Monthly Archives: October 2007

Seduced at the Barbican

Fresco, 1st century AD, at the Villa dei Vetii, Pompeii
Not on show at the Barbican

Yesterday, “Seduced, Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now” opened at the Barbican Centre. Curated by Martin Kemp it features usual suspects Araki, Bacon, Bellmer, Boucher, Carracci, Fragonard, Goldin, Klimt, Koons, Mapplethorpe, Picasso, Rembrandt, Rodin, Schiele, Turner and Warhol.

You may want to pay it a visit for works by Marlene Dumas (X-posure, 1999) and Thomas Ruff (nudes ama14, 2000).

Dumas was new to me: here is her Google gallery.

Ruff I was familiar, but think I need to buy his book Nudes, a collaborative effort with Houellebecq. His Google gallery. And a Google gallery of the Nudes set.

Tip of the hat to John Coulthart

In praise of cover versions

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6l8zrsf4LY&]

Seu Jorge, a cover version of “Is there Life on Mars”

Happy birthday Pharoah and World Dance Music classic #8

Pharoah turns 67 today.

Thembi (1971) – Pharoah Sanders
(with on the cover I believe, Lonnie Liston Smith)

Pharoah Sanders (born October 13, 1940) is an American jazz saxophonist. Ornette Coleman once described him as “probably the best tenor player in the world.” Most of Sanders’ best-selling work was made in the late 1960s and early 1970s for Impulse Records, including the 30-minute wave-on-wave of free jazz “The Creator has a Master Plan” from the album Karma. Sanders’s works influenced a new generation when his music was a major influence on the British acid jazz scene from the late 1980s and 1990s. Most recently his work was compiled on You’ve Got to Have Freedom, which features my favorite and the most danceable and accessible track of Sanders: the 1980 You’ve Got to Have Freedom, which is number 8 in my World Dance Music Classic series.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdTgH1u7cmM]

World Dance Music Classic #8

Previous World Dance Music Classics

“I am a writer of tales of the uncanny”

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jQtkGJMtH0]

Fake H. P. Lovecraft 1933 WPA Newsreel Interview via William Gibson

Today, William Gibson reported on the above footage. In a second post, Gibson admits having been fooled. As he writes in a second post: “I guess I so wanted to believe that that was Lovecraft that I managed to ignore the actor’s complete lack of HPLoid bone-structure. (Lovecraft was one distinctively-jawed New Englander.)

Faking elder footage on YouTube, though, has great potential as a form.”

Italian white noise and avant-garde exploitation

“In 1951, the first electronic music studio was conceived from scratch at the WDR Radio of Cologne (Germany) to enable the composition of electronic music sounds. Briefly, the concept of studios evolved up to the 1955 design of the Phonology studio in Milan by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. With nine oscillators, various filters and other sophisticated equipment , the presence of a technician/musician (Marino Zuccheri), the studio was the best equipped in the world at that time.” via usoproject

You may also know Bruno Maderna from his work on Death Laid an Egg.

Good night, sleep tight.

La morte ha fatto l’uovo (1968) – Giulio Questi

In praise of non-eventfulness

Tomorrow is Brigitte Lahaie 52nd birthday. While researching for this post I stumbled upon the following clip which is a perfect example of the non-eventfulness I appreciate in some films. The first time the concept of non-eventfulness took shape was when I saw the extended scene in La Maman et la putain where one of the female protagonists puts a record on and listens to it in real-time (I believe this actually happens twice in that same film).

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZzV7HLSYpk]

Unidentified clip of early Lahaie (when she was still a brunette)

Please notice how the food Lahaie is about to eat, gazes back at her in the clumsy editing.

The most powerful image of Lahaie I know of is the one where she is photographed standing topless sort of straddling a Great Dane dog. Here.

And here is her Google gallery.

Happy birthday Brigitte.

I’m an eye. A mechanical eye.

Speaking of Ways of Seeing (see previous post).

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu1ejGmPk2w]

Beginning of the first of four Ways of Seeing at the BBC

This is a first for me, I’ve read the book, but had never seen the documentary film. Fascinating.

It starts with Berger cutting a piece out of a quattrocento painting in a museum, moves to showing a printing press printing the cut-out, switches then to fragments of Man with a Movie Camera accompanied by the text of the 1923 manifesto Kinoks Revolution, by Vertov (see below). Please also the checkbook lettering which were en vogue at the time.

Notes how Berger constistenly says “camewa” and “woom”.

An excerpt of Vertov’s manifesto:

“I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unkown to you.”

One just has to love Youtube for making all of this available. Filesharing has made music available (but not in real-time alas), Google books did the same for books, Youtube does it for the moving image. There is still a wealth of TV and radio documentaries waiting to be unearthed. I am particularly thinking of European state funded radio and television since the 1960s.

David Toop is coming to Brussels next Wednesday

David Toop (born 1949) is one of the more adventurous and intelligent music critics of the late 20th century. He is coming to the Argos center (Werfstraat 13 rue du Chantier) in Brussels next Wednesday at 20:30. I hope I can make it. I’ve never heard him lecture. Here is an excerpt from his intro at Argos.arts.

“Seeing comes before words. The child sees and recognizes before it can speak.” These are the first two sentences of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Berger defines sight as the primary human sense and introduces the idea that we find our place in the world through seeing. What this premise ignores is the fact that sound comes before seeing, and the child listens before it looks. In this lecture David Toop will investigate the position of sound in the realm of the senses, the relationship between hearing and seeing, between silence and not seeing. What did Marcel Duchamp mean when he proclaimed “one can look at seeing; one can’t hear hearing”? Are we living in a visual age, as the cliché goes, or rather in an aural world? What can words and images tell us about sonic absences and hauntings? What are the challenges sound artists, who work in the domain of visual arts, are confronted with?” —argosarts.org

Here is Toop interviewing Bjork @ Youtube.

Icons of counterculture #2

Utopia in the United States

Founded by Charles Fourier, died 170 years ago today

François Marie Charles Fourier (April 7, 1772 – October 10, 1837) was a French utopian socialist and philosopher. Fourier coined the word féminisme in 1837; as early as 1808, he had argued that the extension of women’s rights was the general principle of all social progress. Fourier inspired communism, situationism, 1960s countercultures and Hakim Bey. He was the subject of a study by Roland Barthes Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971), is mentioned in André Breton‘s Anthology of Black Humor (1940) and has a whole convolute dedicated to him in Walter Benjamin‘s Arcades Project.