Beautiful Losers

We posted the trailer for Beautiful Losers on our other blog when it was first released, but never saw the movie. Well Nick and I FINALLY got around to watching Beautiful Losers last night. It's been in our Netflix instant queue for months. (That's right, it's streaming, go watch it tonight.) It's a documentary about some of the artists that have been the very most influential in Nick and my's art career. I'm talking Barry McGee, Ed Templeton, Margaret Kilgallen, and Thomas Campbell influencial. Some of these people were influencing me before I even knew they were.  When I was in 6th grade a local skate shop opened up behind my house and I would go over there and study the graphics on the decks and shirts, particularly on Toy Machine, while I aspired to be a designer for a skate or snow company someday.  Although that didn't happen, Nick and I have defninetly incorporated simple TM type monsters into our style. Later, in art school, I would see the PBS Art:21 segments on Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee and begin to replicate my career even more upon theirs. Not just their visual style, but their attitudes. It's these attitudes that the documentary focuses on. Art is for enjoyment. Why take it so seriously? We can have fun doing this, right? It's not a career choice, it's a lifestyle choice, to live a life dedicated to art in all it's forms. It's all about being less critical and instead really loving everyone's individualistic ways that they chose to express themselves. These artist's don't box themselves in. A style will naturally come out of an artist's work, but they aren't stuck there. They express themselves in everything they do whether that be professional skateboarding, sleeping in a gallery while they are working, making short films, paintings, traveling, creating communities, tagging trains,or whatever. I found the movie to be very inspirational as I naturally share many of their views and hold their works in incredibly high regard. The footage is interesting, as it is not always pertaining to the art. Cropped footage of all sorts of Beautiful Losers reoccur throughout, skaters, punks, druggies, weirdos, the salt of the Earth. There was also footage directly from the Art:21 series, which was necessary, since Margaret passed away in 2001. I can't speak for Nick, but I do believe both of us were quite misty eyed when they talked about her passing in the movie. To me, these artists and they way they view the making of art is a fresh and visionary way that will go down in history as the most prominent movement of the 90's and early 2000's. Anyone out there who loves art should view this art and familiarize themselves with it. These folks are heroes.