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Tuesday, October 1st, 2024
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | Revisit Episodes of Liquid Television, MTV’s 90s Showcase of Funny, Irreverent & Bizarre Animation
MTV stands for Music Television, and when the network launched in 1981, its almost entirely music video-based programming was true to its name. Within a decade, however, its mandate had widened to the point that it had become the natural home for practically any exciting development in American youth culture. And for many MTV viewers in the early nineteen-nineties, youthful or otherwise, nothing was quite so exciting as Liquid Television, whose every broadcast constituted a veritable festival of animation that pushed the medium’s boundaries of possibility — as well, every so often, as its boundaries of taste. Liquid Television’s original three-season run began in the summer of 1991 and ended in early 1995. All throughout, its format remained consistent, rounding up ten or so shorts, each created by different artists. Their themes could vary wildly, and so could their aesthetics: any given broadcast might contain more or less conventional-looking cartoons, but also stickmen, puppets, early computer graphics, subverted nineteen-fifties imagery (that mainstay of the Gen‑X sensibility), Japanese anime, and even live action, as in the recurring drag-show sitcom “Art School Girls of Doom” or the multi-part adaptation of Charles Burns’ Dogboy.
Burns’ is hardly the the only name associated with Liquid Television that comics and animation fans will recognize. Others who gained exposure through it include Bill Plympton, John R. Dilworth, Richard Sala, and Mike Judge, whose series Beavis and Butthead and feature film Office Space both began as shorts seen on Liquid Television.
But no discussion of the show can exclude Peter Chung’s futuristic, quasi-mystical, dialogue-free Æon Flux, whose eponymous acrobatic assassin became a cultural phenomenon unto herself. The Æon Flux episodes have been cut out of this 22-video Liquid Television playlist, but you can also find a collection of uncut broadcasts at the Internet Archive.
The Tongal video above credits the show’s influence to the insight of the show’s creator Japhet Asher, who saw that “the attention span of your average TV viewer, particularly young people, was getting shorter and shorter.” Hence Liquid Television’s model: “If you didn’t like the current short, another one, which would be totally different, would be along in a few minutes. Furthermore, if a segment was so inexplicably bizarre and brain-tickling, perhaps an even more compelling one would come next.” At the time, this would have been taken by some observers — much like MTV itself — as a disturbing reflection of an addled, over-stimulated younger generation. But with Youtube still about a decade and a half away, it’s fair to say they hadn’t seen anything yet. Related content: Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast (August 1, 1981) All the Music Played on MTV’s 120 Minutes: A 2,500-Video Youtube Playlist When a Young Sofia Coppola & Zoe Cassavetes Made Their Own TV Show: Revisit Hi-Octane (1994) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. |
| 9:00a | How Henri Matisse Scandalized the Art Establishment with His Daring Use of Color
Even those of us not particularly well-versed in art history have heard of a painting style called fauvism — and probably have never considered what it has to do with fauve, the French word for a wild beast. In fact, the two have everything to do with one another, at least in the sense of how certain critics regarded certain artists in the early twentieth century. One of the most notable of those artists was Henri Matisse, who since the end of the nineteenth century had been exploring the possibilities of his decision to “lean into the dramatic power of color,” as Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak puts it in the new video above. It was Matisse’s unconventional use of color, emotionally powerful but not strictly realistic, that eventually got him labeled a wild beast. Even before that, in his famous 1904 Luxe, Calme et Volupté, which has its origins in a stay in St. Tropez, you can “feel Matisse forging his own path. His colors are rebelling against their subjects. The painting is anarchic, fantastical. It’s pulsing with wild energy.” He continued this work on a trip to the southern fishing village of Collioure, “and even after more than a century, the paintings that resulted “still retain their defiant power; the colors still sing with the daring, the creative recklessness of that summer.” In essence, what shocked about Matisse and the other fauvists’ art was its substitution of objectivity with subjectivity, most noticeably in its colors, but in subtler elements as well. As the years went on — with support coming from not the establishment but far-sighted collectors — Matisse “learned how to use color to define form itself,” creating paintings that “expressed deep, primal feelings and rhythms.” This evolution culminated in La Danse, whose “shocking scarlet” used to render “naked, dancing, leaping, spinning figures who are less like people than mythological satyrs” drew harsher opprobrium than anything he’d shown before. But then, “you can’t expect the instantaneous acceptance of something radically new. If it was accepted, it wouldn’t be radical.” Today, “knowing the directions that modern art went in, we now can appreciate the full significance of Matisse’s work. We can be shocked at it without being scandalized.” And we can recognize that he discovered a universally resonant aesthetic that most of his contemporaries didn’t understand — or at least it seems that way to me, more than a century later and on the other side of the world, where his art now enjoys such a wide appeal that it adorns the iced-coffee bottles at convenience stores. Related content: Henri Matisse Illustrates Baudelaire’s Censored Poetry Collection, Les Fleurs du Mal Hear Gertrude Stein Read Works Inspired by Matisse, Picasso, and T.S. Eliot (1934) Henri Matisse Illustrates James Joyce’s Ulysses (1935) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. |
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