Lewis Carroll – { feuilleton }

November shirts

Skull Print shirts.

November weather isn’t exactly suitable for T-shirt wearing when you live this far north (although it’s unseasonably mild just now) but I’ve recently added four more shirt designs to my Skull Print page. As I was saying last month, now that I’ve quit CafePress all shirts featuring my art and design will be done through Skull Print, a small business who specialise in shirt-printing, and do so with very reasonable prices: £22 (inc. postage) for the UK, £32 (inc. postage) for the rest of the world. Long sleeves, sizes 3XL and over, and tie-dye colours add a little more to the cost.

It’s always the case when creating spin-off products that I’m guessing what people may want. Three of the four new designs have been extracted from popular works of the past (the Tarot designs have been given a boost now that they’re featured in the Bumper Book of Magic). I’m always open to suggestions for new designs so long as they don’t infringe on any trademarks or copyright agreements.

The Chaos symbol is a new creation based on a shirt I designed for Hawkwind’s Chronicle Of The Black Sword tour in 1985 (see this post). The symbol isn’t exclusive to Hawkwind, of course. Michael Moorcock invented it for the original Elric stories in the 1960s after which it was picked up by the practitioners of Chaos magic in the 1980s.

And this is one of my popular Alice in Wonderland designs which I amended for The Graphic Canon in 2012, extending the square composition into a rectangle. I may add one or two more from this series in future although this was one was easier to adapt than some of the others.

Minotaur Ballet – Swansea Surreal

October is still Spook Month as usual but this year it’s also the 100th anniversary of the publication of André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto, something I wrote about back in January. Many events have been acknowledging the anniversary including Minotaur Ballet – Swansea Surreal, an exhibition curated by David Greenslade and Incunabula Media which will be running at Volcano Theatre, Swansea from now to the end of the month. I’m one of the contributors with prints of my Alice in Wonderland posters. Lewis Carroll’s books were rare examples of British culture that Breton was enthusiastic about—he made Alice the “Siren of Dreams” in the Surrealist card deck—while Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst both created illustrations for the stories. I would have preferred to have made something new for the event but other work intervened.

The exhibition…will feature mainly Welsh artists, most of them from Swansea, alongside guests from Australia, Ukraine, Romania, Czech Republic, Egypt, Ireland and other parts of the UK.

ARTISTS INCLUDE
George Ostafi, Mark Sanders, Alexandria Bryan, Neil Coombs, John Goodby, Ricardo Acevedo, Carla-Francesca Schoppel, Dagmar Stepankova, David Rees Davies, Matt Leyshon, Jennifer Allan, Ben Faircloth, Wynford Vaughan Thomas, James Green, David K Mitchell, John Coulthart, Ian Walker, Premysl Martinec, Roger Moss, Julia Lockheart, David Greenslade, Simon Evans, Syd Howells, Keith Bayliss, Anatoly Shmatok, Maria Dolorosa de la Cruz

FILMS OLD AND NEW BY
Kenji Siratori, Zac Ferguson, Jane Arden (Norah Morris), Ricardo Acevedo

And a special screening of Blue Scar (1949)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Scenes from a carriage
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Surrealist cartomancy

Four short films by Vince Collins

The expressions “psychedelic” and “surreal” are often so casually applied that they lose any useful definition, but in the case of these early films by American animator Vince Collins “psychedelic surrealism” is an accurate description. All have somehow managed to evade my weirdness radar until now, despite being superior examples of the endlessly mutating dream-landscape which animation can do so well. The last of them, Malice in Wonderland, is a breathless run through Lewis Carroll scenarios which Collins made in collaboration with his wife, Miwako Collins. That punning title has been overused in the music world but the pair ought to be given sole ownership of it, their bad-trip film is the most grotesquely nightmarish reworking of Alice themes that I’ve seen.

Vince Collins’ YouTube channel contains many more recent works done with computer animation. The hand-drawn films are more to my taste but it’s good to see him still being active and creative.

Gilgamish (1973).

Euphoria (1974).

Fantasy (1976).

Malice in Wonderland (1982). (Or avoid YouTube’s adults-only policy by going here.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The groovy video look

Max Ernst, estampes et livres illustrés

And speaking of Max Ernst… These are pages from a catalogue for a exhibition of Ernst’s prints and book illustrations held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1975. Ernst was such a versatile and prolific artist that any collection can only show a small sample of the available work which here ranges from Dadaist collages and Surrealist frottages, to pages from his three collage novels plus later works like Wunderhorn which featured illustrations based on the writings of Lewis Carroll. Some of the captions erroneously assign collages from Une semaine de bonté to La femme 100 têtes, not the kind of thing you expect from a national library. Several of the images towards the end are from Maximiliana or the Illegal Practice of Astronomy, an art-book that Ernst created in 1964 which features the curious hieroglyphic figures that proliferate in his drawings and paintings from this period. Peter Schamoni made a short film about the project which may be viewed here.

Continue reading “Max Ernst, estampes et livres illustrés”

Bugs Bunny meets Fantômas in the Aquarium of Love

Pop Surrealism, 1949.

More from the Chicago Surrealists. The discovery of the first item comes via a comment from Paul (thanks!) in the post about Arsenal magazine which directed my attention to Monoskop where there’s another publication, Cultural Correspondence, related to the Chicago Surrealist Group. Cultural Correspondence was a US journal which ran for 14 issues from 1975 to 1981. Searching around for more information revealed an archive of the entire run at Brown University:

A journal born from the collapse of the New Left and hopes for a new beginning of a social movement, but also of left-wing thinking about culture, Cultural Correspondence was in many ways a unique publication.

Its founding editors, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, had both served on the editorial board of the journal Radical America, founded in 1967. Buhle had been the founder of that bi-monthly journal, creating it out of a network of activist-intellectuals in the Students for a Democratic Society; Wagner was officially “Poetry Editor,” but after its shift from Madison, Wisconsin, to the Boston area in 1971, he became a member of an expanded board of editors. Together they taught at the Cambridge-Goddard Graduate School, then Wagner left for Europe and Buhle left the editorial board, moving to Yonkers. An exchange of letters from these locations spawned the notion of a new publication. It was to be the first radical magazine put out by members of a generation that had since childhood watched television and appreciated as well as enjoyed a considerable portion of it, also films and “pulp” literature.

The issue at Monoskop was the penultimate one (numbered 10/11), guest-edited by Franklin Rosemont who took the opportunity to give the readers an exploration of “Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices”. The final issue (numbered 12–14) continued the theme with a Surrealist supplement.

Even without the Surrealist content, Cultural Correspondence is an interesting magazine, closer to the era’s underground magazines than an arts publication, especially in its attention to the underground cartoonists. Given my general antipathy to arts magazines I find this very much in its favour. The Rosemont-edited issue shows a different side of the Chicago group when compared to the more pugnacious Arsenal, with no sign of the scowling ideologues that fill the pages of the Surrealist journal. HP Lovecraft turns up once again (musings about Surrealism from his very last letter), together with Rosemont’s beloved blues musicians. Rosemont also reprints the short essay about pulp fiction by Robert Allerton Parker, Explorers of the Pluriverse, which appeared in the catalogue for First Papers of Surrealism.

Meanwhile, at the Internet Archive there’s Marvellous Freedom, Vigilance of Desire, the exhibition programme for the World Surrealist Exhibition which was staged in Chicago in 1976. Penelope Rosemont refers to this event several times in Surrealist Women so it’s great to be able to see some of the artworks which are only described in brief in the book. Many exhibition catalogues are mere lists of pictures with an essay or two but this one looks like it took the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue as its model, being filled with essays, poems, small illustrations and so on. The early Surrealist exhibitions were never satisfied with scattering artworks around an otherwise empty room, several of them extended their themes into the exhibition space in early manifestations of the installation or environment concept. For the Chicago event the visitor passed through “Sleepwalker’s Hill” into the “Corridor of the Forgotten Future”, which led to the heart of the exhibition and eleven “Domains of Surrealist Vigilance” dedicated to significant figures: Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the Duchess of Towers (from one of Andre Bréton’s favourite films, Peter Ibbetson), Sade’s Juliette, Harpo Marx, T-Bone Slim, Peetie Wheatstraw, Robin Hood, Bugs Bunny, Alfred Jarry’s Doctor Faustroll, Melmoth the Wanderer, and the Surrealists’ favourite master criminal, Fantômas. The imperishable wise-cracking rabbit had already appeared in the pages of Arsenal, as well as on the cover of the first issue of Cultural Correspondence, but this is where he becomes a genuine Surrealist icon.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion