What do you get when you cross an ouroboros with a Möbius strip? M.C. Escher knew: The dreaded Mouroboröbius!
Actually, it’s just Escher’s four-block wood engraving print Möbius Band I, circa 1961, which gives the appearance of being both a double and a triple ouroboros/Möbius strip combo: Two loops, two strips; three creatures, three twists. (It is also a left-handed trefoil knot.) In my copy of Escher’s The Graphic Work, the notes to this piece (which notes I believe are written by Escher himself) mention that the three creatures depicted are in fact supposed to be … fish? (The dreaded ichthyoboros?)
An endless band has been cut through, down its whole length. The two sections have been drawn apart from each other a little, so that a clear space divides them all the way round. Thus the band ought to fall apart into two unattached rings, and yet apparently it consists of one single strip, made up of three fish, each biting the tail of the one in front. They go round twice before regaining their point of departure.
Escher’s other ouroboros: Dragon, circa 1952.
I find I must add my voice to the choruses of acclaim for Shaun Tan’s wordless graphic novel The Arrival, which I buy in October on the strength of New York magazine’s eight-page preview of it. A great book. Masterful art and design work, these surreal and otherworldly scenes illustrated in monochromatic soft pencil (reminding me of Chris Van Allsburg plus M.C. Escher plus La Jetée plus the Codex Seraphinianus). And I’m moved by the story, in which a youngish father immigrates to a bustling foreign land to begin a new life for himself and his waiting family, all the while being bewildered and awed by his strange surroundings (making me wonder what similar things my various great-grandparents must’ve experienced when immigrating to the U.S. from their less hospitable points of origin). But of course what also impresses me is that the book is fantastic weather-writing! Excellent weather. Tan even lets the weather take center stage to do some of the narrative work. In the photos above and below (no way am I flattening this book open on the scanner): one big cloud, sixty small clouds, and the seasons in twenty-four steps.
More at Tan’s website, and at selfdivider. Also: I love the veiled incredulity (or perhaps indignation?) in the headline Book without words wins Premier’s literary prize.
It occurs to me that 2001: A Space Odyssey may qualify as another cinematic ouroboros, by virtue of a smallish (?) plot detail. In Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 novel, the Discovery mission’s destination (and the location of the third monolith) is Saturn. But for the film, Kubrick and Clarke changed the destination to Jupiter, supposedly because the special effects artists at the time couldn’t reproduce Saturn’s rings. Clarke has since written three sequel novels (2010, 2061, and 3001) in which the continuing storylines hold that the original mission went to Jupiter, in order to preserve continuity with the movie. The Saturn angle is never mentioned again.
Via kfan: “Ouroboros”, a sculpture by Shary Boyle, features an unusual take on the ouroboros’s “self-eating” symbology. (Possibly NSFW.)
Ed coins a fine phrase: Another day, another Ouroboros.
While we’re talking art: Noted art historian Clifford C. Clavin, Jr.:
You know, back in the Renaissance times, full-figured women were revered. It’s true. Artists would only paint big, voluptuous women. In fact, that’s how they got rid of a lot of their old paint.
I start up the first incarnation of my Dave McKean website back in March 1998, while I am still in college at UVA. At the end of this week I’m finally closing the site down. In honor of the occasion, here is what is probably my #1 favorite bit of McKean art:
It is a sequence from “Strata part one”, a 1992 volume of his serial graphic novel Cages, in which two of the main characters, Leo and Karen, having just met, spend all night in a downtown jazz bar engrossed in conversation. Before this one sequence hits, we see the two of them share an eight-page conventional dialogue scene. But then as they continue to warm up to each other, and their conversation takes off, the written dialogue disappears and McKean’s art explodes into a wild, sensuous, improvisational-jazz-inflected, increasingly abstract thirteen-page wordless montage, impressionistically nailing this sense of Leo’s and Karen’s being carried away by their conversation and the music and the wine and their surroundings and the crowds of people and each other, and their losing all track of time, floating out of the panels and off the page and beyond the reach of the grammar of comic narrative, so lost are they in talking and listening and drinking and (it turns out) falling in love brains first.
Not sure I can ever adequately convey just how much these thirteen pages absolutely floor me when I first read them several years ago. They still do floor me. (And the fourth and fifth pages I think may be my favorite single McKean art piece.) I guess for a start I could just repeat what Leo says to Karen earlier in the scene, moments after they meet: Someone should throw some cold water over me, really.
I’m first tipped off about the Codex Seraphinianus when M. Gaw mentions it on her website several years ago. What it is is a big, beautiful, mind-manglingly strange illustrated book, full of arcane drawings and diagrams that encylopedically describe a surreal, dreamlike, imaginary world and its inhabitants of all shapes and sizes and degrees of spookiness, accompanied by copious text meticulously handwritten in an indecipherable invented language. No one knows what the book’s text means, if anything, and its author, Luigi Serafini, remains elusive (and possibly insane). Apparently the Codex is not an easy book to come by: it’s only intermittently in print, it regularly vanishes from what few libraries dare stock it, and it’s long been a rare and expensive collector’s item, at least in its more deluxe editions. And it grieves me a little that Justin Taylor’s illustrated full-text Believer essay about it from the new issue may now raise the book’s profile enough to make it even tougher to obtain. (Perhaps the attention will encourage another publisher to bring it back into print.)
