A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Sculpture
British jewellers Yunus Ascott and Eliza Higginbottom describe their work as “sculpture to be worn”. That’s an angel in the picture above while the lethal heels are a mermaid and a pirate. Probably far too expensive for Giftmas but you can dream. Via Phantasmaphile.
Manchester, August, 1819: yeomanry on horseback charge a crowd of demonstrators; London, November, 2010: Mounted police charge demonstrators; London, December, 2010: “…police horses have charged the crowd once and appear to be about to do so again.”
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable NUMBER!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fall’n on you:
YE ARE MANY–THEY ARE FEW.Percy Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy (1819).
• Amid the rest of the week’s tumult, discussion and activity around the censoring of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly film at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, continues to rumble on. I’d missed this appraisal of the exhibition at The Smart Set. Hide/Seek: Too shocking for America features an interview with Jonathan Katz, co-creator of the exhibition in the eye of the storm:
“When,” Katz asks, “will the decent majority of Americans stand against a fringe that sees censorship as a replacement for debate?” Hide/Seek sought to conquer what Katz calls “the last acceptable prejudice in American political life” – but the conservative right, rampant after last month’s midterm elections, won’t relinquish their prejudices without a fight. And so, “an exhibition explicitly intended to break a 21-year blacklist against the representation of same-sex desire,” says a dispirited Katz, “now finds itself in the same boat.”
Related: Q&A with Hide/Seek curators Jonathan Katz and David C. Ward. The Smithsonian Institution issued a fatuous statement saying they stand by the exhibition despite having forced the removal of one of its works. One of the NPG commissioners resigned in protest at the gallery’s capitulation to political pressure. Other protestors were banned from the Smithsonian after playing a video of the work on an iPad. There’s video of the iPad protest here and the protestors have their own blog. In my earlier post on the subject I noted that the actions of censorious Catholics have given Wojnarowicz’s work far more public exposure than it would otherwise receive. The LATimes has details of some of the galleries throughout the US showing the video as a result of its removal in Washington.
• Related to the above, Bruce Sargeant and His Circle: Figure and Form, a book by artist Mark Beard about the work of his “Bruce Sargeant” alter ego. Homotography has a preview.
• “We focus most strongly at the margins, on the music that others may be blind to. We don’t care whether it is electronic, metal, jazz, folk, classical, noise, world music or whatever. We are as excited by the experimental, as we are exhausted by the ephemeral. We listen. We mosh. We think. We dance. We write words. We capture images. We hope to do justice to the art which inspires us. We are The Liminal”.
Rotary Signal Emitter, a vinyl zoetrope by audiovisual duo Sculpture.
• Rest Easy Sleazy, a small mix dedicated to Peter Christopherson. Related: A Peter Christopherson tribute mix. Another mix: Mixhead was a 1997 promo CD by Portishead.
• Related to the above: What if we could touch our music again? (Hello? Some of us still play—and create—CDs and vinyl…) Is the mix tape as object-of-seduction a dead concept in a virtual world? “We traded connection for convenience,” says I Miss My Pencil. Their proposed solution, C60 Redux, is an RFID reader plus speakers, packaged in a smart 12-inch case.
• Iannis Xenakis: How an architect took music back to mathematical roots. Related: the Xenakis exhibition at MOCA, Los Angeles.
• The Body Electric at Ikon, Birmingham, is the first retrospective exhibition in the UK of work by New Zealand artist Len Lye.
• Hayley Campbell has a blog. This week you can read about her contribution to Jamie McCartney‘s Great Wall of Vagina.
• More David Lynch: he really does love cherry pie but isn’t 100% sure how magnets work. I sympathise on both counts.
• 2019: A Future Imagined. Visual Futurist Syd Mead reflects on the nature of creativity and how it drives the future.
• Quashed Quotatoes by Michael Wood, reviewing a new edition of Finnegans Wake.
• Portishead’s 2008 performance for the Canal+ show Concert Privé is one of their best filmed concerts. YouTube has the whole thing.
Magick Kruller Alefbet Lamen of the Golden Dawn.
People cast around the superlatives when describing Hunter Stabler’s hand-cut paper artworks with good reason. The skull below is an ink drawing but the artist’s website features many paper works which are just as intricate. Via Phantasmaphile.
Hare Christmas Maharishi.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism
Dhatu (2010).
The intensities of colour found in some of James Turrell’s light works might warrant the description “psychedelic” at times, although “transcendental” is probably more apt when it comes to his immersive environments. Dhatu is one of the latter, a new installation at the Gagosian Gallery, London, where a room filled with changing shades of light has been named after a bodily element from Buddhism. The gallery says of the work:
Light like this is seen rarely with the eyes open, yet it is familiar to that which can be apprehended with the eyes closed in lucid dream, deep meditation, and near-death experiences.
Bindu Shards (2010).
As for Bindu Shards, also at the Gagosian, the name refers to a kind of cosmic singularity in Hinduism and for this Turrell has created a bathysphere-like chamber which visitors are required to enter one at a time in order to experience its light show. This one really does sound psychedelic if Jonathan Jones’ frothing description is anything to go by:
Then I see a cityscape of vertiginous skyscrapers, with no earth below. All these forms and volumes that pulse and metamorphosise are defined by colours that change convulsively – the most intensely saturated greens and reds you can imagine, colours that seem solid, then burst into microscopic patterns of oranges, blacks, gold and misty white; all these colours bubble and whir at breakneck speed, as if you were in a particle accelerator. (More)
And a frothing description is all that’s available unfortunately, now that visiting sessions are fully-booked, but the other Turrell works will be on view until December 10, 2010.
• Greeting the Light: An Interview with James Turrell
• Other Turrell works at Flickr
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Colorscreen
• New Olafur Eliasson
• New work from James Turrell
Marian Bantjes designs the cover of the latest Creative Review and there’s a feature about her work inside.
• “…the question: ‘was Shakespeare gay?’ strikes me as so daft as to be barely worth answering. Of course he was. Arguably he was bisexual, of sorts, but his heart was never on his straight side.” Don Paterson throws the cat among the pigeons in an examination of the Shakespeare’s sonnets. Related (sort of): Shakespeare and Company: The bookshop that thinks it’s a hotel. Also related: Jeanette Winterson revisits Shakespeare and Company.
• 100 orbs of light float in the Schuylkill River. Also in Philadelphia: Animators Amok in a Curiosity Cabinet: the Brothers Quay are making a film in the Mütter Museum. Can’t wait to see it.
• More Alan Moore: Fossil Angels, a lengthy essay about magic and the occult, was written in 2002 but hasn’t been given a public airing until now.
• Alberto Manguel is always worth reading:
As Borges was well aware even then, the history of literature is the history of this paradox. On the one hand, the deeply rooted intuition writers have that the world exists, in Mallarmé’s much-abused phrase, to result in a beautiful book (or, as Borges would have it, even a mediocre book), and, on the other hand, to know that the muse governing the enterprise is, as Mallarmé called her, the Muse of Impotence (or, to use a freer translation, the Muse of Impossibility). Mallarmé added later that all who have ever written anything, even those we call geniuses, have attempted this ultimate Book, the Book with a capital B. And all have failed.
• Here Comes Everybody: Wake In Progress is a self-described “foolhardy attempt to illustrate Finnegans Wake”. Easier to illustrate than make a film of the book, I’d have thought, and Mary Ellen Bute already attempted the latter.
Psychic Explosion: Adolf Hoffmeister’s illustrations for a 1967 edition of Lautréamont’s Poesies at A Journey Round My Skull.
• Craig Colorusso’s Sun Boxes can be seen at Turner Falls, Massachusetts, during November.
• Clive Hicks-Jenkins has a book and retrospective exhibition of his art due next year.
• A sneak peek into The Steampunk Bible to which I’m a contributor. And also here.
• “Human or other; depends who comes”: the Ballardian films of Paul Williams.
• Transmission (1979) by Joy Division; Transmission (1995) by Low; Monkey (2010) by Robert Plant.