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Here in the northern hemisphere it’s the wrong time of year to be cavorting in the open air with your clothes off for any length of time. In warmer months the people behind Satyriconte—who were in touch earlier this week—do just this as an exploration of what they call “the contemporary tale of a satyre”: [...]

Gratifying this week to see album cover art under discussion even if the heat-to-light ratio was as unbalanced as it usually is when pop culture is the subject. Jonathan Barnbrook, who also designed the Heathen (2002) and Reality (2003) packaging for David Bowie, wrote about the thinking behind the new cover on his blog. (And [...]

More Polanskiana. This film location site made the tracking down of locations in Repulsion (1965) an easy business. I was hoping they might have an entry for The Tenant, much of which is filmed around the Porte Saint-Denis in Paris but the only other Polanski entries are for Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. No matter, one [...]

From the Beautiful Faces series (2012) by Tran Nguyen. • “What possessed a generation of young European artists, and a few Americans, to suddenly suppress recognizable imagery in pictures and sculptures? Unthinkable at one moment, the strategy became practically compulsory in the next.” Peter Schjeldahl on the birth of abstraction. • “A profanely mystical work [...]

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (2012) by Lesley Barnes. She also has peacock wrapping paper. The most popular post of the year was one I made last December featuring all the artists whose work had appeared throughout 2011 in the weekend links posts. (The surge of views occurred early in January when it was [...]

Thanks to Callum for pointing the way to a beautiful set of playing cards designed by Picart le Doux. • Of cigars and pedants by Houman Barekat, in which Vladimir Nabokov has a problem with Henry James. Tangentially related: Post-Punk’s Nabokov: Howard Devoto and Magazine, live from Berlin, 1980. (Given A Song From Under The [...]

Here in Britain there’s no Thanksgiving so turkey as a seasonal meal is a Christmas dish. Turkey also has another meaning which the OED can supply: 6.6 U.S. slang. a.6.a An inferior or unsuccessful cinematographic or theatrical production, a flop; hence, anything disappointing or of little value. This post concerns the latter—turkeys for the turkey [...]

Arriving in the post this week, a Christmas gift from Supervert, a chapbook featuring a new piece of writing that purports to be the unauthorised biography of American artist/photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. The premise is that the facts of the real Witkin’s life are far too mundane to account for his extraordinary photo tableaux so Supervert [...]

Self-portrait by Jon Jacobsen from his Home series. • Steven Arnold: Cabinet of Curiosities is “a retrospective exhibition of this groundbreaking yet under-recognized queer artist at the ONE Archives Gallery & Museum in West Hollywood. The exhibition celebrates Arnold’s radical imagination, presenting many of his tableaux vivant photographs alongside never before exhibited drawings, sketchbooks, paintings [...]

Last year I was searching out various works of American land art via Google Maps. This is a similar post looking for some of Britain’s hillside figures, all of which are far older than any 20th-century artworks even if some of them aren’t as old as people hope. The antiquity of the Uffington White Horse [...]

Wiltonia sive Comitatus Wiltoniensis; Anglice Wilshire (1649) by Atlas van Loon. Avebury doth as much exceed Stonehenge in grandeur as a Cathedral doth an ordinary Parish Church. John Aubrey John Aubrey (1626–1697) was the pioneering antiquarian and archaeologist whose interest in the ancient sites of southern England made him the first person to subject Avebury [...]

Predicadors del be i del mal (c. 1928–1930). My thanks to Will at 50 Watts for sending these experimental photos by Spanish artists Eduardo Chicharro (1873–1949) and Gregorio Prieto, neither of whose work I’d looked at before. Prieto is of most interest here (that’s him in photo five with the metalwork wrapped around his head) [...]

Salomé (c. 1919). Frantisek Drtikol (1883–1961) was a Czech artist and photographer whose nude studies frequently borrowed fin de siècle themes. Salomé was a subject he returned to on many occasions with different models. In other hands this might be a pretext for showing naked flesh but Drtikol’s work goes beyond mere soft porn with [...]

Technological mandala 02 (The beginning) (2012) by Leonardo Ulian. • The Yellow Magic Orchestra really were the Japanese equivalent of Kraftwerk in 1978. I’d not seen this video for Firecracker before. Same goes for the Technopolis and Rydeen videos. Related: YMO’s synth programmer, Hideki Matsutake, showing off his modular Moog on a Japanese TV show. [...]

La Hora del Fantasma (no date) by Joaquim Pla Janini. • Many of the art links featured here are tips from Thom Ayres, so it’s only right to point to his new album project which he’s funding through Kickstarter and embellishing with his own nature photography. • Anne Billson is another writer beguiled by Philippe [...]

A Glove: Anxieties (1881) by Max Klinger. Although the Glove‘s scenario was given its due Germanic explication by contemporary critics, it defies rational analysis. The last picture, which was seen as a kind of happy ending to the glove’s peregrinations, is particularly ambiguous and leaves the whole meaning of the series in doubt. The story is [...]

The Arcade, Cincinnati (1905). Some arcade views from the Shorpy Historical Photo Archive, home of many wonderful high-res pictures. The Colonial Arcade below has appeared here before since some of Shorpy’s prints can also be found at the Library of Congress. This page has details about Cleveland’s arcades while the photos themselves show the changing [...]

Japanese poster (1982). At The Quietus Steve Earles looks back at John Carpenter’s visceral and uncompromising The Thing which exploded messily onto cinema screens thirty years ago. It’s always worth being reminded that this film (and Blade Runner in the same year) was considered a flop at the time following bad reviews and a poor [...]

Autochrome by Léon Gimpel. The Grand Palais exhibition hall in Paris is one of the few sites remaining from the Exposition Universelle of 1900 (see yesterday’s post), and is still in use today as a venue for art exhibits, fashion shows and the like. The huge and graceful canopy ceiling makes it a far better venue [...]

Grand entrance. Every time I think I’ve said enough on this subject something else turns up. I’ve linked before to the Brooklyn Museum’s tinted photographs of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 but these photochom prints at the Library of Congress are so sharp, detailed and subtly hued they make all other views seem crude [...]