Emvergeoning

Some enterprising movie nerds have traced the history of a stock scream sound effect now known as the “Wilhelm Scream” (the original title in the Warner sound effects archives was “Man Being Eaten by Alligator”). The sound effect has been used in over 75 movies, including all the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies, as well as a number of TV shows and even video games.

This is an interesting counterpoint to a performance by Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh at UTSA last spring, which paired movie sound effects with their titles from the stock sound effect catalogs. Kubick and Walsh built collections of comparable sounds such as various recordings of ringing bells or galloping horses and created a program that projected the name of each sound effect as it was being played, showing the huge variety of linguistic associations that can be made with very similar sounds.

(via The Plank)

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(The community gives him a saucy welcome.)

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Bruce Nauman, Walking in an Exagerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68)

Monty Python, The Ministry of Silly Walks (1970)

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That’s still another thing about the Correspondence School, it’s not just the letters, the postcards, the drawings, the poems, it’s also the New York Correspondence School objects. The Spam radio, for example, was a radio in the shape of a Spam can, which had a little handle on it, it was a thing the Spam Corporation made one year as an advertising gimmick. It was something they gave to people, and you could go to the beach with your Spam radio, and play your radio on the beach, it was a little radio inside of a Spam can, and I didn’t really treasure it very much so I gave it to Jim Bohn.

…

But to get back to that radio, I gave it to Jim Bohn — which is BOHN and not BONE — and the following week he was in Soho walking around with his wife and carrying the Spam radio as a kind of prize trophy. He was taking it out for a walk, and the minute I saw him with it I realized that he had given it some kind of notoriety and importance, and I was intensely jealous that he was walking around with the Spam radio and that I hadn’t thought of walking around with a Spam radio, like the time I had once walked around with the head of Candy Darling in a plastic bag. So still another week later, I was in Soho again and went to the supermarket and bought a real can of Spam and put a little handle on it, and then I was walking around with that.

— Ray Johnson

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exhibit a : Audio from Karen Mahaffy describing the execution.

exhibit b :

(photos copyright Justin Parr 2008)

INTRODUCING NEW EVIDENCE:

exhibit c : futureWorkerGirl reflects on artist as murderer, victim, pimp and ho.

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As many of you know, San Antonio sculptor / performer Jimmy Kuehnle has been in Japan since August working on a Fulbright project. He recently posted photos of his first two exhibits, at the Kyoto Museum (Artjam 2007) and the Aichi Geidai Gallery in the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music. Continuing a body of work he started in San Antonio, Kuehnle fabricated huge, inflatable sculptures, which also served as interactive / performance pieces.

Mr. Bubble Head, which Kuehnle made for Artjam, is a huge orange inflatable sculpture with ropes criss-crossing inside. Kuehnle spend much of the opening inside the sculpture tugging on the ropes as people walked by, creating an impression of organic response to the viewers’ presence. Museum visitors were also allowed inside the sculpture at various points, turning it into an interactive sculpture.

His piece at the Aichi Geidai Gallery, called Big Blob, was another inflatable sculpture made of the same orange material. This piece, however, was a suit which Kuehnle could walk around in “like a large leviathan.” After his performance in this enormous suit, Kuehnle invited audience members to try it on — but it seems a bit more unwieldy than those ridiculous sumo suits.

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Since UTSA art professor Ken Little is doing a performance of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece tonight, I thought I’d link back to a post I wrote about the piece in the early days of Emvergeoning (the seventh post!). It is a four part response to a video of Ono performing the piece at Carnegie Hall.

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Why does this picture remind me of walking around Lora Reynolds Gallery in the construction-condo zone of downtown Austin? A recent lecture by Conrad Bakker proved once again that despite its location, Lora Reynolds always exhibits unusual and intriguing artists.
In other news, behold the best zombie portraiture ever taken by one prolific Jillian McDonald. She makes me love America, oh wait, she’s Canadian. Seems like an apropos photo for the Katrina anniversary. Which reminds me, check out the latest New Yorker cover with a brilliant new work by silhouette connoisseur Kara Walker.

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Everybody has their own story about who won this year, Please post yours in the comments below.

All of these photos (and bunches more with labels) are located here.

click on the link below for more action!

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A lot of you have probably seen this, but it is too funny to pass up. Plus it’s time for a new post, and I have nothing to say. (A post on Alberto Mijangos’ T-shirt series is forthcoming, however…)

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Mr. Bichelbaum hits the Oil Industry with a doozy of a presentation, proposing that the key to fueling the petroleum industry is found in burning human beings. This new magical fuel, called Vivoleum, will solve all of life’s little energy crises. Lots of their website links are broken, maybe because they are under serious Homeland Security surveillance. The Yes Men sure know how to pull the wool, though nothing seems quite as incredible as their DOW chemical acceptable risk calculator stint.

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A subtle and layered performance by one of America’s great performance artists (this is on the early ’80s sketch comedy show, Fridays):

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Puttering around the San Francisco/Bay Area art scene a few years ago, I always enjoyed finding residual artifacts made by the ever elusive Carolyn Ryder Cooley. Her work melts curious, sometimes precarious performances with elaborate costumes and an abundant array of forest fauna drawings. She now lives and works in Albany, NY and recently curated this interesting group show called Vestuary Operatics. An intriguing aspect of this show rests in the local art community’s ability to revive a forgotten architectural gem, in this case, the long abandoned St. Anthony’s church in Albany. Here are a few more examples of Cooley’s carefully crafted scenes:

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I sifted through a lot of riff raff to find this amazing example of Chinese Opera. The sui generis sounds of drums and gongs found in Chinese theatre have to be some of my favorite all time auditory delights. Watch out for the treble on this one though.

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Around the same time that Destroy All Monsters started playing around with strange music and film footage, The Residents embarked on their underground film project, Vileness Fats. Although the film was never completed, some of the footage was used for music videos in the coming years. From the official Residents web site:

The world of Vileness Fats, consisting of a village, a cave, a desert and a nightclub, is tiny, claustrophobic and primarily populated by one armed midgets…. Two versions of the incomplete feature have been released: the 32 min long “Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats?” (1984) and the tighter 17 1/2 min “Vileness Fats (Concentrate)” (2001), and both come across as artifacts from some hellish but mildly amusing nightmare — the claustrophobic product of a model railroad builder’s beyond bad acid trip.

Here is some of the footage, with part of the classic “Third Reich ‘n Roll” (a commentary on the fascism of the music industry) as the soundtrack:

Also check out the Buñuelesque .

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Destroy All Monsters, whose founding members include Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, was a legendary Detroit anti-rock band with almost no recorded output other than a DVD called , and a now out-of-print 3-CD set released on Ecstatic Peace (a few other live recordings have trickled out and are available here). The group’s shows were an abrasive blend of noise, performance art, and visual chaos. Grow Live Monsters includes no-budget Destroy All Monsters film footage from 1971 to 1976. Around 1976 Kelley and Shaw left the group to pursue their visual art careers, and were replaced by Ron Asheton from the Stooges and MC5 bassist Michael Davis. Here’s a clip from the DVD:

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