Friday 30 December 2011

foliage


Ben Robinson - Eaux d'Artifice (Silk Flowers with Alexander McQueen Kingdom Eau de Toilette, Evian Water), 2004

Extract from by Octave Mirbeau - The Torture Garden:

We were approaching the bell. On the right and left there were immense red and purple flowers and blood-colored peonies, and in the shade, under enormous parasol-shaped leaves, petasites and anthuriums like bleeding tissues seemed ironically to greet us on the way, and point out the path of torture to us. There were other flowers also, flowers of butchery and massacre, tiger-flowers with their gaping mutilated throats, diclytras and their garlands of little red hearts, and fierce labiates with their firm and fleshy pulp the tint of mucus; they were veritable human lips — Clara's lips — crying from the tops of their tender stalks:
"Come, my dears, come quickly. Where you are going there is still more pain, more torture, more blood flowing and dripping on the earth, more contorted and torn bodies breathing their last on iron tables... more ragged flesh swaying on the gallows-rope, more horror and more hell. Come, my loves, come, lip to lip and hand in hand. And look between the foliage and the lattice-work, look at the infernal diorama unfolding, and the diabolic festival of death!"

Monday 26 December 2011

receipts

Bought a few items:


Glenn Gould - Bach: French Suites BWV 812-817 CD, £1.26


D'Marc Cantu - Fallen (Creme Jak) 2LP, £15.99


Drexciya - Journey Of The Deep Sea Dweller (Clone Classic Cuts) 2LP, £15.99

Sunday 25 December 2011

Xmas dinner 2011



As cooked by my dad:

Boned, organic chicken stuffed with minced pork, sage, lemon, chestnuts and apple with pheasant, wild duck and partridge, served with braised carrots and parsnips, sprouts and sprout tops, cranberry and orange relish, bread sauce, roast potatoes and mashed potatoes.

Wednesday 21 December 2011

monstrous



Extract from Octave Mirbeau - The Torture Garden:

“Dear Clara,” I objected, “is it really natural for you to seek sensuality in decomposition, and urge Your desires to greater heights by horrible spectacles of suffering and death? Isn’t that, to the contrary, a perversion of that nature whose cult you invoke, in order perhaps to excuse whatever criminal and monstrous qualities your sensuality involves?”

“No!” said Clara, quickly, “since love and death are the same thing! And since decomposition is the eternal resurrection of life… Look—” Suddenly she interrupted herself, and said:

“But why do you tell me that? You’re funny!” And with a charming pout, she added:

“How provoking that you don’t understand anything! How is it you don’t feel it? How is it you haven’t already felt that it is—I don’t even say by love, but by the heightened sensuality which is the perfection of love—that all the intellectual faculties of man awaken and become more acute? And it’s by this sensuality alone that you attain the full development of personality. Look! In the act of love, have you ever thought, for instance, of committing a beautiful crime? That is to say, lifting yourself above social prejudices and all the laws—above everything, in fact? And if you haven’t thought if it, then why do you bother making love?”

“I haven’t the strength to argue,” I stammered, “and it seems to me we are walking in a nightmare. This sun… this crowd… these smells… and your eyes—ah, your torturous and lustful eyes—and your voice… and your penchant for crime… all that terrifies me, and it’s all driving me mad!”

Clara gave a little mocking laugh.

http://bookkake.com/books/torture-garden/extract/

Tuesday 20 December 2011

best of 2011

Over on Dennis Cooper's definitive blog DC's yesterday, readers were invited to post lists of their personal 2011 highlights. What follows is my own illustrated best of the year:

A few things off the top of my head:

Music:


Cut Hands - Afro Noise 1


Hieroglyphic Being – Le Jardin Des Chemins Bifurquants

Books:


Dennis Cooper - The Marbled Swarm


Kate Zambreno - Green Girl


Wayne Koestenbaum - Humiliation

Art:


Sophie Lisa Beresford - Rave Meditation Dance, Edinburgh

It's highly recommended that you follow this 'ere link to discover what he and everyone else nominated as this past year's brightest and best: LINK

Monday 19 December 2011

receipts

Bought a few items:


Bruce Hainley - Pep Talk, $10.00


Animal Love DVD, £12.94


Ton Koopman - Bach Organ Masterpieces, £3.79

Friday 16 December 2011

Yuck 'n Yum winter 2011



The Yuck 'n Yum winter 2011 issue is now online and available for your festive delectation: LINK

Thursday 15 December 2011

Yuck 'n Yum @ Mixcloud / Winter 2011 launch




DJ Ben 'Jack Your Body' Robinson with a festive minimix for the Yuck 'n Yum winter 2011 launch at HMC, Dundee 14.12.11

Wednesday 14 December 2011

Yuck 'n Yum winter 2011 launch 14.12.11

To Dundee's Hannah Maclure Centre this evening for the Yuck 'n Yum winter 2011 issue launch. This involved a piñata, some bicycle-like contraptions, mulled wine and tunes. A few photos were taken and here they are:





































The Mordant Liquor of Tears: Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece



Although regarded as a masterpiece of Renaissance religious art, the Isenheim Altarpiece is unlikely to feature on any of your supermarket Christmas card designs anytime soon. Created near the French Alsatian town of Colmar between 1512 and 1516 for an audience who suffered the debilitating effects of ergot poisoning, the Altarpiece is an artwork whose central panel, a horrifying, visceral crucifixion scene, was originally intended as a form of medicine. Patients at the monastery hospital’s chapel had been struck by ergotism, a malady contracted by eating fungus-infected rye bread. They experienced an array of unpleasant symptoms such as vomiting, gangrene, intensely painful burning sensations in their limbs and extremities, hallucinations and madness. Their fingers and toes would be dropping off and their skin would have broken out in painful sores. This is the context in which Grünewald’s magnum opus was originally seen, and his agony-wracked Christ was there to provide sympathy and to share in the victims’ suffering. His green, rotting corpse cries out in an empty desert, and the artwork conveys the message that pain will bring one closer to God.

Stanley Meisler’s September 1999 article for The Smithsonian magazine explained the artwork’s origins:

“The monks treated the sick with a balm made from herbs and other plants and with prayers to Saint Anthony, who was believed to possess miraculous curing powers. The monks also tried to bolster the faith of the sick by reminding them that Christ - and Saint Anthony as well - had suffered even greater torments. Grünewald's altarpiece played an important mystical and psychological role in the Isenheim treatment program.”

Ergot poisoning went by the name of Saint Anthony’s fire and was a regular epidemic in the Middle Ages. Fungus-infected bread was to blame, the local rye bread developing hard, dark spur-like structures. This contamination would thrive in damp conditions and affect hundreds at a time. The cause was then unknown, though was often blamed on witchcraft. The monks would serve the sick with good quality food, have them drink a holy fortified wine, and let them contemplate their rich collection of artworks.

The Isenheim Altarpiece takes the form of a multipanelled polyptych whose wings open out to reveal a Nativity, Crucifixion and Resurrection. Of these multiple scenes it’s the Crucifixion whose force has held sway over generations of artists and writers throughout the centuries. In the French decadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1891 novel Là-Bas, the protagonist Durtal contemplates Grünewald’s picture, his musings forming an extended meditation on the work’s exquisite horror. In his description of Christ’s wounds, Huysmans doesn’t stint on the gore:

“Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice. Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulae touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of blood.”

Durtal experiences a spiritual crisis, disgusted by the emptiness and vulgarity of the modern world, while in the altarpiece’s depiction of unalloyed suffering he can glimpse salvation:

“(Grünewald) had gone to the two extremes. From the rankest weeds of the pit he had extracted the finest essence of charity, the mordant liquor of tears. In this canvas was revealed the masterpiece of an art obeying the unopposable urge to render the tangible and the invisible, to make manifest the crying impurity of the flesh and to make sublime the infinite distress of the soul.”

In his overarching and accessible Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich wrote,
“Art for him did not consist in the search for the hidden laws of beauty - for him it could have only one aim, the aim of all religious art in the Middle Ages - that of providing a sermon in pictures, of proclaiming the sacred truths as taught by the Church. The central panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece shows that he sacrificed all other considerations to this one overriding aim.”

You’d be forgiven for assuming this art would hold scant appeal for modernism, but many artists did return to it repeatedly. The altarpiece had always held an evident lure for the grotesque and visionary Max Beckmann, and in 1932 it also inspired Picasso to complete a series of ink drawings of the Crucifixion. Christ’s twisted limbs and diseased wounds would be shadowed in the paintings of war veterans by Otto Dix and George Grosz, while Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion used Grünewald’s 1503 Mocking of Christ as an influence for the blindfolded central figure. Bacon’s piles of source imagery teemed with photos of the crucifixion panel. The avowed atheist eventually travelled to Colmar two years before his death to see the Isenheim Altarpiece for himself in the green, decaying flesh. You’d hope this pilgrimage was no mere eleventh-hour religious conversion, but rather a meeting of two like minds. At a distance of five hundred years Grünewald and Bacon had between them performed the most forensic renderings of the human situation’s enduring anguish. I’d quite fancy making that trip myself at an apposite moment, whenever such a time might be.

Tuesday 13 December 2011

inserts

So for each issue of Yuck 'n Yum I design a flyer notifying our readers of the deadline for the next issue. What follows is a display of all that I've done so far:


summer 2009


autumn 2009


winter 2009


spring 2010


summer 2010


autumn 2010


winter 2010


spring 2011


summer 2011


autumn 2011


winter 2011


spring 2012