"With him an entire epoch ends," added Werner Herzog in a statement to the Film Society this morning.  A close friend of Vogel's for more than 40 years, the filmmaker added, "The Last Lion has left us."

Amos Vogel no longer walks the earth. He was a beautiful man and I remember drinking champagne with him in 2005 when we made the deal for getting his book, Film as a Subversive Art back into print (first published in 1974). He was the founder of the subversive cinema club, Cinema 16 (1940), which screened works by notorious film makers such as Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren and Yoko Ono. 

He lived a potent life and contributed much to the cultural cannon. I raise a shot of vodka to him tonight. He will be missed and he will be remembered. God Bless his Soul.

You can review a Q&A he did for me here in 2005. Watch Paul Cronin's film in full over at Artist-Talks

And for more on the man and his contribution to film see this article from the Lincon Film Society. And The Sticking Place. 

 

Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), Ophelia

 

Cold porcelain kisses your flesh
Bound hindquarters keep me safe
Bleached stainless steel blades light up the whites of your eyes

Icy blue iridescent planets roll deep inside
Bruised, sticky skin
Baby brides fall from the sky

Petrol inky rivers stand still upon your gaze
Silence dances in your crimson mouth
Blood becomes darker with each turning phase

There's little breath left in my body
Between my legs is ever lasting heat
The wind lifts my ashes to a place where time has no space

 

*Postscript: after writing this I learnt that Amos Vogel passed away early this morning. May he be forever in peace. 

Music to be still to:

 

Thomas Ruff, Nudes dr02, 2011

There's been a lot of talk recently about this 'New Aesthetic' we're in. James Bridle has a blog here, a kind of visual essay on what it is. Bruce Sterling writes 5000 words on it here and describes it as "The explosion from the digital to the physical". These recent conversations seem to have been bourne out of a conference at SXSW The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices (which for the life of me I don't know why they haven't got a video up for us ... but there we go)

So we're all familiar with this aesthetic by now, even though the term may be new to us. The computer glitches, hicups, where moving images erupt and tear up our screens. When we try to work with a 175dpi image when what we need is a 300dpi and that image corrupts the more we push it and becomes something new. An environment of imagery where pixels multiply and reality converts to the virtual and corrupts the physical understanding of what we think we once recognised as the image of any given thing. 

Thomas Ruff, Jpeg bi01, 2007

Whilst thinking of this idea of The New Aesthetic my mind moves to Thomas Ruff and his Jpeg images that I think I first started to notice around 2009 (see an interview here with him for the Guardian). They have a kind of hyper-modern nostalgia to them already, akin to what sepia was for the images of our childhood, those lovely washed out dreamy aesthetics that nudge our memories. This new aesthetic of blured 8-bit graphics and fuzzy edges does that for our screen based eyes. 

So Ruff's new show, Nudes, currently on at the Gagosian is well worth a look I think, on till the 20 April. To see Ruff in conversation about his work and view other photography experts discuss the nature and future of photography visit Artist-Talks here. 

Reminded by a friend, Lee Gamble, of these beautiful tracks earlier this week. Play them back to back and on repeat, it is Sunday after all. 

The King

The Queen

The Hayward, London

I thought I'd put a little compilation of videos together that either are in direct reference to the exhibition or certainly nudge my memory and thoughts into these places. The show is well worth a visit, his social anthropology and cultural commentaries makes for interesting art. 

More on Deller's exhibition with interviews with him and clips from his work here at Artist-Talks 

Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks, circa 1980

Football Hooligans, Chelsea vs Middlesborough, 1989

The Prodigy, Out of Space, 1990

E Zee Posse, Everything Starts with an E, 1989

Acid House 1989 Illegal Rave part 4 Sunrise

Joy Riding is sexy or at least the noise is.

The Battle of Orgreave, 1984-5, Miner's strike 

 

Monologues is an audio publication. For each volume two participants are invited to pick and speak about a topic from a pre-selected list.

 

Monologues #1:

 Mark Fisher on The Poor and the Proletariat 

Sally O'Reilly on Wine and Milk

Cassette (EP4)
Listen to an extract here 
£6:00 inclusive of postage. 
Buy here

Sally O’Reilly is a writer, contributing regularly to many art and  culture publications. Her book The Body in Contemporary Art was published by Thames & Hudson in 2009. She has also curated and produced numerous performative events and was writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (2010–11).

Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism (Zer0, 2009). His writing regularly appears in frieze, The Wire, Film Quarterly and Sight and Sound. He teaches at the University of East  London, the City Literary Institute and Goldsmiths, University of London.

Co-published by CT Editions and Entr'acte 

OOOoooo, lookie here. 

David Hockney, Hawthorne Blossom, Woldgate No. 4, 2009

My favourite room at David Hockney's exhibition at the Royal Academy  exhibition, The Hawthorne Room, and my favourite work from the whole show, Hawthorne Blossom, Woldgate No. 4. Kind of candy colours just touching insipid, it’s like they have slightly subverted themselves; they’re totally my type of colours. The projection of light across the scene makes me want to breathe it in, it pulls you in. A road stretching into the distance, the destination out of sight; such a seductive symboliser of what’s to come, of time and of reflection. In my humble opinion Hockney is having some of his best years. Never stop painting (or smoking) you brilliant, brilliant man.

See Hockney talking about his work here over at Artist-Talks

SwOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOn