Ésser del Cap (1977–78).
A pair of works by a Catalonian artist whose varied and occasionally Surrealist output can be viewed here. There’s further work and career details here but not in English. Via.
Sin título (1982).
Category: {surrealism}
Surrealism
Scenes from a carriage
One of John Tenniel’s illustrations for Through the Looking-Glass (1871).
The collaboration with Carroll, and the production of this clairvoyant illustration gave Tenniel the chance to accuse the killer, whose identity he knew – because he had, at some level, shared in the crime. His capped (or crowned) Guard wears the Diamond and stares, eyeless, at the girl: because he is, or stands for, the Red King. He is checkmated. The Goat accuses him, a Tarot Devil, representing ‘ravishment, force, fatality’. So Tenniel is able to put into his depiction of Alice the details of the murders that the police have never made public. The hands of the victims were always tied in front of them – as Alice’s are, within her muff. They were all strangled with a knotted scarf, such as the one that Alice wears. And a single feather was knotted into their hair. I rest my case.
There’s further divination by Iain Sinclair of Tenniel’s carriage scene in his 1991 novel Downriver but you’ll have to search out the book if you want the rest. The picture above is scanned from my 1908 edition of the two Alice novels which has the sharpest reproductions of Tenniel’s illustrations I’ve seen, not least because they’re printed on quality paper. Later editions often print second- or third-generation copies with the cross-hatched areas reduced to black smudges.
Oedipus by Max Ernst from Une semaine de bonté (1934).
Tenniel’s carriage scene has always been linked for me with this collage by Max Ernst from his Surrealist masterwork, Une semaine de bonté. Sinclair’s proposed murder scenario gives the two pictures an additional resonance when you notice the body on the floor of Ernst’s carriage. Is this Oedipus’s father, recently slain by his son, or some other victim?
Lithograph by Max Ernst from Lewis Carroll’s Wunderhorn (1970).
Salvador Dalí illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1969 which perhaps prompted Ernst’s own set of mysterious Alice-inspired lithographs a year later. I’ve yet to see a complete set of the Ernst prints, if anyone has a link then please leave a comment. The artist’s collage novel is a lot easier to find since it’s one of the many great books that Dover Publications keep in print.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Through the Psychedelic Looking-Glass: the 2011 calendar
• Jabberwocky
• Alice in Acidland
• Return to Wonderland
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice
Weekend links: Hodgson edition
Masters of Terror, Vol 1, Corgi Books, 1977. No illustrator credited.
It was all happening this week so there’s a lot to get through. Are you ready? Deep breath…
For ye Hogge doth be of ye outer Monstrous Ones, nor shall any human come nigh him nor continue meddling when ye hear his voice, for in ye earlier life upon the world did the Hogge have power, and shall again in ye end.
The Hog (c. 1910) by William Hope Hodgson.
• “The Hog is Hodgson’s most nakedly Jungian setpiece; fetid waves of archetypes sweep repeatedly against the thin walls of quotidian reality.” Thus Iain Sinclair, writing in a 1991 afterword to Carnaki the Ghost-Finder which I highly recommend to both Hodgson and Sinclair enthusiasts. China Miéville dissected Hodgson’s Hog on Wednesday and a few hours later a student protest in London turned into an assault on the Tory HQ. Coincidence? Here at {feuilleton} we only offer the facts, it’s up to you to join the dots. M John Harrison approved. Of the protest, that is, not the raising of Porcine Malevolence from the Gulfs Beyond, although he might approve of that as well.
• Further Hodgsonia: Science of The Night Land: Dying Suns and Earth Energy while for real devotees there’s Andy Robertson’s Night Land site.
• “Amplifying the vibrations of the ether” for a view “beyond the limits of ordinary life”: The Fugitive Futurist (1924), a remarkable short film at the BFI’s YouTube channel in which Trafalgar Square is flooded, a monorail crosses Tower Bridge and a dirigible takes to the air over the Houses of Parliament. Also Trafalgar Square Riot (1913), a newsreel with suffragettes at the centre of a civil disturbance. Some of the critics of Wednesday’s events seem to have forgotten that women gained the vote in this country only after repeatedly smashing windows and causing trouble.
• Related to the above: How to Hex a Corporation at Arthur magazine. And let’s not forget Hakim Bey’s Occult Assault on Institutions.
Cover illustration by Ian Miller (1972). The other great cover for THOTB was by Ed Emshwiller in 1962.
The wanderings of the Narrator’s spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system’s final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature.
HP Lovecraft reviewing Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland in Supernatural Horror in Literature.
• Lovecraft has long cast a shadow over Hodgson’s fevered visions even though words of praise like those above have done much to keep the earlier writer’s work in print. I’ve been talking for years about doing a series of illustrations for The House on the Borderland and may yet make good on that threat; never say never. Meanwhile, Rick Poyner returned to Design Observer this week pondering the challenge of non-Euclidean architecture in What does HP Lovecraft look like?
Druillet illustrates Hodgson (1971).
• In his latest piece of Barney Bubbles detective work, Paul Gorman discovered the identity of BB’s first design employer, the alluded to but never named Michael Tucker. More surprising for me than the Robert Brownjohn connection is that there’s now a tenuous link between Barney Bubbles and William Gerhardi.
• 777 classical music album covers from the collection of Dr Horst Scherg. Related: The Golden Age of Wacky Classical LP Covers — Westminster Gold and the Westminster Gold discography.
• Chez Fini: Little Augury looks at the work and workplaces (and cats!) of the marvellous Leonor Fini.
• There’s yet more Lovecraft (and much else besides) in Nomad Codes, a new book from Erik Davis.
• The Irrepressibles: “They’re scared of what we’re going to do next”.
• New Scientist asks Is this evidence that we can see the future?
• Of Electricity And Water: A Thomas Dolby Interview.
• Jarvis Cocker talks to Brian Eno.
• Hog Callin’ Blues (1962) by Charles Mingus. Play loud and often.
Cephalopod bride
This week’s Photoshop researches lead to interesting encounters.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fascinating tentacula
• Jewelled butterflies and cephalopods
• Haeckel fractals
• Octopulps
Design as virus 13: Tsunehisa Kimura
Waterfall by Tsunehisa Kimura.
Continuing an occasional series. Japanese artist Tsunehisa Kimura (1928–2008) was initially inspired by the polemical graphics of John Heartfield to create his own photomontages, a painstaking collage technique now rendered obsolete by Photoshop. Kimura’s work exchanges Heartfield’s satire for an overt and frequently apocalyptic Surrealism, as in his most visible piece, Waterfall. The copy above is one of a number of pictures reproduced by Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG from a 1979 Kimura collection, Visual Scandals by Photomontage.
Design by Anne-Louise Falson & Paul Schütze.
I was first startled by Waterfall in 1996 when Paul Schütze released his Site Anubis album, the product of a “virtual group” comprised of musicians recording in different studios around the world:
The musicians comprising Phantom City—the name, incidentally, originating from the book title Topology of a Phantom City by French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet—never met for the recording of Site Anubis, as each one recorded in a different studio in a different country: guitarist Raoul Björkenheim in Helsinki, bass- and contra-bass clarinetist Alex Buess in a Basel studio, soprano saxophonist Lol Coxhill in London, bassist Bill Laswell at Green Point Studio in Brooklyn, New York, trombonist Julian Priester in Seattle, drummer Dirk Wachtelaer in Brussels, and Schütze himself in London and Basel. Incredibly, Laswell had only Schütze’s electronic backing track to respond to. Wachtelaer had Laswell and Schütze to play against, Björkenheim had drums and bass,—in short, certain players had more information than others.
Kimura’s picture is an ideal accompaniment to this excellent album, especially when you note a Ballard reference in the titles (not the first in Schütze’s oevre), and read the scene-setting piece of fiction on the CD insert, an explanation of the album title:
That morning a report came in from an unmarked helicopter somewhere over the city. The waters were subsiding and the smoke from a thousand fires had begun to drift inland revealing an impossible new structure. Towering some eight hundred feet over the gleaming devastation of the streets, its base occupying an entire city block, was a colossal black basalt figure. The body was male and human, – the head, which stared expectantly toward the boiling western horizon, was the head of a jackal. From the air it was clear that the pattern of destruction on the ground was radial and that the massive figure was sited precisely at its centre.