John Coulthart's Blog, page 315

Weekend links

Three Seekers (2009) by Kelly Louise Judd.

• Kevin Sessums talked to Elizabeth Taylor in 1997 about Tennessee Williams, her Aids activism and related matters. Other related matters: Catholics lead the way on same-sex marriage and Mahatma Gandhi was in love with a German body-builder named Hermann.

• Cray porn (the computer, that is) at Barnbrook Design as the CD package for Interplay by John Foxx and The Maths is unveiled.

• Michael Rother and Friends Play the Music Of Neu! A stream of an hour-long concert from August 2010.

One of the tragedies of drug prohibition is that we have never developed a culture in which young people can learn how to use powerful drugs properly from older, wiser and more experienced psychonauts. I count myself lucky to have encountered such good teachers to guide me with such drugs as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA and mescaline.

Dr Susan Blackmore on using LSD.

• Another Dispatch in a World of Multiple Veils, a new release by Arkhonia.

• Micromachina by Scott Bain "examines what makes the insect world tick".

• Down with art!: the age of manifestos. Related: The Manifesto Manifesto.

• John Patterson: "We're all living in the future as seen by Philip K Dick."

• Music To Play In The Dark: A Wake For Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson.

• Albert Einstein, Radical: A Political Profile.

• Was "God's Wife" edited out of the Bible?

• Porn made for women, by women.

• Hallogallo (1972) by Neu! | Opa-Loka (1975) by Hawkwind | Jenny Ondioline (1993) by Stereolab | Hallogallo (1997) by Porcupine Tree.

The Vengeance of Nitocris

Cover illustration by CC Senf.

In her mind the queen Nitocris was seeing a ghastly picture. It was the picture of a room of orgy and feasting suddenly converted into a room of terror and horror, human beings one moment drunken and lustful, the next screaming in the seizure of sudden and awful death. If any of those present had been empowered to see also that picture of dire horror, they would have clambered wildly to make their escape. But none was so empowered.

Everyone today will be marking the Tennessee Williams centenary by noting his theatre work, of course, or his subversive celebration of outsiders and, yes, the gays. I'll confine myself to reminding people that Williams' first published work was a short story entitled The Vengeance of Nitocris in Weird Tales for August 1928, written when he was only 16. The story reads like the work of a teenager but editor Farnsworth Wright evidently enjoyed an atmosphere of lurid Egyptian melodrama which you can appraise for yourself here. Also in this issue was the debut appearance of Robert E Howard's Solomon Kane, and The Demoiselle d'Ys by Robert Chambers. Seeing the name Nitocris I have to wonder whether Williams chose it after reading HP Lovecraft who used the name twice in earlier stories published in the same magazine, Imprisoned With the Pharaohs (1924) and The Outsider (1926). That last piece was one of Lovecraft's most popular tales, and it's easy to imagine its grotesque parable of alienation making an impression on a would-be writer who, as a gay youth, would have looked upon himself as another kind of outsider.

Previously on { feuilleton }

• The King in Yellow

Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #15

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. This week there's another jump in the running order, from volume 12 to 15, and it's impossible to avoid feeling frustrated by this when some of the previous editions have been so good. Volume 15 covers the period from October 1904 to March 1905, and includes work by the Wiener Werkstätte whose rectilinear designs mark the transition from Art Nouveau to what would eventually be called Art Deco. There's also another feature on the Glasgow Arts and Crafts movement based around Charles Rennie Mackintosh with a look at the designs for Hill House in Helensburgh, Scotland. As usual, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail is advised to download the entire volume at the Internet Archive. There'll be more DK&D next week.

The peculiar Symbolist paintings of gay artist Sascha Schneider are featured once again, and typically for this artist there's a profusion of male flesh on display.

One of several illustrations by Jessie M King.

A tomb design by Hermann Obrist.

Another feature on the colossal Wertheim department store, Berlin, designed by Alfred Messel, and damaged beyond repair during the Second World War.

Decorative panels by Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh.

Previously on { feuilleton }

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #12

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #11

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #10: Turin and Vienna

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #10: Heinrich Vogeler

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #9

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #8

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #7

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #6

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #5

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #4

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #2

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #1

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration

• Jugend Magazine revisited

• The art of Sascha Schneider, 1870–1927

Elizabeth Taylor, 1932–2011

Remember her for her incomparable beauty, her great performances in great films, the camp confections like Cleopatra and Boom, and years of activism on behalf of gay people:

There is no gay agenda, it's a human agenda. Why shouldn't gay people be able to live as open and freely as everybody else? What it comes down to, ultimately, is love. How can anything bad come out of love? The bad stuff comes out of mistrust, misunderstanding and, God knows, from hate and from ignorance.

It would also be remiss of me (since no obituaries will be tasteless enough to mention it) if I didn't note her presence at the heart of one of the more notorious novels of the past fifty years. I often used to wonder whether anyone had told her about Crash. Not that she'd want to know about it if they did; who would be eager to read detailed plans for their own horrific death? But it was her status as a 20th century icon, the sine qua non of film stardom, that made her the perfect choice as the focus of Vaughan's obsessions in JG Ballard's novel.

• Elizabeth Taylor: a career in clips

Gothic details

Gargoyles, Notre Dame de Paris.

These aren't all as old as they look, the gargoyles are part of Viollet-le-Duc's 19th century restoration of Notre Dame, but the sepia tone makes them seem complementary. There's a lot more at the Andrew White Architectural Photographs Collection at Luna Commons.

Wrought iron torch holder or horse tether from the Strozzi Palace by Benedetto da Maiano.

Flying buttresses, Reims Cathedral.

Previously on { feuilleton }

• Schloss Falkenstein

• Pite's West End folly

• Viollet-le-Duc

The Public Voice by Lejf Marcussen

is a Danish filmmaker whose animation Den Offentlige Røst (The Public Voice, 1988) I know from UK TV screenings, back in the days when the TV channels here used to screen more than cookery shows and soap operas. This is a short Surrealist piece which begins with zoom into a Paul Delvaux painting then reverses the process by pulling back from a continually changing picture some of whose details can be seen here. It is, of course, better to watch the film than read a description of it which is why I kept hoping a copy might turn up on YouTube. Sure enough, a rough copy has been languishing there for two years so I suggest you watch it here while you have the chance. These obscure shorts have a habit of getting deleted, and this miniature marvel is more obscure than most.

Previously on { feuilleton }

• Patrick Bokanowski again

• L'Ange by Patrick Bokanowski

• The Hour-Glass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has

• Babobilicons by Daina Krumins

• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited

• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk

• The Brothers Quay on DVD

Thomas Mackenzie's Aladdin

The tip for this one came via Beautiful Century. Thomas Mackenzie (1887–1944) was a minor British illustrator whose work I hadn't seen before, and if I'd seen the picture above uncredited I might have taken it for something by Kay Nielsen or Edmund Dulac. Mackenzie's colour plates for the 1919 edition of Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp in Rhyme by Arthur Ransome are very similar to his more famous contemporaries, while the black-and-white pieces owe a considerable debt to Aubrey Beardsley, especially the title page below. Not all the drawing is as assured as one might hope but the book as a whole is still worth a look.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }

• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }

• More Arabian Nights

• Edward William Lane's Arabian Nights Entertainments

Weekend links

James Bidgood's luscious and erotic micro-budget masterpiece Pink Narcissus (1971) receives a screening at the IFC Center Queer/Art/Film festival, NYC, on Monday. The film is presented by Jonathan Katz, curator of the Hide/Seek gay art show whose controversial history was recounted here in December. The NYT ran a short piece about Bidgood, now 77 and not the first artist to be disappointed by his past work; they also have a Bidgood slideshow. Hide/Seek, meanwhile, is now a touring exhibition.

• Related: the delightful Drew Daniel of Matmos (and Soft Pink Truth) posing in a jockstrap at the Club Uranus, San Francisco circa 1990; he also used to go-go dance wearing a fish.

• The Isle of Man may have one of the oldest parliaments in the world but its laws have often been out of step with its neighbour across the Irish Sea. This week the island joined the rest of the UK in granting civil partnerships to its citizens. Now the name whose punning appeal so delighted James Joyce doesn't seem as inappropriate.

• Howard Jacobson: "The novelist Yukio Mishima posed pointing a Samurai sword to his chest and ultimately had himself beheaded in public. This is what's called taking your art seriously."

The Realm of the Queen of the Night (1974) by Wolfgang Hutter from Zauberflote at 50 Watts.

The revelatory operations of the chance encounter lie at the heart of le merveilleux ("the marvelous")—the Surrealist conception of beauty. You find something marvelous in the world (an object, an image, a person, a place) that corresponds, like a piece clicking into a puzzle, to a deep inner need.

Slicing Open the Eyeball: Rick Poynor on Surrealism and the Visual Unconscious by Mark Dery.

• Boy from the Boroughs: Alan Moore interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid; Michael Moorcock interviewed at Suicide Girls.

• Illustrations from Quark, the anthology of speculative fiction edited by Samuel Delany & Marilyn Hacker in 1970.

• The Residents, sans masks, filmed at their San Francisco home in the 1970s.

• Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor played on a glass harp.

• What art can do for science (and vice versa).

• You can never have too much Virgil Finlay.

• Lydia Kiesling reviews Lolita.

• Alain Resnais film posters.

• Red Mug, Blue Linen.

• No GDM (dub version) (1979) by Gina X | L. Voag's Kitchen (2004) by Soft Pink Truth.

The Arms of the Art

The Arms of the Art (2000).

An addendum to the Splendor Solis post. The Arms of the Art was a drawing I did in 2000 intended to inaugurate a series of pencil improvisations based on the Splendor Solis alchemical plates. As things turned out I only managed the first in the series (the picture it uses as a starting point is here) and about half of the second one which is languishing in a pad somewhere. Nothing in this drawing was planned or sketched beforehand, it was all done directly onto the paper, the idea being that I'd take the basic symbols or elements of each plate as a starting point and see what emerged once I began moving the pencil around. What usually emerges in these situations is a kind of abstracted landscape of hybrid forms that could be either mineral, organic or something in between. Some of the paintings I was doing in the 1990s followed a similar process, the challenge being to see how far you can develop things without the result becoming either too pictorial or too abstract; the painting below is an earlier example. I still like the idea of re-interpreting the Splendor Solis, and if I didn't have other projects in progress I might be prepared to try it again. Maybe later.

Eidolon (1997).

Previously on { feuilleton }

• Splendor Solis

Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #12

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 12 covers the period from April 1903 to September 1903, and this edition opens with a feature on the French Art Nouveau artist and designer George de Feure. This is followed by more from sculptor Franz Metzner including some of his designs for Germany's many Bismarck monuments. Earlier volumes of DK&D have featured similar Bismarck designs by other architects but they tend to be as ponderous as you'd expect, the kind of thing which nationalists of the time would have found grand but which to our eyes look either pompous or—at their worst—quasi-fascist. Another feature on artist Paul Bürck finishes the edition. As before, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail is advised to download the entire volume at the Internet Archive. There'll be more DK&D next week.

A sphinx-shaped tomb (?) by Franz Metzner that's almost sinister enough to be the model for the entrance to the Morlocks' lair in The Time Machine.

A lengthy feature on the drawings of Joseph Sattler shows the artist's macabre side. I've seen this stamping skeleton before but little else of his work which tends towards depictions of medieval life.

The Goethe monument at Darmstadt created by Ludwig Habich. Wikimedia Commons has a view of the statue as it is today looking somewhat weathered and with grafitti around its genitals.

Paul Bürck's drawings this time round include some odd fantasy pieces and caricatures.

Previously on { feuilleton }

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #11

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #10: Turin and Vienna

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #10: Heinrich Vogeler

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #9

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #8

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #7

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #6

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #5

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #4

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #2

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #1

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration

• Jugend Magazine revisited