Tarot – Page 12 – { feuilleton }

The Fool album covers

The Fool (1968).

Many people know the work of design collective The Fool even if they couldn’t tell you the name or the names of any of the individuals involved. The accelerated career trajectory of Dutch artists Marijke Koger and Simon Posthuma took them from a hippie enclave on the isle of Ibiza in 1966, to London and work for The Beatles throughout 1967 thanks to their distinctive brand of rainbow-hued psychedelia. Marijke Koger says the name The Fool was chosen after they met Crowley-obsessed blues singer Graham Bond who introduced them to the Tarot deck. Barry Finch and Josje Leeger later joined Koger and Posthuma. For The Beatles the group created the short-lived mural for the Apple boutique in Baker Street (removed after complaints), the decoration on John Lennon’s piano, and the inner sleeve for the Sgt Pepper album. The gatefold interior of the album was going to incorporate a Fool painting but Robert Fraser apparently persuaded the band to replace this with a group photo. The Fool themselves (and their decor) appear in the Beatles-produced feature film, Wonderwall (1968).

Proposed interior for the Sgt Pepper album (1967).

Given all this sudden visibility it’s surprising they weren’t more in demand for album cover designs although they were also busy producing florid outfits for other groups. The Beatles clothes on the All You Need is Love broadcast are Fool creations. Of the album covers, the one for The Incredible String Band is probably the most well-known. This small collection reminds me I still haven’t heard Evolution by The Hollies. The work on that cover led to a collaboration with Graham Nash on an album by The Fool (and session musicians) in 1968. The collective split up in 1969 with Marijke Koger and Simon Posthuma relocating to California.

• Marijke Koger-Dunham’s site
• Simon Posthuma’s site

Sgt Pepper inner sleeve.

The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion (1967) by The Incredible String Band.

Evolution (1967) by The Hollies. Clothes and design by The Fool, photo by Karl Ferris.

Picknick (1967) by Boudewijn De Groot.

Move (1968) by The Move.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Through the Wonderwall

Fetish photographer Rick Castro

Photographs by Rick Castro.

Presenting another guest post from John Wisniewski who back in May contributed an interview with William E. Jones about gay film director Fred Halsted. The subject this time is Rick Castro, pioneering bondage/S&M photographer, and also the proprietor of the Antebellum Gallery in Los Angeles which bills itself as the only fetish gallery in America. Castro has worked with Joel-Peter Witkin and Bruce LaBruce, and also photographed subjects as diverse as the Dalai Lama and Kenneth Anger, neither of them in bondage, unfortunately. As before, John offers a list of ten questions. Read on to discover why hustlers always used to wear white jeans (I have wondered about this)…

* * *

John Wisniewski: When did you begin photographing?

Rick Castro: 1986…around June…. My first photo was of my longtime friend (and former GF!), Odessa. I was a wardrobe stylist at the time, so I dressed her like Morticia Addams. Very high contrast/high shadowed B&W.

My second photo was of Tony Ward. I cast him for his first “mainstream” photo shoot. Editorial for a now defunct men’s magazine, INSTYLE, (published by porn mag IN TOUCH). We were working for photographer Albert Sanchez at the time. Between takes I’d dressed him up in full leather fantasy—leather hood, harness, gauntlets, codpiece, boots and horsetail!

JW: Whom are some of your influences in photography and art?

RC: I like the dead guys: Brassai, Pierre Moliner, F. Holland Day, Julia Margaret Cameron, Otto Dix, Paul Cadmus, Egon Schiele, Tennessee Williams, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gilles De Rais.

JW: When did you meet fellow photographer Joel-Peter Witkin?

RC: Also during 1986, I bought Joel’s first book. At the back of the book was a request: “I am looking for people with physical deformations, amputees. Quadriplegics, burn victims, persons into extreme S&M, a woman with three breasts, geeks, pinheads, a woman with severe skin disease that will pose in an evening gown, anyone bearing the wounds of Christ, Christ.”

Later that year the new annex of Book Soup on Sunset Blvd hosted the first LA photo exhibit for Joel. I attended, introduced myself and gave him a stack of photos I had taken of my potential “models.” He called me the next morning. From then I worked with Joel on 13 of his most iconic photographs as a wardrobe stylist, costume designer, location scout, model scout, casting director, photo assistant, art director, make up artist and all around assistant.

Continue reading “Fetish photographer Rick Castro”

Palladini’s Aquarian Tarot

For the past two months I’ve been busy drawing a new set of Tarot designs. More about these later, but sporadic research has naturally led to me to look at a few earlier sets, although my Trumps have mostly been following Pamela Colman Smith’s illustrations for the Waite deck. Tarot designs have really proliferated in the past few years (Is there a Lego Tarot? Yes, of course there is), so much so that many previous designs which would once have been notable are now swamped by mediocre decks.

David Palladini’s Aquarian Tarot first appeared in 1970 when the occult revival was getting into its stride. Palladini had contributed to the Linweave Tarot in 1967 along with three other artists, something you can read more about at the excellent Sweet Jane’s Pop Boutique. I’m sure I must have seen the Aquarian Tarot in the past but probably dismissed it for being too modish and not occult enough; for a long time Aleister Crowley’s Thoth deck was the only one I’d look at. Palladini’s art is a lot more familiar now that his fabulous poster for Nosferatu the Vampyre looks down on me every day, and I’ve grown to enjoy his combination of Art Nouveau and Deco motifs so much that I wouldn’t mind a pack of these cards. The Aeclectic site reviews the deck, and has a few more examples of the designs. They also review the New Palladini Tarot which the artist produced in 1996. Given the choice I’d still go for the earlier set.

Continue reading “Palladini’s Aquarian Tarot”

Le Tarot de Philippe Lemaire

Philippe Lemaire is French, and another engraving collage artist who I’d have to include in the list of post-Ernst practitioners if I ever get round to updating my Strange Attractor essay about Wilfried Sätty. Like Ernst and Sätty, Lemaire seems to use paper-and-scissors techniques, although Sätty also made use of print processes in order to duplicate the images he cut from old books, and also resize, flip or invert them. In this he’s the bridge between the original method of engraving collage and digital techniques.

The examples here are from a small series of Tarot images on the artist’s website, none of which are labelled so we’re left to guess the identity of what I presume are figures from the Major Arcana. The one above may be The Empress but the other two resist easy interpretation. Judge the others for yourself here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tarotism and Fergus Hall
• Giger’s Tarot
• The Occult Explosion
• Wilfried Sätty album covers
• Nature Boy: Jesper Ryom and Wilfried Sätty
• Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
• The Major Arcana by Jak Flash
• The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951
• The Major Arcana

Weekend links 154

Collage by Chloé Poizat.

• Xenis Emputae Travelling Band plays the Music of John Dee, and free at Bandcamp: Victorian Machine Music by Plinth, the “creaking, winding, piping, chiming and wood-knocking of Victorian parlour music machines”.

• Jeremy Willard on Mikhail Kuzmin, “the Oscar Wilde of Russia”. Related: Conner Habib on the Disinfo podcast discussing pornography, sexuality, and whether sex be a revolutionary act.

• Ed Vulliamy paid a visit to Hawkwind’s Hawkeaster festival. The Hawks’ Warrior On The Edge Of Time album is released in a remastered edition next month.

• Blasts from the past: Mahavishnu Orchestra, live in France, August 23rd, 1972, and Ashra (Manuel Göttsching & Lutz Ulbrich) in Barcelona, 1981.

An illustration by Alberto Martini for Raw Edges (1908) by Perceval Landon.

• NASA’s cover designs for Space Program manuals, guidebooks, press kits, reports and brochures.

• PingMag—”Art, Design, Life – from Japan”—makes a welcome return as an active blog.

• Suzanne Treister‘s Hexen 2.0 Tarot designs.

• Listening to records that no longer exist

• The architectural origins of the chess set

• The Bohemian Realm of Absinthiana

• Les sources d’une île: a Tumblr

• Hammer Without A Master (1998) by Broadcast | Test Area (1999) by Broadcast | Make My Sleep His Song (2009) by Broadcast & The Focus Group