November 2011 – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 85

Group I (Convertible Series, 2010) by Monir Farmanfarmaian.

The four albums recorded by Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis under the name Dome are being reissued by Editions Mego together with Gilbert & Lewis’s Yclept album. I always preferred Gilbert & Lewis in their Dome incarnation (and Colin Newman solo) to the punk and post-punk stylings of their former band, Wire. Dome were (among other things) eccentric, awkward, noisy, hypnotic and experimental. Their recordings seemed to go largely unnoticed in the early 1980s so it’s good to see them being reissued.

• A Children’s Treasury of American Cops Brutally Attacking Citizens: “…it takes quite a lot of tax money to keep a bunch of vicious thugs overfed and dressed like junior Darth Vaders with their portable hard-ons, on the off-chance some college kids might one day peacefully sit outside to protest this nation’s revolting descent.”

• “Stevenson, as has been said, was disarmingly candid about the material he borrowed for Treasure Island. One name, however, is missing from the extensive catalogue of self-confessed ‘plagiarisms’.” John Sutherland at the TLS.

• “Messiaen’s advice was revelatory. ‘You have the good fortune of being an architect and having studied special mathematics’, he told Xenakis. ‘Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music.'”

• “They always said punk was an influence. Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, what a load of old shit that was. It’s Thatcherite art care of Saatchi & Saatchi.” And don’t ask Jamie Reid about the Sex Pistols.

• Dennis Cooper is interviewed at Lambda Literary. I was surprised last week to find my recent post about William Burroughs’ The Wild Boys linked on a feature about the novel at Cooper’s blog.

• Cosmic Geometry: The art of Monir Farmanfarmaian at The Paris Review. Related: Monir Farmanfarmaian at the Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

• Paleolithic phallic art suggests that many early European men scarred, pierced and tattooed their penises.

• FACT mix 301 is a selection of dub tracks, dubstep pieces and Middle Eastern songs compiled by Kahn.

• Who left a tree, then a coffin in the library?

• The Little Journal of Rejections (1896).

• Clive finished another painting.

• The Great Salt Desert of Iran.

• Keep Drawing.

• Troisième (1980) by Colin Newman | And Then… (1980) by Dome | The Red Tent pts I & II (1980) by Dome) | Jasz (1981) by Dome.

Koloman Moser posters

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Secession poster (1899).

Since I’ve been delving over the past year into the fin de siècle culture of Germany and Austria, the name of Koloman Moser (1868–1918) has kept recurring. This is partly because of Moser’s associations with the Viennese Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, of course, but I’ve made a point of drawing attention to his work since it’s struck me as some of the most remarkable being produced anywhere in Europe during the period 1895–1910. Moser’s poster designs are a good example of his authority as an artist and graphic designer who quickly evolved from Mucha-derived Art Nouveau flourishes to a degree of stylisation that was incredibly advanced for the early 1900s. The graphics of Moser and fellow artist/design Alfred Roller point the way to Art Deco twenty years later, and also to the psychedelic era whose poster artists eagerly borrowed motifs, figures and lettering designs from Moser, Roller, Mucha and others.

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Frommes Kalender poster (1899).

Wikimedia Commons has a generous sampling of Moser’s work that shows his incredible versatility in a variety of media. The Secession designers, and Moser in particular, and memorialised in Paul Shaw’s typeface design, Kolo.

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Illustrierte Zeitung poster (1900).

Continue reading “Koloman Moser posters”

Ver Sacrum, 1902

Continuing the series of posts about Ver Sacrum, the art journal of the Viennese Secession. The volume of issues for 1902 maintains the same format as the previous year, beginning with a series of calendar pages then proceeding to showcase art, sculpture and graphics from Austria and elsewhere. The Secession exhibitions in Vienna were a highlight of this year, something explored in greater detail in the pages of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration. Also in these issues is more Symbolist art, this time from Jan Toorop and Franz Stuck. Among the latter’s drawings and paintings there’s a version of his popular temptress-with-serpent theme here entitled The Vice. (Stuck’s The Sin is the most reproduced of this series.) I hadn’t seen this one before which is surprising seeing as it’s his only (?) horizontal treatment of the theme.

As before, anyone wishing to see more can browse all 412 pages or download the entire volume here.

Continue reading “Ver Sacrum, 1902”

Secret Societies and Spirit Boards

Komposition für einen Rhombus (2007) by Fabian Marti.

Fabian Marti’s print is one of the few works that stood out for me in the press materials for the Secret Societies exhibition which has just opened at the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux:

[Secret Societies] deals with the general theme of secret societies through the prism of contemporary art in the current context of media super-exposure – from WikiLeaks to Credit Rating Agencies (CRA), just to quote two current examples. Artists have always been fascinated by the unknown and the occult. But unlike journalists who are mainly focused on investigating present-day news, artists work around the mechanisms of the secret and are better equipped to question the very limits of the ideology of transparency in our era of super-exposure.

Unfortunately many of the works look like the customary state of affairs, with a bunch of contemporary artists doing their usual schtick and not really questioning (familiar gallery buzzword) anything much at all. On the plus side they have a screening of Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother, and also a contribution from Cerith Wyn Evans whose Acephalé reworks in neon the André Masson design for Georges Bataille’s Surrealist secret society. Gary Lachman has created an audio guide for the exhibition which is curated by Cristina Ricupero and Alexis Vaillant, and which runs until February 26th, 2012.

For a more determinedly occult showing this month, there’s Spirit Board curated by JL Schnabel at the Articulated Gallery, San Francisco. And elsewhere I’d recommend the work of Scott Treleaven and Jesse Bransford.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Scott Treleaven

The art of Mel Odom

Boys Kiss 2 (2007).

The gay artists archive has for a long time been the most popular part of this site, that page proving twice as popular as the next post down. In which case I feel I ought to try and add to its contents a bit more frequently…

Mel Odom is an American artist who since the late 1970s has been highly-regarded as a book and magazine illustrator. (JVS Publishing has more about this side of his output.) For the purposes of this post there’s male nudity and some homoerotica, of course, in that Art Deco-ish Tamara de Lempicka style that was very popular in the 1980s. For the time being, this site seems to have the best selection of his paintings and drawings. If you need more then Flickr is one place to go searching.