Weekend links 275

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A painting from the Projekt Babelturm series by Wessi.

• “The first thing I would say is that I have no idea what authentic psych music is, and I have no wish to pursue that either. To me the idea of real psych is a paradox. I can’t see how you can have such a thing as real psychedelia when the whole thing is based on a psychedelic drug that gives you hallucinations and illusions and layers and layers of unreality.” Rob Chapman talking to Ben Graham about his new book, Psychedelia And Other Colours.

Elsewhere in a rather psychedelic week: Rob Young reviewed Chapman’s book for the New Statesman; Dangerous Minds posted “Hypnotic video of how a psychedelic masterpiece is made“; and in Germany a homeopathy conference “ended in chaos in Germany after dozens of delegates took a LSD-like drug and started suffering from hallucinations.”

• Coming soon from Dark Entries (so to speak), another collection of Patrick Cowley‘s music for gay porn films.

• Jonathan Barnbrook works some quotes from JG Ballard into the British Road Sign Project.

• “Sorcery is more popular than football in Morocco,” says writer and filmmaker Abdellah Taïa.

• “If you’re going to make something, you should try and be wild,” says Mica Levi.

• Coca-Cola Milanese: Patrick Ellis considers the state of the world’s fair in 2015.

• Hear two pieces from Collapse, the forthcoming album by Drew McDowall.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 162 by Ketev (Yair Elazar Glotman).

• Emptyset’s Signal transforms Earth’s ionosphere into sound art.

• Paul Laffoley: The Force Structure of the Mystical Experience.

• Fuck off, Star Wars, Ben Wheatley’s High Rise is on its way.

• Ideologic Organ

• Psychedelic Ride (1967) by The Ides | Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke) (1974) by Hawkwind | Psychedelic Sewing Room (1989) by Bongwater

Christopher Dresser’s Studies in Design

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The previous post about Christopher Dresser’s design studies proved popular so here’s another discovery from the same source. A surprise this time was seeing the middle motif on the page above; I have this separated from its neighbours in a collection of Art Nouveau graphics, and used it on the slipcase of a Cradle of Filth CD in 2002. Studies in Design (1876) is a collection of colour plates of Dresser’s design work. Some of these emulate medieval or Arabian/Persian decoration but the most interesting examples for me are Dresser’s more personal pieces. Once you’ve seen a few of these his style is easy to recognise. Thanks to some searching by Mr TjZ I now know that a number of collections of Dresser’s designs are available from (who else?) Dover Publications. More for the shopping list.

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Christopher Dresser’s Art of Decorative Design

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Studies of decorative design are numerous but this one stands out for the quality of its colour plates, all of which show a variety of designs derived from plants and flowers. The Art of Decorative Design (1862) is one of a number of design books published in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the most celebrated being Owen Jones’ lavish Grammar of Ornament. Christopher Dresser was a professor of ornamental art and botany who here continues where The Grammar of Ornament ends, exploring the floral design that’s a recurrent feature of Victorian decoration. What’s most remarkable for me about some of these designs is the way they prefigure the forms of Art Nouveau, a style that wouldn’t emerge for another thirty years.

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Fleurs by Serge Gladky

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More from the Glasgow School of Art book collection at the Internet Archive. Fleurs (1929) by Serge Gladky might be described as flowers à la mode, with the mode being Art Deco on the one hand and late Cubism on the other. Twenty-six plates present a variety of floral motifs and designs with some very striking arrangements of shapes and colours. Gladky produced a lot of work in this style, examples of which can be found in a Dover collection, Jazz Age Art Deco.

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Kunstgewerbliche Schmuckformen für die Fläche

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Kunstgewerbliche Schmuckformen für die Fläche is another collection of decorative plates intended as a reference book for designers, and it’s proved its usefulness by providing me with a motif I can use in one of the things I’ve been working on this week. This book differs from others by being the first in a series that runs to at least eight volumes, going by the uploads at the Internet Archive. The first number is vaguely Art Nouveau in style, the later volumes feature designs that are much more bold and abstract. Anyone wishing to see the full set is advised to search for the title to compensate for the inconsistencies of the Internet Archive’s cataloguing system. This volume and the others are part of a recent batch of uploads from the library of the Glasgow School of Art so I’m looking forward to browsing some of the other titles. Via Beautiful Century.

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