Tours de Revolutions by Peter Eudenbach (2007). Built to commemorate the French Revolution, the Eiffel Tower inspired Ferris to create a revolving wrought iron marvel to surpass it. Twenty years later Duchamp’s love of Ferris Wheels led to the first readymade and caused a revolution in art. Tours de Revolution is a Ferris wheel made [...]
The Buccaneer was a Picturesque Fellow by Howard Pyle (1905). Seeing as how Johnny Depp and co. are sailing the Spanish Main once more (to mixed reviews, unfortunately), now is perhaps a suitable moment to note the genesis of our popular conception of buccaneers. The famous characters of the Wild West were being mythologised while [...]
Us and Them (Torn Map Collage on Canvas). At first glance, from afar, Berrini’s works look like a collection of high-quality maps and atlases with unfamiliar continents and geographic markings. As you examine the details of the maps a bit closer, and try to follow the geographic and geopolitical information displayed, you do a double-take [...]
Dies Irae. Jacques Sultana is a French artist whose paintings of naked men are very well-realised—photo-realist almost—but like a lot of gay art don’t do much apart from say “here’s a naked man.” However, his site also has a small gallery of homoerotic fantasy drawings which are equally well-done and far more detailed and imaginative [...]
Ballard on Dalí The shock of the old.
Not art inspired by LSD but drawings done whilst under its influence. These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD—part of a test conducted by the US government during its dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950s. The artist was given a dose of LSD-25 and free access to [...]
BLDGBLOG: The Book From web to print.
Young couple with motor car, c.1910. Photographer unknown. An exhibition of extraordinary Edwardian colour photographs opens today at the National Media Museum, London Bradford. This exhibition will open on the 25th May. Marking one hundred years of the first practical process for colour photography—the Autochrome, invented by the Lumiere brothers—the National Media Museum presents a [...]
The London Oasis, first seen on Clerkenwell Green last summer, has been resurrected at the Chelsea Flower Show. London Oasis opened on 19th June 2006 as a temporary structure on Clerkenwell Green. Designed by architect Laurie Chetwood, the Oasis is a demonstration of sustainability and renewable energy working with architecture to provide a tranquil oasis [...]
This week’s book purchase (yes, dear reader, it never ends, there are merely lulls between one indulgence of the vice and the next) is a small Bodley Head volume that comprises part of the collected works of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), or “Saki” as he’s better known. I have Saki’s complete works already in a [...]
A few drawings by British illustrator John Austen (1886–1948), like Patten Wilson another artist whose work is hard to come by today. Austen was one of the many young illustrators over whom Aubrey Beardsley’s etiolated shadow fell from 1900 onwards and it’s the first ten years of Austen’s work I find most interesting, mainly because [...]
left: Mikel; right: Matt. Toxicboy aka Mikel from Montreal, is a photographer as stunningly gorgeous as many of his models, so his “self-centred self portraits” are entirely justified, for this viewer at least. He enhances some of his pictures with subtle and artful digital manipulation, as with the photo above showing three incarnations of the [...]
Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #3 (1992). Following from the post about an art forgery exhibition (and Eddie Campbell discussing his American Gothic cover for Bacchus), I thought I’d post some of my own forgeries, or pastiches as we call them when no deception is intended. Reverbstorm was the Lord Horror comic series I was creating with [...]
Love and Haight: 1967 again Another Summer of Love retrospective piece. Big feature, great stuff.
Non-Brits may not be aware that The South Bank Show is a long-running arts programme (or “show”, as Americans prefer) and the last bastion of cultural broadcasting on the otherwise completely moribund ITV channel. Over the years the SBS has produced some great documentaries and this one from 1985 is particularly good, capturing artist Francis [...]
Harlequin Disturbs Sleeping Fish by John Myatt in the style of Joan Miró (no date). Fakes and Forgeries: The Art of Deception is an exhibition at the Bruce Museum, Connecticut, running from May 12th–September 9th 2007. For its major spring/summer exhibition, the Bruce Museum explores a subject that is exceptionally topical in today’s art world. [...]
Liu Hui Wen’s “Call of Cthulhu” And other forgotten masterworks of Chinese SF.
The Bradbury Building, 304 South Broadway, Los Angeles. This looks like an old photograph but it actually dates from 1989 and comprises part of the Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990 archive that the UCLA Library has recently made public. The Bradbury Building (constructed in 1893) was one of the few places I insisted [...]
Devils and Angels. There’s been plenty of speculation over the past twenty-four hours concerning the nature of the post-mortem torments that might await Jerry Falwell now that his soul has departed its corpulent container. Various suggestions I’ve seen run the gamut from the fanciful—being buggered for eternity by purple Teletubbies—to the semi-serious—finding himself in the [...]
Lesbian Witches Claim Credit For Falwell Demise Goddess bless them.
I can’t resist the opportunity to acknowledge the demise today of one of America’s worst bigots with a picture of something he’d really, really hate. All your efforts were in vain, fat boy—tough. Photography by the wonderful Jack Slomovits. Update: Boing Boing posts the parody ad from Hustler that had Falwell claiming to have lost [...]
Oh Yeah (1962). Sleeve design by Loring Eutemey. “People say that I’m hollering. Man, I feel like hollering.” Charles Mingus. Listening to this great album this week had me searching for the equally great sleeve design from the vinyl edition which vanished from the CD reissue. The cover that replaced it is a dour photo [...]
The deteriorated Gothic splendour of George Gilbert Scott’s railway hotel at St Pancras station, London, in a series of 360 degree views. The empty building looks distinctly creepy in many of these panoramas, like unused maps for a computer game. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The panoramas archive Previously on { feuilleton } • [...]
The Bacon-esque blur is Machinefabriek, aka Rutger Zuydervelt from the Netherlands, performing this evening at the Cross Street Chapel with Xela and friends. Events I’ve seen here before have been predominantly acoustic so it made a change to see something where the balance was shifted in favour of electronics or the electronic processing of acoustic [...]
Rose Hobart (1936) Dir: Joseph Cornell 17mins, tinted B&W The first experimental film by Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) is available for viewing at Ubuweb (where they list the years of his birth and death incorrectly). Cornell’s famous boxes are highly-regarded and still influential but his films receive less attention. This is the first one [...]
…for Miss Melinda Gebbie and Mr Alan Moore on the day of their wedding. I can’t make it to Northampton today but here’s the delightful invitation that Melinda created which features a Fabergé egg adorned with views of San Francisco and the happy couple dancing inside. I hope the weather’s good for them. Update: Neil [...]
The Codex Seraphinianus again Justin Taylor investigates. Via.
Cute and sexy Flickr photographer Jean-Paul works a couple of variations on the Flandrin pose. (His other version is here.) Earlier Flandrin variations are linked below. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The recurrent pose archive
Glykon and Asmodeus by Alan Moore (1994). Alan’s lengthy 2003 interview with Arthur magazine is now online if you missed it the first time, wherein he “gives Jay Babcock a historical-theoretical-autobiographical earful about the connection between the Arts and the Occult”. And his equally lengthy piece on the history of pornography from Arthur #25 is [...]
The Guardian makeover Following the lead of the NYT by the looks of it.
The Four Seasons (1897). Typically gorgeous work from the unjustly neglected Victorian illustrator. There’s more scans of the Coleridge illustrations (shown below) at Dr Chris Mullen’s excellent Visual Telling of Stories site.
Griffith Park, Los Angeles, last night.
Helvetica at 50 The BBC talks typefaces.
Curtis Harrington, who died on Monday, was chiefly known as a director of low-budget horror films, the most acclaimed of which is his debut feature Night Tide (1961), a watery riff on Cat People (1942) starring a young Dennis Hopper. But Harrington should also be remembered for his associations with early American avant garde cinema, [...]
Trunk (Jay Garvin) by James Bidgood (early 1960s). The Male Gaze is an exhibition at the powerHouse Arena, Brooklyn, NYC, from April 20th–May 27th, 2007. Untitled by Raymond Carrance (aka Czanara) (1960–70). Sullen burger boys meet the effete cognoscenti in The Male Gaze: a group show including over 20 artists whose cultural explosions have rocked [...]
Some YoYo Stuff: An observation of the observations of Don Van Vliet by Anton Corbijn (1993). Anton Corbijn’s sad and touching short about Captain Beefheart is at Ubuweb. Includes a brief appearance by David Lynch. Don van Vliet, alias “Captain Beefheart”, is one of the most influential, misunderstood, talked about, admired, copied, treasured, loved and [...]
Powell & Pressburger reworked for the stage A Matter of Life and Death and theatre.
Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler is one of my all-time favourite music books, an expert guide to the psychedelic jungle of German rock from 1968–1975. (And it seems to be out of print. Damn.) Now he’s written a follow-up. Julian Cope, eccentric and visionary rock musician, hip archaeologist and one time frontman of Teardrop Explodes, follows the [...]
The IoS Pink List: 2007 “The Independent on Sunday‘s annual celebration of the great and the gay.”
top: Jon Hassell: Solid State. Richard Maxfield: Memorial Concerts. bottom: The Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band. Pandit Pran Nath: Evening Ragas. Artist Marian Zazeela’s beautiful hand-drawn posters can be seen (and bought) at the MELA Foundation website. Most of these were created for the Dream House productions hosted by Zazeela and partner La Monte [...]
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