{sculpture} – Page 32 – { feuilleton }

The sphinx of Wolf City

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

Heimkiller and High

Heimkiller.

More Giger. Among the pre-Alien films, Passagen (1972), a documentary by FM Murer about the artist’s work, is the one I’d most like to see. That’s yet to appear online, however, so in the meantime here’s two shorts from 1967 which are the earliest entries in Giger’s filmography. Heimkiller is a brief study of Giger’s Blood-Glass sculpture which shows the piece in action and does little else. High is the first of several collaborations with director FM Murer, a black-and-white journey through the late Surrealism of Giger’s early works, some of which show a slight Dalí influence. I’ve always liked the drawings in his Shafts series, some of which can be seen here: views of plunging walls threaded with staircases that were derived from nightmares about a cellar stairway in his parents’ house.

High.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Man Who Paints Monsters In The Night
• Hans by Sibylle
• HR Giger album covers
• Giger’s Necronomicon
• Dan O’Bannon, 1946–2009
• Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
• The monstrous tome

Clocks of the Midnight Hours: The Work of Max Eastley

I was hoping this might turn up on YouTube eventually, my copy being stuck on a VHS tape. Clocks of the Midnight Hours (1986) is a 25-minute film about the music of Max Eastley directed by Simon Reynell. The title is taken from a Borges poem. What makes Eastley’s music special is that all his instruments are unique “sound sculptures” that range through autonomous devices, to wind- and water-activated instruments, to creations requiring human performance. Some of the sounds, if not the look of the instruments, will be familiar to anyone who’s heard Buried Dreams, the album Eastley made in 1994 with frequent collaborator David Toop. Both Eastley and Toop appear in the film (the latter masked by a wicker helmet), as does Evan Parker in a performance in Kent’s Cavern, Torquay. An earlier Eastley & Toop collaboration, New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments (1975), may be heard at Ubuweb.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Max Eastley’s musical sculptures

Les Statues Meurent Aussi, a film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais

When statues die they enter into art.

This is a Resnais short I hadn’t seen before, and a proper collaboration this time between Resnais and Chris Marker. Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die) was commissioned in 1950 by Présence Africaine, a pan-African magazine published in Paris. The film was released in 1953. The subject is African art as it relates to colonialism, and on that level has more in common with Marker’s preoccupations than those of Resnais; the colonial history of France has always been a touchy subject, and the original brief was for a short documentary about African art. The scenes in the second half of the film, showing black sportsmen and a jazz drummer, were censored until 1963. This copy at YouTube is subtitled.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Toute la mémoire du monde, a film by Alain Resnais
• Marienbad hauntings

The chimeras of Dimitrie Paciurea

Chimera (1923).

One of the many commendable things about Dreamers of Decadence (1971) by Philippe Jullian is the use of the figure of the chimera to describe the impulse that drove the development of Symbolist art in the late 19th century. A chimera is a fabulous, hybrid creature which is also a metaphor for an unfounded conception or mental phantasm, and chimeras happen to be as popular in Symbolist art as the more familiar sphinx. Both creatures had been given a heady promotion in the fin de siècle imagination thanks to Gustave Flaubert’s extravagant Temptation of Saint Anthony whose final version appeared in 1874; the fluid and metaphoric nature of the chimera, however, makes for a more useful image in art.

Romanian sculptor Dimitrie Paciurea was born around 1874 (his birthdate is uncertain), and is one of those artists who perpetuated Symbolist themes in the 20th century by which time they were rapidly losing the little grace they once possessed. In addition to the profusion of chimeras seen here Paciurea was also sculpting fauns and Pan figures, further hybrids from the Symbolist menagerie. These photos are from WikiPaintings where the artist is rather fatuously categorised as an Impressionist.

Chimera of the Earth.

Chimera of the Sky.

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