Cosmic Eggs Beyond Civilization
“Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.”― Thor Heyerdahl
I was in Los Angeles earlier this week for a pretty condensed work trip…which usually means no friend hangs, no cultural explorations…except this time I managed to move a meeting with the board chair of Reboot, who is also a friend, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and therefore achieved a walk and talk through galleries of mind bendingly inspired works of beauty. I have not been to the LACMA in years…long before the new outside area has been installed including a coffee bar and the monolithic Ai Weiwei piece Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads. Walking the halls of the LACMA gave the feeling of seeing old friends again, those Max Beckmann paintings in the German Expressionist gallery or Diego Rivera’s Flower Day a few rooms down, and new friends like the mind-bending Helen Pashgian Untitled piece on the first floor, where art bends the mind and challenges the senses.
The reason I wanted to go the LACMA (and so thankful to my companion Jamie for enthusiastically jumping in for a visit) was to explore the current temporary exhibit Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938–1945. During those war years, a group of artists went to New Mexico and baked their brains in the sun as they pulled oil from the surrealist pallet, contemplating science, religion, myth, history, futurism rolled up into a practice they called Theosophy. What would it look like to create a tradition that could be universally embraced, bringing together a world in conflict?
The exhibit is broken up into the artists who made scene (most of whom I had not heard of before), starting with one of the groups’ co-founders Emil Bisttram. An immigrant from Hungry, Bisttram’s early life…from a troubled teen to an artist very involved in his local church, set him on a path towards this concept of Theosophy. In the early 1930s, after a Guggenheim fellowship with Diego Rivera in Mexico was not all it was cracked up to be for the young artist, he found himself in Taos digging into the Native American culture and starting a journey with his artistic practice that led to establishing The Taos School of Art and an anchor for the future Transcendental Painting Group. Seemingly setting a tone for the TPG members to follow, Bisttram often painted, with a pastel hew, amoeba-styled organic shapes of Dalí and company with angular, modern designs: science and nature, math and religion exploding from the canvas.
The paintings across the exhibit have a familial sense of style. Without even reading the extensive notes provided for each painting and each artist, it is obvious that the artists fed off of each other, off of the surrealist movement, off of their dessert habitat. Some paintings, like Beyond Civilization to Texas (above) could easily fit into a Beyond Surrealism show while others break free of the normative surrealist understanding into swiftly bending evolutions like Abstract Painting, No. 95 (below) by Steve Martin-championed painter Lawren Harris or Nature by Agnes Pelton (below) . The more one stares at the latter, the more one dives into a strange beautiful world with answerless awe; there are many moments in the show when the Transcendental Painting Group transcend art history creating a style all of their own; he exhibit does an excellent job transporting its visitors on a voyage following these crazed storytellers.
One of the highlights of the show takes place in its inter-sanctum room, where on the far wall Horace Towner Pierce's The Spiral Symphony in Four Movements is continually screened. The piece is made up of 30 paintings that flow into each-other. It was supposed to have been made into a scored film in 1938, which was never realized until now. Sometime in the recent past, it has finally been given its film birth, with a soundtrack that flies over the entire exhibit. As the images flow into each other, so does the esthetic of the entire exhibit…a brightly colored, hopeful theme where spirals and free-formed objects collide with angular mazes and waveforms, where new worlds are created infused imagining the best of civilization, offering a universally loving antidote to one of the worst wars of history.
The exhibit runs through June 19th.
Shabbes!
∈Y∋ from The Boredoms has an active Twitter account these days, and he posts some incredible stuff. The Ricoh Prism, which is an interactive cube where humans can experience some pretty insane computer-driven visions is something worth checking out (there is a video which demonstrates what it is). YOU WILL NEED GOOGLE TRANSLATE to read the page….or just click on the video (the music is great as well).
AI@IA — Extracting Words Sung on 100 year-old 78rpm records
At the Internet Archive, Brewster Kale has been digitizing 78s. Hundreds of thousands of them (want to throw away your weekend, click here). And now he is using AI (reminding me that there are great uses for it) to transpose the lyrics for each song.
Grenfell: Steve McQueen’s film is a silent, unflinching reminder of lives devastated by fire
I remember seeing the shell of the building on the way to the airport…it was visible from the freeway for anyone to see. Horrifying…
The Winning Photos of the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards
Oh yeah….
A fantastic story around protrusive green teeth, a fake funeral, and a freak who was with Wilde when he died and pocketed his false teeth. The next amazon prime series?
RPG Group happiness awards | Champions of cheer
“The Happiness Fest and Awards celebrated the most inspiring, funny and positive influencers for bringing joy and giving hope to people in these trying times. Music, laughter and a celebration of the most inspiring, funny and positive influencers—that’s how the India Today Group and RPG Group brought down the curtains on their second season of the Happiness Quest campaign…”
Stephen Stills on His ‘Enduring’ Friendship With Neil Young and Butting Heads With Crosby
You know, I just saw, last night, for the first time in years, the director’s cut of Woodstock. And that’s the funniest fucking movie I’ve ever seen. At 78, looking back on that, I was rolling. I was howling at how naïve and how earnest we all were.
Give Me Your Hand
By: Gabriela Mistral
Give me your hand and give me your love,
give me your hand and dance with me.
A single flower, and nothing more,
a single flower is all we’ll be.
Keeping time in the dance together,
you’ll be singing the song with me.
Grass in the wind, and nothing more,
grass in the wind is all we’ll be.
I’m called Hope and you’re called Rose:
but losing our names we’ll both go free,
a dance on the hills, and nothing more,
a dance on the hills is all we’ll be.
Dame la Mano
By: Gabriela Mistral
Dame la mano y danzaremos
dame la mano y me amarás.
Como una sola flor seremos,
como una flor, y nada más…
El mismo verso cantaremos,
al mismo paso bailarás.
Como una espiga ondularemos,
como una espiga, y nada más.
Te llama Rosa y yo Esperanza:
pero tu nombre olvidarás,
porque seremos una danza
en la colina, y nada más.
“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.”
― J.G. Ballard