Alfred Kubin's The Other Side

[Mark Kohut]

Rich,

Mucho thanks....I am definitely going to read it. Never had heard of it.

Mark

--- On Sun, 9/6/09, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
> Subject: Alfred Kubin's The Other Side
> To: "“pynchon-l at waste.org“" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Sunday, September 6, 2009, 11:55 AM
> http://dxsuperpremium.blogspot.com/2007/10/other-side-by-alfred-kubin.html
> 
> another Vheissu-like dream of annihilation. Kubin's only
> novel. known
> more for his artwork
> 
> Written in 1908 and hailed by artists such as Kandinsky,
> The Other
> Side describes a dream kingdom that becomes a nightmare and
> a journey
> to Pearl, a mysterious city created deep in Asia that is
> also a
> journey into the subconscious'
> 
> http://calitreview.com/1624
> 
> wonderful drawings. if u like Goya and the Wall
> 
> In Munich and Berlin it reached for a vehement, grotesque,
> fantastic
> linguistic means, for a wild primitive-sounding syntax,
> from which an
> “other modernism” gradually emerged. Kubin helped
> create this anarchic
> opening, which ignored the norms of taste of peinture and
> ultimately
> still avowed the ancient Horatian delectare—that is, an
> experience of
> the moment in which we recognize a variation of Lessing’s
> “pleasure.”
> Kubin had something quite different in mind: with his
> hallucinatory
> incantations he was seeking to disturb the viewer; he felt
> driven to
> solve the riddle of humankind and creation in a
> spellbinding act. In
> the process he exposed himself to the anxiety that
> Worringer wrote had
> been controlled by the Oriental peoples, since they see
> “in the world
> nothing but the shimmering veil of Maya.” Kubin’s
> studies of occult
> doctrines and Buddhism did not provide him with the refuge
> for which
> he had hoped, however. As early as 1908 he was warning his
> friend
> Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando against Buddhism: “a
> watertight but
> sterile system” that “is incompatible with an
> artistically creative
> existence.”
> 
> rich
> 
>