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Month: February 2012
German bookplates
A selection from Das Moderne Deutsche Gebrauchs-Exlibris (1922) edited by Richard Braungart, an overview of the practioners of the bookplate form in Germany and Austria during the first decades of the 20th century. Some of the German and Austrian art magazines featured here over the past couple of years included bookplate designs, and Braungart’s collection includes many artists from those magazines: Melchior Lechter, Hugo Höppener (aka Fidus), Julius Diez, Heinrich Vogeler, Marcus Behmer, Franz von Bayros, Koloman Moser, Carl Otto Czeschka, Ephraim Moses Lilien, Franz Stassen and others. 400 examples in all.
Jarek Piotrowski’s Soft Machine
Jarek Piotrowski is a Polish-born Canadian artist whose exhibition of hand-cut PVC mats at Galerie8, London, borrows a title and inspiration from William Burroughs’ The Soft Machine. From the usual slab of gallery-speak:
Drawing on the subversive William S. Burroughs novel The Soft Machine (1961), Piotrowski’s work explores themes of the human body under siege, repetitive rituals and institutions of control. Through an immersive installation of paintings, cut-outs, experimental music and live performance, structure and order are broken down and unanswered fundamental questions of human nature confronted.
These creations no doubt look better in situ than in photos. The close-up below makes me think of Brion Gysin’s meshed calligraphy and the slots in his Dreamachines. Piotrowski talked to Dazed Digital about the Burroughs influence:
I don’t necessarily have a favourite part of the book, I like it as a gesture in itself completely rather than a particular part. I think of it more as an entity, but I do particularly like the phrase, ‘two assholes and a mandrake’ – it is a beautiful picture that I find quite intriguing.
Soft Machine runs to March 11th, 2012.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive
Weekend links 94
Mateo (2011), carved wood sculpture by Bruno Walpoth.
“Dennis Potter’s [The Singing Detective] is 25 years old but still feels avant garde,” says Stephen Armstrong. No fucking kidding, I watched the DVDs again last weekend. Potter’s drama featured non-linear flashbacks, song-and-dance hallucination sequences, an intertextual sub-plot, and a central character who was vitriolic, misanthropic, misogynist and covered from head-to-toe in flaking skin. This wasn’t exiled to an arts channel ghetto but was primetime viewing, Sunday evenings on BBC 1. • Related: “Is Dennis Potter’s singalong noir miniseries the all-time pinnacle of television drama? Graham Fuller thinks it is.”
• American band Earth are using Kickstarter to fund their next project, Wonders from the House of Albion, an LP/CD/DVD/book combining their music with “field recordings from various megalithic and other sites of human/fairy encounters across the UK, also the use of ritual and folkloric magical practices”. Dylan Carlson & Adrienne Davies discuss their work here.
…sort of like Nabokov’s objection to Our Lady of the Flowers, which he saw as a masterpiece but thought, “Why isn’t this book about women?” Nabokov hated homosexuality and was very edgy around it, partly because his own brother was homosexual and his uncle. And he believed that it was hereditary, so he was always nervous about it.
Edmund White chooses five favourite gay novels. Related: a dance adaptation by Earthfall of Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys.
• “The Belbury Tales is the kind of record you feel should have come out on Vertigo around ’73, but never actually did.” Belbury Poly‘s Jim Jupp on ploughman’s lunches, prog rock and avoiding “Clarkson/Wakeman territory”.
• Morbid Curiosity: The Richard Harris Collection, an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center exploring “the iconography of death across cultures and traditions spanning nearly six thousand years”.
• Geoff Dyer’s Zona, an exegesis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, is officially out at the end of this month. The book is reviewed here and here.
• “Through a blurry electronic prism“: MetaFilter traces a history of analogue video synthesis.
• Dylan Ricci‘s wonderful photography of the male body has moved to a new location.
• Infinite Forest by Studio a+i, a design for an AIDS memorial in New York City.
• Susan Cain discussing “the power of introverts” at Scientific American.
• Strange Flowers on that icon of Middle Eastern music, Umm Kulthum.
• Ewan Morrison on “The self-epublishing bubble”.
• Winter Sleep (2007) by Valgeir Sigurdsson feat. Dawn McCarthy | Black (2008) by Ben Frost with Valgeir Sigurdsson, Sam Amidon & Sigrídur Sunna Reynisdóttir | Unbreakable Silence (2011) by Ben Frost & Daníel Bjarnason
Derek Jarman’s music videos
Duggie Fields in It’s A Sin
A hidden Derek Jarman film lies scattered among a handful of music videos from the 1980s, something you can pretend you’re seeing flashes of in the promo shorts the director was making whilst trying to raise money for his last few feature films. A recent re-watch of Caravaggio reminded me of these, recalling a remark Jarman made that his video for the Pet Shop Boys’ It’s A Sin was the first time anyone allowed him to use 35mm film. Among other things, that promo features artist Duggie Fields with a gilded face, one of a number of little in-jokes that Jarman aficionados can retrieve from these shorts. Running through them in sequence you get a skate through familiar visuals, from the masks and mirrors flashed into the camera in Broken English, to the Super-8 fast-forwards of The Smiths and Easterhouse films, with plenty of flowers and ritual fires along the way.
Broken English
This isn’t a complete list since not everything is on YouTube. Even if it were I wouldn’t link to anything by the wretched Bob Geldof for whom Jarman made two promos. Needless to say some are more sympathetic to Jarman’s obsessions than others: Marianne Faithfull’s film is a fascinating short that provides a link via the singer between Jarman and Kenneth Anger. The Bryan Ferry film, on the other hand, is a bland piece for a bland song. Suede and The Smiths seemed to have let Derek do what he liked. Well done, boys.
Broken English (1979) by Marianne Faithfull (featuring Witches’ Song, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan and Broken English).
Dance With Me (1983) by The Lords of the New Church.
Willow Weep For Me (1983) by Carmel.
Broken English
Dance Hall Days (1983) by Wang Chung.
Tenderness Is A Weakness (1984) by Marc Almond.
Windswept (1985) by Bryan Ferry.
The Queen Is Dead
Panic (1986) by The Smiths.
Ask (1986) by The Smiths.
The Queen Is Dead (1986) by The Smiths | Long version
1969 (1986) by Easterhouse.
Whistling In The Dark (1986) by Easterhouse.
So Young
It’s A Sin (1987) by the Pet Shop Boys.
Rent (1987) by the Pet Shop Boys.
So Young (1993) by Suede.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Derek Jarman’s Neutron
• Mister Jarman, Mister Moore and Doctor Dee
• The Tempest illustrated
• In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman
• Derek Jarman at the Serpentine
• The Angelic Conversation
• The life and work of Derek Jarman