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Art

Ziggy Stardust

· Chuck Conelly's David Bowie ·

 

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When I photographed the young man in today’s featured image I immediately thought of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, although by that time Bowie had already morphed to the Thin White Duke. He was a musician I always liked – except for the Major Tom phase – for his intelligence, his risk taking and his embrace of change. His death this January, then, was saddening although comforted by the album he released chronicling his last journey, called Blackstar.

303C694B00000578-0-image-m-33_1452975626515( Music here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kszLwBaC4Sw)

Chuck Conelly, the great American painter, is now working on a series of Bowie portraits, the first one (below) painted shortly after the death of the musician. Conelly had withdrawn from public view for a quarter of a century after major conflicts within the art- and gallery world, living as a recluse in Philadelphia. Only last year did he start to show work again. He had met with Bowie some 30 years ago; I assume the portrait was not simply from memory. It surely captures some of the luminosity surrounding the artist. Here is a short intro to the painter: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2997525/The-return-Chuck-Connelly-America-s-greatest-modern-artist-spiralled-control-upsetting-Scorcese-Saatchi-1980s-New-York-sober-selling.html  

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Portraits of Young Men

· · Thomas Gainsborough's Boy in Blue · ·

I learned that in your email the featured photo does not automatically show – it only shows if you go to the website. I will try and remedy that since for this week the match between the photo and the other materials is essential. DSC_0129

Whatever the occasion – maybe a birthday – one day I came home from school to discover that my mother had papered the outside doors of my closet with old calendar pages. All of them were portraits by different painters, and all of them were ignored but one that had me instantly smitten: Thomas Gainsborough’s Boy in Blue. Love at first sight. Not clear if with the painting or the boy. Or the shoes. Not clear either, when that romantic streak in me disappeared, but I digress.

This week I will be showing portraits taken on the streets or other public places that try to capture some of the energy, the facial expression or the distant demeanor of the boy in blue and others like him. I obviously could not create the light, as the painter did, but had to work with the conditions that were present. That is a challenge but also the fun in street photography, you have to be quick, flexible, and in contact with the subject to get their approval.

Gainsborough painted this around 1770, partially as an homage to van Dyck from whose painting he borrowed the costume. The color choice might have been one of defiance, since Gainsborough objected to Joshua Reynold’s proscriptions of what colors should be used for various topics. The boy was a merchant’s son, not a royal, and the painting started a long journey after bankruptcy of the owner, ending up eventually in the US where it now hangs in the Huntington. Tidbits: German director Wilhelm Murnau constructed one of his first films, Der Knabe in Blau,completely after this portrait. The anti-hero’s costume in Quentin Tarantino’s Django, Unchained  was also inspired by this painting.

Would he look like today’s photograph if only he smiled?

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The Aftermath

· The lingering effects of war ·

Today is the last day to introduce a montage for a movement of Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man –  I chose Now that the Guns have stopped (Music here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac6IHmzVjvg). If you want to see the remaining ones you need to come to Astoria on May 21/22…..

The lyrics to this movement were written by historian Guy Wilson, who was then Master of the Royal Armouries Museum which commissioned the musical mass. They tell of survivor’s guilt, the shame and loss of having been privileged to survive when friends and comrades did not. This is only one of the aspects that haunt those who survived war – post traumatic stress, as it is called these days, is another all too faithful companion for many who lived through hell, victims as much as perpetrators. Loss of limb(s) or other physical ailments incurred in war make it hard to return to the life once known, forcing different job choices, if there is employment at all. Hunger in post-war societies, the psychological burdens of rape victims, the displacement after your country is no longer yours, all contribute to an aftermath that lingers when the history books have long closed the case on the actual conflict.

Psychological research shows that for those families where parents were under extreme stress situations like concentration camps, and where one or both parents have a tendency to dissociate strongly, even the second generation can be psychological affected in their ability to cope. Most of the second generation, however, shows resilience, as did after some time many of the first. So there is some hope. http://www.jpost.com/Health-and-Science/Holocaust-survivor-trauma-rare-in-2nd-generation

The montage tries to capture the lingering of the wounds and trauma of war. Like all of the works in this project it tries to convey that we have to fight for the alternative, in small and large measures, together, for peace.

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Sacrificial Lamb or Sheep for Slaughter?

· The Armed Man/Agnus Dei ·

I remember the collective gasp of students in my social psychology class when they saw a movie about gender differences – often assumed to disadvantage women. They heard Ursula LeGuin, a feminist if there ever was one, hold forth on the fate of young men: across the centuries they were expendable, used as cannon fodder. The role of sacrifice – in the case of the Agnus Dei, the lamb of God, to save all of humanity, in the case of the soldier to save the fatherland – runs through almost all historical narratives like a red thread. Where runs the line, though, between the selfless lamb and the flock of dumb sheep?

Karl Jenkins’ movement Agnes Dei (music here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgvqkL4qlow) is one in a long succession of sometimes stunning compositions using the liturgical theme (and handily provided by Wikipedia.) Not the worst company….

The montage used a grieving figure from a grave side in a Paris cemetery. It struck me that I found only female figures displaying emotional distress or anguish – the men, if depicted at all, usually have their likeness, mustaches, pith helmets and all, carved in stone, or they are displayed as resting bodies. Mourning is women’s work, it looks like. After all, male display of emotions around death and dying might weaken the resolve of the next round of cannon fodder……
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We’ll never know

· The Armed Man/Charge! ·

“Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet!” John Dryden, famous man of letters at the end of the 17th century, is alleged to have said this to Jonathan Swift, one of the brilliant minds of the beginning of the 18th century. We’ll never know if this encounter actually occurred and led to Swift’s realization of his strength, satirical prose (think: Gulliver’s Travels), but we do know that Swift nurtured a life-long enmity toward his distant relative Dryden, even after the latter had long died. This in spite, or perhaps because of, so many parallels in the lives of these gifted men, their shifting allegiances towards crowns and religions, their insight into the irrational nature of man and the fact that economic considerations were a driving force behind imperials wars.

Why am I bringing this up? Jenkins’ 7th movement of The Armed Man, called Charge! is using words from both sources, intermingling Dryden’s patriotic call for duty with the lament offered by Swift.

(Music here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNrD305XbXg). Did the composer or did he not know about the strained relationship between the writers? Was he just taking familiar words that seemed to express the polar experiences towards engaging in battle, or was it an inside joke, to join the two at last? We’ll never know that either.

I admit to using my own inside jokes occasionally when creating montages, or to using allusions that make only sense to me. That is the privilege of creating. Explaining them makes little sense, and, more importantly, ruins the personal or overall interpretation viewers might bring towards the image, narrowing their impression to “trying to get it.” That said, the horses that charge into battle in the montage are from an arc de triomphe in the Louvre courtyard celebrating military victory.  However, they reminded me also of Swift’s Houyhnhnm society, a nation of horses. That nation was founded upon reason, and only reason and therefore the horses practiced eugenics based on their analyses of benefit and cost, as we can read in part 4 of Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver adored the horses despite them not having pity or believing in the intrinsic value of life. It did not end well….IMG_2371 copy

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Firestorm

· The Armed Man/Angry Flames & Torches ·

9 Torches A copyFreud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), “The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared.” His enduring nightmare, that America, with its notions of Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, would be “gain[ing] control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man” was made real in 1945. In August of that year atomic bombs were deployed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 100.000 people immediately, 10s of thousands through radiation exposure later, and devastated most of the attacked cities. Current talk of “Let’s make America great again!” hints at a willingness to repeat this kind of strategic annihilation, and one wonders if and what we’ve learned from history, if anything at all; it also makes Freud seem quite prescient.

Jenkins’ The Armed Man devotes two movements to the horror caused by nuclear incendiary devices, Angry Flames (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy3K9wbHA7w) and Torches (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roNU_ORGTSk). I configured the landscape in the montage Angry Flames as some kind of Rohrschach depiction in reference to the Freudian analysis. I added photographs of figures from a sculpture which has an interesting history. A war memorial in Hamburg, celebrating soldiers with the slogan “Germany must live even if we have to die,” is now prominently faced with a “counter-memorial,” a sculpture by Alfre Hrdlicka that depicts the Hamburg firestorm (the largest areal bombing before Dresden and Hiroshima by allied forces) and the loss of life when concentration camp inmates were put on board of a ship that the British sank.

For Torches I used a photograph of an amazing exhibit I saw in Paris, that documented a different kind of loss of life: Prune Nourry’s Terracotta Daughters.

(http://www.prunenourry.com/en/projects/terracotta-daughters.)

The artist created over a hundred of these girls to point to selective abortion practices in Asia, which have far reaching consequences.

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Käthe Kollwitz (1867 – 1945)

· The Armed Man/Kyrie Eleison ·

The third movement of Jenkins’ The Armed Man is called Kyrie Eleison (Lord, have Mercy on us) – music here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5BfirqTqm8.  In response to this plea I created a montage around a sculpture by Käthe Kollwitz. The sculpture depicts a grieving mother holding her fallen son and is located at the Neue Wache in Berlin, a memorial that commemorates the victims of war and tyranny http://www.visitberlin.de/en/spot/neue-wache-memorial. Kollwitz lost her own son in the first weeks of WW I in Flanders – as an underage volunteer he had needed his parents written consent to enlist. His father refused, but his mother’s declared patriotism led her to persuade him to provide the signature. She worked for 18 years after her son’s death to finish a sculpture commemorating the losses for parents – it is placed near the Flander’s grave of the soldier.

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We associate the topics of death, war, loss, poverty and parental love very much with this particular artist. Along comes a fascinating biography, Kollwitz by Yury and Sonya Winterberg http://www.randomhouse.de/Buch/Kollwitz/Yury-Winterberg/e446036.rhd, which shines new light on her life and work. New to me, anyhow. Painstaking archival work and interviews with three of her surviving grandchildren reveal an even more complex story. On the one hand, she was preoccupied with death, growing up in a household that saw three of her siblings perish young. On the other hand, she possessed an extraordinary life force, was sensual, and openly acknowledged her bisexuality. The love for her children, it is hinted in the narrative, was overbearing bordering on abuse when it came to interacting with her sons in sexualized situations. Her self-assurenedness made her a center of her social circles, and many a famous artist, including Ernst Barlach and Berthold Brecht adored her. Her membership in diverse women’ organizations can be counted as early feminist engagement.

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She looms large as a model for progressive political engagement – the Nazis eventually declared her art degenerate – and yet many of her most famous political posters were commissioned, with her complaining that she was “dragged” into politics. She wrote about her son’s death as a sacrifice that would be a source for creative renewal in her own work, but mourned the loss of her oldest grandson in WW II as final proof that “war is wasting the seeds of the future.” She was strong, demanding, ahead of her times and probably hard to live with. Her art work is extraordinary (over 100 self-portraits alone) and much of it a timely reminder of the ravages of war.

.katalog24

Never again war

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Hamburger Kunsthalle

· "L'art est un jeu sérieux" - ·

I lived in Hamburg from 1970 to 1981 with many hours spent in this museum. Today, the freshly renovated and now reopened Hamburger Kunsthalle continues its attempts to showcase women artists who have not (yet) gotten the recognition they deserve. At my last visit it was Louise Bourgeois whose sculptures were prominently placed in the courtyard of the museum (and served as convenient car ports for city tours….)

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This spring it is a retrospective of Rumanian artist Geta Brãtescu to celebrate her 90th birthday http://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/en/exhibitions/geta-brătescu (link in english.) The artist is a renaissance woman when it comes to her choice of and facility with different artistic mediums; she is thoroughly modern, however, in her integration of history, social commentary and, yes, whimsey, into her work. Here is a 3 minute clip that visits the artist in her studio where she refers to art as a serious game. http://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/ausstellungen/geta-brătescu

I very much relate to her intense joy of travel and indiscriminately photographing whatever attracts the eye. And I cherish the opportunity to learn from female role models how to navigate an art world that has been not exactly welcoming. The pigeons, kept at bay by the wire netting at the museum exteriors walls, know of which I speak….

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Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau Dresden

· Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden ·

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Dresden, often called”Florence at the river Elbe,” is a beautiful city, and one of contrasts. Having suffered through one of the worst allied bombing attacks of WW II which cost 25.000 lives and burnt much of its famous architecture, the old part of town is now restored and glorious. The new part of town, on the other side of the river, is vibrant and artsy.  Dresden is, however, also home to the far-right PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West) movement and a stronghold of the populist party AfD (Alternative for Germany) that scored mightily in recent state elections despite (or because of) its anti-immigrant, nationalistic, and authoritarian leanings.

The upcoming exhibition in the Lipsiusbau (its dome nicknamed the lemon squeezer) is thus a timely look into some of the horrid ideas associated with neo-nazi and other right-wing movements. Surveying the non-human – On the aesthetics of racism explores how racists often tried to justify their notions with scientific arguments. http://www.skd.museum/en/special-exhibitions/surveying-the-non-human/index.html (link in english). Among other things, the project displays an as yet unexamined obsessive collection of pictures by the Dresden ethnologist and anthropologist Bernhard Struck (1888—1971) as well as pieces by Fabio Mauri and Arnold Franck. I am reminded of the fabulous Carri Mae Weems show at the Portland Art Museum some years back. Her work tackled the same issues through photography.

Since today is Yom HaShoa and anti-Semitism is alive and well in some parts of those populist movements, I am adding one of my favorite photos of the New Synagogue in Dresden. Completed in 2001, it was built on the same location as the Semper Synagogue (1839–1840) which was destroyed in 1938, during Kristallnacht. The building stands at the edge of Dresden’s old town, the latter carefully restored in all its baroque  detail, the former refusing to be a replica of what was lost (although some parts of the destroyed synagogue are incorporated into the walls.) It is a dramatically modernist building, built slightly off plumb, to remind of the traditional isolation of the Jewish community from the city.

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Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

· An oasis of art in a city of banking ·

I cannot recall his name for the life of me. He was a Hungarian refugee who had managed to escape after the 1956 uprising and landed in Paris where he became a student of Joan Miró’s. How he ended up teaching art in a public school in the middle of nowhere at the Dutch/German border is anybody’s guess. It certainly changed my life – for a short time anyhow, when I began painting with wild abandon, all of 12 years old, under his tutelage and with his encouragement. When sent to boarding school, a year later, and presenting my new art teacher with a watercolor of blue and purple stone walls her scathing ridicule made me drop the brush for decades to come.

These memories were triggered by reading about the current exhibit of Miró works at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, http://www.schirn.de/ausstellungen/2016/joan_miro/. The Schirn is an interesting, modern building nestled between the cathedral of St. Bartholomew and the Römer plaza. I like the museum – they know how to balance shows of established artists with risk-taking exhibitions of emerging power. When I visited last they had a show of installations and contemporary art from Brazil which made a lasting impression.

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Opening in mid-May is a show of one of our own, NYC-based artist Peter Halley. He’s gone all swirly, it looks like, after so many years of geometric abstracts.  http://www.schirn.de/programm/angebote/eroeffnung_peter_halley_11_mai/ Wish I could be there!

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