{art} – Page 364 – { feuilleton }

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.

Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets

It’s not exactly the most appropriate moment to be recommending an exhibition in New York given the chaos in the city following the recent hurricane. However… Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets has been running at MoMA since August, and will continue into early 2013. A copy of the catalogue turned up this week, a slim volume of 64 pages that’s nevertheless an essential item for Quay obsessives such as myself.

Set design for A Flea in Her Ear (1989).

I’ve written before that while the Quays’ films are the most visible part of their oeuvre, much of their early output as artists and designers remains either obscure or unavailable. So it’s a pleasure to find a number of their early drawings, poster designs and book covers reproduced here. The catalogue also features examples of gallery installations and their designs for the stage. Ron Magliozzi, the curator, and Edwin Carels contribute essays while the Quays themselves are “interviewed” by Heinrich Holtzmüller “who was once real and now only exists under the glass of a museum vitrine in Nürnberg”. An appendix includes a thorough listing of their film works, giving me more things to chase at a later date.

In addition the Quays have also designed parts of the book, notably the title pages which feature their idiosyncratic typography. The catalogue may be purchased direct from the museum.

Grand Box, decor for Street of Crocodiles (1986).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Quay Brothers archive

Holbein’s Dance of Death

A post for Día de los Muertos. The Internet Archive has several books reprinting the Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543). These samples are from an 1892 edition. There’s also a complete copy of the very rare original printing, Les Simulachres & Historiees Faces De La Mort, Autant Elegamme[n]t Pourtraictes, Que Artificiellement Imaginées (1538), but the reproductions aren’t as good as the later copies. Later this month the Wellcome Collection in London hosts Death: A Self-portrait, an exhibition of memento mori and related art from the Richard Harris collection. They don’t say whether Holbein will be included but I’d be surprised if he wasn’t, these images of popes, kings and paupers being hauled to the grave by grinning skeletons have been reproduced endlessly. For an example of Holbein’s astonishing painting try his portrait of Charles de Solier.

Continue reading “Holbein’s Dance of Death”

Weekend links 132

La Hora del Fantasma (no date) by Joaquim Pla Janini.

• Many of the art links featured here are tips from Thom Ayres, so it’s only right to point to his new album project which he’s funding through Kickstarter and embellishing with his own nature photography.

• Anne Billson is another writer beguiled by Philippe Jullian’s masterwork, Dreamers of Decadence. And thanks to Ms Billson for drawing attention to the insane opening of Crime Without Passion (1934).

• Does this fake ad for The Necronomicon use one of my Cthulhu pictures? Possibly. Get the picture for yourself in this year’s Cthulhu calendar. (My thanks to everyone who’s bought a copy so far.)

To break the ice, I talk about books: he is delighted to discover that I have read his beloved Denton Welch, also J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment With Time. I have found them in my old school library, and know both have been a tremendous influence on him in different ways. Knowing of his interest I also mention that I have just read Colin Wilson’s The Quest For Wilhelm Reich, published the year before. He likes Wilson, he says, jokes that “the Colonel” with his cottage in Wales in Wilson’s Return of the Lloigor and his own Colonel Sutton-Smith from The Discipline of DE are one and the same. On something of a roll, I mention Real Magic by Isaac Bonewits, and he acknowledges that it has “some good information” – but is much more enthusiastic about Magic: An Occult Primer by David Conway [years later I would discover that Burroughs & Conway had in fact exchanged letters on various subjects pertaining to magic, occultism, and psychic phenomena – but that is decidedly another story!]

Matthew Levi Stevens recalls The Final Academy and an encounter with William Burroughs thirty years ago.

• Locomotif: A short survey of trains, music & experiments: Gautam Pemmaraju on Kraftwerk, Pierre Schaeffer, Luigi Russolo and others.

• A flip-through of The Graphic Canon, volume 2. Wait to the end and you’ll see a couple of my Dorian Gray pages. Imprint has a review of the book.

• Julian Bell reviews two new books about Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.

• Alan Moore talks to The Occupied Times about art, education and anarchism.

• Colin Dickey reviews Vilém Flusser’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise.

Las Parcas II (1930) by Joaquim Pla Janini.

• Michael Newton reviews A Natural History of Ghosts by Roger Clarke.

• Golden Age Comic Book Stories revisits the work of Sidney Sime.

• Front Free Endpaper asks “What’s in an inscription…?”

• Mormon Missionary Positions

• Amateur Aesthete

• Ghosts (1981) by Japan | Ghosts (2008) by Ladytron | Ghosts (2012) by Monolake.

Schalcken the Painter

Next week the BFI releases a box set of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas, a series of hour-long TV films broadcast during the 1970s, most of which were adaptations of stories by MR James. One film that isn’t among them, unfortunately, is Leslie Megahey‘s superb Schalcken the Painter, a 70-minute drama based on Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter (1839) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Megahey gets mentioned here more than any other TV director (see this earlier post), for years he was someone whose productions I looked out for with a kind of cult fervour.

Schalcken the Painter was first screened on 23rd December, 1979, and repeated two or three times over the next decade. Megahey directed several period dramas for the BBC but this is his only supernatural piece. Its story of real-life Dutch painters Godfried Schalcken (1643–1706) and Gerrit Dou (1613–1675) is beautifully produced, with great attention to period detail, lighting and photography. The BBC used 16mm film for everything at this time but lighting cameraman John Hooper does an excellent job of creating shots that resemble Schalcken’s celebrated chiaroscuro paintings, still life tableaux or scenes from Vermeer. Many of the shots appear, Barry Lyndon-like, to be illuminated with nothing but candles. The acting is equally good, with Jeremy Clyde as Schalcken, Maurice Denham as the heartless Dou, and Cheryl Kennedy as Dou’s daughter, Rose. The narrator is the splendid Charles Gray.

Self-portrait of Godfried Schalcken (1694).

Given all of this it’s surprising the BFI haven’t included the film in their DVD series, it’s a superior work compared to several of the other inclusions, not least the most recent (and terrible) Whistle and I’ll Come to You. YouTube has a couple of uploads, however, so the curious may choose from a full-length version here or the usual multi-part version here. None of these fuzzy VHS copies do John Hooper’s photography any favours at all but for now this is the only way most people will be able to see Leslie Megahey’s beautiful and chilling ghost story.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard
• “Who is this who is coming?”
• The Watcher and Other Weird Stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
• Chiaroscuro