The Mumpsimus

  "To paint in earth's dull colours the forms clothed in the living light of other worlds is a hard and thankless task; so much the more gratitude is due to those who have attempted it. They needed coloured fire, and had only ground earths." —Annie Besant, "Foreword", Thought-Forms by Annie Besant & C.W. Leadbeater  Julia Voss's recent biography of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) is a revelatory study of a woman whose work was mostly unseen until the 1980s and not especially well known even fifteen years ago.  In 2013, Sweden's Moderna Museet put together a large exhibition which toured Europe. And then the Guggenheim Museum in New York opened a massive exhibit devoted to af Klint ( Paintings for the Future ) — it became their most popular show in history, with reports of visitors waiting in line for hours for the chance to see the work of an artist few had likely heard of before. In 2019, Halina Dyrschka directed an excellent docum...

David Wojnarowicz, untitled (Face in Dirt) Each painting, film, sculpture or page of writing I make represents to me a particular moment in the history of my body on this planet, in america. Therefore each photograph, film, sculpture and page of writing I make has built into it a particular frame of mind that only I can be sure of knowing, given that I have always felt alienated in this country, and thus have lived with the sensation of being an observer of my own life as it occurs.  --David Wojnarowicz,  Close to the Knives * Reading the early chapters of Cynthia Carr's biography of David Wojnarowicz, Fire in the Belly , provides an experience I can't recall in any other biography: the utter uncertainty of witness. Again and again, Carr presents an event as one person remembered it, then follows with other participants' very different recollections. Works of biography and history regularly present varying versions of events, but will usually take side...

Two new biographical films give viewers an opportunity to see diametrically opposite approaches not just to biography, but to film narrative itself. A warning: I saw Mr. Turner and The Imitation Game months ago (as part of the annual Telluride at Dartmouth festival), and my thoughts here are based purely on memories that are getting ever dimmer. Nonetheless, the differences between the films are so striking that I couldn't help but keep thinking about them, to keep reading about the stories' subjects, and to keep coming back to the idea of how information is conveyed through moving pictures. I went into both films with relatively high expectations, since I adore Mike Leigh 's work and I had very much enjoyed Headhunters , the previous movie directed by Imitation Game's Morten Tyldum . And overall I did like both Mr. Turner and The Imitation Game ; however, "like" is part of a broad spectrum, and for me, Mr. Turner was a powerful emotional and a...

For Press Play, I wrote about the late H.R. Giger: H.R. Giger's imagery so deeply influenced the imaginations of film production designers, tattoo artists, fashionistas, magazine illustrators, skateboard designers, and just about everyone other than My Little Pony animators that at this point it's difficult to separate Giger from the gigeresque. What was once outré, repulsive, and disturbing became the Thomas Kincaid style for the cyber/goth set, a quick kitsch to perform a certain idea of taste. You hang Christmas Cottage in your living room to display your pleasant, unthreatening Christianity; I put a poster of Giger’s Li I on my bedroom wall to show how transgressive I am in my deep, dark soul. Each is a sign that communicates immediately, without any need to look for more than a second, because each communicates not through itself but through all the associations is has accumulated. Of course, this is not fair to Giger the artist, who was much more than his mos...

If you haven't read John Coulthart's commentary on the recent controversy over an exhibit at the Smithsonian, do.  It's called "Ecce Homo Redux" .  Here's the first paragraph: If the news of the past few weeks has felt like a re-run of the 1980s—ongoing recession, government cuts, riots in London, Tories casting aspersions on the undeserving poor, the threat of another royal wedding—then add to the list of déjà vu  moments a flurry of outrage concerning art and religion in America that’s like a recapitulation of the  Helms vs. NEA  spats of 1989. On that occasion Andres Serrano’s  Piss Christ  was in the firing line, accused of being a blasphemous portrayal. This week it’s been the turn of a video installation of a short film made the same year,  A Fire in My Belly , by David Wojnarowicz, a work featured in an exhibition I linked to a couple of weeks ago,  Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture  at the National Portrai...

by Eric Schaller [This post is part of  an on-going series  of explorations through, investigations with, and inspirations from  Jeff VanderMeer's  new short story collection,  The Third Bear .]

Over at Colleen Lindsay's digs, The Swivet, I interview David Beronä , who wrote a marvelous book called Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels . One fun bit of trivia I forgot to mention in the intro to the interview -- before David and I had any knowledge of each other, we were both reviewers for Rain Taxi , and you should definitely check out his review there of one of the most recent wordless books to gain a lot of attention, Shaun Tan's The Arrival .

I discovered Frédéric Chabot's work when we were looking for cover artists for Best American Fantasy 2008 . We looked at art from a bunch of different people, but I kept coming back to Frédéric's images. For a while, in fact, he was going to be our artist. Alas, the publishing world is mercurial, and in the end some marketing forces pushed us in other directions. It happens all the time, and I certainly understand. But this is such marvelous art, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm with the world... More of Frédéric's images are available here and here .

While watching the marvelous end credit sequence of WALL-E last week, I thought I saw Shaun Tan's name amongst the art department, but I wasn't sure, because I was having too much fun following the concept of the credit sequence to pay close attention to the names. I thought I could rely on IMDB, but no, he's not listed there. Did I dream it? I fired up the ol' Google, though, and voilá -- this article from The Australian , wherein it is said: "...he was commissioned to do art work on the Hollywood children's films Horton Hears a Who and the forthcoming WALL-E . While he enjoyed both jobs and insists he has no complaints, most of his work ended up on the cutting-room floor." The jaws of Google are vast, though, and they also caught an entry on TOR art director Irene Gallo's blog that is really the point of this whole entry. What they caught was Bob Eggleton's comment : "The ending credits are worth the price of admission and,really un...