A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Photography
In which personal obsessions infiltrate the outside world… Rastko (above) writes that he remembered the recurrent pose archive when playing with his camera’s self-timer whilst on holiday on the island of Brac in Croatia. The result was this photo which is posted here with his permission. A rare example of the pose in question being au bord de la mer for once. Thanks Rastko!
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive
La Perspective Curieuse (1663) by Jean François Nicéron. From Curious Perspectives at BibliOdyssey.
• 1612 Underture is a forthcoming album by The Eccentronic Research Council and Maxine Peake which extends the electronics + occult concept to encompass Kraftwerk and the Pendle Witches. The Quietus has a review of their album, and an interview and report about a recent live performance (I missed the latter, unfortunately), while the Guardian’s interview with the splendid Ms Peake reveals that “musically, her tastes range from Japanese black metal, garage rock and folk, to techno and psychobilly.” The famous Lancashire witches also happen to be the subject of Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel, The Daylight Gate.
• Yet more Marker: The Owl’s Legacy: Chris Marker’s 13-Part Search for Western Culture’s Foundations in Ancient Greece, and J. Hoberman on The Lost Futures of Chris Marker.
• Dr Oliver Sacks talks about how hallucinogenic drugs helped him empathize with his patients.
Paulo Coelho’s ill-judged Joyce-bashing has made him a butt of scorn this week, but he’s a safe target because, with books that multitask a little too openly as self-help manuals, he’s not so clubbable. Unlike, say, Ian McEwan, who not-that-differently declared against “the dead hand of modernism“, for all the world as if the dominant literary mode in post-war England was Steinian experimentation or some Albion Oulipo, against which young Turks hold out with limpidly observed interiority, decodable metaphors, strained middle-class relationships and eternal truths of the human condition(TM).
China Miéville on the always contentious future of the novel.
• The Foliate Head: a new book by Marly Youmans with illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
• Hysterical Literature: Session Two: Alicia reads from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
• Dreaming in Dirigibles: The Airship Postcard Albums of Lord Ventry.
• The Art of the Literary Fake (with Violin) by Jeff VanderMeer.
• RIP Neil Armstrong, first human on the Moon.
• Macho Man: Morgan Meis on Robert Hughes.
• Book covers by Hannes Bok.
• Lunar Rhapsody (1947) by Dr Samuel J. Hoffman | Lunar Musick Suite (1976) by Steve Hillage | Back Side Of The Moon (Steve Hillage’s Under Water Deep Space Remix) (1991) by The Orb.
Poster on the left designed by Major Felten (1931).
In 1914, [Ruth] St Denis married a twenty-two-year-old gay man, the ambitious and sexually charismatic Ted Shawn (1891–1972), who became her dance partner. Shawn appeared at any opportunity in the scantiest of costumes. In 1915, they founded the Denishawn Dance School in Los Angeles, which became a significant artistic center from which many creative dancers emerged, most notably Martha Graham.
Burton Mumaw (b. 1912), a student of Shawn’s, first danced with the Denishawn company in 1931. Mumaw and Shawn soon became lovers and life companions. Shawn separated from St. Denis in 1933 and formed his Company of Male Dancers. Mumaw and Shawn were the leading soloists of the new company. (more)
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of GLBTQ’s claims about Ted Shawn’s sexuality before he married Ruth St Denis, but it’s impossible to see his all-male dance troupe as anything other than homoerotic, especially when they had a tendency to perform in the nude (see below). Shawn’s intention was to move the associations of male dance away from the perceived effeminacies of ballet towards something more assertive and muscular. Shawn and Ruth St Denis had gone to great lengths to import into American dance various exotic elements from Asia and the ancient world, a process they called “Oriental dance”. This was no doubt the kind of Orientalism which is repudiated today for its appropriations but in the 1910s and 20s these developments were significant moves away from the staid traditions of 19th-century ballet. Shawn continued this evolution with a robust choreography based on ethnic war dances and other masculine fare. This kind of all-male dance is now very common—and remains homoerotic, of course, often intentionally so—but in the 1930s the idea was a radical one.
YouTube has a short film of Shawn and company in action in 1935. At the Internet Archive there are the two volumes of Ted Shawn’s Ruth St. Denis, Pioneer & Prophet: Being a History of Her Cycle of Oriental Dances (1920).
Following some leads about American dancer Ted Shawn (1891–1972) turned up this series of photos from 1923 in which he adopts the Flandrin pose whilst enacting “The Death of Adonis”. The series is from a large collection of Shawn photos at the NYPL Digital Gallery. The dancer had dark hair which has here been covered by a light wig in order to convey a statue-like appearance. Poses plastiques, as they were known, were a common Victorian form of titillation which enabled variety audiences to admire near-naked women and men masquerading as living statuary or as figures from mythology and famous paintings. As with many Victorian fashions, they persisted into the early 20th century. Ted Shawn at this time was still married to dancer Ruth St Denis, and the pair had no qualms about displaying their bodies tastefully for the camera. Shawn is a fascinating figure so there’ll be a little more about him tomorrow.
Transmitter Crowbar Discharge Unit, Bates Linear Accelerator. Photo by Daniel Jackson from his Dark Machines series.
The language we use for writing about art is oddly pornographic: We know it when we see it. No one would deny its distinctiveness. Yet efforts to define it inevitably produce squeamishness, as if describing the object too precisely might reveal one’s particular, perhaps peculiar, investments in it. Let us now break that unspoken rule and describe the linguistic features of IAE in some detail.
IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal, autonomy. An artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things. IAE rebukes English for its lack of nouns: Visual becomes visuality, global becomes globality, potential becomes potentiality, experience becomes…experiencability. […] Whatever the content, the aim is to sound to the art world like someone worth listening to, by adopting an approximation of its elite language.
International Art English by Alix Rule & David Levine
For years I’ve been calling it Artspeak: the frequently disingenuous, misleading or merely confused jargon that passes for descriptive writing in the art world. Alix Rule and David Levine apply the more neutral label of International Art English. In a lengthy essay at Triplecanopy they reveal the origins of IAE’s terminology and show why the stuff has spread like semantic kudzu.
• “What a bizarre focal point Anish Kapoor’s spiral callipers are: a Laocoönian observation platform strangled in red steel at a cost of many millions, while electricity pylons, with their austere elegance, once hymned by the poets of the 1930s, have been removed, at enormous cost, from the same site to be buried in the radioactive tilth of landfill dumps and industrial detritus.” Iain Sinclair reports on the Olympics.
• Alfred Kubin in…Nottingham! The Other Side, an exhibition of “haunting drawings of death, trauma and fantastical creatures inhabiting imaginary worlds”, running to the end of September.
• Francis Ford Coppola and Stewart Copeland discuss the making of Rumble Fish (1982). Over at The Rumpus there’s Coppola talking about his career and his latest film, TWIXT.
• Eraserhead: The Making of a Cult Classic. In the 1980s Kenneth George Godwin interviewed everyone responsible for making David Lynch’s film. Fascinating reading.
• Skin Job, the debut poetry collection by Evan J. Peterson, is twenty-one poems about monsters, horror, and science fiction. Evan made a trailer.
• Wood, brass and “the latest advances in nanotechnology”: Teka, an OLED lamp by Aldo Cibic and Tommaso Corà.
• Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967): Peter Whitehead’s film of the capital at its swinging height.
• “Beam Us Up, Mr. Scott!”: Why Misquotations Catch On by Maria Konnikova.
• Hari Kunzru‘s ten favourite books about underground London.
• The Periodic Table of Heavy Metals.
• Alan Garner: A life in books.
• (HR) Giger Counter.
• This week was all about Vangelis in the 1970s: Creation du Monde (1973) | Spiral (1977) | Himalaya / Summit (1979).