{sculpture} – Page 39 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 107

Le Faune (1923) by Carlos Schwabe.

• “When I recently attended a conference in China, many of the presenters left their papers on the cloud—Google Docs, to be specific. You know how this story ends: they got to China and there was no Google. Shit out of luck. Their cloud-based Gmail was also unavailable, as were the cloud lockers on which they had stored their rich media presentations.” Ubuweb’s Kenneth Goldsmith on why he doesn’t trust the Cloud.

• “I’m a poet and Britain is not a land for poets anymore.” A marvellous interview with the great Lindsay Kemp at Dangerous Minds. Subjects include all that you’d hope for: Genet, Salomé, David Bowie, Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, The Wicker Man and “papier maché giant cocks”.

• “As early as the 1950s, Maurice Richardson wrote a Freudian analysis which concluded that Dracula was ‘a kind of incestuous-necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match’.” Christopher Frayling on the Bram Stoker centenary.

• Björk gets enthused by (among other things) Leonora Carrington, The Hourglass Sanatorium and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s YouTube lectures.

• Before Fritz Lang’s Metropolis there was Algol – Tragödie der Macht (1920). Strange Flowers investigates.

David Marsh recreates famous album covers using Adobe Illustrator’s Pantone swatches.

• New titles forthcoming from Strange Attractor Press. Related: an interview with SAP allies Cyclobe.

• 960 individual slabs of vinyl make an animated waveform for Benga’s I Will Never Change.

• An exhibition of works by Stanislav Szukalksi at Varnish Fine Art, San Francisco,

• Keith Haring‘s erotic mural for the NYC LGBT Community Center is restored.

• The Situationist Times (1962–1967) is resurrected at Boo-Hooray.

• Doors Closing Slowly: Derek Raymond‘s Factory Novels.

• Will Wilkinson insists that fiction isn’t good for you.

• More bookplates at BibliOdyssey and 50 Watts.

• The Top 25 Psychedelic Videos of All Time.

• Flannery O’Connor: cartoonist.

• RIP Adam Yauch.

• Their finest moment: Sabotage (1994) by Beastie Boys.

Three Fragments of a Lost Tale

I hadn’t come across sculptor John Frame’s animated work before so my thanks to John Burridge for the recommendation. Three Fragments of a Lost Tale is part of a larger project, The Tale of The Crippled Boy, which is described at Frame’s website. Being a collection of fragments, this film is necessarily mysterious although I seldom worry about that. One quality of animation I’ve always enjoyed is its ability to convey the disjunctions and strange atmospheres of dream states, something it often does more effectively than anything else.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Brothers Quay scarcities
• Achilles by Barry JC Purves
• The Torchbearer by Václav Švankmajer

Virgil Finlay’s Tarzan

Thanks are due to Ty Reutel for alerting my attention to this one. I’d no idea that the great Virgil Finlay had illustrated Tarzan but here’s the proof, one half of an interior drawing for The Quest of Tarzan in Argosy Weekly for 1941. That’s the first surprise, the second, of course, was that Finlay had copied Frederic Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877) ( below), a sculpture which has been a subject of discussion here recently. I’ve mentioned before my including Leighton’s work in one of my Lovecraft adaptations; I referred to many other artworks in those stories but never made any direct reference to Virgil Finlay even though he was the original illustrator of Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark when it was first published in Weird Tales in 1936. Finlay’s illustrations for that story later appeared with some of my own in the enormous Centipede Press collection of Lovecraft art so it’s strange to find that we were also led to the same Leighton sculpture.

Tarzan illustration has been in my thoughts for the past few weeks while I’ve been at work (again!) on the collected Reverbstorm, many pages of which played variations on Burne Hogarth’s comic adaptations of the Tarzan stories. Reverbstorm is at long last very close to being finally, absolutely finished, and ready for printing in a single definitive volume. No production schedule just yet but any news will be announced here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Frederic Leighton’s sculptures
• Virgil Finlay’s Salomé
• Die Farbe and The Colour Out of Space
• Lovecraft’s favourite artists revisited
• Angelo Colarossi and son
• The monstrous tome
• Men with snakes

The recurrent pose 47

After subjecting Frederic Leighton to undignified speculation yesterday, his work is now ushered into the homoerotic environs of the Recurrent Pose Archive. These engravings are from a Leighton-themed edition of The Art Annual which is undated but which refers to The Sluggard as being a work in progress so that would date it to 1894 or 95. Despite throwing barbs at Leighton, I bought the bound copy of four issues mainly for the feature on the artist’s work and his extraordinary home. The three other artists represented—Millais in his horribly dull post-PRB phase, Alma-Tadema and Meissonier—can’t compete with Leighton’s academic flamboyance.

Cymon And Iphigenia (1884) can be seen in all its splendour at the Google Art Project, not the only painting of Leighton’s where the depiction of drapery seems to be the principal concern. The figure caught in the Flandrin pose is robed and tucked away in the background.

Frederic Leighton’s sculptures

An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877).

The python wrestler by Frederic Leighton (1830–1896) has appeared here before, and it’s one sculpture that always catches my eye for having appeared in my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu in 1988. It’s now one of the Leighton works available for close viewing at the Google Art Project although only from a single angle, something that seems a flaw in web presentation of three-dimensional art.

The Sluggard (c. 1895).

In the same collection is a copy of Leighton’s The Sluggard from the Yale Center for British Art. What’s notable about this piece is that it’s generally offered as Exhibit A for the homo-prosecution during discussion of the artist’s sexuality. The Sluggard to which most people refer is the life-size bronze which is a lot more robust and muscular than this lithe and twinky specimen. According to a note at the V&A Yale’s copy is one of many cast from the clay model for the life-size version. What was excused at the time as a late Victorian exercise in contrapossto looks even more camp—in the Philip Core definition—than the finished piece which makes me wonder whether Leighton beefed up the original to disguise something. Core defined camp as “the lie that tells the truth”; camp art always pretends to be one thing whilst simultaneously telegraphing a very different message about its creator. Leighton’s sexuality is a source of continual speculation which means it’s unlikely now to be resolved in any direction, and the artist himself would loathe our prurience, but it’s only by reappraising works in this way that we’re able to show that gay people didn’t magically erupt via some process of spontaneous generation in 1967. If Leighton had any dalliances whilst holidaying in the gay resort of Capri then he was perfectly circumspect. Back at home, as a President of the Royal Academy he had a rather pompous and remote reputation, being memorably described by Violet Paget as “something between an Olympian Jove and a head waiter.” For more camp, see The Narcissus Hall in the artist’s incredibly lavish home, Leighton House in London, where 1st Baron Leighton, PRA, lived splendidly alone.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Angelo Colarossi and son
• Men with snakes