The Apollo Prophecies

A CD arrived in the mail yesterday from Nicholas Kahn, containing a collection of images from Kahn & Selesnick’s new series: The Apollo Prophecies.

This installation features a continuous ten inch by thirty-six foot long black and white panoramic photograph depicting astronauts from the 1960s traveling to the moon and back. While on the lunar surface they discover a lost Edwardian expedition that may or may not be real. It was shot and assembled on sets or on location with miniature models and live actors. We are using the narrative techniques of Italian fresco cycles of the early Renaissance such as Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel cycle. The story is told in multiple episodes featuring the same characters, appearing numerous times, within a single long panel. The use of this quasi-religious format echoes the concept of astronauts as gods.

Some snippets from this panorama follow below: click on them to see larger sections of the ‘single long panel’, bearing in mind that the full-size images are quite large, and may take some time to download.

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In addition to the long panoramic photograph there is a mass installation of small drawings and photographs. These feature Edwardian photographs of moon rocks, schematic drawings and design notes, portraits of astronauts, beaked and “debeaked” i.e. Edwardian and Aquarian, ephemera, etc.

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Sculptural pieces are intended as artifacts of the Edwardian expedition. The exhibition at Pepper Gallery includes a large Edwardian lunar rover constructed of wood, featuring an expandable McCroskeyen bellows pump, protective metal helmet hood, pig iron chamber pot, and optional carved yoke for oxen, man, or horse. Also featured is a long display cabinet containing samples of lunar rock and dust along with a large pile of cans of Edwardian moon paste, a devotional palliative/exfolliate with curative properties.

All images are Copyright © Kahn & Selesnick, and are reproduced here with permission. The Apollo Prophecies will be on show at the Pepper Gallery in Boston until June 19th.

Balli di Sfessania

In about 1622, an album of etchings by the French graphic artist Jacques Callot (1592-1635) was published, under the title Balli di Sfessania…

The prints in this series - Callot’s most exuberant and delightful - depict dances known in Neapolitan dialect as the sfessania. Such dances, as Callot’s etchings demonstrate in salacious detail, are characterized by violent and sometimes obscene physical contortions and gesticulations. Each plate features a pair of figures pulled from the repertoire of popular entertainers, their balletic interactions running a comic gamut from mock grace to blatant crudity - source here.

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Callot had lived in Rome from 1608, and then in Florence from about 1612. He was appointed to the court of Grand Duke Cosimo II in 1614, for whom he made numerous prints intended as official depictions of the various public festivities staged by the Medici Court. Presumably, Callot had ample opportunity to make sketches of the entertainers participating in these events, later to become source material for the Balli series, which Callot etched some time after he returned to his native Nancy.

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I recognized some of the figures in these dances, or at least their names, as stock characters of the Commedia dell‘Arte: Pulcinella (not pictured here) and Scaramouche, for example. Many of the other names were unfamiliar to me, though: I had never heard of Maramao, say, or Cucurucu.

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Interestingly, Callot’s works in this vein had a delayed but decisive literary influence. Amongst the first publications of the 19th-century German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann was a collection of tales entitled Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier ‘Fantastic pieces in the manner of Callot’ (1814/15). A later story of Hoffmann’s, the marvellous Princess Brambilla (1820) was subtitled ‘Ein Capriccio nach Jakob Callot’.

The present images were all lifted from a Commedia dell‘Arte page at Guy Spielmann’s marvellous site Spectacles du Grand Sičcle, which collects many fascinating images relating to theatre in the 17th/18th Centuries. The final image, below, belongs to a different series of etchings, also by Callot, called Varie Figuri Gobbi (‘Various Hunchbacked Figures’)…

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