October 22, 2008

Three-Way Rorschach Test

This post now resides on my other site 50 Watts:

4 comments:

  1. 1. A brain in cross-section
    2. A Salem witch-hunter viewed through a bonfire heat-haze (I'm quite proud of that one)
    3. A party gone horribly wrong

    I love these. I didn't know Anderson did those paper cuttings until I saw the few reproduced in the Penguin Graphic Classics edition of his stories (the one with the beautifully melancholy Anders Nilsen cover).

    Also, by the way, Nick Motte of the Dalkey covers is Warren 'Oulipo' Motte's son. More to come when I type up the interview.

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  2. hey will, what a wonderful surprise to see the andersen stuff here! and honored to get such a kind shout out... the andersen visit it was quite a pilgrimage, already being in europe but making the very wise decision to ignore documenta and the venice biennial for some real food for the soul, fearful that the museum might not have much on view. fortunately the it was incredible (even a case with dried flowers he took from dicken's garden!) and a lot of visual works on view. there are a few good books on his visual work, but the best is a beautiful facsimile of one of his collage albums that is findable on abe, but in the $100 - $200 range, and quite incredible. reading his travel diary while i was there made him a lot less appealing as a human, and i have never really found my way through the writings, but his experimentation with visual works has that lack of baggage that most good writers visual works have - hugo in the same boat with freedom and experimentation all over the place. also enjoying much of what you have been posting of late, and if you didn't see it, i gave you some props on the wire's website, trying to get music geeks to pay more attention to this stuff, as it's so darn inspiring!

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  3. that first one is easy--it's a record of the devolution of the republican party

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  4. Great to see Andersen's visual art getting some recognition. Appealing as a human being? Certainly he wasn't an easy person - sexually conflicted, tortured by self-doubt, fired by a sense of his own genius, incredibly sensitive to slights or praise, incredibly insensitive to his own impact on others - but one of the greatest imaginations of all time. I'm only halfway through Caradec's biography of Raymond Roussel, but time and again I have been struck by similarities between the two. Roussel is, essentially, Andersen reborn with limitless wealth - a weird twist on what Andersen called "the fairy tale of my life".

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