{animation} – Page 51 – { feuilleton }

After Beardsley by Chris James

I have Greg Jarvis of Flowers of Hell to thank for prompting this discovery. Greg left a comment on an earlier post about Aubrey Beardsley’s influence in the musical world in which he drew my attention to some Flowers of Hell cover art and a video inspired by Beardsley’s Morte Darthur drawings. The video reminded me of a short animated film I’d known about for years but never seen, After Beardsley by Chris James. Sure enough it too is on YouTube, to my great surprise since I swear I’ve searched in vain for this in the past.

After Beardsley was made in 1981 and my knowledge of the film is a result of its being praised by V&A curator Stephen Calloway. The picture of Aubrey in a hospital bed featured in the 1993 V&A exhibition High Art and Low Life: The Studio and the fin de siècle, and is also the final picture in Calloway’s 1998 biography of the artist. Chris James describes the film thus:

The film After Beardsley attempts to depict today’s world through Beardsley’s eyes and in his drawing style…Beardsley is ‘resurrected’ from his death bed and begins to walk through time to the present. On his journey he witnesses the evolution of the car and of air and sea travel, then climbs a phallic mountain before descending into 20th century New York City. [The] ghost of Aubrey Beardsley explores the urban jungle of New York City where, amongst other things, he sees Bob Dylan as a satyr sitting by an iconic 1959 Chevy, and Lenny Bruce being injected with heroin. He is then beckoned by Patti Smith (as Beardsley’s Messalina) into a hospital room where he finds himself hooked up to life support equipment. His hospital persona shows his ghost the horrors of the present day—overpopulation, pestilence starvation, and death. Via John Lennon, he sees the horrors of a nuclear winter. The premise of the film is that, if Beardsley had been alive today instead of the 1890s, modern medicine would have kept him alive, but that, having had a glimpse of where the world was heading, he may have chosen to die anyway. Written and drawn by Chris James, after Aubrey Beardsley. Music by Ronnie Fowler.

As Beardsley pastiche the drawing is some of the best I’ve seen, it’s easy to see why Calloway would be impressed. The film is split into three parts here, here and here, and Chris James has more animation on his YT channel. I’d be tempted to ask for a better quality copy but for now seeing the film at all is good enough.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Aubrey Beardsley archive

Weekend links 40

Manchester, August, 1819: yeomanry on horseback charge a crowd of demonstrators; London, November, 2010: Mounted police charge demonstrators; London, December, 2010: “…police horses have charged the crowd once and appear to be about to do so again.”

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable NUMBER!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fall’n on you:
YE ARE MANY–THEY ARE FEW.

Percy Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy (1819).

• Amid the rest of the week’s tumult, discussion and activity around the censoring of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly film at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, continues to rumble on. I’d missed this appraisal of the exhibition at The Smart Set. Hide/Seek: Too shocking for America features an interview with Jonathan Katz, co-creator of the exhibition in the eye of the storm:

“When,” Katz asks, “will the decent majority of Americans stand against a fringe that sees censorship as a replacement for debate?” Hide/Seek sought to conquer what Katz calls “the last acceptable prejudice in American political life” – but the conservative right, rampant after last month’s midterm elections, won’t relinquish their prejudices without a fight. And so, “an exhibition explicitly intended to break a 21-year blacklist against the representation of same-sex desire,” says a dispirited Katz, “now finds itself in the same boat.”

Related: Q&A with Hide/Seek curators Jonathan Katz and David C. Ward. The Smithsonian Institution issued a fatuous statement saying they stand by the exhibition despite having forced the removal of one of its works. One of the NPG commissioners resigned in protest at the gallery’s capitulation to political pressure. Other protestors were banned from the Smithsonian after playing a video of the work on an iPad. There’s video of the iPad protest here and the protestors have their own blog. In my earlier post on the subject I noted that the actions of censorious Catholics have given Wojnarowicz’s work far more public exposure than it would otherwise receive. The LATimes has details of some of the galleries throughout the US showing the video as a result of its removal in Washington.

• Related to the above, Bruce Sargeant and His Circle: Figure and Form, a book by artist Mark Beard about the work of his “Bruce Sargeant” alter ego. Homotography has a preview.

• “We focus most strongly at the margins, on the music that others may be blind to. We don’t care whether it is electronic, metal, jazz, folk, classical, noise, world music or whatever. We are as excited by the experimental, as we are exhausted by the ephemeral. We listen. We mosh. We think. We dance. We write words. We capture images. We hope to do justice to the art which inspires us. We are The Liminal”.

Rotary Signal Emitter, a vinyl zoetrope by audiovisual duo Sculpture.

• Rest Easy Sleazy, a small mix dedicated to Peter Christopherson. Related: A Peter Christopherson tribute mix. Another mix: Mixhead was a 1997 promo CD by Portishead.

• Related to the above: What if we could touch our music again? (Hello? Some of us still play—and create—CDs and vinyl…) Is the mix tape as object-of-seduction a dead concept in a virtual world? “We traded connection for convenience,” says I Miss My Pencil. Their proposed solution, C60 Redux, is an RFID reader plus speakers, packaged in a smart 12-inch case.

• Iannis Xenakis: How an architect took music back to mathematical roots. Related: the Xenakis exhibition at MOCA, Los Angeles.

• The Body Electric at Ikon, Birmingham, is the first retrospective exhibition in the UK of work by New Zealand artist Len Lye.

• Hayley Campbell has a blog. This week you can read about her contribution to Jamie McCartney‘s Great Wall of Vagina.

• More David Lynch: he really does love cherry pie but isn’t 100% sure how magnets work. I sympathise on both counts.

• 2019: A Future Imagined. Visual Futurist Syd Mead reflects on the nature of creativity and how it drives the future.

• Quashed Quotatoes by Michael Wood, reviewing a new edition of Finnegans Wake.

• New Weird Australia.

• Portishead’s 2008 performance for the Canal+ show Concert Privé is one of their best filmed concerts. YouTube has the whole thing.

Len Lye

Rainbow Dance (1936).

Fortunate Londoners can see a BFI screening of early film shorts by Len Lye (1901–1980) this Friday at the NFT. (Details here.) Lye is one of the pioneers of abstract cinema and his work still astounds for its inventiveness and playful interaction between synchronised image and music. Many of his works were created by painting directly onto the film strip, a technique later pursued by animators like Norman McLaren. Free Radicals has long been a favourite, created with nothing more than a drum track and scratches on black-and-white film; five minutes of hypnotic genius. The BFI programme list below features links to YouTube versions. Some are poor quality but worth watching all the same:

This slot is dedicated to Len Lye, a towering figure in experimental film. The films are: Tusalava (1929, 9min, silent); Peanut Vendor (1933, 2min); Kaleidoscope (1935, 4min); A Colour Box (1935, 3min); The Birth of a Robot (1936, 6min); Rainbow Dance (1936, 4min); Colour Flight (1937, 4min); Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1940, 4min); Rhythm (1957, 1min); Free Radicals (1958, 5min); Particles in Space (1966, 4min); Cameramen at War (1944, 14min); Everyday (dir Hans Richter, 1929, 17min). Approx 77min total.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Gilliam’s shaver and Bovril by electrocution

Pears Soap ad, Illustrated London News, March 16, 1895.

I’ve been working feverishly this week to complete page designs for The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities which will be published next year by HarperCollins. This is a sequel of sorts to 2003’s Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases to which I was also a contributor and designer. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer are editing the new collection, and Jeff has posted a couple of teaser introductions to the contents here and here. Gabriel in yesterday’s comments mentioned Terry Gilliam’s animations for the Monty Python TV series, something I was reminded of today while leafing through a 1968 collection of old advertising graphics looking for suitable pictures. Victorian Advertisements was compiled by Leonard de Vries and Ilonka van Amstel, and its Pears Soap ad (above) is obviously the source of Gilliam’s animation (below) showing a man lathering his face then beheading himself with a straight razor, a gag which features in both the TV series and the first Monty Python feature film And Now For Something Completely Different.

And Now For Something Completely Different (1971).

It’s easy to see what would have attracted Gilliam to the De Vries book when it’s filled with bizarre or grotesque ads like the Bovril one below; someone evidently decided that the meaty drink ought to be promoted via the novelty of electricity.

Bovril ad from The Graphic, Christmas number, 1891.

De Vries features many ads for electrical products, not all of them genuine or even likely:

Pseudo-science began to play the part it still plays in therapeutic advertising. Electric light was, by the end of the century, being installed in theatres and restaurants and in some private houses. To what other uses could the magnetic fluid be put? Electricity was the new magic and all kinds of quarters began to exploit its possibilities—and impossibilities. The Medical Battery Company Limited, of Oxford Street, assured the public that its Electropathic Belt had “restored thousands of sufferers to health and vigour”, and had “proved an inestimable blessing to the weak and languid”. It was particularly recommended for “weak men suffering from the effect of youthful errors”. Did the weak men in question wear the contraption in bed? Women also could benefit by it, and one is a little surprised to find this and other remedies for “female irregularities” so frankly discussed. An Electric Corset was the “Very Thing” for ladies. One can only wonder how the batteries if there were any operated. And what could possibly be meant by an “electric” towel, and how could failing sight be cured by an “eye battery”?

There’s also an Electric Hair Brush which gives “hope for the bald” without explaining how it differs from an ordinary brush. Several of the pieces in the new Lambshead volume will be exploring similarly eccentric territory. Watch this space for further details.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Portuguese Diseases
• Pasticheur’s Addiction
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk

Weekend links 35

Marian Bantjes designs the cover of the latest Creative Review and there’s a feature about her work inside.

• “…the question: ‘was Shakespeare gay?’ strikes me as so daft as to be barely worth answering. Of course he was. Arguably he was bisexual, of sorts, but his heart was never on his straight side.” Don Paterson throws the cat among the pigeons in an examination of the Shakespeare’s sonnets. Related (sort of): Shakespeare and Company: The bookshop that thinks it’s a hotel. Also related: Jeanette Winterson revisits Shakespeare and Company.

• 100 orbs of light float in the Schuylkill River. Also in Philadelphia: Animators Amok in a Curiosity Cabinet: the Brothers Quay are making a film in the Mütter Museum. Can’t wait to see it.

• More Alan Moore: Fossil Angels, a lengthy essay about magic and the occult, was written in 2002 but hasn’t been given a public airing until now.

• Alberto Manguel is always worth reading:

As Borges was well aware even then, the history of literature is the history of this paradox. On the one hand, the deeply rooted intuition writers have that the world exists, in Mallarmé’s much-abused phrase, to result in a beautiful book (or, as Borges would have it, even a mediocre book), and, on the other hand, to know that the muse governing the enterprise is, as Mallarmé called her, the Muse of Impotence (or, to use a freer translation, the Muse of Impossibility). Mallarmé added later that all who have ever written anything, even those we call geniuses, have attempted this ultimate Book, the Book with a capital B. And all have failed.

• Here Comes Everybody: Wake In Progress is a self-described “foolhardy attempt to illustrate Finnegans Wake”. Easier to illustrate than make a film of the book, I’d have thought, and Mary Ellen Bute already attempted the latter.

Psychic Explosion: Adolf Hoffmeister’s illustrations for a 1967 edition of Lautréamont’s Poesies at A Journey Round My Skull.

• Craig Colorusso’s Sun Boxes can be seen at Turner Falls, Massachusetts, during November.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins has a book and retrospective exhibition of his art due next year.

• A sneak peek into The Steampunk Bible to which I’m a contributor. And also here.

• “Human or other; depends who comes”: the Ballardian films of Paul Williams.

• Transmission (1979) by Joy Division; Transmission (1995) by Low; Monkey (2010) by Robert Plant.