In anticipation of the sold out Brian Eno and Jon Hassell conversation on Sept 22, here is a gem for your pleasure. Eno performs here with legendary Roxy Music in the early 70’s, freaking out on tambourine and, er, keyboard? Here he is rocking his crucially dangerous “vampire peacock” look. Check out that skullet!
Also, here’s one for your desktop:
http://consequenceofsound.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/roxy_band0.jpg
I really enjoyed Walker photographer Gene Pittman’s recent post about his portrait of skateboard videographer Ty Evans. I immediately got excited when I saw that old school Powell Peralta ripper graphic, and I commented that the graphic was one of the images that got me interested in art. As a fiery young dork imprisoned in small town USA, I was riveted by the danger and recklessness that the image represented. As an added bonus, Ma absolutely HATED it. It got me thinking about other images that inspired my creative path in life. Here are some, in no particular order:
Oh no, what have I started? I had better stop now. What are your influential images? Post them in reply.
Broomball:
A Canadian team sport resembling ice hockey and played with sticks and a ball. (via)
Lumber Baron:
…a partially informal term used to refer to a person who has reached a prominent place in a particular industry (or set of industries) and whose wealth has been derived primarily therefrom. (via) The occupation of T.B. Walker, founder of the Walker Art Center.
The 2009 Lumber Barons. Top row, L to R: Rebecca Yaker, Justin Heideman, John Vogt, Joe King, Ashley Duffalo, Dawn Fredericks. Bottom row: Megan Leafblad, Brian Lesteberg, Peter Eleey, Gene Pittman, Jess Durant.
For the past several years, the staff of the Walker Art Center has formed a Broomball team. Being sequestered indoors for the 6 months of winter isn’t a lot of fun, and broomball is the only team sport left if you can’t ski or skate. I’ve played for two years, and we’ve yet to win a game (yes, this is sad). We’re working up to it.
Each year, a team member designs a new logo for our jersey. Here are two of them:
Logo for the 2007 Lumber Barons
The 2009 Lumber Barons
Games are played outdoors and are only canceled if there is a windchill below -40 or temperature below -15. Each year, it seems as if we end up with one game that freezes the hair in your nose and another game where the ice turns into a lake. How cold is that? Here’s a photo that explains:
Here’s a sample of our dominating gameplay:
I asked a few people yesterday if they were attending the flashmob outside the Walker, and the response was a pretty universal “People are still doing those?”. Yes, Yes they are. For those that don’t know what a Flashmob is, Wikipedia helps out:
…a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via social mediaor viral emails, rather than those organized by public relations firms or for a publicity stunt.
The call for this flashmob went out on craigslist and was spreading around Twitter and Facebook. The instructions were simple:
The general idea, for all of those who don’t know, is to dance for 3 minutes to your iPod/MP3 but no music is allowed to be played out loud (just in your headphones).
The point of this is that it has no point. Total pointless, random fun!At 8:00 PM on the dot neon colored poster board will be held up-that is your queue to start your tunes and start dancing for the cars driving by. You must silently dance to your iPod. Simple!
At the end of 3 mins the signs will go up again, this is when we all calmly walk away from our “dance floor.”
There were about 50 people at the event. Most in the crowd seemed to be around high school or college aged, making me feel old. Most people had iPod earbuds in during the dancing, so there was not much interaction between participants, unlike the pillow fight, but everyone was smiling. As total pointless, random fun, it did the job.
Waitingline also posted a video:
I saw about ten other people there taking pictures last night and talked to a few of them. If anyone has photos, adding them to the Walker Art Center flickr group would be swell.
Museum of Bad Art
Today the Walker was visited by Michael Frank, the Curator-in-Chief of Boston’s Museum of Bad Art (MOBA). Since the early 90’s, the MOBA features “art too bad to be ignored™,” displayed in galleries in the basements of two community theatres in the Boston area, the “largest network of theatre-basement exhibition venues on Earth.” The museum exhibits artworks with a playful ironic subtext. The hilarious website is a fascinating peek into the world of images found in thrift stores, garbage piles, yard sales, and even donations from artists themselves. Michael is in town to view and promote Masterworks: The MOBA plays , 6 commissioned plays based on 6 paintings from his new book The Museum of Bad Art: Masterworks. Being a Boston native myself, I was immediately excited to meet Michael and ask him some questions about MOBA.
What is your professional background?
I’m a professional musician and guitar player—Mike the Hatman. I do kids’ shows.
How did you become involved with MOBA?
In the early 90’s, the founders of the Museum of Bad Art decided to move on. There were a group of us who wanted to see it continue. I knew the founders because of a donation I made to the museum. I became Curator-in-Chief because I donated more art than anyone else. Louise Reilly Sacco, the sister of one of the founders, became Permanent Acting Interim Executive Director.
What is the mission of MOBA?
We look for art created in earnestness, but where something went wrong in the execution or concept.
Which piece exemplifies the mission of MOBA?
That’s so hard to do, choose one piece. That’s like asking, “Which kid do you like the best?” I think Gilded Nude does a good job of showing what we’re about. You have to read the commentary, though—“The viewer is struck immediately by the youthful female subject’s oversized arm.”
Very tongue-in-cheek.
That’s MOBA.
What is your definition of “bad art?”
It’s difficult to be ironic about abstract art. Most art I would include in MOBA is representational, mostly with poor technique. Just because it has poor technique, though, doesn’t mean it automatically fits in at the MOBA. Some of the work has very good technique. It has to be a compelling image, one that I find interesting. Basically, if I say it’s museum-worthy, it is.
How do the artists at MOBA compare with “outsider” artists?
The works are very similar to Outsider Art or Art Brut. Some of the artists are also in many outsider art collections.
Some artists donate their works. How do the artists feel about being exhibited at MOBA?
A lot of artists do donate works. Some artists will use MOBA on their resumes. I follow the mission of MOBA when choosing the works. If the artist is too self-conscious or silly, trying to make bad art, I don’t accept it. Some artists are surprised when they find that their works are in MOBA. Only one person objected, the rest are happy about it for the most part.
MOBA exhibits mostly paintings and some sculpture. Have you considered including other media like film or performance art?
No. I thought about photography. Like abstract art, I find it hard to be ironic about photos. I do have a collection of music that I play at the galleries. One musician is Mary Schneider, Australia’s Queen of Yodeling. She yodels the classics. She yodels the melody to the William Tell Overture with an accompanying orchestra. She has fantastic technique.
What are people’s reactions to MOBA?
Almost everyone likes it. Some people don’t get it. What are people’s reactions to the Walker?
Mostly positive, some mixed opinions. The Walker shows so many different kinds of art, not many people like everything at the Walker. A lot of people know who we are and that we push the boundaries of the definition of art, so they expect that. Some people expect to see Van Gogh paintings and are mad when they find out we don’t show any.
I saw some works in your museum that I might consider for MOBA but like I said, it’s hard for me to be ironic about abstract art. I wondered, “Why is a canvas with a slit cut into it considered art?”
The Bryant Lake Bowl is currently showing Masterworks: The MOBA plays, performed by the Minnesota-based Commedia Bauregard theatre company. Interestingly, one of the plays is based on the painting Bone-Juggling Dog in Hula Skirt, by Minneapolis artist Mari Newman.
The Museum of Bad Art: Masterworks and other MOBA merchandise can be purchased from the MOBA website.
Like all reputable museums, MOBA happily accepts donations. Submissions should be made via email: curator@museumofbadart.org.
The Walker has a Christo imitator lurking around. He hit Witt Siasoco, Teen Programs Manager. From the WACTAC blog:
At least the mouse stayed fresh while on vacation.
Thanks to help from those connoisseurs of often obscure but always excellent wordsmithing at Rain Taxi Review of Books, we’re welcoming a quartet of flarf poets at the Walker this Thursday night. Flarf, as you may have heard, exploits search engines, chat rooms, and other Internet nooks and crannies to create poetry that can be gloriously tacky, strikingly modern, uncannily touching, or any other number of adverb/adjective combinations (do your own Internet search!).
The four poets include Gary Sullivan, who, according to this wikipedia entry probably coined the term “flarf.” Or at the very least he plays a key role in the flarf “origin myth” posted on boingboing, by having submitted this jubilant bit of badness to the vanity enterprise known as Poetry.com (FREE POETRY CONTEST – YOUR POEM COULD WIN $10,000) :
Yeah, mm-hmm, it’s true
big birds make
big doo! I got fire inside
my “huppa”-chimp(TM)
gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god
wanna DOOT! DOOT!
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!
oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take
AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee)
uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah
hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get
off the paddy field and git
me some chocolate Quik
put a Q-tip in it and stir it up sick
pocka-mocka-chocka-locka-DING DONG
fuck! shit! piss! oh it’s so sad that
syndrome what’s it called tourette’s
make me HAI-EE! shout out loud
Cuz I love thee. Thank you God, for listening!
Then there’s Sharon Mesmer, whose flarf mines rich veins of Internet obscenity; you can preview her performance via clips from Flarf Festival 06 on YouTube.
And here’s an excellent overview of the genre from Buffalo, NY’s Artvoice , which covers both flarf’s controversial standing in the broader context of poetry genres, as well as the work of both Sullivan and poet #3, Nada Gordon.
Rounding out the quartet is K. Silem Mohammed. According to a blogger on |||AS/IS2|||, which is devoted to “poetics as practised in the 21st.C.,” he is the author of “possibly the first flarf masterpiece if I have any idea what flarf is about. It’s [Deer Head Nation] certainly a terrific book in any case.”
So hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get off the paddy field and git here Quik!
The Walker has been the site of some pretty swell shindigs over the years, and the Vanity Fair-Google party last Thursday has to rank right up there – after all, the hosts were two media powerhouses, old and new. (How did Vanity Fair get its name to come first?) Walker staff watched for two days as party planners decked our halls with white leather furniture, tons of pillows, elaborate A/V gear, and trompe l’oeil window clings in the Cargill Lounge.
Vanity Fair’s “Politics & Power” blog has a post on the party (RT Rybak stopped by to comment!), which leads with the alluring image above, from Andy King/WireImage.com. Seeing as how it is “non-partisan” and all, the blog also has a post on the bash that VF and Google threw for Democrats in Denver the previous week. Not having attended either, I’d still wager that one had the better setting, while the other had better guests – or at least more glamorous celebs.
What happens when an art lover tiles his bathroom?
You may have seen work by graphic designer Christoph Niemann in Wired magazine, the New York Times, or the New Yorker (he’s done a number of covers for that last publication). Like most illustrators, he’s developed a range of styles, one of which involves rendering images in pixel form.
So in designing a bathroom for their home, Niemann and his wife decided it’d be fun to translate a famous piece of art into pixel form, then render that image using colored ceramic tiles. The hard part, as you’ll see from his post on the process, was deciding which artwork to use (after all, it’s not like they could just take down this “art” if they got tired of it).
Turns out they considered works by a host of artists – Richter, Indiana, Hockney, Rothko, and others – who’ve shown at the Walker, and/or who have works in our permanent collection. The winning work for their shower tiles was this Pop classic from the collection, on view in The Shape of Time through November 16.
For the tub, they translated a more esoteric work, Corner of Fat, by another Walker favorite, Joseph Beuys (his works are also on view in the Friedman Gallery through next summer). Niemann thought it was a “terrifyingly perfect” idea to do a bathroom-tile version of this work, which originally involved several pounds of butter; his wife’s reaction, he reports, was the quote used in this post’s headline. Luckily, she came around and agreed. Bathroom tiles are one of those crucial matrimonial decisions.
part one
part two
I found an odd little series on YouTube called Each & Every One of You, which the creators describe as “a sincere but irreverent 1980s cable TV-style show” that “teaches ordinary people how to make contemporary installation art.” The host, Don Goodes — a former art critic and self-styled Mr. Rogers living in Montreal — dedicates this two-part episode (warning: total running time is about 30 minutes) to what he calls Political Accumulation Installation.
“We begin by taking a stand — the stand of criticizing Western culture for its misdoings,” Goodes says, before leading viewers through the other three essential steps to contemporary installation art: Making aesthetic decisions, developing the concept and, ultimately, making the work. My favorite segment, in Part 2, is dedicated to “rejected artists,” featuring interviews with artists “whose projects were rejected by art galleries, art councils or whatever.”
