Two years ago the Getty Center in LA showed a collection of illuminated manuscripts with a focus on what they could tell us about the lives of women in the Middle Ages. The richly illustrated prayer books and religious texts provide a window into the themes that dominated in those early years – childbirth, obedience, self-sacrifice.

Women themselves, mostly connected to nunneries but not always, were involved in creating these books. According to scientists about 4,000 books produced between 1200 and 1500 CE can be attributed to 400 specific female scribes in Germany alone, involved in both transcription and painting the illustrations.

For anything before 1100 CE not much is known, only about 1% of the few surviving manuscript can be linked to women artists. Fast forward to a skeleton find in North-Rhine Westphalia: the woman turns out to have a blue tooth, when examined. She lived sometime between 997 and 1162 CE, according to radiocarbon dating of her teeth, at a small women’s monastery called Dalheim.

The blue flecks of lazurite came with microscopic bits of a clear mineral called phlogopite, another ingredient in lapis lazuli. It’s rich in iron and magnesium, and it’s possible to trace the ratio of those two elements to specific mining spots in northeast Afghanistan. Using this, Warinner and her colleagues could eventually be able to tell exactly where Dalheim’s scribes and painters got their pigment.The team found lazurite particles embedded in the calculus on several of the unnamed woman’s teeth, which suggests that licking the tip of her brush was a habit she practiced over a long period of time.

The mineral was used for the intense blues, often associated with the Virgin Mary’s cloak, found in the manuscripts. It was a rare and expensive substance available only to the most highly skilled illustrators. Anthropologists had originally investigated the plaque of this woman to determine medieval diet. The finding of lapis flecks led to the illustrator hypothesis, somewhat confirmed by the status of the artist’s bones: no hard physical labor or disease for her, living to the then ripe age of 60ish. https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/medieval-illuminated-manuscripts-were-also-womens-work/

Lesson #1: Scrupulously floss if you don’t want anthropologists to get to your life’s history.

Lesson#2: Our views of gendered (or racial) history might change if we are able to accrue and publish sufficient data. This is not just a question of having the scientific tools. Look at this fascinating discussion of the political issues inherent to the publication of anthropological findings: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna-paleogenomics.html

Photographs today are from Heinsberg, North-Rhine Westphalia (a staunchly catholic state,) a small market town close to the village of my childhood. It had barely changed when I visited some 40 years later.

Music, since we drew the arc from female spiders, to female war photographers to female illustrators this week: a medieval woman composer, Hildegard von Bingen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6qFCYRQKVA

Too late. The exhibit closes in 4 days. Well, not really too late, since I wouldn’t travel to Hungary in any case, on account of my politics. Or Victor Orbán’s and his administration’s, more precisely.

András Böröcz, “Barrels on Eggs” (1993-94), cardboard, cork, chicken eggs, duck eggs (photo by Dorka Hübner)

That said, ohh, would I have loved to see this exposition of ingeniously fabricated objects. (And, if anyone ever described my own work as “….represent(s) both the consciousness of homo faber and the ease of homo ludens,” as Agnes Berecz, a Pratt Institute prof of History of Art and Design did of András Böröcz’ sculptures, I’d die a happy woman.)

So what am I talking about? Non-Objective Objects, András Böröcz’s Art, curated by Márta Kovalovszky, is currently on show at Budapest’s Kunsthalle, a museum that has become a focal point of the tensions between progressive views and the reactionary Hungary administration.

András Böröcz, “The Head Accountant” (2013), carved pencil, oak, toilet plunger, straight pins, cork, tape measure (photo by Dorka Hübner)

From what I discerned from the reviews, the exhibition excels in both what is displayed and how it is displayed, the latter referenced as a cabinet-of-curiosities, Wunderkammer, perfectly suited to its contents.

The artist left Hungary in 1985 and is living in NYC. You can catch glimpses of his work here https://www.andrasborocz.com   and early reviews of the artist as a wizard and his work as magical here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/arts/art-in-review-andras-borocz.html 

Basically Böröcz takes everyday objects, both found in nature or manufactured and creates sculptures or tableaux from them that reference in all directions: politics, quotidian life, art history with a focus on surrealism, and again and again Jewish rituals that in themselves refer to political action. Yad, the Jewish pointer use in reading Torah,

noise makers for the Purim Megillah, Matzoh and more all appear in – sometimes satirical – disguises. Think of him as a Hungarian Max Ernst, landed in the 21st century, balancing learnedness with a fondness for craftsmanship, performance art and an unerring eye for historical parallels. As for the politics: read the Hyperallergic review linked to above, since I am keeping with my promise to be mum on them this week….

Let’s hope there will be a US- based retrospective soon!

Music today: a terrific version of Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, arranged for violin and piano, that perfectly matches the spirit of Böröcz’ work.

Photographs are select items found in different Wunderkammer settings in Lower Saxony, Germany…..

Help me out here. When you look at art, how do you judge if it’s good or not? Or, more importantly, whether it is truly art or not? I mean, I know when I like something, or dislike it. But I am often at a loss when I have to decide if something meets the criteria for being counted as good art. And sometimes I can’t figure out for the life of me if it’s art at all.

Of course I can do the relevant research, consulting those in the know, the experts, the books, the treatises, the critics. But that feels like cheating when I ask myself the simple question: is this or that painting, photograph, piece of music a work of art or not.

What should the criteria be? Beauty can’t be it – there are beautiful things that are not art, and art that is by no means beautiful. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines art as “something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings. Important ideas? That’s just kicking the can down the road by adding another concept that for the most part defies definition.

Should I be content with this? From the Stanford Encyclopedia: The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated. Maybe that’s the solution: not useful to define it, so why bother – go back to the like or dislike, as a purely subjective phenomenon?

It all went through my head when I came across the work of South-Korean artist Jung Lee. She puts neon signs that spell single words, or phrases or whole stanzas into the landscape and then photographs them.

http://www.damnmagazine.net/2018/03/12/jung-lee-dwelling-with-neon-light/

There is certainly imagination, to come up with the concept. There is likely skill, if she crafts the signs themselves, or in the way she photographs them. They can, I guess, look beautiful if you like surprises in your natural environment, but we had already agreed anyhow that beauty is not a necessary condition.

What ideas are expressed? Is there some essential meaning conveyed in the combination of message of choice and placement in the landscape? Am I too dense to get it? I honestly find it obscure. What is the difference to graffiti words, put across the urban landscape? I actually went back to my own archives, selected somewhat similar landscapes that I had photographed across the years, and painted in the opposite messages, hoping to find some answers. No luck. To me, The End did not convey anything significantly different from The Start. Except that it came first, as a concept, a call, compared to my response. (And on a side note – the landscapes are called desolate in the description of her works, increasing the sense of enigma, perhaps. Note that all my “matching” landscapes were photographed during simple walks in the forests and the beach, and just made to look this way via manipulating of lighting.)

The Why question, why is something to be considered art, in the end met the Why Not…. I’m sure that will rile the serious folks among us, or reveal my ignorance, or both. Why not!

PS – Before I get accused of forgery… these montages were only made for purpose of making my point, not to imitate someone else’s ideas. Here is a link to the relevant psychology research: https://medium.com/@inna_13021/art-forgery-why-do-we-care-so-much-for-originals-7ec4d88fd241

Last time I offered Liszt’s Feux Follets (Irrlichter/Will-o-Whisps) it was played by Richter. Today: Ashkenzy’s version:

The once-a-year mentioning of my annual calendar is upon us, or you, as the case may be. This year’s theme is

Tied to the Moon (a spectrum of experiences in women’s lives.)

I have been working on this series for most of 2018, generating montages that all contain a semblance of a moon, some materials like rope that bind different elements and a representation of women at different life stages. The sisters, mothers, young and old, the ones that mourn, the ones that love and long, the rivals, the curious and the skeptical ones, they are all there, 32 of them, appropriated in one or another form from paintings across centuries to acknowledge the similarities of women’s fates across time and place.

Price is the same $25 as the least few years, part of the proceeds go to Mercy Corps for refugee work; calendar shows one selected image per month, and I ship or bring over. Shoot me an email if you are interested.

Here are some sample montages: feedback much appreciated even if you are not interested in the calendar, given how everything works electronically these days or walls have shrunk with downsizing….

And here is the aria Casta Diva sung to the moon goddess (from Bellini’s opera Norma staged in Roman times) wishing for her to scatter peace across the earth.