{architecture} – Page 84

The art of Thomas Cole, 1801–1848

The Titan’s Goblet (1833).

Thomas Cole’s Titan’s Goblet isn’t featured at the Google Art Project, unfortunately, but the following paintings are, and all benefit from being able to explore their details. Cole’s colossal vessel predates Surrealism by a century, and is one of many paintings which always has me mentally labelling him as the American John Martin (1789–1854). Having thought of him for years as an American artist–not least because he founded the Hudson River School–it’s a surprise to learn he was born in Bolton, a town not far from Manchester, with his parents emigrating to the US when he was 17. John Martin also grew up in the north of England so there’s another similarity, although the more important comparison concerns their use of painting to convey the spectacularly vast and unreal scenes common to the imaginative side of Romantic art. The Titan’s Goblet is unusual in not having any particular symbolic or moral significance, unlike the pictures below, it’s Magritte-like in its careful depiction of the impossible. The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge, on the other hand, could be exhibited beside Francis Danby’s The Deluge (1840) for a “before and after” effect. Like Martin, Cole enjoyed painting architecture of an exaggerated scale. The Architect’s Dream features an Egyptian temple of stupendous size, while the pyramid looming in the background is closer to William Hope Hodgson’s seven-mile-high Last Redoubt than any structure on the Nile plain.

Of equal interest are Cole’s two well-known series: The Course of Empire (1833–36) and The Voyage of Life (1842), both of which I’d love to see at Art Project size.

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1828).

The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge (1829).

The Architect’s Dream (1840).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Martin’s musical afterlife
• Albert Bierstadt in Yosemite
• Danby’s Deluge
• John Martin: Heaven & Hell
• Darkness visible
• Two American paintings
• The apocalyptic art of Francis Danby

Weekend links 136

Der Triumph des Tintenfisches from Meggendorfer-Blätter (c. 1900). Via Beautiful Century.

Much dismay this week at the news that Coilhouse—the web and print magazine founded in 2008 by Nadya Lev, Meredith Yayanos and Zoetica Ebb—was closing its doors for the foreseeable future. I always loved what they were doing, and was delighted when S. Elizabeth interviewed me for the website two years ago. Looking at the list of their featured articles is like seeing the contents of my head laid bare. Have a browse and see what you may have missed. And fingers crossed they return soon.

• “I think we are just used to seeing naked women because they are used as objects of desire in advertisements and TV. Naked men are not that common—we are not used to seeing a penis. I think that is the main problem for people.” The shock of the (male) nude.

• Michael Clarke asks “What Can Publishers Learn from Indie Rock?” Also: Michelle Dean on the value of used books.

Queers find themselves on both sides of the free speech question. Those of us who are writers want the freedom to write and say what we want. I know I do. Yet a preponderance of LGBT people have become part of the larger wave of those who would limit free speech. Because while we want to be able to say whatever we want about “them,” we do not want “them” to say whatever they want about us.

Victoria Brownworth on The Case Against Censorship

• Caspar Henderson re-reads The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges.

• One hundred classic minimalism, electronic, ambient and drone recordings.

• BLDGBLOG visits the Chand Baori stepwell in Abhaneri, India.

• Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine is launched in the UK.

• Ken Hollings visits Ludwig II’s Venus Grotto.

• A guide to Meredith Monk‘s music.

• RIP Boris Strugatsky.

• Maldorora: a Tumblr.

• Stalker: Meditation (1979) by Edward Artemiev | Undulating Terrain (1995) by Robert Rich & B. Lustmord | Stalker (2004) by Shackleton.

Weekend links 135

Two Grove Press covers by Roy Kuhlman. From Arden Kuhlman Riordan’s Pinterest page collecting her father’s cover designs.

• “When people asked me what boylesque was, I’d say I’m doing burlesque and I have a penis,” said Mr. Ferguson.

• Sequence5: 42 tracks of new, atmospheric/ambient music. A free download in a variety of formats.

• The trailer for Jimmy’s End, the forthcoming film by Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins.

As a porn performer, I can say from experience and with confidence that I’ve never been objectified by other performers. Nor have I been objectified by viewers. At least not in a way that seemed to confuse them into thinking I was an object. What happens instead is that I shift in and out of object-hood. Athletes do this too—they engage with their bodies for a specific task. At the end of the game or the shoot, the context changes.

Conner Habib on The Virtues of Being an Object

• Secret Weapons (1972), David Cronenberg’s lost TV movie resurfaces.

• Joseph Burnett reviews Nude, the new album by The Irrepressibles.

• Over a third of e-readers are used just once before being set aside.

The guarded, the cautious, the small-scale, the modest, the well-crafted—such books may be rewarded (in our own time, at the national level), but they are rarely preserved. They are not preserved because guardedness, caution, smallness, modesty, and craft can be replaced in any given generation. What is irreplaceable is excess: Of verbal kinesis, religious intensity, intellectual voracity.

Amit Majmudar on Entertainment and Excess: The Great Literary Audiences

• Miniature Book Interviews with Louis Wain Bound by Hand.

• A Tour Inside Salvador Dalí’s Labyrinthine Spanish Home.

• Horror fiction should be deep, not cheap, says Nina Allan.

• RIP Peter Kuhlmann aka Pete Namlook

• More is More by Alex Trochut

• The Useless Web

• Lost In The Sea (1992) by Sequential (Pete Namlook & DJ Criss) | Angel Tech (1994) by Bill Laswell & Pete Namlook | Yenlik (Part II) (1996) by Burhan Öçal & Pete Namlook

Weekend links 133

Lower Manhattan (1999) by Lebbeus Woods.

RIP Lebbeus Woods, an architect and illustrator frequently compared to Piranesi not only for his imagination and the quality of his renderings but also for the way both men built very little from a lifetime of designs. Lots of appreciations have appeared over the past few days including this lengthy piece by Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG. (Geoff interviewed Woods in 2007.) Elsewhere: A slideshow at the NYT, Steven Holl remembers Lebbeus Woods and Lebbeus Woods, visionary architect of imaginary worlds. See also: Lebbeus Woods: Early Drawings and this post about Woods’ illustrations for an Arthur C Clarke story collection. Woods was at his most Piranesian with Gothic designs for an artificial planet that would have been the principal location in Vincent Ward’s unmade Alien 3.

• Arkhonia draws to the end of a year of blogging about and around the Beach Boys’ errant masterwork, Smile (1967). Witty, discursive and frequently scabrous accounts of how Brian Wilson’s magnum opus was derailed and marginalised until it became convenient for commercial interests to exploit its reputation. Anyone following those posts won’t have been surprised by Wilson’s sacking from his own group by Mike Love in September.

• “We’ve been underground for 27 hours now. Everyone is caked in mud, with grit in their hair.” Will Hunt explores the catacombs and sewers of Paris.

I think the only remotely interesting drug was acid. I had a slightly peculiar attitude towards it I think. Just about everything about hippydom I hated. I liked the 60s up to about ’65 or ’66. I liked the mod clothes, I liked the look. I wasn’t a keen taker of speed because I didn’t like the comedown from it. Then everything changed and became looser, I didn’t like the clothes at all. I felt rather out of step with it. The acid thing was interesting though. I come from Salisbury and from the age of 12 I had a friend who was 30 years older than I was who I saw regularly up until when he died a couple of years ago, whose obituary I wrote in The Times. This man was called Ken James and he was deputy head at the chemical warfare unit at Porton Down [the MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory]. He then became head of the scientific civil service; he was the man who introduced computing into the civil service and he had taken acid as early as 1950. This was long before Aldous Huxley.

Sharp Suits And Sparkle: Jonathan Meades On Acid, Space And Place by John Doran. Marvellous stuff. Meades’ new book is Museum Without Walls.

• In New York later this month: A Cathode Ray Séance – The Haunted Worlds of Nigel Kneale.

• More acid: Kerri Smith talks to Oliver Sacks about his drug experiences.

• “It starts with an itch”: Alan Bennett (again) on his new play, People.

Lower Manhattan last Wednesday. Photo by Iwan Baan.

• Back issues of OMNI magazine can now be found at the Internet Archive.

• Alan Moore & Mitch Jenkins present their new film, Jimmy’s End.

• At BibliOdyssey: Atlas title pages part one & part two.

• Raw Functionality: An interview with Emptyset.

• Athanasius, Underground

• Vintage Caza

• Stormy Weather (1979) by Elisabeth Welch.

Astronomy in China: The Pekin Observatory, 1888

Observatoire de Peking (c. 1790).

Work this week has necessitated going through more 19th-century journals. For a while now I’ve had some downloaded copies of Scientific News, a kind of London equivalent of Scientific American, but I hadn’t noticed this particular article until I had to look through it again. The uncredited piece describes the ancient astronomical instruments at the observatory in the heart of Beijing, China (or “Pekin” as they have it here). Armillary spheres always catch my attention, and the Beijing ones are splendid examples supported by ornamental dragons. The text is informative but also mildly condescending as most discussion of China or Japan at this time tended to be. The piece includes some nice engraved illustrations of the instruments (scroll down), all of which can still be seen today surrounded by a city which the Chinese of 1888 would no longer recognise.

* * *

ASTRONOMY IN CHINA: THE PEKIN OBSERVATORY

VICE-ADMIRAL MOUCHEZ has just received from Pekin, for the Astronomical Museum which he has founded in connection with the Observatory of Paris, a series of photographs representing the Pekin Observatory and the instruments there erected. By the courtesy of our contemporary La Nature we are enabled to place these curious views before our readers, and thus give them an exact idea of the present state of astronomy in the nation which has cultivated it with the greatest zeal, for the longest time, and among whom it has received the most remarkable developments.

Astronomical functions have not ceased to be held in honour in China, and the Observatory of the Celestial Empire is at present under the direction of an uncle of the Emperor, who ranks as the fifth prince of the blood, and bears the title of Chancellor.

The number of persons attached to this establishment is more considerable than that at Paris. It amounts, including students, to 196. The chief functionaries after the Chancellor are a Chinese director and a Tartar director, having the right to wear a button of a precious stone, and to bear on the chest the image of a sea-raven. Then follow two sub-directors, one Chinese and one Tartar, and two assistants entrusted with calculations. These latter, prior to the expulsion of the Jesuits, were always foreigners. Two other functionaries require to be noted. The first is the keeper of the buildings, and the second the custodian of the water-clocks, as chronometers have not been as yet introduced into the observatory, any more than have telescopes.

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