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Tuesday, September 17th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | Art Trips: Visit the Art of Cities Around the World, from Los Angeles & London, to Venice and New York
When first we visit a city, even a small one, we can't hope to see all of it. Hence the need for strategies of approach and exploration: do we walk its main streets? Eat its food and drink its drinks? Visit its most beloved bookstores? Sarah Urist Green gets into cities through their art, hardly a surprising habit for the creator of the PBS Digital Studios series The Art Assignment. We first featured The Art Assignment five years ago here on Open Culture, and Green and her collaborators have kept up the good work ever since. In that time their mission of "traveling around the country, visiting artists and asking them to give you an art assignment" has expanded, taking them outside America as well. On the road they've collected not just material for regular episodes, but for special Art Trips as well.
Their first Art Trip to Los Angeles, for instance, takes Green and company to the Hammer Museum, the galleries of Culver City (one of which has a show up of Andy Warhol's shadow paintings), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (where they walk under Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass and through Chris Burden's much-Instagrammed Urban Light), and the then-newly-opened Broad Art Museum. In between they take side trips for refreshment at the noted ice cream sandwich shop Coolhaus (named in honor of the Dutch architect) and deep into the Inland Empire city of Bakersfield. This combination of places expected and unexpected comes not without the occasional tourist cliche, such as Green's description of "the most quintessential of Los Angeles experiences: driving." The Art Assigment's return visit to the southern Californian metropolis focuses on "the Los Angeles hiding in plain sight" with Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a series of exhibitions all over the city on Latino and Latina artists at institutions like the Craft and Folk Art Museum, the Los Angeles Central Library, and the Geffen Contemporary. All the while Green and her team eat plenty of tacos, as any Angeleno would advise, and the final night of their stay finds them in Grand Park among the shrine-like handmade offerings set up for Día de los Muertos, all of them crafted with an eeriness matched only by their good humor.
Los Angeles has become an acknowledged art capital over the past half-century, but London, fair to say, has a bit more history behind it. The Art Assignment's time in the English capital coincides with Frieze Week, when galleries from all over the world descend on Regent's Park to show off their most striking artistic wares. Not coincidentally, the museums and galleries based in the city use the same part of the year to schedule some of their most anticipated shows, turning the few days of this Art Trip in London into a mad rush from Trafalgar Square to the National Portrait Gallery to the Royal Academy of Arts to the Courtauld Institute of Art, by which point Green admits the onset of "masterpiece overload " — but also has several galleries, not to mention the main event of Frieze itself, to go.
Frieze Week doesn't come to Detroit, the onetime capital of American auto manufacturing whose population peaked in the middle of the 20th century and whose subsequent hard times, culminating in the city's 2013 bankruptcy, have been chronicled with both fascination and despair. But The Art Assignment finds a Detroit apart from the ruined factories, theaters, and train stations, the stuff of so many internet slideshows, at the Motown Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts (home to Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals), as well as in folk-art environments like the famous Heidelberg Project and public-art environments like downtown Detroit, whose recent revival has proven as compelling as its long decline. But many ruins remain, and artists like Scott Hocking have found in them not just their subjects but their materials as well.
More striking than Detroit's urban desolation is that of another unlikely The Art Assignment destination, Marfa, Texas. In his essay "The Republic of Marfa," Sean Wilsey describes it as "a hardscrabble ranching community in the upper Chihuahuan desert, sixty miles north of the Mexican border, that inhabits some of the most beautiful and intransigent countryside imaginable." In the mid-1970s "the minimalist artist Donald Judd moved to Marfa, exiling himself from what he termed the 'glib and harsh' New York art scene, in order to live in a sort of high plains laboratory devoted to building, sculpture, furniture design, museology, conservation, and a dash of ranching," and his influence — as well as the presence of his large-scale installations — helped to make Marfa "a sort of city-state of cattlemen, artists, writers, fugitives, smugglers, free-thinkers, environmentalists, soldiers and secessionists."
In Marfa Green explores the monumental work Judd left behind as well as the monumental work other artists have since contributed, including a project in a converted military barracks by neon artist Dan Flavin and a fake Prada store. Other Art Trip destinations include the likes of Chicago and Columbus, Indiana (modern-architecture mecca and setting of the recent feature film by video essayist Kogonada) as well as Tijuana and the Venice Biennale, all of which you can find on one playlist. Green has even done an Art Trip right where she lives, the "bland-leaning, chain restaurant-loving" Midwestern city of Indianapolis — which boasts the Museum of Psychphonics, an under-freeway art installation by Vito Acconci, and a fair few bike-share book-share stations as well. We can never fully know the cities we don't live in, but nor can we ever fully know the cities we do live in either — which, if we nevertheless enjoy the attempt as much as Green does, is no bad thing at all.
Related Content: The Art Assignment: Learn About Art & the Creative Process in a New Web Series by John & Sarah Green Tour the World’s Street Art with Google Street Art Electric Guitars Made from the Detritus of Detroit Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Art Trips: Visit the Art of Cities Around the World, from Los Angeles & London, to Venice and New York is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 2:32p | Learn the Number One Rule of Funk: Bootsy Collins Explains the Importance of “Keeping It on the One”
We all want the funk, but do we even really know what it is? Most every style of music has its distinctive rhythmic properties, from waltzes to samba to the offbeat ska guitar of reggae. But what is it that primarily defines the music of James Brown and other funk greats—music we cannot seem to hear without moving some part of our bodies? If you don’t know the answer, don’t worry—not even the great Bootsy Collins understood the fundamental principle when he first backed the Godfather of Funk in the early 70s. Though funk is purpose-built to make people get loose and has produced some of the freest spirits in popular music, it must be played a certain way, its high practitioners proclaim. No less a master of funk than Prince put it best, as Austin Kleon notes: “Funk is the opposite of magic. Funk is about rules.” Collins learned the number one rule in Brown’s band, the sine qua non of all funk: You’ve got to keep it on the one. In other words, the bass has to hit the first beat of every bar. Hit the one, Collins learned (and teaches us in the short lesson at the top) and you can blast into the wild pyrotechnics that made him famous. Miss the one, and no amount of fancy fretwork is going to impress James Brown, who told him, “you give me the one, you can do all those other things.” (See Collins tell the story in the video clip below.) Brown had an elaborate theory of “the one,” according to his biographer RJ Smith: “The ‘One’ is derived from the Earth itself,” he said, “the soil, the pine trees of my youth. And most important, it’s on the upbeat…. never on lowdownbeat.”
It’s the one, according to Brown, that gives funk its root and its fruit: a seismic, earthy pulse and sexy, uplifting optimism. “I was born to the downbeat, and I can tell you without question there is no pride in it.” Unlike his mentor, Bootsy doesn’t shade the blues when talking about the one. But he does have a message to deliver and it’s this: once you get the “basic funk formula, you can do anything you want to do with it.” Booty’s been bringing the funk since it began and took it places James Brown would never tread in Parliament/Funkadelic. Who better to carry the message to would-be funkateers out there? In order to reach as many as possible, Collins decided to found a school, “Funk U.,” in 2010. Still going strong, the program has featured such guest online lecturers as Flea, Les Claypool, and Victor Wooten. The lessons of Funk U. are about music, he says, but they’re also about something else: about the deep truths he learned from James Brown. “You need the discipline and you also need to know that you can experiment, and you can open up and let your creative juices flow.” All that from the simple rhythmic beauty of keeping it on the one. Related Content: The Neuroscience of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instruments Are Fundamental to Music Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Learn the Number One Rule of Funk: Bootsy Collins Explains the Importance of “Keeping It on the One” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 7:00p | Ric Ocasek and The Cars Perform Live in Concert After Their Groundbreaking Debut Album: Watch the Complete Show (January 13, 1979)
Legendary musician and producer Ric Ocasek passed away on Sunday, and the whole rock world mourns his loss. Greatly respected not only by fans but by fellow musicians (and Stephen Colbert), Ocasek achieved a very rare position in the music business—one almost unheard-of: an international superstar in the 80s with his band The Cars, formed in Boston in the late 70s, he thrived in the era of the video star, at the dawning of the music video age alongside 80s juggernauts like Van Halen, Madonna, and Michael Jackson. Ocasek was also one of the most revered producers in 80s punk and 90s alt-rock, with as much credibility in such circles as producers like Steve Albini and Butch Vig. (His credits include Bad Brain’s Rock for Light, Weezer’s Blue Album and Green Album, and records by Suicide, Hole, Bad Religion, Jonathan Richman, Guided by Voices, etc. etc.) He had a daunting work ethic, but he also had a great deal of humility and an enduring sense of what recorded music does for us. He may have mastered the art of making hit records and slick videos, but as he told Rolling Stone in 1980, “music’s a powerful emotional force” that is, most importantly, “a way to communicate without alienating people, a way to get beyond loneliness. It’s a private thing people can have for themselves any time they want. Just turn on the radio and there it is: a sense of belonging.” That’s what The Cars gave their fans. They created a sense of familiarity, blending synth pop, punk, and New Wave with classic rock and roll moves; five ordinary-looking joes who’d paid their bar band dues. They also sustained an air of alienation and intrigue. Willing to be silly, yet unapproachably cool, with the most weirdly oblique of pop radio hits. “With their debut album in 1978,” writes Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore, “the Cars created one of the rarest phenomena of late-Seventies rock & roll: a pop artifact that unified many factions of a pluralistic rock scene.” “Conservative radio programmers jumped on it because of Ocasek’s consonant pop symmetry and Roy Thomas Baker’s polished, economical production; New Wave partisans favored it for its terse melodicism and ultramodern stance; and critics applauded it for its synthesis of prepunk art-rock influences, including Lou Reed, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Brian Eno.” The band's reputation with critics would suffer with their sophomore album, Candy-O. And what Gilmore called the “technopop” of their third record came to define their sound in the 80s. The Cars in 1978 were raw and edgy, even as their debut album spawned some of their most radio-friendly hit songs, including “Good Times Roll,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Just What I Needed” (the first three tracks on the first record, and some of the biggest songs of their entire seven-album run). See them play the early hits and more at the University of Sussex, Brighton in 1979 in the full concert film above, and let the good times roll. Related Content: The First 10 Videos Played on MTV: Rewind the Videotape to August 1, 1981 Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Ric Ocasek and The Cars Perform Live in Concert After Their Groundbreaking Debut Album: Watch the Complete Show (January 13, 1979) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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