Ten years ago, Jeff Antebi, the founder of the record company Waxploitation, asked musicians and contemporary painters to collaborate on a collection of children’s stories for grown-ups. Today, you can find the fruits of their labor collected in a new, 350-page book project called Stories for Ways & Means. The book features tales by Tom Waits (above), Nick Cave, Bon Iver, The Pixies’ Frank Black and other artists. (Note: the stories contain “outre art, weird images, graphic displays of nasty stuff and cuss words.”) Also, you can now watch a series of short promo films where celebs like Danny Devito, Zach Galifianakis and Nick Offerman read items in the collection.
Danny Devito Reads “Doug the Bug” by Frank Black
Zach Galifianakis Reads “Next Big Thing” by Gibby Haynes
“The Lonely Giant” by Nick Cave, Read by Andre Royo (aka Bubbles from The Wire)
“Wishing Well Fountain,” Written and Narrated by Alison Mosshart
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With the rise of Far Right candidates in Europe and in America, along with creeping dictatorship in Turkey and authoritarianism in the Philippines, the idea of democracy and freedom of speech feels under threat more than ever. While we don’t talk about political solutions here on Open Culture, we do believe in the power of art to illuminate.
Argentine artist Marta Minujín is creating a large-scale artwork called The Parthenon of Books that will be constructed on Friedrichsplatz in Kassel, Germany, and will be constructed from as many as 100,000 banned books from all over the world.
The location has been chosen for its historical importance. In 1933, the Nazis burned two-thousand books there during the so-called “Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist” (Campaign against the Un-German Spirit), destroying books by Communists, Jews, and pacifists, along with any others deemed un-German.
Minujín chose the Parthenon—one of the great structures of Ancient Greece—for its continuing symbolism of the enduring power of democracy throughout the ages.
Minujín constructed a similar Parthenon in 1983 after the fall of her country’s dictatorship. The original El Partenón de libros featured the books that the former government had banned, and, at the end of the installation, Minujín let the public take what they wanted home. (She will be allowing the same thing to happen this time.)
Her people, as she says in the video above, didn’t know what democracy was after years of military rule. We might be on the opposite side of the spectrum: we won’t know what democracy is until we lose it.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
For at least half a decade now, New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has been digitizing its exhibition catalogs and other art books. Now you can find all of the publications made available so far — not just to read, but to download in PDF and ePub formats — at the Internet Archive. If you’ve visited the Guggenheim’s non-digital location on Fifth Avenue even once, you know how much effort the institution puts toward the preservation and presentation of modern art, and that comes through as much in its printed material as it does in its shows.
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Whether at the Museum of Modern Art, a dorm-room wall, or anywhere in between, we’ve all seen Salvador Dalí’s 1931 canvas The Persistence of Memory, and who among us wouldn’t want to own one of the “melting watches” it famously depicts? Alas, technology hasn’t quite caught up to that flamboyant Spanish surrealist’s vivid imagination: though clocks now come as flat as you like, no artistically minded entrepreneur has yet put such a Camembertishly malleable one into production. But that doesn’t mean you can’t surround yourself with the other stuff of Dalí’s paintings, thanks to this set of collectable figurines.
Or perhaps you’d prefer to add not just a touch of Dalí to your home, but a touch of Dalí depicting Dalí. In that case you might consider Parastone’s three-dimensional version of his 1941 Soft Self-Portrait with Grilled Bacon. Salvador-Dali.org describes the image as “a spectre full of irony, where an amorphous, soft face appears, supported by crutches” — the face of Dalí himself — “with a pedestal that bears the inscription of the title of the work and, above, a slice of fried bacon, a symbol of organic matter and of the everyday nature of his breakfasts in New York’s Saint Regis Hotel.” Not only does the figurine thus feature a vogue meat of the early 21st-century, it renders it in a manner that perhaps even Dalí, also a noted cookbook author, would consider good enough to eat. See the full figurine collection here.
In the first decade or so of the Soviet Union’s existence, “avant-garde experimenters emerged from obscurity to benefit from actual state sponsorship,” writes Harvard professor of Russian Literature Ainsley Morse. Their “aesthetic radicalism jibed nicely with political turmoil.” Among these artists were Futurists and Formalists, poets, painters, actors, directors, and many who fit into all of these categories. Most famous among them—the rakish romantic poet, writer, artist, actor, playwright, and filmmaker Vladimir Mayakovsky—had already achieved a great deal of notoriety by 1917. After the Revolution, he threw himself, “wholeheartedly” into creating playful, optimistic agitprop for the Party and “became a foghorn for socialism.”
At least at first. “In hindsight,” Morse laments, it’s hard to see the careers of these early Soviet artists “without wincing: all of these artists and writers getting cozy with the state machine that would shortly bring about their mental and physical destruction: imprisonment, exile, starvation, and suicide.” Sadly, the last of these was to be Mayakovsky’s fate; he killed himself in 1930, as Stalin’s paranoid totalitarianism began to gain strength. Yet throughout the 1920s, Mayakovsky was “driven by ideological commitment,” as well as “financial exigency,” writes Robert Bird at the University of Chicago’s “Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary.” The wildly imaginative and idealistic poet “transformed the popular media landscape of Russia” under Lenin.
Though he was harshly criticized by other artists for his work as a propagandist, “under his pen Russian poetry began to speak with a more flexible and expressive (even anarchic) play of sound and rhythm.” Maykovsky applied his talents not only to posters and poetry for adults, but to works for children as well. “The early years of the Soviet Union were a golden age for children’s literature,” notes the New York Review of Books in their description of The Fire Horse, an early example of Soviet pedagogy from Mayakovsky and fellow poets Osip Mandelstam and Daniil Kharms. The pages you see here come from the first edition of another classic Mayakovsky children’s work—a long poem called Whom Shall I Be?, first published, with illustrations by Nisson Shifrin, in 1932, two years after the author’s death.
In these verses, Mayakovsky exhorts his readers to choose their own path, “create their own identities,” even as the book channels their desires “into specific existing roles” predetermined by a seemingly very limited number of professional choices (all for men). Nevertheless, in final lines of Whom Shall I Be? Mayakovsky writes, “All jobs are fine for you: / Choose / for your own taste!” The book illustrates what Ruxi Zhang calls the “ineffectiveness of Soviet pedagogy” in its earliest stages. Lenin and his even more iron-fisted successor desired a “generation of faithful workers.” Instead, children’s books like Mayakovsky’s “overplayed Soviet fantasy,” often advocating for “freedom that fundamentally countered Soviet expectations for children to follow directions from the regime without questioning or interpreting them.”
In Mayakovsky’s earlier children’s story, The Fire Horse, several craftsmen get together to make a beautiful toy horse—which cannot be bought at the store—for a young boy who dreams of being a cavalryman. The book, writes Morse, is “transparently didactic,” explaining “in detail how the horse is made, and at the cost of whose labor.” Nonetheless, its story sounds less like an exemplar from the state’s idea of a worker’s paradise and more like a vignette from anarchist, aristocrat, and naturalist Peter Kropotkin’s society of “mutual aid.” It’s only natural that Mayakovsky and his comrades’ children’s books would reflect their stylistic daring, individualism, and wit. “It wasn’t much of a leap” for Futurist artists whose “mainstay” had been artist’s books with “interdependent text and illustrations.” Eventually, however, avant-garde artists like Mayakovsky were purged or “tamed” by the new regime.
Bird demonstrates this with the pages below from a 1947 edition of Whom Should I Be? These correspond to the pages above from 1932, showing an engineer. In addition to the replacing of an enthusiastic adult worker with an obedient, dutiful child, “the abstract depictions of constructivist buildings are replaced by realistic renderings of neo-classical edifices.” In 1932, Socialist Realism had only just become the official style of the Soviet Union. By 1947, its absolute authority was mostly unquestionable. Browse (and read, if you read Russian) all of Mayakovsky’s Whom Should I Be? at the Internet Archive, or at the top of this post.
Uruguayan-French poet Jules Laforgue, one of the young T.S. Eliot’s favorites, published his major work, The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon, in 1886, two years before his untimely death at 27 from tuberculosis. It is “a book of poems,” notes Wuthering Expectations, “about clowns who live on the moon… wear black silk skullcaps and use dandelions as boutonieres.” The Pierrots in his poems, Laforgue once wrote in a letter, “seem to me to have arrived at true wisdom” as they contemplate themselves and their conflicts in the light of the moon’s many faces.
I cannot help but think of Laforgue when I think of another artist who, around the same time, began on the other side of the world what is often considered the greatest work of his career. The artist, Japanese printmaker Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, also stood astride an old world and a rapidly modernizing new one. And his visual ruminations, though lacking Laforgue’s arch comedy, beautifully illustrate the same kind of dreamy contemplation, loneliness, melancholy, and weary resignation. The moon, as Laforgue wrote—a “Cat’s‑eye of bright / Redeeming light”—both comforts and taunts us: “It comes with the force of a body blow / That the Moon is a place one cannot go.”
Yoshitoshi’s prints feature a fixation on the moon’s mysteries, and a theatrical device to aid in the contemplation of its meanings: characters from Chinese and Japanese folklore and heroes from novels and plays, all of them staged just after key moments in their stories, in static postures and in silent dialogue with the night. Heavily invested with literary allusions and deeply laden with symbolism, the 100 prints, writes the Fitzwilliam Museum, “conjure a refined poetry to give a new twist to traditional subjects.”
The portraits, mostly solitary, wistful, and brooding, “penetrated deeper into the psychology of his subjects” than previous work in Yoshitoshi’s Ukiyo‑e style, one soon to be altered permanently by Western influences flooding in between the Edo and Meiji periods. Yoshitoshi both incorporated and resisted this influence, using figures from Kabuki and Noh theater to represent traditional Japanese arts, yet introducing techniques “never seen before in Japanese woodblock prints,” writes J. Noel Chiappa, breaking convention by “show[ing] people freely, from all angles,” rather than only in three-quarter view, and by using increased realism and Western perspectives.
Yoshitoshi began publishing these prints in 1885, and they proved hugely popular. People lined up for new additions to the series, which ran until 1892, when the artist died after a long struggle with mental illness. In these last years, he produced his greatest work, which also includes a kabuki-style series based on Japanese and Chinese ghost stories, New Forms of 36 Ghost Stories. “In a Japan that was turning away from its own past,” Chiappa writes, Yoshitoshi, “almost single-handedly managed to push the traditional Japanese woodblock print to a new level, before it effectively died with him.
His tumultuous career, after very successful beginnings, had fallen into disrepair and he had been publishing illustrations for sensationalist newspapers, an erotic portrait series of famous courtesans, and macabre prints of violence and cruelty. These preoccupations become completely stylized and psychologized in his final works, especially in One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, an extraordinary series of prints. View them all, with short descriptions of each subject, here, or at the Ronin Gallery, who provide information on the size and condition of each of its prints and allow viewers to zoom in on every detail. The images have also been publishished in a 2003 book, One Hundred Aspects of the Moon: Japanese Woodblock Prints by Yoshitoshi.
While it certainly helps to understand the literary and cultural context of each print in the series, it is not necessary for an appreciation of their exquisite visual poetry. Perhaps the artist’s memorial poem after his death at age 53 provides us with a master key for viewing his One Hundred Aspects of the Moon.
holding back the night with increasing brilliance the summer moon
Note: There are a couple brief not-safe-for-work moments in this film.
Patronizing, ponderous, well-meaning, self-aggrandizing, incoherent… young artists are subjected to a lot of unsolicited advice, and not just from their parents.
But what happens when a young artist actively seeks it out?
Her resultant short film, above, appears to be the work of a deliriously aggro inner child, one with a keen bullshit meter and an anarchic sense of humor.
The pulsating reproductive organs aren’t entirely inappropriate. Listen to Eliasson’s full interview to hear him equate making art with making the world. Now that’s the sort of advice that will put a young artist to work!
Some of the more generous advice:
Build a good name, keep your name clean, don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful.
Don’t be embarrassed about what excites you.
If you are doing something weird that everybody hates, that might be something worth looking into and worth investigating.
Make your own way in the world. Wrap up warm. Eat properly, sensibly. Don’t smoke and phone your mom.
We love imagining the sort of unfettered advice Shuhman will one day be in a position to dispense.
You can see some of her post graduation illustration work on her Flickr page.
From filmmaker Steve Olpin comes a short documentary (a “documentary poem”) called Earth and Fire, about artist and primitive potter Kelly Magleby. The film follows Kelly as she travels into “the backcountry of Southern Utah with a knife and a buckskin for 10 days to try to learn about Anasazi pottery by doing it the way the Anasazi did it.” On her website, Kelly writes “My desire to make Anasazi pottery started with my interest in primitive and survival skills. I love the fact that you can go into the wild with nothing and get all you need to survive and even flourish from the earth. The idea that you can go out and dig up some ‘dirt’, shape it, paint it and fire it all using only materials found in nature is amazing to me.” On her site, she details her method for making the pottery. Find more info about the Anasazi and their pottery here and here.
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