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.

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.

Hard to beat Jamie Keenan‘s cover for This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

From my essay:

“Several nearly monochromatic covers reveal unexpected eloquence by using obscured, distorted and disappearing text to great effect. Jamie Keenan’s truncated words that appear to be in the process of sinking into a heavily textured background suggest the methodical erasure of countless lives that vanished into nothingness.”

It was a rather dissapointing turnout for the latest contest, both in terms of number of submissions (58) and overall quality. It was perhaps too difficult a task to integrate the Dante/Heaney quote with all of its ambiguity and complexity with the notion of a global hunger campaign. In many ways, the two notions were at odds. Marco and I discussed not awarding a prize at all. Still, there were several bright spots and we were in agreement on the five best entries, none of which were excellent, but which still seemed measurably better than the rest. Moreover, we agreed that Suzene Ang’s entry was just that much better than the other four. We were also aware that since Suzene was the winner of a previous contest as well as being honorably mentioned in others that perhaps there would be a sense of impropriety or unfairness in our decision. We decided, though, that no one should be penalized for submitting high-quality entries to several contests and, in the end, we decided to award Suzene one-half of the prize money and to donate the remaining half to Save the Children, not because she has been a past winner, but because we felt that no one submitted an entry that succeeded on all counts.

With that being said, we are pleased to also show the four runners-up. From top to bottom shown below are Jessie Kroeger, Eva Toth, Mitoui Razvan and Ryan Igarashi.