{photography} – Page 89 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 100

How to become a mermaid and dissolve into sea foam in just seven surgical operations (2010) by Carla Bedini.

• D.I.Y. Magic was a regular feature in the late Arthur Magazine that’s now become a book by Anthony Alvarado: “Think of it as jail-breaking the iPhone of your mind. Teaching it to do things that its basic programming was never set up for. Advanced self-psychology.” A first edition letterpress silver foil cover is limited to 1000 copies. | More magic: Jimmy Page’s unused soundtrack for Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer’s Rising finally gets an official release on March 20th.

• Julia Holter‘s tremendous new album, Ekstasis, has been rocking my world this week. She’s interviewed at FACT where you can also hear the opening track, Marienbad, which receives extra points for being derived from that film. And there’s more: Ritual Music, a live performance at Sea & Space Gallery in Los Angeles, and Fur Felix, a film by Eric Fensler.

• Brute Ornament, an exhibition of new work by Seher Shah and Kamrooz Aram opens at the Green Art Gallery, Dubai, on Monday. While the UAE is out of reach for most of us, the gallery site has samples of the work on display.

• This week’s mixtape arrives courtesy of BUTT magazine: Rock Bottom Mix by Cesar Padilla, a blend of acid, glam, grunge, punk, surf and stoner rock. Elsewhere, Richard Norris lists his 20 favourite UK psychedelic records.

• the name is BURROUGHS ? Expanded Media at ZKM, the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, is a comprehensive exhibition presenting for the first time in Germany the artistic output of William Burroughs.

• Boneland by Alan Garner will be published in August, a new novel that concludes a narrative thread begun with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in 1960.

• Coming soon (so to speak) on BFI DVD, The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome, more gay obscurities receiving quality attention.

• The Northampton Chronicle reports on Alan Moore’s forthcoming novel about the town, Jerusalem.

• Susan Cain is playing my tune (again): Why the world needs introverts.

• Techniques of terror: Carl Dreyer‘s Danish Gothic dissected.

• NASA has the latest map of Everything.

• The male sex toy revolution.

• Lucifer Rising Sessions (1972) by Bobby Beausoleil.

The recurrent pose 46

Something I’d had bookmarked for ages then overlooked, French photographer Bertrand Le Pluard borrows the Flandrin pose for a Raf Simons shoes feature in Wad Magazine. In addition to another shot avec génitales at the Le Pluard site there’s also a feature here and here for German gay mag Kaiserin celebrating those queer hippies known as The Cockettes. Via Homotography.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Flamboyant excess: the art of Steven Arnold

Schütze and Unstable at Maggs Bros

Maggs Bros. Ltd, London, hosts two events soon featuring { feuilleton } friends and cohorts. First up is Paul Schütze with Air Into Light, a showing of eighteen of his photo prints with musical and perfume accompaniment. Paul has been making perfume a subject of particular concern recently. The combination of sound and scent is still little explored despite Scriabin’s ambitious plans for his apocalyptic Mysterium. Air Into Light opens on 12th March.

Chaos (2001) by Joel Biroco.

Unstable is a Strange Attractor event which will run from 8th May to 8th June, 2012 presenting new and old work by Battle of the Eyes (Chris Long & Edwin Pouncey), Joel Biroco, Julian House and Cathy Ward. Maggs Bros. has a page with exhibition details here including a PDF catalogue.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Strange Attractor Salon

Opium fiends

When bachelor dens cast over waking hours a loneliness so deep (1904).

From morphine to opium. Despite drug addiction being an equal opportunities affair, many representations of opium dens in the late 19th and early 20th centuries tend to show women as the victims. This is probably chauvinistic in part—women being thought of as the weaker sex—but no doubt also connects to xenophobic fears about the white slave trade that fueled so much popular fiction of the time. The photo above at the Library of Congress is one exception with its young man chilling with a hookah in his fur-lined den, as you do. (He’s not necessarily smoking opium, of course…) The posters below, all from 1899, are also from the Library of Congress, and are more typical both in their sensationalism and in the dens being filled with white women.

As for Miss Ada Lewis, Mesmerize Magee was a “dope song” by Melville Ellis from a farce entitled A Reign of Error (1899), in which she recounts how her dope is paid for by a young policeman (the Magee of the title) who the lyrics describe as being “green as a pill”. When Magee worries about spending his wages in this fashion Ada has to wield her charms. And people think of 19th-century entertainment as being entirely wholesome and innocent…

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La Morphine by Victorien du Saussay
• Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
• The Mask of Fu Manchu
• The Dark Ledger
• Demon rum leads to heroin
• German opium smokers, 1900

The art of Elmgreen and Dragset

Ganymede (Jockstrap) (2009).

Artist partners Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset—Danish and Norwegian respectively—became better known to the British public this week (well, Londoners anyway…) when their Powerless Structures, Fig 101 was unveiled by Joanna Lumley in Trafalgar Square. The pair’s bronze boy on a rocking horse is their contribution to the series of works that temporarily occupy the square’s Fourth Plinth, a site originally intended to display an equestrian statue of William IV. Elmgreen & Dragset admit that their new piece is slightly camp but also say:

“One thing that is absolutely forbidden in the public realm is to show emotions and be fragile,” Elmgreen says. “That is something we wanted to touch upon in the square, where it’s all about power. The sculpture is not about pop culture issues, or what is in trend at the moment. You step outside the whole thing and try to speak with another voice.”

“It’s beyond that,” says Dragset. “It’s like daring to expose sides of yourself you’re not supposed to show. Like vulnerability. It is often on our minds at the moment. Dare to be uncool!” (more)

Jason (Briefs) (2009).

Rather more overtly camp are these photos of additions by the artists’ to statues by Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), amendments which lend an erotic frisson to cold marble. The Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen commendably hosted an exhibition of these photo prints last year, and have a page detailing Elmgreen & Dragset’s intentions.

Powerless Structures, Fig 101, will be on display in Trafalgar Square throughout the year.

Mercury (Socks) (2009).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive