salvador dali

Antoine Wiertz was one pretty sick bastard all right. The gallery he demanded be built to house his gigantic paintings in his adopted hometown of Brussels is  testament to an artist obsessed by death, disembowelment, rape, damnation and a virulent sexuality. Everywhere flesh is impaled or torn, eyes glisten with horror, and spears drive...
> culturalelsewhere/1993/antoine-wiertz-rape-damnation-and-the-art-of-darkness/

Popular culture loves nothing so much as the early death of an obvious talent. We are left with questions and the speculation on just what direction the gift might have moved in had the artist lived. Some of that discussion will doubtless be aired with the Auckland exhibition of works by Thames-born painter Rhona Haszard, who fell to her...
> culturalelsewhere/1761/rhona-haszard-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-woman-2004/

This charming, low-key and multiple award-winning documentary introduces two remarkable, modest but fiercely intelligent art collectors, Herbert and Dorthy Vogel of New York who met in '60 and shortly thereafter began painting and drawing. But within a few years, despite some interesting work of their own as the doco shows, they had started...
> film/3338/herb-and-dorothy-a-documentary-by-megumi-sasaki-madman-dvd/

Of all the monuments a man has built to himself few, if any, are more bizarre than the grand conceit Salvador Dali designed in a burned-out theatre in his birthplace of Figueres. A little more than an hour north of Barcelona by local bus, Figueres is a modest, not especially interesting town of some 35,000 people. But it is the...
> culturalelsewhere/1785/salvador-dali-his-museum-in-figueres-the-disneyland-of-the-disturbed/

At his first Pan-Australia Dada exhibition, Barry Humphries had packages printed up bearing the name Platitox, which allegedly contained a poison to put in creeks to kill the platypus, that much-loved, much-protected and playful native animal. “So why have an exhibit which offers a pesticide to destroy these animals? Because everything...
> culturalelsewhere/2168/barry-humphries-on-the-record-the-early-life-of-an-agent-provocateur/

Sex fascinated Stanley Spencer. But so did angels, the transcendence of the spirit through faith, and life in his home village of Cookham where, as a child, he believed biblical events had taken place and been witnessed by local folk.This confluence of religious and rural influences, and his belief that sexual and spiritual desire were...
> culturalelsewhere/233/sir-stanley-spencer-essayed-2003-of-angels-and-dirt/

In a recent documentary Drilling for Art, the spotlight was put on Dubai as a place with no art history (other than some minor folkloric things) and a city where 95 percent of people come from somewhere else. A few years ago Dubai decided it needed Art -- and so in tentative steps started encouraging contemporary galleries to open, and...
> film/3275/china-power-art-now-after-mao-a-documentary-by-pia-getty-dv1-southbound-dvd/

In his last self-portrait -- a crayon on paper work done nine months before his death in 1973, at age 91 -- Pablo Picasso created a disconcerting image: the eyes wide as if terrified, the mouth taut and drawn tightly over the teeth, and the face gaunt with defined cheekbones quite unlike what his bowling ball face actually looked like. It...
> culturalelsewhere/363/picasso-the-final-mask-2003-into-the-void/

Pain. The word rings like a refrain in any discussion of painter Frida Kahlo. Her pain is writ large on the pages of even the most meagre of biographies: the crippling polio at age 6; the horrific bus accident at 18 and the more than 30 operations she endured as a result; the emotional wounds in her marriage to the great Mexican muralist...
> culturalelsewhere/2059/frida-kahlo-1907-54-the-artist-as-subject-the-pain-and-passion/

At the launch of the long overdue local publication of his graphic novel Hicksville in Auckland recently, Dylan Horrocks said he grew up in two places: In New Zealand and in comics, and both were on the edge of the ‘real world‘. “This was stuff I thought after I finished Hicksville,” he says later. “It...
> writingelsewhere/3005/dylan-horrocks-interviewed-2010-the-graphic-novelist-as-social-commentator/

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the artists Gilbert and George revealed in this insightful and candid documentary is -- aside from their alarming normalcy -- that they don't have a kitchen in their tidy but chock-full home. No kitchen means no smells, no time wasted on cooking or cleaning up, more space. So they eat locally...
> film/2835/with-gilbert-and-george-a-film-by-julian-cole-2008-madman-dvd/

If we believe that, as is commonly said, great art is born of great suffering then Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was born to make great art. He certainly exceeded his quota of great suffering. Munch's mother died of tuberculosis when he was 5 and his sister Sophie - the subject of his first major work, The Sick Child -...
> writingelsewhere/2701/the-story-of-edvard-munch-by-ketil-bjornstad-death-at-his-shoulder/

Should Venice sink beneath the sea, it is possible the city could be reconstructed exactly by referring to the millions of photographs tourists have taken of every palazzo, piazza, corner and calle. On any given day -- in bitter winter or the smelly humidity of summer -- Venice is crammed with visitors snapping and filming. ...
> culturalelsewhere/2627/the-venice-biennale-2009-art-for-arts-and-its-curators-sake/

The context of this curious film needs to be sketched in before the innocent venture into its bewildering chicanery and capriciously obscuring nature. Made in the early Seventies and one of the last films that Welles, a notorious unfinisher, actually completed, it is on one level a look at the life of the art forger Elmyr de Hory (if...
> film/2577/f-for-fake-a-film-by-orson-welles-madman-dvd-rooms-full-of-mirrors-and-smoke/

It can happen anywhere: in Miami you hear OMC's How Bizarre, on late-night television in London Smash Palace turns up, in a Japanese park you come across Maori carvings, in Hong Kong a woman is wearing a bone pendant of familiar design ... This not the shock of the new, rather the frisson of the familiar.Our culture, inchoate some say,...
> culturalelsewhere/1783/colin-mccahon-in-melbourne-context-is-everything-2001/

We should expect to suffer for our art. God knows I have for mine -- although standing in the rain outside Madrid's famous art gallery the Prado on a bitterly cold day might just have be taking it too far. It was. I quit the queue and headed back to my tiny hotel room for a warm shower, then jumped puddles to the nearby bar where I...
> culturalelsewhere/274/madrid-and-barcelona-putting-in-the-hard-yards-for-arts-sake/

Subtitled “eccentric characters from New Zealand’s past” this collection of short biographical articles by Dunmore -- Professor Emeritus of French at Massey, Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2001 -- is considerably more insightful than it looks. To his more than two dozen, diverse subjects -- from ambitious or...
> writingelsewhere/1981/wild-cards-by-john-dunmore-reviewed-mad-bad-and-dangerous/

When the English author Thomas DeQuincey was describing nightmarish drug-induced visions in his early-19th-century autobiography Confessions of an English Opium Eater, he reflected on curious and compelling images he had never seen. They were a set of engravings by Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and DeQuincey referred to...
> culturalelsewhere/1883/piranesis-engravings-exploring-the-dark-discomforts-of-roman-ruins/

Out here in this bleached-brown landscape the wine is fine, and so are the views. Gazing across the rolling Yarra Valley less than an hour from inner-city Melbourne, the eye can take in columns of grape vines marching in orderly lines over low ridges, expensively manicured golf courses, and huge steroid-expanded homes running to many...
> culturalelsewhere/1846/tarrawarra-gallery-in-the-yarra-art-in-the-landscape/

When Auckland model Renata and actress Alicia-Anne Crawford stepped out last week at Une Enveloppe to announce the opening of "Fashion Month'' -- Blair Trader's new eatery on Auckland's fashionable Sandringham Road -- there were audible whispers and faux-gasps in the room. Both were wearing outfits -- "consembles'' as Auckland...
> somethingelsewhere/253/in-and-out-of-fashion-the-style-council-deliberates/

We live in a cynical world, as Jerry Maguire said. And there are reasons to be cynical: corruption and graft, deja-vu politics, corporate fraud and payouts, famine and futility … Yet it is also too easy to by-pass healthy scepticism and head straight for the negativism of a suspicious, cynical view of Man and the world. Cynicism...
> culturalelsewhere/234/sir-norman-fosters-bridge-at-millau-2004-sublime-architecture-from-here-to-modernity/

In an ideal world good design should be like fine wine and excellent food: only noticeable by its absence. But we live with ordinary chardonnays, indifferent meals, and abusive or annoyingly awful design. As one who enjoys travel I am accustomed to airline seats (I don’t care what the PR spin is, they are still uncomfortable in economy)...
> culturalelsewhere/238/essay-on-design-2007-the-internationalism-of-idiocy/

Roger Corman is the King of the B Grade Movie. He has directed and/or produced hundreds of films, claims he shot his cult classic Little Shop of Horrors (1960) in two days and one night, and usually brought in a movie in less than 10 days. He would often shoot sequences for two films simultaneously to save on costs and actors would also work in...
> film/231/roger-corman-interviewed-2006-its-a-gas-gas-gas-s-s-s/

For anyone who has only experienced her singing -- which slews wildly between a visceral scream of anguish and an orgasmic howl -- Yoko Ono’s remarkably quiet speaking voice, barely above a whisper, comes as a surprise. And this week as she talks about art and music from her home in New York it is aggravated by a cold and initially...
> absoluteelsewhere/502/yoko-ono-interviewed-the-touring-lennon-art-exhibition-1997-in-his-own-draw/

Gazing across the rolling Yarra Valley less than an hour from inner-city Melbourne, the eye can take in columns of grape vines m in orderly lines over low ridges, expensively manicured golf courses, and huge steroid-expanded homes running to many millions of dollars. In the distance lie the blue shimmering hills of the Great Divide.This is...
> travelstories/298/yarra-valley-victoria-australia-art-in-the-hills/

The Romans hadn't seen anything like him before, this strutting little fanatic who was so gifted with words he could move a crowd to mass action. A born propagandist, he was often invited into the homes of the wealthy for their amusement as they listened to him rant over the dinner table. But when he finally took complete power -- without a...
> travelstories/269/rome-italy-the-man-who-shook-the-world/