The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Author: DC (Page 11 of 1092)

Jud Yalkut’s Day

 

‘As an underground filmmaker and video artist, Jud Yalkut participated in seminal moments of early video art. In 1965 Yalkut became a resident filmmaker for USCO, a countercultural collective. Starting in 1966 and continuing into the 1970’s, he collaborated with Nam June Paik on a series of video-film pieces in which he used the medium of film not merely to document performances, but, through editing and juxtaposition, to create conversations between film and video.’ — Lightcone

‘One of the most influential filmmakers making experimental cinema in New York in the 1960s was Jud Yalkut… Since then, Yalkut has gone on to consolidate an enviable reputation as one of the most important metamedia artists in American independent cinema.’ — Wheeler Winston Dixon, “The Exploding Eye”

‘Jud Yalkut has collaborated in dozens of intermedia performances throughout the United State since 1965, when he became resident filmmaker for USCO at their commune in Garnerville, New York… Yalkut displays a sense of control and orchestration that is the result of working closely with superimpositions within the film frame. Thus in the superimposition of multiple-projection environments he is able to control not only the spatial and temporal dimensions of a performance, but the graphic composition and integrity of the images as well. The result is a ‘film performance’ in the fullest sense.’ — Gene Youngblood, “Expanded Cinema”

‘The work of Jud Yalkut emerged out of the radical, politicized utopianism of the 1960s… Yalkut continues to explore the theme of inner contemplation in ‘Vision Cantos’ (2000), his most recent video installation, whose title reflects the breaking down of boundaries among disciplines that has characterized all his work… Once again, the viewer is encouraged to perceive the projected image as a total experience.’ — Chrissie Iles, Curator, Film and Video, The Whitney Museum of American Art

 

____
Stills







































 

____
Further

Jud Yalkut @ Wikipedia
Electronic Arts Intermix: Jud Yalkut
Jud Yalkut @ IMDb
DREAM REELER: Jud Yalkut (1938-2013)
Film and video artist Jud Yalkut dies at 75
Jud Yalkut @ Filmmakers Coop
Nam June Paik Jud Yalkut – Video Synthesizer and TV Cello Collectibles
Between Film and Video- the Intermedia Art of Jud Yalkut
Imagining Flight – Jud Yalkut

 

____
Extras


Jud Yalkut on Immersive Environments


Nam June Paik: Art & Process – Jud Yalkut

 

______
Interview

 

Sabrina Gschwandtner: I thought we could begin by talking about what the Destruct Film at the Judson Gallery – later installed at the Whitney – had in common with your 1967 film, Kusama’s Self-Obliteration.

Jud Yalkut: Actually, there was no connection between them whatsoever. The show at the Whitney in 2000 was media environments by myself, except for the collaborative work that I did with USCO, which was the one with the balloons, spinning around, called “Yin/Yang Sine/Pulse,” and everyone’s contributions to it were equal. Many of the films from the USCO period were shown at the final weekend of the show. The second installation, the Destruct Film, came out of my participation in the “Art and Destruction” movement—I was on the American Committee of Artists for that—which included, among other people, Jon Hendricks, Jean Toche, Al Hansen, Lil Picard, and a number of other people. The “Art and Destruction” movement was an international movement, of course, in England and all over. There was a big show of Destruction Art at the Finch College Museum; a lot of things were going on at that time. The Judson Gallery became one of the venues where that kind of art was explored, and people did a number of things there. There was a series called “Manipulations,” which included Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman; there was a very famous, almost infamous moment, when Charlotte was performing this piece by Paik, “One for Violin,” which involved smashing a violin, and she was about to smash it and some artist/activist—I think his name was Saul Goodman, or something like that—stuck his head right into the place where she was going to do this. It was a kind of protest to prevent her from smashing the violin. And what happened in the end was that somehow Charlotte actually completed the action, but he got hurt.

Sabrina: She smashed it on his head?

Jud: Probably. There are a lot of different accounts of that. Also Al Hansen gave a Dada lecture, and there was a painter in the area named Steve Rose, I think—he’s now teaching in Pennsylvania—and his idea was to do an Abstract Expressionist painting as a live performance. Then there was also Jean Toche with his light machines that said, “Do not hurt me, I am a human being,” and lights that were too bright, that hurt your eyes, all these other kinds of things. I filmed a bunch of these things.

Sabrina: So they asked you to be the filmmaker for this?

Jud: Well, I was a friend of all the people there, so there was never a formal asking. I filmed it all on regular 8 mm and left it unslit so that on 16 mm it’s four screens and this film was shown as a continuous loop. The big thing is that Destruct Film was a piece that I designed site-specifically for the Judson Gallery, where as you walked down into the gallery, you walked into a sea of film strewn all over the place; there were some projections, there was a loop of “Some Manipulations” that ran continuously, like feedback, of things that had happened in the space, being projected back into the space, and there were two slide projectors, which had at that time slides from filmstrips that used to have “start” and “end” printed on them, but later the slide projectors showed 35 mm slides that had the standard 35MM countdown on them, and this is the way it was presented at the Whitney. And in front of the lenses of the projectors, I had motorized beam-splitter mirrors, which spun the images around the room. So you had all these light beams going on, with all this film in the middle, and people had to destroy the film by walking on it, sitting on it; people made piles and jumped into it, picked it up and held it into the light, and so forth. The whole thing was based on the idea of film as a strip and a loop; it was a comment on the nature of film in the context of art and destruction.

Sabrina: There seems to be a thematic link between Kusama’s Self-Obliteration and Destruct Film, no?

Jud: Well, only because it happened the same year. I was filming with a choreographer at the Black Gate Theater, and Kusama came in; she was doing something there two weeks later, and she asked me to film it. It was in the beginning of December that I did the Destruct Film, and later in December, I was in Belgium for the Experimental Film Festival where the Kusama film was shown. So they were simultaneous but unrelated in other respects.

Sabrina: So you see the Kusama film as a documentary that you did for her?

Jud: No, not a documentary, it was a film that I wanted to do. I had an interest in film as an experiential medium because I did it environmentally, I did multi-media shows with USCO. Destruct Film became an experiential/environmental thing, and this was an experiential art concept expressed as a film. At the end of the film, one of the things that happened in 1968 was that Kusama started using it to lead into actual naked body painting happenings. But the whole thing is that it moves towards different levels of poetics; well, that was my real interest in doing it.

Sabrina: Poetic…?

Jud: Visual poetry. I was originally a word poet. And I was also a visual artist and I was interested in technology. I majored in math and physics for a year at the City College of New York, and all that merged together in film. So merging art and technology has always been present in my work in film, video, digital, or whatever. I highly enjoy an admixture of film, video, and digital manipulation, and the complex tactilities that this affords me.

Sabrina: What do you mean by tactilities?

Jud: By tactilities, I mean the unique texture which each medium has, whether it is the beautiful reflected light of film, the direct eye-brain projection of electron/photons in video, or the magical iterations of digital delay, feedback,,and electronic coloration. The contrast between “real” color in imagery and the otherworldly richness of electronic color is highly beautiful and fascinating to me, as are the confluence of pixels in digital work, raster lines in video, and grain in film. They each have a unique beauty that cannot be found in other forms.

Sabrina: How has the idea of tactilities evolved over time for you? I remember a mention of the tactile in Jonas Mekas’ diary entries published in an edition of Film Culture that I read recently, in which he writes about Sol Mednick speaking at the Philadelphia College of Art. Mednick said that cinema will probably never have that tactile feeling, the energy passed from a painter’s brush onto a canvas.

Jud: Mednick is referring to what he conceives of as being the “hands-on” feel of the artist and the direct contact with the medium. In filmmaking, the tactility of editing is very direct, with the feel of the film in one’s hands, the smell of the cement, the ability to cut directly to the correct frameline. Filmmakers feel that video lacks this tactility, but in video there is another translation of this hands-on effect in the almost instantaneous reaction of the medium to the maker’s will, which is an experience of another ilk. If a painter could project his vision directly onto a canvas, and with a twist of the mind give the strokes the strength or gentleness required, this might somehow equate to the video artist’s tweaking of the image, producing changes and making choices almost in real time, or as close to it as is humanly possible.

Sabrina: Your film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration seems to translate the tactile experience of the editing and shooting very well—not just because the film features people touching. The camera movements and the intimacy of the shots give a very tactile impression. And your piece Electronic Zen seems to me very much about tactility and energy.

Jud: Electronic Zen was Nam June’s piece, in which the film is clear leader and picks up dirt and scratches and is based very much on the energy of the projection beam into the environment. Self-Obliteration and the process of its shooting involved very much my total immersion in the scene, moving with the camera, creating “body zooms” by choreographing with the camera (I owned no zoom lens at that time and used the “body zoom” in many of my films of the 60s; some people misinterpreted it as “overuse” of the zoom). Also, by involving the camera in the action, there was a new sense of the subject and object merging, which in the case of Self-Obliteration was highly relevant.

Sabrina: Tell me about your first experience with filmmaking. How did you get into it?

Jud: Well, the very first film I made was when I was 13 years old, and I was bar mitzvahed. My present was not a fountain pen, but an 8mm camera, which my father used to film the bar mitzvah. I actually made some films with that camera, and then I got into other things, but I was always interested in film, and I went to films from the time I was 12, and became really conversant in avant-garde and experimental films early on. But, as I say, I became a poet. I went to McGill College in Canada, and Leonard Cohen was my fraternity brother. But when I went to Big Sur in 1957, I stopped writing poetry and stopped doing anything art-related until I moved to the Monterey Peninsula a year later where I started painting again. When I got back to New York much later, in 1961, the woman who became my first wife—a real film buff—gave me an 8 mm camera, and I started making films again. In 1964 I got my first Bolex, and at the end of that year and the beginning of 1965, I started working with the USCO group. It was in 1965 that I started working with Nam June Paik, and the rest is history.

Sabrina: And you worked with him until 1972?

Jud: Well, the Video/Film Concert pieces went up to 1972, but the collaborations continued ever since that time, because I worked with him on a John Cage piece in 1973; there was the Suite 212 that was actually finished when I left New York in 1975, and we still do things together.

Sabrina: I know that you produced a video around the Paik retrospective.

Jud: That was for the touring show, “Electronic Super Highway,” in 1996. I directed that thing, working with the Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati where the pieces were actually being fabricated, so that made it easy, because the whole show was there. And then we had someone go out and shoot the first installation in Ft. Lauderdale.

Sabrina: In your Early Color TV Manipulations with Nam June Paik, there is a sense that the energy comes from objectifying the subjects of the video, where you electronically manipulate the video image and destroy the video signal.

Jud: In these early color TV pieces with Paik, he was transforming the video signal through various means, either rewiring the circuits, or throwing in electromagnetic interference, and destroying the video sync signal in the process. I was discovering ways to capture these images on film, since they could not be recorded on video, and then reworking these images through film editing into final pieces. In the Cinema Metaphysique series, one of the techniques I used was a matte box to film only portions of the screen, as we were basing the series on the exploration of the “unsafe” parameters of the film image’s edges when it is translated to TV.

Sabrina: And you used TV in other films.

Jud: Paik and I produced the whole series of video films in the “VideoFilm Concert” program from 1965 through 1972. I have used the video of the Woodstock Festival, transferred to film, and A&B rolled with my original color film to produce Aquarian Rushes. Of course, my ongoing video work involves various aspects of TV at various times, and I have produced works like Raw War, based on TV images of war and destruction, and another based on images from the early history of television, as well as Felix in Videoland based on the fact that an image of Felix the Cat was the first experimental image transmitted from a studio in NY to the Midwest before World War Two.

Sabrina: Tell me a little bit about the filmmaking for USCO.

Jud: There was a commune in Garnersville, New York—which is very close to Stony Point—where Stan VanDerBeek, John Cage, the sculptor Shari Dienes, and a lot of other people were. The church in Garnersville that USCO used as a base is still there; it’s the Intermedia Foundation now.

Sabrina: The term ‘intermedia,’ isn’t used so much right now. How did it come about?

Jud: I wrote an article back in 1966, when I started writing for Arts Magazine, called “Understanding Intermedia,” which was a paraphrase of Marshall McLuhan’s term. The term came about in a number of different ways; no one knows exactly how it was formulated, but some people think it might have been by Dick Higgins, who used it to talk about things that were working between the different art media. So intermedia is the combination of different media working together. Some people called it “multimedia,” but multimedia as a term is totally corrupted by the whole cyber thing. You know, it’s something else and doesn’t have the same meaning anymore.

Sabrina: What’s the difference?

Jud: At the time, intermedia and multimedia were the same thing. It was like talking about avant-garde, experimental, or independent film back then. Today, when you talk about independent film, you’re talking about people who are making feature films outside of Hollywood. It’s different. Multi-media means making things for what they call ‘new media,’ which is, you know, DVDs; it’s when people are going to do a presentation for somebody and they are providing images, word, sound, blah blah blah. And, it’s a totally other thing. People make DVDs and CD-Roms for art, of course. I use DVDs for installation work now. The Whitney USCO installation will be shown in Vienna as DVDs and video projection instead of film loops. I was one of the first and one of the few people who worked with both film and video. There were a handful of us, including Scott Bartlett, Tom Dewitt, Ed Emschwiller, Stan VanDerBeek, and myself. That was it. I interviewed all of them about it; the manuscript for that is up at the Experimental Television Center; it was finished finally with a grant in 1984, from NYSCA. Some of it is on the Vasulka web site; I think it’s also on EAI’s web, and some of it is on the ETC web pages.1 But it’s a 400 page manuscript, called “Electronic Zen: the Alternate Video Generation.”

Sabrina: What sort of questions did you ask people during the interviews?

Jud: Oh, they covered everything–technical, philosophical, social, aesthetic, questions, and so forth.

Sabrina: What do you think of the intermedia approach to ideas of social connectedness now?

Jud: It’s not as prevalent as it was back then. In New York in the 1960s and 1970s, filmmakers, composers, dancers were all overlapping, attending each other’s things. That was the time when my career was really built and there was a lot of collaboration; so my career has always been really involved with that in some form or another. USCO is a notable example; the continuing relationship with Paik is another; the collaboration with Kusama another. There used to be a real community.

 

____________
13 of Jud Yalkut’s 25 films
____________
Us Down By The Riverside (1966)
‘USCO light, Beatles sound. A visionary realization of the USCO Riverside Museum installation exhibition in New York, the show which introduced the word ‘Be-In’ to the English language. Premiered by National Educational Television on Channel 13, WNET-TV, New York’s first “Wednesday Magazine” program. Selection (with “Turn Turn Turn) for the Second Tokyo Underground Film Festival; Hors de Concours screenings (also with “Turn Turn Turn”) at the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium.’ — Filmmakers Coop


the entire film

 

____________
Turn! Turn! Turn! (1966)
Turn, Turn, Turn (1966) is a collaboration between Jud Yalkut (visuals) and the Us Company aka USCO (sound). The latter receive several mentions in Chapman’s detailing of the early psych scene in San Francisco in the mid-60s; here they put a Byrds song through the mangler while Yalkut’s mechanical and other effects flicker and gyrate. The visuals are reminiscent in places of the film made by László Moholy-Nagy of his Light-Space Modulator, fittingly so when Chapman credits Moholy-Nagy’s machine with being one of the many forerunners of psychedelia in the art movements of the early 20th century.’ — John Coulthart


the entire film

 

_____________
The Godz (1966)
‘Document of 1960’s rock-and-roll cult band “The Godz.” Contains footage of a few mid-60’s performances as well as candid footage of the band.’ — Filmmakers Coop


the entire film

 

_______________
Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1967)
‘Yayoi Kusama’s art has often been classed as psychedelic—some of her mirrored rooms were featured in the travelling Summer of Love exhibition in 2005—but this is more a consequence of her activities meshing with the interests of the late 60s than anything else; her preoccupations always seem a lot more personal and obsessive. Jud Yalkut’s short film shows Kusama and various friends cavorting in typical underground-movie fashion in 1967, the main indicator of the artist’s involvement being her sticking polka dots (and leaves) onto everything: trees, people, cats, horses, even a river. Later on there’s more polka-dotting at some kind of body-paint happening inside one of her mirrored rooms. The film itself is pretty psychedelic in the second half, looking like outtakes from Roger Corman’s The Trip. The of-the-moment score was provided by The CIA Change, whoever they were.’ — John Coulthart


the entire film

 

______________
Destruct Film (1967)
‘In Destruct Film, viewers walk over reams of unspooled film strewn across the floor, shifting the experience of film into a tactile encounter.’ — The Whitney


Excerpt

 

_______________
w/ Nam June Paik Beatles Electronique (1966-69)
‘This is an interesting pioneering piece of work in video art realized in 1969 by Jud Yalkut and Nam June Paik. The authors take filmed and sound extracts from a Beatles concert, as well as the visual rendition of the concert sound on the monitors of the recording equipment, process the images and the sound to create something new and different. Original soundtrack: “Four Loops” by Kenneth Werner. “BEATLES ELECTRONIQUES was shot in black-and-white from live broadcasts of the Beatles while Paik electromagnetically improvised distortions on the receiver, and also from videotaped material produced during a series of experiments with filming off the monitor of a Sony videotape recorder. The film is three minutes long and is accompanied by an electronic soundtrack by composer Ken Werner, called ‘Four Loops,’ derived from four electronically altered loops of Beatles sound material.’ — artelectronicmedia.com


the entire film

 

_______________
w/ Nam June Paik Video Tape Study No. 3 (1967-69)
‘This piece is historically significant as well as remarkably prescient. Video Tape Study No.3 is a direct media intervention, in which Paik distorts and manipulates footage from news conferences by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson and New York Mayor Lindsey.’ — Letterboxd


the entire film

 

_______________
Aquarian Rushes (1970)
‘Comprises film and videotape from the August (1969) epic freak-out in New York State (White Lake- “Woodstock”) with all the groups you can name, and a cast of half a million.’ — IMDb

 

_______________
w/ Nam June Paik Waiting for Commercials (1966 – 1972)
Waiting for Commercials is a hilarious compendium of Japanese TV commercials. This early example of Yalkut and Paik’s use of appropriated television imagery as pop cultural artifact was originally created for a performance piece of the same name, which featured Charlotte Moorman and her cello.’ — EAI


the entire film

 

___________
Planes (1972)
‘For Trisha Brown. Dancer: Simone Forti. Sound: “Vacuum and Voice” by Simone Forti. With thanks to Jill Johnston, Les Levine, Walter Gutman, and the New York State Council on the Arts. PLANES is an exploration.’ — Filmmakers Coop


Excerpt

 

_____________
w/ Nam June Paik Suite 212 (1972)
Suite 212 is Paik’s “personal New York sketchbook,” an electronic collage that presents multiple perspectives of New York’s media landscape as a fragmented tour of the city. Opening with the 1972 work The Selling of New York, a series of short segments designed for WNET’s late-night television schedule, Paik critiques the selling of New York by multinational corporations, and the city’s role as the master of the media and information industries. Russell Connor is the ubiquitous television announcer whose droning statistical information on New York is ridiculed by a series of “average” New Yorkers; a burglar steals the TV set on which we see his talking head. Intercut throughout this comic scenario are appropriated Japanese TV commercials of American products. At the core of Suite 212 is a series of short collaborative pieces that form an accelerated, vibrant romp through New York neighborhoods. Street interviews with Douglas Davis’ neighbors, Jud Yalkut’s rendering of a Chinatown noodle shop and a colorized walk along the bridge to Ward’s Island, and Paik and Shigeko Kubota’s hallucinatory tour of the Lower East Side with Allen Ginsberg are among the segments in this dizzying time capsule of New York in the 1970s.’ — eai

Watch an excerpt here

 

_____________
John Cage Mushroom Hunting In Stony Point (1973)
‘Filmic impressions of composer John Cage, mushroom hunting on his home ground of Stony Point, New York; visiting his home for the last time; radiating love towards his friends; and buying fruits and vegetables at the farm market before returning to New York City.’ — Jud Yalkut

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Carsten, Hey. Well, based on my own experience. And I guess on that of writers I know. There are publishers, always indie/micro, which are IMO  the best publishers, who put out chapbooks, yeah. I guess look around? I’d have to give a think/look around myself to suggest any. ** _Black_Acrylic, Art, the great deifier. Oh, thanks for the ‘Meth Head’ link. Good on you, lad. Having had a meth phase ages ago, your instincts are most correct in its regard. ** Alistair, Hi. Yeah, some people, not just you, have problems sometimes reaching the current post, no idea why. If you’re on Instagram or Facebook, I post a link to each day’s post there, and some people access the blog by using them. Bonding vs. writing … tough call. Maybe keep the notebooks propped up at an uncomfortable tilt? ** Dominik, Hi!!! For me, definitely. Actual inspiration is completely unbeatable. We’re like Vienna but with snow. You look out the window on those very rare occasions when it’s snowing, and you get your sled out of the back of the closet, and by the time you’ve dusted it off, the snow’s gone and the streets and rooftops are just moist. Ha, shit eating grin, funny saying, that. I mean unless you’re a scat slave, I suppose. All possible and needed luck on getting that document polished up. Love passing by the Ritz Hotel on his way to the supermarket and seeing an extremely fancy car pull up in front of the entrance and Kim Kardashian getting out and thinking she has really scary big hips, G. ** Misanthrope, And you’re there! And hopefully too busy having fun to even see these words. So, is it plausible to think said job with Amazon, should David get it, might be the little nudge he needs to get off you-know-what? ** Justin D, Thanks, man, about that scene. We were very happy that it worked. And that Destroyer let us use the song for free. We’ll put extra, concentrated effort into figuring out where in Portland might be willing to show ‘RT’. Surely there’s some amenable place. Thanks for finding that reading clip. I won’t watch it because I’ll feel embarrassed, but … Everyone, Justin D found a clip of me reading from ‘The Marbled Swarm’ at LA’s great bookshop Skylight if you want to access that. Here. Thanks, pal. Your weekend starting apace? ** julian, The post did try to walk that fine line, whew. I stopped writing poetry, or seem to have, quite a while ago, and it does seem to have to do with not feeling things I need spew and share. Although of course there are old poets who are awfully good. We don’t really do normal auditions for performers in our films. We do have them read a little dialogue, but it’s more like what you said Lynch did. Talk and hang out, and usually you know just from doing that. And with really young potential performers especially. Especially in that case we’re just looking for charisma. If a kid has that, we know he or she or they will be able to do anything excitingly. My teen idol friend was the inspiration for ‘David’, yes, in the sense of how his mind worked. Although my friend was a lot more cynical and amused about the whole idol thing. Do you have any weekend plans? Or I guess I mean do you see weekends as special periods and feel any social inclination or pressure to employ them maximally? ** Steve, Actually, what I love about Lukas Haas is that he still radiates spacey benevolence even in his, what, 40s, I guess. The weekend being technically tomorrow, I hope you get through today with old fashioned pleasure. ** Steeqhen, Hi. I can’t nap unless I’m jet lagged, so lucky you. If I wake up too early, it’s either false caffeine alertness or ugh. Working in a library does appeal imaginatively. I like being alone. I mean, I’m a writer, and an obsessive one, so I think I learned the bliss of solitude very young. But of course I like seeing people. Usually only one on one or in groups of 2 or 3 tops. So, yeah, that’s my approach. ** HaRpEr, Hi. Yeah, in ‘Providence’ the film itself being subjected to Gielgud’s character’s writing’s lapses and so on was really telling. Robbe-Grillet and of course Kristof! I’m always trying to find ways to make fiction really layered. And film too. It’s kind of easier to do in film, I think, based on attempts so far. But it’s a brain twister. In experimental film, that kind of internal layering is inherent, either within the film itself or in the way the film triggers layered thoughts in viewers, or ideally both. In more conventional, plotty films it so rarely works. Christopher Nolan and David Fincher are examples of directors who try to do that, but all you see is them trying to do it. Sometimes horror movies can do that in a kind fun if cheesy way successfully, like the Freddie Kruger movies, for instance. Marguerite Duras … now there’s an artist who can do that in numerous mediums. She’s so great. A lot of her novels are recommended. Let’s see … ‘The Malady of Death’ is one of my all-time favorite novels. ‘Destroy, She Said’ is great. ‘Moderato cantabile’ is great. Something made me deliberately avoid Gilbert & George in the shit post. Sometimes I think some appropriate artist is too obvious to include, but I forget that I’m a contemporary art nut and most people aren’t. ** Darbz 🕷️, Hey! That is a classic. Thank you so much for sending me the photos! The animals ones are cool, especially that cat with the vexing face. And I’m so happy to be able to see you! You look amazing! And you have my favorite nose! Whenever I see someone with a nose like yours I get shy and tongue-tied, I don’t know why. But luckily I’m not looking at your photos this very second or else this comment would be a blank or I’d have use emojis only. Thank you! Really, you look great! That is interesting to know what the deadline is over there for commenting here without missing me entirely. I go to bed art 10 pm, so I’m impressed by your night owlish-ness. No, I didn’t know about the Daniel Johnston book. Wow. I’ll go look for it. Thanks! How’s your weekend dawning? xo, me. ** catachrestic, Hey. Yeah, I guess it depends on what one thinks objectivity is, but I think you kind of need to be on acid or something to not see oneself without inordinate emotional interference. Aristotle was onto something there. I’ve never read Freud. Weird, huh? I don’t know the term ‘fatberg’, no. Odd term. I will investigate that word and where it leads behaviorally and aesthetically, yes. You’re so helpful. ** Okay. Today I concentrate the blog’s resources on another excellent experimental filmmaker that I’m suspecting most of you have never heard of before in hopes that you’ll set aside some minutes or whatever to acquaint yourself with his stuff and react accordingly and freely. See you tomorrow.

Shit 2

_______________
Santiago Sierra Anthropometric Modules made from Human Faeces by the People of Sulabh International, India (2007)
This work has been made possible by the collaboration of Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak and all people from Sulabh International in India.

 

_______________
Daniel Edwards Suri’s Bronzed Baby Poop (2006)
Casting of the baby poop with a bronze finish and mounted on a base that includes a brass plate engraved with baby Suri’s name, comes at a time when Tom Cruise is increasingly known for his eccentricity.

 

_______________
Christopher Madden Plastic bags arranged on path. Unspecified contents, June 2018
This is a piece of art that I created recently that’s inspired by frequent unpleasant encounters with dog poo bags while out on walks in the countryside. On one walk along a popular track up a mountain in Wales last year the poo bags were so frequent that they inspired me to conceive of the idea of a path lined with an avenue of poo bags.

Watch a video here

 

_______________
Gelatin Vorm – Fellows – Attitude (2018)
One is a light-brown swirl pointing upwards that, from one angle, looks like the poop emoji. The second is a gigantic, dark-almost-black turd snaking its way from one room to the next while another is a three-layer construction with a gap wide enough for someone to crawl through. The last one is a big pile — somewhat meringue like — similar to the great heap of dinosaur dung in Jurassic Park that prompts Jeff Goldblum’s befuddled character to utter: “That’s one big pile of shit.” They were made by the Vienna-based art collective Gelatin.

 

_________________
Toto Untitled (2015)
At Tokyo’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, known as the Miraikan (literally “Future Museum”), children donning special shit-shaped caps line up to get flushed down the toilet.

 

________________
John Knuth Made in Los Angeles (2013)
Painter John Knuth of Los Angeles has created a series of paintings called “Made in Los Angeles,” where the verb “made” is used the way my grandmother used it, as in, “Did you make in the potty?” Knuth, who created the series for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, takes hundreds of thousands of maggots and places them in a screened-in box that has a canvas for a floor. The maggots hatch into flies, and Knuth feeds them a brew of water, sugar, and watercolor paint. The canvases are painted in neutral, monochromatic colors and the watercolors are bright reds, blues, and greens. For three months, Knuth lets the flies buzz happily around their enclosure, emitting little specks of color and creating inadvertent art (to them) as they go.

 

________________
Henry Taylor From Sugar to Shit (One tree per family) (2023)
mixed media

 

__________________
John Miller I Stand, I Fall (2016)
Made with things such as buckets, Styrofoam, gauze tape, plywood, plaster, and modeling paste, the work was painted with acrylics to look like poop. “It was supposed to have an excremental or shit-like feel,” Miller informs. “At the time, it was a bit of a provocation. I think the U.S. audiences were much more puritanical than they are now. It was more just to invoke excrement as a reference.” But some spectators told him the work made them feel physically ill. Of course, it was embraced in Germany.

 

________________
Jerzy S. Kenar Sh*t Fountain (2009)
Crafted by internationally known religious sculpture artist Jerzy Kenar, Sh*t Fountain is a sculpture of a big turd that rests on a 3ft-high concrete column in Augusta, IL.

 

________________
Ivan Volkov Untitled, 2022
A Moscow artist faces criminal charges for creating an installation depicting what appears to be a huge piece of excrement in a puddle of urine on the snow in Marsovo Pole (Field of Mars), a landmark square in St Petersburg. Ivan Volkov and a friend were detained by police at a St Petersburg train station on 16 January when they were on their way back to Moscow. A police source told the official Tass news agency on Monday that a criminal case was launched against Volkov based on Article 244 of Russia’s criminal code (“Desecration of the bodies of the dead and their burial places). The minimum punishment is a fine of 40,000 rubles (around $520). The maximum is up to five years in prison if it is determined that there were political, ideological or certain other motives.

 

_________________
Tom Friedman Feces on Pedestal (1992)

 

_________________
The Jumbo Golden Poop Mosquito Coil Cover is made from durable, heat-resistant ceramic and sports a polished golden cover fashioned to resemble some ideal, dream dump no actual person could produce without the assistance of a spotter holding a GPS receiver. The cover is pierced with holes to allow the smoldering mosquito coil secreted within to waft its insecticidal incense.

 

________________
Nicolas Deshayes Cramps (2015)
The embryonic lumps that snake across the generic surface of Deshayes’ Cramps (2015), a diptych of vacuumformed polyurethane guts, are shrink-wrapped into a sickly sweet veneer. The material is a non-bio-degradable, seemingly anti-organic plastic, however it is processed from fossil fuels that have formed over many million years through the degeneration of prehistoric organisms. Vacuum-forming today serves as the standard process of industrial prototyping and a method for mechanical reproduction.

 

_________________
Dieter Roth Rabbit-shit-rabbit (1972)

 

_________________
Erik Patton Stool Sample (2018)
Erik Patton’s Stool Sample is a partial-room constructed environment that continues his interest in the body and its relation to materiality. As early as the Old Babylonian hymns, the anus has been recognized as a body portal. Where will yours take you?

 

_________________
Mitsuyuki Ikeda, a researcher from the Okayama Laboratory, came up with the process of producing an artificial steak after Tokyo Sewage asked if he could devise a way of using up the city’s excessive “sewage mud”. His methods? He extracts proteins from the waste, turns it red using food coloring and injects a boost of flavor with soy. His equipment? An exploder. Oh, and he adds “reaction enhancer.” The synthesized fecal meat’s vitals stats are: 63% protein, 25% carbs, 3% lipids and 9% minerals.

 

_________________
Simon Fujiwara No Milk Today (2015)
On another floor are a series of paintings made by cows, created by their excrement, which colored canvases positioned behind them during lactation (“No Milk Today”). The works are hung lower than the standard hanging height of an artwork, placed at the average cow’s eye level, and are unified in shape, size, and khaki shades.

 

_________________
Mauro Perucchetti My Shit is Better Than Yours (2012)

 

________________
Kiki Smith Tale (1992)
In the work, a female sculpture which is in a prostrate gesture is shown. It is naked and is crouching on all fours while defecating a long, snakelike turd onto the floor. Moreover, There is full of dirt on her body, especially on her bottom.

 

________________
Bruce Nauman Shit and Die, 1985
Drypoint on paper

 

________________
Wim Delvoye Cloaca (2000-2007)
Designed by Belgium artist Wim Delvoye and first exhibited in 2000 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, the machine was fed twice a day. After the machine is “fed,” the food is ground up. Digestive juices (acid, etc.) are added and, after a spell, the machine pushes out a nice (somewhat solid) doodie.

 

_________________
Mike Bouchet The Zurich Load (2016)
Bouchet’s piece saw eighty tonnes of human excrement packed into a series of large brown bricks spread out to cover an area of 79 x 840 x 3,040 centimetres at Lowenbraukunst, a converted brewery on the banks of the Limmat river that was home to the majority of Manifesta’s offerings. The ‘load’ had been mixed with cement, lime and pigment, and there was a notice near the entrance stating that the sludge had been made safe for public presentation. My visit occurred about eight weeks into Manifesta, and thus the worst of the smell had dissipated – I was told by a local, however, that residents in the neighbourhood complained vehemently when the piece was installed and the stench was somewhat riper. Now it was, surprisingly, not overpowering and more like the smell of manure on a farm than human sewage. Also striking was the dryness, with the slabs resembling peat briquettes used for fuel. The fact the bricks were immaculately laid out in perfect order seemed a nod to Zurich’s glorification of neatness and symmetry.

 

_________________
Andres Serrano Shit Series (2007)
Yvon Lambert New York is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by American artist Andres Serrano. The exhibition titled “SHIT” features new large scale photographs and will be accompanied by a full color catalogue with an essay by Hélène Cixous.

 

_________________
Tala Madani Rear Projection: Soft (2013)

 

________________
Google CEO Eric Schmidt, famous for weirdly off-kilter mockery of the privacy his company exploits for its billions, has been immortalized in shit. Artist Katsu selected “Eric Shit” as the second in his series of portraits created using his own excrement. The first was of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

 

_________________
Jaan Toomik May 15 – June 1, 1992 (1992)
A renowned and controversial installation by Jaan Toomik consisting of several jars of the artist’s own excrement is being bought by the Tartu Art Museum. Now Estonia’s most recognized contemporary artist on the international circuit, Toomik caused a stir two decades ago with his work “May 15 – June 1, 1992,” which includes a “menu” of what he ate along with each day’s output for the period.

 

_________________
Jock Mooney Vom Shit Dog (2010)
plastic modelling compound, enamel paint

 

_________________
Dan Colen Birdshit Paintings (2007)

 

_______________
Zhu Cheng, one of China’s most famous and talented sculptors, has helped nine of his art students create a replica of Venus de Milo out of excrement. As you can see in the photo, the excrement-made Venus de Milo is encased in a transparent box to protect it and make sure that the smell of crap doesn’t drive everyone away from the exhibit at the Henan Art Museum in Zhengzhou city, China. The statue was purchased by a Swiss art collector for 300,000 yuan ($45,113).

 

_______________
In Toronto, a city crammed full of fine restaurants, famous chefs and innovative dining ventures, it would be difficult for anyone to create a new fad. But one George Brown College graduate is hoping her “Poop Café Dessert Bar” will cause the next big stink. Opening mid-August in Koreatown, Lien Nguyen’s cafe will offer an all-brown menu, in the shape of human stools. “I’m trying to make poop cute,” Ms Nguyen explained to the Toronto Star. She said she first discovered the concept when she was visiting her mother in Taiwan a few years ago. “We checked out a toilet-themed restaurant and I just loved it,” she said. “It’s funny to put food and poop together; it’s a great comparison. It stayed in my mind for a long time. As soon as I finished school, I said, ‘OK, I’m going to bring the restaurant to Toronto.’”

 

_______________

 

_______________
Ian Haig Excelsior 3000 – bowel technology project (2001)
Excelsior 3000 looks to the toilet as an amalgam of bodily and machine interface, and the fantasy of a toilet that functions as a medical device in assisting ones bowel movements. The work seeks to redefine the relationship of the human body and technology to the bowel and amplify the notion of the bowel and toilet as everyday ‘invisible’ interfaces.

 

_______________
Mike Kelley and Bob Flanagan MORE LOVE THAN CAN EVER BE REPAID (1991)

 

______________
White Male Artist (AKA Cassils) $HT Coin: After Banksy, 2021
‘Excrement after eating the diet of Banksy for one day. Signed, numbered and dated “White Male Artist – July 28, 2021”.

‘Medium: Tin can, printed paper and excrement (strawberry doughnuts, iced coffee, almond milk, margherita pizza with torn basil, avocado and corn salad with blackberry dressing, robata corn on the cob with salted chili and lime, sorbet, baby spinach risotto with Amalfi lemon zest, bread pudding).’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Safe, quick trip eastward today if you’re not already there or almost. Say hi to Kyler for me. Find NYC’s pastry filling and dig in. ** Dominik, Hi!!! The script is going well. I’m working on it obsessively morning to night right now, and that’s usually a good omen. If it rains for more than a couple of hours here, the streets flood. In LA, the streets flood if it rains at all. I happily assign love the task of washing my dishes, thank you. Love taking any of the dumps up above that your little heart desires, G. ** Steeqhen, I have peculiarly high tolerance for the alleged obnoxiousness of school kids, at least when they’re French. Well, the less Rimbaudian the better I guess, as long as it has a whiff of him and doesn’t get too slam poetry-esque. Doesn’t seem like that’s a worry with you. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘Meth Head’ seems quite hard to see, but, if you find it, pass along the hiding place. ** Steve, Hi. Mm, I have no doubt that Haas would have been an excellent father, but John Williams, who plays the part, is amazing and kind of impossible to beat. I think if we were ever to work with a known actor, we would create a character that either acknowledges that or finds some way to erase it. You’re not whining, no worries. Were you able to relax either via the intended target or otherwise? ** Carsten, Hi. My first couple of poetry books were self-published. Honestly, I’ve never encountered or heard of a publisher that won’t publish work if it’s been published in an online (or print) magazine or blog or wherever. That doesn’t seem true to me. Well, you might be overlooking all the work it takes to get a self-published book’s existence known to people and making the book seem appealing to people who don’t already know and like your work, and then, assuming the book is for sale, the work of handling the purchasing and getting it to the people who buy it. I’ve never had very much problem at all with publishers in terms of getting the books to look how I want except sometimes the cover image ends up being something of a compromise. Yeah, those are the downsides of self-publishing. Me, I would try some publishers first before you choose to put it out yourself. ** Justin D, Hi. Well, ‘RT’ is going to play in San Francisco soonish, but I can’t announce the specifics for about another week. I don’t think there are any Northwest festival submissions, but I need to ask our producer because he’s submitting the film places on his own. We want to show it up there in Portland and/or Seattle or elsewhere if there is a way. Congrats on being post-mortgage! I’ve never owned anywhere I lived, but that sounds like a dreamy breakthrough. There have been things in our films that were inspired by songs or particular music. Or I guess I mean scenes in the films that wouldn’t have come about otherwise. There are two scenes in ‘PGL’ that were built to accommodate two pieces of music — Destroyer’s ‘Don’t Become the Thing You Hated’ and Thomas Brinkmann’s ‘PSA’ — that we wanted to do something with before we even started writing the script. ** HaRpEr, Hm, maybe I’ll try seeing my cloud brain can output language pre-caffeine although I suspect I would just scribble the equivalent of ‘uh…’. ‘Providence’ influenced ‘The Marbled Swarm’ — the whole multi-layered meta fiction within a fiction thing, and the tone too in a way. ‘Last Days’ is a favorite film of Zac’s. I like it. It’s in the era of Gus Van Sant’s films that interest me. I really don’t like ‘Elephant’ though. Yeah, I think Michael Pitt was just arrested for sexual abuse, like, yesterday. I met him once through Gus years ago. He seemed like an arrogant jerk, I’m sorry to say. ** Darbz 🕷️, Hi. Lukas Haas gives a little speech towards the end of ‘Mars Attacks!’ that’s one of my favorite film moments ever. An elevated porch that turns a building into a castle is even more beautiful, gosh. Tens days, cool, tick tick tick … NYC has lots of wonderful museums. You’ll have no problem finding things like that to wander through. Great, I’ll go check my email. I haven’t checked it yet this morning. Thank you! And I’m happy to get to see you! What a boring brained doctor. Little guys are the coolest. It’s great to look down at something/ someone you respect. I don’t know why. It keeps you on your toes, and the best people always do. I hope your day was worthy of you. ** julian, Hi! Needless to say, choosing violence as a theme is something I seem to be drawn to do too. I’m drawn to things that seem to need to be put into words to be fully visible or something. Your second book sounds very interesting, of course. My fiction certainly got a million times better with age. I decided I wanted to write novels when I was 15, and I didn’t end up thinking my fiction was anywhere good enough for so long that I didn’t publish my first novel until I was in my 30s, but I worked hard on it the whole time in between. That it took so long speaks to how talentless I was at fiction when I decided I wanted to conquer it. So, yeah, give yourself as much time as you need. Oh, interesting. I guess in terms of being especially interested in child actors, I feel like they’re less self-conscious and ready to dare themselves to try things. Zac and I worked with three very young people in our new film, all non-actors, and they were just incredible. No matter what they did, even if it was awkward or seemed kind of forced or something, it was always really pure and beautiful in some way. So I guess that’s why? In terms of my interest in teen idols in my early books, I think a lot of that came from the fact that I was close with a guy who became a very famous teen idol during the time we were close, so I saw how he constructed himself into what he and his managers decided would be the ‘ideal, adorable, sexy teen’ for his teen idol persona, and I was fascinated by how that worked on him and on the fans who kind of worshipped the constructed version of him. I think that being on the inside of the teen idol thing in that sense is what made me interested in exploring that, if that makes sense? ** catachrestic, Hi. ‘Johns’ is not a good film, but Lukas Haas is wonderful and dreamy in it, yes. I actually interviewed him for Spin Magazine while he was making ‘Johns’, and he was extremely cool, and I think he actually might be willing to be in a strange film like ours if we caught him in the right mood. So glad you liked ‘Sure Fire’! That period of Jost’s films is very good. ‘Last Chants for a Slow Dance’ is great too, for instance. Self-criticism is almost always a lie, right? It sounds weird, but one is almost always the least qualified to criticise oneself accurately. Or so I think. ** Okay. Obviously, today’s post is the sequel to an earlier post of the same name and thematic. See you tomorrow.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 DC's

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑