Another of the videocassette releases on Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision label, TV Wipeout was released in 1984 as a “video magazine”. This and Johnny YesNo were the two Doublevision releases I was most interested in, and I did get to see some of the former release when Cabaret Voltaire’s first appearance at the Haçienda in 1983 [...]
Years before Brokeback Mountain, and a few years before The Place of Dead Roads, another pair of gay cowboys were causing a stir on a T-shirt in the SEX boutique, London, a shop run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in the mid-1970s. Paul Gorman’s latest piece of pop archaeology examines the history and possible [...]
Film and opera posters by Franciszek Starowieyski (see below). • At first glance, Jerzy Skolimowski’s new film, Essential Killing, sounds like Joseph Losey’s Figures in a Landscape (1970) reworked for our era of renditions, torture and war without end. The trailer is here; Sight & Sound liked the film and dismissed any Losey comparisons. The Quietus [...]
Being an inveterate Kubrickphile I was naturally pleased to hear that some of the excised scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey have survived in a watchable form, even though I’m often ambivalent about the restoration of such material. While it was good to see at last the missing French compound sequence of Apocalypse Now, for [...]
An Eruption of Vesuvius, Seen from Portici (c.1774–6) by Joseph Wright of Derby. Joseph Wright of Derby captured the eruptions of Vesuvius in several pictures of which this is one of the more spectacular examples. The painter enjoyed spectacle as he also the rendering of chiaroscuro effects so it’s no wonder he was attracted to [...]
top row: The Division Bell by Pink Floyd; A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay. bottom row: London Calling by The Clash; Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. The Royal Mail follows its series of British Design Classics postage stamps with a series dedicated to what they call “classic” album covers. The design classics [...]
Deva-loka (2007). Big new paintings by one of my favourite Japanese artists at Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, until February 29, 2008. The wild details in Deva-loka are completely lost at this size but there’s a larger version on Amano’s site. Creation (2007). These works are being sold as fine art but Amano’s reputation rests upon [...]
Situla—Fassbinder Homage. Two samples from a Querelle-themed series based on Fassbinder’s film of Genet’s erotic fantasy. Exterface is Julien and Stéphane in Paris whose luscious, saturated tableaux make them seem a contemporary equivalent of James Bidgood, while the picture below may have been referring to the poster Andy Warhol produced for Querelle. Via MiamiGlen. Previously [...]
Still from Blowjob by Andy Warhol (1963). Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now opens today at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, and runs until 27 January 2008. Seduced explores the representation of sex in art through the ages. Featuring over 300 works spanning 2000 years, it brings together Roman sculptures, Indian manuscripts, Japanese [...]
Hardly a week passes without the religious right in America getting their knickers in a twist over some new iniquity, a condition so commonplace that new outbreaks are barely worth acknowledging. However, this week’s storm in a teacup caught my attention for being art-related. If there’s one thing certain American Christians have in common with [...]
The Candles by Christian Boltanski. The Shadow is an exhibition at Compton Verney from Saturday 30 June–Sunday 9 September, 2007. I’d been considering a post about shadows in art for a while so this has forced my hand. There’ll be some follow-ups in the coming week, work permitting. I’m busy with a big new piece [...]
Curtis Harrington, who died on Monday, was chiefly known as a director of low-budget horror films, the most acclaimed of which is his debut feature Night Tide (1961), a watery riff on Cat People (1942) starring a young Dennis Hopper. But Harrington should also be remembered for his associations with early American avant garde cinema, [...]
Finally…well, we’ll see. Forgive my sceptical tone, these announcements have been cropping up for years although this one seems genuine, with an Amazon page and everything. Good to know that it’s a Fantoma production since they did a great job with Jodorowsky’s Fando y Lis. The enigmatic Marjorie Cameron portrays the Scarlet Woman for Inauguration [...]
‘He created his own universe and became its star’ Director David Cronenberg explains the debt he owes to Andy Warhol’s bizarre and chillingly prophetic work David Cronenberg Monday September 11, 2006 The Guardian EMPIRE IS THE CLASSIC. It was outrageous—yet somehow it worked. An eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building, it was high concept, [...]
Listening to the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers recently had me musing about the great cover design by Andy Warhol, probably his most well-known after the first Velvet Underground album. The music may sound better than it ever did in the Seventies but CD reissues can’t reproduce the brilliant sleeve which included a real metal zipper [...]
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