‘Adults are idiots’
| Laurie Anderson and her new show, Homeland.
Month: April 2008
The art of Heidi Taillefer
Frustration Attraction (2006).
A Canadian artist works a marvellous variation on Salomé using oils and photo-printed canvas. Lots of other fine, inventive work at her site, all of it shown far too small to see the considerable detail. A tip to artists with websites: let us see the pictures properly; people appreciate it and will spread the word if they like your work. Via Fabulon.
Update: Her site has been relaunched and you can now see a lot more of the detail in her incredible paintings.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• Peter Reed and Salomé After Dark
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
Klaus Dinger, 1946–2008
Klaus Dinger (right) with brother Thomas, circa 1978. From the sleeve of Viva by La Düsseldorf.
“There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk and Klaus Dinger’s Neu! beat.” Brian Eno
Klaus Dinger, the great drummer for Neu! and La Düsseldorf (and briefly Kraftwerk in 1971) died back in March but news of this has taken a while to emerge. Everything he did in the Seventies is essential, the Neu! albums especially. YouTube has a few choice examples such as this clip of someone playing Neu!’s finest (and oft-imitated) moment, Hallogallo, slightly too fast. Then there’s Isi from Neu! 75 and the crazy glam-punk of Hero (a tremendous period performance) shortly before guitarist Michael Rother left and the band transmuted into La Düsseldorf. For a blast of the latter, there’s the majestic Rheinita from Viva. Happily, Michael Rother is still with us and was interviewed in the most recent issue of The Wire.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk
• Metabolist: Goatmanauts, Drömm-heads and the Zuehl Axis
• The genius of Kraftwerk
Atelier Elvira
Atelier Elvira (1897-98).
Seeing as there’s been a run of Art Nouveau-related posts here it’s worth mentioning a location that’s familiar to students of the Jugendstil but less well-known to the world at large. August Endell’s Atelier Elvira was a Munich studio building whose exterior decoration of a very stylised dragon creature manages to be even more exaggerated than similar work by Antoni Gaudí. Munich was the centre of German arts and crafts and produced much home-grown Art Nouveau but this eruption of bizarre plasterwork in an otherwise mundane street was still surprising. The façade was painted green, as in the tinted photo above, and the dragon painted different colours each year, yellow, red and so on.
The ironwork street entrance.
Needless to say, not everyone looked upon this kind of challenging décor favourably. In 1937 the Nazi Oberbürgermeister complained about the “hideous façade disrupting the character of the rest of the street” and had the dragon design chipped off the wall. Allied bombs did for the rest a few years later so these pictures are all that we have left.
New coins
The coins of the realm receive a very welcome makeover following a design competition by the Royal Mint. The winning design by Matthew Dent is a surprisingly contemporary choice for such a staid institution. Although the Royal Arms shield is very traditional, the act of breaking it into pieces across the smaller coins is a clever move which makes the individual coins seem strikingly contemporary when only a small part of the design is visible. I’m looking forward to seeing these once they go into circulation.