Bill Barminski
Encyclopedia
Bill Barminski is an American
artist
and filmmaker born in Chicago
, Illinois
.
, while still very young and it was there that he spent most of his formative years.
While attending the The University of Texas at Austin
as an art major, he was a contributor of satirical cartoons to the student newspaper, The Daily Texan
. The cartoon strip, entitled "King of the Pre-Fab", featured Dick Nixon, a used car salesman and campus gadfly. Despite repeated efforts by the student's association to have him removed, Barminski went on to create the underground comicbook, "Tex Hitler, Fascist Gun in the West". Author and cultural critic, Greil Marcus
mentions this character in Artforum
: "What's most remarkable about Bill Barminski's "Fascist Gun in the West" is how quickly and completely it pulls you into its twisted, yet utterly familiar little world".
After dropping out of art school in 1985, Barminski moved to Los Angeles where he continued to produce his hand-bound comic books. He began in earnest to paint. His first show in 1986 in a downtown L.A. gallery, Oranges/Sardines, created a minor sensation and resulted in modest sales.
His work caught the eye of record producer, Scott Arundale, who commissioned him to create the album cover for an Industrial/Tribal band, "Death Ride '69". The image of Elvis Presley
as Jesus Christ was later acknowledged and reprinted in the Greil Marcus
book, Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991), about the phenomenon of the Rock 'n' Roll icon in the years since his death.
The themes and style of his work critique mass media
and consumer culture. His exhibitions usually contain installation elements showcasing a video work produced for each show. His richly textured paintings have been reviewed in numerous publications such as FlashArt, Art in America, Art News, Visions Art Quarterly, New American Paintings, and the L.A. Weekly.
Tobey Crockett describes his work in a 1996 article for Art in America
: "The advertising-derived images that Barminski incorporates into his paintings are meant to evoke postwar America. Like filmmaker David Lynch
and others, Barminski is interested in the ominously surreal side of the good life."
Bill Barminski's paintings are prominently featured in the movie Horseplayer (1990). The film stars Brad Dourif
as a homicidal artist living in downtown L.A. and Barminski makes a cameo appearance. His paintings have adorned the walls of several feature films including Sliver (1993) and Zero Effect (1998) as well as the TV show, Friends
.
In 1996, he designed the album art for the School of Fish recording, "Human Cannonball".
In 1998, Barminski is credited with designing the largest and most expensive billboard ever commissioned by Absolut Vodka
which remained on the Sunset strip for over two years.
hired Barminski to create a music video for his song "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)", based on Mary Schmich
's newspaper column, "Wear Sunscreen
". The spoken word piece is set to music by Luhrmann and features animation and home movies of Barminski and his family. The video aired on all major networks in the U.S. and was featured on the The Tonight Show
, The Today Show and The View as well as VH1
and MTV
. It also appeared in the UK, Australia and Japan.
The Goo Goo Dolls commissioned him the following year to create a video to be presented on stage as part of their 2000 summer concert tour.
Entitled "Greed in Action", the four minute piece features stock footage and original flash animations by the artist including American vintage automobiles being dropped from B-52 Stratofortress
bombers.
Barminski worked with director Peter Howitt
and Oscar-winning editor Zach Staenberg
to created multiple video sequences for the feature film Antitrust (2001), starring Tim Robbins
and loosely based on the real-life creator of a major software conglomerate.
In 2001, H&M
, an international clothing retailer of Sweden, commissioned him to create a music video to present to its corporate staff entitled "Add Your Note".
Barminski joined forces with Christopher Louie in 2007, to create a fictional film director named Walter Robot
. The very same robot stars in his own video for the band Modest Mouse
called Missed the Boat
.
The duo has created numerous videos for bands such as Gnarls Barkley, Rob Thomas, Hawthorn Heights and Death Cab for Cutie. Their animated Death Cab for Cutie video for the song " Grapevine Fires " won several awards including "Best Music Video" Los Angeles Film Festival, 2009.
Barminski is author and co-creator (along with Webster Lewin and Jerry Hesketh) of "The Encyclopedia of Clamps", an interactive CD-ROM game featuring an amusement park of games and social and political commentary. It was awarded first prize for Best Foreign Package at the Tokyo MultiMedia Grand Prix in 1997.
During the same year, Barminski and Webster Lewin created the original character Cyclops Boy, featured in the internet series "Cyclops Boy: The One-Eyed Detective in Satellite Sky". It won Best Multimedia Award at the FilmWinter Fest, Stuttgart Germany.
In 2006, Barminski created a video for Mortified, the spoken word project ripped from the pages of real life. Mortified is a comic excavation of adolescent artifacts (journals, letters, poems, lyrics, home movies, stories and more) as shared by their original authors before total strangers. The innovative video has been hailed as a breakthrough in guerilla web marketing.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
and filmmaker born in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
.
Life and art
Barminski moved with his family to Fort Worth, TexasFort Worth, Texas
Fort Worth is the 16th-largest city in the United States of America and the fifth-largest city in the state of Texas. Located in North Central Texas, just southeast of the Texas Panhandle, the city is a cultural gateway into the American West and covers nearly in Tarrant, Parker, Denton, and...
, while still very young and it was there that he spent most of his formative years.
While attending the The University of Texas at Austin
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...
as an art major, he was a contributor of satirical cartoons to the student newspaper, The Daily Texan
The Daily Texan
The Daily Texan is the student newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin. It is entirely student-run and independent from the university. It is one of the largest college newspapers in the United States with a daily circulation of roughly 30,000 during the fall and spring semesters and bills...
. The cartoon strip, entitled "King of the Pre-Fab", featured Dick Nixon, a used car salesman and campus gadfly. Despite repeated efforts by the student's association to have him removed, Barminski went on to create the underground comicbook, "Tex Hitler, Fascist Gun in the West". Author and cultural critic, Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.-Life and career:Marcus was born in San Francisco...
mentions this character in Artforum
Artforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
: "What's most remarkable about Bill Barminski's "Fascist Gun in the West" is how quickly and completely it pulls you into its twisted, yet utterly familiar little world".
After dropping out of art school in 1985, Barminski moved to Los Angeles where he continued to produce his hand-bound comic books. He began in earnest to paint. His first show in 1986 in a downtown L.A. gallery, Oranges/Sardines, created a minor sensation and resulted in modest sales.
His work caught the eye of record producer, Scott Arundale, who commissioned him to create the album cover for an Industrial/Tribal band, "Death Ride '69". The image of Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....
as Jesus Christ was later acknowledged and reprinted in the Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.-Life and career:Marcus was born in San Francisco...
book, Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991), about the phenomenon of the Rock 'n' Roll icon in the years since his death.
The themes and style of his work critique mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
and consumer culture. His exhibitions usually contain installation elements showcasing a video work produced for each show. His richly textured paintings have been reviewed in numerous publications such as FlashArt, Art in America, Art News, Visions Art Quarterly, New American Paintings, and the L.A. Weekly.
Tobey Crockett describes his work in a 1996 article for Art in America
Art in America
Art in America is an illustrated monthly, international magazine concentrating on the contemporary art world, including profiles of artists and genres, updates about art movements, show reviews and event schedules. It is designed for collectors, artists, dealers, art professionals and other...
: "The advertising-derived images that Barminski incorporates into his paintings are meant to evoke postwar America. Like filmmaker David Lynch
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...
and others, Barminski is interested in the ominously surreal side of the good life."
Bill Barminski's paintings are prominently featured in the movie Horseplayer (1990). The film stars Brad Dourif
Brad Dourif
Bradford Claude "Brad" Dourif is an American film and television actor who gained early fame for his portrayal of Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and has since appeared in a number of memorable roles, including the voice of Chucky in the Child's Play franchise, Younger Brother in...
as a homicidal artist living in downtown L.A. and Barminski makes a cameo appearance. His paintings have adorned the walls of several feature films including Sliver (1993) and Zero Effect (1998) as well as the TV show, Friends
Friends
Friends is an American sitcom created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, which aired on NBC from September 22, 1994 to May 6, 2004. The series revolves around a group of friends in Manhattan. The series was produced by Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions, in association with Warner Bros. Television...
.
In 1996, he designed the album art for the School of Fish recording, "Human Cannonball".
In 1998, Barminski is credited with designing the largest and most expensive billboard ever commissioned by Absolut Vodka
Absolut Vodka
Absolut Vodka is a brand of vodka, produced near Åhus, Skåne, in southern Sweden. Since July 2008 the company has been owned by the French firm Pernod Ricard who bought V&S Group from the Swedish government....
which remained on the Sunset strip for over two years.
Music video
In 1999, Baz LuhrmannBaz Luhrmann
Mark Anthony "Baz" Luhrmann is an Australian film director, screenwriter, and producer best known for The Red Curtain Trilogy, which includes his films Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge!...
hired Barminski to create a music video for his song "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)", based on Mary Schmich
Mary Schmich
Mary Theresa Schmich is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.Born in Savannah, Georgia, the oldest of eight children, Schmich grew up in Georgia, attended high school in Phoenix, Arizona, and earned a B.A...
's newspaper column, "Wear Sunscreen
Wear Sunscreen
Wear Sunscreen or Sunscreen are the common names of an essay titled "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young" written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a column in 1997, but often erroneously attributed to a commencement speech by author Kurt Vonnegut. Both its...
". The spoken word piece is set to music by Luhrmann and features animation and home movies of Barminski and his family. The video aired on all major networks in the U.S. and was featured on the The Tonight Show
The Tonight Show
The Tonight Show is an American late-night talk show that has aired on NBC since 1954. It is the longest currently running regularly scheduled entertainment program in the United States, and the third longest-running show on NBC, after Meet the Press and Today.The Tonight Show has been hosted by...
, The Today Show and The View as well as VH1
VH1
VH1 or Vh1 is an American cable television network based in New York City. Launched on January 1, 1985 in the old space of Turner Broadcasting's short-lived Cable Music Channel, the original purpose of the channel was to build on the success of MTV by playing music videos, but targeting a slightly...
and MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
. It also appeared in the UK, Australia and Japan.
The Goo Goo Dolls commissioned him the following year to create a video to be presented on stage as part of their 2000 summer concert tour.
Entitled "Greed in Action", the four minute piece features stock footage and original flash animations by the artist including American vintage automobiles being dropped from B-52 Stratofortress
B-52 Stratofortress
The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress is a long-range, subsonic, jet-powered strategic bomber operated by the United States Air Force since the 1950s. The B-52 was designed and built by Boeing, who have continued to provide maintainence and upgrades to the aircraft in service...
bombers.
Barminski worked with director Peter Howitt
Peter Howitt
Peter Howitt is an English actor and film director. He grew up in Eltham, London and Bromley, Kent, Peter used to be a part of the Priory Players in the Priory behind Christ Church, Eltham. He studied at the Drama Studio London. He has two children, Luke and Amy...
and Oscar-winning editor Zach Staenberg
Zach Staenberg
Zach Staenberg is a film editor best known for the Matrix Trilogy. Staenberg won an Academy Award and an ACE Eddie Award for the editing of The Matrix...
to created multiple video sequences for the feature film Antitrust (2001), starring Tim Robbins
Tim Robbins
Timothy Francis "Tim" Robbins is an American actor, screenwriter, director, producer, activist and musician. He is the former longtime partner of actress Susan Sarandon...
and loosely based on the real-life creator of a major software conglomerate.
In 2001, H&M
H&M
H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB is a Swedish retail-clothing company, known for its fast-fashion clothing offerings for women, men, teenagers and children....
, an international clothing retailer of Sweden, commissioned him to create a music video to present to its corporate staff entitled "Add Your Note".
Barminski joined forces with Christopher Louie in 2007, to create a fictional film director named Walter Robot
Walter Robot
Walter Robot is the fictional director created by artist Bill Barminski and writer Christopher Louie. They direct films, commercials and music videos...
. The very same robot stars in his own video for the band Modest Mouse
Modest Mouse
Modest Mouse is an American indie rock band formed in 1993 in Issaquah, Washington, by singer/lyricist/guitarist Isaac Brock, drummer Jeremiah Green, and bassist Eric Judy. They are based in Portland, Oregon. Since their 1996 debut album, This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think...
called Missed the Boat
Missed the Boat
"Missed the Boat" is a song by American indie rock band Modest Mouse and is the sixth track on their 2007 album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. The song was released as the second single from that album and peaked at #24 in Billboard's Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart.James Mercer of The Shins...
.
The duo has created numerous videos for bands such as Gnarls Barkley, Rob Thomas, Hawthorn Heights and Death Cab for Cutie. Their animated Death Cab for Cutie video for the song " Grapevine Fires " won several awards including "Best Music Video" Los Angeles Film Festival, 2009.
Digital media
Bill Barminski is an accomplished Flash, Shockwave and After Effects designer with his many musical and digital art compositions available on his website. Macromedia frequently awarded him "Flash Site of the Day" during the late 1990s as he constantly tinkered with and updated his on-line works.Barminski is author and co-creator (along with Webster Lewin and Jerry Hesketh) of "The Encyclopedia of Clamps", an interactive CD-ROM game featuring an amusement park of games and social and political commentary. It was awarded first prize for Best Foreign Package at the Tokyo MultiMedia Grand Prix in 1997.
During the same year, Barminski and Webster Lewin created the original character Cyclops Boy, featured in the internet series "Cyclops Boy: The One-Eyed Detective in Satellite Sky". It won Best Multimedia Award at the FilmWinter Fest, Stuttgart Germany.
In 2006, Barminski created a video for Mortified, the spoken word project ripped from the pages of real life. Mortified is a comic excavation of adolescent artifacts (journals, letters, poems, lyrics, home movies, stories and more) as shared by their original authors before total strangers. The innovative video has been hailed as a breakthrough in guerilla web marketing.
Internet marketing
Internet marketing, also known as digital marketing, web marketing, online marketing, search marketing or e-marketing, is referred to as the marketing of products or services over the Internet...