venus febriculosa

“I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. If we cannot find that kind of artistic and virile painting, let us settle for an immaculate white jacket (rough texture paper instead of the usual glossy kind), with LOLITA in bold black lettering.”  – Letter from Vladimir Nabokov to publisher Walter J. Minton of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, April 23, 1958 in response to five submitted cover designs for the first US edition of Lolita.

Sulki & Min‘s cover for our new book! The gray rectangle shows the area of glossy varnish on the otherwise matte white cover.

For those who love the work of the late W.G. Sebald, erudite, elegaic, steeped in melancholy and Weltschmerz,  it is not a stretch to declare his somber books sacred texts. Little wonder, then, that the prospect of a film based on The Rings of Saturn could produce in such a person anxiety bordering on panic. However, Grant Gee’s superb film, Patience (after Sebald) part documentary, part gloss, part travel diary, manages to achieve the unthinkable: an intelligent and interesting exploration of Sebald’s world. And, organically woven through the film, inseparable from it, is the extraordinary music of James Leyland Kirby or, rather, his project The Caretaker.

From Marco Sonzogni, chair of the jury:

The winner of this unusual design contest is Ignacio Serrano. The starting point was an ekphrastic poem (i.e., one based on, and inspired by, a visual of art), titled The Unmade Bed. Its author –  the poet, critic and academic Harry Ricketts (1950 -) – is well-versed in this genre and has produced a faithful and detailed response to the original painting, charged with physical and emotional nuances. The painting in question is Un triste presentimento (A Sad Premonition) by the Italian painter Gerolamo Induno (1825-1890).

Ignacio Serrano, an illustrator and graphic designer from Madrid, has produced an excellent design, capturing in a clear, delicate and meaningful way the most essential elements of the original poem (and, of course, of the original painting); in particular the posture and look of the female protagonist, the painting on the wall, the chair, the overall atmosphere of the room.  Serrano’s design is a persuasive example of how words and image can interact to communicate meanings and emotions. From the viewpoint of intersemiotic translation, this is an ideal result on a macro- and micro-level and I commend the artist for his contribution to the contest.

Maggie Best from Wales deserves mention for her interesting composition which I very much liked.

In general I like the ones that are more hazy and indistinct, and offer less information — ones that don’t try to force a particular viewpoint on the viewer. Too much visual information gets in the way of imaginary soundtracks for imaginary films. -Geeta Dayal

After much deliberation, and in order to honor a complex competition which generated a particularly diverse set of images, as well as to respect the divergent perspectives of the jury, two winning covers have been selected: those of Arya Bakhsheshi of Iran and Andy Chen of the United States.

Arya Bakhsheshi (front)

Arya Bakhsheshi (back)

On Arya Bakhsheshi’s cover:

This is a beautifully considered piece of design, again both the front and back. It stays very close to established Eno-esque imagery — it’s impossible not to think of Eno’s Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan skylines and the Obscure Records covers — and it has a photographic quality that seems to locate it in the period (1970s-1980s) when Eno was moving more deeply into non-vocal, ambient music. The “obviousness” of the imagery could count against this cover, and yet the delicate judgement of mood, the photos’ sombre melody and soft twilight melancholy, the jewel-like dying sun, the transmutation of the ordinary into something magical and poetic, are so close to my experience of listening to Eno that I can’t resist it. If this were to be the album’s new official cover it would give me pleasure every time I got it out to play it — far more than the existing cover — and I know I would never tire of it.  I feel the designer has lived with Eno’s music and deeply appreciates what it is about. In two variations of the same scene, the designer suggests the temporal lapse of film with the subtlest, most contemplative of gestures. The typography occupies the spaces in the images with the same intelligence and sensitivity of touch. If only Eno’s later album covers had been this good. -Rick Poynor

Whilst I find this image to be slightly derivative, reminding me somewhat of Eno’s “Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan” video work, I do like its overall quietness, which is only broken by one flaring luminescent light. The typography and overall design of both front and back covers is very tight, thoughtful and works perfectly. -Russell Mills

Andy Chen (front)

Andy Chen (back)

On Andy Chen’s cover:

I like the mysteriousness of this purely abstract black and white submission. I feel it also echoes Eno’s strengths, being that he operates best, innovating approaches to sound, when working at the edges of the mainstream, constantly experimenting. (The mainstream generally catch on and appropriate his ideas and techniques about three years after the event.) -Russell Mills

I do think it’s a fine piece of work — both the front and back cover. It’s the kind of highly finessed design that would emerge as a favourite and perhaps winner in a more general design contest, if designers alone were the judges. That’s partly why I resisted it  — because from a design-world perspective it seemed too much the obvious choice in its refinement and tastefulness. Over the years I have become a bit tired of the predictability of the results when judging design competitions. Also, for me, although I appreciate the cover as an abstract image and as a piece of typography, it doesn’t strongly evoke my experience of the album’s music. -Rick Poynor

There were many strong entries. You can see some of them below, or see all of the submissions here.

Alice Twemlow singled out Anibal Perez’ cover as a particular favorite noting:

I like its visual references to piano keys, circuit boards, plugs, fret boards,  speakers and an LP itself, and also to the endlessly circular nature of Eno’s music which a number of the cover artists pick up on. But I especially appreciate its allusion to the darker, more mechanical sounding aspects of this album (felt most strongly in Patrolling Wire Borders) through the reference to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon plan for a prison in which the staff of the institution are positioned at the center of a circular arrangement of cells and are able to view all  the inmates around them. Inmates would not know when they were being watched. Maybe its just me but there seem to be some associations between ambient music with mind control (all that knob twiddling and wires I suppose) and the physically arresting effects it has on the human body, so the imagery seems to fit. 

I like its restrained use of black and white and its avoidance of retro tropes, or too- obvious allusions to trippy journeys through outer space. You can use it as an op-art piece, staring into the central eye and letting the radial elements spin and pulsate, if you need to. 

Frith Kerr liked David Castillo’s cover for its most successful consideration of type and image.

Here are some other wonderful submissions. From top to bottom, Jamie Keenan, Charles Chamberlin, Duncan O Ceallaigh, Adam Green, Robert Jarrell, Randy Slavin, Brad Konick.

Russell Mills singled out Howard Gardener’s:

I like the subdued nature of the image, which I suspect is simply an inverted photograph i.e. in negative. The row of anonymous un-labelled cans, some opened with smoke or vapours pluming from within, suggests  mysterious contents of unknown potential, very like the music of Music for Films, each track conjuring up the atmosphere of previously unknown environments, physical landscapes or mental mindscapes. The framing of the image, its composition and the careful placement and treatment of the typography thoughtfully and appropriately mirrors the tone of the photograph.”

According to John Berger (Ways of Seeing, 1972), “it is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world, and we explain that world with words.”

This contest is part of a research project that investigates the relationship between and verbal and the visual; more specifically, to what extent an image (or a set of images) can effectively capture the essence of a text, and how this process of illustration occurs.

To this end we have chosen a particularly evocative poem and we are inviting artists from all over the world to come up with an illustration of this text — as ‘literal’ as possible, in visual terms, to the text.

The poem is unfamiliar and is presented anonymously so that the artist’s response is not conditioned by preexisting knowledge.

The unmade bed

She sits on the unmade bed, just right

of centre, with something in her hands.

Her dark hair hangs in one long pigtail

down over her right shoulder, the left

her white nightie, décolleté, leaves bare.

Her dropped face, that winsome, downward stare.

On the floor near her naked, crossed feet

are two petite brown boots: one lies flat,

the other toes a blur of paper.

If the scene were contemporary,

she could be holding some flash iPad

or iPhone. She could be listening

to Leonard Cohen, Gillian Welch.

But this almost homely bedsit – wood-

ceilinged, clothes flopped on chair, wash-basin

tucked away in the hearth (what’s that shoe

doing on the crumbling mantelpiece?) –

must surely be nineteenth century.

Not English though with that crucifix

hazy behind the open shutter.

Continental? Some provincial

French town, perhaps. A miniature,

that’s what she is holding: his picture.

Does the paper – a letter? – announce

he’s died or loves another (“Ma chère

Lisette …”)? Could that black aquascutum,

angled beside the chest of drawers,

have been his? His features swim, she feels

his touch, quickens, finds her mind go numb.

Sunlight slants through the window, catches

the pretty, floral bedspread, picks out

a painting above it on the wall.

Shadows. Steps. A locked embrace. She wears

a blue dress, he a red cape, jaunty

plume in his cap. She is leaning back

to receive a last, quick, lunging kiss.

This is how it should have, should have, been.

Not here, alone on an unmade bed,

in this room, bright, sad, slightly shabby.

Each entry must be accompanied by the artist’s explanatory commentary (250 words maximum).

Submit entries to marco.sonzogni@vuw.ac.nz and admin@venusfebriculosa.com by Friday, November 30, 2012.

The top ten entries will be included in an academic publication.

The terms and conditions of entry are that the submitted work may be used in academic presentations and publications; copyright remains with the artist

Prize: $500US for the winner.

See the full requirements here.

Brian Eno

“As an intellectually mobile loner, scene-setter, systems lover, obstinate rebel, techno-prophet, sensual philosopher, courteous progressive, close listener, gentle heretic, sound planner, adviser explorer, pedant and slick conceptual salesman, and devoted fan of the new, undrab and surprising, wherever it fell between John Cage and Little Richard, or Duchamp and doo wop, or Mondrian and Moog, Eno busily and bossily remodeled pop music during the 70s. He looked at what the Velvet Underground, Can, Steve Reich and the Who had done, went forth and multiplied. Eno created an atmosphere, and helped determine what the history of electronic music was between the avant garde 1950s and the pop 21st century.” – Paul Morley

If it’s not clear from the laundry list in the quote above, the absurdly-prolific ‘non-musician’ Brian Eno has done enough over the past forty years to variously impress, interest, annoy or alienate just about everyone. There are, of course, his early art school inflected Kraut-, glam, and prog-rock beginnings and his later work with ‘ambient’ and ‘generative’ music; his long list of now-legendary collaborative efforts and producing credits (among a certain subset of rock cognoscenti Eno is the eternal brilliance behind – and everything good about – Roxy Music, David Bowie, and Talking Heads); and, finally, his disparate extracurricular activities: Oblique Strategies, Obscure Records, 77 Million Paintings, The Long Now, A Year With Swollen Appendices not to mention his ubiquity as an interviewee and lecturer on art, music, science and technology. Eradicate most of the last 25 years, and step back into the mid-70s, and the man and his oeuvre become at least somewhat manageable (no best-selling Irish rock bands, no Windows 95 start-up sound, no Spore). This was arguably Eno’s most fertile period: in just those few years he generated (or helped generate) such a startlingly wide range of music with a ridiculous number of brilliant collaborators (in particular Robert Fripp who, in my opinion, was an indispensable component of Eno’s sound and process during their long and fruitful association) on so many different records that it would surprise no one if one or two albums should fall through the cracks.  From that era Music for Films, in particular,seems to be perennially overlooked.

Music for Films

“This album is a compilation of fragments of my recorded work over the last two or three years. Some of it was made specifically for use as soundtrack material, some of it was made for other reasons but found its way into films; most of it is previously unissued in any form.”  -from the back cover of Music for Films

“It is not Eno’s fault – although it’s not been to his disadvantage either – that the ‘soundtrack to an imaginary film’ concept is now so commonplace that it no longer stands up as a concept, it’s just a thing, a clump of words, no more meaningful than ‘rock’ or ‘punk’.  – Frances Morgan

“The real films in [Music for] Films are the ones on the backs of your eyelids or behind your forehead, much as they must have been when Eno was first creating them.” – Serdar Yegulalp

“This and much else of Eno’s music has its own psychological landscape in our shared consciousness. By design it is not the bumper-ridden library music typical of a broadcasting industry interested in moving participants by cuing advertisements. Music in film can foment empathy which can be difficult to restrain when you know the music a director has chosen, a sense of sharing a secret in total silence as you stare at the screen steeping in your own past. Where might Eno’s music prove effective as just such a means, of passively compelling trust, honesty and assent? Who would tend to trust the message of a film with an Eno soundtrack? Clever bastards like us.” – Tim McGowan

1978 saw the ‘official’ release of Brian Eno’s Music for Films, a collection of 18 short and musically disparate instrumental tracks, a handful of which had previously surfaced on a 1976 promotional LP of the same name (which consisted of 25 musical interludes, including some unreleased and others that appeared elsewhere, notably 1975’s Another Green World). Not officially part of Eno’s Ambient Series nor, in fact, strictly ‘music for films’ they range in tone and mood from impressionistic sketches of an ‘ambient’ nature to darker, quirkier and, in some cases, louder pieces that could just a easily be at home on Before and After Science or Another Green World or might be found on one of the Dieter Moebius/Hans-Joachim Roedelius collaborations (or even the slightly later My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with David Byrne). Perhaps never considered to be among Eno’s very best work of any period or genre (overshadowed at one end by the more conceptually ambitious Ambient 1: Music for Airports with its four long glacially-paced looping tracks, and at the other by the controlled mania and kitchen sink maximal-ism of his earlier ‘rock’ albums), nevertheless, Music for Films remains a consistently interesting and quietly surprising album.

The Cover

Brian Eno’s album covers have always tended toward the interesting, (one or two I find exceptional, notably Music for Airports), and he was fortunate to count work by the brilliant artists Tom Phillips and Russell Mills among them. On some level, however, the covers have always seemed more intent on establishing Eno’s artistic, intellectual, and theoretical bona fides (and, especially with the earlier albums, his overall weirdness) than anything else. The cover for Music for Films, however, is radically different.  Not so much designed as intentionally left blank, the chocolate brown Helvetica text is pushed to the extreme upper edges of the texture-less and indescribably beige cover (the same text layout was used to good effect for the Cluster collaborations After the Heat and Begegnungen). This apotheosis of neutrality avoided the plain brown wrapper look in favor of what in retrospect seems closer to the generic packaging popular in grocery stores in the late ‘70s (or perhaps a reference color from Interiors, Woody Allen’s beige-est Bergman-esque film, also from 1978). Importantly, the cover is not ‘conceptual’ in the way that Richard Hamilton’s design for The Beatles’ ‘White Album” is, nor has it the cool rigor and studied minimalism of any number of ECM or Factory Records covers that – brilliant as they are (and they are brilliant) – somehow appear positively baroque in comparison. Rather, music and cover co-exist nicely as a unit, the latter providing no commentary on the former (or anything else for that matter), simply existing as a visual analogue to the wordless music. It’s a nice conceit.

The Contest

So in spite of the fact that Music for Films perhaps already has the perfect cover, and because we prefer difficult projects and are very fond of the album and believe it deserves new listeners (and re-listeners), we are sponsoring a competition for a new LP cover. You can find all of the rules and gobbledygook here (read them, please), but keep in mind that the deadline for submissions is 1 September 2012 and that there will be a $500 US prize for the entry that jurors like best as well as some special Eno-related prizes to be announced. All of the tracks can easily be found on any number of video-sharing and music-streaming sites ( Note: There were two different track orders. The later EG version with the revised sequence is now the standard so, unless you have a 1978 Polydor or Antilles LP, this is the sequence you will most likely hear.). If you have any questions you may e-mail us at: admin {at} venusfebriculosa {dot} com

The Jury

Were honored to have as jurors:

Geeta Dayal, staff writer specializing in culture reporting at wired.com;  electronic music journalist; columnist at Frieze Magazine; contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music; author of Another Green World; commentator, Brian Eno, 1971–1977: The Man who Fell to Earth.

Frith Kerr, director of the graphic design consultancy Studio Frith based in London, frequent collaborator with artists and architects, including Juergen Teller, Michael Clark, Tate Modern, Valentino, Victoria and Albert Museum; member of Alliance Graphique Internationale.

Brad Laner, founder of the beautiful/noisy/guitar-y/drone-y band Medicine (of particular note is their 1992 debut Shot Forth Self Living) and the experimental electronic project Electric Company; musical genius in and behind many other  bands; contributor to Brian Eno’s Another Day on Earth.

Russell Mills, artist;  illustrator and co-creator of More Dark than Shark; book and album cover designer (most famously Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral as well as the Eno collaborations Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks and The Pearl); sound installation artist; recording artist (Pearl + Umbra).

Rick Poynor, writer/essayist focusing on design and the visual arts; cultural critic; design historian; founder of Eye magazine; co-founder of Design Observer; contributing editor of Print magazine; author, with collaborators Brian Eno and Russell Mills, of More Dark than Shark.

Alice Twemlow is a British-born writer and educator based in New York. She is chair and co-founder of the Design Criticism MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and also a PhD candidate in Design History at the Royal College of Art in London. Alice is a contributor to Design Observer and writes about design for publications including Eye and Architect’s Newspaper. She is the author of What is Graphic Design For? (Rotovision) and of numerous essays.

UPDATE: We hope to have the results of the contest posted by Monday, October 8. We apologize for the delay!

Sanja Planinic, a graphic design student at the Academy of Fine Arts Sarajevo sent me a link to a project she had recently completed for a book design class. The book was Lolita, and the resulting red, white and black images, reminiscent both of Barbara Kruger’s critiques of power and sexism as well as constructivist photo-montages, act as potent commentary on the story. The key lies in understanding that the black text represents Humbert while the red text and “the little red childlike interventions” act as Lolita’s gloss on Humbert’s text as well her small yet persistent bid for autonomy and her attempt to carve out her own identity amidst the crushing authority of Humbert’s words.

I found Planinic’s text selections quite intriguing. Be sure to click on the images above to appreciate them full size.

Before today I had not heard of the Armenian-Ukrainian artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan, but a link to an article by Karin D. B. about The Lolita Project on Sub25, the newly minted Romanian arts and culture site (whose purpose is the promotion of young Romanian artists) shows this image first and foremost. It’s one of a pair of large oil paintings of Stalin and Lenin that was auctioned by Sotheby’s back in 2010 (an earlier collage is shown below). Bakhchanyan was part of the anti-Soviet and anti-propaganda Sots Art movement in Moscow in the early 1970s before moving to New York  in 1975. He died in 2009.

What was perhaps the most extraordinary publishing venture of the last century was inaugurated in 1943 by Mary Conover Mellon, the 39 year old wife of philanthropist Paul Mellon (who, along with his sister and two cousins for a period comprised half of the eight richest people in the country).

The catalyst for this illustrious enterprise was a five-part seminar conducted by psychiatrist C. G. Jung that the Mellons attended in New York in 1937. What began then as an already ambitious project by Mary to publish the collected works of Jung in English translation exploded into a remarkable publishing program of hundreds of titles that included works by Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces), Mircea Eliade (The Myth of the Eternal Return), Heinrich Zimmer (The King and the Corpse), Marie-Louise von Franz (Aurora Consurgens), and Jaroslav Pelikan (Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons) to name a few, as well as critical translations of new and classic works: the collected works of Paul Valery, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin translated by Vladimir Nabokov and The I Ching translated by Richard Wilhelm. The Bollingen Foundation (named for the village where  Jung built his retreat the “Tower”)  sponsored archaeological expeditions, established research fellowships, initiated a poetry prize and a lecture series and in general supported the work and livelihood of a startling number of people including Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, who organized the annual Jung-related Eranos lectures at her home in Anscona, Switzerland and Natacha Rambova, the silent film costume and set designer (and wife of Rudolph Valentino) turned Egyptologist. The story of the Bollingen Foundation is full of fascinating tales and eccentric people, behind which is glimpsed only rarely the elusive figure of the philanthropist with a nearly limitless bank account whose major gifts to institutions include the Yale Center for British Art, and the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art.

My introduction to the Bollingen Series came in 1984 during my freshman year at St. John’s College when I purchased a copy of The Collected Dialogues of Plato that absolutely radiated gravitas through its austere olive green jacket. Those first year students flush with cash were also able to buy another Bollingen book, the newly published Oxford Translation of Aristotle with its brilliant shiny cover somewhere between French ultramarine and cobalt blue (I remember it costing an exorbitant $60).  The rest of us had to make do with Random House’s rather tweedy old Basic Works of Aristotle. (To be sure, though, the famous series at the St. John’s bookstore was unequivocally the fusty diminutive volumes of The Loeb Classical Library, specifically the Greek texts bound in green linen with gold embossing and Irish green jackets — two years of Greek was required, but no Latin. I still have the two Loebs:  Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrranus and Sextus  Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism).  My junior year I acquired my third and last program-related Bollingen: Charles S. Singleton’s translation of Dante’s Commedia.

My colleague Yuri Leving recently taught a course entitled EAST EUROPEAN CINEMA: WAR, LOVE, AND REVOLUTIONS. Among the many wonderful (and seminal) films viewed and analyzed were Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains (Czechoslovakia, 1966), Dusan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism (Yugoslavia, 1971), Vera Chytilova’s Daisies (Czechoslovakia, 1967), and Elmar Klos’ and Jan Kadar’s The Shop on Main Street (Czechoslovakia, 1966). One student, Davis Carr, created poster designs for several of the films featured in the syllabus. Yuri was eager to share these with me and I, in turn, am delighted to share them here. I think they compare favorably to current Criterion and Second Run offerings.

You can read Carr’s commentary on these posters here and view the complete PowerPoint presentation that includes several additional posters.