Some of the incredible work of the Asafo, the warrior group of the Fante people of Ghana. Exploited by Europeans for centuries, the Fante noted their enslavers obsession with pageantry and mixed it with their own history and traditions to create these amazing, often satirical and defiant banners, many of which are still in use today.
I've always had a soft spot for Studio Vista / Dutton Picturebacks: the 'comprehensive pictorial surveys written by experts for laymen' on a wide range of topics: cinema, art, crafts, antiques, architecture, ballet, cars, cybernetics, guns, etc. so I thought I'd share some of my (far from complete) collection. Yeah, it's no problem, really, please don't mention it.
This pictureback covers Andy Warhol (his paintings, films and everything else) and was published in 1971, a great time to review the career of an artist who had been both brilliantly creative and incredibly influential in the sixties, but whose subsequent work was far less daring in comparison for all sorts of reasons, including being shot and nearly dying, then, later, totally dying.
'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' (Arthur C. Clarke)
I'm 57 years old. I'm white, male, heterosexual, English, middle class, liberal, woke a.f, and I try to be aware of my privilege. I work in local government and my life is steady and although I try to vaguely keep up with things, I haven't been fully tapped into the zeitgeist for over thirty years. Despite all of this, I really like Tyler the Creator, and I'm totally in awe of his eclectic, powerful and multi-faceted artistry although I actually understand only a little of who he is, what he does and what it means.
I can't pretend to know the life Tyler leads, or has had in the past, or to say that I parse the cultural references, artefacts, influences, microtrends, clap backs, look forwards and leaps into the unknown which comprise the kaleidoscopic shards of a voice and viewpoint which extend beyond music into dance, film, fashion, sport, performance art and social commentary. I don't like all he says, because he says some provocative things, some of which he apologises for, some of which he doesn't (his song 'Sorry, Not Sorry' covers this in revealing detail). But Tyler is a Creator, an artist, an individualist, an adult: he does what he likes. He doesn't need any sort of approval as far as I can see, least of all from me.
His art is not fully knowable to me and, as such, it has an even more potent allure. It's gleeful co-opting and mutation / usurpation of every facet of culture seems like the future right here and now, and is clearly the refined product of a fully formed and highly sophisticated permaculture that has developed all around me whilst my attention was elsewhere. This system is febrile and fertile and is strong with hybridity, diversity, variance. It is resilient, and seems better adapted to how we must live on this planet now. This is a good thing, a natural and necessary evolution and I welcome it, even if it is not really for me and it doesn't need any of my attention to exist.
No, I don't fully understand Tyler the Creator or, for that matter, lots of things in contemporary music, film, art and literature, and if I were born a hundred years earlier, I might have felt the same about Dada, or Stravinsky or Eisenstein. But gaps in comprehension are not the same as disapproval or, at least, they shouldn't be. The fact is that, despite Francis Fukyama's 1992 announcement about the end of history*, new and exciting things still happen or, rather, like Tyler the Creator, simply and steadfastly refuse to stop happening - whether you as an individual are in the right space or place to get that is a completely different matter.
* There is more to this statement than meets the eye, of course, and Fukyama may have even been right at the time, but he didn't reckon for a. the seething complexity of the world outside the West and b. the broiling insanity of the twenty first century.
The Responsive Eye was an exhibition of optical art held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from February to April 1965. Some of the artists represented included Josef Albers, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, Victor Vasarely and the French collective Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuele.
Curator William C. Seitz said "unlike most previous abstract painting, these works exist less as objects to be examined than of generators of perceptual response, of colours and relationships existing solely in vision; of forms, presences and variations often entirely different from the static stimuli by the artist'.
The first night audience, captured in a short film (one of the cameraman was Brian de Palma), is clearly drawn from the upper echelons of Manhattan society (the men are wearing black tie; the women evening gloves), and seem largely indifferent, being far more interested in themselves and each other.
Some medical professionals are on hand to talk about the physiological effects the pictures and objects might be having on the viewer, and the curators and the artists work hard, talking about concavity and convexity, transience and translucence, perhaps trying to ensure people understand that this is ART, not a set of fairground mirrors.
David Hockney says that he detests some of the work because it 'makes my eyes blink', a statement he thinks very clever indeed, but then he's always been an obnoxious little prick.
The prodigious Jeff Keen cuts, rips, scratches, scribbles, burns, melts, mutilates and defaces his way to fervid, febrile creation - snapshots taken from his 1967 film Cineblatz.
Bernat Klein was a Serbian textile designer and painter who lived and worked in Scotland from the early 1950s, where he established his own studio and a number of businesses that specialised in weaving and knitting for carpets, tapestries and haute couture clothing, including for Dior, Chanel, Pierre Cardin - and Marks and Spencer.
Jeff Keen (1923-2012) is one of my all time art heroes. Keen was an autodidact who never joined any part of the establishment, not even briefly and, as a result, received none of the attention and accolades due to him as one of the greatest and most original British artists of the 20th century. Posthumously, his reputation has grown, but still not enough. He is one of my biggest influences.
His films are perhaps his primary artform, and they remind you of why Edison called his early cinematic device the Kinetoscope – they are full of motion and energy, crazed, febrile things that burst onto the screen in a barrage of crashing planes, mushroom clouds, plastic soldiers, fires, floods, sexy girls, hairy men, super heroes and super villains, starring his friends and family and set to intriguing and ear popping soundtracks. The young Keen had fought in World War Two (he called it ‘the best time of my life’) and the violence and anarchy of that experience was a major and indelible influence on him.
After leaving the Army, Keen spent a single term at Art College, but was working as a gardener with Brighton Council’s Parks Department when he made his first short film in 1959. A confirmed cineaste, it suddenly occurred to him that he could make a film himself, so he borrowed an 8mm camera and set out on a fifty year career as the UK’s most innovative radical film maker.
Edvard 'my whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm' Munch worked on this painting for three years (1932-1935) without ever finishing it.
It's called Uninvited Guests and in it he makes a fairly unequivocal statement: alcohol has been consumed, the wallpaper is weird, and I have a firearm, so don't come around here ad hoc with your smiley balloon heads and expect your shrift to be anything but short.
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