A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Architecture
These photographs of Angkor Vat (sic), Angkor Thom, and some of the smaller Cambodian temples show the difference between the overgrown ruins of 1912 and today’s domesticated tourist attraction. Guide aux Ruines d’Angkor by Jean Commaille contains many more photos plus maps of the grounds and plans of the temple construction. The depredations of the jungle would eventually have destroyed everything but I still prefer to see the walls and statues festooned with foliage.
The ruined temple complex of Angkor Wat is another of those places for which I maintain a cult fascination despite never having been there. I’ve posted links to panoramas of Angkor Wat in the past but Google recently added the complex to their Street View catalogue, so you now have the opportunity to see the fabled Nagas in their natural habitat: surrounded by garishly-clad tourists.
A large part of the attraction of places such as this involves the promise of deterioration and isolation, two qualities kept remote by the site’s World Heritage status. I imagine a visit to Angkor would be like the visit I paid to the ruins of Hadrian’s villa outside Rome, the well-tended bones of a formerly splendid construction. Hadrian’s villa is still worth a visit even if you won’t ever see it overgrown by foliage the way it was in Piranesi’s day.
Wolf City (1972) by Amon Düül II.
Behold another favourite album cover by a favourite band, one of several superb designs for Amon Düül II by Falk-U Rogner who was also the group’s keyboard player. Rogner’s suitably hallucinogenic cover images are worth a post of their own but this one requires attention today since I happened to solve the mystery of the location of the Düül sphinx during the recent hiatus.
Ever since I began these blog posts I’ve had a feeling that the endless trawling of image archives might one day turn up the location of this stone creature. It was only ever going to be something you’d find by accident, and that’s precisely what happened with the discovery of the drawing below in volume 4 of Materials and Documents of Architecture and Sculpture (1915) by A. Raguenet, a set of books I’ve been plundering recently for architectural details.
Compare with this photo.
The notes for the drawing offer enough information to trace the location to the Brunswick Monument in Geneva, a mausoleum built in 1879 for the Duke of Brunswick. The monument is a typically Gothic edifice guarded by a number of stone lions plus this splendid sphinx on a plinth by a pool of water. On the opposite side of the monument there’s a matching bird-headed sculpture. Amon Düül II were a German group so it was always likely that the sphinx would be in Europe somewhere, if not Germany itself. The photo below is a detail from this Flickr shot which is the best match I’ve found for the angle of the cover photo. Jean Franel was the monument architect but statues are often the work of specialist artists, and I’ve yet to find a name attached to these examples.
Photo by Till Westermayer.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Frémiet’s Lizard
Limbroglio (URBS V).
Drypoint prints by a French artist who also has a nice line in moody renderings of European cities—Paris, Venice, Rome—which occasionally stray into architectural speculation. Outright fantasia is more evident in these mysterious views more of which may be seen at the Velly gallery.
Les grandes Manoeuvres.
Paysage aux mollusques.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
Soundcarriers poster by Julian House.
A new release on the Ghost Box label is always a welcome thing but Entropicalia by The Soundcarriers, out on May 20th, is one I’m especially looking forward to. Julian House has made a video for new song Boiling Point, and there’s also the poster above which can be downloaded at larger size here. The Ghost Box Guest Shop has a couple of new additions including the recent Man Woman Birth Death Infinity album by Raagnagrok.
• “It’s a funny time to be making music, because we’re a generation of people who make music with screens instead of with ears.” Ben Frost talking to Tristan Bath.
• At Dangerous Minds: You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess, a rare glimpse of Yello live in concert, 1983.
Our movements about London are closely circumscribed, and while we may imagine ourselves to be free, the truth is that the vast majority of our journeys are undertaken for commercial imperatives: we travel either to work or to spend. All about us during our daily existence we are presented with buildings we cannot enter, fences we cannot climb and thoroughfares it would be foolhardy to cross. We are disbarred from some places because we don’t have the money — and from others because we don’t have the power. The city promises us everything, but it will deliver only a bit.
The place-hackers draw our attention to how physically and commercially circumscribed our urban existence really is. […] As more and more international capital flows into London, so public space is increasingly eroded — it’s just too valuable for us ordinary folk to paddle about in any more.
Give the freedom of the city to our urban explorers, says Will Self. Related: Robert Macfarlane accompanied urbexer Bradley Garrett on a night-time jaunt.
• Black Sabbeth: Metal band Gonga covering a classic with Portishead’s Beth Gibbons on vocals.
• Pelican books take flight again; Paul Laity on the resurrection of the non-fiction imprint.
• Finland’s homoerotic stamps are an ocular feast for women, too, says Nell Frizzell.
• “I guess you could say I am a Pagan.” Kenneth Anger on the occult.
• “How much gay sex should a novel have?” asks Caleb Crain.
• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 112 by Kyoka.
• The Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock
• Zombie Warfare (1979) by Chrome | Escape From The Flesheaters (Zombie) (1979) by Fabio Frizzi | Zombie’ites (1993) by Transglobal Underground