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Art

Environmental Influence (1)

Today I want to introduce a surrealist painter, Arturo Nathan, who was born into a Jewish family in Trieste, Italy in 1891 and settled there after a youth spent under the command of others – his rich merchant father who made him work in unloved business in London and his army superiors who made him partake in World War I. His family history was complex, the father born in India, lived in China, a British subject (as was his son) married to a wealthy Italian from Trieste. Nathan was a fervent pacifist and spent his time in the British Army doing menial labor, having lied that he was never educated beyond third grade to avoid having to shoot people.

The Ascetic – self portrait, 1926

The trauma of the war led to depression; he turned for help to the very first Italian Psychoanalyst, Eduardo Weiss, who was part of the early Freudian circle, himself trained by Paul Federn and in consultation with Freud across a life time. Weiss suggested that Nathan should explore painting, and he soon made friends with surrealist painters Leonor Fini and eventually Giorgio de Chirico, both of whom highly influenced his choice of subjects and artistic direction in general.

Nathan exhibited throughout the 20’s and 30’s in reputable places, the Venice Biennale included, although he never quite reached the first tier of the famous surrealists. There are only 80 or so paintings that survived. His own life came to halt when he was sent to the Marché, an Italian region that housed many Jewish families around Ancona when the race laws were introduced by Mussolini. He was shipped to Bergen-Belsen and then the concentration camp at Biberach, where he was murdered in 1944. (His analyst, in contrast, was able to emigrate to Chicago after the Anschluss, and had a rich and productive career in this country until his death in 1960.)

NAVE A RIMORCHIO, 1934

When I looked at the few paintings I could find on-line, I was struck by two things: for one, the sense of role play when the artist put himself into the picture, portraying exiles or ascetics, and the like. Mere speculation, but it might have been the influence of his analyst known for contributing to a theory called ego state. The theory assumes that there are various parts of a person that need integration, the assigned roles meant to interact with each other (a precursor to psychodrama approaches.) In symbolic form, a shattered Humpty-Dumpty being put together again. Perhaps we see here the many different states that the artist felt comprised of, but also a continual focus on Self, given the centrality of the figure in the paintings. Look at the painting below: the actor approaching a stage, set with formal symmetry, but where is the entry? Cypresses like stern sentries, wilting plants framing the stage. And is jumping off the little cliff required?

IL POMERIGGIO D’AUTUNNO (Afternoon in the Fall) 1925

Also mere speculation, although a bit more more certain, is my second observation: the choice of color in Nathan’s work. He stands out with his pastels, soft oranges, light greens, unsaturated blues in contrast to the general color use found in Surrealism: strong, saturated, contrast-rich hues (think Dali, de Chirico, Miró.) What was captured here, to perfection, were the light and the colors of his surround, Trieste.

Combinations of orange and white, orange and green, the light blue of the sky or the Adriatic Sea find their way into paintings that seem to depict some other worlds.

Those worlds contain structures also ubiquitous in Trieste, from old Roman ruins with their stales, columns and stonework, to towers regulating the naval traffic. I think it’s a glorious combination, the real and the dream, the softness of color counteracting the inner harsh turmoil.

Il ghiaccio del mare (The ice of the Sea,) 1928

I just hope the creative engagement had some real therapeutic value before the bitter end of being erased by murderous fascism.

L’ABBANDONATO (The abandoned one), 1928

Photographs are all from Trieste in 2018.

Music today is by Jewish composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who was able to flee Italy for the US in 1939. His works was performed at the time by the likes of Walter Gieseking, Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky and Arturo Toscanini.

Bonus music is for my friend Steve T. who needs to practice his guitar!

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Early Smell

Today you have to do your part – I did mine by photographing the lilac bush in the garden and also going back to the archives to pick photographs from a place I would usually visit right now. It is a funky little garden north of here in Washington, planted over a century ago with countless species of lilacs. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to use your imagination to provide the smells, some of the most fragrant of all of spring.

Hulda Klager was a German immigrant in the late 1800s, who got her hands on a book about hybridization in 1903. She started hybridizing lilacs two years later and from then on there was no stopping her. Her reputation grew, people ordered, communities vied for being the recipient of the newest annual variety, and she pretty much did it on her own.

Edouarde Manet White Lilacs in a Glass (ca. 1882)

Even the large Columbia River flood of 1948 which basically eradicated her garden was tackled by her with absolute determination: people would return saplings of many of the plants purchased across the years so she could start the garden fresh. She lived to the ripe age of 96 and the garden was eventually taken on by the Woodland Federated Garden Club who founded the Hulda Klager Lilac Society and managed to have the place dedicated as national landmark.

Lawrence Preston Lilac Study #2 (2011)

It is small. It is fragrant. It is weirdly old-fashioned at first sight, the house in some ginger bread way and the garden art leaning towards fairies. It is busy with tourists for exactly two weeks a year, by the busload pre-Covid.

Christiaen van Pol Lilac Blossoms (ca. 1800) – Philly friends you can see this at PMA!

It is also a place of true beauty, capturing the love and skills of a plant enthusiast and the many volunteers in her footsteps who have made preservation possible. I am always amazed at the dedication of people who love plants that bloom for only a microsecond – lilac and peonies among them.

Peter Faes A Marble Vase with Lilac and other Flowers on a Marble Shelf (Undated)

I am truly sad I won’t make it there this year. Maybe next.

Rachmaninoff’s Lilac captures something very specific at the end of the short composition – the way the little parts of each blossom drift down like confetti when the bloom nears the end. I love that piece, here played by the composer himself.

Vincent van Gogh Vase with Lilacs, Daisies and Anemones (1887)

And here is Lilacs by George Walker commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra that won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1996.

Gustave Baumann A Lilac Year (Woodcut 1951)

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Shift in Perceptions

Over the last 2 weeks or so I have occasionally photographed the buds that were sprouting on the pear tree in front of my window. Growing at record speed they finally opened into the most luminous blossoms when the weather turned warm this weekend. Photographs today are in order of dates taken.

When searching for an appropriate poem to go with the images, I came across the words below, by a poet who, I admit, I’d never heard of. Before you yell at me how I dare to offer something that contains an offensive term for the deaf and hard of hearing community in the title, bear with me. The words used have a rhetorical purpose – they activate commonly held negative stereotypes before the poem forces us to completely shift perceptions.

Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree

BY P. K. PAGE (1916 – 2010)

His clumsy body is a golden fruit
pendulous in the pear tree

Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds

Adriatic blue the sky above and through
the forking twigs

Sun ruddying tree’s trunk, his trunk
his massive head thick-nobbed with burnished curls
tight-clenched in bud

(Painting by Generalíc. Primitive.)

I watch him prune with silent secateurs

Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight
heavily as oxen in a stall

Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth
a kitten in a box

Pear clippings fall
                            soundlessly on the ground
Spring finches sing
                            soundlessly in the leaves

A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue

Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree’s
quick springtime pulse

Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears

Pale sunlight’s choppy water glistens on
his mutely snipping blades

and flags and scraps of blue
above him make regatta of the day

But when he sees his wife’s foreshortened shape
sudden and silent in the grass below
uptilt its face to him

then air is kisses, kisses

stone dissolves

his locked throat finds a little door

and through it feathered joy
flies screaming like a jay

From The Glass Air: Selected Poems.– 1985

Deaf and dumb used to be one of the earliest of all the negative associations with those who cannot hear or use spoken language. It was coined by Aristotles, who believed that the absence of hearing implied the absence of learning, leaving the person unable to reason, thus dumb. The phrase was later intended to describe not hearing and not speaking, eventually changed to deaf mute, with identical definition – much to the justified ire of the deaf and hard of hearing community who points out how many ways of communication their members have, including their very own language. The horrid associations for those who live with deafness as being not quite right can be found across cultures and religions – an informative source for historical tidbits can be accessed here, famous rabbis and Martin Luther among the more rabid lunatics when it came to stigmatizing the other.

The poet obviously moves from the introduction in the title to further negative descriptions of the man in the pear tree. His body is slightly misshapen, his fingers stubby, his head massive, his utterances the mewing of a kitten and his movement of the slowness of oxen in the barn – suggesting some chromosomal mishap, if not proximity to animals more than humans.

But then something shifts. He does delicate work with the secateurs, and even though a stone clogs his ears and weighs down his tongue, he has other modes of perceptions, highly sensitive. He feels spring’s life pulse through the tree with his touch, he smells the future in whiffs of sap, and he sees a world of sunlight and blue sky translated into summery panoramas, freely sailing off.

The joy is multiplied when his wife on the ground tilts her face at him, and his love for her enables an articulated response, pure happiness. He is loving and beloved, the healthiest, most human state of all. How many readers can remember a time at all where we screamed with joy at the closeness of a loved one? What is wrong with US?

There remains one riddle: (Painting by Generalíc. Primitive.) What does that line seek in the poem?

Ivan Generalic was Page’s contemporary, a Croatian farmer and autodidactic painter, among the most famous in the European Primitivist movements. Page was a painter herself, and I wondered if she was drawn to one or another of his paintings that would deliver the template for the imagery. All I could find was a couple underneath a pear tree. Maybe the poetic imagination described what unfolded before that reunion.

Or, alternatively, she is using the coinage of primitivism to have us look at something that is not primitive at all. Generalic’s work was suffused with critical political commentary of farmers’ and workers’ lots, superstitions in rural areas, the burdens of religion and so much more. The analogy of taking a second look behind what is perceived as primitive at first glance, and correcting our assumptions, is a tempting interpretation of the poem as well.

Music from Croatia, across a century.

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Virtual Louvre

When I learned that the Louvre now has an internet platform on which you can peruse 480.000 or so objects of art, I was flooded with memories.

The earliest one was in the 1960s of barely making it through the museum visit before ending up with a horrible case of traveler’s food poisoning, spending two miserable days in a cheap hotel room instead of exploring Paris. Whatever I saw in the museum was displaced by anxious estimates if the next loo was in timely reach…

Another one still has my heart sing – showing Paris to my 13-year old for the first time during the hot summer of 2005. We stayed in a tiny, airless apartment borrowed from friends of friends in the un-touristy 13th arrondissement, plastered with cheap posters showing Louvre paintings. Soon we traced them to the real source, guided by a teenager with unusual patience – art was not really his thing – as long as he was given a chance to get there by Metro. Figuring out a European subway system was joy for this PDX kid who had barely yet taken busses….

That was also the time when I purchased a letter opener – the traditional souvenir for the stay-at-home husband – for an exorbitant price at the Louvre giftshop, only to find a much more interesting one for a fraction of the money at a flea market days later.

Live and learn.

My latest Paris visit was by myself a few years ago, this time much more interested in photographing the building and the people surrounding it than spending a precious day being swiftly carried along by crowds within….

Now we all can choose our own pace for enjoying the art, perusing the website which has a nifty set up, for lay people and researchers alike. On display are not just the exhibits but also objects that are on long term loan to other institutions or in storage. You can search by name of artist or art work, by department, or follow their suggested thematic compilations. There is also an interactive map where you can prepare your tour, room by room, should you ever be so lucky to enter the real thing again.

A woman can dream…..

Music today is a must-watch – visually brilliant and conceptually clever. The artists, Beyonce and Jay Z had private access to the Louvre to film a video for one of their songs on the 2018 album Everything is Love.

The dancing – almost all POC in a place filled with almost all White representations – is choreographed in front of the Mona Lisa, Jacques-Louis David’s the Coronation of Napoleon, and his portrait of Madame Récamier, The Winged Victory of Samothrace sculpture, honoring the goddess Nike, The Great Wings of Thanis, the largest Egyptian sculpture in the museum, the Venus de Milo, Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, and, the one portrait of a Black person painted 6 years after the abolition of slavery, Marie-Guillemine Benoit’s Portrait of a Black Woman (Negress.) These scenes are interspersed with glimpses of normal family life, tranquil domesticity, in front of the famous art.

It’s easy to detect references to current political events (taking a knee, for example,) but you have to dig if you want to understand some of the other reasoning. Here is just one case:

Why, for example, are all of these exclusively black women dancing in front of Napoleon’s coronation, of all pieces? Well, let us consider that Napoleon, at the time when France had colonized much of the Caribbean, started as an “abolitionist”, but within a few years, came out with this gem: “How could I grant freedom to Africans, to utterly uncivilized men who did not even know what a colony was, what France was?”. His friends at the time blamed Josephine, his wife, who grew up in the Caribbean owning slaves. Guess who the woman kneeling directly behind Bey is? Josephine. Guess what ethnicity Beyonce’s mother is? Creole.

 (I found this in the comment section on one of the NY Magazine reviews of the new album.)

Or look at the seminal piece of the French Romantic movement, The Raft of the Medusa, located behind Jay Z who is singing I can’t believe we made it. A reference, by all reports, to the endangered marriage, but also likely commentary on the aftermath of colonialism and slavery, the reminder of the many souls lost at sea during the trade. The real shipwreck, by the way, happened not too long before this painting was created. Géricault even interviewed two of the 15 survivors on this raft that started out with 147 who had survived the shipwreck per se, then drifting for 13 days before the rescue of the few who made it.

And why was the Louvre open to being used as a stage? Here is a spokesperson (not discussing monetary exchange, mind you – )

“Beyoncé and Jay-Z visited the Louvre four times in the last ten years. During their last visit in May 2018, they explained their idea of filming. The deadlines were very tight but the Louvre was quickly convinced because the synopsis showed a real attachment to the museum and its beloved artworks.”

Live and earn…

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Masking Up

Something curious and creative today: a German artist’s work, created long before Covid-19 entered our lives, that is focussed on masks. I might have been particularly attracted to his digitally altered portraits because of my own work in a similar domain (I wrote about the mix here.) I believe though, that there should be general delight in his compositions, because they are witty, technically accomplished, and certainly exhibit fluent bending of art historical styles. They also make you think about – or they made me think about – the role that facial expressions play in deciding whether a portrait is outstanding or middling at best.

Just for the fun of it, I have superimposed Hermes’ digital portrait onto parts of my contemporary photographic portrait. An urge to play!

Volker Hermes, born in 1972, as it turns out just a few kilometers from my childhood village, decided to reinterpret classical portraits from the historical archives by obscuring the faces, sometimes partially, sometimes beyond recognition. He uses what he finds in the portraits themselves, parts of the jewelry, accessories, hair, or clothing to create the mask. It directs our attention first to the now invisible face, and subsequently, perhaps, to the remainder of the figure – symbolic aspects within the dress-up, gestures, background.

His series Hidden Portraits displays enormous range, as best seen in this link, that will give you an overview. Do check it out, one portrait is more inventive than the next.

Good portraiture depends on both, capturing a likeness, however fleeting, and also an essence that reveals more than a mirror. Neither is available to the viewer if the face is obscured, leaving us with nothing but style and baubles, status symbols or flower code, ultimately nothing but a husk. Something that might or might not have been great art, depending on what the face accomplished for the viewer, is reduced to costume design, with the stroke of imagination and photoshop. Well done.

In real life we have probably all grappled with the problems that arise when faces are partially obscured. A person’s face readily exposes their identity, gender, emotion, age, and race, all of which are harder to discern when the face is covered by a mask. Not only are we worse at recognizing faces; the way we usually perceive them, holistically, is also disrupted, which leads to qualitative changes in person perception. It can interfere with social interactions, for sure.

Hey, you might say – and I’d join you in a second – at least masks game those intrusive facial recognition systems, which use algorithms that analyze our facial geometry – disrupted when mouth and nose are obscured.

I wish.

“…these types of errors are likely temporary, as companies that produce facial recognition technology are racing to update their algorithms to better adapt to face coverings. As Recode previously reported, firms were already touting their algorithms’ ability to account for masks as early as February, and Panasonic indicated it had cracked the mask problem even earlier. Since the pandemic started, a slew of facial recognition companies, including UK-based Facewatch, California-based Sensory, and the China-based firms Hanwang and SenseTime, have all begun to tout their ability to recognize people wearing masks.” (Ref.)

Well, masks do protect us from infection. Grateful for that. Although even that can backfire, wouldn’t you know it. The mask-induced, remarkable decline in active cases of the flu this year has scientists scratching their head. The dearth of data makes it difficult to predict what strains should be included in the vaccine preparation for next year, making them likely much less effective.

Looks like we might be wearing masks for years to come….. might as well embellish them in ways suggested by Volker Hermes.

Let’s have a rousing start into this week with Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera.

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Dark Frontiers

Bits of house keeping:

1. Yesterday’s published version of the blog somehow dropped the attribution of the poem to its author. It was written by former Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen. I apologize.

2. I will be back in hospital for the rest of this week for more surgery. Savor the dark blues of today’s musing until I’ll reach out again.

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One of the things I find truly inspiring are reports of people who have excelled in their fields and yet are suddenly trying something new and different, unafraid of failure or ridicule. So many aspects involved in that process, all of which I cherish individually: curiosity, flexibility, courage, plain old guts.

Take Brooklyn-based artist Lorna Simpson, for example, an accomplished conceptual photographer now in her early 60s, often included in the context of Carrie Mae Weems‘ and Kara Walker‘s work when it comes to conversations about strikingly innovative and successful Black women artist. Her body of work, making collages with found photographs, staged settings, script, and sometimes video elements, was defined by the way she juxtaposed language with image, opening entirely different modes of interpretation. And now she has turned to painting.

A description of her new approach and her thoughts around it can be found in an interesting Vogue Interview. The huge paintings (some are 9 feet in the largest dimension) consists of layers of screen-printed materials, still in collage mode, applied to some substrate canvas like gessoed wood or fiberglass, which she then paints with ink. The work was in progress before we were confronted with Covid-19, but after the true colors of the Republican administration started to reveal themselves, environmental consequences and all.

The underlying photo materials, found in old magazines and blown up to these extra large dimensions, are all about historical expeditions into parts of the Arctic. There are still elements of language (although undecipherable when you do not have access to the real thing and rely on photographs in art reviews,) but they recede against the background of magnificent landscape.

A sense of terra nova and seemingly glacial silence, combined with the dark ink shrouding the landscape, evokes an ominous tone fit for our times and, alas, planet. I associate Arctic expeditions with people willingly or forced to push physical limits, with a longing to experience the most alien terrain on earth compared to our usual habitat, and with territorial power grabs to exploit yet more of earth’s limited resources.

The paintings mirror the sense that darkness descends and eternal ice is no longer eternal. They remind us that extreme winter storms become frequent experiences, and vulnerabilities previously reserved for those living at the extreme boundaries of human civilization are now engulfing the rest of us. They strike me less as objects of desire for the adventurous, or seekers of solitude, but more like clarion calls to be alert to the ruthlessness of environmental degradation. The fluidity of the ink also triggers a sense that nature is lowering a billowing curtain, a curtain call next, signaling the end of a performance before the house empties for good. From Brooklyn to the Behring Sea – we are warned to batten the hatches.

And, sounding like a broken record, what is my next sentence? Yup, how I wish I could see that work in person!

Photographs today are miniature blue ice abstractions found on my tomato cages during the recent storm, photographed through a window.

Music is not my cup of tea, but the video was worth it. Check it out, to see how one pulls off a piano performance on an arctic ice floe.

Here is a better piece to combat all that darkness: Angel of Light. (We recently listed to Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus, remember?)

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To know what you want

So why would I write about an artist whose work I don’t particularly like and whose politics I found a mixed bag at best, and pretty upsetting in some aspects? An artist who died about 2 week ago, forcing me to keep my snark at a minimum?

I tell you why. Arik Brauer (1929-2021) had a trait that I singularly admire: he did what he wanted in his pursuit of art as well as in life, in full defiance of the demands, criticisms or attacks by his contemporaries.

An Austrian Jew, he survived the Holocaust, in contrast to many of his family. He eventually settled in Vienna again after detours of living in Paris and Israel, where he met his wife. He was a singer, an architect, a painter, who engaged in the good fight for environmental protection and the odious fight against muslim immigration into Austria. His views of Islam as an evil force, however shaped by his experience as a Jew, even let him devote paintings late in life depicting what he understood to be the oppression of Muslim women.

During a time where abstractionism was believed to be the future of painting, he engaged in Fantastic Realism, drawing from myth and fairy tales, religious themes and the healing power of nature. As I said, not my cup of tea, but an unperturbed pursuit of what he saw as his best tool for expression. A mix of realism, surrealism and art nouveau, saturated colors and not a scintilla of fear to cross over the border of kitsch, it seems. Below is a short clip that shows a retrospective, no need to understand the German.

I think it is hard to begin with to know what we want to express and how we want to express it. It is harder in societies like ours that proscribe such structured trajectories from childhood, leaving little room to explore who you are in the constant competition for achievement. It is even harder when you are surrounded by people and movements who label you old fashioned or any number of derogatory terms. To pursue your own path without hesitation is something I envy.

Not that he didn’t have his fans, though. Among them was a couple, the Leopolds, who deserve their own little report one of these days, two ophthalmologists who collected work by Klimt, Schiele and any number of emerging artists in the 1920s, including Brauer.

The Cube in the Center above is Museum Leopold

Eventually their treasure found its home in the Leopold Museum – here, too, a light and a dark side closely connected. On the one hand they understood the artistic power of many of the Austrian painters they collected; on the other hand they used any means to get their hands on looted Nazi art, at least according to some pending law suits (and one that settled for $19 million, keeping a stolen painting in the museum.)

The Leopold Museum is part of Vienna’s Museum Quarter, depicted in todays photographs. It is an important museum, testament to collectors who also knew what they wanted – Zeitgeist be damned.

Music is by Brauer himself and one of his daughters, Timna Brauer, who is a renowned singer in her own right.

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From Past to Future

Do you know that feeling when you are spontaneously attracted to something or someone, without being able to put a finger on to the reason why? An inexplicable, intense pull towards something with no clear rational basis?

Sidney Cain Tricksters in Pools (2020)

This happened to me last week when I chanced onto the work of Sydney Cain, a San Francisco based, young emerging artist, who has shown work at Betti Ono Gallery, Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, Rena Bransten Gallery, SOMArts, San Francisco Arts Commission, and the African American Arts and Culture Complex. I only saw it on the web, so wish I could have stood in front of the real thing.

Cain’s work is deeply spiritual – I am not. Her work is steeped in the myth and history of her people of African descent. I am a White woman with no connection to that continent other than a longing to travel there again. Her focus is on multiple aspects of genealogy and her ancestors in the Jim Crow South. As a German, I’d rather not engage in genealogy for fear of what one might find.

Sidney Cain Refutations, pt. 1 (2019)

Her images touch something in my heart and my brain, nonetheless. The large figures, often located behind an obstruction, like a wire or a fence (typical of the wrought-iron fences surrounding the graves found in Southern cemeteries,) seem to exist in some liminal space. They are not quite defined persons, but also not simply ghosts. They seem to be going about their business, rather than waiting to be called back from the past, yet they are not quite present.

They remind me of some of Käthe Kollwitz’s work in her print cycles around the Peasants Wars, her political focus on the evil of oppression, and paean to the masses demanding justice. Her preoccupation with death across history was matched by her connection to populations who suffered, bringing the dead back to life, ignoring existing class and cultural divides or historical chasms.

A canny ability to used smudged imagery to bring something else into sharpened focus.

Sidney Cain At the Corners I Miss #1 (2019)

Cain moves dust of graphite, chalk and cobalt with her hands across the paper to reveal these ancestral representations. The choice of these media is deliberate:

“Graphite, as the element carbon, represents the possibilities of forming into new allotropes. Chalk and carbon based material, commonly formed from the shells of ancient deep marine organisms acts as a medium of spiral time theories.”

These media are somewhat ephemeral (compared to an oil painting,) which confronts us, in her words, with the ideas of impermanence and transformation, on the bedrock of her belief that the ancestors can be reborn as narrators in our own reality.

Sidney Cain Where Guardians Meet (2020)

Maybe that was the pull of the work, linking to the preoccupation of many of us right now with impermanence and transformation given our plague-riddled world – virus and racism alike. Although I should phrase that more carefully: I really have shifted from thinking about impermanence to thinking about transformation instead.

Sidney Cain Abiku (2020)

Impermanence for me links to a state of loss, often grieved, something that existed in the past and is now gone. Transformation, on the other hand, is not a state but a process, one that is oriented toward the new, the future. We might not control the transition or even know what that future looks like, but it is movement, like life itself, rather than stasis shrouded in nostalgia (or for some, dread.) That framing – a forward movement – feels, if not empowering, at least like a guide accompanying us into the unknown. It is comparable to the drinking gourd songs of Cain’s ancestor, purportedly leading them, with the help of the Big Dipper, from bondage into new worlds.

ONWARDS.

Follow the drinkin’ gourd
Follow the drinkin’ gourd
For the old man is comin’ just to carry you to freedom
Follow the drinkin’ gourd

Sidney Cain The Drinking Gourd (2018)

Here is an interview with the artist.

Images of Cain’s works are from her website. Mine are from steelyards, the closest match I could find to her gorgeous series Spaces.

Spaces Built By the Hands (2018)

Music follows to the Drinking Gourd, in multiple versions, with different artists.

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History, coded in color.

Inauguration – today we rejoice! Tomorrow we remind ourselves that the mascot is gone but the team remains intact.

It is surely no coincidence that I have been thinking about South Africa’s long history of colonial racism, eventually codified in laws imposed by the Apartheid regime. Racist practices had begun with the arrival of the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century, were later fortified by the British colonizers in the 19th century, but then legally structured (and then some) by the Nationalist Party which ruled South Africa between 1948 and 1994.

Despite the vanquishing of the racist German National Socialistic regime in 1945, South Africa decidedly went for its own version of White supremacy just three years later. Laws prohibited marriage and sex between the races, required registration of your race, enacted a prohibition for Blacks to vote and assigned them to certain areas or homelands through The Group Areas Act (1950.) This law partitioned the country into different areas, allocated to different racial groups. It represented the very heart of apartheid because it was the basis upon which political and social separation was to be constructed.

Gone are the Sacrificial Lambs (2011) (Series: Affirmation&Negation)

There were laws segregating universities, and those banning opposition parties. Laws drew divisions between the homeland areas themselves to prevent solidarity or joint action among different groups of Blacks. There were laws to formalize discriminations in employment, laws that controlled migration in and out of areas and protected forced and violent expropriation of property and relocations of Blacks to poor areas. As late as 1970 the Black Homeland Citizenship Act (1970) changed the status of the inhabitants of the ‘homelands’ so that they were no longer citizens of South Africa. The aim was to ensure Whites became the demographic majority within ‘white’ South Africa.

La Couturière (2010) (Series: (S)Elective Affinities)

By the mid to late 1980s opposition had become strong and vocal in a Defiance Campaign, and the regime reacted with violent oppression and police power. One of the ways the protest movements mobilized people and signaled meanings was through the use of color. Orange, white and blue, associated with the Nationalist Party, the colors of the first flag of the Republic of South Africa, were shunned. Visual graphics in posters and leaflets used black, green and gold instead, which stood for the color of the People, the green of the land and the gold for the wealth of the land. They had been chosen by the African National Congress, the main opposition party, since its inception in 1912. Those colors went underground in 1960 with the banning of the ANC, since people found by the regime to be in possession of items bearing these colours (no additional writing or image necessary) ran the risk of being beaten up, arrested or even killed.

But then came purple:

“On 2 September (1989,) police turned a powerful water cannon on thousands of protesters attempting to march to parliament. The water contained a strong purple dye, the intention being to mark all those who were protesting so they could face arrest at a later time, even if they managed to run away. Hundreds were arrested and for days it seemed a large part of the Cape Town population had become various shades of purple. This flew in the face of racial segregation laws and became a standing joke. People filled out ‘purple’ on the section of the arrest forms that demanded information about race and the defiance campaign slogan was changed temporarily to ‘the purple shall govern’. Ironically, the event contributed successfully to the Defiance Campaign in that people with different skin colour looked more alike. ‘Purple people’ signified the ultimate embodiment of the mode of colour as a political statement, more than the media of clothes mentioned earlier.” (Ref.)

The Moor (2010) (Series: (S)Elective Affinities)

A year later, the color red was added to the protest vocabulary.

Joe Slovo, General Secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa, on returning home for the first time in 1990 after 25 years in exile, sent a message to his supporters anticipating his arrival. ‘Wear red socks’, he said and thousands did. No written explanations, images or verbal slogans were needed. When people put on their red socks for Slovo, they were acknowledging their own history of concurring with the senti-ments, politics and strategies of the South African Communist Party, and joining these thoughts with the quirky humour of the leadership. The choice of media, namely socks, was deliberate because socks are not immediately and overtly discernible and can be shown or hidden at will. (Ref.)

I’m going on about this at length for two reasons. For one, it is timely to remind ourselves of how racism has governed historical developments not even 100 years ago and how a mass movement could break some of the spell. Secondly, the mind-blowing sculptures by South African sculptor and photographer Mary Sibande, who I want to introduce today, can only be appreciated if we understand the historical significance of both color and costume.

Sibande casts life-sized sculptures of her face and body molded in fiber glass, creating an alter ego, Sophie. She then dresses these sculptures in gowns filled with enough symbolic references that it compares to decoding a renaissance portrait. Sophie is the silent narrator of the history of South African Black women, often in servitude or barely paid domestic workers, who are allowed to express their fantasies of what the world should look like if they weren’t indentured.

Silent Symphony (2010)

Blue was the chosen color in her early work, the blue of the traditional maid’s uniform; the shapes of the gowns are of Victorian splendor, and the activities enacted are undermining the racial and class hierarchy. (Below Sophie, with eyes closed as always, is repairing a superman cape.)

More recently the artist has added the color purple and now even red to her repertoire and the alternate versions of Sophie are juxtaposed as those representing her maternal past and those standing for the future of the progressive movement with an allusion to the events of 1989 described above.

A Reversed Retrogress: Scene 1 (The Purple Shall Govern). (2013)

“Sophie” straddles time, pre-, during and post-Apartheid, as well as roles. There is the specific inheritance of stories and dreams of the women in the artist’s family, four generations who were maids or other kinds of domestic workers. There is Mary as Sophie, now, drawing on the repository of African myths, beliefs and wisdom.

There is also, it seems, a general representation of the struggle of Black women in the system, their marginalization in a post-colonial world as well. In each configuration she is confident, alive, a subject that tells the story, her story, rather than someone subjugated.

The sculptures really strike me as a celebration of strength.

Detail from the series “In the Midst of Chaos There is Also Opportunity” (2017)

I assume anyone not familiar with the politics of South Africa would still be moved and made to think by this emotive work. If you are able to fill in the necessary facts around the use of color, or other symbolism of note in the fight against Apartheid, the full power of these sculptures unfolds. Oh, when can we travel again to see all this in a museum in the country where it come from? Or at least in a gallery in our own nation?

Music today is interspersed with talk – I learned a lot. Music mobilizing protest.

Photomontages are from 2010 and 2011, chosen for the colors blue, purple and red and the fact that they, too, focused on narrative.

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Blues

I am a failure.

In more ways than one, but today I am thinking of my ignorance about modern abstractionism.

Yup, literally ignorant.

Give me some Greek and Romans, I can wing it.

Nike, Goddess of Victory….

Give me some 16th century angels, I can sermonize.

Gerard David, Virgin and Child with Four Angels ca 1510-1515 (Netherlandish)

18th century Blue Boy? I’ll wax poetically

Thomas Gainsborough, The Blue Boy, 1770

Give me Victorian fairies and lions, and I’ll start telling tales.

Briton Riviere, Una and Lion from Spensers Fairy Tales, 1889

Give me a modernist nude, and I’ll launch into elongated discourse.

Amedeo Modigliani, Nude on a Blue Cushion, 1917

Give me Paul Klee, and I’ll become expressive to the point of sounding surreal.

Paul Klee, Landschaft mit blauen und roten Bäumen, 1920

Show me photographic portraits of the 1930s and I might just click.

Dorothea Lange, Children from Oklahoma staying in a migratory camp in California, November 1936.

 

Manga Lady Bat? I’ll hum you a Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch Pure.

Modern abstractionism? You’ll have to wait until your’re blue in the face. Or, alternatively, you and I can watch and learn from this marvelous gem about Jackson Pollock and his painting Blue Poles.

Photographs today are street art from Seattle, WA in which I only kept the blues.

Music is a warhorse. So what. The title did it.

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