Walking through my garden towards dusk this weekend, watering can in hand for the new plantings, my eye was drawn to numerous small creatures. Oblivious in their own small universe, perhaps tired, they did not budge when I moved the iPhone directly above them, my watering task all but forgotten.
In the mysterious ways memory works, I suddenly recalled a miniature landscape I had encountered years back in the middle of Manhattan, to be looked at through a glass embedded in, I don’t know, a construction fence? Some office wall? No, I checked: Wall of the Museum of Arts and Design, on Broadway.
The artist, Patrick Jacobs, builds pseudoscientific dioramas using paper, styrene, acrylic, vinyl, neoprene, wax, and hair, and photographs among other materials, viewing them through lenses as he works, using tweezers and brushes. They are lit from within and exhibit incredible depths. Below are links to some of his typical work. If you are in Italy, you have a chance to catch his most recent exhibit until June 9th…..
You look at the panoramas through circular shaped lenses, which reminded me of the Claude glass, an optical device used by 18th century landscape painters. The convex black mirror allows you to asses tonality and light and shade ratios in its reflection. I have always thought it would be interesting to do a landscape photography project with one of those things – probably done already by numerous photographers. Nonetheless, it would fit into the themes of reflection and distortion so much part of my montage work. Which reminds me: I have finally re-designed my art website – give it a look, feedback appreciated!
And for your Monday morning jolt, here is another insect-related masterpiece….gives you a crunching start into a hopefully bug-free week:
Spitbugs!
Unless you want to end up like Rothenberg who does all this interspecies music.
One of the regrettable side products of a society on the move – whether moving is voluntary or not – is the loss of historical knowledge. If you grow up in a place and stay there for most of your life you are usually familiar with the history of your surroundings. You relate facts and stories to the next generation and you recognize them in the art that surrounds you, if it is focussed on any of these issues.
None of that is true any longer when you move to another area, another part of the country, another country. You have to do painstaking work to put all the pieces together and even then you might not have the information that comes with narratives handed down from generation to generation.
I found myself reminded of that twice lately. Once when exploring some non-touristy areas in Santa Fe and seeing a lot of murals and graffiti that clearly spoke to some issues related to New Mexico, or so it seemed. I had, of course, no clue. Photographs today are from those jaunts.
The second time it happened when I read this ArtsWatch piece by Bob Hicks yesterday, describing the work of Henk Pander (full disclosure, they are both friends of mine) that relates the history of the Vanport flood. An exhibit of new work around this topic opens here. There has been a festival since 2015 that commemorates annually the 1948 accidental flooding of Oregon’s then second largest city and its horrific destruction of lives and housing in a predominantly black neighborhood. It took an artist and an art critic, however, to get through to people like me with the story.
Why should we care about knowing the history of any given place? For one, I believe it connects us to prior generations, increases an understanding of the place and provides a sense of belonging, which in turn makes it more likely that we stand up for “our” community when that is required. Secondly, we might learn from what has happened in the past to protect us against similar mistakes in the future. That covers about any area I can think of, from awareness of the fragility of an eco system, the perils of building in potential floodplains, preparedness for earthquakes, to the more sociological issues of housing segregation and so on. And, come to think of it, the folly of war.
And since this week was Malcom X’s birthday, here is a master story teller when it comes to drawing the arc of history from past to present, offering alternative visions, warnings and hope: the compilation of speech excerpts is exquisite.
And music? Turns out people use music, big time, to teach history….
18.248 – that is the official number of refugees who during the last 5 years drowned or went missing in the Mediterranean, according to the newest report by the United Nations. The dark figure is likely much higher. Organizations like Sea Bridge have been trying to rescue as many as they could, but their work has been made increasingly difficult by the political right wing forces in Europe.
The official E.U. Marine rescue boats were already withdrawn when the new Italian government refused to allow any more refugees on land. The E.U. states could not agree on a distribution quota that would have swayed the Italians. Now private rescue operations are brought to a halt as well.
People who use their own boats to fish drowning refugees out of the water are threatened with up to 20 years in prison and insane fines for supporting “illegal immigration.” Last Tuesday the captain of the boat “lifeline” was sentenced to a 1o.ooo Euros fine in Malta for rescuing 230 migrants and bringing them on land.
That same approach to “deterrence” is of course also happening here in the US: the criminalization of humanitarian aid has progressed under the Trump administration to destroy potentially the lives of those trying to prevent deaths along the Southern Border. Whether you leave water for those trying to cross the desert, or pick them up in your car to bring to social services, you can be charged with federal crimes like trafficking. (This last article on the treatment of organizations that try to save lives is frightening.)
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In a statement last year the European rescuers declared: SEEBRÜCKE is an international movement, supported by several civil society alliances and people. We declare our solidarity with people who are forced to flee their homes. From German and European policy makers, we demand the establishment of safe routes for refugees, to stop the criminalisation of sea rescue and to receive them in a humane way whilst respecting their rights.
Last year, protest actions organized by Seebrücke were held in Greece and several German and Swiss cities. This week, there was a protest in Berlin.
One of the city’s landmarks, Molecule Man by Jonathan Borofsky, was clad in an orange life vest and black blindfolds by art activists. The 30 meter high sculpture was installed in 1999 and strategically placed in the river Spree where the former East and West Germany met. Refugees had sewn the huge (48 square meters) life vest by hand according to a pattern devised by a Syrian mathematician, also a refugee. Banners along the bridges proclaimed: Build Bridges not Walls!
Aktivist_innen der Seebrücke befestigen am 17.05.2019 ein riesiges Transparent in Form einer Rettungsweste am Molecule Man, einer Skulptur die sich in der Spree zwischen Elsenbrücke und Oberbaumbrücke in Berlin befindet.
Foto: RubyImages/F. Boillot
Here is a fascinating, short video documenting the action.
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“Molecule Man” (1981) by Jonathan Borofsky
Here is another of Borofky’s Molecule Man, this one located in L.A. Any clever suggestions how to decorate that one to draw attention to the plight of those crossing the Sonoran Desert? And those trying to prevent them from dying of thirst? Garments of canteens, anyone?
Photographs today are of desert plants I’ve encountered in the US.
And here is some desert music although from a desert in a different continent.
Double dipping today – this will be up at Oregon Arts Watch as well.
IT HAPPENED TO ME AGAIN. That’s twice now, in just two years. I had to revise my assessment of an artist once I got to know the history and environment that was essential to their work. The first re-evaluation took place both on an intellectual and an emotional level – where I truly disliked Frida Kahlo before, I came round. https://www.heuermontage.com/?p=5790
Gerald’s Tree I, 1937 – Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
And now I have to admit something similar is happening for Georgia O’Keeffe. I was never a fan of the endlessly repeated desert skulls or foreshortened flower paintings, imbued with sexual metaphors or gender-specific markers – references, it turns out, mostly peddled by the men in her life in the beginning of her career and appropriated by many a feminist at some later point. O’Keeffe herself rejected these interpretations just as much as being co-opted by the feminist cause. (For a thorough analysis of her relationship to feminism read Linda M. Grasso: Equal under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe & Twentieth-Century Feminism University of New Mexico Press, 2017)
I was also not particularly taken by the way the oil paintings were rendered. Even though the landscapes use saturated colors, there is often a dullness that does not capture the intense brightness of New Mexico’s high desert. Laura Cumming, reviewing the 2016 O’Keeffe retrospective mounted at the Tate Modern, says it better than I possibly could:
But by now, what strikes is the stark disparity between the sensuous imagery and the dust-dead surface. O’Keeffe’s oil paintings turn out to be pasty, matte, evenly layered. They have no touch, no relish for paint, no interest in textural distinction. They are as graphic and flat as the millions of posters they have spawned worldwide; in fact, on the strength of this first major show outside America, they look just as good, if not better, in reproduction. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/jul/10/georgia-okeefe-review-tate-modern-retrospective
From the River – Pale, 1959 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Mostly I was put off, though, by her ways of perfecting a persona, here too some semblance to Kahlo. She paid a lot of attention to how she looked (perhaps to be expected in one so often photographed) down to having a beloved piece of jewelry recreated in a different metal that better matched the color of her now white hair. She insisted on – often self styled – black and white clothing when being photographed, although she appeared usually in quite colorful clothes. The environments she lived in, particularly later in life when fame also brought fortune, were carefully arranged with designer furniture – Mies van der Rohe and Saarinen pieces among them. It is unsurprising that we now have traveling exhibits dedicated to her style, her clothes, her surroundings. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/touring/georgia_okeeffe_living_modern
Cottonwood (Detail), ca. 1952 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
And above all there was that myth making of the independent, strong, lonely recluse seeking solitude in the acrid Southwest after life got too complicated on the East Coast. I had trouble squaring my images of recluses with someone having a house keeper, a gardener, a staff, and a coterie of friends, neighbors and endless groupies while floating on ever growing fame as a true American modernist. She objected to be associated with anything commercial (allusions to the fact that some of her paintings foreshadowed pop art infuriated her) but her ascent was driven, in part, by the commercial aptitude of her husband, photographer, artist and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, a much older man.
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SO WHAT SHIFTED? Why have I started to see the artist and her art with new eyes and a certain appreciation? It was a combination of three factors during my recent visit to Santa Fe. I saw her early work in the lovely museum dedicated to her (https://www.okeeffemuseum.org).
Black Lines, 1916 Georgia O’Keeffe MuseumAbstraction with Curve and Circle, 1915-1916 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
I watched a documentary movie that the museum offers, in which the artist ruminates on her own life, and I experienced the landscape of New Mexico for the first time.
Black Place III, 1944 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
The museum offered the usual biographic time line. Born in 1887 to farmers in Wisconsin, O’Keeffe teaches school in rural Texas after training at the Art Institute in Chicago. She takes up with Stieglitz, a leading promoter of modern art, and becomes part of an influential intellectual circle that catapults American art out of the dark ages, including names now extremely familiar to us, among them “Make it new!” Ezra Pound and “The Local is the Universal!” William Carlos Williams. She is close friends with another photographer and protégé of Stieglitz, Paul Strand, as well as his wife Rebecca and later Ansel Adams and Todd Webb. When her husband turns to even younger women and their marriage falls apart she moves to the Southwest, having visited every summer previously for many, many years.
All that I knew. I now learned, that this path was also riddled with disease and breakdowns (psychiatric wards included,) not as extreme as that of her friend Frida’s, but enough to stress how strong she must have been to go her independent ways. I was also drawn in when she talks about happiness in the documentary. She said something along the lines that happiness is insubstantial and short-lived for most people. What counts is being interested and that she was. She also took, she insisted, throughout life what she wanted.
In the Patio VII, 1950 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
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INTERESTED SHE WAS: it shows in her ways of learning and applying principles developed by other artists – and then giving those principles her own rendering, taking what she wanted, whether that meant sticking to abstraction, or emulating strands of Neue Sachlichkeit. Being able to see her early abstractions, not painted in oil, made that particularly clear to me. These lovely watercolors herald later form and point the way to her insistence on 2-dimensionality, even in her landscapes.
Black Mesa Landscape NM/Out Back of Marie’s II, 1930 – Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Interest helped her to extract what she could use from all these photographers around her: endlessly modeling for Stieglitz, Strand, Adams and later Webb did not stop her from taking from this art form what made her paintings part of the American Avant-garde: she zoomed in and out in her depictions, as if she had those different lenses, shifting from macro to wide-angle renderings, making things big that were small and vice versa. Lessons of scale drawn from photography clearly influence her during most of her career.
Ram’s Horn I, ca 1949 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
(And talking about photography – it drives me to distraction that every exhibit of her work that I have ever seen or read about, is paired with photographs of her by all these famous men in her life. It really has the viewer focus on her as a subject rather than her as the agent of her art.) But she took what she wanted: she left when it suited her, she stood by her artistic vision even when pressed to adapt to that of those around her and she experimented with relationships at a time where it took even more courage than it does today.
Interest made her a world traveler – particularly later in life when she went all over the place, always to return to her home in New Mexico where she finally settled in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’ death. And this landscape, as I now understand having seen it, provides a superb match to anyone with photographic sensibility. The thin air and the way it affects vision upends our usual ability to judge distance; in this way her paintings are quite literal depictions, only intensified by her proclivity towards abstraction. It is also a landscape in which anything incidental disappears when trying to brave the harsh elements, the dryness, wind, dust, heat or cold. That, too, is captured in O’Keeffe’s work, with its singular focus.
A Piece of Wood, 1942 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
The ground she walked and worked on in NM consists of compressed material from volcanic eruptions called Tuff. It is a soft substance, crumbly, easily destroyed – everything the artist was not, even though she had to endure one of the worst nightmares imaginable for a visual artist: macular degeneration. It appeared first in 1964, and her last unassisted oil painting was finished in 1974. She died in 1986, 98 years old. She might have been self-absorbed, vain, single-minded, but she also was vulnerable, thoughtful and above all, tough. Can’t help but like that, and allowing it to color the assessment of her art.
Church Steeple, 1930 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
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INTERESTED SHE WAS AND INTERESTING SHE REMAINS. If you are curious to learn more about O’Keeffe, here is your chance: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust education presents Carolyn Burke on Tuesday, 4/30 at noon. The renowned author will discuss her book, Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury.
And if you are lucky, you will have a chance to listen to a new opera about O’Keeffe wherever it will next be produced. Today it rains with music by Laura Kaminsky and a libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed just saw its world premiere in San Francis late March. It is staged as a train ride that O’Keeffe and Rebecca Strand take to NM, where they play drunken games and talk about their lives. https://operaparallele.org/today-it-rains-2/
The only musical excerpt I could find is late in this clip, start at 25:00: And yes, it’s modern chamber opera. You know what that means.
Photographs today were taken completely independently of the paintings in NM and only later matched up. Talk about translations of a landscape….
Yesterday I wrote about how certain kinds of clothing signal political beliefs or status. I was particularly grateful to the many of you who emailed in with their own experience of the kinds I described. Lifts the isolation.
Today I want to share a wonderfully mischievous artist’s work, using clothing and other props to skewer political beliefs and/or stereotypes.
Sarah Maple is a young British artist of mixed Islamic descent who has been a rising star.
She had her first solo exhibit in NYC this February, and has received numerous awards and commissions for specific purposes. Her art is daring (she receives regular threats and people throw bricks through her gallery windows etc.) and insightful.
Sara Maple – Disney Princess Series
I especially like how she is not fixed on a particular topic, say skewering gender stereotypes, or racism, or nationalism, or – well, you get the idea. She processes what is happening all around her with her art, in paintings, photography, mixed media installations and films. The fun she seems to be having with putting her ideas into image simply oozes out of every picture.
Sara Maple – Disney Princess Series
I am posting images of an early (2011) series that looked at the contrast between the dreams little girls (are encouraged to) pursue, dreams about the existence as a princess, preferably a Disney one, and the kind of professions that regularly exclude women. Hanker over that mermaid dress, and never mind that a little bit more self confidence could have you excel in the sciences…. I applaud the playfulness mixed with an understanding of the seriousness of the topic.
Note, no complicated articles to read today! I’m too tired to find them as you probably are to read them.
I will, however, add to Maple’s clever work some photographs about abandoned props found by the wayside. And speaking of which: I am signing off to go on a little road trip. Communications will be intermittent, but will give you a chance to travel vicariously!
Appropriate music today, since I have no clue how people always get these insanely clever ideas, are some Enigma Variations….. composer Elgar being, of course, Maple’s Landsmann.
I do get a kick out of visiting art exhibits with my octogenarian painter friend – sometimes grumpy, often funny, never boring and always, always good for some revelations about art. Yesterday we did have a blast again, wandering through the halls of the Portland Art Museum, exploring its newest exhibit: the map is not the territory.
The exhibit, celebrating, in the widest sense, regional art, was put on by the new (2017) PAM curator of Northwest art, Grace Kook-Anderson. Despite some occasional misgivings, I was sold on her vision after finishing the rounds of exhibition halls. There was enough substance that it was easy to put aside what my friend sometimes calls “the exploitation of human tragedy for the production of trendy conceptual art.” The curatorial display decisions were strong, some individual art works truly stood out, and the whole of it radiated cohesion. It taught, and it moved.
Charlene Vickers Turtle Clan, part of the installation Ominjimendaan/to remember
It is a mystery to me how a curator can make limited choices when there is an abundance of good work to choose from. I’ve talked about that previously here:
Mistaken cramming is often the result – none of that at this show. The works had space to breathe and the range of mediums used did not interfere with each other. I found the juxtaposition of natural materials (fish skins, wood, etc.)
Annette Bellamy Out of Water Fish skin and artificial sinew (Background installation)
and/or concrete natural forms with man-made or even machine-made abstractions thought-provoking. Weight was given to artistic expressions of native American peoples’ losses, strengths, collective memory and contemporary struggle – a fitting decision given centuries of willful ignorance or suppression.
Charlene Vickers Sleep Walking Moccasins, beer case cardboard, thread, synthetic twine, glass bead, letter beads, faux fur, denim. cotton fabric, 1920s bedroom chairs, wool blankets, acrylic knit blankets, assorted mixed media and found photo works.
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The first of my favorite two pieces was Annette Bellamy’s Moving Mountains. The work is luminous and suggests that defying gravity is possible, after all. The contrast of seemingly heavy stones and boulders (stoneware, presumably hollow) and a sense of ascending lightness proved nothing but up-lifting. The lines from which the individual objects are suspended become part of the installation, suggesting falling rain at the same time that optically there is a sense of upward motion. The shadows seem to shift as something existing independently. The installation moved me, deeply, although I suspect that was not the “moving” referenced in the title.
The second work, slipstream (by the light of the moon) was a gouache/ink drawing on black clayboard by Mary Ann Peters. It, too, had a mesmerizing quality, inviting thoughts about watery surfaces. Funnily enough, it reminded me of one of those Rohrschach inkblot tests used by clinicians of yore as a psychodiagnostic tool – long debunked. Peters’ projective plane seemed to contain the mirror images displayed in those test stimuli, but of course, on closer inspection, defied that expectation. Smartly done, thought provoking.
Mary Ann Peters Slipstream (by the light of the moon) Gouache/Ink on black clayboard.
This was also the artist who apparently suggested the title of the exhibition, derived from Alfred Korzybski’s major publication: Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1948.)The actual quote is longer: “The map is not the landscape, but if the map is similar to the structure of the landscape, it is useful“ which suggests a bit more than the general assumption that he referred only to the essential distinction between an object and its representation—or, more broadly, between our beliefs and the underlying reality.
Korzybski was trained as an engineer in Poland; he later developed a theory called General Semantics (GS) that he taught and wrote about here in the US. He had quite a bit of a following, many science fiction writers among them, and reached something akin to cult status mid-century. Most notably, he is considered linked to Scientology and in fact long passages of Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard borrow from GS and the conceptual road-map laid out in Science and Sanity. Among early GS critics in the field of psychology and linguistics was Martin Gardner, who wrote a flaming rebuke in Fads and Fallacies In the Name of Science (1952.) More recent criticism has come from both Noam Chomsky and later Steven Pinker. In fact the latter’s book The Language Instinct (1994) has a whole chapter debunking Korzybski and his predecessors Sapir and Whorf.
Rob Rhee Marginalia Alginate plaster, acrylic, construction adhesive, gourd sherds.
Ok, enough of a detour – I’ll take off my cognitive-psychologist-hat and put back on the one devoted to art. If the map is not the territory then the quote is not a mirror of an underlying dead-end theory. It is instead a suitable guide for what this thoughtful exhibit references: regional issues, across time, tackled by inquisitive artists and a curator with vision, making borders apparent and inviting us to examine the history of the land.
That phrase originated with Star Trek, right? Space, where no man had gone before? Today it’s two women’s turn: two artists who have done some incredible work with space and constellations.
The first is Scottish artist Katie Paterson who has an enviable knack for combining scientific research with creative genius: In 2017 she built Totality, an installation that culled images of every stage of a solar eclipse from the body of 10,000 which have been created since a drawing in 1778. The images span drawings dating from hundreds of years ago through nineteenth-century photography and up to the most advanced telescopic technologies. Over 10,000 images reflect the progression of a solar eclipse across the room – from partial to total – mirroring the sequence of the Sun eclipsed by the Moon.She printed each individual image onto a mirrored panel, and then inserted it into a disco ball spanning 32.5 inches. Each row was arranged in the order that the sun eclipses, so began with quarter eclipses and finished with totality. You can see the whole thing for yourself in the clip below.
This year she will show her newest work, The Cosmic Spectrum, which encompasses the color of the universe from its very beginning to its eventual end. Working with scientists who have pioneered research on the cosmic spectrum, Paterson created a spinning wheel which charts the color of the universe through each era of its existence.
Here is her own description: The Cosmic Spectrum encompasses the colour of the universe throughout its existence, spinning in one continuous cycle. It charts a history of starlight, from the primordial era, through the Dark Ages and the appearance of the first stars, to the current Stelliferous Era and into the Far Future. It uses the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey and speculative data from leading scientists to establish the average colour of each era. The 2dF Redshift Survey measures the light from a large volume of the universe, more than 200,000 galaxies. Scientists Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry analysis this data in order to determine the average colour of the universe today as it would be perceived by the human eye – a colour they coined ‘Cosmic Latte’.
Cosmic Latte – I like that!
While Paterson utilizes science, and conceives of her shows as exhibitions of ideas, Vija Celmins tackles the constellations as a subject for her passion:the illusionistic process of image making itself. The Latvian-American artist, now in her eighties, uses satellite photographs to depict the night sky. Over decades she painstakingly drew layers and layers of charcoal, often sanded down, and then used erasers to add the stars. A current retrospective runs at San Francisco’s MoMa, with at least 40 paintings and drawings of the night sky. https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/vija-celmins/
Nothing but horizonless sky, dotted with stars and planets. As a reviewer noted:One of the primary philosophical questions of art has to do with its dual function as an illusory window, through which we view a subject beyond, and as an object to be valued for itself. Celmins has dedicated her career to consideration of that great dilemma. Ultimately, as this exhibition reveals, the subject is the picture.
“It’s an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing ‘art’ to defend their collapsing culture.” George Grosz
Down the street from where I went to law school used to be a rare-book store, some steps down into a daylight basement. They sold prints as well and it was there where I first encountered George Grosz. I had no clue who he was, or how his work was anchored in yet another period of horrid German history. I was 18 and just starting to wake up to political reality. I also had no money to buy a print, which is probably why I remember this whole episode in the first place, since I was overwhelmed by what I saw, coveted it and couldn’t have it. It was different from anything I had been exposed to before.
You can see the original Faith Healers at MOMA. The KV stands for KriegsVerwendungsfähig which is usually translated as fit for active service; the literal translation is: usable for war.
Grosz’ experience with the horrors of war as a soldier in WW I made him a committed pacifist. He became intensely involved in subversive art and social critique, became a political activist and documented the upheaval of the 1920s in Germany. Hannah Arendt called his drawings “reportage.” He was dragged into court multiple times over accusations of agitation against the state, or blasphemy, and eventually escaped the rise of Hitler and his minions by moving to the States.
The man who had been a principal member of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, co-founder of DADA, who collaborated with John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann in the invention of photomontage (!), did not fare too well as an emigrant. The revolutionary spirit was subdued – “You come from another country you don’t start right away criticizing – they took you in.”
His art which had so brilliantly subverted the bourgeois style and content, turned into landscape painting and still life, with the occasional apocalyptic sheen. I almost spilled my coffee when I read in the Brittanica that his art became “less misanthropic…” He lived and taught on Long Island, still enamored with the country that took him in, but also clearly suffering the consequences of displacement.
In 1958 he returned to Germany, and died a short time later in an inexplicable fall down a staircase.
Until mid-July you can see some of his works at the Tate Modern in their Magic Realism – Art in Weimar Germany 1919-1933 exhibition. In case you, like I, didn’t know either: the term Magic Realism, for me always linked to South American literature, was actually invented by German photographer, art historian and art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe modern realist paintings with fantasy or dream-like subjects. Hah, not a day without learning something new. Lusting for a London trip…..
For music today go to this website and click on the arrow in the black box offering different titles. It is a compilation of music from the Weimar Republic.
Photographs today are street art from Berlin, his hometown.
PS: In the title photograph of today’s blog you can see half a bedbug and a sign below that reads: Vor der Mauer, nach der Mauer , schickt der Staat die Wanzen. – This is a wordplay on an old nursery rhyme: Auf der Mauer, auf der Lauer, liegt ‘ne kleine Wanze, roughly translated: On the wall lies a bedbug in wait to bug you. The wordplay: Before the wall, after the wall, the state sends bugs to bug you.
One of my favorite contemporary baritones, Sanford Sylvan, suddenly died last month, a year younger than I.
“We are going to a very deep place within ourselves. And what comes up and what comes out is our Self.” This was part of his philosophy of singing (and teaching singing) and related to deep breathing but I think it encapsulates what is essential about any true artist. I had earmarked that sentence at some earlier time when trying to remind myself what, among other things, art is about. It tells you about yourself in addition to what you are trying to tell the world in hopes of reaction.
The obituary gives you a fair summary of how singular Sylvan was as a singer. The link below let’s you hear for yourself – it is a remarkable performance of John Adam’s The Wound-Dresser. (And 3 cheers for the Oregon Symphony under Kalmar’s direction…) The album is called Music for a Time of War – but this is an anti-war piece if there ever was one.
Here is the Walt Whitman poem the music is based on:
The Wound-Dresser
An old man bending I come among new faces, Years looking backward resuming in answer to children, Come tell us old man, as from young men and maidens that love me, (Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war, But soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself, To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead;) Years hence of these scenes, of these furious passions, these chances, Of unsurpass’d heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;) Now be witness again, paint the mightiest armies of earth, Of those armies so rapid so wondrous what saw you to tell us? What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics, Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?
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O maidens and young men I love and that love me, What you ask of my days those the strangest and sudden your talking recalls, Soldier alert I arrive after a long march cover’d with sweat and dust, In the nick of time I come, plunge in the fight, loudly shout in the rush of successful charge, Enter the captur’d works—yet lo, like a swift running river they fade, Pass and are gone they fade—I dwell not on soldiers’ perils or soldiers’ joys, (Both I remember well—many of the hardships, few the joys, yet I was content.)
But in silence, in dreams’ projections, While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on, So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand, With hinged knees returning I enter the doors, (while for you up there, Whoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart.)
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, Straight and swift to my wounded I go, Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in, Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground, Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital, To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return, To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss, An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail, Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.
I onward go, I stop, With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds, I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable, One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you.
3
On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!) The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,) The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine, Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard, (Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death! In mercy come quickly.)
From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand, I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood, Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side falling head, His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump, And has not yet look’d on it.
I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep, But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking, And the yellow-blue countenance see.
I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound, Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive, While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.
I am faithful, I do not give out, The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen, These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.)
4
Thus in silence in dreams’ projections, Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals, The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand, I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young, Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad, (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)
Agnes Dei
Photomontages today from another source for anti-war sentiment – my commissioned work for Karl Jenkin’s Armed Man – A Mass for Peace.
We have this thing in our household about language. Well, someone has a thing in our house about my language – more specifically, my usage of the verb to love as applied to something other than a human being. Don’t devalue such a strong emotion, I am told, by wasting it on things, not persons! (That from the same Beloved who still despises split infinitives…)
Jay Senetchko – Sleepwatcher at the End – Oil on Wallpaper, Detail
I can’t help it, here I go again: I love this state. I love finding out new, beautiful things about it, even after 33 years since our arrival from New York City. You turn around and face surprises, in the natural as often as in the cultural landscape. Case in point was a recent visit to Astoria. I have written here before about this small former fishing and cannery town at the mouth of the Columbia river. I’ve described the increasingly vibrant art community, the diversity of what is on offer, from music to photography, from the perspective of a visitor as well as from that of an exhibiting artist.
I had, however, never visited the Royal Nebeker Art Gallery on the campus of Clatsop Community College. And I had certainly not seen any of the 12 previous annual exhibits dedicated to the Nude. My loss. Both with regard to not knowing about the small jewel of a space nestled among trees on the top of a hill overlooking the river as it flows into the ocean; or with regard to tightly curated, thought-provoking exhibitions, if past shows in any way resembled the one currently on offer.
My visit was prompted by an invitation to have a conversation with Carol Newman on the local radio station, KMUN, about a joint project with artist Henk Pander. He had last year painted me and my scarred body, the portrait juried into the current exhibition. While he painted I documented the process with my camera – a double portrait of artistically driven friends coming to terms with age, illness and a passion for observing. (Here is the long version: http://www.orartswatch.org/eye-to-eye/)
Before we sat down to talk about the experience we visited the CCC premises to look at the show. The place was bustling with activity to set up for that evening’s performance of the Vagina Monologues. Kristin Shauck, fine arts professor who has initiated and run the series since its inception, welcomed us. A woman whose passion about art boils under a veneer of quiet reserve, she deserves the 2019 Astoria Juggling Award: so many balls in the air without dropping a single one, all a few days before a major show opening.
I don’t envy anyone the job of having to choose a limited number, some 50 or so, of artworks from over 400 submitted by an international pool of artists. A job potentially made harder by the fact that both paintings and drawings are under consideration. And I wondered what it meant to say curatorial choices would be influenced by “the principles of highlighting contemporary bodies and the value in depicting them with radical clarity.”
Juror Ashley Stull Meyers’ vision certainly produced a set that was clear and contemporary. It was also sufficiently dissonant to keep you interested long after the first round of looking at the whole – something I could have anticipated, given her role as director of the now closed Marylhurst Art Gym – so deeply missed. http://www.astullmeyers.com
There were a number of juxtapositions that you’d expect, full nudes vs. partials, general sweeps vs. detail-orientation, seriousness (serious seriousness!) vs. charming teases. But there were also curatorial choices that I found noteworthy: giving preference, at times, to expressed ideas rather than level of technical skill, and groupings that allowed strange inclusions among the more quotidian pieces.
I just regret the curious lack of color. Maybe that had to do with the nature of the submissions, maybe the artists prefer the pinks, the ivories, the mostly earthy tones, the browns, the umbers, the fawns, the fallows. Those backgrounds gave the art along the walls a sameness that could have used some serious disruption.
The occasional outlier provided a welcome respite. My favorite in that regard was Beth Kehoe’s Shore, a painting that reminded me of some of Egon Schiele’s nudes that I grew up with. Perhaps coincidental likeness, not that I mind appropriation.
Other visitors were drawn around Drea Frost’s female figure submerged in ocean waves. The lovely, thoughtful young artist had painted her in response to recent loss, creating ambiguity: blissful floating or dangerous unmooring?
My own contemporary body, exposed in public, felt doubly jarring among all these voluptuous females.
Henk Pander and the portrait
My current mind, however, had a blast – a few funky reflections beckoned to be photographed. As I said, surprises around every corner. How I love them! There, I used that word again…
You can catch the show here:
Au Naturel: The Nude in the 21st Century will be on display from January 24 through March 14 at Clatsop Community College’s Royal Nebeker Art Gallery located at 1799 Lexington Avenue, Astoria, OR. A community reception will be held on Thursday, February 7t at 6:00 p.m., and this year’s juror will be present to give a brief gallery talk. This reception is free and open to the public.
