Brothers Quay – Page 9 – { feuilleton }

Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets

It’s not exactly the most appropriate moment to be recommending an exhibition in New York given the chaos in the city following the recent hurricane. However… Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets has been running at MoMA since August, and will continue into early 2013. A copy of the catalogue turned up this week, a slim volume of 64 pages that’s nevertheless an essential item for Quay obsessives such as myself.

Set design for A Flea in Her Ear (1989).

I’ve written before that while the Quays’ films are the most visible part of their oeuvre, much of their early output as artists and designers remains either obscure or unavailable. So it’s a pleasure to find a number of their early drawings, poster designs and book covers reproduced here. The catalogue also features examples of gallery installations and their designs for the stage. Ron Magliozzi, the curator, and Edwin Carels contribute essays while the Quays themselves are “interviewed” by Heinrich Holtzmüller “who was once real and now only exists under the glass of a museum vitrine in Nürnberg”. An appendix includes a thorough listing of their film works, giving me more things to chase at a later date.

In addition the Quays have also designed parts of the book, notably the title pages which feature their idiosyncratic typography. The catalogue may be purchased direct from the museum.

Grand Box, decor for Street of Crocodiles (1986).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Quay Brothers archive

Labirynt by Jan Lenica

Labirynt.

One of the links at the weekend was to this post about the favourite Polish posters of the Brothers Quay, a piece which included an example by designer and illustrator Jan Lenica (1928–2001). Lenica, like the Quays, was also a filmmaker who started out by producing short animations, Labirynt (1963) being one of these works. I’d not come across this before but now that I’ve watched it I’d be very surprised if Terry Gilliam hadn’t seen it at some point in the 1960s, the animation of collaged illustrations and hand-tinted photographs from 19th-century sources is precisely the kind of thing that Gilliam was doing a few years later. So is the generally Surrealist atmosphere with a bowler-hatted protagonist being menaced in the street by a host of hybrid creatures, encountering the women one sees in old erotic postcards, being seized by a giant hand, and so on.

Many Eastern European animations from the Cold War period involve a degree of political allegory, and Labirynt is no exception. One of the menacing figures is a mechanical gentleman who captures Bowler Hat Man and subjects him to a series of forced operations, eventually building a cage inside the captive’s head. Given this, and some opening shots which show Bowler Hat flying over the city using self-powered wings, it’s not stretching a point to see this 13-minute film as Brazil in miniature. Watch it for yourself here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Brothers Quay scarcities
• Gilliam’s shaver and Bovril by electrocution
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk
• The Brothers Quay on DVD

Weekend links 126

Mala Reputación (1991) by Dogo Y Los Mercenarios. Cover art by Nazario Luque.

Artist Nazario Luque was Spain’s first gay comic artist who’s also known for the drawing which appeared (without permission) on the sleeve of Lou Reed Live – Take No Prisoners in 1978. On his website Nazario says he’s been described as “Exhibicionista, solidario, provocador, agitador moral, rompedor, arriesgado, polifacético, transgresor, canalla, pintiparado, morigerado o simplemente superviviente…” Via Música, maestros, a two-part post (second part is here) about album cover art by comic artists.

• The BBC Radiophonic Workshop Returns. And quite conveniently, Ubuweb posts some original Radiophonic creations by electronic music genius Delia Derbyshire. Ms Derbyshire is profiled along with her other pioneering colleagues in an hour-long TV documentary, Alchemists of Sound.

• Tor.com celebrates the fiction of Shirley Jackson. Too Much Horror Fiction has a substantial collection of Shirley Jackson book covers.

Phantasmagorical and all but plotless, Nightwood flings itself madly upon the night, upon Wood, and upon the reader. Its sentences pomp along like palanquins and writhe like crucifixions. They puke, they sing. Their deliriums are frighteningly controlled. […] TS Eliot loved Nightwood so much that he shepherded its publication and wrote the introduction to the first edition. Dylan Thomas complimented it with his left hand by calling it “one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman” and with his right hand by stealing from it. […] Nightwood’s Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante O’Connor, florid monologist and transvestite, seems to have been a model (along with Captain Ahab) for Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. The difference is that Cormac McCarthy’s Judge is essentially Satan, whereas O’Connor is essentially Christ; they’re only just on opposite sides of the border of madness.

Austin Allen on The Life and Death of Djuna Barnes, Gonzo “Greta Garbo of American Letters”. There’s a lot more Djuna Barnes at Strange Flowers.

• Out at the end of the month, Extreme Metaphors, interviews with JG Ballard, 1967–2008, edited by Simon Sellars & Dan O’Hara.

• The favourite Polish posters of the Brothers Quay. Over at Cardboard Cutout Sundown there are more Quay book covers.

• The Mancorialist: people on the streets of Manchester are given the Sartorialist treatment.

• The Liverpool International Festival Of Psychedelia takes place on 29th September.

• The Caves of Nottingham are explored in a detailed post at BLDGBLOG.

• In Remembrance: Bill Brent, Groundbreaking Queer Sex Publisher.

• Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie

• The Uranus Music Prize 2012

• Fuck Yeah René Lalique

• Dr Who: original theme (1963) by Ron Grainer with Delia Derbyshire | Falling (1964) by Delia Derbyshire | The Delian Mode (1968) by Delia Derbyshire | Blue Veils And Golden Sands (1968) by Delia Derbyshire.

The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello

This animated short by Anthony Lucas isn’t exactly obscure but I’ve only just noticed that the distributor has the whole film available for viewing on YouTube. The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello blends silhouetted characters and decor with elaborate steam-powered machinery in a manner that looks like the kind of thing Lotte Reiniger might have produced if she’d exchanged her fairy tales for Jules Verne. Impossible to watch Lucas’s film now without thinking “steampunk” but Jasper Morello was made in 2005 and so pre-dates the ongoing explosion of interest in Victoriana, dirigibles and coal-powered contraptions. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on two new steampunk projects which is what brought this to mind. More about those projects later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Three Fragments of a Lost Tale
• Brothers Quay scarcities
• Achilles by Barry JC Purves
• The Torchbearer by Václav Svankmajer

Three Fragments of a Lost Tale

I hadn’t come across sculptor John Frame’s animated work before so my thanks to John Burridge for the recommendation. Three Fragments of a Lost Tale is part of a larger project, The Tale of The Crippled Boy, which is described at Frame’s website. Being a collection of fragments, this film is necessarily mysterious although I seldom worry about that. One quality of animation I’ve always enjoyed is its ability to convey the disjunctions and strange atmospheres of dream states, something it often does more effectively than anything else.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Brothers Quay scarcities
• Achilles by Barry JC Purves
• The Torchbearer by Václav Svankmajer