Category Archives: visual culture

I am the Dying Gaul

The Dying Gaul

I am the Dying Gaul

This is my death scene, I was not given a deathbed. I do not represent the most famous death scene. I am outdeathed by Jesus Christ who died on the cross and Jean-Paul Marat , both after me.

I seem to have been born in a culture of death, yet I was not given any last words. This fascination with death in Western culture. Why? Why so pervasive?

Why did Jane write A Death-Scene?

So I knew that he was dying-
Stooped, and raised his languid head;
Felt no breath, and heard no sighing,
So I knew that he was dead.

Why this fasicnation with crime scenes?

Why did Andy Warhol produce The Death and Disaster paintings?

And why is every sensationalist  corner of video-libraries around the world filled with copies of Faces of Death?

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5GDcs8i2ng&]

Bonnie and Clyde

Why do we enjoy the slow motion death of Bonnie and Clyde and countles other movie death scenes?

Aristotle, had I known him, would have answered me:

Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. —Aristotle via the Poetics.

RIP Forrest J. Ackerman (1916 – 2008)

Famous Monsters Of Filmland by modern_fred

Famous Monsters of Filmland

Forrest J Ackerman (November 24, 1916 – December 4, 2008) was an American collector of science fiction books and movie memorabilia and a science fiction fan. Ackerman was influential to the wider cultural acceptance of science fiction as a literary, art and film genre. To a general audience, Ackerman is best remembered as the editor-writer of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, as the producer of Vampirella, and as literary agent.

Vampirella magazine (France, 01/1970), published by Publicness
image sourced here.

Most of us have a passing interest in horror. In his Ways of Hearing book presentation, David Toop revealed that he discovered the Price, Corman and Poe-connection (the connection between 19th century literary horror to 20th century cinematic horror) via Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Guy Bourdin @80

Charles Jourdan ad, 1976

French fashion and advertising photographer Guy Bourdin (1928 – 1991) would have celebrated his 80th birthday today had he not died of cancer 17 years ago.

I’m not sure when I first consciously came in to contact with his oeuvre, but I am pretty sure it was in the terra cognita that the internet has become by way of this page[1] from the site of music and culture connoisseur Phinn.

Today, a wide selection of his videos is available on YouTube[2]; a large number of his films can be found on Flickr and on the internet at large[3].

However, and although I cannot confirm this, I feel that I had seen the imagery of Bourdin in the pre-internet world, in a Dutch-language magazine called Avenue, which my parents bought during the seventies. It was The Netherlands’ and Flander’s first glossy, and ran from 1965 until 2002. Contributors have included Paul Huf, Eddy Posthuma de Boer, Ed van der Elsken and Inez van Lamsweerde. I distinctly seem to remember the Charles Jourdan shoe photo-ads Bourdin produced during that era. Not coincidentally, Avenue reminds me of that other glossy, Nova magazine, which I covered a couple of weeks ago[4].

To me, Bourdin can only be compared to his contemporary Helmut Newton (although admittedly I’ve also tentavily compared Ralph Gibson [5] to Bourdin) because in the words of Charlotte Cotton and Shelly Verthime he “emphasised fetishism, power relationships, and the potential for sexual violence, as well as the artificiality of the image, its gloss rather than its reality.”[6]

I’ve reported on Bourdin many times, and I am glad that I saw his retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and was given as a present Luc Sante‘s first monograph on his work: Exhibit A: Guy Bourdin

You can find Bourdin’s work all over the net.

Avenue van A tot Zero

Can anyone ID the photograper of this cover image?

For something different here[7] is a photo of a cover from Avenue.

The swarm of spirits came clambering up to her

Bertalda, Assailed by Spirits by Theodore Von Holst by you.

Bertalda, Assailed by Spirits by Theodore Von Holst

“Bertalda then showed the piece of gold she was given to the goblins below, and they laughed themselves half-dead over it and hissed at her. At last they all pointed at me with their metal-stained fingers, and more and more wildly, and more and more densely, and more and more madly, the swarm of spirits came clambering up to her.” –remix of Undine

Damsel in distress trope in Undine, actually a take on tentacle eroticism of which I am so fond.

Indescribable, unspeakable, ineffable and inexplicable

The Aigiulle Blaitiere. c. 1856 by John Ruskin by you.

The Aigiulle Blaitiere. c. 1856 by John Ruskin

A painting by Thomas Hill dated 1870 by you.

A painting by Thomas Hill dated 1870

Reading the opening chapter of Ivins‘s Prints and Visual Communication[1] on the indescribability of things (and the need for photographic representations) reminded me of the garland and the Greek Anthology.

Googling for “indescribability” brings up this interview regarding the sublime, indescribability and mountain literature and mountain art.

The trope of unrepresentability is probably the commonest of all in mountain literature and art: the throwing up of the hands, the confession of the inadequacy of representation to catch the phenomena of the mountain world. I remember reading the journal of an Edinburgh bishop from the 1760s who’d gone on a mini-Caledonian tour. He writes: “I looked north and saw rank on rank of unspeakably beautiful…” He crosses out “unspeakably”—he’s obviously unhappy with it—and writes instead “mountains so beautiful I could not describe them.” Then he crosses that out, and we get four synonyms for “indescribable,” the first three crossed out. What’s exciting about Ruskin is that instead of acquiescing to indescribability, he tries to enact it, to let his art or prose take the forms of their subjects. In his drawing of the Glacier du Bois, near Chamonix, for example, the whole image is vortical; everything is being tugged by some centripetal force which has no apparent center but which is clearly at work. It’s hard to say what that force is, but it has something to do with time, a kind of deep time that is at work in that viewing moment. The glacier looks like a river in flood, in spate; the sun looks to have been absorbed by it, and there’s an inexplicably detached tree bole and root in the foreground. Even his curving signature seems to be vulnerable to the vortex. –Brian Dillon interviewing Macfarlane [2]

My love for subjects starting with un-, in-, a- and variants is great and started with with the notion of unfilmability. Notable related concepts to indescribability include unspeakable, ineffable and inexplicable.

They connote to absence, lacking, contrary, opposite, negation and reversal, concepts and tropes very apt to denote their positive counterparts.

For what is there to say on effability if one does not investigate its negative: ineffability?

The whole of this subject touches on representation in the arts and of course, medium specificity.

Older links to this subjects are general aesthetics and the sublime.

To end with a quote which I cannot reproduce verbatim:

“Sex begins where words stop”. —Georges Bataille.

I’ve explored the previous notion here[3].

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.”

Introducing “At Her Discretion”

Introducing “At Her Discretion.”

Nurses and Anal Love

pulp fiction cover

What is obscene

Life Magazine photo of unidentified theatre advertising Pornography in Denmark

http://atherdiscretion.tumblr.com/

At her discretion is an Anglophone visual culture blog, self-described as “The vintage, the modern, the strange and erotic. It’s sometimes NSFW.” It’s very prolific and highly entertaining.

Some notable blogs include BibliOdyssey, A Journey Round My Skull, Femme Femme Femme, Hugo Strikes Back, ponyXpress, John Coulthart‘s Feuilleton and Adventures in the Print Trade.

Il Giornale Nuovo was one of the most renowned but has been defunct since 2007.

Tip of the hat to Paul Rumsey.

Introducing Adventures in the Print Trade

Introducing Adventures in the Print Trade[1] by British writer Neil Philip, who currently has a post on Degenerate Art during Nazism, a fave subject of mine, illustrating the beneficial side effects of censorship best illustrated by Lichtenberg:

“The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalogue of banned books.” —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms (G 37 in R. J. Hollingdale‘s translation and numeration)

Neil, author of Adventures in the Print Trade, begins his post thus:

“In 1929, the artist Richard Lindner, whose work can be considered the bridge between Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop Art, was appointed art director of the Munich publishing house of Knorr and Hir. Lindner remembered, “I saw Hitler every day in Munich at the Café Heck, a small café with about ten tables and thirty seats… Hitler used to sit there every day at his usual table. Our table was beside his and we knew each other because we avoided direct contact… He always wanted to be with artists.”[2]

The Window, 1958 Original lithograph by Richard Lindner [3]

Child’s Head, 1939 Original lithograph by Paul Klee [4]

Le Jardin d’Amour, 1981 Original silkscreen by Herbert von Arend [5]

Aus de Walpurgisnacht, 1923 Original woodcut by Ernst Barlach [6]

Woodcut for 10 Origin, 1942 Original woodcut by Wassily Kandinsky [7]

Untitled, 1979 Original lithograph by Boris Herbert Kleint [8]

Maschinenwerkstätte, 1921 Original lithograph by Lili Réthi [9]

Fabulously original, my only and usual gripe is that, art blogs should use Flickr or a similar service.