Weekend links 454

ewerswunderwald.jpg

Octopus and Pike (1937) by Ilna Ewers-Wunderwald.

• At Expanding Mind: writer and avant-garde publisher Tosh Berman talks with Erik Davis growing up in postwar California, hipster sexism, the hippie horrors of Topanga canyon, his impressions of family friends like Cameron and Brian Jones, and his charming new memoir Tosh, about growing up with his father, the remarkable underground California artist Wallace Berman.

• At Haute Macabre: A Sentiment of Spirits: Conversations with Handsome Devils Puppets.

• “We felt a huge responsibility.” Behind the landmark Apollo 11 documentary.

Jarman’s work was a statement that conservatism did not, or at least should not, define the perception of Britishness. His vision extended all of the way back to the likes of William Blake, John Dee and Gerard Winstanley, the radicals, mystics and outcasts of English history. His era, on the other hand, looked inwards and pessimistically so. The outward world was solely a free market. Our projected national identity was little else but the retread of colonial fantasies, a faux benevolence to the world that handily discarded the violence and tyranny that built it. Jarman saw through this imaginary landscape, often skewering it in his films.

Adam Scovell on the much-missed radicalism of Derek Jarman

• Director Nicolas Winding Refn: “Film is not an art-form any more.”

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 281 by Blakk Harbor.

• At Greydogtales: Hope Hodgson and the Haunted Ear.

Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922).

Michael Rother‘s favourite albums.

Renaissance metal

Puppet Theatre (1984) by Thomas Dolby | Puppet Motel (1994) by Laurie Anderson | Maybe You’re My Puppet (2002) by Cliff Martinez

One thought on “Weekend links 454”

  1. Regarding your recommendation of the Webpage Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill Prinzhorn is regarded as a discoverer, or explorer and we have a different view of his motives and action:
    This webpage is a piece that faithfully reproduces the dominating conceived hegemonic view. But for those who wish to enlighten themselves in a more sobering and factual understanding, here are a few points:

    1. Prinzhorn started his ambitions in 1920 as a reaction to the Dada outburst in World War I beginning 1916. Some of the Dada founding artists in Zurich got sanctuary from forced conscription by hospitalizing themselves as patients in a Swiss psychiatric clinic. That demonstrates that art is its own category and it is impossible to distinguish between the artist being deemed crazy or not. The novelty was that Dada escaped from the art’s ivory tower!

    2. Prinzhorn’s interest was not in the artistic merit of the work, on the contrary. It was a psychiatric reaction to encounter the Dada escape by establishing a pathologizing approach to discriminate artists and denounce their art work as products of a diseased brain. This point is again proved in your website by the fact that a lot of the works are not attributed to any named person but to a psychiatric label, just as the Heidelberg University did.

    3. This point is further established by the initiative of Prinzhorn’s successor, Prof. Carl Schneider, who contributed the works in Heidelberg to the “entartete Kunst” exhibition as a reference to demonstrate that the modern art shows the signs of insanity. How Prof. Carl Schneider in doing so prepared the ramp for the gas chambers of all modern artists, you can read his speech in Archiv für Psychiatrie – Volume 110 and here: https://www.dissidentart.de/eigensinn/carlschneide.htm

    4. Prinzhorn never “collected” the works. There is no evidence whatsoever that the original ownership of the creating artists was transferred by being sold or donated to him. This is proved by an expert opinion by a lawyer specialized in copyrights, Prof. Peter Raue, documented here: https://www.dissidentart.de/eigensinn/gutachten.htm
    Plainly spoken, what Prinzhorn “collected” is in fact looted art. Especially obnoxious is the display TODAY of the exhibition in the lecture room of murderous Prof. Carl Schneider.

    5. Here you can read more in English about the initiative to take the works from Heidelberg and give the artists back their dignity by displaying them in a planned museum “Haus des Eigensinns”- (House of Resoluteness):
    https://www.dissidentart.de/eigensinn/english.htm
    https://www.dissidentart.de/eigensinn/open_letter_english.htm

    Read more here in German, with a link to French: https://irrenoffensive.de/paris.htm

    Hagai Aviel and René Talbot
    for the International Association Against Psychiatric Assault http://www.iaapa.ch

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