Spectrum 20: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art

The award winning Spectrum series 20th Anniversary Volume showcases the best fantastic art from the worlds most renowned illustration artists. Leafing through the pages reveals a kaleidoscope of pattern and colour, while the diverse range of imagery forms a compendium of Magic and Myth, of the nether regions of the imagination, where dragons and ghouls work their nefarious ends, and enticing fairies open windows on enchanted childhood Arcadias.

Imaginative reverie is the leitmotif, and in Mathieu Lauffray's illustration 'Treasure Island' I have envisaged the cavern as a totem of the psyche, and Long John Silver as a symbolic gatekeeper of the subconscious realms from whence emerges the raw material of creativity:

Perched atop a rough-hewn alter beneath a mysterious aboriginal idol, Long John Silver slumps languidly in an ornately carved ceremonial throne. His sheathed sword leans against his knee, and his eyes remain concealed behind the down turned brim of his hat. He is inscrutable, and the wonders stories might tell of his dark and treacherous deeds are written in the lines of his weathered face, etched in an expression of deep and troubled contemplation; or maybe he speaks to us from his dreams because they are also our own, dim, half remembered childhood fantasies.

Long John Silver, the mythological archetype, sits encircled by towering vaulted embankments that obscure him within a shadowy golden half-light. The craggy walls leap upwards into the hazy sunlit recesses of this primitive subterranean chamber. An ancient cavern redolent with an archaic and malodorous atmosphere and out of its misty vapour looms half formed shapes, peculiar echoes, and shadowy intimations.

Could he be sleeping, caught unaware while guarding some ancient buried treasure, and might we dare to approach? Aye now I recall, it is we who lie sleeping, the unconscious primal monad of his deeper dream! Beware! He reaches for his sword!


Title: Spectrum 20: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art
Author: Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner
ISBN: 9781599290676 (pbk.)
Published: 2013
Publisher: Fairfax, Calif. : Underwood Books


Leibniz's philosophy of mind

Soviet Ghosts by Rebecca Litchfeild

The post-apocalyptic landscape photographs collected in Rebecca Litchfield’s book Soviet Ghosts constitute a hauntingly beautiful ode to death and decay and aroused in me a voyeuristic fascination. Here, desolated and disintegrating buildings, their interiors wreathed in pealing plaster, function as “galleries of cultural memory, exhibiting the social detritus of a recent civilization”. The unnatural absence of people amidst the abundant evidence of their once industrious activity and everyday lives conjures an eerie silence, a vacuum, while the accompanying essays wax lyrical; "The lack of life, the presence of absence in this body of work, creeps across every page" and "It is the recognition of emptiness in these spaces that adds to their power. The more one turns the pages, the more the desolation becomes shockingly apparent, a lack of life that laments the exodus of the living". 

These ruins resonate with a melancholic nostalgia, with poetic sentiment that harks for a turn of phrase; In the gathering dust a child’s doll rests, here a hat perches on the edge of a chair, and broken windows gaze somnolently out on wild urban prairies, on burgeoning forests that crowd in against civilization's intrusion. Everywhere the sublime in nature, and everywhere the entropic passage of time casts its pall in wonderfully textured patterns of corrosion and colour.

The text elucidates expertly on the underlying aesthetic theory "Many of the photographs are what in German would be described as unheimlich, a term derived from Freud’s musing upon aesthetics and translated loosely as ‘uncanny’. It describes a feeling of unease in a familiar setting, or might also suggest a hidden secret that is not known. Far from being just documentary in form, the unheimlich in the aesthetic of decay breathes life into the inanimate, an existence not measured in its lifetime but recognised through its decomposition in death. For it is here and now that it finds its true significance, where the mundane becomes an object of beauty."

For me, the photographs evoke a contemplative intimation of the void, what Daniel Pinchbeck described as, "that vast garbage heap of all that is unknown and forgotten — that empty maw into which all celebrated enterprises eventually follow". Everywhere the fragility and fleetingness of human existence is made visible, while offering an unsettling presentiment about the ideological master narratives that animate our own lives, the closeness is almost suffocating, post-society, post-human, post-life.  In this context Susan Sontag’s famous commentary on photography offers a grave literality "To take a photograph is to participate in another person (or things) mortality, mutability, vulnerability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to times relentless melt".
 
Title: Soviet Ghosts
Author:  Rebecca Litchfield; written by Tristi Brownett, Neill Cockwill, Owen Evans.
Publisher: Great Britain, Carpet Bombing Culture 2014 
ISBN 9781908211163

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the Surveillance State

In ‘No Place to Hide’, Glenn Greenwald documents the complicity of the five eyes partners, of which New Zealand’s GCSB is a member, in the construction of an Orwellian global surveillance network operating in the dark, with negligible oversight, under the alarming institutional aegis “collect it all, sniff it all, partner it all, process it all, know it all, exploit it all.”

The menacing overreach of the NSA, in violation of core constitutional guarantees, and the chilling construction of the architecture of oppression, is placed on trial by this constitutional and civil rights litigator turned journalist. Greenwald incisively prosecutes the NSA’s ambition to indiscriminately invade personal privacy globally without check or possibility of individual protection, as explicitly revealed in the top secret documents leaked by whistle blower Edward Snowden.

Greenwald’s expert analysis is a revelation of fearless investigative reporting in defence of civil liberties and core democratic values. Piercing through the high noise to signal ratio of the mainstream press, Greenwald systematically subjects Government propaganda and subservient media stenography, to a remorseless examination by trail lawyer logic. The resulting dissonance is both fascinating and frightening; on the one hand a reasoned, passionate, and erudite warning against the perils of sweeping state intrusion into our private lives, on the other a mutating political culture shredding hard fought for freedoms like confetti, and aggressively lauded by large factions of the supposedly watchdog media. Greenwald describes the hostility he encountered from members of his profession as “anger and even shame over the truth that adversarial journalism had exposed: reporting that angers the government reveals the real role of so many mainstream journalists, which is to amplify power.”

The final chapter headed “The Fourth Estate” cross-examines the unprecedented and escalating attack on whistle blowers and investigative reporters alike, ironically by the Obama administration that promised to be the most transparent administration in history. Here Greenwald assertively reclaims the core tenet of journalism “The idea of the fourth estate is that those who exercise the greatest power need to be challenged by adversarial pushback and an insistence on transparency; the job of the press is to disprove the falsehoods that power invariably disseminates to protect itself.” From start to finish Greenwald's reporting exemplifies this attitude of moral courage, complemented by Snowden's selfless act of conscience, it makes for a hugely inspiring read.

This book is part spy thriller, part dystopian nightmare, communicating an urgent clarion call to action in defence of our eroding civil liberties, a reminder of why the hard fought for freedoms that define our western democracies should not be abandoned to a sliding decent, an eviscerated mutilation into a society very different from the one we all too often take for granted.

Title: No Place to Hide

Author: Glenn Greenwald

ISBN:9781627790734

Published: 2014

Publisher: Metropolitan Henry Holt

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity is a collection of gritty and emotive photographs by Mike Brody, documenting five years of his train-hopping travails across the United States in the company of a ragtag group of bohemian cohorts. The prints are hewn from earthy hues of warm and slightly faded colour, at times luminous in the soft golden light of dawn or dusk, and appear as if distilled from the dirt and grime of months on the road.

Together the body of work forms a brawny narrative, of defiant young outcasts, rough sleeping and hard living vagabonds with an unerring sense of post-punk style, traversing the seamy margins of society, and framed amidst stark, transitory, and anonymous landscapes.

The depictions of free-wheeling camaraderie, and the lonely beauty of the itinerant lifestyle could easily slip into romanticism, but for Brody's candid depictions of the adversity he encounters. Here, weathered youths with drawn and pallid faces make their home amidst the rusted hulks of dirty carriages, scavenging food amidst rail-side detritus, a coal heap for a bed, a battered copy of The Rum Dairy for a pillow.

The emotional tenderness of Brody's work stands as testament to his total emersion in the lifestyle. The images are highly subjective and communicate a powerful authenticity of experience I often find lacking from contemporary art. There is no pretence in Brody's work, for him the journey is the destination, deeply felt and lovingly documented.

Title: A Period of Juvenile Prosperity

Author: Mike Brody

ISBN: 9781936611027

Published: 2012

Publisher: Santa Fe, N.M : Twin Palms.


Essays and articles:

The Cost of Freedom: Mike Brodie’s “A Period of Juvenile Prosperity”