Category Archives: aesthetics

Viewing ‘wrong’ films for the right reasons

Muralla by Bofill

The image above is Xanadu in Calpe, Alicante (1969-1983), a surreal structure designed by Ricardo Bofill where the action of Jess Franco‘s 1980 Sade appropriation Eugenie, historia de una perversión is set. Robert Monell remarks that “this labyrinthine structure boggles the eye and teases our sense of perspective. This interior can be seen, shot from a radically different angle, in 1973’s The Perverse Countess.” Bofill’s design for the Catalan resort of Xanadu consists of a seven-story block with cubical living spaces arranged around a central utility core. Franco used this structure several times [1], [2].

Of all the “Euro trash” exploitation directors (I’m not counting Alain Robbe-Grillet, that’s artsploitation), Jess Franco had a knack for finding good interiors and exteriors. One of his films is set in Park Guell of Gaudi, but there are undoubtedly countless other examples to be found.

Of related interest is The Wrong House exhibition, on Hitchcock and architecture, currently showing in Antwerp.

Guilty pleasures #3

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO96CaLFRBw]

Cargo de Nuit (1983) Axel Bauer

The clip is directed by French photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino (1983). It is an homage to the movie Querelle by Fassbinder. To us, in the early eighties, Querelle was the quintessence of the macho/gay sensibility and it was copied by musicians such as Luc Van Acker on the cover of The Ship[1] album. Jean-Paul Gaultier appropriated this seaman’s aesthetic and celebrated it all through the early eighties.

Querelle (1982) – Rainer Werner Fassbinder
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Fassbinder’s adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel features surreal sets that underscore the dreamlike quality and abstraction of the novel. It was Fassbinder’s final and, by his own words, most important movie.

Digression #1: Axel Bauer is not related to John Bauer:

John Bauer

John Bauer

 

More monkeys in art

In Consultation (1924) – Joseph Schippers

Monkey Portraits (2006) – Jill Greenberg
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Gorilla and Woman (1887) – Emmanuel Frémiet

Some paintings of Gabriel von Max, Joseph Schippers, Chardin. The photography of Jill Greenberg. The sculpture of Fremiet. King Kong at the low art end of the spectrum. Is there a work dedicated to the representation of apes and monkeys in art outside of The Monkey in Art (1994) by Ptolemy Tompkins?

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.

Faultlines in 20th century art

Fault lines caused by an ancient earthquake

Faultlines in 20th century art

The classification above is indebted to Sex in History by Gordon Rattray Taylor (see Matrism and Patrism) and the work of Camille Paglia, especially Sexual Personae. Both theorists classify along Apollonian and Dionysian axes.

Lost and found: biomorphism

Unidentified Art Nouveau/Art Deco object

The previous post by >dmtls Merzbau on Carlo Mollino prompted me to Google for the term biomorphism once more and there it was, the image I had found on the web a couple of years back but had since been unable to find again. Biomorphism connects with anthropomorphism, zoomorphism, Casa Milà, Surrealism, the grotesque, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Isamu Noguchi, Carlo Mollino, Luigi Colani in the visual realm and with literary tropes in the work of H. P. Lovecraft and Lautréamont; and provides a potent antidote to sexless modernism.