‘Worm Tensions’: The Forgotten Art of Eugene Matendre

25 01 2012

[The following excerpt is taken from the fourth chapter of D H Laven’s much anticipated work-in-progress ‘The Story of Forgotten Art’. As Laven writes in his introduction: ‘There is no such thing as forgotten art. There are only forgotten artists. And a hell of a lot of them too’. In this extract, he looks at the case of Eugene Matendré, a man once described as ‘if not the best, then at least the best-looking artist in France']

In June 1926, in the small village of Essanay outside the town of Montargis near the city of Paris, the body of a naked old man was dragged from a river. At the age of ninety four, Eugene Matendré had decided to drown himself. It wasn’t an easy decision, as his suicide note (well presented, with a firm sense of design) attests: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : D H Laven

Cloven Conspiracy?: Sir Anthony Tosh and the Hereford Heresy

21 01 2012

[The following excerpt is taken from the twenty-fifth chapter of D H Laven’s historic work-in-progress 'The Story of Forgotten Art’. In the introduction to this pioneering work he writes: ‘There is no such thing as forgotten art. There are only forgotten artists. And a hell of a lot of them too’. In this passage he looks at the work of Sir Anthony Tosh, an eighteenth century cow painter.]

Many a word I have written on art that has been forgotten. Literally forgotten: thrown into a damp and dingy cellar, burnt on a fiery furnace, tossed into the whiffy wastepaper baskets of history, to the unutterably ghastly gutters of culture’s overcrowded highways and byways; to the edge of the canonical circle – and beyond. Many a word I have written on this type of art. Art which has been and gone – which is no more, is lost, is finished, is but a faint stain on the great carpet of memory.

But there are two ways of forgetting. There is never looking, and there is never looking properly. There is some art, therefore, which is both remembered and forgotten. Art that is in fact well-known, and yet not known at all. Art that hides behind itself; that can be seen and not seen, both at the same time. Such is the art created by the British eighteenth century painter Sir Anthony Tosh. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : D H Laven

‘Lights Out’: The Unfortunate Art of Luis Recagis

21 01 2012

[The following excerpt is taken from the fourteenth chapter of D H Laven’s historic work-in-progress 'The Story of Forgotten Art’. In the introduction to this pioneering work he writes: ‘There is no such thing as forgotten art. There are only forgotten artists. And a hell of a lot of them too’. In this passage he looks at an unfortunate Spanish artist, whose great paintings quite literally never saw the light of day.]

Luck is no lady: it is the bastard child of the drooling she-monster and her incontinent husband; the festering cockroach under the cocktail cabinet; the hapless harbinger of despondency and doom. It may treat some people well, but many more are flung aside, like so many empty crisp packets hurtling along the dirty streets of modernity, pushed and pulled by the restless winds of change.

At the beginning of April in the year 1973, I was fortunate enough to find myself in New York, eager to witness the opening of an exhibition of work by the young Spanish painter Luis Reçagis. I had of course been aware of Reçagis for several years, but this was his first major exhibition – his so-called ‘breakthrough’. And I was just one amongst many who were extremely excited by the prospect. Previous work by Reçagis had promised much, but now – as an old lecturer of mine used to say (a little too often for his students’ liking) – ‘the time was as ripe as Aphrodite’s breasts’. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , ,
Categories : D H Laven

‘Nurtured from Pain’: The Bruised Beauty of Maria von Uppelhart

21 12 2011

[The following excerpt is taken from the thirty-first chapter of D H Laven’s historic work-in-progress 'The Story of Forgotten Art’. In the introduction to this pioneering work he writes: ‘There is no such thing as forgotten art. There are only forgotten artists. And a hell of a lot of them too’. In this passage he looks at a contemporary ‘body-artist’ whose achievements are frequently misinterpreted by feminists and cynics alike.]

My body is a work of art. I refer not to myself, of course – I merely repeat that over-familiar cliché for effect. That gaudy, ghastly, insolently persistent battered cod of a cliché, of which so many of the world’s poorest artists’ are so fond (aesthetically poor, that is, not economically). The phrase is a sleeping pill: in its tepid tedium it tires me instantaneously. Whenever it plummets like a putrid pear from the moist mouth of an artist, any audience is well advised to run for cover. Ninety nine percent of the time it functions favourably as a warning sign, painted in bright fluorescent pink on a dull black background, reading as follows: ‘THIS ARTIST IS A WASTE OF TIME’. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , ,
Categories : D H Laven

Vladimir Dorwindovitch – Jokebook

10 12 2011

I don’t know how many of you have ever tried to spontaneously translate a Swedish joke into French during a public lecture, but I’ll gladly let you into a little secret: it isn’t very easy. Especially if the joke you choose is based on particular wordplay that couldn’t possibly operate outside of its native language. That I succeeded in sucking even a titter or two from between the flaked lips of my gratuitously soporific audience is testament to the mighty powers of coincidence. Though the original pun fell flatter than an anorexic pancake, it so happened that a word I’d used earlier on inadvertently presented me with a later opportunity to salvage the wreck. In fact, as I reflected afterwards, the new joke was in some ways funnier than its predecessor. Spurred on by this delusion, I later made the foolish move of leaping into yet another language as I tried, in vain, to communicate the comedy with an English friend. This time the joke emerged as no more than an informative sentence without the slightest hint of light relief. Luckily for me my friend found the whole thing so incredibly un-hysterical that he never cottoned onto the fact that I was telling a joke in the first place. I escaped unscathed – and have never touched the gag since. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , ,
Categories : Reviews

Invitation to an Execution: a note on Jon Gvennersson

10 12 2011

[an anonymous article, first published c.2005]

My brain takes a ride on the memory train. Destination: St. Anselm’s Convent School, 196–. Escaped from the clutches of some domineering nun, I spend a blissful evening in the empty cloisters thwacking crane flies with a damp towel. I kill fifty, sixty, seventy: I lose count. Most of them die; a few escape baring wounds. One, two, three, four, five legs missing. A torn wing or two. They limp across the ancient paving stones like men on crutches, fly unsteadily into the courtyard like poor paper planes, either way regretting the day they ever crossed this small child’s path. And well they might.

I have so many happy memories of killing crane flies. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Miscellaneous

Red Onion Imagery in the Last Poem written by Ludomir Birovnik

10 12 2011

Of the many ways in which the Bulgarian poet Ludomir Birovnik might have made his exit from the planet earth, choking on a stick of celery – obscure though it might seem – may yet rank amongst the most apt. Of course, there is some doubt whether the celery was the primary cause of his death – or whether his subsequent tumble down the stairway and far-from-safe landing on an especially sharp-edged example of proto-futurist Bulgarian sculpture was actually to blame. But it matters not. The fact remains that the last surviving member of the Bulgarian Farm Poets Movement (a group which, in its prime, produced more poems about celery than any other Eastern European literary faction) has taken his final breath. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , ,
Categories : Reviews

Firelight Crumbled: Tomas Lurgsy and the Bulgarian Farm Poets Movement (reviewed by Georgy Riecke)

10 12 2011

[Being a review of ‘FIRELIGHT CRUMBLED’ : Tomas Lurgsy and the Bulgarian Farm Poets Movement: An Experiment in Poetical Criticism, by J T Marsden]

The warning sign is neon-lit; the alarm bells ringing like a thousand wind-chimes on a windy day. A rough ride is guaranteed: all bets off. Unless ‘rough ride’ is considered a compliment, in which case I shall gladly retrieve the word and put it safely back in my pocket. For I am not in the habit of handing out compliments, especially to books as silly as this.

Hark: the forewarning of things to come from the pen of J T Marsden. For only in the second paragraph he writes these words: ‘I gave up pulling sensation’s tail in my twenties. The thrill of making the academic world squeal like pigs has long since lost its attraction for me. My bottom drawer of review slips has plenty enough ‘polemical’s for the meantime…’

A gesture of maturity is the most immature thing one could ask for a writer to indulge in Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : Reviews

Firelight Crumbled: Tomas Lurgsy and the Bulgarian Farm Poets (excerpt)

10 12 2011

[Being an excerpt from the book: ‘FIRELIGHT CRUMBLED’ : Tomas Lurgsy and the Bulgarian Farm Poets Movement: An Experiment in Poetical Criticism, by J T MARSDEN.  Reprinted with the author and publishers’ permission].

Introduction

When I was first asked to write a book about the Bulgarian Farm Poets Movement, I must admit that I panicked. I loved the subject, undoubtedly, but I couldn’t for the life of me imagine how one would begin to interpret it in an original manner. The scene was all set for a cynical expose; a clinical deconstruction of those malodorous ironies that have always scurried like rats beneath the floorboards of the BFPM. You must know the script by now. So none of the so-called ‘farm poets’ actually came from the country. So they were all well educated. So none of them were particularly poor. So they were useless farmers.[1] So their attempts to create poetry for the common man were a failure. So the entire movement was a bit of a sham. The scene was set for this story to be told. And it would probably read well; all but a pocketful of sentimental Bulgarians refusing to accept its myriad truisms.

But what kind of a story is it? Not one that I’m especially interested in, I must admit. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : Miscellaneous

Bernard Randall Jnr – ‘Not Another Book on the Cold War’

10 12 2011

[one of my own reviews, to be added to the 'miscellaneous' file...]

Hate is human; racial hate is merely a human misinterpretation, or unnecessary compartmentalisation of this very human hate. (Bernard Randall Jnr – Not Another Book on the Cold War)

Bernard Randall Jnr does not have many friends in the literary world. This is the man, after all, who once described the Laami family as a ‘tribe of leprous non-talents’; who wrote that Jan Zbigwurt was ‘as profound as a signpost pointing the wrong way’ and, most infamously, claimed that the whole concept of racism was a ‘figment of our imagination: a pure media invention’. It was this last theory that formed the backbone of his 2000 study, Mr Blue Skin and which, despite its having been blasted by critics in the intervening years, continues to preoccupy him in his most recent work, Not Another Book on the Cold War – a collection of essays examining the ‘thin racial webs woven around tangible cultural struggles’.

I need hardly say that for the most part this book does not deserve reviewing Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : Miscellaneous

« Previous Entries


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.