Eva Aeppli

"Eva Aeppli, born on May 2, 1925 in Zofingen (Switzerland), grew up in Basel with her parents and three siblings. She attended the Steiner School in Basel, which had been co-founded by her father. During the 2nd World War she enrolled in courses at the School of Applied Arts and created her first fabric figures, glove puppets which she sold in various stores. She only commenced her actual artistic oeuvre – she considered the glove puppets her bread-and-butter work – once she was in Paris.After a first marriage to architect Hans Leu, of which her son Felix-Vital was born in 1946, she was soon the partner of Jean Tinguely. She lived with him in the Burghof, a villa scheduled for demolition which was located at the spot where the extension of Basel’s Kunstmuseum is currently taking place. Their daughter Miriam was born in 1950; Aeppli and Tinguely married the year after. 1949 saw the start of Eva Aeppli’s years-long close friendship with Daniel Spoerri, whom Aeppli and Tinguely followed to Paris in 1952. After an initial period in modest hotels they soon moved into a studio in Impasse Ronsin, an artists’ colony in the Quartier Montparnasse, whose doyen was the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi. Here, Eva Aeppli’s oeuvre began with fabric pictures and charcoal drawings, mostly of people, often gaunt figures in gloomy mood.
The subsequent period saw the creation of further groups of heads in fine fabric, which were cast in bronze, Astrologische Aspekte (Astrological Aspects), Die zwölf Sternzeichen (The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac), Einige menschliche Schwächen (Some Human Weaknesses), and a number of others. These are heads whose physiognomies record deeply felt emotions. Despite her reclusiveness, exhibition makers recognized the intensity and quality of her oeuvre and organized major retrospectives: in 1993 the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Pontus Hultén in 1994 at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, André Kamber in the same year at Kunstmuseum Solothurn.
A final group of works was created in 1990 and 1991: these are sculptures that she created jointly with Jean Tinguely, morbid figures such as the Hommage à Käthe Kollwitz (Kunstmuseum Solothurn) or Erika (private collection). These sculptures were on show at Basel’s Galerie Littmann and were central components of the subsequent retrospectives. Eva Aeppli collaborated with other artists, too, such as Jean-Pierre Raynaud or Daniel Spoerri.."(.tinguely.ch/en/)

Nam June Paik - Visual artist and video art

Nam June Paik ( July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with an early usage (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" in application to telecommunications.Born in Seoul in 1932, the youngest of five siblings, Paik had two older brothers and two older sisters. His father (who in 2002 was revealed to be a Chinilpa) owned a major textile manufacturing firm. As he was growing up, he was trained as a classical pianist. In 1950, Paik and his family had to flee from their home in Korea, during the Korean War. His family first fled to Hong Kong, but later moved to Japan. Six years later he graduated from the University of Tokyo where he wrote a thesis on the composer Arnold Schoenberg.
Paik then moved to West Germany to study music history with composer Thrasybulos Georgiades at Munich University. While studying in Germany, Paik met the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and the conceptual artists George Maciunas, Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell and was from 1962 on, a member of Fluxus.

In 1964, Paik moved to New York, and began working with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman, to combine his video, music, and performance. In the work TV Cello, the pair stacked televisions on top of one another, so that they formed the shape of an actual cello. When Moorman drew her bow across the "cello," images of her and other cellists playing appeared on the screens.
In 1965, Sony introduced the Portapak. With this, Paik could both move and record things, for it was the first portable video and audio recorder. From there, Paik became an international celebrity, known for his creative and entertaining works.
In a notorious 1967 incident, Moorman was arrested for going topless while performing in Paik’s Opera Sextronique. Two years later, in 1969, they performed TV Bra for Living Sculpture, in which Moorman wore a bra with small TV screens over her breasts. Throughout this period it was his goal to bring music up to speed with art and literature, and make sex an acceptable theme. One of his Fluxus concept works ("Playable Pieces") instructs the performer to "climb inside the vagina of a live female whale." Of the "Playable Pieces," the only one actually to have been performed was by Fluxus composer Joseph Byrd ("Cut your left forearm a distance of ten centimeters.") in 1964 at UCLA's New Music Workshop.

 

In 1971, he made a cello out of three television sets stacked up on top of each other and some cello strings. He got a famous cellist to play the "cello" as well.
In 1974 Nam June Paik used the term "super highway" in application to telecommunications, which gave rise to the opinion that he may have been the author of the phrase "Information Superhighway". In fact, in his 1974 proposal "Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society – The 21st Century is now only 26 years away" to the Rockefeller Foundation he used a slightly different phrase, "electronic super highway":"The building of new electronic super highways will become an even huger enterprise. Assuming we connect New York with Los Angeles by means of an electronic telecommunication network that operates in strong transmission ranges, as well as with continental satellites, wave guides, bundled coaxial cable, and later also via laser beam fiber optics: the expenditure would be about the same as for a Moon landing, except that the benefits in term of by-products would be greater."

Also in the 1970s, Paik imagined a global community of viewers for what he called a Video Common Market which would disseminate videos freely. In 1978, Paik collaborated with Dimitri Devyatkin to produce a light hearted comparison of life in two major cities, Media Shuttle: New York-Moscow on WNET.The video is held in museum collections around the world.
In another work, Something Pacific (1986), a statue of a sitting Buddha faces its image on a closed circuit television. (The piece is part of the Stuart Collection of public art at the University of California, San Diego.) Another piece, Positive Egg, displays a white egg on a black background. In a series of video monitors, increasing in size, the image on the screen becomes larger and larger, until the egg itself becomes an abstract, unrecognizable shape. In Video Fish, from 1975, a series of aquariums arranged in a horizontal line contain live fish swimming in front of an equal number of monitors which show video images of other fish.
Paik’s 1995 piece Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, on permanent display at the Lincoln Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is a stunning example of his cultural criticism. With this piece, Paik offers up his commentary about an American culture obsessed with television, the moving image, and bright shiny things.Paik was known for making robots out of television sets. These were constructed using pieces of wire and metal, but later Paik used parts from radio and television sets

During the New Year's Day celebration on January 1, 1984, he aired Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a live link between WNET New York, Centre Pompidou Paris, and South Korea. With the participation of John Cage, Salvador Dalí, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Merce Cunningham, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, George Plimpton, and other artists, Paik showed that George Orwell's Big Brother had not arrived. In 1986, Paik created the work Bye Bye Kipling, a tape that mixed live events from Seoul, South Korea; Tokyo, Japan; and New York, USA. Two years later, in 1988 he further showed his love for his home with a piece called The more the better, a giant tower made entirely of 1003 monitors for the Olympic Games being held at Seoul. Despite his stroke, in 2000, he created a millennium satellite broadcast entitled Tiger is Alive and in 2004 designed the installation of monitors and video projections Global Groove 2004 for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.Wikipedia

Performance art - avant garde designer Leigh Bowery

Leigh Bowery (26 March 1961 – 31 December 1994) was a London-based performance artist, club promoter, and designer. He was also a significant model for the English painter, Lucian Freud. Bowery was born 26 March 1961 in Sunshine, Australia, a suburb of Melbourne. He studied music, played piano, and in Melbourne he studied fashion and desig.In Australia, he began to feel that he didn't fit well with his conservative surroundings, and became interested in London and the New Romantic club scene while reading British fashion magazines. Bowery then moved to London, where he worked in a clothing shop, did some commercials for Pepe jeans, and created promos for musical artists, including a promo for David Bowie's "Ashes To Ashes" video. He soon became an influential and lively figure in the underground clubs of London and New York, as well as in art and fashion circles. He attracted attention by wearing wildly outlandish and creative outfits of his own making. He became friends and roommates with two others, Guy Barnes (known as "Trojan") and David Walls. Bowery created costumes for them to wear, and this trio became known in the clubs as the "Three Kings.

 He was known as a club promoter, and created the club called "Taboo", which began as an underground party, and then opened as a club in 1985. Taboo soon became "the place to be" with long queues for those waiting to get in. Drugs, particularly ecstasy, became a part of the dancing scene for the attendees. Taboo was known for defying sexual convention, for embracing "polysexualism", for its wild atmosphere, and for its sometimes unexpected song selections.As a fashion designer he had several collections and shows in London, New York and Tokyo. He has influenced designers and artists. He was known for wildly creative costumes, makeup, wigs and headgear, all of which combined to be striking and inventive and often kitschy or beautiful.
He also designed costumes for the Michael Clark Dance Company. When that company performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1987, Bowery won a Bessie Award for his work on "No Fire Escape in Hell" Wikipedia

 Art & Fashion