Tag Archives | Art

Back When Valentines Cards Were Brutally Cruel

By on February 14, 2013 in News 2

Slate writes that vindictive Valentine’s cards, mailed anonymously, were once as popular as romantic ones. Is it time to bring back the tradition?

These “vinegar valentines” were produced between the middle of the 19th century and middle of the 20th. The tradition was quite popular. Some historians argue that comic valentines—of which vinegar valentines were one type—made up half of all U.S. valentine sales in the middle of the 19th century.

Vinegar valentines were a socially sanctioned chance to criticize, reject, and insult. They were often sent without a signature, enabling the sender to speak without fear. These cards were sent not just to significant others, friends, and family but to a larger social circle. People might post a vinegar card to a store clerk, a teacher, or a neighbor.

… Read the rest

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This Movie Was Filmed in the Fifth Dimension

By on February 13, 2013 in News 12

The title to this was something that was communicated to me while I was ganj-i-tating during the witching hour last Sunday Morning, accompanied by a feeling of supreme recognition. The movie they’re referring to is our lives. Friend me for magick updates on Facebook, this is the sort of odd shit that happens. Are cute pug puppy pictures coming soon? Of course they are.

The other week I decided that so as to stay away from the net a bit like I normally do on the weekends, I’d condense my psychic updates to a weekend edition entitled The Weekend in Sorcery. First weekend was interesting. The second was fucking bananas- (edited it a bit to post here, so keep that in mind, but otherwise, read on true believers):

Weekend of January 8-10, 2013 (year of the witch):

This is a rich. Went to the OM show on Friday, which was super packed.… Read the rest

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Hacker Exposes George W. Bush’s Bizarre Oil Paintings

By on February 8, 2013 in News 23

Can a psychologist explain the significance of continually painting yourself bathing? Via The Smoking Gun, leaks from the email accounts of members of the Bush family revealed no nefarious Illuminati-style plottings, but did turn up this:

The apparent hack of several e-mail accounts has exposed personal photos and sensitive correspondence from members of the Bush family, including both former U.S. presidents. Included in the hacked material is a confidential October 2012 list of home addresses, cell phone numbers, and e-mails for dozens of Bush family members, including both former presidents, their siblings, and their children. The posted photos and e-mails contain a watermark with the hacker’s online alias, “Guccifer.”

The hacker also intercepted photos that George W. Bush e-mailed two months ago to his sister showing paintings that he was working on, including self-portraits of him showering and in a bathtub.

… Read the rest

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Wallace Berman’s Kabbalah Cinema

By on January 24, 2013 in News 0

Wallace Berman was born in Staten Island, New York in 1926. While he was still a child, he correctly predicted that he would die on his 50th birthday. He was hit by a car in 1976.

During those five decades, Berman became a pioneering assemblage artist as well as one of the cornerstones of the post WWII California art scene. Berman became associated with the Beats and his self-published magazine Semina combined his own collage imagery with writing by luminaries like Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, David Meltzer, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau. In addition to his groundbreaking, multimedia assemblages, Berman made the short film Aleph. The artist’s only experiment with moving pictures,Aleph reveals both Berman’s love of collage as well as his interest in the Kabbalah.

Here is what www.jewishmuseum.org has to say about the film:

Aleph is an artist’s meditation on life, death, mysticism, politics, and pop culture.… Read the rest

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A Box For Manipulating The News On Other People’s Computer Screens

By on January 18, 2013 in News 3

The artistic creation of Julian Oliver and Daniil Vasiliev, the Newstweek device allows for “altering reality on a per-network basis” by literally changing the headlines on people’s screens:

Newstweek is a device for manipulating news read by other people on wireless hotspots. Built into a small and innocuous wall plug, the Newstweek device allows writers to remotely edit news read on wireless devices without the awareness of their users.

While news is increasingly read digitally, it still follows a top-down distribution model and thus often falls victim to the same political and corporate interests that have always sought to manipulate public opinion. Newstweek intervenes upon this model, providing opportunity for citizens to have their turn to manipulate the press; generating propaganda or simply ‘fixing facts’ as they pass across a wireless network.

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Paul Laffoley’s Architectonic Thoughtforms

By on January 17, 2013 in News 1

Artist Paul Laffoley is kicking off 2013 with a show at New York’s Kent Gallery before heading to London’s Hayward Gallery and The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Once labeled as an “outsider artist,” Laffoley is achieving the kind of recognition that many “mainstream” artists (whatever they are) can only dream of. We paid tribute to him in our classic TV series over a decade ago:

Taken from DisinfoTV on DVD.

Subscribe to Disinformation’s YouTube channel.

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The Words of Traitors: bridging expectation, mediums and genres

By on January 15, 2013 in News 1

Announcement from Modern Mythology:

Described as “Beautiful!” by award-winning sequential artist and author David Mack (Kabuki, Daredevil, Dexter), Words of Traitors is an attempt at laying bare the inner workings of hope and loss, love and despair, with the raw fury of a complete mental breakdown. At the brink of death, our life flashes before our eyes. Are those memories nothing more than lies? Our memories construct our sense of identity, but can we rely on them?

This work explores the fallibility of memory and how much our memories change over time and ultimately betray us, becoming “words of traitors.” Each story is based on a jigsaw of real memories told by a fictional narrator. The combination of magical realism and real life allows both the writer and the reader to explore the language of the  subconscious.

The production process was an intense alchemical experience, much of which was documented behind-the-scenes on the Words of Traitors website.

… Read the rest

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Brian Butler Performs Aleister Crowley’s ‘Bartzabel Working’ Ritual

By on December 27, 2012 in News 1

Witness the spirit of Mars summoned three weeks ago in Los Angeles in haunting and beautiful fashion, as Butler invokes forces I would be scared to tamper with:

L&M Arts presents The Bartzabel Working, a performance by filmmaker and artist Brian Butler, on December 4th, 2012. Based on a ceremonial evocation of the spirit of Mars, first written and performed in London in 1910 by the famed British occultist Aleister Crowley, the ritual later became part of Los Angeles history in 1946 when Jack Parsons conducted his own version of this rite with the intention of placing a Martial curse on a pre-scientology L. Ron Hubbard.

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