{occult} – Page 87 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 88

Typographic Composition (1924) by Teresa Zarnowerówna from a post about Polish graphic design at 50 Watts.

• “Direct action is a matter of acting as if you were already free… […] …the link between military and money systems remains the dirty secret of capitalism.” A lengthy and essential interview with “anarchist anthropologist” David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5000 Years.

• “…it was after being told by an art director that he preferred her images of women to men that Toyin [Ibidapo] began to shoot boys in an attempt to prove him wrong. Something that Cult of Boys does perfectly.”

The pornographic imagination is deeply intertwined with the pain and horror of life. Some of that comes from our basic biological reality, which is unpleasant enough, and much of it comes from our social structures. Biological life has been completely degraded and continues to become more and more degraded in novel and more horrific ways, so it is inevitable that our horrible social structures – our schools, prisons, families, slaughterhouses and farms – become sites for the pornographic imagination.

Stephen Beachy discusses his novel, boneyard.

• “To my right is a wall bracket that, on closer inspection, turns out to be a human face made of porcelain fruits. The anteater rests on top of the television.” Jonathan Jones meets Jan Svankmajer.

• Anselm Kiefer‘s new exhibtion at White Cube, London, takes its name and some inspiration from Fulcanelli’s alchemical exegesis, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (1926).

• Today (Sunday, 11th December) on Resonance FM at 8.00pm GMT, Alex Fitch talks to Alan Moore about HP Lovecraft and related matters.

• Nick Hydra is putting all 112 issues of occult encyclopaedia Man, Myth & Magic online.

• Ira Cohen ‘s 1968 film The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda is available again on DVD.

• Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s paintings of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

• “Margate’s a bloody toilet!” Can you handle The Reprisalizer?

• Bibliothèque Gay on Cocteau’s Le livre blanc (in French).

• Josie & the Pussycats in A Clockwork Orange.

• Lovely Book Covers

• Words With The Shaman (1985) by David Sylvian w/ Jon Hassell, Steve Jansen & Holger Czukay – I: Ancient Evening | II: Incantation | III: Awakening (Songs From The Treetops).

Thought-Forms and Auras

Like yesterday’s squid, some of these Theosophist illustrations from Thought-Forms (1905) by Charles Webster Leadbeater & Annie Besant, and Man Visible and Invisible: Examples of different types of men as seen by means of trained clairvoyance (1902) by Leadbeater alone, have been reproduced for years in books yet you seldom see the complete set. The University of Heidelberg has scans of both volumes so I’ll direct the curious there for detailed explanations of the illustrations which were intended to graphically portray mental states, and the auras which Theosophists believed surrounded the human body. The diagrams above are harmonographs created by pendulum motion, and evidently seemed sufficiently strange for Leadbeater and Besant to interpret them as representations of emotional experience. They’ve always made me think of the similar pendulum drawings used by Saul Bass in his Vertigo title sequence, although I’ve never seen any indication that Bass had these particular diagrams in mind. In the pictures below there’s also a suitably spiky depiction of an angry person’s aura, and representations of music emerging from a cathedral in the form of polychrome mushroom clouds.

Continue reading “Thought-Forms and Auras”

Europe and the Spirit World

The Temptation of St Anthony (c. 1470) by Martin Schongauer.

From one lot of devils to another, and also another art exhibition with an occult theme. Are curators running out of ideas or becoming more adventurous? The answer probably lies somewhere in between. Europe and the Spirit World, or the Fascination with the Occult, 1750-1950 is currently showing at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Strasbourg, France, and the art on display ranges from early pieces like Schongauer’s famous engraving to more recent works by artists such as Victor Brauner, one of whose Chimeras is featured. The website is sparse but there is a 450-page catalogue for those interested. The exhibition runs until February 12th, 2012.

Secret Societies and Spirit Boards

Komposition für einen Rhombus (2007) by Fabian Marti.

Fabian Marti’s print is one of the few works that stood out for me in the press materials for the Secret Societies exhibition which has just opened at the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux:

[Secret Societies] deals with the general theme of secret societies through the prism of contemporary art in the current context of media super-exposure – from WikiLeaks to Credit Rating Agencies (CRA), just to quote two current examples. Artists have always been fascinated by the unknown and the occult. But unlike journalists who are mainly focused on investigating present-day news, artists work around the mechanisms of the secret and are better equipped to question the very limits of the ideology of transparency in our era of super-exposure.

Unfortunately many of the works look like the customary state of affairs, with a bunch of contemporary artists doing their usual schtick and not really questioning (familiar gallery buzzword) anything much at all. On the plus side they have a screening of Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother, and also a contribution from Cerith Wyn Evans whose Acephalé reworks in neon the André Masson design for Georges Bataille’s Surrealist secret society. Gary Lachman has created an audio guide for the exhibition which is curated by Cristina Ricupero and Alexis Vaillant, and which runs until February 26th, 2012.

For a more determinedly occult showing this month, there’s Spirit Board curated by JL Schnabel at the Articulated Gallery, San Francisco. And elsewhere I’d recommend the work of Scott Treleaven and Jesse Bransford.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Scott Treleaven

Weekend links 84

Regeneration (2011) by Toshiyuki Enoki. Via.

• HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the art exhibition that caused such a fuss last year at the Smithsonian Institution, opens at the Brooklyn Museum, NYC, on November 18th. Among the events associated with the show is a screening of James Bidgood’s lusciously erotic Pink Narcissus. David Wojnarowicz’s video piece, A Fire in My Belly, is still a part of the exhibition so the New York Daily News reached for the outrage stick to prod some reaction from people who’d never heard of the artist or his work before. Will history repeat itself? Does the Pope shit in the woods? Watch this space…

Magic is not simply a matter of the occult arts, but a whole way of thinking, of dreaming the impossible. As such it has tremendous force in opening the mind to new realms of achievement: imagination precedes the fact. It used to be associated with wisdom, understanding the powers of nature, and with technical ingenuity that could let men do things they had never dreamed of before. The supreme fiction of this magical thinking is The Arabian Nights, with its flying carpets, hidden treasure and sudden revelations…

Marina Warner, whose new book, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, is reviewed here and here.

• Those Americans who adore big business but loathe the idea of gay marriage will be dizzy with cognitive dissonance at the news that 70 major US companies—including CBS, Google, Microsoft and Starbucks—have signed a statement saying the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is bad for business. Mark Morford at SFGate says this now means that real homophobes don’t Google.

• Divining with shadows and dreams, tears and blood: S. Elizabeth talks to JL Schnabel of BloodMilk about her “supernatural jewels for surrealist darlings“.

• Earth: Inferno (2003), a short film by Mor Navón & Julián Moguillansky based on the book by Austin Osman Spare. Via form is void.

Illustration by Virgil Finlay for A. Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss. From a 1942 Finlay portfolio at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• The Mute Synth as created by Dirty Electronics & designed by Adrian Shaughnessy.

• Phil Baker reviews two new Aleister Crowley biographies at the TLS.

• A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

• The Most Amazing Room In Queens, NYC.

• Brian Eno on composers as gardeners.

• Alan Turing is Alan Garner’s hero.

• Paintings by Guy Denning.

• Static (1998) by Redshift | The Owl Service (2000) by Pram | Lover’s Ghost (2010) by The Owl Service.