Posts from the “1970s” Category

Anton Perich: Max’s Kansas City

Posted on May 5, 2017

The Cockettes, Photo by Anton Perich

or a decade Max’s Kansas City ruled New York, becoming the premier spot to eat, drink, dance, party, and frolic. Proprietor Mickey Ruskin opened the nightclub and restaurant in 1965, drawing top talents like Allen Ginsberg. William S. Burroughs, and Robert Rauschenberg. But when Andy Warhol and his entourage started hanging out in the back room, Max’s quickly became the place to be. Soon David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed were regulars, along with Warhol’s latest superstars like Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn.

In 1970, Croatian émigré, Anton Perich arrived a Max’s, by way of Paris. An activist in the Lettrism group during the 68 Revolution, Perich was an avant-garde filmmaker. He made friends with some busboys on staff, and they said it was the best job in America. In 1972, he joined the staff, which included busboy Carlos Falchi, manager Eric Emerson, and waitress Debbie Harry, whose presence eluded him.

For the next two years, Perich would fill in when someone called out. As he remembers, the best time to work was late at night, when the famous and the infamous alike could come and let down their hair. No one batted an eye when Perich pulled out his camera for a photo. As you can see from the photos here, they were more than happy to oblige – or sometimes, not even aware. He was soon contributing his candid snaps to Interview before going on to launch NIGHT in 1978, his very own publication.

Perich speaks about those heady years, when it was impossible to tell the nights from the days.

Read the Full Story at Dazed Digital

Candy Darling, Photo by Anton Perich

Robert Mapplethorpe, Photo by Anton Perich

Categories: 1970s, Art, Dazed, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Basquiat Before Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979-1980

Posted on April 28, 2017

Photo: Basquiat in the apartment, 1981. Photograph by Alexis Adler.

Before Jean-Michel Basquiat was known by name, his work had already hit the streets of New York. Writing under the name SAMO©, Basquiat and partner Al Diaz co-opted the means of graffiti to build street cred and fame but they took it a step further by adding tongue-in-cheek turns of phrase in bold block letters. By avoiding the highly stylistic letterforms of graffiti writers, SAMO© made it clear: they wanted to be read, known, and understood. Theirs was a message to the people of New York.

SAMO© was a name that Diaz and Basquiat came up with one day while smoking they called “the same old shit.” They shortened it to “Same old,” then “SAMO” came through. At the time, Basquiat had been working in the art department of Unique Clothing Warehouse, perfectly situated at the intersection of Broadway and West Eighth Street. At night, they’d go out bombing, leaving messages behind, letting the city know what was on their mind.

“SAMO©… THE SO-CALLED AVANT GARDE”
“SAMO©… 4 MASS MEDIA MINDWASH”
“SAMO as an alternative 2 playing art with the ‘radical chic’ sect of Daddy’s$funds’

While art critic Jeffrey Deitch described the messages as “disjointed street poetry” in a 1982 issue of Flash Art, Basquiat admitted in a video interview that first ran on ART in 1998 it was, “Teenage stuff. We’d just drink Ballantine Ale all the time and write stuff and throw bottles…”—because, in fact, he was just 18 and 19 years of age.

But then, in 1979, things changed. Basquiat and his friend Alexis Adler got a small apartment in the East Village together. The Brooklyn-native was on his own, free to explore life on his terms. Although his work as SAMO© continued through 1980, it was slowly getting phased out as Basquiat began to develop his work as a fine artist.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Photo: Basquiat in the apartment, 1981. Photograph by Alexis Adler.

Photo: Basquiat practicing clarinet in the bathroom of the apartment, c. 1980. Photograph by Alexis Adler.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Wall Writers: Graffiti in Its Innocence Exhibition

Posted on April 26, 2017

Photo: COCO 144, 1974. Photo by Michael Lawrence. Courtesy Roger Gastman.

Graffiti is a basic human impulse. From the oldest known cave paintings, going back 40,000 years in the Maros region of Indonesia to a toddler in 2017 who has discovered the magic of crayons and walls, the desire to leave a mark speaks to a fundamental tool of communication. The visual and the verbal commingle and merge in its purest form, continuing to speak for the person who may since be long gone.

Graffiti, in its contemporary form, found its footing in New York and Philadelphia during the Summer of Love as the idea of writing on the wall transformed from a primitive impulse to craft an anonymous message took shape as an increasingly stylized representation of a specific personage. As it did so, it became more than act of rebellion; it became a form of art, a flourish of a handstyle that was as unique as a signature and as bold as an autograph.

The earliest practitioners of the form have been left largely to the underground, to the myths of history or fallen into the cracks of the past. As pioneers and innovators, their work could be rudimentary, as it was more invested in discovery than perfection. It wouldn’t be until the second generation came along with its top-to-bottom whole train car masterpieces that many sat up and took notice. But the first generation certainly made waves, inspiring newspaper and magazine stories, books, and later collaborations and films. But quick as they came up, they disappeared, moving on with their lives as they aged out, from boys to men.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Photograph by Jon Naar, 1973. Courtesy Roger Gastman.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Crave, Graffiti, Manhattan, Photography

Art Pioneer Carolee Schneemann Looks Back at 50 Years of Work

Posted on April 21, 2017

Photo: Still from performance of “Up to and Including Her Limits” (June 1976). Photo: Henrick Gaard

Artist. Feminist. Revolutionary. Carolee Schneemann, now 77 years old, has been traversing the sacred spaces of female sexuality and gender in the name of truth, liberation, and freedom from the patriarchy for more than half a century. Raised on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, Schneemann learned not to fear viscera, injury, or death. Instead, she embraced the creative and destructive forces of Mother Nature and fused them into work that challenged every assumption about women in the art world.

A multidisciplinary artist, Schneemann has created groundbreaking paintings, photographs, performance-art pieces, and installations that expose deep female secrets, pleasures, fears, and taboos. Using her body as a starting point, Schneemann also challenges cultural norms that discourage female artists from using their own nude bodies as the subjects of their work. Most memorably, in her landmark piece, Interior Scroll (1975), Schneemann stood on a table, assumed “action poses,” then slowly extracted and read from a scroll tucked neatly inside her vagina.

Her work shocked the establishment, but over the past 50 years, it has also become the foundation upon which generations of artists and pop-culture figures stand. From Matthew Barney to Lady Gaga, Schneemann’s influence is vast, yet she remains a solitary figure in the world of art, constantly reinventing her methodologies to examine the beauty and horrors of life in equal measure. On the cusp of her first United States retrospective, “Kinetic Painting,” at MoMA PS1 (running from October 22, 2017 to February 1, 2018), Schneemann spoke with BUST about her iconoclastic life in art.

Read the Full Story at BUST Magazine

Photo: Still from performance of “Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera” (1963), photo: Erró

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Women

Gary Simmons: Recapturing Memories of the Black Ark

Posted on April 12, 2017

Photo: Dubblestandart and Lee “Scratch” Perry at Popfest 2015; Karlsplatz in Vienna, Austria. Photo by Manfred Werner – Tsui. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Black Ark. The name alone evokes memories of yesterday, of the spirit of the 1970s when originality and innovation was at the heart of music and culture. In 1973, reggae and dub producer Lee “Scratch: Perry built the Black Ark behind his family’s home in the Washington Gardens section of Kingston, Jamaica.

As with the D.I.Y. spirit of the times, the Black Ark made due with what was available—providing the genius is in the mind and not in the equipment. Perry understood the nature of recorded music existed in harmony between man and machine. In order to create “the living African heartbeat,” he once buried microphones at the base of a palm tree, then thumped on the grounds to create a mystical bass drum effect.

It was not the rudimentary set up or the dated equipment that gave the Black Ark its sound, but the wisdom of Perry to incorporate life into the creation of his art. He would later songs with subtle effects that spoke to his truth, the sounds of broken glass, crying babies, falling rain, and cow noises simulated by Watty Burnett.

“I see the studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality. Invisible thought waves – you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs or you jack it into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain itself, so you got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man, that the brain can take what you sending into it and live,” Perry told Roy Ascott for the book Art, Technology, Consciousness: Mind @ Large (Intellect, 2000).

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Recapturing Memories of the Black Ark. Installation view, Prospect 3, New Orleans, 2014.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Music

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life

Posted on April 10, 2017

Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowcz Reclining (2), 1981; from Peter Hujar: Speed of Life (Aperture, 2017)

The Man. The Myth. The Mystery. Photographer Peter Hujar (1934-1987) was a fixture in the downtown New York scene during the 1970s and ‘80s, creating a seminal body of work that was quietly captivating. He was a fixture in the East Village, where he lived and worked, when it was a magnet for bohemian artists, writers, performers, musicians, and iconoclasts. Back in the days, the neighborhood was rough and raw, in a perpetual state of poverty that bred the avant-garde.

Perhaps the most telling word in the neighborhood was the word “village”—it was truly a community of friends, families, comrades who were constantly in the mix. Much of New York had been abandoned throughout the decade, leaving the bold and the daring with the run of the place. There was overlap and interplay between the arts as personalities mingled freely in an ongoing dialogue of the times.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Peter Hujar, Mural at Piers, 1983; from Peter Hujar: Speed of Life (Aperture, 2017)

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Photography

Motown: The Sound of Young America

Posted on April 10, 2017

Photo; Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson and Diana Ross in London’s Manchester Square, outside the headquarters of EMI Records, in October 1964. Courtesy of EMI Group Archive Trust

Motown: The sound of young America, coming straight out of Motor City/Detroit was the perfect blend of soul and pop. It was the home of legends from Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, and Stevie Wonder to the Jackson 5, the Supremes, and Diana Ross. And it was all the brainchild of Berry Gordy, Jr., a local songwriter who quickly realized that producing records and owning the publishing was the best way to make bank.

After launching Tamla and Motown labels, Gordy purchased the property that would become the legendary Hitsville U.S.A., in 1959. The multi-purpose building served as a recording studio, administrative offices, tape library, control room, and living quarters for Gordy in those early formative years. He put several family members in key roles, and made Smoke Robinson VP. Then, on April 14, 1960, Berry Gordy, Jr. incorporated the Motown Record Corporation, and that same year the company had its first number 1 R&B hit, the Miracles, “Shop Around.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Seen at a Detroit nightclub in 1964 are, from L to R, Levi Stubbs of The Four Tops, Motown songwriter/producer Ivy Jo Hunter, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, with musicians Dan Turner on sax and James Jamerson on bass. Private Collection.

Photo: With The Supremes, Berry Gordy hails members of the Motown house band, at left, and his Holland/Dozier/Holland hitmakers, in December 1965. LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-L901A- 65-26- 16-VVV, no. 10]

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Books, Crave, Music, Photography

Moshe Brakha: L.A. Babe

Posted on March 31, 2017

Photo: Moshe Brakha, Club Zero One, 1985.

“I’m a very passionate guy. I’ve always been passionate about photography. I started in 1970 and I’m still doing it,” Moshe Brakha reveals. “Day in and day out: you have to be committed and crazy in love with it.

That love and passion appears on every page of L.A. Babe: The Real Women of Los Angeles 1975-1988 (Rizzoli New York), his phenomenal first book that showcases the sexy, stylish beauty of the era. Brakha’s crisp black and whites and luxurious color photographs transport you back to an era that was equal parts sensual and glamorous—and all the way loose.

Born in Israel, Brakha enlisted as a sailor in the Navy and arrived on the shores of Los Angeles in 1969 at the height of the countercultural movement. From Easy Rider to Midnight Cowboy, the spirit of radical freedom filled the Southern California air. Sex, drugs, and rock & roll were everywhere. At night, Brakha took his camera and hit the nightclubs and bars just as the punk scene took hold, finding himself in the company of beautiful women who became the perfect subject for his photographs.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Moshe Brakha, Downtown Studio / 7th & Rampart, 1978.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Photography

Oh So Pretty: Punk in Print 1976-80

Posted on March 30, 2017

Poster For Blondie’s 12-Inch singles ‘Denis’, ‘Contact in Red Square’ and ‘Kung Fu Girls’, February 1978, 42.5 x 30.4 cm, 16¾ x 12 in. Courtesy of The Mott Collection

Poster for The Slits’ album ‘Cut’, September 1979, 50.8 x 75.5 cm, 20 x 29¾ in. Courtesy of The Mott Collection

Forty years ago, a revolution took shape and stormed the shores of the U.K. Punk had arrived—and it could not, would not, refused to be denied. It took everything the nation held dear and turned it upside down, then dropped it on its head, with the aim to break it open and find freedom. Gone were the polite niceties, the veneer the nation upheld while the empire crumbled. Punks knew there was nothing nice—or civilized—about it all. No pretense could cloak the truth about the subjugation of the world.

As the U.K. struggled to rebuild, a new generation came forth calling out the fraud, the perpetrators, and the imposters. The took shots at the establishment from the outside, embracing their place as upstarts, rebels, and anarchists. From nothing came something—one of the greatest cultural movements of all time: the ethos of Do-It-Yourself that fueled their drive. From music and fashion to art and design, D.I.Y. became the a force of liberty, equality, and modernity. It produced some of the most iconoclastic images of the time, which are beautifully showcased in the new book Oh So Pretty: Punk in Print 1976-80 by Toby Mott (Phaidon).

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Bored Stiff #1, C. Terry et al., Tyneside Free Press, July 1977, [dims unknown]. Courtesy of The Mott Collection

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Crave

Word on the Street: The History of Globe Poster

Posted on March 25, 2017

For more than eighty years, you could see Globe Poster standing tall, hanging out on street corners, posted up on telephone palls, or chilling ‘round the way inside the union halls. They were bright, bold, fabulous affairs that understood that one must demand attention if you want to be seen and heard in this noisy world.

Using DayGlo colors and big black letters etched out of wood type and letter press, if Globe Poster a theme song it would be Nas, talking about “Made You Look.” Because they had to—they needed t let you know the 2Pac, Luke, Snoop Doggy Dogg and That Dog Pound were performing at the Miami Arena on Saturday, August 24. Better get your tickets now, before they sell out, because trust and believe and event like this only comes once in a lifetime.

Globe Poster knew what the people wanted and they delivered the goods. Established in Philadelphia in 1929, Globe Poster promoted everything from carnivals to concerts up and down the East Coast. Like so many in old Hollywood, they started out in vaudeville, moving their way up to burlesque and film, then finally hitting their stride and finding their groove with R&B acts during the 1960s.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave

Game Show Legend and Alleged CIA Assassin Chuck Barris Dies at 87

Posted on March 24, 2017

Pour one out for Chuck Barris, game show genius and alleged CIA assassin, who died of natural causes on Tuesday, March 21, at his home in Palisades, New York, at the age of 87.

Best known as the creator and host of The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong Show, in 1982, Barris stunned the world with the publication of his memoir Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Autobiography, in which he claimed to be a former CIA agent and assassin. In 2002, the book was adapted into a feature film of the same name, directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, Julia Roberts, and Clooney. The CIA adamantly denied Barris’ employment, calling the whole thing “ridiculous.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s