The word “robot” first appeared in a Czech play by Karel Čapek from 1920 called R.U.R., to describe humans made of inferior materials that would function as unthinking and unfeeling slaves. The Czech word “robota” translates to “forced labor.” So began the uneasy...
BUNKER VISION
BUNKER VISION Are We Not Men?
Decades before there was a public internet, people were using the post office and self-published magazines to build communities. An interesting example of this was heterosexual men who liked to cross-dress. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was completely illegal for men to...
BUNKER VISION Surrealism and Fashion
When you talk about utilitarian art, the elephant in the room is always fashion. As fashion houses expand to encompass lifestyle brands, most art with a utilitarian function might fall into the fashion category. It is not uncommon to see museum retrospectives now for...
BUNKER VISION The Power of Lust
If you are addressing power dynamics in your art, a good place to set scenarios in is a military context. There is a built-in component of control in every aspect of martial discipline. What one wears, eats and how one’s time is spent, is all carefully prescribed from...
BUNKER VISION Watching the Hits
Twenty years before MTV aired its first music video, people were making short films of bands and singers performing their hits. The ones from France featured A-list acts and production values. Italy gave us the best film documentation of Screaming Lord Sutch. The...
BUNKER VISION Chaos Access TV
Before the advent of online videos, the only way to take your moving images outside of the underground film and video art context was to get them on television. Chris Burden made commercials, and performance artists infiltrated The Gong Show, but the real hidden...
BUNKER VISION That'll Do, Pig
Between 1971 and 1983 Los Angeles hosted an annual film festival called Filmex. The people behind it went on to found the American Cinematheque. In 1975 they received a submission from Belgium that caused the judges to cringe so hard that they planned to reject it....
Afrofuture Zombies Bunker Vision
One of the very positive effects of MTV and YouTube is the restoration of demand for short films. Early cinema consisted mostly of short films. Auteurs of early cinema managed to pack a lot of plot into films that ran 20 minutes or less. MTV also inspired a lot of...
Ottinger for Anglophones Bunker Vision
One of the things that always made the French New Wave cinema special was that one of the leading figures, Agnes Varda, was a woman. American underground cinema had Maya Deren. But based on what one could find available in the United States with English subtitles, the...
Tableaux Vivants Bunker Vision
Back in the days before television, radio and movies, a popular form of entertainment was the Tableau Vivant. People would pose in costumes alongside elaborate props to reenact historical events, or to mimic paintings and statues. If you have ever encountered the...
The Feel-Good Pandemic Bunker Vision
The first conspiracy theory I got swept up in had to do with a movie that a few of us caught on television in eighth grade. After the summer of 1968, it felt like big changes were afoot. The movie that captured our imaginations was the story of a pandemic that caused...
BOOKS: Forbidden Photos George Platt Lynes' Daring Eye
In 1981 a new photography monograph appeared that seemed like an artifact from a parallel universe. The cover was a studio shot of a nurse flanked by two nude men. Many of the photos in the book depicted nude men in potentially gay scenarios. It had only become legal...
Hungarian Rhapsodies Bunker Vision
Early success in any of the arts comes with a certain peril. This is especially true for artists whose art is rebelling against something like an authoritarian government. Filmmakers tend to require a lot of resources, so they are especially prone to censorship by...
The Digital Mob Bunker Vision
It’s a familiar story these days: somebody is killed in broad daylight in front of witnesses. After the lawyers (and judges) perform their machinations, the killer walks. A new round of comments and editorials appear about how there are two justice systems. The...
René Magritte and the First Art Gang Book Review of "Magritte: A Life"
Magritte: A Life By Alex Danchev 439 pages, illustrated Pantheon Books When an artist achieves the kind of iconic status where they are known outside of the Art World, there can often be a tendency to codify their myth into something that might pass the Elevator Pitch...
TALLY HO! Bunker Vision
A friend who made his name in the world of queer underground theater often quipped that “Film is forever.” When he landed a featured role in a late Paul Morrissey film, he was confident that something he had done would outlast him. That film turned 40 years old last...
Before Bechdel Bunker Vision
If you are interviewing somebody who gets interviewed a lot, and they compliment you on the quality of your questions, you are probably doing something right. This happened on multiple occasions to Delphine Seyrig during her 1981 documentary Be Pretty and Shut Up!...
The Abandoned Sea Bunker Vision
A term that has gained a lot of currency in the past couple of decades is “abandoned.” There are hundreds of social media accounts dedicated to abandoned things. New websites and art books about them keep springing up. Abandoned things from the mid-20th century are...