Thu, 19 May 2005

Emile Chucklehurst
(cowritten with W. Schwein)

“Self-portrait with Guest” 1919-1922 oil, ink, charcoal and wire on canvas and wood — It is perhaps telling that it is impossible to tell which figure is Emile and which is the guest.

“Circus Attacked By Lightning”, 1922, oil on metal and canvas — A knot of human, primate and reptilian hands, each set of fingers clasping the wrist of another hand; surrounded radially by a faces, some recognizable as contemporary Viennese politicians, clergy, professionals and civil servants. Included also are an infamous sodomist, two anarchists killed by the Ringstrasse riot in 1918, several prostitutes and a skinned dog. In the lower left are three portrayals of the artist himself, in varying degrees of fanciful scarification. Note the single band of steel stretching the canvas concave, & the fringe of electrical wire soldered to each end of the band. That Chucklehurst for several months kept a steady current moving through the painting may account for the minute singes and striations in the surface.

“Bratislava Sunset”, 1923 oil on canvas — During the summer of 1923, Chucklehurst entered a period of hiding, spending three months living in the basement labyrinth of what is now known as the Slovak National Theater, located at the eastern end of Hviezdoslavovo Namestie (Hviezdoslav Square). It is here that Chucklehurst may have spoken with Rabbi Michael Weissmandl, best known as a member of the Working Group, a cell of resistance fighters during the second world war; we do know that Weissmandl’s study of equidistant letter sequences in the Torah parallels much of Chucklehurst’s paintings throughout the twenties, including this piece.

“Sewage Labyrinth Ascent”, 1924, assemblage — Swinging freely, a bladed pendulum massaged the contours of a squat stone and plaster cylinder. Overlaid with several dozen prints of leaping men —acrobats and tumblers believed to have been employed by the Vergeltungszirkus, costumed in the absurd admixture of military, paramilitary and religious garments favored by the artist throughout his Karthago-Zweilicht period— the sunken surface leaked a viscous fluid when lacerated by the blades. Only photographs remain of this work, destroyed by Yugoslav authorities in 1939 —the base incinerated & the pendulum reduced to scrap metal.

“Twilight Dinner”, 1924 oil, ink on wood — Now in the possession of one Arthur Brisbane, this piece is unviewable and no photographs have been taken. Reports state a piece of massive size, which requires distance of nearly half a mile in order to view in full. It is suspected by at least one viewer, a Rachel Aven, that this piece was intended to be suspended from hot-air balloons over a large area, such as a city.

“Three Billion Years of Inane Chatter”, 1926, environment with sound — 16 branching and gently curving steel poles, 3.4 meters in height, clothed in vines and limning an imaginal blossom. A rotating brass and zinc ‘stamen’ produces a variety of tones when breezes from any direction are caught and amplified by the fluted surface: low moaning chords, short dopplering bursts and intermittent whines producing continuous texture later much praised by experimental composers such as Ingemar Liljefors of the Fylkingen Society. Sixteen guests were hospitalized with inner ear injuries following a freak windstorm at the installation’s opening. One of the earliest products of collaboration with expatriate Baronet James St. James Vachwood, “Years” prefigures the later investigation of plant life, sound, and architectonics that was to provoke arrest and imprisonment under Hungary’s Reform regime.

“Balaam’s Ass”, 1931 watercolor, ink on paper — Between the word of the ass and the ears of the curse-maker (balu - ‘am: destroyer of the people), the mind sullied by years of Midianite hookers and booze, Balaam stared up from his murder by the forces of Israel and searched the skies for the Star of Bethelehem. Servant of the son of the father, the child of incestuous union, this piece is most likely indicative of the increasing popularity of Chucklehurst’s work, a disturbing omen of the war to come for a man whose ass never saw any damn angel.

“Langa”, 1931, oil/fur/blood on canvas — Two men of equal height face one another, mouths open in speech, smiling. One holds a full wineglass, into which his companion knocks the ash of a cigarette. Two crushed tips are already to be seen in the glass. In the foreground three children play with a doll dressed as a Cardinal; behind the men and painted in the blurred brown shades of a daguerreotype stand four women and an elderly man, tense and evidently vexed. These five hold out a variety of objects belonging to farm and household —recognizeable are a gelding knife, a pocketwatch with a cracked face, a meat tenderizer and a handmirror reflecting the wineglass. A premier example of the artist’s facility with texture: note the variety of fabrics clothing this ‘pericosmic’ family.

“Guest of Melchezidek’s Family, 1930”, 1931 oil, steel dust on canvas — The guest mentioned here is most certainly Abram (Abraham), and the appearance of his feast on dust most certainly indicates a turning-away of Hebraic subservience of forces cloaked in Christian garb who actually serve false gods (Melchezidek blesses Abram in the name of God Most High), the first of his overtly political pieces directed against the burgeoning forces of National Socialism.

“bone, valley, light”, 1932-1933, stone earthwork — 36 sandstone columns, equilateral triangles in cross-section, rising out of a deep still pool. Landscaped into a garden of the Vachwood estate, the last and greatest of Chucklehurst’s sculpted environments was long a venue for raft-borne midnight fetes. Rising 4 meters above the water, the stones’ vertical faces are riddled through with climbing plants, a living paradigm of the fantastic vegetal overgrowth and cutaways inhabiting works as varied as “Bromius Iacchus, M.P.” and the Antiphrastic series. Within a year of its construction, “bone, valley, light” was colonized by albino kingfishers, adopted by the Vachwoods as the “Gens Ponti Gaeaque” but all killed for food late in the war.

“Apology to Midian”, 1932 oil on canvas — The blind prophet Shu’ayb, known Biblically as Jethro, was sent to Midian, a city of bandits and heathens, in order to convince them to desist their wicked ways. Shu’ayb was shunned and rejected, and thus God destroyed them. Chucklehurst is to have spent the year of 1932 in southern Syria, east of the Gulf of Aqaba, wandering an empty tract of land and working on this piece, swirls of paint applied almost calligraphically across scraped canvas. When asked, he would speak of the transmission of certain forces via the pupil, which (according to his only contact in Syria, one Bilal bin Rabah, named for the Muathin freed by Abu Bakr) nested in saline.

“There Is No Hiding Place”, 1939, oil/silk/metal on wood — Believed to be based on photographs from the Finno-Soviet war. A lakeside meadow blooming with the first spring flowers and crossed by four rows of concertina wire barriers. The rising sun illuminates condensation on the wire and traces the edges of three soldiers’ bodies lying off center in the middle distance. The technique by which Chucklehurst invokes rippling water out of a continuous sheet of satin fabric (an effect used frequently throughout the Magdalene period) has not been recorded but may have involved many successive stretchings followed by immersion in a nitrate solution.

“Eight: Mirrored Revitalization Casket”, 1939, oil/sand/glass on silver — From the last series of sculptures. Folding up into a dodecahedron more than a meter in diameter, the piece’s layered silver panels are each hinged to two others and have customarily been displayed in an open configuration. Including such elements as minute hand-hammered spirals and arabesques painted with a single-hair brush, “Casket” ends the artist’s explorations of “maximal textury in minimal variation”. That Chucklehurst requested post-mortem interment in the work has been ruled out following the research of M.E.B. Tillinghast (“Saltpork and the Green Man: Soteriological Dimensions of an Apeirophobe,” 1972, Clarendon Press).

“Untitled #9”, 1936 housepaint on wood — Suggestions of deep space align centrally in a gridwork where coded words (utilizing a combination of a cipher devised by Abu Bakr Ahmad ben `Ali ben Wahshiyya an-Nabati and the aforementioned equidistant letter sequence) are scraped into the upper layer of the black paint. At the time of this writing, the painting had yet to be decrypted.

“In The Fields, The Killer Rises To Heaven”, 1941, ink on plaster — Part of a defacement of the Chapel of St. Hugh in Bermondsey (subsequently deconsecrated; purchased 1951 by the Ordo Juliansis and reopened as a salon). A radical departure: one continuous line describing a nude male figure suspended without support over crowded city street. The central figure, disproportionately large, floats head-down in a fetal crouch, his face twisted to the left to face the viewer and his hands bound with loops of his own intestine. The eyes are closed, the lips curling into a subtle smile. Long considered a self-portrait (the only such image in the post-imprisonment corpus), recently discovered letters identity the subject as an amalgam of several Presbyters Apostolick [sic], an East End apocalyptic sect with whom the artist maintained extensive correspondence.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #