Mark E Smith and The Fall lived on the outskirts of alternative rock and pop music for over forty years.
I saw them once in '85. They played the Hammersmith Palais. I went with my brother Phil who was a big fan from the start. The place wasn’t packed but the core was positioned around the band, close. Many of them taping the show. I had this sense of the stage being low and we were really in on the vibe. Which was heavy, carrying a low-level threat of aggression. It felt like cheap grindy speed.
I didn't know the songs but they steered pretty close to The Fall formula. Heavy repetitive bass and drums. Jangly guitar, rough keyboards and this dead ahead vocal. Part drunk in the pub, part accosting wind up on the street ("give us a quid, lend us a fag, go buy me a pie...
I saw them once in '85. They played the Hammersmith Palais. I went with my brother Phil who was a big fan from the start. The place wasn’t packed but the core was positioned around the band, close. Many of them taping the show. I had this sense of the stage being low and we were really in on the vibe. Which was heavy, carrying a low-level threat of aggression. It felt like cheap grindy speed.
I didn't know the songs but they steered pretty close to The Fall formula. Heavy repetitive bass and drums. Jangly guitar, rough keyboards and this dead ahead vocal. Part drunk in the pub, part accosting wind up on the street ("give us a quid, lend us a fag, go buy me a pie...
- 1/29/2018
- by Millree Hughes
- www.culturecatch.com
I cannot believe that even the most devout American fascist has not danced or punched their fist in the air to a song created by African American musicians; at a prom, at a frat party or a wedding. "1999" by Prince, "Rock n Roll" by Chuck Berry, "Nutbush City Limits" by Ike and Tina Turner. Black music is an ever-present treatise on American life.
In the new season of New York galleries, Kara Walker, Sanford Biggers and Mark Thomas Gibson are Black American artists who "Keep on Pushing."*
Sanford Biggers show, Selah Is up til October 21, 2017 at Marianne Boesky Gallery, 507 West 24th Street, NY. He mixes African and American themes. The show is made up of found quilts and other fabric sewn together forming delicate and seductive "paintings." Other pieces jam on the floor with mixed materials and African statues or sprawl across the wall. (Overstood, 2017, image left) He riffs on...
In the new season of New York galleries, Kara Walker, Sanford Biggers and Mark Thomas Gibson are Black American artists who "Keep on Pushing."*
Sanford Biggers show, Selah Is up til October 21, 2017 at Marianne Boesky Gallery, 507 West 24th Street, NY. He mixes African and American themes. The show is made up of found quilts and other fabric sewn together forming delicate and seductive "paintings." Other pieces jam on the floor with mixed materials and African statues or sprawl across the wall. (Overstood, 2017, image left) He riffs on...
- 10/9/2017
- by Millree Hughes
- www.culturecatch.com
Anselm Kiefer: Transition From Warm to Cool Gagosian Gallery, NYC Thru Septemer 1, 2017
An older creative man who finds energy in their work from having a new young love in his life can represent a wonderful coda. In 1857 when Dickens was 45 years old, he fell in love with the 18-year old actresses Ellen Ternan, a passion that lasted the rest of his life. In 1917 the composer Janacek met Kamila Stösslová, 38 years his junior, who inspired a host of new works. A young woman's sexual ecstasy is the central theme of a suite of new pieces by Anselm Kiefer at Gagosian on 21st Street in Chelsea, up until September 1st.
There are a lot of things in this show that he is famous for -- giant, stage-sized paintings and vitrines with large books in them. The paintings are as thick as condo walls with loopy written inscriptions on them. Recently we have...
An older creative man who finds energy in their work from having a new young love in his life can represent a wonderful coda. In 1857 when Dickens was 45 years old, he fell in love with the 18-year old actresses Ellen Ternan, a passion that lasted the rest of his life. In 1917 the composer Janacek met Kamila Stösslová, 38 years his junior, who inspired a host of new works. A young woman's sexual ecstasy is the central theme of a suite of new pieces by Anselm Kiefer at Gagosian on 21st Street in Chelsea, up until September 1st.
There are a lot of things in this show that he is famous for -- giant, stage-sized paintings and vitrines with large books in them. The paintings are as thick as condo walls with loopy written inscriptions on them. Recently we have...
- 8/25/2017
- by Millree Hughes
- www.culturecatch.com
Dona Nelson: Models Stand Close to the Paintings Thomas Erben Gallery, NYC Through May 6th, 2017
Dona Nelson is showing new paintings at Thomas Erben Gallery. There is no other artist in America that is a "modern painter" in so many different ways without losing her centre.
Trying to subvert its meaning seems to be part of the definition of what modern art is. There doesn't seem to be an accurate way to define an activity that is made up of a system or interelating systems that has occasional contradictions built into it, But art doesn't seem the worse for it. Modern painting in particular is like a series of interconnected temples where people are constantly entering and trying to knock down a load bearing pillar to see if it still stands or if it's now something else. It's quite often a sign that that particular approach is thriving.
Part of...
Dona Nelson is showing new paintings at Thomas Erben Gallery. There is no other artist in America that is a "modern painter" in so many different ways without losing her centre.
Trying to subvert its meaning seems to be part of the definition of what modern art is. There doesn't seem to be an accurate way to define an activity that is made up of a system or interelating systems that has occasional contradictions built into it, But art doesn't seem the worse for it. Modern painting in particular is like a series of interconnected temples where people are constantly entering and trying to knock down a load bearing pillar to see if it still stands or if it's now something else. It's quite often a sign that that particular approach is thriving.
Part of...
- 4/17/2017
- by Millree Hughes
- www.culturecatch.com
Julian Schnabel: New Plate Paintings Pace Gallery, NY Feb 24th - Mar 25th, 2017
I'm not going to write a bad review of Julian Schnabel's show of roses painted on smashed plates up at Pace Gallery. I don't believe it matters what I think of them. The parameters that embraced what was good and rebuffed what was bad are mostly no longer in place. The people who will buy these paintings for $900,000 are as far from me as the people who built the pyramids were from those inside them.
Instead I would like to thank him for his role in what I choose to call, retroactively, The Art World. Back in the early '80s he made these heaving great objects covered in smashed crockery, as if a syrup-smeared bull had stormed through the Met in search of a distant buffet table. More chunks of stage than mere props,...
I'm not going to write a bad review of Julian Schnabel's show of roses painted on smashed plates up at Pace Gallery. I don't believe it matters what I think of them. The parameters that embraced what was good and rebuffed what was bad are mostly no longer in place. The people who will buy these paintings for $900,000 are as far from me as the people who built the pyramids were from those inside them.
Instead I would like to thank him for his role in what I choose to call, retroactively, The Art World. Back in the early '80s he made these heaving great objects covered in smashed crockery, as if a syrup-smeared bull had stormed through the Met in search of a distant buffet table. More chunks of stage than mere props,...
- 3/16/2017
- by Millree Hughes
- www.culturecatch.com
Mark Sheinckman: New Paintings Lennon Weinberg, NYC Until March 5th, 2017
Mark Sheinkman sets up his canvas with an oil and alkyd ground and polishes and reprimes it again, until it looks like Carrera marble, so that it can take the thin black oil paint. He wipes off and lays in. Many of the pieces deal with tropes of painting and design. Squiggles and spots, diamonds on what appears to be a spinning disk. Cross hatching becoming unmoored and floating away, Some are pure muscle memory. Lines just moving and co responding. Like the way Coltrane drops off the theme and into the solo on "Ascension," responding to a shifting background of changing modality, with a thin free line twisting in the void.
The way Sheinkman treats the edge speaks to the material that he thinks he sees. It's an issue. Where are we? What is this? The edge of what?...
Mark Sheinkman sets up his canvas with an oil and alkyd ground and polishes and reprimes it again, until it looks like Carrera marble, so that it can take the thin black oil paint. He wipes off and lays in. Many of the pieces deal with tropes of painting and design. Squiggles and spots, diamonds on what appears to be a spinning disk. Cross hatching becoming unmoored and floating away, Some are pure muscle memory. Lines just moving and co responding. Like the way Coltrane drops off the theme and into the solo on "Ascension," responding to a shifting background of changing modality, with a thin free line twisting in the void.
The way Sheinkman treats the edge speaks to the material that he thinks he sees. It's an issue. Where are we? What is this? The edge of what?...
- 2/26/2017
- by Millree Hughes
- www.culturecatch.com
Consumer culture sucks the content out of every subculture it touches. All except Glam, which returns every ten years or so altered by time but with its central message of theatricalized otherness unchanged. Glam pop and fashion were in all the magazines both for teenyboppers and young mums. It was commercial, not very musically challenging, and seemed to have arrived already fully absorbed. But British glam (glam of the '70s as opposed to American glam of the '80s, otherwise known as "hair metal") was highly critical of the counterculture.
Hippy
Hippy culture was 'real' as opposed to 'straight culture' which was 'fake'. America's support of democracy in North Vietnam disguised a terrible agenda. The hippies proposed an alternative world; one were real freedom could be cultivated.
Sex
However, women suffered a great deal of abuse in the name of free love. The '60s generation have compained that...
Hippy
Hippy culture was 'real' as opposed to 'straight culture' which was 'fake'. America's support of democracy in North Vietnam disguised a terrible agenda. The hippies proposed an alternative world; one were real freedom could be cultivated.
Sex
However, women suffered a great deal of abuse in the name of free love. The '60s generation have compained that...
- 12/24/2016
- by Millree Hughes
- www.culturecatch.com
Goth America has a taste for cultural collapse and rebirth. Whether in the religious right's mythos of the Rapture or in the left's fascination with nuclear extermination or the cataclysmic results of the effects of global warming as in say, Cormack McCarthy's The Road. This is the mulch that Goth grows best in. American Gothic, the subculture of the doomed.
At the beginning of the '70s Heavy Metal emerged as a genre separate from Hard Rock. The record Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath released in 1970 contains all of the essential elements of the genre. Loud, often slow, riffy, hard, blues influenced rock. Satanic lyrics, long hair and beards, simple silver jewellry and a gloomy melodramatic mein. The band came from Birmingham and reflected the bleakness of an industrial city in decline. Instead of militating against the situation of the four day working week, strikes and unemployment that its young men faced,...
At the beginning of the '70s Heavy Metal emerged as a genre separate from Hard Rock. The record Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath released in 1970 contains all of the essential elements of the genre. Loud, often slow, riffy, hard, blues influenced rock. Satanic lyrics, long hair and beards, simple silver jewellry and a gloomy melodramatic mein. The band came from Birmingham and reflected the bleakness of an industrial city in decline. Instead of militating against the situation of the four day working week, strikes and unemployment that its young men faced,...
- 11/27/2016
- by Millree Hughes
- www.culturecatch.com
I knew Caroline Crawley and Jemaur Tayle who were Shelleyan Orphan through my brother Jeremy. They were making a video for their single "Cavalry of Clouds." I painted for pop videos and fashion shoots. They'd found this little unsigned drawing by the lesser known Pre-Raphaelites Simeon Solomon in a flea market and wanted me to paint something like that on an easel in the video.
They liked Nick Drake, that kind of thing, the early '70s folk and strings but their sound was steeped in a greater sweetness, a far off wistfulness. Like some new elderflower liquor based on an old recipe. Music and politics had taken a dark turn in the late '80s and the journalists were curious but suspicious. But for artists, musicians and fashion designers who knew them they represented a golden numinous away from all that.
Caroline's voice lifted them into a high cloud.
They liked Nick Drake, that kind of thing, the early '70s folk and strings but their sound was steeped in a greater sweetness, a far off wistfulness. Like some new elderflower liquor based on an old recipe. Music and politics had taken a dark turn in the late '80s and the journalists were curious but suspicious. But for artists, musicians and fashion designers who knew them they represented a golden numinous away from all that.
Caroline's voice lifted them into a high cloud.
- 10/6/2016
- by webmaster
- www.culturecatch.com
Sarah Davis lives and works in Brooklyn with her husband Millree Hughes and daughter Meriel.
Bradley Rubenstein: What were some of your early experiences, like school, for example, where you decided to become an artist?
Sarah Davis: My radar was, What’s the best thing to be doing when you’re 80? Where are the best-looking old people? And for me, that was obviously painters, or the art world more generally. Maybe I was close to my grandparents, or maybe it came from going to high school in L.A., where the projected end was 30. Still, painting was my identity from about age 8. Every kind of picture book, and there were tons of them, was how I spent my free time. I copied everything and made up my own. Making paintings and drawings was how I socialized, from third grade on.
Br: A lot of your work deals with...
Bradley Rubenstein: What were some of your early experiences, like school, for example, where you decided to become an artist?
Sarah Davis: My radar was, What’s the best thing to be doing when you’re 80? Where are the best-looking old people? And for me, that was obviously painters, or the art world more generally. Maybe I was close to my grandparents, or maybe it came from going to high school in L.A., where the projected end was 30. Still, painting was my identity from about age 8. Every kind of picture book, and there were tons of them, was how I spent my free time. I copied everything and made up my own. Making paintings and drawings was how I socialized, from third grade on.
Br: A lot of your work deals with...
- 4/10/2016
- by bradleyrubenstein
- www.culturecatch.com
Millree Hughes, born in North Wales in 1960, has been making art on the computer since 1998. In the 2000s, he showed with Michael Steinberg Fine Arts. Hughes is currently working with Museum Editions (www.museum-editions.com) in New York City and Polyglot Gallery in Dallas, Texas.
Bradley Rubenstein: Let's start by talking a little bit about Lummox (2010) before we get into the new work. I thought it was hilarious, and at the same time there was a serious aspect regarding cultural mediation that a lot of your work touches on. It also came out before James Franco’s Cindy Sherman show at Pace (New Film Stills, 2014), and all the Marina Abramović performances with Jay-z and whatnot, so it really caught something about our cultural moment.
Millree Hughes: Thank you. I like that you put our documentary in the context of Abramović and Franco -- making the artist a persona...
Bradley Rubenstein: Let's start by talking a little bit about Lummox (2010) before we get into the new work. I thought it was hilarious, and at the same time there was a serious aspect regarding cultural mediation that a lot of your work touches on. It also came out before James Franco’s Cindy Sherman show at Pace (New Film Stills, 2014), and all the Marina Abramović performances with Jay-z and whatnot, so it really caught something about our cultural moment.
Millree Hughes: Thank you. I like that you put our documentary in the context of Abramović and Franco -- making the artist a persona...
- 9/12/2014
- by bradleyrubenstein
- www.culturecatch.com
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