French special effects genius Geoffrey Niquet collaborated with Gaspar Noe on the creation of the mindblowingly wonderful Enter The Void. Here’s a clip that shows the multi-layered visuals that were composed for the film. It’s like looking through a glass onion. For those of you have seen the movie, this will be a reminder of its loveliness. For those of you who haven’t experienced the Void, this will tantalize and perhaps compel you to see it.
Perhaps best known for their brilliantly-colored, wall-sized paintings, artists Gilbert and George have been working together since they first met at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, 1967. The pair claim they became friends as George was the only person who could understand the Italian-born Gilbert’s poorly spoken English. “It was love at first sight,” they have since claimed. It was while they were students that Gilbert and George first devised their trademark performance art called Living Sculptures, where they wandered through the city streets covered in metallic make-up. The idea was to “collapse the distance between art and artists.”
In 1970, Gilbert and George developed this further and first performed their famous Singing Sculpture, at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery. Again coated in metallic make-up, the duo stood on a table and moved in robotic movement to comedy double-act, Flannagan and Allen’s 1930’s music hall song “Underneath the Arches” - about the homeless men who slept under railway arches during the Great Depression. Their show proved controversial and divided audiences, which is will no doubt happen with the pair’s latest show, The Urethra Postcard Art of Gilbert and George, which has just opened at the White Cube Gallery in London.
For this latest show, Gilbert and George have created 564 pieces of art from their personal collection of tourist postcards and telephone booth sex cards, advertising prostitutes’ services. Collecting the tourist postcards was easy, the call girl cards more difficult, as they explained to the Guardian:
The phonebox sex cards were trickier. When they saw one they liked – “Luke man 2 man horny fit lad 27 years” – they would dive in and grab it, but would then have to scour the area looking for 12 more. “Transexual Linda new in town” must have found business collapsing as all the ads within half a mile disappeared.
The prostitutes’ cards are a vanishing artform, along with the phoneboxes themselves – “almost fizzled out now,” George said mournfully.
The Urethra Postcard Art of Gilbert and George is at the White Cube until 19 February. And if you’re interested in contacting the pair, then you’ll find them under “artists” in London’s Yellow Pages.
This short documentary explains the background to Gilbert and George’s Living Sculptures, discussing their Singing Sculpture and how everything they do is a form of art.
More from Gilbert and George, including ‘Bend It’, after the jump…
Last night Richard and I watched the Awfully Good TV special hosted by Little Britain’s David Walliams. It’s one of those clip shows of “so bad that it’s good” TV moments that normally aren’t that great, but this one actually was hilarious. I nearly peed myself when this clip came on. A kid named Matthew wrote in to the Jim’ll Fix It TV show and asked the host (Jimmy Saville) if he could “fix it” so that Matthew could drive around in Gary Numan’s “Down in the Park” car. And Jim came through! Watch as young Matthew, in crap shades, takes a little ride as Numan croons “Music for Chameleons.”
Matthew actually chimed in on the YouTube comments, writing:
All I can say is…HAHAHAHAHA…can’t stop laughing because that miserable kid is me! Blame the BBC for making me put those stupid glasses on just before filming…I hated them but they thought they looked futuristic. *ahem*
Apart from that had an ace day.
They wanted me to look spooky…but my grumpy face was just me being mardy and also scared. The jacket is too small for me these days, not that I’d ever wear it out for fear of damaging it.
The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics is the name of a book by Norton Juster (who also wrote The Phantom Tollbooth) which was made into an Academy Award-winning animated short in 1965 by the great Chuck Jones. Jones was the creator of the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Sylvester, Pepé Le Pew as well as as the director of several Bugs Bunny shorts considered to be masterpieces of the art of animation.
Frequently seen in 70s and 80s classrooms, The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, is the engaging tale of an uptight line who is aced out at every turn by an unkempt squiggle for the affections of a female dot. Math teachers used to show this to geometry students in an effort to get them excited by the subject. In many cases, I’ll bet it worked. Not for me, though, I sucked in math, but I do recall seeing this cartoon in the eighth or ninth grade.
This is truly an incredible piece of work. It’s as minimalist as you can get in animation, but at times it evokes MC Escher, Blue Note album covers, even the work of artist John Baldessari. The story is read by British actor Robert Morley. It’s pretty amazing. If the snow’s got you home today (it’s in the 70s here in Los Angeles, not to rub it in) you couldn’t find a better way to waste some time than with this delightful film. If you’re of a certain age, then chances are you’ll probably remember seeing it. Jones would work with Norton Juster’s material once again with The Phantom Tollbooth in 1970, a film Juster was not supposed to be very fond of.
I’m not in the habit of paying that much attention to Alex Jones, but from time to time, he does have the goods, even if his “conspiracy theorizing” often just takes matters too far for credibility. I could say the same thing for his frequent guest, investment advisor and precious metals advocate, Catherine Austin Fitts. Fitts was once the Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development during the first Bush Administration, and she’s a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the holder of an MBA from the prestigious Wharton School. She’s a sophisticated, well-traveled, passionate and intelligent woman who also happens to be a 9/11 truther and has written of her overwrought theories that the purpose of the flu vaccine is depopulation.
Oh well, can’t have everything, can we? There’s obviously a reason she’s always on the Alex Jones radio show.
Should these far-out viewpoints eliminate her as someone to take seriously on the matter of how the global economy works? I don’t think so, which is why I’m linking to this fascinating interview that Catherine Austin Fitts gave to one of Alex Jones’ producers. It’s absolutely worth your time, even if a little bit too long. Watch at least the first 5 or 6 minutes. Consider the implications of the example she uses of the three women in Tennessee and what they each did with their money. It’s striking to hear it put this way, I think you’ll agree.
And if you do, then you should really consider watching this all the way through. I did and I got a lot out of it, even if the way she sees the world and my admittedly more, er, Trotskyite “orientation,” aren’t exactly coming from the same place. Her notion, expressed in the beginning of this video, that the American people could “shift the flow” of where capital gets invested by taking it AWAY from the big banks so Wall St. won’t have such easy access to it is a revolutionary idea and she explains it in a way that anyone could understand it. This is something that Ron Paul fanatics and Marxists could probably both get behind.
Could this be the worst celebrity guest star appearance in television history? Methinks so. Watch the cringe-worthy trailer below. Also, take note on how Boy George delivers his line “Totally awesome, Hannibal.” It’s sheer brilliance.
You can watch the entire episode titled “Cowboy George” over at Hulu. Thank God!
