Archive for September, 2018

Helena Almeida, Portuguese Performance Artist – (1934-Sept 25, 2018)

Wednesday, September 26th, 2018
  • Helena Almeida (1934 – 25 September 2018) was a Portuguese artist known for her work in photography, performance art, body art, painting and drawing.

  • wiki

    artnet

    Helena Almeida
    We Find Wildness (blog)

    Art Seen Chicago

    RIP Paul Virilio, An Aesthetic Philosopher of Bunker Archeology

    Wednesday, September 26th, 2018
  • Frieze

    How Philosopher Paul Virilio (1932–2018) Spoke to an Age of Acceleration and Total War


  • Claude Parent and Paul Virilio


    via


  • Paul Virilio (wiki) (French: [viʁiljo]; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018)[3] was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.
    According to two geographers, Virilio was a “historian of warfare, technology and photography, a philosopher of architecture, military strategy and cinema, and a politically engaged provocative commentator on history, terrorism, mass media and human-machine relations

  • Bunker Archeology

    Magdalene Jetelova
    – in which she laser-projected select quotations from, what else, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology onto the half-submerged fortifications found scattered along Normandy’s beaches.

    Magdalene Jetalova (Czech artist)

  • RIP Arthur Mitchell – Balanchine to Dance Theater of Harlem

    Thursday, September 20th, 2018

  • (Photo via)

    Arthur Mitchell passed away at 84.

    Dancer broke barriers for African Americans in the 1950s in leading roles with the New York City Ballet


    George Balanchine with Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell working on ‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue’ in 1968.
    Photo by Martha Swope from the collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
    via

  • Balanchine archive


  • George Balanchine and Arhtur Mitchell

    Mitchell shares interesting stories about Balanchine. (youtube) or why Pad de deux was so controversial (youtube)

    Arthur Mitchell is an African-American dancer and choreographer who created a training school and the first African-American classical ballet company, Dance Theatre of Harlem.
    In 1955 Mitchell made his debut as the first African American with the New York City Ballet
    Mitchell was the only African-American dancer with the NY City Ballet until 1970. Choreographer and director of the NYCB George Balanchine created the pas de deux in Agon especially for Mitchell and the white ballerina Diana Adams. Although Mitchell danced this role with white partners throughout the world, he could not perform it on commercial television in the United States before 1965, because states in the South refused to carry it.

    Arthur Mitchell

    Slim dragon-fly
    too rapid for the eye
    to cage,

    contagious gem of virtuosity
    make visible, mentality.
    Your jewels of mobility

    reveal
    and veil
    a peacock-tail.

    — by Marianne Moore

  • Arthur Michell Quote

    A Life in Pictures.

    RIP Annette Michelson, Pioneer Film Critic, Co-Founder of “October”

    Tuesday, September 18th, 2018

  • Annette Michelson (photo via)

  • Art News – Annette Michelsonk Pioneering Film Critic, Co-founder October dies at 96.


  • Photo by Fung Lin Hall

  • Fabulous Japanese Actress, Kiki Kirin – Moved On at 75

    Sunday, September 16th, 2018
  • Kiki Kirin

    Josh Parmer posted on FB a sad and shocking news that Kiki Kirin (樹木 希林) passed away. (See a great photo of Kiki there)

    May your body rest and your soul soar Kiki Kirin. You have been one of my favorite actresses since I first saw you back in Still Walking.

    Japan times Obit

  • Interview with Kiki
    Kiki Kirin’s response here.

    Regarding the afterlife, there is the Buddhist idea of rebirth. Right now, my soul is in this body and this body is Kirin Kiki. After this body is used up and death comes around, that soul and spirit moves on and reappears. I don’t see death as an end.

  • 1an-2kawase

    Kiki with Nagase (Previous post)

  • Koreeda and Kiki (Shoplifters won Palme’dor at Cannes – 2018)

  • Still Walking aruitemo

  • 1abehirokazukoreedaafterstormphotocallmbsvnuu3zdll
    Previous Cannes festival.

    Kiki, for whom After the Storm is her fifth Koreeda film, described the director as among one of the most observant she has seen in her 55-year career.

    Art of Ree Morton – Analects & Recitations

    Sunday, September 9th, 2018
  • Sea-Saw

  • Morton’s work is as unusual as her biography. Born in upstate New York, in 1936, Morton, who was a trained nurse, only started making art in her thirties and received her MFA at the age of 34, already a mother of three.
    Her entire body of work was created between 1968 and 1977, when she died prematurely in a car accident at the age of 41. But her vision seems to have erupted almost fully formed and, in just a few years, she managed to deliver more than many artists cobble together in a lifetime.


    Ree Morton

    Google Ree Morton

  • NYtimes Ree Morton -Artist/Mother

    Present in the selection of pieces are many of Morton’s sentimental, décor-oriented, performatively feminine motifs — bows; ruffles; wallpaper; flowers; fairy-tale-looking flags; loopy, girlish cursive lettering — which collectively one critic would later refer to as “Emily Dickinson in love with Raymond Roussel.” When she prepared the application, Morton had been making artwork for less than a decade, and a few months later, she would be dead.

    In the 41 years since, Morton — who once described her own artistic ambitions as “light and ironic on serious subjects without frivolity” — has become something of an obsession within the art world.


  • (photo from pages of Individuals:Post-Movement Art in America Edited by Alan Sondheim)

    RECITATIONS

    Mean Business

    mean
    mean ing
    mean ing ful

    mean
    mean er
    de mean ing

    me an you, babe.

    Text by Ree Morgan

  • Paul Schrader, Travis to Ernst, & Letter to Leonard Schrader

    Monday, September 3rd, 2018

  • (“First Reformed” directed by Paul Schrader)

    On casting Ethan Hawk (Spoiler alert!)

    “There’s a certain physiognomy in playing a man of the cloth, be it Montgomery Clift in ‘I Confess,’ Belmondo in ‘Leon Morin’ or Claude Laydu in ‘Diary of a Country Priest.’ So, you’re thinking about actors who have that physiognomy, maybe Jake Gyllenhaal, Oscar Isaac, but Ethan was 10 years older than them and his face was getting some very interesting wrinkles. I started thinking he’s just right for this. I sent him the script and he responded right away.”

  • Shooting fast, took only 22 days of filming.
    Budget $3.5 million. (Investers got their money back)

    Richard Brody on first reformed – (The reckless passions of Paul Schrader)

  • On naming the Pastor “Ernst Toller” –

    Yup. I did. I came across the name years ago in a poem by W.H. Auden, but there were two things about the name I liked. One was the “tolling” of the bells. The other was the playwright who escaped Nazi Germany to come to America and then committed suicide

  • Willem Dafoe 1aaPaulDafoe
    (The Light Sleeper)

    Dafoe and Schrader have collaborated many times, The Light Sleeper, The Affliction and Auto-Focus etc.

  • Light Sleeper, American Gigolo etc. (Mishima, Patty Hearst and Auto Focus were incredible biopics, and Schrader directed late Natasha Richardson twice – she played Patty Hearst and was also in the Comfort of Strangers, scripted by Harold Pinter based on a short novel by Ian McEwan.)

  • Polygon Interview – (First Reformed, Taxi Driver filmmaker Paul Schrader will change how you think about movies)

    Which modern, American filmmakers have mastered leaning in?
    Paul Schrader: In America, [Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff director] Kelly Reichardt works that way. Gus van Sant did that three film trilogy [Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days].

  • 1AAmishima06
    Paul Schrader directing Mishima, A Life in 4 Chapters, his sister in law acted as his interpreter with Japanese crew and actors.
    (Philip Glass composed the soundtrack, Eiko Ishioka designed the set, Mishima was Schrader’s most theatrically stylised film.)
    His brother Leonard knew Mishima.

    On Mishima.. ( His Final Performance, the Suicide of Yukio Mishima )

  • Read his letter to his brother Leonard Schrader (His visit to Jean Renoir in Beverly Hills )

    I spent the afternoon at Jean Renoir’s home in Beverly Hills, and was very entertained. Jean (as we friends call him) is shooting four short stories for French TV. During some continental business haggles he decided to come back to L.A. for two weeks. He told Max Laemmle, manager of the Los Feliz Theater, that my article on Boudu was the best he had ever read. He then sent me a letter to thank me, enclosing an autographed photo, asking for a tear sheet for Michel Simon, and inviting me to his home.
    So Joel and I (Joel is an old friend of the Renoirs) were there this afternoon. This is an exceedingly kind, gracious, and fragile person. Just like his films: you can’t help but love him. We had a very interesting conversation about Bresson, Simon, Moreau, Magnani, Chabrol, Truffaut, but I remember the afternoon primarily as an experience, like a warm bath. His home is covered with original paintings by his father, Picasso, Cezanne, Braque, etc. In his living room hangs a larger-than-life-size portrait of Jean at 17 painted by his father: he is young and handsome, has a shotgun and hunting dog. Jean, now past 70, bald and pink-faced, was sitting in a chair in front of that painting. I think I’ll always remember that view. He is, as he describes Picasso, “a force of nature.” I think he is a greater artist than his father, for he invented the vocabulary before he embellished it. You think my head’s swelling. Peut-être.


  • (Robert Mitchum and Keiko Kishi in Yakuza)
    Sydney Pollack directed Yakuza, scripted by Leonard Schrader, Paul Schrader and Robert Towne.