I told you earlier that last Saturday was your last chance to ride Austin’s El Camino. It’s now up for sale on eBay.

I took the photo above. It is from a small parade in Long Island City two years ago.

Bill Bartman, the founder and genius madman of Art Resources Transfer, died this morning after battling all kinds of illnesses over the last two decades. He will be missed by all of us who were lucky enough to encounter him.

More from James.

Update: Ed Winkleman tells one of my favorite Bill stories.

Austin Thomas, Perchance: A Floating Scenic Overlook, 2003

Start (or end) your Chelsea gallery crawl on Saturday by hitting The Kitchen High Line Block Party which is happening from noon to 6PM. Click on the link for a list of participating artists, restaurants, and organizations.

According to an email I received from Austin Thomas, it is also your last chance to ride the El Camino, of which I have written before.

What’s the High Line you may ask? Go read all about it at that link.

Related: Joy Garnett on the event.

Check it out.

We’re not going to Berlin until October, so we’ll miss Ostpunk, an exhibit revisiting the punk movement in the GDR (East Germany). The web site plus this article from Deutsche Welle will have to suffice.

When Michael Böhlke, otherwise known as “Pankow,” took to the stage at the opening of Germany’s first-ever exhibition on punk in the GDR last Friday, it was as if the last 25 years had never happened. Reunited with his former fellow renegades, he brought down the house.

“It felt so right — I realized that I was born to perform,” he said later. But while members of many former punk bands in West Germany went on to become household names — die Toten Hosen, die Ärtzte, Einstürzende Neubauten, to name but a few — Pankow never managed to carve out a successful musical career for himself.

Like many of the GDR’s punks, his flirtation with counterculture had lasting repercussions. In the late 1980s, he was refused permission to study theater directing and forced to train as a mechanic. His former girlfriend Jana — whose photo features in the exhibition — was sent to jail for her punk activities and is psychologically traumatized to this day.

…

Broadly dismissed in the west as nihilistic, punk in the GDR was fuelled by optimism and a desire to change society.

…

“In retrospect, I was probably more of a hippy,” shrugged Pankow. “I had a vision; I was full of hope that things could improve. We didn’t do drugs and we didn’t drink — we thought we were better than everyone else, and every last loser in the GDR drank beer like it was going out of fashion, so being a teetotaller was a form of rebellion.”

…

The cultural depth of GDR punk is reflected in the exhibition. Housed in a former industrial warehouse in Prenzlauer Berg, a neighborhood in the eastern part of the city, the show features paintings, drawings, print graphics, photography, super 8 film, collages, rare audio footage and miscellaneous pop culture ephemera such as record covers, buttons, flyers and posters.

…

“Punk inevitably became political very fast,” said Pankow. “If you were in a band, you had to apply for permission to perform in public and audition before a committee that would assess your musical competence, the way you looked — and above all, whether you were politically acceptable. The punks refused to go along with this — it was considered a compromise.”

As the youthful rebellion began to spiral out of state control, punks in the GDR were no longer seen as disaffected teenagers — they were denounced as enemies of the state. By 1983 the secret police had sunk its talons into the movement and the scene was slowly but surely infiltrated with informants, forced under pressure from the State to choose between cooperation, a jail sentence, expulsion or military service.

[Image from the Ostpunk website.]

It’s called The Pit.

This isn’t precisely why we’re headed to Berlin, but it is indicative of a free-wheeling artistic culture that we find attractive.

While it’s not unusual for critics to suggest the imbibing of illicit substances to make atrocious artistic performances and events more bearable, it is less usual for the producers of a theatrical piece to promote drug use in a bid to enhance the audience’s enjoyment of their show.

But this is exactly what the artistic director of the Neuköllner Opera House in Berlin is doing. Bernhard Glocksin is encouraging members of the audience to smoke joints while taking in performances of “La Princesse Jaune (The Oriental Princess)”, the one-act druggy opera by Camille Saint-Saens.

— Taking High Culture Literally, Deutsche Welle

Yes, I am aware that the literal title is “The Yellow Princess.” The production’s subtitle appears to be “Or, in the cat skin of the Manga Queen.”

[image from the Neuköllner Oper

Jason Fox’s Jeff by Michael Cambre

Check out mentions of James’s “Free the Art” project at Tom Moody’s blog and in artnet news.

Remember that this was actually Michael Cambre’s idea, which he suggested as a comment to this blog post. Michael contributed five(!) color drawings.