art spiegelman

At his first Pan-Australia Dada exhibition, Barry Humphries had packages printed up bearing the name Platitox, which allegedly contained a poison to put in creeks to kill the platypus, that much-loved, much-protected and playful native animal. “So why have an exhibit which offers a pesticide to destroy these animals? Because...
> culturalelsewhere/2168/barry-humphries-on-the-record-the-early-life-of-an-agent-provocateur/

Age has not wearied him -- and nor can it. The little adventurer with a distinctive flick to his forelock, oddly unfashionable plus-fours and rarely a change of clothes, is frozen in time. As he globetrots from the old Orient to the Land of the Pharaohs - and even the Moon - he looks as he ever did. Yet in 2004 he turned 75. However he...
> writingelsewhere/384/the-world-of-tintin-the-timeless-boy-2004/

In his last self-portrait -- a crayon on paper work done nine months before his death in 1973, at age 91 -- Pablo Picasso created a disconcerting image: the eyes wide as if terrified, the mouth taut and drawn tightly over the teeth, and the face gaunt with defined cheekbones quite unlike what his bowling ball face actually looked like. It...
> culturalelsewhere/363/picassos-last-works-the-final-mask-essay-2003/

The Japanese phenomena of manga (comics) and anime (animated films) have long commanded Westerners‘ attention: they are often violent and sexual graphic, some explore arcane myth, others are hopelessly romantic, and some are social documentaries. There have been numerous attempts at penetrating their layers of meaning (Frederick L...
> writingelsewhere/2027/wrong-about-japan-by-peter-carey/

When a history of animated film is written, it is possible that the largest chapter about how this genre emerged will go not to Walt Disney or Otto (Felix the Cat) Mesmer but to a modest quietly spoken Scots-born Canadian, Norman McLaren. McLaren’s whimsical films charmed and delighted audiences for nearly 50 years. He entered the...
> culturalelsewhere/2010/norman-mclaren-animator-making-the-screen-come-alive/

When the English author Thomas DeQuincey was describing nightmarish drug-induced visions in his early-19th-century autobiography Confessions of an English Opium Eater, he reflected on curious and compelling images he had never seen. They were a set of engravings by Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and DeQuincey referred to...
> culturalelsewhere/1883/piranesis-engravings-exploring-the-dark-discomforts-of-roman-ruins/

Few people -- even American Republicans these days -- still believe the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had much to do with containing terrorism, and various truths about the impetus for these events contend for attention. Doubtless, as with most enormous affairs in world history, time and access to more information from all sides will...
> writingelsewhere/1844/1812-napoleons-fatal-march-on-moscow-by-adam-zamoyski-2006-reviewed/

That there's yet another version of Jack the Ripper in cinemas - From Hell starring Johnny Depp, and based on this graphic novel - is hardly surprising. The mysterious Jack has fascinated generations of film-makers for three reasons: location, location, location.Think London in the late 19th century: narrow cobbled streets barely illuminated at...
> writingelsewhere/1688/from-hell-by-alan-moore-and-eddie-campbell-book-review-2002/

You know how it is, you see Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea and you think, “Man, I should read that book. It looks kinda neat.” Or you watch Michael Jackson: The E! Hollywood True Story and decide you’d love to read a biography of that troubled and troublesome soul. Right now there is a glut of bio-flicks in cinemas...
> writingelsewhere/1876/the-book-of-the-film-of-the-man-2006-from-silver-screen-to-serious-stuff/

Few poems of the 20th century have as much emotional resonance and visceral power as T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men. Published in 1925 when the trench horrors of World War I had been fully revealed, the poem conjured up a philosophical ennui as Old Europe was trying rebuild out of ashes and despair. Book-ended by much-quoted lines...
> culturalelsewhere/1766/chris-marker-film-maker-and-photographer-darkness-at-the-break-of-noon-2008/

Lazlo Moholy-Nagy would argue that our eyesight was defective and limited. He would cite the pioneering 19th-century German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who told his students if an optician made a human eye and brought it to him he would say, "This is a clumsy piece of work".The punchline for Moholy-Nagy would be that we have a...
> culturalelsewhere/1683/moholy-nagy-and-the-bauhaus-photography-exhibition-essay-2003/

Five floors up in a swanky Auckland hotel room someone else is paying for, Oliver James should be happy enough, but he's concerned. He is grappling with the issue of happiness. Or more specifically the lack of it. James is asking a knotty question: why is there more unhappiness among the middle-classes of the developed countries than there...
> culturalelsewhere/224/oliver-james-interviewed-2004-if-youre-happy-and-you-know-it/

Roger Corman is the King of the B Grade Movie. He has directed and/or produced hundreds of films, claims he shot his cult classic Little Shop of Horrors (1960) in two days and one night, and usually brought in a movie in less than 10 days. He would often shoot sequences for two films simultaneously to save on costs and actors would also work in...
> culturalelsewhere/231/roger-corman-interviewed-2006-its-a-gas-gas-gas-s-s-s/

Sex fascinated Stanley Spencer. But so did angels, the transcendence of the spirit through faith, and life in his home village of Cookham where, as a child, he believed biblical events had taken place and been witnessed by local folk.This confluence of religious and rural influences, and his belief that sexual and spiritual desire were...
> culturalelsewhere/233/sir-stanley-spencer-essayed-2003-of-angels-and-dirt/

Movie producer Al Brodax said it began with a 3am phone call from John Lennon. "Wouldn't it be great if Ringo was followed down the street by a yellow submarine?"That -- allegedly/mythically -- was the start and (aside from them knocking off a few songs for the soundtrack and a short appearance before the credits) the end of the...
> absoluteelsewhere/442/the-beatles-yellow-submarine-film-album-reconsidered-1999-fantasia-for-the-pot-generation/