Expecting Rain

Don't know where it came from, but this was on WT yesterday:
(sorry they're so small - it keeps rejecting the picture if I try to post it larger)

This one's gonna be great, I'd love to go and see them.

The gourmand tasting his own blood is The Sheik, star of the wrestling film I Like To Hurt People - http://youtu.be/DCEMqPcH394

The glam rocker on the cover of Rolling Stone is wrestler/singer Exotic Adrian Street. Here he is singing "I'm in Love with Me" - http://youtu.be/c8A3ZUMK74s

thanks for coming to the rescue as always Scott

that Adrian proves what i always said, there are stockings, beautiful stockings in bob's past.


Ev'rybody wants some.
Baby, how 'bout you?
I like the way the line runs up the back of the stockings.
I've always liked those kind of high heels too. You know, I...
No no no no, don't take 'em off, don't take... Leave 'em on, leave 'em on.
Yeah, that's it, a little more to the right, a little more....

You can make your own these days. Online. Cheap! Just upload the image!

what's WT? I want to download these images individually.

Thanks for the tip. I'm going to be the king of the campus.

The All Along The Watchtower forum, Troub - on that site, this is HUGE!!

which thread? on every thread i open all i can find is a fight between an AWT member and an ex ER member.

they don't have the best organization.

I'm captain kidd over there btw.

I didn't know that, captain kidd!! It's on the "Drawn Blank" thread - here: http://www.allalongthewatchtower.dk/pho ... 16,page=11

(Know what you mean - sometimes I just read the posts to realize how much I like ER - if it wasn't for the fact that BB is on there, I wouldn't really enjoy that forum.)

There's something very funny in all of this. It's not the humour of the pieces themselves, which is off-the-shelf irony of the sort utterly prevalent in today's culture, and not an especially inspired manifestation of it (although very much of a piece with Bob's smirking mid-60s persona). I think this exhibit really works as a 'the-joke's-on-you' exercise, whereby Bob is - intentionally or not - revealing the sheer ludicrousness of a celebrity culture in which his noodlings with photoshop can get to be exhibited in a gallery, complete with all the trappings of fine art; and in doing this, further thumbing his nose at all the critics who dumped on his earlier artistic forays (in effect, 'here's what I think of you'). The whole thing is preposterous, and the conceptual art is in the very existence of this exhibit in the first place.

The more things change...

now Lone Pilgrim - as i said before here about this all - this discussions of ours itself is part of the artistic pop-art of this exhibit,

so i see you are also saying that the whole thing is a Wind Up as they say in England?--

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wind-up

sorta like how whatsittoya found out LARS was sung first very memorably by Mamie huh!!!



viewtopic.php?f=6&t=73369&p=1287018#p1287018

that would mean bob has been putting one over everyone in lots of ways for a long time!!

but Lone Pilgrim, you think these are not serious?

you do think they aren't 'efforted' so much as 'grifted'?

but then - before i heard your idea of 'total Wind Up' - i had a vision of my old neighborhood of LA and Mulholland Drive,

and i suddenly thought -- yea, these really are for those dealers' wives as he sung in Tangled lately -

i could really see these things being driven up on top of the Cayenne (heh heh Beavis) and placed in the Foyer of the modern house on the cliff

these things are soooo LA arrogant, like Hockney doing a Warhol fetish kit. Poolside baby!

NOW the circularity of WHERE the joke starts is the the real art piece - who's zooming who. Bob is so cheap and deep huh.

It is up to every Bob Fan and Collector in his own Mind to Decide where the joke lies - and EUREKA, when he does Question that -THAT'S THE ART - IN the CONCEPT(UAL ART) - and Bob uses the Wind Up as you say, Lone Pilgrim, as the MEANS, the METHOD to achieve the EUREKA moment Bob is working for. Uh, like - how does it feel.

We have never left Hibbing is all I ever said. --Sign us all, -- Brillo Pad Boxes piled in the corner.

http://www.google.com/search?q=brillo+w ... 76&bih=684

with this kind of talk we are looking at a substantial show

Professional wrestler Exotic Adrian Street, the subject of one of Dylan's new paintings, is also a main focus of the Jeremy Deller retrospective Joy In People, curated by Ralph Rugoff. The original installation, called The Life & Times of Adrian Street, included a video documentary and several large murals depicting Street - check one out here - http://styleandthensome.wordpress.com/2 ... da-nylind/

The retrospective is showing in Philadelphia until the end of the month; it goes to St. Louis in January.

Jeremy Deller also has a smaller one-man show going on right now in New York City at Gavin Brown's Enterprise. Here's a description from New York Magazine, "Known for his epic reenactments of sociological events, Deller presents intriguing text-based silk-screens as well as three long videos. The highlight: a half-hour mini-biography of seventysomething Welsh cross-dressing wrestler Adrian Street."

It seems the combination of Adrian Street and silk-screens with intriguing text are all the rage in the New York art world at the moment.

Joy In People curator Ralph Rugoff should be familiar to Dylan fans for creating the imaginary outlaw artist Robyn Whitlaw, someone Dylan claims to have met in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One. Rugoff's essay on Whitlaw appears in his book Circus Americanus, which happens to feature a professional wrestler on the cover.


Here's video of Rugoff and Deller talking about Joy In People. It includes a clip of one of the Adrian Street murals: http://youtu.be/HKZz-AeEWqU

I think it is also valuable to consider Dylan's The Asia Series in the context of contemporaries who also use photographs as the basis for paintings. Ralph Rugoff lays out the playing field in this video while describing an exhibition he curated called The Painting of Modern Life, a show where all of the paintings are based on photographs. He says, "I think for anyone who is interested in contemporary painting this is a crucial show to see because this development, this use by artists of photographic materials and the way they translate and reinvent the photograph, has really been one of the most important developments in painting over the past half-century." http://youtu.be/zr2WMYrXrB4

Be nice to connect this thread to the Like A Sharon Stone thread where whatsittoyou and the_revelator have done some research into the possible sources of the Sharon Stone silk screen.

Someone posted a photo showing a view of the show from just outside the gallery doors. Dylan's painting based on the Life cover featuring the gold woman from Goldfinger can be seen
http://s230.beta.photobucket.com/user/g ... 7859147767

Here's the original Life cover:

bobschool, I'm not sure if I quite see where you're going, but I think it's spot-on to say that the circularity to the whole thing - whereby the total effect of the work of 'art' encompasses the response to that art, including this thread, as absolutely integral to the concept. But I don't pretend to know whether that was part of Bob's intention. He may have thought that these pieces were clever as stand-alone works, in which case he is simply a mediocre-to-bad visual artist. What I'm saying is that the effect of these pieces is such as to render absurd the cultures of both celebrity and fine art. And that's a cool effect.

I also think there's a basic difference between Dylan-the-visual-artist and Dylan the singer-songwriter. The latter is certainly a magpie taking whatever he wants from found elements and transmuting them into something amazing. I don't see this as a 'wind up' - it would only be taken that way if we have a childish notion of 'originality' as the hallmark of art, a delusion from which Bob clearly does not suffer. Bob may be doing the same kind of thing as a visual artist, but there is absolutely no danger of his visual art rising to the level of his musical work. Otherwise put, if this artist's name was Joe Blow instead of Bob Dylan, nobody would give a rip about it.

That was most likely true for his previous exhibitions. But now he, who cannot ever be not-Dylan in the public eye, uses his Dylan-ness as part of the artwork. Unlike the paintings, these are very dylanesque works, and they also are a mirror of the real values that rule this time and culture.

Harvard girls... my leg!

This guy has been to the show.

http://www.cinchreview.com/revisionist- ... york/8845/

Hopefully, he's using the name "Bob Dylan" in the same way he's using "Sharon Stone".

that's a great article

Milky's right - thanks for posting the link, Raging - very interesting.

The name Bob Dylan helps to get galleries interested in the works and it helps to get them exhibited but it keeps many people from taking the works seriously.

If the "Revisionist " works had been done by young Joe Blow, fresh out of art school they would be taken far more seriously and they would be celebrated for their "fresh conceptual approach", "clever critique of mass media and celebrity culture", "juxtaposition of the mainstream and underground phenomena", "absurdist take on news media", "retro chic" and "vibrant color schemes". I work in art and design, I have seen it happen again and again and again.