The Story of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Rise in the 1980s Art World Gets Told in a New Graphic Novel

in Art, Books, Comics/Cartoons | May 21st, 2019

Jean-Michel Basquiat was keen­ly sen­si­tive to the way the art mar­ket thought about him. He was com­pared to “a preach­er pos­sessed by the spir­it,” his art, wrote crit­ics, indica­tive of his “inner child.” This talk, writes Art­net’s Bruce Gop­nik, “could eas­i­ly veer into ideas of the Noble Sav­age.” The artist thought so; he was dis­gust­ed by his por­tray­al as “a wild man run­ning around,” he said. He want­ed no part of the prim­i­tivist image forced upon him. Yet “to this day, he’s almost always billed as being more in touch with his emo­tions and the pas­sions of urban life than with the order­ly rea­son­ing of post-Enlight­en­ment cul­ture.”

This itself is a false dichotomy—between expres­sion­ist and con­cep­tu­al art, “urban” pas­sions and reason—but if any­one gets caught in-between, it’s Basquiat. Gop­nick leans, maybe too heav­i­ly, on the con­cep­tu­al side of things, push­ing com­par­isons between Jen­ny Holz­er and Hans Haacke, down­play­ing Basquiat’s roots as a street artist and his con­nec­tions to hip hop and new wave. Basquiat had his ear to the street—also an arti­fact of post-Enlight­en­ment culture—and was hard­ly com­fort­able with the order­ly rea­son­ing of the mas­sive­ly prof­itable art mar­ket.

What­ev­er any­one wants to call his work, it makes no sense to sep­a­rate it from its con­text: Basquiat’s Brook­lyn home and Low­er East Side stomp­ing grounds, the down­town scene in which he came of age, his com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ships with Kei­th Har­ing, Andy Warhol, and Julian Schn­abel, three of many fig­ures who, along with Basquiat, cre­at­ed the huge 1980s art mar­ket and art gallery cul­ture. A new graph­ic nov­el by Ital­ian illus­tra­tor Pao­lo Parisi promis­es a new take on the now-well-worn biog­ra­phy of Basquiat. It’s a sto­ry writ­ten and drawn by a fel­low con­cep­tu­al artist, albeit one whose work more fits the image.

With eye-pop­ping pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary tones—the com­ic book col­ors favored by Basquiat and his contemporaries—Parisi takes some license, imag­in­ing con­ver­sa­tions that may or may not have occurred. “Basquiat comes off as a bit more naïve and far less con­flict­ed than we now know him to be,” writes Eileen Kin­sel­la at Art­net. The chap­ter excerpt­ed there, “New Art/New Mon­ey,” (see a few pages above and below), has mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives. In a recon­struct­ed din­ner scene between art deal­ers Mary Boone and Lar­ry Gagosian, Basquiat doesn’t even appear.

But the nar­ra­tive also draws direct­ly from Basquiat’s own words. One page is a fac­sim­i­le of a hand­writ­ten note the artist made in April 1984. “I have mon­ey every­where, every­where. I’m paid exor­bi­tant sums for a sin­gle piece,” he writes, not to boast but to mar­vel at the incred­i­ble amount of infla­tion he sees all around him:

A pic­ture I sold to Deb­bie Har­ry for $200 only a cou­ple of years ago is now worth $20,000. That’s the art mar­ket today. Work­ing with gallery own­ers is exhaust­ing.

                                                They always want

                                                            More

                                                            More

                                                            More

Lat­er Parisi adapts the artist’s thoughts in a crit­i­cal mono­logue: The gal­lerists “have this way of doing things I’ve nev­er seen before. They focus a lot on the artist’s image, buy in bulk, decide who to pro­mote and how. They often buy and sell among them­selves, between gal­leries. They nev­er respect agree­ments. I don’t think I’ll be able to trust them.” Basquiat’s frus­tra­tion at “some­thing rot­ten in this scene” made him con­sid­er giv­ing up paint­ing for good. He didn’t get the chance, though Parisi has him tell a girl­friend “Picas­so died at nine­ty… I’m cer­tain­ly not going before then.”

Parisi, who has also writ­ten and illus­trat­ed graph­ic biogra­phies of Bil­lie Hol­i­day and John Coltrane, has an ear for Amer­i­can speech pat­terns and class and race dynam­ics, draw­ing out with more or less sub­tle­ty the asso­ci­a­tions between the art world’s fas­ci­na­tion with “prim­i­tivist” art and the con­tin­u­ing res­o­nances of slav­ery and colo­nial­ism in its hyper-cap­i­tal­ist econ­o­my. Was Basquiat a child­like char­ac­ter who only slow­ly real­ized the greedy machi­na­tions of the deal­ers?

In the 2010 doc­u­men­tary The Radi­ant Child, his for­mer graf­fi­ti part­ner Al Diaz explains his moti­va­tions from the very begin­ning. “We want­ed to do some kind of con­cep­tu­al art project.” Basquiat aimed direct­ly at the art world, writ­ing mes­sages on walls like “4 THE SO-CALLED AVANT-GARDE.” Once in its com­pa­ny, how­ev­er, he found, like many oth­er fierce­ly inde­pen­dent artists who make it big, it wasn’t worth the mon­ey. Read the ful­ly excerpt­ed chap­ter at Art­net and pur­chase Parisi’s graph­ic nov­el Basquiat online.

via Art­net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of How David Jones Became David Bowie Gets Told in a New Graph­ic Nov­el

Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large For­mat Book by TASCHEN

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Chaot­ic Bril­liance of Jean-Michel Basquiat: From Home­less Graf­fi­ti Artist to Inter­na­tion­al­ly Renowned Painter

Sal­vador Dalí & the Marx Broth­ers’ 1930s Film Script Gets Released as a Graph­ic Nov­el

How Art Spiegel­man Designs Com­ic Books: A Break­down of His Mas­ter­piece, Maus

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The Writing System of the Cryptic Voynich Manuscript Explained: British Researcher May Have Finally Cracked the Code

in Books, History | May 16th, 2019

Human­i­ty will remem­ber the name of James Joyce for gen­er­a­tions to come, not least because, as he once wrote about his best-known nov­el Ulysses, “I’ve put in so many enig­mas and puz­zles that it will keep the pro­fes­sors busy for cen­turies argu­ing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insur­ing one’s immor­tal­i­ty.” If Joyce was right, then the author of the mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich man­u­script (about which you can see an ani­mat­ed intro­duc­tion here) has set a kind of stan­dard for immor­tal­i­ty. Filled with odd, not espe­cial­ly explana­to­ry illus­tra­tions and writ­ten in a script not seen any­where else, the ear­ly 15th-cen­tu­ry text has per­plexed schol­ars for at least 400 or so years of its exis­tence.

But recent years have seen a few claims of hav­ing cracked the Voyn­ich man­u­scrip­t’s code: one effort made use of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, anoth­er con­cludes that the text was writ­ten in pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish, and the lat­est declares the Voyn­ich man­u­script to have been com­posed in “the only known exam­ple of pro­to-Romance lan­guage.” Uni­ver­si­ty of Bris­tol Research Asso­ciate Ger­ard Cheshire, the man behind this new decod­ing, describes that lan­guage as “ances­tral to today’s Romance lan­guages includ­ing Por­tuguese, Span­ish, French, Ital­ian, Roman­ian, Cata­lan and Gali­cian. The lan­guage used was ubiq­ui­tous in the Mediter­ranean dur­ing the Medieval peri­od, but it was sel­dom writ­ten in offi­cial or impor­tant doc­u­ments because Latin was the lan­guage of roy­al­ty, church and gov­ern­ment.”

And what, pray tell, is the Voyn­ich man­u­script actu­al­ly about? Cheshire has revealed lit­tle about its con­tent thus far, though he has described the text as “com­piled by Domini­can nuns as a source of ref­er­ence for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon.” Though he has claimed to deter­mine the nature of its unusu­al lan­guage — one with­out punc­tu­a­tion but with “diph­thong, triph­thongs, quad­riph­thongs and even quin­tiph­thongs for the abbre­vi­a­tion of pho­net­ic com­po­nents” — deci­pher­ing its more than 200 pages of con­tent stands as anoth­er task alto­geth­er. In the mean­time, you can read his paper “The Lan­guage and Writ­ing Sys­tem of MS408 (Voyn­ich) Explained,” orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the jour­nal Romance Stud­ies.

Although Cheshire’s dis­cov­ery has pro­duced head­lines like the Express’ “Voyn­ich Man­u­script SOLVED: World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous Book Deci­phered After 600 Years,” oth­ers include Ars Techh­ni­ca’s “No, Some­one Has­n’t Cracked the Code of the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script.” That arti­cle quotes Lisa Fagin Davis, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Medieval Acad­e­my of Amer­i­ca (and vocal Voyn­ich-trans­la­tion skep­tic), crit­i­ciz­ing the foun­da­tion of Cheshire’s claim: “He starts with a the­o­ry about what a par­tic­u­lar series of glyphs might mean, usu­al­ly because of the word’s prox­im­i­ty to an image that he believes he can inter­pret. He then inves­ti­gates any num­ber of medieval Romance-lan­guage dic­tio­nar­ies until he finds a word that seems to suit his the­o­ry. Then he argues that because he has found a Romance-lan­guage word that fits his hypoth­e­sis, his hypoth­e­sis must be right.”

Fagin Davis adds that Cheshire’s “ ‘trans­la­tions’ from what is essen­tial­ly gib­ber­ish, an amal­gam of mul­ti­ple lan­guages, are them­selves aspi­ra­tional rather than being actu­al trans­la­tions,” and that “the fun­da­men­tal under­ly­ing argu­ment — that there is such a thing as one ‘pro­to-Romance lan­guage’ — is com­plete­ly unsub­stan­ti­at­ed and at odds with pale­olin­guis­tics.” Fagin Davis’ crit­i­cism does­n’t even stop there, and if she’s right, Cheshire’s approach will be unlike­ly to pro­duce a coher­ent trans­la­tion of the entire text. And so, at least for the moment, the Voyn­ich man­u­scrip­t’s life as a mys­tery con­tin­ues, keep­ing busy not just pro­fes­sors but enthu­si­asts, tech­nol­o­gists, Research Asso­ciates, and many oth­ers besides.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Has the Voyn­ich Man­u­script Final­ly Been Decod­ed?: Researchers Claim That the Mys­te­ri­ous Text Was Writ­ten in Pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to “the World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous Book,” the 15th-Cen­tu­ry Voyn­ich Man­u­script

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script: Has Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy Final­ly Solved a Medieval Mys­tery?

An Intro­duc­tion to the Codex Seraphini­anus, the Strangest Book Ever Pub­lished

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Oliver Sacks’ Recommended Reading List of 46 Books: From Plants and Neuroscience, to Poetry and the Prose of Nabokov

in Books, Neuroscience | May 13th, 2019

Image by Lui­gi Novi. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We remem­ber Oliv­er Sacks as a neu­rol­o­gist, but we remem­ber him not least because he wrote quite a few books as well. If you read those books, you’ll get a sense of Sacks’ wide range of inter­ests — inven­tion, per­cep­tion and mis­per­cep­tion, hal­lu­ci­na­tion, and more — few of which lack a con­nec­tion to the human mind. His pas­sion for ferns, the core sub­ject of a trav­el­ogue he wrote in Oax­a­ca as well as an unex­pect­ed­ly fre­quent object of ref­er­ence in his oth­er writ­ings and talks, may seem an out­lier. But for Sacks, ferns offered one more win­dow into the king­dom of nature that pro­duced human­i­ty, and which through­out his life he tried to under­stand by observ­ing from as many dif­fer­ent angles as pos­si­ble.

No small amount of evi­dence of that pur­suit appears in Sacks’ list of 46 book rec­om­men­da­tions com­mis­sioned for The Strand’s “Author’s Book­shelf” series. (See the full list below.) A fair few of its selec­tions, includ­ing William James’ The Prin­ci­ples of Psy­chol­o­gy, A.R. Luri­a’s The Mind of a Mnemonist, and Anto­nio Dama­sio’s The Feel­ing of What Hap­pens, seem like nat­ur­al favorites for a writer so end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by human cog­ni­tion and con­scious­ness.

Trac­ing the devel­op­ment of the human brain and mind would, of course, lead to an inter­est in biol­o­gy and evo­lu­tion, here result­ing in such picks as Edward O. Wilson’s Nat­u­ral­ist, Carl Zim­mer’s Evo­lu­tion: The Tri­umph of an Idea, and the jour­nals Charles Dar­win kept aboard the Bea­gle.

But Sacks was­n’t just an observ­er of the brain: some of his most inter­est­ing writ­ings come out of the times he used him­self as a kind of research sub­ject — as when he found out what he could learn on amphet­a­mines and LSD. A sim­i­lar line of inquiry no doubt showed him the val­ue of Aldous Hux­ley’s The Doors of Per­cep­tion and Heav­en and Hell, and in less altered states the likes of Sig­mund Freud’s The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams. But whichev­er paths took Sacks toward his knowl­edge, he ulti­mate­ly had to get that knowl­edge down on paper him­self, and the prose of Vladimir Nabokov, the poet­ry of W.H. Auden and the phi­los­o­phy of David Hume sure­ly did their part to inspire his inci­sive and evoca­tive style. We would all, what­ev­er our inter­ests, like to write like Oliv­er Sacks: if these books shaped him as a writer and thinker, who are we to demur from, say, A Nat­ur­al His­to­ry of Ferns?

  • A Nat­ur­al His­to­ry of Ferns by Rob­bin C. Moran
  • A Rum Affair: A True Sto­ry of Botan­i­cal Fraud by Karl Sab­bagh
  • A Trea­tise of Human Nature by David Hume
  • A Vision­ary Mad­ness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influ­enc­ing Machine by Mike Jay
  • Actu­al Minds, Pos­si­ble Worlds by Jerome Bruner
  • Being Mor­tal: Med­i­cine and What Mat­ters in the End by Atul Gawande
  • Can­nery Row (Stein­beck Cen­ten­ni­al Edi­tion (1902–2002)) by John Stein­beck
  • Chal­lenger & Com­pa­ny: the Com­plete Adven­tures of Pro­fes­sor Chal­lenger and His Intre­pid Team-The Lost World, The Poi­son Belt, The Land of Mists, The Dis­in­te­gra­tion Machine and When the World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle
  • Col­lect­ed Poems by W.H. Auden
  • Curi­ous Behav­ior: Yawn­ing, Laugh­ing, Hic­cup­ping, and Beyond by Robert R. Provine
  • Dar­win and the Bar­na­cle: The Sto­ry of One Tiny Crea­ture and His­to­ry’s Most Spec­tac­u­lar Sci­en­tif­ic Break­through by Rebec­ca Stott
  • Dis­turb­ing the Uni­verse by Free­man Dyson
  • Earth Abides by George R. Stew­art
  • Evo­lu­tion: The Tri­umph of an Idea by Carl Zim­mer
  • Eye of the Behold­er: Johannes Ver­meer, Antoni van Leeuwen­hoek, and the Rein­ven­tion of See­ing by Lau­ra J. Sny­der
  • God’s Hotel: A Doc­tor, a Hos­pi­tal, and a Pil­grim­age to the Heart of Med­i­cine by Vic­to­ria Sweet
  • Igno­rance: How It Dri­ves Sci­ence by Stu­art Firestein
  • Imag­in­ing Robert: My Broth­er, Mad­ness, and Sur­vival by Jay Neuge­boren
  • In Search of Mem­o­ry: The Emer­gence of a New Sci­ence of Mind by Eric R. Kan­del
  • Inward Bound: Of Mat­ter and Forces in the Phys­i­cal World by Abra­ham Pais
  • Lise Meit­ner: A Life in Physics by Ruth Lewin Sime
  • Lost in Amer­i­ca: A Jour­ney with My Father by Sher­win B. Nuland
  • Music, Lan­guage, and the Brain by Anirud­dh D. Patel
  • Nat­u­ral­ist by Edward O. Wil­son
  • Phan­toms in the Brain: Prob­ing the Mys­ter­ies of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachan­dran
  • Plu­to­ni­um: A His­to­ry of the World’s Most Dan­ger­ous Ele­ment by Jere­my Bern­stein
  • Same and Not the Same by Roald Hoff­mann
  • Select­ed Poems by Thom Gunn
  • Silent Thun­der: In the Pres­ence of Ele­phants by Katy Payne
  • Speak, Mem­o­ry: An Auto­bi­og­ra­phy Revis­it­ed by Vladimir Nabokov
  • Swim­ming to Antarc­ti­ca: Tales of a Long-Dis­tance Swim­mer by Lynne Cox
  • The Age of Won­der: How the Roman­tic Gen­er­a­tion Dis­cov­ered the Beau­ty and Ter­ror of Sci­ence by Richard Holmes
  • The Anatomist: A True Sto­ry of Gray’s Anato­my by Bill Hayes
  • The Doors of Per­cep­tion and Heav­en and Hell by Aldous Hux­ley
  • The Ele­phan­ta Suite by Paul Ther­oux
  • The Feel­ing of What Hap­pens: Body and Emo­tion in the Mak­ing of Con­scious­ness by Anto­nio Dama­sio
  • The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams by Sig­mund Freud
  • The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curios­i­ty Changed the World by Jen­ny Uglow
  • The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Lit­tle Book about a Vast Mem­o­ry by A. R. Luria
  • The Prin­ci­ples of Psy­chol­o­gy (Vol­ume Two) by William James
  • The World With­out Us by Alan Weis­man
  • Think­ing in Pic­tures: And Oth­er Reports from My Life with Autism by Tem­ple Grandin
  • Time, Love, Mem­o­ry: A Great Biol­o­gist and His Quest for the Ori­gins of Behavior by Jonathan Wein­er
  • Voy­age of the Bea­gle: Charles Dar­win’s Jour­nals of Research­es by Charles Dar­win
  • What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Sens­es by Daniel Chamovitz
  • What Mad Pur­suit: A Per­son­al View of Sci­en­tif­ic Dis­cov­ery by Fran­cis Crick
  • Won­der­ful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of His­to­ry by Stephen Jay Gould

To pur­chase books on this list, vis­it The Strand’s web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

This is What Oliv­er Sacks Learned on LSD and Amphet­a­mines

Oliv­er Sacks Con­tem­plates Mor­tal­i­ty (and His Ter­mi­nal Can­cer Diag­no­sis) in a Thought­ful, Poignant Let­ter

A First Look at The Ani­mat­ed Mind of Oliv­er Sacks, a Fea­ture-Length Jour­ney Into the Mind of the Famed Neu­rol­o­gist

Oliv­er Sacks Explains the Biol­o­gy of Hal­lu­ci­na­tions: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

Oliv­er Sacks’ Final Inter­view: A First Look

29 Lists of Rec­om­mend­ed Books Cre­at­ed by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge Luis Borges, Pat­ti Smith, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Artistry of the Mentally Ill: The 1922 Book That Published the Fascinating Work of Schizophrenic Patients, and Influenced Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky & Other Avant Garde Artists

in Art, Books | May 10th, 2019

It’s an endur­ing irony of art his­to­ry: artists whose work has come to define high cul­ture are often char­ac­ter­ized by var­i­ous men­tal health issues. But the art­work of ordi­nary, anony­mous peo­ple who strug­gle with those same issues is regard­ed as ther­a­py, maybe, or a diver­sion, or a mean­ing­less form of busy work. Though the art world has cre­at­ed a mar­ket for “out­sider art,” it can seem like such work and its cre­ators get viewed through an ethno­graph­ic lens rather than human­iz­ing por­traits of the artist.

As Michel Fou­cault demon­strat­ed in Mad­ness and Civ­i­liza­tion, insti­tu­tions sprung over the course of mod­ern Euro­pean his­to­ry to quar­an­tine cer­tain class­es of peo­ple from the rest of soci­ety, even if it is trou­bling­ly clear to many of us that the dis­tinc­tions can­not hold—hence, per­haps, the mor­bid fas­ci­na­tion with the mad­ness of famous pro­fes­sion­al artists. In 1922, Ger­man psy­chi­a­trist Hans Prinzhorn chal­lenged this reign­ing ortho­doxy with the pub­li­ca­tion of Artistry of the Men­tal­ly Ill.

The book, writes the Pub­lic Domain Review, “reflect­ed a break­down of high culture’s claim to ‘civ­i­liza­tion,’ expos­ing the mis­ery and tur­moil at the heart of mod­ern life.… Against the grain, the book grant­ed voice to the pre­vi­ous­ly mar­gin­alised: those incar­cer­at­ed, those deemed insane, those suf­fer­ing under pover­ty, those untrained, those in the wrong type of insti­tu­tion.”

It grant­ed those artists an audi­ence, more to the point, of appre­cia­tive fel­low artists like Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Jean Debuf­fet (who would coin the term Art Brut in response). As should be abun­dant­ly clear from the small sam­pling of images here from the book, mod­ernists took much from the images they saw in Prinzhorn’s book, most of it the unat­trib­uted and anony­mous work of schiz­o­phrenic artists, some of whom them­selves draw from ear­li­er mod­ernist trends.

When the Nazis held their “Degen­er­ate Art” exhi­bi­tions in 1937, a por­tion of Prinzhorn’s col­lec­tion of “over 5000 paint­ings, draw­ings, and carv­ings” was includ­ed next to the avant-garde artists it influ­enced. Art his­to­ri­an Stephanie Bar­ron argues that “one quar­ter of the illus­tra­tion pages in the [Degen­er­ate Art Exhibiton’s] guide fea­tured repro­duc­tions of the work of these psy­chi­atric patients.” Mod­ernists iden­ti­fied, in com­pli­cat­ed ways, with those exclud­ed from civ­i­liza­tion, and they were sub­ject­ed to the same treatment—“the insane and the avant-garde were here equat­ed, both equal­ly pathol­o­gized.”

Prinzhorn’s book reced­ed into obscu­ri­ty, along with the artists it care­ful­ly col­lect­ed and pub­lished. It deserves to be far bet­ter known, both for its own sake and for its sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry avant-garde, and hence all sub­se­quent avant-garde art. The book takes the work it presents seriously—not as child­like attempts or ther­a­peu­tic inter­ven­tions, but as expres­sions of six basic dri­ves “that give rise to image mak­ing,” as the Pub­lic Domain Review sum­ma­rizes.

Those uni­ver­sal dri­ves include “an expres­sive urge, the urge to play, an orna­men­tal urge, an order­ing ten­den­cy, a ten­den­cy to imi­tate, and the need for sym­bols. For Prinzhorn, image mak­ing is dri­ven by our intense desire to leave traces.” Art, wrote Prinzhorn, rep­re­sents “an urge in man not to be absorbed pas­sive­ly into his envi­ron­ment, but to impress on it traces of his exis­tence beyond those of pur­pose­ful activ­i­ty.”

The the­o­ries of artists like Kandin­sky and Debuf­fet expressed some sim­i­lar ideas. The for­mer ascend­ed to the realm of spir­it and sym­bol, and the lat­ter acer­bical­ly cas­ti­gat­ed the emp­ty, out-of-touch ven­er­a­tion of high cul­ture. Who knows what the artists here had in mind when cre­at­ing their work? In Prinzhorn’s analy­sis, the­o­ret­i­cal con­cerns may be large­ly irrel­e­vant. The cre­ation of art, by any­one, is a uni­ver­sal human dri­ve that requires no spe­cial train­ing, no social sanc­tion, no web of bro­kers, cura­tors, and col­lec­tors. Maybe this is a threat­en­ing mes­sage to peo­ple who police the bound­aries of cul­ture.

The mid­dle class­es of his day, wrote Debuf­fet, were “con­vinced that [their] fash­ion­able knowl­edge legit­imizes the preser­va­tion of their caste. They work at per­suad­ing the low­er class­es of this, at con­vinc­ing some of them of the neces­si­ty to safe­guard art, that is to say arm­chairs, that is to say the bour­geois who know with which silk it is prop­er to uphol­ster these arm­chairs.” Reduc­ing art to a sta­tus sym­bol turns it into so much fur­ni­ture, he argued; a “recourse to antique styles takes the place of good taste.” In the “raw art” of the men­tal­ly ill, Debuf­fet and oth­er mod­ernists saw a renew­al of a pri­mal human dri­ve, the cre­ative act.

Prinzhorn’s neglect­ed book is out of print, though you can pur­chase an expen­sive 1972 edi­tion on Ama­zon, and even an expen­sive Kin­dle ver­sion. See much more of this incred­i­ble art­work at the Pub­lic Domain Review and read brief pro­files from the ten schiz­o­phrenic artists Prinzhorn iden­ti­fied in a lat­er sec­tion of the book. Artists like Karl Bren­del, an amputee for­mer brick­lay­er from Turingian, who carved haunt­ing wood sculp­tures and began his art career sculpt­ing with chewed bread, and August Neter, to whom 10,000 fig­ures once appeared in a sin­gle vision that lat­er became the sub­ject of enig­mat­ic pen­cil draw­ings like World Axis and Rab­bit, below.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Artist Draws Nine Por­traits on LSD Dur­ing 1950s Research Exper­i­ment

Sun Ra Plays a Music Ther­a­py Gig at a Men­tal Hos­pi­tal; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

A Uni­fied The­o­ry of Men­tal Ill­ness: How Every­thing from Addic­tion to Depres­sion Can Be Explained by the Con­cept of “Cap­ture”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How to Make a Medieval Manuscript: An Introduction in 7 Videos

in Books, History | May 3rd, 2019

All of us came of age in the era of mass-mar­ket books, bun­dles of text on paper print­ed quick­ly, cheap­ly, and in large quan­ti­ties. Noth­ing about that would have been con­ceiv­able to the many vari­eties of arti­san involved in the cre­ation of just one man­u­script in the Mid­dle Ages. Even here in the 21st cen­tu­ry we mar­vel at the beau­ty of medieval man­u­scripts, but we should also mar­vel at the sheer amount of spe­cial­ized labor that went into mak­ing them.

We might best appre­ci­ate that labor by see­ing it per­formed up close before our eyes, and a new video series allows us to do just that. “The British Library has released a set of sev­en videos to look at the process of cre­at­ing medieval man­u­scripts,” says Medievalists.net.

“Patri­cia Lovett, a pro­fes­sion­al cal­lig­ra­ph­er and illu­mi­na­tor, hosts these 2–3 minute videos, which fol­low the process from the tools used to the tech­niques employed in design­ing an illu­mi­nat­ed page.”

Lovett cov­ers every step in the mak­ing of a medieval book: “how to make quill pens from bird feath­ers”; “the com­plex process behind mak­ing ink for writ­ing in man­u­scripts” (which involves wasps); “how ani­mal skins were select­ed and pre­pared for use in medieval man­u­scripts”; “the tools for rul­ing and line mark­ing in medieval books”; “the vari­ety of pig­ments that were in use in the Mid­dle Ages” to apply vivid col­or to the pages; “how medieval artists paint­ed the beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions in their books”; and “the work behind paint­ing and embell­ish­ing man­u­scripts and repro­duc­ing a lav­ish­ly illu­mi­nat­ed page.”

“The word ‘man­u­script’ derives from the Latin for writ­ten (scrip­tus) by hand (manu),” writes Lovett and British Library illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script cura­tor Kath­leen Doyle, and who among us will for­get that, after we’ve wit­nessed the care­ful man­u­al labor on dis­play in these videos? For fur­ther insight into the medieval man­u­script-mak­ing process, have a look at the Get­ty Muse­um’s series of videos on the sub­ject fea­tured last year here on Open Cul­ture.

We’ve also fea­tured the alche­my of the pig­ments used to col­or the pages of medieval man­u­scripts; the pages of a medieval monk’s sketch­book that shows what went into the designs for these man­u­scripts’ illu­mi­na­tion; and a look into the mak­ing of The Book of Kells, the Irish cul­tur­al trea­sure that stands as one of the very finest sur­viv­ing exam­ples of the illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script form. (And since you’ll sure­ly get curi­ous about it soon­er or lat­er, we’ve also put up an expla­na­tion of why so many mar­gin­al draw­ings in medieval man­u­scripts include killer rab­bits.)

Just as the books we read today — whether the afore­men­tioned mass-mar­ket prod­ucts or the rel­a­tive­ly arti­sanal small-press cre­ations or even the e‑books — reveal impor­tant qual­i­ties about the world we live in, so medieval man­u­scripts have much to say about the beliefs, the tech­nol­o­gy, and soci­etal struc­tures of the times that pro­duced them. But for those who actu­al­ly devel­oped the skills for and ded­i­cat­ed the time and effort to that pro­duc­tion, these man­u­scripts also showed some­thing else. As Lovett and Doyle quote the 12th-cen­tu­ry scribe Ead­wine as pro­claim­ing about his Ead­wine Psalter, “The beau­ty of this book dis­plays my genius.”

via Medievalists.net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

How the Bril­liant Col­ors of Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made with Alche­my

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

Killer Rab­bits in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Why So Many Draw­ings in the Mar­gins Depict Bun­nies Going Bad

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Classic Children’s Books Now Digitized and Put Online: Revisit Vintage Works from the 19th & 20th Centuries

in Books, K-12, Libraries | May 1st, 2019

Children’s books are big busi­ness. And the mar­ket has nev­er been more com­pet­i­tive. Best­selling, char­ac­ter-dri­ven series spawn their own TV shows. Can­dy-col­ored read­ers fea­ture kids’ favorite com­ic and car­toon char­ac­ters. But kids’ books can also be fine art—a venue for well-writ­ten, fine­ly-illus­trat­ed lit­er­a­ture. And they are a seri­ous sub­ject of schol­ar­ship, offer­ing insights into the his­to­ries of book pub­lish­ing, edu­ca­tion, and the social roles chil­dren were taught to play through­out mod­ern his­to­ry.

Dig­i­tal archives of children’s books now make these his­to­ries wide­ly acces­si­ble and pre­serve some of the finest exam­ples of illus­trat­ed children’s lit­er­a­ture. The Library of Con­gress’ new dig­i­tal col­lec­tion, for exam­ple, includes the 1887 Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Pic­tures & Songs, illus­trat­ed by Eng­lish artist Ran­dolph Calde­cott, who would lend his name fifty years lat­er to the medal dis­tin­guish­ing the high­est qual­i­ty Amer­i­can pic­ture books.

The LoC’s col­lec­tion of 67 dig­i­tized kids’ books from the 19th and 20th cen­turies includes biogra­phies, non­fic­tion, quaint nurs­ery rhymes, the Gus­tave Doré-illus­trat­ed edi­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, and a num­ber of oth­er titles sure to charm grown-ups, if not, per­haps, many of today’s young read­ers.

But who knows, King Win­ter—an 1859 tale in verse of a pro­to-San­ta Claus fig­ure, in a book par­tial­ly shaped like the out­line of the title character’s head—might still cap­ti­vate. As might many oth­er titles of note.

A sly col­lec­tion of sto­ries from 1903 called The Book of the Cat, with “fac­sim­i­les of draw­ings in colour by Elis­a­beth F. Bon­sall”; a book of “Four & twen­ty mar­vel­lous tales” called The Won­der Clock, writ­ten and illus­trat­ed by Howard Pyle in 1888; and Edith Fran­cis Foster’s 1902 Jim­my Crow about a boy named Jack and his boy-sized crow Jim­my (who could deliv­er mes­sages to oth­er young fan­cy lads).

An 1896 book called Gob­olinks intro­duces a pop­u­lar inkblot game of the same name that pre­dates Her­mann Rorschach’s tests by a cou­ple decades. Oth­er high­lights include “exam­ples of the work of Amer­i­can illus­tra­tors such as W.W. Denslow, Peter Newell… Wal­ter Crane and Kate Green­away,” writes the Library on its blog. The dig­i­tized col­lec­tion debuted to mark the 100th anniver­sary of Children’s Book Week, cel­e­brat­ed dur­ing the last week of April in all 50 states in the U.S.

“It is remark­able,” says Lee Ann Pot­ter, direc­tor of the LoC’s Learn­ing and Inno­va­tion Office, “that when the first Children’s Book Week was cel­e­brat­ed, all of the books in the online col­lec­tion… already exist­ed.” Now they exist online, not only because of the tech­nol­o­gy to scan, upload, and share them, but “because care­ful stew­ards insured that these books have sur­vived.”

Dig­i­tal ver­sions of today’s kids books could mean that there is no need to care­ful­ly pre­serve paper copies for pos­ter­i­ty. But we can be grate­ful that archivists and librar­i­ans of the past saw fit to do so for this fas­ci­nat­ing col­lec­tion of children’s lit­er­a­ture. The theme of this year’s Children’s Book Week—Read Now, Read For­ev­er—“looks to the past, present, and most impor­tant, the future of children’s books.” Enter the Library of Con­gress dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of children’s books from over a cen­tu­ry ago (and see the oth­er siz­able online archives at the links below) to vis­it their past, and imag­ine how vast­ly dif­fer­ent their future might be.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Dig­i­tal Archive of 1,800+ Children’s Books from UCLA

Hayao Miyaza­ki Picks His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

Enter an Archive of 6,000 His­tor­i­cal Children’s Books, All Dig­i­tized and Free to Read Online

Grow­ing Up Sur­round­ed by Books Has a Last­ing Pos­i­tive Effect on the Brain, Says a New Sci­en­tif­ic Study

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in Vintage Recordings from the Early 1950s

in Books, Literature | April 23rd, 2019

J.R.R. Tolkien was not a big fan of his fan­dom. He had seri­ous doubts about whether any of the mil­lions of read­ers who adored The Hob­bit and The Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy under­stood any­thing about what he was try­ing to do. But none of them can be blamed, since he didn’t at first set out to write fic­tion at all—at least not when it came to The Lord of the Rings. The books, he said, were “an attempt to cre­ate a world in which a form of lan­guage agree­able to my per­son­al aes­thet­ic might seem real.”

The most famous fan­ta­sy series of all time began its life as a lin­guis­tic exper­i­ment, in oth­er words. “The inven­tion of lan­guages is the foun­da­tion,” said Tolkien. “The ‘sto­ries’ were made rather to pro­vide a world for the lan­guages than the reverse.” Of course, Tolkien fans know quite a bit about how per­son­al his sto­ries became, even as they incor­po­rat­ed more and more myth­i­cal ele­ments. How could we pos­si­bly under­stand these sto­ries the way Tolkien did?

Authors do not get to choose their read­ers, nor can they direct the inter­pre­ta­tions of their work. Still Tolkien may have been more mis­un­der­stood than oth­ers, and maybe more enti­tled to com­plain. The schol­ar­ly work of philol­o­gists like himself—academics who stud­ied the roots of lan­guages and mythologies—had been man­gled and mis­used by the Nazis. The fact caused Tolkien to con­fess to his son “a burn­ing pri­vate grudge against that rud­dy lit­tle igno­ra­mus Adolf Hitler” for “ruin­ing, per­vert­ing, mis­ap­ply­ing, and mak­ing for ever accursed” the his­to­ry Tolkien had made his life’s work. (He also penned a scathing reply to a Ger­man pub­lish­er who asked him for proof of his “Aryan” descent.)

He would also have been appalled that not long after his death, Mid­dle Earth became a “mer­chan­dis­ing jug­ger­naut,” as one stu­dent of his effect on pop­u­lar cul­ture puts it. Tolkien had stren­u­ous­ly resist­ed efforts by Dis­ney to buy the rights to his fic­tion, object­ing to what he saw as vul­gar, mer­ce­nary com­mer­cial­ism. The hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars poured into the Hob­bit and Lord of the Rings films, and the empire of games, action fig­ures, t‑shirts, etc., might have seemed to him the very image of pow­er-mad wiz­ard Saruman’s designs for world dom­i­na­tion.

This isn’t to say we should hear Tolkien scold­ing us as we pick up our box set of spe­cial edi­tion books, Blu-Rays, and LOTR tchotchkes. He was no stranger to mar­ket­ing. And he pro­duced the inspi­ra­tion for some of the most beloved adap­ta­tions with his own cov­er art designs and over a hun­dred draw­ings and paint­ings of Mid­dle Earth and its Eng­lish ref­er­ents. But per­haps it would repay fans of the many LOTR-themed con­sum­ables to attend to the cre­ator of the now-self-exis­tent world of Mid­dle Earth every now and then—to get clos­er, if not to Tolkien’s inten­tions, then at least to his mind and voice, both record­ed in his let­ters and his own read­ings from his work.

In the clips here, you can lis­ten to Tolkien him­self read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit, includ­ing a record­ing at the top of him read­ing one of the fan­ta­sy lan­guages he invent­ed, then cre­at­ed an entire world around, the Elvish tongue Quenya in the poem “Namarie.” Some of these YouTube clips have received their own cin­e­mat­ic treat­ment, in a YouTube sort of way, like the video below with a mon­tage of Tolkien-inspired media and a dra­mat­ic score. This may or may not be to your lik­ing, but the ori­gin sto­ry of the record­ing deserves a men­tion.

Shown a tape recorder by a friend, whom Tolkien had vis­it­ed to pick up a man­u­script of The Lord of the Rings, the author decid­ed to sit down and record him­self. Delight­ed with the results, he agreed to read from The Hob­bit. He liked the tech­nol­o­gy enough that he con­tin­ued to record him­self read­ing from his own work. Tolkien may not have desired to see his books turned into spec­ta­cles, but as we lis­ten to him read, it’s hard to see how any­one could resist the temp­ta­tion to put his mag­nif­i­cent descrip­tions on the big screen. Hear the sec­ond part of that Hob­bit read­ing here, and more Tolkien read­ings in the many links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

J.R.R. Tolkien, Using a Tape Recorder for the First Time, Reads from The Hob­bit for 30 Min­utes (1952)

Lis­ten to J.R.R. Tolkien Read Poems from The Fel­low­ship of the Ring, in Elvish and Eng­lish (1952)

J.R.R. Tolkien Reads From The Two Tow­ers, the Sec­ond Book of The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read From The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit

J.R.R. Tolkien Expressed a “Heart­felt Loathing” for Walt Dis­ney and Refused to Let Dis­ney Stu­dios Adapt His Work

J.R.R. Tolkien Snubs a Ger­man Pub­lish­er Ask­ing for Proof of His “Aryan Descent” (1938)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Street Art for Book Lovers: Dutch Artists Paint Massive Bookcase Mural on the Side of a Building

in Architecture, Art, Books, Travel | April 19th, 2019

Book­cas­es are a great ice break­er for those who love to read.

What relief those shelves offer ill-at ease par­ty­go­ers… even when you don’t know a soul in the room, there’s always a chance you’ll bond with a fel­low guest over one of your hosts’ titles.

Occu­py your­self with a good browse whilst wait­ing for some­one to take the bait.

Now, with the aid of Dutch street artists Jan Is De Man and Deef Feed, some res­i­dents of Utrecht have turned their book­cas­es into street art, spark­ing con­ver­sa­tion in their cul­tur­al­ly diverse neigh­bor­hood.

De Man, whose close friends occu­py the ground floor of a build­ing on the cor­ner of Mimosas­traat and Ams­ter­dam, had ini­tial­ly planned to ren­der a giant smi­ley face on an exte­ri­or wall as a pub­lic morale boost­er, but the shape of the three-sto­ry struc­ture sug­gest­ed some­thing a bit more lit­er­ary.

The trompe-l’oeil Boekenkast (or book­case) took a week to cre­ate, and fea­tures titles in eight dif­fer­ent lan­guages.

Look close­ly and you’ll notice both artists’ names (and a smi­ley face) lurk­ing among the spines.

Design mags may make an impres­sion by order­ing books accord­ing to size and col­or, but this com­mu­nal 2‑D boekenkast looks to belong to an avid and omniv­o­rous read­er.

Some Eng­lish titles that caught our eye:

Sapi­ens

The Sub­tle Art of Not Giv­ing a F*ck

Kei­th Richards’ auto­bi­og­ra­phy Life

The Curi­ous Inci­dent of the Dog in the Night­time 

Pride and Prej­u­dice

The Lit­tle Prince

The World Accord­ing to Garp

Jumper

And a classy-look­ing hard­bound Play­boy col­lec­tion that may or may not exist in real life.

(Read­ers, can you spot the oth­er fakes?)

Boekenkast is the lat­est of a num­ber of glob­al book­shelf murals tempt­ing lit­er­ary pil­grims to take a self­ie on the way to the local indie book­shop.

via Bored Pan­da

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Japan­ese Artist Cre­ates Book­shelf Dio­ra­mas That Mag­i­cal­ly Trans­port You Into Tokyo’s Back Alleys

157 Ani­mat­ed Min­i­mal­ist Mid-Cen­tu­ry Book Cov­ers

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City this May for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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