{painting} – Page 129 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 85

Group I (Convertible Series, 2010) by Monir Farmanfarmaian.

The four albums recorded by Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis under the name Dome are being reissued by Editions Mego together with Gilbert & Lewis’s Yclept album. I always preferred Gilbert & Lewis in their Dome incarnation (and Colin Newman solo) to the punk and post-punk stylings of their former band, Wire. Dome were (among other things) eccentric, awkward, noisy, hypnotic and experimental. Their recordings seemed to go largely unnoticed in the early 1980s so it’s good to see them being reissued.

• A Children’s Treasury of American Cops Brutally Attacking Citizens: “…it takes quite a lot of tax money to keep a bunch of vicious thugs overfed and dressed like junior Darth Vaders with their portable hard-ons, on the off-chance some college kids might one day peacefully sit outside to protest this nation’s revolting descent.”

• “Stevenson, as has been said, was disarmingly candid about the material he borrowed for Treasure Island. One name, however, is missing from the extensive catalogue of self-confessed ‘plagiarisms’.” John Sutherland at the TLS.

• “Messiaen’s advice was revelatory. ‘You have the good fortune of being an architect and having studied special mathematics’, he told Xenakis. ‘Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music.'”

• “They always said punk was an influence. Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, what a load of old shit that was. It’s Thatcherite art care of Saatchi & Saatchi.” And don’t ask Jamie Reid about the Sex Pistols.

• Dennis Cooper is interviewed at Lambda Literary. I was surprised last week to find my recent post about William Burroughs’ The Wild Boys linked on a feature about the novel at Cooper’s blog.

• Cosmic Geometry: The art of Monir Farmanfarmaian at The Paris Review. Related: Monir Farmanfarmaian at the Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

• Paleolithic phallic art suggests that many early European men scarred, pierced and tattooed their penises.

• FACT mix 301 is a selection of dub tracks, dubstep pieces and Middle Eastern songs compiled by Kahn.

• Who left a tree, then a coffin in the library?

• The Little Journal of Rejections (1896).

• Clive finished another painting.

• The Great Salt Desert of Iran.

• Keep Drawing.

• Troisième (1980) by Colin Newman | And Then… (1980) by Dome | The Red Tent pts I & II (1980) by Dome) | Jasz (1981) by Dome.

Ver Sacrum, 1902

Continuing the series of posts about Ver Sacrum, the art journal of the Viennese Secession. The volume of issues for 1902 maintains the same format as the previous year, beginning with a series of calendar pages then proceeding to showcase art, sculpture and graphics from Austria and elsewhere. The Secession exhibitions in Vienna were a highlight of this year, something explored in greater detail in the pages of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration. Also in these issues is more Symbolist art, this time from Jan Toorop and Franz Stuck. Among the latter’s drawings and paintings there’s a version of his popular temptress-with-serpent theme here entitled The Vice. (Stuck’s The Sin is the most reproduced of this series.) I hadn’t seen this one before which is surprising seeing as it’s his only (?) horizontal treatment of the theme.

As before, anyone wishing to see more can browse all 412 pages or download the entire volume here.

Continue reading “Ver Sacrum, 1902”

The art of Mel Odom

Boys Kiss 2 (2007).

The gay artists archive has for a long time been the most popular part of this site, that page proving twice as popular as the next post down. In which case I feel I ought to try and add to its contents a bit more frequently…

Mel Odom is an American artist who since the late 1970s has been highly-regarded as a book and magazine illustrator. (JVS Publishing has more about this side of his output.) For the purposes of this post there’s male nudity and some homoerotica, of course, in that Art Deco-ish Tamara de Lempicka style that was very popular in the 1980s. For the time being, this site seems to have the best selection of his paintings and drawings. If you need more then Flickr is one place to go searching.

Mathematics – A Beautiful Elsewhere

David Lynch turns up again via a post at New Scientist about Mathematics – A Beautiful Elsewhere, an exhibition currently running at the Fondation Cartier, Paris:

A large number of mathematicians and scientists contributed to the creation of this exhibition, and eight of them acted as its overseers: SIR MICHAEL ATIYAH, JEAN-PIERRE BOURGUIGNON, ALAIN CONNES, NICOLE EL KAROUI, MISHA GROMOV, GIANCARLO LUCCHINI, CÉDRIC VILLANI and DON ZAGIER. Representing a wide range of geographical backgrounds and mathematical disciplines, they work in areas such as number theory, algebraic geometry, differential geometry, topology, partial differential equations, probability, mathematics applied to biology…

They were accompanied by nine artists chosen for their exceptional ability to listen, as well as for their great sense of curiosity and wonder. All of these artists have exhibited at the Fondation Cartier in the past: JEAN-MICHEL ALBEROLA, RAYMOND DEPARDON AND CLAUDINE NOUGARET, TAKESHI KITANO, DAVID LYNCH, BEATRIZ MILHAZES, PATTI SMITH, HIROSHI SUGIMOTO and TADANORI YOKOO, as well as Pierre Buffin and his crew (BUF). They worked together to transform the abstract thinking of mathematics into a stimulating experience for the mind and the senses, an experience accessible to everyone.

The image above is credited to the surprising combination of Lynch and artist/collagist/psychedelicist Tadanori Yokoo. There’s a catalogue of works on the Fondation site but since all the pages there are Flash-based it’s impossible to link to anything. One of the pieces that caught my attention was by Beatriz Milhazes, a Brazilian artist whose work I don’t recall having seen before although she’s been exhibited in the UK. Her abstract paintings are gorgeous things. The James Cohan Gallery has a selection of her work.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• David Lynch window displays
• David Lynch in Paris

Weekend links 84

Regeneration (2011) by Toshiyuki Enoki. Via.

• HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the art exhibition that caused such a fuss last year at the Smithsonian Institution, opens at the Brooklyn Museum, NYC, on November 18th. Among the events associated with the show is a screening of James Bidgood’s lusciously erotic Pink Narcissus. David Wojnarowicz’s video piece, A Fire in My Belly, is still a part of the exhibition so the New York Daily News reached for the outrage stick to prod some reaction from people who’d never heard of the artist or his work before. Will history repeat itself? Does the Pope shit in the woods? Watch this space…

Magic is not simply a matter of the occult arts, but a whole way of thinking, of dreaming the impossible. As such it has tremendous force in opening the mind to new realms of achievement: imagination precedes the fact. It used to be associated with wisdom, understanding the powers of nature, and with technical ingenuity that could let men do things they had never dreamed of before. The supreme fiction of this magical thinking is The Arabian Nights, with its flying carpets, hidden treasure and sudden revelations…

Marina Warner, whose new book, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, is reviewed here and here.

• Those Americans who adore big business but loathe the idea of gay marriage will be dizzy with cognitive dissonance at the news that 70 major US companies—including CBS, Google, Microsoft and Starbucks—have signed a statement saying the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is bad for business. Mark Morford at SFGate says this now means that real homophobes don’t Google.

• Divining with shadows and dreams, tears and blood: S. Elizabeth talks to JL Schnabel of BloodMilk about her “supernatural jewels for surrealist darlings“.

• Earth: Inferno (2003), a short film by Mor Navón & Julián Moguillansky based on the book by Austin Osman Spare. Via form is void.

Illustration by Virgil Finlay for A. Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss. From a 1942 Finlay portfolio at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• The Mute Synth as created by Dirty Electronics & designed by Adrian Shaughnessy.

• Phil Baker reviews two new Aleister Crowley biographies at the TLS.

• A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

• The Most Amazing Room In Queens, NYC.

• Brian Eno on composers as gardeners.

• Alan Turing is Alan Garner’s hero.

• Paintings by Guy Denning.

• Static (1998) by Redshift | The Owl Service (2000) by Pram | Lover’s Ghost (2010) by The Owl Service.