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Werner Herzog – Cave of Forgotten Dreams — he likes the lions, too. –

Cave of Forgotten Dreams — documentary film by Werner Herzog

30,000 year old cave painting from the Chauvet Cave

detail of bodypainting titled "Chauvet Lions Watching"

In an interview on Fresh Air yesterday, Terry Gross asked Werner Herzog which one painting he had the strongest reaction to as he filmed inside the Chauvet Cave. After saying that it was the overall effect of the cave that moved him the most, he singled out the painting of the lions. Paraphrasing his description, it is of five lions stalking something, intently looking at something but we don’t know what they are looking at — and depicted with such a complete naturalism that we could think we are looking at living lions today. Yet, it is among the single oldest paintings ever made. The earliest pictorial images in all of human art. As moving and complex as any art ever created since. I understand how he feels about the lions.

I’m trying to think of another time when I heard of a project and had such an immediate reaction to just how perfect it is. Werner Herzog, given the chance to bring to us this story of what may be the origin of art, the origin of our humanity. He’s one of the most fascinating artists in the world, and here he is making a movie about this cave that has always fascinated me, and been a continual inspiration for my work since it was first discovered in the 90s and I read about it in my Natural History Magazine.

Go to the article from NPR on the film, and listen to the Fresh Air interview there — in addition to talking about the film, Herzog talks about a lifetime of making films that “stare into the abyss” of humanity ( “Grizzly Man” and “Encounters at the End of the World” have both been on TV a bunch lately): http://www.npr.org/2011/04/20/135516812/herzog-enters-the-cave-of-forgotten-dreams

Clip of the movie:

http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2827853081/

Werner Hertzog speaks of having always been drawn to prehistoric art, fascinated about the idea of paintings being made so long ago and yet we still can feel the connection between the people that made them and ourselves. I share that feeling. I began to explore our earliest art as I sought to find the origins of bodyart. And the connection between painting ourselves and painting cave walls is undeniable, with, for example, in Chauvet Cave — as in so many others —  painted hands being used as stamps to create designs on the cave walls. From the start, though, what caught me most was the constant examples of how these ancient artists expertly used the shape of the cave walls in their paintings, in a way that seems to me the very essence of bodypainting. Speaking only as an artist here, the transference of images on the body to images on the sculptured surface of a cave wall seems a very direct step.

The need to show how the paintings work on the form of the walls explains why Herzog filmed this in 3D: “When I saw photos, it looked almost like flat walls — maybe slightly undulating or so. Thank God, I went in there without any camera a month before shooting. What you see in there is limestone, and you have these wildly undulating walls — you have bulges and niches and pendants of rock, and there’s a real incredible drama of information. The artists utilized it for their paintings. … So it was clear it was imperative to do this in 3-D, in particular, because we were the only ones ever allowed to film.”

There are a lot of videos about Werner and his work, including these two interview segments about this film, particularly fun because he is speaking so off the cuff: 

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Is A Painted Body Naked? – Pt. 2: Painting Clothing On vs. Painting On Clothing – Demi Moore Vanity Fair

By Christopher Agostino

Why is it that if you paint underwear on a naked model she seems to be wearing more clothes than if you paint almost anything on a model wearing underwear?

My beat up cover from Vanity Fair, August, 1992. Demi Moore, body paint by Joanne Gair, photograph by Annie Liebovitz

There’s a slowly growing awareness of bodypainting in American Pop Culture, and I’d mark its beginning with Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair. Prior to that, bodypainting was for hippies, Woodstock and Goldie Hawn. More than just a masterful exhibition of a makeup artist’s ability, that cover broke boundaries.

Goldie Hawn from Laugh-In

This was a naked woman (a celebrity!) on the cover of a mainstream magazine — yet she wasn’t naked. It was a successful fashion image — yet she wasn’t wearing any clothes. Bodyart functioning as conceptual art, playing with perceptions and expectations of the viewer, maybe you can even connect it to what Man Ray did in his famous “bodyart” photograph.

The year before when she was on the cover naked and pregnant, Demi Moore positioned her arm to cover her breasts. This time, the body paint was deemed sufficient covering for this magazine to be displayed on newsstands, which we can take as a significant statement of “no” in regard to the question “is a painted body naked?”

As exciting for me as that cover was the little bit on the editor’s page about how long it took — demonstrating the serious approach that can be brought to body painting — and the name of the body painter: Joanne Gair. When did you ever see “body paint by” as a credit line before? She has got to be the closest thing we have to a “famous body painter” in mainstream consciousness, and this public understanding of bodypainting as illusion remains prevalent with her work in the very popular annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Regarding SI, I don’t think that anyone could argue that the painted models there are any more (or less) naked than the models in the real bikinis.

There is also a whole realm of Joanne Gair’s work beyond the painted bathing suits — look for her book “Body Painting”(2006).    http://www.joannegair.com/books1.1.htm

I haven’t attempted to paint clothing on anyone since the 80s, my bodyart goals are different. I have though been required at times to paint my art over clothing by clients and convention producers, over a bra or such, and it just doesn’t look right. Maybe because when the women is naked, or just in nipple shields, the paint can better pull off the appearance of being  a costume than if you can see the bra straps telling you that somebody is standing in front of you in their underwear. I’ve come to tell clients that this just doesn’t work right, so if they need real modesty we should have some kind of minimum clothing and work it into the design rather than try to hide it.

A few years back I was hired to do some “sexy” painting on a couple of models for a cd release party in a night club, with nipple covers and enough paint that they wouldn’t seem naked, plus the cd logos thrown in. One of the models showed up and wouldn’t take her bright blue satin underwear off — the client had hired the models and I don’t know what he told her to expect. She explained to me that she didn’t need to take her top off because she had seen photographs when body painters put fake clothing on naked models, so I should be able to make her look naked while she kept her bra on.

These days, there are also all those nifty prosthetic pieces from people such as BodyFX that make disguising the body parts part of the design  — like “starfish boobs” for your topless mermaid. From their website: “BodyFX Prosthetics are new and innovative products that will help you to create artistic and discreet body paints. Instead of painting bra’s, you can use an artistic solution. To overcome the nudity factor, BodyFX Prosthetics can be glued over the whole breasts or just the nipples. Using BodyFX Prosthetics, you will find more clients (and models) are willing to try body-art as a means of entertainment.”  http://www.bodyfx.co.nz/products/prosthetics.htm

Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

To learn more about our programs and performances:  http://www.agostinoarts.com  Christopher Agostino

follow me for the face of the day:  https://twitter.com/#!/storyfaces

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The Nuba Bird Dance at Bodies Alive! – Nao Dance Collective

The Nuba Bird Dance, performed by the Nao Dance Collective as part of our Bodies Alive! show at the Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC) in Orlando, 2008 — in black and white bodypaint designs based on the analytical sketches of James C. Faris in his book "Nuba Personal Art"

by Christopher Agostino

The underlying creative intention behind Bodies Alive! was to explore how movement and performance can bring bodyart to life, so we sought to create a modern dance piece inspired by bodypainting. In any previous opportunities I’d had to bodypaint dancers for performance my task was to create designs to support an existing theme and concept. For this dance the makeup design came first.

Nao Dance Collective  http://www.naodance.com/  is a structured improvisational company under the direction of Linda Eve Elchak — just the kind of group we were looking for to create a brand new piece for a single performance. We discussed the project and I sent the music, sketches for the bodypainting and some insight about the functional effect of this type of tribal bodyart: that the use of hard-edged  geometric designs is intended to break the human form and destroy recognizable individual identity, and thereby create a new unified tribal identity. I suggested the dancers could take advantage of this visual confusion by contrasting movement as a group with movement as individuals. From that, they created the piece. It was thrilling for me to see what these elements had led to in the rehearsal before the Orlando show. We didn’t paint them for the rehearsal, so they had some concerns about what performing in bodypaint would be like, particularly if they had to be careful not to smudge it by touching each other — and I reassured them that I wanted the paint to be alive, to change and to smear and to transfer from one dancer to another as it would in a tribal dance.

The dancers were painted by a group of experienced bodypainters following my designs (see their foto below, and the video of the bodypainting room). Bodies Alive! required the participation of dozens of models and performers, along with teams of designers, painters and assistants — a resource we might only have found at an event like the Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC) http://www.fabaic.com/ , celebrating it’s 10th anniversary this year, and I will be there again.

Putting the music together for this piece involved some serendipity. Although I wanted something tribal, I was taking these body designs so far out of their original context that I didn’t want anything directly connected to the Nuba or African culture. The chant is listed as “Kecak: The Ramayana Monkey Chant  from Bali” on a cd of Indonesia music from Nonesuch Records‘ Explorer Series  http://www.nonesuch.com/artists/explorer-series-indonesia Once you hear it, it stays with you. I had it stuck in my head for this, but didn’t think it was enough to build the dance around and was looking for alternatives when I heard “Surfer Bird” by The Trashman on Bob Dylan’s radio show. The pieces fit, the rhythm was right and there is that iconic Nuba face design of the ostrich over the eye to seal the deal.

See the previous post, and search “Nuba” on this site for more information.

Nuba Bird Dance Painters: Paola Paredes-Shenk, Leah Reddell, Kerry Ann Smith, Diane and Theresa Spadola, Pam Trent, Jeff Edney, Deidre MacDonald

Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

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