In 1987, Compuserve begatteth Image Format 87A.
Image Format 87A begatteth Graphics Interchange Format or GIF (rhymes with a certain brand of peanut butter, the video history above helpfully points out).
The proliferations of free online GIF generators begatteth the countless annoying, smarmy, boneheaded animated loops you’ve seen junking up emails, profile pictures, and MySpace pages.
Of course, some of them are also pretty cool, which is why they’re being celebrated with a festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. No tickets necessary. Moving the Still: A GIF Festival will be screening through June on the outdoor electronic billboard meant to promote upcoming and current attractions. Conceivably, viewers with wheels and time to spare could take it in on an endless loop of their own, by circling up Flatbush to Lafayette, then moving up when the light changes, battling traffic from the nearby Barclays Center on the return leg.
What do we stand to see in this festival? The video history leads us to believe that anything is possible, though certain things—accidental happenings, laser cats, colorful barfing (…wait, colorful barfing?)—have a built in appeal.
Considering the possibility of a truly proletarian art, the great English literary critic William Empson once wrote, “the reason an English audience can enjoy Russian propagandist films is that the propaganda is too remote to be annoying.” Perhaps this is why American artists and bohemians have so often taken to the political iconography of far-flung regimes, in ways both romantic and ironic. One nation’s tedious socialist realism is another’s radical exotica.
But do U.S. cultural exports have the same effect? One need only look at the success of our most banal branding overseas to answer in the affirmative. Yet no one would think to add Abstract Expressionist painting to a list that includes fast food and Walt Disney products. Nevertheless, the work of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning wound up as part of a secret CIA program during the height of the Cold War, aimed at promoting American ideals abroad.
The artists themselves were completely unaware that their work was being used as propaganda. On what agents called a “long leash,” they participated in several exhibitions secretly organized by the CIA, such as “The New American Painting” (see catalog cover at top), which visited major European cities in 1958–59 and included such modern primitive works as surrealist William Baziotes’ 1947 Dwarf (below) and 1951’s Tournament by Adolph Gottlieb above.
Of course what seems most bizarre about this turn of events is that avant-garde art in America has never been much appreciated by the average citizen, to put it mildly. American Main Streets harbor undercurrents of distrust or outright hatred for out-there, art-world experimentation, a trend that filters upward and periodically erupts in controversies over Congressional funding for the arts. A 1995 Independent article on the CIA’s role in promoting Abstract Expressionism describes these attitudes during the Cold War period:
In the 1950s and 1960s… the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art—President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.” As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.
Why, then, did they receive such backing? One short answer:
This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy’s hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy.
The one-way relationship between modernist painters and the CIA—only recently confirmed by former case officer Donald Jameson—supposedly enabled the agency to make the work of Soviet Socialist Realists appear, in Jameson’s words, “even more stylized and more rigid and confined than it was.” (See Evdokiya Usikova’s 1959 Lenin with Villagers below, for example). For a longer explanation, read the full article at The Independent. It’s the kind of story Don DeLillo would cook up.
William Empson goes on to say that “a Tory audience subjected to Tory propaganda of the same intensity” as Russian imports, “would be extremely bored.” If he is correct, it’s likely that the average true believer socialist in Europe was already bored silly by Soviet-approved art. What surprises in these revelations is that the avant-garde works that so radically altered the American art world and enraged the average congressman and taxpayer were co-opted and collected by suave U.S. intelligence officers like so many Shepard Fairey posters.
If you head to SFMOMA’s café on Third Street in San Francisco, you can order up some Damien Hirst “Amylamine” lemon velvet cake, Donald Judd tomato soup, and Mark Rothko Toast. The Rothko Toast comes painted with apricot butter along the top, and wild blueberry jam along the bottom, creating an edible imitation of Rothko’s painting known as “No. 14, 1960.” The painting (see below) hangs at SFMOMA, the West Coast’s first museum devoted to 20th century art.
A group of top American libraries and academic institutions launched a new centralized research resource today, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), making millions of resources (books, images, audiovisual resources, etc.) available in digital format. First hatched as an idea at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the DPLA is now realizing its vision of being “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that draws on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”
The Digital Public Library of America rolls out today as a beta site with some kinks to work out. Some links to materials don’t work at the other end. And right now the offering is built around a modest number of online exhibitions that have been digitized by cultural institutions throughout the country, according to Robert Darnton, a driving force behind the DPLA. When you visit the site, a dynamic map and timeline will help you navigate the collections by year, decade or place. It will lead you to exhibitions, for example, about the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal, Boston’s storied sports temples, and Prohibition in the US. Around this core, the DPLA will grow until it truly serves as the digital public library of America.
The brilliant Native American ballerina Maria Tallchief died Thursday at the age of 88. Tallchief is remembered as one of the great ballet stars of the 20th century. In her New York Times obituary, the dancer and choreographer Jacques d’Amboise is quoted as comparing Tallchief to the legendary dancers Galina Ulanova of the Soviet Union and Margot Fonteyn of Britain: “When you thought of Russian ballet, it was Ulanova. With English ballet, it was Fonteyn. For American ballet, it was Tallchief. She was grand in the grandest way.”
Tallchief was born on January 24, 1925 in Fairfax, Oklahoma. Her father was a full-blooded Osage Indian whose family became wealthy when oil was discovered on their land. When she was eight years old her family moved to Los Angeles, partly so that she and her younger sister Marjorie could find better dance instruction. Tallchief showed early promise and eventually became a student of the Russian émigré dancer and choreographer Bronislava Nijinska. In 1942 she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in New York, where it was based during World War II. In New York, Tallchief quickly grew to prominence, attracting the attention of the legendary choreographer George Balanchine, who became the first of her three husbands.
The clip above, from the 1989 film Dancing for Mr. B: Six Balanchine Ballerinas, shows Tallchief reminiscing about Balanchine and dancing the title role in his 1949 New York City Ballet production of Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird. Balanchine choreographed the ballet especially for Tallchief, and it became her signature role. The sets and costumes of the 1949 production were designed by Marc Chagall. “Maria Tallchief made an electrifying appearance,” wrote the impressario Lincoln Kirstein after the opening of Firebird, “emerging as the nearest approximation to a prima ballerina that we had yet enjoyed.”
For more of Tallchief’s dancing, see the film clip below of her and Rudolf Nureyev, in his American debut, dancing the pas de deux from the August Bouronville ballet, The Flower Festival in Genzano. The performance was broadcast on the Bell Telephone Hour on January 19, 1962, less than a year after Nureyev’s defection to the West and four years before Tallchief’s retirement as a dancer.
Some watch the Super Bowl for just the commercials. Others watch films for the title sequences that bookend a movie. Title sequences can be “engaging or wildly entertaining … or simply drop dead beautiful.” They can “ooze with visual poetry and sophisticated imagery,” or they can put the audience in the right mood for the movie, or close it in the right way, writes the web site Forget the Films, Watch the Titles.
But it hasn’t always been this way. During the early days of cinema, title sequences were often crude and informational. That started to change with the advent of sound film, when title sequences took on aesthetic dimensions they hadn’t known before. By the 1950s and 1960s, they became a high art form, especially in the hands of the iconic graphic designer Saul Bass. The history, philosophy and aesthetics of the title sequence — especially the opening credits — all get covered by The Film Before the Film, a short, informative film born out of a research project at the Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule. It runs 9 to 11 minutes, depending on whether you count the closing title sequence!
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In a video for MOCA, the “defining museum of contemporary art” in Los Angeles, Shepard Fairey, the graphic designer and illustrator best known for the Obama Hope poster of 2008, spent a few minutes rapping about the YouTube videos that have inspired him, both personally and professionally. He starts with one we’ve featured here before — Saul Bass’ Pitch for the Redesign of Ma Bell’s Logo. Read all about that fascinating 1969 project here.
Next up comes the 1981 music video for Blondie’s “Rapture” — momentous because it was the first rap video ever aired on MTV and because it features an appearance by graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who stepped in for Grandmaster Flash when he inexplicably went MIA.
Now let’s roll George Clinton’s video for “Atomic Dog” (1982), an inspiration to Fairey because it layers 1980s-video game imagery on top of prison scenes, creating a “template for what a lot of gangster rappers would embrace later.” Call it the ur-gangsta rap video.
Finally, Shepard refers to videos by The Sex Pistols, the English punk band formed in 1975. But when it comes to selecting a particular clip, he leaves us hanging. So, given that curating YouTube videos is our everyday gig, hope you don’t mind if we lay some “God Save the Queen” on you. Enjoy.
Havas Worlwide Paris, a global design agency, reawakened fond memories of my days living in Paris. They did it by creating this artistic video that captures the character of Parisian neighborhoods/metro stops through typography. The Marais, Latin Quarter, Montmartre, Père Lachaise, Bastille — they all get a creative nod.
The video was originally created as a New Years Greeting card, and it comes to us via Pret-a-Porter.
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