Zeit-Guys and Zeit-Gals

This will be about my favourite Zeit-Guys and Zeit-Gals, discovered, remembered and reported down the decades of being a kind of perpetual art-student based on the Isle of Wight, in Portsmouth, London and elsewhere as I was growing-up from the late Fifties to now I guess.

I hope you enjoy these characters -  they seem to me to be epiphanic epitomes of their time, neo-perfecto personifications of the zeit-spirit - here are a few to get your taste-buds athinkin.

So what've I got here? how about (top row) John Hoppy Hopkins, John Dunbar, Joan Baez, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Jack Kerouac (2nd row): Heathcote Williams, Harry Everett Smith, Germaine Greer, Carolyn Hester, Annie Ross, Christopher Logue, Caroline Coon, Kevin Ayers, (3rd row): Barbara Rubin,Mary Travers, Aretha Franklin, Richard Brautigan, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Pete Townsend, Anita Pallenberg Maya Deren (4th row) Miles Davis; Henry Miller, Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Malcolm X, John Coltrane, ????, Joni Mitchell, Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassidy), (5th row) Martin Sharp, Marianne Faithfull, William Burroughs,????, Lenny Bruce, Viv Stanshall, Michael X, Kurt Vonnegut....

And the rest!: (top row): John Finch as Jerry Cornelius, Little Richard Penniman, Carolyn Hester and Bob Dylan, Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd), Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Joe Boyd of UFO, op-artist Bridget Riley; (2nd row): folk-singer Karen Dalton, Leonard Cohen, William Burroughs, Tim Leary, Fats Domino; John Cage; Barry Miles; Allen Ginsberg (3rd row): Ken Kesey, John Lennon, Dennis Hopper, Baba Ram Dass; David Lynch, Suze Rotollo, Terence McKenna, Peter Fonda (4th row):  Nam June Paik, ????, Richard Hamilton, Heathcote Williams, Jane Fonda, Andrew Loog Oldham, Malcolm X,Jane Asher (5th row): David Hockney, Hunter S. Thompson, Peter Cooke, ????, Pauline Boty, Robert Rauschenberg, Peter Blake; Richard Neville (6th row) Jerry Garcia, Arlo Guthrie, Cher, Mal-Dean's drawing of Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius,Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, CND symbol, Robert Crumb's Mr Natural

OK so what's the fascination with these iconic characters? And what do they have in common?

Well, I explained that when I was compiling my mediainspiratorium, I became aware that there were those zeit-guys and zeit-gals in modern history who in their individual ways illustrated, summed-up and in their character personified the Spirit of the Age. The film director Dudley Murphy (above) did this for the new generation of international American artists, working with Man Ray and Fernand Léger and the composer George Antheil on Ballet Mecanique in 1924...

" Dudley Murphy (from Google AI summary)

• Avant-Garde: He co-directed the seminal avant-garde film Ballet Mécanique (1924) with French artist Fernand Léger, a work considered a masterpiece of early experimental cinema. His early short films, such as The Soul of the Cypress (1921) and Danse Macabre (1922), were often musically driven experiments.
• Musical Films: Murphy directed several notable musical shorts featuring Black cultural icons during the Harlem Renaissance, including blues legend Bessie Smith in her only film appearance, St. Louis Blues (1929), and Duke Ellington in Black and Tan (1929). Both films have been selected for the National Film Registry.
• Feature Films: His most acclaimed feature film was the independent production of Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones (1933), which starred Paul Robeson in the title role and was written for the screen by DuBose Heyward. He also directed a number of other features, including The Sport Parade (1932), The Night Is Young (1935), and ...One Third of a Nation... (1939).

Josephine Baker, the genius dancer/singer/performer, appearing in her Revue Negre 1925-1927.

And some of these Zeit-guys and zeit-gals remain forever ingrained in one's consciousness - points of human reference and resonance, showing how individual artists and creatives can often surface through the cultural and counter-cultural clatter to emerge as eternal beacons or signposts for us all. Revue Negre and Josephine Baker seem to fit with the contemporary art-decoratif (l'art deco) explosion in Paris at around this same time, and l'art deco and Baker's celebration of sex to have repercussions in the work of Tamara de Lempicka, Marlina Deitrich, and her lover Annette Berber, and....

Louise Brooks of course - just came across a fabulous BBC Arena video and interview with her as an older woman - super-bright, super clever, super knowledgable on people take a look:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001t638/arena-louise-brooks

Tamara De Lempicka: Tamara in Green Bugatti. And of course I'm aware of the great wealth - and the neo-fascism of Tamara's ambisexual celebration of the Twenties rich set. You should have a look at Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 - the 4-hour version - to help you understand the growth of fascism in the 1930s...

https://m.ok.ru/video/6292760824451

Otto Dix: Anita Berber - of course the zeit-gals weren't all exotic cabaret performers like Deitrich and Berber, there were intellectuals and artists too: such as Susan Sontag, Emmy Hennings and Elaine de Kooning...and (bottom) Francoise Sagan and Jean Seberg on the set of Bonjour Tristesse in 1956...

(top) Susan Sontag - the philosopher-critic and her book Against Interpretation (1966); Emmy Hennings - who with Hugo Ball invented the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 - kick-starting the Dada anti-art movement; then the painter Elaine de Kooning who with her husband Willem and the artist Jackson Pollock, created Abstract Expressionism in New York in the 1940s. Elaine and Willem were also student-teachers at the famous Black Mountain College (with Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Stan Vanderbeek and John Cage (lots of zeitguys and gals here!)

At Black Mountain College, Elaine de Kooning helps Buckminster Fuller, experimenting with geodesic-dome. Susan Weil - who with her husband Robert Rauschenberg made Body Blueprints (Light Borne in Darkness) using full-size cyanotypes (invented by John Herschel in the 1840s)...

So what about more recent zeitguys? Well there's Bobby Zimmerman/Dylan of course, Lenny Cohen, and all the many other singers and artists that emerged in the Sixties and seemed to be permanent fixtures (guiding stars) in the spirits-of-the-age firmament. For me, these included Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Donald Cammell, Nick Roeg, Anita Pallenberg, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, ...we could go on and on...

But the task is this - can you design a masked ball-cum-parade (a smorgasbord) featuring as many of the zeitguys and zeitgals as take your fancy -or choose a period known to you and make a masque celebre of heroes from that period.