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Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

Image-heavy post! Please be patient.

Four designs for three bands, all by the same designer, the versatile and brilliant Barney Bubbles. A recent reference over at Ace Jet 170 to the sleeve for In Search of Space by Hawkwind made me realise that Barney Bubbles receives little posthumous attention outside the histories of his former employers. Since he was a major influence on my career I thought it time to give him at least part of the appraisal he deserves. His work has grown in relevance to my own even though I stopped working for Hawkwind myself in 1985, not least because I’ve made a similar transition away from derivative space art towards pure design. Barney Bubbles was equally adept at design as he was at illustration, unlike contemporaries in the album cover field such as Roger Dean (mainly an illustrator although he did create lettering designs) and Hipgnosis (who were more designers and photographers who drafted in illustrators when required).

Colin Fulcher became Barney Bubbles sometime in the late sixties, probably when he was working either part-time or full-time with the underground magazines such as Oz and later Friends/Frendz. He enjoyed pseudonyms and was still using them in the 1980s; Barney Bubbles must have been one that stuck. The Friends documentary website mentions that he may have worked in San Francisco for a while with Stanley Mouse, something I can easily believe since his early artwork has the same direct, high-impact quality as the best of the American psychedelic posters. Barney brought that sensibility to album cover design. His first work for Hawkwind, In Search of Space, is a classic of inventive packaging.

Update: BB didn’t work with Mouse in SF, I’ve now been told.

Hawkwind: In Search of Space (1971).

It’s fair to say that Hawkwind were very lucky to find Barney Bubbles, he immediately gave their music—which was often rambling and semi-improvised at the time—a compelling visual dimension that exaggerated their science fiction image while still presenting different aspects of the band’s persona. In Search of Space is an emblematic design that opens out to reveal a poster layout inside. One of the things that distinguishes Barney Bubbles’ designs from other illustrators of this period is a frequent use of hard graphical elements, something that’s here right at the outset of his work for Hawkwind.

This album also included a Bubbles-designed “Hawklog”, a booklet purporting to be the logbook of the crew of the Hawkwind spacecraft. I scanned my copy some time ago and converted it to a PDF; you can download it here.

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Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux

La Rue du Tramway (1938) by Paul Delvaux.

Taxandria (1994) is a feature-length fantasy film by Belgian animator Raoul Servais that’s received little attention outside his native country, possibly because it failed in the marketplace and has been deemed too weird or uncommercial to export. You only have to compare the export version of Harry Kümel’s Malpertuis with his original cut to see how inventive Belgian films are treated by US distributors.

Servais had previously made an acclaimed animated short, Harpya, using a combination of live actors and painted backgrounds. Taxandria elaborates on this process (called Servaisgraphy by its inventor) using settings designed by one of my favourite comic artists François Schuiten, creator (with Benoît Peeters) of Les Cités Obscures. Taxandria intrigues for a third reason, the inspiration of Surrealist master Paul Delvaux whose paintings served as the origin of the project. And it also contains a remarkable detail in the screenplay credit for Alain Robbe-Grillet, a man better known for making Last Year at Marienbad with Alain Resnais, and the kind of fierce intellectual one imagines would usually run a mile from this kind of extravagant whimsy.

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The Codex Seraphinianus

It had to happen…the entirety of Luigi Serafini’s masterpiece (US edition, 1983) scanned and Flickr-ised for your viewing pleasure.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

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• Tressants: the Calvino Hotel
• Surrealist cartomancy

The art of Cameron, 1922–1995

Fairy Queen (1962), ink and dyes on parchment.

A rare exhibition of work by occult artist Cameron, aka Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel, can be seen at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York.

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Cameron (1922–1995), curated by Michael Duncan, George Herms, and Nicole Klagsbrun. The exhibition runs from January 12 until February 10, 2007. An opening reception will be held on Friday, January 12, from 6–8 pm.

This survey is the first solo gallery exhibition of artist, performer, poet, and occult practitioner, Cameron (Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel). A maverick follower of the esoteric mysticism of Aleister Crowley and his philosophical group, the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis), Cameron was also an accomplished painter and draftsman and mentor to younger artists and poets such as Wallace Berman, George Herms, and David Meltzer. While enlisted in the Navy, she was assigned the tasks of drawing maps and working in a photographic unit, which led to attendance at art classes after being discharged. In Los Angeles, she became the wife and spiritual avatar of scientist and mystical thinker Jack Parsons (1914–1952), one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an influential leader of the OTO.

The mundane Cameron during the Second World War.

In the early 1950s, Cameron met the fellow LA artist and jazz enthusiast Wallace Berman who was fascinated by her artwork, poetry, and mystical aura. In 1955 Berman used his photograph of Cameron as the cover of his literary and artistic journal Semina and included in the issue a drawing she had made the previous year. The drawing became renowned when the police cited it as ?lewd? and shut down Berman’s 1957 exhibition at Ferus Gallery. After this experience, Cameron, like Berman, refused to show her art in commercial galleries. She remained, however, a crucial figure in the Berman circle. Cameron’s romantic aesthetic and commanding persona prompted filmmaker Curtis Harrington to commemorate her output as a visual artist in The Wormwood Star (1955), a lyrical short film recording the art and atmosphere of her candlelit studio. Filmmaker Kenneth Anger cast her in a leading role opposite Anäis Nin in his film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954).

The occult Cameron, manifesting as the Scarlet Women for Kenneth Anger.

Despite the grim fatality of much of her writings, Cameron?s artworks portray a fanciful, even wistful lyricism. In the early 1960s she corresponded with Joseph Campbell, citing her interest in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as well as in the fiction of Hermann Hesse and Isak Dinesen. Consumed by myth and the idea of protean growth, Cameron depicted the process of metamorphosis and transformation in hundreds of line drawings where ominous figures and landscapes emerge from uniformly striated, passionately articulated ink marks. Other gouache drawings and paintings depict mythic figures of her own creation engaged in ritualistic, symbolic acts.

For now, her work is barely visible on the web but there’s another small gallery of her pictures here. And just to show how MySpace is seemingly intent on resurrecting everyone who ever lived, Marjorie Cameron, Babalon 156 is in your extended network.

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
526 West 26th St, no. 213,
New York.

Via Jay.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• Austin Osman Spare

Michael Petry’s flag

Monument to an Unknown Soldier: Portrait of an American Patriot (detail) by Michael Petry.

American artist Michael Petry has made works in the past using freshwater pearls threaded on sheets of black velvet. Viewers can admire the pearls then be disconcerted when given the additional information that the shapes they make are derived from those produced by human seminal emissions. A new work by Petry uses the same effect with a full-size US flag taking the place of the black velvet. The emission pattern in this case was produced by a gay American soldier and serves as a comment on the US military’s ridiculous “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy towards gay servicemen and women. The soldier in this instance must remain unknown or risk expulsion from the army.

It remains to be seen what reaction this will provoke when the work goes on display at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York as part of the America the Beautiful exhibition. The flag in the United States is a sacred object in a way it could never be here and many patriots won’t take kindly to seeing it “besmirched” even if it is by a small arrangement of pearls. In this kind of work context is all. If people were told the pearls were arranged in the shape of the Marshall Islands (where the US conducted its nuclear tests) they’d be less upset than when informed as to the real origin of the design. Yet nothing would physically change; the flag and pearls would remain the same, all that would alter would be a single piece of information and the perception of the viewer.

White Flag (1955) by Jasper Johns.

Petry isn’t the first artist to use the American flag as a subject, of course, Jasper Johns (another gay artist, incidentally) produced a number of flag-derived paintings in the 1950s and 60s. His famous White Flag of 1955 was intended to be abstract rather than political (although it’s debatable how using such a highly-charged symbol could ever be unpolitical) but it’s interesting to consider how this would be viewed if it had been painted today. White flags are only used to signify surrender; in time of war Johns’ exercise in abstraction gains a new resonance.

Sundaram Tagore Gallery
547 West 27th Street,
New York.

Via Towleroad.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Army Day