{architecture} – { feuilleton }

The Journal of Decorative Art

My workload has increased of late to a degree where I’ve not been looking at many websites that aren’t intended to fulfil some research quest or other. To this end, the Getty Research Institute has become a regular port of call, especially when the GRI section of the Internet Archive is updated regularly with many fine books that you won’t easily find elsewhere. For my purposes, the GRI is especially good with books about architecture, design and ornamentation, like this three-volume collection of The Journal of Decorative Art, “An Illustrated Technical Journal for the House Painter, Decorator, and all Art Workmen” published from 1881 to 1883. The illustrated examples are typical late Victoriana of a type I don’t always have much use for but for anyone who does the illustrations are very good, especially the spreads which were obviously intended to be copied by decorators. Some of these include lettering samples for sign-writers that range from simple post-Pugin Gothic to the excessively detailed styles that were de rigueur in the 1880s.

Continue reading “The Journal of Decorative Art”

Weekend links 691

Arcus (2019) by Markus Matthias Krüger.

• “Listeners can only make an educated guess as to what the experience of working with Slapp Happy might have done for Faust.” Fergal Kinney on the 50th anniversary of Sort Of by Slapp Happy, an eccentric intersection of Anglo-American rock and German experimentalism.

• Now that the summer is over people are making mixes again. Take your pick this week between a mix for The Wire by Shane Woolman at Stihia festival, The Observatory by Jay Keegan, or DreamScenes September 2023 at Ambientblog.

• Quantum poetics: “How Borges and Heisenberg converged on the notion that language both enables and interferes with our grasp of reality.” William Egginton explains, with a little help from Funes the Memorious.

“I feel as if I am entering Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, a universe of books and records, or maybe a labyrinth of paper and vinyl,” a flabbergasted Szwed relates. “The temptation is to read and listen to every one of them in hopes of at least finding the meaning behind Harry Smith the reader and listener.” He adds, with pointedly Borgesian anxiety, that “maybe my book is in there, already written.”

Ed Halter reviewing Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith by John Szwed

• At The Daily Heller: Photographs of lost buildings and American ruins.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: The unknowable presents…Secretly encoded.

• At The Paris Review: Six photos from WG Sebald’s albums.

• Winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023.

• The Art of Cover Art: A Substack by Rachel Cabitt.

• New music: Le jour et la nuit du réel by Colleen.

• Familiar Reality (1971) by Dr John | Reality Dub (Virtual Reality Mix) (1993) by Material | Reality Net (1994) by Richard H. Kirk

Rudiments of Curvilinear Design

George Phillips’ Rudiments of Curvilinear Design (1839) belongs among a subset of books about historic design in which the desire to provide a faithful record of various styles competes with the imagination of the artist creating the illustrations. The artist in this case is Phillips himself who runs through the catalogue of decoration and ornament in a series of beautiful full-page plates, the engravings being credited to publisher Shaw and Sons. Each plate is a tableau of different architectural features—windows, wall decoration, columns, and so on—which Phillips embellishes in a manner that avoids outright fantasy while also deviating from the more accurate renderings you’ll find in similar volumes. The notes at the beginning of the book describe the author’s aesthetic philosophy, a process which involves “engrafting upon that which may be considered as already excellent, some feature enhancing its value, and extending its usefulness to larger or more opulent classes of the community.”

Acanthus leaves abound here, inevitably when so many of the plates feature designs based on Classical styles. The acanthus is a common feature in design books from the 19th century, with some books even showing the correct (ie: Grecian) way to draw or sculpt the leaves if you’re having to create Corinthian columns. Mr Phillips seems to have taken such lessons to heart. For more acanthus, and many fine engravings which aim for greater historical accuracy, see Ornamenti di Tutti Gli Stili (1882) by Camillo Boito.

Continue reading “Rudiments of Curvilinear Design”

Weekend links 690

The Voice of St. Teresa (1928) by Oskar Sosnowski.

• The House is the Monster: Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle forms “a body of work not only deeply coherent but uniquely inspired,” says Geoffrey O’Brien.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Amberwood, while at The Daily Heller there’s a profile of Otto Bettmann, “an unsung visionary of commercial art”.

• At Public Domain review: The Works of Mars (1671), plans for military architecture by Allain Manesson Mallet.

The “underlying oneness of all things,” the conviction “that everything is connected” (Gravity’s Rainbow 703), is a thesis that appeals to many mystics and even to some scientists, but Fort complains that the latter too quickly dismiss unexplainable coincidences, or feebly explain them away. Scorning “scientific procedure” and inept police investigations, Fort turns for answers to denizens of the occult—poltergeists, invisible people, vampires, werewolves, miracle healers, fakirs, psychic criminals, dowsers—and to such notions as teleportation, human-animal metamorphoses, spontaneous combustion and pyrokinesis, “psychic bombardment,” telekinesis, animism, “secret rays,” telepathy, spirit-photography, clairvoyance, and modern instances of witchcraft.

Steven Moore in a perceptive essay about the overlooked connections between Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Charles Fort. Having discussed Fort’s preoccupation with coincidences, the author notes that he shares a name with the late Steve Moore, former editor of Fortean Times magazine

• Pynchonesque headline of the week: The Paradox of the Radioactive Boars.

• James Balmont’s guide to the masterworks of New Taiwanese Cinema.

• New music: Solo for Tamburium by Catherine Christer Hennix.

• Winners of Bird Photographer of the Year 2023.

• Idris Ackamoor’s favourite music.

• Radio-Active (1984) by Steps Ahead | Radioactivity (William Orbit Remix) (1991) by Kraftwerk | Radioactivity (1998) by Hikasu

The sublimities of John Harris

I might never have paid much attention to John Harris’s paintings if they hadn’t appeared so often at Adam Rowe’s 70s Sci-fi Art. Harris is also featured in Rowe’s new book, Worlds Beyond Time, with a few examples that sent me looking for more. I like science-fiction art when it’s dealing with megastructures, especially if those structures aren’t readily interpretable as buildings, spaceships or alien artefacts. This is SF art in the service of the philosophical Sublime, a quality which, since the 1940s, you don’t find very much in painting outside the work of illustrators or artists of the fantastic. Some of these structures, like the one that Harris calls “The Wall” (below), might be relatives of the abandoned concrete edifices in Jean-Pierre Ugarte’s paintings. Another point in Harris’s favour is the way he uses SF-like imagery as outlets for his own visionary experiences: there’s a series entitled Mass which depicts images that came to him following a period of transcendental meditation. The Mass series later gave a title to the first book of Harris’s art which was published by Paper Tiger in 2000.

• More John Harris

Continue reading “The sublimities of John Harris”