30 years ago, The Empire Strikes Back premiered and audiences saw what may be the best Star Wars film anyone will ever see. The original Star Wars and the franchise it created changed the business of filmmaking and the experience of moviegoing forever. But did Star Wars subvert the aesthetics of cinema? Did it actually show us something we’d never seen before or just give us an updated hero’s journey tale set in a Wilder West that we were used to? Here’s what Stan Brakhage said about bringing new eyes to cinema…

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word.”

Now here’s Star Wars Wars: All 6 Films At Once, reducing George Lucas’s vision to pure sound, color, movement and iconography…

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I love how the New Year inspires the summing up of the year gone by. What’s the best movie you saw? What’s the best album you heard? I have a pretty sizable library of art books, artist biographies and exhibition catalogs, and this is the time of year when publishers send me their spring catalogs, looking for some press/blog buzz in the coming months.

Last year was a pretty good year for art books, but my favorite 2013 art books are two Mike Kelley titles that eclipse everything else in the category…

Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibone – Profiling the edge of the Southern California art scene by illuminating three of its most controversial figures, Pleasures is an important volume the examines the artist’s separate oeuvres while also pointing to the overlap in their collaborative efforts. The book focuses on work produced in the 1970′s, 80′s and ’90′s, and author, Cary Levine’s investigations into the musical subcultures these artists were drawn to provides an intriguing jumping-off point for this tour of transgressive expressions which includes everything from disturbing statements on sex and gender to sculptures made of feces. The work here challenges the minds, hearts and stomachs of viewers – often simultaneously. And it’s Levine’s brave understanding of this work and these artists that makes Pleasures such a pleasure.

Mike Kelley is the most complete catalog yet produced on the work of the artist and it’s the companion book to the retrospective exhibition that followed Kelley’s death in 2012. The eponymous volume tracks the artist’s sculpture, works on paper, paintings, sound, music, installations, videos and performances from the 1970′s through Kelley’s last work, “Mobile Homestead.” The book suspends its audience between the harrowing and hilarious dichotomies that defined Kelley’s output and it’s an invaluable reference for writers, artists, teachers and the Kelley-curious, seeking a deeper, critical understanding of this important artist’s work.

Here is an experimental video project that features Kelley’s band Destroy All Monsters

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