{ feuilleton }

AVAF at Mao Mag

New York-based Mao Mag seems to have a predilection for a particular brand of psychedelic imagery if recent issues are anything to go by. Peter Max was on the cover of #8 earlier this year and appeared inside together with a feature on the equally eye-popping work of Kenny Scharf.

For #9 it’s the turn of AVAF aka Assume Vivid Astro Focus, a Brazilian artist also based in NYC whose paintings and installations combine a psychedelic vibrancy with frequent gay themes. The work in the magazine looks considerably more interesting than the show I saw at Tate Liverpool in 2005 which seemed to suffer from bad lighting and being separated from the Summer of Love exhibition it was intended to complement.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Heinz Edelmann
• Verner Panton’s Visiona II

Maximum Silence by Giancarlo Neri

Not an album cover design by Storm Thorgerson but an artwork of 10,000 lights by Giancarlo Neri which filled the grounds of the Circus Maximus in Rome earlier this week. Neri’s earlier work, The Writer, a huge table and chair, was also shown in Rome as well as appearing on Hampstead Heath in London. What the photo above doesn’t show is the lights gradually changing colour but you can see that via YouTube.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Yayoi Kusama
• Atomix by Nike Savvas

The recurrent pose 7

The Flandrin pose returns in a photograph for the Adonis series by Brent Dundore. Flandrin was striving for a Classical simplicity in his original painting and the quasi-Classical seat in this picture seems to be doing the same. This might easily become a line drawing like those produced by John Flaxman, a contemporary of Flandrin’s whose work was inspired by Classical sources.

“Athena in the form of Penelope’s sister tells the queen of the return of her son Telemachus” from illustrations for The Odyssey by John Flaxman (1810).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger

The title comes from a newspaper headline, one of many that the tabloid press bestowed on occultist Aleister Crowley whilst titillating their readers with lurid descriptions of orgies and Black Masses throughout the 1920s. Before the Second World War it was still possible to label a self-aggrandising magus “The Wickedest Man in the World”. If only they knew what was coming…

The picture above is a still from Kenneth Anger’s 2002 film of Crowley’s paintings which you can see in two parts at YouTube. The paintings were filmed in exhibition at the October Gallery in 1998 and Anger turns the original tabloid headline around by making the “hang” refer to hanging a painting. Crowley’s crude artwork often turns up in books but there are several pictures in the film I hadn’t come across before. Crowley’s depiction of the Himalayas, where he spent some time mountaineering, look very similar to those of Nicholas Roerich, the painter whose work HP Lovecraft references in At the Mountains of Madness. It would have been nice to have some more information about the pictures but that’s not Anger’s style.

• The Man We Want to Hang pt 1 | pt 2

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare

Coulthart Calendar 2008

Mid-September is when new calendars are unveiled so here’s my addition to the calendrical onslaught. This year’s edition is an improved version (with tinted page art and a unique cover design) of the Lovecraft-themed calendar I produced last year, and of the three 2007 designs was easily the most popular. The pictures are those from The Great Old Ones sequence in The Haunter of the Dark. You can see larger versions of the page art here and the CafePress shop is here.