Strange Attractor – Page 12

Anger in London

It’s that man again… Following on the heels of the occult-themed Strange Attractor Salon (which is running events throughout this month, it should be noted; tickets here), the Sprüth Magers gallery, London, has a Kenneth Anger exhibition opening on February 19th based around Anger’s delirious short film Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) and his scurrilous anthology of movie tragedy and gossip, Hollywood Babylon. Anger himself presents a showing of his films on the same day at Tate Modern.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Strange Attractor Salon
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Vision Quest

Artwork: Accepting Fear Rather Than Trying to Understand It by Jason Leinwand.

Pam at Phantasmaphile follows last year’s Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists show by curating a new exhibition, Vision Quest, at Observatory, Brooklyn, NYC later this month:

…each piece in VISION QUEST explores the archetype of the shamanic voyage, using the tools of paint, pencil, or paper in lieu of fire, flower, feather. Taken together this work represents a full spectrum of what it means to go underground and out of body; to go there and come back again, perhaps just a little bit wiser or, at the very least, more wide awake.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Jesse Bransford • William Crump • Scott Gursky • Juliet Jacobsen • Ashley Lande • Adela Leibowitz • Jason Leinwand • Christopher Mir • Joe Newton • Herbert Pfostl • Christopher Reiger • Christine Shields • Erika Somogyi • Jessie Rose Vala

More details at Phantasmaphile. Meanwhile, a reminder that the similarly-themed Strange Attractor Salon opens this week at Viktor Wynd Fine Art, London. It’s looking like I’ll be too busy to attend the opening as the world crawls back to work after the holiday season but many of the other featured artists should be there on Thursday night if you happen to be in the East End.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Strange Attractor Salon
• Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists

Autobahn animated

The Düsseldorf maestros are treated to some animated illustration in this 1979 film by Roger Mainwood which takes Kraftwerk’s Autobahn as its soundtrack. Mark at Strange Attractor provided the tip and he compares the animation style to René Laloux and Roland Topor’s Fantastic Planet (1973). The purple humanoid floating through surreal landscapes is certainly reminiscent of Laloux’s film, but Autobahn also reminds me of Bruno Bozzetto’s Allegro non troppo (1977) and, given that Mainwood’s animation comes a couple of years later, it may well have been inspired by it. Bozzetto’s film is a feature-length “adult” response to Walt Disney’s Fantasia which takes the Fantasia format—well-known classical themes illustrated by animated sequences—but does so in a slightly more grotesque or risqué fashion. Much of Bozzetto’s film seems less daring today than it was in 1977 but the best sequence still works well and happens to be as science fictional as Mainwood’s Autobahn, an entire cycle of planetary evolution set to Ravel’s Bolero. Follow the links below.

• Roger Mainwood’s Autobahn pt. 1 | pt. 2
• Ravel’s Bolero from Allegro non troppo

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sleeve craft
• Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?
• Old music and old technology
• Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk
• The genius of Kraftwerk

Strange Attractor Salon

Some of my work makes a rare appearance in the gallery world next month as part of the Strange Attractor Salon at Viktor Wynd Fine Art, London. The Major Arcana (2006) will be one of the designs on display as a large print with its occult theme complementing the esoteric tenor of the exhibition. Not sure how busy I’ll be in the New Year but I may be down there for the opening on the January 7th.

The first Strange Attractor Salon will be held at Viktor Wynd Fine Art (incorporating The Little Shoppe of Horrors), 11 Mare Street, London, UK, E8 4RP, between 7 and 31 January 2010. The exhibition will gather together, for the first time, a selection of art and illustration from Strange Attractor’s contributors, friends, allies and inspirations.

Like our books and events the Salon will incorporate a wide range of media (painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, sound and video) from both trained and untrained artists. The assembled exhibitors all share Strange Attractor’s fascinations with inner space, craft, science (natural and unnatural) and the fantastic.

Confirmed contributing artists are:
Joel Biroco * Richard Brown * Ossian Brown * John Coulthart * Rod Dickinson * Disinformation * Tessa Farmer *Blue Firth * Alison Gill * Doug Harvey * Josephine Harvatt * Stewart Home * Julian House * Ali Hutchinson * Alyssa Joye * Maud Larsson John Lundberg * Eleanor Morgan * Drew Mulholland * Katie Owens * Edwin Pouncey * Arik Roper * Gavin Semple * Martin Sexton * Catharyne Ward * Eric Wright *

Previously on { feuilleton }
• SAJ again
• Strange Attractor Journal Three
• The Major Arcana

Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos

Unveiling another new piece of work, this is a T-shirt design for metal band Cyaegha whose Steps of Descent album I illustrated and designed last year. They asked for something based on HP Lovecraft’s god Nyarlathotep so I thought I’d take the opportunity to rework from scratch the version of this I created in 1999 for the first edition of The Haunter of the Dark. I always felt the earlier piece was going in the right direction but lacked somewhat in execution; this makes up for that. Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep is one of his most curious creations, in part because the conception of the character changed over many years. In various stories, letters and dream fragments the god/entity is variously described as an Egyptian pharaoh, an itinerant showman with electrical apparatus, the “black man” of European witch cults and the more typically Lovecraftian squamous alien monstrosity. The challenge, then, is to try and represent a little of each of these elements without overly favouring one or the other.

This is one of two illustrations I’ve produced in recent months which use Photoshop to imitate the engraving collage style of Wilfried Sätty, an artist whose work I discussed in an essay for Strange Attractor #2 in 2005. Sätty’s style was derived from Max Ernst’s famous collage “novels” of the 1930s and Photoshop is the ideal tool for this, far better than the old method of scissors, paper and glue. Sätty expanded Ernst’s technique by using reverse printing and the duplication of images; Photoshop extends the technique even further, making it possible to scale images up or down instead of being limited to the size of the original reproduction. The other illustration I’ve done in this style is for a short story and I’ll reveal that closer to publication. In the meantime I should be making a slightly different version of the new Nyarlathotep suitable for the usual range of CafePress products. More about those when they’re done.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Haunted Palace
• The art of Stephen Aldrich