A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
More David Byrne. Artist Bruce Conner made two films in 1981 using pieces of music from Byrne & Eno’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts album: America Is Waiting and Mea Culpa. The latter is the more abstract of the two, with the drums and fragmented voices matched to dancing particles from science films. Watch it here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The South Bank Show: Talking Heads
• The Catherine Wheel by Twyla Tharp
• Moonlight in Glory
• My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
Like many UK arts documentaries, The South Bank Show seldom repeated its films so you had to watch them when they were broadcast or you might never see them at all. This Talking Heads feature from 1979 is one that I missed, a great portrait of the band shortly after the release of their third album, Fear Of Music. Shots of the group performing songs from the first three albums are intercut with interviews and montages of American TV. You also get to see a very young-looking David Byrne writing (or attempting to write) some lyrics. The most revelatory aspect of the film now is the discussion of the ordinariness of both the band and their lyrics. In 1979 being resolutely mundane had become a radical position.
Not the horror magazine, this is an earlier American title that ran from 1919 to 1923. Shadowland covered the arts in general with a preference for stage and film. The thing that immediately sets it apart from other film magazines of the period is the cover art by AM Hopfmuller; many of the paintings resemble theatre backdrops or backgrounds for animated films. The Internet Archive doesn’t have a complete run, unfortunately—the examples here are from volumes 1, 7 and 8—but more of Hopfmuller’s work may be found on other sites. The magazine interiors are also worth a browse for their colour plates and art photographs. (Thanks to Kristian for the tip!)
Leo Visser (1880–1950) was a Dutch artist who created a number of calendars in addition to other decorative designs featuring plants and animals. This example is one of the earliest, combining both flora and the fauna in a series of attractive Art Nouveau plates. You don’t see monkeys very often in Art Nouveau designs, for some reason they were more popular during the Art Deco period.
More from Japan. I found some of Tatsuji Okawa’s bondage drawings on a website some years ago but there was no information about the artist other than his name. The reproductions were also poor quality, being grainy scans from books. These drawings are from the excellent Japanese Gay Art site, a wonderful resource that also sells the work on display. Most of the drawings deal with bondage and/or humiliation—popular themes in Japanese porn—but there are a few portrait-style pieces like the ones below. No surprise to read that Yukio Mishima enjoyed Okawa’s work.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive