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Weekend links 833

Tony Hyde’s original artwork for the front cover of Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music by Hawkwind. The painting is being auctioned later this month.

• At the Daily Heller: Steven Heller reprints his 2012 Atlantic review of The Graphic Canon, a three-volume collection of visual adaptations of works of literature. The collection was edited by the late Russ Kick, and includes my own condensation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Bill Hsu presents…21st Century Nightmares: Dark Animations by Cristóbal León/Joaquín Cociña, Hugo Covarrubias, Christiane Cegavske, John Frame, Saori Shiroki, Joe Hsieh, Phil Tippett, Robert Morgan, Shengwei Zhou.

• At Colossal: In Los Angeles, 70 artists transform a vacant hospital into a sprawling art experience.

What we were doing was rooted in that specific moment, but looking back, it also seems to resonate strongly with the present—particularly in terms of how we understand media, perception, and reality itself. This is something I’ve been thinking about again recently, especially with the renewed activity around Cabaret Voltaire. It brings into focus the extent to which earlier work now reads almost as a form of prefiguration. At the time, though, much of it was intuitive. We didn’t necessarily have a fully formed theoretical framework for what we were doing—we were artists, and we were working instinctively. It’s really only in retrospect that some of those ideas begin to take on a clearer shape and meaning.

Stephen Mallinder talking to Nicolas Ballet about Cabaret Voltaire, the group’s history and working methods

• New music: The Endless Dance by Hannah Peel; Helt by Fjall; Air Signs by Anthéne.

• Adam Rowe is writing a new book about science fiction art.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Brutal Types.

• Mix of the week: Isolatedmix 135 by Aspetuck.

• Brute Reason (1983) by Bernard Szajner | Let’s Get Brutal (1986) by Nitro Deluxe | Brutal But Clean (1994) by Cabaret Voltaire

Rhino Head

A new book arrived in the post this week. Rhino Head is a collection of words (in both German and English) by Carlos Atanes and drawings by Jan van Rijn which describes itself thus:

This illustrated fantastical narrative consists of 21 chapters and features short, self-contained stories told from shifting narrative and temporal perspectives. It is a collaboration between author/director Carlos Atanes and illustrator Jan van Rijn, and explores the realms of eroticism and magical realism.

What lies behind a simple fable about wolves and rabbits? An actress fleeing in terror from an underground film shoot on the slopes of Mount Fuji? A New Mexico scrap dealer serving coffee to two visitors from outer space? A fashion designer who believes she is being dreamed by a mythical figure? An antiques forger who discovers an old tale has come true? A female cult disrupting the cosmic order with terrifying rituals?

This interwoven web of stories includes a summons to a fictitious event, sunflowers acting as orgasmic energy batteries, rhino heads at the farthest reaches of the world, pornographic films projected inside the viewer’s mind, dolls transformed into women and women transformed into dolls – a constellation of strange intertwined incidents creating a hyperfable, moving beyond its individual characters because the meaning of the whole can only be revealed to each individual reader.

Having known Jan for some time—I contributed to the Genet-themed collection he put together in 2021—I was happy to write a foreword for his new publication. In books like this you tend to find the pictures acting solely as illustration but here there’s more of a dialogue going on between the different media. The drawings show you things the texts don’t provide, and vice versa.

Rhino Head doesn’t appear to be on sale just yet but anyone wanting further information should contact Kraut and Rubies.

Huszti Horvath’s Three Dragons

Book of the Three Dragons is an unusual illustrated volume, being an American edition of a retelling of Welsh myths by a Welsh writer, Kenneth Morris, with illustrations by a Hungarian artist, Ferdinand Huszti Horvath (1891–1973). Morris was, among other things, a Theosophist who was living in California when he wrote Book of the Three Dragons which no doubt explains the American publication. There doesn’t appear to be any Theosophy in this book at least. Dragons are an important symbol for the Welsh, with a red dragon being a prominent emblem on the flag of Wales. Morris’s book opens with a guide to the pronunciation of the Welsh names and words that appear in the text.

Ferdinand Horvath, meanwhile, moved to the USA in the 1920s where he eventually found employment as an illustrator before working (without credit) for Disney. It’s at Disney-related websites that you’ll find most of the information about his life and work, where the discussion inevitably concerns his designs for animated films. A list of his other book productions would be welcome. There’s a very nice edition of The Raven that was published in the same year as Book of the Three Dragons but with art in much more of an Expressionist style.

I often wonder what Disney’s animations might have been like if the studio had given artists like Horvath and Kay Nielsen a freer rein. Disney only began to change its style in the late 1950s as a result of competition from other animation studios, and even then the results were compromised. Sleeping Beauty used the designs of Eyvind Earle to distinguish the film from the studio’s previous fairy tales but Earle was dissatisfied with the treatment his work received and he left the project before it was finished; the art direction for One Hundred and One Dalmatians was based on the cartoons of Ronald Searle but Walt Disney hated the results and refused to try anything similar again.

Continue reading “Huszti Horvath’s Three Dragons”

Weekend links 832

Dark Corridor (1990s) by Unknown Artist.

• “I greatly enjoyed this rich, allusive and strange text, which has affinities to the literary form and style of TS Eliot, David Jones and Iain Sinclair, uniting high modernism with demotic and pulp elements, as well as to the occult thrillers of Charles Williams, Mary Butts and others.” Mark Valentine reviews B-Movie: Serial of Seven Stars by Andrew Duncan.

• New music: Electronic Meditation For Inner Space Travel by Studio Kosmische; Fathom Tides by Werner Dafeldecker & Lawrence English; rust/wave by Tewksbury.

• At Public Domain Review: Animal, Vegetable, Lamb: Thom Sliwowski on the history of the mysterious Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.

• At Door of Perception: Wistman’s Wood, Dartmoor, as photographed by Neil Burnell.

• Anne Billson selects 20 of the best corridors in film.

• More corridors: Scificorridorarchive.

• Ukrainian animation.

• RIP Sonny Rollins.

• Current Rothko

• The Black Corridor (1973) by Hawkwind | Corridor (2018) by Steve Jansen | Spectral Corridor Part 4 (2021) by The House In The Woods

Steal Me

Coming soon from Absinthe Books, the novella imprint of PS Publishing, is Steal Me by Helen Grant, a book for which I created the wraparound cover art:

Rowan Byrne hasn’t stolen anything for ages—not since she started to straighten her life out after a personal tragedy. But the volume she’s just picked up in the new bookshop in town seems to want her to steal it. The text is very persuasive. There’s a book for everyone in Legends—a book that will encourage their worst impulses. Steal. Fear. Burn. Kill. It’s not long before Rowan’s small town, isolated from the outside world, is descending into mayhem. Assailed by her own demons, Rowan could try to cut and run. Or she could make a stand, and try to save the community she loves…

This was a good book to work on. I’d not worked for PS for a while, and very much enjoyed Helen’s collection of stories for Swan River Press, Atmospheric Disturbances, whose cover and boards I also designed. “Legends”, the mysterious shop with the darkened windows, is staffed by a pair of elderly women who seem vaguely unreal—pleasant and helpful but not quite human, and with an undefined aura of menace. By coincidence, the previous book I worked on for PS Publishing was a fully illustrated edition of Needful Things by Stephen King, a much longer novel about a mysterious shop in a small town whose sinister/unreal proprietor and wares cause mayhem among the populace. Helen says she wasn’t imitating the King novel, and the similarities are superficial in any case. I feel she did more with the concept, and with greater economy, than the world’s most popular horror novelist (and I say this after the world’s most popular horror novelist sent his compliments for my work on his book); but then I’ve never been keen on the tendency favoured by King and others to fill out hundreds of pages with background detail and character biographies at the expense of the horror. In the past I’ve thrown the occasional barb at Mies van der Rohe’s overused quote, but sometimes less really does mean more.

Steal Me will be published in June. Don’t steal it.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Atmospheric Disturbances
• The Needful Thing
• All the Things
• Needful Things