Weekend links 29

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A Folies Bergère dancer, c. 1909.

Six Novels in Woodcuts: The Library of America publishes a boxed set of Lynd Ward’s works: Gods’ Man, Madman’s Drum, Wild Pilgrimage, Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words and Vertigo.

• RIP ace graphic designer Raymond Hawkey. Related: Raymond Hawkey: An eye for detail, and Hawkey’s James Bond cover designs from the mid-60s.

The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, an exhibition at Duke University, North Carolina, features work by 41 artists from around the world, from the 1960s to the present, using vinyl records as subject or medium.

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The Île de la Cité, a steel engraving by Albert Decaris (1950).

Fred Tomaselli will have a new exhibition of his work at the Brooklyn Museum next month.

Socialist Monuments in Bulgaria photographed by Linda Ferrari.

• What would Howard think of the Mythos Art Dildo?

Space is Process, a film about Olafur Eliasson.

Thurston Moore’s Indie Books.

Chris Colfer in a leather bar.

Ephemeral New York.

• Chrome! Helios Creed’s YouTube channel.

Le Palais de l’Optique, 1900

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Here at {feuilleton} the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 is never far away. This post is linked to those of the previous two days via the zodiac signs which decorate the lavish canopy on the Palais de l’Optique, one of the smaller exposition halls. The zodiac signs seem oddly inappropriate for displays of scientific endeavour until you discover that the principal attraction was François Deloncle’s Grande Lunette, or Great Telescope, one of the largest refracting telescopes ever built.

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The astrological signs, then, signify the heavens which the telescope allowed an audience to view on a giant screen. The elegant poster advertising the attraction is by Georges Paul Leroux (1877–1957), and was discovered at Gatochy’s Flickr pages. The diagram below shows the colossal scale of thing and—appropriately—ought to be viewed at a larger size on Pignouf’s page. When you consider the small scale of film projections in 1900 the screenings from this monster must have been quite spectacular. The Exposition Universelle 3D Project has additional photos.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
Exposition Universelle films
Exposition jewellery
Exposition Universelle catalogue
Exposition Universelle publications
Exposition cornucopia
Return to the Exposition Universelle
The Palais Lumineux
Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
Exposition Universelle, 1900
The Palais du Trocadéro

Mind the doors!

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Russian artist Alexey Andreev populates the Moscow Metro with eldritch weirdness in a photo-collage series he calls Metronomicon. A couple of these pieces remind me of Clive Barker’s throat-grabbing story, The Midnight Meat Train, which was filmed a couple of years ago. For an earlier cinematic example of the horror inherent in underground transport systems there’s Gary Sherman’s Death Line, or Raw Meat as it was fatuously rebranded for the US, a very effective low-budget film from 1972. Fantastic Voyages reviews it here.

Andreev tip via MetaFilter.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
Subterrania
Tunnel 228

Weekend links 26

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The interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County “Old Main” Building, 1874. Reblogged over the past few days on numerous Tumblr postings, none of whom had bothered to find out any details about the picture. I’m with Silent Porn Star on the contextless reblogging issue.

Keith Richards et Mick Jagger à Londres, TV interviews with the Glimmer Twins from 1968 with some remarkable footage in the second half of Jagger filming the penultimate shot of Performance. That French video site requires further exploration. Also there is a short film from 1961 with Jacques Lasry demonstrating the Cristal Baschet. Related: Jacques Doyen & Jacques Lasry play their Cristals while Arlette Thomas and others read French poetry. I wrote something about the mystery of the Cristal two years ago this week.

• Two great album cover blogs from Jive Time Records: Project Thirty-Three is “a shrine to circles, dots, squares, rectangles and triangles, and the designers that make them come to life on album covers” while Groove Is In The Art “celebrates the era when psychedelic graphics and pop art met the mainstream”.

• At A Journey Round My Skull: Night Hallucinations: illustrations by Jaroslav Šerých for Tales of the Uncanny (Prague, 1976); Snark, Strangeness and Charm, Mahendra Singh’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll and others.

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Laurence Chaves illustrates De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Austin Osman Spare: Fallen Visionary at the Cuming Museum, Southwark, London in September, “will be the largest showcase of [Spare’s] work in a public museum since his death in 1956.” Jerusalem Press are publishing an expensive monograph to accompany the exhibition.

Freeing “Pale Fire” From Pale Fire; “the next big Nabokov controversy”. Probably not but the thesis is an interesting one.

Quintessential ‘topiary’ in Gandalf’s Garden: Barney Bubbles, head shops and Op Art graphic design.

• Monster Brains discovered some more paintings by Thomas Häfner.

• Spaceweather’s Northern Lights gallery.

The passion of Krzysztof Penderecki.

• More Bookshelf porn.

White peacocks.

Sussan Deyhim: Daylaman | Desert Equations (for Brion Gysin) (with Richard Horowitz) | An interview at WorldStreams.

Several links this week via Adrian Shaughnessy’s Twitter feed. Thanks!