December 2011 – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Meeting Harry Smith by Drew Christie

A short anecdotal film by artist and animator Drew Christie in which musicologist John Cohen relates his first encounter with mercurial polymath Harry Smith, a man small in stature but large in interests and influence. Christie is something of a polymath himself since he also provides the banjo soundtrack. There’s more art and animation at his blog, while Ubuweb (of course) has a small selection of Smith’s own films. Thanks to Caspar for the tip.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Heaven and Earth Magic by Harry Smith
• Harry Smith revisited
• The art of Harry Smith, 1923–1991

Weekend links 88

Typographic Composition (1924) by Teresa Zarnowerówna from a post about Polish graphic design at 50 Watts.

• “Direct action is a matter of acting as if you were already free… […] …the link between military and money systems remains the dirty secret of capitalism.” A lengthy and essential interview with “anarchist anthropologist” David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5000 Years.

• “…it was after being told by an art director that he preferred her images of women to men that Toyin [Ibidapo] began to shoot boys in an attempt to prove him wrong. Something that Cult of Boys does perfectly.”

The pornographic imagination is deeply intertwined with the pain and horror of life. Some of that comes from our basic biological reality, which is unpleasant enough, and much of it comes from our social structures. Biological life has been completely degraded and continues to become more and more degraded in novel and more horrific ways, so it is inevitable that our horrible social structures – our schools, prisons, families, slaughterhouses and farms – become sites for the pornographic imagination.

Stephen Beachy discusses his novel, boneyard.

• “To my right is a wall bracket that, on closer inspection, turns out to be a human face made of porcelain fruits. The anteater rests on top of the television.” Jonathan Jones meets Jan Svankmajer.

• Anselm Kiefer‘s new exhibtion at White Cube, London, takes its name and some inspiration from Fulcanelli’s alchemical exegesis, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (1926).

• Today (Sunday, 11th December) on Resonance FM at 8.00pm GMT, Alex Fitch talks to Alan Moore about HP Lovecraft and related matters.

• Nick Hydra is putting all 112 issues of occult encyclopaedia Man, Myth & Magic online.

• Ira Cohen ‘s 1968 film The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda is available again on DVD.

• Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s paintings of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

• “Margate’s a bloody toilet!” Can you handle The Reprisalizer?

• Bibliothèque Gay on Cocteau’s Le livre blanc (in French).

• Josie & the Pussycats in A Clockwork Orange.

• Lovely Book Covers

• Words With The Shaman (1985) by David Sylvian w/ Jon Hassell, Steve Jansen & Holger Czukay – I: Ancient Evening | II: Incantation | III: Awakening (Songs From The Treetops).

Thought-Forms and Auras

Like yesterday’s squid, some of these Theosophist illustrations from Thought-Forms (1905) by Charles Webster Leadbeater & Annie Besant, and Man Visible and Invisible: Examples of different types of men as seen by means of trained clairvoyance (1902) by Leadbeater alone, have been reproduced for years in books yet you seldom see the complete set. The University of Heidelberg has scans of both volumes so I’ll direct the curious there for detailed explanations of the illustrations which were intended to graphically portray mental states, and the auras which Theosophists believed surrounded the human body. The diagrams above are harmonographs created by pendulum motion, and evidently seemed sufficiently strange for Leadbeater and Besant to interpret them as representations of emotional experience. They’ve always made me think of the similar pendulum drawings used by Saul Bass in his Vertigo title sequence, although I’ve never seen any indication that Bass had these particular diagrams in mind. In the pictures below there’s also a suitably spiky depiction of an angry person’s aura, and representations of music emerging from a cathedral in the form of polychrome mushroom clouds.

Continue reading “Thought-Forms and Auras”

Le Poulpe Colossal

If this isn’t quite the ur-Kraken of illustration history, it’s one of them, reproduced countless times when sea monster depictions are required. The source is Histoire naturelle, générale et particuliere, des mollusques, animaux sans vertèbres et a sang blanc (1802) by Felix de Roissy, some of whose other illustrations are in this Flickr set from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

There are further cephalopodic curios in the BHL Mollusks and Invertebrates sets, the example below being from Résultats des campagnes scientifiques accomplies sur son yacht (1889), a fine collection of what the French would call aquarelles.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Abysmal creatures
• Fascinating tentacula
• Jewelled butterflies and cephalopods
• The art of Rune Olsen
• Octopulps
• Coming soon: Sea Monsters and Cannibals!

The art of Rob Clarke

International Monster (1993).

I found this drawing on a Tumblr site, as I recall, then traced its lineage back to the artist’s own Tumblr, and his own website where he states that “This site contains fucked up shit. If that bugs you please go away.” After all that it was a surprise to discover that Rob Clarke was one of the artists whose work was featured in the Dirty Comics exhibition in San Francisco back in October, a show to which I also contributed. There’s another of what he calls his “penis python things” on his Tumblr pages, while his website contains a “menagerie of nasty pigs, dogboys, gymbunnies, trolls, bears and other critters”, some of which are for sale.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive