{ feuilleton }

Weekend links 671

No. 54 (1915) by Anna Cassel.

• “I called it the treasure hunt: two years of tapes appearing from closets, letters dropping out of attics, persuading a film company to find the rushes of a TV show buried in a warehouse, paying a film director to digitise unused footage and a radio company to surface an old broadcast.” Nick Soulsby on pursuing the ghosts of Coil for his book about the group, Everything Keeps Dissolving.

• “It is likely that af Klint scholarship is on the brink of some radical changes regarding attribution and authorship.” Susan L. Aberth on the researches revealing collaborations between Hilma af Klint and other mystically-inclined women artists. It makes a change reading something about this group that isn’t completely dismissive about the beliefs that informed their work.

• New music: No Highs by Tim Hecker (“a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue…”), and Seascape–polyptych by Jan Jelinek.

I think an unfortunate effect of Foucault’s work, as it was absorbed by academia, was that it made historians reluctant to call people or sexual acts in the past ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’ since these terms ‘did not exist at the time’ or were recent creations. This gave some homophobes a spurious defence when suggestions were made as to the inclinations of their heroes, but it also—or so I thought—tended to downplay the reality of non-opportunistic homosexual desire as a constant in history, reducing it to recorded acts performed and then deeming these inadequate evidence anyhow, because they were assumed to have taken place in a fuzzy sexual universe.

If, as it seems to me, and as it seemed to Symonds and Carpenter, terms like ‘homosexual’ were invented in the effort to describe a type of person that has always existed, then they are in essence just a shorthand. Each term has its history, associations and effects, but—and perhaps this makes me an unsophisticated thinker—I think it’s the sexual feelings that fundamentally matter, and that these have existed across time. For that reason, I don’t find the Victorian sexual psyche, as far as it can be defined, alien or outlandish, or hard to speculate on. It is the product of sexual feeling filtered through observable social beliefs and conditions.

Tom Crewe talking to Amia Srinivasan about The New Life, Crewe’s debut novel which explores Victorian sex and sexuality

• “I’ve been tumbling down the rabbit-hole of toy theatre all my life, and I’m tumbling still.” Clive Hicks-Jenkins on the dark art of the toy theatre.

• At Public Domain Review: Jean Baptiste Vérany’s Chromolithographs of Cephalopods (1851).

• “Glass is perhaps the most frequently overlooked material in history,” says Katy Kelleher.

• At Cartoon Brew: Chris Robinson remembers the surreal animations of Run Wrake.

• At Unquiet Things: Of Dreams and Dark Pasts: Surrealist Painter Sofía Bassi.

• RIP Harry Belafonte.

• House Of Glass (1969) by The Glass Family | Heart Of Glass (1978) by Blondie | Slow Glass (1997) by Paul Schütze

Consulting the Oracle

Good to find such a pristine reproduction of this Rick Griffin poster. Kenneth Anger commissioned the design in 1967 when he was putting together a package of promotional items to stimulate the interest of potential investors in his new film. Bill Landis in the unofficial Anger biography says the ploy was a successful one, investors were forthcoming although it would be several years before Anger had enough footage for the ill-fated first version of Lucifer Rising to appear in public. While we’re on the subject, I’ll note again that the Gustave Doré engraving used here is from the Purgatorio section of The Divine Comedy, not Paradise Lost as some people continue to claim. Milton’s Lucifer had wings of his own, as well as god-like powers, he didn’t need to be ferried around by a giant bird.

This copy of Griffin’s poster is from issue 7 of the Oracle, or the San Francisco Oracle as it was later titled and known outside the city, an underground newspaper, and one of the best where graphics are concerned.

Underground papers and magazines of the late 1960s often followed the form of other amateur or semi-professional publications, with attractive cover art wrapped around more prosaic interiors. The Oracle ran for 12 issues, from 1966 to 1968, and in its later issues gave as much attention to the appearance of its inner pages as its covers, assisted by artists like Griffin and Bruce Conner. Being based in the city that gave the world so many exceptional concert posters was an obvious advantage.

I was hoping the Internet Archive might have a complete run of the Oracle but only four of the highly-decorated issues are currently available. There’s no Wilfried Sätty artwork in evidence either, although I’m not sure he ever worked for the undergrounds despite there being many titles to choose from in the Bay area. Of note in one of the later issues is a full-page announcement for the forthcoming march on the Pentagon, an anti-war protest that took place in October 1967. Kenneth Anger attended the event although the exact nature of his involvement, like so many other Anger stories, varies according to the reporter.

• San Francisco Oracle – Vol 1, No 7
• San Francisco Oracle – Vol 1, No 9
• San Francisco Oracle – Vol 1, No 10
• San Francisco Oracle – Vol 1, No 12

Continue reading “Consulting the Oracle”

Saga de Xam revived

Saga est magnifique. Saga a la peau bleue. Saga est une extraterrestre. Envoyée par la reine de la planète Xam, la voici qui parcourt la Terre à plusieurs époques, traitées dans des styles différents. Son but: découvrir la quintessence artistique, politique et poétique de notre belle Terre. Marquée par l’Art nouveau, le psychédélisme américain, l’érotisme des années 1960 et la contreculture occidentale, Saga est une oeuvre hors norme et inclassable, dessinée sur des formats géants et publiée une première fois par Éric Losfeld en 1967. Hélas, le livre est très vite épuisé et devient un objet pour les collectionneurs. Cette édition reprend l’intégralité des planches de Saga, renumérisées et dotées d’une nouvelle mise en couleurs fidèle à l’originale. Saga peut enfin repartir dans une nouvelle… saga.

Here’s a book I never expected to see in a new edition. Saga de Xam is a 100-page bande dessinée depicting the time- and space-voyaging adventures of a blue-skinned alien woman, Saga, newly arrived on Earth from the planet Xam. The Xamians are a race of humanoid lesbians (their reproduction is parthenogenetic) whose planet is at war with the masculine Troggs; Saga has been sent to Earth to find a way to combat the Trogg invasion, an expedition that instructs her in the propensity of humans towards conflict and violence. The story was drawn by Nicolas Devil, with contributions from guest artists, and based on an outline by Jean Rollin which had been intended originally for a science-fiction film. There’s no need to go into detail about this cult item, I wrote about it at length several years ago after a couple of its pages stimulated my curiosity when they turned up in an exhibition catalogue. The book was published in 1967 by Éric Losfeld, an edition of 5000 which the publisher said he would never reprint, partly because of the expense, but also because he liked to think of the book becoming a rare object in the future. Rare it still is, although the embargo was broken in 1980, a year after Losfeld’s death, by the publication of a second edition. This was only a partial reprint, however, with a poor cover design and all the interior pages reproduced without their colour overlays.

The new edition from Revival is slightly larger than the original (27.5 x 36 cm to the original 24 x 31 cm), and bound between heavy boards. A lengthy preface by Christian Staebler describes the book’s history, offering a few biographical details about Nicolas Deville (as he was known pre-1967), together with further information about the story’s creation. The wildness of the final pages is explained as an attempt by all involved to capture some of the delirium of an LSD trip, while also bringing the story of Saga’s investigation of the human race and its violent nature into the present day. Jean Rollin was apparently unhappy with this dénouement but I find the ending to be a satisfying one for a story where each chapter explores a different period of time (and of space, when Saga returns to her home planet).

The icing on the cake is the appearance near the end of a few early drawings by Philippe Druillet, together with several beautiful pages by Devil, one of which found wider circulation when reprinted as a poster. The text in the new edition is still in French, of course, and even on slightly larger pages the legibility problem from the original remains. Devil was drawing on boards that were twice the size of their printed equivalents, without caring too much whether the story would be readable when scaled to a printable size. Losfeld’s solution was to provide a magnifying glass with each copy of the book. This isn’t too much of a problem; the story is easy enough to follow once you know the general outline, and for this story it’s the art that counts more than the words.

Continue reading “Saga de Xam revived”

Weekend links 670

An octopus catching a lobster (1894) by Gustav Mützel.

• RIP Barry Humphries. He emailed me a couple of years ago in his capacity as a collector of fin-de-siècle art, hoping I might answer a question about a very obscure artist. If you require justifications for the blogging habit then add this to the list. Humphries’ first book, Bizarre (1965), is a more cerebral counterpart to Charles Addams’ Dear Dead Days, and a compendium of oddities that I’d buy if I ever saw it in a secondhand shop. RIP also to incendiary singer Mark Stewart.

• “Schulz gets compared to Kafka because of his dreamy, disconcerting stories, but in Balint’s book, a version of Schulz emerges that is closer to one of Kafka’s characters—a man on the run who can’t get past the city walls; an artist exiled by a shape-shifting, unknowable tormentor—than to Franz himself.” Leo Lasdun reviewing a new biography of Bruno Schulz by Benjamin Balint.

• “Instead of asking whether an octopus shows aspects of human intelligence, perhaps the better question is whether humans can show aspects of octopus intelligence.” David Borkenhagen on octopuses and what they might teach us about the perception of time.

• “Uproar was my element, I wanted to get people moving, the more they roared, the bolder I became.” The pioneering theatrical performances of Valeska Gert are explored at Strange Flowers.

• Digital copies of albums by the mighty Earth may currently be purchased at the group’s Bandcamp page for $1 each. I’ve got everything already but you may wish to sample something.

• Charles Drazin on the director who dared to tell uncomfortable truths: Lindsay Anderson at 100.

• Steven Heller on Commercial Art, a magazine from the 1920s that chronicled UK design.

• At Unquiet Things: The luminous drama of Frants Diderik Bøe’s bejewelled floral still lifes.

• New music: This Vibrating Earth by Field Lines Cartographer, and Draw/Orb by Extra.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R podcast 796 by Gold Panda.

• The Strange World of…Andrzej Korzynski.

• The Jewel In The Lotus (1974) by Bennie Maupin | Jewel (1985) by Propaganda | Black Jewelled Serpent Of Sound (1985) by The Dukes Of Stratosphear

Eco Del Universo

Eco Del Universo, the ninth album by Mexican band Los Mundos, was released last month on Acid Test Recordings. I designed and illustrated the outer and inner sleeves for an album whose music is described on the group’s Bandcamp page as psychedelic rock. I’ve not seen a physical copy yet but the vinyl disc is available in two pressings that complement the colours of the cover.

The brief for this one was for something based on the concrete fantasia known as Las Pozas, an overgrown park with accompanying hotel that Edward James spent many years and a great deal of money building in the Mexican jungle. James was a British aristocrat who fell for Surrealism in a big way in the 1930s, using his inherited wealth to support artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Leonora Carrington, while creating Surrealist-styled homes for himself, first at Monkton House in West Sussex then at Xilitla in Mexico. James and his jungle resort have been recurrent subjects here so I didn’t need much encouragement to create something based on his constructions. In the past I’ve described Las Pozas as unfinished but this suggests a scheme with a final goal in mind. I don’t think this was ever James’s intention. His creations are more like very large concrete sculptures rather than architecture, even though some of them have a recognisable architectural form. Finished or not, the structures are a unique hybrid of the purposeless architectural folly—a popular indulgence for British landowners of the 18th and 19th centuries—and caprices like the Palais Idéal of Ferdinand Cheval.

My cover art is a fantasy on the fantasy which makes James’s improvisations look a little more planned than they are by mirroring their disposition. I also crowded together several of the constructions which at Las Pozas are in separate areas of the complex. Looking at the artwork again I’m reminded of some of Roger Dean’s views which wasn’t my intention originally. I think it’s the combination of unusual architecture, layered foliage and the treatment of light and shade. If the structures weren’t outlined and the sky was a Dean-like gradient there’d be even more of a similarity. The beautiful stellar photo is from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) whose images of the cosmos are free to use so long as you give them credit. This one was by Stéphane Guisard.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Secret Life of Edward James
• Palais Idéal panoramas
• Las Pozas panoramas
• Return to Las Pozas
• Las Pozas and Edward James