Avant Garde
Hamfat Asar
The creator's Wikipedia page.
Posted By: Paul - Tue May 26, 2020 -
Comments (3)
Category: Art, Avant Garde, Surrealism, Stop-motion Animation, 1960s
The Painter Joachim Raphaël Boronali
NOTW and Weird Universe have covered innumerable art world hoaxes and farces. Paintings hung upside down, installations destroyed by janitors, large prize money for unmade beds, and so forth. Here is one of the first such japes. A painting done by a donkey with a brush tied to its tail, and exhibited at a famous Paris salon as the work of a new painter named Joachim Raphaël Boronali.
Read the whole story here.
Posted By: Paul - Thu May 14, 2020 -
Comments (3)
Category: Animals, Art, Avant Garde, Hoaxes and Imposters and Imitators, Twentieth Century
Artwork Khrushchev Probably Would Not Have Liked 27
Bronislava Nijinska made up for Kikimora by Léonide Massine.
Posted By: Paul - Sat Mar 21, 2020 -
Comments (2)
Category: Art, Avant Garde, 1910s, Dance, Body Painting
Johanna Went
Let us know when you bail.
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.
Source of quote, long essay.
Another essay on the creator, here.
Her Wikipedia page.
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
Alas, Ulay is no more.Marina is still with us.
Enjoy 2.5 hours of their art.
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
With Libya in the news, perhaps it's time to revisit Gaddafi: A Living Myth, the 2006 opera that was billed as an "all singing, all dancing, free-spirited version of the Dictator's life."
Here's a catalog of contemporary reactions.
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".
Alas, I cannot find a video of the actual production. Here are two of the creators discussing it.
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
The Wikipedia page.
Posted By: Paul - Wed Jan 22, 2020 -
Comments (1)
Category: Avant Garde, 1920s, Dance
Virgin Prunes, “Theme For Thought”
Their Wikipedia page.
An even earlier version of the song here.
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
Ten minutes of colorful blobs reflected in puddles. Not sure what audience this was aimed at.
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.
Source.
His Wikipedia page.
Posted By: Paul - Wed Dec 11, 2019 -
Comments (2)
Category: Art, Avant Garde, Body, Criticism and Reviews, Russia, Twentieth Century
| Who We Are |
|---|
| Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes. 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. Contact Us |