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THE POLITICS OF POP CULTUREEXPANDING THE CONCEPT OF ART - Protest As Tradition
Posted November 22nd, 2007 in Activism, All, Entertainment, Expanding the concept of "Art", Music and Politics
Singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie is responsible for what could be considered the longest running protest in U. S. history. A child of the Vietnam War era, Guthrie recorded Alice’s Restaurant as a comedic protest against the draft. The song runs 18 minutes and 20 seconds long, and as such it is rarely played on radio stations. The exception is Thanksgiving Day, when radio stations across the country play the song once in its entirety, in the spirit of gratitude for freedom of speech. Today we urge you to do the same. Due to request that the video not be embedded, we’ll direct you to the link instead.
Expanding the Concept of “Art” - A shadow of art’s former self
Posted October 26th, 2007 in All, Expanding the concept of "Art" and Take a look...In keeping with the conviction that art can be created from nearly anything so long as it speaks to its audience, I’m happy today to be able to feature… a pile of trash. Specifically trash arranged to form a shadow which appeals directly to the human brain’s imagery recognition center, despite the fact that the trash itself is reminiscent of nothing more than a back alley during a waste removal company’s union strike. Most beloved Basement dwellers, I give you Shadow Art.
Dirty White Trash (With Gulls)
English artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster are the artists most widely credited with mastering the genre of shadow art, and you can plainly see why. At least, you can if there’s a cleverly placed industrial light bulb in the vicinity. The two artists, who work as a team, create shadow art scenes which have captured the imagination of the art world and resulted in widely critically acclaimed exhibitions at renowned galleries including New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The unlikely selection of refuse as a medium doubtless boosted their sculptures’ artistic (if not olfactory) appeal. The dichotomy created by the use of materials which society has deemed useless and thus thrown away to create images filled with the beauty and fluidity of daily life speaks to the inherent wastefulness of a society obsessed with immediacy and superficiality.
Real Life Rubbish
He/She
Although metal is a more conventional medium for sculpture, Japanese artist Shigeo Fukuda channels his unusual shadow imagery through common flatware. He created his shadow art piece Lunch With A Helmet On, a detailed depiction of an upright motorcycle, with the help of exactly 848 forks, knives, and spoons.
Lunch With A Helmet On
Now that you’ve seen a little of what can be done with a lot of imagination and a few well placed lights, put your inner art critic to the test. The following piece is uncredited. What imagery or emotion does the shadow elicit in you? What materials do you see in the sculpture, and how do you think the selection of materials reflects the artist’s intentions for the piece?
Uncredited
If you would like to see more shadow art and live in the Northern United States, check out the 2007 Shadow Art Fair on December 1 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. With the tagline “One Day, 40+ Artists, 9000 Gallons of Beer,” how far wrong could you go?
When Art Was Made In Studios - Nostalgia for the cinematic heroes of Generation X
Posted August 13th, 2007 in All, Celebrities, Commentary, Entertainment, Expanding the concept of "Art" and Take a look...
Ok, maybe it’s not such a huge stretch to call cinema “art.†That’s why we decided to bring the focus of today’s post to some of the most engaging films from the nostalgic past of Generation X. If nothing else, we hope you’ll find here a fuzzy reminder of some of your favorite films that evoked the golden era of reluctant heroes, conflicted heroines, action, adventure, and above all, irreverence.
We speak of a time before the Great Box Office Schism whence real filmmakers got fed up with greedy studio executives valuing “titanic†profits over artistic value and spilled into the brave new world of independent film. A time when “studio film†didn’t refer to overproduced, underacted, predictable tripe starring models who should have stuck to modeling. When films were remade only if they could be improved upon in some way, and a sequel was an honor bestowed upon only the industry’s paragons. When more money went to location sets than makeup artists. When writers outranked computer effects. When Stephen Spielberg worked with Richard Dreyfuss.
Yes, in a time before Jar Jar, Spielberg used to prefer actors to pretty faces or stereotypical cartoons, and the legendary pair made films like Jaws, Close Encounters, and Always. Dreyfuss’s box office success allowed him to star in other seminal films of the era, such as Stand By Me, Stakeout, Let It Ride, The American President, and Mr. Holland’s Opus. Spielberg also instituted the second extraordinary transmutation of a carpenter to create Han Solo and Indiana Jones. That guy with the big scar on his chin went on to bring us some of the most relevant films of our time – Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, Witness, Working Girl, and Regarding Henry. He took an unknown little boy and that Barrymore girl and stuck them in a film called E.T. Their combined cinematic futures included films like Firestarter, Irreconcilable Differences, Cloak and Dagger, Boys on the Side, Valmont (a delicious re-imagining of Dangerous Liaisons), Legends of the Fall, and The Suicide Kings.
At the intersection of cinematic genius and television entertainment was a show called Amazing Stories. Long before film actors joined the ranks of TV stars, filmmakers like Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis joined forces to entertain the masses with the show which catapulted Danny DeVito out of impeding obscurity and into the world of Hollywood royalty after the cancellation of Taxi. Life as Gen X-ers know it would not exist without the likes of Terms Of Endearment, Ruthless People, and Throw Mamma From The Train. Zemeckis cast the 4 foot 11 inch actor in his first blockbuster – Romancing the Stone. The film sparked a successful sequel and afforded Zemeckis the chance to put his own script on film. With the help of a small, fresh-faced young TV actor named Michael J. Fox, Back to the Future found record audiences and the rare honor of two successful sequels (a feat achieved previously, of course, by Spielberg and George Lucas’s The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi). Love for graphics, which turned out to be the Achilles’ heel of this generation of filmmakers, was still a fresh idea when Zemeckis unveiled Who Framed Roger Rabbit – likely the last film of its kind to rely on graphics solely for the artistic effect of furthering the plot rather than for convenience.
Meanwhile, a gravely voiced, beaknosed actor was capitalizing on the success of the Romancing the Stone series in his own way, and rocketed to long-lasting stardom with leads in films like A Chorus Line, Fatal Attraction, Wall Street, The War Of The Roses (in which he paired up again with Romancing’s DeVito and Kathleen Turner), Shining Through, and Basic Instinct. In her stead, Turner – though not the typical stick-skinny falsetto voiced Bambett leading lady – graced films like Prizzi’s Honor, Peggy Sue Got Married, and The Accidental Tourist. Zemeckis wisely recruited her again to voice the sultry Jessica Rabbit.
And while men were the primary recipients of this action comedy golden era, extraordinary women like Holly Hunter, Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close, and Sally Field took Turner’s lead and dauntlessly lent their spunk and spirit to cinematic masterpieces like Raising Arizona, Broadcast News, Always, The Piano, Rocky Horror Picture Show, White Palace, Bull Durham, The Natural, Jagged Edge, Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons, Smokey and the Bandit, Norma Rae, Murphy’s Romance, and that exemplification of Southern women’s angst, Steel Magnolias.
If you’re young enough not to remember most of these films, make those Netflix folks earn their dough and set yourself up a rental list. And if you do, we’d love to hear your comments. Post them on our blog, or email lazlo@lazlosbasement.com
And raise a glass to some of the greatest bygone years of filmmaking history.
EXPANDING THE CONCEPT OF ART - Jewelry As History
Posted August 9th, 2007 in All, Expanding the concept of "Art" and Take a look...
Fine jewelry is often considered a great luxury but rarely thought of as an artform, despite jewelers throughout history having had audience with and joined the retinues of some of the most powerful people ever to run a city, rule a country, or commanded an empire. As politics and fashion fads have risen and fallen, some of the best-loved sparklies have made their ways into the realm of icons, as appreciated for their histories and associations as they are for their aesthetic appeal. Names like Cartier and Tiffany evoke images of wealth, luxury, and power. Crown jewels such as the Hope Diamond and the Orlov have come to represent the rise and fall of entire dynasties.
Besides making us feel a lot poorer than we actually are, famous gems and jewelry also serve a historical purpose. They tie us to some of the most fascinating names in history, like Marie Antoinette, Queen Victoria, Emperor Babur, Napoleon and Josephine, Catherine the Great, and Eleanor of Aquitaine. They carry curses, inspire literature, witness murders, solve crimes (maybe not so much), and tell time, if perhaps with a bit more pomp and circumstance than strictly necessary.
One the most well-known names among jewelry history buffs (a small but wildly eccentric clan of overly-wealthy intermarried socialites and minor royalty - or so I like to imagine when secretly reading dimestore romances…er, historical novels) is Peter Carl Faberge. Most commonly know for the Faberge eggs, Faberge was the jeweler to the last of the Russian Czars, who commissioned the precious statuettes as Easter presents before being overthrown in a bloody revolution. But we’re sure it was nice for a while. At any rate, some of the treasured eggs have gone missing, others have been sold privately, and a very few are occasionally displayed in museums and exhibitions around the world. Having had the good fortune to be in St. Petersburg, FL during the same time in which one egg was shown in the traveling exhibit “Treasures of the Czars,” while across the street another egg was being loaned to the local museum, I can strongly recommend that any artist who has the opportunity to examine the work of the Faberge jewelers in person should take it without hesitation.
So if you, like us, are bored tearless by history lessons but easily distracted by something shiny, this just might be a way for you to delve into the intriguing realm of the human past. Or at least pass a few minutes without actively losing brain cells.
Expanding the Concept of Art - THRILLER
Posted July 20th, 2007 in All, Celebrities, Commentary, Entertainment and Expanding the concept of "Art"A few months ago I was visiting my sister in law, who is a Dance teacher at her local public high school, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller came up in conversation. Her school is one of the most diverse in the state, both in Ethnic background and income level of the students’ families. She mentioned however, that every single one of her dance students could perform the entire Thriller dance by memory before they arrived at her school. There’s a reason it’s one of, if not the, most famous music videos of all time. This video crossed all the boundaries, including racial, that had previously been applied to the “job” of making music videos, thus being one of the first to turn it into an artform.
Don’t believe us? Then try to take your eyes off this video of the inmates in a Filipino prison re-enacting the video. There’s at least one man in that prison who should be well into a successful choreography career.
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