Brian Eno and David Byrne’s 1981 album gets a remastered reissue this month, something I’m looking forward to hearing as all the early Eno albums sounded pretty crappy on their initial CD release. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is being given an added publicity push this time round with much being made of [...]
The Monument to the Third International would have loomed 400 metres over St Petersburg (100 metres taller than the Eiffel Tower) had it been built after the Revolution of 1917. The building was intended as a monument, exhibition space and location for the Comintern offices, and included several blocks within its structure, a cube, pyramid [...]
This wonderful poster was designed by Andrzej Bertrandt for the Polish release of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film of the novel by Stanislaw Lem. Lem didn’t like the film, referring to it as “Crime and Punishment in space”, which is a fair description seeing as it’s filled with the same lengthy moral discussions as Tarkovsky’s other [...]
Stanislaw Lem, author of Solaris.
The pathetic record company warning from the 1980s receives a parodic makeover for the digital age. The original tape-and-crossbones graphic was printed on the inner sleeves of vinyl albums from major labels for a brief period when the record companies were in a panic about kids swapping tapes in school playgrounds. If only they knew [...]
Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural genius rather overreached itself with his 1956 proposal for a mile-high skyscraper of 528 floors situated in Chicago and to be named The Illinois. A building of this size would have severely tested the engineering capabilities of the time (bear in mind that the world’s tallest skyscraper was still the Empire [...]
In order to coincide with the British Museum’s exhibition of Michelangelo drawings, the current edition of Gay Times tries to imitate some of the more famous works in their main photo spread. What’s interesting about these pictures is seeing how much they lack the compelling dynamics of the artist at his best. Maybe this is [...]
A handful of dust The modernists wanted to strip the world of mystery and emotion. No wonder they excelled at the architecture of death, says JG Ballard Few people today visit Utah beach. The sand seems colder and flatter than anywhere else along the Normandy coast where the Allies landed on D-day. The town of [...]
A rather substantial fault in either the WordPress software or a problem at the server end has resulted in two folders of images being deleted today, hence the image-less posts. Not the end of the world but I’m not looking forward to restoring things I don’t have a backup for.
The original company logo from 1976 depicts Isaac Newton sitting under a tree with the fateful apple glowing above his head and looks about as far removed from a computer company logo as it’s possible to get. The picture frame contained Wordsworth’s description of Newton, “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” [...]
I wrote about the great Oz magazine a couple of weeks ago. Former editor Richard Neville has maintained his anti-authoritarianism and sense of mischief since the 1960s and this week provoked more controversy with a fake website, johnhowardpm.org, that includes an “apology” for his part in the Iraq war supposedly written by egregious Australian PM [...]
Reworking the illustrations of the standard fifty-two card playing deck has become quite a common thing in recent years with numerous themed decks being produced in costly limited editions. The same goes for decks of Tarot cards which have now been mapped across a number of different magical systems and produced in sets that often [...]
ANNOUNCING THE AKASHIC RECORD DVD SERIES – A BASTET EXCLUSIVE “THE INVASION OF THUNDERBOLT PAGODA” DVD FEATURING “BRAIN DAMAGE” & “FROM THE MYLAR CHAMBER” SLIDESHOW BASTET, in collaboration with SATURNALIA and THE IRA COHEN AKASHIC PROJECT, is proud to announce the launch of THE AKASHIC RECORD DVD SERIES. Celebrated internationally for more than 40 years, [...]
The Wrestlers. Born in Philadelphia, Eakins studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he would later teach, from 1862, before travelling to Paris where he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. His final six months in Europe were spent in Spain. Returning to Philadelphia in July 1870, he set himself up as a [...]
England is filled with curious buildings, follies as they’re commonly known, most of them the creation of wealthy landowners with time on their hands and a degree of imagination. Many of them are fake ruins, imitations of antiquity or classical architecture intended to add a degree of romance to a picturesque landscape. Some buildings are [...]
Cosmic Zoom was a short animated film by made by Eva Szasz in 1968 for the National Film Board of Canada. This film probes the infinite magnitude of space, and its reverse, the ultimate minuteness of matter. Animation art and animation camera achieve this journey to the farthest conceivable point of the universe and then [...]
Hanging in there From Greek art, to Dolce & Gabbana advertising, the male nude has always been about sex. It’s just that these days we don’t try to hide it, writes Jonathan Jones Today, probably nothing so alienates us from the high art of the European past as its most prestigious subject – the male [...]
Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The fantastic art archive
Blickling Park, Norfolk, England. Built by Joseph Bonomi in 1796–7.
In late 1960, in various flats in Hampstead, a loose group of people started to meet: to criticize projects, to concoct letters to the press, to make competition projects, and generally prop one another up against the boredom of working in London architectural offices. The main British magazines of the time did not publish student [...]
Discussing Brokeback Mountain, among other things: Look, homophobia is fed into every child in the United States at birth. It is unrelenting, it never lets up. They asked a whole raft of high school boys across the country a couple years ago, one of those polls about what they would most like to be in [...]
This site showcases the printed program for Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The program was available in UK cinemas, accompanying the first release of 2001, circa 1968.
The Angelic Conversation, 1985. An unseen woman recites Shakespeare’s sonnets—fourteen in all—as a man wordlessly seeks his heart’s desire. The photography is stop-motion, the music is ethereal, the scenery is often elemental: boulders and smaller rocks, the sea, smoke or fog, and a garden. The man is on an odyssey following his love. But he [...]
The Temptations, Afterwards (1988–89). Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The fantastic art archive
Minimum–Maximum, live DVD. More pictures after the jump.
Titre. Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin (Paris 1721–86) was one of three famous artist brothers. He worked as a designer for fabrics and textiles, and held the position of dessinateur du Roi to Louis XV. He made twenty-seven etchings, of which the best-known are two sets of six plates from around 1750 entitled Essay de Papilloneries humaines, [...]
Photography by Dylan Ricci.
Metamorphosis of Hitler’s Face into a Moonlit Landscape with Accompaniment (1958). Impressions de la Haute Mongolie (1976/Salvador Dali/José Montes-Baquer/Germany) In any list of films I’d currently most like to see but can’t due to lack of availability, this bizarre “documentary” collaboration between Salvador Dalí and José Montes-Baquer would be near the top of the list. [...]
Jeff VanderMeer’s wonderful and award-winning fantasy tales of the sinister city of Ambergris are now back in print in the US from a major publisher. This is good to see, not only because the book is well worth your attention but also because I helped design the interior, providing title pages for the stories and [...]
It’s a shame there isn’t more of this imaginative work from Filippo Morghen (1730–1777). In a series of etchings from around 1766 he presents the moon as a tropical world inhabited by the 18th century conception of New World savages. I especially like the hunter on his winged serpent (above) and the elaborate trap set [...]
Cathedral Towering over a Town (1813). Karl Friedrich Schinkel was a German painter and Neo-Classical architect. These paintings, produced early in his career, strongly resemble those of his contemporary Caspar David Friedrich, using landscape as a metaphor and with a similar attention to the quality of natural light. Apparently Schinkel thought too much of the [...]
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