Dutch Picture Books

Some great covers of Dutch picture books at BibliOdyssey, one of my favorite sites for illustrated books.

Go here to see more. Plus, contemporary movies as Russian lubki (via). See if you can guess what this one is.

Piss Pooh

Last week, a small gallery in San Francisco hosted a group show called "Kinkade Cannibalized! An Exhibition of Augmented Thomas Kinkade Paintings." The idea, as reported in this SF Gate article, is that a number of artists take offense at Thomas Kinkade's blend of idealized landscapes and fairytale, his creation of banal, formulaic images that have earned him the title "master of light." The artists in the exhibition wanted to critique his work in order to "communicate a message." Though what this message entails is unclear, other than a certain bitterness—Kinkade is reportedly the most collected living artist in the US. The work in the show seems as hackneyed and dull as the paintings they seek to satirize:

One of Evans' works was called "The Bloodshot Eye of the Beholder." Evans created a "badly done San Francisco landscape with a bloodshot eye in the middle," explaining: "It gives you bloodshot eyes to have to look at Kinkade's works."

In all, there were more than 20 pieces, ranging from paintings and multimedia sculpture to a diorama light box, a meat cleaver cutting cheese and several collage works.

Whoa, snap!

What's in it for purportedly "serious" artists to attack the work of someone they hold to be so beneath them intellectually and conceptually? How does bitch slapping constitute a valid and thoughtful critique?

That said, a couple of the works are somewhat interesting. I like that this one plays off the idea of a found painting:

This one is called Serrano's Kinkade II, though it has nothing to do with Kincade (other than being premised on a fictional and ridiculous backstory). It might've been more interesting as a revision/update of Serrano's Piss Christ, a contemporary examination of the abject and sacred. Of course, such an artwork would require critical thinking, purposeful reflection, not knee-jerk reaction.

Rotopol

Love Michael Meier's poster for Rotopol's "Secret Service" show. I haven't dug out my 3-D glasses yet. Apparently, it works.

New Ben Jones zine

Nieves has new zines from the whole Paper Rad crew. It's worth reading the description for Ben Jones's 24-page tour de force.

What Hits the Moon

Love this Lilli Carré animated film, What Hits the Moon. The lulling rhythm of the crickets matches her wavering line so perfectly.

Geisha This

Digging through old files, I found this collection of the first six issues, made between 1975 and 1979, of Destroy All Monsters magazine. The cover is proving hard to reproduce, since some of the ink is metallic. My scanner doesn't like it, and my camera is dying (hence not one but two crummy versions).

Each issue mostly contains hectic collages (using comics, ads, photos), newspaper articles about the group, and music reviews (one of which aptly quotes John Cage: "You needn't call it music, if the term offends you"). There is also a smattering of full-page drawings by Niagra (such as the cover image above). The one to the right is my favorite. The magazines are an amazing repository of early reactions to their sound, which didn't always go over well in Detroit Rock City. "Kelley remembers their first such 'gig' as being an assault on Black Sabbath's 'Iron Man' that went on until the plug was pulled, the only resemblance to the original being the repeated recitation of two lines of the songs lyrics accompanied by a deafening wall of tape loops, feedback, and aural pain."

Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, Niagra, and Cary Loren formed DAM in the early '70s as an "anti-rock band." Niagra played a scratchy violin and sometimes sang off-key, they bought their first guitar and keyboard at K-Mart and used a bunch of broken pedals. They were art students, after all, so experimentation seems mainly to have been the point. This, from the "Manifesto of Ignorance": "We were . . . freaky nerds flying through time in a blur of art and noise. Our music sometimes contained a narrative or storytelling direction that was never explored . . . a sense of gloom, disaster and apocalypse mixed with a dose of anarchy, comedy and absurdity kept us together and were some of the major themes which colored our small scene . . . our alienation and heightened anxiety was a psychotronic view of life we each shared to various degrees. We were creating sounds we wanted to exist but weren't to be found in the slick desolate landscape around us . . ." Gee, sounds a bit like Fort Thunder/Lightning Bolt.