November 2022 – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 648

The Twittering Machine (1922) by Paul Klee.

• “Thinking of ‘writer Twitter’ as more important than writers themselves is an insult to the profession. People have been trading words for money for thousands of years. They will continue to do so after the death of a platform built on manufactured outrage, social hierarchy, unfunny jokes, stale memes, pornography, and spam. I mention this Atlantic essay only because it echoes what so many people are saying in the ether right now, not to pick on its author. The piece reads like a parody of how writers overestimate the importance of Twitter to their work and careers. It’s frankly a little embarrassing. Your work is the product you sell! Not the shitty jokes you tell with people you want to impress.” Freddie deBoer on the kerfuffle du jour. For “writer” see also “artist” or anyone else working at the intersection between commerce and creativity. From what I’ve read this week about potential technical problems at the pestilential birdcage I’d be less sanguine about its immediate survival. Since I retreated from the place as an active user two-and-a-half years ago all I get from it is the inflated subscriber number you see on the right-hand side of this page, a combination of Twitter followers plus email subscribers. The latter currently stand at some 270 individuals so if you’re among that number you can consider yourself part of a more exclusive group. And thanks for subscribing!

• “…the books of the past, besides adding to our understanding, offer something we also need: repose, refreshment and renewal. They help us keep going through dark times, they lift our spirits, they comfort us. Which means that I also strongly agree with the poet John Ashbery, who once wrote, ‘I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word “escapist,” but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.'” Michael Dirda makes a case for reading classic, unusual and neglected books. Kudos for the mention of Anthony Skene‘s Monsieur Zenith, a character few of Dirda’s readers will have heard of.

• “While Haeckel’s paintings turn the floating phantoms into baroque spectacles of colour and flowing form, Mayer’s medusae are more sober, their tentacles subdued, their umbellate bells transparent.” Kevin Dann on the jellyfish and other “floating phantoms” described in AG Mayer’s Medusae of the World (1910).

• “The passing of time has added potency to the images, giving this interpretation of the Dracula story the feel of a distant fairy tale, a myth emerging from the mists of time, erupting across the world of cinema, its shadow reaching everywhere.” Martyn Bamber on 100 years of Murnau’s Nosferatu.

• At AnOther: Camille Vivier talks about shooting nude models in the treasure-filled home of HR Giger.

• New music: In Concert & In Residence by Sarah Davachi, and Anglo-Saxon Androids by Moon Wiring Club.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Kimono portraits were popular souvenirs for sailors visiting Japan in the 1800s.

• Mix of the week: Saturnalia: Deep Jazz for Long Nights, 1969–1980 at Aquarium Drunkard.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Clouds.

• Dark Clouds With Silver Linings (1961) by Sun Ra | Obscured By Clouds (1972) by Pink Floyd | Firmament (Cloudscape) (1995) by Main

The art of Paul Binnie

Dragon and Demon (1997).

More Japanese art, although the artist responsible happens to be Scottish. One of Paul Binnie’s prints appeared here in January in a post about the Itsukushima Shrine together with ukiyo-e views by other artists. Binnie studied print-making with a Japanese master of the medium in the 1990s, and many of his prints that follow traditional ukiyo-e subjects are now valued by collectors. He also has a nice line in homoerotic portraiture, which is what you see here, a few examples from this collectors’ site. Most of my selections are those styled like his traditional prints but you’ll find plenty of paintings and drawings in the “Handsome Men (Bidanshi)” section.

Celadon Censer (2004).

Yoshitoshi’s Ghosts (2004).

Bang Bang (2011).

Hokusai’s Waterfalls (2006).

Katana (2007).

Maple Leaves (1994).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

The teamLab experience

One of the surprise pleasures of browsing Rambalac’s YouTube channel was finding two visits to his local teamLab exhibitions. teamLab is a Japan-based arts collective who use digital technology to create immersive artworks using light and sound. Rambalac’s main excursion takes you to teamLab Borderless in Odaiba, Tokyo*, a building-sized collection of the group’s past creations situated in interconnected rooms on two floors. As with other Rambalac videos, what you have here is one man wandering around the place with a camera, which in this case gives us the opportunity to see Borderless from a visitor’s point of view. teamLab also has its own YouTube channel but most of the videos there are promotional pieces, usually a few minutes in length and heavily-edited. Rambalac seldom edits his videos which generally run for an hour at a time.

The Borderless exhibits variously resemble nightclub interiors, Yayoi Kusama installations, theme-park attractions and psychedelic lightshows, with some of the larger, projection-filled areas giving the impression of walking around inside the DMT trip from Enter the Void. Kusama’s infinite mirror reflections are obvious precursors, especially in The Infinite Crystal Universe, a room containing a mass of illuminated cables running from mirrored floor to mirrored ceiling. The main difference, of course, is that Kusama’s installations are as static as most contemporary art, whereas teamLab’s creations are continually in flux. Some of the change relies on viewer participation; there are touch-sensitive surfaces and phone apps that allow visitors to adjust the parameters of specific works. It’s not all child-friendly psychedelia, at least at the conceptual level. The titles of some of the creations remind me of the portentous declarations favoured by Keiji Haino for his doom-laden recordings: Life is Flickering Light Floating in the Dark; Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity; Massless Suns and Dark Spheres; Matter is Void…

I find all of this fascinating and exciting, it’s just a shame that you have to travel halfway around the world to see the things in person. teamLab does exhibit in other countries but to date most of their external work has been close to Japan. Some of the musical accompaniment at Borderless is overly dramatic for my tastes, like extracts from an anime soundtrack, but elsewhere the exhibits have their own brand of generative ambient music which in this context is genuinely ambient, not the diluted techno that we’ve been burdened with since the early 1990s. A good example of this is can be found in the other Rambalac video which visits Resonating Life in the Acorn Forest, an exhibit in a wooded park at Higashi-Tokorozawa.

In this installation the trees are lit with coloured lights controlled by the illuminated polythene blobs sitting beneath them. The blobs emit electronic chimes when touched; each chime affects the nearest blobs which in turn change the colours of the lights. An additional bonus in Rambalac’s video is the nocturnal chirping of cicadas. teamLab are big on rippling fluctuation, it’s a quality found in many of their other exhibits. The ripples have become physical in more recent exhibits which require visitors to get their feet wet. I’ve no idea how Living Crystallized Light has been created but whatever the technology behind it the end result is quite incredible.

I’m predisposed to enjoy this kind of thing when I’ve always liked art that involves coloured light and mirrors—I’ve a lot of time for the creations of James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson—but I’ve been wondering for a while now when we’d start to see the emergence of art that feels like it belongs in this century instead of yet more expensive (and inert) novelties sitting in blank-walled galleries. teamLab aren’t the only people using technology in this way, there’s an increasing overlap between art and sound among electronic musicians like Robert Henke and Ryoji Ikeda, while Brian Eno has been evolving his own abstract sound-and-light environments for many years. More like this, please.

* Borderless in Odaiba permanently closed in August but teamLab will be opening a similar venue in Toyko next year.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Light Leaks
• Eno’s Luminous Opera House panorama
• Infinite reflections
• Yayoi Kusama
• Maximum Silence by Giancarlo Neri

Weekend links 647

A local dispute on the planet Mars. Art by Kevin O’Neill from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

• “…this image has puzzled enthusiasts of the scientific mystic’s works, both for its obscure provenance and cryptic symbolism. With its pastiche of Renaissance visual style and medieval caption — “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch” — the illustration was once thought to have originated centuries before Flammarion published his text.” Hunter Dukes on the enduring mystery of the “Flammarion Engraving”.

• “For Spare, radio, and the waves that carried the music he loved to listen to, were more than just a metaphor for the spirit world. They were an active mode of conveyance for occult energies and vibrations – the swirling, ectoplasmic tendrils from which odd figures emerge in some of his most dense and haunting work.” Mark Pilkington explores Austin Osman Spare’s influence on the world of music.

• At Spine: Design studio Milk & Bone’s designer Alicia Raitt re-imagines all 14 of Kurt Vonnegut’s book covers to celebrate his 100th birthday.

• Farewell to Kevin O’Neill and Nik Turner, both of whom headed to the Western Lands this week.

• Mean, moody and magnificent: film noir studio portraits – in pictures.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 773 by Roméo Poirier.

• New music: Evergreen by Patrick Shiroishi.

• Brainstorm (1972) by Hawkwind | Hurricane Fighter Plane (1985) by Inner City Unit | Brainstorm (1993) by Monster Magnet

The Legend of Charlie Fish

I’ve had several new book covers waiting in the wings for the past few months. The most recent of these, the cover for The Legend of Charlie Fish by Josh Rountree, was made public earlier this week so I can reveal it here.

In this debut, neo-gothic Western novel, an unlikely found family flees to Galveston, Texas, and a psychic young girl bonds with an enigmatic gill-man. While two bounty hunters are determined to profit by the spectacle Charlie Fish, the Great Storm—the worst natural disaster in US history—is on its way.

The brief for this one was to create something similar to the covers I designed for Mike Shevdon’s Courts of the Fayre series. Having already been asked to imitate the look of that series for a Marianne Williamson cover I was a little reluctant to do so again, but the final version of this one feels sufficiently different from the others to stand apart. One advantage of the graphic treatment was being able to use silhouettes to hint at the nature of the “enigmatic gill-man” without being too specific. When the appearance of characters is more alluded to than described you have to take care that your artwork isn’t too literal.

The Legend of Charlie Fish will be published by Tachyon in July 2023.