A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Art
Seduction.
One of a series of paintings by a British artist, and what a great series it is with echoes of ancient art as well as Gustav Klimt. Also further evidence that this theme isn’t a wholly masculine preoccupation.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive
Three Seekers (2009) by Kelly Louise Judd.
• Kevin Sessums talked to Elizabeth Taylor in 1997 about Tennessee Williams, her AIDS activism and related matters. Other related matters: Catholics lead the way on same-sex marriage and Mahatma Gandhi was in love with a German body-builder named Hermann.
• Cray porn (the computer, that is) at Barnbrook Design as the CD package for Interplay by John Foxx and The Maths is unveiled.
• Michael Rother and Friends Play the Music Of Neu! A stream of an hour-long concert from August 2010.
One of the tragedies of drug prohibition is that we have never developed a culture in which young people can learn how to use powerful drugs properly from older, wiser and more experienced psychonauts. I count myself lucky to have encountered such good teachers to guide me with such drugs as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA and mescaline.
Dr Susan Blackmore on using LSD.
• Another Dispatch in a World of Multiple Veils, a new release by Arkhonia.
• Micromachina by Scott Bain “examines what makes the insect world tick”.
• Down with art!: the age of manifestos. Related: The Manifesto Manifesto.
• John Patterson: “We’re all living in the future as seen by Philip K Dick.”
• Music To Play In The Dark: A Wake For Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson.
• Albert Einstein, Radical: A Political Profile.
• Was “God’s Wife” edited out of the Bible?
• Porn made for women, by women.
• Hallogallo (1972) by Neu! | Opa-Loka (1975) by Hawkwind | Jenny Ondioline (1993) by Stereolab | Hallogallo (1997) by Porcupine Tree.
Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. This week there’s another jump in the running order, from volume 12 to 15, and it’s impossible to avoid feeling frustrated by this when some of the previous editions have been so good. Volume 15 covers the period from October 1904 to March 1905, and includes work by the Wiener Werkstätte whose rectilinear designs mark the transition from Art Nouveau to what would eventually be called Art Deco. There’s also another feature on the Glasgow Arts and Crafts movement based around Charles Rennie Mackintosh with a look at the designs for Hill House in Helensburgh, Scotland. As usual, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail is advised to download the entire volume at the Internet Archive. There’ll be more DK&D next week.
The peculiar Symbolist paintings of gay artist Sascha Schneider are featured once again, and typically for this artist there’s a profusion of male flesh on display.
The tip for this one came via Beautiful Century. Thomas Mackenzie (1887–1944) was a minor British illustrator whose work I hadn’t seen before, and if I’d seen the picture above uncredited I might have taken it for something by Kay Nielsen or Edmund Dulac. Mackenzie’s colour plates for the 1919 edition of Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp in Rhyme by Arthur Ransome are very similar to his more famous contemporaries, while the black-and-white pieces owe a considerable debt to Aubrey Beardsley, especially the title page below. Not all the drawing is as assured as one might hope but the book as a whole is still worth a look.
James Bidgood’s luscious and erotic micro-budget masterpiece Pink Narcissus (1971) receives a screening at the IFC Center Queer/Art/Film festival, NYC, on Monday. The film is presented by Jonathan Katz, curator of the Hide/Seek gay art show whose controversial history was recounted here in December. The NYT ran a short piece about Bidgood, now 77 and not the first artist to be disappointed by his past work; they also have a Bidgood slideshow. Hide/Seek, meanwhile, is now a touring exhibition.
• Related: the delightful Drew Daniel of Matmos (and Soft Pink Truth) posing in a jockstrap at the Club Uranus, San Francisco circa 1990; he also used to go-go dance wearing a fish.
• The Isle of Man may have one of the oldest parliaments in the world but its laws have often been out of step with its neighbour across the Irish Sea. This week the island joined the rest of the UK in granting civil partnerships to its citizens. Now the name whose punning appeal so delighted James Joyce doesn’t seem as inappropriate.
• Howard Jacobson: “The novelist Yukio Mishima posed pointing a Samurai sword to his chest and ultimately had himself beheaded in public. This is what’s called taking your art seriously.”
The Realm of the Queen of the Night (1974) by Wolfgang Hutter from Zauberflote at 50 Watts.
The revelatory operations of the chance encounter lie at the heart of le merveilleux (“the marvelous”)—the Surrealist conception of beauty. You find something marvelous in the world (an object, an image, a person, a place) that corresponds, like a piece clicking into a puzzle, to a deep inner need.
Slicing Open the Eyeball: Rick Poynor on Surrealism and the Visual Unconscious by Mark Dery.
• Boy from the Boroughs: Alan Moore interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid; Michael Moorcock interviewed at Suicide Girls.
• Illustrations from Quark, the anthology of speculative fiction edited by Samuel Delany & Marilyn Hacker in 1970.
• The Residents, sans masks, filmed at their San Francisco home in the 1970s.
• Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor played on a glass harp.
• What art can do for science (and vice versa).
• You can never have too much Virgil Finlay.
• Lydia Kiesling reviews Lolita.
• No GDM (dub version) (1979) by Gina X | L. Voag’s Kitchen (2004) by Soft Pink Truth.