{photography} – Page 69 – { feuilleton }

Abraxas 4

My thanks to Livia Filotico at Fulgur Esoterica for sending these previews from the forthcoming issue of Abraxas, the Journal of Esoteric Studies. Abraxas is a beautifully produced large-format book whose artist interviews—as I’ve mentioned before—are especially valuable. Issue 4 will include:

Prof. Sarah Victoria Turner’s interview with artist Christine Ödlund on theosophy and synaesthesia, a special feature on the Italian artist Agostino Arrivabene, a documentation of Art Angel artist Lindsay Seer’s ancestral performance/installation Nowhere Less Now, Shannon Taggart’s extraordinary photographs of Brooklyn vodou and Valentin Wolfstein insightful analysis of the Mystic Fool. Following this tarot theme, the artist Francesca Ricci provides an account of her working with urban symbols, and their subsequent transformation into a unique tarot, titled Anarca.

Mention of combining urban symbols with the Tarot sounds especially interesting after I’ve recently dealt with that challenge myself. Those who buy the limited edition hardback will receive a signed suite of Francesca Ricci’s Tarot cards. Abraxas 4 is published on September 22nd. Further details and page previews here.

Nowhere Less Now by Lindsay Seer.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Abraxas: The International Journal of Esoteric Studies

Weekend links 176

This week PingMag was looking at Czech film posters. This one by Bedrich Dlouhy is for the belated 1970 release of Kurosawa’s Rashomon.

• In October Alison Goldfrapp curates an exhibition for The Lowry, Salford, featuring her favourite art. Examples will include work by Leonora Carrington, Lotte Reiniger and Henry Darger so I’ll definitely be seeing this one. The new Goldfrapp album, Tales of Us, is released this week. Alison Goldfrapp & Lisa Gunning’s film for Annabel is here.

• Michael Glover profiles artist Tom Phillips who has a new show of his paintings at the Flowers Gallery, London. The indefatigable Phillips also talked to Tracy McVeigh about his design for the new 50 pence coin which celebrates the centenary of Benjamin Britten.

• Get Carter director Mike Hodges remembers re-teaming with Michael Caine for the island-set crime thriller Pulp, and shares a letter that JG Ballard wrote to him in admiration of the film.

Dismantling the surveillance state won’t be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? Whatever happens, we’re going to be breaking new ground.

Bruce Schneier on how to deal with the total surveillance state.

• Babel/Salvage presents The Midnight Channel, the newest montage of poetry by Evan J. Peterson, inspired by cinema of the horrific, fantastic and bizarre.

• Mixes of the week are from composer Amanda Feery at The Outer Church, and Pinkcourtesyphone (Richard Chartier) at Secret Thirteen.

• At Dangerous Minds: Kimberly J. Bright on the psychedelic poster art of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. Related: LSD may not be bad for you, says study.

• Queer Zines: a 400-page study edited by AA Bronson & Philip Aarons.

• Justin Abraham Linds on The Walt Whitman of gay porn.

• Designs for theatre and print by Oskar Schlemmer.

• Beautiful Mars: a Tumblr.

• Catleidoscope!

• Goldfrapp: Lovely Head (2000) | Strict Machine (2003) | Caravan Girl (2008)

Prominences

Work-related searches this week has led me to the gallery pages of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The SDO is an observational satellite in a geostationary orbit that monitors the Sun with a variety of cameras and other imaging equipment. Some of the recent spectacular photos of solar prominences have been captured by the SDO, examples of which may be found in the project’s gallery where you can also see short movies of solar eruptions and other events. (There’s also an SDO YouTube channel. For a start try “Fiery Looping Rain on the Sun“.) I always find the Sun to be a combination of the incredible, the weird and the terrifying: many of those coronal mass ejections dwarf the Earth. Pictures such as these make you reconsider how much we take our local star for granted.

Skivvies

Not had anything for a while deserving of the eye candy tag so here’s some gratuitous shots from a short promo video for some underwear company or other (he said disingenuously). The ad is directed by Steven Klein, and the piece as a whole doesn’t appear to have had a straight viewer in mind given the amount of shots that look like AMG beefcake or extra auditions for Fassbinder’s Querelle. And speaking of Rainer’s matelots, they’ve been in mind recently following news that the director’s Genet fantasia will be making a welcome appearance on Blu-ray later this month. The DVD format didn’t do much for those saturated colours so this is good to hear. (Underwear tip via Homotography.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hello, sailor
• Querelle again
• Sailors
• Mikel Marton
• Exterface

Max and Dorothea

Photo by Arnold Newman (1942).

I love this photo of Max Ernst by Arnold Newman, one of several pictures of the artist together with Dorothea Tanning in Max Ernst: A Retrospective, a catalogue for a 1975 Guggenheim Museum exhibition at the Internet Archive. The catalogue itself isn’t so revelatory (and most of the reproductions are monochrome) but it’s good to see a connection made between Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead and Ernst’s work. It’s an obvious parallel: all those porous landscapes and “fishbone forests” which offer a kind of mutated Symbolism. Browse the book here or download it here.

Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1961).

Photo by Frederick Sommer (1946).

No photographer credited.

Photo by Frederick Sommer (1946).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dorothea Tanning, 1910–2012
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier
• A Picture to Dream Over: The Isle of the Dead
• Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage