Slade – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 361

The Future Vol.2 (2016) by f1x-2.

• One of the notable things about the reaction to the original series of Twin Peaks was the way in which Americans were astonished that something so outré could be allowed on television. Here in the UK the response was a little more subdued; we had, after all been spoiled for years by The Prisoner, Sapphire and Steel, and numerous odd and challenging dramas by Dennis Potter and others. Pre-dating all of these was The Strange World of Gurney Slade (1960), a six-part series starring Anthony Newley that was unprecedented in its Surrealism. Andy Murray looks back at the series, and at the rest of Newley’s career.

• Andrew Dickson on Peter Ackroyd whose latest book, Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day, is published later this month.

• Alyona Sokolnikova on a Soviet vision of the future: the legacy and influence of Tekhikia – Molodezhi (Technology for the Youth) magazine.

You know who weren’t cops? All the radicals and queers and artists and dreamers that were there while I grew up, my mom and dad’s old friends from New York and the wider bohemian world, the actors and the drag queens and the dilettantes and the ex junkies and the current junkies, the kind of queer people who wouldn’t get caught dead getting married, the people who actually made the “old New York” of the myth into what it was. They were smart and they were funny and they were tougher than I can imagine and they were possessed of an existential commitment to the idea that life is complicated and so we shouldn’t be quick to judge. They were tolerant, in the true sense, even while they were tireless advocates for actual justice. […] Now we’re Rudy Giuliani, trying to get offensive art pulled off the walls. Now we’re the book burners. Now we’re the censors. Now we attack the ACLU for defending free speech. Now we screech about community morals. Now we’re the prison camp screws. That’s us. Me, I could never be one of the good ones. Never. I can never live up to that ideal. I know I’m not good enough. I know when the judgment day comes, I go down. And so I decline. You can decline, too.

Planet of Cops by Freddie deBoer, or how inflexible morality makes everyone a cop

• Mixes of the week: FACT Mix 601 by Dark Entries, Secret Thirteen Mix 221 by Eli Keszler, and XLR8R Podcast 490 by Ben Lukas Boysen.

• At Dangerous Minds: Punk, Patti Smith, William Burroughs & capitalism: A “conceptual conversation” with RE/Search’s Vale.

• Emily Wells on the strange, irreverent worlds of Down Below and The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington.

• Rick Poynor on Mike Halliwell’s montages based on JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition.

• “Why are the British so scared of cannabis?” asks Professor David Nutt.

• Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (1978) by Arthur Evans.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jacques Rivette Day.

• Designing Penguin Modern Classics

• Future Dub (1994) by Mouse On Mars | Future Proof (2003) by Massive Attack | Future (2004) by Alva Noto

Derek Jarman’s landscapes

Landscape with Marble Mountain (1967).

1968 – The Lisson Gallery

I have been painting landscapes fairly consistently since I left school, and during that time they’ve changed a great deal. At first they were sparked off by holidays with Aunt Isobel at Kilve in North Somerset. I painted the red-brown earth and dark green of the Quantock Hills, which are at their brightest under the stormy grey skies which blow up over the Bristol Channel. In these paintings there are megaliths and standing stones and clumps of beech trees. By 1965 this has all changed. Oil paint is out. Aquatec, the new acrylic paint, in. The canvas is no longer rough brown flax, but a smooth white cotton duck. The use of rulers and masking tape produces a metrical precision, and replaces improvisation.

I began a series of landscapes which were larger—you have to paint large at the Slade or nobody notices. They have flat red grounds, blue skies, above eye-tricking imagery: Trompe l’oeil water, real taps, classical statues. The largest of these canvases, nine feet by seven, wins the Peter Stuyvesant award for painting at the Young Contemporaries show at the Tate in May 1967.

Since then things have changed again, and at my one-man show, my first one-man show at the Lisson, the canvases have become linear and perfectly balanced. There are no longer any figures or objects, and definitely no jokes. The canvases which are left raw resemble marble through which a grid of lines has been scored.

Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (1991)

I don’t have a book of Derek Jarman’s paintings so the pictures featured here—taken from the BBC’s collection of public artworks in Britain—are the only examples I’ve seen of his landscapes. These are surprisingly minimal compared to the richly textured Super-8 films he started making in the early 1970s, but then his painting—which is only one facet of his artistic output—went through several distinct periods. It’s notable that he mentions painting standing stones from an early age given their presence in the Avebury series below, and in his beguiling short, A Journey to Avebury (1971).

(Note: Landscape with Marble Mountain is shown on the BBC site as a portrait picture which would appear to be an error. I’ve taken the liberty of rotating the image anti-clockwise.)

Landscape with a Blue Pool (1967).

Landscape (no date).

Landscape II (no date).

Avebury Series No.2 (1973).

Avebury Series No.4 (1973).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Derek Jarman album covers
• Ostia, a film by Julian Cole
• Derek Jarman In The Key Of Blue
• The Dream Machine
• Jarman (all this maddening beauty)
• Sebastiane by Derek Jarman
• A Journey to Avebury by Derek Jarman
• Derek Jarman’s music videos
• 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

Weekend links 145

Weird Tales, October 1933. Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

• Michael Moorcock’s novels are being republished this year by Gollancz in a range of print and digital editions. Publishing Perspectives asks Is Now a Perfect Time for a Michael Moorcock Revival? • Related: Dangerous Minds posted The Chronicle of the Black Sword: A Sword & Sorcery Concert from Hawkwind and Michael Moorcock. My sleeve for that album was the last I did for the band. • Obliquely related: Kensington Roof Gardens appear as a location in several Moorcock novels, and also provided a venue for the author’s 50th birthday party. If you have a spare £200m you may be interested in buying them once Richard Branson’s lease expires.

• One of my favourite things in Mojo magazine was a list by Jon Savage of 100 great psychedelic singles (50 from the UK, 50 from the US). This week he presented a list of the 20 best glam-rock songs of all time. For the record, Blockbuster by The Sweet was the first single I bought so I’ve always favoured that song over Ballroom Blitz.

• The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage is a forthcoming book by J. David Spurlock about the Weird Tales cover artist. Steven Heller looks at her life (I’d no idea she knew Djuna Barnes) while io9 has some of her paintings. Related: Illustrations for Weird Tales by Virgil Finlay.

The masterpiece of Mann’s Hollywood period is, of course, Paracelsus (1937), with Charles Laughton. Laughton’s great bulk swims into pools of scalding light out of greater or lesser shoals of darkness like a vast monster of the deep, a great black whale. The movie haunts you like a bad dream. Mann did not try to give you a sense of the past; instead, Paracelsus looks as if it had been made in the Middle Ages – the gargoyle faces, bodies warped with ague, gaunt with famine, a claustrophobic sense of a limited world, of chronic, cramped unfreedom.

The Merchant of Shadows (1989) by Angela Carter. There’s more of her writing in the LRB Archive.

• Television essayist Jonathan Meades was back on our screens this week. The MeadesShrine at YouTube gathers some of his earlier disquisitions on culture, place, buildings and related esoterica.

• Sometimes snark is the only worthwhile response: An A-Z Guide to Music Journalist Bullshit.

• London venue the Horse Hospital celebrates 20 years of unusual events.

• The Politics of Dread: An Interview with China Miéville.

• How Giallo Can You Go? Antoni Maiovvi Interviewed.

• A guide to Terry Riley’s music.

• Three more for the glam list: Coz I Love You (1971) by Slade | Get It On (1971) by T. Rex | Starman (40th Anniversary Mix) (1972) by David Bowie

A Moment of Inspiration, 1983

Marc Almond (1983) by John Coulthart.

This, girls and boys, is how we occupied ourselves in the long nights before the advent of 24-hour television: we sat up drawing portraits of Marc Almond. A conversation on Twitter reminded me of this, a drawing that’s never before appeared in public but which is now added to the web collection. For a quick piece of art it’s actually a lot more successful than many of the more laboured things of mine that were printed far and wide at this time. The portrait was copied from a magazine photo, I forget which one, possibly Flexipop if it was still going, an increasingly wayward title that had a soft spot (so to speak) for Soft Cell. The Spanish hat identifies it as being from the Torment and Toreros period while the lettering was taken from Val Denham and Huw Feather’s cover design for the first Marc and The Mambas album, Untitled (1982). The padded-cell background refers, of course, to Marc’s former group, and was copied from the back of the Bedsitter 12″. Most of the drawing is done in black Biro pen with the hat and shirt in gouache. On the back I happened to make a note of the date, something I seldom bother with.

The Twitter conversation was prompted by the appearance of Soft Cell’s notorious Sex Dwarf video at Dangerous Minds; Flexipop enjoyed the scurrilous side of Soft Cell so much they printed a still from this Bacchanal as a centre-spread in one of their issues. Meanwhile Marc himself was writing in the Guardian this week about Bowie manqué Jobriath, one of the real-life inspirations for the Brian Slade character in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, and the subject of a feature-length documentary, Jobriath A.D., by Kieran Turner, currently showing at the BFI’s London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Derek Jarman’s music videos

The art of George Sheringham, 1884–1937

Baptism of Dylan, Son of the Wave from The Cauldron of Anwn (c. 1902).

About the artist:

George Sheringham was born in London. He studied art first at the Slade School (1899–1901) before leaving for Paris, where he studied from 1904–1906. Chiefly known as a designer of stage sets and decorative artist he was also illustrator of works by Arthur Conan Doyle and Max Beerbohm. He was the author of Drawing in Pen and Pencil (1922) and Design in the Theatre (with James Laver, 1927). An invalid from 1932, he continued to paint flowers until his death.

About the work:

This striking series of paintings were commissioned by the 8th Lord Howard de Walden (Baron Seaford) to illustrate his Celtic poem, The Cauldron of Anwn. It has been suggested that they were part of a decorative sceme for de Walden and it is therefore likely that they were part of his remodelling on the interior of Seaford House in Belgravia which he undertook from 1902 onwards. The modifications at Seaford House included the panelling of the dining room and installation of an onyx staircase and frieze carved from marble imported from South America. No expense was spared and it is said that to ensure a supply of the right kind of marble, Baron Seaford bought the mine.

The series of The Cauldron of Anwyn reflects Sheringham’s interest in oriental ornamentation and also reflects modern approaches to book illustration. A close comparison can be drawn between Sheringham’s work and that of Edmund Dulac and Sheringham’s work is also suggestive of a more exotic continental approach to decoration. Sheringham had studied at the Slade School between 1899 and 1901 and in Paris between 1904 and 1906. The qualities of his work were recognised in Paris before they were in Britain and his first exhibits were at the Paris Salon. He was born and lived in London all his life and became well known as a decorative artist, applying his talents to costume and scenery design for various theatrical productions. He also illustrated many books including The Happy Hypocrite and Design in Theatre and this interest in intricate decoration was transposed into his interior design work.

• The Cauldron of Anwyn at ARC.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive