A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Architecture
Passage Bourg l’Abbé, Paris. Photo by FlickrDelusions.
Cours et passages à Paris, the perfect Flickr pool for anyone who shares my fetish pour les passages couverts de Paris.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arcades panoramas
• Arcades
• Passage des Panoramas
• Passages 2
• Passages
Ad Astra (1907) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela.
• Andres Serrano’s works are photo prints so you can’t damage an exhibition item the way you can with a painting. That didn’t stop Catholic protestors in France attacking a copy of Piss Christ on Monday. By coincidence, Dave Maier had posted an essay about Serrano’s work a few hours earlier, and with a reminder that the notorious photograph was part of a series, a detail which is often forgotten or conveniently ignored.
• The Avant Garde Project which made available deleted experimental audio works (see this earlier post) ceased activity a while ago so it’s good to see that its archives will now be hosted at Ubuweb.
…African Head Charge again was a studio name I had to start with, and it evolved into a band about eight years later. That started out again I read an interview in a newspaper where Brian Eno talked about he’d made an album called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with another musician—that Talking Heads fellow [David Byrne]—and he said “I had a vision of a psychedelic Africa”. And I thought, “Oh, that’s pretentious”. But then I thought about it, and thought “No, what a good idea! Make really trippy African dub”.
Adrian Sherwood on thirty years of On-U Sound.
• Related: Brian Eno has a new album out in July, Drums Between The Bells, a collaboration with Rick Holland.
“Do you think Lord Leighton could by any chance have been a homosexual?” enquired Richard. “It says here,” I replied, consulting a laminated information card, “that there is no evidence one way or the other.”
“Rent boys leave no evidence,” said Richard.
A private view of Lord Leighton’s home in Holland Park, London, which opened to the public again last year.
• Passengers, an exhibition of urban transit photos by Chris Marker at Peter Blum, NYC. For a different kind of rail transport there’s this exploration of London’s disused underground Post Office Railway.
• Reappraising the recent past: Jon Savage on Taxi zum Klo, Christiane F, David Bowie and the seedy attraction of Berlin in the 70s and 80s; Iain Sinclair on the Festival of Britain sixty years on.
• Stella Steyn’s illustrations for Finnegans Wake as seen in transition magazine, 1929. And speaking of literary magazines, the return of New Worlds has been announced.
• Clive Hicks-Jenkins is an art monograph published next month by Lund Humphries. Clive enthused about the book’s arrival.
• 50 Watts announces the Polish Book Cover Contest.
• 4th June, 2011 is Radiophonic Creation Day.
• Americans: has your state banned sodomy?
• Stardust (1931) by Louis Armstrong | Stardust (1940) by Artie Shaw | Stardust (1957) by Nat King Cole.
More sculptual work by Franz Metzner for a building whose interiors are in that ponderous Teutonic style which resembles designs for a fantasy film.
Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 20 covers the period from April 1907 to September 1907, and this is where this fascinating publication starts to run out of steam. A few more editions are worth looking at but after volume 25 the content collapses into the same welter of excessively dull genre painting and academic work that was plaguing Jugend magazine at this time. More about that later.
As usual, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail is advised to download the entire number at the Internet Archive. There’ll be more DK&D next week.
Will at 50 Watts points the way to a set of line drawings by Kozma Lajos, a Hungarian artist better known for his later work as an architect and designer. What strikes me about these illustrations is their similiarity to the graphics being produced by German and Austrian artists a few years earlier, some of whom have been turning up in the recent samples from Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration. There’s the same Klimt-like decorative detail and a lack of perspective. See the series here and further illustration work at the end of this page.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Film and opera posters by Franciszek Starowieyski (see below).
• At first glance, Jerzy Skolimowski’s new film, Essential Killing, sounds like Joseph Losey’s Figures in a Landscape (1970) reworked for our era of renditions, torture and war without end. The trailer is here; Sight & Sound liked the film and dismissed any Losey comparisons. The Quietus interviewed the director this week, and there’s also a video interview here.
“He was trying to tell the truth about war. In the 1950s the US was telling itself a mythic, grandiose, heroic story about the second world war and GI Joe saving the world. [James] Jones was saying, ‘That wasn’t the war I saw, I want to write something more honest and realistic. Whatever the mid-America myth, one of the things men were doing was giving blow jobs for money.'”
From Here to Eternity is published in an uncensored edition.
• Edogawa Rampo‘s sinister short story The Human Chair concerns a man who conceals himself inside a chair. Taiwanese artist Lan Hungh may have had Rampo’s story in mind for his Demolished Chair art piece about which we’re told “Hungh’s flaccid penis is the only body part that’s visible, and becomes hard as soon as anyone starts discussing the chair or sitting on it.” BUTT magazine spoke to the artist.
…unaware of their double standards, the police objected to the portrayal of men in Harrison’s work as demeaning. There was Hugh Hefner squeezed into a bunny girl costume, a beefy but emasculated Captain America wearing false breasts and a stars ‘n’ stripes-patterned basque, and Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who tried to murder Andy Warhol, stamping on his Brillo box artwork.
A piece about artist Margaret Harrison whose work is on show at Payne Shurvell, London.
• Connecting Science and Art: “Novelist Cormac McCarthy (!), filmmaker Werner Herzog, and physicist Lawrence Krauss discuss science as inspiration for art and Herzog’s new film on the earliest known cave paintings.”
• At Tumblr: Gurafiku, “a collection of visual research that encompasses the history of Japanese graphic design”, and Archidose.
• “Michael Moorcock’s Modem Times 2.0 is a good introduction to the literary legend.”
• The Spring 2011 edition of Periwinkle Journal (Queer Art + Creativity) is now live.
• Rick Poynor (again) on [Franciszek] Starowieyski’s Graphic Universe of Excess.
• Coudal now have a page of links for the great Terrence Malick.
• Wake in Progress is Finnegans Wake illustrated.
• Brown Study, a blog by Jay Babcock.
• RIP Sidney Lumet.
• Ry Cooder & The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces: Let’s Have a Ball is a film by Les Blank of a fantastic performance by Cooder’s band in Santa Cruz, California, in 1987. It’s not available on DVD but most of it can be seen on YouTube.