In 1983, artist Michael Smith followed FEMA's plans and built a Fallout Shelter Snack Bar, which he then displayed as an art installation. To accompany the snack bar, he also created a video game housed in a custom, upright arcade cabinet:
In the game, air sirens blast, and a pixel version of Smith's recurring dopey, tv-dadish "Mike" is charged with moving three blocks from the 1st floor of a suburban house to its basement to create a fallout shelter before the bomb hits (spoiler: it's impossible to win).
LONDON — A major exhibition by 11 Los Angeles artists was postponed at Hayward Gallery here Thursday in a controversy involving titled officials, a show business star, the press, and a people who pride themselves on their love for animals.
An international flap over fish.
Artist Newton Harrison's "Portable Fish Farm" is an ecological work about growth and life cycles. Six large tanks contain lobster, crayfish, oysters, brine shrimp and catfish, dominating a large upper room of the government-owned gallery.
The catfish—200 of them—were shipped here live from El Centro, Calif. Harrison wanted to demonstrate man's ability to haul food great distances and harvest it in a new environment. Some catfish were to lay eggs; some were to mature during the showing. Others were to be cooked at an opening feast for 250 guests, to prove Harrison's idea that "all art is about survival."
Fish, to be cooked, must be killed. Harrison wanted people to see the process as part of his exhibition.
The killing part hooked the British press. Advance stories ignored almost everything except the "ritual execution" of catfish. That news triggered a reaction nearly incomprehensible outside animal-loving England.
Confused readers called papers to protest the "bludgeoning" of innocent cats. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was moved to "deplore" any public catfish killing.
British comedian Spike Milligan, famous for his work on "The Goon Show," carried his protest to the gallery itself. He threw a hammer through the front window Thursday morning.
Journal of the Identical Lunch, published in 1971, records the experiences of artist Alison Knowles and her friends all eating an identical lunch — "a tunafish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo and a large glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup" — though not all at the same time. Knowles herself reportedly ate this identical lunch every day at a New York diner.
An album cover that would also work as the cover for a horror novel. (Reminds me specifically of that Clive Barker story, "The Body Politic," in which disembodied hands gain consciousness.)
Posted By: Alex - Thu Jun 08, 2023 -
Comments (2)
Category: Art, Music
We've previously posted about Zarh H. Pritchard, who pioneered the art of painting underwater. A later practitioner of this subaquatic form of art was Jamy Verheylewegen who begain painting underwater in 1983.
Settled for a few years in Hyères, in the South of France, Jamy devotes himself to his eminently original sport/art: underwater painting.
Harnessed like a professional diver; diving suit, suit and bottles of compressed air, He descends to a depth of about ten meters to spend more than an hour, installed near a "drop-off", to transcribe, using his colored tubes, the wonders of the sea.
He has a secret process, that of depositing colors based on pigments on a prepared canvas and this, in a definitive way. The easel is held to the ground by heavy weights, otherwise the wood it is made of will cause it to rise to the surface.
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.