HANNE'S ART AND CULTURE BLOG

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Guthrie presents selections from his beloved collection of World Wide Web awesomeness!

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4 American Composers: Directed by Peter Greenaway. Feautring John Cage, Meredith Monk, Robert Ashley and Philip Glass. Based on London performances under the aegis of the New York/Almeida Festival, this set of four one-hour documentaries, originally produced in 1983, introduced these avant-garde composers and their music to a general public. It is a tribute to the filmmakers' accomplishment (and a sorry comment on how we honor our own prophets) that the set provides no less valuable an introduction for audiences over two and a half decades later. Rarely seen and out of print, Greenaway's films make a perfect companion to Robert Ashley's set of composer portraits Music With Roots in the Aether, produced in the mid-70s.

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(Mama Cass Elliot - New World Coming)

Only two minutes long, this cartoon is considered a classic by animation fans. Most of the movie consists of the opening credits, with the "Ranz Des Vaches", from Gioacchino Rossini's William Tell, playing in the background. At the end, Bambi looks up to see Godzilla's foot coming down, crushing Bambi as the light music switches to a loud, elongated piano chord (which sounds strikingly similar to the final note of "A Day in the Life" by The Beatles). This cartoon prefaced Godzilla 1985 on New World Pictures' VHS release. Two sequels were later made without Newland's involvement: Son of Bambi Meets Godzilla and Bambi's Revenge.

If you did not read your (art) history, you should read up on the story of the ship Medusa. Go here, and here for the more entartaining story.

Stairway to Stardom was a 1980s public access amateur variety show, hosted by a singing italian brooklynite named Frank Masi. Its guests, many of whom were regulars on the show, included child and teen performers, comedy acts, dancers, and local bands.

Buy downloadable films cheap from www.jonasmekas.com
Or click here for an overview of films.

Go there for a wide range of articles and interviews




Also, here is a picture of Andy Warhol painting a BMW. This was the fourth BMW Art Car, called "M1 by Andy Warhol" and it was created in 1977 by Andy who, unlike the previous artists, worked directly on the full-scale vehicle and painted the car himself. Warhol explained the sweeping strokes of his car, "I tried to portray speed pictorially. If a car is moving really quickly, all the lines and colors are blurred." All previous Art Car artists created their designs on 1:5 scale models, called maquettes, and had technicians reproduce their designs on the real cars. Warhol insisted on painting the real M1 himself. He is reported to have spent all of 23 minutes painting the car. He ran his fingers through the paint to leave a personal touch. When asked if he was pleased with the end result, he replied, "I love the car; it's better than the work of art itself." This is what the car looked like after Warhol had painted on it:

You can read about the Art Car Collection, including artists such as Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and Jenny Holzer here. Olafur Eliasson is the 2006 artist.

Guy de Cointet was born in France, but settled in California in 1968. In the early seventies, he began presenting installations and performances in a number of galleries, including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Otis institute, the Whitney Museum, Franklin Furnace, and other venues.

De Cointet's works are texts broken down into their visual components. He was keenly aware of the imprecision of language, and intrigued by the ability of people to quickly gain meaning from ambiguous uses of language, open to many interpretations. Through his books, and printmaking projects, the artist attempted to transform the language experience into a visual experience. He also turned to performance as a way of presenting different relationships between the textual images. In 1974, de Cointet created a play, TSNX C24VA7ME, a play of Dr. Hun, which included props of license plates, phone numbers, movie ratings, and words.

Recently, Paul McCarthy included a tribute to Guy de Cointet in an exhibition at Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble. He says: "[De Cointet] was highly respected and influential in California in the 1970's and deserves more attention now... de Cointet influenced artists as diverse as Mike Kelley, Allen Ruppersberg, Larry Bell and Eric Orr."

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The Radical Software Web Site is a joint project of the Daniel Langlois Foundation of Montreal, and Davidson Gigliotti and Ira Schneider. The historic video magazine Radical Software was started by Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, and Ira Schneider and first appeared in Spring of 1970, soon after low-cost portable video equipment became available to artists and other potential videomakers. Though scholarly works on video art history often refer to Radical Software, there are few places where scholars can review its contents. Individual copies are rare, and few complete collections exist. This Web site makes it freely available and searchable on the Internet.

Radical Software online.

Media Art Net has an extensive archive of texts on areas such as Aesthetics of the Digital, Sound and Image, Mapping and Text, and Art and Cinematography. In the category Art and Cinematography, you can find the following texts ( among others) :

"Artists, Auteurs, and Star. On the Human Factor in the Culture Industry" by Diedrich Diederichsen
" »That's the Only Now I Get« Immersion and Participation in Video Installations by Dan Graham, Steve McQueen, Douglas Gordon, Doug Aitken, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Sam Taylor-Wood" by Ursula Frohne
"Deserts of the Political - Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Smithson and Michael Snow" by Tom Holert
"Toward a Corporeal Cinema: Theatricality in the '70s" by Ivone Margulies
"No More Boring Art" by John Miller

A rare clip of the notorious b.i.g freestyling at the age of 17 in the streets.

Directed by Spike Lee and starring a very young Lawrence Fishburne. "White Lines (Don't Don't Do It)" is a song by Melle Mel, released as a 12" in 1983 on Sugar Hill Records. The song, which warns against the dangers of cocaine, addiction, and drug smuggling, is one of Melle Mel's signature tracks. The instantly recognizable bassline is sampled from a performance of the Sugar Hill house band playing Liquid Liquid's "Cavern". Duran Duran released an electronica/alternative rock/rap version on their 1995 album Thank You. They were backed by the original musicians on the track, and as of 2006, the band is continuing to perform the song as a regular part of their live set.

Mp3 by Reena Spaulings.


White Light/White Heat is The Velvet Underground's second album. The record is famous for rejecting the pop sensibilities of their first record, as well as that record's guest vocalist Nico and producer Andy Warhol. Recorded relatively rapidly in a period of 2 days in late 1967, the distorted, feedback-driven, and roughly recorded sound went onto influence countless musicians. The album became one of the prototypes for The Stooges and the punk movement. The album consists of six tracks, each offering a different sonic challenge to the listener. The album's title track, "White Light/White Heat", explodes with a pounding rhythm and lyrics that glorify the use of heroin and amphetamines.

The introduction of the very first Macintosh computer.

Cory is curating a list of links for ArtReview, and I particularily liked this curatorial move.

The black muppet on Sesame Street, listen to his songs.

Stephens website

"When someone at Mitsubishi saw my Video Weavings works, he contacted me about projecting the images on their giant Diamond Vision screen. Perhaps seeing the chevron shapes passing through portions of the Video Weavings work triggered his thinking of a connection. This was the first installation of a Diamond Vision video screen in the United States, and I was very interested in the concept of projecting some of my Video Weavings images during a Major League Baseball game."

Go to the project here.

Listen to Here Comes the Sun by the Peanuts Gang here

Avant Garde was a magazine notable for graphic and logogram design by Herb Lubalin. Some more info here and here

Visit Matthieu here

Matthieu Clainchard is a great artist, curator and gallery director living and working in Paris. He is part of the artist group Bad Beuys Entertainment and the curator group Le Commissariat. If you go to Paris you can visit him in the gallery La Vitrine.

Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revolution. This is one of the music segments between stories from the early 70s series "Lancelot Link : Secret Chimp". This all ape band featuring Lance Link (played by Tonga) on Guitar, Mata Hairi (played by Debbie) on Tamborine, 'Blackie' on Drums and ??? on Keyboards (name never mentioned on the show and creators Burns and Marmer couldn't recall his name when interviewed recently). A self titled album was released as well as a single titled 'Sh La La La Love You'. The musical style was leaning towards bubblegum pop, but with some great vocal harmonies similar to that of The Eagles. Some songs also contained heavy guitar riffs, reflecting the growth of hard rock and heavy metal at the time. While some of the songs do seem rather cheesy when listened to today ('Yummy Love' for example), some of them have stood the test of time and would fit in nicely on any classic rock radio station ('Teaser', 'The Evolution Revolution' and 'Live' for example). For the performances on the show, they played the songs to the chimps and they were able to pick up the rhythm quite easily. Obviously they couldn't really play but if you watch them (especailly Blackie) you'll see that while they may not be anywhere near the right chords, as far as the rhythm goes, they seem to be pretty much spot on most of the time.

"The Beat Lab"
Directed by Monihan Monihan
DP RB Umali & Joe Cookie
Graphics by Doug Lee
Motion graphics by Joe Cookie & Travis Johns
Music by Dante Ross, Prince Paul and The Captain and Tenille
Special guest appearance by ray chu as "the slow learner"

Anders Nordby of Computerprincess re-copied and pasted the design of "The Copy and Paste Show" that I curated for Rhizome at the New Museum of Contemporary Art into this beautiful site.

An interview with John Baldessari by Moira Roth in 1973. In this extensive interview from the early part of his career, published in full for the first time, Baldessari talks about his views on Duchamp, language-as-readymade, teaching, and his artistic process.

Jack Goldstein, Shane, 1975. Still image from 16 mm color sound film, 3 minutes.

Pictures" at an Exhibition, Installation view, Artists Space, 2001. (Re-hanging of original Pictures exhibition.) Pictured: Jack Goldstein.

A look at shifting critical positions about the art of the 1980s as evidenced in the recent pages of Artforum and Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia. Read the text.

The following three entries are all links to texts from the website of the art publication X-TRA.

By Jan Tumlir - Part 1 of a forthcoming book that maps the concentric cultural displacements around Sgt. Pepper--end of empire, brit pop, artistic formation and strategies of interpretation. Original illustrations by Brad Spence.

The second excerpt from Tumlir’s forthcoming book, The Magic Circle, begins with a close analysis of “A Day in the Life.” Tumlir concentrates on the genesis and context of Peter Blake’s cover for Sgt. Pepper. Original illustrations by Dave Muller.

Paintings of Judy Garland. Thanks to Lars Laumann.

'The Raft of Medusa' was one of the largest scandals in music history. Henzes description of events reads as follows: "There was at the beginning of the Hamburg Radio´s concert a Sit-in with slogans against the konsumistische culture and leaflets from three different groups: the SDS-Projektgruppe Culture and Revolution, Berlin, the Hamburg Music School and the Hamburg SDS. Then, there was a poster of Che on the concert platform, which the orchestral manager tore up abruptly. The actual protagonist was therefore this enraged orchestral manager, who although knew that the poster of che Guevara was hung in honour, could not tolerate ththat although he knew, that this picture of Che Guevara was hung in his honour, could not tolerate it. Then other protestors flew a red flag in place of the Che posters. I asked the lawyer of the radio to request the flag be moved, otherwise I could not be responsible for the consequences. I didn´t let slip what the consequences would be as I showed restraint to myself." After the musicians had refused to begin the performance under red flag, the police came and took seven people away. During the scuffle the librettist was injured. Henze meanwhile had left the hall in order to find a lawyer and the performance was cancelled. It wasn´t until two years later in Vienna that the work was finally first heard. More on Henze here

Water Music is a collection of orchestral movements, often considered as three suites, composed by George Frideric Handel. It premiered in the summer of 1717 when King George I requested a concert on the River Thames. The concert was performed by 50 musicians that joined King George I on his barge. King George I was said to have loved it so much that he ordered Handel to play the suites three times on the trip.

Many portions of the Water Music have become familiar. Between 1959 and 1988 a "Water Music" movement was used for the ident of Anglia Television. The D major movement in 3/2 meter subtitled "Alla Hornpipe" is particularly notable and has been used frequently for television and radio commercials, including commercials for the privatisation of the UK water companies in the late 1980's. The "Air" and "Bourrée" from the F major "suite" have also become popular with audiences, with the latter being the theme music to the popular cooking show The Frugal Gourmet.

Read about Water Music here