Blessed are the Merciful

Carlos Aires... Untitled (from the series 'Happily Ever After' 2004, lambda print on metallic paper and polyurethane frame). From the exhibition Blessed are the Merciful at Feigen Contemporary in New York, NY. "...This exhibition endeavours, not without humor and a jarring ironic tone, to inculcate a sense of conscience through the surprising works of these twenty-four artists, and to bring us back to the roots of our Western faith: compassion and consideration of the misery of others."

I'll Go Down Swinging

Exene Cervenka and Los Straitjackets... I'll Go Down Swinging (.mp3 audio 02:13). From the Los Straitjackets album Sing Along With....

Dance CRAZE at Radio Rumpus Room

Don't miss the fourth ever edition of 'Dance CRAZE' currently available in the Audio Archives at Radio Rumpus Room. "...saluting songs intended to get people moving: Some, onto the dance floor; others, out of the building altogether and into the parking lot. Expect tunes like the Chicken Switch, the Alligator, the Log, the Weirdo Wiggle. And remember: If your eyes don't BUG OUT when you say Dance CRAZE, you're saying it wrong!"

Theremin Vox

A few goodies from Theremin Vox. Freddie & the Hitch-Hikers... Sinners (1961 Bandbox 251, .mp3 audio 02:42), Bud Averill... Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair (.mp3 audio 02:40), and Samuel J. Hoffman on You Asked For It (.mp3 audio 03:50). "...Hoffman plays excerpts from The Lost Weekend and Spellbound motion pictures and the standard, "You Were Meant For Me.'"

Geraldo De Barros

Geraldo De Barros... Sans Titre - Tatuapé (1948, Sao Paulo, Foto Formas 9/15, Photo noir/blanc). From Works by Geraldo De Barros at Galerie Guy Bärtschi in Genève. Excellent!

Netropolis

Also... Michael Najjar... Hong Kong (2003-2005, Lightjet-print, Edition de 6). From the exhibition Netropolis. More Works by Michael Najjar at his personal site.

Assack Lawn No. 1 Dub

Glen Brown... Assack Lawn No. 1 Dub (.mp3 audio 02:44).

Ansel Adams at Work

Newfound Photos of Ansel Adams at Work. "...Ansel Adams, arguably the most famous photographer of the 20th century, is best known for his stunning images of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and other Western landscapes. He also created the Zone System of photography for crafting black-and-white photographs that remains influential to this day. Society archivists recently uncovered striking new photographs of Adams at work. These images show Adams in his home, working in his darkroom, and taking photographs on location at Point Lobos, California, in the late 1960s."

Faces: Ena Bunraku

Hiroshi Watanabe... Faces: Ena Bunraku (25 images). "...The tradition of Ena Bunraku is now in the hands of twenty members of the Ena Bunraku Conservatory in Kaware village whose current population is only 280. There are now only sixty-five puppet heads kept in a small warehouse at the corner of the playground in the village’s elementary school. They only come out a few times a year to perform in front of an audience. Other times, they are kept sleeping in the dark. The school was closed in 2003 because there were not enough students to attend in the village." From Hiroshi Watanabe Photography.

Selected Works on Paper from Edvard Munch to Gerhard Richter

Otto Dix... Matrose und Mädchen (Sailor and Girl, 1923, Color lithograph). "...An extremely rare trial proof printed from three stones (pink, green and two blues), before the numbered edition of 65. The stone which was printed in red in the edition here printed in green. With traces of the work process and printer's ink in the margins and on the verso. Signed and confirmed by Martha Dix Originallitho von Otto Dix, Martha Dix in pencil on the verso. On thin wove paper, the colors fresh." From Selected Works on Paper from Edvard Munch to Gerhard Richter at Kunsthandel Jörg Maaß.

Documenting History: The Charles "Teenie" Harris Archive

Documenting History: The Charles "Teenie" Harris Archive. "...Charles "Teenie" Harris photographed the events and daily life in Pittsburgh's African-American community between 1936 and 1975 for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the largest and most influential Black newspapers in the country. In 2001, Carnegie Museum of Art acquired Harris' archive of nearly 80,000 photographic negatives. The archive documents Black urban life from the Depression through the Civil Rights Era, and represents the largest single collection of photographic images of any Black community in the United States. In its breadth and its rich documentation of the life and community spirit of Black urban America, the archive is unequalled."

Peter Schuyff

Peter Schuyff... Paintover #8. One of a selection of 'Paintings on Found Paintings' by Peter Schuyff.

Charlotte Salomon

Works by Charlotte Salomon at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. "...Charlotte Salomon was raised in a cultured German-Jewish environment. In January 1939, following Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, she fled Berlin. She travelled to her grandparents in the South of France, who had left Nazi Germany back in 1933. Her grandmother committed suicide upon the outbreak of World War II. Only then did Charlotte learn that her mother had also committed suicide in 1926.

Charlotte found a very special way of dealing with the suicides in her family and her experiences growing up Jewish in Berlin. She withdrew and started painting. Outdoors, in sunny southern France, she created Life? or Theatre?.

In her work Charlotte reaches out to her audience by mingling fantasy and reality. Her family and friends are the actors and have appropriate pseudonyms. Her texts are simple, laced with quotations from German literature. Charlotte also indicates music that increases the dramatic effect. She calls Life? or Theatre? a Singespiel or lyrical drama.

In 1943 shortly before Salomon was deported to Auschwitz she gave the gouaches to a friend of the family, saying: 'Take good care of them. They are my whole life.'"

Brittingham Family Lantern Slide Collection

Travelling Priest in Kyoto (1898, Kyoto, Japan, Glass lantern slide). From the Brittingham Family Lantern Slide Collection. "...This collection consists of the personal and travel photographs of the Brittinghams, a prominent and influential Wisconsin family. Spanning the years 1897-1922, these images capture the private lives of a wealthy family at the turn of the century, and document their travels to 22 states and 32 countries. The subjects of this collection range widely from informal pictures of children at play to detailed interior shots of the Brittingham homes. Scenic landscapes, cityscapes, and street scenes from around the world are in abundance. The Brittinghams traveled from the Grand Canyon to Eastern Asia, and everywhere captured particulars of dress, architecture, and locomotion."

Kansuke Yamamoto: Vintage Photographs, 1935-1955

Kansuke Yamamoto: Vintage Photographs, 1935-1955 at Stephen Wirtz Gallery. "...Yamamoto’s highly aesthetic imagery can be seen as a Japanese interpretation of the language of European surrealism with many works in dialogue with artists such as Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro, Man Ray, Rene Magritte, and Jean Arp. Yamamoto published over a 40-year span in avant-garde journals with limited circulation in Japan, and the strangeness and transgressive nature of his imagery was considered threatening, inviting persecution of the artist by the Tokko (Thought Police)."

Luděk Vojtěchovský: Reality of Abstraction, Photograms

Luděk Vojtěchovský: Reality of Abstraction, Photograms. "...Luděk Vojtěchovský was born on 11 September 1959 in Caslav, and in a short time his family moved to Pardubice. He was educated as a reproduction graphic designer. After that he studied at secondary school of applied arts. He has made photographs for Care of Historical Monuments, done business for printing houses. His works have been presented at more than 130 exhibitions all over the world and he has been awarded several golden medals FIAP for his work. He lives in Pardubice."

Painted Beehive Panels From Slovenia

Painted Beehive Panels From Slovenia - Exhibition from the Museum of Apiculture in Radovljica. "...In the past, beekeeping was not only an important branch of agriculture in Slovenia, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it also bore rich fruit in an aesthetic sense: the distinctive architecture of apiaries covered with straw or shingles, which blended picturesquely into the landscape, and, perhaps even more important, painted beehive panels."

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Hirshorn Museum. "...Hiroshi Sugimoto is celebrated for his multiple series of black-and-white photographs that explore the themes of time, memory, dreams, and the history of representation. The Hirshhorn and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, have co-organized the first major survey of Sugimoto’s work, co-curated by Hirshhorn director of art and programs and chief curator Kerry Brougher and Mori Art Museum director David Elliott. The exhibition features approximately 120 photographs from 1976 to the present, encompassing the entirety of this artist’s thirty-year career."

Spotkanie (Encounter)

Bruno Schulz... Spotkanie (Encounter, A young Jew and two women in an alley, 1920, oil on cardboard). From Bruno Schulz (12 VII 1892 – 19 XI 1942). (pl)

The Thirteenth Freak Month

Kinoeye... The Thirteenth Freak Month - The influence of Bruno Schulz on the Brothers Quay. "...Although US-born and now based in London, the Brothers Quay have long been inspired by the absurdist art of Mitteleuropa, including Franz Kafka, Jan Švankmajer and particularly Bruno Schulz, the 'secret catalyst' to their work. James Fiumara looks at the Polish writer's influence on the Brothers' stop-motion animations."

Possum Trot: The Life and Work of Calvin Black, 1903-1972

Possum Trot: The Life and Work of Calvin Black, 1903-1972 (1977, a film by Allie Light and Irving Saraf). "...Calvin Black was a folk artist who lived in California's Mojave Desert and created more than 80 life-size female dolls, each with its own personality, function, and costume. He also built the 'Bird Cage Theater,' where the dolls perform and sing in voices recorded by the artist. The film works on two levels. One is the documentation of the artist's legacy and commentary on women: grotesque female figures moving in the desert wind and the theater with its frozen 'actresses,' protected by his widow from a world she views as hostile. The other is the re-creation of the artist's vision through the magic of film, as the camera enables the dolls to move and sing and brings theater to life as the artist imagined it."

Works by Franca Ravet

Works by Franca Ravet. "...Le travail de Franca Ravet s'inscrit pleinement dans la contemporanéité. Ses œuvres accrochent d'emblée le regard du spectateur par son écriture, un graphisme proche des graffitis, par sa gamme chromatique, un dualisme noirblanc sous tendu par des tons oxydés.

En s'attardant, un autre constat s'impose : les thèmes traités, non sans humour, par l'artiste sont actuels et profonds. Elle parle de l'homme, de l'autre, cet être avec lequel un échange est possible mais qui ne se réalise pas ou si peu. Elle exprime la vie, le temps qui passe, les traces que l'homme laisse au cours des siècles sur la terre, nos origines." (be)

Olhares do Morro - Fotografia e Cidadania

Olhares do Morro - Fotografia e Cidadania. "...In the heart of Rio de Janeiro, we develop a polarizing space, between creative photography and visual documentary. As a photographic investigation, Olhares do Morro documents from inside the favelas, the richness of social and cultural life, outside the common frame of police brutality and gang fights."

How Long The Night Was

deadboy & the Elephantmen... How Long The Night Was (.mp3 audio 03:14). From the album We Are Night Sky.

Exene Cervenka: America the Beautiful

Exene Cervenka: America the Beautiful at DCKT Contemporary in New York, NY. "...On view in America the Beautiful will be journals and mixed media collages dating from 1974 through 2005 by one of the founding members of the seminal Los Angeles punk group, X. The exhibition was originally organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art and guest curators Kristine McKenna and Michael Duncan. The exhibition will feature a selection of journals from the collection of approximately 100 that CERVENKA has completed over the past thirty-one years, as well as over twenty collages. CERVENKA’s journals combine rough drafts of songs and personal reflections rendered in a baroque calligraphic script with photographs, drawings and scraps of ephemera found while traveling as a musician. Similarly, the collages are created from found materials to form an interpretative composite portrait of the country she’s come to know through her life experiences on the road."

Television

Robyn Hitchcock... Television (.mp3 audio 06:22). "...You're the Devil's fishbowl, honey."

Don Fritz: Wünderland

Don Fritz: Wünderland at Billy Shire Fine Arts in Culver City, CA. "...Childhood, as a concept, is a place charged with fantasies of freedom and innocents. It is addressed in my work by appropriating familiar imagery and reconstructing it on an image surface in a self-reflexive and highly material approach. Through techniques of layering and erasing of visual elements and texts, I present conflicting ideas and develop a trace of my psychological process. In reworking the surface, each layer brings me further into the dialectics of the issues being addressed."

Works by Lisa Krivacka

Works by Lisa Krivacka. "...When I was growing up, my family never went on a real vacation, so, once I left home and traveled a little, I became fascinated by travel postcards and began to collect them. I am especially interested in the postcards that depict banal destinations, like the State Highway Building in Columbia South Carolina, or the Rotary Club in Chicago, Il. I am also drawn to the outwardly innocent motels and diners, that probably don’t exist anymore."

I'm On Fire

Johnny Cash... I'm On Fire (.mp3 audio 03:05).

Honey Talks: Comics Inspired by Painted Beehive Panels

Honey Talks: Comics Inspired by Painted Beehive Panels. "...Painted beehive panels are a part of Slovene cultural heritage of national importance. They are a variety of folk art created largely by and for the Slovene lower (rural) classes. Painted beehives appeared after the middle of the 18th century in the Slovene ethnic territory, achieved their greatest flowering in the period between 1820 and 1880, and died out in the early 20th century in the face of changed socio-economic conditions and new ideas. Painted beehives were in general use at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th in southern Carinthia, north-west Slovene Styria, central and northern Carniola and part of the Gorizia region. Their emergence and application are linked with the ascent of bee-keeping as one of the most profitable economic activities in 19th century. Outside the mentioned territory, thousands of painted beehives were spread to European countries by trading with live bees." Also... the same project In Slovene.

H.H. Bennett & Civil War Cycloramas

H.H. Bennett & Civil War Cycloramas. "...A unique set of H. H. Bennett photographs recorded two Civil War cycloramas created in the 1880s, depicting the Battle of Gettysburg (specifically Pickett's Charge) and the Battle of Missionary Ridge (Chattanooga, Tennessee). A cyclorama is a panoramic display of huge oil-on-canvas paintings mounted on the walls inside a large round building built especially for it, with a viewing platform in the center. These massive paintings were given a more realistic quality from the actual objects, landscaping, and life-size figures placed in front of them. The cyclorama was a primitive precursor to today's IMAX, giving the feeling of being in the middle of a scene." From H. H. Bennett – Photographer Extraordinaire at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

To Die So As To Leave The Hell

Raymond Depardon... Untitled (from the series San Clemente, a mental asylum in San Clemente near Venice, 1982). From the exhibit To Die So As To Leave The Hell, photographs by James Nachtwey, Don McCullin, Sebastião Salgado, Raymond Depardon, Joël-Peter Witkin, Dieter Appelt, and Elizabeth Prouvost at Dmochowski Gallery. "...the photographs show the fortunes of people for whom the existence was (and still is – for those who have survived) the only, never-ending streak of suffering and only death (usually tragic) lets them find the peace. Today I am showing seven artists. They are very famous (except for Prouvost, who is less known, but I had the honour to present her works in my real gallery in Paris at the time when I still had it). Their works have greatly impressed me for a long time. With this exhibition I would like to pay my tribute to them and at least a little bit contribute to making them popular, especially in Poland. For in the West almost everybody knows them, so I am not discovering anything to an average European aesthete."

Fish Decoys by Oscar Peterson

Fish Decoys by Oscar Peterson - one of the Master Carvers at American Fish Decoys. "...Born of Swedish parents in 1894, Oscar Peterson was an outdoorsman who spent his youth hunting and fishing in the lower Michigan Peninsula. He eventually settled in Cadillac, Michigan and was active as a wilderness guide in the area all his life. Peterson's involvement with decoys began as a child and continued his entire life. He spent nearly fifty years carving and painting with a fluency, industry and imagination unique to the art form."

Les Réanimations de Blanquet et Olive

"...Préparez votre lecteur de DVD aux 'Réanimations,' la récolte de courts-métrages de Stéphane Blanquet & Olive !

Ce DVD de 60 minutes d'animations décontractées en papier découpé propose : 'La peau de Chagrin,' 'Mon placard,' la série 'Histoire Muette' plus de nombreux bonus : les premiers films ('Le mélange des couleurs,' 'Vivement l'an 2000,' ...), deux diaporamas (un pour Blanquet, un pour Olive) ainsi qu'un auto-entretien expérimental de Blanquet nommé 'Mode d’Emploi.' Complétant le contenu du DVD, 'Mini Bouche Cousue Comics,' un extra bonus papier regroupant les premières bandes dessinées 'histoire muette' (celles parues dans 'La Monstrueuse'). Les images complémentaires ainsi que l'habillage du DVD ont été entièrement conçus et réalisés par Blanquet !" (fr)

The Late Indian Larry

The late Indian Larry. "...Indian Larry's inspiration was 50's - 60's motorcycle clubs, Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth and the legendary, Von Dutch. The skilled machinist, metal-sculptor and master motorcycle mechanic won countless custom shows, participated in motorcycle racing, and originated the hard-core motorcycle style - a blend between classic choppers and hotrod race bikes. Indian Larry's resume includes movie, video, television, and magazine spreads. His eccentric nature combined with a unique and colorful appeal has gathered great interest from media, producing a fanatic fan base."

Io tacerò, ma nel silentio

Vocalconsort Labia Vocalia... Io tacerò, ma nel silentio (.mp3 audio 02:18) by Carlo Gesualdo - our favourite murderous late Renaissance composer.

The Black Museum

The Black Museum - Kostas Seremetis 2005. Surrender Gallery, 14 Scotts Road 05-06 Far East Plaza, Singapore.

Storker

Mark Jenkins... Dumpster (2003, Rua Pompeu Loureiro, Copacabana, Rio, Brazil). From Storker - Tape Sculpture and Street Installations by Mark Jenkins.

The Book of Tags

The Book of Tags. "...THE BOOK OF TAGS is a DROPDROP Agency project, published by KITCHEN 93 and made possible by the collaboration of over 300 worldwide graffiti writers. The project attempts to analyze and also give voice to one of the most demonized yet pure means of expression within the graffiti world, the Tag. The Tags appeared for the first time in the early 70's in New York City in the form of marker signs on subway cars. Tags are today as they were in the beginning, a sort of nickname or alias used by young people belonging to every kind of social class, to leave their mark on public property and be noticed. After thirty years of elaboration and development of different styles by the writers, tags have taken on a strong aesthetic value. Using the state of this art as our point of departure, DROPDROP carried out two years of research worldwide studying and identifying tags. From our collection, we have selected the most significant examples for this book."