This month I’ve been enjoying the latest quality publication from Fulgur, Songs for the Witch Woman, the centrepiece of which is a cover-to-cover reproduction of the book of occult poetry and art created by Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron in the early 1950s. It’s been a great pleasure in recent years seeing the welling of interest in Cameron’s work. In 2001 when I was compiling notes for an abandoned study of occult cinema, Cameron as artist, witch or mere human being was a shadowy presence about whom nothing substantial seemed to have been written; her art was impossible to see anywhere, all one had were fleeting references in books, and her appearances in The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, a pair of films that only exaggerated her mystique. The intervening years have seen a lifting of successive veils so we’re now able to watch Curtis Harrington’s film portrait, The Wormwood Star, and see her work in books and exhibitions like this one (also titled Songs for the Witch Woman) which will be showing at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles from mid-October. As an early precursor to that there’s this feature by Robert Garrova at SPRC which includes comments about the exhibition from organisers Scott Hobbs and Yael Lipschutz.
Pan: art by Cameron, poem by Parsons.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Songs for the Witch Woman
• More Cameron
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: The Eldorado Edition
• The Wormwood Star
• Street Fair, 1959
• House of Harrington
• Curtis Harrington, 1926–2007
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995