Update: Happy birthday Robert Crumb (Aug 30 1943) .. now a film about his life should be in the list. Seraphine won numerous awards and Camille Claudel is missing too.
Thanks HermanCosta for the tip.
Chistoph was a German film and theatre director, actor, artist, and author. Initially working as an independent underground filmmaker, Schlingensief later began staging productions for renowned theatres and festivals, which often were accompanied by public controversies. In the final years, he also worked for opera houses, and established himself as an artist.
According to many, his desire to set his legacy in stone was manifest in a development project in Burkina Faso, one of Africa’s poorest countries, that if completed would include an opera house, a school providing music and film lessons for 500 children and an infirmary. Schlingensief called the project “Remdoogo – The Opera Village,” and the foundation stones for the Festival Hall of Africa were laid in February.
Schlingensief’s filmmaking techniques illustrate his aesthetic vicinity to Fassbinder: the tendency to base the treatment of a particular subject matter on a sudden idea or a topical occasion, the anarchic and nonchalant approach to the forms of dramatic portrayal, the spontaneity of performing as an inferior re-enactment of everyday reality as well as a casual, disturbing tendency towards aggressiveness. Imitation and irritation assume key significance here. The objective is to find the most direct way of documenting a unique, unrepeatable occurrence, which consequently assumes a theatrical character. Schlingensief’s films are personal statements – not just on the era in which they are set, but, in particular, on the time of their creation.
Schlingenseif is seen here with British actress Tilda Swinton, with whom he had a romantic connection previously.
More than an artist: During the 1998 federal elections he founded a political party of his own, Chance 2000, to represent non-voters, the handicapped and other minorities. (Click to see the photo)
No other German director has in recent years been as active as Christoph Schlingensief in earning the term “political” for his theatre. As society’s concept of the political became increasingly arbitrary and theatrical, Schlingensief responded with a rather unusual cure: he fought against the haziness of politics by totally confusing supposed unambiguities.
From his early films in the 1980s, in which Hitler, rapists and mass shooters indulged in orgiastic mischief, to his dramas at the Berlin Volksbühne in the 1990s, whose chaotic scenes brought German icons such as Rudi Dutschke, Helmut Kohl or Rosa Luxemburg down off their pedestals, and to his performances in public (e.g. the artistic welfare mission 1997 at Hamburg’s main train station), one basic theme is always apparent: do not trust certainties!
Who knew Nick Cave and Brad Pitt from the great team of The Assasination of Jesse James by a Coward (trailer) – appeared together in Johnney Suede before.
This was a fun film with Catherine Keener.
Granted, I’m partial to Johnny Suede’s downtown NYC vibe, pompadours, and anything with Catherine Keener in it, but Johnny Suede does give us a taste of the Pitt that was to come. And let’s not forget cameos by Samuel L. Jackson and Nick Cave, whose white pompadour rivals Johnny’s in magnificence and brings to mind director Jim Jarmusch’s famous coiffure, which is perhaps no coincidence since DiCillo was the DP for several Jarmusch films.
Mr. Ohlson’s work astutely fused aspects of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting and Minimal Art on a grand scale; his paintings sometimes measured as much as 23 feet across. The staple of his formal vocabulary was repeating vertical bars that seemed, increasingly, to levitate before clouds of vibrant contrasting color.
Jeremy Blake R.I.P July 17 2007
Little different from Modigliani and Jeanne, Jeremy was an up and coming successful artist who followed his paranoid girlfriend.. glamour, beautiful people and madness.
What I am searching for is neither the real nor the unreal, but the Subconscious the mystery of what is Instinctive in the human Race.
Modigliani’s intense artistic, spiritual [for him no distinction existed between these two states of being] search to express what he saw as the mysterious, innermost beauty of the human soul, drew him to Buddhist, Indian, Greek, Etruscan, Egyptian, African, early Italian and Renaissance art. (via)
“Everything rings true in this totally false film. Everything is illuminated in this obscure film. For he who leaps into the void owes no explanations to those who watch.” Jean Luc Godard
Montparnasse 19 was originally to have been directed by Max Ophüls with a script by Henri Jeanson. Becoming ill, Ophüls turned the project over to Jacques Becker. Dissatisfied with Jeanson’s script, Becker re-wrote the scenario. (Leap into the Void, Godard and the Painter)
This tender, moving drawing portrays Akhmatova as both Egyptian goddess. And poet lost in her dream.
Erotic in its restraint and languid, sensual pose, it evokes the elongated body and ‘helmet’ of hair of the Egyptian queens and goddesses depicted in the Louvre reliefs Modigliani and Akhmatova returned to, time and again, during the summer of 1911.
He met the first serious love of his life, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, in 1910, when he was 26. They had studios in the same building, and although 21-year-old Anna was recently married, they began an affair. Tall (Modigliani was only 5 foot 5 inches) with dark hair (like Modigliani’s), pale skin and grey-green eyes, she embodied Modigliani’s aesthetic ideal and the pair became engrossed in each other. After a year, however, Anna returned to her husband.
Gallery of works (wiki Modigliani)
“Anna Akhmatova’e memoir, fifty-four years later, of her affair with Modigiliani in 1911. Sitting in the rain under an unreliable umbrella in the Luxemberg Gardens and reciting Verlaine to each other — unable to afford anything Gander” Page 7 David Markson – Vanishing Point.
Ward Schumaker Shostakovich is a hand-painted book, created in 2004, with pages 13″ w x 19″ h, 64 pages.
Shostakovich Suit – (something fun and charming from Ward – he is a great story teller).
I’d come down to the waterfront earlier in the evening, to the offices of Walter Landor, advertising man and San Francisco celebrity, a man who carried on his business aboard an old ferryboat, The Klamath, berthed at Pier Five. Landor died recently but his company continues on the boat. (read more here.)
“My hand-painted book, 5-and-Dime Deluxe, will be shown in UNBOUND, an exhibition at the Lesher Center for the Arts’ Bedford Gallery, July 11 thru September 19, 2010.”
Patrick Michael Fitzgerald is an Irish artist who lives and works in Vizcaya, outside Bilbao, Spain.
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GUEST ROOM/CONTEMPORARY ART | BRUSSELS, BELGIUM | JUNE 10 – JULY 17, 2010 -PATRICK MICHAEL FITZGERALD Drawings
by John Yau (Brooklyn Rail)
Chris Asheley interviewed Patrick Michael Fitzgerald
A Conversation with Patrick Michael Fitzgerald
Patrick M. Fitzgerald lives in Bilbao, Spain and Chris Ashley lives in Oakland, California. This conversation about Patrick’s art was conducted via email between December 2008 and April 2009.
PATRICK MICHAEL FITZGERALD will be showing in Oakland California next September (via Chris Asheley)
“John Baldessari: Sediment,” Margo Leavin Gallery. Los Angeles, CA, May 22 – July 10, 2010.
June 2010
“John Baldessari: Foot and Stocking (With Big Toe Exposed) Series,” Gemini G.E.L. Los Angeles, CA, June 26 – September 3,
Panic
John Baldessari: Pure Beauty,” Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, NY, October 19, 2010 – January 9, 2011.
Ken Goldberg, a Professor of Engineering and Information at Berkeley was inspired by Baldessari – (vimeo – Respectful Cameras)
Sigmar Polke, an artist of infinite, often ravishing pictorial jest, whose sarcastic and vibrant layering of found images and maverick, chaos-provoking painting processes left an indelible mark on the last four decades of contemporary painting, died yesterday in Cologne, Germany. He was 69; the cause was complications of cancer, according to Gordon Veneklasen, a partner at the Michael Werner Gallery New York, the artist’s chief American representative.
Sigmar Polke’s editions are not something the artist “does on the side”. They highlight the reproductive techniques which his paintings also return to time after time: printing, complete with raster dots, photographs and Xeroxes. The editions literally render what the paintings simply translate. But they also translate what the artist himself has painted, or anticipate it. The editions are an important element in Polke’s enquiry into the representation and duplication of the world.
Song of Summer was based on Eric Fenby’s 1936 memoir Delius As I Knew Him (re-released in 1966), which recounts his experience of offering his services in transcribing Frederick Delius’s music from the composer’s dictation.
In the mean time no-one interested in Delius should be without a copy of Song of Summer. It has not dated at all and it repays repeated viewing (in fact it has been the most repeated of all Ken Russell’s BBC films) and remains a fine tribute to Eric Fenby’s sacrifice and self-less devotion. – Stephen Lloyd
spotted by Jtwine in San Francisco.
Painter of Vivid Abstracts, Dies at 73
Camnitzer
oddly naked. (via Theresa’s blog Wit of Staircase)
web ride
Andriessen
