The Art of The Black Panthers: A Short Documentary on the Revolutionary Artist Emory Douglas

in Art, History | June 4th, 2015

Known as the Revolutionary Artist by his fellow Black Panthers and officially titled their Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas provided the striking visuals and designed the layout to the newspaper that bore the organization’s name when it premiered in 1967. In this short but insightful documentary by the outfit known as Dress Code, Douglas looks back at his time with Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P. Newton and the other Panthers during that most tumultuous decade and a half.

Douglas reminds us that San Francisco was segregated just as much as the South during the earlier part of the 20th century and that police brutality was, well, just like today, but without cell phone cameras. Ironically, it was because Douglas went to juvenile detention (he first got arrested at 13 years old) that he learned screenprinting in the print shop there, priming him to help Cleaver start up the The Black Panther newspaper in his apartment.

Douglas’ graphic design style was born from necessity–thick black lines did not let color seep out as much in the printing, and talking about color, he could only afford one or two. Professor Colette Gaiter called Douglas the “Norman Rockwell of the ghetto,” affording the poor and oppressed a normalcy in its depictions usually given to the middle class. And although pigs had symbolized power, greed and corruption long before Douglas was born, it was his depiction of cops and other authority figures as anthropomorphic swine that has stuck with us to this day.

At its height, The Black Panther newspaper had a weekly circulation of 400,000, but in the early ‘80s, Douglas stepped down as designer. He has never stopped working for social justice and by the 2000s, his huge body of work began to tour galleries and museums, admired for its technique and beauty, along with its message.

A critique of Dress Code’s documentary is that it only affords us slivers of Douglas’ art–zoomed in and animated.

This other doc from a 2008 studio visit provides a bit more context, and for those who would like to see the art alongside the essays, calls to action, and collages in the original issues, there are plenty of them scanned online for you to read.

via BoingBoing

Malcolm X, Debating at Oxford, Quotes Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1964)

Wattstax Documents the “Black Woodstock” Concert Held 7 Years After the Watts Riots (1973)

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.

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Frida Kahlo’s Colorful Clothes Revealed for the First Time & Photographed by Ishiuchi Miyako

in Art, Museums, Photography | May 29th, 2015

Imagine the dress up fun we could have in Grandma’s attic, if Grandma were Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) and the attic was a sealed off Mexico City bathroom where Grandpa — artist Diego Rivera, natch — had stashed all her stuff.

Yellow-laced scarlet booties trimmed with beads!

A glamorous, rotting swimsuit and an extremely familiar-looking traditional Tehuana headdress!

A saucy prosthetic leg! A skirted body cast embellished with hand-painted hammer and sickle.

Now let us take a minute to live vicariously through photographer Ishiuchi Miyako, whose previous subjects have included the clothing of her late mother and victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In 2004, the Museo Frida Kahlo’s staff started organizing Frida’s personal effects. Rivera (1886–1957) had stored them in the aforementioned Mexico city bathroom, along with instructions that the room should remain sealed for a period of 15 years following his death. In 2011, the museum invited Miyako in to document the far-from-mint condition relics, almost 300 in total.

“If I met her, I wouldn’t ask any questions,” the photographer avowed in an interview with AnOther Magazine. “I would only want to stare at her and touch her body.”

There is an intimacy to her gaze that suggests this statement might be true. Rarely have a couple of bottles of dried up nail polish exuded such sensuality.

Miyako’s Frida photographs have been collected in a book, and can be seen in the flesh in London’s Michael Hoppen Gallery through mid-July.

via Patron of the Arts

Frida Kahlo Writes a Personal Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Nervous Breakdown (1933)

Photos of a Very Young Frida Kahlo, Taken by Her Dad

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico, 1938

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Watch Chris Burden Get Shot for the Sake of Art (1971)

in Art | May 28th, 2015

Chris Burden passed away on May 10 and here at Open Culture we honored him with a post about his oddly hilarious late night 1970s TV commercials. But before that, Burden entered the public consciousness with one of his ballsiest and insane performance pieces.

“Shoot” (1971) consisted of the 25-year-old Burden being shot in the arm at close range by a friend wielding a rifle. A few inches off, and Burden would have probably died. Instead, as we see in the original piece above, he walks off very quickly, more in shock than pain. His intention was to be grazed by the bullet. It went a little deeper.

As Burden points out in the video, only eight seconds of the brief piece exists. It was filmed, November 19, 1971 in a small gallery in Santa Ana, CA called “F Space,” a few doors down from Burden’s studio, with only a few friends in attendance. He had previously announced his intention to be shot for art to the editors of an avant-garde art journal called Avalanche.

The video and Burden’s commentary on the missing footage is now what constitutes the piece. He urges us to listen for the sound of the empty shell hitting the ground. “In this instant I was a sculpture,” Burden later said. Journalists at the time wondered if Burden would make it to 30. Douglas Davis in Newsweek called him “the Evel Knievel of art.”

Coming at the height of the Vietnam War, the piece is about many things: trust, violence, the limits and risks of art, the role of the audience, the bravery of artists compared to the duty of soldiers. The video is now part of the MoMA and Whitney collections.

The New York Times commissioned this new short doc about the work and tracked down the marksman, one of Burden’s friends, whose identity had remained a secret until now. Fortunately, Burden is also in the video, and gives the last word:

“I think a lot of those performance works were an attempt to control fate or something,” Burden says. “Or giving you the illusion that you can control fate.”

via Kottke

Metropolis II: Chris Burden’s Amazing, Frenetic Mini-City

Yoko Ono Lets Audience Cut Up Her Clothes in Conceptual Art Performance (Carnegie Hall, 1965)

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.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Patti Smith’s Polaroids of Artifacts from Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Roberto Bolaño & More

in Art, Literature, Photography | May 28th, 2015

Polaroid photography has seen a new wave of interest over the past decade, in large part from young photographers looking to do something different from what they can with the digital technology on which they grew up.

The other modern practitioners include no less a creator than Patti Smith, who have personally witnessed the format’s appearance, fade, and return. A few years ago, her Polaroid photography reached the galleries, becoming shows and installations in Connecticut and Paris.

These “black-and-white silver gelatin prints made from Polaroid negatives, small and square and in soft focus,” writes the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, “are culled from a collection that documents hundreds of encounters with worldly effects transformed into sacred relics. A fork and a spoon that belonged to Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet who has been one of Smith’s touchstones forever. [Robert] Mapplethorpe’s bedroom slippers and the tambourine he made for Smith. A chair that belonged to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. William S. Burroughs’s bandanna. A replica of a life mask cast from the features of William Blake.”

Smith’s “gorgeous, misty photographs are inspired by artifacts from some of Smith’s favorite artists, from museums she has visited around the world, and many are from her personal life,” writes Flavorwire’s Emily Temple on “Camera Solo,” the Hartford exhibition which introduced these Polaroids to America in 2011. If you didn’t make it to the Wadsworth Atheneum for that show, you can still experience it through Patti Smith: Camera Solo, its companion book. Or have a look at her work on display at the BBC’s site, the gallery that offers the photos of Virginia Woolf’s bed, writing desk, and gravestone just above.

You can see even more at this post from Lens Culture on “Land 250,” the exhibition of Smith’s Polaroid photography at Paris’ Fondation Cartier.“I first took Polaroids in the early 1970s as components for collages,” it quotes Smith as saying. “In 1995, after the death of my husband, I was unable to center on the complex process of drawing, recording or writing a poem. The need for immediacy drew me again to the Polaroid. I chose a vintage Land 100.” In 2002, she settled on the Land 250, the venerable instant camera that gave the Paris show and its associated monograph their titles. It surely counts as one of the most important artifacts of Smith’s artistic life — and one with which she has captured the artifacts of so many other artistic lives important to her.

Patti Smith Reads Her Final Words to Robert Mapplethorpe

Patti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rimbaud to Susan Sontag

Andy Warhol’s 85 Polaroid Portraits: Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, O.J. Simpson & Many Others (1970–1987)

The Masterful Polaroid Pictures Taken by Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Robert De Niro Tells Graduating NYU Arts Grads, “You Made It… And You’re F*cked”

in Art, Creativity, Education, Graduation Speech, Life | May 25th, 2015

I’ve attended my share of graduations and hence my share of graduation speeches—from politicians more interested in stumping than inspiring their audience; to local TV personalities assuring graduates they too could become local TV personalities; to the real Patch Adams, who wasn’t nearly as funny as Robin Williams in his less-than-funny turn as Patch Adams. My experience has taught me that graduation speeches generally suck.

But not for the most recent batch of graduates of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, who got both bracing honesty and career validation from a speaker most likely to give it to you straight. With his trademark foul-mouth gruffness, De Niro told the graduating class what every aspiring artist needs to know: “You made it,” he said, “and you’re f*cked.” The world, De Niro told his audience, is not opening its arms to embrace art school grads. For all our pop cultural celebration of creativity, the so-called “creative class”—as we’re told again and again—is mostly in decline.

Of course it’s never been an easy road for artists. De Niro knows this full well not only through his own early experiences before superstardom but from his upbringing: both his mother and father were bohemian painters with turbulent, fascinating lives. And so he also knows of what he speaks when he tells the NYU grads that they “didn’t have a choice.” Where pragmatic accounting grads may be “passionate about accounting,” De Niro says, “it’s more likely that they used reason and logic and common sense to reach for a career that could give them the expectation of success and stability.”

Not the arts grads, the famous actor says: “You discovered a talent, developed an ambition and recognized your passion.” Their path, he suggests, is one of self-actualization:

When it comes to the arts, passion should always trump common sense. You aren’t just following dreams, you’re reaching for your destiny. You’re a dancer, a singer, a choreographer, a musician, a filmmaker, a writer, a photographer, a director, a producer, an actor, an artist. Yeah, you’re f***ed. The good news is that that’s not a bad place to start.

Maybe not. And maybe, for those driven to sing, dance, paint, write, etc., it’s the only place to start. Granted, NYU students are already a pretty select and privileged bunch, who certainly have a leg up compared to a great many other struggling artists. Nevertheless, given current economic realities and the U.S.’s depressing aversion to arts education and funding, these grads have a particularly difficult road ahead, De Niro says. And who better to deliver that hard truth with such conviction and good humor?

h/t @sheerly

Jim Carrey Commencement Speech: It’s Better to Fail at What You Love Than Fail at What You Don’t

‘This Is Water’: Complete Audio of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Graduation Speech (2005)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Mœbius Illustrates Paulo Coelho’s Inspirational Novel The Alchemist (1998)

in Art, Books | May 25th, 2015

When Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist came out in English, the level of popularity it eventually attained seriously impressed me. Then I went to Latin America, where the Spanish version seemed to have won a vaster readership still. I haven’t yet gone to Brazil to gauge the book’s popularity on the streets of Coelho’s homeland since its first publication to relatively little interest, but it surely hasn’t gone unknown there. As many fans as The Alchemist has, though, the inspiration-and-destiny-inflected appeal of the text entirely escapes some readers, in whichever language they read it. Perhaps they’d prefer an edition illustrated by Mœbius?

Born Jean Giraud, Mœbius’ career guarantees him a permanent place as one of the most influential comic artists ever to live. Even apart from the achievements in the medium in which he became famous — his founding work on Heavy Metal, his creation of nontraditional western outlaw Blueberry — he did a good deal of work that brought his singularly imaginative aesthetic into other creative realms, such as concept art from Alejandro Jodorowky’s Dune and illustrations for Dante’s Paradiso. In some sense, it might have seemed natural for him to lend his hand to Coelho’s fantasy tale of an Andalusian shepherd boy on a treasure-hunting journey to Egypt.

The Illustrated Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream came out in 1998, and it included 35 Mœbius illustrations, four of which you see here. The artist’s signature style, which he usually used in the service of dark, complex fusions of past and present, might at first sound ill-suited for Coelho’s simple fable, but Mœbius adapts well to the material. Even if you put down the book unconvinced by Coelho’s arguments about following your dream, you might consider looking to Mœbius instead with our post on his tips for aspiring artists. Either way, The Illustrated Alchemist itself showcases a collaboration between two well-known creators who most definitely paid their dues.

Paulo Coelho on the Fear of Failure

The Inscrutable Imagination of the Late Comic Artist Mœbius

Mœbius’ Storyboards & Concept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

Mœbius Illustrates Dante’s Paradiso

Moebius Gives 18 Wisdom-Filled Tips to Aspiring Artists (1996)

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Norman Rockwell Illustrates Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn (1936–1940)

in Art, Books, Literature | May 22nd, 2015

There’s no getting around it: Norman Rockwell was a square. There’s also no getting around the fact that his career helped define the way mainstream Americans saw themselves for decades. And while an artist like Rockwell—so steeped in nostalgia, so lacking in irony and a taste for transgression—might have faded into complete irrelevance amidst the tumult of the sixties, the opposite in fact occurred. Instead of pale, freckle-faced scamps and neighborly civil servants, Rockwell painted likenesses of world leaders like Nehru and Nasser, as well as a now iconic symbol of the Civil Rights struggle on a 1964 Look magazine cover.

The sixties Rockwell, though still very much a purveyor of small town Americana, became a somewhat weightier figure, even if he never gained (or sought) acceptance in the art world. But we might think of Rockwell as working on two registers throughout his career—as the PG-rated painter of mischievous, childish niceness, and the earnest commentator on mores and values in adult society. In a way, these two sides of America’s most popular illustrator mirror those of the nation’s most popular writer, Mark Twain. Though separated by a generation, the two, writes the Mark Twain House & Museum’s website, are “twinned in many ways in the public consciousness.”

In part, this is because Rockwell illustrated for Heritage Press two of Twain’s most famous books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1936 and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1940. Above, see three of Rockwell’s illustrations from Tom Sawyer and, below, one from his Huck Finn. The differences between the two books (so hilariously contrasted by Louis CK), could stand for the two sides of both Twain and Rockwell. As the Mark Twain House puts it, “some critics have dismissed [Twain and Rockwell’s] work as lightweight, blithely ignoring the important statements they made on race.” Tom Sawyer is a lightweight book, the work of Twain the popular humorist. (Twain himself would say, “my books are water: those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.”) Huck Finn on the other hand is a serious adult novel with serious adult themes. For all of its flaws, it makes an admirable attempt to identify with and faithfully render the plight of enslaved people.

Twain’s great strength as a serious writer was his wealth of empathy, a quality Rockwell manifested as well. In fact, in order to best represent Twain’s books, the illustrator traveled to their setting, Hannibal, Missouri, where he “acquired a new respect for the characters,” writes the Norman Rockwell Museum. “The longer I worked at the task,” Rockwell wrote, “the more in love with the different personalities I became.” Illustration and design blog Today’s Inspiration points out that Rockwell purchased old clothes from the Hannibal locals to “soak up the atmosphere”: “Of all the illustrators (and there were quite a few) that illustrated these novels in the past, Rockwell was the first to visit Mark Twain’s home town. In typical Rockwell fashion, no amount of detail or research was ignored, faked or quickly glossed over.”

Today’s Inspiration zooms in on details from several of the Tom Sawyer paintings to show the fine, almost Vermeer-like attention Rockwell lavished on each illustration. The extensive examination of these early Rockwell classics makes a good case for the folksy illustrator as a “storytelling genius with pallet and brush.” Rockwell may be dismissed as a creator of kitsch, and in some cases the charge is justified, but—like Twain—even his lighter work depended on a fine attention to details of setting and characterization that make his work memorable and moving, in its corniest and its weightiest moments.

Bill Murray Gives a Delightful Dramatic Reading of Twain’sHuckleberry Finn (1996)

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties

Mark Twain Writes a Rapturous Letter to Walt Whitman on the Poet’s 70th Birthday (1889)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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

in Art, History, Technology, Travel | May 22nd, 2015

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time at the Indianapolis Star, where my mother worked in what was then referred to as the “women’s pages.” She kept me busy returning the photos that accompanied marriage and engagement announcements, using the SASEs the young brides had supplied. After that, I’d hit the printing floor, where veteran workers sported square caps folded from the previous day’s edition, as that day’s issue clacked on tracks overhead. If I was lucky, someone would make me a gift of my name, set in hot type.

The Star still publishes — I shudder to report that its website seems to have renamed it IndyStar… — but cultural and digital advances have relegated all of the particulars mentioned above to the scrap pile.

They came rushing back with wild, Proustian urgency when Osamu Yamamoto, a master printer at Benrido Collotype Atelier in Kyoto, mentions the smell of the ink, in the short documentary above, how over the years, it has seeped into his skin, and become a part of his being.

Collotype, defined by the Getty Conservation Institute as “a screenless photomechanical process that allows high-quality prints from continuous-tone photographic negatives,” has been on the way out since the 70s. As master printer Yamamoto notes, it’s a low-efficiency, small batch operation, involving messy matrixes, hand-operated presses, and heavy iron machines that give off a sort of animal warmth when working.

Rather than pressmen’s caps, Benrido’s shirtless printers wear hachimaki, rubber aprons, and purple disposable gloves.

Filmmaker Fritz Schumann (whose film on the oldest hotel in Japan we previously featured before) evokes the workplace — one of two remaining collotype companies in the world — through small details like the plastic-wrapped digital Hamtaro clock and also by drawing viewers’ attention to the number of years logged by each employee. The art of collotype takes a long time to master and novices appear to be in short supply.

Should we conceive of this operation as a quaint relic, creeping along thanks to the whimsy of a few nostalgia buffs?

Surprisingly, no. The laborious collotype process remains the best way to duplicate precious artworks and historic documents. The way the ink interacts with reticulations in the gelatin surface atop results in subtleties that pixellated digital images cannot hope to achieve.

Visitors to the studio may support the enterprise by picking up a handful of collotype-printed postcards in the gift shop, but the office of the Japanese Emperor is the one who’s really keeping them in business, with orders to copy hundreds of delicate, centuries old scrolls, paintings and letters.

Like a circle in a circle…cultural preservation via cultural preservation! Perhaps the smell of the ink will prevail.

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter

- Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Art of The Black Panthers: A Short Documentary on the Revolutionary Artist Emory Douglas

Frida Kahlo’s Colorful Clothes Revealed for the First Time & Photographed by Ishiuchi Miyako

Watch Chris Burden Get Shot for the Sake of Art (1971)

Patti Smith’s Polaroids of Artifacts from Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Roberto Bolaño & More

Robert De Niro Tells Graduating NYU Arts Grads, “You Made It… And You’re F*cked”

Mœbius Illustrates Paulo Coelho’s Inspirational Novel The Alchemist (1998)

Norman Rockwell Illustrates Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn (1936–1940)

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

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