Johanna Went

Halfway through 1984’s Knife Boxing, Johanna Went interrupts her incessant frenzied bopping to thrust her hands into a crudely made body part—half-buttocks, half-vagina—suspended from the roof of Club Lingerie.1 A vicious viscous excremental substance seeps down her arm. She brings her face close and sucks the stuff into her mouth before hauling out a giant goo-covered tampon that she aggressively flings at the audience. Some cringe, others laugh. Quickly she pulls on a costume, a huge mask-headed apron covered in sex doll heads, all the while screaming her unique tongue, a babble from Hell channeled through Lolita-cum-Medea. Screeching tape loops accompany her, along with a blaring saxophone and a loud percussive racket emanating from a woman drumming on found objects.2 A monstrous vagina appears stage right. Went extracts more tampons, heaving each into the mesmerized mosh pit. Completely at one with her, the audience starts hurling these back in a game of volleyball gone mad. After all, this show was held to coincide with the Los Angeles Olympics. Much art programming accompanied that event, but Went was not part of the roster. Instead, she held her own celebration of sports, on the stage of a punk club, flanked by headless stockinette figures replete with genitalia parodying the elegant cast metal kouroi made by Robert Graham to decorate the official Olympic stadiums.

Posted By: Paul - Fri Mar 13, 2020 - Comments (9)
Category: Ambiguity, Uncertainty and Deliberate Obscurity, Antisocial Activities, Armageddon and Apocalypses, Bad Habits, Neuroses and Psychoses, Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Music, Avant Garde, Bohemians, Beatniks, Hippies and Slackers, Twentieth Century

Ulay & Abramovic

Posted By: Paul - Thu Mar 05, 2020 - Comments (0)
Category: Art, Avant Garde, Performance Art, Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Body, Entertainment, Ineptness, Crudity, Talentlessness, Kitsch, and Bad Art, Bohemians, Beatniks, Hippies and Slackers

Gaddafi: A Living Myth

Speaking before the September premiere of his new commission, Gaddafi: A Living Myth, English National Opera artistic director John Berry averred that it could "redefine opera".

The piece, written by members of Asian Dub Foundation, was billed in advance as a venture of extraordinary audacity, addressing contemporary politics in music that would set our old friend the Classical Music Establishment by its ears.

Some of us had doubts long before the premiere. In December 2005, writing in this paper about the state of affairs at English National Opera, I said: "A commissioned opera from Asian Dub Foundation has had to be put off - and it's not hard to guess why."

When it was finally unveiled, there was not much pleasure to be had from seeing this gloomy prognostication confirmed.

The critics did their worst: "Cliche and bombast ... "repetitive and incoherent ... laughably wooden" ... "as cynical as Simon Cowell" ... "embarrassingly redolent of sixth-form earnestness" ... "long stretches of jaw-dropping banality" ... "risible moments that look and sound like a Middle Eastern version of Springtime For Hitler". Worst of all, almost every review used the word "brave".

Posted By: Paul - Thu Jan 23, 2020 - Comments (0)
Category: Bombast, Bloviation and Pretentiousness, Crowds, Groups, Mobs and Other Mass Movements, Dictators, Tyrants and Other Harsh Rulers, Music, Avant Garde, Twentieth Century, Twenty-first Century, Cacophony, Dissonance, White Noise and Other Sonic Assaults

Artwork Khrushchev Probably Would Not Have Liked 26

Posted By: Paul - Wed Jan 22, 2020 - Comments (1)
Category: Avant Garde, 1920s, Dance

Virgin Prunes, “Theme For Thought”

Posted By: Paul - Thu Jan 09, 2020 - Comments (3)
Category: Antisocial Activities, Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Music, Avant Garde, 1970s, 1980s, Cacophony, Dissonance, White Noise and Other Sonic Assaults

Abstract in Concrete

Posted By: Paul - Thu Jan 02, 2020 - Comments (2)
Category: Art, Avant Garde, Urban Life, 1950s

Artwork Khrushchev Probably Would Not Have Liked 25

"King Solomon" was the last sculpture that Alexander Archipenko made and the only one that he conceived as a monumental sculpture. Throughout his career, Archipenko experimented with positive and negative space in his sculptures, often using voids or holes to suggest form. In King Solomon, he placed abstract shapes together to create the vague shape of a figure. The tall prongs at the top evoke a crown, and the intersecting triangles suggest an imposing archaic costume. Archipenko captured a dramatic sense of scale, and it is easy to imagine how formidable this figure would be if enlarged to the sixty-foot-tall version that the artist envisioned.

Posted By: Paul - Wed Dec 11, 2019 - Comments (2)
Category: Art, Avant Garde, Body, Criticism and Reviews, Russia, Twentieth Century

VARIACIONES 1/113

In the Parque del Retiro (Retiro’s Park) in Madrid, Ines Sastre runs to meet Javier Bardem who is waiting for her with his arms wide open and they embrace one another in a passionate kiss. This only one shot which lasts one minute twenty seconds is subjected to a hundred and thirteen changes for one hour and seventeen minutes. “I wanted to exhaust the possibilities of changing a shot by changing the music, the colours, by burning it, by making some holes…” remembers Aguirre; “sometimes, the heads are not visible, or we can only see her legs, or the image seems to be scrapped off”… /… the variations of this shot are preceded by the ones of another couple taken in the beach of La Concha in San Sebastian that maybe acts as a suggestion of a merely real support for this ideal meeting. The images are accompanied by not only Borges’ voice-over but also Fernando Fernan-Gomez and Francisco Rabal’s voices-over among some not so well-known other voices …/ … disparate prints, sometimes unpredictable, that Borges’ literature proposed to moviemakers of this period and from distant cultures. It is the disparity of Javier Aguirre’s experimentation along with the contradiction that seems us so provocative.

Posted By: Paul - Fri Dec 06, 2019 - Comments (0)
Category: Annoying Things, Excess, Overkill, Hyperbole and Too Much Is Not Enough, Movies, Avant Garde, Twenty-first Century, Love & Romance

Telephones

Posted By: Paul - Fri Nov 22, 2019 - Comments (5)
Category: Movies, Avant Garde, Telephones, 1990s

The Paul Lynde Halloween Special

Posted By: Paul - Mon Oct 28, 2019 - Comments (2)
Category: Annoying Things, Antiques, Anachronisms and Throwbacks, Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Celebrities, Confusion, Misunderstanding, and Incomprehension, Eccentrics, Entertainment, Geeks, Nerds and Pointdexters, Humor, Ineptness, Crudity, Talentlessness, Kitsch, and Bad Art, Innuendo, Double Entendres, Symbolism, Nudge-Nudge-Wink-Wink and Subliminal Messages, Superstition, Television, Avant Garde, Surrealism, 1970s, LGBT, Halloween, Nausea, Revulsion and Disgust, Nostalgia