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Damien Hirst: He laughs in the face of death – Telegraph
As a composition, the black and white photograph is unremarkable: no doubt it was hastily taken, for reasons made clear by its content. On the left is a young man he was 16 at the time with dark bristling hair and a chunky ribbed sweater, leaning low over a polished steel surface, the raised and squared-off edge of which reveals it to be a mortuary table.
The young man is looking directly at the camera and grinning broadly, perhaps a little too broadly to convince us of his levity, because beside him on the table is the fat, bald, severed head of a man in late middle age. They look, this grinning boy and his new dead acquaintance, like the traditional graphic personifications of Comedy and Tragedy: one maniacally beaming or guffawing, the other frowning and puckered, mouth down-turned.
Damien Hirst’s With Dead Head 1991 is in part a record of his early fascination with the physical reality of death and the medico-scientific apparatuses that surround it. In his late teens, partly under the influence of Francis Bacon, he amassed – mostly by stealing – a large collection of pathology books, and was especially keen on volumes concerned with burns. He was drawn, he says, to the combination of hideous subject matter and pristine, detached photography; the books contained “delicious, desirable images”.
As a precursor to Hirst’s later conjunctions of dead animal matter – or representations of human death – with the gleaming metal and glass vitrine, With Dead Head is almost too good to be true. Here, it seems to proclaim, is Damien Hirst doing what we think Damien Hirst is meant to do: confronting us with the dismal but fascinating actuality of death and adopting a gleeful attitude to mortality.
via Damien Hirst: He laughs in the face of death – Telegraph.
Strange Random Death Quote:
“He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend – provided, of course, that he really is dead.” – Voltaire (French Philosopher and Writer. One of the greatest of all French authors, 1694-1778)
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BBC News – Vintage 80s: Life on the streets
Time passes and society and places change, yet we often don’t notice or overlook the visual clues we see everyday.
But, by always carrying a camera and recording those daily encounters, Johnny Stiletto managed to capture a very personal view of life on the streets of London in the 1980s.
Those of you who follow this blog may remember a post on Johnny Stiletto’s book, Shots from the Hip back in 2009; well now there’s a new collection of his work, a book entitled Vintage 80s which brings together about 160 street shots.
As before though, the photographs are interspersed with his comments and thoughts on the moment, or the wider situation.
His work links together the news events of the time with the personal. To me they seem like frames from black and white dreams rather than someone else’s photographs.
The pictures depict a time when London cast off the final remnants of post-war grey where you could still find, and indeed park on, former bomb sites, to the beginning of what was to become modern London.
via BBC News – Vintage 80s: Life on the streets.
Strange Random 80s Quote:
You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jellybeans. – Ronald Reagan
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TateShots: Storm Thorgerson on Magritte
Cover of Dark Side of the Moon
Storm Thorgerson designed the cover for Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon‘, an album that can be found in the homes of over 40 million people. In a career spanning over 30 years he has produced album graphics for numerous acts.
Strange Random Graphic Design Quote:
Design should never say, “Look at me.” It should always say, “Look at this.” — David Craib
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Stranger than fiction … Magritte and Marc
Image via Wikipedia
For 10,000 Monopoly dollars, can you tell us what the Surrealist painter Rene Magritte and Marc Bolan of T-Rex have in common? Tick, tock, tick, tock … Well, it could be that neither of them were French, they were both before their time or they were very fond of a pipe or two after dinner. But the main reason is soon to be put on show at the Tate Liverpool Gallery, namely Le 16 Septembre – Lune et L’Arbre (16th September – Moon and Tree). A new exhibition called The Pleasure Principle starts at the gallery this Friday (more information here) aiming, in the words of the organizers, to “reveal the inspiration behind the artist’s celebrated style, focusing on the less explored aspects of Magritte’s life and artistic practice.”
Which still doesn’t tell us why an army of British Glam Rock fans would make a special pilgrimage to see a Belgian Surrealist’s tree. Until, that is, you realise that the “cosmic coincidence” is that Bolan was killed in a car crash on 16th September 1977, two weeks before his 30th birthday, which he himself had predicted he would not see. Not only that, his car (driven by his girlfriend, because Bolan was, ironically, afraid of driving in case he suffered a crash), hit A TREE! Many people believe it to be suspiciously similar to the one Magritte had painted 21 years before…
So now you know. If you are going to be in Liverpool from this Friday, we’re sure the exhibition will be worth a look.
If you need any more convincing of the cosmic coincidences surrounding Bolan’s death, take a look at this (rather bad VHS) video of a Channel 4 programme from the late 80s (I think). Yes, it’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek 😉
Strange Random Surrealism Quote:
To be a surrealist… means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been. – Rene Magritte
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BBC News – Tudor coroners’ records give clue to ‘real Ophelia’ for Shakespeare
Image via Wikipedia
An Oxford historian has found evidence of a story that could be the real-life inspiration for Shakespeare’s tragic character, Ophelia. Dr Steven Gunn has found a coroner’s report into the drowning of a Jane Shaxspere in 1569. The girl, possibly a young cousin of William Shakespeare, had been picking flowers when she fell into a millpond near Stratford upon Avon. Dr Gunn says there are “tantalising” links to Ophelia’s drowning in Hamlet. A four-year research project, carried out by Oxford University academics, has been searching through 16th century coroners‘ reports.
via BBC News – Tudor coroners’ records give clue to ‘real Ophelia’ for Shakespeare.
Ophelia’s Death, from the Olivier film version of Hamlet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h1ept8rtiA
Strange Random Hamlet Quote:
Lay her i’ the earth:
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring!
– Laertes, Act V, scene I
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