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Twentieth Century Meets the Fifteenth

Something spotted whilst browsing issues of Photoplay magazine at the Internet Archive, a photo showing the US dirigible ZR1 drifting over the Cosmopolitan Studios in 1923 during the filming of Yolanda. I don’t doubt that the ZR1 really did fly over Hollywood although it looks here to be at an odd perspective (it’s also being completely ignored by the crowd of extras). This makes me think the magazine may have comped two separate photos for convenience, as famously occurred with the cover photo of Pink Floyd’s Animals album.

Searching around for details about the ZR1 turned up this 1931 poster by Georgii Kibardin exhorting Soviet citizens to build a fleet of airships in Lenin’s name. The Hindenberg disaster six years later put an end to this kind of enthusiasm.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zeppelinology
• Vickers Airship Catalogue
• The Air Ship
• Dirigibles
• The Airship Destroyer
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls

Giger’s Tarot

This week’s posts reminded me that I have a copy of the HR Giger Tarot set published by Taschen under their Evergreen imprint in 2000. The set is Taschen’s reworking of Giger & Akron’s Baphomet Tarot der Unterwelt set from 1994, and I recall this being one of the last things Taschen created with Giger after spending the previous decade producing a run of books, diaries and posters featuring his paintings. Inside a box you find a set of 22 oversize Tarot trumps presenting some of Giger’s works against metallic silver surrounds. There’s also a poster-size sheet for card readings printed with his pentagram design plus a 224-page paperback book by Swiss Tarot scholar Akron, aka CF Frey, which interprets the paintings as they relate to the Major Arcana. (The Baphomet set had a hardback book and the pentagram design printed on the back of each card.)

The design on the back of the cards, printed in black on metallic silver.

If you’re familiar with Tarot symbolism you don’t have to use these cards to find the correspondences intriguing. The trump ordering is an odd mix of the Crowley scheme with the more traditional designations. Two of the trumps have also been given new names: The Hanged Man is now The Hanged Woman while Crowley’s Art (formerly Temperance) has become Alchemy, an association which works since the card in the Crowley deck depicts the Androgyne of alchemical symbolism. I can imagine some Tarot collectors finding these cards far too dark and nasty, but when so many Tarot designs today are various degrees of garish or twee there’s plenty of room for a Giger or two to harsh the New Age mellow.

The card set has been out of print for years but Abebooks still carries copies at reasonable prices. A few examples of the cards follow.

Continue reading “Giger’s Tarot”

HR Giger album covers

Walpurgis (1969) by The Shiver.

An inevitable follow-up to yesterday’s post, this continues an occasional look at album cover art by people better known for their work elsewhere. Giger’s album covers fall into two categories: those with some direct involvement from the artist and those which are merely reuses of pre-existing paintings. The former category is the one that’s of concern here.

The Shiver were a ~~German~~ Swiss group who Discogs label as “Krautrock”, a term with an unfortunate tendency these days to get attached to any German music that isn’t James Last. From what I’ve heard the group are a lot more ordinary than that, doing the kind of late psychedelic/early progressive rock common to many European bands in 1969.

Update: Further research reveals that The Shiver were Swiss, not German as they’re listed at Discogs. They evolved later into Island (see below) which explains why both groups released albums bearing Giger cover art.

Brain Salad Surgery (1973) by Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

And speaking of prog… I’ve always loved the cover for this album which in its vinyl edition opens out to reveal the spectral woman beneath. The female face is named Isis on a poster I still have somewhere. Despite liking the cover I never really liked ELP so this is one album of the period I’ve yet to hear.

Brain Salad Surgery interior.

Pictures (1977) by Island.

And yet more prog… Island were a Swiss group. The cover painting is Necronom IIIa (1976) with some Giger lettering added.

Attahk (1978) by Magma.

Magma are (of course) Christian Vander’s ongoing jazz/prog/opera/Zeuhl/sf/freakout music project. Giger declares a taste for jazz and jazz rock in one of his books so I imagine this commission would have appealed more than others, Magma’s approach to jazz having an apocalyptic tendency. Track titles like Liriïk Necronomicus Kanht (In Which Our Heroes Ourgon & Gorgo Meet) wouldn’t have done much harm either. The safety-pin sunglasses were inspired by the safety-pin fashions of punk.

KooKoo (1981) by Debbie Harry.

And speaking of punk… Giger considered Debbie Harry to be “the Queen of the Punks” so he decided to pierce her face accordingly. The album isn’t punk, however, it’s a collection of smart and funky pop songs produced by Nile Rodgers & Bernard Edwards. Two singles from the album have Giger-directed videos, Backfired (which HRG also appears in), and Now I Know You Know which has Ms Harry posing against the Passagen paintings in a black wig and a biomechanical body stocking. There’s more about the KooKoo album at the Giger site.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Giger’s Necronomicon
• Dan O’Bannon, 1946–2009
• Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
• The monstrous tome

Giger’s Necronomicon

Another artist documentary only this time the artist concerned is a full participant and co-creator. Giger’s Necronomicon was filmed from 1972 to 1976 and functions as a taster for the first book collection of the artist’s work, also called Giger’s Necronomicon, which was published a year later. JJ Wittmer was the co-director. The paintings are very familiar now so it’s worth being reminded how shocking and outré Giger’s work seemed in the 1970s. In addition to interviews with the artist’s parents and some of the painting’s owners there are shots of a very modish gallery event, and we get to see inside Giger’s studio and witness one of the paintings being produced. The sound quality is somewhat erratic since the video appears to come from a Japanese tape but the voiceover is in English. The most notable thing about Giger’s Necronomicon is that all the mobile camera shots are from the artist’s point of view, we only see him when he looks in a mirror.

• Giger’s Necronomicon: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

There’s some additional interest here for Krautrock aficionados. Giger’s books mention his associations with a couple of peripheral figures from the Swiss end of Cosmic Courier/Cosmic Jokers scene: Sergius Golowin and Walter Wegmüller. Golowin is credited with one of the spacier albums on the Cosmic Courier label but he was better known in Switzerland as a writer, and he appears briefly in Giger’s Necronomicon offering some thoughts about the artist’s paintings. The music for the film sounds like the ambient jazz doodlings of Stomu Yamash’ta but is the work of Joël Vandroogenbroeck and Carole Muriel. Vandroogenbroeck recorded a lot of library music, including one release entitled Biomechanoid (1980) which has a Giger cover painting. Prior to this he was a member of German group Brainticket and plays on Cottonwoodhill (1970), an album with a (deserved) reputation as the most demented Krautrock release.

Also at YouTube is another Giger film from the same period, Giger’s Second Celebration of the Four (1977), a four-minute piece directed by JJ Wittmer showing a ritualistic club event. The combination of robes, torches and some of Giger’s more Satanic imagery resembles a black metal music video, albeit with a jazzy soundtrack.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dan O’Bannon, 1946–2009
• Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
• The monstrous tome

The art of George Stavrinos, 1948–1990

I’m still playing catch-up with the generation of gay artists who came to prominence in the 1970s or early 1980s. Many of them worked for American magazines which were seldom seen over here: both Mel Odom and George Stavrinos provided illustrations for Blueboy while Stavrinos was popular enough to be given the cover treatment from Christopher Street in 1978. Stavrinos is rightly remembered for his stunning Art Deco-styled fashion illustrations but there was enough work in the gay press for him to be regarded as an important artist in that sphere. There’s more at The Advocate and Decoy.

Bather (1977).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive