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Jamie Gillis / Peter Sotos - Pure Filth

March 6, 2014, 11:45 am
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Jamie Gillis (born James Ira Gurman; April 20, 1943 – February 19, 2010) was an American pornographic actor, director and member of the AVN Hall of Fame.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Gillis






















Peter Sotos (born April 17, 1960) is an American writer and musician. In his books, Sotos examines sadistic sexual criminals and sexually violent pornography, particularly involving children. His writings are interpreted by some as commenting on media hypocrisy around these issues. His books are often first person narratives, taking on the point of view of the sexual predator in order to explore sadistic and pedophilic sexual impulses.






















Jamie Gillis appeared in over one hundred films, and as such was a primary performer in pornography’s “Golden Age.” Gillis is also known for inventing the “Gonzo” genre of pornography, played out in the film Boogie Nights by Burt Reynolds’ character.

Pure Filth appears as transcripts from the films Jamie produced during these early years of radical and highly personal pornography. Completed just before his death in February 2010, Gillis contributed an introduction to each transcript to shed light on his ideas and plans, as well as anecdotal details and personal commentary. The book has more to do with an artist’s understanding of sex than the mere views of a flesh peddler. The careful language and brutal intelligence that Jamie brought to interviews are what separates the conversations from any other work that might have more academic or prurient pretensions.

Extreme novelist Peter Sotos, perhaps better known and appreciated in France and the United Kingdom than his home country, was a good friend of Jamie Gillis, and Sotos’ unusual perspective makes this volume possible.
http://feralhouse.com/pure-filth/






















This one is a little hard to pin down since it's transcripts from some of Jamie Gillis extreme porn vids. It's good, it's interesting, it's thought provoking, it's more than a little disturbing and it's certainly not for the faint of heart. 
Russell Grant
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13236856-pure-filth

While Sotos’s most recent work, Pure Filth, seems tame compared to his earlier work, it offers a glimpse into his universe without the extremities of the illegal and grotesque. Pure Filth takes as its subject the gonzo films of porn star Jamie Gillis, whose enterprise was adapted into the scenes in Boogie Nights where Burt Reynolds takes Heather Graham out on the town in a limo to have real sex with strangers on tape. As it turns out, P.T. Anderson’s version of Gillis’s series “On The Prowl” is well beyond tamed down. The actual videos feature Gilis leading a series of hired escorts into backseats and dirty bookstores and hotel rooms to take part in whatever kind of debauchery the men they encountered wish to subject them to. Gillis would direct the scene via a constant stream of taunts, slurs, jeers, and encouragements, which frequently ended with Gillis joining in himself. The films feature golden showers, analingus, physical violence, and a general sense of degradation of the females even as they willingly, and in seeming pleasure, take their part.

Pure Filth is, simply, Sotos’s transcriptions of the dialogue that occurred in selected bits from Gillis’s films. The text provides little-to-no actual dictation of what is happening in the video; at most, we receive minimal parenthetical notations such as: (ass to back) or (piss). As readers, then, we are left without visuals that might have given some kind of context to the scene, which somehow builds an even more relentless, blank-faced wall of hell. By stripping the ongoings down to only language, the reader’s mind is forced to bear the brunt of the images itself, filling in the white feed of the paper with a kind of what I can only describe as sick ambient sound. Early on in the series this equates to a ridiculous and well-known skronk, such as “Oh. Yes. Yes. Oh honey, where’d you get those panties? Where’d you get those panties? Oh. Oh. Let me see more panties—those panties, where’d you get those, Jesus. Beautiful.” As the book goes on though, and as Gillis’s enterprises continue to knock down their own walls, it turns to something more unsettling: “Is that dog shit? Dog shit? Is that dog shit? Look at yourself. Come on, you know what you are. Who’s a fucking whore? Huh?” The book becomes more and more inductive to a neutered kind of violence, which somehow in its 2D hold sticks even more, if in a way that holds fully still.
Blake Butler
http://www.vice.com/read/the-putrid-voyeurisms-of-peter-sotos-1 

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Claude Cahun - autoportraits

March 8, 2014, 10:13 am
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I Extend My Arms, 1931 or 1932

Claude Cahun (25 October 1894 – 8 December 1954) was a French artist, photographer and writer. Her work was both political and personal, and often played with the concepts of gender and sexuality.

Cahun's work encompassed writing, photography, and theater. She is most remembered for her highly-staged self-portraits and tableaux that incorporated the visual aesthetics of Surrealism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Cahun






















Self Portrait, circa 1925

Cahun steals the show. But this extraordinary figure would be a star anywhere. There is more to her than dressing-up, although from 1917 to her death she made herself the playful subject of hundreds - perhaps thousands - of photographs and photomontages, many now lost. Raiding the prop-box was only the visible aspect of her self-invention. Her gaze pulled itself away from the narcissist's mirror, turning to face those on the other side of the camera.

With lacquered hair and kiss-curls, and wearing a Clara Bow pout and love-hearts on her cheeks, she appears in a 1927 photograph sporting a shirt on which she has written 'I am in training. Do Not Kiss Me'. Her shirt has sewn-on nipples, and she is cradling a set of dumb-bells. Elsewhere, she looks like one of Hans Bellmer's mannequins, and in another shot she bears an unnerving resemblance to Pierre Molinier, another Surrealist photographer and cross-dresser, whose career is also being revived.
 
Cahun's photographs record an extraordinary life, and are the record of an enormously prescient artist whose chief concern was transforming and transcending her self. She created herself, and singled herself out.
Adrian Searle
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/photography--behind-the-mask-who-was-claude-cahun-man-woman-or-member-of-the-third-sex-adrian-searle-reviews-the-genderbending-surrealist-photographer-1444902.html






















Untitled (Self-Portrait), 1930 - 1939

A writer born into literary royalty, with a pseudonym to hide the fact; a forebear of Cindy Sherman, with only one self-portrait published in her lifetime; a lesbian in love with her step-sister; a Jewish, Marxist Surrealist – Claude Cahun is probably the most complicated artist you and I have never heard of.

Cahun effectively vanished from history. Her membership of the Surrealists and her political activities in Paris, her written texts encompassing, among other things, an attack on Louis Aragon, a French translation of Havelock Ellis's Woman in Society, a parody of Oscar Wilde's Salomé (the original of which her uncle had edited), and a vast array of self-portraiture – all of it was forgotten. It wasn't until well after Malherbe's death in 1972 that French writer François Leperlier was prompted to dig deeper. His subsequent biographical works are the only ones available, though Cahun's oeuvre has since become an intermittent battleground, with feminists and leftist art historians squabbling over her proper place in their respective narratives.

For Cahun was a writer, first and foremost – and no amount of artistic squirming could change that. As W Somerset Maugham explained, "We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to." Indeed, Cahun was encouraged to write by all who knew her – most especially Breton. "It is essential," he wrote to her, "that you write and publish – you must keep telling yourself this."
It was, however, her dilettantism – a refusal to fit in, to be pinned down as "writer", "woman", "lesbian", and master her craft – that rendered Cahun a blind spot in the history of the last century. As she herself wrote: "Individualism? Narcissism? Of course. It is my strongest tendency, the only intentional constancy I am capable of. Besides, I am lying; I scatter myself too much for that.
Gavin James Bower
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/14/claude-cahun-finding-great






















Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore - Untitled: Cahun and mirror image, 1928

Born in Nantes in 1894, Cahun was the niece of fin de siècle literary heavyweight Marcel Schwob and was later hailed by Surrealism’s ‘Pope’ André Breton as ‘one of the most inquiring minds of our time’. She also survived two World Wars – and, alongside her step-sister and lover Suzanne Malherbe, was a resistance fighter on their adopted home of Jersey in the Second. A writer of poetry and prose, self-centred curator of tableaux, a skilled sketch artist, photographer and muse, a poseur, actress and performer, composer of objets d’art, a propagandist and saboteur…she was nevertheless all but forgotten by the time of her death in 1954. Following Malherbe’s suicide in 1972, Cahun’s work was sold in a Jersey auction but has only in the last two decades enjoyed something of a renaissance – thanks in no small part to French historian and biographer François Leperlier.

Through every medium she employed, Cahun was willfully narcissistic in her quest for self-identity. As the centre of her own work, she refused to submit either to narratives or preconceived relationships of subject to object, while she returned the scrutiny of her audience – and her own investigations – with uncompromising effrontery. She sought to reflect rather than deflect, and never shied away from what was for her an unanswerable question: Who Am I? Rather than attempting to solve the mystery of Claude Cahun, therefore – by positing her, explaining her, and so somehow understanding her – I tried my best to ditch agendas, abandon narratives, and follow her lead.

Cahun was far from prolific. Of the work that survived her tumultuous lifetime and the passing of years since her death, the question of authorship (not to mention target audience) is by no means in all cases clear. She was the most unreliable of narrators, disingenuous, dissembling and deliberate in subsuming her identity while, on the surface at least, attempting to reveal it. But none of this matters, because to be a Cahunian is akin to addiction: to art for art’s sake; to the most unknowable of all things; to a life lived without compromise, with courage and conviction. When Marcel Duchamp said ‘my art is that of living’, he was talking about individuals like Cahun – for her life was a remarkable one, and a masterpiece unparalleled by anything she would ever produce on paper or through the lens of a camera. To us Cahunians, Claude Cahun is art.
Gavin James Bower
http://www.fluxmagazine.com/index.php/arts/claude-cahun/

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Tom Burr - Bulletin Boards

March 10, 2014, 3:03 pm
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Brutalist Bulletin Board (detail), 2001

Tom Burr (born 1963) is an American conceptual artist, based in New York.

In the late 1990s Burr embarked on a body of work that remains ongoing; derived from the language and forms of both Tony Smith's sculptures, on the one hand, and closed architectural spaces such as bars, cages and boxes. These works, often borrowing Smith's matte black palate, evoke spaces of control and containment, as well as the "safe zones" of underground cultures.

Alongside these works, Burr developed his now iconic Bulletin Boards, originally created out of the excessive collecting of images and materials that are part of his working methods. Constructed through plays of juxtaposition, the boards are markers of place, often reflecting the situation of their exhibition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Burr

Slacks, 2008

Here, a collection of photographs layered black-and-white images of the Minimalist vocabulary and yet sinuous and mostly jet-black forms of Tony Smith alongside (and on top of, and beneath) stills from Kenneth Anger’s cult film, Scorpio Rising(1964) , with its ironic rock-and-roll send-up of 1950s American values, its youthful James Dean rebel-types polishing and rubbing their “Christmas tree versions of motorcycles” (to paraphrase Anger), with its fetishization of the black leather uniforms of biker culture, and its exaggerated overtones of homoeroticism, violence, and brutality. The incongruence of the pairing, of Tony Smith and Kenneth Anger, of deadpan Minimalism and parodic exaggeration, gave way under these image-conditions to an overarching work of correspondence, as the accumulation sought out visual rhymes between black sculptures and black leather jackets, polished Minimalist surfaces and the gleam of the boys’ bikes, the play of light off crisp sculptural facets and the bathing of beautiful male bodies in shadow, serial sculptures and the repetitive phallic pool cues or metal stools of the biker bar, esoteric geometries and the arcane symbols (including the Nazi swastika) of the bikers—between one form of sexiness, or one form of violence, or one form of fetishization, and another . The result is a contagion of meaning, in the wake of which none of the former valences of the objects in question will remain.

Such has been the work of most of Burr’s bulletin board projects. In Brutalist Bulletin Board (2001) , for example, various photographs of the corrugated, rough-hewn sur faces of that Minimalist variant of architecture known as Brutalism were grouped with and compared to the seductive and idolized “character” of the rock star Jim Morrison of The Doors. In a series of photographs worthy of the fanzine, we are shown Morrison posing, and laughing, and vamping for the camera. We see the star pulling sensuously on a cigarette, or staring vapidly, his plump lips at times half-open in the notorious Morrison scowl, or simply in toothy, empty, perhaps slightly stupid abandon. And the implication of the collection is that the Brutalist architecture, presented here in fetishistic pieces and image fragments like the body parts of Morrison, is doing all of these things, too: it is a pose, a vamp, a scowl, a per formance; it is empty, and vapid, and masculine, and seductive. Incongruity, in such works, arises from a potentially jarring historical com
George Baker
http://thepuritan.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/baker_burr.pdf

Black Bulletin Board, 1998

TIMOTHY HULL: You've used this appropriative physicality of photos in works like "Brutalist Bulletin Board  (2001), and so I am interested to hear your thoughts on the queer aesthetics of the brutalist style of  architecture.

BURR: The first time I worked with that imagery was for an early bulletin board that juxtaposed images of Jim Morrison with these Paul Rudolph buildings from my hometown of New Haven, which added a heightened sense of my own autobiography. It's important to have multiple parallel reasons to include something in your art so you can't be pinned down to any one. But the idea of Brutalism as an abject, ugly, and bulky architecture was appealing to me, because of its rebellion against conventions. There is a real subversive contradiction there because Brutalism became the dominant style of government and municipal architecture, yet it also had an erotic quality to it. I was interested in that contradiction; the latent adolescent rebellion of Brutalism.

HULL: This may sound like a left-field question... do you believe in ghosts and other psychic phenomenon? What is the nature or role of ghosts in your life or work?

BURR: Do I believe in ghosts? Well, I suppose this is a similar question to the one earlier on about modes of memory or history... because I think that ghosts do exist as buoyed by a collective memory or consciousness regarding a person or the idea of a person. Our desire for lingering essences of people is enormously powerful and can certainly take on the trappings of a phenomenological experience.
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/tom-burr/

Caged Kate, 2009

By sexualizing institutional critique Burr’s work reveals the waste and luxury of any spectacle. His work makes available the sexualized zone of seeing anywhere at all ­ the body existing liminally between sex/not-sex, which is the inescapable, spectacular, mutating instantiation of seeing/being seen. His work should be considered in relation to the sparse erotic environment of Calvin Klein’s John Pawson-designed flagship store, the situational burdens of Paul Reubens, and the dizzying contradictions of Travis, as much as in relation to Minimalist sculpture (Tony Smith and Richard Serra), institutional critique, and the allegorical site (Robert Smithson). Burr allows all these things to be the commentaries and reflections of one another. Call it Brutalist in that it necessitates a confrontation between different registers of cultural discourse.

‘Brutalism’ was the title of Burr’s most recent show at Galerie Neu, Berlin. It built upon previous work: Black Box (1998), which broke down a plywood black box into four corners, using a mirror for one of the sides, and providing a ledge, bar height, upon which were placed black ashtrays; Black Bulletin Board (1998), which juxtaposed stills from Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964) with pictures of work by Tony Smith and photos of a dark, butch bar; Black Pavilions (1999), black plywood garden pavilion mock-ups; and his discrete photographic study, Palm Beach Views (1998), of four and a half metre ficus hedges in Palm Beach, Florida, ‘through which only extremely rare, and potentially criminal glimpses into private gardens were possible’. ‘Brutalism’ centred around Quartered (2001) where the black box, divided into four Goth cubes, generated a black boxing ring. Bringing his interest in site mobility to a new level, the entire structure was poised on rolling wheels. Instead of biker boys, bars, and Smith, there were two black bulletin boards with photos of architectural works situated in New Haven, Connecticut (Burr’s place of birth, and the academic residence of architect Paul Rudolph, Brutalism’s paterfamilias). Insinuated darkly among these structures glowered photos of Jim Morrison (as Burr wrote for the press release) ‘... posing, dancing, and being arrested on stage in the New Haven Coliseum ... for verbally assaulting a police officer who accused Morrison of making a public sexual display with his girlfriend ... further secur[ing] his arrest by chanting ‘fuck the police’ on stage during the concert and encouraging the audience to accompany him.’ Two of a suite of six black ‘chairs or chair-like forms’ in wood with cushions of black vinyl completed the exhibition’s decor, providing ‘the anti-brutal with heavy residual traces of repressed brutality’.

The paths taken to expedite the transactions of desire have environmental consequences, an ecology. The landscape design term for such shortcuts is ‘desire lines’. Burr is tracking such lines.
Bruce Hainley
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/black_box_recorder/ 

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DC's - Father Ted Day

March 12, 2014, 10:49 am
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Jack Rabbit ‎– Only Wanted To Be

March 13, 2014, 1:12 pm
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Me and James used to DJ back in the 80's and the concept behind this song was about a crush he had on my ex girlfriend's best friend . We all used to hang out together but she only saw him as a friend and believe it or not he actually cried over this girl. He was one of the coolest cats you would ever want to meet. R.I.P. " Rabbit " that's what we called him back in the day,we rarely called him James 
smuvgs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O07zy3eCw90



If there is a Robert Johnson of Chicago House Music, it's James "Jack Rabbit" Martin.

For nearly 25 years, Martin's poorly distributed (and often poorly pressed) records have been discovered, re-discovered, treasured, bootlegged, bought and sold for extortionate prices. It's not uncommon for an original pressing of his only long player, There Are Dreams And There Is Escape, to fetch several hundred dollars from record collectors (at press time, there is but one up for grabs on discogs.com - for the asking price of $970.02).

In 1988, James Martin's four track record There Are Dreams And There Is Escape was pressed by Yoton Records, an imprint which Martin appears to have created especially for his first original release. Yoton released no other records; its business address was a small house at 10847 S. Prospect.

UK label Westside Records released a version of There Are Dreams'"Only Wanted To Be" as a white label. In a one-sheet preserved and posted to discogs.com, Westside's Paul Ruiz alludes to the buzz about Martin in the country. "If you've gathered who Jack Rabbit is, you can convince yourself that this one of the softest records he's ever made!" But the real treat was what was on the flip: an acid mix that is absolutely mental, and - adding to the legend of Jack Rabbit - has still never been commercially released.

This is a fact: what is often regarded as the greatest acid record ever made has been limited to bootlegs and a reported 200-run white label pressing.
Terry Matthew
http://www.5chicago.com/features/january2013/there-are-dreams-james-jack-rabbit-martin/

This is a rather rare record that has recently been bootlegged. I’m pretty sure my (bootleg) copy has the labels on the wrong sides. The title of the release is ‘There Are Dreams And There Is Acid” and both tracks features a very high level of sound quality and production compared to other acid house records of the time, with individually effected drums – heavily flanged hi-hats and reverbed claps. Whereas a lot of acid tracks are just quick jams knocked out in an afternoon (and it’s true that if you gave 100 monkeys 100 TR808s and 100 TB303s, you’d probably get more than 70 decent acid tracks) this track stands out as a seriously thought-out song with fantastic sounds and structure.
Ed DMX
http://www.factmag.com/2014/01/22/20-best-acid-house/21/

The vocal is oddly disconnected, like those Italo records in which you can tell the vocalist doesn't really understand English and is singing the words phonetically. And really with that climbing bassline and spartan chords, it does remind me more of an Italo record than anything else in Jack Rabbit's catalog.

For the acid remix, you have simple drum patterns and a 303 line - relatively simple by Jack Rabbit standards - vibrating like a rubber band. But note that little 2 note rise buried in the mix that throws the whole thing awry again and then takes over entirely just before the fade at 4:00. This is a more subtle track than the pyrotechnics of "Rabbit Trax" - and still raw as fuck.

It wouldn't be a legend if there wasn't the rare b-side obscurity. And this is a rarity among rarities. The white label from UK label Westside Records was released with 200 copies to start with and obviously that number has dwindled significantly since 1988. Phuture's "Your Only Friend" is an obvious reference point with that demonic voice of the River Styx that takes a bit too much satisfaction in calling you out and rattling in the steel ribcage of this incredible track. This is nearly the only track with those creepy vocals from the era that doesn't sound kitschy today. It sounds terrifying.
Terry Matthew
http://www.5chicago.com/features/5-records/james-jack-rabbit-martin/

Im not sure really how to start this review about this 12, as no matter what I write it just wont be able to tell you enough. I had this white lable for a long time before I knew who actually did it. This 12 is all about the side that was never released, the acid mix of 'only want to be'. I have a large collection of acid house from the time but this was truely and is still the darkest piece of them all. The production is magnificant, the acid line and 707 that runs the trk is sublime but the genius is in the f-ked up vocals and the dark story of emotion that it tells...Such a shame that he only released a few trks.... The 'jack rabbit' was a master of the Acid House. If you are after the definitive acid house trk of all time, you have found it.  
tecnos6
http://www.discogs.com/Jack-Rabbit-Only-Wanted-To-Be/release/459672

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Plastik Zine Launch @ Generator Projects 14.03.14 - pictures

March 14, 2014, 1:43 pm
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To the Generator this evening for the launch of Plastik, a new bi-monthly Zine coming out of Dundee. I took a few photos and here they are:

The name of the zine is Plastik Zine

The New Young Masons scout for recruits

Plastik features artistic contributions including images, drawings, photomontage, haikus, poems etc


https://www.facebook.com/plastikzine
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history

March 17, 2014, 3:56 pm
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Isidore Ducasse Memorial Plaque, 2009

Extract from Paul Zweig - Lautreamont: The Violent Narcissus:

Apparently Lautréamont understood the danger of his poem, and was fascinated by it. The starkness and the strange immediacy of the language here characterize Maldoror. The entire poem seems to take place at an intersection between literature and madness. The language is warped into uniqueness by the associative pressures of the primitive mind (the unconscious), and yet controlled, magnificently, by the rhetorical form of which the poet never loses sight. The result makes the poem seem self-generating and monolithic. One experiences Maldoror as a unique vision of cruelty and revolt, a poem whose rhythm is so compelling that it must be "authentic," a true if terrifying call from the depths.

   This undoubtedly explains the reverence for Lautréamont expressed by André Breton and the French surrealists, who insisted that Maldoror must never be allowed to enter literary history, inserted between "this fellow and that fellow"; that Lautréamont had, at all costs, to be rescued from "literature." It also explains the feeling of scandal created when large passages in Maldoror were found to have been cribbed word for word from naturalist encyclopedias, and others were shown to echo, in a style just short of plagiarism, a whole panoply of popular writers from Michelet and Victor Hugo, to Goethe, Byron, Baudelaire, Sue, Shakespeare and others, too. In fact, on the evidence, few works of literature in the nineteenth century (which was so compelled by the romantic values of "authenticity" and "sincerity") were so resolutely literary as Lautréamont's late Gothic epic.

   Ultimately, the fascination Maldoror continues to exert on readers probably will be defined by this enigma of a poem which breathes a uniqueness that is all but hallucinatory, while clinging at every moment to all its cultural and literary origins. In the end, one cannot decide whether Isidore Ducasse was a master of rhetorical effects, and a very great master at that, or a man driven mad by writing, whose poem must be read as a history of his madness.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2094842.Lautreamont
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Society - shunting

March 19, 2014, 8:04 am
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Society is an American horror film. It was finished in 1989, but not released in the US until 1992. It was Brian Yuzna's directorial debut and was written by Rick Fry and Woody Keith. The film stars Billy Warlock as Bill Whitney, Devin DeVasquez as Clarissa Carlyn, Evan Richards as Milo and Ben Meyerson as Ferguson. Screaming Mad George was responsible for the special effects. Society is considered to be a minor classic in the body horror sub-genre.

Bill finds a large, formal party. He is snared by the neck and Dr. Cleveland reveals all of the secrets he has been searching for. He is not really related to his family after all. In fact, his family and their high-society friends are actually a different species from Bill. To demonstrate, they bring in a still-living Blanchard. The wealthy party guests strip to their underwear and begin "shunting". The rich literally feed on the poor, physically deforming and melding with each other as they suck the nutrients out of Blanchard's body. Their intention is to do to the same to Bill. In a fight with Ferguson, Bill manages to pull the pliable Ferguson inside-out. With Milo and Clarissa's help—who is also of this alternate species, but has fallen in love with Bill—he escapes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_%28film%29

The 20-minute climax, in which a disbelieving Bill is presented to the nouveau riche as the latest addition to their flesh fondue (the 'Shunting'), remains one of the most startling, shocking, and frankly exhilarating endings in the genre, let alone one of the kinkiest uses of latex in any medium. 2005's Slither may have upped the latex stakes, but SFX genius Screaming Mad George's sobriquet is entirely justified, as a crowd of thoroughbreds, stripped to their underwear, and "bent out of shape by society's pliers" to quote Bob Dylan, rearrange their DNA - dad really is a butthead - and slither through one another's yawning cavities like wet, red slugs.

Had the Marquis De Sade taken too much Camembert before bedtime, he'd be hard-pressed to imagine anything quite so brilliantly disgusting. It may be a one-gag picture, but it executes that gag with wit, flair and delirious abandon. Marx and Engels would surely applaud. Unfortunately, so would David Icke.
Ali_Catterall
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098354/reviews 

What exactly is "shunting," you might ask? Well, if I could try to put this as mildly as I possibly can, it's got something to do with the Beverly Hills nouveau riche asserting their privilege in ways that suggest a Salvador Dali nightmare of Caligula. And given that the man responsible for bringing this indelible image to life is Screaming Mad George, who handled Brooke Theiss' cockroach disintegration scene from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, you might want to lay off the munchies given that the entire third act of Society involves a mass shunting party held for the indoctrination of teenage lead Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock, Baywatch star and son of stuntman Dick Warlock from Halloween II& III).

Society has been waiting for Billy, but he's been left wanting. Despite his affluence presenting him alpha male status as both a basketball jock and senior class president, Billy still visits a shrink, Dr. Cleveland, confessing to a home life plagued by "incest and psychosis," and that there is something dubious about his privilege that he's afraid to explore. Enter David Blanchard (Tim Bartell), the chunky ex-boyfriend of Billy's pampered sister Jennifer (Patrice Jennings), whose planted tape recorder unveils references to "copulation" in regards to the girl's coming out party that frighten Billy even more. Blanchard turns up dead, and the unctuous taunts of elite preppie Ted "The Tycoon" Ferguson (Ben Meyerson) force the reluctant Billy to scratch the surface of society.

Society packs plenty of unforgettable images involving the goopy, ghastly contortions of flesh. Early on, a voyeuristic glance at Jenny in the shower hints at shapes of things to come, and Billy's sexual encounter with Clarissa, in which she is found in a rather "funny position," is shrugged off with a "pissing in the tea" joke. It all culminates in a finale that gives Yuzna and Screaming Mad George (credited with not merely special, but "surrealistic make-up effects") the chance to one-up the methyl cellulose monstrosities of Stuart Gordon's From Beyond. To arrive there, though, we have to consider the notion that Bill might potentially paranoid, a bit of character detail that doesn't particularly shine through in script or performance. It really isn't a matter of whether or not Bill might be too self-absorbed in his angst, but of waiting for someone to recognize the shady goings-on involving (dis)appearing corpses and incestuous sexuality are not detritus of the imagination.
John Bishop
http://mind-of-frames.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/society-spontaneous-combustion.html

Tim Bartell: After getting the part, I remember initially being a little freaked out reading the script. Especially my character going through the shunting. I drove to my agent's and said, "Um... there's people I don't even know licking my body in this." He talked me into going through with it. But I was still a little nervous.

And the shunting is of course what stands out for me about the shoot. I remember lying on that couch, screaming and crying as I was being sacrificed to Society... half naked, covered in slime with lots of people fondling and licking me. I had made the mistake of telling one of the crew I was a big fan of art house filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Between takes he would lean in and say, "Tim, Bergman just called! He's very proud of you."

But I really went for it as an actor. I wanted to make my death uber-painful to watch. And I succeeded. Director Brian Yuzna later told me while he was editing my death, he had a visit from one of the actors from Night of the Living Dead. The actor was so disturbed by my performance, he left the editing bay. I was really proud of that. Brian decided my death had to be lightened a little. He cut and trimmed, brought down my screaming and added in some waltz type music under the scene, so it wouldn't play too heavy. Which was probably a wise directorial decision. I screamed so much over the course of the day we shot most the shunting, I lost my voice. We shot a little more the next day, but I had to do that part sans my voice.

The whole thing was frankly a little creepy to play at times. You know you're in a film, it's just a part. But I'm crying, screaming, begging for my life. Everyone is laughing and growling at me like animals. I got a little overwhelmed at one point. I thought it was just pain in my legs, because I was crouching then inside the couch, with the prosthetic version of my body attached at my neck. My legs were really sore. I got a break and an extra came over to me and said "It's hard, isn't it?" He didn't mean my legs. He meant just playing this whole weird scene. His acknowledging that really made me feel a lot better.

But I don't regret the experience at all. It's been nearly 24 years since we shot Society and I have nothing but really the fondest memories of it. Yes, even the shunting.
http://gorehoundmike.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/1980s-retrospective-series-society.html


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March 22, 2014, 4:51 am
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Nami Shimada - Sunshower

March 23, 2014, 4:08 pm
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Nami Shimada was (she retired from singing in 1990) a J-Pop artist and although I’m not fond of that genre, a few tracks she did, like Sun Shower released in 1989, are really more Garage or House than Pop. And they are good.

On a side note, Nami Shimada now appears to be DJing in Japan.
okay_awright
http://overfitti.ng-dis.co/?p=329 

Nami Shimada (島田奈美)was one of the aspiring idol singers of Momoco Club. She had a very pure and  girlish appearance and a charming smile that guaranteed that her face was seen as well in TV commercials of Clearasil and Sapporo Ichiban ramen (with famous actor Takuya Fujioka 藤岡琢也). Nami Shimada never had a real hit song, but she was always present in chart shows like Top Ten and Best Ten, usually in a place 9 or 10. A fact that might give some ideas to those, who have for a long time suspected that the lowest places on chart shows were open to the highest bidder. 

In her final recordings Nami Shimada was no more an idol singer. She had become a club beat vocalist, whose voice was distinctive and clear. Sunshower (1990) became a much played house hit thanks to remixes by Larry Levin and others. It made Nami Shimada’s name known in brand new musical circles. However, Nami was no longer around. In the last releases she didn’t even appear as Nami Shimada. She used her real name Naoko to point out that the idol career was over. 
jari lehtinen
http://kayokyokuplus.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/nami-shimada-onegai-kiss-me-again.html



In September and October 1992 Larry Levan had a triumphant D.J. tour of Japan. Even though The Paradise Garage had closed five years before his star was still shining bright around the world. On that tour he played amazingly to rabid crowds but he was suffering physically due to his deep drug addiction.

One of his last remixes was Sun Shower by Nami Shimada. This deep house mix of a song by an 80's Japanese pop star was released in 1991 on Columbia records Japan. The 12" also featured a Mark Kamins dance mix. Danceteria legend Mark Kamins and Paradise Garage star Larry Levan enjoyed a particularly elevated status in Japan and could easily fill dance floors as often as they were willing to play in clubs like Gold, and EndMax.
ExpatMichael
http://discovinyl-discovinyl.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/sun-shower-one-of-larry-levans-last.html 



This one runs deep. Apart from being an amazing track it also brings fond memories of the times we spent in Japan and the friends we made there. For a few years we toured extensively through Japan. DIY Crème-style of course, in trains, crashing on couches, in weird plastic hose-down hotels, playing back alley gigs in off brand towns etc. This network disappeared after a while, after everybody branched out in all kinds of directions. One of the best nights there was a gig in Tokyo where we presented the record and Nami DJ-ed with a Yakuza style body guard standing there the whole time and middle aged Japanese fanboys in the audience waving autographed pictures.

A short history, [Nami] was a big J-Pop lolita star in the 80′s in Japan, and her vox on this Soichi Terada prodution are a bit of a fluke. The track got picked up by Larry Levan who made it a footnote in House-history. She choose a different career path and became a writer.  We managed to drag her out of exile for one night and put her behind the decks. It all felt pretty special. The place was a real sweatbox too, a ram packed basement with no emergency exit and just a small concrete staircase leading down into it. Proper Asia-style. I remember thinking, “If faith strikes tonight and we don’t make it out of here, then I’m OK with that.”
DJ TLR
http://www.factmag.com/2013/09/10/the-top-10-essential-creme-organization-tracks-as-selected-by-dj-tlr/7/ 

 
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Öyvind Fahlström - maps

March 26, 2014, 3:10 pm
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ESSO-LSD, 1967

Öyvind Axel Christian Fahlström (1928–1976) was a Swedish Multimedia artist.

Although some critics such as Frances Richard dismissed him as a "throwback to Surrealism or Agitprop at worst" other critics, such as Mary Flanagan have seen his use of games as constituting examples of critical play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96yvind_Fahlstr%C3%B6m

Pentagon Puzzle (detail), 1970

With images based on jigsaw puzzles, dollar bills, and pie charts throughout, it`s easy to see why Fahlstrom`s work gets lumped under the rubric of Pop. But he doesn`t really belong there. Notes 6 (Nixon`s Dreams), 1974, for instance, shows a blue-faced, insomniac Tricky Dick counting panthers jumping over a police barrier and an electrified map of South Vietnam lying on a catafalque surrounded by gold bullion. Notes 7 ("Gook"-masks), 1971-75, a handcolored etching, depicts Smokey Bear, Angela Davis, Uncle Sam, of course, and personifications of Hiroshima and South Africa. What American Pop-ist would base an entire composition on snatches of poetry by Sylvia Plath (Sixteen Elements from "Chile I," 1976/89), or include in a dense, rollicking silkscreen a request addressed "Dear Picasso" that the artist remove Guernica from MOMA until the United States withdraw from Southeast Asia (Column no. 2 [Picasso 90], 1973)?

Fahlstrom`s relative lack of critical lionization is belied by the fame of some of Pop`s abject, punk-rock offspring whose work was prefigured in his-among them Raymond Pettibon, Matthew Ritchie, Carroll Dunham, and Mike Kelley. In fact, any contemporary artist who mixes words with pictures, sociocultural reference with dreamlike personal form, or writing and performance with painterly and graphic production is, to a certain degree, Fahlstrom`s inheritor. There`s little about this artist that isn`t, still, en avant.

Indeed, like the late Mark Lombardi, whose post-Conceptual depictions of political and financial malfeasance bear a distinct relation to this very body of work, Fahlstrom is an artist one wishes were here to comment now: Guernica, rejected by the UN in February 2003 as a too-embarrassing backdrop for a press conference on Iraq, has again become symbolic in the struggle against a crypto-imperialist US-led war, while the problem of creating effective agitprop that maintains aesthetic independence is, of course, perennial.
Frances Richard 
http://www.mutualart.com/OpenArticle/Oyvind-Fahlstrom/12CD1BFCFB5F2215

Eddie (Silvie's Brother) in the Desert, 1966

His art was a stew of references, half-submerged allusions, enthusiasms and conversations, both with the living and the dead. It is difficult to see how, precisely, he got from A to B, from a fascination with Antonin Artaud (whom he translated) and Marquis de Sade to AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh, or from championing an American comic book artist like Robert Crumb, to producing an installation of shiny, flat metal cut-outs derived from the forms in Crumb's cartoons. And from here to his interactive artworks based on the Monopoly game, to his gorgeous annotated maps and to his final works, with their moveable elements (if nothing else, Fahlstrom's work is a precursor to the fridge magnet), and their pointy, bulbous, extruded, blunted, somehow nasty, Miro-esque forms.

Fahlstrom's sketchbooks and notes are, throughout, wonderful jams of words, diagrams, fanciful machines, pictographs, petri-dish dictionaries, highly wrought but unreadable hieroglyphs, lists and graphic explosions. I dare any commentator to untangle their logic, but perhaps that doesn't matter. Their fertility is the thing. While his drawings and private notations show Fahlstrom's thought in flight, his early paintings are just clogged, agglutinative and somewhat dead layers of formal and linguistic material. 

Fahlstrom was in essence a graphic artist. His enthusiasm for comic-book illustration and cartoon strips as well as his interest in Matta (a terrible painter who could have been a great comic-book artist) serve to highlight where Fahlstrom's own talents really lay.
Adrian Searle
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2002/oct/01/art.artsfeatures

World Map, 1972

What really separates Fahlstrom from most American Pop artists is the literary underpinning of his work. His art is less concerned with showing than with talking. Its origins, in fact, are primarily in concrete poetry, for which he wrote a manifesto in 1953. No wonder he was captivated early on by the work of Giuseppe Capogrossi, the Italian artist whose paintings consisted of swarming iterations of a single highly variable letterlike character. Writing and drawing existed on a continuum for Fahlstrom, with innumerable intermediate varieties and no inherent contradiction. (Maybe that's why he never saw formal exuberance and referential specificity as antithetical.) Similarly, he recognized no essential distinction between work in two and three dimensions, or between a painting on the one hand and a board game with movable pieces magnetically attached to their wall-mounted support on the other. Such "variable paintings," probably his best-knownwork, engaged him from Babies for Africa, 1963, through Night Music 4: Protein Race Scenario (Words by Trakl, Lorca, Plath, and Pietri), realized in 1976, the year of his death.

And yet Fahlstrom's art was not as protean, as infinitely permutable as he may have wanted it to be. In particular--and in contrast to the brilliant use of photographic imagery by the equally adept draftsman Warhol--whenever Fahlstrom stepped away from that drawing/writing continuum and yielded to the temptation to use the neutral gaze of photography, his work loses energy, looks dated. (I am thinking, notably, of The Little General (Pinball Machine), 1967, with its flotilla of pictorial elements drifting freely on a pool of water.) His subject matter extended to the grand scale of geopolitical events (essentially a new form of history painting) and, though his political aspirations are less interesting than his anxieties and even paranoia, to utopian desires for humanity at large, as in the installation Garden--A World Model, 1973. But its embodiment was always entrusted to the eccentric immediacies of the hand, the insubordinate divagations of a line that had more than a little affinity with Surrealist automatism, as shown, for instance, in the studies that make up 20 Improvisations (for Chile 2), 1973-74. Such forms, as incorporated into Fahlstrom's more elaborate compositions, could be deliberately athwart their constative meaning. Their intricacy, as the artist himself once observed, "may have something of the surprising beauty of tropical fish."
Barry Schwabsky
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/OYVIND+FAHLSTROM.-a075761320

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ART101 preview

March 27, 2014, 2:58 pm
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ART101 is an actual thing, a YouTube channel that's due to launch sometime in 2014. What follows  is my interview with Art in Scotland from January with a compendium of clips and images: 



Dundee based artist Ben Robinson introduces his project ‘ART101‘, a YouTube channel created by Ben as a response to the government’s discussions to get rid of art education. Ben pitched his idea of an arts channel to the Dundee Visual Artist Award, and won thus helping him kickstart the project.

Art 101:
Written and directed by Ben Robinson
Performed by Morgan Cahn
Editing and FX by Andrew Maclean




Sequence 01 1 from Ben Robinson on Vimeo.

Sequence 02 from Ben Robinson on Vimeo.

Sequence 03 from Ben Robinson on Vimeo.

Sequence 04 2 from Ben Robinson on Vimeo.
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Navid Nuur - RENDERENDER @ DCA 28.03.14 - pictures

March 28, 2014, 2:30 pm
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To the DCA this evening for the opening of Navid Nuur's show RENDERENDER, an "inventive and playful array of new and existing work" featuring "magical mixed media installations". I took a few photos and here they are:

When you end I begin, 2008-2014

The Dundee art massive

City Soil, 2009-2014






















 Ours, 2013






















Never Mind the Map Never Map the Mind, 2009-2013

Recaptured from the Collective, 2006-2014

Untitled (broken ellipse), 2014, Untitled, 2006-2014






















 Untitled, 2014

Somewhere at night, black got stabbed, 2012

Untitled, 2014

http://www.dca.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/navid-nuur.html
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Ren & Stimpy - Powdered Toast Man

March 30, 2014, 1:49 pm
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The Ren & Stimpy Show, often simply referred to as Ren & Stimpy, is an American animated television series, created by Canadian animator John Kricfalusi. The show premiered on August 11, 1991, on Nickelodeon as part of its Nicktoons block along with 'the titular characters: Ren Höek, an emotionally unstable chihuahua, and Stimpson J. Cat, a good-natured, dimwitted cat. The show ran for five seasons on the network. The show has received critical acclaim and developed a cult following during and after its run, while some critics credit it along with The Simpsons for leading the way for satirical animated shows like Beavis and Butt-head and South Park, and playing a significant role in television animation. Throughout its run, The Ren & Stimpy Show was controversial for its off-color humor, sexual innuendo, and violence which were rare for television animation of the time. This controversy contributed to the production staff's altercations with Nickelodeon's Standards and Practices department.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ren_%26_Stimpy_Show

Powdered Toastman is a superhero seen in "Powdered Toast Man". He is an extremely dramatic and oblivious vigilante and spokesperson for Powdered Toast, the breakfast treat that "tastes just like sawdust". He was based on a Frank Zappa inspired character. Powdered Toast Man appeared in various Powdered Toast commercials within The Ren and Stimpy Show, and starred in two episodes of the show, "Powdered Toast Man vs. Waffle Woman" and "Powdered Toast Man" (which had a guest appearance by Frank Zappa as the Pope). Oddly, Powdered Toast doesn't taste right unless Powdered Toast Man farts on it before it is consumed.

Powdered Toast Man can fly, either by releasing flatulence, by inserting his head into a special toaster and launching from it, or merely by pushing off from the ground. Importantly, he flies backwards. He can also hover in mid-air. His powers include some offensive weapons: high-velocity raisins shot from his mouth, hyper-corrosive croutons fired from his armpit, butter pats that are launched from the top of his head, and hyper-acidic marmalade from his navel. There are several signals that alert Powdered Toast Man to danger — his tongue phone, the inflation of his briefs, the dissipation of the toast particles in his head, or the reading of emergency messages encoded in slices of olive loaf. He is apparently made entirely of Powdered Toast, as he can produce fully formed Powdered Toast by flicking his wrist or by separating his head (which is made of two pieces of toast) and scraping the interior with a butter knife. His head is therefore depicted as being made of two identical pieces of toast, each complete with a face.
http://renandstimpy.wikia.com/wiki/Powdered_Toastman

I remember when I first saw Powered Toastman. I begged my mom to find the Powdered Toast in the grocery stores and she gave me a weird look.

All of the drawings are incredible!!!!
Sandra Rivas
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/ren-and-stimpy-curiosities.html 

Early in the second season of Ren & Stimpy, there appeared a rollicking and utterly disrespectful segment called “Powdered Toast Man.” 1992. The character of Powdered Toast Man unified the clueless and self-important silliness of The Tick with the tendency to wreak havoc of, say, Inspector Clouseau or Maxwell Smart. Voiced by the incomparable Gary Owens—and you might not know the name, but if you’ve ever seen Laugh-In or Space Ghost, you sure as hell know his voice—Powdered Toast Man was the spokesman for, obviously, a product called Powdered Toast, which was billed as tasting “just like sawdust!” According to Wikipedia, he was based on the character of Studebacher Hoch, from the epic song “Billy The Mountain” of off the Mothers of Invention’s 1972 album Just Another Band from L.A. I frankly don’t quite see the connection, but anything’s possible.

It’s kind of amazing just how dark and subversive the Powdered Toast bit is. The anti-advertising message is just the start of it. Tasked with saving a kitten from being run over by a truck, Powdered Toast Man causes a passing jetliner to crash into the truck, thus saving the kitten at the expense of who knows how many lives (the injured survivors cheer him on anyway). A few moments later, Powdered Toast Man thoughtlessly tosses the kitten out of frame, where he is apparently run over by a truck, to judge from the sound effects. Later on, he uses the Bill of Rights for kindling. He induces projectiles to emerge from his armpits by doing that “fart noise” maneuver, he uses his own tongue as a telephone…....... actually, you really need to see the video to believe it. The satire of the prevailing superhero ethos really couldn’t be more savage—or more entertaining.
Martin Schneider
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/starring_frank_zappa_as_the_pope_ren_stimpys_powdered_toast_man_1992 



Powdered Toast Man had appeared in a bumper during season 1, and this time he takes center stage.  It’s significant because it’s the first time that Ren and Stimpy merely appear in cameo roles.  There would only be a few other instances in the series where the duo were minimal or absent entirely, but thankfully this episode is still enjoyable despite their limited screen time; it proves the show can be engaging following other characters.

The titular hero (this time played by veteran actor Gary Owens), normally disguised as a mild-mannered government clerk, kicks into action when he gets the all-important distress call.  First up in need of help is a cat crossing the street that’s about to be hit by a truck.  A common problem, but how PTM handles it is absurd:  He takes down an airplane to hit the truck before it collides with the adorable kitten.  Yay, hundreds of innocent lives lost, but at least the kitty is okay!  And he discards the feline very soon after getting another distress call anyway.

Next, the pope’s in trouble.  He’s been taken hostage by Muddy Mudskipper, who is now a villain, I guess.  Side note:  The Pope’s voiced by famed musician Frank Zappa, the only cartoon he ever did.  And one of his few roles, period.  It makes sense that he would voice a religious figure on a subversive cartoon; it totally fit in with his “challenge the system” personality.

After saving The Pope, it’s time for a more down-to-earth (but no less severe!) problem to solve:  Ren and Stimpy are out of their beloved Powdered Toast breakfast!  PTM zooms in, restocks them by scraping one of his toast heads, and takes off.  But the two are less than satisfied; it turns out PTM forgot to give the powdered toast that extra “spice” to make it extra nice.  So PTM returns, apologizes, and farts on their breakfast as he takes off again.  NOW, they’re pleased.  Hey, don’t ask me; maybe PTM’s farts are bakery fresh.

Finally, PTM rescues the president of the U.S. from his own zipper.  I’m surprised what the show got away with; what other kid’s cartoon was this edgy in 1992?  After a successful rescue (if you want to call it that; he’s clearly out of commission), PTM is abruptly made president, promising to deprive all citizens of their human rights.  I dunno, this may have been a funny gag at one time, but when you consider some corrupt/totalitarian governments in the world do just that, not to mention that we have to constantly remain vigilant to ensure that our own government doesn’t fall into the same trap, it loses much of its absurdity.  That said, the crowd at his inauguration doesn’t mind, so that makes the gag a little funny, I guess.

The cartoon ends with PTM and his beautiful secretary in need of some heat, so PTM casually burns the Bill of Rights and the Constitution in the fireplace.  Again, see the paragraph above; it’s honestly a little uncomfortable nowadays.  Doesn’t mean Nick was right to censor it back in the day, though; besides the obvious negative of censorship, it’s not like kids out there can imitate this action or anything.

“Powdered Toast Man” is a good episode, showcasing a superhero who gets results, but often in the worst way possible and not caring after he reaches his goal (besides the cat throwing, he places The Pope on a tall, remote mountain just because Ren and Stimpy need more breakfast).  And Gary Owens is perfect for the part, sounding sort of like a nasal Space Ghost.  “PTM”‘s flaw is that it’s merely a series of unconnected set pieces; as entertaining as they are, it’s just PTM going from one disaster to the next, with no particular story arc or momentum.  While season 4′s “Powdered Toast Man vs. Waffle Woman” had a simpler art style, it had a better plot and even a touch of emotion.  But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
ianlueck
http://renandstimpyreviews.blog.com/2013/01/25/powdered-toast-man/ 

 
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Sarah Lucas - NUDS

April 5, 2014, 6:50 am
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NUD 18, 2009

Sarah Lucas (born 1962) is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged during the 1990s. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour, and include photography, collage and found objects.  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Lucas

NUD CYCLADIC 15, 2010

In 2009 Sarah Lucas starts NUDS, a series of new works, sculptures where stuffed tights on plinths of concrete breeze blocks assume polymorphic shapes. Recently, casted in bronze, NUDS have gone beyond representation to become pure, polished, shining forms. Suggestions of, allusions to limbs of female and male bodies embrace entwined, entangled, breasts and genitalia melt one into the other in the eternal fight between Eros and Thanatos. The third gallery at Whitechapel, which opens with Self-Portrait, 2000, outlined in cigarettes on brown paper, shows in all their sculpted, elegant morphism, the cast bronzes NUDS 2013 like Nduda, Realidad, Hoolian, Nahuiollin.
Floriana Piqué
http://www.theartsection.com/#!copy-of-sarah-lucas-absolute-beach-man-/cw9j 

NUD 19, 2009

With her series of "NUDS" sculptures, begun in 2009, Lucas heightened her work's abstraction. Each features stockings stuffed with foam on a cinder-block plinth. The forms are twisted, like balloon sculptures, to evoke tangles of swollen limbs, the gatherings in the fabric their orifices. The stockings hark back to an early sculpture included here, Bunny Gets Snookered #1 (1997), which straightforwardly represents a nude made out of stockings draped over a chair. The "NUDS" sculptures, however, deliteralize this impulse, introducing a Brancusi-esque indirectness. They make one feel unwantedly, unspecifically illicit. A series of recent versions substitute the stuffed stockings with bronze casts of them, highlighting the Brancusi allusion while sacrificing the fertile associations arising from the mottled fleshy surfaces of the stockings. The polished bronze connotes "figure sculpture" before we have assimilated the abstraction of the form.  
Mark Prince
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/sarah-lucas/  

Obsidiana, 2012

Rail: Talk a bit about the Nuds Cycladic show that you did at the Museum of Cycladic Art. I know it kind of grew out of your bunny sculptures and developed into this sort of human form.

Lucas: I suppose it’s obvious to say they developed out of the bunnies because they use the same materials. But in a strange way they developed out of Penetralia. That was the next thing to come along. There is something very organic and branchy and sprite-like about them. You start making something, and it suddenly jumps to life and it seems so clear that you can’t believe you didn’t see that years ago. I mean, there is no reason why I shouldn’t have done something like that immediately after doing the bunnies. I do tend to jump around from one thing to another just for my own amusement. I like the change of materials. Enough fluff up your nose for so long and then you start to think, “Actually, I wouldn’t mind dealing with something else for a bit.” So that’s one thing. But I think it also just depends how you have your point of view adjusted at any particular moment. I really think that having it adjusted into these trees, and the “branchiness,” and the organic things, lead me to notice that about the Nuds. The first Nud was actually just a screwed up old bunny that had been in the back of a cupboard for some years. When I went through the cupboard and came across it, I suddenly saw something in it that I hadn’t seen when I screwed it up.

Rail: How did the bunnies come about to begin with?

Lucas: The first bunny, actually a hare, was started around the time I had this shop. I decided to make a kind of the Tortoise and the Hare sculpture, which actually never worked out, so I abandoned it. I stuffed the tights to try and make a kind of hare’s legs—it does look a bit like a hare’s legs—and at the time it was stuffed with newspaper. There was something about those legs. I never worked out the tortoise bit and I just thought it was a bloody silly idea anyway, but there was something intriguing about the life-likeness of those legs, so I put them on a top shelf in my kitchen at the time. When I returned to it some years later I wasn’t thinking of the tortoise and the hare; I don’t know what I was actually thinking of, but I remembered the sexiness of these legs. Only this time I decided to stuff them with fluffy cotton. It was when I stood back and looked at them around a chair that I thought, “There’s something so going on here.” So it developed out of that, really.
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/09/art/sarah-lucas-with-william-corwin 

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John Miller - brown

April 6, 2014, 1:58 pm
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Now We’re Big Potatoes, 1992

Born in 1954 in Cleveland, John Miller is a Conceptual artist who is inspired by a corrupted pop-cultural aesthetic. He is best known for his "John Miller brown" sculptures, as well as his more recent assemblages of trash and found objects covered in gold leaf. Miller lives between Berlin and New York, where he teaches at Columbia University. His work was included in the 1985 and 1991 Whitney Biennials, and he has had solo exhibitions at Metro Pictures in New York, Tokyo's Center for Contemporary Art, and MoMA PS1.
https://paddle8.com/work/john-miller/26719-untitledhttps://paddle8.com/work/john-miller/26719-untitled

Salute, 1990

In the 1980s, Miller became notorious for his works that liberally employed a shit-brown acrylic paint. The brown paint covered and unified the various objects and materials that constituted his paintings, assemblages, reliefs, and sculptures. So much did the substance come to unify and symbolize his oeuvre that “John Miller Brown” or “J.M.B.” became a trademark of sorts. As Bataille’s bassessecountered Breton’s high-flying optimism, so J.M.B. might be understood as a materialist antidote to the I.K.B. or “International Klein Blue” of Yves Klein’s cosmic monochromes.
Roy Arden
http://www.royarden.com/media/ardentexts/arden_consolation.pdf 

These Foolish Things, 1990

The American artist John Miller is often mentioned in the same breath as his contemporaries – such as Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, Stephen Prina and Jim Shaw – though his place within this generation is, on the whole, much less acknowledged than that of his peers.

The human desires that can be submerged within the banal are also the theme of Miller’s sculptures and reliefs assembled from found objects on panels and coated with a thick paste-like layer of paint. In recent years, the artist’s signature paint colour, ‘John Miller brown’ (a term coined by critic Peter Schjeldahl in 1990), for which he became widely known in the 1990s, has been partly replaced by imitation gold leaf. Evoking Freudian associations with excrement and money respectively, the brown and gold objects create a strange contradiction: because the mass of shells, swords and shoes are rendered amorphous, we’re compelled to focus on their forms rather than their functions.
Felicity Lunn
http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/john_miller/

Scatological humor is probably as old as culture itself--but in art of the '80s and early '90s, jokes about excrement proliferated, provoking a lot of nervous laughter. RUN FROM FEAR/FUN FROM REAR--that's one of the ways Bruce Nauman put it. He also paired clowns and toilets to flush out the complexities of pleasure, pain, and self-consciousness that rim the act of evacuation. Remember Mike Kelley's 1987 felt banner that blared PANTS SHITTER AND PROUD P.S. JERK OFF TOO, or the video Heidi, 1992, made with Paul McCarthy, that featured sausage turds and a sustained involvement with defecation? McCarthy's performances take us to the compacted core of identification with disgust that, in turn, is linked with creativity. At this juncture, we find ourselves at the deep end of theory.

Given the climate of angst and obsession that percolates in the art of his colleagues, John Miller's world of brown impasto paintings, reliefs, and sculptures, produced from 1985 to 1994, pop into view as disarmingly happy and full of hilarity. At a safe distance from the emotional spectrum of humiliation, Miller's works resonate at the level of child's play. The body itself, particularly the adult body, with its baggage of psychic wounds and scars, seems to be long gone, apparently the victim of a tidal wave of brown that's mucked everything up, as in Restless Stillness, 1991, which features the remains of a body felled and, Pompeii style, petrified by the stultifying ooze. Presented in a six-foot slab of the hardened crap that looks as if it were cut from a larger debris field, this flashback to utter destruction delivers a vicarious thrill.

Twenty years ago, Miller's work (and the idea of abjection in general) was grounded in theories of late capitalism and could be read as a critique of mass culture and the institutionalization of art--indeed, Miller was among the leading theorists in the art world of the first polemical wave of postmodernism. We may continue to read discourses of disenfranchisement in his work, but today concerns are quite different. Rather than expose the insidious dimensions of commodification, the bent and boom of contemporary art leans in the direction of "youth culture." Hand-made, highly crafted, but kind of crappy, quirky, funny, messy, juvenile, and favoring the goth--the formal aspects of art invested in one way or another with adolescence or childhood show a remarkable affinity with Miller's vintage work. What have kids and critique got to do with one another? On the basis of Miller's brown art, and its generational recontextualization, the question has officially been opened for discussion.
Jan Avgikos
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/John+Miller%3A+Metro+Pictures.-a0118445859


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The Other People Place - Lifestyles Of The Laptop Café

April 8, 2014, 6:42 am
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James Marcel Stinson (September 14, 1969 - September 3, 2002) was an electronic music producer from Detroit, Michigan. He is known for his contributions to electro and Detroit techno music. James Stinson grew up the east side of Detroit and graduated from Kettering University in Flint, Michigan in 1989. He was one of the two members of Drexciya from 1992 to 2002; he produced the last few albums on his own. He died of heart complications in 2002. At the time of his death he was married to Andrea Clementson-Stinson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stinson

It was long rumored (and later confirmed) that the anonymous producer behind the Other People Place guise is James Stinson, one half of Detroit electro geniuses Drexciya, but with the familiar jazzy tech-house rhythms that fill most of Lifestyles of the Laptop Café, it could be anyone with an ear for early Detroit techno. In fact, very much of the record sounds like the work of second-wave visionary Carl Craig. A sophisticated structure emerges from Lifestyles that is held up primarily with deep bass and warm synths. The rain-drenched, dark-street rhythms and liquidy chords that comprise the leadoff "Eye Contact" (and other standouts like "Moonlight Rendezvous and "It's Your Love) recall Derrick May's "Strings of Life" while carrying with them an entirely new theme. "Eye Contact is one such track that is spiced with soothing spoken lyrics intended to lampoon '90s culture (the male voice re-enacts a falling-in-love-from-across-the-room-whilst-sipping-a-latte situation; very '90s, indeed). Lifestyles is at least on par with any of the Detroit records of old, but where radio-friendly Inner City might have failed, Other People Place picks up, maintaining the high dance factor but with zero cheese factor. Detroit techno serves as a touchstone for Lifestyles, but this record is hardly a nostalgic throwback to those idealistic times. Instead, every track treats the music respectfully, pushing forward in a very new groove.
Ken Taylor
http://www.allmusic.com/album/lifestyles-of-the-laptop-cafe-mw0000591046

Electro for the 23rd century shopping mall crowd: While searching vainly for holiday deals on Hoverboards, customers retain only the vaguest awareness of the familiar 808 drums and analog synths, which combine to create a stimulating soundtrack to their outing. The mall proprietors are pleased.

“Was electro always this sweet-sounding?” a curious young girl asks her mother.

The girl is perceptive. By the Other People Places, Lifestyles of the Laptop Café effectively bridges the gap between funky old-school Detroit techno and the aesthetic of blissful atmospherics. Though it isn’t the first to do so, it is certainly one of the best examples. In terms of percussion and groove, the songs are very similar to the work of groups like Drexciya and Elektroids (membership likely overlaps), while the layering of non-percussive sound is much more reminiscent of Carl Craig or the Orb. While most electro aims to be sparse, the Other People Places fill in the gaps with rich, warm noise.

The warmth of the samples is the perfect complement to the classic depth of the grooves. “Moonlight Rendezvous” and “It’s Your Love” are perfect executions of this principle, striking a balance that defines the record. Then there are tracks like “Lifestyles of the Casual,” which could have been a Dopplereffekt song in another lifetime, and “Sunrays,” which is pretty and cosmic and ends the album on an unexpected note.

Lifestyles of the Laptop Café isn’t a record that will set the kids out in search of new software to achieve heretofore unheard sounds. Its brilliance isn’t in the newness of the equipment used to make it, but rather in the superior quality of the songwriting, the depth of the beats, and the inexplicable desire it generates for purchasing Hoverboards(tm). Regardless of who actually has their hands in the 
Other People Place, the songs on this record are obviously the work of people who know their genre inside and out and can lay down groovy, nicely layered tracks with admirable consistency. See you in the future.
Ben Tausig
http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/15

After long talks on the internet she finally agreed to meet in real life. Eye contact was made. A simple kiss exchanged deep emotions, awoke peace of mind, confusion and love. People on the streets noticed and looked in awe. It's your love. Impressed, in a different city a moonlight rendezvous occured. She said she want me. She said i know what i want.

Some days later the cavities of life reached out. Enough with that! Let me be what i wanna be. Suddenly she was gone. Was she running from his love? Gone? Back to earth, yet luckily there are the sunrays.

Project produced by James Stinson about a love born which prematurely ended. James died exactly one year after the release. Rest in peace my friend.
Ron242
http://www.discogs.com/Other-People-Place-Lifestyles-Of-The-Laptop-Caf%C3%A9/master/5383 

There are eight gorgeous slow paced tracks on this album, six with vocals. Due to the lyrics this the most direct Storm yet, with no confusion about the sentiments of the tracks. Love and possibly lust are what makes this record tick. The only exception being ‘Let Me Be Me’ which appears more broadly philosophical in nature with the repeated vocal loop of ‘Let me be what I want to be.’ I think this is also my favourite track, such a simple statement which could be directed at parents, lovers, anyone in authority over us. I think it may also be the central piece of the album which connects to the previous storm as it echo’s similar sentiments on the Transllusion album about finding your true self.

The longest vocal is on the opener ‘Eye Contact’, “What do we have here? Wow! Something's happening to my transmitters, starting to over load., sitting here in this cafe drinking my latte. Something's happening to me. What do I see on the other side of the room? My my, hmm that's what, my, she’s gorgeous. So let me slide over, transmission, communication sent.” It sounds like he might have sent her a wireless infra red message or did he really slide over and talk? The following track, ‘It’s Your Love’, has a vocal loop of “It’s your love that’s keeping me sorry” which gives some emotional balance. ‘Moonlight Rendezvous’ is instrumental but the title references the lyrics of 'Running From Love’, “ I’m a fugitive in the moonlight just running from your love”. Maybe the instrumental soundtracks what happens when he stops running? The idea of running from love might be to ask why we are afraid or unwilling to give in to those emotions. It could be another reference to how modern society is growing ever more complicated, so much so that we would prefer to resist something as precious as love. Although love can still break your heart without any interference from outside.

The first appearance of what seems like a female vocal appears on ‘You Said You Want Me’. The woman asks that question to be answered by the male “You know I do.” I guess with technology this might not even be a woman singing, but I would like to think that it is, something else we‘ll never know. In fact there is an obvious question here about the male vocalist. Is this Stinson or Donald, if either. I would plum for it being Stinson, only because it just doesn’t sound like Donald but we’ll never know unless we’re told. Another female vocal, presumably the same person/effect, is on the closing ‘Sunrays’. Another standout track on an album full of them. The lyrics loop the phrase “Relax your mind, slowly unwind, catch some rays of the sunshine.” Sublime and so simple. Not a love song, more a chill out/simplify message which does chime in with the whole getting back to nature concept.
‘Lifestyles of the Casual’ is another instrumental and a bit of a mystery. I guess as it’s so close to the album title it may mean we can refer to the inhabitants of the Other People Place as Casuals, but this might be taking it too literally. It could mean the lifestyle of accepting casual occurrences also, but that is really just another literal interpretation.

Love and the awakening of an inner life could certainly be described as a storm and fits in well with the concept so far.

There is one other release by The Other People Place that I want to consider, even though it came out a year later and on a different label. Sometime in 2002 Clone released the 12"'Sunday Night Live at the Laptop Cafe'. This was the first time Clone hooked up with Drexciya and they went on to build a strong relationship with the band culminating with their Grava 4 swansong and continuing into today with Der Zyklus. Of course to add more confusion this is actually The Other People Place featuring Mystic Tribe a.i. First of all the producer of Mystic Tribe is Sherard Ingram who is a respected producer in his own right. He must have been a close friend of Drexciya as he is also their Drexciyen DJ Stingray. The mesmerising and very ‘Lifestyles’ sounding ‘Sorrow & a Cup of Joe’ is credited to TOPP while ‘Telepathic Seduction’ is down as written and produced by Mystic Tribe a.i. The artwork presents a mock handwritten poster on the window of what looks suspiciously like the Clone record shop. It reads, ‘performing at midnight The Other People Place’ and ‘special guest Mystic Tribe A.I. will be performing at 2am’. Maybe this release is more oddity than anything, only linked to the 3rd Storm by its titles. But as Stinson himself said of storms, that they can be pretty chaotic, a piece of debris like this flying off should come as no surprise in this context.

I suppose to sum up in very broad strokes where we have got to with the interpretation of the series would be wise at this point.

‘Harnessed The Storm’ is the violent scene setter that tells us that all is not well but ends on a note of hope of a new kind of life.

‘The Opening of the Cerebral Gate’ is when things start to become clear, it is the first real step in the Storm towards this new life. We learn to look within and explore our mental dimensions.

‘Lifestyles of the Laptop Cafe’ tells us to continue this process of finding our true selves but also to develop/retain basic human emotions, especially love and not to become a victim of the coldness of technology/modern society.
STEPHEN
http://www.drexciyaresearchlab.blogspot.co.uk/2005/08/other-people-place.html

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Hannah Höch - Album

April 10, 2014, 1:50 pm
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Album, c. 1933

Hannah Höch (German: [hœç]; November 1, 1889 – May 31, 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_H%C3%B6ch

Höch's Album is a scrapbook of a little over 100 pages into which she pasted 421 photographs cut from magazines and newspapers. It is not an exercise in photomontage as such; almost all the images are intact, and the book's visual intensity is mostly a matter of how they collide and rhyme across double-page spreads. She borrows liberally from fashion photography, movie-star portraits, architectural studies and natural-history close-ups. The legs of dancers and naked gymnasts resemble nests of scaffolding and the spindly forms of Karl Blossfeldt's plant photographs; dogs and kittens stare soulfully like Hollywood starlets and pompous statesmen. It's been argued that the Album was a repository for motifs to be employed later in her photomontages, but the effect is actually of a fully achieved work, in which the forms and images of mass media meld and interlace into an exotic whole.



Unlike many of her contemporaries, Höch stayed near Berlin between 1933 and 1945. Unable to exhibit, she began collating the Album – a change in her method, putting existing images together in a way that, shown here in a book, allows viewers to find meanings in their juxtaposition, rather than cutting fragments together to generate new works. Her interests in the New Woman and ethnography remain constant, but overt visual messages are resisted – unsurprisingly, given the conditions.
Juliet Jacques
http://www.newstatesman.com/juliet-jacques/2014/01/new-woman-berlins-feminist-dadaist-pioneer-hannah-h%C3%B6ch

Her collages are like an analog version of a Tumblr blog!
Thombeau
http://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/hannah-hoch-scrapbooks/

I checked out Hannah Höch's Album that she created in approximately 1933. It consists of 114 pages and contains over 400 photographic illustrations from periodicals. She liked images of female nudes, cats, and children as they are the most commonplace photographs. She liked cats so much, I scanned all the pages with them.

From Gunda Luyken's essay: “She created associative contexts which, knowing the circumstances of her life, permit of very impersonal interpretations. Beyond this, her album is marked by purposely introduced ‘disturbance factors.’ One such conscious accent, for instance, is the head of an emu, set on a double page otherwise devoted entirely to cats.”

In case you were wondering (because I was), Album contains 18 domestic cats.
j. russell  
http://jacindarussellart.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/hannah-hochs-album.html

A major coup of the exhibition is ‘The Album’, a corridor dedicated to Höch’s 1934 ‘encyclopaedia of images’. Though not collages themselves, they document clippings from magazines of the era which appear later in her post-war work. This collection of ‘scrap books’ is an academic tool that bridges the development of her pre-war work, and her increasingly abstract post-World War Two work. Between clippings from Life Magazine and women’s titles from the period, a commentary on consumer lifestyle can be gleamed between beaming faces, advertisements (and the occasional cat).

It also marks a cut-off point in Höch’s personal and private life: as the Nazi party rapidly came to power through the 1930s, Höch retreated into isolation. By this point, her association with the Dada artists was largely over, but her work, increasingly gripped by politics and themes of exoticism, (some of her earlier collages explored images from colonial Africa, fixating on dancers), singled her out as a “cultural Bolshevik”. Marking the start of what Höch described as “12 terrible years”, her albums provide a private insight into how, despite her inability to exhibit, the germ of creativity remained as she documented the world around her.
Betty Wood
http://www.port-magazine.com/art-photography/hannah-hoch-at-the-whitechapel-gallery/


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DEFINITE MOTION @ Generator Projects 11.04.14 - pictures

April 11, 2014, 2:17 pm
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To the Generator this evening for the opening of DEFINITE MOTION, a show bringing together practices from Scotland, mainland Europe and The Americas to model and resist forms of capitalist exchange. I took a few photos and here they are:

The name of the show is DEFINITE MOTION

Ellie Harrison - Anti-Capitalist Aerobics

Danilo Correale - The Warp and the Weft

Kosta Tonev - The Heavenly Bodies, Once Thrown Into A Certain Definite Motion, Always Repeat

Toril Johannessen - Non-Conservation of Energy (and of Spirits)

Anna Moreno - Read the Newspapers

http://generatorprojects.co.uk/definite-motion/
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