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[news]
Work by well-regarded Seattle artists appears uncomfortably similar to that of other artists. Idea plagiarism? What's wrong and what's right in terms of originality and art is a matter of serious debate. If no one did anything wrong, then how can a work of art be tainted? Which is worse, theft or ignorance? The Stranger .
Their performances are forbidden by Belarus's restrictive regime, which controls every aspect of life in the country, in a manner that has barely changed since the days when it was part of the Soviet Union. So the Free Theatre has to keep one step ahead of the authorities. The Guardian.
A woman named Jane started a blog and said whe was going to kill herself in 90 days. She got a web following. Turns out, the blog is a kind of "art" project... "It was meant for me and (what I ignorantly thought would be) a small number of people who might find it on BlogSpot. Gawker.
The European Union proposes extending musicians royalties for 95 years as in the U.S., up from 50 years, under a plan to avoid cutting off income for artists as they retire. Bloomberg.
A massive renovation of the Museum of the Moving Image will shutter the New York facility for an extended period. YAHOO
"President Putin and Prime Minister Brown have withdrawn as patrons of the Royal Academy (RA) exhibition which opened last month." The Art Newspaper
"If anyone deserves to be called the ‘artist of the twentieth century’, that man is Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973). The forthcoming exhibition Picasso in The Hague covers his entire career and reveals his untiring urge to experiment. The works on show will include not only oil paintings, but sculpture, drawings, prints and ceramics." ART DAILY
"London Underground decides image of unclothed Venus is likely to offend commuters" GUARDIAN.
The Canadian government proposes to end a service that transports art beten museums across the country. Museums worry that traveling exhibitions will be dramatically curtailed. National Post.
From the beaches of southern England to the thoroughfares of London, the fightback against 'bad' public sculpture in the UK has begun. In recent years an unprecedented number of tasteless statues (with the rare exception, such as works by Antony Gormley) have appeared across the country. The Art Newspaper.
Aric Sigman says that all TV is bad for young kids. The phrase 'educational television' was, of course, invented by people who make television. To me it's an oxymoron. The Globe & Mail.
Canada has taken no meaningful steps toward modernizing its copyright law to meet the minimum global standards of the WIPO internet treaties, which it signed more than a decade ago. .CBC .
Leaving the stage at London's Barbican, violinist David Garrett, 26, one of the UK's foremost young concert performers, had an accident that every world-class musician must dread: he tripped and landed on his violin. The Independent .
"Understanding that people are often almost more fascinated in how dancers work and how choreography gets made than they are in the finished product, Misnomer.org has already tried a new approach to posting videos of its work online." Voice
"For my money, what makes games unique among all other forms of entertainment is that they allow us to experiment with insanely dangerous physics. Games are only arena of modern life in which otherwise responsible adults are permitted to smash expensive things all to hell, purely for the sheer joy of it." Wired
HarperCollins has decided to beging offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site. The New York Times
The arts aren't an issue in this year's election, and it's even difficult to find out what the candidates' positions are. But here's a helpful guide... DancerUniverse
Four paintings by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Degas and Monet worth an estimated SFR180m (£84m) have been stolen from a museum in Switzerland in what police today described as a "spectacular art robbery". The Guardian
Obama "beat both former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter to win best spoken word album for his audio version of his book The Audacity Of Hope: Thoughts On Reclaiming The American Dream." Houston Chronicle
Ismail Gulgee, one of Pakistan's most senior and internationally renowned artists, was discovered brutally murdered along with his wife Zareen and a maid in their house in Karachi. The Art Newspaper
"Out go the big budgets, lengthy run times and large venues. But in come the stars from the world of literature and music, who have been asked to produce 15-minute operas which will sit beside each other at sold-out shows in small theatres in Glasgow and Edinburgh early next month." The Independent (UK)
"Without subsidies or quotas, what's the incentive for theatres to show an unknown Canadian film instead of a Hollywood movie with more obvious box office potential? They'll say 'We can play a blockbuster with no advertising, no work, do nothing and everyone will come, or we can take your stupid Canadian movie and no one's going to come.' " The Globe & Mail (Canada)
Creative writing as an area of study is booming in Australia ... Australian universities now offer more than 70 of these courses. There are numerous mature-age students willing to pay universities $100-plus an hour to sit in a postgraduate writing class. But "the creative writing boom throws up striking paradoxes." The Australian
The financial markets ae in turmoil. But "most areas of the market seem to be immune from the anxieties that have been taking hold of the outside world." International Herald Tribune
Argentine cinema has carved out a niche at arthouses, taken fest kudos and plied styles like minimalism and comic bathos with taste... But now returns are narrowing as costs rise for studio time, wages and promotion. Debate is raging within the industry over how best to keep Argentina competitive in a Hollywood-dominated world. Variety.
Classical music's scrappiest record label proved to be its most prescient when the internet revolution came upon the world. What put Naxos ahead of the game, and what did founder Klaus Heymann see in the industry that convinced him to make a huge online push when he did? The Guardian.
There was a time when high- and middle-brow culture coexisted on television, in the form of wildly popular variety shows that showcased everything from dancing poodles to orchestras to The Beatles. Those shows mirrored and even led a mass pop culture that was more populist than what we have today. City Beat.
Forget the Bilbao Effect. It's not Frank Gehry who has ridden the U.S. museum-building boom, it's Renzo Piano." Piano's new addition to the LA County Museum of Art opens to the public next week, and James Russell says that the architect's work is all starting to look the same, and what used to seem innovative now just seems repetitive. Bloomberg.
Academy Award organisers have said they are 'running out of time' in the search for a deal to avoid the Oscars being hit by the Hollywood writers' strike, even as the guild prepares to present a tentative deal to its members this weekend. BBC.
They would get one Euro for each hour reading. "A recent European Commission study showed 31 per cent of Spain's students were leaving school early. Spanish students were also some of the worst at reading in Europe, with 21 per cent of 15-year-olds having difficulties, compared with the European Union average of 19.8 per cent." The Globe & Mail
"If a show with a cultlike following, stellar reviews, a not insurmountable $1 million capitalization cost -- and after some adjustments, a $50,000 weekly running cost -- couldn't turn a profit, then what could?" The New York Times
There's a shocker! A new study "calculated that Americans from ages 15 to 18 listening to 2.4 hours of music a day hear 84 references to substances daily and more than 30,000 annually. About two-thirds of the references put drugs, alcohol and tobacco in a positive light by associating them with sex, partying and humor." The New York Times
"It costs more to care for healthy people who live years longer, according to a Dutch study that counters the common perception that preventing obesity would save governments millions of dollars." Wired
"Insiders calculate that the number of post industry members who have lost their jobs or been put on hiatus is in the thousands. That figure includes great numbers of freelance workers such as editors, assistants and post coordinators as well as staffers at postproduction facilities." Yahoo
The Bush administration wants to hack federal funding for public broadcasting by more than 50% and possibly zero out the budget in as little as two years. Variety
"George Clooney, one of Hollywood's most bankable stars who earns up to £15 million a movie, has taken a swipe at the film industry, saying he believes the golden age of cinema is dead... Clooney places the glory years of cinema firmly between 1964 and 1976 when he says studios produced almost a masterpiece a month." The Telegraph
Pixar is well known for having changed animation forever, by hiring the top talent in the business and spending lavishly on the best technology money could buy. Of course, relying on computers inevitably means dealing with their obsolescence, which often comes astonishingly quickly. The Independent (UK)
"Nowhere does the [movie trailer] mention the fact that Sweeney Todd is a musical. In fact, it goes out of its way to conceal the fact that the movie is entirely sung, save for a few snippets of dialogue... Stung at paying to see a collection of tortuously constructed Stephen Sondheim tunes when they were expecting a gory Gothic thriller, a fair proportion of cinema audiences has been walking out of Sweeney Todd." The Guardian (UK)
"An Andy Warhol painting stolen from a Manhattan art gallery a decade ago has resurfaced at Christie's auction house, and on Tuesday the gallery sued to have it returned. The painting, one of Warhol's Dollar Sign portraits that was created in 1981, is worth at least $100,000." MSNBC
The inevitable rise in sea level that comes with climate change is going to make it increasingly difficult to control flooding in low-lying Holland. But instead of cursing their fate, architects are designing a new Holland that will float on water, and the Dutch government seems willing to try out the scheme. NPR.
At first glance, this seems like an excellent idea. After all, Labour's decision to drop museum entry charges 10 years ago was a sign that thinking about culture was shifting. And schemes such as Nicholas Hytner's £10 season at the National have made for bigger, broader audiences. But is a week of free events really the best way to give every member of society access to the arts? The Guardian.
The story of why "The Fifth Column" has been neglected is a complicated one, involving several mishaps, an inept Hollywood screenwriter, and a 1940 Broadway production of a bastardized version of the play. New York Sun .
The total includes record estimates for Impressionist art this week: 89 million pounds for Christie's today, 82 million pounds for Sotheby's tomorrow and 72 million pounds for Christie's contemporary art on Wednesday. Bloomberg.
Language evolves in sudden leaps, according to a statistical study of three major language groups. The finding challenges the slow-and-steady model held by many linguists and matches evidence that genetic evolution follows a similar path. New Scientist.
Why not sell tickets to rock concerts and use the proceeds to underwrite the classical end of your business? It makes sense on paper, and it's worked before." And yet, "regional symphony orchestras and theater companies are increasingly finding themselves squeezed off the stages of performing-arts centers by high-grossing Broadway road shows. The Wall Street Journal.
Hollywood's striking writers and major studios [have] reached the broad outlines of a new employment contract, resolving key sticking points over how much writers should be paid for work that is distributed over the Internet... A final contract could be presented to the Writers Guild of America's board as early as Friday. Los Angeles Times .
Interactive theater places theater-goers in the middle of things, at times making them performers. The imaginary wall is broken down in this type of work, and the audience has a different experience of what is happening.But what if the audience doesn't agree to being part of the procedings? Chicago Tribune.
Foreclosures are the dark side of the American dream. And, just as many works of art depict the joys of homeownership after long striving... others have depicted with equal vigor the pain of losing those homes -- and losing them because of fast-talking salesmen who peddled not snake oil, but adjustable-rate mortgages. Chicago Tribune.
Author George Packer, who wrote a well-regarded non-fiction book on the American invasion of Iraq, has now written a play based on the tragic stories of ordinary Iraqis who agreed to serve as translators for the Americans and paid dearly for it. "It was the struggles of the Iraqis that stayed with Mr. Packer after the journalism was done, and what prompted him to bring 'Betrayed' to the stage." The New York Times.
Oscar-nominated films are often small, dark and unintended for mass audiences. They're about art, after all, not commerce. But that's especially true of this year's crop, which has little mainstream buzz and among the lowest box-office totals in recent years. Toronto Star.
A group of Japanese, European and American scientists are collaborating to restore damaged murals in caves in the Bamiyan Valley, famous for its two gigantic statues of the Buddha that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. The Daily Star.
Researchers are working on contact lenses that could display information on it. The lenses could use the electronic lens as a cell-phone display, to see who is calling and to watch videos during a commute. MIT Technology Review
They have conditioned audiences to expect an inhuman degree of performance accuracy, comparable to what a recording studio's editing team can produce by patching together the best moments from multiple takes. Critics, meanwhile, judge performances by the degree of textual fidelity to the 'urtext' -- a score that tries to reproduce the composer's original intent. Wall Street Journal
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Sonic City has developed a piece of wearable technology that allows the user to turn a walk into a creative process by producing electronic music from an amalgam of recorded sounds, hence the creation of a 'personal sound scape'.
The purpose of the development is that of turning a sometimes monotonous task into something much less mundane.
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How much of the presentation of reality is influenced and filtered through the lens of an artist's personality and immediate context? How much will this individual perception of an artist "creating" reality determine the collective way we ourselves perceive our surroundings? Much of the imagery used in our understanding of modern life and our times came from artists in the beginning of the 20th century, but their reaction to their own historical environment has been as varied as their personalities and our own motivations to understand what surrounds us, as viewers. In 1922 T.S. Eliot published his poem "The Waste Land", which would set some of the strongest images for the understanding of his time. Erected from the ruins of the First World War, through which he lost the carefree atmosphere of his Paris years, but also lost one of his best friends, the poet Jean Verdenal, working gloomy jobs in rainy London, he begins his perception of reality by saying that "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain." Its the beginning of spring, everything is in movement, as we can see in the insistence of ending the lines in the gerund forms "breeding", "mixing", "stirring", all in copulation, excitement, but Eliot (who named the opening sequence of his poem "The Burial of the Dead"), can only see cruelty in the persistence at surviving, going on, life going on, even after tremendous tragedies. Spring had ceased to be the time for revival. "The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends / Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. / And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; / Departed, have left no addresses." But why is it that another American, springing from the same tradition and writing at the same time as Eliot, "chose" to see "reality" in a different way? For at the same time Eliot was writing "The Waste Land", published in 1922, William Carlos Williams was writing the poems for his 1923 collection "Spring and All", whose striking differences to "The Waste Land" began in the title. Part of the title poem reads "All along the road the reddish / purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff of bushes and small trees / with dead, brown leaves under them / leafless vines- // Lifeless in appearance, sluggish / dazed spring approaches- // They enter the new world naked, / cold, uncertain of all / save that they enter. All about them / the cold, familiar wind- // Now the grass, tomorrow / the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf // One by one objects are defined- / It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf // But now the stark dignity of / entrance-Still, the profound change / has come upon them: rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken". In this poem, "Spring and all", the winter deadliness is happilly, not cruelly, revived by "sluggish, dazed spring". Eliot is steeped in the reality of a metropole, London, which had been shaken by death and destruction and loss through the First World War. Williams is surrounded by pastoral American life, where he remained, and can see nothing but life "breeding, mixing, stirring" around him, sluggish and awakening. And one must only survey what was being done in other parts of the world at the same time, to understand how the cultural and personal context will determine a poet's view of reality, which we later adopt, being hard to know how much a poet sees before it becomes obvious to others and how much he defines what we see. Also from the guts of a city, São Paulo, but without reasons to link it to destruction, Mário de Andrade would write in his "Hallucinated CIty", also published in 1922: "The streets all naked / The houses in darkness / "Let me bring my handkerchief to my nose. / I have all of Paris perfumes", though his melancholy personality would also guide his eyes towards death: "Deep down. My filthy chest. / Look at the building: Continental Slaughterhouses. / Vices corrupting me in adulation without sacrifices / My soul hunchbacked like St. John Avenue". And one could go on for pages, poet after poet, relating to his historical moment through the lens of his personality, all in context, contextual reality. Bertolt Brecht, in 1925 Germany: "We have sat, an easy generation, / In houses held as indestructible / Thus we built Manhattan's tall boxes / And thin antennae to communicate the seas // Of those cities will remain their visiting wind / The house entertains the eater: he lays it empty. / We know we're only temporary tenants / And what replaces us is not worth discussion.", closer to the war-like atmosphere of Eliot, but filtered through Brecht's laconic and earthly refusal of searching for transcendence, or Vladimir Mayakovsky in Moscow: "Again and again / nuzzling against the rain, / my face pressed against its pitted face, / I wait, / splashed by the city's thundering surf." blasting in enthusiasm for his time, though we all know his later desperation and suicide. What was it again that they call universal? - Ricardo Domeneck
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Diego Rivera was commissioned to do a gigantic mural for Rockefeller Center as it was being constructed. He accepted the commission and called the mural Man At The Crossroads. Included was a small portrait of Lenin among the dozens of figures in the huge mural. The Rockefeller family was incensed. They ordered Diego Rivera to remove Lenin. He considered the demand and chose instead for artistic integrity: the Lenin figure would not be removed. The Rockefellers then ordered the mural destroyed around midnight of Saturday, February 9, 1934, by being chipped from the wall and smashed to powder. Diego Rivera lost some high pay commission work as a result of the scandal, but his artistic integrity remained intact, giving inspiration to artists and creators around the world. Something to consider! - newsdesk staff
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In the history of video art, the relationship between image and language has been researched by two artists specially: Vito Acconci and Gary Hill. In the 1960s, Vito Acconci became active as a poet in the New York scene. Along with Bernadette Mayer, he edited the experimental poetry magazine 0 to 9, which would slowly create a merge of contributions between other experimental poets and the writings of conceptual and minimalist artists active at the time, including writers such as Edoardo Sanguineti, Clark Coolidge and Jackson Mac Low (not to mention the extremely innovative texts of Acconci himself, who signed Vito Hannibal Acconci as a poet) but also the writings of artists like Sol LeWitt and Dan Graham. The magazine privileged writers and artists who drew their poetics from the materials they used in their work, and not from some external metaphorical system of signs. The name of the magazine points to a relationship with Jasper Johns in his work "0 through 9". Once Acconci started to attend readings of poetry, he realized that the presence of his own body as generator of the text simply had to play a bigger role than just that of the "oralizer" of the written. He moved then to more performance-oriented techniques, experimenting with tape recordings and later with video. Today, he is seen as a video & performance artist, and his work as a poet is largely unknown, for words infiltrated his visual work and he ceased to publish in the 70s. Although his first interests as a poet were the materiality of words and the physical space of the page, which could link him in certain aspects to the concrete poets of the 50s, such as Haroldo de Campos or Max Bense, he later stated that the page as only field of action seemed limiting, restraining. He then took to his first performance pieces, as the one known as "Following Piece", in which he would follow one person a day in the streets of New York, until they vanished into some situation that prevented him to go on. Some performances lasted 15 minutes until someone got into a cab and he was unable to follow, some lasted up to 8 hours.
The path for Gary Hill, who belongs to a slightly younger generation beginning their work in the 70s, pointed to video art first. Steeped in the materiality of his own body, Gary Hill also centered his imagery within the realm of the corporeal, but also within the shifting horizons of language processing and production. In his work "Incidence of catastrophe", the images range from his own body, curled up on the floor with traces of excrement, to those of flowing water and moving sand dunes, with fragments of language flowing as well, in a work that concentrates on syntax rather than the immanence of semantics. Hill stated: "More than traditional sculpture I was involved in material process… 'How far can I take this material?'" But once present, the artist's body must also become a tool, a set of materials, but complicating procedures even further, the artist's body is also the generator of language and perceiver of imagery, as that of the viewer. Vito Hannibal Acconci:
"A hand is placed on this page /
that is kept, then, from food stains, such as anchovies and the like /
(that might look like the letters that spell "anchovies" here, /
if they were thrown about, left and right, around this), /
but not from watermarks, /
nor is it kept -- again: kept -- keep this -- keep that -- /
keep it going -- keep it up -- /
from fingerprints, /
"as it is printed under any hand that is out of place here," /
it says here." -
If these artists inhabit a world of concepts, they never forget they are part of a contextual atmosphere which includes their own body and the social-collective processing of language. - Ricardo Domeneck
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The dream was that the Internet might bring the world together, make the exchange of information easier, allow people to cross country borders without having to step out of their homes (or flee through barbed wire fences). Even bigger a dream was to use the internet as a weapon against cultural monopolies from economical empires such as the United States. American culture, especially through Hollywood, had a tremendous impact in the post war era. Ok, even before. But nowadays, we can see other borders being crossed, and people from around the globe being influenced by the music of far away lands. One could not imagine two countries as dissimilar as Japan and Brazil, for example, although Sao Paulo is the largest Japanese city outside of Japan, and many have trailed back, making of Japan one of the biggest destinations for emmigrating Brazilians. Few countries consume "foreign culture" as wildly as Japan. American jazz or punk rock, German electro, Brazilian bossa nova, the music market in Japan is one of the liveliest in the world. One young lady, called Tigarah, is mixing ingredients one could not have imagined. Shortly after majoring in political science at Tokyo's renowned Keio University, she started writing songs on her own in her tiny room in Tokyo, inspired by the Baile Funk music from Brazil. In several trips to Sao Paulo and Rio, Tigarah devoured the electronic music being made in the slums and came out with some of the most exciting tracks in the past year. It was in Rio where Tigarah started collaborating with producer/beatmaker MR.D and they since formed a duo who write and produce everything together. Since 2003, they're recording tracks on a regular basis in Los Angeles. Blurring national borders. Japanese baile funk. Her website is www.tigarah.net, fighting national narcissism. - Kate Loss
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Paul Chan's Untitled is a video portrait of Lynne Stewart who is the first lawyer to be convicted of aiding terrorism in the USA.
Stewart faces up to 30 years in prison for "aiding Islamic terrorism by smuggling messages out of jail from a client [Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman] she was defending".
The video portrait 'Untitled' centers around language and the relationship between its poetic and lawful use.
Click here to see an excerpt from Untitled
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Keith Armstrong's Intimate Transactions
comprises of one or more participants located in a variety of physical spaces who will lie against his sensor laden 'bodyshelves'. The participants movements will thereupon translate into a series of apparitions which will flow and merge producing text, light, and sound that evolves with each participation.
His work emphasizes art-science collaborations through new media works, with particular focus on performance and installations.
Click here to see Intimate Transactions in action
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Sure, art has many uses, many so-called objectives, oh yes, some would say to console, or to teach, to stir dusty minds, but is beauty still the business of art, any art, from scribblers of verses to dashers of paint, was it ever the business of art? Or could it be that "beauty" in art, today, ends up being simply some sort of more intelligent entertainment for the dominant? Simply preparing beautiful images for the rich to brood over their tea while talking to their interior decorators?
What is the feeling we experience when exposed to works of art which provoke something more than just our corneas? Oh iris, pupil, and anterior chamber, I need more than just beauty to focus on. For there are interventionists who deliver much more than a stroke of beauty. When Pipilotti Rist one day walked down a street in Switzerland smashing car windows with an iron flower or fast-fowarded herself on a video, singing "Happiness is a Warm Gun", like a demented doll, what is it that stirs in me? It escapes beauty. Is it beauty that I perceive, not on my eyes, but somewhere behind it? What is it that I feel suddenly freeze in my stomach when I think of Leonilson using a single drop of his blood on a white sheet of paper? Marina Abramovic playing with her breathing till she colapses? Eva Hesse and her latex and polyester sculptures? Is that what one could just sigh to and say "it is so beautiful" and go home unchanged? I do not need or ask art to increase my vocabulary (would that be what beauty does?) but to disrupt my syntax, to disrespect my grammar, to change my language. - Ricardo Domeneck
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Underground currents of fertilization. When one thinks of the 20th century artistic movements, one still tends to name those who got the most press at their time, gaining thus "historical importance", and those who were widely copied, garanteeing their inheritance. Certain movements remain unsung, or seen as "just experiments" which did not have much consequence. Gertrude Stein is famous, alright, but regarded sometimes as an isolated anomaly, despite the fact that she gave us works as "Tender Buttons" in 1914 or the "Stanzas in Meditation" of 1932. How people can waste time saying that Jack Kerouac "invented" a "more spontaneous and experimental prose" in "On the road" of 1957, with its extremely conservative narrative, when Gertrude Stein had already written the "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", is something that escapes my comprehension. A poet like Mina Loy (1882 - 1966), who published her outrageous "Songs to Joannes" in 1917, is still a secret tip among passionate readers. The dadaists of Zurich are many times mentioned only as forerunners of the "more important" surrealists, who were also very conservative when compared to the much more iconoclastic works of the dadaists. The surrealists kept syntax untouched, in their literary works, and the models of representation tied to realist techniques in their paintings. Their work is seen as "more serious", easier to catalogue and file under "High Art". The extremely innovative and groundbreaking poems of Hans Arp remain forgotten, as the work of Kurt Schwitters or Pierre Albert-Birot. The paintings of Salvador Dali look better in calendars, of course, than those of Max Ernst. But it was these artists, along with Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Theo van Doesburg, plus Hans Arp, or Schwitters, who kept an underground flow of iconoclasm and refusal to settle or sell, which influenced some of the most exciting writers in the post-war era, such as Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery in the United States, or the Vienna Group (HC Artmann, Ernst Jandl, Gerhard Ruhm, Konrad Bayer), with visual art influx on the Actionists, also in Vienna (Otto Muehl, among others), or the Flux artists in New York. These destructing creators, non-artists, anti-artists, predict the death of the artist-demiurgue, and invoke the need of what I call cultural interventionists. Someone to piss again on the standards of good taste, as Bruce Nauman or Paul MacCarthy have done, or Kate Bush and Yoko Ono, or as Adilia Lopes and Angelica Freitas are doing. It is deadly serious how most have no sense of humor. Lets piss on them. - Ricardo Domeneck
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The American visual artist and writer David Wojnarowicz is among the most daring artists of our generation, who managed to be an iconoclast in love with an iconography addicted world that had already plasted the faces of Marilyn Monroe or Liz Taylor to museum walls, but was still somehow interested in the power of glamour art kept on playing within this system. Wojnarowicz then congregated more rebellious icons to rejoin our century and commit the crimes they might be bound to commit if among us. In his series "Arthur Rimbaud in NY", he photographed friends, lovers or himself, wearing a mask of Rimbaud, and performing such activities as shooting up heroine or hustling by street corners. Not the glossy party activities that some photographers in the 90s got in the habit of documenting, trying to portrait themselves and their friends as leading the amazing life even Hollywood could not have dreamed, as New York started exporting and the world consumed. All that, as if Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, Nobuyoshi Araki or Walter Pfeiffer had never existed, with their much more questioning work. In such an environment, there would be no room for the work of an artist like David Wojnarowicz, who might be called a party pooper by the photographers perpetrating glass-eyed vice for baby dolls. - Ricardo Domeneck
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When we want to sing along to the lyrics of a favourite song, we dont need to think that the word "lyrics" is a survivor from the time when poetry and music walked hand in hand. In German, poetry is still called Lyrik, for example, and if they didnt have the troubadours, they did have Walther von Vogelweide and the Heinrich Heine of the Buch der Lieder. The history of pop music, may it be rocknroll or electronic, is filled with amazing writers, who somehow kept the old joint venture of sounds and words together. Many performers actually kept the writing of poetry as a parallel activity to their composing, like Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, but gave their most amazing contributions when their words were dancing to their tunes. Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" or "Subterranean Homesick Blues", Leonard Cohen' s "Story of Isaac", Patti Smith's "Till Victory" or "Space Monkey". Kate Bush's "Sat in the lap" or "Get out of my house". The list could go on for pages. David Bowie, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson. In the eighties we had Morrissey, whom many call The Bard. The Scotish band Cocteau Twins took the merging of music and words into new levels with albums like "Blue Bell Knoll", for example, or "Heaven or Las Vegas", both the song and the album, amazing poetry. In the nineties there were bands like My Bloody Valentine, who took Liz Phraser's vocal experiments (and those of Kate Bush before her) into the realm of guitar noise experimentation, where Sonic Youth nested and dwelt, where The Jesus and Mary Chain had already begun to spawn sad beauty, and also gave us albums like "Loveless". Beth Gibbons of Portishead, Tricky, kept the flame going. Nowadays we have Sigur Ros and Mugison, poet-artist-musicians, or Planningtorock, who is able, with the tireless permutation of the words "have it all" and her vocal experimentations, to create one of the most eerie and beautiful tracks of this year. Sufjan Stevens and his dada-baroque madness. Poetry, music, twisted pop. Rimbaud, if you had only lived in our times to see these. - Ricardo Domeneck
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But boys and girls, there is no need for dogma, or tell me, would you be among those that booed Bob Dylan for going electric? Would you be there among those who threw tomatoes (even if only verbally)? Its only new equipment,and new equipment will bring new sounds, I mean, it has been over ten years that Radiohead gave in and said "Ok, mr. computer, ok". Sticking to the roots, they say. The roots of what? All I can see is the branches, and they look so exciting. They move in all possible directions, while the roots are stuck there in the ground, immovable. I dig it, I dig it, I do swear by all chuckberriness, but I do prefer the surprises of where the wind and the growth will take these new branches of pop pop pop music. - Ricardo Domeneck
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The human body has been placed in the center of art since decades. Some see the turnaround in Jackson Pollock´s painting, when his gestures over the canvas became the source of art, in direct relationship with his materials. Performance became a cultural necessity in the 60s and since then, even those dealing with new forms of technology have based some of their questionings on their own skin. One could think of video artists like Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, or performance artists who experimented also with video, as Marina Abramovic. These artists tried to save us from the extreme conceptualization that kept leading us to the unhuman obligation of being axioms, though much of their work was still based on art as the manipulation of ideas. Other artists, however, decided to work with the meager materials their own bodies provided them, not relying on any form of machinery. One radical example is José Leonilson, a Brazilian visual artist who first exhibited in the early eighties, and created some of the most visceral works through the eighties and early 90s, before dying of AIDS in 1993. Influenced by artists such as Arthur Bispo do Rosário and Hélio Oiticica, who experimented with cloth as material for art (one is also reminded of Joseph Beuys´s "Felt Suit"), Bispo do Rosário sewing throughout his life his famous "Mantle to Meet God", or Oiticica creating his "Parangolés" and dressing beggars in the street with them, Leonilson also worked with draperies and clothing in his installations. However, after falling sick in the early 90s, Leonilson began a quest for the essentials that led him to use his own blood as material for his art. In 1991 he produced the series of drawings called "O Perigoso" (The Dangerous), the first of which is a single drop of his blood on a immaculately white sheet. Once again, the exposing of oneself in the search of selfless encounter with the others. "Nobody", Leonilson, 1992 (photo above) - Ricardo Domeneck
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Bas Jan Ader has lived the stuff of legend. His work is still largely unknown, but it has caused an impact over the years on young artists who came after his cultural interventions. Born in Holland in 1942, he moved to Los Angeles in 1963 after sailing across the ocean from Morocco. Once in the United States, he studied art and philosophy, and was one of the most radical artists blurring the borders separating art from life. Maybe life as the irresistible habit of falling. Bas Jan Ader's works range from video to photography (of him arranging flowers in a vase, in a simple action which allures us in its sadness, or of him falling off trees or into cannals, or of him crying for a camera, simply "too sad to tell") In 1975, at the of 33, Ader set out on a journey to cross the Atlantic on a tiny boat. It was part of his performance "In search of the miraculous", and it was in search of the miraculous that he disappeared in mid-ocean, never to be found. It is risky stuff to ignore thin lines, to start the journey. - Ricardo Domeneck
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The writer James Purdy remains a cult figure. That is, unread. Which is a shame: author of many novels, short stories and poetry, his work has had an impact on many other writers, but he has remained a secret tip among fans.Born in 1923, he made some noise with his first novel, "Malcolm", publishing some time later "The Nephew", which is considered by many his masterpiece... but naming one work among so many of fine construct could only contribute to this aura of cool but inaccessible. His last works were the novel "Gertrude of Stoney Island Avenue" (1996) and the collection "Moe's Villa and Other Stories" (2000). James Purdy deserves to move from cult figure to read figure. We would simply be doing ourselves a favour. - Marianne Butcher
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Born in Nagoya, Japan in 1960, artist Tatsurou Bashi reinterprets public spaces and monuments, bringing us the possibility of looking at known objects in a completely new way, following the principle of "ostranenie" or defamiliarization, making the familiar strange or once again new. In "Reinterpreting a streetlight", he builds a living room around a streetlamp, giving us the possibility of looking and living with it in an unforeseen way, or as in the photo above, where he builds a new home for a homeless statue. He enables us to realize how much habit distorts our very notions of reality, and returns our public sphere to the realm of privat observation. - Detlef Blatt
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Few artists are as talented as Walter Pfeiffer, and very few are such decent people. Pfeiffer met with Flasher during a brief stay in Berlin and we were most impressed. The artist has little time for the hype which has taken over so much of the contemporary art market. He genuinely likes meeting people and enjoys conversation about art much more than hearing how great he is. Walter Pfeiffer provides real inspiration to artists instead of latching on to the latest hot thing. Watch for a Flasher video conversation with Pfeiffer coming soon. In the photo: an untitled 1985 work by Pfeiffer. - Flasher newsdesk staff
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How happy we are, for it seems we are entering a new time for performers who choose to strike their audience's ears and eyes. In pop history there have been several artists who paid close attention to their stage performances. Patti Smith's interactions with the poetry scene in New York made her specially attentive to that. She has already spoken of the impact it had on her, when she first saw Mick Jagger on stage and the crowd hipnotised by his body and voice. Still misunderstood by many, Kate Bush has given us some of the most interesting videos, striking against our standard notions of taste: when watching a video like the one for "Sat in the lap" one has no choice but to make a choice. Unassisted by the industry of conservative good taste. On video (much more than on stage, where she seems to be actually quite uneasy), Bjork has carried the relationship of visuals & sound in the work of the pop artist to new levels. So did Portishead, Tricky and the collaborations of Chris Cunningham and Aphex Twin. A new name enlisted might be Bat for Lashes (photo), who releases her debut album in September. - Kate Loss
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The poet Ezra Pound wrote it was his conviction that "music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music;" Such separations were not so clear once upon a time. Healthier days, maybe. We like to believe that after a long age of specialization, when artists no longer merged or practiced several arts at the same time, we might see a change in the scenery. It is exciting to witness visual artists experimenting with music, poets turning to the cinema. Borders are getting more and more blurred. Lets hope the one dividing the arts will also fade slightly. - Ricardo Domeneck
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A retro-tendency has dominated rocknroll in the past years. The scene swarms with pimple-faced boys fingering their guitars, calling themselves "old-school" and going over those VelvetSexRamonesStonesPistolsUnderground chords once again, ad nauseam. Its the girls that bring the excitement these days. Picking up the flame from Kate Bush, Patti Smith, Suzi Quatro, Marianne Faithfull, or The Breeders more recently, it was with angry ladies like Bikini Kill, Chicks on Speed, Le Tigre, Cat Power, Kevin Blechdom, Yelle, Planningtorock, Angie Reed, PJ Harvey, Linda Lamb, Bat for Lashes, Barbara Panther, Goldfrapp, Uffie, that pop music could remain dignified and exciting, cutting edge and on the edge, for they know rock is more than just a guitar around the neck of a boy. Let the boys play, but nothing like an angry lady in the front, as in Ladytron or Tetine or Broadcast or Ms. John Soda. New equipment is accessible, and not to experiment with it contradicts the very essence of pop music. The girls know. - Ricardo Domeneck
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