HR Giger – Page 6 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 138

Heartsick (2011) by Kelly Durette.

• Now that Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch album is out and causing the usual consternation, the spotlight-shy singer/composer has been doing a surprising amount of promotional interviews. Simon Hattenstone talked to him for the Guardian at the end of last month; this week it was John Doran’s turn at The Quietus. One quote from the latter piece stood out in the light of this week’s posts: “…the music we’re making is meant to be an aural version of the HR Giger drawings for Alien. It always sounds to me like those look.”

• Satanica is a limited-edition publication curated by Gio Black Peter & Christopher Stoddard “for anyone who rejects societal norms, for those dedicated to a life of pleasure, excess and self-reflection”.

• Sci-Fi-O-Rama has put five years’ worth of blog pictures onto Pinterest. I don’t really need to do that, there’s already a diverse crowd of Pinterest users compiling their own selection of things posted here.

As Susan Sontag once observed, pornography is practical. It was designed as a marital aid, and its vocabulary should follow natural biological rhythms and stick with hot-button words in order to produce a predictable climax. It is not about sex but is sex. Whereas the great sex writers (Harold Brodkey, DH Lawrence, Robert Gluck, David Plante, the Australian Frank Moorhouse) have a quirky, phenomenological, realistic approach to sex. They are doing what the Russian formalists said was the secret of all good fiction – making the familiar strange, writing from the Martian’s point of view.

Edmund White on writing about sex in fiction

• When pirate DVDs of films by Cocteau, Bresson and Pasolini are on sale in a Mexican market, life in the 21st century increasingly resembles a William Gibson novel. Joanne McNeil investigates.

• Copies of City Fun, Manchester’s premier music fanzine/alt culture mag (founded 1978), can now be read online at the Manchester District Music Archive.

• Linked everywhere during the past few days, the astonishing map of bomb hits on London during the Blitz (October 1940 to June 1941).

• At 50 Watts: 30 Vintage Magazine Covers from Japan and Alfred Kubin’s illustrations for Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel (1913) by Paul Scheerbart.

• Earlier this year for Frieze Magazine Geeta Dayal talked to musical collaborators of the great German producer Conny Plank.

• Invisible Ink by Christopher Fowler, “the extraordinary stories of over one hundred forgotten authors”.

• Cynthia Carr talks about Fire in the Belly, her biography of American artist David Wojnarowicz.

• “Blasphemy, Filth, And Nonsense” More Aleister Crowley ephemera at Front Free Endpaper.

• At Strange Flowers: Surrealist art by Jindrich Heisler (1914–1953).

• Vladimir Nabokov wrote to Alfred Hitchcock in 1964.

• Scott Walker’s four tracks from the Nite Flights album (1978): Shutout | Fat Mama Kick | Nite Flights | The Electrician.

Giger’s Tarot

This week’s posts reminded me that I have a copy of the HR Giger Tarot set published by Taschen under their Evergreen imprint in 2000. The set is Taschen’s reworking of Giger & Akron’s Baphomet Tarot der Unterwelt set from 1994, and I recall this being one of the last things Taschen created with Giger after spending the previous decade producing a run of books, diaries and posters featuring his paintings. Inside a box you find a set of 22 oversize Tarot trumps presenting some of Giger’s works against metallic silver surrounds. There’s also a poster-size sheet for card readings printed with his pentagram design plus a 224-page paperback book by Swiss Tarot scholar Akron, aka CF Frey, which interprets the paintings as they relate to the Major Arcana. (The Baphomet set had a hardback book and the pentagram design printed on the back of each card.)

The design on the back of the cards, printed in black on metallic silver.

If you’re familiar with Tarot symbolism you don’t have to use these cards to find the correspondences intriguing. The trump ordering is an odd mix of the Crowley scheme with the more traditional designations. Two of the trumps have also been given new names: The Hanged Man is now The Hanged Woman while Crowley’s Art (formerly Temperance) has become Alchemy, an association which works since the card in the Crowley deck depicts the Androgyne of alchemical symbolism. I can imagine some Tarot collectors finding these cards far too dark and nasty, but when so many Tarot designs today are various degrees of garish or twee there’s plenty of room for a Giger or two to harsh the New Age mellow.

The card set has been out of print for years but Abebooks still carries copies at reasonable prices. A few examples of the cards follow.

Continue reading “Giger’s Tarot”

HR Giger album covers

Walpurgis (1969) by The Shiver.

An inevitable follow-up to yesterday’s post, this continues an occasional look at album cover art by people better known for their work elsewhere. Giger’s album covers fall into two categories: those with some direct involvement from the artist and those which are merely reuses of pre-existing paintings. The former category is the one that’s of concern here.

The Shiver were a ~~German~~ Swiss group who Discogs label as “Krautrock”, a term with an unfortunate tendency these days to get attached to any German music that isn’t James Last. From what I’ve heard the group are a lot more ordinary than that, doing the kind of late psychedelic/early progressive rock common to many European bands in 1969.

Update: Further research reveals that The Shiver were Swiss, not German as they’re listed at Discogs. They evolved later into Island (see below) which explains why both groups released albums bearing Giger cover art.

Brain Salad Surgery (1973) by Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

And speaking of prog… I’ve always loved the cover for this album which in its vinyl edition opens out to reveal the spectral woman beneath. The female face is named Isis on a poster I still have somewhere. Despite liking the cover I never really liked ELP so this is one album of the period I’ve yet to hear.

Brain Salad Surgery interior.

Pictures (1977) by Island.

And yet more prog… Island were a Swiss group. The cover painting is Necronom IIIa (1976) with some Giger lettering added.

Attahk (1978) by Magma.

Magma are (of course) Christian Vander’s ongoing jazz/prog/opera/Zeuhl/sf/freakout music project. Giger declares a taste for jazz and jazz rock in one of his books so I imagine this commission would have appealed more than others, Magma’s approach to jazz having an apocalyptic tendency. Track titles like Liriïk Necronomicus Kanht (In Which Our Heroes Ourgon & Gorgo Meet) wouldn’t have done much harm either. The safety-pin sunglasses were inspired by the safety-pin fashions of punk.

KooKoo (1981) by Debbie Harry.

And speaking of punk… Giger considered Debbie Harry to be “the Queen of the Punks” so he decided to pierce her face accordingly. The album isn’t punk, however, it’s a collection of smart and funky pop songs produced by Nile Rodgers & Bernard Edwards. Two singles from the album have Giger-directed videos, Backfired (which HRG also appears in), and Now I Know You Know which has Ms Harry posing against the Passagen paintings in a black wig and a biomechanical body stocking. There’s more about the KooKoo album at the Giger site.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Giger’s Necronomicon
• Dan O’Bannon, 1946–2009
• Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
• The monstrous tome

Giger’s Necronomicon

Another artist documentary only this time the artist concerned is a full participant and co-creator. Giger’s Necronomicon was filmed from 1972 to 1976 and functions as a taster for the first book collection of the artist’s work, also called Giger’s Necronomicon, which was published a year later. JJ Wittmer was the co-director. The paintings are very familiar now so it’s worth being reminded how shocking and outré Giger’s work seemed in the 1970s. In addition to interviews with the artist’s parents and some of the painting’s owners there are shots of a very modish gallery event, and we get to see inside Giger’s studio and witness one of the paintings being produced. The sound quality is somewhat erratic since the video appears to come from a Japanese tape but the voiceover is in English. The most notable thing about Giger’s Necronomicon is that all the mobile camera shots are from the artist’s point of view, we only see him when he looks in a mirror.

• Giger’s Necronomicon: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

There’s some additional interest here for Krautrock aficionados. Giger’s books mention his associations with a couple of peripheral figures from the Swiss end of Cosmic Courier/Cosmic Jokers scene: Sergius Golowin and Walter Wegmüller. Golowin is credited with one of the spacier albums on the Cosmic Courier label but he was better known in Switzerland as a writer, and he appears briefly in Giger’s Necronomicon offering some thoughts about the artist’s paintings. The music for the film sounds like the ambient jazz doodlings of Stomu Yamash’ta but is the work of Joël Vandroogenbroeck and Carole Muriel. Vandroogenbroeck recorded a lot of library music, including one release entitled Biomechanoid (1980) which has a Giger cover painting. Prior to this he was a member of German group Brainticket and plays on Cottonwoodhill (1970), an album with a (deserved) reputation as the most demented Krautrock release.

Also at YouTube is another Giger film from the same period, Giger’s Second Celebration of the Four (1977), a four-minute piece directed by JJ Wittmer showing a ritualistic club event. The combination of robes, torches and some of Giger’s more Satanic imagery resembles a black metal music video, albeit with a jazzy soundtrack.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dan O’Bannon, 1946–2009
• Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
• The monstrous tome

Weekend links 122

Transmitter Crowbar Discharge Unit, Bates Linear Accelerator. Photo by Daniel Jackson from his Dark Machines series.

The language we use for writing about art is oddly pornographic: We know it when we see it. No one would deny its distinctiveness. Yet efforts to define it inevitably produce squeamishness, as if describing the object too precisely might reveal one’s particular, perhaps peculiar, investments in it. Let us now break that unspoken rule and describe the linguistic features of IAE in some detail.

IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal, autonomy. An artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things. IAE rebukes English for its lack of nouns: Visual becomes visuality, global becomes globality, potential becomes potentiality, experience becomes…experiencability. […] Whatever the content, the aim is to sound to the art world like someone worth listening to, by adopting an approximation of its elite language.

International Art English by Alix Rule & David Levine

For years I’ve been calling it Artspeak: the frequently disingenuous, misleading or merely confused jargon that passes for descriptive writing in the art world. Alix Rule and David Levine apply the more neutral label of International Art English. In a lengthy essay at Triplecanopy they reveal the origins of IAE’s terminology and show why the stuff has spread like semantic kudzu.

• “What a bizarre focal point Anish Kapoor’s spiral callipers are: a Laocoönian observation platform strangled in red steel at a cost of many millions, while electricity pylons, with their austere elegance, once hymned by the poets of the 1930s, have been removed, at enormous cost, from the same site to be buried in the radioactive tilth of landfill dumps and industrial detritus.” Iain Sinclair reports on the Olympics.

• Alfred Kubin in…Nottingham! The Other Side, an exhibition of “haunting drawings of death, trauma and fantastical creatures inhabiting imaginary worlds”, running to the end of September.

• Francis Ford Coppola and Stewart Copeland discuss the making of Rumble Fish (1982). Over at The Rumpus there’s Coppola talking about his career and his latest film, TWIXT.

• Eraserhead: The Making of a Cult Classic. In the 1980s Kenneth George Godwin interviewed everyone responsible for making David Lynch’s film. Fascinating reading.

• Skin Job, the debut poetry collection by Evan J. Peterson, is twenty-one poems about monsters, horror, and science fiction. Evan made a trailer.

• Wood, brass and “the latest advances in nanotechnology”: Teka, an OLED lamp by Aldo Cibic and Tommaso Corà.

• Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967): Peter Whitehead’s film of the capital at its swinging height.

• “Beam Us Up, Mr. Scott!”: Why Misquotations Catch On by Maria Konnikova.

• Hari Kunzru‘s ten favourite books about underground London.

• The Periodic Table of Heavy Metals.

• Alan Garner: A life in books.

• Fuck yeah, manuscripts!

• (HR) Giger Counter.

• This week was all about Vangelis in the 1970s: Creation du Monde (1973) | Spiral (1977) | Himalaya / Summit (1979).