Minnesota artist Mark Larson debuted his line of Art-Necko ties in 1978. These were plastic, see-through ties, and the gimmick was that he filled them with various stuff.
As described in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Nov 26, 1978):
There is the aquarium tie (a snail, a plant, some gravel and a puzzled guppie floating on the wearer's chest). The Paint-by-Number tie. The captured-flight tie (two broken toy airplanes and a dead moth). The floral arrangement tie (dirt and live plants). The regimental stripe (available in dirt and candy stripes or the more restrained hairline stripes, executed in human hair in gentle tones of rust, brown and gray).
The neon tie, however, is the current front-runner. Larson's favorite, it's a stunning red-and-blue creation that makes a glowing statement about the wearer—providing he's hooked up to a power source.
And these have nothing on the proposed ties. There could be—well, the world's loudest tie (armed with a tiny loudspeaker to broadcast jets taking off); the horror movie or Vincent Price model (containing dry ice, with tiny holes in the front to permit the wearer to trail wisps of fog); the Fit-to-be-Tied Tie (a self-inflating strait-jacket that takes over when you feel you are losing control), and the chow mein tie, inspired by the Seal-a-Meal machine that is basic to the Art-Necko process.
The cowboy tie
People magazine (Jan 15, 1979) listed a few more:
Railroad Tie has an HO-gauge track, pebbles and a miniature crossing sign inside.
Fishing Tackle features Goldfish crackers, a hook, sinker and a rubber worm. Vanity contains false eyelashes and phony fingernails. And for the ghoulish, there's Bones—scrubbed and boiled shortribs.
In 1995 Roger Powell was 46 years old and living homeless on the streets of London after the failure of his taxi business. And then, by a strange twist of fate, his life changed and he became a work of art.
Film director Tony Kaye had decided to display a homeless person as a work of art at the Saatchi Gallery. So he sent his assistant out to find a homeless person willing to go along with this scheme, and Powell was the one found.
Powell on display at the Saatchi Gallery. Source: alamy.com
Powell sat in the gallery beside a sign explaining that he was for sale as a "human work of art." The price: £1000.
As far as I know, no one offered to buy Powell. Nevertheless, Kaye continued to display Powell at various museums for the next two-and-a-half years, but most of the time not as an official exhibit. Powell would simply walk around the museums while wearing a t-shirt that said "For Sale, Roger, By Tony Kaye, Four Million Pounds." (The sale price had inflated quite a bit.) In return for doing this, Kaye paid Powell a small weekly allowance and gave him some money towards rent.
San Francisco Examiner - Nov 19, 1995
Eventually Kaye lost touch with Powell. Then, in 2002 Powell died. Kaye paid for Powell's cremation and received his ashes. He said he planned to use them to create a painting that would say "Dead Homeless Man." I don't know if he ever completed this work.
If you walked down Mitte’s Oranienburger Straße at any point between 1990 and 2012, you would have likely noticed a commanding, if dishevelled, structure located just a short distance from the synagogue. Up until five years ago, the second-most visited art attraction in Berlin wasn’t the East Side Gallery or Museum Island, it was this five-storey building: aka Kunsthaus Tacheles. Taken over by artists after the Wall fell in 1990, the building was transformed into a creative commune. It was quintessential post-Wende Berlin: upon their occupancy, the artists launched a legal battle for the property and rescued it from demolition, maintaining a presence for 22 years.
An experimental film from 1960 about flicker effect. Or, as one commenter on YouTube puts it, "One of the most horrible things ever in the history of the cinema."
Arnulf Rainer premiered May 1960 in Vienna, where most of the audience walked out of the screening. Kubelka has stated that after the premiere, he "lost most of [his] friends because of Arnulf Rainer".
Wikipedia also notes that Kubelka refused to digitize the film because "cinema is a completely different medium which cannot be imitated by the digital medium." But it's on YouTube, so someone digitized it.
"Uke-TEL NAKI-U1" is the 1993 creation of the 'art collective' Maywa Denki (brothers Masamichi and Nobumichi Tosa), who specialize in creating "useless machines". They offer the following description of 'Uke-TEL' on their website:
A thrilling "fish cage" with a special device. The hanging needles fall off from the roof in time to the telephone time signal and may hit the unlucky fish swimming at the bottom
A fish is swimming in a cage, nails hanging on the ceiling. When you call 177 using a phone attached to the cage, nails fall into the water along with the tone.
Seems to me its use is to kill goldfish, which makes it relevant to the controversy, previously posted about, concerning the legal rights of goldfish.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.