Category Archives: art

More text on Bourdin over at my page and pictures over at Flickr.

Also, this picture a very good illustration of Bourdin’s fascination with disembodied limbs, what I like to call independent body parts in fiction, of which I’ve blogged here.

Trivia: Madonna was sued in 2004 for using the copyrighted work of the late French fashion photographer Guy Bourdin in her music video for the American Life track “Hollywood”[YouTube]. It was claimed she reenacted poses from at least eleven of the late photographer’s erotically tinged photos. Madonna settled the copyright lawsuit out of court.^[4]

François Houtin’s imaginary gardens

Imaginary gardens with real toads in them

The French printmaker François Houtin (1950- ) is an artist whose work has been devoted almost exclusively to the depiction of imaginary gardens.

See www.spamula.net/blog/2007/02/houtin.html

Also an interesting blog: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com, introduced by Mr Aitch of Il Giornale as:

I’m grateful to Peacay, of Bibliodyssey renown, for introducing me to the work of this artist, nicely described by his friend and collaborator Gilbert Lascault as ‘the printmaker-gardener, the draughtsman-nurseryman, the demanding dreamer, the landscape artist, and the arboriculturalist-etcher.’

Here is another superb post from Bibliodyssey:

German naturalist Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber (1739-1810) trained as a physician and went and studied botany in Sweden under the great Carolus Linneaus. He would eventually edit one of Linneaus’s publications and he also included the Linnean binomial species naming system for the first time for some of the animals depicted above.

And this one on cabinets of curiosities is a must.

Eye candy #1

Some recent Flickr uploads. Flickr is one of the most elegant content publishing platforms I’ve encountered in a long time. If you have a blog heavily involving pictures, it pays just to publish them there and write your blog entries over at Flickr, you can very easily include any kind of links to other pictures or outside of Flickr.

Click the pictures to find more info.

My mother’s favorite song

Steven Hall, whom I first met in 2000, is now on MySpace, under the moniker Buddhist Army. So am I, not as Jahsonic (somebody had beat me to it) but as MetaSoul. The similarities do not end there. We both feature his brilliant track — and also the favorite track of Steven’s mother — ‘Volleyball’. Click one of our spaces to listen.

One can easily recognize Steven’s guitar as the guitar on many a Arthur Russell track. Here is Steven Hall’s profile at Discogs.

‘Volley Ball’ sounds like nothing else I’ve heard in a while but to give you an idea it’s similar to:

Padlock EP (1983) – Gwen Guthrie with Sly and Robbie, the ‘Padlock’ track can be heard here, unfortunately simultaneously with another choice Guthrie track: ‘Closer’, turn one off.
Arthur Russell tracks, obviously, at MySpace here, here, and here are more.
Josephine (La Version Francaise) by Chris Rea (here at Youtube, not the Version Francaise.), don’t be offended Steven, your song is way better.

Update: Steven notifies me that he doesn’t want to “take all the credit for the Volleyball song. Daniel Wang programmed and recorded the beat with that relentless bell–I used it readymade–I liked this beat so much I used it for another song that appears on the same live concert cd–“Go For The Night” which is one of only two songs that Arthur and I ever wrote together.”

Awe of nature, taste for the bizarre, thirst for knowledge

I found some excellent plates of the Monstrorum historia cum Paralipomenis historiae omnium animalium by the Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522 – 1605) at the Universidade de Coimbra. You can view full sized versions by clicking the thumbnails. In the same collection are also plates by Ambroise Paré, Conrad Gessner, Bartolomeo Ambrosinus, Olaus Magnus, Giovanni Cavazzi da Montecuccolo.

Here are the Wikipedia links: Ambroise Paré, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Conrad Gessner, Bartolomeo Ambrosinus, Olaus Magnus, Giovanni Cavazzi da Montecuccolo.

Il Giornale Nuovo has two posts on Aldrovandi: Aldrovandi’s Watercolours and Aldrovandi’s Herbal. Mr. Aitch adds:

Plants, sea-creatures, serpents, birds, domestic beasts, exotic creatures, ‘monsters’ (deformed animals, freaks of nature, conjoined twins, etc.) are all depicted in these watercolours, as are fantastic fauna, such as dragons, whose existence one supposes had not yet been altogether disproved. Many of the paintings are very beautifully and vividly executed. I’m particularly impressed by the pair of entwined snakes which, whilst I can hardly vouch for their zoological verisimilitude, appear very much alive.

Stuffed Animals & Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (2001) Stephen T. Asma [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The natural history museum was a place where the line between “high and low” culture effectively vanished–where our awe of nature, our taste for the bizarre, and our thirst for knowledge all blended happily together. The first natural history museums were little more than high-toned side shows, with such garish exhibits as the pickled head of Catherine the Great’s lover.

Eye candy

Various visuals, discovering the pleasures of Flickr

Work by Tivadar-Kosztka-Csontvary, sourced here, it reminds me of this painting.

Tivadar Kosztka Csontváry (1853-1919) was a Hungarian painter. He was one of the first Hungarian painters to become well-known in Europe.

Work by Ulisse Aldrovandi, sourced here.

Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522 – 1605)

Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522 – 1605) was an Italian naturalist, the moving force behind Bologna’s botanical garden, one of the first in Europe. Carolus Linnaeus and the comte de Buffon reckoned him the father of natural history studies. He is usually referred to, especially in older literature, as Aldrovandus.

Work by Jean-Louis Alibert. Ilness illustrated is Haematoncie framboisée, painted by Valville and engraved by Tresca.

Jean-Louis-Marc Alibert (1768 – 1837) was a French dermatologist.

Before (1736) – William Hogarth

After (1736) – William Hogarth

Inspired by Gershon Legman’s book Rationale of the Dirty Joke, in which Legman tells of a joke where a woman and a man are window shopping and the man promises the woman everything she likes. After having made love, the man refuses everything he’d promised saying: “When I am hard I am soft, when I am soft I am hard”. Like John Currin today, Hogarth was an excellent portraitist of the condition humaine.

Still-Life with Partridge and Iron Gloves (1504) – Jacopo de’ Barbari

Jacopo de’ Barbari, sometimes known or referred to as: de’Barbari, de Barberi, de Barbari, Barbaro, Barberino, Barbarigo or Barberigo etc., (c. 1440 – before 1516) was an Italian painter and printmaker with a highly individual style. He moved from Venice to Germany in 1500, making him the first Italian Renaissance artist of stature to work in Northern Europe. His few surviving paintings (about twelve) include the first known example of trompe l’oeil since antiquity. His twenty-nine engravings and three very large woodcuts had a considerable influence. —Wikipedia

Anna P., who lived for many years as a man in Germany, was photographed for Magnus Hirschfeld’s book Sexual Intermediates in 1922. Today, Anna would probably be considered to be transgender.

Surrealism avant la lettre

Bizzarie di varie figure

Bizzarie di varie figure (1624) – Giovanni Battista Bracelli

I quote the Giornale Nuovo:

I’ve mentioned Giovanni Battista Bracelli’s book Bizzarie di Varie Figure before. It was originally published in Livorno, in 1624. One would assume the book was not a success, as it exerted no influence, and attracted very little notice until its rediscovery in Paris ca. 1950. Its rediscoverer, Alain Brieux, published a limited facsimile edition of the book in 1963, with a preface by Tristan Tzara. –source

The juvenile delinquents — not the pop artists —

King Asa of Juda Destroying the Idols () – Monsù Desiderio

I was looking for info on Media Burn (1975) [Youtube] and [Youtube] and [Photo] by the Ant Farm collective and I happened upon Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes blog. Daniel Flahiff introduces the top five American buildings blog-a-thon:

In response to Tyler Green’s challenge to choose your five favorite American buildings (okay, structures)–which is itself a response to the AIA list–here are my five [a list that could, of course, change tomorrow], in no particular order. What are yours? No, really, I want to know…

The reason I was searching for Media Burn in the first place was a previous search for American radical and activist Charles Radcliffe, the image of the Cadillac smashing into the wall of television turns up when you Google for Radcliffe.The reason I was looking for Radcliffe is that I wanted to introduce you to The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution, an essay published by the British arm of the Situationist International and co-authored by T. J. Clark, Christopher Gray, Charles Radcliffe and Donald Nicholson-Smith. This essay, which I’ve hosted for a while now (most if not all of the SI texts are copyleft), resurfaced to my consciousness following the comments by Muli Koppel to my recent post on social realism and anarchism in 19th century French art.

Of the essay the most potent quote is:

THE JUVENILE delinquents — not the pop artists — are the true inheritors of Dada. Instinctively grasping their exclusion from the whole of social life, they have denounced its products, ridiculed, degraded and destroyed them.

A smashed telephone, a burnt car, a terrorised cripple are the living denial of the ‘values’ in the name of which life is eliminated. Delinquent violence is a spontaneous overthrow of the abstract and contemplative role imposed on everyone, but the delinquents’ inability to grasp any possibility of really changing things once and for all forces them, like the Dadaists, to remain purely nihilistic.

They can neither understand nor find a coherent form for the direct participation in the reality they have discovered, for the intoxication and sense of purpose they feel, for the revolutionary values they embody. The Stockholm riots, the Hell’s Angels, the riots of Mods and Rockers — all are the assertion of the desire to play in a situation where it is totally impossible.

All reveal quite clearly the relationship between pure destructivity and the desire to play: the destruction of the game can only be avenged by destruction. Destructivity is the only passionate use to which one can put everything that remains irremediably separated. It is the only game the nihilist can play; the bloodbath of the 120 Days of Sodom proletarianised along with the rest.—The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution

Some info on Asa King of Judah of whom the destructions are pictured above:

Asa, King of Judah purged the land of pagan cults; all the sites of idolatrous worship were completely destroyed and the worshippers persecuted. The Queen Mother was also deposed for having been involved with same. There was also a large-scale crackdown on prostitutes.

The two men had an elective affinity to each other

Meryon’s engraved views of Paris. No one was more impressed with them than Baudelaire. To him the archaeological view of the catastrophe, the basis of Hugo’s dreams, was not the really moving one. … Meryon brought out the ancient face of the city without abandoning one cobblestone. It was this view of the matter that Baudelaire had unceasingly pursued in the idea of modernism. He was a passionate admirer of Meryon.

The two men had an elective affinity to each other. They were born in the same year, and their deaths were only months apart. Both died lonely and deeply disturbed — Meryon as a demented person at Charenton, Baudelaire speechless in a private clinic. Both were late in achieving fame. Baudelaire was almost the only person who championed Meryon in his lifetime. –Walter Benjamin [1]

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon …

Gustave Courbet (portrait by Nadar)

“I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of ‘art for art’s sake.’ No! I have simply wanted to draw from a thorough knowledge of tradition the reasoned and free sense of my own individuality. To know in order to do: such has been my thought. To be able to translate the customs, ideas, and appearance of my time as I see them — in a word, to create a living art — this has been my aim.” Gustave Courbet, preface to World’s Fair catalogue, 1855.

The Stone Breakers (1850) – Gustave Courbet

Courbet depicted the harshness in life, and in so doing, challenged contemporary academic ideas of art, which brought him criticism that he deliberately adopted a cult of ugliness. [Apr 2006]

Anarchism had a large influence on French Symbolism of the late 19th century, such as that of Stéphane Mallarmé, who was quoting as saying “Je ne sais pas d’autre bombe, qu’un livre.” (I know of no bomb other than the book.) Its ideas infiltrated the cafes and cabarets of turn of the century Paris.

Related: avant-garde – anarchism – government – French theory

Proudhon and his children (1865) Gustave Courbet

The painter Gustave Courbet was friends with Proudhon and supported the latter’s views on societal change. Proudhon was avant-garde in politics, Courbet in the visual arts. One of Proudhon’s most poetic and prophetic exposés was “To be GOVERNED is …” which is reproduced on this page.

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.” (P.-J. Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294.)

Jahsonic

Burgemeester van Dodenstad