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Art

Dreaming, while snared, of murmurations.

I have been working on a project that, once again, tries to express the feelings associated with our current predicament: longing for freedom of movement and togetherness with others while being forced into spatial isolation. (I wrote about my last one along those lines here.)

The most recent exploration was initiated by watching a clip about those eerie kinetic artists, starlings, swooping through air in energetic and coordinated murmurations. The freedom of movement combined with a sense of communal action seemed like the perfect symbol for all that we deprived of right now during (in)voluntary quarantine due to Covid-19.

Artists have, of course, taken an interest in starlings for centuries. A contemporary one is photographer Søren Solkær who has observed the flights for many years now and published the images in a series called Black Sun. It’s worth clicking on the link below (Colossal) to see a spread of what he captured, some etherial beauty of stark landscapes in addition to the murmurations.

This project has taken me back to the landscape of my childhood and youth in the marshlands of Southern Denmark. A place where as many as one million starlings gather in the spring and fall, prior to onwards migration, and set the stage for one of nature’s most spectacular phenomena. As the countless birds congregate in large murmurations before collectively settling in the reeds at dusk they put on an incredible show of collaboration and performance skills. And now and then, by the added drama of attacking birds of prey, the flock will unfold a breathtaking and veritable ballet of life or death. The starlings move as one unified organism that vigorously opposes any outside threat. A strong visual expression is created – like that of an ink drawing or a calligraphic brush stroke – asserting itself against the sky. Shapes and black lines of condensation form within the swarm, resembling waves of interference or mathematical abstractions written across the horizon. At times the flock seems to possess the cohesive power of super fluids, changing shape in an endless flux: From geometric to organic, from solid to fluid, from matter to ethereal, from reality to dream – an exchange in which real time ceases to exist and mythical time pervades. This is the moment I have attempted to capture – a fragment of eternity.

BLACK SUN: Amorphous Flocks of Starlings Swell Above the Danish Marshlands

One of my favorite paintings of a young starling is by Dutch painter Jan Mankes (1889 – 1920) who, come to think of it, deserves his own YDP one of these days.

Starlings are often snared – they are perceived as a nuisance when they descend in great numbers onto cities, Rome being a case in point, where 5 million of them spend the entire winter before flying to Scandinavia to nest in spring. The city, no longer allowing nets, now has taken to releasing falcons to hunt them and places loudspeaker with starling distress calls and calls by other predatory birds near their roosting sites. Why such efforts, you wonder? In one word: Poopocalypse….. More than a nuisance are starlings at airports, endangering safety when they get caught in the jets of planes – Seattle’s airport SEA TAC catches over a thousand each year.

In any case, I had to combine, for my own Covid response purposes in my montages, a sense of being snared with a sense of symbolic murmuration. You tell me if the sentiment is adequately captured.

Music today is in honor of Mozart’s starling – a bird he held as a pet. Details on that in an interesting interview here. Apparently Mozart’s piece Musical Joke was part of their collaboration….

“Mozart’s Musical Joke was completed very shortly after his starling died in 1787. And I’m not the first to make the connection between this starling and this piece of music. That was Meredith West in a 1990 piece for American Scientist magazine [co-written with Andrew King]. She noticed that musicians hated this piece because it made them sound really bad — a lot of disharmony, fractured phrases, very odd key changes. Finally, she noticed that if you overlaid some of the most disconcerting parts over the song of a starling, there are a lot of similarities. You find the same kind of fractured phrases and general playfulness.”

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Leaves, Folded

If Nari Ward, who I introduced yesterday, is a master of conceptual installations, Sam Gilliam stands out with his abstractions. I say that not because his name is all of a sudden popping up everywhere, as if he had just emerged, early notable successes non-withstanding, but because his art is a love sonnet to color. Except it doesn’t keep to the 14 lines rule – or any rule at all but free flow of hues.

I picked a vicarious visit to his works because they instill joy in me; equally importantly, though, I took a few minutes to listen to an interview with him that floored me for its energy of this 87-year old. Do yourself a favor and watch. His paintings are represented also with much better light in the video than in the photos below that I found on the web.

Never mind that the guy represented the US as the first African American at the Venice Biennale almost half a century ago. Forget that he showed at the Tate Modern exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, or that he was commissioned for a piece by the National Museum of African American History and Culture in his hometown of Washington, DC, prominently hung in the lobby. The piece was inspired by a poem, and named after it, Yet Do I Marvel by Black poet Countee Cullen, celebrating the resilience of creativity.

Photographic source here

All eyes are upon him because he now has an inaugural exhibition, Existed, Existing, with a posh New York City gallery, Pace. An informative and comprehensive review of the present works in the New Yorker can be found here. It also educates about the artist’s evolution from color field to lyrical abstract painter to something all his own.

What do you make of an introduction, presented on the gallery’s exhibition website, that reads: Sam Gilliam’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Existed Existing debuts new works and artist-led installations that reflect the culmination of his six-decade-long career with color?

Career with color? Sounds like one of those self-help booklets, or a sample binder at the paint store. Artist-led installations? Led? What does that mean? Disciple-followed? Assistant-produced? Directing the movers? Could anything be more vague? No hint at any of his revolutionary moves, or the inclusion of politics, or the race-specific aspects of his work that make it special, never mind his genius with color, career be damned.

The new work includes “pyramids, and circle made from stained plywood and aluminum, which evolved from Gilliam’s exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2018. There he observed the city’s growing population of African immigrants, and was inspired to revisit ancient African architectural forms.” (Ref.) In contrast, I want to show samples of the earlier paintings that so strongly appeal to me, known as drape paintings.

This was the painting that inspired today’s photographs of drooping leaves.

The canvas is taken down from its stretcher, poured and stained with acrylic and metallic paints that spread and mingle while the artist manipulates the fabric. Gilliam drapes the canvas from a wall or a ceiling, allowing it to hang, fold or move in ways not previously conceived. The result is a curious mixture of painting and sculpture, tricking us into multiple ways of perceiving shifting picture planes. While the overall first impression might hint at tie-dyed projects from your youth, a closer inspection reveals insane combination of colors, sparkly detail, and allusions to forms with meaning for the Black artist: the laundry swinging on the lines in front of his D.C. apartment window, looking at the backyards of the projects, or the hoods of KKK members, the way the peaks of the paintings are folded and tied.

Gilliam considers abstraction to be just as political as conventional represential art might be: “It messes with you. It convinces you that what you think isn’t all. And it challenges you to understand something that’s different… Just because it looks like something that resembles you, it doesn’t’ mean that you have an understanding.” (Ref.) Of course that implies that people are willing to open their minds to art as such to begin with. Here is a depressing recent psychological study, that used one of Sam Gilliam’s drawings to look at correlations between people’s willingness to consider it art and their approval of Trump’s politics. You can guess the outcome.

Some of the work is directly tied to political themes, as for example the series about the fate of Martin Luther King, Jr., which includes green and red April in commemoration of the date of assassination.

Gilliam’s work is, in his own words, also influenced by music, in particular Jazz with its ever changing variations on themes. The Music of Color was perhaps the perfect title for his recent European show. The influence is captured in some of the titles he gives his paintings, but also by the fact that any one piece of drape painting is never folded the same way twice across exhibitions. The flux and variability is an important aspect of the power inherent to these canvases.For me, in the end, there is something intensely alive in the abandon to color, color mixes, and wild pattern that reminds me of nature, an association helped by the natural forms of the folds of the materials he uses.

Here is some of the music Gilliam likes to listen to. Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, and more recently Beyoncé covering Ettas James.

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If only…

“If only I could….” must be one of the most frequently uttered sentence fragments of this constraint- and fear-ruled year. If only I could see my children, if only I could travel, if only I could go to museums and fill my heart with art. Those wishes pale, of course, in comparison to the “if only I still had a job, if only I could feed the kids, if only I could pay the rent, if only I could say Good Bye to the loved one dying alone in the ICU,” that are existential worries most of us are spared. Or so I pray.

My frivolous wishes pale in particular when things like travel and museum visits can be replaced by virtual experience, looking at art and places through the caleidoscope of the internet. That said, there is nothing wrong with a bit of vicarious joy and so parts of this week will be devoted to joyful or uplifting or thought-provoking art I wish I’d had had the fortune to see in the flesh.

I missed Nari Ward‘s first retrospective exhibition, We The People, at the New Museum in New York City last year by only a couple of months. I was too late, as is so often the case…. and bummed about it. The exhibition surveyed 25 years of the artist’s work: sculptures, large-scale installations, paintings, and videos created between 1992 and 2019. I had never seen any of the work of this Jamaican-born, Harlem-based artist and was made curious when I read that his visual art accomplishes what Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Project did for writing: “echoing the features of a cityscape (Paris) with textual passages resembling it in pace and structure – the passages of urban exhibition halls, arcades, and train stations cloned in immaterial fashion.” How do you echo the pace and structure of Harlem visually?

What are we looking at? I’ll pick a central piece, Amazing Grace (1993), because it speaks across time and place, a brilliant combination of locating something within a specific history and a specific place – and not.

Ward has worked for most of his career by using discarded objects he found on the streets of NYC. He collected, combined and choreographed these items into political meaningful assemblages that speak to issues that concern us all with historical references that might be understood only by some. Amazing Grace was an installation in direct reaction to the crack epidemic and devastation from AIDS in the 1990s, a memorial to a community in crisis.

Some 300 dilapidated, broken and bent strollers are arranged in a circular fashion around a central piece that also contains many of them, intersected by firehoses on the floor, producing an uneven surface that affects balance when you walk. My first thought when I looked at the photographs was that it resembled a church congregation of mourners surrounding the central coffin.

The artist found all of these strollers discarded across Harlem, abandoned by either the families who no longer needed them or the unhoused who use them to transport their remaining worldly goods. Mahalia Jackson’s voice carries Amazing Grace like a beacon of hope across the scene of devastation.

What happens to the children, once snug in these strollers, growing up into communities ravaged by disease, poverty and resulting addiction? What happens to the people who lose their housing when illness or addiction take over and carry their belongings in shopping carts or strollers? When your entire already precarious universe becomes unstable? How is it related to the original sin of this nation (note the shape the fire hoses hinting at the hull of a slave ship?) How is it related as the artist noted in an interview here, to community narratives that saw the epidemic as an intended tool for the forces of gentrification?

“The one material that was so ubiquitous and so dangerous that I did not touch because it was so charged was the crack vial. It was everywhere, almost like pebbles. Because it was such a devastating epidemic, I did not feel I could address it at the time. But I do think about those vials and what having collected them would mean today, as they were so much about what they represented in terms of loss, but also in terms of greed. There’s a whole narrative that considers that this was a kind of expulsion to clear out the inner cities for what’s happening now with gentrification, because immediately after this happened the government stepped in and created empowerment zones where they dictated who was going to develop these neighbourhoods. It was almost like dropping a bomb on these poor neighbourhoods and then going back in and reforming it, all within 20 years. It really makes you think about the other narrative that is not in the mainstream, and it still seems to somehow resonate today.”

Loss. Greed. A racist history. And now think how this installation might fit the 2020 mold. Empty strollers could represent all that’s left behind when children are separated from their asylum-seeking parents, many of whom will never be reunited again. Firehoses might be echoing the water canons used against protesters who demand respect for Black lives, or the futile attempts to douse the fires incited by ever progressing drought and winds from climate catastrophe, destroying homes and all that’s in them, strollers included.

This is what I find essential in truly successful art – it is anchored in its own time as a reaction to the answers needed, but it is also reaching back into a past that paved destructive paths and a future that contains variations on a theme – in our case the devaluing of human life in the interest of preserving established economic and power structures. The music, of course, is about redemption and hope. That is what art does as well: it can lift our spirits into a realm where we still see the possibility for change. If we look hard enough and not away, if we act on what we see. Which is why I chose this vicarious visit today!

Photographs are from Harlem last year.

As an aside: I have always thought that people’s claim that music is the truest, highest form of art relates to the fact that it elicits emotion, pure subjective reactivity, and is protecting us from the worry that we might not “understand” the message communicated by a piece of art. I mean, how often have I stood in front of something visual and rolled my eyes, sometimes frustrated, sometimes embarrassed, that I simply did not “get it.” (Well, of course I also often roll my eyes when I do get it….)

So much work needs to be done to read up on what people more educated or more insightful than I have said about that art. Sometimes the reading elicits a lightbulb moment, sometimes you just feel like a dumb outsider. No deeper understanding will change the crucial emotional tone of your experience when you listen to music, this one in particular, on the other hand.

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Doing the Heavy Lifting

Who should do the heavy lifting? Preferably someone else other than yourself, it seems, when you look at how people generally are willing to give up thinking for themselves and buying into whatever seeming authorities tend to sell them.

I had touched on that issue in yesterday’s musing about one of Remedios Varo‘s most famous paintings, The Juggler (The Magician), 1956. Longing for enlightenment, or just simple instructions of how life should be handled, as a matter of fact, could lead the masses to become enchanted with a charlatan, and willingly give up personal identity to do so.

Today I want to turn to a specific case, one of existential importance for all of us: the acceptance of millions of people of Trump’s pandemic response. (You are getting the summary argument of a long and informative essay by James Hamblin in The Atlantic, that can be found here.)

I will not go into statistics of the disease, I’d rather try to stick to the psychological mechanisms that make us fall for the kind of false promises, outright lies and suggested solutions that ask for unthinkable sacrifice, all presented by a President who saw the pandemic as more threatening to his economical fortunes tied to re-election than to the fate of the nation.

His claims about the virus and the ways to attack it were not just false and/or self-serving. They were accepted or even approved by millions of voters who did not punish him for the failures that are responsible now for a system break-down. The nature of the claims, not rooted in science and fabricated out of wishful thinking, are similar to those that we see in faith healers, cult- and authoritarian leaders. What makes us buy into them?

When we feel threatened, we tend to accept promises of relief, clinging to wishful thinking. When authorities disagree (science: it takes time and it’s complicated – charlatan: do this now and simply don’t worry) we are persuaded by the more attractive option of help, now. The disease is not that bad! You can’t get easily infected! If you don’t believe me and go with the science crowd, your jobs are in jeopardy! We’ll have a vaccine soon! Who does not want to hear that?

There is, however, another element at play as well, the possibility of identity fusion, when you subsume your personal identity under something larger, a social group, or the person of a charismatic leader. This kind of alignment allows you to improve your sense of self, providing a feeling that the leader’s or the group’s good fortunes extend to yourself. It also allows you to work less hard on thinking for yourself or doing the work of critical analysis, since the word of the leader is good enough for you, in all its glowing conviction.

And when is a positive sense of self particularly needed? In times of doubt, of threat, of fear, whether in regards to a concrete present danger, like Covid-19, or a longer-term sense of deprivation, be it economic decline, or status loss in a society that does no longer grant you special privileges with changing population compositions. Fusion, importantly, is not just blind fellowship. It is an engaged process in which you adopt the values laid out to you, no longer evaluating your own, because it makes you feel valued, important, and belonging. And so you buy quackery hook, line and sinker.

How can we turn things around? Hamblin says it most eloquently:

“There are ways to serve as a confident, optimistic leader without making up nonsensical promises. Hope can be conferred with promises to take care of people, and to be there for them. Reassurance can be offered by guaranteeing that no one will go into debt because they had to go to the hospital, and that people will have paid sick leave and job security so they can stay at home when necessary. If the public-health community does not do more to give people hope and reassurance in the face of this disaster, it will see people defect to those who will—even when they know the promises are too good to be true.”

Varo had a solution as well, not surprisingly for a woman whose life had been touched by fascism, forcing her to flee France when the Nazis invaded and prohibiting her from retuning to her native Spain ruled by Generalissimo Franco. In her 1960 painting Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst we see a woman outside the dark corner office tagged Dr. FJA (Freud, Jung, Adler) approaching a courtyard well. An ominous sky threatens to descend and whispers of fog on the bottom seem to cling to her leg, not ready to let go.

In one hand she holds a basket with psychological detritus (thread, a key, a pair of glasses and a clock – I leave the game of interpretation within the context of the therapeutic session to you…) in the other hand she holds the head of a patriarch by the long beard, about to drop him like a discarded condom into the depth of the well. A father figure, a ruler, an autocrat, a charlatan, off and away with his head, now that she can see clearly.

The part of her long cloak that covered her face has slipped down, after all, the blinding mask just dangling. The hair freed – oh, that hair! – forming horns becoming any old Pan…

One promise of much of analytic therapy is, of course, that you discover your true identity, a sense of self no longer ruled, through unconscious mechanisms, by authority figures or our relation to them. (In)sight arrived! Independence it shall be!

Now just be willing to think independently as well, to do the work of informed choice. You might just stay healthy.

Photographs are from the San Francisco Bay waterfront at the newly opened Crane Cove park.

Music presents many of Varo’s paintings. I swear, I’ll be a painter in my next life….

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The Dream World and the Real World are the same.

There I was mid- afternoon, back to my old haunts, this time Oaks Bottom. Looking one way, a fall landscape of etherial beauty, separated by a mirror-like body of water, still as can be. Looking the other way, I was surrounded by throngs of people trying to catch the last sun rays before the upcoming storm, getting their runs in, having outdoor school, setting camp for the night, ever deeper in the woods that shelter the unhoused. Busy, noisy, alive, but not exactly a retreat into undisturbed nature.

Made me think of something Spanish-born artist Remedios Varo once said: “The dream world and the real world are the same,” although she, of course referred to the content of her paintings, her art in general, that “alchemically combined traditional techniques, Surrealist methods, and mystical philosophic inquiry into visionary dreamscapes.” (Ref.) It was also the mantra of the surrealist movement – André Breton declared in his essay The Manifesto of Surrealism,”surrealism is a movement that seeks to display the thoughts of the unconscious mind in a conscious manner, linking the dream-world and reality.”

My dream world and my real word yesterday depended on where I pointed my gaze, while hers’ originated with her inner eye. Varo had joined the surrealists when moving from Spain to France in the late 1930s before she fled fascism and emigrated to Mexico in 1941. Her art was a reaction to both the misogyny she experienced in Paris among her fellow painters and the political repression, also squarely directed at women, that made her stay in Mexico during Franco’s rule of Spain after the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939.

Having grown up in the 1920s to the achievements of a women’s movement that was espoused in the liberal Second Republic, she saw those rights trampled, including the right to divorce, use contraception, have an abortion or simply have a passport or a job (your husband had to sign.)

In 1934, a very conservative fascist group founded a new branch of government named the Sección Femenina. Franco later redesigned the mission of the Sección Femenina to encourage women and teach them how to be the ideal woman, as described by Franco and the Catholic Church. Women had to take classes at a young age to be “cheerful, supportive, self-sacrificing wives, waiting for the return of their husbands to a spotless home and happy family.” Maybe Lindsey Graham read the instructions. This is what he said at a campaign event beginning of November almost 100 years later: “I want every young woman to know there’s a place for you in America if you are pro-life, if you embrace your religion, and you follow a traditional family structure — that you can go anywhere, young lady.”

Varo became a highly successful painter in Mexico before her death of a heart attack in her mid 50s, although much less known than her male surrealist counterparts. Just think Salvador Dali, her contemporary, attending the same art schools in Spain as she did, and part of the movement that she joined in Paris during late 1930s.

Art critics have often described the two as surrealism’s extremes, representing shock and wonder, respectively.

And yes, there is much wonder to be found in her work, much admiration for nature (birds are ubiquitous, reason alone for me to be enchanted,) and mysticism and magic, but there is much more to it than that. There are clear feminist expressions found in the way women are depicted, strong, self-determined, explorative and intelligent. Equally important, she understands the Orwellian implications of mass movements centered around a snake oil salesman, having sacrificed their personal identity for being members of a cult, yearning for mystical fusion with the conjurer.

Here is The Juggler. (The Magician) (1956)

I think this painting could not be more apt for our times. (A lager version can be seen in the MOMA link attached at the bottom.)

The juggler, on the one hand, seems to represent enlightenment, his face painted on mother-of-pearl, in nature a protective layer, here a mask protecting who from whom? He is painted in the style of Hironymous Bosch (one of Varo’s role models) with red, shimmering robe, and metaphysical objects rather than rings thrown in the air, a light show to distract and/or blind the acolytes in front of him, although sold as enlightenment.

His cart, like a little ship that could sail away any moment when his manipulative task is done (or he lost the election,) contains a woman with closed eyes (no enlightenment here!) and all matter of domesticated critters, tame lion included. That’s what autocratic figures pull off.

The most interesting part is of course, as Varo herself declared, the uniformed mass of beings. “… a kind of unenlightened individuals who were awaiting a transference of enlightenment from the magician so that they can wake up…”

If you look closely, they seem to be wrapped all in the same cloth, a cape that reminded me of those fairy tale invisibility cloaks, about to be triggered. The people are rather androgynous, although upon close inspection you can see still hints of individual expression, some hope or differentiation. Not all is lost. The dystopian future of psychic fusion with the magician might just be averted.

Let them wake up to the real world, not the dream world, and tackle its healing without the help of witch-hat spouting quacks. And have eagle eyes to be on the look-out for the next one….

(Note that the MOMA interpretation of the painting is rather different.)

And here are jugglers at the opera.

Here is the full opera, a master piece.

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Seeking a Model

You surely know those days when everything, even the most innocuous bit, takes on a dark halo, a portent, a trigger for irrational thinking. I am in the middle of one of those days as I write this – hopefully behind me tomorrow when you read this.

Most of the Pentagon leadership fired? Must mean war in the offing, or a coup where the military sides with the ones clinging to power. You get the idea – thoughts so far out of the ordinary that one would laugh at them during normal times, would scold me for even uttering them, and yet here they take on a realistic sheen in my already anxious universe.

Time to look for role models who have survived far worse and risen to live meaningful lives, using art for resistance. None more fitting than Lin Jaldati, an extraordinary Dutch woman who survived Auschwitz when betrayed after years of living in hiding in Amsterdam.

I learned about her in a project researched, written up and at times performed by historian David Shneer, z”l.

Shneer who died a few days ago at age 48 of a brain tumor, held the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History at the University of Colorado. He was an outstanding intellectual pursuing the history of Yiddish culture, but also a lively performer – some of the videos in the link below (Art is my Weapon) show him together with colleagues, in particular Jewlia Eisenberg, performing music and bringing the history of Jewish resistance to life.

The project is called Art is my Weapon – the radical musical life of Lin Jaldati, and tells the story of the Dutch, communist, Jewish cabaret actress who immigrated to East Germany after liberation from Auschwitz to become a famous singer and political player keeping up the memory of the Holocaust until her death in 1988. I familiarized myself with her on the basis of the incredibly poignant title of Shneer’s biography of the artist: Trümmerfrau der Seele. (Woman who clears the soul from rubble.)

Trümmerfrauen were the women who cleared the rubble, the debris, the ruins of the bombed-out buildings of post-war German cities. To envision that act done to the soul, finding pathways to and clearing away the destruction wrought by persecution or trauma, in her case opening space for the memory of a culture that was not destroyed after all, is for me an image that holds incredible power. Humans can withstand and overcome catastrophe, picking up the pieces, refusing to be forced into oblivion. A timely reminder.

Below are a few samplings of her music. One of the most famous songs, from Yiddishe Lieder, published in 1981, is In Kamf (In Struggle.) I have attached the translation of the lyrics. The song is about justice and persecution in a political domain not just reserved for Jews.

Mir vern gehast un getribn, Mir vern geplogt un farfolgt; Un alts nor derfar vayl mir libn Dos oreme shmaktnde folk.

Mir vern dershosn, gehangen, Men roybt undz dos lebn un rekht; Derfar vayl emes farlangen Un frayhayt far oreme knekht.

Ober undz vet nit dershrekn Gefenkenish un tiranay, Mir muzn di mentshhayt dervekn Un makhn zi gliklekh un fray.

Shmidt undz in ayzerne keytn, Vi blutike khayes undz rayst; Ir kent undzer kerper nor teytn Nor keyn mol undzer heylikn gayst.

Ir kent undz dermordn, tiranen, naye kemfer vet brengen di tsayt; Un mir kemfn, mir kemfn biz vanen Di gantse velt vet vern bafrayt.

Here is the translation

We are hated and ostracised, we are tormented and persecuted and all just because we love the poor people pining away.

We are shot, hanged, you rob us of our life, our rights so because we want truth and freedom for poor slaves

Hated & hunted & driven, turned out & chased from your doors & only because we have given our love to the weak & the poor

We perish by lash & by fire your prisons & armies we fill our bodies alone may expire our spirits you never can kill

You tyrants may murder or beat us new fighters will rise in our place& we’ll fight & you’ll never defeat us we fight for the whole human race

but you will never frighten us prison and tyranny we must wake humanity and make them happy and free and make them happy and free.

And for those particularly interested in how Yiddish fits into teaching about the Holocaust, here is an informative link.

Photographs are from Holland where Lin Jaldati was born.

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Thoughts in Yellow

I figured we’d celebrate the wave of relief felt by more than half of this country with a color that stands for enthusiasm, positivity and enlightenment. Or so the color gurus tell me…. conveniently ignoring that yellow has often had different connotations.

Just think of its association with sickness – yellow-fever, hepatitis, yellow-jack (a flag on a ship that is under quarantine) – or associations with excess – yellow journalism. Then there are yellow-dog contracts which deny workers the right to join unions. And my own yellow-bellied (cowardly) manner towards a personal nemesis: yellow jackets.

Oops, I announced a celebration, so let’s look at the positive side: yellow daffodils are one of the few bulbs that are absolutely resistant to being devoured by critters, and who bring brightness to spring. And yellow is certainly the color in late fall, early winter, that captures, mirrors and reflects the last of the light, reminding us of escape from the darkness.

Yellow mums bring cheer, modeling patience for long winter days given the eternity they last even in a vase or through first frost. The vivid contrast between yellow and the dark surroundings in the fall woods feels energizing, no hiding here, no shyness, a sturdy presence, at least when it comes to mushrooms.

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Yellow was van Gogh’s favorite color. Speculations abounded what could account for his “yellow vision.”

It was his abuse of absinthe, the alcoholic drink he favored! No, he suffered from xanthopsia, a state where everything in your sight looks yellowish, the result from exposure to toxins, including poisonous foxglove tinctures prescribed by his doctor in the asylum at St. Remis! It was subacute angle closure glaucoma that accounted for the yellow ‘halos’  in his paintings!

Basically all of these arguments are put to rest here. The use of digitalis from the foxglove plant was well understood in the 19th century, and by the time van Gogh would have reached sufficiently toxic levels (from absinthe as well) to exhibit xanthopsia he would have been unable to paint. Furthermore, he did not display any of the other symptoms associated with the kind of assumed glaucoma (brow ache, blurred vision,) never once mentioned in his otherwise detailed thousands of letters home.

His vision was also tested by his Doctor in 1889, using the kinds of color vision tests available for railroad personnel in safety tests, and found to be normal, as was his short- and long-distance vision. The guy was in his early 30s at the time, remember?

In contrast, we have his own thoughts in letters about his use of color, of his experimentation with color (yellows were almost always off-set with blue and white, a white he could not have distinguished from yellow with xanthopsia) and the fact that the use of yellow was already dominant in his very young years in Holland, before any of the potentially poisonous agents appeared on the scene. (Here is an invaluable source for his letters, searchable by key concepts.)

Last but not least we also have the assessment of his colleague Paul Gaugain:

‘Oh yes, he loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland — those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth.’

Now why do I bring up so much of this debate, in my view solved by looking at scientific facts with an eye on the whole package of historical data?

I have been thinking of how arguments are flying around in the Democratic party post-mortem of the election, claiming this or that or those being at fault for losses, for gains, on all sides. Often the loudest arguments win, or the ones that jive most with our own closely held beliefs (confirmation bias,) or the ones that are repeated most often. Now more than ever it seems paramount to wade through them all and really test the veracity of claims, not just their plausibility.

This is important because we will not prevail if we do not learn from mistakes. I am all in favor of celebrating today – but the work of tomorrow has to begin with honest assessments of future moves. And a good start is to look at the differing voices. We can contemplate what AOC had to say in an interview with the NYT yesterday, pointing to the fact that we urgently need and utilize the help of marginalized communities, but then tend to drop them and their demands once we’ve won, giving plum political jobs to anyone but progressives. Or we can turn to a thoughtful, intelligent essay in the Atlantic about what it would mean for democracy to simply go back to the status quo ante 2016. (Highly recommended reading.)

We can look at the argument of many that a centrist Biden, or down-stream candidates like him, overall outperformed the more progressives, even if those won in their own districts. We need to ask, if those claimed differences (we don’t even have yet all the numbers!) are based on message content differences (Medicare for All/Defund the Police) or were inherently driven by misogyny or racism (the more progressive candidates also tended to be POC, many of them women.)

There has to be an assessment of the way messages were conveyed – did we match the skillful bite-size narratives of the republicans with our more complicated stories, did we match their community engagement (democrats did not do door to door canvassing because of Covid)? Did top-down regulations and media approaches hamper individual democratic candidates because they were not appropriate for their communities?

Was there a failure to nationalize attacks on Trump for fear of scaring potential republican voters ready to jump ship – a population that did NOT materialize? After all, campaigns that accepted top-down funding were obliged to run under basic strategic maps brought to them by the DCCC/DSCCC/DLCC and this was their strategy.

Was lack of skill or funding or awareness for the need for social media dispersion a factor? There are so many variable to be taken into account beyond the core issues of progressive demands versus centrist calls for reconciliation and moderateness, that it will take time to isolate them and analyze them all. Most of all it will take the will to do that, otherwise we will not stand in 2022.

Reward yourself for due diligence in exploring these issues with a walk in the woods showering you with exuberant yellow. It will lift your soul.

Music today is by Michael Torke who has composed a lot around colors, including bright blue and its opposing color on the wheel: YELLOW. (Yellow Pages are not the only industry to flag that color. Think Nikon, National Geographic, McDonalds, and CAT and Caterpillar…..) Someone knows what they are doing.

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“Finding immortality, one pumpkin at a time.”

“Finding immortality, one pumpkin at a time,” was reportedly uttered by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk in response to the work of the Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, Marc Evan and Chris Soria. (I am skipping his newest book published this September, The Invention of Sound, all about mortality in its most sadistic forms….)

The Brooklyn, NY-based duo has been carving pumpkins for many years. One of their approaches, carving famous works of art into their pumpkins, has been recognized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. MoMa has ordered an annual pumpkin devoted to a piece from their collection for the last 7 years, so has the Whitney and the Queens Museum of Art. And now Chuck Palahniuk.

Here is a sampling of their work, done these days in cooperation with 12 other carvers, using tools from different trades, including kitchen knives, hardware tools, such as small saws, serrated knives, linoleum cutters (typically used for printmaking), and clay loops (used for trimming in pottery). (Photographs from the website.)

Keith Haring
Van Gogh

The pumpkins, internally wired with little lamps, can cost up to $800. That is a lot for a fleeting pleasure, and not much if you consider the skill that goes into it and the fact that this is probably a one-shot-per-year business.

To put the word immortality and pumpkin into one sentence requires some chutzpah. I cannot think of another organism widely available to observe, perhaps with the exception of sunflowers when they go dry and black, that reminds me so visibly of death and decay. Who hasn’t thought about the fleeting of existence when watching the crisp pumpkins melting into pulp and slime, on one’s doorstep as much as in the fields come winter?

On my visit to Sauvie Island yesterday, the fields were ready to be picked, the greenery already gone, the pumpkins bare for the take. It poured, I could not even leave the car, photographing out of the window. My favorite willow tree had finally collapsed under its own weight, pieces stacked along Reeder Road.

The ponds were dry, not good for November when so much traveling water fowl needs a place to settle.

(The red dirt is where usually the pond resides)

As a result a universe of hunters concentrated around one of the few remaining wet spots, killing scores of ducks by the unrelenting sound of the shooting.

Mortality was on my mind, not immortality. Beauty, of course, as always is the case in nature, visible even in the stark reminders of transience.

Then again, the quest for immortality, or ruminations about it, have also created some – literary – beauty. The ancient Greek texts come to mind, or Wordsworth, but also something decidedly contemporary. Here is Brian Culhane.

THE IMMORTALITY ODE

Bill Evans is quiet, fingers still above the keys,
But ready to begin again and again and again
The first twelve bars before the drums come in,
Just as I am ready for inspiration this evening,
Fingers rehearsing an entrance above the keyboard
Of the Olivetti Lettera 32 I pounded years ago
On Charles Street, nights I wore my father’s
Black cashmere overcoat whenever the steam
Failed to make it up five flights, and back then
Evans waited, too, for his entrance, rain on glass
Waiting to accompany him, and on the B side?
Everlastingness is still there, and all Camus
Said it was, the boulder, the hill, the boulder again
That we come to over and over, pushing—
Quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua
As Lucky said and which my annotated Beckett
Traces to the Latin (qua) for in the capacity of.
As in I qua Sisyphus, I quaquaquaqua greybeard
Old father shuffling along in black cashmere:
The Child is father of the Man, a looped immortality,
While happiness, per Camus, if patently absurd,
Nonetheless may rise with the struggle to old heights
And just might be enough to fill a man’s heart,
Even as Evans once more lifts his fingers for
“You and the Night and the Music,” his solo fresh
As when he first sat down, and the night is young.

And here the referenced music by Bill Evans. Stay alive for now, folks. We need to be around for the official calling of the election…..

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The De Young Museum (2)

So much for good intentions. I really mean to keep my prejudices in check, but when I learned many months ago that two of the major art institutions in this country, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) of which the de Young is a part, simply swapped their White, male, European-anchored directors, I rolled my eyes. It is even weirder, given that Thomas Campbell left New York for San Francisco with his reputation under attack, his new Board of Directors undergoing major upheaval with fundraising threatened, for an institution that had worn down four directors in less than a decade, the last one lasting only 22 months, and that had no exhibitions planned beyond 6 months – a process usually stretched over years to be successful.

As so often, I should have been more open minded. Looks like Campbell is rising to these challenges and then some. Despite Covid-19 closing the museum for months on end (they just re-opened,) starving the limited endowment institution of ticket sales on which it heavily relies, he managed so far to prevent major staff lay-offs.

Having to delay major traveling exhibitions for now – a full-dress Judy Chicago retrospective that was supposed to open in May has been postponed for a year – he turned his efforts to support of the local artist community.

“In celebration of the de Young museum’s 125th anniversary, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are hosting The de Young Open, a juried community art exhibition of submissions by artists who live in the nine Bay Area counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma.

Works of art in The de Young Open are hung “salon-style,” installed edge to edge and floor to ceiling, which enables a maximum number of works to be displayed. The de Young filled the 12,000-square-foot Herbst Exhibition Galleries with 877 artworks by 762 Bay Area artists in The de Young Open.”

The work can also be sold directly without the usual commission for the museum, a major boost for the hard-hit community of artists.

Community outreach occurred not on that front alone. In June, protesters against racism had pulled down multiple statues in the park’s Music Concourse, which is flanked by the museum on one side, and the Academy of Sciences on the other. Francis Scott Key, national anthem lyric author and slave owner, came down, as did Saint Junípero Serra, founder of California missions and enslaver of Native Americans, and Ulysses S. Grant.

The statue of Key sat right under the flag bearing figure; the ferris wheel has been empty and motionless since its installment this spring.

The day after the protest, Campbell posted and later wrote to the SF major that the newly empty spaces should be filled with art derived from an annual competition and commission a work by a Bay Area artist that might respond to the challenge of, Who should we memorialize?” A conversation about what to do with sculptures of people who have blood on their hands, had already happened within the museum before the June protests took place. The civic spirit displayed by these efforts is a hopeful sign.

Robert Emmet survived the purge. An Irish nationalist and rebel leader, he is famous for his speech from the dock during his trial. I have no clue why he is memorialized in San Francisco.

I am writing about this at length not because I am particularly familiar with the museum, I am not, but because I find examples of constructive leadership important to flag. When I wandered around the Music Concourse, benches and fountains recently restored from the vandalism, I was thinking about how people who understand where the rage is coming from without condoning vandalism, and who are in positions to make choices, can really be agents of change. It is the next steps that count, after the upheaval. San Francisco seems to have gained an effective and welcome voice in the art scene and the civic realm in this regard.

Someone who doesn’t just sit it out.

The other part of FAMSF is the Legion of Honor Fine Art Museum, which is still closed. I walked by the palace yesterday afternoon, with the fog rolling into this unimaginably beautiful setting next to the Pacific,

and communed with the bored lions, Jeanne d’Arc and El Cid by Anna Hyatt Huntington. Don’t ask me how they are related to San Francisco either.

The neo-classicist building itself is impressive, a gift of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels to the city of San Francisco, after she persuaded her sugar magnate husband to build a replica for the French pavilion she had fallen in love with at the 1915 world exposition. Here is the history of the museum’s creation. I left the thinker to himself, maybe he’ll come up with further good plans for the museum world….

Music in honor of the maid of Orleans who is forever exposed to the damp fog of the region.

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Yerba Buena Gardens

In what seems another lifetime, I used to go to San Francisco for psychology conferences, or to attend the opera, or, as you might remember, document some of the climate change-movement protests last year. Whirlwind trips that focussed on the task or pleasure at hand, not leaving much time to explore the city’s history.

I did walk once or twice through Yerba Buena Gardens, to or from a visit to SF Moma or the Contemporary Jewish Museum, mostly engaging in people watching. People who were nowhere to be seen this time around – when I came to photograph the site, I was one of maybe three or four people hanging out there in the middle of a Tuesday morning. We are talking an area comprising a few city blocks! The name means Good Herb in Spanish, referring to Spearmint and other herbs in the mint family. None of those to be seen, either.

The space is organized on several levels, with a pedestrian bridge, meandering pathways, large swaths of lawn, cafés, iceskating rink and bowling alleys, kids’ playgrounds, conference centers and art exhibits. The public art ranges from middling to beautiful, with no real cohesive curation detectable. Or maybe that’s just me, too hot on a mid-October day going on 90 degrees having fought yet another battle for parking, drowning my judgement in sweat.

Playground closed due to Covid-19

There is a kinetic sculpture, Urge by Chico MacMurtrie, a half man half woman who moves when you do, sitting down or standing up on top of the world.

There is a sculpture that reminds too much of a certain Californian actor elected president, The Shaking Man by Terry Allen. Judging by the shininess of his hand(s) people are eager to shake indeed.

Covid-19 related landscape art the has seen better days in the but three weeks or so since installation by artist Tosha Stimage. The social distancing devices are supposed to fade and make room for the next artwork to arrive mid-November, but it is a pity that their original beauty can only be guessed at.

Photograph above from the garden web site

And then there are the walls and reflecting streams by Danish artist Lin Utzon, a compelling area of stillness, movement, pattern and integration of the surrounding cityscape through reflection. The fluted granite walls, perforated with large-scale silver fissures, seem to belong to the sky, the air, the light in all its San Franciscan brightness. Or the light belongs to them – depending on your shift in perspective. A photographer’s pleasure.

By chance I came across a fabulous illustrated history of the area once I started reading up on the site. The historic photographic footage alone is worth checking this document out, compiled as The Memory of Traces by artist Jenny Odell during a residency at the Yerba Buena Art Center 5 years ago. Anybody interested in or from SF should check it out – it is revelatory!

www.jennyodell.com/ybc.pdf

I learned that the area was originally home to Filipino immigrants and hotels for elderly veterans, pawnshops, and small businesses. When developers swooped in, the people formed a citizen group to prevent displacement, with limited success (public housing was erected in other places for the people who had to leave.) After court battles and infighting among developers for the best use of the area, a proposition passed in 1976 that allowed an underground convention center, with a park and cultural facilities above it.

The gardens were finished in the mid 90s. During construction, a lot of burial sites and Native American artifacts ranging back to 6000 (!) years were discovered. A memorial to the indigenous tribe of the Muwekma Ohlone is now part of the gardens.

A huge entertainment center, the Metreon, was erected after the gardens. It did not do well, and has re-emerged, now as a High tech experience, in 2012. Suffice it to say, that Rebeccah Solnit mused “a more obsequious monument to capitalism would be hard to find.” 

I leave it at that. The gardens certainly enrich people who need to stop for a moment in a green oasis when the surrounding intensity of the city starts to grate. If I say so myself.

Music today is by a trio from the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, playing Beethoven and friends in their backyard two weeks ago.

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