Skip to main content

In The Arts

 

 

The Secret Books

This page constitutes the height of photographic art on Borges' texts. Photographs by Sean Kernan. Texts by Jorge Luis Borges. The printed edition is also available. By permission of the author, you can also download this program and use it as a Borges screen-saver.

The Helft Collection

Some of the best documents (manuscripts, first editions, covers, pictures) by and about Borges. They belong to Jorge, Marion and Nicolás Helft, a well-known family of art collectors in Buenos Aires.

La Biblioteca total

A graphic presentation (with texts in Spanish) of the CD-Rom produced by Helft & Ferro and published by La Nación. The most beautiful and exciting multimedia work of Borges art ever done.

Vakalo School of Arts 

The complete series of illustrations for The Book of Imaginary Beings was done by the graduate students in the Department of Illustration and Art of the Book at the Vakalo School of Art and Design in Athens, Greece. The project was carried out under the Art Direction of Hector Haralambous and Dimitris Kritsotakis and started with a few selected students. As it went on many more students insisted that they had fallen in love with the theme of the book and that they would like to do it as well.

Venetian aMazing Recursions

Maria Mannone, composer and theoretical physicist, made a drawing for the cover of the Research Unit Arts & Complexity of the Ca ’Foscari University in Venice. The drawing is inspired by the Borges' green maze on the Island of St. Giorgio, Venice. Here you can find a link to her Gallery and to a video that the artist made to present her artwork.

 

Painting and Graphic Art:

Buzz Spector: Alternations (November 20, 2020-May 31, 2021), Saint Louis Museum

Literature, language, and philosophy are at the core of Buzz Spector's work. He is a contemporary Conceptual artist who explores the aesthetic possibilities of language, paper, and books. Buzz Spector: Alterations spans the artist’s career from the 1970s to the present and includes drawings, altered books, postcard assemblages, collages, and more. Refashioning existing printed materials, he poses questions about authorship, the history of art, and the written word. His works are at once deeply literate and slyly humorous.

In this exhibition are included two pieces inspired by Borges's work: A Library for Babel, 2016 (Stacked discard books, Drake University Libraries, Anderson Gallery, Drake University, Des Moines, IA) and Tower 1, 2016 (Collaged dust jacket elements over ink on paper, 52 x 38 inches)

Michelle Lord: City of Inmortals. A poetic interpretation of Borges' imaginary cityscape. Australian Centre for Photography, from August 28th to September 20th, 2009.

Keith Lima's "Borges the Hierophant." Oil on canvas (1992).

Honk If You Love Borges

A bumper sticker distributed to bookstores by Viking Penguin at the time of the publication of the three-volume edition of Borges in English. 

 

Music:

Diego Vega's "Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö. "

"Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö" is included here by permission of the composer. Further information about his work is available on his website, http://diegovega.com/

Diego Vega, Colombian composer

 

Brian Richard Earl's Sonata 

Sonata for flute and piano inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ poem “Tankas”, written by the composer Brian Richard Earl. The artists are Maurizio Simeoli, flute, and Paolo Spadaro, piano, both musicians of the “La Scala” Opera House, Milan, Italy. Earl’s work can be overviewed on www.brianearl.net.

Brian Richard Earl (right) with Maurizio Simeoli

 

Musical Legacies: Jorge Luis Borges

An episode of Seth Boustead's podcast Relevant Tones (29 July 2020)

"The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges has had an enormous influence on artists, writers, philosophers and thinkers of all kinds and composers are no exception. We spoke with renowned Borges scholar Daniel Balderston about the incredible legacy of one of the most influential writers of all time, and with composers Carla Kihlstedt, Diego Vega and Gheorghi Arnaoudov about how this legacy inspired their musical creations."

Film and Animation:

Alexis Gideon's The Crumbling (2015)

The Crumbling is a twenty-one-minute stop-motion animation video opera set in a dream-like mythic town following the trials of an apprentice librarian as she tries to save her city from crumbling down around her. The video is projected alongside Gideon's live musical performance.  The piece explores the importance of word and symbol in a decaying culture, as well as the marginalization and persecution of people based on heritage, gender, race or belief, and all that is lost in such persecution.  Inspired by the Borges' story "The Aleph," Gideon started researching Kabbalah, which lead to researching Hermetic philosophy, alchemy, and occult societies.   The Crumbling takes a modern and innovative form, while drawing from ancient texts and esoterica such as the Sepher Yetzriah, the Bahir, the Sepher Rezial Hemelach, the Hermetic Philosophy of ancient Egypt, and the mystical beliefs of Hildegard von Bingen.