ecopolis

Boy George – The War Song

George Alan O’Dowd, better known as Boy George (born June 14, 1961 in Eltham, London) is a rock singer-songwriter and Club DJ. His music is often classified as blue-eyed soul, since he was heavily influenced by Rhythm and Blues and reggae. Mainly O’Dowd is a essential part of the British new romantic movement which emerged in the late 1970s and was popularised in the early 1980s. He and Marilyn, born Peter Robinson were regulars at ‘The Blitz’, a highly stylised nightclub in London run by Steve Strange of the musical group Visage, and a place which spawned many early 1980s pop stars such as Spandau Ballet.

Publication date: 17/03/2005 • 304 pages • 242×161mm • ISBN: 1844133907 Order this book

From 1979 he worked as a DJ alongside Jeremy Healy until he joined forces with DJ Michael Craig and drummer Jon Moss in 1982 to form the 80’s super group Culture Club. Over the next four years, the group made history with their music including the huge hits “Karma Chameleon” and “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me”. The group split in 1986 and reformed in 1998.
http://www.culture-club.co.uk/

Dread-locked Boy George challenged the traditional boundaries of gender: wore makeup, exotic outfits and brought this androgyny to a mainstream market, which was later dubbed as gender bending.

Today Boy George is recognized foremost as a leading dance music DJ, a solo artist and for his Broadway musical Taboo.

Boy George Feb 2007 DJ Tour Press

Enzimi offers space to talent and assists the natural outcome of creative processes. We want to bring projects together, and share them, make ‘em real. Starting from 2009 in the Old Slaughterhouse area in Testaccio in Rome near the Old Pelanda, a huge cultural production centre will raise aimed to sustain new talents. The centre will be a 4000 square meters area hosting recording studios, video post production, sets, ateliers for artists residences, media centres and multifunctional spaces.

Enzimi2007 is the starting point of a permanent platform developed with the specific goal to develop original projects. A real and virtual space to link emerging worlds and to give value to look for new ideas, to increase quality and innovation in your area and to create opportunity to grow up and change.

“Talents out!” is our call for anyone who wants to pump up this process. This is your city, this is your time, let’s come outside! This year Enzimi is not occurring in the middle of September but at the end of November to give you all the opportunity to participate. Our goal is to let projects be born and give ‘em time to grow up and gain a major strength than that a single event can offer.

Some of projects you’ll submit are going to be presented in November, whereas others will be carried on and others still, thanks to enzimi platform, will find autonomous life in the Testaccio space. The choice will be determined by different factors: originality, feasibility, openness, the absence of self-refence, the wish to involve, the ability to use the city in a brand new way paying attention to social aspects and sustainability and to the wish to stimulate and to develop happiness.

Enzimi is meant as a continuous drive towards viral ideas, their changing quality and their ability to move, generate and regerenate possibilities. It is a thrust necessary to anyone who wants to questions oneself, who is curios now, and wonders about tomorrow. It is the driving force for those who can interpret their own time and environment. Of those who are sure of their own talent and want to get to know the others’.

TALENTS OUT!
Submit your project.

Super Furry Animals – Juxtaposed With U

Probably the earliest evidence of recorded activity by SFA is a track called ‘Dim Brys, Dim Chwys’ (recorded in 1994 for the seminal ‘Heno Bydd Yr Adar Yn Canu’ programme on Radio Cymru, and subsequently featured on the ‘Triskadekaphilia’ compilation album released in August 1995).

However this track did not appear on their debut release – the ‘Llanfairpwllgwyngyllllantysiliogogogoch(In Space) EP’ – which appeared on the Ankst label in June 1995 (Ankst57).

As it happens, this release was also listed in The Guiness Book of World records – as the longest ever title for a commercially-released EP.

Next up was the ‘Moog Droog’ EP (Ankst62), which followed in October 1995 (featuring a first outing for ‘God!Show Me Magic’, which would later be released as a single).

Towards the end of 1995, Mark Bowen, a thrusting A+R man from Creation Records managed to persuade label owners Dick Green and Alan McGee to sign SFA which saw them joining a roster which was already home to, amongst others, Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream and Oasis.

Since then the band have gone on to produce and release an astonishing and wide ranging collection of albums; details of which can be found on _

Croeso i superfurry.com, gwefan swyddogol Super Furry Animals:

http://www.superfurry.com/index_main.php?lang=cym

When I saw Albert Reyes’s video on youTube I though about Pollock’s rhythmic use of paint and his drip technique: He would poke a hole in the bottom of a tin can of paint to get an extended drip line. Pollock’s technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term action painting . Another dripping is the Shigeko Kubota performing her Vagina Painting, at Cinemateque, during Perpetual Fluxus Festival New York City . The most visible aspect of those “body art movements” was the irreverent style.

The roots of this “utterance” lie in early 20th-century Fururistic rebellions and Cubist experiments with mixed media, further accomplished Dada performances. However, the antecedent of performance art, can be found in the happenings of the late 1950s and the 1960s : Fluxus performances were usually brief and simple. Event scores such as George Brecht’s “Drip Music”, are essentially performance scripts consist of descriptions of actions to be performed rather than dialogue.

First performer on a tall ladder pours water from a pitcher very slowly down into the bell of a French horn or tuba held in the playing position by a second performer at floor level

Fluxus happenings and performances have progressily incorporated vary elements as electronic music, song, dance, television, film, sculpture, spoken dialogue, and storytelling.

Albert Reyes has been known to spit art on his hands and knees with a mouth full of beer in the middle of the street which tackles both performance and graffiti art inspired not only by street art, comic books, and American pop culture; but also by icons of corporate America to Hollywood stars to mass media to politics to consumerism. Toward a new Refluxus? http://pimplywimp.com/

A Portrait of the Artists as Young Men

London 1967: two sculpture students meet at St. Martin’s School of Art. From then on, they decide to join their lives and their art in a unique, indissoluble entity. During the subsequent forty years, calling themselves simply Gilbert & George, the two artists investigate the complexity of the human condition.

Six Bombs Pictures

Gilbert & George. Major exhibition
CASTELLO DI RIVOLI
The exhibition is curated by Jan Debbaut and Ben Borthwick, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.
16 October 2007 to 13 January 2008

Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short term solution), Expendable (easily-forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young, Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business…

This is just the beginning…

–Richard Hamilton, 16 January 1957

Pop Art is: Gagosian

– London Sky, Frieze Art fair Preview, 10 October 2007

Vivienne Isabel Swire born in Glossopdale, Derbyshire, on 8 April 1941, always enjoyed cutting a dash. As a teenager in the 1950s, she customised her school uniform to emulate the fashionable pencil skirt and made many of her own clothes, including a long, fitted ‘New Look’ dress made of sleeveless shifts, with a single seam and darts, from exactly one yard of fabric. Ecology and independence remain central to Westwood’s character. She has lived in south London for many years, cycles everywhere.

Using culture as a way of making trouble

Vivienne Westwood met Malcolm McLaren in 1965, and their son Joseph Ferdinand Corré was born in 1966. Their working relationship, which lasted from 1970 until 1983, launched Punk. Vivienne recalled : I felt there were so many doors to open, and he had the key to all of them. Plus, he had a political attitude and I needed to align myself.

McLaren was infact obsessed with fashion and music and saw them as inseparable parts of a Rock ‘n’ Roll outlaw spirit. Rejecting the dominant hippie look, in 1971, McLaren opened a shop called Let It Rock, and shifted to another fashion minority.

McLaren renamed it Sex and he scrawled above the door ‘Craft must have clothes but Truth loves to go naked’. The interior was sprayed with pornographic graffiti, hung with rubber curtains and stocked with sex and fetish wear.

Sex was intimidating and it attracted an extraordinary clientele, with voyeurs and prostitutes mixing with proto-Punk King’s Road shoppers. Jordan, the shop assistant, wore rubber clothes, a beehive hairstyle and theatrical make-up.

The Punkature Era

Soon Westwood’s horizons opened and expanded. As McLaren put it: We want to get out of this island mentality, and relate ourselves to those taboos and magical things we believe we have lost.They designed new collections based on ethnic and primitive looks culled from National Geographic magazine while their second collection Savage (S/S 1982) combined Native American patterns with leather frock coats. Third came Nostalgia of Mud (A/W 1982), with its huge tattered skirts and sheepskin jackets in muddy colours. In March 1982, McLaren and Westwood opened a second shop. It was called Nostalgia of Mud . The interior was styled like an archaeological dig. McLaren and Westwood began to conjure up darker spirits and found a magical, esoteric sign language in the work of the New York graffiti artist Keith Haring.

Punkature (S/S 1983) still had a raw feeling and an emphasis on pre-washed and over-printed natural fabrics. It played on the words ‘punk’ and ‘couture’, and carried images from Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner.

The Witches collection was the final collaboration between McLaren and Westwood:

By 1984 Westwood had moved to Italy with her new business partner, Carlo d’Amario. The Hypnos collection featured sleek garments made out of synthetic sports fabric in fluorescent pinks and greens. They were fastened with rubber phallus buttons. This was followed by Clint Eastwood, a collection that hankered after the wide open spaces seen in Western films: It included garments smothered in Italian company logos and Day-Glo patches inspired by Tokyo’s neon signs.

The Harris Tweed collection celebrated Westwood’s love affair with traditional English clothing and also her growing obsession with royalty. It was named after the woollen fabric hand-woven in the Western Isles of Scotland. The word clann in Gaelic means children of the family. A Clan Tartan is the regular sett (pattern) of the clan or family. The identification of clans with tartan patterns became a dogma of great success: all the recognised clans had their tartans, be they Highland or Lowland. Using a mix of different tartans, Westwood ensembles exploits the rich depth, colour and diversity of the traditional checked pattern. Let’s camouflage.

Many of the garments – the twinsets made by the long-established firm of Smedley, the ‘Stature of Liberty’ corsets, the tailored ‘Savile’ jackets – became Westwood classics and her most recognisable trademarks. Romantic and historically accurate, the corsets are also surprisingly practical. Stretch fabrics allow ease of movement, and removable sleeves convert a daytime garment to evening wear. Once a symbol of constraint, corsets are now an expression of female sexuality and empowerment.

Frans Hals corset, 1992-3, “Vivienne Westwood”, Victoria and Albert Museum

With Britain Must Go Pagan, Westwood combined traditional British themes with classical and pagan elements. Classical drapery was paired with tweed, Smedley underwear was overprinted with pornographic images from ancient Greece. This strange mix reflected the inherent camouflage in her work, its respect for tradition and culture alongside a love of parody and sexual liberty. With the Mini-Crini collection she has devised a ‘mini-crini’ that combined the tutu with an abbreviated form of the Victorian crinoline. References to literature and high art pervaded Westwood’s work. She spent many hours in the Wallace Collection in London studying the 18th-century French art collected by Lord Hertford. In shows she began to use statuesque models dressed in sumptuous costumes and poised on 10-inch platform shoes, as if on a pedestal. The idea was that they had just stepped out of a portrait. Fashion is Camouflaging Environment.

Harlequin from Vivienne Westwood’s “Voyage to Cythera Autumn / Winter 1989-90″ collection “Vivienne Westwood”, Victoria and Albert Museum

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD – V&A Retrospective, Palazzo Reale, Milan.

Launched in the 2004 at the London Victoria & Albert Museum, the exhibition is the largest display the museum ever dedicated to a British designer. The Retrospective features designs selected from both the V&A’s collections and Vivienne Westwood’s personal archive.

Kate Bush (born 30 July 1958) is an English singer, songwriter, musician and record producer. Her eclectic musical style and idiosyncratic lyrics have made her one of England’s most successful solo female performers of the past 30 years. Bush was signed by EMI at the age of 16 after being recommended by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. In 1978, at age 19, her début song Wuthering Heights topped the UK charts for four weeks and made her the first woman to have a UK number one with a self-written song.