1966: Muttering Small Talk at the Wall

voted warhol because pittsburgh

(tbh it's silly the museum is there -- he obviously left as soon as he possibly could -- but i guess it stands out more there than it would in nyc)

hope that's ok with matt

i don't give a fuck about you either, just to be clear.

cool thx

not wishing i would die = compliment

Christ that Dylan screen test is brilliant. I do think this is kind of an oddly-grouped trio but of the three, Warhol, because I think Warhol gets the other two in ways they don't really get him.

lonely Warhol thinking baout Dylan & Godard

http://www.bohemia-apartments.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/warhol4.jpg

I don't believe that any of the 3 listed above were the most important people in the world at any point in 1966, but Dylan means a lot more to me than the other 2. But at a very general level I'm more into music than art or film, and I could probably name half a dozen musicians who were active in '66 that I'd take over those 2.

o. tm

Clearly the most important people in the world in 1966 were Sun Ra, Julie Andrews and Sandy Koufax.

i wonder how many ppl are really entranced by any of warhol's visual art nowadays. the electric chair prints are pretty striking and scary, but i can't say i get that much out of most of his work anymore. i think he's the only artist i've ever liekd whose work wasn't enhanced in any real way by seeing it in person.

wouldn't that delight him tho

wow

Warhol's art still looks impressive in person. He's definitely important if only for the fact that the screenprint punk style has completely permeated western culture, showing up on everything from DIY band flyers to TV motion graphics. If his pieces don't have the impact they once did it's because his aesthetic has saturated our culture.

And his "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" axiom keeps getting more and more true as time goes on. Youtube confessionals, reality TV, blogging, etc. There are behaviors and art actions prototyped in the Factory that are now standard daily operating procedure for anybody with a cell phone.

otm, I think he had a very keen sense of the general trends

Of the three, Dylan's work easily means the most to me. And I do love work from Warhol and Godard in and around this time. But what Dylan did in '65 and '66 stands apart from everything for me--from everything else that he did, and from everything anybody else did. He's even separated himself from Neil Young the past year or so. I have a mix-CD of maybe 15 songs from those two years (plus a couple from The Basement Tapes tacked on at the end) that I play constantly in the car.

But I think Adam has it right too. If I use who I enjoy talking to my students about the most as a measure, I'm able to connect Warhol to the world they know in a way that's much more difficult with Dylan. (Godard seems somewhere in between in that regard--his influence, while maybe not as pronounced as Warhol's, is also everywhere to be seen, and I love showing clips from his work.) There's so much there, in his work and in his life. Even when you look at the screen test above: what's there is Dylan's, but it exists because of Warhol.

If my grade 6 teacher had shown clips from Godard films in class, I would have liked grade 6 a lot more.

by complete chance i went to a warhol exhibit today that consisted largely of polaroids he'd taken at parties in the '70s, mostly of anonymous ppl doing movie-star poses. it was actually kinda sweet.

(xpost) Plus you get mind games, lectures, and moodiness as a bonus.

I saw the Warhol exhibit that David Cronenberg put together here a few years ago. They ran a lot of films concurrently at the Cinematheque--Chelsea Girls in a jam-packed theatre was an experience.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I'm more interested in music than in pop art or new wave cinema, so Dylan would seem to be the logical choice. But as far as '66 recordings goes, nobody means more to me than Cecil Taylor, and since the cover of Unit Structures owed a lot to Warhol, he gets the instinctive vote.

Also, I like VU+Nico as much as "Blonde on Blonde" and that one was recorded in '66 too.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I was glad to read the other day that women are still writing books and making films. There was some concern that this thread was going to bring that to a close forever--it was touch-and-go there for a while.

The Lightbox has a three-part Warhol program running this fall and winter: his films, Liz and Marilyn films, and an exhibition of various artifacts. I'm most looking forward to 80 minutes of the screen tests. Also ordered for The Chelsea Girls (which I saw once and found more memorable than boring), Kitchen, Poor Little Rich Girl, Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of, Lonesome Cowboys, The Nude Restaurant, Bike Boy, and Mrs. Warhol.

so just for fun i looked up 1966 in film and found that (via wikipedia):

(1) dino de laurentiis and john huston's the bible: in the beginning was the top grossing film in the US;

(2) fred zinnemann's a man for all seasons won an academy award for best picture.

(3) no notable mention of jean-luc godard. but maybe his style was too refined for us north americans.

i like a couple of his films. but generally, i find his films to be too stylised/too artsy and lack substance.

i did the same for music. though the biggest hit singles in the US were dominated by the beatles and the beach boys, bob released one of his greatest albums of all time, blonde on blonde. cool. i dig this album.

i don't care about art from 1966 and couldn't find anything of interest. that makes sense because if warhol was allegedly the most dominating figure of that time, it's no coincidence a lot of artists were moving towards that style. that is to say, garbage.

bob wins.

i'd rate jack kirby's art in fantastic four way 48-51 ahead of any pop art i've seen

^^ "way" should be after "48-51"

and i mean these are all artists i like but god. no nutritional value left. plowing the same narrow field again and again.

― e-bouquet (mattresslessness), Friday, June 12, 2015 4:13 AM (7 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM, stupid thread... actually I have no interest in Dylan at all... why am I here? To say that Godard wins this particular poll easily.

Really, really stupid.

Saw the Screen Tests tonight. Not a film...seemed to be two separate compilations of about 40 minutes each. The most disappointing omission by far was Dylan's. I guess he intervened and made sure he wasn't included, although you can easily see his on YouTube. Dali's was missing, and I thought Dennis Hopper had done one too.

Extremely unnerving to sit in a theatre--especially a small one, with maybe 30 people in attendance--in absolute, total silence. (I've never seen a silent film that didn't have a score.) I had three friends on either side of me, and people directly in front; about 20% of my attention was hoping that my stomach didn't start to rumble, or that I didn't start coughing, or not to shift too loudly in my seat. It's the first time in my life I wanted people to make a little bit of noise.

I thought the screen tests were great. Sontag's was my favourite, Ed Hood's was the most audacious, and Taylor Mead once again cracked me up. The one with Gerard Malanga and another guy I didn't recognize, I'm curious as to whether that was shot before or after Persona (same year, probably). There are so many ways you could approach these. Mostly I thought of the stillness and the quiet in the middle of everything else that was going on at the time.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to say this, but I meant to add that the screen tests would make a great double-bill (Warhol playing first) with The Passion of Joan of Arc.