Category Archives: modernism

Freeing the hand (media theory)

Prints and Visual Communication (1953) – William Ivins [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

I’ve read ten pages of William M. Ivins, Jr.‘s Prints and Visual Communication and this work is incredible and incredibly neglected. In its first ten pages it presents a full revisionist history of Classical Antiquity vs. The Dark Ages (what the Greeks and Romans didn’t have). (see “Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages“, Lynn White, published in Speculum#15, April 1940)

But more remarkable still:

From the blurb:

“The sophistication of the photographic process has had two dramatic results–freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions and freeing the scientist from the unavoidable imprecision of the artist’s prints. So released, both have prospered and produced their impressive nineteenth- and twentieth-century outputs.”

With all Ivins’s talk about “freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions” with regards to the invention of the photographic process, I find it very surprising to find no mention of Walter Benjamin‘s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in this book. Benjamin wrote in 1935/1936:

“For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens.”

The gullibility of American audiences

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9VWC8eB9ic]

October 30, 1938 radio broadcast

Orson Welles first gained wide American notoriety 70 years ago today for his October 30, 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. WellsThe War of the Worlds. Adapted to sound like a contemporary news broadcast, it caused a large number of listeners to panic, now commonly and somewhat euphemistically referred to as mass hysteria. Welles and his biographers subsequently claimed he was exposing the gullibility or naïveté of American audiences in the tense preamble to the Second World War.

Placeholder for Icon of erotic art #34

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La Fleuve (1913) – Leon Spilliaert

Ghent today, lovely work by Leon Spilliaert, very sensual, very erotic though not in a stroky way.

Unfortunately permission was not granted to photograph this work.

The work depicts a seated female, seen from behind left from a birdseye perpective. This point of view accentuates here pear-like voluptuousness. The tone is dark, reminiscent of Gauguin’s Tahitian ladies.

The woman is seated on a rock overlooking the sea. Just as the Danish Mermaid [1] protects the city of Copenhagen, this siren has been protecting the imaginary coast of the Belgian seaside since 1913.

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Click for credits

One day I will find a decent online copy of this painting and point you to it. For now, please accept the substitute.

In the meantime, let me show you these:

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A History of Derision, wikified

A History of Derision

A History of Derision

A History of Derision by way of Illusory Confections who wrote on its subject[1]:

“Be still my beating heart, this is practically everything I adore in one tidy 240 page bundle! But it isn’t referenced anywhere online and I couldn’t even find mention of it on the Atlas Press site. So I zipped an email to Atlas inquiring about it, and, sadly, its nonexistence was confirmed. Apparently it was a planned project that fell to the sidelines and “[1]

the website is the accurate source of what is available, the catalogue part bibliography and part fiction, if you like…

Here it is again in a wikified version,

A History of Derision is an aborted project by Arkhive, an Atlas Press imprint.

It builds on André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour, but is more a history of French avant-garde.

French Romantics: Sade, Lassailly, Rabbe, Forneret, Nodier, Fourier

Bouzingos: Borel and O’Neddy

Hydropathes: Goudeau, Cros, Haraucourt, Lafargue, Richepin, Tailhade, Rollinat, Monselet, Sapeck, Allais.

Hirsutes and the Chat Noir: Salis, Moréas, Lorrain, Verlaine, Sarcey, Haraucourt.

Arts Incohérents: : Lévy, Rivière, Allais.

Zutistes: Allais, Cros, Nouveau, Rimbaud, Ajalbert, Haraucourt, Verlaine.

La Nouvelle Rive Gauche : Trézenick, D’Aurevilly, Verlaine.

Lutèce: Rall, Rimbaud, Corbière, Caze, Rachilde, Floupette (Vicaire and Beauclair).

Symbolists : de Gourmont, Jarry, Tailhade, Huysmans, Pawlowski.

Ecole de Paris : Apollinaire, Jacob, Salmon, Albert-Birot, Cami.

Dada : Aragon, Picabia, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Satie, Arp, Rigaut.

Surrealism : Desnos, Prévert, Péret, Topor, Magritte, Scutenaire, Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte.

Situationists : Arnaud and Jorn, Dotremont, Mariën.

Daily Bul & Co: Bury, Béalu, Colinet.

Encyclopédie des FARCES et ATTRAPES et des  MYSTIFICATIONS

Farcistes: Encyclopédie des farces et attrapes et des mystifications, François Caradec, Noël Arnaud.[2]

Oulipo.

Dream sequences in literature and film

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2eVb4CC4XU]

Dream sequence in La Prisonnière (1968) by Henri-Georges Clouzot

I love dream sequences in film. Every Disney film has nearly one. Always psychedelic. Film as a medium is particularly well-suited to impart dream visions, much better than previous visionary literature, which required more narrative realism.

An interesting juxtaposition here is Dante‘s Divine Comedy compared to its first film adaptation[1].

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA3NRe5kgak]

L’Inferno

The Divine Comedy exemplifies the conventions of dream-vision literature, though Dante specifically says that his Comedy is not a dream vision.

I guess what this post comes down to is the boring but somehow unavoidably attractive “literature vs. cinema” debate I’ve been engaging in.

The debate is boring when you limit it to either/or, but of interest if you view it from its technical angle, with fiction at the center, and medium-specificity at its perifery.

Notions such as unfilmability provide the best entry point.

But that notion I was not thinking about when going to bed last night. I thought about cinematic effects in literature, a notion first put forward to my knowledge by Lotte H. Eisner in The Haunted Screen.

She writes:

“Romantic authors such as Novalis or Jean Paul, while anticipating the Expressionist notions of visual delirium and of a continual state of effervescence, also seem almost to have foreseen the cinema’s consecutive sequences of images. In the eyes of Schlegel in Lucinde, the loved one’s features become indistinct: ‘very rapidly the outlines changed, returned to their original form, then metamorphosed anew until they disappeared entirely from my exalted eyes.’ And the Jean Paul of the Flegeljahre says: ‘The invisible world wished, like chaos, to give birth to all things together; the flowers became trees, then changed into columns of cloud; and at the tops of the columns flowers and faces grew. In Novalis‘s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen there are even superimpositions.”

Der letzte Mann

Example of a superimposition in The Last Laugh (1924) – Murnau

She concludes:

“It is reasonable to argue that the German cinema is a development of German Romanticism, and that modern technique [cinematography] merely lends visible form to Romantic fancies.”

La Prisonnière is World Cinema Classic #67, L’Inferno #68.

Cross-pollinations such as BBC Radiophonic Workshop/Doctor Who and Studio di Fonologia Musicale/Death Laid an Egg

Maderna-Berio by U.S.O. Project.

Tape editing: Bruno Maderna (left) and Luciano Berio (right)

Simon Reynolds published the director’s cut of an article[1] he wrote at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which was founded in 1958 on an unknown date. Similar radio services were started at the various public radios in Europe, all of influence to the emerging fields of electronic music and acousmatic music. Paris had the Groupe de Recherches Musicales which developed musique concrète, Cologne had Studio für elektronische Musik which nurtured the talent of Stockhausen, Italy had Studio di Fonologia Musicale with Bruno Maderna.

I’m probably generalizing, mixing studios with projects and radio with art projects. However, all of these projects share common characteristics: they are state funded (this is post-war, Marshall plan funded Europe), they involve electronic music and are centered around tape editing and thus the development of non-linearity in music recording.

So far the history of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which was probably the biggest, as well as the other scenes mentioned above have been best documented. However, such studios and projects must have existed all over Europe. It would be interesting to get your feedback of the scene of your country. Scandinavia, Spain, Austria, the Balkan, everywhere, let’s hear it from you. I’m especially looking for cross-pollinations such as BBC Radiophonic Workshop/Doctor Who and Studio di Fonologia Musicale/Death Laid an Egg.

I’m collecting the notes for this project at European public radio and experimental music.

Service your engine if you want it to function

Fritz Kahn @120

click the images for larger versions and credits

Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace) by Marc Wathieu

Fritz Kahn was a German writer and illustrator in the 1920s who specialized in illustrating the physical processes of human bodies as though they were machine powered.

Fritz-KahnNEW by raspberryteacup

This man machine trope can also be found in Lee Perry‘s “Throw Some Water In[1] with the lines “Service your engine if you want it to function” by Lee Perry, from his album Roast Fish Collie Weed & Corn Bread .

Der mensch gesund und krank by Marc Wathieu

Additionally Horace Silver and Andy Bey recorded “I Had a Little Talk,” in which the narrator has a little talk with each of his organs:

Das Leben des Menschen... (The Life of Man). Vol. 5 by Marc Wathieu

“I had a little talk with my lungs and I’ve decided to treat them right. We made a mutual agreement and I think, at last we both see the light. ” –Bey/Silver

Man as machine by densitydesign

The Andy Bey track can be found on the Blue Note kozmigroov compilation The United States of Mind.

I almost forgot The Man-Machine, the 1978 album by Kraftwerk, perhaps the ultimate cyborg manifesto.

One of the most hateful and disagreeable female characters in fiction

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5v0spjsk1Y]

Bette Davis is Mildred Rogers

As noted in a previous post[1] I’ve been reading Of Human Bondage last week. I was particularly piqued by the female protagonist Mildred Rogers, a thoroughly unsympathetic character. One contemporary critic described her as one of the “most hateful and disagreeable female characters in fiction.” After finishing reading (I cried big tears towards the end) I wanted to find out if Mildred was inspired by a real-life love of Maugham, which is only fair given that the novel is auto-billed as semi-autobiographical.

Darragh O’Donoghue over at Senses of Cinema has provided me with a clue on how Maugham achieved such accuracy in describing the bleakness of the human condition in Of Human Bondage, pointing to Maugham’s homosexuality.

“The character of Mildred, according to Maugham’s intimates, was an amalgam of rent boys and lovers: she is often described in masculine terms, while descriptions of female sexuality are coloured with disgust; the narrative of cross-class, unconsummated, elusive desire can be read as a story of thwarted gay love. Some of this is retained in the film, such as the contrast between “abnormal” (because physically maimed), “sensitive” Philip and the raucous sexuality of his friend Griffiths (Reginald Denny), to whom he effectively pimps Mildred, unable to bed either of them.” —Darragh O’Donoghue [2]

Why is it, and I believe I asked this before, that gay men and to a lesser extent women, are so proficient in painting the human condition. Is it because their lenses aren’t “pinked” by images of “knights in shining armor” and parenthood. For examples see for example films like Ozon‘s Water Drops on Burning Rocks and Fassbinder‘s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

The Human Bondage wikipedia article provides another clue:

“Maugham’s homosexual leanings also shaped his fiction, in two ways. Since, in life, he tended to see attractive women as sexual rivals, he often gave the women of his fiction sexual needs and appetites, in a way quite unusual for authors of his time. Liza of Lambeth, Cakes and Ale and The Razor’s Edge all featured women determined to service their strong sexual appetites, heedless of the result. Also, the fact that Maugham’s own sexual appetites were highly disapproved of, or even criminal, in nearly all of the countries in which he travelled, made Maugham unusually tolerant of the vices of others. Readers and critics often complained that Maugham did not clearly enough condemn what was bad in the villains of his fiction and plays. Maugham replied in 1938: “It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.”

Aside from these attempts at analyses, I cannot recommend Maugham’s writing (my first exposure was the filmed version of The Razor’s Edge by Jahsonic fave John Byrum when I was in Portugal in the mid eighties) highly enough. Maugham missed critical acclaim by his contemporaries because he wrote in a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as “such a tissue of clichés that one’s wonder is finally aroused at the writer’s ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way” (Edmund Wilson, quoted in Vidal, 1990). Another author who equally suffered (but not at the box office), was George Gissing, the hero of The Intellectuals and the Masses.

Cult fiction item #10; unabashed male opinions

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My edition of Cocaine (in a 1982 translation by Frédérique Van Der Velde for the Dutch-language imprint Goossens, which also published translations of Thérèse philosophe, Villon, and Aretino)

“Not since Of Human Bondage have I read a more poignant rendition of the human condition,” and “after The End Of The World Filmed By An Angel possibly the second surrealist novel” wrote American literary critic Sholem Stein in a rare review of Cocaina in 1922.

Cocaina is a 1921 Italian novel written by Pitigrilli, a pseudonym of Italian journalist and author Dino Segre.

The novel, set in Paris and dedicated to cocaine use, was banned when it was published due to its liberal use of explicit sex and drugs.

The protagonist is Tito Arnaudi, a young Dostoevskian nihilist who travels from his home town Turin to Paris after a failed love story. There he discovers the joys of cocaine, takes a job as a journalist and meets two women: the exotic and orgiastic Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz and the tawdry cocotte Maud Fabrège. Maud, who later in the story is renamed to Cocaina (she is the personification of the effects of cocaine, at first lively and spirited, later jaded and blunt) is his femme fatale. Tito falls in love with her despite her apparent infidelity and despite of her sterilization which he knows is bound to make her ugly and less feminine.

The novel is full of unabashed male opinions on women and love and ends with an original “Russian roulette” twist.

I read in three days, and never felt the urge to quit reading. I laughed out loud at least three times. An underrated masterpiece. See also drugs in literature and cocaine in literature.

More covers:

Cocaine (1921) – Pitigrilli [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Whither now, anarchitecture?

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4A5ybTAOWw&]

Some Office Baroque footage, Some footage similar to Office Baroque

Gordon Matta-Clark died thirty years ago today. He stayed in Antwerp for a while in 1977, just before his death, working with Florent Bex, creating Office Baroque, which he called anarchitecture. Pieces of his “building cuts” were sold around the world[1].

I like him, much as I like the near-contemporary and also short-lived Robert Smithson. Whither now, anarchitecture, and other visionary environments?