Caravaggio – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 104

Prettiest Star (2004) by Timothy Cummings.

• I Want Your Love, a feature film directed by Travis Mathews catches my attention for having been described as “the gay Shortbus” even though (as the director notes) Shortbus was pretty gay to begin with.

• I’ve always found Hans Christian Andersen’s story of The Tinderbox—a tale of spectral dogs with enormous eyes—to be rather weird. But these illustrations by Heinrich Strub for a 1956 edition beat everything.

• “From an early age, however, I became in secret the slave of certain appetites.” The line that Robert Louis Stevenson deleted from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

• Scientific American: Homophobes might be hidden homosexuals. Not exactly fresh news but always worth bearing in mind when someone starts ranting about those evil gays.

• Minimal Wave: The 80s synth-pop underground. The Minimal Wave label releases a vinyl compilation by Hard Corps this month.

• “Blame the Victorians for making menswear boring.” Alex Jung on the endless tyranny of the suit-and-tie combination.

• Women, Vaginas and Blood: Breaking menstrual taboos with artist Sarah Maple.

• London’s lost rivers (again): the hidden history of the city’s buried waterways.

• Vincenzo Pacelli says the Knights of Malta murdered Caravaggio.

• Street style 1906: Edward Linley Sambourne’s fashion blog.

• Architectural Stationery Vignettes at BibliOdyssey.

• Hans Bellmer & Unica Zürn at Ubu Gallery, NYC.

• Pam Grossman admits to being a “candle hooch”.

• Dirty (1986) by Hard Corps | Lost Rivers Of London (1996) by Coil | The Tinderbox (2009) by Patrick Wolf.

Google Art Project revisited

The Deluge (1834) by John Martin.

One of John Martin’s Biblical cataclysms succumbs to a Turner-like nebulosity at the Yale Center for British Art, something that can now be viewed in detail thanks to Google’s expansion of its Art Project. 151 additional galleries have been added, and the collections of those already present expanded, which means there are now 30,000 paintings and other art objects waiting to be examined. The examples here are those picked from a very cursory look at what’s on offer. Good to see the Musée d’Orsay is now one of the featured galleries where I ignored all the Van Goghs, Monets and the rest in order to select one of Gustave Moreau’s Salomés. Blake’s Ghost of a Flea is actually a lot more visible in its online state than in the original. Many of the works in the Blake collection at Tate Britain are so fragile the lights are kept low to avoid damaging their pigments. Most of Blake’s paintings are also very small, Ghost of a Flea included. Even peering at it up close doesn’t yield as much as the opportunity we now have to explore its frosted craquelure.

Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604–1605) Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio.

The Ghost of a Flea (c. 1819) by William Blake.

The Apparition (c. 1876) by Gustave Moreau.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Ambassadors in detail

Derek Jarman’s music videos

Duggie Fields in It’s A Sin

A hidden Derek Jarman film lies scattered among a handful of music videos from the 1980s, something you can pretend you’re seeing flashes of in the promo shorts the director was making whilst trying to raise money for his last few feature films. A recent re-watch of Caravaggio reminded me of these, recalling a remark Jarman made that his video for the Pet Shop Boys’ It’s A Sin was the first time anyone allowed him to use 35mm film. Among other things, that promo features artist Duggie Fields with a gilded face, one of a number of little in-jokes that Jarman aficionados can retrieve from these shorts. Running through them in sequence you get a skate through familiar visuals, from the masks and mirrors flashed into the camera in Broken English, to the Super-8 fast-forwards of The Smiths and Easterhouse films, with plenty of flowers and ritual fires along the way.

Broken English

This isn’t a complete list since not everything is on YouTube. Even if it were I wouldn’t link to anything by the wretched Bob Geldof for whom Jarman made two promos. Needless to say some are more sympathetic to Jarman’s obsessions than others: Marianne Faithfull’s film is a fascinating short that provides a link via the singer between Jarman and Kenneth Anger. The Bryan Ferry film, on the other hand, is a bland piece for a bland song. Suede and The Smiths seemed to have let Derek do what he liked. Well done, boys.

Broken English (1979) by Marianne Faithfull (featuring Witches’ Song, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan and Broken English).

Dance With Me (1983) by The Lords of the New Church.

Willow Weep For Me (1983) by Carmel.

Broken English

Dance Hall Days (1983) by Wang Chung.

Tenderness Is A Weakness (1984) by Marc Almond.

Windswept (1985) by Bryan Ferry.

The Queen Is Dead

Panic (1986) by The Smiths.

Ask (1986) by The Smiths.

The Queen Is Dead (1986) by The Smiths | Long version

1969 (1986) by Easterhouse.

Whistling In The Dark (1986) by Easterhouse.

So Young

It’s A Sin (1987) by the Pet Shop Boys.

Rent (1987) by the Pet Shop Boys.

So Young (1993) by Suede.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Derek Jarman’s Neutron
• Mister Jarman, Mister Moore and Doctor Dee
• The Tempest illustrated
• In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman
• Derek Jarman at the Serpentine
• The Angelic Conversation
• The life and work of Derek Jarman

The Divine Eros Defeats the Earthly Eros

Another favourite painting receiving the Google Art Project high-res treatment. Giovanni Baglione’s picture (also known as Sacred Love versus Profane Love) was painted circa 1602 as a riposte to Caravaggio’s provocative Amor Vincit Omnia. Where Caravaggio showed Eros triumphing over worldly concerns Baglione gives us an image of religious propaganda which displeased the older artist. Salt was rubbed in the wounds when Baglione produced a second (and lesser) version which puts Caravaggio’s features on the figure of the Devil. There’s an irony in this spat in the way that Baglione’s noble aspiration is subverted by erotic tension, the victorious angel shown happily astride a vulnerable and capitulating youth. If someone had pointed this out to Caravaggio he might not have felt so aggrieved.

Both Amor Vincit Omnia and The Divine Eros Defeats the Earthly Eros are part of the Old Master collection at the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, where they can be viewed side by side.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Chiaroscuro
• Angels 1: The Angel of History and sensual metaphysics

Weekend links 57

A 1973 Ballantine edition of William Burroughs’ novel with a cover illustration from Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) by Salvador Dalí. Via the Burroughs Book Covers archive.

The Sel Publishing House, Turkey, published a new translation of The Soft Machine by William Burroughs in January, an edition which is now under investigation by the Istanbul Prosecutor’s Office following a report by the (deep breath) Prime Ministry’s Council for Protecting Minors from Explicit Publications. The Council lodged a number of complaints, among them assertions of “lacking unity in its subject matter,” “incompliance with narrative unity,” “using slang and colloquial terms” and “the application of a fragmented narrative style.” Details here. Does Turkey still want to join the EU? Because this kind of persistently illiberal bullshit (see the earlier treatment of Orhan Pamuk) isn’t helping their case at all.

• Related to the above: Evan J Peterson reads Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in the toilet of a Seattle gay bar; Ginsberg himself reads Kaddish and other works here.

• More illiberal bullshit: LGBT activists arrested during royal wedding; Queer Resistance released a statement about the arrests. MPs, activists and trade unionists condemn new attacks on the right to protest.

• The Dorian Gray That Wilde Would Want Us To Read. Harvard University Press publishes an uncensored and annotated edition of Wilde’s novel. Kudos for using Caravaggio’s Narcissus on the cover.

One weekend in late 1967, they all decamped to a hotel suite in California’s Ojai Valley for a brainstorming session. Amid clouds of pot smoke, they talked all weekend with the tape recorder running. [Jack] Nicholson then took the tapes and turned the conversations into a screenplay; according to Rafelson, he structured it while on LSD.

Revisiting The Monkees’ psychedelic movie, Head.

Kraftwerk icons for Windows and Mac OS X by Dave Brasgalla.

• Robert Louis Stevenson gets his revenge on sneaky literary agent – 120 years later. And Michael Moorcock imagines tales of unseen Mervyn Peake pictures.

Painting doesn’t look so good on the web. It looks better in life. Sculpture looks better in life. What you end up with is just a reproduction. Whereas with film or with sound or with poetry, you get the deep primary experience not the secondary experience. The web delivers those primary experiences very well.

Ubuweb’s Kenneth Goldsmith interviewed.

• Arkhonia’s Another Dispatch in a World of Multiple Veils is now a free download.

• The story of This Is The Sea: An interview with Mike Scott of The Waterboys.

• Fairlight: The Rolls Royce of synthesizers.

• Haeckel Clock, a free app for the iPad.

• What is totalitarian art?

• Porpoise Song (1968) by The Monkees | Hope For Happiness (1969) by The Soft Machine | I’m A Believer (1974) by Robert Wyatt.