{painting} – Page 150 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 33

Blue Sky Noise (2010) by Esao Andrews.

• Franz Xaver Messerschmidt is the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to the 18th-century sculptor. Related: an earlier post about the artist’s work.

• How are the team behind War Horse planning to follow up their smash hit? With a gay love story performed by puppets. Related: Achilles (1995) by Barry JC Purves.

• More great posts at A Journey Round My Skull: Czechoslovakian Expose VI and Black Cradle of Bright Life, fifteen works by the Macedonian artist Vangel Naumovski (1924–2006).

• Top 10 Anti-Gay Activists Caught Being Gay. Related: “Fuck your feelings,” in which columnist Dan Savage gets righteously impatient when a correspondent complains. As Savage says, people who use their faith as a stick to beat gay people contribute to an atmosphere of intolerance in which kids are bullied for being gay (or appearing to be), or transgender, or merely different, and kill themselves as a result. Over the past couple of weeks there’s been an upsurge of US media attention to the most recent suicides; Savage inaugurated the It Gets Better project in order to help. Also related: God Loves Poetry.

Meigh (2010) by Esao Andrews.

• Antony Hegarty enthuses about Shoot Yer Load, one of the scurrilous 12″ singles released by my Savoy colleagues in the 1980s. Antony and the Johnsons have a new album out, Swanlights, on Secretly Canadian.

• When the future of music was a rainbow hued parabola: book designer John Gall collects old synthesizer manuals.

• Fantastic Memories (1944) by Maurice Sandoz, illustrated by Salvador Dalí.

• Urban optometry: life as a London crane operator at BLDGBLOG.

• Today is 10/10/10 which means it’s Powers of Ten Day.

• These New Puritans: a band like no other.

• Art Nouveau: a virtual exhibition.

• Diaghilev: Lord of the dance.

• Flaming Telepaths (1974) by Blue Öyster Cult; Flaming Telepaths (2005) by Espers.

Carceri, thermae and candelabra

Piranesi’s etching which purports to show a statue gallery at Hadrian’s Villa was published in 1770 as part of the artist’s Vedute di Roma series, and conveniently provides a themed link for a pair of new exhibitions. The artist’s attribution of statue gallery was a mistaken one, the structure is actually the remains of Hadrian’s thermae, or baths, but archaeology was still in its infancy in the 18th century so mistakes were inevitable. If you’re fortunate enough to be in Venice during the next two months the Fondazione Cini has a major exhibition of Piranesi’s work, The Art of Piranesi: architect, engraver, antiquarian, vedutista, designer. On display are over three hundred prints which no doubt include many of the Vedute di Roma.

Ornamental candelabrum created by Factum Arte from a design by Piranesi.

Good as that sounds, what’s especially notable about this exhibition is a presentation of three-dimensional works specially created from Piranesi’s designs for candelabra, fireplaces, and other objects based on his studies of artefacts from the ancient world. These pieces have been produced by Factum Arte who have a great website showing the finished pieces and also a page detailing the production of the objects. Also on that page is one of the exhibition’s other features, a 10-minute video by Gregoire Dupond which cleverly joins together and animates a journey through several of Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons). The music accompaniment is Bach’s Cello Suite 2 which happens to be the piece played by Yo-Yo Ma in an earlier animation of the Carceri, so it’s a reasonable guess that the earlier film was an inspiration for this new work. The exhibition runs to November 21, 2010.

Jack’s Bath (2010) by Danny Jauregui. Gouache on canvas.

Hadrian’s obsession with his doomed lover Antinous makes the Emperor a gay icon which explains the connection between Piranesi’s view of the ruined baths and an exhibition of work by American artist Danny Jauregui. There Goes the Neighborhood is at the Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, New York, and features a selection of Jauregui’s paintings of tiles from the bathhouses which were a feature of gay life in the days before AIDS.

I make paintings of bathhouses in ruin. Moldy, disheveled and abandoned, the paintings are memorials to the absence of memorials – indexes of the traumatic erasure inflicted on the radical gay sexuality of the past. They are paintings of what I imagine those spaces to look like, had they not been disguised and hidden from sight. (More.)

The exhibition runs until October 30, 2010. By coincidence gay news blog Towleroad had a post yesterday about New York’s first anti-gay police raid on the Ariston Baths in 1903.

Time Bandits.

Seeing as I posted the picture of Hadrian’s baths I have to also post this shot from Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) showing the interior of the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. Here we see the Piranesi’s ruined baths incorporated into a vast and gloomy space which must surely be inspired by the Carceri, the views of Rome being absorbed by the artist’s darker imaginings. And for a final piece of trivia, writer Marguerite Yourcenar is not only the author of Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), a novel about the Emperor’s passion for Antinous, but also penned an essay about the Carceri. I haven’t read either of those works so I think it’s time to add them to the shopping list.

Update: For those in the UK, there’s also Piranesi’s Prisons, an exhibition at the Mead Gallery, Warwick, from now until December.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters
• Set in Stone
• Hadrian and Greek love
• Piranesi as designer
• Vedute di Roma
• Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons
• The Cult of Antinous

Weekend links 32

Red Quechquemitls (2010) by Sylvia Ji.

• The Blackout Mix, a pay-what-thou-wilt 49-minute mixtape, “specially designed to accompany (or simulate) a human-plant interaction”. Art by Arik Roper, music selection by Jay Babcock.

• An ode to the many evolved virtues of human semen: “the penis is capable of dispensing a sort of natural Prozac” says Jesse Bering.

• The new John Foxx CD & DVD release, D.N.A., has a Jonathan Barnbrook cover, a new collaboration with Harold Budd and a disc of short films.

• “I have been copying Margaret Hamilton my whole life, and I am proud to admit it. The Wicked Witch of the West, the jolie laide heroine of every bad little boy’s and girl’s dream of notoriety and style, whose twelve minutes of screen time in The Wizard of Oz can never be topped … I’m a big butch-lesbian hag. I love the ones with chips on their shoulders and heavy attitude. They’re my real favorites.” John Waters always gives great interviews.

• Listen to a track from the forthcoming Brian Eno album while you’re reading Kristine McKenna’s interview with the man himself at Arthur mag. Includes an appreciation by Alan Moore.

Atropa Bella Donna (2009) by Sylvia Ji.

• Steven Severin is touring the UK this month, performing a live accompaniment to screenings of Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. He’s at the Tyneside Cinema this Tuesday. Other dates can be found on his website.

• “I know it’s a very emotive subject and you’re either for it or against it but for a jobbing self-employed musician such as me – bootlegging (CD copying) is just killing us.” Finding The Spaces Between: musician Chris Carter (Throbbing Gristle, Chris & Cosey, et al) interviewed.

• Mile End Pugatorio (1991), a one-minute film-poem by Guy Sherwin and Martin Doyle. Related: four one-minute movies by The Residents.

• Gijs Van Vaerenbergh installed an Upside Dome at the St. Michiel Church in Leuven, Belgium.

• Sidney Sime illustrates Lord Dunsany at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• Europe according to gay men. There’s more at Mapping Stereotypes.

• There’s never a dull moment in the High Desert.

• Generative art by Leonardo Solas.

Diaghilev’s World of Art

Cover by Evgeny Lanceray for Prospectus of the Magazine, 1901.

Previous posts here have concerned fin de siècle art magazines like The Savoy, Pan and Jugend; yesterday we had Sergei Diaghilev so it seems fitting to mention Diaghilev’s own magazine, Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), founded in 1899 with similar intentions to the European magazines which were highlighting developments in art beyond the academic sphere. Mir Iskusstva was also the name of the Russian art group who used the magazine as their forum, and a number of the artists involved in the movement, notably Léon Bakst, Ivan Bilibin and Nicholas Roerich, went on to work for Diaghilev at the Ballets Russes.

Cover by Léon Bakst for Mir iskusstva #8 (1902).

I find this later development especially fascinating since it positions the magazine as a precursor to the groundbreaking works which followed rather than being—as so many periodicals were and still are—a publication which had its moment of glory then faded from view. Of the works shown here, Vrubel’s Symbolist Demon, one of several painted by the artist, was featured in a 1903 edition of the magazine, whilst the Bakst painting, depicting the destruction of Atlantis, shows a Symbolist side to an artist who later became far better known for his Ballets Russes costume designs.

Demon (1902) by Mikhail Vrubel.

Unlike the other magazines mentioned above, I’ve yet to come across a cache of whole editions of Mir Iskusstva (and I’m still waiting for Ver Sacrum to turn up somewhere). This page has an overview of the Russian art movement and its journal, while this page has a selection of works by the artists involved. For more of Vrubel’s work, Wikimedia Commons has the best collection of the artist’s paintings and sculpture.