Tag: emblematics

  • Wild Apollo’s Arrows. An illustrated introduction I

    I Classic / Anti-Classic Decades before the French Revolution, a culture of intoxicating affects burst into the heyday of the Enlightenment, increasingly boosted by national-mythical and folkloristic enthusiasm. The cultural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder compared its impact to the epidemic projectiles that marked the beginning of Homer’s battle epic Iliad. Terms such as the ‘Age […]

  • Wild Apollo’s Arrows. An illustrated introduction II

    III Blind Visionaries –True Homers Paintings Gallery The dismantling of noble Homer had already begun in the 1730s, in the cultural-anthropological milieu of the Scottish Enlightenment, which was characterised by approaches based on early cognitive science and evolutionary theory. The atavistic portrait bust, which on a self-portrait of the Edinburgh barber and graphical chronicler John […]

  • Adam in Oraibi – Wild Apollo’s Arrows Add. I

    CS: New Series. A first visual essay in the wake of the Wild Apollo’s Arrows project.  What happened after the Ossianists discovered the descendants of their wild Homer among the North American tribes and Blake identified their shamans as visionary Ezekiels? Lightning strikes a curved thimble in a garden by night.

  • The Illuminated Myth of Mzona by Richard of Kédange (1802-1879). Part IV

    Primal Catholicism / Marian Magic / Evadah / A throw of the dice Primal Catholicism As a graphic practitioner, Richard was a farmer and gardener through and through, one who furrowed lines with sigil-magical ploughs into which he spread evocative seeds, only to have them emerge in the end into a colourful talismanic sea of […]

  • The Illuminated Myth of Mzona by Richard of Kédange (1802-1879). Part III

    Heavenly Zo / INRI becomes ISO / Swabian and Lorraine Somnambulism Heavenly Zo Richard’s emblematic sexual symbolism originated in the theurgic Neoplatonic geometry of Alexandrian late antiquity and had found its way from there into Jewish mysticism and Hermeticism. The most famous example was the Seal of Solomon, the hexagram, which consisted in the interpenetration […]

  • The Illuminated Myth of Mzona by Richard of Kédange (1802-1879). Part II

    The Ichts / The Sator Arepo mechanism / Two Evas The Ichts When looking through these magic books, one is quickly confronted with the question of whether there was a system here that was comprehensible and decipherable, at least in parts, or whether it was an entirely idiosyncratic construct, a blooming nonsense, a crazy simulation […]

  • The Illuminated Myth of Mzona by Richard of Kédange (1802-1879). Part I

    From Alsace to Lorraine / The research / The book In 2010, three graphic grimoires from rural Lorraine popped up at a Strasbourg bookseller’s, whose peculiarity and intensity were astounding. A Richard from Kédange, today Kédange-sur-Canner, a town not far from the border with Saarland and about 30 km north of the capital of Lorraine, […]

  • Visual notes. A selection.

    Alex Bodea´s “Visual notes” is an ongoing series of poetically condensed observations in the urban sphere combining image and text. The visual notes archive was started in 2012, comprising more than 2000 entries. Technique: ink on paper, 5,7 x 10,7cm.

  • ROSTA / GPP : Pictorial Newsposter-Series of the Russian Avantgarde III , Moscow, 1921

    The campaign at ROSTA ended at the beginning of 1921 with the departure of the director of the news agency Platon Kerzhentsev. Afterwards, it was continued for one more year with a stricter conception in didactical terms under the patronage of Glavpolitprosvet (GPP), a newly founded educational institution of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. The […]

  • ROSTA / GPP : Pictorial Newsposter-Series of the Russian Avantgarde I , Moscow, 1920 / 1921

    In February 1919, caricaturist Mikhail Cheremnykh started an artistic campaign in an empty shop window with a visually designed report of the Bolshevist news agency ROSTA. Shortely thereafter the initiative was taken up by the popular poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. He selected most of the news items and prepared them for pictorial realisation. “The field of […]