He also has a handful of flyers documenting the late ‘70s LA punk scene.
Talk about ephemera!
Man, psychedelic concert posters of the period were suitable for framing, and the utilitarian boxing style window cards’ cool quotient ensured their longevity. Amateur whip outs (such as those Patterson managed to preserve) rarely survived beyond a season or two on a fan’s fridge door.
His ragtag collection is what self-promotion looked like in the predigital age. The Plimsouls, the Runaways, and Black Flag excepting, few of these bands achieved the sort of status that would have allowed them to move away from the realm of the murky photocopy.
The amateurish aesthetic of these homemade efforts was anchored with a spiky humor that went nicely with the outrageous band names. Sketchy locations were heralded as the sorts of places where the popular teen set gathered. Word bubbles abounded.
Cut and paste collage, Letraset, and scratchy hand lettering were the hallmark of necessity. Nowadays, these obsolete elements are co-opted for their implied authenticity, even if the final product is likely assembled in Photoshop.
As you faithful readers of Open Culture know, we love nothing more than when important works of humankind fall into the public domain. According to current United States copyright law, a work stays out of the public domain for 70 years after its author’s death; for corporate “works-for-hire,” 95 years after its publication. This means that, theoretically, new things arrive in the public domain each and every year. Since we’ve just started a new one, what has the public domain gained?
On January 1, 2015, according to Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, public-domain readers received “the writings of Rachel Carlson, Ian Fleming, and Flannery O’Connor” — in Canada, that is. As for Europeans, they can now freely enjoy “the works of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Edvard Munch, and hundreds of others.” But what of the Americans? Alas, “no published works will enter our public domain until 2019,” owing to an extension of U.S. copyright law legislation that pushed up retroactive copyright by 95 years for anything created between 1923 and 1977 — a legal event that may, some whisper, have had the endorsement of a certain corporation in possession of a certain highly lucrative cartoon mouse.
For a sense of what this has cost us, the CSPD has put together a tantalizing list of still-vital works of literature, film, music, and science that could have gone public domain this year, if not for that meddling extension. It includes Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Simone de Beauvoir’ Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, Nathan H. Juran’s Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater.”
To learn more about the art that some parts of the world have newly welcomed into the public domain, see also Hyperallergic’s Public Domain Day post by Allison Meier. Though we could easily feel frustrated by the richness of the material that America has refused, in the words of Justice Louis Brandeis, to let “free as the air to common use,” do remember the existence of a little something we citizens of 2015 like to call the internet. The increasingly few boundaries and little friction with which it has enabled us to connect and communicate will certainly continue to alleviate the cramp regulations like these have put in our style. So even if Americans won’t enjoy a meaningful Public Domain Day for four years yet, I’d say we still have reason to celebrate.
Earlier this year, Colin Marshall told you how “Chess has obsessed many of humanity’s finest minds over centuries and centuries and Marcel Duchamp seems to have shown little resistance to its intellectual and aesthetic pull.” His passion for the game (which he describes above) led him to design a now iconic Art Deco chess set, to print an array of chess tournament posters, and to become a pretty adept chess player himself, eventually earning the title of “grand master” as a result. In a pretty neat project, Scott Kildall has looked back at records of Duchamp’s chess matches and created a computer program that lets you play against a “Duchampian ghost.” Just click here, and then click on the chess piece you want to move. It will turn green, and then you can move it with your trackpad/mouse. Enjoy.
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Photograph of Nigel Henderson via Nigel Henderson Estate
If you’re like me, one of the first items on your itinerary when you hit a new city is the art museums. Of course one, two, even three or four visits to the world’s major collections can’t begin to exhaust the wealth of painting, sculpture, photography, and more contained within. Rotating and special exhibits make taking it all in even less feasible. That’s why we’re so grateful for the digital archives that institutions like the Getty, LA County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, and the British Library make available free online. Now another museum, Britain’s Tate Modern, gets into the digital archive arena with around 70,000 digitized works of art in their online gallery.
“Sketch of the bus stop” from the estate of Josef Herman
But wait, there’s more. Much more. A separate digital archive—the Tate’s Archives & Access project—offers up a trove of materials you’re unlikely to encounter much, if at all, in their physical spaces. That’s because this collection digitizes little-seen “artists’ materials, including photographs, sketchbooks, diaries, letters and objects, documenting the lives and working processes of British born and émigré artists, from 1900 to the present.” These include, writes The Guardian, “the love letters of painter Paul Nash, the detailed sculpture records of Barbra Hepworth, and 3,000 photographs by Nigel Henderson, providing a behind-the-scenes backstage look at London’s 1950s jazz scene.” Thus far, the Tate has uploaded about 6,000 items, “including 52 collections relating to 79 artists.” At the Tate archive, you’ll find photographs like that of painter and photographer Nigel Henderson (see top of the post) and also paintings by the highly regarded Polish-British realist, Josef Herman (right above).
“Squared-up drawings of soldiers” via The estate of David Jones
You’ll find preliminary sketches like the 1920–21 Squared-up drawings of soldiers by painter and poet David Jones, above, one of 109 sketches and two sketchbooks available by the same artist. You’ll find letters like that below, written by sculptor Kenneth Armitage to his wife Joan Moore in 1951—one of hundreds. These are but the tiniest sampling of what is now “but a drop in the ocean,” The Guardian writes, “given the more than 1 million items in the [physical] archive.” Archive head Adrian Glew calls the collection “a national archival treasure” that is also “for the enrichment of the whole world.”
Letter from Kenneth Armitage to Joan Moore via the The Kenneth Armitage Foundation
The remainder of the digitized Archives & Access collection—52, 000 items in total—should be available by the summer of 2015. While viewing art and artifacts online is certainly no substitute for seeing them in person, it’s better than never seeing them at all. In any case, millions of pieces are only viewable by curators and specialists and never make their way to gallery floors. But with the appearance and expansion of free online archives like the Tate’s, that situation will shift dramatically, opening up national treasures to independent scholars and ordinary art lovers the world over.
Back in 2011, we featured John Cage’s 1960 television performance of his piece Water Walk. Its video quality may have left something to be desired, but now, thanks to the YouTube channel of Bard College’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, you can watch the entire ten-minute segment in much crisper quality than most surviving programs from that era.This unlikely happening occurred on I’ve Got a Secret, the long-running occupation-guessing game show whose guest roster also included chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, “fifth Beatle” Pete Best, and fried-chicken icon Colonel Harland Sanders. For this particular episode, we wrote in our earlier post, “the TV show offered Cage something of a teachable moment, a chance to introduce the broader public to his brand of avant-garde music.”
For Water Walk, Cage rounded up a variety of “instruments” all to do with that liquid — a bathtub, a pitcher, ice cubes in a mixer — and the unconventional symphony they produce culminates in the Rube Goldbergian mixing of a drink, the sipping of which the composition dictates about two and a half minutes in. Naturally, Cage being Cage, the piece incorporates audience reaction noises; when host Gary Moore warns him that certain members of the studio audience will laugh, Cage responds, “I consider laughter better than tears.”
You can learn more about this intersection of far forward-thinking artistry and the midcentury televisual mainstream in Laura Paolini’s piece “John Cage’s Secret,” available at johncage.org. “At that moment in 1960, a rupture was being deepened,” Paolini writes. “High art and low were becoming more and more comfortable with one another over the airwaves. At this moment, as the screens glow their blue auras into the homes of North America, everyone sees something they haven’t seen before. And everyone has an opinion about it.” And those opinions, I like to think Cage would have said, only extend the art further.
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If ever you find yourself looking down on the Christmas card as a bland, mainstream art form, remember that John Waters makes them. So did Andy Warhol. But we’ve told you about those two countercultural creators’ appreciation for the imagery of Christmas before. This holiday season, we submit for your approval a series of Christmas cards from the hand of none other than Salvador Dalí. They came our way via Spanish literature professor Rebecca M. Bender, who writes that the surrealist painter “designed 19 unique Christmas cards between 1958–1976 for the Barcelona-based company Hoechst Ibérica,” a chapter in a commercial career that also included “artwork for advertisements (Bryan’s Hosiery) and magazine covers during the mid-20th century.”
Bender, a Dalí enthusiast who teaches at Grinnell, has assembled an impressive collection of images that give Christmas the surreal touch that I think we can all agree the holiday has always needed. The sketch for a 1948 Vogue magazine cover just above “exhibits tell-tale characteristics of Dalí’s surrealist style, including the barren, expansive landscape and the incorporation of double-images (which also characterize his depiction of the Spanish Civil War).” While that image has today become a specialty Christmas card, the art he created specifically for cards “did not incorporate traditional Mediterranean, Catholic Christmas imagery such as the Nativity scene or the Reyes magos (Wise men), but rather they appropriated more American and Central European elements, such as the Christmas Tree,” which he sometimes used as “an allegorical depiction of the year’s events” or infused “with distinctive elements of Spanish culture.”
When Dalí did try his hand at more traditional Christmas iconography, he did it for American greeting-card titan Hallmark. You can see one fruit of this commission in the 1959 nativity scene at the top of the post. Bender cites Patrick Regan’s book Hallmark: A Century of Caring as describing Dalí’s “take on Christmas [being] a bit too avant garde for the average greeting card buyer.” But tastes, even mainstream tastes, seem to have broadened quite a bit over the past 55 years. The time may have come where every man, woman, and child in America could do with a little surrealism stirred into their Christmas spirit. If you agree, make sure to read and see everything else Bender has gathered from Dalí’s Christmas-card career, all of which will inspire you to make the Yuletide more aesthetically daring.
Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by definition, pretty dull, filled with those quotidian little tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laundry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local market.
Leonardo Da Vinci was, however, no ordinary person. And his to-do lists were anything but dull.
Da Vinci would carry around a notebook, where he would write and draw anything that moved him. “It is useful,” Leonardo once wrote, to “constantly observe, note, and consider.” Buried in one of these books, dating back to around the 1490s, is a to-do list. And what a to-do list.
NPR’s Robert Krulwich had it directly translated. And while all of the list might not be immediately clear, remember that Da Vinci never intended for it to be read by web surfers 500 years in the future.
[Calculate] the measurement of Milan and Suburbs
[Find] a book that treats of Milan and its churches, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cordusio
[Discover] the measurement of Corte Vecchio (the courtyard in the duke’s palace).
[Discover] the measurement of the castello (the duke’s palace itself)
Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.
Get Messer Fazio (a professor of medicine and law in Pavia) to show you about proportion.
Get the Brera Friar (at the Benedictine Monastery to Milan) to show you De Ponderibus (a medieval text on mechanics)
[Talk to] Giannino, the Bombardier, re. the means by which the tower of Ferrara is walled without loopholes (no one really knows what Da Vinci meant by this)
Ask Benedetto Potinari (A Florentine Merchant) by what means they go on ice in Flanders
Draw Milan
Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions by day or night.
[Examine] the Crossbow of Mastro Giannetto
Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner
[Ask about] the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese
Try to get Vitolone (the medieval author of a text on optics), which is in the Library at Pavia, which deals with the mathematic.
You can just feel Da Vinci’s voracious curiosity and intellectual restlessness. Note how many of the entries are about getting an expert to teach him something, be it mathematics, physics or astronomy. Also who casually lists “draw Milan” as an ambition?
Later to-do lists, dating around 1510, seemed to focus on Da Vinci’s growing fascination with anatomy. In a notebook filled with beautifully rendered drawings of bones and viscera, he rattles off more tasks that need to get done. Thingslike get a skull, describe the jaw of a crocodile and tongue of a woodpecker, assess a corpse using his finger as a unit of measurement.
On that same page, he lists what he considers to be important qualities of an anatomical draughtsman. A firm command of perspective and a knowledge of the inner workings of the body are key. So is having a strong stomach.
You can see a page of Da Vinci’s notebook above but be warned. Even if you are conversant in 16th century Italian, Da Vinci wrote everything in mirror script.
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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
(Yes, we know, MOOCs are free. This will be too, if you add it to your holiday wish list, or insist that your local library orders a copy.)
Barry’s marching orders are always to be executed on paper, even when they have been retrieved on smartphones, tablets, and a variety of other screens. They are the antithesis of dry. A less accidental professor might have dispensed with the doodle encrusted, lined yellow legal paper, after privately outlining her game plan. Barry’s choice to preserve and share the method behind her madness is a gift to students, and to herself.
The decontextualization of cheap, common, or utilitarian paper (which also harkens back to the historical avant-garde) may be understood as a transvaluation of the idea of working on “waste” –a knowing, ironic acknowledgment on Barry’s part that her life narrative, itself perhaps considered insignificant, is visualized in an accessible popular medium, comics, that is still largely viewed as “garbage.”
I got screamed at a lot for using up paper. The only blank paper in the house was hers, and if she found out I touched it she’d go crazy. I sometimes stole paper from school and even that made her mad. I think it’s why I hoard paper to this day. I have so much blank paper everywhere, in every drawer, on every shelf, and still when I need a sheet I look in the garbage first. I agonize over using a “good” sheet of paper for anything. I have good drawing paper I’ve been dragging around for twenty years because I’m not good enough to use it yet. Yes, I know this is insane.
Sample assignments from “The Unthinkable Mind” are above and below, and you will find many more in Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor. Let us know if Professor Chewbacca’s neurological assumptions are correct. Does drawing and writing by hand release the monsters from the id and squelch the internal editor who is the enemy of art?
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![Letter from Kenneth Armitage to Joan Moore [1951] by Kenneth Armitage 1916-2002](https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Kenneth-Armitage-Letter.jpg)
