ART – Page 71 – Vitro Nasu

May/2/2005May/2/2005

Jean Vigo + Satyajit Ray+ Mixed Alphabet Soup

Love on the Water
“It’s a modest, everyday story without any big themes or grand spectacle. So what makes Jean Vigo’s film L’Atalante unforgettable?
“To this day, there is a Prix Jean Vigo in France for exceptional talent and resolve in the very young, and it derives from an urge in Vigo to make his films quickly, before he might be dead. ”

Jean Vigo shared a birthday with Shakespeare and Wittgenstein.
Happy 100 years from a blogger on Vigo
A clip from L’atalante animated.

Bark
Digital photo – Bark & Bark Form W.

Satyajit Ray‘s birthday today. The Apu Trilogy beautiful, moving masterpieces and must see if you have not.
“Like Renoir and DeSica, Ray sees that life itself is good no matter how bad it is. It is difficult to discuss art which is an affirmation of life, without fear of becoming maudlin. But is there any other kind of art, on screen or elsewhere? “In cinema,” Ray says, “we must select everything for the camera according to the richness of its power to reveal. (Pauline Kael).

Located a poem by Howard Nemerov that I was looking for.
(see Diane Arbus)

To D–––, Dead by Her own Hand

My dear, I wonder if before the end
You ever though about a children’s game –
I’m sure you must have played it too – in which
You run along a narrow garden wall
Pretending it to be a mountain ledge
So steep a snowy darkness fell away
On either side to deeps invisible;
And when you felt your balance being lost
You jumped because you feared to fall, and thought
For only an instant: That was when I died.

That was a life ago. And now you’ve gone,
Who would no longer play the grown-ups’ game
Where, balanced on the ledge above the dark,
You go on running and you don’t look down,
Nor ever jump because you fear to fall.

–Howard Nemerov-
(from Modern Kicks)

Apr/27/2005Dec/10/2011

Poking around Wittgenstein + Bruce Nauman

Some random observations
1) Examples of Wittgenstein’s influence on art in general as follow:
A) Both Bruce Nauman and Jasper Johns were profoundly influenced by Wittgenstein. Their works reflect the paradox that the connection between the proposition and reality is not found in the picture itself.
B) In a recent biography of Willem de Kooning, the author described de Kooning’s preference of Wittgenstein to Sartre. Bernett Newman read and studied Wittgenstein and probably influenced de Kooning who tended to learn by listening and paying attention to his peers.
C) Derek Jarman made a film called “Wittgenstein”. (Film fun trailer here on youtube )
D) The Artist Wittgenstein by Terry Eagleton (a report on a new paperback The Literary Wittgenstein, edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer) “Why are artists so fascinated by Ludwig Wittgenstein? ” wrote T. Eagleton, then he lists additional artists and writers who have incorporated Wittgenstein’s thoughts in their work. (Must read said Matt from Pas au-dela)

Sculpture by Bruce Nauman

Wittgenstein along with Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett provided a more questioning and critical intellectual foundation for artists to pursue visual art as a tool to investigate the nature of reality through language games. (visual art is another kind of language that artists teach one another as well as accommodate new idioms and expressions).

2) Ludwig Wittgenstein was born on April 26, 1889 .
Taurus with moon in Pisces. (the same as James Mason and Audrey Hepburn). Moon in Pisces is otherworldy, intuitive, compassionate, private and impressionable. This trait explains why Wittgenstein gave up his family fortune in favor of more humble, austere lifestyle. He acted more like a mystic than a professional philosopher or an engineer.

3) He was Taurus OX- the deliberate Dictator The autocratic and dictatorial side of him showed up when Wittgenstein threatend Karl Popper, the famous poker incident involoving Karl Popper and Wittgenstein.

4) Wittgenstein and Zen Buddhism

5) Marjorie Perlof’s Wittgenstein Ladder, an Introduction..
“A philosopher,” he wrote in 1944, “is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense” (CV 44). And again, “My account will be hard to follow: because it says something new but still has egg-shells from the old view sticking to it” (CV 44). Perhaps it is this curious mix of mysticism and common-sense, of radical thought to which the “egg-shells” of one’s old views continue to “stick,” that has made Wittgenstein, who had no interest at all in the “poetry” of his own time, paradoxically a kind of patron saint for poets and artists. ”

6) One time Salon blogger dogma on Wittgenstein as a mystic.

Neon Sign by Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman 2
The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths

Here is a discussion on Wittgenstein’s influence on art. (Part of two questions posed by a blogger. Must be patient to sort this out.
Steve Reich’s Proverb was based on the text of Wittgenstein- “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!“. I have loved and listend to his music without knowing about this until now.

On Freud, Wittgenstein said, “It seems to me that my dreams are always an expression of my fears, not, as Freud thought, my wishes. I could build up an interpretation of dreams just cogent as Freud’s in terms of repressed fears.
“Freud’s work died with him. No one today can do psychoanalysis in the way he did. Now a book that really would interest me would be the one he wrote in collaboration with Breuer”. (Recollection of Wittgenstein, edited by Rhees p154) In footnote, he further stated – I have always believed – without knowing why that the real germ of psychoanalysis came from Breuer, not Freud. Of course Breuer’s seed-grain can only have been quite tiny.” Wittgenstein died of cancer in 1951, the unpopular view expressed by him came from his intuition and acute observation.

Lost in words….

The House of Wittgenstein here.

Apr/20/2005Aug/19/2011

We Love Our Leader – Leon Golub & Nancy Spero

The Catholics got a new Pope and the citizens of the world got a new James Bond. HBO was circulating Sylvia on the network, we will see more of Daniel Craig who played Ted Hughes in the coming days.
Poets had Ted and Sylvia . (Seamus Heany said that their union was mythopoetic. ) Unlike Ted & Sylvia who played monster and a victim, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, as a great painting duo inspired us all with their brash style of protest through their work and shared with public their comraderie, love and respect they have for each other.

Leon Golub
See his
We Love Our Leader and other paintings by Leon Golub.

Nancy Spero

A tribute was paid to Leon Golub on April 17 at Cooper’s Union. (from here).
“Golub’s outsized paintings bear searing and prophetic witness to a history of war and oppression, conflict and violence. In the iconography of the second half of the twentieth century art, his images of mercenaries, napalm victims, goons, and white squads create an implacable lexicon. Not withstanding the seriousness of Golub’s commitment to his politics in paint, his work was filled with pathos and a raunchy sense of humor and sexuality. Family, friends, colleagues, and students will miss his extraordinary knowledge and wit, his love of provocative discourse, and his generosity.”

Something unexpected happened in the closing minutes of the memorial for Leon Golub in the Great Hall at Cooper Union last Sunday,(read more here.)

An old interview of Leon and Nancy is here.

Hitler’s birthday today.
Two Hitler movies one imaginary and the other more historical, Max and Downfall.

Apr/14/2005Apr/15/2013

No Sun In Venice – Henry James and Leonardo

Venice
Here is a piece of music to accompany the photos of this page, No Sun In Venice by MJQ (Modern Jazz Quartet). More about the album. The brilliant music composed for the French movie “One Never Knows” became the masterpiece and the best album by MJQ.
My trip to Italy coincided with the US Election 2000. I learned about the mess in Florida while in Venice from Italian newspapers and CNN at the hotel . On the eve of Election day, I developed a hive thinking about the dreadful possibility of a Bush Presidency. On the train from Venice to Florence the Americans we met discussed our worries.
Venice

Today, April 15 is the birthday of Henry James and Leonardo da Vinci.
“The Master” is a novel about Henry James written by Colm Toibin recommended by Caterina Fake quite recently and the timing is perfect.
Michael Cunningham wrote, “In The Master, Colm Toibin takes us almost shockingly close to the soul of Henry James and by extension, to the mastery of art itself. It is a remarkable, utterly original book.”
Here is an excerpt from the novel.
“It was not true to say that Minny Temple haunted him in the years that followed; rather, he haunted her. He conjured up her precense everywhere, when he returned to his parents’ house, and later when he traveled in France and Italy. In the shadows of the great cathederals, he saw her emerge delicate and elegant and richly curious, ready to be stunned into silence by each work of art that she saw, and then trying to find words which might fit the moment, allow her new sensuous life to settle and deepen.
Soon after she died he wrote a story, “Travelling Companions,” in which William, traveling in Italy from Germany, met her by chance in Milan Cathederal, having seen her first in front of Leonardo’s The Last Supper. He loved describing her white umbrella with a violet lining and the sense of intelligent pleasure in her movments, her glance and her voice. He could control her destiny now that she was dead, offer her the experiences she would have wanted, and provide drama for a life which had been so cruelly shortend. He wondered if this had happend to other writers who came before him, if Hawthorne or George Eliot had written to make the dead come back to life, had worked all day and all night, like a magician or an alchemist, defying fate and time and all the implacable elements of re-create a sacred life.”

Leonardo

The Renaissance man by Adam Gopnik from the New Yorker. He wrote, Leonardo remains weird, matchlessly weird, and nothing to be done about it.
Leornardo

Leonardo’s Resume (hilarious)

Leonard spent his last years and died here at Le Clos Luce and see this page. This is a wonderful place to visit, following La Loire and visiting the famous castles nearby.

Leonardo da Vinci Tarot is here.

Arno
(All Photos of Venice and Florence are by Fung Lin Hall)

Back to Ephemeral Cities

Apr/11/2005Jun/29/2014

Life is Elsewhere

Life is Elsewhere Praha Man
The above image is a photo collage of an outdoor art installation from a street near Malostranska station in Prague. The statue of Sigmund Freud hanging by one hand by David Cerny – Czech Sculptor.

Milan Kundera who wrote “The Joke” was born on April’s Fool day. Here is a belated acknowledgemnt for this Parisian Czech writer. He now writes in French and lives in Paris, for which the Czech people have felt betrayed augmenting their sense of national/cultural insecurity.
(Kafka is a German Jew who was bilingual but did not write in Czech. Though Kafka is intimately linked to Prague as no other writer, not even Rilke who was born in Prague). Then there is Havel but he became the figurehead Politician ( still admired and loved. )
Kundera, in Life is Elsewhere, uses a quote from Rimbaud as his title.
“Life is Elsewhere” is a celebrated sentence of Rimbaud. It is cited by Andre Breton at the conclusion of his Surrealist Manifesto. In May 1968, Paris Students scribbled it on the walls of the Sorbonne as their slogan. But the original title of my novel was ‘The Lyrical Age.” I changed it at the last moment when I saw anxiety on the faces of my publishers, who doubted anyone would buy a book with such an abstruse title.” (From Preface of the Novel Life is Elswhere).
He wrote very fine essays in his “The Art of Novel”. A good interview on him, here.

Gravity, Grace and the Unbearable Light Beans is a phrase I have
used in my email headings in honor of Milan Kundera and javascript that my collaboraters have used.
Fiona Tan
The above image by Fiona Tan, Indonesian born international artist.

Elswhere, next Life from the team of the Last life in the Universe, from Bangkok post here

Click to see large

Paris Review Milan Kundera interview

Elsewhere……………..
“Leading Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang teams up once more with Japanese cult actor Asano Tadanobu on another bizarre movie-making mission”
“The movie, instead, represents a liberal attitude towards the way a film can be made, where the nationality of the director is not its sole cultural influence, while the marketing effort is engineered to catch the attention not of any particular nation but perhaps of the world.”
The guest star Takashi Miike arrived at the arport in gangster character, for this scene, Doyle said of Miike that Last Life in the Universe is everything that Takashi Miike leaves out in his films.
The cable network was showing Ichi the Killer a few days ago and I did not have the stomach to see his violent film. Sorry Takashi, but I liked your Katakuri Family film.

On Matisse new biography, a review by Jeanette Winterson

Letter to Jane (Jane Fonda who is mouthing academic feminist jargon while making round these days with her Christian conversion. It smells like a strategy to fight right wing Christian domination. Has she read Simone Weil? You don’t have to be a Christian to have a contact with Christ? On the other hand Jane has a Midas touch, or the force of Forrest Gump, who knows?)
A book review by Ann Patchett, here.
“Her decision to marry Ted Turner is not just confusing, but genuinely baffling. But then it would take a writer of Nabokov’s skill to make that guy seem charming on the page.
I wish the book contained more discussion of her life as an actress, but aside from the time she spent working with Lee Strasberg, her career gets fewer pages than it deserves.
Both Jane Fonda and her text are most alive when she’s dealing with Vietnam.”

She was good to Jean Genet.
Roger Vadim and the film I hope one day to see where Vadim used Art Blakey and Theloneous Monk and now the Korean remake.

Apr/1/2005Apr/11/2005

A Lesson in Breathing We Loved , We Still Love

The above image shows two books by Robert Creeley, the one pictured is Elsa’s Housebook which I bought on my first trip to Boston. Read and see two terrific photos from Elsa Dorfman.

Found this poem “Creeley Led” by Crag Hill, here.

(Bresson’s Movies is a poem many love and are now going around the blogosphere. Bresson sounds like a lesson in Breathing, who is Bresson? )

Bresson’s Movies

A movie of Robert
Bresson’s showed a yacht,
at evening on the Seine,
all its lights on, watched

by two young, seemingly
poor people, on a bridge adjacent,
the classic boy and girl
of the story, any one

one cares to tell. So
years pass, of course, but
I identified with the young,
embittered Frenchman,

knew his almost complacent
anguish and the distance
he felt from his girl.
Yet another film

of Bresson’s has the
aging Lancelot with his
awkward armor standing
in a woods, of small trees,

dazed, bleeding, both he
and his horse are,
trying to get back to
the castle, itself of

no great size. It
moved me, that
life was after all
like that. You are

in love. You stand
in the woods, with
a horse, bleeding.
The story is true.

“To Bresson, add Creeley (a Robert to a Robert, as shown by the witty enjambment of lines one and two). The poem puts the poet in the picture, and a binary lyric system prepares to close. But not yet, not quite.” (read from here)

“We see, for instance, that collaboration has not been a sideline for the poet, but rather, that Creeley has consistently built many of his strongest poems out of relationships with visual artists.” (Read more here.)

Collage
Still Life with Donald Saltan
Collaborating with Gary Indiana and with Francesco Clemente , more here.

“For any young readers out there start with his early book FOR LOVE and keep going. The work expands over a rich & full life.” (from Patti Smith site, a tribute by Ann Waldman).

From Alan Sondheim, “He taught the value of the word and the spaces that fell through so that the poem disappeared.” (read more here. )

Darren Hughes just posted on his blog the release of Bresson’s
donkey film au hazard Balthazar from the Criterion Dvd Collection.

Mar/30/2005May/8/2005

Goodbye – Robert Creeley RIP+Vincent & Nina

(This sad news came from Ron Silliman’s blog. More here, and here.)

Black Mountain poet fired by an elemental energy (from the Guardian)

Goodbye by Robert Creeley

Now I recognize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose

itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water

might run

or a chicken
dead for dinner
or a plan
inside the head

of a dead man.
Nothing so wrong
when one considered
how it all began.

It was Zukofsky’s
“Born very young into a world
already very old…”
The century was well along

when I came in
and now that it’s ending,
I realize it won’t
be long.

But couldn’t it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother’d say. Did it
have to kill everything in sight,

did right always have to be so wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.

I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.
(Poem is from here).

Vincent van Gogh was born in Groot Zundert, The Netherlands on 30 March 1853, (from here.)
Read his Letters on his birthday.

Read this article today. Olivier Assayas said, “Maggie is a mystery,” he says, finally. “I don’t know if I ever fully understood her. I thought I did, but she’s even more of a mystery to herself.”
A parting gift for Maggie (from here.)

Another (the) Long Goobye took place in Arizona.
Funny Long Face says goodbye to Nina this morning.

Mar/24/2005Dec/14/2019

Rebecca Horn- Concert for Anarchy

The wild flowers are in full bloom in the desert and today is a birthday of Rebecca Horn and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Rebecca Horn, Body, Art installations

“Her discourse is charged with emotional tension but the representation is cool and calculated. Even the apparent contradiction between form and content helps to keep up the concentration her work demands. The most impressive piece in the Octagon room is Concert for Anarchy. A grand piano hanging upside down from the ceiling follows the pattern of the other sculptures: suddenly the keyboard cover opens and with spasmodic violence spills out the keys. After a few minutes it retracts back into itself with an extraneous release of energy, the absurdity and the violence of the piece creating a sense of uncertainty and a simple question: What is next?…”

More images are here.

Her early works – Berlin Exercises in nine pieces are here.

Concert for Anarchy

Artaud’s Train is here.

(Underwear, Unicorn body suit – previous post)

Rebecca Horn, Body, Art installations

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Dreaming Stones – Rebecca Horn.

Rebecca Horn was born March 24, 1944, in Michelstadt, Germany. As a young girl, Horn read Johann Valentin Andreae’s Die chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosenkreutz and Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, which cultivated the artist’s interest in alchemy, Surrealist machines, and the absurd. Studying at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg from 1964 to 1970, Horn was inspired by the writings of Franz Kafka and Jean Genet and the films of Luis Buñuel and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The most profound influence on Horn’s development as an artist, however, was a lung condition contracted in 1968 that forced her to stop using certain sculptural materials. A subsequent period of convalescence at a sanatorium inspired a series of sculptures concerned with the body, isolation, and vulnerability. Horn turned to soft materials, reminiscent of bandages and prostheses, and began making her body-extension sculptures.
(Excerpts from here.)

Rebecca Horn is Aires Monkey, the crafty chatterbox.

Rebecca’s Sun and Moon are in Aries (the same as Marlon Brando and June Chang).
The combination of your Sun sign and your Moon sign produces in you a truly explosive personality; dynamic, hard hitting, powerful, and magnetic. Independence and self-confidence may be so intensified that they become a stumbling block in personal relationships, if they are not somewhat tamed. You are an individualist first, last, and always. You are extremely impatient with people, sometimes to the extent of being intolerant. People may view you as hardboiled because of a tendency for you to be too matter-of-fact. You do express yourself readily and forcefully, with considerable dramatic effect. It’s painfully difficult for you to listen to and understand the woes of others. Your mind is always active: reading, talking, discussing. When it comes to getting things done and done rapidly, your talents can fill the bill (from here.)

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Buster’s Bedroom – just found out about this film today..

Director: Rebecca Horn
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Geraldine Chaplin, Amanda Ooms and Valentina Cortese
Release: 1992
Origin: Canada
Genre: International, Drama
Duration: 103 min.
Language: English
Price: $25.00

A film student fascinated by Buster Keaton decides to visit Nirvana House, a sanatorium in the California desert where the actor stayed after the end of the silent film era. In charge is Dr. O’Connor (Donald Sutherland), an eccentric who experiments with venom and believes that great strength can be derived from complete inertia. The clinic’s oddball patients include an alcoholic former stuntwoman, an ex-pianist who believes that his ideal of silent music can be achieved by destroying his grand pianos, a former actress who collects her former lovers’ “souls” in the form of butterflies, and a man who thinks he’s a bee and goes around collecting nectar. Everyone soon comes to realize that the meaning of life resides in change, the source of true freedom.

Mar/17/2005Dec/12/2010

The Last Empress Besieged

Susan Sontag <><><> Susan Sontag photography by Fred McDarrah
Susan Sontag at a symposium on sex in 1962 at the Mills Hotel, now defunct, on Bleecker Street. (Image source from NY Times “On Self” by Susan Sontag)
In previous posts on Sontag, I have emphasized how Susan Sontag expressed her wish to be remembered as a novelist. This view was reenforced after reading a hilarious and a touching article, a portrait of Susan Sontag with warts and all by a Stanford professor who used to escort Sontag from time to time. (Terry Castle – Desperately Seeking Susan)

Susan Sontag is back in the public discourse recently in relation with the opening of Diane Arbus retrospective at the Met. Finally from a seasoned critic came this article on Diane Arbus by
Peter Schjeldahl calling her a revolutionary artist. Peter illustrated how wrong headed Sontag was in her treatment of Diane Arbus.

“Sontag’s notorious attack on Arbus, in an essay from 1973 that became the linchpin of her book “On Photography” (1977), passed one test of great criticism. It asked the right question—about photography’s claim to be a full-fledged and legitimate art—at the right time, when Arbus’s work had advanced that claim with unprecedented force. Otherwise, the essay is an exercise in aesthetic insensibility, eschewing description of the art for aspersions, often pithy, on the artist’s ethics…. (read more here).

Susan Sontag was right when she said one must remember artists by their best work and not by their worst.
I have many posting on Susan Sontag in this blog because I remember her for her best works and her forceful and tireless promotion of international talents in the arts and her high minded activisim but not for her controversial book on photography .

Besieged

Here is a photo based digital image, neither my best nor my worst, just created recently when I saw the groove of cement on the floor while my spouse was fixing the tiles in our bedroom.

Elsewhere in the world,
Matt (Pas au-dela) has great post on Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson’s brilliant novel. Make time and read this delightful work.

Two birthdays passed by on March 16: Isabelle Huppert and Bernardo Bertolucci.
Isabelle Huppert – there are so many memorable films by her,
she was especially brave and brilliant in “The Piano Teacher”.
Thinking about the twisted relationship of mother and piano teacher, reminds one of our pathological repressed leaders .
I will digress here, I often wished that our Secretary of State had stayed in the music world as a concert pianist or a figure skater. She is an amoral monkey performer, a consumate careerist. Astrologically speaking , Condi Rice and Laura Bush share the same Sun and Moon combo- Scorpio with Moon in Cancer – one in 144 – W is a Cancer. The threesome seems to embody the worst of Cancer trait – needy, cagey and ready to attack at any moment. W shares a birthday with the Dalai Lama, which I find kind of funny, like a story from Dumas the Iron Mask the exiled King and the fake King.

Isabelle and Bernardo are Pisces Snakes.
Bernardo Bertolucci old films inspired me and gave me the title of this post. His film “Besieged” was not appreciated as well as his other films. His earlier film “The Conformist” influenced Coppola, dark, brooding operatic style so well incorporated in the first two Godfather. Bertolucci’s Birth Chart

Mar/14/2005Mar/14/2011

Diane Arbus – Bus Ride Like in the Ghost World

diane-arbus
I knew that Diane Arbus lived in the gloomy factory like artist residence called Wesbeth where she died and that she occupied a prestigious place in that complex, as she was one of the few recognized and respected artists of the time. There was a competition of sort among artists as to who should take over her space. Apparently these artists did not worry about ghosts or residual spirtual influences.

Found this writing online ,
A meeting with Diane Arbus on a hot summer day one month before her death by Allan Porter.

“Our discussion started with August Sander and her close affiliation with his work in spite of the fact that she had started photographing long before she had come in contact with his pictures. I neither recorded the interview nor took notes, and the fifteen allotted minutes went by about ten times. In fact, it seemed that I was the one who was being interviewed, for she questioned me unceasingly for about an hour-almost as if she were visiting me in my house rather than the other way round. Her questions were naive and her answers sophisticated.”

Diane Arbus was born on March 14, 1923 (Pisces with moon in Aquarius), the same birthday as Albert Einstein. Like Simone Weil whose brother was a famous mathematician, Diane’s brother was Howard Nemerov, a respected poet, unlike Simone Weil, Diane’s parents were strange and cold. Maybe to esacpe them Diane married early to Allan Arbus and had two daughters.

Here is an article by Van Riper, Revealed and Rediscoverd “It has taken decades, but finally the life’s work of Diane Arbus – as well as her life – has been chronicled, after a fashion. This stunning book from Random House, accompanying what promises to be an equally stunning exhibition, doubtless will be the standard by which subsequent work on Arbus is measured.”
Diane Arbus

“At Arbus’s funeral, her brother gave the eulogy, and later composed the poem,

“To D—Dead by Her Own Hand.

My dear, I wonder if before the end
You ever thought about a children’s game –
I’m sure you must have played it too – in which
You run along a narrow garden wall
Pretending it to be a mountain ledge
So steep a snowy darkness fell away
On either side to deeps invisible;
And when you felt your balance being lost
You jumped because you feared to fall, and thought
For only an instant: That was when I died.

–Howard Nemerov-
(from Modern Kicks)
An interview with Howard is here. (if you would like to know his poetry.)

Jayne Jayne and her daughter and her daughter

Take a look at 4 great photos from this page, titled – Diane Arbus, Noah’s Ark of Humanity.
Jayne Mansfield died of car accident – in the manner of David
Cronenberg Crash. (The film was adapted from the fiction by J.G Ballad)

A photo by D. A. we have not seen before, Name that baby from Tyler Green.

Cartoon Arbus
The above cartoon by Pino Antonelli from an Italian site.

Mar/6/2005May/9/2010

Japanese Grandmothers – Past, Future and Overseas

Orimoto2
“Mama and Neighbors” by Tatsumi Orimoto.

“My Grandmother” a project where young women were asked to imagine what type of women they would become in 50 years, by Miwa Yanagi. (click on the stars to see 19 photos and stories by Miwa Yanagi).

Yanagi: When I was in high school, I happened to meet an elderly woman. She was hospitalized and didn’t have much time to live. When I went to see her in the hospital, she talked about a coming election. Of course, she passed away before the election. But, I was surprised to realize that she was seriously concerned about the future of the society after she was gone, even if she knew she wouldn’t live long, and was physically restricted. I really respect elderly women or men in their 80’s and 90’s who care for others, and have opinions about the society and beyond until they die. There are only few people who can do that. They move me and I would like to be like them. (from here.)
Miwa expressed her desire to adopt a child from other nationality.

Mie Japanse Grandmother from Miywa Yanagi

The Floating world was my introduction to Cynthia Kadohata‘s writing. The novel opens with a quirky description of a Japanese American grandmother. Here are excerpts from the first two paragraphs of the Floating World. “My grandmother has always been my tormentor. My mother said she’d been a young woman of spirit: but she was an old woman of fire. In her day it had been considered scandalous for young Japanese to smoke, but she smoked cigars…. (skip to next paragraph)
“My grandmother surprised my family by dying one night in a motel in California. Neither of my three brothers liked her any more than I did, and none of us cried at the funeral. My grandmother used to box our ears whenever she pleased, and liked to predict ghastly futures for all of us. We traveled a great deal, and sometimes in the car she talked on and on, until even my mother became annoyed and told her to keep it down, just as if she were one of us kids. When she got mad she cursed me. “May you grow hair on your nose!” she would say, and I would run to check my mirror. ”
Cynthia adopted a son from Kazakhstan in 2004 and her story for teenagers “Kira Kira” won an award recently. Her web site includes photos of her son and her dog.

One memorable grandmother from the past was Yukio Mishima‘s grandmother. She might have had a great deal to do with Mishima’s life long quest for masculinity.
“Mishima was born to a family dominated by his petulant and oppressive paternal grandmother, Natsu. Less than a couple of months after his birth, he was snatched away by Natsu from his mother, Shizue, who was allowed to see her infant son only when she was summoned to breast-feed him under her mother-in-law’s supervision. Natsu seldom allowed him to be taken out of her room. Since she disliked boys’ roughness, she forbade him to associate with other boys, and his companions were limited to women or girls. As a consequence, he picked up (in Japanese male chauvinistic terms) feminine patterns of speech, as well as women’s taste and sensitivity… read more here.

Mar/3/2005Apr/6/2010

Magdalena Jetelova – Light, Water, Mud and Wood

Magdalena Jetelova
Domestication of a Pyramid

Magdalena Jetelova, a Czech installation artist/architect has a website. (Need to follow instruction to navigate this site and requires patience. Go to Global and visit Iceland then go to Pyramid and click the corners of the pyramid). She is an impressive and formidable figure who used to show at John Weber gallery in Soho in the late 80’s.

Magdalena's installation Magdalena Jetelova

Go to this PLACE to see her old piece in a particular location. (The Royal Forest of Dean is situated on the English and South Wales border in the UK, 120 miles west of London,65 miles from Birmingham (via the M5), and 35 from Bristol to the centre of the Forest.)

“My sculptures go for the basics. I am interested in getting through to the essence, to reach the origins. That is why I am fascinated by the Middle Ages.”

Two pieces from Atlantic Wall, see this page (click to enlarge).
“Magdalena Jetelova’s show, Atlantic Wall, at Derry’s Orchard Gallery, consists of ten large black-and-white photographs of concrete bunkers on the Jutland coast – relics of Germany’s defence strategy of the second world war. Lasers are projected onto the constructions to form short textual phrases, descriptions of their significance, quoted from French philosopher Paul Virilio‘s book Bunker Archaeology. They look like documentary records of a performance/event, until one discovers that they were made with no audience. The final photographic product is the art work and we receive the theatricality of its construction second hand.” (Read more from Atlantic Wall).
10 photos of the Atlantic Wall from the German site are here

How much should we know?

The Atlantic Wall, (ever heard of the Siegfried Line?), were huge fortifications made by Hitler during WW2 along the coast of the Atlantic. What does that knowledge change? How different is the spectator’s position? Now go a step further in the mythological aspects of the Atlantic Wall. And now, go for an informed review. How does your response to the work change as you discover the various layer? Does it necessarily get «better»? You don’t need a spoiler to make it a spoiler.

From Bubec, a Czech web page showing the process from material to its finish.

Then there was the devastating flood.
Rhino from Prague Flood
This rhino was saved but the Chair was lost. “A giant chair worth one million Czech crowns was swept away by the river, reads the headline in Pravo. The wooden chair was a unique work of art created by the well-known artist Magdalena Jetelova and was exhibited outside the Sovovy Mlyny Gallery as part of the riverside gallery’s collection. Unfortunately, the chair was not removed in time and Pravo carries a vivid photograph of the chair sweeping downstream in the middle of the river.”
(from here.)