Impart Art - Daily

Bye now

2009-02-17T22:23:00.004+02:00

Back when I started this blog this is what we all looked like:

But that was then, and this is now. See you there.

The New Mini

2007-08-25T08:39:00.000+02:00

Shrinky Dinks. They're remarkable, really. $5 for ten 8x10 pages of shrikable magic. For anyone unfamiliar with shrinky-dinks, here's the story. Plastic sheets that you can color/cut any way you want, and then bake for 1-3 minutes. In the oven they reduce to about 1/3 their original size.

Here are some things that we've made recently.

The odd shapes in the middle are Star's very own designs. I think they might make nice pendants. Any takers? Oma Bonnie? We used a hole punch (regular office size) to make the holes in each of the shapes so that they can be strung.

As you can see, we traced my kids' hands and they colored them in. Star on the left and Dandelion on the right. Actually, Dandelion just scribbled all over a page and I traced her hand onto the already-there marks. Star really did color hers in, and if you look really close, you can see that she drew rings on her fingers.

More Books

2007-08-21T22:18:00.000+02:00

Today, just for fun, I made a list of all the books I've read just for fun this year. This is a big deal for me, because up until this year I have read books for two reasons:
1. I was supposed to for a class.
2. I had to convince and console myself that yes, I am cultured.

It has been years since I read for the latter reason. Nearly a decade, actually. I can think one other time when I was bored out of my mind and started picking up books because I couldn't think of anything else to do. Yeah. Those days are long gone. It sure is nice to have such sweet memories.

I'm not reading out of boredom these days. I just really like to read, and I think that has to do with my Thesis. Since I've had so much practice rewriting my Thesis I am now a really great rewriter, so I sometimes rewrite books as I'm reading them. I let myself think things like, "this is an intelligent idea but it needs to be further developed" or "this is an interesting sort of character, but he isn't entirely believable and that's preventing me from caring if he lives or dies right now" or "this ending is totally unsatisfactory because the book really ended a chapter ago and all this here is worthless".

And since I mentioned my Thesis, I'll just add one bit more. It isn't done. But here are three books that I've read some or all of this year not for fun, but for my research. They've been useful.

Tangled Memories by Marita Sturken
Remembering War the American Way by G. Kurt Piehler
Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

Even though these are not books I have read for fun, I've still rewritten them as I go. For example, I have wondered for quite a while how I would have rewritten this section of Regarding the Pain of Others:

. . . it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one's sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
No one after a certain age has a right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.

Yeah. I'm not sure how I would rewrite that, only that I really definitely would. It has become a speed-bump in an otherwise easy read. I get to that section and I wonder about it and I eventually go around in circles, which bears a remarkable resemblance to what I've been doing with my Thesis.

We're Off

2007-07-20T22:31:00.001+02:00

Tomorrow, way too early for anyone's good, we will depart for Michigan. Our travels will involve one borrowed car, two airports, a rental car, and a vacation house. And then we'll do it all in reverse four days later. Total travel time to get there: 9 hours. I'm going with Star and Dandelion. They're champion travelers by now, besides which, 9 hours (2 to get to the airport, 2 to wait in the airport, 2 on the plane, and 3 in the rental to get to the vacation house) is nothing. It was easily 26 hours to get from St. Louis to Beirut. EASILY. That includes 5 layover hours in Heathrow. Not a barrel of laughs. But they did it, and they might have even liked it.

Star and Dandelion can't wait to see papa. Everything is better with papa.

A Whole Lot of Nothing

2007-07-19T21:59:00.000+02:00

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, that's what you've been reading here for nearly three months. What's that? Oh yes. You're right. Four months. Yes.

I'm reading lots. But then, I've blogged about that. And I'm writing my Thesis. Oh, yes indeed I am. And I'm mommying. I mommy better than I do any of the rest of those things. AND . . . I've taken advantage of the summer arts festival in Boone, NC. Not impressed? Oh really? Well then, I have two words for you.

Mark Morris

Enough said.

I went on Tuesday. With my mother-in-law. No one has a better mother-in-law than I do. She rocks and we get along. So, while I've been blogging nothing at all rest assured that art just keeps right on happening. All the time. Sooner or later to reappear here.

Hug

2007-06-19T19:56:00.000+02:00

Hug: the artist not the verb.

Interesting story behind this picture. It is actually a relic of my childhood. Aparently back when my mom and dad were recent acquaintances (1973?) they discussed (among other things) Fritz Hug. My mom had returned from Europe, disappointed I suppose, that she had come across art that she really liked and not purchased any of it--not even one print. My dad was just about to go back to Europe (where he and my grandfather would succeed in finding our ancestral home in Switzerland) and he asked if there was anything mom wanted from Europe. There was. She wanted something from Fritz Hug.

Dad brought back a calendar, and they later had the pictures mounted and hung them on the walls of one apartment after another. This picture is one from that set. It and nine others survived two solid decades in our basement, where they were retired after my parents left the vagabond phase of their lives behind.

I think my kids will like them. I do, anyway. In the late 1960s, Hug began painting endangered species for the World Wildlife Fund. These are almost definitely part of that project.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

2007-06-15T20:28:00.001+02:00

I certainly hope you've noticed a pattern by now. This is the third installment of 'art stuff in books not really about art', and today it'll be from David Sedaris, around page 51. This quote is drawn from the chapter Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist, and this moment is number Nine in which David has become a performance-conceptual-happenings artist.

------

Watching the performances of my former colleagues, I got the idea that once you assembled the requisite props, the piece would more or less come together on its own. The inflatable shark naturally led to the puddle of heavy cream, which if lapped from the floor with slow steady precision, could account for up to twenty minutes of valuable stage time. All you had to do was maintain a shell-shocked expression and handle a variety of contradictory objects. It was the artist's duty to find the appropriate objects, and the audience's job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours.

------

It's Mary Ann again with a bit of summary: he goes to a thrift store for 'appropriate objects' and chooses a pile of sock monkeys. He tells the check out lady that he's an artist and she says her daughter is an artist too.

------

I looked into this woman's face, her fuzzy jowls hanging like saddlebags, and I pictured her reclining nude in a shallow pool of peanut oil. Were she smart enough to let me, I could use her as my living prop. I could be the best thing that ever happened to her, but sadly, she was probably too ignorant to appreciate it. Maybe one day I'd do a full length piece on the topic of stupidity, but in the meantime, I'd just pay for the sock monkeys, snort a few lines of speed, and finish constructing a bulletproof vest out of used flashlight batteries.

------

The whole chapter is like that--full of descriptions of his crazy projects and his self-important description of them. Oh yes, he took his art very seriously. I've been wondering if he made it all up or if he really did this stuff. If I ever get to meet him, I think I'll ask.

Humboldt's Gift

2007-06-13T18:25:00.000+02:00

The title of today's post is one-and-the-same with Saul Bellow's book, from which I, not coincidentally, will now quote extensively.

Humboldt and Charlie, our two main characters, are talking. Or rather, Humboldt is talking (as always) and Charlie is (predictably) listening. Humboldt has been going for a while already and Charlie knows this rant well enough to see certain sections coming.

------
And at this point Humboldt generally spoke of Antonin Artaud. Artaud, the playwright, invited the most brilliant intellectuals in Paris to a lecture. When they were assembled there was no lecture. Artaud came on stage and screamed at them like a wild beast. "Opened his mouth and screamed," said Humboldt. "Raging screams. While those Parisian intellectuals sat frightened. For them it was a delicious event. And why? Artaud as the artist was a failed priest. Failed priests specialize in blasphemy. Blasphemy is aimed at the community of believers. In this case, what kind of belief? Belief only in intellect, which a Ferenczi has now charged with madness. But what does it mean in a larger sense? It means that the only art intellectuals can be interested in is an art which celebrates the primacy of ideas. Artists must interest intellectuals, this new class. This is why the state of culture and the history of culture become the subject matter of art. This is why a refined audience of Frenchmen listens respectfully to Artaud screaming. For them the whole purpose of art is to suggest and inspire ideas and discourse. The educated people of modern countries are a thinking rabble at the stage of what Marx called primitive accumulation. Their business is to reduce masterpieces to discourse. Artaud's scream is an intellectual thing. First, an attack on the nineteenth-century 'religion of art,' which the religion of discourse wants to replace . . .
pgs. 31-2

------

Just thought it was interesting and passing it along. I've been thinking of all kinds of equivalent 'stunts' that artists have pulled. Empty galleries, performance art of any description, Warhol’s movies. And yeah, I half expect that they did it to see if people would stay in their seats.

On Beauty

2007-06-12T17:32:00.000+02:00

The title of the post is one-and-the-same with the title of a book I'm about to extensively quote. By Zadie Smith. If you'll be mad to find a potential spoiler here, I urge you to quit now. NOW.

The scene is New England, a family home. The mother (Kiki) is clearing out the junk in her teen-age son's (Levi) bedroom. Her other son (Jerome, nearly 20) has lifted one end of his brother's bed off the ground so that she can clear out the crap.

------
Jerome hiked up his end of the bed.
'Higher' requested Kiki and Jerome obliged. Suddenly Kiki's right knee slipped and her hand went to the floor. 'Oh my God' she whispered.
'What?'
'Oh my God'
'What? Is it porn? My arm's getting tired' Jerome lowered the bed a little.
'DON'T MOVE' screamed Kiki.
Jerome, terrified, lifted the bed higher. His mother was gasping like she was having some kind of fit.
'Mom--what? You're scaring me man. What is it?'
'I don't understand this. I DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS'
'Mom I can't hold this any longer'
'HOLD IT'
Jerome saw his mother grip the sides of something. She slowly began to pull out whatever it was from under the bed.
'What the . . . ?' said Jerome.
Kiki dragged the painting to the middle of the floor and sat next to it, hyperventilating. Jerome came up behind her and tried to touch her to calm her, but she slapped his hand away.
'Mom I don't understand what's going on. What is that?'
Then came the sound of the front door clicking and opening. Kiki lept to her feet and left the room, leaving Jerome to stare at the naked brown woman surrounded by her technicolor flowers and fruit.
------

Clever, isn't it? Oh, we all know that tired old debate about where art ends and porn begins, and which kinds of nudity qalify in which categories. TIRED. And we have long since grown accustomed to seeing porn where we thought we'd find art. But I have to hand it to Zadie Smith. She's found a way to laugh at it all by dumping it upside down. She's put a nude paiting--art as much as art can be under the bed of a teenage boy, where a stash of porn would be entirely expected if not somehow required. I just love Jerome's question 'Is it porn?' (and holding up the bed, he can't see a thing). Brilliant.

I love books that do this kind of thing. You wouldn't even know she was making fun of the distinction unless you knew to look for it.

Not Quite Right

2007-06-06T16:31:00.000+02:00

Right. So I said on the fourth that I was going to post the Second Coolest Family Picture Ever on the 5th.

Well, this isn't the fifth nor is this the Second Coolest Family Picture Ever. This is a cheap a substitute for the Second Coolest Family Picture Ever, just like this is a cheap substitute for a real post. Not that this picture isn't great. It is, but it's out of the running all the same. We aren't all present. Left to right, you've got Sam, K8, Dad, Suz, and Joe.

Anyway, I'm still trying to find the right picture. Matthew's got a copy of it hanging in the hallway in Beirut, but the scan I stumbled on the other day was in better condition.

Coolest Family Picture Ever

2007-06-04T15:10:00.000+02:00

I've been cleaning out the basement with my family. Yeah. Even more fun than it sounds like, because of cool stuff like this.

I drew this family portrait in first grade. There we all are.

Stay tuned for the Second Coolest Famly Picture Ever tomorrow.

Hello St. Louis

2007-05-14T22:53:00.000+02:00

We're back. Not much art to blog about yet, but there will be eventually.

Bye Bye, Beirut

2007-05-04T08:50:00.000+02:00

This is my last blogging day in Lebanon until September, which frankly is so far away that I feel like I'm never coming back. And let's face it. I might not come back. Ever. Over the past two-ish years I often wondered if I'd ever miss Beirut at some distant future point. For quite a while it didn't look promising. I was sick of everything broken, everything dirty, everything disorganized, everything Lebanon. Then there was the war, the horribly mismanaged evacuation, the gut-wrenching uncertainty and powerlessness, the aching sense of loss. Loss. There are the people that I became attached to in spite of myself and hopes that I never managed to let go of. There are places that have become the wallpaper of my existence. There are smells, sounds, flavors that I found here and have learned to rely on. This has become my home. Love it, hate it, want to see it leveled to the ground but don't you dare change it.

That's my Lebanon.

Thesis Update

2007-05-03T10:33:00.000+02:00

. . . as if there haven't been enough of those already. There have been. No, I'm not finished yet. Why? Who knows?

But I do have a really good idea where I'm headed with it at least. That makes a difference. But I feel sick inside just thinking about it. Yuck. I think I need to go do some positive visualizations and affirmations and then maybe . . . if I'm lucky . . . I'll have it in me to finish it. How I would love to deal it a deadly blow.

Don't Jump on the Art

2007-05-02T15:14:00.001+02:00

One of our favorite public parks in Beirut has a bit of a sculpture garden along its southern ridge. We were there recently and the girls were doing their thing.

Look! I caught Dandelion mid-jump!

Star discovered the joys of jumping on this "thing" two years ago, and once Dandelion learned to jump she joined her. It's actually quite springy.

Not that I usually advocate jumping on art, but I have never seen anything wrong with this. The other sculptures in the park are equally accessible for climbing and indeed are climbed upon.

I've always wondered about the shape, and recently I figured out why it looked familiar. It looks familiar because it is familiar. Duh. It's the drawing of an elephant that has been swallowed by a snake in The Little Prince. The Prince would have been disappointed in my ability to spot snake-swallowed elephants.

I was right about the elephant-inside-a-snake thing too. If you look carefully you can just barely read HOMMAGE A ST. EXUPERY on the end where Star is jumping. I wish I could tell you more about this. Who made it? When? What else are they up to now? No idea. Maybe if I clear away some of the scrub growing around the edges I'll find more clues.

Oh, and I intend to let my kids keep on jumping. I doubt the Prince would mind.

Arman Beirut

2007-05-01T20:16:00.000+02:00

A long, long time ago, Del put up a picture of Arman's 1995 Espoir de Paix.

Her picture is a good deal better. Its hard to get a good picture of it, and anyway, I wasn't really trying. Go see hers. It shows it from a different angle.

Anyway, ever since her post, I've been wondering exactly where to find it. Since directions are impossible here and basically don't exist I was so pleased to happen upon it by chance one day as I was driving home from my husband's ancestral village in the valley. With the pesky location problem solved I'd been waiting for the right day to go visit it. And today was the day.

If you click over to Del's blog, you'll see that there's some negative sentiment about this monument to the Lebanese Army. It's ugly, sure, but that's not really a problem for contemporary art. Ugly is our old standby.

It it has an important flaw and this is it: the Espoir de Paix in an ineffective memorial. This was comissioned for the 50th anniversary of the Lebanese Army. So, lets ask ourselves what an army ought to be. Well, at the very least it should not be stuck, encumbered, weighed down, static, literally made up of obsolete equipment that is trapped in cement anyway. None of the associations are good.

Well, Arman's reputation is a good association, but only for the art-obsessed. They know that it is significant that something like this is here in Beirut. But that's something for the culture crowd to cheer about, not the army.

Name That Movie

2007-04-30T11:50:00.000+02:00

The Birthday that Wasn't

2007-04-27T22:14:00.000+02:00

Today, Star ought to have had a little birthday party at school, but there was much ado about nothing in Beirut today and school was canceled. But I wasn't to know that last night when I was preparing for the festivities. Star decided that bubble-blow would be a great party favor for all her little friends at school. I liked that idea, except for the fact that bubble-blow is exactly the kind of thing that gets branded all the time. You can't just get bubbles, they're going to be barbie, pooh bear, dora, or diego bubbles. That's bad. Yes, it is. I think kids ought to be free from that kind of thing, especially when they’re blowing bubbles.

So, I got out my wrapping paper and covered up the labels. I did a nice job too, see?

I've got all 25 of them ready (oh, I don't think there are that many kids in her class, but I figured better too many than too few) and waiting. Just as soon as the "mood on the ground" stabilizes and people go back to their day-in day-out, Star will have a great class party. This weekend of course, there will be two parties. Dandelion on Saturday, Star on Sunday.

See and be Seen

2007-04-26T17:45:00.000+02:00

I'm about half way through the first book in the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz. Why am I reading the trilogy? First, because Mahfouz is the only Arabic-language writer to ever receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Second, it came highly recommended. Third, it is well written. Not even being translated into English could ruin the quality of the writing.

(those reasons are in chronological order, not priority order. Nobel Prizes have not redeemed other authors I’ve picked up in the past)

So, like I said, I'm about half way into the first book, Palace Walk, and I just (literally 5 minutes ago) read the passage where Amina, the mother in the story's central family, has been persuaded by her children to venture out into the street for the first time EVER. This is a very traditional family, with a very authoritarian, unkind, and distant father. He leaves for a short business trip when her teen-aged and adult children convince her that there is no sin in visiting a nearby mosque/shrine (Amina is devout). She covers herself with her maid's shawl, veils her face, and is accompanied by her male sons. We get a third-person omniscient description of it:

As she crossed the threshold of the outer door and entered the street, she experienced a moment of panic. Her mouth felt dry and her pleasure was dispelled by a fit of anxiety. She had an oppressive feeling of doing something wrong. She moved slowly and grasped Kamal's hand nervously. Her gait seemed disturbed and unsteady as though she had not mastered the first principles of walking. She was gripped by intense embarrassment as she showed herself to the eyes of people she had known for ages but only through the peephole in the enclosed balcony. Uncle Hasanayn, the barber, Darwish, who sold beans, al-Fuli, the milkman, Bayumi, the drinks vendor, and Abu Sari', who sold snacks - she imagined that they all recognized her jsut as she did them. She had difficulty convincing herself of the obvious fact that none of them had ever seen her before in their lives.

I've often thought about what the veil does both to the one veiled and to the one seeing it. It certainly sets up an uneven relationship, one in which I would guess that the concealed party has more power. Sort of like the soldier in camo--there's a degree of protection in being able to vanish.

I've also thought a lot about my relationship to the fact that some women cover (to varying extents). Our neighbors on the floor below are Muslim, and the wife covers her head and wears clothing that covers her from neck to feet (pant-suits, but the kind that reveal nothing). Inside the house though, she dresses just like me. My husband has never seen that. He's also never seen her hair, the way it compliments and softens her face. He has no idea that she is beautiful. I, because I'm a woman too, have access to a part of her world that is not available to any man who isn't blood-related to her.

Appearances, what we allow others (and which others at that) to see is ultimately about control. You can't stop others using their eyes to judge the world. The best you can hope for is to really get what it is that they might see in you.

Will to Art

2007-04-25T09:03:00.001+02:00

I've written about artistic intent, originality, authorship etc. on a number of occasions. Those exercises are interesting, but today we are faced with something of a conundrum in the form of a Jean Arp collage.

That's Arp's Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance 1916-17.

To make this collage, Arp apparently dropped the blue and white paper scraps onto the lager, gray paper and then "further developed the collages by arranging the pieces automatically, without will."

Now that's really something. Is Arp saying that he is able to overcome free will? I think he must be, because if he was a determinist that would be stating an irrelevant, obvious fact. Why bother? I don't think he did. I think Arp thought he had a will that generally got in the way of the automatic process he favored.

So we've now come to the $50 question (except the $50 is fake). Assuming you've got free will (and those of you who follow my husband's blog know that he's been thinking a whole lot about that lately) can you shut it down? Can you will not to will? Isn't that like thinking about not thinking?

Well, Arp thought he could, and according to MoMA's page about this collage, it was by willing not to will that Arp's subconscious was able to allow a more essential, natural composition to emerge. Yeah.

For a while I've been thinking about doing a series here at Impart Art where I go through and recreate the works of other artists, and every time that thought crosses my mind this collage comes with it. But now that I've gotten myself good and confused about free will and whether I can will myself not to will, well, I don't think I'm interested.

The Family Jewels

2007-04-24T07:35:00.000+02:00

Here is an image of two necklaces that my paternal grandmother gave me. I'm sure that they were Christmas presents.

The green one most definitely came from Central America where my grandparents lived for two years in the late 1980s. I could not have been older than 12 when I received it. At the time I'm sure I didn't know or care that I'd been given jade. 10 years later fashion had changed, I was an adult, and suddenly the necklace was interesting to me for the first time. I've been wearing it ever since, and wearing it out. A few years ago I re-strung it with plastic spacer beads between the jade stones.

I have no idea about the origins of the other necklace (other than its entry into my life as a gift from grandmother). It came in a very lovely orange box. Because grandmother traveled the world several times over I have no idea where it might have come from. My amateur-gemologist husband tells me that this one is amber. Maybe it is. Grandmother has very likely been to the Baltic States and the Dominican Republic where amber comes from. When I saw her two weeks ago I didn't have the necklace with me or I would have asked her. But she might not have remembered anyway. Like the jade necklace, this one sat in the basement of my parents’ home for a decade before I changed my mind about it, and quite likely two decades before I retrieved it.

In part I value these necklaces simply as gifts from my grandmother. But part of me values what they represent to me now; the foolishness of my youth, the transience of fashion, the merits of waiting a few years or decades before discarding another's treasures. And another part of me reflects with something like wonder that my grandmother never seemed concerned that I (as a child) didn't know how to appreciate these gifts.

The Bastard of Istanbul

2007-04-23T12:00:00.000+02:00

While in the US I started and finished 'The Bastard of Istanbul' by Elif Shafak. In the author's acknowledgements she states, "Between the Turkish edition and the English edition of this novel in 2006, I was put on trial for "denigrating Turkishness" under article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. The charges that were brought against me were due to the words that some of the Armenian characters spoke in the novel; I could have been given up to a three-year prison sentence, but the charges were eventually dropped."

Well, folks, that's pretty much why I bought the book, and I only bought it because there is no library to borrow it from. I really wanted to read it. I'm glad I did. It is a book full of characters who are (usually in more than one way) between cultures. And since that's my whole life, I was interested.

Its the first time I've read a book and thought "I could write this better". How's that for arrogance? But honestly, there were too many times when the reader is told rather than shown, and the telling wasn't convincing. On the other had there were some sections that were perfect. There's no other word for it, they were really that good. Its too bad that many of the characters seem like rough sketches or paper-doll cut-outs. Oddly, its the dead characters that really seem alive.

Anyway, enough of that. In one rather neat section, the author describes various dishes in a restaurant in terms of modern art they resemble:
Sesame-crusted ahi tuna tartare with foie gras yakiniku appears as Francesco Boretti's The Blind Whore (you'll have to scroll down). Prime rib-eye with hot mustard cream sauce on a bed of pasison fruit vinaigrette and jicama materializes as a Mark Rothko Untitled. (No I don't know which 'Untitled' the author intended, and I've made no effort to find one that could be recreated in steak, mustard, and passion fruit.)

These dishes are brought to the table where one of the central characters is having dinner with a cameo-character who is even more paper-doll like than she is. When dessert arrives (without the reader hearing the characters order) they are described as Peter Kitchell's April Blues Bring May Yellows and Jackson Pollock's Shimmering Substance.

At first, both characters find it a bit overwhelming to munch their way through great works of art but eventually forget and eat freely.

Art as Food, made by a chef who wanted to be a philosopher and then an artist, and after failing at both turned to food. I'm still trying to figure out why the author included this restaurant scene at all. It wasn't one of the books strong moments, and I can't help trying to figure out what she meant for it to accomplish, because I must be observing its failure to deliver. Otherwise, would I be wondering?

Ahem

2007-04-20T00:25:00.000+02:00

Happy April. I just got back from St. Louis and a trip to see my grandparents who are just outside Vegas. Yes, this is the first time I've posted in a month. No, that wasn't intentional. No, I haven't given it up. Yes, I expected to have more down time while in the US, but yeah, that was silly of me. What's that? Yeah, it was a good visit, but I'm happy to be back. Yes I am.

That's me on the way back down from Angel's Landing, a spectacular hike in Zion's National Park, with siblings, of course. My dad took the picture.

I've been reading, reading, reading which has been a nice diversion from writing, writing, writing. Art played an interesting bit-part in one of the books I got on the trip and I think I'll blog that tomorrow.

A trip to St. Louis always involves at least a few hours of going through my old stuff (which is very neatly confined to two cedar chests--when I impose on people I'd like to think I do it with care), and this visit I hit the jackpot. I was fortunate enough to stumble upon my photo album from highschool, which really was more like a portfolio showcasing the wish I briefly entertained to become a photographer. I also retrieved a necklace that my grandmother gave me at least 15 years ago that (like most things she has given me) I had no appreciation for at the time. My parents had taken good care of my 'Northern Renaissance' and 'Art and its Significance' text books after I left them there six years ago. Anyway, foder, all of it is foder.

Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun

2007-03-28T12:12:00.000+02:00

Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun's Marie Antoinette and her children, 1787.

Vigée-Le Brun is yet another french woman that I really wish I had learned more about a long time ago. Unlike some of the other 'forgotten French ladies', it is easy to find information about Vigée-Le Brun. I've linked to a fantastic web-resource where you can view a copy of nearly every painting she ever made. It is nice that, while we know almost nothing about some of the marvelous lady-painters that France produced around the turn of the 19th century, there are others who have had their stories told.

Vigée-Le Brun was (as the image here indicates) a well regarded portrait painter and in the good graces of the French royal family. They and the aristocracy kept her busy until the French Revolution swept them all away. Worried that her connections with them were a bit too tight, Vigée-Le Brun left France for Italy, Russia, and Austria (later she would leave again for Switzerland). One admirer wrote that she "knew and painted the portraits of just about every prominent figure in Europe and Russia from approximately 1770 to 1835." Not bad.

She was a member of artists' acadamies and societies around Europe. First the Académie de Saint Luc in 1774, then Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1783, the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, the Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Petersburg, and later the Swiss Société pour l'Avancement des Beaux-Arts. A cosmopolitan, if there ever was one.

Read more here.

Marguerite Gérard

2007-03-27T20:56:00.000+02:00

This is Marguerite Gérard's 1804 Bad News

Clearly, the lady in blue has just read a letter bearing bad tidings. Her attentive friend has produced the smelling salts, which a woman surely needs in such times as these. And even the dog, as though to prove that this isn't just some melodramatic act, looks on with great interest.

Gérard (1761-1837) is another one of those French women painters whose legacy resides at the margins of art and art history. Unlike the other French ladies we've seen this month, Gérard's work wouldn't be confused with David's. It would (and has been) confused with the work of Fragonard, her brother-in-law. The two collaborated, influenced the other's work. It is easy enough to find web references that put Gérard forward as Fragonard's very savior, the influence that saved him from his dedication to Rococo even after the style had fallen out of favor.

Many of Gérard's images are much like the one above. Bad News is a scene of women, and I'd guess it is also intended for women. After all, they attended exhibitions too. Like other painters of her day, Gérard's work centers on the world she lived in, and that world consisted of well appointed homes, loving families, and wealthy friends. With so many women painting and patronizing the arts, it is unsurprising that mundane moments of their lives ended up on canvas.

Belle Kinney

2007-03-26T22:11:00.000+02:00

Matthew got back from NY on Saturday night, and with him came a pile of books I'd specially requested. I'm in heaven, partly because new books are a rarity and partly because these particular books are so very interesting. The one I'm reading right now is G. Kurt Piehler's Remembering War the American Way, which is indeed thesis related. In the introduction (I can't understand why I always skipped the preface/introduction when I was younger. Increasingly I find these sections remarkably useful) I found a reference to yet another book, which will doubtless be added to my library some time soon. The title grabbed me at once--Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscape of Southern Memory. Women, it appears, were the ones who organized and advocated for Confederate commemoration. Eager for more information, I googled it, and found a review overflowing in details about the text (enough detail, even that I've decided I probably am ok NOT citing it in my research, which means I don't have to import it, for which my pocketbook is already heaving a sigh of relief). In one particularly useful section, the review catalogued the artists named in the book, who are responsible for many a monument to the 'Lost Cause' (ie. US Civil War). And among them, one woman was named.

Belle Kinney was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1890 and later studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. She taught there for a time. Her sculptures, almost all of them in bronze, are scattered around the nation. Here's an incomplete list of her work:

Statue of Jere Baxter, Jere Baxter School Nashville
Monuments to the Women of the Confederacy, Nashville
Monuments to the Women of the Confederacy, Jackson, Mississippi
Statue of Andrew Jackson at the U.S. Capitol
Statue of John Sevier at the U.S. Capitol
Bust of Admiral Albert Gleaves at Annapolis
Bust of Andrew Jackson at the Tennessee State Capitol
Bust of James K. Polk at the Tennessee State Capitol
Bust of Alexander P. Stewart
Statue of Richard Owen in the Indiana State University (pictured here)
The Bronx County (WWI) Memorial
Pediment sculptures of the Nashville Parthenon (based on the original Greek)

She is generally remembered as Tennessee's best sculptor, and for a few decades there, anyone who was anyone in the state's past or present had their likeness rendered by her. She is one among a few women who executed the monuments that the United Daughters of the Confederacy promoted with such tenacity. Somehow, that seems fitting.

Baroness Elsa : Dada Muse

2007-03-23T10:40:00.000+02:00

We started this ill-fated week with Hannah Höch, Dada Artist, and so I suppose it is fitting that we end it with an ill-fated Dada Muse.

She's got quite a name: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She acquired the title with her 1913 marriage to Leopold Freiherr von Freytag-Loringhoven. I suppose the foregoing description 'Dada Muse' isn't quite enough. She was a dancer, a poet, a model, a farmer. But no matter what she was up to, she did it as a complete exhibitionist, feminist, and artist. The image here is a photo of what she called a "portrait of Marcel Duchamp" in 1920. In perfect Dada style, the portrait is made up of everyday rubbish. Feathers, beads, wire, a champagne glass. Very little of her art survives, but her poetry and some of her letters have. Oh, and descriptions of her clothing, appearance, and antics can be found in the work of any author remotely connected with NY Dada. That's how outlandish she was.

The Baroness was resourceful, bold, and persistent enough to fend for herself. Even though it was certainly humiliating, she took work in a cigarette factory once, selling newspapers on the street on another occasion when the men and the money ran out. She also used her own flamboyance to cultivate as much material advantage as she could. And it worked. Ezra Pound wrote about her in his "Cantos", Frederick Philip Grove wrote a few books based on her life before abandoning her in Kentucy in 1911. She modeled her way to NY where she modeled some more for Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia. Modeling was a means to an end. It kept her close to art, and the money got her closer to being able to afford to actually do art. She eventually returned to Germany in 1923, where her life and finances got particularly bleak. Several friends (women who were all part of the first circle of American feminists and authors) came to her aid and bankrolled her relocation to Paris, where she died in 1927.

Unlike some of the other women we've seen here this month, there is no shortage of information out there about the Baroness. She's an enigma, a fascinating one. And even though 90 years have passed since her outlandish Greenwich Village escapades began, they'd still look like outlandish escapades today. Currency. Just something an artist has got to have.

Love Hate

2007-03-22T19:46:00.000+02:00

At about 3:30 this afternoon I decided to drive the kids to their favorite park, and about half way there plowed into the back of a car stopped ahead of me. It was embarrassingly stupid of me. I had taken my foot off the pedal for a split second to mess with my sock, and then couldn’t find the brake pedal in time. Quite likely the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Ever. (Which I suppose is comforting. Stupid goes downhill a long way from there, but still.) It took more than an hour and a half to sort everything out, and it was an even bigger mess that it might have been because our insurance had lapsed. Yes, it had.

Star fell asleep like a little cherub, while Dandelion played contentedly in her car seat. Karim appeared at the last minute like a deus ex machina, and prevented any further bungling of things by me, and sent me home with a wave of the hand and an “I’ll take care of it.”

I swear, I’d hate this place if I didn’t love it so much. Or maybe I’d love it if I didn’t hate it the way I do.

Lebanese Mother's Day

2007-03-21T00:02:00.000+02:00

If there has been a downside (which is not a foregone conclusion) to WHM here at Impart Art, it is that I have blogged nothing about Lebanon, and nothing about my kids, which are big parts of my world. I'm going to try to bring all that in today, since this is our Mother's Day.

Yesterday, Star's preschool had a party for all the moms. I walked in 15 minutes late, which is nothing in Lebanon. Late happens all the time. So it should bear some significance that when I arrived late, my child was the only one without at least one maternal figure sitting close by (yes, some kids had mom and Grandma). All the other moms where there. All of them. They had quite obviously already started the crafty-portion of the day's festivities. Star was totally unconcerned by my late arrival, but I got enough dirty looks from the other moms to make up for it.

It's a big deal here, Mother's Day. My husband keeps track of holidays by the banner ads online. But with only 15% of the Lebanese online, advertisers are sticking to billboards. For the past week or so, many billboards around town have been given over to suggesting anything from shoes to luxury watches for Mom. Some of these have been absolutely fascinating. Oh yes, I will elaborate.

1. There's a huge billboard on the costal highway from Exotica, the local fancy-schmancy (expensive) florist. The advert's only text is the company name and 'Mother's Day'. It shows a child's hand holding up a cut flower, and a woman's hand lazily half-inclined toward it. I swear, the positions of the hands are exactly out of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. In Michelangelo's image, God is about to give Adam life, through the touch of both beings' gently reaching fingers. How interesting, to put the mother in as God, the child in as Adam, and reverse the giving role. Are children who appreciate their mother essentially giving her life? Does a child repay the gift of his/her life by showing devotion to the mother (in the form of an annual flower)? What does it mean?!?

2. All along the road to Damascus, another billboard will greet you again and again. It shows two women seated, one on the right and the other on the left half of the image. Both are young, pretty, smiling. The one on the right is dressed in a suit with hair nicely done. She's a woman ready for the office. Her gaze is directed at the woman on the left whose clothing is comfortable, a t-shirt and knit pants, obviously not an office type. We see these two women just as the comfortably-clad one has unwrapped her mothers day gift--a lovely pair of shoes. Text running along the top reads: It's Mother's Day, Not Yours. Huh? Women who wear suits aren't moms? Or is it women in the work place aren't moms? Or moms are dowdy, so get them fancy shoes! Or what? What does it mean?

I'll get pictures when I can. Our camera is currently spending time with Matthew in NY.

Art Goes to the Movies

2007-03-20T19:42:00.000+02:00

And now, a brief, sorta-break from Women's History Month to bring you a divergence (in which women outnumber men 3-2, if that matters).

I've written about movies and art once before. It was boring, so don't bother clicking the link. Don't bother re-reading it. It was about movies that have art crammed into the background. For my second swing at the Art in Movies theme, I've decided to respond to Modern Art Notes' request for bloggers to list their five top paintings that would make a good movie all on their own. I was intrigued, but not entirely by paintings. Here are my painted-and-not selections:

1. Jeff Wall’s 1978 Destroyed Room
It's the prefect candidate for a mystery. I blogged all about it here. Some third party person could stumble on the room and try to figure out who it belonged to, why it was destroyed, and attempt to put things right. Or it could be like Suz's room meet's Groundhog's Day, where the main character works all day to tidy the room and despite all their heroic efforts they wake up the next day and the room is a disaster again. I'd like to see Jennifer Hudson play the owner of the room in either case.

2. Any one of Louise Bourgeois's Spiders (1999-2001, I think?)
The biggest of these creations are huge (30' high) sculptures designed for public spaces. They stand on spindly legs and look positively menacing, and yet Bourgeois has named them things like 'Maman', mommy in her native French. The spiders have been on a bit of a world-tour, Russia, Japan, UK, Canada, and they are totally terrifying. But I imagine a movie in which they are benevolent, as Bourgeois intends them to be, only in CGI rather than steel. HUGE terrifying-yet-benign spiders take up residence in major metropolitan centers. Conflict over what to do about them (ie. how to co-exist with them if at all) will be the movie's central theme. Disaster movies need Tommy Lee Jones, so he could be the mayor or something. And the Spiders will need a human advocate--that could be Julian Moore.

3. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard's 1799 Dublin-Tornelle
The painting itself is almost too boring, but the story behind it is nothing if not dynamic. The movie could trace the material reality of the painting. I would have the movie start in the 1950s when the debate over authorship began, and the movie could showcase the two women who have been given credit for it. This picture would be like the diamond necklace in the Titanic--central to a story that explains why it matters so much.

4. James Ensor's 1889 Christ's Entry into Brussels
Not only is this painting packed with people, details, life, all perfectly setting the stage--the painting asks the impossible. Imagine if Jesus appeared in your city, right NOW. Ensor's Christ is absolutely LOST in the crowd. You'd hardly know he was there at all but for the title. I imagine a movie of this painting going something like a cross between Dostoyevsky's hypothetical appearance of Jesus in the Brother's Karamazov and the recent movie Lady in the Water. I have no suggestions for who should play Jesus or any other role in this movie. No idea.

5. Ann Hamilton's 1993 Torpos
It seems like a long time ago that I referenced this installation, but it was just so good, and like Ensor's painting, Hamilton was able to really create a feeling, an atmosphere in this project. She clouded the windows, raked the floor, covered it in horse hair, and then in the middle of all that methodically had book after book slowly, and deliberately burned as it was being read. It makes me think of the never ending story, where the pages suddenly go blank. Tropos allows a more educated, adult contemplation of the 'nothing'.

Hannah Höch, Dada Artist

2007-03-19T12:36:00.000+02:00

I can hardly believe that there are only 10 blogging days until the end of March. I've frankly liked my Women's History Month project. It has made my whole formal education look so, well, male-centric, which, let's face it, it was/is. It took this project for me to see that for what it was: incomplete.

One other note before I devote my full attention to the next fantastic woman: my extra verses for Follow the Prophet are on view here, with (what for FMH is indeed) a tiny, bitty discussion. Chime in, if you want.

When people get bent out of shape about the 'state of art today', their issues generally go directly back to Dada, a movement that was as tied up in pre-WWI angst and post war disillusionment as a movement ever could be. Dada, as we all know from the urinal-legacy of Marcel Duchamp (read more here, and here), engaged in the presentation-as-art of common things, material things, things that were drawn right out of the nitty-gritty of every-day life.

Hannah Höch's collages, made from magazine and newspaper clippings, fit easily into the Dada framework of common things. But while Duchamp's images critiqued the art establishment and its values, Höch and other Berlin-Dada artists were engaged in (often biting) social commentary. Dada was perhaps foremost an effort to expose the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie. The vulgarity of the masses, along with a sharp criticism of it, emerged in their work again and again.

No one did this better than Höch, in part because she was a woman. The absurdity and vanity of the bourgeoisie, though clearly ripe for a good parody was nothing to the way women were thought of, constructed, limited by the customs of the day. In the image I've selected, Höch has literally constructed (collaged) a woman out of images of her--the way she has been depicted in various times and places. And she's a mutant, a freak. Höch's sense was that her own culture's view of women was no better, and she wanted to show the viewer what she saw.

Höch, unlike so many of the artistic Avant-Garde, stayed in Germany, survived the war, and died there in 1978.

Olga Rozanova

2007-03-16T11:08:00.000+02:00

Back on 7 March, I said that I'd returned to my old text books, searching for women. Same story here, but in a different book. Nearly 200 pages into Art in Theory, you'll find Olga Rozanova's 'The Bases of New Creation' from 1913. Here is one of her paintings from the same year.

In 'The Bases of New Creation', she wrote:

A servile repetition of nature's models can never express all her fullness.
It is time, at long last to acknowledge this and to delcare frankly, once and for all, that other ways, other methods of expressing the World are needed.

What is she talking about? A lot of things probably, Abstraction chief among them. Five years earlier, Picasso and Braque had begun their cubist experimentation. But even in 1913, Rozanova's was a bold proclamation. Over the years, she was associated with a number of movements and groups. She is best remembered as a Suprematist, a super-modern artistic revolution in Russian, with among other things, total abstraction as an aim. Rozanova's essay proves her committment to the main ideals of this movement well before it had taken shape. She and one other woman, Kseniya Boguslavskaya, were important enough in this movement to be mentioned by name in their earliest publication (1915) among aritists who "had led the struggle for the freedom of objects from the obligations of art".

Rozanova died in 1918. A picture that she made the year of her death shows nothing but a verticle green stripe. She was 32, and like all artists that die young there is lots of specuation about what she might have done if she had lived longer.

Julia Margaret Cameron

2007-03-15T11:35:00.000+02:00

Like Lady Hawarden of yesterday's post, Julia Margaret Cameron was a British woman who got into photography in the medium's early days. She was given a camera in 1863 as a birthday present when she turned 48. 48! Back in the mid-1800s, 48 was OLD. That ought to give hope to anyone out there. It is never, ever too late. I love it.

Anyway, Cameron was well-connected, so well in fact that she had the opportunity to make portraits of some of the notable figures of her day: A. L. Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Edward Burne-Jones, among others. And it is primarily because of these portraits that we have any record of Cameron's work. In 1926, these portraits were published under the title Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women by none other than Virginia Woolf. Cameron was her great-aunt. I admit that I was a bit surprised that the title wasn't something like J.M. Cameron's Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women. That her name wasn't included leads me to believe that in 1926, she was totally unknown, and therefore it wouldn't have helped the volume sell. Besides, in 1926 photography's status as art was still a matter of debate.

Anyway, many of Cameron's photographs were complete fantasies, Allegorical images as they are called. She posed her family, servants, neighborhood children, even Sri Lanken natives when her husband's employment took them there, and these are the images that I find most engaging. The image above is one of these, an Allegorical portrait of the Madonna and child, with Cameron's maid posed as the Madonna.

The differences between Cameron and Hawarden are slight. They both photographed their children in varyingly fantastic situations, were recognzied for their technical competence and skill, and both were very nearly forgotten entirely. Cameron's work is seen by many as a forerunner to the images Sally Mann made of her children during the late 1980s and early 90s.

wikipedia
science & society picture library

Lady Clementina Hawarden

2007-03-14T14:42:00.000+02:00

We’re back in Europe for the next installment of Women's History Month artists (artistresses?). Across the channel in Britain, where in 1861, Lady Clementina Hawarden was busy taking pictures of, among other things, the neat things her dog could do.

Most of her surviving photographs are in the V&A in London, where I found this image along with everything else I can report about Hawarden. I love a good, informative page.

Haraden was a respected photographer, and even won silver medals at the Photographic Society of London. Many of her photographs are of her daughters play-acting, posing in costume, or otherwise being theatrical in their home. I think photography gave Hawarden an opportunity to entertain fantasy, realize imaginations, and explore slight variations on reality. Like the dog's precarious perch, the images of her family that I find most engaging are the ones that feature uncommon moments.

Another interesting note: see how the edges of the photograph are missing? Apparently the prints held by the V&A were damaged when someone removed them from an album before the museum acquired them. Of the ripped, cut, cropped corners, the V&A text offered the general observation that, "the state of a print reveals much about a photograph's material history." I like that.

Kiyohara Yukinobu

2007-03-13T13:17:00.001+02:00

UPDATE: 15/03/07--the image is here!

Just a reminder, in case you missed the post heralding my current project, March is Women's History Month. I'll be posting about women artists all month long. After my post about Louise Nevelson, who is quite famous, I decided to focus on women who aren't so well-known (or at least those who were hitherto totally unknown to me).

So far, there has been a definite focus on France, and I don't know about you but I'm getting wanderlusty. Not that France isn't all that. It really, really is, but there's a world full of women out there and the month is already nearly half over. Today, we're leaving the continent all together and moving far, far east.

Art was every bit as much a man's pursuit in Japan as it was in Europe during the 1600s, the century in which Kiyohara Yukinobu lived. Painting was one among the "Four Accomplishments" that upper-class men cultivated (the other three were music, calligraphy, and the chess-like game go). But Yukinobu's father was a master Kano-school painter, and so she had access to a world that normally would have excluded her.

I've tried off and on for the better part of an hour to upload a good example of her paining, but alas, blogger will not comply. You can find one at the Kyoto National Museum. The link will take you to their search page. Enter Yukinobu's name, and you'll find it. I recommend that you use their picture viewer to magnify the image as much as you can. Her brushwork is amazing.

I have not been able to find much else about her life or work. I can see a trip to the library in my future. Just as soon as good reserach libraries re-enter my world of possibilities.

Césarine Henriette Flore Davin-Mirvault

2007-03-12T12:50:00.000+02:00

Ok, ok, ok. I'm sure everyone is just dying for another "Oops! It isn't a David after all" story, so here it is.

A portrait of Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni, 1804.

This time it concerns a woman (big shock) named Césarine Henriette Flore Davin-Mirvault. I've been able to find very few web references, and she is unsurprisingly absent from my library of art books. So, if you feel you can trust Time magazine ca. 1960, here are the facts:

Césarine Henriette Flore Davin-Mirvault was "the daughter of a geographer and the goddaughter of a marquise, presided over small dinner parties that artists and musicians, now long forgotten, loyally attended. She exhibited fairly often, was always listed in catalogues as a pupil of David."

Davin-Mirvault's connection with David is clear enough, so when the Frick Museum bought the portrait of the violinist Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni and it was attributed to David, no one should have been too surprised. That was in 1952, and about a decade later, they settled on Davin-Mirvault--but only after they could prove that she knew the violinist. The article continues:

"For the answer to that, [Dealer Georges] Wildenstein went to the diaries of a certain Mme. Moitte, one of Mme. Davin's cattier friends. On Feb. 3, 1806, Mme. Moitte went to Mme. Davin's for dinner. She reported that the wine was inferior, that the fried cakes were undercooked, and that the candles "reeked of grease." As a final social note, she added that Mme. Davin sang and that Signor Bruni "played the violin."

See the image at the Frick's site.

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

2007-03-09T14:30:00.000+02:00

Yesterday we looked at one case where a Villers was mistaken for a David. Today we have another one to consider. Here's the image in question.

That's the 1799 portrait of Dublin-Tornelle.
And here is a bit about it that I found here:
In 1943, the Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, Mass.) received this portrait of actor Dublin-Tornelle through a bequest of Harvard alumnus Grenville L. Winthrop. For twenty-eight years as part of the Fogg's permanent collection, the portrait was believed to be a David.

Biggest clue that it wasn't? Scholars estimated that the name 'David' was added to the image 26 years after David died. So, they took a look at the painting under ultraviolet lights. I know very little about this process, but apparently this shows a whole bunch of things, like if the painting was ever restored, over-cleaned, over-painted, varnished, etc. Read more here. Anyway, they looked at the painting under ultraviolet lights and they saw a totally different signature: Adélaïde Labille-Guiard.

Labille-Guiard was an accomplished painter, who painted the portraits of anyone who was anyone in Paris, where she was spent most her life. She was a respected teacher and spent many years teaching others to paint. AND, if that isn't enough, she was an activist. She took part in lobbying the academy to allow women to exhibit, and she was among the first women to do it. If you'd like to read more about her, here are a few links:
wikipedia
ladyreading
getty

Marie Denise Villers

2007-03-08T13:26:00.001+02:00

Yesterday's post found me asking myself why so few of the paintings Charpentier is known to have made are still with us. Where did they go? Well, today, we have one answer, and tomorrow, another. It concerns this painting:

It is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and when they acquired it, they attributed it to David. In 1951, their then-director, Charles Sterling, attributed it to Constance-Marie Charpentier. Evidence against Charpentier started to pile up, and finally it was decided that the painting was instead by Marie Denise Villers.

I'm sure no one will be surprised to hear that the painting lost considerable value when it no longer could be attributed to David. David, after all, was a master even in his own time. Is it then any wonder that collectors and dealers, eager to sell a painting with obvious technical merit and stylistic similarity would claim that it was his? It certainly is easier to sell (and for greater returns) with a famous name attached.

For a brief biography of Marie Denise Villers, click here.

Constance-Marie Charpentier

2007-03-07T12:56:00.000+02:00

Searching for women in my old text book for a 19th c. art class I took as an undergrad, I found Constance-Marie Charpentier. The text doesn't say much about her, other than that she was "one of many women artists who had studied with, among other masters, David". The link above will take you to the second edition, which is 20 years newer than the one I used. I wonder how it might have changed since then.

Melancholy, 1801
The text began by stating that this painting was exhibited at the 1801 Salon and goes on to describe this image in terms of David's painting Oath of the Horatii. The authors chose words like "prototype" and "source" for the relationship of David's image to Charpentier's. But the analysis offered in the text is most successful in cataloging the differences between the works, which leaves me wondering why they presented David as a foundation at all. Among these differences, the text noted Charpentier's drastically altered "emotional ambience", "mood of eternal sorrow", "bittersweet emotion . . . echoed in nature itself", "the weeping willow tree . . . seems virtually to grieve with her", "all the world . . . responds to this unspecified sorrow". And then it moves on to the next David-esque painter.

I've looked for more information about Charpentier, and haven't found much. This is from artnet:

She exhibited at the Salon from 1795 until 1819, when she received a gold medal. Like other female painters of her period, she specialized in sentimental genre scenes and portraits of women and children. Although she was considered by contemporary critics to be one of the finest portrait painters of the age, few works by her have been traced.

I find all of this very interesting. Carpentier doesn't seem like the kind of artist who should have just vanished from the record, or to only have her work spoken of as a derivative of David's. But that has clearly happened. Maybe some day I'll have the chance to do some research and fill the void surrounding her.

Berthe Morisot

2007-03-06T20:05:00.000+02:00

Before I write out even one more 'Women's History Month' post, I need to make something perfectly clear. While some (no, most) of my posts are taken right off the top of my head (with a dash of fact-checking), these are not. Well, I check my facts, but they're not spontaneous. Not that I couldn't easily list 3 dozen or more women artists who are just so darn knock-your-socks-right-off cool that they deserve a post all their own, because I could, and maybe in '08 I will do a month all about the women who come to my mind first. Since my interest in art is all tied up in modern/contemporary, the women I know most about tend to be recent, still living artists. But for this month, I'd really love to focus on the ones who did the dirty work 150, or 100 of 50 years ago. I want to know more about the women who set the stage for ones I've come to admire.

I think I can safely say that I never heard the name Berthe Morisot in any art class I have ever taken. Maybe I'd have learned about her if she had been American, or if my education had taken place in France. Art education gets nationalistic like that. Sad, but true. Morisot was French, and quite a good painter of landscapes.

Once Blogger decides to upload images again, I'll add one here.
Ah, here it is:

Like my Gardner post, Morisot is often compared with Cassatt. They date from the same period and were tied up in the same movement, Impressionism. The even shared quite a bit of subject matter. Women and children are prominent subjects in both painters' work, but Morisot tended more to landscape, to the out-of-doors plein-air moments that Monet and other Impressionists likewise chased.

Elizabeth Jane Gardner

2007-03-05T19:08:00.000+02:00

When you flip through most books about art and art history, you will find reference to very few women. Most of the women you will find will be from the second half of the 20th century, and it really is very good that the second half of the 20th century has yielded so many phenomenal women. But lets talk about the 19th century for a little while longer.

Those who have ever been given even a basic overview of the history of art will have heard of Mary Cassatt. She was an American who left for Paris where she really came into her own. Cassat was not the darling of American-lady-painters of the mid 1800s though, that was Elizabeth Jane Gardner. Like Cassat, Gardner left the US for better opportunities (ie. education) in Paris. She was the first American woman to win a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1872. The newspapers lauded her, the pubic loved her style (which is hard for me and any non-expert to tell apart from Bouguereau--not surprising. He was her instructor and eventually her husband).

Whereas Gardner was perhaps the foremost woman in art during her lifetime, Cassat was virtually unknown. The reverse is now true. Cassatt is well known today because a) the feminists have had so much fun analyzing her images of the spaces of femininity and b) her work was closely aligned with the Impressionists and they were clearly on the trajectory that produced Cezanne, Picasso, and Modernism. Gardner, though wildly successful during her life, wasn't part of the push toward abstraction. And I'm pretty sure a feminist reading of her work would tie itself in knots. Her subject matter was determined by the market--she painted what had been proven to sell well. A few decades later, her work had come to represent everything the avant garde had rejected, the style, the subject matter, all of it.

I was disapointed to find very little about Gardner online. The best resources are actually at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Anyway, Gardner is worthy of adminration. She set off for Paris to be a big success and she did just that.

Louise Nevelson

2007-03-02T20:48:00.001+02:00

I've written elsewhere that I don't have a favorite artist. But if I were to name contenders for the title, Louise Nevelson would be on the list. She died nearly 20 years ago, so I wonder if she still counts as 'recent'. Anyway, she was known for making things like this:

She built these (sometimes massive) collages usually out of scrap wood and whatever a carpenter might have discarded. And, like the one pictured here, the final product was painted all in one color--usually black, but she also used white or the occasional gold. The gold ones look like a kind of schizophrenic altar. Anyway, the first time I saw one of these sculptures in real life was in the art museum in Mannheim. Pictures of her work aren't nearly as much fun to look at as the real thing.

There are lots of completely subjective reasons why I like her work. I like that she went monochrome. I like that she made use of found objects. I like that she put things in boxes, and I find her arrangement of those filled-boxes pleasing. I like that her work challenges what it is to be 'sculpture'.

Women's History Month

2007-03-01T13:48:00.000+02:00

I'm not sure where this idea came from, but as soon as it arrived in my head I knew it was the kind of idea that was going to eventually take shape. The title of this post has done some of the explaining for me. I was reminded a few weeks ago that March is Women's History month (FYI Feb. was Black History month). As I understand it, the concept of Women's History is to educate us all about what women were doing, how they lived, what their lives were like etc. and also to write women into the histories that have overlooked them. A big job. Yeah.

So, anyway, about a year ago, Katie bequeathed me all of her books from a college feminism course. I hadn't read them before, nor had I read anything feminist that wasn't directly related to art history. But I recently picked one up: "Gender, Power, & Promise: The Subject of the Bible's First Story". I have no time to do justice to the book or my experience of reading it. No TIME. So I won't even tell you if I thought it was good, or interesting, or anything. But I read it, and reading it got me thinking about the old testament and the lessons I learned about it during all those years of childhood Sunday school.

There's a song that kids sing at church "Follow the Prophet", and you can read the whole text here. Its got a zippy, middle-eastern-sounding melody (well, what I really mean is Jewish sounding, but my brother in law will call me racist if I write that, but really, it could be in the background while tevia dances. I mean, come on people.) and kids love to sing it. Problem is, all the OT prophetesses have been left out. Enter Women's History month, give me a few weeks for my subconscious to chew on the idea, and Poof! In my free time between waking up and lunch you've got three new verses. Enjoy.

(Judges 4)
Deborah was a prophet—she judged Israel.
Led them into battle, triumphed with Jael.
God will guide our leaders, women can lead too.
They will show the way to God for me and you.

(2 Kings 22 & 23)
Huldah was a prophet—she warned Judah’s king
“keep the law, repent! or evil I will bring”
Humbled by the word, the king changed Judah’s ways
Huldah’s counsel lengthened out the city’s days.

(Luke 2:36-38)
Anna was a prophet in Jerusalem.
Recognized redemption’d come to all of them.
Anna testified that Jesus was the one,
just as all the prophets ’fore and since have done.

Happy Women's History Month, everyone. I've decided to have a women-centric month at Impart Art. Women are too often overlooked and left out, even on this blog.

Another Flag

2007-02-28T21:52:00.000+02:00

In case you've forgotten (or never saw) the other flag that has been featured here, go ahead and click.

Barbara Kruger Untitled 1991
photographic silkscreen/vinyl, 66 x 93 inches

Discuss, if you wish.

I am frankly too busy to deal with this blog right now, so yes, that's all I'm doing today.

Visualized Data

2007-02-23T13:09:00.000+02:00

Visual representations of otherwise texty/numbery data are a big deal in certain fields. Some of these are artsy, and others aren’t. Take my post about Mark Lombardi, whose complicated graphs are held in the collections of major museums and were consulted as evidence in the aftermath of 9/11. And speaking of the aftermath of 9/11, those handy terror-alert-warning-whatevers—well, they’re another visual tool, a translation of (probably massive amounts of) texty/numbery stuff that is not at all artsy (or useful if you ask me).

My scientist-dad, for example, has told me that there are artists/designers out there, employed by the scientific community to create illustrations, teasers, if you will that help normal folk and scientists alike easily and quickly grasp a complicated reaction or biochemical situation.

And my husband uses graphs, charts, and other visual helps to plan projects and track information and processes. Like government terror alerts, these are really far from any kind of artistic/creative impulse. They exist not (just) to look cool, but because people respond well to it. It works.

So visualized data works, and it work quickly. But the translation from data to image doesn’t always go well. When that happens you (of course) end up with an image that hurts more than it helps. Since I’m totally enamored of visual things, I tend to take these visual gaffs as affronts rather than mere errors. Here’s one such data-to-image failure that came into my home on a bottle of oil:

Right. I’m no mathematician, and I don’t make graphs for a living either, but take a look at the yellow indicators. 61% and 28% are shown to be equivalents, as are 7% and 14%. Worse still, 48% is shown bigger than 49%, which makes me think these people weren’t even trying.

Well, they were trying to get the saturated fat indicator right. Canola has the least. Yup. Got that. But Canola also has far and away the MOST of the good, monounsaturated fat. Canola isn't just low on damage, it hands-down wins for being good. But if you relied on your inclination (which is to look at the picture) you'd miss that all together.

So, since I'm on a crusade and all, I corrected it. Here's how it ought to look (with the minor error that 'trace values' are indicated as 1 whole percent):

The Fabric of an Anchor

2007-02-20T12:26:00.000+02:00

Sometimes, I’m amazed by how much I remember from my undergrad days—it's an awful lot. And oddly, I seem to remember a great many off-hand remarks that weren’t part of any lecture or academic program at all. One such memory was jogged when I saw these:

Those are the stamps that my sister put on the valentines she sent us (thanks!). Pretty neat looking, I say. In addition to jogging some art-related memories, my honest reaction to these stamps is, “Does any country have cooler stamps than America?” I’m guessing not.

Back to the memory called up by these stamps – I can still see my American art teacher digressing briefly from the lecture into a description of her occasional presentations to women’s groups at local churches. She was church-going and an expert in American art, a combination that made this kind of request not uncommon. The story of American Art can't be told without the 20th century developments that have left many ‘normal’ people with the sense that art is not for them, not relatable, and not relevant. Women’s church groups are usually full of these normal people. So, to give them an anchor in an otherwise incomprehensible sea of shapes and colors, she brought in quilts. As illustrated by my sister’s (I can safely bet) carefully chosen stamps, there isn’t much difference in the appearance of some American abstraction and many American quilts. My teacher had (rather brilliantly) appealed to something her audience already accepted and understood. Quilters know all about the formal concerns that any artist would face, and rarely are they derailed by the abstract, non-representational (meaning that the colors and forms depict nothing recognizable from the natural world), expressive elements of quilt designs. Bravo to my teacher for finding a way to make art relatable, to make it accessible to women who might only have seen the differences between modern painting and the painting hanging above their sofa back home.

The quilts in the stamps are from the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective. The story of their community is an inspiring tale of survival, perseverance, and hard work. I don’t think I can salute them enough.

Yet Another Thesis Update

2007-02-16T13:23:00.000+02:00

I haven't done a thing on my thesis in nearly a month, and today I've decided to put a stop to that nonsense. Oh, such a saga. I mean, come on. Aside from the obvious, what's my probelm?

Art Education: Quotes

2007-02-15T13:53:00.001+02:00

". . . lately the artist has been misled by the fatal and arrogant fallacy, fostered by the state, that art is a profession which can be mastered by study. Schooling alone can never produce art!"

"Theory is not a recipe for the manufacturing of works of art, but the most essential element of collective construction; it provides the common basis on which many individuals are able to create together a superior unit of work; theory is not the achievment of individuals but of generations."
-- Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, 1923

"The artist must follow his inner leading independent of fads and fashions, therefore art education should take this individual inner direction more seriously than is done at present. Art teaching is not soap manufacture."
-- Hans Hofmann, 1932

". . . the general liberal arts culture is highly desirable in a painter's training. The artist must know more today than he had to know in former years. My own art students, for example, get a general course in natural science - not with any idea of their specializing in biology or physics, but because they need to know what is going on in the modern world. The main thing is to teach students to think, and if they can to feel."
-- Grant Wood, 1935

"Science looks and observes, Art sees and foresees. Every great scientist has experienced a moment when the artist in him saved the scientist. 'We are poets', said Pythagoras, and in the sense that a mathematician is a creator he was right."
-- Naum Gabo, 1937

Feb. 14

2007-02-14T14:22:00.000+02:00

This is the second anniversary of Hariri’s assassination. Our family has been instructed to stay home, which we are mostly doing, and it seems that no one else is. Massive demonstrations are going on down town, and I admit that I am worried about what might happen today and in the coming weeks. I’ve heard honking, yelling, sirens, etc. all morning. There is nothing quite like the threat of civil war/disturbance to nullify my interest in writing about art. It seems that everything is ok at the moment.

The girls and I made these hearts for Valentine’s Day.

Yes Kathleen, that’s the scrapbooking paper you gave me. Thanks again. Star also decided that we needed a cake (since all holidays require cake, didn’t you know that already?), so I made one with peaches and cream. If you know someone I love, kiss them for me.

Look and Listen

2007-02-13T12:10:00.000+02:00

If there’s anything better than visual art, it's the combination of it with music. I’m not talking about sound art. I’m not talking about Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk either (or anyone else’s for that matter). Today, I’m thinking about looking at one art while you listen to another. It is easy enough to craft such an experience. Just open a book of whatever you think is great art while listening to whatever it is that you consider great music. If you chose to do that, you can create the experience you want to have. But sometimes, you find yourself unexpectedly in the middle of such an experience—someone else’s un/intentional creation. As a student, I went to a fair number of concerts in the campus art museum. The most impressive of these was an African drum troop, whose rhythms and resonances created (bizarrely) a counterpoint to the rather stark austerity of the space they played it. As I attempt to describe their music, I come up with things like earthy, traditional, cultural—the opposite of the museum’s deliberately sleek modernity. Another memorable visual/auditory experience took place in a little jewel of a rococo theater in Germany. It was a pleasure to watch Mozart’s Magic Flute performed in a theater that would have been in operation when the opera was written (though by 1791 it would have been out-moded and passé).

I’ve mentioned the blog of the St. Louis Museum of Contemporary Art before—in the same sound art post linked above. It was on their blog that I learned of another visual/auditory experience going on at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. They’ve got a weekly concert series in the museum and you can get free podcasts of the performances. I think today must have been my lucky day.

As for tomorrow, well, lets just wait and see. Keep your fingers crossed for us because in Lebanon, Valentines Day will be a big afterthought.

World of Music

2007-02-09T12:58:00.001+02:00

Here's a picture of some of the musical toys that our kids have. I can't believe that the accordion didn't make it into this photo! I also missed the triangle. And though they aren't toys, we've also got an ok-ish keyboard and a super-duper violin in the house.

I've named and given a bit of information about each item's origin.
1. Guitar (French, real but tiny enough for a toddler to handle)
2. Thumb piano (Nairobi)
3. Double ended shaker (Nairobi)
4. Dried gourd with cowry shell shaker (Nairobi)
5. Percussion frog (Germany, missing the mallet)
6. Oud (Beirut-very cheaply made, child sized)
7. Tablah (Beirut-like the one Bonnie bought last year, but kid sized)
8. Rababa (Beirut-this one has one string, but they can have up to three)
9. Sajat (Beirut-originally a set of four, one missing, they work like castanets)
10. Plastic tambourine, maracas, and ankle bells (what remains from a bigger set that included a recorder, kazoo, other percussion instruments)
11. Wooden rattle (Germany, a baby present for Star)
12. Xylophone-piano Alligator (another cheap toy-instrument gift)

Always Anterior

2007-02-08T19:31:00.001+02:00

Here's another T-shirt idea that I've had floating around in my head for a while. I really like this one, even more than that's so bourgeois. But alas, my brain has long since been finished for the day, so I'll leave the explaining for tommorow.

Big fat bonus points for anyone who can pin down the reference without googling it. I suppose this is a sort of trick question.

Update--9 Feb 2007
In 1977, Roland Barthes (who wrote the much lauded Camera Lucida) wrote about literature: “The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.” His text ends with the statement “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” Then five years later, Sherrie Levine’s statement was published. It is 11 sentences long, and at least three of them were more or less directly lifted from Barthes. Her text includes the assertion that “We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.” It ends with “The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter.” The obvious nod to Barthes is an interesting element of a statement that originality is never going to happen.

I really like the idea of putting this claim on a shirt, which is the least original place for any text to appear. Plus, the words would go on the front of the shirt, literally anterior. Anyway, there is nothing original about logo-Ts or the text that you typically find on them. More often than not it's a brand identity, a play on words, or references an idea that did not start out having anything to do with a T-shirt.

Anyway, I really wonder if anyone would wear this shirt. I think people would worry that it reflects badly on them—as if they are admitting that they aren’t original either. I’d guess very few people are comfortable with the idea that they might not be different after all. Too many bad connotations there, I guess.

The Artist in Her Studio

2007-02-07T13:35:00.000+02:00

Star, shown here, painting her canvas of choice.

In other news, Matthew returned from Nairobi safe and sound 11 hours ago. He brought authetic African musical instruments with him that are too cool for words.

Faux-Science Art, Faux-Art Science

2007-02-06T14:04:00.000+02:00

As a person who knows very little about real science (and what little I know is entirely NOT my fault or doing), I appreciate humorous attempts at faux-science. My dad (ahem—the man solely responsible for the science I’ve managed to comprehend) once showed me a brochure, packed with information about an animal I’d never heard of—the nauga—and its plight to survive extinction given the huge human need for naugahyde. A few years following, my brother gave him a shining example of faux-science. A “Teach Your Chicken to Fly” book, complete with the aerodynamics of it worked out in graphs and charts, and all the metrics you’d need to reproduce the author’s results with your own flock. Brilliant, fake, and funny too.

More recently, J.K. Rowling published two of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts textbooks. “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” began with (what for children would certainly be) a very lengthy and involved discussion of the distinctions and classification criteria between beasts and beings. It included descriptions of how the borderline species came to be classified (including centaurs, fairies, goblins, merpeople, etc.), and the text reminded me forcibly of other texts dealing with technical distinctions (fine art vs. folk art, anyone?).

None of these forays into faux-science were made to be art. They were all made to be humor, jokes, hoaxes, etc. But recently I came across a book full of faux-science, fully intended as art. It is Julian Montague’s Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification. According to the publisher, “Montague is an artist and graphic designer whose various art projects address issues of scientific classification as they relate to our perceptions of the natural and man-made worlds.”

Ok. Yeah. No, really, I’m ok with that. I’d like to take a look at the book before I put my vote one way or the other. But the thing is, if it makes a better joke than work of art, I’m not sure what I’ll think. Does humor stop art dead?

On the flip side, I’ve seen way too much faux-art science lately. Boing boing linked to this “art-project” the other day.

It’s a tool that enables the user to share their payed-for web connection (at the airport, lets say) with any wireless device close by. The description on the creator’s web site described its art-value as follows:
the Wifi-Liberator critically examines the tensions between providers trying to profit from the increasingly minimal costs associated with setting up a public network and casual users who simply want to see the Internet transform into another "public utility" and become as ubiquitous and free as the air we breath. The project targets pay-per-use wireless networks as often found in airports, other public terminals, hotels, global-chain coffee shops, and other public waiting points.

So using this thing requires that you first buy into the system of pay-per-use. That’s a problem for me, or at least it seems like a dilemma that ought to be addressed. Further issues? Yes. The art, it seems, is not the thing, but the act of using it, which makes this a tool for a happening? For a performance piece centered in civil disobedience and theft? These are big issues that get in the way of the WIfi-Liberator’s claim to critical examination.

Another problematic scientific venture into art is the Bioglyphs project, described on their website as “a collaboration co-created by the Montana State University–Bozeman School of Art, the Center for Biofilm Engineering, and billions of bioluminescent bacteria.” Said bacteria are grown in petri dishes and arranged into aesthetically pleasing compositions.

They are cool looking, to be sure. But I don’t think that makes them art. It isn’t just about aesthetics. Plus, I’ve got issues with referring to the bacteria as a “collaborator”. They no more collaborate than wind collaborates with a mobile. The bacteria are totally indifferent to the scientist/artist's creative vision.

So, that’s my current feeling on artists doing faux-science and scientists doing faux-art. I’m convinced that science/technology can make a pretty picture or a political statement, but that art requires more. And I remain convinced that “hilarious art” is at best dubious and at worst a contradiction.

Tragic Consequences befall PFVP

2007-02-05T13:23:00.000+02:00

Beirut--Recent reports confirm that the P. Family Video Project (PFVP) has been brought to an abrupt halt. Sources close to the family have confirmed that the video camera was rendered non-operational by the youngest P., Dandelion, less than a week ago. Eyewitness accounts place the camera with the child mere seconds before it plunged downward, violently colliding with the composite-stone and marble floors of the family’s dwelling. Yet the family chose to take no immediate action, a choice that certainly did nothing to prevent tragic consequences. “I honestly didn’t think anything of it. We’ve dropped that thing a hundred times and nothing ever happened to it. I didn’t even consider that it might be broken,” the family’s disheartened matriarch confided. “Later, when the girls were finger painting, I thought it would be great to capture that moment—but the camera definitely wasn’t functioning.” It was at that point that she noticed the camera’s cracked casing, damage surely caused by the impact.

The PFVP began early in 2004 with the family’s purchase of a Sony Handy Cam. After creating the project’s first 15 DVDs, the camera began to emit a high-pitched whine, and was promptly replaced with the higher-end Panasonic ?? in October 2005. Five DVDs later, the camera was abducted from the family home on March 6, 2006. It remains at large. Since that time the PFVP has relied on the very JVC Digital Video Camera that met its demise less than a week ago.

Of course, the family has only begun to consider how they will cope with this most recent loss. “It was a good camera. Even though it was inexpensive, I was very pleased by the quality of the video output. I don’t know what we will do without it, and I’m not sure how we will replace it. All of our previous cameras were purchased in the United States. The Lebanese technology market is a joke—so we won’t buy one on location,” a family spokesperson said.

Importing a new camera is not an option and the family is not expecting to visit the US until July 2007. If they wait until then to replace the unit, it will mark an unprecedented delay in the PFVP’s production.

Inside sources have suggested that the viewers might not notice this most recent setback. “We have five DVDs waiting in the wings. We expect those disks to bridge any gap that our audiences may have perceived. By the time the as-yet unreleased disks have been distributed and viewed it is likely that we will have resolved hardware issue we now face.”

Still, the PFVP’s critics and fans alike have expressed concern about the future viability of the project. In a telephone conversation yesterday, one critic questioned the family’s commitment to the project. “At some point, you have to consider what these folks are up against. They live in a war-torn wasteland that can barely keep the power on and the sky from falling, and you wanna tell me that they’re going to find the kind of technology they need? Ok, ok, sure they can find it, but c’mon. These people are cheap. They aren’t going to shell out $200 more than they would pay at Staples.” Although prospects are grim, PFVP fans met in candle-light vigils through out the country to sing and pray. “We are here to give people hope. To tell them not to give up. PFVP is forever. It isn’t just a fad or a dream. Matthew and Mary Ann know that. They know we are counting on them, and we know they will never let us down.”

Magic Markers

2007-02-02T10:36:00.001+02:00

The other day I took the kids to a toy store because we were in dire need of new playdough and finger paint. Actually, we still are in need--neither was found. Well, technically I found playdough: two tubs sold with a super pasta factory. Or I could have bought a playdough sandwich making kit (with four tubs; white for bread, yellow for cheese, green for lettuce, and pink for meat) but it was frankly too gross. And I was not about to add to the amount of plastic-junk toys that we own, so we passed on playdough all together. Finger paint just wasn't there. But these were:

Crayola makes these great window/mirror markers that, according to the package, wash off skin and clothing (and of course the glass too). Magic. Since my kids inadvertently mark all kinds of things other than the intended surface, that promise was a selling point (even at nearly $1/marker). The washable thing is presently an untested feature, so I'll update this post after I've done the laundry. Meanwhile, more and more of our windows will be scribbled on.

That’s How It Happened

2007-02-01T12:54:00.002+02:00

Sometimes, it takes diving into obscurity to identify obvious things in plain sight. That’s what happened to me today. I thought you’d enjoy seeing both the obscurity and the obvious that was so plainly visible that I had never really identified it before now.

I use bloglines, a service that checks almost all the blogs I read for me. One of these is the official blog of the St. Louis Museum of Contemporary Art. They are about to host a concert, and asked a local grad student to write about the composer--Morton Feldman. Here’s what I read:

Beckett's radio play "Words and Music" attracts immediate curiosity with nothing but its dramatis personae: Croak, a master and moderator, and his two charges, Joe (Words) and Bob (Music). Croak and Joe express themselves through the customary words and nonverbal expressions, but Bob's "voice" is literally music, played by a small chamber ensemble consisting of two flutes, vibraphone, piano, violin and cello, its "lines" indicated in the script by vague directions as to mood and dynamics. The role of the score in creating the actual utterances of a dramatic character presents a fascinating and extremely difficult problem to the composer, as attested to by the ultimate failure of the original score (by Beckett's cousin) and Feldman's writings on his own trials and tribulations while working on the play.

So I was thinking about how I always mix up vibraphones and theremins in my mind, and how much cooler the play would be scored for a theremin. And then I was thinking about how enormous the idea is behind Beckett’s play, which caused me to reflect on my own inclination to judge anything “ideaful” as a thing of art. And that jogged my memory of an introductory visual arts class that I took when I was 17. They brought in new art stuff every week that I had never heard of, and most of which I can’t remember well enough to find further information on. One such “cool new thing” was an artist who had attempted to let the ears see and the eyes hear. I wish I had more information, but that is really all I could remember. I took that to google, and one advanced search later found an Artforum (great magazine with free online membership, which I immediately signed up for) review of a huge sound art exhibit in Berlin, which contained this paragraph:

Too rarely did the artists seem to be asking, “Why sound?” “Why sound in this work?” or “Why this sound?” If sound art is to end up being something more than a subcategory of visual art that makes noise, it will need to think through these questions and consider the auditory as a problematic field rather than simply as another sensory modality to stimulate. Perhaps within the next decade, those artists who engage sound will more fully make this conceptual turn, and “Sonambiente 2016” will showcase a vigorous and fresh (and not merely sustained) sound-art practice.

And that was where I had “oh, look what was right here in plain sight” realization. The idea of art as problematic: of course. Is art anything more often than problematic? What I find really interesting about art – truly engaging about art – are the problems inherent to representation. A great many of my Impart Art entries center on art’s problems, and a great many of western art’s recent masterpieces are masterpieces because they illustrate lingering visual problems (either by pointing them out or attempting to resolve them). Images and words and sounds and ideas and all of this can be engaged in a discussion of the problems of representation. At least, that’s what images and words and sounds and ideas do if they are going to convince me that they are art.

Trompe L'Oeil

2007-01-31T14:10:00.000+02:00

Here's another installment extolling Beirut's artsy side. Two years ago I strollered Star to and from pre-school each day, walking a route that took us right past a little shop called Trompe L'Oeil. Looking through the big picture window on their storefront, I could see that the shop was full of children's things. Tiny stepping stools, hangers, toy boxes, book cases, kid-size table and chair sets, etc. All wood. All painted (usually with animals and plants). I loved it, but I knew it wasn't going to come cheap, so I waited. And waited. Waited some more because that is what I do. And bought!

If they had a webpage, I'd link to it, but since they don't, here's a scan of the business card they left with me. That black streak is my hand turning the card over while the scanner took it all in.

So, back to buying things. Star and Dandelion have (for about half a year now) been in a phase where just about everything has to have a nap time. Spoons, scrubbrushes, shoes. I have even been scolded for interrupting said naps unintentionally. So I requested a doll size cradle in an effort to create less trauma for my dear little mommie-daughters. The second purchase had less to do with the girls and more to do with war-induced shortages. After the summer-war, plastic storage boxes (big ones) have been hard to come by. When you find them, they're likely to be totally expensive and flimsy. Anyway, I need more even though I already have lots. They were all in use, and the only one that I could imagine repurposing to hold other stuff was the one serving as the girls' toy box. So, to free up the tub for other storage, I got the ladies a 'real' toy box. It is exactly what a toy box ought to be: huge with a lid, and hinges that prevent said lid from smashing fingers. Ah, perfection.

Body of Fashion

2007-01-30T13:11:00.001+02:00

NY fashion week begins in a few days. Today WWD ran a 15 web-page article on the current push within the NY fashion industry to encourage ‘healthy’ models—discouraging those who are too young, too skinny, or both. Their move has been preceded by more concrete action in Milan, where regulations are in place requiring models to have a body mass index no less than 18.5 (the lowest ‘normal weight’ BMI) and be at least 16 years old. Regulations have not been introduced in the US, but the mere suggestion that they might be got 15 pages worth of fashion-professional backlash, with designers, models, their agents, advertisers, magazine editors, etc. all pointing the finger at the other guy. Designers insisted that they don’t care what a model weighs—just so long as she has the ‘right look’. Models scoffed at the notion that they might not ‘naturally’ be so thin. Agents swore that they would fill the demand for not-so-skinny models if there was one. But there isn’t. Advertisers claimed that they’d already been avoiding stick-insects, opting for ‘fitness’. Same goes for editors. And all of them blamed Hollywood. Since neither has a monopoly on showcasing underweight women, lets just leave that as the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum that it is.

I don’t really care if they regulate this aspect of the fashion industry or not. My personal feelings about the super-skinny prevalence in fashion has little to do with its practical aspects. And the current popularity of the very tall, very skinny look has some practicality to it. For example, tailoring around curves is much harder than tailoring their absence. It simply takes less work to fit a thinner, flatter figure. Thin figures also do a better job of disappearing under the clothes. When a model walks down the runway, you don’t want the audience thinking “oooh, look at that figure!”. Nope. You want them to focus on the clothes. So you go with a body type that on its own isn’t that impressive. As for the height, it too serves the presentation of the clothing. Details of construction and design are more apparent on a tall figure than a short one.

Although they follow some of the same meta-trends (charted over centuries and millennia) fashion and art are rarely alike. Oh they both involve 'artists' realizing a 'vision', and they both have aesthetic elements. And they both exist in rather insulated worlds that interface cautiously and rarely with the 'real' world. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, fashion can’t get away from the body. It needs it. The body reflects on fashion and fashion on the body. Art? Comparatively, bodies don’t have a thing to do with it.

On Rightness

2007-01-29T12:37:00.000+02:00

In rhapsodies of praise for its “inner living quality”, George Rowley wrote of Mu Ch‘i and his Six Persimmons (ink on silk, 13th c.), in his book Principles of Chinese Painting. Here's a scan of the rather poor image in the book:

“Mu Ch‘i can paint six persimmons upon a square foot of silk so that the tensions between them seem to be inexhaustible. Not only is each circle of fruit perfectly adjusted to all the others by the equilibrium of the intervals, but the measure of those intervals is accentuated by the ideographic stems in black ink and strong brush which unmistakably mark the distances and the rising and falling movement within the group. Rightness of interval, furthermore, is bound up with the shapes of the motifs. What nuances arise from the full round curve of one persimmon and the flattened contour of another in relationship to the distance between them!” (pgs. 6 & 59)

Hmm. I actually would like to know what nuances arise, because I’ve missed it.

Rowley’s book was published in 1947, with a second edition in 1959. That goes a long way toward explaining why he used words like “perfect” and “rightness” to describe the composition and placement of the fruit. These words have long since fallen out of favor, at least in the context of formal analysis. Also, note that Rowley failed to describe why these particular persimmons are such a famous example of Chinese painting. Instead of proving the matter, he no more than declares it to be so. We know that he sees inexhaustible nuance in the relational-placement of the fruit and that’s about all.

One of the biggest reasons to be upset by Rowley’s failure to explain the underlying principles of Chinese composition is that most viewers will need to be shown how to recognize ‘perfection’. I doubt many of us intuitively see it or comprehend it. I know I don’t. In my very first art history class I was shown these two quatrefoils, by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi. The high-relief sculptures were these artists’ entry in a competition for the honor of designing the east doors of the baptistery of Florence (around 1400):

Our lecturer asked us to guess which quatrefoil won, and went on to explain that composition had a lot to do with who won and who lost. Can you pick the composition with greatest ‘rightness’? That day in class I chose the wrong one, and honestly this is an exercise that I still have trouble with. Although I have long since learned to recognize western art’s conventional appearances, I still vividly recall when I couldn’t see it at all.

Version Inversion

2007-01-26T14:00:00.001+02:00

Just over four months ago, the summer's war ended and we returned to Beirut with a big fat layover in London. With the kids in tow there wasn’t much to do but wait and keep them happy, which we did. By the time our flight boarded I was kind of brain-dead, but not too much to appreciate a rather insightful ad-campaign by HSBC, a British bank self-proclaimed to be “the world’s local bank.” That they have branches enough in Beirut seems to indicate that they’re managing.

Anyway, because of this international focus, their advertising frequently highlights the differences among the cultures of the world. The implication is that because we humans are such a diverse bunch, you really do need HSBC to navigate all the madness for you. But let’s put their conclusion aside for the moment and just focus on the first clause—we humans are such a diverse bunch. Returning to the scene in the airport, where I first saw the ad-series, I had to agree that there was wild disagreement among many of us about lots of things. Consider these two examples, which I think are ideal illustrations.

As I walked through the jet way I saw probably a dozen of these. I was impressed. The ads each reduce a debate—each one a matter of taste—to its most irreducible form.

Simple images and words show this flawlessly and concisely. There are quite a few ways this “irreducible form” can be expressed in English: one man’s trash is another’s treasure, to each his own, etc. People aren’t crazy for liking shoes we don’t or for loathing the food we adore. But imagine if this idea was elevated to something more significant than one’s taste in music. Ooh, look, you don’t have to imagine.

Here’s one I created based on the HSBC originals, none of which were controversial. But you could do this with a seemingly endless number of hotly debated subjects, and I think the end result would be the same. Well, except that at some point, most of us would opt out of the “to each his own” reaction. In complete honesty, I would doubt the sanity (well, more likely the intelligence and exposure to information) of anyone who thought either Nasrallah or Bush was any kind of hero. In both cases, I’d be much more sympathetic to (though unconvinced by) the terrorist argument.

Keeping it Real

2007-01-25T11:45:00.000+02:00

Terra sent us a lovely box of surprises a few months ago, which included two sets of flashcards to help kids learn numbers/counting and words/spelling. We were going through them the other day, and when we got to this one, I asked Star how many wheels the wagon had.

She said three. For a moment I had no idea what to say or how to respond. She’s right, of course. There are only three wheels in that picture. But wagons have four wheels. They just do.

Realism. It’s probably art’s most problematic ‘ism’ for exactly the reason Star illustrated. Can the flashcard picture be said to be realistic with only three wheels? It looks enough the way a wagon might from that angle, but that view of it doesn’t show all that the wagon is. It is, if anything only partially representative of a wagon’s reality. When it comes right down to it, what should realism mean?

Was it realism when Monet tried to paint light the way it actually looked? Was it realism when Courbet rejected painting’s conventional composition in favor of a more jumbled ‘real’ look? Or was it realism when artists, more than a century ago, started looking at fruit bowls and bathers from three or four different places and rendered each of those views on a single canvas. You could argue (and Star would likely agree) that they were being more real, truer to the whole reality of the depicted thing.

Instead of calling something realistic, we art-farts tend to call it ‘representational’, 'photo-real', 'hyper-real', 'naturalistic', etc., because realism means so many things that it in the end means nothing.

Its a Fact

2007-01-24T12:35:00.000+02:00

Back around Christmas '05, I had one of my favorite art books re-enter my life and blogged about it here. The following exercise was taken from that book, Communications: The Transfer of Meaning.

"To most of us, this is a pretty familiar scene. So familiar that we may tend to feel that we see more in it than is there for us to see. Try answering the questions below and see how you come out."

"Which of the following statements are true, false, or cannot be answered at all?"

1. The Jones family owns a TV set
2. Johnny is doing his homework while he watches TV
3. Johnny's father is a stockholder.
4. The screen is showing a scene from a Western.
5. Mrs. Jones is knitting a sweater.
6. Mr. Jones is a cigar smoker.
7. There are three people in the room.
8. The Jones family subscribes to TIME, LIFE, and FORTUNE.
9. The Jones family consists of Mr. Jones, Mrs. Jones and Johnny.
10. They have a cat for a pet.
11. They are watching an evening television show.

I'll post the answers right here tomorrow.

--update 25 Jan 2007--
And now for the answers, by the book:
1. You do not know that the set is owned by them; it could be borrowed, or a demonstration set.
2. You do not know whether Johnny is doing homework or not; all you can see is that he has a book in front of him.
3. You do not know that Johnny's father is a stockholder; you only know he is looking at the stock market report. Matter of fact, you don't know he is Johnny's father, either. He may be an uncle or friend just visiting the house.
4. You do not know that it is a Western. It could be a commercial or a foreign-made movie, or almost anything else.
5. You do not know that it is Mrs. Jones, and you can not tell what she is knitting.
6. You do not know that Mr. Jones (if, indeed, that is Mr. Jones) actually smokes cigars. You only can see that there is a cigar on the ashtray. Perhaps someone else left it there.
7. You do not know how may people might be in the room; you can only see that there are three people in the part of the room shown in the picture.
8. You do not know what magzines they subscribe to. The ones on the table may have be purchased at the newsstand or loaned by a friend.
9. You do not know if this is the Jones family; nor can you tell if there are other members of the family who are not present.
10. Could be a neighbor's cat, making itself "at home."
11. You cannot tell if it is evening or not; only that the lights are on. Perhaps it is midday and the shades have been drawn.

Confession

2007-01-23T12:26:00.000+02:00

I collect paper:

And I obviously love patterns that frequently repeat.

I have never once thought of my paper collection as anything other than; a) evidence that I am a packrat, b) a reflection of my taste and whimsy, and finally c) a waste-not-want-not aesthetic and world view that has thus far prevented me from actually spending money on pretty paper. I don't see these as art, even though they are all artfully done.

What, then, does this have to do with art? Probably not a whole lot. It might go a long way to explain my taste, preference for contemporary art and geometric patterns. It might not.

But confessing my paper-collecting mania provides a convenient opportunity to discuss the difference between the scraps that appeal to me and the very different reality of art. One of art's problems that comes up again and again is the difference between designing something and making art. Rephrased, the difference between arts and graphic arts. The two have enough in common to confuse things. Looking at the papers in the image, you can tell they didn't happen by accident. Each one of them was designed by someone who chose each color, shape, where it would appear on the page, etc. There is an element of deliberate, intentional, conscious doing within graphic arts, all aimed at creating an appealing end result.

Art, on the other hand, has questioned the need for deliberation, intention, for conscious trying. I have also come to expect art to provide at least something to think about. All of the paper in my collection is decorative only. Even though it wasn't made to make me think, it does. If it inspires any intellectual thought, it is this: some papers more successfully reach the intended purpose of the paper. Some of the papers are security envelope patterns. YES, I saved envelopes if the inside was pretty. The harmony of their design and function is interesting to me, especially that one with the word EXECUTIVE printed in the interwoven lines. Here you've got a paper (third from the bottom) that tells you not only what it is for, but who as well. Whenever form and function meet in spectacular (or even above-average) fashion, you'll end up having a discussion about high and low art. Fine and applied art. Art and craft. Blech. But I like it anyway.

Look Right!

2007-01-22T23:05:00.000+02:00

They're all called David.

From left to right youve got Donatello 1428-1432, Verrocchio 1465-1470, Michelangelo 1501-1504, and Bernini 1632. That they all appear to be looking to the right is an odd coincidence. If you click the picture you'll be able to view a much bigger, lovelier image.

Anyway, what you see up there is 200 years worth of Florentine self-conceptualization. David, the city's symbol, certainly went through a lot during those years. He grew up for one. Donatello's bored, navel-gazing little boy ends up as Bernini's feisty hero, one good twist away from slaying Goliath and losing his delicate drapery. I have no idea what Verrocchio was thinking. David looks down-right feminine, like a cheerleader. After the first two, your first thought on seeing Michelangelo's might be "Where's the decapitated head?" The first two are self contained statements: David victorious. Michelangelo's David looks to the left, preparing to cast the stone. The statue is directed outward, only depicting half the story. Same with the Bernini. David's posture implies that Goliath is on the receiving end of his sling.

Say it like an Art Historian

2007-01-19T08:35:00.001+02:00

Shortly after Dandelion was born (a mere 20 months ago) I was up to my eyebrows in the highly theoretical texts that eventually lead to my thesis. As I read and reread, I found myself looking up the same words again and again. So, I started keeping track of them, and whenever I read I refered to and updated my list. Some of these words are now very familiar and I actually use them without feeling strange or somehow dishonest. Others are so new to me that I still forget what they mean without my handy list.

Here is a short version of my list; the words you definitely need to know to read about art:

Agonistics: The science of athletic combats, or contests in public games.
Bifurcation: Forked or divided into two parts or branches, as the Y-shaped styles of certain flowers.
Countervail: To act against with equal force; counteract. ~or~ to compensate for; offset.
Desideratum: Something considered necessary or highly desirable
Diachrony: Change occurring over time.
Elide: To omit, cut short, abridge, eliminate, strike out.
Fealty: the fidelity of a vassal or feudal tenant to his lord
Hegemony: The predominant influence, as of a state, region, or group, over another or others.
Hermeneutic: Interpretive; explanatory.
Heterogeneity: the quality of being diverse and not comparable in kind
Heuristic: Of or relating to a usually speculative formulation serving as a guide in the investigation or solution of a problem
Metonymy: A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power.
Obscurantism: A policy of withholding information from the public.
Paralogy: False reasoning; paralogism.
Performativity: optimization of the global relationship between input and output, the true goal of a system.
Polemical: Of or relating to a controversy, argument, or refutation.
Polysemic: having more than one meaning; having multiple meanings
Quixotic: Caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; idealistic without regard to practicality.
Reifying: To regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence.
Shoah: The mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis during World War II
Sublate: To negate, deny, or contradict.
Sublimation: An unconscious defense mechanism in which unacceptable instinctual drives and wishes are modified into more personally and socially acceptable channels.
Synaesthetic: a concomitant sensation
Telluric: of or pertaining to the earth: terrestrial.
Vituperative: Using, containing, or marked by harshly abusive censure.

Sue Me

2007-01-18T12:39:00.001+02:00

One of the things that they tell you you can do with a degree in Art History is pursue a career in Art Law.

I've decided that you'd be better off studying law.

The other day, I came across The Art Law Blog, which is maintained by a NY law firm specializing in copyright, non-profit organizations, media, and art too.

Anyway, just knowing The Art Law Blog is out there is of great comfort to me. For a while, I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of all my favorite artists-getting-sued cases out there, because they raise very interesting questions about authorship, reputation, originality, and so on. Turns out they've got the present pretty well covered.

I suppose I could still compile a list of my favorite historic law suits. And who knows, maybe I will.

Unapologetic Thievery

2007-01-17T13:04:00.000+02:00

Today I’m not much for pontification. This stunning image (swiped from my sister’s blog) depicts the even more stunning (splitting hairs?) art of Dale Chihuly.

Between Christmas and New Year’s when everyone was together the whole family went to the St.Louis Botanical Garden to see the installation he currently has there. Back in 2005 there was a similar “glass in the garden” display in London. I saw a short segment on CNN about it, envied a friend who got to see it in person, and now, envy my whole family because they’ve seen something equally impressive right in their backyard.

I’ve seen Chihulys in real life only once (or possibly twice--I’m forgetful) and that was certainly a “stumbled over it in my backyard” kind of experience. Anyway, it’s just one more reason to wish I was there.

Art: Because I Say So

2007-01-16T09:56:00.000+02:00

Even though he’s not my favorite artist, Andy Warhol does provide good fodder for Impart Art, and for contemporary art generally. One of the very first installments of Impart Art described a short-on-cash assistant who in 1968 produced a new series of silkscreen paintings, forged Warhol’s signature, and made a deal with a gallery. As planned, all of this transpired without Warhol’s knowledge, who found out about the paintings only when the gallery owner asked for authentication of the works. He claimed them as his own, as well as payment for them (surely the assistant was disappointed).

In 1969, another assistant told the press that she had been doing all Warhol’s art for over a year. Warhol, she reported, had given up art. When asked by Time magazine about the matter, Warhol confirmed the report, only to retract the statement when infuriated collectors and dealers heard the news.

Can an artist outsource, and if so, how much? I know it isn’t uncommon among contemporary artists to hire skilled painters with good technique to execute ideas on their behalf. As far as I know, the painting is still considered the work of the one who thought of it. And let’s face it. Warhol wasn’t really “painting” anyway. So what if it was his arm working the silkscreen machine? But here, if you trust the assistants, Warhol wasn’t involved at all. His participation amounted to nothing more than his saying so. And he might not have even done that much if the buyers hadn't been scandalized.

Art Upside Down

2007-01-12T23:54:00.001+02:00

I was rummaging around on-line today and came across this book all about the wonderful world of ambigrams--a word that reads the same if you rotate it 180º. A good, simple example is the little word pod.

Photo credit
The book is called Wordplay, by John Langdon, who is something of an ambigram genius. The title as pictured is itself an ambigram. Of course, in whatever font Impart Art uses, Wordplay fails to look anything at all like itself when flipped upside down. Thus the art (or is it the science?) of ambigrams. To be able to tweak each letter just enough that it could double for something else upside-down is an amazing feat. Not saying it is Art, but an art for sure.

As for Art upside down, you’ve always got George Baselitz.

This is his “Tulips”, 1981, as it appeared in my one-painting-per-day 2003 calendar. Yes, I kept all the pages and in mint condition too.

Flipping words upside down is pretty entertaining, but an upside down image has other connotations. His work raised all kinds of questions about art and the art world. Had it been stood on its head? Some have said that Baselitz wanted to present recognizable things, but also keep the viewer from losing sight of the paint-and-canvasness of any painting. It really is harder to relate to an upside down image, and so you are more likely to notice color, form, composition and less likely to think about who knocked over the tulips.

And now, for the real treat of the post, upside down music. Years ago in middle school, there was a mini-concert during orchestra (third hour, I think). Two violinists, both decent and a year ahead of me, played a duet. They stood facing each other with a single sheet of music placed between them on a table. The one on the left played what he saw from top to bottom, as did the player on the right. In other words, the duet was a single set of notes played right-side-up and up-side-down at the same time.

It is attributed to Mozart, but apparently that is in question. Those of you who want to download a free copy of the duet can do so here. Scroll down until you see the German title “Der Spiegel”, in English, The Mirror.

That's so Bourgeois

2007-01-11T14:37:00.001+02:00

Sometimes, when I’m driving or otherwise bored, I design t-shirts and bumper stickers in my head. On one such occasion, I designed this:

. . . and ever since I’ve been trying to figure out if calling something Bourgeois is an insult.

Turns out it is, at least in some circles:
In the rhetoric of some Communist parties, "bourgeois" is sometimes used as an insult, and those who are perceived to collaborate with the bourgeoisie are called its lackeys. Marx himself primarily used the term "bourgeois", with or without sarcasm, as an objective description of a social class and of a lifestyle based on ownership of private capital, not as a pejorative. He admired the industriousness of the bourgeoisie, but criticised it for its moral hypocrisy. This attitude is shown most clearly in the Communist Manifesto.
(Wikipedia: Bourgeoisie)

Because there is a whole Marxist approach to art criticism (read more about it here, and original sources here)bourgeois is a term I've had floating around in my brain for a while. Before looking it up, I knew of lots of artists who had derided the bourgeois, but also knew that the term basically just meant "middle class". I’ve already acknowledged that I've got a bunch of stuff in my head that I know far too little about, and what I know is generally from the wrong angle. My knowledge of Marx is sort of like what I’d expect the average football enthusiast to know about sewing a sports jersey.

Anyway, I’m still wondering about that idea for a shirt. If I wore it, do you think anyone would understand it? Would anyone feel insulted? Would you wear it? Why or why not?

Signifier Signified

2007-01-10T10:13:00.000+02:00

If you don't get the title, don't worry. I didn't really get it for a long time too.

But then I was driving early in the morning years ago in Utah. There was no one else on the road, and you know how you can see for miles in some places because the valley is so flat. I was at one of those spots where I knew there was no one at all. Anyway, I came to an intersection and the light was red, so I stopped. When it turned green, the following thoughts flashed through my head in very quick succession as I drove on:

"green means go" - "but it doesn't. That color is just called green (a slight distinction, I know) and it only signifies right of way in this limited context."

It was the first time that I really understood the difference between our words and their referents, that it is all a construction and none of it (except words like *BANG*) has any essential connection to the concepts/objects they signify. Why does this matter? What does it have to do with art? Well, of course there's the whole disjuncture between a picture of something and the thing itself--analogous with the division between things and the way we name them.

The thing about art is that it has, for three decades or more, been quite aware of the theory that surrounds it, and again and again, the most successful works of contemporary art are actively involved in pushing the theory onward. Cindy Sherman's myriad images of herself in disguise are a good example of art that points to the fringes where the arguments gets gray and murky and shines a light on it. Sherman's work deserves a post of its own. Maybe next time.

Art Lounge, Beirut

2007-01-09T12:51:00.002+02:00

Back in October I went to the Art Lounge here in Beirut to see a friend's show of photographs from all around Asia. The rather large prints of her work were impressive and I now own three of them (christmas presents from my very put-upon spouse. I mean really. Who would want the task of buying me presents?). While I was at the show, I picked up a freebee postcard to go with the invitation to the show (left).

So, since I'm all interested in the arts and I'm here in Beirut, and the two intersect oh so infrequently, I thought I'd write about the experience at the lounge. First, they aren't kidding about being a lounge. It’s basically a bar/night club with art on the walls. I've never been to any show there except my friend's, so I don't know what else they have had there, so I can't tell you about the general quality of the art side of the "Art Lounge" business. Knowing that there is a lot more night-clubbing than art-going happening in this city, I'd have to guess that they are definitely an ok lounge and as for the general standard of the art . . . who knows.
They had a nice little book/gift shop, but without any art games I went away a bit disappointed. As for the location, it is fairly easy to get to, which is not a given in Beirut. They're right off the Dora highway right at the edge of the Beirut city limits, in just the kind of place that looks just the way dangerous places in the US look. Funny how my whole visual lexicon of places to avoid has been turned on its ear in this place.
Anyway, as a viewer in the gallery/lounge, I was very aware that I was being watched. People lounging with their drinks who might glance over at the exhibition would not be able to help glancing at me too. In a dedicated gallery, you've basically got a definite visual focus--the stuff on display. Everyone is there to see it. But start putting out chairs, tables, finger food and drinks, and all of a sudden, my viewership is being included in the viewership of others.
So, its sort of a strange place--a strange viewing experience. But the lounge makes art a little less rare around here, and that's a step in the right direction.

More Art Games

2007-01-08T12:43:00.000+02:00

Josh's recent posts' conflation of art and games (a genius combination, I think) put me in mind of some of my favorite art games. I've blogged about one already, a memory game based on famous paintings from the Alte & Neue Pinakothek in Munich. This was the first art game I ever owned, and it was followed in quick succession by these:

Going clockwise from the top left, you've got a game about Renaissance paintings (thanks mom!), the collection of the Musee D'Orsay, Color (illustrated with paintings from France's major museums), and French history from pre-history to the first empire (illustrated with a wide variety of art and artifacts). These were mostly picked up in museum gift shops, and their mere existence, I think, covers a multitude of museum-gift-shop sins.

All 4 games work on the same principle: your goal is to collect all seven cards to make a set, and to complete as many of the seven sets (or families in French) as you can. This is done by asking other players for the cards you need or fishing a lucky card from the pot.

I've never won even one round of this type of game. In fact, the smallest one (about French history) made its way into our lives on the trip to Paris with Dan and Bonnie and Samantha in '03. We all played in the train on the way back to Germany, and it was shameful how poorly I did. The kids aren't quite old enough for this, which means I'm safe for the moment. Once Dandelion is old enough to not try to ingest or crumple the cards, we'll probably get a lot of use out of these, and I'll learn new lessons on facing defeat with grace.

My favorite Artist

2007-01-06T21:31:00.001+02:00

I don't have one.

No really.

It would be like a singer having a favorite pitch (so I dearly well hope that you singers out there don't because first, it would ruin my argument and second I would think it was stupid and I'd hate to think so ill of anyone for something so mundane).

Probably most of my close relations would guess that Andy Warhol is my favorite, but that's just because I own a lot of books about him. And I've read all of them, some of them numerous times, and I've used those books in a good deal of Warhol-centric research. But so what. He's not my favorite. I don't have one. Really. What I like most is the relationship among works of art, the kinds of dialogues you can imagine (or prove in some cases) between them, the way one artist's work becomes infinitely more rich when compared with the work of another.

But for those of you who are enamored of favorites of this or any other kind, here's a link to a questionnaire of favorites, famously completed by the young Marcel Proust.

Innovation

2007-01-05T14:27:00.000+02:00

innovative: adjective
1. ahead of the times; "the advanced teaching methods"; "had advanced views on the subject"; "a forward-looking corporation"; "is British industry innovative enough?" [syn: advanced]
2. being or producing something like nothing done or experienced or created before; "stylistically innovative works"; "innovative members of the artistic community"; "a mind so innovational, so original"

This from WordNet® 2.1. Princeton University by way of dictionary.com

I've always thought of innovation as inherently good, useful, and productive (though I couldn't find any dictionary to support my sense of the word). It isn't like invention or creativity. They can be negative. Inventors come up with useles junk all the time, and we've all (at one point or another) been abused by the very annoying creativity of others. But no one ever bothers to say "positive innovation", useful innovation", or "constructive innovation", to give a few examples. To do so would be redundant, at least in our current use of the term.

Given that innovation is seen (by me at least) as relevant, needful, and good, does the ongoing story of art require anything more than this?

Two Books About Purses

2007-01-04T21:11:00.000+02:00

If for no other reason than that I own both the books pictured at left, I am a lucky dog. The top, Handbags, and bottom, Bags, are about, duh, purses. And though they have that in common, there is little else the same about them. First, there isn't much duplicate information in them, even though they cover the same time periods, production sites and techniques. Handbags includes interviews, brief biographies, and brand histories of the best contemporary purse designers and companies. The purses are organized by style, which allows a 2001 Jamin Puech to appear directly before a rare English purse from the 1550s, emphasizing a continuity of sorts--a harmony within this genre that has endured for centuries (see pgs 264-5).

By contrast, Bags is organized first by date, beginning with the oldest surviving examples of purses. Because all the bags of a certain era appear together, it is far easier to imagine the time, appreciate the purse in its context. The emphasis here is on the history of the purse, whereas the Handbags emphasis was on the style of the purse. Bags also offers much more detailed information about materials, construction methods, and the historic context of each period's chosen forms. For example, this about Petit-point, lace and cloth:

Until the nineteenth century, fine needlework was performed not only by women as a home industry, but also by professional embroiderers. Partly due to technological developments, the variety of needlework techniques increased sharply. Although less very fine needlework was done at that time, there were many techniques for making reticules, such as Berlin woolwork, blackwork, lace, weaving, embroidery, crocheting and knitting.
pg 248

So, there you have it. Both are heartily welcome in my library of things about which I probably know either too much or too little. But since I don't know which it is, I'll stop here.

My Waning Moments of 2006

2007-01-03T10:58:00.001+02:00

Way back at Christmas 2003 Matthew gave me a book making kit, and I have just now gotten around to using it. At first I was quite worried that the included glue would have passed its shelf-life. But it was still functional and so on New Year's Eve I went forward with the project. New Year’s Eve was the perfect time for this. It is the one night of the year when getting into bed late is expected. After the kiddies were snuggly in bed, I had about 4.5 hours to work.

The kit included enough materials for two books and I almost finished both in one night. The instruction booklet said to expect it to take 3 hours, but since this was my first time through the process and I made two of them, I’m content with my turnaround time. And my results aren't too shabby either. I'll post pictures later.

I now know all kinds of bookbinding terminology. The pages are placed together in groups called signatures, which are individually sewn and sewn to each other. The sewing on the fold lines is called a mull, and the pretty band that is placed on the mull at the top and bottom is called a headband. I could go on and on like this, but won’t.

The best part of the process is that I have lots of leftover glue, thread (a nice, sturdy one) and even some special papers. If I got my hands on the other necessities, I’d have the ability to make another book. I really like the idea of that. The books I made require nothing more special than 8½x11 paper and some heavy card-board for the spine and covers. I know my way around papers and fabrics well enough to be able to find buckram and everything else right here.

I've dabbled in bookbinding before, but I've never had instructions, tools or such professional looking results. In comparing my book with other hard-cover books in my house I see little difference in construction or quality, which is impressive.

Bird Brains

2007-01-02T12:28:00.000+02:00

Because I live in a world where on-line shopping is impossible, I haven’t used the web for that kind of thing in a while. That’s probably why I just barely found out about like.com in this Dec 27th WWD article:

Like.com, whose technology allows shoppers to find shoes and accessories using celebrity photos as the basis for search, expanded into apparel on Saturday. Unlike text-based search, where shoppers type words to describe what they are looking for, image search is based on visual properties of an item such as color, texture and shape. . . Like.com did not feature apparel . . . because the variety of ways that clothing is photographed . . . adds complexity to the task of calculating a visual signature for each item . . . Although shoes and watches are photographed in a more consistent manner, making for a simpler calculation, the visual signature for those items still contains some 10,000 data points.

I’ve got the solution for them. Pigeons. And wouldn’t you know, pigeons are also the connecting link between that brief WWD article and your daily installment of Impart Art.

Pigeons "have been shown, by Richard Herrnstein and his associates at Harvard, to be able to categorize pictures by subject, and hence to appreciate the differences between pictures of X and pictures of something else. The basic procedure was simple: the pigeons were trained on a set of slides to pick out the pictures of trees, or bodies of water, or of a specific individual, pecking one disk or the other depending upon pictorial content, and getting rewarded for being right. Once the suite of images was learned, the pigeons were shown novel instances, which they were able to classify with about the same success humans might have. . . .”

That was taken from Arthur Danto’s Beyond the Brillo Box, pg 24. And it is an interesting idea. I would not be surprised if pigeons are many factors better at this kind of work than our most advanced technologies. Pigeons could do that kind of relationship-linking and no one would have to code it. Danto described and then imagined some other advanced uses for the pigeons a few pages later:

“No one that I know of has as yet trained pigeons to discriminate by style, thought here are fascinating indications that pigeons are easily up to this task. . . . Debra Porter and Allen Neuringer, of Reed College trained pigeons to discriminate between selections from Bach and from Stravinsky. That achieved, they had to decide which of five other composers sounded Stravinsky-like and which Bach-like. Without error, they classed Buxtehude and Scarlatti as Bach-like, Walter Piston and Eliot Carter as Stravinsky-like. They classed Vivaldi however, as Stravinsky-like, leaving it up to us to decide whether they were in error or instructing us in how to think about and listen to Vivaldi. My own feeling at the moment is that I would trust a pigeon more than your standard member of the Rembrandt project on questions of reattribution. I wager The Polish Rider(pictured above) will be returned to the Rembrandt canon if my pigeon colleagues are consulted."
Brillo Box, pgs 28-29.

Ok, so I'm totally sock-knocked-off impressed with pigeons and their remarkable skills and all that, but I'm not sure I trust them to listen to human-made classical music better than humans do. And though the Rembrandt Project has been troublesome in many regards, Danto's insult to their work raises some interesting questions about painting, painters, and viewers. Can a painter eventually be reduced to little more than his style of rendering? What of composition, of subject matter, of materials, of anything, really? Will a computer eventually be able to answer all these unanswered questions, or are pigeons our best hope?

I think they might be for like.com, but I don't know about the rest of it.

Merry Christmas . . .

2006-12-22T23:47:00.000+02:00

. . . and a happy New Year. We'll see you then.

Better than the Taj Mahal

2006-12-21T22:24:00.001+02:00

On our way out of Cairo today, we stopped by the Tombs of Mohammad Ali's Family, which we were told by our (not exaggerating at all) fantastic taxi driver, were worth 950 million dollars. Mohammad Ali was the first Ottoman emperor of Egypt, who came to power in 1811. Apparently they kept slaves and had them killed off to be buried with them.

The tombs were of course very ornate, very Ottoman, and very shabby-chic. 15 Egyptian Pounds, the entry price, is just under $3. I liked the look of the place, and the sun was just right to really illuminate the stained-glass windows. But by the time we got there it was well into the afternoon, we hadn't eaten since 8 am, and we were all a little bit worried about catching our flights (two of sweetie's colleagues joined us). I guess all of those reasons collided in reducing the amount of time we spent there to about 10 minutes.

However, those ten minutes were choice. Our taxi-tourguide sang to demonstrate the acoustics, rhapsodized on the non-violent nature of Islam, gave thorough explanations of the interior and who was buried where and what the tombs were made of, etc. He even accused Matthew of not believing him.

The Egyptian Museum

2006-12-20T06:45:00.001+02:00

I don't remember who, but someone told us recently that we just should not even bother with the Egyptian Museum. I wish I could remember now who said that, since I have bothered with it and can now heartily disagree.

It costs about $9 to get in, which is $9 more than the entrance to the British Museum, but that was ok. The museum had the best collection of Egyptian artifacts I have ever seen. Better than London. Better than Berlin. And I was pleased to finally see some of the statuary that I've had knocking around my brain for a decade now. The trans-gender statue of Akhenaton, for one, but that’s a post for another day.

What impressed me most about the Egyptian Museum is that the experience of it is quite different from other major museums--at least the ones I have visited. When you walk in it is as if you have gone back in time. You leave the contemporary self-obsessed confidence found in most museums. The Egyptian Museum, for lack of a better word, is low-tech. Nothing is guarded by lasers that bounce from ceiling to floor. The exhibits are encased in simple glass and wood. There are no sleekly-designed information placards, just paper, type-written with the most basic descriptions. Instead of accession numbers that tell you where and when a piece was discovered, there are at times old photographs of piles of numbered things, and somewhere in that pile is the object in the case. Huge enlargements of similar excavation photos are propped up against the walls, as if no more elegant presentation were possible or necessary. There was, throughout the museum, enough dust to convince anyone that museums might still house hidden treasures. The lighting was terrible. The jewelry was positively inspirational.

What I liked best was that the museum shop sold postcards and books. Nothing else. No neck-ties printed to look like mummies. No recreations. No erasers or chocolates molded to look like ankhs.

Artistic Economy

2006-12-18T08:33:00.000+02:00

This from M.F.K. Fisher's introduction to Map of Another Town:

Often in the sketch of a portrait, the invisible lines that bridge one stroke of the pencil or brush to another are what really make it live. This is probably true in a word picture too. The myriad undrawn unwritten lines are the ones that hold together what the painter and the writer have tried to set down, their own visions of a thing: a town, one town, this town.
Not everything can be told, nor need it be, just as the artist himself need not and indeed cannot reveal every outline of his vision.

I remember one of my favorite passages of one of the Ramona Quimby books described in great detail how Beatrice, Ramona's older sister, labored over a drawing of a fantasy dinosaur, determined not to over-do it. Often the true difficulty of art is not getting a point across. The difficulty is doing it without doing too much. It is probably one element of genius to give just enough and not over do it.

Egypt at Stake

2006-12-16T13:56:00.000+02:00

My husband is ill. Violently. He and the girls are resting right now, and well, you know what I’m doing.

We have tickets to go to Cairo on Monday evening, but if my sweetie’s health doesn’t improve quickly, none of us will go. Tagging along on business trips is just like that.

Still, I have Cairo on my mind, and particularly their ancient treasures. I don’t know anyone who isn’t at least a little bit curious about the pyramids, temples, and other ruins of long-gone dynasties. To young Americans, they are among the most familiar of foreign, exotic things. When I was a kid, my parents had a subscription to National Geographic, but also to their jr. version called World. If my memory serves (it doesn’t), every single issue was devoted to Tutankhamen’s tomb.

National Geographic has a great Egypt page. Very informative for people going there literally or virtually. They have a list of sources for further reading and even a list of their own publications about Egypt going back to 1913.

Interestingly, they didn’t include what I think was one of their most significant issues. From what I’ve been able to put together, the Feb 1982 issue was almost entirely devoted to the foregoing century’s discoveries and excavations in Egypt. That issue isn't listed on the current Egypt page. Maybe the reason they don't reference this issue is that the pyramids depicted on the front cover were digitally manipulated to squash them into the available (narrow) space. The ethics of their alteration of the pyramid’s positioning has prompted quite a bit of discussion. Just do a Google search for "National Geographic 1982 Giza".

I don’t know if the 1982 issue was left off the source list for this reason or for no reason at all. If it was deliberately left out, that would signal that NatGeo agrees that its reliability is in question. But there’s a lot to be said for the “no reason at all” argument. They didn’t say their bibliography was a complete one.

I’ve never really been able to decide where I stand on this issue. Digitally shifting a pyramid to the side is not the same as lying about its entire existence, or putting it into the mountains of China. The pyramids are where they belong even if they aren’t exactly there. But National Geographic is a respected source of both excellent scholarship and excellent photography. If they are to be regarded as the standard-bearers for the crossover between art-photography and scholarship, suddenly even a slight "reinterpretation" of where a pyramid actually is really undercuts their reputation.

Kansas Painting

2006-12-15T21:22:00.000+02:00

I was looking through my photos today, looking for any picture that I might have taken of some art somewhere in the last two years. I was looking for something from Lebanon. But I found this:

What you see there are two painted clowns bookended by three of my blood relations. While we were avoiding the summer's war, I was fortunate enough to go apple picking on one very fine day in September. These clowns were part of the gig.

I had entirely forgotten that they were there until I saw the picture. Now, I'm completely convinced that they were in fact there, even though I really have no recollection of it. And the more I consider it, the more I am sure that I actually do have a vague memory of those silly cut-out clowns.

That's the power of a photograph. It gave me a memory that even my own brain did not. I'm not saying this is art, just commenting on one of the many assumptions that each of us bring to a photographic image.

The New Beautiful

2006-12-14T13:12:00.000+02:00

I just read the NYT’ rather ironic, (and I conclude) unfavorable review of The Architecture Of Happiness by Alain de Botton, which contained this little, priceless gem:

As John Ruskin observed, we don’t want our buildings merely to shelter us; we also want them to speak to us. But of what? De Botton has an answer. Great buildings, he says, “speak of visions of happiness.”

Up until the precise moment, I really did believe that beauty was the most subjective of all things, but de Botton has shown me my error. But really, could happiness become the new beauty? All chiding aside, I’d like to read that book. I’ve added it to my list of books to test drive at the library just as soon as I live in a country that has one to patronize.

Jasper Johns

2006-12-13T13:26:00.001+02:00

Sorry to be so self-referential, but I also promised in the very comment thread that inspired yesterday’s musings to tell you all what I think about Jasper John’s White Flag. So, here’s a bit about that.

Most of what I know about Jasper Johns actually is stuff that I came across entirely unintentionally. He was one of Warhol’s contemporaries, and because of that, a lot of books about one mention the other. They were both significant, distinct forces. Anyway, Johns was really young when he became really famous and that somehow seems to have worked out. Warhol, by all accounts was envious of Johns, and his early work reflects that—some flattery-in-the-form-of-imitation, if you will. Johns’ paintings have been sold for more money than those of any other painter alive today. The most expensive one? 80 million. And they say the arts don’t pay.

Anyway, the cool things about White Flag are numerous. Most of these start with the flag itself and all the messages that they bring with them. Move it into the art scene of the mid 1950s, with its cares and concerns and those messages multiply.

Flags. They’re like pictographs, really. Any *real* American can tell you that there are 13 stripes for the 13 colonies that broke away from Britain, 50 stars represent each of the current states. We also have so much associated with this flag—seeing it draped over the coffins of dead soldiers and presidents, flown at half-mast, waved proudly every July 4th, Memorial and Veteran’s Day. We watched it be burned in acts of civil disobedience and International protest. We’ve seen it printed in the kitschiest fashion on t-shirts and coffee mugs. We even have songs about our flag.

So the US flag is a loaded symbol, particularly for Americans but (risking arrogance yet knowing I’m right) for every one else too. Merge that flag with white and suddenly you have all the connotations of surrender. I wonder if he was going for that or if he was instead exploring the design of the flag, maybe in an effort to assert that his painting isn’t a flag at all. It's a painting.

Insult Art

2006-12-12T12:56:00.000+02:00

This comment was left by Suz about five months ago when I featured Jasper John's White Flag in this post:

i thought it was interesting that johns was described as a neo-dadaist as well as a pop artist. that made me think of a question i'v been meaning to ask you. i was having an art discussion with my roommate who is a tattoo artist/painter, in which he commented "as an artist, i think that stuff like duchamp's 'fountain' is the biggest insult to the work i do" i'm rather curious about your thoughts on this- might make a good upcoming post, maybe?

Thanks for the question. I hope I can provide a satisfactory response, even though the closest I have ever come to "body art" are those face-painting booths at carnivals.

My first thought is that, tattoo artists are very likely quite good at getting a butterfly to look like a butterfly, or an anchor to look like an anchor. Because of this your roommate probably sees craftsmanship as an integral part of what it is to create art. Tattoos, frankly, have to meet certain visual expectations. No one wants bumbling imperfection burned into their flesh. And having painted faces a time or two myself, I recognize that flesh is not the easiest foundation for such work.

In addition to good technique, I'd imagine that a tattoo artist also needs at least a little artistic feeling. Probably, there are customers out there who are not satisfied with the same old tattoo that everyone else already has. Creativity, improvisation, even thoughtful re-interpretation are skills that such an artist would likely do well to have in his arsenal. Otherwise, people could just get branded and have the whole thing done in one very painful go.

In the case of the tattoo-artist-friend-roommate, my guess is that he sees Duchamp's work as an insult to the requisite technique of his medium--as an insult to anyone who has acquired that skill through hard work, practice, maybe a few black-eyes if it went wrong . . .

Fountain can be seen as an insult to certain definitions of craftsmanship, but I don't see it as an insult to craftsmanship itself. Duchamp's interest was in searching out the fringes, the gray area between art and not art. His Fountain was less an assertion than this question: "can it still be art, even though there is no reason for it be except that I say it is?" Ever since, that question has driven art and artists and has become one of art's most productive inquiries of the 20th century.

Rather than insulting fields that require high levels of skill and technique, I believe Fountain simply differentiates itself from them. Art can be found in exquisite craftsmanship, but after Fountain, it can be found elsewhere too.

Art History: Problematic Situation #7

2006-12-11T14:14:00.000+02:00

This is another installment in an ongoing series.

Back when I first came across Art History as a discipline—a major study option at the university—I imagined it would be something like history from the perspective of art. I thought of the world civilization courses that I’d had in the past and envisioned a place where art would play a bigger role in essentially the same discussions of the past.

Oh, no. No, no, no.

Art History is the history of art. Certainly, one could use art to tell the history of a group, people, culture, or slice of time. I think it would work quite well, too. But after all the studying, reading, learning, researching, etc. that I have engaged in over the last decade-and-then-some, I find that I still could tell you very little about the historic events that surrounded and in some cases created the art and theory about which I (immodestly) know buckets.

This, I suppose should be the first of Art History’s Problematic Situations. It causes a foundation-level tension between historiography and the far more limited task of charting art’s history. And though Art History is at times undermined and crippled by its own issues, history proper is nothing if not worse.

Book Review: Can You Find It, Too?

2006-12-10T15:47:00.000+02:00

Sadly, I don't have very many art books for children, but I do have Can You Find It, Too? (Thanks Bonnie!), which showcases some of the amazing art at the Metropolitan Museum. It works like Where's Waldo, except that it isn't Waldo and the visual style of each scene differs by centuries, continents, and media. I love the variety in this book, and the things that you search for are surprising and perfect for little kids. In one image (probably 1920s) of the seashore, packed with families, children, and dogs, you get to find among many other things, the one and only dog on a leash. In another picture from the 1700s of a busy Chinese city there are very few children, but only two women. An ancient Egyptian Hieroglyph has only one falcon, but 22 eyes and 30 feet, and your job is to find them all.

If you read the reviews at Amazon’s website, you'll see that there are some who think a few images are too violent, and they are probably right. Beheadings aren't really for little tykes. But as a mom who unconcernedly handed this book to my children, who am I to judge?

Es Weihnachtet Sehr

2006-12-07T12:18:00.000+02:00

We will now depart from Impart Art's normal features to present this report on festive goings-on

Tuesday night the girls, in proper German fashion, each put a boot outside our front door. There was an old legend, I told them, that Santa had been sent on an errand to leave candy at the homes of all the good girls and boys. To let Santa know where to find you, all you have to do is put your boot out for him. So, we did. After they were in bed, I filled each boot (a rather tight squeeze) with the things you see the girls enjoying below:

I expected that the girls would forget overnight what they’d done with their boots, but they didn’t. Before enjoying their treats though, we delivered two paper Christmas trees with candy taped on them to our neighbors. We tried very hard to be silent and sneaky in the stairwell.

This year, the smallest chocolate santas were the ones made by the Kinderschokolade people, which is why they are white inside. I had to get small ones because tiny kids have tiny boots. Yes, Dandelion has her chocolate santa and Star's. Star was bored with candy by the time I got this picture. What you can't see is how Dandelion struggled to hold both santas, her marshmallow rope, and eat gummy bears out of a little sack all at once.

I Miss Bill Watterson

2006-12-05T20:12:00.000+02:00

Go ahead, click it, make it big enough to read.

And, because I'm aching to get in trouble for something, here's a speech Watterson gave that I most definately don't have permission to republish. I nevertheless believe that it is among the most worthwhile reading a person could do. I dare you to read it all, and if you can manage it, leave me a comment with your favorite line in it, or if you are a compelte weirdo, your least favorite line.

****

Speech by Bill Watterson
Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class.
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED
Bill Watterson
Kenyon College Commencement
May 20, 1990

I have a recurring dream about Kenyon. In it, I'm walking to the post office on the way to my first class at the start of the school year. Suddenly it occurs to me that I don't have my schedule memorized, and I'm not sure which classes I'm taking, or where exactly I'm supposed to be going.

As I walk up the steps to the postoffice, I realize I don't have my box key, and in fact, I can't remember what my box number is. I'm certain that everyone I know has written me a letter, but I can't get them. I get more flustered and annoyed by the minute. I head back to Middle Path, racking my brains and asking myself, "How many more years until I graduate? ...Wait, didn't I graduate already?? How old AM I?" Then I wake up.

Experience is food for the brain. And four years at Kenyon is a rich meal. I suppose it should be no surprise that your brains will probably burp up Kenyon for a long time. And I think the reason I keep having the dream is because its central image is a metaphor for a good part of life: that is, not knowing where you're going or what you're doing.

I graduated exactly ten years ago. That doesn't give me a great deal of experience to speak from, but I'm emboldened by the fact that I can't remember a bit of MY commencement, and I trust that in half an hour, you won't remember of yours either.

In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book.

Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch.

The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry.

The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head God was transmitting the spark of life to man.

My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year. And that's what I did.

Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.

If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running.

You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of "just getting by: absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your politics and religion become matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people's expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you'll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you'll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

For me, it's been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity. I've been amazed at how one ideas leads to others if I allow my mind to play and wander. I know a lot about dinosaurs now, and the information has helped me out of quite a few deadlines.

A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you'll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.

So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.

I don't look back on my first few years out of school with much affection, and if I could have talked to you six months ago, I'd have encouraged you all to flunk some classes and postpone this moment as long as possible. But now it's too late.

Unfortunately, that was all the advice I really had. When I was sitting where you are, I was one of the lucky few who had a cushy job waiting for me. I'd drawn political cartoons for the Collegian for four years, and the Cincinnati Post had hired me as an editorial cartoonist. All my friends were either dreading the infamous first year of law school, or despondent about their chances of convincing anyone that a history degree had any real application outside of academia.

Boy, was I smug.

As it turned out, my editor instantly regretted his decision to hire me. By the end of the summer, I'd been given notice; by the beginning of winter, I was in an unemployment line; and by the end of my first year away from Kenyon, I was broke and living with my parents again.

You can imagine how upset my dad was when he learned that Kenyon doesn't give refunds.

Watching my career explode on the lauchpad caused some soul searching. I eventually admitted that I didn't have what it takes to be a good political cartoonist, that is, an interest in politics, and I returned to my firs love, comic strips.

For years I got nothing but rejection letters, and I was forced to accept a real job.

A REAL job is a job you hate. I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the 4-1/2 million minutes I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the perfect second where they would earn another 20 cents without doing any work for it.

It was incredible: after every break, the entire staff would stand around in the garage where the time clock was, and wait for that last click. And after my used car needed the head gasket replaced twice, I waited in the garage too.

It's funny how at Kenyon, you take for granted that the people around you think about more than the last episode of Dynasty. I guess that's what it means to be in an ivory tower.

Anyway, after a few months at this job, I was starved for some life of the mind that, during my lunch break, I used to read those poli sci books that I'd somehow never quite finished when I was here. Some of those books were actually kind of interesting. It was a rude shock to see just how empty and robotic life can be when you don't care about what you're doing, and the only reason you're there is to pay the bills.
Thoreau said,

"the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

That's one of those dumb cocktail quotations that will strike fear in your heart as you get older. Actually, I was leading a life of loud desperation.

When it seemed I would be writing about "Midnite Madness Sale-abrations" for the rest of my life, a friend used to console me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw themselves into the sea.

I tell you all this because it's worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few.

I still haven't drawn the strip as long as it took me to get the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.

Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.

Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn't what I caught. I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.

To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.

As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted a piece of that pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons.

Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.

The so-called "opportunity" I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need.

What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts.

On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.

You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.

Many of you will be going on to law school, business school, medical school, or other graduate work, and you can expect the kind of starting salary that, with luck, will allow you to pay off your own tuition debts within your own lifetime.

But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.

I think you'll find that Kenyon touched a deep part of you. These have been formative years. Chances are, at least one of your roommates has taught you everything ugly about human nature you ever wanted to know.

With luck, you've also had a class that transmitted a spark of insight or interest you'd never had before. Cultivate that interest, and you may find a deeper meaning in your life that feeds your soul and spirit. Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself.

Graduating from Kenyon, I suspect you'll find yourselves quite well prepared indeed.

I wish you all fulfillment and happiness. Congratulations on your achievement.

Bill Watterson

A Nation Divided Against Itself

2006-12-04T18:01:00.000+02:00

In two months and 10 days, Lebanon will certainly commemorate the death of Rafik Hariri, whose assassination marked the beginning of the turmoil that has gripped Lebanon for the past two years. From the beginning, it was assumed that Syria was to blame for Hariri’s death. One month after the assassination, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese descended on Beirut’s central district to express their anger at the Syrian-backed leadership of their country. They called for the immediate withdraw of Syria from Lebanon. With the help of the international community acting through the United Nations, Syrian troops were removed from the country, but their influence lingered. If the UN investigative body is to be believed, Syria’s influence in the country has been evidenced by a steady trail of assassinations spread over the past two years.

Why then, is the current political climate pro-Syrian? Why are there hundreds of thousands of Lebanese demonstrating in favor of the very leadership that was blamed for Hariri’s death? Well, lets not forget the summer’s war. Although the United States was quick to express concern for Lebanon when Syria was seen as the culprit, they turned a blind eye when Israel came knocking. The UN peacekeepers at the boarder did not prevent or intervene in the hostilities. There they were, doing nothing.

So Hezbollah was the closest thing to a defender that the south had. There was every appearance at the beginning that Israel was going to do to Lebanon what it had been doing to Gaza for weeks—strangle, starve, and suffocate. And it didn’t happen. Israel essentially gave up the fight. No wonder Hezbollah has claimed a divine victory. No wonder so many Lebanese see it that way.

But there are many others who don’t. Every day, I see people in number heading downtown to continue the ongoing protests intended to bring down the western-leaning government. And every day, as I walk or drive through the city, I see Lebanese flags hanging from balconies—the sign of those who despite the war are still against Syrian interference.

Recently, the New York Times reviewed an art exhibit here in Lebanon, aimed at identifying what it is to be Lebanese and what their country ought to become. The author observed, “all of the main . . . confessional communities (Christian, Sunni, Shiite, Druse), want a Lebanon united by their definition of what Lebanon should be.” Each sect believes they are the real Lebanon.

The article made some valuable observations on contemporary divisions within the country, and for that it was worth a read. But I’m not sure the art at the center of it would be worth looking at. There were only a few, bad photos of the show and the descriptions given by the author were lifeless.

Media and the Real

2006-12-03T20:30:00.000+02:00

I’ve just listened to an interesting NPR story about a prisoner at Auschwitz who was assigned to paint watercolor portraits of her fellow prisoners because (according to the Nazi commander there) photographs simply weren’t satisfactorily capturing the degenerate qualities of the gypsies.

Here is one such image. It was painted by Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who is now 83 years old and wants ownership of her work. The Auschwitz museum claims ownership of anything that serves as evidence of the place's history.

NPR’s story wasn’t about the merits of photos vs. paintings, but I can't help thinking about that. I’ve been wondering if artists choose to do what they do. My guess is that it is rarely a case where a person weighed the options and chose one medium over the other. More often than not, people go with the medium they happened to learn before they really thought about being an “artist”, be it drawing, photography, or even the new technology-media. There's usually a predisposition. But here, it was a clear choice, and a completely backward seeming one.

Nobody today, except in closed court rooms, would turn to a painting for evidence. Photographs, which make the most credible appeal to reality of any of art’s expressive forms, were thought “not real enough” in this case. It seems like proof enough to me that what the Nazi’s saw in these lesser races was a projection of their inner horrors. Why else would a subjective art, like painting, be seen as more accurate than a documentary photography?

Tea Time

2006-12-02T21:05:00.000+02:00

I took a class about the arts associated with Zen and Tao shortly before we moved to Beirut. I was fascinated by the subject matter, delighted by the application of these philosophies/religions to the arts, culture, and even aspects of daily living. The harmony among these seemingly divided pursuits appealed to my sense of universalism. That art, belief, and life are all part of the same big picture is something that I have always felt anyway.

Among the arts that Zen influences is the tea ceremony. There are whole books, some of them ancient, about how to properly prepare, present, and drink tea. They describe in detail the correct proportion and appointment of the room, the manner of the guests, their optimal mode of dress, arrival, and conversation.

Tea continues to be an art in Japan, and a ritual in Britain. It was neither in my childhood home. My mother drank tea only when she was ill, and encouraged all of us to do the same. She drank an infusion called ‘rose-hip’ which still makes me think of head colds and flu bugs. I have no memory of ever taking her up on her offer, but she still swears by it.

Later, when I was an adult and went a-traveling, I discovered that with enough sugar anything tastes great, and a hot cup of anything takes the edge off a cold day. I began experimenting with my favorite drinks and found that flat soda is down right divine hot. Root Beer becomes sassafras tea. Sprite becomes a delicate lemony delight.

I don’t care for sugar as much as I used to, which I guess means I’m getting old. It actually makes my mouth ache. Plus, I never have flat soda around like I did when I was single. The stuff gets consumed before it has a chance to fizzle out. When I went to London last month I had the best cup of peppermint tea that I have ever had. I had it without sugar because there was no sugar on my table. And I admit, I’m hooked. Every morning since I got back to Beirut I’ve had a cup of peppermint tea. A box of individually wrapped bags had been lurking in our cabinet since the beginning of 2005.

Some of you know that I was learning French this summer, and lets just say I’m still an absolute beginner. I can’t even say “I’m learning French” in French. Today that came back to bite me when, at the grocery store I bought green tea with peppermint instead of peppermint all by itself because I didn’t bother to realize that vert means green.

It smells fantastic.

I can not find even one authoritative source that indicates its status within the LDS church’s dietary guidelines. I’ve done all the research I can, and I have come to what I think is a very safe conclusion about it. Does anyone out there have access to anything authoritative about this?

That's pretty good for a . . .

2006-12-01T11:54:00.000+02:00

Consider this:

When asked to provide details about his life to a curator, the painter Balthus sent the following telegram in reply: "No biographical details. Begin: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. Now let us look at the pictures. Regards. B." Balthus was rebelling against the modern fondness for viewing an artist's output through the prism of his public image. He worried that once an artist's personal life was known, his work would be seen only as a means of diagnosing the artist's psychological shortcomings and not as an end in itself. (found here)

So, do Vincent's letters to Theo make Starry Night a better picture? Did Warhol's attention-craving-madness make his silkscreenes art? Would it have mattered if Jackson Pollock had instead been Jackie? What if Picasso hadn't been a womanizer?

Pictures rarely, if ever, stand alone. There is always a context, a background, an origin. All too often, a person's lifestyle choices are seen as an integral part of the images they make. But what if everything we (think we) know is wrong? Do we read art one way for a suicide, and another way for death by natural causes? Do we read the art by men one way and women another? What exactly are our foregon conclusions about a life that are transposed onto the image we see?

How old am I?

2006-11-29T10:08:00.000+02:00

Star & Dandelion

2006-11-24T09:16:00.000+02:00

As you all ought to know, I have two charming kids, and to protect the innocent, we'll call the oldest child star and the youngest dandelion. On frequent occasion, my interest in art gets taken out on them. It happened again not long ago. Matthew showed me a link to a neat little webpage where you can make a simulated Pollock "drip painting" just by waving the mouse over the formerly blank canvas--err, screen. Of course, I immediately set the Jr.s down to try it. Neither one is a very good fake Pollock, but both are pretty good additions to Star and Dandelion's art escapades. Can you guess who did which painting?
(readers of character will resist the urge to cheat)

What I did last night.

2006-11-22T08:07:00.000+02:00

It started with these doors that I found at the Metropolitan Museum's website. I repeated the image a few times, and then I started to map some of the geometry. Fun, fun, fun. Really.

I hope you’ve clicked the link to see the original. It is small, and although the design wouldn’t need to infinitely repeat to fill such a small place, it can and as my image shows, it can very well.

I’ve always enjoyed geometry. That was the only class I took in high school where the subject matter (rather than a charismatic teacher) was remotely interesting.

Whoever created this specific pattern did a few things that show a remarkable amount of artistry, or bending of geometry’s rules. The resolution of a square into a circle, of a triangle into a hexagon, the kind of stair-step alignment of the stars, etc. These are not perfect shapes, but shapes that have been slightly pushed and pulled to make the overall pattern work. I am baffled by this kind of art (craft?) because although I can find fun patterns in it, I doubt I could design this or something like it, and there are many variations on this kind of pattern that look quite a bit like this one but are different enough to have required a bit of genius.

We are Safe

2006-11-21T17:30:00.000+02:00

But here's why that's news today.

Here's your art idea for the day:

“a picture of a dead dog shows a dead dog. It only becomes difficult when you want to communicate something beyond that, when the content is too complicated to be depicted with a simple portrayal”
Gerhardt Richter (Harrison and Woods 1037)