Dying For A Laugh

Six Feet Under (b. 2001 - d. 2005)


'Comedy is tragedy plus time.'

Carol Burnett

Let Us To Bodies Go

Exhibit A:

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) - Sleep, 1866

Exhibit B:

Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) - Nudes, 2000


The Ecstasy

Where, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swell'd up, to rest
The violet's reclining head,
Sat we two, one another's best.

Our hands were firmly cemented
By a fast balm, which thence did spring;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string.

So to engraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one;
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.

As, 'twixt two equal armies, Fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls - which to advance their state,
Were gone out - hung 'twixt her and me.

And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay;
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day.

If any, so by love refined,
That he soul's language understood,
And by good love were grown all mind,
Within convenient distance stood,

He - though he knew not which soul spake,
Because both meant, both spake the same -
Might thence a new concoction take,
And part far purer than he came.

This ecstasy doth unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love;
We see by this, it was not sex;
We see, we saw not, what did move

But as all several souls contain
Mixture of things they know not what,
Love these mix'd souls doth mix again,
And makes both one, each this, and that.

A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour, and the size -
All which before was poor and scant -
Redoubles still, and multiplies.

When love with one another so
Interanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls.

We then, who are this new soul, know,
Of what we are composed, and made,
For th' atomies of which we grow
Are souls, whom no change can invade.

But, O alas ! so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though not we; we are
Th' intelligences, they the spheres.

We owe them thanks, because they thus
Did us, to us, at first convey,
Yielded their senses' force to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay.

On man heaven's influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air;
For soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair.

As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can ;
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot, which makes us man ;

So must pure lovers' souls descend
To affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.

To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.

And if some lover, such as we,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
Small change when we're to bodies gone.

John Donne

A Fistful Of Icons

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) - The Apotheosis of Homer, 1827


Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.

Walter Benjamin

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition VI

In And Out Of The Secular Sepulcher...Again

Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1255-1260 – c. 1318-1319) - The Kiss of Judas, 1308-11

Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431 – 1506) - Calvary, 1457-60

Rogier van der Weyden (c. 1400 – 1464) - Deposition, c. 1435

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) - Lamentation, 1490

Fra Angelico (c. 1395-1455) - Entombment, 1438-40

Hans Memling (c. 1430 – 1494) - The Resurrection, with the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and the Ascension

'It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.'

Joseph Campbell

The Sky Is Not The Limit

John Constable (1776-1837) - Cloud Studies, 1821-22

'I have done a good deal of skying. I am determined to conquer all difficulties and that among the rest. . . .Certainly if a sky is obtrusive, as mine are, it is bad; but if it is evaded, as mine are not, it is worse; it must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition. It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment '.

John Constable

The Week In Review

Films:

I Shot Jesse James, 1949 - d. Samuel Fuller
The Baron of Arizona, 1950 - d. Samuel Fuller
The Steel Helmet, 1951 - d. Samuel Fuller
Fixed Bayonets, 1951 - d. Samuel Fuller
Pickup on South Street, 1953 - d. Samuel Fuller
House of Bamboo, 1955 - d. Samuel Fuller
Forty Guns, 1957 - d. Samuel Fuller
Shock Corridor, 1963 - d. Samuel Fuller
The Naked Kiss, 1964 - d. Samuel Fuller
The Big Red One, 1980 - d. Samuel Fuller

Television:

Six Feet Under: Seasons 1 & 2

Books:

Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres, and David by Todd Porterfield and Susan L. Siegfried

Art:

Peter Graham - Tolarno Galleries
NEWO8 - ACCA

Music:

Complete Works for Solo Piano - Luciano Berio
String Quartets - Luciano Berio
Gesang der Jünglinge -Karlheinz Stockhausen
Kontakte - Karlheinz Stockhausen
Piano Pieces - Karlheinz Stockhausen
Mikrophonie I & II - Karlheinz Stockhausen

The Red Tower: Redux

13.03.2008: Serero Architects unveils its design for the extension of the Eiffel Tower top floor. The project will extend the top floor plate of the tower by grafting a high performance carbon Kevlar structure on it. The structure will be temporarily bolted to the slab without requiring any modification of the existing structure. It will expand the usable floor area from 280 m2 to 580m2.

The Mechanical Paradise

There were some artists to whom this mechanical age was more than a context, and very much more than a pretext. They wanted to explore its characteristic images of light, structure, and dynamism as subjects in their work. The most gifted of them in the Ecole de Paris, and still the least appreciated today, was Robert Delaunay (1885-1941). For him, the master-image was the Eiffel Tower, which he viewed with real ecstasy as an ecumenical object, the social condenser of a new age. . . .

[Delaunay] wanted a pictorial speech that was entirely of this century, based on rapid interconnection, changing viewpoints, and an adoration of "good" technology, and the Tower was the supreme practical example of this in the daily life of Paris. His friend and collaborator, the poet Blaise Cendrars, remarked in 1924 that

No formula of art known up to now can pretend to give practical resolution to the Eiffel Tower. Realism shrank it; the old laws of Italian perspective diminished it. The Tower rose over Paris, slender as a hatpin. When we retreated from it, it dominated Paris, stark and perpendicular. When we came close, it tilted and leaned over us. Seen from the first platform, it corkscrewed around its own axis, and seen from the top it collapsed into itself, doing the splits, its neck pulled in . . . .

Delaunay must have painted the Tower thirty times, and he was almost the only artist to paint it at all - although it makes a modest appearance in an oil sketch by Seurat, and crops up now and again in backgrounds of the Douanier Rousseau. The Red Tower, 1911-12 [below], shows how fully Delaunay could realise the sensations of vertigo and visual shuttling that Cendrars described. The Tower is seen, almost literally, as a prophet of the future - its red figure, so reminiscent of a man, ramping among the silvery lead roofs of Paris and the distant puffballs of cloud. That vast grid rising over Paris with the sky reeling through it became his fundamental image of modernity: light seen through structure.

Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) - The Red Tower, 1911-12

The planners of the Paris World's Fair wanted something even more spectacular than the Crystal Palace. But Paxton's triumph could not be capped by another horizontal building, so they decided to go up: to build a tower that would be the tallest manmade object on earth, topping out - before the installation of its present-day radio and TV masts - at 1056 feet high. No doubt a Biblical suggestion was at work, consciously or not. Since the Fair would embrace all nations, its central metaphor should be the Tower of Babel. But the Tower embodied other and socially deeper metaphors. The theme of the Fair was manufacture and transformation, the dynamics of capital rather than simple ownership. It was meant to illustrate the triumph of the present over the past, the victory of industrial over landed wealth that represented the essential economic difference between the Third Republic and the Ancien Regime. What more more brilliant centrepiece for it than a structure that turned its back on the ownership of land - that occupied unowned and previously useless space, the sky itself? In becoming a huge vertical extrusion of a tiny patch of the earth's surface, it would demonstrate the power of process. Anyone could buy land, but only la France moderne could undertake the conquest of the air.

The Fair's commissioners turned to an engineer, not an architect, to design the Tower. This decision was in itself symbolic, and it went against the prestige of Beaux-Arts architects as the official voice of the State; but Gustave Eiffel, who was fifty-seven and at the peak of his career when he took the job, managed to infuse his structure with what now seems to be a singular richness of meaning. Its remote inspiration was the human figure - the Tower imagined as a benevolent colossus, planted with spread legs in the middle of Paris. It also referred to the greatest permanent festive structure of the seventeenth century, Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona in Rome, which (like the Tower) was a spike balanced over a void defined by four arches and (like the Fair itself) was an image of ecumenical domination of the four quarters of the world.




Postcard from The World's Fair, Paris, 1889


You could not escape the Tower. It was and is the one structure that can be seen from every point in the city. No metropolis in Europe had even been so visually dominated by a single structure, except Rome by St. Peter's; and even today, Eiffel's spike is more generally visible in its own city than Michelangelo's dome. The Tower became the symbol of Paris overnight, and in doing so, it proclaimed la ville lumiere to be the modernist capital - quite independently of anything else that might be written, composed, produced, or painted there. As such, it was praised by Guillaume Apollonaire, the cosmopolitan poet who had once been a Catholic and imagined, in a tone of mingled irony and delight, the Second Coming of Christ enacted in a new Paris whose centre was the Tower, at the edge of the coming millennium, the twentieth century:

At last you are tired of this old world.
O shepherd Eiffel Tower, the flock of bridges bleats this morning
You are through with living in Greek and Roman antiquity
Here, even the automobiles seem to be ancient
Only religion has remained brand new, religion
Has remained simple as simple as the aerodrome hangars
It's God who dies Friday and rises again on Sunday
It's Christ who climbs in the sky better than any aviator
He holds the world's altitude record
Pupil Christ of the eye
Twentieth pupil of the centuries he knows what he's about,
And the century, become a bird, climbs skywards towards Jesus.

The important thing was that the Tower had a mass audience; millions of people, not the thousands who went to the salons and galleries to look at works of art, were touched by the feeling of a new age that the Eiffel Tower made concrete. It was the herald of a millennium, as the nineteenth century made ready to click over into the twentieth. And in its heights, its structural daring, its then-radical use of industrial materials for the commemorative purposes of the State, it summed up what the ruling classes of Europe conceived the promise of technology to be: Faust's contract, the promise of unlimited power over the world and its wealth.

In 1913, the French writer Charles Peguy remarked that "the world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years." He was speaking of all the conditions of Western capitalist society: its idea of itself, its sense of history, its beliefs, pieties, and modes of production - and its art. In Peguy's time, the time of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, the visual arts had a kind of social importance that they no longer claim today, and they seem to be in a state of utter convulsion. Did cultural turmoil predict social tumult? Many people thought so then; today we are not so sure, but that is because we live at the end of modernism, whereas they were alive at its beginning. Between 1880 and 1930, one of the supreme cultural experiments in the history of the world was enacted in Europe and America. After 1940 it was refined upon, developed here and exploited there, and finally turned into a kind of entropic, institutionalised parody of itself. Many people think the modernist laboratory is now vacant. It has become less an arena for significant experiment and more like a period room in a museum, an historical space that we can enter, look at, but no longer be part of. In art, we are at the end of the modernist era, but this is not - as some critics apparently think - a matter of self-congratulation. What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.






The Eiffel Tower under construction, 1887-89


For the French, and for the Europeans in general, the great metaphor of this sense of change - its master-image, the one structure that seemed to gather all the meanings of modernity together - was the Eiffel Tower. The Tower was finished in 1889, as the focal point of the Paris World's Fair. The date of the fair was symbolic. It was the centenary of the French Revolution.

From The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes

The Poetics Of Sensation

J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) - The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 1835


'Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematical form, from every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of the body.'

William Butler Yeats

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition V

The Sweet Smell Of Excess

Thomas Banks - The Falling Giant, 1786

Fernand Leger (1881-1955) - La gran Julie, 1945

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) - Still Life With A Glass Under Lamplight, 1962

Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) - Raw War, 1970

Roy Lichtenstein - Bananas & Grapefruit #1, 1972

Gilbert and George (b. 1943 and 1942) - Son of God, 2005


'Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.'

Mick Jagger

Supplement: Beijing Boxing




China Is Getting Ready (Amnesty International Poster)

An Emroidery Of Thresholds

Christo and Jeanne-Claude (both born 13th June 1935) - The Gates, 1979-2005 (exhibited in Central Park, New York, between the 12th and 27th of February, 2005)


'Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's. Each of us has to find his own way.'

Joseph Campbell

Useful Links:

The Gates (HBO documentary)
The Gates (HBO documentary promo)
Making of 'The Gates' (Wolfgang Wolz)
'The Gates', Central Park (photos)
'The Gates' at Central Park ("videofeeback" on YouTube)
In Pictures: The Gates, Central Park - Extra Geographic Magazine Online
'The Gates, Central Park and New York, 1979-2005', Christo and Jeanne-Claude (The New York Times)
Enough About 'Gates' as Art; Let's Talk About That Price Tag by Mike McIntire (The New York Times)
Cave Paintings and Christo's "Gates": Art in Individual Minds and Public Spaces (Forgotten Delights)
Stephen Colbert (The Daily Show) on The Gates

The Existential Eye

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599 - 1660) - Las Meninas, 1656


'From one point of view, the mirror can be said to carry out with complete success that reduplication of the world which, in the classical account of Western art (Pliny, Vasari, Gombrich), is the constant aim of the tradition. The perfect replication of the real in its mirrored reflection is thus a kind of utopian fulfilment of painting's realist project, and between the mirror and painting there exists a bond of similarity which European painters have not hesitated to stress: one need think only of obvious cases where the similarity stated - the convex 'witness' mirror in Van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage, the self-portraits of Dürer, the mirror that gives us the odalisque's face in the Rokeby Venus, or the explicit play between mirror and canvas in Las Meninas (though in each of these cases there is also a play against the equation of mirror and painting; the painting is always that which exceeds or goes beyond the mirror)...

Yet, although the mirror is an instrument that gives us the world in all its original presence, the status of the mirror is also ambiguous. It has another, less plenary aspect, an aspect doubtless crucial in the case of the child, though that first encounter with the mirror can hardly be regarded as a special case, or confined only to childhood development. We know from childhood psychology that the child realises from the behaviour of others that it exists somewhere in space and that it is in constant transaction with the vision of others: it soon learns to retrace with its own eyes the path of an adult glance. We know also that at some point the child apprehends its existence as an image for others, and that this image is not simply a spectacle, but an identification, an image to be assumed by the self. What clinical psychology cannot be said to have determined is whether in this mirror phase of development encounter with an actual mirror is necessary to predicate the identification; but whether or not a causal and precipitating function is ascribed to an actual reflection, it remains that it is only in the transactions with a mirrored reflection that the child apprehends its full existence as an image for others. Henceforth the child cannot place itself at the single centre of its universe, but by a Copernican shift, must think of itself as a decentred image seen from the place the child cannot occupy, an image which nevertheless is to be assumed by the child as its visual identification. For the child the mirror is accordingly a place of spatial disruption: the laws of the mirror are not the same as those of ordinary space, as Alice discovers; in particular the mirror installs a principle of discrepancy between the mirror image and its original, and learning how the mirror works involves checking, point by point, the original against the double. The uncanniness of the mirror is not confined, however, only to childhood. In adult life it is still by checking the appearance disclosed by the mirror against the complex social codes of self-presentation that the individual adjusts his or her own persona in everyday existence. Here also the mirror is a place of the gap and the discrepancy, between the actual reflection and the social codes of presentation, and in both childhood and adult experience the mirror repeats its action of alterity: the mirror does not simply reflect things as they are, in plenitude and presence; it opens an interval between the place the self feels as its actual residence or location, 'behind the nose', and the unknowable place at which the self will appear in the image.

It is in this experience epitomised by the mirror, yet occurring constantly in the socialised existence of adult life (and here one must point to an anxiety which not even psychoanalysis has fully named, yet which seems rooted in the human condition: fear of being observed), that the individual passes from vision - simply seeing the world and opening, like a camera, on to its light - into visuality, the subjective experience of seeing-and-being-seen. In vision, the world is a continuum without division, but in visuality the continuum is split - on this side ('behind the eyes'), consciousness without an image; on the far side ('in the eyes of others'), image without consciousness; the self must articulate across this divide. And even if we discount the psychoanalytic tale of the 'mirror phase', nevertheless this remains as the disconcerting truth of the mirror: it gives back ourselves to ourselves; but in a form which is not quite our self. Those eyes are our eyes, but they look at us; and in those eyes that are both our own and not our own, what we experience is 'being looked at' which surrounds our consciousness on all sides ('self-consciousness), but is here mysteriously collected by the mirror into a line of vision: the gaze.'

From Visionary Delays: Ingres in the Atelier of David by Norman Bryson

The Week In Review

Books:

J. L. David: Brutus - Robert L. Herbert
David's 'Death of Marat' - eds. William Vaughan and Helen Weston

Films:

The Great McGinty - d. Preston Sturges, 1940
Christmas in July - d. Preston Sturges, 1940
Sullivan's Travels - d. Preston Sturges, 1941
The Lady Eve - d. Preston Sturges, 1941
The Palm Beach Story - d. Preston Sturges, 1942
Hail The Conquering Hero - d. Preston Sturges, 1944
The Great Moment - d. Preston Sturges, 1944
The Bad Seed - d. Mervyn LeRoy, 1956

Television:

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Seasons 1-5

Music:

Complete Piano Sonatas - Ludwig van Beethoven
Goldberg Variations - J. S. Bach

Violin Concerto (To the Memory of an Angel) - Alban Berg
Ad Dominum cum tribularer - William Byrd
Piano Trio in D - Claude Debussy
Scheherazade - Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Piano Sonata in A - Franz Schubert
Forest Scenes - Robert Schumann
Symphony No. 3 (The Poem of Ecstasy) - Alexander Scriabin
Concerto for Chinese Water Percussion - Tan Dun

Pain In My Heart - Otis Redding
Dance To The Music - Sly & the Family Stone
SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century - Sonic Youth
Absolute Garbage - Garbage

The Garden Of Painterly Delights

Claude Monet - Irises, 1900


'I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.'

Monet

The following is an excerpt from a special cable to the New York Times sent from Paris on May 15th, 1908:

'$100,000 IN PICTURES DESTROYED BY MONET

Famous French Impressionist Artist Thinks His Work of Past Three Years Unworthy.

SLASHES THEM WITH KNIFE

Unique Studies of Water Effects - Paris Art World, which Praised the Paintings, Astonished.

Pictures with a market values of $100,000 and representing three years of constant labour, were destroyed yesterday by Claude Monet, the French Impressionist master, because he had come to the conclusion that they were unsatisfactory.

The pictures destroyed had already been seen by the friends of the artist and by leading critics, who had pronounced them to be among the best works that M. Monet had ever accomplished. They were to be the feature of an exhibition of this master's work which was announced to open next week in the galleries of Durand-Ruel. The exhibition, which already had been advertised in the French papers, had aroused unusual interest among artists and amateurs, as it had been a long time since any new works by M. Monet had been placed on public exhibition.

At the last moment, while he was reviewing the pictures and superintending the framing of them, the artist became discouraged. He declared that none of his new works was worthy to pass on to posterity. With a knife and paint brush he destroyed them all, despite the protests of those who witness the act.

Pictures by Monet are currently selling from $6,000 to $10,000 each. The artist's action has aroused consternation in the art world. It has also raised the ethical question as to the artist's right thus to destroy his handiwork.

The pictures were unique, in that they constituted a series of remarkable studies reflecting water under different light effects.

M. Durand-Ruel, the senior member of he firm which in recent years has acted as agents of M. Monet, told the correspondent of THE NEW YORK TIMES this afternoon that while he was disappointed to be unable to hold the exhibition as advertised, M. Monet's actions showed him to be an artist, not a mere manufacturer.

"Such action is not unprecedented," he said. "Degas, for example, destroyed three-fourths of his production. It is a pity, perhaps, that some other painters do not do the same."'

A Lacework Of Pleasure And Perversity

Del Kathryn Barton (b. 1972) - the whole of everything, 2007-08


'It's the details that entice me first. The lilac acrylic wash that bruises a pair of breasts. The turquoise paint splattered across the hundreds, the thousands, of meticulously marked dots and lines. The stretches of near-white monochrome that signify raw skin within that painstaking and almost painful expanse of throbbing ink. And the eyes: these watch from anxious animal faces, partly shielded from view; from women seemingly of another world. At once haunting and opaque, these staring eyes have sent seasoned writers into skittish reverie as they draw into the fantastical image-world of Sydney artist Del Kathryn Barton.

Standing back from one of Barton's newest paintings, or make myself a space to inhabit, 2007, this response is typical, or so I'm told, of the way most viewers find themselves lured into Barton's ever-swelling fan club. At first, an admiration for the decorative style of the painting as a whole, for Barton's blazing range of brazen colour, and for the 'surface that attempts to impart a quality of energy', as the artist herself calls it. Then stepping closer from a respectful distance, one is struck by the sheer amount of work involved in crafting this other space of life. And then, like moth to flame - or better still, curious Alice to cavernous rabbit hole - the detail-lured spectator is caught in a world of Barton's making.

It can be a very strange world indeed. The women she moulds into being - and they are always women, even when bearing a hefty penis or sprouting a fine sheen of fur - have, for the ten years of Barton's practice, been occasionally lascivious, often enigmatic, at once defiant and fragile. In some series - such as Barton's watercolour, gouache and ink drawings from 2002 - naked women recline, their legs splayed, fingers caressing their orifices, animals nuzzling at their breasts. In other works, like the exquisite dark beauty of 2005, young girls stare out through hand-embroidered frames, replicating so many film stills of women staring wistfully through window panes, their romanticism wrung with pathos. Some of Barton's women take the pose of contemporary catwalk models at their moment of full exposure, staring down at the audience from the runway's edge before they spin around and strut their way backstage; others, such as aranella, 2005, have an air of 1970s-style fashion shoots, all Farrah Fawcett hair and fey hand gestures.

It is not just pop culture quotations that peek through Barton's works; art-historical references equally abound. The folksy pussy cats and hermaphrodite children of the mid-twentieth century outsider artist Henry Darger mingle in Barton's portraits. An economy of inky lines recalls the work of Egon Schiele or Paul Klee, while the contortions and elongations of Barton's bodies echo Kiki Smith. The abstract and often abject eroticism - the sextet of breasts and the truncated body in her sculpture inquire within, 2006, for example, make for a curious lacing of Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeois. Even Barton's continual framing of her figures with guardians from nature - with kittens and koalas suckling at teats, with bunnies, Bambis and other ciphers of innocence sourced from personal associations and from particular Native American cultures - reveal a mystical world of symbolism that is as cultivated and cryptic as the film art of Matthew Barney and especially David Lynch.'

From Del Kathryn Barton: Paradox of Ecstasies by Anthony Gardner

Obituary: Lazare Ponticelli

'Lazare Ponticelli, the last French soldier to have endured the horrors of World War I, died at the age of 110 on Wednesday, President Nicolas Sarkozy said.

"Through him, I bow to the millions of 'poilus' who responded with exemplary everyday courage to the call of the invaded homeland," Sarkozy said, using the French word commonly used in France to describe the unshaven men on the front lines.

Sarkozy said there would be a national ceremony in coming days to honor all French soldiers who fought in the Great War, which broke out in 1914 and ended in 1918 and left about 1.4 million French dead and 4.5 million wounded.

The president's statement gave no cause or details of Ponticelli's death, but an official at the president's office said Ponticelli died at his home in Kremlin-Bicêtre, near Paris, on Wednesday morning.'

International Herald Tribune: Europe

Strange Meeting

by Wilfred Owen, poet and soldier (March 18, 1893 – November 4, 1918)

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,-
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'
'None,' said that other, 'save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

'I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now....'

(Owen died aged 25 - just one week before the war ended - at the Battle of the Sambre.)

The Skin Is Faster Than The Word, Or Towards An Erotics Of Art

Victoria Reynolds - Down the Primrose Path, 2003


'[It] may be noted that the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and affect: it would appear that the strength or duration of an image's effect is not logically connected to the content in any straightforward way. This is not to say that there is no connection and no logic. What is meant here by the content of the image is its indexing to conventional meanings in an intersubjective context, its sociolinguistic qualification. This indexing fixes the determinate qualities of the image; the strength or duration of the image's effect could be called its intensity.

...

The relationship between the levels of intensity and qualification is not one of conformity or correspondence but rather of resonation or interference, amplification or dampening.

...

Approaches to the image in its relation to language are incomplete if they operate only on the semantic or semiotic level, however that level is defined (linguistically, logically, narratologically, ideologically, or all of these in combinations, as a Symbolic). What they lose, precisely, is the expression event - in favour of structure. Much could be gained by integrating the dimension of intensity into cultural theory.

...

There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literary, and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information- and image-based late capitalist culture, in which so-called master narratives are perceived to have foundered. Frederic Jameson notwithstanding, belief has waned for many, but not affect. If anything, our condition is characterised by a surfeit of it. The problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure even across irreconcilable differences (the divorce proceedings of poststructuralism: terminable or interminable?). In the absence of an asignifying philosophy of affect, it is all too easy for received psychological categories to slip back in, undoing the considerable deconstructive work that has been effectively carried out by poststructuralism.

...

An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativisable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognised. It is crucial to theorise the difference between affect and emotion. If some have the impression that affect has waned, it is because affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognisable and is thus resistant to critique.'

From The Autonomy of Affect by Brian Massumi

Painting Posterity

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) - Napoleon Crossing the St. Bernard Pass, 1800


'There are two ways of understanding portraiture - either as history or as fiction.'

Charles Baudelaire

Nature's Unimpeachable Arc

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) - Moonrise Over The Sea, 1821


To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats

Evicting The Soft Embalmer Of The Night

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) - Danae, 1907-08


'The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.'

Gustav Klimt

Because His Eyes Held Hands

Paul Klee (1879-1940) - Insula Dulcamara, 1938


'One eye sees, the other feels.'

Paul Klee

The Week In Review

Films:

Shadows in Paradise (Varjoja paratiisissa) - d. Aki Kaurismäki, 1986
Ariel - d. Aki Kaurismäki, 1988
The Match Factory Girl (Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö) - d. Aki Kaurismäki, 1990
Lust, Caution (Se, jie) - d. Ang Lee, 2007
No Country For Old Men - d. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007
There Will Be Blood - d. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007

Television:

Rome (HBO): Series One

Books:

Nineteenth Century European Art - Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu
Art In Theory, 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas - eds. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger

Art:

Benjamin Armstrong - Tolarno Galleries
Black in Fashion - National Gallery of Victoria
Resonant Visions - National Gallery of Victoria
Sidney Nolan - National Gallery of Victoria
Warhol - Queensland Art Gallery

Music:

Symphonies 1-9 - Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphonies 1-10 - Franz Schubert
Winterreise (Winter Journey) - Franz Schubert
Symphonies 1-4 - Robert Schumann

Tenebrous Tyrannies

Julius Ceasar (Ciarán Hinds) - Episode 4: 'Stealing From Saturn', Rome (2007)


'The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.'

Maximilien Robespierre