Bob Dylan – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 344

Axiom Dub – Mysteries Of Creation (1996), a Bill Laswell production. Art by James Koehnline.

• As noted earlier, the great Bill Laswell has made some of his sprawling back catalogue available at Bandcamp, news of which has prompted Vinyl Factory to put together a recommended listening guide. Judging by the comments I’m not the only Laswell-head deploring the absence of the masterpiece from Material, Hallucination Engine. Linked here before, and happily still being updated, the comprehensive Bill Laswell discography at Silent-Watcher. Related: An ESP-Disk Primer by Marc Masters.

• Listen to the Voice of Fire, a symposium concerning alchemy in sound art, takes place at the National Library of Wales at the beginning of March. Phil Legard offers some thoughts on alchemy, music and John Dee.

• The guilty cinematic pleasures of John Carpenter. Related: Director and actor Alice Lowe chooses seven favourite horror films.

• The Broomway, Essex, a tidal path known as “The Doomway” for its reputation as the most dangerous walk in Britain.

• Mixes of the week: K-Punk presents Return to the Fourth World, and FACT Mix 584 by Lawrence English.

• “There was more to the late John Berger than that TV series and art book”, says Richard Turney.

• “Music’s cassette-tape revival is paying off,” says John Paul Titlow.

• Diamanda Galás announces two new albums.

• Bob Dylan paints a Blackpool pier.

• Pixel art by Uno Moralez

• One Letter Words

• Reduction (1980) by Material | Ghost Light/Dread Recall (1996) by Material | No Guts No Galaxy (1999) by Material (feat. Ramm Ell Zee & phonosycographDISK)

Martin Sharp, 1942–2013

Oz magazine no. 15, October 1968.

The psychedelic art of Australian artist Martin Sharp has featured here on several occasions. Unlike his British and American contemporaries who maintained a single graphic style, Sharp was a versatile artist whose work could range from loose, often cartoony drawing and painting to very detailed collage designs; he was also as happy as any other artist of the period to plunder art history, as the cover for issue 15 of Oz demonstrates. The Mick Jagger figure from that cover was later reworked as a poster for “Turner’s Purple Orchestra”, one of a number of pieces of Sharp art which can be glimpsed throughout Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970).

Performance (1970): Michele Breton and a Martin Sharp collage.

Sharp’s involvement with Oz magazine, and the creation of a handful of endlessly reproduced designs—the Bob Dylan Mr Tambourine Man poster, Jimi Hendrix in a Jackson Pollock explosion, the sleeve art for Cream’s Disraeli Gears—makes his art some of the most visible of the period. People may not necessarily know the name but they’ll recognise the work.

In 2009 Sharp’s Oz colleague Germaine Greer wrote a warm appraisal of the artist and his work. A few more examples follow. There’s a great selection of posters and other art and design here.

• The Guardian: Martin Sharp, Australian artist who came to symbolise the ’60s | Martin Sharp in pictures

Mister Tambourine Man (1966).

Continue reading “Martin Sharp, 1942–2013”

The art of Marijke Koger

Love Life (1966).

A slight return to The Fool, and specifically the work of Marijke Koger. Since The Fool was a collective it can be difficult separating out the work of individuals but all of these examples are credited as hers in Norman Hathaway & Dan Nadel’s excellent Electrical Banana (2011) book. The nature of the collective also tends to downplay the contribution of women to psychedelic art, with Koger tending to receive less individual credit than Bonnie MacLean does for her US concert posters. Koger’s Love Life design is very advanced for 1966, and could easily have been created at almost any time in the next decade. The Bob Dylan poster below is the most florid representation of Mr Zimmerman I’ve seen, an image that fits the times more than Dylan’s persona which remained resolutely untouched by acid culture.

It’s no surprise with this subject that Sweet Jane has already looked at the work of The Fool. There’s more photos and designs to be found at A Dandy in Aspic (many of them from the Electrical Banana book) while Bang The Drum All Day has some of the graphics produced for Brian Epstein’s Sunday Night at the Saville concerts.

Fashion drawing (1966).

Lucy (1966).

Love Bob Dylan (1967).

Tiger Man (1970).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Fool album covers
• Through the Wonderwall

Milton Glaser album covers

Music For Space Squirrels (1958) by Al Caiola’s Magic Guitars.

Having sought out Saul Bass’s album cover designs recently, curiosity impelled me to see what fellow New York designer Milton Glaser had been doing during the same period. I already knew some of Glaser’s covers for the Tomato label in the 1970s but Discogs has many more, including a handful in the Pop/psychedelic style he used most famously for his Bob Dylan poster. Not all of these are to my taste—illustration-wise I prefer Bob Pepper’s art—but Glaser was nothing if not versatile. I’ve no idea what Music for Space Squirrels sounds like although it’s probably less interesting than the promise of those floating rodents.

Medium (1968) by The Mandrake Memorial.

Grieg’s Greatest Hits (1969).

Continue reading “Milton Glaser album covers”

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