Jimmy Collects Richly Encoded Symbolist Illustrations

[kenog]

Full article here: http://www.artnet.co...tess10-8-10.asp

".... Recently labeled in Time Out magazine as one of the "heroes of the underground" by no other than Wolfgang Tillmans, Richard La Rue -- aka Racky -- pulled a marvelous performance out of the bag at the Red Gallery for a multi-performance, slightly dirty art night called PSI Kick Self Defense/ Blank Cheque last week. Fronting a band called Winnie the Poof with the legendary musician and designer Richard Torry on ukelele, Racky bowled me over with his singing ability and ongoing oddity.

I originally came across him dressed as a bathroom cabinet, since which time he has changed his name to Racky, and become a lot more vocal with me than he was back then, trapped and almost mute as he was in the confines of his mirrored dresser.

The Blank Cheque night seemed to be sponsored by -- no word of a lie -- Walker's Prawn Cocktail Crisps (a British staple), and, if a blind-looking man in the audience (pictured) wasn't the Norwegian, bell-headed, looks-like-he's-been-hit-by-a-bell, chess master champion and G-Star Raw Jeans poster boy Magnus Carlsen (photographed for the jeans campaign by artist and filmmaker Anton Corbijn), I will eat my non-existent hat.

Talking of Tillmans, his eponymously named Serpentine Gallery retrospective that ran during this summer attracted the gallery's biggest ever audiences, averaging over 2,000 visitors per day. The exhibition was Tillmans' first major show in London since 2003.

Racky, being a bit of a cult figure himself, told me about a cultish dead man called Austin Osman Spare whose work had its first public museum outing at the Cuming Museum on the Walworth Road. At 17, Osman Spare (1886-1956) was hailed a genius as he became the youngest exhibitor at the Royal Academy's summer show of 1904. Traumatized by his experience as a WWI war artist, Spare rejected fame and fortune and concentrated his talent on "richly encoded Symbolist illustrations," which are now collected by the likes of Jimmy Page. The work I saw was "stack-hung" Edwardian style, in the manner of the RA's summer shows and Spare's own pub exhibitions of the late 1940s, early 1950s...."

[SteveAJones]

The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love), Psychology of Ecstasy is a book written by Austin Osman Spare during 1909-1913.

The book could be regarded the central text among his writings. It covers both mystical and magical aspects of Spare's ideas; as the modern ideas on Sigils (as now have become popular among Chaos Magic) and Spare's special theory on incarnation are for the first time introduced in this book.

There are some chapters in The Book of Pleasure that Spare has referred to them within the text, but are omitted. It seems that they were destroyed during World War II.

The book had originally been planned as a mutus liber of illustrations only -"the Wisdom without words", but expanded later.

Only two drawings from The Book of Pleasure are known to have survived, one is in Jimmy's collection and another (which was subsequently reworked by Spare) is in a private collection in London.

[SteveAJones]

A fairly recent example of a "richly encoded symbolist illustration":

[kenog]

Thanks SAJ, brilliant as ever.