{ feuilleton }

The art of Michael Hutter

Stadtlandschaft I (City I) (1999).

Michael Hutter‘s work is pitched at that enjoyably nebulous zone which lies on the borderlands of fantasy, science fiction and Surrealism, from which hybrid visions emerge that are never too defined in one direction or another. It’s a zone that French and Belgian artists often visit but whose inhabitants from other nations often seem all too few. Hutter’s art encompasses oil paintings and also ink drawings which include some erotic scenes like the example below. His site is well worth a browse, especially the vast and detailed Triptych which recalls similar works by Wayne Barlowe and Hieronymus Bosch. For more inhabitants of the nebulous zone, see the archive link below.

Pterdactyl II.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Bob Peak revisited

left: Mame (1974); right: Excalibur (1981).

Matthew Peak, son of film poster artist Bob Peak, left on a comment this week on an earlier post I made about his father’s art with news of the relaunch of the Peak site. I’m looking forward to seeing what gets posted there especially since the additions to date are such good quality. Peak was a tremendously powerful and dramatic artist whose posters are often a lot more engaging than the films they were intended to promote. He was also exceptionally versatile, as the two examples above demonstrate (via IMP Awards), being equally adept at hard-edged graphics as he was with nebulous airbrush paintings. As with the similarly versatile Richard Amsel, the more time passes, the more these posters seem evidence of an artistry and individuality which has vanished from the world of film design.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Aquirax Uno
• Alice in Acidland
• Salomé posters
• Polish posters: Freedom on the Fence
• Kaleidoscope: the switched-on thriller
• The Robing of The Birds
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Dallamano’s Dorian Gray
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

Three Heads Six Arms by Zhang Huan

A new sculpture by Chinese artist Zhang Huan which was officially dedicated in San Francisco’s City Hall Plaza last week. The photo is by Flickr user David Dasinger and similar views can be found in this Flickr pool. Huan’s copper figures may be intended to evoke Buddhist serenity but I can never see that plaza without remembering the horrible ending of Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Three Heads Six Arms is part of a series of monumental works depicting the fragmented extremities of Buddhist statues. The series was inspired by Zhang’s discovery of religious sculptures that had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution for sale in a Tibetan market. (More.)

Via Erik Davis.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Arnaldo Pomodoro
• Sculptural collage: Eduardo Paolozzi
• Dead monuments
• The art of Igor Mitoraj

Steven Berkoff’s Salomé

A new production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé is touring the UK this month, a presentation of the Headlong company which will appear in a number of venues throughout the country but not in Manchester, unfortunately. My disappointment at this news prompted me by way of compensation to finally order a DVD of the Steven Berkoff production, a live performance filmed in Tokyo in 1992. I wish I’d done so sooner.

Herod (Steven Berkoff).

Berkoff’s production was first staged at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 1988. The play’s success led to a run at the National Theatre in London (with a Beardsley-derived poster) followed by performances worldwide. I don’t know how significant the original choice of venue was but the Gate Theatre was founded by Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards in 1928. MacLiammóir was a great Wilde enthusiast whose one-man portrait of the writer, The Importance of Being Oscar, achieved considerable success in the 1960s. He would have relished Berkoff’s production.

Salomé (Myriam Cyr).

Continue reading “Steven Berkoff’s Salomé”

Weekend links 14

A drawing by Eric Fraser from the Radio Times, 1947. From this Flickr set.

• I helped put together the design for the Pursuit Grooves album recently. FACT magazine interviewed Vanese Smith about her work.

• One of the books whose interiors I designed last year for Tachyon was The Secret History of Science Fiction, a story collection edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. (And a book which I’ve yet to add to my web pages, I’m still behind with updates.) The LA Times has a piece about the anthology here, focusing on the Don DeLillo contribution, Human Moments in World War III.

• It’s been another week of Facebook hate; being a self-satisfied refusenik I can’t help but find this amusing. Too many good pieces to list but Gizmodo had more reasons why you should still quit Facebook, Jason Calacanis gathered lots of links to other stories on his blog while social media expert Danah Boyd got to the heart of the matter with a very cogent polemic.

• If you want an alternative to Facebook, Diaspora is “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”.

• David Toop has a new book out next month. “Sinister Resonance begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location is ambiguous and whose existence is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny – a phenomenal presence in the head, at its point of source and all around. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there.”

• Coilhouse looks at the late Decadent artist and designer Hans Henning Voigt (1887–1969), better known as Alastair.

come, been and gone.

• “After a sold out season at the Barbican in 2009 Michael Clark Company returns with the next instalment of his critically acclaimed production made primarily to the music of David Bowie. come, been and gone also embraces the work of Bowie’s key collaborators: Lou Reed , Iggy Pop , Brian Eno and touches on some of his influences; The Velvet Underground , Kraftwerk and Nina Simone……This production contains loud music and graphic images.” I should hope so.

• “Why should boys always be boys, and girls always be girls?” Brutal/Beautiful, photography by Austin Green.

• John Foxx, Iain Sinclair and others appear at Short Circuit 2010 next month.

• Black, Brown, and Beige: Duke Ellington’s music and race in America.

• Jane Siberry has made all her albums available as free downloads.

• Ruth Bayer photographs people after they’ve inhaled poppers.

• Swiss artist catalogues mutant insects around nuclear plants.

• Pompeii’s X-rated art will titillate a new generation.

• The Happy, Haunted Island of Poveglia, Venice.

• The Art of American Book Covers, a blog.

• Kanellos, the Greek protest dog.

• Song of the week: Twiggy Twiggy (1994) by Pizzicato Five.