The Gretsch Pages: Discussions: Other Guitars: Creepy guitars

Creepy guitars

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- Rated: 14 ↑
Dec 17, 2006 1:20 p.m. Grant53:

In the spirit of the old Ugly Guitars thread, i thought you should see this.Frankly, I don't expect it to be out-creeped.
This is wrong on so many levels
- Rated: 31 ↑
Dec 17, 2006 1:46 p.m. Dawg:

Wow.

I gather that the pictured 'luthier' Lou Reimuller is now doing time...

yep that's pretty creepy
- Rated: 272 ↑
Dec 17, 2006 1:46 p.m. Proteus:

No, I think you're right. That's about as demoralizing as it gets.
- Rated: 104 ↑
Dec 17, 2006 1:49 p.m. Pappy:

I was expecting a bunch of creepy stuff. This did not once come into my mind.

I don't think it could get much worse than that. Well, maybe if the girl was facing the other way and was played by a player who likes his guitar slung low...
- Rated: 31 ↑
Dec 17, 2006 2:18 p.m. Dawg:

"I was expecting a bunch of creepy stuff. This did not once come into my mind"

err....simulating groping a 13 year old girl....?
- Rated: 17 ↑
Dec 17, 2006 2:32 p.m. Crazyquilt:

I could have lived my whole life never having seen that, and I would have been content.

Thank you.
- Rated: 104 ↑
Dec 17, 2006 3:29 p.m. Pappy:

I was thinking ghouls and goblins, not semi-realistic represntations of girls.
- Rated: 43 ↑
Dec 17, 2006 4:37 p.m. Hobie:

I actually am struck by the message that bit of art conveys. It is brilliant; yes unsettling, and disgusting.

Working at times in the area of child abuse, physical, sexual etc I come across this evil and have to contend with what it does personally to me and my colleagues.

Conveys so clearly the evil that is childhood abuse, and exploitation; primarily sexual, but also commercial, that chldren and adolescence is subjected.

It does make me uneasy and sickens; but then it should; it should not be hidden, left unsaid and censored as child abuse is.

The reactions above are a demonstration of the artists success, in my opinion. Sometimes the unpalatable truth has to be experienced.

I do encourage you all to think that this shit goes on across all demographics, all the time, and far more often to contemplate, than is comfortable, when in a room full of adults .

I will cease my sanctimonious rant.
- Rated: 272 ↑
Dec 17, 2006 5:07 p.m. Proteus:

The armlessness of the girl, among other things, is disturbing here. Even the expression becomes ominous in context.

The artist does succeed in disturbing. But we assume that was the intent. Is it fair to ask what the artist intended?

Amy Crehore apparently posted this image on her website.

Here's some of Amy Crehore's work.

Are these images of primal innocence, or is our artist a bit perverse?

I can see it either way. It's dicey to discuss sexuality, particularly of the young, in a way that takes into account both essential innocence - and the natural (innocent?) impulses of pleasure and desire.

Maybe those are the things Crehore is attempting to address in her symbology.

Maybe it's more tawdry than that.
- Rated: 21 ↑
Dec 17, 2006 5:42 p.m. Gretschington:

I think it's less sinister. I think it's 100% about shock value and getting a reaction; kind of a "calculated creepiness." He missed his era. That guitar (and his hair) would have fit in with the late 60's/early 70's theatrics of The Mothers Of Invention or Alice Cooper or David Bowie perfectly.
- Rated: 19 ↑
Dec 17, 2006 5:52 p.m. chrisbo:

I was going to say somthing about it's F holes, but that might be too gross so I guess I wont.Child abuse is a real issue
- Rated: 23 ↑
Dec 18, 2006 1:11 a.m. Adam:

Proteus said:
Are these images of primal innocence, or is our artist a bit perverse?

I think that she probably had more perverse intent due to the titles of her work. When each of the dozens of titles have those innuendos in them...she may be trying to show both primal innocence and perversity at the same time, or how primal innocence is perverse...or....

..yeah I'll just go play my guitar now.
- Rated: 104 ↑
Dec 18, 2006 5:59 a.m. Pappy:

Sounds like Adam's on the right track. It would be easy to title it something like "kid on beach" and have everyone bask in the innocence of it all, but when you read the title your mind (or my mind) almost instantly "gets it" only to find that the artist must have missed the memo on what these phrases mean.

It leads to an uncomfortable feeling. The innocence isn't perverse, but the fact that we're ready to see something perverse from the title only to find something considerably more innocent makes me feel very dirty and guilty as hell.

So maybe the statement is that we are not innocent if we get it, if we feel guilty? They didn't cover this in Art Appreciation in college.
- Rated: 272 ↑
Dec 18, 2006 11:19 a.m. Proteus:

Like it's a Rorschach test for our immortal souls?

You're giving her too much credit for innocence. One of her other interests is hokum music - which was phenomenally "dirty" humorous blues-derived music from the 19teens - 30s. Full of multiple double-entendre, but also just outright lyrical porn. As vile as rap (but much funnier).

In every picture she gives us a nubile young girl in a ripe state - and hands, tails, bananas, and literal snakes tucked coincidentally in the most provocative places.

I think she wants us to read sex all over the place as a starting point - and then she uses animals as the girl's only company. She CALLS the series Monkey Love. What are we to make of that?

The artist may play disingenuous and, all wide-eyed and shocked, say "you're reading all that into it." That's one of the tricks artists play, by way of having their cake and eating it too.

But I'm pretty sure we're invited to see open sexuality, and that that has to be accepted before we get what might be the rest of her message.

But the more I think about it, the less I'm inclined to think the artist is perverse. I think instead she's imagining a utopian state of grace humans rarely (if ever) attain.

While we don't know for SURE, the girl in the art is apparently post-pubescent, physically sexually mature. (We're not asked to judge her mental or emotional maturity - and I think those are irrelevant to Crehore's thesis.)

She may be making the point that overt sexuality is a natural and innocent part of human nature, for the young as for anyone else. She may be imagining that in a paradisical state, beyond the imposition of cultural or religious norms of guilt (without "the man" there to sully things), the pleasure and desire of sexuality, however excited, are wholly natural and good and innocent.

In other words, that any kind of sexual feeling or expression is innocent, because it's natural. There's no one there to tell Lil Miss Nubile that there's anything wrong in feeling good - so there isn't.

That's rather an attractive view of things, and in principle I'd like to agree. But it flies against thousands of years of social conditioning, and the strictures of the great majority of the world's religions and ethical systems.

I suspect Crehore means the art as images of Eden, and the girl Eve before the apple (and perhaps an Eve who was created individually, not derived from the absent man).

I'm just not sure things can ever be so simple.
- Rated: 82 ↑
Dec 18, 2006 11:31 a.m. bonedaddy:

I think this description of the 'girl guitar' says it all...

Here is Lou Reimuller (a.k.a. Sunset Lou, musician, collector, luthier, artist) and his invention: Teenar, The Girl Guitar - a vintage mannequin transformed into an electric guitar (1986, Richmond, VA).
Yes, she really does play the blues.

I think I'd be singing the blues if some hippie cut off my arms and shoved a guitar neck in my abdomen. I think he saw that movie mannequin one too many times
- Rated: 34 ↑
Dec 18, 2006 5:11 p.m. RepentOrPerish:

As a former student of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, I can flatly tell you, that , with very few exceptions, artists who are into shock value stuff are much more about trying to fit in with their black fingernailed peers by "being radical" than about trying to draw awareness to any sort of a cause.

Pathetic.
- Rated: 272 ↑
Dec 18, 2006 8:17 p.m. Proteus:

And that could be all there is to it, too, RoP. I doubt we could find out by asking the artist.
- Rated: 43 ↑
Dec 18, 2006 10:49 p.m. Hobie:

I get what you want to see in the art Prote, but I also see an interesting commentary, and this is coming from my perspective, on the exploitative nature of our natural desires as they can work both ways, and interact.

The girl is often coquettish, pleased and exuding sensual pleasure and come hither. But the monkeys are us blokes with the tool maker hands and bipedal mobility but the body and soul of the ape we descend from (or were intelligently designed from).

And there is an element of, as Pappy so well describes, arousing mixed feelings in us coming from our socialised state. The male is usefull and stimulating, but finally, put down as just another animal, not fully human as is woman-archetypal miss utopia; is she one of those beach boy californian girls?

Happily in our post modernish void we are all right, and the art is interesting and pleasing and stimulating at many levels.

I still think the mannequin is inspired, but disturbing and cuts far to close to an ugly reality, for most of us. Where as Crehore (what a name for this artist) intimates on a broader spectrum.
- Rated: 272 ↑
Dec 18, 2006 11:49 p.m. Proteus:

I can add the men-as-apes subtext to my view of it as well, Hobie. Another interesting gloss.

What of the monkeys' expressions? Only in a couple do they look "happy." Generally they appear confused, perplexed, or just dull.

More commentary?
- Rated: 74 ↑
Dec 19, 2006 9:19 a.m. Ratrod:

That guitar is kinda creepy. How perverted it is depends on where the jack plug goes in.
- Rated: 27 ↑
Dec 19, 2006 10:20 a.m. cielski:

"Art is what you can get away with."---R.Buckminster Fuller.
I found this odd enough. Even tho I work in theater, artists of all ilks can seem odd, and some of them just bizarre. I don't get her fascination with monkeys, or, the just under the edge sexuality. I was impressed with the "Life of Memphis Minnie" painting---the artist knows her Blues---she even got the National guitar right.
- Rated: 17 ↑
Dec 22, 2006 11:36 a.m. hellbilly:

Had to laugh at this one!
http://cgi.ebay.com/Old-Harmony-Electric-Guitar-Blues-Rockabilly-UNUSUAL_W0QQitemZ160065607937QQihZ006QQcategoryZ2384QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
- Rated: 31 ↑
Dec 22, 2006 1:37 p.m. Dawg:

That is one FUGLY guitar.
- Rated: 54 ↑
Dec 22, 2006 5:29 p.m. Joel:

Why do I get the feeling the phrase "it put's the lotion in the basket or it get's the hose" bounces through the builder's head?
- Rated: 24 ↑
Dec 22, 2006 10:50 p.m. jazzbo:

Jesus, now I'm going to have nightmares tonight. Permenantly traumatized by that Twilight Zone episode about the mannequin that forgot she was a mannequin.

Maarrrshaaa! Marsha? Marsha! Marrrrshaaa!