The Incal: Classic Collection

By Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky

If you like French space opera style comic art, then this is the graphic novel for you. This is one of Moebius's most popular series, combined into a single hardback binding and at 307 pages its a riot of tongue in cheek high adventure. Its not the best of its kind, but given its popularity in Western Europe at least 'The Incal' is certainly iconic.

The primary character is a small time detective named John Difool who becomes embroiled in a galactic struggle between the forces of light and darkness when a mysterious object named the Incal chooses him as its vessel. Difool is quickly cataputed through a series of ever greater events which will have a profound impact on the universe, and on his own destiny.

'The Incal' is one of those graphic novels I expect to become a film at some point, and I hope if it does, it will be a Fench film because I doubt Hollywood could pull it off.

The Grand Duke

By Berthet Yann and Romain Hugault

This graphic novel was recommended to me by my friend Andreas, who assumed (correctly) that I might like it.
In three parts, combined, this is a story revolving around two fighter pilots on the Eastern front, one a German man and the other a Russian woman. Both go through various trials by combat in differing aircraft and it isn't hard to see how much Romain Hugault loves his aircraft! (Examples of this can be seen on his blog).
The story itself is not as interesting as the images, but it does the job. There are the usual post-modern dissaociations to contemporary political ideologies, with both pilots demonstrating contempt for their own political leadership, but given the awful times in which the novel is set, this is probably necessary for a modern audience to appreciate the unlikely romance which evolves between the two. Most of us need a means by which to suspend our disbelief after all.

The art work is very well done, with meticulous attention to the technical aspects of Second World War aviation (though I spy an understandable emphasis on the German aircraft) and there is no end of details for aeroheads to obsess over. The images appear to be hand drawn line art, coloured in photoshop, and are technically much the same as some of the images I've done in the past. These are just far better than anything I've produced and are so obviously a labour of love that its imposible for me (not least as a aeroplane fan) to not like them.

Ashes and Snow

The full film, though the quality is as you'd expect on You Tube.

moif's bad Danish art rant

Most of the time, I ignore other Danish people's ideas regarding what constitutes good art, because if I didn't, I would almost certainly consume myself in an ungovernable rage. Sometimes however, usually when some eager politician or an individual-with-no-taste-and-too-much-money gets a bright idea with regards to 'smartening up' Aarhus, I am provoked to indignation. A decade or so ago some powerful members of Copenhagen's cultural elite did one of their own a favour and unloaded a pile of junk known as the 'Water Dragon' onto us. This leaking pile of expensive scrap metal (known to locals as 'the urinal') now dominates our central plaza and does a brilliant job of making us look even more provisional than we already do. At the time, public opinion was largely opposed to the sculpture with most locals (or at least those who had any opinion) preferring something by a local artist, of which there were several candidates. This opposition from the common herd made no impact on the cultural elite of Copenhagen.



Recently, Aros (an amazingly expensive art museum erected in the centre of the city around the same time as the 'Water Dragon' was being foisted upon us) forked out another vast quantity of money on a 'work of art' designed to bring international attention to Aarhus. In the image above you can see how Aros, the big brick cube looming behind the houses, manages to convey a subtle sense of the sublime... by looking like a big brick cube. Stuck on top, and looking like a misplaced multi-coloured halo, is the 'stunning work of art' designed to inspire foreign awe and exclamations of admiration. The big idea is, you walk around inside it and look at the view through the various shades of horribly expensive glass.



Now, Aarhus faces its latest artistic challenge in the shape of a 72 m tall abstract statue by the late Robert Jacobsen (an artist whose work has no relevance to modern Denmark what so ever and whose legacy is tediously guarded by his own, diminishing generation). Weighing in at 1,800 tons this monstrosity, named 'Big Robert' is almost as big as the statue of Liberty. No one seems to want it, indeed several other cities have already turned the horrible thing down, but if things go the way they usually do, this 'important work of art' will probably be dumped in Aarhus by the cultural elite in Copenhagen so that they can have a good laugh at our expensive.

I would like to take the time to publicly announce that in my opinion, the 'Water Dragon', Aros's technicolour crown, and 'Big Robert' are all perfect examples of the sort of bad art only large amounts of money in the hands of morons can buy. If I had the means, I would wage a clandestine campaign to erase these objects from existence and replace them with beautiful, imaginative works of art, probably something figurative, probably something which reflected the culture of Denmark and not the tedious thought processes of mediocre artists whose only recourse of expression is the abstract.

Beauty

Dr Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics who has recently courted controversy by publishing findings based on a survey of white, Asian, black and native American men and women who were asked to rate each other’s attractiveness based on photographs. Black women scored lowest and Asian women scored highest. Kanazawa already has a dubious reputation and as you can probably imagine his findings have been poorly received.

I was trained to see the human body as a shape surrounded by negative space. In drawing the body one can see it as nothing but an abstract form, without any context what so ever. In this way, any human body can have a beauty that is described by form or posture or the interplay with light that is the basis for all visual communication.

I was also taught the history of art and this illustrates clearly just how many ideas of beauty human beings have developed (thousands). The ideal body form expressed as beauty seems to have started in Greece, but the Greeks also developed realism in sculpture and some of the most beautiful Greek statues are of old, bent people suffering the hardships of life. In order to appreciate this kind of beauty though, I suspect one needs a specific perspective that comes most often with age; empathy. Teenagers it is said have difficulty with empathy, and as often as not cannot recognize beauty in old, or disfigured people.

The emphasis on youth in modern western culture seems to mean that a lot of adults also tend toward a similar lack of empathy, and any one showing the signs of age or having a less than perfect body form are considered less beautiful. When I was young, like so many people in the western world do, I thought fat people were ugly. As I grew older however I started to see them as beautiful. When I studied the history of art I learned that Europeans in the past, much as Africans do today often regarded fat people as beautiful. Eventually there came a day when I found I no longer shared the common perception of beauty and the difference had been brought about by the context of my own life and experiences.

I can't see how a single body form, whether it is described by its shape, or ethnic identity or gender can be classified as more beautiful than any other. Certainly there can be a commonly held agreement that a certain person is beautiful, but to then say that all people who share a similiar identity are beautiful seems to me to be utterly missing the point of what beauty is. Beauty isn't defined by the law of averages, its defined by perception.

Kanazawa's experiment seems to aiming for a conclusion that misses this entirely. He sees a trend as a shared perspective which I don't think it is. Two different people can look at a photograph of a person and agree the person is beautiful, but their reasons for agreement can be wholly different and I think it is the reasoning which is important, not the agreement. By Kanazawa's experiment you could also find that one colour is more beautiful than others, beacuse more people voted for it.

Leni strikes back

Leni Riefenstahl was a celebrated German film maker of the 1930's. Her career went meteoric when she was employed by the Nazi Party to film their 1934 party conference in Nurenberg (which can be seen here) and the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. After the war, her name was mud (being known as a personal friend of Adolf Hitler probably didn't help) and she was shunned by the international film community, even though her 'hated films' weren't, for throughout the last sixty Riefenstahl's composition has been shamelessly ripped off by every one from George Lucas to the Rolling Stones. The reason for this is simply because Riefenstahl, though she only ever made eight motion pictures, was a genius film maker with a knack for unconventional methods. As these things go and despite her subsequent infamy, Riefenstahl was probably the best female film maker of the twentieth Century, and certainly the most influential.

Now it transpires that in 1936, Riefenstahl created two half hour long films which were, technically, in 3d. The Germans called it 'raum film' which means 'space film' and was a reference to the illusion of depth. It took the rest of the western film industry a good seventeen years to catch up.

Slav Epic update

The Slav Epic is Alphonse Mucha's great master piece. It is comprised of twenty vast oil paintings each showing a significant moment in the history of the Slavic people. It was completed in the last twenty years of Mucha's life and given to the city of Prague as a gift. I went to Prague in 1995 hoping to see it, but try as I might, I couldn't find any one who would tell me where to find the paintings (We were surprised to find the people of Prague to be rude and obnoxious without exception). The books I had on Mucha said it was in Prague, but the fact is it was actually in another town called Moravsky Krumlov where the paintings had been kept for safe keeping. Now it seems Prague wants the paintings back but the people of Moravsky Krumlov are resisting the idea.

A fierce legal struggle is under way in the Czech Republic over the fate of 20 enormous paintings by Alphonse Mucha, creator of the style known as art nouveau.

The paintings - entitled the Slav Epic - have spent the last half a century hanging in a chateau in the Moravian town of Moravsky Krumlov. But officials in Prague now want them moved to the capital, prompting angry protests from the rest of the country.

Continue reading...

What ever they decide to do with the paintings I would dearly love to see them. Mucha is probably my favourite artist of all and I already made one trip to Prague to visit his grave and pay my respects. A chance to see the Slav Epic is just about the only thing that would induce me to return to Prague!

Can you guess....

...whats so impressive about this picture?

The Philosophy of Beauty

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