Paradise Regained

A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55
David Mellor
Lund Humphries, 1987

This fascinating catalogue from an exhibition at the Barbican, London, was the first to re-examine the Neo-Romantic movement, which dominated British art in the post-war years. It's interesting to see which artists have sustained a recognised profile, and which have disappeared into the margins. Mellor draws together many interesting themes, not least an early connection between surrealism, science fiction and pagan myth in the work of Graham Sutherland.

 

It is also enlightening to see the work of Gerald Wilde, a decidedly non-conformist painter who saw himself in the novel The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Carey and took on the persona of the fictional artist Gully Jimson.

The film adaptation, starring Alec Guinness (to whom Wilde bore a strange resemblance), is second only to Hancock's The Rebel in the canon of essential British art films. Wilde is sadly almost forgotten now. The few works available online show an energy and vision that would suggest an exhibition of his paintings is long overdue.

He's dead, Jim...

Well, you would be forgiven for thinking that, given the recent inactivity on this blog. I've had a few distractions, and then I had a chat with my old pals from Mounds and Circles about our shared interest in the original Star Trek TV series, and found I had been press-ganged into a new project, What Is Brain?  Come and check it out.

We're going to revisit all 79 episodes and hopefully review them in an entertaining fashion. For the record: we are NOT Trekkies and we will be as disrespectful as necessary! There are plenty of good things about the old Star Trek, especially its dafter moments, but we will show no mercy when it becomes tedious and dull.

I used to enjoy the series when it was regularly shown by the BBC in the 70s and 80s but have absolutely no interest in any of the subsequent films or Next Generation spin-offs. I have owned three pieces of ST merchandise in my life, only one of which remains:

1. A model of the USS Enterprise that fired yellow plastic discs. I think I got this for my 6th birthday. I thought it was brilliant, though soon lost the little shuttle craft that came with it. Now missing, presumably lost in space.

2. A replica of a communicator that someone gave me in my early twenties. It reminded me of a cheap electric shaver and fell to bits just as quickly.

3. The picture disc of the soundtrack for the pilot episodes (pictured). The cheesy quality of picture discs is entirely appropriate for such recordings.

One to beam up.

Dymo Glen

New Worlds Order

Eduardo Paolozzi - At New Worlds. Science Fiction And Art In The Sixties
David Brittain 
Savoy Books, 2013

This is a most enlightening and well researched book about New Worlds magazine, the UK's most progressive SF periodical in the 60s and 70s. Under the stewardship of Michael Moorcock, authors such as J.G. Ballard and artists including Eduardo Paolozzi were brought together in a publication with a mission to push SF inspired art and literature into speculative experimental futures.

The book is generously illustrated and benefits from John Coulthard's fine design and layout, but there was one image missing. In Rick Poynor's introduction there is a description of the cover design of a Nebula Short Stories anthology that sounded familiar but was not reproduced, so here is my copy for your entertainment, more than just another example of the questionable genre of fantasy art. 

"It's like a warped dystopian remix of Robbie the Robot tenderly cradling the unconscious woman, except that the woman is wide awake, bleeding and angry. This dark and peculiar fantasy, a kind of sado-erotic space crash, somehow meshes Surrealism, science fiction, the Independent Group, the New Worlds' ethos, Paolozzi's mechanomorphs, the emerging sense of 'crash-culture', and Ballard's soon to be formulated claim that 'Sex times technology equals the future'." 

Cover: Giannetto Coppola

Eduardo Paolozzi, Zero Energy Experimental Pile (Z.E.E.P): Pacific Standard Time (1970)

New Worlds featured artwork by Mal Dean including his cartoon illustrations for the jacket of  Moorcock's 'No Cure for Cancer'

Issues 178 (1967) and 199 (1970): SF smut

Six Polaroids documenting the first meeting of Moorcock, Ballard, Paolozzi (and Ballard's partner Claire Walsh)

Real desktop publishing: the Portobello Road flat where designer Charles Platt laid out issues of New Worlds

Cover design by Mervyn Peake

Eduardo Paolozzi, Zero Energy Experimental Pile (Z.E.E.P.): Hollywood Wax Museum (1970)

Summa Galactica

Design by Choice
Reyner Banham
Academy Editions, London, 1981

While we're talking Reyner Banham, I thought I would post an article he wrote for New Society in October 1977 on the Star Wars phenomenon, reprinted in a collection of his criticism Design by Choice. I should state for the record that I'm not a SW fanatic; I like it but for me it has to assume its place in the SF pantheon and it probably won't be a regular feature of this blog.

I find much of Banham's design writing fairly turgid and overwrought, though his pop culture commentary is a little easier to digest. Note this was written before the film was released in the UK; Banham was semi-resident in the US by this time, teaching at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

It's hard to see the first Star Wars film (Episode IV: A New Hope) with such clarity now, so much has happened in the intervening 37 years, and indeed continues to occur as the filming of part VII may or may not be already taking place in Abu Dhabi. Banham's contention that the film's colossal success was due to it's positioning at the heart of popular culture is hard to contest.

Whether this hurried the end of popular cinema's potential as a progressive artform is arguable. Much was changing in Hollywood at that time, though if we are looking to place the blame the decline in cinema somewhere, Skywalker Ranch might be as good a place as any.