had not their designs and costumes been gifted to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) in 1925. These precious artefacts were rediscovered in 1989 and are available to view online in the full glory of color.

Below are some of Diez-Dührkoop’s original photographs from 1924 of Shulz and Holdt’s costumes.
 
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‘Toboggan.’
 
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‘Technik.’
 
More expressionist delights from Shulz and Holdt, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.30.2019
06:34 am
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Myths of the Near Future: The collage artwork of Julien Pacaud (NSFW)
05.10.2019
09:27 am
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Tulip.
 
I think it was C. P. Snow in a book about the artist Brian Clarke who pointed out that art preceded science. He alluded to the way artists had broken down objects into geometric forms from Cezanne to Picasso, Braque, and Cubism, to the wild canvas splatter of Jackson Pollock that all anticipated the atomic age. Snow was a very earnest and serious writer with tremendous pretensions to being a great, if not the greatest writer—he long thought he deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was the kind of self-agrandizement that comes from a life where one brooks no disagreement from others. But Snow did have a point and is still an author worth reading. Art does, in some ways, prefigure science. An easy example, Warhol’s endless silk screens suggest a digital age of (im)perfect cloning or nanobiology and cell-replication. So it is with the art of the collage—our modern world of multiple voices, multiple viewpoints, multiple screens all contained within one frame like television of the Internet or our minds.

French artist Julien Pacaud calls his work “digital collage” as he uses a computer to create his artworks rather than the traditional method of scissors and glue. Self-taught, Pacaud claims he works by instinct. He flicks thru vintage magazines and old books looking for an image that will inspire him. Once found, he scans these images, stores them, before returning to them to find out where they might take him. When he starts a collage, he has no set plan. It develops by trial and error, accident and chance. A process which eventually reveals its own path.

I think that what drives my creation is my subconscious—the ways I express myself come rather randomly. I also don’t feel the need to explain my artworks, and am happy for anyone who interprets my work however they want—even if I created the piece with a specific idea in mind.

Pacaud has described his work as “organizing chaos,” depicting his “inner need” to bring structure to the disparate elements in his work—the clash of landscape and geometric form; of nature and human construct; of desire and the failure of communicate. In a way, he is creating myths for a modern age. His influences range from The Twilight Zone to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, but he first attracted to the possibilities of collage by Storm Thorgerson’s cover design for Pink Floyd’s album Wish You Were Here—two men shake hands on a deserted backlot, one is on fire. It could be an image out from Pacaud’s portfolio.

Based in Paris, Pacaud was “an astrophysician, an international snooker player, a hypnotist and an esperanto teacher” before turning his skills to art. He works as an illustrator contributing to newspapers, magazines, and books. His work has also been used on the covers of several albums by the likes of Hushpuppies, Jeff Mills, and (Swedish) Death Polka. He also produces his own music. A book of his work, Perpendicular Dreams was published last year, and a second volume will be released this year. His work is available to buy and more can be seen here.
 
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Funny Games.
 
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Magical Geographic.
 
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One Million Years Trip.
 
More organized chaos, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.10.2019
09:27 am
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