Watch Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests of Three Female Muses: Nico, Edie Sedgwick & Mary Woronov

in Art, Film | September 24th, 2018

Artist Andy Warhol shot over 500 silent, black-and-white screen-tests in his famous Fac­to­ry between 1964 and 1966, doc­u­ment­ing the beau­ti­ful youth who were drawn to the scene. Some­times he would chat with the sub­ject before­hand, offer­ing sug­ges­tions to help them achieve the type of per­for­mance he was look­ing for. More fre­quent­ly he took a pas­sive role, to the point of leav­ing the room dur­ing the film­ing.

The oppo­site of a peo­ple per­son, he pre­ferred to engage with his sub­jects by scru­ti­niz­ing the fin­ished screen tests, pro­ject­ing them in slow motion to imbue them with an added ele­ment of glam­our and ampli­fy every nuance of expres­sion. As Warhol wrote in The Phi­los­o­phy of Andy Warhol:

That screen mag­net­ism is some­thing secret. If you could fig­ure out what it is and how you make it, you’d have a real­ly good prod­uct to sell. But you can’t even tell if some­one has it until you actu­al­ly see them up there on the screen. You have to give screen tests to find out.

The screen tests are less audi­tions for roles in Warhol films than pieces of an ongo­ing project. Warhol played with them, assem­bling and reassem­bling them into col­lec­tions which he screened under such flu­id titles as 13 Most Beau­ti­ful Women and 13 Most Want­ed Men. Some of his test sub­jects went on to achieve real star­dom—Lou Reed, Den­nis Hop­per, and Bob Dylan…

Oth­ers’ fame is for­ev­er tied to the Fac­to­ry.

Edie Sedg­wick, above, one of his best known mus­es, was a trou­bled girl from a wealthy fam­i­ly. Unlike some of the mood­i­er screen tests, Sedgwick’s is ful­ly lit. She dis­plays a gen­uine movie star’s poise, bare­ly mov­ing as the cam­era drinks her in. Her beau­ty appears untouched by the addic­tions and eat­ing dis­or­ders that were already a dri­ving force in her life.

Actress and painter Mary Woronov emerged unscathed from her time at the Fac­to­ry. Like Sedg­wick, she seemed com­fort­able with the idea of being observed doing noth­ing for an extend­ed peri­od. Recall­ing her screen test expe­ri­ence in an inter­view with Bizarre, she made it clear that the sub­jects were far from the cen­ter of atten­tion:

Andy put you on a stool, then puts the cam­era in front of you. There are lots of peo­ple around usu­al­ly. And then he turns the cam­era on, and he walks away, and all the peo­ple walk away too, but you’re stand­ing there in front of this cam­era.

I saw Sal­vador Dali do one, it was real­ly fun­ny. It’s a very inter­est­ing film, because it’s a way of crack­ing open your per­son­al­i­ty and show­ing what’s underneath—only in a visu­al way, because there’s no talk­ing, noth­ing. You just look at the cam­era. Sal­vador made this gigan­tic pose with his mous­tache blar­ing and every­thing, and he could­n’t hold the pose. Not for five min­utes. And so at about minute four, he sud­den­ly start­ed look­ing very, very real.


The cam­era loves still­ness, some­thing mod­el and singer Nico was unable to deliv­er in her screen test. Per­haps not such a prob­lem when the direc­tor has plans to project in slow motion.

As he stat­ed in POP­ism: The Warhol ’60s:

What I liked was chunks of time all togeth­er, every real moment… I only want­ed to find great peo­ple and let them be them­selves… and I’d film them for a cer­tain length of time and that would be the movie.

Fac­to­ry regular/interior decorator/photographer Bil­ly Name told punk his­to­ri­an Legs McNeil in an inter­view that the screen tests served anoth­er pur­pose—to iden­ti­fy the fel­low trav­el­ers from among the poor fits:

… it’s always cool to meet oth­er artists, you know, to see if it’s some­body who’s going to be a peer or a com­pa­tri­ot, who you can play with and hang around with or not. Andy was doing a series of screen tests for his films, and we want­ed every­body to do one: Dylan, Nico, Den­nis Hop­per, Susan Son­tag, Donovan—everyone famous that came up to the Fac­to­ry. We’d just film 16mm black-and-white por­traits of the per­son sit­ting there for a few min­utes. So our pur­pose was to have Dylan come up and do a screen test, so he could be part of the series. That was enough for us. But Dylan did­n’t talk at all when we filmed him. I don’t think he liked us, ha, ha, ha!

Revolver Gallery, devot­ed exclu­sive­ly to Warhol, has a gallery of screen-tests on their YouTube chan­nel.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Vel­vet Under­ground & Andy Warhol Stage Pro­to-Punk Per­for­mance Art: Dis­cov­er the Explod­ing Plas­tic Inevitable (1966)

Andy Warhol’s 15 Min­utes: Dis­cov­er the Post­mod­ern MTV Vari­ety Show That Made Warhol a Star in the Tele­vi­sion Age (1985–87)

The Big Ideas Behind Andy Warhol’s Art, and How They Can Help Us Build a Bet­ter World

Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Test’ of Bob Dylan: A Clas­sic Meet­ing of Egos

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 24 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Hieronymus Bosch Demon Bird Was Spotted Riding the New York City Subway the Other Day…

in Art, Comedy, Creativity, Life | September 21st, 2018

To me, the great promise of home­school­ing is that one day your child might, on their own ini­tia­tive, ride the New York City sub­ways dressed in a home­made, needle­felt­ed cos­tume mod­eled on the ice-skat­ing bird mes­sen­ger from Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Temp­ta­tion of St. Antho­ny.

Rae Stim­son, aka Rae Swon, a Brook­lyn-based artist who did just that a lit­tle over a week ago, describes her upbring­ing thus­ly:

Grow­ing up I was home schooled in the coun­try­side by my mom who is a sculp­tor and my dad who is an oil painter, car­pen­ter, and many oth­er things. Most of my days were spent draw­ing and observ­ing nature rather than doing nor­mal school work. Learn­ing tra­di­tion­al art tech­niques had always been very impor­tant to me so that I can play a role in keep­ing these beau­ti­ful meth­ods alive dur­ing this con­tem­po­rary trend of dig­i­tal, non­rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al, and con­cep­tu­al art. I make tra­di­tion­al art­work in a wide vari­ety of medi­ums, includ­ing wood­carv­ing, oil paint­ing, etch­ing, nee­dle felt­ing, and alter­na­tive process pho­tog­ra­phy.

Not every home­school­er, or, for that mat­ter, Wal­dorf stu­dent, is into nee­dle felt­ing. It only seems that way when you com­pare the num­bers to their coun­ter­parts in more tra­di­tion­al school set­tings…

Even the tini­est crea­ture pro­duced by this method is a labor inten­sive propo­si­tion, where­in loose woolen fibers are soaked, soaped, and jabbed with a nee­dle until they come togeth­er in a rough mat, suit­able for shap­ing into the whimsical—or demonic—figure of its creator’s choos­ing.

Stim­son matched her full-head bird mask to the one in the paint­ing by equip­ping it with gloves, a blan­ket cloak, long vel­vet ears, and a leaf­less twig emerg­ing from the spout of its hand-paint­ed fun­nel hat.

An accom­plished milliner, Stim­son was drawn to her subject’s unusu­al head­gear, telling HuffPo’s Priscil­la Frank how she wished she could ask Bosch about the var­i­ous ele­ments of his “beau­ti­ful demon-bird” and “what, if any, sym­bol­ic sig­nif­i­cance they hold.”

The answer lies in art his­to­ry writer Stan­ley Meisler’s Smith­son­ian mag­a­zine arti­cle, “The World of Bosch”:

…a mon­ster on ice skates approach­es three fiends who are hid­ing under a bridge across which pious men are help­ing an uncon­scious Saint Antho­ny. The mon­ster, wear­ing a badge that Bax says can be rec­og­nized as the emblem of a mes­sen­ger, bears a let­ter that is sup­pos­ed­ly a protest of Saint Antho­ny’s treat­ment. But the let­ter, accord­ing to (Bosch schol­ar and author Dirk) Bax, is in mir­ror writ­ing, a sure sign that the mon­ster and the fiends are mock­ing the saint. The mon­ster wears a fun­nel that sym­bol­izes intem­per­ance and waste­ful­ness, sports a dry twig and a ball that sig­ni­fy licen­tious mer­ry­mak­ing, and has lop­ping ears that show its fool­ish­ness. All this might have been obvi­ous to the artist’s con­tem­po­raries when the work was cre­at­ed, but the aver­age mod­ern view­er can only hope to under­stand the over­all intent of a Bosch paint­ing, while regard­ing the scores of bizarre mon­sters and demons as a kind of dark and cru­el com­ic relief.

A field guide to Bosch’s bizarre images in the same arti­cle gives view­ers leave to inter­pret any and all fun­nels in his work as a cod­ed ref­er­ence to deceit and intem­per­ance… per­haps at the hands of a false doc­tor or alchemist!

Not every sub­way rid­er caught the arty ref­er­ence. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, some even refused to acknowl­edge the strange being in their midst. Those folks must not share Stimson’s ded­i­ca­tion to exam­in­ing “that which is unfa­mil­iar, seek­ing out all that is yet unknown to you in both art and life.”

With­in 24 hours of its Met­ro­pol­i­tan Tran­sit Author­i­ty adven­ture, the one-of-a-kind demon-bird cos­tume was sold on Etsy.

(Holler if you wish Stim­son had kept it around long enough to take a spin on the ice at Rock­e­feller Cen­ter or Bryant Park, where the major­i­ty of patrons would no doubt be glid­ing around in igno­rance that, as per Meisler, Bosch equat­ed skates with fol­ly.)

See more of Rae Stimson’s nee­dle-felt­ed cre­ations, includ­ing a full-body alien robot cos­tume and a sculp­ture of author Joyce Car­ol Oates with her pet chick­en in her Etsy shop.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fig­ures from Hierony­mus Bosch’s “The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights” Come to Life as Fine Art Piñatas

Hierony­mus Bosch Fig­urines: Col­lect Sur­re­al Char­ac­ters from Bosch’s Paint­ings & Put Them on Your Book­shelf

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is a New York City-based home­school­er, author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her at The Tank NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 24 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Download Classic Japanese Wave and Ripple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japanese Artists from 1903

in Art, Books, Design, History | September 18th, 2018

Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese art may please so many of us, even those of us with lit­tle inter­est in Japan itself, because of the way it inhab­its the realm between rep­re­sen­ta­tion and abstrac­tion. But then, it does­n’t just inhab­it that realm: it has set­tled those bor­der­lands, made them its own, for much longer than most cul­tures have been doing any­thing at all. The space between art, strict­ly defined, and what we now call design has also seen few achieve­ments quite so impres­sive as those made in Japan, going all the way back to the rope mark­ings on the clay ves­sels used by the islands’ Jōmon peo­ple in the 11th cen­tu­ry BC.

Those ancient rope-on-clay mark­ings can eas­i­ly look like pre­de­ces­sors of the “wave pat­terns” still seen in Japan­ese art and design today. Since time almost immemo­r­i­al they have appeared on “swords (both blades and han­dles) and asso­ci­at­ed para­pher­na­lia (known as ‘sword fur­ni­ture’), as well as lac­quer­ware, Net­suke, reli­gious objects, and a host of oth­er items.”

So says the Pub­lic Domain Review, which has fea­tured a series of three books full of ele­gant wave and rip­ple designs orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1903 and now avail­able to down­load free at the Inter­net Archive (vol­ume one, vol­ume two, vol­ume three).

Called Hamon­shū, the books were pro­duced by the artist Mori Yuzan, “about whom not a lot is known,” adds the Pub­lic Domain review, “apart from that he hailed from Kyoto, worked in the Nihon­ga style” — or the “Japan­ese paint­ing” style of Japan­ese paint­ing, which emerged dur­ing the Mei­ji peri­od, a time of rapid West­ern­iza­tion in Japan.

He “died in 1917. The works would have act­ed as a kind of go-to guide for Japan­ese crafts­men look­ing to adorn their wares with wave and rip­ple pat­terns.” Though they do con­tain text, they require no knowl­edge of the Japan­ese lan­guage to appre­ci­ate the many illus­tra­tions they present.

Tak­en togeth­er, Mori’s books offer a com­plete spec­trum from tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese-style rep­re­sen­ta­tion — espe­cial­ly of land, water, moun­tains, sky, and oth­er nat­ur­al ele­ments — to a taste of the infi­nite vari­ety of abstract pat­terns that result. Such imagery remains preva­lent in Japan more than a cen­tu­ry after the pub­li­ca­tion of Hamon­shū, as any vis­i­tor to Japan today will see.

But now that the Inter­net Archive has made the books freely avail­able online (vol­ume one, vol­ume two, vol­ume three), they’ll sure­ly inspire work not just between rep­re­sen­ta­tion and abstrac­tion as well as between art and design, but between Japan­ese aes­thet­ics and those of every oth­er cul­ture in the world as well.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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R. Crumb Illustrates Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea: Existentialism Meets Underground Comics

in Art, Literature, Philosophy | September 18th, 2018

Sartre’s nov­el Nau­sea intro­duced his philo­soph­i­cal view as a form of ill­ness to a WWII read­er­ship. “Nau­sea is exis­tence reveal­ing itself—and expe­ri­ence is not pleas­ant to see,” he wrote in his own sum­ma­ry of his first book, pub­lished in 1938. The novel’s drama­ti­za­tion of His­to­ri­an Roquentin’ s cri­sis presents a case of exis­ten­tial sick­ness as most­ly invol­un­tary.

Though pub­lished before his many Marx­ist books and essays, Nau­sea con­nects the malaise to a cer­tain class expe­ri­ence. “I have no trou­bles,” thinks Roquentin in Robert Crumb’s short adap­ta­tion of the book above, “I have mon­ey like a cap­i­tal­ist, no boss, no wife, no chil­dren; I exist, that’s all…. And that trou­ble is so vague, so meta­phys­i­cal that I am ashamed of it.” Nau­sea, in one sense, is bour­geoise alien­ation, while Roquentin’s con­ver­sa­tion part­ner, the Self-Taught Man, con­fess­es a naïve human­ist ide­al­ism.

The char­ac­ters alone, some crit­ics sug­gest, imbue the book with a sub­tle par­o­dy. As he lis­tens to the Self-Taught Man’s trou­bles and rumi­nates on his own, Crumb’s Roquentin grows more Sartre-like. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the Self-Taught Man takes on a Crumb-like demeanor and aspect. Their dia­logue moves briskly, the scene resem­bling My Din­ner with Andre with less ban­ter and more neu­ro­sis. Sartre’s tone lends itself well to Crumb’s obses­sive, tight­ly-com­posed pan­els.

Crumb’s lit­er­ary inter­pre­ta­tions have grav­i­tat­ed toward oth­er anx­ious writ­ers like Charles Bukows­ki and Franz Kaf­ka, as well as the mur­der and incest of the book of Gen­e­sis. The under­ground comics leg­end is right at home with Sartre­an dread and despair. Crumb became famous for Fritz the Cat, an ani­mat­ed film ver­sion of his raunchy hip­ster, what many called his gross­ly sex­ist and racist sex fan­tasies, and the draw­ing and slo­gan “Keep on Truckin’.” He was a fig­ure of 60s and 70s coun­ter­cul­ture, but that’s nev­er where he belonged.

Crumb was a Sartre­an pro­tag­o­nist , even when he “often por­trayed him­self in his work as naked… and pri­apic.” In an an inter­view with Crumb The Guardian describes him:

his words are depres­sive and lugubri­ous, and yet he appears mel­low, laugh­ing eas­i­ly through his exis­ten­tial nau­sea. The most ter­ri­ble sto­ries amuse him as much as they pain him. He tells me how a best friend killed him­self by swal­low­ing four bot­tles of paper cor­rec­tion flu­id, and he chor­tles. He talks of his own despair, and gig­gles. He admits that he could nev­er have imag­ined a life quite so fulfilled—with Aline, and his beloved daugh­ter Sophie, also a car­toon­ist, and suc­cess and money—and says he’s still mis­er­able as hell, and laughs.

He is a lit­tle Roquentin, a lit­tle bit Sartre, a lit­tle bit Self-Taught man, apply­ing to his read­ing of lit­er­a­ture and phi­los­o­phy an LSD-assist­ed, sex-pos­i­tive, and unavoid­ably con­tro­ver­sial and depres­sive sen­si­bil­i­ty. See the full Crumb-illus­trat­ed Nau­sea here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

R. Crumb Shows Us How He Illus­trat­ed Gen­e­sis: A Faith­ful, Idio­syn­crat­ic Illus­tra­tion of All 50 Chap­ters

Three Charles Bukows­ki Books Illus­trat­ed by Robert Crumb: Under­ground Com­ic Art Meets Out­sider Lit­er­a­ture

Under­ground Car­toon­ist Robert Crumb Cre­ates an Illus­trat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Franz Kafka’s Life and Work

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Behold Mystical Photographs Taken Inside a Cello, Double Bass & Other Instruments

in Art, Music, Photography | September 13th, 2018

“If God had designed the orches­tra,” remarks a char­ac­ter in Rick Moody’s Hotels of North Amer­i­ca, “then the cel­lo was His great­est accom­plish­ment.” I couldn’t agree more. The cel­lo sounds sub­lime, looks state­ly… even the word cel­lo evokes regal poise and grace. If orches­tral instru­ments were chess pieces, the cel­lo would be queen: shape­ly and dig­ni­fied, prime mover on the board, majes­tic in sym­phonies, quar­tets, cham­ber pop ensem­bles, post rock bands….

With all its many son­ic and aes­thet­ic charms, I didn’t imag­ine it was pos­si­ble to love the cel­lo more. Then I saw Roman­ian artist Adri­an Bor­da’s mag­nif­i­cent pho­tos tak­en from inside one. The pho­to above, Bor­da tells us at his Deviant Art page, was tak­en from inside “a very old French cel­lo made in Napoleon’s times.” It looks like the bel­ly of the HMS Vic­to­ry mat­ed with the nave of Chartres Cathe­dral. The light descend­ing through the f‑holes seems of some divine ori­gin.

Bor­da has also tak­en pho­tos from inside an old dou­ble bass (above), as well as a gui­tar, sax, and piano. The stringed orches­tral instru­ments, he says, yield­ed the best results. He was first inspired by a 2009 ad cam­paign for the Berlin­er Phil­har­moniker that “cap­tured the insides of instru­ments,” writes Twist­ed Sifter, “reveal­ing the hid­den land­scapes with­in.” With­out any sense of how the art direc­tor cre­at­ed the images, Bor­da set about exper­i­ment­ing with meth­ods of his own.

He was lucky enough to have a luthi­er friend who had a con­tra­bass open for repairs. Lat­er he trav­eled to Amiens, where he found the French cel­lo, also open. “To achieve these shots,” Twist­ed Sifter notes, “Bor­da fit a Sony NEX‑6 cam­era equipped with a Samyang 8mm fish­eye lens inside the instru­ment and then used a smart remote so he could pre­view the work­flow on his phone.” Depend­ing on the angle and the play of light with­in the instru­ment, the pho­tos can look eerie, somber, omi­nous, or angelic—mirroring the cello’s expres­sive range.

Bor­da gives the cel­lo inte­ri­or shot above the per­fect title “A Long, Lone­ly Time….” Its play of smoke and light is ghost­ly noir. His pho­to below, of the inside of a sax­o­phone, pulls us into a haunt­ed, alien tun­nel. If you want to know what’s on the oth­er side, con­sid­er the strange sur­re­al­ist worlds of Borda’s main gig as a sur­re­al­ist painter of warped fan­tasies and night­mares. Unlike these pho­tos, his paint­ings are full of lurid, vio­lent col­or, but they are also filled with mys­te­ri­ous musi­cal motifs. See more of Bor­da’s inte­ri­or instru­ment pho­tos at Deviant Art and Twister Sifter.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a Luthi­er Birth a Cel­lo in This Hyp­not­ic Doc­u­men­tary

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Nine Tips from Bill Mur­ray & Cel­list Jan Vogler on How to Study Intense­ly and Opti­mize Your Learn­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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When Steve Jobs Taught Andy Warhol to Make Art on the Very First Macintosh (1984)

in Art, History, Technology | September 7th, 2018

When Andy Warhol first became famous, few knew what to make of his art. When Apple first released the Mac­in­tosh — dra­mat­i­cal­ly pro­mot­ed with that Rid­ley Scott Super Bowl com­mer­cial — few knew what to make of it either. The year was 1984, when almost nobody had seen a graph­i­cal user inter­face or even a mouse, let alone used them, and the Mac­in­tosh looked as strange and com­pelling when it entered the com­put­ing scene as Warhol did when he entered the art scene. Both seemed so casu­al­ly to repu­di­ate so many long-held assump­tions, an act that tends to star­tle and con­fuse old­er peo­ple but makes imme­di­ate sense to younger ones. What hap­pened, then, when Warhol and the Mac­in­tosh first crossed paths?

Jour­nal­ist David Sheff, who wrote an ear­ly pro­file of Steve Jobs and con­duct­ed the last in-depth inter­view with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, remem­bers it well. In Octo­ber 1984, he and Jobs attend­ed the ninth-birth­day par­ty thrown by Ono for Sean, her son with Lennon. As a present, Jobs brought along one of his com­pa­ny’s new Mac­in­tosh­es and set it up him­self in young Sean’s bed­room. “Sean took con­trol of the mouse, and rolled the small box along the floor,” Sheff writes. “Steve said, ‘Now hold the but­ton down while you move it and see what hap­pens.’ Sean did, and a thin, jagged, black line, appeared on the screen. Sean, entranced, said, ‘Cool!’ He clicked the mouse but­ton, pushed it around, and on the screen appeared shapes and lines, which he erased, and then he drew a sort of lion-camel and then a fig­ure that he said was Boy George.”

Though Boy George may not have been in atten­dance, the par­ty’s unsur­pris­ing­ly fab­u­lous guest list also includ­ed Andy Warhol (an “eccen­tric uncle” to Sean) and Kei­th Har­ing, both of whom Sheff remem­bers com­ing into the room as part of a crowd want­i­ng to catch a glimpse of Sean’s new toy. It was­n’t long before Warhol, pre­sum­ably com­pelled by the artis­tic impulse as well as by his fas­ci­na­tion for all things new, asked if he could give it a try:

Andy took Sean’s spot in front of the com­put­er and Steve showed him how to maneu­ver and click the mouse. Warhol didn’t get it; he lift­ed and waved the mouse, as if it were a conductor’s baton. Jobs gen­tly explained that the mouse worked when it was pushed along a sur­face. Warhol kept lift­ing it until Steve placed his hand on Warhol’s and guid­ed it along the floor. Final­ly Warhol began draw­ing, star­ing at the “pen­cil” as it drew on the screen.

Warhol was spell­bound – peo­ple who knew him know the way he tuned out every­thing extra­ne­ous when he was entranced by what­ev­er it was – glid­ing the mouse, eyes affixed to the mon­i­tor. Har­ing was bent over watch­ing. Andy, his eyes wide, looked up, stared at Har­ing, and said, “Look! Kei­th! I drew a cir­cle!”

In his diary, Warhol writes of enter­ing Sean’s room to find “a kid there set­ting up the Apple com­put­er that Sean had got­ten as a present, the Mac­in­tosh mod­el. I said that once some man had been call­ing me a lot want­i­ng to give me one, but that I’d nev­er called him back or some­thing, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ ” But Jobs, pos­sessed of as keen a pro­mo­tion­al instinct as Warhol’s own, assured him that the offer was still good, and that he would also give him a les­son in draw­ing on the Mac right then and there. “I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it,” writes Warhol, not­ing that “it only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in col­or.”

The Mac­in­tosh made an appear­ance in Warhol’s “Ads” series of paint­ings in 1984, the same year he also agreed, accord­ing to Art­sy’s Abi­gail Cain, “to be a spokesper­son for Apple’s rival in the per­son­al com­put­ing sphere — Com­modore. The artist was to pro­mote the company’s new com­put­er, the Ami­ga 1000, and its cut­ting-edge mul­ti­me­dia capa­bil­i­ties” that includ­ed a 4,096-color dis­play. At the machine’s launch, Warhol “used ProPaint to sketch Blondie lead singer Deb­bie Har­ry in front of a crowd of eager tech enthu­si­asts,” which you can see in the video above. Just a few years ago, the efforts of dig­i­tal artist Cory Arcan­gel and spe­cial­ists at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty recov­ered 28 long-lost dig­i­tal paint­ings Warhol made on his Ami­ga. Whether the artist ever made any­thing with or even took deliv­ery of his promised Mac, we don’t know – or at least we don’t know yet.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Short Film Takes You Inside the Recov­ery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art

Andy Warhol Dig­i­tal­ly Paints Deb­bie Har­ry with the Ami­ga 1000 Com­put­er (1985)

Apple’s Guid­ed Tour to Using the First Mac­in­tosh (1984)

Dis­cov­er the Lost Ear­ly Com­put­er Art of Telidon, Canada’s TV Pro­to-Inter­net from the 1970s

Japan­ese Com­put­er Artist Makes “Dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans” in 1964: When Giant Main­frame Com­put­ers Were First Used to Cre­ate Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Enter an Archive of William Blake’s Fantastical “Illuminated Books”: The Images Are Sublime, and in High Resolution

in Art, Literature | September 7th, 2018

William Blake earned his place as the patron saint of all free­think­ing out­sider artists. One might say he per­fect­ed the role as he per­fect­ed his art—or his arts rather, since his poet­ry inspires as much awe and acclaim as his vision­ary engrav­ings and illus­tra­tions. Stand­ing astride the Neo­clas­si­cal eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry and the Roman­tic era, Blake reject­ed the ratio­nal­ism and clas­si­cism that sur­round­ed him from birth and devel­oped a prophet­ic style drawn from an ear­li­er age.

He “sought to emu­late the exam­ple of artists such as Raphael, Michelan­ge­lo and Dür­er in pro­duc­ing time­less, ‘Goth­ic’ art, infused with Chris­t­ian spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and cre­at­ed with poet­ic genius,” writes the Met’s Eliz­a­beth Bark­er. (“Blake described his paint­ing tech­nique as ‘fres­co.’) But no one would ever mis­take the works of Blake for any­one oth­er than Blake, with their mus­cu­lar, hero­ic fig­ures, vio­lent­ly expres­sive faces, and tor­tured pos­es.

The William Blake Archive gives us access to a huge sam­pling of Blake’s work, from his book illus­tra­tions to his draw­ings and paint­ings, to his man­u­scripts, etc. The images are high res­o­lu­tion scans that users can add to a light­box, rotate, zoom into, view “true size,” or enlarge.

Per­haps most inter­est­ing are the images, like those here, from Blake’s “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books,” a series of philo­soph­i­cal, reli­gious, and mytho­log­i­cal works com­posed from about 1788 to 1822. The archive con­tains dozens of vari­ant print­ings of these end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ing hand-let­tered books.

Becom­ing a furi­ous­ly pro­lif­ic, mys­ti­cal­ly inspired artist while liv­ing in pover­ty and near-obscurity—“considered insane and large­ly dis­re­gard­ed by his peers,” as BBC His­to­ry puts it—required for­ti­tude and almost super­hu­man belief in him­self, espe­cial­ly since his belief sys­tem was large­ly self-cre­at­ed. While Blake con­sid­ered the Bible “the great­est work of poet­ry ever writ­ten,” and its themes and nar­ra­tives spoke to him through­out his career, his own reli­gious ten­den­cies took the form of the mythol­o­gy he elab­o­rat­ed through the fan­tas­ti­cal illu­mi­nat­ed books.

“I must Cre­ate a Sys­tem,” he wrote in Jerusalem, com­posed between 1804 and 1820, “or be enslav’d by anoth­er Mans,” and so he did, invent­ing fig­ures like Los, Urizen (the oppres­sive, sup­pres­sive God of the Old Tes­ta­ment), Albion, the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of Eng­land, and his daugh­ters, Bromion, Oothoon, and Theotor­mon. While work­ing on these unortho­dox projects, he bare­ly “eked out a liv­ing as an engraver and illus­tra­tor” of com­mer­cial books. He also drew and paint­ed sev­er­al Bib­li­cal sub­jects and scenes from lit­er­ary texts by his favorite authors, Mil­ton and Dante.

The illu­mi­nat­ed books, Bark­er writes “rank among Blake’s most cel­e­brat­ed achieve­ments.” Writ­ten “in a range of forms—prophecies, emblems, pas­toral vers­es, bib­li­cal satire, and children’s books,” these eclec­tic works “addressed var­i­ous time­ly subjects—poverty, child exploita­tion, racial inequal­i­ty, tyran­ny, reli­gious hypocrisy.” With lit­er­ary vig­or, moral clar­i­ty, and emo­tion­al insight, Blake harsh­ly cri­tiqued what he saw as the evils of his age, and more­over, offered an alternative—an anti-Enlight­en­ment, rad­i­cal­ly egal­i­tar­i­an, free love vision, com­posed of patch­work ele­ments of the Bible, Mil­ton, Emanuel Swe­den­borg, and pagan and druidic sources.

Two of the most famous of Blake’s illu­mi­nat­ed books show the influ­ence of Milton’s Il Penseroso and L’Allegro, stud­ies in the con­trast of melan­choly and mirth, which Blake once illus­trat­ed. In Blake’s hands, these become Songs of Inno­cence, “the gen­tlest of his lyrics,” writes BBC, and Songs of Expe­ri­ence, “con­tain­ing a pro­found expres­sion of adult cor­rup­tion and repres­sion.” Blake also found in Dante “a seem­ing­ly inex­haustible source of inspi­ra­tion in his own fer­tile mind,” Bark­er explains. But just as he trans­formed his artis­tic influ­ences, he took his lit­er­ary inspi­ra­tions in direc­tions no one else but Blake would think to do. And for that, he remains a sin­gu­lar­ly orig­i­nal artist, peer­less in inven­tive­ness and ded­i­ca­tion to his work.

See the William Blake Archive here. The link to his “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books” from which the images here come is at the top left-hand cor­ner of the archive’s nav bar.

You can pur­chase a copy of William Blake: The Com­plete Illu­mi­nat­ed Books in book for­mat here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

William Blake’s Mas­ter­piece Illus­tra­tions of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

Artists Illus­trate Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Bot­ti­cel­li, Mœbius & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch Willem Dafoe Become Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s New Film, At Eternity’s Gate

in Art, Film | September 6th, 2018

We know Julian Schn­abel for work­ing in two forms: paint­ing and film. His work in both has more con­nec­tion than it might at first seem, since most of his films are about art, or at least about artists. After mak­ing it big in the art world him­self in the late 1970s and 1980s with his sig­na­ture large-scale can­vass­es incor­po­rat­ing a wide vari­ety of mate­ri­als, he got behind the cam­era in 1996 to direct Basquiat, a biopic on the epony­mous graf­fi­ti-artist-turned-painter. In the 2000s he fol­lowed it up with Before Night Falls, about Cuban poet Reinal­do Are­nas, and The Div­ing Bell and the But­ter­fly, about a French mag­a­zine edi­tor turned writer after a stroke left him “locked” inside his own head. (At that same time he also shot a Lou Reed con­cert film, a song from which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.)

Now Schn­abel has brought his film­mak­ing career back to where he start­ed it with anoth­er film about anoth­er painter, a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure in his day, whose influ­ence grew after his ear­ly death. At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate depicts the final days in the life of Dutch Post-Impres­sion­ist Vin­cent van Gogh, cast­ing in the role no less a thes­pi­an than Willem Dafoe, known for play­ing every­one from T.S. Eliot to Pier Pao­lo Pasoli­ni to Jesus of Nazareth.

Though he has already lived a much longer life than Van Gogh ever did, Dafoe no doubt has the skills to use that in the per­for­mance’s favor, trans­mit­ting the way that the painter saw more deeply into the world around him than any­one else did and got labeled a mad­man for it. And yes, there was also the mat­ter of his ear, from which the trail­er above assures us that Schn­abel’s film does­n’t shy away.

But At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate clear­ly focus­es on Van Gogh’s strug­gle to pur­sue his art, accord­ing to his per­son­al vision, in an unre­cep­tive time and place. “Rather than sim­ply sug­gest that mad­ness and genius are inex­tri­ca­bly linked, as count­less movies of this sort have already done, the film­mak­er por­trays the act of cre­at­ing art as less an action and more a state of being, an ever-flow­ing stream that the man hold­ing the paint­brush is pow­er­less to stop or even con­trol,” writes Indiewire’s Michael Nor­dine. “Watch­ing the artist at work and hear­ing noth­ing but his rapid brush­strokes as the wind howls in the back­ground is med­i­ta­tive, even mes­mer­ic.” Schn­abel’s film fol­lows last year’s Lov­ing Vin­cent, which told Van Gogh’s sto­ry with ani­ma­tion made entire­ly of oil paint­ings. Its suc­cess, and the acclaim that has so far come in for At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate in advance of its wide release in Novem­ber, sup­ports one obser­va­tion in par­tic­u­lar made by Dafoe-as-Van Gogh: “Maybe God made me a painter for peo­ple who aren’t born yet.”

via IndieWire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Near­ly 1,000 Paint­ings & Draw­ings by Vin­cent van Gogh Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: View/Download the Col­lec­tion

New Ani­mat­ed Film About Vin­cent Van Gogh Will Be Made Out of 65,000 Van Gogh-Style Paint­ings: Watch the Trail­er and Mak­ing-Of Video

Watch as Van Gogh’s Famous Self-Por­trait Morphs Into a Pho­to­graph

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

The Vin­cent Van Gogh Action Fig­ure, Com­plete with Detach­able Ear

Lou Reed Sings “Sweet Jane” Live, Julian Schn­abel Films It (2006)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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