Category Archives: underrated

Free Radicals

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaYi6FlB4cw]

Scrub to 3:30 for immediate access to Free Radicals (an instant dance music classic)

The phrase “free radical” got stuck in my head, and Googling for it brought up a 1958 film by New Zealand experimental filmmaker Len Lye, titled Free Radicals. The film features white ‘chalk’ lines constantly moving on a black background with African drums (‘a field tape of the Bagirmi tribe’) playing throughout. The film won second prize out of 400 entries in an International Experimental Film Competition judged by Man Ray, Norman McLaren, Alexander Alexeieff and others, at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. In 1979 Lye further condensed this already very concentrated film by dropping a minute of footage. Stan Brakhage described the final version as “an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece (a brief epic)’. I could not agree more.

Introducing Gabriel von Max

Monkeys as Judges of Art, 1889

Monkeys as Judges of Art, 1889

 

Äffchen mit Zitrone Gabriel von Max Saure Erfahrung

Monkey with Lemon

Die ekstatische Jungfrau Katharina Emmerich, 1885

Katharina Emmerich, 1885

 

Der Anatom, 1869

The Anatomist, 1869

Gabriel Cornelius Ritter von Max (August 23, 1840, Prague – November 24, 1915, München) was a Prague-born Austrian painter. His themes were parapsychology and mysticism. He surrounded himself and with monkeys and painted them often, sometimes portraying them as human.

See also: Monkeys in art

Experience is like a comb to a bald man

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMFymZJWaEE]

Roland Topor portrait by Frantz Vaillant of Topor et moi.

Question: I was looking into the love life (cherchez la femme) of Roland Topor (who I consider the finest draftsman of the twentieth century) but could find nothing. Has there been a Topor biography? Yes there is, by  Frantz Vaillant.

Camille Paglia and black music

Camille Paglia was at the height of her popularity in the early and mid 1990s, right after the publication of her magnum opus Sexual Personae. While she is currently dismissed as a provocateur (or should I say une provocatrice?), her thought and writing are still valuable to me and she still is one of my main inspirations in the nobrow canon. Consider for example a speech she gave exactly 26 years ago at the M.I.T. where she said the following about black music:

“[…] you cannot be graduating from an American liberal arts college without knowing about black music. This is a great art form we have given to the world. Jazz, blues, Billie Holiday, Coltrane, Charlie Parker–there is no true liberal arts education in this country without that. We must do something to the curriculum to build that in. Right now dance, which is this enormous form, the most ancient of all art forms, is off there in the Phys. Ed. department–you go and take an aerobics class! You are not a liberal arts graduate until you know about dance–you know about it. You know about Martha Graham, you know about ballet, you know about the incredible contributions that African-Americans have made to dance.”

The second significant artwork of the 20th century

The Fourth Estate, Il Quarto Stato (1901) – Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo

The second significant artwork of the 20th century is The Fourth Estate, a 1901 painting by Giuseppe Pellizza that depicts in – “MGM grandeur” – sepia-toned rows of handsome Italian workers marching toward a new dawn behind two men and a woman holding a baby.

This entry is part of a new series: “100 artworks that set the world on fire (while no one was watching)”, inspired by Wire’s 100 records that set the world on fire (while no one was listening).

See the previous entries here.

Informe, abjection and Robert Gober

Happy birthday Robert Gober. Google gallery.

I have found 35 useful sources for the informe, the abject, and religious purity, which tend to be related in current discourse. These terms are often seen as variations on a theme but should be considered as quite separate according to Rosalind Krauss (see October Winter 1993 and Krauss, 1997).

Three theorists appear in this discourse: Georges Bataile, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler.

The artists that have been associated with the informe, the abject, and the grotesque include Fontana, Joel-Peter Witkin, Robert Gober, John Miller, David Hammons, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley and David Lynch. [1]

The first significant artwork of the 20th century

The first significant artwork of the 20th century is The Road to Hell, a 1900 drawing by Alfred Kubin that depicts a tunnel, at the end of the tunnel is a woman, between this woman’s legs disappear rectangular boxes speeding towards her.

This entry is part of a new series: “100 artworks that set the world on fire (while no one was watching)”, inspired by Wire’s 100 records that set the world on fire (while no one was listening).