An Interview with Austin Osman Spare

May 15th will mark the 53rd anniversary of Austin Osman Spare’s death. A short video depicting a posthumous “interview” with Spare has been produced by Jamie Gregory & Neil Dineen in commemoration.

The video is comprised of photographic stills and images of Spare’s paintings and sketches are interspersed throughout. Philip Glass‘ ‘Spaceship’ provides the soundtrack.

The “interview” is conducted via oracle, with a dice, playing cards, Beck’s and Zos Speaks!, and related through scrolling text on the screen. Questions are posed in places Spare had a connection with: the Royal Academy in Piccadilly where two paintings were exhibited in Spare’s youth, the British Museum which inspired Spare’s imagery, and the Goat Tavern he frequented with Kenneth and Steffi Grant.

For all that, the responses calculated to the questions are interesting, though this may be attributed more to Spare’s enigmatic style. Repeat answers, however, dull some some of the potency of this method for the spectator.

Amusingly, the oracle declined to answer the question “What really happened between you and Aleister Crowley?”

Following the “interview” two “new” automatic images are produced “via the menstruum of undines”, and a thankful toast of Budweiser¹ is offered at Spare’s grave.

The twelve-minute video can be downloaded from LaShTAL.com at “An Interview with Austin Osman Spare – a commemorative video“.

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Footnotes:

1. Ick. Really? [back]

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