{religion} – Page 27 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 90

Portrait of Dr. Ignacio Chavez (1957) by Remedios Varo (1908–1963) some of whose Surrealist paintings can be seen at Frey Norris, San Francisco, from 19th January. There’s also In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 29th January.

The current crop of Republicans jostling for the Presidential nomination have reminded me of the Downunder people in Harlan Ellison’s post-apocalypse novella A Boy and His Dog (1969): a retrograde, fear-ridden community who send troublesome individuals to be exterminated at “the farm”. Rick Santorum (unforgettably pictured here with family in 2006 after losing an election) almost received the majority of Iowa’s votes for his nomination last week, prompting renewed scrutiny of his negative views about gay people, sexually active people, foreign people (especially Arabs and Mexicans), and anyone generally who isn’t a white, Catholic, Downunder person. Santorum is against gay marriage, of course—it’s hard to find a Republican who isn’t—but he also wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and given the opportunity would allow US states to prevent any use of contraception. Add to this his pro-torture stance (which offends current Catholic church policy), and his willingness to wage war with Iran, and it’s easy to see why his name prompts reactions such as this:

I have a history with Rick Santorum. In 2003, when Santorum, in an interview with the Associated Press, first compared gay relationships to child rape and dog fucking (have I mentioned that Santorum has compared gay relationships to child rape and dog fucking?), I held a contest to redefine Santorum‘s last name. The winning definition: “the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.” (“Sometimes” is the most important word in the new definition of santorum; if you’re doing anal sex correctly, there won’t be any santorum – lower- or upper-case.) And since 2003, the new definition has been the No. 1 Google return when you search “santorum“.

Rick Santorum’s homophobic frothing by Dan Savage

Related: Santorum was named one of the three “most corrupt” Senators in 2006 | “Homohater fosser fram” which is how Dagbladet, Norway’s second largest tabloid newspaper, introduces Santorum to its readers | “Rick Santorum channels Saint Augustine” an article at Slate exploring the Handmaid’s Tale extent of Santorum‘s attitudes towards sex and morality | Rick Santorum quotes as New Yorker cartoons.

The Rod (1973) by Brigid Marlin.

• Ballardian posts a long-overdue interview with Brigid Marlin, famous now for having brought two lost Paul Delvaux paintings back to life for JG Ballard, but also a woman with an extensive career as a fantastic artist using Ernst Fuchs‘s laborious mische painting technique.

• Quentin Blake on Ronald Searle, in which Blake notes that his hero was given a full-scale exhibition of his work at the Bibliothèque Nationale, France, in 1973 whilst being ignored throughout his life by the major institutions in Britain.

• Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life by Alastair Brotchie is reviewed by Michael Moorcock who tells me the Guardian cut out his references to Boris Vian, Maurice Richardson and David Britton.

• Ian McKellen stirs things up by suggesting (not for the first time) that Shakespeare was bisexual.

• Ten posters by Only More Never Less inspired by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

• An end to bad heir days: The posthumous power of the literary estate.

• Peace Eye! Fug! A Long Talk With Ed Sanders.

• Sand sculptures by Carl Jara.

• Letterheady

• Skylab: These Are The Blues (1995) | Beyond The Breeze (1995) | Red Light, Blue Light (1995) | Indigo (Sabres of Paradise remix, 1995) | Seashell (Nobukazu Takemura mix, 1995).

Athanasius Kircher’s Tower of Babel

Here’s a picture whose myriad details I’ve wanted to scrutinise for many years. Lieven Cruyl was the draughtsman and Coenraet Decker the etcher while the picture itself appears as an illustration in Athanasius Kircher’s (deep breath) Turris Babel, Sive Archontologia Qua Primo Priscorum post diluvium hominum vita, mores rerumque gestarum magnitudo, Secundo Turris fabrica civitatumque exstructio, confusio linguarum, & inde gentium transmigrationis, cum principalium inde enatorum idiomatum historia, multiplici eruditione describuntur & explicantur. The book was published in 1679 and, among other speculations, features Kircher’s eye-popping illustration (below) showing how tall the Tower of Babel would have to be in order to reach the Moon. I used part of the big illustration in a cover design for metal band Melechesh in 2006.

The copies here are from a scanned volume at the University of Heidelberg where the pages have suffered slightly from bookworm. But the resolution is high enough to explore a picture crawling with tiny details, from the bristling scaffolding at the top of the structure, and the houses (for the workers?) built on the ramps lower down, to a procession of camels and other beasts being led towards the main entrance. In the background there are smaller towers and a few pyramids (Kircher explored the latter elsewhere in the book), and also a harbour with beast-headed sailing ships. The full-size picture may be explored here.

Continue reading “Athanasius Kircher’s Tower of Babel”

Labyrinths

The Breamore Miz-Maze, Hampshire. Photo by Jim Champion.

As part of the work-related research this week I was looking for designs of old turf labyrinths. It turns out I have two pages of the things in a book I’d earlier considered dropping into Oxfam so that particular volume may have gained a reprieve. Before I went to the bookshelves I’d been browsing the rather wonderful Labyrinthos site which is just the kind of detailed resource you hope to find in these circumstances. There we find an explanation for the difference between a maze and a labyrinth (the general rule being that a maze has more than one choice of route), and a wealth of examples from ancient history to the present day. I’ve long been fascinated by the labyrinths found in churches and cathedrals, of which the most famous example is the one in Chartres Cathedral. They’re a rare incidence of a symbolic device in Christian architecture which is near-universal, and which has clear antecedents in the labyrinths and mazes found in ancient temples. Labyrinthos has a guide to some of the surviving examples to be found in England. As to England’s turf labyrinths, there’s a page devoted to those here with a number of photos.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jeppe Hein’s mirror labyrinth

Danby’s Deluge

Since John Martin’s tumultuous canvases are back in the news it’s worth remembering another 19th-century painter of Biblical cataclysm, Francis Danby (1793–1861), whose enormous The Deluge (1840) used to hang in the same room as the Martins at Tate Britain. Danby was a contemporary of Martin although not as enthusiastic about this kind of subject matter. Visions of apocalypse proved to be popular, however, so Danby painted his Flood and similar works with reluctance. (Even Turner wasn’t above painting the occasional disaster.) Danby’s Deluge impressed me as much as Martin’s work when I first saw it not least for its having some believable human figures which give the vast canvas a tragic dimension. Martin’s figures are perfunctory and invariably dwarfed by the scale of events.

These details are from the Google Art Project which unfortunately don’t show us as much detail as they might. This is one of those paintings which encourages a lengthy contemplation, with a composition that draws the eye away from the swirling waters to a glowering sun and the shape of Noah’s ark on the distant horizon.

I’ve always been intrigued by the curious detail of the angel caught in the flood, and the even more curious detail of a drowned giant beside it. For the first time, however, I’ve noticed that the angel is peering into the face of a dead woman draped over the giant’s body. Paintings such as these often toured the country accompanied by the artist responsible who would lecture a paying audience about the various details. Besides the storytelling Danby gives the water in the foreground an astonishing transparent quality which Google’s photos can’t replicate. All the more reason to see his paintings for yourself if you’re in London.

• Francis Danby at Tate Britain

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Martin: Heaven & Hell
• Darkness visible
• Death from above
• The apocalyptic art of Francis Danby

Weekend links 68

Every man and every woman is a star by Sveta Dorosheva.

• Matt Taylor (illustration) with Gregg Kulick and Paul Buckley (design) provide new Penguin covers for John Le Carré. I love the look which seems inspired by Daniel Kleinman’s title sequence for Casino Royale even if it doesn’t quite suit the shabby world of George Smiley and the Circus.

[Deborah Kass] told me that when she was going to art school in the ’70s, she tripped on LSD almost every week and she said she felt it was her “moral duty as an artist to take the trip.” […] I think psychedelic experience makes you think that there are multiple realities, that there isn’t just this one normal real world to which we’re supposed to conform, but that the reality changes depending on the state of consciousness that we’re in when we’re experiencing it. So, any different kind of art kind of posits a different reality. (more)

New York Times art critic Ken Johnson discussing his new book Are You Experienced?: How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art.

• “That got me thinking that evolution really isn’t survival of the fittest, when it comes to these things, it is more like survival of the interesting, survival of the beautiful, survival of the weird, cool stuff that managed to evolve.” Laurie Anderson and David Rothenberg discuss music and animals.

• Laura Cumming on the late Lucian Freud. And Stephen Heller on Alex Steinweiss, the originator in 1939 of the artistic record sleeve who also died last week.

• Alan Moore says “Think Locally: Fuck ‘Globally'”. He and Queen Calluz explain how Dodgem Logic magazine puts their ideas into practice.

• Adam Curtis gets interviewed while Alan Bennett returns to Armley Public Library in Leeds.

• Peacock’s Garden, a celebration of pavonine splendour.

• A visit to Seher Shah’s studio in Brooklyn, New York.

• Maximum androgyny at Epicenity, a Tumblr.

• Does your god have a penis?

• Chrysalide (1978) is an album of “cosmic” guitar instrumentals by Michel Moulinié which sounds at times like a French equivalent of Manuel Göttsching. It’s never been released on CD but a copy can be found here.