Vitro Nasu

(Mary Harron directed the Daliland)

Ben Kingsley as Salvador Dali – Daliland

Oscar winner Ben Kinglsey is no stranger to inhabiting larger-than-life characters. From Gandhi to Schindler’s List and Sexy Beast, the actor’s career has spanned a wide variety of roles with presence and gravitas. Despite his comfort with such parts, Kingsley says that approaching the enigmatic and iconic Salvador Dalí in Mary Harron’s Daliland – the story of the artist’s strange and fascinating marriage to his tyrannical wife Gala (played by Barbara Sukowa) – was still a “daunting task”.
“He was exhausting and exhilarating to portray,” comments Kingsley in his first interview since wrapping the movie. “Dali’s cup overflows. I had to give myself the opportunity to take risks. Dali encouraged me to take risks. That could have been catastrophic, but it could also pay off. If I’m in Dali’s silhouette, then I must allow myself to take certain risks. His artwork, writing and public appearances were one risk after another. He was not a character that one could portray carefully.”

Ben Kingsley can play just about any ethnicity (see photos here)
(Happy birthday Sir Ben Kingsley)

Ben Whishaw was terrific in ‘Surge”, a film he made with his friend. (Kanopy was streaming).

Jean-Marc Vallée Canadian filmmaker passed away

With Reece W.
Reece was a producer and and actress for Big Little Lies, earlier she was directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, a Canadian filmmake in “Wild”

Cafe de Flore

Young Victoria

Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey, who played the lead won awards for “Dallas Buyers Club”

Joan Didion Documentary shows the warmer side of a cool Icon

(See a full film on youtube)

(Directed by Frank Perry, starring Tuesday Weld and Anthny Perkins, Play as it lays, written by Joan Didion)

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New Yorker –

The Center will not hold

Photo by Annie Leibovitz

Joan Didion wrote the White Album (previous post)

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” is the first sentence of this collection of essays written by Joan Didion.
“The White Album” includes her essays on Doris Lessing and Georgia O’Keefe.
“I WILL BE HER WITNESS.
That would translate sere su testigo, and will not appear in your travelers’ phrasebook because it is not a useful phrase for the prudent traveler.’ Another beginning sentences from her novel “A Book of Common Prayer”.

Joan is the wise seer with a fragile exterior and migraine headaches and Harrison Ford built this deck at Joan Didion’s home’

Remembering Joan Didion: ‘Her ability to operate outside of herself was unparalleled’

Paris Review interview

Eve Babitz (1943-2021) was the author of several books of fiction, including Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time, L.A. Woman.

( Eve Babitz, pictured in Ed Ruscha’s “Five 1965 Girlfriends,” from 1970.)
(Photograph by Julian Wasser / Courtesy of Ed Ruscha)

Ed and Paul Ruscha on Eve Babitz Death

HDP: Do you think that she had any influence on you in terms of the evolution of your own art?

Ed Ruscha: Oh, I guess I’m influenced by everything. There’s nothing that crosses my path that doesn’t influence me in some way or other. Even if I reject it, I’m influenced by it. And, so, sure. I mean, she was a strong figure and I think everybody respected her. All the artists respected her, and and we were curious about her because she was a hot number. She did well with it, you know. (laughs)

Eve Babitz on the time She played Chess Nude with Marcel Duchamp

The only trouble was, I had been taking birth control pills for the first and only time in my life, and not only had I puffed up like a blimp but my breasts had swollen to look like two pink footballs. Plus they hurt. On the other hand, it would be a great contrast—this large, too-LA surfer girl with an extremely tiny old man in a French suit. Playing chess.
(After I saw the contact sheets, I never took the Pill again.)

Rare Interview Eve Babits long sober cool author

Eve Babits introduced Salvador Dalí to Frank Zappa.

(“Pretend Not to See Me”)

See the film at Kanopy or here online

Katherine Knight is a Photographer who directed “Pretend Not to See Me”

Colette U.

What does it mean to live on the edge of the country, but at the heart of art?

At her spectacular oceanfront farm in Newfoundland, performance artist Colette Urban becomes a half woman-half bear, dances a tango while strapped into bungee cords, wheels nonsensical record contraptions and turns herself into a parody of consumer goods.

“I am timid in the real world. Performance and this idea of disguise are a real comfort to me. I’m not me. I’m someone else once I am in that role of the performer.”

This is a film about following a dream, having courage and believing in oneself. It’s about embracing risk and sustaining courage through acts of the imagination. It’s an astonishing representation of Colette Urban’s enigmatic art performances set against the rugged beauty of rural Newfoundland

Google celebrated Émilie du Châtelet (17 December 1706 – 10 September 1749)
wiki
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(via wiki)

Relationship with Voltaire
In the frontispiece to Voltaire’s book on Newton’s philosophy, du Châtelet appears as Voltaire’s muse, reflecting Newton’s heavenly insights down to Voltaire.

Du Châtelet may have met Voltaire in her childhood at one of her father’s salons; Voltaire himself dates their meeting to 1729, when he returned from his exile in London. However, their friendship developed from May 1733 when she re-entered society after the birth of her third child.[4]

Du Châtelet invited Voltaire to live at her country house at Cirey in Haute-Marne, northeastern France, and he became her long-time companion. There she studied physics and mathematics and published scientific articles and translations. To judge from Voltaire’s letters to friends and their commentaries on each other’s work, they lived together with great mutual liking and respect. As a literary rather than scientific person, Voltaire implicitly acknowledged her contributions to his 1738 Elements of the Philosophy of Newton, where the chapters on optics show strong similarities with her own Essai sur l’optique. She was able to contribute further to the campaign by a laudatory review in the Journal des savants.[12]

Sharing a passion for science, Voltaire and Du Châtelet collaborated scientifically. They set up a laboratory in Du Châtelet’s home. In a healthy competition, they both entered the 1738 Paris Academy prize contest on the nature of fire, since Du Châtelet disagreed with Voltaire’s essay. Although neither of them won, both essays received honourable mention and were published.[13] She thus became the first woman to have a scientific paper published by the Academy

(Happy birthday John Lurie – December 14)

John Lurie’s father used to take him to fishing. John Lurie is a hard working, self taught artist in music, acting and in painting. Basquiat painted and slept at his place. Basquiat was a close friend that Lurie wrote a lot about in this memoir.
John Lurie is a world traveller.
He wrote about Africa, one of many places Lurie visited. He wrote.
“I had been depressed for a long, long time. I could not get out of it. Africa saved me. You can feel life started there.

More paintings at his Gallery with great soundtrack from John Lurie’s Strange and Beautiful homepage

Strange and Beautiful John Lurie (previous post)

Listen to his playing here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_864xjMQY8)

John Lurie: ‘I wanted to break into Martha Stewart’s house and change the curtains. My lawyer said no’
(He’s hung out with Warhol and gone ice fishing with Willem Dafoe, but the Fishing With John man’s new series stars just him and his canvas)

(A man, a bull and of course, the Soldier Bunnies. – John Lurie)

Katja Novitskova wiki

Katja Novitskova (born 1984 in Tallinn, Estonia) is an Estonian installation artist. She lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Her work focuses on issues of technology, evolutionary processes, digital imagery and corporate aesthetics. Novitskova is interested in investigating how, “media actively redefines the world and culture, and everything”[2] related to art, nature and commerce.

Her series of installations, pattern of activation

Novitskova derives patterns from and expresses her works through her archives of online images, in a contemplation of our relationship with our screen based and environmental spaces. Her work is equal parts science, philosophy and an expanded approach to reading visual imagery. A perfect example of this lens is Pattern Of Activation, a series of more than five installations made by the artist over a span of six years. Her visual vocabulary is informed by her study of semiotics, culture, new media arts and graphic design in conversation with her philosophical interests. On the series Pattern Of Activation, Novitskova comments on her anthropologically and ecologically driven exploration, “I have always been interested in deep time loops. If you look at a contemporary object or emotion like an iPhone or our obsession with social media, I am always curious about the deep time origin of that activity and how it connects to our first tools of humanity or the evolutionary structures in our brains and our bodies that enable us to behave how we do today even though today’s world feels so far removed from the ancient times. We are actually really connected to the older generations, it’s not that long ago. I am always trying to be aware of this time thread and how we got here and of course the time scale of the Earth itself and our deep connection to other living creatures on it. From a jellyfish to bacteria, can be seen as a web of connections that is active today but also has this historical connection”.

Lina

Italodamericano – Lina Wertmuller Oscar

Wki

In general, Wertmüller’s films strongly reflect her own political commitments, with main characters who are either dedicated anarchists, communists, feminists, or all those, and the films’ main action centers on political or socioeconomic conflicts. Wertmüller self-identified as socialist.

Grotesque Poetry a Conversation with Lina Wertmuller

Review here
Ziff has pulled off an astonishing accomplishment with Witkin and Witkin. The film works on many levels. Firstly, the viewer is drawn into the “weird news” curiosity about identical twins who go their separate ways. Then comes the compelling rush of fascination around the art they make. Finally, she delivers a tender, charming look at two very different lives of artists have gone through many experiences and relationships. It combines a sideshow with an art course and a twin biography that is exceedingly entertaining.

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(Still Life with Mirror – Joel Peter Witkin

Joel Peter Witkin – Heaven, Hell, Transesexuals, Deformed people (Previous post)

At Whitney

Lawrence Weiner

Marian Goodman Gallery

In Memoriam: Lawrence Weiner

Our fellow artist and dear friend, Lawrence Weiner, has passed at the age of 79. A force of conceptual art, Lawrence gained international recognition for the use of language as his primary medium. He proposed a new relationship to art and redefined the position of the artist, and his works demonstrated the power of language worldwide.
“I am heartbroken.” —Marian Goodman

Artforum obit

Lawrence Weiner, a towering figure in the Conceptual art movement arising in the 1960s and who profoundly altered the landscape of American art, died December 2 at the age of seventy-nine. Known for his text-based installations incorporating evocative or descriptive phrases and sentence fragments, typically presented in bold capital letters accompanied by graphic accents and occupying unusual sites and surfaces, Weiner rose to prominence among a cohort that included Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, and Sol LeWitt. A firm believer that an idea alone could constitute an artwork, he established a practice that stood out for its consistent embodiment of his famous 1968 “Declaration of Intent”:

George Seurat Org

George Seurat (December 2, 1859 – March 29, 1891)

“We realized that that painting was the setting of a play,” explained Sondheim. “All the people in that painting, when you start speculating on why none of them are looking at each other, maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe someone was having an affair with another one, or was related to someone else.” The final question Sondheim and Lapine asked themselves before they started work: Who was missing from the painting? Sondheim and Lapine both agreed — it was the artist

Happy bithday Goerge Seurat (December 2)