Salvador Dalí – Page 13

Flamboyant excess: the art of Steven Arnold

Invitation to Yin and Yang by Steven Arnold.

“Less is NOT more, MORE is more, less is less.”

Steven Arnold

Thanks to Monsieur Thombeau for pointing the way to The Steven Arnold Archive, a respository of biographical and career detail about Steven Arnold (1943–1994):

…a California-based multi-media artist, spiritualist, gender bender, and protégée of Salvador Dalí. His work consisted of drawings, paintings, rock and film posters, makeup design, costume design, set design, photography, and film.

Arnold’s work with outrageous performance troupe The Cockettes seems to receive more attention today than his other creations so it’s good to see the balance being redressed. It was a surprise, for instance, to find he’d drawn a poster in 1967 for The Matrix club, San Francisco. Similar works are mentioned but the site doesn’t have any examples and I’ve yet to see any elsewhere.

And I haven’t seen the Cockettes film, Luminous Procuress (1971) either. Salvador Dalí unsurprisingly responded with enthusiasm to its atmosphere of androgynous weirdness:

Luminous Procuress is an altogether extraordinary, individualistic phantasmagoria. It was filmed entirely in San Francisco over a two-year period, and describes the adventures of two wandering youths in San Francisco who visit the home of a mysterious woman, the Procuress. She is an elegant emblem of sorcery, her vivid features glowing under bizarre, striking maquillage, and one is not certain who she is or where she intends to lead the protagonists. Although the language she speaks is vaguely Russian, it appears that the Procuress has psychic powers. She discerns a sympathetic response to her on the part of the youths, and by magical means, conducts them through fantastic rooms, on a psychic journey… (more)

Definitely one for the future viewing list. Meanwhile, one of Arnold’s tableaux photos, The Advantages of Modern Marriage, is currently on display in Cruising the Archive: Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles, 1945–1980 at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles. The exhibition runs to April 1st, 2012.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• James Bidgood

Weekend links 86

Salammbô by Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt) from Harry Crosby‘s Red Skeletons (1927). Dover published a new collection of Alastair’s drawings in September.

“A Taste of Honey showed working-class women from a working-class woman’s point of view, had a gay man as a central and sympathetic figure, and a black character who was neither idealised nor a racial stereotype.” RIP Shelagh Delaney. Related: Shelagh Delaney’s Salford (1960), directed by Ken Russell, and all 47 minutes (!) of The White Bus (1967), Lindsay Anderson’s strange, pre-If…. short, written by Shelagh Delaney, filmed in and around Manchester.

Since birth I’ve craved all things psychedelic, the energy and beauty of it. The pleasure… […] But in the US the exploration of consciousness and its powers—or really any curiosity about anything at all—is actively discouraged, because the system is so corrupt that it depends on people being virtually unconscious all the time. Burroughs cracked that code long ago. Spirituality here equals money; no one seems to be able to think, never mind explore their own consciousness.

Laurie Weeks: Making Magic Out of the Real

• Ian Albinson shows us The Title Design of Saul Bass while Ace Jet 170 has a copy of the new Bass monograph.

• Kris Kool (1970) at 50 Watts, Philip Caza’s lurid, erotic, psychedelic comic strip.

Götz Krafft by EM Lilien from a collection at Flickr.

• Serious Listeners: The Strange and Frightening World of Coil.

• The Octopus Chronicles, a new blog at Scientific American.

• We now live in a world where there are Ghost Box badges.

• Kilian Eng interviewed at Sci-Fi-O-Rama.

• Dalí Planet

• Bedabbled!

• A Taste of Honey (1962) by Acker Bilk | A Taste of Honey (1965) by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass | A Taste of Honey (Moog version) (1969) by Martin Denny.

Dalí’s discography

Lonesome Echo (1955) by Jackie Gleason.

Not a definitive list, I was merely browsing Discogs.com out of curiosity. For an artist eager to infiltrate every medium you’d expect there to be more involvement from Dalí with the music world. The Jackie Gleason is included here as the earliest entry for which the artist apparently provided a cover painting and a sleeve note. There’s a nice shot of the back cover on this page with its photo of Salvador and Jackie shaking hands.

L’Apothéose Du Dollar Racontée Par Salvador Dalí (1971).

Next up is a panegyric to one of the artist’s obsessions—money—recorded on a flexidisc for Crédit Commercial de France. Difficult to imagine any bank today promoting themselves with someone dropping phrases like “divine diahrrée“. A scarce item which can however be found on Ubuweb.

Je Suis Fou De Dalí (1975).

Here the artist extemporises (in French) to a trio of dutiful journalists. Ubuweb again has the entire album, together with a handful of other recordings. This page has some details of the discussion.

Etre Dieu has been mentioned here before owing to its connection with that cult composer of mine Igor Wakhévitch. Described as an “Opera-Poem: Audiovisual and Catarrah in six parts” it propels Dalí’s megalomania to cosmic proportions with the artist portraying a godlike version of himself. In attendance are an angel and two further Dalís, the male and female halves of an androgynous avatar with the female component being voiced by the great French actress Delphine Seyrig. The libretto is credited to Manuel Vázquez Montalban. The performance was recorded in 1974 but not released on disc until 1989. Not the best of Wakhévitch’s works at all, you’re better off with Logos or Docteur Faust.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí
• Mongolian impressions
• Hello Dali!
• Dalí and the City
• Dalí’s Elephant
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
• Dirty Dalí
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Dalí and Film
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• Dalí Atomicus
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

Alice in Liverpool

Alice and the Caterpillar (1865) by John Tenniel.

It’s perhaps surprising that an art gallery, rather than a library, is holding a huge survey exhibition about Alice, but then Carroll’s creation has been and still is the inspiration of artists, photographers, theatrical designers, animators, film-makers.

Thus Marina Warner writing about an exhibition of art based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice books opening at Tate Liverpool this Friday:

Alice in Wonderland will offer visitors a rare opportunity to view Carroll’s own drawings and photographs, alongside Victorian Alice memorabilia and John Tenniel’s preliminary drawings for the first edition of the novel.

Carroll’s stories were soon adopted by other artists. Surrealist artists from the 1930s onwards were drawn towards the fantastical world of Wonderland where natural laws were suspended. From the 1960s through the 1970s, Carroll’s Alice tales also prompted conceptual artists to explore language and its relationship to perception, and the stories inspired further responses in Pop and Psychedelic art. Expect to see works by artists ranging from Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, to Peter Blake and Yayoi Kusama. (more)

The exhibition runs to January 29th, 2012, and I suppose this gives me a convenient opportunity to point again to my psychedelic Alice calendars which have been updated for the forthcoming year.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Coulthart calendars for 2012
• Scenes from a carriage
• Through the Psychedelic Looking-Glass: the 2011 calendar
• Jabberwocky
• Alice in Acidland
• Return to Wonderland
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice

Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí

Yet another Dalí documentary, Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí is a welcome arrival at the splendid Ubuweb for its being the source of a number of sequences that turn up in later Dalí documentaries, notably the scenes of the artist and wife Gala emerging from giant eggs, and Dalí clattering away at a piano in which a number of unfortunate cats have been imprisoned. Jean-Christophe Averty is the director, and the narration for the English version is by Orson Welles. Ubuweb gives the date as 1967 but it’s listed as 1970 on IMDB. Whatever the year, it’s certainly the end of the 1960s with Dalí appearing a little more sprightly than in the Russell Harty film. He also appears wearing a shaggy wig out of sympathy for the youth of the day. (We know now that his sympathy for young men and women was more than a cultural interest.) Amid the usual boasting, tantrums and rather tiresome antics the filmmakers manage to come away with a couple of insights: at this point Gala was still appearing in public with Salvador, something she refused to do in later films. And there’s a trip by boat to a rocky coastline which Welles’ narration asserts was the inspiration for a number of the famous paintings. In all, it’s 52 minutes of craziness that’s recommended for anyone interested in Dalí’s art.

See also: Photographer David McCabe’s best shot in which that wig makes an appearance in the presence of another wig-wearing artist.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mongolian impressions
• Hello Dali!
• Dalí and the City
• Dalí’s Elephant
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
• Dirty Dalí
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Dalí and Film
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• Dalí Atomicus
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie