Billy Al Bengston was een Amerikaans kunstenaar.
Men verwijst dikwijls naar Bengstons link met de “kustom”-auto-scene en de motorcultuur. Hij was naar het schijnt de eerste om autolak te gebruiken in de hoge kunsten met psychedelische kleuren die vaak mandala-achtige vormen kregen.
Ik geef u een lied van Harold Budd (die stierf onlangs ook): “Three Faces West (Billy Al Bengston’s)” (2005).
Dmitri Vrubel was a Russian painter known for his painting My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love (1990).
Claes Oldenburg was a Swedish-born American sculptor known for soft sculptures such as Giant Soft Drum Set in the first half of his career, and extra large artworks in the second half of his career.
Spent two days on The History of Painting: From the Fourth to the Early Nineteenth Century (1907).
This history of art is a welcome change to the puritanism of the likes of Lübke.
Margaret Keane was an American artist known for her kitschy paintings of subjects with big eyes.
A resurgence of interest in Margaret Keane’s work followed the release of Tim Burton’s biopic Big Eyes (2014).
Paula Rego (1935 – 2022) was a Portuguese-born artist known for such paintings as The Dance (1988), Nursery Rhymes (1989), Dog Woman (1994) and War (2003).
Her masculine women remind me of Fernando Botero, her depictions of loneliness remind me of Jean Rustin and her graphic work of Francisco Goya.
I found her Dog Woman on the internet in the early 2000s and immediately canonized her. Following this post, I will also canonize Jean Rustin.
Ken Kelly was an American fantasy artist in the style of Frank Frazetta.
Kelly is best-known for his rock and heavy metal album cover artwork, as well as his illustrations for American horror magazines.
Jacques Villeglé was a French mixed-media artist best known for his work in décollage, the process of tearing (lacerating) posters from city walls revealing other posters underneath, thus arriving at new compositions.
His work Ach Alma Manetro (1949) is in the Centre Pompidou.
Cynthia Plaster Caster was an American visual artist known for creating plaster casts of celebrities’ erect penises.
If you are looking for a recording in mainstream cinema of a penis being cast, check Nancy Godfrey‘s work in W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971).
Hermann Nitsch was an Austrian artist who is known for his transgressive performance art.
His seven minute short “Maria-Conception-Action: Hermann Nitsch” (1969) illustrates how the past is a foreign country.
The performance is a combination of a sadomasochistic performance, artsploitation and carnography.
A typical scene from Herman Nitsch’s happenings featured cruelty, sexuality, blood and violence.
In the “Maria-Conception-Action: Hermann Nitsch” a young women is crucified and defiled with a disemboweled lamb carcass.
That film is not featured on YouTube but it can be faintly seen on footage of a concert by the band Concrete Flesh.
The closest I ever came to witnessing a spectacle like this is, is seeing Tier Mon (1988) by La Fura dels Baus in Antwerp when I was 23. And then there was Abattoir Fermé, the Belgian theater group whose aesthetics sometimes flirt somewhat with that of Nitsch.