If you watch one 10-minute video starring a vagina house, a mechanical bird, and a demanding stereo on the internet today, let it be “kHz.” Created by Daniel Bird, the short is an unfinished work that’s mind-boggling, regardless. One part Jan Svankmajer, one part Quay Brothers, it’s a freakishly surrealist peek into another world in which everything is simultaneously anthropomorphized and mechanized. According to the caption and the comments thread, Bird posted the unfinished work online as a way of pushing his coworker into working on completing it. “After two to three years of working on this short (model-making, set-building, animating) my co-director and cameraman took the masters to New York with him, with the promise that he would look after the compositing, wire-removal and grading. Three years later, I’m still waiting…” Bird’s subsequent comments suggest the piece may be finished one day, after all–although, as several viewers say, it’s pretty fucking great, either way. |Circuitry|
Died Young, Stayed Pretty
“Died Young, Stayed Pretty” is a documentary that focuses on the random people who make rock posters. Directed by Eileen Yaghoobian, the movie features talking head artists pontificating about their transient, occasionally obscene, eye-popping, promotional art. Rather than posit the poster makers as part of some as yet undiscovered movement, the film reveals how even fractured, random acts of creativity plastered across the city one day and destroyed the next expose something deeper about the unsated consumerist culture at large. Art Chantry, Methane Studios, and Stainboy Reinel make appearances as “the vivisectionists of America’s morbidly obese consumer culture.”
Scandinavian death metal fashion? Accessories by World of Warcraft? I remain flummoxed. Regardless, the redheaded, Australian, supermodel-in-training Tiah Eckhart is rockin’ it in this virtual reality-themed shoot. It kind of looks like what Gwar would masturbate to, doesn’t it? Relatedly, the tattoo around her wrist reads: “Belle-Laide.” That’s French for “beautiful ugly,” or a “woman who is attractive though not conventionally beautiful.” You’ll have to take her word for it.
Zach Plague has published a book: boring boring boring boring boring boring boring. It’s an oddly illustrated sort of novel, consisting of five parts: The Art Kids, The Prep Kids, The Art Terrorists, The Adults, and The Past. As for the story, it meanders from anti-love scenes to surreal sex drugs. “He was trying to imagine her in a way that would break his heart,” the tale begins. But rather than publish one more boring book of black type on white pages, boring was created as posters, which were then cut and turned into book pages. In total, the book looks more like art than literature, emblazoned as it is with human-monster hybrids and ink that sprawls across the words. It’s anything but boring, really.
A cute-ugly new ad campaign for SHS clothes for the teen set, “Goodbye Innocence,” depicts a young man and a young woman seated in the midst of their safari-hunted booty. The girl’s kills include skinned teddy bears and the trophy skulls of Hello Kitty and Snoopy. The boy’s quarry includes robots, aliens, and Minnie Mouse. How interesting. How unique. What a fine job the ad team did with this! Only, they stole the idea, of course, from Portland, Oregon, artist Michael Paulus. Click below for the other execution.
Germs
Once upon a time, The Germs was the original hardcore LA punk rock band, loaded with heroin and headed for death by suicide. Helmed by Darby Crash, the group hosted musicians ranging from Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go’s to Pat Smear who went on to play with Nirvana and the Foo Fighters. Now, a new indie movie, “What We Do Is Secret,” aims to resurrect The Germs in a biopic. Starring Shane West, whose credits include “Boy Meets World” and a role in “A Walk to Remember” opposite Mandy Moore, as Crash, and Bijou Phillips, who’s better known for her rack than her acting abilities, as Lorna Doom, the film is one more drop of what used to be edgy into the mainstream bucket. Maybe next up someone in Hollywood will make “The GG Allin Story,” starring James Van Der Beek and brought to you by the creators of “Dawson’s Creek.”
According to the artist, Steve Ellis paints “trashy glamour and disposable, dangerous pop still lifes.” From broken high heels to a stripping pen, guns that blast “OOPS!” to a crashed Swinger, his neo-pop artworks glorify and vilify the detritus that Man leaves behind him. The ‘Summer Salon’ group show opens tomorrow night at Sloan Gallery and Ellis is showcasing one piece from his new series that trains a distorted magnifying glass on mangled celebrity tabloids. “The crumpled magazines are simple appropriations from an already trashy subject,” Ellis explained by email. “By distorting the glossy celebrities and text, a new ugly truth is unveiled. Gossip magazines and downward spiraling celeb stories printed weekly in glossy rags trumps real news about our world today because somehow people can’t get enough.” Click below for more another mutilated celebrity mag from the new collection of work.
You might recognize the photography of South Africa-based Pieter Hugo from a series he did that focused on Nigerian men with hyenas on leashes. For a new project, he trained his lens on Nollywood, the Nigerian movie industry. In staged reenactments of what he’d seen on real sets, Hugo had hired actors portray the stark, deeply symbolic characters and scenarios that populate Nigeria’s decidedly over the top film aesthetic. “Stars are local actors; plots confront the public with familiar situations of romance, comedy, witchcraft, bribery, prostitution. The narrative is overdramatic, deprived of happy endings, tragic. The aesthetic is loud, violent, excessive; nothing is said, everything is shouted.” |BoingBoing|
Kristin Victoria Barron is a Brooklyn-based artist who makes, among other objects, odd-looking dolls out of human hair, leather, and latex. What appear to be the priests sit huddled in legless clumps while human-haired, blue-faced, chicken-footed twin girls lie not far from them. Born and raised in Michigan, where she was sick much of her childhood, Barron reports the Priests & Twins series was inspired by her experience with a Jungian analyst with whom she examined her dreams. Her other works include a man’s hat/mask outfitted with horsehair, a woman’s eye-patch made of over-sized rhinestones, and an interactive, digital, Tokyo vending machine.
The A.V. Club has a cool roundup: “Drawing-Board Confessional: 22 Unflattering Moments from Autobiographical Comics.” The list excerpts work from a smattering of comics creators, among them R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and Joe Sacco, as the artists reveal their sometimes less glorious moments through their most intimate artworks. Julie Doucet picks her nose and arranges her boogers bedside. Joe Matt is totally addicted to pornography. And Chris Ware portrays himself as a condescending, elitist bastard. Comics great Art Spiegelman takes the cake, though, for spurning his depressed mother who later kills herself. “You murdered me, mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!” he howls in the wake of her death. Ah, the compelling misanthropy of comic book artists. |A.V.Club|
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