The New York Times is running a review of the Whitney’s Summer of Love exhibit. I had considered a jaunt down to New York, partly to see old friends, partly to check out the new antiquities wing at the Met, and partly to remind myself why I live in California. Two days ago, I decided that I wouldn’t– but the lead image from the article almost makes me reconsider:
Issue 16, the wonderful & unbelievable OZ Presents the Magic Theatre, was designed and executed by Sharp alone. It stands as the best artefact of the whole psychedelic period. The visual and narrative complexity are astonishing. Also indescribable. It’s better to just go read it yourself. In fact, you can read the vast majority of issues of OZ here.
Look for the Lucifer ads, amongst other period hilarities.
Although I don’t think it’s mentioned in either of the two books (or are there three?) on the film, Sharp was clearly hired by Donald Cammell to do some, if not all, set design on Performance. Turner’s living room/performance space and Noel/Chaz’s basement flat both contain vintage Sharp, including a funny adaptation of the cover of OZ #15:
Got around to screencapturing some of Performance. See this post for more background.
Here are the significant appearances of Martin Sharp’s artwork within the film. The first image contains a reworking of Sharp’s famous Bob Dylan poster. The last three are of the reworking of OZ #15’s cover, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the other images have direct antecedents as well. The last capture is the only place where we learn the name of Turner’s band. Turner’s Purple Orchestra. Well, yes. It was, after all, the sixties.
P.S. Buy the DVD! Ignore the hideous box art!
Hey, many days of no updates; a combination of Hard Living and finishing projects has made my blog time non-existent. ANYWAY, I’d like to point everyone to this fine post on Will Kane’s blog, discussing the art of Guy Peellaert.
I’d never heard of Peellaert, which is fascinating, as the images from The Adventures of Jodell appear to be stolen directly from my mind by a malicious djinn. This really is what goes on in my head. Reading down further, one will see images of another Peellaert strip, Pravda. Something clicked and I realized that I had seen one of the images before– in the set design for 1970’s Performance.
Here’s Peellaert’s image:
And if you look to the center, here’s the same image in Turner’s basement, behind a gigantic head of Mick Jagger:
As I’ve mentioned, much of the set design for Performance was clearly the work of Martin Sharp of OZ fame and contains some of the more famous Sharp/OZ images, including a modified version of the Jagger cover from #15, and a heavily stylized version of Sharp’s famous Dylan poster. Seeing Peellaert’s comics, one retroactively detects his very obvious influence over Sharp.
Digging around the Internet, I discovered that Sharp + Co have begun selling artwork from the OZ days. While I believe that Sharp is the great unsung artist of the 1960s, and I can only applaud his decision to make this stuff available, it’s kind of depressing to see the wildly exorbitant prices of his prints. Who in god’s name wants a $299(AU) poster of the cover to OZ #16, Oz Proudly Presents the Magic Theatre?
You know, other than me.
I didn’t even know these pictures existed– I found them accidentally while digging through the external hard drive, hunting down weird crap from ages gone by. I’m not sure why their quality is so atrocious.
They are from a performance of a canto in Dante’s Paradiso. It was for a class at NYU. I had talked Sam Tregar, author of the rivetingly titled Writing Perl Modules for CPAN, into helping. Sam was supposed to wear a goofy white mask and scream through a megaphone, but earlier in the day, we were walking around Gramercy Park and there in the trash was a homemade hat. Attached to its top was a placard reading KOSHER 4 EASTER. Sam, a Reform Jew with nothing but hatred towards the Jews For Jesus contingent, fell in love. I think we took it to my apartment and disinfected it with Lysol.
I’m in the second picture wearing an ape mask and playing the banjo. I had bought the banjo a year before on eBay for about $99. What kind of banjo do you get for $99? One that will never, ever, ever stay in tune. So I stuck a pickup inside and ran it through a fuzzbox pedal and then through a deathmetal pedal. This was all connected to a big amp. The only sour aspect of this whole performance was that the amp never got turned up loud enough.
The next year, I took another class with the same professor and we read The Decameron. Again a performance was a required assignment. Sam helped out with that one, too– he wore his wife’s viking halloween costume and played bass through a broken effects board. This time we made sure the amp was deafening. Sam let me borrow a big lobster pot which I wore on my head. I bought an aluminum garbage can and made a breast plate of its lid and spent the whole performance alternately bashing my chest or the can with a hammer while screaming about The Sea. Through a distortion pedal. By the end, the can was about half its original size, and I believe that I had bruised my chest somewhat seriously. A big highlight of this particular nightmare was the special guest appearance of Kaia Wong of the awesome band Mixel Pixel, who had a boss electric violin that looked like a Romulan warship. She was also wearing many, many mirrors tied to her body. She played the fiddle part to that terrible song “Cotton-Eyed Joe” and I think had a death metal pedal.
Sadly, no pictures of this exist, but I swear it happened.
