Showing posts with label Artist Book Celebrity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Artist Book Celebrity. Show all posts

Sunday, 31 August 2014

ABC: ARTIST BOOK CELEBRITY

With every edition one artist, one book title and one celebrity are selected to appear in an article that highlights the artworks, songs, movie scenes, and performances that made them stand out of the crowd. The principle of following the chronological order of the alphabet and of finding names that all share the same initial letter has been inspired by the German game 'Stadt Land Fluss'. To help people to remember the names easier, I create little aide-memoires from emojis (so far they have proved to be fairly efficient).



C

      Artist



Untitled (The Hotel Eden) (1945)


American artist and sculptor, Joseph Cornell was born in 1903 in New York and lived for the most part of his life in Flushing, New York, as a recluse (He died in 1972). His lack of relationships made him a self-taught artist that was afraid of strangers. His shyness made romantic relationships almost impossible. Cornell was one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage and he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. Many of his boxes, such as the famousMedici Slot Machine boxes, are interactive and are meant to be handled. As a young man he worked as a textile salesman. He began to make montages of engravings at the age of 26, without any art training; 6 years later they were included in the first Surrealist group exhibition in the USA at the Wadsworth Atheneum http://www.thewadsworth.org/ (the oldest public art museum in the United States). Cornell has met many of the leading Surrealist artists and writers at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York, and started to make glazed boxes containing mysterious assemblages created from found objects in poetic association. His work included was in the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1936. 3 Years after at the age of 33 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery. Cornell made recurrent use of objects such as clay pipes, wine glasses, engravings, mirrors and astronomical maps, often with a flavour of Victorian and some allusion to the opera or the ballet. He also had numerous friendships with ballerinas, who found him unique, but too eccentric to be a romantic partner.His imagery was often related to that of Nerval, Novalis, Mallarmé and other 19th century Romantic and Symbolist writers. He also made a number of short lyrical films and a montage of old Hollywood film clips with existing film stock that Cornell had found in New Jersey warehouses, one of which isRose Hobart (additional TP 9'12'' Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnbbqiD7C7A). Died in Flushing.

E.T.P.: 2'



Fyodor Dostoevsky (also spelled Dostoyevsky) is renowned as one of the world’s greatest novelists and literary psychologists. His works grapple with deep political, social, and religious issues while delving into the often tortured psychology of characters whose lives are shaped by these issues. Raskolnikov’s time in a Siberian prison, described in the Epilogue of Crime and Punishment, is based on Dostoevsky’s own experiences at a similar prison. Dostoyevsky conceived the idea of Crime and Punishment in the summer of 1865, having gambled away much of his fortune, unable to pay his bills or afford proper meals. Raskolnikov, a conflicted former student, lives in a tiny, rented room in Saint Petersburg. He refuses all help, even from his friend Razumikhin, and devises a plan to murder and to rob an unpleasant elderly pawn-broker and money-lender, Alyona Ivanovna. His motivation comes from the overwhelming sense that he is predetermined to kill the old woman by some power outside of himself. While still considering the plan, Raskolnikov makes the acquaintance of Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov, a drunkard who recently squandered his family's little wealth. Raskolnikov also receives a letter from his sister and mother, speaking of their coming visit to Saint Petersburg, and his sister's sudden marriage plans which they plan to discuss upon their arrival... The main plot involves a murder as the result of "ideological intoxication," and depicts all the disastrous moral and psychical consequences that result from the murder.

E.T.P.: 2'




Marion Cotillard born 30 September 1975 is a French actress, singer and songwriter. She is also an environmentalist and spokesperson for Greenpeace, the organization for which she travelled to Congo in 2010 to visit tropical rainforests threatened by logging companies. Besides she has also been the face of Lady Dior handbags since 2008 and has appeared on more than 200 magazine covers around the world. Cotillard was born in Paris, and grew up around Orléans, Loiret, in an artistically inclined, "bustling, creative household". Her father, Jean-Claude Cotillard, is an actor, teacher, former mime, and 2006 Molière Award-winning director. Cotillard's mother, Niseema Theillaud, is also an actress and drama teacher. Her two younger brothers are twins: Quentin and Guillaume. Guillaume is a screenwriter and director. Cotillard began acting during her childhood, appearing on stage in one of her father's plays. Since October 2007, Cotillard is in a relationship with French actor and director Guillaume Canet and in 2011 their now 3 year old son Marcel was born. The couple prefers to live a simple lifestyle and neither star discusses their relationship with the media. Cotillard garnered worldwide acclaim for her roles in films such as La Vie en Rose in 2007, in which she starred as the French singer Édith Piaf and for which she received critical acclaim and won several awards  including Golden Globe Award for Best Actress (she was the first person to win an Academy Award for Best Actress in a French language performance).

E.T.P. 2-3'

Sunday, 17 August 2014

ABC: ARTIST BOOK CELEBRITY

With every edition one artist, one book title and one celebrity are selected to appear in an article that highlights the artworks, songs, movie scenes, and performances that made them stand out of the crowd. The principle of following the chronological order of the alphabet and of finding names that all share the same initial letter has been inspired by the German game 'Stadt Land Fluss'. To help people to remember the names easier, I create little aide-memoires from emojis (so far they have proved to be fairly efficient).

 
 



Photo via Jmeshel.



Chuck (Charles Edward Anderson) Berry was born in 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri. The guitarist and songwriter is also known as “The Father of Rock’n Roll”, as he has introduced rock’n’roll some 70 years ago, while at the same time trying to merge the worlds of black and white through music. His performances such as Maybellene (1955) (watch online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvKDr8AgvK8), Roll Over Beethoven (1956), Rock and Roll Music (1957), and Johnny B. Goode (1958), are well known because of his approach to entertain the crowd according to their immediate feedback on stage. (Chuckberry.com/biography: http://chuckberry.com/biography/). Although his first notable performance was on his school's musical stage singing ‘Confessin The Blues’ (listen on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3qVbQNRjJU) accompanied by his friend, Tommy Stevens, on guitar it was not until he met Muddy Waters in 1955 when his career started to pick up. He was sentenced to prison for the first time while he still was at high school, from 1944 to 1947 for armed robbery from and again in 1960 to 1963 for transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines. In between he was trained as a hairdresser at the Poro School, freelanced as a photographer, assisted his father as a carpenter and even owned a restaurant while beginning his career as a musician. His passion for food made him choose the locations of his performances according to the proximity to the next Indian restaurant. Berry was included in several Rolling Stone “Greatest of All Time” lists and three of his songs made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. Today at the age of 87 Chuck Berry is still performing live.

ETP (5-8')



Beloved was written in (1987) by american writer Toni Morrison. The novel is set after the American Civil War (1861 - 1865). The book's epigraph reads: "Sixty Million and more," by which Morrison refers to the estimated number of slaves who died in the slave trade. Morrison's fifth novel is loosely based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner, who temporarily escaped slavery during 1956 in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. After a posse arrived to retrieve her and her children Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured. Beloved's main character, Sethe, kills her daughter and tries to kill her other three children when a posse arrives in Ohio to return them to Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation from which Sethe recently fled. The tombstone of the daughters grave shows the word "Beloved". A  woman presumed to be her daughter, called Beloved, returns years later to haunt Sethe's home at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati. The story opens with an introduction to the ghost: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom." Beloved is not narrated chronologically; it is composed of flashbacks, memories, and nightmares. As a result, it is not an easy read if you haven't encountered William Faulkner, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf. It aims to point the difficulties victims of slavery experience to deal with the past that leads to a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. The novel received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. It was adapted during 1998 into a movie of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey (watch the trailer). A New York Times survey of writers and literary critics ranked it the best work of American fiction from 1981-2006.

You can read more here and here.


Photo via Deadline.

 Kobe Bean Bryant (born August 23, 1978) is an American professional basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He entered the NBA directly from high school, and has played for the Lakers his entire career, winning five NBA championships. Bryant is a 16-time All-Star, 15-time member of the All-NBA Team, and 12-time member of the All-Defensive team. As of March 2013, he ranks third and fourth on the league's all-time postseason scoring and all-time regular season scoring lists, respectively. Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal led the Lakers to three consecutive championships from 2000 to 2002. He is also the all-time leading scorer in Lakers franchise history. Since his second year in the league, Bryant has been selected to start every All-Star Game. He has won the All-Star MVP Award four times (2002,2007, 2009, and 2011), tying him for the most All Star MVP Awards in NBA history. At the 2008 and 2012 Summer Olympics, he won gold medals as a member of the USA national team. Because of his recent devastating injury Kobe Bryant's basketball career has come to an end. His new project is called "Kobe Bryant's Muse", a screening of his biography that will come out this autumn.

Sunday, 3 August 2014

ABC: ARTIST, BOOK, CELEBRITY



The ABC for artists, books, and celebrities to fight against my name literacy through writing and creating an aide-memoire with emojis (inspired by the german game 'Stadt-Land-Fluss').



The New Zealand born artist Billy Apple (now 78 years old) studied at The Royal College of Art in London and is one of the first artists to use neon lights in art work. Apple is best known for his involvement in the New York and London Pop art movements of the 1960s (see Four Billy Apple Trademark Classes at Frieze Magazine) and with the conceptual art movement in the 1970s (see 2 Minutes 33 seconds at the Auckland Art Gallery). He was included in the important 1964 exhibit 'The American Supermarket', a show held in Paul Bianchini's Upper East Side gallery. The show was presented as a typical small supermarket environment, except that everything in it - the produce, canned goods, meat, posters on the wall, etc., was created by prominent pop artist of the time, including Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, and Jasper Johns.

Read more here. E.T.P.: 5'


Pictures via University of Michigan.

As I Lay Dying has been named one of the 100 greatest novels of all Time by The Guardian. American author William Faulkner wrote it in 1930 over the course of six weeks from midnight to 4am while he was working at a power plant. The book is narrated by 15 different characters over 59 chapters. It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her family's quest and motivations - noble or selfish - to honor her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 (listen to an audio recording of William Faulkner's Banquet Speech additional E.T.P. 3' (headphones recomended). The Grammy-nominated metalcore band 'As I lay Dying' derived its name from this novel. In 2013 writer/director James Franco released a film adaption of the novel (Trailer here, additional E.T.P. 1.20').

Full E.T.P. (5-8')



Image & Content via Forbes.

Just 24 years old, the Swedish DJ notched the best year of his career in 2014 on the strength of his debut album "True". The record included "Wake Me Up," which became the first electronic song ever to move more than 4 million units in the United States. He continues to clean up on the road, taking home six-figure sums every time he spins at a club, which he did 80 times during our scoring period alone (watch the official video additional E.T.P. 4.32').

Fulll E.T.P.: 3-6'