50 Years of Arguing Over Sgt. Pepper.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band may not be the greatest album ever, but neither is any other, of course. Having celebrated its 50th birthday in June, the classic Beatles album illustrates how consensus bounces up and down throughout history. By the time Pepper came out in 1967, ten months after 1966’s Revolver in what was then considered an unreasonably long gap between projects, the band had stopped touring in order to work exclusively in the studio. This produced a giddy anticipation cycle that inspired instant coronation upon release. Even when it first came out — especially when it first came out — the coverage framed it in world-historical terms, terms like “great art” and “magnum opus” and such; in 2003, it topped Rolling Stone’s roundup of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, which merely confirmed an attitude several decades old among the rock press.

But the imposition of received taste rankles, and a subsequent generation of critics spurned the album’s myth, attributing its acclaim less to actual merits than to good timing and the culmination of what Greil Marcus in 1979 called a “pop explosion.” Pepper’s 50th anniversary has rekindled much debate: note Jon Pareles in TheNew York Times nailing the album’s “impulsiveness, its lighthearted daring, its willingness to try the odd sound and the unexpected idea”; note also Amanda Marcotte in Salon complaining that Pepper is “music for men” over “girl music,” which reveals nothing about the album and everything about the author’s unwitting failure to reject gender norms. Fifty years on, we’re still arguing about the Beatles; they’ve got us in their clutches, and we can’t get free.

Oh, well perhaps many people are still in the clutches of The Beatles, I wouldn’t be one of them. I didn’t mind their music, and found some of it catchy enough, but it wasn’t my thing, even as a child. I did learn to not admit as much, after ending up in a vicious fight with a bunch of other 10 year old girls who were seriously in love with them. I was completely captured by The Rolling Stones and The Who at that age. For those who are captured by The Beatles, Hyperallergic has a good article up about the 50th anniversary of Pepper.

The Lady of Cao.

A replica of The Lady of Cao face, a female mummy found at the archaeological site Huaca El Brujo, a grand pyramid of the ancient Moche pre-hispanic culture, is seen at the Ministry of Culture in Lima, Peru July 4, 2017. REUTERS/Guadalupe Pardo.

The discovery of the Lady of Cao’s mummified remains in 2005 shattered the belief that the ancient Moche society, which occupied the Chicama Valley from about 100 to 700 A.D., was patriarchal. Several Moche female mummies have been found since in graves with objects denoting a high political and religious standing.

Archaeologists believe the Lady of Cao died due to complications of childbirth but otherwise lived a healthy life.

Her arms and legs were covered with tattoos of snakes, spiders and other supernatural motifs. Discovered near her funerary bundle was a strangled adolescent, who might have been a sacrifice to guide her into the afterlife, according to the museum at the El Brujo archaeological site where she was found.

The Lady of Cao is a reminder of the complex societies that thrived in what is now Peru long before the Inca empire dominated the Andes or Europeans arrived in the Americas.

The Moche built irrigation canals to grow crops in the desert and were known for their ceramics and goldwork that have been looted from their gravesites.

The replica of the Lady of Cao, a collaboration that included archaeologists, the Wiese Foundation and global imaging company FARO Technologies Inc, will be displayed in Peru’s culture ministry in the capital Lima through July 16. It will later be shown at the museum at El Brujo.

There’s more to read and see at Reuters.

A Perfect Summer Fan.

I could use a good, beautiful summer fan, given that are temps are in the withering range.* These not only express a specific concept, they are also part a very old papermaking process, and with my deep and abiding love for paper, makes this an even more enticing item.

Komorebi (木漏れ日) is one of those uniquely untranslatable Japanese words. It means “sunlight filtering through the tree leaves” and embodies a poetic appreciation for nature and its changing seasons. Capturing that aesthetic, and embedding it into a beautiful handheld fan (uchiwa), is designer Kotoko Hirata, who created the Komorebi Uchiwa.

Escape the summer heat with this beautiful handheld fan made from Echizen Washi paper, a traditional Japanese craft with a 1500-year history. Artisans steeped in the tradition create leaf patterns by hand so when sunlight hits the fan a silhouette of tree leaves appear. It’s a lovely reminder that there are ways of appreciating the summer, rather than escape into air conditioning.

Once the paper is completed it’s transported to Kyoto where fan makers, known for their kyo-uchiwa, create the radial wooden skeleton of the fan and merge it with the paper.

More at Spoon & Tamago, where you can buy this beautiful fan.

*On the bright side, this is the quietest 4th ever, with none of the months of assholes setting off fireworks preceding it. The silence is lovely.

Wondrous Weiners.

I think many artists have a tendency to hit boredom quickly and often. I certainly do. Thus, there’s a need to play, to invent, and reinvent. The men behind Burpzine are still playing with their food, but have a recent focus on wieners, fabulous wieners. And sometimes, pickles.

WonderWiener.

If these wieners look familiar, it’s because Belgian food stylist Erik Vernieuwe is obsessed with turning them into the most famous faces on the planet. In the digital pages of his Burp Zine, classic artworks and movie scenes become delectable edibles under the trained pasty chef, food historian, and recipe tester’s careful gaze. A work is complete when Vernieuwe gives it a punny name like Wiener de Milo or Robodog. “It’s becoming a bit of an obsession,” he tells Creators. “I see something and think, ‘Can I turn this into a hot dog?'”

Vernieuwe works with his husband, photographer Kris De Smedt, both professionally and when they play with their food. A fashion photographer in their hometown of Antwerp, De Smedt turns Vernieuwe’s pun-filled creations into sleek, Instagram-worthy images. “His way of looking at things and how he sees light and color really works for the kind of food pictures we do together,” Vernieuwe says. They often collaborate on “stupid things” between gigs because, as Vernieuwe puts it, he gets bored really easily.

Burp Zine is their longest-running “stupid thing” so far, perhaps because it’s unabashedly dumb and playful. “It’s just for fun. No depth to it whatsoever,” Vernieuwe says proudly.

I’d argue that it isn’t dumb at all. People need play, and they need playful. We need to be delighted in creativity for its own sake, not always concerned over messaging or significance. Play greatly reduces stress, anxiety, and hostility, and engages imagination, boosts curiosity, brings laughter and joy.

Alien.

Wiener Spock.

The Persistence of Wienery.

You can lose yourself in the delights of Wienerdom here, or get lost in other play here.

Via The Creators Project.

Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal.

Aidan O’Shea, Regina Strayhorn, Ayun Halliday, and Ben Watts in Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal (all photos by Jonathan Slaff).

We do not live in a time of subtlety. If you need evidence, take a look at the news. Shaded, nuanced criticism of President Donald Trump would sound like a whisper next to a tornado. It was refreshing, then, to see a play that dispenses with elegant critique of the president in favor of a gloves-off battery. Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal combats Trump’s logorrhea of vulgarities with its own. Trump is never actually named in the script, but the title alone tells you who it’s about, and the text gives plenty of indications. It is replete with scatological jokes; the story tells of a society that makes a Faustian pact to choose a king who will supposedly better their lives, but then shits on all of his subjects. Having made this deal, the citizens are forced not only to live under the shitty reign (and rain) of this despot, but also to pretend they love it, even as the king ends the world in nuclear war. To describe this play as a scathing satire of Trump would be putting it mildly.

[…]

In addition to adopting the rhetorical position of Biblical prophecy, it also plays with Biblical material in clever ways. Jesus’s lines from the Gospels are articulated as ironically inverted versions that resemble Trump’s likely misinterpretations of them, such as: “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall save it, and whosoever shall lose his life is a loser and deserves it.”

[…]

The piece is not subtle, and that’s probably fitting. When the president of the United States of America has condoned sexual assault, has publicly said that he would date his own daughter were they not related, has boasted about the size of his penis during a debate, and has both said and tweet-spewed other horrors too numerous to name here (I won’t even go into policy), comparing him to Caligula and Nero doesn’t seem so far-fetched. A play like this would have been too heavy-handed if it were directed at any other recent president, but these days, the rules of public discourse seem to have been thrown out. Now is not the time for art to play nice.

Performances of Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal continue through June 26 at Judson Memorial Church (55 Washington Square South, Greenwich Village, Manhattan).

John Sherer’s full review is at Hyperallergic, and well worth reading.

The Museum of Failure.

Oh, this is absolutely grand, and you can read all about it, and see more at The Creators Project, or just head over to The Museum of Failure in Helsingborg, Sweden. On July 13th, the museum will be having a failed beer tasting:

July 13 / 19:00 – 21:00

Explore the world of good, bad and experimental beer with Brygghuset Finn  www.brygghusetfinn.se

The Museum is also on tour, and will be doing pop ups in Gothenburg, Sweden, Istanbul, Turkey, Miami Fl, USA, New York City, USA, and Stockholm.

Driftwood People.

Installation at Mount Fuji, November 2008.

 

“Gathering bits of wood from here and there, like an insect building a nest, I create sculptures”.

Artist Nagato Iwasaki‘s lifelike driftwood sculptures are perfect examples of the uncanny valley — the feelings of revulsion and uneasiness one experiences from non-human objects that appear a bit too similar to real human beings. Japan seems to excel at this in areas like robotics technology, and indeed, the term “uncanny valley” itself was coined in 1970 by a Japanese roboticist, Masahiro Mori. Iwasaki takes this concept out into nature, blurring the line between flesh and wood.

Over the past 25 years, Iwasaki has been crafting these sculptures as part of a collection he simply calls “torso.” The sculptures themselves are life-sized at around 180 centimeters tall, or 5 feet 9 inches and made entirely of driftwood the artist collects in various locations in Japan. No one sculpture is exactly like another which makes them all seem like individuals with their own quirks and personalities. Descriptions of Iwasaki’s sculptures by viewers run the gamut from scary, unsettling, and imposing, to profound, intriguing, and otherworldly.

I love these sculptures, perhaps because I’ve always seen wood as flesh. You can read and see much more at Spoon & Tamago.

The Ghost of the Fortress.

The Ghost of the Fortress has become a permanent fixture at the Mark Rothko Art Center and Gallery. Per rq: a sort of monument to warhorses (who quickly became obsolete with the advent of more modern technologies), and thus is wrapped in gauze as a symbol of the uneasy life and death these horses (and, by extension, soldiers who served with them) experienced. As the sculpture concept declares (and I translate loosely from the article): “Usually what remains after war is not medals or grand victories, but crippled and ruined lives.” And for this reason they shied away from a heroic depiction of the warhorse (no bared teeth, flailing hooves, free manes flying in the wind). The authors of the piece drew inspiration from photographs of the wounded from WWI, and as it’s probably the last war that saw active-duty warhorses on the premises, they produced this restless ghost.

Via Delfi Kultura.

Cool Stuff Friday.

Images courtesy the artists.

Take a few moments from your day to get acquainted with Botanica, a blend of music, art, and science.

In 2012, Italian music group Deproducers launched a project of science-related albums, with the first, Planetario, exploring the topic of astrophysics. For their second musical science project, Botanica, Deproducers brought back the design studio Super Symmetry to create a multimedia live performance that highlights the beauty and artistic wonder of plants by merging music and scientific data. All told, there are 30 videos for Botanica, exploring things like plant roots, psychoactivity, and deforestation, amongst other topics, by way of grids, video footage, graphics, information, generative animation, and other visuals. Like Data Garden’s bio-reactive installation, Quartet, Botanica elevates the natural wonder of plants to a plane equal with human creativity.

While Planetario featured a collaboration with astrophysicist Fabio Peri, Botanica includes a collaboration with botanist Stefano Mancuso. During the live show, before the band begins to play, Mancuso gives a brief “science lesson” about the songs, and how each of the topics are interlinked. For each live show, Super Symmetry is tasked with visually integrating the musical and scientific aspects of the project.

There is much, much more at The Creators Project.

We could all use more Mr. Rogers.

Install shot of Topophilia. Image courtesy Wyoming Art Party.

Check out the Wild Wombs of the West!

Martha Wilson performing as Donald Trump in “Art Rising” at Trump Tower.

And don’t miss the art protest performance which took place at Trump Tower.

Lakin Ogunbanwo.

© Lakin Ogunbanwo.

© Lakin Ogunbanwo.

Nigerian-born and based photographer Lakin Ogunbanwo was commissioned by Galeries Lafayette to create a photo- and video– based window installation for the Parisian department store’s ‘Africa Now‘ season. Ogunbanwo’s concept centres around highlighting the multifaceted nature of his experience of Africa, which he realised with a cast of collaborators such as models Toyin Oyeneye and Uju Marshall and the stylist Oyinye Fafi Obi. Certain shots also depict a selection of objects that represent the spirit of his home city, Lagos. “Drawing from the colors and vibrancy of my city serves as a metaphor for the continent, where many people, cultures and realities all mix and interweave to make one beautiful whole,” he explains. The resulting series is cleanly composed, and at once energetic and peaceful, and notable for the sense of joy and exuberance they convey.”

Lakin Ogunbanwo x Galeries Lafayette from Nataal Media on Vimeo.

Via iGNANT.  Lakin Ogunbanwo.